this post was submitted on 09 Mar 2024

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Usage Of Elon Musk’s X Dropped 30% In The Last Year, Study Suggests (www.forbes.com)

submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 50 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.

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

How the fuck is that all?

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

Bots on bots on bots.

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[–] [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I’m sure a lot of the original population has dropped by a lot more than that, but in numbers they would have been replaced by an influx of fascists and bots.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] 6 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

The whole Musk takeover is much less relevant (in the sense of interesting) for people outside the western context. I asked a few friends in Japan why they still use Twitter, but they just don't care about the platform and ownership as long as they can still interact with their friends there. Curious how the botification will affect that over time, though.

[–] [email protected] 38 points 8 months ago (6 children)

What the fuck's "x"?

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

A robot created by Dr. Light with the capacity to reason and make decisions on his own, unbound by the laws of robotics. Could also stick to walls.

[–] [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.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 8 months ago (1 children)

He sure has a lot of X's

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

who cares

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

Good

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

Twitter's for #fascists.

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