Month: July 2023

Elon Musk’s reign running Twitter has been a cavalcade of failure ever since he walked into Twitter HQ carrying a sink, but even by the very low standards set so far, last week was quite the sight to behold. Let’s review, shall we?

Let’s start at the beginning. Twitter’s pretty broke. Don’t just take my word for it.

Twitter is ‘skipping rent payments’ broke. Twitter is ‘not giving out promised bonuses‘ levels of broke. Twitter is ‘being sued for $500M of unpaid severance‘ levels of broke. Twitter is a ‘do we really need a Trust and Safety team‘ level of broke. Twitter is ‘who needs parental leave?’ levels of broke. Twitter is ‘do we really need to pay Google or Amazon for cloud servers and other services‘ levels of broke.

Between the headcount loss of engineers to try to get costs down and some of the decisions above, Twitter is technically limping at best. At the beginning of the month, Twitter users were limited to reading only 600 posts a day – not exactly what you want for your advertising based business! Things are back to normal again – or at least, not quite this absurd.

How Twitter got here is quite convoluted. When Elon took over, he announced that he’d try to convert Twitter to be primarily a subscription business (called Twitter Blue), to make it less dependent on ads. To do that, he’d retire the old blue checkmark system given to celebrities (colloquially called the ‘legacy checkmarks’) and sell them to everyone instead.

But nobody wanted to pay for Twitter. As of February, only about 300K accounts signed up for Twitter (Twitter has about 200M Daily Users so call it a 0.15% conversion rate). After legacy checkmarks were retired, only 12000 out of 400K legacy accounts switched to Twitter Blue. It was such a fiasco that Elon ended up giving BACK blue checkmarks to notable celebrities – many of which then urgently stressed to their fans they didn’t pay for it and never would!

Advertising has plummeted because Advertisers are highly skeptical. Big advertisers like Coke, Jeep, and Wells-Fargoo have stopped advertising, and users are now served wall-to-wall ads for Cheech and Chong’s gummies and various wish.com caliber crap.

All of this has been made worse by the fact that Elon burdened Twitter with about $13B worth of debt that has to be paid off. Twitter was a tight margin business previously that flirted with profitability before acquisition. The destruction of the advertising base combined with these huge interest payments dramatically changed this calculations to be a massive whiff. Twitter is – as Elon said in the first tweet above – not cash flow positive, and not even close.

Which made it all the more surprising when last week a bunch of blue checkmarked Tweeters reported getting informed they were getting big payouts from Twitter, in the $20K range.

When pressed upon it, Elon stressed that the payouts were based on ads that were served in replies to their threads to other verified members, stressing that content to free users was easy to manipulate. And let me just say, it sure is funny that the CEO of a business based on serving ads to an audience that is 99.8% non-subscribers is saying that any metrics including those numbers are untrustworthy and shouldn’t be counted! Wonder how the advertisers feel about this!

This is also funny because a core promise of Twitter Blue – and indeed the primary benefit for most users – is that you won’t see very many ads! So Twitter Blue went from the feature that would make ads unnecessary to the service and where subscribers wouldn’t see very many to one where Blue users MUST be shown ads in order to succeed!

Also, if you think this sounds like a pyramid scheme or an MLM… yeah, kinda does! It’s a transparent attempt to goose blue subscriptions with the promise that you, too, could be getting $25K checks instead of being one of the greater fools shelling out $8/month.

But wait, it gets better. Over on Bluesky, Parker Molloy noted that one particular power user was kind of pissed off.

CatTurd2 is a MAGA diehard with 1.8M followers, who was banned by the old Twitter regime before being reinstated when Elon took over. Despite being an unqualified garbage person, the esteemed Mr. Turd2 is an endless source of amusement to me, given that he constantly complains about being treated unfairly by Elon’s twitter DESPITE BEING ARTIFICIALLY ALGORITHMICALLY BOOSTED. So it would be easy to say this was just Catturd being … turdlike. But no, another person in Catturd’s circle of MAGA doofuses did a little research and discovered that, no, it wasn’t a systematic thing, just checks sent out to a handful of handpicked posters — mysteriously, posters that interact with Elon a lot.

