From the company slashing staff and rate limiting APIs to save money comes: the most expensive content to host
this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2023
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founded 2 years ago
a move only a true busines genius could execute
Yeah, you know what would've been a better solution? Do the exact opposite of every decision Musk has made.
I think Twitter could've been profitable with a few small tweaks to get more from big content generators. When running a SM site, your #1 priority should be to make the experience for regular users better and make money from content producers. Maybe have a few money-making options for regular customers like paying to remove ads, but the bulk of the revenue stream should come from ideas like:
- permalink messages - this would also make them easier to find with a search
- real account verification - not the stupid blue checkmark thing, but an actual human verifies your identity
- promoted messages - not ads (i.e. ban attempts to market products), just increase visibility, but would be time-limited (i.e. pay for a boost over the next hour, day, week)
- integrations with other platforms - have a blog? pay to auto-link when you make a new post!
This only works because Twitter is already big, so if you're starting from scratch, you just don't charge for anything and maybe run some ads to offset losses. But once your platform gets big, that's when you start milking the whales.
But no, Musk instead tried to milk the userbase, so the userbase just leaves. He also decided to reinstate undesirable accounts, which offends advertisers. And he decided to make account authentication worthless, so content creators have no reason to stay. He's making every possible wrong decision.
I'm glad to know that people out there still like to read. It's terrifyingly concerning that 54% of adults in America, have the literacy at the 6th grade level and below.
If pivoting to video succeeded, we would just be seeing people left and right just responding through recordings. Can you imagine how debates would work? It'd just be boring video responses to video responses of what was said, not that it doesn't happen anyways because it already does. But I'm talking if it was the basis of just communicating because the idea of reading and understanding words would be 'too hard' for them to grasp.
It'd just be boring video responses to video responses
Have you seen tiktok?
Have you seen tiktok?
I am honestly very happy to say "no."
Glad to see I'm not alone. I don't understand the hype behind tiktok... it's the exact same thing as Vines and I wasn't exactly excited about Vines eithers
It's endless content for people with short attention spans that don't care about the quality or even really the topic of the content they are consuming... they just want mindless entertainment to occupy their time without needing to make any decisions or take any actions. Or even to stay focused on any one thing for more than a few seconds.
So, of course it's extremely popular.
I mean I am not a huge fan of it being Chinese spyware practically (this is not disagree with the point that* Youtube is basically American spyware) but wasn't a big problem with mid 2010s youtube being videos getting padded to reach the sacred time of 10 minutes for ad sense to really kick in. I find most of youtube shorts/tiktok is worthless garbage but I can see the appeal for short and snappy videos to get their point across rather than it being padded with the common trappings of other vod content. Now I don't mean to throw shade at people who do the whole padding/sponsors/call to actions since at the end of the day some of these people want to try to make a living out of this stuff and if people actually want this content made there needs to be support for it (it is actually a huge problem in the print industry as well since many people don't want to pay for articles).
I don't get tiktok either, but I have a friend who seems to spend hours on it every day.
I wish I hadn't but I know of it since several friends tie their existences to it. But yes, that is ADHD central.
Hell, YouTube too. I remember seeing an hours long video that was a response to someone else's hour long video (I think it was about dark souls 2 or bloodborne?). There's tons of response videos there too
You are probably thinking about HBombomberguy's "In Defense of Dark Souls 2" and Mauler's 10 video response of it.
Yeah, that was absolutely it. Good call!
As someone who never really used Twitter, I find this to be kinda sad. Everything is shifting to video, and I hate it lol.
Like, what is wrong with reading something? Is it really that hard?
That being said, on the list of stupid ideas Musk has implemented since he bought Twitter this actually seems to be inline with what the rest of the (social media) industry seems to be pushing. TikTok is obviously the first one that comes to mind, but Instagram and Snapchat have been pushing videos for years, too. Even Reddit started promoting a videos over text-based threads - it’s a pain in the ass to get to the comments on a video post with their official app!
I’ll keep my fingers-crossed that lemmy & kbin are able to sustain themselves, because right now its one of the only places where text-based forums are not being pushed off to the side.
Videos are easier to add advertising to
Like, what is wrong with reading something? Is it really that hard?
Half of US adults cannot read a book written at an 8th grade level.
