Twitter misses ad revenue and user growth estimates
reuters.com
reuters.com
Over time, it became cumbersome to continue doing this and I thought I'd give in and create an account (on the website) so that these people were all easy to access from a single point. So I did, and went and immediately followed the 4 or 5 people. On the last one, my account locked up and said there was "suspicious activity" and if I wanted to continue I needed to supply my phone number. What? I haven't even tweeted anything yet and only followed verified checkmarked users. And why do I have to supply a phone number to use a web site? So, I just left the account in limbo and went back to what I was doing before - just manually going to individuals walls to read because they're bookmarked.
So then a few months ago, Twitter started putting up an overlay up prompting you to log in or create an account to continue after viewing x tweets. Annoying, but not a huge issue as you could just dismiss the modal and continue.
As of a few weeks ago, they got rid of the ability to dismiss the modal. The page just locks and you can't scroll unless you sign in.
And that was the last day I used or visited Twitter. I now see 0 ads, will never give up a phone number to join a website, and have nothing but disdain for that company.
I have never encountered a more hostile website, or company for that matter, towards innocuous behavior. The juice just ain't worth the squeeze. At least I was seeing your ads before.
Thus triggering the headline "missed user growth estimates".
Instagram pulled that same crap a couple of years back, and I haven't visited since.
I think Instagram and/or Pintrest often require you to log in before letting you see even the first picture you click on.
And it's functional like a WAP site in 2001 was functional. It's incredibly barebones to the point of being useless. I reckon Reddit forgot it exists at all.
The push to open web links in a mobile app has already become a PITA
I did the exact same thing for Instagram. I never post or like anything.
I have repeatedly heard it said that Twitter does this for every single new account as a matter of course. Twitter wants your phone number, but don’t want you to bounce right at registration.
On top of the phone number, they also go through purges seemingly once a year, getting rid of up to a million accounts a day. That also doesn't fair well with giving the stock market raw numbers
Makes no sense. If they wanted to require a phone number to keep out bots, they would simply ask for a phone number at registration. Delaying it like this, claiming “suspicious activity” is hard to see any other way than how I described it.
Twitter has massive data on your interests but collects only minimal information about you vs, say, Facebook which has your name, birthday etc etc. I would also argue that Twitter has BETTER interest data than Facebook b/c you are constantly interacting with thousands of tweets a day across multiple dimensions. Facebook tends to be your family and a couple pages you happened to like.
If they get your phone number, they get all of the available "data in the cloud" about you e.g. income, purchasing preferences etc. Cross reference the interests with that cloud data and you have a very precise target profile to sell to advertisers.
Some VoIP providers do a PAYG model, so you can choose from any number of phone numbers, regional, local landlines or from mobile numbers for free and only pay when you make a call or answer their answerphone.
Now obviously Twitter will send text messages so you never incur a cost from the VoIP provider.
So how does a phone number solve bot activity?
I don't know how the implementation works, if theres a way to check for virtual vs. real number, but some sms verification service provider seems to have successfully implemented a filter on Google Voice
Implementing (no opt in) 2FA on sites where that level of security is not really warranted is just a ploy to get data that can be resold in my opinion.
Instead, they end up filling their database with countless unused accounts created by those who gave up?
I had to make a new MS account to migrate a 2nd minecraft account. The account has only ever been used from the game launcher, and they have the analytics that the account was created for the migration. But apparently there was "suspicious activity" that violates TOS and they auto locked it, and rather than contact the gmail address I used for the account, they demand a phone number.
Tbf, I'm considering just raising this with the authorities, given a lot of relevant authorities, as not everyone migrating an account will be ab adult, and asking for kids phone numbers seems like a GDPR slamdunk.
Its weird because they have to know that hurting Java edition is just stabbing the most evangelical members of the community. The ones that built it up and developed so much of the word of mouth marketing.
My alternative isn't switching to the non-Java edition—it's finally getting around to looking into open source clones. I'm riiiiight on the edge of pushing my kids into one of those instead.
If anyone reading this works at Twitter: WHY are you guys making these changes? I'm far more likely to just never use the service again out of outrage then make an account.
This is abhorrent to me and led to me deleting my account after a dozen years of use and double digit thousands of followers.
If you won't let me read it, don't let it be posted.
I will no longer donate my writing and attention to censorship platforms.
you can no longer dismiss the modal, or in any other way bypass this as of a few days ago. (at least on mobile)
Pinterest images in Google image search results would like to have a word with you.
Worst part is that when Pinterest launched I even used it for a short while, it was useful for some things (e.g. collecting examples of furniture I'd be eyeing, tattoo motifs inspiration) and over time it just became a huge cluttered unusable mess. And then the spam on image search came and I simply despise Pinterest, ranting about them convinced at least 2 close friends to abandon it as well.
The latter give me longer annoyance displayed.
As of you account deactivation maybe twitter think you are a bot scanning an account.
(I've also never created an account there, and only ever used it in "read-only" mode.)
And what did it get them? Billions USD from Microsoft.
So dark patterns work.
