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This man is burning anything that had any value at Twitter. From an extremely valuable list of verified users to the name which is even used as a verb. There i
by sschueller 3y ago
This man is burning anything that had any value at Twitter. From an extremely valuable list of verified users to the name which is even used as a verb.
There is absolutely no reason to rename Twitter. The name isn't even that stained compared to like Comcast or what ever the name was of that phone company in the 90s that sucked so bad it was renamed.
- reisse 3y ago> From an extremely valuable list of verified users Was it extremely valuable? I know a lot of people (myself included) viewed blue checkmarks as a "company PR account/mass-media journalist/celebrity account maintained by SMM" sign. The most interesting people I followed on Twitter were not verified.
- 3cats-in-a-coat 3y agoA verified account managed by PR/SMM is probably better than a scam account of the same person offering you to get rich with this one weird trick. A verified account of a newspaper is probably better than a fake one, spreading false news about the war in Ukraine, for example. Managed by PR or not, a verified account stood for the person behind this account, and guarantees this is their (proxy or direct) opinion or a real fact about upcoming event, or information about a past event. Right now a verified account means nothing.
- kaba0 3y agoObligatory mention of r/RealTwitterAccounts. The content at the time of the enshittification of verified accounts have been fantastically funny! But you are absolutely right, that trust was very important.
- threeseed 3y agoYes because on a Twitter style platform it is those core influencers that are important to the growth and health of the overall network. It is not the random guy with 100 followers, no qualifications, life experience or expertise. And the point of the original verification system was to make sure you can trust what that person is saying especially in volatile situations e.g. during a crisis where Twitter's role was so influential and important.
- reisse 3y agoI feel like you (and the person above) are missing the whole point of Twitter for many people. I'm not interested in influencers at all, I'm interested in the random guys which often have a lot of interesting life experiences or expertise (shoutout to @foone, for example). And in crisis, video and witnesses from people on the ground are more valuable than second-hand opinionated media rewritings.
- oneeyedpigeon 3y agoPeople use Twitter in vastly different ways, so it's difficult for each of us to appreciate the uses that others put it to. Even in your case, though, the flaw now is that you don't know if 'verified' accounts are bots, paid actors, etc.
- kaba0 3y agoYou still don’t want a fake Russian Government announcing nuclear war on Twitter, do you? Of course non-verified accounts had value, but you also want to know if a supposedly official account is the real deal.
- reisse 3y ago> You still don’t want a fake Russian Government announcing nuclear war on Twitter, do you? Ugh, have you seen Telegram posts by the real Dmitry Medvedev (ex-President, ex-PM, now chairman of the Security Council)? I guess the line between real and parody is pretty thin here. Besides, anyone falling for the nuclear war announcement on Twitter deserved that. Social medias aren't the trustable channel despite any verifications. What if the real account got hacked?
- Swenrekcah 3y agoBanks aren’t trustable organisations despite any verifications. What if your information got hacked? I believe what you just did is called “moving the goalposts”.
- 3y ago
- snowwrestler 3y agoYes it was extremely valuable; the easiest way to tell is that shortly after Twitter leadership got rid of all legacy verified accounts, they had to frantically add some back. And even then the company lost about 2/3 of its value.
- macintux 3y agoIncluding adding back dead people murdered by the same people who funded the Twitter buyout. The level of self-awareness surrounding Musk is astonishingly absent.
- pessimizer 3y agoNo, it was elitist and alienating, and people hated them until Elon was in charge, and then we were taught to love them because a bunch of blue check journalists with no followers and no likes instantly turned into journalists with no followers, no likes and no blue checks and lost the delusion that they were important. Then they wrote articles about it. Imagine a bunch of nominal liberals advocating for royalty, and you have the blue check whiners.
- eropple 3y ago"Royalty". Right. Now you have impersonation accounts of everybody under the sun selling you shitcoins and convincing low-information people that they're real because they paid eight bucks. This is the angry-for-the-weirdest-reasons thing I will read today, and it is 9:10 AM. Coupled with your post elsewhere in the thread that somehow justifies this as paying to be "part of the conversation", and it only computes as "'tis cope".
- School-Cotton 3y agoWhat is SMM?
- thefz 3y agoIt is wrong to conflate economic success with intelligence.
- audunw 3y agoOr to think intelligence in one domain transfers to another. There’s a long history of Nobel prize winners having stupid ideas outside the domain where they did the work for which they’re celebrated. It’s silly to think that Elon isnt incredibly talented and smart in some ways. That doesn’t mean he’s universally talented and smart.
