Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

The next time the wall street journal editorial board speaks the truth will be the first.

It’s easy to sit in safety and prescribe what other people should be doing.

I like you, you’re my kind of trouble.

American History and Black History Cannot Be Separated

Never entrust democracy to any process that requires republicans to act in good faith.

They fucked up the fucking up of the fuckup!

Hot air and ill-informed banter

Is it negotiation when the other party actually wants to shoot the hostage?

T R E 4 5 O N

This year has been the longest three days of putin’s life.

The party of Reagan has become the party of Putin.

They are lying in pursuit of an agenda.

So many bastards, so little time.

Let there be snark.

In short, I come down firmly on all sides of the issue.

This isn’t Democrats spending madly. This is government catching up.

Let me eat cake. The rest of you could stand to lose some weight, frankly.

Let’s delete this post and never speak of this again.

Republicans don’t want a speaker to lead them; they want a hostage.

There are consequences to being an arrogant, sullen prick.

“Cheese and Kraken paired together for the appetizer trial.”

Give the craziest people you know everything they want and hope they don’t ask for more? Great plan.

… pundit janitors mopping up after the GOP

Putin dreamed of ending NATO, and now it’s Finnish-ed.

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Late Night Open Thread: Twitter Owns the ‘Chief Twit’

Late Night Open Thread: Twitter Owns the ‘Chief Twit’

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Yes, I am spending waaaaay too many brain cells enjoying the latest Muskageddon. How it started:

Hilarity ensured ensued!

And then *this* happened…

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50Comments

  5. 5.

    Splitting Image

    Never apologize for enjoying the sight of a deserving man get what’s coming to him.

    At this point it’s obvious that Musk has no clue what makes Twitter a unique platform, which means that he has no clue what he bought or why it was (supposedly) worth what he paid for it. People use the site for a lot of different reasons, true, but a big part of Twitter’s appeal is that it has a great many celebrities on it who like goofing around with their fans.

    Other social media platforms have more people, but Twitter arguably has more of the right people. It’s possible to fool around with other Star Wars fans from around the world, have one of your threads make its way into Mark Hamill’s feed, and have the man himself chime in. Or depending on your fan interests, you can hob-nob with George Takei, Stephen King, Neil Gaiman, or hundreds of others. Musk wants to tell these guys that they ought to pay for the privilege of being able to connect with their fans. Maybe it’s news to Musk, but none of these guys pay fees to the folks who run conventions to meet their fans there either.

    The way it works is that you pay Hamill to show up and charge fans of his to get in the door in order to meet him, which ought to provide Musk with a clue as to who he should be charging for his service. Most users wouldn’t pay a dime, unfortunately, which presents Musk with a bit of a conundrum.

  7. 7.

    Llelldorin

    A key sign that Musk hasn’t thought this through at all is that his stated key directions for Twitter are all at cross purposes

    1. He wants to “bring back free speech on Twitter.” That means loosing the trolls.
    2. He wants to control the “trolls & bots.” That’s… exactly the opposite of the first point. It’s also a really hard engineering problem.
    3. He wants to fire a lot of engineers to save money. That’s… not generally how one solves hard engineering problems.
    4. He wants to charge people quite a lot for the privilege of using the dumpster fire that points 1-3 are creating.
  8. 8.

    Martin

    Musk doesn’t seem to understand that social media is unlike almost any other business in that it has an exceptionally unstable business model.

    The entire value in a social network is the social graph. You need users, and lots of them. That need makes it impossible to charge for the service, which is why it becomes ad-dominated. There are some ideas of chaining it to other revenue sources – government if you can comply with the requirements of government, payments, etc. but barring those, you have this free service that by necessity needs to be free but also by virtue of it being free turns into a free mechanism for abuse/fraud/etc. So you need to throw money into the service to keep it clean enough to be useful to people, and clean enough to run ads on, but unclean enough to provide value to a significant percentage of your user base.

    And that leads to the next problem – the realities of advertising. Most investors don’t recognize that advertising is effectively a fixed percentage of GDP – about 1.5%-2%. It’s pretty much a fixed pot of money you are chasing, so advertising is effectively zero-sum. It moves between print, physical, radio, TV, social media, etc. but the more advertising channels you provide, the cheaper ads become – because again, it’s zero sum. So your growth is difficult to sustain because more users means more ad supply (supply means ad slots, demand means advertisers willing to pay for those slots) and more supply with a fixed spend on the industry means that either you are making your ad opportunities more compelling than the alternatives, or you are diluting the ad value as you grow.

