nuff said
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.
Remember the 50% number is just what he was comfortable with publishing to the public
We have no reason to believe his public statistics
Wait, the white supremacists and Nazis that he caters to aren’t making up the ad revenue? Well I’ll be!
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…
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
Or saddled the business with 10 billion in debt? Shit is like an ouroboros…
Genius at work coming through!
Let that sink in!
- 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.
deleted by creator
If it’s something interesting I would really like to read, I put it through https://archive.ph first.
Honestly my wild guess is that he’s trying to make Twitter profitable from subscription based services and not so much from ad revenue.
Can’t really have free speech if platform depends on advertisers and investors.
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?
I think these limits were increased to a point where they are not really bad or they were removed. The point of them was to prevent scraping to train AIs
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.
Could be meant more like to influence elections…
He doesn’t really care about free speech. Just his opinions. (He is shadowbanning Ukrainian accounts btw)
Which accounts?
- *changes URL to nitter.net*
Didn’t work when they blocked non-registered visitors.
It is working now though, the login restriction on the official Twitter website is still in place
Oh damn, I did realise it’s working again a few days ago, so I just assumed Twitter is open too.
Step 3: Profit!
+++
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?
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.
Troth senchal
Twitter is Fox, TS is more like NewsMax.
So its failing.
deleted by creator
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
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.
deleted by creator
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.
Musk wasted a shitload of money to make it private. Twitter is wasn’t even close to being a net neutral business, was downright a hole of money the investors kept feeding because well, it’s Twitter.
Musk bought the brand, he was well aware that this was going to happen.
deleted by creator
Go Fasc, lose cash!
Fuck you, Musk. Piece of shit.
OK ill have to steal this one
Go fac die back.Mock woke go broke. Insist on heros retain zeros.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/qcz6sGGkmVg
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
*go woke, go broke. ftfy
And no interest in thinking about why they’re down ~50% in advertising revenue.