You’re telling me the company that once had ads for T-Mobile and Volkswagen and now almost exclusively has ads where random bots with NFT photos advertise ChatGPT ‘services’ isn’t doing well financially??
It’s important to note that “doing well financially” isn’t just revenue and user count, it’s also expenditures. If Twitter has managed to cut costs by more than whatever its income has dropped by then that could well be a good outcome for it, I’ve heard it wasn’t profitable when Musk took it over.
It’s kind of ironic how big companies are frequently criticized for fixating on “endless growth” and “line goes up”, and then when a company or organization sheds that it also looks bad.
There’s so much wrong with your understanding here…so I’ll just point out that you’re talking about Twitter as if it’s still a public company, it’s not.
Also, Twitter was never profitable, and it was likely never going to be profitable. But there’s a big difference between their losses and projections before Musk, and after.
If “lines goes up” meant things get better for the customers, the employees, and the world in general, then people would be cheering it on. Usually it means it gets worse for at LEAST one of the three, and sometimes all 3.
Here, “line goes down” is following Twitter getting worse for the customers, the users, the employees, and the world in general. So people will cheer as it crashes.
Twitter has 1.3 Billion / in interest payments alone as it took on $13,000,000,000 in debt for the honor of being bought out by Elon Musk.
The owners of that debt have been quaking in their boots all last year. As Bankruptcy proceedings would make them the new owner of Twitter.
Note that Twitter made $5 Billion revenue on its best year, and that’s likely halfed or worse.
EDIT: $5 Billion revenue on its best year. Far less today and you still have all the OTHER costs going on. I’m sure Elon will prop up Twitter with Tesla ads or something but Twitter cannot stand by itself anymore.
I thought Twitter’s infrastructure was going to collapse within weeks after Musk made all those cuts and changes. I was obviously wrong because Twitter’s infrastructure didn’t collapse. I’m not speaking to the user experience on Twitter but from a purely infrastructure perspective, Musk was right and I was wrong.
Uh-oh, you said something positive about Musk. I only said “maybe he’s not as bad as it seems” and look where that got me.
What the fuck is the other 70%'s problem?
Or people with morbid curiousity like me who hop on to see the dumpster fire occasionally. Can’t say I recommend it.
He kept the 70% he wanted, it’ll be a propaganda engine and communications platform for the right wing.
Whatever wing willing to pay, honestly.
EDIT: I rarely see the voting system of lemmy for a reason. I find it cute, this reaction to the mere comparison between so-called “wings” in the American political system. Both, republicans and democrats, are two sides of the same coin.
How much did human usage drop? Because there are a shitload more bots on twitter nowadays than there were in the years before he took over.
Ah, ok, 27% -> 19%, an 8% YoY drop, and the numbers were obtained using identical methodologies across multiple years. Yeah, I agree, seems to check out.
Still, there are definitely a shitload more bots than there were before.
Are there more bots or does it just seem that way because there are fewer people? I don’t ask to be snarky, I’m legitimately curious what the numbers were and are.
Any time something gets too big it gets bots. Lemmy will be the same. We will see instances getting defederated who cannot manage the spam.
Fuck Elon though
If people set up their own instances with 100% LLM bots how would we even know they are bots to defederate? The AIs are too realistic. Only giveaway would be the ones dumb enough to make accounts post/comment 24/7 with seconds between each comment.
Right now, it’s still possible to realize texts are written by llms, due to style and mistakes, but it can become a serious problem in the near future, and we are kind of ignoring it, because no one is preparing in any way.
Wasn’t like one of his focuses going to be getting rid of bots? Did they just not do anything and the bots just invaded or did the bots just get better?
Ever since Musk’s control of the company, Twitter (I refused to call it X) showed me multiple hate and racists posts. Basically, Twitter is showing me garbage. I now use Mastadon instead.
I was never active in terms of posting but I followed several news outlets, local government agencies, and a few friends. Shortly after Musk took over I saw nothing but right wing nutjobs and a lot of posts from Musk. I tried unfollowing but nothing worked so I quit logging in. I need to cancel my account but haven’t taken the time.
Yeah, I had a Twitter account but rarely used it. Shortly after Musk took over, his account was in recommendations and his tweets were in my feed, even though I’d NEVER seen them before.
I blocked him.
He remained at the top of my recommendations.
I think I even occasionally saw his posts when they were retweeted or something by someone I didn’t even follow, because the retweet was trending, I guess?
That’s when I deleted my account.
It’s a shame because Twitter is a perfect platform for the kind of one-way communications required by a news agency or local government agency. Maybe Mastodon or Bluesky will fill that void.
Facebook does that for me too, alongside flat earthers, anti EV crap and the occasional funny picture. It’s depressing.
I’m back to calling it Twitter. (Not that I’m ever on it though.)
It’s such a stupid name! Everytime it’s mentioned, it has to be prepend or suffixed with something so people actually understand the “X” context.
And more importantly - If you visit x.com, it redirects to twitter.com! So what’s the fucking point of the rebrand?
Until he stops allowing deadnaming on his site, I’m going to deadname his site.
To the Mayan people X makes a ‘sh’ sound. That’s the way I pronounce it. Now and forever.
Xitter, I mean Shitter. I still pronounce the letter X normally.
In Portuguese, too. And most other languages from Iberia*. And “x” is typically so rare in other orthographies that, for Portuguese speakers, rendering “x” as /ʃ/ (the “sh” sound) is almost automatic, so the first time that I saw “Xitter” I couldn’t stop laughing.
*with one exception: modern Spanish. And by “modern” I mean past the 17th century, because before that it was /ʃ/ in Spanish too. That’s where the Maya languages got that spelling convention from.
(Sorry for the off-topic.)
I’ve seen “xeet” from people outside of Twitter. Not sure what an X person would say. It’s pronounced “shit” or “sheet”.