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this post was submitted on 07 Oct 2023
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Honest-to-God question: is Elongated Muskrat intentionally screwing up Twitter so people can’t use it as a means to communicate? It sounds like a tinfoil hat conspiracy theory, but it’s the only logical thing I could think of at this point that explains this kind of stuff they’re pulling.
That reminds me of this SMBC comic: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/artificial-incompetence
Honestly, that gives Elon just an easy out, making him look as if he is actually competent. Which he is not.
daily reminder that elon doesn't work on rockets or cars, HIS EMPLOYEES FUCKING DO THAT.
In the way that no boss, manager or team leader works on anything, as they "just" order workers around. You really think his employees came up with something as dumb as the cybertruck on their own?
He's never worked a day in his life
That's addressed in the alt text:
Edit: The extra panel, too.
Removing the Like button means you can't be Ratio'd anymore, even compared to the comments of your detractors. That means vile, unpopular opinions will no longer be identifiable by the lack of likes. They get to stand on equal footing with popular opinions, with the average person none the wiser. Also, advertisements take one more step to being indistinguishable from organic posts.
Homogenizing content on Twitter supports Musk's two two main allies (or people he wishes were his ally): advertisers and fascists.
That's not what's happening, although that's what the headline implies. What's changing is that you need to click a post to show the options to retweet and like.
I've been thinking exactly the same thing. Facebook, Twitter and Reddit. Each of them a complete shit show of disinformation and censorship. Blogs and personal web sites are pretty much dead. It's getting harder and harder for anyone without buckets of money to stand on equal ground.
Higher intrest rates are dynamiting an already sketchy busniess model. Once the era of the cirpo macrowebsite ends santiy will return to the web
There's always SpaceHey.
I think initially, he just wanted to do his duty as a right-wing reactionary and use his influence to shame Twitter for deplatforming white supremacists, likely having heard that Truth Social was eying up a plot next to every other dead social network that pandered to fascists.
But like every other figurehead of that crowd, below the bluster and bravado lies a very tiny dick and his preferred method of wearing shorts in the shower is spending millions of dollars in an effort to convince everyone he is the smartest man in the world.
So pretentious screeds about "free speech absolutism" quickly turned into self-aggrandizing posts about how he could do it better and before he even got a chance to call someone a pedo, he'd accidentally made some comments about buying Twitter that he was legally obligated to follow through on.
He tried to squirm out of it for a while, muttering about bots and whatnots, but it seems his lawyers informed him that yes, he had also bragged away his opportunity to back out and he was going to have to follow through.
And so a couple of months later, he walked into a mostly empty office with 4 goals in mind.
First, he needed to get far-right propaganda back on track. Too many people had started to see through the "we're not neo-nazis we just have the opinions, goals and pundits", plausible deniability schtick and the far-right funnel just wasn't flowing how it used to before all the domestic terrorism.
That kicked off a flurry of actions like unbanning mentally ill hip-hop artists, internationally embarrassing politicians and pseudo-intellectuals who'd spent decades striving to achieve mediocrity before they said something bigoted and were immediately placed on a pedestal.
Second, he needed to self-soothe after doing something so stupid in front of so many people. $44 billion dollars down the drain! That's not what the smartest man in the world would do! Especially not if money was the only thing that made him noteworthy in the first place.
So he marched around unplugging things and pretending he knew what he was talking about and wasn't just lifting key phrases from more intelligent people like a celebrity parrot.
It was an unconvincing show for anyone in the industry who quickly realised he barely had a junior-level understanding of a single moving part, let alone the hundreds that keep a site like Twitter online.
Third, he needed to claw back every penny he could, carefully balancing things like "gleefully firing all the heartbroken staff" with other important business like "indulging his teenage edgelord".
But each new idea is even more dogshit than the last. He bought a sinking ship and he's trying to bail out the water with every piece of cutlery in the kitchen. It's only a matter of time before the office supplies turn up on ebay.
And fourth and, probably most importantly: "Are there any women in this place worth manipulating into prostitution? I need everybody back in the office tomorrow for a face to face"
There are people that benefit from Twitter sinking (foreign governments, the US government, Twitter’s Saudi investor), so this has been my theory as well. I don’t think it’s a scenario where he’s aware though. I think he’s a useful idiot that can be manipulated.
So the Saudi investor invests in something that he wants to go broke?
You may underestimate the amount of money the Saudi government has
That’s precisely why they invested in it. Sinking that ship means that one of the few remaining lifelines for working class communication around the world goes down in flames. When mass protests, school shootings, the Capitol invasion, and police violence occurred, which social media platform was almost always the place you’d end up reading about it from someone on the ground? Twitter. Think about how much easier the narrative can be controlled when Twitter is gone (or at least behind walls).
For political aims, possibly. What is sure is that Twitter would never be able to repay the amount of debt the company got saddled with. It was barely making ends meet and now it has to pay an additional billion dollars a year in interest. Why would someone would put their money in such a bad deal?
foreign governments yes (Saudi) but how does the US government benefit...?
Because US politics might actually become less about who gets the most likes on social media. Look, I don't know, but I can say after our previous presidency that the platform can't be entirely beneficial to the US.
If Twitter is at least hindered, it no longer works as a platform that gives people on-the-ground information about what’s going on in the country. When Twitter was at its peak, it was a tool for the working class to stay connected about protests and other events occurring in real time. That makes it more difficult for a government to control the narrative. Since the media can’t be trusted, Twitter would often become the place people go for information about shady shit a company is doing, outing cops trying to blend into protests, and other corrupt shit.
