> "Twitter’s newsletter service Revue will be shut down by the end of the year. Revue was acquired by Twitter in January 2021 for an undisclosed amount. The report also says that Notes, a longform posting feature, is on hold, as is Twitter’s plan to build crypto wallets."
All these are look so distant to Twitter's core value.
Why do you think that? Twitter has tonnes of journalists who are running a substack or patreon, Revue would have let Twitter get in on that revenue stream. Building a tool for longer form content seems like a totally reasonable leap for twitter, and crypto - whilst a bit bullshitty - would be a fine way of moving payments into twitter which is another great monetization strategy. All of those projects seem reasonable extensions of Twitters core business.
I don't think the decision to lay off the teams is odd. It is quite clear that Elon Musk's plan is "We're going to fix this by firing 90% of you and expect the remaining 10% to work 10x harder". They're not dumping any of these ideas, they're just expecting to deliver them with far fewer engineers (who, btw, will not be earning 10x salaries).
It wasn't the decision to layoff teams, it was the fact that he did tell them to stop working on the longform product. Maybe he'll take it back once they're done with paid verification.
Some say it's the world's town square. Fine, but how do you support (pay for) that? Town squares are generally funded and maintained by public organisations and tax money. Twitter is a private company and I don't think there's much enthousiasm for giving Twitter public funding in order to run it.
All these are look so distant to Twitter's core value.