When the Bluesky and the Facebook competitors launch I can see a lot of big firms moving across to those and leaving Twitter behind. Twitter is going to become the Fox news of social media I think. Lots of hardcore maga, funded by ads from the same people that advertise on Fox News.
People sometimes compare Musk to Howard Hughes. This is unfair, on Hughes; as far as I know, if you bought a plane from him he rarely showed up at your house to insist that you not eat large peas. Musk, by contrast, tends to inflict his neuroses on his user base.
(Also, Hughes largely stayed out of direct running of his important businesses when he was in his pea-sizing phase, as far as I know)
Delusions of grandeur when tech executives have begun to believe, and pursue that their followers develop them a cult of personality and subvert the Democratic process.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been anti-vaxx for many years. When COVID started he went full in on the "5G Bill Gates microchips!!!" stuff and the craziest of the craziest of COVID-related nonsense.
It’s the Yahoo comment section at this point, especially for blue checks. No one who can post would pay 8 dollars a month, so it’s all hustlebro scammers or idiotic conspiracy theories.
One of the most brilliant ideas: Put the content of people who need to pay for engagement, whether due to their own psychoses or due to the fact they produce garbage content, above anyone who organically produces engaging content.
I think that is far from guaranteed. Most people aren't reading twitter to see what Fox news, or any other media company, thinks the news should be about.
I think you're rather missing the point the parent was making. It doesn't matter what you're there for, if the experience feels Fox-News-like, a lot of people will leave. The people remaining will be those who like Fox News.
"in the US" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. The entire rest of the world thinks Fox News is grotesque. Twitter becoming something that's a laughing stock to most of the planet is probably not "positive".
The highest rated cable news program is still a drop in the bucket. It's just not that many people. It's up there with large niche YouTube channels: popular in their space like a Linus Tech Tips or Contrapoints, but most people have never heard of them. More people watch Stephen Colbert poke fun at Fox News than watch Fox News.
Almost no one gets their news from Fox News, or cable news in general. People who do are less informed.
No, it's a negative shift. Twitter trying to be a Fox News is reducing their total addressable market and value, you understand that, right?
They had a business that (in theory) appealed to every human on the planet. Now they don't. It's shedding its userbase as a result.
Not to mention the Venn diagram between "people who are not already on Twitter and are evaluating Twitter as a platform to use" and "Fox News / right wing information consumers" has a very narrow overlap.
Apart from the CEO's posturing, it seems like the "More Tweets" shown around other tweets to unregistered users are now heavily skewed towards that demographic even when wildly irrelevant to the actual content being looked at
(the popularity of certain commentators producing that sort of content isn't exactly unique to Twitter, and nor is the other irrelevant tweets mostly being cat pics, but I suspect the fact that nearly all the politics Twitter randomly surfaces to people who haven't cultivated a profile with the opposite preferences is of that ilk probably reflects who buys the blue ticks...)
I use Twitter to keep up on AI and the new space industry (there really is no alternative).
Revenue could shrink further and none of that would be lost. Growing revenue could let them improve things I don't care about (spaces, video, payments, etc). I guess yay for them if they improve revenue, yawn if they don't.
> Revenue could shrink further and none of that would be lost
$88mm per month is ~$1bn per year. That yields a low single-digit enterprise value on a generous revenue multiple, which implies—as do Twitter’s bond prices—that the equity is already worthless. (Twitter Blue is revenue irrelevant [1].)
> that would matter if we owned equity, but we don't, so?
Equity being worthless means imminent bankruptcy. That means, at a minimum, operational disruptions, challenges over control and possibly the end of Twitter as an independent concern.
What a shortsighted view!
Do you think Twitter operates out of the goodness of their hearts and will continue to let you keep up on Ai and new space in the face of losing money? Do you think what’s there will just do to help working without active maintenance? Do you think the servers that make all this possible are running for free?
Ad revenue is mostly tied to sales people talking with big companies, addressing their issues.
For example: Southwest airlines has a huge number of advertisements across the internet. But Southwest doesn't want these advertisements to appear next to airport disasters. This kind of "custom request" is the bulk of $Millions+ revenues. You need to constantly cater to these company's seemingly arbitrary requests as they try to protect their brand.
