• BURN@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Ad revenue is down (at least) 50% and they just keep making decisions that kick people off their platform.

    I’m pretty sure Twitter advertising and Reddit advertising are in a race to the bottom to see who’s going to have to pay companies to put ads on their site first.

    It’s insane to watch this happen. I remember watching the rise of Twitter as a kid and it becoming ubiquitous with social media, only to see it crash down this quickly.

    I’m speculating, but I’d guess a lot of functionality is being limited because they don’t have dev staff to maintain it, as well as trying to cut server costs as much as possible. I’d honestly be surprised if musk was making these decisions because he thinks it’s good for the health of the platform. There has to be some ulterior motive for it.

    • deong@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      It is unfathomable to me how Reddit isn’t profitable.

      Facebook makes a mint by telling advertisers, “trust us, we’ll get your ads in front of people who might buy your product based on a lot of inference around their fairly generic profile data plus some tracking cookies”. One guy should be able to sell a billion dollars worth of ads on Reddit. Just put up a form that says, “which subreddit do you want to advertise in?” and “what’s your credit card number?”. That’s it. They have like 10,000 completely segmented markets just sitting there full of hundreds of millions of people who have self-selected to be members of those communities.

      We spend hundreds of billions of dollars collectively trying to figure out which google search terms might find us a few more solid leads. Reddit has an amazing list of them for every company in the entire world. How in the everloving fuck have they managed to blindly bumble around for two decades without ever falling into the giant pile of money in front of them?

      • Lydia_K@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Yes, yes fucking exactly, how is it not an automatic gold mine!? This vexes me as well.

      • ikidd@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        They have plenty of devs, but they’re all the worst in their field. How else could they take a fully developed app and turn it into the dumpster fire itbos today?

        • deejay4am@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          It’s usually not the devs who make the decisions on what to implement; that only happens in the early days of a site when the owners are also the devs.

          C-levels looking to make money are pulling the strings. The devs at any large site just have a list of user stories to burndown.

          • outdated_belated@lemmy.sdf.org
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            1 year ago

            Right. Never underestimate the absolute stupidity of hierarchies. (Corp bureaucracy in this case).  Stuff gets done just to make people look good based on who can tell the most convincing lie, not based, primarily at least, even on what would be good for the company as a whole.

             Devs, in most cases, are at the very bottom of this all, and therefore pretty much less responsible and have the least autonomy over what they do

      • III@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Are you saying you can’t find top-tier developers who are willing to work countless hours for no pay?.. what now?

    • deejay4am@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      It’s funny how the biggest fuckups are happening to the platforms that critiqued the billionaire class the loudest.

      Hmmm

  • soulifix@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    We’re living in very interesting times indeed.

    So we have one billionaire over in Meta, who’s been making it very known how predatory in practice he is with getting your data and they fundamentally shatter the functionality of all of their platforms.

    Then, we have this billionaire here who under a year, has made a total catastrophe of what was once a thriving platform once worth billions of it’s own until he came and acquired it.

    And then we have this not-a-billionaire who, is inspired by the self-destruction of the other platforms that they too, must follow suit, in hopes of aspiring success.

    I wonder what book they’re all reading from in the ways of business, that says if you suck harder, they’ll mean a net positive.

  • Snapz@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I can’t think of another product I know more about that I don’t use. Just die already, elon is killing you in public to remove the threat of Twitter as an organizing tool for social uprisings and labor as a favor/brownie points/roundabout contracting for other billionaire “buddies”.

    Just go.

    • Xerø@infosec.pub
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      1 year ago

      If was always about limiting the ability to organize using Twitter and Reddit. They want things to go differently in 2024, not because of any conservative political ideology even though most of them skew that way. But because they make more money when the monsters are in charge.

  • relative_iterator@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    I don’t see the logic in making this change. Is someone supposed to want to join blue just so they can DM people that haven’t changed the default setting?

  • Licherally@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    I think it’s important to remember that musk has never actually done anything to innovate the companies he’s been a part of. He didn’t create PayPal, he just bought his way in and made a series of dumb suggestions. He didn’t create Tesla, he bought Tesla right after they had fine tuned their models, and then he made a series of changes that likely resulted in a worse product.

    Elon Musk is not a good businessman, he’s just rich and has a habit of purchasing profitable companies. Anyone could do this with his wealth. I’m not even really convinced that he’s offered many technical ideas or designs for any of his companies, as it seems that would be the first thing he would mention every single time someone brought up one of his companies.

    • Dr. Dabbles@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      But open AI wouldn’t even exist without him! After all, he contributed less than 10% of their raise and he suggested the name. You can’t have a company called Open AI if nobody names it Open AI.

      He’s a dumbass, and his worshipers deserve him.

      • fidodo@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        The moment I fully knew he was a fraud was when I heard him talk about ai.

        • Blackmist@feddit.uk
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          1 year ago

          I think it was the submarine thing where the mask slipped for all to see.

          Musk: “I’m making a magic submarine to rescue those poor boys. Oh it doesn’t work, hang on a bit.”

          Diver: “It’s alright, I rescued them the old fashioned way!”

          Musk: “… Pedo.”

          Nothing like a big strop in front of everyone to show us all the thin skinned narcissist he was all along.

  • eek2121@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Damn, Mr. Musk could have made more money betting on stocks mentioned in r/wallstreetbets, and they ALWAYS lose money. Dude seriously needs to have twitter do the opposite of what he thinks.

    I have never seen a billionaire try to go from billions to zero so hard in my life. It is like he is showing the U.S. government why billionaires shouldn’t exist.

    Is there a fund that lets me do long term shorts on rich people?

      • eek2121@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I made a lot of money from GME. I bought a bunch of shares early on for $10-$50 and sold the morning when Robinhood yanked the buy button. However, most WSB plays are money losers.

