Fewer people are using Elon Musk’s X as the platform struggles to attract and keep users, according to analysts
Fewer people are using Elon Musk’s X as the platform struggles to attract and keep users, according to analysts
He’s making X into a “whites only” platform. What did he expect?
I remain convinced he's killing it on purpose. I don't know a plausible motive, but I guarantee it's on purpose.
I used to think so too, but I don't know if he is also bad at that because it is taking him longer than I expected.
If he wanted to kill it on purpose, he could have just shut it down. Maybe to keep the trademark he could have launched some other telecommunications service and used the brand for that.
Elon Musk is all about convincing people to act against their best interests to benefit him. For example, look at Tesla: it has a manufacturing capacity of ~2 million cars per year. Now look at Toyota: it has a manufacturing capacity of ~9 million vehicles per year. Now look at the market capitalisation of each company: for Tesla it is still about $535B, despite some fall from the peak in 2022. For Toyota, it is $416B (which is a record high).
So Toyota makes almost 5 times as many cars a year, but is worth 78% of Tesla? And the production capacity and value gap was even more extreme in the past? I think the question then is, what is going on?
The answer, of course, is Musk. He is very slick at convincing investors to act against their own best interests (usually by suggesting the possibility of things that happen to have the true objective along the way, like full self-driving cars by 2018 rather than competing with existing auto-makers, or 35 minute travel from San Francisco to Los Angeles, or a colony on mars rather than competing with existing satellite companies). This is the same skill-set as a confidence artist. I don't mean to imply that Musk has necessarily done anything illegal, but due to the similarity in skill set, and the large scale at which he operates, it would be fair to call him the most successful con artist in history. Looking at it through this lens can help to identify his motive.
So what would a con artist want with a social network, and why would he want to alienate a whole lot of people, and get a lot of haters?
Well, the truth is that a con artist doesn't need everyone to believe in them to make money - they just need the marks to believe in them. Con artists don't want the people who see through the con (call them the haters for lack of a better word) to interfere with their marks though. At the small scale - e.g. a street con, the con artist might separate a couple where one partner is the mark, to prevent the other from alerting their partner to the scam. But in addition to separating the marks from the haters, con artists use brainwashing techniques to create a psychological barrier between the marks and the haters. A Nigerian Prince scammer might try to convince a mark that their accountant can't be trusted. A religious cult con might brainwash followers to think their family are different from them, and if they try to provide external perspective, they are acting as the devil. They try to make the marks the in-group, and everyone else, even family and friends, the out-group who doesn't care about the in-group.
So what would a con artist in control of a social network do? They would start by giving the con artist the megaphone - amplifying everything the artist says to try to get more marks. In parallel, they'd try to get rid of the haters. They could shadow-ban them so the marks never see what they have to say, or they could put up small barriers the marks will happily jump over, and feel more invested in the platform having done that, but which would scare off the haters. However, the marks and the haters might still interact off the social network - so the scam artist would also want to create a culture war to try to make the marks hate the haters, and ignore anything they say, by amplifying messages hostile to the haters.
So what can you do if you don't want a world wrecked by divisions sewn just so billionaires can be even richer? My suggestion is don't buy into the divisions - work to find common ground with people, even if others are saying just to ignore them because they are different and will never get it, and get in early before the divisions are too deep.
The problem with this narrative is that Musk lost money doing so.
I agree he’s killing it on purpose. Something to do with information control.
His meeting so long at the Superbowl with Rupert Murdoch in his suite sure didn’t give me a warm fuzzy feeling.
I thought that for a bit, but more and more I think it's just extreme incompetence. Remember, he wanted X to be a thing for a long time, it's telling that he wanted it to succeed in that he renamed Twitter to X.
You think conspiracy theories in general sound reasonable, don't you
He’s making X into a “whites only” platform
Is there some evidence of this outrageous claim or it is just something that sounded cool in your head?
Twitter is for fascists & their sympathizers.
My wife insists she's staying there for the news and legal people she follows and she has a point. A lot of government, business, and schools continue to use it as an easy way to broadcast information.
Threads pulled off some celebrities, Bsky some policy and legal wonks, and Mastodon the tech geeks. If these services all start federating together and offering unified text and hashtag search, then where you land won't matter.
Until then, it'll be hard to get people to switch away, even with all the bad press.
If these services all start federating together
No one should federate with meta.
