this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2023
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Ad revenue is down (at least) 50% and they just keep making decisions that kick people off their platform.
I’m pretty sure Twitter advertising and Reddit advertising are in a race to the bottom to see who’s going to have to pay companies to put ads on their site first.
It’s insane to watch this happen. I remember watching the rise of Twitter as a kid and it becoming ubiquitous with social media, only to see it crash down this quickly.
I’m speculating, but I’d guess a lot of functionality is being limited because they don’t have dev staff to maintain it, as well as trying to cut server costs as much as possible. I’d honestly be surprised if musk was making these decisions because he thinks it’s good for the health of the platform. There has to be some ulterior motive for it.
It is unfathomable to me how Reddit isn't profitable.
Facebook makes a mint by telling advertisers, "trust us, we'll get your ads in front of people who might buy your product based on a lot of inference around their fairly generic profile data plus some tracking cookies". One guy should be able to sell a billion dollars worth of ads on Reddit. Just put up a form that says, "which subreddit do you want to advertise in?" and "what's your credit card number?". That's it. They have like 10,000 completely segmented markets just sitting there full of hundreds of millions of people who have self-selected to be members of those communities.
We spend hundreds of billions of dollars collectively trying to figure out which google search terms might find us a few more solid leads. Reddit has an amazing list of them for every company in the entire world. How in the everloving fuck have they managed to blindly bumble around for two decades without ever falling into the giant pile of money in front of them?
Yes, yes fucking exactly, how is it not an automatic gold mine!? This vexes me as well.
This theory requires them to have sufficient devs to implement a new feature. That also seems unlikely to me
They have plenty of devs, but they're all the worst in their field. How else could they take a fully developed app and turn it into the dumpster fire itbos today?
It’s usually not the devs who make the decisions on what to implement; that only happens in the early days of a site when the owners are also the devs.
C-levels looking to make money are pulling the strings. The devs at any large site just have a list of user stories to burndown.
Right. Never underestimate the absolute stupidity of hierarchies. (Corp bureaucracy in this case).  Stuff gets done just to make people look good based on who can tell the most convincing lie, not based, primarily at least, even on what would be good for the company as a whole.
 Devs, in most cases, are at the very bottom of this all, and therefore pretty much less responsible and have the least autonomy over what they do
Are you saying you can't find top-tier developers who are willing to work countless hours for no pay?... what now?
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It wasn’t cheaper than paying the contractual penalty, but if he had done that, it would have been his debt and not Twitter's.
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It’s funny how the biggest fuckups are happening to the platforms that critiqued the billionaire class the loudest.
Hmmm
It wouldn't surprise me if this was what is really going on musk spent 44 billion which is far more than twitter was ever worth he basically got tricked into buying a company that has never made money and now he's trying to get it to make money
He fucked himself into buying it by knowing nothing about how business acquisitions work, no one tricked him. He was and remains still a fucking idiot.
It wouldn't surprise me if this was what is really going on musk spent 44 billion which is far more than twitter was ever worth he basically got tricked into buying a company that has never made money and now he's trying to get it to make money
He didn’t get tricked into anything. He massively over offered and then when Twitter accepted his offer he realized he fucked up
Maybe I'm miss remembering but he made a huge offer realized it wasn't worth anywhere close to that then realized he faced a huge fine and sec investigation if he backed out and was basically forced to buy twitter
The problem with this remembering of events. Is that what would be more costly. 44 billion dollars. Or a fine that he would be able to pay off with an hour or two's earnings. And an uneventful SEC investigation? And if the 44 billion was the better of the two options. Then what is he hiding that the SEC would absolutely own his ass over? And why is it a good thing that he's hiding it?
If you look in to the court case, he was 100% going to be forced to buy it. There was a penalty fee for backing out but it didn't apply
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/05/13/elon-musk-cant-just-walk-away-from-twitter-deal-by-paying-1-billion.html
I'm no rich billionaire with insider knowledge but my confident guess is he could finance it on his terms or be forced to liquidate stock to pay straight cash. He chose the option that wouldn't very possible take him out of the top .01%
Only if it went to trial and the contract held up. So no not 100%. And even then he was only in that position due to his ignorance and hubris. Elon isn't a smart man.
Agreed, but the writing was on the wall that he was not going to win - the judge had previously sided with sellers in these kinds of contracts in other cases.
If it had gone to trial and he was ruled against, he would have VERY likely been forced to settle the transaction rapidly with his own capital, rather than have time to arrange for the financing that he ended up using.
I think it's pretty clear in retrospect - he stubbornly tried to get out of the purchase while people who were smarter than him kept telling him he needs to start accepting reality that he's going to own twitter soon. Finally he gave in when he realized he had a lot more to lose than a few billion, or maybe he got a call from daddy who told him to stop being a moron and arrange a loan.
It's very unlikely though that it would have ever gone to trial or been settled against him. The last thing Twitter would have wanted was discovery on the case. Musk makes a lot of bullshit claims. But Twitter did too. And having to go into Discovery to prove that they were not trying to be misleading etc would not have gone well for them. They would have settled in a heartbeat for a song. It's great and all to see Elon eat crow and flounder. But I wish we could have seen the Twitter execs doing it too. Oh well.
I think a big part of it was that he announced he’s buy it for a ridiculously over-valued price and their stock surged as people bought in so they could get a slice of the pie.
If he didn’t follow through that would have been clear stock manipulation and, unlike dogecoin, there are more severe repercussions for that…
That's just an argument for not having billionaires who can do that sort of thing though. Especially fucking morons like Elon who've accomplished nothing of real note in his life beyond having money. Though sadly in America and much of the West that's all you need to have for people to worship you. We really are a bunch of sick monkeys.
I think he's already been in trouble with the SEC over alleged Tesla stock manipulation (using Twitter to claim he was taking the company private at 420 a share or something), so maybe it could have become a real mess, so he decided to just go ahead with the deal.
He also manipulated crypto with his oversized influence through Twitter, though afaik the SEC can't do shit about that as crypto was (and still is) basically unregulated.
One of the sanctions the SEC seeks for repeat offenders is a ban on serving as an officer of any public company.