Meta antitrust trial kicks off in federal court

If that were true then acquisitions would be great for competition.

Well in most cases you just ate your competition, so there's not a whole lot to care about.

The hardest part of competing with encumbants, especially when it comes to stuff like social media and IM, is acquiring users, due to those coveted network effects. When you look at what happened with Discord, it was able to swoop in when there was somewhat of a vacuum building with Microsoft-owned Skype being completely shit, MSN and AIM falling way out of fashion, and IRC... continuing to be IRC. Then they took advantage of something relatively new; they could lower the barrier to entry. Most existing IM networks required you to download a client to really use it, but Discord, just being a web app, you could log in from a browser and get the full experience. And if you needed to jump in quickly, you could literally just enter a name and start using it immediately, at least in the early days.

That doesn't happen often. What usually happens is the company that acquires the software makes use of the asset they actually care about (the users they just paid for) and now they don't have to do all of that hard work of actually acquiring the users by making a better product and marketing it. (Nevermind that they're almost certainly better-resourced to do that than the company that they are acquiring.) A large minority of users are very unhappy with the enshittification of the service, but most users don't really care much since they are pretty casual and a lot of them may not have even known things to be much better anyways. Microsoft squandering Skype seems to be the result of a lot of things at once, ranging from incompetence to the complexity that the P2P nature of Skype brought with it (at least early on.)

For example, look at Twitter. Elon Musk could do basically anything wrong but it has such a long history and so many users that it really is hard to squander it entirely, even after making many grossly unpopular moves. Don't get me wrong, Mastodon and Bluesky are doing fine, and it's also fine that neither of them are likely to ever really take over the number one spot in their niche; they still function just fine. But Twitter will always be the place where basically everything happens among them, even if the people who care the most absolutely hate the shit out of it.

I wish more acquisitions did go like Skype, only much faster.

Post-acquisition products can still dominate their market even if they have declining quality. E.g. they can be bundled with other offerings from the parent company. This is exactly the point of anti-trust.

I take one thing out of the Musk acquisition that goes beyond just being buying a product, which is that there was a real problem under Jack Dorsey that they were banning people for explicitly ideological reasons, significantly for covid "misinformation", that wasn't. Including doctors/researchers, and qualified people to speak who went away from the mainstream narrative. Like, one of the first things he did was take Jay Bhattacharya (coauthor of Great Barrington Declaration) and show him he had been put under a blacklist by the old regime of Twitter

I think the reason this gets ignored is because there's too many people on a certain part of the political spectrum where they see covid censorship as a nothingburger when actually it was a massive problem and whatever else people think of Elon I don't think you can take away from him that the situation was intolerable

I hated Twitter before and after the acquisition, for a number of reasons. The last time I really liked Twitter was probably 2015. It's hard to qualify everything that was wrong with Twitter, but it'll probably be somewhat overshadowed by the Musk era because Musk is such a big dumbass. He also didn't really resolve a lot of Twitter's old issues with ideological bias, he just replaced it with less popular ideological bias. Twitter doesn't really feel like it is any less of a hellscape where people get banned for wrongthink, it just leans differently in high profile decisions...