This is Musk’s “Reichstag Fire” moment for Twitter.
The rate limiting is not because of “extreme manipulation”, but because of piss-poor code that Twitter deployed as part of their change to only allow tweets to be viewed if logged in. Twitter is effectively DDoSing itself right now. But, it creates an opportunity for Musk to create a narrative.
These “temporary” limits will probably remain inevitably, as they provide another benefit to Twitter - they drive Blue subscriptions. Unfortunately, they also repel free users from using the platform entirely, and at a much higher ratio.
Twitter is going to become even more of a cesspool than it already is at an alarming rate. Crazy how many established social media platforms have decided to crumble at the exact same time.
There are several negatives to the limitation too. Advertisers (which are already leaving in droves) are even further discouraged from placing ads that have a much smaller chance of being seen.
Not just less likely to be seen, but now a greater percentage of those views will come from Twitter blue subscribers as well who might not be their intended audience.
Is there some source on advertisers leaving in droves? I’ve heard a couple stories on people (big accounts ands advertisers) loudly leaving but is it really a noticeable trend? I wonder if there’s some publicly accessible way of knowing that.
Much like the case of Reddit, Musk might want to reflect on who actually produces all the content he’s guarding so jealously, and ask himself what’s likely to happen to the value of his site if he makes it difficult for millions of us to write all his content for free
I don’t think this is that complicated. The hypothesis Musk and Spez are pursuing is that right wingers are easier to monetize because they are stupid. They are basically purging the old, liberal web2.0 userbase, under the premise that they are going to build back something which is more friendly to the conservative social media space.
I find it especially bizarre that spez took inspiration and guidance from Musk. I can entertain the possibility of Musk intentionally driving Twitter to the ground (though he sure is taking the scenic route), but Reddit? It just seems like the rich tech bros have collectively lost their minds
They never had their minds. They just now have enough money to make that all of our problems… This is why no one deserves billions of dollars. It makes you go megalomaniacle.
He’s rich not because of his salary (what Reddit pays him). He’s rich because of his equity/ownership in Reddit. But he can only monetize that if there are buyers.
For years this wasn’t a problem because private buyers and banks were happy to buy his shares or lend against them as collateral. However that market has been drying up over the past 18 months.
So he desperately needs to get to an IPO so he, and his Board of Directors and other stockholders, can dump their shares on an unsuspecting retail public market that doesn’t realize that the “profitability” was only achieved by destroying the user base, and that what they’ve actually bought is a ticking time bomb.
The problem is that if the IPO bombs, it’s the public investors that will lose money, as fuck u/spez and other shareholders will have dumped their steaming pile of shit shares onto the market from the start to reduce their shareholding and cash in.
It would be the Institucional investors that have the opportunity to buy before the share is open in the market. After that is fair game to anyone stupid enough to buy it.
This all started with the API changes. Before they were charging a fair price for the API and companies happily paid it for the convenience. Then Elon got greedy he started charging a ridiculous amount for the API so those companies decided it would be worth it to just deal with the annoyance and switch to scraping the website instead. But when you hit the website it’s way less efficient than hitting the API because it’s doing a bunch of mixing and ranking which is a lot more complicated and costly than serving static content, which costs a small fraction of real time algorithmic ranking. So now instead of making money off companies that want their data they’re losing money on the cloud costs to serve the scrapers.
More recently, they haven’t been paying their hosting bills to Google and their service was set to expire at the end of last month. What just happened at the start of this month? They added the limitations. That can’t be a coincidence. Now the Google services weren’t hosting the site itself, otherwise they’d probably be fully down right now, but it was hosting their trust and safety services for things like fighting spam. That could have also been hosting anti scraper services as well. Since they’re so under staffed they probably couldn’t swap the services in time, so instead of having anti scraping services like every other big company on the internet, they decided to cut service instead. It’s just built up incompetence coming to a head.
Yo for real, what’s up with all these social media sites literally shooting themselves in the foot as we speak?.
Youtube planning to antagonize adblock users and limiting video watching, Reddit killing itself with bureocracy style and now Twitter doing this shit. Hopefully shit sites like TikTok or Facebook jump on the wagon too.
Twitter successfully sold itself to a private investment firm for over market value. That’s the dream for tech startups and never-made-a-profit digital services.
Anyone still using Twitter is an addict or a boomer, but that’s exactly the audience that Musk wanted to purchase.
The only reason twitter was popular is because you could check it for information. Towns and organizations would post updates there, it drove traffic, eyeballs, ads and revenue. This is the dumbest thing ever, even if he wanted to promote nazi ideology, it’s idiotic because your only preaching to the choir. You cannot convert people when you drive them all away, so even if it wasn’t about money, it’s dumb.
