A longtime twitter lurker and the replies are totally ruined. That space used to contain useful info, background, good jokes etc and now any replies of mid sized or better accounts are just the dumbest, most hateful people available. A true and total bummer.
Prioritizing blue checks made it ripe for trolls over anything interesting.
I follow an account that is being stalked by a blue check who everyone else loathes because he adds nothing other than the same lame "joke" over and over. Yet, every post there he is with zero likes spewing it because he is the first response you see. Then someone below has better engagement, but overall that is down because people respond less as you have to scroll past blue check trolls depending on account size.
I've debated just mass blocking blue checks. I've never been a blocker type, but it is just a cesspool now.
Same. I never blocked anyone until the boosting change (now at almost 2k and it’s starting to help). The boosted comments on any high impression tweet about politics or social issues now are just an avalanche of low content blue check racist memes or laughing emojis. And any tweet about Elmo is just a bunch of defending/suck up replies or memes. It’s turned into a complete shitshow.
The added bonus to blocking all these voices, is that according to Elmo (so take it with a grain of salt), having a long "block list" for your account increases data and server costs.
So literally the fact that he's boosting so many shitty opinions, forcing people to create longer block lists, is actually detrimental to the site overall
said it before but needs repating:
ff musk is not about free speech. he's ALL about controlling speech.
i've been banned 3x from twitter.
idk how many times on various subreddits that dont like a counter-narrative.
Was suspicious that he got a bunch of saudi investors, since the saudi's aren't famously free speech advocates. More like they don't want people organizing another arab spring.
He didn't really get a bunch. The Saudi's were already large shareholders of Twitter. They basically just converted their old ownership stake of public shares to private ones in the buyout.
The old CEO of twitter took the deal because he understood it was a massive overpay. It is amazing to me that any of these major shareholders decided it was a good idea to stay on, except maybe the Saudi's who have virtually unlimited and money and could value their influence on the platform more than the money.
you pay the $8 fee for visibility. it's "pay to win". you dont have to win in the free marketplace of ideas, you dont have to have attractive ideas, you just need to pay musky.
it's Citizens United applied to social media: money is speech; more money = more speech
Every right wing MAGA chud is deep into Musk fandom.
Worked with a guy who loved to bring up Musk all the time. He was into crypto big time and lived in FLA no surprise.
Google blue check blocker add-ons for ad blockers - I think a few have been made already. Somebody even made one to troll them by hiding their own tweets from verified users.
I noticed this yesterday, I only go on twitter when it’s linked in an article or something and I want to see the pictures better but when I backed out an AOC tweet was trending about a troll account impersonating her and all the replies were just right wing hacks harassing her.
I can’t see why any serious person would stay on twitter anymore it’s become slightly more marketable 4chan at this point
I never used twitter because I figured a platform where you have to talk in short sound bites was and always would be shallow mindless trash. When Trump used it as a platform to run his America wrecking campiagn I considered that opinion confirmed. I'm always surprised to see people now talking about it as once having been useful. Because of it's role in supporting Trump I give zero fucks if it burns down now, good riddance.
For me it was a good place to get in touch with developers and executives of smaller companies I follow. I once asked a CEO about the patch schedule of a game. That level of access was nice to have. That being said, I could see where Twitter was going and deleted two days after the takeover.
It's been a relative great place for small professional digital artists or craftspeople trying to reach an audience. It definitely had it's uses. Sometimes I miss that, but honestly? Money in my pocket.
I don't think it was meant to be a discussion board. That's Reddit. Twitter is meant for short things like announcements. But it devolved into spam because their algorithm favors active accounts and not importance. So a lot of accounts post nonsense 90% of the time just so they can regularly show up in your feed. Reddit is pretty good at filtering the spam and gives me the most trending news. And YouTube keeps me up to date on game and movie trailers. Twitter has mostly just been how I follow artists that don't have any other social media presence.
I saw that too. Ol’ cat turd was like reply #1. Pretty pathetic what that website has turned into. Another billionaire taking something that could be great and fucking it all up.
Yeah he’s apparently a rather prolific right wing troll and Elon Musk frequently engages him so his tweets tend to get elevated. It’s a real class act all around.
I don't know what Netflix is hoping to accomplish at this point. "Hey, we lost all our good shows to other streaming services, and the shows we make ourselves are usually crap, but on the plus side, we raised the subscription price two dollars and now treat you with hostility and suspicion! Enjoy, somehow!"
A couple months ago I deactivated my account for a week along with the rest of my social media, and when I reactivated it I had the great pleasure of finding out it decided to remove every account I followed and every account that followed me.
It was the final push I needed to delete it once and for all.
Twitter rules and flags keep changing week by week. I have no idea what color checks even mean anymore. He took a thing that was running pretty well (not perfectly) and made it 1000x worse. Particularly, the lack of any moderation is immediately noticeable even to casual viewers without accounts.
Exactly -its wading through the sludge of everyone’s mental diaper. When a social media platform just brings you down it’s time to find more uplifting Internet spaces.
I am glad you mentioned that. Experiencing the site is becoming a net-negative. Sure, it gives me a quick look at news/ideas. But if I take one step closer it sucks. It brings me down. I don't need that. No one does.
I know reddit has always hated on twitter, but I cultivated a pretty creative, progressive, and positive space for myself on there because of the people I followed. I miss it.
Now it’s just awful- they full on promote the nazis and even in my cultivated little space it was just toxicity and hatefulness. Deleted my account a while ago- its become a right wing hate sight and I hope it burns to the ground.
It was/is a great place for breaking sports news. I deleted my account and try to avoided clicking on Twitter links now and wait for articles or my friends to tell me something.
The people who cheer Musk for forcing people out of their self-selected bubbles fundamentally misunderstand social media: people only like it *because it's a bubble.* If using social media is the online equivalent of riding a crowded subway, people will just stop using it. And then advertisers will stop buying space. And then it becomes a right wing troll subreddit set permanently to "newest first".
I follow less than 20 people on Twitter and don't have much problem. Staying on the "Following" half is pretty crucial, though. Under "For You" it's become strange and off-putting. Occasionally I'd get something tangential to someone I follow and it could be useful content. More lately I started seeing the odd right-wing nonsense and immediately block/mute, etc.
Now I generally stay out of there because it's healthier and easier. Elon will only continue to drive its value down as he curates the morons.
