Pretty sure the company is going to be sold to a private equity firm once it reaches $1b in valuation. There's just no way Musk is going to want to stick around the way things are trending.
Premium tiers are not going to come close to replacing the lost revenue to declining ad spend. Especially when it's in a death spiral with increasingly spammier ads causing a flight of higher quality advertisers. And there isn't the profit to cover debt payments let alone pay for new features like payments that X desperately needs to generate new revenue.
Meanwhile Meta gave a glimpse of the levers it can pull by adding Threads to the Instagram sidebar. Ever closer integration is going to drive hundreds of millions of new users at zero cost.
"There's just no way Musk is going to want to stick around the way things are trending."
He does like attention and with controlling twitter, he can control quite some attention. I don't think he can easily give that up, as long as it stays somewhat relevant and as long as he already burned so much money with it.
But he's not in control of the company. Banks are.
Without them agreeing to a restructure of the debt or committing to ongoing bridge loans X will be bankrupt. The banks have already tried to sell off the debt to reduce their risk but declined as they were only getting offers valuing the company at < $8b.
We are reaching the cross-roads where big decisions will be made. And one is whether Musk leaves with some dignity e.g. he hands over day-day work to someone else or is simply forced out.
I doubt he ever sells. He made the purchase because of his ego. As long as he still owns it, he can pretend that there is some future in which the company has value. Selling it for $1b locks in the valuation and confirms the deal was a huge mistake. I don't think he needs that $1b enough for him to be willing to take that hit to his ego.
He made the purchase because he was forced to. He didn't want to buy it at all. He was doing his usual trolling thing and got trapped by his own nonsense.
Unless he's willing to continue covering the interest payments on the loans indefinitely, it may not be his decision to make.
The interest payments to the banks on the loans will continue to come due. I doubt Twitter is pulling in anywhere near enough revenue to satisfy those loans.
I'm not saying he'll do this, but theoretically he could just pay them out of pocket. The banks only hold around $13B in Twitter debt and Musk owns ~$170B of tesla stock with around 42% of that available for him to access immediately (the other 58% is pledged to secure personal loans).
Exactly. It will get gradually more expensive, but I don't buy the idea that one of the richest people on the planet will be unable to find anyone to lend him money. That is especially true for Musk who has shown a willingness to deal with anyone with money including people that have questionable ethics and morals.
> I'm not saying he'll do this, but theoretically he could just pay them out of pocket.
To be honest, I've never understood why we allow the purchased company to buy itself. It makes no logical sense and I've never heard a good argument as to why this is beneficial to our economy in general.
He could just short Tesla stock and go on an unhinged nonstop rampage for a week or two and collect $13B. Then go quiet again and let the stock recover.
Pretty sure the company is going to be sold to a private equity firm once it reaches $1b in valuation. There's just no way Musk is going to want to stick around the way things are trending
If he did that, it could recover its former might perhaps, and the censorship he disliked may return.
Thus he likely wants it dead, rather than in other hands.
What sort of topics are currently being censored? I haven't seen examples of things being suppressed, but that's also why I'm asking; because I wouldn't have seen things that got suppressed.
Twitter used to be the best tech company in the world at resisting government censorship. They routinely fought governments around the world in court, including in the US. Now they aren't. For example they recently did global censorship at the behest of the Indian government.
Erdoğan opposants accounts and tweets were blocked/suppressed a few weeks before the election (its mostly good now, most accounts are unbanned since the election is over).
> The reason given for its account suspension, an Elm Fork John Brown Gun Club contributor told The New Republic, was that it had violated Twitter rules against “hateful conduct,” with two tweets cited: a reply to the official account of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (“Mugging at gun point,” reads the reply to an unspecified CBP post) and another post with what seems like a retort to the perpetual conservative nonjoke about pronouns, “Every queer a riflethem.”
Twitter used to fight _actual_ censorship. From governments demanding things be taken down. Musk rolls over like a puppy for China, India, Turkiye, etc...
Not to mention that whole period where they were blocking links to Mastodon instances, Instagram, Substack, and Linktree (excuse me, "prohibited 3rd-party social media platforms").
Sure. My response is to someone upthread who claimed Musk scoped his criticism to "censorship he disliked"; I'm pointing out he claimed to dislike basically all censorship, making that a meaningless distinction.
no, I mean tying your identity with your location and giving it potential to go viral. this is what "Elon Jet" was doing. it was taking technically public info and making it extremely easy to consume and re-share. as entertainment. for someone who is very much in the public eye.
you probably aren't famous so maybe you don't understand, but that sounds potentially harmful for someone who is.
> you probably aren't famous so maybe you don't understand, but that sounds potentially harmful for someone who is.
I’m not so convinced. What harm does this account cause?
