[HN Gopher] The Twitter API is now effectively unmaintained
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The Twitter API is now effectively unmaintained
Author : edent
Score : 344 points
Date : 2023-03-30 09:35 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (snarfed.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (snarfed.org)
| h11h wrote:
| One data point is that there is no way to get the full text of
| long tweets from the API. Twitter Blue subscribers have been able
| to post tweets longer than 280 characters since early February
| but the API only returns the first 280 or so characters.
| onion2k wrote:
| There clearly is an API that returns the full text of a tweet
| or the official app and website wouldn't be able to display it.
| They _must_ be maintaining and building an API. The only thing
| that 's not being maintained or updated are the public facing
| endpoints. That doesn't mean much.
| h11h wrote:
| Yes, there is a GraphQL API that Twitter's web interface
| uses, but developers who use the publicly available API can't
| use that.
| BulgarianIdiot wrote:
| So it can only be used secretly by bots. Good job.
| onion2k wrote:
| _developers who use the publicly available API can 't use
| that_
|
| The point is that saying there's no API is wrong. There is
| an API. Elon has chosen not to let developers outside of
| Twitter use it. It's clearly a political choice rather than
| a technical competence problem.
| rsynnott wrote:
| I mean ultimately it's all semantics, but the idea that a
| private API is not an API _proper_ is not exactly
| unusual.
|
| It's more a business competence than a technical
| competence issue, likely (unless he's actually attempting
| to have a direct technical role, in which case it is
| Dunning-Kruger made manifest).
| anigbrowl wrote:
| That's like saying that my front door isn't shut because
| the doors to rooms inside are open. When people say 'API'
| they mean the public-facing endpoints, not the internal
| ones that are only accessible to Twitter's developers.
| ncallaway wrote:
| It doesn't have to be a technical competence problem. It
| could easily be a business competence problem.
| titaniumtown wrote:
| That's hilarious. The complete incompetence over there lol.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| It seems like they don't care about the API. That makes it a
| matter of values rather than competence.
| [deleted]
| skipants wrote:
| So what you're saying is we have an inverse Hanlon's Razor,
| here?
| Quarrelsome wrote:
| I mean you're a platform company in 2023 and you don't want
| an API? Idk that sounds like competence to me in failing to
| appreciate its value. Sure, I appreciate it follows a
| strategy but I worry that the strategy will not help
| twitter in the long term.
| toast0 wrote:
| Twitter was a platform company in 2011, but after they
| started limiting the api in 2012[1], I'm not sure that
| they wanted to be a platform anymore.
|
| [1]
| https://blog.twitter.com/developer/en_us/a/2012/changes-
| comi...
| Quarrelsome wrote:
| I think you need to rate limit and auth most free
| consumer-facing end points, given the maliciousness of
| public traffic. Limiting it is just protecting yourself
| from its worst excesses, that doesn't necessarily mean
| you don't want to be a platform.
| ALittleLight wrote:
| In what sense is Twitter a platform?
| Quarrelsome wrote:
| it hosts a communication service for organisations and
| individuals to build followings and broadcast messages. I
| guess its about whether you see Twitter as more than its
| user interface or not.
| [deleted]
| organsnyder wrote:
| They certainly don't seem to be valuing it enough to assign
| the quality/quantity of engineering necessary to maintain
| it.
| raverbashing wrote:
| Commercial awareness is also competence
| stainablesteel wrote:
| is it incompetent to not maintain something you don't want to
| maintain?
| nonethewiser wrote:
| Nope
| addisonl wrote:
| It's incompetent to not want to maintain it.
| 100721 wrote:
| * without taking it offline
| yamtaddle wrote:
| The API's the thing that makes Twitter tolerably-usable to
| heavy users--the ones who draw eyeballs to the site so the
| ads are worth more than $0.00--right?
|
| If so, not wanting to maintain it would probably count as
| incompetent, yes.
| imiric wrote:
| I'm not familiar with Twitter or its API, but are ads
| also returned via the API?
|
| If not, then it would be more profitable for them to
| heavily restrict API access, and kill off 3rd party
| clients, so that more people would use the official
| clients where ads are actually shown.
|
| I.e. they don't care about heavy users if they can't make
| a profit from them.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| Heavy users are the ones who generate the content that
| gives the site value in the first place, though.
| Advertisers aren't there to sell products to the 1% of
| users who make most of the posts, they're there to sell
| to the 99% reading those posts. Making posting on twitter
| a bigger pain for the people who do most of the posting--
| and especially for celebrity and brand accounts that get
| tons of "engagement" they want/need to keep track of--is
| probably not a great move.
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| The incompetence is at the very top, choosing not to
| maintain something that they were apparently making
| $400m/year from paid subscribers for
| cutemonster wrote:
| Yes, at the same time, this:
|
| > complete incompetence over there
|
| sounded to me as if it also includes the employees
| dev_daftly wrote:
| The post seems to talk about 2 different APIs, a public
| one they are not continuing to work on and a commercial
| one that makes $400mm/year
| marcellus23 wrote:
| Yes, without either taking the API down or publishing a
| disclaimer that it's deprecated.
| JustSomeNobody wrote:
| Make it awful for long enough so that when you make it
| better, you're a genius who saved Twitter.
| phowat wrote:
| Or so that when you finally pull the plug, people don't
| complain too much.
| olalonde wrote:
| The mental gymnastics of Musk haters are next level. If
| Twitter dies, he is dumb and incompetent. If he saves it,
| it was all just part of his evil plan. You got all outcomes
| covered, great.
| samtp wrote:
| Either way he is still the guy who publicly mocked his
| own employee for having muscular dystrophy, offered
| another employee a horse if they gave him a handjob,
| called a cave diver who saved a bunch of children a pedo,
| spread conspiracy theories about an elderly man who was
| beaten by an intruder with a hammer....
|
| He's not a good person.
| scottyah wrote:
| Do you believe him to be less "good" than the average
| person? What's the scale here?
| [deleted]
| olalonde wrote:
| I didn't say he was a good person. But it's obvious that
| he's not incompetent and that he's just trying his best
| to salvage his investment. The idea that he is
| intentionally driving Twitter into the ground is beyond
| ridiculous.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| According to himself it has fallen 50% in value since he
| bought it. If he just wanted to salvage his investment
| he'd tweet once a week about about features or metrics.
| As it is he spends a lot of his time shitposting and
| making facially absurd claims.
| xeromal wrote:
| I don't think I've seen Elon mentioned that twitter is an
| investment to him.
| olalonde wrote:
| But he does tweet multiple times per week about Twitter
| features. I can count at least 7 such tweets in the past
| week.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Right...and I'm saying that if he tweeted less and
| delivered more, he'd be taken more seriously than he is.
| Hype/salesmanship is part of business, but in the case of
| SpaceX and Tesla, they're delivering bespoke and high-end
| manufactured products. People are willing to wait for
| infrequent product delivery while tolerating sometimes-
| fanciful claims of great potential.
|
| Twitter is different because it's a real-time mass
| communication platform, so the hype is received and
| processed differently. And outside of his fanbase, few
| people seem impressed with the changes as manifested so
| far and this is reflected in the response of advertisers.
|
| Long tweets seem to work OK and offer a clear, obvious
| user benefit. I'm having difficulty thinking of any other
| examples.
| JustSomeNobody wrote:
| I can't help it if he's very obvious.
| [deleted]
| LightBug1 wrote:
| Yeah, Musk does have that ridiculous saviour complex ...
|
| "Oh Tesla was hours away from going bankrupt" yada yada
|
| Or the bizarre interview with him in the dark ...
|
| I don't believe his bleatings for a minute ...
| amitrip wrote:
| [dead]
| adql wrote:
| It's ironic that the latest post on it is now info about tiered
| paid api access with some absolutely joke limits and pricing.
| arecurrence wrote:
| From the comments that Musk has made over the last few months,
| this appears to be as intended. He doesn't seem to view the API
| as a benefit to the company nor a fit for his plans on where he
| wants to go with it.
| dragontamer wrote:
| Be that what it may, the Twitter API was making like $400
| Million/year revenue for Twitter.
|
| So Musk has destroyed Advertising Revenue, and now Twitter API
| revenue. Is he really trying to make money from just blue check
| marks alone?
| metalliqaz wrote:
| But it's potential for dark-money income from the Saudis and
| Russia has never been higher!
| alexpotato wrote:
| This makes sense given that:
|
| - Elon has stated that bots are a problem for Twitter
|
| - Bots were most likely largely operated via the API. Or at a
| minimum, used the API as a data source for targeting and
| crafting of tweets.
|
| - If not the API, then using web based automation tools
|
| Therefore, if you want to drastically reduce the number of bots
| you should:
|
| 1. Remove the API free tier and/or drastically reduce the
| feature set of the paid tier
|
| 2. Raise the cost of tweet creation e.g. Twitter Blue and paid
| verification
| fleetwoodsnack wrote:
| It makes sense if we assume that the API's change in
| performance was deliberate.
| gpm wrote:
| > - Bots were most likely largely operated via the AP
|
| This strikes me as extremely unlikely. The bots being
| discussed were attempting to pretend not to be bots, and
| there were active attempts to detect and remove them. Using
| the API would have made it trivial to detect them.
| csb6 wrote:
| The plan doesn't make much sense because the free tier is
| _write_ -only. Bots can post 1,500 Tweets per API token per
| month, but free users can no longer make simple read-only
| queries about Tweets or users.
|
| This means the free API is only useful for people who want to
| post Tweets automatically (e.g. bots) and not people who just
| want read-only access and do not contribute to spam. These
| users will now have to resort to web scraping, which is much
| more expensive for Twitter to serve than basic JSON API
| responses.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| You can still do user queries actually. But not search,
| tweets, or streaming endpoints under the latest proposals.
| DecoySalamander wrote:
| Spam bots need read access to find relevant keywords and
| insert themselves into replies to popular posts - otherwise
| they have zero visibility. As for hobby projects - I'm sure
| this will break a lot of them, but those that just post
| regular updates (like @tinyspires) should be fine.
| riskable wrote:
| The lack of foresight (and/or experience) by Musk here is
| breathtaking. The Internet collectively learned (I thought) a
| long time ago that if you don't provide a public API (that
| you can control/track) you're just going to wind up with end
| users and bots using your regular web endpoints to perform
| the same actions which is inefficient and slow; for both the
| clients and the service itself.
|
| Endpoints meant for web browsers are about to get a whole lot
| more (fake) traffic which will throw off their metrics and
| mess with ad algorithms and by extension, ad revenue.
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| The breathing-taking lack of foresight started when he
| accepted terms that any competent lawyer would run away
| screaming from.
|
| Everything since has been one train wreck after another. I
| have no breath left to take. :)
| anigbrowl wrote:
| It really doesn't. Under the new plan, you won't be able to
| read out anything from query/streaming endpoints unless you
| pat least $100/month. But you'll still be able to post 1500
| tweets/mo (about 50/day) for free.
|
| Given how easy it is to make/purchase Twitter accounts, this
| works just fine for spammers, people running influence
| operations etc. Sure you won't be able to tweet 10
| times/minute like some spammers do, but those people are
| usually doing it manually or puppeteering via headless
| browsers rather than operating developer accounts.
|
| You also don't need Twitter Blue unless your output depends
| on cold views. In reality, nearly all spam/scam/influence
| campaigning relies on follower/retweet networks to do
| amplification. Commoditized verification is meaningless, it's
| like paying for a t-shirt that says 'I'm famous.'
| majormajor wrote:
| Yeah, operating a free service and "limiting bots and fake
| accounts" are pretty incompatible.
|
| I didn't think "I'm going to fix bots" meant "I'm going to
| really limit free access" but it's a coherent approach, at
| least.
|
| I just don't think a paid Twitter will be as valuable as it
| was. Competing with free is really hard; I'm not sure
| Mastodon is that competitor, but I bet there will be
| something.
| MuffinFlavored wrote:
| sounds like a hard job to quantify "can/does maintaining the
| API make the company money"
|
| on one hand you've got a knee-jerk answer: "absolutely! how
| could it not?!"
|
| on the other... maybe he's getting rid of it for a reason?
| sucks for people who integrated against it but is it is "right"
| to effectively screw these people over who aren't paying for
| (but are benefitting from) the API?
|
| maybe give them the option to pay?
| sangnoir wrote:
| > maybe he's getting rid of it for a reason?
|
| Probably, but is it a _good_ reason? IMO, he lost the benefit
| of doubt many decisions ago.
| sleepybrett wrote:
| If there is an api someone can, and has, written a client
| that makes twitter work better. You can subvert most the dumb
| shit they keep trying to throw into the experience that ruin
| the user experience. Ad's... don't show them, timeline... put
| it in order, etc.
|
| Also there is a small community of researchers out there that
| use the api to detect botnets, follow networks, etc. Can't
| have that with musk around.
| throwaway50607 wrote:
| > Ad's... don't show them, timeline... put it in order,
| etc.
|
| People doing that are probably why they're deprecating the
| API.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| I'm part of that small community. It's a pain in the ass,
| but I guess I'm just going to get better at asynchronous
| scraping.
| maliker wrote:
| Sad but honestly a reasonable concession to make while Twitter
| fights to just remain solvent.
| tehjoker wrote:
| important to remember the insane debt Twitter is in is due to
| Musk's leveraged buyout where he got the debt for his loans to
| attach to the company he bought with them.
| organsnyder wrote:
| It's going to be hard to remain solvent if key services become
| unusable.
| tehwebguy wrote:
| Yeah, if the number of scrapers spun up in response don't use
| even more resources
| killingtime74 wrote:
| Twitter is now effectively unmaintained.....
| lprd wrote:
| The documentation and usability of Twitter's API has been in
| decline for at least a few years now. I gave up in 2018/19 (or
| whenever they implemented the new version of their API?). This
| has nothing to do with the advent of Musk, and anyone blaming him
| are insufferable Musk haters (which is pretty standard these
| days).
|
| In the beginning, their API was a joy to use and a lot of neat
| software popped up around it. There was some drama around them
| making changes internally (API changes) which put some of these
| companies out of business. People became weary of their API
| since. That said, I would love to see a completely revamped API
| with great documentation.
| d23 wrote:
| You gave up on it 5 years ago but are sure nothing happened in
| the last few months, while the team that was actively
| maintaining it is saying they were all fired. Sorry for being
| "insufferable," but why is your take more credible than theirs?
| lprd wrote:
| > You gave up on it 5 years ago but are sure nothing happened
| in the last few months
|
| I said that it's been in decline. If its unusable now, I'm
| not shocked because of the way it was headed even a few years
| ago. Musk very well might have realized the dumpster fire
| that is their API and shelved it for the time being.
|
| > why is your take more credible than theirs?
