Matt Tait hits it out of the park with his piece,Twitter Was Special. But It's Time to Leave. First off, on one of the biggest draws of the service: learning more about the thoughts and interests of people you'd normally know for one thing.

The sticking power of the bird app was that nobody ever stayed in their lane. You might follow someone for their insights on a topic you’re interested in, but once you did, you’d often get a series of little glimpses far deeper into all the other aspects of their life too. You’d meet the whole human, not just the suit. Where else can you see a law professor, feared and admired for their impeccable intellect and encyclopedic knowledge of separation-of-powers freely admit staying up all night to wait for the latest Taylor Swift album to drop?

Also on Elon's obsession with bragging that people may be angry, but the metrics are up, so it's all good!

This is the thing that the new ownership of Twitter never seemed to fully grasp: Twitter’s value was never about engagement or technology or checkmarks. […] The engine that drove Twitter was the people. Nothing more. Nothing less.

And finally, how Elon and Trump are more similar than probably either of them would like to admit.

Since his purchase of the bird site, Musk has shown no interest in preserving any aspect of the site that made it previously healthy or tolerable. In the three weeks he has been at the helm he has run the site pretty much as Trump ran his administration: entirely from the hip, without listening to competent advisors, and with policies issued on a whim by tweet.

There's tons more in here, so just go check it out.