In a few months he could demonstrate that you don’t need as many employees as you thought, that you don’t need the heavy handed moderation/censorship, and that you could actually charge for your services rather than being wholly dependent on advertising.
All positive developments for the industry IMO.
You are wishful thinking the best case scenario for Musk decisions. It is just as likely, in my opinion, that in a year or two the worst scenario will be the outcome of Musk tenure.
The worst case scenario, in my view, is something like the revenue never recovering to pre-acquisition levels (which weren’t great already), the product not having any significantly valuable new feature, and suffering from long outages and ended up being sold for ~$10bi.
It's extremely difficult to find the right balance, almost impossible when the company is sky rocketing, like Twitter was.
Trying to analyze it from a business man perspective, I see that Elon's trying to find that balance and I see that as positive. He can be wrong, things can go wrong, but sometimes you must make this kind of decision, take the consequences, and adjust to fix what you broke.
He's definitely made a bunch of contrarian decisions but it's too early to speculate that they could be 'impact'.
Buying a company and immediately forcing it to operate on a fraction of its prior resources is not new, btw. It's the private equity formula.
A bunch of 3rd-party devs jumped ship, and it's tempting to say "they'll remember that" if Twitter tries to lure them back,but we don't know yet if that's true or not. A bunch of advertisers jumped ship, but they could come back. The cost is that users look at these decisions and trust the platform less.
But we don't know the cost of that cost, if that makes any sense. We don't know if this ends up sparking a death spiral or if everyone complains about the decisions and then forgets about it by the end of 2023.
There has been light to no coverage from mainstream press as it doesn't advance the left's current agenda.
The headline says 180,000, but it’s close to 300,000 worldwide — which you can read before the hard paywall cuts you off.
I’d rather judge on things that have actually happened than have to deal with a new set of forward looking projections about what could happen every few months.
> I’d rather judge on things that have actually happened than have to deal with a new set of forward looking projections about what could happen every few months.
If you're leaving all prediction and forecasting to other people, why complain when they do it?
I'm not sure selling sausages made out of sawdust is a big win or even that interesting of a business solution. It's a short-cut that most companies could take if they were to chuck their ethics out of the window (and possibly be willing to break the law).
But if it makes money a large swath of the tech industry will hail it as an innovation and follow suit. Which is kind of sad. And also, at the end of the day, why we need laws against selling sausages made out of sawdust.
I'm not sure that anyone should be looking at Twitter and thinking, "this is a good strategy for making things more profitable." Is Twitter making more money? They were already losing money before, and my understanding is that post-transition a bad situation has turned into a crisis.
What are the odds that Twitter ends up being seen as something to emulate in business and not as a cautionary tale? I mean, never say never, but the impression I've gotten about Twitter's financial prospects is not optimistic.
By removing the very politically-biased censorship he already did a very healthy move for the whole world.
About that…¹²³
¹ https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/25/23571103/elon-musk-twitte...
² https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/16/tech/musk-censors-press/index...
³ https://theintercept.com/2022/11/22/elon-musk-twitter-censor...
Unfortunately it isn't possible to have an unmoderated forum. Choosing not to moderate is still a moderation choice.
The notifications feature on Android App is already broken and hasn't been fixed since like eternity now. Messenger notifications don't show up either. It takes hours, at times even days for the notifications to show up. There are times when the messages are not properly ordered. They just removed 2FA. Messaging was a nice way to talk to people of common interests, and that's barely working these days.
The app/website are randomly down and you often have to scream on Twitter to get it up and running.
Nothing is really working in Twitter at this point in time, It could get fixed eventually but the strategy has clearly backfired.
Perhaps people underestimate what sort of effort it takes to run operations of that magnitude. If you have a $50 billion site. It is not really a bad idea to pay a few people to keep something like notifications and messenger running. The sheer amount of losses in terms of user trust, experience and eventually money numbers themselves would far exceed expenses paid in salaries.
