Musk's X appoints 'king of virality' in bid to draw in younger users

3 pointsposted 15 hours ago
by mrvenkman
(bbc.co.uk)

5 Comments

PaulHoule

14 hours ago

I find it hard to believe.

I've worked on some social platforms and participated in or watched many more and one thing I've noticed is that it is very hard to get users of a successful platform to play a different "game" than the one they are accustomed to.

It's also super hard to start something new so if you have 10,000-1,000,000,000 using voice chat or uploading and downloading scientific papers or anything else it would be a shortcut to use your platform to get those people to do something else but when you try it you find they are pretty resistant. Platforms like that have a huge amount of inertia and it's hard to get them to change.

For instance, everybody says Facebook is aging out and you don't see Facebook trying to counter that at all, instead their strategy has been to buy newer platforms like Instagram, WhatsApp and Oculus and make little effort to integrate them. When they do try to start something new like Threads they can't translate their existing large user base and technological advantage into a successful new product.

Bier has a heck of a track record at starting new things, and I'm sure Musk is paying Bier plenty, but I'm not sure anyone can steer that ship in a new direction.

gsf_emergency_2

6 hours ago

Musk is having a midlife crisis like Zuck, tho' unlike Zuck all of his uh core territories need tending to..

For social media (as well as democracies?) users should be seen as the upstream, conservative side..? So it makes sense that social media is *the* tool to steer the national ship

Btw, Graeber's use of "corporatism" suggests that he harbors the same animosity towards trump as towards the center-left: in interviews he has consistently highlighted the unity aspect common to both neo- & classical corporatists (even if their effectiveness diverge)

But IMHO the biggest difference between the "fascist" and the "crypto-fascist" would be in their methods of control (as discussed in Winkler1976)

(According to en.wiki Robert Reich is a neo-corp)

If we view Musk /Zuck as military-style/militant corporatists, they would firmly be center-left?

No more motte&baileying the inner-kook, over (lol)

josefresco

14 hours ago

Related: (the guy they hired used this "trick" to grow his polling app tbh)

We eventually identified a psychological trick:

1. Set the app’s Instagram profile to Private.

2. Set the bio to something mysterious, e.g., “You’ve been invited to the new RHS app—stay tuned!”

3. Follow the targeted users.

4. Wait 24 hours to receive the inbound Follow Requests. (They were curious about our profile so they requested access)

5. At 4:00PM when school gets out (The Golden Launch HouseTM), add the App Store URL to the profile.

6. Finally, make the profile Public

Supposedly this loophole/exploit(?) has been closed.

PaulHoule

14 hours ago

It makes me think of the early King Games phase when it was highly effective to market a game virally by flooding players status with notifications about their progress in the game -- back when Facebook had a lot of user engagement but no real business plan.

Once they understood what their business was they were happy for you promote your game on Facebook but only if you paid them. So that channel got closed off, or at least was no longer a low-cost approach to marketing.

mrvenkman

15 hours ago

I’ll admit I know little about this guy.