Tag: Youtube

Elon Musk and Twitter

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Everyone’s heard that Elon Musk has made an offer to buy Twitter and convert it into a privately held company.  And if you asked me my opinion about this situation I’d have to say, “What the hell is Twitter and why should I care?”  I looked up Twitter and what I learned is that it’s a social media website that allows any idiot to post a message up to a maximum of 288 characters long (but somehow this doesn’t count any enormously larger attached video clip).

But the proviso is that the poster has to be a brain-dead doofus.  For non-doofuses your every utterance will be scrutinized by uber-leftist social justice warriors who will report any violations against Democrat party talking points to the commissars at Twitter’s Ministry of Truth where you will be suspended either temporarily or permanently and then cast into the outer darkness where there will be wailing and gnashing of teeth.

So, the supposedly smartest and richest man in the world wants to buy this company.  Why?  What will be accomplished if he owns this weird network?  Will he somehow level the playing field?  Will his employees allow this to happen?  Will the government allow this to happen or will they instead administer a death by a thousand paper cuts?  And is Twitter really of any value to the world?  Does it have an impact?

I have to confess I’ve never really understood the allure of a 288-character snippet of information.  That’s like forty, fifty words.  So far, this post is about 250 words and I haven’t really finished the initial idea.  If a tweet is really just a headline for an attached normal sized post, I guess that would make sense.  Is it just that Twitter has such a large user base that it acts as a global bulletin board?

Okay, but if you were the richest man in the world and also supposedly one of the most technologically savvy individuals couldn’t you just build something better from the ground up?    And you wouldn’t even have to do it alone.  Peter Thiel is another tech billionaire who is interested in free speech concerns with the social media platforms.  Couldn’t these two titans of industry capitalize on the demand of a public that is hungry for a level political playing field and build something much, much better than Twitter, YouTube or Facebook?  After all, much less savvy people have begun to create alternates to Twitter, YouTube and Facebook.

Surely the financial and intellectual resources that an Elon Musk or a Peter Thiel can bring to bear on this kind of opportunity must be considerable.  And if Musk is seriously considering buying Twitter, then he has identified it as a viable business opportunity.  He doesn’t need to spend tens of billions of dollars to create an exciting and profitable business that already has a large population of people who would make up its user base.  Probably one billion dollars would get the job done.  And what’s one crummy billion dollars to Elon Musk?

I hold out the possibility that Musk is hoping that Twitter rejects his offer and that he plans to build his own platform.  Maybe this whole bid is a publicity stunt to advertise his own entry into the social media business.  I hope it is.  Places like Gab and Truth don’t have the clout needed to compete with the established social media platforms.  And, honestly, it’s not enough to just provide a similar product.  Twitter and Facebook aren’t providing a satisfying product.  They thrive merely because they currently enjoy a monopolistic stranglehold on the niches they created.  What’s needed is something that provides a healthier environment for people on-line.  A truly honest marketplace of ideas would be that healthier environment.

So, Elon Musk and Peter Thiel and any other entrepreneurs out there who see an opportunity in Twitter’s partisan methods; don’t try to fix Twitter.  Instead, bury it with a superior platform.  And make obscene amounts of money doing it.

Outcompeting The Left

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Millennials aren’t patriots.  And they aren’t individualists.  They’re mostly sort of like grade-school children.  In fact, grade-school children that went to a really artsy-fartsy grade school.  There’s no way we are going to turn them into revolutionaries, ready to storm the barricades in search of liberty.  They don’t want liberty.  They want a latte.

But millennials will someday soon be the majority of voters in this country.  So even if they don’t believe in what we believe in we can get them to follow us if we can outcompete the woke option.  “What the hell is photog talking about?” you’re probably saying to yourself.  Let me explain.

