It’s not just lemmy that’s benefiting from Elon Musk.
I’m sure there were a huge swath of people who used Twitter and didn’t care at all about Musk one way or the other.
Then he rebranded and threw his ego and control in everyone’s face. And all the people who like Twitter IN SPITE of Elon were now forced to acknowledge that their Twitter is gone.
Just like over at reddit now, the latest move has alienated the people who really cared about the platform itself. If they rebranded to “Spez’s World”, though, a lot of the people who didn’t give a shit before would suddenly be ready to bail.
Lmao “Spez’s world” will be so funny though
He has so thoroughly ruined Twitter that you can’t help but wonder if that was his goal from the outset.
Narcissists like him would never seek failure intentionally.
You’ve obviously never played a board game with a narcissist. Flipping over the table and calling everyone, including the game they themselves purchased, cheaters is a totally expected move.
They’re not doing that to lose. They’re doing that because they already lost.
I GUESS YOU’RE RIGHT, LIKE YOU ALWAYS HAVE TO BE!
- Knocks phone over -
Fucking cheaters
You’re not wrong but he bought it at an extremely overpriced amount so he did already kind of lose.
Musk ‘lost’ when he had to spend the $44 billion. I can totally believe that he’s burning Twitter out of spite from having to buy it.
That is quite fitting
It’s just like Michael from The Office. You see he isn’t doing things on purpose to sabotage everyone, but he can’t control it, he needs the attention and the self worship.
Thanks for this analogy, it’s going to help me see the world in a funnier light.
To what end, though? The man blew 44b on a site that apparently was only worth 5-10b, and that was before he ran it into the ground. He also destroyed his reputation and the mystique as “genius entrepreneur” which the world can now clearly see he never was.
I can’t think of a single net positive. I think it’s an age old tale with people with too much money: he fell victim to an over inflated ego and too many yes men aiming to please. He started to believe he really was brilliant.
Sad thing is the man has so much money he still can’t fail, personally. He’ll have destroyed Twitter and even more people will lose their jobs. And autocrats around the world will be pleased. Musk will just shrug, tell himself it wasn’t his fault, “it was the libs” or something, and move on.
Eta: the only winners here, as per usual, are the shareholders.
44b sounds like a lot of money (it is!), but his net worth right now is 219b after this fiasco. At this point it’s just a score between rich assholes who got the bigger number.
You could take 200b away from his evaluation and he could still retire on a yacht and not work a single day in the next 100 years. Same for his children and his children’s children.
So yeah, “bad” financial investment, but it might be worth for him to kill one of the biggest platforms where he was called out for his bullshit.
Totally valid point.
To be fair, Elon doesn’t all have that money in cash. Also, like half of the Twitter buyout was made possible with a loan where he used his a Tesla stocks for like half of the operations as collateral.
Although I agree that he’s far from being broke, this can become a pretty bad financial decision to Elon.
Thing is, now ALL the platforms are calling out his BS. I don’t think he would have sold his golden boy reputation for any price, given the choice
Chop one head off…
That 44b had to be paid in real cash, not just the current theoretical value of the sum of his shares. He sold quite a lot of Tesla shares afaik to banks to give them a “small loan”.
Lol, “real cash”, look it up what he actually did. He took a loan in the name of Twitter, so he didn’t even use his own money. Pretty much financing half of the deal with the theoretical value of the company he just bought. And he took in extra money from Saudi investors, it’s not all his money.
There was never a 44b “real cash” transaction.
Foil hat time. Twitter was at one point a huge communications platform. People got news and opinions on daily happening almost immediately. He has successfully purchased that platform and destroyed the faith people had in it, in time for some of the most controversial events in recent history.
I mean, sure, assuming he doesn’t mind paying for that with 44 billion of his own dollar bucks, the devaluation of his other companies and the evaporation of his personal reputation.
