Something I've been wondering is how many people have left Twitter because of the service's recent instability issues. Because none of the people I know have stopped using the site, despite most being fiercely anti-Musk. It could be that Elon is perfectly OK with letting the site go from 99.99999% uptime to just 99% because he knows nobody will leave, and the engineers behind those extra five 9's were being paid hundreds of thousands.
I stopped using it, mainly because of an “inverse network effect”. Twitter used to be a useful place to keep up on scientific papers. Science Twitter is dead. Now my feed is like 10 percent science, 10 mildly racist / inflammatory content, 10 percent miscellaneous, and 70 percent a certain VC constantly shaking his fist, yelling about crypto, and shitting on fiat currency. And this is after aggressively curating my feed by unfollowing anybody who cheered on Musk’s takeover of Twitter. No thanks.
I think the inherent design of Twitter has a bit of a flaw in that you're friends with people instead of joining communities. So if you think "geez, I have a lot of political content on my feed I don't want to read," you can't just unfollow all the politics topics/forums/subreddits/whatever you are subscribed to, you have to "unfriend" people, which is socially difficult if you're both small enough to follow/recognize each other. On top of that the "for you" page and trending topics seem to be injecting more stuff I don't want to read into my feed than before, which exacerbates the problem.
I used to think that following people was lame and that communities (like on Reddit) were where it was at. Until Reddit shut down a sub I joined. Because it got mass reported. Yes, it had some toxic people on it, but it also held really deep debates, and it wasn't 5% as horrendously hateful as some of the subs that still exist. It just felt wrong to me, that everyone's conversations were shut off by the electric eye, and all history off those debates was lost. How do you even begin to change your mind, or other people's minds, if you can't even talk? Isn't it the foundation of a working democracy, asking with a functioning press?
Meanwhile, my wife is playing the long game on Twitter. She has a specific way of using it that just works for her. She follows a few hundred people, and she's followed by ~5k people, mostly "nobodies", but a handful are impressive: researchers, journalists, politicians, authors. She has conversations with "household names" daily. She even orchestrated an interview been a well known researcher and an ex NYT journalist on substack. Yet she's an be absolute nobody.
Twitter does have ways to follow both topics (following a hashtag, basically, iirc) and joining communities. I've never used them because what I want from a Twitter-like network is to follow people who I'm interested in, or have interesting things to say.
If I'm reading my timeline and think "geez, this person sure does post a bunch of political stuff I don't want to see" I either mute specific keywords, or just unfollow the person. Back on Twitter I was aggressive with keyword muting - I don't care about Marvel or people having passionite topics about "MCU", so I muted those phrases and my timeline was free of them.
What had made Twitter easier to use for me was the aggressive use of filters to just block out most of political Twitter. It didn’t block everything, but you would be surprised what blocking the names of Presidents, former Presidents, Presidential candidates, the clap, and a few popular political slogans can do to really cull the politics from a Timeline in the height of election season down to almost nothing. I was going to investigate targeting shibboleths next but then Twitter killed Tweetbot and Twitter is dead to me without Tweetbot.
I mean, if you use Twitter for political news, then yes. I hadn’t even considered that, but my approach would also wreck your ability to follow political news via Twitter.
The problem is that I'm interested in what people have to say about some topics and not others. Sometimes I'll follow a musician I like and realize when he's not posting about his music he's talking about conspiracy theories I'd rather not look at. Or someone will be pretty funny and interesting but also spend a lot of time interacting with porn. Or just post a lot about a topic that I have no interest in. If it worked differently I could interact with these people on subjects I'd like to without being subjected to every thought that enters their head and everything they want to follow.
>Twitter does have ways to follow both topics (following a hashtag, basically, iirc) and joining communities
ehhh, sort of. i tried a few of these before the musk takeover, and it was pretty disappointing. it was essentially a way of opting into more of the trash algorithm-recommended tweets in your timeline. instead of just the normal "recommended for you" stuff, you'd also have "recommended for you because you follow X".
Twitter has quite an extensive option to mute things nowadays. Such as keywords, phrases, usernames and hashtags. That's how I can keep following people that sometimes go on political rants.
TBH I prefer traditional forums over Twitter/reddit. There are a few I go to every now and again, and while there is way less content, I feel people are way less inflammatory over random things and conversation is usually way more civil.
That technology exists. It's called newsgroups, it's fast, distributed, hard to censor, without a central authority and based on community of interests. It's also pretty much dead except for sharing pirated contents.
Consider Hacker News. It's a forum that's laid out somewhat similarly to reddit. It has pretty good moderation but in a way that is distinct from reddit. I don't think it would be better as a subreddit.
It would be nice if someone with minimal tech skills could just spin something similar up. Related forums could link to each other, like the webrings of the past lol. That would be the ideal structure of interactive communities on the web, at least to me.
The public API used to help tweets persist beyond normal (on platform) visibility thresholds. Before it was ruined, people could embed tweets in their own sites, and tweets were more persistent on platforms like tweet deck.
Musk has no real idea of the impacts of technical decisions on the platform, but he realized the tweet visibility threshold was too short bac when even his own tweets weren't seeing engagement.
Since then he's created a scheme to grant slightly better longevity to the visibility of tweets by "verified" accounts, but it's really smoke and mirrors... Tweets anyone makes (Except for Elon and his selected Twitter "buddies") only are visible for seconds and to small audiences of people... It kills interaction, growth, and engagement for everyone else, but gives the illusion that the site is still vibrant (because it makes everyone tweet more often).
Deception of this kind will just make everyone burn out and not come back... It defeats the very purpose of Twitter, as visibility of ideas is the only payment most people get on the platforms to begin with, the main problem is that most people on the platform don't know they're mostly invisible, and dropping their tweets into a waste bin.
And the platform is really showing its lack of moderation, even compared to how little it was moderated in the past. I don't really want to click on webdev tweets and find replies full of hate speech and weird pornography.
Because it's not the default. Every time you go to Twitter, the first page you see is full of random recommendations.
There is a rule of thumb about online services and software: Don't fight the developers, because they have more power than you. If your usage is no longer compatible with the vision of the developers, stop using it. You may find temporary workarounds that make the service useful with a lot of effort, but it won't last. The developers will eventually find new innovative ways of ruining your experience.
Science Twitter was already dying before the takeover, because it was not compatible with the increased focus on recommendations. Musk simply accelerated the process.
YouTube is the same way (if I'm understanding this correctly, I don't use Twitter). You don't immediately land on a page full of your subscriptions. On the TV app I have to arrow left, arrow down 3 times to subscriptions, then I see my curated feed. On mobile I click the notification icon or the subscription tab.
Neither of these feels like I'm "fighting with the developers". It's such a trivial thing to do. And almost all social media apps do this. Instagram does this[0], it looks like Tik Tok only allows an algorithmic feed[1], it seems like Reddit has recommendations on by default but I'm seeing mixed things[2], LinkedIn does this (not that linked in is a model to be followed in any regard). In fact, Facebook is the only major social media company I know of that doesn't spit out an algorithmic feed by default.
So, if having to go to a new tab is "fighting the developer", then I think we've failed extraordinarily in this regard on all fronts and Twitter isn't doing anything new here.
All social media platforms I've used have eventually become useless for the purpose I wanted to use them.
Remember when Facebook was about staying in touch with the people you know? Then there was a huge controversy when they introduced the algorithmic feed, made it the default, and always reverted back to it despite user preferences. Today it's a wasteland full of recommendations, promoted content, influencers, silly videos, controversial topics, and other forms of spam, with some interesting content randomly sprinkled around.
Defaults are important, because they influence people's expectations. If algorithmic feed is the default, it encourages posting certain kinds of content and discourages others. Eventually even your manually curated feed will be full of content that would be successful in the algorithmic feed. That is what happened to the part of Science Twitter I was following. People started posting less and eventually left, because Twitter was discouraging the kind of content they were posting.
As for Reddit, I don't consider it a social media platform. It's more like a collection of unrelated message boards that share the same underlying technology. I'm vaguely aware that there is a front page, and I sometimes visit it accidentally, but I never go there on purpose.
> Today it's a wasteland full of recommendations, promoted content, influencers, silly videos, controversial topics, and other forms of spam, with some interesting content randomly sprinkled around.
Is it? That's not my experience at all; I'd say Facebook has mostly dropped out of the news because it's quietly kept chugging away at what it's good at.
It's just so much more noisy and garbage filled. Maybe I was in the minority, but I used it mostly to follow some bands/artists/game designers and keep up with their projects - I rarely engaged with the twitter userbase in general and it feels like that's what is being amplified and it's a lot of noise, toxic speculation, and useless opinions.
Who are these people getting all this in their feed? Are you outing yourself or something? Why would the algorithm give you a bunch of nazi content? Never seen anything of the sort, and I follow some very edgy crypto twitter accounts among other sketchy ones. Your bar for what constitutes “nazi” content must be low.
You don't get pushed anything if you are not using the "For You" tab. If you still see "Nazi" content (though I'm aware that many people on the US American left are now using the term in an inflationary way, which, as a German, I find highly objectionable) then it is because you follow people who post this content.
I get push notifications from people I don’t follow and my follow feed has people I unfollowed (though that’s not the nazis except for some that masked off)
actual nazis - they post hitler content and all, polls about why you are/aren’t a nazi too, etc. reporting sometimes works but it’s no longer permanent, you’re allowed back after some weeks if you post rule violating nazi content now. some of these nazis who were previously permanently banned learned that you just contact support and say you were banned for right wing views and they get let back in. there are a lot of active nazis who are open about it.
some are just rw who mingle with the openly nazi posters too though yeah.
Nazi and antifa are not equivalents in any way whatsoever. I think the only equivalence you might find is that both tendencies are somewhat open to the concept of political violence? But beyond that, banning nazi content while allowing antifa is a perfectly reasonable stance for any platform to take.
Science today is exactly like the Catholic Church 500 years ago. We are supposed to worship the Gods of science and listen to everything the priests have to say. I have given up on any reformation coming from the West though because I think it is too corrupt and too powerful and don't see how it can change in the near future. I am hoping it will be from India and/or China when they catch up.
My Twitter feed started showing hot takes from more and more right-wing nutjobs, probably because I am naturally slightly conservative (small-c) in my views. Eventually I got fed up with seeing so many posts from Lotus Eaters / Alex Jones / Katie Hopkins / <insert fascist>, was thinking of leaving, then Musk took over, fired everyone and tried to charge me $8, so a good opportunity to go. Account deleted and I haven't been back since.
Where do you go for AI news? I haven't found anywhere close to as good as Twitter for AI stuff (admittedly I didn't unfollow anyone because I just ignore political tweets)
The "I dont like this tweet" function is completely broken. I don't like blocking or muting, but I have to tell Twitter over and over I don't want to see certain people (including King Joffrey) but it never works.
Is there really a dichotomy between 1. Someone providing "proof" that you will accept, and 2. This being what you claim without evidence or justification is the "usual" smearing?
> Did science twitter migrate to somewhere else? Where would you go to keep up with scientific papers?
Science Twitter in particular has mostly migrated to Mastodon (although it's split between a few different subgroups).
A number of other de facto Twitter communities have migrated to Mastodon. Some have stayed on Twitter. And some have basically died without moving anywhere else.
(although it's split between a few different subgroups)
This is the big problem with Mastodon. Some people want highly curated communities on small instances, and it's great for that. But it's really bad for people who want to make us of network effects - as exemplified by the very phrase '______ Twitter'.
The history of fiat money is always one of endemic inflation, sometimes really wild inflation.
