Ad revenue is down (at least) 50% and they just keep making decisions that kick people off their platform.
I’m pretty sure Twitter advertising and Reddit advertising are in a race to the bottom to see who’s going to have to pay companies to put ads on their site first.
It’s insane to watch this happen. I remember watching the rise of Twitter as a kid and it becoming ubiquitous with social media, only to see it crash down this quickly.
I’m speculating, but I’d guess a lot of functionality is being limited because they don’t have dev staff to maintain it, as well as trying to cut server costs as much as possible. I’d honestly be surprised if musk was making these decisions because he thinks it’s good for the health of the platform. There has to be some ulterior motive for it.
It is unfathomable to me how Reddit isn't profitable.
Facebook makes a mint by telling advertisers, "trust us, we'll get your ads in front of people who might buy your product based on a lot of inference around their fairly generic profile data plus some tracking cookies". One guy should be able to sell a billion dollars worth of ads on Reddit. Just put up a form that says, "which subreddit do you want to advertise in?" and "what's your credit card number?". That's it. They have like 10,000 completely segmented markets just sitting there full of hundreds of millions of people who have self-selected to be members of those communities.
We spend hundreds of billions of dollars collectively trying to figure out which google search terms might find us a few more solid leads. Reddit has an amazing list of them for every company in the entire world. How in the everloving fuck have they managed to blindly bumble around for two decades without ever falling into the giant pile of money in front of them?
They have plenty of devs, but they're all the worst in their field. How else could they take a fully developed app and turn it into the dumpster fire itbos today?
It wouldn't surprise me if this was what is really going on musk spent 44 billion which is far more than twitter was ever worth he basically got tricked into buying a company that has never made money and now he's trying to get it to make money
He fucked himself into buying it by knowing nothing about how business acquisitions work, no one tricked him. He was and remains still a fucking idiot.
It wouldn't surprise me if this was what is really going on musk spent 44 billion which is far more than twitter was ever worth he basically got tricked into buying a company that has never made money and now he's trying to get it to make money
So we have one billionaire over in Meta, who's been making it very known how predatory in practice he is with getting your data and they fundamentally shatter the functionality of all of their platforms.
Then, we have this billionaire here who under a year, has made a total catastrophe of what was once a thriving platform once worth billions of it's own until he came and acquired it.
And then we have this not-a-billionaire who, is inspired by the self-destruction of the other platforms that they too, must follow suit, in hopes of aspiring success.
I wonder what book they're all reading from in the ways of business, that says if you suck harder, they'll mean a net positive.
I can't think of another product I know more about that I don't use. Just die already, elon is killing you in public to remove the threat of Twitter as an organizing tool for social uprisings and labor as a favor/brownie points/roundabout contracting for other billionaire "buddies".
If was always about limiting the ability to organize using Twitter and Reddit. They want things to go differently in 2024, not because of any conservative political ideology even though most of them skew that way. But because they make more money when the monsters are in charge.
I don’t see the logic in making this change. Is someone supposed to want to join blue just so they can DM people that haven’t changed the default setting?
I think it's important to remember that musk has never actually done anything to innovate the companies he's been a part of. He didn't create PayPal, he just bought his way in and made a series of dumb suggestions. He didn't create Tesla, he bought Tesla right after they had fine tuned their models, and then he made a series of changes that likely resulted in a worse product.
Elon Musk is not a good businessman, he's just rich and has a habit of purchasing profitable companies. Anyone could do this with his wealth. I'm not even really convinced that he's offered many technical ideas or designs for any of his companies, as it seems that would be the first thing he would mention every single time someone brought up one of his companies.
But open AI wouldn't even exist without him! After all, he contributed less than 10% of their raise and he suggested the name. You can't have a company called Open AI if nobody names it Open AI.
Damn, Mr. Musk could have made more money betting on stocks mentioned in r/wallstreetbets, and they ALWAYS lose money. Dude seriously needs to have twitter do the opposite of what he thinks.
