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>there is an overreaction to new Twitter management Oh i think its a perfectly legitimate and reasonable reaction to new Twitter management. a guy worth about

>there is an overreaction to new Twitter management Oh i think its a perfectly legitimate and reasonable reaction to new Twitter management. a guy worth about 200bn USD spent his first day at the office dragging a piece of plumbing around cheerleading his impending job cuts and upcoming $8 surcharge for a feature that only really benefits and legitimizes the platform. he then axes most of the company, especially the moderation team, and acts shocked when brand-safety conscious corporations pull their advertising out of an abundance of caution. hes lucky corporate brands and advertisers havent figured out they could start their own Mastodon instance for almost nothing, plug it until it becomes more popular than Twitter, and maintain all their existing brand safety controls in the process. If Musk wanted to take a 44bn USD kick to the knackers and spend the end of his year getting deadass roasted on his new social media platform by literally everyone, its a success.

sieabahlpark 4y ago
vorpalhex 4y ago
The advertisers pulled before any layoffs. Actually they started pulling the day before he took over. The teams he cut are mostly silly teams. A climate team? At twitter? AI Ethics? He has to stop burning money. He is moving twitter from ad funded (which never paid the bills) to subscription funded (which might pay the bills? $8/mo is nothing. It will certainly make bans hurt more. It will significantly help spam.)
- addajones 4y ago
  Absolutely! People love to hate it’s very infectious. I personally believe for-profit social media companies should have always charged a subscription. People tend to be more respectful and use things they pay for.
  - thedrbrian 4y ago
    none of the big social media companies would have gotten big if the users had to pay. See something awful where you had to pay a tenner to post.
    - addajones 4y ago
      You're correct 100%. I just think the entire idea of building a userbase for free isn't so great.
- noahtallen 4y ago
  How the hell is AI Ethics irrelevant to a company that uses AI to determine what tweets people are shown?
- sigmar 4y ago
  The ad model works for instagram, youtube, and tiktok. Why can't it work for twitter? I don't understand why the mostly text-based site would be so much more expensive than the various other social media sites that don't require subscriptions to achieve high-reach. I'm sure it'll massively cut down on spam, but think Elon might be overestimating how much other ppl care about spam based on his own feed/replies/notifications.
  - GekkePrutser 4y ago
    It works financially but not ethically. Tracking users to maximize ad revenue is something advertisers demand and it's frowned on more and more. In the EU it's now illegal to do so without the user's consent. So.think it's smart to look at subscription business models and much more ethical too. At least you can give the user a choice now.
  - briantakita 4y ago
    > Why can't it work for twitter? Don't know. Perhaps the fired management can comment on why it didn't work for Twitter? > Elon might be overestimating how much other ppl care about spam based on his own feed/replies/notifications. Difference is one does not need to follow Elon if one thinks his content is spam. Disincentivizing ubiquitous spam created by bots out of the platform will reduce the noise overall so one can curate the list of those who they follow.
    - sigmar 4y ago
      I'm not describing Elon's content as spam. I'm saying he receives more spam than most people, particularly because he likes to respond to ppl that @ him and is very into crypto.
- chmars 4y ago
  Do you have a source for those 'silly teams'?
  - sieabahlpark 4y ago
- therouwboat 4y ago
  Are they going to ban paying customers? Thats like throwing money away.
- GekkePrutser 4y ago
  A climate team at a company with a huge energy footprint is absolutely a great idea IMO. Twitter operates a lot of servers and I'm sure some optimization can be done there.
  - UncleEntity 4y ago
    Laying off half the workforce will probably save more electricity than whatever schemes the climate team ever dreamed up. Just saying…
    - GekkePrutser 4y ago
      How will that save electricity for society? Those people will just work somewhere else (if they're not working at home already which is super common in IT). It's not really solving the problem, just shifting it onto someone else's plate. Reducing things like underutilized servers could really make a big difference that won't just shift to somewhere else like fired employees would. Especially storage is something that is pretty energy intensive even when not in use very much. Our SAN systems were by far the hottest things in our datacenters even though the amount of compute capacity done on those boxes is negligible.