When the US was on the gold standard, the inflationary periods were during the California and Yukon gold rushes, which had the effect of "printing" more gold.
The inflation we see today in the US is due to massive deficit spending, which is enabled by fiat money. All countries today use fiat money, because then they can spend money without limit and without raising taxes. They always blame the resulting inflation on something else.
The value of crypto currency is based on supply & demand. To me it seems more like collecting Beanie Babies than being a substitute for money. We'll see how it fares in the next few years.
Interestingly, when Spain looted the New World of gold and silver, it did not make Spain any wealthier. The result was just inflation - the gold was worth less. The more gold that was imported, the lower the value the gold had.
It's just like the government deficit printing fiat money.
I prefer my society to allocate valuable goods and services to those who are contributing positively to it today over those who had the luck to be born earlier and/or to wealthy families, so a stable but nonzero inflation suits me very well thank you.
Compared to the horror stories of the gold standard days? Yes. 0% -> 5% overnight is not nothing but it compares favourably to most assets one could pick.
Edit in response to your undeclared edit: inflation hurts those who hold cash, by its very nature; on average inflation is a transfer of real value from the rich to the poor, although of course there will be exceptions.
The fact of the matter is that the ability for the government to print money when needed and not be beholden to a scarce element for currency and wealth reserves has allowed our economy (and the world economy, and trade) to grow. If there is no 'extra' money when we need it, economies stagnate. The side-effect of 'extra' money is inflation. However, I think that we have a lot to show for it -- considering that economic disasters haven't completely destroyed the wealth of entire generations of people since we started doing it this way, and we have a least a passable system of class mobility.
This whole 'pining for the gold standard' is ridiculous. Do you want to go back to zero-sum economics because you don't like the Fed? Everyone hates the Fed, but it happens to be the least bad option that we have come up with so far.
If you don't think the US economy didn't grow enormously from 1800-1914, what can I say?
> If there is no 'extra' money when we need it, economies stagnate
The banks create money as needed through supply & demand. This is complex subject, but the fact that the US economy thrived from 1800 to 1914 shows your dire predictions to be simply lacking.
> class mobility
Was very robust in the 1800s. The US moved scores of millions of people from poverty into the middle class, and a lot into the wealthy class.
May I recommend reading some history books about 19th century America.
> it happens to be the least bad option that we have come up with so far.
Your dire predictions didn't happen in the 19th century, and we didn't have endemic inflation.
There were huge economic busts in the 19th and first half of the 20th. They made the 2008 crisis look like nothing. You glorifying the gilded aged is quite alarming.
When you read history do you skip over the parts that don't agree with your philosophy, or do you just assume you would be one of the robber barons?
Also, our economy grew a lot in a large part because we expanded westward exterminating the people who lived on the land and taking it from them and all the resources underneath. We got a lot of that 'extra' money as gold from that expansion.
> You glorifying the gilded aged is quite alarming.
LOL. Read "Historical Statistics of the United States". You can download it for free from archive.org.
> our economy grew a lot in a large part because we expanded westward exterminating the people who lived on the land and taking it from them and all the resources underneath
So "we" stole railroads and steel mills and factories and shops and mills and textiles etc. from the Indians?
> We got a lot of that 'extra' money as gold from that expansion.
Spain looted enormous quantities of gold from S America and transported it to Spain. Did it turn Spain into a wealthy industrial powerhouse? Nope. Is Russia's oil extraction industry making Russia an economic powerhouse? Nope again. How about Saudi Arabia? Nope nope nope. Venezuela? Nopety nopety nope.
What theory are you speaking of? My point was that you claim that the USA was better off under the gold standard economically. We weren't -- we were subject to incredibly large booms and busts. Just because there was a railroad boom doesn't mean there wasn't a bust.
The ability to control boom and bust cycles by messing with the money supply is the whole point. Of course the gold standard is awesome if we ignore the busts and only look at the booms.
Regarding the Spanish -- I fail to see how that refutes anything? They were a poorly run religious monarchy operating in the pre-industrial age. Cool. What's your point? Are you contending that vast amounts of free land are not conducive to rapid economic expansion under capitalism?
> The ability to control boom and bust cycles by messing with the money supply is the whole point.
Except they're a failure at it. We have boom and bust cycles anyway. Remember 2000, 2008, 2022? Friedman also demonstrates in "Monetary History of the United States" that the hand of the Fed on the tiller results in less stability of the money supply.
The "whole point" of fiat money is to be able to spend money without having to tax it first. That's why the European powers adopted it in WW1 - to finance the war.
> I fail to see how that refutes anything?
It refutes the notion that the quantity of gold in an economy has anything to do with prosperity.
> free land
Why have Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, S Korea, and New York City become economic powerhouses despite little or no land?
> Except they're a failure at it. We have boom and bust cycles anyway. Remember 2000, 2008, 2022?
Those cycles weren't nearly as bad as the ones that came before it.
> The "whole point" of fiat money is to be able to spend money without having to tax it first. That's why the European powers adopted it in WW1 - to finance the war.
Sure. You haven't explained why this is bad except 'inflation'. I think inflation is a small price to pay for relative stability.
> It refutes the notion that the quantity of gold in an economy has anything to do with prosperity.
No it doesn't. It illustrates that idiotic people with a lot of resources can do stupid things with them.
> Why have Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, S Korea, and New York City become economic powerhouses despite little or no land?
Poor people do become rich, but that doesn't refute that it is a lot easier to become rich(er) when you already have a lot of money.
I left the day my client stopped working. Broke a decade-long daily habit.
Twitter had already become less enjoyable than it was back in the day, that started before Musk and isn't his fault. The underlying engagement was no longer there, only inertia. Inertia alone would have kept me there much longer, but without true engagement I wasn't going to start using their crappy official client/site, and the idea of paying for a subscription was laughable.
Twitter won't die like MySpace did, losing to a single party like Mastodon as MySpace did to Facebook. It will die like Craigslist. It will be very slow, still be around a decade from now, having lost its cultural relevance and having been supplanted by a number of different options rather than one. I'm seeing Twitter's niche get fragmented to different places, and everyone has one foot out the door and the engagement is dwindling slowly but intractably. The brand is poison, but people are taking their time to figure out how to deal with that. So I'm not expecting to see an abrupt exodus. Nor do I expect to see Mastodon become as big as Twitter was, or die out completely.
Craigslist has had the benefit that its infrastructure is very simple, and takes almost no maintenance to run. Something at the complexity level of Facebook would probably die in weeks if the servers were left to run unmaintained. That may happen to Twitter if the slow bleed continues and the service becomes unprofitable to run.
> Something at the complexity level of Facebook would probably die in weeks if the servers were left to run unmaintained
I'm not sure that's true. The site runs best when most employees are out of the office during the last week or two of December and when employees are busy writing peer reviews on the last day or two before that portion of the review cycle ends.
Craigslist without maintenance probably turns into just scams and spam.
Well, yes. Hate me, but slowing down changes and only applying changes very deliberately makes a system more stable. The idea of continuous deployments in order to reduce the size of changes, in order to reduce the risk of changes is good. But if the goal is reliability, it's hard to compete with the idea of only doing well-planned, well-coordinated changes geared towards improving reliability.
For example, we have a process based on the idea of the downtime budget from the SRE book. If the downtime allowed by the SLA of our customers is spent halfway, all changes to the systems have to be approved by leadership. Cosmetic bugs can be tolerated for two weeks in order to not risk anything.
On the other hand, if the necessary maintenance of the supporting infrastructure of a system is stopped, the system is running towards a cliff. It certainly depends on how deep the stack goes and how many redundancies and self-healing ideas are built into a system. If you have redundant storage arrays with redundant drives, with redundant systems built on top of these, with smart failover strategies, the overall infrastructure can tolerate a terrifying amount of damage while still running reliably.
But once that redundancy degrades and rots away, and once that resulting final linchpin drive or system instance fails, it'll result in an unsalvageable clusterfuck very, very quickly. Especially if you fire important core SRE and ops staff.
Sure, but it used to be the go-to place for a bunch of more mainstream verticals. It's not a place to find jobs anymore, personals are gone, and for apartments it's become synonymous with scams.
One of our new recruiters unbeknownst to the rest of the team posted a job on Craigslist as well as the typical places and more than one interviewee mentioned to me that they thought the job may be a scam before googling us.
I think for many people Facebook Marketplace has replaced Craigslist for them, but thats the only thing I can think of that is a comparable service. Craigslist is still pretty much the standard for online classifieds
Maybe. That depends entirely on the extent to which Musk can keep it together -- past Mastodon growth spurts correlate with his erratic and sometimes unhinged policy changes and outbursts. But I don't know what will make comedians and polticos move out; I suspect it'll be individuals coming over to Mastodon here and there and then suddenly it'll reach critical mass.
Disagree about Mastodon -- I think it or the protocols backing it, will be the glue that holds the rest of social media together. You may not be using something branded "Mastodon" in 2035, but it will probably be Mastodon underneath.
2035 is a long way away. If you’d told someone in 13 years ago that in 2022 a decentralised social network started making headway, they’d probably have guessed it was RSS-based. I definitely wouldn’t bet on ActivityPub being The Thing in another 13 years.
Same here. I thought Musk would bring some good change to the site, but stopping third party client access was my limit on bad changes. No way I was going to use their terrible official client or website - they are so bad to be unusable. So I stopped two months ago.
Probably for the better. I read more long form articles and don't get caught up in the outrage of the day. I feel happier too. Sometimes I miss it, go to the site to read, and then immediately close the tab when I can't actually use it because it's so bad.
I was struck by how many presenters at SRECon last week listed Mastadon handles instead of Twitter ones: well over half were on Mastadon, and I'd say around half didn't even list a Twitter username. Of course, that's a highly specific population.
Yes, a large chunk of engineers & computer scientists have shifted to Mastodon, which makes it great if you follow that crowd. It's the largest collective action I've seen in that cohort since people stopped using IE6 in favour of Firefox.
Now I'll head to Twitter a few times a week as a guilty pleasure to read the people left behind — comedians, political commentators, and journalists. But for stuff that's relevant to my job, Mastodon is great. And my Twitter usage has dropped by over 95%.
I just never read twitter links anymore because when I follow them now I get a pop up shaking me down to buy twitter premium or to disable 2FA with no way to view the post. So it's convenient for me that most of the people who used to link interesting content on twitter are now being linked via their mastodon handle instead.
I feel sympathy for people who still love the blue bird and don't want anything to go wrong, but this right here is why the ongoing dumpster fire has been very good for me, personally.
I used to love Twitter. I used Twitter way too much. Now I don't post at all and only read a little. It can be hard to realize how bad something is for you when you are in the middle of pulling those sweet endorphins at a steady rate. My life is so much better since a certain someone decided the drug was so good that he should buy the pharmacy. Admittedly I got lucky: if he had valued it correctly or knew what he was doing, then my outcome could have been much different. Cheers to incompetence!
"SREcon is a gathering of engineers who care deeply about site reliability, systems engineering, and working with complex distributed systems at scale."
Why? A blog is a very different use-case than social media (even social media based on microblogging). Yes, many social media communities are toxic, but many of them (or at least parts of them) can be incredibly enriching. There are plenty of Mastadon communities run with open governance structures.
Besides, most presenters will also list their personal URLs if they have sites they'd like to promote.
Maintaining your own site instead of using a common, sensible, resilient solution might be antithetical to some notions of being an SRE. A personal blog is also not a replacement for social media. Hacker News is something that an individual would be hard-pressed to replicate on their own.
yeah... ideally, there should be a reachable identity system for everyone, independent to centralized database. Content can be anywhere, RSS is nice, a content authentication system is nice too, but what's missing is an identity system.
