Careful though: something only has to be partially (5% is adequate) shit to "be shit". Twitter also has lots of value (and thusly, "is not shit", simultaneously).
Consider all the soothsaying in this thread, does this cause HN to "be" a soothsaying platform? In part yes, but not in whole.
Twitter was by very far always the most toxic cesspool in the internet.
The format creates incentives for the most inane but inflammatory posts to gain traction, and the userbase it cultivated was all in for the drama. So many witch hunts started on Twitter, for the most asinine reasons, and the mob mentality of the userbase made it the norm.
IME a significant portion of those advertisers still on Twitter are absolute bottom of the barrel AliExpress dropshipping outlets. Technically advertisers, but not really the type you want given the choice, so it's no surprise that Fidelity recently estimated Twitters value at ~25% of what Musk paid for it.
> IME a significant portion of those advertisers still on Twitter are absolute bottom of the barrel AliExpress dropshipping outlets
That's your retargeted ads.
From my experience, I haven't noticed any changes.
> Fidelity recently estimated Twitters value is ~25%
This is an entirely made up figure based on guesses and politics. Nobody, including Fidelity, have any clue to the internals of Twitter now that it's private.
The world's most important news still breaks on Twitter (including the sitting president's announcement to not run for re-election), despite all the Musk hate.
> Nobody, including Fidelity, have any clue to the internals of Twitter now that it's private
Fidelity is an X shareholder. They absolutely have its financials.
On a quarterly basis their valuation committees have to value their holdings, including illiquid ones, in part to appraise how their managers are doing. In this case, their valuation committee wrote down the value of their equity in X to 25% of the original acquisition price. Given Twitter was about 1:4 levered on acquisition, that’s writing down the value of X as an enterprise to roughly half.
The reality is Twitter remains the figurative public square. You are being disingenuous if you are asserting financials are the only aspect to Twitter's value.
Given it's prevalence and importance, there is no way Twitter is worth 1/2 or 1/4 of what it once was. If given the opportunity to purchase Twitter - what would someone pay for it? What would someone pay for the single-most important and influential website/app in the world - the only one that has presidents and governments around the world make announcements and break news?
The mass exodus never happened - of either users and advertisers. This is flatly in fantasy land for Musk haters. It's amazing to witness.
> being disingenuous if you are asserting financials are the only aspect to Twitter's value
Straw man. We’re talking about the value of X, the company, not Twitter, the community. The former is what Fidelity and Musk own; the latter is what X ostensibly controls, but we’re getting into WeWork-style Narnia metrics when we start community adjusting numbers.
> given the opportunity to purchase Twitter - what would someone pay for it?
Not the purchase price! X’s minority holders have offered at a 50%+ discount. Nothing trading. The banks will sell you the loans at a haircut. Nothing trading.
We have a testably falsifiable level, and it’s somewhere below half what Musk paid. (Where, we don’t know, because the bonds are saying the equity is worthless while there are buyers of the equity at a positive price.)
Meh. Everything that's happened has been stupid as hell. There used to be some really interesting & helpful info streams on Twitter, weather alerts and streams of edits. There used to be academic research & people understanding trends of the world via Twitter. But now Twitter is trying to extract as much value as it can, make itself as opaque and unreadable as it can. Absurd API prices, no access for researchers, and you can't read much at all unless you are logged in.
Twitter has done amazing job at incinerating the value it once had as connective matter of society.
Also the algorithm now top-ranks a bunch of paid-for blue-check musk-ites and batshit-crazy-right-winger trash.
I don't see how Fidelity is incentivized to make Twitter look bad, they invested $20 million in the company and their assessment is that their holding is now worth about $5 million. If anything that claim makes Fidelity look like chumps for putting their money there.
That's a tiny amount of money for Fidelity. Unless they have some secret insider information that can be verified - they are guessing along with everyone else.
Nobody will know the value of Twitter until Musk sells it, if ever. That's par for the course of private business.
What we do know is literally all of the most important stories continue to break on Twitter. CNN and other MSM companies continue to write articles about specific Tweets, and more. Twitter remains - as it was before - the figurative public forum and no alternative offering has come anywhere close to overtaking it. Nothing has changed.
