You’re telling me the company that once had ads for T-Mobile and Volkswagen and now almost exclusively has ads where random bots with NFT photos advertise ChatGPT ‘services’ isn’t doing well financially??
It’s important to note that “doing well financially” isn’t just revenue and user count, it’s also expenditures. If Twitter has managed to cut costs by more than whatever its income has dropped by then that could well be a good outcome for it, I’ve heard it wasn’t profitable when Musk took it over.
It’s kind of ironic how big companies are frequently criticized for fixating on “endless growth” and “line goes up”, and then when a company or organization sheds that it also looks bad.
There’s so much wrong with your understanding here…so I’ll just point out that you’re talking about Twitter as if it’s still a public company, it’s not.
Also, Twitter was never profitable, and it was likely never going to be profitable. But there’s a big difference between their losses and projections before Musk, and after.
But there’s a big difference between their losses and projections before Musk, and after.
Which are?
If “lines goes up” meant things get better for the customers, the employees, and the world in general, then people would be cheering it on. Usually it means it gets worse for at LEAST one of the three, and sometimes all 3.
Here, “line goes down” is following Twitter getting worse for the customers, the users, the employees, and the world in general. So people will cheer as it crashes.
Twitter has 1.3 Billion / in interest payments alone as it took on $13,000,000,000 in debt for the honor of being bought out by Elon Musk.
The owners of that debt have been quaking in their boots all last year. As Bankruptcy proceedings would make them the new owner of Twitter.
Note that Twitter made $5 Billion revenue on its best year, and that’s likely halfed or worse.
EDIT: $5 Billion revenue on its best year. Far less today and you still have all the OTHER costs going on. I’m sure Elon will prop up Twitter with Tesla ads or something but Twitter cannot stand by itself anymore.
I thought Twitter’s infrastructure was going to collapse within weeks after Musk made all those cuts and changes. I was obviously wrong because Twitter’s infrastructure didn’t collapse. I’m not speaking to the user experience on Twitter but from a purely infrastructure perspective, Musk was right and I was wrong.
Uh-oh, you said something positive about Musk. I only said “maybe he’s not as bad as it seems” and look where that got me.
Lol exactly, how dare you have a nuanced opinion!
What the fuck is the other 70%'s problem?
They’re bots
Or right-wing fascists
Or both
And definitely porn addicts
yeah. no that’s whistleblowers. you ever notice how every major whistleblower gets hit with a child porn charge? It’s like a label that reads “the government doesn’t think you should talk about this guy”. Nothing more than character assassination by our government. Ridiculous to suggest that someone used to being that furtive about something so shameful would also just want the world to know the truth.
those two things don’t fit together, and yet it keeps happening. weird
Or people with morbid curiousity like me who hop on to see the dumpster fire occasionally. Can’t say I recommend it.
Damn, I thought it was a requirement to shit post on Twitter while you’re shitty code compiles. How am I supposed to become a real programmer now? I guess I still got mastodon.
He kept the 70% he wanted, it’ll be a propaganda engine and communications platform for the right wing.
Whatever wing willing to pay, honestly.
EDIT: I rarely see the voting system of lemmy for a reason. I find it cute, this reaction to the mere comparison between so-called “wings” in the American political system. Both, republicans and democrats, are two sides of the same coin.
Strategic alignment. Getting his taxes cut counts. Of course, could be some deeper conspiracy. I’m not so anto- conspiracy that I don’t think people aren’t making grand plans to install trump.
I have a lot of friends that won’t quit because of sports updates and all the shitposts
This is in addition to the first year of losses, which are likely higher.
Sunken cost fallacy
There are a lot of quasi-celebrity types with a big following that don’t want to give up their follower base.
I’ll bet it’s more than 30% left but bots backfilled the space.
My problem is that I never had a Twitter account to stop using it lmao.
How much did human usage drop? Because there are a shitload more bots on twitter nowadays than there were in the years before he took over.
This should be human usage - the user survey was done by phone.
Ah, ok, 27% -> 19%, an 8% YoY drop, and the numbers were obtained using identical methodologies across multiple years. Yeah, I agree, seems to check out.
Still, there are definitely a shitload more bots than there were before.
Are there more bots or does it just seem that way because there are fewer people? I don’t ask to be snarky, I’m legitimately curious what the numbers were and are.
X seems to have stopped fighting against bots. So there are less people, more bots and those bots won’t be banned as quickly as before.
Any time something gets too big it gets bots. Lemmy will be the same. We will see instances getting defederated who cannot manage the spam.