The most harmful thing that comes to mind is that someone could use the information to plan a murder. The account doesn’t provide this information; it is actually relevant that the information is otherwise available. A person so dedicated to hating this person that they decide to show up with violent intent at a public airport where his jet just landed or is about to take off is pretty damn likely to also be dedicated enough to find this information from other public sources. The account only makes it easier -- it doesn’t enable given that they’re already able -- for someone else to be actually harmful.
This talk of some billionaire gets to fly around in his private jet and the worst thing about it is that everyone else in the world gets to know when and where the jet arrives and departs... it’s just not something I have any sympathy for.
And all his mealy mouthed claims about anonymity are laughable. The jet's registered owner is a company with a very Space-y name, whose address is "1 Space Drive" an address which if you put into Google will say "Businesses associated with this address: Tesla, SpaceX, The Boring Company".
Pre-elon twitter banned some nazis, sometimes, there were still plenty of them around. It also banned a-lot of normal people who were questioning official narratives, people who just so happened to get report-bombed, people who were joking around with eachother about innocuous things that weren't against the ToS, people who governments wanted banned, etc etc.
All of that has gotten much better, and appeals are approved much faster, much more often. It used to be if you replied to a tweet disagreeing with someone, and their fans/followers report bombed you, you'd get banned with no recourse. That's fixed now.
Also, my impression of recent twitter is that it's very heavy on user silo's now, sure if you search for objectionable content you'll find it, that's not unique to twitter, but you don't really happen upon it unless you're following people who post things you find objectionable.
I don't really see anything wrong with that model, and if you're truly worried about nazi's, wouldn't you rather it's on a public cleartext platform instead of on something like session where it's mathematically unable to be seen/policed by -anyone- not directly involved?
And like, I'm no fan of Ol'Musky, I think his accomplishments are mostly him attracting talented people and then taking credit for it, but to say that twitter isn't safer/better now... idk, seems like it is by any measure, which might be because it was horrible before, and it's simply less horrible now, but, still, less horrible all the same.
Do you have any data to back up these claims? My sense has been the opposition, but I also don’t have any data to back it up. So I could be wrong, which is why I don’t make seemingly factual statements like you are.
But you sound so sure that I assume you have data, would you share it?
To address one portion of what you wrote: no, I do not want Nazis and other bigots spreading cleartext hate online and radicalizing angsty teens. If that shit were shoved further into the margins I think we'd have fewer people showing up at pizza parlors with rifles.
Instead, we have racists who went antiquing for Nazi propaganda and dusted off the old classic "elite pedophiles who run international politics are trafficking children and drinking their blood." Something actual elected officials have been able to engage with and not lose significant support.
> It also banned a-lot of normal people who were questioning official narratives
They really didn't. "Non official narratives" were usually conspiracy theories or hate speech. If anything, these accounts were given multiple opportunities before being banned. Only the worst of the worst were banned.
> Godwin wrote on Facebook that someone had asked him to post a statement about Charlottesville, because people bring up his law to shut down arguments all the time. Turns outhe was happy to oblige. "By all means, compare these shitheads to the Nazis," he wrote. "Again and again. I'm with you."
> In general, Godwin has always said you can bring up the Nazis in an online conversation, as long as you're doing some research first. "If you're thoughtful about it and show some real awareness of history, go ahead and refer to Hitler or Nazis when you talk about Trump. Or any other politician," he wrote in The Washington Post backin 2015. But in the case of the white supremacists in Virginia, there's no research necessary to make that comparison. The facts speak for themselves.
> From an anecdote shared by Michael B. Tager (@IamRageSparkle) on Twitter in July 2020. In the multi-tweet thread, Tager recounted visiting a "shitty crustpunk bar", where he saw a patron abruptly expelled. The bartender explained that the man was wearing "iron crosses and stuff", and that he feared such patrons would become regulars and start bringing friends if not promptly kicked out, which would lead him to realize "oh shit, this is a Nazi bar now" only after the unwanted patrons became too "entrenched" to kick out without trouble
It is censorship. Whether you'd consider it acceptable or not is a different matter, but don't try to duck the important decision you'd have to make about it. Many groups throughout history have thought that silencing people they didn't like was a matter of hygiene—including the Nazis, as a matter of fact. It's an enticing concept, using different standards when it comes to people you hate.
Advocating throwing human beings into ovens isn't acceptable. If you find yourself on the other end of that opinion, do some deep, deep soul searching. It's not about speech at that point.
Despite continuously making very unpopular moves, I can't see how Twitter loses its users. In fact, I think it will exist long after usage on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok falters -- because, it is less replaceable and less age-demographic dependent.
I also think that advertisers will return when budgets increase again. There aren't that many other good options.
In the long term, I think it goes nowhere and returns to profitability and a higher valuation.
I am very angry about government officials posting public and relevant information on a commercial platform with a randomly appearing login wall and questionable recommendation algorithms.