For reddit at least, The money from VCs dried up. They have to monetise fast or go broke.
Elon way way way overplayed for Twitter and the company is hemorrhaging money paying the loans he took out to pay for the purchase.
Google in general is in decline. Ad sales are down as the net becomes SEO’d to death. Marketing teams just aren’t willing to pay for Google ads like they used to since the roi isn’t there anymore.
In general, i agree with your post, but GOOG is up ~ 30% in the last 6 months. Specific parts of Google may be dwindling but their overall business is thriving right now.
The stock is not the company, that’s important to remember. The PE ratios for tech companies are totally out of whack compared to basically any other company.
Google stock is doing ok in part because they have Bard which means they’re participating in the AI boom. I think that’s going to turn out to be mostly hot air, but in the meantime it’s helping a small number of companies stay afloat
But there are so many ways Reddit could have played this better. It wasn’t just about monetizing. The API changes were in bad faith and meant to kill 3rd party apps without flat out doing it. Users would have been understanding if they charged a reasonable amount of started injecting ads into the API feeds, but instead they went full aggro and disrespected not just the devs working to make their platform better, but the users as well. If they wanted 3rd party apps to show their ads or charge a fee to remove ads I would have been understanding, but because of the disrespect I’ve dropped them.
I forgot the actual numbers, but it’s downright bizarre that Reddit can’t figure out how to make money. They have a massive platform that is user-moderated for free, filled with free user-created content, with third party developers creating solid apps and features, again for free. Reddit should be able to do fuck all and make money
but it’s downright bizarre that Reddit can’t figure out how to make money.
Because of (venture) capitalism…
They made more from people giving it to them. If the company posted a profit, they’d have to pay taxes
So they pay themselves and amass assets.
If it fails you keep your salary and sell the assets. If you owe more than that’s worth, declare bankruptcy. If not, collect a check.
Startups stay in this phase right up till IPO, where they try to flip to profits as fast as possible. Then you can not only declare x profits, but y% increase in profits.
Tldr:
They’re nonprofitable by choice. This method just doesn’t work during a recession.
The tin foil part of my brain says that they’re trying to destroy media ahead of the election so they can control the narrative but really I think it’s just that we’ve reached a point where no one is pouring free money into literally any old internet nonsense and it’s turned out that this ‘they’re selling your data and making billions!’ was never actually very true.
They pushed their website as ‘we’re having massive growth and with enough investment we can dominate the market!’ so all the idiot ‘angel Investors’ threw monkey into it but that can only last so long before people say ‘ok you dominate the market, now what?!’
The tin foil part of my brain says that they’re trying to destroy media ahead of the election so they can control the narrative but really I think it’s just that we’ve reached a point where no one is pouring free money into literally any old internet nonsense and it’s turned out that this ‘they’re selling your data and making billions!’ was never actually very true.
They pushed their website as ‘we’re having massive growth and with enough investment we can dominate the market!’ so all the idiot ‘angel Investors’ threw monkey into it but that can only last so long before people say ‘ok you dominate the market, now what?!’
In order to quickly fix it they would probably have to roll back the change to require login to view tweets, which would be admitting that it wasn’t caused by “attacks” on Twitter, which Elon won’t do. Rock and a hard place.
The self-DDoS truly the height of idiocy. It’s been a good couple of weeks watching billionaires who have never faced consequences fuck around and find out.
Unfortunately, they also repel free users from using the platform entirely, and at a much higher ratio.
This is really, really bad for Twitter. The whole reason so many groups and people use it for official communications and announcements is because their audience can easily and freely see it. Rate limiting and requiring an account completely destroy that. And without it, Twitter really doesn’t have much to offer.
This is Musk’s “Reichstag Fire” moment for Twitter.
The rate limiting is not because of “extreme manipulation”, but because of piss-poor code that Twitter deployed as part of their change to only allow tweets to be viewed if logged in. Twitter is effectively DDoSing itself right now. But, it creates an opportunity for Musk to create a narrative.
These “temporary” limits will probably remain inevitably, as they provide another benefit to Twitter - they drive Blue subscriptions. Unfortunately, they also repel free users from using the platform entirely, and at a much higher ratio.
Twitter is going to become even more of a cesspool than it already is at an alarming rate. Crazy how many established social media platforms have decided to crumble at the exact same time.
There are several negatives to the limitation too. Advertisers (which are already leaving in droves) are even further discouraged from placing ads that have a much smaller chance of being seen.
Edit: spelling
Not just less likely to be seen, but now a greater percentage of those views will come from Twitter blue subscribers as well who might not be their intended audience.
