It’s not just lemmy that’s benefiting from Elon Musk.
I’m sure there were a huge swath of people who used Twitter and didn’t care at all about Musk one way or the other.
Then he rebranded and threw his ego and control in everyone’s face. And all the people who like Twitter IN SPITE of Elon were now forced to acknowledge that their Twitter is gone.
Just like over at reddit now, the latest move has alienated the people who really cared about the platform itself. If they rebranded to “Spez’s World”, though, a lot of the people who didn’t give a shit before would suddenly be ready to bail.
Lmao “Spez’s world” will be so funny though
He has so thoroughly ruined Twitter that you can’t help but wonder if that was his goal from the outset.
Narcissists like him would never seek failure intentionally.
You’ve obviously never played a board game with a narcissist. Flipping over the table and calling everyone, including the game they themselves purchased, cheaters is a totally expected move.
They’re not doing that to lose. They’re doing that because they already lost.
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I GUESS YOU’RE RIGHT, LIKE YOU ALWAYS HAVE TO BE!
- Knocks phone over -
Fucking cheaters
That is quite fitting
It’s just like Michael from The Office. You see he isn’t doing things on purpose to sabotage everyone, but he can’t control it, he needs the attention and the self worship.
Thanks for this analogy, it’s going to help me see the world in a funnier light.
To what end, though? The man blew 44b on a site that apparently was only worth 5-10b, and that was before he ran it into the ground. He also destroyed his reputation and the mystique as “genius entrepreneur” which the world can now clearly see he never was.
I can’t think of a single net positive. I think it’s an age old tale with people with too much money: he fell victim to an over inflated ego and too many yes men aiming to please. He started to believe he really was brilliant.
Sad thing is the man has so much money he still can’t fail, personally. He’ll have destroyed Twitter and even more people will lose their jobs. And autocrats around the world will be pleased. Musk will just shrug, tell himself it wasn’t his fault, “it was the libs” or something, and move on.
Eta: the only winners here, as per usual, are the shareholders.
44b sounds like a lot of money (it is!), but his net worth right now is 219b after this fiasco. At this point it’s just a score between rich assholes who got the bigger number.
You could take 200b away from his evaluation and he could still retire on a yacht and not work a single day in the next 100 years. Same for his children and his children’s children.
So yeah, “bad” financial investment, but it might be worth for him to kill one of the biggest platforms where he was called out for his bullshit.
That 44b had to be paid in real cash, not just the current theoretical value of the sum of his shares. He sold quite a lot of Tesla shares afaik to banks to give them a “small loan”.
Lol, “real cash”, look it up what he actually did. He took a loan in the name of Twitter, so he didn’t even use his own money. Pretty much financing half of the deal with the theoretical value of the company he just bought. And he took in extra money from Saudi investors, it’s not all his money.
There was never a 44b “real cash” transaction.
To be fair, Elon doesn’t all have that money in cash. Also, like half of the Twitter buyout was made possible with a loan where he used his a Tesla stocks for like half of the operations as collateral.
Although I agree that he’s far from being broke, this can become a pretty bad financial decision to Elon.
Foil hat time. Twitter was at one point a huge communications platform. People got news and opinions on daily happening almost immediately. He has successfully purchased that platform and destroyed the faith people had in it, in time for some of the most controversial events in recent history.
I mean, sure, assuming he doesn’t mind paying for that with 44 billion of his own dollar bucks, the devaluation of his other companies and the evaporation of his personal reputation.
To reduce the ability of the 99% to interact with each other on a basis that results in change of the 1% methodology.
The people running this nation and the rest of the world absolutely do not want us getting together and figuring out how to make change effectively. I’m pretty sure it’s why they keep ruining all of the social networks, we can’t unite if there’s not a platform for us to do so on…
Elon jet tracker has way less of a following now.
True, but it popped up on other platforms, effectively defederating. And you probably jest, but if not: 44b is a lot more than the 5k he initially offered the guy to take it down.
Elon is a narcissistic idiot, but that’s all he is. He bought the same crap his own PR team was peddling a few years ago, figured he didn’t need his PR team because he was so great (according to propaganda they spread), and went on to confidently make idiotic decisions because of course the real life Tony Stark can make no mistakes
Actually the number of Twitter users increased
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Really?!? That’s surprising.
If it’s active users increased I’d be surprised, but if it’s not I wouldn’t be, most people probably don’t delete accounts when they stop using them
Those are all the flies attracted to shit.
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This is how I mainly used Mastodon before Lemmy. It lets you follow topics instead of people; I prefer finding content this way. Unless a person really likes the format of Mastodon better, I’d suggest Lemmy over Mastodon for people that would rather follow topics than individuals.
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I found it very refreshing that it doesn’t have an algorithm at all. I know there are some downsides to that, but I think they’re worth it.
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Another good thing is putting people you follow into lists. I just wish we could do the same with hashtags.
