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I think this is certainly true. But my understanding of Twitter - and this may be flawed - was that it was always a mission driven company over a profit driven

I think this is certainly true. But my understanding of Twitter - and this may be flawed - was that it was always a mission driven company over a profit driven one. Elon said he wanted to continue that tradition, but with the debt load Twitter is literally in an existential crisis. So this begs the question, can Twitter be successful being “twitter”? My guess is no, Musk can make a lot of money going after video or micropayments, or X or whatever (well this has yet to be seen, My gut says Twitter is in a worse position then anyone realizes when you combine all the factors, but some people work best backed into a corner, and he’s backed by investors with deep pockets) but the free speech public square open forum has to be a passion project. There’s too many constraints otherwise. Ship of Theseus adjacent, when does Twitter stop being “twitter”?

mschuster91 4y ago
> Ship of Theseus adjacent, when does Twitter stop being “twitter”? When the users that people are interested in - politicians, news organizations, certain brand accounts, celebrities - go away. The problem for Twitter is that politicians and celebrities don't really want to hang around on a platform where they have to deal with abusive content all the time.
- logicalmonster 4y ago
  > The problem for Twitter is that politicians and celebrities don't really want to hang around on a platform where they have to deal with abusive content all the time. Maybe. At a certain point, that's probably true, but are we close to that? Sometimes you have to look at what people do, not what they say. It costs a celebrity nothing to say nice things about seeking peace and love and opposing hatred and wanting to fight all of the "hate speech" and "cyber-bullying" they see. In fact, they gain social capital for saying these things, so if you're a celebrity, you're effectively "leaving money on the table" by not talking in a certain way about certain topics. But it costs a celebrity a lot to actually leave a platform where they have some world-shaping influence. My guess is that most celebrities would figuratively crawl through a field of broken glass to get their fix of attention and kudos from their supporters.
  - mikkergp 4y ago
    > My guess is that most celebrities would figuratively crawl through a field of broken glass to get their fix of attention and kudos from their supporters. Yeah I think the network effects are stronger than anyone would like to admit. I think Twitter has a lot of challenges going forward and my analytical read of the situation says he’ll fail, but my gut says he’ll succeed, now it just remains to be seen — succeed at what?
    - andsoitis 4y ago
      Instinct is jet fuel to help work through uncertainty.
      - mikkergp 4y ago
        I think most of my instinct is just fear of going against the “smart money” support of Elon.
  - BryantD 4y ago
    A couple of months ago Elon posted some notes on usage that indicated that the users with huge followings were in fact going away. This was later confirmed by a leaked internal research document[1]. So yes; we are close to that and quite possibly are at that point already. It's not clear to me that any of the changes he's made so far are oriented towards reversing that flow. It's possible that he didn't actually care about that, I suppose. 1. https://www.reuters.com/technology/exclusive-where-did-tweeters-go-twitter-is-losing-its-most-active-users-internal-2022-10-25/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/exclusive-where-did-tweet...
  - mschuster91 4y ago
    > Sometimes you have to look at what people do, not what they say. At least in the "science bubble", I've seen a lot of people say they are fed up and moving to Mastodon. And particularly regarding COVID, it's clear why: they already had to fight insane amounts of trolls and deniers before Musk bought Twitter, and now Musk has made clear he's going for the radical-libertarian interpretation of "free speech" - evidenced by a ton of far-right trolls coming back or, worse, getting the real blue checkmark [1]. That means that the sane voices providing facts and context slowly leave, which is objectively bad as it allows misinformation to go uncontested, and leading more people to leave. FFS, even here on Hacker News one can clearly see on any debate that touches COVID that positions advocating for continuing combatting the pandemic get downvoted. [1] https://twitter.com/TabitaSurge/status/1592895889575915523 https://twitter.com/TabitaSurge/status/1592895889575915523
- mantas 4y ago
  Looking at some content there, „abusive“ is relative to say the least.
wollsmoth 4y ago
I think Twitter can continue to operate and even be profitable. But without completely adding a new product offering it's hard for me to imagine it growing to be worth a lot more than what Elon paid for it.
- mikkergp 4y ago
  > I think Twitter can continue to operate and even be profitable Im curious to hear more on this, in my mind the biggest problem with adding a new product offering would be diluting the text based content which may drive people to more “entertaining / TikTok” content than text content, I think one reason Twitter works as the public square is _because_ text is low effort for celebs/politicians/journalists/etc. Hard to imagine journalists driving as much traffic to their articles over video, especially if you go the Instagram route of starting to prioritize video over classic format (text/images) Again twitter as public square, not Twitter as some yet to be defined TikTok rival)
  - wollsmoth 4y ago
    I just think there's a limit to how far optimizing the code and cutting costs is going to get him. I heard twitter was making a push to be more worldwide in its reach which could maybe work I guess. As it is though I don't know how much more he can drive usage of this product. I don't have any real product ideas for them myself. But they either need to drive ad revenue or come up with a compelling paid option. Maybe they can build on tweetdeck and make that a premium $$ feature? Maybe they start charging for api access.

