It feels like 2004 again
anildash.com
anildash.com
Non-tech people don't realize Google is getting worse or Chrome is bloated. Non-tech people go to Best Buy because "my computer is slow", drop triple or quadruple digits on a new laptop and then move on.
The renaissance of the open, human internet is in full swing only among the small number of people who have an opinion about the open, human internet.
David Sax, who wrote The Future is Analog back in 2016, has another book from 2022: The Revenge of Analog. It looks at the data from at least the first year or two of Covid and concludes, "Wow, this is awful for humans."
We need to get back to in person meeting with people, and find ways to expand that out again - it's been the default for most of human history, except about the past decade and change. We've tried it, and found it wanting. So let's go back to things we know work.
I'm hopeful about the next generation of teenagers coming up - they've seen the digital destruction caused by smartphones everywhere, and at least some of them are opting to carry flip phones instead of smartphones. We're seeing schools starting to simply ban phones entirely during the day, with massively positive results. So I think the changes are happening!
i've been remote since 2015 and nothing has really changed. niche orgs and niche skillsets, usually highly in demand and qualified, will make it work.
What I mean to say by saying this is that while I understand your use of the royal "we", I don't think you are speaking for everyone. The "things we know work" don't work for everyone and Covid was a welcome break for some of us. And while I wouldn't inflict Covid conditions on everyone just so I could be happier, unfortunately, the inverse doesn't seem to be true. Tyranny of the majority, as usual.
And if anything X/Twitter is gaining more relevance in normal peoples' lives, not less, since the acquisition.
Mastodon or whatever other federated alternative you're peddling are where the political extremists and pedos hang out and regular people want absolutely nothing to do with that.
Tech people of today are much more terminally-online than we were in 2004. We are not the cool kids this time around.
You are kidding yourself if you think that twitter has or is gaining relevance. It has nose dived in users and has dramatically lost revenue from advertisers.
Dont kid yourself.
Objectively untrue, Twitter lost ~35m (out of 370m) active users since the Elon acquisition. I'm not sure how much of that was due to his policies as opposed to people just losing interest, but people are leaving twitter/X.
20m less people voted for Democrats this week and that's just eligible US voters. The people leaving Twitter are terminally-online fringe weirdos, from the perspective of your average person.
Just look around your own networks at the people who left: It's all hardline political people, infosec, trans activists, furries, etc. Those are not normies. I know it's hard to look in the mirror and say you're part of the echo chamber, but with high likelihood everyone posting on this board is exactly that.
None of us here are normcore.
To normal people, Musk himself is a "terminally-online fringe weirdo"… and in the same group as everyone here on "the orange site".
And yet, it was able to generate over $4.4B in revenue. It also remains one of the most popular social media platforms.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/twitters-revenue-collapses-84...
By these numbers, if it made $4.4B in revenue, that's the total since he bought it, not per year.
Its kind of funny to see the discussion here about X. First it was the platform has lost too many users. Doesn't matter, its still very popular. Celebs, politicians and companies still advertise on there. If the platform didn't generate revenue for these companies, nobody would be advertising on there, would they? No they wouldn't.
Then I pointed out it still generates billions in revenue. You said, "Well, it used to generate a lot more." Well, it also had massive overhead operating costs which Elon cut to the bone, so back before he bought it, the platform needed to generate a lot more because of the amount of people who did little or anything productive for the platform. If you take into account the reduction in human capital, and the overall reduction in other overhead costs, the profit margins are still very close to what they were pre-acquisition.
You, however, responded to a claim about number of users with a statement about revenue.
> If the platform didn't generate revenue for these companies, nobody would be advertising on there, would they? No they wouldn't.
Many did in fact stop. That is specifically why the revenue is down, that they stopped.
> Then I pointed out it still generates billions in revenue. You said, "Well, it used to generate a lot more."
I specifically denied that it generates billions in revenue, linking to a statement of 114 million in a quarter:
https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/x-is-still-far-from-pr...
Your claim of "$4.4B in revenue" is what it did, past tense, in the year before Musk bought it — it's not the revenue it achieves now.
> If you take into account the reduction in human capital, and the overall reduction in other overhead costs, the profit margins are still very close to what they were pre-acquisition.
Not even close.
The purchase added $1.2 billion in annual costs for debt servicing, which is — all by itself even if it had zero servers, zero staff, zero other costs of any kind — 2.6x the total revenue.
The profit margin before the purchase was also a loss, -221m on a revenue of 5,077m in 2021.
So, even though I don't have a full financial report, I can say that at best it's now got a loss of at least -744m on a revenue of 456m. Probably worse because that's calculated on the assumption he's replaced all his staff with an LLM, has no bandwidth costs, no hosting costs, no rent, no electricity, and no lawsuits like the one in Brazil or all the previous staff who are suing for un-paid contractual obligations.