Currently Silicon Valley is almost entirely composed of woke companies that have been telling millennials for twenty years that they are not only smart but also good.  Google famously had a motto “Don’t be Evil.”  Facebook, Twitter and all the other social sites spend half of their time just banning anyone who won’t acknowledge the need to worship the cult of pronouns.  Undoubtedly that sort of mean girl social selection activity has a definite demographic cohort that will relish that environment.  We call them Karens.  And right now, they seem to be the dominant life-form on planet Earth.  But as powerful as they are, I think there is a very large chunk of the millennial population that would like something more interesting to look at and talk about than Karen’s latest battle against accidental misgendering.

So how hard could it be to come up with a site that’s more interesting than that.  Look at what Substack has recently done.  They provide a platform for (among other things) journalists who are too normal to survive in the woke media environment.  Guys as liberal as Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi were hurled into the outer darkness by the likes of Rolling Stone and The Intercept because they thought that journalism should be factual.  Not unbiased mind you, but just not completely fake.  Now they’re making more money than they did previously by committing actual journalism and providing a service to readers who are tired of being lied to.

Other social sites have slowly begun to appear to compete head-to-head with the likes of YouTube and Facebook.  Rumble, Gab and BitChute are tiny players but they provide a service that isn’t available from YouTube.  The market for their product is growing and will continue to do so.  And it is attracting people with deeper pockets like Peter Thiele.

These are the beginnings of competition.  They barely register on Big Tech’s radar.  But that will change.  Better product will draw customers.  And honestly the entertainment value of Facebook and Twitter is pretty low.  I can easily imagine someone monetizing the audience that exists for reality-based news and entertainment.  It will happen and when it does it will attract more than just a right-wing audience.  It will attract everyone except for the left-wing ideologues.  A good example of that is the recent news that Greg Gutfeld was now the “King of Late-Night Comedy.”  Greg Gutfeld isn’t a conservative.  But he’s a libertarian who doesn’t alienate the conservatives who enjoy his humor.  He is vague enough about his own personal beliefs that Trump fans and normies think of him as their guy.  And that’s good enough.  I’d like it better if there were an even more right-wing guy who came on after Gutfeld on Fox News.  Someone a little more edgy but it’s a beginning.  If Fox News were smart, they’d give the Babylon Bee guys their own show too.  Of course, they currently have a YouTube channel of their own but I wouldn’t be surprised if YouTube eventually shut them down.  They’re that funny I assume they’ll be considered a threat.

And that’s my point.  The Left has become “all fake all the time.”  In the long run that becomes quite boring.  It can be outcompeted in a marketplace of ideas.  So, all we need to do is create that marketplace and let reality do the rest.

14MAY2020 – Boosting My Morale

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I remember how much fun it was to watch the compilation videos of the 2016 election and the reactions of the Left.  To hear them go from arrogant assurance to nervous uncertainty to shocked disbelief and finally crash land into wallowing misery was a comedic masterpiece on par with the best of Seinfeld or Monty Python.  The loopiness of the lefties both famous and unknown was marvelous.  Their gob-smacked stuttering shock was music to my ears.  In every way it was poetic justice.

And I’ve missed that experience.  It’s a great tonic to see your enemies driven before you in panic and derision.  At the very least, it’ll be six months until the election and even the debates, if they happen, are months away.  So, what’s a deplorable to do?

