Welcome to hell, Elon

[LiberalArkie]

By NILAY PATEL

You fucked up real good, kiddo.

Twitter is a disaster clown car company that is successful despite itself, and there is no possible way to grow users and revenue without making a series of enormous compromises that will ultimately destroy your reputation and possibly cause grievous damage to your other companies.

I say this with utter confidence because the problems with Twitter are not engineering problems. They are political problems. Twitter, the company, makes very little interesting technology; the tech stack is not the valuable asset. The asset is the user base: hopelessly addicted politicians, reporters, celebrities, and other people who should know better but keep posting anyway. You! You, Elon Musk, are addicted to Twitter. You’re the asset. You just bought yourself for $44 billion dollars.

The problem when the asset is people is that people are intensely complicated, and trying to regulate how people behave is historically a miserable experience, especially when that authority is vested in a single powerful individual.

Snip

https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/28/23428132/elon-musk-twitter-acquisition-problems-speech-moderation

[Walleye]

1. He knew he made a mistake based on emotion when he tried to pull the offer back

Seems like he’s already losing interest, as he has turned the content decisions over to a committee

[Phoenix61]

2. Seems it's the perfect example of be careful what you wish for. nt

[Hotler]

3. "You just bought yourself for $44 billion dollars."

[Shermann]

4. I'm guessing he will flip it before long

He will probably find a way to do it for a profit as well.

[samnsara]

10. take a big ol write off

[Warpy]

25. Oh, yes, bragging about cutting the staff

and increasing ad revenue, blah blah blah. Good luck to him in making it do something it has never done before--turn a profit.

He gets a couple of quarterly profits, that thing is g-o-n-e. Some right wing loon will buy it and finish killing it off.

[Fullduplexxx]

5. Probably did it because trump asked him too then trump formed truth social

[mahina]

20. Or Putin

[ProudMNDemocrat]

6. The LOSS of Advertising revenue will see to the demise of Twitter.

The sooner the better.

Bye Bye (Blue) Birdie

[samnsara]

11. i like twitter....its much better than facebook which is a giant cesspool...

[Native]

21. +1

[PXR-5]

19. Well you probably will

be able to buy Pillows, Gold Coins, Medicare Supplement Policies, and Catheters. 😆

[ProudMNDemocrat]

22. Don't need them.

Only Sleep Number pillows and beds for this grandma.

[LeftInTX]

38. It's not going away

A breaking point may reach. But it's too big to fail..

[lapfog_1]

7. Twitter is essentially an updated version of unix "talk"

Talk was around in 1983 as part of Berkeley 4.2 Unix release.

talk itself is a version of Multics facilities invented in the late 1960s.

you add a web GUI interface, distribute the talkd to a cluster of computers, geld talk to only 128 character messages, add the ability to imbed links to photos, videos, etc. add bells and whistles to create # channels (other versions of talk already had "channels&quot ...

presto... twitter.

No idea why it is so popular with users... it really isn't that special of a software package.

40 year old software.

[Shermann]

9. It is popular because you don't need to grow a Unix beard to use it nt

[plimsoll]

13. I never had a unix beard.

But I did get tired of listening to VMS folks talk about how great their OS was and how it was so intuitive. VMS had a talk utility as well, as I recall you needed a Vulcan deathgrip and your nose to type a . That's an 11fingered bucky for people who are counting.

[Shermann]

18. I dabbled in AIX and SunOS back in the 90s

I never had the beard either.

[LeftInTX]

39. It caught on with media because of the 128 character thing

Quick, quick, quick

Don't need to write a blog post or update a website. Any reporter can now break news.

You can do the same on FB, but the media quickly gravitated to Twitter for breaking news. Both have decent interfaces for breaking news.

It might be the hashtag thing. I can't tag certain people on fb unless I follow them. FB lacks "flash" "viral" capacity. On Twitter. I can tag whoever I want.

[lapfog_1]

40. I written a lot of kernel code for both various Unix and Linux systems

but I never had a beard either.

All I was pointing out with my post is that Musk paid $44B for some pretty trivial code and almost no IP.

He is buying a "brand" and a user base. Either of which could be very ephemeral.

What's is my "myspace" login again... I forget... and so did everyone else.

[LeftInTX]

41. I don't believe the NYT posted breaking news on My Space

Musk bought a network, media platform

[GreenWave]

8. As SNL aptly put it:

The second place bidder after Musk's $44 bn offered zero dollars!

[samnsara]

12. well i vote that we as DU collectivey offer ten bux for it

[TheBlackAdder]

30. Let's not be cheap, I'll chip in a buck to make it 11.

[Heather MC]

14. This man spent 44 billion dollars on basically artificial air🤷🏾‍♀️

I'd like to think that if I was ever in the fortunate position to have 44 billion dollars to throw out the Fucking window.

That's exactly what I would do with it, because let's face it's faced it, it would be a greater benefit to society if I tossed 44 billion dollars out of a window

Than spending it to buy Twitter


Think about it I could go to 44 of the poorest States and just hand out one billion dollars in the street. And still go home at the end of the day and be as wealthy as hell🤷🏾‍♀️

[Ferrets are Cool]

16. Similar to this

Except that people will actually buy this...

