I’m not a fan of Musk but Musk isn’t trying to make Twitter better…
He’s trying to make Twitter able to pay its own bills. Twitter has never made money (except once) in its 17 years of existence.
Twitter as it was should not exist. It’s like a bakery that sells loaves for bread for 20c at a loss. It’s going to eventually implode unless something changes.
> He’s trying to make Twitter able to pay its own bills.
He could've bought seats on the board to accomplish this through standard shareholder activism. By committing a leveraged buyout and saddling the company with an additional >1 billion a year in added debt payments, while simultaneously driving advertising revenue into the ground, he's basically sent the company on a beeline toward insolvency.
I agree that Twitter should pay it's own bills. But the causes for that are obvious from my POV:
* Their add platform is truly terrible. Ask anyone who deals in that area to compare it with Meta or Google's and they will laugh.
* They can't ship new products. Since 2008 they have increased the size of tweets from 140 characters to 280 characters, and that is the biggest change. Look how many things Facebook has tried in the same time. Some failed, but lots succeeded.
Also in the history of bad decisions, surely the decision to kill Vine is right up there? Occasionally people still find an old Vine video and share it. What could have been...
That’s not true about new products: since idk, 2018 or so, they’ve been constantly shipping new ML crap to ruin the main feed. This is why I closed my account in 2020. “Person you follow liked…” is the literal worst feature.
> Those features drive use but did they also increase profit, given that Facebook successfully enshitified their main product (the news feed)?
I don't have any insight into groups, but I do into Marketplace where yes it absolutely did.
I'd be astonished if Pages didn't have a measurable effect too since they are one of the main ways brands (which is a major source of FB revenue) interfaces with FB.
I see a lot of conspiracy theories like this one but zero explanation of motive.
WHY would Musk act as a stooge for the Saudis in this way, at a cost of $44 billion? He's the richest man in the world, he doesn't have to do errands for anyone.
"Parag hurt his feelings, so he impulsively and vengefully made a buyout offer. He almost immediately came to his senses, and unsuccessfully tried for months to wiggle out of the deal" fits the fact pattern. Once he realized he actually had to try and run the thing, he failed. It's a lot simpler than the Saudi thing.
He's the richest man in the world partially because he's desperate for money. Being bottomlessly greedy is a necessary prerequisite to being a multibillionaire, any normal person would retire before they get there. And although he's one of the wealthiest people in the world, his wealth is dwarfed by that of the Saudi state.
Technically the Saudi PIF and the Saudi ownership of Aramco, which runs into trillions, is all property of the Saudi royalty, and increasingly the personal property of the current rulers, father and son. So no, Musk isn't the richest man on the planet.
Musk has been accused of bringing anti-Muslim content to the attention of his millions of followers (like Amy Mek's tweets about the France riots and other things[0]) and I'm sure that wouldn't sit well with Saudi Arabia.
I understand worries of Musk supporting the right, but your interpretation is a unique one that seems highly unlikely.
Saudi Arabia doesn't care about Muslims and Yada Yada. If they did, where's the outcry over Uighurs and what not? Saudi Arabia just cares about one thing and that's securing the interests of the royal Al Saud family.
It's Musk we're talking about here, so Hanlon's Razor probably applies. Unlike his other companies he doesn't have handlers to mitigate his poor decision-making.
Is it really suppressing liberal discourse, or is the new Twitter balancing the sides by letting the conservative discourse run freely? It’s a common fallacy for folks to think that just because they are seeing tweets from the opposite side more that they think their side is being suppressed
Many have doubted Elon Musk during the early days of Tesla and SpaceX thinking he was incompetent in running those companies and the goals were lofty. People still doubt him with as much ferocity as his fans that adore him. It’s super fascinating IMO.
That being said, I do think Instagram will have some success with threads the same way Reels has been successful in fending off TikTok (as in not made completely irrelevant). People who share on TikTok also cross post on IG reels for more views and for eyeballs that are not on TikTok. I think the same thing will happen, where there will be some crossposting. Twitter still has a large audience - that will still make it relevant for some time.
From an Indian perspective, from the Twitter files, shadow banning 40k accounts 99 percent of them being conservative while all the while saying they aren’t doing anything like this was shady.
Add to that there was no prep to the accounts too, it was just provided without any evidence by an online only news publisher who recently posted fake news about Facebook and got caught.
I think this is a different situation to Tiktok. What Reels did was slow the growth of tiktok, by creating the same product that 18 year olds loved, but for the more mature 25-30+ demographic of instagram.
But twitter isn't growing. There isn't an audience for a new twitter for people who haven't used twitter before, because everyone who is a potential user for twitter has already tried it.
So I don't see where the growth will come from, unless meta can force lots of instagram users to actually START using text only. But then they aren't actually destroying twitter, just creating a parallel product for a different audience.
Why does conservative == hate speech? Hate speech isn’t allowed on Twitter - I have not seen that happen without swiftly being modded out. If anything, I am seeing both sides of arguments in topics. There has been more nsfw images and porn. Will be interesting to see how disinformation operates in the new Twitter and if Community Notes can mitigate that
I was asking. I was asking because that was the only way I could make good sense of your comment. Musk did not change Twitter to allow conservative voices: conservative voices were already perfectly welcome on Twitter. The big change to Twitter under Musk was that he allowed hate speech and targetted harassment. (Or, rather, allowed more hate speech: there was already quite a bit.)
He’s trying to make Twitter able to pay its own bills. Twitter has never made money (except once) in its 17 years of existence.
Twitter as it was should not exist. It’s like a bakery that sells loaves for bread for 20c at a loss. It’s going to eventually implode unless something changes.