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Comment by gleenn | Hacker News Reader

His two examples are Twitter and Reddit whose ad revenue is dying because those two companies have made huge blunders. Elon seems to almost actively be killing Twitter (which the poster even states). Reddit screwed Apollo and then many of the most popular subreddits protested and did things like show porn on otherwise usually SFW content to prevent Reddit from showing ads and thus killing their profits. Those are big sites, but those are definitely attributable to other obvious confounding factors. I would definitely argue they should be the first data points thrown out in asking "is the ad biz on the internet dying?". I do think ads have gotten worse but I definitely don't think it's going anywhere for a long long time. Way too many companies have built their whole revenue model around them. And companies may spend less to post ads but they definitely still will because there really aren't that many alternatives.

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> Twitter and Reddit ... have made huge blunders

In addition to which - they were never that solid in the first place. They (and Facebook) are mostly just "dumb hosting" for other people's content - if the content producers leave, they don't have anything to offer. They don't even really own the content that was produced on their platform and it wouldn't have any value even if they did. There's a weak value proposition there: "we'll let you put your stuff up for people to see and even sort of promote it, but we'll run ads next to it to offset our hosting costs", but neither seemed to realize just how precarious their position is/was.

I think this is really what we're seeing now.

One can suggest that recent decisions were "blunders" due to the problems they have encountered, but maybe there just was no path forward for them simply because there's not much value to be extracted from this business. Now we just see the entire house of cards collapsing around them.

There were many obviously lucrative paths Reddit could have taken. They have incredible amounts of data on users who self-select their own interests. They were making money selling subscriptions even. They could have monetized all sorts of things in non-annoying ways, like secret santa (pay to verify users or have direct anonymous shipping?), subreddit sponsorships (want to own /r/steam, Valve pays for it), etc.

Instead they wanted to be Facebook Jr, killed all of their interesting and niche aspects, ignored the things users and mods were asking for, and hamfisted general ads in people's faces while adding expensive, unneeded (unwanted!) features like live chat and video hosting.

Reddit is an example of what happens when you put people in charge of a business who are both greedy and stupid.

> Reddit is an example of what happens when you put people in charge of a business who are both greedy and stupid.

No, it's what happens when your investors are VCs who need to 10x on their wins because most of their investments fail. As a result, stable, long-term profitability isn't the goal; big IPOs are, or at least explosive growth. There's no room for a company which is moderately successful when VCs are involved.

They didn't need to take money from VCs. They would have been fine as they were -- they were making enough money from Reddit premium subscriptions to pay hosting costs (before they pivoted to hosting all their own media instead of just text). All they had to do was monetize the subreddits, license branding, and do some event stuff. All of the founders would have been 10millionaires. They got greedy and took VC money and every decision since then has been objectively terrible for anything but engagement metrics.

Oh slow & proper growth is frowned upon - taking other people’s money & trying to grow fast isn’t sadly. I’ve been in that situation w/ a business partner & the moment I realized my partner was trying to push me out I was like f* this & you - I’m out. I have no tolerance for bs & I saw it early enough to check out before having invested more than 2-3k of my own money. Sadly a good bit of my time but I was furious & done w/ it.

This would be true if Reddit was ever profitable, which it was not. Hosting images was an expensive decision, and they weren't making much money before then.

I think this is just the way of the world. Usenet -> Slashdot -> Digg -> Reddit -> Discord -> ???

They weren't profitable because they kept spending money on growth.

Reddit made a lot of people rich and never promised to make more people rich indefinitely, it is spent.

Twitter was in mild loss. It did not needed that much to break even ... and Musks moves were ridiculous.

the real value for them is in knowing your preferences and building a profile on you where they can categorize you with people who have similar interests.

Look at the facebook ads platform from the perspective of a small business looking to advertise. It is incredibly effective in how it can target people.

What examples of ad based rising companies do you see ?

My first thought was Google, and it's started to plateau in the recent years:

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOGL/alphabet/rev....

Meta also took a dive, and while it was from a sharp turn of the business focus, I'd argue it comes from an attempt to avoid staying on a stagnating market.

TikTok and IG continue to see good ad rev growth

I still dont know how IG hasnt stopped the very obvious bot spam.

[1] This recent post on @bloombergbusiness for instance, it just takes 1 fold of comments to be all scammers, multiple accounts, same or near same message, pointing to the same account.

Sometimes in app its swipe up to go to the next thing, sometimes its swipe left, sometimes i have no clue and trigger an ad event.

And then the "game" ads I get, cant seem to tell IG the ad irrelevant enough times.

1. https://www.instagram.com/p/Cuk_35AMXeE/

It's interesting that those aren't really available on the open web and require the app.

Instagram can be accessed with a web browser.

I don’t use it but TikTok

TikTok makes its money selling data to governments like the CCP. The ads aren't paying for all that bandwidth.

At the scale of Google/Meta plateauing could just mean market saturation, not that ads aren’t working anymore. I’d be interested to see data showing that RoI has also been decreasing for advertisers or that advertisers have started to pay less because they don’t find ads worthwhile.

I think the two biggest players plateauing is in itself an interesting indicator.

For instance sister comments are mentionning TikTok growing in revenue, but if Google/Meta were already saturating the market, it means that growth is eating from the other less successful players (Twitter/Reddit ?), and at some point Google and Meta will also see dramatic decreases or TikTok's growth will stop.

That also

Amazon has a growing ad business, but imo it seems more like a “listing fee” that is required to have any sales on their store.

Ah, perhaps this why almost the only time I buy things on Amazon I have usually found the listing through Google…

I read that the new cheaper ad based Netflix tier was really successful. So maybe a future of all paid products but a cheaper option for a worst experience with ads?

Unfortunately, ad revenue is a poisoned well. Even if you are paying for the ad-free tier, you will be limited to content that was developed with a mind toward advertisements. Once you serve any ads, everything is under pressure to be optimized for ads.

