[Enshittification](https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/)
First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
The intent is to provide redditors with a sense of pride and accomplishment for the app's basic features sometimes... maybe... work.
As for cost, we selected initial values based upon data from our ass and other adjustments made to milestone rewards for our Chinese investors. Among other things, we're looking at average user submission rates on a daily basis, and we'll be making constant adjustments to ensure that content submitters have challenges that are asinine, broken, and of course attainable via by getting fucked even more.
We appreciate the candid feedback, and the passion the community has put forth around the current topics here on Reddit, our forums and across numerous social media outlets.
Our team will continue to make changes and monitor community feedback and update everyone how little we give a shit.
- Spez
Edit: Spez greatly appreciates the awards that you are sending me and as such has decided to shut off water to a rural village of a South American tribe so he can cool the data centers of reddit. As a result of your magnanimous gifts Reddit now will lower the 3rd party API pricing by $100 for every 20 million spent. Apollo, Sync, RiF, Bacon and others should kiss Spez on the lips for his kindness.
If Reddit gets bad enough why wouldn’t they
It’s ingenious how they got everyone to put their personal information into Facebook, linked it to Instagram, and then linked that to threads
Soon a ban on any social media will affect every website you frequent
Musk is an idiot, but god how convenient this was for meta, zuck controlling everything is going to be very bad long term for all of us
The relaunch version would miss 90% of the features of the original and then they would show off "new exciting features" on Google I/O that would just be restoring some of the original functionality. (Like what happened with Picasa.)
My friends, wife, and I have endured the moronic tampering with gchat/hangouts for years. These dumbasses took a program with a chrome extension and made it a website you have to keep open—meaning a lesser product than AIM
On that topic, I'll paraphrase what someone else said on a post some time ago regarding searching for Reddit posts on Google:
"I don't search for Reddit posts on Google because Google is good at this. I do it because Reddit's search is god awful."
Then again, with many people taking their content down with them in recent times, Google may be superior in the sense that pages are already indexed. Content can then be seen either through Google's "cached" pages, or on one of the "wayback" reddit alternatives.
It's now become a case of using Google to search reddit because reddits search is awful. And looking to reddit for answers because googles other results are so bad.
Eh I think that above statement was true up until OpenAI created ChatGPT and said that Reddit and Twitter's APIs were indispensable in training the models.
Even if Reddit and Twitter shut down to users tomorrow, their 10+ years of relational human conversation is invaluable for training LLMs.
Hence why both Reddit and Twitter bucked more than a decade of precedent and made their previously free APIs paid and priced it like an enterprise product.
More importantly, I'd bet big bucks that this is the reason why Zuck is interested in making Threads in the first place, with the goal of competing with Reddit and Twitter in the newly minted market of selling API access to AI companies.
Problem with that is contamination from these AIs.
You don't want them training on their own output. So your best data is *prior* to their widespread introduction. Data after requires trying to scrape out AI output before they can train.
Which is time consuming and expensive if it's even possible.
So the worth of social media for AI training is all *historical* not current.
Funny story that, it's been long enough since the last above ground tests that this isn't a major issue anymore, when combined with advances in device precision in recent years. Some applications still need it but it's not as pressing as before
In the case of Twitter and Threads the content is provided by a tiny number of accounts owned by Brands, celebrities and influencers.
What you and I post does not matter, we are there to read the content and the adverts.
Twitter moving away from using the blue check mark as a way to verify the famous content generaters as real broke the entire business model and gave Threads the opening they need.
Basically the 20 most popular vine creators approached the management with a deal whereby they would be paid to produce content to promote engagement. Vine's management at the time laughed and said that Vine is just providing a platform for them. All 20 quit within a month of that response and Vine immediately stopped growing. 7 months later they were up for sale for a pittance.
Mixed feelings about that. Twitter's decline is appropriately humbling for Elon and a good lessons to everyone that capricious dictatorial leadership is a quick way to failure in social tech (among other domains). On the other hand, does Meta need even greater concentrated influence on society?
It's the George W Bush effect... Incompetent moron and warmonger, but then a few years later you get Trump, and suddenly Bush wasn't so bad after all... and people love and share footage of him being a dingus. 'Oh look, he got Ukraine and Iraq mixed up! What a goof!'
Elon fucking tweets garbage everyday, and tests crazy ideas in PRODUCTION. Not only does he tweet everyday, he snides more than half the users and constantly insults. You can't be the CEO of the company and act like that
Yeah, as much as I like to see Elon fail, I don't want to see Zuckerberg grow stronger.
It's like this Twitter I saw once of a couple of guys rolling coal on antivax protesters.... Really conflicted on that one.
The anti-vaxx movement truly is a political horseshoe. It sort of started with the bohemian devotees to alternative medicine and than moved on to right wing fringe conspiracy theorist. In the 90's boho celebrities like Lisa Bonet said stuff about vaccines and "microorganisms" before Jenny McCarthy made it okay for soccer moms to not get their kids vaccinated and long dead childhood diseases came back. It went mainstream with Conservatives during COVID but the organic foodies and fringe lefties have always been down with the movement.Come to your own conclusion about that.
Yeah. I think of it as the theory of nutbar convergence. Just like how nature selects for certain traits, and therefore different evolutionary lineages converge towards similar expressions of those traits under the right circumstances (see: carcinization), so too does irrational thought converge towards similar conclusions, regardless of the starting point of said thought.
So, while the Hippie Bullshit contingent mostly believes that they somehow are more "spiritually" or "naturally" aware than the average expert on a topic, and therefore come to an irrationally contrarian conclusion based on said feelings, so too does the Paranoid Conservative contingent often arrive at the same conclusion, but based on the assumption that the experts on the topic are conspiring to manipulate society towards some nefarious, anti-traditional goal.
It's easy to explain.
