Originally published at: Twitter sinks in app store ranking and general findability after "X" rebrand | Boing Boing
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His fanboys think he’s playing Nth-dimensional chess but his actions say he’s playing one-dimensional Tic-Tac-Toe.
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Hopefully, this will lead to more people downloading X-Com.
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Obligs:
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And he’s “O”, not “X”
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“Twitter built a ubiquitous, household-name brand over the course of nearly 2 decades and then simply abandoned it, leaving it to be exploited by competitors, unopposed, through the mobile platforms’ branded search ads.”
If nothing else, Musk will be immortalised in a business school case study.
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You’re optimistic. A study? He’s going to be in several.
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Perhaps the Smithsonian can keep his brain on hand, so we can use the calipers to figure out what went so wrong? /s
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His Twitter take over really has destroyed the whole “Overly Optimistic Futurist” persona, into “Just a normal jackass who somehow made too much money.”
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What baffles me is how some people are easily fooled by this guy. Like sure, I love the idea of a techno-optimist future, but he’s just awful at selling it. Seriously, he’s the drunk’s version of a smart person.
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In the tradition of his grandfather.
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Barf, I hate technocracy nonsense. I’ve had this discussion over the years with a long time online acquaintance that keeps thinking technology can solve many problems. I use to be a techno-goof like him, but living long enough and working for so many jobs I’ve found technology to be at best a convenience, but on average I think most technology is a complication that can be done better but thanks to capitalism such fixes aren’t allowed or have to be done on an individual basis (no standardization for you!).
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The technocracy movement was basically hearing about “engineer’s disease” and concluding it’s the perfect basis for a system of government.
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Well, when you change your company’s name and logo to generic unicode character 120143, aka Mathematical Double-Struck Capital X, aka 𝕏, you lose a lot of things. Copywritability, trademarkability, searchability, respectability, and profitability. It’s really to be expected that people can’t find it, when they can’t properly enter high-numbered unicode characters into their search box without some translating website and cut-and-paste. It’s too much effort.
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“If you want a simple answer for why Musk did this, one better than “branding obsession with the letter X,” it’s because changing Twitter’s name is the only likely way he ends up described as its founder.”
What is another term for when a ship fills with water and sinks?
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It’s a shame Musk didn’t go for * - that would have been fun in the search engines.
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When I was young I also used to think “we can make this work if only we engineer it harder.” And yes, we could make things that worked, marvelous things that saved time or effort, or gave comfort.
But after a while I realized that lots of the problems we saw were due to the people involved having different perspectives and different goals.
I recently ran into a situation where Team A owned a system that wasn’t giving them any trouble, but was causing Team B’s systems to fail, resulting in issues for a large number of clients. I estimated Team A would have to do about a week’s worth of work to fix their system. When I asked Team A about fixing it, I was stonewalled. Team A’s manager’s primary goal was not to make everything better across the board, but was instead protecting their team from extra work.
These are people issues. Technical solutions can create magical tools that improve things for many people, but they can’t “fix” opinions, goals, or other motivations. And it’s wrong to think of those as broken things that need fixing.
That’s what politics are for, getting enough people to agree to a set of rules so they can cooperate and understand each other well enough to at least coexist, if not prosper together. It’s not perfect by any means, but tech is not a panacea that can fix what’s wrong with uncooperative humans.
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He really is creating quite the pure stress test case study for the resilience of the network effect. It’s all I can think about when we see repeated “group _____ is starting to leave zxitter because of Musk’s latest decision…” He’s eliminated almost any other intervening variable that would have confounded things.
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“The sad truth is that there are no great ‘social networks’ right now.”
Given that Twitter rather set the standard (low as the bar may have been), is this a moment of self-awareness from Elno about how much he’s destroyed Twitter? It’s an extra weird claim that he’s trying “to make… one,” given that he’s trying to make Twitter into, well, something else.
I’d be baffled if people were being fooled by him for the first time now, but I think the previous dynamic (before he showed his ass with Twitter) worked extremely well to mythologize him. There wasn’t much (accurate) information about him except the uncritical press/media representations (which just completely ignored most of the reality), so he could do his whole self-promoting “I am a business/tech genius visionary” thing without any pushback. Some people invested so much in the mythology, bought into it so whole-heartedly, that they built some of their own self-image around it, so now that contradictory information is available, they just can’t acknowledge it.
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Aiiiggghhhhh
You just gave me flashbacks to COM+
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