This is a worldwide sociological phenomenon happening in real time. And you are a part of it, whether you know it or not. Elon Musk may be the richest man in the world (or was, before his $44 Billion debacle) but he doesn’t know the golden rule of retail-customer driven anything — and that is, it’s much easier to keep customers than to get them to return. Once they’ve left, and left angry, they’re gone. You need to keep them in the store.

Elon Musk’s answer to the exodus, which he alone caused, is to rebrand Twitter with an “X” instead of the bird. Whut? Don’t ask me. It’s beyond my capacity to fathom what goes on in this man’s head. I thought it was strange enough when he named one of his children X Æ 12. Then there was his technical child, SpaceX, (you know, where the rocket ships have “unscheduled dis-assemblies” which is a euphemism for blowing the hell up?) and now Twitter is the newest member of the X family.

The obvious here is: 1. How do you copyright the letter “x”? Answer: you can’t. 2. This permutation of X looks like a lot of other Xs out there. That’s not going to be good.

He’s going into “payments and banking?” He already owns PayPal, what could he do to top that? Or, is that going to blow up now, too?

Let me bottom line it for you: Twitter is journalism central. At least it was. A lot of professional journalists came on Twitter when it was created in 2006 and they created huge followings. Every media outlet you can think of has a Twitter account and gets a certain amount of its traffic from Twitter. Breaking news goes on Twitter right when it happens. Journalists tweet from courtrooms, what have you.

Digital media outlets, such as the one you’re on right now, also depend on Twitter for a certain amount of traffic. Right now, Musk’s shenanigans have cost us about 20% of our traffic. And I don’t know where it’s going to stop.

And I’m not speculating or guessing. I use an analytics company, Clicky, which tells me where the traffic is coming from. I also check this data against Google Analytics. It’s my business to know these things and identify trends.

The downfall of Twitter, if indeed that happens and it looks like it is, is a seismic event in social media and the transmission of information in the modern world.

And you’re along for the ride.

Again, I thank those of you who have stepped up and contributed to our fundraiser for your kind generosity. I especially thank those of you who have recently become patrons on Patreon. You are helping us pull our cybernetic choo choo through cyberspace and we appreciate the help. With Elon Musk creating mudslides and floods, we need all the help we can get to stay on track and continue our journey.

This is like watching the Titanic sink in real time. Unfortunately, just as the rising tide floats all boats, so the receding tide sinks them and Twitter going down affects us adversely.

 

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14 COMMENTS

    • Naturally, that’s the kneejerk reaction people are having, is to compare it to x-rated movies. It’s amazing that Musk bought this thing and didn’t have the first clue about running it. And it should have been obvious to him when he started butting horns with the people who actually ran Twitter when he discussed buying it. He couldn’t work with them.

      I’ll tell you something, I had the identical experience. This site used to be hooked up to a sister site, Daily Sound and Fury. Long story short, some new buyers came in and we locked horns like you can’t believe. I chose not to do business with them. I pulled our content away from DSF and it went straight into the toilet.

      I told them this would happen and they didn’t believe me. Musk was told by people at Twitter how that platform worked, too, I’m absolutely certain of that. He didn’t believe them. Now he finds out the hard way.

      The moral here is that in any business, there are key people who know exactly how something works and it behooves you to listen to them.

      I guess some people can’t learn any other way than the hard way, though.

      15

      • Even after the hard way, some people don’t learn. When all this is over, Musk will have blown more money and destroyed more value than even Trump could have.
        What a talent!

        13

        • It’s amazing how dense some people are. Again, going back to the example of our sister site, the new owner bought it for an investment. And it could have been a FINE investment, had he played ball with me. He simply did not understand that PolitiZoom articles are what gave Daily Sound and Fury original content and breaking news and without those, you sink like a rock in the search engines. They literally have as much traffic over there as we get in one day — and this is even with our challenges of Twitter messing with our traffic. We’re still soaring so far above them.

          They would not listen to me. They had some cockeyed idea of how the internet worked and they were going to do it their way. So they did. And lost probably hundreds of thousands of dollars doing it.

          9

      • Musk is not dumb but he is nowhere as smart as he thinks he is. I have lots of followers in 3 ex-Twitter accounts but I will go somewhere else starting today.

        1

    • Somewhat ironically, it was due to the unlimited use by “adult film” companies to slap their own “X” ratings (for films that weren’t even submitted to the MPAA in the first place) on their product–and then the explosion of “XX” and “XXX” ratings–that led the MPAA to drop its “X” rating in favor of the “NC-17.”

      The MPAA couldn’t legally trademark “X” and they don’t have any current trademark control over “G” or “R” either but when it comes to film ratings in the US, a film CANNOT carry an official rating that doesn’t come from the MPAA (no matter what you may think of that organization and its bizarre standards for awarding film ratings). And it was that lack of control that led to the downfall of “X”–the porn film makers were slapping the “X” (and its variants) on films that they knew met the MPAA’s legal standing for the “X” (notably, “for adult audiences only”). But the MPAA had intended the “X” to apply to films that weren’t necessarily pornographic but might have a lot of nudity as well as other “adult” themes. When the porn industry used the “X,” they were already saying, “This is not for children” (and the films, of course, were not); the additional “Xs” were largely intended to kind of “up the ante” in terms of what was happening.

      Finally, in the late 1980s after a number of legitimate “adult-themed” films–films with a lot of violent or sexual imagery that the films needed to tell their stories properly (rather than the kind of just gratuitous nudity designed to lure in older teen boys or the over-the-top, almost cartoonish violence and gore of the slasher films)–were being slapped with a “X” that the film makers objected to because people saw the “X” as “porn” rather than having real artistic value or merit that led the MPAA to devise “NC-17”; of course, “NC-17” faced the same restrictions as the older “X” rating had–notably, limited newspaper advertising and limited TV promotions (even limited theatrical promotions–trailers for “NC-17” films could only run before other “NC-17” films but they could also run trailers for “R” or even “G” films).

      3

  2. Nah, Musk couldn’t have suddenly felt sorry for the poor bird formerly on Twitters logo. An unscheduled rebrand, perhaps.

    6

    • Here’s how I see it. You have a brand of dog food, say. It used to be a good brand, but you take over the factory and make a lousy brand. Sales fall off, accordingly. Then you slap a new label on the lousy brand — and that’s supposed to do what, exactly?

      9

  3. There are people who are absolutely convinced they already know everything they will ever need to know. It’s not even a thought, it’s an attitude. Consequently they do not learn from experience, they are not curious, they just keep doing their shtick. And it works for a while, until they have too much power and get too destructive. People get wise to them. I learned this from watching Trump, but he’s obviously not the only one out there.

    5

  4. Maybe muskmelon was tired of hearing twitter called the dead bird site, the dying bird site, etc. Maybe he felt that no one could say anything bad about an X lol.

    3

  6. Why would one ever think that Twitter or whatever it is now, is a news site? Have we completely lost sight of right-wing nut job propaganda?

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