Do you think that with Elon trying to make this similar to a Chinese "super app" that the FTC could step in and try to put a stop to it? Or am I misunderstanding the FTC's role? - not from USA.
Devin, 100% agree with perspective you add to Elon. And as any other innovator, he have flaws, lets take a momment and remeber all the flaws Steve jobs, Bill gates, da Vinci, Thomas Edison and Bezos. Like all humans, they got flows but they do stuff
You're completely incorrect about the state of bots on X. There are a few things going on at the same time that you're missing. 1. Bots do use "verified" accounts. Because X pays out money based on interactions from verified accounts, bot farms can dampen the cost of verification by directing large portion of bot activity towards their content-farm accounts. They can chargeback costs in two ways. First, from their own verified bot impressions, that are now paid and funneled back (or even other cooperating bot networks) and second, by self-botting metrics and harvesting engagement from legitimate users. Those accounts usually farm highest-engagement lowest-effort content, reposting viral posts from other sites, ragebait or copy-pasting a post that is blowing up in smaller community and exploding it to wider audience with self-boted boost. Your actual impression-botting service fee only needs to cover for the remaining undampened cost. X paying up to ~90% of revenue generated from verified account interactions makes the possible chargeback ceiling pretty high. You might even cycle the content-farm accounts because first $50,000 has ceiling of 97%. The more content-farm chargeback accounts you have, the closer to ceiling you can push. With one content-farm account, 100 000 bots spending 90% of their activity there will immediately show up on a radar. With 60 content-farm accounts, 100 000 bots spending 90% of their activity there will look like legitimate user activity. Larger bot network can feed more into itself while still looking valid. Depending on your botting prices, farmed engagement and chargeback efficiency, you can move your bot network more or less into human made posts and still come out positive. Paid verification is not a one way money hose. It can be looped with leakage. 2. You don't see verified bots because AI got better. I don't know if everyone memoryholed it, was more focused on nazi content being posted or it's actually bots themselves deliberately rewriting collective memory. There was plenty of bots with verified checkmarks bugging out while interacting with humans, responding with gibberish, writing a song when ordered to in reply etc. They all disappeared a few months later, not gradually but suddenly. Not because of paid verification, multiple months of it didn't help. It's because AI got better. When X rolled out the verification, all good AI models were private, available only through paid APIs. The better the bot, the more safeguards it would have and it would cost more. There was a lose-lose tradeoff present between available AI bots. You could use a cheap small model that wasn't well guarded and would spew gibberish every third response. Or you could use pricey large model that would be smart but require hackery, jailbreakes and gaslighting to not refuse impersonating X account every third response. And then first good large open source AI models got released (LLaMA) If you have model weights, you can just do whatever. Finetuning is dirt cheap and can be done on a regular workstation. If you're a botting company, you probably already have lots of Twitter/X data and now you get to put it to good use. Full range of model size variants was available, from the large expensive smart ones to the cheap tiny meh ones. With that, you can now eliminate all previous issues. Depending on the level of believability required by different content types, you can create specialized versions of different model sizes. Create variants of small model for celebrity comments, sports, outrage, general one sentence contentless responses that constitute 95% of all comments. Grab a medium model for higher threshold content types, gaming, cars, guns. Finetune away the refusals of the big-smart model for high expertise content. Now that finance bot account doesn't look most competent to an expert but neither do most real humans. Finally, finetune a special model that will select which of the other variants should be used for given post/reply. Refusals never happen because you've finetuned them completely away. Bot never breaks character because instead of being talked into impersonation, impersonation was finetuned into it. You're running your own models, not caring about provider outages. You get to run cheapest models most of the time, generating believable behavior between bots and most users. Rarely, when necessary you either switch to a smart model or ping human operator to take over. Or you can just never go more then 1 reply deep with anyone outside of bot network. Basically assume you're talking to a bot until proven otherwise. PS: If you agree that X doesn't have to make money because it's a political tool, why do you not apply the same to bots?
I'm listening to this while articles exists stating that China is frustrated about lowered X activity, Bluesky has overtaken Threads in users, and in the UK? Reddit is overtaking X in daily users. There's no responses by Devin to answer a LOT of articles spitting data right now. Including excessively high bot activity that runs contrary to what he's saying. I like a LOT of things Devin says, but when it comes to his optimism about Elon, the bias shows if you actually have been exposed to data he's glossing over. Because he **NEVER ADDRESSES NOR REFUTES THEM** If Devin did that in these videos I'd have a lot more respect for his claims. This is why PirateSoftware didn't bend when they were talking about twitch. Devin had no data to talk of, whereas Thor had data and at NO point did Devin actually talk data. Its fluff. Also Its very dishonest to misrepresent and say that people are leaving bluesky because of "the content". The problem is the actual rule violating harassment and hate speech not being moderated driving them away. It's actually really easy to represent your political beliefs without delving into that behavior.
@@DseanSupreme 100%. I feel like Devin over time has gone from a very information based youtube channel with some personality to help you as a creator or if you want a sight into what and how things happen to becoming the biggest "I'm a centrist I promise, Elon Musk is our savior I swear" that actively ignores data to push his own narrative. It's kinda pathetic ngl
@@zugetzuzu The fact that he started off appealing to a userbase that likes information is what got him into this position. You can't hypebeast shit to people that were drawn to supported facts and conclusions. We're not mad, just confused and disappointed. Right now I feel like either he goes stupid when it comes to X/Twitter, or he thinks his userbase is stupid. You're getting userbase traffic so it works, but yet your ad agency isn't buying ads. Why is that? Bot activity is down and human activity is up. Yet you still don't wanna buy ads? Why not get more engagement? The devil is in the missing details
my beef with twitter/x is the fact they ignore your content filters. in the settings you can go through the long and tedious task of filting out everything you dont want to see. I dont want to see political nonsense from either side. I dont want to see bitcoin/ crypto crap either. just fired up twitter for the first time in 5 days, clicked on my "following" tab, not a single post from anyone I follow it, its a wall of paid ads from .eth users, several paid political posts, or random economics crap. I have never engaged with that type of content to make the algorithm think I want to see it. I joined to keep up with and see what creators I follow are up too. not to see what flavor crayon the government is eating today.
although community notes can be useful, they are created with the idea that the truth is somehow democratic. especially since an account's followers are most likely to see the tweet and agree with it, they can mass downvote factually correct notes. I currently don't have a better solution, but there needs to be some kind of independent committee that corrects posts. however then you get into the conundrum of "well then who's in the committee? are they biased?" and around and around you go. even as community notes exist now people on the right say they have favoritism for the left so it's perceived as misinformation by some even in it's current state. until people gain some more trust in truth seeking institutions idk if any kind of note system will really help matters. :/
This guy said he was not political online, and like clockwork began to d*ck ride Elon for all his works. X is functionally inferior and what it boosts is a degradednright wing fever dream.
Yeah, I think the right still gets a sizeable boost on X as of now. The most frustrating part is that there are not strong enough corrective mechanisms for flat out misinformation, and I don't think elon cares because his response is always "everyone is wrong sometimes." At some point hopefully he will realize there a malicious actors who deliberately lie to confuse and misdirect people and will implement some policy to more harshly punish them. However, as of now you can just make shit up and (if you're unlucky) get a community note which carries a punishment so small calling it a "slap on the wrist" would be hyperbolic.
It was being used as a political tool long before Elon bought the company. You can also argue that Elon purchased the company BECAUSE it was being used as a political tool.
Twitter was certainly still full of politics, drama, and controversies, but it at least aggregated good content too. It had a use to me as a consumer. On X, creators are incentivized by the algorithm to share their hot-takes about politics, drama, and controversies, and to agree with Elon Musk. The algorithm disincentivizes sharing links to their content... so now they don't link their content anymore. Sometimes it feels like creators don't even CREATE content anymore. This will pay a toll on X in the long term. As a consumer, I'd rather follow the same person on Bluesky all else equal, because they're incentivized to share and create better content there.
This is a big miss, you're coming at this from a marketting perspective as a content creator, which has more value to you. Sure X is probably better than bluesky, but 99.9% of the people using EITHER site are not content creators and dont care about any of what you are saying. They dont want the most moderate platform, they dont care about having the most reach because they are nobodies and are always going to be nobodies. You're describing a niche value market use case for a social media site that is dependent on a broad wide user base engaging with the platform in a completely different perspective than you have. If the audience doesnt like X, all your positives will diminish over time if they leave for other platform alternatives.
Actually, data researchers have found an early indicator that they have about 3.5 (or 4.5 I don't remember the exact number) TIMES higher click through rates as well as having higher conversions on things such as subscriptions or bought items on bsky compared to on twitter. This is probably a big mix of the alarming amount of bots on twitter combined with external links being "deboosted"
in the general public doesn't want X or care about my niche value market use case why then does Twitter have 500 million MAUs (backlinko.com/twitter-users) vs Bluesky have 20 million TOTAL users (techcrunch.com/2024/11/19/bluesky-tops-20m-users-narrowing-gap-with-instagram-threads/) ????
If the left would use the platform more then it would be more neutral but the reality is each political side have chosen their preferred social media platforms and as such, they have become echo-chambers.
Why do you love it? Because it was a clever ruse to soothe the concerns of rubes? The richest man in the world is making a concerted effort to bend news and media for his own political goals and that doesn’t concern you at all?
