Trying to use X/Twitter to find out what’s happening with the missing F-35 aircraft, but it’s impossible as the site is flooded with alt-right idiots making jokes relating it to Biden, woke, covid, Boebert, gender etc.
I think that you could shorten your post a bit if you like. I propose something about like:
Trying to use X/Twitter to find out what’s happening
with the missing F-35 aircraft, but it’s impossible as the site is flooded with alt-right idiotsmaking jokes relating it to Biden, woke, covid, Boebert, gender etc.
Time to stick a fork in X. It’s simply a crowdsourced NewsMax / QAnon. All transmit and no receive.
Today on NPR a guest called his platform “Twitter X”. I thought, that sounds a lot cooler than just “X”.
And now, in continuing banooners news
Go for it Elon, then my Twitter account will go from “something I pretty much never use” to “something that no longer exists”.
I’m quite confident that Twitter would die off shockingly fast if he ever tried that.
All his mistakes from the beginning have been rooted in his incorrect belief that he acquired and is running a technology company and not a social interaction platform where human beings interact with one another. Astonishing that he continues to not understand this.
Ah, @Cervaise, but he apparently does not understand human interaction to begin with.
The hope of any tech entreprenuer is to ensnare the userbase with free social features (funded by advertising), then once they’ve moved their entire social existence into that app, suddenly start charging them to stay or be banished to the nether regions of social non-existence or at least irrelevance. Ditto for content providers / celebs / influencers. Pay or vanish from your public’s eye.
The critical thing is there needs to be no effective alternative platform, and no existing momentum away from your platform, when you spring the pay-to-use trap on them.
Musk is 0-for-2 on those latter criteria. And will suffer accordingly for his hubris.
I think “Ex-Twitter” better conveys the desired dumpster-fire imagery.
Right. It’s arguably where folks like Jack Dorsey wanted to end up all along. But Elon, seemingly confused between his narcissistic need to remake his own favorite social toy in his own image AND hyper-accelerate Twitter into his vision of a universal pay platform, has fumbled it.
At this point I’m actually hoping he succeeds in tanking it for good (which seems likely at this point). The alternative is probably not any kind of reformation, but rather him eventually succeeding in building some WeChat clone to some limited degree or other that continues to limp along for years. And I’ve gone from being pretty much neutral about his crazy ass a couple of years ago (no worse than other notable corporate tech assholes like Jeff Bezos or the late Steve Jobs, who occupy no real space in my mind), to rather despising his arrogance and enabling of assholes.
He still fails to understand that Twitter users aren’t the customers, they’re the product.
There is a fundamental societal misunderstanding underpinning everything he’s done here. Elon, and those aligned with him, have views that are not popular. They think they are not popular because social media companies were artificially limiting those views in the past. He thought, incorrectly, that if he bought the platform and changed things so that his views and those like them (the unpopular ones) were artificially boosted and promoted, then those views would then become more popular. This only works if everyone is forced to see those views (hence the desire to get rid of the block feature, the blue check comments getting elevated, etc.). At a basic level he thinks the popularity of opinions can be changed from the top down if you control the global conversation. This premise is flat out wrong and totally misunderstands human nature. People largely feel how they feel, and part of that can be due to online influence, but just getting the opposing views artificially blasted at you all day every day is not going to change your feelings to the opposite, it’s just going to annoy you and, for me at least, make you less likely to see things that way. You cannot engineer popularity like this, but he’s doing a speed run on using all of his resources to prove that you can. I don’t think he’ll stop until he’s burned the whole platform to the ground. He can’t, because it would require him to realize that he was wrong all along about human nature and accept that he and his views are unpopular.
This also explains why X/Twitter likes, engagement and follower numbers do not translate to electoral success. It also explains why the most MAGAish congress members seem to be doing everything they do for X/Twitter clout rather than trying to actually govern and represent. The majority of voters do not use social media regularly. Of those that do use social media, most don’t actively get involved in political arguments. They are appealing to a small minority of voters, the terminally online, right wing bubble people. There just aren’t enough of those to win elections on their own, but to those in that bubble, what they see is that “everyone agrees with us”, so that also explains why they refuse to accept election results when they lose. How could we lose when I never hear from anyone that supports the other side. They’ve insulated themselves and think they can force everyone to agree with them and Elon is supposed to be the hero that will make them more popular.
To me, this explains everything Elon has done since taking over. Well that, plus foreign (Saudi) investors and foreign business interests, i.e. Tesla and China. He thinks he is the ruler of the public square and he has the power to shape public opinion. He has no idea how wrong he is.
And this too. I always tell people what I learned about the internet long ago. If you are using something online that you are not paying for, then you are the product.
It’s identical to drug dealers who start out by hooking some mark on free drugs.
And the majority of those who actively get involved in political arguments have already made up their minds and so are not going to be influenced.
That too. To them their information silo is “everyone”, but in reality it’s a small percent that is way over-estimated due to their self-siloing, the artificial inflation caused by Musk’s finger on the scale, and just the nature of social media in general, where controversial posts get more reactions, which gets them more promoted, which gets them more reactions, etc…
If vehemence were votes, the MAGATs would defeat all comers 90/10. The important thing is to not let their greatly vehement small numbers cause the other much quieter side to abstain in despair.
Empty vessels make the most noise. Still waters run deep. The loudest farts are usually not the most aromatic.
I dunno, plenty of people believe Fox News and its ilk have shifted/brainwashed formerly liberal relatives into hardcore conservatives. Maybe he’s trying to recapture that in social media form.
Yes, of course that’s what he’s thinking, but I don’t think it works the same way. Fox news is a single stream of (mis)information beamed to every home and business in America that’s by definition top down, and has a sizeable reach, and is also a passive activity. It just happens whether you are paying attention or not. Social media is an active thing we have to intentionally go to and interact with, and consists of voluntary groups of people discussing things with each other, who can also block those they find distasteful. Freedom of association in action. Anyone can say what they want, but nobody is forced to listen. This does, however, lead to information silos, with everyone reaffirming everyone else’s beliefs. People do fall into these rabbit holes, but you cannot get a critical voting mass of the public by influencing only these closed information silos. You get a very passionate minority that can’t win general elections because most people are not in those bubbles and think the bubble people are weird.