He may have done far worse things as well but that depends on your opinion of his product/feature changes. But the additional debt he has saddled them with and the revenue he deprived Twitter of aren't really arguable, and his attempts to cut costs by short term slash and burns don't make anywhere near the dent needed to offset them.
I don't like Musk but is this a mercy killing?
Personally, I'd rather try something and have it not work out and learn the lessons than sit around saying "what if" for the rest of my life.
Why would you say that though? The people who've hung on this long probably want to be there.
There are a lot that don't want to be there. A lot returned out of necessity. Mostly from h1b visa stuff and avoiding being deported. Or getting a new job isn't as easy right now as some think it is. Teams are tiny so people are over worked and elon is making demands that require people to over work and do things immediately.
Reports from inside the company suggest a rather grim attitude. Musk has fired several engineers, even those directly aligned with his vision for the site, often over fairly minor errors and mistakes. There's no sense of loyalty to either the company, the product, the boss or even the vision, Musk has basically eroded all of that.
Musk has been treating the employees as completely expendable. He fired one of his last two principal engineers for daring to suggest that the reason he had less views was just because people weren't into his antics anymore. Then he forced 80 employees off of their current tasks just after the Superbowl to artificially boost his own priority in the algorithm over the weekend because Joe Biden got more views on his Superbowl tweet than Musk did.
People want to find doom and gloom, but the reality is that if Musk wants priorities changed, he is the boss and should be able to do so. 'Forced' is a pretty strong word given that he's paying their salaries and people should be able to switch tasks if the boss wants it.
Well sure. Musk risked a lot more than that and almost lost Tesla on the Model3 ramp. He risked a lot more than that on reusable rockets, he's risking a lot more than that on Starlink & Starship.
If you want to do something extremely impactful, you've gotta take big risks.
Playing the safe game is pretty mundane and boring, and to be honest it's not a very exciting way to live, and not a very fast way to improve something.
I wish FB would have a free verification service so everyone can be verified...so when I look through comments I can filter by such.
>In a few months he could demonstrate that you don’t need as many employees as you thought
Fact: The site has repeatedly had significant technical issues since he took over, with repeated down time, massive waves of complaints from top users about flakey behaviour.
Fiction:
> that you don’t need the heavy handed moderation/censorship
Fact: His first move at Twitter resulted in a collapse in ad revenue and massive stock market shocks for companies as impersonators announced new policies on the platform. Since then he has taken far more overarching, far more capricious, moderation decisions than the previous management.
Fiction:
>and that you could actually charge for your services rather than being wholly dependent on advertising.
Fact: Twitter revenue is in freefall. The revenue from Twitter Blue is entirely inconsequential and the loss of ad revenue has completely eclipsed it. It is an open secret Musk is fundraising to cover his enormous losses.
I think this tells us one very clear thing that we've known about the industry for a while. It operates on vibes not facts. Does everyone love the idea of a subscription based model rather than Ads? Sure! People were talking about that for years before Musk turned up. Does that mean Musk has succeeded? Fuck no! He's made an absolute mess of it. Welcome to Twitter Blue, perks include everyone on twitter thinking you're a mug for paying Elon Musk $8 for your brand new blue badge.
A lot of people thought Twitter would collapse immediately due to all the cuts. Granted, as you wrote, it isn't as good as it was, so he probably cut too much.
Companies were afraid to be first but Elon plus the new malaise economy gives them the right condition to follow suit and start it.
I hated the moderations/censorship on these platforms and I dislike the adtech/tracking business model so he has my support on both of those angles.
Meta also appear to be bundling in customer support which is probably my third objection to big tech. So I’ll thank Elon for that one too.
He still has yet to demonstrate any other outcomes than making twitter vastly less profitable.
No, it doesn't let you be a prick with someone elses resources. They have no obligation to listen or amplify you.
Perhaps people's expectations of free speech are a little greedy?
Thanks for confirming my point, glad you agree.
Is free speech in your mind something someone automatically has obligation to share? Thats forced, not free.
Yes, I can write what I want in my personal word editor but quite obviously that's not the topic at hand in a discussion on social networks.