The claim is a major departure for the service, which has long been known as a destination for posting short snippets of text.

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      Guys, I think he’s just trolling humanity. If he’s actually trolling, I think he earned my respect. He’d be the biggest troll humanity has and will ever know. Like, the cheer magnitude, the execution… damn.

      • Plopp@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        No troll ever deserved respect for trolling. And I say that as someone who occasionally engages in innocent trolling.

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          He’s obviously not trolling the whole planet, it was a joke… but people hate him so much that they even downvote hypothetical sarcastic imaginary praise

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              Are you seriously so retarded you thought I was actually supporting Elon Musk somehow with that comment?

              I think Musk is pretty retarded, but you take the trophy. Are you sure you’re not trolling?

      • theneverfox@pawb.social
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        My theory is he’s pulling a zero requiem. He watches anime, so he’s probably watched code geas - it’s a very popular futuristic anime after all

        First he became the symbol of the useful billionaire, the Tony Stark guy who’s going to save humanity, because he’s a futurist with the power of money. He learns everything about his companies the way a kid learns every stat about their model car, and actually does weirdly good as a hype man. He gives off the awkwardness of an engineer

        After he meets Trump in the white house, he realizes how close we are to the brink. The fact that billionaires own all our media has led to existential danger, where truth doesn’t matter and money speaks

        So, there’s a plan for a group of individuals to buy Twitter. There’s text logs of this - he was invited into a group planning to buy it together for the good of humanity, but it took all of 5 minutes for them to start carving holes in the ideology, so he backs out.

        He then announced the intention to buy, trapping him in a situation where he was forced to go through with it… He struggled a bit, but not that hard really

        So then comes the plan. He takes over, and every two weeks or so, he makes an impulsive decision showing zero understanding of the company. One idiotic decision at a time, spread out long enough to remind people “I’m still here, and I’m still ruining a major platform for public discourse!”

        People start to realize he’s actually kind of dumb and pretty racist… Even the fanboys are getting quieter and quieter in defending him. It’s becoming public knowledge he isn’t a Tesla or spaceX founder, he came in as an investor when they already had a plan

        He’s burning up half his fortune in an effort to show us all what a billionaire is. He’s not a businessman, he went to college to learn programming but doesn’t understand the basics of software, he’s hated by pretty much everyone in his personal life, and every company he’s tried to build from scratch has been a disaster. He lies constantly, in ways that will eventually come to light.

        This guy was able to buy Twitter, just because he invested in a company that bought and sold PayPal (after kicking him out for being unbearable). He’s showing us all that billionaires are an existential danger to mankind, even the “good” ones.

        Or, maybe he’s just having a midlife crisis and has a compulsive need for attention. One of the two.

  • frezik@midwest.social
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    1 year ago

    It’s amazing watching a platform with no substantial competitor kill itself so badly. AltaVista was killed by Google, MySpace was killed by Facebook, Twitter is killed by the ramblings of the lunatic who bought it.

    • ripcord@lemmy.world
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      And yet there are so, so many people that don’t seem to be able to pull themselves away from it.

      I really don’t get it.

      • Hyperlon@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        For the reason above. There’s not a serious alternative that replaced it for those people.

        • S_204@lemm.ee
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          It’s fucked up how threads immediately devolved into a bigoted Antisemitic shit hole like twitter in a fraction of the time.

          Is it impossible to develop a social media platform that doesn’t get overrun with conspiracy whack jobs and assholes?

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              It’s just not a useful platform at present. Maybe one day it’ll be relevant enough but not today.

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            1 year ago

            Social media in modern times is an instrument of war. It will always be used as such whenever possible. So no, I think the answer is no

            • S_204@lemm.ee
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              Social media in modern times is an instrument of war

              It is fascinating watching what Iran, Qatar and Russia have pulled off this past few years.

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              Sadly I’ve just come to assume most people are Antisemitic bigots these days. I’d rather be pleasantly surprised than disappointed.

        • MisterFrog@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          I never seriously used twitter (I probably have used it less than 10 hours total), but what really is stopping people from getting on mastodon? It’s the same thing, and is extremely easy to sign up for.

          It’s right there, not that I have much of a desire to use it, but if people like twitter, is it just that not enough people are on it? Just the network effect?

          • Hyperlon@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Twitter has more people, meaning more content. It’s the same reason I still have Reddit downloaded.

