Elon Musk

The real money will be in every wannabe influencer/scammer/grifter paying for verification for a few years until it's completely devalued.

Another site (platformer) is reporting $5/month fwiw

I believe that was something they were thinking about pre-Musk, and now that he's there he's gonna try and squeeze as much money out of his expensive new toy as quickly as possible, because he's dumb as shit and has no idea what the actual value of his expensive new toy is. Twitter is going to death-spiral incredibly fast; I'll be surprised if it still exists a year from now.

yeah if its $5/month I guess a lot of people will just do it. if it's $20 I suspect the blue check mark is gonna be the next NFT profile picture, having one will get you mocked relentlessly

the check mark would be nice for people doing literal fraud on there

ah now hes looking through internal coms and tweeting stuff out

Wachtell & Twitter board deliberately hid this evidence from the court. Stay tuned, more to come … pic.twitter.com/CifaNvtRtt

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 31, 2022

ahahaha of course the first thing he'd do is review all the internal docs for messy drama

as business strategy it makes no sense to take a company private and immediately jack up prices, something you'd do to juice revenues to placate impatient shareholders. whole point of going private is to free you from those short-termist incentives and let you experiment with risky investments with potential long-run upside

same with all the firings

Fun fact: because Twitter is under an ftc consent decree its slack is set up such that you can’t delete or edit a comment after 5 minutes. The sheer amount of shit that was talked about him on there is staggering.

lol

And unlike the previous ceo, who I never once saw on slack, I hear he actually spent the entire weekend logged in. Apparently his username is ermt. Feel free to email him @twitter.com.

terminal posting disease, good god rich ppl used to have standards

The idea of forcing people to pay for blue checks gets Twitter’s value proposition totally backward.

For Twitter to have value, it needs to provide valid information from legitimate sources. If anyone can pay for the appearance of validity, the site losses all value.

— Max Berger (@maxberger) October 31, 2022

I mean yeah that's kind of what the whole appeal of Twitter was, you could hear from celebrities, athletes, and journalists all at once. like 90% of their users joined because a specific person was on it. maybe that's not the case anymore but still this sounds like a remarkably idiotic idea

I don't understand why somebody wants or needs a blue check unless they're actually famous enough for someone to want to impersonate them

I mean it's a cool status symbol I guess. especially if you're a pretty niche writer/artist/musician or whatever

But isn't having the followers the status symbol? Is it high status to have a blue check and, like, 1000 people following you?

seems easier to get followers if you have the check though

wow lol

so my understanding is at twitter HQ, the folks running things in the “war room” are Musk, David Sacks, Jason Calacanis (VCs/Elon pals) Sriram Krishnan (exTwitter/current a16z), Elon’s legal and finance head guys (Spiro, Birchall) and a fleet of Tesla/BoringCo engineers

— rat king (@MikeIsaac) October 30, 2022

Jason c is a podcast content grifter with a get rich quick intro to angel investing book and literally zero management experience. Krishnan is ex Twitter for a reason.

everyone made fun of jason for pledging his sword to elon but whos in the war room now

First task: Get rid of all the spam!
Second task: Get companies to pay to spam your DMs!

Guys. pic.twitter.com/e3G9m4TSLb

— Mike Masnick (@mmasnick) October 31, 2022

twitter only needs one person to pay $20/month. that's enough to buy four tomato plants. after 6 months that's 100 tomatoes. plant them. 6 more months that's 2500 plants. plant them. 6 months it becomes 62,500 plants. 12 months later that's 39MM tomatoes. sell them for $1 each

— leon (@leyawn) October 31, 2022

lmaooo that's a deep cut

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FgXqR1_WAAIoHbq?format=jpg&name=900x900

interesting

Welp, I just got fired from this bird app ya’ll. It’s been grand.

— ttl.eth (@taylorleese) October 31, 2022

The ongoing layoff process is a complete farce and an embarrassment. It’s a bunch of Tesla goons making decisions about people they know nothing about other that number of code commits. It’s complete absurdity.

— ttl.eth (@taylorleese) October 31, 2022

senior managers getting canned for not writing code on a sunday night

I'm sure Elon's goons are goonier than usual, but that also sounds like any number of M&A bloodbaths.

