I'm confused that every established big social tech company had six whole months to prepare for Elon's twitter takeover and its likely consequences, and none of them tried to make a run at launching a site to capture some portion of Twitter's userbase. Network effects are very hard to beat, but if someone creates a Schelling point for lots of people to switch, it's silly to not at least try to capitalize on it. Meta seems like the company in the most obvious position to pick up at least the "standard place for well known people and entities making pronouncements" part of Twitter, but it seems they had metaverse goggles on the whole time and just weren't paying attention.
Back in April I wrote a prediction:
"Is Elon Musk the sort of person who can rise above Twitter's inherent limitations and incentive structures to produce something beautiful? It doesn't seem like it. Watching Elon talk for half an hour about how Starship will enable a new era in space exploration is super inspirational! Are his tweets inspirational? Not so much. While he may control the hot take machine, the hot take machine still controls him, and I'm not sure he will make it any better."
Now instead of being innovative and thinking about low-cost methods of getting to Mars, or planning the future of electric transportation, he's regurgitating right-wing tribal signalling like an NPC. The hypnotizing hot-take infinite mirror world of Twitter fan adulation just makes people with egoistic tendencies dumber, Elon included.
In case it's not clear, I wasn't a fan of Twitter pre-takeover -- its incentives aligned everyone to post hot takes and get into fights -- and nothing has changed about that post-takeover. However, it was and remains the best place for me to follow updates from prominent crypto thought leaders and a couple of close friends, mainly because it's the place everyone converged on as the spot to follow well-known people. Hopefully they'll all find a better spot soon.