@@JulienisInterested The people from all over left now that bsky is open because people don't want to see neo nazi rhetoric on the platform. It doesn't help that Researchers have found that Twitter boosts Republican and conspiracy talking points and himself (Queensland University of Technology) which in itself causes the left to get less visibility. So yeah, it's not an political neutral platform. Before he took over it was rather politically neutral but many conservatives would be banned for hate speech and similar things. Now they're getting boosted while spreading hate speech
Sorry but you are wrong about him wanting to create an open town square. Just because you say it doesn't make it true. That argument loses all basis in fact with his manipulation of the feed and reply algorithms to promote his tweets/replies and right wing tweets/replies. You can see this in action by just creating a new account or just seeing the feed for someone who follows/likes right/left politics. A person who follows left politics still gets right wing crap injected into there feed. A person who follows right politics doesn't and has to intentionally seek out left wing politics to see the other side. Queensland University of Technology just published a study about this and it's also not the first study proving this.
Yep, if Elon cared about an "open town square", he would build X on top of the AT Protocol or at least the ActivityPub protocol. BlueSky created ATProto and it's truly innovative. If you want a long-term town square then it's important to look at what technologies stand the test of time and that's things like the web and email. The web is built on top of HTTP protocol, social media should be build on AT Protocol.
can you share some evidence that the algorythm of the feed is trained to promote right wing political views? you dont need to go technical just give us some ranking parameters you think they are using to do that. I already know the answer but wanna give you the benefit of the doubt cause. I want to beliebe you but just because you say it doesnt make it true :-)
This is just categorically wrong. I am right wing in my feed is almost all people I follow, and then an equal amount of random content that is either left or right I see so many left-wing politicians, Hassan, and every single celebrity is left-wing.
Didn't Devin say it's doing better and "in time it will be a more moderate platform," which implies it's currently not there but trending in that direction? Your examples are saying he's wrong now, but he was clearly talking about the trend it's heading towards. I don't have a Twitter/X account, but from the outside looking in, it seemed as though it swung from being a very left-leaning platform to showing both sides more across the last couple of years. Then as we got really close to election, the mass exodus from X to Bluesky definitely swung things temporarily to the right. That's just what it seems like from my perspective. It could be you thought it was fair and balanced back when it was skewed left before Musk, so of course it would feel like more right-wing promotion is happening when suddenly things became closer to 50-50. But hey, if you have any links or info on this topic, I'd love to learn more
14:00 Sounds like the same exact problem old school RuneScape has. The botting problem is incredibly hard to combat, as they are adapting to changes as well.
Devin, do you unironically think that his goes with twitter was to make it a 'open town square'? I mean bro, he's literally Trump's personal ball fondler as we speak.
Elon isn’t perfect, but he has absolutely more pro free speech than the left. Users are given the tools to filter out the content they don’t want to see. Free speech is messy, but a way better deal than letting some massive corp decide what is and isn’t true and what I should and shouldn’t be able to see. Period. End of story for me.
12:06 the answer is a million percent no as it depends on ur political affiliation. Pro lgbt stuff or pro ukraine or pro migration stuff and your account gets ur post practically removed as it drastically lowers reach.
For 8:14, I'd argue Tesla is not a great company in terms of pushing humanity forwards because cars aren't the perfect transport solution. He admitted that Hyperloop wasnt even feasible so California didn't get a high speed train which would serve selling more cars. I will agree that spaceX and starlink are big impact projects.
I think Elon definetly said he wanted to a town square as you said, but hes not gone that direction at all. I dont even care what ones view of Trump are, Elon turned Twitter into an advertisering platform for himself and Trump.
You may be partly right, however, it’s way more of a free speech platform now than it was. That a W. Users are given the tools to censor what content they don’t want to see. I will never trust what some big corp decides is or is not true and what I should and should not be allowed to see. Period. End of story for me. Twitter and facebook were both banning people for saying lab leak, and now it’s a recognized possibility. That to me is all I needed to see.
I don't disagree with any of the projections of success for X, Tesla, SpaceX or Starlink. However I think this amount of success in this many domains and the recent direct involvement in politics is rife with "conflict of interest" concerns. It's simply bad for our society for any one person to have this much influence, whether you like them or not.
7:51 like you said, you're not left or right. but you're pro elon, of course you gonna said that elon is doing a great job on all his companies, X is great and you are seeing alot of real people and real engagement. ignoring the real X experience is more ads and bots then ever, and real problematic accounts (Peds, Naz) thats surfaces and X moderations is blidfolded. and even ignoring that elon continue do feed that left-right war saing this is "freespech", saing that you dont care about politcs and being pro elon, that is all feed with politcs its not honest on your part devin, its even worst this video looks like and PR annoucement of elon.
I'm sorry but this video felt more like an attempt to manufacture approval for Twitter more than anything else. There is a genuine concern that Twitter has evolved to a platform that primarily favors right winged / reactionary content and your only response to that is how you've personally seen more left winged focused content being shown on your timeline in these most recent weeks. What gives you the confidence that this will be the norm moving forward instead of seeing this as indicator that certain types of content may not succeed on that platform depending on how Elon sees fit?
Its hard to gauge the change and whether or not some of it is good or bad. Like we can see genuine impressions are up as you mentioned, but how many of those are bots? It doesn't really feel like there is transparency on that, which leads me to believe it is much more than what it is. On top of that, the amount of paid blue checkmark accounts being boosted has completely destroyed the reply section. I used to see more interesting stuff before, but much of the algortythm change for me has turned into what my facebook did in 2015-2017, which is why I left, which is generic videos and meme BS which just feels like bottom of the barrel engagement. I think you can make an argument if your are saying that there is more eyeballs on a given topic or post potentially (may not even be true with bots), but that doesn't make something enjoyable to use, or good for online discourse and the spread of misinformation on both sides.
Regardless of the person that Elon is, and my personal views on him. I moved away from Twitter cause of two things: firstly that they declared that everything posted on twitter would feed Grok (Side note: I think AI is a tool and like any tool, it can be used for good and bad depending on who is using it. I don't personally trust Twitter using AI responsibly), and secondly, the fact that they put a paywall on safety. And what I mean by that is that they declared that when you block someone, that person is now able to see all your posts and your profile. They cannot interact, but they can see them. This is a huge concern for anyone who has stalkers, parasocial followers, anyone who is actively bullied by people they know, or folks in the LGBTQIA who are not comfortable being open about that part of their lives with people they know in real life. This is a MASSIVE problem. Attention may be a great market... but I always have to ask what the cost of that attention is. There are several content creators who have prison sentences cause they wanted to capitalise on attention.
@AdmiralVortex true. There are always ways around security measures, but it's about making it more difficult and inconvenient to do, not about laying out the welcome mat. That specific change feels like a massive backward step in regards to making users FEEL safe. What was so wrong with keeping it as it was? Like trying to keep my personal theories out of it, what legitimate business reason was there for that change?
@@thirstandvanity No clue for what the business reason is. Maybe Devin can answer that one. Regardless, I think your comments on user safety hold no actual value in the examples you gave, and are just fearmongering at best
@AdmiralVortex i never intend to fearmonger as I genuinely don't think it serves any purpose. I can only talk from my own experience, and as someone who has had stalkers, that change instantly spiked my own fear as to whether it would reignite the hell i was dragged through. If there was a legitimate and understandable business reason as to why that change was made, I am open to hearing it. There are plenty of business decisions that are made that I disagree with but I understand why they were done, but I cannot fathom any "business" reasoning as to why that change was made.
@@thirstandvanity If it helps you any, I've had Elon Musk blocked for like 3 years on twitter and ever since this change I've seen his tweets twice, without any "you have this person blocked" in my "for you" page. IDK if this is something that has always been able to happen but it only recently started happening.
lol xD 7:20 - bullshit starts... As someone who is up to date in the world of engineering due to my profession I strongly recommend looking deeper than Twitter/X posts into ANY of the claims you are making Electric cars - this is the only thing I can sortof agree on - even though electric vehicles were a thing long long time ago, indeed when Elon Musk initially invested in Tesla - he did bring the electric cars into the mass market with very smart marketing strategy and making it be "the cool thing". Altho - if you look into Tesla right now (as a company not a stock ticker) - they really need something new, because the competition is eating them alive and Cybertruck wasn't it. Self Driving Cars? there is NOT A SINGLE self driving car on the market (as of now, either due to regulation or simply because self driving in the same environment as human drivers is currently not even close to being reliable as of now) and there won't be for some years... what we do have is advanced lane assistant not more not less... impressive - yes but Tesla is currently not even the leader in that tech (recommend checking out the Chinese brands - currently they have a slight edge in it compared to the rest of the world. Rocket/Spaceships that lands itself was already done by NASA in the 90s (how do you think do the rovers land on mars?). The project was simply abandoned for rockets because.... its simply not financially viable. The cost of refurbishing used rocket is close to equal to brand new rocket - if you look past spaceX PR and the big words of Gwynne Shotwell and into the actual numbers you will see that its just a PR stunt to get gov subsidies... Satelite internet - please -.- It was a thing in early 2000, and even now starlink doesn't have the best value offer on the market. (a quick google is all it takes). no ill will from me here - I think this video is a perfect summary to Twitter/X being the platform that molds the collective consciousness in a way that is simply not true. He is a very good marketer, he knows the right people and he does the right things in order to get publicity. This is an era of an influencer and he understands it very well which is how he became so successful, but let's not pretend that he is some sort of genius because that's just easy to disprove.