Even if you don't mind the changes to the content, there's a constant pressure driving up costs and driving down convenience to continue avoiding ads. If you're paying for an ad-free experience then you have money, and you're willing to spend it. You are essentially forced into a bidding war for your own attention.

I'm sure they sell your usage data even if you pay to opt out of ads as well so it isn't like you've even completely escaped by paying to start with.

It was already full of ads via product placement.

Apple’s ad business is growing.

When you own the platform, your ads are a "Personalized digital user experience" and your competitors' are "ad tracking".

YouTube has its own internal micro economy of channels, networks of channels, etc that is thriving from ad revenue. Binging with Babish was “a guy cooking food from tv” a few years ago and is now an entire platform of channels. I think those companies can all be considered separately from the operator of the marketplace.

That's just syndication, though, is it different from having a bunch of blogs that cross-promote content but are ultimately reliant on Google Search and Google Ads to bring in traffic and revenue?

You typically won't see rising ad revenues during a recession. When times are hard, or look like they could get hard, advertising is the first thing cut. Its a well established pattern. Eg, from https://www.createwithnova.com/blog/the-history-of-advertisi... :

> After the last recession in 2008, the US ad market declined by 13%. Newspaper ad spend fell 27%, radio spend 22%, magazine spend 18%, outdoor spend 11%, TV spend 5% and digital 2%.

And yes, it happened this time too. From https://simonowens.substack.com/p/the-advertising-recession-... :

> Digiday published a recent overview of media earnings reports, and while earnings overall were a mixed bag, nearly every single company reported a significant dip in advertising revenue:

> Publishers reported declines in digital ad revenue from about 9% to 30% — worse than the 3% to 27% drop in ad revenue year over year reported for the fourth quarter of 2022. Executives continued to cite macroeconomic conditions and a soft ad market as major challenges to their businesses.

But nominal growth is huge unlike back in 2008/9, most of that is eaten by inflation but it should still result in meaningful revenue growth in many sectors.

Total ad spending is growing slower than the economy [1].

[1] https://www.ibisworld.com/us/bed/total-advertising-expenditu...

Google and Meta each have something like half the world as users in any given month? And most of the people who aren't using them are not on the internet?

At some point, you literally have no more people you can get in your service.

Most of them overlap pretty heavily though. Assuming 2B people, minus the 1.3B that China has (rough calculations), there's still room for them to grow user-wise. The issue is revenue though - having 1.5 B Indian users is not the same as having 330 million American users.

some of the decline is attributed to companies pulling back on marketing spend due to declines in consumer spending and also because of iOS changes that has led to decreased efficiency in targeting.

This gets to one big confusion I have, with ad revenue and volume decreasing why are the ad platforms selling more ad spots? When demand for ad spots falls, the supply of spots should fal as fast or slightly faster to avoid a price collapse.

Attempting to shore up revenue by trying to show even more ads is begging for your business to crumble and die a quick, painful death.

In economics there is a concept, profit maximization, where it is determined at which prices the products will, well maximize profits, by taking into account marginal changes in supply and demand. I would be very surprised if the big ad companies didnt have a few economists do the calculations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profit_maximization?wprov=sfla...

I'd be even more suprised if the profit maximization point when prices and the demand for ad spots were both down involved an even higher supply of ad spots for sale.

Finding the right level to decrease supply by would be a tricky calculation to get right, but in no way could the right move be to further flood the market with supply.

You have to remember economics is a model and not exactly how reality works, there are many examples where you will find the supply demand curves arent linear and there are also other things to take into account. Companies can artificially move the demand curves, for example the ad companies can change the quality requirements of what ads they allow, creating more demand. These calculations are best done with real numbers and experiments, kinda like A/B testing and I would guess that the ad companies have such infrastructure

Marketers have ruined internet with deceptive and click baity ads.

I dont have a problem with ads, just dont sell my data to everyone who knocks on your companies doors. Happy to support ethical ads.

Twitter ads are aweful, showing unknown, click bait ads on its platform.

... deceptive and click baity content too.

It’s interesting we hear a lot about how engineers need to understand ethics, but nobody says a peep about the field of marketing which focuses on psychological manipulation and deception.

I think that's because everyone already knows that the marketing field is slimy and don't expect differently from it. There is still hope for devs, though.

Advertising, as a field, has had a horrible reputation since way before anyone on this site was born.

Yep. It's almost like most people don't appreciate being manipulated.

I don't even have a problem with what ads I'm shown being based on some information about me. I'd happily provide additional information which I think would, if it were used, result in less ads being wasted on me (showing me ads for horror movies/game is never going to benefit the movie/game company, and I find the ads unpleasant. Not showing me ads for horror content, and showing other ads instead, should be a win-win. But the only topics google lets me restrict ads for are "gambling", "alcohol", "dating", and like one or two others that I don't remember. Maybe "parenting"?)

I'm not supporting any ads anymore ever again. My trust in the industry has been eroded so much that I can't imagine them going the right thing even when they claim to do so.

I recently googled some random topic (drag race engines I think) and got some fairly-decent article from 5 years ago that satisfied my curiosity.

The website was actively user-hostile. Multiple things popping up all over the place, the works.

Is there any other destiny for content like that? Long since written, but owned and served. Why not enshittify as much as possible, one performance review cycle at a time?

Interesting thought that for content where no competition exists, the owner can maximize profit by drowning it in ads. Doesn’t seem like there is much of an alternative outside of legislation or action from google to enforce stricter ad standards(like how pop ups got killed)

The real issue IMO is that users do not understand that ads pay for their apps. They don't want to see ads and the ads they do see they want them to be uninformed and general. They want everything free. This just encourages subscriptions. Which we're seeing become more and more common.

Everyone understands that ads pay for sites. You can want something for free while still understanding how adverts work.

Honest question: how can you expect stuff for free without ads?

Using VC money? It's not even people's fault as well. For more than a decade, VC has spoiled people to expect internet to just work for free.

> For more than a decade, VC has spoiled people to expect internet to just work for free.