Which is where my conspiracy theory falls apart. It mainly rests on fact that most of these decisions seem deliberate. Even an idiot by this point might start worrying about the loss of money. As much as he has, 40bil is considerable.
It’s not his money though, so your theory hasn’t really fallen apart. Some of it his money but he’s been hanging with the saudis and murdoch.
It is most definitely his money. He is using his real source of wealth, Tesla stock, as collateral to secure the loans. $44 billion worth of Tesla stock. And when you sell off a huge amount, as would happen in the case of the collateral being seized, it would tank the rest of his wealth which is mostly in non-collateralized (as far as we know, in relation to Twitter) Tesla stock. Investors knowing that $44 billion of Tesla stock will be liquidated–even if slowly–by creditors would make prices tank.
Elon’s rich. Like all rich people, he is inherently immoral and opportunistic, holding no allegiance to his species nor country of residence (“world citizens” are a blight yet most countries still let them buy citizenship–that’s true class solidarity while they get us fighting over stupid shit like transgender Chess Grandmasters). I have a feel that you are correct in that he’s been earning money from the Saudis and Murdochs and many others. But the main source of his wealth is still in the market. A source which he pumped up with market manipulation because the SEC is a captured entity run exclusively for the benefit of the parasites at the top.
But it feels like arguing around the edges a bit. Elon is just not good at this. He has failed upward his entire life which is why he had to buy his way into basically every successful enterprise he is credited for. Rich people, especially nepo babies like Elon, don’t succeed because they are better. They succeed because the upper class ensures that their class succeeds, because the alternative is the working class becoming their peers. And they can’t have that.
Considering that most of the market was stupidly overpriced, if you had 100b of worth in overpriced stock, and you had to choose between spending it or waiting for it to lose value over the next few months, what would you do?
I wouldn’t buy Twitter, fire everyone, chase off a lot of the good people and then change the name. If I felt like Twitter was the only plan, I would have negotiated a fair price, worked with the people on what was already working and wasn’t, kept everyone on until you knew how it ran, kept the worldwide, known name and probably paid my rent, lol. I’m not a “genius” in business, but I do know that this is probably the best I could have done.
IMO Mush was trying to run a simple pump and dump scheme with Twitter stock. You know, make some statements about ho he’s going to buy it at a massively inflated price, sell all the stock during the uptick and then suddenly find some issue with the sale and leave. However, during the “make some statements” phase he managed to make some legally binding statements and Twitter and their lawyers held him to them.
So there’s no agenda or plan really, just a larger version of the Dogecoin pump and dumps that Mush has done in the past. It’s just this time rather than some crypto rubes he tried running it on a company with lots of lawyers and it blew up in his face.
Agreed, very plausible scenario. It played out that way as well, right up to the part where his lawyers told him “you legally can’t actually walk away from this deal”.
To reduce the ability of the 99% to interact with each other on a basis that results in change of the 1% methodology.
The people running this nation and the rest of the world absolutely do not want us getting together and figuring out how to make change effectively. I’m pretty sure it’s why they keep ruining all of the social networks, we can’t unite if there’s not a platform for us to do so on…
Take any of the top 3 social platforms, then have a look at their total number of users. If we were going to go unite, that shit probably would have happened by now. Instead we post memes about billionaires.
Elon jet tracker has way less of a following now.
True, but it popped up on other platforms, effectively defederating. And you probably jest, but if not: 44b is a lot more than the 5k he initially offered the guy to take it down.
Elon is a narcissistic idiot, but that’s all he is. He bought the same crap his own PR team was peddling a few years ago, figured he didn’t need his PR team because he was so great (according to propaganda they spread), and went on to confidently make idiotic decisions because of course the real life Tony Stark can make no mistakes
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
Honestly even if the executive wanted to crash Twitter on purpose I’m not sure they could have done as good as Musk.
He’s carefully destroying the brand, the infrastructure, the finances and the credibility of Twitter.
