I find the most surprising thing in this thread that there apparently is an event that sells billions of dollars advertisement space each year. I thought all this happened on online auctions.
If you've heard of TV "upfronts"¹, NewFronts² are the same thing with a focus on digital content. They're marketplaces that bring together brands, creators, advertisers, marketers, and distributors.
An easier analogy is the ad industry term « inventory ». When you want to commit to buying very large quantities of inventory you might want more guarantees, discounts and other specific terms that wouldn’t be feasible or reasonable in small quantities. It happens for goods, and it’s roughly the same B2B negotiations for ad space.
That’s also why most big advertisers never pay the actual rate card price of an ad slot. In TV or print, I’ve seen many discounts of over 50% on the official price for large ad buy commitments.
They meant stock. If you wanted to buy a lot of public stock you don't use a random app - you engage at a higher level. Same with buying a lot of advertising.
I think that analogy doesn’t make much sense. If you’re trying to buy a lot of stock it’s basically going to depend on how good you are at execution whether you do it yourself in tiny bits or as a big block trade with someone who is good at execution. If you want a significant % and you’re not eg black rock, you’ll often need to negotiate with the board.
I don't have any inside information, but as I understand it's basically just a spending commitment. The online auctions still take place, however the purchaser will gain some sort of bonus for agreeing to a certain amount of spending over the next year.
The deals seem to be rather secretive, but from what I can tell bonuses can be anything from a straightforward discount, to a guaranteed amount of impressions for some campaign, to things like guaranteeing that the client will win a certain percentage of auctions above some price.
Twitter used to be a bastion of free speech. At one point ISIS/Daesh was announcing executions on Twitter - which was when Twitter started enforcing their already existing rules (eg no conspiring to murder people).
Somehow it’s got stricter and stricter to the point where satire articles get flagged.
I’m pretty sure Twitter has room to maneuver without advertisers caring.
The problem is advertisers demanding assurances when the company literally had a takeover last week.
There are no assurances ik a situation like this, which lets activists manufacture doubt.
> The problem is advertisers demanding assurances when the company literally had a takeover last week.
Advertisers have the right to demand all the assurances they want. There are other places to spend ad budget. In this economic context there is extra pressure to make every dollar count.
Advertisers care about brand equity and RoI. They don’t owe Twitter one dollar.
It’s not the advertisers’ fault the takeover is so messy. It’s 100% of Musk’s doing.
It’s not the activists’ fault Twitter had no good answers, irrespective of where the questions originated.
And lastly, it’s not the first media M&A deal in history. Seeking assurances post-acquisition is boringly standard practice.
If activists were "manufacturing" doubt, that implies the doubt is false. Which means Twitter could resolve the doubt when the advertisers ask questions.
Advertisers are asking questions, and Twitter isn't providing answers or assurances. Therefore, advertisers are backing off.
This is completely down to Twitter being taken over by a guy who insisted for months that he would turn it into a "free speech" hellscape, and refusing to answer any questions about his policies. Policies which he seems to change based on the weather.
Twitter isn't providing any sort of assurance that the platform will continue to exist in a way that advertisers are comfortable advertising on.
Trying to blame this on a boogeyman labeled "activist" is pretty much nonsense. Musk has been completely reckless during the takeover, and these are the consequences of those actions.
I don't think ISIS organizing on Twitter and other genocides worldwide is something good. But also, Twitter was moderating long before ISIS issues - except it focused on English speaking world (meaning Americans were moderated much more).
More importantly, the events this talk about were in May. That was when advertisers asked questions about future leadership and got no answers. Except what was on Elon Musk tweet feed. And Elon Musk vision as shown on his feed does not add confidence.
There thing are apparently bought a year in advance, so they think a year in advance. Twitter used to spend a lot of effort in order to ensure advertisers year after year. Musk thought it is unnecessary, so he did not. So now they are doubting because communication toward them changed.
Then, as Musk was firing ad accounts managers from Twitter, he had group call with ads who felt not being listened to. Combine it with being unsure who even to talk to, they did not bought again.
Elon himself said that Twitter "cannot become a free-for-all hellscape", and so advertisers want to understand exactly what the plan is to avoid that given that (for example) Elon laid off 75% of the moderation team.
Pre-Elon, leadership spent lots of cycles building trust and confidence with advertisers, involving them in policy discussions, etc. That is not only no longer happening, but it appears that Elon is blocking people who are asking tough questions.
