The advertisers will return eventually. I'm anti-elon and anti-twitter, but as much as I would love to indulge in the schadenfreude, the collapse of twitter seems totally unrealistic.
Yeah, seems most likely it will continue to run but won't make much revenue and changes will be harder.
It's not like HN or sites like 4Chan require a lot to keep running but if Elon is hoping to get some return on his $44billion then that now seems very unrealistic (which based on his desperate and now-defunct 8$/month subscription scheme I assume he is)
Yahoo still had other things like news and stocks once nobody was around for a game of Literati. What does Twitter have when there's no one left to argue aimlessly?
I know what you said. My point is that as long as there is a good supply of people wanting to argue pointlessly on the Internet, Twitter will have no shortage of same. I've had an Mastodon account for years; as others have pointed out, it's just not the same thing. (cf. the bien-pensant arguing over which is the "correct" server to join.)
The only way to fully replicate Twitter's ability for anyone to potentially address the entire world is to, well, replicate Twitter. No alternative (including, meta-speaking, Hacker News) suffices.