It's the web. Please do better.
I also hate how news outlets embed Xitter, although I have seen some creative workarounds.
Is humanity really dumping the last remnants of productive political discourse into this centralized and manipulative trash cans because we are unable to define suitable web standards (e.g. for short and distributable messages)?
Eh, I deleted my account last October because of his policy changes, and I'm definitely not the only one. It's honestly been great to remove it from my life, I owe Musk for nudging me to get off the platform and have one less social media thing to make me feel crappy.
I didn't mean that literally zero users have left Twitter. But, I do not recognise its replacement by other services (Threads, Bluesky or Mastodon).
Obviously there are people that have cut social media out of their lives, and there are people that belong to Mastodon servers and so on, but this is a small subset of users.
Uhm - Musk paid $44 billion for Twitter. Obviously it's not worth >=$44B currently but it's also obviously still worth more than $1B.
Edit: Some people seem to be thinking I'm arguing it's worth >$10B -- I am not. I'm only arguing that it's absolutely worth more than $1B. There are plenty of sources in the past 6 months which have valued it between $3.7B and $8B. There are absolutely buyers out there who would love to buy Twitter right now for a 90% discount vs. what Musk paid for it. You may still believe those parties would be overpaying, but it wouldn't be super difficult to find a buyer as long as there weren't other onerous terms attached to the deal.
Can't be blocked with first party tools, at least.
That "can't reply, retweet, or even see the account's name" format should be distinct enough for things like uBlock or a specialized extension to find.
Is this even legal according to FTC guidelines? I thought ads had to be clearly marked in digital content.
Either way, whatever. X is dying. I think the mainstream assumes “it’ll never happen, it’s too big to fail.”
But it’s not. X really is shrinking and dying. It won’t die this year or next but it’s following in the steps of MySpace, perhaps more slowly. But it’s happening.
On prominent accounts I follow, the top replies are universally all paid accounts posting clickbait, totally unrelated (or possibly AI generated?) to the poster. Here's a great example. I follow Jake Sherman, founder of Punchbowl News, to stay up to date on happenings in Congress. This is a reply:
All of that account's replies are spam like that. They're not even the worst offender, there are a handful of other accounts that just post emojis, complete nonsense, to every single popular account.
Musk had already destroyed the value of looking at a tweet's replies, which I consider the "accuracy" of the platform. But that was never the main draw anyway.
So far, my feed remains pretty good - the "recall". I've opted in to follow certain people or topics and truly, there's no better place to get the latest news. But if they destroy the value of the feed, there really will be no reason for anyone to stay.
I’m stunned no-one was able to talk him out of that one. “Pay-for-attention” is an _awful_ mechanic; even dating/hookup apps, who to some extent depend on it, generally have to ration it; you can’t just pay to be at the top of the grid/stack of cards all the time.
Elon's purchase and then (mis)management of Twitter has been recurring, mainstream news virtually everywhere. This is hardly some fringe HN type focus, it is literally everywhere. Everyone has seen the dramatic change in the quality and features of the site.
Twitter has a massive amount of "lock in" effect, however. If it didn't Musk would have killed Twitter ten times over now, but somehow people always rationalize things getting much worse. With some of the newest change a new wave of Twitter refugees are hitting Threads, and it's comical, if a bit sad, how often their first tweet is citing their Twitter follower-count, seemingly obligating the Threads community to match it to keep their interest. Eh.
They presumably know that _something_ has happened to it, though; the identity of the idiot responsible is somewhat beside the point. Like, no regular user could possibly not have noticed the changes to it over the past year.
There’s a restaurant near me which I used to like, but which has gone downhill over the last couple of years. I don’t know or particularly care who owns it, but I don’t go here anymore.
> Twitter may be dying for hackernews, but is it alive for other communities?
Probably depends on the community. The non-tech people I know have almost entirely abandoned Twitter. Those who still use it use it far less than they used to.
Maybe, but there's still no alternative. Most people don't care, journalists and politicians still need Twitter to share their thoughts/amplify their voice, and researchers/content creators still link to their work on Twitter. Wake me up when it changes.
I'm curious how much of this is perception vs reality.
Context: Heard something about an active shooter this week and followed a link to the Baltimore Police twitter account[0].
As I'm no longer logged in, I see tweets from 2021 and 2017 with no indication that there's new content I'm missing. If this is how public services are trying to get the word re:ongoing events, it's a terrible option.
(granted, you said journalists and politicians, not public services…)
If anything, it'll be the legacy media that ceases to exist soon enough.
Twitter directly competes for the same advertising revenue the legacy media does. If Twitter was dying, it behooves the legacy media to report about it.
I can't think of any other industry where a someone spends more time trying to paint the competition in a negative light, than casting their own brand in a positive one. Think about it.