  • daniskarma@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    The didn’t buy Twitter for a profit.

    He bought Twitter to destroy it because big free horizontal communication platforms are bad for billionaires.

    He can’t just close it, so he just destroy it little by little until it is no more.

    The same way conservative groups bought Tumblr because it was too sexual liberating for their conservative views.

    • notatoad@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      he offered to buy twitter for a joke, and he actually did buy twitter because a court forced him to. not because this was some grand plan to accomplish anything - he literally spent months in court arguing that he shouldn’t have to buy twitter, and he lost. that’s the only reason he owns twitter now.

      • penguin@lemmy.fmhy.ml
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        1 year ago

        Yeah, he owns it because he’s a dumbass and he’s running it into the ground like a dumbass

      • JoYo 🇺🇸@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        the court didn’t force him, he could have paid a penalty that was much lower than his current losses.

      • Dr. Dabbles@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        “mistake” in this case actually means by shooting his mouth off and thinking he was smarter than everyone else in the room. He fucked around, then immediately began finding out.

        • ChrisLicht@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          But, $420.69, bruh!

          It’s so frustrating to be in the Valley, and be subjected to one set of rules to tightly follow, while a group of special sociopaths (e.g., Musk, SBF, Holmes, Neumann) are free to do whatever they like.

          • LostSchema@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Just playing devil’s advocate. But aren’t two of your examples either on their way or in jail right now?

            • ChrisLicht@lemm.ee
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              1 year ago

              I should have been more clear: The Valley allows and even encourages certain sociopaths to flout rules and conventions around ethics and reporting, while the rest of us are held tightly to those rules and conventions. For example, Sequoia seemingly didn’t even perform de minimis due diligence when leading a nine-figure round in FTX.

      • JoYo 🇺🇸@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        This is also the case, however he had the option to drop out with much lower losses.

    • Isthisreddit@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      You give Musk too much credit. The fucking guy is a big baby with impulse issues - who happens to have billions of dollars at his disposal. He is running Twitter exactly as I would think a dipshit narcissistic tantrum baby would run it, although dismantling Twitter does coincidentally benefit the top .1% for now

    • TWeaK@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      Exactly. His old friend Peter Thiel couldn’t make a rival platform take off, so Musk bought Twitter and saddled it with an untenable $13bn of debt.

    • Heresy_generator@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      He bought Twitter because he (along with the Saudi royal family, the monarchy ruling Qatar, and the larger worldwide cabal of authoritarians) thought he could use it to control public discourse in the same way oligarchs bought up newspapers, radio stations, and TV stations in the past. He’s killing it because he never understood what most people liked about Twitter, he only understood what he liked about Twitter (getting a lot of attention and being able to be shitty to people without having to actually socialize).

  • MeanEYE@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    To be honest, this is the only reason why I still have Twitter. I use it to contact various companies and ask for tech support. If I can’t do that now, then there’s no point to keep the account alive. Self-proclaimed genius is kind of an idiot. Just recently he complained about 50% drop rate in ad revenue, after killing ability to view tweets without account.

    • IAmMohit@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      It is not meant for companies and companies who regularly talk to customers on twitter will definitely turn this feature off. So you will likely still be able to talk with any company that wants to talk with its customers on twitter.

      It is meant for regular folks who get lot of unsolicited spam in their inboxes. It puts an immediate stop to those. So in that sense, it’s a tricky but good move.

      • MeanEYE@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I went and checked and you are right. All those companies that matter to me don’t have the blue thing.

        • IAmMohit@lemmy.ml
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          1 year ago

          They don’t need a blue thing just to talk. They can just turn the feature off and they will be available to receive messages again from their customers. It’s just as simple as it was earlier to keep your messages open or closed to general public.

      • cley_faye@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I sure hope they check regularly; the setting seems to reset every other days to “only blue people”.

  • noodle@feddit.uk
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    1 year ago

    But you can change is back. Here’s how

    Why? Why waste the mental resources fighting to make a platform work for you? Just let Twitter die

  • max@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    The longer this shitshow goes on, the dumber Elon looks. Who could idolize him at this point?

    • jonne@infosec.pub
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      1 year ago

      Watch him ban every mention of Signal or Telegram as well when people try to get around the DM issue.

    • MrFlamey@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      It’s much harder to fuck up so quickly, since a Tesla is not a live service, so there’s not a lot that will change about the already sold cars.

      I guess if Musk decides to save money by firing engineers and reducing QA on the car software, and insists on pushing really buggy software then it could get gnarly I guess, but I don’t think he’s that stupid, and I don’t think all these Twitter moves are entirely about trying to make a profit; It’s so bad I think there is a level of malevolence involved.

      • chumbaz@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        Almost the entire vehicle interface is software and screens. If he’s doing it at Twitter he could just as easily start doing weird paywall stuff with Tesla.

      • darkkite@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        that just leaves room for the second biggest communication platform to become the biggest platform.

        and tbh the newest generation uses tiktok more to stay informed

        • Buddahriffic@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Which also has momentum to get it shut down. The fact that I agree with shutting it down makes me wonder if it’s actually the smart idea or if I’ve just bought the propaganda behind that drive.

          • darkkite@lemmy.ml
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            1 year ago

            Tiktok is already bigger than Snapchat, Twitter and reddit

            and yes. many politicians and meta see tiktok as a threat

              • darkkite@lemmy.ml
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                1 year ago

                i don’t know what the age distribution is but you certainly have a large population of current and future voters.

                it’s certainly more left, but with every large platform it’s really a reflection of society at large.

    • assassin_aragorn@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I don’t think so, solely because his ego wouldn’t allow it. Tanking Twitter is making him a laughingstock. There’s no way he would’ve done that intentionally.