1y ago

Advertising revenue in Twitter crashes by 50%

nuff said

426 comments

With the way he's running this, I'm a bit confused as to why he didn't just buy Truth Social directly. Wouldn't have cost him nearly as much.
- He bought the users. Elon knows that people are lazy and will not change websites.
  
  50% ad revenue says otherwise
  
  "users" - more than 50% are likely to be bots, LOL
  
  Most people I know that use Twitter did leave it because they can no longer use the platform. They used it to promote their work and get new clients, which through a series of changes is basically impossible now.
  
  Threads has like 100 million sign ups. It could replace Twitter.
- Dude could have created his own Mastodon insrance for practically nothing. Is he somehow even dumber than Trump?
  
  I think the evidence speaks for itself.
- Let's be honest Elon doesn't care about Twitter.
  He bought it with money he doesn't have. He only increased in net worth since the takeover and has successfully done what he wanted to, destroy an organization he thought was problematic and now everyone gives even more data to Facebook.
  Everyone of them won.
  
  I think part of it is his own hubris through. His head is so far up his head by now that he though he knew better. It's the same reason why Super Heavy destroyed itself on first launch. He thought he was smarter than his engineers and forced them to go without a proper launchpad.
- I'm still convinced there is money coming in from an outside influence that is paying him to destroy Twitter, and I wouldn't be surprised if the same thing is happening to Reddit as well
  
  As much Saudi money as he burned though, I'm expecting him to leave an embassy in a half dozen suitcases.
  
  The simpler explanation is he's a dumbass with a big mouth and he screwed himself over with Twitter. Now he doesn't have any lifelines left, and he's failing miserably.
  
  I think he thought the "Twitter files" were real and wanted them so he could be the saviour of democracy and the right wing.
- Simple. He didn't shit-talk Truth Social in a legally binding way and then have his bluff called by people with enough financial resources to survive the lengthy court battle.
  He probably experiences less personal financial loss from running Twitter into bankruptcy now that he has been forced to buy it. He even gets to use it as his personal ego-stroking machine in the meantime.
  But he may have experienced significant personal loss had he decided to continue fucking around with the SEC (or was it one of the other agencies?), whom he had previously pissed off.
  If you view his words and actions through the lens of what will make him the most money or lose him the least, his actions make sense. Add a significant dash of arrogant impulsive invincibility too. He's comfortable telling us about Twitter's financial problems because starving it gets rid of it and let's him focus on his other vanity projects.
  It's not like they can send him to jail for being a bad manager. It's not like he's going to pay his bills. It's not like he even used all of his own money to buy Twitter in the first place. What does it matter to him?
- The biggest obstacle to spreading far-right propaganda has always been finding a platform.
  Before the internet, when neonazis tried to shove racist leaflets into peoples pockets at punk gigs, they'd be immediately run out of the venue, despite "angry, dissaffected, young people" being exactly the kind of vulnerability they were looking for.
  When the internet did come along, initially things weren't much better. Sure, there were sites like Stormfront, but nobody went there. So instead they'd "raid" other forums to spread their shitty views, getting instantly banned because they hadn't figured out how to be a Nazi with plausible deniability yet.
  When they finally nailed that, it was a big moment for them.
  Historically, mainstream media also never gave a fuck what the opinions of Nazis were. But the moment they rebranded to "alt-right", the psycopathic, for-profit, neoliberal media companies saw a way to make some quick cash without having to openly admit they were functioning as a mouthpiece for people with swastika tattoos.
  From there, the "mask on, hide your powerlevel" stategy was codified. 4chan and far-right Discord servers openly stategized about how to do it best, such as presenting their dogshit opinions as popular, moderate beliefs and blaming progressives for their asshole personalities.
  By the time Charlottesville's swastika-waving parade and domestic-terrorism-finale happened, it was too late. Key figures in the far-right funnel had settled into social media like bedbugs at a two-star hotel.
  Whenever a platform tried to get rid of them, they'd slip away through cracks in the walls. They would get banned and create new accounts that were slightly toned down, searching for that sweet spot of "as far-right as we can get away with". They'd move to another major platform (or somewhere else on the same platform), because there was no coordinated effort to remove them for good.
  But despite the slow, uncordinated response from social media sites, it was starting to work, especially on Twitter. By the time you'd hidden how far-right you were, you could no longer spread your message. Nobody was fooled by the dog whistles, fake engagement and flowery misrepresentations of "freedom of speech" any more.
  Intially, they tried their own mask-off Twitter with Truth Social (who conspiciously aren't being sued by Musk for being a Twitter clone). But the numbers were dogshit. It had a fraction of the traffic and everybody there was already far-right. You could keep them frothy, but you couldn't breed more of them.
  So Musk bought Twitter. Ideally, he wanted to just hand one of the big three socials back to right-wing reactionaries ane extremists but he also has no problem just killing the platform.
  The only thing that mattered was that the deplatforming stopped, before people realised that it works and makes sites 1000x better.
- The d*ck contest. It's all about who has the biggest.
- He wanted to prove he doesn't care about money and is fully willing to throw away $44 billion dollars on a shitpost