For anyone confused about motivations, this isn't about "wokeism" but is straight capitalism. In the same way that airlines don't want their ads to be placed next to coverage of an air disaster, advertisers and agencies need assurances that Twitter isn't on the road to becoming a cesspool, and that their brand/ads won't appear near harmful content.
According to this BBC article[1], "Yoel Roth, Twitter's Head of Safety & Integrity, said that most of the more than 2,000 content moderators working on "front-line review" were not impacted" by the firings.
More details here[2], where Roth says "More than 80% of our incoming content moderation volume was completely unaffected by this access change. The daily volume of moderation actions we take stayed steady through this period."
I assume we'll know final numbers once the dust settles, but that sounds not nearly as bad as assumed.
However, my personal experience of Twitter suggests that it remains an open air sewer, which tends to indicate that the content moderation team was already severely under-staffed. I suspect that it's even more true for non-English language.
So, even if only 15% of the content moderators have been laid off, this doesn't bode well for the future health of conversations on the platform.
Regardless, thanks for the sources!
update: Reading through the source once again, 15% of the T&S team was laid off but we don't have numbers for the number of content moderators who were laid off. I had assumed that content moderators were part of the T&S team, but that may not be true.
I wouldn't be surprised if a good chunk of them aren't Twitter employees, but subcontractors somewhere. At least that's what plenty other social media sites do.
We've created a new class, of tens of thousands of people all over the world, who spend all day censoring content in realtime.
Eventually there will be giant censorship service corporations lobbying government for more restrictions on speech, and for them to be more complicated and confusing (to make them more difficult to in-house.)
No, we’ve created a class of global citizens whose only job is to handle, without protection, the torrent of psychological toxic waste we create every single second of the day. The vast majority of the work they do is to act as an ablative shield for all the horrors humanity can pour into the internet, and they do it for a fraction of the remuneration of a single social media company SWE, even when they’re onshored. What the rest of us see as “censorship” is the tip of the iceberg — the stuff that isn’t so horrid as to get weeded out immediately and so ends up in the “user-initiated moderation” category. Everything below that, if we weren’t destroying people’s minds and emotional well-being for outsourced pennies on the hour, would make the Internet so radioactive for every single user that an open WiFi point would be considered a crime against humanity.
> In the same way that airlines don't want their ads to be placed next to coverage of an air disaster, advertisers and agencies need assurances that Twitter isn't on the road to becoming a cesspool, and that their brand/ads won't appear near harmful content.
Yep. How many major companies do you recall advertising on 4chan?
That question was discussed on 4chan itself recently. I believe the suggestion was that twitter will be saved by onahole retailers and pirate anime streams. There's also that one guy that buys ads for his own Spotify playlist. That certainly won't sustain twitter but it's a humorous future to think about for the org.
> advertisers and agencies need assurances that Twitter isn't on the road to becoming a cesspool, and that their brand/ads won't appear near harmful content.
The underlying assumption is that slackivists will actually put their money where their mouth is. The Chick-fil-A boycotts did absolutely nothing to their sales and I suspect the same would be true for any company that people call out for advertising on Twitter. I seriously doubt that there are very many consumers will genuinely care where a company allocates its advertising dollars.
I'm actually politically left, but the reason I care is that I hope that this forces the left to actually act outside of being angry on the internet. As much as I disagree with conservatives, I have to applaud that they actually take meaningful political action (e.g. volunteer as poll watchers because they believe in election fraud).
I don't think you understand. This has nothing to do with activists. Companies already did not want to advertise on controversial content 40 years ago. You don't see Rolex advertising on The Sun (and no, it's not only about demographics, plenty of upper class people read tabloids).
Brand image is extremely important. You most definitely do not want most brands appearing close to shitty content.
You have the same thing with physical advertising where brands will refuse their ads in some places if the perception of the space is too bad (ex: homeless people around, drug traffic...). The reason is that even if you might be interested with the brand you will now associate it with the environment you were presented it with.
Of course for Lidl it is less of a worry, but even low price brands have standards and don't want to be anywhere near a nazy content.
But there have been calls to violence on Twitter for a long time. Just in Portland, we had 100 days of street violence, a prolonged attempt to burn down a federal courthouse, various attacks on the city mayor, and the attempted murder of a gay immigrant journalist. It wasn’t hard at the time to find Tweets planning and celebrating all of this stuff.
