This idea of "why doesn't the west have a WeChat-like app" (which X is supposed to be eventually) is so shallow that I have trouble believing there is any corporate support behind it besides Elon. As he's seemingly pushing his successful space & EV business under this parent brand, it would be a strange hill to die on.
I don’t understand how Twitter and the X idea overlap. Elon just wants to use the existing user base to seamlessly switch to the new app. If that’s the only reason he is bulldozing Twitter into X, feels like a bad idea. With his celebrity (though severely diminished) he can pull in a lot of interest to X as a new company. That would have automatically added a few billion in value for him. Instead trying to morph Twitter into X reduces Twitter’s value and doesn’t net anything positive at all. I don’t get this madness
I think his idea is that Twitter as a pure diffusion platform is dead and/or insufficient, as shown by the competition meta is going to bring in the market with Threads.
His vision is that the west needs/wants a mega app - WeChat like - where you can communicate privately or publicly; interact with people / communities / companies and pay / exchange money. Do not forget that his wealth initially came from changing the way people pay online, he's got a thing for that kind of market.
To create that mega app; you can either start from scratch (hard) or flip an existing product. Ideally such a product would need to have a massive audience (network effect) and at least part of the feature your mega app needs.
Amongst the available platforms; TikTok was too big/expensive and targeted at minors. Meta and all their properties is too expensive. Twitter was the next on this list that was kinda aligned. It was loosing money (so not "too" expensive even if he arguably overpaid it); got a ton of (adult) customers; and communication already provided.
Engineering wise; twitter was known in SV as a place to "vest and rest". So he immediately put a stop to it and made the team leaner. As the saying go: "If you want to go fast; go alone. If you want to go far; go together". It looks like Musk wants to go fast right now. He seems to believe that there is hundreds (if not thousands) of billions of valuation waiting for the first company that would become the western world WeChat.
If he is right; then the 44 billions he paid for Twitter were just a way to kickstart the project; just like he did by turning Tesla from a so-so company to a global leader (depending on the metric you look like). Using his fame definitely would have drawn interest to X.com; but that alone isn't enough. Google itself failed multiple time to launch social networks despite their fame (Google +; Google Wave; ...). But if tomorrow he launches a "Send money to" feature in twitter, he will already have far more user in 24h) than everything he could have hoped for had he done it otherwise. And that might be worth those 44B.
Or he just fails miserably to deliver on the vision; he also had his failures (the boring company being an obvious one).
> Do not forget that his wealth initially came from changing the way people pay online, he's got a thing for that kind of market.
His wealth came from PayPal investors paying him to go away, not because he was actually good at it.
WeChat exists because that's easier for China to regulate. There's no particular demand for an everything payment app; there's already Facebook and Venmo.
Absolutely nothing he did, starting a year before he bought Twitter to now, makes me believe that anything you said here. He has completely ruined the reputation, lost good will among engineers across the world, proclaimed himself to be a terrible boss, shown that he has no idea what he is doing, all this without even going to the extreme fringe he seemed to have moved.
As Tom Nicholas (the British YouTuber) pointed out, a chat app that's used by the vast majority of the population (like WeChat in China, or perhaps in some countries WhatsApp) can add a payments method and be successful, but Twitter has only ever been a niche. An influential niche, popular with journalists and celebrities, but a niche nonetheless. A chat app first needs the massive audience, and to be a normal way to send private messages to people you know in real life, before it can become a successful payments app.
WhatsApp could perhaps do it, but most of the countries where WhatsApp is popular already have decent payments infrastructure.
> Twitter has only ever been a niche. An influential niche, popular with journalists and celebrities, but a niche nonetheless.
This is the key. Elon has been in this niche and can't see it from the outside, from the viewpoint of the Regular People who only hear about Twitter on the news but never actually go to the site.
Same with journalists and "journalists" who create "news" about some two follower default profile picture account with a hot-take on Twitter, pretending that it's the view of some larger crowd just because it was said on Twitter.
Twitter lacks what IRC had decades ago and Discord/Telegram have, a way to moderate who can see your message within a group. Currently it's just shouting to the void (with hashtags).
> Twitter lacks what IRC had decades ago and Discord/Telegram have, a way to moderate who can see your message within a group.
It has that, Circles.
Except they announced they were going to remove it recently but… haven't. I think they may actually be unable to remove things and have just told him it's gone.
Circles were a near-exact lift of the same-named feature from Google Plus. You could (can still?) set up ring privilege layers of your followers or specific subgroupings and send tweets only visible to those in that group.
I think it's because he was financially successful with PayPal and he wants to duplicate that success, so he's always been trying to break back into the money flows and this was too juicy of an idea to merge the two.
If he wanted to make all these sweeping changes then why did he alienate his staff?
Can you imagine all the time and money that was put into staffing Twitter? There is value to an organization and its unwritten human network upon which it operates. Then it was just blown away over night to appease some beanie wearing mouth breathers on the platform
Nobody is asking for a "Wechat" in the west. It's not something I've ever seen anyone craving for.
And no need to spend 44,000,000,000$ on twitter if all you want is to destroy the brand and replace it with a letter brand that's ungoogleable. But hey... what do I know.
I don't shop on twitter. Why would I shop on twitter?
Honestly I can't follow the example at all. What does banking (one thing billionaire genius Musk wants to do on twitter) have to do with sending 140 character text posts? I don't see any kind of connection there at all.
