Elon Musk's X claims it's now a 'video-first platform' as it tries to reverse an advertiser exodus that has cost it billions in value

I'm going to purchase xvideos.com right now!

Nope he is just a rich spoiled manchild on cocaine.

No troll ever deserved respect for trolling. And I say that as someone who occasionally engages in innocent trolling.

My theory is he's pulling a zero requiem. He watches anime, so he's probably watched code geas - it's a very popular futuristic anime after all

First he became the symbol of the useful billionaire, the Tony Stark guy who's going to save humanity, because he's a futurist with the power of money. He learns everything about his companies the way a kid learns every stat about their model car, and actually does weirdly good as a hype man. He gives off the awkwardness of an engineer

After he meets Trump in the white house, he realizes how close we are to the brink. The fact that billionaires own all our media has led to existential danger, where truth doesn't matter and money speaks

So, there's a plan for a group of individuals to buy Twitter. There's text logs of this - he was invited into a group planning to buy it together for the good of humanity, but it took all of 5 minutes for them to start carving holes in the ideology, so he backs out.

He then announced the intention to buy, trapping him in a situation where he was forced to go through with it... He struggled a bit, but not that hard really

So then comes the plan. He takes over, and every two weeks or so, he makes an impulsive decision showing zero understanding of the company. One idiotic decision at a time, spread out long enough to remind people "I'm still here, and I'm still ruining a major platform for public discourse!"

People start to realize he's actually kind of dumb and pretty racist... Even the fanboys are getting quieter and quieter in defending him. It's becoming public knowledge he isn't a Tesla or spaceX founder, he came in as an investor when they already had a plan

He's burning up half his fortune in an effort to show us all what a billionaire is. He's not a businessman, he went to college to learn programming but doesn't understand the basics of software, he's hated by pretty much everyone in his personal life, and every company he's tried to build from scratch has been a disaster. He lies constantly, in ways that will eventually come to light.

This guy was able to buy Twitter, just because he invested in a company that bought and sold PayPal (after kicking him out for being unbearable). He's showing us all that billionaires are an existential danger to mankind, even the "good" ones.

Or, maybe he's just having a midlife crisis and has a compulsive need for attention. One of the two.

For the reason above. There's not a serious alternative that replaced it for those people.

The network effect is a real doozy.

Social momentum is a hell of a thing

It's all about stickiness. Twitter still has accounts people want to follow whereas other platforms don't so people can't shift or find it hard to. I've seen some prominent users move to Threads, Substack, Bluesky, Mastodon etc. but not enough and scattering to the four winds doesn't help either. If there were an actual exodus of accounts across media, news, celebrities, sports, government etc. then Twitter die on its ass. Or even if big accounts started mirroring their content across other social media services.

And these rival services should really federate. But we all know that the commercial services are loath to cooperate with each other when they want all the pie.

I got on twitter because artists I want to follow post there, a lot of them exclusively. They do this because -- in theory -- that is where the audience is, with the biggest potential for growth. Then they all get shadowbanned, even the ones that don't draw porn, because they don't bring in ad revenue or something. Alternatives exist but so many of them refuse to go to another platform because there isn't an audience there, pre-packaged and waiting for them.

I understand it, but also I don't. It's a cyclical problem but only the content-producing side has the power to solve it.

To be fair, there are also people like me who didn't use it at all before, but now do just to watch it burn cause it's funny.

I really don’t get it.

I'm still on Xitter, but on my own terms. I use a plugin called Control Panel for Twitter, which means I don't get anything on my feed other than stuff from those I follow, and what they share, unless they share some bollocks then I will block shares from them. There are a bunch of Hong Kong activists, journalists and fellow HK travelers who don't use other platforms yet, and I don't want to get cut off from what's happening there. There is also good motorsports contributors, who also post on TikTok and IG which I refuse to go near. In addition there are feeds and posters related to my work, some I can't see anywhere else, then there is some random stuff I can't see anywhere else.

I don't have the Xitter app on my phone and use the same Control Panel plugin to ensure my terms of engagement are maintained on mobile. This plugin, for example blocks anyone who paid Xitter for a blue badge, so I don't see any of their putrid bile in response to those I follow. It also frees you from the "algorithm" that determines what Xitter want's you to see, I only get a chronological timeline feed. Upsells, ads, who to follow, bookmarks and other random bits of UI I never use are also gone.

Basically, it is exactly how I want the whole Xitter experience with none of elmo's shit polluting my screen.

Get it now?

That's been the outcome, but I think you're dramatically overestimating Musk if you think that was his intent.

It seems clear to me that he's of below average intelligence with an overinflated, incredibly fragile ego.

