Notice how almost all social media sites are now offering, or considering offering, paid 'blue checkmark' options? Yeah, seems that us plebians didn't factor into the 'OMG, that's awesome' reaction from the CEOs.
Unfortunately probably a lot of CEOs realizing they can make drastic cost cutting and policy moves and get away with it. And sadly looks like it’s working.
He hasn't been paying for Twitter's servers, which is the equivalent of a construction company refusing to pay a supplier for wood. No wood = no product, likewise for Elon no servers = no twitter.
So far it doesn't look like he's getting away with it. Ad revenue is down 60% compared to last year, it doesn't look like there is enough revenue from subscriptions to make up for that, and they're being evicted from one of their offices.
That story is (unfortunately) not as bad as it sounds on the surface. Basically the office they're being evicted from was leased just as COVID lockdowns were happening and WFH became a thing. So no one was actually working there and it was pretty much just sitting empty. It's still not great, but Twitter isn't really losing anything of value.
Right, even if you don't use anything affected by the restrictions being put on the API, I just feel like Reddit will get noticeably worse from here on out. Huffman is basically promising that it will.
Yeah ppl already predicted it's probably gonna be a battle of who can place the most shorts in the least amount of time on Reddit stock when they go IPO. There's no reason to go through with it any longer, it will only hurt his company more.
And as long as he's CEO, good. I'm a 15 year veteran of Reddit, and Huffman has done nothing but drive it into the ground. 10 days and counting for when I purge everything on Reddit and delete my account. It's going to be a sad day for me. I loved that site.
The way he has been talking about competition makes it look like he has no idea what he is doing and is insecure about it. Even from a pure money-making standpoint, whoever is funding that needs to replace the CEO (assuming the CEO has no control).
I use(d) it to follow 1 guy for updates about my favorite sports team and transfers etc.
But he introduced a new site (today) and is actually gonna quit the platform to go to twitch or somewhere else, so i'll say goodbye to another social media account after today.
I've use feedly with nitter for feeds from Twitter from specific accounts. Seems best way to go over having an actual Twitter account. Then you don't see anything but the accounts you follow.
I feel like we’re seeing a lot of money leave tech. These companies are no longer getting cash injections and running into the red. The number one game for them now is revenue generation and that is through user fees and advertising. That’s why we’re seeing this shit now.
A lot of these platforms (Twitter/Reddit) started off simple and never took into account advertising. That means third party apps never got the ad feed in the general timeline.
Seeing their infinite funds dry up, these companies are now looking for where they can generate extra revenue, or where they are not generating revenue and making cuts.
These APIs cost them money. So now they’re making the gamble. Will their users tolerate losing their favourite apps to a privacy invading and ad serving machine just to access their feeds?
I'd like to think most of the app users are power users who actually drive a lot of value and forcing them to leave will tank your business, but who knows, time will tell.
Did you not hear that Steve Huffman let slip during an interview that the API cost them about 10 million? And that he demanded 20million from the Apollo app alone? He wanted 3rd party apps gone.
I didn’t hear that, but I’m not surprised it’s also about control. When you offer a paid API you’re capping potential revenues for those users at essentially a flat rate.
I suspect that their revenue generation plans likely would see more than 10M/yr return so they threw out some big number to kill everything, force a portion of those users to their own services where they’re planning on ramping up monetization
Holy crap, this man does not have an original thought in his head does he?
He thinks he'll become the next Musk by emulating the next Musk. Only problem is, he skipped steps 1-10 which involve owning a company (X.com) that another merges with (Confinity) which becomes a huge company (Paypal) that gets bought out by a massive company (Ebay).
Then you can start acting like a massive asshole while throwing money at everything.
Unfortunately, Spez doesn't realize steps 1-10 exist, and thinks he can just treat everyone like shit and have people think (at least for a while) that he's a genius. Also forgets about steps 11-200 which is to surround yourself with brilliant people that can build your shit so you become more rich. Then you can become the asshole everyone hates.
Sadly Spez is on step 200+ without the cash from steps 1-199 and has surrounded himself by "yes men" instead of brilliant people that know what the fuck they are doing, which leads him to build whatever next big think like Twitter was will be.
I was going to include that, however in my literal minute of searching him, I couldn't find a verified source. I will admit, I didn't try very hard at all so I may have just overlooked it.
JC: How do you handle fear?
