"And at the other end of the spectrum, some humans exhausted by Twitter’s chaos and combativeness are warming to quieter, more controlled conversations. The kinds you can find in text messaging threads, or moderated conversations on Reddit or Discord. Perhaps the best realistic case for Twitter’s importance comes from writer Ryan Broderick, who calls it 'the main website through which all culture travels' in America.... [That's] mainly because it’s quite searchable, especially compared to TikTok (for now). It’s a guide to the rest of the internet, not a hangout.... Twitter’s usefulness as a political tool had a decade-long run that peaked during Trump’s presidency, [somebody] theorizes.... [A]s Musk himself pointed out, the non-Musk celebrities with the most followers on Twitter rarely use it anymore. Too much hassle, not enough upside.... Once internet users decide they’ve moved on to something else, they never come back. See: Myspace, AOL, Yahoo. Also see: Mark Zuckerberg’s plan to create a new metaverse business to replace his aging Facebook business. If you wanted to spin this positively for Musk, you could argue that he doesn’t want to turn Twitter around, but that he wants to turn it into something else entirely — a 'super-app' that would have ... everything...."
From "Elon Musk can’t fix Twitter because no one can/A $44 billion mistake," by Peter Kafka (Vox).
About that "super-app" that has "everything," Musk tweeted, on October 4th, "Buying Twitter is an accelerant to creating X, the everything app." Twitter is a place where you say tiresome things like that.
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70 comments:
"Elon Musk can’t" - the implicit (and widespread) assumption of being smarter than Elon always tells me more about the writer than Elon. Maybe - but I wouldn't bet on it ;-)
Twitter at its greatest is a place for breaking news. When I quit I lost the ability to see if the power company knew about my downed line, or if people in the hurricane zone were safe. Twitter is where I first learned Bergoglio was the new pope. If Musk can return it to an imminent news site, I'd rejoin.
Ah yes.
We are suddenly, post-Musk acquisition moves, deluged with so very many articles explaining why Twitter is not only not a great place to visit, but it has no future and you shouldn't spend any time there and besides who needs it....
...and all these articles are penned by the very people screaming to the heavens that any Musk acquisition of Twitter is the Worst Possible Thing Of All Time Since Musk Could End Up Amplifying The Wrong Voices And Not Censoring Conservatives...
...while these very same lefties/dems/nevertrump (but I repeat myself) keep telling us that its important that Twitter remain in their control for purposes of minimizing "misinformation"....
Gee, it sure is interesting how the lefties are complaining about a $44B purchase which the lefties claim is doomed to economic failure yet somehow is key to the democraticals maintaining control of the narrative and "fortifying" elections.
Twitter absolutely CAN be monitized. There are thousands of people who depend on Twitter to earn THEIR millions.
Think the Kardashians and every other social influencer out there.
Why should they get all those millions and Twitter gets no cut? Apple gets 30% of the revenue of every app that they distribute. BILLIONS AWAIT.
How much will New York Times employees PAY to doxx people using Twitter? I think they'll pay a LOT. Want a blue check? No problem, sign here. The amount you pay is directly proportional to how many followers you are influencing. This will immediately remove the incentive for bots because a cost would be associated with having bot followers.
Want to sway an election? Why should people get to do that for free? Politicians and other political operators are especially ripe for PAYING A TOLL. Want to censor certain information - like Hunter Biden's laptop??? PAY UP. All these scheming politicians and Deep Staters are getting this app for free. That's horseshit. Nobody should be getting a free ride.
And hey, if anyone bitches about the costs, just steal $2,500 from their account - like PayPal does.
Twitter absolutely CAN be monitized. There are thousands of people who depend on Twitter to earn THEIR millions.
Think the Kardashians and every other social influencer out there.
Why should they get all those millions and Twitter gets no cut? Apple gets 30% of the revenue of every app that they distribute. BILLIONS AWAIT.
How much will New York Times employees PAY to doxx people using Twitter? I think they'll pay a LOT. Want a blue check? No problem, sign here. The amount you pay is directly proportional to how many followers you are influencing. This will immediately remove the incentive for bots because a cost would be associated with having bot followers.
