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Comment by WisNorCan | Hacker News Reader

Twitter reminds me a lot of Yahoo about a decade ago. A company that lost its way. Cycling through lots of CEOs, re-orgs and visions and a culture that atrophied along the way.

Microsoft offered to buy Yahoo for $45B in 2008. The board of directors declined, believing in much more upside. Yahoo became increasingly irrelevant. They later sold to Verizon for $4.5B

https://www.onmsft.com/news/its-finally-over-yahoo-is-acquir...

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No. Yahoo played that situation smartly. They knew they were worth more than the $45B Microsoft offered due to their stake in Alibaba.

This thread dives into how Microsoft lowballed Yahoo: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31029289

No.

Yahoo got lucky with the Alibaba stake. That wasn’t what Microsoft was after. Microsoft was desperate to be relevant in Internet consumer services and compete with Google.

Yang and the board believed they could fix Yahoo. None of their predictions came true.

—-

“In an email to Yahoo employees after the board's rejection of the Microsoft offer was made public, Chief Executive Jerry Yang maintained that the company is well-positioned to grow, citing the Internet powerhouse's efforts to improve its standing in online advertising and build an alliance with newspapers.

"We have accomplished a great deal in a very short time," Yang said. "Yahoo is a faster-moving, better-organized, more nimble company well on its way to transforming the experiences of its users, advertisers, publishers and developers."

He said the company aims to "grow visits to key Yahoo starting points and properties by approximately 15% per year over the next several years."

https://www.marketwatch.com/amp/story/yahoo-rejects-bid-micr...

There's a difference between what the board believed (we'll probably never know,) and what they communicated. No one would email their workers saying "we're waiting for payday, at the expense of you".

That is fair.

However I don’t think that applies here. if the board truly believed it, they would have sold the “pure Yahoo” piece to Microsoft for far more than $4.5B and spun out the Alibaba stake. They didn’t and ended up losing billions in shareholder value.

Maybe that wasn't on the table. We won't know until some executive would retire and end up writing a tell all.

You can just read the statements from Ballmer and others on what they were excited about. I wasn’t on the deal team, but I worked with them on parts of it. The statements below are reflective of the belief.

Occam’s razor would suggest that Microsoft and Yahoo’s exec teams both talking about the value of the Yahoo Internet services as the rationale for the deal probably is the truth. And Microsoft would have paid much more than 10% of the $45B to get it.

——

Microsoft sees Yahoo as a way to compete with arch-rival Google Inc GOOG.O in the Internet search and advertising arena, but it has limits to what it is willing to pay to get a deal done.

“We’re prepared to move forward without a merger with Yahoo,” Ballmer said. “We think the best way to move forward quickly (and gain critical mass against Google) is to come together with Yahoo.”

https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSMAT00810920080423

To be fair, I think Microsoft would have also fumbled Yahoo at the time.

This was the era of Vista and IE and windows live/hotmail. My maybe-controversial(?) opinion is they just would have MSNd Yahoo in some directionless brand “synergy” at a time where Microsoft still seemed to be figuring out what its own future identity/company vision would be.

I think Yahoo knew that. And while Yahoo had many of the same challenges internally at the time (which it eventually succumbed too, whereas there was no clear consensus that Microsoft would successfully reinvent itself), at least it was in control of its own destiny

100% agree. I believe Microsoft would have made a mess of the acquisition. Microsoft had the same issues internally with their MSN/Live strategy at the time. Integrating Yahoo + MSN/Live was unlikely to succeed.

That is separate from saying that Yahoo shareholders would have benefited from selling to Microsoft.

No.

... I don't actually have an argument. I just wanted to keep the 'No' chain going. Sorry.

> Yahoo played that situation smartly.

This is one of the hottest tech takes I've read in the past 10 years.

Getting lucky due to an investment in something that is _not_ their core business does not count as "smart" to me.

> They later sold to Verizon for $4.5B

After spinning out their share of Alibaba into a separate company worth $56 billion. Yahoo shareholders still got a lot more out of it than they would have by accepting the Microsoft buyout.

Twitter still has fantastic network effects, making it difficult to supplant. If only someone, perhaps Musk, can solve the censorship problem for them.

Can you elaborate on what you think the censorship problem is?

Killing good (funny) accounts from various anons and even small celebrities, like Nick Mullen.

It stifles discussion (people are worried about getting locked/limited/banned) and makes for a much less interesting scroll.

So the censorship problem is that the twitter feed became less interesting for you as a user?

That sounds more like just bad product choices (assuming it drives users away) rather than any sort of issue of rights.

Censoring important news stories during an election and then a year later just being like, oops, ya that was real.

This supposed “important news” is an invented (probably Russian) propaganda story that couldn’t be confirmed by any of the news outlets who investigated it and was hyped up by armies of Russian bots and Russian-funded media trolls, immediately before a presidential election. [According to proponents of this story, the chain of custody of this laptop goes: Hunter Biden → Repair Shop (owned by a legally blind GOP partisan hazy about the details) → ??? → Rudy Giuliani → Steve Bannon → NY Post → Matt Gaetz. Seriously?]