I bailed. The richest person on the planet (at the time), buying up a premier media platform and then actively posting political content like how to vote in an election was the nail in the coffin for me.
I don’t want to support an owner who uses their platform in that way any more than I’d want to watch political opinion shows on TV or subscribe to a political opinion Substack.
If Musk was the richest person on the planet, then FTX actually had billions in assets holding onto their FTT tokens or whatever made up tokens they had. Is a person actually "the richest person in the world" if there's not enough liquidity in the world to realize their holdings? If Musk sells his Tesla / SpaceX shares, can he really do it at CurrentSpotPrice x NumberOfSharesHeOwns?
Sure, but when you call someone "the richest person in the world" this is just what you mean. And you're generally referring to power and influence in the world rather than literally how much physical cash he could come up with in 24 hours. I think the normal way of counting the richest people in the world is pretty reasonable.
Meme stocks are fairly liquid, somewhat by definition of their memetic popularity. Musk was not in a position to liquidate his entire net worth, but nobody with an appreciable net worth is.
I was mainly referring to those FTT tokens, but the problem with a meme stock (or similar) is that those buying and selling it are fickle and it's a bubble, it's a liquidity issue in the future not now. Due to the memetic popularity _today_ you can buy and sell very easily. Whether you can do that tomorrow is a different question. If Musk goes on a selling spree, how long will it take until the bottom is hit?
If someone owned thousands of very rare collectible beanie babies in the late 90s, on paper worth hundreds of millions, do they actually have hundreds of millions of dollars? Sure they could find one buyer, ten buyers, but thousands of buyers? What can such a bubble handle?
People hate Musk, I get it, but the guy is not the wealthiest in the world. He's sitting on a pile of rare collectible beanie babies.
> the guy is not the wealthiest in the world. He's sitting on a pile of rare collectible beanie babies.
Beanie babies are a novelty. Stock in market leading companies is not.
Gates, Bezos, etc. have handed over control of their companies to the extent that yes, they could liquidate without impacting the company’s ability to operate. Musk is not far from that if he chooses. Tesla and SpaceX have mature products that plenty of capable CEOs can manage.
I get what you’re saying that the act of mass selling on the open market decreases your net worth. But stock can be used to purchase companies, secure loans, etc., so it’s still a productive asset without needing to convert it to cash. And, if he chose to sell Tesla or SpaceX the acquiring company almost always pays a premium over the market price. It’s not like he would just dump his shares on the market without a strategy. Just like you wouldn’t list your house until it’s staged properly. But your house is still part of your personal wealth even if you couldn’t sell it for a fair price by midnight tonight.
Plus, it’s nearly impossible to rank wealth on any other metric like cash on hand as that information is not public.
People also always ignore the whole "Controls giant corporations" thing. You have significant leeway to direct companies you control into things you want without falling foul of regulations. Consider Musk bringing in Tesla software developers to Twitter.
Just because that power can't always be converted to cash 100% in a second doesn't mean it doesn't exist
Capitalism is a farce and a complete house of cards. Remember when we realized during the pandemic that the most important people in society were grocery store clerks and gas station attendants? We learned nothing from that. Broken system.
It probably depends on a lot on your social group. I maintain a twitter account because, damnit, I’ve had it since 2007, back when they had visible numeric ids it was in the six figures, and I don’t want someone to squat it; everything changes and twitter may once more have competent leadership.
But if I look at that twitter account… it’s pretty dead. Most of the people I followed have either gone to mastodon (my choice) or instagram (which I could never get into) or just dialed back on social media. Just a wasteland of uninteresting stuff it thinks I might like and gambling ads, increasingly.
Mind you, to your point, I didn’t leave due to instability; my breaking point was the purge of the journalists, and if that hadn’t driven me away, the death of the third party apps certainly would have.
You don't have to maintain your twitter account just to have someone to not take your username.
I (kind of, my profile timeline is now inconsisntent/corrupt) deleted all my tweets, locked my account, and changed password to something I don't know.
Do you have a source for the actual reliability of the site going down since Musk took over? All I have ever seen is these general claims without substantiation. What's especially funny is that the fail whale was a common theme for much of Twitter's early years, so even if the reliability was lower, it's less of a change and more of a return to those early days.
The only source I've been able to find is here https://app.upzilla.co/statistics/32, which shows something like 99.9% uptime since November '22.
Being up unfortunately isn't enough. Failures are in different components (Microservices?) Today for example I was greeted by "Internal server errors" when attempting to login to my tweetdeck. A few days bay I hit a bug, where I clicked a link to a Twitter message and was redirected to my home (apparently to refresh my session as I didn't use Twitter in that. Browser for a while and second attempt worked)
Any simple "upstate" tacker won't notice those things. For me it is notable, though, while I use Twitter a lot less, which of course impacts perception.
There is an article on here every other week about twitter being down for hours at a time. Plus you can't even tell anymore given how many features are cut.
Mentions have been reduced to zero for any mid-size Twitter account since the culling started. That's a silent failure that led to a lot of tech people leaving.
There also weren't any functional alternatives to Twitter at the time. The following+unthreaded discussion model has only been replicated by Mastodon, and Mastodon obviously has much stronger competition!
No it isn't. I know someone who runs a specialist news outlet and cross-posts everything to Mastodon. It yields only a trickle of traffic/engagement despite the target market being pretty anti-Musk. Indeed, I'm told traffic/engagement on Twitter has actually improved since the takeover. What people say and how they behave are two different things. A lot of people still check Twitter every day because train wrecks are interesting.
Every time someone shares a link to a Mastodon post, I click on it and eventually realize it's not my instance, so I can't just click to follow the person or return to my feed by clicking. And that is only one example of how the decentralized experience is fundamentally broken.
You shouldn't be downvoted as you're factually right. MAU have been tanking since Dec 22. They lost almost 50% from the peak, and the line continues to go down, losing a few thousand active users every single day.
Which isn't a total failure, it can be a small self-sustaining network but it fails to have a broad appeal.
That competition feels/looks like early 00s blogging -- less mass, pre-eternal-September, Gibsonian ham-radio-postcards -- but then again that's what grew up into what we have now.
Actually, yeah, it did have competitors with money. You ever wonder why IE and specifically IE 6 just got abandoned in stasis forever? Because like a number of other big incumbents circa early 00s, MS really thought the web was a fad. They envisioned an app ecosystem. Maybe XAML, maybe Java, maybe something else. But not these dumb little browsers.
> IE 6 was abandoned because Microsoft won the browser war.
This has never been adequate to explain how MS treated IE.
Microsoft also won the desktop decisively, arguably more decisively than the browser front. And yet far from abandoning windows, it pretty consistently iterated via major releases and service updates, even when competitors were almost rounding errors and when they had a business base that often valued backward compatibility as much or more than anything else.
Microsoft doesn't abandon things just because they achieved dominance.
IE was abandoned because MS of the early 00s still thought most computing would stay on the desktop, in network-aware applications, maybe even using different runtimes, but still desktop apps.
> It's ridiculous to say that in 2006/7 Microsoft thought web was a fad
It's ridiculous of you to choose 2006/2007 when you're responding to a comment that specifies "circa early 00s."
And yes, by 2006/2007, MS realized they'd made a mistake and the web was becoming something that could deliver experiences competitive with desktop apps.
It's obvious that none of the non-tech elite/journalist/media types were able to wean themselves off Twitter, and the bulk of the normie population barely registered it.
It really was just tech-oriented and tech-oriented-LGBTQ* groups that fully abandoned Twitter for Mastodon. Which has been frustrating, I want to support Mastodon but I'm also mostly on Twitter for a good time with a smattering of tech concerns, and it seems like people on Mastodon are generally only talking about tech, having a bad time in their lives, or they're simply bad at being funny.
I closed my 13-year-old account last Fall, when the new management explicitly welcomed US-based domestic terrorists onto the platform. I've moved on to a couple of Discords where people I used to follow on Twitter hang out, and Cohost. It's been a positive change for me, Twitter was quite a drag for the past couple years even before Musk, and it's good to change things up now and then anyway.
I have reactivated my Mastodon server this week, and unlike when I last attempted in mid-2020, there are actually people I want to follow on there now.
To have your own, yes, more or less (it handles downtime to some extent). Running your own server is not the "for dummies" version.
The for dummies version is "just go sign up on a instance with open sign ups and reasonable moderation", I'd recommend hachyderm.io to the tech crowd. It doesn't matter that much what server you're on.
Basically Mastodon is a bunch of different social networks, but you can follow/subscribe people who are using any of them. If you want your own server, you need to leave it on somewhere for it to pull messages from other people and push yours out. Otherwise, you can just pick a server and set up an account on it.
Which server you join doesn't particularly matter, but most of them offer some sort of "see all of the messages on this server" functionality, so if you pick one with a lot of people who have common interests, you'll have a better default experience.
>> I've been wondering is how many people have left Twitter because of the service's recent instability issues.
I remember about 6-8 years ago fervently trying to get my friends and family off of FB and Twitter. It was completely useless. I even offered running my own Diaspora server with zero luck. I was constantly pushing decentralized platforms including Mastodon and others for years before finally giving up.
Its crazy what it takes nowadays to get someone to move off of a social media platform for good. I know many have left Twitter because of Musk, but many haven't stayed away and have come back. Its like a drug for some people, its incredibly hard to just walk away from.
I left because the official twitter client is garbage and all the third party clients were killed off by Musk. If someone links a Tweet I'll still look at it, but I haven't logged in since Tweetbot stopped working.
I stopped using it not long after he took over, not because of any principled objection just because how much crap I had to sort through to get to anything worthwhile had greatly increased.
None of this really has any impact because of social stickiness. Unless Twitter has repeated multi-hour outages preventing people performing basic actions, like reading their main feeds or replies or posting tweets, the continued service degradation metrics will not be acknowledged.
> none of the people I know have stopped using the site, despite most being fiercely anti-Musk
To offer another data point, some of the people I know have actually stopped using Twitter and started using other platforms more. Then again, none of them said the site’s uptime was the reason.
imo, this particular move will likely hurt Twitter more.
The reason Twitter attracts its current audience is a) celebs & politicians, and b) Twitter-specific creators - think of all the thread writers and serial memers.
All of these people rely on third party tools to schedule their tweets. No one is going to manually craft 1/30 thread series or tweet 8 times a day.
If the cost of running third party tools goes up 10x, a lot of creators, especially on the lower-end, will leave. I can pay $10/month for a tweet scheduling app, but if I had to pay $100 (because the app has to now pay 20x), I won't bother.
I've checked in on people who supposedly fled to mastadon, and at least in my network they've basically stopped posting there, and have come back to twitter.
A few people seem to have just logged off completely.
>Something I've been wondering is how many people have left Twitter because of the service's recent instability issues.
Twitter doesn't make money primarily by someone continuing to 'use twitter'. They make money with ad impressions. If everyone who used twitter still continues to use twitter, but 10% of them end up using it 30% less because they get annoyed when the site isn't working, that still costs the company millions of dollars.
It's not just uptime. They are making weird changes like making it so that replies show up in the Following feed as if it were a regular tweet without context.
I've also unfollowed many people, and they still show up in my feed.
Musk also said only paid accounts will show up in the For You feed, but then later said it will also include people you follow.
Just checked in again after 2 months and noticed that roughly half of the people I follow have reduced posting or stopped posting altogether. I'm also not seeing a lot of posts from people that I follow until I go to their profile page.
My 'for you' feed is a mix of a sprinkling of the people I follow, with a hefty helping of 'entertainment', crazy people, politics (most of these accounts are still on my blocklist, which apparently doesn't function anymore) and a host of other stuff that do no interest me.
