The people claiming that Twitter still being up proves they were vastly bloated need to read the following paragraphs until they "sink in":
> Our entire account team turned over multiple times in 2 weeks. We had multiple people (AE, AM, analyst, creative specialist) supporting our account and they all vanished without so much as an email. We finally got an email with a name for an AM last week but they quit and we don’t have a new one yet.
> Ads UI is very buggy and login with SSO and 2FA broken. One of my campaign managers logged in last week and found all our paused creatives from the past 6 years had been reactivated. Campaign changes don’t save. These things cost us real money.
That's the engineering bias at play. While I agree that can still be "up" with a skeleton crew of DevOps and SREs, being "up" doesn't mean making money. It completely ignores the fact that Twitter makes their money on B2B with advertisers and even in 2022, those are human social relations. Firing the people on the Twitter side of that equation destroys those relations and ultimately the dollars they represent.
It's perfectly natural for an engineer to de-value B2B relations - I expect it, but at the same time that's the grain of salt we should take when we read an engineer's hot takes.
It's also what Musk's fans often refer to as 'moving the goalposts.'
Keeping Twitter up is not success for Elon
He needs to make it worth well more than the $44bn he paid for it in order to achieve anything resembling success; the Twitter is going to crash thing was just a dumb hashtag, no one believed that he's just let it go down and stay down.
what would that even look like? Yet, not achieving that insane failure is now what people cite as success.
> Twitter is going to crash thing was just a dumb hashtag, no one believed that he's just let it go down and stay down.
I do think Twitter is likely to crash. A machine can continue for a while if you stop maintenance, but at some point you'll run into a problem that needs intervention, and Twitter has lost enough of the people who know how things work that there's a good chance they'll have a serious outage.
I don't remember if I read it here or somewhere else, but someone noted that if you remove all the fire extinguishers from a building, the building will keep standing, but watch out when a fire starts.
Yep, it's pretty hilarious to me that after all the grand promises made about improvements Elon and his cult have been reduced to boasting hysterically about Twitter just merely still being up and running.
I don’t get the cult thing. I encounter way more people who hate musk, often times irrationally than I do big time supporters. I’ve seen plenty of positive takes on him but not people fawning over him. Maybe it’s because I don’t use Twitter and that’s where they’re found but at least the platforms I’m on are dominated by people calling him a muskrat and stuff. Is this anyone else’s experience?
> I don’t get the cult thing. I encounter way more people who hate musk, often times irrationally than I do big time supporters
I encounter way more people who hate scientology than people who praise it, that seems consistent with the cult label.
I'd be curious to know some of the "irrational" reasons people dislike Musk, I think people's dislike of him is pretty understandable: he's a dishonest businessman and a partisan troll.
I have no doubt that most people, let alone people who have accumulated that kind of wealth have done plenty to deserve some ire. It’s the focus on him that can make it seem irrational and like it’s more because he’s a loud mouth. There are a lot more businessmen doing substantively worse things for the world that don’t catch an ounce of hate. For me that looks a little superficial and does resemble something closer to hating a pop culture icon.
> There are a lot more businessmen doing substantively worse things for the world that don’t catch an ounce of hate
I'm certain nobody likes those vaguely described bad things and would agree those "substantively worse" things are worse. So what? The topic is Elon and thus we see people's reaction to Elon.
> I don’t get the cult thing. I encounter way more people who hate musk, often times irrationally than I do big time supporters.
These things are not connected, it actually makes no sense to say that. I know many more Musk haters than fans but at least 2 of the fans I know are definitely into the Musk-cult where they believe everything Musk does is great, that he has no flaws and any perceived flaw is just a tactic for him to get even further. They really do subscribe to the Musk 4D-5D chess stuff.
That's a cult behaviour, they are just into the personality of Elon Musk with no regards to his actions. The successful outcomes of Musk validates, to them, anything he does, like he is an infallible demi-God.
That's the cult thing.
Really not sure why you are conflating with how many hate or love him, there's no connection to that, at all.
That’s my whole point though. That I don’t encounter those people and my only exposure to the cult is people who hate him/it talking about it. You’re even telling me it’s a much smaller group than implied by all the references to it. I don’t know what is so confusing about that?
I used to think I hate Musk, then I realised I can't stand the fanboys who keep repeating talking points without possibility of engagement(you can't reason with those) and have no problem with Musk and I actually appreciate his way of thinking and it's worth listening to.
Musk lost quite of non-fanboy supporters though, over they years he did things that not everyone can stomach. No one forgot his pedo guy accusation for the diver who saved the kids from a cave in Thailand.
A long time Elon hater here. It is very infuriating to see this guy do anything and people cheering him on. Everything he does is more infuriating then the last, and I can’t help hating him more and more every day. I think this is a very human feeling. I also think it is very healthy, we should hate people that hold so much power through their wealth. We can’t elect him out or anything, the only thing we can do is hate.
> I also think it is very healthy, we should hate people that hold so much power through their wealth.
War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength, hate is healthy?
How is it "healthy"? Sitting there hating some random person you don't know "more and more everyday"? That sounds like someone who needs therapy or, at least, a new hobby.
"on the left?" Why is everything politicized? It's not like the Democratic party is pushing for the collapse of Twitter. How is saying the moves Elon is making are risky a "left" position? Why does everything need to turn into politics? Why can't people just be criticizing the way Elon executed the acquisition? Is the "right" so obsessed with billionaires that any criticism has to come from "the left?"
I say this with no animus whatsoever, but I would be shocked to learn that's the reason Musk bought Twitter.
I have no private insight to his motives, but profitability / vanity / dozens of other motives seem a lot more likely to me than spending $44 billion to fix a censorship problem, even if that does make for (selectively) good marketing.
It seemed like a PR move that went horribly wrong. He got trapped by the offer that he probably thought he could back out of. I am sure he's all for free speech, but he tried so hard to kill the deal it makes me think he never really wanted it.
I suspect that both the "this is the backout penalty" and the SEC looking closely at him for trying to manipulate the price of Twitter discouraged him from backing out.
He was able to use it as an opportunity to sell some other significant amounts of stock as part of the "I am going to buy Twitter" that he would likely have been able to keep as cash if he was able to successfully back out of buying Twitter (though he's containing to sell stock).
All of his business associates in this are right-wing activists. Why did right-wing activist and non-tweeter Larry Ellison offer Musk a blank check to finance the Twitter deal?
No, I asked the specific question: Why did Larry Ellison invest in Twitter?
It was a terrible business deal if your concern was profit. Even Musk says he overpaid, and the previous investors of Twitter were clearly eager to get out of that investment, going to court to force Musk to buy it.
If you read the text messages between Musk and Ellison, which came out as part of the trial, Ellison was offering Musk basically any amount of money, a blank check. Why?
I don't know the answer to the questions you asked, but it's worth pointing out that "overpaid" can just as likely mean "I could have gotten it for cheaper" as it could "I paid more than it is worth."
The point is that Musk didn't acquire Twitter for business reasons. Nobody thought Twitter was a great financial opportunity. He acquired Twitter in order to change Twitter, for whatever his actual goals may be: "save humanity", "free speech", shits and giggles, etc.
But no one was talking about "the left" or "the right" until you brought it up. The predictions from "the left" is something you feel adds to the conversation. Why? Why do you feel criticisms of the way Elon is running the company are associated to the "left," when plenty of neutral and non-partisan sources have called into question the way he is running the company?
The fact is some of the criticism of him is legit and I personally don't like the way Elon has promoted Tesla (bordering on fraud). But it's obvious the outrage is mostly selective. So Elon firing his well paid staff is worse than Apples hordes of child labor for years? Compare the reaction.
Nobody here was until you did. I would hope that HN would be above that stuff. We always complain that the MSM gets engineering work wrong. We value our own understanding of technical stuff better than the MSM's understanding. As such, I'd be curious how many were referencing laypeople or the MSM when they talk about Twitter's technical capabilities and risks here. I certainly would have assumed that we're all just talking about technical stuff as technical people, forget the laypeople and the MSM.