      • arc@lemm.ee
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        It’s all about stickiness. Twitter still has accounts people want to follow whereas other platforms don’t so people can’t shift or find it hard to. I’ve seen some prominent users move to Threads, Substack, Bluesky, Mastodon etc. but not enough and scattering to the four winds doesn’t help either. If there were an actual exodus of accounts across media, news, celebrities, sports, government etc. then Twitter die on its ass. Or even if big accounts started mirroring their content across other social media services.

        And these rival services should really federate. But we all know that the commercial services are loath to cooperate with each other when they want all the pie.

      • Heavybell@lemmy.world
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        I got on twitter because artists I want to follow post there, a lot of them exclusively. They do this because – in theory – that is where the audience is, with the biggest potential for growth. Then they all get shadowbanned, even the ones that don’t draw porn, because they don’t bring in ad revenue or something. Alternatives exist but so many of them refuse to go to another platform because there isn’t an audience there, pre-packaged and waiting for them.

        I understand it, but also I don’t. It’s a cyclical problem but only the content-producing side has the power to solve it.

      • NιƙƙιDιɱҽʂ@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        To be fair, there are also people like me who didn’t use it at all before, but now do just to watch it burn cause it’s funny.

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        I really don’t get it.

        I’m still on Xitter, but on my own terms. I use a plugin called Control Panel for Twitter, which means I don’t get anything on my feed other than stuff from those I follow, and what they share, unless they share some bollocks then I will block shares from them. There are a bunch of Hong Kong activists, journalists and fellow HK travelers who don’t use other platforms yet, and I don’t want to get cut off from what’s happening there. There is also good motorsports contributors, who also post on TikTok and IG which I refuse to go near. In addition there are feeds and posters related to my work, some I can’t see anywhere else, then there is some random stuff I can’t see anywhere else.

        I don’t have the Xitter app on my phone and use the same Control Panel plugin to ensure my terms of engagement are maintained on mobile. This plugin, for example blocks anyone who paid Xitter for a blue badge, so I don’t see any of their putrid bile in response to those I follow. It also frees you from the “algorithm” that determines what Xitter want’s you to see, I only get a chronological timeline feed. Upsells, ads, who to follow, bookmarks and other random bits of UI I never use are also gone.

        Basically, it is exactly how I want the whole Xitter experience with none of elmo’s shit polluting my screen.

        Get it now?

        • arc@lemm.ee
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          I use Twitter with the control panel and ad block. Both on my desktop and my phone. The phone doesn’t use their app, it uses a web app which gets stripped of all the ads and other bullshit. I peek into Bluesky and Mastodon and post the odd thing there. Some Twitter accounts I follow are starting to mirror on other sites which is a positive thing. I just wish the news services I follow would do the same. I don’t get why the BBC (for example) doesn’t mirror its content or other news orgs when Twitter / Musk is so hostile to them and their journalists.

        • ripcord@lemmy.world
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          No. You’re still supporting that shitpile and its piece of shit owner.

    • TWeaK@lemm.ee
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      You seem to be taking pleasure in it, but the fact is this was the plan from the moment he was locked into the purchase. Buy the business, run it into the ground, destroy the platform that people use to organise on. On the way down, try a bunch of shady shit and see what they can get away with - this will be the new standard for any platform that comes next.

      • WaxedWookie@lemmy.world
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        That’s been the outcome, but I think you’re dramatically overestimating Musk if you think that was his intent.

        It seems clear to me that he’s of below average intelligence with an overinflated, incredibly fragile ego.

        • TWeaK@lemm.ee
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          It wasn’t his intent when he posted about wanting to buy the company, but after the SEC forced him to buy, and once he formed a coalition to buy it, the plan became to kill the business off with a leveraged buyout.

          Make no mistake, Twitter isn’t dying because of Musk’s mismanagement, it’s dying because it was saddled with $13bn of debt that it could never have hoped to pay back. The mismanagement is just a show to provide deniability.

          That isn’t to say that Musk is some kind of genius, just that he’s a clown playing his role.

          • Littleborat@feddit.de
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            How is Musk going to profit from running Twitter into the ground? I think I did not understand that part.

            • TWeaK@lemm.ee
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              He isn’t. However, you can still make something from a loss - such as establishing new standards of what social media websites can get away with.

      • GeneralVincent@lemmy.world
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        Everyone is downvoting as if this is a baseless conspiracy and ridiculous.

        For those people, here’s a source

        https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/was-elon-musks-strategy-twitter-rcna118490

        And an excerpt;

        On the day that public records revealed that Elon Musk had become Twitter’s biggest shareholder, an unknown sender texted the billionaire and recommended an article imploring him to acquire the social network outright.