It's a damn racket when most of the artists I enjoy only post on twatter. Just upload to mastodon too ffs!
Is it really a racket though? Most artists are not tech geeks and desire cultivated feeds instead of .. none.
All the artists are in cahoots with Elon Musk!
At this point Musk has platformed all of the undesirables of the internet. He's a big, blinking, neon sign that says "there are no adults in the room, do whatever you want."
That could be a service to the rest of us. It would be nice if, now that they're all concentrated there, the internet could quietly agree to shadowban the entire site. Just disappear it from search results, conversation, "zeitgeist." Let all of the toxic users keep each other busy while the rest of us enjoy a cleaner internet.
No adults. That’s funny I consider kids to be the ones to he protected from hearing the wrong things.
I never liked Twitter to begin with, once it became an unabashed environment for hate it was a piece of cake to close my account.
At least thats kind of reassuring in a way, that part of it is people dont want to associate with that stuff. (Though I realize that isnt the only reason)
Well, he says X is a free speech platform when it clearly isn't. Blud can't even take a joke.
He drove me back into using RSS after more than a decade for staying up to date. Much better for the mental health. Thankfully, since Wordpress and also some other CMS have the RSS feature enabled by default, many websites have it even if they’re not advertising it.
WordPress powers over 40% of the web, so that's a very large number of sites/blogs that have RSS. WordPress has sites per category/tag too, so you can subscribe just to a subset of posts. For example, I'm subscribed to TheFlightDeal.com but just for flights from San Francisco (https://www.theflightdeal.com/category/flight-deals/sfo/feed/).
It's built into Mastodon too
Yes, this is what happens when you take a big shit in people's cereal. They tend to leave. I, too, could be an analyst.
Yeah telling your advertising megacustomers to go F.. themselves on TV and naming them explicitly. Wow. That's some kind of nasty.
It totally proved Disney right, too.
It's morbid but the only use it has to me is info on live shitty events.
I only follow specific youtubers and artists. If stray away from my specific feed, Twitter is too scary lol. I am at a loss for good social media though. It seems like most social media sites have just gotten worse over the past decade.
I guess there's pros an cons to it all. Pro: less time wasted on social media Con: I've missed out on some information that is sometimes good to know.
Good.
Agreed, but, it makes meta stronger.
So at what point does/did it reach death spiral?
There's probably a sociology theory that would apply, but my guess would be a loss of 33% of active users over the course of 6 months.
When the “large” voices leave in significant numbers - in the UK it is used wildly by public sector and charity organisations, there are official governmental Twitter accounts, all the broadcasters have accounts.
Really wish I could convince local government entities to switch to Mastodon - my local police said it was "subject to O.P.R.A." and needed to meet retention rules (if you rolled your own...), and the state wildfire commission said they were looking at Threads :/
So instead, both are still stuck on the platform that requires a login to see posts and filled with nazis.
Like when a US President was banned? Was that an example of those “big voices” leaving the platform?
the death spiral is in progress, elon's just rich so he can pay bills (or let leases go resulting in eviction...) for a while
So at what point does/did it reach death spiral?
It isn't so much a spiral as it is a series of 90 degree turns.
But Lonnie said they're doing great? /s
X will be dead any day now people! Any day now!
Good.
174 million daily active users. Wake me up when it's the same as mastodon.
Off to ItsownSpace it goes /s
It seems Twitter isn't the only one on the decline trend. Good job, burgerlanders.
Same. I don't want to make an account.
The elongated muskrat is learning first hand how the Nazi Bar Problem works
excuse me but what the fuck is the nazi bat problem
For reference:
https://www.upworthy.com/bartender-explains-why-he-swiftly-kicks-nazis-out-of-his-punk-bar-even-if-theyre-not-bothering-anyone
You have a bar: Nazi comes into your bar, you let him stay, because why not its just a single nazi. Nazi invites friends, those friends invite their friends, and so on. Now you a have nazi bar.
When you find a nazi but you can't find a bat.
Speaking of Nazis, are you able to provide any evidence whatsoever of Nazi activity on X?
Or is it more of a feeling you have?
This was very easy to find, I'm sure there's more.
https://www.npr.org/2023/11/22/1214619331/advertisers-leave-elon-musks-x-after-their-ads-appeared-next-to-pro-nazi-posts
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/05/elon-musk-ron-desantis-2024-twitter/674149/
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/elon-musk-antisemitic-comments-x-post-actual-truth/