I think they lost the initiative the moment they decided to focus on censorship instead of combating spam/bots. Other things that didn't help include killing third-party clients a few years back, and screwing with the chronological timeline. Twitter was frickin amazing from like 2009-maybe 2013ish (though the whole TweetDeck aquisition in 2011 was a serious blow) and has been in steady decline ever since from a quality and usefulness perspective.
> focus on censorship instead of combating spam/bots
There isn't really a distinction between these two.
The crackdown on abuse was absolutely necessary, although it doesn't really go far enough, because the platform was getting a name for driving off high-profile users.
Scenario One: I, a real, active user that discusses a variety of topics, says something someone doesn't like and twitter decides to ban/shadow ban me.*
Scenario Two: I set up a network of fake accounts to automatically tweet, dm or @mention people pushing the same thing over and over to thousands of users.
Twitter has a block/ignore function. That is all that is needed to deal with scenario one in the vast majority of cases. When companies start introducing their politics and speech preferences into a global communications platform in the form of censorship and banning, the utility of that platform drops immediately. Consider if anyone ever said something in an email or sms that someone else disagreed with, we took away their ability to use email or sms. I know it's not apples to apples since those are primarily one-to-one platforms but you can see what I mean.
Meanwhile, combating scenario two almost always has a positive effect, but apparently is too hard of a problem for Twitter and its $2b/year budget to tackle as evidenced by the complete and utter lack of progress on that front since, from what I can tell, the platforms humble beginning in 2006.
*Note this is a hypothetical, my account is and has been in good standing since I signed up but I've seen many accounts go away or be silenced in this fashion.
Edit: Had wrong date for twitters inception. Fixed.
Twitter repeatedly conflates organised spam / abuse / brigading, with sincere criticism and disagreement. They've shown a shocking disregard for differences of opinion, while refusing to develop tools to allow users with large followings to quickly cut off a mob attack.
This has put them in a position where they're both overly censorious - removing satire accounts, shadow banning without notice and using 'verified' status as a form of punishment; and simultaneously failing to engage with real abuse of the platform.
Presumably because to deal with real abuse and spam would be difficult and costly. Look how long it took them to remove fake / bot users who were being used to target political campaigns.
To be clear, I wasn't defending peoples "rights" to harass others. I was talking about topic censorship. If you use the platform to harass people then yeah, you should probably be cordoned off at a minimum.
Law has been around for a very long time and harassment vs speed has been successfully understood and prosecuted for a very long time. If it's a passing comment on a social network then no matter how dispicable it is, it's just a comment. Ignore and block it, and move on with your life.
However SMS/email is not comparable to Twitter. One is push, ie you don't have to do anything to receive the unwanted messages. The other is pull, where you explicitly have to search the user's profile or follow them to see the unwanted tweets.
Twitter has offices in UK, Ireland, France, Italy, Spain, Germany and Belgium. They are very much under the reach of European legislation, such as GDPR. (Also responding to the GP.)
Twitter has been very sloppy in maintaining a clear line between abuse and unpopular opinions. Twitter has value because it's a relatively open place where anyone can interact.
When twitter starts having strong opinions about what content is acceptable or not outside of abuse, then it becomes a very liberal echo chamber which drastically biases all the conversations that go on in it.
The issue, and this isn't a twitter specific issue, is that the line between preventing abuse and censoring content is not a clear or distinct line at all - some users want every art installation to have a trigger warning before it while other users hold the firm political opinion that the mixing of different races is unethical.
It's not clear that Twitter (or Facebook, or Reddit) has ever been good at navigating that line, or that they should be in that business. Reddit is somewhat successful in that most of the moderation happens at least at a subreddit level, so that if you disagree with a given community you can simply move to a different one.
> some users want every art installation to have a trigger warning before it while other users hold the firm political opinion that the mixing of different races is unethical.
Those aren't even slightly equivalent positions, though. One is a request that material dealing with shocking or upsetting subjects be marked as such so that people who may be affected can avoid it, and the other is unsubstantiated racism that has been known as wrong for a century or more.