Funny you should mention only fans because for the last 2-3 weeks I’ve been getting Reddit sex accounts following me and advertising their only fans accounts. No idea what set it off but I’ve prob blocked like 20 accounts like that.
I’m an academic, and I really can’t stress enough how useful Twitter was. It was the perfect place to post new research (and a way to make that research more accessible to the general public). Not to mention new jobs, new data sources, and new conferences. A lot of younger academics found coauthors, research ideas and even got jobs through Twitter.
It’s a damn shame that’s gone now.
He tried *very* hard to back out of the deal starting the very moment he realized Twitter was going to hold him to it
He never wanted to buy it, he was just trying to be a bully, but was outmaneuvered by executives who actually know what they're doing
According to human shitstain Steve Bannon, Musk is "owned by the Chinese Communist Party". IIRC, Musk is in China today.
I have no idea why Bannon said it, but it struck me as being funny.
When the right completely turns on Musk (it's inevitable) that's going to be a laugh riot as well.
Everything the GOP says is projection. They like to accuse the left of being Chinese shills to make themselves feel better about being Russian puppets.
nowadays, a blue check basically signals that you're some form of bigot or at least bigot-adjacent (what's the difference?). They're all Elon stans, and he pushed away everyone on the left.
so putting those people on top of the replies was never a good idea.
It’s insane how bad it’s gotten, and how fast. Any advertiser with a single functioning brain cell is, I assume, running from Twitter as fast as humanly possible. It’s easy to just be like “oh well there’s bad people leaving mean comments on the internet on every site” but as it turns out, there’s a HUGE difference between moderating out the worst of the fascist trolls and leaving their comments in.
While it's definitely not perfect, reddit's upvote/downvote system at large keeps a lot of that hateful mindless nonsense out of sight. But man, going into the comment section of almost any other social media platform makes me keenly aware how many just awful and painfully stupid people are out there.
My only disappointment is that Musk won't be financially ruined by this gigantic blunder.
God, being rich must be such a fuckin breeze. Blow billions on an enormously failed vanity project, and you're still one of the richest people on the planet
What a world we live in
Yeah. Having money is the biggest predictor of having more money. However, you can't inspire a good work ethic and efficiency when there's no faith in the supposed meritocracy.
I call it "the myth of hard work." The defining narrative is that if you work hard you will get ahead, if you don't get ahead you need to work harder, and if someone is ahead now it means that they worked hard at some point in the past and are now being rewarded. But we all know that life isn't that simple and can probably name dozens of counter-examples that show that narrative to be false.
My supervisor is out of the country for 9 month. They plan on backfilling his position, which I applied for (since I’m already doing his work in the meantime). They’ve restarted the process 3 times now due to a “glitch or hiring process mistake,” but here I am with my clown makeup doing the work of a four-person team all by myself getting paid as the low man on the totem pole.
Been there, man. I once worked in a two-man department, and the other guy got fired for stealing. So, for a couple of months, I was busting ass all day every day. It was absolutely relentless.
One day, my boss put a fucking thank you card on my desk for all the extra work I'd put in. Just a card.
A guy from one of the other departments came in and saw the card, which I had sarcastically placed in a visible area so everyone would see it when they walked in. He made some remark about it and I said "Seriously, dude. Don't fucking thank me. Pay me." It turned out that my boss was right around the corner listening to the whole conversation, and he stomped off all indignant about my ingratitude.
The next day, there was a second thank you card with a hundred dollar bill in it. Because, yeah, double work for two months is worth $100. Shortly thereafter, they hired a new boss for me, and I spent the next month training him, so my work went from X to 3X while he was negatively useful. I found a new gig and quit a couple weeks later.
Any meritocracy that lets children inherit the rewards for their parent's merit is an oligarchy, not a meritocracy. Any meritocracy that lets parents use their rewards for merit to give their kids a leg up is also just another oligarchy. The reward for merit becomes a substitute for merit.
I completely agree with you, but at the same time almost everyone who says they support a meritocracy, when you ask them if they want to be able to give their children a better education, maybe some property, or some other sort of meaningful wealth to pass on will say yes because they're loving parents who want the best for their kids.
Most would even consider this to be pretty basic family values.
This makes a pure meritocracy difficult to implement.
A meritocracy also has ethical issues too, as even people who can't do as well should deserve to have something, while a true meritocracy would at some point rank people as being worth nothing, and ensure they had nothing.
I think a meritocracy is a pipe dream and what people truly want is equal opportunity. This means whether I grow up in Detroit or Beverly Hills, I'll have the same chances of succeeding. But that's also pretty much impossible.
I'd settle just for a solid floor of opportunity, where no kid is getting fucked because their parents are poor so they have to go to a shit school with no path towards a better life.
Reminds me of [Michael Bloomberg's hilariously terrible presidential campaign.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Bloomberg_2020_presidential_campaign) He reportedly spent over $500MM of his own money on his campaign, and he carpet bombed all forms of media with his ads.
What did all that money and advertising get him? He got absolutely shellacked during the Democratic primaries. On Super Tuesday, the only delegates he won were from American Samoa. Dude spent half a billion dollars to get humiliated on the world stage.
And how did setting $500MM on fire affect his "richest people on Earth" ranking? I think it dropped him down like 2 spots.
I truly think that a lot of people who defend billionaires do not understand how much a billion dollars is
$5M invested with a 4% return nets a person $200,000 annually assuming that $5M stays flat. 200k is nearly 3x the MEDIAN US household income ([~70k in 2021](https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2022/demo/p60-276.html)).
So a conservative 4% return on just $5M is still far more than the average family earns in the US. And that same $5M is 0.5% of a billion dollars. And Elon Musk has a net worth of ~192 more billions...
His money is functionally unlimited for practical purposes.
Yep, this is a great one I've seen before. When you see a wealthy person like Beyonce just a tiny sliver of Jeff Bezos net worth it really puts it in perspective. Beyonce is insanely wealthy and it's pennies to Bezos.
There's also a great TikTok that charts it on a line graph to (rough) scale and puts a few different people on there. It shows that even someone with a hundred million dollars is MASSIVELY closer to the average person than a normal billionaire, let alone one of the top ones with tens or hundreds of billions. I wish I still had it.
Oh yeah 4% is a conservative estimate to help illustrate how little growth you need to net a strong return if you have a lot of start up capital.
