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You've laid out an excellent case for the value of Twitter, and you don't strike me as a "I'll pay to make you pay attention" type. Your points about the utility are exactly right. Now, if there was some way to insure the kind of link-collecting you discuss, except even better and easier, and ways to filter out not only the obvious crap like racism but the less-obvious crap like discussions of some rando's favorite sandwich--well. I'd pay for that, in part because it'd be impossible for me to roll that on my own, even if I had enough money. (If I did have enough money, I'd be reading Proust under a tree somewhere.)

Because the obvious thing is that Twitter is chockablock full of free riders. I don't know what kind of career Venkat would have without Twitter. If I were him, I'd budget at least $250 a month for what Twitter brings him. I mean, where else you gonna get it for a tenth that price? LinkedIn?

It's not about the grad students, it's about asking the guy 'cause he's still alive. I think that's profoundly valuable, just not for most people. So Musk bought a paper and he's gonna take it private. If this works at all, I think it'll look like an extremely exclusive family of newsletters at scale. No, I have no idea how that will work. But I'm not sure how else you'd go about fixing Twitter. Cause it's the sickest big tech company out there, and has been for a while, speaking in business terms. (Ideas eagerly welcomed--it's a fun thought experiment.)

Make sure I can find you again if you leave. Enjoying your work.

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