Musk’s takeover turbocharged VC Twitter usage | Hacker News Reader

Musk’s takeover turbocharged VC Twitter usage

maddyness.com

66 pointsMaxLunn62 comments

What I find interesting is that, anecdotally, recently my VC network on LinkedIn has started treating it like facebook. I always thought LinkedIn was basically just an address book for people you've interacted with professionally, increasingly I see it turning into family photos and mediocre thought leadership.

I joined LinkedIn two weeks ago for the first time and have never used it before. It feels very much like Facebook to me with a touch of business-LARPing.

It's somehow worse than Facebook because the 'social media' aspect is flooded with posts from what people refer to as LinkedInfluencers competing with each other to post the most cringeworthy brand-safe corporate-worshiping 'motivational' content you can imagine.

True. I'm not in VC or anything, just a regular engineer.

I've been considering ditching LinkedIn altogether for many months now, due to increased rubbish content. The only bit I'd miss is to be able to look into others profiles to basically access their CVs.

I wonder if there in an opportunity for a paid solution for something which is "the old Linkedin" which means your online CV with very limited social stuff... perhaps some text messaging and that's all.

Just don’t read it and don’t get rid of your account?

People do that either to push their brand/being visible, or to appear relatable to their network. It's like most ads - not meant to convince you of the product, but to reinforce your awareness of it.

LinkedIn has increased its value for me because I can follow companies and learn what they are up to - either as competitors or potential employers. These mediocre linkedin influencers are a scourge on the platform, though. If I encounter one of these posts, I quickly unfollow the person that liked or shared it.

The issue seems that it more and more enforces other recommended stuff and you constantly need to be "unfollowing" stuff you didn't follow in the first place.

So like all other social media recommendation algos. Side note, I also unfollow people liking shalloe leaderships posts. Either Simsek stopped posting, or I finally managed to get rid of him.

Don't you want to read my story about how a guy cut me up in traffic and swore at me and then turned up to be interviewed by me 30 minutes later? Definitely really happened and not made up.

Yesterday I was walking to an interview. There was a starving dog on the road. I stopped to feed him & missed the interview. The next day I got a call asking to come in to do the interview. I was surprised, but I went. Then the interviewer came in. He was the dog.

(source unclear)

Smart dog :-)

The worst thing is some of these LinkedIn influencers have been spotted cutting and pasting these bullshit stories (not necessarily your one!) word for word. It's cringey enough as an original, but to copy it??

My favourite is the (hopefully) joke version, that starts off denouncing the mindless copy-pasting of feel-good content and ends something like:

> Just remember you're the best dance group anyone could hope for, and wish you all a fantastic 2011!

(Ironically I can't remember enough of the pattern to Google it to paste an exact copy…)

This is the latest version I received for Christmas, just make sure your name isn't Helen:

Hi all, just wanted to take a minute to wish you a very merry Christmas and a happy year, most of all good health! These days people don't spend much time or thought on some personal words to their friends and family, they just copy and paste some random old shit and send it on. So after all we've been through together this year I want to thank you for your friendship and wish you a happy and fulfilling 2018 - you’re the best gymnastics group anyone could ask for. Best wishes, Helen xxx

Just in case you missed the video on it, here it is https://www.youtube.com/shorts/IHt9PJM8Md8

Ha!

Wow. Talk about a massive red flag. If your interviewer can’t afford food, you really don’t want to work there.

Source: I’m a dog.

Lol

About halfway through the interview for my first office job I realised the bloke interviewing me had almost knocked me off my bicycle about a year earlier, trying to beat me to the junction because he wouldn't be able to overtake me for a bit after that (maybe 30 seconds?) He actually got out of his car and made the wanker sign at me and I almost certainly said something choice in return. There was no mistake because the junction was right outside the office.

I took the job. Funnily enough, one of my colleagues told me that our boss thought that speed limits in built up zones were annoying and should be at least 50mph. Not a surprise.

They call it "Broetry."

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/why-are-these-p...

I do the same, immediately unfollow people in my connections that like something of that kind. Now I follow just 3-4 connections who don't like a single thing, as I do.

Never used LinkedIn.