Remember the 50% number is just what he was comfortable with publishing to the public
We have no reason to believe his public statistics
- 100% of the ads I see on Twitter today are dropshipping scams, while in the pre-musk era they were highly targeted to my job and interests to the point that if there wasn't the "ad" tag I couldn't distinguish that.
  They can't cost the same for the advertiser, a generic dropshipping scam that targets everyone must be cheap
- Indeed. Elon is a pathalogical liar.
- Why would he tweet about his losses in the first place? I applaud his openness (/s) but I doubt any investors or advertisers will come running to a dying social networking.
  
  He thinks it gives him an excuse to escalate his erratic decision-making.
  
  I think it's either better than 50, or he expects it to be better shortly so when he says it's 40, he can celebrate how good he did for the +10.
  
  If your losses are at 80% and you tell everyone they’re at 50% you can try to spin the story in your favor.
- The ~ has an error of +/- 50 percentage points.

Wait, the white supremacists and Nazis that he caters to aren’t making up the ad revenue? Well I’ll be!

Maybe.... I don't know, just throwing ideas out there.... you shouldn't have Musked all over Twitter nor fired its core developers? Again, just thinking out loud....
- Or saddled the business with 10 billion in debt? Shit is like an ouroboros...
- Not even just that... Alienates all potential leftwing/brand friendly advertiser's through changes and being the spokesperson for the platform.
  "We're down 50% how could this have happened?????" - Elon Musk
  Dude needs to stfu, make an alt account. He has chosen to be the spokesperson for the platform. Spouting off conspiracies and controversial takes. You can't be surprised nobody wants to associate with him.
  He is a liability and a brand risk. Sure he can have his opinions but here is the problem...
  He has chosen to be extremely public and force those opinions onto the average consumer feed due to his narcissistic tendencies and it is biting him in the ass.
  No sympathy. He wanted free speech, (albeit it isn't because he is okay as long as it doesn't criticise him or his affiliates.) now he has his free speech platform but in the same way advertisers can chose not to engage with it.
  
  make an alt account
  But then nobody would know it's him and the tweets would get no attention
- Genius at work coming through!
  
  Let that sink in!

Your Google search result redirects to Twitter
you click and open the link
Twitter asks you to login to see the tweet.
You close that tab and move on to next search result.
Best way to avoid traffic to your site, then complain about revenue loss from advertisements.
- medium started doing the same shit, sometimes it has interesting articles I'd like to read, but then they started putting in behind registration so I just no longer open medium links.
  
  Hell, medium should be paying me to read them
  
  If it's something interesting I would really like to read, I put it through https://archive.ph first.
- changes URL to nitter.net
  
  Didn't work when they blocked non-registered visitors.
- Step 3: Profit!
- +++

Please don't turn this community into another Musk news ticker.
- I agree. I don't really consider social media "technology" anymore. I mean yeah it uses technology but so does everything else. I don't think technology is the right community for this kind of post. There should be an enshittification community where we can see all the Twitter, reddit, and meta stuff.
  In fact a lot of "technology" companies are just regular companies with an app. Netflix is a media company, Uber is a taxi company that somehow skirted regulators, and Airbnb is a hotel company that also skirted regulators.
  
