>“Although X may not be a top priority for most advertisers in Brazil, the platform needs them more than they need it.”
Really does seem like it came down to this point. Musk hoped Brazilian users would get angry with the government, and they just downloaded bluesky instead. Musk lost a month of Brazilian revenue and gained nothing.
I followed some Brazilians on my (mostly unused) bluesky account. Will be interesting to see if they stick around there, return to twitter, or use both.
> Musk hoped Brazilian users would get angry with the government
It’s like when he claimed he’d “document in great detail” how the boycotting advertisers would kill Twitter, and was smugly confident “Earth” would care. Absolutely delusional. The interviewer even understandably struggled with that line of reasoning.
Is that really true? I think platforms have strong network effects that make migrations to alternatives (like Bluesky) very difficult. However, a government shutdown of that platform, with the power/threat of violence, can break through that network effect by making the platform inaccessible to both sides (the people making tweets and their audience).
This shows the true value of the platform to end users is near zero.
Is that really true? I think platforms have strong network effects that make migrations to alternatives (like Bluesky) very difficult.
The network effect has negative value to the user; if the platform went away, everyone would migrate to a better platform, and everyone would be better off. The network effect is an artificial barrier to competition that only benefits the owner of said network, and it only works because collective action is harder than collective inaction.
There’s no technical reason different social media networks couldn’t be made to interoperate. The barriers that keep other platforms from building off of a successful network are largely legal, not natural.
I’m also equating these kinds of network effects with other artificial barriers to competition, like price fixing or mandatory non-compete agreements.
Migrations are indeed difficult but not at all impossible it seems. It feels like a tipping point has been reached and activity of what I would call high quality posters is now at such a level on bluesky that I can’t read it all from the relatively few people I follow. Even my own posts are getting traction that they didn’t until very recently. And people seem to be joining now not only because Musk drove them away but because it’s worth it on its own merits.
The influx of Brazilian users to BlueSky was pretty public(1).
> What's the word for posts like these online?
The word is “post”. When someone writes a thing and puts it online with or without a supporting body of evidence they are engaged in posting.
For example you have posited without evidence that there is a need for a special word for a post without evidence. I don’t know if that claim is true or false but it is, undoubtedly, a post
It is customary to learn the local slang for posts when you’re riding the information superhighway but in a pinch everyone knows what a post is, as it is the product that comes from the process of posters posting.
Sticking to fundamentals can be good when for example a literal insane person tries to tell you that an Xer Xes Xs on X. That’s just not true, nobody believes that wording is right.
If somebody wants to interpret a mundane opinion online as some sort of arcane summoning incantation or volley of memetic warfare that is up to the reader, but “a ton of Brazilians signed up for bluesky” is generally accepted as fact and “it doesn’t seem like the fight with the Brazilian government really accomplished anything” is a pretty understandable opinion that doesn’t require a lot of mental gymnastics or bad faith to arrive at given public information.
It’s just a post. Somebody posted their opinion on the internet. What it becomes inside a specific reader’s mind is neither here nor there
“Speaking as if something is true” is how people often share opinions — especially mundane ones that a person wouldn’t expect to be picked apart
It appears as though GP found the word they were looking for, and would like to call that post a “prayer for the downfall of Elon Musk”… so I’m going to guess that the question was a weird attempt to mask a fandom complaint as a heady question about language, because “Why don’t we have a special word for when people aren’t as nice to Elon as I want them to be?” would sound downright insane
In general, I think you're looking for self-fulfilling prophecy. Hearing the prophecy induces behavior that leads to the prophecy coming true.
Although I'm not sure sigmar's observation fits this criteria as it's a discussion of events that already happened, or that it will be disseminated enough to change the future if you consider it as a prediction of future events should some other widely substitute service cross the Brazilian courts.
Ex-Twitter wasn't the first service to get blocked in Brazil. Brazilians know from experience that if the service they use gets blocked, they should look for a similar service that's not blocked, and get on with their life. When the one they used comes back, they often go back, but it probably depends on relative merits. If you're a competing service, it's a great way to get a lot of exposure, but sometimes the load is too much and you leave a poor impression.
I don’t think any comment anyone makes here is going to will anything into existence.
And it’s a fact that Musk lost Brazilian revenue, gained nothing and that some percentage of users would’ve switched to Bluesky, Threads etc. during the block.
I guess this confirms almost no one understood your original question. There's a phrase that got more popular in the past 5-10 years, but I guess still has pretty limited spread (I don't see it even on urban dictionary):
Really does seem like it came down to this point. Musk hoped Brazilian users would get angry with the government, and they just downloaded bluesky instead. Musk lost a month of Brazilian revenue and gained nothing.
I followed some Brazilians on my (mostly unused) bluesky account. Will be interesting to see if they stick around there, return to twitter, or use both.