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.
“users” - more than 50% are likely to be bots, LOL
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
He doesn’t really care about free speech. Just his opinions. (He is shadowbanning Ukrainian accounts btw)
Which accounts?
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!?”
Could be meant more like to influence elections…
- *changes URL to nitter.net*
Didn’t work when they blocked non-registered visitors.
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
What does he has to gain in lying anyway? It’s not like he cares about what investors think since Twitter is now a private company owned by him.
He’s a pathological liar. He doesn’t gain anything from it
You’re painting him like he’s a super villain, that’s pure hate for him. Why?
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!
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.
Or saddled the business with 10 billion in debt? Shit is like an ouroboros…
Translation: “I’m terrible at business, and I’m making it everyone else’s problem”
Not losing money, just having “negative cash flow”.
I had to search the euphemism to see if I was just out of the loop on the economics terminology, and if those legit were different concepts.
On the downside, they’re not. On the upside, Musk is setting a great example for how to stop getting accused of hoarding wealth
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”.
On the other hand, I think the people at Tesla/SpaceX are probably very happy that Elon has his hands full with Twitter right now.
50% is just what he’s admitting to. Not sure how easily that number can be verified, but if someone told me that the actual numbers were much, much worse… I wouldn’t bet against them.
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.
And no interest in thinking about why they’re down ~50% in advertising revenue.
Only 50 more percent left to go!
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.
It’s impressive how quickly and severely he fucked up what was once a successful tech giant!
I disagree. Twitter was already going under even before he took over. In fact, it was doomed from the beginning as one of the uber era “grow valuation, think about revenue later”, hoping to exit someday by selling it to some rich megalomaniac, and actually, they’re the ones who succeeded.
well, it was actually about ready to start breaking even, and even paying off some debt. there was a path to profitability with twitter, but it was tenuous at best.
king of the idiots was forced to by it, saddling it with so much dept that that profitability dream was over the moment he became involved.
and now he’s doing the same grift with bluesky
I think twitter is artificially ‘failing’ because of meddling by influential special interests. It is being shunned by some advertisers because he won’t bend the knee to the ESG tyrant bankers.
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.