They've screwed over devs trying to build on their APIs and eroded all trust along the way. New features have been rolled out haphazardly, and they totally botched Vine and let TikTok takeover.
Despite all these issues, I like it, but it's increasingly frustrating to use, and can't help but question what's going on inside the company.
Related: Here's how to hide all the crap they've been adding to the timeline
twitter.com##[aria-label="Timeline: Trending now"]
twitter.com##[aria-label="Relevant people"]
twitter.com##[aria-label="Search and explore"]
twitter.com##[aria-label="Footer"]
twitter.com##[aria-label="Who to follow"]
twitter.com##[aria-label="Discover new Lists"]
twitter.com##[aria-label=" liked "]
The convoluted ways in which people are gathering info on individuals is rampant in many Facebutt groups... There is way too much unsolicited spam and it grows every time I use an app or social site.
Makes me not want to log in at all a lot.
But somehow Youtube and Twitter are the only services where I prefer 3rd party clients.
1: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/instagram-api
2: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/instagram-basic-display...
Just because you have an API doesn't mean you're going to allow anyone and everyone to use it how they want.
It's incredible how things changed since the 00s.
PS: I keep a few selected apps from this era on my phone. Once a year I open them and admire them in their data-less beauty. (Favourite one: Partly Clouded) Let's call it software shinto.
In the age of bots and schedules posts, fake accounts and marginal content/reposts are rampant. Twitter to me now feels like a "dead body" repost zone where the only thing that grabs attention are snuff clips and pr0n.
Their overhead from all the volume is probably stratospheric, and they're scrambling to stop the hemorrhage of expenses over innovating now, so it's probably gonna take an entirely different platform to recapture the classic dynamic that Twitter once had.
https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/twitter-api/getting-st...
I don't like those things in my timeline either, but that's your answer. Also those annoying voice chatrooms and their lame attempt at stories.
Unfortunately that's not enough, since these tech firms tend to be priced to eat the whole planet, thus requiring a lot more than going global with a little thing that works.
If you mean Twitter specifically I'd be interested in reading your thoughts on the "bull case" for this takeover. I like Twitter and use it to shout into the void from time to time. I wonder if it's just like.. a company and not a growth company? Like what if we just had Twitter with some monetization and then it just paid out dividends to shareholders? Why is that such a bad thing?
Billionaires are tweeting each other in the open. Politicians. Reporters. CEOs, CFOs.
No other social network is like that. It's the only thing keeping Twitter relevant.
TikTok and Instagram have their celebrities and trend setters (which is where the ad dollars are), but you don't see anyone musing about "metaverse", "web3", and what their latest fund is going to pursue, geopolitics, OSINT, stocks, etc.
twitter won; no doubt - but there is no stick or way to money-tise that doesnt not turn into a facebook slow drain gurrgler on your userbase.
this is the conundreum of social enagement based apps. Your a fad, and your only another fad away from history!
GREAT long term investment? NAahhhhh. Traditional PUMP n DUMP stock. Billionaires get made, mom and pops get DESTROYED! Celebs will go wherever the endorsement money is. Life will continue. These apps wont.
In the end Twitter is just the illusion of people talking to each other. It's all just to further their brand or to push their goals, not insight they give up for free. Sometimes someone slips up but this just results in even more carefully crafted tweets.
In Germany, health minister Karl Lauterbach, foreign Minister Annalena Charlotte Alma Baerbock (yes, her parents really did name her 1312) as well as a boatload of MPs (most notably Katharina Schulze) also tweet on their own.
If I go onto "developer Twitter", there is a thriving ecosystem of thought leaders, developers attached to well-known project, etc. If I follow those people I feel like I am a part of a conversation between People Who Matter™.
But if I compare that to my own firsthand knowledge of those same projects and what's happening in the ecosystem, I realise that there is very little overlap between reality and Twitter's projection of reality.
Sure they could start slapping ads on everything, even paywall the site but at the end of the day there'd be significant competition eroding profits.
Twitter almost makes more sense as an open protocol than a commercial service, which is basically what Mastodon is. It's even what Dorsey wanted to do at one point with Bluesky, not sure if that's still alive.
Twitter is a company that has a track record of both user and developer hostility. They shouldn't be this for the world, and they don't need to be either.
I like to say if you're skating where the puck is going to be, you should be skating towards running your own software that speaks ActivityPub.
By you, I don't mean you per se. I mean organizations with budgets who would typically be assigning email accounts and that keep an LDAP directory.
Twitter could even sell a white-labeled version of this and manage it on your behalf on their own servers.
Some of the target organizations may not want to be subject to rules applicable to American corporations. They're free to operate something like this outside those bounds and use an interoperable protocol.
Between this and Facebook's recent woes, I wish this was a sign of a global tiring of social media in general.
I'm frequently wrong about these things, but one can hope.
If you're gonna use Twitter anyways, Twitter has zero incentive to make it a more productive tool for you (in fact they want to be slightly less productive so you spend more time on it). Due to network effects, they are not worried about competitors shipping a better product.
Then why do they ban low quality users such as bots or users who have broken their rules?
There was that one time in 2017 when they increased the character limit.