|
| What can I say, I'm just a simple user? Whether you find my
| "take" credible or not is purely up to you. ymmv
| brunes wrote:
| Name a single other major social network around today that has an
| API and allows third-party clients. The only one I can think of
| is Reddit - and even in that case, there are numerous features
| already being locked out of third-party clients. They are on the
| same path as Twitter, and at some point they will realize that
| maintaining a gigantic cost center that provides no revenue
| (since they don't control ads) and does not allow them to rapidly
| innovate or build a brand (since they don't control the app) does
| not make a lot of business sense.
|
| The death of the Twitter API is long, long overdue. Bad for us
| consumers? Sure. But these companies are not charities, they
| exist to make money.
| n1c00o wrote:
| Discord currently provides to the public almost-stable and
| maintained parts of its API, it allows the network to gain some
| attractions
| courseofaction wrote:
| Yes, we're at the stage of enshittification where twitter turns
| ejects anything inessential, and the only value is for the
| investor.
| mongol wrote:
| I don't know if Flickr counts any more but I think they were up
| there at least in the past.
| unity1001 wrote:
| The public apis are what you use to get other people to build
| stuff that you dont want to build and increase the usage of
| your application by creating an ecosystem around it. Through
| the api, you draw in users, partners, entire use cases that are
| not provided for by your app directly and your app becomes
| something that is much bigger than what could it have been
| without an api.
|
| The problem with Twitter was that it had no legitimate
| monetization for the app itself. It was a zero-interest,
| investor/vc money fueled growth machine. And even for that
| purpose, it used that api to great extent to bring a lot of
| users into the platform and integrate a vast swath of internet
| to Twitter - from Twitter logins to automatic embeds to entire
| 3rd party applications that served different subsets of users.
|
| But now that the investors who dumped cash on something that
| does not have a level of monetization and revenue compared to
| its over-inflated valuation want something for their money,
| suddenly growth is not that important anymore and problems
| ensue.
|
| Even in this particular situation, its a dumb idea to restrict
| or close down an api. If you do that, another service that
| doesnt do it will get an ecosystem built around it and it will
| eventually eat your lunch. A fixed set of people working on a
| singular app in a company can never produce as much features as
| an entire ecosystem with its large community can produce
| through an api. The Open Source movement and its successes
| follow the same pattern: Centralized, large corporations cannot
| compete with the development speed and breadth of communities
| of millions of people, even if those corporations employ tens
| of thousands of engineers.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Telegram
| segasaturn wrote:
| The open API access is a very large differentiator for Twitter
| and Reddit because of the presence of novelty accounts/bots,
| automatic moderation tools etc. Twitter can follow along with
| Facebook wrt APIs, but then there's less of a reason to use
| Twitter instead of Facebook.
| [deleted]
| ttepasse wrote:
| Social media giant Pinboard. People are warned not to compete
| with Pinboard but they still make 3rd party clients which seem
| to work.
|
| On your point: In my opinion 3rd party clients expand services,
| are a new place of innovation and a place accompanying
| different usage patterns. The trick is not to kill them; the
| trick is, to make it work. I would have accepted a Tweetbot
| with ads. But without Tweetbot I mostly stopped visiting
| Twitter.
| santoshalper wrote:
| According to the post, the Twitter API was already generating
| $400M/year in revenue. Not sure what it cost, but that doesn't
| sound like a charity to me.
| brunes wrote:
| That is the commercial API. People keep treating these the
| same, when they have nothing to do with eachother.
| pazimzadeh wrote:
| Wouldn't twitter not have many of its current features and
| conventions if it wasn't for third parties?
|
| https://techcrunch.com/2023/01/24/how-the-recently-shuttered...
|
| Why couldn't they just add ads within the API instead of
| alienating the community which is responsible for its success?
|
| Aka, name another major social network around today which has
| been as influenced by third party clients as Twitter has
| vlunkr wrote:
| > Why couldn't they just add ads within the API
|
| Because the first thing every 3rd party client will do is
| ignore the ads and not show them to users.
| kadoban wrote:
| And 2 seconds after that, it'll be in the ToS that you
| can't do that. It's not like it will be hard for Twitter to
| check.
| vlunkr wrote:
| > It's not like it will be hard for Twitter to check.
|
| Are you sure? That would require a centralized review and
| distribution process for all 3rd party clients, like the
| App Store for Twitter. It's not outside the realm of
| possibility, but there's very little incentive for them.
| jahewson wrote:
| Without all the integrated tracking the ads would be
| basically worthless.
| imglorp wrote:
| > add ads within the API
|
| Realistically, how much of the "content" is already ads? Ie
| corporate announcements, brand building, or political
| astroturfing, etc. It's almost like twitter is double
| dipping.
| johnm212 wrote:
| > maintaining a gigantic cost center that provides no revenue >
| these companies are not charities, they exist to make money.
|
| From the article: > Twitter already had a $400m paid API
| business
|
| If this is true, the API would be generating almost 10% of
| Twitter's revenue. This is a serious business unit for Twitter.
| 4rb1t wrote:
| makes you wonder did the commenter read the article at all?
| brunes wrote:
| The commercial API has nothing at all to do with the third-
| party client API.
| veeti wrote:
| What makes you think this post is about the third party
| client API? The commercial API tiers have also been nerfed
| [1] to a level where you need Enterprise to do almost
| anything useful.
|
| [1]
| https://twitter.com/TwitterDev/status/1641222782594990080
| [deleted]
| newaccount74 wrote:
| The API is not just about 3rd party clients. The API is about
| integrating all kinds of stuff from 3rd parties, and it's
| absolutely required if Elon Musk wants to make Twitter an
| "everything app" like WeChat.
| wankle wrote:
| Twitter I used for several years and may go back now that
| someone with common sense is at the helm but only ever heard
| of WeChat and what I heard was mostly negative.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| > only ever heard of WeChat and what I heard was mostly
| negative
|
| WeChat is pretty lit and contains a whole internet, sort of
| akin to how Facebook Pages might contain the only
| information or updates about many businesses and
| municipalities.
|
| Yes, a state agency will censor some things, just like a
| corporation will censor some things. Yes, they collect your
| data and share it with third parties including the
| government, just like a series of corporation do on every
| other network. You're not Chinese, you're not going to
| disappear, its rare they experience anything more than a
| message disappearing too, its the same user experience. I
| don't find the reality to be different _enough_ to warrant
| the perception of reality.
| andrewguy9 wrote:
| The api hurts the Twitter. My company extracted lots of value
| from it, which Twitter didn't monetize at all. But they had huge
| infrastructure and engineering effort to support the api. They
| never should have built it.
| saryant wrote:
| Twitter made hundreds of millions a year selling API access.
| moneywoes wrote:
| Curious how did they extract value?
| steviedotboston wrote:
| I applied for Twitter API access for a small personal app a few
| weeks ago. I receive the following response yesterday:
|
| Thank you for applying for access to the Twitter API. We're
| working on exciting updates including new access types and will
| have more to share soon. Please stay tuned to @TwitterDev and
| resubmit your application as soon as we launch our new API.
|
| In the meantime, you can learn more about the Twitter API v2 and
| find resources on developer.twitter.com. We appreciate your
| continued interest in developing on the Twitter API.
|
| Thanks,
|
| Twitter
| numpad0 wrote:
| Funny it's called API v2, IIRC the current version is supposed
| to be v2 as well.
| james_pm wrote:
| Better than the emoji you get back if you email
| press@twitter.com.
| favsq wrote:
| I tried that and it didn't work for me.
| notatoad wrote:
| if that means they've set up auto-responders with the poop
| emoji, but only to certain news outlets, that's even
| funnier than just responding with it to everybody
| olalonde wrote:
| FWIW, it seems the new API was launched a few hours ago:
| https://twittercommunity.com/t/announcing-new-access-tiers-f...
| Boltgolt wrote:
| A basic tier for "students learning code" starting at $100 a
| month? Delusional
| sethammons wrote:
| Delusional for sure, even in the US market. That is up to
| 14 hours of minimum wage work. Even in California, that is
| 7+ hours of work. I think you can expect students to be
| working poorly paid jobs generally. I can't imagine anyone
| actually paying that as a student themselves.
| duxup wrote:
| I take that at "we really don't want to serve these folks
| but want to say we do".
| olalonde wrote:
| Probably just a marketing technique to steer businesses
| away from that tier. I doubt they seriously expect many
| students to have 100$/month available to spend on their
| API.
| oluwie wrote:
| ????
| anigbrowl wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35367552
| swyx wrote:
| and the new twitter api limits announced is like 50 per 24
| hours...
| https://twitter.com/igorbrigadir/status/1641201626449956865?...
| zimpenfish wrote:
| Hilariously, the
| https://developer.twitter.com/en/portal/products/free link
| takes me to the "we're evaluating your application for V2
| access" holding page. Which, IIRC, I applied for in March 2021.
|
| Just a clusterfuck of an omnishambles.
| jimmySixDOF wrote:
| What a huge missed opportunity for Usage Based Pricing [1]
|
| [1] https://openviewpartners.com/blog/state-of-usage-based-
| prici...
| zactato wrote:
| Is there research that shows that a well maintained API adds
| value to large established companies?
|
| Maintaining a good API for an ever changing product is VERY non-
| trivial. Designing easy to consume APIs and writing good
| documentation requires some specialized skills. Internal APIs are
| often very different than external ones. Some times APIs need to
| be duplicated which can make breaking changes of the underlying
| systems more complex.
|
| I can see the value of APIs for a growing company that is trying
| to establish itself, but there must be a line somewhere.
|
| I suspect a large amount of API support over the last decade has
| been driven by brand development and recruiting.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > I can see the value of APIs for a growing company that is
| trying to establish itself, but there must be a line somewhere.
| I suspect a large amount of API support over the last decade
| has been driven by brand development and recruiting.
|
| It brought INSANE value to Twitter in it's early days.
|
| The API allowed a client to be written for every platform
| around by domain experts way before the Twitter team could get
| to them. They got Apple to integrate it natively on iOS 5.
| That's right, the OS had built-in support for Twitter. You
| didn't need to install an app.
|
| It's one of the things that cemented Twitter's presence in the
| social media's landscape.
| rvz wrote:
| Another giant nothing complain post. It just means that companies
| should not build their entire business on someone else's API and
| Twitter can change it and their prices at anytime. No different
| to other platforms that allow third party apps.
|
| Contrary to this complaint post, the API is still up and far from
| 'unmaintained' or its 'immediate death' as incorrectly predicted
| 5 months ago with still 200M - 220M daily active users continuing
| to use the platform, even after all the chaos and nonsense
| articles.
|
| Free APIs forever is unsustainable for a business and eventually
| price increases will happen. Believing otherwise is essentially
| wishful thinking, just like basing an entire business on someone
| else's API and not paying for it. There is always a cost.
| phailhaus wrote:
| You didn't read the article, because it has nothing to do with
| business users. The team responsible for maintaining the
| Twitter API is down to zero engineers. This is the product that
| brought in $400M ARR.
| ZunarJ5 wrote:
| At a premium cost too.
| RobertRoberts wrote:
| Does Mastodon have an API I can use to access everyone's feed?
|
| I am curious because I have never used the API, and I can see
| Mastodon taking over if they have an API that let's 3rd parties
| interact and download content.
| whoomp12342 wrote:
| you mean deeply damaging layoffs lead to a shitty product?
| whodathunk
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| Twitter following the LinkedIn playbook. And LinkedIn is still
| more generous.
|
| Absurd that these platforms have no scruples about gathering data
| from users, but if you try doing the opposite, they'll block you
| at every turn.
| luckylion wrote:
| > Absurd that these platforms have no scruples about gathering
| data from users, but if you try doing the opposite, they'll
| block you at every turn.
|
| Most people have no problem getting paid too much for something
| they're selling, but they'll try to block you at every turn if
| you want them to overpay.
| foreverobama wrote:
| What's really absurd is that people are still using that
| platform at all.
| dekimir wrote:
| For personal consumption, one can always scrape one's feed[1].
| I wonder why more of us don't do it.
|
| [1]
| https://twitter.com/feedliness/status/1638580147304505349?s=...
| ChicagoDave wrote:
| But Merlin expects it to be a $250 billion business at some
| point.
| aww_dang wrote:
| I'm seeing more and more Twitter integrations based on scrapers.
| dekimir wrote:
| Me too. Probably the way of the future. Each of us could run a
| little personal scraper, and the Twitter servers wouldn't know
| the difference.
| creshal wrote:
| For being unmaintained for months it's holding up remarkably
| well.
|
| Edit: And the sole active Ads developer who was still actively
| responding when the blog post was written, was apparently laid
| off a week after the article was posted. Ouch.
| imwithstoopid wrote:
| > For being unmaintained for months
|
| which describes probably 90% of web apis out there
|
| imho, unless a company is dogfooding its own api, I assume it
| is broken/bitrotted/owner-left-the-company etc
|
| twitter is by no means alone
| cldellow wrote:
| Eh, for some values of well.
|
| My post is one of the "12 [...] about Twitter not responding to
| the standard API access request process".
|
| It's easy to keep an API running if you reject access to it,
| no? Due to a delightful quirk of how the Twitter Ads API review
| process works, our entire application no longer works, even for
| non-Ads API use. Genius way to manage the load.
| olalonde wrote:
| Given the amount of bad predictions and misinformation regarding
| post-acquisition Twitter, I'd take this with a grain of salt.
| Remember that many on HN thought that Twitter would literally
| stop operating shortly after the first rounds of layoffs[0].