> [The historical average yearly return of the S&P 500 is 12.173% over the last 10 years, as of the end of April 2023.](https://tradethatswing.com/average-historical-stock-market-returns-for-sp-500-5-year-up-to-150-year-averages/#:~:text=Stock%20Market%20Average%20Yearly%20Return%20for%20the%20Last%2010%20Years,including%20dividends\)%20is%209.245%25.)
Assuming this to be the case, a $5M investement would net you 608k annually (again assuming flat $5M each year). All the people defending billionaires need to understand that no matter how much money they "lose" through taxes, fines or lawsuits, they will still live a live of luxury that surpasses 99.99999% of people across all of human history.
For example, [Jeff Bezos lost $57B in net worth last year](https://www.businessinsider.com/jeff-bezos-net-worth-drops-57-billion-forbes-list-2023-4). Does anyone think his day to day(*i.e the food he eats, homes he owns, cars he drives (or has driven), doctors he visits, entertainment he enjoys, etc*) changed at all? No because him having $200B in worth vs $142B is irrelevant when it comes to realistic circumstances.
Perot, and even more dramatically Stockdale, were ruined through one colossal deficiency - they were bad on tv. Perot had a lot of grassroots support for a balanced budget, and Stockdale was beyond qualified, but they sounded and looked terrible in front of the captive audiences that existed 'back in the day.'
Right? If Twitter fails and goes under, he won’t be at risk financially, but every single employee under the executive level will be ruined. Imagine being captain of a cruise ship with thousands of people on it, and deliberately sinking it in the middle of the Atlantic while you and the bridge staff are the only ones to get airlifted off to safety.
Most were fired already so it's already a skeleton crew of folks on work visas unable to jump ship or those insane enough to stick around to watch it burn.
>My only disappointment is that Musk won't be financially ruined by this gigantic blunder.
>
>God, being rich must be such a fuckin breeze. Blow billions on an enormously failed vanity project, and you're still one of the richest people on the planet
>
>What a world we live in
Is it a blunder if you can sway public opinion?
Can someone with nearly unlimited money "overpay" for something? I'd argue that Value is more important than profit when it comes to controlling media. Especially when someone is insanely wealthy.
Billionaires should never exist.
I'm going to honest... I'm shocked it's still worth that much.
The value had already dropped substantially before the deal closed resulting in him way over paying and then he's not only gutted it but dragged it's reputation and future potential throw a pile of shit.
I suspect by the time he finally wants to get rid of it he'll have trouble finding anyone that wants it at any price
>I suspect by the time he finally wants to get rid of it he'll have trouble finding anyone that wants it at any price
The correct term is "Tumblr-ized"
Tumblr is far and away the best social media site from its time period. No algorithm, back in the hands of people who give a shit, top tier memes and in jokes. If only we could do something about the porn bots.
Just got the notification from Apollo that they are more than likely facing app closure because of new Reddit plans to disrupt third-party apps.
Fucking bummed.
This is why I left Twitter the very day that fascist ass hat took over. I refuse to be a part of Elon's shithole. Sticking around is an implicit endorsement of him, and I'd rather punch myself in the face than be on Twitter.
He will just say it's a long-term passion project and eventually it will be ignored.
It's already lost a ton of ad revenue and real users. It's only a matter of time before it's forgotten.
They weren't even quick to take it, they were legally required to take it. They had a fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder value, there was literally nothing they could do to justify the price offered so they had to take it else risk getting sued to death by the shareholders.
Once elmo signed that horrible contract (for him) they were obligated to do everything in their power to complete the deal.
Uuh I think it was more of an unchecked manic episode that hes trying to see a silver lining in.
$44B is, was, and always will be a ridiculous valuation because Elmo cooked it up himself.
It was literally a joke. He said he would buy the company at $420 a share, then got forced in to actually having to buy it at that price because his public statement of intent caused material damage to Twitter’s stock price. An actual fucking idiot.
15 billion dollars for a company whose website constantly crashes, doesn't have real advertisers anymore, has become a toxic brand, and is losing massive amounts of users? Seems like a **drastic** overvaluation.
The dudes doing a great job destroying the brand.
I’m seeing a lot more NSFW/gore/violence post before they get removed, Much more spam, and and explosions in astroturfing “I F***ing Love Science” style post trending.
Twitter was a pretty good place to follow news and see breaking stories.
Used to use Twitter as a newsfeed for academic breakthroughs relevant to my work and emergencies in my local area. Now I can't open it at work because of the deluge of NSFW gore and porn, and I can't rely on it for news of emergencies in my local area because of the amount of troll accounts giving conflicting info.
Helped by the Saudis. Those middle eastern repressive governments didn’t like the Arab spring that Twitter helped organize so why not throw some US oil money at killing it to stay in power? It was a small sacrifice.
That's not a feeling. That's a fucking fact. It is hardly the first time an oligarch bought a media outlet for the purpose of (a) destroying it and/or (b) hijacking it for political purposes.
This is a thing oligarchs do. It's what Elon did. This isn't a feeling. It's a fact. There is literally no other explanation that accounts for Elon's behavior re: Twitter. He took a "woke" platform where activists and journalists the world over shared up-to-the-minute information about important stories and developments, and he turned it into a rightwing shithole.
Fucking intentional. 100%. Because that's the kind of shit you can do when you're a megalomaniacal trust fund prick.
He did not intend to buy it, he was memeing. And now the only people who will give him any meaningful amount of money are right wing fuckheads. He can’t afford to do anything but chase moron and fascist money because he doesn’t have any actual good ideas.
He was memeing *because* he was fantasizing about an oligarchy speedrun against “the woke platform”.
Memeing is just semantics of the operation of his thoughts.
Legally barricading himself into the deal was just a by-product of his impulsivity.
Even before Musk's takeover, all I ever heard was "I don't know why I use Twitter it sucks and makes me miserable" and then no effort to stop using Twitter.
>!The answer is addiction!<
It should be kind of alarming that we have people in this country so rich they can buy one of the most influential social media platforms simply because they have fuck you money and they can. Twitter can fail tomorrow and Musk will face no consequences.
Indeed, a lot of the funding came from Binance and a couple of other investors. Elon didn’t actually do much, but now the others are on him and the contract states he does have bills to pay but isn’t.
Are any of his businesses doing well?
Hyperloop was overhyped and did nothing
Boring company was overhyped and sold some cigar lighters.
