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Nov 9, 2022Liked by S Peter Davis

I think that the answer here is obvious: you sell the damn thing to Alphabet, claim victory, and run. The other thing about Polluxes (Polli?) that you don't point out is that they are immune to failure, not inasmuch as they cannot fail, but that they cannot be convinced that they have failed. If you ask Donald Trump about his defunct swindler classes he would - to this very day - defend them as being the very height of business education. Failure doesn't register, but self-preservation does.

Alphabet is about the only company that can hope to use Twitter for any purpose other than a tax write off. Twitter is a good source of consumer information that they can't necessarily get right now, so as one of the world's biggest data brokers, they can gain soft credit of the social network that nobody else could hope for. Facebook wishes that it could, but the SEC would presumably axe that deal before it even hit the table. Google, though? Their social network crashed and burned. They're not in the market anymore. They have a much stronger argument for being allowed to buy this turd.

I suspect that's what's going to happen. Fudgie the Fail here is going to keep poking at the thing with progressively stupider ideas until he finally gives up, the stability lets the stock gain a little bit of value, and then turn around and sell it to the only people who would want it in the first place. I actually suspect that a year from now we'll all be back on Twitter and all of this nonsense people are getting up to now will be long forgotten. Every celebrity and content creator needs to maintain some kind of presence and every competitor is in some way inferior (really, Mastodon - you want people to pick a server, knowing nothing whatsoever what effect that will have?).

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I think when the market value of Twitter falls just a little further, SOMEBODY should buy it. But not another company that wants to use our data—or even necessarily anybody who expects to make a profit from it.

No, this platform can best be what it should be if a few deep-pockets philanthropists buy it, to administer as the public trust that a major communications utility is meant to be.

Think of Twitter as a cross between “the phone company”, public radio and TV, and public libraries. A few big donors can sponsor it—as a tax writeoff, and because it’s the right thing to do—and smaller donors can chip in for the tax deduction and recognition. Just as some people give to NPR or the Friends of the Library.

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