    Enter Elon who decides to invert the whole scheme. Charging content creators rather than paying them, which could possibly work if Twitter were sufficiently compelling, but it’s really not. Technologically it’s a shit-show. There’s no inherent value in the tech stack, which means that reproducing that stack is pretty easy to do. The value is in the social graph, and Twitters isn’t that large. So it’s probably not all *that* hard to clone Twitter and peel off their users because it means just building a competent clone, and given how shit Twitters clients are, they really open that door.

    It’s not that Musks ideas are all garbage, a few of them are okay, but they don’t form a coherent whole. Some work against one another – charging users and then bypassing paywalls isn’t terrible, other than everyone’s experience with Facebook doing this, and they put a year of consideration behind that, not a week. None of the social media have tried to tackle bots by increasing the cost of creating an account. That cost doesn’t need to be money – it can be time or effort. That’s enough to destroy a bot economy but not deter new signups.

    But I suspect even the best ideas aren’t going to be enough to counter the general collapse of ad spending that Google and Meta just reported which are inevitable to Twitter. You have a whole new category of ad-supported streaming which are unskippable, content which is well programmed and therefore safe, and a decent opportunity for targeting. More ad dilution.

    My guess is that longer term social media is not sustainable as a pure service play. Glue it to a cleaner revenue service that benefits from a large social graph and maybe it holds together that way. This has been a big part of Apple’s success. They can afford to run zero profit services for years because they pull their revenue from hardware sales. That’s probably the way out of this, and I don’t think Musk has any idea how to get there from his quite dystopic and perverted view of how society should function.

  10. 10.

    ColoradoGuy

    The comments over at Ars Technica are pure gold. Highly recommended. The funniest thing I’ve seen in a long time.

  11. 11.

    Martin

    @Ruckus: The other aspect of the blue check is that under the current system, a blue check cannot be anonymous. Under Musk’s proposal, it could be.

    As a result, blue checks tend to not be trolls and abusive – they’re identifiable. Sure, Ye and Trump can go off and be assholes, but as we’ve seen, there are consequences even beyond getting your account closed.

  13. 13.

    Ian R

    No matter what happens, Musk has already succeeded in destroying Twitter. The leveraged buyout adds about one billion/year in debt service to their expenses. This is a company that was just barely managing to sometimes make a profit with total costs of about $1.5 billion/year.

  16. 16.

    Bruce K in ATH-GR

    Musk’s antics remind me of the cause of the Chornobyl nuclear disaster – partly because, like a nuclear reactor, Twitter needs a critical mass to sustain itself (users in Twitter’s case versus fissionable materials), and someone who thinks he’s all-knowing and surrounded by incompetents can kill it without meaning to.

    At this point, failure may well be inevitable, but there’s a question of whether the failure will be quiet or spectacular, and what the fallout will look like.

  17. 17.

    p.a.

    “I will gladly give you *mumble mumble mumble* in the future for $20 a month.”

    “Fuck you.”

    “Name your price.”

    “Fuck you.”

    “You don’t want to be left out!”

    “F.U.”

    “uhhhhh… unnnnn… ehhhhrrrrrrrrr…”

  19. 19.

    Jinchi

    @Martin: The other aspect of the blue check is that under the current system, a blue check cannot be anonymous.

    Maybe I’m confused about the purpose of the blue check.

    Isn’t it supposed to confirm a person’s identity? I could understand a one time fee to pay for verification, for those who care to do it. But how does an $8/month fee make any sense at all?

  20. 20.

    Baud

    @Bruce K in ATH-GR:

    but there’s a question of whether the failure will be quiet or spectacular, and what the fallout will look like.

     

    Edgar Frog: I think I should warn you all, when a vampire bites it, it’s never a pretty sight. No two bloodsuckers go the same way. Some yell and scream, some go quietly, some explode, some implode, but all will try to take you with them

  24. 24.

    ant

    It’s kinda like Tesla’s door handles.