mschuster91 4y ago

> Ship of Theseus adjacent, when does Twitter stop being “twitter”? When the users that people are interested in - politicians, news organizations, certain brand accounts, celebrities - go away. The problem for Twitter is that politicians and celebrities don't really want to hang around on a platform where they have to deal with abusive content all the time.

logicalmonster 4y ago
> The problem for Twitter is that politicians and celebrities don't really want to hang around on a platform where they have to deal with abusive content all the time. Maybe. At a certain point, that's probably true, but are we close to that? Sometimes you have to look at what people do, not what they say. It costs a celebrity nothing to say nice things about seeking peace and love and opposing hatred and wanting to fight all of the "hate speech" and "cyber-bullying" they see. In fact, they gain social capital for saying these things, so if you're a celebrity, you're effectively "leaving money on the table" by not talking in a certain way about certain topics. But it costs a celebrity a lot to actually leave a platform where they have some world-shaping influence. My guess is that most celebrities would figuratively crawl through a field of broken glass to get their fix of attention and kudos from their supporters.
- mikkergp 4y ago
  > My guess is that most celebrities would figuratively crawl through a field of broken glass to get their fix of attention and kudos from their supporters. Yeah I think the network effects are stronger than anyone would like to admit. I think Twitter has a lot of challenges going forward and my analytical read of the situation says he’ll fail, but my gut says he’ll succeed, now it just remains to be seen — succeed at what?
  - andsoitis 4y ago
    Instinct is jet fuel to help work through uncertainty.
    - mikkergp 4y ago
      I think most of my instinct is just fear of going against the “smart money” support of Elon.
- BryantD 4y ago
  A couple of months ago Elon posted some notes on usage that indicated that the users with huge followings were in fact going away. This was later confirmed by a leaked internal research document[1]. So yes; we are close to that and quite possibly are at that point already. It's not clear to me that any of the changes he's made so far are oriented towards reversing that flow. It's possible that he didn't actually care about that, I suppose. 1. https://www.reuters.com/technology/exclusive-where-did-tweeters-go-twitter-is-losing-its-most-active-users-internal-2022-10-25/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/exclusive-where-did-tweet...
- mschuster91 4y ago
  > Sometimes you have to look at what people do, not what they say. At least in the "science bubble", I've seen a lot of people say they are fed up and moving to Mastodon. And particularly regarding COVID, it's clear why: they already had to fight insane amounts of trolls and deniers before Musk bought Twitter, and now Musk has made clear he's going for the radical-libertarian interpretation of "free speech" - evidenced by a ton of far-right trolls coming back or, worse, getting the real blue checkmark [1]. That means that the sane voices providing facts and context slowly leave, which is objectively bad as it allows misinformation to go uncontested, and leading more people to leave. FFS, even here on Hacker News one can clearly see on any debate that touches COVID that positions advocating for continuing combatting the pandemic get downvoted. [1] https://twitter.com/TabitaSurge/status/1592895889575915523 https://twitter.com/TabitaSurge/status/1592895889575915523
mantas 4y ago
Looking at some content there, „abusive“ is relative to say the least.

wollsmoth 4y ago

I think Twitter can continue to operate and even be profitable. But without completely adding a new product offering it's hard for me to imagine it growing to be worth a lot more than what Elon paid for it.

mikkergp 4y ago
> I think Twitter can continue to operate and even be profitable Im curious to hear more on this, in my mind the biggest problem with adding a new product offering would be diluting the text based content which may drive people to more “entertaining / TikTok” content than text content, I think one reason Twitter works as the public square is _because_ text is low effort for celebs/politicians/journalists/etc. Hard to imagine journalists driving as much traffic to their articles over video, especially if you go the Instagram route of starting to prioritize video over classic format (text/images) Again twitter as public square, not Twitter as some yet to be defined TikTok rival)
- wollsmoth 4y ago
  I just think there's a limit to how far optimizing the code and cutting costs is going to get him. I heard twitter was making a push to be more worldwide in its reach which could maybe work I guess. As it is though I don't know how much more he can drive usage of this product. I don't have any real product ideas for them myself. But they either need to drive ad revenue or come up with a compelling paid option. Maybe they can build on tweetdeck and make that a premium $$ feature? Maybe they start charging for api access.