this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2023
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Bro what is elon doing????
At this point, I'd say: Providing entertainment to the internet while also helping grow the fediverse
Having never been on twitter myself I'm especially entertained, watching and laughing from a far corner of the internet
Twitter has a bad reputation from the "buzzworthy" people. It was nowhere near as bad as the terminally online would have you believe. I'd even say it was a GREAT site before 2016.
It's a social media platform. You (used to) choose whose tweets you saw. As such, it was easy to curate your account to stick to one kind of content. I never saw politics or sports, I only followed funny people. And I had every major brand straight up blocked
The 140 character days were like text Vine where you made a joke through constraints and I loved it
Notably, Vine was created by Twitter.
And then Vine was axed by Twitter. (One of the dumbest mistakes Twitter ever made - look how successful TikTok is, and think that Twitter literally had that a decade ago and decided to shut it down.)
So really, Vine was just video Twitter, instead of Twitter being text Vine.
I wasn't really involved with social media back then sadly, but yes I did get that general impression. Before all the toxicity really overtook it around 2020 it did seem quite pleasant.
Shame really, corporate greed taking something quite nice and milking it so hard it's absolutely ruined. Then again, it gives way to things like bluesky so i guess it has its upsides!
See that's the thing ...toxicity DIDN'T take over, you just heard about it more.
This internet hate machine loves to pretend that the angry tweet screenshots they see reposted over and over are representative of the site as a whole while all the funny tweet screenshots they've laughed at are one in a million. But if you look at the usernames on the political ones it's usually the same handful of people...like that guy who starts every other tweet with "Holy fucking shit, Trump just..." Or the Brooklyn dad guy
I mean you know better than me (I'm not even on twitter so everything i see is just the internet perspective of it). I'll take your word for it as you're probably right!
Thank God i just got suspended from it for absolutely no reason
A suspended account can't be deleted without appealing your suspension, and I'm pretty sure no one even looks at those with Musk in charge.
So suspending accounts keep them as users. They're not active users, but it's better than nothing.
And honestly wouldn't be the craziest shit Elon's done this week. So he might actually be randomly suspending accounts to lock them in
I think the combination of sheer incompetence and his overlord bosses wanting to kill Twitter. Which is wild to me, since it could have been used as a propaganda tool for him ultimately worth more than the money he paid for it, despite the ‘worth’ of the company. The guy lives in a bubble with yes men surrounding him. He is the epitome of the meme “is it me that’s wrong? - no everyone else is out of touch”.
A right-wing propaganda tool needs people outside of the right wing to look at it. He’s far too embedded into that space to be able to appeal to other groups.
Saudi Arabia put up 20 billion or so of the 44 he used to purchase twitter. The reason behind this is widely speculated to be Saudi Arabia wanting to destroy twitter because it was instrumental in the Arab Spring uprising.
Have you heard of MBS? He’s…something.
They didn't put new money into the purchase, they rolled their pre-existing shares over. Dorsey did the same FYI.
Y'all are giving this idiot waaaay too much credit when it comes to scheming behind the scenes. It was a really poorly thought out pump and dump, nothing more. There's no big evil master plan; he's just really that stupid, and rich enough to constantly fail upwards. With Xitter we're just seeing his xitty ideas in their purest form, without the influence of the handlers he has to manage his bullxit at his other companies.
Although I have to say, the accidental brilliance of going with branding that's so phonologically flexible is pretty fantastic, the jokes can write themselves now. But I doubt advertisers are going to appreciate the fact that their interactions on Xitter are colloquially becoming known as xcrements now...
They would've had to convince Musk though to take a huge hit to his credibility and ego with this, which I can't see him agreeing to.
He is ensuring his place in history as a seminal business case study.
I can think of two explanations.
He wants to intentionally run Twitter into the ground and destroy it. Probably because people were mean to him on it or something
He’s completely lost his mind and is just being stupid.
Hanlons Razor makes me think it’s 2
For the first one, just shutting it down would have been enough.
Could be both. He wants to destroy it AND he’s an idiot.
Right now he'd have plausible deniability for his debtors
Extorting his advertisers, it seems. It's hella funny.
Because he knows nobody is going to want to buy more ad space on a site that is (or at least was) restricting how many posts users can scroll through.
tHe SmArTeSt MaN iN tHe UnIvErSe. Doing small brain things again
He previously said that Twitter was in the red when he bought it. So pretty much everything he's been doing has been clearly aimed at either reducing Twitter's expenses or increasing its revenue. Better to have a smaller company that is profitable than a bigger company that is not profitable.
Whether it's working or not, time will tell. But that's the likely motivation behind most of it.
The most generous thing I can think of is that it's a social experiment to see just how many ways he can undercut a successful brand and platform before it completely implodes.
He's got a really big loan payment to pay in October, everything is about that to keep it going for another year
Something about this move makes me feel like he was bragging to somebody about how he managed to own a single letter domain, and his conversation ended up somehow here, with him doubling down on what wasn't even a good joke to begin with.
This is purely speculative, obviously, but it just makes me think it's him putting his money where his mouth is to save face to someone else (who is likely bemused at best)
He’s playing with his new middle age crisis toy. Cars and spaceships got boring.