A year and a half later, the course of the Russian invasion of Ukraine provides solid evidence that we should be thankful for social media companies’ rare responsible anti-propaganda effort here. Instead of dissolving NATO and dropping Russian sanctions as the previous president repeatedly suggested, the US instead provided significant diplomatic, military, intelligence, and economic support, and now Ukrainians have a good chance of holding their country.

Once again, remember that impeachment #1 was about a ham-handed explicit attempt by the US president to extort president Zelenskyy of Ukraine, denying US military aid unless he would fabricate dirt on the president’s political opponent and (falsely) exonerate Russia. For that effort, the president’s entire party (with only a few notable exceptions) gave him a pat on the back.

That “invented Russian propaganda” was confirmed by the New York Times.

No, what was confirmed was that some of the emails placed onto the laptop were real emails. (Those emails are not in and of themselves any evidence of wrongdoing, FWIW.)

Nobody can demonstrate where or how those emails were obtained, or who put them on the laptop. The repair shop owner has repeatedly claimed that much of the current content of the hard drive was not there when he originally examined it.

The whole thing has been treated in such a slipshod and ridiculous manner by a whole clown car of incompetent partisan activists that it is now impossible to validate anything about whose laptop this was or what it had on it originally.

Meanwhile Jared Kushner was literally just handed $2 billion by the Saudi government to run an “investment fund”, right out in the open. None of the people worried about this laptop/email story have said a peep.

From the New York Times[1]: "People familiar with the investigation said prosecutors had examined emails between Mr. Biden, Mr. Archer and others about Burisma and other foreign business activity. Those emails were obtained by The New York Times from a cache of files that appears to have come from a laptop abandoned by Mr. Biden in a Delaware repair shop. The email and others in the cache were authenticated by people familiar with them and with the investigation."

[1]https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/16/us/politics/hunter-biden-...

I think you've missed some developments, or perhaps I'm misinterpreting you?

https://nypost.com/2022/03/17/hunter-bidens-infamous-laptop-...

Why link to a conservative tabloid instead of the actual article from NYT?

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/16/us/politics/hunter-biden-...

honestly, b/c it was the first thing to show up on DDG, and my intuition was that it was so beyond dispute that prestige wasn't a necessary credibility signal

This has been the modus operandi of MSM and social media for the past few years for all sorts of topics. It's sad to see people still speak in favor of such censorship.

Feel free to disagree, but I believe there is a large segment of the population, especially conservatives, who feel sidelined or silenced by Twitter.

Case in point: Musk recently polled his followers: "Free speech is essential to a functioning democracy. Do you believe Twitter rigorously adheres to this principle?" and 70% of respondents said "No" [1].

Also, many conservatives believe that banning Trump while allowing the representatives of various autocracies globally is hypocritical.

Of course, you can argue that Twitter is a private company and can do whatever they please. You can also argue that Trump and his followers are a danger to society, or Elon and his followers are biased. I'm just communicating a perspective I believe exists broadly.

[1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1507259709224632344

I mean, the poll is biased in that most people who saw it are followers of Elon Musk already (and the split is probably 60-70% people who like him, the rest being journalists, people curious to see what he has to say, and yes, people who disagree with him).

It’s not an objective measure or poll, much in the same way that Trump (or any politician) blasting out “opinion polls” to their donors is not representative of the general US population, so much as the contingent that voted/donated to them.

He has 82 million followers. That’s a lot of people to be completely biased. Granted, it’s not half a billion for completely unbiased sample, but still, that’s a lot.

It seems fairly obvious that most people who follow him do that because they like what he has to say. Even if he had 500 million followers it still wouldn't be an unbiased sample.

Followers != people who take the time to engage with his polls/other content

I'm on Twitter most every day; I don't follow Elon Musk (I try not to follow any big twitter accounts, rather than curate interesting smaller accounts); I didn't see the poll until two days after it was already closed; I think it's fair to say that most people who saw the poll were

a) Either followers of Elon

b) People the Twitter Algorithm decided were most likely to interact with it -- I.E. people who would be interested in what Elon has to say

Just because Elon tweeted something doesn't mean all of Twitter saw it.

Bias is a spectrum, and if your pool is non-random, you will always have a much higher bias than otherwise.

Yeah, and so did Donald Trump before he got banned in 2020; his followership wasn't at all representative of all of Twitter (and that's even considering many people who actively disagreed with him probably followed him purely because of his position of power)

If you polled the audience at a regular-season San Francisco Giants home game against the Los Angeles Dodgers as to what team they support, you'd probably get an overwhelming number of responses indicating support for the Giants. That does not mean more people support the Giants than the Dodgers in Los Angeles. They're two different populations, so you can't generalize the outcome from one to the other.

>> Of course, you can argue that Twitter is a private company and can do whatever they please.

This was what people on the left were claiming when Trump got kicked off. Now? Suddenly they think freedom of speech needs moderation and its not safe in the hands of a single company or Musk having "too much control".

I've never seen this question asked in good faith on HN. It's inevitable that the answers and replies to answers descend into infantile spitting matches, with waring parties attempting to take superior moral high ground.

If you've not already read the litany of articles out there covering both the approval and disapproval of Twitter's method of content moderation, and how it applies its methods over the last 5 years, then now is the time to head to your favorite search engine.

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