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But Twitter is an ad-driven platform. Most of those other ones are not. It's ALL about the exposure to eyeballs. But now that Elon chewed on some wires and kill

But Twitter is an ad-driven platform. Most of those other ones are not. It's ALL about the exposure to eyeballs. But now that Elon chewed on some wires and killed whole colocations, they are not able to serve all that traffic that is supposed to view the ads - for all the talk about how "Twitter is still running like it used to" after being gutted like a fish. It is definitely not.

wkat4242 3y ago
It's not really that ad driven anymore since most of the advertisers have gone to fuck themselves as musk told them to :) But seriously, if they want to increase revenue it probably is more effective to not insult their advertisers than it is to make a login mandatory.
MisterBastahrd 3y ago
Once upon a time, you could go to Twitter as a non-registered user by clicking on an embed in another application, view the post, and then click on the user's post and see all their interactions without ever registering or logging in. Today, you get to see the one post, and if you're lucky, it will give you a few of their most highly interacted posts. If the point of twitter is to make money, then it doesn't matter whether someone is logged in or not: ads in front of eyeballs is what's important. Musk's entire schtick since buying the platform is that he'll bully people into doing what he wants. But users on the internet have near zero patience with such demands from platforms, especially when the platform in question is losing relevance and isn't unique. What genius! Not only did he make the ads less valuable, but his behavior has created less competition for the ad slots that people actually see. I've watched while shaking my head as a former employer has taken a similar approach and absolutely cratered their online business. I warned them that it was going to end in disaster. I provided the evidence that we'd used to make decisions against exactly what they were attempting to do. I can't unstupid them.
- jdminhbg 3y ago
  > If the point of twitter is to make money, then it doesn't matter whether someone is logged in or not: ads in front of eyeballs is what's important. To serve you ads that have any hope of making money, they need to know which eyeballs they're going in front of.
  - burkaman 3y ago
    No they don't. People sold ads profitably for hundreds of years without any sort of surveillance, and many people continue to do so today. If it were impossible to make money just selling ads (I wish it were) then billboards and bus stop posters wouldn't exist. You can even make money on the internet this way: www.ethicalads.io. Twitter also has an enormous advantage: even if they don't know anything about you, they know a whole bunch about whoever posted the tweets you're reading. They could do a lot of targeting by just looking at the content you're viewing.
    - jdminhbg 3y ago
      > People sold ads profitably for hundreds of years without any sort of surveillance, and many people continue to do so today. If it were impossible to make money just selling ads (I wish it were) then billboards and bus stop posters Billboards and bus stop posters are cheaper to run than Twitter.com is, so making much less money is ok. The whole reason Twitter has always been unprofitable but Facebook/Meta is a trillion-dollar public company is that FB figured out how profitably identify users and serve them ads and Twitter didn't.
      - burkaman 3y ago
        I agree with you, it is unquestionably more profitable to spy on people and then sell them ads. My point is that you can still make money without the spying part, and there is no reason for us to accept that the two always have to be bundled. If you can't make a profit without spying on people then your business model sucks. The fact that you might be able to make more money by being less ethical is not very interesting, that's true of almost anyone.
    - 3y ago
- autoexec 3y ago
  > Musk's entire schtick since buying the platform is that he'll bully people into doing what he wants. But users on the internet have near zero patience with such demands from platforms The continuing decline of reddit makes me suspect people are much more tolerant of being bullied than you think. when old.reddit.com is finally killed off (it already seems to be getting less functional) I'll stop going there entirely too.
  - macNchz 3y ago
    It’s somewhat intriguing how long they’ve kept old reddit alive. I had figured it’d get the axe fairly soon after they made the redesign the default, even if they claimed otherwise. I suspect there must be a contingent of users who are big contributors or otherwise important, who they believe will leave if they shut it down.
    - literalAardvark 3y ago
      I suspect they have loads of data showing that contributors use old Reddit and cat video watchers use new Reddit. And they haven't chosen to cater only to the watchers, yet.
  - MisterBastahrd 3y ago
    People ceaselessly cry about reddit and its moderation while anyone is perfectly free to start a community of their own and moderate it to their own heart's content. I've seen no real decline in reddit. It's generally the same mindless shithole it was 10 years ago, while the communities which have had steady moderation haven't changed at all.
    - autoexec 3y ago
      The quality of individual subreddits has a very wide range, but it's the admin side of things that just get worse and worse. Anyone can create a community but you can't escape the way they run the site. Over time more and more subreddits get shutdown for questionable reasons, censorship creeps in more often, long standing problems with moderation go entirely unaddressed (both in terms of problematic moderators/moderation and in terms of the lack of tools/resources available to moderators), transparency, communication, and integrity get worse all the time, nice features get removed, obnoxious new ones get added, etc. Even old.reddit.com is starting to become broken. If you're lucky you can still find some great little subreddits, and maybe they'll even be allowed to stick around, too many good users won't get chased off, and they don't degrade in quality much as the site itself gets worse around them. There's still no good reddit alternatives but I'm still hoping we'll get one soon.
godelski 3y ago
Well it probably doesn't help that they're now riddled with bots. About 6 months after the Musk takeover I've started to receive 2-3 likes a day from bots and a follow every week. I only have an academic account so my bot interaction vastly outweighs my non-bot interaction. I stopped reporting them because they still exist. The big change I saw was that they no longer suggest to me 30 other bots with the same profile picture when I click on the bot's page but instead suggest I follow other researchers. I guess a slight improvement, but only visually. It's weird to see him talk about how bots are so harmful to the platform, see that the platform is identifying bots, but then not see any action. These are accounts that can be identified via a naive bayes filter too, so pretty low hanging fruit. But then again, same thing is happening to my gmail.
- londons_explore 3y ago
  There is a financial incentive to ignore bots. The investment banks and advertiser's want to know how many eyeballs the site has, and counting bots too increases that number and hence the company valuation.
  - godelski 3y ago
    I'm more taking about the hypocrisy since Elon made a huge deal about bots

wkat4242 3y ago

It's not really that ad driven anymore since most of the advertisers have gone to fuck themselves as musk told them to :) But seriously, if they want to increase revenue it probably is more effective to not insult their advertisers than it is to make a login mandatory.

