[HN Gopher] Twitter misses ad revenue and user growth estimates
___________________________________________________________________
Twitter misses ad revenue and user growth estimates
Author : onpedrof
Score : 159 points
Date : 2022-02-10 18:31 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.reuters.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.reuters.com)
| whoisjuan wrote:
| Honestly, Twitter is just a weird product. On the authoring side,
| it has a tremendous product-market fit with particular outspoken
| groups (investors, founders, politicians, journalists, activists,
| etc) and a terrible product-market fit with everyone else.
|
| I believe their biggest bet on revenue has always been to grow
| their passive audiences (people who just use the feed and don't
| tweet) but their product lacks the immediate stickiness that
| other feed products have. It's almost impossible to get the value
| of Twitter out of the box if you don't have a clear idea of what
| topics matter to you and who are the central figures in those
| topics.
|
| News outlets have a better funnel to distill and distribute
| information, so most people don't need to have Twitter to have a
| general idea of what was said on Twitter. A large amount of news
| nowadays is "X person tweeted Y".
|
| I'm convinced Twitter will never be able to grow into a
| meaningful mainstream social media (+1B users) with their current
| model, but I do believe there's a lot of unlocked value in what
| they have created.
| kleinsch wrote:
| Yea, TikTok is playing in a similar place (big creators, lots
| of passive people) but their algo + video being stickier has
| led to massive wins. I think it's late for Twitter, but
| interesting thought exercise on what could have been if they
| had the TikTok discovery algo.
| pseingatl wrote:
| Maybe if they'd stop deplatforming people.
| hitpointdrew wrote:
| Shocker, a cesspool political platform that is banning users
| every day isn't growing....you don't say.
| 0000011111 wrote:
| They may not make much money but I think they will outlast
| Facebook - Meta.
| acegopher wrote:
| Could platforms like this be better served as non-profits?
| riffic wrote:
| Mastodon, perhaps, would be one non-profit to look at.
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/Mastodon/comments/shdmpq/mastodon_a...
| fnord77 wrote:
| or public utilities
| asdswe wrote:
| I don't understand why anyone would read Twitter regularly. The
| short limit in messages makes any intelligent discussion
| difficult, so nearly all tweets are either links elsewhere or
| nonsense. Either way, Twitter is by far the easiest of all social
| media giants to avoid.
| sremani wrote:
| I am willing to pay for no noise -- straight dope twitter just
| like I do for YouTube premium. But, Twitter has to remind of some
| fucking celebrity, some fucking political meltdown, so cultural
| gossip bullshit and days outrage. There is no way, I could turn
| this off this. Along with this, the garbage mumbling of the
| tweets of people I follow based on popularity (as twitter claims)
| instead of chronological or some other custom organization, I
| feel works for me.
| arthurz wrote:
| It seems that every popular Social Media platform became an
| extension of the liberal governments. I trust a proper sentiment
| analysis would reveal this.
| kwertyoowiyop wrote:
| Why not do that sentiment analysis?
| rsoto wrote:
| Twitter has been an absolute mess over the last few years.
| Through the explore tab, they aggressively promote topics that I
| have no interest in: k-pop, fashion, reality TV, telenovelas and
| birthdays. And there's no way to tell them that I don't really
| care about those topics, you can't even hide them.
|
| The trending topics used to be a very good way to know what's
| happening. Being the pulse of the planet was achieved. Nowadays,
| the trending topics are heavily abused. When a streamer or an
| influencer does something, there's usually 6 or 7 trending topics
| all related to that person.
|
| And then there are the spoilers. Every major movie release has
| the name of the characters or actors right in your home page the
| very same day of the premiere. I had to permanently hide them in
| my browser, and I've been reducing the usage of Twitter in my
| phone. I'm very tempted to uninstall it from it and use it only
| in a PC, although I don't see myself closing my account.
|
| And even though they're alienating a big part of their user base
| by promoting topics that clearly drive their numbers, they're
| still not reaching their goals. I wonder what they'll do next.
| floe wrote:
| > you can't even hide them
|
| I changed my trends location to Tokyo on someone's
| recommendation, and it's been a great workaround. I don't speak
| Japanese, so it's the same as 'hiding' the trends to my brain.
|
| (I think the way to do this is 'Explore' -> gear icon, at least
| on desktop.)
| rsoto wrote:
| I actually wrote a userscript in order to hide them.
| jdrc wrote:
| Burundi or Anguila are also good choices
| imbnwa wrote:
| Nah, TikTok is much, much worse since their algorithm and the
| nature of the UX is so much better at it. We only think Twitter
| is the king of this because we have so much experience with it
| after 10+ years.
|
| You have to _aggresively_ curate your For You page constantly
| to stop TikTok from throwing a bombastic opinion piece at you
| vineyardmike wrote:
| > You have to aggresively curate your For You page constantly
| to stop TikTok from throwing a bombastic opinion piece at you
|
| As you regularly hear people say about TikTok.. "ive never
| seen that on my FYP". I think honestly you react in a certain
| way to the opinion pieces dude. Do you comment on them? Share
| them? Linger? Just scroll on and leave it alone...
| bradly wrote:
| The biggest problem for me is showing me favorites/likes/hearts
| of the people I follow in my feed with no way to hide them. Not
| only does it make my feed into a hot mess, I now make sure not
| like anything since I don't want that showing on my followers
| feed.
| rsoto wrote:
| I haven't actually seen them in a long while, but I'm using
| the chronological timeline, maybe you should try it.
| bradly wrote:
| Thanks! I had no idea that the three star icon is a button.
| ProfessorLayton wrote:
| uBlock:
|
| twitter.com##[aria-label="Timeline: Trending now"]
|
| twitter.com##[aria-label="Relevant people"]
|
| twitter.com##[aria-label="Search and explore"]
|
| twitter.com##[aria-label="Footer"]
|
| twitter.com##[aria-label="Who to follow"]
|
| twitter.com##[aria-label="Discover new Lists"]
|
| twitter.com##[aria-label=" liked "]
|
| It won't stop your likes from showing on their feeds,
| however.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| I loathe how often BrooklynDad_Defiant!, DutyToWarn,
| OccupyDemocrats, Palmer Report, Gravel Institute, Jeff
| Tiedrich, and many others always end up being the top tweet of
| whatever trending topic there happens to be. I refuse to
| believe this is a coincidence or the result of organic
| participation. Their appearance is far too consistent,
| predictable, and durable. Politically motivated trends also
| start appearing around a paltry 2,000 mentions, which seems
| absurdly low.
|
| But also, in terms of non-politics, I am so tired of seeing
| "JUST ANNOUNCED".
| orhmeh09 wrote:
| FWIW, BrooklynDad_Defiant! is a paid operative for the US
| Democratic Party:
| https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-
| politic...
|
| If the Democratic Party is paying him to tweet really well,
| can trending topics by him be the result of coincidence or
| organic participation?
| sydthrowaway wrote:
| It beggars belief that people don't think the numbers from any of
| these companies are completely fraudulent.
|
| Has anyone _been_ on Twitter? Bots, spam, etc.
| aquamarine1 wrote:
| how do we know you're not a bot?
| xwdv wrote:
| Aye, Twitter seems to be mostly a social network for bots and
| people's scripts to talk to each other. Very few real humans
| posting original thoughts. Maybe celebrity types use it as an
| easy way to get a word out, but not the common man.
| Fascinating.
| asdff wrote:
| I wouldn't be surprised if most celebrity tweets are just
| written up in advance by their spokesperson and doled out
| throughout the week with a script.
| el-salvador wrote:
| I think that even political speeches are written in a way
| that they can easily be twitted.
| samwillis wrote:
| While there may be a flood of bots and sock puppet accounts,
| it's worth noting that advertisers wouldn't be spending if they
| couldn't see actual conversions from Twitter ads. So there are
| at least enough real people on there for their advertising
| business to work.
| dylan604 wrote:
| That's not necessarily totally true. The advertising world is
| susceptible to FOMO just as much as other people. Companies
| authorize their ad agencies to come up with a campaign and
| agree on an ad spend for that year/campaign. That money gets
| split up to cover as many markets as possible. If a
| competitor is spending on Twitter, then you spend on Twitter
| as well. You can't give the competitor the entire Twitter
| market.
| jorts wrote:
| I use twitter daily and I believe most of the content I see is
| real people? Perhaps that's just based on who I follow so I
| don't have the same experience as you.
| pyronik19 wrote:
| I think it depends on the topic. I don't think you will find
| many sockpuppet accounts when you are talking about some CS
| programming framework... but you want to talk about politics?
| Its where the culture war is being waged.
| aeturnum wrote:
| Sure - no one thinks Twitter (or anyone) knows the exact count
| for real users, etc. But fraudulent activity and bot
| development is also driven by the underlying success of the
| website (scammers don't scam where there's no one to scam) so
| there's reason to pay attention to relative changes (or lack of
| change) in overall patterns.
| adamsmith143 wrote:
| If their numbers are completely fraudulent why would they
| release fraudulent numbers indicating they missed their
| targets?
| [deleted]
| zeruch wrote:
| It's almost like Dorsey knew "when to get out"...
| fullshark wrote:
| Or he was forced out
| robertlagrant wrote:
| If you look at the graph of the share price since IPO it doesn't
| exactly look as though Twitter is suddenly doing badly.
| PKop wrote:
| opportunity cost especially relative to other tech companies
| gojomo wrote:
| Correct, except for some brief delusional pumps, it's _always_
| done badly.
|
| In the same period that Twitter is -10.4% from its IPO, the
| S&P500 is +150%. The NASDAQ composite is +260%.
|
| And the destruction wraught by Twitter Inc goes beyond what can
| be measured in its shareholders' lost value. By purchasing
| short-form video leader Vine, privileging it just enough to
| undermine competitor Periscope, then fumbling Vine completely,
| they destroyed two promising US-based short-form video
| companies - allowing Chinese-owned TikTok to dominate.
|
| Twitter-like companies overseas have pioneered new e-commerce &
| private-messaging features, while Twitter launches, then
| ignores, half-thought-out features like polls, bookmarks, or
| fleets.
|
| Twitter Inc is a corporate malignancy suppressing innovation on
| an essential communications frontier.
| todd8 wrote:
| Since inception, Twitter is down 10.4%.
|
| Starting at the same time (Oct 3, 2013), S&P 500 is up 153.45%
| and the NASDAQ is up 260.30%
| madballster wrote:
| It's only once you compare the performance of Twitter to other
| tech shares and realize the last 12 years were the biggest tech
| bull market in history. And Twitter shows zero return.
| marcusverus wrote:
| It's not just tech--the entire market has been on fire since
| the Twitter IPO. The S&P has risen 150%.