Hey I'm not trying to be an asshole or anything but I sat in a Model X that did not need any driver input the entire journey from the home garage to Getty museum in LA. So I'm not so sure about your self-driving cars comment.
@@tonycarpaccio9550 not an asshole comment at all - appreciate the conversation. and YES there are cases where Tesla, Waymo, Cruise or Baidu cars do indeed perform very well. BUT if we are talking self driving - it is much more than a trip across LA where roads are very well marked and there is lots of driver data that fed the learning algo. not every road fits those criteria even in the US. Plus there is the whole regulation part where right now driver has to be present and alert for the whole journey - but that's a whole different conversation. I've driven in model Y myself and indeed its a cool car, but the idea that the car itself will autonomously and more importantly RELIABLY operate on a daily basis is years away.
I think any time you find yourself saying that someone is "pushing humanity forward" while they are still ostensibly doing it, you have to start asking yourself if you haven't been captured by narrative. That's a difficult evaluation to make at the end of a person's lifetime, nevermind right in the middle of it.
This is a big hit. What's on top usually stays on top. Elon is wielding attention like a fencer, growing his brand every strike. If fifa, COD and madden still sell like they do, that's an indication that there is a silent majority who will just stick to what they know willingly. Game is game
Good video. But the comments on this video. Holy cow. “My feed only shows me right wing extremists so it’s an extremist site for right wing people”. Bro. It feeds you what you engage with. I interact with board game content and fantasy content on there so I see no political content. If I want to “trick” the algorithm I can interact with either side and I will get more of that content. If you think the algorithm is feeding you something from an extreme side. It’s because you’re engaging with it. This is not a super complicated algorithm.
I think you hit the nail on the head that X can just lose money forever, but I think that it will be outcompeted by other social media like reddit. That's just my opinion though. My question for you is how do advertisement campaigns perform on X? I think it's performance might be a reasonable proxy for it's users and replies being real or bots.
Hey Devin, love all your content but I have a question. The way you describe leverage is similar to the way you've described ROI (at least to me). Could you explain what the differnce between these two concepts are or are they the same thing?
Dude. Position your mic on the side of your face. Having it right below your mouth is picking up ALL your Ps. You're a podcaster FFS. Be considerate of the quality of your audio for the listener. It's not that difficult.
Weird to make fun of people that leave twitter for Blue Sky because they like the content better, would you rather them stay on twitter and complain about it?
i like bluesky cause it actually shows me content from who im following on my "following tab" if I click that on twitter, its all political crap from people I dont follow, or crypto peddlers.
@@pepsilove6306 Devin talks about how the market doesn't care about anything except if people like the product and he's right. It's the reason why Bluesky is growing, they're offering a better product for a general user in the minds of millions of people. I have no idea if that will last long term but twitter isn't entitled to people's attention, we can spend that where we want.
I left twitter because the content was terrible, outright porn, OF funnel accounts and annoying engagement bait. I used it primarily for NFL and NBA news and coverage, and guess what, I can get that on bluesky without all the annoying shit mixed in.
@@djudju8047 Yea it inevitably will if they get big at all. Engagement bait is less valuable if there aren't many people to impact so its not as prevalent yet
@@djudju8047 Bots wise? Perhaps. On twitter you can make an account without having an email verified so probably a bit more of a hassle. But at least bluesky removes crypto scams and other things that breach their TOS swiftly, such as hate speech (example: Things Elon occasionally retweets that talk about "Look at what they want for our future" fearmongering about people of color)
Hank Green made an interesting post about one aspect of the enshitification of a few social media platforms - particularly as it relates to content creators. curious for your thoughts
I hope you are right. Twitter could become trustworthy again with a competitor to fuel its innovation. Thats why bluesky/threads should be a real rival.
Not in love with the title. You split the focus with the x/twitter. Is bro doing algebra like I don't got time for algebra even though I normally always click on Nash videos?
I can both believe that Tesla stock is a good investment and that X is great for impressions but also not believe that Elon has any intention to make X an "open town square."
No sorry but this is wrong, if he is giving anecdotal evidence to why it’s a “town square”, we can give anecdotal evidence why this isn’t true. Any left wing post is filled with right wing replies and still plenty of bots. And as far as him saying there is amplified far left wing views with far right wing…. The only far left views is anything regarding the Middle East currently, which shares the same opinion as a lot of right wing views. Devin missed on this one.
Town squares aren't normally dominated by "far anything", anyway, unless something is about to go horribly wrong. If far left views on X are balancing out far right views that's not exactly a plus for the platform.
@@davidgarcia2016 BlueSky is open to anyone. The good thing about BlueSky is that it's built on AT Protocol which means it can truly be a "town square". If Elon cared so much about this, he would use AT Protocol.
Elon didn't sell any Tesla stock after its rise post the election which held on November 5th which the stock was worth around $250 and not $160 like you said (interesting that you don't see headlines saying Elon lost money when it went down from $360 to $338), the reason it went up to $250 before the election was because of the better than expected financial results in the previous quarter. Please do better research in your future videos.
Good Video Devin, but .. I disagree on the bot side of things. Advertiser are still important on X, despite Elon is willing to take the L, if necessary. It is some how close to the situation between Amazon and Twitch, Twitch is / was also a L for Amazon, but it doesn´t have a real impact on Amazon. Considering that Grok runs in the background of X and is or will also be trained on video material (Grok 1.5), it is a W for Elon. The implementation of paymentsystems / currencies on X is a W for Elon. X does have potential but it depends on in wich direction they want to develop X in the future ?! There are many ways to go on with this at that point and we all don´t really know ! All Elon Musk companies are also AI based, they are Software and hardware companies. launching and catching rockets, navigating and operating Satellites, the car Software and Self driving and so on. There is also still the Tesla bot (Optimus) and Neuralink, Software / AI based as well.
The thing that will make BlueSky successful is not that it's "left wing twitter", it's the AT Protocol. As a software developer, I recognize the innovation.
@@onyxdevil26 AT Protocol is open source and can be used for a lot more than just BlueSky. It allows you to use a domain name as your username and you can configure it so that all of your data can be hosted on your own server, or any server you like. By default, BlueSky hosts your data for you, but you can change it. Even if BlueSky doesn't stick around, I believe the AT Protocol will be quite useful for other applications. It's similar to web and email.
BlueSky servers also run the relay which is what connects everything. You can see another users data because of the relay. But, you don't have to use BlueSky for the relay either. AT Protocol allows anyone to use their own relay, so we aren't stuck on BlueSky for that either. A server that can handle the relay costs about $150 per month for 500k users. BlueSky is really just an app that people use to interact with the AT Protocol. They are handling the familiar user interface and the server hosting. Also, BlueSky is completely open source and many people have already built similar BlueSky clients.
Something I really like about BlueSky is that it allows us to create our social media experience however we want. It starts with a "Following" feed that just gets tweets from people we follow in chronological order. That's pretty much the main feed I use, but you can make your own feeds or use other feeds created by other users. So if you don't like the algorithm, you can use your own or one you like. You can have multiple completely customizable feeds. They also have starter packs that help people find others to follow with just a click of a button as well as block lists. Furthermore, I like how they handle moderation on BlueSky. It hardcodes "in-house moderation" to uphold some basic community guidelines while allowing users to subscribe to additional moderation services.
I think the AT Protocol is trying to solve 2 major problems. The first problem is that we get "walled-in" to many social media apps and it's difficult to leave. They don't make it easy to get your data and move it to somewhere else. There is no standard for this. We just request social media apps to give us our data and they email us a few days later with a zip file that's full of data that's difficult to use elsewhere. AT Protocol is trying to provide that standard so you can take your data and use it anywhere you want. It's your data hosted on servers of your choice and you can even host it on multiple servers in case one goes down. It's easy to leave an app since they are all just frontend clients, the servers hosting your data are separate. It's just JSON data.
X is fantastic for talking to people on a professional level. The first point contact for us when we're reaching out to work with someone is usually through X, and many times it's the last point of contact as they respond. Now buying ads, I'm a lot less interested in.
"Extrem left wing takes" - Ye right. WTF is even is that now days. Solidarity with the poor? Working public transport? Free healthcare? It is not extreme at all Devin.