  In tech, "disruption" is another word for "skirting regulation before the law catches up".
  
  To be fair, the social media platform are generally very advanced in terms of technology. Many of the most breaking grounds software technologies at least come from them.
- I'm happy to learn about significant updates to the health of the platform but not as literal Musk tweets pls.
- Agree, I don't really care about that platform
  
  I also don't care but I'm really enjoying the schadenfreude
- With RIF is just straight blocked posts containing Musk, Rowling etc, plenty of specific subreddits and managed to make my /all experience a great one. I'm hoping I can do that down the line with Lemmy too!
  
  Good idea. I'll put that on the roadmap for my Lemmy app.

Weird, users can't access the site, so ad revenue goes down?? Nobody can blame Elon, that's literally impossible to predict. Maybe if he bans users from tweeting more than once a day it will get better?
- Maybe it’s the advertisers. They’re racist and hate Musk because he’s African. That must be it. Couldn’t possibly be anything else.

I'm not waiting to see Twitter fail. I'm just hoping that the federated alternatives for Twitter and Reddit will get more mainstream. And I must say that I'm happy with the way things are evolving at Mastodon and Lemmy.
- That’s actually a better outcome, quarantine the crazies in twitter and/or reddit while the mainstream happens in the fediverse.
  
  The mainstream ARE the crazies now, though. The outliers, and only some of the outliers, are sensible, smart people.
- I don't see Twitter failing. Perhaps this is just going according to plan too. I think the more likely case is that it becomes something like a social network version of Fox.
  
  You just described Truth social
  
  So its failing.
- Im pretty bummed Blue Sky chose to write their own protocol. Many of my friends who are not techie chose to go there rather than learn the fediverse.

Hmm maybe putting in rate limits, thus greatly reducing the amount of time people spend on the app, isn't the best strategy for a platform whose main source of revenue comes from advertising?
- I think there is like a 1% chance rate limits were an actual thing. It really feels like someone fucked something up, caused the issue and the "rate limits" were how Elon decided to try and play it. Then "increasing" the limits multiple times to completely illogical values was the system slowly coming back up. Elon increasing that limit makes him look like he is listening to the users and thus the good guy.
  I have not seen anyone complain about rate limits since the day it happened. Other than jokes has anyone seen or heard of the issue?
  I would say a company suddenly introducing a major policy change like view limits with no warning is beyond stupid but then again it is Elon who seems to believe he is God's gift to tech.
  
  Yup it’s been real. https://www.piquenewsmagazine.com/must-reads/bc-government-hit-tweet-limit-amid-wildfire-evacuations-7268169
  The rate limits are because serving such a service at scale without the user noticing requires continuous innovation to get through scale bottlenecks; but with the engineering team greatly reduced, a lot of that work isn’t happening anymore. Typically, you’d get through those bottlenecks by coming up with some heuristics that make it seem like the service is doing a ton, when really it only needs to do little (like by sharding data, or by pre-caching a bunch of stuff). Without anybody to work on those heuristics to fake things, you gotta restrict with real restrictions.
  Source: that’s what I do for a living. I’ve been working on some of the highest-scale services out there for over a decade.
  
  Also you still can't browse Twitter without logging in, that started a couple of weeks ago, around the same time the news about the rate limits came.
- Sure, but how else is Elmo going to keep Amazon and Google from suing him for nonpayment? Geez man, use your noodle.

