And it also doesn't take a genius to make changes a little slower and more conservatively. For instance, in this case they should have at least added ID verification (of the kind Facebook sometimes forces people to do), and only allowed people to verify their real names for $8.
It seems like Musk also got too used to people cutting him slack for his crap at Tesla and SpaceX, but those companies have mission narratives that people can "believe in." That's not the case for Twitter, and it's looking like Musk is going to slam into the ground without that net to catch him.
It also doesn't help that there's a Twitter replacement (Mastodon) waiting in the wings. IIRC, Bad decisions like Musk's killed Digg, because Reddit was there to take the exodus.
If you don't already know Elon's govt scheming, read about Mike Griffin and Elons missile defense contracts with the US DoD.
You're being disingenuous by claiming carbon credits are the only form of government largesse or incentive.
Don't fault Tesla for that as if the government is propping them up. At this point very little of Tesla's money comes from.
You using Norway is disingenuous they have just over half the population of New Jersey. They are incredibly small. Meanwhile Tesla is #1 in all of Europe.
https://www.tesla.com/blog/what-you-need-know-about-federal-...
https://www.tesla.com/support/incentives
Tesla claims they pay up to 7500 for every Tesla (depending on the time bought), up to 30% + 400$ for every powerwall for example.
This is what gets me. He's basically speedrunning a world-class demonstration of the lesson of Chesterton's fence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton#Chesterton's_...
https://watchfuleye.online/whisky70/2017/8/1/the-one-great-m...
As much as I want to see Mastodon succeed, I don't see it ever happening. Its biggest feature (multiple instances) is also the biggest reason most users are never going to use it. It's just too confusing for the end user. Also it's bizarre that the one instance that actually has the potential to gain mainstream interest (mastodon.social) is not accepting new invites.
I'd put my money on something new taking Twitter's place way before Mastodon.
Something new, like what? When there's a big user exodus from some kind of service or platform, there has to be something for them to flock to right then. When Digg imploded, Reddit was there to absorb the exodus. Right now, Mastodon is there, even if it has significant downsides. Users aren't just going to wait around for something ideal to be built for them.
This is particularly surprising to me also, for a different reason. Since Musk was a key player at PayPal, he should have learned that although the vast majority of users are well-intentioned and harmless, there are a small group of scammers and criminal who MUST be dealt with or they will rapidly bankrupt you.
On Twitter, we must add to the list of scammers & criminals the additional bots, trolls, and pranksters, all of whom can rapidly destroy trust in a community (online or off).
Why he didn't carry that lesson forward to this platform is baffling (unless he's in a contest with Kanye and the FTX crypto guy to see who can create the largest and most rapid-burning money bonfire).
That's mostly a legend. In actuality he took some part in some company that got bought by another company which eventually became PayPal.
Heck, it is something that is already obvious to everyone here, and most of us were never employed in banking or payments operations...
It remains to be seen if learning has occurred.
Oh, Twitter is full of bots! So when I'm in charge I'm going to press the "no more bots" button and save Twitter! Also, the company only needs half this much staff, so we're going to spend a few days firing half of them and then the company will be better off!
Elon's not gonna learn because that would tarnish his image of someone who has any idea what the heck he's doing.
1. Create a new Apple account
2. Buy a $10 iTunes gift card
3. Use that to pay for Twitter Blue
Would I pay $10 and twenty minutes of my time to knock $20bn off of an insulin profiteer's stock price? Absolutely. Put me down for a recurring subscription.
What GP means is to go to a grocery store and lay out 10 American Dollars for an Apple-branded services gift card (what used to be called an iTunes Gift Card). One of these: https://www.apple.com/shop/gift-cards
You apply it to the brand new Apple ID you've made and use those virtual funds to make the in-app purchase in the Twitter app that, at the time, was the method of paying for Twitter Blue. (The purchase page even said/says, "You can only subscribe on the Twitter iOS app (for now).")
No blocking of prepaid or gift cards here; you're doing exactly what Apple wants and it's not Apple's problem that Twitter takes IAPs for a "verified" service.
I'd be too worried about getting charged with wire fraud or something personally.
It's normally combined with recorded IM conversations along the lines of "bro, I bought some short term chickens for Lli Eily. Let's make them CLUCK with this tweet." You call them chickens, or something similar, to try and fool the FTC. This is also a surprisingly common occurrence during insider trading investigations.
Extremely Fungible Tokens.
Not such a great system when a bunch of peasants convince themselves to believe in lies. "Everyone gets a voice to say damaging things" is the road to ruin.
But what if the entire business model was/is actually a lord and peasant system. Whereby lords can, while verified and identified as lords, communicate with the masses of pesants without any other gatekeepers.
The peasants having their chit chat on the side isnt the point, that is the noise and the lords are the signal.
If all the blue checkmarks are saying it, people give a shit.