| azinman2 wrote:
| Doesn't help their user base largely stopped growing in 2015
| while their competitors are in the billions.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| To put it in perspective, if you invested $10k in TWTR in
| 2013, I invested $10k in GOOG, and Mary invested $10k in AMZN
| - you'd have $9k, I'd have $55k, and Mary would have $90k
| dragontamer wrote:
| Those ratios are too close to Jesus's "Parable of the
| Talents". (A "Talent" was a huge sum of silver in the
| Biblical / Roman days). One investor brought back 10
| Talents, another brought back 5, and one brought back 1.
|
| Probably just a coincidence to to round numbers and such,
| but it amuses me.
| visarga wrote:
| > Probably just a coincidence to to round numbers and
| such, but it amuses me.
|
| Or is it? Maybe Jesus knew how Twitter would turn out in
| 2022. /s
| boplicity wrote:
| I use Twitter occasionally -- but the real shift in the past year
| is that all of my family (4 siblings, parents, in-laws, etc) have
| switched to using Signal. A group Signal chat is a wonderful
| social media platform, without any advertisements, algorithms, or
| similar nonsense. Just updates and thoughts from people I care
| about. It gives me hope that the destructive social media
| platforms like Twitter and FB will eventually be small compared
| to actually private communication channels like Signal.
| nicbou wrote:
| This is something I learned to love with Snapchat. Instead of
| public posts, people just send stuff to you or the group. It's
| private, personal, and as you say, ad-free.
| [deleted]
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Snapchat is all ads for me. I have no idea what any of the
| buttons do except there is a 50% chance of seeing an ad with
| women in bikinis.
| inetknght wrote:
| > _This is something I learned to love with Snapchat. It 's
| private, personal, and as you say, ad-free._
|
| It's not private if it's viewable by Snapchat. You can have
| personal on any platform. And Snapchat is one of the most
| advertisement-laden platforms ever.
| tinyhouse wrote:
| First, billions of people have been using WhatsApp for years
| for 1:1 and small group communication. It's much bigger than
| Twitter for years now. Second, it's not the same. On
| WhatsApp/Signal you primarily communicate with people you know
| well. On Twitter you primarily consume content or communicate
| with people you don't know.
| qwertyuiop_ wrote:
| There aren't enough ex-USA Ad Dollars. Its a modern version of
| the town crier there isn't much room to grow in terms of
| features. So they are trying with 'clubhouse' aka Spaces which
| has been a flop and other superficial UX gimmicks. I think it hit
| its apex and something or someone will disrupt it so the cycle of
| businesses continue.
| rybosworld wrote:
| I think Twitter is a victim of it's niche.
|
| It's hard to describe why some people love twitter and others
| don't. But it seems fairly difficult to change it in such a way
| that you gain new users and don't lose the current.
| thewebcount wrote:
| Really? I can describe pretty precisely why I hate it. I don't
| have an account, so when I get a link to Twitter, I see one or
| more of the following:
|
| - A reply to someone else that I can't see, so I now have no
| context about what I'm looking at. It's like coming in in the
| middle of a conversation.
|
| - A normal tweet followed by a set of replies that appear to be
| incomplete. There are a bunch of buttons to press to "see
| more". Often when you click on them there's only a single
| additional response, not a very long thread, so it's unclear
| why I had to click to "see more". Other times there are several
| back-and-forth replies in a row shown, most of them
| inconsequential. What decides whether I need to click to "see
| more"?
|
| - Bots, crypto scams, misinformation, ads
|
| - The entire interface appears to be an overlay over something
| else. Like it looks like you're reading a popup that you can
| dismiss to see the actual content. But when you do that, it
| shows you something unrelated.
|
| - Sometimes, but not always, I see the tweet I was intended to
| see, but instead of seeing replies, there's a bunch of
| completely unrelated tweets below that where the replies
| normally are
|
| I'm old, so it's probably me, but I just can't parse a Twitter
| page because it's so bizarrely laid out, and so much of the
| expected content either isn't shown, or is hidden by default,
| and so much unexpected content is shown. Call me crazy, but I
| don't have time to figure it out just to read someone's hot
| take on the latest trend.
| rsync wrote:
| After all of these decades ...
|
| After talk/ytalk, .plan files, sysop chat, fidonet, usenet,
| livejournal/myspace/facebook ...
|
| I can't believe that the mass-adoption of threaded, text
| discussions _looks like this_ !
|
| What must non-technical, end user, always-online-generation think
| of this ?
|
| It's confusing, barely-usable garbage.
| demosito666 wrote:
| Yep, every time I'm linked to twitter (I don't have mobile app)
| I feel myself so old, because for the love of god I can't
| figure why anyone would use this for communication. Maybe the
| fact that I don't use it from mobile adds to this.
| betwixthewires wrote:
| I'd love to see a workgroup to discuss social UX ideas with the
| goal of implementing a new type of social media experience.
| Even the FOSS, decentralized and federated implementations of
| social media are taking their queues from these terrible UX
| designs.
| anthk wrote:
| Twitter is best used thru Bitlbee and an IRC client.
| Jcowell wrote:
| Honestly ? It great. Short consumable content that allows for
| vertical discussion in two directions with different meanings ,
| per thread discussions that you can skip if you want.
|
| If you find it boring you can bail at anytime and if you find
| it interesting you can bookmark tweets for later consumption.
| The trending feature allows for multi-community discussion,
| jokes, and memes.
|
| Twitter encompasses engaging text-based human interaction
| perfectly.
| mftb wrote:
| Unfortunately having been through a similar evolution, I feel
| the same, but when I talk to younger people, they think it's
| great.
|
| I specifically agree with the part about barely-usable garbage.
| Whenever I'm linked to a Twitter thread it's a dumpster fire.
| Baffling.
| ahmedfromtunis wrote:
| I see they a huge loss of more than 500 million dollars on a
| healthy 1.2 billion dollars (which is up 37% from last quarter).
|
| What did they spend that money on? Did they invest it in some new
| stuff or spend it on marketing?
| donio wrote:
| Twitter is up by over 150% since 2016.
|
| Both are pretty useless statements without context.
| IncRnd wrote:
| The context is the original IPO share price of Twitter in 2013.
| knorker wrote:
| The context of "since IPO" for a company that's been public for
| almost a decade, in the tech business.
|
| In fact, what other tech stock valued at double digit billions
| has had such a flat valuation for its whole lifetime, yet still
| survived?
|
| Yes, a range of ~14-77, but it's neither taken off nor crashed.
|
| Look at any other survivor and they'll be shaped more like
| Oracle, Cisco, FB&NFLX (well, recent troubles aside)
|
| Look at them all over the last 9 years. Twitter stands out to
| me.
|
| I dunno, maybe there are many big tech companies following the
| same pattern. But none of them are this high profile, so
| Twitter is the odd one out.
| tinyhouse wrote:
| Look at AMD before and after the new CEO...
| ARandomerDude wrote:
| It's been pretty much a straight line downward trend for 10
| years. There's probably not a whole lot that is redeemable by
| more context.
| austincheney wrote:
| I have never understood Twitter as a product. The idea of
| _following_ people seems bizarre to me. If I wanted to follow
| some product or organization I would subscribe to an email,
| mailer, RSS, or something of the sort specific to the thing I
| wish to stay informed about.
|
| Over sharing, or the idea of broadcasting details about my life
| to strangers on the internet is also something I completely don't
| understand.
| danlugo92 wrote:
| "It's the UX stupid!"
| charcircuit wrote:
| Do you understand the concept of being a fan of someone? For
| example you can follow a bunch of artists to see what they are
| working on. You can follow your favorite content creators to
| see what they are working on. You can follow your friends to
| see what they are up to.
| ProfessorLayton wrote:
| As a heavy twitter user who mostly enjoys it (I'm very particular
| of who I follow), I just don't understand what they've been doing
| all this time. Their product has been incredibly stagnant for
| _years_ save for the occasional feature here and there and some
| styling.
|
| They've screwed over devs trying to build on their APIs and
| eroded all trust along the way. New features have been rolled out
| haphazardly, and they totally botched Vine and let TikTok
| takeover.
|
| Despite all these issues, I like it, but it's increasingly
| frustrating to use, and can't help but question what's going on
| inside the company.
|
| Related: Here's how to hide all the crap they've been adding to
| the timeline
|
| twitter.com##[aria-label="Timeline: Trending now"]
|
| twitter.com##[aria-label="Relevant people"]
|
| twitter.com##[aria-label="Search and explore"]
|
| twitter.com##[aria-label="Footer"]
|
| twitter.com##[aria-label="Who to follow"]
|
| twitter.com##[aria-label="Discover new Lists"]
|
| twitter.com##[aria-label=" liked "]
| znep wrote:
| ...and almost every time I end up on a mobile link to a tweet
| in a web browser I have to refresh the page to get anything but
| an error. Which has been going on for years, or at least seems
| like it.
| tshaddox wrote:
| What they've been doing is tons and tons and incomprehensibly
| many tons of work on targeting and selling advertisements.
| riffraff wrote:
| Based on the ads I see in my timeline, they didn't do a great
| job at that. I have used the service for many many years and
| I have literally never seen any ad that I wanted to click.
|
| Maybe they do better for the US, but they seem to have done
| far worse than their competitors in ad space.
| cpeterso wrote:
| I've used Twitter for almost 13 years (!!) and its ads are
| barely relevant to me. An example of Twitter missing the
| mark: my Twitter mute list includes a bunch of
| cryptocurrency keywords and yet Twitter still shows me
| cryptocurrency ads that include those muted words. I've
| explicitly told Twitter that I'm not interested in
| cryptocurrency, but they show the ads anyway. Perhaps
| Twitter still considers me in the target audience because
| I've proven that I what cryptocurrency is by muting those
| keywords.
|
| In contrast, I joined Instagram just last year and use it
| very little, but its ads are much more (sometimes almost
| scarily) relevant to me. My wife is a big Instagram user,
| so perhaps Instagram has a shadow profile for our home IP
| address and I'm seeing ads personalized based on her
| activity (and thus peripherally relevant to me).
| YaBomm wrote:
| kawsper wrote:
| You also can't right click their trending widget to open in a
| new tab.
| pphysch wrote:
| Twitter like all mass social media is competing for quantity of
| user not quality of user. Because their product is the user:
| behavioral analytics & advertising.
|
| If you're gonna use Twitter anyways, Twitter has zero incentive
| to make it a more productive tool for you (in fact they want to
| be slightly less productive so you spend more time on it). Due
| to network effects, they are not worried about competitors
| shipping a better product.
| charcircuit wrote:
| >Twitter like all mass social media is competing for quantity
| of user not quality of user.