I still enjoy it. There is the occasional minor bug for example lately I have noticed that the image carousel acts as if you double clicked the next button on the 2nd or 3rd image and skips it. I also get followed by a new asian woman (bot) every day. Other than that, not really too bad. I like the lists feature for following news.
See a lot of people saying they are presented with nazi posts, but I have not seen anything at all like that. I do see more right wing / conservative posters but they are very far from Nazis.
I mean, back when it first became a thing it was down frequently (fail whale), but people kept coming back anyway. Downtimes have never been a deterrent for Twitter.
Reddit survived a long time with absolutely horrendous stability. They still have pretty bad uptime: 99.72 % uptime (web). Their community was very vocal about it, but they continued to grow.
I could even see it helping. When reddit was down everyone lost their shit and there would be posts "where were you during the outage of '21" and "today I actually went outside", etc.. Kinda adds to the hype.
I entirely left twitter, and 15k+ followers account, when they deprecated the html version and never went back.
It seemed at the time that twitter was beginning to crumble already as they were unable to maintain such a simple feature, I couldn't imagine at the time that they would fail to even maintain the API.
You may be right but it sets a terrible precedent if anyone other than social media tries this. If your probability of a service working is only 99% the probability of an overall failure is .99 to the power of the number of services you depend on, which could be a lot.
he still has to figure out some way to make money and apparently most major news outlets will not be paying for Twitter Blue because they rightly realize it means nothing. The "status symbol" that was the blue checkmark is over and only an idiot would pay for it, Twitter has a lot of idiots but it seems likely the vast majority of them will also figure this out
Interesting--I think a large chunk of my friends have stopped using twitter. Certainly anyone I had on my main list has moved to mastodon or just stopped posting.
My guess is not much at all. It was even independently reported that Twitter was growing under Elon Musk[0]. Also, "Mastodon's users have dropped significantly" according to a report by Wire[1].
Edit: It's quite telling that the various personal stories and anecdotes are receiving upvotes, while my comment, which contains links to concrete data, is being downvoted.
Upvoted. There is a significant HN backlash against Twitter - where any data even remotely positive for Twitter or even mentioning the stuff in the Twitter files that contradict known "facts" about Twitter's previous "fairness" will get you downvoted by the dozen.
A lot of people like to hate on Musk and act like he is clueless yet they haven't build or done anything, let alone at the scale Elon has been able to run things at, yes he has a lot of people around him, yes he might get a lot of the credit when it belongs to them, but he is still the person that bought everything together.
There has got to be something that he is doing right and a lot of it to me seems to be getting rid of the nonsense that doesn't matter, not having much respect for norms or the way it is normally done, much like the first principles framework he has used successfully in many things he has done.
A lot of programers and startups love a huge amount of frameworks, processes and to be honest nonsense, because that is just how that industry works, musk tore up a lot of that and people then start calling him crazy, but as you point out, do people really care if Twitters uptime is 99% or 99.999999% engineers and people that are so stuck to industry standards do, the rest of the world and reality not so much.
One data point is that there is no way to get the full text of long tweets from the API. Twitter Blue subscribers have been able to post tweets longer than 280 characters since early February but the API only returns the first 280 or so characters.
I mean you're a platform company in 2023 and you don't want an API? Idk that sounds like competence to me in failing to appreciate its value. Sure, I appreciate it follows a strategy but I worry that the strategy will not help twitter in the long term.
I think you need to rate limit and auth most free consumer-facing end points, given the maliciousness of public traffic. Limiting it is just protecting yourself from its worst excesses, that doesn't necessarily mean you don't want to be a platform.
it hosts a communication service for organisations and individuals to build followings and broadcast messages. I guess its about whether you see Twitter as more than its user interface or not.
That sounds like a deliberate decision to maintain backwards compatibility.
I shudder to think of badly coded consumers of that API sticking that text into a fixed-sized buffer (with the right scaling factor between whatever Twitter considers a character and the actual bytes) and Twitter just wants to avoid buffer overflows like that.
The mental gymnastics of Musk haters are next level. If Twitter dies, he is dumb and incompetent. If he saves it, it was all just part of his evil plan. You got all outcomes covered, great.
Either way he is still the guy who publicly mocked his own employee for having muscular dystrophy, offered another employee a horse if they gave him a handjob, called a cave diver who saved a bunch of children a pedo, spread conspiracy theories about an elderly man who was beaten by an intruder with a hammer....
I didn't say he was a good person. But it's obvious that he's not incompetent and that he's just trying his best to salvage his investment. The idea that he is intentionally driving Twitter into the ground is beyond ridiculous.
According to himself it has fallen 50% in value since he bought it. If he just wanted to salvage his investment he'd tweet once a week about about features or metrics. As it is he spends a lot of his time shitposting and making facially absurd claims.
Right...and I'm saying that if he tweeted less and delivered more, he'd be taken more seriously than he is. Hype/salesmanship is part of business, but in the case of SpaceX and Tesla, they're delivering bespoke and high-end manufactured products. People are willing to wait for infrequent product delivery while tolerating sometimes-fanciful claims of great potential.
Twitter is different because it's a real-time mass communication platform, so the hype is received and processed differently. And outside of his fanbase, few people seem impressed with the changes as manifested so far and this is reflected in the response of advertisers.
Long tweets seem to work OK and offer a clear, obvious user benefit. I'm having difficulty thinking of any other examples.
The API's the thing that makes Twitter tolerably-usable to heavy users—the ones who draw eyeballs to the site so the ads are worth more than $0.00—right?
If so, not wanting to maintain it would probably count as incompetent, yes.
I'm not familiar with Twitter or its API, but are ads also returned via the API?
If not, then it would be more profitable for them to heavily restrict API access, and kill off 3rd party clients, so that more people would use the official clients where ads are actually shown.
I.e. they don't care about heavy users if they can't make a profit from them.
Heavy users are the ones who generate the content that gives the site value in the first place, though. Advertisers aren't there to sell products to the 1% of users who make most of the posts, they're there to sell to the 99% reading those posts. Making posting on twitter a bigger pain for the people who do most of the posting—and especially for celebrity and brand accounts that get tons of "engagement" they want/need to keep track of—is probably not a great move.
There clearly is an API that returns the full text of a tweet or the official app and website wouldn't be able to display it. They must be maintaining and building an API. The only thing that's not being maintained or updated are the public facing endpoints. That doesn't mean much.
This is how many websites work. A public api requires done right means you are spending effort maintaining it but worse, if your apps use it as well, it means you have to wait not only for your apps to update (maybe 11+ for different platforms), you have to wait for independent third parties to also update. With internal platforms, you can generally priortize changes if you need to with your coworkers, and you know the time frame for platforms like Samsung tvs and Playstations, and can plan for it.
External 3rd parties are unknown in some cases, and may try to leverage you in others.
So you have a stable 3rd party api for some very large features, and we have a internal highly fluid api for our stuff. 3rd parties can totally use that api you use, and do. But why make any representations or tie your velocity to all those 3rd parties for your main app.
You want these companies to inovate and improve while also tying them to often unmonitized ecosystems of 3rd parties you can't communicate with or priroitize well.
It's generally unsurprising to me that the api support breaks down this way. I actually think it's pretty disiungenuine to make a sold 3rd party api without it being monetized. That encourages people to build ecosystems on other peoples good will which. We've seen how that works time and again. Even worse when 3rd parties try and compete partly with the bread and butter of the api they're using.
developers who use the publicly available API can't use that
The point is that saying there's no API is wrong. There is an API. Elon has chosen not to let developers outside of Twitter use it. It's clearly a political choice rather than a technical competence problem.
That's like saying that my front door isn't shut because the doors to rooms inside are open. When people say 'API' they mean the public-facing endpoints, not the internal ones that are only accessible to Twitter's developers.
I mean ultimately it’s all semantics, but the idea that a private API is not an API proper is not exactly unusual.
It’s more a business competence than a technical competence issue, likely (unless he’s actually attempting to have a direct technical role, in which case it is Dunning-Kruger made manifest).
Name a single other major social network around today that has an API and allows third-party clients. The only one I can think of is Reddit - and even in that case, there are numerous features already being locked out of third-party clients. They are on the same path as Twitter, and at some point they will realize that maintaining a gigantic cost center that provides no revenue (since they don't control ads) and does not allow them to rapidly innovate or build a brand (since they don't control the app) does not make a lot of business sense.
The death of the Twitter API is long, long overdue. Bad for us consumers? Sure. But these companies are not charities, they exist to make money.
What makes you think this post is about the third party client API? The commercial API tiers have also been nerfed [1] to a level where you need Enterprise to do almost anything useful.
I think the enterprise plan is probably intended for established corporations that already pay out hundreds of thousands per month. As developers we're looking at it from the perspective of like "I want to build X on top of the twitter platform" but from their perspective it's more like "I want to sell access to my database to Pepsi and ESPN."
> It's not like it will be hard for Twitter to check.
Are you sure? That would require a centralized review and distribution process for all 3rd party clients, like the App Store for Twitter. It's not outside the realm of possibility, but there's very little incentive for them.
It barely needs to be more than a line in the ToS for the API. I'm sure Twitter already had a list of terms, and a way to ban people who misbehave. This is one more way to misbehave and get banned. Going right to an App Store would be insanity.
Showing ads isn’t enough. You need to count as impressions to bill advertisers and convince them to trust the impression data coming from third party clients.
They could just tell Apple & Google that your app doesn’t conform to their TOS, and poof, it’s gone. Especially PlayStore is really careful around 3rd party content.
Realistically, how much of the "content" is already ads? Ie corporate announcements, brand building, or political astroturfing, etc. It's almost like twitter is double dipping.
The public apis are what you use to get other people to build stuff that you dont want to build and increase the usage of your application by creating an ecosystem around it. Through the api, you draw in users, partners, entire use cases that are not provided for by your app directly and your app becomes something that is much bigger than what could it have been without an api.
The problem with Twitter was that it had no legitimate monetization for the app itself. It was a zero-interest, investor/vc money fueled growth machine. And even for that purpose, it used that api to great extent to bring a lot of users into the platform and integrate a vast swath of internet to Twitter - from Twitter logins to automatic embeds to entire 3rd party applications that served different subsets of users.
But now that the investors who dumped cash on something that does not have a level of monetization and revenue compared to its over-inflated valuation want something for their money, suddenly growth is not that important anymore and problems ensue.
Even in this particular situation, its a dumb idea to restrict or close down an api. If you do that, another service that doesnt do it will get an ecosystem built around it and it will eventually eat your lunch. A fixed set of people working on a singular app in a company can never produce as much features as an entire ecosystem with its large community can produce through an api. The Open Source movement and its successes follow the same pattern: Centralized, large corporations cannot compete with the development speed and breadth of communities of millions of people, even if those corporations employ tens of thousands of engineers.
The open API access is a very large differentiator for Twitter and Reddit because of the presence of novelty accounts/bots, automatic moderation tools etc. Twitter can follow along with Facebook wrt APIs, but then there's less of a reason to use Twitter instead of Facebook.
According to the post, the Twitter API was already generating $400M/year in revenue. Not sure what it cost, but that doesn't sound like a charity to me.
Social media giant Pinboard. People are warned not to compete with Pinboard but they still make 3rd party clients which seem to work.
On your point: In my opinion 3rd party clients expand services, are a new place of innovation and a place accompanying different usage patterns. The trick is not to kill them; the trick is, to make it work. I would have accepted a Tweetbot with ads. But without Tweetbot I mostly stopped visiting Twitter.
