Big signals that Musk made a lot of mistakes with twitter if Meta scrambled to ship a competitor like this. I don’t use Twitter so I won’t use this either but it’ll be interesting to see if the instagram folks can take this market from twitter.
> But hooooly crap does it underscore how much of a catastrophe Musk’s actions are
I think that pretty much nails it. This is Zuckerberg's life - social media & nearby segments - and he's still in his prime (very active, attentive to threats / paranoid) as a competitor in the business sphere. If you give him an opening to cripple Twitter opportunistically, he's going to take a shot.
Did Musk think Twitter actually had a moat (thus he didn't have to be overly concerned with his actions promptly sinking the ship)? It would be hilariously delusional if so.
It kind of did, just by network effects, but he’s spent the last 6+ months systematically filling it in. This last weekend might be the walls crumbling down
Twitter was great because you could broadcast and get picked up by news orgs and viewed by everyone for years. And it didn’t need a CRM or IT staff to deal with, just someone with a phone.
Now that that’s over it can’t meet the needs of services like my local power company pushing updates.
> Did Musk think Twitter actually had a moat (thus he didn't have to be overly concerned with his actions promptly sinking the ship)?
I don’t think he cared [0], because he’s always wanted to gut Twitter and remake it as a a very different service that is not really in the same market (very different substantive functions and revenue model.)
On the other hand he seems to have very not-evidence-based and turns-out-to-be-wrong-at-every-step map of how to get from a ad-supported microblogging platform to a user-pays long-form-content-and-financial-services platform.
[0] It did, through network effexts, but his plans were incompatible with focussing on preserving it.
> I don't think normal non-technically inclined people are going to move their twitter activities to "Threads".
Normal, non-technical users (including the key ones that produce a lot of content that other people come for) are often already on Instagram, and many are moving more of their presence their recently even without a Twitter-like UI in response to changes on Twitter. So, that’s something Meta can leverage to build Threads if they manage it well.
Did Musk think Twitter actually had a moat (thus he didn't have to be overly concerned with his actions promptly sinking the ship)? It would be hilariously delusional if so.
Oh I didn’t know that. At any rate those product folks at instagram have likely been salivating for the last couple months. Probably would be an extremely fun team to be on right now.
Musk's actions generally speaking make a lot of financial sense, it's just that he bought a company that wasn't founded on financial sense, and now all that debt requires payment because the economy is in tatters
> Musk's actions generally speaking make a lot of financial sense, it's just that he bought a company that wasn't founded on financial sense...
He bought it for ~40% more than it was valued and then scared away a lot of advertisers. That does not make financial sense, and is in large part the root of Twitter/his money problems.
His actions make zero financial sense. He bought it 30-40% overvalued, has tanked its income, destroyed its brand reputation, absolutely set fire to advertiser trust & safety.
Most estimates put it at ~25% of the value he paid 7 months ago.
All the debt you mention? He saddled them with that. That was t there until he came along. Another failure.
About the only positive financial thing you can say he did is cut payroll costs. Unfortunately he did that at the expense of site stability & reliability.
It will be studied in MBA programs as an example of what NOT to do
>All the debt you mention? He saddled them with that.
No, Twitter was already in debt. The alternative was letting it die, which mind you I don't think would have been a bad idea, but if Musk's goal is to keep it alive then the huge amounts of debt would certainly do that.
>Unfortunately he did that at the expense of site stability & reliability.
The site did not have the efficiency or importance to warrant the number of employees it had.
Buying Twitter at the price he bought it at made no sense once the market turned. It would have made financial sense to structure the deal in a way that it was easy for him to get out of, but he didn’t. Twitter has also now been saddled with additional debt with interest that needs to be paid on a regular basis since it was a leveraged buyout. I’ve been thinking about the deal since it happened and it certainly doesn’t seem to make financial sense to me.
The economy is in great shape despite how many people try to cope a recession into existence. ("Inflation" is a bad thing that can only happen in a good economy.)
