I knew the end of the cheap money era would cause some businesses to be exposed but wow. We are basically in the middle of watching someone flush 44 billion down the drain. I could understand if it was a 600 posting limit. But a 600 viewing limit? wow. For example, NBA free agency just started. There are types of trades & signings being talked about. Just looking at that information I'm going past the 600 limit in about 30 minutes just by scrolling to see if anything is new. Twitter was nice to get this information from & they showed me a few ads. Decent transaction. But now I'm just going to refresh ESPN to see the latest signings.
It’s wild. Used to checking it frequently which any social media company would love, but can’t even scroll the feed this morning as I hit the rate limit just drinking coffee and catching up. The good thing is this will make me spend far less time on social media since it was the last one I had on my phone.
Wow, so maybe Musk was society's savior we didn't want to need. Although, maybe if Twitter was no more, people would begrudgingly go back to FB for their doom scrolling needs.
Between Musk and u/spez, I recovered at least 2 hours a day of normally wasted time.
I've read books, like actual paper ones. Spent some time making a simply 2-d space shooter, just for fun. Spent more time engaged with people I care about. Turns out social media is the least social thing ever and basically sucks.
I don't think this is because of the "end of cheap money" (I don't think this high interest rate environment will last that long) but just sheer incompetence by Musk and his staff. Elon has become increasingly erratic on the platform, he just tweeted recently a reply to a Tweet saying Islam would take over France. I don't know if he's always been like this or if the stories of his heavy ketamine usage are true and taking a toll on him.
>>I don't think this is because of the "end of cheap money"
Explain just about all platforms doing revenue adjusting user hostile actions then? Examples include Reddit with the API fees, YT with the Ad Blocking blocking. etc
This is all a reaction to the end of cheap money, aka the cost of capital is going up, so companies need to actually make revenue instead of chasing free capital
>>I don't think this high interest rate environment will last that long
There is no indication this true, most likely the "new normal" is going to be on the order of rates before the 2008 housing crash, not going back to the insanity of 0-1% fed rates...
Reddit over hired and is doing other stupid pricing models because they want to IPO, they filed confidential paperwork for an IPO last year. Twitter has been unprofitable since before Musk, and Musk's actions drove their revenue into the ground. Those aren't related to higher interest rates. What other examples do you have? Reddit and Twitter are bad examples.
> There is no indication this true, most likely the "new normal" is going to be on the order of rates before the 2008 housing crash, not going back to the insanity of 0-1% fed rates...
There's no indication that your statement is true either, I think in a 5-10 year span we'll have lower rates simply because virtually every economy is in population decline. In any case, the Twitter and Reddit flubs weren't due to higher interest rates. SVB was, this isn't.
They're not perfect examples. But what they're saying is:
* High returns from interest means the cost of capital is higher. Comparable safe investments return more, so investors demand more of a return from a riskier one.
* As a result, a lot fewer venture investments make sense with the higher discount rate.
* Companies cannot count on going back to the venture till, so high volatility strategies of chase-IPO-now or monetize-now are increasingly employed.
* Similarly, public companies desperately seek better fundamentals now, because future revenues are discounted so much in investors' opinions.
* As a result, a lot of companies enshittify, going after short term wins that risk the entire company's reputation..
As to the interest rate environment: the Fed has suggested a couple more interest rate hikes are likely later this year. It is likely to take quite awhile to walk rates down after inflationary pressures reduce. Current market prices imply rates will stay relatively high for the next few years.
No one really knows what an aging, contracting population will do to the interest rate environment. It's likely governments will have to borrow a bunch more, which can push up rates... And older workers seem to be more productive than models expected, which adds further upward rate pressure.
> Explain just about all platforms doing revenue adjusting user hostile actions then? Examples include Reddit with the API fees
Bad example. Reddit actions (and Twitter actions) are definitely not due any user hostile actions.
> YT with the Ad Blocking blocking.
This one may be has some merit to it, but we only have Google's word for it, and Google itself doesn't seem to be hurting because of all the bad-no-good ad blocking. Is Youtube hurting? No idea.
>Bad example. Reddit actions (and Twitter actions) are definitely not due any user hostile actions.
