Elon Musk's $45 billion takeover of Twitter has been something of an ongoing circus, with the outspoken billionaire making thousands of staff redundant, relaunching verification as a paid-for service and, this past weekend, overseeing some sort of IT cockup that rendered the site unusable for many (which Musk spun as deliberate, citing "data scraping"). People saying they're leaving Twitter for Mastodon and others has become almost a sub-genre of posts on the site, while the fresh restrictions keep coming: most recently, Twitter announced the hugely popular TweetDeck is to be paywalled.
Long story short: The business master is trying to retrofit paid-for services onto a service that became popular because, among other things, it was free. That's not to say Twitter was ever without problems but, whatever they were, it was an open platform anyone could sign up for and get the full functionality. Musk is piece-by-piece crimping what he can to increase friction and make people pay for something they've been using for free for god knows how long.