MisterBastahrd 3y ago

Once upon a time, you could go to Twitter as a non-registered user by clicking on an embed in another application, view the post, and then click on the user's post and see all their interactions without ever registering or logging in. Today, you get to see the one post, and if you're lucky, it will give you a few of their most highly interacted posts. If the point of twitter is to make money, then it doesn't matter whether someone is logged in or not: ads in front of eyeballs is what's important. Musk's entire schtick since buying the platform is that he'll bully people into doing what he wants. But users on the internet have near zero patience with such demands from platforms, especially when the platform in question is losing relevance and isn't unique. What genius! Not only did he make the ads less valuable, but his behavior has created less competition for the ad slots that people actually see. I've watched while shaking my head as a former employer has taken a similar approach and absolutely cratered their online business. I warned them that it was going to end in disaster. I provided the evidence that we'd used to make decisions against exactly what they were attempting to do. I can't unstupid them.

jdminhbg 3y ago
> If the point of twitter is to make money, then it doesn't matter whether someone is logged in or not: ads in front of eyeballs is what's important. To serve you ads that have any hope of making money, they need to know which eyeballs they're going in front of.
- burkaman 3y ago
  No they don't. People sold ads profitably for hundreds of years without any sort of surveillance, and many people continue to do so today. If it were impossible to make money just selling ads (I wish it were) then billboards and bus stop posters wouldn't exist. You can even make money on the internet this way: www.ethicalads.io. Twitter also has an enormous advantage: even if they don't know anything about you, they know a whole bunch about whoever posted the tweets you're reading. They could do a lot of targeting by just looking at the content you're viewing.
  - jdminhbg 3y ago
    > People sold ads profitably for hundreds of years without any sort of surveillance, and many people continue to do so today. If it were impossible to make money just selling ads (I wish it were) then billboards and bus stop posters Billboards and bus stop posters are cheaper to run than Twitter.com is, so making much less money is ok. The whole reason Twitter has always been unprofitable but Facebook/Meta is a trillion-dollar public company is that FB figured out how profitably identify users and serve them ads and Twitter didn't.
    - burkaman 3y ago
      I agree with you, it is unquestionably more profitable to spy on people and then sell them ads. My point is that you can still make money without the spying part, and there is no reason for us to accept that the two always have to be bundled. If you can't make a profit without spying on people then your business model sucks. The fact that you might be able to make more money by being less ethical is not very interesting, that's true of almost anyone.
  - 3y ago
autoexec 3y ago
> Musk's entire schtick since buying the platform is that he'll bully people into doing what he wants. But users on the internet have near zero patience with such demands from platforms The continuing decline of reddit makes me suspect people are much more tolerant of being bullied than you think. when old.reddit.com is finally killed off (it already seems to be getting less functional) I'll stop going there entirely too.
- macNchz 3y ago
  It’s somewhat intriguing how long they’ve kept old reddit alive. I had figured it’d get the axe fairly soon after they made the redesign the default, even if they claimed otherwise. I suspect there must be a contingent of users who are big contributors or otherwise important, who they believe will leave if they shut it down.
  - literalAardvark 3y ago
    I suspect they have loads of data showing that contributors use old Reddit and cat video watchers use new Reddit. And they haven't chosen to cater only to the watchers, yet.
- MisterBastahrd 3y ago
  People ceaselessly cry about reddit and its moderation while anyone is perfectly free to start a community of their own and moderate it to their own heart's content. I've seen no real decline in reddit. It's generally the same mindless shithole it was 10 years ago, while the communities which have had steady moderation haven't changed at all.
  - autoexec 3y ago
    The quality of individual subreddits has a very wide range, but it's the admin side of things that just get worse and worse. Anyone can create a community but you can't escape the way they run the site. Over time more and more subreddits get shutdown for questionable reasons, censorship creeps in more often, long standing problems with moderation go entirely unaddressed (both in terms of problematic moderators/moderation and in terms of the lack of tools/resources available to moderators), transparency, communication, and integrity get worse all the time, nice features get removed, obnoxious new ones get added, etc. Even old.reddit.com is starting to become broken. If you're lucky you can still find some great little subreddits, and maybe they'll even be allowed to stick around, too many good users won't get chased off, and they don't degrade in quality much as the site itself gets worse around them. There's still no good reddit alternatives but I'm still hoping we'll get one soon.

godelski 3y ago

Well it probably doesn't help that they're now riddled with bots. About 6 months after the Musk takeover I've started to receive 2-3 likes a day from bots and a follow every week. I only have an academic account so my bot interaction vastly outweighs my non-bot interaction. I stopped reporting them because they still exist. The big change I saw was that they no longer suggest to me 30 other bots with the same profile picture when I click on the bot's page but instead suggest I follow other researchers. I guess a slight improvement, but only visually. It's weird to see him talk about how bots are so harmful to the platform, see that the platform is identifying bots, but then not see any action. These are accounts that can be identified via a naive bayes filter too, so pretty low hanging fruit. But then again, same thing is happening to my gmail.

londons_explore 3y ago
There is a financial incentive to ignore bots. The investment banks and advertiser's want to know how many eyeballs the site has, and counting bots too increases that number and hence the company valuation.
- godelski 3y ago
  I'm more taking about the hypocrisy since Elon made a huge deal about bots