Twitter fired the team that did this. And when they did, the big companies that care about their image left.
Ignoring the political drama twitter has just fallen so much in quality the last 6 months it will soon be useless if not fixed.
It's like the feed is becoming an addiction machine, just like youtube has already done before Tiktok perfected this "you can't control shit, just watch endless streams of our garbage."
Just wait for it. His master stroke is coming. I have no idea what it is. Everything he has done seems insane and counterproductive.
But that’s how genius works.
Unless it’s not genius.
He created a business, with about $13B in funding, which the richest guy on the planet (at the time) wanted to buy for $44B. I'd say that's a bit more than "very little".
Twitter exposed no corruption, just the same worn-out conspiracy theories Fox News has been peddling for some time now. Users have seen the writing on the wall and realizing what the new Twitter is - a Fox News social media outlet. So they're abandoning the platform as a result. As the users leave then so are the advertisers. That's just how the advertising business works.
Twitter under Musk complies with more government demands than it did previously [0]. It was a Republican governing party making the requests prior to Musk taking over. How do these facts fit with your preconceptions?
If you're referring to the "Twitter Files," Twitter's own lawyers just admitted that it was all just a viral marketing campaign and didn't actually show any evidence of wrongdoing[0].
It was all smoke and mirrors bullshit, like Hunter Biden's briefcase, like the "treason" hidden within the DNC hacks, like Pizzagate, like the Benghazi hearings.
The article is written in a very straightforward manner, if these facts are in fact true. According to this alleged document.
This isn't an anonymous source. This is a leaked document from Twitter management. Presumably NYTimes can eventually release more details if pushed on this issue and offer more solid proof.
But "anonymous source" usually means "Dude who emails reporter", and often someone who is an executive level or above. You know, someone who matters, but for their own sake they need to stay anonymous.
If its just a document, then the "source is the document". You don't need to quote an anonymous person (who likely has their own biases), you just quote the document itself.
These words that journalists use? They have meaning. "Anonymous source" is not how the story is described. It is described, rather precisely, as "internal documents".
Its not clear at all if there even is a "person" in this context.
Ex: lets say New York Times reporter was let into Twitter HQ for some kind of interview. The reporter noticed that a computer was open, so they stuck a thumb-drive in and grabbed the document.
No human source, but the document is likely valid.
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Alternatively, Twitter could have posted some document to an internal Slack or Discord meeting, and New York Times reporter may have the know-how to enter into those private channels or grab something from Discord.
There's no reason to assume that they worked with a Twitter insider to grab this document. Not everything is a leak. Old school Journalism is basically spycraft, a reporter can sometimes just grab something to get a good scoop.
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Or maybe the slides were just laying around on a table, printed out. Etc. etc. So maybe its not a computer document at all, but a bunch of slides that they dug out of the dumpster.
Every time there’s an article about virtually anything on Hacker News, this line comes up. Tell me, how do you think the media should report on governments and companies, if not through protected sources? Like, do you want them to just be press release machines?
There is a fair amount of editorializing. But, this part remains newsworthy:
"But Twitter’s U.S. advertising revenue for the five weeks from April 1 to the first week of May was $88 million, down 59 percent from a year earlier, according to an internal presentation obtained by The New York Times. The company has regularly fallen short of its U.S. weekly sales projections, sometimes by as much as 30 percent, the document said."
That's hard to reconcile with "regularly fallen short of its U.S. weekly sales projections, sometimes by as much as 30 percent". They set their own projections.
Sounds roughly like they expected a 30% drop (for the reasons you cited) and got a 60%-ish drop instead.
From my limited perspective given the factually reported cost reductions, -60% seems 'fine'. Right now it seems like the platform has hit rock bottom in terms of public sentiment so even if the projections were optimistic at -30%, as long as things don't get worse, that's about it. Everyone who is holding out to subscribe or who has left the platform, has probably left already.
Would love to see the source document to understand what frequency 'regularly' and 'sometimes' refer to, and to know when in the last months the projections missed so spectacularly - but that would be boring journalism.
Can you clarify a few of the main parts of the bias? I don’t have a NYT subscription, so only could read an initial part. It seems the source is internal documents.