> I am not on the 'right', but it's clear the left and media have been using twitter as it's coordination and messaging infrastructure
You are not on the 'right' but calling out the 'left' while omitting the GOP (Trump, MTG, et al) and associates (Ben Shapiro, Tucker Carlson, et al) from your assertion.
If those on the right have not used Twitter for coordination and messaging, then they are far behind the zeitgeist. If they are, then you are likely not aware of that, or if you are, intentionally omitted that fact to make a point.
The difference between Zuckerberg “wasting” $100B is that Meta is still a cash generating machine and has been since before it went public. Twitter has been a listless barely profitable shit show and now has to service more debt per year than it has cash flow.
> it's clear the left and media have been using twitter as it's coordination and messaging infrastructure
I don’t tweet/have an account and I browse only in private mode. Why do I see so many right-wing trolls? Kirk, Owens, Boebert, Sorbo, etc, a whole cadre of extremists intent on creating an angry mob, and countless other anti-social, lying, and hateful lunatics… they’re all there, they frequently appear in the “you might like” tweets after the linked tweet’s thread.
If you see twitter as “the left,” I suggest that may well be a result of the personalized engagement algorithm, because the untracked user is seeing a much broader range of tweets.
Some people just cannot tolerate free speech. They have to use any method to shut it down including ad hom attacks and using labels like ‘cult’. He’s owned the platform for a few weeks. What changes do you expect are possible in that time?
They're not boasting that it's up and running; they're boasting that the people that tweeted about Twitter burning or going down are idiots. And they are idiots.
If they're boasting about anything, it's that Twitter is getting more users, is faster, and there's less hate. Before Elon, Twitter was a place where employees were paid $180k to endlessly redesign icons and have DEI meetings. The new Twitter is a lot leaner.
But Elon has also stated multiple times that Twitter is the best and most accurate place for news. This is directly contradicted by the fact that the "twitter is burning down" rumor was spread on twitter and lots of uninformed people believed it because they saw it everywhere on twitter lol.
I will openly admit that I did believe that he managed to do enough damage with his firings that the remaining engineers won't be able to keep it running because some critical teams and their institutional knowledge have been completely lost. I'm still surprised it's running so smoothly.
Based on what I've heard from former engineers there, there are still plenty of opportunities for things to go very wrong. Maybe not this week or this year, but the sheer amount of lost knowledge means they're really skating on thin ice right now.
If they were to have a seriously catastrophic incident, it's conceivable that they might not have anyone left who knows how to get things back online. It's not inconceivable that they could eventually figure it out, but without that essential knowledge, who knows how long that could take? I imagine it would be pretty bad for Twitter's future if the site were unavailable for days or weeks on end.
George Hotz is asking on Twitter for people to solve his problems for him, because he is incapable of doing basic web development things like removing the login pop up: https://twitter.com/corg_e/status/1595287073547862018
A brilliant programmer isnt asking on twitter for ''a oneliner i can paste in the console'' to fix something that is basically not much harder than a take home assingment for a job interview.
George Hotz is an amazing technical person but you are putting him in a pedestal of Saviour that... Isn't really how technical stuff works.
Twitter is a quite complex distributed system, as good as geohot is he's just a guy, with one brain, capable of holding a limited amount of information and context at a time. There's no way that one guy, no matter how good, can actually completely reason about all aspects of a complex system.
Even less in 12 weeks, that's actually absurdly preposterous.
Reductionism is pretty dumb and tired already, it works well for hot takes (on Twitter nevertheless) but not really to properly discuss something.
If you are a SWE you should probably know that issues in complex systems are not about full disks and certification renewal. That can and should be automated as much as possible, that's not the issue and repeating it sounds dumb as fuck.
I think it's more likely Twitter gets hacked. The turnover, loss of organizational knowledge, lack of compliance department, lack of proper onboarding for new hires, etc all make a social engineering attack far more likely. Plus a plain old security vulnerability gets more likely as they try to add anything to Twitter without the knowledge they used to have of how it all works. This is likely one of the reasons the blue check has now been delayed indefinitely.
It seems bizarre to call this moving the goalposts. You don’t have to list every single goalpost any time you mention one. Especially when these are extremely obvious goalposts like “the site should be working” and “the ads sales tools should be working.”
But Twitter/Musk's detractors are moving the goalpost. The initial argument was that twitter would not be able to function without much of the staff that were fired, that they were somehow imperative to the site staying up. Now that it's been over a week, and the site is taking on more traffic than it has in a while, the goalpost is being moved to "this will never be profitable".
I understand people hope it will fail, because they don't want to admit how useless much of the staff these big tech companies have accumulated over the years are to the core products. But, you will only be setting yourself up for disappointment. Elon has done much more impressive things with a small team of "hardcore" engineers (as he puts it). I think many sticking around are the type not to shy away from a challenge, though again I understand many are not in a position to be playing competing in the workplace.
> The initial argument was that twitter would not be able to function without much of the staff that were fired,
You are missing out some important nuance there: no one said it would fall off the earth immediately, that it would cease to function right now. Many, myself included, have said we think it can't function long term, or even medium term, like this.
Day to day running of the main app is all automated when things are OK so it will keep ticking over as long as someone says the infrastructure invoices. The real test comes when there is next an infrastructure issue or some other fault: are the right sort of people there to resolve it quickly? Also do they have a good combination of people around to work on those bugs those advertisers are concerned about and other maintainence & improvement (of both the app and the other infrastructure it and the company relys upon)?
If we get rid of all car mechanics your car won't break down immediately, but good look getting it sorted easily when it eventually does develop a fault.
Twitter was somewhat bloated, I agree there. But what has happened to it in recent weeks is far more damaging than that could ever have been. It needs to turn around very quickly to survive financially and technically, and I think the chances of that happening are small.
> no one said it would fall off the earth immediately
This is very disingenuous, there were hordes of people claiming it would be down in 24 hours, 48 hours, after the weekend etc. and there are still masses of people still saying it won’t last two weeks. At this point so many people have cried wolf loudly and repeatedly that I think the best option is to believe no one unless they are reporting first hand facts that can be independently verified. Everything else is just hot air.
> > > The initial argument was that twitter would not be able to function without much of the staff that were fired,
> > You are missing out some important nuance there: no one said it would fall off the earth immediately,
> This is very disingenuous,
Fair, I matched hyperbole (the implication that a majority were saying something) with hyperbole (staying no one was).
Let's go with no one with a clue who is unbiased by direct connection.
> there were hordes of people claiming it would be down in 24 hours, 48 hours, after the weekend etc
If this pot may comment on the a kettle's underside for a moment: "hordes" may be as disingenuous "no one". It was said by some angrily¹ on their way out and repeated and amplified by the mob that is Twitter² users.
And that outgoing team didn't say it would fall down in any time frame IIRC: just that things could not run without them. I would read this as a medium/long term view, the social media amplifier read it as "it dies in 3, 2, ...".
----
[1] rightly so, but the emotion does reduce the ability to maintain objective reasoning
[2] one of the selection of reasons I have for not using Twitter aside from occasionally looking at a message linked elsewhere: it is too full of certain types who think Twitter is a good idea!
From my perspective, most people were saying something along the lines of Musk is going to tank the company within a week. Or something along those lines.
Which… by all evidence he has. The corpse of Twitter might shamble on for awhile. He might even sell it down the line for pennies on the dollar. But he’s got to turn a billion in profit just to pay down the debt. Best of luck with that.
Tank can be many things. Like for example. Would the ex-shareholders buy back the company at stock value it had before Musk completed the transaction? Or where would the company in current shape be valued at?
My money is a critical hardware failure somewhere. Certs are known to be an issue and many companies have them. Twitters hardware is probably far more bespoke.
As the sibiling comments have already stated, that nuance was entirely absent in the claims people were making.
