Emanuel Posted November 8, 2022 Share Posted November 8, 2022 Elon Musk promises to revolutionize Twitter. Your bet? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
newfoundmass Posted November 9, 2022 Share Posted November 9, 2022 He'll either sell it for a huge loss or kill it. kye and IronFilm 1 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kye Posted November 9, 2022 Share Posted November 9, 2022 I've heard he wants to take it in the direction of WeChat. If that's true, and he pulls it off, he'll make an absolute killing. There is definitely demand for many of the extra features that WeChat has that twitter doesn't, so it'll be a matter of implementation. Twitter seems to have been devoid of any serious innovation for quite a long time now. IronFilm 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fuzzynormal Posted November 9, 2022 Share Posted November 9, 2022 I honestly have never heard of WeChat. I'll brag about that. (I think?) Oh, wait, I just googled it. Yeah, it's that messaging app that's popular in Europe. Yes. I remember that it came preinstalled on my Nokia-6300-mostly-dumb-phone. Let me tell you, seriously, there's some liberation knowing that one has gotten older than the cultural zeitgeist --and it doesn't really affect them anymore. FOMO? That desire has been snuffed. It's kind of nice, this bubble of ignorance. I can see the appeal now. (might be why I'm still filming stuff on a GH1 13 years on. Anyway, musings of an old man. If anyone wants to know how I used to walk to school uphill in snowstorms, drop me a DM) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MrSMW Posted November 9, 2022 Share Posted November 9, 2022 4 hours ago, fuzzynormal said: It's kind of nice, this bubble of ignorance. I can see the appeal now. I see you in your bubble. Do you see me in mine? 😂 I use IG for business and another account (private) for personal. I still have a Facebook account but don’t use it. I have a Twitter account but never used it and have been locked out for years having forgotten the password. Just not a big user of social media and never heard of WeChat either! Emanuel 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
newfoundmass Posted November 9, 2022 Share Posted November 9, 2022 It's not that I think Twitter was perfect before, or that there isn't room to innovate, it's that I think Elon Musk is an idiot that is obsessed with the platform and shitposting. When you are among the wealthiest people in the world you can afford to hire geniuses to build companies like Tesla and SpaceX. Elon is not an engineer, he's not deep in the bowels of those companies leading the charge in innovation and development. He's just a guy that comes from a rich family that used his money to facilitate it. He was smart enough to understand his limitations when it came to these things, but when it comes to Twitter the same can't be said. It seems clear that he is deeply hands-on with everything going on with Twitter right now, which has resulted in internal chaos, plummeting ad revenue, and embarrassing public outbursts. Being an erratic asshole that antagonizes a large part of the user base and its advertisers isn't an intelligent thing to do, particularly when you've spent 44 BILLION DOLLARS on a company that wasn't profitable. He can pretend it is advertisers wanting to silence "free speech" (no Elon, you're just an asshole and brands don't want to be associated with a site that seems poised to let a bunch of racists and fascists back on it) and whatever other excuse he wants to make, but ultimately the dude just isn't nearly as smart as he (and millions of others) think he is. When you are that obscenely wealthy it is pretty easy to accumulate more wealth by leveraging your assets regardless of your business acumen or intelligence. Elon is just the latest example of that. It's time for society to stop putting these people on a pedestal and thinking they're smart. Phil A 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
A_Urquhart Posted November 9, 2022 Share Posted November 9, 2022 8 hours ago, fuzzynormal said: (might be why I'm still filming stuff on a GH1 13 years on. Anyway, musings of an old man. If anyone wants to know how I used to walk to school uphill in snowstorms, drop me a DM) Musings of a wise man! Can't think of anything worse than a place (Twitter) where I can read everyones small talk! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kye Posted November 11, 2022 Share Posted November 11, 2022 On 11/9/2022 at 11:21 PM, fuzzynormal said: I honestly have never heard of WeChat. I'll brag about that. (I think?) On 11/10/2022 at 4:25 AM, MrSMW said: Just not a big user of social media and never heard of WeChat either! You're excused for not knowing about WeChat - it's not really known much outside China. Calling WeChat a "messaging app" is kind of like calling a smartphone a "portable telephone" - it's not technically incorrect and that's what it was at the start but it's so far from the truth as to be so misleading that it's worse than useless as a description. Here's the first paragraph from Wikipedia: Quote WeChat is a Chinese instant messaging, social media, and mobile payment app developed by Tencent. First released in 2011, it became the world's largest standalone mobile app in 2018,[2][3] with over 1 billion monthly active users.