Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Elon Musk owns Twitter: The story so far

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

731–740 of 1001 posts

Re: Elon Musk owns Twitter: The story so far

#731

Post by xwowsersx »

RedBeetDeadpool wrote: post #718
xwowsersx wrote: post #685

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> doubles down on money power, to a point where only money is power What has he said or done that indicates he is pushing for such a system? Are you suggesting the mere fact of his purchasing a company and being a billionaire means he is pushing for such a system or was there something else he said or did? I'm asking genuinely because I may very well have missed some important news item or other piece of information.…

Looks like you were downvoted ... no response. You know what that means.

Hehe indeed

Re: Elon Musk owns Twitter: The story so far

#732

Post by ttepasse »

mFixman wrote: post #105
fitzroy wrote: post #76

I'm still surprised that Google didn't just clone or buy Twitter in the 2009 "Fail Whale" era. Seems like they had 95% of the work done already: a highly-scalabile real-time infrastructure that took Twitter years to catch up to. (Yes, Google+ came later, but the UX of the boundaries, of where the network started and stopped on the web, felt too amorphous for most people as a social media destination)

Remember Google Buzz? Google tried to copy Twitter and automatically added it to the front page of every Gmail account, fucked up the launch by having everything be public by default, and finally declared it a failed product and abandoned it a year later. In retrospect, the whole thing was a mini-Google+.

If I remember correctly, Buzz would have had a certain interoperability with other services via open protocols. G+ then was mostly closed.

Re: Elon Musk owns Twitter: The story so far

#733

Post by mullingitover »

mjr00 wrote: post #494
mullingitover wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> managing the exodus of users (size:?) that will happen regardless; This is probably the biggest risk in this acquisition. Twitter wasn't doing anything special, and it's easy to launch a clone of their business model. Elon's talking about taking an axe to the things that keep the lights on at Twitter: effective content moderation and talent.

> Elon's talking about taking an axe to the things that keep the lights on at Twitter: effective content moderation and talent. I don't think it's clear this is the case. It's just the network effect that keeps it in such a dominant position. Plenty of Twitter clones have been created, yet neither conservatives have migrated to Truth/Parler/Gab/whatever, nor have or will liberals/the anti-Musk contingent to Mastodon,…

> It's just the network effect that keeps it in such a dominant position.

Exactly. Just ask Friendster or MySpace or any of the other failed social networks how deep and wide the network effect moat is in the long run. I'd argue that for all the hype, Twitter was already in the 'long goodbye' phase before Musk bet the farm on it.

> Twitter is one of the few social media sites where porn is still allowed, for the most part.

And they're completely at the mercy of Google and Apple's policies here. Both of those app stores could put their feet down next week and this 'feature' of Twitter's suddenly becomes a liability.

Re: Elon Musk owns Twitter: The story so far

#734

Post by jerkstate »

2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #663

They need to stop ruining the experience for those of us without an account. Everyone was using Twitter as basically an open bulletin board and then they go and make it visitor-hostile. I look at ads either way.

not sure if you have seen it today but they added a "x" (ability to close) the nag screen that shows up after a few seconds while browsing not logged in, and the main page now goes to a generic feed of news posts and cat videos instead of the signup page. was probably a few clicks in the a/b testing system.

Re: Elon Musk owns Twitter: The story so far

#735

Post by arisu »

JasserInicide wrote: post #659
reocha wrote: post #447

https://joinmastodon.org/

Ah yes, the solution to the social media echo chamber is to join an even worse echo chamber!

How exactly is it supposed to be worse? Have you even ever been on the fediverse before? My guess is that you just want it to be worse.

Re: Elon Musk owns Twitter: The story so far

#737

Post by tenpies »

kjksf wrote: post #684
JasserInicide wrote: post #649

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Musk is going to discover (and maybe admit?) that fixing Twitter is harder than he thought. Yeah I think he's going to intensely focus on Twitter for ~6 months, not change much, get bored, and then move onto something else.

The way he got bored running Tesla and SpaceX for ~20 years? I really don't get where this meme of "impulsive, erratic, hotheaded Musk" comes from given he demonstrated ability to stick with a business in the toughest of times. Tesla was literally days away from bankruptcy at one time and Musk made it work. After first 3 failed launches he was about to run out of money and yet he financed another launch, which worked…

> The way he got bored running Tesla and SpaceX for ~20 years?

For all practical purposes, doesn't Shotwell run SpaceX and Elon just shows up to give "input", whenever the capital raise du-jour is necessary, and to do the marketing and PR?

It does seem to me he will need another Shotwell for either Tesla or Twitter, though. You can be CEO of as many companies as you want, but if the CEO is also doing the Operations part of the work, then you're constrained to pretty much one company at a time. I wonder if we'll see Jack come back to Twitter.

Re: Elon Musk owns Twitter: The story so far

#738

Post by mhh__ »

kjksf wrote: post #684
JasserInicide wrote: post #649

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Musk is going to discover (and maybe admit?) that fixing Twitter is harder than he thought. Yeah I think he's going to intensely focus on Twitter for ~6 months, not change much, get bored, and then move onto something else.

The way he got bored running Tesla and SpaceX for ~20 years? I really don't get where this meme of "impulsive, erratic, hotheaded Musk" comes from given he demonstrated ability to stick with a business in the toughest of times. Tesla was literally days away from bankruptcy at one time and Musk made it work. After first 3 failed launches he was about to run out of money and yet he financed another launch, which worked…

Musk of today does not feel like the one of even 5 years ago.

Re: Elon Musk owns Twitter: The story so far

#739

Post by LeonM »

TehCorwiz wrote: post #730
GMoromisato wrote: post #582

My predictions: 1. Musk is going to discover (and maybe admit?) that fixing Twitter is harder than he thought. It will be just like self-driving, which seems straightforward, but which actually has thousands of edge cases which are hard to solve with a single general system. Nevertheless, he will persist, because that's what he does. 2. Current Twitter makes a profit on advertising, which means Twitter needs to encou…

> his goal is the Everything App (which he calls X). The Everything App has news, social media, games, videos, and a payment infrastructure so, AOL?

More like WeChat, where you have micro apps within the app, and payments.

Re: Elon Musk owns Twitter: The story so far

#740

Post by insanitybit »

merely-unlikely wrote: post #448
maxerickson wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if he just loses a big pile of money while Twitter twists in the wind because there isn't much of a plan? That seems likely enough really.

If that's the case, it won't be so different from when Twitter was run as a public co.

There's a massive difference because Twitter is now owned through a massive debt finance.
Post reply on HN