Twitter, Inc. today announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to be acquired by an entity wholly owned by Elon Musk, for $54.20 per share in cash in a transaction valued at approximately $44 billion. Upon completion of the transaction, Twitter will become a privately held company.
Joy. I wonder how much worse it’ll get now.
how could it? is it not allready a cesspool
He’ll do whatever he needs to do to get it into China and any other regions it is banned or blocked from operating, do his best to have the restrictions removed in other locals like Russia, France and India, then put it up for sale again.
In the long term, the changes might not be as minimal as Musk has made out.
Humor indeed.
$44 billion for Twatter? That’s excessive for open sourcing a inferior Mastodon clone.
excessive for any venture. twitter was valued at 23 million plus/minus debt
Mastodon is written in RoR… basically its a dumpster fire and doesn’t scale efficiently. You can probably run 10-100x the clients on some other platform that’s actually performant than on mastodon.
Mastodon needs like 10 servers to support a mere 50k users … thats poor scalability for what is supposed to be a microblog for millions.
Well, they had some kickups, but doing fine now with one million users according to https://fediverse.party/en/mastodon/ and over 3000 servers.
And you dont have to worry it will be bought out by a megalomanic car seller.
lighans,
That’s funny.
But serious question, why not? I think it’s probably too small to be a huge takeover target for now, especially if the user base is biased against corporate control. But let’s say it were to become more successful and expand to 100 million general users, I think the risk of owners & devs selling out would grow accordingly and even the users themselves could be attracted to “adsense”.
Eyeballs attract advertisers, and while I don’t like it, the advertisers usually have the money to invite themselves to the party. Even the subscription streaming platforms that originally differentiated themselves with no ads have been raising prices and looking to ink deals with advertisers to supplement their revenue to stabilize the rising prices going forward.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2022/04/20/netflix-ads-impact-subscribers/7379645001/
Thanks to money, advertising manages to creep into everything, even our local operating systems
Lol, for real? Mastodon is an obvious knockoff of Twitter made out of matchsticks and paper glue. But it’s open-source, so it must be the cat’s whiskers according to some people. Yeah, sure it is…
Also, Elon is not only buying the Twitter codebase, he is buying the userbase too. People are not going to Mastodon (or Gab, or Trush Social, or wherever) no matter how hard they say they will, because Twitter is where everyone else is. See: Network effect. This is why, in my opinion, any effort by Elon Musk to clean up the toxic pile that is today’s Twitter (like for example verifying the identities of people so defamation lawsuits can be filed by the victim(s) of cancel culture campaigns who have been wrongly accused) is a big plus.
The best part of this deal is seeing Jack Dorsey being forced to sell out and come out in support of Musk. Humiliating.
Yeah, right, so humiliating… I am sure he will spend the rest of his life crying over the nearly 1 Billion dollars that he just converted from Silicon Valley valuation funny money to actual cold hard cash.
The only reason Jack Dorsey and the board adopted the “poison pill” manoeuvre was so Elon Musk could not start purchasing stock at market-rate prices until he had enough stock to control the majority of the board seats and effectively take control of the company. This would have allowed Musk to take over the company at about half its valuation. The “poison pill” manoeuvre forced Elon Musk to co-operate with the board as it was, and as a result he had to buy the entire company and at a 38% premium over its then valuation too.
Couldn’t he have just dumped his stock, which would sink the price the of the now diluted volume? That potentially would make his proposal and valuation even more compelling.
Twitter is a dumpsterfire I avoid like the plague – same as all the modern corporate owned “social” web.
However; I like that this has happened. Why? Because I can feel entertaining headlines on the horizon. Newstainment people!
People will actually get used to free speech once again and not pandering to the masses stops being newsworthy pretty quickly.
Free speech like Parler, Gab, or Turth.Social? LOL
Go away.
Yes, I meant actual free speech.
So, not like Parler, Gab, or Truth.Social then, since it’s a recorded fact that they’ve been kicking people off for criticizing or lampooning people like Donald Trump.
