X will pay its Premium users to engage with each other
theverge.com
theverge.com
Circling the drain.
The incentives only point one way now. If Twitter/X ever was a forum for genuine conversation or debate, they just killed it.
It never was. Twitter is shit now under Elon, and was shit before him.
Some very annoying people just happened to like how that turd used to smell, is all.
Consider all the soothsaying in this thread, does this cause HN to "be" a soothsaying platform? In part yes, but not in whole.
The format creates incentives for the most inane but inflammatory posts to gain traction, and the userbase it cultivated was all in for the drama. So many witch hunts started on Twitter, for the most asinine reasons, and the mob mentality of the userbase made it the norm.
And also not, simultaneously.
Related: do you disagree with the theory that the speed of light is relative to the frame of reference of the observer?
EDIT: I must say though, you're not wrong. Twitter is a lot like the Wild West, lots of clever racists, it's nuts.
Yes, relatively speaking, if you have ass cancer it kills you and it sucks, but to the tumor growing in your ass everything is fine.
The people that enjoyed Twitter were, relatively speaking to the world at large, ass cancer.
The world’s richest man owns it as a plaything.
People want Musk to fail so badly they literally make things up.
That's your retargeted ads.
From my experience, I haven't noticed any changes.
> Fidelity recently estimated Twitters value is ~25%
This is an entirely made up figure based on guesses and politics. Nobody, including Fidelity, have any clue to the internals of Twitter now that it's private.
The world's most important news still breaks on Twitter (including the sitting president's announcement to not run for re-election), despite all the Musk hate.
Fidelity is an X shareholder. They absolutely have its financials.
On a quarterly basis their valuation committees have to value their holdings, including illiquid ones, in part to appraise how their managers are doing. In this case, their valuation committee wrote down the value of their equity in X to 25% of the original acquisition price. Given Twitter was about 1:4 levered on acquisition, that’s writing down the value of X as an enterprise to roughly half.
Given it's prevalence and importance, there is no way Twitter is worth 1/2 or 1/4 of what it once was. If given the opportunity to purchase Twitter - what would someone pay for it? What would someone pay for the single-most important and influential website/app in the world - the only one that has presidents and governments around the world make announcements and break news?
The mass exodus never happened - of either users and advertisers. This is flatly in fantasy land for Musk haters. It's amazing to witness.
So yeah, Fidelity is making stuff up.
Straw man. We’re talking about the value of X, the company, not Twitter, the community. The former is what Fidelity and Musk own; the latter is what X ostensibly controls, but we’re getting into WeWork-style Narnia metrics when we start community adjusting numbers.
> given the opportunity to purchase Twitter - what would someone pay for it?
Not the purchase price! X’s minority holders have offered at a 50%+ discount. Nothing trading. The banks will sell you the loans at a haircut. Nothing trading.
We have a testably falsifiable level, and it’s somewhere below half what Musk paid. (Where, we don’t know, because the bonds are saying the equity is worthless while there are buyers of the equity at a positive price.)
Twitter has done amazing job at incinerating the value it once had as connective matter of society.
Also the algorithm now top-ranks a bunch of paid-for blue-check musk-ites and batshit-crazy-right-winger trash.
Nobody will know the value of Twitter until Musk sells it, if ever. That's par for the course of private business.
What we do know is literally all of the most important stories continue to break on Twitter. CNN and other MSM companies continue to write articles about specific Tweets, and more. Twitter remains - as it was before - the figurative public forum and no alternative offering has come anywhere close to overtaking it. Nothing has changed.
They’re not. Valuation committees are notoriously deferential to PMs and issuers, particularly for private names.
(Psst. You're not replying to a serious person.)
Ah, yes, I forgot investment firms receive standard-issue crystal balls.
Basically the subsidization flow: high engagement and advertisers > lower engagement > free users
Giving a user a feature like that will only hurt the company, so it won't be implemented.
(it's imperfect, there are also bots which mirror content and many of the creator tools support posting to multiple platforms including Bluesky)
it feels like the last major shift in quality occurred around the time twitter started doing revenue sharing. the algorithm incentivizes provocative or "relatable" content so many people who were given that opportunity shifted to an "engagement bait" strategy, which doesn't lead to high-quality content, it just leads to stuff that provokes a reaction. alongside that there seemed to be a huge flood of "me too" content in replies. i can't imagine the majority of the people responding to everything and anything with the most inane nonsense are benefitting from this program, but that was really the time i felt the first profound shift in quality on the platform. people's relationship to what they were posting changed meaningfully, and the overall quality of content suffered as a result.
this shift moves the motivation to exhibit engagement-bait behaviors from implicit (when people see ads near my content, i make money, therefore i should game the algorithm to be seen by as many people as possible) to explicit (engagement is how i make my money.) i cannot imagine this improving the situation with regards to what's being posted. it kind of seems like a recipe for more of the worst parts of twitter to blossom - accounts that just rush to swipe and repost viral hits from other platforms first to gain traction, explicit incitement through saying increasingly controversial things (to both juice the people who agree and coerce argument from people who don't) and so on.
realistically, couldn't this potentially directly add up to rewarding people who post misinformation? if someone with a lot of visibility posts a false claim, people rush to correct and provide context, juicing engagement numbers, leading to them making more money lying than they would telling the truth. it's kind of perverse.
if i was more conspiracy minded i feel like i would suggest this was explicitly designed to promote the creation and dissemination of misinformation but i really don't think there's anyone thinking that strategically at twitter.
They're certainly worse now, but I don't see any cause to lament a transition from vapid vitriol to more vapid vitriol. Nothing of value was lost.
Tech Twitter brought tons of great interesting citations & references to discussions. Even amid the rest of Twitter, there was such a massive global brain at work: the associations & connections people would make was amazing. It's remarkable to me that such rank cynicism often goes unchecked. I pity those who so deeply missed out, who didn't see or grasp the amazing power of a good network of follows.
The only thing that has changed is Twitter is directly speaking to their average audience, which you are not, and that is now painfully more obvious.
no doubt we're a decade or more past peak twitter, but it seems like the algorithm has entirely flipped and is designed explicitly to surface as much lowest-common-denominator content as possible, drowning out anything targeted that you're actually interested in. i'll never say it was particularly wonderful, but it was better than it is now.
I’m still kind of shocked they went ahead with it; when he first started talking about it I put it down to Musk’s endless need to spout nonsense.