What I don't get about twitter as a company: Why do they have so many employees? If they scaled back they could have a nice business as it is.
Maybe they do better for the US, but they seem to have done far worse than their competitors in ad space.
In contrast, I joined Instagram just last year and use it very little, but its ads are much more (sometimes almost scarily) relevant to me. My wife is a big Instagram user, so perhaps Instagram has a shadow profile for our home IP address and I'm seeing ads personalized based on her activity (and thus peripherally relevant to me).
I've never seen any other tool as productive as it boched terribly... Facebook was never really as useful for real time news and events in nature (mind you).
It's unfortunate that these tags need to be leveraged outside of their intended purpose to make their product more usable, but here we are.
They added NFT profile pics. What more do you want?
I found it a nice challenge to learn a bit about selectors and uBlock Origin filter rules, and got this working, for anyone who might care:
twitter.com##span:has-text(Discover new Lists):upward(6) > :nth-child(n+5):nth-child(-n+11)
PS. also a nice tip: you can use the uBlock's "element picker mode" and write your filter starting from the "##" (i.e. leave the domain name out), and that will provide immediate visual feedback of the affected area, without having to reload the page. Neat!
https://sergiotapia.com/how-to-use-custom-adblock-rules-in-b...
Say what you will about Facebook and Instagram, their ads are better overall. There's been several times an Instagram ad showed up in my feed, and I said shut up and take my money.
Nothing like that has ever happened on Twitter for me.
Google Ads is an amazing piece of tech with usually great ROI but requires lots of setup. Facebook is easy to use, worse in terms of ROI but it has the amazing feature of optimizing for spending 100% of your budget all the time.
Twitter and LinkedIn don't do either.
- Is it because they are "not evil enough" compared to FB in tracking people?
- Is it because they can't track people in the same way (FB pixel is _everywhere_ on the net, Twitter's code is also widespread but probably less?)
- Is it because publisher tools are not as good as FB's? (in FB from what I know you can target various demographics really well with campaigns, based on criteria such as location, age, interests, approximated wealth etc)
Twitter does neither.
Which is great for the users, but probably horrible for the advertisers.
I never ever get an actually good ad on Twitter.
I believe their biggest bet on revenue has always been to grow their passive audiences (people who just use the feed and don't tweet) but their product lacks the immediate stickiness that other feed products have. It's almost impossible to get the value of Twitter out of the box if you don't have a clear idea of what topics matter to you and who are the central figures in those topics.
News outlets have a better funnel to distill and distribute information, so most people don't need to have Twitter to have a general idea of what was said on Twitter. A large amount of news nowadays is "X person tweeted Y".
I'm convinced Twitter will never be able to grow into a meaningful mainstream social media (+1B users) with their current model, but I do believe there's a lot of unlocked value in what they have created.
We seem to all browse it to find interesting news/articles and then share them on WhatsApp groups. Having said that we all follow politics pretty closely so maybe we are a bit niche?
I actually get a lot of value out of twitter. Way more than I used to do with Facebook, which is just total trash now and my habit of checking it all the time has actually stopped simply because the content was so poor I seem to have inadvertently trained my brain out of expecting a dopamine hit scrolling through it.
After talk/ytalk, .plan files, sysop chat, fidonet, usenet, livejournal/myspace/facebook ...
I can't believe that the mass-adoption of threaded, text discussions looks like this !
What must non-technical, end user, always-online-generation think of this ?
It's confusing, barely-usable garbage.
I specifically agree with the part about barely-usable garbage. Whenever I'm linked to a Twitter thread it's a dumpster fire. Baffling.
If you find it boring you can bail at anytime and if you find it interesting you can bookmark tweets for later consumption. The trending feature allows for multi-community discussion, jokes, and memes.
Twitter encompasses engaging text-based human interaction perfectly.
It's not private if it's viewable by Snapchat. You can have personal on any platform. And Snapchat is one of the most advertisement-laden platforms ever.
Its algorithm seems to work really well for rapid consumption of buzz within a particular network that you can tap into by following people. It is one of the few cases where I like the fact that I occasionally get out-of-network Tweets in my timeline because it usually exposes me to something really interesting posted by someone outside of my direct field. I'd never want to use Twitter for comprehensive reviews of some topic, reliable back-and-forth discussion, etc. but it's just fantastic for gossip and trends.
The tables here are even starting to turn–so many people are on Science Twitter that it feels like I find as many new and relevant papers on Twitter as I do in my tailored email notifications and RSS feeds. Twitter is also always a day or two ahead, and the papers usually come with the backstory and context in plain English. I hate to say that the Twitter thread from the paper author is often more informative (at least, per unit of time that it takes to consume) than the content of the paper itself.
And even if I create lists for people I want to see posts from (suggestion from another post from earlier this week), I still can't make my likes not be 'advertised' to everyone that follows me. So basically sometimes I can't even give a like to a tweet if it's risqué for example, because some followers might not like seeing that and then unfollow me.
You can sign up here: https://mastodon.social/about
(Solving the "critical mass of users" problem is left as an exercise to the user.)