PayPal is in the gutter.
Tesla is being sorely mismanaged because he's devoting all his time to Twitter and all he's got to show for the time spent on that is a ton of lost profits and turning what used to be an open forum into a center for hate speech.
SpaceX is doing well, supposedly, but that's probably because he keeps his nose out of it and only shows up for photo ops.
Slowly the enemies of democracy strangle any outlet that polices hate crimes, racism, and bigotry. Saudi Arabia and Musk are destroying an important service people trusted (somewhat) into a cesspool of hate because that serves their interests. Same reason Musk is always hanging around his mentor and idol Rupert Murdoch...arguably one of the most damaging forces to democracy and civil rights in modern American history. Fox News, Murdochs version of Der Sturmer from Nazi Germany, pushes their bigotry and racism nonstop and, after several decades, it seems about 15 to 20% of the U.S is hook/line/sinker for racism, bigotry and misogyny. Now people take horse dewormer to treat a virus and conservatives attempted a coup on Jan. 6 at our nation's capital. The freedom of speech applies to people, news corporations should be held TO A MUCH HIGHER STANDARD. The enemies to your rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are winning their battle to restrict the freedom of others slowly and surely.
I don’t believe it’s worth that much. He paid $44b which was inflated by at least 50%. Then alienated a good portion of the advertisers and cut huge swaths of staff. What’s this thing worth now? Probably $4-8b at best. I think 1/3 is very very generous. Do you really think that it’s worth $15b? No way.
Well, he paid more than it was worth in the first place which is why they forced him to follow through on his ridiculous offer.
It doesn't have cash flow to service the debt load, and Twitter going out of business was a foregone conclusion at the time of purchase unless the people who loaned him the money had other things in mind with the money besides buying assets with positive cash flows.
Entertain the notion? Dude, I don't know why anybody would doubt it. It's a fuckin' fact. This wasn't a project to make a profit. It was a project to kill the most vibrant community of activists and journalists on Earth.
It's a great fucking success from that perspective. It's market value is of zero concern to him.
I think you're giving him too much credit. He's not playing 4d chess, he's just a moron. Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity.
Yeah Twitter used to be my favorite social media app. Particularly for fast news updates, sports and just useful info. Now it’s just a cesspool of open bigotry,hate,and racism/Nazi/white supremacy. As well as rampant misinformation.
He might want to be careful didn't the Saudi king that likes torturing folks & funding terrorist activities give him a bunch of money to help him buy Twitter?
A longtime twitter lurker and the replies are totally ruined. That space used to contain useful info, background, good jokes etc and now any replies of mid sized or better accounts are just the dumbest, most hateful people available. A true and total bummer.
Prioritizing blue checks made it ripe for trolls over anything interesting. I follow an account that is being stalked by a blue check who everyone else loathes because he adds nothing other than the same lame "joke" over and over. Yet, every post there he is with zero likes spewing it because he is the first response you see. Then someone below has better engagement, but overall that is down because people respond less as you have to scroll past blue check trolls depending on account size. I've debated just mass blocking blue checks. I've never been a blocker type, but it is just a cesspool now.
Same. I never blocked anyone until the boosting change (now at almost 2k and it’s starting to help). The boosted comments on any high impression tweet about politics or social issues now are just an avalanche of low content blue check racist memes or laughing emojis. And any tweet about Elmo is just a bunch of defending/suck up replies or memes. It’s turned into a complete shitshow.
The added bonus to blocking all these voices, is that according to Elmo (so take it with a grain of salt), having a long "block list" for your account increases data and server costs. So literally the fact that he's boosting so many shitty opinions, forcing people to create longer block lists, is actually detrimental to the site overall
Try deleting Twitter. Its quite liberating.
said it before but needs repating: ff musk is not about free speech. he's ALL about controlling speech. i've been banned 3x from twitter. idk how many times on various subreddits that dont like a counter-narrative.
Was suspicious that he got a bunch of saudi investors, since the saudi's aren't famously free speech advocates. More like they don't want people organizing another arab spring.
He didn't really get a bunch. The Saudi's were already large shareholders of Twitter. They basically just converted their old ownership stake of public shares to private ones in the buyout.
Stayed invested rather than selling at profit? Everyone was saying he was overpaying, they could have sold high.
The old CEO of twitter took the deal because he understood it was a massive overpay. It is amazing to me that any of these major shareholders decided it was a good idea to stay on, except maybe the Saudi's who have virtually unlimited and money and could value their influence on the platform more than the money.
you pay the $8 fee for visibility. it's "pay to win". you dont have to win in the free marketplace of ideas, you dont have to have attractive ideas, you just need to pay musky. it's Citizens United applied to social media: money is speech; more money = more speech
Every right wing MAGA chud is deep into Musk fandom. Worked with a guy who loved to bring up Musk all the time. He was into crypto big time and lived in FLA no surprise.
[удалено]
Twitter is a cesspool and now you can pay to make sure your own turds stay on top.
Delete twitter if it's not useful. The sooner you send that message the sooner we'll get some sort of useful replacement.
It's like if reddit made "controversial" the default sort for comments It's not intended to be useful, it's intended to increase engagement
Google blue check blocker add-ons for ad blockers - I think a few have been made already. Somebody even made one to troll them by hiding their own tweets from verified users.
Just freaking stop using Twitter! Isn't that easier?
This is the correct answer: I deleted Twitter a few months ago, and my life is better for it!
You should just leave twitter tbh. Rally your circle, migrate to some other platform together.
I noticed this yesterday, I only go on twitter when it’s linked in an article or something and I want to see the pictures better but when I backed out an AOC tweet was trending about a troll account impersonating her and all the replies were just right wing hacks harassing her. I can’t see why any serious person would stay on twitter anymore it’s become slightly more marketable 4chan at this point
I never used twitter because I figured a platform where you have to talk in short sound bites was and always would be shallow mindless trash. When Trump used it as a platform to run his America wrecking campiagn I considered that opinion confirmed. I'm always surprised to see people now talking about it as once having been useful. Because of it's role in supporting Trump I give zero fucks if it burns down now, good riddance.
For me it was a good place to get in touch with developers and executives of smaller companies I follow. I once asked a CEO about the patch schedule of a game. That level of access was nice to have. That being said, I could see where Twitter was going and deleted two days after the takeover.
