this post was submitted on 09 Mar 2024
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[–] [email protected] 221 points 8 months ago (8 children)

You’re telling me the company that once had ads for T-Mobile and Volkswagen and now almost exclusively has ads where random bots with NFT photos advertise ChatGPT ‘services’ isn’t doing well financially??

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[–] [email protected] 181 points 8 months ago (8 children)

What the fuck is the other 70%'s problem?

[–] [email protected] 84 points 8 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 79 points 8 months ago (3 children)
[–] [email protected] 24 points 8 months ago (2 children)
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[–] [email protected] 46 points 8 months ago (2 children)

He kept the 70% he wanted, it'll be a propaganda engine and communications platform for the right wing.

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 8 months ago

I have a lot of friends that won’t quit because of sports updates and all the shitposts

[–] [email protected] 17 points 8 months ago

This is in addition to the first year of losses, which are likely higher.

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[–] [email protected] 130 points 8 months ago (6 children)

How much did human usage drop? Because there are a shitload more bots on twitter nowadays than there were in the years before he took over.

[–] [email protected] 47 points 8 months ago (2 children)

This should be human usage - the user survey was done by phone.

[–] [email protected] 39 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Ah, ok, 27% -> 19%, an 8% YoY drop, and the numbers were obtained using identical methodologies across multiple years. Yeah, I agree, seems to check out.

Still, there are definitely a shitload more bots than there were before.

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[–] [email protected] 30 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (5 children)

Any time something gets too big it gets bots. Lemmy will be the same. We will see instances getting defederated who cannot manage the spam.

Fuck Elon though

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[–] [email protected] 87 points 8 months ago (4 children)

Ever since Musk's control of the company, Twitter (I refused to call it X) showed me multiple hate and racists posts. Basically, Twitter is showing me garbage. I now use Mastadon instead.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 8 months ago (2 children)
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[–] [email protected] 21 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (4 children)

I was never active in terms of posting but I followed several news outlets, local government agencies, and a few friends. Shortly after Musk took over I saw nothing but right wing nutjobs and a lot of posts from Musk. I tried unfollowing but nothing worked so I quit logging in. I need to cancel my account but haven't taken the time.

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[–] [email protected] 55 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (16 children)

I'm back to calling it Twitter. (Not that I'm ever on it though.)

[–] [email protected] 46 points 8 months ago (1 children)

It's such a stupid name! Everytime it's mentioned, it has to be prepend or suffixed with something so people actually understand the "X" context.

And more importantly - If you visit x.com, it redirects to twitter.com! So what's the fucking point of the rebrand?

[–] [email protected] 19 points 8 months ago

Genius, i say! The man’s an absolute genius!

Obviously. Some people say trump should run a social media platform. More and more.

[–] [email protected] 34 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Until he stops allowing deadnaming on his site, I'm going to deadname his site.

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 8 months ago

Xitter, but the X makes a ‘sh’ sound.

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[–] [email protected] 54 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Needing to log in to view someones tweets means now I wont even visit the site when linked. Kinda the number 1 rule of platforms is to make them accessible to those that don't already use it, so as to convert them later. Musk, and everyone around him letting these decisions run through, are idiots

[–] [email protected] 26 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (3 children)

ran into this last night.

I hate twitter, but there was something I was trying to see and the only way to get the info was from a twitter post. Couldnt view the goddamn twitter post without creating an account and logging in.

My immediate thought was "This isnt important enough for this bullshit" and immediately gave up.

I'm convinced this login to view shit is to hide the explosion of right wing white supremacy/racism/etc posts and the bots echoing and amplifying it from people before they commit themselves to an account.

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[–] [email protected] 49 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

I wrote this right as the first elon buying Twitter mentions were popping up...

Notably, Twitter facilitated communication during the arab spring, where the people organized to stand against and even overthrow several broken and corrupt government regimes throughout the middle east - including some participation in places like Saudi Arabia, for example.

