Elon Musk's X claims it's now a 'video-first platform' as it tries to reverse an advertiser exodus that has cost it billions in value
(fortune.com)
from stopthatgirl7@kbin.social to technology@lemmy.world on 10 Jan 2024 03:12
https://kbin.social/m/technology@lemmy.world/t/751133
from stopthatgirl7@kbin.social to technology@lemmy.world on 10 Jan 2024 03:12
https://kbin.social/m/technology@lemmy.world/t/751133
The claim is a major departure for the service, which has long been known as a destination for posting short snippets of text.
threaded - newest
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Elon Musk’s X, long known as a service for posting short text-based messages about anything and everything, claims it’s “now a video-first platform.”
The assertion, made by the company today in a blog post that was aimed at advertisers, follows an exodus of marketers from the platform including Disney, IBM, and Apple after Musk’s assertion that an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory was the “absolute truth.” That implosion plus other missteps have caused the value of the business to plummet from its $44 billion sales price last year by more than 70% according to Fidelity, one of X’s investors.
A source at X, who asked to remain anonymous because they weren’t authorized to talk to the press, was skeptical about the blog post’s assertion of a video-focused transformation.
“We’re just starting to add in video ads with a similar thing to YouTube where you can skip ahead after five seconds,” Musk said.
Yet many users complain that many ads are from low-quality marketers pitching counterfeit luxury goods and fake Keto Drops endorsed by Shark Tank.
Elon Musk discussed his vision and features for a Twitch competitor while playing Diablo online for 3 hours
The original article contains 552 words, the summary contains 184 words. Saved 67%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Lol, twitter was brilliant when it was 144 character text messages. Then it got ruined by adding photos. Now it is going the rest of the way down the tubes by becoming becoming video first. Ugh.
Oh yea back when it needed that limit because the whole point was to text it over SMS and you could post with any SMS capable phone lol
That was fun and unique, now it’s just…boring? Just another social media site, it’s only defining thing is it’s (declining) size and reach
SMS was the original reason, but the side effect of forcing people to condense their thoughts into a couple sentences was pretty wonderful. Especially for an open ended community where anyone can talk about anything.
I disagree with you simply because brevity is nice but not at the expense of nuance. Having to try to follow a string of tweets because one simply can’t suffice is awful.
I don’t understand the difficulty, the series of tweets are all replies to the previous tweet in the chain. Where’s the difficulty?
Likewise I don’t understand the difficulty in reading more than 140 characters.
But I’ve never used Twitter so when I experience the platform it’s through screen caps of tweets. Instead of having paragraphs and cohesive formatting it reads like a programmer who writes code all in one line. Sure, it can be done and it can be read but it’s fucking awful that it isn’t formatted correctly so that it is more clear.
It’s formatted how you’d expect if you’ve a timeline on anything, most recent at the top though, right?
Thats not formatting. That’s like reading a book transcribed on post-it notes and calling it a format. It can be ordered, yes but I’m talking about paragraphs and complete sentences.
Sure, it’s split into smaller bits because it’s on a site designed for short posts, it’s not hard to follow though.
Wonderful in theory, but in practice it's a dumpster fire. Quick, mainstreamm-acceptable takes are incentived, and nuanced, alternative viewpoints are nearly impossible.
If it were all for hobby stuff, it would be fine, but when this is how most people get their news, it's not good.
Hey at least photos worked…
Video playback doesn’t work half the time, and the other half the time it insists on 140p playback and then freezes.
They’re doubling down on something they’ve been failing at for years.
Not to nitpick but I think the limit was 140?
And with this brilliant move they are going to increase bandwidth and storage expenses. There’s a reason why it’s so hard to compete with YouTube.
What are “strange expenses”?
Typo. Was supposed to swipe “storage expenses”.
swipe, huh?
Gotta proofread, man :)
Can confirm. This is the way.
I keep on taking that lesson from time to time, but I still haven’t passed the final exam.
Yeah “let’s make it like youtube” what could go wrong.
Do it for the
VineX. Just doesn’t have the same ring to it. (Or a different ring cough.)Man, I still can’t believe Twitter had Vine and killed it, especially given everything that has followed
The creators didnt want to monetise it, they wanted 6s video clips without ads interrupting it. Fair play to them really, but it did mean the end of it, Twitter wasnt really profitable either so they couldn't endlessly dump money into it and the rise of other short-form video was biting at Vine's ankles as well. I think the original creators went on to make byte, a similar service to Vine, but it never took off, cancerous tiktok did instead.
Be twitter. Make no profit. Fund side project with zero expectation of ROI. Side project becomes wildly popular. Lose money on it for years. Shut it down for being unprofitable. Wait awhile. New app is a copy of yours and is 100x more popular now. That app makes a lot of money via simple ads. Feel incompetent. Still get bought for $45 billion despite being a useless company. Watch your hard work be driven into the ground by a moron. Your former founder sells out to NFTs. Be X. Beg your users for money. Destroy the platform. Give a home to extremism. Still have users too dumb to realize your grift. Lose a lot of money as usual. Stop existing in a few years. Be no more.
.
“X goin’ give it to ya.” Don’t forget!
X promised but never delivered. As far as I’m concerned, X still owes me it.
Certainly gave it to his many baby mamas
Buffoon
Seems accurate.
Something that I feel needs to be reiterated with all of these “news” pieces - the “71% drop” everyone is touting is from the stupidly high price Musk bought Twitter for that only ever represented his desire to flex, not the value held by the site itself. Even Musk knew it wasn’t worth that much and tried desperately to get out of the deal himself.
