What's Next for Twitter? - Slashdot
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What's Next for Twitter?
What's Next for Twitter? (nbcnews.com) 158
Posted by EditorDavid
on Saturday July 09, 2022 @09:34PM from the after-Elon dept.Elon Musk no longer wants to buy Twitter, which now will "pursue legal action" simply to "enforce" their planned merger agreement, according to the company's chairman.
But however that plays out, Twitter is now in a worst-case scenario, one Wall Street analyst argues to NBC News:
Dan Ives, a managing director and senior equity research analyst covering the technology sector at Wedbush Securities, said Twitter's stock price stands to suffer significant damage.... "The company has been in pure chaos — people have left in droves, and now competitors are going to seize on the ad dollars. With the employee turnover, it's going to be viewed as damaged goods from another potential buyer...." Ives believes the damage to Twitter's value has only just begun. "When you have a cult figure like Musk — one of, if not the, most followed person in world — calling out Twitter, now it has a ripple effect that's hard to quantify," Ives said. "From advertisers to employees to the political firestorm that could ensue," he said. "For Twitter, it's not about the court battle and the legal ramifications, and how that plays out, that will be debated by lawyers. But it's a public company that needs to be run, and now it's hanging in the wind."
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Why can't he build a competitor to twitter from that? Spend $3 billion on servers and software development (use the open source twitter clone software like mastodon.) Offer the top 4000 twitter and tiktok people $10 million dollars cash to switch over exclusively for one year.
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Or spend just 20 billion dollars getting influencers to switch or at least advertise the new company and the another 20 billion bucks on a bot army to spam Twitter telling eople to switch. If twitterâ(TM)s bot detection sucks as asserted it should not be a problem.
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Or even better, he could find 44,000 cancer sufferers and fund their treatments.
But, yeah, I guess another social network is cool too.
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That's a nice well meaning answer, but rather than fix the problem of individuals why not instead address the underlying issue that that is the USA healthcare system?
Buy a man to fish and he eats for the day. Teach a man to fish...
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Elon is more of the âoegive a man a fire, and heâ(TM)ll be warm for a night, set a man on fire and heâ(TM)ll be warm for the rest of his lifeâ school of thought
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Fair point, let's change the analogy then.
Build a man a fire and he'll be warm for the night. Set a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
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Because people who invest into building a better future do not sink money into dead end projects that have little to no hope of providing long standing betterment for mankind.
The choice being proposed was between cancer treatment and another social network. Not sure how you think an new twitter clone will be for the betterment of mankind.
New garbage fire! Now with extra garbage!
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No, the choice being proposed is between improving an existing communications network that is used by world leader's and institutions world over to a significant degree and a tiny handful of cancer treatments.
The reason why you have to lie about the other side of the argument as you do above is specifically because if you actually spoke truth about the choices, you would understand the horrific, utterly vile nature of your argument. Which tries to weaponise human empathy against human progress.
It's no diffe
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Once you strip off the excess emotion, histrionics, and points of view that you invented out of whole cloth for me, your entire argument is predicated on the idea that a twitter clone is advancing human progress.
I disagree that this is the case.
Wittering on about how I'm vile and the cause of war and other astoundingly hyperbolic garbage doesn't change my opinion of twitter, a twitter clone and social networks in general.
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Because he signed a legally binding contract to buy Twitter, as-is, at a specific price. And of course getting people to move from one platform to another is difficult, but mostly the first part.
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Yeah, that's like complaining he's not going to buy a used car because it didn't have a drive train.
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Yeah, that's like complaining he's not going to buy a used car because it didn't have a drive train.
After being too stupid to try turning the key to see if it even starts before agreeing to buy it.
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This right there.
It still puzzles me to no end how this man ended up as one of the richest people on the planet. If anything, it's proof that "getting rich" by "work" is no different than doing it via the lottery: All you need is a shitload of luck. Sure, there'll be people who claim in either case that some sort of skill is involved, but no later than now you can look at the people who claim that there is some skill required to do it with "work" with the same disdain and contempt as you always looked at the ones who claim that you require a certain spark of genius or inspiration to fill out that lottery ticket.
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Musk had rich parents who helped him get started. So did Bezos, do did Gates, so did Trump. Having rich parents is the winning lottery ticket.
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Reminds me of the old saying, how can you make a small fortune with the internet? By throwing a big fortune at it.
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Not luck. Opportunity combined with your work.
You can work hard at throwing a dart at a dart board and hitting the bullseye. What separates you from people like Musk is that after Musk tried and failed his wealthy upbringing will give him a second chance to throw a dart. And a third, and a fourth until he hits it.
It's the same reason why people loan money to Trump despite him having lost more money than I ever will.
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Luck is a factor, but luck alone is not enough in my experience. What I think is needed:
1) luck. Okay, you do need luck as well. Someone I know started a company and straight away got to create a team of freelancers for government and be the billing partner. He took an obscene percentage and this how he quickly got major cash to build his company. He really believes he is all that, but I have never noticed an original thought in him. His 'skill' is cashing in on whatever fad IT managers now believe in. He d
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Since he has had access to some internal Twitter info, setting up a competitor could land him in legal hot water. It would look a lot like he pretended to want to buy Twitter in order to get access to their corporate secrets, so he could launch a rival.