Video is easier and faster for most people, as much as I dislike it. It's a way for a clueless board of MBAs to circumvent the "literacy" problem of more widespread adoption of their service. Lowest-common-denominator corner-shaving ruins everything, as usual.
Hey guys, do you think Elon is just stupid and got lucky? I'm just asking the questions.
He is definitively a risk taker. The thing with a risk is that is easy to take if you have money, and if you have a lot of money you can fail many times.
He was born to rich family and had that luxury.
Here's summery of his evandors:
1995 - Founded Zip2 with his brother, got ousted from CEO position in 1996, the company was sold to Compaq in 1999
1999 - he launched his X.com with three founders
2000 - X.com merged with Confinity resulting in PayPal, Musk again was ousted as a CEO on the same year, in 2002 they sold it to eBay (he no longer was in the company but still had stocks)
2002 - He used his money from PayPal to fund SpaceX
2004 - Tesla. This one is interesting, because he is recognized by a lot of people as founder, but he was investor, but they let him to paint himself as Founder
2006 - SolarCity - it didn't do well and was purchased by Tesla in 2016
2015 - co-funded OpenAI, he resigned in 2018 due to conflicts with Tesla AI
2016 - co-funded Neuralink
2016 - The Boring Company - supposed to be working on creating hyperloop, but that idea turned out to be failure, and now any mention of hyperloop was scraped from the company website. He apparently admitted that hyperloop was successful attack to stop California from building high speed rail.
2022 - Twitter
So it looks like largely his biggest successes were Zip2, X.com/PayPal and SpaceX and investment in Tesla. In Zip2 and X.com he was ousted before companies got successful.
SpaceX and Tesla are where he actually succeeded the rest after that he was just throwing money in investments. Technically that's also what happened with Tesla.
I think his smarts are focused on particular kinds of companies and particular kinds of projects, and a large pre-established social media company is very far outside of those usual areas where he's successful.
It's hard to do well with social media when you're a colossal asshole with poor social skills.
Actually he had many companies that failed or he was ousted of before they were successful. SpaceX is one that he actually started, even Tesla wasn't founded by him. It really helped to have money to invest.
Musk's first company was Zip2, which he co-founded with two other people and $28,000 of seed capital from his father. He eventually sold his share to Compaq for $22 million, and used that money to co-founded X.com, an online bank. X.com eventually did a merger with Paypal, giving Musk %11 of the shares of the merged company, which when Paypal was bought by eBay gave him $175.8 million. Next up was SpaceX, which he founded with that money. It wasn't until a few years later that he bought into an existing company, Tesla, using a $6.5 million investment to buy a majority share. Tesla was quite small then as car companies go and didn't build its first car until after Musk's acquisition.
Seems to me like a consistent pattern of building up companies from small to large and then cashing out to start the next one going.
Which were the ones that failed or that he was ousted from?
Yeah, Zip2 was founded in 1995, he was ousted from it in 1996, the company sold in 1999.
He founded X.com in 1999, was ousted in 2000 before it became PayPal and sold to eBay in 2002
SpaceX was company that he actually founded and got successful, Tesla he technically didn't found but as you mentioned bought majority share and made himself look like CEO.
SpaceX and Tesla though are really run by different people SpaceX, they just learned how to deal with him instead of ousting it as the other companies did. But ok, I think he still deserves credit.
Though you omitted all the companies that he failed at. If you have a lot of money you can afford to lose frequently and still be successful. A luxury that you or me don't have.
"Ousted" is an odd word to use for "sold his share", but I guess if that's the word you want to use then he was "ousted". At massive profit for himself.
Though you omitted all the companies that he failed at.
You haven't mentioned any companies that I didn't already mention.
Ousted means, the board of directors removed him from CEO position against his wishes (in case of Zip2), and in case of X.com they did it while he was on honeymoon. Both of this things happened BEFORE the companies became successful.
You haven't mentioned any companies that I didn't already mention.
SolarCity, The Boring Company, X.com (basically his X.com that he is trying to revive with Twitter died when they merged with Confinity and created PayPal, and likely it's why he was ousted), I guess technically Neuralink has still chance to succeed.
wrong he has money
I want to get out of this simulation, every month there's some rich guy fucking destroys products that aren't even broken. Each month passes another weird shit happens. Damn
Elon feels he can make more money this way most likely.