I think Twitter is easier for the mass public to join. Go to Twitter.com, put username and password, verify phone number. Done! The screens are cleaner and very intuitive.
For mastodon, there's more text and messaging about the differences regarding Twitter, what's the Fediverse, instance rules. So you just landed on the main screen and you have to think about choosing an instance with different number of people, different rules.
After you are in, you can't search!! You can only search usernames or hashtags, but that is REALLY cumbersome and ineffective since people don't write "This is my #Twilight #book #review #bookreview URL". If you are not tech/privacy focused, the trending tags are usually not interesting, apart from #caturday I guess?.
Even after you are able to follow people, you can't quote-retweet (which is a pro AND a con), and even "retweeting" is cumbersome if you are on someone's profile from another instance.
Sharing is also more cumbersome since there's no bookmarklet or chrome extension that I could find, and sites don't have a "share on mastodon" link. The solution was to enable a cross-poster, so I just keep posting on Twitter.
About instances: on some main instances, speed is ok, but try to follow some pic focused profiles on smaller instances. It can take like 5~10 seconds for an image to load. And now on the iPhone official app, I can't seem to be able to download pictures anymore, and the option to bookmark a post (not like) is not there, only on the web-mobile version.
To answer "How to solve that problem?", I'd say don't worry a damn thing about Joe Public.
I read an interesting point somewhere: empirically, platforms can change an innovate far faster than protocols. The example given was encryption: email doesn't have it, even though people have been talking about it for literally decades, but WhatsApp added it in a relatively short time (a year? less?).
It makes sense. With a protocol, once it gets popular, change becomes really hard. It's like herding cats to get everyone to update, so things stagnate at the lowest common denominator for interoperability reasons. When all the software and installs are controlled by one entity, that entity can make a decision to change and just execute it, no herding needed.
There is some truth to the classic HN post that "Twitter can be built in a weekend". A service / protocol that can distribute 280 character messages isn't really where the value is for a service like Twitter. It's 20% engineering, 80% recruiting the right users, retaining them, and getting them to engage on the platform.
Additionally, open protocols are way harder to evolve and are therefore less competitive with closed services. The only reason why email has stuck around as long as it has is because it locked everyone in with its network effect before commercial players figured out how to compete.
Additionally, email isn't really an open protocol in practice. Sure, it's spec'd, but in order to actually participate in the network you need to navigate a really complicated system of anti-spam reputation systems. This is why people just end up paying companies like Twilio to send email instead of running their own servers.
Overall, I don't think we should be looking to learn any lessons from email. It achieved market dominance in a time that doesn't look anything like the modern era, and is much more complex than most people realize.
This is straight up denialist and hyperbolic FUD. There's a healthy and vibrant ecosystem surrounding the federated social web, which has been a thing since 2008 or so.
Also, I would argue that email's staying power isn't quite backed by the answer you gave ("it locked everyone in with its network effect") but more along the lines that it survived the Lindy effect (the great thing about this is that it's not going to its grave as a technology anytime soon).
Yes, there are people using federated social products but the growth rate is low and so are the absolute numbers. If growth were good, we would see VC backed startups trying to profit off of it. Why do you think that is?
This headline is at best misleading -- intended to give the impression that Twitter is performing worse than they are by ignoring the metrics in which they are excelling -- or potentially even just outright wrong.
If you're expecting much of what Wall Street (or journalists covering the markets) does to make sense, you're going to have a bad time.
The overall conclusion seems to be the same as with Meta last week: It's going well, but not as well as predicted. The slower than expected growth is only a problem, because the stock market likes predictability and will punish any company unable to correctly foresee the future.
But if you look at a company that is always in the red with no plan to become profitable, the question becomes:
- how is this a business?
- where is money coming from?
- why is money still coming?
Twitter seems to be mostly profitable in the past few years.
Among other things, we resell hardware and software. The basic idea is that customers can get a Dell, or Oracle server and a license for an Oracle database from us, when buying hosting. This saves them the trouble of dealing with multiple suppliers. The hardware and software business is just sort of a side thing, but we can generate crazy amounts of revenue by losing money on hardware. The idea is that we make the money back longterm on hosting. We never use revenue as a meaningful KPI, because we know that some years it will be inflated like crazy by hardware or software sales (which aren't profitable).
So I don't really see revenue as useful figure either, not without also knowing if you're profitable.
No single number tells any story on its own. You can have $1T revenue tomorrow. Just sell $10 bills for $1.
Net income would be negative. Aka profit.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/n/netincome.asp
If you sold 2 $10 bills and received $2 in exchange, your revenue is $2, your cost of goods sold is $20, and your net income or profit is -$18.
If you keep losing money, you eventually run out.
All five of the Big Tech companies were profitable before they went public. Even Amazon had positive margins and they were plowing money back in to the business. Most of the former unicorns don’t have positive margins.
“Growth” is okay if your funneling profits back into your business. But see DoorDash. How do you not money delivering food when everyone is afraid to leave their house like in 2020?
It’s not about growth, it’s about attrition. Every VC is hoping that they can pawn their money losing investments off to a gullible public.
