X rolls out new ad format that can't be reported, blocked
mashable.com
mashable.com
Premium tiers are not going to come close to replacing the lost revenue to declining ad spend. Especially when it's in a death spiral with increasingly spammier ads causing a flight of higher quality advertisers. And there isn't the profit to cover debt payments let alone pay for new features like payments that X desperately needs to generate new revenue.
Meanwhile Meta gave a glimpse of the levers it can pull by adding Threads to the Instagram sidebar. Ever closer integration is going to drive hundreds of millions of new users at zero cost.
He does like attention and with controlling twitter, he can control quite some attention. I don't think he can easily give that up, as long as it stays somewhat relevant and as long as he already burned so much money with it.
Without them agreeing to a restructure of the debt or committing to ongoing bridge loans X will be bankrupt. The banks have already tried to sell off the debt to reduce their risk but declined as they were only getting offers valuing the company at < $8b.
We are reaching the cross-roads where big decisions will be made. And one is whether Musk leaves with some dignity e.g. he hands over day-day work to someone else or is simply forced out.
He made the purchase because he was forced to. He didn't want to buy it at all. He was doing his usual trolling thing and got trapped by his own nonsense.
The interest payments to the banks on the loans will continue to come due. I doubt Twitter is pulling in anywhere near enough revenue to satisfy those loans.
The decision to sell it may not be his.
To be honest, I've never understood why we allow the purchased company to buy itself. It makes no logical sense and I've never heard a good argument as to why this is beneficial to our economy in general.
And he’d probably get away with it.
If he did that, it could recover its former might perhaps, and the censorship he disliked may return.
Thus he likely wants it dead, rather than in other hands.
Closed platforms are not and can never be "free speech zones." They answer to their owners, period.
Also, crimethInc ban will soon have its birthday (https://fr.crimethinc.com/2022/11/25/elon-musk-bans-crimethi...)
[1] https://newrepublic.com/article/169112/elon-musk-anti-trans-...
Twitter used to fight _actual_ censorship. From governments demanding things be taken down. Musk rolls over like a puppy for China, India, Turkiye, etc...
Before Musk, Twitter's full compliance rate hovered around 50%; since the takeover, it is over 80%.
These countries include China [2] and India [3].
[1] https://restofworld.org/2023/elon-musk-twitter-government-or...
[2] https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/twitte...
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/apr/05/twitter-accuse...
That was rapidly shown not to be the case when @ElonJet got snuffed out.
https://www.theverge.com/2022/12/18/23515221/twitter-bans-li...
He claims all sorts of things, the majority of which turn out to be utter nonsense.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Sweeney#Creation_of_fligh...
you probably aren't famous so maybe you don't understand, but that sounds potentially harmful for someone who is.
I’m not so convinced. What harm does this account cause?
The most harmful thing that comes to mind is that someone could use the information to plan a murder. The account doesn’t provide this information; it is actually relevant that the information is otherwise available. A person so dedicated to hating this person that they decide to show up with violent intent at a public airport where his jet just landed or is about to take off is pretty damn likely to also be dedicated enough to find this information from other public sources. The account only makes it easier -- it doesn’t enable given that they’re already able -- for someone else to be actually harmful.
This talk of some billionaire gets to fly around in his private jet and the worst thing about it is that everyone else in the world gets to know when and where the jet arrives and departs... it’s just not something I have any sympathy for.
When then Ashley Madison scandal hit, people used that to find out if anyone of their neighbors was having an affair.
Still we didn’t close off public access since it’s useful for more than shaming others.
Elon is free to not own private jets
What’s with coddling a minority that does not care we exist?
Security through obscurity, it ain't.
Banning Nazis is not censorship, it's basic hygiene.
All of that has gotten much better, and appeals are approved much faster, much more often. It used to be if you replied to a tweet disagreeing with someone, and their fans/followers report bombed you, you'd get banned with no recourse. That's fixed now.
Also, my impression of recent twitter is that it's very heavy on user silo's now, sure if you search for objectionable content you'll find it, that's not unique to twitter, but you don't really happen upon it unless you're following people who post things you find objectionable.
I don't really see anything wrong with that model, and if you're truly worried about nazi's, wouldn't you rather it's on a public cleartext platform instead of on something like session where it's mathematically unable to be seen/policed by -anyone- not directly involved?
