The ongoing X and Elon Musk Transgressions Thread

[photon]

He's a good engineering manager, at least in terms of getting results. It's not like he wrote the code to do vertical rocket landings though, he's got big teams of technical people that do the work. And even then how much of it is his management, and how much of it is just appeal to engineers who want to solve hard problems regardless of who the manager is?

But he's probably not that much smarter or dumber than many of us, he's human and he's just as susceptible to cognitive biases and logical fallacies as the rest of us.

Combine that with a huge echo chamber of millions of fans telling him he's humanity's salvation and the money and power to ensure that everyone tells him what he wants to hear and it doesn't seem unusual.

I'd probably be the same if I had millions reenforcing my nonsense beliefs day in and day out.

[Mr.Coffee]

Originally Posted by PsYcNeT

It seems Musk has fallen victim to the Trust Thermocline

https://twitter.com/user/status/1588115310124539904

hey ROGERS / NHL.

Hope you're taking notes.

[Slava]

The thermocline idea is really interesting. I'm not sure that it's actually where we are though. Maybe it's wishful thinking on my part though? I just think that like bizaro says above, if they make it past this initial shock they might be just fine.

Twitter is a bit weird overall. The trust they have is entirely borrowed trust. If you follow journalists for example, you're trusting them to give you updates on whatever topics you follow them for. If Pierre LeBrun tells you that the Flames have traded Matthew Tkachuk on a Friday night at 10pm, you trust that because it's his account and you get that instant information. Is that kind of thing on the verge of changing? I don't know for sure. But people do want that immediate information and there's pretty obviously a market for it.

[pseudoreality]

I never got twitter, and no it looks like I never will. Redit is my social media of choice. It is not without its problems, but I can general find out what is going on in the world on there.

[Yoho]

https://twitter.com/user/status/1587894226695884800

Some food for thought.

[Looch City]

Yoho, you should apply to work at Twitter. Elon would love someone to constantly suck up to him.

[Yeah_Baby]

my iced coffee brings me infinitely more joy than twitter dot com



I do think with inflation where it's at, and folks looking at their spending, the online support or subscription model will take a hit. I'd be curious to know how several patreons for podcasts etc were doing.

[flames_fan_down_under]

Pretty rich coming from the richest person on earth who just fired hundreds of people.

[Senator Clay Davis]

There's no food for thought lol. Elon is absolutely desperate to avoid this being the (incredibly likely) disaster it's going to be. At this point he'll be lucky to only lose $35 billion on this. Imagine losing such an obscene amount of money because you could be baited. Pathetic.

[photon]

It'll be interesting to see if there is a mass exodus but really to me that is completely beside the point.

Even if Twitter isn't close to crossing the thermocline, they're still in tough.

In the big scheme of social media Twitter is small. And now they have a gigantic debt to service, far in excess of their ability to do so with existing revenue.

$8 for blue checkmarks is a drop in the bucket, they'd need every single current blue checkmark to pay AND 25 MORE people to pay for every single current blue checkmark just to service the debt. That's not happening unless they grow Twitter by a factor of 25.

And there isn't enough broad appeal to grow Twitter by that much, people already see it as toxic and negative overall.

Trying to monetize this feature or that feature isn't going to help much, they need to increase advertising revenues by a huge amount, which means increasing user count a huge amount and they won't do that by decreasing moderation.

EDIT: It's also hilarious that Musk thinks it's about the actual cost of the blue checkmark. People are willing to pay for value, if there's no value then they will complain about the price. Ignoring the fact that all Musk's talk about free speech is totally ignored now.

[Fuzz]

Originally Posted by KootenayFlamesFan

He's even tweeting like Trump now.

For such a smart guy, he doesn't seem very smart.

Ya, I read that tweet in Trump's voice, and it totally fits.

[opendoor]

It's also not just a question of user numbers, but also the demographics. Twitter never had huge overall numbers compared to other social media companies, but its users tend to skew heavily towards the higher educated and richer demographic.

Most social media companies have relatively flat income demographics among their user base. So the % of people that earn under $30K that use a platform like Facebook is pretty similar of the % of people earning over $100K who use it. But Twitter's share among higher income ($75K+) users is about double what it is among the low-income population which makes it more attractive for advertisers (obviously companies want to target people with more money).

But if Twitter does things that tend to alienate the higher earning and higher educated demographic just to get a bunch of rubes on there, then that's going to change the calculus for advertisers significantly.

[Tkachukwagon]

It is strange that the richest man in the world (on paper at least) acts like an internet troll. He literally could have done absolutely nothing to Twitter and it would have been a better strategic plan then what he is doing right now.

[Ozy_Flame]

The glorification of rich people as intelligent leaders will continue until stock prices improve

[Scroopy Noopers]

Originally Posted by KootenayFlamesFan

He's even tweeting like Trump now.

For such a smart guy, he doesn't seem very smart.

He’s not a smart guy. He was born into fortune.

[GGG]

Originally Posted by pseudoreality

I never got twitter, and no it looks like I never will. Redit is my social media of choice. It is not without its problems, but I can general find out what is going on in the world on there.

Reddit is very bubble reinforcing. The way they link articles you see the posters opinion before you see content and you don’t even click the content before you start debating. Mods ability to ban enforces group think. How do you avoid just seeing a very limited range of opinion?

To me Twitter is good at getting links to a wide variety of content by following a wide selection of people. Sure you can self censor and just follow those who agree with you but I find of all the social media sites it’s the easiest to escape your bubble and follow people you disagree with. I don’t read comments or participate I use it as a newsfeed.

[Azure]

Originally Posted by photon

It'll be interesting to see if there is a mass exodus but really to me that is completely beside the point.

Even if Twitter isn't close to crossing the thermocline, they're still in tough.

In the big scheme of social media Twitter is small. And now they have a gigantic debt to service, far in excess of their ability to do so with existing revenue.

$8 for blue checkmarks is a drop in the bucket, they'd need every single current blue checkmark to pay AND 25 MORE people to pay for every single current blue checkmark just to service the debt. That's not happening unless they grow Twitter by a factor of 25.

And there isn't enough broad appeal to grow Twitter by that much, people already see it as toxic and negative overall.

Trying to monetize this feature or that feature isn't going to help much, they need to increase advertising revenues by a huge amount, which means increasing user count a huge amount and they won't do that by decreasing moderation.

EDIT: It's also hilarious that Musk thinks it's about the actual cost of the blue checkmark. People are willing to pay for value, if there's no value then they will complain about the price. Ignoring the fact that all Musk's talk about free speech is totally ignored now.

There are only 420,000 verified users on Twitter, so we assume 300k of them stick around to pay the $8 per month, that equals $2.4 million per month. Not exactly 'paying the bills' type of money for an organization like that.

Unless they think they can get more people to start paying for the feature, which at this point will only happen if there are better benefits.

It'll be interesting to watch, because I think right now the entire tech industry is looking at Twitter to see how they deal with this.

No secret that companies are laying people off like crazy right now, so I find the complaining about Twitter doing it pretty amusing.

[devo22]

he's completely lost the plot. Which would be hilarious if he wasn't such a rich and powerful man with a ton of influence.

[calculoso]

https://twitter.com/user/status/1588569650136109061

[Senator Clay Davis]

Well if the employee who is fact checking Elon on his own app wasn't already fired...