If you're calculating the present value of future profits and the rate of increase in profits declines then the present value can swing wildly. That's not "punishment". It's the market self correcting.
https://www.geekwire.com/2022/amazon-would-have-posted-1-8-b...
I feel like Twitter would be way better if people had different topics you could subscribe (or not) to.
All services would be better if they were more like Google+ (but didn't share name with a despised effort to crush pseudonyms and wasn't owned by a company that buried it as soon as they had been forced to iron out the wrinkles ;-)
Opt in would be nice, I am sure high follower people would rather go to the effort of categorising their tweets rather than losing followers when they decide to Tweet about their local sports.
You're really better off with traditional thread-based forums to have conversation topics. Muting somebody's entire existence just because they occasionally dirty the general feed with 'offtopic' just doesn't seem like a sustainable way to use social media.
It’s nothing personal for me not to follow someone, so I don’t really see it as muting their whole existence.
You can argue that the payouts are a pittance for the large number of views those YouTubers get, but in comparison, the only thing Twitter has done to reward its users is provide a virtual tip jar.
Not only that, you can't pay to remove ads on Twitter.
I realize iOS users are not the majority, but it's likely that they are more valuable for advertisers and therefore could generate more revenue.
edit: as noted below, this was in the article — I had done a search for "FB" and didn't see there was another reference to Apple that was upstream from where I landed.
> The company said the impact from privacy changes by Apple Inc (AAPL.O) remained modest. Last year, Apple began requiring apps to receive permission from iOS users to track their activity on apps and websites owned by other companies.
> The Apple changes could impact Twitter in the future as it grows its performance advertising business, Segal said, referring to ads that seek to drive sales or other consumer actions. He said Twitter is working to mitigate future negative impacts from Apple's changes.
That being said, good recommendations are welcome!
NFT profile pictures? Who wants this?
Someone else mentioned Mastodon. If you don't want to run your own Mastodon server, but you have a WordPress site, use an ActivityPub plugin to connect with the wider network.
I don't know what 'the solution' is, but I do sense a precedent being established that I am weary of. Twitter is simultaneously a public sphere where politicians are prohibited from blocking users, but also a private platform where they can be ejected at-will.
I do not know what public sphere means, but I doubt Twitter stops specific accounts from blocking other accounts. I do not see why that is relevant either.
The president of the United States, of all people, has the capability to put an RSS feed on Whitehouse.gov or the president’s personal website anytime they want.
I also believe AOC would be a nobody if she didn't have a Twitter account. She'd be the same as the other 435 Representatives who release statements on their house.gov website that no one realizes exists.
Edit: >"I doubt Twitter stops specific accounts from blocking other accounts."
This was actually a court ruling. I have no clue if Twitter actually coded this requirement on @realDonaldTrump after the fact. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/all/trump-can-t-block-users-his...
It's a general problem too (IMO): Microsoft/Github mediates FOSS development, Facebook (I'm never going to call them "Meta", I think the rename was a huge dick move by Zuckerberg that pollutes our language and culture. Nyah.) Facebook is Easy-Bake oven Internet for normies and they love it. Smart phones are malls.
No, it's not.
When a public official uses their Twitter account as an official channel, that account becomes a limited public forum from which users cannot be blocked for reasons that they could not be excluded from official government fora more generally (e.g., viewpoint discrimination is not permitted.) This is not a restriction on Twitter, but on the conduct of government business by public officials that applies wherever and whenever they conduct such business.
“a public sphere where politicians are prohibited from blocking users” is a de jure not de facto distinction, unless you are using hyperbolic language for a practical difficulty rather than an actual prohibition.
There is no such notion - private companies have to obey the laws of the land like anyone else.
Platforms like Twitter have the right to ban politicians on the basis of the rights of private property and freedom of speech and association. The same rights that allow restaurants to eject people for "no shoes, no shirt, no service" and allow radio stations and newspapers to choose what and what not to publish, and me to tell Jehovah's Witnesses off. I don't know why this suddenly makes people feel uncomfortable, when these rights, and the ability of private enterprise to exercise them, have been part of the basis of Western liberal democracies for hundreds of years.
The inverse of this would be to give carte-blanche ownership and rights over all property to politicians - including social media platforms, that supersede the rights and desires of the platform owners. That it would be illegal to ban any politician from any private property under any circumstances.
I believe it's a good thing that the President of the United States has no more right to act the fool on Twitter than you or I should. Twitter is not, and should not be, the sole nexus for all global political and cultural communication. It's a microblogging platform, ffs, the only reason it "matters" at all is because one specific paranoiac President didn't trust his own media apparatus.
It's a convenience. It's certainly useful, but it isn't necessary.
Why would the alternative be carte-blanche over all forms of property? The government already forces telephone companies not to discriminate based on speech. Broadcasters must follow restrictions and allow government messages to be played under certain circumstances. The Net Neutrality folks are fighting so that Comcast cannot determine which parts of the internet I am allowed to visit using their service.
