[*] - as a product - there is some really great engineering due to the scale of course.
https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/28/23428132/elon-musk-twitt...
And despite about a decade of similar whining on HN about deleting Facebook they are still the most popular social network around.
I personally wouldn't gamble the farm on corporation ad spending's adherence to social justice if those eyeballs are all in one place... at least long term.
At least FB has to compete with messaging apps and Instagram/TikTok. Twitter doesn't have a good #2.
It's probably a mistake to take the emotional outrage news cycles over the next month (or 3) as much more than the exact thing people will keep going back to Twitter for... ironically this outrage at Musk is the exactly what drives people to use Twitter.
What I've found is Facebook is not popular with young people: the audience many advertisers are the most interested in. The stock market is certainly not happy with their latest results. So sure, I can easily find a source that says Facebook is still the most popular platform. The details matter. Is it growth in Asia that's keeping their numbers up while US users shrink? Are they failing to attract young people? Have they lost users among the HN demographics? These details matter if you want the actual story.
> One area where Meta showed promise was in adding to Facebook’s massive user base
> Facebook has 2.93 billion monthly active users. 1.98 billion daily active users. That was up from 1.97 billion three months ago.
> Facebook has 264 million monthly active users in the United States and Canada alone. The majority of Facebook’s users belong to the 25 to 34 age group.
> Twitter has 206 million daily active users.
> TikTok has 1 billion monthly active users (MAU’s).
Facebook is going through a massive pivot and spending a wild amount of $$ on the Metaverse. All tech stocks are down. So I wouldn't put too much weight on stock price.
The other major thing is how Apple changed ad tracking works which reduce ad prices by 20% on average. That's a major decline in revenue for any company ("Advertising represented 98.2% of the company’s total revenue"). But YoY revenue only declined by 4%.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/meta-facebook-q3-earnings-repor...
Yes user-wise they do seem to be doing fine, but I'd like to know where the growth is happening. That's important.
The 2nd source has some interesting demographics, but unfortunately doesn't include growth which would be the most interesting to me.
Very interesting that their largest user base by far is now in India, which I hinted at before. I suspect much of their growth from their latest earnings report is from that region of the world. Which also helps explain why ad revenue is down. Note also that ad reach in India is a very low 30% compared to the UK at 60% or Mexico over 80%. They didn't give numbers for the US. But if a lot of the growth is in India with such a low ad reach, that doesn't bode well for ad revenue.
Facebook also seems to be failing at attracting the young demographic from the west that advertisers love. As their core user base ages it will be interesting to see if they can maintain the interest of advertisers. I think Instagram is going to prop them up for a while. But it wouldn't surprise me at all if Facebook starts to become less important to advertisers, who will quickly move to wherever their target audience spends the most time.
Either way, just because FB is doing fine user wise doesn't mean that folks on HN who threatened to quit FB didn't actually go ahead and do that. If every HN user quit FB in one day, I don't think it would even show up on any chart.
Of course it doesn't? Who cares. I deleted my account too but that doesn't mean much.
I'm highly skeptical this outrage cycle will go on for long enough to seriously impact their userbase. Absent a proper competitor to Twitter. I've been part of enough internet boycotts of them to be cynical about their odds.
Also I'm not sure why you're having trouble finding Facebook data... just google it if you care so much about dismissing their obvious dominance. And WSJ paywall is easily bypassable.
Yes paywalls are easy to bypass. It's also a reasonable choice to respect them.
> I'm not having trouble finding Facebook data. Did you get that idea from me asking you to back up your own claims?
You've asked me repeatedly about geographic and demographic data that Facebook (and plenty of 3rd party data mining sites) post publicly. If you actually care just compare it to other sites and make your own judgement calls.
If Facebook was really dying in the west then we'd be hearing about it. You seem to be using anecdotal data, in my life everyone I know hates Facebook but at least 75% of them use it... especially 90% of the non-technical ones who tend to be the best ad targets. Maybe you're not talking to enough regular people?
I didn't claim Facebook is dying in the West. That's you putting words in my mouth.
Nothing's changed? Sure it has. Trust and confidence are hard to build, easy to torch.
One week.