- _djo_ 4y ago
  The advertisers began pulling ads after ad agency execs met with him and failed to get satisfactory answers[0] and after he posted that conspiracy theory about Paul Pelosi. It didn't help that he ignored and then blocked the head of MMA Global just after the layoffs started.[1] If he wanted to keep advertisers on board this is an odd way to go about it. The Ethical AI team wasn't 'silly', it was working on ways to make the algorithms used at Twitter more transparent to users, avoid bias, and potentially allow for multiple algorithm choices. Subscription funding for Twitter is never going to work as Twitter Blue showed quite clearly. At best it'll result in marginal profit on a substantially smaller and less interesting site, dominated by a few voices and with many of its members leaving to other places. Nor will it block scammers, who'll be able to use stolen cards and other payment methods to pay for access the same way they currently pay for hacked accounts. It'll just be even cheaper for them. Nor is $8/mo 'nothing' for large groups of people, especially in the developing world, and would result in them being excluded from the platform. Musk made one vague statement about the price being adjusted for different regions but nothing further has emerged on that. [0]https://www.adweek.com/media/elon-musk-fails-to-answer-brands-questions-in-private-meetings/ https://www.adweek.com/media/elon-musk-fails-to-answer-brand... [1]https://twitter.com/LouPas/status/1588599808587345921?s=20&t=SguSYedGWKG78GxG9dRGoQ https://twitter.com/LouPas/status/1588599808587345921?s=20&t...
  - PM_me_your_math 4y ago
    You don't need a blue check mark to have an account or post.
    - _djo_ 4y ago
      Musk has openly stated that those without Twitter Blue will have their tweets substantially deprioritised and de-emphasised.[0] [0] https://twitter.com/somebadideas/status/1588876465915166721?s=46&t=sfuIQVNAM-m1voXowfiY2w https://twitter.com/somebadideas/status/1588876465915166721?...
      - PM_me_your_math 4y ago
        What does that have to do with the facts I posted?
- youngtaff 4y ago
  He’s burning money because he loaded the company with a billion dollars of debt Without that debt Twitter was in much better shape
  - vorpalhex 4y ago
    Twitter took the debt. Twitter did not have to take the debt. Twitter made that choice before agreeing to Elon.
    - _djo_ 4y ago
      Nope. This was taken on as part of Musk's acquisition which is structured as a leveraged buyout and saddled Twitter with nearly $13 billion in additional debt. Twitter's annual debt service cost before Musk took over was an entirely manageable $60 million a year. Now it's somewhere around $1 billion.
- pjc50 4y ago
  > $8/mo is nothing. Most of non-Western Twitter will vanish overnight if this is a requirement to use the platform. But it's still not clear what it will actually mean and how it will affect the site culture.
  - shultays 4y ago
    It is not a requirement to use platform, it is for blue checkmark
  - PM_me_your_math 4y ago
    Do you need a blue check mark to use Twitter? Ask yourself that question.
- CuriousCosmic 4y ago
  An AI ethics team is 100% a core team for a business like twitter. Facebook has already proven that such a team is necessary [1] to prevent atrocities from occurring. Being able to identify biases in the content selections by "the algorithm" (read: a bundle of fancy heuristics) is a core part of their job. Their job is to identify ways bad actors are abusing their content propagation algorithms and ways to mitigate these abuses. 1. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebook-genocide.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebo...
  - pseudo0 4y ago
    An AI ethics team isn't going to catch promotion of violence or genocide in Myanmar, that is a problem that requires local cultural and language expertise and staff performing 24/7 real-time moderation. An AI ethics team is just a PR prop for companies to trot out when something bad happens to show that they care, not an effective solution.
- nemo44x 4y ago
addajones 4y ago
Why does it matter how much he’s worth? Never understood why people are so concerned about him cutting jobs? He bought the company and took it private. It’s his right to restructure it and try to make it generate profit as he’d wish. The board of directors of public Twitter approved of this. What do people think, the USA is FOSS?
- forgotusername6 4y ago