Which only means he double fucked himself from the start, not that everyone else is wrong for laughing at him
By all means, laugh away. He deserves to be mocked endlessly. I just appreciate accuracy/clarity.
Accuracy of what, your subjective opinion of Twitter’s value?
Somethings only worth what someone pays for it
Twitter was trading around $40 at the time he made the offer for $54 per share. At the current value, that equals $15 per share. The last time Twitter was trading at that value was 2017.
These are all rough numbers based on some graphs I looked over quickly.
If you want to play devils advocate on this topic you should understand what you’re talking about.
What? I’m not really sure what you’re trying to disprove here. We seem to be in agreement that the buyout sum didn’t match the trading price*.
*The price before Musk started manipulating it with his showboating.
I don’t think you understand how someone takes a company private such as Musk.
No company is going to agree to a buyout lower than the trading pricing. The shareholders would reject the offer.
Even if we pick the $40 value for the public price, musk has erased over 60% of the value.
Do you understand the math behind your devil advocacy? Because from where I sit your argument can be summed up as: “well acktually it only dropped 60%” — except that’s not true. The people who backed Musks buyout lost the full 77% – they can’t go to their shareholders and claimed, “well actually we overpaid so we really only lost…” because that’s not how any of this works.
Why do you keep calling my comments “devil advocacy”? I’m not making theoretical arguments for the sake of debate. I’m saying that in real, actual numbers, Twitter was not worth $44 billion. That figure was purely invented by musk to show off. That he had to pay out is just karmic justice, not the objective valuation of Twitter.
And I’m not saying whoever put up that money isn’t losing tremendously, either. They definitely have, and that’s my point. Whether it was musk or someone he went begging to, it was an equally dumb decision since, again, Twitter wasn’t worth that much.
Also, since you seen like you may know, afaik the “71% drop” is purely from one investment company, Fidelity, right? Are they a reliable authority in this? The only other time I’ve heard of them was during the Reddit drama last summer, so to me they mostly come off as latching onto Internet drama rather than providing sound investment advice. Do they have a good track record to earn this level of credit the news is giving them?
If I sell someone a banana for $20, that banana is worth $20. Someone else may disagree with the value but that does not change the fact that in that moment the banana was valued at $20.
It means the person that bought it is a fool, nothing more.
You lack the information or understanding as to why it was given that value. You are the fool.
Feel free to prove me wrong with concrete numbers that back up your assertion with the true value.
I am confident you are not an investment analyst.
I’m the fool for saying a banana isn’t worth $20? That’s a weird line to draw. And I never claimed to be anyone here. I’m just pointing things out. Like this - musk literally had 4.20 in the cost “for the lulz”. Nobody’s convincing me that man had any idea of the “true” value of Twitter when he proposed his bid.
The banana is an example.
Your inability to understand how a banana could actually be worth $20 further illustrates my argument that you do not understand economics.
Your example had zero context. I’m supposed to just infer all the meaning for you? Come on now. If you don’t wanna put in the effort, just don’t bother in the first place. Don’t blame other people for your actions.
it would be accurate to say Musk assigned the value of $44B to Twitter by paying that much for it because that’s how capitalism works. He instantly inflated the price by paying far over its previous market value in a stupid showboating maneuver, and has, in doing so (as well as his subsequent antics) totally screwed himself and his investors by causing it to lose 71% of that value.
Correct.
It wasn’t just him though, he put up less than half the money. Other investors and lenders backed that price and hoped to profit after the purchase. I think it’s fair to say that the market valued Twitter + Elon at the price he paid, and was initially willing to pay more than what Twitter was trading at because they bought into the idea that he’d do good things with it.
Elon only wanted to back out after tech stocks overall dropped further following an increase in inflation concerns (they were already down, providing an opportunity for the buyout, but continued to fall after the deal). But most tech stocks have since recovered those losses and the nasdaq is up about 10% from where it was at the time of the deal.
The amount the Saudis are willing to pay to kill the platform so it can’t support the next Arab Spring and the amount “the market” thinks the company is legitimately valued at for non-ulterior motives are two very different things.
Him paying the full amount doesn’t really factor into my point, which is that Twitter wasn’t that valuable.
Meta already did the “pivot to video” scam. I doubt most media outlets are going to fall for it again.
Xitter inflates its video metrics - scrolling past a video is the same as watching it. So yeah, basically the same playbook.
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/a53bb557-bd85-49d3-a7ec-2129f03271b2.jpeg">
lolololololol
I love this meme format
Jose is not happy
And yet, how often does Elon create and post videos?
I’m looking forward to all the selfie videos with Elon sitting on the toilet accusing his advertisers of being pedos. Then we can sit and guess what specific drugs he’s on that particular day.
I look forward to the drunk cheeseburger eating.
He missed the image board step in X devolution.
So is he changing name again to XVideo?
Should get Vin as the spokesman and call it xXxvideo.
Xvideo? I never heard of that before um…
I’m going to purchase xvideos.com right now!
He likes the letter X so much, why not prepend 2 more while you’re at it
He likes X because it’s closest to a swastika without being one. Extras would just be redundant.
Too late, some mastermind from the Czech Republic already did it in '98
Better double down and buy xideo.com as well
Guys, I think he’s just trolling humanity. If he’s actually trolling, I think he earned my respect. He’d be the biggest troll humanity has and will ever know. Like, the cheer magnitude, the execution… damn.
Nope he is just a rich spoiled manchild on cocaine.
Damn, sarcasm is hard.
Right but you also seem confused about what sarcasm is.
I know, I said sarcasm is hard, didn’t I?
