nuff said
- 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.
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!
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
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.
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
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
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.
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?
He wanted to prove he doesn’t care about money and is fully willing to throw away $44 billion dollars on a shitpost
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.
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.
I think he thought the “Twitter files” were real and wanted them so he could be the saviour of democracy and the right wing.
Has he tried not fucking up the platform yet?
He probably only wants to try that after exhausting all ways of fucking it up. You’d think that will be soon, but he’s pretty creative in this regard.
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.
My brother is in the space program in the army & has worked with SpaceX on several projects. He says Elon is the master at smudging numbers to make things appear they are better than they are or not as bad as the true numbers would suggest so I guarantee the same applies here. I’m sure the actual figures are much, much worse.
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.
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*go woke, go broke. ftfy
Can’t wait when he lays off another 50% of whatever the company remains, his fanbase will go nuts for it and say he’s a business genius.
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Saying you’ve ended cancel culture is like saying you’ve ended the idea of consequence.
HA! If it was the largest toxic platform (it wasn’t), and somehow responsible for “cancel culture” (it wasn’t, because that’s not even a real thing), training AI against it would just create a super duper toxic cancel culture bot.
It’s gotten even more toxic, and “cancel culture” is still a thing on there. And language model? first time I’ve heard of this
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
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.
Indeed. Elon is a pathalogical liar.
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?
Good. Twitter is a cess pit.
I was looking at Twitter earlier, and my feed was full of antivaxxers, election deniers, some anti-abortion activist that claims that Planned Parenthood is involved in sex trafficking, and even 9/11 deniers.
Twitter is a dead man walking
Boycott twitler
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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.
and now he’s doing the same grift with bluesky
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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.
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.
Other then a website…what technology does twitter actually do? I do not consider websites to be tech giants.
lol good.
Twitter has/is/was always a cesspit.
Disagree, when Twitter first came about it was actually possible to connect with people around specific topics, and was originally mostly random celebrities, news/journalists, and tech nerds. It was a very different vibe in my experience.
due to ~50% drop in advertising…because I’m not very good at this. ftfyE.one leads to the other
So, we still 50% to go. I believe in you, Elon /s