I think the ones that don't engage enough to make money are subsidized by those who do. And then you have people like George Takai who has a blog that capitalizes on linking people to X threads, who probably makes quite a bit of money on it.
Basically the subsidization flow:
high engagement and advertisers > lower engagement > free users
Seems like it ought to be possible to link your identity on another platform (e.g. Blue Sky or Threads) with your Twitter identity through some sort of specific post (similar to a DNS proof) and just transplant entire swaths of the network graph to another social network.
I don't think that would be possible. Either there would be so few people doing it that it would not be effective at transplanting the network graph, or else it would be widely enough used that X noticed and cared, in which case they would block it.
i don't think i'm making a controversial statement by saying that "premium user tweets are, on average, the lowest quality content on twitter right now." i'm kind of astounded by how bad the top replies to any viral tweet are - it's not even that they're offensive (though they often are) or that i disagree with them - they're just useless. they're inane. they're pointless. they're uninteresting. i left twitter functionally long ago, but occasionally get sent a tweet and i'll try and read the replies to see what other people are saying and rarely do i ever reach a point where i see anything useful.
it feels like the last major shift in quality occurred around the time twitter started doing revenue sharing. the algorithm incentivizes provocative or "relatable" content so many people who were given that opportunity shifted to an "engagement bait" strategy, which doesn't lead to high-quality content, it just leads to stuff that provokes a reaction. alongside that there seemed to be a huge flood of "me too" content in replies. i can't imagine the majority of the people responding to everything and anything with the most inane nonsense are benefitting from this program, but that was really the time i felt the first profound shift in quality on the platform. people's relationship to what they were posting changed meaningfully, and the overall quality of content suffered as a result.
this shift moves the motivation to exhibit engagement-bait behaviors from implicit (when people see ads near my content, i make money, therefore i should game the algorithm to be seen by as many people as possible) to explicit (engagement is how i make my money.) i cannot imagine this improving the situation with regards to what's being posted. it kind of seems like a recipe for more of the worst parts of twitter to blossom - accounts that just rush to swipe and repost viral hits from other platforms first to gain traction, explicit incitement through saying increasingly controversial things (to both juice the people who agree and coerce argument from people who don't) and so on.
realistically, couldn't this potentially directly add up to rewarding people who post misinformation? if someone with a lot of visibility posts a false claim, people rush to correct and provide context, juicing engagement numbers, leading to them making more money lying than they would telling the truth. it's kind of perverse.
if i was more conspiracy minded i feel like i would suggest this was explicitly designed to promote the creation and dissemination of misinformation but i really don't think there's anyone thinking that strategically at twitter.
Maybe we've had different experiences, but I can't recall one instance pre-Musk where I was linked a tweet and found the replies to be worthwhile. This is the site that invented the term "reply guy". My twitter-inclined friends would link me things and remind me to never look at the replies.
They're certainly worse now, but I don't see any cause to lament a transition from vapid vitriol to more vapid vitriol. Nothing of value was lost.
I really don't get the "Twitter was always terrible" crowd.
Tech Twitter brought tons of great interesting citations & references to discussions. Even amid the rest of Twitter, there was such a massive global brain at work: the associations & connections people would make was amazing. It's remarkable to me that such rank cynicism often goes unchecked. I pity those who so deeply missed out, who didn't see or grasp the amazing power of a good network of follows.
Really, all it is doing is surfacing the asinine nature of Twitter itself. Those inane, dumb, wrong, malicious tweets have always been there, you just weren't looking for them. Now there are promoted tweets, and the tweeters being promoted are people you didn't find interesting in the first place.
The only thing that has changed is Twitter is directly speaking to their average audience, which you are not, and that is now painfully more obvious.
well that kind of breaks the entire utility of the platform, doesn't it? the thing that was nice about twitter way back when was the fact that it felt very community-focused and the people who were most actively involved generally had feeds that largely represented their interests. it wasn't hard to stay away from the garbage, and what you saw felt more intuitively targeted towards your interests. i used it to keep up with friends and leaders in fields i found interesting and found it a lot more intuitive and engaging than other platforms at the time.
no doubt we're a decade or more past peak twitter, but it seems like the algorithm has entirely flipped and is designed explicitly to surface as much lowest-common-denominator content as possible, drowning out anything targeted that you're actually interested in. i'll never say it was particularly wonderful, but it was better than it is now.