Fuck Elon though
If people set up their own instances with 100% LLM bots how would we even know they are bots to defederate? The AIs are too realistic. Only giveaway would be the ones dumb enough to make accounts post/comment 24/7 with seconds between each comment.
I imagine the content would be bad, which is the whole reason an instance would become defederated.
Right now, it’s still possible to realize texts are written by llms, due to style and mistakes, but it can become a serious problem in the near future, and we are kind of ignoring it, because no one is preparing in any way.
It will take someone really smart to figure this out without requiring some form of identity confirmation (which would be horrible imo), like using credit cards or (even worse) government digital IDs (I live in a country where we have a gov ID app which can be used to sign documents and confirm ID online but if I had to use it on Lemmy or any other social media I’d just fuck off).
Any time something gets too big it gets bots
Dead internet theory, summed up in a sentence
I suspect even more than 30%, and by a lot. Nearly all of the communities that once thrived seem to be dead. It feels very empty.
Wasn’t like one of his focuses going to be getting rid of bots? Did they just not do anything and the bots just invaded or did the bots just get better?
He got rid of like 80% of the staff. I doubt he has a functional team who can even tackle the problem.
I think the focus on bots was primarily used in an attempt to back out of the deal. It was never an issue, especially if it inflated his ego by pumping up his account.
Ever since Musk’s control of the company, Twitter (I refused to call it X) showed me multiple hate and racists posts. Basically, Twitter is showing me garbage. I now use Mastadon instead.
Mastodon has been great.
Are there enough using it?
Yes!
I was never active in terms of posting but I followed several news outlets, local government agencies, and a few friends. Shortly after Musk took over I saw nothing but right wing nutjobs and a lot of posts from Musk. I tried unfollowing but nothing worked so I quit logging in. I need to cancel my account but haven’t taken the time.
Yeah, I had a Twitter account but rarely used it. Shortly after Musk took over, his account was in recommendations and his tweets were in my feed, even though I’d NEVER seen them before.
I blocked him.
He remained at the top of my recommendations.
I think I even occasionally saw his posts when they were retweeted or something by someone I didn’t even follow, because the retweet was trending, I guess?
That’s when I deleted my account.
It’s a shame because Twitter is a perfect platform for the kind of one-way communications required by a news agency or local government agency. Maybe Mastodon or Bluesky will fill that void.
I would prefer RSS.
So would I but good luck getting your average local sheriff or office of emergency preparedness to use RSS. Most of their “IT” staff is the deputy who is “good with computers” meaning they can open a PDF file.
Facebook does that for me too, alongside flat earthers, anti EV crap and the occasional funny picture. It’s depressing.
Oh yeah, the flat earthers, the pictures with lens flare on it being proof of “planet X” and other insanity? The best comedy I’ve ever seen.
I’m back to calling it Twitter. (Not that I’m ever on it though.)
It’s such a stupid name! Everytime it’s mentioned, it has to be prepend or suffixed with something so people actually understand the “X” context.
And more importantly - If you visit x.com, it redirects to twitter.com! So what’s the fucking point of the rebrand?
Genius, i say! The man’s an absolute genius!
Obviously. Some people say trump should run a social media platform. More and more.
Until he stops allowing deadnaming on his site, I’m going to deadname his site.
It’s only fair.
Xitter, but the X makes a ‘sh’ sound.
Xwitter (zwitter)
To the Mayan people X makes a ‘sh’ sound. That’s the way I pronounce it. Now and forever.
Xitter, I mean Shitter. I still pronounce the letter X normally.
In Portuguese, too. And most other languages from Iberia*. And “x” is typically so rare in other orthographies that, for Portuguese speakers, rendering “x” as /ʃ/ (the “sh” sound) is almost automatic, so the first time that I saw “Xitter” I couldn’t stop laughing.
*with one exception: modern Spanish. And by “modern” I mean past the 17th century, because before that it was /ʃ/ in Spanish too. That’s where the Maya languages got that spelling convention from.
(Sorry for the off-topic.)
This was almost entirely on topic
Xchan
Szechuan
I haven’t stopped calling it twatter
What do people call a tweet in the X rebranding?
Xcrement
I’ve seen “xeet” from people outside of Twitter. Not sure what an X person would say. It’s pronounced “shit” or “sheet”.
😂
deleted by creator
I call it the x social media site
Needing to log in to view someones tweets means now I wont even visit the site when linked. Kinda the number 1 rule of platforms is to make them accessible to those that don’t already use it, so as to convert them later. Musk, and everyone around him letting these decisions run through, are idiots
ran into this last night.
I hate twitter, but there was something I was trying to see and the only way to get the info was from a twitter post. Couldnt view the goddamn twitter post without creating an account and logging in.