@@GinSoakedBrain Lets say that small individual socialist pieces of legislation is socialism. IDK about you but if I can choose between billionaires (almost trilionaires now) making a few billions more or making sure nobody dies due to being to poor to live I'd rather go with socialism than capitalism, because capitalism actively chooses to hurt people for the benefit of those at the top
@@GinSoakedBrain Then what are extreme left wing takes? I mean like mainstream liberal ideas that are extreme, not fringe socialist ideas since you don't feel that socialism is a proper representation for "extreme leftism"
i don't think the exodus from x/twitter to bluesky mainly about left or right, but it's more about how elon trying to train AI using art that uploaded on twitter without artists permission (it's ultimately already part of the "ToS" for using twitter). twitter users aren't just from US, nobody outside US give a sht about US politic, people just use twitter as social media or promotional platform. that's most likely why twitter still doing fine to do those job. mark cuban moved to bluesky (and back again) due to political reasons, which ultimately not the reason why people moved to bluesky and he made that blunder. nobody care in japan or indonesia about US politic (twitter users in japan is massive), but since elon trying to train grok using artists arts without permission, people moved to bluesky. just to remember, art industry is massive and very influential, you can find artist with hundreds thousands followers, as soon as they moved, people moved too. artists in east tied to other industries too, like vtuber industry and gacha game industry which nowdays still dominating japan and indonesia market (they are benefiting each other as artist usualy make fanarts and vtubers will repost it and use it for thumbnail, the artist will get exposure from it). that's why anything that's not related to art will still fine (which ultimately why mark cuban back again) but not with art. but the problem with bluesky is here, they're heavy in censorship. twitter is probably still better "free speech" platform but they decide to hit artists, while bluesky is heavy at censorship for artists that moved to bluesky unable to express their arts (they even put sensitive content tag for drawing of dudes playing beach volley at beach). remember that bluesky exodus was starting when elon announced grok will train image for AI, not about election
@devinnash i disagree about the remark you said about rumble its a free speech alternative youtube not twitter and i think thats its the best platfom for democrat libs and republicans
No matter what was said here I think the platform is destined to fail. Attention and where the market is mean nothing once a right wing guy ultimately decides his ego is more important then anything else and Elon Musk is already kinda there its only a metter of time. You don't really get society Devin and what moves it, yes the system and business move the needle, but above everything its people and not all people are on twitter and people will continue to move away from it because of its toxicity and then it won't be anything really. I think the future of the internet will be that there will be like 3-5 twitter variants running around and they will incompass the values of certain groups. Twitter and Reddit will be Centrist and apolitical which your one of those for sure, Bluesky will be the new Tumblr (so left sure) and then all the shitty places will be right wingers with everyone dipping their wig into the video/streaming platforms since those are overall for everyone to use and have the most reach. To say that you don't have a political opinion when you say things like "Elon is the only one advancing humanity forward" is frankly just ignorance when you consider he of course would not be the only one to do that and be able to do that, its like saying Thanos is normal and right when its just not true. You and your friends like destiny and train will never understand that you CANNOT seperate this stuff from moral beliefs as a whole because the whole framework of said person would be incomplete in that regard and you are misinforming your audience actively. You know this is all subjective too, but you want to pretend that business data is science when you have literally been wrong many times in the past. I believed that you could be someone who could be trusted when it came to business, but I was wrong. You know 5 years in listening to you and understanding this stuff, but your just adding fuel to the burning house that is the internet and you are whats wrong with gaming business today too. We just don't need people like you to vote with their feet and lead the charge, you are not what makes things better and your return shows that literally. So anyway I think just like how I never use twitter myself and only youtube cause yk Im not a loser like you and YOUR streamer friends, I'm just not coming back here cause i'm done hearing from you. And unlike those suckers you talked about that came back to twitter anyway, I'll actually never come back to these videos cause I have more conviction then your whole business lol which isn't hard considering ya'll don't really make moves like that.
Thank you so much for this amazing video! A bit off-topic, but I wanted to ask: My OKX wallet holds some USDT, and I have the seed phrase. (alarm fetch churn bridge exercise tape speak race clerk couch crater letter). How should I go about transferring them to Binance?
Too many people with an emotional investment in X failing to have any sort of interesting comment section on this, but i appreciate the insight. If theyre clamping down on bots to the point that campaigns are now feasible again thats very interesting for the present and future direction.
Anyone that thinks twitter has less free speech today than it did before elon is utterly delusional. i despise his banning people that offend him personally, making him a massive hypocrite, but for almost any other case, it's better. People forgot over the 2012-2020 ramp-up of left-biased moderation on all of social media what a good half of the population thinks but was not allowed to say. we'll see how long it lasts.
I never comment, but I watch all of your videos religiously. This is one of the better ones imo, every take was spot on. Most people who disagree just don’t like seeing things on there that they dislike.
I used X to hear the right side of political stuff, and it has certainly centered a lot recently. X will be a super app. Not sure if it’s a good thing, but it will happen. Love the videos.
Devin saying what anyone who wasnt just "elon bad" was saying for the last few years. X/Twitter was never dead or going to die and now finally people are realizing that it's undeniably one of the most important social medias (besides youtube)
Just to be clear I do believe that Elon has intentions that are aimed at improving humanity. Investment into AI, getting to mars with affordable rockets that can be reused, and creating a universal "Town Square" are all very good things. There's just a lot of other things about him that conflict with his own goals that he either doesn't see because of tunnel vision or is drunk with power. These are all common pitfalls for people who come into a position of power, so it's not necessarily about him. It's possible to be doing positive things and negative things at the same time. As far as those goals to push humanity forward go, I fully support Elon. That's where it ends. I don't even want to start talking about the specifics, but anybody who is even remotely aware of politics should be able to answer that, especially for reasons that are directly related to my personal human rights.
Exactly. This administration will undoubtedly be good for Elon and his businesses, so long as Elon doesn't get on the bad side of Trump's ego. If he becomes the enemy of Trump, all of this will backfire. If he doesn't get on his bad side, but the administration gets blamed for the economy getting worse, then Elon and all his brands will suffer alongside that. What Devin is glazing over is that brands can and do get ruined over public opinion. If X engagement keeps dropping while others flourish, if US auto manufacturers can take advantage of the tariffs alongside Tesla and create a market for all the people who don't like or even the people who don't care about Elon, they just don't like the look and or functionality of Tesla vehicles - Then Tesla will be in trouble also. Most of the country isn't going to trust Elon/X/PayPal with their transactions or pseudo-banking needs. Devin is hugely underestimating the drag that Elon's personality will have on all his companies. He's right, the market will decide. But the problem is, this past election isn't the market. The market votes for vastly different reasons.
Of course "everyone" was wrong. The entire premise that he was buying Twitter to make money in the first place was just a goalpost move. He bought it because he hated the censorship that was happening while respecting the importance of Twitter's presence in modern discourse. This likely inspired him to then dig into the numbers, realize it's actually a treasure trove, and he can just fire half the people that work there to cut costs and keep the good shit, then monetize it a bit more, get as close to flat on liabilities as possible and enjoy the benefits of owning Twitter. Not only that but people were just incorrect with the numbers even after that, underestimating the various ways Twitter can funnel attention from many decentralized places to a single point via pushing engagement as an engine that is just not accessible for most businesses that exist. Most businesses have marketing teams, Elon has an entire platform marketing everything just by it existing within the sphere of his influence and being able to decide what is on there for others to see. It's a level of control of the internet's series of tubes that has authority in a way that is hard to put a value on correctly when looking only from the perspective of a company's earnings and projections.
I'm looking forward to the civil, sane, and reasonable discussions I've come to expect in the comments when posting a Twitter video!
Do you think that with Elon trying to make this similar to a Chinese "super app" that the FTC could step in and try to put a stop to it? Or am I misunderstanding the FTC's role? - not from USA.
Devin, 100% agree with perspective you add to Elon. And as any other innovator, he have flaws, lets take a momment and remeber all the flaws Steve jobs, Bill gates, da Vinci, Thomas Edison and Bezos. Like all humans, they got flows but they do stuff
Way to preempt and deflect any serious criticism! Good job!
@@percilenis8464 IT DIDNT WORK HELP
You're completely incorrect about the state of bots on X.
There are a few things going on at the same time that you're missing.
1. Bots do use "verified" accounts.
Because X pays out money based on interactions from verified accounts, bot farms can dampen the cost of verification by directing large portion of bot activity towards their content-farm accounts.
They can chargeback costs in two ways.
First, from their own verified bot impressions, that are now paid and funneled back (or even other cooperating bot networks) and second, by self-botting metrics and harvesting engagement from legitimate users.
Those accounts usually farm highest-engagement lowest-effort content, reposting viral posts from other sites, ragebait or copy-pasting a post that is blowing up in smaller community and exploding it to wider audience with self-boted boost.
Your actual impression-botting service fee only needs to cover for the remaining undampened cost.
X paying up to ~90% of revenue generated from verified account interactions makes the possible chargeback ceiling pretty high.
You might even cycle the content-farm accounts because first $50,000 has ceiling of 97%.
The more content-farm chargeback accounts you have, the closer to ceiling you can push.
With one content-farm account, 100 000 bots spending 90% of their activity there will immediately show up on a radar.
With 60 content-farm accounts, 100 000 bots spending 90% of their activity there will look like legitimate user activity.
Larger bot network can feed more into itself while still looking valid.
Depending on your botting prices, farmed engagement and chargeback efficiency, you can move your bot network more or less into human made posts and still come out positive.
Paid verification is not a one way money hose.
It can be looped with leakage.
2. You don't see verified bots because AI got better.
I don't know if everyone memoryholed it, was more focused on nazi content being posted or it's actually bots themselves deliberately rewriting collective memory.
There was plenty of bots with verified checkmarks bugging out while interacting with humans, responding with gibberish, writing a song when ordered to in reply etc.
They all disappeared a few months later, not gradually but suddenly.
Not because of paid verification, multiple months of it didn't help.
It's because AI got better.
When X rolled out the verification, all good AI models were private, available only through paid APIs.
The better the bot, the more safeguards it would have and it would cost more.
There was a lose-lose tradeoff present between available AI bots.
You could use a cheap small model that wasn't well guarded and would spew gibberish every third response.
Or you could use pricey large model that would be smart but require hackery, jailbreakes and gaslighting to not refuse impersonating X account every third response.
And then first good large open source AI models got released (LLaMA)
If you have model weights, you can just do whatever.
Finetuning is dirt cheap and can be done on a regular workstation.