Twitter is a glorified message board. You don't need more than 50 engineers to oversee that. Wasn't instagram and whatsapp overseeing >250m DAU with around that many engineers before their acquisitions?
You don't need more than 50 engineers to run a glorified message board, but you sure as hell do to run the ad spend management front-ends that actually pay the bills.
Twitter-as-140-characters-shouted-into-the-ether can be 'built in a weekend'. Twitter-as-a-business-that-makes-money is an entirely different machine.
> Mr. Musk also issued an order to slow or in some cases halt transfers of funds to Twitter’s vendors and contract services, the people said. Any expenditures for services need to be approved by Mr. Birchall, three people said. Mr. Musk has since declined to pay for the travel services incurred by the former Twitter executives, the people said.
> ...
> Mr. Davis, the president of the Boring Company, has also directed Twitter employees to renegotiate the deals that the company has with firms such as Amazon and Oracle, which provide computing and tech services, the people said. The employees were told to suggest to those companies that Mr. Musk’s firms would not work with them in the future if they refused to renegotiate, the people said.
> After Twitter’s contract with one software vendor expired under Mr. Musk’s ownership, that company voided a discount it had given to Twitter, one engineering manager said.
Having millions of DAU is potentially hard, but not the most manpower intensive part.
The hard part is monetizing.
What was the revenue Instagram and Whatsapp were collecting at the time of their acquisition? Likely 0.
The moment you start collecting money, signing contracts, besides the non engineering work like legal and finance, not to mention sales, you will need to do a lot of tracking whether you delivered what you claimed you sold.
Didnt Facebook get in trouble for exaggerating ad metrics?
And that's on top of all sorts regional compliance requirements over GDPR, cookies, which require both engineers building stuff as specified by legal, which wasnt required before because if you have no revenue, you dont really need to worry about getting sued or banned in the region.
> The initial argument was that twitter would not be able to function without much of the staff that were fired, that they were somehow imperative to the site staying up.
Again, what does this even look like? Twitter.com returns 404 and everyone gives up?
At least make straw man arguments that are reasonable.
Two separate things there, just as you point out: being "up" and being profitable.
But my original criticism was about all of the hysteria in the last two weeks about Twitter "going down". Those sky-is-falling tweets got very little pushback. The claim was not about profitability or advertising; there were only these shrill voices claiming the site would stop working. And when that didn't materialize, all the people making those claims just went about their business without any personal repercussions or call outs. It was all just motivated by irrational Musk hatred generated by politics. It had nothing to do with technology. You can still see these tweets right now, a lot of people didn't delete them when Twitter didn't burn.
I always held out the possibility that Twitter could die, but if it does it will be a slow death. It all depends on if the new payment model generates enough cash to offset advertising losses. So in that sense I agree with her conclusion.
Things like emotion-based statements. Excessive exclamation points. Complaints that have no basis in fact and no proof. Classic example: "Twitter is burning LMAO!!!"
And likewise, it's easy to keep a service "Up" if you don't deploy any code changes. Unfortunately, feature launches, bug fixes, one-off backfills, and all the other nonsense that comes with actually running a business tends to require deploying code.
You can fire everyone and fully re-staff the firm, and eventually get to the point where you can do all of those things safely. But it's going to take a hell of a long time and downtime to shake out all the things that can go wrong in the myriad of unplanned interactions between different services.
I don't expect Twitter to crash and burn in the sense of the website being down and not coming back up. But I do expect feature velocity to grind to a halt, until all of these self-inflicted wounds are staunched.
He still has a few hundred people who couldnt afford to lose their job due to H1B status, and probably a couple dozen people who are members of the cult of Musk.
This is so damning. Twitter always had mediocre ROI as an ad platform in my experience. Now it is literally becoming dangerous for your business. Imagine a 10-100k per day ad campaign from years ago being made live by buggy software and not realizing it...
There was definitely a bug and everyone knows. No one is going to pay for the accidentally reactivated campaigns, and if Twitter tries to force the matter it'll turn into a bunch of expensive individual suits plus at least one expensive class action for them.
Twitter advertiser here. Even before the takeover Twitter advertising was broken and unreliable - starting a new campaign on a desktop would fail as the payment UI loaded a bunch of internal DNS names and failed.
Note again: this is a few weeks BEFORE Elon took over. So yes its broken, I think they generally weren’t working particularly hard on it before either.
This is likely temporary and advertisers have a short memory. If the platform starts targeting people more effectively and CPMs / CPCs are decent, they will be back. Most of this should be self-serve with third-party marketing agencies helping clients anyway.
There's a bunch of bugs. I got to reload more often than previously as tweets don't load. In the DMs view it tells me all my contacts joined Twitter in 1970. Bunch more of those small things. The core works, but there is a notable degration. I also assume that can be stabilized with acceptable (to Musk) effort and then it loves on, while they rebuild knowledge about old and work on something new (be it new features or a new replacement system)
There are discussions around a WeChat-like "everything app" I can speculate that one of the "success" paths is to have that "everything" is somewhat built around Tesla, which is quite a pivot, but hey, don't you need a Tesla Assistant communicating with your friends and providing your news during the commute and for paying for coffee while AutoPilot guides you thought the boring tunnel!? And then selling it to Tesla and thus offloading some of his debt to Tesla shareholders (see SolarWorld)
Sure, will take a bit, especially so that SEC and other Tesla shareholders won't go after him, but an independent IPO seems far off.
> Twitter nonsense has me using Twitter more than before. It’s like Cubhouse a year ago.
And it's mostly news about Twitter itself. It's hard to scroll without having people talk about Elon Musk. Had to unfollow him and still getting Elon related tweets, it's boring to say the least.
I believe this was the result of turning off the "get rid of all the microservices " directive Elon pushed. I don't think it was malicious; some badly name microservice that was probably in charge of sending text messages or generating session tokens was shut off and the dependency chain wasn't fully understood.
>AdsUI
Anyone spending enough money for Twitter to case likely has an account manager who does everything for them. Anything that isn't in the "happy path" of the AdsUI probably gets handled by some engineer making some API calls to a prod API because it's unique enough to not worry about putting AdsUI and urgent enough where someone had to take care of it now.
> Anything that isn't in the "happy path" of the AdsUI probably gets handled by some engineer making some API calls to a prod API
Prior to going private, Twitter would have had recurring Sarbanes-Oxley audits. Auditors understand the need for occasional emergency break-glass methods of making manual database queries or API calls, but they are less tolerant about that being a normal way of operating.
Plus, if you use emergency access often you'll eventually waste more time explaining each individual access to auditors at the end of the quarter than it would have taken to just implement a UI for the feature in a code-reviewed and audited internal admin console or user-facing UI.
> Anyone spending enough money for Twitter to case likely has an account manager who does everything for them.
Did you miss the part where they are cycling through AMs several times a week? ("We had multiple people (AE, AM, analyst, creative specialist) supporting our account and they all vanished without so much as an email. We finally got an email with a name for an AM last week but they quit and we don’t have a new one yet.")
> Anything that isn't in the "happy path" of the AdsUI probably gets handled by some engineer making some API calls to a prod API because it's unique enough to not worry about putting AdsUI and urgent enough where someone had to take care of it now.
LOL who? They can't even hold on to undifferentiated sales people for more than a week at a time.
Coke and Nike don't directly deal with twitter tho. Agencies deal with all the delivery of adverts to the different advertising platforms. The agencies use what ever is available. They would sit and make dozens of different sized video files to fit different adverters specifications to upload into Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, etc.
That's only when the budgets are small that they pawn off the execution to some operations intern. For large budgets you have every chef in the kitchen on calls with the Twitter's Ad Sales manager who in turn will make sure all the assets work in the system.
> One of my campaign managers logged in last week and found all our paused creatives from the past 6 years had been reactivated. Campaign changes don’t save. These things cost us real money.
That....can't be coincidental, and smells an awful lot like fraud.
Large accounts >$1mm spend routinely get zero support on platforms such as Facebook. That side of the business also goes through ridiculous re-orgs.