That also doesn’t make much sense as a reply.
Man, get those neurons checked. If you think the initial comment wasn’t sarcasm, you need. to go and read the definition.
It absolutely wasn’t “sarcasm”.
OK, maybe it wasn’t sarcasm in the traditional sense, but it was clearly not something pro-Musk, which is why most dumbasses are downvoting.
No, it wasn’t sarcasm in any sense.
I like how you completely ignored the other aspect of what I said. It says a lot about who you are and how you debate.
I didn’t care about the other aspect you were trying to steer to.
But also no, the downvotes we’re because the comment was stupid. Then you tried to lie about “sarcasm” and how other people were too stupid to get it, which got you a bunch more.
I don’t really care about the personal attacks you’re trying to make. But blocking you, since you seem like a child lashing out when called out, and it’s worthless.
You mean it is hard for you to execute it?
No troll ever deserved respect for trolling. And I say that as someone who occasionally engages in innocent trolling.
He’s obviously not trolling the whole planet, it was a joke… but people hate him so much that they even downvote hypothetical sarcastic imaginary praise
Man, Eloon apologists are working overtime these days
Are you seriously so retarded you thought I was actually supporting Elon Musk somehow with that comment?
I think Musk is pretty retarded, but you take the trophy. Are you sure you’re not trolling?
My theory is he’s pulling a zero requiem. He watches anime, so he’s probably watched code geas - it’s a very popular futuristic anime after all
First he became the symbol of the useful billionaire, the Tony Stark guy who’s going to save humanity, because he’s a futurist with the power of money. He learns everything about his companies the way a kid learns every stat about their model car, and actually does weirdly good as a hype man. He gives off the awkwardness of an engineer
After he meets Trump in the white house, he realizes how close we are to the brink. The fact that billionaires own all our media has led to existential danger, where truth doesn’t matter and money speaks
So, there’s a plan for a group of individuals to buy Twitter. There’s text logs of this - he was invited into a group planning to buy it together for the good of humanity, but it took all of 5 minutes for them to start carving holes in the ideology, so he backs out.
He then announced the intention to buy, trapping him in a situation where he was forced to go through with it… He struggled a bit, but not that hard really
So then comes the plan. He takes over, and every two weeks or so, he makes an impulsive decision showing zero understanding of the company. One idiotic decision at a time, spread out long enough to remind people “I’m still here, and I’m still ruining a major platform for public discourse!”
People start to realize he’s actually kind of dumb and pretty racist… Even the fanboys are getting quieter and quieter in defending him. It’s becoming public knowledge he isn’t a Tesla or spaceX founder, he came in as an investor when they already had a plan
He’s burning up half his fortune in an effort to show us all what a billionaire is. He’s not a businessman, he went to college to learn programming but doesn’t understand the basics of software, he’s hated by pretty much everyone in his personal life, and every company he’s tried to build from scratch has been a disaster. He lies constantly, in ways that will eventually come to light.
This guy was able to buy Twitter, just because he invested in a company that bought and sold PayPal (after kicking him out for being unbearable). He’s showing us all that billionaires are an existential danger to mankind, even the “good” ones.
Or, maybe he’s just having a midlife crisis and has a compulsive need for attention. One of the two.
oh boy, get ready for the downvote rain. You can’t make jokes here my man.
“What if we ignored what made our platform successful and instead tried to force our product into a already crowded market?” Elon Musk, Tech genius
Look how well that’s going for Disney
Fairly well by comparison…?
They have their own content. Decades of content. Zwitter* has…?
*I am refusing to write that name as only X or Twitter or X/Twitter and writing it XTwitter almost sounds like the German word Zwitter, which is the word for hermaphrodite, and I know someone who owns that platform who would dislike that association…
Disney's not hurting. They just posted bigger profits than ever this past year and expect to exceed that by several billion this year.
So higher gross profit but lower net income from last year which is far lower than their net income from 2019 and their highest in 2018.
They’ve produced ~4 flops last year that cost them almost $1 billion, their stock price hit a 9 year low last year at below $84, Disney + has been operating at a loss since it started. Universal Studios overtook them with box office revenue last year.
Unless I’m interpreting that incorrectly it would seem that they aren’t doing too well. Correct me if I’m wrong.
They aren't doing as great as they hoped, that's all. Disney isn't hurting for money, every day people spend billions in their parks. Yes they aren't having cinematic triumphs, but that isn't the only source of their income.
I haven’t visit twitter/X for a while. A “video-first platform” typically supports live streams, captions/subtitles and 4k videos. Does X supports these?
Best I can give you is low quality videos with a max length of 2:20 that occasionally lose audio sync, and sometimes the audio decides it doesn’t want to work at all.
In a few more months, it will turn into world’s most serious scientist’s exchange, and next year (if it’s still not dead) it’s going to evolve further into a platform for testing and comparing children’s games of different cultures and hair colors.
The only thing worse than its video player are the literal nazis on the site, has he tried watching video there? To call it dogshit would be an insult to dogshit, which can presumably be useful as fertilizer.
Free speech
*free speech if Elon agrees with you
Paradox of tolerance and all that. You want a tolerant site? Can’t allow Nazis.
Secondly, there was a wave of banning of leftists and journalists recently, it’s very much only free speech for the right there.
The paradox of tolerance is a gross misunderstanding of the concept of tolerance
You tolerate your gay coworker - you treat them like a coworker. If any of your coworkers make inappropriate sexual comments or unwanted advances, that’s not okay. You respond appropriately, such as expressing your discomfort to them or going to hr or the police. There’s no conflict
You tolerate racists - so long as they stay within the social contract, they’re allowed to hold whatever they want in their hearts.