If you're a botting company, you probably already have lots of Twitter/X data and now you get to put it to good use.
Full range of model size variants was available, from the large expensive smart ones to the cheap tiny meh ones.
With that, you can now eliminate all previous issues.
Depending on the level of believability required by different content types, you can create specialized versions of different model sizes.
Create variants of small model for celebrity comments, sports, outrage, general one sentence contentless responses that constitute 95% of all comments.
Grab a medium model for higher threshold content types, gaming, cars, guns.
Finetune away the refusals of the big-smart model for high expertise content.
Now that finance bot account doesn't look most competent to an expert but neither do most real humans.
Finally, finetune a special model that will select which of the other variants should be used for given post/reply.
Refusals never happen because you've finetuned them completely away.
Bot never breaks character because instead of being talked into impersonation, impersonation was finetuned into it.
You're running your own models, not caring about provider outages.
You get to run cheapest models most of the time, generating believable behavior between bots and most users.
Rarely, when necessary you either switch to a smart model or ping human operator to take over.
Or you can just never go more then 1 reply deep with anyone outside of bot network.
Basically assume you're talking to a bot until proven otherwise.
PS:
If you agree that X doesn't have to make money because it's a political tool, why do you not apply the same to bots?
great response
I'm listening to this while articles exists stating that China is frustrated about lowered X activity, Bluesky has overtaken Threads in users, and in the UK? Reddit is overtaking X in daily users.
There's no responses by Devin to answer a LOT of articles spitting data right now. Including excessively high bot activity that runs contrary to what he's saying.
I like a LOT of things Devin says, but when it comes to his optimism about Elon, the bias shows if you actually have been exposed to data he's glossing over. Because he **NEVER ADDRESSES NOR REFUTES THEM**
If Devin did that in these videos I'd have a lot more respect for his claims.
This is why PirateSoftware didn't bend when they were talking about twitch. Devin had no data to talk of, whereas Thor had data and at NO point did Devin actually talk data. Its fluff.
Also Its very dishonest to misrepresent and say that people are leaving bluesky because of "the content". The problem is the actual rule violating harassment and hate speech not being moderated driving them away. It's actually really easy to represent your political beliefs without delving into that behavior.
@@DseanSupreme 100%. I feel like Devin over time has gone from a very information based youtube channel with some personality to help you as a creator or if you want a sight into what and how things happen to becoming the biggest "I'm a centrist I promise, Elon Musk is our savior I swear" that actively ignores data to push his own narrative. It's kinda pathetic ngl
spot on @@zugetzuzu
@@zugetzuzu The fact that he started off appealing to a userbase that likes information is what got him into this position. You can't hypebeast shit to people that were drawn to supported facts and conclusions. We're not mad, just confused and disappointed.
Right now I feel like either he goes stupid when it comes to X/Twitter, or he thinks his userbase is stupid.
You're getting userbase traffic so it works, but yet your ad agency isn't buying ads. Why is that? Bot activity is down and human activity is up. Yet you still don't wanna buy ads? Why not get more engagement? The devil is in the missing details
my beef with twitter/x is the fact they ignore your content filters. in the settings you can go through the long and tedious task of filting out everything you dont want to see. I dont want to see political nonsense from either side. I dont want to see bitcoin/ crypto crap either. just fired up twitter for the first time in 5 days, clicked on my "following" tab, not a single post from anyone I follow it, its a wall of paid ads from .eth users, several paid political posts, or random economics crap. I have never engaged with that type of content to make the algorithm think I want to see it. I joined to keep up with and see what creators I follow are up too. not to see what flavor crayon the government is eating today.
super reasonable take and 100% agree
One thing I like about x right now is the notes under the tweets.
although community notes can be useful, they are created with the idea that the truth is somehow democratic. especially since an account's followers are most likely to see the tweet and agree with it, they can mass downvote factually correct notes. I currently don't have a better solution, but there needs to be some kind of independent committee that corrects posts. however then you get into the conundrum of "well then who's in the committee? are they biased?" and around and around you go. even as community notes exist now people on the right say they have favoritism for the left so it's perceived as misinformation by some even in it's current state. until people gain some more trust in truth seeking institutions idk if any kind of note system will really help matters. :/
@@glaciqueexactly...
The elon glazing is reaching krispy kreme levels
This guy said he was not political online, and like clockwork began to d*ck ride Elon for all his works.
X is functionally inferior and what it boosts is a degradednright wing fever dream.
0:40 yeah hard disagree. He started that way.. he then realized it can be used as a political tool.
Yeah, I think the right still gets a sizeable boost on X as of now. The most frustrating part is that there are not strong enough corrective mechanisms for flat out misinformation, and I don't think elon cares because his response is always "everyone is wrong sometimes." At some point hopefully he will realize there a malicious actors who deliberately lie to confuse and misdirect people and will implement some policy to more harshly punish them. However, as of now you can just make shit up and (if you're unlucky) get a community note which carries a punishment so small calling it a "slap on the wrist" would be hyperbolic.
It was being used as a political tool long before Elon bought the company. You can also argue that Elon purchased the company BECAUSE it was being used as a political tool.
Saying that X is becoming more center or showing an even spread of political content was the hottest take of the video with anecdotal evidence.
Yeah shit is completely wrong.
Even cnn has reported on it becoming more center what are you talking about?
Living in a bubble. Even CNN showed that X user base is split even (48% DEM, 47% GOP)
@@themasterseye And a study Queensland University of Technology beg to differ massively
people trust cnn?
Twitter was certainly still full of politics, drama, and controversies, but it at least aggregated good content too. It had a use to me as a consumer.
On X, creators are incentivized by the algorithm to share their hot-takes about politics, drama, and controversies, and to agree with Elon Musk. The algorithm disincentivizes sharing links to their content... so now they don't link their content anymore. Sometimes it feels like creators don't even CREATE content anymore.
This will pay a toll on X in the long term. As a consumer, I'd rather follow the same person on Bluesky all else equal, because they're incentivized to share and create better content there.
This is a big miss, you're coming at this from a marketting perspective as a content creator, which has more value to you. Sure X is probably better than bluesky, but 99.9% of the people using EITHER site are not content creators and dont care about any of what you are saying. They dont want the most moderate platform, they dont care about having the most reach because they are nobodies and are always going to be nobodies. You're describing a niche value market use case for a social media site that is dependent on a broad wide user base engaging with the platform in a completely different perspective than you have. If the audience doesnt like X, all your positives will diminish over time if they leave for other platform alternatives.
I stopped using Twitter before elon bought it and brought back all the interesting people
Actually, data researchers have found an early indicator that they have about 3.5 (or 4.5 I don't remember the exact number) TIMES higher click through rates as well as having higher conversions on things such as subscriptions or bought items on bsky compared to on twitter. This is probably a big mix of the alarming amount of bots on twitter combined with external links being "deboosted"
And that broad user base comes from the platform not being politically affiliated. Hence why bluesky will fail.
in the general public doesn't want X or care about my niche value market use case why then does Twitter have 500 million MAUs (backlinko.com/twitter-users) vs Bluesky have 20 million TOTAL users (techcrunch.com/2024/11/19/bluesky-tops-20m-users-narrowing-gap-with-instagram-threads/) ????
@@devinnash Reading comprehension: "If the audience doesn't like X..." describes the consequences *if* the audience leaves
I love the Elon 2022 tweet of saying “this needs to be a politically neutral platform upsetting the far left and far right equally” 💀💀
It boosts right wing heavily. This is one o one Goebbels propaganda, that will destroy the country eventually.
If the left would use the platform more then it would be more neutral but the reality is each political side have chosen their preferred social media platforms and as such, they have become echo-chambers.
Why do you love it? Because it was a clever ruse to soothe the concerns of rubes?
The richest man in the world is making a concerted effort to bend news and media for his own political goals and that doesn’t concern you at all?
@@JulienisInterested The people from all over left now that bsky is open because people don't want to see neo nazi rhetoric on the platform. It doesn't help that Researchers have found that Twitter boosts Republican and conspiracy talking points and himself (Queensland University of Technology) which in itself causes the left to get less visibility. So yeah, it's not an political neutral platform. Before he took over it was rather politically neutral but many conservatives would be banned for hate speech and similar things. Now they're getting boosted while spreading hate speech
@@JulienisInterested I see wackos from both ends of the spectrum on X. I don't see many moderate takes though.
This might be Devin's worst take.
I like Devon, but he does like Elon too much while trying to hide it
@@voultronix761 I don't think he even really tries to hide it. He's pretty outspoken about his pro-Elon opinions.
"elon musk is saving astronauts" lmao Dude needs to watch a few thunderfoot videos
Sorry but you are wrong about him wanting to create an open town square. Just because you say it doesn't make it true. That argument loses all basis in fact with his manipulation of the feed and reply algorithms to promote his tweets/replies and right wing tweets/replies. You can see this in action by just creating a new account or just seeing the feed for someone who follows/likes right/left politics. A person who follows left politics still gets right wing crap injected into there feed. A person who follows right politics doesn't and has to intentionally seek out left wing politics to see the other side. Queensland University of Technology just published a study about this and it's also not the first study proving this.