    Every other car manufacturer puts ergonomics and reliability as their priorities when designing these things. But at Tesla, no, it’s a whis-bang fancy pants tech marvel BS that’s hard to use, and breaks a lot.

    But it’s different. And it draws attention. So pedo guy insisted on having it that way.

     

    The dude is an idiot.

  25. 25.

    Geo Wilcox

    @Jinchi: It doesn’t. Twitter is like all other social media. If you aren’t paying for it you are the product. It makes zero sense to charge the product (user) a fee.

  26. 26.

    Ken

    There’s a whole second level of getting owned, with Musk fans claiming people like Stephen King and Mark Hamill need their blue checks to remain famous, and the entire rest of the world laughs in their faces.

  27. 27.

    Betsy

    Those of us in transportation and urban planning  have seen this all before with his stupid tunnels and non-self-driving electric cars

    Directly analogous – an expensive non-solution, stupider than anything people who actually work in the field would come up with

  28. 28.

    trucmat

    @ColoradoGuy:

    Ars Technica commenters have undergone a U-turn on Musk. They love SpaceX and formerly loved Tesla. Most of them originally thought Musk was a genius businessman and engineer. Then they learned he wasn’t actually either and in fact is an asshole scion of an emerald mine whose narcissism was hurting the companies they loved. Turns out he’s not a genius and his over-the-top exaggerated claims about Tesla full self driving autopilot make him seem to be a tout and a fool.

    So yeah … The world of programmers and engineers are already onto Musk.

  29. 29.

    Betsy

    @ant: More like his stupid tunnels, where he “solves” traffic by building super-expensive single lanes for cars underground.

    It won’t work, for a host of reasons, but it’s intended as a special fast lane just for those who can afford it and don’t have to mix with the plebs.  Just like a Blue check fee, huh.

  30. 30.

    Betsy

    I love how he thinks $96/year from a small minority of users on twitter is supposed to generate “an income stream for content creators,” his words — ie, *most* people on twitter.

    How does that work? Lol

  31. 31.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    There is something really bilious about someone Nate Silverman telling Musk to go fuck himself over paying subscription.

  32. 32.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    As usual, “defeat the bots & trolls” literally just means to him “create a VIP lane where us grand people won’t have to mingle with the pleb”. That’s the man’s answer to EVERY SINGLE problem thrown at him, lolsob

    I am pretty sure that was why rich celebs like Steven King use twitter, to mingle with the plebs.

    Also, you pay a subscription fee and still get adverts? Yes, fuck off Musk.

  33. 33.

    Jinchi

    @Enhanced Voting Techniques: ​
      Apparently, now that blue checks will be handed out to anyone willing to shell out $8/m, Elon is planning on introducing a new “secondary tag for someone who is a public figure”.

    Wasn’t that literally what the blue check was invented for?

  34. 34.

    Ken

    This is the best analogy I’ve seen so far (warning, twitter link).

    Matt Pearce: Twitter is the ad-dependent print newspaper bought out by private equity that now needs to service its debt, and the first order of business is to sell off the real estate, lay off staff, hike subscription costs and hope the core customer base doesn’t notice everything is worse.

  35. 35.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    @trucmat: Most of them originally thought Musk was a genius businessman and engineer. Then they learned he wasn’t actually either and in fact is an asshole scion of an emerald mine whose narcissism was hurting the companies they loved.

    One does wonder what is really going on with Musk; it does seem like there are other, better businessmen behind Musk who are doing the investments in companies like Space X and Tesla,  appointing Musk to run them because they know Musk is such a no life loser, so desperate for attention, that Musk will work himself to death making them richer.

  36. 36.

    Another Scott

    @Martin: Mostly agree, with a caveat.

    Twitter’s value is in quick news that is read by politicians, news orgs, MotUs, lawyers, etc.  Power brokers.  Lots of places do well in that niche (Fox News, Bloomberg, The Economist, Politico, TheHill, RollCall, etc.) without being the behemoth.

    Trouble is, as you say, they have ways to generate revenue that it seems like Twitter hasn’t figured out – especially since Elon’s banksters are wanting $1.5M (or whatever) in interest every day, and especially since he’s doing his usual trolling and destroying the company.