You can’t be too quick because then people would take about for maybe a month and move over.
No it had to be slow and painful so everyone start to really hate it.
I wonder if his goal isn’t for Twitter to be successful. I’m wondering if political influence will help to get cushty deals or legislative changes favourable to Tesla or SpaceX.
Why worry about losing $30bn from one hand when you gain $100bn in another?
Actually the number of Twitter users increased
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Really?!? That’s surprising.
If it’s active users increased I’d be surprised, but if it’s not I wouldn’t be, most people probably don’t delete accounts when they stop using them
Those are all the flies attracted to shit.
Is this migration already called xit? Because it should…
Xodus
tweXit
tweXit does have a nice ring to it. Made me laugh 😂
Not sure which I like more. I think I’ll use both.
Xitting the Xitter (shit-ter)
Xatter (shat-ter)
It’s not the rebrand that’s killing Twitter. Elon is. He’s proving to himself that he cannot, in fact, run Twitter better than the prior owners.
I wonder if previous twitter execs are feeling a bit bad to have sold him twitter to see it destroyed like that.
I mean it certainly proves Elon is an idiot as he used fraud to manipulate the price and got played instead.
But was it worth it to let him destroy Twitter just because he tried to defraud it?
They got $44 billion, double what sane people thought the company was worth. It would be irresponsible not to take Elon for a ride.
Responsible financially, as agents of the corporation, sure. And I understand why they did it. Morally though (and I would argue civilly) it was wildly irresponsible. Thousands of people lost their jobs, hundreds of people are now forced to work at Elons insane business under threat of deportation if their visa is invalidated, and hundreds of millions lost a trusted, dependable direct link to governments, public figures, and other notable people. The world is a worse place for having let this deal happen. What is responsible financially is often irresponsible in pretty much every other way, and I wish this perspective was represented more.
As a shareholder in a number of other large corporations, I would actively like for buy-outs like this one to fail, even if it would make me a quick buck now, even if that quick buck is a lot. I much prefer stability to major erratic changes, even when they benefit me.
hundreds of millions lost a trusted, dependable direct link to governments, public figures, and other notable people.
It should not have been trusted and pervasive to such an extent. If anything, better to cut the dependency now than later.
That’s a fair argument, and to an extent I agree. That said, I don’t think firebombing something hundreds of millions depend on is not the ideal solution, and it could have been handled differently, like by adding contingencies, for example. Or working in some form of transition period.
In an ideal world, yes. But face it, you, I, and my aunt’s puppy knows that’d never happen. Get every govt agency in the world to cooperate? Yeah right. This might have been one of the best ways we could realistically have ended it.
I disagree. Nationalizing Twitter is definitely idealistic thinking, but adding some small contingencies to the deal definitely is not, and is actually pretty standard in large mergers, to maintain stability.
An easy counterpoint to what you just said: mahney. Nobody cares about doing the responsible thing when billions are on the line. Also, a lot of people say they wouldn’t do something for a billion dollars which just boils down to “you didn’t get a chance like that and you never will”. Hypotheticals are easy till it actually happens to you.
I have morals that I will not violate. Money does not matter to me beyond enough to comfortably live on my own (and I have reached that point already). I give the rest away to people in need, because that’s how my moral system works. You’re welcome to think whatever you want about hypotheticals, but in this case it doesn’t matter if they sold or not. The people making this deal would have been obscenely rich either way. At a certain point, money is nothing more than bragging about a big number, your life doesn’t get materially different. If your moral system allows for that kind of action, good for you I suppose, but I can assure you its far from a universal perspective.
Also illegal, since Twitter was a public company- they can’t discriminate on bona fide offers or they risk being sued.
As someone who doesnt use twitter… yes this was totally worth it!
I’d be bummed out but happy I have an unlimited supply of hundred dollar bills to wipe away the tears.
I wonder how long twitter would able to run at a loss if elon didn’t take it over as a slapstick joke went wrong.
