- cross-posted to:
- doingmypart@lemmy.world
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With the way he’s running this, I’m a bit confused as to why he didn’t just buy Truth Social directly. Wouldn’t have cost him nearly as much.
He bought the users. Elon knows that people are lazy and will not change websites.
-50% ad revenue says otherwise
Twitter could have 200% more users, if no one want to show them ads, then ad spots will be dirt cheap. Printing 5 millions of 1cent ads vs 1 million of 10cents ads is not the same. Both on income and expenses…
This, so much this. I also find it rather coincidental that fb cam out with threads soon after the twitter implosion. Opportunistic feasting on a dead carcass perhaps?
Twitter has been on the outs since musk bought it. If Facebook was smart they’d have started right then.
Threads looks like they started development as soon as Musk bought twitter.
According to Adam Mosseri, IG had been working on Threads in various forms since 2021. Apparently they struggled to make it a native part of IG, then started working on the stand-alone version in 2022. So if he is to be believed, Threads development predates Twitter’s sale to Musk.
Threads still doesn’t have #hashtag searching IIRC. It’s missing a huge number of features. It’s clear that they only came out as early as they did because they saw an opportunity to eat Twitter’s lunch.
They really needed a few more months of dev time.
Bluesky is the same way. There are a lot of features there that still need to be implemented.
I’m glad Masto at least has hashtags and video and gifs and editing. For me right now it has the best features and the best experience. I’m pretty happy with it.
Indeed, it looks like they hurried the threads launch because Twitter was having outages.
Still exciting to be on the ground floor, when every day out week could bring a new update or feature. Wonder how they’ll improve over the next 3 months
Considering development time, server setup, testing time, etc… They probably did. It probably took several months to develop, deploy, integrate with the rest of their systems, and test. And then it’s simply a matter of waiting on Musk to do something stupid before they announce the launch, so all the freshly spurned users are happy to switch.
To be fair I don’t think that can be entirely prescribed to drop in user base; the internet ad market in general is absolutely tanking at the moment.
“users” - more than 50% are likely to be bots, LOL
Most people I know that use Twitter did leave it because they can no longer use the platform. They used it to promote their work and get new clients, which through a series of changes is basically impossible now.
Threads has like 100 million sign ups. It could replace Twitter.
That saw an overnight 50% drop in activity. People were kinda pissed to find out that Meta created them a Threads handle from their Facebook/Instagram and immediately deactivated their Threads accounts. I don’t know what it means, but I like it
is it possible to deactivate your account without downloading the app?
You don’t have an account unless you activate it, but they do hold your Instagram handle if you were to sign up that would be your Threads handle. The 50% drop in activity is because the app is lame as hell, and once people saw it they were done. No chronological sorting option, not even an option to only see threads from the people you follow.
not even an option to only see threads from the people you follow.
lol then what’s the fucking point of following anyone
Dude could have created his own Mastodon insrance for practically nothing. Is he somehow even dumber than Trump?
I think the evidence speaks for itself.
Let’s be honest Elon doesn’t care about Twitter.
He bought it with money he doesn’t have. He only increased in net worth since the takeover and has successfully done what he wanted to, destroy an organization he thought was problematic and now everyone gives even more data to Facebook.
Everyone of them won.
I think part of it is his own hubris through. His head is so far up his head by now that he though he knew better. It’s the same reason why Super Heavy destroyed itself on first launch. He thought he was smarter than his engineers and forced them to go without a proper launchpad.
I’m still convinced there is money coming in from an outside influence that is paying him to destroy Twitter, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the same thing is happening to Reddit as well
As much Saudi money as he burned though, I’m expecting him to leave an embassy in a half dozen suitcases.
The simpler explanation is he’s a dumbass with a big mouth and he screwed himself over with Twitter. Now he doesn’t have any lifelines left, and he’s failing miserably.
I think he thought the “Twitter files” were real and wanted them so he could be the saviour of democracy and the right wing.
Simple. He didn’t shit-talk Truth Social in a legally binding way and then have his bluff called by people with enough financial resources to survive the lengthy court battle.