But if they violate the social contract, such as by saying racist things, you respond appropriately.
If someone believes Nazi ideas deep down, you tolerate them. If Nazis want to organize, spread their ideals, or do Nazi things, you respond appropriately.
It’s that simple.
It’s funny how Tucker Carlson thought he could just do his show on Twitter and basically instantly lost his entire audience.
No no no you’ve got it all wrong:
The Nazis are supposed to be a feature of the platform.
Xitter is running out of feet to shoot itself in.
Eventually it’ll shoot its own dick off
So can we now stop embedding Twits in articles instead of simply including the pictures?
Musk is to Zuckerberg what Donald Trump is to Sheldon Adelson. They’re in the same business, but one is a ruthless, highly-adapted predator owning the industry and making a killing, while the other is a large adult failson frittering away his inheritance cosplaying as the other guy and managing to go bankrupt running a casino.
Donald Trump is ruthless. Not because he needs to be, but because he uses it to stroke his ego, like compulsive masturbator uses his hand to stroke his…
He’s also a walking example of Dunning-Kruger. He’s convinced he’s a genius when in reality he is dumb as fuck. He is uneducated white trash with money. If his daddy wasn’t rich he’d be a homeless person eating out of a McDonald’s dumpster.
Maybe that’s why he’s morbidly scared of being poisoned. In the great multiverse most of his counterparts are dead due to excessive consumption of antifreeze.
.
I think next week it should be a nazi dating site.
That’s what Facebook is for
50yr old Brownshirt looks for Liebensborn partner. Blonde, 21max, fluent German.
I claim that I am now a millionaire.
Doesn’t make it true though…
Yes. I’ll cover as a witness.
#fuckingcapitalists #goddamnedfascists
I’m still not convinced this wasn’t just an effort by Saudi Arabia to dismantle the platform.
.
.
Other than the billions they loaned Elon so he could make the purchase without spending any of his money…
He spent a lot of his own money.
He just spent moderately less.
There sure is a lots of video with young looking girls on there, but I’m not sure why anyone would be advertising that.
Young looking or too young? Big difference. Advertisers have no issues as long as they are old enough on paper.
I really am not one to chastise people for either looking at porn or searching for petite men/women. Unfortunately I’ve seen a handful of short sequences on twitter that pushes thing really, really far to make them look like kid, to the point that no physical feature could be associated to actual adults. So while it’s impossible to know with absolute certainty (especially since these are posted by bots account with absolutely no working link to any actual source or info), it really did not look like it was the “young looking” type, at least not as far as any other porn sites shows young looking women.
Twitter videos don’t even load half the time on mobile browsers.
That is on purpose. They want you to use the app.
Yea, that sort of stuff is most likely deliberate… tiktok doesn’t work in the browser either
I would believe that if they worked on the app. But videos don’t load on the app half the time either.
That is on purpose. They want you to use the browser.
I know you’re joking but, related: I tried opening a Webex meeting on my phone which told me to download the app. App downloaded, try to open meeting, app opens…and then opens the meeting in Firefox.
I really hate apps that could be a website (hint: most of them).
I thought Xitter was going to be a bank! Honestly, who can follow the mentally-ill, cocaine-fueled ramblings of this man-baby?
Do it. I haven’t seen this play out in the recent past, and I’m sure moving from text content to video content to chase advertising has never gone wrong for anyone ever.
See Cracked.com’s “pivot to video”
Also collegehumor.com
I really miss funny websites that didn’t have videos. I kind of hate online video content that isn’t YouTube tutorials or gifs less than 10 seconds
I’ve been in a coma the last decade, those went well, right? It wasn’t something where the whole market would just :Dropout or something, right?
I suppose that’s better than being a ‘white supremacists first platform’ but I bet they’ll probably still do that too.
He probably figured that it was implied that they would be white supremacist videos. I mean, what other kind would they host at this point?
You need video to show with certainty that they are white. Text can be written by anyone
Of course let’s take a platform that barely holds itself together to show just text and let’s pivot it to be the most technical demanding and expensive kind of service. It will work fine, I’m sure.
It’s really wild to go from real life, where I don’t know anyone who uses twitter, to online where people are very interested in what’s happening to it.
Do these people not know a ton of viewership for news shows is that the channel is just on? Who’s gonna go to twitter and watch Don Lemon talk about stuff if they have to seek it out? Maybe they think it’s a built-in audience because people are there so surely they’ll watch?
Basically it’s content that expires quickly that isn’t “just on” anywhere. I’m no genius but I wouldn’t count on it working.
In Norway less people use Twitter then fucking teletext <img alt="" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/d143a4a9-32af-4104-8d38-6f9873ffad57.png">
Yet it’s in the media all the time
That screenshot is old enough to drink. Do people actually still use teletext?
Actually yes
According to the national media, twice as many use teletext than Twitter in Norway
Source nrk.no/…/nrk-tekst-tv-holder-det-gaende.-i-ar-er-…
Twitter is shoved down our throats because every time you go to a news site they embed it into their articles. Twitter is a success because journalists are addicted to it despite constantly complaining about how shitty it is.
What journalist wouldn’t love a giant repository of short, easily digestible, up to the minute quotes, with built in attribution?
The only videos that show up on my Twitter are literal war crimes, gore, NFSW, NFSL… I’m sure being LiveLeak Jr is doing great things for bringing advertisers back.
It’s an interesting claim.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a platform struggle more with video than Twitter. Everything looks like it’s using RealPlayer. It’s the only platform where the Japanese wouldn’t have to censor their porn before uploading.