The only “chaos” I’m aware of is the /b/ N**r spam invasion that occurred one afternoon? The rest seems to just be Musk doing Musk and manufactured outrage (as I really do not understand how $8/mo is breaking the bank for popular celebrities and brands) over charging for validation.
Anyway, down with Habbo Hotel.
Musk doesn't understand the platform he bought, so he promised to change the existing identify verification system – part of a strategy to combat impersonation and misinformation – to a pay-for-play subscription feature.
But Twitter already has a subscription offering! He's just ruining the verification system out of ignorance and spite.
Doesn’t matter what the “in the know” understood, it’s what the blue checks perceived it to be. To them it was a hard to get item that only folks with some degree of “celebrity” received.
Boo hoo. Your little blue badge of elitism is now available to the proles, how will you ever cope with such uppityness?
Old blue checkmark: Twitter confirms that this person is who they claim to be. If an account is called DonaldTrump and has a blue checkmark, Twitter confirms it is the account of the former president.
New blue checkmark: Twitter confirms that someone pays 8 dollars every month. If an account is called DonaldTrump and has a blue checkmark, Twitter confirms that someone is paying 8 dollars every month for this account.
So, if you see a tweet from the blue checkmark @DonaldTrump saying "I am running for president", with the new system, you have no idea if the former president has publicly announced he is running again, or if some rando who had 8 dollars to spare wants to make it seem so.
Good! I can’t think of a better way to make Twitter better for the world than to eliminate the elitism.
For what it’s worth, if Twitter eliminated the blue checkmark entirely…the exact same people would be complaining about that too. It’s their special celebrity badge that separates them as “valid” from the little people.
To illustrate with an example, I follow Paul Massaro https://twitter.com/apmassaro3 because of his expertise and because he gave me advice when I needed it the most. He is, to put it mildly, a target for nation state actors,
> Paul Massaro is the senior policy advisor for counter-corruption and sanctions. Paul’s work has advanced the recognition of corruption as a national security threat. He has been described in the media as “one of America’s foremost corruption experts” and an “endless source of democratic ingenuity." His work has been similarly described as "breathtakingly prescient.” He has worked on over 13 pieces of counter-corruption legislation and facilitated the founding of the Congressional Caucus against Foreign Corruption and Kleptocracy and the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance against Kleptocracy. Paul also covers German-speaking Europe and East Asia.
> His work on the Rodchenkov Anti-Doping Act, a landmark law redefining doping as fraud and making it illegal in international competitions anywhere in the world, has for the first time provided justice to clean athletes and held to account the authoritarian actors who use sport as a tool of foreign policy. The Associated Press described the unanimous passage of the act as “a remarkable achievement considering the polarization in U.S. politics.” His work on the Transnational Repression Accountability and Prevention (TRAP) Act was similarly groundbreaking, serving as the first-ever U.S. law to respond to abuse of INTERPOL by authoritarian regimes.
https://www.csce.gov/about-csce/staff/paul-massaro-iii-polic...
He deals with sanctions and he is one of the people deeply involved in the Russian sanctions when they invaded Ukraine, https://www.csce.gov/international-impact/press-and-media/pr...
I am sure there are people who'd prefer that he was discredited, his work hampered, or just to hurt him a bit for the amount of money he's taken out of their coffers.
He is a cog in the machine, but he is one of the more important cogs in the machine. That makes him a target.
He is also an avid social media user and interacts with people on Twitter. A lot. He uses the site prolifically and has 300k+ followers due to his expertise.
If anyone could buy that badge, and millions would have to for Twitter to service the LBO's debt, then it becomes trivially easy for nation state actors to eventually create a fake, or several fake, Paul Massaros, and knowing which one is the real Paul would get harder. ("just check the username" doesn't quite work with the general public)
It would become easier to manufacture a scandal that could be used against him & the US in general.
The kicker is that he's not even remotely the most important person on Twitter. The site has a heavy chunk of the American leadership regularly interacting with people and each other online, and they're all targets that could be used by clever propagandists.
The badge used to help mitigate it. I know if I'm talking to a Paul Massaro with a badge, then it's the real Paul. That becomes impossible without it.
This is a terrible idea.
in the first week.
That's chaos whatever your benchmark.
Is it wise to sail the sea with such a captain at the helm? Sure it's the same old boat, and we're heading to the same old destination, with the same old crew. But something is amiss.