This quote makes it sound as though they had an AE/AM visit them every week ? Most advertisers count themselves lucky to hear from the ads teams once a quarter outside regular scripted emails.
That’s not my experience at all. My employer is way below $1m annual spend on FB and our in-house ad manager has regular check-in calls with a FB rep who is local to our city. Same with Google and LinkedIn.
Those teams help grow revenue. The more help they give, the more the advertiser is likely to increase their spend. They do a lot of heavy lifting to help educate ad teams about about new ad products and software changes.
This should not be controversial. Startups should become profitable not weapons wielded by rich investors that disrupt society while they get richer.
Uber and AirBnB got rich by being subsidized and breaking regulations. Uber is now just a normal taxi company except its also national duolopoly with Lyft. DoorDash and Saucy sold me on grabbing groceries: except now they don’t have half the items they advertise and make money by sink costs (fine I’ll settle for X.). My orders are wrong or cold and even when I get a completely wrong order door dash takes a few (Uber eats is the same)
Our entire economy is a bloated and artificial mess because of VCs pumping companies and money being so free there was no risk.
Uber never got rich. They are still blowing billons of VC money every year and realistically there's not really a path to profit when laws and regulations have to be obeyed.
I've had a support ticket open since Saturday for 2FA. (Didn't try sooner than that, but the timing of when it stopped working suggests it's possibly related to Elon's tweet.) No response on my support ticket and it still doesn't work.
Thanks. I’ve seen folks report problems with 2FA (which since resolved). Correlative evidence is indeed evidence, but yet it is still not as strong as causal evidence.
If I've got something that needs an hour of care every week by a sales person, https://xkcd.com/1205/ puts it at about 10 days (two weeks) of work to make it more efficient.
However, if shaving that 1h a week off takes more than 10 days of work, it is probably better to leave it as it is.
We've got a PEF of 8 there. Note that this is the pain for the hypothetical sales person - not the pain for the end advertiser who the sales person works with.
So, what's the risk of making the change to make it so that the sales person doesn't have to do that 1h/week task? How much effort does it take? How easy is it to verify that its actually working?
And so now we've got bugs where we can put them on a grid and say "these fixes are the low hanging fruit" while "these other ones are risky and don't get us much."
Its quite possible that that this issue would never get into the "this is painful and so we need to do the analysis for it" or "this is low hanging fruit that can be fixed and have a big impact on 'stuff'".
Nonetheless, you've got something that takes 1h/week from someone who knows what they're doing with their accounts... and they're not working there anymore. Even in a perfect org, this could fall apart rather quickly.
The attention economy seems to be "forcing" people to jump to conclusions as fast as possible to write that viral post "X is dead", "goodbye Y", etc.
You can't just call for a business model change after only two weeks of such a radical management change. Twitter positioning is very strong and there is no real alternative/competitor. If users keep using Twitter advertisers will come back.
It is tiring and makes seemingly smart people look dumb.
This ignores the fact that Twitter was never a good ads business. Even in its heyday, it had a fraction of the ad revenue of Meta. They were just showing users less relevant ads, meaning less value to advertisers and less revenue generated.
You confidently state that they’ll be back if there are users. That’s not true. They’ll be back if they think their RoI will be better than alternatives. And it’s unclear if Twitter is capable of providing more value than YouTube, Meta, TikTok etc.
I half suspect the only reason Twitter had the status it did is because all the news organizations pushed it so hard. Hell, it did all the hard work of finding interesting "new/hot" topics for them to cover. Made their job easier, and it's with the journalists I see a lot of concern and fear over where Twitter is heading.
Of course others used it too, but the 'news cachet' meant a lot too, and helped convince others to use it too. I could easily see journalists fears helping to keep the ugly bastard going. Glad I never wasted my time on it.
Twitter had a team dedicated to working with news organisations to surface their content throughout the app. The leader of that team quit yesterday.
People seem to think Twitter is this almighty power that everyone was begging to work with but actually it's the opposite. Twitter was out there hustling for any relationship they could get.
As advertisers are saying, what Twitter really had going for it wasn't that it was a great place to advertise so much as it was a very engaged ad sales team that leveraged their agency and advertiser relations for all they were worth. Gutting ad sales (and mocking the concept of brand safety) is Musk -- whether he realizes it or not -- burning the advertising bridges behind him and forcing him to commit entirely to this idea of Twitter being a subscription-funded service. Now, Riedy's a long-timer who's held senior positions in both US and EMEA ad sales, so there's what normally would be considered a steady hand at the tiller, but not clear to me if he can keep the ship afloat under such a mercurial owner.
Discord is the closest thing to a successful subscription only social media business. Compare what Nitro offers to Twitter Blue.
Twitter Blue is like buying the “I am rich” app while Discord Nitro solves actual customer pain points.
Discord has about 10% of their active users paying for Nitro by my calculation based on available information. Twitter getting anywhere close to that level is not likely. Discord has been building their service around paid features for years.
Luckily, Twitter has a large and skilled engineering team capable of quickly rolling out valuable new features to entirely change their business model!
(Sidenote: has anyone ever heard of a generally stable ~10 year IPOed tech company pivoting so drastically? It’s insane)
When on vacation earlier this year I saw ads in a language I don't understand.
Think about that: For 16 years Twitter management was so sclerotic that they were unable to perform basic improvements on targeting ads. Instead their focus was on trendy but money-losing projects like hexagonal profile pics for NFT users.
This is indicative of deep structural problems at Twitter, and won't be tolerated by Elon
When I went on a vacation to another country, I saw an ad for an ISP in the tri-state area 10 times. Friends, I have never been to the tri-state area in my life. I don't live in the US. I have no idea why I saw this.
This is a mobile app! You can get a coarse location, good enough to not show me an ad meant for an area 12000 km away. And yet, Twitter could not manage it.
That ISP wasted money by advertising on Twitter. Eventually other brands will realise this as well.
>They’ll be back if they think their RoI will be better than alternatives.
The RoI will be better than alternatives if Twitter ads are cheap enough. TikTok and possibly YouTube aren't profitable either, but they have inherently higher expenses. If Facebook and Instagram can be profitable, that means that there's a profitable company inside Twitter somewhere. I'm skeptical that Elon can achieve this, but that doesn'tean it's impossible.
>This ignores the fact that Twitter was never a good ads business.
Twitter had >5 billion in ad revenue. Facebook isnt the minimum threshold for good revenue.
It isn't a winner take all system. Meta might get the lions share, but that doesnt mean there is no room for competition.
Costs are adjusted to get similar ROI. Meta might get more clickthrough per add and command a higher price, but Twitter can compete with more adds for the same price, resulting in the same ROI.
Not if they can’t prove the ROI vs other ad channels. They will just move spend from Twitter to better performing platforms, or even into other marketing or sales activities entirely. For most brands, Twitter isn’t the sole place they can target their audience.
As the article points out, large enterprise clients require a human relationship and that’s something hard to provide with a massive staff cut.
They also don’t tolerate their brand being used alongside extreme content, and Twitter is telling the world that it’s going lax on moderation. Elon stated that directly in the recent tweet where he described the shadow banning process.
Twitter is looking at $1 billion a year just in interest payments, which is basically a 20% increase in total expenses compared to 2021, and they’re facing lower revenues.
No real alternative? Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Snap, Pinterest, YouTube, Reddit, Tumblr…
On top of that, any sales professional will tell you that competition includes doing nothing. Advertisers can just not spend and wait out the Twitter situation, especially during a recession.
Elon is going to need to show advertisers that he represents stable leadership rather than posting memes of women’s asses with Twitter logos on them. He’s not used to running a company where customers are buying a product that projects the customers’ own image into the world.
You know how Zuck is a boring G-rated robot? Advertisers love that.
I mentioned in another reply, but none of the networks you enumerate have the same value proposition as Twitter.
