The sequence of events from Elon Musk acquiring Twitter to now is an incredible journey.
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Elon Musk bought a social media company for tens of billions, attempted to back out of the deal but couldn't because of his ineptitude by signing away the ability to reneg on the deal.^[1]
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Then there was the freedom of speech advocacy from Musk where he ultimately unbanned racists and then began sharing bigoted Tweets. But it's only freedom of speech for his bigoted supporters, when authoritarian governments ask Musk to censor people/tweets he abides by their requests.^[2]
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The site becomes inundated with the alt right, it's become rife with bigotry.^[3]
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There was the whole verified blue check mark debacle where verification became something you could pay for, with people making fake "official" accounts. For example a fake account impersonating a pharmaceutical company caused their stock to drop abruptly following a satirical tweet.^[4]
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Twitter engages in mass layoffs and multiple things break on the site. There are also reports that they can't pay rent in certain locations across the globe. Twitter is hemorrhaging advertisors, as they record a 59% reduction in advertisement sales.^[5]
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Elon Musk posts tweets seemingly apologizing for some of the changes and says he will follow the will of the people by posting polls for users to vote on policy changes. Musk asks if he should step down, to which the majority vote in favour of his removal. He then goes on a tirade about bots after losing in the poll. He goes on to say that only paid subscribers will be permited to vote in future polls. Vox Populi, Vox Dei.^[6]
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The crème de la crème is Elon Musk implementing a new restriction where you have to be logged in to see tweets and restricting the number of tweets you can view. Inadvertently DDOSing his own site.
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New York Times - Why Elon Musk Can’t Back Out of Buying Twitter, According to Twitter
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Forbes - Fake Eli Lilly Twitter Account Claims Insulin Is Free, Stock Falls 4.37%
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New York Times - Twitter’s U.S. Ad Sales Plunge 59% as Woes Continue
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The Guardian - Elon Musk breaks silence after 10 million Twitter users vote for him to step down
Whoa PoppinKREAM is on Lemmy now? I knew I made the correct choice. Welcome, legend.
Is this real? It doesn't feel real...
That whole not paying rent thing becomes even murkier when you dive into one of his many other lawsuits.
- Elon doesn't pay rent, one member of the transition team told Hawkins. Another member of the transition team put it more bluntly to Killian: Elon told me he would only pay rent over his dead body.
- Both Killian and Hawkins were told that for Musk, the fact that Twitter was legally or contractually obligated to pay a particular sum would be irrelevant to the decision of whether to actually pay it when that amount came due that Musk operated on a zero cost basis"
And
- Between the demands that he effectively participate in theft and fraud and instructions to take actions inviolation of California law and that could put his colleagues lives at risk in the event of a fire a possibility only increased by the unlicensed use of space heaters Killian had no choice but to walk away from the job he had dedicated over a decade of his life to .
Hey, thanks for the source! Oh my goodness, this is awful. I'll have to go through this court filing.
Hell yeah PoppinKREAM is on Lemmy. We've made it boys!
Omfg you're here! I'm so fucking excited now! I would always read through your such well written and referenced comments!!! This is such an exciting moment!
TIL that Lemmy supports references. What a neat feature.
Hey, it's poppinkream!
I wonder if we will get the Internet Historian feature-length special about it or some dude will generate it with AI first.
It truly has been a wonderful ride, is amazing that Spez could pull away last second and destroy reddit right before musk pulls this shit. 8 do thing when is all said and done musk will have fucked himself the hardest .. I think anything can happen
don’t forget that the new CEO, hired to bring advertisers back, has a non-compete clause preventing her from working with advertisers
The gems are is the post. The gold is in the comments.
You know we're in the right place when these golden PoppinKREAM posts are here.
Platforms are nothing without these true internet content creators.
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Emeralds instead of gems would be more appropriate.
"Daddy's emeralds" is even more accurate.
I was going to say the exact same thing.
I was thinking DOGE rather than GEMS but Emeralds works too!
Nice
Missed a golden opportunity to use an emerald instead of generic gem.
They should use emeralds like those dug out of his dad's emerald mine
Not realistic, they'd make very random gem numbers to confuse people as much as possible.
"Buy 295 gems for $4, or for a limited time get 699 gems for $10! Subscribe now for 295 gems a week for one month! Recharge your tweet limit for only 365 gems!"
Nah, Elon being Elon, he would use meme numbers. The API costs $42000 per month because 420 funny numer.
Somehow, every time I think Elon Musk has reached his zenith of cringe, he manages to outdo himself.
Yep. Confuse the customer as much as possible. This is the rule of capitalism. The more confused the customer, the more likely they are to just say "fuck it" and do whatever you're nudging them to do, which, hint, is the most profitable.
"You are attempting to make a post on politically sensitive subject matter, so your reach has been restricted. For $4.99, buy an extra Boost™ so more see your post! ($49.99 if you're a registered Democrat.)"
You have to remember, most apps and sites all boomed around (roughly) the same time.
I think it's a mixture of two things I saw other commenters say: investors demanding constant growth (I'm not one of those rabid anti-capitalists, but this cutthroat unforgiving attitude of boards and investors is NOT sustainable), and the other factor is these sites/apps focused on finding their niche and building an audience/userbase first and worried about monetizing second.
Since websites and apps all had the same start point just a couple of decades ago (for the oldest sites), it's not a huge surprise they're all running into the same dilemmas around roughly the same 5 year time span.
If I had to hazard a guess, I'd wager we'll see a few major companies rise up, build a huge audience, screw up the monetization, and drive everyone scattering to smaller sites/apps. Then in a few years one of those smaller apps has a good run, rises to the top, pulls all the users that were previously scattered, and then botches their own model eventually, scattering the users again. Rinse and repeat. Just my thoughts though
Will it actually be cyclical? Twitter and Reddit tearing up their user base has caused the Fediverse to grow. I find it unlikely that - if Twitter and Reddit continue to go the way of Facebook, with the majority of the core user base leaving as enshitification worsens - they go somewhere other than Mastodon or Lemmy.
People can shout about how lemmy/Mastodon aren't user friendly - but with their growth they are massively improving and will continue to do so.
Something I read someone else here on Lemmy, but which is a good point, is the fact that there aren't that many investors around anymore. Boomers are slowly dying out and Millenials don't have that much money (Gen Y even less so). All of those social media apps were/are running at a loss for a long time before eventually becoming (barely) profitable, needing a steady stream of investors chasing the potential value of the app to stay afloat.
Saudi Arabia are currently a significant portion of venture capital. They have a ton of money coming from a dying source (oil) so they need to diversify.
Spez taking notes for Reddit 3.0
Quality shitpost
Soon enough this will actually happen. There's no way they won't try to pull this shit.
The $4.20 is absolutely something he would do.
If I used Twitter this would be depressing, but I don't so it's hilarious.
Touch grass tokens
Literally pay to lose
Elon Musk is the innovator of bad ideas.
this is gold
No, they're gems.
The 10 gem pack (nice pack) has 11 gems drawn, literally unplayable.
The most implausible thing here is that it only costs 1 gem.
My dumbass is on here trying to click the red x to get that fool off my feed.
This reminds me of the MyVegas apps
Okay, that gem made me laugh.
i love the faces on the gems.
Don't give them ideas!
Is the title a play on Clash of Clans (and other SuperCell games)? I never thought of them as the worst of the pay-to-win mobil games, but I haven't played them in a decade
Test
👀
Couldn’t comment on anything yesterday — so had to try it out before committing to a reply to a longer post again 😅
This is the most Elon thing I've ever seen.
Or go touch grass