He probably experiences less personal financial loss from running Twitter into bankruptcy now that he has been forced to buy it. He even gets to use it as his personal ego-stroking machine in the meantime.
But he may have experienced significant personal loss had he decided to continue fucking around with the SEC (or was it one of the other agencies?), whom he had previously pissed off.
If you view his words and actions through the lens of what will make him the most money or lose him the least, his actions make sense. Add a significant dash of arrogant impulsive invincibility too. He’s comfortable telling us about Twitter’s financial problems because starving it gets rid of it and let’s him focus on his other vanity projects.
It’s not like they can send him to jail for being a bad manager. It’s not like he’s going to pay his bills. It’s not like he even used all of his own money to buy Twitter in the first place. What does it matter to him?
The biggest obstacle to spreading far-right propaganda has always been finding a platform.
Before the internet, when neonazis tried to shove racist leaflets into peoples pockets at punk gigs, they’d be immediately run out of the venue, despite “angry, dissaffected, young people” being exactly the kind of vulnerability they were looking for.
When the internet did come along, initially things weren’t much better. Sure, there were sites like Stormfront, but nobody went there. So instead they’d “raid” other forums to spread their shitty views, getting instantly banned because they hadn’t figured out how to be a Nazi with plausible deniability yet.
When they finally nailed that, it was a big moment for them.
Historically, mainstream media also never gave a fuck what the opinions of Nazis were. But the moment they rebranded to “alt-right”, the psycopathic, for-profit, neoliberal media companies saw a way to make some quick cash without having to openly admit they were functioning as a mouthpiece for people with swastika tattoos.
From there, the “mask on, hide your powerlevel” stategy was codified. 4chan and far-right Discord servers openly stategized about how to do it best, such as presenting their dogshit opinions as popular, moderate beliefs and blaming progressives for their asshole personalities.
By the time Charlottesville’s swastika-waving parade and domestic-terrorism-finale happened, it was too late. Key figures in the far-right funnel had settled into social media like bedbugs at a two-star hotel.
Whenever a platform tried to get rid of them, they’d slip away through cracks in the walls. They would get banned and create new accounts that were slightly toned down, searching for that sweet spot of “as far-right as we can get away with”. They’d move to another major platform (or somewhere else on the same platform), because there was no coordinated effort to remove them for good.
But despite the slow, uncordinated response from social media sites, it was starting to work, especially on Twitter. By the time you’d hidden how far-right you were, you could no longer spread your message. Nobody was fooled by the dog whistles, fake engagement and flowery misrepresentations of “freedom of speech” any more.
Intially, they tried their own mask-off Twitter with Truth Social (who conspiciously aren’t being sued by Musk for being a Twitter clone). But the numbers were dogshit. It had a fraction of the traffic and everybody there was already far-right. You could keep them frothy, but you couldn’t breed more of them.
So Musk bought Twitter. Ideally, he wanted to just hand one of the big three socials back to right-wing reactionaries ane extremists but he also has no problem just killing the platform.
The only thing that mattered was that the deplatforming stopped, before people realised that it works and makes sites 1000x better.
The d*ck contest. It’s all about who has the biggest.
He wanted to prove he doesn’t care about money and is fully willing to throw away $44 billion dollars on a shitpost
Thanks to Elon, there will never be another Arab Spring. Most of the money came from investors where that is a big plus. Elon invested a surprisingly small amount of his own money given the 44b total. Even a shattered Twitter will be a bigger soapbox than truth social. 6-8B of his own money, which he may have already extracted from twitter as a loan, is not a big deal to him.
Remember the 50% number is just what he was comfortable with publishing to the public
We have no reason to believe his public statistics
100% of the ads I see on Twitter today are dropshipping scams, while in the pre-musk era they were highly targeted to my job and interests to the point that if there wasn’t the “ad” tag I couldn’t distinguish that.
They can’t cost the same for the advertiser, a generic dropshipping scam that targets everyone must be cheap
Targeted ads are more expensive. They need to develop an algorithm for it and the advertiser gets possible higher turnover since it’s no longer random people.
plus, twitter could track the impressions and conversion rates, so they could charge even more for that, too.