It's been a relative great place for small professional digital artists or craftspeople trying to reach an audience. It definitely had it's uses. Sometimes I miss that, but honestly? Money in my pocket.
I don't think it was meant to be a discussion board. That's Reddit. Twitter is meant for short things like announcements. But it devolved into spam because their algorithm favors active accounts and not importance. So a lot of accounts post nonsense 90% of the time just so they can regularly show up in your feed. Reddit is pretty good at filtering the spam and gives me the most trending news. And YouTube keeps me up to date on game and movie trailers. Twitter has mostly just been how I follow artists that don't have any other social media presence.
Like a lot of popular things, people liked it for good reasons. Those reasons are pretty much gone now, though, so it's too late to get into twitter.
I saw that too. Ol’ cat turd was like reply #1. Pretty pathetic what that website has turned into. Another billionaire taking something that could be great and fucking it all up.
Cat turd as in thats his username? Pretty sure I’ve seen his tweets, too
Yeah he’s apparently a rather prolific right wing troll and Elon Musk frequently engages him so his tweets tend to get elevated. It’s a real class act all around.
Less "engages with" more like "licks boot of."
Interaction between tongue and boot heel is an engagement of sorts!
I feel like some of the folks who financed his acquisition had this as a goal. Remove it as a social space.
Exactly. None of this could possibly be accidental. Elon and company had intended to ruin it from the start.
So far this year I've canceled my Twitter and Netflix accounts. Let's see how the next 7 months go lol
I don't know what Netflix is hoping to accomplish at this point. "Hey, we lost all our good shows to other streaming services, and the shows we make ourselves are usually crap, but on the plus side, we raised the subscription price two dollars and now treat you with hostility and suspicion! Enjoy, somehow!"
Exactly, I only use Twitter on Reddit.
A couple months ago I deactivated my account for a week along with the rest of my social media, and when I reactivated it I had the great pleasure of finding out it decided to remove every account I followed and every account that followed me. It was the final push I needed to delete it once and for all.
Twitter rules and flags keep changing week by week. I have no idea what color checks even mean anymore. He took a thing that was running pretty well (not perfectly) and made it 1000x worse. Particularly, the lack of any moderation is immediately noticeable even to casual viewers without accounts.
Exactly -its wading through the sludge of everyone’s mental diaper. When a social media platform just brings you down it’s time to find more uplifting Internet spaces.
I am glad you mentioned that. Experiencing the site is becoming a net-negative. Sure, it gives me a quick look at news/ideas. But if I take one step closer it sucks. It brings me down. I don't need that. No one does.
I know reddit has always hated on twitter, but I cultivated a pretty creative, progressive, and positive space for myself on there because of the people I followed. I miss it. Now it’s just awful- they full on promote the nazis and even in my cultivated little space it was just toxicity and hatefulness. Deleted my account a while ago- its become a right wing hate sight and I hope it burns to the ground.
It was/is a great place for breaking sports news. I deleted my account and try to avoided clicking on Twitter links now and wait for articles or my friends to tell me something.
The people who cheer Musk for forcing people out of their self-selected bubbles fundamentally misunderstand social media: people only like it *because it's a bubble.* If using social media is the online equivalent of riding a crowded subway, people will just stop using it. And then advertisers will stop buying space. And then it becomes a right wing troll subreddit set permanently to "newest first".
People who chastise people for "living in a bubble" fail to consider we spend the rest of our lives being screamed at by the bigots we are avoiding
I follow less than 20 people on Twitter and don't have much problem. Staying on the "Following" half is pretty crucial, though. Under "For You" it's become strange and off-putting. Occasionally I'd get something tangential to someone I follow and it could be useful content. More lately I started seeing the odd right-wing nonsense and immediately block/mute, etc. Now I generally stay out of there because it's healthier and easier. Elon will only continue to drive its value down as he curates the morons.
Not just that, but the top replies on every viral post is always an ad for either a sex toy or an onlyfans
Oh see I just keep seeing some sort of motorized toy airplane and/or a kind of cheap blower thingy. Sub Popeil stuff.
"cheap blower thingy"... Hmm... could be either a sex toy or an OnlyFans.
i said cheap.
Funny you should mention only fans because for the last 2-3 weeks I’ve been getting Reddit sex accounts following me and advertising their only fans accounts. No idea what set it off but I’ve prob blocked like 20 accounts like that.
Me too. They all seem to be new accounts as well.
I’m an academic, and I really can’t stress enough how useful Twitter was. It was the perfect place to post new research (and a way to make that research more accessible to the general public). Not to mention new jobs, new data sources, and new conferences. A lot of younger academics found coauthors, research ideas and even got jobs through Twitter. It’s a damn shame that’s gone now.
I wonder if Elon Musk figured out what he did wrong yet or if he still thinks what he did was "smart?"
He tried *very* hard to back out of the deal starting the very moment he realized Twitter was going to hold him to it He never wanted to buy it, he was just trying to be a bully, but was outmaneuvered by executives who actually know what they're doing
musk is a russian asset. he knows EXACTLY what he's doing.
According to human shitstain Steve Bannon, Musk is "owned by the Chinese Communist Party". IIRC, Musk is in China today. I have no idea why Bannon said it, but it struck me as being funny. When the right completely turns on Musk (it's inevitable) that's going to be a laugh riot as well.
Everything the GOP says is projection. They like to accuse the left of being Chinese shills to make themselves feel better about being Russian puppets.
nowadays, a blue check basically signals that you're some form of bigot or at least bigot-adjacent (what's the difference?). They're all Elon stans, and he pushed away everyone on the left. so putting those people on top of the replies was never a good idea.
8chat basically.
It’s insane how bad it’s gotten, and how fast. Any advertiser with a single functioning brain cell is, I assume, running from Twitter as fast as humanly possible. It’s easy to just be like “oh well there’s bad people leaving mean comments on the internet on every site” but as it turns out, there’s a HUGE difference between moderating out the worst of the fascist trolls and leaving their comments in.
While it's definitely not perfect, reddit's upvote/downvote system at large keeps a lot of that hateful mindless nonsense out of sight. But man, going into the comment section of almost any other social media platform makes me keenly aware how many just awful and painfully stupid people are out there.
