Zen Of Design

The design and business of gaming from the perspective of an experienced developer

Month: November 2022

Freedom and Speech

November 29, 2022 /

Just because you think you’re hosting a really swell combo Klan rally and clambake, Coca-Cola is under no obligation to sponsor the shindig or put up big Coke banners up by the burning crosses. Yeah, this is an Elon rant.

Today, Elon declared war on Apple. He got pretty melodramatic.

My dude, you make an app that primarily shares cat pics, dank memes and dunking to the edge of harassment. And in the grand scheme of things, it’s pretty small – it’s not even a top 10 social media app. And that was before you decided to turn it into $8chan. It’s gonna get smaller.

Now then, there are good reasons for Elon to be mad at Apple. To wit:

1) Apple has cut their ad spend. Apple was Twitter’s top advertiser before Elon. They spent $48M in 3 months (1 quarter) earlier this year, which was 4% of Twitter’s revenue.

2) Apple’s 30% cut. Elon posted this a little later.

Why, yes, Elon. I did know this. Everybody who has ever made an iOS app knows this (we also know it goes down to 15% in the second year). It definitely wasn’t a ‘secret’ of any sort. This is the sort of thing that any competent business person on the Internet should know before they, say, spend $44B on a website with no real plans to make that back from a business that’s treading water.

For iOS users, that $8 will be closer to $5.60 for the first year. There are ways around it. Netflix, for example, doesn’t let you pay in-app, urging you to go to a website to pay.

Now I’m not thrilled about Apple in this case, but let’s not pretend its unusual – Steam’s cut is in the same ballpark.

3) Apple’s threats to delist the app from the store. I’ve always considered this a longshot eventuality, but apparently it’s a real enough concern for Elon to publicly air it.

Apple will pull your app from the store for all sorts of insane reasons (trust me, I’ve been there!) but it’s not a decision they take lightly.

Anyway, these are three very good reasons for Twitter to tread cautiously when dealing with Apple. Apple is a goliath. It’s the biggest company in the world. As rich as Elon is, Apple earns twice Elon’s net worth every YEAR (and that was before Elon set fire to his valuation on this fools’ errand). Surely Elon will realize the position he’s in, and go to Apple with proper deference and…

No, sorry. Instead he’s going to launch his army of flying monkeys at the CEO of the company who was, until recently, his company’s #1 source of revenue. In order to shame them into playing nice.

LOL. Words cannot express the degree in which Apple does not give a fuck about antics like this. They famously punted Fortnite off the app store for not playing by the rules when Fortnite was generating hundreds of millions of dollars for Apple. Amazon, Netflix and other giants have also gone toe-to-toe with Apple over Apple’s rules and 30% cut. All have been humbled.

Twitter, a relatively miniscule company with little cash and enormous debt, has no chance if those companies didn’t. Apple’s mercy is all the hope they have. That comes from compliance. Defiance and openly flouting the rules are not likely to go well for Twitter.

Two days ago, I thought the odds of Twitter being delisted were remote. Now, Elon’s begging to be made an example.

Let’s go back to this first tweet.

Free speech is a noble goal. Everyone at Apple probably supports it in principle. But it’s also a trap. Taken too far, and you no longer have a civilized business. As a simple comparison, you absolutely can run a restaurant where you encourage people to stand on the counters and shout racial epiphets at other customers. It’s completely legal to do that, and within your rights as a business owner. But you shouldn’t expect to stay in business for long, and you shouldn’t expect anyone to want to stay in business with you.

Here are some reasons why Apple might be wary:

1) They probably don’t want to associate too closely with a company that has an enormous CSAM problem after Elon gutted the teams that were tasked to finding and getting rid of child porn and reporting that stuff to authorities.
2) They probably don’t want their ads appearing next to tweets from the virulent antisemites Elon is letting back into the service.