For example today, I'm watching the World Cup.. Argentina just conceded a goal... I want to see reactions, memes, etc. Too soon for Youtube, uploading videos takes time, TikTok is too random.. Too soon for Tumblr and Pinterest.. Snap format is weird.. Reddit also might have something but I want a shorter format, reactions from known celebrities and sport commentators.. Instagram has some stuff but it is too picture centered... and then comes Twitter, exactly what I wanted, a quick fix of the now, some funny replies, I scroll a little bit, I go back to watching the match.
In the real world people are using Twitter the same as they were before Musk, and if the this trend doesn't change or even improves, advertisers will come back.
If there are eyeballs there are ads. It's a fact of nature (sadly).
Please tell me something that millions of people pay attention to daily that isn't plagued with ads.
Twitter was always the 'commercial break' of the internet. Ad spots on TV and radio were 15-30 seconds. On twitter you got 140 (now 280 characters). Its always been advertising. Sizzle clips, strong sentences with no meat. Why would you pay for advertising on a website whose entire purpose is advertising. Maybe their ad targeting is not strong. The risk now is you're supporting someone promoting hate, violence, lies..... Maybe someone is still there that honestly likes twitter and doesnt like exposure. But its always been the internet's commercial break.
There are so many competitors for Twitter. Every social media platform is an alternative. Twitter's only moat is the network effect, and they are ruining any chance of that being maintained by making the experience awful, not moderating the platform and reinventing people who the majority of users don't want to hear from.
Snapchat, TikTok, Hacker News, and LinkedIn are all social media sites. In the sense that you can only pay attention to one thing at a time, sure, these are competitors to Twitter.
But as far as actual content, value, or user experience, none of these are direct competitors. How exactly would the White House or your local school district go about making an announcement on TikTok?
It seems like the content, user experience, and value to the user are not necessarily relevant to the customer, who is the advertiser.
In that sense, I think all the other major social media platforms are direct competitors to Twitter, probably better ones at that considering how often Twitter content is shared around as screenshots and quotes instead of funneling users into data-collecting apps.
The advertisers just want to get their message in front of someone who is paying attention and fits their desired attributes.
At least for me personally there aren't any real alternatives.
* Facebook/Meta: I'm a life long non-facebook user and never will use any facebook product.
* Reddit: I'm on Reddit and have been for a long time but moderators ban people on a whim constantly for the slightest disagreement. My primary account has been banned from several major subreddits for a long time. Any community that grows to any size becomes a cess pool. It also doesn't work for news, as news is delayed by up to a day before getting any kind of traction.
* Mastodon: Becoming a left wing echo chamber that mixes the worst parts of Reddit and the worst parts of Twitter.
* Truth Social: Don't get me started...
* Forums: I still use a number of site-dedicated forums.
How does that different user experience and format affect the customer? By customer, I mean advertiser.
Why does an advertiser go to Twitter over Meta or TikTok? That’s the real question to be asking.
I’d make the argument that the content format is very nearly irrelevant to the advertisers.
I can understand why an advertiser goes to Twitter instead of more defined niche ad platforms like Yelp, Google Maps, and iOS App Store.
What customer can be reached on Twitter that can’t be reached in Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok? In my mind, if advertisers are spooked by Twitter, they’ve got plenty of equivalent alternatives.
What’s to stop any of its current competitors from making a Twitter clone, one with moderation? If he can’t keep advertisers, Google or someone else could leverage their already existing network effects to take Twitter refugees.
> Google or someone else could leverage their already existing network effects
Google tried this taking on Facebook. It didn't work because network effects cannot force someone to a new network. Heck, it almost killed YouTube in the process of getting Google+ their network.
A lot of this is a self fulfilling prophecy. There are many people who don’t want the “new” twitter to succeed and being vocal about it will result in advertisers leaving the platform making the whole thing collapse in on itself.
Twitter doesn’t have a valid competitor though (no mastodon is not it) so Elon might end up pulling it off. I hope he doesn’t though and I’m going to do what it takes to influence that decision.
> Elon might end up pulling it off. I hope he doesn’t though and I’m going to do what it takes to influence that decision.
Wow. That’s a pretty mean-spirited way to go through life. Why not put your efforts into building something positive instead of trying to tear others down?
The problem with that goal, even if one were to assume your assessment of him is correct, is that you'd be advocating for the end of adoption of electric vehicles and keeping humanity a single planet species forever, thus increasing our existential risks.
Since his success metric for launching Tesla was the success of green tech itself rather than Tesla's market share and his goals for SpaceX were similarly broad rather than purely financial, making a point of trying to make him fail is also negatively aligned with long term civilizational outcomes.
It would take a very petty person to hope that we go back to throwing away rockets after a single use, just because they have a beef with the person in and inspired others to build a reusable one.
If you feel that the 2018-2021 era version of Twitter was its ideal state, that's defensible even if a bit odd. But hoping a platform millions love fails, just because of the guy who bought it (and has a track record of doing great things for humanity), then your goal sucks.
It’s pretty bizarre take to think that just because Elon has done amazing things for humanity (which I’ll take at face value), that you should root for him to succeed at whatever he does, regardless of how destructive it is.
I hope he fails hard at this and returns to making rockets. Tesla could disappear at this point and I don’t think it would matter, but SpaceX feels important still.
Well hopefully you're not implying that's my take, because I don't think you should root for him to succeed at everything he does.
I think you should focus on what you want to make in the world rather than how to hurt others.
Even within the scope of companies to destroy, Twitter seems like an exceptionally poor target. Is Twitter really so much more threatening than Apple, Google, MS, FB, Tiktok, Tencent, any company marketing cigarettes etc, that it's worthy of setting aside all the productive things you can do with your life and make it your ambition to bring it down?
The amount of negative energy focused at it is downright pathological given its size and impacts, IMO.
“The problem with that goal…is that you'd be advocating for the end of adoption of electric vehicles and keeping humanity a single planet species forever”
I don’t care about Twitter itself, but I hope that Elon’s cruel and destructive approach fails.
And I’m not so entranced by his self-aggrandizing mythology that I think him failing at Twitter will have any impact whatsoever on adoption of electric vehicles or our ability to get to space. Give me a break lol
> ”I don’t care about Twitter itself, but I hope that Elon’s cruel and destructive approach fails.”
Cruel and destructive?
That’s quite the extreme and bizarre interpretation of recent events, and it’s not very charitable. I hope you find something a bit more positive to focus your energies on.
The truth is, neither of us can know what the long term consequences of the leadership change will be but it’s almost certainly not worth doing this to yourself over it.
> you'd be advocating for the end of adoption of electric vehicles and keeping humanity a single planet species forever thus increasing our existential risks.
Even if you thought that we could become multi-planetary (incl. not just getting to other planets but living there in our current human form), thinking that Elon Musk is the only person on earth ever who could make this happen is pretty cultish. I mean, come on. Do you really believe he is humanity's savior?
Also, you completely missed the point. Since his ultimate goal with SpaceX is a multi-planetary future, the only way to make him “fail” at that goal is to ensure a single or zero-planetary future for humanity.
Now you are redefining what failure looks like. I'd bet most people that don't want 'Elon the bully' to succeed are talking about their businesses failing (e.g Twitter going down). If you're somehow claiming Musk's succeeds even if SpaceX fails as a business but another company from another founder succeeds in making a multi-planetary future, that's quite the mental gymnastics, but, whatever lets you keep the saviour image of Musk you have I suppose.
Thanks for the nudge on the guidelines, you're right.
You are however redefining the meaning in this conversation or just not really aware that no one here wants that 'mission' to fail, we want Elon's methods to fail because they set a bad precedent for current and future leaders.
It's only in your opinion that is what he is. If you've actually been following him in detail for any length of time you'd realize that doesn't really describe him.
“Pedo guy”: bully, even ignoring the borderline abusive behavior over the last few weeks.
Narcissist? The fact that he’s nominally head of 3 companies, trying to execute a dramatic turnaround on one in real time, but still tweets constantly.
Certainly, he has many positive attributes. But, quoting Steve Rogers, I don’t like bullies.