Does Twitter Blue show ads? I guess I assumed if you’re paying you don’t have to see those, but that would make too much sense 🤦♂️
Yeah, that’s the extra stupid part. Not only limiting the amount of content people can see, but also the ads he needs money from.
Is there some source on advertisers leaving in droves? I’ve heard a couple stories on people (big accounts ands advertisers) loudly leaving but is it really a noticeable trend? I wonder if there’s some publicly accessible way of knowing that.
CNN reported on it: https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/10/tech/twitter-top-advertiser-decline/index.html
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How is that even possible? By limiting access the load should be lower, there is no way
Much like the case of Reddit, Musk might want to reflect on who actually produces all the content he’s guarding so jealously, and ask himself what’s likely to happen to the value of his site if he makes it difficult for millions of us to write all his content for free
I don’t think this is that complicated. The hypothesis Musk and Spez are pursuing is that right wingers are easier to monetize because they are stupid. They are basically purging the old, liberal web2.0 userbase, under the premise that they are going to build back something which is more friendly to the conservative social media space.
I find it especially bizarre that spez took inspiration and guidance from Musk. I can entertain the possibility of Musk intentionally driving Twitter to the ground (though he sure is taking the scenic route), but Reddit? It just seems like the rich tech bros have collectively lost their minds
They just don’t want LLMs scrapping their websites
They never had their minds. They just now have enough money to make that all of our problems… This is why no one deserves billions of dollars. It makes you go megalomaniacle.
I’d love a self ddos of Reddit at this point tbh
Is spez rich?
Already has more money than he should have.
Compared to musk? No. Not even close tongue same tier. But he’s still a 1%er
Yes. While he loves to talk about how little reddit makes, he doesn’t mention how much reddit pays him for that.
He’s rich not because of his salary (what Reddit pays him). He’s rich because of his equity/ownership in Reddit. But he can only monetize that if there are buyers.
For years this wasn’t a problem because private buyers and banks were happy to buy his shares or lend against them as collateral. However that market has been drying up over the past 18 months.
So he desperately needs to get to an IPO so he, and his Board of Directors and other stockholders, can dump their shares on an unsuspecting retail public market that doesn’t realize that the “profitability” was only achieved by destroying the user base, and that what they’ve actually bought is a ticking time bomb.
deleted by creator
I really hope the IPO bombs just to spite all the people, including Spez, that drove Reddit into the ground.
The problem is that if the IPO bombs, it’s the public investors that will lose money, as fuck u/spez and other shareholders will have dumped their steaming pile of shit shares onto the market from the start to reduce their shareholding and cash in.
When people say that, they don’t mean they hope it bombs after the IPO…
They mean they hope It bombs before the sale so Huffman and the others with a stake don’t make much money
Anyone that buys the stock after the IPO would get a lower price.
It would be the Institucional investors that have the opportunity to buy before the share is open in the market. After that is fair game to anyone stupid enough to buy it.
Nah I’m pretty sure he got some preferential liquidation a few times and is cash rich.
Thank you for making my point. That’s not salary. That’s equity sold in a secondary.
Yes, and he would like to graduate into being obscenely rich through a successful IPO.
I really don’t believe at all that he would intentionally drive it to the ground. I can see him claiming that if he manages to actually kill it tho
I really don’t believe at all that he would intentionally drive it to the ground. I can see him claiming that if he manages to actually kill it tho
It goes deeper than that.
This all started with the API changes. Before they were charging a fair price for the API and companies happily paid it for the convenience. Then Elon got greedy he started charging a ridiculous amount for the API so those companies decided it would be worth it to just deal with the annoyance and switch to scraping the website instead. But when you hit the website it’s way less efficient than hitting the API because it’s doing a bunch of mixing and ranking which is a lot more complicated and costly than serving static content, which costs a small fraction of real time algorithmic ranking. So now instead of making money off companies that want their data they’re losing money on the cloud costs to serve the scrapers.
More recently, they haven’t been paying their hosting bills to Google and their service was set to expire at the end of last month. What just happened at the start of this month? They added the limitations. That can’t be a coincidence. Now the Google services weren’t hosting the site itself, otherwise they’d probably be fully down right now, but it was hosting their trust and safety services for things like fighting spam. That could have also been hosting anti scraper services as well. Since they’re so under staffed they probably couldn’t swap the services in time, so instead of having anti scraping services like every other big company on the internet, they decided to cut service instead. It’s just built up incompetence coming to a head.
Yo for real, what’s up with all these social media sites literally shooting themselves in the foot as we speak?.
Youtube planning to antagonize adblock users and limiting video watching, Reddit killing itself with
bureocracystyle and now Twitter doing this shit. Hopefully shit sites like TikTok or Facebook jump on the wagon too.Twitter successfully sold itself to a private investment firm for over market value. That’s the dream for tech startups and never-made-a-profit digital services.