I’m sure the previous execs are crying into their wads of cash. So much sympathy for them.
Lol. Like if they gave a shit they would have forced that buyout to go through.
Yeah. I left with the bluetlicker shitstain bump up in every reply. The dumbest people to ever buy a device and learn English that somehow didn’t choke on rocks as a kid…
Just had enough and had to leave
To be honest, for me it absolutely was the rebranding that made me delete the app.
Why? I’m really curious what difference the rebranding made to users
Imagine your favourite fancy restaurant suddenly adopts an extreme “Batman” theme. Same food, but just hardcore decorated a la the Dark Knight. You’d probably still go there, but you’d have a different time. And you’d reconsider the types of people you’d bring there, etc.
Brand is far more than the logo in the top corner, and I think marketing textbooks are going to use Twitter -> X as an example of how not to do things.
Now I’m imagining meeting a professional contact at a classy Italian sit down place, but the waitress greats us with a deep gravely “I’m Batman.”
Thank you for building that moment for me. And yeah, I see exactly your point now. If I hadn’t already left X, I would be concerned about sharing a personal and professional brand with it.
For me personally it was simply a gut feeling of how stupid that name and logo looked on my screen. I was of course annoyed but everything else going on before, but that didn’t yet push me away. This is a minor thing, but it was the tipping point.
It’s stupid and unnecessary.
If you said it was the final nail in the coffin, sure. But for that to be the only reason?? Why??
Are you one of those “my brand truck is better than yours because … bowtie” types?
You are jumping into conclusions. See my other answer here https://lemmy.world/comment/2511227
Here are tips for everyone to enjoy Mastodon (thoroughly explained in the sourced article at the bottom):
- Boost posts you like
- Look at user profiles on their original home server
- Search for content on other instances
- Enable the advanced web interface for Mastodon
- Use groups
- Be your own aggregator with RSS
Source: https://www.infoworld.com/article/3701292/6-ways-to-find-better-content-on-mastodon.html
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I don’t think all of the apps have this option, but they change so quickly that they might all have it now. If I put in my search #mastodon, there is a person outline that has a + sign after it. This lets you follow any post with the #mastodon on it. It’s pretty cool to find your topics. I know Tusky has it but my version of Mastodon doesn’t.
This is how I mainly used Mastodon before Lemmy. It lets you follow topics instead of people; I prefer finding content this way. Unless a person really likes the format of Mastodon better, I’d suggest Lemmy over Mastodon for people that would rather follow topics than individuals.
I like it more than Twitter and go there way more often but I went to Twitter like once or twice a year. I like their search better and this feature but you’re right, Lemmy is way more fun.
I found it very refreshing that it doesn’t have an algorithm at all. I know there are some downsides to that, but I think they’re worth it.
I think they do have an algorithm but it’s super basic, Ruud from lemmy.world said they’re trying to adjust it. It’s not focused on making money but more on what you subscribe to, what your instance puts on the front page and not much else. I think they’re trying to make it more inclusive to the little instances and communities so it doesn’t get overwhelmed by a few large places.
On Mastodon? I distinctly recall reading that it did not have one but I guess these projects are fast moving so maybe it has changed or I am just mistaken.
Another good thing is putting people you follow into lists. I just wish we could do the same with hashtags.
Those are actually not groups. Groups boost posts from all users that mention them. https://a.gup.pe/ is one implementation of groups with mastodon in mind, but lemmy communities actually work the same way when followed from mastodon. I believe other fediverse platforms implement groups in similar ways under the hood. This means that everything is more or less interoperable between platforms.
Oh you’re right, I didn’t realize there was a separate thing and that’s a great feature too. I think the author needed to add whatever I was talking about then too.
Very true. Following hashtags is a pretty essential feature.
Tusky is a great app. But it doesn’t seem to have a trending tab, which I use to find cool accounts to follow. For now I use trunks.
