2y ago

So Elon's a "visionary" who wants to turn X into a single website where you can do everything — kinda like Yahoo!

He wants his new MySpaceX portal to be a website...

Where you can message people: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!Messenger

Where you can stream audio: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadcast.com

Where you can stream videos: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!Screen

Where you can create social media posts: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!360%C2%B0

Where you can manage your finances: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!Finance

Where you can share photos: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!Photos

Where you can earn money publishing content: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!PublisherNetwork

Where you can find a job: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!HotJobs

Where you can buy and sell stuff: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!Auctions

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, this truly is a vision for the future — if by "the future" you mean 1997.

tech #technology #twitter #X #musk #ElonMusk @technology #yahoo

102 comments

That's a basic rule that can be applied to lots of things: If a company offers a lot of different products or one product that can do everything, usually none of those are really good. Typical example would be a restaurant that serves everything from pizza/pasta, asian cuisine/sushi to steak, burgers and so on
- "If a company offers a lot of different products or one product that can do everything, usually none of those are really good. "
  I wish this applied to Google xD (Their search & web browser used to be good. Their cloud/photo storage and email services are still amazing.)
  
  @Sina @Blaubarschmann Google is more like a restaurant that has a large chalk board covered with specials. The kind that has a soup of the day, and a fish of the day, and a chef's special.
  There are a few core menu items that are perennials on its printed menu. Search, maps, photos, ads, Gmail, Google Docs, Chrome, Android, Chromebook, YouTube...
  Then there's the messaging app of the day, the TV platform of the day, the flavour-of-the-month device selection...
  
  They are like an abusive ex promising you everything after a breakup, but slowly undermining your will in general.
  
  It kinda does apply tho
- That’s the Cheesecake Factory.

I can't wait until he starts up the video streaming section as x videos.

He's trying to make zombo.com, but with an X.
Welcome to Xombocom. This is Xombocom. You can do anything at Xombocom. Anything at all. The only limit is yourself!
/Anything is possible!
- History repeats itself...at xombocom
- Oh man...this is an absolute blast from the past!
- You can do anything at zombo com
- Reminds me of Bazoomer.com.
- The unattainable is unknown at Xombocom.

I think his ideal business model is WeChat, which is extensively used in China.
Unfortunately he hasn't factored in "Get literally everything else banned by the government".
- ....I mean that could explain his very alt-right bent...
  Endorse a fascist into office then ban the rest (this is no more likely than any general conspiracy theory though. We'll have to wait and see if that's what his actions actually align with in this coming election season to give this theory any actual weight)

I switched to Mastodon yesterday.
- hell yes
  
  Just a question: how do I link to my mastodon profile on something like Bandcamp? It doesn't accept the URL starting with the @ :/
- I signed up for mastodon when he bought Twitter. The challenge is that I never actually used Twitter so I am lost on what to do with Mastadon. I repost and star posts that are fun but can’t figure out how to follow the conversation. Happy with Lemmy since it’s much easier to follow each conversation. Maybe I’m using Microblogging wrong.
  
  My advice is follow hashtags for topics you like or are interested in. They will then show up in your feed. It's wonderfully personalized and I've found lots of great people that way with similar interests
  
  I usually post my thoughts about stuff I consume (books tv series anime games movies music) or about stuff that gives me food for thought or opinions about what's happening in the world. Links to my music when I produce it too.
- I was under the impression I can also see Mastodon posts on Lemmy? Sorry, I still don't get the Fediverse.
  
  A few weeks ago I found that the server software of Lemmy wasn't really prepared for that yet. You were able to open a Mastodon users profile (it wasnt easy, though), but you werent able to subscribe to it as on Lemmy you cannot subscribe to users, and since content is only synced to Lemmy (e.g. from a community) if users are subscribed to it on your server, posts of Mastodon users didnt get synced, and so you didnt see anything.
  I don't know if it has changed yet, did not try it again since then, but I think theres an issue on Lemmy's github repo about this
  
  Yes, but it’s a bit weird and the interface isn’t designed for it. I keep them separate, but I could see it being useful in a pinch.
  