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33647882
| olalonde wrote:
| As expected, Twitter announces a v2 API just hours ago:
| https://twittercommunity.com/t/announcing-new-access-tiers-f...
|
| Not the kind of announcement you typically expect from an
| unmaintained API!
| social_quotient wrote:
| The blog is over a month old, the api is still up and running.
| I'm not exactly how this is on page 1 of HN?
| oxfordmale wrote:
| Unmaintained APIs are generally not a problem as long as the
| underlying platform doesn't change. Let's talk again in 18
| months.
| myko wrote:
| the api no longer serves complete tweets, it cuts text off of
| those larger than 280 characters
|
| it's busted
| segmondy wrote:
| up and running is different from "unmaintained"
| social_quotient wrote:
| Yes, I view keeping the lights on generally different from
| continuous improvement and new development. The api is not
| accidentally online still, so it would be reductive to say
| zero people are in charge and aware of it being online and
| available.
| zpeti wrote:
| Because complaining about how badly Twitter is run about as
| popular as claiming depositors are investors in SVB.
| foreverobama wrote:
| [dead]
| [deleted]
| entelechy0 wrote:
| [dead]
| uptownfunk wrote:
| Why don't they let me add people to a starred/favorited list of
| people I care about listening to, and then the rest whose
| toxicity I can only tolerate in small doses. :) Elon if you're
| listening
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| Twitter has lists.
| TheChaplain wrote:
| Perhaps Twitter is becoming the golden example of how not to run
| a business?
| concordDance wrote:
| A year ago it was the golden example of how not to run a
| business, it's now the golden example of how not to run a tech
| system/service.
| muyuu wrote:
| a year ago it had just lost over US$1B over the running year
| tlholaday wrote:
| Compared to losing US$24B with Musk.
| illiarian wrote:
| So, like Uber, or any of HN's top startups. In modern times
| this is called a shining example of how to run a company.
| sangnoir wrote:
| Now it's spending $1.3B p.a. on servicing loans alone. Does
| that sound like an improvement?
| mjr00 wrote:
| No, it's the complete opposite: the fact that Twitter has laid
| off 80% of its staff and is still operating has encouraged
| execs at other tech companies to push staff cuts. Vanity Fair
| wrote an article about this yesterday.[0]
|
| I do think there are long term-issues with laying off that many
| employees, but clearly the "if you fire all these engineers the
| service is going to collapse and stop working" doomsaying was
| unfounded.
|
| [0] https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/03/big-tech-
| layoffs-202...
| justapassenger wrote:
| Twitter and Elon Musk didn't invent layoffs.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > but clearly the "if you fire all these engineers the
| service is going to collapse and stop working" doomsaying was
| unfounded.
|
| Despite all the firings, Twitter's financials are worst than
| pre-acquisition. How comes? Advertisers pulling out. Why?
| Firing abuse and content moderation teams meant there was a
| lot more unsavory spam on the platform and advertisers didn't
| want any of it near their brand. Remember the Twitter Blue
| two days of spam?
|
| Not only that, but it's been leaked that Twitter is trying
| hard to recruit some laid-off employees with huge comp
| packages. Without a lot of success.
| mjr00 wrote:
| > Despite all the firings, Twitter's financials are worst
| than pre-acquisition. How comes? Advertisers pulling out.
| Why? Firing abuse and content moderation teams meant there
| was a lot more unsavory spam on the platform and
| advertisers didn't want any of it near their brand.
|
| Advertising revenue for Meta and Google has also tanked to
| the tune of 30-50% of their stock value, so it's
| disingenuous to link Twitter's ad revenue woes directly to
| any increase in spam (which is in and of itself an
| unsourced claim).
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| Brands pulled out specifically because of it [0] [1]
|
| [0] https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-lost-half-
| top-advert...
|
| [1]
| https://www.vox.com/recode/2022/11/4/23438917/twitter-
| verifi...
| mjr00 wrote:
| Both of those are from November, from what I've heard
| most brands stopped advertising while the drama was going
| on and they wanted clarity around the future of the
| platform (making sure it didn't becoming explicitly "alt-
| right" or "free speech" like Rumble/Truth Social), but
| got back in after things settled down.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > but got back in after things settled down.
|
| Unless targeting has wildly changed, that doesn't seem to
| be the case (have things "settled down", even?) None of
| the major brands that I used to get ads from regularly
| are hitting me with ads at all now, and most of the ads I
| see are for the same type of places I was seeing just
| after the major backouts.
| revel wrote:
| Twitter has remained functional largely because all the
| former employees did their jobs effectively. I've seen what
| happens when companies lay a tech department to waste and it
| looks like this. This is a one-way cost reduction program
| that will forever reduce the quality of workers available to
| the company.
|
| The way this pans out is that in the short term, nothing much
| happens except deadlines start to get pushed out. As time
| goes on everything becomes more and more dysfunctional. All
| progress grinds to a halt; simply treading water created by
| ongoing churn and operational needs ends up becoming
| impossible. Next the business tries to get more and more out
| of the remaining staff until they get fed up with it and
| leave. Shortly before the wheels really come off, legal and
| compliance issues will suddenly start ballooning. That's
| where we are now. Nobody _wants_ to work on these kind of
| projects -- they do nothing for your career and nobody will
| celebrate your work -- but they are not optional. Elon seems
| to have decided simply not to comply with laws he dislikes in
| regulatory environments where he thinks he can get away with
| it. This can work for a while, but companies with no internal
| governance and that regularly flout laws can don 't tend to
| last for too long without making painful changes. Let's see
| how it turns out. Given the reported state of the company it
| sounds like he has about a year to figure it out.
| Caldwell-77 wrote:
| In cutting its workforce down from 7,500 to 1,800
| employees, I wonder what percentage of Twitter's
| legal/compliance staff were kept on.
| eclipsetheworld wrote:
| I'll take the contrarian stance here. During the Morgan Stanley
| Conference interview, Elon Musk forecasted that Twitter had the
| potential to achieve a positive cash flow status by the second
| quarter of 2023. Advertisers are returning to the platform and
| they just announced their new API monetization plans [0]. The
| company's strategic direction notwithstanding, Twitter may be a
| profitable company soon.
|
| [0] https://twitter.com/TwitterDev/status/1641222782594990080
| adql wrote:
| Also FSD in 2024 will work perfectly
| gamblor956 wrote:
| Advertisers are returning because they're basically getting
| free stuff, and will cut back on Twitter as soon as that
| spigot runs out.
|
| My company advertises on Twitter, because they gave us an 80%
| discount to keep advertising on Twitter after we started
| shifting more spend to other sites last fall. We haven't
| actually paid Twitter yet; they keep sending emails but we
| figured we'd just pull an Elon and wait until they actually
| got serious about collecting. It helps that our account reps
| keep getting laid off.
|
| Notably, Elon Musk contradicted that interview a number of
| times internally, noting that Twitter is still deeply in the
| red. So he was either lying in that interview or he was lying
| to his minority investors.
| comte7092 wrote:
| At this point I've learned not to take anything Elon says
| about the future, especially the near future, at face value.
|
| Could it happen? Certainly. Will it happen the way he says it
| will? Probably not.
| Kye wrote:
| But which advertisers? It's not enough to get +10,000 people
| trying out a $10 or $100 ad while rates are low due to low
| bidding competition. Twitter needs the big advertisers who
| expect to have someone at the company support their
| campaigns. The new owner fired the people who did that.
| Worse, he fired the people who'd spent years earning those
| advertisers' trust and patience.
| eclipsetheworld wrote:
| Performance-focused advertisers. Growing this segment was
| already set as a strategic direction for Twitter in 2021,
| however, Musk's takeover and the subsequent departure of
| brand-focused advertisers seem to have accelerated these
| plans [0].
|
| As for brand-focused advertisers, I can see parallels to
| 2017's "YouTube Adpocalypse" in which advertisers paused
| their spending due to their ads being displayed before
| videos containing offensive content. They recovered from it
| by demonitizing offensive content. Twitter will have to
| address "brand safety" concerns, however,
|
| [0] https://www.wsj.com/articles/have-the-ads-in-your-
| twitter-fe...
| [deleted]
| onion2k wrote:
| The antagonist forces of "Ha! Look how much the revenue fell!"
| versus "Hmm.. look how much they slashed costs.." means it's
| really hard to tell how well Twitter will do in the long term.
| thedailymail wrote:
| It really does seem like a historic moment in business history.
| I'm strugling to think of a precedent, other than cases of
| outright fraud, where a prominent firm (= its management)
| experienced so much negative publicity and self-owning.
| concordDance wrote:
| More than half of that negative publicity is due to the
| people who make publicity (journalists) having their hang out
| taken over by a billionaire they hate.
|
| No comment on the other half.
| d23 wrote:
| Here it is, that tired old argument that's also used to
| defend Trump: it's the biased media. And just like Trump, I
| can look at Musk's tweets too and see how obnoxious,
| narcissistic, petty, and disingenuous they are for myself.
| In fact, it's hard to avoid now that he appears to have
| goosed the algorithm to shove his tweets down everyone's
| throat.
| concordDance wrote:
| It's possible for someone to suck AND the media to be
| biased against them.
|
| Just reading Trump and Musk's tweets will tell you plenty
| with zero bias. And indeed, this is how you can tell that
| Trump is legitimately a fool and Musk is simultaneously
| whimsical and stubborn.
|
| This does not mean there isn't also an extra bit of anti-
| Musk/Trump stuff piled on top (in Musk's case the stuff
| about him inheriting an Emerald mine and lying about his
| child dying in his arms and in Trump's case the stuff
| about him being a big anti-LGBT guy).
| d23 wrote:
| You said it's "more than half" of the negativity, not "an
| extra bit."
|
| > This does not mean there isn't also an extra bit of
| anti-Musk/Trump stuff piled on top (in Musk's case the
| stuff about him inheriting an Emerald mine and lying
| about his child dying in his arms
|
| I guess you're implying the emerald mine stuff is false?
| Or are you saying it's not a big deal? And re: the child
| dying in his arms, the media is quoting his wife, who
| said he's lying. Are they to just ignore a story like
| that?
| concordDance wrote:
| "Half" vs "a bit" is far too big an argument for a
| hackernews comment section
|
| On the rest:
|
| He did not inherit an Emerald mine and no reliable source
| has alleged he did, nor that his father even owned any
| part in the mine after the 90s, nor are there any
| reliable sources stating that Musk's father monetarily
| helped him in business other than a $28k loan he paid
| back. Heck, they even failed at doing a quick Google to
| figure out how much a pocket full of uncut emeralds
| actually goes for (a few hundred dollaras). And yet he's
| often portrayed as a trust fund kid who was given
| millions and never worked a day in his life.
|
| On the child dying, neither his wife nor he lied: https:/
| /twitter.com/justinemusk/status/1595539044217552896
|
| The baby death rattled in her arms but he felt the last
| heartbeat.
|
| When journalists dislike you they will knowingly
| propagate misleading distortions and myths and will never
| correct inaccuracies that went against you or promote
| facts that are in your favour.
| [deleted]
| e40 wrote:
| Literally everything I have heard about twitter came from
| twitter or here and it was all negative.
| freeone3000 wrote:
| Yes, Twitter is defined by its users hating it. (This
| does prove some issues with monetization)
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Sears.
| antifa wrote:
| Imagine if Twitter actually came out of this fine and then
| business schools decided to build a generation of "tough guy
| CEO" MBAs.
|
| Or worse, imagine if Twitter continues to plummet as we
| currently see it, then business schools decide to write
| history as if it were a success story anyways.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| Not sure how old you are but this already happened in the
| 80's. We also got an entire generation of "Steve Jobs was a
| successful asshole, ergo asshole => success" MBAs
| derf_ wrote:
| With one memo, Stephen Elop [1] drove Nokia's market cap from
| its peak of over $57b in March of 2010 to a trough of less
| than $7b in July of 2012 [2].
|
| [1] https://communities-
| dominate.blogs.com/brands/2011/08/coinin...
|
| [2] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/NOK/nokia/marke
| t-c...
| KineticLensman wrote:
| Gerald Ratner who described the products of his own jewellery
| company as 'crap'
|
| [edit] he actually said 'total crap' and lost PS500m.
| bakuninsbart wrote:
| While this is true, it doesn't really seem to damage Twitter
| as a platform for now. - And it is not as if Musk turned a
| great profitable business into trash, Twitter never had a
| sustainable business model.
| zarzavat wrote:
| To be fair, corporate acquisitions do often fall into
| disrepair and failure. It's just that usually the company
| making the acquisition... still has their existing business.
| When it's an individual making a botched acquisition, you get
| to watch the company disintegrate instead.
| spiderfarmer wrote:
| So far it has exposed the real business acumen of Elon Musk.
| The only company he runs by himself, arguably the easiest to
| run, is losing him a staggering amount of money in one year.
|
| I wonder how he rates his own perfomance.
| KoftaBob wrote:
| The way I see it, it more-so shows that his strength is in
| companies that are heavy on complex engineering problems.
|
| Twitter on the other hand, is a company dealing with
| sociological/societal challenges, being that it's a social
| network. That takes an entirely different kind of skill set
| to do well as a CEO for.
| ModernMech wrote:
| I don't buy it. Internal reports from SpaceX and Tesla
| detail Musk's chaotic, capricious management style that
| they have to spend resources to actively manage. SpaceX is
| better at it I guess, because he's seemed to have caused
| far more problems at Tesla with his antics.
|
| Either way, he's essentially abdicated his CEO role at both
| companies, and his chaotic management style is on full
| display now, which confirms the Tesla and SpaceX reports.
| But why did Tesla and SpaceX thrive where Twitter is
| failing? Because the former companies grew up to create
| processes that contain Musk; whereas Twitter was bought
| outright, so his blast radius is unlimited there. Twitter
| has no Musk immune response.
|
| At SpaceX when Musk suggests X, where X is... I dunno, an
| really dumb idea that no one would ever want, the people at
| SpaceX know how to redirect Musk until he drops it, or they
| know how to shape it into a good idea. At Twitter, they
| have no idea how to do this, and so Musk always gets his
| way, every time. All the people with the skills to turn bad
| ideas into good ones have left, all the people who tried to
| manage Musk were fired, so now he's left to his whims. And
| it shows.
|
| If anything, Musk has proven how ceremonial the CEO role
| is. He has the title CEO of at least 4 companies, and
| claims 80 hours per week is a full time role. So at best
| CEO is a part time job.
| tcmart14 wrote:
| I would also add on to the context of Tesla and SpaceX.
| Now part of this is speculation on my part. But I would
| also like to propose that the problem domains of Tesla
| and SpaceX also attract people who have vested interest
| in the problem domain. Engineers and researches at both
| of those companies are passionate about the problems that
| those two companies are trying to solve. With Twitter and
| social media, maybe there exists some people who are
| passionate, but I imagine the biggest attraction of
| Facebook and Twitter are the pay and the resume item. But
| at Tesla or SpaceX, your willing to eat more shit because
| your working on something your probably really passionate
| about and not to mention badass. I don't like Musk, but I
| would worked for him at SpaceX just because rockets are
| badass and I like space.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| > If anything, Musk has proven how ceremonial the CEO
| role is. He has the title CEO of at least 4 companies,
| and claims 80 hours per week is a full time role. So at
| best CEO is a part time job.
|
| I think the thing about CEO is that you can delegate not
| just the things you probably shouldn't personally be
| doing, but also the things you _should_.
|
| I'd believe that some CEOs have a real job, but it's
| pretty clear that a lot have delegated it away to nearly
| nothing.
| croisillon wrote:
| Isn't the Cybertruck a really dumb idea that no one would
| ever want?
| hersko wrote:
| I would want it.
| eropple wrote:
| Why would you want it when the F150 Lightning already
| exists?
| ModernMech wrote:
| It _is_ still vaporware. One potent delay tactic is to
| arrange a splashy prerelease, and then drag feet to
| production. But delay tactics only work for ideas that
| aren 't strongly seated yet; if he keeps coming back to
| it, delay will eventually fail. That's how you get bad
| movie and terrible ideas on store shelves. He is the boss
| after all.