Elon Musk bought Twitter specifically to hollow out its progressive cultural core.
Alternatively, it seems to have a significant genetic component, and most of the rest will depend on the environment you grow up in. Choice isn't part of it, you don't evaluate all the possibilities and then pick the best one, you think the one you're part of is the best one because it intuitively made sense to you. The rest is rationalization.
It's true that I don't live in America, so maybe there is a difference, but you definitely are not describing a human truth.
Of course, some people do change their ideology later in life (which I don't think is the right term, because they don't actively change it, it's more that they change and their ideology is part of them), but that's not common, and overall it's remarkably stable.
If you are born in Mecca, you are very likely to become and stay Muslim. If you are born in coastal California, you are very likely to become a Democrat of leftist bend. If you are born in a small town in the English Home Counties, you are likely to become a Tory. If you are born in a Catholic part of Northern Ireland, you are likely to become a Sinn Fein voter etc.
Obviously this isn't anywhere near as sticky as your skin color or even your primary language of communication, but the defaults are still rather strong.
Most people do not own individual stocks. And in fact, most people do not own stocks at all. The set of stock-owning people is far from average.
And yes, of course pension funds count. Why wouldn't they?
I think you’ll find a small percentage owned by rich private individuals/family offices, some owned by private investors like insurance companies, and the rest held by pension funds or mutual funds which look like big shares on paper but don’t really exercise control and correspond to lots of tiny holdings by people who range from poor to ordinary to a small number of quite wealthy people.
That is, I think the usual answer to “who are the shareholders of this public company?” is “ordinary people through their pensions or investment accounts, skewing a little bit older and richer”. Some companies have a relatively large stake owned by some private person or fund, and others have a big share owned by their original founders or their families, but in that case those people would be named instead of just saying ‘shareholders’.
Where? Can you provide a source?
https://www.projectveritas.com/news/twitter-senior-engineer-...
Twitter engineer: “Our jobs are at stake, he's a capitalist and we weren't really operating as capitalists, more like very socialist. Like we're all like commie as f*k.” ... “Twitter does not believe in free speech… Elon believes in free speech.”
https://www.projectveritas.com/news/twitter-executive-mocks-...
Twitter Lead Client Partner: “The rest of us who have been here believe in something that's good for the planet and not to give people free speech.” ... “People don’t know how to make a rational decision if you don’t put out -- correct things that are supposed to be out in the public, right?” ... “If we’re implementing all these rules…and Elon wants to dismantle them, then technically our ideology has led us to not making money because we’re not making money, and Elon wants to turn it the other way so that we can make money,”
https://www.projectveritas.com/news/undercover-video-twitter...
“if it was a pro-Trump thing and I’m anti-Trump… I banned his whole account… it’s at your discretion” ... Olinda Hassan, Policy Manager for Twitter Trust and Safety explains, “we’re trying to ‘down rank’… shitty people to not show up,” “we’re working [that] on right now”
Parnay Singh, Twitter Direct Messaging Engineer, on machine learning algorithms, “you have like five thousand keywords to describe a redneck…” “the majority of it are for Republicans”
Sure. Given links I'll do that. I just did right now since you are the first person to actually provide links.
The claim was:
> literal hours of continuous footage
None of the links you provided come even close to that claim. They are FULL of cuts. Many of them don't even include the question that was asked!
And even you took quotes out of context. The quote "Twitter does not believe in free speech" was qualified by a followup that free speech allows bullying and that Twitter does not believe in bullying because it's bad for business! Which is totally reasonable if you are an advertising platform.
Can you provide what I asked for? The source to "literal hours of continuous footage"?
Also, please stop giving quotes to your links. You've done exactly what people already claimed: taken things out of context to try to make them look worse than they really are. Folks can watch uncut videos themselves and make up their own minds. If these "literal hours of continuous footage" actually even exist.
You want people to transcribe every word for you now? I already did the web searches and wrote out snippets for you, so the topic of each video was clear. You could have done those things yourself which is why I'm the first to dish it up; it seems uncharitable to get mad about it and now accuse me of trying to manipulate you!