Indeed. Elon is a pathalogical liar.
Why would he tweet about his losses in the first place? I applaud his openness (/s) but I doubt any investors or advertisers will come running to a dying social networking.
He thinks it gives him an excuse to escalate his erratic decision-making.
I think it’s either better than 50, or he expects it to be better shortly so when he says it’s 40, he can celebrate how good he did for the +10.
If your losses are at 80% and you tell everyone they’re at 50% you can try to spin the story in your favor.
The ~ has an error of +/- 50 percentage points.
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He’s a pathological liar. He doesn’t gain anything from it
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Has Elon musk done a lot recently to earn your trust and support?
Wait, the white supremacists and Nazis that he caters to aren’t making up the ad revenue? Well I’ll be!
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- Your Google search result redirects to Twitter
- you click and open the link
- Twitter asks you to login to see the tweet.
- You close that tab and move on to next search result.
Best way to avoid traffic to your site, then complain about revenue loss from advertisements.
medium started doing the same shit, sometimes it has interesting articles I’d like to read, but then they started putting in behind registration so I just no longer open medium links.
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Perhaps. But a rather large issue arises when your content is generated primarily by users who wouldn’t want to pay for a service.
There is also the issue where if you are having to pay to get around interaction limits is it really free speech? Or just limited to those that can afford to pay?
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Imagine using Twitter to train AI. “Why is my AI such an asshole!?”
I’d argue it’s a poisoned dataset. You can’t validly train an AI based on content that contains a non-trivial percentage of bot-generated content.
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He doesn’t really care about free speech. Just his opinions. (He is shadowbanning Ukrainian accounts btw)
- *changes URL to nitter.net*
Step 3: Profit!
+++
Maybe… I don’t know, just throwing ideas out there… you shouldn’t have Musked all over Twitter nor fired its core developers? Again, just thinking out loud…
Or saddled the business with 10 billion in debt? Shit is like an ouroboros…
Not even just that… Alienates all potential leftwing/brand friendly advertiser’s through changes and being the spokesperson for the platform.
“We’re down 50% how could this have happened???” - Elon Musk
Dude needs to stfu, make an alt account. He has chosen to be the spokesperson for the platform. Spouting off conspiracies and controversial takes. You can’t be surprised nobody wants to associate with him.
He is a liability and a brand risk. Sure he can have his opinions but here is the problem…
He has chosen to be extremely public and force those opinions onto the average consumer feed due to his narcissistic tendencies and it is biting him in the ass.
No sympathy. He wanted free speech, (albeit it isn’t because he is okay as long as it doesn’t criticise him or his affiliates.) now he has his free speech platform but in the same way advertisers can chose not to engage with it.
make an alt account
But then nobody would know it’s him and the tweets would get no attention
Genius at work coming through!
Let that sink in!
Please don’t turn this community into another Musk news ticker.
I agree. I don’t really consider social media “technology” anymore. I mean yeah it uses technology but so does everything else. I don’t think technology is the right community for this kind of post. There should be an enshittification community where we can see all the Twitter, reddit, and meta stuff.
In fact a lot of “technology” companies are just regular companies with an app. Netflix is a media company, Uber is a taxi company that somehow skirted regulators, and Airbnb is a hotel company that also skirted regulators.
In tech, “disruption” is another word for “skirting regulation before the law catches up”.
To be fair, the social media platform are generally very advanced in terms of technology. Many of the most breaking grounds software technologies at least come from them.
I’m happy to learn about significant updates to the health of the platform but not as literal Musk tweets pls.
Agree, I don’t really care about that platform
I also don’t care but I’m really enjoying the schadenfreude
With RIF is just straight blocked posts containing Musk, Rowling etc, plenty of specific subreddits and managed to make my /all experience a great one. I’m hoping I can do that down the line with Lemmy too!
Good idea. I’ll put that on the roadmap for my Lemmy app.
Weird, users can’t access the site, so ad revenue goes down?? Nobody can blame Elon, that’s literally impossible to predict. Maybe if he bans users from tweeting more than once a day it will get better?