He bought the company because he was mad they banned a hate speech account he thought was funny, unbanned them and brought all the other racists back to juice the numbers and so he could reply-guy them, and instantly lost all the advertisers because they don't want to be associated with statue avatar Nazis. That was not good business sense.
Killed audience? Most certainly, but as far as revenue I do think he's making headway. The fact is once you start demanding money for things people leave. The idea that users = money has never been true.
Now call me crazy but I disagree. I think - or rather I feel - he's doing an excelent job somehow. He's doing what other executives are afraid to do: he's building and building requires some walls to be hammered down ; and yeah this makes some noise and smoke. He's moving fast and breaking things (if you'd excuse the easy punt). To me, what he's doing is exciting and I think twitter is gonna thrive once the big work is done.
I don't like to use insults around mental health, or I totally would ;) Musk wants to build an "everything app" where people conduct business and accept payments. And he's shown over the past weekend that he is fully willing on impulse to literally just stop everyone from using the website.
So who on earth would be irresponsible enough to trust Twitter with anything essential or important after this? Who is going to build a storefront on a platform where they might wake up one day and find out that all of their customers are rate-limited from using the platform? And then the CEO jokes that he's doing people a favor by making them touch grass?
A bunch of artists who had (shortsightedly) built their business models around using Twitter as an art platform woke up one day to find out that their artwork can no longer be embedded in other websites. A bunch of government agencies and public services just found out that "check our Twitter for updates" no longer works. With no warning and with no announcement, all because Elon is mad that OpenAI hasn't cut him a check.
That is a business-destroying decision. Other executives are afraid of doing this because it's the kind of thing that permanently hinders your platform from ever being treated like a reliable place to do business or build on top of. It puts a mark on your businesses reputation that will never go away. And it's not a tech issue, it's a trust issue. Finish the big work and make something exciting, sure, but nobody with an ounce of sense would ever trust Elon not to pull the rug out from under them now.
You're going to build a business on a platform that might randomly decide to effectively shut itself down on a whim? Imagine if you had an Amazon shop and Amazon decided tomorrow with no warning that every customer on the platform is limited to buying at most one item per day, and also external links to Amazon no longer work for guest checkout unless your customer makes an account. How are people defending this? It makes no sense.
> Musk wants to build an "everything app" where people conduct business and accept payments.
Which is a bad idea. China has everything apps like WeChat because monopolies are easier to regulate, but customers don't actually like them, which is why we don't have them elsewhere.
When the App Store was launched, most apps had a single backend they connected to. I’m thinking of say the FB app or the Google maps app which only talked to Fb and Google respectively.
These payment apps integrate with a much wider arrays of backends from multiple providers and allow you perform many more unique use cases. E.g., making charitable donations and paying an insurance premium are unrelated but the Indian payment app I’m thinking of enables it.
This brings it closer to being an “everything” app.
We also have banking superapps in Russia - and even more. I still wouldn't say that's an "everything app", all of those features are related to payments and they can be in a banking app.
I take no view on whether Elon will be successful on making Twitter more profitable. But as a user -- and someone that typically supports Elon -- I have to say he's made the app subjectively worse IMO. I find the "For You" page and algorithm to boost more "junk" content than before. I used to find it interesting, now it feels like scrolling through Instagram meme pages. I'm at the point where I am thinking of uninstalling it.
Sorry your For You page sucks, but that's a you problem. My For You page is excellent - I see mostly the kind of tweets I like, and when I see a tweet I don't like I tap the not interested button. I actually love the new FYP way more than the old home feed, and the option to switch to the chronological "Followed" feed is more visible than before.
This is complete bullshit. I have the exact same experience Parent has, my feed used to be full of interesting people from tech, science, and journalism. Now it's ~80% meme feeds sprinkled with a small helping of what I actually care about. How is that my fault, as a user that had a perfectly good curated feed prior to For You existing?
The only reason my FYP is good is because I blocked all the different meme accounts they added. A good algorithmic feed for a power user is one that 1. shows people you follow but 2. in relevance order not chronological order.
The current one is half trying to be the new Reddit account experience and half trying to show you politics news you'll get mad about for engagement.
