tw.tter

[El Pollo Diablo]

Your and my favourite* billionaire, Elon Musk, is buying your and my favourite* social media website. I'm sure they'll be very happy together.

[IvanV]

Like he was so happy with crypto-currency?

[lpm]

I can't see how tw.tter can make money, long term.

How much have I spent on it in real money? Zero. How much have I spent on it via seeing adverts? Minimal. How much exploitable data has tw.tter got on me? Hardly anything.

There's a reason why it was a flop as a public traded stock. It IPO'd in 2013 at $26. It's traded between $16 and $77. It's been bought at $54.

In that same period Amazon's gone from $350 to $3,000, Facebook from $50 to $187, Google from $500 to $2,500, Apple from $20 to $163, Netflix from $50 to $210, and Tesla from $30 to $1,000. Nasdaq index has gone from 4,000 to 13,000.

Tw.tter is incredibly noisy and that disguises the fact that it's pretty thin as a business.

Leveraged buyouts work for solid cash generators. Have enough cash flow to pay your interest each year, then hope for the company's value to increase. Tw.tter does not have that reliable cash flow but is a mature company with limited room to expand. And once it's private it can't go on an acquisition spree using its shares as currency.

I think he's made a terrible mistake out of ego. The good news is it will probably lead to him reducing his stake in Tesla and SpaceX, which will free them from the whims of an unstable owner.

[Stranger Mouse]

I doubt if he will manage to change much but in the meantime I will set up an escape hatch to a Twitter competitor just in case. What is good? Mastodon?

[Gfamily]

Maybe a useful loss maker to write against future tax liabilities (no idea how that sort of thing works, but that shouldn't stop me thinking it )

Plus the approbation of the #freespeech people he seems to need.

[Gfamily]

What is good? Mastodon?

Someone posted a screenshot claiming that them sharing their Mastodon feed onto Twitter was blocked, allegedly because it's 'unsafe', but I've no idea if this was actually the case or just more anti twitter Musk fake news.

[Stephanie]

What is good? Mastodon?

Someone posted a screenshot claiming that them sharing their Mastodon feed onto Twitter was blocked, allegedly because it's 'unsafe', but I've no idea if this was actually the case or just more anti twitter Musk fake news.

Mastodon is decentralised, which means there are lots of instances - I saw some folk saying they couldn't post links from one specific instance, but the one I'm on is fine (if a little overloaded with all the new sign ups).

[IvanV]

Maybe a useful loss maker to write against future tax liabilities (no idea how that sort of thing works, but that shouldn't stop me thinking it )

Making losses is usually not good for you, even when it can reduce the tax elsewhere.

Sometimes companies have "tax losses" that are not true losses, because of convoluted tax accounting differing from objective accounting.

When you buy a business, sometimes it can have an additional value to you if you can use its expected temporary or past losses to set against your other tax liabilities. It's best if you are expecting to turn it around. Sometimes you might instead buy it for its tax losses intending to liquidate it, limiting its losses during that period to less than the value of the tax advantage. Clearly that is only usable as a method if it becomes an integrated part of a consolidated corporation, ie if both Tesla and Twitter were subsidiaries of the same higher corporate entity that was treated as consolidated for tax purposes.

A different situation is where an individual makes money out of a loss-making company, by using its cashflow to pay themselves a large salary or dividends, while the losses mount up, which then fall on the creditors. For example the Phoenix Four. Football clubs are a common vehicle for this little trick. If you can avoid a rap for trading while insolvent, a rather rare charge, it's not even illegal. After all, the ordinary employees deserve their salaries for their work done while the business continues. Taking a salary or dividend of £10m while the company goes down the tubes isn't legally different from that, but morally it is quite different.

Clearly you can also get the taxman to subsidise your hobby, if you can construct it so your company "owns" your hobby. The waste-processing business that owns the hayfield opposite my house also owns racehorses, that the hay feeds. The racehorses operate at a large loss. Essentially the business owners are getting the taxman to subsidise their horseracing hobby.

[lpm]

Experiment:

- look at the companies advertising to you on twitter with Promoted Tweets
- ask if they would be less likely to advertise if twitter became even more badly moderated, with abusive speech or hate speech

My advertisers seem to be:

- car companies, from when I was buying a new car and the famous algorithm flaw makes them think I'll want to buy another new car
- finance / investment. From what I follow and talk about?
- health & fitness. From my demographic?
- travel. From what I talk about?

It's a bit of a problem for Musk, because advertisers don't want unmoderated "free speech". Except for maybe the adverts from bitcoin scammers. Advertisers don't want to sit next to a bit of casual racism or be in the middle of an abusive twitter spat.

