So "X" - nothing to see here. Elon's in control - Part XXX **Threadbans in OP**

jmcc

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122163743#Comment_122163743

Getting the costs under control was a priority. The ad revenue for 2023 was $2.5 billion but there was also $0.9 billion in subscriptions and data licencing. The previous year's subscriptions and data licencing revenue was $0.4 billion. It is lumbered with a lot of debt. They need to be able to meet to meet the interest payments on the debt and pay operating costs. The subscriptions helped but the focus on dealing with bots scraping content from Twitter/X may have helped increase the data licencing revenue.

Regards…jmcc

pjohnson

Dealing with bots when the place has multiples of the bots it used to is comical.

I thought most musk simps had fled this sinking ship by now.

Regards Musk4Lyfe

Penn

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122163791#Comment_122163791

GOOD POST I LIKE THIS MUCH LOL

← p#u#s#s#y##i#n##b#i#o

eightieschewbaccy

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122163781#Comment_122163781

Bots and scams are more prominent than ever before. Getting costs down is great and all but it's not great if it causes more and more platform instability. And killing off technical innovations means that they can't compete with other platforms.... Nobody wants Twitter to be their everything app but that's his idea of innovation… Have you any proof that there's any substantial uptake for API functionality? Iirc, most major platforms eg consoles have removed the ability to tweet instead of paying. The fact Musk isn't come out with any big figures to indicate major profits indicates that there simply aren't.

It's somewhat fascinating to watch posters struggling to find any way to indicate the takeover as a success. Meanwhile both Tesla and Twitter are in serious trouble long term.

Christy42

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122163597#Comment_122163597

This post is wildly irrelevant if you don't include what the net income was after Elon took over.

jmcc

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122163862#Comment_122163862

The user generated content, (the tweets, the interactions and the locations) are valuable data. In addition to posting using bots, people also try to scrape this content for free. This kind of activity is not immediately obvious but content scraping has been a major problem for all large websites for decades. With AI and the need for data to train AI, this content, and the content from all large websites has become quite valuable. The New York Times has already taken legal action against one well known AI operation. Ryanair has also successfully sued companies scraping its website.

Twitter only ever had two profitable years. It probably would have struggled to make a profit even if Musk didn't take it over. Musk overpaid for a company with a lot of problems. Some of them were dealt with by cutting costs. Others will take a lot longer to fix. That kind of discussion might be beyond the scope of this thread.

Regards…jmcc

ohnonotgmail

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122163928#Comment_122163928

you dont fix a company by cutting revenue by a third

LuckyLloyd

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122163597#Comment_122163597

You ignored the point above, but I’ll note it again: Twitter is estimated to be only worth 15b now, a value loss of ~65%. We can argue this up and down and all around, but slashing costs and improving net revenues will never make up for catastrophic value loss and brand toxification (as demonstrated by the nature of ads on the site since he took over).

Unless those core aspects of Musk’s Twitter / X can be turned around, the rest are mere deckchairs.

eightieschewbaccy

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122163928#Comment_122163928

He hasn't eliminated bots though, they're still there... He's also lost almost a fifth of their active users and half their advertisers… I shutdown my Twitter account about a year ago, I sometimes glance at the content and the comments and they amount to far right nutjobs going wild. Advertisers won't go back because of the kind of content they're associated with…

crusd

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122162971#Comment_122162971

It is advisable to check your own bullsh*t before posting it. Trump was banned from Twitter in January 2021.

But "owning the libs" fanboys dont do facts

jmcc

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122164035#Comment_122164035

When Musk took over Twitter, it was delisted as a public company and became a privately owned company. That changed the financial reporting requirements. It no longer had to publish quarterly statements. That was mentioned above as was point about X being worth less now.

Twitter only had two profitable years before it was taken over. For all those other years, it was losing money. Musk had to reduce operating costs. He fired 80% of the workforce and reduced costs on hosting. X also lost advertising revenue. X now has to try make a profit and keep making a profit in order to restore some of that value for its investors. And the point about Musk overpaying for the company was mentioned too.

