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Musk has been open about this being the goal. "Musk wants X to become more like Tencent Holdings Ltd.'s WeChat, a messaging service turned super-app that offer
by ryanSrich 3y ago
Musk has been open about this being the goal.
"Musk wants X to become more like Tencent Holdings Ltd.'s WeChat, a messaging service turned super-app that offers everything from social media and video games to fintech. X Chief Executive Officer Linda Yaccarino has said X will include features such as payments and banking."
If that doesn't scream social credit score then you're intentionally ignoring it.
- robg 3y agoSo like authoritarian governments? Seems like the exact opposite of free speech absolutist…
- ryanSrich 3y agoMusk is a staunch free speech opponent. You need not listen to what he says, just observe what he does. There may not be a single thing on this earth Musk hates more than free speech.
- rsynnott 3y agoSee, the mistake you're making is reading "free speech absolutist" literally. Read it like you're Winston in 1984, instead.
- hooverd 3y agoI thought I recalled there becoming some sort of "anti-woke" LLM service in the mix too.
- pier25 3y agoHow can X become a super app when it can't even be a social media and chat app right?
- rsynnott 3y agoIt can't; it's pure fantasy.
- gonzo41 3y agoYou nailed the killer question. That leads to all sorts of thinking about brand management and the skills of the person at the top. Twitter had the same level of brand recognition that google has. Musk threw that away for a bad rebrand. He just wrecked a company out of spite, or ignorance. It's surprising he didn't do his own social media to try and outflank them on features from the ground up. It would have been cheaper too.
- realce 3y agoAggressive lock-in and positioning their conglomerate's holdings to be blocks to conducting normal activity in society via any competitor. How about I flood your whole city with robotaxi cars and make it cost a nickel a mile, but you must be an X account holder, must use the X app, must pay in X-coin, and must submit to whatever other perverse encapsulation Lord Musk decides to implement. How about I only carry X-related data over my global net of satellites, forcing most connected people to buy from my ISP, must pay in X-coin but it also only costs 20 bucks a month. On and on, it seems pretty transparent to me. It's all a furious and cynical land-grab in preparation for a very dystopian future.
- ericmay 3y agoYea but competitors (Apple, Meta, Google, etc.) are better across the board and they would be able to provide alternatives or prevent these activities. > How about I only carry X-related data over my global net of satellites Just cherry-picking this one but, but it would get regulated and competitors would come on to the market, and you can also obtain service from traditional providers (ISPs, and mobile providers) like you do today. Also you can see how well these items work now ala Apple (maybe Google too?). Apple Card, iCloud, iPhone, Car Play, etc. good luck competing with that when people actively hate your products lol. I'm not super worried about this. I'm much more concerned about something like disinformation campaigns on social media or something along those lines than I am any sort of competence with Twitter turning into a dystopian nightmare machine.
- dehrmann 3y agoThe problem is Twitter doesn't have a critical mass of users or government support to make these invasive requirements actually happen.
- re-thc 3y ago> The problem is Twitter doesn't have a critical mass of users Twitter might have had. X no.
- googlryas 3y agoI've seen estimates that 65M Americans have twitter. 65M/330M is definitely enough of a critical mass to start something big. Effectively, Musk paid $675 per (American) user to bootstrap his everything app. Probably easier to incrementally add features to the-app-formerly-known-as-Twitter than to build something brand new, even if you can get a ton of sign ups when it is first announced. Take threads as an example, people got excited for approximately 1 minute, then forgot about it.
- numpad0 3y agoThreads died because the content trends was consistent with that of Facebook, highly monetized and therefore unappealing to Twitter users. Totally irrespective of Threads, Facebook is a superior replacement to Twitter in terms of its systems, and the value of Twitter is its violent flow of unmonetizable content generated by explicitly anonymous users, and so the whole thing is where capitalism goes to die and financially there's just no way out. That billionaire man paying generous amount to users would have been a fortunate event to users collectively, but that's it.
- rchaud 3y agoGoogle has probably had 100% of every American adult and child in the past 20 years, and they haven't made a dent in payments, even with their own phone ecosystem. This 65m/330m back of the envelope stuff is pure fantasy. Unless people have no option but to use it, it won't work. For example, the onl reason I use Paypal is that 20 years ago, Ebay didn't offer an alternative. Today, I use it because I can unsubscribe from stuff with one click. I'd never use it otherwise.
- bozhark 3y agoSo he’s a chinussian puppet. Got it.
- gorwell 3y agoYou have to assume they would want to limit their audience, which why would they? They would prefer everyone using their app and not artifically limiting to a subset. That's only something governments or captured corporations do and Twitter/X is neither. Although that could change and worth raising the possibility. Is there any way they could institute a hard constitution-like policy that could prevent it from ever sliding down that slope?
- pelorat 3y agoThe only reason it works in China because it disallows the competition and also lets the government spy on everyone through a single app. In China the Internet might as well be WeChat. Twitter, sorry "X", is in for a rude awakening unless Elon pulls the app from the EU.
- xNeil 3y agoBut WeChat does have competition in China.
- jimlongton 3y agoAre there major micro/restaurant payment apps in China other than WeChat? I imagine it's difficult to compete with an app that's preinstalled on every phone, integrated with every bank and used by every restaurant and street vendor. And that's ignoring the social network effect of the 900+ million daily users.
- whycombagator 3y agoWhat are the competitors and what is their market share/active user base like by comparison?
- bee_rider 3y agoAlso disliking popular things is just a fundamental part of American society. You’d think Musk would get this, given that his whole vibe is “king of the misanthropes.” There’s no way “everything under one brand” works here for long enough to escape the fate of us turning on that brand.
- tempodox 3y agoMany an American is green in the face with jealousy about the total control that China has.
- __derek__ 3y ago> X Chief Executive Officer Linda Yaccarino has said X will include features such as payments and banking. With an ad exec at the helm?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]