[Gfamily]

I use tweetdeck and simply don't see any 'promoted tweets'

[lpm]

How do you pay for your service then? Is it entirely free?

Musk is paying $200 to acquire you, if I've done the calcs right of $43 bn divided by estimated human users. How are you going to generate over $200 profit for him?

[Stephanie]

can't wait for musk to generate profits from my tweets about *checks* jean chairs and *squints* feral cat wife, plus *recoils* ET with tits

[noggins]

I despise Pedomusk and want him to fail.

What can i do to contribute to his downfall?

[lpm]

can't wait for musk to generate profits from my tweets about *checks* jean chairs and *squints* feral cat wife, plus *recoils* ET with tits

1) Stephanie creates excellent content many people want to see
2) Stephanie charges zero for this content
3) I rush to see Stephanie's content and see adverts alongside ET with tits
4) Twitter takes all the advertising revenue

It's a great business model, fundamentally. But it became a mature market 10 years ago and has barely grown since. Removing moderation in the name of "free speech" is likely to reduce the quantity of excellent content provided for free.

Maybe some people will pay twitter for the honour of providing twitter with excellent content for free?

[noggins]

ah, so the key is to develop my abilities in politically harmless shitposting.

[Stephanie]

can't wait for musk to generate profits from my tweets about *checks* jean chairs and *squints* feral cat wife, plus *recoils* ET with tits

1) Stephanie creates excellent content many people want to see
2) Stephanie charges zero for this content
3) I rush to see Stephanie's content and see adverts alongside ET with tits
4) Twitter takes all the advertising revenue

It's a great business model, fundamentally. But it became a mature market 10 years ago and has barely grown since. Removing moderation in the name of "free speech" is likely to reduce the quantity of excellent content provided for free.

Maybe some people will pay twitter for the honour of providing twitter with excellent content for free?

Twitter was already moving towards content creators by adding stuff like tip jars and ticketed spaces. They also have Twitter Blue, as the subscription model - no idea what the features were beyond a small amount of time to edit a tweet I think.

[Stephanie]

ah, so the key is to develop my abilities in politically harmless shitposting.

I saw people talking about how Tumblr responded when they were bought by Yahoo, and it's pretty much how the Mastodon community behaves. A) bully every brand account and celeb so they leave the platform and B) post content so ghastly, no brand would want to go there.

[monkey]

How do you pay for your service then? Is it entirely free?

Musk is paying $200 to acquire you, if I've done the calcs right of $43 bn divided by estimated human users. How are you going to generate over $200 profit for him?

He hasn't only bought users, they are Twitter's largest asset (or their data is, anyway), but not the only one. And he only needs to raise the value of the company more than his loan interest to increase his wealth, he only needs enough profit to make his payments.

Anyway, to increase profits, it seems to me that he thinks he could gather better quality data, leading to better targeted advertising. One of the things he said he wants to do is to "verify all humans", presumably this means he thinks he can sort out the people from the bots. There would be an additional verification step to do this, which would mean you have to give out more information about yourself than you currently do. That means it'll be easier to link your twitter activity to the rest of your online activity. By removing bots from user data and having easier to link up data, he'd be selling something more valuable.

(I hate twitter and I hate Elon Musk)

[Gfamily]

can't wait for musk to generate profits from my tweets about *checks* jean chairs and *squints* feral cat wife, plus *recoils* ET with tits

My most regular subject for tweets is letting people know that the company that runs Welsh Trains has changed, so they should be asking @tfwrail rather than @ArrivaTW*

* it's over 3½ years now, but they didn't change the branding enough


Personally, I rarely see adverts as I mostly use tweetdeck, and that doesn't seem to do 'promoted tweets' or 'based on your ...'

[Stranger Mouse]

Musk gets pwned again.

https://twitter.com/aoc/status/15204059 ... uGfNP57cGg

846D2269-E635-40C3-BBDD-980AB648BD75.jpeg (146.01 KiB) Viewed 13222 times

[lpm]

Oh dear.

[jimbob]

Oh dear.

You might need to narrow it down a bit to clarify what particular bin fire you are thinking about

[Gfamily]

Oh dear.

You might need to narrow it down a bit to clarify what particular bin fire you are thinking about

Most likely the Musk "has put his bid on hold" bin fire

[bjn]

Oh dear.

You might need to narrow it down a bit to clarify what particular bin fire you are thinking about

Most likely the Musk "has put his bid on hold" bin fire

I wish the LoL emoji was bigger.

[jimbob]

You might need to narrow it down a bit to clarify what particular bin fire you are thinking about

Most likely the Musk "has put his bid on hold" bin fire

I wish the LoL emoji was bigger.

Oh is he discovering about liability? And not just legal, but brand reputation if he let Twitter become 8-Chan?