The Pedo guy was one of the dumbest things Elon has done. But it's worth noting that the guy had used a sexually explicit insult against Elon on TV immediately before that. It didn't come out of nowhere.
Elon stupidly went much further. Elon is mean to people who are mean to him and nice to people who are nice to him. That makes him kind of easy to manipulate.
Neurotypicals (and those with higher social intelligence) know you're supposed to pretend to be nice to people who are mean to you.
I guess you can find excuses to defend anyone, including bullies. I mean, most bullies were bullied and abused themselves, so there's that. What's the excuse for the other points raised by the OP though? + a bunch of other stuff such as firing people and announcing it on Twitter over people disagreeing on Twitter with him?
I find amusing all the mental gymnastics Musk followers are doing these days. It does seem like a personality cult.
I used to look up to him, read one of his biographies, etc; Plenty to admire from his achievements, but his most recent toxic behaviour and shitty management style has really changed that.
The problem is that this is a unique case. If Twitter 2.0 succeeds, then it sends a signal to the capital class that they can proceed in buying up tech companies and gutting them to the bone. The power that Engineers have will be severely reduced and I suspect that avenue towards a respectable middle class life will be further eroded. Hell if Twitter only lasts a few more years, Elon has the potential of turning it around enough to sell it, getting the credit and the profit and letting someone else hold the bag. In this case its not a matter of mean spirited or not. This is a silent war going on and the other side could care less about being nice.
To be honest, I think maybe engineers' talents would be better spent on things other than optimizing ad placement and toxic engagement. So I'm fine either way...
If Twitter 2.0 succeeds, then ad-reliant "tech" businesses will be gutted and engineers freed to do more constructive things... if it fails, then one of the most toxic websites--toxic even before Elon, of course--might go under. But I think that's wishful thinking.
I think it wont stop at ad-reliant tech companies. Twitter 2.0 succeeding will show that you can force Engineers to work in much harsher conditions for less pay and that will become the norm. They become the same as other blue collar roles. Just surviving and not thriving. I've often felt that was a motivating push behind "Learn to Code", bootcamps and other initiatives. Engineers have been blessed to have this unique power over the capital class. Its a once in a generation (or two) opportunity and that class is trying to find any way it can to wrestle back that power.
His agenda and what he’s enabling is incredibly mean spirited to large swaths of the population to the point where it observably increases violence against them. In contrast, my hope that his financial venture fails isn’t all that destructive.
I find it difficult to believe that "embracing the idea that what is legal should be legal on a platform designed for conveying speech" should be considered evil. Unless you believe that American law with regards to speech is also evil.
What's remarkable to me is people cheering desperately for Tesla to fail.
Also weird that people were both cheering for Elon to be forced to buy Twitter, then mad that he bought it.
Then cheering for Elon Twitter to fail (hoping for advertisers to leave even before any layoffs were announced) and then lambasting Elon for being so mean to lay off people (how can they stay employed if Twitter's revenue fails?). It's really weird.
I don't know how this ongoing "Twitter revolution" is going to turn out (out of pessimism, I bet the likelyhood of success is 3:7) but it does seem that musk et al. at least diagnosed correctly when saying that Twitter needs to find new revenue sources (other than ads) - NOT because there's anything inherently bad with ad money (there is!) - but because it is now clear that advertisers were not sticky on Twitter ad platform since they are so ready to jump ship en mass within weeks.
I have long heard about the idea of the great deception that is online advertisement despite the fact that in last couple of decades people have argued of how effective it is and how critical/unavoidable it is to advertise on certain platforms. It seems clear now that Twitter at least is not a critical platform for many brands.
> advertisers were not sticky on Twitter ad platform since they are so ready to jump ship en mass within weeks.
They were not sticky to Twitter, the platform, alone. But to Twitter, the platform, coupled with Twitter, the organization, and the high engagement of its relevant ad, sales and advertiser relationship teams.
Which is where Musk went wrong, because that was part of the company that he needlessly drove out. The exact opposite of bloat! At least until an equivalent revenue stream was secured.
Watch him turn it into an OnlyFans clone... seems like the only viable subscription model to earn enough to stay afloat, porn. If he implemented AI Porn features, could earn more. With patrion/substack style subscription features for the non-porn content too, maybe it works?
Twitter would need a lot of subscriptions to justify a $44B valuation on user revenue alone. You'd need 16 million subscribers paying $8/mo each just to cover operating expenses. Maybe Elon can bring opex down (firing everyone is a start, I guess?); maybe it is just a vanity purchase after all, but there is a reason that the advertising model is so dominant in social media, and so hard to avoid. Reddit has done everything it can to grow direct user revenue for years now and it's still basically an ad company.
True but reality is more nuanced than that. Case in point, Truth Social also "has eyeballs" but is there any respectable company investing in ads there?
For better or worse, the type of eyeballs also matter, increasingly so I'd say.
Well to be fair, if you think you can give Twitter a better revenue source that eventually captures more value for Twitter, you can think a long play makes sense here.
I don't think most ads are critical to specific platforms, especially if those platforms take a sudden turn of ownership. I'm sure if Facebook got bought out, somehow, and the new ownership started telling all of their ad clients that they have literally no plan for them, they would also leave in droves. [My understanding is that this is what Musk effectively did during an end-of-year reestablishment of annual advertising contracts, thereby Twitter got a lot of clients leaving the platform.]
This is just a second hand rehash of an anonymous and unverifiable comment on Blind. If there's a real adverising exodus, there must be better sources than that.
Incidentally, I’ve been seeing more ads than ever before on Twitter. There’s a promoted tweet every four tweets in my timeline. I’m pretty sure this is more than it was previously. It’s annoying!
I am not not using one. On iOS Safari, with both firefox focus and wipr blocking content, the “promoted tweets” are not blocked. But the ads on every other site are.
That means little for the long term. What happens, is many companies do such things to "make a story of it" to appease some advertising base, and then quietly when no on is looking, or cares, in a few months companies quietly re-allocate budget back to such media channels.
If Musk is upset over losing $4M/day, then losing 1/4 the revenue stream for 3 months should be significant. He cut HC to help pay for the interest on the purchase loan, cut revenue for 3+ months. In the process, he fired the very people who might be able to coax advertisers to return.
That sounds to me like a flywheel of failure or a death spiral, self-inflicted.
Yeah, but isn’t the issue a long term problem now? If he is committed to little/no moderation, when would things change in a direction that would bring advertisers back?
If he wants a free speech free for all ala 4chan, he’s going to have to find an entirely new way to monetize that doesn’t rely on ads.
This theory is that rather than the change itself driving advertises away, it's outrage about the change that's driving them away. In which case they could be expected to only stay away for as long as the outrage persists.
I’m saying as long as brands can’t be guaranteed their ads won’t regularly show up next to horrific things, they won’t come back. Especially since they weren’t great To be fun with, having significantly smaller numbers of advertisers than their competitors.
Advertisers could just be pausing till the dust settles - which it eventually will. The faltering economy also is a good reason for advertisers to take this opportunity to revisit their ad spend. This could just be temporary, the next couple months will be telling. Until then it is premature to call advertising on Twitter dead
Both those things can be true. If many of the top advertisers pulled their ads then they could be going out to the long tail and showing a larger number of lower value ads to compensate.
It's also possible you're in an A/B test to show a different ad volume.
In general sample size of 1 for ads (or feed ranking) is hard to reason about.
It’s anonymous as execs compared to Twitter who will never admit to these issues. It also tracks with what little I know about advertising.
Also… I think advertisers don’t want to be the spotlight, their job is to make their customers the spotlight. Publicly speaking out is likely a huge faux pas.
> I remember advertiser exodus from YouTube and advertiser exodus from Facebook, twice. They returned, eventually.