3) They probably don’t want their ads appearing next to tweets from the open nazis Elon is letting back into the service – and giving verified checkmarks to.
4) They probably don’t want their ads appearing next to tweets from the aggressively homophobic and transphobic folks people are letting back into the service, especially just a week after a shooting targeting a drag show that many of these people are cheering and/or blaming on the victims.
5) They probably don’t want their ads appearing next to those of a guy who tried to overturn American democracy.
6) They probably don’t want their ads appearing on a service that just let back in a whole bunch of people who led harassment campaigns against other users, especially minority users.
7) They probably don’t want to keep an app on the app store that is certain to fail Europe’s very harsh GDPR regulations – failure to comply became almost certain once Elon laid off the team that ensured compliance.
8) They probably don’t want to keep an app on the app store where impersonation of famous people will remain ridiculously easy.
9) They probably don’t want to maintain relations with a company where a huge percentage of the people who maintain relations with advertisers have quit or been fired, and where the tools are slowly starting to break.
10) They probably don’t want to maintain relations with a company whose owner thinks the fact that they had a Trust and Safety division was a joke.
11) They’re probably not a big fan of the fact that the CEO himself passes around tinfoil hat nuttery and obvious fabricated news.
12) They probably don’t want to advertise for a platform where activists are actively ridiculed and demonized and blamed for Elon being flatly unable to deal with any of these concerns.

And before you think that Apple is being a big baby, one should note that half of Twitter’s top advertisers have made a similar decision. This isn’t Marxism. This is crass capitalism. Advertisers didn’t want to advertise on 8chan, and they won’t want to advertise on $8chan either.

Twitter’s Death Spiral

November 24, 2022 /

Sure, you’ve probably made some purchase decisions you regret, but have you ever just set fire to 44 billion dollars? No? Why would anyone?

Ah right. Well, when you purchase a company – for ‘da lulz’ or some other reason, you pick up a whole bunch of things as part of the package deal. Let’s take a quick gander at what Elon paid money for – and then take a look at how he’s systematically destroying each one.

The Intellectual Property. Buy a company and you get both their code, and you get the creations they’ve created. In the games industry, it’s usually around the creations – Microsoft is much more interested in owning Call of Duty and World of Warcraft than any piece of Activision code. Not so here – Twitter’s IP is almost exclusively code. And Elon owns it now.

And that’s not nothing! As simple as Twitter appears on the outside, it’s an incredibly complex organism behind the scenes, especially to operate at scale. There’s a reason why no serious Twitter competitor has risen up in more than a decade. Twitter is the only codebase that can really do what it does – and is within a year of doing so.

So on the face this is good, right? Heh, we’ll get back to that.

The Customers.

Twitter had a very large and very loyal audience. They aren’t loyal anymore. Elon has made his plans clear for Twitter: It’s going to be an active source of disinformation, it’s going to be actively hostile to minority members, it’s going to be full of spammers and harassment is going to go relatively unpunished.

He’s also pushing to make it a more expensive service, expecting the majority of users to pay $8 a month (and promising those who don’t will get a severely degraded service). This is in a media landscape where everything similar is free.

Competitors like Mastodon and Hive are seeing massive growth in response. If the free service continues to degrade, people will not stick around.

The Actual Customers

But wait – very few Twitter users actually give Twitter any money. Twitter is actually in the advertising business, and Twitter depends on their money to keep the lights on. Elon’s going to need to not only keep existing advertisers as well as grow this revenue base and possibly raise prices if he’s going to keep Twitter going, now that he’s saddled the company with enormous debts that require servicing. How’s that going?

Yep, Twitter advertisers are leaving Twitter en masse. Elon is quick to blame ‘activists’ and not the fact that he’s turning it into a den of misinformation and virulent hate.

The Content

Every day, a handful of notable people – ‘blue checkmarks’ if you will – grace Twitter with their presence and provide the free content of whatever comes to their mind. Millions of people are attracted to Twitter so that they can see what people like Stephen King, Trent Reznor and Kathy Griffin have to say. Elon Musk has made it clear that these are all ‘elitists’, has worked hard to show them the door, and has pissed on them while they’re gone.

What’s going to fill in the gap? Why, some of the worst people in the world, of course. Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate were unbanned, and immediately responded by being absolutely shitty. Donald Trump, the man who literally tried to overthrow democracy, was also unbanned.

Elon’s argument are that these elitists were dominating conversation. But no one’s logging in to hear the political insights of FirstNameBunchaNumbers. As the best content creators leave, Elon will increasingly be left with a platform and an audience that looks a lot like Gab’s — and that’s a formula that’s already failed numerous times.