If you go to settings you can add/remove tabs which includes trending. You can also add your own tab with any combination of hashtags, but pretty sure this only sorts by latest
It has it, it’s in the search bar when you press hashtags. You put in your search hashtag and then press the little silhouette with the + sign and you’re following the hashtag in general.
Not not trending hashtags. Just overall trending posts. Maybe I need to uninstall and reinstall tusky or something.
I think I read your comment wrong, I thought you wanted to save a hashtag for watching all hashtags. You’re right, tusky doesn’t have that.
Groups boost posts from all users that mention them. https://a.gup.pe/ is one implementation of groups with mastodon (and other federated microblogging platforms) in mind, but lemmy communities actually work the same way when followed from mastodon. I believe other fediverse platforms implement groups in similar ways under the hood. This means that everything is more or less interoperable between platforms.
EDIT: Try it yourself! Follow technology@lemmy.world from Mastodon to see what I mean. Although I don’t know that I would stay a follower of a community that large unless I wanted significant impacts on my feed. A smaller, potentially more useful, addition to your feed are things like gardening communities.
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Cool, but the article is from July 24th
Just deleted my Twitter account. Of course, the app gave nothing but errors so I had to do it on desktop, but it’s done!
So now you have an ex-Twitter account. Or an X account for short.
Maybe Elon was truly 200 IQ with his naming
I deleted all of mine and move to mastodon when I heard Elon was possibly going to buy it. I’m glad I did, because who knows what he has all implemented since then.
I am sure my account was never “deleted”, even under Jack, but at least I know I gave the best chance for my data to be deleted.
Twitter under Elon looks similar to the UK under Brexit.
So smooth sailing right? Right??
I find Mastodon very stuffy and boring, is there a way to shake up my feed? I feel like I’m missing something about how the app works.
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The more i see and recognize the use of the term “Federation”, the more my inner geek hopes this is how IRL Star Trek starts.
“The federation started as a group of loosely associated social media and information hubs where people would share ideas, porn and memes. The ideals and social structure would eventually spread to a much larger and more dynamic series of instances that built up to and even greater federation of the human online colonies. As it grew, first contact was made and the inter galactic trade federation was established to trade porn and memes, would eventually go onto to much more larger, important, totally not porn related causes. To explore strange new worlds, and seek out new…”
There is a whole star trek instance conveniently enough: startrek.website
I love the fact that you can now have a website that ends in
.website. It’s like havingusername@email.comas your address.
I can’t wait to charge aliens 5.99 intergalactic glonches to see my butthole every month.
“…to seek out new porn and new positions. To boldly jerk off to something no one has seen before…”
I wanted to use mastodon, but I haven’t even used twitter in years, so then I realized I just don’t social media that way anymore (or much at all for that matter).
I got it and I’m trapped in a weird bubble of shit that doesn’t really interest me and I don’t like microblogging I think
Same. @squizzy, I don’t like microblogging in general either. I was raised in the golden era of forums (the days of phpBB and vBulletin). My twitter account hasn’t been touched for years now.
I mostly used twitter for checking trending topics for news
I was finally super duper permabanned from Reddit, and decided to give up. No more workarounds, new accounts, new emails, spoofing MAC addresses, multihop VPNs… And I’ve got to say, I have gotten more done in the past few weeks than in the last year combined.
super duper permabanned from Reddit
What the hell did you do?!
I got permabanned for canning a right wing troll a loser. Apparently I had repeatedly violated the rules ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I got permabanned for shitting on russians (I am a Polander so it’s my default behavior).
I posted unpopular opinions. Perpetually for over a decade.
I never used Twitter save for occasionally hearing about tweets, but I have been enjoying using Mastodon because in practice it’s basically just a way for me to have a feed of cool astronomy pictures.
I found cool astronomy pictures on Reddit, and some now on lemmy! Cheers for random cool pictures of space.
