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?
Yes, yes fucking exactly, how is it not an automatic gold mine!? This vexes me as well.
This theory requires them to have sufficient devs to implement a new feature. That also seems unlikely to me
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’s usually not the devs who make the decisions on what to implement; that only happens in the early days of a site when the owners are also the devs.
C-levels looking to make money are pulling the strings. The devs at any large site just have a list of user stories to burndown.
Are you saying you can’t find top-tier developers who are willing to work countless hours for no pay?.. what now?
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It wasn’t cheaper than paying the contractual penalty, but if he had done that, it would have been his debt and not Twitter’s.
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It’s funny how the biggest fuckups are happening to the platforms that critiqued the billionaire class the loudest.
Hmmm
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
He didn’t get tricked into anything. He massively over offered and then when Twitter accepted his offer he realized he fucked up
Maybe I’m miss remembering but he made a huge offer realized it wasn’t worth anywhere close to that then realized he faced a huge fine and sec investigation if he backed out and was basically forced to buy twitter
The problem with this remembering of events. Is that what would be more costly. 44 billion dollars. Or a fine that he would be able to pay off with an hour or two’s earnings. And an uneventful SEC investigation? And if the 44 billion was the better of the two options. Then what is he hiding that the SEC would absolutely own his ass over? And why is it a good thing that he’s hiding it?
I think he’s already been in trouble with the SEC over alleged Tesla stock manipulation (using Twitter to claim he was taking the company private at 420 a share or something), so maybe it could have become a real mess, so he decided to just go ahead with the deal.
He also manipulated crypto with his oversized influence through Twitter, though afaik the SEC can’t do shit about that as crypto was (and still is) basically unregulated.
One of the sanctions the SEC seeks for repeat offenders is a ban on serving as an officer of any public company.
If you look in to the court case, he was 100% going to be forced to buy it. There was a penalty fee for backing out but it didn’t apply
I’m no rich billionaire with insider knowledge but my confident guess is he could finance it on his terms or be forced to liquidate stock to pay straight cash. He chose the option that wouldn’t very possible take him out of the top .01%
Only if it went to trial and the contract held up. So no not 100%. And even then he was only in that position due to his ignorance and hubris. Elon isn’t a smart man.
Agreed, but the writing was on the wall that he was not going to win - the judge had previously sided with sellers in these kinds of contracts in other cases.
If it had gone to trial and he was ruled against, he would have VERY likely been forced to settle the transaction rapidly with his own capital, rather than have time to arrange for the financing that he ended up using.
I think it’s pretty clear in retrospect - he stubbornly tried to get out of the purchase while people who were smarter than him kept telling him he needs to start accepting reality that he’s going to own twitter soon. Finally he gave in when he realized he had a lot more to lose than a few billion, or maybe he got a call from daddy who told him to stop being a moron and arrange a loan.
We’re living in very interesting times indeed.
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.
And then there’s Maud
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.
He’s a dumbass, and his worshipers deserve him.
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”.
Just go.
But you can change it back. Here’s how.
At this point, why even bother?
Just leave the god damn platform :)
I never had a Twitter to begin with. I’m certainty not going to get one now lol.
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?
Hey now, I actually made some money on GameStop and AMC thanks to WSB.
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.
The didn’t buy Twitter for a profit.
He bought Twitter to destroy it because big free horizontal communication platforms are bad for billionaires.
He can’t just close it, so he just destroy it little by little until it is no more.
The same way conservative groups bought Tumblr because it was too sexual liberating for their conservative views.
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.
You cannot make a “joke” offer file it with the SEC and expect to get out of it.
the court didn’t force him, he could have paid a penalty that was much lower than his current losses.
He bought Twitter by mistake, and was forced into it by Twitter shareholders who saw the opportunity to make bank.
“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.
This is also the case, however he had the option to drop out with much lower losses.
That would involve him backing down and admitting an error, which he’s clearly not capable of.
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
“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 must be nice to be able to burn 44 billion dollars and not miss it at all.
I could live comfortably for the rest of my life on 1/10,000th of what Musk wasted.
Most of us will be overjoyed to see 1M deposited in our bank accounts. Not for Elon.
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.
alienated right wing by curbing free speech despite saying the opposite
They don’t care. They don’t want actual free speech, they just wanted their speech forced to everyone without fact checking or throttling.
Its still profitable for him because people still use that site.
The longer this shitshow goes on, the dumber Elon looks. Who could idolize him at this point?
My parents, tryna force me to work for him cause “he’s such a great person! Could you do a better job than him!”.
Mostly my dad suggesting me to be “the next musk” which honestly horrifies me
And you don’t immediately respond asking for some startup cash?
Could you do a better job than him
“I could’ve not drunk-bought Twitter, thereby saving $44 billion.”
Just their way of saying they want ten in-vitro grandchildren who all hate you
if it annoys you to worship him they’ll do it twice as hard.
Racist homophobic incels.
And he panders for that crowd hard, which only makes him look more pathetic.
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I don’t think so, solely because his ego wouldn’t allow it. Tanking Twitter is making him a laughingstock. There’s no way he would’ve done that intentionally.
What happens to Twitter can also happen to your Tesla. Buyers beware.
A lot of Telsa’s stuff is already paywalled.
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.
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.
I went and checked and you are right. All those companies that matter to me don’t have the blue thing.
They don’t need a blue thing just to talk. They can just turn the feature off and they will be available to receive messages again from their customers. It’s just as simple as it was earlier to keep your messages open or closed to general public.
I sure hope they check regularly; the setting seems to reset every other days to “only blue people”.
Gotta save on those server costs.
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Because the short-term equation is easy:
Would you rather have 10 users paying nothing but taking up server space and bandwidth? Or would you prefer 1 paying user and 9 people leaving? In the short term, option B is a win-win.
And if that leads to Twitter becoming a dead husk of itself, oh well, that’s a problem for next quarter
Seems like Reddit and Twitter are having a race on who can burn their house down faster.
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.
Because you are the product. They want what you have.
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.
It is because they have sheer numbers and that is what they are selling. Probably trying to get conversion ratios high to try and attract investors.