What would the harm be in making a law along the lines of "A digital service used primarily for communication with over twenty million members must allow sitting members of congress, the supreme court, the president, and members of the cabinet to disseminate any communication they so desire during their tenure."
The government controls what citizens can do with their private property all the time, and in just about every facet of our lives. I see no harm in making laws depending on the scale of the company.
Because the rights of property, free speech and association that apply to social media platforms apply everywhere, so altering those rights for social media platforms also alters them everywhere.
>The government already forces telephone companies not to discriminate based on speech. Broadcasters must follow restrictions and allow government messages to be played under certain circumstances.
Social media platforms are not common carriers. They don't have monopoly over free speech or the dissemination of information, nor has any platform ever claimed to act neutrally. The entire business model of social media is curation and algorithmic recommendation of content - the exact opposite of what a common carrier does.
Also, broadcasters are regulated because broadcast spectrum space is a limited resource. Cable broadcasters, for instance, aren't subject to the same regulations.
>What would the harm be in making a law along the lines of "A digital service used primarily for communication with over twenty million members must allow sitting members of congress, the supreme court, the president, and members of the cabinet to disseminate any communication they so desire during their tenure."
The harm is that the First Amendment prevents the government from abridging the people's freedom of speech, and a fundamental part of freedom of speech is freedom from compelled speech. Forcing all social media platforms which meet some arbitrary (and arbitrarily changeable) limit on membership to carry speech by the government is compelled speech, and an abridgement on freedom of speech, and thus voids, or at least weakens, the First Amendment. Which is a bad thing.
Governments already have their own media infrastructure. Members of Congress, the Supreme Court, and the President of the US have Twitter accounts (remember, what was banned was Trump's personal account, @POTUS is still perfectly fine.) The solution here is for the government to either comply with the rules set by social media platforms like everyone else, or else create their own platform.
That doesn’t require ads, is optional, and works well in a social context.
I think Twitter has massive opportunity though with their power users. Many of them are definitely willing to spend $100+/mo just based on the value they get out of it alone if they can get access to power user analytics, insights, data, or better tools to engage with their audience.
Assuming 1% of their users are power users, that's around 3M users with a market opportunity exceeding $3B annually.
Seriously, that has been developed by game companies since a while now, people pay for showing to their friends their cool little golden label. Twitter has the advantage of not being a serious platform, people are there to shitpost, create and follow drama, or other type of crowd interactions. And users already show of their affiliation, how cool and trendy they are using their bio and username.
Imagine for example a 1-month “official Marvel fan” banner for $$ at the time of release of a big marvel movie, people would pay for this.
It's hard to describe why some people love twitter and others don't. But it seems fairly difficult to change it in such a way that you gain new users and don't lose the current.
- A reply to someone else that I can't see, so I now have no context about what I'm looking at. It's like coming in in the middle of a conversation.
- A normal tweet followed by a set of replies that appear to be incomplete. There are a bunch of buttons to press to "see more". Often when you click on them there's only a single additional response, not a very long thread, so it's unclear why I had to click to "see more". Other times there are several back-and-forth replies in a row shown, most of them inconsequential. What decides whether I need to click to "see more"?
- Bots, crypto scams, misinformation, ads
- The entire interface appears to be an overlay over something else. Like it looks like you're reading a popup that you can dismiss to see the actual content. But when you do that, it shows you something unrelated.
- Sometimes, but not always, I see the tweet I was intended to see, but instead of seeing replies, there's a bunch of completely unrelated tweets below that where the replies normally are
I'm old, so it's probably me, but I just can't parse a Twitter page because it's so bizarrely laid out, and so much of the expected content either isn't shown, or is hidden by default, and so much unexpected content is shown. Call me crazy, but I don't have time to figure it out just to read someone's hot take on the latest trend.
Both are pretty useless statements without context.
In fact, what other tech stock valued at double digit billions has had such a flat valuation for its whole lifetime, yet still survived?
Yes, a range of ~14-77, but it's neither taken off nor crashed.
Look at any other survivor and they'll be shaped more like Oracle, Cisco, FB&NFLX (well, recent troubles aside)
Look at them all over the last 9 years. Twitter stands out to me.
I dunno, maybe there are many big tech companies following the same pattern. But none of them are this high profile, so Twitter is the odd one out.
The trending topics used to be a very good way to know what's happening. Being the pulse of the planet was achieved. Nowadays, the trending topics are heavily abused. When a streamer or an influencer does something, there's usually 6 or 7 trending topics all related to that person.
And then there are the spoilers. Every major movie release has the name of the characters or actors right in your home page the very same day of the premiere. I had to permanently hide them in my browser, and I've been reducing the usage of Twitter in my phone. I'm very tempted to uninstall it from it and use it only in a PC, although I don't see myself closing my account.
And even though they're alienating a big part of their user base by promoting topics that clearly drive their numbers, they're still not reaching their goals. I wonder what they'll do next.
I changed my trends location to Tokyo on someone's recommendation, and it's been a great workaround. I don't speak Japanese, so it's the same as 'hiding' the trends to my brain.
(I think the way to do this is 'Explore' -> gear icon, at least on desktop.)