|
| Then why do they ban low quality users such as bots or users
| who have broken their rules?
| dageshi wrote:
| Their advertiser don't want to advertise to bots and the
| users who break the rules potentially cause a pile of bad
| publicity for them so they're happy to get rid of them.
| winternett wrote:
| They've actually screwed up the very basis that made it useful
| though, they reduced control over what users can elect to see,
| they've completely wrecked real time timelines, and they are
| covertly ratio-ing user accounts so that even their subscribers
| see posts later than they are completed or even in many cases
| not at all, and now they're marketing to users (main
| contributors to all the platform's content) to pay in order to
| boost their posts... The whole business model is like telling
| people they can ride electricity generating stationary bikes in
| order to charge up teslas for the wealthy.
|
| I've never seen any other tool as productive as it boched
| terribly... Facebook was never really as useful for real time
| news and events in nature (mind you).
| meerita wrote:
| What killed me it was Twitter killing developers apis: no more
| interesting apps than theirs. It sucks big time. They're also
| screwing the chronology, sometimes you get the latest tweets
| (most interesting) and sometimes they switch you to
| Recommended, which, normally, it sucks. Let me browse
| chronologically as it was in the old days.
| charcircuit wrote:
| Chronological is worse since you will see a bunch meaningless
| tweets from people. It's better if twitter can show me the
| important tweets that I've missed since I last used it.
| atorodius wrote:
| I recently wondered about this, from another angle. In a way
| it was "weird" that they had an API, given our times. I.e.,
| it was different: imagine if FB/Instagram/WhatsApp had an
| API. (I think it would be awesome, but it puts into
| perspective that it was weird that they had one imo)
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Facebook actually had APIs which got closed down after a
| couple of data-mining scandals (first these "quiz" apps and
| games, then Cambridge Analytica as the final nail in the
| coffin), and their messenger used to support federation via
| XMPP. IIRC that got shut down because of spam and scams.
| winternett wrote:
| Now devs and social engineers are using FaceBook groups
| to covertly gather intel... I joined a local development
| (to my home) group and found out after answering
| development questions people posted that I was suddenly
| getting a lot of recruiter calls out of nowhere. Facebook
| apparently exposes contact info in the process, or
| perhaps the engineers cross-reference other sites as
| well. It makes the job easy for scammers too.
|
| The convoluted ways in which people are gathering info on
| individuals is rampant in many Facebutt groups... There
| is way too much unsolicited spam and it grows every time
| I use an app or social site.
|
| Makes me not want to log in at all a lot.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Facebook still has APIs, there's just a bunch of
| attestations and app reviews before you get access to
| them now. Some of them have been neutered, like friends'
| lists and whatnot, but there's a lot they still do.
| ximeng wrote:
| WhatsApp has an API for $$:
|
| https://www.whatsapp.com/business/api
| nradov wrote:
| Is it viable for advertising supported services to have a
| fully functional API? Some third-party developer will build
| an alternative client app with no ads and eliminate the
| revenue stream.
| vkou wrote:
| And they'll get their API keys revoked.
|
| Just because you have an API doesn't mean you're going to
| allow anyone and everyone to use it how they want.
| riffraff wrote:
| It wasn't our times, it was a time when every service
| provided APIs, and many services provided parsable html to
| be scraped. The era of "mash ups".
|
| It's incredible how things changed since the 00s.
| masswerk wrote:
| Back then, free APIs and mashups based on them were _the_
| hot thing. (Free geolocation resolvers, Google hat a free
| search API, Bing as well, FB had one, too, free weather
| forecasts APIs, etc., etc.) You couldn 't be a trendy
| start-up without providing one. Things have changed a lot
| since.
|
| PS: I keep a few selected apps from this era on my phone.
| Once a year I open them and admire them in their data-less
| beauty. (Favourite one: Partly Clouded) Let's call it
| software shinto.
| wongarsu wrote:
| Instagram has an API [1][2], Facebook used to have a decent
| API back in the days, Reddit still has an excellent API.
|
| But somehow Youtube and Twitter are the only services where
| I prefer 3rd party clients.
|
| 1: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/instagram-api
|
| 2: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/instagram-basic-
| display...
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| Facebook used to have an API (that was useable to do
| interesting things).
| winternett wrote:
| Chronological posts were the one thing making tools like
| twitter useful. The ideal that you could follow someone and
| see their minute-to-minute thoughts was refreshing.
|
| In the age of bots and schedules posts, fake accounts and
| marginal content/reposts are rampant. Twitter to me now feels
| like a "dead body" repost zone where the only thing that
| grabs attention are snuff clips and pr0n.
|
| Their overhead from all the volume is probably stratospheric,
| and they're scrambling to stop the hemorrhage of expenses
| over innovating now, so it's probably gonna take an entirely
| different platform to recapture the classic dynamic that
| Twitter once had.
| mdns33 wrote:
| deepsun wrote:
| Do they need to do anything? The product just works, pays their
| bills, why should everyone jump off pants trying to squeeze as
| much money from their product as possible?
| atlantas wrote:
| Thanks, that's useful.
|
| What I don't get about twitter as a company: Why do they have
| so many employees? If they scaled back they could have a nice
| business as it is.
| tshaddox wrote:
| The goto answer for this is that they have the number of
| employees they have because they deemed each new employee to
| provide more value than they cost to employee. That's their
| goal. Their goal is not to have the minimal number of people
| required to run some very simplistic description of their
| company. They would employee a thousand milk delivery people
| if they thought each one would provide more value than their
| cost to employee.
| 8note wrote:
| Alternatively, the cost of hiring the employee is lower
| than the cost of letting a competitor hire them
| [deleted]
| ARandomerDude wrote:
| > I just don't understand what they've been doing all this
| time.
|
| There was that one time in 2017 when they increased the
| character limit.
| elcapitan wrote:
| Do these ublock rules still work? At least in my web ui, most
| css classes and IDs seem to be randomized now..
| delecti wrote:
| I'm amused at you questioning what they've been doing all this
| time, and then giving instructions to avoid seeing what they've
| been doing all this time.
|
| I don't like those things in my timeline either, but that's
| your answer. Also those annoying voice chatrooms and their lame
| attempt at stories.
| lordnacho wrote:
| One could argue they filled out their niche. Took the VC money,
| made the thing global, does what it says on the tin. The world
| now has a broadcast-short-messages service that can be used by
| people to reach their audience.
|
| Unfortunately that's not enough, since these tech firms tend to
| be priced to eat the whole planet, thus requiring a lot more
| than going global with a little thing that works.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _One could argue they filled out their niche_
|
| Between this and Facebook's recent woes, I wish this was a
| sign of a global tiring of social media in general.
|
| I'm frequently wrong about these things, but one can hope.
| doublepg23 wrote:
| Wouldn't TikToks rise be in opposition to that idea?
| shakezula wrote:
| It's not the end of social media, just nearing the end of
| its first gods.
| Traubenfuchs wrote:
| TikTok can be considered at least 3rd generation, if FB
| and Twitter were second and first is MySpace. I am sure
| one could argue there are more generations. Twitter is
| not among the first social media god generation.
| mywittyname wrote:
| Adding to this: it's really hard for Do One Thing Well
| companies to pivot.
| beebmam wrote:
| They're not even remotely priced at the magnitude to eat the
| whole planet. And yet, their market _IS_ eating the entire
| world (except China, due to insular political reasons). That
| points to me like they 're significantly undervalued.
| underwater wrote:
| What is Twitter's market? They seem increasingly like just
| another online community. Most of my feed is the same few
| Twitter influencers with high follower counts. The drama,
| conventions, and memes all make it feel insular and hostile
| to outsiders. Feels more like Tumblr than some global,
| open, platform.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| just because you reach the whole world doesn't necessarily
| mean there's a good way to monetize it, at least without
| losing what makes the service attractive.
|
| Sure they could start slapping ads on everything, even
| paywall the site but at the end of the day there'd be
| significant competition eroding profits.
|
| Twitter almost makes more sense as an open protocol than a
| commercial service, which is basically what Mastodon is.
| It's even what Dorsey wanted to do at one point with
| Bluesky, not sure if that's still alive.
| ericmay wrote:
| When you say they are you referring to Twitter specifically
| or social media/US tech companies in general?
|
| If you mean Twitter specifically I'd be interested in
| reading your thoughts on the "bull case" for this takeover.
| I like Twitter and use it to shout into the void from time
| to time. I wonder if it's just like.. a company and not a
| growth company? Like what if we just had Twitter with some
| monetization and then it just paid out dividends to
| shareholders? Why is that such a bad thing?
| riffic wrote:
| > world now has a broadcast-short-messages service
|
| Twitter is a company that has a track record of both user and
| developer hostility. They shouldn't be this for the world,
| and they don't need to be either.
|
| I like to say if you're skating where the puck is going to
| be, you should be skating towards running your own software
| that speaks ActivityPub.
|
| By _you_ , I don't mean you per se. I mean organizations with
| budgets who would typically be assigning email accounts and
| that keep an LDAP directory.
|
| Twitter could even sell a white-labeled version of this and
| manage it on your behalf on their own servers.
|
| Some of the target organizations may not want to be subject
| to rules applicable to American corporations. They're free to
| operate something like this outside those bounds and use an
| interoperable protocol.
| tootie wrote:
| I honestly don't get it. My company gets a lot of traffic from
| Twitter apparently so I signed up to get some perspective. I
| mostly follow journalists and publications as well as some
| business and tech folks I like. I see so many context-free
| messages of people arguing about topics I'm out of the loop on
| or posting links to news I already saw in a better aggregator.
| Maybe once or twice a week do I see an interesting bit of
| insight but it's drowning in an ocean of gibberish. And as far
| as I can tell that's the entire premise of the platform.
| oonerspism wrote:
| It's a version of the same problem that Facebook has.
|
| Once you've had your term of ruling the world, there are only so
| many directions you can go from there. And by definition, the
| majority are downwards.
| AniseAbyss wrote:
| Guess Trump needs to come back.
| powera wrote:
| The Hacker News zeitgeist appears to be strongly anti-Twitter.
| I'm not entirely sure why.
|
| As far as "is the stock fairly priced" - it is only 5% of the
| market cap of Facebook.
|
| As far as "is Twitter a good product" - apart from complaints
| that people talk about politics on the app, I don't see anything
| substantial in the complaints here.
| rvz wrote:
| > As far as "is the stock fairly priced" - it is only 5% of the
| market cap of Facebook.
|
| Twitter looks under-priced if you count its recent acquisitions
| from Quill, Sphere, Revue and it's intention to focus on the
| so-called 'web3'. Lots of ways to grow in those areas if they
| are smart enough.