The Staff

I’m not saying that you shouldn’t expect layoffs after a major event like a purchase. You absolutely should. And many times, layoffs in these situations are necessary and/or warranted. Companies often have excessive baggage, and it’s reasonable to expect the purchasers to take a company in a new direction. But.

BUT.

Every person who has left in the last month is part of the puzzle that understands how Twitter operates. This isn’t just the coders. It’s the QA guys who know how to replicate bugs and the IT guys who know how to keep the servers up. It’s the moderation team that struggles to maintain a consistent moderation policy across the board. It’s the legal guys who keep Twitter from being sued when Elon does something dumb. It’s the international guys who know how to navigate laws across 200 countries.

Is there fat to trim here? Probably. Is it half the company? Almost certainly not. But perhaps most saliently, is one week enough time to figure out who is valuable and who is fat? ABSOLUTELY FUCKING NOT. But that’s how long Elon took to drop the first hammer. He’s still doing it. On Monday, he promised that Twitter was done with layoffs. Then he laid off more people Wednesday night.


Not only that, Elon has made it clear that Twitter will be a fucking terrible place to work. He will end the WFH policy that is now relatively standard in Silicon Valley. He will try to deny you compensation you’ve earned if he can weasel out of it. And he will crunch your team to do incredibly stupid features, and the push them into the world with insufficient QA or even any data that the userbase even wants them.

Everyone who went to Twitter because of the vision of Twitter is almost certainly gone. Everyone with talent probably had an offer in their mailbox before Elon showed up. Twitter currently has no central vision, and their new CEO is actively trying to destroy the old one that motivated the team.

Which brings us back to the IP. You know the code.

It’s a humongous pile of shit.

I mean, I haven’t seen it, but I’ve heard rumblings but, more to the point, it’s 16 years old. That’s 16 years of experimentation, desperate patches, failed experiments, and lord knows what else all piled on top of each other. I guaruntee its a festering slop pile of WTF.

That’s not unusual, of course. There are lots of billion dollar companies built on the back of festering slop piles of WTF. But here’s the key. The reason it works is the people. Twitter’s engineering staff is the only staff in the world capable of implementing anything in that code base quickly, safely, and with minimal service disruption.

Elon disintegrated it.

Elon wants to expand Twitter Blue to be an $8 checkmark anyone can buy. He laid off the Twitter Blue team. Elon wants to bring back Vine. He laid off the team that did that. Almost every idea that Elon has randomly thrown out as ideas who could rescue Twitter from the precarious financial position that Elon has put Twitter in was in some stage of development at Twitter already. And most of the people working on those features are gone.

And almost certainly much, much happier this Thanksgiving than the people who decided to stick around and work on this pathetic manchild’s incomprehensible and constantly shifting roadmap for the future.

The Reputation

LOL, well, that’s torched. As is Elon’s reputation as a wunderkind.

In Conclusion

Elon paid $44 billion dollars for Twitter – already 2-3x what experts thought Twitter was actually worth. For that money he got the codebase, the employees, the reputation, the customers, loyalty of the talent, the infrastructure and the advertising base. Every single one of these is in tatters compared to a month ago. And the reasons why can all be laid at the feet of the guy in charge.

Twitter is currently in a death spiral. Every decision that Elon has made so far has pushed Twitter farther away from being a viable business. And he’s trapped in it because he surrounds himself with sycophants and listens to right-wing nutjobs, none of which has even a meager understanding of the business. Can it break out? Probably not, until a more sober leader can come in.

Is it tragic? Yes. Is it funny? In a horrific sort of way, sure. But it’s all fun and games until you realize ol’ What’s His Face also applies this dazzling intellect, business savvy, respect for society, drive for quality and intellectual rigor to filling our streets with cars that drive themselves as well

Twitter’s Theoretical “Pivot to Video”

November 23, 2022 /

There is no more cursed phrase in Web dev than ‘pivot to video’ and so OF COURSE this is where Elon and his dipshitosphere of incompetent yes men are thinking of pushing Twitter.

