Ideally a missed Mars shot, with him tumbling out of control into deep space, to be honest.
This has all the advantages of Musk not being first man on Mars, we are rid of him, and his communications become fainter and fainter, with bigger and bigger time lapse as he heads towards exiting the solar system.
The analogies with Sears and Target are imperfect to say the least, but there are still the valid elements of predatory (Sears) and grossly incompetent (Target Canada) management analogies. All of which are valid analogies to what you rather eloquently referred to in the other thread as “Lord Musk, Dipshit Extraordinaire”.
Musk is certainly not trying to drain the tangible assets of Twitter, which doesn’t really have any. I don’t think anyone really knows what the hell he thinks he’s doing – some kind of mission to save the world by taking over a major social media platform and enabling fascists, as far as anyone can tell, as well as his own narcissistic megaphone. Of all the people who are guaranteed not be banned from Twitter, I’m pretty sure that Elmo is the most secure, pretty bloody unlikely to ban himself. He will maintain himself at the very top echelon of tweeters, and that’s pretty much the point.
Lord Pissbottle posted a fake news meme again, got called out by Community Notes again, and is now pretending he meant to do that to show off how good they are.
He can go in a little red car if he likes.
It’s kinda strange that I keep getting right wing posts that I never used to get. I am on a blocking spree.
That Adam Conover video was hilarious! Glad this thread is back. Comedy Gold.
Elon has fired so many people accidentally, that Twitter HR has a special “accidental termination” office to get fired employees back. (The link is behind a paywall, unfortunately)
It’s not an office, it’s a special toggle option in their HR system to label someone as accidentally terminated.
Unfortunately, the person in charge of turning the “accidentally fired” toggle has themselves been accidentally fired. /s
“The directors of the firm hired to continue the credits after the other people had been sacked, wish it to be known that they have just been sacked.”
I’m gonna disagree with everyone who says Twitter is going to collapse or go offline.
To be sure, Musk deserves to lose his entire investment for his hubris and stupidity. His technical skills are shallow, his management style is one typically associated with the diminishment of formerly great companies. All of it was unnecessary. Even if Musk had wanted to turn Twitter into his personal mouthpiece to denigrate his rivals and bury unflattering coverage, it could have been done so much smarter than what he’s doing.
But people really don’t understand how resilient Twitter is. In social terms its network of users is very sticky. In neurological terms it has a massive honking brainstem that’s well-protected against disruption. Twitter is well-engineered to continue in zombie form as long as Musk can keep feeding it brains. And in Silicon Valley, there’s no shortage of Nazi-adjacent techbros and H1-B slaves to keep things running.
SDMB veterans should consider how many years they’ve tolerated of slow performance, tired hamster jokes, “Winter of Missed Content” reminiscence, database struggles, the turbulent switch to Discord, controversial moderation developments. Introduction of a paid subscription - does “Charter Member” ring a bell?. Change of ownership to a new entity that doesn’t really “get it”. Endless struggles over what’s OK to post, what sort of people and behavior we want to encourage, what the “soul” of the board should be. Any of that sound familiar?
At every turn, a small minority declared the board to be dead. In fact, key people maintaining the site literally and physically died. It seemed unclear how things could continue, yet here we are. It’s changed, but it’s undeniably the same. We mostly don’t pay anything, we mostly have no reason to move on.
So folks need to go ahead and prepare their talking points: Twitter is going to be around forever. Musk will own it for a while. He will end up bending it to his will, he will end up burying the voices of his critics and boosting those of his flatterers. A few people will leave (have left), but most will be too lazy to switch. They tolerated Twitter before Marjorie-Taylor Greene was banned, and they’ll tolerate it after she was banned. The userbase will be resilient.
How about Twitter competitors? None really fill the niche. Technically speaking, it’s the easiest site in the world to build. The only challenge is scaling it. Original Twitter was a shitty little Rails app that crashed every 12 minutes, and they just rebooted it and soldiered on. But building a Twitter clone is unsexy work. It’s not cool or shiny, and investors know there’s no new money to be made there. So they try stuff that’s a different “twist” on Twitter, and invariably it falls flat, because Twitter users want Twitter. Partially they want the same technical experience, but mainly they want the Twitter social network, even if a third of it is converted to bots and Nazis. Grandpa is still Grandpa even when Alzheimers has eaten large parts of his brain.
What about revenue, about advertisers? Those are circling the drain, of course. But between the various oligarchs and autocrats Musk has aligned with, I am 100% confident there is an infinite pool of cash available to cover minimal operating expenses. Musk can funnel billions from the Gulf States, Russia, and China. It’s a private company; you’ll never know where the funds are really coming from.
Twitter will never be as “nice” as it was in the final days before Musk. It will become the hellscape it was circa 2016. But doomsayers should prepare yourselves: Old Crappy Twitter had users and advertisers for years and years, and so will New Crappy Twitter. It’s not going anywhere.
I generally agree with you, for all the reasons you list. But I am not an absolutist, and I would prefer to say that “Twitter is probably not going to disappear.”
I hedge, because Musk himself is a wild card who doesn’t operate by normal rational rules. He is notorious for having a short attention span and for acting more impetuously and petulantly than others in his position.
An example, which is mostly forgotten nowadays but which is illuminating: Back in 2014, he “offered” to buy The Onion. (His desperate insecurity about being perceived as cool and funny, or at least being associated with cool and funny things, goes way back. But that’s not relevant here.) He was rebuffed, so he poached a couple of high level people and started a competing online comedy venture.
It was called Thud.
It’s long dead. Musk wandered off and pulled his funding before it even formally launched, and operationally it didn’t make it out of its first year. A handful of public-facing pages still linger as empty shells but it’s otherwise deceased.
A normal entrepreneur would look at the wreckage of Twitter and try to figure out what continued value can be extracted. Musk is not a normal entrepreneur.
Hey, wait a minute.
This is why my long-term guess is that Musk is going to get bored with his new toy once he decides he wants to clone Harambe and teach him to smoke weed, and he’ll either take the site public again and then ignore it, or sell it to Facebook for a quarter of what he paid for it.
Musk failed in a business venture? That cannot be true. I have it from good authority from the Muskrats that Musk is a business ultra mega super genius and a real-life Iron Man that is going to save the Earth by going to Mars, digging holes, and stuff.
Social Media sites fade away and disappear all the time. I would say the closest analogy here is Tumblr, where really bad management decisions impacted a profitable community. However, the site is still there, and recently they (possibly) retracted the rule which decimated their user base. So Twitter… Tumbld.
If Elon starts flinging lawsuits at Apple, Google, etc, all bets are off. This is no longer about business.
Same thing with his cuddling up to the MAGA Right. De Satan yesterday mentioned Elon’s “support of free speech” and hinted at govt action against Apple and Google. Can Elon get a bullshit House investigation in the next two years? He seems to be headed that way.
A reminder that MySpace is still going.
I have every confidence that Musk can turn Twitter into the new MySpace.
Apple, Google, the FTC will not accept such (anymore).
And whatever Elmo thinks, if they’re not buying it, it ain’t happening
On my BBC Minute update today, they mentioned that Moby was leaving Twitter. That must be the final nail in the coffin.
(Is Moby much bigger in the UK or something? As Eminem said, “it’s over, nobody listens to techno!”.)
Parenthetically, I have customers who still use aol.com email addresses.