| agentultra wrote:
| It's the only social I use really but I've been looking into
| alternatives. Ever since Twitter decided to open up a crypto/web3
| team and introduced NFT profile pics I'm out and won't support
| it... but as the only social I have to keep in touch with other
| open source contributors and projects I work on/follow it's going
| to take some time before I totally close my account.
|
| That being said, good recommendations are welcome!
| digianarchist wrote:
| I honestly thought this stuff was going to disappear with the
| change of leadership but it looks like they've doubled down.
|
| NFT profile pictures? Who wants this?
| betwixthewires wrote:
| I'd suggest as an initial migratory step (or just for having
| that extra reach) start using a Mastodon server for
| microblogging. That appears to be where this twitter-like
| social UX paradigm is headed.
| riffic wrote:
| run a blog and connect with the Indieweb community.
|
| Someone else mentioned Mastodon. If you don't want to run your
| own Mastodon server, but you have a WordPress site, use an
| ActivityPub plugin to connect with the wider network.
| champagnois wrote:
| Twitters design makes it kind of a weird one way communication
| tool.
|
| Elon Musk can tweet something and a million people will reply.
| What percentage if those replies are bots, shills, or people
| trying to get money out of some offer of employment? Likely an
| absurdly high %.
|
| Then there are the hacker groups and their influence campaigns...
| All over twitter.
|
| I feel like twitter might be useful on a self hosted intranet
| with your close family and friends -- but as a global product it
| is grotesque.
| zack-m wrote:
| I've always thought of it as that. More generally, idea could
| be applied to YouTube, podcasting, etc. One person has ability
| to broadcast to millions, while the millions can't broadcast
| back equally.
| 1024core wrote:
| Jack saw this coming and hightailed it outta there as fast as he
| could!
| [deleted]
| Victerius wrote:
| Throwing a subscription wall over reply chains doesn't entice me
| to create an account.
| FalconSensei wrote:
| They failed to get revenue from ads, just started a paid version
| that doesn't offer anything attractive for most people (I would
| be willing to pay a bit for a good experience), and by focusing
| SO MUCH on engagement without a way to opt-out, they make people
| hate the tool and their timelines. Tik Tok at least has two tabs:
| Following and For You. On following I only see content from users
| I follow. But Twitter refuses to let this happen, and clutter my
| timeline with things I don't wanna see.
|
| And even if I create lists for people I want to see posts from
| (suggestion from another post from earlier this week), I still
| can't make my likes not be 'advertised' to everyone that follows
| me. So basically sometimes I can't even give a like to a tweet if
| it's risque for example, because some followers might not like
| seeing that and then unfollow me.
| rlewkov wrote:
| Buy more, it's on sale
| brokencode wrote:
| That's what people say when a normally healthy and growing
| company has a dip. But when a company does nothing but lose
| value for almost a decade, the phrase is totally inapplicable.
| rlewkov wrote:
| Was trying to be a bit glib and sound like a cold calling
| stock broker "if you liked it at $10 you should love it at
| $5" :-)
| rvz wrote:
| Then we better hope it becomes oversold at $19, since when
| that happens it becomes a very strong buy signal.
| yumraj wrote:
| Like a gallon of milk nearing its sell by date?
| hackerlytest wrote:
| > Buy more, it's on sale
|
| Only works when you have money lying around
| pumaontheprowl wrote:
| Are you sure about that Reuters? Twitter's stock is up 5% over
| the last five days. It seems to me that they met the market's
| expectation for growth. Not many people buy more of a stock after
| it underperforms their expectations.
|
| This headline is at best misleading -- intended to give the
| impression that Twitter is performing worse than they are by
| ignoring the metrics in which they are excelling -- or
| potentially even just outright wrong.
| ziggus wrote:
| Remember, this is Wall Street you're talking about, so both
| things can be true: Twitter can miss analyst's expectations,
| and the stock can go up because other analysts see an
| opportunity based on different expectations.
|
| If you're expecting much of what Wall Street (or journalists
| covering the markets) does to make sense, you're going to have
| a bad time.
| curiousllama wrote:
| Estimates are analyst estimates, not market expectation. The
| market can (and often does) expect a company to miss estimates.
| If they missed by less than expected, the stock usually goes
| up.
| [deleted]
| conradfr wrote:
| Like Instagram and others they have gotten quite hostile to
| visitors without an account. I guess tracking and monetizing your
| users earns a lot more than displaying ads for everyone.
| ApolloFortyNine wrote:
| Well with France making it illegal to use Google analytics, I
| expect many more websites to move forward with forcing you to
| login. They force you to have an account, which makes you agree
| to them tracking you, and they'll use you being logged in to
| track that. When they can use third party analytics it's not as
| important, but still obviously a plus to them to have people
| have an account.
| Vosporos wrote:
| *making it illegal to use Google Analytics because GA moves
| identifying data to the US. Tracking with an account doesn't
| solve this. Let's not be reductive.
| ApolloFortyNine wrote:
| In other comments they mention that user consent would be
| enough to allow this.
|
| Unfortunately I'm not going to read another country's laws
| to see if this is actually the case.
| ProAm wrote:
| > I guess tracking and monetizing your users earns a lot more
| than displaying ads for everyone.
|
| During a gold rush, sell shovels.
| DixieDev wrote:
| Yeah, if you click too many links without an account it'll
| bring up a sign-up pop-up that takes you to the previous page
| when you close it. You can get around it by opening the link in
| a new tab, or save yourself constant hassle by disabling
| cookies on twitter altogether.
|
| While we're here, take another pro-tip: Set yourself up with an
| RSS/Atom reader and "Follow" accounts you are interested in
| through Nitter. No account, no random "We thought you might
| like", and no ads, just posts and retweets from the accounts
| you're interested in.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| Twitter is also hellbent on associating accounts with phone
| numbers. This is a dealbreaker for me. I will look into
| Nitter.
| thejohnconway wrote:
| Maybe there just aren't enough people in the world that want to
| be a part of something like Twitter. It's an aggressively public
| platform, which many people understandably don't want. one in
| twenty people in the world using your platform aught be enough
| for anybody, but the whole financial system we've set up around
| these companies is insane.
| charcircuit wrote:
| >It's an aggressively public platform
|
| You can easily make a private account.
| ynac wrote:
| I feel so naive / out-of-touch when Twitter comes up. How is it
| we don't have a simple micro-blogging protocol. Like we do for
| email. Twitter didn't invent it, neither did Unix for that
| matter. Twtxt and others are doing some great things, but why
| don't we move from innovation to standardized protocols to
| enhance the user experience of the internet. Is it just great
| marketing driven by profits. As I said, I'm probably just naive,
| but it sure seems like a trivial protocol to write and then we
| can all jump on the task of building clients.
| scarface74 wrote:
| Do we really want any new technology to be "like email"? Email
| is basically useless now with all of the spam.
| peterhunt wrote:
| We do and no one uses it.
|
| There is some truth to the classic HN post that "Twitter can be
| built in a weekend". A service / protocol that can distribute
| 280 character messages isn't really where the value is for a
| service like Twitter. It's 20% engineering, 80% recruiting the
| right users, retaining them, and getting them to engage on the
| platform.
|
| Additionally, open protocols are way harder to evolve and are
| therefore less competitive with closed services. The only
| reason why email has stuck around as long as it has is because
| it locked everyone in with its network effect before commercial
| players figured out how to compete.
|
| Additionally, email isn't really an open protocol in practice.
| Sure, it's spec'd, but in order to actually participate in the
| network you need to navigate a really complicated system of
| anti-spam reputation systems. This is why people just end up
| paying companies like Twilio to send email instead of running
| their own servers.
|
| Overall, I don't think we should be looking to learn any
| lessons from email. It achieved market dominance in a time that
| doesn't look anything like the modern era, and is much more
| complex than most people realize.
| woodruffw wrote:
| I believe we do: it's called ActivityPub[1], and it's what
| Mastodon and others use.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActivityPub
| djbusby wrote:
| Surprisingly difficult for Joe Public to get on - how to
| solve that problem?
| sumtechguy wrote:
| The problem is number of users they want to see on that
| platform. If you want to follow/read/interact with someone
| you will be there. If not you do not care about it. It is
| surprisingly hard to make a network of people if your
| network has no people in it. I had to teach this lesson to
| several managers over the years 'setup a page where our
| users can interact'. That turned out to be the easy part.
| The hard part was getting anyone to actually post anything.
| Much less interact with each other. That happens a decent
| amount when you try to move into a space that already has
| established players.
| woodruffw wrote:
| Mastodon is about as easy to create an account on as
| Twitter (if not easier; Twitter's human verification
| process is pretty cumbersome).
|
| You can sign up here: https://mastodon.social/about
|
| (Solving the "critical mass of users" problem is left as an
| exercise to the user.)
| riffic wrote:
| Running your own email server is pretty difficult but
| getting an email address somewhere doesn't seem to be a
| problem with the public anymore.
|
| To answer "How to solve that problem?", I'd say don't worry
| a damn thing about Joe Public.
| iratewizard wrote:
| Open source creates a superior product, technically and
| morally. Silicon valley creates a more addicting product.
| hedgehog wrote:
| Technology isn't the hard part, for example Mastodon exists and
| works fine. Funding a sustained product delivery effort is
| expensive, developing a value prop big enough to overcome
| network effects is really hard, etc.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > How is it we don't have a simple micro-blogging protocol.
| Like we do for email. Twitter didn't invent it, neither did
| Unix for that matter. Twtxt and others are doing some great
| things, but why don't we move from innovation to standardized
| protocols to enhance the user experience of the internet.
|
| I read an interesting point somewhere: empirically, platforms
| can change an innovate far faster than protocols. The example
| given was encryption: email doesn't have it, even though people
| have been talking about it for literally decades, but WhatsApp
| added it in a relatively short time (a year? less?).
|
| It makes sense. With a protocol, once it gets popular, change
| becomes really hard. It's like herding cats to get everyone to
| update, so things stagnate at the lowest common denominator for
| interoperability reasons. When all the software and installs
| are controlled by one entity, that entity can make a decision
| to change and just execute it, no herding needed.
| alangibson wrote:
| I'm one of the suckers buying Twitter stock. My theory is that
| they're the last untapped value in social networking. In order to
| tap that value, they need to get someone that can run a business
| in the top spot. Time will tell if they ever find them.
| edmcnulty101 wrote:
| I got a new political debate with three other people on Twitter
| and at some point they revealed to me that all three of them were
| the same person.
|
| That's what I decided to quit using Twitter.
| hunterb123 wrote:
| michaelmcdonald wrote:
| Sure you can! Michigan has a ban on smoking indoors and
| business grew for just about every bar and restaurant! Just
| gotta ban the right people. From what I can tell Twitter is
| doing that; but their business model is terrible and the
| platform is clunky. Their lack of growth has nothing to do with
| banning people.