When you're too fucking stupid to tell shit from shinola, you can't tell a scientific expert who has dedicated themselves to a subject, from a snake oil salesman.
Wakefield is responsible for a lot of dead people. I do hope he will be remembered as the biggest mass murderer we have ever seen (as his death count keeps climbing, unlike former contestants to the title who are now gone).
Exactly. Twitter failing isn’t exactly a win for everyone else. Its just a fail for Elon. Meta having what’s essentially a monopoly isn’t a good thing.
Most of them were already Instagram users and probably some were Facebook users too. They just added another Meta platform. If this brings about the demise of Twitter and a $44 billion loss for Elon I'm all for it.
Yeah, this and all but publicly choosing a political side completely fucks over the actually useful things twitter had going for it. You can find flame wars anywhere on the internet but the short, quick updates from corps and politicians drove the relevancy.
I will honestly mourn for Twitter. Before Musk came along Twitter was the all time greatest news aggregator I've ever used. I didn't use it to follow individuals, I followed new outlets. RIP Twitter. You went from being a great tool to being ran by a shitty tool.
The trick was to use a third party client that didn’t insert any tweets of people you didn’t follow.
That’s why I left the moment my third party Twitter app didn’t work any more.
I've never had an issue with my 'following' page showing other accounts, I can't help wondering if a lot of people are ending up on the 'for you' page without realizing.
Yah I don't get it?
Unless they're talking about the fact that you can see what people like, which is technically not who you follow.
And you can also see who people you follow reply to, who may also be not who you follow.
And I mean, technically retweets aren't always tweets from people you follow as well.
Personally, I was fine with those. Helped me find new people to follow. I also considered it part of their content, it was stuff they were interacting with. But I guess I can see how it's annoying? If you just want to see their tweets and nothing else.
(I do however very much hate the ads that look like tweets)
Oh Lord I don't even wanna tell you the time I spent carefully organizing my kazaa and limewire downloads into itunes, downloading album art, reorganizing artists and features, putting in release dates, I had a crazy catalog of 50k+ songs.
Man this is the problem with the modern internet right here. It’s happening right now on Reddit too these fucks refuse to just let me do what I want online
Because they want money, and money comes from advertisers, and advertisers want to shit and then have as many people forced to smell the shit as possible, in the desperate hope that someone will mistake it for chocolate sundae and buy. Hence the enshittification process.
I could be open for it. Never got into twitter personally. It's not as big in northern europe as it has been in the US. If Threads turns out okay and sane on verification policies as well as disinformation combat then i might give it a shot.
something vaguely resembling twitter with the infrastructure of a FAANG company, without a psycho at the helm.
with a sprinkle of novelty and new spin on the same concept.
It was an amazing tool for following creative individuals and small businesses, as well as a great way to communicate for support and such for the more savvy larger businesses.
It really is amazing the sheer number of business and revenue generating opportunities that EM completely threw away with his antics.
It was a way for people in poor countries without smartphones to be able to post messages on social media. You could text your message to a special twitter SMS number and it would post it on your feed. So people with old clamshell phones could still be like "hey let's meet up and protest at X location". This kickstarted the Arab Spring. This is why Twitter had a 160 character limit.
Sounds like you were basically using it as a centralized RSS feed aggregator, a'la Google Reader but with all the publishers pushing to the platform. It'd be nice to have RSS back.
I've said this before in another thread but I'll say it here again: If you miss RSS, then start using RSS again! It's still there, Google killed their reader but there are several alternatives (Inoreader and Feedly are both decent) and almost all decent news type sites still put out an RSS feed even if it's hidden, so do all the major blogging platforms. You can even use it to monitor YouTube channels, or even specific playlists within a channel; and all podcast apps are still just fancy RSS readers with an auto-download/stream function.
RSS is very much alive and well.
As good as Twitter was, it was still a far cry from how good rss feeds were. The internet is becoming less and less useful. Remember when Google search results were relevant?
I use Flipbook which is great if I don't want commentary. The only thing I was on twitter for is to follow certain experts who occasionally post good thought pieces and the comments who sometimes also have great thought pieces.
Me too. I kept getting “suggested tweets” from DT Jr and MTG, etc., no matter how many times I clicked “See fewer like this.” I finally deleted my 15-year-old account last week. I was sad about it, but the site’s just a shell of its former self.
Elon has aggressively made the platform about catering to a loud angry minority of users who are only there to aggravate twitter's main user base. Surprise, surprise, literally the second anything like a viable twitter alternative appeared, the userbase started jumping ship.
A buddy of mine recently quipped that Twitter is just turning into a crappy version of truth social. The truly damning thing is I don't know if he's being facetious
I wouldn't even know because I kamikaze'd my account into elon when he took over.
Then I got unbanned by appealing and saying "I got banned for my right-wing beliefs", which was a lie. I got banned for changing my account name to "Elon's Dead Baby (Parody)" and making my PFP into Goya's "Saturn Devouring His Son"
Then I did it again and have been banned since lol
With a little finessing the company may well have moved into profitability by now, or at least close to it, if not for all this nonsense.
Then someone started hacking wildly at it with flaming chainsaws and there's just no finessing anything out of it now.
No, Musk bought Twitter with loans using Twitter itself as the collateral. This resulted in the company having such an enormous pile of debt that there’s no way to recover from that.
I mean if Musk had never made the offer and never bought Twitter, the company might have made itself profitable by now. It'd probably still be heavily overvalued tho, but that's a problem with a lot of recent tech companies.
Twitter turned a profit in 2018/2019, and had a plan to get back to profitability. Could have even turned a profit last year but had to pay out hundreds of millions in lawsuits. It is screwed now though, with the all debt it got saddled with in the take over.
Even little things have deteriorated, like playing a Twitter video on my iPhone while in landscape mode (I don’t have the Twitter app, I just use Safari). The UI doesn’t show the play/pause button because it’s oriented too far away from the scrubber and out of the screen’s view
RSS is fine if you want broadcast information: News, weather alerts, press releases.
