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>What does Twitter offer Wikipedia that Mastodon does not? Though it may not seem like it to the highly-technical terminally-online, twitter is still very much

>What does Twitter offer Wikipedia that Mastodon does not? Though it may not seem like it to the highly-technical terminally-online, twitter is still very much the Schelling point[1] for social media communication. People, by default, will look for communications from (and attempt to get the attention of) large entities on twitter (especially during events like the main website going down). This is a huge deal that needs to be accounted for when listing what the platform "has to offer". (Of course, the way things are going, this may change in the future. This is by no means a bad move by the WMF. The future is uncertain, though, and it's just worth being realistic about the value twitter still holds in the present.) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focal_point_(game_theory) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focal_point_(game_theory)

dragontamer 3y ago
Only if you look at people with Twitter accounts. Someone like me, who has always relied upon nitter to get Twitter information (and now that API access is locked off and anonymous browsing is disabled... I'm no longer welcome to Twitter). Its ridiculous that Twitter looked upon the grand social network of Quora and thought... "We should copy that model". Closing off access to the website is the literal opposite direction, it will kill Twitter faster than any other decision made thusfar.
- bboygravity 3y ago
  You do realize that you're one of many people (and large media outlets) in the past year or so who claimed that Twitter will die "very soon"?
  - dragontamer 3y ago
    Elon Musk is rich, he can keep this going as long as he wants. But we all know that Twitter's revenue is down from $5 Billion to maybe $2.5 Billion/year, and they got a $1.3 Billion / year interest payment due every year. It will not be profitable in any reasonable time period. Whether or not Elon Musk will want to keep it when its in such a sorry state, or whether or not Elon will waste even more money on it in vain hopes of saving his investment is whatever. I don't know the timing of things, but these things can take years (especially if Elon puts more of his money up to raise funds). But in any case, the money-losing aspect of Twitter is rather solid and publicly admitted. In general, businesses that constantly lose money (and loses $Billions when they only have low-single-digit Billions in revenue) makes the overall picture rather... obvious? I'm not surprised that many other people agree with me. If that's where you're going with this. Do you have a counterpoint to offer?
    - blisterpeanuts 3y ago
      Twitter's doing very poorly right now, financially speaking. Musk & team are working on adding new features: long form video hosting, long form text, encrypted messaging, P2P video conferencing, payments, and I think he's planning to incorporate A.I. somehow. They're starting to pay top content creators. Some of this is done, some is in the pipeline. They're accomplishing it with 20% of the previous headcount. It seems to me Twitter's being run these days by an entrepreneur who's trying hard to figure out ways to make it a profitable operation. The next year or two will be interesting to watch, especially with the U.S. election madness.
      - dragontamer 3y ago