[4][5][6] WeChat has been described as China's "app for everything" and a super-app because of its wide range of functions.[7] WeChat provides text messaging, hold-to-talk voice messaging, broadcast (one-to-many) messaging, video conferencing, video games, sharing of photographs and videos and location sharing. It also does a bunch of other things too, like payments, booking restaurants / movie tickets, calling taxis, ordering food, etc. Workplaces use it to communicate with staff. It's used in China as the official vaccine passport. WeChat is kind of like Twitter + Facebook + Instagram + SMS + Apple Messages + Skype + YT + ApplePay / your credit card / cash + Uber + Uber Eats + lots of things that are done manually (aren't apps) outside China. The Chinese government loves it because it's highly censored and a valuable piece of their massive surveillance apparatus. I read a long article about it some years ago now that a foreigner living in China wrote about their life before and after getting their WeChat account. The account is hard to get I think because it has to link to bank accounts and other offical things, so they'd been living there without one for some time. Essentially they'd struggled to do day-to-day things in China without a WeChat account, and when they got it they tried doing everything with it and found that they could do almost everything they wanted to do just in the single app. Apparently lots of users kind of use WeChat like it's the operating system on their phone - they use their phones just like we do only they do everything inside WeChat rather than from lots of apps all written by different companies. If Musk can make Twitter into anything that even remotely compares to WeChat then $44B will look like the money spent buying a winning lottery ticket compared to collecting the prize. Assuming he doesn't screw it up of course. But either way he's guaranteed to piss off the people who like the status quo, which is what we're seeing. Silicone Valley types like to go fast and break stuff, and while they mostly get things wrong, they've also built almost all the cool stuff too, so we'll see. Emanuel 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Anaconda_ Posted November 11, 2022 Share Posted November 11, 2022 Christ. WeChat sounds absoultely terrifying. IronFilm, kye, Phil A and 1 other 4 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kye Posted November 11, 2022 Share Posted November 11, 2022 40 minutes ago, Anaconda_ said: Christ. WeChat sounds absoultely terrifying. Absolutely. One of the privacy challenges of data is when you are able to combine different types of data. Almost every useful (and private) thing that can be known about a person depends on being able to combine different types of data. Knowing if someone is rich or poor only tells you about their wealth. Knowing if someone buys lots of camera equipment only tells you about their interest in cameras. BUT, if you know both, then you can find the people who are poor and also buy lots of camera equipment, and now you can now know that not only are they poor and interested in cameras, but you can also deduce that they're probably mentally challenged in some way 😉 The more you know about a person the more that you can exploit their psychological weak points, which is why governments and big business love this stuff, because it gives them more power over us. Emanuel 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fuzzynormal Posted November 11, 2022 Share Posted November 11, 2022 3 hours ago, kye said: WeChat is kind of like Twitter + Facebook + Instagram + SMS + Apple Messages + Skype + YT + ApplePay / your credit card / cash + Uber + Uber Eats + lots of things Thanks for the warning. Like I said, because of nonsense like this I'm ready to let modern culture turn the page on me. I'm willing and able to be a footnote. kye 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MrSMW Posted November 11, 2022 Share Posted November 11, 2022 4 hours ago, kye said: It also does a bunch of other things too, like payments, booking restaurants But can you book a Chinese restaurant with it? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
IronFilm Posted November 11, 2022 Share Posted November 11, 2022 On 11/10/2022 at 2:10 AM, kye said: Twitter seems to have been devoid of any serious innovation for quite a long time now. THIS! Twitter has been very stagnant for many years. So much missed opportunity! That other social media platforms have been exploiting. I do see Elon pushing hard to bring in lots of new innovations to evolve Twitter into something else new, a "Twitter 2.0" kye 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
IronFilm Posted November 11, 2022 Share Posted November 11, 2022 On 11/10/2022 at 4:21 AM, fuzzynormal said: (might be why I'm still filming stuff on a GH1 13 years on. Anyway, musings of an old man. If anyone wants to know how I used to walk to school uphill in snowstorms, drop me a DM) Both ways! You walked uphill to school and uphill back home too! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
newfoundmass Posted November 12, 2022 Share Posted November 12, 2022 Bless your hearts for having any faith in Elon Musk. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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