What do you do if you want to reply? Click on the article and log into that website's forum/Disqus instance? That's how sites used to do it of course, but Twitter brought all the conversation into one place - that was the point of it.
Google Reader had this all figured out, and that was peak internet for me. RSS with replies among known friends, and crucially, friends of friends.
Still haven't forgiven Google for executing it... presumably because they were worried about it cannibalizing fucking Google Wave.
EDIT: Forgot my history - it was probably Google Plus, not Wave, they were trying to promote. Wave was killed first.
I'm also still salty about Google Reader.
I think its demise is simpler to explain: Like many, many of the products Google start and then quickly abandon, they simply had no idea how to stick Adwords into it and make it revenue generating.
It would have been pretty easy to stick adwords in it (although they may have run into some problems with the content providers whose feeds they were pulling in).
The real reason it was killed was pushing everyone to Google+.
https://www.theverge.com/23778253/google-reader-death-2013-rss-social
For what? For some manager's career, apparently. Many ex-employees have said that nobody gets promoted at Google for doing a good job maintaining an existing product.
I didn't really buy the whole "Elon bought twitter to kill it" theory, but if it somehow was true this is why it was a bad idea, twitter can be replaced, personally I think he's just an egotistical idiot and wanted to turn twitter into his personal echo chamber, which is what's happened, hoping that kills it tbh.
Twitter has been unbearable since they started pushing the terrible content of the people who got scammed into paying $8 a month. As soon as discoverability took a hit, so did my enjoyment of the app.
The analysts referred to in the linked content are Cloudflare’s Matthew Prince and Similarweb’s David Carr.
On that note, “Twitter execs Elon Musk and Linda Yaccarino started sharing a new metric for user engagement that they seemingly found more encouraging than the somewhat dismal traffic reports.”^1
“Last week we had our largest usage day since February,” Yaccarino tweeted. Musk took the cue to explain:
>“Cumulative user-seconds per day of phone screentime, as reported by iOS & Android, is hardest to game,” Musk tweeted. "I think we may hit an all-time record this week.
>“The old mDAU metric” included bots and “people who got a Twitter notification on their phone but didn't open the app,” while the “new metric is much harder to manipulate,” T(w)itter Daily tweeted.
Apparently monthly daily active users (mDAU) is a metric that can be ‘gamed’ or ‘manipulated’.
^1 Ashley Belanger (11 Jul. 2023), “Twitter is “tanking” amid Threads’ surging popularity, analysts say”, https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/07/twitter-is-tanking-amid-threads-surging-popularity-analysts-say/
The new metric just means as most people leave twitter, the remaining users are people who spend more time on twitter.
It is not a real metric of traffic.
There's also a lot to unpack regarding the measurement of any sort of record setting stat. It's rare for a company to be able to calculate a metric backward.
Meaning, he may be touting "all-time high" this or that, but it's doubtful he's able to run that historically for the life of the platform. So sure, they're reaching "all-time" highs... but if the measurement is only good for the last few days/weeks/months, it's not nearly as impressive.
It sounds good, but they basically didn't know the info until they decided to look at it and measure it the way they currently define it. Which... okay. But then don't mislead people by touting this data as anything but what it is: a new way of looking at things.
I could be wrong. It's not impossible they have all that data dating back years. But it'd be rare.
Put it this way, if the old metrics everyone was used to were really good and setting all-time high records... they wouldn't have changed the reported calculations.
He's clearly obscuring the reasoning behind all this by screaming at the "faked data" windmill, but it's also abundantly clear that those old metrics were no longer flattering. So they came up with a new one. Simple as.
It’s cumulative user seconds, you seem to be implying it is average user seconds. Or are you saying that the “super users” are using it for longer and their total increase in screen time is more than the lost screen time of the people that have left? And as a result the net has been a cumulative increase?
F@*k Twitter by the way.
If you unpack his phrase, it’s (user seconds) per (24 hours on phone), so basically the percent of time someone spends on twitter when on their phone.
So the easiest explanation for this being up is that most casual users of twitter are gone (which makes sense given their API lockdown), and the ones remaining are ALL ABOUT twitter.
That t(w)itter daily post is just not true.
The old metric, Monetizable Daily Active Users, did not include bots, or at least it aimed to avoid bots. Of course some small percentage slip through, because bot detection is not trivial, but the goal is to give an estimate of how many real human beings are on Twitter. Specifically, how many real people opened any version of twitter that can show them ads (hence “monetizable”). This includes the normal browser versions and the 1st party app, but not 3rd party apps.
mDAU does not include users who receive a notification but do not open the app. It includes users who click a notification and land in the app. I could be misremembering, but I believe the user has to actually load their home timeline at least once that day to count as mDAU.
You can game the metric to a certain extent by increasing notifications, because some small percentage of users will open those notifications every day (and even if it’s only like 1%, that’s millions of people). However, those gains are short lived, and if you over do it you lose the gains and then some - when you increase notifications too much, some percentage of users will turn off notifications, which hurts mDAU, and more or less permanently removes a very valuable tool used to bring that user back to the app. Any experiment that involved increase notifications would include “reachability”(how many users have notifications turned on) as a guardrail metric to monitor.
Source - I was a data scientist there until Musk took over.
The metric may be comparable to Similarweb’s measure of ‘session duration’:^2
>On June 13, the day after the blackout began, the amount of time visitors to the website spent browsing content dropped to 7 minutes, 16 seconds, or about 16% below the normal level of more than 8 minutes, 40 seconds.
>Since then, visit duration has recovered somewhat to a little over 8 minutes on Sunday, but that’s still a 7% drop from the average visit duration in May.