One thing we will find out - did they return on their own, or did they return because of persistent sales calls from FB and YT? Those are the part of the cuts - Twitter lost some very high profile relationships with brands that spend big. And it's reach/scale rarely justified dedicated campaigns - I'm sure most agencies are happy to not spend 20% of their time on 5% of their reach, compared to G and Meta.
the most recent advertiser exodus from youtube was mostly stemmed because youtube put in significant work to increase their content moderation and improve brand safety - that was when all your favourite edgy youtubers started complaining about having their videos demonetized.
As that financial advertiser said the problem with Twitter is that the performance and ROI of their campaigns has plummeted. That has nothing to do with recession and it's nothing like Youtube/Facebook which had external and temporary factors.
It's purely to do with Twitter not currently being able to run a competitive ad engine. And it ties directly with a large proportion of the engineers and data scientists being let go.
Does it though? The ad engine was either in place already or it wasn’t. There shouldn’t be a shift in performance of the engine due to people being let go.
> The bigger problem is current recession. Budgets for ads are cut first.
Is this true? I've seen a lot of big budget ad investment from companies whose stocks have been tanking all year. It almost seems like they're trying to dig themselves out of a hole with marketing.
Unlike with engineering, there's very little practical or deep articles about issues like brand safety, etc. and most people seem like parroting the same arguments without anyone explaining why this is the case.
You can build Twitter clone from scratch without knowing anything about IT at the beginning and learn it on the process but you can't learn much about brands or advertising or marketing except for some high level talks.
I have no idea how so many people can analyse the Twitter ad situation, is everyone well versed in these topics?
I run a PR agency and in my experience, the bigger the brand, the more conservative they are. Many have dedicated brand teams who care only about how the brand is portrayed. Multiple independent departments would likely be weighing in on the issue. Unless Twitter was an enormously successful marketing channel for the business (it almost never is), why risk it?
Also, many larger companies advertise on Twitter simply to cover all their bases. If Twitter becomes an advertising pariah, higher ups are going to be asking the marketing team to justify staying. Given the mediocre ROI of Twitter ads in general, I think we will see many marketing heads err on the side of caution and recommend pausing until things get better.
So what's the risk here? What happens if someone sees an ad for Adidas above a tweet saying some bigoted stuff?
I can reason for Kanye being dropped by the brands after saying unhinged things, as they directly engage with him but in the context of web advertisement what is the mechanics of unrelated content damaging the brand?
The damage of a screenshot of the ads next to horrible shit going viral. Many brands probably also have concerns about potential subconscious impacts of the association, even if they would be hard to measure.
Brand teams at big companies, especially those in regulated industries, are incredibly risk averse. With Twitter typically being a small minority in a marketing mix, there’s a quickly diminishing benefit to sticking it out.
Add in a buggy ad platform that can steal your money? Lol nope.
Here is a quick screenshot I just took of Casio watch ad delivered by Google on a very popular Turkish website founded by ex Microsoft engineer displayed next to the topic of "Elon Musk getting rid of the Twitter managers of Indian origin" https://i.imgur.com/eO8uvsl.jpg
The content is similar to right-wing Twitter, someone says how the Woke are letting Indians replacing the whites of America and the others reply to these with counter claims. Typical alt-right BS is everywhere and this is just one example from a recent popular topic.
The website is pretty much what Musk promised for free-speech: Anything legal goes. Of course a lot of anti-govt stuff is removed all the time because, Turkey. But stuff like this stays and all kind of brands have no problem advertising here. The website is alive and well since 1999 and the founder is very well known person who moved to California for good(probably was afraid from the Turkish govt, they were arresting media bosses all the time).
My point is, that brand safety stuff might not be absolute. I get your reasoning but that reasoning doesn't seem to apply everywhere and I wonder why Twitter wouldn't get an exception too.
What you're missing is that Twitter is not a top-tier advertising channel.
They are a very distant 3rd behind Facebook and Google and getting worse by the day. So it's not like advertisers are desperate to run ads on Twitter. In fact it has been the opposite. Twitter had to go out of their way to convince advertisers to come e.g. brand safety teams, account managers etc.
And now that those teams are gone the status quo is actually for advertisers to not run ads.
I think it would have to be an exceptionally good ad platform for most brands to look the other way. It’s never been a great performer and has historically had way fewer advertisers than Facebook.
Because the juxtapostion of the ad with the offensive content makes it look like the advertiser endorses the content. Which in a sense they do because they're paying to keep the lights on.
> Because the juxtapostion of the ad with the offensive content makes it look like the advertiser endorses the content.
This isn't the case, not really. No one believes that Henry Ford has personally reviewed and approved every social media post that has an ad for Ford trucks next to it. That's just not how online advertisements work. (Consider that Gmail shows ads in your inbox, and that doesn't mean Ford is reading your mail.)
But activists and old-media and the like have managed to convince a lot of advertisers that it is the case. This happened relatively recently; the YouTube "ad-pocalypse" is less than ten years old. It'll be interesting to see how this perception changes in the future.
Advertisers are the ones with the power here. It is their money and there is a wide array of choices for them to spend that money. And they have made clear over many years that brand safety is important to them.
So if Twitter doesn't want to listen to them then they will suffer not the advertisers.
I'm not sure you replied to the right post. I'm not saying advertisers don't have power. I'm saying advertisers' opinions about brand safety don't reflect the real world, those opinions were formed relatively recently, and they might change their minds again in another few years.
If it helps, the situation is similar to Donald Trump's presidency. The man had power, but he frequently made poor decisions based on his incorrect beliefs.
"Replies to our posts with hardcore antisemitism and adult spam remained up for days even when flagged."
This seems like a serious concern.
Twitter advertisers never had control over the tweets that an ad appears between. That's pretty random. But the replies to promoted tweets are different matter, and they stick to the ad wherever it's seen.
Yeah, that's one area where claims of consumer confusion are a bit more legitimate. A lot of platforms let you delete replies to your posts, but Twitter doesn't, so people might see those and think "why hasn't this company deleted these replies?". (In fact, I personally am confused; I thought there were tools for hiding replies or disabling them or something. But I haven't used Twitter for a while, and maybe they don't work on ads.)
> I'm saying advertisers' opinions about brand safety don't reflect the real world
It reflects their world view which is all that matters when they hold all the cards.
And not sure where you are getting the idea brand safety is a recent concept. According to this [1] aligning content and brand has been an issue for over 70 years.
If United Airlines ads show up during a 9/11 documentary, the brand doesn't necessarily care that its their fault for buying ads on keywords like "New York flights". A screen shot will end up on Reddit regardless making fun of the juxtaposition regardless. Even even if Mr. United himself wasn't involved with the placement.
I believe Twitter "ads" are mostly promoted tweets; people can _reply_ to them. That's a significant risk.
(Incidentally, I just went to twitter to try to confirm my impression that they're always/nearly always interactive... It's no longer serving me ads. A couple of days ago it was at least showing me ads for online gambling and GPT-3-looking spam articles...)
It's easy to understand: people in most companies don't appreciate having their ads next to porn, extremist content, or violent content. Especially so when it's posted as a reply to the ads.
And maybe people don’t appreciate this but on Twitter, brands are totally dependent on Twitter HQ to moderate this content. That is because all the replies are tweets as well, and you can’t delete other people’s tweets.
On Facebook, in comparison, you can delete nasty comments on a post by your brand. Brand safety is far more in your own hands there. I think this is true on LinkedIn too, although I’m not certain. In general it is a much “cleaner” place because of the focus on real names and career content.
Pedos and prostitutes are fine, but you wouldn't want your ads for shaving cream to be next to some guy questioning the immigration or covid policies of his country /s
The part about them not liking is the obvious one but there's nothing about why they don't like it. Is it something like not liking pineapple on pizza? is it like not liking extremely muscular human body? Or does it actually have some kind of logic?
Because if it has logic we can reason about it.
I know for a fact that all those brands actually do advertisement on some websites where horrible stuff are discussed.
Look at who advertises on 4chan. Elon is taking the platform that direction. That’s who will be all that’s left if he doesn’t figure out content moderation and get his ads team and software fixed ASAP.