If you want free speech, host your own website.
If you are posting on SOMEONE ELSES website, you have zero free speech.
jmorgannz,
I agree with you in principal that private owners should have the right to make their own rules. However like so many things, this idea becomes more twisted when pushed to the extremes. Companies are becoming oligopolies and monopolies with large scale powers, including but not limited to mass censorship, it creates major problems with the laissez-faire approach. I think it behooves us to seriously question how much power dominant private corporations should have over the public and commerce in general. I for one am very hard pressed to place my trust in the benevolence of corporate rule. There’s already great concern over their ability to influence elections and it’s all legal. The power some of our private corporations have would be enough to make the communist party of china jealous.
That’s not the same as free speech either.
That’s just regulating speech at a different level.
jmorgannz,
I’m not sure I follow your point? I’m talking about extreme consolidation leading to ultra-powerful corporations having excessive power and control over the masses. I’m for free market economies and letting the market decide, but only to a point. If we don’t have healthy competition (oligopolies aren’t healthy) then it breaks down into a nightmarish version of Adam Smith’s vision.
> If you are posting on SOMEONE ELSES website, you have zero free speech.
If that page is a publisher of news, then you are right.
Than the owner of this page is responsible for the content and can be sued …
But Twitter is not a publisher but a provider. It is not responsible for the tweets of other people and you can not sue twitter for things someone else tweeted there …
As a PROVIDER Twitter offers you just a special kind of webspace – and should therefor respect free speech.
IF he follows thru with what he has been saying up to now then perhaps free speech is finally getting back to norm
Free speech depending on the benevolence of globocorps like Google, Twitter and Meta?
bubi,
To be consistent you ought to call google “alphabet”. I still don’t call facebook “meta” though. It’s always going to be facebook until meta actually does something to meaningfully establish itself as an independent brand.
I oppose the idea that corporations should ever be the arbiters of free speech. The centralization of power under corporations has put us at the mercy of those who happen to have the most money. Even those that aren’t politically motivated can end up being financially pressured into the role of censors by cancel culture mobs. I find it regrettable that the internet has evolved away from its decentralized roots and towards centralized data silos of for profit corporations like google/facebook/etc. For better or worse though the advertising, which has proven itself to be the dominant business model, favors a few centralized giants.
Free speech means the government can’t limit what people say or how they say it, although they do. Nothing more, nothing less.
It has no bearing on other people getting tired of your sh*t and throwing you out of the room. Right wingers need to get over themselves.
ROFLMAO
ROFLMAO
ROFLMAO
ROFLMAO
The brain damage is amazing.
Flatland_Spider,
I don’t think it’s about “right wingers” though. I oppose the centralization of power over our networks period. I even consider it dangerous to democracy. IMHO it’s not enough for “freedom of speech” to mean freedom from government oppression especially when it’s the dominant tech companies and not the government that has increasing police power over our networks. They should not hold the defacto power over freedom of speech.
Companies are not government entities though and are not bound by the same restrictions. Companies, even big tech ones, should have flexibility to set their own policies. The First Amendment doesn’t extend to all people in all places at all times to say anything they want, and it shouldn’t. Public & private property isn’t the same thing and freedom & rights aren’t absolute. Twitter or any non-government entities code-of-conduct policies are not expressions of power over freedom of speech because First Amendment rights aren’t applicable. Twitter can censor/discipline/ban/whatever anyone on their platform they want, for any reason. People don’t have rights on Twitter and that’s why it was laughable certain politicians threatened to “force” Twitter to allow certain other politicians back on if they didn’t do it willingly. It never happened because it had zero legal standing.