They started spamming me relentlessly in the early noughties, and I never talk to spammers. They were a seedy, manipulative platform, almost as seedy as Where Are You Now? (WAYN), which was a ghastly sewer.

Agree! It’s the best place I know to get updates from many companies. I follow over 1000 startups there for monitoring purposes and it’s incredible how many news are being published exclusively through LinkedIn, at least here in Sweden.

https://www.reddit.com/r/linkedinlunatics is full of that, lol

Having a - not so great - day at work, I know what I'll spend some time on now. :-D

Love it!

Thanks!

The interpretations are what does it for me.

LinkedIn is a hallucinogenic social media platform. Because people are using their professional identity on that platform, you can post that 1+1=3 and have people profusely thanking you for your valuable insights.

I have half considered to create a fake LinkedIn account to comment on all the BS that is posted, however life is too short.

LinkedIn is a strange place indeed. People interacting like overexcited toddlers, banalities are shared like life-changing epiphanies, people are congratulating themselves on jobs well-done.

I considered writing a short story about an alien race that prepares for first contact with earth solely from learning about humans on LinkedIn.

I’d read that story - LinkedIn is a very weird place.

There's already a number of parody LinkedIn accounts. The real accounts are so crazy I really wasn't 100% sure this was a parody when I first read it: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/alexander-cohen_work-money-ho...

I really want to comment on some of these idiotic posts but it basically goes on your “permanent record” so to speak, so I hesitate. Probably the same for everyone else, and why there is nothing at all to stop the rampant fake positivity which ruins the platform.

I made the mistake of connecting with an old engineering colleague who has since become a "life coach" and I'm so sick of their life lessons posts and fake positivity but feel like I can't remove them from my network.

You can unfollow them and I think that will keep them out of your feed. I’m on a job hunt so I have to be active on LI right now. I consider the future, where I can ignore it again, a motivator to get a new gig.

>I have half considered to create a fake LinkedIn account to comment on all the BS that is posted, however life is too short.

A second best idea is to join the subreddit /r/LinkedInLunatics and have some fun.

For me it is 3/4 just this type of address book or my company's talent search posts.

The other 1/4 is a flood of r/linkedinlunatics material which is getting increasingly more common and worse. Platitudes about leadership, work life and mediocre, thoughtless hot takes on whatever field the OP is working in.

It feels very much the same as Instagram influencers superficial bullshit posts but now it targets the professional world rather than potential consumers.

> mediocre thought leadership.

Mediocre is being generous

This sounds more like correlation than causation. VCs have a hard time right now. Money is not flowing like before. LPs are getting nervous and putting the pressure high. These could also be underlying reasons why VCs have become much more socially active than before.

Twitter is indeed going great [0].

[0] https://twitterisgoinggreat.com/

This reminds me of those "X president is doing great/horribly" bullet lists. It works because with any sufficiently huge system, you can cherry-pick points to reflect your desired viewpoint.

The fact is, the mass exodus from twitter hasn't materialized. It's still the primary medium of discourse for all of the major actors who used it before. Musk has maintained 95% of functionality while drastically reducing costs. When the dust settles, MBA's will be studying this for decades.

Another list idea: compile all of the "twitter will die in a week if you mess with this system" tweets from senior twitter engineers that Musk fired a few months ago.

> the mass exodus from twitter hasn't materialized

I disagree. Everyone I deemed worth following on Twitter is now on Mastodon. Over there it's like Twitter's early days. It's growing and I think it will continue to do so until it reaches mass adoption.

My anecdotal experience suggests that some number of journalists and tech people have switched to Mastodon. Almost zero of the normal funny people that I followed on Twitter have switched. Which is unfortunate--they were the posters I enjoyed most.

In The Netherlands we have an expression along the lines of "when one sheep crosses the dam more will follow". Funny people want an audience, once they're convinced they can get that at Mastodon, they too will make the jump.

> Musk has maintained 95% of functionality while drastically reducing costs.

It's unclear if your intention was to frame this as a "genius business outcome" but this is really a fairly expected outcome given the business parameters. Outside of adages like "the last 10% of the work takes 90% of the resources", and "to add another 9 of reliability, multiply your budget by 10", you can also intuit this result pretty easily just from your own experience (if you have a background in the field). If you proposed a project of "build Twitter, but multi-hour downtime is acceptable, key features like logging in with 2FA breaking is acceptable, complying with local laws and paying bills is optional, etc" then you'll find the necessary budget will be much smaller than otherwise.