  Because there is something distasteful about a man that rich firing loads of people. There is something almost medieval about it. He's basically a modern day king. I've never understood the complete lack of empathy displayed by so many people on HN. It's worse than Reddit. "He bought the man, it is his property now. He can do with him as he wishes" - legal ownership can still be wrong.
  - joshmanders 4y ago
    > "He bought the man, it is his property now. He can do with him as he wishes" - legal ownership can still be wrong. Jesus do you even read the words you just typed? Someone bought a company that was hemorrhaging money, he let go of the fluff and you're equating it to slave ownership?!
    - kemayo 4y ago
      Is this the moment to snarkily bring up "corporations are people, my friend"? :D
      - parineum 4y ago
        "Corporations are people" is the plural of "a corporation is people". It has nothing to do with assigning person hood to a corporate entity. "Corporations are people" is in reference to the 1st amendment free speech rights that the _people_ who make up a corporation still maintain when they are acting as a group. Consider not eating up the soundbites of politicians without understanding the context.
    - 4y ago
ambrozk 4y ago
> hes lucky corporate brands and advertisers havent figured out they could start their own Mastodon instance for almost nothing, plug it until it becomes more popular than Twitter, and maintain all their existing brand safety controls in the process. This is a very funny way of thinking which gets reality backwards. Corporate brands go where user eyeballs are. In the past the eyeballs read newspapers, and advertisers paid newspapers for space. Then the eyeballs went to Google, and advertisers paid Google for space. Then Facebook, and Twitter took over, and advertisers started paying them. Advertisers don't tell user eyeballs what platforms to go to. They follow the users.
- sosull 4y ago
  Is there even a remotely balanced alignment between the number of users on a platform and that platform’s advertising market share? I think the answer is no. Google and Meta dominate ads. No-one else really has traction, irrespective of their platform’s success.
  - rco8786 4y ago
    That’s a super weird take. Google and Meta absolutely dominate on users also.
    - sosull 4y ago
      Yes, you’re correct. I was wrong. Apologies.
- nimchimpsky 4y ago
- __alexs 4y ago
  Google ad revenue is considerably more than Meta and Twitter combined.
- frereubu 4y ago
  I don't think it's that simple is it? Companies like Ford don't advertise on sites like Parler not just because there aren't many people there, but because of the content that their adverts would be presented alongside. What seems to concern companies about the new direction of Twitter is that more extremists may be allowed back on Twitter if the content rules are loosened, and the companies' advertising may be presented alongside that. It may also be that if those extremists are allowed back then many people will start to desert Twitter, and it will be even less attractive. But I think both things - number of users and the content - are being taken into account.
squidbeak 4y ago
Alternatively, a businessman running some of the world's most successful companies took over a failing company and in his first week took a hatchet to a slovenly working culture and overgrown staff, and along with a practical plan to mend the company's finances and break its reliance on advertising, proposed new features (community notes, improved search, payments for creators) on an aggressive timeline that have many user excited about the platform for the first time in years.
- smcl 4y ago
  Was Twitter really failing? It finally became (extremely) profitable in 2018 and 2019 before tanking in 2020 (covid?) but it made a decent recovery in 2021: https://www.statista.com/statistics/274563/annual-net-income-of-twitter https://www.statista.com/statistics/274563/annual-net-income...
  - jurassic 4y ago
    The company wasn't financially failing until Elon showed up, scared off most of the major advertisers, and stuck the company with $13B in high-interest loans he used to buy it.
    - PM_me_your_math 4y ago
      Losing 4 billion dollars over 10 years isn't healthy.
      - smcl 4y ago
        Wouldn't this logic make basically all SV giants "failing" until they hit that hockey stick turning point? Hell even Tesla didn't turn a profit until 2020, and it is pretty universally considered to be a success (even if there are some raised eyebrows over their the source of the profits being tax credits, and sky-high stock price)
        PM_me_your_math 4y ago
papito 4y ago
And he doesn't even take it that well. Criticize Musk and the whining ensues. You see, the richest man on the planet IS the victim.
- concordDance 4y ago