Americans tend to think they have far more freedoms and rights than they actually do, and of the ones they have, many people don’t seem to understand what they are. I notice this more with right-wing people but not exclusive to them by any means. Contrary to what many of my fellow countrymen think, the USA is not an anything goes free-for-all and people should be damn happy it isn’t.
friedchicken,
That’s true. The founders essentially created the constitution to protect citizens from the types of enemies that they were encountering at the time, which is why protection from governments and organized religions are explicitly called out. Had they been aware that private corporations would go own to become as powerful/influential/corrupt as governments and religions, it is extremely likely that protections from corporate power would have ended up in the constitution as well. They just didn’t have a crystal ball.
Sure, but I think there need to be limits on their powers, especially when they become monopolistic.
I wouldn’t say it is absolute either. If anything rights are extremely relative: for example one person’s right to be free denies another person’s right to enslave them. One person’s right to own guns denies another person’s right to take those guns away. One person’s right to walk around in scantily clad clothing denies another person’s right to force them to cover up. Practically every right we have is an implicit value ranking of conflicting rights. This is true here as well.
Morally speaking I believe corporate rights should be secondary to our civil rights. We as a people should not tolerate the erosion of individual rights on the technicality that it’s being done by a private entity instead of a public entity. The harm does not get mitigated just because a private entity is committing it.
Obviously I cannot expect you to agree with my values just because I believe in them, but I’d like for you to at least comprehend my rational: corporations are not living beings and as such don’t deserve any intrinsic rights that trump the rights of actual living beings. The only reason we as a society should recognize any corporate rights at all is insofar as they are a means to an end and benefit society. We should not be granting corporate rights simply because the corporations want them nor even because they are good for the corporations. Corporate rights should only exist if and when they are what is best for society. If we find that corporate rights are diametrically opposed to the rights of living beings, then the moral call is to promote the rights of the living over those of the corporations.
Some people want to view a corporation as being “people” for semantic purposes, but even then I still think we can and should apply the same analysis with respect to civil rights. Do the rights of a privileged few in power trump the rights of society at large?
I believe they should not, but obviously this is a question posed the world over in philosophy classes:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant/
I don’t think a crystal ball was needed, or that it was an oversight not including corporations in that list. Power, influence and corruption isn’t a new thing, it’s been with us since our beginning and beyond that is observed across nearly all living things. Corporations existed long before the inception of the US constitution so I don’t doubt the founders had the foresight to see what corporations could become, I think they understood that governments, religions, and corporations are not equal things. There’s overlap in a venn diagram but you can’t just lump them all together when what separates them is significant. Our government, (presumably) and religion will be around long after corporation A, B, or C is gone.
The problem there is most of that isn’t real rights so I don’t think the argument that every right we have conflicts with another is true. The right to be free doesn’t step on the right to enslave because there is no right to enslave.
I don’t believe in `companies are people`. I don’t believe companies should be granted equal rights and freedoms to those given to real living people. My take is not really that companies have that, or that they should, it’s that people don’t have nearly the rights and freedoms they think they do. Twitter can ban someone not because they have an explicit right to do so, but because nobody has the right to use their platform, much less do it unrestricted. The boundary doesn’t exist because Twitter has rights, it exists because the individuals freedom and rights aren’t absolute.
Society can’t function when it’s all-or-nothing, there needs to be compromise. Our rights are certainly being eroded, and that will come at great cost, but our rights and freedoms simply never extended as far out as a lot of people think. It’s not companies eroding them, it’s lawmakers. The politicians who are supposed to represent the people but more often than not act in corporate interest or their own instead.
friedchicken,
Corporations have gone on to fill the mold of corrupt power and oppressive institutions that the founders so wanted to protect us from. It’s a clear oversight, but it’s an understandable one given that in their time it was governments and churches that held this power over the people (and corporations too for that matter). In hindsight we can see that there’s been a role reversal; corporations are now much more powerful than churches, and they’ve also corrupted governments to serve them over the public. I have no doubt that the constitution would have more protections against corporate power if they had the benefit of hindsight, but then there’s little point in complaining about it now. For better or worse we cannot fix the past.
That’s the point though. Granting one right logically implies denying another. It’s a balancing act of values, which is true of every right. And in this balancing act, I feel there’s a moral obligation to prioritize civil rights over corporate ones.