For more than a decade the fed has spoiled VC to expect that money could just be borrowed for nearly free.

Depends on the definition of "for free".

Depending on where one lives, but many people have access to "free" government services, ranging from roads, education, unemployment security, healthcare, and more. The costs of these services are payed by taxes.

Some "free" services are sustained via donations. Wikipedia is a good example of this.

Some people might say that those are not examples of "for free", because someone is paying for those things, either via taxes or donations. They do have a cost for society. Yes, but in that case then ad-based services are not free either: the advertisers are putting the money to run those services, and the society is also paying a huge cost in thousand of hours of people's lives wasted down the drain, promotion of harmful products, scams, etc.

As a user that isn’t my problem. If a service is being given away for free, I will take advantage of that for as long as its available.

Linux, github, open source games/office suites/tools/etc, fediverse, irc, free cloud compute... You can live comfortably online for free without adds if you stick to the free/os world.

> Honest question: how can you expect stuff for free without ads?

Require something in return.

Flightradar24 gives ad-free subscriptions to users who pay $20 or so for an RTL dongle and feed it data.

Flip side: Why doesn't YouTube pay users for the work they perform on their platform, re- impressions, interactions, training? The more often and "better" someone interacts with their services, the more "free minutes" without ads they earn. If someone is a big producer of value, they earn access to tiered UHD/4K/8K or "premium" content, or they're cut a check / given credits.

YoutTube is making money, somehow, off of us. Is it not our right to reclaim the excess value we are creating for them? Why is only okay for trillion dollar companies to have free lunch?

Good lord, no. "Excess value" is a frankly pants-on-head stupid notion that should have died in the 19th century. It assumes businesses should operate with not only zero profit but zero margin for expenses or growth. It is beyond stupid and I find it unbelievable that there are so many followers who really should know better on several level.

Conversely, profit now is less used for expenses or growth, and redirected to stock buy-backs and shareholders.

Excess value is real, measured not from the margin, or even money that goes back into the org, but value that is 100% extracted from the organization, often at the detriment of the org for the sake of shareholders. Its very often just parasitic.

People are so entitled now, "nooo i need my investments doubled at all costs". I have little sympathy for professional investors that have tied the global economy to short term private gain over long term sustainable growth. Its a rich child's game.

There are all kinds of reasons for professional investors to be in a position when they need an investment to double in the short term. Sometimes thats greed, other times it's to cover existing bets that are losing and could cause their entire fund to collapse.

Say, for example, a certain bank where to listen to the Fed and invest massive piles of cash deposited after currency debasement into federal notes and bonds. If those notes where purchased when the story was interest would remain zero only to face 4-6% interest months later, the investor could well need a quick win to dig out from those now toxic assets that can't be sold at face value.

You will still get the interest and money back from lower rate bounds. They only drop in value if you need to sell them before they mature.

Right, the example I was attempting to give was a scenario where a professional investor may legitimately need to have a quick windfall from am investment. They couldn't sell their bonds that are currently worth less than they paid for them so the investor may legitimately need another investment to double their money.

So I understand there is a lot of nuance in this space, but:

> other times it's to cover existing bets

This is my issue. Our economy has become a casino for these professional investment firms with lots of capital to try to strike it rich. This is not a healthy way to run a system that determines who lives or dies in a big picture sense.

The economy has become a game for people with connections. It no longer matters if a business is healthy or profitable, if it does not work within this grand casino. The search for constant growth is killing us all.

Well I completely agree here, constant steady growth is a terrible, unsustainable model. There's no way around it, eventually we'll either fail or have to adjust course and give up on this idea that we can continue to consume more raw materials to create a steady growth of output value.

> The real issue IMO is that users do not understand that ads pay for their apps

Because it does not make any sense. No one wants to be shown something he does not find interesting or important, even if they say that they will. So if you believe people should watch, read, or listen to your ads, you've been living in a bubble.

> They want everything free.

It would be nice if everything were free, but only small children believe that. People know they got to pay for cars, houses, clothes, and education. And they do because it's valuable. They also pay for apps that are valuable to them. If they don't use something unless it's free, that's because its value is 0.

> This just encourages subscriptions.

There are subscriptions in the real world, like phone, internet, and electricity. I do not mind subscriptions, for music streaming, or apps that require continuous maintenance (support fees). But most apps are done (or should be, apart from the bugs) and they should just provide a license. New feature requests should be added to the backlog for the new version.

Take Duolingo, I could have paid $3 a month for the service (that's their value to me). But no way, I'm paying $7 a month. However, they say: "Hey, you can use it for free". So, I do. And the ads are just so ugly that they bring the whole app down to their level. So now, I'm even less appreciative of their service. And when the ads will get too irritating, I will just stop using their "free" service. And I've paid the 273 dollars for a Michel Thomas course. Because no ads, just good content.

> If they don't use something unless it's free, that's because its value is 0.

I'd say that it is because the value is less than the transaction cost of any payment, not zero.

> The real issue IMO is that users do not understand that ads pay for their apps. Because it does not make any sense. No one wants to be shown something he does not find interesting or important, even if they say that they will. So if you believe people should watch, read, or listen to your ads, you've been living in a bubble.

It's either watch some ads, or work slightly harder to make slightly more money, to afford a subscribtion (or forgo some other pleasure, and reallocate that money to subscribtion instead). Both options are unpleasant, but of the two, majority of people seem to prefer ads.

To the downvoters: YouTube has been, for a couple years now, conducting a natural experiment that my confirms my claim. People can either buy a subscribtion or suffer the ads. Most prefer the ads.

I don't think that's a good experiment, though. Regardless of people's overall preference on this, I would expect the existing YouTube audience to mostly stay with the ad-supported stuff, because that's what they're used to with YouTube and people who really, really hate ads weren't using YouTube to begin with. All of that makes YouTube users a biased sample.

A more valid experiment would require all users to be new to the platform.