| rexreed wrote:
| The revenue model for ads would be akin to the restaurants
| giving away the food and charging others to promote stuff to
| you while you're eating. When you're paying for the product,
| it's all different.
| ribosometronome wrote:
| As far as I can tell, people are still allowed on Twitter.
| thawaya3113 wrote:
| A distinction without a difference.
|
| If you repeatedly smoked in a restaurant even after being
| told no, the next time you won't be allowed in.
|
| That's exactly what Twitter does. If you keep breaking
| their rules they ban you.
| hunterb123 wrote:
| > Their lack of growth has nothing to do with banning people.
|
| Doesn't seem like that as their competitors that have sprung
| up are solely from conservatives being banned.
|
| Banning smoking !== banning dissenters, your analogy has a
| false equivalency for multiple reasons, I wouldn't use them
| for debates if I were you, just teaching.
|
| - edit because of post limit -
|
| @cheriot: Enough users for you to know about them.
| Competition starts somewhere. But yes I agree Twitter has a
| monopoly right now, my point is that monopoly is cracking due
| to censorship.
|
| @ketzo: So you know of their future competitors? That's a
| start. Maybe Twitter's monopoly will be dethroned one day.
| Conservatives make up nearly half of the US, I'd say it's a
| good guess.
|
| @ribosometronome: HN and Twitter are two different entities.
| Twitter is used as the defacto communication medium to
| interact w/ official government accounts, corporations, etc.
| It's supposed to be for all. Hacker News is a small news
| aggregator and discussion community.
|
| @shrimp_emoji: har har har JS is bad amirite guys?!
|
| @JaimeThompson: guess conservatives are mad for no reason I
| guess, they are imagining being banned. Maybe if Twitter had
| open mod logs we'd know for sure, but there's plenty of
| prominent people that were banned.
| ribosometronome wrote:
| Do you think HackerNews would be a friendly place for the
| type of behavior that has resulted in folk being banned
| from Twitter?
| ketzo wrote:
| Are we calling Gab/Parler "competition" now? Do they even
| have _revenue_ , let alone profit?
|
| Seems like a big reach, bordering on disingenuous, to
| attribute Twitter user growth/revenue slowdown to
| conservatives mad about being "unfairly censored". Twitter
| JaimeThompson wrote:
| >Conservatives make up nearly half of the US, I'd say it's
| a good guess.
|
| Lots and lots of conservatives on Twitter so can you give
| examples of those who got banned simply for being
| conservative?
| cheriot wrote:
| How many active users do Gab and Parlor have?
| shrimp_emoji wrote:
| The only thing that offends me here is the !==.
| dgellow wrote:
| I don't understand why platforms like Twitter don't make money
| the easy way: let people pay for visual customizations, like a
| different profile shape (octogonal instead of a circle), or a
| special banner or label, or any other cosmetics. That has been
| very successful for multiplayer games since more than a decade,
| people love to pay to show their cool new cosmetic. Let people
| pay for cool set of emotes. Or different colors, etc.
|
| That doesn't require ads, is optional, and works well in a social
| context.
| dematz wrote:
| It should be increasingly expensive and time consuming to add
| more sides to your profile shape, eg pentagon->hexagon is a
| step up. Adding enough sides to be a circle, or
| indistinguishable from one on a pixelated screen, would be very
| prestigious. Of course, this dimension might be disrupted by
| block...
| TylerE wrote:
| So, I guess it turns out that buying user engagement isn't really
| worthwhile if you have no monetization strategy (that doesn't
| make all those users angry)?
| Dma54rhs wrote:
| They have ads but not even nearly is the tech on par with
| Facebook or Google. Difficult to understand how they are doing
| so poor when the media and politicians are the ones holding
| this simple platform on float like a baby.
| mrweasel wrote:
| There aren't many companies with a need to target journalist
| and politicians for a profit... well there is but Twitter ads
| are a little to obvious.
|
| Twitter has a pretty large userbase, but I think it's the
| wrong demographics for consumer ads.
| cheriot wrote:
| I wonder if Jack's new company will see a similar stagnation.
| Square is getting beat by Clover while the CEO is focused on
| blockchain.
| murat124 wrote:
| Not related to said beating but I opened https://www.clover.com
| and umatrix icon showed the number 258. This many requests to
| 3rd party resources at start usually mean there is too much
| tracking. A good reason to just close the tab. By the way,
| Square had only 2.
| qwertyuiop_ wrote:
| The nail in the coffin you are looking for ...
|
| https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2022/02/apple-unveils-contact...
| Androider wrote:
| Apple and Stripe are also set to commoditize the small business
| Point of Sale that is Square's bread and butter. iPhones were
| just announced to soon accept contactless payments directly,
| and probably also the next iPad will include the required NFC
| hardware.
| cheriot wrote:
| The hardware is less important than the merchant account. The
| risk of charge backs means a small business accepting a
| credit card is effectively taking out a loan. Apple isn't
| going into that part of the value chain (so far).
| Androider wrote:
| Right, Apple is only providing the hardware and it requires
| to use a (partnered) processor, like Stripe, which was the
| example they used in their recent announcement. Stripe
| coincidentally sells chargeback protection as a service
| https://stripe.com/radar/chargeback-protection if that is a
| concern.
| zht wrote:
| in what way is square being beat by clover? was square in some
| way doing better than cover at one point and is no longer doing
| so?
| cheriot wrote:
| That's my understanding, yes. Square was first but now Clover
| is signing up more merchants.
| arnvald wrote:
| > Twitter also announced a new $4 billion share repurchase
| program, which replaces a $2 billion program from 2020.
|
| So they're a growth stock, but really they're a dividend stock?
| lbriner wrote:
| I think there used to be an adage that if you can get enough
| members, you can monetize it. Twitter haven't exactly made no
| money but I can't imagine that there is any real trick here other
| than adverts - the same as most other "free" services.
|
| Maybe they should try something more person like where people pay
| a certain amount of money to get exclusive content from the
| people they follow. Can't think of any other way I would pay for
| micro-blogging.
| xnx wrote:
| Vine:Tiktok::Myspace:Facebook
| tootahe45 wrote:
| I wonder if they count crypto scammers as real users. Hell , i
| can't even tweet at Amazon support without multiple automated
| scambots messaging me.
| barbazoo wrote:
| Well, if they let me sign up without a phone number...
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| Maybe they shouldn't have banned _that_ user, after all.
| zeruch wrote:
| Nah, they should have...and sooner.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| As an American, it feels strange to me that the CEO of
| Twitter has control over how The President is able to
| communicate.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| The CEO of Twitter has control over how the President is
| able to communicate on Twitter. As an American, this makes
| sense because Twitter is private property.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| It's one of those things where in theory and in the rule
| of law the CEO can do so. It does make me feel
| uncomfortable, though. As time goes on I am less and less
| supportive of the notion that private companies can do as
| they please on the basis that they are private companies.
|
| I don't know what 'the solution' is, but I do sense a
| precedent being established that I am weary of. Twitter
| is simultaneously a public sphere where politicians are
| prohibited from blocking users, but also a private
| platform where they can be ejected at-will.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > Twitter is simultaneously a public sphere where
| politicians are prohibited from blocking users
|
| I do not know what public sphere means, but I doubt
| Twitter stops specific accounts from blocking other
| accounts. I do not see why that is relevant either.
|
| The president of the United States, of all people, has
| the capability to put an RSS feed on Whitehouse.gov or
| the president's personal website anytime they want.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| Sure, but you'll have a hard time convincing people that
| is an effective alternative. How many people do you know
| who visit the official website of the White House to read
| press releases and memos? Does the average person know
| that the president used to give a weekly radio address?
| The medium of the message is just as important as the
| message itself.
|
| I also believe AOC would be a nobody if she didn't have a
| Twitter account. She'd be the same as the other 435
| Representatives who release statements on their house.gov
| website that no one realizes exists.
|
| Edit: >"I doubt Twitter stops specific accounts from
| blocking other accounts."
|
| This was actually a court ruling. I have no clue if
| Twitter actually coded this requirement on
| @realDonaldTrump after the fact.
| https://www.nbcnews.com/news/all/trump-can-t-block-users-
| his...
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| That is a court order due to the President's status as a
| particular type of government employee, not a Twitter
| policy.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| Okay. The whole situation still makes me uncomfortable. I
| don't particularly think that being a "private company"
| on the size and scale of Twitter justifies their ability
| to censor the president.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Twitter is [...] a public sphere where politicians are
| prohibited from blocking users
|
| No, it's not.
|
| _When_ a public official _uses_ their Twitter account as
| an official channel, _that account_ becomes a limited
| public forum from which users cannot be blocked for
| reasons that they could not be excluded from official
| government fora more generally (e.g., viewpoint
| discrimination is not permitted.) This is not a
| restriction _on Twitter_ , but on the conduct of
| government business by public officials that applies
| wherever and whenever they conduct such business.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| I'm saying it's a de-facto public sphere rather than de-
| jure one.
| krapp wrote:
| >As time goes on I am less and less supportive of the
| notion that private companies can do as they please on
| the basis that they are private companies.
|
| There is no such notion - private companies have to obey
| the laws of the land like anyone else.
|
| Platforms like Twitter have the right to ban politicians
| on the basis of the rights of private property and
| freedom of speech and association. The same rights that
| allow restaurants to eject people for "no shoes, no
| shirt, no service" and allow radio stations and
| newspapers to choose what and what not to publish, and me
| to tell Jehovah's Witnesses off. I don't know why this
| suddenly makes people feel uncomfortable, when these
| rights, and the ability of private enterprise to exercise
| them, have been part of the basis of Western liberal
| democracies for hundreds of years.
|
| The inverse of this would be to give carte-blanche
| ownership and rights over all property to politicians -
| including social media platforms, that supersede the
| rights and desires of the platform owners. That it would
| be illegal to ban any politician from any private
| property under any circumstances.
|
| I believe it's a _good thing_ that the President of the
| United States has no more right to act the fool on
| Twitter than you or I should. Twitter is not, and should
| not be, the sole nexus for all global political and
| cultural communication. It 's a microblogging platform,
| ffs, the only reason it "matters" at all is because one
| specific paranoiac President didn't trust his own media
| apparatus.
|
| It's a convenience. It's certainly useful, but it isn't
| necessary.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| >"The inverse of this would be to give carte-blanche
| ownership and rights over all property to politicians"
|
| Why would the alternative be carte-blanche over _all_
| forms of property? The government already forces
| telephone companies not to discriminate based on speech.
