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Twitter's been acting weird for several hours. Turns out that Musk has done something extraordinary:
Of course everyone on Twitter knows that 600 posts/day is basically nothing, so it's basically something to get people to pay for Twitter and get that blue check, but even then it's not an unlimited offer.
Is Musk knowingly just trying to run the website down, or is there some logic here that I'm not seeing? Is this, finally, the much-predicted Death of Twitter?
does reading a post mean viewing the timeline , refreshing it, or clicking a tweet and reading it individually? it is possible to read posts in many ways.
twitter seemed to work so well from 2010-2022 and then all a sudden it doesn't
no, not the death at all. it is to test the waters on this idea. if it fails to generate enough verification signups, he will abandon it. also, it helps generate free press about the site being down
AFAIK Twitter was not profitable overall in that time. Running nice to users unprofitable website is much easier than running one that gets enough income/donations.
Twitter would be profitable now (and indeed he could have fired fewer engineers) if he had kept his mouth shut after acquisition, calmed the advertisers down and just kept the ship afloat.
Elon’s dumb move was firing 75% of staff and then also losing half the advertisers, such that even the former could not make the company profitable.
He lost the advertisers because Twitter wasn't really selling advertising. They were providing control of the social commons through their "Trust and Safety" censorship policies. The payment for this was in the form of advertising dollars. If he'd done what the "advertisers" wanted, he'd have to continue with the policies that he bought the company in order to end.
He didn't have to continue with the policy at all, he only had to gesture toward it. If he'd been overtly supportive while quietly implementing exactly the same speech policies he has, while not tweeting much himself and putting out the occasional corporate press release with the right words, he'd be fine. Advertisers don't care about policy, but they do care about the appearance of policy. Kind of like how Trump would have had a much easier time passing his plans through congress if he hadn't tried to claim they were actually much more radical than they were.
As I said, these aren't really "advertisers", these are ideologues using advertising dollars to pay for control of the social commons. They do care about results.
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from what I understand, the answer seems to be yes. also all the replies appear to be included.
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I understand the principle of experimentation and generating buzz. But there's experimentation and then there's setting yourself on fire to see what happens.
it depends how long it stays broken. i am sure if he wanted he could revert twitter to how it was yesterday
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