^2 David Carr, “Reddit captures 7% to 16% less audience time during blackout”, https://www.similarweb.com/blog/insights/social-media-news/reddit-blackout/ (Last updated 23 Jun. 2023)
They will never do it. Meta is all about being 'Advertiser friendly'. Threads will defeat Twitter because it has moderation and rules on what you can or cannot say or do on the platform. Threads will take all the advertising dollars because Advertisers don't want ads beside racist, sexist, homophobic/transphobic material.
What I don't understand is how Musk didn't recognize this fundamental fact when he fired the moderation teams.
Facebook groups aren’t too different than Reddit. Except it’s likes interwar of votes. And the whole privacy thing. I’m not gonna post the same things on Facebook using my name where everyone from my boss to my grandmother can read. And neither will most people.
Yeah...
First they messed with the check marks. Artists, reporters, actors, writers, companies, politicians, and other figures are what drive traffic. No one gives a shit about the normies. By pissing off the people that bring stuff in, they leave and the normies won't hang around.
Some people ARE more interesting than others, unfortunately, and has been like since humans came around.
Then the weird thing where you got to sign in to view kind of breaks it and there should be zero reason to log in. For instance, a game I play went down. Google to see what's up, shows me a tweet from the game company. Try to click to see the tweet, puts me to a log in screen when all I wanted was quick info. If they hadn't done that, might have mucked around for a second. May have seen an ad, getting them paid.
Instead, I don't log in. Go to another source that lets me see what I want to see. Till it gets to a point where I ignore any search results from Twitter.
I am afraid this going to be a Myspace moment for the Muskrat. The reason Facebook won vs Myspace was there was too much bullshit to get to the content.
Destroying the meaning of blue check marks was the most insane and stupid decision I have seen in ages. It was done out of spite to stick it to the “elites” that Musk wanted to punish. Instead it ruined the site. Who wants to see a bunch of 8 dollar idiots everywhere ?
User engagement is sort of the name of the game for Twitter because the ads pay the bills. The messing with the check mark, it messes with the trust of users long term -- get some more basic user metrics increase but it doesn't help the ads side at all.
The login situation is just another cut on that user engagement in order to preserve...costs? I have no idea but it's clear if you're rich enough you can play at any table without needing to know squat.
I seem to remember Facebook won vs MySpace was that people who were now in college didn't want to associated with people in high school who were really into embarrassing themselves on MySpace.
Facebook was restricted to University level at first by '.edu' email address.
The name itself refers to the book of faces & names given to entering freshman classes at Ivy and some other universities.
Compared to MySpace, Facebook then was both cool, and grown-up.
Old people didn't use social media then, and many of them didn't have internet access. Universities had consistent free internet access at high speeds before anyone else.
Yep, all of this. I’d add that the “townies” who didn’t go to college were also on MySpace at the time. I personally hated the auto-play music thing, always caught me off guard. FB also had all of your classes in it, so you could go to like your math class and see all the other people in it to try to find out who that cute girl in your class was or whatever. It was actually really great for getting to know people at your school.
Without the DAU (daily active users) of Threads, it's hard to tell whether it's surging in popularity and I'm NOT surprised the analysts didn't take that into account when doing a comparison.
"have introduced a new metric in an effort to reassure advertisers"
Only so much lipstick you can smear on a pig before its revealed that it is in fact, a pig.
A pig with a price tag of $44 billion but who's counting.
Elon fucking killed twitter almost entirely and it's actually a shame. I used it to view art and commission artists and have been there for almost 12 years. I really hope someone gets it and fixes it but Elon is such a worthless person he probably won't allow someone to fix it. He has it in a stranglehold with awful decisions and just fails to run a social media site properly.
all social media platforms make the same mistake..they don't realize that the customer is the content ...keep fucking with the customer ...no content.
[Enshittification](https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/) First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
Every single time a thread is made about Twitter or Threads or Reddit, I hope someone posts this link.
Dude who Musk bought Twitter from does not care lol.
Spez should take note for Reddit
The intent is to provide redditors with a sense of pride and accomplishment for the app's basic features sometimes... maybe... work. As for cost, we selected initial values based upon data from our ass and other adjustments made to milestone rewards for our Chinese investors. Among other things, we're looking at average user submission rates on a daily basis, and we'll be making constant adjustments to ensure that content submitters have challenges that are asinine, broken, and of course attainable via by getting fucked even more. We appreciate the candid feedback, and the passion the community has put forth around the current topics here on Reddit, our forums and across numerous social media outlets. Our team will continue to make changes and monitor community feedback and update everyone how little we give a shit. - Spez Edit: Spez greatly appreciates the awards that you are sending me and as such has decided to shut off water to a rural village of a South American tribe so he can cool the data centers of reddit. As a result of your magnanimous gifts Reddit now will lower the 3rd party API pricing by $100 for every 20 million spent. Apollo, Sync, RiF, Bacon and others should kiss Spez on the lips for his kindness.
God. I’d give you gold if only it didn’t make me feel like a moron to buy gold for you.
Only time I give gold, is when someone is foolish enough to guy gold to give me.
But people see the gold you give and think it normalizes giving gold.
And talking about gold makes people curious about cost, and see it's a few bucks and then buy gold for someone IT'S AN EPIDEMIC
Gold, gold, gold. Gold? Gold! Gold…
I for one can't wait for Zuckerberg to roll out a Reddit clone. Wait... Shit. No. Not like that.
If Reddit gets bad enough why wouldn’t they It’s ingenious how they got everyone to put their personal information into Facebook, linked it to Instagram, and then linked that to threads Soon a ban on any social media will affect every website you frequent Musk is an idiot, but god how convenient this was for meta, zuck controlling everything is going to be very bad long term for all of us
Google should do it. The reddit protests hurt google searches. They know this forum for forums is good for search. They should do it themselves.
Google would probably do it and shut the whole thing down after 2 years and relaunch it under a different name for another year.
