This is an absolutely brutal and spot on analysis. This dude is great.
The overwhelming majority of this revenue was from advertising, but according to Musk’s thesis that revenue stream was garbage. He would deprioritise ads, reduce moderation, and boost the posts of people who would pay $8 a month for a blue tick.
… So if someone is posting regularly enough to be willing to pay $8 a month for a blue tick, but has not built up a sizeable following organically, this is a very strong signal that the posts they are producing are no good.
It is exactly that content that Twitter’s new model relies on promoting – and those newly-minted blue ticks are quickly learning that there is no magic behind the checkmarks. New followers are not magically heading their way. The problem wasn’t a biased liberal algorithm, it was that their tweets are no good.
His ending was spot on as well:
There are major elections in the UK, EU and USA next year. There are no adults left at Twitter to safeguard their integrity.
Twitter’s chaos has consequences – but it’s not Elon Musk who’ll feel them. It is, alas, all of us.
Exactly. People follow stuff they like not because of a checkmark.
I remember in the early days of the Musk takeover he was mocked for talking about introducing microtransactions using Dogecoin as a way to combat bots and scraping. And it was good he was mocked, because crypto was a stupid as fuck idea for about a thousand different reasons. It’s interesting to read how a lot of people here support the idea of automatically sending a fraction of a cent to a website for each post to discourage bots and support smaller servers though.
With how prevalent the AI and data scraping conversation has become, I wonder what the view of Musk’s Twitter would be if he had stuck with that original plan instead of selling meaningless blue check marks. Probably still extremely negative, since a system like that would kill engagement overnight without SEO pumping tweets anyway… but an interesting thought experiment.
Not like the monetization scheme of blue check marks even ranks in the top 10 of terrible Musk decisions at this point. Seems like the dude is just constantly making and reversing poor choices.
With how prevalent the AI and data scraping conversation has become
You realize that “conversation” is fake, right? There is no increased load on Twitter, Reddit, or other web services due to “AI data scraping”. That was made up to distract from the material causes of Twitter’s failure, namely:
- most of their engineers were laid-off or quit
- they don’t pay their bills
Big tech companies that already run search engines already have a copy of all public Web pages, which they use for search engine indexing. They don’t need to make a second copy for AI training; they can just use the same one.
Google can train Bard with the same copy of the public Web that they use to create Google Search; same with Microsoft, Baidu, or any other big company that runs a search engine.
And for everyone else, there’s Common Crawl.
“Fake” from the side of data load, sure, I can see that, but there’s plenty of interest in trying to stave off the “dead internet” by incorporating new systems where bots and AI generated content aren’t profitable. That’s more what I was referring to.
It’s interesting to read how a lot of people here support the idea of automatically sending a fraction of a cent to a website for each post to discourage bots and support smaller servers though.
People are here because they are tired of paying for social media by looking at ads and promoted shit and other shenanigans like rate limiting and being funneled through hostile UX. The “you are the product …” business model of social media is collapsing in 2023 (LLM scraping, interest rates, inflation, enshittification, pick your poison, it doesn’t matter).
Donation- and micro-transaction-supported social media sounds like a fantastic alternative who’s time has come.
I also find it a bit rich to hear extreme pessimism about cryptocurrencies from a fediverse user. Crypto has exactly the same problems and exactly the same advantages over centralized approaches as the fediverse has, because it’s more or less the same core idea. It takes hard times to learn or remember the importance of censorship-resistance. But I guess the hard times are here for social media/fediverse users, where as many people (especially in the western world) still have it really good with their currency.
Republicans are a threat to democracy, and Musk is a Republican of the worst kind.
I guarantee Musk improved the possibilities of using Twitter for misinformation in upcoming elections on purpose, to help Republicans win. That’s by design, and probably the only real value Musk expects to get out of twitter by now.
Good riddance
Sad? It is a good day for Twitter to die.
Take it out back and put 2 in it’s fucking head already.
Most users have not abandoned Twitter as it collapses. Mastodon gets mentioned much less than it did a few months ago, and while an invitation to Bluesky, backed by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, was the hot ticket six weeks ago, most people seem to have shut up about it again by now. Twitter is still the best approximation of Twitter.
So to sum up his point, Twitter alternatives are failing because no one on twitter is talking about them. But takes like these are fundamentally missing the point, the people who pushed for those platforms have left for those platforms. They’re not adding to the conversation on twitter anymore (why would they?) so what the author is seeing is an increasingly worse and worse circlejerk. Unreasonable and incorrect opinions become louder and more visible, gradually pushing reasonable people away as they each reach their individual tolerance levels for bullshit. You can watch it in real time right now on reddit, posts are getting more and more critical of the blackout protests. This is the true way a social media platform dies, mass sudden migrations are the exception, not the rule.
Sad? Nah. It’s time we all migrate to Nostr!
It was necessary.