  Money can't buy social acceptance. And once you get beyond the amount needed to live comfortably the latter becomes much more valuable.
- robertlagrant 4y ago
  Not everything people discuss involves a victim.
- toofy 4y ago
  > And he doesn’t even take it that well. no, he really doesn’t. he very publicly blocked the ceo of an advertising company when they attempted to—professionally and politely—explain to elon what some of their concerns were. it’s unreal how he’s so loudly demonstrating his instability and then complaining that people are saying he’s unstable.
manmal 4y ago
> hes lucky corporate brands and advertisers havent figured out they could start their own Mastodon instance for almost nothing I think competitors would all start their own instances (Nike instance vs Adidas instance?), so you'd end up with a myriad of them eventually.
- Timshel 4y ago
  That would be kind of awesome I think :).
  - bombcar 4y ago
    It would be hilarious watching the infighting spread over various instances themselves that were infighting. But companies don't want the "liability" (not necessarily legal liability, but appearances) - and they don't want @thenewh1tler@nike.mastadon or whatever doing unsightly things.
    - stormbrew 4y ago
      Companies wouldn't have open registration. They'd run it like any other corporate resource, integrated into their ldap/ad/sso solution and with a corporate policy for what their employees could do on it. Ya know, like their email servers.
      - bombcar 4y ago
        I mean, company blogs still exist, as empty and as dead as they've always been.
        stormbrew 4y ago
        Yeah and for Nike I think that'd be true here too. But for, say, Wired? Probably more active/useful. That's the biggest corporate comms use of Twitter anyways, outside "Twitter as support short line" which is honestly both incredibly obnoxious and really unfair to users not on Twitter so I think it's a good thing it might die.
drstewart 4y ago
>hes lucky corporate brands and advertisers havent figured out they could start their own Mastodon instance for almost nothing, plug it until it becomes more popular than Twitter So you think the only reason that Twitter (and all social media companies) exist is because literally every other company on the planet that advertises didn't "just realize" they could "just plug" a Mastodon instance until it's more popular? McDonald's, Pepsi, Audi, Coke, Nike, etc - don't have one single person that realizes this one easy trick for displacing Twitter? That's the take you're going with?
- UncleEntity 4y ago
  > McDonald's, Pepsi, Audi, Coke, Nike, etc - don't have one single person that realizes this one easy trick for displacing Twitter? Why would they when there were a handful of users there? But now there’s a whole bunch of people looking for that one easy trick and whoever gives it to them gets all the marbles.
  - drstewart 4y ago
    >Why would they when there were a handful of users there? Because they could just plug it and make it the most popular social media
esskay 4y ago
The reality is the average user could not give a crap who owns twitter, or what they do. They arent there for the owner, they're there because its a functioning social network.
- pixl97 4y ago
  The key term here is 'functioning social network' and what that actually means. One of the truths of humanity is we don't accept 'extreme' views that we ourselves do not hold. When presented with them we will find ways to censor them from our daily lives. The opposite side of the coin is the people that hold these extreme views very commonly want to share these views with others (I would assume so that others adopt these views, but there could be other motivations). These behaviors are in conflict with each other, and if the extremists are not moderated, the moderate masses will eventually leave. Why the owner is important is they typically become the 'buck stops here' person for policy on what is extreme and how the site will be moderated. As of so far Musk (already a controversial character to many) has not given much good information to any party involved in the continuation of twitter (users/advertisers/workers) on how this is going to proceed and given quite a fair amount of questionable information and bad signaling.
Aleksdev 4y ago
Your post comes off as extremely negative towards Musk. I’m going to get downvoted for saying this but let’s be honest for a minute. There were multiple videos titled something like “a day in the life of a twitter employee” were they employees at twitter documented how they drank alcohol and “chilled” on the roof after a few meetings. This doesn’t seem like work to me. Second, the moderation team at twitter covered up the Hunter Biden laptop story because they had a bias. I don’t think they were doing a great job.

