Twitter Twee: all your tweets are belong to chud

[Kalbear]

Also, if you're wanting to reduce costs it is definitely something to just...refuse to pay bills owed. But that also does not make it likely anyone is going to partner with you.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/22/technology/elon-musk-twitter-cost-cutting.html

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SAN FRANCISCO — Before Elon Musk bought Twitter last month, the company’s executives had racked up hundreds of thousands of dollars in travel invoices that the social media service planned to pay.

But once Mr. Musk took over the company, he refused to reimburse travel vendors for those bills, current and former Twitter employees said. Mr. Musk’s staff said the services were authorized by the company’s former management and not by him. His staff have since avoided the calls of the travel vendors, the people said.

 

[Mlle. Zabzie]

@Ser Scot A Ellison I'm not 100% sure why you tagged me in your post in the last thread.  BUT, the $1 billion of interest expense Twitter is racking up may or may not be tax deductible, and, in fact, as their advertiser revenue declines, it is less likely to be tax deductible.  That is because, very generally, a corporation may only deduct interest equal to 30% of what amounts to its EBIT (starting 1/1/23, roughly EBITDA before then, and it's a little bit more complex).  That means as a taxpayer's revenues decline, its ability to deduct interest also declines (albeit with a carryforward of the disallowed interest expense if things ever turn around), giving rise to what those of us who practice in the restructuring area call the "death spiral".  Because of this rule, failing companies can absolutely end up with a large amount of cash tax on top of a large amount of cash interest expense (which interest expense has the benefit of collateral).  

To be very very clear, I know absolutely nothing about the Twitter tax situation other than what anyone can read in the papers.

[Heartofice]

28 minutes ago, Kalnestk Oblast said:

It had doubled in numbers of active users in 5 years. 

As it turns out, having a system that works well in one language is hard to do for all languages, and especially so for different countries. Twitter had chosen to grow somewhat slowly, but it was growing. Again, the notion that it wasn't is not backed up in facts. 

It was growing,  but is still at numbers lower than social media platforms that came out later , or dying platforms like Snapchat. Point being it was not going to hit numbers the bigger platforms have managed to achieve, it’s had a lot of opportunity as it’s been around for a long time. I

And yes I agree , it does raise the question as to why Musk would buy it. You are right that it’s hard to imagine an everything app if it doesn’t have everyone on there.. but then conversely if you build an everything app, there is more ability to bring people to the platform. 

So yeah, I don’t get why Twitter would be used as the starting point for something like that, but at the same time I’m not writing it all off like everyone else here till I see more.

 

[Zorral]

On 1A, many a talking head, including the editor of The Verge, he CEO of Gerber, say advertising isn't musky objective at all.  What he's really doing is taking on YouTube, to become a YUGE content creator and supplier.  Very, very, very smart sez these talking heaqds, who use musky's first name in a most familiar manner.  Also musky intends to make Twitter a bank -- like, um, Venmo? -- since that's where  Real Money, particularly crypto, is going. He's well on his way having gotten all the previous employees of what twitter was previously out of there, and now hiring all new talent that is happy to turn twitter into his vision of what the platform will be.

Various of the media talking heads guesting their input to the program clear up musky's non-contribution to paypal, tesla, etc.  He buys companies already made.  He's never implemented anything from idea to completion in his life.

 

 

[Kalbear]

2 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

It was growing,  but is still at numbers lower than social media platforms that came out later , or dying platforms like Snapchat. Point being it was not going to hit numbers the bigger platforms have managed to achieve, it’s had a lot of opportunity as it’s been around for a long time. 

It probably wasn't going to grow at the rate TikTok was going to, sure. But that assumes that the only thing that you ever should care about is user growth. Twitter probably needed to work more on user monetization over user growth, honestly. 

Again, though, the notion that it wasn't growing or wasn't profitable are both simply things not backed up by facts. 

