- cross-posted to:
- doingmypart@lemmy.world
You must log in or register to comment.
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.
“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?
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
I think he thought the “Twitter files” were real and wanted them so he could be the saviour of democracy and the right wing.
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
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.
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.
He thinks it gives him an excuse to escalate his erratic decision-making.
The ~ has an error of +/- 50 percentage points.
deleted by creator
He’s a pathological liar. He doesn’t gain anything from it
deleted by creator
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
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.
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.
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…
Genius at work coming through!
Or saddled the business with 10 billion in debt? Shit is like an ouroboros…
The heavy debt load was caused by his purchase… He paid $26 bn, a couple other investors (including a Saudi prince) together paid $5 bn, the remaining $13 bn is a loan Twitter took out to buy itself on Musk’s behalf.
The purchase was always a financial death sentence. Either Twitter steps into line and becomes the propaganda tool he and his old friend Peter Thiel want, then it can have some extra investment, or Twitter dies.
I still don’t get how it’s legal for Twitter to take out a loan on itself on Musk’s behalf.
It’s a common trick the wealthy have. The idea is, if the business was under the control of its new owners, they could direct the business to get the loan. It’s what happened to Toys R Us and many other businesses.
Somewhat similarly, the UK have a way of turning a business into an “Employee Owned business”. Basically, if the business has enough cash, it can buy itself from its owners. The real shady part, though, is that the owners don’t pay any capital gains tax on the sale whatsoever. They get all their money out of the business, tax free. But yay, employee owned businesses (that are still run the same as before).
And if you try to read the financial regulations to understand it all, you’ll very quickly lose the will to live. Reading law is one thing, financial regulations are a completely different ball game.
That’s the part which is the most absurd. Extending a hypothetical to justify a 13 billion dollar loan is bonkers.
I wonder if there’s a study of how many companies this has happened to, and how many have come away from it not bankrupt after 5 years. I assume the only reason this is still legal is because the original shareholders get their payday when the company is sold, the new CEO gives themselves a great salary, bleeding the company dry and it’s just the employees who suffer when their jobs are cut, which is valued less than the shareholders and CEOs in America.
This practice destroyed several century old retail chains in my country. Got sold to some American investment fund, via a loan placed on those company’s account. Then immediately sold the real estate in prime locations these chains held, so the companies became tenants in buildings they previously owned (and had paid off 80 years ago). Waif a few years, then they die even with decent revenue.
It’s not really that different from buying a house or car. The money Musk put forward is the down payment, the loan is the mortgage, the company assets are the collateral. Where it’s sketchy is that a house or vehicle is generally worth repossessing and selling if you default, but by the time Musk is done with Twitter, it’ll be worthless.
Think of him like a crackhead who strips the plumbing and wiring from the house he has a mortgage on, before skipping town
Companies taking loans out to have someone buy them doesn’t make sense. Shouldn’t that cost just be truncated out of the purchase?
But if they didn’t do that then the purchase wouldn’t happen, and the wealthy wouldn’t be able to consolidate more wealth so easily!
There’s also probably tax benefits if the business is paying some of the cost, rather than the buyer.
Let’s see: Alienate the users. Fire everyone who knows how to keep the place running. Fill the site with bots and white supremacists.
FA complete. FO now underway.
Colour me surprised that Mr Musk and lowering moderating standards would lower advertising revenue.
I am mostly surprised that he actually admits worse numbers
- 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
deleted by creator
He doesn’t really care about free speech. Just his opinions. (He is shadowbanning Ukrainian accounts btw)
deleted by creator
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?
deleted by creator
Imagine using Twitter to train AI. “Why is my AI such an asshole!?”
deleted by creator
- *changes URL to nitter.net*
Didn’t work when they blocked non-registered visitors.
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.
Advertisers don’t want to advertise on Twitter anymore even after Elon fired all the talent and essentially drove the platform into the ground? Noooooo…
What no government subsidies for social media?
Oh no…!
anyway…