I understand your view, but it really depends how dominant a service is. I don’t think twitter is unavoidably dominant yet, but it becomes extremely problematic when services actually are.
I’ve already agreed with you that rights are not absolute, they are a balancing act and society has to decide where to draw the lines and who’s rights to favor.
Well, yes it logically makes sense to blame the lawmakers, but at the same time though we need to recognize that the vast majority of them are actually corporate puppets serving the corporations that fund their elections. Not to mention the notoriously corrupt revolving doors that literally have industry insiders in the position of and overseeing themselves.
That’s my point – corporate corruption and abuse of power was already a thing by the time the constitution was written and it would be a pretty enormous oopsy for the founders to have let it slip their mind. That doesn’t sound reasonable at all to me, especially considering how much thought and debate was put into creating the document.
There’s nothing that dictates rights have to co-exist in binary pairs or have balance. Granting a right doesn’t automatically mean denying another because there’s no real world quantification for it. Not everything that sounds logical actually is, especially when it requires things that don’t exist.
There’s no getting around the fact that corporations have their hands all over our laws an policies. Our government is heavily influenced by corporate money and interests. I do however hold the politicians accountable because they’re the ones responsible for representing the people. They take the Oath of Office, not the lobbyists. It’s a lot easier to get rid of a politician acting in bad faith than it is getting rid of a corporation.
I agree that corporations wield and abuse tremendous power & influence that they shouldn’t have in the first place. There needs to be some degree of regulation to keep that in check, but I also think the same of people.
friedchicken,
They were still controlled by the world’s monarchs and religious institutions. They didn’t conceive that the flow of power would completely flip and that private entities would end up on top of all the world’s wealth and power. As much thought that went into the constitution they did lack the benefit of hindsight on so many fronts, which while not their fault, is costing us today. That’s just the nature of time though with an uncertain future. Blaming the past is not a solution, it is our responsibility alone to fix things. The catch-22 here is that the corrupt forces that we need to weed out are those who control the process.
Yes there is because it’s an inseparable and inherent property of rights. I thought I already explained why earlier. In our history corporations had a government protected right to own slaves, that is the logical inverse of those slaves having a protected right to be free. Draw the line where you may but logic dictates they are mutually exclusive rights. It doesn’t matter what rights we are talking about, you have to make a judgement call about which of the rights is more deserving.
Indeed, I agree with those ideals, but the amount of corruption in the system seems unprecedented for my lifetime. Even though we may not agree on a solution I think we ought to recognize that this corruption is preventing government from serving the people as the spirit of the constitution intended.
Really? I think the number of politicians acting in bad faith is on the rise. And while it’s not new, their tactics to fight basic democracy like gerrymandering are paying off. Swaths of people’s votes don’t matter. There’s a lot to say about this, but it’s a topic unto itself so I’ll leave it there.
I can agree with that.
That’s not really the case though. Global trade was a thing and corporations were certainly expressing their impact & influence on government and religion, they certainly were not subservient to them. They surely lacked hindsight in many areas but the power a corporation could achieve was absolutely not one of them.
That sounds logical but it isn’t. Slaves did not have a protected right to be free. You can’t have two things be inseparable when one of them doesn’t exist. Rights aren’t a product of reality, they don’t have properties. Rights are only what people say they are, they aren’t ruled by natural law. Physics dictates that hot can’t exist without cold. The same is not true of rights.
I wholly agree and it doesn’t conflict with my assertion that bad faith politicians are easier to get rid of than corporations. For example, the former president acted in bad faith and the people swiftly ended his presidency when the time came. Now contrast that with any powerful corporation that consistently and continuously acts in bad faith and arguably has caused far more damage to society, yet they continue to not only exist, but thrive.
friedchicken,
They were sub-servant though. It was only through a king’s graces that corporations were allowed in their kingdoms. Even the founders themselves were subjects before declaring independence. I think they would tweak things about corporations with hindsight…but anyways I understand that you disagree with me on this and that’s ok
I agree that rights are a human construct. I suspect that maybe you’re not following my rational because legal rights and their logical counterparts may not be written as such. It is an abstract concept but regardless of how rights are enumerated in the books, the logical duality of rights that I am referring to remains fundamental and inescapable.
