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> I still can't get over the banana-pants insanity of the first count As someone who's unfamiliar with this, could you explain what's banana-pants insane about
by nomel 4y ago
> I still can't get over the banana-pants insanity of the first count
As someone who's unfamiliar with this, could you explain what's banana-pants insane about a company inflating their hard-to-discover numbers, for profit? I thought that was, unfortunately, banana-pants standard? For example, the fiction that is Twitter or Reddit's user count.
- jjeaff 4y agoWhether they inflated their numbers or not, the burden would be on Musk to prove that and it would be completely impossible to do that with a 3rd party tool. You are a monetizable user on Twitter if you just log in and read tweets. Something that no 3rd party tool could possibly track.
- zinekeller 4y ago> You are a monetizable user on Twitter if you just log in and read tweets. Actually, even logged-out users (until they forced everyone to log in to read timelines) are monetizable, so Musk is really trying to make something to get out.
- eastbound 4y agoI’m surprised that someone clever enough to run a business, takes that excuse to get out of a deal. He must have been tired. Any businessman who gets into such a position, even by mistake, would have at least taken this opportunity to require Twitter’s methodology on counting bots an expose its flaws. The claim would be something tangible like “This account is a bot and your criteria falsely counts it as a user.” Not “Really there are 5% bots? Everybody, look!” He looks more like an engineer who can’t stand the fact that ballpark numbers are a decent way to do business in a lot of cases.
- lokar 4y agoNo, the burden is not on Musk to prove anything. He waived all rights to due diligence. There is nothing to prove or disprove.
- jcranmer 4y agoTwitter is a public company (and has been for 9 years), and has maintained the 5% mDAU disclaimer in its required annual reports for years. I don't know off-hand how long it's been doing so, but probably at least 4 or 5 years. The allegation is saying not only that Twitter has been lying about that number--for years, on documents that land it in legal hot water if it's been lying--but that it was doing so specifically so that Musk would buy Twitter at an inflated price. The insane part is really that specific intent, not the lying about the numbers.
- flerchin 4y agoWell twitter would have been obscuring bots to obtain an inflated purchase price _by anyone_.
- thr0wawayf00 4y agoFWIW, academic research has questioned the 5% number for years. USC and IU put out a report 5 years ago that believed the upper bound for fake accounts was 15%[0]. This isn't a new allegation. 0: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/03/10/nearly-48-million-twitter-accounts-could-be-bots-says-study.html https://www.cnbc.com/2017/03/10/nearly-48-million-twitter-ac...
- jcranmer 4y agoAs explained many times by many people, the 5% is not the number of bots on Twitter. It is the false negative rate of Twitter's bot detection algorithms.
- kergonath 4y agoFrom your source: > our estimates suggest that between 9% and 15% of active Twitter accounts are bots From Twitter: “roughly 5% of our monetizable daily users are bots”. Both can be true at the same time, and it does not mean that Twitter lied.
- dahdum 4y agoTwitter's lawsuit mentions this, stating only they know who is monetizable. IIRC Musk's lawyers deliberately push the same false equivalency in their filing.
- benj111 4y agoThe fact that musk tweeted that he was buying Twitter to fix the bot problem. So the fact that he's using his reason for buying to try and get out of buying seems... Insane.
- phailhaus 4y agoIt's insane because Twitter has been very careful to explain that the 5% number is not some sort of "promise". > Additionally, our calculation of mDAU is not based on any standardized industry methodology and is not necessarily calculated in the same manner or comparable to similarly titled measures presented by other companies. Similarly, our measures of mDAU growth and engagement may differ from estimates published by third parties or from similarly titled metrics of our competitors due to differences in methodology. They covered themselves very clearly, and Musk has no standing here. He knew this, and decided to waive his due diligence and buy anyways. [1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1418091/000141809120000199/twtrq320ex992.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1418091/000141809120...
- 8ytecoder 4y agoHe claimed to buy Twitter, specifically, to clean it up; to get rid of bots. That was his stated goal. "If our twitter bid succeeds, we will defeat the spam bots or die trying!" https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1517215066550116354 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1517215066550116354
- kennxfl 4y agoApparently Twitter subpoenaed Musk's friends and colleagues who were actively tweeting about the deal with what is believed to be an attempt to prove he encouraged his posse tweet negatively to force a lower price.
- threeseed 4y agoDavid Sachs, prominent VC was one of those subpoenaed and he definitely seemed a little sensitive about it: https://twitter.com/DavidSacks/status/1554258141876932608 https://twitter.com/DavidSacks/status/1554258141876932608
- SilverBirch 4y ago[flagged]
- daed 4y agoOne point not mentioned (and I’m just paraphrasing Levine from Money Stuff here): It’s crazy because it would probably be BETTER if you had more bots. Then you could say that your revenue per user was higher and you could argue that you had more room for growth. So, if anything, lying and OVERestimating the bot count would help your valuation more.
- Ferret7446 4y agoNot really, because the revenue comes from ads not users. Twitter makes profit from ad buyers thinking they are reaching many users. The "revenue per user was higher" you mention is actually "cost per ad impression" and ad buyers want that to be low.
- Sebb767 4y agoAd buyers want this to be lower, but investors would love for this to be higher. I think that's what the parent was aiming at.
- fooey 4y agoThere's a whole assumption that bots are a net negative to the platforms value besides any arguments over how many of them there are. As a human, it's annoying to get get a reply notification only to discover it was bot spam, but from the platform perspective that bot just created user activity and content for you for free. I have a theory that the most embarrassing thing to come out of this might be that Twitter doesn't really care about bots much more than issuing platitudes that they care about bots to assuage the user base.
- blackoil 4y agoIf there are too many bot activities, user may completely turn off notifications and reduce the usage.
- ryantgtg 4y agoI have like 9 twitter bots and they’re all cool and interesting. I wonder if Musk’s tool differentiates between cool and uncool bots. In the past I tried to write bots that do things like reply to people, but that is a violation of the TOS and twitter would immediately identify and ban the account.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]