The API is not just about 3rd party clients. The API is about integrating all kinds of stuff from 3rd parties, and it's absolutely required if Elon Musk wants to make Twitter an "everything app" like WeChat.
Twitter I used for several years and may go back now that someone with common sense is at the helm but only ever heard of WeChat and what I heard was mostly negative.
> only ever heard of WeChat and what I heard was mostly negative
WeChat is pretty lit and contains a whole internet, sort of akin to how Facebook Pages might contain the only information or updates about many businesses and municipalities.
Yes, a state agency will censor some things, just like a corporation will censor some things. Yes, they collect your data and share it with third parties including the government, just like a series of corporation do on every other network. You're not Chinese, you're not going to disappear, its rare they experience anything more than a message disappearing too, its the same user experience. I don't find the reality to be different enough to warrant the perception of reality.
> Reddit - and even in that case, there are numerous features already being locked out of third-party clients
I've used a third-party client for years and I don't miss any features. Maybe I don't know what I'm missing but, like, I can read, comment, and post and that's enough for me.
I applied for Twitter API access for a small personal app a few weeks ago. I receive the following response yesterday:
Thank you for applying for access to the Twitter API. We’re working on exciting updates including new access types and will have more to share soon. Please stay tuned to @TwitterDev and resubmit your application as soon as we launch our new API.
In the meantime, you can learn more about the Twitter API v2 and find resources on developer.twitter.com. We appreciate your continued interest in developing on the Twitter API.
Delusional for sure, even in the US market. That is up to 14 hours of minimum wage work. Even in California, that is 7+ hours of work. I think you can expect students to be working poorly paid jobs generally. I can't imagine anyone actually paying that as a student themselves.
Probably just a marketing technique to steer businesses away from that tier. I doubt they seriously expect many students to have 100$/month available to spend on their API.
if that means they've set up auto-responders with the poop emoji, but only to certain news outlets, that's even funnier than just responding with it to everybody
From the comments that Musk has made over the last few months, this appears to be as intended. He doesn't seem to view the API as a benefit to the company nor a fit for his plans on where he wants to go with it.
The plan doesn’t make much sense because the free tier is write-only. Bots can post 1,500 Tweets per API token per month, but free users can no longer make simple read-only queries about Tweets or users.
This means the free API is only useful for people who want to post Tweets automatically (e.g. bots) and not people who just want read-only access and do not contribute to spam. These users will now have to resort to web scraping, which is much more expensive for Twitter to serve than basic JSON API responses.
Spam bots need read access to find relevant keywords and insert themselves into replies to popular posts - otherwise they have zero visibility. As for hobby projects - I'm sure this will break a lot of them, but those that just post regular updates (like @tinyspires) should be fine.
Really? On the API docs it still says write-only access. I don’t see anything about allowing user queries (unless the docs haven’t been updated to Musk’s latest whim, which should be expected given Twitter’s state I guess).
The lack of foresight (and/or experience) by Musk here is breathtaking. The Internet collectively learned (I thought) a long time ago that if you don't provide a public API (that you can control/track) you're just going to wind up with end users and bots using your regular web endpoints to perform the same actions which is inefficient and slow; for both the clients and the service itself.
Endpoints meant for web browsers are about to get a whole lot more (fake) traffic which will throw off their metrics and mess with ad algorithms and by extension, ad revenue.
> - Bots were most likely largely operated via the AP
This strikes me as extremely unlikely. The bots being discussed were attempting to pretend not to be bots, and there were active attempts to detect and remove them. Using the API would have made it trivial to detect them.
It really doesn't. Under the new plan, you won't be able to read out anything from query/streaming endpoints unless you pat least $100/month. But you'll still be able to post 1500 tweets/mo (about 50/day) for free.
Given how easy it is to make/purchase Twitter accounts, this works just fine for spammers, people running influence operations etc. Sure you won't be able to tweet 10 times/minute like some spammers do, but those people are usually doing it manually or puppeteering via headless browsers rather than operating developer accounts.
You also don't need Twitter Blue unless your output depends on cold views. In reality, nearly all spam/scam/influence campaigning relies on follower/retweet networks to do amplification. Commoditized verification is meaningless, it's like paying for a t-shirt that says 'I'm famous.'
Yeah, operating a free service and "limiting bots and fake accounts" are pretty incompatible.
I didn't think "I'm going to fix bots" meant "I'm going to really limit free access" but it's a coherent approach, at least.
I just don't think a paid Twitter will be as valuable as it was. Competing with free is really hard; I'm not sure Mastodon is that competitor, but I bet there will be something.
sounds like a hard job to quantify "can/does maintaining the API make the company money"
on one hand you've got a knee-jerk answer: "absolutely! how could it not?!"
on the other... maybe he's getting rid of it for a reason? sucks for people who integrated against it but is it is "right" to effectively screw these people over who aren't paying for (but are benefitting from) the API?
If there is an api someone can, and has, written a client that makes twitter work better. You can subvert most the dumb shit they keep trying to throw into the experience that ruin the user experience. Ad's... don't show them, timeline... put it in order, etc.
Also there is a small community of researchers out there that use the api to detect botnets, follow networks, etc. Can't have that with musk around.
For being unmaintained for months it's holding up remarkably well.
Edit: And the sole active Ads developer who was still actively responding when the blog post was written, was apparently laid off a week after the article was posted. Ouch.
My post is one of the "12 [...] about Twitter not responding to the standard API access request process".
It's easy to keep an API running if you reject access to it, no? Due to a delightful quirk of how the Twitter Ads API review process works, our entire application no longer works, even for non-Ads API use. Genius way to manage the load.
This post is more than a month old. Twitter announced pricing tiers yesterday
(March 29). From the first link on the blog post:
> Today we are launching new Twitter API access tiers! We’re excited to share more details about our new plans and what you should expect in terms of next steps and timeline.
> Free: For write-only use cases and testing the Twitter API (1,500 Tweets per month)
> $100: For hobbyists or students learning code (50,000 Tweets per month - posting limit at the app level)
> Current access plans including Standard (v1.1), Essential (v2), Elevated (v2), and Premium will be deprecated over the next 30 days, so we recommend that you migrate to the new tiers as soon as possible for a smooth transition. Any non-migrated developer accounts will be impacted by April 29th, 2023 at the latest.
It's not unmaintained. They were just putting it behind a pay wall.
Not to defend twitter here, but it's not that far out if you're a grad or Ph.D student working on some project for your thesis or whatever - especially if you can get the money refunded.
A collegue of mine is writing his Masters thesis part time on deep learning, and he's paying around $30-$50/month for cloud computing
Unmaintained and putting up a pay-wall are not mutually exclusive. Sounds like they are going to layer a new pricing model on-top and leave it at that.
OP here. Sure, they finally anounced the new pricing, months late, but all of the evidence in the post that it's effectively unmaintained still stands. The hostile new pricing just adds to the lack of support in convincing me not to waste any more of my time developing for it.
My idea was to:
1) Set up a public Git repo on GitHub with a list of quotes.
2) Set up a Cloud Function to execute once a day. This function will read the list and post the quote for the day.
This is super simple - no server required, and all free. I think the work here would be to come up with good sets of quotes. For example, I found a list of idioms in the Telugu proverbs. The book would require some sort of image processing to find quote boundaries, and to cut those out. I'd have to learn how to upload images via the API as well.
> Absurd that these platforms have no scruples about gathering data from users, but if you try doing the opposite, they’ll block you at every turn.
Most people have no problem getting paid too much for something they're selling, but they'll try to block you at every turn if you want them to overpay.
If Twitter went bankrupt, could Elon buy its intellectual property at auction for a discount to effectively reduce his acquisition price? Or is the majority of debt tied to Musk personally?
I'm not a Musk fan but if this play is in the cards, his actions could be rational.
I dont know how it works but there must be some way to prevent that.
Otherwise poeple would just
- buy 51 % stake
- run the company into the ground
- announce its bankrupt
- at the auction buy back IP for pennies on the dollar
- start new company with previous IP, same domain name, same servers etc
Also if there was an auction, what prevents Google, Meta, MS, Amazon, etc from buying the IP instead.
I could be missing some details here, but when he bought it and took it private, doesn't he already technically own all of Twitter's IP? So he would crash his company to buy back his own IP from himself at a discounted rate?
If the business failed, IP would be sold to satisfy creditors. If you bought a widget for $100, but financed $50 of the purchase, you've effectively spent $50. If you then go bankrupt, buy that something back at auction for $10, you've reduced your cost from $100 ($50 + $50 of debt) to $60 ($50 + $10) after defaulting on the debt.
Does it? Besides numerous malfunctions over the last months one current example is that I can see posts of accounts that I blocked or that blocked me in my feed, which I have seen reported by others aswell.
Twitter search is also a total crapshoot now. Some days it returns zero results, some days it returns completely irrelevant results that match none of my filters, and once in a blue moon it seems to work properly, but unless I want to browse every Tweet an account has ever made, I have no way to confirm it's working.
The claim was that Twitter would experience some kind of total collapse- that Musk had no choice but to capitulate to demands of a disgruntled work force, many of whom were incensed that the platform would no long actively censor the speech of huge numbers of people.
As it turns out Musk mostly didn't need them, and firing them didn't harm his interests to any tangible degree.
No it wasn't. And if Musk's actions aren't harming his interests, that's only because he says he doesn't mind losing ~$20 billion. I do not believe that he is going to be able to grow it into a $200 billion company on the back of frog Twitter.
None of this about money, though is it. It's about control.
The ones who are most upset about this have an ideology that is a house of cards that has to be shielded from all interrogation, mocking and critique, lest it implode under the weight of its own internal inconsistencies.
These people know very well how to distinguish friend and enemy, and Elon is decidedly not a friend.
To lose this castle to an enemy like Musk is a huge problem for them because of its strategic importance, hence the fire-storm of consternation.
In the wider world, the ones who are upset about this are vastly outnumbered by those who just want to have fun and express themselves on the Internet, so if Twitter can become that kind of a place it will do very well.
The other day reply indicators on tweets just disappeared. This makes threaded conversations harder to read, and allows for all sorts of abuses.
For example, a common trolling tactic is to block someone, unblock them and post a mean or disagreeable comment, and then immediately block them again, and to do this repeatedly. The target can't see who is clogging up the conversation with BS, while the unblock-tweet-block cycle is very little extra work for the troll.
Yes, I view keeping the lights on generally different from continuous improvement and new development. The api is not accidentally online still, so it would be reductive to say zero people are in charge and aware of it being online and available.
I don't understand the problem. Can't everybody just convert their businesses into Mastodon tools and interfaces? If Mastodon is the future, why complain about twitter? Why so desperate to cultivate an actual, literal fascist's newly-walled garden?
Mastodon is most definetly not the future. I think Twitter will still be a thing in 10 years while Mastodon (and even ActivityPub/Fediverse for that matter) will still be a niche or failed idea.
Does Mastodon have an API I can use to access everyone's feed?
I am curious because I have never used the API, and I can see Mastodon taking over if they have an API that let's 3rd parties interact and download content.
Why don't they let me add people to a starred/favorited list of people I care about listening to, and then the rest whose toxicity I can only tolerate in small doses. :) Elon if you're listening
When I think of "free tier API" for Twitter I think of the one you get when you go to the site in a browser. I doubt that one won't go away without some serious loss of userbase.
The documentation and usability of Twitter's API has been in decline for at least a few years now. I gave up in 2018/19 (or whenever they implemented the new version of their API?). This has nothing to do with the advent of Musk, and anyone blaming him are insufferable Musk haters (which is pretty standard these days).