Let’s take another example: there’s plenty of debate over whether police should have the right to enter your house, but their right to enter your house and your right to keep them from entering your house are the mirror opposites of the same fundamental thing. Logically changing the rights from one side of the mirror also changes them on the other. We can change the granularity of rights, such as adding new conditions for police entry, but this doesn’t change the fact that rights and their mirror counterparts represent the same thing from opposite perspectives.
It is possible for the laws to be incomplete and even inconsistent, which is a problem on its own. Even so it’s not an exception to the logical duality of rights. Whatever ruling the court applies and whatever the justification, their ruling logically applies to both sides of the duality. Even case law affects the right “A” and its corresponding logical mirror “A-prime”. This is true whether the court recognizes this logical duality or not.
It’s pure logic though. Your right to X means others don’t have the right to deny you X. It’s specifying the exact same thing, just from the opposite perspective.
His conspirators are still in power but it’s a different topic and I think we’re mostly in agreement about the politics.
I oppose all of that too. There are freedom of speech issues with media companies. They censor the left harder then they censor the right.
“Freedom of speech” has become a coded phrase for the Reds, and it’s about freedom from consequences rather then actual censorship. These are the same people who are launching booking banning initiatives, assaulting women’s rights, rolling back LGBTQ+ gains, and reinstate slavery in a second. It’s not about censorship; it’s about putting a simile face on repression of their critics and maintaining the narrative that “they’re the good guys”.
At this time, I don’t believe anyone mentioning “freedom of speech” in regards to birdsite or zuckyland is willing to argue in good faith about societal ideas, and they want to pound sour grapes about being deplatformed.
They’ll have to go someplace else to make people’s lives miserable.
No, free speech is an ideal that transcends government and public/private distinctions. In the US, it it somewhat protected by a law (The First Amendment to the US Constitution) that applies to the government, but a partial legal protection and the principle itself are very different things.
Everyone having a right to express themselves without reprisal is about fundamental equality of people – regardless of wealth or physical power or nominal authority. Free speech is a left-wing ideal, though I’m very glad many on the nominal right have adopted it too – shows how far things have come over the centuries.
“No, free speech is an ideal”
+1 to that.
Almost everywhere but most definitely in the land of the free people don’t have a firm grasp of the meaning of freedom or freedom of speech (and a lot of other topics, but that’s a long story). Especially in the US I’ve come to see that for most people freedom seems to mean I’m free to do as I see fit and you’re free to mind your own business, while freedom of speech usually means I can say what I want so shut the hell up. So, lots of people shout above and around each other, they don’t get what the other wants, and at the end everyone goes crazy because of the noise.
I agree. Freedom for people to express themselves is important and healthy.
In this case it’s a law people like to wave around. the right has confused free speech with freedom from consequences, and there is a certain type of person who goes around crowing about “fReE SpeECh”.
Also, more of a libertarian ideal rather then left-wing ideal. Left-wingers can be authoritarians too.
Jeff Bezos bought a famous newspaper for 250 million, Elon Musk bought the dumpster fire twitter for 44 billion dollars… I guess for billionaires like them controlling narratives is priceless but one of them sure overpaid.
Regardless, expect to see a while lot more propaganda from his good friends China and Xi Jinping. He’s got to make his money especially if advertisers leave the platform. Practical matters trump ideological.
Yup. Controlling the narrative is why franchise laws were loosened in the ’90s. It allowed right wingers with lots of money to buy up news media outlets to push their propaganda.
“Free Speech” on birdsite just means the Parler, Gab, and Truth.Social users can come back.