Oh my God. I forgot about real player. Plus DivX.
And QuickTime. You can still get both of these. I can only imagine they’re visited by people that’ve just come out of a 20 year coma and need something to play their .avi files on…
RealPlayer was, and still to this day is, a for-profit product. Somehow. RealNetworks LLC still exists, they apparently now provide “artificial intelligence and computer vision based products” though they still provide subscription-based online entertainment services…presumably for people who set up automatic bill pay then forgot about it for 15 years.
Also, do you mean DivX, the vaguely obscure MPEG-4-like video codec that some people even used for reasons beyond my understanding, or DIVX, the completely unrelated DVD rental system operated by Circuit City which involved encrypted DVDs with unique barcodes and a special DVD player with a modem in it that would phone home, check if the rental is still valid, and if so get the key needed to play the disc…which is now defunct and all the discs are useless. Because both of those pretty much sucked.
The codec was quite popular for a decent little stretch there… Far more so and for far longer than the circuit city product.
SHIT!
Real Player was pr….***buffering***
Reddit video…
I doubt their server infrastructure will hold after all the shenanigans Elmo pulled with it.
Video streaming is a lot more taxing than text.
It’s not a video service, it’s a pile of poo.
With this guy, I can only assume he’s saying so because video ads generate more profit.
Twitter has no skin in the video serving game and they have no USP there (aside from famously allowing porn). When he realizes the folly of his actions, he’ll do another U-turn like the many he’s done since purchasing Twitter.
I didn’t know this guy’s character before he bought Twitter but am now fully convinced he’s but a charlatan who’s always trying to seek the popular ‘vote’ as a billionaire.
New X url is now xvideos, the sites never been better imo.
It blew us all.
You forgot to say “away” again.
dont turn on that light, aint nobody gonna see what frank’s face look like
This guy never told a truth in his life.
Elon, put down the crack pipe.
Right? If this guy wanted tictok then why didn’t he just buy tictok instead of dumping money into something completely unrelated and then turn it into a shitty competitor for the already established tictok “market.”
But yeah, Big Brains will keep telling us Billionaires are Smart People that totally earned their wealth… 🙄
He didn’t want a video platform, he wanted to control twitter. Once he had it he had to figure out how to make money.
I can’t wait for X to transition finally into “no longer existing”
Thing is, it probably won’t. MySpace is still around. LiveJournal is still around. Big social media platforms don’t tend to stop existing. But they do stop being culturally and socially relevant, and that’s what I hope comes sooner rather than later to Twitter: irrelevancy.
Preach!
One can dream.
Twitter can show videos?
Press X to doubt
.
<img alt="" src="https://programming.dev/pictrs/image/0388c564-8f5f-4961-92bf-b9bbe46135b7.jpeg">
It’s amazing watching a platform with no substantial competitor kill itself so badly. AltaVista was killed by Google, MySpace was killed by Facebook, Twitter is killed by the ramblings of the lunatic who bought it.
You seem to be taking pleasure in it, but the fact is this was the plan from the moment he was locked into the purchase. Buy the business, run it into the ground, destroy the platform that people use to organise on. On the way down, try a bunch of shady shit and see what they can get away with - this will be the new standard for any platform that comes next.
That’s been the outcome, but I think you’re dramatically overestimating Musk if you think that was his intent.
It seems clear to me that he’s of below average intelligence with an overinflated, incredibly fragile ego.
It wasn’t his intent when he posted about wanting to buy the company, but after the SEC forced him to buy, and once he formed a coalition to buy it, the plan became to kill the business off with a leveraged buyout.
Make no mistake, Twitter isn’t dying because of Musk’s mismanagement, it’s dying because it was saddled with $13bn of debt that it could never have hoped to pay back. The mismanagement is just a show to provide deniability.
That isn’t to say that Musk is some kind of genius, just that he’s a clown playing his role.
Everyone is downvoting as if this is a baseless conspiracy and ridiculous.
For those people, here’s a source
nbcnews.com/…/was-elon-musks-strategy-twitter-rcn…
And an excerpt;
On the day that public records revealed that Elon Musk had become Twitter’s biggest shareholder, an unknown sender texted the billionaire and recommended an article imploring him to acquire the social network outright.
Musk’s purchase of Twitter, the 3,000-word anonymous article said, would amount to a “declaration of war against the Globalist American Empire.” The sender of the texts was offering Musk, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO, a playbook for the takeover and transformation of Twitter. As the anniversary of Musk’s purchase approaches, the identity of the sender remains unknown.
The three texts were sent on April 4, 2022. In the nearly 18 months since then, many of the decisions Musk made after he bought Twitter appear to have closely followed that road map, up to and including his ongoing attacks against the Anti-Defamation League, a nonprofit organization founded by Jewish Americans to counter discrimination.
But…how does NBC News have texts that Musk received…?
Edit: Revealed in a court filing.
See relevant text:
God damn but that gun is smoking like Australia in a heatwave.
I bet that anon texter practically jizzed himself to see how much chaos a few words could create.
That is one explanation, but imho a more likely explanation in the spirit of Hanlon’s razor is that he receives 100s of crazy texts like this on a daily basis and one of them just happens to somewhat align with what crazy shit he is doing now.
You should read the article. It details how Musk followed the text’s suggestions exactly, and is aligning himself closely with the same far right neo-nazis that begged him to buy Twitter and deplatform it.
Even if that exact text didn’t convince him, one of the well known far right political pundits has definitely tried. Free speech is like their worst enemy, they can’t let Twitter be open to all that free information.