Don’t get me wrong. It is the absolute height of macabre hilarity watching Elon squirm like an epileptic, drunken orangutan in quicksand as he tries to find some sort of viable business plan that can change the fundamental reality: he bought a company that danced back and forth across the line of profitability but at the time had cash in the bank. In doing so saddled it with so much crippling debt that even Bob Cratchit would say ‘yeah, let them fail’.

As a side note: part of the reason the debt is crippling is that Elon paid 2-3x what any observer thought Twitter was worth, and in doing so had to sell enough Tesla stock that Tesla is now more than 50% off it’s peak as well. Given that much of Elon’s wealth is still in Tesla stock, that means that a gobsmacking percentage of Elon’s personal fortune has simply evaporated in the last six months. He now owns a business that will need to come up with an extra $1B in revenue annually just to pay interest – a business that was just treading water before. Also, he’ll need to make up lost revenue from advertisers he spends his moments on the shitter jumping on Twitter to actively antagonize.

Also, Elon Musk is a business genius. So there’s that.

Anyway, Elon’s planning all sorts of crazy plans to dig himself out of this hole. This includes crazy ideas such as charging money for blue checkmarks and allowing Twitter to become an online bank.

But longform video seems to be where Elon wants to go, and Twitter currently allows short videos, which could in theory be expanded. And as befitting a business genius of his stature, he seems to be getting ideas on the business realities of the space from randos on Twitter, so you know this plan is super fleshed out and well-realized.

Some of Elon’s sycophants have suggested that that indeed is where Elon wants to go.

(Running parallel to this is Elon’s idea that Twitter should bring back Vine. This specifically is a bad idea for lots of reasons, the biggest being that Vine died for good reasons, and since then the Vine codebase has aged like a carton of milk in Death Valley)

Anyway, reasons why this is all very funny:

  1. Moderation. Elon Musk is abandoning the concept of moderation at a breakneck pace, utterly dismantling the internal mechanisms for moderating Twitter. But video requires EVEN MORE MODERATION. Like MASSIVELY MORE. Moderating video is massively more difficult and time-intensive than moderating text, and MUCH harder to do algorithmically. The companies that invest in video have enormous sweatshops of people whose entire job is to keep your Youtube feed from filling up with snuff films and child porn. Side note: Moderation problems were one of the reasons why Twitter killed Vine in the first place.
  2. Advertisers. The reason why Youtube works is because of advertisers. Advertising will become massively MORE important in a world where Twitter is centered on video, and that does not play nice with Elon’s declaration of war on advertisers, or insistence on the ‘free speech’ principles of allowing and promoting racist, antisemitic and homophobic content that advertisers abhor.
  3. Storage Space. At a time where Elon Musk is dismantling internal infrastructure to save a buck, video requires massively MORE infrastructure to store and distribute than 288 character text snippets.
  4. Technical Difficulty. It’s very good that Twitter has some tech here, but the real meat of video is Live Streaming, which is very difficult to do well, especially at the scale of more popular content creators. Can Twitter’s infrastructure handle distributing a live feed to a million people simultaneously? Because that’s the arena Elon’s saying he wants to play in if he wants a credible competitor.
  5. Entrenched Competition. Longform video currently has two established players – Youtube and Twitch – who also happen to be owned by companies with VERY deep pockets (Google and Amazon). Elon’s bright idea is to compensate creators more than those companies. Where he thinks he’ll get the cash to do that is ANYONE’s guess, but not even Elon has enough to do it if Youtube and Twitch decide to fight back.

Now, some have surmised that Elon can get around some of these issues if the focus of the work is to put content behind paywalls, thus allowing for example adult performers to make a buck on Twitter. Problems:

  1. OnlyFans already exists.
  2. If you think advertisers are fleeing now, just wait until you tell them that the future of Twitter is hardcore porn.

Could I be proven wrong? Sure. The Internet is still a place where a brilliant vision can surprise everyone and win the day. But is there a brilliant vision here? Nope. Just a billionaire flailing desperately as his fortune and wunderkind reputation evaporates.

Hey, Is This Thing On?

November 23, 2022 /

Took some doing, including remembering HOW to log into the site that hosts my blog, but in theory the old blog is up and running again. Now I just have to remember to not peruse old posts and see how stupid I was when I was younger.

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