sieabahlpark 4y ago

vorpalhex 4y ago

The advertisers pulled before any layoffs. Actually they started pulling the day before he took over. The teams he cut are mostly silly teams. A climate team? At twitter? AI Ethics? He has to stop burning money. He is moving twitter from ad funded (which never paid the bills) to subscription funded (which might pay the bills? $8/mo is nothing. It will certainly make bans hurt more. It will significantly help spam.)

addajones 4y ago
Absolutely! People love to hate it’s very infectious. I personally believe for-profit social media companies should have always charged a subscription. People tend to be more respectful and use things they pay for.
- thedrbrian 4y ago
  none of the big social media companies would have gotten big if the users had to pay. See something awful where you had to pay a tenner to post.
  - addajones 4y ago
    You're correct 100%. I just think the entire idea of building a userbase for free isn't so great.
noahtallen 4y ago
How the hell is AI Ethics irrelevant to a company that uses AI to determine what tweets people are shown?
sigmar 4y ago
The ad model works for instagram, youtube, and tiktok. Why can't it work for twitter? I don't understand why the mostly text-based site would be so much more expensive than the various other social media sites that don't require subscriptions to achieve high-reach. I'm sure it'll massively cut down on spam, but think Elon might be overestimating how much other ppl care about spam based on his own feed/replies/notifications.
- GekkePrutser 4y ago
  It works financially but not ethically. Tracking users to maximize ad revenue is something advertisers demand and it's frowned on more and more. In the EU it's now illegal to do so without the user's consent. So.think it's smart to look at subscription business models and much more ethical too. At least you can give the user a choice now.
- briantakita 4y ago
  > Why can't it work for twitter? Don't know. Perhaps the fired management can comment on why it didn't work for Twitter? > Elon might be overestimating how much other ppl care about spam based on his own feed/replies/notifications. Difference is one does not need to follow Elon if one thinks his content is spam. Disincentivizing ubiquitous spam created by bots out of the platform will reduce the noise overall so one can curate the list of those who they follow.
  - sigmar 4y ago
    I'm not describing Elon's content as spam. I'm saying he receives more spam than most people, particularly because he likes to respond to ppl that @ him and is very into crypto.
chmars 4y ago
Do you have a source for those 'silly teams'?
- sieabahlpark 4y ago
therouwboat 4y ago
Are they going to ban paying customers? Thats like throwing money away.
GekkePrutser 4y ago
A climate team at a company with a huge energy footprint is absolutely a great idea IMO. Twitter operates a lot of servers and I'm sure some optimization can be done there.
- UncleEntity 4y ago
  Laying off half the workforce will probably save more electricity than whatever schemes the climate team ever dreamed up. Just saying…
  - GekkePrutser 4y ago
    How will that save electricity for society? Those people will just work somewhere else (if they're not working at home already which is super common in IT). It's not really solving the problem, just shifting it onto someone else's plate. Reducing things like underutilized servers could really make a big difference that won't just shift to somewhere else like fired employees would. Especially storage is something that is pretty energy intensive even when not in use very much. Our SAN systems were by far the hottest things in our datacenters even though the amount of compute capacity done on those boxes is negligible.
_djo_ 4y ago