        > It seems to me Twitter's being run these days by an entrepreneur who's trying hard to figure out ways to make it a profitable operation. Twitter was only losing 200-million in 2021. The $1.3 Billion in loan-payments, followed up by the $2.5 Billion loss in advertisement revenue means that Elon Musk is personally responsible for a NEGATIVE $3.8 Billion differential in just 9 months of running the company. You realize that, right? Twitter has _NEVER_ in its history lost this much money before. I'm not sure how long it can go losing money like this. But I know it can't lose money forever, especially in a rising interest-rate environment, and double-especially on private equity. Eventually, Elon Musk will cut his losses and just shut the whole thing down. So I'm not going to place a time-limit on when this all collapses and Elon Musk gives up on the project. I mean, I've seen how he dealt with SolarCity (a shady merger into Tesla to hide the fact that that other company also collapsed). So maybe Twitter "survives" through technicality in any case. Musk is very good at making failures look like a success (aka: exploded rocket was a successful test effect), he'll find a way to declare this $3.8 Billion / year loss a success too and have his fans eat up his story. But I've already made my opinion up about this situation. Anyone who takes a company who is losing $0.2 billion/year and turns it into a company losing $3.8 billion/year in 9 months is... not a good businessman.
        blisterpeanuts 3y ago
        Twitter has never been a hugely profitable business. They lost quite a lot of money in 2021-22, though 2022 had a fairly profitable couple of quarters prior to the acquisition. Musk made a leveraged buyout, which saddled the company with debt, true. But that's not really related to operating profit. It's a liability, true. Unfortunately he bought at the peak of the market; had he waited 3-4 months, could have paid a lot less, & thus leveraged less. As I understand it, he signed a contract and then was under obligation to complete the buyout, and Twitter forced him to comply under threat of a lawsuit in Delaware court. It was thus the Twitter major shareholders & leadership that caused this situation. Be that as it may, he's treating this like his other companies, where he and his team were able to innovate and iterate until they became profitable. It happened with SpaceX and Tesla, at least. I have a lot of confidence in a man with this kind of track record. Listen to his interview with Tucker Carlson, on youtube. He lays out the problems and promises of Twitter. Exciting times ahead.
- LordDragonfang 3y ago
  >Only if you look at people with Twitter accounts. My point is that "people with Twitter accounts" outnumber "people like you" (who primarily access twitter via nitter) literally and without hyperbole a thousand to one. You are exactly the kind of person who I'm talking about, who is wildly miscalibrated as to how the average person interacts with twitter. >Its ridiculous that Twitter looked upon the grand social network of Quora If you're talking about the login gate, then it's not "Quora's model", it's the model used by the single most successful social network in the world, which is still at or near the top despite being considered irrelevant. Dark patterns aren't used because execs like being evil for fun, they're used because they've proven to be effective in many cases.
  - dragontamer 3y ago
    Oh really? Facebook's users numbers in the literal billions. Twitter's users numbers in the... what? 300 million or so? EDIT: Looks to be 450 million by some people's estimates. Twitter remains a small fry compared to the real platforms. Locking itself out of the full size userbase of the world is incredibly stupid. TikTok has 1.06 billion active monthly users. I think by any reasonable metric, Twitter's userbase is miniscule in comparison to the real bigwigs. ------------- Who is really out of touch between you and me? Do you have any numbers to back up the assertions you're making?
    - LordDragonfang 3y ago
      >Oh really? Facebook's users numbers in the literal billions. Sorry, I meant to be clearer about this. By "the single most successful social network in the world", I was talking about Facebook, not Twitter. Facebook has done aggressive log-in gates since its inception, and it is self evident how successful that was in getting active users. Claiming that Twitter following suit is "locking itself out of the full size userbase" while using Facebook as an example is ironic, to say the least.