And like, I'm no fan of Ol'Musky, I think his accomplishments are mostly him attracting talented people and then taking credit for it, but to say that twitter isn't safer/better now... idk, seems like it is by any measure, which might be because it was horrible before, and it's simply less horrible now, but, still, less horrible all the same.
But you sound so sure that I assume you have data, would you share it?
Instead, we have racists who went antiquing for Nazi propaganda and dusted off the old classic "elite pedophiles who run international politics are trafficking children and drinking their blood." Something actual elected officials have been able to engage with and not lose significant support.
They really didn't. "Non official narratives" were usually conspiracy theories or hate speech. If anything, these accounts were given multiple opportunities before being banned. Only the worst of the worst were banned.
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/news/a56987/godwin-law...
> Godwin wrote on Facebook that someone had asked him to post a statement about Charlottesville, because people bring up his law to shut down arguments all the time. Turns outhe was happy to oblige. "By all means, compare these shitheads to the Nazis," he wrote. "Again and again. I'm with you."
> In general, Godwin has always said you can bring up the Nazis in an online conversation, as long as you're doing some research first. "If you're thoughtful about it and show some real awareness of history, go ahead and refer to Hitler or Nazis when you talk about Trump. Or any other politician," he wrote in The Washington Post backin 2015. But in the case of the white supremacists in Virginia, there's no research necessary to make that comparison. The facts speak for themselves.
Incredible that needs to be said, but here we are.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Nazi_bar
> From an anecdote shared by Michael B. Tager (@IamRageSparkle) on Twitter in July 2020. In the multi-tweet thread, Tager recounted visiting a "shitty crustpunk bar", where he saw a patron abruptly expelled. The bartender explained that the man was wearing "iron crosses and stuff", and that he feared such patrons would become regulars and start bringing friends if not promptly kicked out, which would lead him to realize "oh shit, this is a Nazi bar now" only after the unwanted patrons became too "entrenched" to kick out without trouble
He didn't buy twitter for profit. He doesn't mind that it's losing money.
You fell for his narrative, which is false.
https://english.elpais.com/international/2023-05-24/under-el...
I also think that advertisers will return when budgets increase again. There aren't that many other good options.
In the long term, I think it goes nowhere and returns to profitability and a higher valuation.
It's the web. Please do better.
I also hate how news outlets embed Xitter, although I have seen some creative workarounds.
Is humanity really dumping the last remnants of productive political discourse into this centralized and manipulative trash cans because we are unable to define suitable web standards (e.g. for short and distributable messages)?
Obviously there are people that have cut social media out of their lives, and there are people that belong to Mastodon servers and so on, but this is a small subset of users.
Uhm - Musk paid $44 billion for Twitter. Obviously it's not worth >=$44B currently but it's also obviously still worth more than $1B.
Edit: Some people seem to be thinking I'm arguing it's worth >$10B -- I am not. I'm only arguing that it's absolutely worth more than $1B. There are plenty of sources in the past 6 months which have valued it between $3.7B and $8B. There are absolutely buyers out there who would love to buy Twitter right now for a 90% discount vs. what Musk paid for it. You may still believe those parties would be overpaying, but it wouldn't be super difficult to find a buyer as long as there weren't other onerous terms attached to the deal.
https://www.reuters.com/breakingviews/elon-musks-x-is-black-...
Yeah, but he overpaid, and that is only about the value pre-deal, and not:
(1) the adverse effect the news of the deal had on Twitter even before it was consummated, and
(2) The adverse effect his tenure has had on Twitter’s value since.
Is it now worth more than $1 billion? My guess is yes.
Is it worth more thsn $10 billion? Probably not.
That "can't reply, retweet, or even see the account's name" format should be distinct enough for things like uBlock or a specialized extension to find.
I thought this was illegal? I guess just toss it on the pile of lawsuits Musk is ignoring?
Either way, whatever. X is dying. I think the mainstream assumes “it’ll never happen, it’s too big to fail.”
But it’s not. X really is shrinking and dying. It won’t die this year or next but it’s following in the steps of MySpace, perhaps more slowly. But it’s happening.
https://twitter.com/3MTS_/status/1710360772612706416
All of that account's replies are spam like that. They're not even the worst offender, there are a handful of other accounts that just post emojis, complete nonsense, to every single popular account.
Musk had already destroyed the value of looking at a tweet's replies, which I consider the "accuracy" of the platform. But that was never the main draw anyway.
