But network effects businesses are really hard to kill. Sure, Musk has set $20-30 billion on fire and Twitter is rapidly decaying. But imagine taking a resilient business like a McDonald's franchise and subjecting it to Musk levels of chaos. It would have been out of business long before, instead of merely shrinking significantly.
Well, not anymore.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/05/technology/twitter-ad-sal...
Is "VC" tech's catch-all for capitalism? Reddit is pining to go public and Twitter just LBO'd. Neither is having its chain yanked by venture capital.
Unfortunately any platform that draws >10 million daily users will reliably have people calling and offering billions of dollars to adopt that strategy and chase after revenue growth. Eventually the owner breaks down and agrees to take a huge personal payoff in order for the company to adopt a "Double or nothing" policy. Over, and over again.
There's too many enormous piles of money out there seeking a return for this to be a sensible self-regulating system with stable provision of goods & services.
Holdouts are few and far between, like Craigslist.
Twitter and Reddit are just run by incompetents who can’t figure out how to advertise anything relevant.
Trying to monetize that at scale is hardddd.
Facebook has got groups, yes. But they have instagram. Messenger. Whatsapp. They have my friends and family. They have my photos going back 10 years. Facebook is personal to many people.
I don't see Twitter and Facebook being interchangeable.
Facebook is astoundingly profitable, and is the canonical example of network effects. Almost everyone I've ever known is or was on Facebook.
So I don't consider Network Effect Businesses to be terrible as for-profits in and of themselves.
The issue perhaps is that there is an expectation that they can become Google or Facebook.
Now we have a generation raised on social media that doesn't require your real name, maybe we will see a new platform reach Facebook levels.
TikTok and YouTube are obviously huge, but slightly different again to Facebook.
As an aside, people talk about how amazing Tik Tok is, but in the end, it's really just the creators uploading content that make it work.
Facebook captured Advertising dollars, in part, by investing in Ad infrastructure and building tools that companies could use to create targeted Ads. Every other platform, apart from AdWords, felt unfinished, especially Twitter!
The events leading up to the US 2020 election are burned into my mind. Sure people tend to talk about the craziness of the US far-Right but the non-centrist Left also got attacked and censored.
In one case a popular Youtuber on the Left (Kyle Kulisnki) had posted some commentary on independent attack ads that were extremely negative to the Democratic party. That led to a multiple threads on Wikipedia calling for the deletion of his page.
After 3 attempts to remove his page by the same editor, it finally got removed on the 4th attempt.
[1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio...
Watching this whole experience play out in real time was utterly disgusting and showed me how the site has since become captured.
Its a shame because despite calls for secondary sourcing in my experience many people do in fact trust Wikipedia whole heartedly. It is really dangerous that leadership did not clamp down on this behavior when it was happening. Now they have exposed themselves to attacks from the far right and eventually people with a lot of exposure (People like Musk) might call them out(if he hasn't already). That will begin the slow slide into half the country not trusting the site at all and their minds being made up no matter what Wikipedia does.
Interestingly the page was recreated over a year later after the election was over but the lasting damage has been done. I presume that in the next election it will be targeted again.
We see this behavior on other platforms such as Reddit during election season and you can be sure that Musk is whipping up something big for 2024 (and his rivals are probably developing some sort of countermeasure) but I thought I could always count on Wikipedia being a place of refuge. I guess not.
However, the drawback is they had a lot of great ideas for improvements but the power users throw a fit over any changes.
On the other hand there are sites like Danbooru which seem to thrive without advertising probably because the nature of their content drives advertising away.
I know that is a minefield of issues regarding access and moderation and it would make it a frequent election day financial harassment target but it would be nice to have something that is publicly funded, ad free, and not vulnerable to deep pockets stealing the entire system from the people.
I think doing feature development on big socio-technical systems with an entrenched user base, is fundamentally hard.
All of the BigTech companies are built on network effects and two sided markets
Musk keeps picking fights with vendors; the latest feud with Google means they may soon lose significant trust and safety tooling. Twitter keeps losing staff, Ella Irwin being the latest, and word is that they're running skeleton crews for core functionality, with a lot of the current staff being people who are trapped in the jobs by visas and the like. That suggests we'll be seeing more messes like the failure of DeSantis's campaign launch.
And that's all off the top of my head. If you want to read more, I'd suggest Casey Newton's articles on it; he's been covering it pretty well.
Yes, lot's of people tried Mastodon as an alternative, but I still see almost all my followees on Twitter.
That explains why the rest of your comment doesn’t make sense to me. IMHO Casey Newton is a vulture journalist. He specializes in exaggerate and twist every minor problem he can find in tech companies.
https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-removes-autocomplete...
Somehow hearing this story made me picture my daughter, 10, searching for cat videos.
There have been other examples beyond that cat video too, that just got a lot of attention.
I don't think Twitter has ever been a place for children.
Not that it's any better presenting such videos to 13 year olds. Or adults, for that matter.
https://time.com/5209144/google-search-engine-algorithm-bias...
Overall this comment is weird to me. Does this show Elon was wrong and the org should continue being massively overstaffed and burning money like before?
I don't recall it being truly necessary before, though there were annoying banners sometimes.
But right now "age restricted" tweets require a login, and the thing that makes tweets age restricted is the presence of images plus a very buggy per-account setting.
As a business, it's obviously fucked. Revenues are down, regulators are circling and it's difficult to see them recovering when Musk has made a habit of publicly pillorying his customers.
Granted, it was the last boom's RJR-Nabisco/Harrah's Entertainment top-tick LBO, so it started the race ass first. But it's difficult to see Twitter avoiding restructuring, a necessarily distracting and value-debilitating process. (On even a generous revenue multiple, its equity value is zero.)
Musk's only face-saving exit is to fold when a foreign regulator fines him.
Anecdotally, due to Musk's support of extreme-right views (for example re-inviting Trump [2], supporting DeSantis [3], or protecting bullying [4]), many people have left in protest and so these views are over-represented on the site.
The word "decay" seems appropriate.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/26/technology/elon-musk-twit... [2] https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/19/business/twitter-musk-trump-r... [3] https://slate.com/technology/2023/05/elon-musk-ron-desantis-... [4] https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/elon-musks-new-twitte...
I dunno, look at private equity buyouts, which Twitter kind of resembles—Musk somehow convinced banks and Twitter itself to foot most of the bill for his purchase.
The whole point is to avoid putting money into the prey company by saddling it with debt, while you squeeze every last cent of value out of its living corpse. It can take a long time for companies to die when this happens: Sears is a solid case study from recent times.
https://ivyexec.com/career-advice/2018/sears-case-business-f...
Considering how little of his own money Musk spent on the deal, I wouldn't be surprised if he was just having fun lighting a huge pile of other peoples' money on fire. He's obviously gotten bored with his car and spaceship toys.
Good for you and Musk! So proud of people who can put money into something and lord over it because of capitalism.
Yeah, maybe if what users are actually doing is bully each other you shouldn't support that.
Could quote tweets be used by ringleaders of mob abuse? Sure. But the solution to that isn't to remove the feature. There are many other ways to deal with that, including banning the people who enjoy fomenting mob abuse campaigns.