| Broadcasters must follow restrictions and allow
| government messages to be played under certain
| circumstances. The Net Neutrality folks are fighting so
| that Comcast cannot determine which parts of the internet
| I am allowed to visit using their service.
|
| What would the harm be in making a law along the lines of
| "A digital service used primarily for communication with
| over twenty million members must allow sitting members of
| congress, the supreme court, the president, and members
| of the cabinet to disseminate any communication they so
| desire during their tenure."
|
| The government controls what citizens can do with their
| private property all the time, and in just about every
| facet of our lives. I see no harm in making laws
| depending on the scale of the company.
| krapp wrote:
| >Why would the alternative be carte-blanche over all
| forms of property?
|
| Because the rights of property, free speech and
| association that apply to social media platforms apply
| everywhere, so altering those rights for social media
| platforms also alters them everywhere.
|
| >The government already forces telephone companies not to
| discriminate based on speech. Broadcasters must follow
| restrictions and allow government messages to be played
| under certain circumstances.
|
| Social media platforms are not common carriers. They
| don't have monopoly over free speech or the dissemination
| of information, nor has any platform ever claimed to act
| neutrally. The entire business model of social media is
| curation and algorithmic recommendation of content - the
| exact opposite of what a common carrier does.
|
| Also, broadcasters are regulated because broadcast
| spectrum space is a limited resource. Cable broadcasters,
| for instance, aren't subject to the same regulations.
|
| >What would the harm be in making a law along the lines
| of "A digital service used primarily for communication
| with over twenty million members must allow sitting
| members of congress, the supreme court, the president,
| and members of the cabinet to disseminate any
| communication they so desire during their tenure."
|
| The harm is that the First Amendment prevents the
| government from abridging the people's freedom of speech,
| and a fundamental part of freedom of speech is freedom
| from _compelled_ speech. Forcing all social media
| platforms which meet some arbitrary (and arbitrarily
| changeable) limit on membership to carry speech by the
| government is compelled speech, and an abridgement on
| freedom of speech, and thus voids, or at least weakens,
| the First Amendment. Which is a bad thing.
|
| Governments already have their own media infrastructure.
| Members of Congress, the Supreme Court, and the President
| of the US have Twitter accounts (remember, what was
| banned was Trump's personal account, @POTUS is still
| perfectly fine.) The solution here is for the government
| to either comply with the rules set by social media
| platforms like everyone else, or else create their own
| platform.
| carapace wrote:
| I think the root problem is that a single private
| platform has become a _de facto_ public sphere, like, _at
| all_. Is there any precedent for this? I also don 't know
| what a solution might look like, I mean, what are you
| going to do? Nationalize Twitter?
|
| It's a general problem too (IMO): Microsoft/Github
| mediates FOSS development, Facebook (I'm never going to
| call them "Meta", I think the rename was a huge dick move
| by Zuckerberg that pollutes our language and culture.
| Nyah.) Facebook is Easy-Bake oven Internet for normies
| and they love it. Smart phones are malls.
| rvz wrote:
| You mean @realDonaldTrump? Gee, I wonder why everyone cannot
| stop talking, reporting about that person given that they have
| been _' deplatformed'_ for over year.
| johndfsgdgdfg wrote:
| FB deservedly gets a lot of criticism. I personally feel Twitter
| doesn't get its fair share of blame. IME Twitter is the most
| toxic social media platform out there. Twitter deserves a fair
| share of blame for the divisive political culture we live in
| right now. I hope these companies go bankrupt and it'd be nothing
| but a blessing for humanity.
| stevofolife wrote:
| But how can you blame Twitter for the divisive political
| culture when "we" are the ones generating the content?
|
| I'm not sure if I understand how Twitter is systematically
| dividing the culture.
|
| I really don't think Twitter is the root cause of this. But I
| may be wrong.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Twitter optimises for engagement. That's not optimising for
| controversy, but it's close. Shiri's scissor statements[0]
| aren't the fault of the people writing the training data;
| they're the fault of the people making them.
|
| Twitter doesn't synthesise things, but it fosters an
| environment where people are driven to write more
| controversial, outrageous, engaging things by tight-loop-
| feedback classical conditioning. It's not magic - the people
| posting such things are partly to blame - but Twitter
| wouldn't have half as many problems if it just showed
| _random_ tweets to people. Instead, it shows people what it
| thinks will keep people on Twitter; short term, that works,
| but long-term it destroys Twitter 's value (and value of
| everything Twitter touches, as a side effect).
|
| [0]: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-
| controversial/
| lariati wrote:
| I mean Marshall McLuhan's entire career is practically about
| this.
|
| A medium of communication is not neutral. A book is not just
| word of mouth stories written down. There is a feedback loop
| in there that a book becomes something entirely different.
|
| I mean if we take things to extremes and make a platform that
| we can only communicate with 4 letter words, what words do
| you think are going to dominate engagement and take over the
| platform?
| zeepzeep wrote:
| The problem is that these sites have optimized their
| algorithms to show you content which provoke a reaction, they
| don't care if positive or toxic. At least that's what FB
| does, dunno about Twitter tbh.
| invisible wrote:
| Whenever this topic comes up, I think a lot of people
| assume this is some elaborate ML algorithm, but I believe
| it's really just "trending things go up, _sometimes_
| categorized and targeted."
|
| It's a really basic algorithm that captures the equivalent
| of groupthink.
| el-salvador wrote:
| > The problem is that these sites have optimized their
| algorithms to show you content which provoke a reaction,
| they don't care if positive or toxic.
|
| Twitter should learn from Tiktok and Spotify. Their
| algorithms work very differently.
|
| Spotify has allowed me to discover some great songs just by
| creating a Song Radio from a song I liked. And it has also
| broadened the genres I listed. And spending 5 minutes on
| Tiktok's For You Page can help me feel better after a
| stressful day.
|
| On the other hand 5 minutes on Twitter can easily lead to
| more stress in my case.
| scarface74 wrote:
| But FB doesn't randomly put "toxic" content in my feed.
| It's because I'm either following "toxic" news originations
| or someone showed your crazy uncle how to get on line and
| you accepted his friend request. My feed has pictures of
| family, dumb non political memes, people talking about
| sports or "uplifting sayings and scripture verses" (I
| usually unfollow people who post too much of the latter)
| gurkendoktor wrote:
| It's hard to prove any of this, but I feel that I see a lot
| more astroturfing on Twitter than on FB.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| >"divisive political culture when "we" are the ones
| generating the content"
|
| I feel like this "we" is misplaced. In a broad sense, yes,
| these acerbic tweets are indeed being made by our fellow
| citizens. That being said, Twitter tends to amplify the
| messaging of a small and vocal segment of it's vast userbase.
| It's a vicious cycle because exposure begets exposure and
| anger begets engagement.
| danielvaughn wrote:
| It really is absurd. I don't get why the focus is all on FB. I
| honestly only keep FB around because my family is on it, and
| sometimes I use FB messenger with my friends. It has zero
| impact on my life.
|
| On the other hand, a single glance into twitter can lead to 2-3
| hours of a sustained state of mild rage, and you just feel
| _bad_ when you finally exit the app.
| umeshunni wrote:
| The focus is on FB because they are the ones taking ad
| revenue away from news publishers and traditional media. That
| gives the media more incentive to publish negative articles
| about them.
|
| When in doubt, follow the money.
| bduerst wrote:
| This is poisoning the well because there are legitimate
| reasons being reported to dislike FB's smarmy practices;
| it's not all sour grapes from media.
| el-salvador wrote:
| > On the other hand, a single glance into twitter can lead to
| 2-3 hours of a sustained state of mild rage, and you just
| feel bad when you finally exit the app.
|
| Definitely. It's really one of the few sites I block using my
| hosts file when I get a new computer.
| lariati wrote:
| Same here. I really feel like I should curate a twitter
| profile but it is just bad for my mental health.
|
| To me, it feels like a small library of really cool books but
| the library happens to be housed randomly inside of a giant
| lunatic asylum.
| zeepzeep wrote:
| idk, it's pretty civil in my bubble, though obviously there is
| some drama every now and then like now (Jonathan Scott ^^)
| bobiny wrote:
| It's easy to mute accounts you don't want to see on Twitter,
| even ones shown as ads.
| twitterhell wrote:
| If you mute the account, the conversation still happens. So
| awesome if you dont like a point of view. Terrible if you're
| gay, female, muslim, or any other hated minority subgroup
| that gets stalked and slandered on Twitter. If someone is
| posting slanderous material on Twitter, and you mute it, it
| isnt a solution. Even if you block it, it barely helps.
| bobiny wrote:
| I don't understand. If you don't want to see what someone
| says, you can mute or block them. What do you mean by
| conversation still happens?
| mrweasel wrote:
| The most damage Twitter does isn't even Twitters fault.
| Journalist f-ing love Twitter and believe that everything
| important is on Twitter, and everything on Twitter is
| important. News media is becoming the weird echo chamber of
| journalist talking to journalists, press people and analysts on
| Twitter and reporting on their Twitter conversations.
|
| Some stories are completely missed, due to not being Twitter
| friendly (to many words, hard to boil down to a tweet). Other
| non-stories are blow out of proportions because it was big on
| Twitter, even if no one outside Twitter cares.
| screye wrote:
| Twitter aggressively censors anyone without institutional
| approval. Twitters scratch the elites' backs, so the elites
| scratch back.
|
| Trump was banned from Twitter first. Any one with mildly right
| wing opinion is insta-banned from twitter. Blue checkmarks are
| strongly tied to institutional approval and fringe
| institutional voices are given a megaphone.
|
| Twitter perpetuates the current class system. So those in power
| have no qualms with it.
| scarface74 wrote:
| Since when wasn't someone who is supposedly a billionaire not
| part of the "elite"?
| screye wrote:
| The cultural elite is completely different from having
| money. It is the same reason that Trump was ridiculed for
| putting ketchup on steak or why journalists/post-docs are
| willing to make pennies on jobs that grand them access the
| cultural elite. I give the example of Trump because he the
| clearest contrast that differentiates wealth from the
| elite.
|
| Phrases like 'Nouveau Riche' or 'Paise aaye, par aukaad
| nahi aaye' (money without class) have existed in different
| cultures for centuries. This is not a new concept.
| scarface74 wrote:
| Someone who owns private airplanes and golf courses
| aren't part of the "cultural elite"? Before Trump's
| conversion to a populist in 2016, he was very much part
| of the cultural elite and spent most of his time hanging
| out with celebrities and Democrats.
| AniseAbyss wrote:
| Trump is part of the elite just not the elite Twitter is part
| of.
|
| You think the elite all think the same? No they have their
| political differences. But you don't have to cry for him the
| GOP has its own media empire.
| scarface74 wrote:
| If your FB newsfeed is toxic, it's because you have toxic
| friends.