[Heather MC]

24. Wait people buy Diet Water, That's it, I want off the planet

🤦🏾‍♀️🤦🏾‍♀️🤦🏾‍♀️🤣🤣🤣

[Girard442]

28. Oh, it's true. I tried drinking tap water with my Pop Tarts and Big Macs and now I'm big as a house.

[AllyCat]

35. Omg!

[Ferrets are Cool]

43. Damn, that's funny.

[3Hotdogs]

34. Yeah, but that would also go to the poorer people in each state and giving money to poor people

causes inflation. It's ok if you give tax breaks to the rich because they are the job producers. The poor will spend it on a 6 pack of Colt 45 and cigarettes and the lottery.

[Heather MC]

37. It seems to me if you give money to the poor, and they spend it on large corporations

Products, doesn't that mean eventually the wealthy get the money back?

🤔

Also as someone the wealthy would consider poor, I would never buy a 6-pack of beer. I would spend all their money at the spa🤣🤣🤣💜💜💜💜

[3Hotdogs]

42. actually, would probably be a bottle of Gutter Buddy

Fine wine.

Poor people Al waste their money on cheap booze, lottery tix and drugs.

[Old Okie]

15. Musk

Clear example of why no one should be allowed to accumulate 214 Billion dollars; they become a law unto themselves. Need a new Teddy Roosevelt.

[RestoreAmerica2020]

17. Doesn't add up..Musk gave satellites stations to Ukraine to fight off fascism, then has

..hate platform promoting fascism where all the crazies incl racist sexual predator #45 will latch onto. Came across this...

Ashton Pittman
@ashtonpittman
·
Follow
Elon Musk's Twitter: A 500% increase in the use of the n-word.
Network Contagion Research Institute
@ncri_io
Evidence suggests that bad actors are trying to test the limits on @Twitter. Several posts on 4chan encourage users to amplify derogatory slurs.

For example, over the last 12 hours, the use of the n-word has increased nearly 500% from the previous average.
9:26 PM · Oct 28, 2022

Honestly, is that what he wants to be known for-- the next Alex Jones, Steve Bannon, Rush Limbaugh, odious oaf#45 other RW fascists.

Imo, something is seriously wrong with that boy that apparently all the money in the woooorld can't fix. Can you imagine what he could do to help humanity, environment? Note: Advise to Ukraine-- beware of "friends" bearing gifts!

As you know, Musk gave Starlink stations to Ukraine at the beginning of the full-scale war, then they helped Ukrainians a lot, including the military. Later, people already bought part of the stations for money.Oct 21, 2022
https://visitukraine.today › blog › st...
Starlink: why the Internet from Elon Musk is crucial for Ukraine

[usonian]

23. I vividly recall a salesman saying "But DOS is so much more USER FRIENDLY than the mac interface"

Familiarity is not friendliness.

I blame geeks for not learning, or aligning with user advocates.
They rarely, if ever, made good things simple enough for the average person to actually use.

Jobs and Wozniak were probably the one exception to that.

In most cases, egomaniacs hire a bunch of bro-grammers to do something really viral, because they can't possibly think of something that people will actually pay for, so they default to advertising as a business model. So much for getting an MBA. You're hawking ads.

Advertising is a poison.
https://democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=17294037
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/oct/24/advertising-poison-hooked
Advertising is a poison that demeans even love – and we're hooked on it

Quote of the previous century:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2011-04-14/this-tech-bubble-is-different

After a couple years at Facebook, Hammerbacher grew restless. He figured that much of the groundbreaking computer science had been done. Something else gnawed at him. Hammerbacher looked around Silicon Valley at companies like his own, Google (GOOG), and Twitter, and saw his peers wasting their talents. "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads," he says. "That sucks."

[Girard442]

31. GUIs are useful, but if the command line interface had never existed and was recently introduced...

...people would swoon over it. Really, is it that much harder to remember a command than to search for an icon of a chipmunk holding a pipe wrench?

[usonian]

36. I started out with CP/M. But I have compassion for others.

And at some point, all the graphical applications that just cannot be run from a command-line would have co-evolved a GUI interface for launching/file management.

Mind you, I curse at least 20 times a day at Mac "Finder". Especially when its idiot animations (which I minimize) slow file moves 10 or 100X compared to cp, mv and rsync.

That said, terminal is always open here. I have always used quicksilver to launch apps, (type in app name) but since an OS upgrade, it is eating up most of my resources, so I shut it down. I will update it or use an alternative perhaps by later today. (done)

I suspect that something like Siri will be used more and more to launch apps and manage files, but personally, I live alone, and in a part of the countryside where people move to get away from other people, so if a computer is the only thing I talk to most of the day, that prospect is way too weird for me.

Fun fact: I used to write up my lab work using grap and troff. So, when data changed, all my plots and reports would update in minutes. The people using dos, windows (whatever) and macs would take days to do the same. And then came perl.

[TeamProg]

26. And when THE PEOPLE GO, Twitter will be WORTH NOTHING !! n/t

[Evolve Dammit]

27. Another billionaire sociopath inserting himself in our lives.

[republianmushroom]

29. LIKE

[live love laugh]

32. Elon, Kanye .... Who's next

[JohnnyRingo]

33. Very clear observation.

I have to agree and I think Tesla will eventually pay for this business entity..

Thanx for posting.