Want to sway an election? Why should people get to do that for free? Politicians and other political operators are especially ripe for PAYING A TOLL. Want to censor certain information - like Hunter Biden's laptop??? PAY UP. All these scheming politicians and Deep Staters are getting this app for free. That's horseshit. Nobody should be getting a free ride.
And hey, if anyone bitches about the costs, just steal $2,500 from their account - like PayPal does.
It is not wise to doubt Elon Musk's acumen.
Twatter now a problem for Vox and other leftwing peoples.
LOL.
I also think it a 44 billion dollar mistake, but then I am approaching this as looking only at Twatter as a business standing alone. Perhaps Musk has other, non-monetary, motives for buying it and, perhaps, different models for using as a business that I can't imagine.
Those grapes are sour!
Well...I think the guy from Vox is correct in much of what he says. (Whew...I've never used that sentence before.) Except for this: Zuckerberg's Metaverse is already being shown to be a failure. It turns out most people prefer to live in reality. Perhaps it'll find it's way, but it's going to have to appeal to humanity, not a small, cloistered bunch who prefer to live in a cartoon world. (If I've offended anybody here, well...go outside.)
And yes- when Musk does take over Twitter, does anybody on the planet expect it to remain the one-dimensional idiot attraction network that it is now?
I'm glad I spend my online time on Althouse and not Twitter. Wait...what?
Isn't the big deal about Twitter that it's what journalists and the media use?
It had to happen.
A journalist named Kafka working for Vox.
If Twitter's last hurrah is to prevent a Democrat from occupying the Oval Office in January, 2025, it will have been a bargain purchase, the Seward's Folly of this century.
"Perhaps Musk has other, non-monetary, motives for buying it…"
He has said as much.
He has plans to upgrade Twitter. OTOH I paid a deposit and signed up for Starlink 17 months ago and thought SoCal would be active by now. Instead they launched clusters of satellites for Ukraine and now Iran and aboard ships at sea but still no service in SoCal. C’mon Elon!
’Twitter remains firmly text-based at a time when much of the world is embracing images and video.’
At least half of my Twitter feed is images and videos. Maybe two-thirds.
"A journalist named Kafka working for Vox."
He's a UW-Madison grad.
Maybe Twitter is a better place, without those celebrities using it.
I first turned to Twitter for an image: passengers rescued off that plane in the Hudson River.
Will it be Musk's next spaceship or next tunnel boring machine?
Twitter is trash, but it's a much higher grade of trash than Vox.
And it does embedded video from other platforms, so I don't understand what the issue is.
And I say that as a guy whose account is still locked because I won't delete a tweet...
Twitter is trash, but it's a much higher grade of trash than Vox.
And it does embedded video from other platforms, so I don't understand what the issue is.
And I say that as a guy whose account is still locked because I won't delete a tweet...
If all he does is take away their toy, so they might grow up; Musk will have done the MSM a service.
SpaceX just set another record a few days ago. Three launches in three days. So successful it's become boring.
I've talked to a few people who used to work high up at Tesla, doing diligence on their startups. Musk is a hard guy to work for, and Tesla is spinning out founders of new companies. Like Jobs and Apple. Like Ellison and Oracle. Hell, it goes back to Bill Shockley and Shockley Semiconductor (the Traitorous Eight) in 1957.
Musk reminds me a lot more of Jobs than of Shockley. I would bet on Musk's future success if I had more high-risk money to play with.
“I come not to praise Twitter, but bury it.”
Twitter is great for getting outside of the prescribed narrative that outlets like Vox make their living proclaiming and enforcing. It’s also addictive and must be managed. As for novels, I still read them as exercises in self discipline, too much Twitter will leave you with the attention span of a gnat. I have even succumbed to audiobooks.
Twitter is the work of Satan. Elon Musk won’t change that. He has dreams of making it an all-in-one platform, and he obviously has deep experience with online payments, but the problem is that twitter is the epitome of a low-trust brand and payments require high trust.
Voxplaining sour grapes. Now that they're less likely to get their "content moderation" way, it's a terrible, awful, no good place anyway.
Were Soros buying Twitter, flowers in the street.
Kanye. Elon. Trump.
Myspace. AOL. Yahoo.