For twitter in particular, there's an important difference between expressing an opinion to the world in general (or at least your followers) versus actually "@"ing somebody. While you might argue that people should be allowed to post anti-miscegenation rants into the void, posting them @ a mixed-race couple is clearly abuse.
Both of those are extreme opinions on different sides of the spectrum. You should have issues with both of them.
But neither of them, in and of themselves, is abuse. Yes, they might be promulgated in a way that becomes abusive (sending racist opinions repeatedly as you mention, or sending your followers to harass a PR department because they didn't include a trigger warning), but censoring either opinion, outside of abuse, falls into the same trap of playing not the responsible platform, but engaging in censorship. If you consistently censor one and not the other, then you are a biased censor.
Why on earth do you think that a request for trigger warnings is an extreme position? Are you opposed to twitter having a "sensitive content warning" function at all, for example?
The wording wasn't trigger warnings existing in a broad sense. A trigger warning on every art installation is a position many would regard as clearly excessive. Not sensitive content, not things that could be expected to be upsetting to some significant minority of the population, every art installation.
Imagine that every time you went to look at a digital representation or photo of art, you had to click through a trigger warning.
Seems like it could, in some cases, be a bit excessive. Although I understand if some people find still lifes of fruit terrifying.
Right, but there isn't actually anyone in twitter calling for a trigger warning on literally every art installation (is there?), whereas there are lots of bona fide racists.
I haven't checked. I have seen enough calls for trigger warnings on assorted things that I can understand where the might-be-a-caricature comes from. I was taking the commentor at their word, rather than presuming to authenticate.
Television, movies, and game trailers all contain content warnings before airing. Personally I ignore most of them, partially because they usually don't affect me, and because Hollywood and such are pretty good about targeting their trailers (e.g., showing slasher trailers only before a slasher movie and not in front of the latest PG Pixar film)
> Those aren't even slightly equivalent positions, though. One is a request that material dealing with shocking or upsetting subjects be marked as such so that people who may be affected can avoid it, and the other is unsubstantiated racism that has been known as wrong for a century or more.
Technically speaking they're categorically equivalent in that they're both sanctionable under freedom of speech. From that perspective, whether or not you find one or the other more sanctionable has more to do with your personal opinions than it has to do with accuracy.
Since Twitter is a private organization it can freely decide to curtail freedom of speech on its platform, because that right is not guaranteed (or rather, relevant) in the private sphere. But that puts it into an uncomfortable position because it must then start being opinionated itself. Which opinions are the "right" ones? Which curtails are merely reducing spam and abuse, and which ones are censoring honest but unpopular opinions?
Now that aside, I agree with you that there is a difference between broadcasting unpopular opinions and targeting unpopular opinions towards another person. This makes the situation more difficult for Twitter, but there's a credible argument that curtailing the expression of those opinions in either context is censorship, while curtailing the expression of those opinions in the targeted context is spam and abuse reduction.
Twitter is fully allowed to engage in censorship, but it's probably strictly more beneficial from an inclusionary standpoint to invest in sophisticated tools for empowering users to reduce the spam and abuse targeting them (or which they come across) than it is to invest in sophisticated tools for curtailing "wrong opinions" across the entire platform. Most people can agree on the most extreme opinions that should be censored (though obviously not everyone). But it's hard to make companies the arbiter of which other opinions to get rid of, because from the obvious extreme ones there is a long, long tail of benign opinions that many people will reasonably (and unreasonably) take offense to.
For what it's worth, I think the situation is extremely complex and companies like Twitter are (somewhat unfairly) demonized for not doing enough, or doing too much to reduce the problem. But I don't think there's a substantially easier or more straightforward way of navigating these waters than Twitter has done, given the same capability and information.
>the other is unsubstantiated racism that has been known as wrong for a century or more.
No, the popular, "politically correct" opinion has not been in favor of interracial relations for "a century or more".