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Cool, but the article is from July 24th
Nice, the official P.J. Fry.
Musk trashed Twitter with intent, by design, and on purpose. Elon Musk is worth 95 Billion more now than when he bought Twitter.
The continued forced cognitive dissonance is the grandest example of info_corpo_kabuki i’ve ever seen. It’s all just so fucking dumb.
Elon bought it to trash it so he could have access to Saudi markets for his electric cars and rocket ships. The face he’s a fascist fucking cunt who gets to stick it to liberals where they most liked to exchange news, information and organize online was just a bonus for him.
I don’t buy this, simply because he bought it. He didn’t need to destroy it, could could have just turned it off.
That Twitter had essentially become accepted as an official source of communication and Elon’s purchase of Twitter so near to the time that he was experimenting with his ability to perform market manipulation on his own companies using Twitter, those things combined made me assume a large part of his reason for purchasing Twitter was to see how far he could take market manipulation and if he could influence other companies. In my darkest version of this scenario, I think Elon was just testing how far his reach is.
Maybe the verified checkmark debacle really was created by incompetence and Twitter tried quickly to fix it, or maybe it was a nefarious way to undermine legitimacy and cause a multi-billion dollar blip on the stock market. Either way, I could easily imagine Musk telling politicians and CEOs after that, “look at what I was able to do just by moving a single finger. Now imagine what I could do to you if I really wanted to.”
I really like the razors, here Hanlon’s razor is relevant:
“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity”
I’m sure Elon has no grand plan behind any of this, just a chain of impulsive actions.
He didn’t want to buy Twitter. He lost a lawsuit that forced him to buy it. None of it goes that deep.
Yes thank you, this is what’s happening for sure. He’s so immature and petty and he can’t hide it.
Is this migration already called xit? Because it should…
Xodus
The term soaring is pretty relative in this case. It’s still completely unknown to the majority of the world. It’s just like Lemmy, where the very few rigid types that absolutely couldn’t stand for one particular thing that happened to their social network will do anything, including cutting their nose off to spite their face rather than continue to use it. That’s why we’re all here and it’s why nobody else but us are coming.
Sadly true. As a nose cutter I will say that I have found the transition from Twitter to mastodon far more painless than Reddit to lemmy
Hey Elon! I hear there’s this bigger, better Public Square that you should buy. I hear it needs more fascists to platform their hate…ahem, “free” speech in. It’s called Reddit.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
As Twitter ditches its iconic branding in favor of owner Elon Musk’s favorite letter “X,” its open source rival Mastodon is seeing usage numbers soar.
According to a new post from Mastodon founder and CEO Eugen Rochko, the number of monthly active users for his Twitter alternative has been steadily climbing over the past couple of months to have now reached 2.1 million — or, as remarked Rochko, “not far off from our last peak.”
Meta’s recently launched Twitter rival known as Instagram Threads has committed to integrating with ActivityPub, which may have raised awareness around Mastodon and decentralized social networking in general.
Musk claimed that Twitter needed to change the rate limits to deal with a significant increase in bots and spam.
Or perhaps, it’s a combination of both of these things and more, including the momentum created by the launches of polished third-party Mastodon clients that have made using the social network less complicated and more enjoyable.
Other Mastodon apps like Ice Cubes and the no-frills client Radiant have also debuted, while Mastodon’s official mobile app received a refresh of its own earlier this month, aimed at addressing various pain points and adding more customization options.
I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Fuck spez. Why isn’t he doing more psycho shit like Elon so he can move more people to Lemmy.
Give him some more time. It’s not that simple keeping up with Elon’s adventures
By the way, your username shows as bot to me. I think you need to disable it in your profile.
I like the idea of referring to it only as “The social media site formerly known as Twitter” from here on out.
I use the historical name, twitter, because to the extent future historians will have to talk about it, that’s the name they’ll use. I cannot imagine it will do anything of relevance from this point forwards except as a glaring example of the failures of capitalism.
the name “X” is just a bunch of pollution to other topics that happens to have something of the same name. i hate it.
Also “former bird site” has a nice ring to it
Ex-twitter
Soaring? 2.1M users is soaring? I’m all for the Fediverse, but it will never reach mainstream social media numbers, and honestly I hope it doesn’t.
YouTuber Ctop is soaring!!!
I honestly hope the Fediverse does become the predominant medium through which online social discourse takes place. Probably not going to happen, but I can dream.
As long as no single instance dominates the entirety of the Fediverse, I think it could avoid many of the pitfalls of centralized social media platforms.
Threads looking at all this crying
Threads is deliberately limiting its growth. Just this morning I saw a guy I know talk about how he really likes Threads despite the smaller number of users. He still doesn’t have any invite codes to give out.
Do you guys remember when I ordered that salad and when they brought it out, it was really really big.
yeah that was pretty cool.Really really big
Good, Twitter is a disgrace to humanity