Twitter's second largest investor after a musk takeover... the kingdom of Saudi Arabia and it's de facto leader who, among other things, killed and dismembered an American journalist without consequence somewhat recently.

And now Twitter is about to be killed... and dismembered.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 8 months ago

Yep, Saudi Arabia bought that service and the price, giving a man child a toy that it would probably ruin quickly, looked rather attractive.

[–] [email protected] 38 points 8 months ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 31 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I’m sure a lot of the original population has dropped by a lot more than that, but in numbers they would have been replaced by an influx of fascists and bots.

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[–] [email protected] 31 points 8 months ago (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 38 points 8 months ago (7 children)
[–] [email protected] 32 points 8 months ago (1 children)

X is one of his older websites, a financial platform that he created after his first startup was sold. Name comes from "X marks the spot" from old treasure maps, was to be the place for all transactions.

It struggled and didn't really get off the ground, but was able to merge with another platform called Confinity, run by Peter Thiel. The merged platforms then became PayPal, and made both guys rich as shit. Thiel eventually power played Musk and got him kicked out of the company, arguably for good reason, though Thiel is quite a piece of work, too.

The new X is Musk's attempt to make twitter more like his old site, and is why he was throwing around things like making it a peer to peer payment site, similar to WeChat / WePay or Venmo. How he plans to make tweets into bank transfers I've got no idea, esp. when losing 30 percent of users.

More on this: https://www.forbes.com/sites/zacharyfolk/2024/01/09/x-announces-peer-to-peer-payment-service-will-launch-in-2024/?sh=62ee775a75a8

[–] [email protected] 16 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Pretty much he wants to turn X/Twitter as WeChat's clone for the West.

As WeChat is both a messaging and payment app used by a couple of hundreds of millions of users in China where people can send money, split bills, pay, etc. using the app.

Visa and MasterCard are extremely profitable companies enjoying really high margins and having very little competition. And this is very lucrative business:

66% operating profit margin for Visa and 55% for Mastercard (four-year average). 51% net profit margin for Visa and 45% for Mastercard (four-year average). 50% per annum return on capital employed for Mastercard and 21% per annum for Visa (11-year average).

[–] [email protected] 25 points 8 months ago (1 children)

It's his favorite letter or something. He'd wanted to name something X for a while. The closest he got before was SpaceX. Which I suppose now retroactively means SpaceTwitter.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 8 months ago

There's also the poor kid that he named 'X Æ A-12,'

[–] [email protected] 22 points 8 months ago (1 children)

An obsolete windowing system for UNIX like operating systems

[–] [email protected] 18 points 8 months ago

obsolete? say that after trying wayland on an nvidia card.

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[–] [email protected] 33 points 8 months ago

How could the jews do this to me :(

-Musk

[–] [email protected] 29 points 8 months ago

That sounds like bragging. Why aren't more people stopping this crap?

[–] [email protected] 27 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Who the fuck is still on that shitpile? Dudes. Stahp.

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I deleted my account and haven't missed it at all. Then again I was never good at making use of Twitter, it's too hectic and disorganized for me, and I have the same problem with mastodon.

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[–] [email protected] 25 points 8 months ago
[–] maculata 25 points 8 months ago

Oh you mean Twitter?

Yeah, ‘X’ is never gonna happen.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 8 months ago (1 children)

How do you measure the percentage of people who never used it and are now saying "Oh hell no, not ever!"?

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 8 months ago (3 children)

Doesn't surprise me. Musk has cultivated and emboldened racists, homophobes, cryptobros, misogynists, and the far right and the platform has turned into a cesspit. Meanwhile scammers & bots run rampant and the blueticks stink up every thread with cretinous remarks and trolling.

I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of people have just given up with it, or moved to another social media that isn't so toxic.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I've been using Bluesky more. It is better with feeds and a way less toxic general user base.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 8 months ago (6 children)

I'm part of the 70%.

I use it exclusively for gay furry porn.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 8 months ago
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