"Musk wants X to become more like Tencent Holdings Ltd.'s WeChat, a messaging service turned super-app that offers everything from social media and video games to fintech. X Chief Executive Officer Linda Yaccarino has said X will include features such as payments and banking."
If that doesn't scream social credit score then you're intentionally ignoring it.
How about I flood your whole city with robotaxi cars and make it cost a nickel a mile, but you must be an X account holder, must use the X app, must pay in X-coin, and must submit to whatever other perverse encapsulation Lord Musk decides to implement. How about I only carry X-related data over my global net of satellites, forcing most connected people to buy from my ISP, must pay in X-coin but it also only costs 20 bucks a month. On and on, it seems pretty transparent to me.
It's all a furious and cynical land-grab in preparation for a very dystopian future.
Original lore: http://ibgwww.colorado.edu/~lessem/psyc5112/usail/library/hu...
But in this scenario Twitter is like Vanuatu planning world domination. They have absolutely no leverage to compel anbody to sign up for a Twitter account. Musk would need to spend significanty more money to do any of this, and frankly, I feel like he will spend the coming year being an election provocateur than do anything productive.
> How about I only carry X-related data over my global net of satellites
Just cherry-picking this one but, but it would get regulated and competitors would come on to the market, and you can also obtain service from traditional providers (ISPs, and mobile providers) like you do today.
Also you can see how well these items work now ala Apple (maybe Google too?). Apple Card, iCloud, iPhone, Car Play, etc. good luck competing with that when people actively hate your products lol. I'm not super worried about this. I'm much more concerned about something like disinformation campaigns on social media or something along those lines than I am any sort of competence with Twitter turning into a dystopian nightmare machine.
The US or the EU are not China. People generally don't accept being forced to do things and I wonder about the legality of it all.
Twitter had the same level of brand recognition that google has. Musk threw that away for a bad rebrand. He just wrecked a company out of spite, or ignorance.
It's surprising he didn't do his own social media to try and outflank them on features from the ground up. It would have been cheaper too.
Unless he aims for influencer branding and consumption of curated content [1] and not the free expression of unpopular opinion, then it's a very cold and one dimensional target market. It's the opposite of what Twitter once was - brief musings thrown into the wind. Instead, people will consciously and deliberately pander to an audience for subs, views, and income. It'll no-longer be a platform for casual, jokey, sarcastic fluff, or raw, honest, and radical perspectives.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/social-media-dead-instagram-...
Effectively, Musk paid $675 per (American) user to bootstrap his everything app. Probably easier to incrementally add features to the-app-formerly-known-as-Twitter than to build something brand new, even if you can get a ton of sign ups when it is first announced. Take threads as an example, people got excited for approximately 1 minute, then forgot about it.
Unless people have no option but to use it, it won't work. For example, the onl reason I use Paypal is that 20 years ago, Ebay didn't offer an alternative. Today, I use it because I can unsubscribe from stuff with one click. I'd never use it otherwise.
That billionaire man paying generous amount to users would have been a fortunate event to users collectively, but that's it.
Twitter might have had. X no.
They would prefer everyone using their app and not artifically limiting to a subset.
That's only something governments or captured corporations do and Twitter/X is neither. Although that could change and worth raising the possibility. Is there any way they could institute a hard constitution-like policy that could prevent it from ever sliding down that slope?
With an ad exec at the helm?
Destination: Gym
Travel time: 10 minutes
Recommended audio: PragerU EXPOSES Fauci Lies (8 min)