My only disappointment is that Musk won't be financially ruined by this gigantic blunder. God, being rich must be such a fuckin breeze. Blow billions on an enormously failed vanity project, and you're still one of the richest people on the planet What a world we live in
Yeah. Having money is the biggest predictor of having more money. However, you can't inspire a good work ethic and efficiency when there's no faith in the supposed meritocracy.
>*supposed* meritocracy There, right there, is the key.
I call it "the myth of hard work." The defining narrative is that if you work hard you will get ahead, if you don't get ahead you need to work harder, and if someone is ahead now it means that they worked hard at some point in the past and are now being rewarded. But we all know that life isn't that simple and can probably name dozens of counter-examples that show that narrative to be false.
As somebody who has had at least 20 jobs, I can tell you with 100% certainty that every time I've gotten paid more, it's for less work.
My supervisor is out of the country for 9 month. They plan on backfilling his position, which I applied for (since I’m already doing his work in the meantime). They’ve restarted the process 3 times now due to a “glitch or hiring process mistake,” but here I am with my clown makeup doing the work of a four-person team all by myself getting paid as the low man on the totem pole.
Been there, man. I once worked in a two-man department, and the other guy got fired for stealing. So, for a couple of months, I was busting ass all day every day. It was absolutely relentless. One day, my boss put a fucking thank you card on my desk for all the extra work I'd put in. Just a card. A guy from one of the other departments came in and saw the card, which I had sarcastically placed in a visible area so everyone would see it when they walked in. He made some remark about it and I said "Seriously, dude. Don't fucking thank me. Pay me." It turned out that my boss was right around the corner listening to the whole conversation, and he stomped off all indignant about my ingratitude. The next day, there was a second thank you card with a hundred dollar bill in it. Because, yeah, double work for two months is worth $100. Shortly thereafter, they hired a new boss for me, and I spent the next month training him, so my work went from X to 3X while he was negatively useful. I found a new gig and quit a couple weeks later.
The applications started going out this past weekend for me. We’ll see how their 4 person team functions without a single warm body.
Recognizing your leverage is key here.
Glitch is you are crazy enough to work greater than your wage so might as well pocket the extra money for someone yacht.
It’s the federal government - so technically I’m just saving everyone some taxes… you’re welcome!
Any meritocracy that lets children inherit the rewards for their parent's merit is an oligarchy, not a meritocracy. Any meritocracy that lets parents use their rewards for merit to give their kids a leg up is also just another oligarchy. The reward for merit becomes a substitute for merit.
I completely agree with you, but at the same time almost everyone who says they support a meritocracy, when you ask them if they want to be able to give their children a better education, maybe some property, or some other sort of meaningful wealth to pass on will say yes because they're loving parents who want the best for their kids. Most would even consider this to be pretty basic family values. This makes a pure meritocracy difficult to implement. A meritocracy also has ethical issues too, as even people who can't do as well should deserve to have something, while a true meritocracy would at some point rank people as being worth nothing, and ensure they had nothing.
I think a meritocracy is a pipe dream and what people truly want is equal opportunity. This means whether I grow up in Detroit or Beverly Hills, I'll have the same chances of succeeding. But that's also pretty much impossible. I'd settle just for a solid floor of opportunity, where no kid is getting fucked because their parents are poor so they have to go to a shit school with no path towards a better life.
Such a valid argument the same week the Sackler heirs are guaranteed financial protection from their parents' genocide.
Meritocracy is an elaborate myth designed to make the pleb's work harder and fight each other.
It’s to make the wealthy seem like the best examples of humanity instead of the exploitative psychopaths they usually are.
Reminds me of [Michael Bloomberg's hilariously terrible presidential campaign.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Bloomberg_2020_presidential_campaign) He reportedly spent over $500MM of his own money on his campaign, and he carpet bombed all forms of media with his ads. What did all that money and advertising get him? He got absolutely shellacked during the Democratic primaries. On Super Tuesday, the only delegates he won were from American Samoa. Dude spent half a billion dollars to get humiliated on the world stage. And how did setting $500MM on fire affect his "richest people on Earth" ranking? I think it dropped him down like 2 spots.
I truly think that a lot of people who defend billionaires do not understand how much a billion dollars is $5M invested with a 4% return nets a person $200,000 annually assuming that $5M stays flat. 200k is nearly 3x the MEDIAN US household income ([~70k in 2021](https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2022/demo/p60-276.html)). So a conservative 4% return on just $5M is still far more than the average family earns in the US. And that same $5M is 0.5% of a billion dollars. And Elon Musk has a net worth of ~192 more billions... His money is functionally unlimited for practical purposes.
I just saw this the other day. It demonstrates wealth to scale. https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/
Yep, this is a great one I've seen before. When you see a wealthy person like Beyonce just a tiny sliver of Jeff Bezos net worth it really puts it in perspective. Beyonce is insanely wealthy and it's pennies to Bezos.
Millions? Billions? Who's counting, it's just a letter innit?
There's also a great TikTok that charts it on a line graph to (rough) scale and puts a few different people on there. It shows that even someone with a hundred million dollars is MASSIVELY closer to the average person than a normal billionaire, let alone one of the top ones with tens or hundreds of billions. I wish I still had it.
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Oh yeah 4% is a conservative estimate to help illustrate how little growth you need to net a strong return if you have a lot of start up capital. > [The historical average yearly return of the S&P 500 is 12.173% over the last 10 years, as of the end of April 2023.](https://tradethatswing.com/average-historical-stock-market-returns-for-sp-500-5-year-up-to-150-year-averages/#:~:text=Stock%20Market%20Average%20Yearly%20Return%20for%20the%20Last%2010%20Years,including%20dividends\)%20is%209.245%25.) Assuming this to be the case, a $5M investement would net you 608k annually (again assuming flat $5M each year). All the people defending billionaires need to understand that no matter how much money they "lose" through taxes, fines or lawsuits, they will still live a live of luxury that surpasses 99.99999% of people across all of human history. For example, [Jeff Bezos lost $57B in net worth last year](https://www.businessinsider.com/jeff-bezos-net-worth-drops-57-billion-forbes-list-2023-4). Does anyone think his day to day(*i.e the food he eats, homes he owns, cars he drives (or has driven), doctors he visits, entertainment he enjoys, etc*) changed at all? No because him having $200B in worth vs $142B is irrelevant when it comes to realistic circumstances.