In the beginning, their API was a joy to use and a lot of neat software popped up around it. There was some drama around them making changes internally (API changes) which put some of these companies out of business. People became weary of their API since. That said, I would love to see a completely revamped API with great documentation.
You gave up on it 5 years ago but are sure nothing happened in the last few months, while the team that was actively maintaining it is saying they were all fired. Sorry for being "insufferable," but why is your take more credible than theirs?
> You gave up on it 5 years ago but are sure nothing happened in the last few months
I said that it's been in decline. If its unusable now, I'm not shocked because of the way it was headed even a few years ago. Musk very well might have realized the dumpster fire that is their API and shelved it for the time being.
> why is your take more credible than theirs?
What can I say, I'm just a simple user? Whether you find my "take" credible or not is purely up to you. ymmv
important to remember the insane debt Twitter is in is due to Musk's leveraged buyout where he got the debt for his loans to attach to the company he bought with them.
Twitter used to be my number one source for quick user generated updates across the globe. An event in my city or around the globe and I wanted to tune in what others are saying and what’s going on? There was nothing faster than Twitter.
Then came the bots and bot farms. They started polluting Twitter and manipulating the masses.
Elon Musk is right in some of his observations. But he did not have the right action plan. He started doing things haphazardly, and many were saying: This is the way he approaches projects, too hastily, apparently very chaotic, but in the end he succeeds. The thing is: This time his ego got in his way. The platform he tries to redefine and reinvent is also his mirror, for polishing his own ego by chasing likes.
Musk is killing Twitter, and Jack Dorsey was complicit in this.
OK, but on the plus side you'll soon be able to access it for only $100 month, or for free if your only ambition is to post tweets automatically.
Now, people say the previous entry-level, elevated, and academic tiers were all free and provided a lot more functionality leading to lots of utility for twitter users, social science etc., but most of those same people balk when asked to affirm that 'Elon Musk is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life.'
Given the amount of bad predictions and misinformation regarding post-acquisition Twitter, I'd take this with a grain of salt. Remember that many on HN thought that Twitter would literally stop operating shortly after the first rounds of layoffs[0].
Elon basically started with the Private Equity leveraged buyout playbook - borrow money to buy a business, then assign that business the debt used to buy it.
But it’s unclear how he’s going to do part 2, which is to either suck enough value out of it to recoup the purchase price before it fails completely, or turn it around and make it more valuable than when he bought it.
Right now Twitter needs to drastically increase its revenue and decrease its expenses just to service the new debt load. Hence Elon firing everyone and trying to charge more for every little thing.
It’s amazing that Twitter was more or less self-sustaining prior to this, and now it’s not.
I think it's a mistake to evaluate his success with it in purely financial terms like that.
He's proven himself thin skinned, egotistical, and capricious, and is easy to provoke into vindictive & retributive actions even if not in his best interests.
I think a big part of why he bought twitter was a sense of grievance, basically that the wrong people were getting positive attention, that people were being mean to and making fun of him and his friends & allies. He wanted to restructure the mechanics and incentives of the platform to better support the people and outcomes he values.
I'm not sure whether he succeeded by these terms either, it's still too early to tell I think. But I do think it's an important factor in evaluating whether he succeeded in what he set out to do when buying twitter.
And from that perspective "make it good or (let it) die trying" may be an acceptable compromise. He doesn't get the musk-adoration platform he wants, but at least there is no longer the musk-ridicule platform he perceived it to be.
Remember, he didn't want to buy Twitter. He pitched it in the first place purely in an attempt to get leverage over the board. He didn't really want to own it.
The board called his bluff and said "sold!", then Musk spent a great deal of time and effort trying to wiggle out of the deal. He failed, and now he's stuck with it.
Everything he's doing now is trying to minimize the amount of financial damage this debacle will cause him.
> Remember, he didn't want to buy Twitter. He pitched it in the first place purely in an attempt to get leverage over the board. He didn't really want to own it.
He didn't just "pitch" it, he made a buyout offer with all the attendant SEC filings. Not the sort of thing you can accidentally do with a slip of the tongue!
Given everything he has said and done about Twitter, I think it's pretty clear he has no idea how contracts work and is very bitter about ever having to follow them.
He's hardly the first person to get rich flouting the law.
Plus it's not at all clear how much credit he should get for the companies he invested in, aside from being a good fundraiser and hype man. There are plenty of stories about employees having to manage him to avoid him stepping on critical work.
What is your alternative explanation for how it turned out? "Didn't understand what he signed up for" is the only explanation that makes sense to me, given my second choice is "he's a fucking idiot that fell into money". Though I don't think Musk is nearly as smart as he (or a lot of his fans) thinks he is, he's no idiot, so...
And you don't have to understand contract law to start a company (or in the majority of Musk's cases, invest in an existing company), that's what lawyers are for.
I think he did want to buy it, but then later thought that decision through a bit, or had it thought through for him, and realized his mistake. You're giving him too much credit.
I still think my analysis holds. Why did he want leverage over the board? For the grievance-based reason I pointed to. He didn't want to follow through with it, but once forced, why would he not continue to act based on that driver and similar petty impulsiveness we now know he experiences?
It's true though that if it loses a bucket of money and he never wanted it in the first place he might not consider it as successful as I'm guessing. We can't know his mind, but thinking of it in this way explains a lot of his behavior around twitter that is difficult or impossible to explain from a pure financial standpoint, so I'm going to stick with it for now.
Are you sure he didn't actually want to but it, before it turned out there are so many bots?
In any case, I suspect that the GP comment by giraffe_lady, explains why he was interested in Twitter at all -- why bothering trying to get leverage over the board.
Or, if he wants to eventually become the President of the US, then that's an alternative explanation (of why he cared)?
> Or, if he wants to eventually become the President of the US, then that's an alternative explanation (of why he cared)?
That would require a constitutional amendment in order for him to be eligible. He’s revealed himself to be pretty dumb, but even I give him enough credit to not be so stupid as to think he will one day he President.
He's not broadly stupid. He does seem to have the very specific failure to believe that rules or consequences apply to him. He's correct about this a lot of the time, and it's probably the source of a good deal of his success. I think he's capable of believing he could be president some day.
> Are you sure he didn't actually want to but it, before it turned out there are so many bots?
There's very little doubt in my mind. The bot thing was always just rhetorical. he didn't suddenly "discover" something he wasn't already well aware of.
> Are you sure he didn't actually want to but it, before it turned out there are so many bots?
Yes. This has been covered widely and was a key reason he had to follow through with the purchase. The bot thing was an attempt to get out of buying Twitter, not something he actually believed. You need to realize that he's like Trump: lying is kind of beside the point. He'll say whatever he thinks will get him what he wants, which ultimately public adulation, however hollow that is.
I don't think he would be ok losing $40billion+ and with only some assuaged grievances to show for it. He's not that tempermental.
He's got a business idea for Twitter, which is to turn it into "X", the everything app he originally wanted Paypal to be 20yrs ago. Basically a US version of WeChat.
But it will be a steep climb from here, with a skeleton engineering crew that needs to both maintain current Twitter and build new X, and the debt service draining money and constraining hiring.
No, it's the complete opposite: the fact that Twitter has laid off 80% of its staff and is still operating has encouraged execs at other tech companies to push staff cuts. Vanity Fair wrote an article about this yesterday.[0]
I do think there are long term-issues with laying off that many employees, but clearly the "if you fire all these engineers the service is going to collapse and stop working" doomsaying was unfounded.
Twitter has remained functional largely because all the former employees did their jobs effectively. I've seen what happens when companies lay a tech department to waste and it looks like this. This is a one-way cost reduction program that will forever reduce the quality of workers available to the company.
The way this pans out is that in the short term, nothing much happens except deadlines start to get pushed out. As time goes on everything becomes more and more dysfunctional. All progress grinds to a halt; simply treading water created by ongoing churn and operational needs ends up becoming impossible. Next the business tries to get more and more out of the remaining staff until they get fed up with it and leave. Shortly before the wheels really come off, legal and compliance issues will suddenly start ballooning. That's where we are now. Nobody wants to work on these kind of projects -- they do nothing for your career and nobody will celebrate your work -- but they are not optional. Elon seems to have decided simply not to comply with laws he dislikes in regulatory environments where he thinks he can get away with it. This can work for a while, but companies with no internal governance and that regularly flout laws can don't tend to last for too long without making painful changes. Let's see how it turns out. Given the reported state of the company it sounds like he has about a year to figure it out.
> but clearly the "if you fire all these engineers the service is going to collapse and stop working" doomsaying was unfounded.
Despite all the firings, Twitter's financials are worst than pre-acquisition. How comes? Advertisers pulling out. Why? Firing abuse and content moderation teams meant there was a lot more unsavory spam on the platform and advertisers didn't want any of it near their brand. Remember the Twitter Blue two days of spam?
Not only that, but it's been leaked that Twitter is trying hard to recruit some laid-off employees with huge comp packages. Without a lot of success.
> Despite all the firings, Twitter's financials are worst than pre-acquisition. How comes? Advertisers pulling out. Why? Firing abuse and content moderation teams meant there was a lot more unsavory spam on the platform and advertisers didn't want any of it near their brand.
Advertising revenue for Meta and Google has also tanked to the tune of 30-50% of their stock value, so it's disingenuous to link Twitter's ad revenue woes directly to any increase in spam (which is in and of itself an unsourced claim).
Both of those are from November, from what I've heard most brands stopped advertising while the drama was going on and they wanted clarity around the future of the platform (making sure it didn't becoming explicitly "alt-right" or "free speech" like Rumble/Truth Social), but got back in after things settled down.
Unless targeting has wildly changed, that doesn’t seem to be the case (have things “settled down”, even?) None of the major brands that I used to get ads from regularly are hitting me with ads at all now, and most of the ads I see are for the same type of places I was seeing just after the major backouts.
It really does seem like a historic moment in business history. I'm strugling to think of a precedent, other than cases of outright fraud, where a prominent firm (= its management) experienced so much negative publicity and self-owning.
Imagine if Twitter actually came out of this fine and then business schools decided to build a generation of "tough guy CEO" MBAs.
Or worse, imagine if Twitter continues to plummet as we currently see it, then business schools decide to write history as if it were a success story anyways.
Not sure how old you are but this already happened in the 80's. We also got an entire generation of "Steve Jobs was a successful asshole, ergo asshole => success" MBAs
To be fair, corporate acquisitions do often fall into disrepair and failure. It’s just that usually the company making the acquisition… still has their existing business. When it’s an individual making a botched acquisition, you get to watch the company disintegrate instead.
While this is true, it doesn't really seem to damage Twitter as a platform for now. - And it is not as if Musk turned a great profitable business into trash, Twitter never had a sustainable business model.
More than half of that negative publicity is due to the people who make publicity (journalists) having their hang out taken over by a billionaire they hate.
Here it is, that tired old argument that’s also used to defend Trump: it’s the biased media. And just like Trump, I can look at Musk’s tweets too and see how obnoxious, narcissistic, petty, and disingenuous they are for myself. In fact, it’s hard to avoid now that he appears to have goosed the algorithm to shove his tweets down everyone’s throat.
It's possible for someone to suck AND the media to be biased against them.
Just reading Trump and Musk's tweets will tell you plenty with zero bias. And indeed, this is how you can tell that Trump is legitimately a fool and Musk is simultaneously whimsical and stubborn.
This does not mean there isn't also an extra bit of anti-Musk/Trump stuff piled on top (in Musk's case the stuff about him inheriting an Emerald mine and lying about his child dying in his arms and in Trump's case the stuff about him being a big anti-LGBT guy).