No relevant context was lost or hidden here. You've added more parts of what one guy said in one case, but that stuff isn't relevant to any point anyone is making in this thread. The discussion started with someone questioning the claim that Twitter employees had radical political beliefs. The Veritas videos were cited as evidence to the contrary and clearly prove the case - one of the employees literally claims Twitter staff were "commie as fuck".
It seems that you accept this original claim is true and are now arguing about something different - that you support their justifications. But their justifications for their radical politics was not a topic in this thread. Not writing out every word isn't an attempt to hide anything, as you saw, because the video is right there - with links for your convenience - ready for you to watch it, and, if you wish, start a separate discussion about their motives.
"Folks can watch uncut videos themselves and make up their own minds"
Only if they're willing to at least do a web search to get started!
All that you've got is a quotes taken out of context that distort the original meaning. Ignorable.
But if you'd rather be in denial about the nature of Twitter as an organization, go ahead and ignore all that. Your questions have been answered.
> literal hours of continuous footage
You gave links to highly edited videos. That is a fail.
Then why did the employees say what they said? In most conversations, you wouldn't have vitriol toward a certain set of political beliefs, yet the Twitter employees in the videos do express vitriol...whether the video is edited for the mass audience (like most news interviews/exposes are) or not.
Either way, our opinions here are moot. Twitter is a private company & it can do whatever it wants. If you don't like that, build your own social network. You can even recruit ex-Twitter employees...
Nonetheless, the Twitter employees still said what they said & expressed their intent to censor political opponents. You can point out that there is no raw footage for Project Veritas, even though all news organizations rarely provide raw footage & they all editorialize & they all edit, but it still does not change the fact of what was said...You might not like their editorialization or their editing, but what was said is still on video. You can call it "deceptive practices", but all news organizations engage in the same "deceptive practices".
I hope they change their policy after my call with them because they have an opportunity be a leading example of even more transparent journalism.
At the end of the day...Elon still owns Twitter, Twitter is having a record inflow of activity & active users, Elon fired the old staff, & many people are happy about it...you can't change that either. You can complain, but it still happened.
Again, it's all moot. These people lost their jobs & good riddance. Twitter is heading in a better direction now. I doubt any more Twitter employees will ramble on about how they are going to censor political opponents anymore.
Project Veritas is an American far-right activist group ... produces deceptively edited videos ... and has propagated disinformation and conspiracy theories
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Veritas
That's a hard fail right there - from a gullible disinfo peddler. No critical thinking skills.
How are we supposed to believe our eyes and ears when you haven't provided any links to video for us to watch?
Ok, but what video? You didn't give any links.
> Also the entire unedited interview is available.
Where? People keep claiming unedited video is available but no one can produce a link to such video.
They didn't do it before, but they're doing it now, and are pleasantly surprised by what they find. Even if Musk hasn't ruined Twitter yet, there's nothing wrong with him being the catalyst for this improvement.
When a leveraged buyout happens (this is true for most leveraged buyouts) a large cost is put into the business that wasn't there before. And this cost does nothing to help make the good or service better. It merely exists so that person B may own the business instead of person A.
So what is the difference between Musk and the previous shareholders? The main difference is that Musk put an enormous cost on the business which will be borne by twitters users and advertisers, and that cost brings twitter nothing more than having musk as an owner.
By himself musk may be no better or worse than the previous shareholders. But just for him to rule over twitter is going to cost twitter a lot of money that will probably reduce the quality of the service.
This is true of most leveraged buyouts and whenever a leveraged buyout happens to a company you use, it is always a good idea to look for alternatives. The official response of the leveraged buyout industry is that the new management is just so much better that it is worth to saddle the company with all this debt and all these costs to just change the management. And the customer will benefit from the better management.
It is yet to be seen whether Musk is such a great manager that he can run a social media company so much better than everybody else to make it worth taking the enormous debt, and do that without having any experience running a social media company and while running two (oh wait - three ) other companies simultaneously.
But generally speaking this is not the case. It might have been the case during the beginning of the LBO industry when there was some truly entrenched bad management in some US companies but not anymore. It is possible to change management of a publicly traded company without doing an LBO, and nowadays stockholders tend to be good about holding their managers to high standards.
Twitter the company takes out a huge loan to pay the current shareholders a fortune (which is decided by those same shareholders, no conflict of interest there at all). But who the fuck would give them a loan like that (like you say, just to have Musk at the helm)?