The advertisers began pulling ads after ad agency execs met with him and failed to get satisfactory answers[0] and after he posted that conspiracy theory about Paul Pelosi. It didn't help that he ignored and then blocked the head of MMA Global just after the layoffs started.[1] If he wanted to keep advertisers on board this is an odd way to go about it. The Ethical AI team wasn't 'silly', it was working on ways to make the algorithms used at Twitter more transparent to users, avoid bias, and potentially allow for multiple algorithm choices. Subscription funding for Twitter is never going to work as Twitter Blue showed quite clearly. At best it'll result in marginal profit on a substantially smaller and less interesting site, dominated by a few voices and with many of its members leaving to other places. Nor will it block scammers, who'll be able to use stolen cards and other payment methods to pay for access the same way they currently pay for hacked accounts. It'll just be even cheaper for them. Nor is $8/mo 'nothing' for large groups of people, especially in the developing world, and would result in them being excluded from the platform. Musk made one vague statement about the price being adjusted for different regions but nothing further has emerged on that. [0]https://www.adweek.com/media/elon-musk-fails-to-answer-brands-questions-in-private-meetings/ https://www.adweek.com/media/elon-musk-fails-to-answer-brand... [1]https://twitter.com/LouPas/status/1588599808587345921?s=20&t=SguSYedGWKG78GxG9dRGoQ https://twitter.com/LouPas/status/1588599808587345921?s=20&t...
- PM_me_your_math 4y ago
  You don't need a blue check mark to have an account or post.
  - _djo_ 4y ago
    Musk has openly stated that those without Twitter Blue will have their tweets substantially deprioritised and de-emphasised.[0] [0] https://twitter.com/somebadideas/status/1588876465915166721?s=46&t=sfuIQVNAM-m1voXowfiY2w https://twitter.com/somebadideas/status/1588876465915166721?...
    - PM_me_your_math 4y ago
      What does that have to do with the facts I posted?
youngtaff 4y ago
He’s burning money because he loaded the company with a billion dollars of debt Without that debt Twitter was in much better shape
- vorpalhex 4y ago
  Twitter took the debt. Twitter did not have to take the debt. Twitter made that choice before agreeing to Elon.
  - _djo_ 4y ago
    Nope. This was taken on as part of Musk's acquisition which is structured as a leveraged buyout and saddled Twitter with nearly $13 billion in additional debt. Twitter's annual debt service cost before Musk took over was an entirely manageable $60 million a year. Now it's somewhere around $1 billion.
pjc50 4y ago
> $8/mo is nothing. Most of non-Western Twitter will vanish overnight if this is a requirement to use the platform. But it's still not clear what it will actually mean and how it will affect the site culture.
- shultays 4y ago
  It is not a requirement to use platform, it is for blue checkmark
- PM_me_your_math 4y ago
  Do you need a blue check mark to use Twitter? Ask yourself that question.
CuriousCosmic 4y ago
An AI ethics team is 100% a core team for a business like twitter. Facebook has already proven that such a team is necessary [1] to prevent atrocities from occurring. Being able to identify biases in the content selections by "the algorithm" (read: a bundle of fancy heuristics) is a core part of their job. Their job is to identify ways bad actors are abusing their content propagation algorithms and ways to mitigate these abuses. 1. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebook-genocide.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebo...
- pseudo0 4y ago
  An AI ethics team isn't going to catch promotion of violence or genocide in Myanmar, that is a problem that requires local cultural and language expertise and staff performing 24/7 real-time moderation. An AI ethics team is just a PR prop for companies to trot out when something bad happens to show that they care, not an effective solution.
nemo44x 4y ago

addajones 4y ago

Why does it matter how much he’s worth? Never understood why people are so concerned about him cutting jobs? He bought the company and took it private. It’s his right to restructure it and try to make it generate profit as he’d wish. The board of directors of public Twitter approved of this. What do people think, the USA is FOSS?

