The claim is a major departure for the service, which has long been known as a destination for posting short snippets of text.
“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
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.
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…
lolololololol
I love this meme format
Jose is not happy
He’s gunna be gutted when he finds out xvideos is already taken.
Time to spread the news that X is rebranding to xvideos
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
Easy, just call it xxvideos.
Throw a third one in there to show you mean business: xxxvideos.com
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!
Too late, some mastermind from the Czech Republic already did it in '98
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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?
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.
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
Social media in modern times is an instrument of war
It is fascinating watching what Iran, Qatar and Russia have pulled off this past few years.
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.
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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.
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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.
The network effect is a real doozy.
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.
I really don’t get it.
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.
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.
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.
Everyone is downvoting as if this is a baseless conspiracy and ridiculous.
For those people, here’s a source
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/was-elon-musks-strategy-twitter-rcna118490
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:
The messages from the unknown sender were revealed in a court filing last year as evidence in a lawsuit Twitter brought against Musk after he tried to back out of buying it. The redacted documents were unearthed by The Chancery Daily, an independent legal publication covering proceedings before the Delaware Court of Chancery.
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.
God damn but that gun is smoking like Australia in a heatwave.
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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.
How is Musk going to profit from running Twitter into the ground? I think I did not understand that part.
He isn’t. However, you can still make something from a loss - such as establishing new standards of what social media websites can get away with.
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.
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.
Not to nitpick but I think the limit was 140?
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.
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.
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.
Musk can have
goodideas but he’sbeing blinded by his own hubrisan idiot.Fixed
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
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.
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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.
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.
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his idea was to reduce visibility of harmful content
He’s got a funny way of accomplishing that goal. So funny that it looks like his goal is exactly the opposite. GENIUS!
Lmao, he doesn’t have the bandwidth capacity to handle videos
Neither does his platform…
Nothing a little random plug swapping can’t fix!
My internal cable management goblin just had an aneurysm.
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:
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.
Reddit video…
Oh my God. I forgot about real player. Plus DivX.
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.
presumably for people who set up automatic bill pay then forgot about it for 15 years.
SHIT!
The codec was quite popular for a decent little stretch there… Far more so and for far longer than the circuit city product.
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…
Real Player was pr….***buffering***
I doubt their server infrastructure will hold after all the shenanigans Elmo pulled with it.
Video streaming is a lot more taxing than text.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Somethings only worth what someone pays for it
I’m still not convinced this wasn’t just an effort by Saudi Arabia to dismantle the platform.
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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.
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“X” the thing you click to close videos you don’t like or are done with.
“T” a drink with jam and bread!
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.
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.
“Pivot to video” - How many popular sites turned to shit and died 15 years ago.
