Microsoft drops Twitter from its advertising platform | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft drops Twitter from its advertising platform

mashable.com

67 pointsdavidbarker21 comments

My opinion is that these sorts of restrictive moves between companies always winds up being for the worse for the end-users.

The motivations can be dressed up in all sorts of plausible rationalizations. It is all so tiresome.

I think the motivation here is that Twitter is charging about half a million dollars a year for access to their API when it was previously either free or close to free.

> I think the motivation here is that Twitter is charging about half a million dollars a year

I've read that the floor is $43k per month but that it can be up to $241k/mo.

Basically corporate mercantilism.

That's what happens when when you make your free API cost a fortune, and Microsoft has nothing to gain from paying the bill.

I doubt they’re worried about the bill. It’s Microsoft. It probably has more to do with him painting them as the evil capitalists who took OpenAI closed source and for profit to achieve world domination. He spoke a lot about this in recent interview.

"It's Microsoft" is to me a very naïve explanation.

It's how a 9-to-5 employee thinks about capital "oh, they're rich, they can spend on anything and not care". That's not how it works.

You don't build a large profitable company if you spend like the spoiled, drunk, drugged out offspring of a billionaire, who has a 10 million dollar weekly allowance, to spend on cars, women, jets and substances.

Every decision has to be rational, meaning you are at least break even, ideally above break even. If not financially, at least tactically, strategically, politically, any way at all. Any way at all.

They weren't breaking even here, and had no reason to invest in a relationship with a man child driving his $44B investment into the ground, while embarrassing himself every single day.

No serious business needs or wants relationship with Twitter anymore. If given a reason to look into it, a tipping point, a drop-that-spills-the-glass reason to exit, they'd exit. And Elon keeps providing excellent, very convincing ones.

Such as "you suddenly owe us MILLIONS to use our API, in order to provide a free service to your customers, which mostly works out to our benefit, so your customers can run ads with us." If you're a Microsoft manager, you spend an hour at most thinking and consulting about it, and of course you finally say "lol, no" and quit.

I think your opinion might be overly influenced by your disdain for Musk. This sounds borderline unhinged to me.

> It's how a 9-to-5 employee thinks about capital

Okay, well, I'm the founder and CTO of a Series C company.

> you suddenly owe us MILLIONS to use our API

Where did you get this price? Regardless "MILLIONS" is not even something you need C-suite approval for at Microsoft.

> in order to provide a free service to your customers

The service is not free.

the only person who loses out from fewer ads on twitter is Musk

I don't know what I'm talking about, but ... Has Musk actually paid all the money for his essentially (self) forced purchase? Is there additional that he'll be on the hook for?

From the outside, it sure looks like he's trying to destroy his own company. Which makes no sense, unless he can thereby profit or at least avoid some obligations.

He borrowed $billions from banks for the deal, but the collateral was Tesla stock, so not paying this debt would not go well for him.

Musk is the definition of reactive. Trying to appease someone like him goes nowhere well for anyone and sets everyone else back as ~~they're~~ (EDIT: he is) a de-facto bully and crybully. Best to let him have his tantrums.

Musk, the one who once tried to s-can Sama. Musk can keep piloting Twitter as an expensive lawn dart for all I care. Twitter is easily replicated by any MAANG.

Is this MS responding to Elon launching a ChatGPT competitor?

It's more likely MS responding to Elon tearing down their API and making their site worse.

It's not worth their time or money, I'd bet that that API integration helps Twitter more than it helps MS.

There are likely a ton of tools that are using the Twitter API in ways that helps Twitter and almost all of them are going to be locked out because there's no way they can afford $42,000/mo.

I'm on a slack channel of (mostly former by now) developers using the Twitter API, and the general feeling is that Twitter is dead for most. A few lucky ones are able to afford the new 42k/m price point, and everyone else has been kicked out without any respect by Twitter, and won't be coming back.

Microsoft is not ruled by a banana republic dictator wannabe, I think you're confusing Nadella for Musk. Twitter also has no ChatGPT competitor, all they have is 10k GPUs and lots of naked aspirations.

Microsoft is rather responding to them using Twitter's API, and Twitter restricted their API, so Microsoft dropped their products that were using it. It's entirely Twitter's fault.

MS's response to the TruthGPT announcement was probably "LOL"...

It's very weird he also called it TruthGPT, because it sounds like the bastard child of OpenAI's ChatGPT and TruthSocial, rather than a product by Twitter.

The man has no clue whatsoever.

This is in response to Elon Musk suing Microsoft and OpenAI for using tweets to train GPT. There are already precedents, such as the Authors Guild vs. Google Books, where it was deemed fair use to use copyrighted works to build a searchable database.

Musk's objective is not to win the lawsuit, though. It is to create as many barriers and troubles for AI companies as possible so that he can catch up with his own technology

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