---Twitter is a place where you say tiresome things like that. [AA]
Disbelieve at your own risk, such as it is. On the wider scale, Drago nails it, IMO.
@John Henry, thanks for the info on Edison and Ford. Didn't realize how they originally knew each other. I see their Ft Myers side-by-side houses, now a museum, made it through the hurricane but at least a couple trees came down.
Unix is a super-app that's an accelerant to creating everything but without an ad capability.
"Twitter is a place where you say tiresome things like that."
Yes, but Elon has a pretty good track record. More than anyone in the past generation he has turned ideas into results.
The advantage of brilliant people is that they have lots of ideas. The disadvantage is that they are also bound to have more ideas that don't work out.
If people ACTUALLY WANTED to get current information, wouldn't they just read a blog?
There's this one, that is run by this old retired lady, that spends a great deal of her day reading and searching for things of interest. She goes to places where mortals might dare to tread; but would find repugnant and silly. She goes through a LOT of sand, looking for a few nuggets.
The Only Real downsides, are that
She is apparently a paid agent of the chinese communist party (judging from her tiktok addiction).
And that you have to get used to looking at LOTS of pix of sunrises
Suddenly, Twitter is toast.
But Twitter is the go-to platform for "journalists", pundits and professors: The Chattering Class.
People who revel is text-based abusing. There they "vex by bringing to notice, or reminding of, a fault, defect, misfortune, or the like; revile; reproach; upbraid; taunt;" or in other words, twit.
Will they abandon the platform to have to stop, set up and video only to have their snark undermined by their face or voice?
A 5 second Tik Tok is unfulfilling, 5 seconds to read a pithy remark...
I quit Facebook when it banned Donald Trump. I assume that many (tens of thousands?) others quit for the same reason.
I assume that Zuckerberg will ban Trump also from Meta.
Were Soros buying Twitter, flowers in the street.
Which is precisely the reason to avoid making the dopey mirror-image mistake.
Yancey Ward: "I also think it a 44 billion dollar mistake, but then I am approaching this as looking only at Twatter as a business standing alone. Perhaps Musk has other, non-monetary, motives for buying it and, perhaps, different models for using as a business that I can't imagine."
Every Musk business has synergistic overlaps with other Musk companies, sometimes significant overlaps (see SpaceX and Tesla manufacturing collaboration as an example). SpaceX, Tesla (cars and robots), OpenAI, the Boring Company, Starlink, etc., all follow this example. There is zero reason to believe that will not be the case with Twitter.
These sorts of facts frighten the Dunning-Kruger Soviet Democratical types, like Heywood Rice.
Earnest Prole: "Which is precisely the reason to avoid making the dopey mirror-image mistake."
Ah yes, Earnest is here to explain how Musk is making a Soros "dopey mirror-image mistake".
Well Prole, don't hold back. Let us have the full benefit of your insight and wisdom. I can't wait for you to fully explicate this latest Musk business "failing".
I can hardly wait............I'm sure it will be forthcoming any moment......
There are a lot of good conversions on Twitter, but I got tired of the "gotcha!" bullshit. People who ignore your message and just try to find that one word or phrase that can be mischaracterized to expose you as a lying hypocrite. Such a waste of time.
Soros is pro-Crime Civilization-wrecker who wants to destroy normalcy and restore the ash heap to a state of Totalitarian fascism run by wealthy Soviet-type leftists.
Musk is a super genius who likes free speech.
Blogger Yancey Ward said...
I also think it a 44 billion dollar mistake, but then I am approaching this as looking only at Twatter as a business standing alone. Perhaps Musk has other, non-monetary, motives for buying it and, perhaps, different models for using as a business that I can't imagine.
If and when the purchase goes through, he'll have his own information feed combined with his own uninterruptible data dissemination network. There's a lot of power in that combination.
I think (hope) that people with something to say, are realizing that they need a blog. All of social media is about providing content for someone else to sell.
I use Reddit for content-specific knowledge, but don't have a use for the rest of them.
Boy you people are sure strong man dependent. It was fun a few years ago when you're all calling Elon Musk a communist for accepting greenie subsidies and sucking off the government rocket contracts being a worthless libtard from California foreign invader etc etc.
