Elon Musk $41B offer for Twitter

[off_again]

dobbo_ said:

dimots said:

It will be garbage at first, but as soon as the jilted Twitterati see all the noobs soaking up the adulation and followers that come with being front page featured they'll be subscribing to Twitter Blue to get their time in the sun!

This doesn't track - but then you're nothing if not inconsistent.

I'll set you up to move the goalposts again anyway, because why not.

You appear to be saying that Twitter will be rubbish until all the "twitterati" that you hold in such great contempt start paying for it, at which point it will be - not rubbish?

What is clear is that some people will subscribe to the service as it is clearly focused on driving engagement (through money rather than anything actually meaningful) and for some, this is what they want. Paid-for engagement is just that, paid-for and what it doesnt capture is the viral element of social media.

The bigger problem is getting a meaningful number of subscribers. Snapchat introduced a subscription service and has nearly 2m who pay for the service. But this is focused on add-on value with access to features and capabilities that are not available to the 'free tier'. You arent getting anything near to that with Twitter and there just isnt the value for users. But hey, 2m users is great right? Its made something like $30m in revenue - but this is with 750m monthly users. But Twitter has 40% less monthly users and somehow they are going to get hundreds of millions of users to subscribe? Netflix has only got just over 200m worldwide subscribers and this is a service where you litterally get TV shows and movies included with no adverts. Why on earth would hundreds of millions of users pay for Twitter to get views and still get ads? Nice.

Not seeing it.

I am sure that some people will subscribe and I am sure they will love it. But not at the volume that Musk needs. Remember, Twitter alone has to pay something like $1.5bn in interest payments per year on the debt that the business genius loaded on it!

[Byker28i]

It was always going to be that, we just forgot to mention it...

or due to overwhelming criticism from users, another change has now been made (we have to pretend it’s not a change though, it was always the plan, just forgot to mention it).

[Byker28i]

Doesn't look like the data backs up Musks plan to raise cash from twitter blue, nor are they the people to forceably push content of.

50% of all paying subs have less than 1k followers. Around 18% have less than 100, thousands have 0 followers, with the estimates that estimates that Twitter likely has around 475,000 paying subscribers.

Thats around 0.2 percent of Twitter's 254 million daily active users are paying for Twitter Blue.
https://mashable.com/article/twitter-blue-half-of-...

and remember, Musk said - it's not about controlling bots - they're fine
"That said, it’s ok to have verified bot accounts if they follow terms of service & don’t impersonate a human"
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/16405329213866...

[Byker28i]

[durbster]

tertius said:

Gweeds said:

tertius said:

It did do that for a while I agree but it doesn’t seem to do so any more. Or at least not consistently, I’ve thought for the last few days it had started doing it again but my simple testing has been inconclusive. (This is on iOS my primary use of Twitter).

Elno claimed it had been turned off. My experience is that’s not the case and it’s intermittent at best.

You may be right but I’ve tried closing Twitter completely and reopening a couple of times and it’s opened to the “Following” tab each time.

It's not immediately clear on the Android app which tab is open at first because the highlighting is broken.

The blue line is under the For You tab, but the bold text is on Following. It's only when you switch between them it gets into the correct state. It's been this way for weeks, and yet another example of what happens when quality is sacrificed.



I suspect the Twitter codebase was already a bit of a mess but Paypalpatine has undoubtedly made it worse by rushing out updates.

[Gweeds]

Byker28i said:

Doesn't look like the data backs up Musks plan to raise cash from twitter blue, nor are they the people to forceably push content of.

50% of all paying subs have less than 1k followers. Around 18% have less than 100, thousands have 0 followers, with the estimates that estimates that Twitter likely has around 475,000 paying subscribers.

Thats around 0.2 percent of Twitter's 254 million daily active users are paying for Twitter Blue.
https://mashable.com/article/twitter-blue-half-of-...

and remember, Musk said - it's not about controlling bots - they're fine
"That said, it’s ok to have verified bot accounts if they follow terms of service & don’t impersonate a human"
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/16405329213866...

Charles Arthur adds:

“That adds up to less than $46m per year from all those subscribers, and there’s zero evidence that the rate of uptake is increasing. The 475,000 figure is about 0.2% of Twitter daily active users: 2 in every thousand. And with “verification” for verified people going away next month, there’s even less point in being “verified”.”

https://theoverspill.blog/2023/03/29/twitter-verif...



But yeah. $250bn seems legit.

