this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2023
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Enough Musk Spam
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What's hilarious to me is a large part of the value of Twitter was the actual brand name "Twitter" and "tweets". Those terms are recognized around the world and pronounced more or less the same globally. That is something no other social media platform has ever been able to reproduce. It's always "posts", "likes", "messages", and "comments."
This is a literal destruction of value for absolutely no reason other than the fact that one guy think it sounds cool.
Throw this onto the pile of "Elon clearly doesn't know what the fuck he's doing"
Anyone who can't see that this is a bad idea is being willfully ignorant.
You make a really good point. The whole concept of a short form text was branded, like Kleenex instead of tissues. I guess Elon thinks that the user base is the most important thing and it doesn’t matter what it’s called?
In any event, “X” is sophomoric. It’s a silly rebranding that doesn’t make sense to me.
No, this is like amazingly, monumentally more stupid. Pre-Elon (prelon?) twitter was getting free advertising on virtually every news cast and commercial in the US. I'm going to guess this varies worldwide, but twitter is for sure a brand that had probably about as much global reach as Apple, McDonald's, etc.
There is virtually no stupider brand change/rename that I can possibly imagine. I thought Max dropping "HBO" might have been one of the dumbest of all time, but this is a whole other level. And I didn't even get to talking about the new brand, which is also possibly one of the dumbest of all time. This post is merely talking about how incredibly dumb it is to drop a globally recognized brand, not even getting to the fact that the brand he chose is dumb for a thousand reasons.
Upvote solely for the portmanteau, stayed for the rest of your comment!
I think we are in agreement! Very true that Twitter was getting free advertising. But if “X” is still relevant, I guess the news will just give that free branding? Already the rebranding has caused a lot of conversation, which is also free advertising, to an extent?
The free ads they're getting right now are like "wow can you believe how much oil BP spilled into the ocean?" Nobody is looking at that and going "I should buy more BP."
It only makes sense when you you look at it from his perspective of making an everything app. "X" or "X corp" sounds and looks very cyperpunkish and it's been his fantasy since at least 10 years.
Learned a new word today, thanks! ♥
Imagine if Google, whose search engine has even a verb - googling - associated with its usage, suddenly decided to rename its wholle search brand to something bland like "A" (so, not even something quirky and distinct that could easilly be turn into a verb like, say, "Pock", but just the one letter)
A seems a little short needs more letters hell just name it the whole alphabet
I refuse to believe that he's this shit at business.
Like this has to be a money grab somehow. He just can't be this fucking stupid. Can he?
I think he's this narcissistic and impulsive but he's always had some sort of buffer between his worst impulses and reality.
He was a VC bro that was able to sell a few unicorn ideas to employees and investors (which is no small feat). His investors at his other companies were able to help build competent teams around him and prevent him from pinballing between bad ideas and keep him relatively focused on their investment and ideas that would work.
As Musk's weath grew, so did his power. His need for investors (and the need to listen to them) diminished. Also weath and power attract an entourage who are willing to do/say anything to stay on Elon's good side.
Elon only only purchased Twitter because he was compulsively tweeting.
He signed a no due diligence contact because no one around him was there to say "that's a really fucking stupid idea, there's no rush to buy Twitter, take all the time you need." But he signed a terms sheet that no homeowner should sign before purchasing a much less a multi-billion dollar acquisition. For reference, an acquisition of a small company with an annual revenue of less than $1M annually takes 3-6 months to go through due diligence, multi-billion dollar acquisitions can take years. That's a seriously compulsive decision.
If he sold his stake after saying he was going to buy them, Twitter was going to sue his ass off for doing a pump and dump and intentionally destroying stock value. That would also open an SEC investigation. Both of those would show the public how fucking stupid Elon is in a court of law. That's simply not okay for a narcissist. They must feed their ego.
Now at Twitter, he doesn't have a large backing of investors that he has to listen to like in a normal VC situation, AND he thinks he's actually smarter than everyone around him and we can see the emperor has no clothes.
After being a lucky VC that got forced out of his initial investments right before the DotCom bubble burst Elon's main value was as a marketer.
At Tesla he was able to sell investors and employees a vision of a gas-free future. At SpaceX he sold his vision of exploring the stars.
Who is clamouring for the next great social media platform?
Who's asking for the next 'everything' app?
Who's asking a private company to be more involved in their day to day lives?
Users certainly aren't.
Tl;Dr: Elon was a lucky VC, who's main value was as a marketer and not as an ops/engineering specialist.
He can and antics like this show he was born from money and a silver spoon in his ass. He is stupid and talentless and uses his money to try to prove otherwise, but since Trump he went mask off and no one can pretend a single word form his mouth is intelligent anymore.
Lucky fucking bastard, i hope his luck runs out but he's too rich to become destitute.
Spending billions of dollars to sink a business is the biggest brain cash grab I've ever heard of
I guess we have to get used to people referring to "tooting" on Mastodon.
I like Mastodon and all, but I'm never going to call a Mastodon post a "toot." It's a terrible name for a post.
When I think of the word 'toot,' the first thing that comes to mind is farting. Maybe that's just me though?
Not just you, everyone has the same thought.
Is it supposed to mean something else?
A mastodon is like an elephant and they toot with their trunks. Like how a dog barks or a bird tweets.
Well...
In germany its called a "Tröt" like the sound an elephant makes. It's super fun to say. Try it! Tröt, tröt
It's funny you say that, because "the trots" means diarrhoea in many English countries. So.. Might be worse.
Haha, we call them "the runs" in the SE US, so the tots makes a lot of sense. Never heard it before now though.
🎺 🎺 🎺 🎺 🎺 🎺
Yeah, that makes me feel like it's not a serious platform. I can't imagine convincing any friend to use it by saying "toots".
Vine had vines which was kind of unique. Didn't have quite the reach of twitter though and died by twitter's hand.
Vine would have been a better TikTok. At the very least, it wasn't Chinese-owned.
It never made sense to me why they shut it down because it got so popular so fast.
Because most of these things pay to get popular. I am a very tech savvy person. Have been using Linux since the early 1990s. I had sign-ins on every major instant message network and many people have never heard of. The first day I ever heard of Twitter. Was when they all the sudden started pushing it on cable news. Back in the late aughts. It was nowhere and then it was everywhere. And there was definitely some money behind the publicity. There's a reason things like Mastodon get very little coverage. There's no money behind it. Which is exactly the reason many people use it. But it limits who gets exposed to it. So if he pay a bunch of money to get your product in front of the eyes of a bunch of people even if it gets popular. It may not get popular enough to cover the cost of the advertising and money invested in equipment.