50 years ago, much of Dr. King's work for human rights was considered by the authorities to be a grave threat to national security that was controlled by the USSR and needed to be "neutralized". Aren't those all criteria that Twitter would accept for banning someone?
Do you think the censors at Twitter have infallable moral compasses that are superior to society's?
I think the moral compasses of Twitter moderators are quite fallible, but the most extreme way that they could fail would be to stop doing their job.
Society has a better moral compass, in aggregate, than the content allowed by the combination of bots and low-paid workers that moderate Twitter. I say that means that Twitter needs to catch up. You seem to be saying that means Twitter should never moderate anything, which seems like exactly the wrong direction to me.
Except that's patently false. Twitter is extremely vulnerable to coordinated campaigns to create fake swells of opinion held by few (or even 0) people. Talking to 5 people in Manhattan is more likely to give you a breadth of opinion than listening to 100 thousand automated nazi bots on twitter.
> While you might argue that people should be allowed to post anti-miscegenation rants into the void, posting them @ a mixed-race couple is clearly abuse.
Not at all - if one is willing to accept @mention from a random twitter user instead of only from a pre-cleared group of one's contacts, one does not get to post action claim that the @mention of his or her account is abuse because one does not like the content of that mention.
> if one is willing to accept @mention from a random twitter user instead of only from a pre-cleared group of one's contacts, one does not get to post action claim that the @mention of his or her account is abuse because one does not like the content of that mention.
So do you truly mean to claim that if a given user accepts any public replies, they may never claim that any public reply of any kind, regardless of content or intent, is abuse?
Yes. Entering a town square one gets to deal with all kind of characters, including the assholes of any and all kinds. If one does not want to deal with them, one simply does not enter the town square and stays in his or her lovely mansion.
So it's also impossible to verbally abuse people in person, since they could have chosen to wear earplugs? If you accept phone calls from unknown numbers, calls can't be abuse?
> When twitter starts having strong opinions about what content is acceptable or not outside of abuse, then it becomes a very liberal echo chamber which drastically biases all the conversations that go on in it.
Or very conservative echo chamber? Have you seen comments on practically any article critical of the current political administration?
Frankly, people don't want bad actors, or trolls in their conversations. It provides no value except to the bad actor and other bad actors. If every time you were having a conversation at a bar someone butted in to talk to you about chemtrails you would stop visiting that bar until the person was asked to leave.
"It provides no value except to the bad actor and other bad actors. If every time you were having a conversation at a bar someone butted in to talk to you about chemtrails you would stop visiting that bar until the person was asked to leave"
Thank you for saying this. It can't be said enough that the Twitter platform is not a public accomodation, and that Twitter needs to make a choice between banning troll and/or abusive accounts and convincing more valuable people to stay on their platform. We seem to be having a collective problem telling the guy with the chemtrail stories that he's the a-hole even though he strongly believes otherwise.
"But the bottom line is this: once you welcome holocaust deniers onto to your property, because, Hey! Its just their opinion! you have crossed a certain line. Other people — moral, rational, intelligent human beings who prefer reality to the fake ideological insanity these folks live in — they begin to say good-bye, and in increasingly larger numbers. People like Alex Jones who say Sandy Hook never happened, the birthers 9/11 truthers — thats a dinner party I won’t be attending."
In practice people don't leave, do they? Instead they pile on and try to harass chemtrails guy into leaving. Twitter is not a bar, so this is not a good analogy. Twitter has infinite space and is specifically intended for the exchange of opinions, not drinking.
Continue blocking, as in whack-a-mole on their brigading followers, or I can continue blocking that one account? If the latter: no shit; if the former: you underestimate the task.
Perhaps I wasn't clear - if people come after you in the physical world (which you cannot escape), that is a crime and we have the appropriate police and judicial departments to take care of it.
If people send you messages online on a public social media platform (which you can turn off at anytime), it is not a big deal. Massive difference between both. Twitter already provides several tools like blocking notifications from unknowns and making your profile private if you want to reduce the noise, but fundamentally Twitter is based on public broadcast so perhaps you would be better suited to something like Snapchat which focuses on private personal connections instead.