> weren't using YouTube to begin with

Or using it with an ad blocker

Most of the apps I use are in fact free, and do not have ads to pay for them. Someone wanted something to exist, so they made it, and then they gave it away for free to everyone because computers are magical and there's no marginal cost to do that. The ad based Internet dying would leave hobby and academic content, significantly cleaning up the signal:noise ratio on the web, which would be great. As a bonus, you wouldn't need to be Google to index it all if it weren't filled with AI generated SEOd blogspam garbage trying to make money from ads.

Some of the best content I've found on the internet was a result of someone's hobby and desire to share, typically paired with a complete lack of ads on the page.

Personal blogs, passion sites filled with resources where they might sell a couple products, open source resources built by a community, etc.

I can say its almost rare I get the answer I need on a commercial platform besides reddit, but that's only because reddit replaced forums where ads were generally small and unobtrusive.

> Some of the best content I've found on the internet was a result of someone's hobby and desire to share, typically paired with a complete lack of ads on the page.

Yes! I would say 90% of the useful stuff I find on the web is this sort of site.

I would love to see a search engine which only indexes ad free websites. Would probably beat Google in many things without any algorithm. Even as blockers don't solve the problem of only getting SEO ad pages, but a search engine which doesn't show any website with ads will automatically filter all the trash.

That search engine would return the same 10 sites for any search.

> I would love to see a search engine which only indexes ad free websites.

YES. Not only would I find more pleasant sites, but they'd likely be of higher information quality.

I've thought something similar for a while now. People say that Google has a harder problem with the SEO industry being so large now and that AI will make it a difficult cat-and-mouse game, but I suspect a decent amount of the problem is just misaligned incentives; if they aggressively penalized sites for having ads, tracking, and affiliate links, they'd be striking directly at the way blogspam funds itself, and there's no need for a cat-and-mouse game.

Of course Google's business is those ads, so they cannot fix the problem. They are the problem. Google's raison d'être is spam, so of course they're going to return a bunch of spam to you. Same deal with email. I get plenty of spam to my gmail inbox with things like, literally, "THIS MESSAGE CONTAINS ADVERTISING". Obviously, Google is not even slightly trying to filter spam from emails, even the spam that labels itself as such.

I would personally prefer to pay for a service with my money as opposed to my information and ads being shoved in my face. Unfortunately many services don't even give an option to pay with money, so I've been trying to find alternatives, for example I've been starting to migrate away from Gmail to Protonmail. I understand things cost money, so let me pay you for your services. I just despise ads with a passion.

> I would personally prefer to pay for a service with my money as opposed to my information and ads being shoved in my face.

You might prefer to, but Google and others know better when it comes to B2C pricing.

Look at Netflix, Youtube Premium, HBO etc. The price increases every year, consumers get pissed. That's because:

a) these companies are bad at forecasting their margins

b) the real cost of pricing these services is MUCH higher than consumers would tolerate, and is thus heavily subsidized at the early stages ($10/mo), in the hope that future revenue deals (cable TV syndication, IP rights etc) will offset those losses later. The subscriber base isn't part of that equation here.

This is much easier to accomplish with a B2B model, i.e. ads. That's because advertisers and companies have budgets available, and aren't as sensitive to price changes.

One reason I like Brave having a subscription for ad-free search.

> prefer to pay for a service

There was a comic (an Oatmeal comic, IIRC) where the guy goes into Starbucks and orders a $5.00 coffee, and then while drinking it picks up his phone and it asks him to pay $1.00 to access a news article and he says, "$1.00! Who do they think I am, Mark Zuckerberg?" (or something like that).

While I get the _sentiment_ behind it (especially from a webcomic guy who's producing entertaining content and not getting anything back from it), it misses a lot of the subtext of why paying for things on the internet is such a hassle. Yes, I'd probably pay $1.00 to read a news article - I pay $5.00 to buy a print magazine when I get on a plane after all - small transactions on the internet are a huge hassle. There's a lot of friction around tracking down my credit card, typing in the number, typing in all my personal info, hoping that the site doesn't store it stupidly and leak it... I don't know what the solution is there, but the way it works now ain't it.

>a webcomic guy who's producing entertaining content and not getting anything back from it

I wouldn’t exactly say he’s not getting anything from it. Per Wikipedia,

>Inman said in 2012 that The Oatmeal had a revenue of $500,000 a year.

I think another, bigger, piece is that people have more issue paying for upfront costs than marginal costs. Most people will have some sort of outrage that their medication costs the manufacturer 30c to produce when they're told it'll cost $30 to buy. Sure, there was the whole discovery process that had an upfront cost, but to most people's intuition, the cost of goods should be "cost to make + some small markup".

For a webpage, the marginal cost is approximately zero. Certainly there was an upfront cost, in that somebody had to write the thing, but the cost to pass it from the server to my phone looks like rounding error.

> the guy goes into Starbucks and orders a $5.00 coffee, and then while drinking it picks up his phone and it asks him to pay $1.00 to access a news article and he says, "$1.00! Who do they think I am, Mark Zuckerberg?"

I'd be one of those people. $1 for a single news article is outrageously overpriced, where the coffee is only moderately overpriced.

Google absolutely wouldn't mind if you paid in money for your mail. They sell it to lots of paying subscribers.

https://workspace.google.com/products/gmail/

No ads in workspace, they don't mine your data for advertising.

Reasonable ads are fine. Its when we go to websites that have ads that make the website load 100x slower, roll video content, and other shitty behaviors made people go to ad blocker. Simple ads really didn't bother anyone. Advertisers destroyed the ad economy themselves by allowing really shitty behavior. Even google search is a joke with the number of ads you get with a single search. Sometimes i see more adds than results.

They want a tax funded internet and shareholder companies gone after the worst bath in history. All it takes is one state to start and give it's citizens the chance to distribute the tax anonymously and the whole advertising industry dies.

I am totally fine with subscription only. Ads should be banned.

> The real issue IMO is that users do not understand that ads pay for their apps.

