A commentary published on top tech news website TechCrunch takes Twitter CEO Elon Musk to task for doing seemingly everything in his power to make the social networking site worse.
The piece's author, Natasha Lomas, marvels at the way that Musk has made Twitter less user-friendly while at the same time implementing changes that are sure to drive away more users, such as taking away verified accounts from people unless they pay him a monthly $8 fee.
"It almost doesn’t matter if this is deliberate sabotage by Musk or the blundering stupidity of a clueless idiot," she writes. "The upshot is the same: Twitter is dying."
Lomas predicts that charging users monthly fees for verified accounts will be Musk's "next -- perhaps final -- stage of destruction" of the company he bought last year for more than $40 billion.
"Genuine users are rightly outraged at the idea of being blackmailed into paying Musk to prove who they are," she charges. "These people — the signal amid the Twitter noise — are, after all, a core component of the value of the network. So of course they shouldn’t (and won’t) pay — and so their visibility on Twitter will decay. Which, in turn, will trigger more damage — as any remaining users wanting to find quality information will find it increasingly hard to come by… It’s death by irrelevance."
The bottom line, Lomas says, is that Musk is "flushing Twitter down the sink."