If it’s truly about violence, why are the advertisers just now getting cold feet?
Multiple reasons: Musk spent a bunch of time bashing twitter's moderation efforts pre purchase. He's then spent a bunch of time mocking advertisers' wish for brand safety [1]. He chased that with calls to harass advertisers who stop advertising on Twitter [2,3].
For context, Twitter has never had a particularly compelling ads product. Like it or not, both FB and Google have super compelling products: the best (by far) tracking, targeting, cross-device linking, or intent. eg Facebook could match your user across devices, browsers, and apps; and allowed ecom targeting by phone or address, not just pixels or cookies. Google has a near-monopoly on the highest-intent ads next to their searches. That's why, in 2021, Google earned $209B from ads, FB $115B from ads, and Twitter < $5B from ads.
Add that up with Musk's ... compelling offer to whip his followers into a rage at you if you, say, reduce ad spend allocation to Twitter in your quarterly ad rebalancing, and it's not hard to see how we got where we are.
It's about looks more than it is actual violence. This is advertising so that's not throwing shade, it really is actually about looks. It's also about actual violence, but looks here are very important. And it looked like Twitter was doing something about the violence. Maybe not 100% successfully, but they were trying, and officially disavowed doxxing and violence.
I was at many of those protests, the attempts to "burn down" a federal courthouse were laughably inept. The cops WANTED the protestors to get farther on it than they did, I talked to a group of about 12 cops the night the march went to the Mayor's house (completely peaceful march, camp set up outside his townhouse pied a terre, no violence or property damage that I'm aware of). Those cops were LIVING for the idea that they might get to brutalize a bunch of protestors for actually posing a threat to the Justice Center. But the people attempting to do so were, uh, not very good at it.
I've lived here for 23 years and been an activist intermittently through the years. The activists/antifa here are not the supersoliders the press, the cops and the mayors make them out to be. They're mostly street kids, crust punks, well-meaning college and grad school students, some hippies and autistic communists. Not an invading army ffs. Just folks. Also, Andy Ngo is a fascist bootlicker pissbaby loser and his followers are Nazis, so you can fuck right off with that "attempted murder of a gay immigrant journalist" tripe you're selling.
You might want to examine your priors. What if the issues you see as symptomatic of wide-spread left wing violence don't look the same way when when considered in the cold light of maximizing advertising dollars?
Hmmm, wonder if it’s a freedom of speech issue if a coalition of companies effectively prevent public discussion of issues that might significantly upset the status quo?
Loud, blatant lies that are repeated by authority figures continuously is one thing. That this is bad is almost universally agreed on. But does this advertiser worry really stop at that?
I think this is a very interesting question, hitting at the heart of the Twitter controversy. Advertisers have an incredibly strong influence on contemporary discourse; their concerns influence almost all publicly-visible discussion, opinion and debate. The attention economy, eyeball-and-click-hunting is just the tip of the spear, and this dominates almost every public communication platform in the world.
Elon Musk and his $44 billion «fuck this shit» purchase is the only significant challenge to this model. It will obviously upset the advertisers; it’s tautological.
Maybe the result is that it won’t work, but if it does, Twitter will be the only public communications platform that isn’t very heavily influenced by advertisers’ interests.
He who pays the fiddler, calls the tune. Want to broadcast whatever you want? Fine, pay for it. Want advertisers to subsidize your costs? Don't be surprised that their money comes with strings attached.
Judging by the downvotes, I don't think I'm getting my point across.
Absolutely every fiddler that currently has an audience of non-negligible size is paid by a consortium of advertisers that have aligning interests. The strings, so to speak, all pull in the same direction. This is largely invisible, since everyone must play by these rules. TV, newspapers, social media. Audience of 5 billion. We do complain about polarization, clickbait, negative emotion amplification and dark patterns a lot, but we accept it as the economic laws of gravity. Shareholder duty cements this. It molds our entire society.
Elon Musk has removed Twitter from this regime, by burning 20 billion dollars and stating a willingness to burn the remaining 24. Assuming he can make the economics work out, Twitter will be the only global media platform that doesn't have to bow to the advertisers' every whim.
A lot of the contention comes from the fact that if this succeeds, Twitter will no longer have to follow the moderation- and censorship rules that advertisers have quietly implemented everywhere else. This might apply to the extremes that the majority want to censor (whether sensibly or not), but it also applies to lots of discourse that vocal minorities wants to censor.