  Me neither. I come from Reddit. :/

If by "the future" you mean 1997
That's funny because part of the reason Musk wanted to turn Twitter to X was because he's been squatting on the domain since the late 90s
- Nah, he bought it from Paypal in 2017.
  
  He founded X.com which became PayPal. No one buys a domain back 2 decades later for no reason, unless you're a manchild who's been having wet dreams about it and can't let that stupid name go

I just hope he calls his video service xvideos
- It would conflict with the real xvideos.
  
  He is going to buy xvideos next and get into the porn industry
- Hope he makes one just for watching hamsters, could call it xhamster...

May he sink a lot of money into his vision.
- The best part is watching these idiots blow their fortunes thinking they are going to continue building on the old paradigm of monolithic platforms when the ground is gradually shifting towards diversification via decentralization and they are behind the curve now, not in front of it. This is not your dad's internet. Hopefully they continue splashing out huge amounts of cash in ill-fated efforts to prove they are still relevant. There's no fool like an old fool - and old, rich technically-out-of-touch fools who lack the self-awareness to stop imagining they are hip are particularly amusing.

You forgot use it as a bank, hail transportation, order food.
Yes, his idea of the everything app was reportedly conceived in 1999.
- And book medical appointments. These apps rely on zero privacy rights.

It's like Yahoo, except for Nazis!
- Yahoo Loses Nazi Memorabilia Case 😅
  
  I stand corrected! LOL

Meanwhile, TikTok has added text posts. For 1 billion monthly active users.
- Whoa, I didn't know tiktok was so popular. it's like 1/8 of the entire world population, and considering that only about 70% of the world has internet access, it's like 18% of all internet users.
  Or are lots of these bot accounts, like other social media, and the real numbers are lower?
  
  Pretty much the entire Pacific rim, so it makes sense... but here's one analysis on bots:
  https://www.fraud0.com/resources/tiktok-bots-fake-accounts-scam/
  "Initial analysis from us shows a clear picture: up to 97% of all traffic coming through TikTok could be detected as automated bot requests by our software. These are frightening figures that cost many advertising companies a lot of money and waste their ad spend."
  Also:
  "In 2022 alone, TikTok removed:
  Over 256 million accounts (including accounts suspected to be under the age of 13 and fake accounts – 282% increase vs. 2021)
  Almost 160 million fake accounts (increase of over 1,200% (!) compared to 2021)
  These numbers are only a fraction compared to Facebook’s total of over 6.5 billion fake accounts removed in 2021."

@ajsadauskas@aus.social @technology@beehaw.org for photos, Flickr also fits: it is owned by Yahoo since 2005
- I get the sentiment, but Flickr hasn’t been owned by Yahoo for a while. They were purchased by the folks that run SmugMug.
  
  @mnrockclimber@lemmy.sdf.org Oh, you're right! I didn't know about that. My bad 😄

@ajsadauskas @technology He couldn't even be bothered to create an actual unique logo. Instead he used a public domain Unicode character. (U+1D54F). I hear the Xodus has begun and the bird site is slowly being Xpunged :) He couldn't even get the sign replaced without controversy.
- @Lockpro @ajsadauskas @technology oh, it isn’t unique, but X.com has been in Elon’s head since 1993 when he worked for the Bank of Nova Scotia for a summer job assistant to the VP Strategic planning. It was’nt BNS’s plan, but Elon’s to put every banking function online. A few years later #Xcom was operating in SiValley, but Elon’s Board lost confidence in his grand design, and removed him as CEO. ../2
  
  @Lockpro @ajsadauskas @technology
  Instead they focussed on payments only, which was the plan of a failing startup that merged with X.com a few months earlier - it was operating down the hall from X.coms small 2nd floor office. The name of that startup ended up replacing X.com’s — PayPal.
  In 2003 PayPal was sold to EBay and Elon’s share of the sold company funded his investment in two new startups, Tesla, and SpaceX. His share after tax was USD $300M.
- I hear the Xodus has begun and the bird site is slowly being Xpunged
  There hasn't been much movement to Mastodon this time compared to when the rate limiting was going on. It looks like there was a decent new user spike yesterday, but the rate limit thing caused a big sustained increase for days.
  (Based on @mastodonusercount@mastodon.social )

- How the heck do I monetize this without looking like an ass?
  On the flip side, Elon doesn't need to care about that anymore, does he?

