What happens if they reject his offer?
He sells and the price falls.
Then he announces a new platform and the price falls again.
He sells and the price falls.
Then he announces a new platform and the price falls again.
I’m not sure whether it’s that, or that simply no one wants a platform everyone isn’t already on.
Personally I would absolutely not mind being “harassed” by text, if I was also able to exercise wide spectrum of free speech myself.
A social media platform advertised as a politics-first/free-speech platform is the social media equivalent of a beer ad featuring a divorced balding man at last call in a dingy basement bar. No one aspires to bicker about politics with strangers on the internet, even though in reality that's the engagement that pays the bills.
This is quite a controversial statement.
This is precisely the idea behind 4chan.
Paul Graham thinks he would be able to compete:
"It is obvious. It's also obvious that Elon could draw an initial set of users that was more than big enough to have sufficient network effects on day 1."
https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1507782349924274180
"I'd try it the first day. Wouldn't you? Sum that pattern across Twitter, and you've got quite a lot of users on day 1."
https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1507855287130243085
"You don't need to get everyone to switch right away. All you need, to start with, is a critical mass of users — enough so that people don't feel they're talking to a void. You'd very likely have that from the start. Then it grows."
This would be "obvious" about Trump, too, no?
Perhaps your claim is that Musk would have a better chance of making something that scales and can accept all those users from day 1, but then that's also a much more expensive bet for Musk to make with higher up-front pre-launch cost.
Being able to launch a product with more than enough resources is almost intertwined with drawing in users. Truth Social never had the bare minimum expectations. Something that is not given to most people since most aren’t abnormally focused on grifting and so on for such a big venture.
The SPAC stock is still holding strong snd it self making no sense day to day. It went up 7%+ on news Fox joined two weeks ago. The next day when this was found to be false. It didn’t even drop 1-2%.
Truth will fail no doubt. However all the SPAC, other investing and political insiders and the Trump family themselves still have a realistic shot of cashing out pretty well. Nothing close to if it was competently rolled out, but tens of millions to hundreds of millions going to many diff insiders is still a ton. Trump’s cash out should still be huge and would probably give him his largest cash stock pile ever (before it goes to pay debts off)
The motivation may be different. Is it any better? Or change anything for the better in terms of social media success?
Trump’s popularity may be larger, but it’s also more isolated and siloed. The total possible user base for a social network of almost any billionaire will be larger than Trump’s. Not that most would ever get close to reaching that amount or getting numbers more than Trump. Just that the addressable market is bigger.
Musk is not nearly as trashed in the media and could leverage promoting an alternative while still on twitter. Obviously there does need to be something that is at least reasonably differentiating from twitter, and I think that is the real challenge as just saying it is twitter but more free is not as tangible.
The other big reason is balancing the greater good vs unrestricted access, which has taken years to accommodate.
Musk is just an ego-centric billionaire with a lot of money and an unproven belief that Twitter could be better with his proposed changes. I’d bet he’s thoroughly aware that those changes could destroy the platform.
I believe the offer is rejected and the other top ten shareholders (all hedge funds) buy up anything he dumps and the price remains stable.
Paul Graham on building a new Twitter: "A decent team could reverse engineer a version 1 in a month."
No global corporation will allow that in their midst. You’re a fool if you think there is any long term viability to those psychotic beliefs.
Because he's not spending $43bn on some infrastructure, but for the >200mn daily users. That's $210 for every user.
Additionally, with all due respect to Paul, his logic here is absurd. "I'd be interested so that means everyone must be" is the wrong line of thinking for a product launch like this. Everyone is _interested_ in something the first day, but whether or not that's enough to build on is another matter. So many social networks had massive first day signups. I was "interested" in Byte on the first day. I signed up, posted a few bytes, and stopped using the app after a week. Parler, Gab, Truth, had "interest" too. The problem is that critical mass of users he describes are all just talking to themselves in their insular group (elon fans) just as the right-wing networks had their conspiracy theorists etc. It's enough to have users, but its not enough to promote long term growth. I know it's not something _i'd_ be interested in, which refutes his point because its purely anecdotal.
So, the only demographics that'd actually stick with an elon twitter competitor are: People who love elon musk and everything he creates, and people who are banned from twitter. If it shakes out to be anything like Gab and Parler, the later means the site is going to swarm with Nazis like every other free speech competitor to twitter, which as a jew is something i'm deeply uncomfortable with. There's not enough free speech in the world for me to put up with being harassed by people who share the views as the ones who murdered my great grandparents. And as much as people here enjoy grandstanding about free speech, its likely something you're uncomfortable with too, otherwise you'd be on those sites.
Basically, the product elon wants to make already exists and it has no users. If Trump (who had a significantly bigger following on twitter than Elon) wasnt enough, if big right wing stars like Milo werent enough, what's gonna be enough? Because copy pasting Truth and slapping Elon on the front... wont be.
Everyone is on twitter, a few of the people you want to follow are on parler. You won't bother checking parler too much.
BigTech owns the mindshare of how to build these platforms. Musk would actually have the resources to pay for the level of expertise and competence to build such a platform. However, it would be years in the making which might all become irrelevant with web3.
Or Musk could throw support behind web3 tech as ultimately free speech will only exist when controlled by no one including free speech advocates such as Musk.
It doesn't need to be web3. It just needs to be somewhat transparent and minimally auditable. Web3 doesn't know what web3 is yet. Most is just garbage, sorry.
One idea that I have is that I noticed a lot of people went from blogging to making YouTube videos. I'm guessing YouTube is the sweet spot that balances monetization potential (they will find ads to put in your videos, and advertisers pay a lot for video ads) with a recommendation engine (that essentially forces people to watch your content; or more charitably, tells people that will like your content that they should take a look). Blogs didn't really have monetization or recommendation, and people were willing to switch media (text to video) just to get those two things! Now we have things like Substack bringing those to text, and people are taking advantage of that.
Maybe that's where the next Twitter wants to be? Paying smart people to write? That sounds a lot more appealing than "free speech" (which is great to have, but I don't really want to read anyone's free speech), which is all we've seen as the differentiation point for Twitter clones.
Oh, the hubris.
The real problem with competing platforms is that they don't offer anything to the main people they need to attract.
what does it even mean?