Lemmy would be soaring too if it weren’t for terrible database code allowing for easy ddos.
Try using a smaller instance. I recently switched from lemmy.world to lemmy.zip and it’s lightning fast. While you still get all the content from lemmy.world :)
I find it interesting how many people are looking for the overall lemmy experience. The first thing I did was find the community niche that interested me and the relevant instance, then when I’ve exhausted that instance I switch to the Everything tab and all find the generic content.
Edit: I accidentally wrote fine the community niece…
How did you like the community niece?
They fined her, so they obviously thought she did something wrong.
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Man, this is what I get for being illiterate.
Oops
Yeah that’s what I said after my first community niece too.
I find it interesting how many people are looking for the overall lemmy experience
I’m one of them. I use Sync so the whole caboodle feels like just one site to me, whether it’s the Everything feed or my subscribed.
(I am not a techy person)
I also use sync, although I bought the lifetime ad-free version for Reddit years ago for like $5 and now it’s $100 which I can’t afford here which is a shame. Still, it’s my favourite app and I’m very familiar with it.
A hundred dollarydoos for an app to view a free website!?
It’s the reddit pricing swapped over exactly, I’m not outright against an independent app creator having a paid option, because it’s a very high quality app that deserves support, but I do feel it’s soo steep. There are also subscription options but I never take those, and the ads are reasonably unobtrusive.
So the developer has no underlying API cost to justify it and is pocketing it all? Obviously they can charge what they want and people can spend their money however they like, but this seems like an absolute con!
I think I’m up to 5 lemmy instances now. Various reasons that others will figure out as they gain experience.
switched from LW to discuss online
Hopefully they can fix that issue and the communist communities stop having hissy fits.
they’re prob ddosing themselves for failing the purity tests.
I had one tell me “you know nothing about communism, stop talking,” and I was like, oh, that’s right, I know nothing despite being well informed about the history of workers movements going back to the 1840s, Das Kapital, the Manifesto, and despite these noble ideals, the fact that every single communist government relied on purges to accomplish its goals, formed an exclusionary ruling class, and were corrupt as fuck. Fucking teenagers and their black and white thinking.
But you see, that wasn’t real Communism. Communism is a great and perfect egalitarian society by definition, so when it inevitably devolves into just another brand of stratification and oppression then it’s not Communism anymore. Next time it’ll work, though. We’ll still follow exactly the same formula that’s failed spectacularly every time it’s been tried, but this time it’ll work. For reasons. And if you say otherwise you’re just a status-quo liberal (never mind the fact that those supposed status-quo liberals are the ones implementing real tangible change that actually affect peoples’ lives while all the Communists do is endlessly wank about some glorious revolution that’ll happen some time in the nebulous future.)
When people say stuff like that it’s not about politics, it’s straight up about gatekeeping.
At least it’s open for collaboration so people who can or help contribute to fix bugs for them are able to do so. That’s the beauty of open source, anyone can help out.
There were stories that Tesla had a team in place to distract Elon any time he showed up to the office, and I absolutely believe that. Now that Elon has Twitter to distract him, I wonder what that team is up to.
Can we have something nice here please? I miss when the internet was nice, and you were allowed to talk to each other about whatever you wanted.
TRON FIGHTS FOR THE USER!
You have pretty skin.
Your hair looks small.
Throughout history, the wealthy always have a habit of congratulating themselves on work that others have created while doing their absolute best to mess everything up.
I don’t know what’s going on here but I’m just glad to be part of something.
We couldn’t have done it without you
Thank you! I got it off the back off a well fed lady!
Fuck spez. Why isn’t he doing more psycho shit like Elon so he can move more people to Lemmy.
Give him some more time. It’s not that simple keeping up with Elon’s adventures
By the way, your username shows as bot to me. I think you need to disable it in your profile.
Thank you
Well, don’t change it if you are a bot.
Hoping they rename Reddit to Y or some such