| dpkirchner wrote:
| > If anything, Musk has proven how ceremonial the CEO
| role is. He has the title CEO of at least 4 companies,
| and claims 80 hours per week is a full time role. So at
| best CEO is a part time job.
|
| Also, he can't be effective at 3 of the companies since
| he's not physically in the office at each. It's
| impossible to do a good job while remote, as we all know.
| JohnFen wrote:
| I think that his strength is with companies that had a
| strong and effective engineering culture in place when he
| bought them. Companies that require the building or
| rebuilding of an engineering culture aren't playing to
| Musk's strengths.
| [deleted]
| nxm wrote:
| Twitter was doing that before Elon bought them
| halfmatthalfcat wrote:
| They had just recently become profitable before the Elon
| takeover.
| adql wrote:
| The 2020 was in negative, 2021 was also in negative.
| That's not "becoming profitable"
| garyrob wrote:
| Data?
| croisillon wrote:
| Looking into it.
| muyuu wrote:
| I don't think Twitter is alone in that respect.
|
| Twitter is unique in that it was acquired for US$ 44B when it
| was a business that lost huge amounts of money consistently for
| years, and the owner intended it to have it run old school
| style, as in making a profit, but also doing so in such short
| notice that he dismantled entire branches of the company
| wholesale.
|
| Obviously for people relying on pre-existing services and rates
| from Twitter, it sucks.
|
| But the root problem is that Twitter had not been a sustainable
| business for a long, long time. One has to wonder how did they
| even subsist for so long and how much institutional money, not
| just VC/investor money, and who knows what sort of
| government/agencies pay-to-play deals made it even possible
| because the sort of money they cashed in during the only few
| years they've even been profitable seems absurdly high and they
| have never replicated that under normal circumstances.
|
| With the ad model struggling and institutional ads sort of in
| retreat, the entire sector is struggling.
| oxfordmale wrote:
| Not sustainable?
|
| Twitter generated $5 billion revenue in 2021, a 35% increase
| on 2020 figures and a significant improvement on the 8% and
| 13% increase the two years before.
|
| Cut backs were needed, as advertising revenue would have been
| significantly down this year, given the economic down turn.
| However, there was no need to gut the company to make it
| profitable.
| zpeti wrote:
| > Cut backs were needed
|
| I mean, you are both claiming cuts were needed and they're
| too much. So how much was right? How do you know? You'd do
| a better job than the people who have access to the
| numbers? That's a fairly arrogant position
| danaris wrote:
| Gee, it's almost like there are aspects of life where a
| single-minded absolutist position is going to be less
| effective than getting to know the actual situation and
| making an informed decision based on human judgement.
| oxfordmale wrote:
| Most FAANGS have been cutting by 10 to 15%. That trims
| excess fat without gutting a company.
|
| Twitter seems to have a serious cultural problem at the
| moment, and that is generally a lot harder to fix than to
| rehire when the growth curve inverses.
|
| I am sure Musk had to cut by 50%, if only because
| Twitter's interest payments are now significant. However,
| that does bring significant challenges.
| wongarsu wrote:
| If Elon hadn't bough it, maybe the Twitter would have been
| fine without significant restructuring. But now Twitter has
| to service a significant part of the debt created to buy
| the company, and thus has to generate more revenue.
| a4isms wrote:
| Elon bough it because he wanted to branch out.
| sangnoir wrote:
| Elon bought Twitter because the Delaware courts are not
| the milquetoasts he's accustomed to (at the SEC).
|
| Edit: my suspicion is that Elon expected the Twitter
| board to rebuff him, and he'd walk away calling them
| names for the rest of his days - and then the market
| dropped, removing resistance from the board (if any
| existed). This was capped off with Delaware courts
| showing every sign of muscular oversight of contract law,
| with Twitter reveling at the chance of embarrassing Musk
| and people in his orbit _and_ getting bought off at a
| now-overpriced amount. It was a perfect storm.
| censor_me wrote:
| [dead]
| muyuu wrote:
| twitter lost copious amounts of money even with
| unprecedented revenue (from institutional ads one would
| assume, as it had never happened to that degree before or
| since, and private ads were cheap in 2021)
|
| https://i.imgur.com/Gea8HRr.png
|
| clearly Twitter was way, way too fat when it managed to
| lose US$1B with record revenue
|
| which I'm not saying it means you should just close down
| core branches of the service, of course
|
| perhaps Musk wasn't ready for the amounts of money Twitter
| required to be made profitable under a reasonable timeline
| oxfordmale wrote:
| The problem for Musk was that he had to borrow a lot, and
| interest payments are now significant for Twitter.
|
| Twitter could have easily be turned into a profitable
| business by cutting 15%, rather than 50% of staff.
| codeulike wrote:
| Revenue not the same thing as profit
|
| Twitter has only made a profit in 2 out of the last 11
| years
|
| https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=twitter+profits+per+ye
| a...
| dragontamer wrote:
| The Twitter Buyout is structured as a $13 Billion loan.
|
| That means that Elon Musk's Twitter Buyout costs $1.3
| Billion/year _ON TOP_ of all the other costs of Twitter.
|
| If Twitter was "barely profitable" in 2021, they're now
| $Billion+ short / year. That has nothing to do with "old
| Twitter" decisions, and 100% to do with how Elon Musk
| structured the buyout.
|
| Presumably, you're supposed to assume that Musk knows
| what he's doing and that he has a plan to make $1.3
| Billion in profits (to break even on the loan) and then
| go beyond (to make profit on his $44 Billion investment).
| But... I'm honestly not seeing it.
| brotoss wrote:
| Now do Amazon
| Drakim wrote:
| As far as I understand Amazon makes a deliberate choice
| to reinvest their profit into research, marketing, etc,
| with the promise that it will grow more in the future.
|
| Musk has been very upfront that Twitter is bleeding money
| (hence why he is firing so many people), it's not simply
| that a healthy profit margin is being reinvested.
| nemothekid wrote:
| Your graph doesn't really counter the parent's point. The
| profit line was trending upwards 2020 was their most
| profitable year. It certainly looks like the business was
| becoming sustainable.
| codeulike wrote:
| _It certainly looks like the business was becoming
| sustainable_
|
| The downturn in early 2022 hit them badly. They were
| losing money again when Elon bought them (one of the
| reasons he tried to pull out of the deal)
|
| Admittedly the way he structured his buy out made it
| worse by adding more debt.
| rvz wrote:
| > However, there was no need to gut the company to make it
| profitable.
|
| There was a need and it was going to happen anyway. Clearly
| slashing headcount earlier even without Elon, would have
| easily made it even more profitable.
|
| Their mistake was that they didn't do it earlier enough. It
| just took Elon to do it for them. 7K headcount wasn't
| sustainable regardless and a 50% - 60% cut in staff makes
| sense for Twitter.
| dpkirchner wrote:
| But why would he bother? If the company was really in
| such bad shape, why not just let it fail and create a
| competing service (for a lot less than $44B)?
|
| In any case, from my perspective Twitter didn't really
| make serious mistakes. They got $44B for the company
| despite its issues.
| Yoric wrote:
| I suspect that if there was government/agencies money, it
| would show up as revenue. Possibly laundered through third-
| parties, but revenue nevertheless.
| majani wrote:
| With 62% of public companies nowadays being in the same loss-
| making predicament[1], the bigger question is: how much of
| the US economy is being propped up by the goodwill of
| investors?
|
| [1] https://www.consultantsmind.com/2018/03/04/choosing-
| stocks/
| EarlKing wrote:
| I think you mean: How much of the US economy is employing
| Hollywood Accounting.[1]
|
| ---
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting
| guelo wrote:
| It had survived for 15 years and there was no hint that it
| was going under.
| zpeti wrote:
| Thank you, for a nuanced answer on this topic. Very rare
| these days.
|
| You are also 100% correct. As revenues fell at snap just like
| twitter, and easy money has dried up at all VCs creating a
| completely different market environment. Just look at stocks
| of small cap tech companies too, which Twitter was.
|
| The only extra nuance to add is that without fines Twitter
| was actually profitable before musk bought it, but in the
| current market environment it certainly wouldn't be even
| without musks leadership.
|
| But of course blaming musk is what gets upvotes.
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| More like, how not to buy a business.
|
| Elon basically started with the Private Equity leveraged buyout
| playbook - borrow money to buy a business, then assign that
| business the debt used to buy it.
|
| But it's unclear how he's going to do part 2, which is to
| either suck enough value out of it to recoup the purchase price
| before it fails completely, or turn it around and make it more
| valuable than when he bought it.
|
| Right now Twitter needs to drastically increase its revenue and
| decrease its expenses just to service the new debt load. Hence
| Elon firing everyone and trying to charge more for every little
| thing.
|
| It's amazing that Twitter was more or less self-sustaining
| prior to this, and now it's not.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| I think it's a mistake to evaluate his success with it in
| purely financial terms like that.
|
| He's proven himself thin skinned, egotistical, and
| capricious, and is easy to provoke into vindictive &
| retributive actions even if not in his best interests.
|
| I think a big part of why he bought twitter was a sense of
| grievance, basically that the wrong people were getting
| positive attention, that people were being mean to and making
| fun of him and his friends & allies. He wanted to restructure
| the mechanics and incentives of the platform to better
| support the people and outcomes he values.
|
| I'm not sure whether he succeeded by these terms either, it's
| still too early to tell I think. But I do think it's an
| important factor in evaluating whether he succeeded in what
| he set out to do when buying twitter.
|
| And from that perspective "make it good or (let it) die
| trying" may be an acceptable compromise. He doesn't get the
| musk-adoration platform he wants, but at least there is no
| longer the musk-ridicule platform he perceived it to be.
| jkern wrote:
| Bit of a Pyrrhic victory isn't it?
| JohnFen wrote:
| Remember, he didn't want to buy Twitter. He pitched it in
| the first place purely in an attempt to get leverage over
| the board. He didn't really want to own it.
|
| The board called his bluff and said "sold!", then Musk
| spent a great deal of time and effort trying to wiggle out
| of the deal. He failed, and now he's stuck with it.
|
| Everything he's doing now is trying to minimize the amount
| of financial damage this debacle will cause him.
| cutemonster wrote:
| Are you sure he didn't actually want to but it, before it
| turned out there are so many bots?
|
| In any case, I suspect that the GP comment by
| giraffe_lady, explains why he was interested in Twitter
| at all -- why bothering trying to get leverage over the
| board.
|
| Or, if he wants to eventually become the President of the
| US, then that's an alternative explanation (of why he
| cared)?
| periphrasis wrote:
| > Or, if he wants to eventually become the President of
| the US, then that's an alternative explanation (of why he
| cared)?
|
| That would require a constitutional amendment in order
| for him to be eligible. He's revealed himself to be
| pretty dumb, but even I give him enough credit to not be
| so stupid as to think he will one day he President.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| He's not broadly stupid. He does seem to have the very
| specific failure to believe that rules or consequences
| apply to him. He's correct about this a lot of the time,
| and it's probably the source of a good deal of his
| success. I think he's capable of believing he could be
| president some day.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > Are you sure he didn't actually want to but it, before
| it turned out there are so many bots?
|
| There's very little doubt in my mind. The bot thing was
| always just rhetorical. he didn't suddenly "discover"
| something he wasn't already well aware of.
| jayd16 wrote:
| Elon will never be president. Only in part because he is
| not a US born citizen.
| cutemonster wrote:
| Ok he's from South Africa
| KerrAvon wrote:
| > Are you sure he didn't actually want to but it, before
| it turned out there are so many bots?
|
| Yes. This has been covered widely and was a key reason he
| had to follow through with the purchase. The bot thing
| was an attempt to get out of buying Twitter, not
| something he actually believed. You need to realize that
| he's like Trump: lying is kind of beside the point. He'll
| say whatever he thinks will get him what he wants, which
| ultimately public adulation, however hollow that is.
| actionablefiber wrote:
| > Remember, he didn't want to buy Twitter. He pitched it
| in the first place purely in an attempt to get leverage
| over the board. He didn't really want to own it.
|
| He didn't just "pitch" it, he made a buyout offer with
| all the attendant SEC filings. Not the sort of thing you
| can accidentally do with a slip of the tongue!
| rurp wrote:
| Given everything he has said and done about Twitter, I
| think it's pretty clear he has no idea how contracts work
| and is very bitter about ever having to follow them.
| tbihl wrote:
| >I think it's pretty clear he has no idea how contracts
| work
|
| Is this really a good assumption for a guy who has
| started so many successful companies?
| rurp wrote:
| He's hardly the first person to get rich flouting the
| law.
|
| Plus it's not at all clear how much credit he should get
| for the companies he invested in, aside from being a good
| fundraiser and hype man. There are plenty of stories
| about employees having to manage him to avoid him
| stepping on critical work.
| officeplant wrote:
| >started so many successful companies
|
| The only companies he actually founded was SpaceX, and
| Boring if that even counts.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| Given how hard he fought against buying it even after he
| signed the paperwork to buy it I think we're forced to
| say "Yes".
| mikestew wrote:
| What is your alternative explanation for how it turned
| out? "Didn't understand what he signed up for" is the
| only explanation that makes sense to me, given my second
| choice is "he's a fucking idiot that fell into money".
| Though I don't think Musk is nearly as smart as he (or a
| lot of his fans) thinks he is, he's no idiot, so...
|
| And you don't have to understand contract law to start a
| company (or in the majority of Musk's cases, _invest_ in
| an existing company), that 's what lawyers are for.
| sangnoir wrote:
| > Not the sort of thing you can accidentally do with a
| slip of the tongue!
|
| If your name is Elon Musk, you may convince yourself you
| can walk away unscathed, or with only a slap on the wrist
| (see the many SEC encounters).
| pkulak wrote:
| I think he did want to buy it, but then later thought
| that decision through a bit, or had it thought through
| for him, and realized his mistake. You're giving him too
| much credit.
| myko wrote:
| It does seem like he was not in the right state of mind
| when he decided to buy for $54.20/share
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| I still think my analysis holds. Why did he want leverage
| over the board? For the grievance-based reason I pointed
| to. He didn't want to follow through with it, but once
| forced, why would he not continue to act based on that
| driver and similar petty impulsiveness we now know he
| experiences?
|
| It's true though that if it loses a bucket of money and
| he never wanted it in the first place he might not
| consider it as successful as I'm guessing. We can't know
| his mind, but thinking of it in this way explains a lot
| of his behavior around twitter that is difficult or
| impossible to explain from a pure financial standpoint,
| so I'm going to stick with it for now.