Would you rather walk through a clean city street or have to step over trash and needles to get where you need to go? If the place is too difficult to walk through you start to think of taking a new route.
These analogies don’t work because Twitter is unlike reality, as stated.
The timeline is fine, follow and interact with whoever you want. If someone you don’t know talks to you, you can turn off notifications for unknowns or block them specifically.
Keep in mind your own biais. I am following liberals on twitter, and there has been a big outcry that some of those users had their account deactivated or tweets taken down while @jack is keeping famous neo-nazis on the platform (not talking of Trump supporters here, people that self-identify as nazis and white suprematist). So while it looks for you like Twitter has been becoming a liberal echochamber, to liberal it is becoming a place where neo-nazis are let free while critics are being harassed/taken down.
Is someone who is a professed neo-nazi using your platform, but not otherwise engaging in abuse, worth banning?
Let's try it with this example. Is someone who genuinely and openly holds the opinion that all men are rapists, but not otherwise engaging in abuse, worth banning?
When we start going down this path of trying to get rid of "undesirables", we start engaging in censorship.
I've been involved in leftist/feminist spaces about a decade both IRL and online and I can assure you that while it certainly never gained mass adoption and may be out of favour now compared to the late 00s early 10s (thank god), calling it an "imaginary" position is disingenuous at best.
Sure, it was a second wave attitude. It's obviously not at all prevalent in the contemporary mainstream, certainly not among people young enough to be active on Twitter. In that sense it's imaginary: it's his imagined view of what feminists on Twitter are arguing for, not an accurate representation of what their views are.
Indeed. There's a reason leftist types have been escaping gradually escaping to Mastodon instances where they have much more useful content-blocking tools and aren't forced under pain of being banned to share a space with people who literally want them dead. On Twitter, a self-identifying neonazi can spout death threats, and the response to that will get the responder banned.
It will be hard to satisfy your demand for proof, because there's no good way to search "tweets you've seen", but I have seen it happen.
Person A starts a thread.
Person B who A doesn't know says something dehumanizing to person A.
Person A says "fuck off and die".
Person A gets shadowbanned for a week.
There was even a time when, due to their bad automated processes, you could get shadowbanned for using the word "queer" in a positive sense.
(Hilariously, Twitter's position on shadowbanning is that they do no such thing, they just hide your tweets from everyone's timeline, which is exactly what everyone means when they say "shadowban".)
Not without identifying myself, sorry. I sit in multiple irc channels where this sort of thing regularly happens to members though.
It’s the bizarre inconsistency of it that’s most grating - content can result in bans or not depending on... as far as anyone can tell, a roll of the dice. For any number of instances where a fascist says something awful and gets away with it, you can find much more banal things that get leftists banned.
> then it becomes a very liberal echo chamber which drastically biases all the conversations that go on in it.
While I do agree they go too far, if banning hate speech/harassment/racism/etc... causes a "very liberal echo chamber" then maybe the non-liberals need to look at cleaning up their house.
> Reddit is somewhat successful
Reddit is a cesspool of white supremacists, incels, etc...
It leads to an echo chamber because the people calling for Twitter to clean up their house don't consider death threats, rape threats, etc done in the name of the correct liberal cause to be something that should be banned, and they have enough influence that Twitter often listens to them.
>Reddit is a cesspool of white supremacists, incels, etc...
What an absurd statement. There are certainly some nasty subreddits on there, but the site's overall community seems to be 90% or more left-leaning and very anti-racism. And reddit banned most white supremacist and incel subreddits in the past few years.
Yeah, none of this is true. The vast majority of users have, again and again, called for Twitter (and Facebook and Google) to perform more censorship because (surprise) absolutely nobody has any interest in reading the tweets of various hate groups and trolls. Twitter et al are now aggressively moving to give users what they want but, if anything, it's too little too late. Twitter has developed a bit of reputation as a haven for trolls and abuse. Their success in fighting these groups off and creating a safe space for reasonable discussion (and therefore a safe space for advertisers) will decide whether the product lives or dies.