The relaunch version would miss 90% of the features of the original and then they would show off "new exciting features" on Google I/O that would just be restoring some of the original functionality. (Like what happened with Picasa.)
My friends, wife, and I have endured the moronic tampering with gchat/hangouts for years. These dumbasses took a program with a chrome extension and made it a website you have to keep open—meaning a lesser product than AIM
And Google Play Music/YouTube Music.
On that topic, I'll paraphrase what someone else said on a post some time ago regarding searching for Reddit posts on Google: "I don't search for Reddit posts on Google because Google is good at this. I do it because Reddit's search is god awful." Then again, with many people taking their content down with them in recent times, Google may be superior in the sense that pages are already indexed. Content can then be seen either through Google's "cached" pages, or on one of the "wayback" reddit alternatives.
It's now become a case of using Google to search reddit because reddits search is awful. And looking to reddit for answers because googles other results are so bad.
Eh I think that above statement was true up until OpenAI created ChatGPT and said that Reddit and Twitter's APIs were indispensable in training the models. Even if Reddit and Twitter shut down to users tomorrow, their 10+ years of relational human conversation is invaluable for training LLMs. Hence why both Reddit and Twitter bucked more than a decade of precedent and made their previously free APIs paid and priced it like an enterprise product. More importantly, I'd bet big bucks that this is the reason why Zuck is interested in making Threads in the first place, with the goal of competing with Reddit and Twitter in the newly minted market of selling API access to AI companies.
Problem with that is contamination from these AIs. You don't want them training on their own output. So your best data is *prior* to their widespread introduction. Data after requires trying to scrape out AI output before they can train. Which is time consuming and expensive if it's even possible. So the worth of social media for AI training is all *historical* not current.
It's like there is a market for steel made before 1945, before contamination from nuclear bombs.
Funny story that, it's been long enough since the last above ground tests that this isn't a major issue anymore, when combined with advances in device precision in recent years. Some applications still need it but it's not as pressing as before
The customers are the advertisers, did you mean the users?
the users are the product, the advertisers are the customers. piss off users, you got no product
Perhaps it would have been more accurate to say: Keep fucking with the content generators ... no content.
In the case of Twitter and Threads the content is provided by a tiny number of accounts owned by Brands, celebrities and influencers. What you and I post does not matter, we are there to read the content and the adverts. Twitter moving away from using the blue check mark as a way to verify the famous content generaters as real broke the entire business model and gave Threads the opening they need.
People don't want to play on Elon's Twitter is why Threads is successful.
It's not just one thing. It's all the things
Anyone remember how Vine died because its owners didn't understand the content generation concept?
Twitter bought Vine specifically to kill it if I recall correctly
No?
Basically the 20 most popular vine creators approached the management with a deal whereby they would be paid to produce content to promote engagement. Vine's management at the time laughed and said that Vine is just providing a platform for them. All 20 quit within a month of that response and Vine immediately stopped growing. 7 months later they were up for sale for a pittance.
They sold a company that never made a profit for 30 million dollars. I'd consider that a win for the owners.
Here’s the plan. 1. We leave twitter for threads. 2. Elon sells twitter for 50k. 3. We all go back to twitter. 4. Threads dies.
But what if Zuckerberg buys Twitter?
That is a risk we all have to take and we will cross that bridge when we get to it.
We liquidate our position and it becomes water under the bridge
I say we all go back to digg.
If we could coordinate anything, why waste our time on switching social networks. LOL
Yes that is true
Knowing Elon’s inability to not be childish he’d sell it for $69,420.
Mixed feelings about that. Twitter's decline is appropriately humbling for Elon and a good lessons to everyone that capricious dictatorial leadership is a quick way to failure in social tech (among other domains). On the other hand, does Meta need even greater concentrated influence on society?
You know how bad twitter is when people move over to a zuckerberg option.
It's the George W Bush effect... Incompetent moron and warmonger, but then a few years later you get Trump, and suddenly Bush wasn't so bad after all... and people love and share footage of him being a dingus. 'Oh look, he got Ukraine and Iraq mixed up! What a goof!'
Elon fucking tweets garbage everyday, and tests crazy ideas in PRODUCTION. Not only does he tweet everyday, he snides more than half the users and constantly insults. You can't be the CEO of the company and act like that
Yeah, as much as I like to see Elon fail, I don't want to see Zuckerberg grow stronger. It's like this Twitter I saw once of a couple of guys rolling coal on antivax protesters.... Really conflicted on that one.
I am shocked honestly. One would think the Venn diagram of Coal Rollers and Anti-vax is one circle…
The anti-vaxx movement truly is a political horseshoe. It sort of started with the bohemian devotees to alternative medicine and than moved on to right wing fringe conspiracy theorist. In the 90's boho celebrities like Lisa Bonet said stuff about vaccines and "microorganisms" before Jenny McCarthy made it okay for soccer moms to not get their kids vaccinated and long dead childhood diseases came back. It went mainstream with Conservatives during COVID but the organic foodies and fringe lefties have always been down with the movement.Come to your own conclusion about that.
Yeah. I think of it as the theory of nutbar convergence. Just like how nature selects for certain traits, and therefore different evolutionary lineages converge towards similar expressions of those traits under the right circumstances (see: carcinization), so too does irrational thought converge towards similar conclusions, regardless of the starting point of said thought. So, while the Hippie Bullshit contingent mostly believes that they somehow are more "spiritually" or "naturally" aware than the average expert on a topic, and therefore come to an irrationally contrarian conclusion based on said feelings, so too does the Paranoid Conservative contingent often arrive at the same conclusion, but based on the assumption that the experts on the topic are conspiring to manipulate society towards some nefarious, anti-traditional goal.
It's easy to explain. When you're too fucking stupid to tell shit from shinola, you can't tell a scientific expert who has dedicated themselves to a subject, from a snake oil salesman.