forgotusername6 4y ago
Because there is something distasteful about a man that rich firing loads of people. There is something almost medieval about it. He's basically a modern day king. I've never understood the complete lack of empathy displayed by so many people on HN. It's worse than Reddit. "He bought the man, it is his property now. He can do with him as he wishes" - legal ownership can still be wrong.
- joshmanders 4y ago
  > "He bought the man, it is his property now. He can do with him as he wishes" - legal ownership can still be wrong. Jesus do you even read the words you just typed? Someone bought a company that was hemorrhaging money, he let go of the fluff and you're equating it to slave ownership?!
  - kemayo 4y ago
    Is this the moment to snarkily bring up "corporations are people, my friend"? :D
    - parineum 4y ago
      "Corporations are people" is the plural of "a corporation is people". It has nothing to do with assigning person hood to a corporate entity. "Corporations are people" is in reference to the 1st amendment free speech rights that the _people_ who make up a corporation still maintain when they are acting as a group. Consider not eating up the soundbites of politicians without understanding the context.
  - 4y ago

ambrozk 4y ago

> hes lucky corporate brands and advertisers havent figured out they could start their own Mastodon instance for almost nothing, plug it until it becomes more popular than Twitter, and maintain all their existing brand safety controls in the process. This is a very funny way of thinking which gets reality backwards. Corporate brands go where user eyeballs are. In the past the eyeballs read newspapers, and advertisers paid newspapers for space. Then the eyeballs went to Google, and advertisers paid Google for space. Then Facebook, and Twitter took over, and advertisers started paying them. Advertisers don't tell user eyeballs what platforms to go to. They follow the users.

sosull 4y ago
Is there even a remotely balanced alignment between the number of users on a platform and that platform’s advertising market share? I think the answer is no. Google and Meta dominate ads. No-one else really has traction, irrespective of their platform’s success.
- rco8786 4y ago
  That’s a super weird take. Google and Meta absolutely dominate on users also.
  - sosull 4y ago
    Yes, you’re correct. I was wrong. Apologies.
nimchimpsky 4y ago
__alexs 4y ago
Google ad revenue is considerably more than Meta and Twitter combined.
frereubu 4y ago
I don't think it's that simple is it? Companies like Ford don't advertise on sites like Parler not just because there aren't many people there, but because of the content that their adverts would be presented alongside. What seems to concern companies about the new direction of Twitter is that more extremists may be allowed back on Twitter if the content rules are loosened, and the companies' advertising may be presented alongside that. It may also be that if those extremists are allowed back then many people will start to desert Twitter, and it will be even less attractive. But I think both things - number of users and the content - are being taken into account.

squidbeak 4y ago

Alternatively, a businessman running some of the world's most successful companies took over a failing company and in his first week took a hatchet to a slovenly working culture and overgrown staff, and along with a practical plan to mend the company's finances and break its reliance on advertising, proposed new features (community notes, improved search, payments for creators) on an aggressive timeline that have many user excited about the platform for the first time in years.

smcl 4y ago
Was Twitter really failing? It finally became (extremely) profitable in 2018 and 2019 before tanking in 2020 (covid?) but it made a decent recovery in 2021: https://www.statista.com/statistics/274563/annual-net-income-of-twitter https://www.statista.com/statistics/274563/annual-net-income...
- jurassic 4y ago
  The company wasn't financially failing until Elon showed up, scared off most of the major advertisers, and stuck the company with $13B in high-interest loans he used to buy it.
  - PM_me_your_math 4y ago
    Losing 4 billion dollars over 10 years isn't healthy.
    - smcl 4y ago
      Wouldn't this logic make basically all SV giants "failing" until they hit that hockey stick turning point? Hell even Tesla didn't turn a profit until 2020, and it is pretty universally considered to be a success (even if there are some raised eyebrows over their the source of the profits being tax credits, and sky-high stock price)
      - PM_me_your_math 4y ago

papito 4y ago

And he doesn't even take it that well. Criticize Musk and the whining ensues. You see, the richest man on the planet IS the victim.

