The situation at Twitter isn't as bad as the media hype would suggest | Hacker News Reader

The situation at Twitter isn't as bad as the media hype would suggest

greyenlightenment.com

32 pointspaulpauper15 comments

> I have never seen such a product before that is so popular, and yet many of its users are also rooting against it.

Perhaps that's because the new owner continually makes impulsive changes to the platform that most of the user base hates. And most of it seems to revolve around wanting to give a voice to hate speech that provides nothing of value to the average twitter user.

>But the media overlooks that in order to have purchased Twitter, Musk had to pay some sort of premium above the closing price; this was unavoidable

Literally nobody has overlooked that which is why he doesn't bother to cite what should be a pretty easy citation if "the media" collectively overlooked it. We all know how acquisitions of public company's work.

>But it’s not all bad. Despite losing some advertisers, some of this is negated by running more ads, and also Twitter Blue and Gold subscriptions.

So even though Elon has publicly stated the loss of advertisers is making their finances untenable, he thinks that "more ads" and "twitter gold" somehow made up for it? In other words, this entire article is based on some random guy using 0 empirical evidence and just guessing that this is fine, everything is fine.

News flash: it's EXTREMELY unlikely that companies with existing contracts with Twitter are willing to double or triple their spend because Elon is putting their ads on repeat. What's more likely is that you're seeing the same thing again and again because there aren't enough advertisers in rotation, and Twitter isn't going to just not show you ads.

The blue and gold subscriptions are recouping a tiny fraction of the lost revenue from advertisers which is exactly why Elon has now floated charging every user $1/year.

The ship is sinking.

> I have never seen such a product before that is so popular, and yet many of its users are also rooting against it.

This is basically what it looks like when there's a product people feel locked into because of network effects and lack of options. People want something different but know they can't move en masse unless everyone is, by definition. So they root against it because they want the whole thing destabilized to a point where people are incentivized to make and try alternatives.

If any of this worked like a healthy competitive ecosystem, people would have just switched to a different service or whatever.

It's the classic chicken and egg problem in networked technology.

Gotta go where your friends are.

> So they root against it because they want the whole thing destabilized to a point where people are incentivized to make and try alternatives.

This just hasn't ever happened with a platform large enough to cater to normies. Everyone hates Facebook but they are still using it. A normie userbase is highly domesticated and will accept all sorts of abuses. Only platforms catering to mostly technical users are susceptible to this kind of user revolt, as seen with the Freenode story.

In this light, even as someone generally opposed to regulation, I can support government initiatives to undermine network power. Let's call it "tyranny of the network."

Ah, yes. That’s why we all still use LiveJournal, Friendster, MySpace, Digg, and Tumblr, yes?

Social networks can _absolutely_ auto-euthanise by annoying the user base too much; this has happened fairly frequently.

> So they root against it because they want the whole thing destabilized to a point where people are incentivized to make and try alternatives.

Wouldn't this de-incentivize any potential competitors?

After all, what's stopping the same groups from doing the same thing to them when they grow large, and with even more ferocity?

> Perhaps that's because the ... owner continually makes impulsive changes to the platform that most of the user base hates

So basically like facebook, reddit, youtube and every other social media (or other) platform?

There’s absolutely nothing to this article except the author’s vague impressions based on the number of blue checks and ads he sees in his feed and a heavy dose of wishful thinking.

> I see so many blue checkmarks now, indicative of a lot of paying users.

Speaking as someone that still wants twitter to exist, the number of posts I’ve seen has tanked. A lot of people I used to follow on twitter are inactive or deleted their account.

I think it’s possible the author is conflating seeing more checkmarks = more users, without grokking that

1) paid users are incentivized to use the platform and

2) the proportion of blue check users increasing COULD just as easily mean there’s less users total with the blue check users sticking around.

It doesn’t disprove anything but it also doesn’t prove any point. We could argue all day because we’re arguing about the vibes we’re getting.

Also, bluetick posts are promoted. You’d _expect_ to see a lot of blueticks.

I don’t think the author fully understands IPO pops. For one thing, the beneficiary isn’t necessarily the company, but rather the groups (often large institutions) that bought the initial shares. In a lot of ways, an IPO pop represents the company leaving money on the table. Additionally, they aren’t caused by some magic market mechanism that increases a companies price by x% when it goes public - they’re caused by the underwriters under-valuing the company (either deliberately or accidentally).

This article is damning by faint praise.

"Had he waited half a year he probably could have gotten a $10 billion discount" It's Twitter, so it had to have been bought by impulse. If there was only a way to parlay that impulsiveness into a profitable product.

I’m confused when people talk about this. If he had waited a year, wouldn’t the price of the stock he sold to pay for Twitter also have gone down? And the interest rate on the loans he got would have gone up? Curious if anyone has done a second order analysis on the purchase timing.

woah, elon does post on here

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