| samwillis wrote:
| I think the difference is that the toxicity on Twitter is much
| more visible, it overflows onto everyones timelines, trending
| topics and in reply's to celebrities and politicians. On
| Facebook it's all "behind closed doors" in groups and on pages.
|
| They are both bad, but in very different ways.
| scotty79 wrote:
| As a person who never understood why twitter existed, let alone
| what purpose it might serve this information validates my
| feelings.
| pcmoney wrote:
| It exists so you can know what everyone is talking about 5
| weeks before they do. Follow the right people and it will
| change your life.
| stevenwliao wrote:
| Any recommendations?
| throwaway4good wrote:
| They are not making money, are they?
| samwillis wrote:
| Yes they are, they have just announced a $4B stock buyback.
|
| They are a "dividend" stock without proper dividends. Not
| everything needs to be a growth stock. Having said that 10%
| down in 10 years isn't great, especially with where the rest of
| tech has gone in that time.
| PKop wrote:
| >isn't great
|
| It's terrible
| xmprt wrote:
| If their main way distributing profits to investors is
| through stock buybacks then that would mean that their stock
| should have grown right? 10% down without real dividends is
| terrible.
| dktp wrote:
| In what way are they a dividend stock?
|
| They don't pay dividends and despite share buyback stock is
| down since IPO
| nradov wrote:
| From an investor standpoint, dividends and stock buybacks
| are roughly equivalent. Both are ways of returning cash to
| investors. Buybacks can be more tax efficient for investors
| using taxable accounts.
| PKop wrote:
| I don't think the confusion is around the concept, but
| the characterization of "them" as an instance of one,
| given the stock has performed terribly.
|
| They are simply in no way that matters a "dividend stock"
| literally or figuratively.
|
| Many are familiar with the concept of buybacks, but
| Twitter seems to be a "growth" stock that hasn't grown.
| todd8 wrote:
| Even flat for 10 years isn't great.
| gpapilion wrote:
| It's more about growth. Twitter isn't growing as it should be.
|
| If they were able to show strong user growth, revenue would
| follow as would the stock price. There are folks who love
| twitter, and those who prefer images. The larger segment is
| those who prefer images.
| 1270018080 wrote:
| They have had positive net income in a handful of quarters in
| their existence, but not recently.
| j4yav wrote:
| I actually still get a pretty decent experience out of Twitter.
| The only topic I really engage with is remote work.. I don't
| follow very many people (only humans who post real content) and
| unfollow anyone who goes "off topic". Which is too bad, but it
| keeps my feed simple and sane.
|
| I feel like Twitter would be way better if people had different
| topics you could subscribe (or not) to.
| skinkestek wrote:
| > I feel like Twitter would be way better if people had
| different topics you could subscribe (or not) to.
|
| All services would be better if they were more like Google+
| (but didn't share name with a despised effort to crush
| pseudonyms and wasn't owned by a company that buried it as soon
| as they had been forced to iron out the wrinkles ;-)
| robryan wrote:
| I suspect that the complexity tradeoff isn't worth it for
| them. As in it would solve the problem but probably send
| overall engagement down.
|
| Opt in would be nice, I am sure high follower people would
| rather go to the effort of categorising their tweets rather
| than losing followers when they decide to Tweet about their
| local sports.
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| That's kind of the rub with twitter, it puts individuals front
| and center... and individuals presumably have more than one
| interest that they might want to talk about. I mainly use
| twitter to surface fanart and some communities are very
| organized with using the right #tags, and when I check those
| tags I have a 100% hit rate on finding something new that I
| want to see. But anything else on that site is a crapshoot.
| It's kind of twitter's normal culture to be disorganized, but
| I'm pretty sure I and everyone I interact with on twitter are
| actually tumblr refugees and we're very diligent with tagging.
|
| You're really better off with traditional thread-based forums
| to have conversation topics. Muting somebody's entire existence
| just because they occasionally dirty the general feed with
| 'offtopic' just doesn't seem like a sustainable way to use
| social media.
| j4yav wrote:
| It has worked well for many years, at least for me. More
| people than you might expect really do focus an account on
| one topic. Some people have multiple accounts to separate
| work/personal life as well.
|
| It's nothing personal for me not to follow someone, so I
| don't really see it as muting their whole existence.
| cronix wrote:
| So I never created a Twitter account. Over the years, there are a
| few people that I liked to read their thoughts on Twitter, so I'd
| manually go to their wall and read occasionally. They're all
| verified.
|
| Over time, it became cumbersome to continue doing this and I
| thought I'd give in and create an account (on the website) so
| that these people were all easy to access from a single point. So
| I did, and went and immediately followed the 4 or 5 people. On
| the last one, my account locked up and said there was "suspicious
| activity" and if I wanted to continue I needed to supply my phone
| number. What? I haven't even tweeted anything yet and only
| followed verified checkmarked users. And why do I have to supply
| a phone number to use a web site? So, I just left the account in
| limbo and went back to what I was doing before - just manually
| going to individuals walls to read because they're bookmarked.
|
| So then a few months ago, Twitter started putting up an overlay
| up prompting you to log in or create an account to continue after
| viewing x tweets. Annoying, but not a huge issue as you could
| just dismiss the modal and continue.
|
| As of a few weeks ago, they got rid of the ability to dismiss the
| modal. The page just locks and you can't scroll unless you sign
| in.
|
| And that was the last day I used or visited Twitter. I now see 0
| ads, will never give up a phone number to join a website, and
| have nothing but disdain for that company.
|
| I have never encountered a more hostile website, or company for
| that matter, towards innocuous behavior. The juice just ain't
| worth the squeeze. At least I was seeing your ads before.
| judge2020 wrote:
| > The juice just ain't worth the squeeze.
|
| Thus triggering the headline "missed user growth estimates".
| RoddaWallPro wrote:
| This is also how I use Twitter. FYI, it still works for me in
| incognito mode.
|
| If anyone reading this works at Twitter: WHY are you guys
| making these changes? I'm far more likely to just never use the
| service again out of outrage then make an account.
| saagarjha wrote:
| It might be difficult to measure this.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| > I have never encountered a more hostile website, or company
| for that matter, towards innocuous behavior.
|
| Instagram pulled that same crap a couple of years back, and I
| haven't visited since.
| bogomipz wrote:
| I had this exact same usage pattern and the exact same
| experience as what you describe. Although I refused to give
| them my phone number, my resolution and conclusion were also
| exactly the same as yours.
| onedognight wrote:
| Same experience except I discovered that, at least on iOS,
| browsing in a private window still works to go to an individual
| user's feed. It's just a matter of time before they close that
| loophole and I too go away. FWIW, I do pay many of the people I
| manually follow on Twitter, but through substack or PayPal.
| programmarchy wrote:
| Yep, same here. It's infuriating. I've been using nitter to get
| around the modal, but who knows how long that will continue
| working.
| PegasusProject wrote:
| I really can recommend Nitter[0], which also creates RSS feeds
| so you can just add them to your RSS reader of choice.
|
| [0] https://nitter.net/
| [deleted]
| DyslexicAtheist wrote:
| > Twitter started putting up an overlay up prompting you to log
| in or create an account to continue after viewing x tweets.
| Annoying, but not a huge issue as you could just dismiss the
| modal and continue.
|
| you can no longer dismiss the modal, or in any other way bypass
| this as of a few days ago. (at least on mobile)
| anthk wrote:
| Replace twitter.com from the URL with nitter.kavin.rocks or
| nitter.fdn.fr .
| kec wrote:
| copying the URL into a new tab usually seems to work.
| asadlionpk wrote:
| Sadly, your outcome is an outlier. The conversion funnel using
| those hostile tactics is significantly higher than churn in
| short term, and that's all that matters for someone's promo
| packet.
| teddyh wrote:
| > _my account locked up and said there was "suspicious
| activity" and if I wanted to continue I needed to supply my
| phone number._
|
| I have repeatedly heard it said that Twitter does this _for
| every single new account_ as a matter of course. Twitter wants
| your phone number, but don't want you to bounce right at
| registration.
| shmatt wrote:
| I would guess it started as a reaction to the many botnets
| used by companies and countries trying to maximize certain
| opinions
|
| On top of the phone number, they also go through purges
| seemingly once a year, getting rid of up to a million
| accounts a day. That also doesn't fair well with giving the
| stock market raw numbers
| teddyh wrote:
| > _reaction to the many botnets_
|
| Makes no sense. If they wanted to require a phone number to
| keep out bots, they would simply ask for a phone number at
| registration. Delaying it like this, claiming "suspicious
| activity" is hard to see any other way than how I described
| it.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| bots can get phone numbers cheap, a cost of doing
| business. Speculation: Twitter wants your phone number so
| they can correlate you with existing marketing data so
| they can target you more effectively.
| onesafari wrote:
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| > I have never encountered a more hostile website
|
| I think Instagram and/or Pintrest often require you to log in
| before letting you see even the first picture you click on.
| captn3m0 wrote:
| Quora as well.
| bogomipz wrote:
| I don't believe Quora does this any more. They used to blur
| the entire page without a login but they relaxed that a
| couple of years ago now. I do notice that sometimes
| extended threads still seem to be behind a login wall but
| it's seems somewhat sporadic and inconsistent.
| robryan wrote:
| The Reddit mobile website might be the worst. Every aspect of
| it is geared to making it as annoying as possible to use so
| that you are forced to download their app (or go find a
| better 3rd party one).
| patentatt wrote:
| old.reddit.com still works, and the day they disable it is
| the last day I am a Reddit user (which I have been since
| the YC days, as an original disaffected digg user)
| Nitrolo wrote:
| On mobile i.reddit.com is probably a better fit.
| sneak wrote:
| In addition, even when fully logged in, having given a phone
| number, they censor the search function on the site. Not just
| the tweets you can post - the search - the tweets that they
| allow to be posted but you are not allowed to read.
|
| This is abhorrent to me and led to me deleting my account after
| a dozen years of use and double digit thousands of followers.
|
| If you won't let me read it, don't let it be posted.
|
| I will no longer donate my writing and attention to censorship
| platforms.
| andrew_ wrote:
| verified account status these days is meaningless. most of the
| truly interesting, unique thoughts come from accounts that are
| not. this is of course my own take after having been on the
| platform since 2010.
| kilroy123 wrote:
| Honestly? It's because their ads are trash. I know lots of
| marketing people and they all stay away from using them.
|
| Say what you will about Facebook and Instagram, their ads are
| better overall. There's been several times an Instagram ad showed
| up in my feed, and I said shut up and take my money.
|
| Nothing like that has ever happened on Twitter for me.