Anyone still using Twitter is an addict or a boomer, but that’s exactly the audience that Musk wanted to purchase.
The only reason twitter was popular is because you could check it for information. Towns and organizations would post updates there, it drove traffic, eyeballs, ads and revenue. This is the dumbest thing ever, even if he wanted to promote nazi ideology, it’s idiotic because your only preaching to the choir. You cannot convert people when you drive them all away, so even if it wasn’t about money, it’s dumb.
For reddit at least, The money from VCs dried up. They have to monetise fast or go broke.
Elon way way way overplayed for Twitter and the company is hemorrhaging money paying the loans he took out to pay for the purchase.
Google in general is in decline. Ad sales are down as the net becomes SEO’d to death. Marketing teams just aren’t willing to pay for Google ads like they used to since the roi isn’t there anymore.
In general, i agree with your post, but GOOG is up ~ 30% in the last 6 months. Specific parts of Google may be dwindling but their overall business is thriving right now.
The stock is not the company, that’s important to remember. The PE ratios for tech companies are totally out of whack compared to basically any other company.
Google stock is doing ok in part because they have Bard which means they’re participating in the AI boom. I think that’s going to turn out to be mostly hot air, but in the meantime it’s helping a small number of companies stay afloat
But there are so many ways Reddit could have played this better. It wasn’t just about monetizing. The API changes were in bad faith and meant to kill 3rd party apps without flat out doing it. Users would have been understanding if they charged a reasonable amount of started injecting ads into the API feeds, but instead they went full aggro and disrespected not just the devs working to make their platform better, but the users as well. If they wanted 3rd party apps to show their ads or charge a fee to remove ads I would have been understanding, but because of the disrespect I’ve dropped them.
That plus their own app being abysmal. The official Reddit app is a terrible experience without the necessary features of the old ones
I forgot the actual numbers, but it’s downright bizarre that Reddit can’t figure out how to make money. They have a massive platform that is user-moderated for free, filled with free user-created content, with third party developers creating solid apps and features, again for free. Reddit should be able to do fuck all and make money
Because of (venture) capitalism…
They made more from people giving it to them. If the company posted a profit, they’d have to pay taxes
So they pay themselves and amass assets.
If it fails you keep your salary and sell the assets. If you owe more than that’s worth, declare bankruptcy. If not, collect a check.
Startups stay in this phase right up till IPO, where they try to flip to profits as fast as possible. Then you can not only declare x profits, but y% increase in profits.
Tldr:
They’re nonprofitable by choice. This method just doesn’t work during a recession.
The tin foil part of my brain says that they’re trying to destroy media ahead of the election so they can control the narrative but really I think it’s just that we’ve reached a point where no one is pouring free money into literally any old internet nonsense and it’s turned out that this ‘they’re selling your data and making billions!’ was never actually very true.
They pushed their website as ‘we’re having massive growth and with enough investment we can dominate the market!’ so all the idiot ‘angel Investors’ threw monkey into it but that can only last so long before people say ‘ok you dominate the market, now what?!’
deleted by creator
The tin foil part of my brain says that they’re trying to destroy media ahead of the election so they can control the narrative but really I think it’s just that we’ve reached a point where no one is pouring free money into literally any old internet nonsense and it’s turned out that this ‘they’re selling your data and making billions!’ was never actually very true.
They pushed their website as ‘we’re having massive growth and with enough investment we can dominate the market!’ so all the idiot ‘angel Investors’ threw monkey into it but that can only last so long before people say ‘ok you dominate the market, now what?!’
Elon was right, firing off many engineers didn’t cause any DDoS attack from outside- as DDoS attacks are now happening from within
“The DDOS is coming from INSIDE the HOUSE!”
My lord. And they can’t/won’t piece 1+1 together? Hanlon’s razor dictates they are indeed idiots.
you commented 3 times btw
Sorry! kept getting lemmy network error
My guess is that they are severely understaffed. Happens when the new boss is a noob in the industry and fires the people he needs…
In order to quickly fix it they would probably have to roll back the change to require login to view tweets, which would be admitting that it wasn’t caused by “attacks” on Twitter, which Elon won’t do. Rock and a hard place.
The self-DDoS truly the height of idiocy. It’s been a good couple of weeks watching billionaires who have never faced consequences fuck around and find out.
This is really, really bad for Twitter. The whole reason so many groups and people use it for official communications and announcements is because their audience can easily and freely see it. Rate limiting and requiring an account completely destroy that. And without it, Twitter really doesn’t have much to offer.
Plus this goes directly against advertising lol