I’ve heard some rumors that the collateral for the deal is tesla stock. So if that drops in value, Musk is in a world of pain. But there is no reason for the stock to drop, now that every car manufacturer is building competing cars that have functional door handles.
Bill Shooter of Bul,
Depends. I’m obviously not privy to Musk’s contract, but he probably has a strong legal team protecting his interests.
Look at Trump, who’s business legacy is filled with huge failures and yet he always arranges to have someone else be on the hook for the losses. I think in his case he uses hundreds of LLCs to shield himself from liability on every project. Something akin to “heads I win, tails you loose”. What amazes me is how he has continued to find willing victims to partner with him for so long.
I don’t think any financial advisor would advise this purchase at this price. But what I initially learned as rumor is true, he put up tesla as collateral for the deal. This seems not wise to this risk adverse non financial advisor.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/04/26/investing/morgan-stanley-elon-musk-twitter/index.html
Bill Shooter of Bul,
I don’t see the wisdom in it either. If he was willing to spend that much money on the project, he might have done better creating his own competitor.
Anyways having so much money means he can afford to make a lot more mistakes than the average Joe. Loosing tens of billions of dollars might be a bad day for him but realistically it’s not going to change his lifestyle.
Eh, I mean his lifestyle right now is buying 44 billion dollar companies.
For a much better discussion of these details by a much smarter individual, see this thread:
https://twitter.com/TheLastBearSta1/status/1518964366900666369
Bill Shooter of Bul,
What else has be bought? If the media accounts are true that his worth is ~$290B, then he can technically afford to splurge on $40-50B companies as easily as a median income family can afford a car and quite a lot easier than a median family can afford a house. I’m not trying to suggest that it’s a good financial decision, but regardless it would seem he can afford it several times over if he wanted to even though he’d have to divest from tesla and move his money around.
Obviously he’d owe a lot of capital gains taxes if he did that, but it’s still so much money that buying twitter isn’t a stretch for him.
@Alfman Its not like cash in a bank that he has, its in stock. There are limits in how much he can sell legally at a time, as well as compounding effect on the stock price after he unloads a huge chunk. Its really complex nest of interactions of his various wealth holdings. Its a really dumb and risky thing hes doing. And hey, sometimes those pay off. Being an entrepreneur means doing that sometimes. I’m just trying to highlight how risky this is. Its risking not only twitter, its employees, users etc, but also Tesla the company, employees, customers, etc.
Tesla like most tech company’s compensate half cash half options,. If musk tanks tesla’s stock price, the tech employees suffer. Its a material risk that was not present before this transaction. If I’m a tesla tech employee, I’m looking at moving to a competitor at this point.
Bill Shooter of Bul,
Insider trading laws requires he executes trades via a “plan” to ensure that his actions are not insider trading. In his plan he can specify the quantity, price, future dates, etc. Still, he is the one in charge of the contents of his plan and how much of his stake he wants to liquidate.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/rule-10b5-1.asp
I’m not disagreeing with you. My point is only that he can technically afford it. Hell even if he looses 100% of his investment, he can still afford that too.
I agree. It’s hard to predict where stocks will go. Sometimes they don’t really make any sense when you look at the fundamentals. A stock may be valued at 10X what it’s assets and profits are actually worth, but stocks kind of have a life of their own because some people have so much money and nowhere else to put it. This tends to balloon valuations beyond what is rational. Even the investors themselves can acknowledge this.
I don’t know that Musk would have such dark ambitions, but technically controlling a dominant social media platform could give him a lot more influence to manipulate elections just by controlling what people get exposed to. Even relatively subtle changes can make big differences at the polls. This is just a conspiracy, but the ability to control elections using social media could be worth a pretty penny.
https://theconversation.com/can-facebook-influence-an-election-result-65541
There sure is a lot of energy being given to something people claim to hate, and a lot of opinions about how someone should be spending their money. For all the pissing & moaning about it, you’d think somebody somewhere would create a worthy alternative. I guess people are motivated enough to complain but not motivated enough to do anything productive.
