this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2023
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Took over Twitter. Ruined it. Then : "The sad truth is that there are no great 'social networks' right now,".
Twitter used to be in much better shape financially before musk took over but implying that it was ever "great" is a bit of a stretch
twitter may have been a shithole in general, but it was great compared to what it is now.
Yes. Twitter was profitable in 2019. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1418091/000141809120000037/twtr-20191231.htm
Ctrl+F for "Net Income", which will take you to the $1,465,659 (thousands) figure somewhere in its charts. Net Income is the bottom line: after all revenues, costs, etc. etc. of the year were added up.
Musk took it over with a so called "Leveraged Buyout", meaning Twitter borrowed $13 Billion to allow Elon Musk to buy it for $44 Billion (meaning Elon Musk only paid $33 Billion, the random +2 Billion to wipeout all the old debt).
Note that $13 Billion in loans costs somewhere between 10% to 14% right now, depending on how much of the loan was fixed and how much of it was adjustable. At 10%, this means that Twitter took on $1.3 Billion/year in interest payments as Elon Musk bought the company. There's pretty much no hope for Twitter to ever be profitable again, they'd have to execute as perfectly as 2019 despite losing 80% of their staff (Elon Musk also fired everyone when he took over the company).
The company was "barely profitable" in 2019, and "just barely losing money" in 2020, 2021. But add on a $1.3+ Billion/year loadstone, and its just... not... going to ever be profitable again.
The funniest part, though, is that the $13 billion in debt to Twitter is held by lenders who would be first in line to get any payout from a Twitter bankruptcy. If the enterprise value as a whole drops below $13 billion, then Musk would get nothing out of the bankruptcy, and would lose his entire $30b+ investment with nothing to show for it. Unless, of course, Musk decides to put good money after bad, and pony up a new investment of even more money, that the lenders would agree to take.
As much as I'm happy to see both Twitter and Musk fail, your comment reminds me yet again that leveraged buyouts are fundamentally fucked up and ought to be illegal.
Twitter was never great, just reactionaries yelling about shit they only know 15% of.
How did he ruin it though? I hear that all the time but I myself haven't noticed any changes. Well, except for a logo but that's very minor
So you haven't noticed the 80% reduction in staff leading to incredible amounts of Twitter Downtime, the rise in hate-speech due to the firing of the moderators, the loss of mainstream advertisements, and the replacement with ridiculous low-quality advertising because the mainstream advertisers have grown concerned about the hate-speech?
And you haven't noticed the increase in downtime as the website continuously crashes? The loss of the blocking feature? The inability to block Elon Musk specifically? (and how he keeps appearing on everyone's feed even when you try to get rid of it?). The loss of API access?
Comment quality and overall quality of discussion has declined significantly on Twitter as well, as Twitter has fallen from top10 on the App/Play store to #55 or later, because it turns out that Americans are too stupid to search for "X" rather than "Twitter". There has been a precipitous decline in the already crappy quality discussion.
Finally, Threads and Mastodon have sucked out many high-quality posters and sub-communities.
"no, not really" is the answer to all of those, honestly. But I rarely use twitter, hence why I was asking. Just blocked Elon by the way, really curious if what you're saying about blocking him is true.
Cool you barely use twitter and didn't notice any of the declines detailed above but "no, not really" thanks for the high quality discussion
Are we speaking a different language or something? The comment above prefaces all questions "you haven’t noticed " - no I haven't noticed none of those precisely because I don't use twitter much. What's the discrepancy here?
You asked how elon ruined the experience, someone explained it to you, you then said you don't even use the platform and hadn't noticed any of that. Like. Why did you ask in the first place and why are you dismissing the fairly detailed and accurate answer you got?
Edit: I'll leave my response but I think you're actually just curious from the perspective of someone who doesn't use twitter a lot. I think I knee jerk reacted as though you were trying to defend musk as his fans are fairly obnoxious. Having reread this whole conversation, I think I'm coming off more aggressive than I should be.
Anyway, yeah you're right you probably wouldn't have noticed the negative changes musk has brought about. As a former daily user of twitter I'm fairly angry at the destruction of the site. I think twitter was an extremely important venue, it gave regular people direct access to interaction with the rich and powerful, it gave access to unfiltered news from on the ground people and it allowed people from remote/poorer parts of the world a way to interact with the west. Losing that in the society we live in is a real bummer.
For a product the logo and brand recognition are not minor. Twitter was so well known and ubiquitous that the word "tweet" was included in dictionaries around the world. He threw that away and replaced it with a generic X, and no one can figure out how to call posts on that platform now.
But other than that, he has a very particular stance on moderation and free speech. He thinks hateful comments are just fine, as long as they aren't strictly against the law. But he also doesn't apply the same standards to himself, removing stuff he doesn't like even though it would be ok according to his own rules. He also gutted the Twitter/X staff, particularly the tech departements, leading to numerous outages and technical problems. All this has made it an even worse platform for civil public discourse, and it wasn't all that great before he took over imo.
I will continue to call them twats
I like Xeets. Pronounced shits.