I have never seen a billionaire try to go from billions to zero so hard in my life. It is like he is showing the U.S. government why billionaires shouldn’t exist.
Is there a fund that lets me do long term shorts on rich people?
I made a lot of money from GME. I bought a bunch of shares early on for $10-$50 and sold the morning when Robinhood yanked the buy button. However, most WSB plays are money losers.
Pundits in general. I really enjoy The Majority Report, but it pisses me off how much they criticize Twitter but still talk about what they're saying on it.
Check the news. Twitter is/was used all over the place as a source for stories. The death of twitter removes the source of some really easy reporting income.
I only use it to get updates and breaking stuff from NFL, ESPN, POTUS, etc. I don’t actually go on it to browse. I wish there was another place where I could the same level of breaking/interesting news/updates
I've been there since 2014 and if I wasn't aware of the constant whining about how bad twitter is on other sites but twitter I wouldn't know anything has changed. For me it's the same it has always been. It's also the only platform where I have any kind of following so I don't just leave like I did from reddit.
So the bottom half of any twitter comment thread has ALWAYS been crypto scammers, gofundme scammers, bots hawking t shirts and maga chuds responding off topic?
"How to burn 44 billion dollars within a year" by Elon Musk
✅ alienated advertisers
✅ alienated right wing by curbing free speech despite saying the opposite
✅ alienated left wing by letting the right wing go rampant
✅ restricting core functions
Wow how is that going to be profitable for him? I don't see it.
It actually seems like the right can still say what they want, and the right was never actually for free speech.
They're for their own speech being unrestricted, mostly to say hateful things and incite violence. But you better believe the same standard isn't applied to the left.
To be honest, this is the only reason why I still have Twitter. I use it to contact various companies and ask for tech support. If I can't do that now, then there's no point to keep the account alive. Self-proclaimed genius is kind of an idiot. Just recently he complained about 50% drop rate in ad revenue, after killing ability to view tweets without account.
It is not meant for companies and companies who regularly talk to customers on twitter will definitely turn this feature off. So you will likely still be able to talk with any company that wants to talk with its customers on twitter.
It is meant for regular folks who get lot of unsolicited spam in their inboxes. It puts an immediate stop to those. So in that sense, it’s a tricky but good move.
he offered to buy twitter for a joke, and he actually did buy twitter because a court forced him to. not because this was some grand plan to accomplish anything - he literally spent months in court arguing that he shouldn't have to buy twitter, and he lost. that's the only reason he owns twitter now.
"mistake" in this case actually means by shooting his mouth off and thinking he was smarter than everyone else in the room. He fucked around, then immediately began finding out.
You give Musk too much credit. The fucking guy is a big baby with impulse issues - who happens to have billions of dollars at his disposal. He is running Twitter exactly as I would think a dipshit narcissistic tantrum baby would run it, although dismantling Twitter does coincidentally benefit the top .1% for now
Why couldn't he just close it, if that was his goal? He owns it outright doesn't he? He could announce that Twitter was ceasing operations, sell off the remaining assets, cover (or default on) the debts, and then Twitter would be no more.
So no, I don't think destroying it was his aim. He's just really, really bad at this.
He bought Twitter because he (along with the Saudi royal family, the monarchy ruling Qatar, and the larger worldwide cabal of authoritarians) thought he could use it to control public discourse in the same way oligarchs bought up newspapers, radio stations, and TV stations in the past. He's killing it because he never understood what most people liked about Twitter, he only understood what he liked about Twitter (getting a lot of attention and being able to be shitty to people without having to actually socialize).
This has always been an interesting point for me. If I buy a secondhand Tesla, I've signed none of the agreements made between the initial buyer and Tesla. I wonder if I could disconnect it and hack the interface to unlock the disabled features that don't require network access, or spoof the authorization for some of those?
It's much harder to fuck up so quickly, since a Tesla is not a live service, so there's not a lot that will change about the already sold cars.