Twitter crashing and burning is probably a good thing, depending on what comes next

xp Firing middle managers for cost efficiencies is expected. Firing middle managers *because* they’ve being doing their job (management) rather than a different job (writing code) is bizarre.

In retrospect, there was no way a little blue checkmark was not going to evolve from a fraud prevention tool into the online equivalent of The Star-belly Sneetches in the minds of these cringe-y losers.

anyone with .eth in their username probably deserves to be fired tbh

Twitter crashing and burning is probably a good thing, depending on what comes next

That's just nonsense. So many marginalised voices have been amplified on the platform. I've learnt a lot from them.

People quitting bcz of Musk are silly. Did you not know the weird people who owned the platform before he came along? Not to defend the cunt but the previous ppl had a contempt for the product and hardly ever tweeted. At least he uses it.

That's just nonsense. So many marginalised voices have been amplified on the platform. I've learnt a lot from them.

This is exactly right. If you think the cumulative cultural impact of the right-wing knuckle-walkers outweighs the cumulative cultural impact of Black Twitter, to pick just one, well, that's on you. It's certainly not my experience.

ive got multiple paul pelosi conspiracies in my trends this morning

a multiplicity of paul pelosis

it’s also simply been a net negative in the world under any objective measure

Would like you to print out the data on this and bring it by my office in 30 minutes.

It's OK to quit sonething because you hate the person in charge of it.

It's OK to hate them more than the previous person in charge of it (esp.given how they behave on it themselves).

I mean these whataboutery complaints about this are pretty weird to me.

In any case I think the vast majority of ppl quitting now are doing so with Musk being the last straw rather than a single reason.

I am querying this guy buying it as being the last straw. Really?

Big portions of the world are carved out for other people's profit (whether that's monetary or cultural). I don't think you escape that by deleting an app.

But you can certainly reduce their ability to rub it in your face.

I mean it does sound like Musk buying was the last straw. Lots of ppl talking about quitting and alternatives.

Funnily enough a couple of Black/Asian posters I saw were like 'it's always been hell it will always be hell', or 'at least I can swear at a dumb blue tick again without getting banned' lol xp = sure, if you think so.

Did you not know the weird people who owned the platform before he came along?

sure but Dorsey seems like your standard issue libertarian techbro while Elon is more of a Trumpy figure whose ultimate goal is to make every single thing on Twitter about him. the idea of him moderating a giant online forum gives me Lowtax vibes...hopefully it ends the same way

ive got multiple paul pelosi conspiracies in my trends this morning

― lag∞n, Monday, 31 October 2022 bookmarkflaglink

Musk himself is pushing some of them lol.

fwiw Dorsey didn't own Twitter the way Musk does now (public v. private)

for my part it was the combination of already waning enthusiasm/enjoyment/utility plus now having to hear about twitter+musk constantly everywhere else on the internet. Also quitting social media platforms feels really good, I recommend it

ive never consciously quit a social media but twitter is the only one i still use

something that's occurred to me is that we're kind of past the era where people who were rich and/or had power had to be serious people; as in, they at least had decent instincts or knew how to listen to people who did. thanks to the way the media works, plus the general entropy of wealth, where random kids are inheriting vast sums of money, or investing in the right startup, or getting big into crypto at a lucky time, you now have a lot of unserious people with a lot of power. the whole appeal of Elon Musk is that he is that "if I had a billion dollars, I'd [something which sounds nice but is obviously stupid and impossible]" guy. very much an extension of the Trumpy "everything is actually easy" mentality. kinda scary but hey if a guy like that is gonna blow his fortune on something a dying social network is a pretty funny way to go

fwiw Dorsey didn't own Twitter the way Musk does now (public v. private)

for my part it was the combination of already waning enthusiasm/enjoyment/utility plus now having to hear about twitter+musk constantly everywhere else on the internet. Also quitting social media platforms feels really good, I recommend it

oh yeah another reason to quit is how funny it would be if this fails quickly

lol gyac, I am of course part of my own problem there, so maybe it's like cutting out wine while continuing to drink beer & liquor