Elon Cleaning House

Celebrating in the Kremlin and Beijing, and throughout the growing axis of autocracy

 

I am viewing this more like a billionaire who buys a sports team. They aren’t doing it thinking “this is clearly the best financial return on my investment.” It’s more like “I guess this is something fun I can do with all this money.”

For reasons you bring up, this may not end up being as fun as Musk would like, but maybe he will still get something out of it, changing twitter in some way he’s proud of.

 

I’ve not paid much attention to musk, Other than the documentary on how he risked everything for spacex. Don’t drive and don’t care about Tesla but I would bet on his vision for Twitter Vs the gatorcountry prognosticators who are self proclaimed experts on everything

 

My guess is he doesnt do a whole lot. He will unsuspend some folks. Maybe everyone for a minute or two and start fresh. Integrate some new features (widely available edit button for instance)... And focus in on ways to monetize the platform even though minimally.

I think they should just open a "free" Twitter "marketplace" that lets you sell within a framework and they take a nice commission chunk. Buy out and integrate platforms like RedBubble for instance.

Allow users to build actual free ads and promote them freely with Twitters % take being based on how widely you disperse the advertising and based on sales. No up front fees. (This allows entrepreneurship to flourish without advertising capital).

In other words move to commission based sales platform instead of upfront pricing.

I am on Twitter a lot and feel it is a wide open place for well done target marketing and they should be able to at least generate some decent revenue from that.

Create a more robust #hashtag and keyword tracker so marketers know where their audience is.

Maybe even allow users to pick who they see advertising from?

There is a way to monetize the platform.
I really believe that

 

“Musk, a self-described “free speech absolutist,” has fiercely criticized the company’s previous leaders as overly rigid and suppressive and said he would work to overturn some of the company’s main enforcement mechanisms, such as indefinitely suspending accounts.

An emboldened cast of anonymous trolls spewed racist slurs and Nazi memes onto Twitter in the hours after billionaire industrialist Elon Musk took over the social network Thursday, raising fears of how his pledge of unrestricted free speech could fuel a new wave of online hate.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/10/28/musk-twitter-racist-posts/

 

Musk has some ideas on how to make it work and turn a profit. We’re not privy to those ideas, of course. This is a wait and see, but the guy is an innovator.

 

So porn and crypto are very popular. Guess we will see how the hate speech stacks up.

Twitter's Most Active Users Have Reportedly Stopped Tweeting

Reuters reports that interest in once-popular topics such as news, sports, and entertainment is down. Twitter is also losing many heavy users interested in fashion and celebrities.

Some of Twitter’s most popular topics among English-speaking users now include cryptocurrency and not-safe-for-work content.

 

Freedom is messy. Tyranny is orderly.

 

Absolute freedom with zero rules is complete anarchy.

 

If you study his history, he's not such a speech absolutist when it comes to people criticizing him.

 

People are calling it "fancy 4 chan." Maybe a difference is that one can choose whom to follow on Twitter so maybe we won't have to scroll through all that sort of garbage. The fact that hate speech is not illegal doesn't mean people will enjoy spending their time there if gets like that.

 

If they were bots, are they really users

 

I have no dog in this fight. I’m skeptical that whatever he’s trying to accomplish is going to work. He may run away some of the irritating liberals and replace it with 4 Chan like hate garbage and porn?

I’ve stayed away from Twitter. I will continue to do so.

The biggest shame is that he is wasting time and resources on this vs other areas where his talents are more fruitful and beneficial.

 

One way for Musk to monetize the platform is by expanding paid-for "promoted tweets", so more people will get to see crap they didn't sign up for.

 

yep. I find twitter useful in finding info or videos on recent events. ie sitting in stands I quickly found video replay within mins of the RTP call against dexter in lsu game.

to your point, if they loosen the controls it will quickly be a cesspool of speech from everywhere. Very few enjoy that. I’m sure he sees that so will be interesting what he does with it. Plus, is it really broken??

 

Not going to make a prediction as to whether Musk will succeed or fail with Twitter and while he deserves credit as a visionary willing to take risks both of his successful endeavors, Tesla and SpaceX were based on innovative tangible technologies. A social media platform is qualitatively different than either a company that produces electric vehicles and advanced storage batteries or a company that manufactures space launch vehicles and satellites. While it won't come anywhere near close to breaking him, Musk's takeover of Twitter could end up being a costly mistake.

 

I think a platform where you only see ads from those you follow would be interesting. It would certainly cater to your tastes at least.

For instance I am launching an outdoor clothing line in the spring. (Just a a passive income gig)... I will probably build a new account catering to applicable content and then advertise to those who enjoy the content. But I support giving them control by unfollowing me.

If Twitter integrated an in house marketplace then they could pull a commission in lieu of up front pricing.

Eliminating this front loaded capital requirement would put them in a space different than meta (facebook/insta etc).

This coupled with user curated ads could be a new opportunity for revenue for the user and the platform.

This is spitballing of course

 

Gonna start with T shirts and hoodies.

 

Yeah, the reason that nobody has done the opt-in ad structure is that when they have experimented with it, it crashes engagement and they start to lose active users. There is a browser that is showing some success paying people to opt-in to ads (literally handing them crypto for watching ads), but they are doing that because nobody was willing to do it for free.