Phrases like "catastrophic value loss" and "brand toxification" may sound impressive but the reality is that X is a business and it has to cover costs, deal with its debt and try to make a profit. The core aspects for a business are survival and making a profit. Typically, the more profit a company makes, the more valuable it is considered. It will take a long time to be worth what Musk paid for it.

Regards…jmcc

jmcc

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122164130#Comment_122164130

It is very difficult to completely eliminate bots. There was a lot of argument about the level of bots before Musk took over Twitter and the previous management was reluctant to state the actual numbers.

The effects of the bots responsible for automated posting are obvious and are the ones on which most people concentrate. The other bots, the ones that scrape content from X and other websites, go largely ignored. For large websites and services, they are an expensive problem. Some of X's actions like requiring users to log in to read tweets and limiting the number of tweets that can be read at a time are geared towards dealing with this problem.

Twitter/X is in the business of monetising user activity. It makes money from advertising on user generated content (the tweets), data licencing and subscriptions. It still has hundreds of millions of active users. It is commonly said about Web businesses that if you are not paying for a product then you are the product. Twitter/X is just one very large scale example of this.

Regards…jmcc

eightieschewbaccy

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122165889#Comment_122165889

And they've lost over half of their advertisers, not seeing the issue yet?

LuckyLloyd

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122165632#Comment_122165632

Yes, yes I understand the basics of how a business operates.

Your last sentence is the key one - Twitter / X is worth a significant amount less than Musk paid for it. It is amazing to me that his supporters always somehow ignore that crucial fact - the man agreed to buy the business for multiples of what it was worth - when lauding all his decisions since. Particularly when those decisions have had a direct impact on lowering the core revenue stream and weakening the potential to increase that revenue stream in the future. It is very hard to square such an acutely bad decision with Musk's supposed brilliance and excellent decision making since.

Quin_Dub

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122166312#Comment_122166312

Exactly - He made an offer using a price based on a marijuana related meme and then spent the next few months desperately trying to get out of the deal.

Having been forced to buy the company and loading it up with catastrophic levels of debt he then went on a cost cutting spree with zero attention to what he was cutting in a desperate attempt to help him pay back the $44B he spent buying a turd.

That turd is now worth about a 3rd of what he paid for it (and he'd already paid about 20% too much right out the gate just so he could have "420" in the bid price, because he's a child) so he is well and truly upside down on the debt.

There is no "plan" other than throw as many sh!t ideas against the wall and hope some of it sticks and generates some money to help pay off the debt.

And now that the Tesla stock is tanking as well , his ability to service the debt or use that stock as collateral to float the loan forward is much harder.

None of the "ideas" that he's put forward so far are going to generate the kinds of revenue needed to service that debt. There is a brick wall waiting for "X" and they don't seem to have a way around or through it.

blackwhite

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122165632#Comment_122165632

Cutting costs is much easier than growing revenues. That's why tech companies often have a prolonged "growth phase" where they try and build their revenues as much as possible using fundraising from both equity and debt sources.

Once they reach a targetted revenue level, they then try to rationalise the cost-base to a sustainable level which leads to profitability and the ability to repay the debts built up during the growth phase. But it's critical that they can rationalise their cost bases without shedding all the revenue-streams that they have built up. Otherwise they remain loss-making forever and eventually fail.

Musk is doing the easy bit - cutting costs - without doing anything to safeguard the revenues. It would appear that he is shedding revenues to a greater degree than he is cutting costs and if that's the case he's dooming the company to failure.

It's much easier to turn around a loss-making company with high revenues and high costs than it is to turn around a loss-making company with low revenues and a low cost base.

Musk appears to have taken over Twitter when it was high-revenue and high-costs and transformed it into X with low revenues and low costs - whilst missing the return to profitability part.

Quiet Achiever

Elon's promise was not and will not be fulfilled.

