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543 points donohoe | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.729s | 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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mapt ◴[] No.44519539[source]
Unfortunately, Bluesky has not taken off. The network effects of Twitter are too great to lose its journalists & public figures.

What has happened instead is that we're back on Facebook. Errm... Threads by Instagram by Meta née Facebook. And it's reached a stage where public figure migration is actually becoming feasible.

https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/07/threads-is-nearing-xs-dail...

Network effected spaces front-loaded by the power of Mark Zuckerberg, third richest person in the world, stand a chance.

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wonderwonder ◴[] No.44520395[source]
BlueSky has not taken off because its the far left version of Twitter. If you stray even to the center you are doxxed and banned. They banned the sitting vice-president within a couple of hours of him joining.
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HDThoreaun ◴[] No.44520947[source]
The sitting vice president is a monarchist, not just a little right of center
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1. dinkumthinkum ◴[] No.44521669[source]
A monarchist? Can you explain what a monarchist is? I would think having the position of Vice President would largely imply one is particularly not a monarchist.
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2. mapt ◴[] No.44522272[source]
JD Vance is/was the personal assistant to Peter Thiel, a tech billionaire who believes we need to get beyond the weaknesses of democracy & egalitarianism in order to preserve the sort of freedom that billionaires need to have. Thiel and Musk are also the financial & political patrons of Mencius Moldbug / Curtis Yarvin, who AFAICT is the person to reintroduce the idea of non-electoral monarchy/autocracy as a credible goal to politics, out loud.

> In his blog Unqualified Reservations, which he wrote from 2007 to 2014, and in his later newsletter Gray Mirror, which he started in 2020, he argues that American democracy is a failed experiment[10] that should be replaced by an accountable monarchy, similar to the governance structure of corporations.[11]

Thiel runs Palantir, whose specialization (again: competing with Musk) is making the authoritarian, panopticon dystopias of science fiction more physically feasible with AI analysis of large volumes of arbitrary data. A system like West Berlin where every third person is informing on their neighbors to a human Stasi officer is horrendously inefficient firehose of data, almost impossible to administrate effectively, and Palantir aims to fix that. Palantir was responding to a market demand from the resurgent US intelligence agencies for this sort of administration for COIN / counterterrorism / occupied territory in Iraq & Afghanistan.

https://zeteo.com/p/peter-thiel-jd-vance-trump-maga-broligar...

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/06/09/curtis-yarvin-...

Thiel in his VC hat has also been deeply involved with ycombinator.