“Pay for attention” is a notoriously corrosive mechanic for a social network; dating sites, which invented it, usually end up having to ration it, say. Like, if you have to pay to get your stuff in front of me, statistically I probably don’t want to look at it.
I’m still kind of shocked they went ahead with it; when he first started talking about it I put it down to Musk’s endless need to spout nonsense.
So a company internally consuming it’s own product is dogfooding. In this case, Twitter is intentionally consuming the waste of it’s own product, and so I think it is wholly appropriate to call this process “dogshitting.”
> the company announced today that creators are instead going to be paid based on “engagement with your content from Premium users.”
Circling the drain.
The incentives only point one way now. If Twitter/X ever was a forum for genuine conversation or debate, they just killed it.
> Twitter/X ever was a forum for genuine conversation or debate, they just killed it.
It never was. Twitter is shit now under Elon, and was shit before him.
Some very annoying people just happened to like how that turd used to smell, is all.
Careful though: something only has to be partially (5% is adequate) shit to "be shit". Twitter also has lots of value (and thusly, "is not shit", simultaneously).
Consider all the soothsaying in this thread, does this cause HN to "be" a soothsaying platform? In part yes, but not in whole.
Twitter was by very far always the most toxic cesspool in the internet.
The format creates incentives for the most inane but inflammatory posts to gain traction, and the userbase it cultivated was all in for the drama. So many witch hunts started on Twitter, for the most asinine reasons, and the mob mentality of the userbase made it the norm.
> Twitter was by very far always the most toxic cesspool in the internet.
And also not, simultaneously.
Related: do you disagree with the theory that the speed of light is relative to the frame of reference of the observer?
EDIT: I must say though, you're not wrong. Twitter is a lot like the Wild West, lots of clever racists, it's nuts.
Ahh, I see what you mean.
Yes, relatively speaking, if you have ass cancer it kills you and it sucks, but to the tumor growing in your ass everything is fine.
The people that enjoyed Twitter were, relatively speaking to the world at large, ass cancer.
Surely this is only going to encourage the proliferation of LLM reply bots? There's already enough of those.
And rage-bait. "Engagement farming" was already a term before it became the specific relevant metric for monetization.
With what money? Nobody's buying ads and the dollars from "Premium" subscriptions are needed to keep the lights on.
> With what money?
The world’s richest man owns it as a plaything.
And there's plenty of advertisers on twitter still - despite this constant, baseless narrative.
People want Musk to fail so badly they literally make things up.
IME a significant portion of those advertisers still on Twitter are absolute bottom of the barrel AliExpress dropshipping outlets. Technically advertisers, but not really the type you want given the choice, so it's no surprise that Fidelity recently estimated Twitters value at ~25% of what Musk paid for it.
> IME a significant portion of those advertisers still on Twitter are absolute bottom of the barrel AliExpress dropshipping outlets
That's your retargeted ads.
From my experience, I haven't noticed any changes.
> Fidelity recently estimated Twitters value is ~25%
This is an entirely made up figure based on guesses and politics. Nobody, including Fidelity, have any clue to the internals of Twitter now that it's private.
The world's most important news still breaks on Twitter (including the sitting president's announcement to not run for re-election), despite all the Musk hate.
> Nobody, including Fidelity, have any clue to the internals of Twitter now that it's private
Fidelity is an X shareholder. They absolutely have its financials.
On a quarterly basis their valuation committees have to value their holdings, including illiquid ones, in part to appraise how their managers are doing. In this case, their valuation committee wrote down the value of their equity in X to 25% of the original acquisition price. Given Twitter was about 1:4 levered on acquisition, that’s writing down the value of X as an enterprise to roughly half.
The reality is Twitter remains the figurative public square. You are being disingenuous if you are asserting financials are the only aspect to Twitter's value.
Given it's prevalence and importance, there is no way Twitter is worth 1/2 or 1/4 of what it once was. If given the opportunity to purchase Twitter - what would someone pay for it? What would someone pay for the single-most important and influential website/app in the world - the only one that has presidents and governments around the world make announcements and break news?
