[astrange]

Approximately every US news organization and Lebron James announced they weren't going to pay for checkmarks yesterday, so he announced a surprise twist where the top 10,000 famous people get free checkmarks.

…so he's now not charging people who can pay, while charging people less able to pay.

Though, the main problem is that Twitter is about as big in Japan as it is in the US, but Elon only thinks about US culture wars because his only friends are a few VCs and a retired postal worker crank named catturd2. So none of his new ideas are going to work there.

[AmericanChopper]

Criticizing somebody by speculating about their motives really only reflects badly upon you, especially if you’re going to accompany it with that much hyperbole. All you’re communicating is that you’ve replaced your ability to reason about a topic with some version of the fundamental attribution error.

> the main problem is that Twitter is about as big in Japan as it is in the US

It’s not even close. When you account for the value of ad impressions, the US market is worth about 3.5x its next biggest market (Japan), and it drops off very sharply after that. You can argue that Twitter’s policies should be less US-centric. But the reason they are that way in the first place is because the US market is their most valuable market by a long shot.

[astrange]

> Criticizing somebody by speculating about their motives really only reflects badly upon you, especially if you’re going to accompany it with that much hyperbole.

No, you can tell who he cares about because he replies to them, and because his emails were released in discovery from the earlier Twitter lawsuit and it turned out his friends put him up to it because they were mad the Babylon Bee got banned for a US culture war pronouns joke.

I certainly don't have to expect he'll make good decisions, since he has no experience with the business, is a completely atypical user, was forced to buy it in the first place, and has lost $20 billion so far by his own valuation. (May have lost a few millions more by firing that disabled Icelandic acquihire in violation of his contract and a few discrimination laws.)

The network effect is very very strong though. Even if someone makes a good competitor (Instagram is prototyping one apparently) I'd be surprised if bad decisions actually killed it.

> When you account for the value of ad impressions, the US market is worth about 3.5x its next biggest market (Japan), and it drops off very sharply after that.

I suggest reverse adjusting for how poor their ad targeting is. I've used it both places; the ads are actually good and relevant in Japan (…except for being for domestic apps, so not valid for tourists) but in the US they've always been nonsense. eg if you follow any doctors it will just assume you're also one and burn the budget of every medical ad it's got showing them to you.