Also a likely mix of ketamine and alcohol.
And yet there are so, so many people that don’t seem to be able to pull themselves away from it.
I really don’t get it.
To be fair, there are also people like me who didn’t use it at all before, but now do just to watch it burn cause it’s funny.
For the reason above. There’s not a serious alternative that replaced it for those people.
It’s fucked up how threads immediately devolved into a bigoted Antisemitic shit hole like twitter in a fraction of the time.
Is it impossible to develop a social media platform that doesn’t get overrun with conspiracy whack jobs and assholes?
Social media in modern times is an instrument of war. It will always be used as such whenever possible. So no, I think the answer is no
It is fascinating watching what Iran, Qatar and Russia have pulled off this past few years.
Is Mastodon overrun too recently, or…?
It’s just not a useful platform at present. Maybe one day it’ll be relevant enough but not today.
I think we just underestimate the amount of people who think like that
Sadly I’ve just come to assume most people are Antisemitic bigots these days. I’d rather be pleasantly surprised than disappointed.
It’s not about having a serious alternative, what twitter does can mostly be written by like 10 people in 3 months. The problem is scaling it to be big enough while eating that cost until enough people start using it.
AND the advertising budget.
There’s no real way to break into that now without a ridiculous amount of investor capital which investors are gunshy in offering for shit like this right now.
We don’t need an alternative, we need the next generation and I hate to say it but it might just be Discord if they get their shit together.
I never seriously used twitter (I probably have used it less than 10 hours total), but what really is stopping people from getting on mastodon? It’s the same thing, and is extremely easy to sign up for.
It’s right there, not that I have much of a desire to use it, but if people like twitter, is it just that not enough people are on it? Just the network effect?
Twitter has more people, meaning more content. It’s the same reason I still have Reddit downloaded.
The network effect is a real doozy.
Social momentum is a hell of a thing
I’m still on Xitter, but on my own terms. I use a plugin called Control Panel for Twitter, which means I don’t get anything on my feed other than stuff from those I follow, and what they share, unless they share some bollocks then I will block shares from them. There are a bunch of Hong Kong activists, journalists and fellow HK travelers who don’t use other platforms yet, and I don’t want to get cut off from what’s happening there. There is also good motorsports contributors, who also post on TikTok and IG which I refuse to go near. In addition there are feeds and posters related to my work, some I can’t see anywhere else, then there is some random stuff I can’t see anywhere else.
I don’t have the Xitter app on my phone and use the same Control Panel plugin to ensure my terms of engagement are maintained on mobile. This plugin, for example blocks anyone who paid Xitter for a blue badge, so I don’t see any of their putrid bile in response to those I follow. It also frees you from the “algorithm” that determines what Xitter want’s you to see, I only get a chronological timeline feed. Upsells, ads, who to follow, bookmarks and other random bits of UI I never use are also gone.
Basically, it is exactly how I want the whole Xitter experience with none of elmo’s shit polluting my screen.
Get it now?
I use Twitter with the control panel and ad block. Both on my desktop and my phone. The phone doesn’t use their app, it uses a web app which gets stripped of all the ads and other bullshit. I peek into Bluesky and Mastodon and post the odd thing there. Some Twitter accounts I follow are starting to mirror on other sites which is a positive thing. I just wish the news services I follow would do the same. I don’t get why the BBC (for example) doesn’t mirror its content or other news orgs when Twitter / Musk is so hostile to them and their journalists.
No. You’re still supporting that shitpile and its piece of shit owner.
It’s all about stickiness. Twitter still has accounts people want to follow whereas other platforms don’t so people can’t shift or find it hard to. I’ve seen some prominent users move to Threads, Substack, Bluesky, Mastodon etc. but not enough and scattering to the four winds doesn’t help either. If there were an actual exodus of accounts across media, news, celebrities, sports, government etc. then Twitter die on its ass. Or even if big accounts started mirroring their content across other social media services.
And these rival services should really federate. But we all know that the commercial services are loath to cooperate with each other when they want all the pie.
I got on twitter because artists I want to follow post there, a lot of them exclusively. They do this because – in theory – that is where the audience is, with the biggest potential for growth. Then they all get shadowbanned, even the ones that don’t draw porn, because they don’t bring in ad revenue or something. Alternatives exist but so many of them refuse to go to another platform because there isn’t an audience there, pre-packaged and waiting for them.
I understand it, but also I don’t. It’s a cyclical problem but only the content-producing side has the power to solve it.
A few months back and he was driving his employees to produce banking apps and god knows what else. I wonder what they think of their mercurial asshole boss who’ll demand everything all at once.
It’s “just” programming, how hard are can it be the program the app that does everything? /s
Honestly if Elon The Musky Husky wanted to rebrand twitter as a competitor to Youtube, there’s a 10% chance I might start using the platform, which is 10% more than usual.
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X the christofascist platform what?
I never, ever see any actual ads anymore. It’s either some dude with an Indian dude smiling saying “Hello!” or the same exact ass picture from “Hailey201238712985723” or “Jonah9018328412873” advertising the same porn site. No advertiser worth their salt would ever advertise on Elon’s Twitter.
I’m getting adverts for prostate cancer and kids book charities. You are just a perv clearly. /s
Prostate cancer is a pretty hard sell.
Don’t knock it until you’ve tried it.
No user worth their salt would be on there either…
Which raises the question, why are you still seeing Twitter ads? Lmao
This is the right question… People keep bitching… Yet are on the platform. Do the same thing as reddit, fucking LEAVE
He’s gunna be gutted when he finds out xvideos is already taken.