Now that Twitter is becoming almost entirely paywalled and stripped of any real value, one of the last bastions of information for the working class is essentially gone. It’s no longer a hub that people use for such things. If you want to stay connected to a mesh network of people in a mass protest or something like that, Twitter is no longer a viable option to get information out immediately.
There are an awful lot of governmental organisations that benefit from having Twitter as a free broadcast information medium
I’m sure it will stay free for them, but the rest of us are expected to pay. That kind of puts a wrench in it sticking around as the go-to platform for events happening in real time. It used to be amazing for keeping up with things like protests. You could keep track of hashtags and watch video on the ground. It’s 100% useless for that now.
it doesn't matter - if unlogged in people can't see it, if the audience numbers fall, organisations will have to start rethinkoing its place in their comms strategy even if they can still post to it. IN the UK this is real issue for organisations such as local authorities and the NHS
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
But he's a very stupid and very malicious man, how do we know?
The capability of stupidity to explain things adequately when it comes to business and politics is very limited. In both those fields there are people constantly enacting malicious schemes and playing dumb.
I think he knows it is a money pit that will never be profitable so is intentionally trying to kill it. It will never make him money only cost him money. He can't just shut it down without seriously damaging what credibility he has left. Seriously, what are his options to stop this 'money leak?'
I think shuttering it would have saved more of his credibility than whatever the fuck this is he’s doing.
Literally taking apart a data center with a pocket knife himself really made him look like a junkie with too much money.
Well, he could try to actually make it a usable platform and offer features people might be willing to pay for?
Think about it, this blue checkmark subscription would have absolutely worked two years ago. You have to prove who you are, pay 10 bucks a month and then you'll get the checkmark. A lot of people and institutions would have done that.
Offering advanced, paid features for professionals might also help. Like user management or thread based user mappings, so that large accounts can get management by a team efficiently. Companies are definitely willing to pay substantial amounts of money for things like that.
Could he though? I don't think he is that smart. He has smart people running his other companies, but he is running the show at twitter. I think this is us seeing him fail when left on his own.
That is not the question. He does have option, whether he is willing and able to realize them, is another question.
Anyway, unless there is some serious change of policy (and realistically, ownership) happening over a Twitter, is will slowly die off.
The first thing he did at Twitter (as it was called back then) was to fire most developers. There’s no way he can introduce significant new features.
Not anymore, no. But that would have been an option.
Companies are only willing to pay for enterprise features if you have users (and the features are meaningfully above and beyond what they can do on a free account).
Users aren't willing to pay jack shit for social media and there's no path to forcing people to pay for it that can possibly work.
If you're paying several thousands a month for social media managers, paying an extra 500 a month is not that big of a deal.
That's only massive companies. There aren't that many of them. $500/month from a couple hundred big enterprise clients won't pay the bills.
You need medium sized businesses to pay to use it.
And even massive companies won't pay $500/month when you completely remove the userbase by making it impossible to use without paying. $5/year would remove 99% of the userbase overnight.
You're convoluting several things here.
First of all, even medium sized businesses often enough employ several people as their social media managers, not all in full-time, but there's already a big cost associated with just "being there". Then, you are severely underestimating what businesses usually pay for in support roles. Databases easily cost six figures in licenses per year, for example. All the MS365 stuff isn't free either. 500€ is a drop in the bucket - especially for marketing, and especially, if there are compelling enough features, to reduce SM-team staffing.
And finally, you're arguing ex post - the question/my point was: would it ever have been possible for him to turn a profit? You're basically arguing "the patient could not have been rescued at any point, as he is currently dead". Also, Twitter is definitely not "dead" as you're implying. Yes, user base is dwindling, but it's an erosion, not implosion.
PS: we're both using oxymoronic handles, so I guess we have to be best friends now.
A medium sized business isn't going to just pay for shit if it doesn't actually add meaningful value to do so. 6 grand a year as a dropped in extra cost is absolutely something that is going to make companies that aren't mega-conglomerations stop and re-evaluate their social media presence.
I don't think it was ever possible for Twitter to ever be profitable at the point of Musk's takeover. There's just way too much cash lit on fire already. You can change the fundamentals so you earn more than you spend, but it's not capable of making anywhere near the money speculatively thrown into it.
It's not dead yet because they haven't forced payment yet. But it's dying hard, and will die overnight the day they add a paywall.
Yup. That has to be it honestly. I've mulled it over a lot and if Musk knows a single thing it's finance. These moves have all been financial. Twitter, I suspect, was not profitable when he bought it. Rather than admit he did a mistake, he tank it. Tracks with his egomaniacal moves so far.
I mean there's communication between Musk and right wing figures before the sale about driving all the blue checks off and devaluating the company which we know about because the messages and communications were released in the court battle
No, he's just incompetent. At his other companies he has handlers, at Twitter he doesn't
Destroying Twitter was always his goal. He really thought the "blue checks" were some cabal of liberal elites that Twitter facilitated so they could suppress the speech of others, and day one his whole purpose was to break that imagined control.
You give him far too much credit. Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by stupidity.
Malice and stupidity aren't exclusive, though. His actions can be stupid and malicious
The only reason why I'm not so keen on the conspiracy, is that it doesn't make sense to me that someone so wealthy would have to stake this destruction on his own reputation and take collateral losses on his other business if he was being machiavellian about it. He could tell his puppet CEO to take all those destructive measures and still maintain his tech genius image. It just seems more like a wild ego thing.
But the people who funded his acquisition, this obvious hare-brained idea, maybe they were aiming for its destruction. They should have known that he was paying far more than the website was worth and that its income would never repay it.