Elon complaining about this just reminds me that he can afford to lose ~50 billion dollars and still be one of the wealthiest people ever to have lived.
- He's below his height of wealth, but he's still #1 and has 250 billion

I remember a fellow saying Elon is a very business savvy person, because of his 2 other successful companies, Tesla and SpaceX. I guess ruining communications with potential advertisers on a platform that depends entirely on advertisers wasn't a very intelligent move.
- If I recall correctly, Tesla was actually cash-negavite for like half a decade after Musk bought it, surviving off investors and SpaceX's success, I remember it was very big news when it finaly went cash-positive and subs like WSB were all over r/all
  
  SpaceX became profitable not all at once as well.
  I think we should all remember that company's success is also a function of investors' money AND public trust. SpaceX for some people was a symbol of all things modern. Tesla as well to some extent.
  With such amount of trust no wonder these finally became profitable.
  Ah, also companies engineering vehicles and spacecraft are rather different from a company the whole purpose of which is matching people (readers to posters, advertisers to customers, so on).
  
  Almost all companies are "cash negative" in their first years.
- The same people would say the same thing about Trump and everything he's ever touched has gone to shit. I think they're legitimately delusional.. all of them.
  
  I think they're just brainwashed by our capitalist system which says that if a person is wealthy it's because they worked for it and we're successful. We are indoctrinated from very young ages to believe that capitalism is a strict meritocracy where only the best, most intelligent, most deserving people become wealthy.
  In reality most wealthy people inherited some or most of their wealth, and used that inherited wealth to create more wealth- because it turns out that once you are wealthy it's really easy to get more wealthy. They aren't wealthy because they are skillful or intelligent or good at business. Most of them are good at precisely one thing: giving some of their money to a professional who knows how to grow it so that they will never run out.
  Then they throw money at whatever catches their eye, and when you have billions to throw around you can cast a very wide net that will almost certainly catch something.

TIL how loooong it takes for a largeish business to die. It's hard to grasp scale I guess. I thought it would be over in months.
I find it hard to believe Facebook is so terribly great. Keep in mind these are not businesses like a grocery store; they're publicly traded and the metric is growth, not profit. (Edit: Twitter is private now no idea how that change is accomplished.)
Truly, I'm hoping they all die.
- The stocks had to be bought back first, then basically they could be turned in to the DTCC and the company gets delisted. That's how Twitter did it.
  The other way is to naked short so much you've got enough shares to control the board and tank the company from inside then you don't have to do a buyback because there's no company. This will be reddit's future if they even get to ipo at this point.
  
  The more realistic death is a buyout, merger and dismantling. That's how the vast majority of publicly traded companies die. Bought my a larger organisation looking for a deal on your IP, userbase or reputation who then sells off all physical assets, offshores all talent and outsources all capabilities. They retain the brand equity which then gets rinsed through a range of products that are smaller and smaller before quietly being shelved. See GEs dismantling of RCA, the death of GE itself, and every company EA has ever bought.
- and the metric is growth
  No, not really. The metric is growth only for those who aren't profitable. They use growth as a promise of future profits.
  Meta/Facebook is turning in a huge profit each ear. Nobody cares about the user count that much anymore unless it sharply falls.
  Twitter is different. Twitter didn't really make a profit yet. They aren't profitable.
  
  Meta is pumping ungodly amounts of money into a moon shot (VR) because it is in stagnation phase and their market is saturated - so they do care about growth quite a bit.
  
  No, even profitable Fortune 500 companies are focused on growth.
- Musk crumpled the cashflow pretty quickly in weeks, but he also has a lot of wealth, he had to chip in billions of his own dollars to save the company from his mistakes.

Go Fasc, lose cash!
Fuck you, Musk. Piece of shit.
- OK ill have to steal this one
- Go fac die back.Mock woke go broke. Insist on heros retain zeros.
  
  You're really good at this.
  
  *go woke, go broke. ftfy

Of course! It's because of Threads! Don't you guys get it? They stole their secrets!! It has absolutely nothing to do with how things are being run on twitter or because Elon Musk is a genius!!!
…
Fuck Musk and fuck twitter and all that goes with it.

And no interest in thinking about why they're down ~50% in advertising revenue.
- I still think the "saudi's paid elon to nuke it" was a solid conspiracy theory.
  