It’s the network effects that make Twitter valuable and hard to unseat.
ssokolow,
Exactly. For better or worse this describes nearly every dominant tech company. New independent platforms can certainly be independently created and in many cases niche alternatives have been created, but the network effects strongly favor the incumbents who already have all the users and advertisers. It’s one thing when the market is starting out fresh, but in a mature market It’s extremely difficult to draw new users and advertisers to a niche platform when everyone’s friends, families, peers are on the more popular network.
Difficult yes, impossible (which isn’t what you claimed) no. Where friends, families, and peers have digitally gathered has changed over the years. Twitter wasn’t the first, it won’t be the last, it’s just what’s currently popular. In fact, other newer platforms are already more popular with far more daily users than Twitter if a people network is what matters most.
Twitter isn’t something being done to anyone, it’s something people do to themselves. Unseating Twitter is as easy as not using it if that’s what people truthfully want. But let’s be honest, that’s not what people actually want. Twitter is valuable because it provides a megaphone for everyone’s/anyone’s thoughts and opinions about everything. You know, cuz it’s important the whole world knows exactly what you think and how you feel on all things all the time.
And you can’t be punched in the face for being an asshole. At least not at the moment you’re compelled to talk shit.
friedchicken,
Obviously it’s easy not to use it, I don’t use it. But let’s take our friend Thom Holwerda who regularly uses twitter. Would it be easy to stop using twitter and use something else? Sure he could, but presumably he derives value from having many other people to interact with him on twitter. You don’t contradict this, but you haven’t explicitly acknowledged the network effect either, which was the basis of ssokolow’s point. It’s not enough to have/build an alternative, even a good one, if it doesn’t have the users. Neither advertisers nor users are particularly compelled to use platforms with <1% market share.
Organic growth is viable in a young market, but once the market matures the momentum tends to be towards consolidation; it can cost a fortune to buy your way into the market. This is why dominant companies like twitter have such ridiculously high valuations. It's not about the technology so much as the eyeballs.
I think it’s important to distinguish between personal use ans business/promotion/etc use. Most of the complaining I see about how much of a dumpster fire Twitter is is seemingly coming from and referring to personal users. I’m not aware of any companies that endlessly moan about people’s behavior on the platform. Twitter’s value to an individual isn’t the same as its value to a company/organization in search of exposure and/or profit.
As far as connections, yes the network of people Twitter provides access to is certainly important whether it’s friends & family, or customers and clients. I wasn’t really talking about a better alternative for businesses, it was more about a better alternative for people to e-socialize. If Twitter vanished tomorrow, everyone who uses it to communicate with their friends would be just fine. The same is not true for companies who use it to communicate with their targets, at least initially. That’s why it’s important to differentiate who we’re talking about which I admittedly didn’t clarify initially because I assumed it was a given.
friedchicken,
I’m not a twitter user, and frankly I’ve always thought that twitter was a bad medium for the type of discussions I like to have, so I don’t feel like I’m missing much. For businesses I guess they like the format because they can just spam it with lazy superficial promotions and not look out of place there.
Not having been part of twitter, I can’t say much about the complaints for the platform.
Well, arguably the market wouldn’t disappear even if twitter was killed off. The top spot would open up and everyone else would rush to fill it. There might be some uncertainty over WHO would fill it, but there’s very little doubt that someone would. If another party managed to snag “twitter.com”, they’d likely end up with hundreds of millions of users and be worth billions for that simple reason. It speaks to how influential network effects are.
It really depends on whether those people have means of independently contacting one another. Social networks used to be secondary means of connecting with friends/family/coworkers/etc, but in some cases they’ve become primary means of connecting with no alternatives. Many people in my old hometown and college went off the grid except for social media.
Say osnews.com went down, we’d all be fine in the sense that we could forget about one another and make new connections elsewhere, but most of our acquaintances here would be permanently lost. We’d all deal with it, but I’d miss the people I’ve known for a long time here too.
