"He knew the valuation was too high" is really not an accurate way to think about it. It makes it sound like he successfully proved those claims, when in fact he failed to present compelling enough evidence in court when he tried to use legal action to back out.
We know this because he decided not to go to court to prove that Twitter had hidden information.
Twitter has 7,500 employees. It doesn't take that many to run a Twitter. Most Twitter employees I know use their positions to work on things weakly aligned with the success of Twitter, such as random political or nerdy projects. That's a small sample set, but the things I hear raise my eyebrows.
If Twitter were private, and management aligned to shareholder value, the value could increase by a lot. I'm not sure if Musk can do that, or if it isn't overvalued in the first place, but that's my opinion on Twitter management from where I sit.
It's not uncommon for public companies, especially older ones, by the way. In many cases, almost every employee, right up through the CEO, is there to maximize their income, to maximize their future career prospects, and to have fun. That doesn't always align well with shareholder value.
either elon musk is the business genius a lot of people think he is (I think he is this) and he turns Twitter around and it's awesome.
else twitter fails and doesnt exist. net positive for the world and net negative for Elon, also good for humanity .
I wouldn't be so quick to assume that Musk's ~15 recent years of experiences with mechanical/aerospace/production-engineering businesses is gonna translate perfectly to whatever Twitter is supposed to be.
Maybe being forced to buy it (it's probably already halved in value at least) will make him think twice before gobbing off in future though.
It is ironic and laughable that Elons post to advertisers is done with screenshots of text. After 20+ years of mainstream networked computing this is what passes as a state of art platform and user experience to communicate to n audience.
The bulk of the problems Twitter faces today are amplified and directly inflicted by the essential design of the product.
Tl/Dr; nothing of value was lost.
Technological progress doesn't mean making user-hostile design. If users like a format or medium, you can offer it to them even if your platform is capable of greater things.
The fact you defend it as more readable than actual twitter design says a lot
In fact, if Twitter did want to improve the user experience, automatic OCR of such text and generation of the corresponding alt tag would be a practical improvement. In fact, general recognition of the content of an image and auto generation of an ALT tag would be a significant improvement.
... But that require them to do actual machine learning as opposed to being the internet's bathroom stall wall.
The fact they haven't done this just shows how inept their employees are.
Screenshots of text are popular because people don't seem to be able to copy and save data anymore. Social media apps don't let users download pictures anymore. I can only share intra-platform links to content. The Instagram app won't even let me select text. People get around this insanity by screenshotting the whole screen and saving a poor quality version of the data in image form. This is actually a lossy format conversion and will happen multiple times as people encounter resistance when they try to copy, save and share. It's not just images of text, it's screenshots of screenshots of of screenshots of text.
This is what computing has degenerated to. People can't do basic actions like copying and downloading anymore so they just use screen shots and screen recorders to get around software limitations. I've seen so many videos that end with the user manipulating the interface to stop the recorder. And then there's the people reduced to taking pictures of another screen with their phone cameras.
These aren't problems with screenshots of text (although others have done a pretty good job in listing those) or even problems with computing. These are problems with shitty social media platforms that want to take control from their users, and with the users who accept those kinds of limitations. Stop using bad user-hostile platforms and they'll either improve to win back users or they'll become obsolete and die as people flock to better alternatives.
There's no point in migrating to some perfect encrypted federated free software platform and being alone because everyone I know is still using Instagram.
If everyone went by that logic no one could ever stop using the social media sites they are using today. If you've found a good platform your best bet is to get people to use it in addition to the bad ones they use now and as more people join and use the better platform people could find themselves using the old ones less frequently. By enjoying and getting used to having the benefits of the new platform they could grow increasingly frustrated by the limitations of the older ones.
As long as the perfect encrypted federated free software platform is at least as easy to join and use as the old one asking a friend to add one more app to their rotation wouldn't be putting a huge burden on them.
Yeah. Next year I'll be reading about how the camera apps are detecting copyrighted content and refusing to take pictures too.
> wish I could just go back to android
Don't count on Android. Stakeholder lock down is increasing there too. Remote attestation is already a thing, soon we won't be able to run most apps if we "tamper" with the device by owning it.
Do you have any evidence of this ? I think samsung has done something with knox, but that is the only case I know of.
Apps will insist that you run unmodified software. Bank apps will require attestation because of "fraud". WhatsApp will require attestation because of "terms of service". Streaming apps will require attestation because of "piracy". Games will require attestation because of "cheating". Every app in the Play Store will find a bullshit reason to require it and the result is we can't use their software if we own the machine, we have to let the corporation own it.
- allow clicking hyperlinks
- allow copying content to paste elsewhere
- adhere to device display preferences. you wanted dark mode? fuck you, my screenshot's black on white, dwi
- support screen readers. i loled hardcore at the other post suggesting twitter OCR them--i mean sure, as a practical matter, they should given the status quo, but YOU COULD HAVE JUST USED TEXT TO BEGIN WITH
- scale properly when zoomed in or out
- display all the text up front. virtually all of these require you click through each image because the thumbnail is cropped (if not too small to read anyway)
idk what reason you'd ever actually want to use them unless you desperately needed to show off the cool font you used. saying they're easily readable is like saying the abhorrent mandatory training videos featuring some extremely bored person reading a script over a static background for 30 minutes, with no option to speed up playback or fast-forward, are perfectly understandable. like, yeah, sure, they _are_, but also you could have provided a set of text bullet points about how not to violate USFCPA that any literate person could read in about 2 minutes and we'd all learn the same damn thing
Ok I want to copy paste one of the sentences he said to send to my friend but not the whole message. Oh wait
One of the most important things for Elon to understand is that no matter how many programmatical measures are put into place to prevent abuse, there will always eventually be a workaround for people on a very public and open site. Protecting users and their content rights should be a goal of the platform as well, too many of these social sites see copycat behavior as fair game, and they reward people who steal and hijack content, that needs to be discouraged among several other bad social media behaviors.
I really don't see a problem with having an internet scale public bathroom wall for people to scrawl all over. Sure, Twitter is mostly spam and garbage, but so what? Every comment, however useless/offensive/entertaining/banal/silly/poetic/helpful/etc that isn't breaking the law isn't really a problem and no one is forcing you to read it.
I don't have much trouble ignoring Twitter entirely most of the time and the main issues I have with it aren't even about Twitter itself but with how people try to use it for things it is poorly suited for. It's the "journalists" who copy/paste tweets then call that an article I take issue with. Twitter is absolutely no place for presidential records, and shouldn't be the only place for any kind of important or official notification, or the only way to reach a company to get customer service.
There are certainty far better platforms for blogging, but lots of people like Twitter and find it useful. I don't see why Twitter should go away.
It's like saying that if you own a Lamborghini you can be a great manager at Lada.
Yeah maybe it helps a little but the vast majority of your decisions is still going to be determined by analysis on your users, not your experience.
1. Spams and bots are rampant. Now I understand it's hard, but eliminating the obvious ones is not hard. A verified account impersonating people and selling crypto is just insane.
2. I used to ask for verification and get this. Twitter doesn't agree with verifying myself. What is this idiotic policy? I am myself.
3. People should allow to tweet as long as it's not illegal, especially from high profile accounts. Moderation might not go away, but it should be minimal.
My opinion is that, if twitter enables widespread verification where a lot more people can be verified, twitter's convo will get 10x better (e.g. now they can rank replies, people will act more reasonably).
I predict the best case scenario is that he does no worse.