The actions are hostile to the users.. Twitter, Reddit, and YT (and others) have changed policies in a way to maximum revenue at the expensive of the users of the platforms.
If it truly is "the end of cheap money" (which I believe is the root cause) we can clearly see which management is competent, and which just flailing aimlessly.
"When the tide goes out, you see who's been swimming naked."
Elon says "He is right". So he is referencing the Imam in the video of the tweet he is replying to (not the tweeter, who appears to be female). The video of the Imam's speech has subtitles, so you can see what Elon is saying 'is right'.
I didn’t read the parent comment as making any particular judgement apart from the one that Islam in France is an unusual and unnecessary topic for Elon to be getting himself publicly involved in.
having worked on products where analytics matter, it's important to be specific about behavior of those who use your products, and a better metric would be related to lingering, did you stop scrolling and if there are many tweets in this feed where you stopped, did you move your mouse towards one of those tweets? was your lingering intentional or related to inattention? It's important to develop an understanding of which in the list is the one you are lingering on (or what even is that list). It's important for behavior monitoring but also to make sure you are serving ads in a way that aligns with attention (assuming you run an ad supported platform, like Twitter) and that you can have accurate measurements for ad impressions (scrolling past an add without even stopping shouldn't cost an advertiser more than the base cost of the ad, and should cost more if someone lingers for even a half second.)
Other random ideas for what you would consider counted? you replied, you liked, you clicked a link through the tweet, you expanded a shortened version of a long tweet. There are so many ways to determine "read" and assuming it's always the naive "it was served" is like building a business based off of page views and not actual engagement.
It's impossible to know for real if someone has read a tweet -especially on Twitter where several tweets appear on the screen at once - however "dwell time" is a common measurement that is usually enough to appease marketers.
In this case it doesn't matter though because the aim is to mitigate cost, so equating an impression with engagement is fine.
What I wonder is, how people who paid for verified account feel about it? First you pay for the reach(more features and priority to display) and then your followers or those who are supposed to reached need to pay to read your content. Some people are actually paying non trivial amounts for business accounts.
Normally I'm inclined to think that Musk is a great product person but this one move seems like a jerk reaction to some numbers not meeting expectations and designing a product to improve numbers without thinking about how the product actually works.
rsync.net has a verified (gold star ?) account which we neither asked for nor paid for. I think it comes with having an advertising balance ?
Interestingly, we have had (for the first time in years) decent advertising traction on Twitter in the first half of 2023 and I was planning on expanding that.
Advertising a product like ours has been very difficult because the venn diagram of "people who understand rsync.net" and "people who don't use an adblocker* has a very tiny overlap.
So between suspending our reddit promotions due to the dysfunction there and seeing some (very marginal) success with Twitter ads called into question I suspect we're headed back to square one ...
Hi! I’m one of the people who fall in the middle of the Venn diagram, and just wanted to let you know I was reading your website and the menu hamburger button doesn’t seem to work on my iPhone 14 on Safari or Firefox, so I couldn’t get to the pricing page etc. I’ll take a note to read it when I’m on my desktop but just wanted to pass it along.
I managed to hit the limit during the F1 sprint race as theres a ton of threaded comments for that. Genius level move on how to screw up your own business.
An account on an ESPN Mastodon instance that comes with and logs in with that Disney+/Hulu/ESPN bundle would probably be popular. Doesn't even have to federate.
Based on the post I replied to, it sounds like realtime updates are an important feature. All the accounts would have RSS feeds if someone wanted it in that format.
> The Fidelity Blue Chip Growth Fund has reduced the market value of its equity stake in Twitter for a third time, now putting it at $6.55 million. That’s down from the nearly $20 million the Fidelity fund valued its stake at in October.
> The financial giant also readjusted the value of its holding in Twitter to $6.86 million, up from $6.55 million from a month prior, but still down 65% since the original investment.
I will buy a Google made phone for Development purposes since they get updates fast but as far as everyday use? Never again. My Nexus 6P bricked just because I forgot to charge it and it went down to 0. And when I did my research online about the problem it was a known issue. That made me furious. It made me move over to a Samsung Galaxy which I love. I can't believe this is still an issue with them.