I wasn’t clear: I don’t mean that no social media alternatives exist, but rather that one cannot use those alternatives with existing contacts unless we arrange redundant contact information up front. Some people might do this but many don’t.
People did: Activity Pub driven Fediverse.
https://fediverse.party/
https://joinmastodon.org/
The most toxic social network in existence, this online lynching mob and cattle herding platform, cannot get any worse. This is a fact.
Twitter devolved from a nice concept to a malignant metastatic cancer dominated by the worst of the humankind over the years.
Under the current circumstances, Elon will be a hero if he just burn down that cesspool. It would be single greatest achievement in favor of the human race ever done by him if he does so.
It’s original concept of a notification system was cool. Then they let people post.
I think it can get worse, and I’m kind of down to see it.
Maybe, Elon can do a SpaceX, Starlink, Tesla join venture. Twitter gets streamed out to the universe, and Teslas read birdsite to the occupants continually without a way to turn it off without opting for a $10,000 upgrade.
BTW how is Elon Musk the founder of Twitter? Link provided is irrelevant.
Its an insider joke. Elon weather its him behind it or he just doesn’t correct lazy journalism, has been credited with founding all of the companies he’s been involved in, when the truth is that he was an investor that took over in many cases. So, since he’s taking over twitter, he must have invented and founded it, get it? Think al gore but for 2022.
True, but he’s made a lot of those companies work, although it’s typical of his type that you don’t hear about the failures. But as a shareholder or employee, you should generally be happy to find Musk investing because it at least means the product is going somewhere! There plenty of great inventions and ideas that have gone bust for want of a Musk type investor to get them across the line!
I much rather see a $billionaire like Musk doing this than building himself a remote Fortress and a fleet of Superyachts to hide away in. There are plenty who do not give back a cent!
Musk puts his wallet where his mouth is and his wealth on the line, if only the world had a few more adventurous investors.
I’ve had some close dealings with Multimedia / Media Barons and they have generally expected someone else to pay for lunch!
cpcf,
I don’t particularly feel like billionaires investing in companies should be viewed as giving back a cent though. In many ways the billionaires are the leeches who profit off of everyone else’s backs simply because they have more money rather than through their own efforts. Of course this is more a statement about how society rewards the wealthy than one about Elon Musk personally, but still I understand “giving back” to mean “philanthropy”, which we haven’t seen much from him.
So… when companies (products) succeed, the CEOs are “leeches who profit off of everyone else’s backs”, but when companies (products) fail, the CEOs are the ones responsible for the failure. Nope, you can’t have it both ways. Not unless the employees who worked on failed products such as the Philips CDi or Windows Phone refunded the salaries they collected to their employers and I didn’t notice…
If you want to blame the CEOs for the failures, you’ve got to credit them for the successes too.
“Philanthropy” is a bottomless pit (you can thank overpopulation and certain religions pushing for overpopulation for that) and it’s mostly a tax-dodging scheme. I prefer the kind of “giving back” that Elon Musk is doing because it has a meaningful impact.
No actually, it’s just an acknowledgementthat those at the top get disproportionate compensation. Obviously it’s very easy to understand why: executives are in control and their incentive is to reward themselves. It’s little surprise that executives across the board have been taking increasingly large cuts for themselves because they can.
I want it both ways? Says who? I have friends and peers who lost their jobs and took pay cuts when employers weren’t doing well during covid. The point being when times are tough, it’s not just the executives that hurt. During normal times I’ve worked at companies where the top brass comes in late and kicks out early because their compensation was never tied to their personal productivity. They skim a few percent from everyone else’s work while they play gulf and deduct their club dues as a business expense. Seriously. I don’t want you to take this as a generalization that they are all lazy because that’s obviously not true, some are workaholics even. Nevertheless the fact remains that in large enterprises most of their income comes from the revenue generated by the pyramid below them and not their own work.
Such as…?