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| I don't think he would be ok losing $40billion+ and with
| only some assuaged grievances to show for it. He's not
| _that_ tempermental.
|
| He's got a business idea for Twitter, which is to turn it
| into "X", the everything app he originally wanted Paypal to
| be 20yrs ago. Basically a US version of WeChat.
|
| But it will be a steep climb from here, with a skeleton
| engineering crew that needs to both maintain current
| Twitter and build new X, and the debt service draining
| money and constraining hiring.
| okeuro49 wrote:
| It seems to me that Musk is moving away from advertisements, to
| trying to build the first social network that doesn't rely on
| the user being the product, but rather paying for the product.
|
| That's supposedly what tech people root for, but because its
| Elon Musk, who eschews many of the shibboleths of the Left,
| people criticise Twitter as a proxy for his political views.
| bhaak wrote:
| This would be a laudable direction to take the company
| towards ...
|
| ... if he didn't start by putting $12.5 billions of debt on
| the balance sheet after the buyout.
|
| Which means that Twitter has to pay $1 billion of interest
| each year which it didn't have to do before that hostile
| takeover.
|
| How many people would need to buy Twitter Blue to offset the
| interest alone? ~~125 million users which is about a third of
| its whole active user base~~ 10 million which is about 3% of
| their active user base (I can't do maths, thanks supermatt,
| luckily I'm good looking and can program).
| ed_elliott_asc wrote:
| Just to pay off the interest? Ouch ouch ouch
| supermatt wrote:
| 1bn / $8/m (excluding costs, etc) / 12 months = ~ 10m
| BulgarianIdiot wrote:
| And so how's that going?
| rlex wrote:
| >It seems to me that Musk is moving away from advertisements,
| to trying to build the first social network that doesn't rely
| on the user being the product, but rather paying for the
| product.
|
| Won't be first. There was app.net [1]. Gained traction at
| first and i had nice dialogues with good people, but died out
| pretty fast.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App.net
| oxfordmale wrote:
| It is the same with streaming. I am happy to pay, but not for
| 100 streaming services to get the content I want (Netflix,
| Disney+, Paramount, HBO, BritBox, etc).
|
| If I pay for a social network, I want quality content and API
| access. Twitter wouldn't be the first platform I would pay
| for.
| Avshalom wrote:
| There are more ads than ever and one of the new promised
| twitter blue features is getting paid if you get people to
| look at ads.
| draugadrotten wrote:
| Buying twitter was never about profiting - at least not the
| profiting from the company balance sheet. The profit can come
| elsewhere, by the influence gained from owning and
| controlling the twitter firehose and recommendation
| algorithms.
|
| In a way, this is Elon buying a newspaper like rich people
| always did to influence politics, except that he is buying a
| modern version of a newspaper.
|
| Musk bought twitter because it is and was an integral part in
| social media campaigns for the last few elections. Targeted
| ads on twitter can reach journalists and politicians, their
| timelines "for you" controlled by Elon's and they might not
| even understand that they are being nudged by the content
| shown in the app. Heck, just by unbanning Trump and allowing
| MFA Russia on the app, he is moving the Overton window a bit.
|
| The proof is in the pudding as they say. How many million
| people now see Elon Musks personal twitter posts, that did
| not see them before he bought twitter?
| sph wrote:
| Aside: As a European, it scares and amuses me to no end how
| the American discourse has become a complete Left vs Right,
| black vs white, us vs them. I'm not even that old, and I
| remember when being so politically polarised and eager to fit
| people and the world in two small boxes was something you'd
| only hear from drunken lunatics at a bar. These days, it's
| every-fucking-where on the Internet because y'all can't
| bloody stop talking about your politics.
|
| I say that in the most polite way possible: you Americans
| have a lot of internal issues you need to sort out, and
| quickly. You're polluting the rest of the world with your
| party politics.
| ramblerman wrote:
| well said,
|
| I'd argue Musk himself has fallen prey to this partisan
| politics - it is really hard to support a large part of his
| tweets these days. He seems to have fallen into some
| strange mental quagmire with the failure of his twitter
| buyout, and his ego is not letting him accept any other
| reason for it than partisan sabotage.
|
| But the way he is portrayed in the aggregate here and on
| reddit is even worse. He is either a genius beyond any
| criticism, or a complete fool, was always a fool and
| twitter is now exposing that.
|
| We can't simply accept any middle ground, which is that he
| is likely a flawed human being who did some pretty amazing
| things once upon a time. If anything I hope we can steer
| him back to moonshot ideas, because he had a talent for it.
| sneak wrote:
| Musk is perhaps the least partisan public figure I know
| of; everyone on the left seems to assume he's a right
| winger because he doesn't subscribe to left-wing
| orthodoxy, so he _must_ be one of the Bad Other Guys.
|
| TBH it seems clear to me that he is a closeted
| libertarian who can't safely express his views in full
| without alienating huge segments of his mostly-red
| autoworker base or his mostly-blue techworker base.
|
| It's a difficult tightrope to walk in the current ongoing
| partisan culture brawl.
| phatfish wrote:
| His "base" is Crypto Bros and conspiracy theorists if
| Twitter is any indicator.
| freeone3000 wrote:
| "Base"? What base? Nobody voted for him, he just has a
| lot of money. Do people have to _like_ him too?
| realjhol wrote:
| Well said
| seszett wrote:
| I'd add that it's not only the extreme polarisation, but
| also a muddying of terms that have different meanings or
| uses between the US and Europe (at least my part of
| Europe).
|
| I sometimes hear people conflating "the left" and
| "liberals" when... the left is here opposed to liberalism.
| Because liberalism means economic liberalism. And the local
| economic liberals are socially conservative. While the left
| is economically illiberal, and socially progressive. And
| our centrists are probably the closest thing we have to the
| US left, but since they are mostly allied with the right
| opposing them makes no sense.
| JohnFen wrote:
| The real problem is that in the US, we measure everything
| with a single yardstick that goes from "Left" to "Right".
|
| But the actual, real reality is that 80%+ of people can't
| be measured in such a one-dimensional way. People have
| more nuance than that, and to get even a remotely
| accurate sense of where someone is politically requires a
| multipolar yardstick.
| thinkingemote wrote:
| If you are interested in potential reasons _why_ Americans
| (and increasingly more of us non-americans) are so binary
| in their arguments, I found the following article
| interesting. Basically it says that America have always had
| a kind of us vs them mentality and it 's now running
| internally. And this is combined with the certainty one
| gets with suspicion. If you suspect someone of being an
| enemy then you know for certain what their reasons are and
| you do not need to seek further information. Empathy in the
| wider sense of understanding what another feels goes
| against this. Conflicts get resolved peacefully when both
| sides find shared ground. Paranoia and suspicion remove any
| idea about even trying to find shared ground.
|
| We see this from all sides from the liberals and the
| conservatives. What's ironic is both sides see the other
| side as doing it not them!
|
| Originally from 1964
| https://harpers.org/archive/1964/11/the-paranoid-style-in-
| am... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24964931
|
| e.g Applied selectively to 2022:
| https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/usappblog/2022/01/26/how-the-
| paranoi...
| sph wrote:
| Thanks, this is good food for thought to educate myself.
| cguess wrote:
| > Basically it says that America have always had a kind
| of us vs them mentality and it's now running internally
|
| This has been a thing in the US since before we were the
| US. The south vs. north and urban vs. rural divide has
| deeply affected the entire fabric of the US down to the
| 3/5ths compromise in the Constitution to placate the
| southern states to ratify the Constitution in the first
| place.
|
| Don't forget that time in the 1860's when literally half
| the country tried to leave as well. This is nothing new,
| it's just that the rest of the world can see it in real
| time nowadays (and much more of them speak English) when
| that was not possible previously unless you were a real
| international policy wonk.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > you Americans have a lot of internal issues you need to
| sort out, and quickly. You're polluting the rest of the
| world with your party politics.
|
| I could not agree more. It's just hard to see how to move
| toward this goal.
| danaris wrote:
| This is absolutely true.
|
| However, it's important to note that there has been a
| _genuine_ and very significant polarization of actual
| American politics over the past ~30-40 years--the seeds
| were planted with the Reagan presidency, and then Newt
| Gingrich in the early '90s started pushing the idea that
| political wins were more important than governing.
|
| It's also important to note that this has been driven
| primarily by the rapid rush of the Republican Party to the
| right, from a conservative party with some fairly serious
| problems with racism, but a willingness to compromise and
| an understanding of governance, to a radical reactionary
| party refusing to censure or otherwise rein in the parts of
| it that are, in some cases, openly and explicitly embracing
| (christo-)fascism and Nazism, and advocating for outright
| violence against marginalized people.
| bastawhiz wrote:
| The word "trying" is doing a lot of work in your reply
| JohnFen wrote:
| > Elon Musk, who eschews many of the shibboleths of the Left,
| people criticise Twitter as a proxy for his political views.
|
| Some probably do, but a whole lot don't. Musk was heavily
| criticized well before people were aware of his political
| views, for reasons that have nothing whatsoever to do with
| his political views.
| Kye wrote:
| >> _" It seems to me that Musk is moving away from
| advertisements, to trying to build the first social network
| that doesn't rely on the user being the product, but rather
| paying for the product."_
|
| First? No. There have been many attempts at this. The
| ActivityPub fediverse is the first with any prospect of
| competing with the VC-funded model. Thousands of servers, all
| but a few funded entirely by the millions of people who use
| them.
|
| It's already self-sustaining. Twitter's new era is starting
| out billions in debt with its advertising base gone and
| flailing attempts to find some way to even cover the debt
| service.
| misssocrates wrote:
| Perhaps Twitter will be the golden example of how to run a
| business like SpaceX and Tesla became after many years of
| derision?
| dragontamer wrote:
| Buy a company for $44 Billion, and now offers equity at $20
| Billion valuation?
|
| https://www.wsj.com/articles/twitter-offers-new-equity-
| grant...
|
| The company has lost over half its value in just 5 months.
| prottog wrote:
| I mean, the Nasdaq 100 lost almost 30% in 3 months, from
| March to June of last year. Doesn't mean every CEO fumbled
| that bad. Or maybe it does!
| dragontamer wrote:
| Elon needs to grow Twitter by 50% before he has 'only' a
| 30% loss.
|
| There is a huge difference between 55% drop that Mr Musk
| has experienced with Twitter, and the 30% drop you're
| talking about.
|
| EDIT: > from March to June of last year
|
| That seems like a weird comparison? An apples-to-apples
| benchmark would be the Nasdaq 100 from November last year
| (when Musk finished buying Twitter) to March this year.
| coldcode wrote:
| It's not worth $20B, that's just his ego talking. I can see
| it being worth $4B. It has no long term path to any kind of
| high growth multiple. Twitter was always an amazingly
| useful concept but not a big money making business idea. At
| best it could become like a steady ultility company.
| dragontamer wrote:
| I'm steelmanning my argument. But yes, you're right. I
| can't imagine a real VC firm buying Twitter today at $20+
| B.
|
| Note that Twitter has a $13 Billion loan with $1.3
| Billion/year in interest payments in a rising interest
| rate economy while VC banks like SIVB are failing. That
| means to buy Twitter at $20B valuation, the VC firm would
| need to spend $33 Billion. ($20 B valuation + $13 Billion
| loan)
|
| I honestly don't see this company having enough runway to
| even reach the $1.3 Billion/year interest payment, let
| alone the rest of it's liabilities or costs.
| misssocrates wrote:
| He overpaid and that was already well known before he even
| took the reigns.
| dragontamer wrote:
| Overpaying by well over double is... a bad business
| decision. Is it not?
|
| Even as bad as the stock market was last year, very few
| companies lost 50%+ of their value.
|
| --------
|
| There's a lot of other decisions that are very strange
| coming out of Tesla, such as the removal of RADAR and
| Ultrasonic Sensors. Does Elon Musk really believe he can
| compete against next-generation companies when he's
| removing sensors from his cars?
| zaroth wrote:
| Regarding the Tesla comments;
|
| Radar is back by the way, with an increased resolution
| that makes it more useful in highways where overhead
| signs false positive as a collision risk on the old
| sensor.
|
| The ultrasonic sensors IMO were basically worthless.
| Initial analysis of the new v4 FSD hardware indicates
| they are adding more cameras - including bumper cameras
| to cover blind spots that previously would have relied on
| ultrasonics.
|
| It doesn't seem like HW4 can be retrofit like HW3 was, so
| it will be very interesting how that all plays out!
|
| https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-hardware-4-hd-radar-
| first-lo...
|
| https://mobile.twitter.com/greentheonly/status/1625905220
| 432...
| [deleted]
| jslaby wrote:
| If other companies follow suit, then it becomes a race to the
| bottom for all, except those at the top.
| misssocrates wrote:
| Improving efficiency of the economy would be a good thing.
| justapassenger wrote:
| Tesla valuation is dropping and years of neglect is catching
| up to them. SpaceX keeps on raising money, likely because
| they keep on losing it. And both of them grew a lot during
| period of cheap money, fueled by huge amount of lies.
|
| Hardly golden examples of how to run business.
| rrix2 wrote:
| He'll need to find a way for Twitter to get a lot of
| government subsidies or contracts for that future...
| BenSahar wrote:
| Bingo.
|
| This Twitter saga is more like his PayPal days when he sent
| the company into a nosedive with bad management.
| wongarsu wrote:
| He only owns the company for 5 months so far. He seems set on
| transforming Twitter, and any company looks bad while in the
| middle of a transformation.
|
| I'm not saying Elon is doing a good job, all signs point to the
| opposite. He probably though so too when he announced to step
| down from CEO (though that has yet to happen). But _if_ he was
| doing a good job, it would also be really hard to tell in this
| phase. I don 't think we are far enough into this to draw any
| good conclusions.
| rurp wrote:
| It's not really hard to tell if he's doing a good job, he's
| clearly not.
|
| Losing nearly half of revenue in only a few months, adding
| crippling debt payments, stiffing employees on their
| severance, refusing to pay rent and other services, plus
| countless other debacles make it clear this is a
| dysfunctional company. Network effects and resilient
| architecture can keep a company humming along for some time
| despite incompetent management, but those resources will get
| depleted and they are hard to regain.
| segasaturn wrote:
| Something I've been wondering is how many people have left
| Twitter because of the service's recent instability issues.
| Because none of the people I know have stopped using the site,
| despite most being fiercely anti-Musk. It could be that Elon is
| perfectly OK with letting the site go from 99.99999% uptime to
| just 99% because he knows nobody will leave, and the engineers
| behind those extra five 9's were being paid hundreds of
| thousands.
| emodendroket wrote:
| Is he right or not and for how long is the big question, but I
| agree that is thinking that's animating him, to the extent
| there is a plan.