Basically it seems like some people are doing some mental gymnastics to justify disliking or boycotting Twitter because Elon bought it and doesn’t seem to be going along with the program.
I find that train of thought very unconvincing.
This article explains: (a) how leveraged buyouts work, (b) how Musk's acquisition is different from a regular LBO, and (c) what debt Twitter now has due to the deal.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/elon-musks-twitter-d...
Edit: I must say that even after I read it I have trouble understanding how any of that happens except through well connected people moving money around to their own benefit.
The banks are on the hook, but it’s not really the banks because it’s not their money they are lending out.
So I really understand them.
And I agree with you. "Leverage" means multiplying both risk and reward. Given a system where losses are socialized, and wins are privatized, it makes complete sense to do LBOs as much as possible - the people with money win, and everyone else loses.
A syndicate of banks, including Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Barclays, Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, BNP Paribas, Mizuho Financial Group and Societe Generale.
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/05/banks-financing-musks-twitte...
Banks usually do not care that much about clients or user experience. They look at a businesses financials and check whether it can take the extra interest payments. Apparently, Musk convinced them that with some job cuts, Twitter would be able to make the interest payments. We will see how this works out. There may be an advertiser exodus happening already and I do not think either the banks or Musk planned for that.
How do you think that debt ends up getting paid off? It'll be close to $1 billion every year just to service that debt.
Given that:
* Twitter has only ever made a profit in 2018 and 2019
* That the profits it made in those two years were $1.2bn and $1.4bn respectively (only just enough to service this new debt)
* That for 2020 and 2021 other tech companies were comparatively minting it, but Twitter burned ~$1.3bn
* The world is generally in the early phases of what is likely to a deep recession, with ad spend and consumer spending already well down
It feels like a bit of an interesting purchase, to say the least.
It should be noted that the plan to charge users $8 per month for a blue verification badge wouldn't even service the debt if 25 times more people bought it than currently have it for free.
> By himself musk may be no better or worse than the previous shareholders. But just for him to rule over twitter is going to cost twitter a lot of money that will probably reduce the quality of the service.
It seems to me that his product-focused ownership (remember, he's a big user of Twitter) will either make it better or he will run it into the ground (due to naïvety and incompetence in this domain). Both seem like a win/win situation to me.
I think he has very strong incentives to make Twitter better because it is his stage, both for marketing his companies but also to stay int he limelight (ego).
Their most profitable years would have been cancelled out by the new debt Musk brought, and that was before he tanked their ad sales.
So you don't have a source to back up your claim.
> Banning people for political speech is an accessibility issue
It is not. [1]. You don't get to widen the definition of things to make them so broad as to include your claim.
Accessibility is the design of products, devices, services, vehicles, or environments so as to be usable by people with disabilities.
You do not have a source. Someone said "many @ Twitter" share their beliefs is not the accessibility team. You're just making a guess.
> If someone is banned from the site, the site is not accessible to that person.
Sure, by definition you can't access a site you are banned from. But that's not what accessibility is and that is not what the accessibility department was working on.
> If people are being banned for political speech, then it certainly violates any form of platform neutrality.
Yes it does violate any form of platform neutrality. That still has nothing to do with the actual definition of what accessibility includes.
> Banning someone for exercising their free speech is anti-accessibility.
That's absurd. Accessibility already has a definition and it's quite specific: it's about disabled people. You are free to re-define words, but folks are also free to ignore your personal definitions.
> Freedom of Speech is a human right which Twitter has been willfully violating.
I don't agree with you that they have been violating anyone's free speech but what does this have to do with your original claim that "the accessibility team acted as political speech commissars"?
Where is your evidence of the accessibility doing that?
Not kicking up shit, genuinely curious why you'd have a separate team work on that, seems like something every engineer needs to know (at least on the frontend) for an app like Twitter.
Then all public companies like Boeing, Lockheed Martin, & Northrop Grumman are owned with the money of "average people"...largely managed by fund advisors.
So Twitter was “really good” (while it was helping the many rich shareholders of a random public company) but it’s suddenly “work” a couple of days after the owner changed?
Nothing wrong for not using it because of ideological reasons, but the product’s accessibility (or anything else really) hasn’t changed yet.