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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 p

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.
  - abracadaniel 3y ago
    Network television is enormously expensive and entirely paid by ads without knowledge of the viewers. Instead they make assumptions based on surveys of demographics and manage to be very profitable. I wonder if you could make a comparison of ratings of a TV show to active users of a website. For example: is Twitter the equivalent of daytime TV, or multiple series-finale-of-Friends per day. *edit: it looks like they are the equivalent of 0.8 Friends finale / day. 41m daily active users vs 51m viewers of the Friends finale.
- MisterBastahrd 3y ago
  Cookies do this for them.
- rchaud 3y ago
  It absolutely matters if someone is logged in. 3rd party cookie blocking on Safari, Chrome and Firefox has crushed the ability for advertisers to do remarketing with any level of precision. That was where you didn't need the user to be logged in, you just needed to match their cookie ID on Twitter.com with the cookie ID passed on by Site X, which the user had visited previously. Nowadays, Advertisers upload customer lists with email, phone numbers and other identifiers into Twitter Ads for ad targeting. Twitter shows those advertisers' ads to logged-in users that have the same email/phone # or other identifier. https://business.twitter.com/en/help/campaign-setup/campaign-targeting/custom-audiences/lists.html https://business.twitter.com/en/help/campaign-setup/campaign... Anything else is effectively untargeted and useless.
  - autoexec 3y ago
    They already have the only information they really need, which is what you've requested to look at. If I'm following someone who tweets about X you can safely guess that I'm interested in X and target me with ads related to that without ever knowing my identity.
    - jdminhbg 3y ago
      There may be a reason there's no social media network that does this.
      - autoexec 3y ago
        To some extent they very often do use the type of content you consume for various things, but they don't use that data exclusively because they can make far more money by collecting, leveraging, and/or selling every scrap of personal data they can get their hands on and money is really all they care about.
      - foobarchu 3y ago
        It may be that it wasn't feasible on large scale to match content to ads. I feel like recent advanced in machine learning and ai could change the game there. What were describing is essentially how television ads worked for decades, isn't it? You know the content, so you can identify the demographics and advertise properly. Podcast and YouTube sponsor deals often work that way too (not always, but that's on the advertiser).
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.

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.
- abracadaniel 3y ago
  Network television is enormously expensive and entirely paid by ads without knowledge of the viewers. Instead they make assumptions based on surveys of demographics and manage to be very profitable. I wonder if you could make a comparison of ratings of a TV show to active users of a website. For example: is Twitter the equivalent of daytime TV, or multiple series-finale-of-Friends per day. *edit: it looks like they are the equivalent of 0.8 Friends finale / day. 41m daily active users vs 51m viewers of the Friends finale.
MisterBastahrd 3y ago
Cookies do this for them.
rchaud 3y ago
It absolutely matters if someone is logged in. 3rd party cookie blocking on Safari, Chrome and Firefox has crushed the ability for advertisers to do remarketing with any level of precision. That was where you didn't need the user to be logged in, you just needed to match their cookie ID on Twitter.com with the cookie ID passed on by Site X, which the user had visited previously. Nowadays, Advertisers upload customer lists with email, phone numbers and other identifiers into Twitter Ads for ad targeting. Twitter shows those advertisers' ads to logged-in users that have the same email/phone # or other identifier. https://business.twitter.com/en/help/campaign-setup/campaign-targeting/custom-audiences/lists.html https://business.twitter.com/en/help/campaign-setup/campaign... Anything else is effectively untargeted and useless.
- autoexec 3y ago
  They already have the only information they really need, which is what you've requested to look at. If I'm following someone who tweets about X you can safely guess that I'm interested in X and target me with ads related to that without ever knowing my identity.
  - jdminhbg 3y ago
    There may be a reason there's no social media network that does this.
    - autoexec 3y ago
      To some extent they very often do use the type of content you consume for various things, but they don't use that data exclusively because they can make far more money by collecting, leveraging, and/or selling every scrap of personal data they can get their hands on and money is really all they care about.
    - foobarchu 3y ago
      It may be that it wasn't feasible on large scale to match content to ads. I feel like recent advanced in machine learning and ai could change the game there. What were describing is essentially how television ads worked for decades, isn't it? You know the content, so you can identify the demographics and advertise properly. Podcast and YouTube sponsor deals often work that way too (not always, but that's on the advertiser).

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.