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'Is Twitter Dying?' Tweets Elon Musk (yahoo.com) 153

Posted by EditorDavid from the bored-directors dept.
The newest member of Twitter's board of directors just tweeted "Is Twitter dying?"

That would be Elon Musk — who'd preceded the question with a list of Twitter's ten most-followed accounts, noting that most of them "tweet rarely and post very little content." And in follow-up tweets, Musk pointed out that Taylor Swift hasn't posted anything in three months, while Justin Bieber "only posted once this entire year."

When someone posted a bar graph showing that Twitter's user count continued to grow, Musk posted a reply which he's since pinned to the top of his own Twitter feed.

"Now subtract crypto scam accounts that twitter constantly shows as 'real' people in everyone's feed"

This isn't the first time Elon Musk has posted something interesting on Twitter, reports AFP: On Thursday, Musk tweeted a photo of himself smoking marijuana on a Joe Rogan podcast in 2018, with the caption, "Twitter's next board meeting is gonna be lit."
About an hour ago Musk also shared a graph from YouGov (a British market research and data analytics firm) showing that Democrats and Republicans have starkly different levels of trust in major news sources. On the chart Republicans show an average "trustworthiness" rating above 50% for just two of the 22 news outlets: Fox News and the Weather Channel.

Above the chart Musk added the words, "Truth is the first casualty."

Two minutes later he followed that tweet with an equally cryptic remark.

"69.420% of statistics are false."
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'Is Twitter Dying?' Tweets Elon Musk More

'Is Twitter Dying?' Tweets Elon Musk

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  • It's a buy and erode/destroy move (like M$ did so many times)

    • Re: Get it now: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by klipclop ( 6724090 )
      Musk is a funny guy. I think twitter is a sh*t platform and toxic. If he can shake things up a little, I say go for it. If it kills the share price a little, so be it.

      • Re: Get it now: (Score:5, Insightful)

        by hey! ( 33014 ) on Saturday April 09, 2022 @05:45PM (#62432760) Homepage Journal

        Musk is a funny guy.

        That's not how I'd put it. I'd say he's kind of a dick. That doesn't make him *evil*; in fact sometimes it may even make him the right person for the job -- as long as that job isn't making a social media platform less shitty and toxic.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by quenda ( 644621 )

          Musk is a funny guy.

          That's not how I'd put it. I'd say he's kind of a dick.

          Being funny, and being a dick are orthogonal attributes.
          If you don't understand that, you are not a true nerd (or at least not an educated nerd) and would not understand Musk's humour.
          And what are you even doing on "News for Nerds"?

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by hey! ( 33014 )

            I'm enough of a nerd to know that "orthogonal" is not the same as "mutually exclusive".

            Also "funny guy" doesn't necessarily mean *witty*. It can also mean "weird".

      • Musk is a funny guy.

        If you think a turd in the punch bowl is funny, then yes. he is a funny guy.

      • I think twitter is a sh*t platform and toxic. If he can shake things up a little, I say go for it.

        What if it turns out he's one of the sources of toxicity? Does this still hold?

      • In this case though I think he's wrong, there's much more gold mine for the clown car to drive into.

    • It's a buy and erode/destroy move (like M$ did so many times)

      Microsoft only did that with competing products, they never just wasted billions of dollars out of spite.

    • Brilliant investment into a dying enterprise. Oh well he can afford it. Like a hobby for him, instead of race cars or yachts.

  • 69 420. Seriously? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by capt_peachfuzz ( 1013865 ) on Saturday April 09, 2022 @05:40PM (#62432736)

    Hardly "cryptic"

    • Re:69 420. Seriously? (Score:4, Funny)

      by fahrbot-bot ( 874524 ) on Saturday April 09, 2022 @05:48PM (#62432770)

      Hardly "cryptic"

      He could have at least said "69.42" and let us assume the trailing "0" ...