  When you think about it, there were a lot of populist movements growing through Twitter. It probably pissed a lot of wealthy, powerful people off.
  Then Musk and Zuckerberg were called to private meetings with the president, weren't they? And Twitter was taken over and shut down. Then Threads, owned by Facebook who is known to help out law enforcement quite happily as well as track everything, takes off as an alternative.
- Didn't you know? Acknowledging any cause would be censorship /s

So, we still 50% to go. I believe in you, Elon /s

Aww. That's super duper sad and I am sad for him.
Anyways.

The heavy debt load was caused by his purchase... He paid $26 bn, a couple other investors (including a Saudi prince) together paid $5 bn, the remaining $13 bn is a loan Twitter took out to buy itself on Musk's behalf.
The purchase was always a financial death sentence. Either Twitter steps into line and becomes the propaganda tool he and his old friend Peter Thiel want, then it can have some extra investment, or Twitter dies.
- I still don't get how it's legal for Twitter to take out a loan on itself on Musk's behalf.
  
  It's a common trick the wealthy have. The idea is, if the business was under the control of its new owners, they could direct the business to get the loan. It's what happened to Toys R Us and many other businesses.
  Somewhat similarly, the UK have a way of turning a business into an "Employee Owned business". Basically, if the business has enough cash, it can buy itself from its owners. The real shady part, though, is that the owners don't pay any capital gains tax on the sale whatsoever. They get all their money out of the business, tax free. But yay, employee owned businesses (that are still run the same as before).
  And if you try to read the financial regulations to understand it all, you'll very quickly lose the will to live. Reading law is one thing, financial regulations are a completely different ball game.
  
  This practice destroyed several century old retail chains in my country. Got sold to some American investment fund,, via a loan placed on those company's account. Then immediately sold the real estate in prime locations these chains held, so the companies became tenants in buildings they previously owned (and had paid off 80 years ago). Waif a few years, then they die even with decent revenue.
  
  It's not really that different from buying a house or car. The money Musk put forward is the down payment, the loan is the mortgage, the company assets are the collateral. Where it's sketchy is that a house or vehicle is generally worth repossessing and selling if you default, but by the time Musk is done with Twitter, it'll be worthless.
  Think of him like a crackhead who strips the plumbing and wiring from the house he has a mortgage on, before skipping town
- Companies taking loans out to have someone buy them doesn't make sense. Shouldn't that cost just be truncated out of the purchase?
  
  But if they didn't do that then the purchase wouldn't happen, and the wealthy wouldn't be able to consolidate more wealth so easily!
  There's also probably tax benefits if the business is paying some of the cost, rather than the buyer.
- The Saudi prince was already invested in Twitter, and opted to roll over his shareholding when Musk bought out everyone else. Wonder if he's happy or sad about that decision now.

Translation: "I'm terrible at business, and I'm making it everyone else's problem"
- Not losing money, just having "negative cash flow".
  
  I had to search the euphemism to see if I was just out of the loop on the economics terminology, and if those legit were different concepts.
  On the downside, they're not. On the upside, Musk is setting a great example for how to stop getting accused of hoarding wealth

Heavy debt load? Where could that have come from.? A leveraged buyout at an overvalued price or something?
- No, a lot of this debt is debt that Twitter already had.
  Edit: Factual corrections.
  
  No, it isn't.
  
  Moderates Tesla Investors and username is Norwegian for "loves Tesla".
  Guys, this one is definitely objective and unbiased!
  
  probably both. twitter was never profitable afaik, the whole idea was to have either some rich moron or (more likely) a megacorp buy it and everyone who contributed would get a fat final paycheck. but the way musk handled things definitely didn't help either.

Gasp. Who would have thought actively courting Nazis would make risk averse corporations stop using your ads! Poor Elon! Also doesn't help that the site was basic private for a while. I know I never bothered to log in while it was log in only.
- Who would have thought actively courting Nazis would make risk averse corporations stop using your ads!
  Nobody could have foreseen this! Nobody! Unless by some miracle they happened to look up who's advertising on far-right platforms like Gab or Pravda Social.
  