2 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

And yes I agree , it does raise the question as to why Musk would buy it. You are right that it’s hard to imagine an everything app if it doesn’t have everyone on there.. but then conversely if you build an everything app, there is more ability to bring people to the platform. 

So yeah, I don’t get why Twitter would be used as the starting point for something like that, but at the same time I’m not writing it all off like everyone else here till I see more.

It is very difficult to build an everything app when you don't have everyone there. That's not how any of the most ubiquitous services have worked; they first worked on bringing in users and THEN worked on getting them to stay by making it very difficult and painful to leave. Doing it the other way is a surefire way to waste a ton of money on features people don't care about while losing users to faster, better systems. Hell, Musk even KNOWS this - because that's how he built both SpaceX and Tesla. What you're suggesting is that he should have waited until he has full-self driving cars before releasing the first car. 

Mostly, I would say that you can write off the vision because there isn't one. This week he says that he wants Twitter to be like Signal and have fully encrypted texts and voice. Why? Who knows! (amusingly he also said he's in talks with Signal, which was apparently news to Signal) He has also said he was going to roll out the blue checkmarks next week, but now that's on hiatus until he can figure out how to stop people from impersonating others. He's said he wants Twitter to be integrating with payment systems but fired everyone who was working on it. He said he wants twitter to be good for advertisers and fired everyone involved with ad revenue. The actions that Musk is taking are not remotely in alignment with what he says, and what he says from week to week isn't in alignment with itself. 

Now, he might be able to flail his way to some weird degree of success because throwing enough money at anything often can work but that doesn't mean that the ideas are particularly sound. Similarly, if you simply state every single idea you possibly have (no matter how contradictory they are) then you can claim how awesome you were when one of those thousands pays off, but that isn't a particularly serious way to predict anything either. 

[JGP]

It's endlessly amusing, but that picture... 

[Larry of the Lawn]

24 minutes ago, Kalnestk Oblast said:

 

It is very difficult to build an everything app when you don't have everyone there. That's not how any of the most ubiquitous services have worked; they first worked on bringing in users and THEN worked on getting them to stay by making it very difficult and painful to leave.. 

Yup.  Anecdotal but the only reason I didn't nuke Facebook 8 or 10 years ago is marketplace.  It's essentially replaced craigslist for classifieds where I live.  Most of my tools and vehicles have been bought on there.  

Kind of nuts to think you'd build an "everything app" getting people (users and staff) to leave by talking shit and then somehow pivot to being an "everything app". Big hyper loop vibes.  

[Varysblackfyre321]

@Heartofice do you think it’s odd that they got banned while Pool just called for more shootings of LGBT bars with no recrimination?

[Kalbear]

A third of twitter advertisers have not advertised at all in the last 2 weeks. That's probably just part of Musk's Master Plan(tm) 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/11/22/twitter-advertiser-exodus-musk/?utm_source=feedly&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=wp_homepage

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Dozens of top Twitter advertisers, including 14 of the top 50, have stopped advertising in the few weeks since Musk’s chaotic acquisition of the social media company, according to The Post’s analysis of data from Pathmatics, which offers brand analysis on digital marketing trends.

Ads for blue-chip brands including Jeep and Mars candy, whose corporate parents were among the top 100 U.S. advertisers on the site in the six months before Musk’s purchase, haven’t appeared there since at least Nov. 7, the analysis found. Musk assumed ownership of the site Oct. 27.

Though this is probably the really big deal: Musk himself is not a great brand.
 

Quote

Matthew Quint, director of the Center on Global Brand Leadership at Columbia Business School, said that many companies are under “pressure, from a range of their stakeholders and consumers, around being connected with content that is viewed as inflammatory.” The challenge for them and for Twitter, he said, is that Musk is becoming “a very strong brand himself, and a controversial brand.”

“The more he is out in the front, the more advertisers may … just choose to say I’m still not ready to be heavily associated with a Musk platform at this point,” Quint said.

 

[Varysblackfyre321]

2 hours ago, JGP said:

Didn't Tim Pool recently die of covid, or am I cross referencing?