The end game here will be the end of anonymous Twitter and a smaller but much more valuable user community. To that end the market is wrong on focusing on declining user growth. Twitter is moving in the right direction: eliminating abusive users and bots and increasing average revenue per user.
(Twitter also has a lot of upside potential when it comes to how they can monetize users. But they are very, very cautious and moving very slowly here. It's a bit frustrating... they are leaving a lot of money on the table... but there's also something to be said for not wanting to piss off users.)
Censoring ‘bots is one thing (by which they mean politically oriented ‘bots, and not consumer oriented ‘bots.)
Censoring people (at times classifying a person-associated account as a ‘bot) on one side of the political spectrum more than the opposing side is an altogether different thing.
The latter is what brings the accusations of censorship.
Twitter has become more and more useful to me over time. It is, for me, an indispensable tool for keeping up with what's happening in ML and in contact with people who I would otherwise never meet. Through careful curation of my feed I get a constant supply of interesting and useful information. (And some pictures of cute dogs).
Reading the Twitter Rules or TOS whatever it was I read is bizarre, if I remember correctly from what I recall Twitter had these conditions:
You can't get too many followers in too short of a time or you're considered a bot. If you are not active enough you're a bot. If you speak ill of Twitter well that's a an account suspension.
My lowly account of a few people I know was locked once no explanation but the bot accounts manage seem to just fine.
I think they lost the initiative the moment they let Twitter devolve into the cesspit that it is today. As an outsider looking in, Twitter seems tailor-made as a pressure-cooker for extremism and harassment.
2011-12 was when the C/D-list hires that were being brought into the middle of the company really ended up pushing out a ton of the earlier clueful employees.
What is the endgame for companies like Twitter and Facebook? It seems like the only behaviour for publicly traded tech companies is grow or die. So what happens when they hit some theoretical maximum? Is it not acceptable that they're making money? Is there no steady state? Not saying that Twitter is there. But theoretically what does that look like?
"Hey, so we basically maxed out our target market share. We're healthy, profitable, popular, but this is basically the limit. There aren't any more people in our demo left on the planet to capture."
"Nope. Go make more money. Sell more ad space. Or shift focus to a new product or something."
"But that will either degrade the quality of our product or take our eye off the ball and allow a competitor to eat our lunch."
"Too bad. I don't care how profitable you are, only that you're more profitable than last year."
There are plenty of public companies that reach a steady state. What happens for those companies is their PE ratios shrink, they start paying out dividends and their expectation is to be a big lumbering giant whose valuation isn't expected to have dramatic swings based on outsized expected future earnings. What happened here is not "Wall Street" saying that Twitter must die, it's saying "Hey, your newly expected future earnings are no longer able to justify your prior valuation and therefore here's your new valuation based on all currently available information".
Okay so twitter has been in a "valued based on anticipated growth" state. And other companies can matriculate to a "valued based on reliable dividends" state? This I can understand. Thanks.
Yes. Bear in mind tech companies are terrible at paying dividends. Google has never paid one, Apple only really started after Jobs' death. No dividends means no reason to hold a stock unless you think the value will go up significantly (and ultimately the value is driven by an expectation that one day divis will be issued).
Facebook and Twitter are getting hammered because it's clear they're spending insane quantities of cash on attempting to "cleanse" their platforms of undesirables. Facebook alone announced they were going to hire tens of thousands more people to work on "security" (lol). That bloated spend reduces future dividend potential and causes their stock to be less valuable.
All this is new territory, mind you. This is why older traditional/value investors like Buffett don't dabble in tech. The PE ratios are through the roof and we don't know what it will mean once we start seeing these companies truly decline.
> What is the endgame for companies like Twitter and Facebook? ... Is it not acceptable that they're making money?
The difference between Twitter and Facebook is that Facebook can make money.
In case of Facebook, it would be like:
"Can you get more users?"
