Pay 44 billion for a brand, then change it. Pure genius.
this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2023
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Pay billions for a userbase, then drive away the ones that aren't Nazis or bots.
An X looks like a swastika if you only add half the seriffs
Been saying it for a while, but his plan was to run it into the ground all along. Who is he buddy-buddy with in public? The Saudi's and the Russians, who both have an interest in seeing Twitter burn to the ground. He started by laying off people, not paying their bills, and making stupid brand decisions. This has been the plan all along and there's really no other logical explanation. 44 billion is nothing to the Saudis and Russian oligarchs if it takes away a key tool for organized dissent and the spread of western ideals.
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Brand and user base. Destroy both
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Twitter and Reddit are both lessons in how to kill a community and a brand.
Lessons for whom? I have several things I would like to kill but lack the requisite trillions to execute my vision.
Sounds like a Kickstarter idea if I've ever seen one.
"Tired of running your massively popular online service? Call Brand wreckers(TM), your one-stop shop for dismantling user loyalty and brand reputation. Call now and lose your first 10k users for free!"
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You can throw Warner Brothers Discovery in there while you are at it (HBO now stupidly referred to as "Max")
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When they start focusing on the brand, it’s over.
I was part of a “startup” that was all volunteers. We called ourselves Citizens Market, and the idea was to produce an app that let you scan a barcode to get ethical info on the company who made the product.
Like GoodGuide, but they got to market faster.
After a few years of effort, a marketing person joined our all-volunteer team and convinced the head to change the name to Fosfo. Why Fosfo? Because matches have phosphorous in them, and so it referenced illumination, and the illumination had to do with our mission of … you guessed it: providing information.
The thing failed. I mean, we were already failing because we didn’t have the profit motive cutting our decisions down to what worked. But the name “Fosfo” was when I knew the project was dead.
“Citizens Market” was the perfect name for what our app would do. But no, had to have some web 2.0 jackass giving us a facelift. That was our path to salvation: a rebrand.
That's a sad story. It sounds like a good utility, and the outcome too common.
Out critical blunder was hoping to crowdsource the generation of the dataset we’d use to provide scores.
What we should have done was find existing data about company ethics and just build the feature of scanning a UPC barcode to get the data.
We tried to be the app and the data source, and we had a huge two sided marketplace problem, and no incentive for the volunteers who would spend hours and hours doing research.
Another reason why I won’t do a startup under volunteer conditions again. We unconsciously modeled everyone else as like us: willing to donate copious time.
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He really did buy it just to delete it.
Of course he did; he hated Twitter because of it's ability for marginalized people to organized as well as give people the ability to share videos about his unsafe products.
Dude, he is a PR guy with Twitter being his main platform. There is no logic there.
I mean, it makes perfect sense. He's a PR guy who wanted to own a platform so he could spin his own facts; the fact that people could post videos of his own products catching fire was bad for him.
He is destroying his platform. While simultaneously helping competitors. While been forced to pay way to much and even pay for the layers his opponents hired. Genius moves all around.
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This gives him way too much credit lol. He isn't playing 5D chess, he impulse-bought a $44B company and is too much of a narcissistic control freak to stop touching it. Harming marginalized people is a natural consequence of essentially any action a billionaire takes by virtue of their existence.
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"After some backlash from users, Musk comes to a compromise: the new twitter logo is a blue bird with a giant Red X over it."
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Wouldn't it have been cheaper to just shut it down once he had it? He's burning a lot of operational money to do this slowly. It doesn't make any sense unless he really is that stupid.
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New logo
Hm, how do images work across instances? Maybe this way?
https://media.kbin.social/media/c9/97/c997d8c329bf759045c432e379534b7687e412b914c86660f9e10f1e5cd7e03c.png
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What is Musks obsession with the letter X?
He's a stunted 8 year old who associates X with edginess. X factor. X Men. X Ray. X rated films. XXX. All super fucking cool
He originally wanted "Model 3" to be called "Model E" so that the three (at the time) Tesla models could spell out "SEX". Fortunately that name was already taken. He's a petulant child.
I'll admit, BACK THEN, I thought it was funny and was sad E was taken. But yeah perspective changes when you realize how much worse he is/was/will be.
Also, he's an unoriginal dipshit. All he's good at is buying things and slapping his name on 'em, he's never had an idea of his own.
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X.com is his product he owned, that is loosely associated with PayPal's success despite it having nothing to do with the tech that it was merged for.
By "absorbing" twitter with his original X company that is older than twitter, he can pretend to be the founder of the parent company X, like he pretends to be the founder of Tesla.
He's emotionally stunted and stuck in the 90s.
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I'm sure all the brands who are unsure about continuing their advertising on the platform are going to love having to derail their UI teams to go change dozens of different social media icons implementation.
McDonalds Web Team on Friday: "I think we've planned a great sprint for Monday everyone. It'll be tight but we should be ready in time to promote the anniversary of Grimace's bris!"
McDonalds Web Team on Monday: "Shit"
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What was that about him doing twitter’s technology policing and leaving running the company to the new CEO?
He's not even good at using his puppet.
Only clearer by the day that this was all an exercise to intentionally kill Twitter to the benefit of billionaires, fascists and other extremists.
Twitter existed as a relatively free and open public space to communicate, organize and assemble to take actions for and against things at scale before musk (e.g. The Arab Spring, a terrifying moment for the Saudis especially - the second largest shareholder behind musk).
When people collectively laughed at elon and his cringe, inbred, emerald boy antics or his humiliating divorce and other routine failures, Twitter was the bullhorn.
Now elon and his desperate far right Toadies will work to try to rewrite reality so they can eventually have this conversation:
"Twitter? What's a Twitter? Wait, are you talking about blork? A bird? No, blork's logo is a dinosaur with chainsaw arms... and everyone wants to be his best friend... and it's against the law to divorce him... and he's cool... and..."
What an everlasting tool history will remember you as, elon. If they remember you at all, it will be to laugh at you - you'll never outrun that.
Don’t attribute to malice what is absolutely just idiocy. Musk is not some genius. He is quite literally a man-child who made money because he came from money (and maybe a little luck).
His hubris led to this disaster with twitter—nothing else.
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It must be incredibly frustrating to be the new CEO that he just appointed, only to have him continuing to run his mouth and make ruinous decisions that tie your hands.
If she didn't know what she was signing up for then she deserves no pity. If she's smart she's using this as a stepping stone.
I mean, I'd love to get paid that amount of money for a few months, do barely nothing, blame my inferiors and retire with investments and a small restaurant in a friendly town.
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All I can think of when he talks about how "X will be an app for everything" is:
Welcome to Zombocom, you can do anything at Zombocom, Welcome to you. Anything is possible at Zombocom. The infinite is possible at Zombocom. The unobtainable is unknown at Zombocom. Welcome to Zombocom.
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Yeah... Because the thing that's wrong with Twitter is it's logo.
Xwitter by Musk - the best social media in all 4 corners of this Flat Earth! Starting at $8* per month.
*Basic plan has a limit of 50 xweets per month.
Least destructive decision he's made since acquiring it.
Ironic how he chose an X in a strikingly similar style to the (old, unmaintained, and deprecated) Xorg. That was certainly a choice of all time.
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E Corp from Wish.com
In ten years some kids in a discord round robin gonna ask why the fake social media in fanfiction are little blue birds. Wait they used to be real??
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