Everyone is downvoting as if this is a baseless conspiracy and ridiculous.

For those people, here's a source

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/was-elon-musks-strategy-twitter-rcna118490

And an excerpt;

On the day that public records revealed that Elon Musk had become Twitter’s biggest shareholder, an unknown sender texted the billionaire and recommended an article imploring him to acquire the social network outright.

Musk’s purchase of Twitter, the 3,000-word anonymous article said, would amount to a “declaration of war against the Globalist American Empire.” The sender of the texts was offering Musk, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO, a playbook for the takeover and transformation of Twitter. As the anniversary of Musk's purchase approaches, the identity of the sender remains unknown.

The three texts were sent on April 4, 2022. In the nearly 18 months since then, many of the decisions Musk made after he bought Twitter appear to have closely followed that road map, up to and including his ongoing attacks against the Anti-Defamation League, a nonprofit organization founded by Jewish Americans to counter discrimination.

Fairly well by comparison...?

Disney's not hurting. They just posted bigger profits than ever this past year and expect to exceed that by several billion this year.

Throw a third one in there to show you mean business: xxxvideos.com

Trademark, not copyright.

SMS was the original reason, but the side effect of forcing people to condense their thoughts into a couple sentences was pretty wonderful. Especially for an open ended community where anyone can talk about anything.

What are "strange expenses"?

You forgot to say “away” again.

*free speech if Elon agrees with you

Paradox of tolerance and all that. You want a tolerant site? Can't allow Nazis.

Secondly, there was a wave of banning of leftists and journalists recently, it's very much only free speech for the right there.

Preach!

And QuickTime. You can still get both of these. I can only imagine they're visited by people that've just come out of a 20 year coma and need something to play their .avi files on...

RealPlayer was, and still to this day is, a for-profit product. Somehow. RealNetworks LLC still exists, they apparently now provide "artificial intelligence and computer vision based products" though they still provide subscription-based online entertainment services...presumably for people who set up automatic bill pay then forgot about it for 15 years.

Also, do you mean DivX, the vaguely obscure MPEG-4-like video codec that some people even used for reasons beyond my understanding, or DIVX, the completely unrelated DVD rental system operated by Circuit City which involved encrypted DVDs with unique barcodes and a special DVD player with a modem in it that would phone home, check if the rental is still valid, and if so get the key needed to play the disc...which is now defunct and all the discs are useless. Because both of those pretty much sucked.

Real Player was pr….buffering

My internal cable management goblin just had an aneurysm.

This is the right question... People keep removed... Yet are on the platform. Do the same thing as reddit, fucking LEAVE

Prostate cancer is a pretty hard sell.

As a porn site they could maybe go toe to toe with the now much diminished twixxer

50yr old Brownshirt looks for Liebensborn partner. Blonde, 21max, fluent German.

Will try now and report back!

Edit: it's good. It blurs out text. Sadly not images!

Very good tip, thank you, stranger.

Does he though? Seems like it's mostly him failing at business.

Anyway, the news coverage of him is unbalanced because it's his plan to be on the news constantly and forever.

If this was the case, Musk's career would have been over.

Instead this publicity fuels him and his wasteful endeavors.

I would believe that if they worked on the app. But videos don't load on the app half the time either.

Yea, that sort of stuff is most likely deliberate... tiktok doesn't work in the browser either

See Cracked.com's "pivot to video"

Also collegehumor.com

I've been in a coma the last decade, those went well, right? It wasn't something where the whole market would just :Dropout or something, right?

The creators didnt want to monetise it, they wanted 6s video clips without ads interrupting it. Fair play to them really, but it did mean the end of it, Twitter wasnt really profitable either so they couldn't endlessly dump money into it and the rise of other short-form video was biting at Vine's ankles as well. I think the original creators went on to make byte, a similar service to Vine, but it never took off, cancerous tiktok did instead.

Being born rich is a pretty good idea.

Making Twitter/X an 'everything app.' if we've learned anything from WeChat in China, LINE in Japan & Taiwan and KakaoTalk in South Korea, such apps can be hugely influential.

The premium tier of access makes it actually usable as a social media platform, my prime complaint about Twitter beforehand was that you'd never get any interaction with your posts unless you were a celebrity with a big following. Musk's dumbassery in this case was selling verified access.

I don't think pandering to the right wing is a good idea either, but if Musk made X a secure messaging platform, a decent dating app, capable of hosting livestreams and even a way to support creators which cut out middlemen like Patreon, OnlyFans, etc, it would have been huge.

Having a social media platform that doesn't rely on censorship to resolve the cesspit problem.

Unfortunately, people are more than happy to back censorship if it's against ideas they dislike.