EM: Company death – not succeeding with the company – causes me a lot more stress than physical danger. But I’ve been in physical danger before. The funny thing is I’ve not actually been that nervous. In South Africa, my father had a private plane we’d fly in incredibly dangerous weather and barely make it back. This is going to sound slightly crazy, but my father also had a share in an Emerald mine in Zambia. I was 15 and really wanted to go with him but didn’t realize how dangerous it was. I couldn’t find my passport so I ended up grabbing my brother’s – which turned out to be six months overdue! So we had this planeload of contraband and an overdue passport from another person. There were AK-47s all over the place and I’m thinking, “Man, this could really go bad.”
I have doubts about his judge of character. If he had any part of the hiring process for Reddit's mobile or video dev teams then he needs a reality check.
I am not a fan of twitter, I have prob tweeted 15 things in the last 15 years.
I am neither pro-musk, or anti-musk, and really don't care to watch him every time I turn the news on-
However, I will note, looking to twitter as a role model for how to manage a company, is prob a pretty bad choice. As a developer- some of the "policies" I saw him forcing on users, were absolutely atrocious.
And- honestly, I would have walked away from a job such as that....
But- on the note- spez is a moron... and he can delete all of the posts he wants. He can change all of the moderators. He can modify as many comments as he feels the need to.
But, this ball is already rolling. That house of cards will fall.
That's absolutely hilarious, but not surprising. These types of people are just absolutely blind to the people around them, and only see everyone else as "beneath them".
I'm not a super big believer of karma in terms of it being this cosmic force that intermingles with all of our lives... However, I do think karma exists in the manner of people who you affect through an action of yours will remember what you've done, and that will shape their interactions with you (in this case, "you" being Reddit as a platform) in the future. It may not be today, it may not be tomorrow - but eventually Spez/Reddit inc will get what is coming to them, in the form of their platform dying. There are very few things in this world that are completely irreplaceable, and by that same token very few businesses are "too large to fall". Reddit is not one of those.
They've pissed off a great deal of the tech folks, next they'll piss off the the porn folks (I have no doubt Reddit will eventually get rid of NSFW content for their IPO)... I'd posit those two are Reddit's biggest content generators. Even if Reddit's "largest content" isn't directly tech or porn related (which I'd argue is near the top, but I don't have statistics on hand to back that up) no doubt the other content is generated by the people who are in those categories (or in other words, no one only uses Reddit to visit r/memes - however, the folks from r/yourfavoritensfwsub and r/technology will visit it because its on the same site if that makes sense).
One of Reddit's biggest strengths was that it was an "anonymous" social network, and I think that'll be its biggest curse. With Facebook, plenty of people are there because their friends and family are there. This doesn't apply to Reddit, people are only there because that is where content they like to consume is at... however if people can't access the content the way they want, or the content just isn't there, then there is nothing to keep them there. Sure, there are usernames I've come to remember seeing in the 12 years that I've been on Reddit, but if I never saw them ever again I wouldn't really lose any sleep over it...
What goes around comes around, or as I like even better "Never bet against the house. The house always wins".
I'm highly disappointed that after Elon took over and then did those changes to Twitter, people still use it, they still post links to it and still talk about it. There wasn't as much exodus as it was.
It looks like Reddit might be the same and people are too lazy to switch to an an alternative.
I do not think Reddit is going to have a mass exodus in the same way that Digg did back then, no. Times have changed far too much for that to be the case.
However, "karma" has no deadline, and I do think that overtime we'll see Reddit decline and the root of the cause will probably come back to this, in some shape or form. I've even heard people in my "normal" circles say that after being met with the "This community is private" this last week, they already don't like their reliance on Reddit.
Twitter and Facebook are a bit different in this perspective. Facebook tends to have close ties to friends/family, Twitter does kinda but not to the same extent - but quite a few people do use Twitter because of celebrities and "bigger people" being on there.
I was wondering what motivated Spez to make such a self-destructive move, he has to run the company further into the black to get his IPO. Evidently he's willing to sacrifice a body part to do it.
Anyway I think the profitability of social media has hit a precipice, it's as good as it's going to get. It's like the brain has not yet registered the arm's been cut off.
As a person who's rather left on corporate America anyway, I'm glad I'm here and not there. It's sort of hypocritical of me to participate in corporate driven media and I'm glad I'm not doing it anymore.
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