This is what happens when you keep telling a person that all their ideas matter.

What devs are going to make any of this "vision" happen? He let them go, and only kept the devs he can rule by fear. More to the point, IF Twitter tries to hire, who the fuck would answer that call to be ruled in an atmosphere of fear?
- Can't pay the rent, can't pay a designer for a new "logo" (𝕏), can't even pay the severance for all the devs he fired, ....
- From my understanding, most people in the tech industry (as in >50%) are probably left-leaning. And I guess Elon believes he will either be able to just code his dream site with AI (impossible,) or he will find enough conservative techies to do it for him, which seems improbable.
  
  everyone has their price. with unlimited funds he should be able to make something pretty slick for whatever the vision is - not that I would ever use it, of course. But don't imagine that software engineers won't compromise their politics if the money is good. Given the necessity of income, you can rationalize anything if you really need to.

@ajsadauskas @technology from Y to X, thats just a logical step
- I mean... it's also a step back - which kinda fits the entire fiasco well

Has fond memories of the Yahoo Answers Etiquette section.
- Maybe we'll finally get an answer to the age old question.
  "How is babby formed?"
  
  "By being pregnante"

Unrelated but I'm very impressed with how well this posted to Lemmy from Mastodon. Exceptional
- Almost makes me think that we have a fighting chance to make tags on Lemmy work. Part of me would want to see tags get some unique formatting like post flairs, but even just inline tags would be a leg-up.
  Or maybe both in-line and post tags. Neat stuff to daydream 🤔.

and probably spectacularly sucking at everything

No, no you misunderstand...
The holy grail for these big corps is to replicate wechat. It's the everything app for over a billion people. Can you imagine the level of control you could exert over a population with a tool like that? It's everyone's wet dream to have something like that for Europe and the US.
And I mean everyone, not just Twitter. Facebook wants to do it, Google wants to do it. People who have never seen it in action don't really get it, there is no analog to wechat in the west. It's a chat program? With PayPal in it? No. You can pay parking tickets in wechat. This is what they're trying to turn Twitter into.

Musk's attitude is "It's mine, I can do whatever I please". In the long run a person's reply to this attitude is "Fair enough, keep it. I'll use something else". Like I and many others have.

Kinda like Yahoo! that is dead too

Isn't this just a web browser? Magical do-all app
- But with more walls around the garden

Can I play chess, tho?
- I don't know. Let's find out:
  e4
  
  Offer draw
  
  I don't have this one. Best I can give you is B1
- Oh, no. Maybe Polytopia, though.
  https://www.chess.com/blog/raync910/elon-musk-chess-twitter

- I still like 𝕏eet (pronounced "sheet")
- Pronounced like the onomatopoeia for sneezing: Axhoo!

I wonder if competition law has anything to say about companies that do everything
- You can do everything, unless one of those is a monopoly that you leverage for other products
  
  ahhh that makes sense. i was remembering microsoft getting broken up/fined and wondered how an "everything company" could possibly avoid that. turns out you have to have a monopoly to start with, which might have been an issue before he tanked twitter. so i guess genius move, 5d chess etc

@ajsadauskas @technology A multimedia platform. Will he eventually look towards ActivityPub as well?

- Whoosh
- What world are you living in? Every single person I know uses Yahoo for email, search, news, lemmy, calling taxis, ordering food, online shopping, streaming tv shows and movies and instant messaging

This man is for the birds!

102 comments