"Nope, we already have the whole planet. However, we can squeeze more money from them. The users already accept that their timeline is created by an arbitrary algorithm. So we can make them bid against each other for appearing in their friends' timelines. If you want your mom to see your photo from holidays, you can pay $1 to make sure it happens."
In case of Twitter, it would be like:
"We already have the whole planet. We can ruin people's careers, or drive them to suicide, more than any other web service."
"Great, but can you make some money? For the shareholders, you know."
"Uhm... if we started charging people for using our service, most of them would leave, so..."
Don't forget the part where they now show you tweets that people you follow have liked, just the same as if they had retweeted them.
I already unfollowed people who tweet/retweet too much for my liking, and now I have to unfollow people who 'like' things prolifically also? Ridiculous.
> Don't forget the part where they now show you tweets that people you follow have liked, just the same as if they had retweeted them.
I rarely use twitter but the first time I saw these "person X liked this" I just looked up how to not get that. Turns out it's pretty simple, you just click on that tweet menu and select "I don't like this tweet", repeat for maybe one or two other tweets on your timeline, and then refresh your feed and they're all gone. People mentioned it can come back after a couple months, you'd notice quickly as your feed quality would suck, you just redo the same.
The only one I see now are "person X and Y liked Z tweet" but in that case I follow X, Y, and Z, so it's usually relevant.
Twitter has some misguided PR priorities. So many news stories include tweets from extreme perspectives that have gotten thousands of likes/retweets/whatever. Since Twitter really works on their API for this, it's clear they think it's a good thing.
This is their biggest source of free advertising and it always presents Twitter as a fringe-fest or, worse, knee-jerk mob mentality and nothing more.
They really need to re-think promoting a system that gives the outside world a view of only the most extreme and unflattering view. No matter your political views, someone you respect will have negative Tweets presented in the news. It really makes it feel like it's only a platform for someone else.
To me, the real TWTR story isn't the 14% drop this week, but that TWTR's price is up 100% from the level it held through all of 2016, a time which included takeover talks.
Twitter is not showing not much growth in MAUs. Valuation is still high. Market cap is based on future cash flows. No future cash flows (MAUs) means market cap has to come down. Just showing profit is not enough. It just shows you can control expenses but does not deserve the huge market cap. This is a $1billion company posing as a $30B company. Anybody disagree?
I propose that MAU growth is a dumb metric for a company that is 10 years old. Companies exist to make money, not attract eyeballs. Plenty of companies make good money without reaching every person in the world, or even a sizable percentage of them.
Twitter is the type of company that only works due to network effect. Like ebay and facebook. So I'd say the age of the company is immaterial, it's how much of the market they've acquired so far. MAU growth is a fair metric.
Some networks are more valuable than others. Raw MAU tells you nothing about the LTV of those AUs. What's better for eBay: a shitload of people who never buy anything? Or a smaller network of engaged, repeat sellers and buyers?
And some networks have negative value. 4chan, despite attracting large traffic numbers and being a well-known cultural force on the Internet, has always struggled to attract advertisers.
To maximize financial value of its user network, a parent company must exclude users and content that subtract value. Examples would be lower-LTV users who drive away higher-LTV users via harassment. Or users who post content so objectionable that brands don't want to advertise against it. MAU growth alone tells you nothing about those things.
I agree with the intention of your message but if Twitter is making money from attracting eyeballs, won't it become the metric unless their business model fundamentally changes.
Unfortunately most tech valuations since the first dot-com boom have been predicated on the assumption that one company will eventually take over the world in a particular market.
They recently started logging out users and asking for mobile number. I didn't want to give my mobile number so I uninstalled the app. Occasionally visit the website and view some users' tweets (without logging in). But as it was mentioned elsewhere it's full of dark patterns and an irritating experience.
I think it was straightforward to predict that monthly active users would be down after they banned the bots (and lots of accounts were tweeting about losing 4-7 figures worth of followers) -- I'm a bit surprised that this is being cited as the reason for the bloodbath. Surely this point is not a sophisticated analysis or am I way over-estimating owners of tech stocks that live and die on earnings calls?