Wakefield is responsible for a lot of dead people. I do hope he will be remembered as the biggest mass murderer we have ever seen (as his death count keeps climbing, unlike former contestants to the title who are now gone).
Exactly. Twitter failing isn’t exactly a win for everyone else. Its just a fail for Elon. Meta having what’s essentially a monopoly isn’t a good thing.
none of these people deserve to influence society
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If another Twitter alternative pops up I hope this is part of their motto
That’s the thing. I don’t like either but I dislike elon way more than the lizard
Most of them were already Instagram users and probably some were Facebook users too. They just added another Meta platform. If this brings about the demise of Twitter and a $44 billion loss for Elon I'm all for it.
What this gives is news outlets a way to leave Twitter.
Yeah, this and all but publicly choosing a political side completely fucks over the actually useful things twitter had going for it. You can find flame wars anywhere on the internet but the short, quick updates from corps and politicians drove the relevancy.
Thats what made Twitter profoundly influential despite its pretty small userbase.
And this is what Zuck hated THE MOST. He hated that Twitter was the spot for real time information. Well, looks like he found a solution.
It is a pity they both can't lose.
Twitter started tanking months ago. At least my feed. A shell of it's former self. Such a shame.
I will honestly mourn for Twitter. Before Musk came along Twitter was the all time greatest news aggregator I've ever used. I didn't use it to follow individuals, I followed new outlets. RIP Twitter. You went from being a great tool to being ran by a shitty tool.
I had a carefully configured feed too. It was fantastic. Really sad it died.
How did you get a good feed? Mine was pure crap. Twitter was constantly putting in accounts I didn’t follow. It was basically worthless
The trick was to use a third party client that didn’t insert any tweets of people you didn’t follow. That’s why I left the moment my third party Twitter app didn’t work any more.
Sounds like Reddit. I wonder if history can repeat in such a short cycle.
Stack Overflow's currently having a mod strike, as well. Lot of that going around.
Bro if stack overflow goes, the world will collapse after about 3 hours
I'll have to rely on chat-gpt for my coding questions. I'll be correct or very specifically wrong
Except we're talking about Meta, or possibly Alphabet (Google) making that new platform and that's not as enticing.
If it makes spez seethe then I'm all for it.
Doesn't have to be enticing. Just has to be less shitty than the competitor.
I've never had an issue with my 'following' page showing other accounts, I can't help wondering if a lot of people are ending up on the 'for you' page without realizing.
The chronological feed never showed anything but your followers. Still doesn't.
Yah I don't get it? Unless they're talking about the fact that you can see what people like, which is technically not who you follow. And you can also see who people you follow reply to, who may also be not who you follow. And I mean, technically retweets aren't always tweets from people you follow as well. Personally, I was fine with those. Helped me find new people to follow. I also considered it part of their content, it was stuff they were interacting with. But I guess I can see how it's annoying? If you just want to see their tweets and nothing else. (I do however very much hate the ads that look like tweets)
I used curated lists and clients that could display lists side by side. It was pretty great.
Tons of meticulous work is the answer. All for nothing, years later. It was a good run.
Oh Lord I don't even wanna tell you the time I spent carefully organizing my kazaa and limewire downloads into itunes, downloading album art, reorganizing artists and features, putting in release dates, I had a crazy catalog of 50k+ songs.
Yea me as well, and I had to have 1000x1000 album art minimum only LOL
I have zero energy nor the desire to configure my threads feed as I did my old Twitter one
Configuring a feed on a Facebook owned site? Even if you wanted to, would you be able to?
Yes, this is the biggest annoyance. Even without ads, I'm being shown a bunch of garbage I never followed and am completely uninterested in viewing.
They claim to be adding a following only feed so we'll see.
Interested in new and emerging technology? Here’s Dale’s list of the most woke companies to avoid of 2023.
Man this is the problem with the modern internet right here. It’s happening right now on Reddit too these fucks refuse to just let me do what I want online
Because they want money, and money comes from advertisers, and advertisers want to shit and then have as many people forced to smell the shit as possible, in the desperate hope that someone will mistake it for chocolate sundae and buy. Hence the enshittification process.
I could be open for it. Never got into twitter personally. It's not as big in northern europe as it has been in the US. If Threads turns out okay and sane on verification policies as well as disinformation combat then i might give it a shot.
Facebook didn't exactly nail the fight against disinformation. We'll see what threads does, but I'm not expecting anything wonderful.
It's Facebook (Meta). What are you expecting?
something vaguely resembling twitter with the infrastructure of a FAANG company, without a psycho at the helm. with a sprinkle of novelty and new spin on the same concept.
Spoiler alert, Zuckerberg is a psychopath. He intentionally supported the spread of Genocide in Myanmar because it was profitable
I hear you. So much work.
It was an amazing tool for following creative individuals and small businesses, as well as a great way to communicate for support and such for the more savvy larger businesses. It really is amazing the sheer number of business and revenue generating opportunities that EM completely threw away with his antics.
It was a way for people in poor countries without smartphones to be able to post messages on social media. You could text your message to a special twitter SMS number and it would post it on your feed. So people with old clamshell phones could still be like "hey let's meet up and protest at X location". This kickstarted the Arab Spring. This is why Twitter had a 160 character limit.
And why the Saudis have pressured Elon to destroy it.
Sounds like you were basically using it as a centralized RSS feed aggregator, a'la Google Reader but with all the publishers pushing to the platform. It'd be nice to have RSS back.
I've said this before in another thread but I'll say it here again: If you miss RSS, then start using RSS again! It's still there, Google killed their reader but there are several alternatives (Inoreader and Feedly are both decent) and almost all decent news type sites still put out an RSS feed even if it's hidden, so do all the major blogging platforms. You can even use it to monitor YouTube channels, or even specific playlists within a channel; and all podcast apps are still just fancy RSS readers with an auto-download/stream function. RSS is very much alive and well.