YouTube may be the Great Satan but it is the lazy man’s answer to any audio-visual search that could exist.  So, I searched under President Trump and Acosta and I found all kinds of comic gold.  It really is remarkable just how much abuse Jim Acosta has absorbed in the last three years.  President Trump has called him a hack, a liar, a purveyor of fake news, an employee for a fake news network.  The only thing he hasn’t done is make fun of his mother.  And then I saw some videos purporting to show the President attacking female reporters unfairly.  More gold.  For them his favorite line is calling their questions nasty.  One compilation claimed that the President especially attacked women of color.  And of course, that was the focus of that video.  But it’s great to see the President doling out equal derision and scorn to all fake news purveyors regardless of race, color or sex.  In fact, I like to think that the President would be proud to give the same messages of scorn to a tall muscular man in a sun dress as he does to a petite Chinese woman or a plain old doofus like Jim Acosta.  His message is one of egalitarianism.  No matter who you are and what you look like all it takes to qualify as a purveyor of fake news is a bedrock lack of honesty and an IQ of about 85.  In a way the White House Press Corps has become a sort of Ellis Island or mixing pot of dishonest talking heads.  Probably the biggest distinguishing characteristic is just how rude any particular reporter is willing to be to the President of the United States.  In this competition women have without a doubt taken the lead.  And this is another area where women’s rights could advance.  I have always harbored the hope that one day in the middle of one of Acosta’s rude outbursts against the President that he would instruct the Secret Service to drag Acosta out by the arms and legs and hurl him out the door.  If they tossed him just right, I always thought that he might bounce a couple of times like when you skip a flat stone over the surface of a lake.  The move could be nick-named the “Acosta.”  What would be great is if someday a woman could be acosta-ed just like a man without any sexism about how women aren’t just as capable of two or even three bounces on that polished White House floor.  That is my dream.  That a reporter not be judged by the choice of its pronouns but rather on the basis of its aero dynamicity and bounce elasticity.  Kinda chokes you up, don’t it?  I can almost hear the Battle Hymn of the Republic playing somewhere in the background.

What Can We Learn from the Death of Gab?

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Vox and the Z-Man have posts up on the shutting down of Gab.

http://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=15418

https://voxday.blogspot.com/2018/10/they-cant-say-i-didnt-warn-them_28.html

There are a few ways of talking about this.  First off, we can discuss what is lost by a Gab shutdown.  Personally, I’ve never really completely understood Twitter or Gab.  It just seemed like everyone linking to everyone else but not actually reading the content.  What the actual value of that is escapes me.  I tried reading my linked content many times and found it a muddled mess.  Maybe that’s what happens when a million people are mixed in a blender together.  But I will confess I probably just didn’t know what I was doing.  So, all in all from a personal point of view it won’t actually affect me.  Now, maybe it has actually been useful for other folks for communication and publicity.  If anyone has found it valuable, say so in the comments.  But from my point of view it wasn’t very useful.

The next way we can look at it is what can we learn from how it was shut down.  Andrew Torba was vehement that he wanted freedom of speech to be the defining characteristic of Gab.  That sounds like a laudable ideal.  In practice, however, the content became pretty foul.  There were some pretty crazy people on the site.  Now, it’s unclear how much was just trolling by those looking to destroy Gab and which was legitimate nutbaggery.  But regardless, the result was unpleasant and chaotic.  Not being a Twitter user maybe I’m just unaware that this is par for the course in a social media arena.  If that is so then it sort of reinforces my impression that Twitter and all these social media environments are toxic places that are mostly about battling your enemies for sport.  I run a very different type of website.  It’s a microscopic place compared to Gab (never mind Twitter).  But we have to deal with the same questions of how to regulate the written interactions between real people.  I have the advantage that I can monitor the discussions on my own.  The scope is possible in a small venue.  For a place like Twitter or Gab it becomes expensive and difficult to maintain a consistent policy because of the need for multiple individuals with their individual points of view.  With respect to freedom of speech on my site, I tell people they can speak their minds but keep it reasonable.  Obviously, that isn’t a highly precise statement.  What I’m trying to say is stay within legal and cultural norms.  Different people have different perspectives on those and the only standard that I have to decide on what conforms and what doesn’t is my own judgement.  But that isn’t too different from any other venue where people interact and debate.  I’m guessing that a truly free speech site will always be a sort of giant demolition derby.  If your site is perceived as being on the right-wing it is clear that you will be punished whenever the opportunity presents itself so allowing the crazier individuals to let it all hang out will eventually lead to the situation that occurred at Gab.  So, the lesson to learn is a fully free speech site is not going to happen in the present environment.