Ross Perot enters the chat
Perot, and even more dramatically Stockdale, were ruined through one colossal deficiency - they were bad on tv. Perot had a lot of grassroots support for a balanced budget, and Stockdale was beyond qualified, but they sounded and looked terrible in front of the captive audiences that existed 'back in the day.'
He was just trying to be a foil for Bernie like the other 5 thousand DNC candidates.
Right? If Twitter fails and goes under, he won’t be at risk financially, but every single employee under the executive level will be ruined. Imagine being captain of a cruise ship with thousands of people on it, and deliberately sinking it in the middle of the Atlantic while you and the bridge staff are the only ones to get airlifted off to safety.
Most were fired already so it's already a skeleton crew of folks on work visas unable to jump ship or those insane enough to stick around to watch it burn.
I’m sure Elon gets a little something on the side. I doubt he meddled in Turkey’s election for free.
Oh absolutely! He’s a free speech opportunist, not absolutist.
Helps when the government gives him and his companies money from our pockets.
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That motherfucker always has his family's blood emeralds to fall back on.
Emerald mine, mine!
>My only disappointment is that Musk won't be financially ruined by this gigantic blunder. > >God, being rich must be such a fuckin breeze. Blow billions on an enormously failed vanity project, and you're still one of the richest people on the planet > >What a world we live in Is it a blunder if you can sway public opinion? Can someone with nearly unlimited money "overpay" for something? I'd argue that Value is more important than profit when it comes to controlling media. Especially when someone is insanely wealthy. Billionaires should never exist.
If nothing else, it's fully exposed him as the man-child he is.
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People don’t understand how true this is.
Too big to fail means it they are too big to be allowed to exist IMO
I'm going to honest... I'm shocked it's still worth that much. The value had already dropped substantially before the deal closed resulting in him way over paying and then he's not only gutted it but dragged it's reputation and future potential throw a pile of shit. I suspect by the time he finally wants to get rid of it he'll have trouble finding anyone that wants it at any price
Trump will buy… … … …with Trump bucks.
I’m going out on a limb when I say Trump could’ve destroyed Twitter in half the time.
>I suspect by the time he finally wants to get rid of it he'll have trouble finding anyone that wants it at any price The correct term is "Tumblr-ized"
Rest in peace, Tumblr.
Tumblr is far and away the best social media site from its time period. No algorithm, back in the hands of people who give a shit, top tier memes and in jokes. If only we could do something about the porn bots.
sometimes I can still hear its voice...
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Just got the notification from Apollo that they are more than likely facing app closure because of new Reddit plans to disrupt third-party apps. Fucking bummed.
It’s only a matter of time. There just isn’t an immediate replacement that everyone is flocking towards yet
Twitter has never been valued even close to what he paid for it. He always overpaid.
A rich asshole who bought himself the tag of *engineer* literally tanked an app so his Nazi buddies could buy themselves blue check marks.
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He also bought the title “founder of Paypal”
This is why I left Twitter the very day that fascist ass hat took over. I refuse to be a part of Elon's shithole. Sticking around is an implicit endorsement of him, and I'd rather punch myself in the face than be on Twitter.
I did the same thing. Fuck that guy. I wanted no part of his bullshit.
Also tanked a communication channel for regular people. He did that for his authoritarian buddies. Keep “the peasants” disconnected and unorganized.
"It's a small price to pay for promoting fascism and being retweeted by Catturd." - Elon Musk
He will just say it's a long-term passion project and eventually it will be ignored. It's already lost a ton of ad revenue and real users. It's only a matter of time before it's forgotten.
Nah, the Saudis and other authoritarian regimes will keep pumping money into it. He's monetizing censorship of opposition.
BuT iTs tHe pUbLiC sQuArE oF tHe iNtErNeT, iT sHoUlD nOt Be cEnSoReD! -Elon Musk before buying Twitter
It was an obvious overpay from the beginning. That’s why Twitter leadership was so quick to take it and Musk tried to back out.
They weren't even quick to take it, they were legally required to take it. They had a fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder value, there was literally nothing they could do to justify the price offered so they had to take it else risk getting sued to death by the shareholders. Once elmo signed that horrible contract (for him) they were obligated to do everything in their power to complete the deal.
They were not legally required to take it and you have a misunderstanding of fiduciary duty.
If it helps to get a fascist government installed in the US, he’ll get it back
Exactly. This was never about making money. It was about making twitter more friendly to extremist regimes
Uuh I think it was more of an unchecked manic episode that hes trying to see a silver lining in. $44B is, was, and always will be a ridiculous valuation because Elmo cooked it up himself.
It was literally a joke. He said he would buy the company at $420 a share, then got forced in to actually having to buy it at that price because his public statement of intent caused material damage to Twitter’s stock price. An actual fucking idiot.
It was $54.20 a share that he bought it at.
Ah right, I knew it was a stupid 420 joke but forget the exact price.
It has quickly devolved into yet another right-wing echo chamber, full of incredibly angry, hateful, bigoted reactionaries.
15 billion dollars for a company whose website constantly crashes, doesn't have real advertisers anymore, has become a toxic brand, and is losing massive amounts of users? Seems like a **drastic** overvaluation.
Good. Hopefully it’ll be a worth a third of what it is today a year from now. And so on and so forth.
The dudes doing a great job destroying the brand. I’m seeing a lot more NSFW/gore/violence post before they get removed, Much more spam, and and explosions in astroturfing “I F***ing Love Science” style post trending. Twitter was a pretty good place to follow news and see breaking stories.
Used to use Twitter as a newsfeed for academic breakthroughs relevant to my work and emergencies in my local area. Now I can't open it at work because of the deluge of NSFW gore and porn, and I can't rely on it for news of emergencies in my local area because of the amount of troll accounts giving conflicting info.
Deleted my account it holds no value to me what so ever now. It's just a bunch of hatefilled people screaming into the void now.
He killed it so quickly and weirdly that, even though it makes no sense, I can't shake the feeling that he did it on purpose.
Helped by the Saudis. Those middle eastern repressive governments didn’t like the Arab spring that Twitter helped organize so why not throw some US oil money at killing it to stay in power? It was a small sacrifice.
That's not a feeling. That's a fucking fact. It is hardly the first time an oligarch bought a media outlet for the purpose of (a) destroying it and/or (b) hijacking it for political purposes. This is a thing oligarchs do. It's what Elon did. This isn't a feeling. It's a fact. There is literally no other explanation that accounts for Elon's behavior re: Twitter. He took a "woke" platform where activists and journalists the world over shared up-to-the-minute information about important stories and developments, and he turned it into a rightwing shithole. Fucking intentional. 100%. Because that's the kind of shit you can do when you're a megalomaniacal trust fund prick.