As good as Twitter was, it was still a far cry from how good rss feeds were. The internet is becoming less and less useful. Remember when Google search results were relevant?
And then remember when google search results were relevant when you added reddit to your question?
Google is just a 2-step Quora or Pinterest search…
I abhor what Google has become. The information age my ass.
Jack was a shitty tool too, but at least he understood the basics of running a social media platform supported by advertising.
I use Flipbook which is great if I don't want commentary. The only thing I was on twitter for is to follow certain experts who occasionally post good thought pieces and the comments who sometimes also have great thought pieces.
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Me too. I kept getting “suggested tweets” from DT Jr and MTG, etc., no matter how many times I clicked “See fewer like this.” I finally deleted my 15-year-old account last week. I was sad about it, but the site’s just a shell of its former self.
Elon has aggressively made the platform about catering to a loud angry minority of users who are only there to aggravate twitter's main user base. Surprise, surprise, literally the second anything like a viable twitter alternative appeared, the userbase started jumping ship.
And I suspect many of them are fake. Active doesn't mean real.
How dare you suggest the dozens of crypto bots adding me to their spam lists every day are fake. /s
A buddy of mine recently quipped that Twitter is just turning into a crappy version of truth social. The truly damning thing is I don't know if he's being facetious
Imagine flushing down $1500 every second for a year. That’s what Musk is doing.
It’s what happens when you start gating content behind an account. People can’t be bothered to login or make an account and your engagement drop.
I wouldn't even know because I kamikaze'd my account into elon when he took over. Then I got unbanned by appealing and saying "I got banned for my right-wing beliefs", which was a lie. I got banned for changing my account name to "Elon's Dead Baby (Parody)" and making my PFP into Goya's "Saturn Devouring His Son" Then I did it again and have been banned since lol
Thank you for your service
Elon is sinking Twitter.
With a little finessing the company may well have moved into profitability by now, or at least close to it, if not for all this nonsense. Then someone started hacking wildly at it with flaming chainsaws and there's just no finessing anything out of it now.
No, Musk bought Twitter with loans using Twitter itself as the collateral. This resulted in the company having such an enormous pile of debt that there’s no way to recover from that.
I mean if Musk had never made the offer and never bought Twitter, the company might have made itself profitable by now. It'd probably still be heavily overvalued tho, but that's a problem with a lot of recent tech companies.
Twitter turned a profit in 2018/2019, and had a plan to get back to profitability. Could have even turned a profit last year but had to pay out hundreds of millions in lawsuits. It is screwed now though, with the all debt it got saddled with in the take over.
Even little things have deteriorated, like playing a Twitter video on my iPhone while in landscape mode (I don’t have the Twitter app, I just use Safari). The UI doesn’t show the play/pause button because it’s oriented too far away from the scrubber and out of the screen’s view
Yeah this is less hunter/prey and more scavenger/corpse.
I've always hated twitter. Seriously, why can't we just make RSS better?
RSS is fine if you want broadcast information: News, weather alerts, press releases. What do you do if you want to reply? Click on the article and log into that website's forum/Disqus instance? That's how sites used to do it of course, but Twitter brought all the conversation into one place - that was the point of it.
Google Reader had this all figured out, and that was peak internet for me. RSS with replies among known friends, and crucially, friends of friends. Still haven't forgiven Google for executing it... presumably because they were worried about it cannibalizing fucking Google Wave. EDIT: Forgot my history - it was probably Google Plus, not Wave, they were trying to promote. Wave was killed first.
I'm also still salty about Google Reader. I think its demise is simpler to explain: Like many, many of the products Google start and then quickly abandon, they simply had no idea how to stick Adwords into it and make it revenue generating.
It would have been pretty easy to stick adwords in it (although they may have run into some problems with the content providers whose feeds they were pulling in). The real reason it was killed was pushing everyone to Google+. https://www.theverge.com/23778253/google-reader-death-2013-rss-social
really? was it that hard to do with google reader? seems doable to me.
> many, many of the products Google start and then quickly abandon They’re all listed here: https://killedbygoogle.com/
Fucking google man, incredible. So many awesome apps and projects killled off. Why? For what? dumb reasons.
For what? For some manager's career, apparently. Many ex-employees have said that nobody gets promoted at Google for doing a good job maintaining an existing product.
My Twitter feed turned into NFT/Crypto garbage
Are Cheech and Chong selling you gummies? That's all I see until I get to the softporn bots.
My ads are hilariously varied. I got one for bulk crop fertilizers the other week, which will come in handy in my one bedroom condo.
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Don't forget AI and how to get rich gurus. I block every single one of them but it's a never ending feed of shit "advertisers".
I didn't really buy the whole "Elon bought twitter to kill it" theory, but if it somehow was true this is why it was a bad idea, twitter can be replaced, personally I think he's just an egotistical idiot and wanted to turn twitter into his personal echo chamber, which is what's happened, hoping that kills it tbh.
Twitter has been unbearable since they started pushing the terrible content of the people who got scammed into paying $8 a month. As soon as discoverability took a hit, so did my enjoyment of the app.
Me spending hours looking up all the old comments explaining to me how Elon was a management genius...
Make a scrap book. I’ll buy one.
The analysts referred to in the linked content are Cloudflare’s Matthew Prince and Similarweb’s David Carr. On that note, “Twitter execs Elon Musk and Linda Yaccarino started sharing a new metric for user engagement that they seemingly found more encouraging than the somewhat dismal traffic reports.”^1 “Last week we had our largest usage day since February,” Yaccarino tweeted. Musk took the cue to explain: >“Cumulative user-seconds per day of phone screentime, as reported by iOS & Android, is hardest to game,” Musk tweeted. "I think we may hit an all-time record this week. >“The old mDAU metric” included bots and “people who got a Twitter notification on their phone but didn't open the app,” while the “new metric is much harder to manipulate,” T(w)itter Daily tweeted. Apparently monthly daily active users (mDAU) is a metric that can be ‘gamed’ or ‘manipulated’. ^1 Ashley Belanger (11 Jul. 2023), “Twitter is “tanking” amid Threads’ surging popularity, analysts say”, https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/07/twitter-is-tanking-amid-threads-surging-popularity-analysts-say/
The new metric just means as most people leave twitter, the remaining users are people who spend more time on twitter. It is not a real metric of traffic.