Users understand this just fine. They pay for Netflix, Disney and others.

It's Google that has failed to position Youtube as something worth paying for. Youtube is free because it is basically a public access tv channel full of amateur content --- consumers don't pay for public access, so they're not going to pay for Youtube. It's on Google to change people's minds about that.

Google could have carved out obviously premium content and put that behind a paywall, but instead they built this ad-based revenue system, thereby positioning its content library as commoditized and interchangeable. The only upsell they provide is to pay to get rid of the ads. It's a terrible offering.

> The real issue IMO is that users do not understand that ads pay for their apps.

Why do you think that people don't understand this?

> This just encourages subscriptions.

Which is the lesser of the two evils.

Elon is such a good guy. Spending $43B to rid society of the trash fire that is twitter. It's a sacrifice not many could make. I am incredibly thankful to him for that and I hope he succeeds at running it into the ground.

> His two examples are Twitter and Reddit whose ad revenue is dying because those two companies have made huge blunders.

Even worse - they never had good ad revenue.

If ad revenue model is dying it would suggest companies like facebook and google see ad revenue dying.

Big platforms are slowly decaying but alternatives are also slowly getting traction with new business models. This is an example that's slowly growing in the lofi-music community https://www.instagram.com/reel/CtR9Lnav1GH/?igshid=MzRlODBiN...

I keep asking this because I don’t understand - how is Elon “killing” twitter?

I’ve frankly not seen any difference, at all. If anything there’s slightly more activity

Driving away lucrative advertising, replacing with much less sustainable premium subscriptions. Then there's cutting the moderation and safety teams to the bone.

I thought everybody hates advertising, no? Let's do a thought experiment and imagine Elon brought more advertising on Twitter. Everyone would bullshit on him for that. In reality, we have the opposite situation. There is less advertising. On top of that, ad revenue is now being shared with creators. What's bad about it?

This is kind of a selling point to me, I can’t use Facebook any more because the obscene number of ads.

My day job is helping sell ad-free, subscriptions, so I'm a fan of the idea. That said, Elon is driving away the lucrative advertisers and not dropping ads entirely. Even Blue subscribers still get ads, albeit fewer.

At their scale and in their market the premium subscriptions model doesn't appear to work, unless their costs can be reduced much, much further.

Sharing revenue with creators is great. Not everything being done is bad. On the whole it just doesn't seem sustainable and sometimes even petty and foolish. Almost appears as if he's trying to bankrupt the company.

The Twitter acquisition happened 7 months ago, on October 27, 2022 to be precise. 7 months is effectively 3 quarters. Let's take "Elon Musk" name out of the equation for a moment. How much do you think is possible to do with one of the largest social network companies in the world within 3 quarters? I work at AWS and I must say everything is really slow here.

What I'm trying to say is it seems like the world is "demanding" too much from Elon. Additionally, there is a weird trend of people rooting for his failure. This is something I strongly stand against.

Why should we be rooting for his success?

Why would I want to live in a world where "a superapp" is needed?

Why would I want to live in a world where you have one company in control of the "town square"?

Personally, I just wanted Twitter to fail because I think that any ad-funded business is bad for us. But if you tell me that Elon's long term game is to make it something even more dystopian than it ever was, then yes I will do everything in my power to see him fail and fail catastrophically.

> Why should we be rooting for his success?

Rooting for someone's success is not about personal preferences or endorsing their actions. It's about fostering a positive and supportive environment that encourages growth and achievement.

> Why would I want to live in a world where "a superapp" is needed?

Super-apps already exist in other markets. Entrepreneurs want to create ones in the US market to foster the diversity of options. This is a healthy process. You live in the world with wars, but you want to do everything in your power to see Twitter fail. That's strange. A world catered only to your preferences is unlikely, so you have to be realistic.

> Why would I want to live in a world where you have one company in control of the "town square"?

I don't know. You don't have to live in that town.

> Personally, I just wanted Twitter to fail because I think that any ad-funded business is bad for us.

Pretty much every business in the world is driven by ads, one way or another. However, as I said, Musk doesn't care about ads. In fact, he wants even fewer ads on Twitter. That being said, his goals kinda align with what you want.

> It's about fostering a positive and supportive environment that encourages growth and achievement.

Not when this "growth" and "achievement" is something that affects part of the society negatively, or when there might be unknown consequences.

> Super-apps already exist in other markets.

And they are enablers of authoritarian states and continuous centralized power over a handful of corporations.

> You don't have to live in that town.

Just on another thread I was being accused of being "socially inept" for refusing to use WhatsApp.

If we live in a world where so much power is centralized into a few corporations, they affect everyone's lives, even if they don't participate directly on it.

> Pretty much every business in the world is driven by ads

Does it help you sleep at night to be telling yourself this kind of bullshit, or are you just apathetic?

> he wants even fewer ads on Twitter.

You forgot to capitalize your Lord's name.

> You forgot to capitalize your Lord's name.

Emotions are the enemy of a constructive dialogue. I bail.

> It's about fostering a positive and supportive environment that encourages growth and achievement.

That honestly sounds more like the goal for an elementary school class than the goal for an adult society.

We don't necessarily need to support and encourage development that we don't agree worth, or even see as dangerous. And the idea that growth and achievement are always good things and should be wholly supported and encouraged sounds lovely on the surface, but there are plenty of things that could be considered achievement that we are better off without.

>What I'm trying to say is it seems like the world is "demanding" too much from Elon.

Like, common he set expectations by himself. He was the one bragging and running his mouth how everyone before him was an idiot while he is going to clean and fix the place.

> Additionally, there is a weird trend of people rooting for his failure. This is something I strongly stand against.

I really really hope for failure of his, quite apparent, political project.

Also, Paul, if you think Elon is doing something completely wrong, I encourage you to jump on Twitter Spaces and explain your concerns directly to him. He is live from time to time and happily chimes into a conversation with mere mortals.

> There is less advertising.