  Pravda Social? I thought that was Twitter.
- But I thought free speech meant no consequences?! /s

Nobody is talking about it, but does that advertising exec that Musk hired for CEO take a massive hit to her career for any of this?
It seems surreal to have a ghost CEO who isn't responsible for anything such a large company does. But that's exactly what's happening here.
- Maybe, but there's a market out there for CEOs who are willing to take the blame for some unpopular decisions and then walk away. There's also something to be said that "-50%" might actually be an improvement over where it was before she was hired, and the bad decisions weren't hers.
  
  But that's the thing. She isn't taking the L on this. That's my point. She seems to just be chillin', doing fuck all. Everyone knows it's Musk running it.
  This isn't a case where he needed to bring in a fall guy CEO for a difficult business choice. This is a case where he brought in a new CEO to literally save the corporation, and she's doing nothing and nobody is blaming her. It's surreal.
  
  the "pain sponge" storyline from Succession
  
  I'm thinking Stephen Elop.
  BTW, fuck him and MS so bad for ruining a tech company I could really make no complaint about.
  Especially if you think that Nokia didn't only make good phones, they also were the major force behind Qt toolkit. And that was in Qt3 times, when Qt was unarguably cool.

Has he tried not fucking up the platform yet?
- He probably only wants to try that after exhausting all ways of fucking it up. You'd think that will be soon, but he's pretty creative in this regard.

Music to my ears

On the other hand, I think the people at Tesla/SpaceX are probably very happy that Elon has his hands full with Twitter right now.

why is this man like this
- Grimes left.
  
  tbf, grimes is not better
  would expect both of them to be less like this if that were the case
- Rich people are so disconnected from reality. I mean, when I tell you disconnected people really don't understand. The best way to put it is ths: we have a hard time intuitively understanding the vast distances in the universe. Musk is like that. He is a person with such level of disconnect. He truly lives in his own reality, most likely because a man like him does not understand the concept of poverty or struggling to make ends meet. The narcissism displayed in that interview in which he says that "if speaking his mind means losing money then so be it" should tell you how this man truly lives in an alternative reality. I am so glad most of us realized the kind of scum he is.
  
  fr fr
  but like, why did it take him tanking Twitter for many to realize that he's just a manbaby with a diamond-encrusted platinum pacifier
  like it's really weird that it wasn't clear when he called that one guy who saved those kids in that cave a pedophile because the guy told Musk that his invention wouldn't be useful for the rescue effort; like people didn't see how shitty he was after he said that
- A lifetime of never being told "no" and facing zero consequences for any of his actions.

Good. Fuck em

lol good.
Twitter has/is/was always a cesspit.
- Disagree, when Twitter first came about it was actually possible to connect with people around specific topics, and was originally mostly random celebrities, news/journalists, and tech nerds. It was a very different vibe in my experience.

Let’s see: Alienate the users. Fire everyone who knows how to keep the place running. Fill the site with bots and white supremacists.
FA complete. FO now underway.

Just shut it down already.

50% is just what he's admitting to. Not sure how easily that number can be verified, but if someone told me that the actual numbers were much, much worse... I wouldn't bet against them.
- My brother is in the space program in the army & has worked with SpaceX on several projects. He says Elon is the master at smudging numbers to make things appear they are better than they are or not as bad as the true numbers would suggest so I guarantee the same applies here. I’m sure the actual figures are much, much worse.

Can't wait when he lays off another 50% of whatever the company remains, his fanbase will go nuts for it and say he's a business genius.

Guys! Guys! Don't you get it? He's "Winning"! /s

Boycott twitler

Good. Twitter is a cess pit.
- I was looking at Twitter earlier, and my feed was full of antivaxxers, election deniers, some anti-abortion activist that claims that Planned Parenthood is involved in sex trafficking, and even 9/11 deniers.
  Twitter is a dead man walking

Colour me surprised that Mr Musk and lowering moderating standards would lower advertising revenue.
- I am mostly surprised that he actually admits worse numbers

~~due to ~50% drop in advertising…~~ because I'm not very good at this. ftfyE.
- one leads to the other

Lol. "Negative cash flow."
You're broke. You're f*cking BROKE.
- But he's not. He'll be fine. He'll always be fine.
  It's hard to comprehend just how vastly, mind-bogglingly rich the ultra rich are, so consider: according to Wikipedia, Musk's net worth in July 2023 was about $239 billion. That means that he could lose 99% of everything he owns, and then lose 99% of what was left, and be left with over $20 million, more money than most of us will see in a lifetime.
  He's not going to be applying for EBT any time soon. Hell, he's not going to be selling off the spare Lamborghini any time soon.
  