| hagbarth wrote:
| I stopped using it. It just doesn't draw me in anymore.
| zzzeek wrote:
| he still has to figure out some way to make money and
| apparently most major news outlets will not be paying for
| Twitter Blue because they rightly realize it means nothing. The
| "status symbol" that was the blue checkmark is over and only an
| idiot would pay for it, Twitter has a lot of idiots but it
| seems likely the vast majority of them will also figure this
| out
|
| https://www.neowin.net/news/major-media-outlets-wont-be-payi...
| ben174 wrote:
| Reddit survived a long time with absolutely horrendous
| stability. They still have pretty bad uptime: 99.72 % uptime
| (web). Their community was very vocal about it, but they
| continued to grow.
|
| I could even see it helping. When reddit was down everyone lost
| their shit and there would be posts "where were you during the
| outage of '21" and "today I actually went outside", etc.. Kinda
| adds to the hype.
| rsynnott wrote:
| It probably depends on a lot on your social group. I maintain a
| twitter account because, damnit, I've had it since 2007, back
| when they had visible numeric ids it was in the six figures,
| and I don't want someone to squat it; everything changes and
| twitter may once more have competent leadership.
|
| But if I look at that twitter account... it's pretty dead. Most
| of the people I followed have either gone to mastodon (my
| choice) or instagram (which I could never get into) or just
| dialed back on social media. Just a wasteland of uninteresting
| stuff it thinks I might like and gambling ads, increasingly.
|
| Mind you, to your point, I didn't leave due to instability; my
| breaking point was the purge of the journalists, and if that
| hadn't driven me away, the death of the third party apps
| certainly would have.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| You don't have to maintain your twitter account just to have
| someone to not take your username.
|
| I (kind of, my profile timeline is now inconsisntent/corrupt)
| deleted all my tweets, locked my account, and changed
| password to something I don't know.
| raydev wrote:
| It's obvious that none of the non-tech elite/journalist/media
| types were able to wean themselves off Twitter, and the bulk of
| the normie population barely registered it.
|
| It really was just tech-oriented and tech-oriented-LGBTQ*
| groups that fully abandoned Twitter for Mastodon. Which has
| been frustrating, I want to support Mastodon but I'm also
| mostly on Twitter for a good time with a smattering of tech
| concerns, and it seems like people on Mastodon are generally
| only talking about tech, having a bad time in their lives, or
| they're simply bad at being funny.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| I mean, back when it first became a thing it was down
| frequently (fail whale), but people kept coming back anyway.
| Downtimes have never been a deterrent for Twitter.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| I left because the official twitter client is garbage and all
| the third party clients were killed off by Musk. If someone
| links a Tweet I'll still look at it, but I haven't logged in
| since Tweetbot stopped working.
| olalonde wrote:
| My guess is not much at all. It was even independently reported
| that Twitter was growing under Elon Musk[0]. Also, "Mastodon's
| users have dropped significantly" according to a report by
| Wire[1].
|
| Edit: It's quite telling that the various personal stories and
| anecdotes are receiving upvotes, while my comment, which
| contains links to concrete data, is being downvoted.
|
| [0] https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/elon-musk-
| twitter-...
|
| [1] https://www.wired.com/story/the-mastodon-bump-is-now-a-
| slump...
| [deleted]
| michaelmrose wrote:
| App downloads have grown, which is the most useless metric
| because banning or breaking third-party clients can drive
| downloads, as can new phones.
|
| Revenue has tanked and other services are nibbling at their
| market. This should at least suggest to you that it's not
| growing .
| madeofpalk wrote:
| A significant chunk of the people _I_ followed on twitter left.
| So I left and followed them on Mastodon.
| iFred wrote:
| Things started to get pretty bad on 2/24 where a lot of the
| backend stuff used to serve media started to get slower.
|
| https://twitter.com/iFred/status/1641552082003193857
| raydev wrote:
| None of this really has any impact because of social
| stickiness. Unless Twitter has repeated multi-hour outages
| preventing people performing basic actions, like reading
| their main feeds or replies or posting tweets, the continued
| service degradation metrics will not be acknowledged.
| tric wrote:
| It's not just uptime. They are making weird changes like making
| it so that replies show up in the Following feed as if it were
| a regular tweet without context.
|
| I've also unfollowed many people, and they still show up in my
| feed.
|
| Musk also said only paid accounts will show up in the For You
| feed, but then later said it will also include people you
| follow.
| somsak2 wrote:
| Do you have a source for the actual reliability of the site
| going down since Musk took over? All I have ever seen is these
| general claims without substantiation. What's especially funny
| is that the fail whale was a common theme for much of Twitter's
| early years, so even if the reliability was lower, it's less of
| a change and more of a return to those early days.
|
| The only source I've been able to find is here
| https://app.upzilla.co/statistics/32, which shows something
| like 99.9% uptime since November '22.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| Being up unfortunately isn't enough. Failures are in
| different components (Microservices?) Today for example I was
| greeted by "Internal server errors" when attempting to login
| to my tweetdeck. A few days bay I hit a bug, where I clicked
| a link to a Twitter message and was redirected to my home
| (apparently to refresh my session as I didn't use Twitter in
| that. Browser for a while and second attempt worked)
|
| Any simple "upstate" tacker won't notice those things. For me
| it is notable, though, while I use Twitter a lot less, which
| of course impacts perception.
| bfeynman wrote:
| There is an article on here every other week about twitter
| being down for hours at a time. Plus you can't even tell
| anymore given how many features are cut.
| philistine wrote:
| Mentions have been reduced to zero for any mid-size Twitter
| account since the culling started. That's a silent failure
| that led to a lot of tech people leaving.
| ChildOfChaos wrote:
| Makes sense to me.
|
| A lot of people like to hate on Musk and act like he is
| clueless yet they haven't build or done anything, let alone at
| the scale Elon has been able to run things at, yes he has a lot
| of people around him, yes he might get a lot of the credit when
| it belongs to them, but he is still the person that bought
| everything together.
|
| There has got to be something that he is doing right and a lot
| of it to me seems to be getting rid of the nonsense that
| doesn't matter, not having much respect for norms or the way it
| is normally done, much like the first principles framework he
| has used successfully in many things he has done.
|
| A lot of programers and startups love a huge amount of
| frameworks, processes and to be honest nonsense, because that
| is just how that industry works, musk tore up a lot of that and
| people then start calling him crazy, but as you point out, do
| people really care if Twitters uptime is 99% or 99.999999%
| engineers and people that are so stuck to industry standards
| do, the rest of the world and reality not so much.
| jabradoodle wrote:
| Advertisers might care when they can't show you adverts.
|
| People commenting on current affairs might when they can't
| comment on events.
|
| Sports fans, etc.
|
| Also, the article is about twitters api, not the availability
| of the site.
| JohnClark1337 wrote:
| [dead]
| wonderwonder wrote:
| I still enjoy it. There is the occasional minor bug for example
| lately I have noticed that the image carousel acts as if you
| double clicked the next button on the 2nd or 3rd image and
| skips it. I also get followed by a new asian woman (bot) every
| day. Other than that, not really too bad. I like the lists
| feature for following news.
|
| See a lot of people saying they are presented with nazi posts,
| but I have not seen anything at all like that. I do see more
| right wing / conservative posters but they are very far from
| Nazis.
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| imo, this particular move will likely hurt Twitter more.
|
| The reason Twitter attracts its current audience is a) celebs &
| politicians, and b) Twitter-specific creators - think of all
| the thread writers and serial memers.
|
| All of these people rely on third party tools to schedule their
| tweets. No one is going to manually craft 1/30 thread series or
| tweet 8 times a day.
|
| If the cost of running third party tools goes up 10x, a lot of
| creators, especially on the lower-end, will leave. I can pay
| $10/month for a tweet scheduling app, but if I had to pay $100
| (because the app has to now pay 20x), I won't bother.
| mkehrt wrote:
| Interesting--I think a large chunk of my friends have stopped
| using twitter. Certainly anyone I had on my main list has moved
| to mastodon or just stopped posting.
| gdulli wrote:
| I left the day my client stopped working. Broke a decade-long
| daily habit.
|
| Twitter had already become less enjoyable than it was back in
| the day, that started before Musk and isn't his fault. The
| underlying engagement was no longer there, only inertia.
| Inertia alone would have kept me there much longer, but without
| true engagement I wasn't going to start using their crappy
| official client/site, and the idea of paying for a subscription
| was laughable.
|
| Twitter won't die like MySpace did, losing to a single party
| like Mastodon as MySpace did to Facebook. It will die like
| Craigslist. It will be very slow, still be around a decade from
| now, having lost its cultural relevance and having been
| supplanted by a number of different options rather than one.
| I'm seeing Twitter's niche get fragmented to different places,
| and everyone has one foot out the door and the engagement is
| dwindling slowly but intractably. The brand is poison, but
| people are taking their time to figure out how to deal with
| that. So I'm not expecting to see an abrupt exodus. Nor do I
| expect to see Mastodon become as big as Twitter was, or die out
| completely.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| Maybe. That depends entirely on the extent to which Musk can
| keep it together -- past Mastodon growth spurts correlate
| with his erratic and sometimes unhinged policy changes and
| outbursts. But I don't know what will make comedians and
| polticos move out; I suspect it'll be individuals coming over
| to Mastodon here and there and then suddenly it'll reach
| critical mass.
|
| Disagree about Mastodon -- I think it or the protocols
| backing it, will be the glue that holds the rest of social
| media together. You may not be using something branded
| "Mastodon" in 2035, but it will probably be Mastodon
| underneath.
| rsynnott wrote:
| 2035 is a long way away. If you'd told someone in 13 years
| ago that in 2022 a decentralised social network started
| making headway, they'd probably have guessed it was RSS-
| based. I definitely wouldn't bet on ActivityPub being The
| Thing in another 13 years.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| Craigslist has had the benefit that its infrastructure is
| very simple, and takes almost no maintenance to run.
| Something at the complexity level of Facebook would probably
| die in weeks if the servers were left to run unmaintained.
| That may happen to Twitter if the slow bleed continues and
| the service becomes unprofitable to run.
| philistine wrote:
| > the service becomes unprofitable to run.
|
| When was Twitter profitable ?!
| toast0 wrote:
| > Something at the complexity level of Facebook would
| probably die in weeks if the servers were left to run
| unmaintained
|
| I'm not sure that's true. The site runs best when most
| employees are out of the office during the last week or two
| of December and when employees are busy writing peer
| reviews on the last day or two before that portion of the
| review cycle ends.
|
| Craigslist without maintenance probably turns into just
| scams and spam.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| I think you may be thinking of feature pauses, which are
| when all sites run best, but they still very much have
| 24/7 SRE coverage.
| tetha wrote:
| Well, yes. Hate me, but slowing down changes and only
| applying changes very deliberately makes a system more
| stable. The idea of continuous deployments in order to
| reduce the size of changes, in order to reduce the risk
| of changes is good. But if the goal is reliability, it's
| hard to compete with the idea of only doing well-planned,
| well-coordinated changes geared towards improving
| reliability.
|
| For example, we have a process based on the idea of the
| downtime budget from the SRE book. If the downtime
| allowed by the SLA of our customers is spent halfway, all
| changes to the systems have to be approved by leadership.
| Cosmetic bugs can be tolerated for two weeks in order to
| not risk anything.
|
| On the other hand, if the necessary maintenance of the
| supporting infrastructure of a system is stopped, the
| system is running towards a cliff. It certainly depends
| on how deep the stack goes and how many redundancies and
| self-healing ideas are built into a system. If you have
| redundant storage arrays with redundant drives, with
| redundant systems built on top of these, with smart
| failover strategies, the overall infrastructure can
| tolerate a terrifying amount of damage while still
| running reliably.
|
| But once that redundancy degrades and rots away, and once
| that resulting final linchpin drive or system instance
| fails, it'll result in an unsalvageable clusterfuck very,
| very quickly. Especially if you fire important core SRE
| and ops staff.
| danjoredd wrote:
| Craigslist is FAR from dead. I go there pretty often and
| there are always new listings. Just today there are 80 new
| sales posts under farm and garden
| gdulli wrote:
| Sure, but it used to be _the_ go-to place for a bunch of
| more mainstream verticals. It 's not a place to find jobs
| anymore, personals are gone, and for apartments it's become
| synonymous with scams.
| lacy_tinpot wrote:
| What do people use now days? Linkedin?
| jamiek88 wrote:
| One of our new recruiters unbeknownst to the rest of the
| team posted a job on Craigslist as well as the typical
| places and more than one interviewee mentioned to me that
| they thought the job may be a scam before googling us.
| thih9 wrote:
| > none of the people I know have stopped using the site,
| despite most being fiercely anti-Musk
|
| To offer another data point, some of the people I know have
| actually stopped using Twitter and started using other
| platforms more. Then again, none of them said the site's uptime
| was the reason.
| LightBug1 wrote:
| I left 2 months ago. Best thing I did this year so far.
| thepasswordis wrote:
| I've checked in on people who supposedly fled to mastadon, and
| at least in my network they've basically stopped posting there,
| and have come back to twitter.
|
| A few people seem to have just logged off completely.
| awb wrote:
| I bailed. The richest person on the planet (at the time),
| buying up a premier media platform and then actively posting
| political content like how to vote in an election was the nail
| in the coffin for me.
|
| I don't want to support an owner who uses their platform in
| that way any more than I'd want to watch political opinion
| shows on TV or subscribe to a political opinion Substack.
| renlo wrote:
| If Musk was the richest person on the planet, then FTX
| actually had billions in assets holding onto their FTT tokens
| or whatever made up tokens they had. Is a person actually
| "the richest person in the world" if there's not enough
| liquidity in the world to realize their holdings? If Musk
| sells his Tesla / SpaceX shares, can he really do it at
| CurrentSpotPrice x NumberOfSharesHeOwns?
| tshaddox wrote:
| Sure, but when you call someone "the richest person in the
| world" this is just what you mean. And you're generally
| referring to power and influence in the world rather than
| literally how much physical cash he could come up with in
| 24 hours. I think the normal way of counting the richest
| people in the world is pretty reasonable.
| awb wrote:
| The same goes for any billionaire with investments, which
| is pretty much all of them I'd imagine.
|
| And those assets even if they're not all disposable at the
| market price can be used as collateral without liquidating
| them.
|
| So I think it's still fair to say that Musk, etc. still
| have the greatest personal financial leverage available to
| them in the world.
| darkwraithcov wrote:
| Capitalism is a farce and a complete house of cards.
| Remember when we realized during the pandemic that the most
| important people in society were grocery store clerks and
| gas station attendants? We learned nothing from that.
| Broken system.
