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542 points donohoe | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.205s | source
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Hoasi ◴[] No.44511157[source]
X has been nothing short of an exercise in brand destruction. However, despite all the drama, it still stands, it still exists, and it remains relevant.
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mrweasel ◴[] No.44511712[source]
More and more I think Musk managed to his take over of Twitter pretty successfully. X still isn't as strong a brand as Twitter where, but it's doing okay. A lot of the users who X need to stay on the platform, journalists and politicians, are still there.

The only issue is that Musk vastly overpaid for Twitter, but if he plans to keep it and use it for his political ambitions, that might not matter. Also remember that while many agree that $44B was a bit much, most did still put Twitter at 10s of billions, not the $500M I think you could justify.

The firings, which was going to tank Twitter also turned out reasonably well. Turns out they didn't need all those people.

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jbreckmckye ◴[] No.44514680[source]
I cannot see how it was a success.

1. He overpaid by tens of billions. That is a phenomenal amount of money to lose on an unforced error.

2. Enough users, who produce enough content, have left to make X increasingly a forum for porn bots, scam accounts and political activists. It's losing its appeal as the place "where the news happens" and is instead becoming more niche.

3. The firings did not go well. X has struggled to ship new features and appears nowhere closer to the "everything app" Musk promised. It posts strange UUID error codes. The remaining developers seem to implement things primarily client side, to the extent I even wonder if they have lost their ability to safely roll out backend changes.

4. The capture of X by far-right agitators has led to long term brand damage for Tesla, Musk's most important business property.

I can't see any positive outcome from it.

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makeitdouble ◴[] No.44515328[source]
Most people were betting on X going under in some way or another within a year. From that POV, it's survival in itself can be seen a success for Musk.

I'm genuinely surprised at the amount of people that stuck to it.

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davidw ◴[] No.44517058[source]
> I'm genuinely surprised at the amount of people that stuck to it.

I thought more people would see a guy doing ... that salute, or things like the antisemitism in Grok in the past few days and say "no", but a huge number of people seem to be able to rationalize things away.

I'm with Wil Wheaton https://bsky.app/profile/wilwheaton.net/post/3ltkjyzjb4k2p

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giingyui ◴[] No.44518173[source]
I profoundly dislike the politics of most “leaders” for lack of a better word in the world of tech, but here I am typing these words in an iPhone. Refusing to use something because of who created it or who benefits from it is a bit too much I think, to the point of being unworkable depending on the case.

In other words as much as I’d like to vote with my wallet that is not always practical. And that extends to everything, not only tech.

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michaelmrose[dead post] ◴[] No.44518485[source]
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collyw ◴[] No.44518725[source]
"literal Nazi" What utter nonsense.
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UltraSane[dead post] ◴[] No.44519138[source]
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Ray20 ◴[] No.44519311[source]
What probably puzzles me the most is the cowardice of multi-billion dollar corporations developing AI, whose main goal is to make sure that no one, God forbid, is offended by a chat bot

They are really ready to castrate their models to the point of complete uncompetitiveness, but without any mean words in 0.01% of use cases. WTF? Is it because all people are complete idiots? Or because they think that all people are complete idiots? Or do they think that the jews running media is hypocritical scumbags who are ready to destroy them for the sake of activism and, most importantly, have enough power to do it, as soon as they see something unpleasant in their chatbot?

Why doesn't anyone come out and say openly "this is a language model, a computer program that, like any other language model, is not designed to speak on behalf of the company or describe the real world. And if you are afraid of stumbling upon a mean word, please contact any of our competitors with their weak castrated soyjak models, thank you very much"

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1. matthewdgreen ◴[] No.44520787[source]
Do you think that reprogramming a smart model to the point where it produces Hitler takes is any better?