      [ All that unnecessary precision and still the first-stage boosters don't always land dead-center on the X. :-) ]

    • Can his employees smoke weed?
    • It doesn’t take a fat bowl of cannabis to realize 9/5ths of statistics are just made up.
    • I don't understand.

      • 69 = the sexual position (because Musk has the maturity level of a 14-year-old)
        420 = marijuana

        So, he's got the sex and the drugs. You think with his budget he would've been able to afford some rock and roll, too.

        • 69 = the sexual position (because Musk has the maturity level of a 14-year-old) 420 = marijuana

          So, he's got the sex and the drugs. You think with his budget he would've been able to afford some rock and roll, too.

          And here I thought 420 was just 10x the answer to everything, and 69 was the year we discovered the monolith on the moon. As for the rock, didn't Elon marry one?

    • This whole thing is trash:

      "This isn't the first time Elon Musk has posted something interesting on Twitter, reports AFP:"

      Reports AFP. OK, boomers.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dohzer ( 867770 )

      Sex Number + Drug Number = Funny Number
      Q.E.D.

  • promise everything, deliver nothing. - Napoleon Bonaparte

  • 50% of Republicans do not trust the ... Weather channel?

    48% of them do not trust Fox News either ....!

    • weather is a leftist conspiracy man!

    • Regardless of politics, I came here to say: Three cheers for the weather channel. The weather channel 100% delivers on its core brand proposition.

      I really don't have anything else to say about this article.

    • If you're not default skeptical about "news" sources these days, you have rocks in your head and blinders over your eyes. Truly.

    • Fox is being beaten in their own game of sowing distrust by even more right wing and more journalistically dishonest news networks, hence the growing lack of faith in it among conservatives.

      It's a little scary to watch from the outside to be honest as Fox does at least have a smidge of journalistic integrity. A lot of these new networks lack even that. Meanwhile all these people being spoon fed outrage vote!

  • SEC violation? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by zendarva ( 8340223 ) on Saturday April 09, 2022 @05:48PM (#62432776)
    I feel like he's attempting to manipulate Twitters stock price? I mean.. why else do you buy 9% of it, then publicly say it's dying?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by aergern ( 127031 )

      So others abandon their stake and he can purchase more at reduced price. The plebs will run, he'll buy then say it's amazing and the plebs come back and now he's in charge. It's a classic tactic.

      • So others abandon their stake and he can purchase more at reduced price. The plebs will run, he'll buy then say it's amazing and the plebs come back and now he's in charge. It's a classic tactic.

        He dun fuked up then. His last large buy in was on the 14th at 35 and it’s now 46.

    • If he's posting against his interest, is it a violation?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by skam240 ( 789197 )

      How about to lay the ground work for when he tries to make the changes he wants? He still needs to convince 41% of other stock holders to go along with his plans and having the user base on his side makes for a very compelling case.

  • For a couple of reasons:
    1. I've always thought Twitter was just "yelling back and forth."
    2. It would be fun to see Musk lose a shitload of cash.

  • It should die. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by presearch ( 214913 ) on Saturday April 09, 2022 @05:57PM (#62432794)

    The twit system should have been established as a published, inter-operable standard,
    instead of a corporate branded advertising portal. IRC, usenet, and email didn't/don't require
    advertising income. RFCs, like the old days, when stuff worked.

    Same with all of the corporate branded internet services we've been saddled with.
    People bitch about walled gardens, but they sure line up to use every single one.
    The gmails, the instas, the snaps, the tocks, the tubes, the googs....

    If twitter worked off of servers that anyone could pull a feed from, all of this nonsense
    of banning and filtering and trump pissing and elon musking would have never happened.

    • Re:It should die. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Saturday April 09, 2022 @06:29PM (#62432868) Homepage Journal

      There is no free lunch. Usenet had to be paid for, either you paid a provider or your ISP/university offered it as part of the service you paid for. It was inefficient too, with every provider needing to duplicate all the data.