The mass exodus never happened - of either users and advertisers. This is flatly in fantasy land for Musk haters. It's amazing to witness.
So yeah, Fidelity is making stuff up.
> being disingenuous if you are asserting financials are the only aspect to Twitter's value
Straw man. We’re talking about the value of X, the company, not Twitter, the community. The former is what Fidelity and Musk own; the latter is what X ostensibly controls, but we’re getting into WeWork-style Narnia metrics when we start community adjusting numbers.
> given the opportunity to purchase Twitter - what would someone pay for it?
Not the purchase price! X’s minority holders have offered at a 50%+ discount. Nothing trading. The banks will sell you the loans at a haircut. Nothing trading.
We have a testably falsifiable level, and it’s somewhere below half what Musk paid. (Where, we don’t know, because the bonds are saying the equity is worthless while there are buyers of the equity at a positive price.)
Meh. Everything that's happened has been stupid as hell. There used to be some really interesting & helpful info streams on Twitter, weather alerts and streams of edits. There used to be academic research & people understanding trends of the world via Twitter. But now Twitter is trying to extract as much value as it can, make itself as opaque and unreadable as it can. Absurd API prices, no access for researchers, and you can't read much at all unless you are logged in.
Twitter has done amazing job at incinerating the value it once had as connective matter of society.
Also the algorithm now top-ranks a bunch of paid-for blue-check musk-ites and batshit-crazy-right-winger trash.
I don't see how Fidelity is incentivized to make Twitter look bad, they invested $20 million in the company and their assessment is that their holding is now worth about $5 million. If anything that claim makes Fidelity look like chumps for putting their money there.
That's a tiny amount of money for Fidelity. Unless they have some secret insider information that can be verified - they are guessing along with everyone else.
Nobody will know the value of Twitter until Musk sells it, if ever. That's par for the course of private business.
What we do know is literally all of the most important stories continue to break on Twitter. CNN and other MSM companies continue to write articles about specific Tweets, and more. Twitter remains - as it was before - the figurative public forum and no alternative offering has come anywhere close to overtaking it. Nothing has changed.
> don't see how Fidelity is incentivized to make Twitter look bad
They’re not. Valuation committees are notoriously deferential to PMs and issuers, particularly for private names.
Why would an investment company have a fiduciary responsibility to account for the value of its holdings lol?
(Psst. You're not replying to a serious person.)
Right, so Fidelity can derive information from zero data?
Ah, yes, I forgot investment firms receive standard-issue crystal balls.
The shareholders of X (which includes Fidelity) receive internal details because they are owners, they are entitled to that information as owners.
I think the ones that don't engage enough to make money are subsidized by those who do. And then you have people like George Takai who has a blog that capitalizes on linking people to X threads, who probably makes quite a bit of money on it.
Basically the subsidization flow: high engagement and advertisers > lower engagement > free users
Seems like it ought to be possible to link your identity on another platform (e.g. Blue Sky or Threads) with your Twitter identity through some sort of specific post (similar to a DNS proof) and just transplant entire swaths of the network graph to another social network.
It should be possible, but companies don't serve their customers or users, they serve their shareholders.
Giving a user a feature like that will only hurt the company, so it won't be implemented.
https://github.com/marcomaroni-github/twitter-to-bluesky
(it's imperfect, there are also bots which mirror content and many of the creator tools support posting to multiple platforms including Bluesky)
I don't think that would be possible. Either there would be so few people doing it that it would not be effective at transplanting the network graph, or else it would be widely enough used that X noticed and cared, in which case they would block it.
I think they are doing it to match threads, see https://www.yahoo.com/tech/metas-threads-paying-creators-tho... .
No, it’s because Musk is an evil loser. The usual types who jump on these X topics told me so.