There's way more ads. Now every blue checkmark tweet is an ad, paid for placement. So I click on a tweet and all I get are pages of ads with the real tweets buried at the bottom.

Ads aside, there are host of other ways he's ruined twitter from censorship to blocking anon access to amplifying his own terrible tweets.

Why does a social media site need to enforce "safety?" What is "safety" anyway?

It's not "opinions I disagree with," I hope. Because labeling that "unsafe" is a new level of Orwellian.

Its a Facebook narrative to get you to use Threads. Twitter is doing just fine.

One thing he has done is push the paid replies to the top of every tweet. So now every tweet is full of low quality replies at the top and you have to scroll to find the higher quality ones below.

I don't personally agree with your observation, but setting that aside, would you consider that (pushing the paid replies to the top) the definition of "killing" Twitter?

I actually think it might. My experience is that the people who pay to get their replies to the top do it either because they have something to sell, or because they agree with Elon's politics. So the result is that every tweet I view have pretty much the same low quality answers on the top. That has made the experience much worse for me, and I personally would quit if there were a good enough alternative.

It also depends on how you define "killed". I dont think twitter will be gone, but there is a chance it will become a lot more similar to truth social or parler.

Do you think Hackernews would do better or worse if they introduced a paid tier that put your comment above others every time?

> Do you think Hackernews would do better or worse if they introduced a paid tier that put your comment above others every time?

If a paid tier alone puts your comment above others, then the result is negative. However, I do not believe Twitter's algorithm simply ranks by the presence of a blue checkmark. It is a signal amongst other signals and not a sole criteria. My feed has improved after all the changes, which is why I could not share your observation.

Truth social exists because of a censorship. The idea of a social network with high censorship results in a state of content being a walled garden. While the intention behind censorship may be to create a safer and more controlled environment, it often comes at the cost of limiting diversity of thought, stifling creativity, and hindering the progress of society.

Censorship, when implemented excessively, can lead to a state where only certain viewpoints and information are allowed, effectively creating an echo chamber that reinforces existing beliefs and discourages critical thinking.

Twitter has the potential to become the next Truth Social. If Meta enforces excessive censorship in Threads, people might perceive it as a more "positive" social network, offering the illusion of a better alternative. With media support, people could gradually migrate towards Threads, leaving Twitter in decline. However, if Elon achieves his super-app goal, Twitter's current form will no longer exist, rendering these social media-related issues irrelevant. Consequently, Twitter and Threads would evolve into a completely distinct applications.

Truth social exists to spread propaganda from china and russia.

I'm not saying or asking what Truth social is doing today (this is subjective), I'm explaining what was the driving force to create Truth social in the first place.

Yeah, it definitely is. It changes the usage patterns and quite a lot of what was interesting is gone.

The only good thing about it is that I spend more time reading books now.

It might depend on who you follow. For the small number of people I follow who also have a small number of followers, it means that people who are more invested in Twitter show up at the top of the replies. So it hasn't made it any worse...if anything it is better. However, I could see that happening more if you are following people with millions of followers. (Though their replies have always been a mess.)

Everywhere online is pronouncing twitter dead, but I agree. As a user, it seems more alive and vibrant than ever.

Its becoming a far right cesspool. And its making even less money than the little that it did before. Most people i know don't use it anymore.

Due to an excessive censorship prior to the acquisition, Twitter was a far left cesspool. All these users are still active after the acquisition, however many right-wing accounts were reinstated. Consequently, from the political perspective, Twitter is now more balanced than ever. One can be sure of this by tuning their feed – follow a politically diverse groups of people.

> Most people i know don't use it anymore.

Twitter hasn't really changed much. If you know people who no longer want to use the platform, then their decision is likely driven by the propaganda. In a way, it's not their personal decision, but the result of influence from elsewhere.

This is a lie. Not even manipulation or twisting the truth, but clear unambiguous lie. If anything, after Musk takeover, it became clear how good decisions twitter made before.

In addition, Must is not even trying to stand up to regimes and such. It became completely meek.

Also, twitter is not "balanced". It is right-wing in the sense of "we use right-wing as euphemism for nazi and such".

Federal ruling concluded that there was censorship prior to the Musk take over. This is not a theory, this is a fact.

If anything, it's just become more centered, now that people aren't getting banned for not conforming to the political whims of the flow of information.

Not sure why you're downvoted, as your observations are completely correct. In fact, there's so much more activity that they've been trying different ways to keep the UX efficient and stable. But, of course, some of the things they've tried haven't worked out so well, so people just like to cherrypick those to make incorrect arguments against Twitters newfound viablity.

Some differences that I've noticed:

1) fake/shell drop shipping companies dominate the ads with nonsense names and computer generated logos. An endless stream of low quality ads as opposed to real companies that used to advertise there.

2) Low effort facebook style posts have began to dominate any reply section, as users who typically had bad posts that saw no engagement, now pay to force people to look at their low effort/hateful/uneducated opinions. (still not gaining many followers but users are now forced to see it over higher quality users).

3) Bot issues are still very much there, every time I make a post with more than a dozen likes, I get 2-3 bot follows that are always a vaguely feminine name and a single post, following hundreds of accounts.

4) API cost increases have hurt positive bot accounts(ie OpossumEveryHour, various "every lot in x" accounts) while tons of crypto scam accounts, tshirt bots, etc have taken over.

5) The general changes to the checkmark system has destroyed the meaning behind the check, it used to serve to ensure accounts were not imposters. Now its simply every guy who watches self help entrepreneur videos has a check.

Just a handful of aspects of the overall degraded experience. Every day the site becomes more hateful and zenophobic, looking more and more like low effort boomer facebook groups every day. Regardless of opinion, the site used to be a place that you could get news from verified sources, follow public figures, and not be inundated literal Nazis. If you own a bar and a couple Nazis are made to feel welcome, you now have a Nazi bar.