  Yeah he personally isn’t broke and no matter how much debt Twitter racks up, it can’t put him in the red. That’s just how corporations work.
  Still, he borrowed that $44bil and will have to face the people who lent it to him. Apparent the service on that debt is already equal to Twitter’s total operating expenses. That’s real money.
  WhY he’s lost by this is prestige. He lost the court case and demonstrably got taken to the cleaners. He hasn’t been able to turn the business around and in fact has made it worse. And his creditors are left holding the bag. That’s some real humiliation for someone like him.
  
  Oh, just for contrast: imagine someone who graduates from med school, immediately gets a job as a neurosurgeon making $200,000/year — No, let's say she really works hard, and is very good at her job, and spends wisely, and actually manages to save $200,000/year. Let's say she manages to keep this up every year for 50 years. How much does she have when she retires? $20 million, less than if Elon Musk lost 99% of everything, and then lost 99% again.
- Negative cash flow means they are spending more than they are earning.
  It doesn't mean they don't have money already.

I wouldn't be surprised if it's even worse than he's describing, but at the same time, it's not like we didn't expect it. The platform has seen a colossal influx of bigots, and all kinds of completely unhinged people, because Elon has clearly shown that he's okay with them posting what they want
- I just don't get what's so problematic with casual bigots when one can encounter Turkish and Azeri Nazis (and bots) in numbers and nobody is really trying to fight them, on any platform.
  But then nobody's trying to fight them IRL.
  In terms of these people Twitter was sort of better than Reddit, or so my sister says (she hasn't used Reddit, I haven't used Twitter).
  
  What you've described is a problem anywhere, not just Twitter. It doesn't matter where it is. It's just wrong either way

Welp that happens when all your changes have been questionable at best Musk...

Idgaf Elon.

Bye Twitter, you will not be missed.

The way he talks is so fucking stupid. He's trying so hard to be a "tech bro". You'd think money would give someone some amount of self confidence, but clearly not.

Oh it’s from Elon’s mouth. Don’t believe it, he’s trying to short twitter still
- Pretty sure he can't do that since it's not publicly traded anymore

It's impressive how quickly and severely he fucked up what was once a successful tech giant!
- I disagree. Twitter was already going under even before he took over. In fact, it was doomed from the beginning as one of the uber era "grow valuation, think about revenue later", hoping to exit someday by selling it to some rich megalomaniac, and actually, they're the ones who succeeded.
  
  and now he's doing the same grift with bluesky
  
  well, it was actually about ready to start breaking even, and even paying off some debt. there was a path to profitability with twitter, but it was tenuous at best.
  king of the idiots was forced to by it, saddling it with so much dept that that profitability dream was over the moment he became involved.
  
  I think twitter is artificially 'failing' because of meddling by influential special interests. It is being shunned by some advertisers because he won't bend the knee to the ESG tyrant bankers.
- Other then a website...what technology does twitter actually do? I do not consider websites to be tech giants.

Luxury? What luxury, twitter is just a feed of memes, short remarks and porn What feature could they possibly have held back???

The other thing, Threads, just came out. I guess they offered promos.
- I don't think Threads has ads yet.
  
  *ThreADs
  
  No, they're going to start with some kind of sponsored post arrangement similar to Instagram's, iirc, and put in ads when they get a bit bigger.

Advertisers don’t want to advertise on Twitter anymore even after Elon fired all the talent and essentially drove the platform into the ground? Noooooo…

Only 50 more percent left to go!

Was it ever positive?
- Nope
- Yes and no. It wasn't positive because they didn't want to be.
  It had about 2.7 billions in cash reserves at the time it got bought, for example.

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