Hacker News Reader

Comment by jcelerier | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand this thread - twitter is pretty much entirely dead, like stackoverflow - in some zombie state before getting the plug inevitably pulled in a decade or so. Its revenue halved since 2020.

View on HN

Net income/profit is what matters, revenue is largely irrelevant. Your own date is a perfect example of this since Twitter somehow managed to lose a ton of money in 2020 when they did indeed see record revenue, probably owing to over-stuffed election coffers. X's user counts and EBITDA are at record levels. In 2024 it was $1.25 billion on $2.7 billion revenue, contrasted against 'old Twitter's' $0.68 billion on $5 billion revenue in 2021. [1]

[1] - https://archive.is/evLAL (WSJ archive)

Doesn't this forum periodically discuss an article[*] about profit not really mattering in the grand scheme of things? (As in, profitable and growing companies are capable of showing profit whenever they want, and conversely to show no profit if they so wish.)

[*] This one I believe - https://commoncog.com/cash-flow-games/

The numbers I referenced were EBITDA, which is mostly the point of that article.

But a software company shouldn't really need to show even EBITDA. Amazon didn't between 2000 and 2012.

I'm not sure this is true. Amazon was investing heavily in things that would be reasonably expected to yield future gains, like fulfillment centers and just broadly expanding their logistic capacity. But for Twitter? So far as I know, most of their expenses were just ongoing operational costs and which seem to have been greatly bloated owing to mismanagement.

That's due to Elon's gross mishandling of Twitter governance (e.g. demanding that the recommendation algorithm be tweaked so that literal Nazis dominate people's feeds), not due to any technical failings of the platform as a result of downsizing the engineering staff.

Twitter really is a hellscape. I was drawn in for a few days recently and started getting affected by the barrage of relentless right-wing garbage. And for those on twitter it seems like the most important information in the world when it’s just a dopamine pump of rage and fear. Easier just to switch it off and live your life in peace.

I doubt it. There are no Nazis in my feed.

For some people, everyone else is nazi.

This is a thought terminating cliche, ironically about a thought terminating cliche. X does have a problem with actual, literal, antisemitic, genocidal Nazis. No funny business or stretched definitions. Nazis. Dismissing it just because of a few people going by the Nazi bar analogy risks normalizing the actual fucking Nazis we're dealing with. "Oh everyone's a Nazi to you people" is a crazy thing to say when the individual under discussion is screaming about globalist cabals of bankers ushering in white erasure. And that is who is getting algorithmically elevated on X.

Also plenty of racists and homophobes, more than I see just about anywhere else on the internet. And more wild, rabid hate surrounding trans people than I see anywhere outside of narrow, festering cesspools in wastelands like 4chan.

I believe you that there are literal Nazis on X, just as there are on every social media platform (and society in general). I despise Nazis but again I literally never see them on my feed so I find it hard to believe that this is a major problem or that the platform is boosting that content. If you're seeing a lot of Nazi content then you're probably following the wrong type of accounts.

No, in fact I block every such account I see. I go on Twitter for inspiration of various kinds, not for doomscrolling, although I recognize that that's in vogue. But the owner of the platform has been demonstrated to artificially push posts and accounts into people's timelines and notifications, particularly his own, and he has retweeted, replied to, and otherwise boosted blatantly antisemitic conspiracy theories. It's pretty well documented as something that does actually happen, and not just as some sort of algorithmic quirk.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com