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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29311 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 12, 2022

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Looks like he's doing the New Coke strategy. Engagement is way up, no matter how much the media insist twitter is dying. People who promise to quit come back later. That is the genius of Musk's strategy...messing up twitter only makes it more popular and more media coverage about twitter.

Of course engagement is up - it's the world cup and American football time! The top of my "For You" page from a logged out browser in India is #fifaworldcup, ronaldo, #sachintendulkar, golden boot, france 4-2, money money money and greatest of all time. The non-football related topics are #sachintendulkar (a cricketer) and money money money.

A logged out page in America has 8/10 on top being NFL, the last two being "Happy Hannukah" and "Twitter CEO". The top of the page is literally Patriots vs Raiders scores.

I will take the opportunity to re-up a comment I left recently, explaining how Musk can make twitter profitable again: https://www.themotte.org/post/229/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/42105?context=8#context

tl;dr; sports + celebrities. No one cares about paul graham or taylor lorenz, lots of people care about Brady, Belichick and Dicker the Kicker. If you don't know who they are, that's your bubble. The only non-NFL humans that twitter America seems to care about are Tom Cruise, Elon Musk, Lionel Messi and (way down the list) Christina Aguilera.

tl;dr; sports + celebrities. No one cares about paul graham or taylor lorenz, lots of people care about Brady, Belichick and Dicker the Kicker

This policy has been an absolute disaster for that group, at least based on my little corner of non-political Twitter.

Until yesterday the effect of Musk on sports/hobby Twitter was zero to slightly positive - the only noticeable change was that the trending hashtags are less dominated by American politics. The Mastadon "migration" was never more than a handful, and even those that did set up accounts either forgot them after a week or just set them to mirror Twitter posts.

But the external links ban seems to have changed all that. Suddenly everyone is setting up alternative accounts, it's an order of magnitude bigger than the initial takeover. Linktree and similar services were very widely used so there are a lot of people that never cared about the takeover that now feel threatened. Even if you aren't personally affected Twitter has made itself look weak so people are concerned about it collapsing.

The policy has seriously undermined Twitter's standing in that area, in a way that looks like it will persist despite the U-turn.

But political Twitter has some power (hence the FBI's interest), and it should be possible to translate that power into money.

How do you propose to turn political twitter into an amount of money remotely proportional to the risk it poses to sports&celebs twitter?

Soft corruption. Twitter sells extremely expensive advertising to candidates and parties. It is known that if just one side pays for this advertising the algorithm overall greatly favors them.

No one cares about paul graham or taylor lorenz, lots of people care about Brady, Belichick and Dicker the Kicker

A lot of people cared about the twitter files. sports is a big part , but so is politics and other stuff.

I'm sure it is during the brief periods (presidential elections) when a spectacle is happening.

From what I recall of advertising analytics I've done in the past, it's even less profitable than the engagement numbers might suggest. Kellogs doesn't exactly love having Frosted Flakes associated with "Trump is the most raaaaacist guy ever", "Lock Her Up" or even "thousands dead in Somalia" and "plane crash" - it's just a negative mental association.

Tom Cruise, Aguilera and "Happy Hannukah" don't have this problem.

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