 

edit: yeah, the latter. nevermind

I thought Jorden Peterson was in a another coma until recently I learned he wasn’t. That bummed me out.

 

[Week]

11 minutes ago, Varysblackfyre321 said:

@Heartofice do you think it’s odd that they got banned while Pool just called for more shootings of LGBT bars with no recrimination?

Well, it's relevant here that the "Ch*rles H*ywood" (posted in the last thread) follows and retweets LibsofTikTok as well as pro-Trump accelerationists and outright fascists. 

[Week]

Excuse me, Mr Twitter. Could I please buy thousands of dollars of ads* next to this?

 

*Wait no sorry, I forgot this is the app that'll be my encrypted messaging, bank account, payment promising, and/or crypto everything app. Seems like fertile ground to build on.

[felice]

@JGP

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You have some points, and I haven’t fucked with Mastodon yet. Perhaps it was unfair to assert so confidently, I’ve just seen so many threads by Black and racialized activists I follow that have run afoul of Mastodon mods and been banned, for (as they’ve said, anyway) fairly tame sjw posts.

As I understand it, it's largely an unfortunate clash of expectations that will hopefully sort itself out in time. Mastodon has a culture of liberal use of "Content Warnings" (functionally equivalent to spoiler tags here, and in practice effectively Subject/Read More). Having a whole bunch of newbies storm in and ignoring that is naturally going to upset the existing population (which includes most of the mods). And from the other side, it's entirely natural for black people etc to be upset about being told off for not hiding their experiences behind warnings. Both sides have some learning to do.

Mastodon servers are largely run and moderated by unpaid volunteers, currently dealing with an unprecedented and ongoing surge in traffic. And many mods are new recruits lacking in experience. Cut them a bit of slack! See how they deal with their mistakes, and don't condemn the entire network for the actions of a few.

On the other hand, Mastodon is full of people, and people are the worst. A lot of them will be genuinely racist, sexist, etc to some degree or another, and I have no idea how to solve that on any platform. At least with Mastodon you've always got the option of running your own server and moderating it to your standards.

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Siloed in that there are so many servers, each having their own mods teams (if there’s even more than one) with little consistency between them.

Siloed is definitely the wrong term. Having many diverse servers is a strength, not a weakness, and they mostly talk freely to each other. Nazi servers etc do get siloed off from everyone else (it's open source software, so there's no way to stop them existing, but they don't get to interact with the rest of us).

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Mastodon is like the burbs, or ‘White flight from Twitter,’ as I’ve seen it referred to multiple times.

That is completely unreasonable. A lot of the early adopters of Mastodon were tech-savvy persecuted minorities. Disproportionately white subcultures, perhaps, but not intentionally so (I'd guess economic factors would play a significant role), and certainly not trying to get away from black people.

[JGP]

[whispers] do you have your own mastodon server

[JGP]

Seriously though, yes I'm likely being a little unfair, repeating what I've been reading. 

It's going to be interesting to see which heir survives.  

[Varysblackfyre321]

28 minutes ago, Week said:

Excuse me, Mr Twitter. Could I please buy thousands of dollars of ads* next to this?

 

*Wait no sorry, I forgot this is the app that'll be my encrypted messaging, bank account, payment promising, and/or crypto everything app. Seems like fertile ground to build on.

Ah you’re just fear mongering/s

[JGP]

Do you think FBI Counterintelligence are looking really hard at this idiot or is he just like, terrified of everything. Both? Both is good.

This is the kind of shit that happens when you don't have good friends that'll slap you.

 

[felice]

27 minutes ago, JGP said:

[whispers] do you have your own mastodon server

I considered starting one, but I don't have the time and energy to run it properly. I mostly just really like the concept in principle, and as a user it's working well for me so far.

[Varysblackfyre321]

I hope at least some people can re-evaluate their dismal of progressives’ warnings.

[Mindwalker]