| coldpie wrote:
| I closed my 13-year-old account last Fall, when the new
| management explicitly welcomed US-based domestic terrorists
| onto the platform. I've moved on to a couple of Discords where
| people I used to follow on Twitter hang out, and Cohost. It's
| been a positive change for me, Twitter was quite a drag for the
| past couple years even before Musk, and it's good to change
| things up now and then anyway.
| mikrotikker wrote:
| Shit they let antifa back on?
| [deleted]
| gtr wrote:
| antifa are in no way terrorists, get a grip.
| organsnyder wrote:
| I was struck by how many presenters at SRECon last week listed
| Mastadon handles instead of Twitter ones: well over half were
| on Mastadon, and I'd say around half didn't even list a Twitter
| username. Of course, that's a highly specific population.
| leephillips wrote:
| > SRECon
|
| That's disappointing for that community. They should just
| list their website, which should have an RSS (atom) feed.
| numpad0 wrote:
| yeah... ideally, there should be a reachable _identity_
| system for everyone, independent to centralized database.
| Content can be anywhere, RSS is nice, a content
| authentication system is nice too, but what 's missing is
| an identity system.
| organsnyder wrote:
| Why? A blog is a very different use-case than social media
| (even social media based on microblogging). Yes, many
| social media communities are toxic, but many of them (or at
| least parts of them) can be incredibly enriching. There are
| plenty of Mastadon communities run with open governance
| structures.
|
| Besides, most presenters will also list their personal URLs
| if they have sites they'd like to promote.
| ghostbrainalpha wrote:
| For people who are curious about SREcon.
|
| "SREcon is a gathering of engineers who care deeply about
| site reliability, systems engineering, and working with
| complex distributed systems at scale."
| muglug wrote:
| Yes, a large chunk of engineers & computer scientists have
| shifted to Mastodon, which makes it great if you follow that
| crowd. It's the largest collective action I've seen in that
| cohort since people stopped using IE6 in favour of Firefox.
|
| Now I'll head to Twitter a few times a week as a guilty
| pleasure to read the people left behind -- comedians,
| political commentators, and journalists. But for stuff that's
| relevant to my job, Mastodon is great. And my Twitter usage
| has dropped by over 95%.
| mustacheemperor wrote:
| I just never read twitter links anymore because when I
| follow them now I get a pop up shaking me down to buy
| twitter premium or to disable 2FA with no way to view the
| post. So it's convenient for me that most of the people who
| used to link interesting content on twitter are now being
| linked via their mastodon handle instead.
| seanw444 wrote:
| Not only specifc - but one of the most likely to use an
| alternative.
| MangezBien wrote:
| I stopped using it not long after he took over, not because of
| any principled objection just because how much crap I had to
| sort through to get to anything worthwhile had greatly
| increased.
| aftbit wrote:
| I have reactivated my Mastodon server this week, and unlike
| when I last attempted in mid-2020, there are actually people I
| want to follow on there now.
| jamiek88 wrote:
| I need a dummies guide to mastodon.
|
| Do you need an always on machine to have a 'server'?
| gpm wrote:
| To have your own, yes, more or less (it handles downtime to
| some extent). Running your own server is not the "for
| dummies" version.
|
| The for dummies version is "just go sign up on a instance
| with open sign ups and reasonable moderation", I'd
| recommend hachyderm.io to the tech crowd. It doesn't matter
| _that much_ what server you 're on.
| throwaway290 wrote:
| I'm following less than 2 hundred and I have seen my number of
| followed people dwindle a dozen or so. Some of them really good
| at-fates-hands wrote:
| >> I've been wondering is how many people have left Twitter
| because of the service's recent instability issues.
|
| I remember about 6-8 years ago fervently trying to get my
| friends and family off of FB and Twitter. It was completely
| useless. I even offered running my own Diaspora server with
| zero luck. I was constantly pushing decentralized platforms
| including Mastodon and others for years before finally giving
| up.
|
| Its crazy what it takes nowadays to get someone to move off of
| a social media platform for good. I know many have left Twitter
| because of Musk, but many haven't stayed away and have come
| back. Its like a drug for some people, its incredibly hard to
| just walk away from.
| pfisherman wrote:
| I stopped using it, mainly because of an "inverse network
| effect". Twitter used to be a useful place to keep up on
| scientific papers. Science Twitter is dead. Now my feed is like
| 10 percent science, 10 mildly racist / inflammatory content, 10
| percent miscellaneous, and 70 percent a certain VC constantly
| shaking his fist, yelling about crypto, and shitting on fiat
| currency. And this is after aggressively curating my feed by
| unfollowing anybody who cheered on Musk's takeover of Twitter.
| No thanks.
| Ifkaluva wrote:
| Where do you keep up with scientific papers now, if you don't
| mind me asking?
| generalizations wrote:
| > And this is after aggressively curating my feed by
| unfollowing anybody who cheered on Musk's takeover of Twitter
|
| If you care about science twitter, I wonder if that was the
| best criteria for filtering your content.
| fuckyah wrote:
| [dead]
| chrsjxn wrote:
| That's where I'm at, too.
|
| And the platform is really showing its lack of moderation,
| even compared to how little it was moderated in the past. I
| don't really want to click on webdev tweets and find replies
| full of hate speech and weird pornography.
| afandian wrote:
| Where do you look now?
| aausch wrote:
| Did science twitter migrate to somewhere else? Where would
| you go to keep up with scientific papers?
| chimeracoder wrote:
| > Did science twitter migrate to somewhere else? Where
| would you go to keep up with scientific papers?
|
| Science Twitter in particular has mostly migrated to
| Mastodon (although it's split between a few different
| subgroups).
|
| A number of other _de facto_ Twitter communities have
| migrated to Mastodon. Some have stayed on Twitter. And some
| have basically died without moving anywhere else.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| _(although it 's split between a few different
| subgroups)_
|
| This is the big problem with Mastodon. Some people want
| highly curated communities on small instances, and it's
| great for that. But it's really bad for people who want
| to make us of network effects - as exemplified by the
| very phrase '______ Twitter'.
| AzzieElbab wrote:
| How is that possible if one tab of the app is dedicated
| specifically to people you follow, and on top of that, you
| can use lists
| jltsiren wrote:
| Because it's not the default. Every time you go to Twitter,
| the first page you see is full of random recommendations.
|
| There is a rule of thumb about online services and
| software: Don't fight the developers, because they have
| more power than you. If your usage is no longer compatible
| with the vision of the developers, stop using it. You may
| find temporary workarounds that make the service useful
| with a lot of effort, but it won't last. The developers
| will eventually find new innovative ways of ruining your
| experience.
|
| Science Twitter was already dying before the takeover,
| because it was not compatible with the increased focus on
| recommendations. Musk simply accelerated the process.
| libraryatnight wrote:
| It's just so much more noisy and garbage filled. Maybe I was
| in the minority, but I used it mostly to follow some
| bands/artists/game designers and keep up with their projects
| - I rarely engaged with the twitter userbase in general and
| it feels like that's what is being amplified and it's a lot
| of noise, toxic speculation, and useless opinions.
| segasaturn wrote:
| Right, I feel like the environment of the site has done a lot
| more damage to it than the unreliability/bugginess/downtime.
| conscion wrote:
| > 70 percent a certain VC constantly shaking his fist
|
| > And this is after aggressively curating my feed
|
| If you're "aggressively curating [your] feed", just
| mute/block them
| dragontamer wrote:
| The allegations is that mute/blocking no longer is working
| consistently on Twitter. Which is further proof that the
| platform is dying.
| throwaway29812 wrote:
| The "I dont like this tweet" function is completely
| broken. I don't like blocking or muting, but I have to
| tell Twitter over and over I don't want to see certain
| people (including King Joffrey) but it never works.
| favsq wrote:
| [flagged]
| a4isms wrote:
| Is there really a dichotomy between 1. Someone providing
| "proof" that you will accept, and 2. This being what you
| claim without evidence or justification is the "usual"
| smearing?
| favsq wrote:
| [flagged]
| emodendroket wrote:
| I think the inherent design of Twitter has a bit of a flaw in
| that you're friends with people instead of joining
| communities. So if you think "geez, I have a lot of political
| content on my feed I don't want to read," you can't just
| unfollow all the politics topics/forums/subreddits/whatever
| you are subscribed to, you have to "unfriend" people, which
| is socially difficult if you're both small enough to
| follow/recognize each other. On top of that the "for you"
| page and trending topics seem to be injecting more stuff I
| don't want to read into my feed than before, which
| exacerbates the problem.
| leephillips wrote:
| You don't have to "unfriend" anyone. And I've never seen
| any of the "for you' stuff:
|
| https://lee-phillips.org/howtotwitter/
| djtango wrote:
| Aren't you describing reddit?
| emodendroket wrote:
| Or a traditional forum, yes.
| danjoredd wrote:
| TBH I prefer traditional forums over Twitter/reddit.
| There are a few I go to every now and again, and while
| there is way less content, I feel people are way less
| inflammatory over random things and conversation is
| usually way more civil.
| MiddleEndian wrote:
| Reddit should have been a technology, like PHPBB or
| Wordpress, instead of a website. That would have been
| better.
| emodendroket wrote:
| Should it have been though? Something to be said for
| having it all in one place with one account.
| MiddleEndian wrote:
| Consider Hacker News. It's a forum that's laid out
| somewhat similarly to reddit. It has pretty good
| moderation but in a way that is distinct from reddit. I
| don't think it would be better as a subreddit.
|
| It would be nice if someone with minimal tech skills
| could just spin something similar up. Related forums
| could link to each other, like the webrings of the past
| lol. That would be the ideal structure of interactive
| communities on the web, at least to me.
| rtsil wrote:
| That technology exists. It's called newsgroups, it's
| fast, distributed, hard to censor, without a central
| authority and based on community of interests. It's also
| pretty much dead except for sharing pirated contents.
| raffraffraff wrote:
| I used to think that following people was lame and that
| communities (like on Reddit) were where it was at. Until
| Reddit shut down a sub I joined. Because it got mass
| reported. Yes, it had some toxic people on it, but it also
| held really deep debates, and it wasn't 5% as horrendously
| hateful as some of the subs that still exist. It just felt
| wrong to me, that everyone's conversations were shut off by
| the electric eye, and all history off those debates was
| lost. How do you even begin to change your mind, or other
| people's minds, if you can't even talk? Isn't it the
| foundation of a working democracy, asking with a
| functioning press?
|
| Meanwhile, my wife is playing the long game on Twitter. She
| has a specific way of using it that just works for her. She
| follows a few hundred people, and she's followed by ~5k
| people, mostly "nobodies", but a handful are impressive:
| researchers, journalists, politicians, authors. She has
| conversations with "household names" daily. She even
| orchestrated an interview been a well known researcher and
| an ex NYT journalist on substack. Yet she's an be absolute
| nobody.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| Twitter _does_ have ways to follow both topics (following a
| hashtag, basically, iirc) and joining communities. I 've
| never used them because what I want from a Twitter-like
| network is to follow _people_ who I 'm interested in, or
| have interesting things to say.
|
| If I'm reading my timeline and think "geez, this person
| sure does post a bunch of political stuff I don't want to
| see" I either mute specific keywords, or just unfollow the
| person. Back on Twitter I was aggressive with keyword
| muting - I don't care about Marvel or people having
| passionite topics about "MCU", so I muted those phrases and
| my timeline was free of them.
| notatoad wrote:
| >Twitter does have ways to follow both topics (following
| a hashtag, basically, iirc) and joining communities
|
| ehhh, sort of. i tried a few of these before the musk
| takeover, and it was pretty disappointing. it was
| essentially a way of opting into more of the trash
| algorithm-recommended tweets in your timeline. instead of
| just the normal "recommended for you" stuff, you'd also
| have "recommended for you because you follow X".
| [deleted]
| SllX wrote:
| What had made Twitter easier to use for me was the
| aggressive use of filters to just block out most of
| political Twitter. It didn't block everything, but you
| would be surprised what blocking the names of Presidents,
| former Presidents, Presidential candidates, the clap, and
| a few popular political slogans can do to really cull the
| politics from a Timeline in the height of election season
| down to almost nothing. I was going to investigate
| targeting shibboleths next but then Twitter killed
| Tweetbot and Twitter is dead to me without Tweetbot.
| emodendroket wrote:
| A bit of a baby-with-the-bathwater approach as I would
| like to keep following straight news sources.
| SllX wrote:
| I mean, if you use Twitter for political news, then yes.
| I hadn't even considered that, but my approach would also
| wreck your ability to follow political news via Twitter.
| emodendroket wrote:
| The problem is that I'm interested in what people have to
| say about some topics and not others. Sometimes I'll
| follow a musician I like and realize when he's not
| posting about his music he's talking about conspiracy
| theories I'd rather not look at. Or someone will be
| pretty funny and interesting but also spend a lot of time
| interacting with porn. Or just post a lot about a topic
| that I have no interest in. If it worked differently I
| could interact with these people on subjects I'd like to
| without being subjected to every thought that enters
| their head and everything _they_ want to follow.
| mkmk wrote:
| The 'mute' function is wonderful for opting out of certain
| communities
| emodendroket wrote:
| I suppose I'm really looking for a more fine-grained way
| to filter certain topics from certain users without
| ignoring them entirely.
| ryanjshaw wrote:
| I've thought about building a ChatGPT-based Twitter
| interface for this but... ironically, Twitter API is
| dead.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > shitting on fiat currency
|
| I hope you're enjoying inflation, then.
| dijit wrote:
| Is the implication here that crypto coins are immune to
| inflation and instability?
|
| Genuinely asking because if I know my crypto history it
| basically says the opposite.
| WalterBright wrote:
| The history of fiat money is always one of endemic
| inflation, sometimes really wild inflation.
|
| When the US was on the gold standard, the inflationary
| periods were during the California and Yukon gold rushes,
| which had the effect of "printing" more gold.
|
| The inflation we see today in the US is due to massive
| deficit spending, which is enabled by fiat money. All
| countries today use fiat money, because then they can
| spend money without limit and without raising taxes. They
| always blame the resulting inflation on something else.
|
| The value of crypto currency is based on supply & demand.
| To me it seems more like collecting Beanie Babies than
| being a substitute for money. We'll see how it fares in
| the next few years.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| I get pushed a lot of nazi content now, so I'm using it less
| instead of trying to manage what their algo changes decided
| to promote now
| wonderwonder wrote:
| Actual Nazi or just right wing / conservative?