Thanks for the explanation. For me none of that, well, except for content moderation, really matters. I just didn't understand why people blame Elon when the platform has already been overrun by bots way before he took over. Whenever I look at it, It's all crypto and political spam. Who cares what logo looks like, or how many people work on it, when there's no good content to begin with?
You're being extremely disingenuous. Those things exist on that platform and every other social media platform. If that's literally all you're seeing, you are not using it right... in fact you have to be going pretty far out of your way to make that the entirety of the content shown to you. It wasn't hard at all to find quality posters and filter out the bullshit.
Right now, I opened twitter, and out of 16 trending topics, 7 are crypto spam, 3 are political spam, 2 are just spam, 2 are generic words, and the remaining two I have zero interested in. Today I also got a "trending tweet" notification that was in some foreign language I don't know. Went on a homepage and every third post is some kind of spam, so I had to block like a couple dozen accounts just so they never pop up again. I have no idea how you are supposed to find good creators when spammers are gaming the system so easily. And it's been like that for a few years already. No other social network has this problem, I would've quit internet if that was the case.
Right now? Probably. Musk has super-fucked it and I won't have anything to do with the guy or his projects. You argued it's always been this way, though. It was not if you took a moment to use it correctly and follow people you like and ignore those you don't. I give my friends shit (jokingly) for using "X" and the answer is the same "It's the best way to keep tabs on my favorite creators."
Think about this. Staff soon may not have a place to work if they don't work from home. Musk hasn't been paying vendors or rent on Twitter offices for some time now. His failure to pay server costs caused outages and a scramble from what staff remained to move that info off google servers he didn't want to pay for and onto servers he owns. This kind of thing may not effect all users on a daily basis, but imagine if your landlord just decided not to pay the utilities bill out of your rent. Eventually the city or municipality would shut off the electric or water. You can't have a domicile that doesn't have electric and water. The place would be condemned and all renters would be out of their homes. That's basically a very similar scenario to what's happening at Twitter.
The "blue check" system which was previously used to denote verified users were who they claimed to be suddenly became a complete cash grab for $8 a month, even more for companies to have verified checks or sets of them? Then when not everyone was buying in those users were pushed to the top of replies to users posts. This of course caused tons of people to just get blocked outright because of their checks.
Additionally i believe he has threatened to remove some companies handles because they stopped using them most notably NPR.
Now he has floated the idea of removing the blocking feature because reasons? Who knows what he thinks. So the functionality has not changed a ton, for now, the quality of what you get has gone down.
Oh also he made a specific exception and unbanned some user who posted literal child porn
The most blocked accounts turned out to likely be the Bluechecks, because these guys paid to be in replies, a d their opinions are 90% trash.
On Twitter I basically always block the new Bluechecks, there's even a hashtag(that won't show in the search e.e) called 'BlockTheBlue'.
He likely saw a report that showed he was the most blocked user, so he got sads
Also, his bluetlicker losers likely see the "you can't see this because you are blocked" message everywhere they went and they complained
Now they'll just be "muted" and not know people shut off their loser ass
If you don't notice the changes, you were part of the people he bumped up at all costs that turned it into a terrible service
Well, maybe, but then it's a terrible bid, because I only use twitter to shit on brands. And I'm definitely not buying the check mark.
EDIT: accidentally removed "not"
This is the one thing I am going to miss more than anything: Twitter worked for resolving issues with companies. It was the single good thing about it. Now that is going away, companies can ignore you.
Seriously I have been on the phone, email, on hold, trying to get things resolved. One tweet and suddenly I am important and they want to help. A lot of companies have different support teams to monitor social media and that is where shit gets done.
So you want to show to the world that you're a mindless Pro-Elon Musk simp?
The blue checkmark is a death upon your online reputation. That's why you're allowed to hide the blue-check these days, because the internet has begun to realize that you LOSE reputation by buying that checkmark.
Fuck sorry, I meant not buying, wanted to make it italic but removed instead
Nice try bluetlicker!
;)
You got me. I'm blue...da-ba-dee-da-ba-di-da-ba-dee-da-ba-di
there's only been about 7,000 articles every week about it
Willfully obtuse should be used as the catchall term for those who wish to express poorly concealed admiration for public figures that are eterna shitheads on a global stage.
Keep it civil, Mr. DickHandler
That's doctor dick handler, he didn't go to internet medical school for 8 years to be called Mr.
Are you sure dick handling is a part of medical school curriculum? I'm pretty sure it's part of gender studies
Mr? Show some respect. He's a Dr!
He had to inject his own persona into the platform by making inflammatory, discriminatory tweets and being a general troll on his platform, and then making unpopular decisions like forcing people to pay for a blue checkmark, increasing API costs, not banning Nazi posters, and of course, the nonsensical rebranding. It drove away people and advertisers who didn't want to be on the same platform as literal Nazis and bigoted TERF people, and companies who couldn't afford the ridiculous API pricing.
Honestly if he had simply not used his own platform as his own bullhorn, he could have enacted some of the more unpopular changes to become profitable.
Wtf?
I'm sorry but if you didn't get mad at every reply on any decently large post being filled with NPC- ass boomer tier memes and replies and attempts at self promo, you might be a boomer NPC.