      Same with email, either you pay with cash or your pay with your personal data.

      • Re:It should die. (Score:5, Interesting)

        by StormReaver ( 59959 ) on Saturday April 09, 2022 @07:25PM (#62433000)

        [usenet] was inefficient too, with every provider needing to duplicate all the data.

        There are pros and cons, like everything else. A con, as you mentioned, was every provider having to duplicate all the data. A pro was that one, two, three, or dozens of providers going down didn't prevent the data that had already been shared from being available to everyone else. It provided for massive redundancy, as any node could be a server for any number of other clients, which could then become servers themselves. Draconian ISP's made that infeasible in practice, but the software and protocol allowed for it.

        When I first got DSL back in 2006, I ran a personal NNTP server to pull down interesting newsgroups. If I'd had the storage and network capacity (I didn't; both were expensive back then), I could have been both an NNTP client and server. Or I could have been a proxy, since the protocol is Open and simple.

        Open standards open a huge number of possibilities. The main reason people flock to closed services like Facebook and Twitter is because it's far simpler and safer to do so rather than setting up your own social media server (assuming a standardized protocol underneath it all).

    • Cue conservatives: "WHY DO YOU HATE THE FREE MARKET?"

      Oh, what, that only applies to pliant media spouting conservative propaganda.

      When Twitter was loaded with state actor *cough* Russia *cough* bots retweeting/liking (pumping up like a double dose of Viagra) right-wing / right-wing terrorist talking points, it was the bestest thing EVAR and those libby libs were just crybabies. Now that Russia has been cut off, That Former Guy forced to use different media, now TWITTER IS 100% PURE EBIL LIBBY LIB LIBR

  • Elon promoted (Score:2, Insightful)

    by AlanObject ( 3603453 )

    Speaking as an admitted Musk fanboi I would just as soon he stayed out of it. But he's earned the right to do what he wants and has the money to do it so it isn't up to me.

    It doesn't look good that he is asking all the wrong questions. Such as why the "top ten" is so quiet.

    Like maybe the owners of the top ten subscribed accounts have something better to do with their time? Maybe they would prefer posting quality posts rather than quantity posts?

    Twitter isn't the fricking center of the universe Elo

    • Just because he's earned money doesn't mean he's earned respect.
    • Quality posts don't make nearly as much revenue for Twitter as do quantity posts. Similar approach as cars - quantity over quality as far as revenue and stock price growth.

    • You yourself can't even ask the "right" question, I'm afraid. The right question would have been: "Do you believe that adults have opinions that I may disagree with, and therefore ought to have the same ability to speak on Twitter as I do?"

      • Disagreement is one thing.

        Incitement to violence, hate speech, and other criminal behavior is another thing.

        Your inability to make that distinction is not championing civil rights.

        • "Incitement" is a weasel word the way you're using it, however. You may think you're setting some objective standard for behavior, but you're just exhibiting more confirmation bias.

          Here's your test: define "incitement" in a way that applies equally to statements in favor of BLM and those in favor of questioning the 2020 election. I don't believe you will be able to.

          • You are playing word games for reasons unknown. Likely just trolling at this point, trying to get me to "defend" one party and "attack" another party in the hopes of me writing a contradiction. I decline to play.

            As for your "test". There is a huge body of jurisprudence on just what "incitement" means. It is not my job to look things up for you but for anyone else's benefit here is one extract in a long list. From an ACLU [talksonlaw.com] attorney.

            You fail.

    • "In the interest of free speech would you be willing that Twitter tolerates people who post hate speech, racisim, calls for violence, sedition, endless repetitions of globally debunked lies, and above all cannot abide the simple terms of the site EULA that YOU are expected to follow? "

      Yes, even the calls to violence and sedition, even if those happen to be illegal. If they are, it is for the authorities to cope with them. Twitter, FB, YT, and all the others that connect users should be treated no different than voice telephone. For the time being, the phone company is not terminating my service if, for example I "misgender" someone, or even if I tell my friends they should violently overthrow the government.

