Twitter C/D

We should invite this Ned guy to ILX

Well you know.

yeah for me it's like ned/gaiman duopoly enterprise, but the gaimans are v perseverative, ned is funny and informative.

As it has been ordained so shall it be forward, controlling the internet again. mark s has thoughts on this.

Should I join bluesky? I actually found a way to make my own and was thinking of launching that. I just have to figure out how to make it work and fix it.

I say yes, it's a perfectly adequate twitter substitute. user base is growing at a very fast base, for better or worse.

pace! pace!

dan, we’ve got a rolling list of invite codes on the bluesky thread if you’re interested

Six months later, we can see that the effects of leaving Twitter have been negligible. A memo circulated to NPR staff says traffic has dropped by only a single percentage point as a result of leaving Twitter, now officially renamed X, though traffic from the platform was small already and accounted for just under two percent of traffic before the posting stopped.

https://niemanreports.org/articles/npr-twitter-musk/

https://i.imgur.com/ewVZ46Z.png

the facebookification of twitter.com

I need catturd2’s engagement numbers to know for sure. How we interpret those numbers is yet to be determined

someone get turd on the horn

lol our already successful efforts

https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_fullsize/plain/did:plc:nont2yyr6zgjd6bryhn7aw7b/bafkreiagikigbisidznv5t7qmi5kxi7cp4v3khbufkmglzn66b4x7twxse@jpeg

saw an ad with Travis Kelce in it which had 1000+ comments and I clicked it and it's just a bunch of blue checks calling him "Mr. Pfizer" and accusing him of aiding genocide (via vaccines, not the actual genocide going on right now). every time I go on this app now I immediately regret it

lol yeah not a cool scene

I’m old and Mr. Pfizer still reads as “viagra man” especially as the recent vaccines don’t have a large pfizer quotient? just reads as “hard man”

Don't know if this is happening with anyone else but my entire feed is hosed on the android app. Looks fine on desktop browser.

“hard man”

= Best Taylor Bop

when i click through to a tweet posted here i get the last tweet i clicked through from here instead of the one i clicked on, some sort of caching issue

looks like it is back to normal again

man it's really getting bad, and i'm a total twitter degenerate

went on there for ten minutes and was already tweeting eat shit bitch at some tech thought leader

Y’all still on Twitter huh? smh

im not on there actually

https://www.reuters.com/technology/exclusive-where-did-tweeters-go-twitter-is-losing-its-most-active-users-internal-2022-10-25/

Twitter is struggling to keep its most active users - who are vital to the business - engaged, underscoring a challenge faced by the Tesla (TSLA.O) chief executive as he approaches a deadline to close his $44 billion deal to buy the company.

These "heavy tweeters" account for less than 10% of monthly overall users but generate 90% of all tweets and half of global revenue. Heavy tweeters have been in "absolute decline" since the pandemic began, a Twitter researcher wrote in an internal document titled “Where did the Tweeters Go?”

The research also found a shift in interests over the past two years among Twitter's most active English-speaking users that could make the platform less attractive to advertisers.

Cryptocurrency and "not safe for work" (NSFW) content, which includes nudity and pornography, are the highest-growing topics of interest among English-speaking heavy users, the report found.

lol eesh

that article's a year old

god damn it

Not bad, Elon...not bad at all.

WSJ News Exclusive: The banks that financed Elon Musk’s $44 billion purchase of Twitter are still struggling a year later to contain the damage to their balance sheets https://t.co/lqqTHCa8Z2https://t.co/lqqTHCa8Z2

— The Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) October 25, 2023

Elon Musk, welcome to The Resistance

I always assumed he just paid cash lol

Twitter pre-Musk was rated junk, despite carrying significantly less debt than it does now. Given that X is no longer publicly traded, it doesn’t disclose its financials, though Musk has said the platform’s advertising revenues have plummeted since he bought it.

it's gonna be rated even worse junk

He successfully destroyed more loaned capital over a year than most companies could ever dream of

those banks got worked lol

those banks totally did their due diligence

you can understand where they were coming from like i want to invest in the up until now extremely successful musk empire and i want to have a relationship with the man who built it, but this particular investment was obviously doomed from the start

hey, he's got an honest face

maybe but isn't it well documented that Tesla's "success" is based entirely on hype, speculation, and other borderline illegal tricks to keep the stock price up?

lol frogbs i was gonna say if banks stopped doing business with companies whose success is entirely that

well there probably would be less banks

I mean it makes sense why they'd maybe invest in Tesla but idk seems pretty clear whatever Elon's "magic" was it wasn't based on actual smarts or business acumen and therefore it wasn't gonna work with Twitter, as predicted by pretty much everyone who wrote about the deal along with every ILX poster

i reckon most of us on ilx have been around long enough to have lived thru the historical evidence that the wisdom of banks is not all that

fyi the banks aren't aiming to invest in tesla/twitter for these kinds of transactions, they're just middlemen - they buy the securities from the company then flip them on to investors. here they couldn't flip the twitter junk because it had rapidly degraded between the time they agreed to finance the buyout and the time they had to sell the junk, because elon proved to be a master at topping the market

the calculus was probably that the banks have made millions in doing tesla financings, elon up to that point had a good track record with companies, they put their faith in him, they trusted him...

tbf that does sound like an investment, they just werent planning on holding very long, but... lol

i mean yeah, that's why they're called underwriters - they're underwriting the risk - but usually banks don't commit unless they think it's close to risk-free...

*narrator voice* it was not risk-free

thing about risk free is its generally also profit free

The Saudi investment probably isn't large enough to get him bonesawed, unfortunately.

fun fact - the saudis own 60% of lucid

saudis dont care if their investments make money its a political influence project

yeah the saudi money is just insane. I kind of wonder if some of the weird stuff from SV VCs right now is due to the saudis directly investing and not going through their funds? I thought I read something about that but I might be mistaken

vcs are like im going to give you one million dollars and i want three board seats and please cc me on all communications, then the saudis or softbank walk through the door with $100m and go call us if you need more

what weird stuff? xp

the top of andreessen's head is quite weird