You said it's "more than half" of the negativity, not "an extra bit."
> This does not mean there isn't also an extra bit of anti-Musk/Trump stuff piled on top (in Musk's case the stuff about him inheriting an Emerald mine and lying about his child dying in his arms
I guess you're implying the emerald mine stuff is false? Or are you saying it's not a big deal? And re: the child dying in his arms, the media is quoting his wife, who said he's lying. Are they to just ignore a story like that?
"Half" vs "a bit" is far too big an argument for a hackernews comment section
On the rest:
He did not inherit an Emerald mine and no reliable source has alleged he did, nor that his father even owned any part in the mine after the 90s, nor are there any reliable sources stating that Musk's father monetarily helped him in business other than a $28k loan he paid back. Heck, they even failed at doing a quick Google to figure out how much a pocket full of uncut emeralds actually goes for (a few hundred dollaras). And yet he's often portrayed as a trust fund kid who was given millions and never worked a day in his life.
The baby death rattled in her arms but he felt the last heartbeat.
When journalists dislike you they will knowingly propagate misleading distortions and myths and will never correct inaccuracies that went against you or promote facts that are in your favour.
Twitter is unique in that it was acquired for US$ 44B when it was a business that lost huge amounts of money consistently for years, and the owner intended it to have it run old school style, as in making a profit, but also doing so in such short notice that he dismantled entire branches of the company wholesale.
Obviously for people relying on pre-existing services and rates from Twitter, it sucks.
But the root problem is that Twitter had not been a sustainable business for a long, long time. One has to wonder how did they even subsist for so long and how much institutional money, not just VC/investor money, and who knows what sort of government/agencies pay-to-play deals made it even possible because the sort of money they cashed in during the only few years they've even been profitable seems absurdly high and they have never replicated that under normal circumstances.
With the ad model struggling and institutional ads sort of in retreat, the entire sector is struggling.
Twitter generated $5 billion revenue in 2021, a 35% increase on 2020 figures and a significant improvement on the 8% and 13% increase the two years before.
Cut backs were needed, as advertising revenue would have been significantly down this year, given the economic down turn. However, there was no need to gut the company to make it profitable.
Your graph doesn't really counter the parent's point. The profit line was trending upwards 2020 was their most profitable year. It certainly looks like the business was becoming sustainable.
The Twitter Buyout is structured as a $13 Billion loan.
That means that Elon Musk's Twitter Buyout costs $1.3 Billion/year _ON TOP_ of all the other costs of Twitter.
If Twitter was "barely profitable" in 2021, they're now $Billion+ short / year. That has nothing to do with "old Twitter" decisions, and 100% to do with how Elon Musk structured the buyout.
Presumably, you're supposed to assume that Musk knows what he's doing and that he has a plan to make $1.3 Billion in profits (to break even on the loan) and then go beyond (to make profit on his $44 Billion investment). But... I'm honestly not seeing it.
As far as I understand Amazon makes a deliberate choice to reinvest their profit into research, marketing, etc, with the promise that it will grow more in the future.
Musk has been very upfront that Twitter is bleeding money (hence why he is firing so many people), it's not simply that a healthy profit margin is being reinvested.
twitter lost copious amounts of money even with unprecedented revenue (from institutional ads one would assume, as it had never happened to that degree before or since, and private ads were cheap in 2021)
If Elon hadn't bough it, maybe the Twitter would have been fine without significant restructuring. But now Twitter has to service a significant part of the debt created to buy the company, and thus has to generate more revenue.
Elon bought Twitter because the Delaware courts are not the milquetoasts he's accustomed to (at the SEC).
Edit: my suspicion is that Elon expected the Twitter board to rebuff him, and he'd walk away calling them names for the rest of his days - and then the market dropped, removing resistance from the board (if any existed). This was capped off with Delaware courts showing every sign of muscular oversight of contract law, with Twitter reveling at the chance of embarrassing Musk and people in his orbit and getting bought off at a now-overpriced amount. It was a perfect storm.
I mean, you are both claiming cuts were needed and they’re too much. So how much was right? How do you know? You’d do a better job than the people who have access to the numbers? That’s a fairly arrogant position
Gee, it's almost like there are aspects of life where a single-minded absolutist position is going to be less effective than getting to know the actual situation and making an informed decision based on human judgement.
Most FAANGS have been cutting by 10 to 15%. That trims excess fat without gutting a company.
Twitter seems to have a serious cultural problem at the moment, and that is generally a lot harder to fix than to rehire when the growth curve inverses.
I am sure Musk had to cut by 50%, if only because Twitter's interest payments are now significant. However, that does bring significant challenges.
> However, there was no need to gut the company to make it profitable.
There was a need and it was going to happen anyway. Clearly slashing headcount earlier even without Elon, would have easily made it even more profitable.
Their mistake was that they didn't do it earlier enough. It just took Elon to do it for them. 7K headcount wasn't sustainable regardless and a 50% - 60% cut in staff makes sense for Twitter.
But why would he bother? If the company was really in such bad shape, why not just let it fail and create a competing service (for a lot less than $44B)?
In any case, from my perspective Twitter didn't really make serious mistakes. They got $44B for the company despite its issues.
> But why would he bother? If the company was really in such bad shape, why not just let it fail and create a competing service (for a lot less than $44B)?
The value in Twitter is its network effect, social inertia and integrations in hundreds of thousands of websites, blogs, apps and APIs with 220M+ daily active users still using it every day.
Recreating that from scratch makes absolutely no sense. There is no serious alternative to Twitter and it is better to buy it instead of building it all over again.
> In any case, from my perspective Twitter didn't really make serious mistakes.
Twitter clearly over-hired like the rest of the tech companies and was wasting millions a day. It is either the mounting costs would get them in the end or someone else would reverse that downward trend to insolvency.
Drastic action was the appropriate method to stem the losses.
With 62% of public companies nowadays being in the same loss-making predicament[1], the bigger question is: how much of the US economy is being propped up by the goodwill of investors?
I suspect that if there was government/agencies money, it would show up as revenue. Possibly laundered through third-parties, but revenue nevertheless.
Thank you, for a nuanced answer on this topic. Very rare these days.
You are also 100% correct. As revenues fell at snap just like twitter, and easy money has dried up at all VCs creating a completely different market environment. Just look at stocks of small cap tech companies too, which Twitter was.
The only extra nuance to add is that without fines Twitter was actually profitable before musk bought it, but in the current market environment it certainly wouldn’t be even without musks leadership.
The antagonist forces of "Ha! Look how much the revenue fell!" versus "Hmm.. look how much they slashed costs.." means it's really hard to tell how well Twitter will do in the long term.
So far it has exposed the real business acumen of Elon Musk. The only company he runs by himself, arguably the easiest to run, is losing him a staggering amount of money in one year.
The way I see it, it more-so shows that his strength is in companies that are heavy on complex engineering problems.
Twitter on the other hand, is a company dealing with sociological/societal challenges, being that it's a social network. That takes an entirely different kind of skill set to do well as a CEO for.
I don't buy it. Internal reports from SpaceX and Tesla detail Musk's chaotic, capricious management style that they have to spend resources to actively manage. SpaceX is better at it I guess, because he's seemed to have caused far more problems at Tesla with his antics.
Either way, he's essentially abdicated his CEO role at both companies, and his chaotic management style is on full display now, which confirms the Tesla and SpaceX reports. But why did Tesla and SpaceX thrive where Twitter is failing? Because the former companies grew up to create processes that contain Musk; whereas Twitter was bought outright, so his blast radius is unlimited there. Twitter has no Musk immune response.
At SpaceX when Musk suggests X, where X is... I dunno, an really dumb idea that no one would ever want, the people at SpaceX know how to redirect Musk until he drops it, or they know how to shape it into a good idea. At Twitter, they have no idea how to do this, and so Musk always gets his way, every time. All the people with the skills to turn bad ideas into good ones have left, all the people who tried to manage Musk were fired, so now he's left to his whims. And it shows.
If anything, Musk has proven how ceremonial the CEO role is. He has the title CEO of at least 4 companies, and claims 80 hours per week is a full time role. So at best CEO is a part time job.
> If anything, Musk has proven how ceremonial the CEO role is. He has the title CEO of at least 4 companies, and claims 80 hours per week is a full time role. So at best CEO is a part time job.
Also, he can't be effective at 3 of the companies since he's not physically in the office at each. It's impossible to do a good job while remote, as we all know.
I would also add on to the context of Tesla and SpaceX. Now part of this is speculation on my part. But I would also like to propose that the problem domains of Tesla and SpaceX also attract people who have vested interest in the problem domain. Engineers and researches at both of those companies are passionate about the problems that those two companies are trying to solve. With Twitter and social media, maybe there exists some people who are passionate, but I imagine the biggest attraction of Facebook and Twitter are the pay and the resume item. But at Tesla or SpaceX, your willing to eat more shit because your working on something your probably really passionate about and not to mention badass. I don't like Musk, but I would worked for him at SpaceX just because rockets are badass and I like space.
> If anything, Musk has proven how ceremonial the CEO role is. He has the title CEO of at least 4 companies, and claims 80 hours per week is a full time role. So at best CEO is a part time job.
I think the thing about CEO is that you can delegate not just the things you probably shouldn't personally be doing, but also the things you should.
I'd believe that some CEOs have a real job, but it's pretty clear that a lot have delegated it away to nearly nothing.
It is still vaporware. One potent delay tactic is to arrange a splashy prerelease, and then drag feet to production. But delay tactics only work for ideas that aren't strongly seated yet; if he keeps coming back to it, delay will eventually fail. That's how you get bad movie and terrible ideas on store shelves. He is the boss after all.
I think that his strength is with companies that had a strong and effective engineering culture in place when he bought them. Companies that require the building or rebuilding of an engineering culture aren't playing to Musk's strengths.
I'll take the contrarian stance here. During the Morgan Stanley Conference interview, Elon Musk forecasted that Twitter had the potential to achieve a positive cash flow status by the second quarter of 2023. Advertisers are returning to the platform and they just announced their new API monetization plans [0]. The company's strategic direction notwithstanding, Twitter may be a profitable company soon.
But which advertisers? It's not enough to get +10,000 people trying out a $10 or $100 ad while rates are low due to low bidding competition. Twitter needs the big advertisers who expect to have someone at the company support their campaigns. The new owner fired the people who did that. Worse, he fired the people who'd spent years earning those advertisers' trust and patience.
Performance-focused advertisers. Growing this segment was already set as a strategic direction for Twitter in 2021, however, Musk's takeover and the subsequent departure of brand-focused advertisers seem to have accelerated these plans [0].
As for brand-focused advertisers, I can see parallels to 2017's "YouTube Adpocalypse" in which advertisers paused their spending due to their ads being displayed before videos containing offensive content. They recovered from it by demonitizing offensive content. Twitter will have to address "brand safety" concerns, however,
Advertisers are returning because they're basically getting free stuff, and will cut back on Twitter as soon as that spigot runs out.
My company advertises on Twitter, because they gave us an 80% discount to keep advertising on Twitter after we started shifting more spend to other sites last fall. We haven't actually paid Twitter yet; they keep sending emails but we figured we'd just pull an Elon and wait until they actually got serious about collecting. It helps that our account reps keep getting laid off.
Notably, Elon Musk contradicted that interview a number of times internally, noting that Twitter is still deeply in the red. So he was either lying in that interview or he was lying to his minority investors.
It seems to me that Musk is moving away from advertisements, to trying to build the first social network that doesn't rely on the user being the product, but rather paying for the product.