Since there's no rebuttal in your reply, consider this a break :)
Analog radio, newspapers, and television were already in a managed decline before the 2016 election. The events that unfolded forestalled the inevitable a bit longer, but the music is about to end for these propagandists masquerading as reporters. Trust in legacy media is at a record low.
I think there's a lot to critique about traditional media, but their ethical standards are head and shoulders above random posters and grifters on social media. If traditional media is a cesspool, social media is a sewer.
Edit: If you want a concrete example, look at how rampant plagiarism is on social media/Youtube[1]. Traditional media journalists regularly got fired[2] for doing shit like this.
How many people were fired from the NYT for reporting about Iraq having WMD?
How many competitors to the NYT reported there were no WMD and why were they all smeared and discredited?
The fact that some information might be plagiarized is hardly of any consequence compared to the million or so people that died because of the legacy media reported Saddam had WMDs.
When the institutions completely fail to get all of the most important things right (and in fact, almost completely wrong) it's only natural to turn elsewhere.
> How many competitors to the NYT reported there were no WMD
Lots, including major papers with receipts on not only that the US claims that the Times was hyping were false, but the fact that US and UK governments because, e.g., the so-called “Winnebagos of Mass Destruction” were not mobile weapons labs and the UK government knew this ab initio because they were sold to Iraq by the UK government.
> why were they all smeared and discredited?
They weren't, they were just ignored, both by the Times and the dominant political narrative, because largely people didn't care about the truth.
I'm certain the innocent people killed cared about the truth, and their families and loved ones are still awaiting justice.
The problem is if people didn't care about the truth then why exactly does it matter now? (Also, surely you understand this is not a defensible position nor do I expect someone to defend war crimes, but this is HN and there's plenty of idiots willing to surprise me.)
Despite having a reputation as an innovator, Musk's ideas for improving Twitter revenue seem to amount to squeezing users for more money or otherwise degrading the free experience. This is a playbook that any private equity shark out there could have executed equally well. Not sure how this will ever lead to a viable "everything" app.
>Users who have seen these X ads report being taken to a third-party website in a new window upon clicking anywhere within the ad, including when they try to click on the fake avatar.
This is kind of nuts, that's "random porn site" levels of advertisement. I don't know why anyone even works for this company any more. They day when someone tells you to let ads through that fake legitimate UI elements is probably when any developer should throw the towel in
Also btw is it even legal in Europe or the US to show an ad without disclosing it as such
Different but I've seen multiple ads from the @NFL (and a few other brands) on X that are not labeled as ads. This is on the "Following" tab which is supposed to only show tweets from accounts you follow (I do not follow the NFL)
Two obsidian-black patterns the “X” app has been employing for months:
Force the “For You” tab after Every Single App Switch.
Randomly use a `WKWebView` instead of a `SFSafariViewController` as the in-app browser. Denying you various features like Reader, AutoFill, Fraudulent Website Warning, and content blocking.
Why? To fuck with you. Musk-Twitter has never been a good-faith operation. Where’s tech journalism when you need it? Thought they (still) spend half their days in that app.
Edit (I missed this): "In addition, users cannot add Community Notes to these ads either. Over the past few months, users have been utilizing Community Notes, the popular feature on the platform that allows users to add context to disinformation and other factually incorrect posts, to warn others of scam ads on X."
Original comment: I'd bet $8 that either ads without Community Notes, or ads with hitbox the size of the entire tweet row that takes you to an embedded link (like the new format of Posted Links) are next.
The latter would be especially bad: just one mis-swipe away from hitting an attacker controlled website :(
The entire rebrand to X allows the twitter brand to live on / be sold once X goes under. Up until this point there have not been any meaningful positive changes to the platform - everything seems to have been done for attention.
It's hilariously ironic how mashable is making fun of these bad ads and at the end of the article are Mashable's other articles that seem indistinguishable from the same bad ads they're deriding.
Why not let Elon live with his terrible branding decisions? I think there's a case to be made that referring to X by its better-known former name is more beneficial for Musk.
Why is this bad? These superads will enable users to discover more products to improve their lives. Many will be YC companies. Advertising is the root of all good.
If not for one of the ads featured in this article, I would never have thought to pour a bottle of baby oil in my ear to cure my tinnitus. I'm still not gonna do it but the thought would have never even crossed my mind, otherwise.
Premium tiers are not going to come close to replacing the lost revenue to declining ad spend. Especially when it's in a death spiral with increasingly spammier ads causing a flight of higher quality advertisers. And there isn't the profit to cover debt payments let alone pay for new features like payments that X desperately needs to generate new revenue.
Meanwhile Meta gave a glimpse of the levers it can pull by adding Threads to the Instagram sidebar. Ever closer integration is going to drive hundreds of millions of new users at zero cost.