Maybe it’s the advertisers. They’re racist and hate Musk because he’s African. That must be it. Couldn’t possibly be anything else.
I’m not waiting to see Twitter fail. I’m just hoping that the federated alternatives for Twitter and Reddit will get more mainstream. And I must say that I’m happy with the way things are evolving at Mastodon and Lemmy.
That’s actually a better outcome, quarantine the crazies in twitter and/or reddit while the mainstream happens in the fediverse.
The mainstream ARE the crazies now, though. The outliers, and only some of the outliers, are sensible, smart people.
That’s a sad commentary of our society as a whole. :( but still, the optimist in me wishes it were reversed.
I don’t see Twitter failing. Perhaps this is just going according to plan too. I think the more likely case is that it becomes something like a social network version of Fox.
You just described Truth social
That’s exactly what I had in mind but I’d rather not give it any sort of mention. I hope it dies in obscurity.
Twitter is Fox, TS is more like NewsMax.
Troth senchal
So its failing.
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Im pretty bummed Blue Sky chose to write their own protocol. Many of my friends who are not techie chose to go there rather than learn the fediverse.
Hmm maybe putting in rate limits, thus greatly reducing the amount of time people spend on the app, isn’t the best strategy for a platform whose main source of revenue comes from advertising?
I think there is like a 1% chance rate limits were an actual thing. It really feels like someone fucked something up, caused the issue and the “rate limits” were how Elon decided to try and play it. Then “increasing” the limits multiple times to completely illogical values was the system slowly coming back up. Elon increasing that limit makes him look like he is listening to the users and thus the good guy.
I have not seen anyone complain about rate limits since the day it happened. Other than jokes has anyone seen or heard of the issue?
I would say a company suddenly introducing a major policy change like view limits with no warning is beyond stupid but then again it is Elon who seems to believe he is God’s gift to tech.
Yup it’s been real. https://www.piquenewsmagazine.com/must-reads/bc-government-hit-tweet-limit-amid-wildfire-evacuations-7268169
The rate limits are because serving such a service at scale without the user noticing requires continuous innovation to get through scale bottlenecks; but with the engineering team greatly reduced, a lot of that work isn’t happening anymore. Typically, you’d get through those bottlenecks by coming up with some heuristics that make it seem like the service is doing a ton, when really it only needs to do little (like by sharding data, or by pre-caching a bunch of stuff). Without anybody to work on those heuristics to fake things, you gotta restrict with real restrictions.
Source: that’s what I do for a living. I’ve been working on some of the highest-scale services out there for over a decade.
Also you still can’t browse Twitter without logging in, that started a couple of weeks ago, around the same time the news about the rate limits came.
Sure, but how else is Elmo going to keep Amazon and Google from suing him for nonpayment? Geez man, use your noodle.
Elon complaining about this just reminds me that he can afford to lose ~50 billion dollars and still be one of the wealthiest people ever to have lived.
He’s below his height of wealth, but he’s still #1 and has 250 billion
TIL how loooong it takes for a largeish business to die. It’s hard to grasp scale I guess. I thought it would be over in months.
I find it hard to believe Facebook is so terribly great. Keep in mind these are not businesses like a grocery store; they’re publicly traded and the metric is growth, not profit. (Edit: Twitter is private now no idea how that change is accomplished.)
Truly, I’m hoping they all die.
The stocks had to be bought back first, then basically they could be turned in to the DTCC and the company gets delisted. That’s how Twitter did it.
The other way is to naked short so much you’ve got enough shares to control the board and tank the company from inside then you don’t have to do a buyback because there’s no company. This will be reddit’s future if they even get to ipo at this point.
The more realistic death is a buyout, merger and dismantling. That’s how the vast majority of publicly traded companies die. Bought my a larger organisation looking for a deal on your IP, userbase or reputation who then sells off all physical assets, offshores all talent and outsources all capabilities. They retain the brand equity which then gets rinsed through a range of products that are smaller and smaller before quietly being shelved. See GEs dismantling of RCA, the death of GE itself, and every company EA has ever bought.
and the metric is growth
No, not really. The metric is growth only for those who aren’t profitable. They use growth as a promise of future profits.