You cant tell the difference anymore.
But at least the blue check system was mostly correct. Imagine how much a blue check would cost if it was opened to the public and the level of verification pre-elon was used .
Right now the $8 was just a code change and let's just call it 100% profit. With actual verification you'd need a bunch more people and one of those identity verification services and now that $8 isn't pure profit
The Twitter user base is massively non-Western. Within the West it skews non-White.
Your assertions are meaningless garbage and betray a complete lack of how Twitter works and who uses it, comprising merely the braying of the far-right greivance industry.
Getting verified previously with a small account was cumbersome and took ages.
That being said, a normal user shouldn't have the same mark as an official Microsoft or government account. A secondary mark make sense, especially imo if only other paid and verified accounts can see the mark. Then it creates a network "in crowd" effect (similar to the green v blue text bubbles.)
I don't think good content is the core value of twitter. In my perception value of twitter is who said what. Good or bad.
I don't use twitter and have contact with twitter only when it's cited elsewhere and bulk of most popular citations are mostly not "here's interesting thought someone had on twitter" but rather "this celebrity/politician/office tweeted that".
To be completely fair, this is my feeling about the web Twitter and especially Reddit UI.
Given how obvious it is, a more logical premise might be to assume someone did and Elon chose to believe otherwise.
That's it. This whole debacle would've been instantly avoided.
I'm aware of no less than 3 formerly verified individuals who did tell him[1] before the feature launched, and he responded by banning them for impersonating him and instituting a "no lying about who you are" rule that empirically works on an honor system, or upon pain of forfeiting $8.
1. "Showed him" would be more accurate, but he shockingly failed to grasp the point they were making.
Here’s a story anyone at home can confirm or not, before I posted the first comment, I tried to look it up to see if it was true: ‘did Elon musk institute a rule about impersonation’ had to reword a few times and scroll through many pages of news articles from all around the world repeating what I would call the same outrage clickbait from seemingly the same script, before I found a snopes article that actually answered the question and no he did not institute such a rule. That’s interesting and worth pointing out imo for the readers here that are interested in getting full stories, because as I’ve already said, that he instituted such a rule is widely reported and repeated, and is (afaik) incorrect.
No, what you think about the Nintendoofus context reflects upon your judgment. Which I pointed out was incredibly questionable seeing as how you are somehow incapable of putting the words together to acknowledge it is obvious parody.
That your next step is to write this whole ridiculous long response based upon a premise that isn't even in question is... telling.
Elon lowered the bar for triggering the rule , and made the punishment harsher: insta-ban, from someone who was against perma-bans less than 20 days ago - that change to an old rule is so large,it might as well be a new rule.
But this twitter thing beginning to end has mostly been a disaster. I think he's mostly unfairly hated, in that almost any CEO is as bad or worse but he's his own worst enemy with twitter.
He's alienated a lot of people and then alienates them more by saying people should boycott thier products.
It’s much worse than that. Selling the verification check mark to anyone with $8 poisoned the platform instantaneously.
It’s a bit like the DMV suddenly starting to sell driver licenses without any proof that you are who you say you are. Immediate erasure of the trustworthiness of any driver’s license, forever.
I cannot imagine that Musk was not aware or made aware of this consequence. He did it anyway.
Possibly after firing the people who warned him.
Interested in reading more about this, do you have any links?
I'm amazed that people have already forgotten this.
How was that not obvious? The current situation Twitter is in is the most naive prediction. If Mr. Musk needed someone to point this out to him and ask why it wouldn't go down this way, I'm not sure what to say. Hell, a bunch of comedians actually pointed this out by changing their names and avatars to Elon Musk and impersonating him. Elon banned them. It really should have clicked at this point.
I see this a lot in redesigns, and it's always "oh people aren't using this thing that I think they should, it must be because they don't know about it" and not "it must not be what they want".
It's like that thing that people do when they come into the room and say "oh why are you sitting in the dark" and switch on the lights, without stopping to check why you're sitting in the dark. I know how to switch on a light, it's just that right now I'm loading a camera.
Just to replace it with what he calls "payment verified", which basically means you have 8$ and means to send it to twitter. Which apparently is worth less than nothing.
It kind of reminds me how a while back somebody posted proposed redesign of stackoverflow to make it more nice from UX perspective. However this person wasn't a user of stackoverflow and didn't understand how much value which features provide and suggested changes that would make very valuable features removed or made less easily accessible while bringing to the front features that are not very useful.
I think it just helps to be a user of the product and have a deep understanding for it before you make any changes. Elon used twitter a lot, but in pretty unusual fashion (because he's world famous billionaire) so he really didn't understand what's most valuable part and took it for granted.
It's really a bit surprising that noone told him that his tweets are worth anything only because people reading them can know they come from Elon not some guy who paid 8$ to call himself Elon on Twitter.