Yep, if Elon cared about an "open town square", he would build X on top of the AT Protocol or at least the ActivityPub protocol. BlueSky created ATProto and it's truly innovative. If you want a long-term town square then it's important to look at what technologies stand the test of time and that's things like the web and email. The web is built on top of HTTP protocol, social media should be build on AT Protocol.
can you share some evidence that the algorythm of the feed is trained to promote right wing political views? you dont need to go technical just give us some ranking parameters you think they are using to do that. I already know the answer but wanna give you the benefit of the doubt cause. I want to beliebe you but just because you say it doesnt make it true :-)
This is just categorically wrong. I am right wing in my feed is almost all people I follow, and then an equal amount of random content that is either left or right I see so many left-wing politicians, Hassan, and every single celebrity is left-wing.
Lmao
Didn't Devin say it's doing better and "in time it will be a more moderate platform," which implies it's currently not there but trending in that direction? Your examples are saying he's wrong now, but he was clearly talking about the trend it's heading towards.
I don't have a Twitter/X account, but from the outside looking in, it seemed as though it swung from being a very left-leaning platform to showing both sides more across the last couple of years. Then as we got really close to election, the mass exodus from X to Bluesky definitely swung things temporarily to the right.
That's just what it seems like from my perspective. It could be you thought it was fair and balanced back when it was skewed left before Musk, so of course it would feel like more right-wing promotion is happening when suddenly things became closer to 50-50.
But hey, if you have any links or info on this topic, I'd love to learn more
14:00
Sounds like the same exact problem old school RuneScape has. The botting problem is incredibly hard to combat, as they are adapting to changes as well.
Devin, do you unironically think that his goes with twitter was to make it a 'open town square'? I mean bro, he's literally Trump's personal ball fondler as we speak.
Elon isn’t perfect, but he has absolutely more pro free speech than the left. Users are given the tools to filter out the content they don’t want to see. Free speech is messy, but a way better deal than letting some massive corp decide what is and isn’t true and what I should and shouldn’t be able to see. Period. End of story for me.
12:06 the answer is a million percent no as it depends on ur political affiliation. Pro lgbt stuff or pro ukraine or pro migration stuff and your account gets ur post practically removed as it drastically lowers reach.
TL;DW Elon Glazing
For 8:14, I'd argue Tesla is not a great company in terms of pushing humanity forwards because cars aren't the perfect transport solution. He admitted that Hyperloop wasnt even feasible so California didn't get a high speed train which would serve selling more cars. I will agree that spaceX and starlink are big impact projects.
I think Elon definetly said he wanted to a town square as you said, but hes not gone that direction at all. I dont even care what ones view of Trump are, Elon turned Twitter into an advertisering platform for himself and Trump.
You may be partly right, however, it’s way more of a free speech platform now than it was. That a W. Users are given the tools to censor what content they don’t want to see. I will never trust what some big corp decides is or is not true and what I should and should not be allowed to see. Period. End of story for me.
Twitter and facebook were both banning people for saying lab leak, and now it’s a recognized possibility. That to me is all I needed to see.
I don't disagree with any of the projections of success for X, Tesla, SpaceX or Starlink. However I think this amount of success in this many domains and the recent direct involvement in politics is rife with "conflict of interest" concerns. It's simply bad for our society for any one person to have this much influence, whether you like them or not.
7:51 like you said, you're not left or right. but you're pro elon, of course you gonna said that elon is doing a great job on all his companies, X is great and you are seeing alot of real people and real engagement. ignoring the real X experience is more ads and bots then ever, and real problematic accounts (Peds, Naz) thats surfaces and X moderations is blidfolded. and even ignoring that elon continue do feed that left-right war saing this is "freespech", saing that you dont care about politcs and being pro elon, that is all feed with politcs its not honest on your part devin, its even worst this video looks like and PR annoucement of elon.
Devin Nash, still alive. We thought he went covert ops & took over the twitch bot net game.
I'm sorry but this video felt more like an attempt to manufacture approval for Twitter more than anything else. There is a genuine concern that Twitter has evolved to a platform that primarily favors right winged / reactionary content and your only response to that is how you've personally seen more left winged focused content being shown on your timeline in these most recent weeks. What gives you the confidence that this will be the norm moving forward instead of seeing this as indicator that certain types of content may not succeed on that platform depending on how Elon sees fit?
That's exactly what it is
Its hard to gauge the change and whether or not some of it is good or bad. Like we can see genuine impressions are up as you mentioned, but how many of those are bots? It doesn't really feel like there is transparency on that, which leads me to believe it is much more than what it is. On top of that, the amount of paid blue checkmark accounts being boosted has completely destroyed the reply section.
I used to see more interesting stuff before, but much of the algortythm change for me has turned into what my facebook did in 2015-2017, which is why I left, which is generic videos and meme BS which just feels like bottom of the barrel engagement.
I think you can make an argument if your are saying that there is more eyeballs on a given topic or post potentially (may not even be true with bots), but that doesn't make something enjoyable to use, or good for online discourse and the spread of misinformation on both sides.
Would you recommend paying for premium to upload longer videos, and do you think the boost to once posts is worth it?
And just 3 weeks ago you were absolutely losing your mind over X being ranked high on a tierlist for content creators...
Regardless of the person that Elon is, and my personal views on him. I moved away from Twitter cause of two things: firstly that they declared that everything posted on twitter would feed Grok (Side note: I think AI is a tool and like any tool, it can be used for good and bad depending on who is using it. I don't personally trust Twitter using AI responsibly), and secondly, the fact that they put a paywall on safety. And what I mean by that is that they declared that when you block someone, that person is now able to see all your posts and your profile. They cannot interact, but they can see them. This is a huge concern for anyone who has stalkers, parasocial followers, anyone who is actively bullied by people they know, or folks in the LGBTQIA who are not comfortable being open about that part of their lives with people they know in real life. This is a MASSIVE problem.
Attention may be a great market... but I always have to ask what the cost of that attention is. There are several content creators who have prison sentences cause they wanted to capitalise on attention.
They could already see your posts through a block. It's called a "burner account"
Nothing has functionally changed in that regard
@AdmiralVortex true. There are always ways around security measures, but it's about making it more difficult and inconvenient to do, not about laying out the welcome mat. That specific change feels like a massive backward step in regards to making users FEEL safe. What was so wrong with keeping it as it was? Like trying to keep my personal theories out of it, what legitimate business reason was there for that change?
@@thirstandvanity No clue for what the business reason is. Maybe Devin can answer that one.
Regardless, I think your comments on user safety hold no actual value in the examples you gave, and are just fearmongering at best
@AdmiralVortex i never intend to fearmonger as I genuinely don't think it serves any purpose. I can only talk from my own experience, and as someone who has had stalkers, that change instantly spiked my own fear as to whether it would reignite the hell i was dragged through.
If there was a legitimate and understandable business reason as to why that change was made, I am open to hearing it. There are plenty of business decisions that are made that I disagree with but I understand why they were done, but I cannot fathom any "business" reasoning as to why that change was made.
@@thirstandvanity If it helps you any, I've had Elon Musk blocked for like 3 years on twitter and ever since this change I've seen his tweets twice, without any "you have this person blocked" in my "for you" page. IDK if this is something that has always been able to happen but it only recently started happening.
lol xD 7:20 - bullshit starts... As someone who is up to date in the world of engineering due to my profession I strongly recommend looking deeper than Twitter/X posts into ANY of the claims you are making
Electric cars - this is the only thing I can sortof agree on - even though electric vehicles were a thing long long time ago, indeed when Elon Musk initially invested in Tesla - he did bring the electric cars into the mass market with very smart marketing strategy and making it be "the cool thing". Altho - if you look into Tesla right now (as a company not a stock ticker) - they really need something new, because the competition is eating them alive and Cybertruck wasn't it.
Self Driving Cars? there is NOT A SINGLE self driving car on the market (as of now, either due to regulation or simply because self driving in the same environment as human drivers is currently not even close to being reliable as of now) and there won't be for some years... what we do have is advanced lane assistant not more not less... impressive - yes but Tesla is currently not even the leader in that tech (recommend checking out the Chinese brands - currently they have a slight edge in it compared to the rest of the world.
Rocket/Spaceships that lands itself was already done by NASA in the 90s (how do you think do the rovers land on mars?). The project was simply abandoned for rockets because.... its simply not financially viable. The cost of refurbishing used rocket is close to equal to brand new rocket - if you look past spaceX PR and the big words of Gwynne Shotwell and into the actual numbers you will see that its just a PR stunt to get gov subsidies...
Satelite internet - please -.- It was a thing in early 2000, and even now starlink doesn't have the best value offer on the market. (a quick google is all it takes).
no ill will from me here - I think this video is a perfect summary to Twitter/X being the platform that molds the collective consciousness in a way that is simply not true. He is a very good marketer, he knows the right people and he does the right things in order to get publicity. This is an era of an influencer and he understands it very well which is how he became so successful, but let's not pretend that he is some sort of genius because that's just easy to disprove.
Hey I'm not trying to be an asshole or anything but I sat in a Model X that did not need any driver input the entire journey from the home garage to Getty museum in LA. So I'm not so sure about your self-driving cars comment.
Copium.
@@TeslasMoustache419 what other reply could I expect from "TeslaMoustache419" xD
@@tonycarpaccio9550 not an asshole comment at all - appreciate the conversation.
and YES there are cases where Tesla, Waymo, Cruise or Baidu cars do indeed perform very well. BUT if we are talking self driving - it is much more than a trip across LA where roads are very well marked and there is lots of driver data that fed the learning algo. not every road fits those criteria even in the US. Plus there is the whole regulation part where right now driver has to be present and alert for the whole journey - but that's a whole different conversation. I've driven in model Y myself and indeed its a cool car, but the idea that the car itself will autonomously and more importantly RELIABLY operate on a daily basis is years away.