This may be an intentional dark pattern / effort to drive users away from the web client and to the official app. Facebook and reddit do the same thing. More permissions = more juicy data to harvest.
Ding ding ding. The web page is so comically broken it can only be intentional. No user pages even load for me unless I do an explicit reload; the first time around, the spinner just spins endlessly.
I assume malice. I work corporate for a Fortune 200 and if anything was broken as badly as Twitter's mobile website, it would be caught by someone in 5 minutes with an on-call assigned to fix the problem ASAP.
It's a dark pattern indeed. Facebook does the same with their mobile web version. If you try to use messenger from a mobile browser, you are redirected to download the app.
If you switch to "Desktop" mode in a mobile browser. The messenger is so freaking buggy and unusable, it deletes text as you type and try to send a message. It's made to frustrate you so you download the messenger app.
You also have to realize how internal politics plays into things like this. Who wants to work on maintaining their mobile web browser when it's not going to get them the promotion? Thus it falls on the least skilled/interested.
This is why Google has products stagnate for years before it is finally euthanized, allowing a completely new iteration of it to take place.
Not just the client's quality, but the amount of obvious spam that could be automatically deleted by simple string comparisons, should they ever think about hiring competent developers.
I think more time will tell. Facebook and Twitter are both still higher than where they were in March of this year. Same for Alphabet, Amazon, Netflix, Apple, and Microsoft.
I like twitter, I don't really tweet that much though, don't really have that much to say.
I follow a lot of people, but I'd imagine if I looked at the stats, probably only the top 25% of those tweet regularly and the rest probably just get lost in the ether, or just don't tweet at all
The surprising thing to note here is how much optimism the street has in $twtr. Just one quarter of small beat and the stock jumped 100%. After the drop today (to $34) it's still too high for $twtr which hasn't actually proved anything since the stock was high teens low 20s. If anything, their live streaming effort is pretty much down the drain, and Anthony Noto, who's pretty much the heart and soul of Twitter operation, left. I'm super surprised the stock is still mid 30s.
Pretty much. People have X hours where they are awake during the day - if they are spending Y less time on social networks that doesn't mean they're migrating Y to new social networks. It just means they're focusing on something else.
You are assuming it needs to be replaced at all. These services are vapid additions to your life and once they are gone I think people will realize they didn't need to exist in the first place.
You're seriously generalizing. I only met my wife because of services like this; we met on Instagram and got to know each other over Twitter. I have other friends I similarly met and keep in contact with mainly over Twitter. I'm very glad the services exist.
There are alcoholics who have dozens of drinks a week and there are people who responsibly augment a night of socializing with a drink or two. Alcohol isn't fundamentally irredeemable because some people develop problems, and neither is social media.
My point was not that meeting people is at all related to alcohol(ism). My point was that both social media and alcohol can be used responsibly in beneficial ways.
Are you being sarcastic (serious question). Alcohol itself is chemically addictive and there are likely orders or magnitudes more people in the alcohol industry trying to make their alcoholic beverages more attractive (and thus spreading addictive substances further into the population) to consumers. It's an industry that easily tops over 1,000 Billion dollars globally.
I know what you're saying, but there's plenty of marketing behind alcohol, and it's already addictive to the point that withdrawal can literally kill you.
marketing doesn't make the product itself more addictive. Alcohol is physically addictive, but so is the dopamine hit you get from many social networking features. The point I was trying to make is that AFAIK no-one's trying to make alcohol the product more addictive, where there are many very intelligent people working to make Facebook the product more addictive.
Alcopops are a recent example of the alcohol industry finding a way to make their product more addictive (by adding sugar, another addictive substance).
Take my own changing habits, for example: over a span of 15 years, I "migrated" from MySpace to Tumblr to Reddit and a few news websites. I have only ever used Facebook except to promote a website. I think tens of millions of people, mostly young guys, prefer playing videos games over any form of social networking or even writing comments in response to ANY type of content.
