4 ms·
The whole thing with Musk's wild flapping back and forth and massive value destruction is entertaining schadenfreude, but I don't think anyone is really surpris
by mmastrac 4y ago
The whole thing with Musk's wild flapping back and forth and massive value destruction is entertaining schadenfreude, but I don't think anyone is really surprised that his ego has been bruised repeatedly over the last year and he's trying to create himself a reality where he's the smartest guy in the room again.
I don't know exactly what happens when someone on the narcissist spectrum starts feeling the world turning against them, but I imagine that the humility required to reboot his relationship with the world is out of reach. He's a human, worked hard, had some lucky breaks and good fortune, and now he's completely out of his depth.
My prediction for the next year is that twitter slowly bleeds users, ends up a shell of itself and virtually everyone who was previously interesting to follow there moves _somewhere_ else. As a follow-on, the world moving on from the last decade of social media will in retrospect be seen as a Good Thing and we'll all be better for it.
- bilsbie 4y agoReportedly twitter has more real users now than it’s ever had.
- nickthegreek 4y agoI’ve haven’t seen those reports and a quick Google didn’t return them either. Would love a link.
- r721 4y agoHe probably meant charts Elon shared himself (https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1596718851097755648 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1596718851097755648). For what it's worth SimilarWeb estimates roughly the same number of visits (user sessions) in Sep/Oct/Nov: Sep: 6.8B Oct: 7.0B Nov: 6.8B https://www.similarweb.com/website/twitter.com/#traffic https://www.similarweb.com/website/twitter.com/#traffic
- jfengel 4y agoWhat's needed, I think, is for some other service to have its Big Break moment. Right now people still talk about Twitter because sometimes things actually happen on Twitter. In between the vast oceans of inanity there's occasional real breaking news or genuine insights. Sometimes, it's an actual trend (as opposed to things that journalists hope will be trends). None of that has yet broken out on Mastodon. It could, and if it does, people might say, "I'll spend more of my valuable waking hours on that application rather than this one." That is the one thing that genuinely cuts into Twitter's enormous incumbent advantage: the more people go elsewhere, the more people it encourages. The gradual outflow of celebrities could lead to that thing. Right now I'm seeing a fair bit of inertia: as bad as Musk is, they want to continue doing whatever the hell it was they were doing on Twitter. They don't want to re-build it from scratch on a new site (and Musk sure isn't gonna make it easy for them). They worked hard to get the followers they've got.