[tangerine_sedge]

I'm sure I saw a twitter post somewhere indicating that ~0.3% of accounts that actually follow elno have a blue tick mark - he's not even convincing his own 'fans'.

[minimoog]

dimots said:

It will be garbage at first, but as soon as the jilted Twitterati see all the noobs soaking up the adulation and followers that come with being front page featured they'll be subscribing to Twitter Blue to get their time in the sun!

What is 'front page featured'? Do you mean the For You feed? Who on earth reads that?

Anyone worth following who is currently critical of twitter blue is highly unlikely to pay to be among the bots and cretins that currently subscribe to it. Especially as - by design - that blue check won't guarantee they are who they say they are, which is all they ever wanted from the blue tick system.

[dukeboy749r]

No, Minimoog.

Dimots knows all!

You cannot possibly know the sheer greatness of the inside of Musk's mind and his ability to turn good into garbage into gold.

[dimots]

minimoog said:

What is 'front page featured'? Do you mean the For You feed? Who on earth reads that?

Yes, that's right, featured in the 'For You' feed on the front page. Sorry for confusing you. To confirm, by front page featured I meant featured on the front page.

[rscott]

dimots said:

minimoog said:

What is 'front page featured'? Do you mean the For You feed? Who on earth reads that?

Yes, that's right, featured in the 'For You' feed on the front page. Sorry for confusing you. To confirm, by front page featured I meant featured on the front page.

But the front page doesn't necessarily show For You. It can show Following instead (it's supposed to remember what you last looked at, according to Elon).

[dimots]

rscott said:

But the front page doesn't necessarily show For You. It can show Following instead (it's supposed to remember what you last looked at, according to Elon).

Yes I have looked at the front page of Twitter and you are right it shows both For You AND Following. Again, sorry for the confusion this must be causing everyone I understand it is a very technical area.

[minimoog]

Your attempt at sarcasm Dimots would have worked at lot better if you understood what you're talking about. But alas.

Anyway, Elon's pulled a reverse ferret and announced he 'forgot to mention' that non-verified accounts would still appear in For You too.



Edit: Further to this, he apparently said it's only (soon-to-be) non-verified accounts you already follow who will appear in For You, so it's still only going to push twitter blue subscribers to you as new accounts to read/follow.

Seeing as I never read the For You feed - and therefore it doesn't appear on my front page - this is irrelevant to me, but still.

Edited by minimoog on Wednesday 29th March 13:37

[rscott]

dimots said:

rscott said:

But the front page doesn't necessarily show For You. It can show Following instead (it's supposed to remember what you last looked at, according to Elon).

Yes I have looked at the front page of Twitter and you are right it shows both For You AND Following. Again, sorry for the confusion this must be causing everyone I understand it is a very technical area.

As usual, you fail to comprehend the simplest of statements. The Twitter website is supposed to remember whether you were looking at the For You or Following tab last visit and present the same one next time you open it.

That works about as well as several other parts of Twitter (ie not particularly well).

Things like clicking on the "replying to" line in the Android app should show you a list of all the accounts being replied to. It doesn't any more, just gives a blank page.

[pquinn]

rscott said:

Things like clicking on the "replying to" line in the Android app should show you a list of all the accounts being replied to. It doesn't any more, just gives a blank page.

The web interface no longer shows the accounts being replied to even in the messages. Looks really weird as it looks like people shouting into the void.

At least that's what it looked like earlier today, may well have changed since.

[Gweeds]

dimots said:

Yes I have looked at the front page of Twitter and you are right it shows both For You AND Following. Again, sorry for the confusion this must be causing everyone I understand it is a very technical area.

Do you ever get tired of having to defend a billionaire who doesn't know you exist?

[Byker28i]

Russians are buying up blue tick verification to push anti Ukraine disinformation
wapo.st/3LVCD9v

[768]

I find this stuff pretty amazing. Wish, say, the NHS worked like this, ever. So many organisations lack this level of open accountability. He does get some things right from time to time.

[dobbo_]

768 said:

I find this stuff pretty amazing. Wish, say, the NHS worked like this, ever. So many organisations lack this level of open accountability. He does get some things right from time to time.

Yeah that's the kind of accountability I like! A guy that gets a random comment from a parent and then implements a system that lets parents leave an unaccompanied infant in the car. You know, that thing that's almost certainly a crime in this country.

Why can't the NHS respond to comments from NancyBUNCHANUMBERS and change how they operate based on a tweet?

[768]

You seem level headed.

Nothing about it affects the ability of parents to leave children in their car.