onfocus

“Elon’s done a tremendous amount of wealth destruction since he’s purchased Twitter,” said Ross Gerber, who said he invested less than $1 million, a stake he now considers worthless. “For the people who put capital into him for any amount,” Gerber said, “ … trying to explain to people how he lost” so much money “is not a fun conversation.”

What’s the German word for Schadenfreude? I think Musk is getting the cultural damage he wanted by forcing normal people to read right wing propaganda all day at X, but at least he isn’t also getting economic rewards.

Loans of around $13 billion have remained ‘hung’ for nearly two years, bringing in interest payments but weighing on banks’ balance sheets

Just top notch business decisions from all the best business minds of our generation.

"We tried peace for 2 years, now it is war," Musk wrote today, a little over eight months after telling boycotting advertisers to "go fuck yourself."

You see, the web is a customer service medium.

X is now an app that forcibly puts abhorrent content into users’ feeds and then rewards financially the people who were the most successful in producing it, egging them on to do it again and again and make it part of their living.

PSA: misinformation and outrage bait is ramping up at Twitter. We have good alternatives now. Fly, you fools!

It’s important to be clear here: there is no chance a critical mass of people will ever leave X without a major shock to the system. Musk is not a smart person but on some level he recognises that many of those who have stuck with X through every single depraved shift in its centre of gravity will happily stick with X as it gets significantly more hateful and harmful. But that doesn’t mean you should stay, and prolong its decline.

The best time to leave was 2018, but the 2nd best time is now. It's painful to shut off a regular source of information. It's also very possible. Experimenting and rebuilding how you get info sounds like a lot of work and it is! Sharpening your Internet skills will make you feel young again and you get to stop working for that weirdo.

The numbers were nearly as bad worldwide, as daily active users on the mobile app fell to 174 million in February, down 15% from a year earlier, the firm said. The worldwide user base has been flat or down every month during Musk’s tenure began except one, when it grew slightly in October and then resumed falling, according to Sensor Tower.

Or: how to get minimal utility out of $44 billion.

These strategies move publishers further away from seeing social media as a source of clicks. This could be a risky pivot away from traffic sources, given that NPR and many member stations have laid off staff or made other cuts due to declining revenues. But the social media clickthrough audience has never been guaranteed; a Facebook algorithm change this year also tanked traffic to news sites. Instead, recognizing that social media is not a key to clicks seems like a correction to years of chasing traffic through outside platforms.

Nice confirmation that the social media effort wasn't and isn't worth the return for news orgs. You're building someone else's platform—and they're platforms that can rug-pull at any moment because their profits aren't directly tied to that organization-generated content.

“Our algorithm tries to optimize time spent on X, so links don’t get as much attention, because there is less time spent if people click away,” he wrote. “Best thing is to post content in long form on this platform.”

LOL. Twitter is absolutely the brand I think of when I think long form content. (sarcasm)

"Grifters need people to harass and a mainstream discourse to counter. As traffic takes a nosedive and Twitter becomes less a part of the conversation, it's going to be harder for these folks to make money," Melissa Ryan, a strategist who helps counter online disinformation, told Salon.

Grifters and trolls will eventually show up where people are. One question we should all ask when we’re thinking about where to spend our online social time: how resistant is it to grifters and trolls? Do we have tools/moderation available to deal with them when they do?

Musk and the people backing all this are more interested in reshaping the global order than in earning fake “fiat currency.” Their real goal is to usher in “hard currency” and re-base global currencies around scarcity and physical assets. So no it really doesn’t matter much what happens to Twitter’s ad model in the meantime. It will probably do alright, and they can probably find other ways to make money, like adding in payments and weird Dogecoin schemes.

Yeah, this article by Dave Troy from last October was not only prescient but has timely reasons why Twitter and Bluesky might not be the competitors you think they are.

Good prophets know how to inspire the zeal of the faithful. They don’t necessarily have the social and political nous to deal with unbelievers, or to reach grudging but necessary accommodations with them. Often, indeed, disagreement is treated as being tantamount to heresy. Nor are prophets good at working with routines, which are antithetical both to their self image and their style of operation.

I have been thinking about this priest and prophet dichotomy since I read this post and I'm seeing it everywhere. It's like the tension between tech innovation and maintenance personified. Plus the phrase routinization of charisma has been giving me good brain dissonance.