Fwiw even prior to his defunding moderation it felt like one of the meanest places on the internet, I don’t see much of a change.
Fwiw even prior to his defunding moderation it felt like one of the meanest places on the internet, I don’t see much of a change.
Few would argue that it works better now than before
> Perhaps its just that people don’t like his personality, I suppose it's more complicated:
- he promised "freedom of speech" and Twitter has rather become "freedom of hate"
- he is taking constantly controversial political positions, usually favoring dictators, and this doesn't resonate very well in the western world
Maybe people just wish he would have stayed the way he was: a sort of fascinating "Doc Brown" rather than yet another average billionaire pushing political ideas through his wealth and popularity.
Maybe in the social circles you stick to, but there are plenty of /other/ people (i.e. more than a "few") that are quite happy that the 80% of employees doing their jobs were let go. [1]
'Matt Taibbi, a journalist who worked on the “Twitter Files” series of articles about old business decisions at Twitter, has said he’ll no longer use the social media platform. Taibbi is apparently frustrated by Twitter’s recent decision to heavily restrict all links and tweets about Substack following that company’s announcement it would be launching Substack Notes, a short form social network and potential competitor to Twitter. Any Twitter user who even tries to retweet a post from Substack is met with a notification, “some actions on this Tweet have been disabled by Twitter,” a move that has angered many users, including Taibbi.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattnovak/2023/04/07/twitter-fi...
Not specifically. That's why I linked to content from him, and not his profile page.
We accept speech we don't like to avoid this very trap.
Oddly enough, he tends to favor hate groups and dictators: “Twitter’s compliance with government demands for censorship or surveillance has risen [during Musk’s tenure] to over 80%, from around 50%.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/04/elon-musk-...
https://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/amp/rcna81961
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/06/elon-musk-free-speec...
https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7zm9q/elon-musk-twitter-naz...
Yeah, his personality is plenty objectionable too, but it's mostly the way he's seemingly intentionally running the company into the ground that I object to.
1) He's going to lose a TON of brand recognition overnight.
2) He seems to have gone from "I'm thinking about doing this" to "We're going live" over the course of a weekend. This is both rushed and more based on reaction than actual thought and research. I don't see any of his customers wanting this.
3) Morale for employees there already seems to be terrible. Having them implement a rebrand over a weekend on a whim makes him seem like a dictator.
4) From a practical perspective the name X is foolish. The word "tweeted" is a verb used every day on the news. Companies would kill to have that level of their product within the culture. Now they will say what? "exed"? No one will say that because the audience won't know what it means and it has the negative connotation of something you've moved away from (ex-husband, ex-girlfriend, etc.).
It was losing $4 million per day.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/delisted/TWTR/twitter/ebi...
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/delisted/TWTR/twitter/num...
As for justifying layoffs, Twitter (or X, or whatever it is) seems to be working just fine, despite the dire predictions that the whole thing was going to die within days.
No matter what the actual number was, it's clear that Twitter was wasting one hell of a lot of money.
There’s no moral or ethical basis to not consider his personality when evaluating Twitter, and even if you have one I’m not obligated to share it.
You don’t have to understand things for them to still be valid! To me, he’s an offputting guy doing a bad job, and those two things are valid to consider when thinking of his company according to my moral values. That’s subjective, but it’s clearly a view that many share with me.
"You either die a hero, or live to see yourself become a villain."
Far too many icons outlive their hero phase, and it's kind of depressing.
Edit: Or rather, the hero phase fails to live long enough to outlive the person.
It’s always been more as a promoter and image seller, but he has also been willing to make big calls and take risks others won’t which has allowed them to grow. That is valuable. And he has been hands on in some areas sometimes in ways that have been instrumental in shaping things. For better or worse.
He’s far from perfect. But no one is, and honesty is important.
I suspect the big issue here is something typical of narcissists - he’s gotten older, and he can’t keep up his game convincingly enough anymore to fool a large enough percentage of the public, so he’s downward spiraling. And internally he can feel it, which makes it worse.
It would explain a lot, especially the often bizarre and destructive attacks on anyone who says anything he doesn’t like. The over the top edgy/controversial behavior to get reactions, etc.
They’ll attack anyone who tells them the actual truth, and end up surrounded by those who either can’t see the truth (due to incompetence or delusion), or are willing to actively lie about it (manipulators). By process of elimination, if not by active choice.
The meanest place on the internet is EJMR, the forum economists use to find job offers. Not joking.
The reason for this is unclear except that it's the most conservative social science.