Regardless of whether one likes this development, it's super interesting.
Alternate proposal: you got your point across and people disagree with you.
Any ideas for how he's going to keep the lights on at twitter? Your suggestion that advertisers fleeing the platform is a "free speech issue" is highly questionable. What remedy would you propose? Forcing advertisers to spend, and how much should the government force them to spend, propping up political speech they disagree with?
Boycotts are protected speech. Even if you find that speech deplorable.
I still think you didn't get my point, since you seem to be arguing a point I didn't make :)
I'll boil it down to just a couple of sentences: It's a democratic problem that 99% of all public discourse is subject to veto and policy from advertisers and payment processers, and the drive to maximize income from these. Even if you disagree on everything else, at least the consequent polarization should be bad enough to concede this point.
Solution? Well, obviously the advertisers are free to do what they want, but that doesn't make their pervasive influence any smaller. A problem doesn't disappear just because solutions are elusive.
My guess is that Musk wins the battle of the wills here; he no longer needs to maximize advertiser income, just get enough to make the wheels turn. I wouldn't bet the farm on him resolving the issues I've highlighted; he's far too mercurial to have any confidence on that. But he does have a shot, as opposed to everyone else.
>It's a democratic problem that 99% of all public discourse is subject to veto and policy from advertisers and payment processers
In the sense we don't want to fund actual public places for discourse online and instead have pushed this off to private servers ran by private companies, yes. When a large portion of the voter base says "reduce taxes beyond all else" don't expect funding to show up for this. More so the advertising industries are also apt to fund political campaigns so it's unlikely most politicians are going to go out of the way to change status quo. And in that sense the average user is going to be aligned with providing most online interactions as 'somewhat' safe spaces until safety is not aligned with their political sensibilities.
I personally don't think that Elon is going to do much other than crash the value of Twitter and lose and epic amount of cash doing so. It's possible that the whole ordeal may push more people to federated social media, but it seems to unlikely to do so in numbers that matter.
A service equivalent to Twitter does not cost billions per year to run. In principle, you could boot one up with pocket change and operate it with a small budget. The reason you can't do this in practice is that the network effects are a fundamental requirement, almost impossible to recreate, and all the established operators are forced by shareholder duty to play the adtech game.
If you were an effective altruist worried about adtech's pervasive influence on society and had unlimited funds, you could hardly do better than purchasing one of the few established, global social networks. Trim down its cost structure to the bare minimum, make the economics work without letting the global-reach advertisers dictate terms, preserve the network effects that comprise the real value of your media channel and then shape the discourse to serve whatever positive outcome the current system prevents. You'll have the only privately-owned, global-reach media channel in the whole world that's not fundamentally influenced by advertisers.
Of course, Elon Musk might not be an effective altruist and the billion-dollar interest payment is an impediment to the above plan, I'll grant you that. But hell, I wouldn't be surprised if the guy just ends up subsidising this thing from his other businesses if he can't make it run organically. That's what I would do. It'd be a uniquely independent and influential media channel.
I really don't see why this would make people quit Twitter en masse. The only people quitting Twitter are those who really hate Elon Musk, and there just aren't that many of them. The service works like before and it might well work better, allowing democratic discourse that is viable for a global audience nowhere else.
As I mentioned earlier, the conclusion boils down to whether you think Musk means well or not.
> In principle, you could boot one up with pocket change and operate it with a small budget.
In practice, a site with user generated content from millions of users and a shoestring budget is an unmoderated, spam-laden shithole. Or, you can leave the moderation up to AI which permanently bans people for arbitrary and inscrutable reasons. Neither of these outcomes is appealing to the general public.
Twitter may not cost billions to run, but it's my bet it still costs far more than you expect. Especially when you get to scale and have to avoid things like DDOS and extremely high connection rates and information exchange while retaining low latency. As you say it's the size of the network that makes it important.
If you think advertisers are your biggest problem then I'll have to tell you about governments. Piss off the EU with privacy issues and you'll be fined. Piss off Russia/China you'll be banned. Don't keep some level of control over the violent threats US posters are making and you'll be civilly sued as an accessory.
And you're still going to spend a massive amount of time and effort banning crap if you want any of your user base to hang around, lest you just create the next 4chan (which even does a fair amount of their own banning).
