All of that is true, but it was true before Elon took over, now they just have fewer employees to pay, so if they can turn the advertising back around, they'll be in a better cashflow situation.
Twitter could have fired nobody and the advertising revenue would have still declined, those two things were mostly unrelated.
I've never personally believed in Twitter as a business model, so you're preaching to the choir there. As far as innovation, though, Elon has stated he wants X to be the 'everything app' similar to whatever it is they use in China, in particular payments.
> Twitter could have fired nobody and the advertising revenue would have still declined, those two things were mostly unrelated.
Unrelated in the short term. In the long term, I disagree.
Twitter is not that interesting of an app that users are flocking to it, nor it is so fundamentally different from any of its competitors and essential as a social network, that it would have a captive audience.
Twitter user base peaked in 2022. There haven't been any new major features, no concrete plans, but regardless, they have not enough manpower to implement them even if they wanted to.
> As far as innovation, though, Elon has stated he wants X to be the 'everything app' similar to whatever it is they use in China, in particular payments.
Good luck with that. People in the US, and especially the EU, don't like to have their payment apps linked to their social media. It's not like big tech hasn't tried already, e.g. Google Wallet, Facebook Pay, SnapCash, etc.
East Asia runs on a different gear. They have their own "everything apps", e.g. Kakao, Line, WeChat. Musk is not going to convince them to switch, that's for sure, and I highly doubt he would succeed where so many others have failed, definitely not with a withering platform like Twitter.
Yeah the whole everything app/banking app concept is pushing is bizarre to me.
Why wouldn’t everyone use Apple Pay? And as successful as Elon has been in his other companies, is it wise to go up head on against Apple, literally one of the most valuable companies in the world? Making Twitter into a payment app sounds like one of the worst ideas I could possibly think of.
> Twitter could have fired nobody and the advertising revenue would have still declined, those two things were mostly unrelated.
They're not unrelated. Advertisers like to know that their ads work; you need staff to do that.
Look at how much tailored the FaceBook ads were vs Twitter [1]. Advertisers would be sticking with Twitter if they thought the ads were worth it.
> Facebook targeting allows advertisers to drill down, ensuring your ad is targeted at those most interested in your ads’ content.
> The Facebook ad targeting based on interests looked like this:
> Science
> Mari Smith
> Joel Comm
> Social science
> HootSuite
> Post Planner
> Smart Passive Income with Pat Flynn
> Kim Garst
> Sprout Social
> Social Media Examiner
> Buffer
> Twitter’s targeting is not quite as refined, but we targeted these keywords:
FaceBook's features are just an example of how bad Twitter's targeting is; but also it is a zero-sum market. Nike has an advertising budget; if those dollars go to FaceBook they don't go to Twitter. Having worse engineering than your competition is a real problem.
However, my point is that the top parent's claim of Twitter's problems aren't engineering is wrong. Their targeting is god awful to the point that Advertisers don't want to bother with it anymore. If they had better ad targeting (aka Engineering) then Advertisers would sweep the problems under the rug.
There are also many non-engineering examples of this.
- "If Jeffrey Dahmer ran a 4.3, we'd call it an 'eating disorder.'"
- Russian Oil / Gas is still buyable by western countries.
- Lack of repercussions for Jamal Khasoggi assassination [1]
- Massive amounts of advertising on FaceBook post-Cambridge Analytica
- USA Companies selling your active location (to journalists pretending to be not-journalists).
You’re leaving out the massive amount of debt he added to the company as part of the buyout. That means they need to do something like triple their most profitable quarter just to be where they were before the buyout.
Nobody said it did? I was responding to a claim that they could end up in a better financial situation because they have fewer staff, which would be an easier argument if there weren’t so many extra billions in debt on the balance sheet now.
It was not. They are losing far more money because they removed the content moderation team and advertisers don't like their brands showing up next to questionable content. The buyout added a ton of debt to Twitter. It's far worse now.
These issues are caused by (1) the buy-out by Elon Musk involving a large amount of debt, and (2) Elon Musk annoying "woke" advertisers who have subsequently deserted the platform.
The actual engineering hasn't been as affected or rather while it has been affected it hasn't been affected to the magnitude that you might expect given the size of the lay-offs.
I wouldn't expect too much change right away after a lay off that size. Any decent engineering team will have processes, workflows, CI/CD, etc... in place and if all the engineers went away today, most places would still run just fine for a while, maybe even a long time if the systems are set up correctly. The question becomes what happens next? How quickly will they be able to leverage new advantageous technologies? What happens when that rare thing breaks and you have no institutional knowledge? How do you solve difficult problems like content moderation? I'm curious to see where Twitter will be a couple years from now in terms of how it's engineered. I would expect a slow decline in expectations and results.
You are right in theory. But instead of trying to predict the future I'm trying to be descriptive about what has changed so far (very little) and why (mostly advertisers + debt driven by buy-out).
> The actual engineering hasn't been as affected or rather while it has been affected it hasn't been affected to the magnitude that you might expect given the size of the lay-offs.
Are new features being added? Honest question -- I don't use the product.
Keeping the lights on for a product with 10% of the workforce isn't shocking or new. We do it in this industry all the time. Can you iterate and ship with 10% of the workforce? That's much more impressive.
Features are both being added and removed. Actually, the main difference is that more feature are being added than were before, but this is being done in a more haphazard way. Sometimes things appear to break but are then fixed. It's not awful though, is what I'm saying.
From the WSJ, so no complaining about liberal bias.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-elon-musks-twitter-faces-mo...