- hourago 3y ago> It’s silly to think that Elon isnt incredibly talented and smart in some ways. EVERYBODY is "incredibly talented and smart in some ways".
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- monkeywork 3y agosadly no they aren't... thus the word "incredibly" -> "to a great degree; extremely or unusually." Most people are average, many are below average.
- pessimizer 3y agoThe average person knows orders of magnitude more about many subjects than you do. Average doesn't mean that you're half-good at everything.
- lesuorac 3y agoSure but that's just a singular person out of billions. The remaining what 4 billion people that are below the average person can easily be worse at everything then the 4 billion above the average person.
- tentacleuno 3y agoI think Elon is a bit misguided, especially in his business ventures in the UK. For instance, it seems egregious to most people that Elon expects people to pay £100 a year for a social media site in the midst of a Cost of Living crisis. Personally, I don't see what the hype is around Elon. I think he's done good things, but in other ways he's not a very good businessman.
- okeuro49 3y ago> expects people to pay £100 a year for a social media site in the midst of a Cost of Living crisis. Twitter blue is an optional premium service as far as I know.
- mschuster91 3y agoTwitter is getting increasingly hard to use without paying for it. Tweet read limits, DM limits, and now the inbox filter for your DMs got silently auto-changed to "only verified accounts can DM you". And no matter how good your reply to someone is quality-wise - a bunch of bluecheck dumbasses will be prioritized. Like every viral tweet has an absurd amount of blue-checked far-right, braindead, scammer and spammer replies below. Musk ruined Twitter by making it "pay to play". If I were to run Twitter, I'd have offered actual verification against a reasonable price to cover the cost of validation, say 100$, years ago. On top of that, some paid features (e.g. long text publishing, uploads > 2 minutes) for those who don't pass the "notability" threshold.
- tome 3y ago> Twitter is getting increasingly hard to use without paying for it nitter.net works wonderfully! > DM limits I've been wanted a way to forbid people to DM me for a long time. Thanks Elon!
- eropple 3y ago> I've been wanted a way to forbid people to DM me for a long time. Thanks Elon! Then you should have been happy in like, 2018? when they added that. You could restrict DMs to people you followed for a long time. The only thing Musk did was add, and then force on for users, "only followers and people who have paid me eight bucks a month can DM you". "Thanks Elon", indeed.
- piyh 3y agoHe's trying to relive his glory days as a Paypal executive.
- lacrimacida 3y agoIs he not aware thise times are long gone?
- timeon 3y agoDuring 90 every other company had name that ended with X in my part of the world. Probably not coincidence that they are called generation-x.
- adolph 3y agoGeneration X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture is the first novel by Douglas Coupland, published by St. Martin's Press in 1991.[1] The novel, which popularized the term Generation X, is a framed narrative in which a group of youths exchange heartfelt stories about themselves and fantastical stories of their creation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_X:_Tales_for_an_Accelerated_Culture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_X:_Tales_for_an_Acc...
- Tomte 3y agoI suppose idlewords is already saving coffee money, so he can buy Twitter for a few hundred dollars in a year or so. ;-)
- pessimizer 3y agoIt's not some obviously horrible decision to change a name that "isn't even that stained." I've turned the corner on this. I think he's turning twitter into a place where blue checks publicly talk to other blue checks, and people willing to pay a recurring fee to try to be included in that conversation can try to get their attention. What it's going to be is a massacre of reply guys (who are going to lose visibility) and sockpuppets (whose new/unused accounts will be useless.) I'm honestly interested in that. I don't even post on twitter, I read, so I'm not giving the perspective of an active twitter participant, but tbh 99% of non-blue-check twitter participants only cost twitter money, are dumb and their accounts should be nuked from orbit. Their only purpose was to make the room feel crowded, and thus to attract more broke users. Not that most of blue check twitter isn't terrible, but that's the terrible that people are actively looking for. Terrible with a fanbase. So, in the future, you should be paying for twitter or have an account at least a year or two old in order to harass journalists, politicians, and people you watch on television. I could see that being appealing to almost everybody.
- maxbond 3y agoI'm having difficulty understanding this comment in relation to one you made elsewhere in the subthread, where you said people who liked the previous verified systems were elitists. Here you are advocating a literal pay for play, and you're identifying certain classes of users as being "worthless" and advocating "nuking them from orbit." That seems way more radically elitist than wanting to know if something is a parody account or not? Help me understand here?