I think any time you find yourself saying that someone is "pushing humanity forward" while they are still ostensibly doing it, you have to start asking yourself if you haven't been captured by narrative. That's a difficult evaluation to make at the end of a person's lifetime, nevermind right in the middle of it.
Elon is an oligarch.
This is a big hit.
What's on top usually stays on top. Elon is wielding attention like a fencer, growing his brand every strike. If fifa, COD and madden still sell like they do, that's an indication that there is a silent majority who will just stick to what they know willingly.
Game is game
Good video. But the comments on this video. Holy cow. “My feed only shows me right wing extremists so it’s an extremist site for right wing people”. Bro. It feeds you what you engage with. I interact with board game content and fantasy content on there so I see no political content. If I want to “trick” the algorithm I can interact with either side and I will get more of that content.
If you think the algorithm is feeding you something from an extreme side. It’s because you’re engaging with it. This is not a super complicated algorithm.
I think you hit the nail on the head that X can just lose money forever, but I think that it will be outcompeted by other social media like reddit. That's just my opinion though. My question for you is how do advertisement campaigns perform on X? I think it's performance might be a reasonable proxy for it's users and replies being real or bots.
Reddit will never be more popular than X because Reddit doesn’t support free speech..
Reddit is riddled with censorship
That stock jump was investors essentially saying that corruption will happen.
Hey Devin, love all your content but I have a question. The way you describe leverage is similar to the way you've described ROI (at least to me). Could you explain what the differnce between these two concepts are or are they the same thing?
People so mad in the comments are to blinded by their hatred of Elon.
Dude. Position your mic on the side of your face. Having it right below your mouth is picking up ALL your Ps. You're a podcaster FFS. Be considerate of the quality of your audio for the listener. It's not that difficult.
Incredible! Great takess
Weird to make fun of people that leave twitter for Blue Sky because they like the content better, would you rather them stay on twitter and complain about it?
i like bluesky cause it actually shows me content from who im following on my "following tab" if I click that on twitter, its all political crap from people I dont follow, or crypto peddlers.
@@pepsilove6306 Devin talks about how the market doesn't care about anything except if people like the product and he's right. It's the reason why Bluesky is growing, they're offering a better product for a general user in the minds of millions of people. I have no idea if that will last long term but twitter isn't entitled to people's attention, we can spend that where we want.
what about people who just want step away and not engage in social media
I left twitter because the content was terrible, outright porn, OF funnel accounts and annoying engagement bait. I used it primarily for NFL and NBA news and coverage, and guess what, I can get that on bluesky without all the annoying shit mixed in.
This is why people leave, some for sure leave due to Elon owning it but the level of spam, porn and garbage on there now makes it unusable
Wouldn't the same thing happen on Bluesky ?
@@djudju8047 Yea it inevitably will if they get big at all. Engagement bait is less valuable if there aren't many people to impact so its not as prevalent yet
@@djudju8047 Bots wise? Perhaps. On twitter you can make an account without having an email verified so probably a bit more of a hassle. But at least bluesky removes crypto scams and other things that breach their TOS swiftly, such as hate speech (example: Things Elon occasionally retweets that talk about "Look at what they want for our future" fearmongering about people of color)
Same, destiny corn videos appearing in feed, I'm out. I would go on there for news, but not worth it.
Dude bought a $44 billion dollar loss leader.
Devin is 100% correct, yall are malding lol
Too much 'corn', OF gals, gore etc. I would go on there for news, but not worth it. I don't want to see Destiny's corn vids in my feed.
Community notes should have always been a thing
Hank Green made an interesting post about one aspect of the enshitification of a few social media platforms - particularly as it relates to content creators. curious for your thoughts
this devin nash guy is kinda a genius
Banger video
how does one start learning the skills necessary to work for you Devin?
He only hires people from third world countries so he doesnt have to pay them much, so I doubt you would want to
Starlink has actually already made its way into the DoD contract world in various ways, including Naval Ships and spaceforce.
I hope you are right.
Twitter could become trustworthy again with a competitor to fuel its innovation.
Thats why bluesky/threads should be a real rival.
Not in love with the title. You split the focus with the x/twitter. Is bro doing algebra like I don't got time for algebra even though I normally always click on Nash videos?
I can both believe that Tesla stock is a good investment and that X is great for impressions but also not believe that Elon has any intention to make X an "open town square."
No sorry but this is wrong, if he is giving anecdotal evidence to why it’s a “town square”, we can give anecdotal evidence why this isn’t true. Any left wing post is filled with right wing replies and still plenty of bots. And as far as him saying there is amplified far left wing views with far right wing…. The only far left views is anything regarding the Middle East currently, which shares the same opinion as a lot of right wing views. Devin missed on this one.
Town squares aren't normally dominated by "far anything", anyway, unless something is about to go horribly wrong. If far left views on X are balancing out far right views that's not exactly a plus for the platform.
Bluesky is a great platform. I am tired of seeing the bots and really disturbing content on X (Twitter) honestly.
Bluesky is great if you like only agreeing with one side of the conversation, that's about it
mental midget 😹🫵
They mute voices on the right and therefore limit free speech. It’s literally just another echo chamber Reddit of leftist ideas. No thanks.
@@davidgarcia2016 BlueSky is open to anyone. The good thing about BlueSky is that it's built on AT Protocol which means it can truly be a "town square". If Elon cared so much about this, he would use AT Protocol.
@@davidgarcia2016yea x is for toxic negativity and bluesky is for toxic positivity.
Both suck
Elon didn't sell any Tesla stock after its rise post the election which held on November 5th which the stock was worth around $250 and not $160 like you said (interesting that you don't see headlines saying Elon lost money when it went down from $360 to $338), the reason it went up to $250 before the election was because of the better than expected financial results in the previous quarter.
Please do better research in your future videos.
Good Video Devin, but ..
I disagree on the bot side of things.
Advertiser are still important on X, despite Elon is willing to take the L, if necessary. It is some how close to the situation between Amazon and Twitch, Twitch is / was also a L for Amazon, but it doesn´t have a real impact on Amazon.
Considering that Grok runs in the background of X and is or will also be trained on video material (Grok 1.5), it is a W for Elon. The implementation of paymentsystems / currencies on X is a W for Elon. X does have potential but it depends on in wich direction they want to develop X in the future ?!
There are many ways to go on with this at that point and we all don´t really know !
All Elon Musk companies are also AI based, they are Software and hardware companies. launching and catching rockets, navigating and operating Satellites, the car Software and Self driving and so on. There is also still the Tesla bot (Optimus) and Neuralink, Software / AI based as well.
The thing that will make BlueSky successful is not that it's "left wing twitter", it's the AT Protocol. As a software developer, I recognize the innovation.
lol
@@onyxdevil26 AT Protocol is open source and can be used for a lot more than just BlueSky. It allows you to use a domain name as your username and you can configure it so that all of your data can be hosted on your own server, or any server you like. By default, BlueSky hosts your data for you, but you can change it. Even if BlueSky doesn't stick around, I believe the AT Protocol will be quite useful for other applications. It's similar to web and email.
BlueSky servers also run the relay which is what connects everything. You can see another users data because of the relay. But, you don't have to use BlueSky for the relay either. AT Protocol allows anyone to use their own relay, so we aren't stuck on BlueSky for that either. A server that can handle the relay costs about $150 per month for 500k users.
BlueSky is really just an app that people use to interact with the AT Protocol. They are handling the familiar user interface and the server hosting. Also, BlueSky is completely open source and many people have already built similar BlueSky clients.
Something I really like about BlueSky is that it allows us to create our social media experience however we want. It starts with a "Following" feed that just gets tweets from people we follow in chronological order. That's pretty much the main feed I use, but you can make your own feeds or use other feeds created by other users. So if you don't like the algorithm, you can use your own or one you like. You can have multiple completely customizable feeds.
They also have starter packs that help people find others to follow with just a click of a button as well as block lists. Furthermore, I like how they handle moderation on BlueSky. It hardcodes "in-house moderation" to uphold some basic community guidelines while allowing users to subscribe to additional moderation services.
I think the AT Protocol is trying to solve 2 major problems.
The first problem is that we get "walled-in" to many social media apps and it's difficult to leave. They don't make it easy to get your data and move it to somewhere else. There is no standard for this. We just request social media apps to give us our data and they email us a few days later with a zip file that's full of data that's difficult to use elsewhere.
AT Protocol is trying to provide that standard so you can take your data and use it anywhere you want. It's your data hosted on servers of your choice and you can even host it on multiple servers in case one goes down. It's easy to leave an app since they are all just frontend clients, the servers hosting your data are separate. It's just JSON data.
I love how much your position has changed on this. LFG!
Wow, 29 minutes in and no secret callout. DISAPPOINTED!
I genuinely just don't have a good time interacting on Twitter as much anymore. Things feel on edge in so many places,
X is fantastic for talking to people on a professional level. The first point contact for us when we're reaching out to work with someone is usually through X, and many times it's the last point of contact as they respond. Now buying ads, I'm a lot less interested in.
yeah X is basically a loss leader its like how the worlds event for league of legends is a loss leader for riot
"Extrem left wing takes" - Ye right. WTF is even is that now days. Solidarity with the poor? Working public transport? Free healthcare? It is not extreme at all Devin.