You realize of course he wants to colonize Mars because he believes global warming is an existential threat. He's a genius so you should believe that too. Of course that's the one big thing he is betting the farm on with Tesla and SpaceX and he's completely wrong he must be duped by the commie educratic elites who want you people dead poor and marginalized hehehe
Boy you people are sure strong man dependent. It was fun a few years ago when you're all calling Elon Musk a communist for accepting greenie subsidies and sucking off the government rocket contracts being a worthless libtard from California foreign invader etc etc.
You realize of course he wants to colonize Mars because he believes global warming is an existential threat. He's a genius so you should believe that too. Of course that's the one big thing he is betting the farm on with Tesla and SpaceX and he's completely wrong he must be duped by the commie educratic elites who want you people dead poor and marginalized hehehe
I can't wait for you to fully explicate this latest Musk business "failing". I can hardly wait............I'm sure it will be forthcoming any moment......
If I remember correctly, you’re the guy whose lips move when he reads.
Twitter is a sewer. Normal people avoid it not just because they have no interest in journalists and celebrities slinging shit but because they find it actively repulsive. It gives them a bad feeling even thinking about it. So if you’re dreaming about an “everything” app that produces revenue by managing people’s payments, twitter will not be that app because normal people associate it with unpleasant and untrustworthy things. No amount of marketing will change that.
You can hardly wait yet you’re too lazy to scroll upthread.
“good conversions”?
I had no idea.
Twitter is for "now" information.
Breaking news
Breaking political opinion
Breaking financial information
Breaking entertainment information
and one thing people always forget
Breaking sports news
The sports information alone is easy to monetize. It's the hardest to get on youtube/tiktok, etc. If I search for a players name on Youtube I'm likely to get his greatest plays, or commentary on this greatest plays, but not the touchdown he just scored.
Twitter is the "now". It's why "trending on twitter" is important.
Youtube is the "deep"
Tiktok is the app you use while you're taking a dump... Or sitting at the red light.
Except for this: Zuckerberg's Metaverse is already being shown to be a failure. It turns out most people prefer to live in reality.
A few years ago, VR was being offered up as the next wave forward. Some of us pulled on the VR headset, and threw up. The rest of us put on a VR headset so we could flail our arms in Pterdactyl PTerror.
I wonder where all of the excitement went???
What are people there to do? If they are there to post news or receive news that could be more significant than just going there to pass away the time and be entertained. If you are going to debate issues, text is the medium you'd use, not short videos or snapshots. If I give you a link or a reference orally or give you a video to supplement the link, it's less likely to get you to click than if I give it to you textually. Yes, Twitter is not at all an ideal medium for serious discussion, but it hasn't been replaced by Instagram or TikTok when it comes to some very significant functions.
If I were Musk, though, I would be looking for the next big thing. If he doesn't have plans to do something new with Twitter, it's best not to pay the money.
Earnest Prole: "You can hardly wait yet you’re too lazy to scroll upthread."
I saw what you wrote. Lets just say it wasn't the most impressive "analysis" I've seen on this to date. I thought there would be more. But there wasn't. Well, there was some snark tossed in when called on it, but that doesn't count as responsive.
It's all more boring warmed over It's Impossible! rhetoric that we've seen with every Musk venture to date. So congrats. You've safely joined the conventional wisdom crowd.
Howard: "Boy you people are sure strong man dependent. It was fun a few years ago when you're all calling Elon Musk a communist for accepting greenie subsidies and sucking off the government rocket contracts being a worthless libtard from California foreign invader etc etc."
LOL
If ever one needed an indication that our Howard, fresh off his Gee, inflation doesn't exist! and Biden's booming economy will lead to a major democratical win in 2022! was imploding, it is the above post.
Hey Howie, when you get with all your democratical pals and they are trashing Musk, just as you have for months and months, do you tell them that you secretly post things at Althouseblog where you pretend its the other side that hated Musk?
Or is that just something you keep to yourself?
We all need a little song to cheer us up.
My Mind is going blank now.
Good stuff!
Boy you people are sure strong man dependent.
Again with the "you people". Do you make an effort to sound condescending, or does it come naturally to you?