And finally, we can look at what should be changed to avoid this waste of resources.  The first thing that comes to mind is an analysis could be done to find out exactly what are the useful functions that a Twitter, Facebook or YouTube serves and how, if at all, they could be replicated in a competing right-wing entity.  I am hardly qualified to do such an analysis but I’ll at least attempt to discuss some of the more obvious answers.  The two most important functions these sites accomplish is communication and commerce.  The sites allow people to find their audience.  To the extent that they are right-wing sites I guess that will help pre-select for the audience intended.  The second function is allowing content creators to monetize their product.  This will be tied into advertising revenue.  From what I’ve heard advertising revenues, even on established giants like YouTube and Instagram, are shrinking drastically.  What I think this all means is that a viable right-wing social media site will be a site where content providers will pay a fee to obtain visibility and the site will provide amenities like video storage space, band-width and some amount of moderation of the trolls.  Eventually, popular content producers will be able to sell advertising on their videos and other content products.  To me this seem to be the future of right-wing social media.  And it seems like a reasonable model.  Eventually the site will develop other ways to monetize its value.  Subscriptions like Netflix and Amazon eventually will be the end state.

So that’s my take on what can be learned from the Gab debacle.  Experience is the cruelest teacher but the most effective.

What Will the Right Wing Look Like in a Year?

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Who survives the great purge on Twitter and Facebook and YouTube and who does not?  It’s an interesting question.  If being banished from YouTube is the end of your career then I guess the ranks will be significantly thinned next year.  Apparently, the powers that be want to go this way.  It will be interesting to see if anyone steps into the breech with a platform that functions enough like YouTube to provide a revenue stream to those dispossessed from the mainstream sites.  As demonstrated by the YouTube shooter, some people can make a living (of some sort) from YouTube popularity alone.  I myself, not having a presence on Facebook, Twitter or YouTube, am currently outside the influence of the conventional social media networks.  But there are quite a few people who earn a living off of the advertising that a YouTube site generates.  Will these people simply disappear or will they attempt to self-monetize via paid subscriptions or some other mechanism?  This is a pretty important question.  People talk a lot about building new platforms for the right but actually getting one up and running is much easier said than done.  Being forced to do it will be a painful and difficult ordeal.  But if anyone does make the transition it will be an important beachhead that will provide that person a significant advantage.  If he can make the service available to others it will be a virtual monopoly since I doubt a second conservative social media entrepreneur will spring up to challenge it.

Or maybe YouTube once put outside the reach of conservatives will be bypassed as a concept.  After all, podcasts and website-based subscriptions are easy enough to do.  No one has to use the YouTube model.  Personally, I like the idea of a podcast type arrangement.  I don’t currently do anything behind a paywall but I actually think it’s the arrangement that makes the most sense.  If you have something of value people will be willing to pay something for it.  The negotiations will of course be how much.  I have in the past subscribed to a few of these.  But I am very interested to see which way all this goes.  In some ways, it seems the folks at YouTube and Twitter may be making a big mistake.  If they do force the Right to become self-sufficient on their own platforms it might actually strengthen them and remove the leverage the Left currently has and uses against the Right to great effect.

I really feel the Right Wing has been very ineffective up until now exploiting the power of the internet commercially.  It’s shocking how little has been done to challenge the media monopoly the old media enjoys even over the internet.  Basically, a handful of sites make up the bulk of right wing opinion.  Hopefully this will improve in the next few years and we can hope to see less reliance on Fox News and Drudge.  Even Real Clear Politics seems to have way too much left wing editorial positioning and not enough interesting voices from the Right.  American Greatness is good but voices from even farther to the Right should be included to capture the range of ideas that need to be considered.

 

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Two Takes on the De-Platforming Threat to Right Wing Businesses by Facebook, Twitter, Google, Etc.

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Vox and the ZMan both look at this situation and address different aspects.  Vox says if you don’t build your own platforms you will be destroyed.  Zman sees the current situation as a Public Utility, no different from the electric company discriminating against its customers.

Both good and valid points.  But I think Vox is speaking to right now and Zman is pointing out something for the justice department to look into.  As someone who use Google for various services it brings home the point that having your own support system and not depending on liberals is a good idea.  But a hard one to achieve.

 

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