That's supposedly what tech people root for, but because its Elon Musk, who eschews many of the shibboleths of the Left, people criticise Twitter as a proxy for his political views.
Aside: As a European, it scares and amuses me to no end how the American discourse has become a complete Left vs Right, black vs white, us vs them. I'm not even that old, and I remember when being so politically polarised and eager to fit people and the world in two small boxes was something you'd only hear from drunken lunatics at a bar. These days, it's every-fucking-where on the Internet because y'all can't bloody stop talking about your politics.
I say that in the most polite way possible: you Americans have a lot of internal issues you need to sort out, and quickly. You're polluting the rest of the world with your party politics.
If you are interested in potential reasons why Americans (and increasingly more of us non-americans) are so binary in their arguments, I found the following article interesting. Basically it says that America have always had a kind of us vs them mentality and it's now running internally. And this is combined with the certainty one gets with suspicion. If you suspect someone of being an enemy then you know for certain what their reasons are and you do not need to seek further information. Empathy in the wider sense of understanding what another feels goes against this. Conflicts get resolved peacefully when both sides find shared ground. Paranoia and suspicion remove any idea about even trying to find shared ground.
We see this from all sides from the liberals and the conservatives. What's ironic is both sides see the other side as doing it not them!
> Basically it says that America have always had a kind of us vs them mentality and it's now running internally
This has been a thing in the US since before we were the US. The south vs. north and urban vs. rural divide has deeply affected the entire fabric of the US down to the 3/5ths compromise in the Constitution to placate the southern states to ratify the Constitution in the first place.
Don't forget that time in the 1860's when literally half the country tried to leave as well. This is nothing new, it's just that the rest of the world can see it in real time nowadays (and much more of them speak English) when that was not possible previously unless you were a real international policy wonk.
I'd argue Musk himself has fallen prey to this partisan politics - it is really hard to support a large part of his tweets these days. He seems to have fallen into some strange mental quagmire with the failure of his twitter buyout, and his ego is not letting him accept any other reason for it than partisan sabotage.
But the way he is portrayed in the aggregate here and on reddit is even worse. He is either a genius beyond any criticism, or a complete fool, was always a fool and twitter is now exposing that.
We can't simply accept any middle ground, which is that he is likely a flawed human being who did some pretty amazing things once upon a time. If anything I hope we can steer him back to moonshot ideas, because he had a talent for it.
Musk is perhaps the least partisan public figure I know of; everyone on the left seems to assume he's a right winger because he doesn't subscribe to left-wing orthodoxy, so he must be one of the Bad Other Guys.
TBH it seems clear to me that he is a closeted libertarian who can't safely express his views in full without alienating huge segments of his mostly-red autoworker base or his mostly-blue techworker base.
It's a difficult tightrope to walk in the current ongoing partisan culture brawl.
I'd add that it's not only the extreme polarisation, but also a muddying of terms that have different meanings or uses between the US and Europe (at least my part of Europe).
I sometimes hear people conflating "the left" and "liberals" when... the left is here opposed to liberalism. Because liberalism means economic liberalism. And the local economic liberals are socially conservative. While the left is economically illiberal, and socially progressive. And our centrists are probably the closest thing we have to the US left, but since they are mostly allied with the right opposing them makes no sense.
The real problem is that in the US, we measure everything with a single yardstick that goes from "Left" to "Right".
But the actual, real reality is that 80%+ of people can't be measured in such a one-dimensional way. People have more nuance than that, and to get even a remotely accurate sense of where someone is politically requires a multipolar yardstick.
However, it's important to note that there has been a genuine and very significant polarization of actual American politics over the past ~30-40 years—the seeds were planted with the Reagan presidency, and then Newt Gingrich in the early '90s started pushing the idea that political wins were more important than governing.
It's also important to note that this has been driven primarily by the rapid rush of the Republican Party to the right, from a conservative party with some fairly serious problems with racism, but a willingness to compromise and an understanding of governance, to a radical reactionary party refusing to censure or otherwise rein in the parts of it that are, in some cases, openly and explicitly embracing (christo-)fascism and Nazism, and advocating for outright violence against marginalized people.
This would be a laudable direction to take the company towards ...
... if he didn't start by putting $12.5 billions of debt on the balance sheet after the buyout.
Which means that Twitter has to pay $1 billion of interest each year which it didn't have to do before that hostile takeover.
How many people would need to buy Twitter Blue to offset the interest alone? ~~125 million users which is about a third of its whole active user base~~ 10 million which is about 3% of their active user base (I can't do maths, thanks supermatt, luckily I'm good looking and can program).
>> "It seems to me that Musk is moving away from advertisements, to trying to build the first social network that doesn't rely on the user being the product, but rather paying for the product."
First? No. There have been many attempts at this. The ActivityPub fediverse is the first with any prospect of competing with the VC-funded model. Thousands of servers, all but a few funded entirely by the millions of people who use them.
It's already self-sustaining. Twitter's new era is starting out billions in debt with its advertising base gone and flailing attempts to find some way to even cover the debt service.
>It seems to me that Musk is moving away from advertisements, to trying to build the first social network that doesn't rely on the user being the product, but rather paying for the product.
Won't be first. There was app.net [1]. Gained traction at first and i had nice dialogues with good people, but died out pretty fast.
> Elon Musk, who eschews many of the shibboleths of the Left, people criticise Twitter as a proxy for his political views.
Some probably do, but a whole lot don't. Musk was heavily criticized well before people were aware of his political views, for reasons that have nothing whatsoever to do with his political views.
It is the same with streaming. I am happy to pay, but not for 100 streaming services to get the content I want (Netflix, Disney+, Paramount, HBO, BritBox, etc).
If I pay for a social network, I want quality content and API access. Twitter wouldn't be the first platform I would pay for.
Buying twitter was never about profiting - at least not the profiting from the company balance sheet. The profit can come elsewhere, by the influence gained from owning and controlling the twitter firehose and recommendation algorithms.
In a way, this is Elon buying a newspaper like rich people always did to influence politics, except that he is buying a modern version of a newspaper.
Musk bought twitter because it is and was an integral part in social media campaigns for the last few elections. Targeted ads on twitter can reach journalists and politicians, their timelines "for you" controlled by Elon's and they might not even understand that they are being nudged by the content shown in the app. Heck, just by unbanning Trump and allowing MFA Russia on the app, he is moving the Overton window a bit.
The proof is in the pudding as they say. How many million people now see Elon Musks personal twitter posts, that did not see them before he bought twitter?
It's not worth $20B, that's just his ego talking. I can see it being worth $4B. It has no long term path to any kind of high growth multiple. Twitter was always an amazingly useful concept but not a big money making business idea. At best it could become like a steady ultility company.
I'm steelmanning my argument. But yes, you're right. I can't imagine a real VC firm buying Twitter today at $20+ B.
Note that Twitter has a $13 Billion loan with $1.3 Billion/year in interest payments in a rising interest rate economy while VC banks like SIVB are failing. That means to buy Twitter at $20B valuation, the VC firm would need to spend $33 Billion. ($20 B valuation + $13 Billion loan)
I honestly don't see this company having enough runway to even reach the $1.3 Billion/year interest payment, let alone the rest of it's liabilities or costs.
Overpaying by well over double is... a bad business decision. Is it not?
Even as bad as the stock market was last year, very few companies lost 50%+ of their value.
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There's a lot of other decisions that are very strange coming out of Tesla, such as the removal of RADAR and Ultrasonic Sensors. Does Elon Musk really believe he can compete against next-generation companies when he's removing sensors from his cars?
Radar is back by the way, with an increased resolution that makes it more useful in highways where overhead signs false positive as a collision risk on the old sensor.
The ultrasonic sensors IMO were basically worthless. Initial analysis of the new v4 FSD hardware indicates they are adding more cameras - including bumper cameras to cover blind spots that previously would have relied on ultrasonics.
It doesn’t seem like HW4 can be retrofit like HW3 was, so it will be very interesting how that all plays out!
Elon needs to grow Twitter by 50% before he has 'only' a 30% loss.
There is a huge difference between 55% drop that Mr Musk has experienced with Twitter, and the 30% drop you're talking about.
EDIT:
> from March to June of last year
That seems like a weird comparison? An apples-to-apples benchmark would be the Nasdaq 100 from November last year (when Musk finished buying Twitter) to March this year.
Tesla valuation is dropping and years of neglect is catching up to them. SpaceX keeps on raising money, likely because they keep on losing it. And both of them grew a lot during period of cheap money, fueled by huge amount of lies.
He only owns the company for 5 months so far. He seems set on transforming Twitter, and any company looks bad while in the middle of a transformation.
I'm not saying Elon is doing a good job, all signs point to the opposite. He probably though so too when he announced to step down from CEO (though that has yet to happen). But if he was doing a good job, it would also be really hard to tell in this phase. I don't think we are far enough into this to draw any good conclusions.
It's not really hard to tell if he's doing a good job, he's clearly not.
Losing nearly half of revenue in only a few months, adding crippling debt payments, stiffing employees on their severance, refusing to pay rent and other services, plus countless other debacles make it clear this is a dysfunctional company. Network effects and resilient architecture can keep a company humming along for some time despite incompetent management, but those resources will get depleted and they are hard to regain.
> Another data point: of the 20 newest posts on this forum, 12 are about Twitter not responding to the standard API access request process, and 4 seem to be about API bugs. This has been the pattern for a while now. It seems like Twitter is now largely ignoring all manual processes and bugs.
Non-responsiveness is pretty normal for large corporations. Try to send email to Google or Facebook. Calling their products "unsupported" and "unmaintained" may actually fit dictionary definition!
The api hurts the Twitter. My company extracted lots of value from it, which Twitter didn’t monetize at all. But they had huge infrastructure and engineering effort to support the api. They never should have built it.
Is there research that shows that a well maintained API adds value to large established companies?
Maintaining a good API for an ever changing product is VERY non-trivial. Designing easy to consume APIs and writing good documentation requires some specialized skills. Internal APIs are often very different than external ones. Some times APIs need to be duplicated which can make breaking changes of the underlying systems more complex.
I can see the value of APIs for a growing company that is trying to establish itself, but there must be a line somewhere.
I suspect a large amount of API support over the last decade has been driven by brand development and recruiting.
> I can see the value of APIs for a growing company that is trying to establish itself, but there must be a line somewhere. I suspect a large amount of API support over the last decade has been driven by brand development and recruiting.
It brought INSANE value to Twitter in it's early days.
The API allowed a client to be written for every platform around by domain experts way before the Twitter team could get to them. They got Apple to integrate it natively on iOS 5. That's right, the OS had built-in support for Twitter. You didn't need to install an app.
It's one of the things that cemented Twitter's presence in the social media's landscape.
Another giant nothing complain post. It just means that companies should not build their entire business on someone else's API and Twitter can change it and their prices at anytime. No different to other platforms that allow third party apps.
Contrary to this complaint post, the API is still up and far from 'unmaintained' or its 'immediate death' as incorrectly predicted 5 months ago with still 200M - 220M daily active users continuing to use the platform, even after all the chaos and nonsense articles.
Free APIs forever is unsustainable for a business and eventually price increases will happen. Believing otherwise is essentially wishful thinking, just like basing an entire business on someone else's API and not paying for it. There is always a cost.
You didn't read the article, because it has nothing to do with business users. The team responsible for maintaining the Twitter API is down to zero engineers. This is the product that brought in $400M ARR.
Great point! Here's my updated response, unchallenged:
The article has nothing to do with business users. The team responsible for maintaining the Twitter API is down to zero engineers. This is the product that brought in $400M ARR.