As someone who wants all of the other things he's supposed to be building, I can't imagine how you would not see Twitter as an objective step back.
Every single change he has made to Twitter is exclusively to claw back income from users because he made all of the advertisers leave. Anyone competent would have just added the features they wanted without burning 80% of the company's income and staff.
The cherry (or turd?) on top is that the platform is manned by a skeleton crew.
I kid you not: I recently saw a screenshot of a post by an engineer asking ex-Twitter engineers for help debugging an issue.. on Blind. Mind you, I don’t blame the engineer at all: it just gives you an idea of the mess Musk has made for himself.
I think the fact that the platform is still running is a testament to those who built & documented the infra. It’s also a feather on the cap for those who remain to man the ship, particularly if there was no other choice.
One catastrophic outage is all it really takes at this point.
Elon has said he's ok losing money on Twitter. Its about providing a free speech platform where people with opposing views are allowed to express them.
For the Turkish Gov thing, I should've specified US citizens on US Soil. The argument he claims is that a country can decide how they want to operate businesses inside their own borders. Twitter must comply. Its better to be allowed to operate in another country than be kicked out and have another more government subservient tech company replacement step in. If you believe otherwise, I think I would need to hear a strong argument that its the better alternative.
If someone is one of the most highly influential people on the planet managing gigantic marketcap companies like Tesla/Spacex, It makes sense from a personal safety standpoint not to dox their location each time they travel. Doxing people fits whose narrative again? I'm not convinced thats a 'narrative'.
Banning links to substack was temporary. Substack released a competitor and was scraping their contact data. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2023/apr/11/row-between-tw.... How would you handle the situation where you have a company losing money and competitors are sucking your data dry?
In regards to scraping users from the platform your moving away from, Facebook did the exact same thing to twitter in 2013. The veterans running these companies know the playbooks.
https://twitter.com/TechEmails/status/1650894515702763521
Its naive that people sit on the sidelines opining they should've done the opposite when all the evidence points to blocking scraping as a standard business practice (and scraping is illegal if the company forbids it in their policy). Most people saying otherwise have not run a company or startup in a competitive environment where every other player wants to steal their lunch.
If someone is crawling your content, that's usually bad behavior.
If a user signs up somewhere else, and wants their data to be ported over, there is very little to legitimately complain about. Even more so when the scraping is just contact data for that user, because that's very little server load.
Go away with this "steal their lunch" stuff. It should be legally mandated that users can transfer contacts between services.
Also blocking API access is very different from blocking user-posted links.
1. Wikipedia had the same issue with the Turkish government, fought it in Turkish courts and won. Twitter bent over and used the "but another even worse app will take our place" excuse you're using here. They're not helping free speech here.
2. Flight data is public, no one is doxing anyone. The incident Musk used as proof that this was bad was while he was in a car... far from his plane.
3. Twitter banned Mastodon links before Substack. Was Mastodon scraping Twitter's contact data too?
You see, the problem is not even what he's doing with Twitter. It's his company, who cares? It's claiming that Twitter is the internet's "town square" and that he is anti-censorship, while restricting access to the platform and censoring content. It's complete bullshit and people like you fall for it and even defend it.
I'd respect Elon Musk more if he came out and just said "this is my platform, I'll ban stuff that affects me or affects my revenue, get out if you're not happy." Instead, he says one thing and does another.
I can't think of a single improvement to Twitter in the past 9 months. What changes I have noticed have ranged from annoying (extra-long tweets, a lot more white supremacist content to block) to destructive (boosting paid users, recent usage restrictions).
Elon has chased off all the biggest advertisers, turned into an abrasive online personality that elevates insane conspiracy theories, and now you can only view 800 tweets a day. That doesn't sound like an "excellent job." I had some hope for when he took over Twitter, because Twitter was not well run...but he's made the previous CEO (who was not a good CEO) look like a genius. He even failed to lure Donald Trump back...I mean. The only reason people are still on Twitter is because there is no alternative, and there are still very valuable voices on Twitter. Once or if they leave, it's all over.