> My guess is that Musk wins the battle of the wills here; he no longer needs to maximize advertiser income, just get enough to make the wheels turn
Twitter now has to pay $1 billion a year in debt servicing costs. Twitter was not wildly profitable before, so it seems very unlikely Musk can make enough money to break even, much less profit, while losing a large portion of advertising revenue.
That's why he's trying cut costs so aggressively, and rushing to gain new subscription revenue.
> It's a democratic problem that 99% of all public discourse is subject to veto and policy from advertisers and payment processers, and the drive to maximize income from these.
The problem is in reverse. Cable news and then Twitter artificially created this idea that a public international town square was a good idea and then decided the need to fund it.
Really the Democratic problem is that over the past 30 or so years we’ve flipped the pyramid from focusing on local news and communication to focusing on national and international news and communication. And that is much more expensive to operate.
The US is first and foremost a capitalist society. One could attempt to argue your characterization that it's "democratic" but in my opinion, that won't stand in the face of of Burwell vs Hobby Lobby and Citizens United vs FEC.
If you think Musk is going to defeat capitalism to the point that commoners are heard in the town square, unfettered by the wants of advertisers and media conglomerates, I'd say your chances are better praying that his next venture is a moonshot for time travel, destination circa 1600. Or before: one of the first tunes I learned on the violin was an advertising jingle popularized around then.
No, Musk doesn't want the commoner to be heard. He wants his opinion to have center stage. He's certainly not going to undo the grip that capitalism has on the public sphere. He's just another moneyed elite.
> I'll boil it down to just a couple of sentences: It's a democratic problem that 99% of all public discourse is subject to veto and policy from advertisers and payment processers, and the drive to maximize income from these.
Yes in the sense that capitalism isn't and will never be a "fair" system as anyone who participates in it may perceive it.
There's a point where any economic system can erode its political cousin whether that be capitalism, socialism, or communism. To me, all you're saying is what others before you have said: we have too much weight in the capitalism category these days. I think most people probably agree with that.
It is not even boycot for political reason (and conservatives do those all the time). It is literally just conservative cold business decision of "I don't trust that guy". This concept of freedom where others are mandated to do business or not do business or listen someone is super odd.
Advertisers have free speech right to not do business with Twitter. They have right to not do business with me too. Just like Musk has right to fire people from his company.
Free speech means also freedom to criticize twitter or disassociate from it when you think it affects your business.a
On the other hand... it seems that Elon's long-term plan is to try to create a social media platform where the users are the customers instead of the product...
that seems like it would have to rely less on advertising revenue to do that.
I am not sure how that will play out but I wish him well (as someone who is not a major user of most social media)...
Not at all. Not when he has public plans to name and shame advertisers who aren’t working with him. And he’s not firing any of the advertisers who are still working with him.
These additional revenue is in response to the extra $1B yearly in interest payments, not to replace advertisers.
Bringing "monetizable" to "monetized" is a completely different story. YT premium has only 50 million premium+music subscribers with much stronger contents and a more suitable format for monetization. And they only could bring roughly only 2% of YT users with very aggressive marketing.
I would say the conversion rate would be closer to 0.2% for Twitter assuming the best scenario since it doesn't really have a content model and there's no incentive for good publishers to participate. This will give Elon precious ~$30M ARR at the cost of pissing advertisers off. Oh and don't forget that Elon still has to pay $1B just for annual interests.
Perhaps they could turn @elonmusk to a protected account and offer paid $8 subscription per month for "super follow" or whatever. Maybe it's a better monetization model given Elon's significant influence to the crypto market... :sigh:
95% of those are bots. Elon himself said it so it must be true.
Given the bots wont add to revenue, you need to up the $8 a month to $160 a month and have every single user pay which seems enough to bring in $1B in revenue per month.
I'm intensely curious to know what you are thinking Twitter could do that would either be compelling enough to convince their active users to suddenly start spending an average of $6/mo in return for it, or somehow cause them become $6/mo more valuable as advertising targets.
This could actually help explain why Musk suddenly decided to go forward with the Twitter deal.
Losing all these advertising commitments are real damages Twitter could point to in court and make Musk pay on top of the $1B break up fee even if the court decided not to force the sale.
I look forward to the demise of the twin sewers of disinformation and privacy destruction Meta and Twitter. I think people forget the internet got along just fine before these companies existed.