concordDance 4y ago
Money can't buy social acceptance. And once you get beyond the amount needed to live comfortably the latter becomes much more valuable.
robertlagrant 4y ago
Not everything people discuss involves a victim.
toofy 4y ago
> And he doesn’t even take it that well. no, he really doesn’t. he very publicly blocked the ceo of an advertising company when they attempted to—professionally and politely—explain to elon what some of their concerns were. it’s unreal how he’s so loudly demonstrating his instability and then complaining that people are saying he’s unstable.

manmal 4y ago

> hes lucky corporate brands and advertisers havent figured out they could start their own Mastodon instance for almost nothing I think competitors would all start their own instances (Nike instance vs Adidas instance?), so you'd end up with a myriad of them eventually.

Timshel 4y ago
That would be kind of awesome I think :).
- bombcar 4y ago
  It would be hilarious watching the infighting spread over various instances themselves that were infighting. But companies don't want the "liability" (not necessarily legal liability, but appearances) - and they don't want @thenewh1tler@nike.mastadon or whatever doing unsightly things.
  - stormbrew 4y ago
    Companies wouldn't have open registration. They'd run it like any other corporate resource, integrated into their ldap/ad/sso solution and with a corporate policy for what their employees could do on it. Ya know, like their email servers.
    - bombcar 4y ago
      I mean, company blogs still exist, as empty and as dead as they've always been.
      - stormbrew 4y ago
        Yeah and for Nike I think that'd be true here too. But for, say, Wired? Probably more active/useful. That's the biggest corporate comms use of Twitter anyways, outside "Twitter as support short line" which is honestly both incredibly obnoxious and really unfair to users not on Twitter so I think it's a good thing it might die.

drstewart 4y ago

>hes lucky corporate brands and advertisers havent figured out they could start their own Mastodon instance for almost nothing, plug it until it becomes more popular than Twitter So you think the only reason that Twitter (and all social media companies) exist is because literally every other company on the planet that advertises didn't "just realize" they could "just plug" a Mastodon instance until it's more popular? McDonald's, Pepsi, Audi, Coke, Nike, etc - don't have one single person that realizes this one easy trick for displacing Twitter? That's the take you're going with?

UncleEntity 4y ago
> McDonald's, Pepsi, Audi, Coke, Nike, etc - don't have one single person that realizes this one easy trick for displacing Twitter? Why would they when there were a handful of users there? But now there’s a whole bunch of people looking for that one easy trick and whoever gives it to them gets all the marbles.
- drstewart 4y ago
  >Why would they when there were a handful of users there? Because they could just plug it and make it the most popular social media

esskay 4y ago

The reality is the average user could not give a crap who owns twitter, or what they do. They arent there for the owner, they're there because its a functioning social network.

pixl97 4y ago
The key term here is 'functioning social network' and what that actually means. One of the truths of humanity is we don't accept 'extreme' views that we ourselves do not hold. When presented with them we will find ways to censor them from our daily lives. The opposite side of the coin is the people that hold these extreme views very commonly want to share these views with others (I would assume so that others adopt these views, but there could be other motivations). These behaviors are in conflict with each other, and if the extremists are not moderated, the moderate masses will eventually leave. Why the owner is important is they typically become the 'buck stops here' person for policy on what is extreme and how the site will be moderated. As of so far Musk (already a controversial character to many) has not given much good information to any party involved in the continuation of twitter (users/advertisers/workers) on how this is going to proceed and given quite a fair amount of questionable information and bad signaling.

Aleksdev 4y ago

Your post comes off as extremely negative towards Musk. I’m going to get downvoted for saying this but let’s be honest for a minute. There were multiple videos titled something like “a day in the life of a twitter employee” were they employees at twitter documented how they drank alcohol and “chilled” on the roof after a few meetings. This doesn’t seem like work to me. Second, the moderation team at twitter covered up the Hunter Biden laptop story because they had a bias. I don’t think they were doing a great job.