Opinion: Elon Musk broke what made Twitter great. It's going to cost him — and us

Elon Musk in happier times, on Oct. 26, 2022, carrying a sink as he enters the Twitter headquarters in San Francisco. — Getty Images/TNS

Twitter once aspired to be the town square of the Internet. Today, it's more like wandering through a third-tier business convention. You can still have some interesting conversations — as long as you can tune out the drone of the bad keynote speakers and the shouts of the vendors hawking their wares.

Things have been trending in this direction since Elon Musk took over the platform in October, but it's clearer what Twitter has become in the wake of the Great Blue Check-opalypse of 2023.