Time to spread the news that X is rebranding to xvideos
Easy, just call it xxvideos.
Throw a third one in there to show you mean business: xxxvideos.com
If X platform is pivoting towards video’s, shouldn’t XVideos sue X for copyright infringement, like Mr Beasts’s Deez Nuts being to close to another brand’s Dee’s Nuts. Even if they are not the same nor similar product but the fact that there is confusion such as have you seen the X video (Elon site video) vs Xvideo ( +18).
Trademark, not copyright.
Sorry not well versed in the technicalities but yes then, trademark violation.
The law says you have to show them your genitals now.
It’s an odd law.
Dammit, but my parents did not raise me to be a criminal. Now Elon, hope you are ready to see my ginormous 1,5inch monster
X, the platform formerly known as twitter, is now dealing in sour grapes.
Okay, so is there a way for me to see the current value of Twitter/X? He lost a bunch as he renamed to X and THEN everything went down the drain. So what’s left?
Merge with Vine?
Oh shit, why doesn’t he revive vine?
The call it Xine
I had forgotten all about Xine…
My first comment on here.
Welcome to lemmy
spits
Edit: jk welcome aboard
“Pivot to video” - How many popular sites turned to shit and died 15 years ago.
Has anyone made any piece of technology that could block Elon Musk news? I understand he is currently ruining the world at full speed, but for fuck’s sake, some of us don’t think this is tech news worthy and it’s frankly annoying. He makes it to every paper, then to every news forum. Yuck. Enough Musk spam… you are only doing him favors, even when the news is bad. There is no such thing as bad publicity.
I’ve seen a Firefox plugin called block the rich… I guess it wouldn’t fly if they called it block Elon
Not used it so don’t know if it’s any good
Will try now and report back!
Edit: it’s good. It blurs out text. Sadly not images!
It blocks these:
Block List
Immediate observation: really cool, also blocks comments about Elon Musk (including my own lol) Sadly doesn’t block images
Yeah thats a great way to stay up to date with technology, just pretend they dont exist!
You forgot the /s!
What ever would we do without updates on technological marvels such as:
The car is fine, and honestly the software is too, it’s the label that’s the problem. It’s like if Tesla had invented the first really good cough medicine but named it “Death Cure Resurrection Elixir (and cough preventative)” and they have this mustache twirling clown villain selling it.
I don’t blame anyone for completely disregarding it as fraud.
Well sure it wouldn’t be fraud if you simply don’t lie about what the car does
Does it block the word “Musk”? Is it case-sensitive? Honestly curious, especially since some of these last names can refer to either the person or a noun.
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It does not block “Musk” or “Elon” when they aren’t in the same sentence It seems to block “musk” or “elon” or “elon musk” in lowercase.
One problem I noticed is that it slows down the loading of other pages, like Protonmail via the browser, so I had to disable it for some web pages. I don’t think you can individually disable it for certain pages though, so I’d have to turn it on/off.
One awesome feature that I’d like to see them ad is allowing custom names. I don’t only dislike Elon Musk, but also Taylor Swift and all the other rich people who make it into my news and my brain every single day on every single news outlet… If it’s not about world economy, there really isn’t a reason why Taylor Swift would be on Reuters. There is no reason at all for Elon Musk to be on the news, and when the news is about the lives he ruined, they should put a picture of THEM up, not of his shitty face.
The solution lies between the monitor and to left mouse button.
Well no, I think bad publicity is a thing, with current cancel culture for saying the wrong things, it can ruin your career. Also pedo allegations do hit hard.
If this was the case, Musk’s career would have been over.
Instead this publicity fuels him and his wasteful endeavors.
Your career can only be ruined if you rely on other people to fund your career. He has enough money (and loans and solvent businesses he hasn’t decided to tank yet) independently to keep going when others would have had to pack up.
You think any other non-billionaire could weather the absolute drain of most advertisers leaving Twitter?
Your career can’t be easily ruined if you shit gold.
In a fair world, Musk would be rotting in some sewer.
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You realize that you are in a technology news section of Lemmy, right? This dude influences technology.
Does he though? Seems like it’s mostly him failing at business.
Anyway, the news coverage of him is unbalanced because it’s his plan to be on the news constantly and forever.
I think if you blocked the person who posted this you’d see a big reduction. It’s usually the same account posting Musk news.
Very good tip, thank you, stranger.
This might work but on the other hand, the brand name “X” doesn’t have a nice ring for the younger generation unlike TikTok or even Vine. “X” is so… Gen X…(sorry, boomer for the young 'uns for everything before 2010).
Gen X is not boomers. Gen X is the “lost generation” which is ironic considering the context here. They were between boomers and millennials, and are typically the parents of millennials and some gen z.
If they are parents of millennials, then only of the youngest I think. I am an older millennial (born 1986) and my parents are 65 and 71 (thus being “boomers”).
The microblogging platform that once limited posts to 140 characters is now a “video-first” platform?
If Twitter’s a video-first platform, then Twitch is a text-first platform.
Just like that and with way fewer engineers somehow.
I don’t see a problem as long as the videos are capped at 140 characters
If he built X.com as a video sharing site to rival YouTube instead of rebranding Twitter and turning it into a Nazi bar, I think people would have a more favourable view of him.
Musk can have good ideas but he’s being blinded by his own hubris.
Where exactly was the good idea?
Being born rich is a pretty good idea.
Man, if only I had thought of being born rich…
I’ve thought of it many times and it hasn’t helped me for shit
Having a social media platform that doesn’t rely on censorship to resolve the cesspit problem.