They likely had tools to make certain that advertisers that objected didn't show up next to new viral meme (so that Procter & Gamble didn't show up next to anyone who had the hashtag #tidepodchallenge).
They also likely had tools to say "this screen shot from one of our testers put our content next to {objectionable figure} - make sure that this doesn't happen again" for advertisers to contact their account managers and make it happen.
The account managers were likely quite responsive if {jewish owned company advertising / verified} said that they were getting people replying back with antisemitic responses when customers were asking for support.
The advertisers had someone to contact and make things right - and were ok with that.
> Getting word that a large number of number of Twitter contractors were just laid off this afternoon with no notice, both in the US and abroad. Functions affected appear to include content moderation, real estate, and marketing, among others
Note the "content moderation" and "marketing" categories of employees.
So it's not content moderation to enforce rules and such of the system, just content moderation to apease advertisers.
That makes so much more sense now why there's so much content that gets reported and stays online and you get responses that there's no violation despite it being clear violation...
I've reported so many tweets over the last couple of years, where people are threatening others with violence, posting graphic videos of animals being killed or videos from the Ukraine war full of overly graphic content and I just get replies that there is no violation and I just assume that it's an automated response unless many people report the same content.
It's a mostly human process, and the humans that pay money are the ones most likely to be heard first.
Many social media systems experimented with a purely automated system and had difficulty with automated systems that likewise reported everything that they didn't like and that resulted in the content creators getting banned for non-reasons.
This leads to needing to having a human check things - and humans don't scale.
Look at the stories of Youtube content moderation - both the humans involved and the false positives from when humans aren't involved - for examples of "why we can't have nice things."
They had figured it out to the extent that there was moderation. I’m not saying the old approach was the right one, but brands need to understand what will and won’t show up next to their ads. Right now, could be almost anything.
One example is when everday people see your ad and constantly see replies below it about The Jews, they can form unconscious relationships about antisemetism and your brand. Why would you risk this as a brand? You are paying a company serious money to promote your company the way you want it promoted.
People will screenshot the ad, and post complaints about it on Twitter. Asking why brand XYZ supports <abhorrent thing> and calling for boycotts. Surely that connects the dots well enough to see why a company would not want this?
I know what you're saying. Imagine the kind of experience you'd need to get close to the dynamics here and provide real insight instead of parroting what you hear/assume to be the answer because it sounds reasonable.
This goes for most corporate discussion on HN where everyone talks with the authority of someone who deals with it daily. Unless you do have those insights, it's not all that interesting to regurgitate what we, the peanut gallery, suspect to be true.
Man. If you had told teenage me that on the 2022 equivalent of slashdot, tech folks would attack a communications platform for offending the sensibilities of Fortune 500 advertisers, I wouldn’t have believed you.
"A large coalition of political/social activist groups agreed not to try to kill Twitter by starving us of advertising revenue if I agreed to this condition.
The condition he's referring to is the moderation council he had announced. Apparently they demanded a council, he agreed, announced it, and then they pressured advertisers anyway?
This sounds like Illuminati conspiracy from Musk. Who is this “coalition”, and why would they be making deals on whether or not to attack his platform?
Also if they were actually activist, why would they be satisfied with just a moderation council? Surely if they cared about causes enough to agree to not criticize Twitter, they would criticize it for other things that would pop up?
This sounds like Elon didn’t bother setting up a council (there was never proof he tried) and is looking to spin the story now that advertisers are dropping off.
Remember that key advertisers dropped off before he even announced the idea of a council. They even specifically mentioned that his erratic behaviour was part of the reason.
I think Elon is going for the classic “victimhood” play to garner sympathy.
I noticed that. There was an announcement of a council, people from certain specific organizations were part of it, then a day later I noticed those same organizations had joined on to pressure advertisers to boycott Twitter. Seemed weird and a bit disheartening, seeing that I was hoping for the various parties to come to some sort of mutually beneficial understanding.
I don't buy it. Ok, I'm not a veteran ad spender, but the claim that after two weeks on Elon-Twitter the metrics shifted so drastically that it wasn't worth it doesn't make sense to me. If anything there's more eyeballs on Twitter than before.
I haven't seen an ad on Twitter in quite awhile, because I read single tweets linked to from somewhere else. I don't have an account, I don't have the mobile app, and I don't browse a feed.
The advertisers will return eventually. I'm anti-elon and anti-twitter, but as much as I would love to indulge in the schadenfreude, the collapse of twitter seems totally unrealistic.
Yeah, seems most likely it will continue to run but won't make much revenue and changes will be harder.
It's not like HN or sites like 4Chan require a lot to keep running but if Elon is hoping to get some return on his $44billion then that now seems very unrealistic (which based on his desperate and now-defunct 8$/month subscription scheme I assume he is)
Yahoo still had other things like news and stocks once nobody was around for a game of Literati. What does Twitter have when there's no one left to argue aimlessly?
I know what you said. My point is that as long as there is a good supply of people wanting to argue pointlessly on the Internet, Twitter will have no shortage of same. I've had an Mastodon account for years; as others have pointed out, it's just not the same thing. (cf. the bien-pensant arguing over which is the "correct" server to join.)
The only way to fully replicate Twitter's ability for anyone to potentially address the entire world is to, well, replicate Twitter. No alternative (including, meta-speaking, Hacker News) suffices.
I definitely hope that Twitter can find a better business model than advertising, which I think is fee for service. That has always been the best way, especially for social media. All the disinformation, the serotonin economy, the harassment, the impersonation–ALL the ills are reduced with a fee for service model.
"For me, the best thing that has come from the Twitter dumpster fire is that I have been posting here instead. Let’s hope for a revival of the independent web, the platforms for which people pay, the Substacks and Word Presses and the like. The better internet we all deserve."
Totally agree. Would love for Twitter to be advertiser free. Will also put pressure on other social media apps.
Pay to promote tweets, perhaps? Kind of like the situation for brands on Facebook now, where "organic" reach is strictly controlled to encourage paid promotion, but applied to all users?
It might work if Twitter didn't have a billion dollars in debt payments to make every year, on top of their fixed costs.
I'm really interested in how this will turn out.
If he manage to improve Twitter after so many laid off I'll never take any big tech employee seriously ever again.
People speak as if twitter isn't going to hire more employees. Obviously they can't sustain themselves on the crew they have now long term. They have to realize this and they'll probably start hiring as needed.
> Obviously they can't sustain themselves on the crew they have now long term
How is this obvious? If you’ve ever been involved with someone leaving a team, you’ll understand there’s usually some chaos right after, as everyone catches up on absorbing some new responsibilities.
Now this, but spread throughout the company.
I think it’s too early to say that those who stayed are incapable of taking up the slack. Give them some time ffs. It’s only been two week.
So basically these companies are proving allegiance to a single political agenda. If you don’t censor those who are critical of people in power, (but only on behalf our specific friends who are in power) then we pull your funding. This has got to be the most unsettling thing I’ve seen in a long time, maybe ever.
I still remember when conservatives, including most of the talent on Fox News were going after companies like Starbucks for the crime of, gasp, using "Happy Holidays" decorations and slogans instead of "Merry Chrismas" ones.
That proposition got voted down by 15 points though, despite every state senate democrat voting for it, almost every state house democrat (3 abstained the vote). As well as major corporate backing. The yes vote, which failed by 15 votes, had 25.1 million dollars spent vs 1.7 million for no.
So if even the most liberal state in the union can't pass it, with such high funding for it, it doesn't seem like it's popular with the general population as you state. Again, 15 point difference, in California, with over 23 more million spent.
> Our entire account team turned over multiple times in 2 weeks. We had multiple people (AE, AM, analyst, creative specialist) supporting our account and they all vanished without so much as an email. We finally got an email with a name for an AM last week but they quit and we don’t have a new one yet.
> Ads UI is very buggy and login with SSO and 2FA broken. One of my campaign managers logged in last week and found all our paused creatives from the past 6 years had been reactivated. Campaign changes don’t save. These things cost us real money.