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.
That’s addressed in the alt text:
It’s remarkable how much nicer the world is when you imagine all bad actions are made in pursuit of higher ends.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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”
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I’m just waiting for
“After moving all features behind a paywall, Musk hides the Login button.”
At this point, he’s obviously just trolling.
Seriously, everyone here, if you know somebody still using Twitter, you should take the time to inform them about mastodon and explain why continuing to use that dying abusive platform and give Musk legitimacy is a bad idea.
The moment you get actual content creators to move off twitter and provide their content on mastodon, I’m deleting it too. Until then I don’t really see mastodon being a proper replacement, if anything it looks like bsky is taking the lead in that area unfortunately. Besides, half of mastodon community is seemingly against the idea of becoming mainstream anyway… so I dunno if it’s ever going to work out that way.
As somebody who produces content (with a full time job so not as often as I like) it’s so much harder to get engagement on mastodon without the algorithm tbh. I’m trying to get my name out there but engagement is slim to none compared to say, Instagram. I’m not on Twitter but both BlueSky and Mastodon have been a struggle. I don’t see myself devoting too much energy into them as far as posting content goes tbh.
I’m sorry but that’s because you are treating Mastodon like an advertising platform, not a social network.
engagement is slim to none compared to say, Instagram
This is because Instagram is an ad platform with social features.
You’re not going to argue them out of Twitter. If they’re still there, it’s not for rational reasons. It’s because of nostalgia, or because they’re part of communities that are stuck facing the Fiddler on the Roof problem.
Shaming them for staying isn’t going to work, either. We need to make a space for them to move to, not away from, and, frankly, the Fediverse just isn’t that right now.
2 weeks from now “Elon musk plans to lock the ability to like and retweet behind subscription”
Can we simply stop talking about Twitter? At this time, we’re just drawing traffic to articles about it, encouraging more free advertising for Twitter to be made
Tbh i like this circling around the dying zebu part of media, especially when its about an oligarch slowly consuming himself!