- coldtea 3y ago[flagged]
- SamoyedFurFluff 3y agoI don’t think musk brought back free speech. I think he just changed who the limited free speech applies to.
- eropple 3y ago"Free speech!" Meanwhile, Twitter's former management would have at least put up a fight when Erdogan wanted things taken down. And we know this because they did, regularly, with regards to requests from governments around the world. What of Musk? Could it be that he just likes strongmen and weird bigots, and it's for them he wants free speech, and everyone else can hang? (Hint: it's this one.)
- coldtea 3y ago[flagged]
- sobellian 3y agoExcuse me, but Elon called himself a free speech absolutist. How meekly that principle retreats when a government just tells him, "no!"
- eropple 3y agoRight. It's not "free speech absolutism" to let a dictator push you around with what speech your very principled platform puts on, is it? Twitter used to fight those, as I mentioned. And won a lot of them. Again: what of Musk? Surely it's not just an act and he's a simp for dictators.
- samr71 3y agoFight those, so long as they were trying to take down left-wingers, right?
- mcv 3y agoYes, but HE has always loved the name X for a brand. He also wanted it for PayPal. He put it in SpaceX. And if he loves X, everybody else surely does too, so he's a genius for rebranding Twitter to X. I'm sure that's roughly his line of thought.
- thinkmassive 3y agoThere’s also xAI that was announced a few days ago
- herval 3y agoand his kid, X Æ A-12
- whyenot 3y agoHe even named his child “X Æ A-12”
- rchaud 3y ago>There is absolutely no reason to rename Twitter For him there is. Twitter at $44b cash was not a business decision, it's something he arrived at through a level of reality-deflecting hubris and vindictiveness that remains unmatched by anyone since. Remember how he appealed to Trump to return to the site, and Trump ignored him and stuck to Truth Social? He then tried to back his rival DeSantis with a campaign launch on Twitter, which failed miserably. It's not 2016 anymore, Twitter's lost its pull as a political kingmaker and/or disinformation platform. That was the one thing Musk could realistically have expected his acquisition to still be able to deliver. Now that users and advertisers are fleeing and news sites are using Twitter sources less, he may as well bury the site, as it's outlived its usefulness to him.
- nemo44x 3y agoMaybe it was never about money and more about discourses? Anyone paying attention has noticed the vibe switch since he acquired it.
- anothernewdude 3y agoIt doesn't matter. Now that you can't even see tweets without having an account, the platform is dead.
- DrBazza 3y agoThe sheer genius of throwing away the brand of one of a handful of companies that has a phrase that has entered common parlance: hoover it up, google it, and tweet it. Feels like Musk has caught some of the PriceWaterhouseCoopers 'Introducing Monday' nonsense. At least we could attribute that to the dotcom madness.
- pjc50 3y agoIt's the "New Coke" of websites.
- hoosieree 3y agoNothing can top the 2008 Pepsi brand philosophy: https://www.goldennumber.net/wp-content/uploads/pepsi-arnell-021109.pdf https://www.goldennumber.net/wp-content/uploads/pepsi-arnell...
- pbw 3y agoOh man that's an amazing document!
- tristor 3y agoWow, I want to take classes from whoever authored this document in how to business bullshit. They seem to have mastered it completely.
- HeckFeck 3y agohttps://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qImHuiYnVQ0 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qImHuiYnVQ0 So great it inspired a song.
- Nathan2055 3y agoThere's a version of that with video that Neil reuploaded a while back as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fu3ETgAvQrw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fu3ETgAvQrw The corporate PowerPoint visuals just adds so much.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- BasedAnon 3y ago>This man is burning anything that had any value at Twitter Good, never liked these massive social media conglomerates. Give me back my forums.
- spacemadness 3y agoRight? Why even buy the company if you’re going to throw away the branding? I’m pretty sure he could have built his own version for a fraction of the 44 billion he spent albeit without the user base, but at least the new user base is there by choice.
- vastbinderj 3y agoTwitter wasn't ever close to making money - its IP wasn't even that valuable - hence the several clones that have popped up since Musk's purchase. This is a straw man - like many other of the comments here. Full of emotion, but vapid in real substance.
- cududa 3y agoMinus the FTC settlement payout, they actually were close to profitable.
- stcroixx 3y agoIf you didn’t share their political biases and don’t like government interference, the name has a very bad reputation.
- sBqQu3U0wH 3y ago>This man is burning anything that had any value at Twitter. Good.
- justcool393 3y ago> From an extremely valuable list of verified users I've got to say, the verified list was not very valuable