Meta/Facebook is turning in a huge profit each ear. Nobody cares about the user count that much anymore unless it sharply falls.
Twitter is different. Twitter didn’t really make a profit yet. They aren’t profitable.
Meta is pumping ungodly amounts of money into a moon shot (VR) because it is in stagnation phase and their market is saturated - so they do care about growth quite a bit.
We were talking about growing the userbase. Growth of the business is something different. Of course any company is interested in growth. However, I don’t think usercount growth is the metric Facebook is looking at currently.
Look at Amazon. The cloud division is now more profitable than the Amazon website. Facebook is looking to use those large profits to branch out in different directions. Some like the metaverse won’t work. Just like Amazon’s echo didn’t become profitable. But others eventually will.
If your business relies on the size of your userbase than those things are quite related. Again, not a coincidence that while facebook is stagnating meta is desperately trying to force vr.
It’s doing double digit billions in profit every year. Both Facebook and Meta. They’re actually doing quite all right even with the VR fiasco.
And even iftheir only possible growth vector was user count(which it isn’t), they have close to 3 billion active users monthly with over 2 billion people using Facebook daily. It is impossible to grow. There are no more people.
No, even profitable Fortune 500 companies are focused on growth.
Musk crumpled the cashflow pretty quickly in weeks, but he also has a lot of wealth, he had to chip in billions of his own dollars to save the company from his mistakes.
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Right. I wonder, now, if he had any idea what he was doing. Not to argue with you. His fuckups are just so weird here. If he wanted it “off” he could have been a lot more effective. He just looks like a fool and not one decision looks intentional. It is interesting though. A very slow motion car crash… I assume the bridge abutment or cliff is in front of him somewhere.
I remember a fellow saying Elon is a very business savvy person, because of his 2 other successful companies, Tesla and SpaceX. I guess ruining communications with potential advertisers on a platform that depends entirely on advertisers wasn’t a very intelligent move.
If I recall correctly, Tesla was actually cash-negavite for like half a decade after Musk bought it, surviving off investors and SpaceX’s success, I remember it was very big news when it finaly went cash-positive and subs like WSB were all over r/all
SpaceX became profitable not all at once as well.
I think we should all remember that company’s success is also a function of investors’ money AND public trust. SpaceX for some people was a symbol of all things modern. Tesla as well to some extent.
With such amount of trust no wonder these finally became profitable.
Ah, also companies engineering vehicles and spacecraft are rather different from a company the whole purpose of which is matching people (readers to posters, advertisers to customers, so on).
Could you please point me to where I can find info on Spacex profitability? I’ve done a google search, but all I can find is revenue.
Almost all companies are “cash negative” in their first years.
Of course, but many, many companies never leave that state in the age where the biggest investment strategy is dumping hella cash into a startup in hopes that it overtakes (monopolizes) the industry but may never be profitable. And many people thought that Tesla would never be profitable, it sure looked like it for a very long time.
The same people would say the same thing about Trump and everything he’s ever touched has gone to shit. I think they’re legitimately delusional… all of them.
I think they’re just brainwashed by our capitalist system which says that if a person is wealthy it’s because they worked for it and we’re successful. We are indoctrinated from very young ages to believe that capitalism is a strict meritocracy where only the best, most intelligent, most deserving people become wealthy.
In reality most wealthy people inherited some or most of their wealth, and used that inherited wealth to create more wealth- because it turns out that once you are wealthy it’s really easy to get more wealthy. They aren’t wealthy because they are skillful or intelligent or good at business. Most of them are good at precisely one thing: giving some of their money to a professional who knows how to grow it so that they will never run out.
Then they throw money at whatever catches their eye, and when you have billions to throw around you can cast a very wide net that will almost certainly catch something.
Go Fasc, lose cash!
Fuck you, Musk. Piece of shit.
Of course! It’s because of Threads! Don’t you guys get it? They stole their secrets!! It has absolutely nothing to do with how things are being run on twitter or because Elon Musk is a genius!!!
…
Fuck Musk and fuck twitter and all that goes with it.
