It seems kind of funny now, thinking about the preceding lines in that song:
You thirty-six-year-old baldheaded [bleep], blow me
You don’t know me; you’re too old, let go
Now Eminem is 50 and never appears in public without a hat.
What does it all mean? I dunno, but Moby must be amused.
I think you are underestimating how mobile subsets of those users are. Many of them are there for specific content creators in the form of celebrities, media personalities and sports. The content creators are more sensitive to Twitter turning into a hellscape and many already have a significant presence elsewhere and can drop Twitter at a moments notice and tell their users to follow them elsewhere.
Others have formed their own social groups that don’t depend on the platform they are on and can jump elsewhere if the rest of Twitter impacts their experience.
Twitter also benefited enormously by how it felt like an important arena of public debate. Part of Musk’s stated motivation stems from this and how problematic it is when this is regulated by a corporation*. But a lot of that feeling came from how completely the platform became a place for journalists to promote their work and from how much they centered activity on the platform in their reporting. They’re currently very interested in how it’s collapsing, but unless it’s turned around they’ll find other arenas and Twitter will just be one of the many places politicians say stupid things.
Yes, it might stay afloat in a much reduced form if the advertising revenue and influx of money from “investors” is enough to service the loans. But I think that’s a big if. I don’t think Musk and his investors want to keep paying for zombie Twitter. They thought Musk would make it new-and-improved-and-just-as-important-Twitter.
I also imagine that no matter how small it becomes, unless it’s a subscriber only, with a high fee, there will never been an end of new users willing to create an account to mock Elon for his little Twitter, and as we’ve seen, Elon has the thinnest of skins. At some point he’ll shut it down out of spite.
*Regulation by megalomaniac twitter polls is of course vastly preferable …
Did it make a sound when it died?
“Blunder.”
When people talk about Twitter dying, I don’t think they necessarily mean it will go offline. I notice a lot of the examples are still online: Tumblr, Truth Social, MySpace, etc. But they’re still considered failures.
Musk could likely keep Twitter online as long as he wants. But it doesn’t mean it would really be Twitter. Right now, as much as people malign it, Twitter still is hanging on as what it was. There are alternatives, but no replacement, either technologically or socially. There’s no Facebook to Twitter’s Myspace.
If Musk gets Twitter removed from the app stores, then that would likely change quickly. If one of these alternatives becomes the place to go to escape Twitter, this changes.
Twitter had no equal before. Its only competition was other social media that had their own niche.
And, sure, Musk may try to sell it off, and maybe that someone else can staunch the bleeding and start repairs. But currently Musk’s pride would seem to prevent that.
My Twitter feed still seems to be filled with Musk Remoras all gushing about how useless those 5000 ex-employees must have been because Twitter is still running just fine without them.
*stanch
With that amount of blood, it seems you need to be a pretty staunch stancher to make much headway against the rising crimson tide.
Bah. I knew it didn’t sound right, but couldn’t think of the other word. I should have googled.
(Lowercase g was an intentional choice there.)
Go 'Bama.
I’m interested in seeing the Venn diagram between people who thought Free speech was defined by refusing to sell a gay person a cake, and the group of people who think it’s violated when Apple won’t advertise on Twitter. Could it be a circle? Possibly!
No, I’m in one group but not the other.
note that “staunch” has gained widespread (if not universal) acceptance as a correct spelling of the verb form.
I don’t like it, but I’m not in charge.
I think persistent email addresses are why a lot of faded husks litter the internet. My brother has had the same hotmail address for decades, and MSFT dropped the name in 2011.
I have a hotmail address myself. That said, I never used it as my main email. I just wanted an easy remember email give out that wasn’t linked to my RL name. And the name was already taken on Google.
(Probably by me. It’s a very rare username that is never used on any sites. But I did use it on YouTube, back before you could have custom names.)
Answering here rather than that thread because I don’t want to stray from breaking news.
But I think Musk will abandon climate change first if it means losing his adoring public. The guy is an egomaniac and much like Trump will say what he needs to say to protect his fortune and have people adore him.
He’s never been attached to climate change. That part was all marketing to him.
Even if the cars are greener than ICEs, the factory and company itself are less so. Just look at the way he brushes off the up front environmental impacts of the manufacturing and gravitates to places with dubious employee protections and environmental standards. Ditto SpaceX. There’s a reason he settled in Texas. Environmental review is, at best, a joke there, and it has already had a major impact on local ecosystems.
He believes in climate change initiatives to the extent he can burnish his own image or profit off it. It lets him be seen as a crusading hero by gullible folks who don’t read beyond headlines. He’d drop it in an instant if he thought he could get those things by doing so.
The EU is warning King Shit of Fuck Mountain that they’ll ban Twitter if he doesn’t start acting like a grownup.
Because the reply is political and per the mod note, I’m replying here a bit more to @Tired_and_Cranky
Unfortunately, conspiracies have been reported a lot coming from Musk lately, the thing about conspiracies is that among the ones that fall for one are more likely to fall for others. They are like Lays potato chips, you just can’t have just one.
The point was that the crowd that Musk is helping here is not conductive to social progress. Time will tell if the bubble of information Musk is relying on will not influence his position about climate change.
I’m not optimistic though, and I say this based on many examples that I have seen from “normies” with right wing leanings that spend too much time in right wing conspiracy media bubbles.
So I find myself in the Pit. Do I get a welcome at least?
Promoting the reality of climate change protects his fortune. It will encourage the adoption of electric cars, which is the source of most of his fortune. It will promote the adoption of solar power, which can’t hurt Solar City, itself a Tesla subsidiary. It doesn’t do much for SpaceX one way or another but his wagon is hitched to multiple horses.
Musk’s band of racists and right-wing lunatics are sadly an influential force in America. To what end they are driven seems to be a function of the people they listen to. They listen to Musk. There is some chance Musk will be persuaded to deny climate change to further ingratiate himself with them. It is also possible that he will begin to persuade peole that climate change is real even as he spews bullshit about many other things.