Drago at 10:25 a.m. hits it out of the fucking park.
I don't disagree that Twitter is garbage, as is much of social media.
That said, this seems more like sour grapes over losing ideological control of the platform rather than a true opinion. Someone took away his toy, so he needs to justify why he never liked that toy anyway.
Howard: "Boy you people are sure strong man dependent."
Mary Beth: "Again with the "you people".
Each day, Howard awakes, peruses the news, identifies what the New Soviet Democraticals are up to and then stumbles and bumbles pell mell to his keyboard to regurgitate those narratives with the political parties reversed.
This is what Howard believes is "victory".
Elon has a plan. Hide and watch.
Something about Aesop and less than sweet grapes...
About that "super-app" that has "everything," Musk tweeted, on October 4th, "Buying Twitter is an accelerant to creating X, the everything app." Twitter is a place where you say tiresome things like that.
What he is talking about is a decentralized communication app that allows private node operators to use open source software to validate and maintain the chain of communication.
There would be no central servers and no way for governments to spy on everyone.
Additionally this app would be using blockchain functionality and since there is a decentralized node network structure you could also support blockchain consensus mechanisms.
This would allow you to set up a point of sale system with block chain currencies. No more central banks. No more fiat bullshit currencies.
There are actual networks of cell towers being built now that are running open source decentralized nodes. World Mobile is going to be selling air nodes so for 1000$, 4000$ and 10000$ for different sized cell towers that are mounted on LTA balloons. They are starting and testing in Africa as we speak.
Entrepreneurs will set up their own cell towers and use the billing infrastructure to run a completely decentralized cell network.
We are heading into Web 3.0. This is going to change the way the world works. Everything is going to be anonymous and decentralized.
You can call it tiresome.
But this is why the Globalist Oligarchs are freaking out right now and trying to force Putin to launch a nuke.
They are about to lose their corporate tools of control.
Earnest Prole said...
Twitter is the work of Satan. Elon Musk won’t change that. He has dreams of making it an all-in-one platform, and he obviously has deep experience with online payments, but the problem is that twitter is the epitome of a low-trust brand and payments require high trust.
It is not so much the ignorance that is bothersome, it is the dumb comment that extrapolates from the ignorance.
People that don't understand Trustless blockchain structures should go look some things up.
Here is an 8 minute video with a very high level description of zero knowledge proofs.
Here is one of those explained at 5 levels videos of a zero knowledge proof.
Earnest Prole said...
You can hardly wait yet you’re too lazy to scroll upthread.
Your other post was embarrassingly ignorant.
Really you should learn some humility and go back and read your own posts.
You are not very smart and you seem to know very little of the subjects you comment on.
Unless I'm directly quoting a movie or famous catch phrase everything I post on here is my own interpretation of the little bit of news that I skim in a stream of consciousness. I don't have the temperament to do all the deep diving that you beta males Fester over to kvetch about then produce hysterical bleetings based on your inferiority complex.
Howard: "I don't have the temperament to do all the deep diving that you beta males Fester over to kvetch about then produce hysterical bleetings based on your inferiority complex."
We aren't "deep diving". We just know this stuff that you dont.
Which is why you skim the news, reverse the parties, and post your nonsense.
Its amusing how you are being forced to admit this and then you still revert to your old habits which reveal your hilarious Dunning-Kruger-based projection.
Never change Howard. Gadfly needs you.
Earnest Prole: "You can hardly wait yet you’re too lazy to scroll upthread."
Achilles: "Your other post was embarrassingly ignorant."
Prole really seems to believe he provided some sort of complete or comprehensive answer.
Who are these alpha males out there somewhere? Where are they? They don't sound particularly interesting as people. Do they have any ideas worth talking about?
People that don't understand Trustless blockchain structures should go look some things up.
Twitter is a Turd. No amount of lickspittle fanboi service will be sufficient to polish it. Musk surely has the business chops to make it profitable (any competent leader could do better than its current hapless management), and I pray Musk can imbue the platform with the deep American value of Freedom of Expression. But if he wants an everything app people will trust with their payments, it would be cheaper to simply start from scratch.
"Never change Howard. Gadfly needs you."
OK. That was funny.
And
A good example of wit.
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