      • Your position is a legitimate one, even if I happen to disagree. And you are in the minority.

        For evidence of that just look at what happened with Gettr and Parler. Both sites that set out to allow "free speech" the way that Twitter would not. At least for "conservatives" by which they meant MAGA/Trump fans. I don't think even a week passed before they started censoring posts and deleting accounts. Go ask them why.

  • Republican or Democrat (Score:3)

    by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Saturday April 09, 2022 @06:27PM (#62432862)
    Don't trust corporate media. And if you have a media outlet you like look into it to find out if it's really corporate media. Ask yourself where the money is coming from.

  • What Twitter needs is a user-programmable algorithm. Now, before you idiots say that can be used to fuck-off their CPU load/data usage .. it can be implemented without fucking off the CPU -- but thats not a topic for this comment because it is too stupid. Anyway, what I am saying is that users should be allowed a limited amount of programmability to their feeds so they can create or purchase third-party algorithms that determine what posts and comments show up to them. For example, if you decide to follow a

    • Is your [backslashdot's] comment Poe's Law in action? Or are you trying to be funny in the run-on style?

      Anyway, only mention of "meme" is in your comment. There was also only one mention of "gold" in the entire discussion. Also only one mention of "filter" in the entire discussion, though your comment could be taken as advocating filtering. I actually think that a double-icon system to support filtering could hide a lot of the sludge tweets.

      However my take on the broader topic is that Musk is basically a lu

  • There, I fixed the headline for you.

  • Dividing people into Republicans and Democrats are just word games.

    The elites control the narratives that divide everyone else. Musk is an elite. Along with his buddies Fox News Rupert Murdoch and his son at Tesla. Along with Trump. And Koch. And Peter Thiel. And Zuckerberg. And....

    Words and emotions distract from numbers. "A billion dollars" is a number, if you have that then your life is easy. Control resources, control the narrative, distract and divide normal people. The elites always do it.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by k6mfw ( 1182893 )

      The elites control the narratives that divide everyone else. Musk is an elite.

      Musk has captured all the space forums and websites. Anyone that criticizes Musk in comment section is quickly banned.

  • If Twitter is dying, then you really have to pity anybody [cnn.com] who just recently bought ~$3 billion in Twitter stock. Talk about lighting money on fire!

    On the other hand, if Twitter is not dying, then Mr. Musk is talking out of his ass again... and doing so on Twitter.

  • On the chart Republicans show an average "trustworthiness" rating above 50% for just two of the 22 news outlets: Fox News and the Weather Channel.

    The Weather Channel? I don't understand, what does TWC have to do with politics? Granted, it's been a long time since I watched them, mainly due to flip-flopping between two different cable providers, packages that have it or not, etc.

  • No, it will thrive with its new friends, Second Life, MySpace and Friendster.

  • Is the media that republishes whatever Elon tweets that day. We can all follow him on Twitter, you know.

  • Netcraft (Score:2)

    by jd ( 1658 )

    What does Musk know? What matters is whether Netcraft has confirmed it.

    (Yes, there is an element of sarcasm there. But, seriously, Twitter is just an echo chamber, favouring nobody but also usable by nobody.)

  • I see that PBS is on the list, but where is C-SPAN? I've been listening to C-SPAN for decades, and that is a news organization with real commitment to keeping editorializing separate from news. To this day I couldn't tell you for certain what the political affiliation of any of its hosts might be. They are that good at not making themselves the news.

  • Billionaire complains that more "common people" aren't giving him free content.
    Film at 11.

  • "...No, Elon, YOU subtract the crypto scam accounts. From Twitter itself. Entirely. ...and all the other scam accounts ...and all the other corporate accounts, for that matter, nobody can chat with a corporation."

  • If it's dying then maybe the bots will leave and it will be the old twitter again: pictures of babies, food, and rainbows.

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