I liked facebook in the early days of popular adoption as it got the normal people I know using the internet more like I had been for a long time. But it went wrong after that and it's an platform that's lost a great deal of its value.
Apparently it represents only 10-15% of the ads for a year, so just a bit more than a month.
Not only that but the fact that it isn't pre-sold due to uncertainty does not mean that it won't be sold later, during the year, when (if) advertisers see that Musk's Twitter isn't that awful after all.
I also imagine that the budget of advertisers that doesn't go to Twitter doesn't necessarily or fully go to other platforms.
Advertisers that wanted to reach Twitter users in 2022 most likely still want to reach Twitter users in 2023, so I'm not convinced that they won't end up giving that money to Twitter anyway during the year.
I wouldn't invest a single dollar in Twitter at the moment (we can't anymore anyway), but this honestly doesn't seem to me like something apocalyptic for them.
I think part of why it feels like a big deal is because Elon is making it a big deal. (E.g. he has been tweeting and making a big deal about advertisers pulling out)
> Apparently it represents only 10-15% of the ads for a year
It doesn't just represent that. It also gives an indication of how advertisers more generally are thinking about where they want to run their ads in the coming year. Which might make it a rather good crystal ball for guessing what will happen with the other 85% of the year's ad revenue.
Yeah. Companies typically come into the year with budget allocations. Some percent of that is going to upfronts / presold, for which you get a discount.
Twitter has a not-particularly compelling product. The dollars that Twitter lost almost surely got committed elsewhere.
You can check the business news and market reactions when a company misses its revenue targets and external estimates by far smaller amounts than that for a better sense of what constitutes a big deal.
I think it’s usually a much bigger deal for growing tech companies because their stock price is basically a guess about their future growth and so getting lower growth than expected implies a big change to future size/revenue of the company and therefore the stock price. I think the effect is much smaller for established companies that aren’t expecting big changes or growth rates.
I think logic of the comment I replied to above was incorrect. The reason that growth numbers have a big effect on stock prices is that they cause big changes to the “company in N years time” posterior distribution. However the comment was suggesting that the numbers are important in the short term and one can tell by analogy to stock markets. But the markets aren’t looking at such an immediate short term so the analogy breaks.
One can decide that Twitter is in a good or bad state but I think one should want a strong foundation rather than relying on faulty analogies.
i see the backlash against Musk is already at the “Trump”, “jail” levels. it’s quite funny to see so many people lose their mind over something that is of no real importance.
Big businesses have an interest in stability (business as usual is predictable) and in being left leaning (pretend to care about people, lobby politicians to lobby for policies that entrench you in a position of power), it's to be expected they won't like change and that they won't like Elon.
I don't think Elon cares too much tbh, he's obviously going to pivot Twitter into something like Line in China which does everything. I'm half expecting payments with crypto soonish.
Trump biggest mistake was not to decrease public spending. You can't really scream at big government while doing exactly what your opponents are doing. He was decent policy wise and was positive for the economy. Overall he did much better than I expected out of a reality show contestant.
Berlusconi did some good things policy wise but ended up facing a system that doesn't want to change. Italy doesn't have any hopes of redemption.
The government is designed so that radical change is impossible (it's different in the US).
Italy will keep on piling on debt until the government completely chokes the entire population and the country collapses.
Trump and Berlusconi share a lot. Elon is crazy in his own way and pretty different.
> Trump biggest mistake was not to decrease public spending. You can't really scream at big government while doing exactly what your opponents are doing.
Of course you can, it has been the republican modus operandi for 40+ years now:
> Berlusconi did some good things policy wise but ended up facing a system that doesn't want to change.
as Italian: Berlusconi is a convicted felon who got into politics to fix his problems with the criminal law and mostly succeeded. he was the first one not wanting to change anything in Italy. He basically stalled my Country for 25 years, because that system got him where he is today. Only a fool would kill the golden goose.
Trump is trying to do the same.
it's not a judgment on their political affiliation, which I oppose, but that's not the issue here.
the issue is they are very bad men, with very bad ideals, not surprisingly both of them admire dictators and totalitarian leaders.
Berlusconi is still bragging, still today, about his close friendship with Putin.
Musk is just not a political leader, yet, but as a influencial personality in the tech space his behaviour has been not very dissimilar from the other two.
