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.
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.
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.
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 d*ck contest. It’s all about who has the biggest.
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
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.
As much Saudi money as he burned though, I’m expecting him to leave an embassy in a half dozen suitcases.
I think he thought the “Twitter files” were real and wanted them so he could be the saviour of democracy and the right wing.
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.
He wanted to prove he doesn’t care about money and is fully willing to throw away $44 billion dollars on a shitpost
- 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.
Hell, medium should be paying me to read them
If it’s something interesting I would really like to read, I put it through https://archive.ph first.
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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)
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- *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!
+++
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.
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!
I’d imagine the sort of companies willing to advertise towards their ilk are also the types not willing to pay much for it either. Not like typical ad networks like Google’s pay much to begin with lol
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.
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
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.
Go Fasc, lose cash!
Fuck you, Musk. Piece of shit.
And no interest in thinking about why they’re down ~50% in advertising revenue.
So, we still 50% to go. I believe in you, Elon /s
Aww. That’s super duper sad and I am sad for him.
Anyways.
Please don’t turn this community into another Musk news ticker.
I’m happy to learn about significant updates to the health of the platform but not as literal Musk tweets pls.
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”.
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.
Agree, I don’t really care about that platform
I also don’t care but I’m really enjoying the schadenfreude
Translation: “I’m terrible at business, and I’m making it everyone else’s problem”
Heavy debt load? Where could that have come from.? A leveraged buyout at an overvalued price or something?
No, a lot of this debt is debt that Twitter already had.
Edit: Factual corrections.
No, it isn’t.
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So facts doesn’t really matter because I’m interested in Tesla? That’s your argument? Twitter had about $7.1 billion in debt before Elon Musk bought it. When Elon Musk bought Twitter, he took on an additional $13 billion in debt to finance the acquisition.
Edit: The simple fact that people are downvoting me for telling the truth honestly says a lot about the state of Lemmy and some of those who migrated here. I had higher hopes for this place, but Im afraid it has become an echo chamber-circle jerk for bitter, non-factual conversations, where people downvote and attack instead of engaging in honest conversation. As for why I moderate that sub, it’s primarily because I’m trying my best to recreate the Reddit experience here on Lemmy, in order to assist with the migration. When I joined, that sub didn’t exist on Lemmy, so I had to create it myself - hence, why I’m a moderator. I appreciated the content that sub provided on Reddit, so I aim to offer that experience to those who migrate. I also post on other subs where the topics are relevant. This witch hunt is absolutely ridiculous and detrimental to making Lemmy a more welcoming and improved place compared to Reddit.
I think being upset about downvotes says a lot more about you than anything else. After all if lemmy is such a loss in your eyes, why bother with such a hugely descriptive and defensive edit. Why not just leave.
Because I belive ln a better future for Lemmy. I will not be dictated by this mob mentality.
Being upset about downvotes and ranting about the lemmy atmosphere seems in opposition to what you’re saying, but ok. Good luck with that
If you can’t see that this mob mentality of attacking users instead of addressing their key points in an argument is detrimental to the platform than we are not heading anywhere productive. Lemmy will simply be reduced to an echo chamber of older users who don’t accept or are even willing to engage in honest argumentation.
If the entire world tells you that water is wet, it’s not a mob mentality drummed up by Big Hydro.
So if im telling factual information about twitters debt situation and get downvoted into oblivion that makes it not true? Is this your logic?
It simply calls into question how factual your facts are.
Call me out on my facts. What part about it do you have an issue with?
probably both. twitter was never profitable afaik, the whole idea was to have either some rich moron or (more likely) a megacorp buy it and everyone who contributed would get a fat final paycheck. but the way musk handled things definitely didn’t help either.
I just want to point out the idea that these companies not being profitable is bullshit. It just means they’ve moved money that would be profit into some other place and now they can call it something other than profit.
Got $100k extra profit? Pay it all out as bonuses to your executives, now that $100k is an expense instead of profit.
on the surface level, makes sense, yeah. but twitter hosts video, that stuff isn’t cheap – hell, even images aren’t cheap and twitter has piss poor ad integration and a meaningless subscription that they made pretty much as uncool to buy as possible. hosting a platform that size is hella expensive.
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Twitter reported its first-ever profitable quarter Thursday after more than four years of trading on the public market. The company announced $91 million in profit for the fourth quarter of 2017. Profitability was the #goal, CEO Jack Dorsey told investors in February 2017, and Twitter nailed it. The stock was up by more than 14 percent in after-hours trading.
https://mashable.com/article/twitter-profitable-earnings-2017-first-time
it was profitable at least at some point
the whole idea was to have […] some rich moron […] buy it
Mission accomplished!