And Discord really don't much power over their userbase unlike Facebook (have massive networking effect) and Twitter (have popular personalities). If Discord ever going to mess with things like censorship or forcing people into paid plans users could migrate really fast.
* Gamers are either tech-savvy or always have friends who are.
* Gamers stick to their small communities and leaders. If you superstar and announce that you're leaving Facebook nobody will follow, but gamers always follow their group / clan / whatever leaders.
* Also there is at least few companies like Valve, Blizzard, Epic Games who hold huge part of the market and have extremely loyal customers. They could certainly manage to set competition for Discord if there will be opening.
you are assuming that people only use these services for vapid interactions. plenty of people that live in censored countries use twitter to find out what is going on around them
I live in the US and I use Twitter to find out what is going on around me. For example, when I lose electrical power, my utility company posts updates on Twitter. My local TV stations and newspapers also post breaking news there.
The only reason those services use Twitter is because that's where all the people are. I'm not saying this isn't a beneficial use case, but Twitter isn't necessary for these kinds of services. I would even go so far as to say that corporate entities using Twitter to provide their users a service (outage reports) they should pay for the privilege or be forced to set up their own notification networks.
As one of those ex-MAUs: Nowhere. I used to have Twitter and Tumblr on my phone (Tumblr mostly for following a bunch of webcomics). One day, I noticed how much time I spend in those apps, so I deleted both of them and while I was at times tempted to reinstall them, I never gave in.
I left Facebook entirely earlier this year, and haven't replaced it with any other service. I'm wondering now about my Twitter account. It's a good source for infosec and test automation news, but nothing I couldn't live without.
Me too. I noticed something yesterday on the train - which made me sad. The carriage had over 100 people; yet 95% had their heads down and looking at their phone.
Most people didn't lookup throughout the whole 20 minute train ride.
For social media making everyone connected, it sure has made everyone else more isolated with each other.
A common observation, yet how have things really changed? When I was riding subways, buses, and commuter trains back in the 80s-90s, everyone had their faces in books or magazines the entire ride, and there was zero interaction with their fellow riders. Maybe in some non-East Coast region, people do/did interact more; I wouldn't know.
I would further observe that in a way, people have more of a shared experience today because of social media & internet in general.
We're still social creatures, just in a different way today. Admittedly, it's different from the days of yore, when people would hang out at the general store (or bar) and chat with the general community of people who passed through. But those days ended long before the Internet came along.
I wonder if the Snapchat generation are going to grow up and uses Snapchat for business. Like now when everyone uses either WeChat or WhatsApp for business.
GDPR could be a factor since it required shutting down accounts of people aged 13-16 that did not have parental consent. Getting parental consent required having parents sign a form and send it in.
That's not true. Consent is only one basis for processing. If they stick to using it for legitimate interest reasons then they don't need consent. Even ads can be a legitimate interest, and probably are in twitter's case, though the user is always allowed to opt out of that. There's also nothing that requires parental consent to involve signing a form.
Instagram will have its own moment to shine. All the 40 somethings trying to be like 20 somethings with their before and after pictures is not going to last once they realize that they are simply models on steriods. Usage will drop.
Trump, but not in the way you might think. Facebook instantly becomes uncool once your grandparents join and try to friend you. Southpark knew this years ago. Now the iconic angry grandparent is on twitter. Not only are kids leaving as their grandparents sign up to follow Trump, everyone sees king grandpa in Trump. It isn't about politics or anger. Twitter is just falling off the uncool grandparent cliff.
I think when we imagined the internet the idea that the president could communicate with us instantly from anywhere in the world was one of the ideal use cases for it. Who could have guessed the reality of it though!
Trump would not have disappeared if Hillary had won. He would have lead the charge to take her down. Prior to the election he had already amassed a very large follower count.
Nighttime TV has changed, especially late night. It used to be old people but the Daily Show or Colbert aren't watched by old people. Retirees watch the daytime news, the fox/CNN/MSNBC crowd. Nightime TV, and streaming generally, is for the working young.