        Musk’s purchase of Twitter, the 3,000-word anonymous article said, would amount to a “declaration of war against the Globalist American Empire.” The sender of the texts was offering Musk, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO, a playbook for the takeover and transformation of Twitter. As the anniversary of Musk’s purchase approaches, the identity of the sender remains unknown.

        The three texts were sent on April 4, 2022. In the nearly 18 months since then, many of the decisions Musk made after he bought Twitter appear to have closely followed that road map, up to and including his ongoing attacks against the Anti-Defamation League, a nonprofit organization founded by Jewish Americans to counter discrimination.

        • NιƙƙιDιɱҽʂ@lemmy.world
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          But…how does NBC News have texts that Musk received…?


          Edit: Revealed in a court filing.

          See relevant text:

          The messages from the unknown sender were revealed in a court filing last year as evidence in a lawsuit Twitter brought against Musk after he tried to back out of buying it. The redacted documents were unearthed by The Chancery Daily, an independent legal publication covering proceedings before the Delaware Court of Chancery.

        • Huschke@lemmy.world
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          That is one explanation, but imho a more likely explanation in the spirit of Hanlon’s razor is that he receives 100s of crazy texts like this on a daily basis and one of them just happens to somewhat align with what crazy shit he is doing now.

          • GeneralVincent@lemmy.world
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            You should read the article. It details how Musk followed the text’s suggestions exactly, and is aligning himself closely with the same far right neo-nazis that begged him to buy Twitter and deplatform it.

            Even if that exact text didn’t convince him, one of the well known far right political pundits has definitely tried. Free speech is like their worst enemy, they can’t let Twitter be open to all that free information.

  • Sludgehammer@lemmy.world
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    “What if we ignored what made our platform successful and instead tried to force our product into a already crowded market?” Elon Musk, Tech genius

        • RBG@discuss.tchncs.de
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          They have their own content. Decades of content. Zwitter* has…?

          *I am refusing to write that name as only X or Twitter or X/Twitter and writing it XTwitter almost sounds like the German word Zwitter, which is the word for hermaphrodite, and I know someone who owns that platform who would dislike that association…

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        Disney’s not hurting. They just posted bigger profits than ever this past year and expect to exceed that by several billion this year.

        • Melonpoly@lemmy.world
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          So higher gross profit but lower net income from last year which is far lower than their net income from 2019 and their highest in 2018.

          They’ve produced ~4 flops last year that cost them almost $1 billion, their stock price hit a 9 year low last year at below $84, Disney + has been operating at a loss since it started. Universal Studios overtook them with box office revenue last year.

          Unless I’m interpreting that incorrectly it would seem that they aren’t doing too well. Correct me if I’m wrong.

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            They aren’t doing as great as they hoped, that’s all. Disney isn’t hurting for money, every day people spend billions in their parks. Yes they aren’t having cinematic triumphs, but that isn’t the only source of their income.

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    Lol, twitter was brilliant when it was 144 character text messages. Then it got ruined by adding photos. Now it is going the rest of the way down the tubes by becoming becoming video first. Ugh.

    • cm0002@lemmy.world
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      Oh yea back when it needed that limit because the whole point was to text it over SMS and you could post with any SMS capable phone lol

      That was fun and unique, now it’s just…boring? Just another social media site, it’s only defining thing is it’s (declining) size and reach

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        1 year ago

        SMS was the original reason, but the side effect of forcing people to condense their thoughts into a couple sentences was pretty wonderful. Especially for an open ended community where anyone can talk about anything.

        • Chriswild@lemmy.world
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          I disagree with you simply because brevity is nice but not at the expense of nuance. Having to try to follow a string of tweets because one simply can’t suffice is awful.

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            I don’t understand the difficulty, the series of tweets are all replies to the previous tweet in the chain. Where’s the difficulty?

            • Chriswild@lemmy.world
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              Likewise I don’t understand the difficulty in reading more than 140 characters.

              But I’ve never used Twitter so when I experience the platform it’s through screen caps of tweets. Instead of having paragraphs and cohesive formatting it reads like a programmer who writes code all in one line. Sure, it can be done and it can be read but it’s fucking awful that it isn’t formatted correctly so that it is more clear.

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                It’s formatted how you’d expect if you’ve a timeline on anything, most recent at the top though, right?

                • Chriswild@lemmy.world
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                  Thats not formatting. That’s like reading a book transcribed on post-it notes and calling it a format. It can be ordered, yes but I’m talking about paragraphs and complete sentences.