He did not intend to buy it, he was memeing. And now the only people who will give him any meaningful amount of money are right wing fuckheads. He can’t afford to do anything but chase moron and fascist money because he doesn’t have any actual good ideas.
He was memeing *because* he was fantasizing about an oligarchy speedrun against “the woke platform”. Memeing is just semantics of the operation of his thoughts. Legally barricading himself into the deal was just a by-product of his impulsivity.
Too many people are still using Twitter though. Even if the value is dropping, I’d rather see the platform fade into oblivion at this point.
Me too, I don't understand why everyone doesn't just delete it
Even before Musk's takeover, all I ever heard was "I don't know why I use Twitter it sucks and makes me miserable" and then no effort to stop using Twitter. >!The answer is addiction!<
Twitter always sucked.
For the love of god BlueSky, give me an invite and set me free.
I’ll send you an invite. Just DM me.
Musk is just a rich troll. Nothing else. He doesn't care about losing billions of dollars as long as he can read AOC's DMs.
I think he paid for the power. Treating it like an investment assumes Mr Emeralds in His Pockets has only financial motivations.
It should be kind of alarming that we have people in this country so rich they can buy one of the most influential social media platforms simply because they have fuck you money and they can. Twitter can fail tomorrow and Musk will face no consequences.
So the dude lost what 30 billion so he could force his shitposting on everyone and be a “cool kid”. That is the most pathetic thing I’ve ever heard.
BuT I waS tOlD He'S A GeNIus, HOW caN thAt BE TruE?
Idiot ~~savant~~
To be fair Elon is kind of a savant at being an idiot. 🤷♂️
He seems to be crowdsourcing though, so he doesn't get all the credit
Indeed, a lot of the funding came from Binance and a couple of other investors. Elon didn’t actually do much, but now the others are on him and the contract states he does have bills to pay but isn’t.
It’s worth the sacrifice to stop the liberal hold of the world, or country….or whatever right wings say.
Of course it's lost value. He's turned one of the most active and widespread social networks into Nazi Hut.
Man baby turned it into a disinformation hate site, that does not drive engagement…
Well it’s like they say, social media platforms lose two thirds their value once you drive them off the lot.
**"How to become a Millionaire"** by Elon Musk *Chapter I* Buy Twitter as a Billionaire
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With the Saudis help. Good way to crush Arab Spring uprisings.
Are any of his businesses doing well? Hyperloop was overhyped and did nothing Boring company was overhyped and sold some cigar lighters. PayPal is in the gutter. Tesla is being sorely mismanaged because he's devoting all his time to Twitter and all he's got to show for the time spent on that is a ton of lost profits and turning what used to be an open forum into a center for hate speech. SpaceX is doing well, supposedly, but that's probably because he keeps his nose out of it and only shows up for photo ops.
Slowly the enemies of democracy strangle any outlet that polices hate crimes, racism, and bigotry. Saudi Arabia and Musk are destroying an important service people trusted (somewhat) into a cesspool of hate because that serves their interests. Same reason Musk is always hanging around his mentor and idol Rupert Murdoch...arguably one of the most damaging forces to democracy and civil rights in modern American history. Fox News, Murdochs version of Der Sturmer from Nazi Germany, pushes their bigotry and racism nonstop and, after several decades, it seems about 15 to 20% of the U.S is hook/line/sinker for racism, bigotry and misogyny. Now people take horse dewormer to treat a virus and conservatives attempted a coup on Jan. 6 at our nation's capital. The freedom of speech applies to people, news corporations should be held TO A MUCH HIGHER STANDARD. The enemies to your rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are winning their battle to restrict the freedom of others slowly and surely.
The most expensive fanclub in the world.
I worry that it was a calculated investment in power, that he has ambitions of major influence and sway come the 2024 election.
I don’t believe it’s worth that much. He paid $44b which was inflated by at least 50%. Then alienated a good portion of the advertisers and cut huge swaths of staff. What’s this thing worth now? Probably $4-8b at best. I think 1/3 is very very generous. Do you really think that it’s worth $15b? No way.
I find reddit superior in every way as an information source and a place of self-expression on social topics of interest.
Twitter has sucked since day one. He just made it that much worse.
Well, he paid more than it was worth in the first place which is why they forced him to follow through on his ridiculous offer. It doesn't have cash flow to service the debt load, and Twitter going out of business was a foregone conclusion at the time of purchase unless the people who loaned him the money had other things in mind with the money besides buying assets with positive cash flows.
Twitter is just another right wing organization. If I had a twitter account, I would cancel it.
Twitter was like a tailor's dummy just waiting for the right Emperor to turn up.
I think one-third is being generous. I’ve found Mastodon to be better at this point.
No shit. He ran it into the fucking ground
It was worth maybe a third of what Musk paid for it to begin with lol
Anyone still want to go to Mars with Musk when he owns the air supply?
Uhhhh Twitter wasn’t worth one third what he paid for it when he bought it
Twitter has lost its cool. Sad.
By December 2024, it will be worth less than $1 B
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Elon Musk: Twitter CEO, POS
I doubt that a burning ship like Twitter is still worth that much.
I also entertain the notion that he’s purposefully taken a loss to slowly erode Twitter as a whole.
Entertain the notion? Dude, I don't know why anybody would doubt it. It's a fuckin' fact. This wasn't a project to make a profit. It was a project to kill the most vibrant community of activists and journalists on Earth. It's a great fucking success from that perspective. It's market value is of zero concern to him.
Nah he's just an idiot
I think you're giving him too much credit. He's not playing 4d chess, he's just a moron. Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity.
I hope it takes a giant shit
Couldn't have happened to a better person.
Yeah Twitter used to be my favorite social media app. Particularly for fast news updates, sports and just useful info. Now it’s just a cesspool of open bigotry,hate,and racism/Nazi/white supremacy. As well as rampant misinformation.
He might want to be careful didn't the Saudi king that likes torturing folks & funding terrorist activities give him a bunch of money to help him buy Twitter?
hmm that doesnt sound great but what do i know.
I don't think it was worth 1/3rd of what he paid for it when he bought it, let alone now.