His promise was to get rid of bots and ensure twitter would be the world's town square.

Bots are worse than ever, and it's far from a town square as all you see in any "discussion' beneath a tweet are paid subscribers who all share the same world view, or irrelevant memes by bots, and everyone trying to get you to read their thread so they can get paid a few pennies by Elon.

It's a million mils away from its vision and it is now 80% the same crude monotone that 4chan is.

But the big positive is that lazy journalists now ignore it so it doesn't drive what we see in the papers or hear on the radio.

silliussoddius

It's a town square, but he got rid of the toilet cleaners and they are starting to back up.

kowloon

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122176450#Comment_122176450

But the big positive is that lazy journalists now ignore it so it doesn't drive what we see in the papers or hear on the radio.

It's slowly losing favour. It's great reading news stories that are not just Twitter dumps of user reactions.

silliussoddius

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122179965#Comment_122179965

I wonder what all these journalists will do with their Ctrl C and Ctrl V skills?

corkie

https://www.sundayworld.com/news/irish-news/us-based-social-media-site-targets-families-of-irish-leaders-after-palestine-declaration/a1958478959.html

Also reported by the times.co.uk ~ archive link

Separately, the Fianna Fail leader criticised Twitter/X after it refused to remove a post by the US-based organisation ……

Not naming the twitter account so as not to generate more traffic to it. Photos are still up today, surprised they didn't report the post under the #DSA. The account did post this under the photo's "This post is for illustrative purposes only and did not actually occur." as if they are claiming 'Fair Use'?

Despicable that photo's can be used in that way.

Edit: -

If Micheal martin can't get these photos/post down what hope has Cynthia Ní Mhurchú getting abusive content taken down after reporting to Coimisiún na Meán this week and basically been told by an information pack posted that content moderation wasn't their remit. Her she is moaning about 'X' on tiktok! Posted day after I tweet to her that I didn't need to know her view point on the subject. That I could have guessed. Good script writers but she obliviously doesn't have a clue what she is talking about. There is limitations to the power it has, as of yet.

odyssey06

Not suprising:

An analysis by The Journal of over 150 anonymous accounts on X, formerly known as Twitter, examined how the accounts engaged in attempts to influence opinions on a range of divisive topics in Ireland.

Some accounts show signs of being operated by non-Irish users, despite claiming to be Irish and posting almost exclusively about Irish political issues.

https://www.thejournal.ie/x-irish-anonymous-accounts-influence-operation-6385526-May2024/

Flaneur OBrien

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122188186#Comment_122188186

Unfortunately, there's a lot of thick people out there that need protecting from bad agents.

Brussels Sprout

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122176450#Comment_122176450

nudes in bio

blackwhite

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122188186#Comment_122188186

Looks like it's already too late for some….

Brussels Sprout

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122188174#Comment_122188174

That's a great bit of analysis. Shame they can't figure out who is behind those accounts.

The bit about the account that was supposedly about Dublin GAA reminded me of a recent piece in The Economist. They talked about how accounts will be set up to initially draw in a user base - so common topics are premier league soccer or news about pop stars. At some point, when they have reached a critical number of followers, they will switch and instead start posting the content that they were initially created for.

L1011

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122190319#Comment_122190319

There's a pile of nostalgia pages in the UK that morph in to supporting Britain First after they've caught enough people with misty eyed crap about the 50s and 60s.

I've seen some vague attempts to do that here, but about the 90s; cause the 50s and 60s weren't great and anything newer than the 90s is already too modern and open for the people trying to drag people in to want to support!

Brussels Sprout

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122190331#Comment_122190331

Yes I have noticed that a lot of the Irish far-right accounts have to use imagery from ancient Irish folklore in order to create some sort of halcyon past. They're quite literally using fiction in order to sell fantasy.

nachouser

I logged into twitter for the first time in ages. Has it gone dark view by default? It looks terrible.

Mike3549

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122190933#Comment_122190933

This only happened to me when my phone was on the low battery , "battery save mode".