My immediate thought was “This isnt important enough for this bullshit” and immediately gave up.
I’m convinced this login to view shit is to hide the explosion of right wing white supremacy/racism/etc posts and the bots echoing and amplifying it from people before they commit themselves to an account.
Login to view started before Musk took over, FYI. I distinctly remember avoiding Twitter to spite them in those days.
Did it? I never had problem grabbing info off it before Musk.
It did. I don’t remember when, but Twitter was getting hard and harder to access without an account before Musk. It might have been one of those Rolling Release things so everyone didn’t notice at once or something.
In the beginning, Twitter even had an RSS feed for accounts you could subscribe to. When it shifted to nagging be for login, I installed a nitter addon and that that’s broken, I haven’t been there since.
Good, but not good enough. It needs to be 0. And if you’re still on that shithole of a propaganda spreading platform- you’re supporting it.
i heard there’s good porn on there, probably why some decided to stick around
Quite a few Tumblr refugees still I’d imagine. Shame mastodon and Lemmy weren’t ready yet back then.
Also twitter is still one of the biggest platforms for sharing art in general, if you want the large audience, you kinda have to be there.
will never be zero accounts
at the end it will just be bots crossposting bots and replying to bots.
I wrote this right as the first elon buying Twitter mentions were popping up…
Notably, Twitter facilitated communication during the arab spring, where the people organized to stand against and even overthrow several broken and corrupt government regimes throughout the middle east - including some participation in places like Saudi Arabia, for example.
Twitter’s second largest investor after a musk takeover… the kingdom of Saudi Arabia and it’s de facto leader who, among other things, killed and dismembered an American journalist without consequence somewhat recently.
And now Twitter is about to be killed… and dismembered.
Yep, Saudi Arabia bought that service and the price, giving a man child a toy that it would probably ruin quickly, looked rather attractive.
How the fuck is that all?
Bots on bots on bots.
This article is a survey of Americans, not a computerized search.
Unless a number of bots answered the telephone survey, I think the stats here are legit.
I’m sure a lot of the original population has dropped by a lot more than that, but in numbers they would have been replaced by an influx of fascists and bots.
I’m taking note of all the prominent individuals and organizations which chose to remain on the fascist platform and thus implicitly support it.
What the fuck’s “x”?
X is one of his older websites, a financial platform that he created after his first startup was sold. Name comes from “X marks the spot” from old treasure maps, was to be the place for all transactions.
It struggled and didn’t really get off the ground, but was able to merge with another platform called Confinity, run by Peter Thiel. The merged platforms then became PayPal, and made both guys rich as shit. Thiel eventually power played Musk and got him kicked out of the company, arguably for good reason, though Thiel is quite a piece of work, too.
The new X is Musk’s attempt to make twitter more like his old site, and is why he was throwing around things like making it a peer to peer payment site, similar to WeChat / WePay or Venmo. How he plans to make tweets into bank transfers I’ve got no idea, esp. when losing 30 percent of users.
Pretty much he wants to turn X/Twitter as WeChat’s clone for the West.
As WeChat is both a messaging and payment app used by a couple of hundreds of millions of users in China where people can send money, split bills, pay, etc. using the app.
Visa and MasterCard are extremely profitable companies enjoying really high margins and having very little competition. And this is very lucrative business:
66% operating profit margin for Visa and 55% for Mastercard (four-year average). 51% net profit margin for Visa and 45% for Mastercard (four-year average). 50% per annum return on capital employed for Mastercard and 21% per annum for Visa (11-year average).
It’s his favorite letter or something. He’d wanted to name something X for a while. The closest he got before was SpaceX. Which I suppose now retroactively means SpaceTwitter.
There’s also the poor kid that he named ‘X Æ A-12,’
An obsolete windowing system for UNIX like operating systems
obsolete? say that after trying wayland on an nvidia card.
He sure has a lot of X’s
And O’s!
A robot created by Dr. Light with the capacity to reason and make decisions on his own, unbound by the laws of robotics. Could also stick to walls.
who cares
How could the jews do this to me :(
-Musk
That sounds like bragging. Why aren’t more people stopping this crap?
Who the fuck is still on that shitpile? Dudes. Stahp.
porn?
I deleted my account and haven’t missed it at all. Then again I was never good at making use of Twitter, it’s too hectic and disorganized for me, and I have the same problem with mastodon.
I’m glad I’m not the only person that doesn’t really understand the whole Thing behind Twitter / Mastodon feed thing.
Oh you mean Twitter?
Yeah, ‘X’ is never gonna happen.