| adamrezich wrote:
| when they (and other platforms) started having sponsored posts
| that, themselves, have a pre-roll ad that plays before the user
| is granted the privilege of viewing them, it reeked of
| desperation. years later now this is the norm--crazy.
| mgh2 wrote:
| Very effective for free influencer marketing or crypto scamming
| though
| [deleted]
| mateus1 wrote:
| As an advertiser yes. This is definitely part of the answer.
|
| Google Ads is an amazing piece of tech with usually great ROI
| but requires lots of setup. Facebook is easy to use, worse in
| terms of ROI but it has the amazing feature of optimizing for
| spending 100% of your budget all the time.
|
| Twitter and LinkedIn don't do either.
| z3ugma wrote:
| Weird. All the B2B services I've bought in the last year are
| because of advertising were based on LinkedIn ads
| xmprt wrote:
| Another big part of it for me is that they make their ads
| appear almost like tweets so now when I scroll, my brain has
| learned to tune them out as useless filler. I don't think
| making them easier to distinguish would be better because I
| would tune them out even faster but they need to change how
| they display ads to actually make them effective.
| jakub_g wrote:
| I've been thinking about this because it's true from my
| observation, and I wonder what's the main reason:
|
| - Is it because they are "not evil enough" compared to FB in
| tracking people?
|
| - Is it because they can't track people in the same way (FB
| pixel is _everywhere_ on the net, Twitter's code is also
| widespread but probably less?)
|
| - Is it because publisher tools are not as good as FB's? (in FB
| from what I know you can target various demographics really
| well with campaigns, based on criteria such as location, age,
| interests, approximated wealth etc)
| elorant wrote:
| Twitter is not set up to know things about people in the
| first place. Your profile doesn't contain any personal
| information. Most of the interaction on Twitter is between
| users, while on FB it can be both users and companies with
| either ads or corporate posts making it into the feed. You
| click a post from a clothing company, Facebook will show you
| a relevant ad a week later. On Twitter on the other hand
| seems like companies never really bother advertising.
| [deleted]
| ghaff wrote:
| At least for B2B, LinkedIn (and paid search) is mostly where
| it's at.
| ChildOfChaos wrote:
| User growth? Why does it need user growth? It's twitter, it's
| been around a long time, everyone that wants to use a service
| like that knows what it is.
|
| So much opposition with everything having to be bigger and
| bigger.
| fumar wrote:
| Should HN have ads and become a revenue generating part of Y
| Combinator? Twitter and Reddit fall in a similar camp. Should
| they take the ad tech approach to sustain themselves?
| sam1r wrote:
| Has anyone messed with their developer apis recently?
|
| Curious if anything has gotten better on that front.
| joseloyaio wrote:
| Twitter it's actually on a better path for generating revenue
| nowadays:
|
| - Spaces have successfully siphoned users out of Clubhouse -
| Audio ads could be next - The crypto integration they've done is
| just the tip of the iceberg
| YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo wrote:
| The funny thing about all these articles about missed growth is
| that all the mission statements are just arbitrary numbers.
| Spotify, Twitter, Facebook none of them said anything about
| building something new or trying to be the best at something,
| nope. "Our Mission is XXX with YYY growth trajectory."
| throwaway4good wrote:
| I think social media for political shit posting will be the first
| to splinter. In other words, Twitter will split into multiple
| smaller Twitters each targeting a specific political group.
| throwaway4good wrote:
| Ie. Gettr:
|
| https://gettr.com
|
| Really just Twitter but for right-wing people.
| marcusverus wrote:
| I wish Twitter would give Jack Dorsey's idea a chance--just
| make the censorship optional. If you want Twitter to be the
| wild west--you've got it! Just disable the little 'safe-space'
| toggle and anything goes. You'll have to mentally filter out
| the fake news, racism, and [foo]-phobia. If you want Twitter to
| be a safe space--you've got it! Just enable that 'safe-space'
| toggle, and Big Brother Jack will make all the nasty people go
| away.
| throwaway4good wrote:
| Yes. I think he understood that censorship beyond what is
| strictly required by law would be the end of Twitter as an
| omnibus-platform, and thus the end of Twitter.
|
| In the same way that we have newspapers split by political
| observation, we will end up with social media split. In a way
| it is natural.
| stewx wrote:
| YouTube and TikTok pay people who have popular videos, which
| gives "creators" an incentive to put a lot of work into what they
| do.
|
| You can argue that the payouts are a pittance for the large
| number of views those YouTubers get, but in comparison, the only
| thing Twitter has done to reward its users is provide a virtual
| tip jar.
|
| Not only that, you can't pay to remove ads on Twitter.
| RspecMAuthortah wrote:
| Live by the wokism, die by the wokism.
|
| Remember that weird time in 2020 when they were slapping
| "offensive content" to all tweets from supporters of one specific
| party while still allowing porn clips without any filter. Yeah, I
| quit twitter around that time.
| spoonjim wrote:
| Twitter is the best professional networking tool I've ever used
| and should be making the kind of money that LinkedIn is.
| fnord77 wrote:
| This chart doesn't take into account inflation.
|
| Anyway, someone described twitter as a "honeypot for assholes".
| If your platform is dominated by trolls or other malicious
| people, I can't see it having a good valuation no matter how many
| users you have.
| gnicholas wrote:
| Is this at all related to Apple's privacy change? The article
| mentions FB's recent miss, which was attributed to this issue,
| but doesn't say whether it was at play here as well.
|
| I realize iOS users are not the majority, but it's likely that
| they are more valuable for advertisers and therefore could
| generate more revenue.
|
| edit: as noted below, this was in the article -- I had done a
| search for "FB" and didn't see there was another reference to
| Apple that was upstream from where I landed.
| vngzs wrote:
| It's addressed in the article, though absent specific numbers:
|
| > The company said the impact from privacy changes by Apple Inc
| (AAPL.O) remained modest. Last year, Apple began requiring apps
| to receive permission from iOS users to track their activity on
| apps and websites owned by other companies.
|
| > The Apple changes could impact Twitter in the future as it
| grows its performance advertising business, Segal said,
| referring to ads that seek to drive sales or other consumer
| actions. He said Twitter is working to mitigate future negative
| impacts from Apple's changes.
| mrweasel wrote:
| Is there some reason articles like this doesn't include profits?
| Revenue is specified along with a number of other key metrics,
| but not profit.
|
| The overall conclusion seems to be the same as with Meta last
| week: It's going well, but not as well as predicted. The slower
| than expected growth is only a problem, because the stock market
| likes predictability and will punish any company unable to
| correctly foresee the future.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| Profit isn't very meaningful without a lot of context. A
| growing business could plow all of their would-be profits back
| into growing their business, making it look like they are
| losing money. Or a failing business could cannibalize itself to
| get a couple quarters of profits at the cost of destroying its
| long term prospects for success. Revenue is a much more
| concrete figure that sort of tells its own story, unlike
| profit.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > Revenue is a much more concrete figure that sort of tells
| its own story, unlike profit.
|
| No single number tells any story on its own. You can have $1T
| revenue tomorrow. Just sell $10 bills for $1.
| [deleted]
| rdtwo wrote:
| So like most tech unicorns
| scarface74 wrote:
| So how well does revenue tell a story if you have negative
| unit costs?
|
| If you keep losing money, you eventually run out.
| djbusby wrote:
| Nope. Cause you have growth, which gets new investors who
| bring in Money - if you can convince them your Growth
| numbers are good.
| scarface74 wrote:
| It's called a Ponzi scheme. It works until it doesn't.
| See Robinhood and Peleton.
|
| All five of the Big Tech companies were profitable before
| they went public. Even Amazon had positive margins and
| they were plowing money back in to the business. Most of
| the former unicorns don't have positive margins.
|
| "Growth" is okay if your funneling profits back into your
| business. But see DoorDash. How do you not money
| delivering food when everyone is afraid to leave their
| house like in 2020?
|
| It's not about growth, it's about attrition. Every VC is
| hoping that they can pawn their money losing investments
| off to a gullible public.
| AniseAbyss wrote:
| The money doesn't run out for as long as your investors
| have faith.
| typon wrote:
| In the good old days having a successful business meant
| making money. Now it seems old-fashioned.
| foobarian wrote:
| This was exactly the feeling in the air around year 2000.
| Irrational exuberance is what they termed it. Be
| interesting to see how the current climate evolves.
| dmitriid wrote:
| > Revenue is a much more concrete figure that sort of tells
| its own story, unlike profit.
|
| But if you look at a company that is always in the red with
| no plan to become profitable, the question becomes:
|
| - how is this a business?
|
| - where is money coming from?
|
| - why is money still coming?
|
| Twitter seems to be mostly profitable in the past few years.
| mrweasel wrote:
| That's is an interesting take, because the company I work for
| is the exact opposite. Revenue is useless, because you can
| just create all the revenue you want.
|
| Among other things, we resell hardware and software. The
| basic idea is that customers can get a Dell, or Oracle server
| and a license for an Oracle database from us, when buying
| hosting. This saves them the trouble of dealing with multiple
| suppliers. The hardware and software business is just sort of
| a side thing, but we can generate crazy amounts of revenue by
| losing money on hardware. The idea is that we make the money
| back longterm on hosting. We never use revenue as a
| meaningful KPI, because we know that some years it will be
| inflated like crazy by hardware or software sales (which
| aren't profitable).
|
| So I don't really see revenue as useful figure either, not
| without also knowing if you're profitable.
| djbusby wrote:
| Your company has a different model than Twitter. Some
| companies need to measure Revenue, some Profit and some
| Growth - and many will switch which is the important one as
| they grow (or shrink).
| cheriot wrote:
| > punish any company unable to correctly foresee the future
|
| If you're calculating the present value of future profits and
| the rate of increase in profits declines then the present value
| can swing wildly. That's not "punishment". It's the market self
| correcting.
| dkjaudyeqooe wrote:
| The companies don't have to foresee the future, there is no law
| requiring them to make estimates about future
| earnings/expenses/profits.
| j4yav wrote:
| TWTR investors seem unfazed, at least so far. Stock is
| essentially flat on the news.
| blihp wrote:
| Because profit doesn't matter as much for a growth story,
| growth does. They do it to themselves... in the face of this
| 'miss' the CEO continues to pitch the growth story:
| https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/10/22925114/twitter-earnings...
| So it should be no surprise when the financial reporters and
| markets flog them when they miss.
| judge2020 wrote:
| For reference, Amazon would have had $1.8 billion in losses
| had it not been for AWS's insane profit [0].
|
| https://www.geekwire.com/2022/amazon-would-have-
| posted-1-8-b...
| newaccount2021 wrote:
| pl0x wrote:
| Maybe Meta buys Twitter. The world would be better off with out
| these two toxic platforms.
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