Haven't experienced a multi hour downtime yet myself...

Honestly any kind of obsession with Musk is weird, and this is included. What happened to the exodus of people leaving Twitter for Mastodon saying Twitter's collapse was imminent? I've seen people coming back after making such a dramatic event of it. I've been using Twitter throughout all of this and honestly nothing has actually changed. It's just so weird people so obsessed with Musk, even hating him with such fervor and putting him under this weird hyper scrutiny.

Depends on your niche, in the people I follow, majority of the big accounts did move to Mastodon and my feed was replaced by a bunch of garbage ads (as I was no longer able to use my 3rd party app). So yes, I did move to Mastodon as well.

I understand it's not everywhere, but Mastodon engagement is surprisingly very high

I'd really like to see some people put their money where their mouth is and place some metacalculus bets.

Things like whether twitters losses in 2023 will be higher or lower than 2022. Whether user numbers will go up or down. Whether revenue will go up or down. Number of minutes of outages. Etc

Personally I'd bet on less losses, revenue slightly down (10% ish) and user numbers approximately the same this year compared to last.

Longer term I think the loss of verified status for journalists will stop it being a big source for their news stories, which will decrease its popularity. But that's next year at the earliest.

It's not a public company anymore, so there would be no way to settle the bet.

Isn't this saying that overall usage went down? And that advertisers fled the platform? I understand why VCs would want Musk's story to be true, that drastically cutting staff would increase profitability. But that doesn't indicate anything other than virtue signaling more or less.

I've built a Mastodon analytics platform, hoping for masses of people to start shifting over and with them brands and businesses, eventually too... so far... it's been reasonably quiet over there :/

Mastodon is great, but it really isn't a Twitter substitute.https://wordsmith.social/elilla/mastodon-for-twitter-users-i.... Thank goodness for that.

It's really more like a distributed version of Reddit that a distributed version of twitter. Server being equivalent to subreddits

If you ignore the musk drama, Twitter is almost identical. So it's not surprising to me.

2+2=5. VC’s look super active right now because they’re fighting for a small number of solid investments. LP’s have turned off the money taps and fake investment marks no longer pay the bills. They need startups that will actually generate revenue, finding them requires a lot more work and thats what we’re seeing. Soon we’ll start to see broke B & C tier investment funds turn into zombies.

There was something to talk about. People who are interested and knowledgable about it talked. News at 11.

Title change recommendation: add “during”, so that causation is not drawn. Alternatively, replace “turbocharged” with “came with a significant increase in”

> Although widely agreed-upon figures for users and tweet volumes are harder to come by

I mean come on, that data is not hard to find and it doesn't show any slump in users/usage

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=...

TBH i don't think the wider audience of twitter noticed much after Musk bought it, but journalists definitely did

That doesn't tell you anything about actual usage, only how frequently people search for Twitter on Google.

While Twitter was a public company there was an obligation to share the number of daily active users, so you can see the numbers compiled over time for example here: https://www.statista.com/statistics/970920/monetizable-daily...

Since Musk took it private, there's no longer an obligation to share such data. Nobody outside Twitter knows how that number changed, we can only make somewhat educated guesses.

Musk has publicly commented on there being a tweets per second record broken during the world cup at '24,400 tweets per second ... highest ever'[1]

I doubt there can have been a large exodus of regular folk from twitter if that sort of thing is still happening.

[1]: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1604520708570517504?lang...

That's Dec 18th, same date as France - Argentina finals in Qatar.

I have no doubt Twitter usage increased during the World Cup, that would've happened with or without Musk. It's the most watched event in the world for a reason, especially the final game.

I very much doubt numbers stayed even remotely the same after World Cup has ended.

Why wouldn't the influx of bots he was also complaining be able to achieve that number?

At best, from that Google Trends, all you can really say is that people are _more interested in news about Twitter_ than previously (which is frankly unsurprising); it tells you nothing about usage of Twitter one way or another.

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