So far, my feed remains pretty good - the "recall". I've opted in to follow certain people or topics and truly, there's no better place to get the latest news. But if they destroy the value of the feed, there really will be no reason for anyone to stay.
Can’t imagine this lasts.
This is quite a claim to make.
Twitter may be dying for hackernews, but is it alive for other communities?
Twitter has a massive amount of "lock in" effect, however. If it didn't Musk would have killed Twitter ten times over now, but somehow people always rationalize things getting much worse. With some of the newest change a new wave of Twitter refugees are hitting Threads, and it's comical, if a bit sad, how often their first tweet is citing their Twitter follower-count, seemingly obligating the Threads community to match it to keep their interest. Eh.
There’s a restaurant near me which I used to like, but which has gone downhill over the last couple of years. I don’t know or particularly care who owns it, but I don’t go here anymore.
Probably depends on the community. The non-tech people I know have almost entirely abandoned Twitter. Those who still use it use it far less than they used to.
Context: Heard something about an active shooter this week and followed a link to the Baltimore Police twitter account[0].
As I'm no longer logged in, I see tweets from 2021 and 2017 with no indication that there's new content I'm missing. If this is how public services are trying to get the word re:ongoing events, it's a terrible option.
(granted, you said journalists and politicians, not public services…)
I think that we just assume that complete platform death (Friendster, MySpace) can’t happen anymore, but I think it definitely can.
Network effects make AND break platforms.
(I don’t use either)
Twitter directly competes for the same advertising revenue the legacy media does. If Twitter was dying, it behooves the legacy media to report about it.
I can't think of any other industry where a someone spends more time trying to paint the competition in a negative light, than casting their own brand in a positive one. Think about it.
Since there's no rebuttal in your reply, consider this a break :)
Analog radio, newspapers, and television were already in a managed decline before the 2016 election. The events that unfolded forestalled the inevitable a bit longer, but the music is about to end for these propagandists masquerading as reporters. Trust in legacy media is at a record low.
Edit: If you want a concrete example, look at how rampant plagiarism is on social media/Youtube[1]. Traditional media journalists regularly got fired[2] for doing shit like this.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDtJ7bte_zg
[2] https://news.yahoo.com/cnn-news-editor-fired-plagiarism-1450...
How many competitors to the NYT reported there were no WMD and why were they all smeared and discredited?
The fact that some information might be plagiarized is hardly of any consequence compared to the million or so people that died because of the legacy media reported Saddam had WMDs.
When the institutions completely fail to get all of the most important things right (and in fact, almost completely wrong) it's only natural to turn elsewhere.
Lots, including major papers with receipts on not only that the US claims that the Times was hyping were false, but the fact that US and UK governments because, e.g., the so-called “Winnebagos of Mass Destruction” were not mobile weapons labs and the UK government knew this ab initio because they were sold to Iraq by the UK government.
> why were they all smeared and discredited?
They weren't, they were just ignored, both by the Times and the dominant political narrative, because largely people didn't care about the truth.
The problem is if people didn't care about the truth then why exactly does it matter now? (Also, surely you understand this is not a defensible position nor do I expect someone to defend war crimes, but this is HN and there's plenty of idiots willing to surprise me.)
This is kind of nuts, that's "random porn site" levels of advertisement. I don't know why anyone even works for this company any more. They day when someone tells you to let ads through that fake legitimate UI elements is probably when any developer should throw the towel in
Also btw is it even legal in Europe or the US to show an ad without disclosing it as such
I know a lot of people who are happily using Mastodon or Bluesky, not looking back and enjoying their chosen platforms a lot more than Twitter.
Force the “For You” tab after Every Single App Switch.
Randomly use a `WKWebView` instead of a `SFSafariViewController` as the in-app browser. Denying you various features like Reader, AutoFill, Fraudulent Website Warning, and content blocking.
Why? To fuck with you. Musk-Twitter has never been a good-faith operation. Where’s tech journalism when you need it? Thought they (still) spend half their days in that app.
Original comment: I'd bet $8 that either ads without Community Notes, or ads with hitbox the size of the entire tweet row that takes you to an embedded link (like the new format of Posted Links) are next.
The latter would be especially bad: just one mis-swipe away from hitting an attacker controlled website :(
Glad I stopped looking at Twitter every day
/s, of course