dragontamer 3y ago

Only if you look at people with Twitter accounts. Someone like me, who has always relied upon nitter to get Twitter information (and now that API access is locked off and anonymous browsing is disabled... I'm no longer welcome to Twitter). Its ridiculous that Twitter looked upon the grand social network of Quora and thought... "We should copy that model". Closing off access to the website is the literal opposite direction, it will kill Twitter faster than any other decision made thusfar.

bboygravity 3y ago
You do realize that you're one of many people (and large media outlets) in the past year or so who claimed that Twitter will die "very soon"?
- dragontamer 3y ago
  Elon Musk is rich, he can keep this going as long as he wants. But we all know that Twitter's revenue is down from $5 Billion to maybe $2.5 Billion/year, and they got a $1.3 Billion / year interest payment due every year. It will not be profitable in any reasonable time period. Whether or not Elon Musk will want to keep it when its in such a sorry state, or whether or not Elon will waste even more money on it in vain hopes of saving his investment is whatever. I don't know the timing of things, but these things can take years (especially if Elon puts more of his money up to raise funds). But in any case, the money-losing aspect of Twitter is rather solid and publicly admitted. In general, businesses that constantly lose money (and loses $Billions when they only have low-single-digit Billions in revenue) makes the overall picture rather... obvious? I'm not surprised that many other people agree with me. If that's where you're going with this. Do you have a counterpoint to offer?
  - blisterpeanuts 3y ago
    Twitter's doing very poorly right now, financially speaking. Musk & team are working on adding new features: long form video hosting, long form text, encrypted messaging, P2P video conferencing, payments, and I think he's planning to incorporate A.I. somehow. They're starting to pay top content creators. Some of this is done, some is in the pipeline. They're accomplishing it with 20% of the previous headcount. It seems to me Twitter's being run these days by an entrepreneur who's trying hard to figure out ways to make it a profitable operation. The next year or two will be interesting to watch, especially with the U.S. election madness.
    - dragontamer 3y ago
      > It seems to me Twitter's being run these days by an entrepreneur who's trying hard to figure out ways to make it a profitable operation. Twitter was only losing 200-million in 2021. The $1.3 Billion in loan-payments, followed up by the $2.5 Billion loss in advertisement revenue means that Elon Musk is personally responsible for a NEGATIVE $3.8 Billion differential in just 9 months of running the company. You realize that, right? Twitter has _NEVER_ in its history lost this much money before. I'm not sure how long it can go losing money like this. But I know it can't lose money forever, especially in a rising interest-rate environment, and double-especially on private equity. Eventually, Elon Musk will cut his losses and just shut the whole thing down. So I'm not going to place a time-limit on when this all collapses and Elon Musk gives up on the project. I mean, I've seen how he dealt with SolarCity (a shady merger into Tesla to hide the fact that that other company also collapsed). So maybe Twitter "survives" through technicality in any case. Musk is very good at making failures look like a success (aka: exploded rocket was a successful test effect), he'll find a way to declare this $3.8 Billion / year loss a success too and have his fans eat up his story. But I've already made my opinion up about this situation. Anyone who takes a company who is losing $0.2 billion/year and turns it into a company losing $3.8 billion/year in 9 months is... not a good businessman.
      - blisterpeanuts 3y ago
        Twitter has never been a hugely profitable business. They lost quite a lot of money in 2021-22, though 2022 had a fairly profitable couple of quarters prior to the acquisition. Musk made a leveraged buyout, which saddled the company with debt, true. But that's not really related to operating profit. It's a liability, true. Unfortunately he bought at the peak of the market; had he waited 3-4 months, could have paid a lot less, & thus leveraged less. As I understand it, he signed a contract and then was under obligation to complete the buyout, and Twitter forced him to comply under threat of a lawsuit in Delaware court. It was thus the Twitter major shareholders & leadership that caused this situation. Be that as it may, he's treating this like his other companies, where he and his team were able to innovate and iterate until they became profitable. It happened with SpaceX and Tesla, at least. I have a lot of confidence in a man with this kind of track record. Listen to his interview with Tucker Carlson, on youtube. He lays out the problems and promises of Twitter. Exciting times ahead.
LordDragonfang 3y ago
>Only if you look at people with Twitter accounts. My point is that "people with Twitter accounts" outnumber "people like you" (who primarily access twitter via nitter) literally and without hyperbole a thousand to one. You are exactly the kind of person who I'm talking about, who is wildly miscalibrated as to how the average person interacts with twitter. >Its ridiculous that Twitter looked upon the grand social network of Quora If you're talking about the login gate, then it's not "Quora's model", it's the model used by the single most successful social network in the world, which is still at or near the top despite being considered irrelevant. Dark patterns aren't used because execs like being evil for fun, they're used because they've proven to be effective in many cases.
- dragontamer 3y ago
  Oh really? Facebook's users numbers in the literal billions. Twitter's users numbers in the... what? 300 million or so? EDIT: Looks to be 450 million by some people's estimates. Twitter remains a small fry compared to the real platforms. Locking itself out of the full size userbase of the world is incredibly stupid. TikTok has 1.06 billion active monthly users. I think by any reasonable metric, Twitter's userbase is miniscule in comparison to the real bigwigs. ------------- Who is really out of touch between you and me? Do you have any numbers to back up the assertions you're making?
  - LordDragonfang 3y ago
    >Oh really? Facebook's users numbers in the literal billions. Sorry, I meant to be clearer about this. By "the single most successful social network in the world", I was talking about Facebook, not Twitter. Facebook has done aggressive log-in gates since its inception, and it is self evident how successful that was in getting active users. Claiming that Twitter following suit is "locking itself out of the full size userbase" while using Facebook as an example is ironic, to say the least.