> If anything there’s slightly more activity

Only from bots. I mean, this is not even disputable, saying that twitter has more genuine activity now or somehow better content is in the reals of fan fiction.

Even the pre Apollo saga, reddit ad revenue was nowhere close to facebook. Same with twitter, before Musk its ad revenue is not good. And both platforms are now trying to emulate facebook with heavy control on the app and the API.

After musk its ad revenue is worse.

Have adds been getting worse? Adds I get in the last 3 years have been way too good for me, so my personal experience has been the opposite (or maybe not? Definitely makes me want to buy more stuff). I guess I’m easily targetable

The official reddit app has an add every 4 posts i swear.

It's possible that the density of ads has increased (gotten worse) thus leading to you buying more items. And some bias in your recall makes you think they've gotten more effective at targeting you, instead of the same conversion rate but far more opportunities to convert.

The YouTube channel Second Thought recently put out a video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gSzzuY1Yw0) whose thesis was that even being cheaper than fossil fuels is not / will not be enough for green energy to win, because under capitalism a cheap thing that also has low profit margin will not attract investment compared to a bit more expensive thing which can be exploited for more profit. I wonder if a similar effect affects sites like Twitter and Reddit: the more efficient they are at connecting users and providing value for user's efforts, the less room there is for profit margin. As a coworker once pointed out to me, the parameter which represents "profit" in an economic system would correspond to "inefficiency" in an engineering context.

Your coworker is wise. Economic theory holds that in a truly efficient market, profits approach 0.

does that mean that investment is fundamentally beholden to market inefficiency?

“Market failure”, “Market gap”

Exploitation of a knowledge gap and existing market constraints.

If all you can think of are services, maybe. But the people that make things don’t agree.

no more than engineering is fundamentally beholden to imperfect science.

We ship fruit from Argentina where it is grown, to Thailand to be packaged, to the United States to be consumed.

While it may be efficient from the perspective of a spreadsheet, its inefficient due to the external costs, ie pollution from shipping, the delicate nature of just-in-time shipments, etc.

Your fruit cup might cost a bit more if it was to be done all in one place, but I would call that a cost for a less fragile system.

Probably I had already heard it in a longer version but wow, summing it up like that really hits home.

That’s economic profits that approach 0. You can still run an accounting profit, it’s just not bigger than it would be if you invested your money somewhere else, like land or mining or coffeeshops or whatever.

Economic profit is still there, it's abnormal profits that would go to zero. With zero EP the opportunity cost of staying in business would be to high.

With 0 AP, the industry is in equilibrium, with no companies dropping out, and no companies entering the market.

The economic profit is literally defined as the accounting-type profits, minus the opportunity costs. When the opportunity cost is large like that you are describing negative economic profit.

"Green energy cheaper why not using it" => it's not cheaper under a broad enough definition of cheap.

Junk bonds have high yields, why don't why all buy them?

True until it can be "monopolized". I guess in the near future govt will regulate green energy to some model that can give enough profit margin for corporates, and that will increase green energyp price to near fossil fuel, with bigger margin. Subscription based solar panel and electric vehicles come to mind.

As for reddit and twitter it's not the efficiency and room for profit, it's the cost to provide said content outweigh the revenue gained from ads. Hosting and maintaining global social media is expensive, which is there's no many players in that field.

You don't need a monopoly, you need competition. Renewables sell into the same energy market as fossil fuels, and get paid the same price. So you end up with low cost renewables making higher profits than high cost fossil fuels, and so attract more investment.

Long term, when renewables have displaced fossil fuels, then profits will fall. But that only happens after the renewables get investment.

I'm not sure what you mean by efficient, that Reddit gets people to the information they wanted as fast as possible?

I thought the whole idea behind Reddit and other sites was to keep people browsing with algorithms that keep them interested. Wouldn't that be what makes them efficient?

Amusing video. 0/

I have a different theory.

But first...

New projects have stalled because of permitting bottlenecks. 1/

Investment in '22 was $1.1 trillion dollars. Another record. https://about.bnef.com/new-energy-outlook/ 2/

There's plenty of other investors. Like utilities, NGOs, govts, and customers. Here's the list of projects in Bhadla Solar Park. https://cms.mercomindia.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/List-... Where's Big Oil, Vanguard, Blackrock? Scanning some dozen other marque projects tells a similar story.

Further, IIRC, the ROI for mega projects are largely predetermined via PPAs and such. Think of them as bonds. There seems to be no shortage of investors (for feasible projects).

Okay, back to my theory...

Big Oil knows this is the end game. But they want to compensated for all their soon-to-be stranded assets, real and (more likely) imaginary.

So this is a hostage negotiation. They've redoubled their efforts to up the stakes. "Pay us! Or we kill the planet!"

It's just straight up extortion.

I have no sense for how it'll play out.

My vote is for nationalizing all the fossil fuel companies. Then put all their execs (say Director on up) and board members in solitary confinement for life. Stage some show trials at The Hague for ecocide or whatever, to add a veneer of legitimacy.

Though I recognize opinions may differ.

0/ I prefer my socialism to be advocacy-oriented, vs whinging, but tastes differ.

1/ Separately, post IRA, the billionaire funded reactionary astroturf campaign is now in full swing. For instance, every single offshore wind farm has been opposed, farmers adopting solar are being harassed, ad nauseum. So even as permitting is reformed, brain worms will likely slow our transition.

2/ Early reports post-IRA suggest new investment, in everything, has gone bonkers. With potential for even more as the Biden Admin firms up the implementation. David Roberts' Volts podcast is one of my primary sources, highest recommendation. https://www.volts.wtf/podcast/archive?sort=new

> "Pay us! Or we kill the planet!"

Well it used to be "Pay us! And we kill the planet!"

My opinion is that the "or" operator is an improvement over the old. It implies that there is a chance to save the planet.

>My vote is for nationalizing all the fossil fuel companies

This will have exactly the opposite effect as you are envisioning. Having every citizen benefit from fossil fuels will make them much harder to keep in the ground.

