this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2023
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Technology

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[–] ag_roberston_author 250 points 1 year ago (6 children)

Pay 44 billion for a brand, then change it. Pure genius.

[–] potpie 179 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Pay billions for a userbase, then drive away the ones that aren't Nazis or bots.

[–] Railison@aussie.zone 50 points 1 year ago

An X looks like a swastika if you only add half the seriffs

[–] MeetInPotatoes@lemmy.ml 16 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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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[–] boredtortoise@lemm.ee 33 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Brand and user base. Destroy both

[–] thingsiplay@kbin.social 16 points 1 year ago (4 children)

@boredtortoise And last, destroy the technology. Mission completed.

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[–] skellener@kbin.social 118 points 1 year ago (9 children)

Twitter and Reddit are both lessons in how to kill a community and a brand.

[–] MagicShel@programming.dev 48 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Lessons for whom? I have several things I would like to kill but lack the requisite trillions to execute my vision.

[–] TheEntity@kbin.social 28 points 1 year ago (9 children)

Sounds like a Kickstarter idea if I've ever seen one.

[–] z3n0x@feddit.de 22 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

"Tired of running your massively popular online service? Call BrandWreckers(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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[–] trachemys@iusearchlinux.fyi 108 points 1 year ago (3 children)

He really did buy it just to delete it.

[–] cupcakezealot@lemmy.blahaj.zone 61 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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.

[–] gapbetweenus@feddit.de 37 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Dude, he is a PR guy with Twitter being his main platform. There is no logic there.

[–] cupcakezealot@lemmy.blahaj.zone 27 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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.

[–] gapbetweenus@feddit.de 27 points 1 year ago

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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[–] ConsciousCode 20 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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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[–] Rentlar 36 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Headline to come one week later:

"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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[–] Banzai51@midwest.social 19 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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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[–] intensely_human@lemm.ee 93 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] andrewrgross@slrpnk.net 32 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That's a sad story. It sounds like a good utility, and the outcome too common.

[–] intensely_human@lemm.ee 27 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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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[–] wischi@programming.dev 59 points 1 year ago (9 children)

What is Musks obsession with the letter X?

[–] Cube6392 88 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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

[–] chahk 37 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] CraigeryTheKid 16 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] Uniquitous@lemmy.one 25 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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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[–] briongloid@aussie.zone 49 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] Banzai51@midwest.social 18 points 1 year ago

He's emotionally stunted and stuck in the 90s.

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[–] AmbroisindeMontaigu@kbin.social 51 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (6 children)
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[–] Bishma@discuss.tchncs.de 50 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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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[–] trashhalo 50 points 1 year ago (1 children)
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[–] AngularAloe 49 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This seems like an admission that twitter is dead.

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[–] Hexorg 46 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What was that about him doing twitter’s technology policing and leaving running the company to the new CEO?

[–] mim@lemmy.sdf.org 31 points 1 year ago

He's not even good at using his puppet.

[–] heliodorh 46 points 1 year ago (2 children)

They are called TWEETS, ELON! TWEETS!

[–] jbpinkle 27 points 1 year ago (5 children)

They are called TWEETS, ELON! TWEETS!

Elon Musk: For now...

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[–] Snapz 45 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] Saganaki@lemmy.one 30 points 1 year ago (4 children)

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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[–] patchymoose@lemmy.ml 44 points 1 year ago (6 children)

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.

[–] HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club 14 points 1 year ago

You would have to know this would happen when working for Musk.

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[–] techviator@infosec.pub 26 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] deadbeef79000@lemmy.nz 26 points 1 year ago

Yeah... Because the thing that's wrong with Twitter is it's logo.

[–] oyenyaaow@lemmy.zip 25 points 1 year ago

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??

[–] jbpinkle 23 points 1 year ago

Least destructive decision he's made since acquiring it.

[–] avidamoeba@lemmy.ca 21 points 1 year ago

E Corp from Wish.com

[–] orowith2os 20 points 1 year ago (14 children)

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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[–] ipkpjersi@lemmy.one 17 points 1 year ago (2 children)

If he keeps doing this people are just gonna switch to Mastodon lol

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