That's still the default way that most normie people share memes that I can see.
Posting is for blue-checkmark people and crazies.
And for all of the people that left Twitter, they aren't all suddenly active on federated alternatives. No, those got a fraction of those 35m users. Hundreds of thousands of users. Clearly not where the normal people want to hang out, as I said.
It is actually the terminally online techies who stayed under the guise of being "the resistance within" though I think most of them just can't bear to lose the inflated follower counts they have (the majority of which are probably just "P*SSY IN BIO" bots but whatever)
at this point it's the terminally online, or a bunch of non-agile holdouts like local governments or small businesses, non-profits, etc.
like my kids school district does announcements through FB and twitter, plus their website. it's far easier to get em via twitter. but that's mostly what its used for these days; anyone I care about communicating with has changed to Insta, gone to mastadon or lemmy, or just given up and walked away.
I'm pretty skeptical of that claim, I know plenty of non-techy people who hardly even know Twitter got renamed. Previously they would have stumbled on and read Twitter pages fairly often, but they never had an account so now they largely can't see any of it.
Has this ever been not true?
Has the median person ever participated in this?
Just like how the original golden age involved only a small portion of the population, so will this "web renaissance", in the best case.
Well kind of? We, the enthusiasts, can just opt out of the social-media big corporate internet any time we want. But it's never going to happen on this grand scale that these starry-eyed people are dreaming about.
to what they answered: oh yeah i have heard about that but what should i do? buy a new telephone?
Comparing what 20024 feels like compared to 2004 (what I've read), the times are very similar. Lots of contracting. Lots of layoffs and waiting to see if the economy gets better. Lots of companies tightening their belts and right now? I'm not getting nearly the interest from recruiters I did even a few years ago. The few interviews I have taken, the process has become increasingly more complex. It used to be two, maybe three interviews. One screen, one technical and one onsite for "cultural" fit. Now? I just had a company tell me the have SEVEN stages of interviews, including two all day interviews on site. I have no idea why its gotten this crazy, but here we are.
An article from CNN at the beginning of 2004:
https://money.cnn.com/2004/02/09/news/economy/jobs_model/ind...
Confounded by sluggish job growth, some economists are starting to suggest that underlying changes in the labor market -- including globalization -- mean it may be time to throw out the old forecasting models.
If they're wrong, then the current labor market could look a lot like that of the early 1990s -- a "jobless recovery" followed by a job boom. If they're right, then the next job boom could be a long time coming.
The final quote is kind of interesting considering we're 20 years on from 2004:
"The United States has long drawn comfort from the quality differential of its educational system," Roach wrote. "However, in the Internet Age with its ubiquitous diffusion of knowledge, innovation, and technological change, that may turn out to be an increasingly false sense of security."
They've successfully taken back business marketshare and marketshare in the post-cloud era.
Sure, they are dealing with companies who are using Linux instead of Windows Server and Macs instead of Windows desktops, Postgresql instead of SQL Server, but Microsoft has put all the developers on GitHub, Copilot, running their not-Windows-based apps on Azure, communidating with Microsoft Teams, etc.
They've made all the right bets lately and are focusing on the areas that provide the most value and interconnected usefulness to typical businesses. If Apple is the ultimate seamless hardware ecosystem, Microsoft is the ultimate seamless IT and software development ecosystem.
To me this feels like the dot-com bubble: lots of terrible business ideas as people feel-out the new opportunity space.
That said, what's different? I would say that his time there's also a lot of new businesses rapidly imploding because as soon as one person publishes an idea that gets tech-demo level of traction, almost anyone can ask an LLM to code up the same idea and publish their own equivalent in a few hours.
I can guarantee you have never used an LLM to code anything seriously large, complex, or novel
I'm not claiming to have done so, I'm saying almost all of the business ideas in the current bubble are so small and trivial they're also easily duplicated by an LLM.
I agree with the implication that where LLMs are at their best is precisely when they're not doing something large, complex or (particularly) novel.
But most of the ideas being tried out are also not large, complex or novel — just as the dot-com bubble had "making a loss on every sale but making it up with volume" and then the mobile app era had "now you can order your pizza on your phone" (like you couldn't already even without an app), the AI era has many very poorly thought out ideas that are easy to replicate.
odd that it was submitted that way multiple times
I think the article is a tad overblown. 2004 used to be way worse than today. I’ll take Gmail as-is just fine.
So the price of a single routable address has gone down by a _massive_ factor.
I mean, there's about twice as many active phones in the world as the full range of the IPv4 address space including the non-routable addresses…