Meanwhile Flight Search is a type of Search. The name kind of gives it away.
It better to think of WeChat like an iPhone as opposed to Twitter. So rather than opening up the Amazon App you can navigate to JD's store on WeChat. Obviously if you don't use WeChat / Twitter then them gaining a app store-lite feature isn't useful to you but cross-selling is a successful practice.
I'm sure JCPenny / etc would love if you could buy on Twitter though. Replace ad fees with just a simple %-age cut of the sale.
The only reason I'd ever use anything like that would be to send money to a person (not a business) in a non-SEPA country. And for that, I'd use PayPal. What's the business case for this X? How does it improve anything?
There's plenty of ways to do that today already including ubiquitous SWIFT transfers almost any bank supports. Plus several startups and tech companies who offer similar services.
One doesn't need twitter for that (nor crypto currencies, which was yesterday's 'money transfer to foreign lands' big promise)
There might be some outages, but still, Twitter as an entity is operating just fine, if Elon's claims are correct time spent on twitter is at record highs, and similarweb doesn't show any real decrease in visitors:
https://www.similarweb.com/website/twitter.com/#traffic
Reddit, Twitter, Facebook all had outages in the beginning all the time, it's not a deal breaker for heavily network effect products.
So really, yes, getting rid of some staff has caused outages, but it's also sped up development of new features, and not really affected usage.
Edit button, separating for you and following, blue checks, 140+ character tweets, unlimited video, algorithm adjustments, live video streaming on the way.
At least be intellectually honest. Please. I know you hate Elon, but at least consider the actual facts. (This is more change than twitter did for 15 years before Elon)
Are you counting the fact that those are now different UI tabs as a new "feature"? Twitter always had the ability to switch between chronological feed of just accounts you followed, and an algo-curated feed of those tweets + other tweets you may have interest in, sorted by interest rank - that's exactly what "for you" is now.
> blue checks
Really not sure what you're claiming here. Verification was already a thing, as was Twitter Blue (editing & long form tweets for paid accounts) - the only "feature" elmo introduced is ambiguity about what that check represents - is it someone who has spent the last 15 years on twitter as a notable public presence with a verifiable identity? or some rando with $8 on a prepaid credit card? Who knows, now.
> unlimited video
to count this as a feature the video player has to actually work reliably. it does not, by any metric. endless buffer, glitching, skipping with no way to reload lost chunks. the 10s videos were an annoying limitation but they just worked.
> This is more change than twitter did for 15 years before Elon
Circles. Spaces. Communities. Community Notes. Co-tweets. Alt text tagging as a first-class citizen of image posting. User tipping options. NFT profile pics. These are all features released in the last 5 years of twitter before elmo took over.
If we're talking about intellectual honesty let's apply it evenly.
You would call "less shadowing banning" a _new Feature_?
Like if I make a wrench and one year I make 50% less of them I wouldn't say I developed a new feature. If I created a slightly different wrench I might call it a new feature but just doing more or less of something I already have isn't _new_.
So to circle back, what new features has twitter developed?
That's called working the refs. You just complain something's happening nonstop whether or not it actually is, and eventually the admins give you treats to shut you up. (Popular right-wing account "catturd2" constantly complains about this even though Elon put him on the special list that shows him in everyone's for you feed, along with dril and the menswear guy.)
In this case it is still happening because that's mostly bugs, and they definitely aren't fixing the bugs. Also, because some of the signal comes from how many people have blocked you, and personally repellent right-wingers get frequently blocked!
It's actually more accurate to say that it used to be that single-letter TLDs could be registered, however
> Only three of the 26 possible single-letter domains have ever been registered under the .com domain, all before 1992. The other 23 single-letter .com domain names were registered January 1, 1992 by Jon Postel, with the intention to avoid a single company commercially controlling a letter of the alphabet.
and
> On December 1, 1993, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) explicitly reserved the remaining single-letter and single-digit domain names. The few domains that were already assigned were grandfathered in and continued to exist.
This is an interesting case of ignoring Twitter's second biggest market - Twitter Japan can't be called X Japan because that's already the name of the most famous rock band in the country.
One can only speculate as there are only two other single-letter .com's (q.com and z.com) and there won't be others [1] . Wiki article says "GMO Internet, Inc. purchased Z.com for nearly $6.8 million from Nissan, who previously used it for the Nissan Z series cars." [2] For comparison, asking price for b.org or r.org are $500k but .org's typically command less than .com's.
It has to be worth a lot less than that today. The number of young people who visit websites ever in any given week is dropping. Reddit's usage among young people shot up after mobile apps were developed for it, not before. Domains just don't matter as much anymore.
As I mentioned in another comment [0], a domain which looks like X.com but is a Unicode X https://xn--vm8a.com/ can be bought for 9,000,000
USD and I'd think that the real X.com is worth much more, as it doesn't get converted to puny code [1].
I recently finished reading "The PayPal Wars". The book recounts an interesting episode regarding PayPal's history where Elon Musk pursued his vision of rebranding PayPal as X.com. Despite his efforts, the initiative was not successful, ultimately leading to his resignation from the CEO position. It remains to be seen whether history has the tendency to repeat these kinds of events.
I think referring to a CEO's termination as 'resignation' is a somewhat diplomatic way of implying that they were actually dismissed from their position.