But also, in terms of non-politics, I am so tired of seeing "JUST ANNOUNCED".
If the Democratic Party is paying him to tweet really well, can trending topics by him be the result of coincidence or organic participation?
(Incidentally, this is more broadly my problem with the default-public nature of Twitter).
I just wonder at what phase of growth-and-bust the networks will start to care a bit more about serving the demands of their eyeballs.
You have to aggresively curate your For You page constantly to stop TikTok from throwing a bombastic opinion piece at you
As you regularly hear people say about TikTok.. "ive never seen that on my FYP". I think honestly you react in a certain way to the opinion pieces dude. Do you comment on them? Share them? Linger? Just scroll on and leave it alone...
twitter.com##[aria-label="Timeline: Trending now"]
twitter.com##[aria-label="Relevant people"]
twitter.com##[aria-label="Search and explore"]
twitter.com##[aria-label="Footer"]
twitter.com##[aria-label="Who to follow"]
twitter.com##[aria-label="Discover new Lists"]
twitter.com##[aria-label=" liked "]
It won't stop your likes from showing on their feeds, however.
I would bias towards people who have a concrete position they are advocating for and not just talk about what they are against. Critique is cheap and mostly pointless without a real solution.
I tend to find the best accounts are ones that you disagree with on some things but not everything. Avoid people who still need herd acceptance to survive. So either niche accounts or people with a social moat/fairly uncancelable, this will get you rawer inputs.
DO NOT JUST FOLLOW PEOPLE YOU AGREE WITH. They should either make you think at a deeper level or inspire you. If they just parrot back what you already think then what's the point of reading what they have to say?
@evacide @JohnArnoldFndtn @sama @ShellenbergerMD @balajis @dhh @micsolana
Also find people who break up the monotony with interesting things: @Rainmaker1973 @Mikeachim @simonsarris
Also do not unfollow people just because they believe/do something your tribe says is "unforgivable". When someone asks you to hate a stranger on the internet, just say no.
It doesn't mean anything more or anything less than that these people are verified to be who they claim they are. But the person above is trying to indicate it means some kind of "endorsement" by some vague "establishment" that he dislikes.
Side note: anonymity can often improve the quality of online discussion. See: “breaking the social media prism”
Eg. Famous actor advocating for some luxury belief
I would wager that a blue check on Twitter is more valuable and monetizable than most 4 yr degrees.
I'm a big believer in this. I feel a bunch of social issues would be assisted and better understood if people somehow had to attach a possible/attempted solution to any stated gripe. It would 1) serve to generally shut up complainers for a more positive enviroment, 2) make people aware of reasons things are often the way they are once they consider a problem more deeply and 3) aid healthier conversation.
I like the HN view conversation must be interesting or add value type approach. I hope this gets increasingly enforced here as there seems increased volume of low effort comments the last 6 months or so.
Got me a strong introduction to multiple jobs. One of which really transformed my career. (Twitter is a much better LinkedIn than LinkedIn)
Exposed me to really interesting thinkers which fundamentally altered what I pursue in life.
Told my COVID was coming in early 2020, shorted the US market and made ~$35k.
Got me off mainstream media and made me deeply pessimistic about both political parties but really optimistic about the future.
They are both bad, but in very different ways.
I’m not sure if I understand how Twitter is systematically dividing the culture.
I really don’t think Twitter is the root cause of this. But I may be wrong.
It's a really basic algorithm that captures the equivalent of groupthink.
Twitter should learn from Tiktok and Spotify. Their algorithms work very differently.
Spotify has allowed me to discover some great songs just by creating a Song Radio from a song I liked. And it has also broadened the genres I listed. And spending 5 minutes on Tiktok's For You Page can help me feel better after a stressful day.
On the other hand 5 minutes on Twitter can easily lead to more stress in my case.
I feel like this "we" is misplaced. In a broad sense, yes, these acerbic tweets are indeed being made by our fellow citizens. That being said, Twitter tends to amplify the messaging of a small and vocal segment of it's vast userbase. It's a vicious cycle because exposure begets exposure and anger begets engagement.
Twitter doesn't synthesise things, but it fosters an environment where people are driven to write more controversial, outrageous, engaging things by tight-loop-feedback classical conditioning. It's not magic – the people posting such things are partly to blame – but Twitter wouldn't have half as many problems if it just showed random tweets to people. Instead, it shows people what it thinks will keep people on Twitter; short term, that works, but long-term it destroys Twitter's value (and value of everything Twitter touches, as a side effect).
[0]: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/
A medium of communication is not neutral. A book is not just word of mouth stories written down. There is a feedback loop in there that a book becomes something entirely different.
I mean if we take things to extremes and make a platform that we can only communicate with 4 letter words, what words do you think are going to dominate engagement and take over the platform?
On the other hand, a single glance into twitter can lead to 2-3 hours of a sustained state of mild rage, and you just feel bad when you finally exit the app.
When in doubt, follow the money.
To me, it feels like a small library of really cool books but the library happens to be housed randomly inside of a giant lunatic asylum.