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          Wonderful in theory, but in practice it’s a dumpster fire. Quick, mainstreamm-acceptable takes are incentived, and nuanced, alternative viewpoints are nearly impossible.

          If it were all for hobby stuff, it would be fine, but when this is how most people get their news, it’s not good.

    • Ottomateeverything@lemmy.world
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      Hey at least photos worked…

      Video playback doesn’t work half the time, and the other half the time it insists on 140p playback and then freezes.

      They’re doubling down on something they’ve been failing at for years.

    • Hamartiogonic@sopuli.xyz
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      And with this brilliant move they are going to increase bandwidth and storage expenses. There’s a reason why it’s so hard to compete with YouTube.

  • Tiger Jerusalem@lemmy.world
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    Of course let’s take a platform that barely holds itself together to show just text and let’s pivot it to be the most technical demanding and expensive kind of service. It will work fine, I’m sure.

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    The only thing worse than its video player are the literal nazis on the site, has he tried watching video there? To call it dogshit would be an insult to dogshit, which can presumably be useful as fertilizer.

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      1 year ago

      It’s funny how Tucker Carlson thought he could just do his show on Twitter and basically instantly lost his entire audience.

    • Technus@lemmy.zip
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      No no no you’ve got it all wrong:

      The Nazis are supposed to be a feature of the platform.

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        Paradox of tolerance and all that. You want a tolerant site? Can’t allow Nazis.

        Secondly, there was a wave of banning of leftists and journalists recently, it’s very much only free speech for the right there.

        • theneverfox@pawb.social
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          The paradox of tolerance is a gross misunderstanding of the concept of tolerance

          You tolerate your gay coworker - you treat them like a coworker. If any of your coworkers make inappropriate sexual comments or unwanted advances, that’s not okay. You respond appropriately, such as expressing your discomfort to them or going to hr or the police. There’s no conflict

          You tolerate racists - so long as they stay within the social contract, they’re allowed to hold whatever they want in their hearts.

          But if they violate the social contract, such as by saying racist things, you respond appropriately.

          If someone believes Nazi ideas deep down, you tolerate them. If Nazis want to organize, spread their ideals, or do Nazi things, you respond appropriately.

          It’s that simple.

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    I thought Xitter was going to be a bank! Honestly, who can follow the mentally-ill, cocaine-fueled ramblings of this man-baby?

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    The microblogging platform that once limited posts to 140 characters is now a “video-first” platform?

  • NutWrench@lemmy.ml
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    How Elon deals with advertising complaints: “Go advertise someplace else.”

    Advertisers:

    • stopthatgirl7@kbin.socialOP
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      Thing is, it probably won’t. MySpace is still around. LiveJournal is still around. Big social media platforms don’t tend to stop existing. But they do stop being culturally and socially relevant, and that’s what I hope comes sooner rather than later to Twitter: irrelevancy.

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    1 year ago

    It’s an interesting claim.

    I don’t think I’ve ever seen a platform struggle more with video than Twitter. Everything looks like it’s using RealPlayer. It’s the only platform where the Japanese wouldn’t have to censor their porn before uploading.

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        1 year ago

        And QuickTime. You can still get both of these. I can only imagine they’re visited by people that’ve just come out of a 20 year coma and need something to play their .avi files on…

      • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.works
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        RealPlayer was, and still to this day is, a for-profit product. Somehow. RealNetworks LLC still exists, they apparently now provide “artificial intelligence and computer vision based products” though they still provide subscription-based online entertainment services…presumably for people who set up automatic bill pay then forgot about it for 15 years.

        Also, do you mean DivX, the vaguely obscure MPEG-4-like video codec that some people even used for reasons beyond my understanding, or DIVX, the completely unrelated DVD rental system operated by Circuit City which involved encrypted DVDs with unique barcodes and a special DVD player with a modem in it that would phone home, check if the rental is still valid, and if so get the key needed to play the disc…which is now defunct and all the discs are useless. Because both of those pretty much sucked.

        • scottywh@lemmy.world
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          The codec was quite popular for a decent little stretch there… Far more so and for far longer than the circuit city product.

        • 15liam20@feddit.uk
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          presumably for people who set up automatic bill pay then forgot about it for 15 years.

          SHIT!

    • Honytawk@lemmy.zip
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      I doubt their server infrastructure will hold after all the shenanigans Elmo pulled with it.

      Video streaming is a lot more taxing than text.