If you haven't already done so, read Kim Stanley Robinson's article on this topic: https://www.noemamag.com/paying-ourselves-to-decarbonize/

> ...will have exactly the opposite effect as you are envisioning.

Sure.

Or not.

At some point, like with coal before it, oil's price will fall thru the floor. What then?

The fate of the countries listed will vary.

Foreseeing the inevitable, some of the Gulf States and Norway have been diversifying for a while. China is racing to create the post carbon future, hoping to outrun the bear. Russia is choosing oblivion. The others will fall somewhere in between. Or in the schizophrenic USA, somewhere(s).

> read Kim Stanley Robinson's article

Ok, have done. Meh.

Aside: "The Ministry for the Future" presents an absolutely best case scenario, in all its terribleness. Pretty unconvincing.

There's no reactionary movement actively thwarting progress, no emergent right wing eco-fascism.

Technological progress always begets social upheaval. Globe spanning wars were fought over much lower stakes (than climate crisis).

That said, I have no idea how any of this will play out. Can't even guess. But I expect the worse.

And I'm an optimist.

> But I expect the worse. And I'm an optimist.

Same. That KSR article just made me more pessimistic about fossil fuels. Politicians in the West need to quickly show some leadership towards a carbon tax.

That video makes no sense. If renewables are cheaper, then fossil fuels have even worse margins. The video claims for some reason that fossil fuels are "more exploitable" and more profitable, but assuming you're baking storage into cost, a lot of energy is fungible. Furthermore, solar can easily be installed on prem and many energy users have plenty of unused roof space, so even if all energy providers conspired to keep energy prices high, energy users can install their own solar.

It's worth noting that a decent portion of the value/products generated by by the fossil fuels industry isn't gasoline or diesel.

Tons of products are made with byproducts from the refining process, much of the research done by these companies over the last century was focused on inventing new products and creating markets to sell them to.

Replacing transportation use of fossil fuels with renewables doesn't actually replace all of the profits in the fossil fuel industry, and doesn't explain how those products we've now grown to expect will be created if we aren't refining oil for gasoline and diesel.

> Tons of products are made with byproducts from the refining process

Fun fact: Gasoline only became the fuel for cars because it was a refinery byproduct that had no real economic value, and so was very cheap. Before that, cars ran on alcohol or electricity, but oil refining was still a pretty large business anyway.

If we stopped fueling cars with gas, refineries would still operate to provide all of the other products we need, just as they did before gas was a thing.

Having worked for the upstream research arm of a major US oil company, I can confidently say this is no longer the case regardless of what the industry may have looked like when Esso was still a business.

Modern oil companies are extremely proud of the additional revenue streams they have invested to consume oil byproducts. The most disgusting of which, in my opinion, was the humble bragging that Hershey's chocolate includes petroleum products in the chocolate bars.

If we stopped consuming oil for gasoline today massive industries would collapse, both due to the loss of byproduct inputs and the transportation required to move products across the country. It wouldn't be the world returning back to a nineteenth century era where trains all ran on coal and lamps were fueled by whale blubber.

I wasn't claiming that there wouldn't be a large economic upset. There obviously would. I was only claiming that oil refining would remain as an industry. Probably a much smaller industry.

But all of that would only be for the good.

Both of the blunders you mention are recent no? (Elon / Apollo). And these companies were never making money so blunders can be considered errors forced by the need to monetize quickly.

> His two examples are Twitter and Reddit whose ad revenue is dying because those two companies have made huge blunders. Elon seems to almost actively be killing Twitter

I disagree. Elon doesn't care about ad revenue. He stated multiple times that the goal is to make Twitter a superapp.

Haha, what is a superapp?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super-app

Something like wechat, like payments, messages, socialmedia, shopping, ...

AOL but in the 21st century. Possibly minus the ISP part.

All the shit you do on the web, but controlled by one company, in their app, so they can rent-seek the hell out of everyone else's business.

He also threatened to "thermonuclear name and shame" advertisers who paused spending.

https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-name-shame-adverti...

That was a sarcasm. I should have stated that he doesn't care as much as other companies. Elon, being the richest person on the planet, is uniquely positioned and has a competitive advantage. He can risk losing ad revenue to achieve his goals - minimize censorship and create a super-app.

Is he still the richest twat in the pot? I would have thought his liabilities would have taken their toll on his net worth. Hair plugs can get pricey.

Yes. Elon is still the richest person on the planet. If you thought otherwise, you might want to reconsider your understanding of how wealth is both preserved and accumulated ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

> how wealth is both preserved and accumulated

By shifting your debts on the company you bought with that debt, so other people take the risks of his failures.

Honestly, it sounds like you are cheering and rooting for him to fail with Twitter.

Easy to say if you are not the target, especially from a guy who called others pedo guy

Yes. It's easy because I'm not attacking Elon, so he's not attacking me.

The man that literally censors views he doesn't like.

"Whoever thought owning the libs would be cheap never tried owning a social media company"

https://i.redd.it/6m0sgmktewab1.jpg

Yeah, sounds super focused on free speech.

And Threads censored from Twitter search and before that Mastodon?

> And Threads censored from Twitter search

Where did you get that conspiracy theory from?

To verify your information, I did a search on Twitter with the keyword threads. The search returned thousands of tweets. In fact, the very first tweet is a WSJ article describing how Threads may kill Twitter soon. Further, I searched for the hashtag #threads. The search returned all the tweets hashtagged with #threads.

As someone who works for an asian "superapp", the grass is always greener.

Superapps are self-limiting, because the app-size is too large for many user's phones (Uber has famously had this problem too, and thus split up their apps [0]).

The UX also tends to be a bit weird. Everyone wants to use the superapp differently and so the interface ends up being the lowest common denominator across all product families.

[0] https://apps.apple.com/in/developer/uber-technologies-inc/id...

Maybe, but none of that matters at the moment. These are after-the-fact problems.

Even when not making blunders reddit has not yet been profitable.

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