I guess if Musk decides to save money by firing engineers and reducing QA on the car software, and insists on pushing really buggy software then it could get gnarly I guess, but I don't think he's that stupid, and I don't think all these Twitter moves are entirely about trying to make a profit; It's so bad I think there is a level of malevolence involved.
Almost the entire vehicle interface is software and screens. If he’s doing it at Twitter he could just as easily start doing weird paywall stuff with Tesla.
The car is effectively a live service.. they've completely changed the UI multiple times.. they can lock out features.. they'll likely disable ultrasonic sensors once they think their camera based version is working..
I think Reddit is in a fat trimming stage where they kick everyone off who they aren't monetizing, then scale their systems to drive down costs. Then try to squeeze their user base even further. If they aren't making money off of me, why would they want me using their systems? That's their mentality.
That just seems so crazy as they ramp up to an IPO. Yes, let's alienate users. reduce our overall active users, and throw hissy fits at our mods who are volunteers without whom, this site cannot operate. That should establish confidence in the marketplace. I just don't understand the thinking here.
People will say 'enshittification', well okay, but even on paper, all their moves have been so bad lately, and they don't seem to care. It's weird. Seems to me for example a platform with 100 users and 40% monetization is inherently more valuable than a platform with 40 users and 100% monetization. That's just my stupid opinion though.
Louis Rossman has stated in a few of his Youtube videos that he would make more money if you sent him $1.00 than if you watched adds in a years worth of videos. I don't imagine that Twitter or Reddit are any better.
I think that what we're actually seeing is the death of advertising supported services. There's just not enough money in adds to be viable and there's no more free investor money to burn.
This is however not something I think we, as consumers, should necessarily celebrate. This also means that we are very likely nearing the end of the "free" web that we are used to.
No, I'm not saying that selling out one's personal integrity is preferable, but if it turns out that advertisement as a business model effectively isn't sustainable, we will just have to accept the reality that we will more and more commonly have to actually pay to access content and services on the web.
I see it more as us going back to the good old days. Websites and social platforms get hosted by interested people with the extra money to get a server going, whether it be for a unique website or an instance in the fediverse or other decentralized networks. Donation supported, nothing required. Maybe some donor icon.
Take the internet back. Quit supporting websites by big companies who have money and whose goal is to use you as the product. Support your fav nerds hosting the platforms you enjoy using. The internet had social websites before FB and twitter. We don't need companies to run the internet for us.
He's banking on the name "Twitter" still meaning something and there being no viable alternatives. Threads has really shown that twitter isn't as ubiquitous as we all assumed.
If you're one of those artists/animators that, for whatever reason, thought basing the entirety of their commission system via Twitter was a good idea, they're definitely going to be affected.
It would be interesting to see it all lead up to some master plan like Elon gaining some hug political favor or something with all his actions with someone.
Time for everyone to turn the page and move forward.
No sense in giving Reddit et al anymore brain cycles.
We'll all end up back inside of an echo ho chamber before you know it :P
Hmm you plebs just don't understand how big our Lord and Savior Elon Musk's brain had to be to come up with something so sophisticated and brilliant. This is truly a step in human evolution.
So basically any companies that were using that as a customer support channel — I’m thinking of like, American Airlines, etc… will now no longer be able to help customers via DM? Are DM’s only subscriber to subscriber now?
I’ve never seen someone ham-fistedly destroy a company faster than this fucking guy.
I'm astounded that people use it for anything other than this. I have received some decently fast customer service via twitter. However one glance at the content and I got tf out.
I dunno, I guess the fact that I've never been very active on Twitter. I use it occasionally and reply to the odd thread, but I never even knew only fans bots was a thing there.
I only use Twitter for sports news and updates that basically don’t exist anywhere else. It would be unfortunate if they destroy the platform with crap like this.
Thanks I didn’t know that, I have never used Mastodon. I also follow some athletes and less popular college sports on twitter. I doubt they are there but I’m signing up now to find out.