Plot twist: Elon realized how harmful twitter is to the society and decided to destroy it.
He sure is going about it in an odd way.
Twitter has officially changed its logo to ‘X’
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Re: Twitter has officially changed its logo to ‘X’
#302I don’t really see what Musk is trying to accomplish. Everything he’s done to Twitter carries the foul stench of Death by Private Equity. No product improvements, but worse reliability, more spam, and a weird desperate-looking rebrand. This is what it looks like when inept MBAs try to squeeze some more life out of a dying platform. The strange thing here is that Musk’s acquisition was supposed to be the exact opposit…
He is not a good engineer or strategist. He is good at marketing though. He got lucky with Space X and the rockets launched. He got a shit-ton of funding for Tesla, the whole business doesn't make sense (competitors can do better with tighter margins) but people threw money at him, so it worked. So he thought he is a genius and can make this one work too. He realized his mistake (tried to get off the deal) but when t…
Something like Tesla only worked because of the era of low interest rates, quantitative easing, insanely busy tech investment market, etc, in the post 2008 era. 15 years of record low interest rates meant investors were desperate to find places to shove money to get returns, and Tesla was one of the chosen spots, profitability be damned.
These days it would be harder to pull something like that off, investors would be demanding better books from day one.
Re: Twitter has officially changed its logo to ‘X’
#303I don’t really see what Musk is trying to accomplish. Everything he’s done to Twitter carries the foul stench of Death by Private Equity. No product improvements, but worse reliability, more spam, and a weird desperate-looking rebrand. This is what it looks like when inept MBAs try to squeeze some more life out of a dying platform. The strange thing here is that Musk’s acquisition was supposed to be the exact opposit…
> No product improvements
That's false though. Some of the improvements are gated behind a subscription, but HD video streams with more options and longer durations (allowing full movies to be distributed on it), longer tweets (reducing the need for "threads" which are obnoxious to read on Twitter and have led people to write bots that put them together), view counts, bringing back the chronological timeline and increased transparency are all net improvements.
What makes this surprising, or sad, or funny depending on your perspective, is that among the rapid product improvements, he sprinkles odd, impulsive decisions with little context and controversial messages that alienate a bunch of people. I guarantee you that without that he'd be hailed as a genius by the people who are calling him Elmo and pretending that revolutionizing the car industry and satellite Internet was "just luck". If there's a lesson to be learned there it's that social media addiction can spoil anyone.
Re: Twitter has officially changed its logo to ‘X’
#304I wonder what's more inane: The Facebook name change to 'meta', or this.
Re: Twitter has officially changed its logo to ‘X’
#305Re: Twitter has officially changed its logo to ‘X’
#306I'd like to give a little background. This isn't intended in defense of the move, I share the general discomfort with the change X.com, a payments company, was Musk's second company formed in 1999. In March 2000 PayPal was formed by the merger X.com with Thiel and Levchin's Continuity. Musk was the initial CEO, but by September 2000 the board replaced Musk with Thiel while Musk was on vacation to Australia. October 2…
> but by September 2000 the board replaced Musk with Thiel while Musk was on vacation to Australia These kinds of stuff always surprise me, like are you so scared of the CEO that you can only replace them on vacation?
Maybe it's hard to meet discreetly with leadership + investors in a pre-zoom era.
Re: Twitter has officially changed its logo to ‘X’
#307Are there still folks on HN who think Musk isn't destroying Twitter?
Re: Twitter has officially changed its logo to ‘X’
#308I hope that this will push government officials and structures to set up mastodon instances. Like one for the government where each agency has an account. Europe did this [0] and I find that it's a very good idea to have control over communication (plus since it's open anyone can do what they want with the data) [0] https://social.network.europa.eu/
It's legally hairy in the United States for the government to moderate Internet platforms. As I recall, some public officials were taken to court over blocking people on the site formerly known as Twitter. There's a court case pending against the government right now regarding its communications with platforms during the COVID crisis.
Oh but registration would be closed for the public.
In the Europe case it serves as a central official communication hub. Since many public officials around the world are using twitter kinda like this I think it would make sense.
It could be using anything else as a platform but Mastodon is kind of an all in one package that would be easier to work with and interoperate.
Re: Twitter has officially changed its logo to ‘X’
#309I'd like to give a little background. This isn't intended in defense of the move, I share the general discomfort with the change X.com, a payments company, was Musk's second company formed in 1999. In March 2000 PayPal was formed by the merger X.com with Thiel and Levchin's Continuity. Musk was the initial CEO, but by September 2000 the board replaced Musk with Thiel while Musk was on vacation to Australia. October 2…
> but by September 2000 the board replaced Musk with Thiel while Musk was on vacation to Australia These kinds of stuff always surprise me, like are you so scared of the CEO that you can only replace them on vacation?
The source of this seem to be a book about Elon, according to Wikipedia atleast, there might be an other side to this story
Re: Twitter has officially changed its logo to ‘X’
#310Will they also replace their stock ticker symbol with U+1D54F ?