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this post was submitted on 10 Jan 2024
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If he built X.com as a video sharing site to rival YouTube instead of rebranding Twitter and turning it into a Nazi bar, I think people would have a more favourable view of him.
Musk can have good ideas but he's being blinded by his own hubris.
Where exactly was the good idea?
Being born rich is a pretty good idea.
Man, if only I had thought of being born rich…
I've thought of it many times and it hasn't helped me for shit
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.
The big difference between Twitter and all those other apps, as someone who has used both KakaoTalk and Line, is that they didn’t start out as social media posting apps - they were just chat messaging apps for talking to your friends, not the world. Then they added payment for things like buying stamps or sending friends money. From there, once they had established payment methods and users that trusted them, they started slowly adding services people thought were useful. The ecosystems built up organically over time. No one planned for them to be everything apps or tried to force it on the apps and users. They became those because they adapted to how people were using the internet on their phones.
I'd say if any app is poised to become the Western world's 'everything app', it's Facebook.
They've got a marketplace, video content, livestreaming, photo sharing, instant messaging, online dating which shits all over mainstream dating apps, and that's just what Facebook can do.
Facebook is probably as close as we’ll get to a western “everything app.” They kind of missed the window, though, which is another thing Elon doesn’t seem to realize - the big eastern “everything apps” were there as people were starting to switch to doing things on their phones, so the ecosystems grew around them as things were developing (especially WeChat). Elon’s coming in trying to turn Twitter into an everything app nearly ten years too late.
That's not an "idea", he's literally just trying to copy authoritarian states where the people are stuck with the ~~"influential 'everything' app"~~ power concentrating garbage, like WeChat, so he can have that power too.
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.
How exactly do you resolve the cesspit problem without censorship? It seems pretty much mandatory to engage in some level of censorship to avoid it. The only way to remove the most toxic people is to restrict their toxic behavior.
I think his idea was to reduce visibility of harmful content (like exclude it from the algorithm, or maybe just penalize it heavily) without fully banning it.
I suppose downvotes are also a solution (up to a point - doesn't work unless there is a strong enough consensus).
But even if these don't work it doesn't mean censorship is the only solution. Just because we don't have a good idea doesn't mean nobody will.
Radication and disinformation are serious problems and some censorship is better than nothing - but still seems like there has to be a better way.
He's got a funny way of accomplishing that goal. So funny that it looks like his goal is exactly the opposite. GENIUS!
You can't coherently convey whatever you think Elon was on about because, whatever he was on about, was complete bullshit designed to make him look smart to the people dumb enough to buy it.