Using his influence to convince people to support things that would only benefit him? check
Bullying competitors? (via twitter) check
Bullying critics? (via twitter) check
addressing other leaders like a tugh in a street fight? check
seriously, this happened for real! (facepalm emoji)
Having said that: one thing is gonna be interesting.
If Elon Musk succeeds to relieve Twitter from his reliance on ads and convince enough people to actually pay for the service, making it a real product, that would make him a great entrepreneur with very bad manners, but still a bad human who is gambling with people's lives and careers just to prove a point.
I don't know who said it, but the real point of buying Twitter was to prove he could buy Twitter. He doesn't really have to care if it burns down, he's not going to be out on the streets from it like the rest of us. It's futile explain what he's doing using any other logic.
I don't disagree. I think he bought it on a whim because to show that he could, in the same way that a football fan might say they could run the team better than a manager.
Then he realized it was not in fact a good idea and backed out of it.
If a football fan actually does buy the team, and finds out they could not, in fact, run it better, they might amend their story to, "Actually I just thought it would be cool to own a team," in order to save face.
I think that's a more likely scenario: much like the hypothetical football fan, in a fit of zeal he said, "I could run this better!" If the goal were simply to flex his bank account, there are so many better ways he could have done that that I think we could safely assume he would have picked one of those instead. He may not be as smart as he thinks he is, but he isn't stupid.
I don't think it makes sense to apply you-and-I logic where actions have consequences to a billionaire. He obviously never had a business case that would make twitter worth the premium and extra billion dollars a year interest it's paying now.
So my point is not that he doesn't want it to succeed, it would obviously be a great personal embarrassment. It's that the risk of destroying a community of millions of people was clearly lower on his mind than the power trip of how cool it would be to own Twitter. He can afford to not care, and that's a deeply depressing situation.
There's an upvote/downvote mechanism that you can use to provide feedback.
HN does sometimes position itself in opposition to Reddit. Nothing wrong with Reddit, of course, just that Reddit does thing sone way and HN does things another. And snarky low-value comments are one of the things that Reddit does and HN does not.
But: because HN doesn't generally do them, you can sometimes get away with the odd one, if it's timed right. Personally, I upvoted this one.
Dang needs to step in and put a warning at top in each of these threads (I think he did it once in one of the main threads). Those tend to be really helpful. The discourse aroung Elon Musk on HN is seething with irrational hate and not a whole lot of sensibility.
I feel like I should hit the 10k karma point and bail out of here. I definitely do not fit here ideologically, politically and intellectually anymore.
Nah, just an arbitrary point to stop. I used to get so much back from HN community, all kinds of cool ideas and great overall discussion. These days even those discussions have become strangely elementary and appealing to lowest common denominator. I am constantly downvoted here for going against the grain and it's not that much fun. That's made me more resentful and I also downvote everyone else. Nevermind the extreme progressive politics here. It is not mentally healthy. It could also be that I am changing and going offtrack mentally.
I feel you on this, but I don't know if HN is the problem. This culture war has broke a lot of people's brains (regardless of what internet communities they're part of), to the point where nuanced discussion on any topic is rather difficult nay impossible.
For people that are captured by this form of thinking, everything is framed in for or against terms. If something or someone can be placed, even conceptually, as against their side; they fail the purity test or make a decision that isn't strictly kosher, well then every single thing they do needs to be hyper analyzed, then framed in a dispassionate if not fully negative perspective.
Like you, I'm getting very tired of this discorse. I'm sure for people who view things this way it can be exhausting, as you constantly have to be reframing everything in ever evolving terms of political doctrine. I don't think this will last. Ordinary people are getting tired of it, and I think these puritans are starting to get real pushback in the open. A totally anecdotal opinion, but hopefully one that resonates a bit.
In anycase I think the best thing we can all do is try our best to be objective, compassionate, and nuanced when evaluating people or events. Life is complex and its elements don't fit into a binary of good and evil.
You might try only engaging in things you find will provide value to you.? You mention politics and it can be difficult to discuss those topics today, especially online and more so when people can be essentially anonymous and trollish.
I personally stopped using Twitter, try to limit the scope of my engagement on Reddit, and am trying to read more of what I would consider reputable sources of information instead of ‘going to the comments to get the real facts’. I’ve found using RSS and just reading articles (rather than going into the comment section to get takes) has been somewhat helpful.