Unfortunately, people are more than happy to back censorship if it’s against ideas they dislike.
How exactly do you resolve the cesspit problem without censorship? It seems pretty much mandatory to engage in some level of censorship to avoid it. The only way to remove the most toxic people is to restrict their toxic behavior.
I think his idea was to reduce visibility of harmful content (like exclude it from the algorithm, or maybe just penalize it heavily) without fully banning it.
I suppose downvotes are also a solution (up to a point - doesn’t work unless there is a strong enough consensus).
But even if these don’t work it doesn’t mean censorship is the only solution. Just because we don’t have a good idea doesn’t mean nobody will.
Radication and disinformation are serious problems and some censorship is better than nothing - but still seems like there has to be a better way.
He’s got a funny way of accomplishing that goal. So funny that it looks like his goal is exactly the opposite. GENIUS!
You can’t coherently convey whatever you think Elon was on about because, whatever he was on about, was complete bullshit designed to make him look smart to the people dumb enough to buy it.
Making Twitter/X an ‘everything app.’ if we’ve learned anything from WeChat in China, LINE in Japan & Taiwan and KakaoTalk in South Korea, such apps can be hugely influential.
The premium tier of access makes it actually usable as a social media platform, my prime complaint about Twitter beforehand was that you’d never get any interaction with your posts unless you were a celebrity with a big following. Musk’s dumbassery in this case was selling verified access.
I don’t think pandering to the right wing is a good idea either, but if Musk made X a secure messaging platform, a decent dating app, capable of hosting livestreams and even a way to support creators which cut out middlemen like Patreon, OnlyFans, etc, it would have been huge.
The big difference between Twitter and all those other apps, as someone who has used both KakaoTalk and Line, is that they didn’t start out as social media posting apps - they were just chat messaging apps for talking to your friends, not the world. Then they added payment for things like buying stamps or sending friends money. From there, once they had established payment methods and users that trusted them, they started slowly adding services people thought were useful. The ecosystems built up organically over time. No one planned for them to be everything apps or tried to force it on the apps and users. They became those because they adapted to how people were using the internet on their phones.
I’d say if any app is poised to become the Western world’s ‘everything app’, it’s Facebook.
They’ve got a marketplace, video content, livestreaming, photo sharing, instant messaging, online dating which shits all over mainstream dating apps, and that’s just what Facebook can do.
Facebook is probably as close as we’ll get to a western “everything app.” They kind of missed the window, though, which is another thing Elon doesn’t seem to realize - the big eastern “everything apps” were there as people were starting to switch to doing things on their phones, so the ecosystems grew around them as things were developing (especially WeChat). Elon’s coming in trying to turn Twitter into an everything app nearly ten years too late.
That’s not an “idea”, he’s literally just trying to copy authoritarian states where the people are stuck with the
“influential ‘everything’ app”power concentrating garbage, like WeChat, so he can have that power too.Fixed
Oh look a very current situation that affects technology but ohhhh noooo it happens to mention Elon Musk (you know, a dude who affects technology) now we get to listen to grown people cry and whine because they just cant stand that this guy exists and affects technology in a very real way. I dont like the dude either but I do like technology news which this and most of his decisions end up being a part of. Cry harder somewhere else almost every other comment is like “just cover your eyes and go la la la la la and he doesnt exist or influence technology anymore lets just ignore him!” Christ
If you call killing Twitter, creating a disaster car no one wants to ride, and pretending to be the only company working with brain chips “affecting technology in a real way”, then yeah sure have your day.
If you don’t want to hear shit being said about Musk, I suggest you go somewhere else to another platform known for sucking his ass.
and don’t get me started on the tunnel… I think it’s people like you who don’t want to accept that Musk assspam is a total fucking failure with no net contribution to society
Their comment is very confusing, but I think they’re complaining about other people complaining about seeing Elon headlines. Meaning, we might all agree here.
I meant both comments to @BobGrarnely It was me being confusing, sorry!
Lmao, he doesn’t have the bandwidth capacity to handle videos
Nothing a little random plug swapping can’t fix!
My internal cable management goblin just had an aneurysm.
Neither does his platform…
Nor the cash to increase the bandwidth capacity to do so.
Omg that’s a significant change in spend. Holy shit, there’s no way he can handle that. My boy scaled up twitch at the beginning. The amount of work, talent, etc …
How Elon deals with advertising complaints: “Go advertise someplace else.”
Advertisers: <img alt="" src="https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/78c306a5-308c-4293-a992-663f061ccc00.png">
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/14105953-20ff-4044-b2ae-dfa5fee73c53.jpeg">
😂
“X” the thing you click to close videos you don’t like or are done with.
For real. Every time I’m scrolling through a news article and I see a rectangle with an X in the upper-right corner, my initial reaction is, “Oops. Ad. Scroll past.” I’m quite certain I’ve missed some embedded tweets that way.
“T” a drink with jam and bread!
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A video-first bank?
I haven’t been keeping up with the changes to X but I checked out their videos site (xvideos, I presume) and it seems like it’s mostly porn with the occasional Tesla shareholder meeting keynote.
The keynotes seem a bit incongruous and I could do without them. Otherwise, it doesn’t seem like it’s gone too far downhill.
If X is becoming a video site, Xvideos should absolutely sue them for infringement on their name.
As a porn site they could maybe go toe to toe with the now much diminished twixxer
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Elon’s statements are the verbal equivalent of getting drunk and vomitting on a wall. Stuff comes up that you never expected to see, it creates a huge mess, and whatever sticks, sticks.