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| actual nazis - they post hitler content and all, polls
| about why you are/aren't a nazi too, etc. reporting
| sometimes works but it's no longer permanent, you're
| allowed back after some weeks if you post rule violating
| nazi content now. some of these nazis who were previously
| permanently banned learned that you just contact support
| and say you were banned for right wing views and they get
| let back in. there are a lot of active nazis who are open
| about it.
|
| some are just rw who mingle with the openly nazi posters
| too though yeah.
| lprd wrote:
| Care to post some examples? I'm not saying they don't
| exist, I've just never seen it in the wild.
| darkwraithcov wrote:
| I'm willing to be $1 million space bucks that AI would
| not he able to tell the difference. Same sentiments, same
| talking points. This is why Twitter didn't end up
| implementing a lot of safety features that went hard
| after neo-nazis because republican figureheads would have
| been swept up in such a ban.
| Nuzzerino wrote:
| [flagged]
| [deleted]
| rhaway84773 wrote:
| How many congresspeople in either the US federal
| government or any of the US state governments are
| associated with Antifa?
|
| OTOH there are at least a few congresspersons who
| subscribe to QAnon.
|
| The
| dev_daftly wrote:
| Kamala Harris was supporting a fund dedicated to bailing
| them out of jail, does that count?
| zztop44 wrote:
| Nazi and antifa are not equivalents in any way
| whatsoever. I think the only equivalence you might find
| is that both tendencies are somewhat open to the concept
| of political violence? But beyond that, banning nazi
| content while allowing antifa is a perfectly reasonable
| stance for any platform to take.
| winternett wrote:
| The public API used to help tweets persist beyond normal (on
| platform) visibility thresholds. Before it was ruined, people
| could embed tweets in their own sites, and tweets were more
| persistent on platforms like tweet deck.
|
| Musk has no real idea of the impacts of technical decisions
| on the platform, but he realized the tweet visibility
| threshold was too short bac when even his own tweets weren't
| seeing engagement.
|
| Since then he's created a scheme to grant slightly better
| longevity to the visibility of tweets by "verified" accounts,
| but it's really smoke and mirrors... Tweets anyone makes
| (Except for Elon and his selected Twitter "buddies") only are
| visible for seconds and to small audiences of people... It
| kills interaction, growth, and engagement for everyone else,
| but gives the illusion that the site is still vibrant
| (because it makes everyone tweet more often).
|
| Deception of this kind will just make everyone burn out and
| not come back... It defeats the very purpose of Twitter, as
| visibility of ideas is the only payment most people get on
| the platforms to begin with, the main problem is that most
| people on the platform don't know they're mostly invisible,
| and dropping their tweets into a waste bin.
| Xeoncross wrote:
| I think the underestimated fact is that Twitter has market
| share for people who matter. I don't believe the 'Twitter is
| dead' sentiment.
|
| It's where I go for access to global establishment personal.
| The CEO's, the Presidents of nations, the boards of banks,
| etc...
|
| I don't find them anywhere else. Twitter is my only choice for
| world business.
| Eric_WVGG wrote:
| Platform shifts don't happen overnight.
|
| A year ago this time, Mastodon was a curiosity. Today, it
| feels like Twitter circa 2010. That's something.
| tick_tock_tick wrote:
| Yeah but it already failed... Popularity peaked and it's in
| a straight dive down.
| dahwolf wrote:
| You shouldn't be downvoted as you're factually right. MAU
| have been tanking since Dec 22. They lost almost 50% from
| the peak, and the line continues to go down, losing a few
| thousand active users every single day.
|
| Which isn't a total failure, it can be a small self-
| sustaining network but it fails to have a broad appeal.
| marban wrote:
| Twitter 2010 was already a global party.
| raydev wrote:
| There also weren't any functional alternatives to Twitter
| at the time. The following+unthreaded discussion model
| has only been replicated by Mastodon, and Mastodon
| obviously has much stronger competition!
| depereo wrote:
| And so is Mastodon, now.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| No it isn't. I know someone who runs a specialist news
| outlet and cross-posts everything to Mastodon. It yields
| only a trickle of traffic/engagement despite the target
| market being pretty anti-Musk. Indeed, I'm told
| traffic/engagement on Twitter has actually improved since
| the takeover. What people say and how they behave are two
| different things. A lot of people still check Twitter
| every day because train wrecks are interesting.
| raydev wrote:
| Every time someone shares a link to a Mastodon post, I
| click on it and eventually realize it's not my instance,
| so I can't just click to follow the person or return to
| my feed by clicking. And that is only _one_ example of
| how the decentralized experience is fundamentally broken.
| jdminhbg wrote:
| Twitter circa 2010 was gaining active users. Mastodon today
| is losing active users: https://mastodon-analytics.com/
| wwweston wrote:
| Twitter isn't _dead_ but it has competition now.
|
| That competition feels/looks like early 00s blogging -- less
| mass, pre-eternal-September, Gibsonian ham-radio-postcards --
| but then again that's what grew up into what we have now.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| Did it grow into that with competitors that have money?
|
| Mastodon will likely never get anyone but tech folks. And
| the era of tech folks being the trendsetter on the intarweb
| pipes is probably over.
| wwweston wrote:
| Actually, yeah, it did have competitors with money. You
| ever wonder why IE and specifically IE 6 just got
| abandoned in stasis forever? Because like a number of
| other big incumbents circa early 00s, MS really thought
| the web was a fad. They envisioned an app ecosystem.
| Maybe XAML, maybe Java, maybe something else. But not
| these dumb little browsers.
| deltree7 wrote:
| IE 6 was abandoned because Microsoft won the browser war.
| It's ridiculous to say that in 2006/7 Microsoft thought
| web was a fad
| wwweston wrote:
| > IE 6 was abandoned because Microsoft won the browser
| war.
|
| This has never been adequate to explain how MS treated
| IE.
|
| Microsoft also won the desktop decisively, arguably
| _more_ decisively than the browser front. And yet far
| from abandoning windows, it pretty consistently iterated
| via major releases and service updates, even when
| competitors were almost rounding errors _and_ when they
| had a business base that often valued backward
| compatibility as much or more than anything else.
|
| Microsoft doesn't abandon things just because they
| achieved dominance.
|
| IE was abandoned because MS of the early 00s still
| thought most computing would stay on the desktop, in
| network-aware applications, maybe even using different
| runtimes, but still desktop apps.
|
| > It's ridiculous to say that in 2006/7 Microsoft thought
| web was a fad
|
| It's ridiculous of you to choose 2006/2007 when you're
| responding to a comment that specifies "circa early 00s."
|
| And yes, by 2006/2007, MS realized they'd made a mistake
| and the web was becoming something that could deliver
| experiences competitive with desktop apps.
| Hamuko wrote:
| Haven't fully left but my Twitter usage has dropped by like
| 90%. And often that is just when I don't have anything better
| to do.
|
| Switched to getting my news from RSS feeds instead.
|
| Haven't really switched to Mastodon since there's no one to
| follow on Mastodon and the platform itself is rather bad.
| jabradoodle wrote:
| Most users probably won't jump ship with some minor downtime
| for a site the size of twitter.
|
| The claim is that twitters api business had a revenue of $400m
| with ~$360m in profit, and that it is now effectively
| abondoned.
|
| Also, seven nines of uptime allows for just over 3 seconds of
| downtime per year, they would never have had that.
| justinhj wrote:
| "Twitter already had a $400m paid API business...They fired the
| entire team so that business will go to $0 soon." Any fact
| checking on this?
| anigbrowl wrote:
| OK, but on the plus side you'll soon be able to access it for
| only $100 month, or for free if your only ambition is to post
| tweets automatically.
|
| Now, people _say_ the previous entry-level, elevated, and
| academic tiers were all free and provided a lot more
| functionality leading to lots of utility for twitter users,
| social science etc., but most of those same people balk when
| asked to affirm that 'Elon Musk is the kindest, bravest,
| warmest, most wonderful human being I've ever known in my life.'
| t344344 wrote:
| > Another data point: of the 20 newest posts on this forum, 12
| are about Twitter not responding to the standard API access
| request process, and 4 seem to be about API bugs. This has been
| the pattern for a while now. It seems like Twitter is now largely
| ignoring all manual processes and bugs.
|
| Non-responsiveness is pretty normal for large corporations. Try
| to send email to Google or Facebook. Calling their products
| "unsupported" and "unmaintained" may actually fit dictionary
| definition!
| dannyr wrote:
| The author was making comparisons to previous activity from
| Twitter employees not to other normal corporations.
| transitivebs wrote:
| This has been my experience as well.
|
| And now w/ the new twitter API pricing, I will have to shut down
| my open source ChatGPTBot which has over 100k followers.
|
| Sad.
| submeta wrote:
| Twitter used to be my number one source for quick user generated
| updates across the globe. An event in my city or around the globe
| and I wanted to tune in what others are saying and what's going
| on? There was nothing faster than Twitter.
|
| Then came the bots and bot farms. They started polluting Twitter
| and manipulating the masses.
|
| Elon Musk is right in some of his observations. But he did not
| have the right action plan. He started doing things haphazardly,
| and many were saying: This is the way he approaches projects, too
| hastily, apparently very chaotic, but in the end he succeeds. The
| thing is: This time his ego got in his way. The platform he tries
| to redefine and reinvent is also his mirror, for polishing his
| own ego by chasing likes.
|
| Musk is killing Twitter, and Jack Dorsey was complicit in this.
| dier wrote:
| This post is more than a month old. Twitter announced pricing
| tiers yesterday (March 29). From the first link on the blog post:
|
| > Today we are launching new Twitter API access tiers! We're
| excited to share more details about our new plans and what you
| should expect in terms of next steps and timeline.
|
| > Free: For write-only use cases and testing the Twitter API
| (1,500 Tweets per month)
|
| > $100: For hobbyists or students learning code (50,000 Tweets
| per month - posting limit at the app level)
|
| > Current access plans including Standard (v1.1), Essential (v2),
| Elevated (v2), and Premium will be deprecated over the next 30
| days, so we recommend that you migrate to the new tiers as soon
| as possible for a smooth transition. Any non-migrated developer
| accounts will be impacted by April 29th, 2023 at the latest.
|
| It's not unmaintained. They were just putting it behind a pay
| wall.
| pradn wrote:
| It looks its still possible to write a tweetbot within the free
| tier. That's good, I've been meaning to for a long time.
| humanizersequel wrote:
| A very limited class of tweetbot that requires only write
| access.
| jehb wrote:
| > $100: For hobbyists or students learning code (50,000 Tweets
| per month - posting limit at the app level)
|
| Students being famously known for spending three figures a
| month on hobby API access. /s
| bdcravens wrote:
| If you have an app that sends out one tweet a minute, that
| strikes me as a bit more than a hobby.
| Avshalom wrote:
| or one read a month.
| hn_20591249 wrote:
| Unmaintained and putting up a pay-wall are not mutually
| exclusive. Sounds like they are going to layer a new pricing
| model on-top and leave it at that.
| snarfed wrote:
| OP here. Sure, they finally anounced the new pricing, months
| late, but all of the evidence in the post that it's effectively
| unmaintained still stands. The hostile new pricing just adds to
| the lack of support in convincing me not to waste any more of
| my time developing for it.
| SCdF wrote:
| > $100: For hobbyists or students learning code
|
| That pricing has real "I mean what could a banana cost, $10?"
| energy. What student or hobbyist is going to pay $100/month for
| fucking twitter access?
| sylware wrote:
| Nitter for all now?
| jwmoz wrote:
| Crazy to watch Twitter being built and scaled back in the Ruby
| days and now effectively destroyed.
| realjhol wrote:
| It works fine though
| anigbrowl wrote:
| The other day reply indicators on tweets just disappeared.
| This makes threaded conversations harder to read, and allows
| for all sorts of abuses.
|
| For example, a common trolling tactic is to block someone,
| unblock them and post a mean or disagreeable comment, and
| then immediately block them again, and to do this repeatedly.
| The target can't see who is clogging up the conversation with
| BS, while the unblock-tweet-block cycle is very little extra
| work for the troll.
| top_sigrid wrote:
| Does it? Besides numerous malfunctions over the last months
| one current example is that I can see posts of accounts that
| I blocked or that blocked me in my feed, which I have seen
| reported by others aswell.
|
| This is _basic_ functionality.
| realjhol wrote:
| The claim was that Twitter would experience some kind of
| total collapse- that Musk had no choice but to capitulate
| to demands of a disgruntled work force, many of whom were
| incensed that the platform would no long actively censor
| the speech of huge numbers of people.
|
| As it turns out Musk mostly didn't need them, and firing
| them didn't harm his interests to any tangible degree.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| No it wasn't. And if Musk's actions aren't harming his
| interests, that's only because he says he doesn't mind
| losing ~$20 billion. I do not believe that he is going to
| be able to grow it into a $200 billion company on the
| back of frog Twitter.
| realjhol wrote:
| None of this about money, though is it. It's about
| control.
|
| The ones who are most upset about this have an ideology
| that is a house of cards that has to be shielded from all
| interrogation, mocking and critique, lest it implode
| under the weight of its own internal inconsistencies.
|
| These people know very well how to distinguish friend and
| enemy, and Elon is decidedly not a friend.
|
| To lose this castle to an enemy like Musk is a huge
| problem for them because of its strategic importance,
| hence the fire-storm of consternation.
|
| In the wider world, the ones who are upset about this are
| vastly outnumbered by those who just want to have fun and
| express themselves on the Internet, so if Twitter can
| become that kind of a place it will do very well.
| saltminer wrote:
| Twitter search is also a total crapshoot now. Some days it
| returns zero results, some days it returns completely
| irrelevant results that match none of my filters, and once
| in a blue moon it seems to work properly, but unless I want
| to browse every Tweet an account has ever made, I have no
| way to confirm it's working.
| shanebellone wrote:
| If Twitter went bankrupt, could Elon buy its intellectual
| property at auction for a discount to effectively reduce his
| acquisition price? Or is the majority of debt tied to Musk
| personally?
|
| I'm not a Musk fan but if this play is in the cards, his
| actions could be rational.
| tcmart14 wrote:
| I could be missing some details here, but when he bought it
| and took it private, doesn't he already technically own all
| of Twitter's IP? So he would crash his company to buy back
| his own IP from himself at a discounted rate?
| IceWreck wrote:
| I dont know how it works but there must be some way to
| prevent that.
|
| Otherwise poeple would just
|
| - buy 51 % stake - run the company into the ground - announce
| its bankrupt - at the auction buy back IP for pennies on the
| dollar - start new company with previous IP, same domain
| name, same servers etc
|
| Also if there was an auction, what prevents Google, Meta, MS,
| Amazon, etc from buying the IP instead.
| grumple wrote:
| Creditors should have the right to any assets, including any
| IP.
| dangoodmanUT wrote:
| That API has always been atrocious to use. Missing features
| between v1 and v2, etc.
| drstewart wrote:
| If only it had the rock solid reliability of something like
| GitHub or Reddit
| MauroIksem wrote:
| This explains why they denied me access to the API a few days
| ago.
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