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The deal itself was predicated on Twitter giving honest assessments of the percentage of users that are actually bots (fake accounts). Twitter initially claimed that bots only made up around 5% of users; it would appear that Musk has discovered this to be false.
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He didnâ(TM)t agree to buy as-is though. And itâ(TM)s not Musk refusing to go along, itâ(TM)s his creditors, primarily Morgan Stanley thatâ(TM)s throwing up their hands. They made clear that Twitter isnâ(TM)t cooperating, isnâ(TM)t showing them necessary documents, top people have left and others within the organization have threatened to sabotage the operation.
All this points to a company that does not have control over its employees. They have let people run wild pulling it i
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Because it is not about servers, but about eyeballs. It always has been. For the time being, Twitter remains the go-to platform for spouting one's opinion. You can start an alternative platform, maybe a bare-bones piece of crap, or an all singing all dancing piece of pure awesomeness. It doesn't matter. Because the only ones who will come to your platform are the ones who are not allowed to give their opinion on Twitter. So, that group is comprised of 1% of unjustly cancelled people, and 99% conspiracy
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Did you miss the part where I said offer around $10 million to the top few thousand influencers? Many of them don't even make a million dollars a year.. so 10 million is 10 years salary in one year after which they can switch back. If the top few thousand influencers switch, so will many of their followers.
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Sounds perfect for Elon Musk, Donald Trump, about 1/2 the GOP, etc..
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Who gets to decide whether or not someone was unjustly cancelled in the first place?
*cue Jeopardy music*
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Microsoft has demonstrated to everyone the lesson that, no matter how much money you spend, it's extraordinarily difficult to break into an established market. There's no guarantee that any amount of money spent could actually unseat Twitter. Established network effects are insanely difficult to work against. Remember Mixer? What you suggested was exactly what MS did with top streamers ($30 million to popular streamer Ninja alone). Most are now all back at Twitch, millions of dollars richer thanks to their short-lived exclusivity bonanza, while Mixer is dead and gone.
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I'm not sure it really proves that. First off, Wikipedia lists a total of three streamers that moved exclusively to Mixer. Secondly, Ninja moved on July 31, 2019, the others apparently joined Mixer later. Finally, Microsoft shut Mixer down June 22, 2020, less than a year later, at the start of the pandemic lockdowns.
I think the real lesson is that if you want to draw people away from a competitor, you need to be in it for the long haul. Microsoft acquired Mixer in 2016 but only really started promoting it h
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Or TRUTH Social. Trump had millions following him on Twitter, but very very few of them followed him over to his own social network. Half the ones who did got banned, because they were the ones trolling him on Twitter that he suddenly had the power to cancel.
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Personally I'm not really happy that the POTUS account, an official role account used by the federal government's executive branch's head, was punished for the actions of a person who was occupying it.
I'm talking about Twitter follower-purging POTUS and stripping it, and by extension Joe Biden, of attention that I could very easily argue was meant for the presidency itself and not Donald Trump personally. And which also quite foreseeably probably included followers from BEFORE Donald Trump's inauguration
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Yes, especially if the competition abuses an effective monopoly position in basically every way possible. Oh, you didn't mean like that?
No. I never went there.
It seems senseless to point out that most of a social network's users are not early adopters, but it does illustrate the network effect problem. Microsoft tried to go too hard with Mixer too fast. You have to get a user base of weirdos who will use any new social network just to get your numbers up before you start wasting money on promotion. If it do
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That kinda begs the question of how "Twitter" in the context of the parent post is even defined.
It could mean Twitter as a brand as a whole, twitter.com, the corporation(s?) owning either of the above, or any shareholders of any such companies.
For any readers of this post, consider "Hostess" in the same light and ask the same question and you'll get where I'm going.
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People have tried. Google won't allow you to see it, amazon won't allow you to host it, and the payment processor duopoly won't allow it or its customers to transact. A handful of companies have total control over the world's infrastructure and finance right now.
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Horseshit. There are alternatives to Twitter that show up just fine in Google. You don't need Amazon to host an online platform, in fact no popular social network is currently hosted by Amazon. There are alternatives, even ones run by right wing nutjobs that have no problem with payment processors or advertisers. Shit man even during the Trump insanity when a social network did get taken down it was done so briefly, being back up with different hosting and different payment networks shortly after.
The answer
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You know you're a conspiracy theorist when you think a cabal is blocking the world's richest person from launching a micro-blogging website.
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Money can't buy patronship. You can build what you want, but it's practically impossible to get a user base unless you're a leader in setting up your system. It's called the network effect.
Why would someone post on Musker if no one remusks, no news article picks up on the musk, etc. How many people use Truth social? less than 500,000? Quite a long stretch less than the number of rightwing nutjobs who post on Twitter. It's not so fun shouting when noone listens. You can't grandstand in a basement.
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