Hey, remember when the whole point of selling blue checkmarks was because the old way was rife with cronyism? I love irony! Anyway, Taylor Lorenz for the Washington Post confirmed this, essentially, saying that contributors collecting money would need to undergo human review. The same article interviews various former Twitter employees who want to stress that it all sounds like a BS marketing stunt.

So out of the people Elon handpicked to get cash payouts, who got paid? Well, for starters, the world’s most notorious sex trafficker.

Media Matters did a bigger roundup of those who announced they were receiving payouts, which includes 9 accounts that got paid out – all of which are right-wing and/or anti-woke commentators. Two others (the Krassenstein brothers) are token left-leaners, but also are suspected fraudsters who were banned from Twitter for literally the sort of platform manipulation Elon claims is bringing down the service (Elon brought them back when he took over).

While we don’t know about anyone who HASN’T tweeted their earnings, it’s still pretty notable that 80% of the people we know Elon picked echoes his antiwoke (read: racist, sexist homophobic and transphobic) worldview. If you want to make money from Twitter, be a right-wing and/or anti-woke influencer who regularly takes a shit on marginalized minorities. All of this is especially interesting given that the audience that Elon bought leans left by a 2 to 1 margin.

That’s right. Elon is literally paying conservatives to torment, start fights with and drive off his core audience.

As an aside, one of the reasons Advertisers were fleeing Twitter was because their ads were, in Elon’s new regime, appearing directly above or below some terrible shit. Advertisers should be aware that this is no longer about their ads appearing next to white nationalist posts, but rather that their ad money will go directly into the pockets of – almost exclusively – sex traffickers, racists, transphobes, vaccine denialists and January 6th defenders. If you advertise on Twitter, you fund hate. Directly.

So what’s next? Well, that’s easy. Elon has promised to massively increase these payouts. But as you consider these promises in mind, remember…. Twitter doesn’t have any money, and has no interesting new revenue pipelines coming.

All of this feels very much like a publicity stunt to try to keep their key influencers from leaving and to convince anyone that Twitter Blue is still a good idea. But why would they feel the need to do that? Gee, that’s a real puzzle.

As a parting gift, please enjoy CatTurd remaining super mad.

Concerning.

It’s been about nine months since Elon Musk spent $44 billion dollars to shit the bed harder than it’s ever been shit on before. In that time, there hasn’t been a serious competitor to Twitter’s claim as the premier western microblogging service. Sure, there was Post. Mastodon. Spill. Spoutable. Hive. And most recently, BlueSky. But none set the world on fire. There are a lot of reasons why, but a huge part of this is because none of them had existing tech stacks, and as such none of them could hit quick critical mass. As one example, Blue Sky is still invite only, and even then hit major load when Twitter had major technical issues.

All the same, if one were Elon Musk, one could perhaps conclude that despite all of these tiny little clones, Twitter was very safe. Maybe his users actually did love what he was doing. Maybe he could find a path to profitability.

About that….

Over the Fourth of July holiday, Elon and company had their worst days yet running the service. Through some combination of bad tech and not paying their bills, most Twitter users were limited to only reading 600 posts a day – an amount that a moderate Twitter user consumes in one trip to the shitter. The day after the holiday ended, Meta (formerly Facebook) launched Threads, a microblogging service meant to directly compete with Twitter. And so far, it’s launch has been a couple of orders magnitude larger than the other clones – in 24 hours. A few notes:

1. Threads hasn’t won yet. It is very hard to dislodge someone’s social media presence, and Twitter was – before Elon – the default social media network for celebrities, corporations and the press. In particular, the people who seem to have the most people letting go of Twitter are the people who found it incredbly useful to do their job – the media. They will probably cling to Twitter until the lights go out.
2. And yet, Facebook was uniquely positioned to this fight. What does Facebook have that BlueSky doesn’t have? Well, for starters, an infrastructure that can handle throwing 30 million users on it on day one. This dramatically increases the chances that Threads can hit an early critical mass. If a significant portion of that 30 million users sticks around, Twitter could be fucked very quickly.
3. Meta was also able to leverage preexisting networks. One of the roughest things about starting on a new social media site is that you start with an empty feed and friends list. On Mastodon and Blue Sky you can get around that with tools like fedifinder but you have to be fairly technically savvy to know that. Meta, on the other hand, was able to preseed most people’s friends list with their Instagram contacts, which meant anyone with an Instagram account started with a lively list. The impact of this simply should not be underestimated. If Threads becomes something, this will be a core reason why.
4. Meta needs a win as much as Elon does – and have the cash to chase it. Meta just spent more than 30 billion dollars trying to build the Metaverse and pulling the plug. But they do have money in the bank, and a lot of it – they have about $40B in the bank and make about $100B a year. Meanwhile, Twitter’s money making capacity was absolutely annihilated both by Musk’s purchase and his poor leadership. Mark Zuckerberg needs a win to get back in Wall Street’s good graces and erase the stink of the last few years. If Threads keeps showing signs of life, expect Zuck to push his chips all-in.
5. Meta is betting big on ‘Friendly’. A huge part of the destruction of Twitter was Elon’s abandonment of community management in order to embrace a view of ‘free speech’ that ensures that everyone’s post is full of white supremacists, homophobes and antivaxers at all time. By comparison, the message put out by Zuck and other Threads employees over and over again was ‘friendly’. Do they mean it? Who knows. Remember, Facebook has evolved into a right-wing echo chamber that is still a major reason why people think vaccines don’t work and Trump won the last election. But it does at least tell you what Facebook’s market research tells us is Twitter’s core weakness.

6) Threads also appears to be taking an aggressive stance against misinformation. Given that misinformation is something that has absolutely blossomed under Elon’s management, this is also almost certainly a reaction (and a smart one) to that.

7) When you first go to Threads, the first thing you notice are the celebrities. My first foray into Threads put Tom Brady and Eva Longoria on top of my feed. Other celebrities were actually talking. There are two important takeaways from this. The first is that celebrities were here and at least experimentally active — one can’t help but remember how Elon has been treating celebrities like actual dog shit on Twitter for quite some time, and so it’s not surprising that celebs are more than eager to try alternatives. But even more significant and important is that, in this environment, you know who celebrities are. In my last Twitter article, I talked about how one of the bits of magic of pre-Elon Twitter was knowing you were rubbing elbows with real stars. That is completely absent in post-Elon Twitter, as Elon was happy to sacrifice that in order to coax $8 bucks a month out of CatTurd. I said it was a mistake before, but it wasn’t until I went into threads that I realized HOW much of a mistake it felt like. Twitter seems small and provincial now, especially since the biggest ‘celebrities’ that talk are right-wing asshats you want to block reflexively anyway.

8) And the advertising situation is very different. Elon’s bad decision-making has utterly destroyed their advertising revenue – their only significant revenue stream. A year ago, I was seeing ads for Acura and Jeep. Now, they’re an embarrassing cornucopia of weed gummies and cheap dropshipped bullshit that even wish.com would be humiliated to stock. Threads doesn’t really have any advertising yet – I wouldn’t expect to see any for a while, while Threads tries to gain a foothold (they have cash to burn to keep your feed clean for a while). But what they do have are brands – and major ones like McDonalds. You can almost feel their joy in knowing their posts won’t be adjacent to white supremacist bullshit and antivaxer crap. I know it seems stupid, but even the commercial angle of Threads feels significantly less cheap.

9) ‘The everything app’. One more weird thing: one of the huge things driving Twitter into the ground is Elon Musk attempting to reinvent Twitter into an ‘everything app’. He already has pushed hard into video (with absolutely hilarious results) and is also pushing hard to advance a payments business and do things like book restaurants and order Taxis. Humorously enough, Facebook already tried that – and ended up with an enormous pile of bloatware that is underused and complexifies the user experience. I strongly suspect that Threads will remain simple and clean, kind of acting as a throwback for the company, and Twitter will look even shittier and more unfocused as a result.

I’m not sure I’m going to permanently entrench on Threads – I’ve been more at home on Bluesky, frankly, and I’m taking a wait-and-see approach to yet another new social media network. Also, let’s be frank, Meta has not exactly been a benevolent force for good tech-wise. They probably helped Trump get elected, they destroyed countless media outlets with fake stats that pushed to video, and Facebook is one of the primary vectors of antivax and other right-wing quackery in the world.

That being said, Elon Musk took a beautiful thing and destroyed it, so I’m pretty okay with at least rooting for Threads to drive Twitter closer to bankruptcy. And frankly, it brings a tear to my eye that about 30 million Twitter users and counting agree with me.