The iPad was the gateway for me into the Apple community. I was never a fan of Mac Os. But when I got an iPad I was hooked. Which then had me upgrade to an iPad Pro and Macbook Pro 16". Leave the iPad as it is. Improve on it, yes. But we don't need it as another laptop.
This article is good but you can tell it was written by someone who was really young when Vanilla Ice came out. The pushback from the hip hop community was equal parts the lies and the really bad music. He tried to compare Ice to 3rd Base who were respected MCs at the time. Yeah MC Serch is known as a bit of a goofball now but back then he was respected rapper.
Vanilla Ice was making songs like Ninja Rap at the same time classics like Low End Theory, Death Certificate, De La Soul is Dead, Cypress Hill and 2Pacalype Now were coming out. Again, of course he was going to get push back. MC Hammer had the same pushback but not as bad as Vanilla Ice.
I think there was still debate back then over whether white people should/could rap. One way for MC Serch and others to get credibility was to say "I'm not like that other white rapper."
This is the reason I live in Delaware. I moved from NYC to Delaware with no intention of staying. But because of a lot of the stuff you mentioned I decided to stay. I'm able to be in Philly in a little more than 20 minutes, back to NYC in 2 hours and DC in 2 hours. The COL is just right and plus I'm near family.
The fact that cats hunt have been helpful to me in the past. Twice while I was living in an apartment building all of my neighbors had problems with mice. Once in New York and once in Massachusetts. In Massachusetts before my girlfriend came to live with me, I would see the mice. After she came to live with me with her cats, never saw them again. The same when we moved to NYC. While my neighbors all had rotten issues I never saw one mouse or rat in my apartment the entire 8 years living there.
This comment is very focused on your point of view of what timeless music is. Plus your examples of who remembers are all artist or groups who were big for a song or two. Middle tier artists. There is a difference as far as staying power between the first set of artist (Swift, Timbaland, Bruno Mars)you used as an example and the second set (Blaque, 3LW, etc).
When you hit 40 you start to see in real time how valuable those old songs are. Your friends and other people in your age group hate the new music so they only listen to music from when they were young. All of the commercials play music you thought would never be used in a commercial. Walking through the grocery store or waiting in an elevator you start to bop your head because one of your favorite songs from high school is now elevator music. A popular song has a lot of long tail value, sometimes you have to wait a generation to start to see the returns.
"Your friends and other people in your age group hate the new music so they only listen to music from when they were young."
Young people hate a lot of music made these days and listen to older music. It's not just a 'when I was young' thing anymore.
There's something very profound that comes from artists who make music, as opposed to a producer who makes some licks, a mediocre singer who belts it out, and a label that brands it.
When the brand/hype/marketing of the 'current flavour' dies down, what is left?
Music older than 4 years has to compete on its own merits, and most of it is forgotten, the better stuff hangs around.
Because music is ever more produced and less created, a lot of the stock today just stand the test of time.
When I was young you'd hear 50's music in the grocery store. Now you hear 80's music. But I think in 30 years we're still going to hear a lot of 80's music (and 60's, 70's and other eras) but the ratio of 'recently contemporary' to older music will be a lot lower.
You will always have some young people who like an older sound. But no, those songs that you think people will hate will be called classics in 10 years time. As a former DJ I have seen that cycle over and over again. When I go to grocery stores I hear mostly 90s music. Most of the commercials I see have 90s or 80s music in it. And when 20 year olds get in their 40s it wil be the same pattern.
There was a "classic rock" radio station playing in the store where I get my morning coffee, and it was playing the same songs as 25 years ago, from the 70s or 80s. By now shouldn't they be playing music from 1995-2005?
As someone who tried to do exactly what you are suggesting, but with considerably less runway, find a job and start the business while you have the job. It was a disaster for me trying to go all in at once. Especially in one of the most expensive cities in the world, NYC. An I was 30 when I did it. I ran into all kinds of issues that I didn't foresee. Health issues, money issues, etc etc. Now I have a job while also starting a business and its running a lot more smoothly.