    He should declare victory, hand it off to a new CEO and board and not touch it any more ASAP.  But he won’t.

    Oh well, users will go elsewhere – they always do eventually.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  39. 39.

    Lacuna Synecdoche

    Nate Silver via Anne Laurie @ Top:

    I’m probably the perfect target for this, use Twitter a ton, can afford $20/mo, not particularly anti-Elon, but my reaction is that I’ve generated a ton of valuable free content for Twitter over the years and they can go fuck themselves.

    Elon Musk via Anne Laurie @ Top:

    You will also get:
    – Priority in replies, mentions & search, which is essential to defeat spam/scam
    – Ability to post long video & audio
    – Half as many ads

    In other words:

    Elon Musk: I want you to come work for me. I want you to write content for my website, so I can charge advertisers money to rent the eyeballs you’re entertaining.

    Content Creator: Okay, sure. How much will you pay me?

    Elon Musk: Oh, no, I want you to pay me. Twenty dollars a month.

    Content Creator: You want me to pay you to help you earn money? Will I get it ad-free?

    Elon Musk: No. But I’ll cut the ads in half.

    Content Creator: …

    Elon Musk: And, uh, I’ll set up algorithms to reduce spam.

    Content Creator: Don’t you have to do that anyway?

    Elon Musk: Yeah, but uh … I’ll give you the ability to post longer content!

    Content Creator: You’ll give me the ability to post more content for your profit?

    Elon Musk: Eight Dollars?

    Content Creator: Fuck you.

  41. 41.

    S Cerevisiae

    This thread has me laughing so much this morning, he really doesn’t understand the thing he has bought.

    Some Twitter clone will eventually reach a critical mass of users and become the new one, then Twitter will become MySpace.

  42. 42.

    Mike in NC

    Fascist-curious Elon Musk bought the social media sewer called Twitter simply to rip people off? Who didn’t see that coming? Does he also own a luxury suite at Mar-A-Lago? His biggest regret is being born a foreigner so he can’t rule over us as a mini-Putin.

  43. 43.

    pacem appellant

    Twitter is dead. My only lament is is loss of journalism. How many news articles are just slapped together Twitter posts? As online journalism moves to Substack, it’s going to be a lot less visible to the unwashed masses.

  44. 44.

    RaflW

    UK’s Financial Times says the big banks know they are going to book big losses on these loans. Also that they are “waiting for (Elon’s) detailed business plan”, which is surely a joke, right?

    What an endless parade of idiots.

  45. 45.

    Kirk Spencer

    @Enhanced Voting Techniques: so what it looks like to me is a guy who has a lot of cool ideas, some of which are pretty good at corr, with enough money and influence to get them off the ground. Some crash and burn, but some are both pretty good and successful. The successful ones, however, don’t get Really Good until Mr Startup is moved out of the business. Both Tesla and SpaceX are on the cusp of this point, I think, and won’t really get better till Mr Musk is Ex.

    Twitter is Elon doing the reverse of what he’s good at. That simple. He just did it spectacularly, and his ego put him in a place where he can’t back down.

    Hubris, in an almost classic display.

  46. 46.

    StringOnAStick

    I enjoyed all these comments, but I want to add one thing: Saudi money helped buy this thing, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Putin money is in the mix as well.  They might be willing to pony up when the banks start demanding what they agreed to, and now that it is a private company, how will we know?

    Let’s see, what was that list Adam posted of the ways intelligence agencies look for a leverage point to create an asset?  I do recall that financial stress is a key one, and Elon is starting to look pretty financially stressed to me.  There’s lots of potential outcomes, and unfortunately not all of them are “Elon crashes Twitter into a wall and destroys it”.  Just something to keep in mind.

  49. 49.

    gvg

    @StringOnAStick: Well if the west proves sanctioned money is going into twitter…..doesn’t that meant they have to confiscate it? Arrest Musk for money laundering? Unfortunately that would be messy and a lot of people wouldn’t believe it plus I don’t think the US wants to have to run twitter. Its funny to think about though.

  50. 50.

    SWMBO

    @StringOnAStick: If Putin is behind some of the financing, would that make Twitter subject to sanctions?  And Musk is raising the rent on Starlink for Ukraine.  Any possible connection there?  Who is following the money?

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