Definitely. It's really one of the few sites I block using my hosts file when I get a new computer.
Some stories are completely missed, due to not being Twitter friendly (to many words, hard to boil down to a tweet). Other non-stories are blow out of proportions because it was big on Twitter, even if no one outside Twitter cares.
Trump was banned from Twitter first. Any one with mildly right wing opinion is insta-banned from twitter. Blue checkmarks are strongly tied to institutional approval and fringe institutional voices are given a megaphone.
Twitter perpetuates the current class system. So those in power have no qualms with it.
You think the elite all think the same? No they have their political differences. But you don't have to cry for him the GOP has its own media empire.
Phrases like 'Nouveau Riche' or 'Paise aaye, par aukaad nahi aaye' (money without class) have existed in different cultures for centuries. This is not a new concept.
Probably just a coincidence to to round numbers and such, but it amuses me.
Or is it? Maybe Jesus knew how Twitter would turn out in 2022. /s
Starting at the same time (Oct 3, 2013), S&P 500 is up 153.45% and the NASDAQ is up 260.30%
In the same period that Twitter is -10.4% from its IPO, the S&P500 is +150%. The NASDAQ composite is +260%.
And the destruction wraught by Twitter Inc goes beyond what can be measured in its shareholders' lost value. By purchasing short-form video leader Vine, privileging it just enough to undermine competitor Periscope, then fumbling Vine completely, they destroyed two promising US-based short-form video companies – allowing Chinese-owned TikTok to dominate.
Twitter-like companies overseas have pioneered new e-commerce & private-messaging features, while Twitter launches, then ignores, half-thought-out features like polls, bookmarks, or fleets.
Twitter Inc is a corporate malignancy suppressing innovation on an essential communications frontier.
As far as "is the stock fairly priced" - it is only 5% of the market cap of Facebook.
As far as "is Twitter a good product" - apart from complaints that people talk about politics on the app, I don't see anything substantial in the complaints here.
Twitter looks under-priced if you count its recent acquisitions from Quill, Sphere, Revue and it's intention to focus on the so-called 'web3'. Lots of ways to grow in those areas if they are smart enough.
- Spaces have successfully siphoned users out of Clubhouse - Audio ads could be next - The crypto integration they've done is just the tip of the iceberg
What did they spend that money on? Did they invest it in some new stuff or spend it on marketing?
So much opposition with everything having to be bigger and bigger.
Once you've had your term of ruling the world, there are only so many directions you can go from there. And by definition, the majority are downwards.
Maybe they should try something more person like where people pay a certain amount of money to get exclusive content from the people they follow. Can't think of any other way I would pay for micro-blogging.
Twitter has a pretty large userbase, but I think it’s the wrong demographics for consumer ads.
Over sharing, or the idea of broadcasting details about my life to strangers on the internet is also something I completely don't understand.
You can easily make a private account.
I'm actively looking to buy a house in Sydney for a million dollars, yet Twitter shows me general ads that have no interest to me - like investing in gold or installing a virtual chatbot app.
Twitter should be working with Domain.com.au to show targeted ads to Domain's active user base.
Anyway, someone described twitter as a "honeypot for assholes". If your platform is dominated by trolls or other malicious people, I can't see it having a good valuation no matter how many users you have.
Curious if anything has gotten better on that front.
That's what I decided to quit using Twitter.
So they're a growth stock, but really they're a dividend stock?
https://www.reddit.com/r/Mastodon/comments/shdmpq/mastodon_a...
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2022/02/apple-unveils-contact...
During a gold rush, sell shovels.
While we're here, take another pro-tip: Set yourself up with an RSS/Atom reader and "Follow" accounts you are interested in through Nitter. No account, no random "We thought you might like", and no ads, just posts and retweets from the accounts you're interested in.
Unfortunately I'm not going to read another country's laws to see if this is actually the case.
They are a “dividend” stock without proper dividends. Not everything needs to be a growth stock. Having said that 10% down in 10 years isn’t great, especially with where the rest of tech has gone in that time.
They don't pay dividends and despite share buyback stock is down since IPO
They are simply in no way that matters a "dividend stock" literally or figuratively.
Many are familiar with the concept of buybacks, but Twitter seems to be a "growth" stock that hasn't grown.
It's terrible
If they were able to show strong user growth, revenue would follow as would the stock price. There are folks who love twitter, and those who prefer images. The larger segment is those who prefer images.
Elon Musk can tweet something and a million people will reply. What percentage if those replies are bots, shills, or people trying to get money out of some offer of employment? Likely an absurdly high %.
Then there are the hacker groups and their influence campaigns... All over twitter.
I feel like twitter might be useful on a self hosted intranet with your close family and friends -- but as a global product it is grotesque.
Has anyone been on Twitter? Bots, spam, etc.
Only works when you have money lying around
Remember that weird time in 2020 when they were slapping "offensive content" to all tweets from supporters of one specific party while still allowing porn clips without any filter. Yeah, I quit twitter around that time.
Really just Twitter but for right-wing people.
In the same way that we have newspapers split by political observation, we will end up with social media split. In a way it is natural.