Also just disconnecting every once and I while is helpful. But it kind of feels like I personally am addicted to the information…so that can be hard.
Sorry for the rant, just wanted to share what I have found somewhat helpful. Cheers
The right Twitter feed will probably feed your curiosity the right way. That's where I am pulled these days. Maybe Musk's long-form promises might actually make it viable. HN is definitely not the place for aggressive independent-mindedness these days.
Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—things like article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.
Maybe you're always logged in there or have ad blocking that knows how to remove it but if you view twitter not logged in and scroll down a bit you'll get hit with an undismissable prompt forcing you to create an account to continue reading.
(certainly not the only one, but what is irritating people in this sub-discussion).
Just visit twitter.com on iOS Safari in private browsing mode without logging in, and see how you far you get. The twitter experience for those without an account is fucking awful.
I opened the post link in an incognito window and it looked fine. The main difference was a footer asking me to log in or sign up. Maybe all the stuff you remember was removed?
I have to be very careful how far I scroll down when reading threads. If I scroll a little beyond the last reply, I get a "See what's happening" full splash screen. Extremely frustrating when you have these X/? Posts and have no idea when the actual end is without checking for existence of the next.
It was not obvious from Elon tweet that the lack of sales already happened back in May. And apparently many other people thought he is raging over events of last week only. Twitter issues are larger then that and started sooner. Firing of account managers or blocking ad buyers on Twitter were just last step in issues.
The special industry event where many companies sell and buy ads a year in advance at discount is the context I did not had and many people did not had.
No. But, it probably cemented twitter decision to insist on selling it. Advertisers being unsure and afraid in between time was know risk (based on what I read about it).
If the ads produce results, then the advertisers will be back as soon as the dust settles. This isn't even a question. Businesses follow the money. If Coke doesn't advertise, Pepsi will happily pick up the slack, etc. It's only a question of short term losses until Musk learns to shut his mouth.
If it turns out ad money is just being flushed down the drain because most of the views are in fact bots, as I suspect, then Twitter has a whole other challenge.
Twitter is known to be a weak digital ads platform. By its nature, its format is not very suitable for ads that directly end up to conversions but it's more of brand ads. Brand ads are hard to accurately measure its immediate effectiveness so it's important to get advertiser trusts first. I think the previous leadership was able to convince advertisers to allocate an experimental level of budget with bunch of initiatives on brand safety over several years.
But Elon simply blew up the foundation they've built just within a week and now he's blaming "activists" for "advertiser boycotting". But in the reality, it is just a really good justification to pull off advertising budgets from Twitter since it's been largely "experimental" and ad agencies don't want to be blamed for any uncertainties from this leadership change. And you know, everyone want to be as frugal as possible these days and digital ads is a kind of soft budget...
I think this is mostly not true. The missing ads here are high-end (as advertising goes) brand ads. This isn't the blender you just looked at on Amazon following you around or weird tricks to remove belly fat. These brand advertisers are not just looking for lots of people to see their ads, there are lots of places they could buy that more cheaply, they are looking for prestige, trust, respectability, etc. This is why you see these ads on the NYT but not on gun forums. Ad space on Twitter is worth far more if the advertisers have guarantees about what their ads might be shown next to (and if Twitter has a good reputation).
I think this will all work out fine in the end, the unique thing with twitter is the exact people who lead these boycott campaigns... are all completely obsessed with using twitter. The author of this thread is a prime example.
And the ads are placed on the feed not on a piece of content (like the issues youtube was having).
Elon should just deploy a "woke bubble" option where your ad is sandwiched between posts from two liberal elites. The audience would still be broad as just as many people follow these people to laugh at them as to support them.
> Elon should just deploy a "woke bubble" option where your ad is sandwiched between posts from two liberal elites.
The reality distortion field behind opinions like this is truly bizarre. Trans makeup artists got demonetized on youtube by the same advertising industry. The vast majority of advertisers don't want their ads shown next to anything remotely controversial. They don't want a "woke bubble" they want a "broadly palatable platform."
If your feed is mostly QAnon and you like that, advertisers aren't going to "reach" you in a woke bubble. If twitter becomes an unmoderated cesspool, that's the userbase, and it won't attract the "general audience" that advertisers are after. Even if free speech means twitter must host all user-generated content, it still doesn't mean you can force normies to read it.
I wanna know more about New Fronts.