How to create an Echo Chamber 101
Perhaps we might call this a Clyde Chamber?
i don't think i'm making a controversial statement by saying that "premium user tweets are, on average, the lowest quality content on twitter right now." i'm kind of astounded by how bad the top replies to any viral tweet are - it's not even that they're offensive (though they often are) or that i disagree with them - they're just useless. they're inane. they're pointless. they're uninteresting. i left twitter functionally long ago, but occasionally get sent a tweet and i'll try and read the replies to see what other people are saying and rarely do i ever reach a point where i see anything useful.
it feels like the last major shift in quality occurred around the time twitter started doing revenue sharing. the algorithm incentivizes provocative or "relatable" content so many people who were given that opportunity shifted to an "engagement bait" strategy, which doesn't lead to high-quality content, it just leads to stuff that provokes a reaction. alongside that there seemed to be a huge flood of "me too" content in replies. i can't imagine the majority of the people responding to everything and anything with the most inane nonsense are benefitting from this program, but that was really the time i felt the first profound shift in quality on the platform. people's relationship to what they were posting changed meaningfully, and the overall quality of content suffered as a result.
this shift moves the motivation to exhibit engagement-bait behaviors from implicit (when people see ads near my content, i make money, therefore i should game the algorithm to be seen by as many people as possible) to explicit (engagement is how i make my money.) i cannot imagine this improving the situation with regards to what's being posted. it kind of seems like a recipe for more of the worst parts of twitter to blossom - accounts that just rush to swipe and repost viral hits from other platforms first to gain traction, explicit incitement through saying increasingly controversial things (to both juice the people who agree and coerce argument from people who don't) and so on.
realistically, couldn't this potentially directly add up to rewarding people who post misinformation? if someone with a lot of visibility posts a false claim, people rush to correct and provide context, juicing engagement numbers, leading to them making more money lying than they would telling the truth. it's kind of perverse.
if i was more conspiracy minded i feel like i would suggest this was explicitly designed to promote the creation and dissemination of misinformation but i really don't think there's anyone thinking that strategically at twitter.
Maybe we've had different experiences, but I can't recall one instance pre-Musk where I was linked a tweet and found the replies to be worthwhile. This is the site that invented the term "reply guy". My twitter-inclined friends would link me things and remind me to never look at the replies.
They're certainly worse now, but I don't see any cause to lament a transition from vapid vitriol to more vapid vitriol. Nothing of value was lost.
I really don't get the "Twitter was always terrible" crowd.
Tech Twitter brought tons of great interesting citations & references to discussions. Even amid the rest of Twitter, there was such a massive global brain at work: the associations & connections people would make was amazing. It's remarkable to me that such rank cynicism often goes unchecked. I pity those who so deeply missed out, who didn't see or grasp the amazing power of a good network of follows.
I'm specifically referring to reading the replies on tweets that are linked from other sources, which the parent called out as being bad now
Really, all it is doing is surfacing the asinine nature of Twitter itself. Those inane, dumb, wrong, malicious tweets have always been there, you just weren't looking for them. Now there are promoted tweets, and the tweeters being promoted are people you didn't find interesting in the first place.
The only thing that has changed is Twitter is directly speaking to their average audience, which you are not, and that is now painfully more obvious.
well that kind of breaks the entire utility of the platform, doesn't it? the thing that was nice about twitter way back when was the fact that it felt very community-focused and the people who were most actively involved generally had feeds that largely represented their interests. it wasn't hard to stay away from the garbage, and what you saw felt more intuitively targeted towards your interests. i used it to keep up with friends and leaders in fields i found interesting and found it a lot more intuitive and engaging than other platforms at the time.
no doubt we're a decade or more past peak twitter, but it seems like the algorithm has entirely flipped and is designed explicitly to surface as much lowest-common-denominator content as possible, drowning out anything targeted that you're actually interested in. i'll never say it was particularly wonderful, but it was better than it is now.
“Pay for attention” is a notoriously corrosive mechanic for a social network; dating sites, which invented it, usually end up having to ration it, say. Like, if you have to pay to get your stuff in front of me, statistically I probably don’t want to look at it.
I’m still kind of shocked they went ahead with it; when he first started talking about it I put it down to Musk’s endless need to spout nonsense.
So you now get free speech (Basic), fee-er speech (Premium) and free-est speech (Premium+) for your replies?
So a company internally consuming it’s own product is dogfooding. In this case, Twitter is intentionally consuming the waste of it’s own product, and so I think it is wholly appropriate to call this process “dogshitting.”
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