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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   27740 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 23, 2023

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Happy Birthday Elon Twitter

We're almost at the one-year anniversary of Elon Musk taking over Twitter X. How have your predictions fared? I'll answer below.

My opinion of Musk is very low, I think he's essentially a fraud, so I don't have much hopes for his ability to improve Twitter.

Even if he does end up being a competent leader, I worry he will simply be unable to do much. It turns out Dorsey was a libertarian-leaning idealist all along, and he was unable to push his own company in that direction, and had to wait until retirement to actually start making idealistic noises again. If Musk does do anything, we're going to see another round of "No Clicks For Hate" or that WSJ article about Youtube that triggered the Adpocalypse.

I think the best case scenario we can realistically hope for is that he drives Twitter into the ground.

Too blackpilled, I thought the change of ownership wouldn't amount to anything tangible, but he is facing some of the pressures I predicted. The ADL led advertiser boycott happened, and though not perfect, he's holding on surprisingly well.

Some things I didn't predict, that stood out over the year:

  • Community Notes was a great idea, and for all the whining about misinformation from the powers that be, it actually does more to address the issue than anything I've seen from them.

  • Who would have thunk it, making tweets editable isn't actually rocket science.

  • Dropping, what was it, 80% of his workforce? Ballsy move, it's simultaneously crazy how well it worked out, and not surprising at all

  • Cutting off Substack was lame.

  • Sealing off access without a login was also lame. Reddit followed his steps by shutting off the APIs, and YouTube is trying to block the adblockers. Combined with the previous point it feels like it marks the beginning of the "cyberpunk" era of the internet. Open access is no longer a given.

  • I don't think the rebranding hurt the company, but I have no idea what was the point of that.

I actually don't mind the login requirement. Employers snoop. Of course you can still see someone's most popular tweets of all time, without logging in. So if you wrote something controversial but also massive hit, you may be in trouble.

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