Super interesting article.
I actually think he could have pulled it off if he hadn't tanked Twitter's reputation trying to be epic and based.
If he was the brilliant and innovative tech guy people think he is, it would have been a nice play. Not sure if it would be successful but there was so much room for Twitter to find a new direction like that and put a squeeze on the competition, especially by providing a utility service like payments or some such.
i'm not sure flexing market power really requires any kind of brilliance.
I don't know if you actually need to be a brilliant tech guy. I think having a reputation for being one might be enough.
His problem now is, only cryptocurrency chuds still think he's a genius, and while it's all about having the right friends, catturd2 is not the guy who will make it happen for you.
Snapchat made that pivot years ago, they kinda adopted the Venmo model. Twitter is definitely a lot bigger and if he hadn't just bulldozed the company they probably could have pulled it off by just copying what everyone else was doing.
Traditionally I've deferred to the "World Values Survey" by Inglehart, et al. when trying to parse macro level differences between societies because they control and translate the survey very well. I'd usually control for xenophobia, eg China has a large Han majority and the US a declining White majority, which substantially complicates this kind of nation-level data, but the raw numbers are significantly different enough that it's not that important.
https://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/WVSContents.jsp
Generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted or that you need to be very careful in dealing with people?
China (2018, latest, N=3036)
Most people can be trusted: 63.5%
Need to be very careful: 35.7%United States (2011, latest, N=2232)
Most people can be trusted: 34.8%
Need to be very careful: 64.3%I would imagine their Wave 8 (2022->) data for either nation, if surveyed, post-pandemic/now-endemic COVID-19, will see significant slides compared to these snapshots... that's generally been the trend with countries with Wave 7 data captured in the aftermath compared to prior years. It's probably worth noting that like other US-specific/less directly comparable studies, trust amongst the younger generations in the US is lower than older ones. It's typically inverted in Chinese surveys, where the older people are slightly more distrustful than younger people.
Yeah, and there's lots more detail in the raw data.
Could you tell me for each whether you trust people from this group completely, somewhat, not very much or not at all? Your neighborhood
China (2018, latest, N=3036)
Trust completely: 15.7%
Trust somewhat: 67.9%
Do not trust very much: 15.3%
Do not trust at all: 0.7%United States (2011, latest, N=2232)
Trust completely: 8.1%
Trust somewhat: 63.9%
Do not trust very much: 20.8%
Do not trust at all: 5.7%
[H]ow much confidence [do] you have in [Labour Unions]?
China (2018, latest, N=3036)
A great deal: 8.5%
Quite a lot: 58.1%
Not very much: 27.3%
None at all: 2.7%United States (2011, latest, N=2232)
A great deal: 3.1%
Quite a lot: 21.5%
Not very much: 49.5%
None at all: 23.8%
America was a trust-based society for a long time. Well, in some parts, anyway. I can remember appealing to total strangers for aid and receiving it with a smile. Also having strangers come up to me and I'd help them out.
I suppose I didn't grow up in the urban area of a big city, which helped. I'd always see these movies based in New York where people were assholes to each other, and I just couldn't figure out why those people would be so mean. Doesn't it make you feel good inside to help people?
the closer you are to a sucking whirlwind of human misery, the harder it is to stay open like that. when you're just trying to get somewhere and people come up to you multiple times per block trying to sell you something, scam you, or beg for help it is terrible and exhausting. this is why cities like New York normalize a default reaction of "fuck you, get out of my face."
Houston is the 4th largest city in the US, and there were no scammers and beggars on every block. Honestly that sounds like homeless-blaming.
Houston isn't dense, it's not the same kind of place at all
like put the whole population inside the loop and then let's see what kind of exciting social pathologies develop
I think it has to do with population density. Living in a city of millions gives a sense of anonymity. Even if you've lived there for decades, you step outside and it's a sea of strangers.
In smaller towns or suburbs, people know each other. If someone scams you, word will get around. That makes it much easier to trust others, because there is more communal accountability.
The US has very low population density, more suburbs and small towns while China is full of mega cities. I can see why the average Chinese person is more distrustful than the average American.
And yet this doesn't match up at all with the World Values Survey posted above.
What makes far more sense to me is that people become more or less trusting based on their perception of threat to themselves. In China, where things have generally gotten better over the last couple generations, trust is up - but in America, where things have generally gotten worse over the same period, trust is down.
I've always been told people on the east coast are assholes. A friend said when he visited a coastal town in California it was like being in a Disney movie.
Oh boy love to pay my bills through the app known specifically for being a broken and insecure piece of shit.
Love to pivot to a payment platform but to first fire all the security people and break security and ruin my reputation before having to immediately hire even more people to do that job anyway because now I'm planning on validating billions of transactions and bank data
According to a new court filing, it’s been merged into a new entity called X Corp
Holy shit it's the return of x.com :data-laughing:
I just listened to the whole TrueAnon series on Elon, and he just won't give up on his terrible name that normal people think is a porn site.
Is he going after Paypal?
Obviously he owned it in the past. A mobile device that's also a chat app and a payment provider is essentially a combination of Twitter and Paypal into one single app. Although the "chat" function of Twitter is woefully under-developed compared to something like Discord and would need enormous expansion to compete.
Ultimately if you slapped a bank onto the side of Twitter, you would have this payment-provider combined with Twitter functionality. That's treading on Paypal's turf.
mobile device that’s also a chat app and a payment provider
Samsung pay. Google pay. Apple pay. Tap to pay.
Unless he brings something unique and invigorating to the table, it's DOA.
titkok and vine were never really competing against each other (though musical.ly was but it never really caught on), plus i think to an extent tiktok's spectacular popularity is a bit of a pandemic outlier
I think if Vine hadn't gone under it would have evolved into basically exactly what TikTok is now. The reason people remember it as being better is strictly because it had a smaller user base.
We killed vine like 3 times. Annoying AF format. I find TikTok to be a cancer format too but it's what the kids like so who am I to judge. It's gen Z's thing now. :seen-this-one: .
The usage of a tool like this is an issue of convenience and it's more convenient if you have everything inside one single app you use regularly, multiple times per day. That's Twitter, at least for Twitter users. It's easier to do it all from one app than to bust out another app when you need to, that tiny tiny tiny fucking almost insignificant amount of effort between opening another app or using the one you always use all day anyway is enough to create usage.
You don't need to do something unique or invigorating, you just need to be the most convenient for users, people will use whatever takes the fewest buttons to carry out the transaction.
You just know this clown is going to integrate it with dogecoin and his fanboys will declare it a major blow to traditional finance.
He should make a money laundering app run out of Seychelles or something. Would be a great competitor to binance.
I am getting old. These things mean nothing to me. :farnsworth:
That's good, I only know because every boomer I know insists on using them to pay for things and I had to use Cash App for rent for a while
wechat has all those fun stickers though, there's no comparison.
Twitter Circles aren't even private anymore. No way I'd trust it with money stuff.
