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Elon Musk owns Twitter: The story so far

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Re: Elon Musk owns Twitter: The story so far

#781

Post by georgeg23 »

planetsprite wrote: post #768

As much as people dislike Musk, he draws excitement and captivation not only to himself, but to whatever he touches. Now for the first time people actually care about the "future" of Twitter, or in a sense, have a vision for its future that isn't defined by its frequent moderation-related controversies. Is Musk's financial success and unparalleled cultural relevance a science that can be replicated? I mean, as much a…

He had help from the government, specifically Mike Griffin:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_D._Griffin#Career

The rocket landing stuff largely borrow from DC-X and the spinoff work at NASA (+Lars Blackmore), all originally Strategic Defense Initiative stuff.

He used all that money from Mike as collateral for loans to Tesla.

He deserves some credit for impressive financial engineering and attracting talent under the guise of purpose ("going to Mars") but he took a lot of shady money along the way. And then there is the Saudis..

Most people who work with Musk 1:1 know he's unpredictable but pretty mentally unimpressive.

Re: Elon Musk owns Twitter: The story so far

#782

Post by biscottigelato »

dragontamer wrote: post #291
lake_vincent wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, speaking in those terms, I think the thing to watch will in fact be censorship. Elon is extremely idealistic, so it will be fascinating to watch him melt down when confronted with the reality of how complex free speech and censorship issues really are. I predict that he will succeed in turning Twitter into the rightwing safehaven that "Truth" Social, Parlor, etc have all been trying to become. He's making a dea…

Idealistic? Elon Musk has been talking about how awesome Gigafactory Shanghai is for the past year, thanks to Chinese workers who don't talk back to their boss and work harder than their American counterparts. Dude loves his Chinese anti-speech factory. Or at least, he already is pretending to do that so that he gets his Chinese sales numbers up. Musk makes the public statements he needs to do business. He has no mor…

I view this as America needs to do better. Not sure why that's anti-American. You fan be good to somebody to tell them the truth and for them to apply themselves. Lie to them and speak American exceptionalism is not pro-America. Its brainwash

Re: Elon Musk owns Twitter: The story so far

#783

Post by threeseed »

planetsprite wrote: post #768

As much as people dislike Musk, he draws excitement and captivation not only to himself, but to whatever he touches. Now for the first time people actually care about the "future" of Twitter, or in a sense, have a vision for its future that isn't defined by its frequent moderation-related controversies. Is Musk's financial success and unparalleled cultural relevance a science that can be replicated? I mean, as much a…

You keep talking about people as if you they are one homogenous block that you deeply understand and represent.

Most people really couldn't care less about SpaceX, Tesla or the future of Twitter. And they definitely wouldn't put Musk at the pinnacle of cultural relevance.

It's a minority of the population that is on sites like this that care. And for many of us there is a much more discerning and skeptical attitude towards Musk and his antics.

Re: Elon Musk owns Twitter: The story so far

#784

Post by fletchowns »

firecall wrote: post #778
thinkingemote wrote: post #248

They need to re-free up the API. Early adopters and hackers really did some great work using the API until they walled-gardened it and rate limited it to make it unusable. They need to do this for goodwill at the very least, but I think it will spark the fire to make it popular with techies again. Based on the recently published discovery chats we will probably see: * High def video * Focus on music publication * The…

With regards to the API, they shut it down because there were people building apps with the stated intention of taking users from twitter and building their own platform. I’m on my phone and don’t have a source handy, but it was a serious enough concern to force Twitter to do what they did to the API!

If that is a real concern, how come Wikipedia isn't susceptible to it?

Re: Elon Musk owns Twitter: The story so far

#785

Post by ohmyzee »

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…

Some kind of e-commerce system will definitely be on his mind. People seem to forgot that he was involved in PayPal.

Re: Elon Musk owns Twitter: The story so far

#786

Post by planetsprite »

threeseed wrote: post #783
planetsprite wrote: post #768

As much as people dislike Musk, he draws excitement and captivation not only to himself, but to whatever he touches. Now for the first time people actually care about the "future" of Twitter, or in a sense, have a vision for its future that isn't defined by its frequent moderation-related controversies. Is Musk's financial success and unparalleled cultural relevance a science that can be replicated? I mean, as much a…

You keep talking about people as if you they are one homogenous block that you deeply understand and represent. Most people really couldn't care less about SpaceX, Tesla or the future of Twitter. And they definitely wouldn't put Musk at the pinnacle of cultural relevance. It's a minority of the population that is on sites like this that care. And for many of us there is a much more discerning and skeptical attitude t…

He has 111 million followers on twitter. He isn't some niche tech celebrity.

Re: Elon Musk owns Twitter: The story so far

#787

Post by nazgulsenpai »

matttb wrote: post #671
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.

I have an account and every time I hit that signup/in wall I just close the page rather than sign into my account

On Android I use Fritter. You can even follow people and get notification without an account. Great for following news and feed type accounts that are only on Twitter.

https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.jonjomckay.fritter/

Re: Elon Musk owns Twitter: The story so far

#788

Post by howenterprisey »

fletchowns wrote: post #784
firecall wrote: post #778

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With regards to the API, they shut it down because there were people building apps with the stated intention of taking users from twitter and building their own platform. I’m on my phone and don’t have a source handy, but it was a serious enough concern to force Twitter to do what they did to the API!

If that is a real concern, how come Wikipedia isn't susceptible to it?

Because the Wikipedia community can't be replicated.

Re: Elon Musk owns Twitter: The story so far

#789

Post by novok »

julianeon wrote: post #57

In the spirit of trying to be high-information and add value: Where Musk is going, there are no maps. So it's very very hard to project. But we can predict likely developments. At a very high level, it's going to involve: bringing back controversial personalities like Donald Trump; increasing Twitter's commitment to 'free speech'; assuaging skittish advertisers; retaining users who might be concerned, while bringing…

I've been in companies where 1/5th of engineer was laid off. The state of company infra and the product dropped significantly and it took a long time to approach recovery, where they hired the same amount of staff back.

I can't imagine how dysfunctional twitter would be with %75 of staff gone, I don't even know if it will continue running as a business after that.

Re: Elon Musk owns Twitter: The story so far

#790

Post by madrox »

thinkingemote wrote: post #248

They need to re-free up the API. Early adopters and hackers really did some great work using the API until they walled-gardened it and rate limited it to make it unusable. They need to do this for goodwill at the very least, but I think it will spark the fire to make it popular with techies again. Based on the recently published discovery chats we will probably see: * High def video * Focus on music publication * The…

I think the ship has sailed on the API. It was a different time, and the people that used Twitter's API to do fun things didn't just give up...they migrated to mastodon and discord. I don't think the golden years of twitter are coming back.
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