Let me give you some perspective here: imagine you just drove your company into the ground (Tesla) and was on the brink of going bankrupt, the Federal Government of the United States literally stepped in and not only saved your company, but also turned it one of the best performing company on the stock market, beating all other major automobile manufacturers who make real cars.

What do you think is the lesson you will learn here? You will think you are God. The world bends to your wants and needs. You can do no wrong. The most powerful government of the world will always have your back. Twitter is just a little trolling space for you, and you literally don’t care if it sinks. It’s one of those toys you get bored of eventually.

just going to "x" out my thoughts on this

Solve for x, but it's a differential equation

What we're not seeing is granular data on their userbase, not that we ever will, but I'd venture a guess that it's much more damning than that 15% represents.

To illustrate my point, take my experience with the Reddit API changes. This was the absolute last straw for that shithole for me.

I still have an account on Reddit. I still dip into a couple of very niche subs to check on them and to provide info to people where I can, but almost exclusively through DMs. Sometimes articles redirect me to a Reddit source. Fairly commonly, search results for things like tech fixes direct me to Reddit.

I'm still a Reddit user (🤢🤮)
I would still be represented in their monthly user stats.
Even if I deleted my account, I would still visit Reddit at least once a month (this is even more applicable to how closely connected the news media and Twitter are.)

Do I comment on Reddit anymore? Nah.
Do I upvote or downvote things on Reddit? Very rarely.
Do I spend any significant amount of time browsing Reddit these days? Nope.
Have I switched from being an active contributor on Reddit, which is probably like 10% of their total active userbase, to being almost entirely passive? Yep.

Idk (because I don't care about Twitter beyond enjoying watching it implode and the anticipation of this potentially taking Elon with it) but I have a hunch that they've had a huge decline in their active contributors and especially those who made Twitter a valuable social media site (in the sense that you're always going to get trolls, bots, marketers and those really vapid chain response tweets as a form of low-value content but there's a certain amount of active contributors who create something of value which attracts other users - and those are the really important users. If that cohort of people shift from high-value contributions to passive consumption or occasionally dipping in only to answer DMs or because of a link redirecting them to Twitter then the site is moribund.)

Masterdon is a thing. I don’t use it either, but it’s there alright.

I feel like that number is obfuscating that a lot of bots have flooded the platform. The number of actual users likely dropped far more.

Then it could have been renamed to "Ex"

Sure, but that'd almost definitely be a trojan horse for Peter Thiel and his League of Impossible Ideologies (aka troll armies). Instead of obviously brainless bots and equally stupid Tech influencers, we'd have explicitly tailored social engineering ops. Think more "anarchist hacker catgirl" types who go viral just to stage a total breakdown and blow up your scene w insipid drama. Worst of all, they'd mostly be friends of Grimes. As if discourse wasn't already rigged enough.

I wouldn't be surprised either way. They've had a lot of major advertisers pull ads.

I wouldn't say it's imaginary. The value of the platform was the people who used it as it effectively functioned as s clearinghouse for news. The fact that a moron like musk didn't realize the value was the people and that by adding nazis and conspiracy theories he was destroying its value shows how much of a dipshit he really is. He basically bought a punch bowl, shit in it, and now is mad that no one wants his shit punch.

profits

They have never had a month of positive cashflow

they in shit ton of debt post acquisition though. yes the valuation is vibes based but still Twitter is objectively worse off than before.