Those are not extreme left wing takes. That's just socialism. I think you're out of the loop on things.
@@GinSoakedBrain Lets say that small individual socialist pieces of legislation is socialism. IDK about you but if I can choose between billionaires (almost trilionaires now) making a few billions more or making sure nobody dies due to being to poor to live I'd rather go with socialism than capitalism, because capitalism actively chooses to hurt people for the benefit of those at the top
@@zugetzuzu The problem isn't capitalism. It's corruption. Corruption effects any and all forms of government if left unchecked.
@@GinSoakedBrain Then what are extreme left wing takes? I mean like mainstream liberal ideas that are extreme, not fringe socialist ideas since you don't feel that socialism is a proper representation for "extreme leftism"
i don't think the exodus from x/twitter to bluesky mainly about left or right, but it's more about how elon trying to train AI using art that uploaded on twitter without artists permission (it's ultimately already part of the "ToS" for using twitter). twitter users aren't just from US, nobody outside US give a sht about US politic, people just use twitter as social media or promotional platform. that's most likely why twitter still doing fine to do those job. mark cuban moved to bluesky (and back again) due to political reasons, which ultimately not the reason why people moved to bluesky and he made that blunder. nobody care in japan or indonesia about US politic (twitter users in japan is massive), but since elon trying to train grok using artists arts without permission, people moved to bluesky. just to remember, art industry is massive and very influential, you can find artist with hundreds thousands followers, as soon as they moved, people moved too. artists in east tied to other industries too, like vtuber industry and gacha game industry which nowdays still dominating japan and indonesia market (they are benefiting each other as artist usualy make fanarts and vtubers will repost it and use it for thumbnail, the artist will get exposure from it). that's why anything that's not related to art will still fine (which ultimately why mark cuban back again) but not with art.
but the problem with bluesky is here, they're heavy in censorship. twitter is probably still better "free speech" platform but they decide to hit artists, while bluesky is heavy at censorship for artists that moved to bluesky unable to express their arts (they even put sensitive content tag for drawing of dudes playing beach volley at beach). remember that bluesky exodus was starting when elon announced grok will train image for AI, not about election
@devinnash i disagree about the remark you said about rumble its a free speech alternative youtube not twitter and i think thats its the best platfom for democrat libs and republicans
No matter what was said here I think the platform is destined to fail. Attention and where the market is mean nothing once a right wing guy ultimately decides his ego is more important then anything else and Elon Musk is already kinda there its only a metter of time. You don't really get society Devin and what moves it, yes the system and business move the needle, but above everything its people and not all people are on twitter and people will continue to move away from it because of its toxicity and then it won't be anything really. I think the future of the internet will be that there will be like 3-5 twitter variants running around and they will incompass the values of certain groups. Twitter and Reddit will be Centrist and apolitical which your one of those for sure, Bluesky will be the new Tumblr (so left sure) and then all the shitty places will be right wingers with everyone dipping their wig into the video/streaming platforms since those are overall for everyone to use and have the most reach.
To say that you don't have a political opinion when you say things like "Elon is the only one advancing humanity forward" is frankly just ignorance when you consider he of course would not be the only one to do that and be able to do that, its like saying Thanos is normal and right when its just not true. You and your friends like destiny and train will never understand that you CANNOT seperate this stuff from moral beliefs as a whole because the whole framework of said person would be incomplete in that regard and you are misinforming your audience actively. You know this is all subjective too, but you want to pretend that business data is science when you have literally been wrong many times in the past.
I believed that you could be someone who could be trusted when it came to business, but I was wrong. You know 5 years in listening to you and understanding this stuff, but your just adding fuel to the burning house that is the internet and you are whats wrong with gaming business today too. We just don't need people like you to vote with their feet and lead the charge, you are not what makes things better and your return shows that literally.
So anyway I think just like how I never use twitter myself and only youtube cause yk Im not a loser like you and YOUR streamer friends, I'm just not coming back here cause i'm done hearing from you. And unlike those suckers you talked about that came back to twitter anyway, I'll actually never come back to these videos cause I have more conviction then your whole business lol which isn't hard considering ya'll don't really make moves like that.
I don't trust it. It looks dark.😊
good video, but months too late. This was pretty obvious and yet you trashed the way he run twitter. Good to see you saw the stratetgy after all!
Extreme right + extreme left doesn't make a moderate platform. It makes it a clown show.
You sound more and more like a scammer
Elon musk is pushing humanity foward the same as hiter.
You people are such neurotic lunatics lol
Explain. Thats a crazy statement.
You're a m0r0n.
Op watches msnbc and is parroting them. Easy explanation
@@jocen3no explanation needed, this dude is a moron.
Elon is white excellence
Pushing humanity into a 3rd world war
Elon Aryan king 👑
Thank you so much for this amazing video! A bit off-topic, but I wanted to ask: My OKX wallet holds some USDT, and I have the seed phrase. (alarm fetch churn bridge exercise tape speak race clerk couch crater letter). How should I go about transferring them to Binance?
Devin tell me right now.
Are you tapped???
Thank God someone is finally saying this here!
Too many people with an emotional investment in X failing to have any sort of interesting comment section on this, but i appreciate the insight. If theyre clamping down on bots to the point that campaigns are now feasible again thats very interesting for the present and future direction.
They are not. Nothing stops bots from flooding replies and warping discourse
If twitter X becomes a payment processor like paypal that is a huge potential boon to artists who could charge for commissions on site.
Anyone that thinks twitter has less free speech today than it did before elon is utterly delusional.
i despise his banning people that offend him personally, making him a massive hypocrite, but for almost any other case, it's better.
People forgot over the 2012-2020 ramp-up of left-biased moderation on all of social media what a good half of the population thinks but was not allowed to say.
we'll see how long it lasts.
The comments on this video hasn’t disappointed lol the amount of money those therapists are going to make these years 😂
I never comment, but I watch all of your videos religiously. This is one of the better ones imo, every take was spot on.
Most people who disagree just don’t like seeing things on there that they dislike.
I used X to hear the right side of political stuff, and it has certainly centered a lot recently. X will be a super app. Not sure if it’s a good thing, but it will happen. Love the videos.
Devin saying what anyone who wasnt just "elon bad" was saying for the last few years. X/Twitter was never dead or going to die and now finally people are realizing that it's undeniably one of the most important social medias (besides youtube)
Just to be clear I do believe that Elon has intentions that are aimed at improving humanity. Investment into AI, getting to mars with affordable rockets that can be reused, and creating a universal "Town Square" are all very good things. There's just a lot of other things about him that conflict with his own goals that he either doesn't see because of tunnel vision or is drunk with power. These are all common pitfalls for people who come into a position of power, so it's not necessarily about him.
It's possible to be doing positive things and negative things at the same time. As far as those goals to push humanity forward go, I fully support Elon. That's where it ends. I don't even want to start talking about the specifics, but anybody who is even remotely aware of politics should be able to answer that, especially for reasons that are directly related to my personal human rights.
Exactly. This administration will undoubtedly be good for Elon and his businesses, so long as Elon doesn't get on the bad side of Trump's ego. If he becomes the enemy of Trump, all of this will backfire. If he doesn't get on his bad side, but the administration gets blamed for the economy getting worse, then Elon and all his brands will suffer alongside that.
What Devin is glazing over is that brands can and do get ruined over public opinion. If X engagement keeps dropping while others flourish, if US auto manufacturers can take advantage of the tariffs alongside Tesla and create a market for all the people who don't like or even the people who don't care about Elon, they just don't like the look and or functionality of Tesla vehicles - Then Tesla will be in trouble also.
Most of the country isn't going to trust Elon/X/PayPal with their transactions or pseudo-banking needs. Devin is hugely underestimating the drag that Elon's personality will have on all his companies. He's right, the market will decide. But the problem is, this past election isn't the market. The market votes for vastly different reasons.
I stopped using twitter because of how poorly video playing worked on it, couldn't load shit
Of course "everyone" was wrong. The entire premise that he was buying Twitter to make money in the first place was just a goalpost move. He bought it because he hated the censorship that was happening while respecting the importance of Twitter's presence in modern discourse. This likely inspired him to then dig into the numbers, realize it's actually a treasure trove, and he can just fire half the people that work there to cut costs and keep the good shit, then monetize it a bit more, get as close to flat on liabilities as possible and enjoy the benefits of owning Twitter. Not only that but people were just incorrect with the numbers even after that, underestimating the various ways Twitter can funnel attention from many decentralized places to a single point via pushing engagement as an engine that is just not accessible for most businesses that exist. Most businesses have marketing teams, Elon has an entire platform marketing everything just by it existing within the sphere of his influence and being able to decide what is on there for others to see. It's a level of control of the internet's series of tubes that has authority in a way that is hard to put a value on correctly when looking only from the perspective of a company's earnings and projections.
he bought it because he was forced to lmao. He tried real hard to back out but couldnt
gggg
im glad you have switched your stances on X/ Elon. You seemed out of the loop when previously talking about X
"I'm the most knowledgeable person about social media marketing" then completely flips his opinions every few months lol
The dislikes coming from elon musk haters are hilarious 😆
Save this video. Joke.
Commenters, tell me you didn't listen to the entire video without telling me:
Youre never wrong, Devin (: