It’s all going to plan. A wealthy investor has paid a lot of money to shut down popular platforms like Reddit and Twitter. Knowledge is power and they can afford to, and have the incentive to keep us in the dark. Can’t have us poors rising up against inequality if we have no soapbox to stand on.
This has been my thought for a while, since before Musk even finalized the purchase of Twitter. They mentioned wealthy foreign investors backing him near the end of the deliberations, and it immediately clued me in. The working class, or the populous at large, have been using social media to unite and protest for years. Look at Iran and the anti-hijab movement. Look at BLM and how it exploded a few years ago. The ruling class are dumbing down education across the board, and limiting what we can even read from libraries. Disrupting our ability to communicate, share and coordinate is just another step. Why is Musk shooting himself in the foot? What business decision makes sense to gut every aspect of Twitter and then prevent outside viewers from seeing tweets? He’s killing it. And Reddit’s doing the same.
What was Twitter? An extremely popular and multicultural, border breaking venue for communication? What was Reddit but a (by and large) progressive and intellectual community sharing ideas that mattered? (On top of feel good stories or something to get your rocks off to.) Then look at Threads, where they explicitly stated they’re going to avoid politics and news? Not letting those topics be part of the discourse. It’s obvious.
Places like this are shrinking and are absolutely under attack.
But seriously, why aren’t we talking about this more? We’ve seen some fairly significant mass movements gain real traction on Twitter and Reddit in the past few years and, simultaneously and nearly instantly they are both quickly scrambled and made completely useless for that purpose.
You’re talking about organizations that can put down $20bn to fund Musk’s takeover of Twitter. People with that kind of money absolutely have the resources and know-how to manipulate entire markets. It would be naive to believe otherwise.
Reddit is 1000’s of communities. It’s just as wrong to say that it isn’t progressive and intelligent as it is to insinuate it’s all one big community in the first place.
However, it’s really not a secret that reddit’s majority (at least used to) lean left harder than any other social media. Intelligent is maybe subjective and not accurate, but they were at least more progressive than most other social media sites.
It fits with existing patterns depressingly well. The issue is, it’s generally very subtle.
E.g. Murdoch once even admitted on camera what he does. He “suggests” what he thinks should happen to politicians. Those that either agree, or follow his “advice” start getting negative stories about them dropped from his papers etc. Conversely, those that disagree get their positive stories dropped more. Once a few politicians have had their careers ended by it, most of the rest fall into line, it’s only minor favours. Until it’s not; and all the previous favours suddenly risk looking very bad in the press…
No laws broken, no overt threats given, but the more it happens the stronger it becomes. It eventually helped cripple BBC news, in the UK, among many other problems.
Reddits behaviour fits this pattern too well. Something has been offered in the background. Initially, it was for small favours, but it’s now reached a tipping point. I suspect they are hoping that they can fire sale the whole user driven system (everything must go [at once]). People fatigue on the constant news, and there’s nowhere new to flow and reorganize.
Hard to prove that type of stuff. It could just be incompetent leadership but it’s starting to feel like it’s something more given how many back to back missteps they’ve had recently.
I’ve played with this idea in my head on several occasions. It does seem rather insane how all social media sites are self destructing and making business decisions that are questionable at best. Given all the uprisings across the globe in recent years, it would not surprise me if there were various investors and governments who would pay good money to destroy those platforms. Also the sudden and complete self destruction of both Reddit and Twitter right as we’re about to head into the 2024 US presidential elections, seems rather suspect as well.
The other idea I’ve been considering is that both Musk and Huffman are raging malignant narcissists who are throwing a massive childish tantrum and burning it all down simply because the users on their sites made fun of them.
I’m leaning into the theory it’s someone in power in Saudi Arabia. A member of their royal family is heavily invested in Twitter, owns shares and fronted Elon a big chunk of money for Twitter and they would surely like to crack down on social media in pretty much every middle eastern country, what with those pesky women protesting by not wearing their hijabs and protests and riots happening over there in the past decade. The first thing they do when there is trouble is shut down twitter, shutting it down permanently makes things easier for them.
People keep laughing at how dumb execs are. Like they are dumber than the average person. They aren’t. They pay lots of money to very smart people who tell them what will happen. It’s just much easier for them if people think they’re dumb instead of malicious. Because again, they have smart people telling them how to play this.
It’s all going to plan. A wealthy investor has paid a lot of money to shut down popular platforms like Reddit and Twitter. Knowledge is power and they can afford to, and have the incentive to keep us in the dark. Can’t have us poors rising up against inequality if we have no soapbox to stand on.
This has been my thought for a while, since before Musk even finalized the purchase of Twitter. They mentioned wealthy foreign investors backing him near the end of the deliberations, and it immediately clued me in. The working class, or the populous at large, have been using social media to unite and protest for years. Look at Iran and the anti-hijab movement. Look at BLM and how it exploded a few years ago. The ruling class are dumbing down education across the board, and limiting what we can even read from libraries. Disrupting our ability to communicate, share and coordinate is just another step. Why is Musk shooting himself in the foot? What business decision makes sense to gut every aspect of Twitter and then prevent outside viewers from seeing tweets? He’s killing it. And Reddit’s doing the same.
What was Twitter? An extremely popular and multicultural, border breaking venue for communication? What was Reddit but a (by and large) progressive and intellectual community sharing ideas that mattered? (On top of feel good stories or something to get your rocks off to.) Then look at Threads, where they explicitly stated they’re going to avoid politics and news? Not letting those topics be part of the discourse. It’s obvious.
Places like this are shrinking and are absolutely under attack.
But seriously, why aren’t we talking about this more? We’ve seen some fairly significant mass movements gain real traction on Twitter and Reddit in the past few years and, simultaneously and nearly instantly they are both quickly scrambled and made completely useless for that purpose.
Take a look at the Hong Kong protests. Twitter was a huge way to show the world what was going on. But also full of shills and bots sewing discord
Honestly at this point I can’t tell if I’m happy or sad about things like Twitter going away. It was full of horrible discourse and bots and misinformation, but also helped a lot of people. Back in the day it was insanely helpful for directing large areas affected by disasters.
I just don’t see the good uses of these platforms ever coming back from all these primadonna CEOs
That’s interesting, but there’s one problem: are they really that coordinated?
You’re talking about organizations that can put down $20bn to fund Musk’s takeover of Twitter. People with that kind of money absolutely have the resources and know-how to manipulate entire markets. It would be naive to believe otherwise.
Not to divert too much from your point, but Reddit was a progressive and intelligent community? Thanks for the laugh haha
Reddit is 1000’s of communities. It’s just as wrong to say that it isn’t progressive and intelligent as it is to insinuate it’s all one big community in the first place.
However, it’s really not a secret that reddit’s majority (at least used to) lean left harder than any other social media. Intelligent is maybe subjective and not accurate, but they were at least more progressive than most other social media sites.
Any proof you can offer on this, except for your hunch?
It fits with existing patterns depressingly well. The issue is, it’s generally very subtle.
E.g. Murdoch once even admitted on camera what he does. He “suggests” what he thinks should happen to politicians. Those that either agree, or follow his “advice” start getting negative stories about them dropped from his papers etc. Conversely, those that disagree get their positive stories dropped more. Once a few politicians have had their careers ended by it, most of the rest fall into line, it’s only minor favours. Until it’s not; and all the previous favours suddenly risk looking very bad in the press…
No laws broken, no overt threats given, but the more it happens the stronger it becomes. It eventually helped cripple BBC news, in the UK, among many other problems.
Reddits behaviour fits this pattern too well. Something has been offered in the background. Initially, it was for small favours, but it’s now reached a tipping point. I suspect they are hoping that they can fire sale the whole user driven system (everything must go [at once]). People fatigue on the constant news, and there’s nowhere new to flow and reorganize.
I doubt doubt it, but damn it makes sense
Hard to prove that type of stuff. It could just be incompetent leadership but it’s starting to feel like it’s something more given how many back to back missteps they’ve had recently.
Everything is a Machiavellian drama nowadays and some people are determined to be the rebel heroes.
I’ve played with this idea in my head on several occasions. It does seem rather insane how all social media sites are self destructing and making business decisions that are questionable at best. Given all the uprisings across the globe in recent years, it would not surprise me if there were various investors and governments who would pay good money to destroy those platforms. Also the sudden and complete self destruction of both Reddit and Twitter right as we’re about to head into the 2024 US presidential elections, seems rather suspect as well.
The other idea I’ve been considering is that both Musk and Huffman are raging malignant narcissists who are throwing a massive childish tantrum and burning it all down simply because the users on their sites made fun of them.
Whichever ends up being true Musk and Huffman are raging malignant narcissists regardless.
Musk would’ve had to agree to making himself look bad, which I don’t think he would’ve done.
I’m leaning into the theory it’s someone in power in Saudi Arabia. A member of their royal family is heavily invested in Twitter, owns shares and fronted Elon a big chunk of money for Twitter and they would surely like to crack down on social media in pretty much every middle eastern country, what with those pesky women protesting by not wearing their hijabs and protests and riots happening over there in the past decade. The first thing they do when there is trouble is shut down twitter, shutting it down permanently makes things easier for them.
They’d be arrogant and stupid enough to call for it, that’s for sure
I don’t know how you could more organically commit corporate suicide than the way they’re going about running Reddit recently.
I’m willing to bet it is somehow connected to BlackRock.
laughs in tencent
This.
People keep laughing at how dumb execs are. Like they are dumber than the average person. They aren’t. They pay lots of money to very smart people who tell them what will happen. It’s just much easier for them if people think they’re dumb instead of malicious. Because again, they have smart people telling them how to play this.