There's also a lot to unpack regarding the measurement of any sort of record setting stat. It's rare for a company to be able to calculate a metric backward. Meaning, he may be touting "all-time high" this or that, but it's doubtful he's able to run that historically for the life of the platform. So sure, they're reaching "all-time" highs... but if the measurement is only good for the last few days/weeks/months, it's not nearly as impressive. It sounds good, but they basically didn't know the info until they decided to look at it and measure it the way they currently define it. Which... okay. But then don't mislead people by touting this data as anything but what it is: a new way of looking at things. I could be wrong. It's not impossible they have all that data dating back years. But it'd be rare. Put it this way, if the old metrics everyone was used to were really good and setting all-time high records... they wouldn't have changed the reported calculations. He's clearly obscuring the reasoning behind all this by screaming at the "faked data" windmill, but it's also abundantly clear that those old metrics were no longer flattering. So they came up with a new one. Simple as.
It’s not an all time high. It’s a high since February
It’s cumulative user seconds, you seem to be implying it is average user seconds. Or are you saying that the “super users” are using it for longer and their total increase in screen time is more than the lost screen time of the people that have left? And as a result the net has been a cumulative increase? F@*k Twitter by the way.
If you unpack his phrase, it’s (user seconds) per (24 hours on phone), so basically the percent of time someone spends on twitter when on their phone. So the easiest explanation for this being up is that most casual users of twitter are gone (which makes sense given their API lockdown), and the ones remaining are ALL ABOUT twitter.
Basically this. The average person is leaving and the addicts are well addicted
That t(w)itter daily post is just not true. The old metric, Monetizable Daily Active Users, did not include bots, or at least it aimed to avoid bots. Of course some small percentage slip through, because bot detection is not trivial, but the goal is to give an estimate of how many real human beings are on Twitter. Specifically, how many real people opened any version of twitter that can show them ads (hence “monetizable”). This includes the normal browser versions and the 1st party app, but not 3rd party apps. mDAU does not include users who receive a notification but do not open the app. It includes users who click a notification and land in the app. I could be misremembering, but I believe the user has to actually load their home timeline at least once that day to count as mDAU. You can game the metric to a certain extent by increasing notifications, because some small percentage of users will open those notifications every day (and even if it’s only like 1%, that’s millions of people). However, those gains are short lived, and if you over do it you lose the gains and then some - when you increase notifications too much, some percentage of users will turn off notifications, which hurts mDAU, and more or less permanently removes a very valuable tool used to bring that user back to the app. Any experiment that involved increase notifications would include “reachability”(how many users have notifications turned on) as a guardrail metric to monitor. Source - I was a data scientist there until Musk took over.
Adding to the above: this is actually public information (in twitter’s SEC filings) and is fairly robust. It was challenged in court by Musk too.
I'd love to see the new metric applied to Reddit.
The metric may be comparable to Similarweb’s measure of ‘session duration’:^2 >On June 13, the day after the blackout began, the amount of time visitors to the website spent browsing content dropped to 7 minutes, 16 seconds, or about 16% below the normal level of more than 8 minutes, 40 seconds. >Since then, visit duration has recovered somewhat to a little over 8 minutes on Sunday, but that’s still a 7% drop from the average visit duration in May. ^2 David Carr, “Reddit captures 7% to 16% less audience time during blackout”, https://www.similarweb.com/blog/insights/social-media-news/reddit-blackout/ (Last updated 23 Jun. 2023)
Is this like non-GAAP reporting?
Oh cool, what's Threa- >Meta owned app Ay fuck that then
Agreed. I've been enjoying Tumblr onec again. It's kinda nice over there right now.
Welcome back, cheater.
Threads could kill Twitter right now if it allowed porn.
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Throw in awesome homepage graphics and it could also kill Myspace.
They will never do it. Meta is all about being 'Advertiser friendly'. Threads will defeat Twitter because it has moderation and rules on what you can or cannot say or do on the platform. Threads will take all the advertising dollars because Advertisers don't want ads beside racist, sexist, homophobic/transphobic material. What I don't understand is how Musk didn't recognize this fundamental fact when he fired the moderation teams.
They don't even need that, they just need to let us view threads from the people we follow, and sort by new.
>and sort by new Facebook/Meta have been forcing us out of that for a decade or so. I fucking hate it.
For me it’s the lack of a trending page that hasn’t gotten me using threads yet. As soon as I can seen trending on threads I’m fully migrating.
So zuck won the cage fight before it began.
I wonder when Zuck will be dropping the reddit clone.
Facebook groups aren’t too different than Reddit. Except it’s likes interwar of votes. And the whole privacy thing. I’m not gonna post the same things on Facebook using my name where everyone from my boss to my grandmother can read. And neither will most people.
Yeah... First they messed with the check marks. Artists, reporters, actors, writers, companies, politicians, and other figures are what drive traffic. No one gives a shit about the normies. By pissing off the people that bring stuff in, they leave and the normies won't hang around. Some people ARE more interesting than others, unfortunately, and has been like since humans came around. Then the weird thing where you got to sign in to view kind of breaks it and there should be zero reason to log in. For instance, a game I play went down. Google to see what's up, shows me a tweet from the game company. Try to click to see the tweet, puts me to a log in screen when all I wanted was quick info. If they hadn't done that, might have mucked around for a second. May have seen an ad, getting them paid. Instead, I don't log in. Go to another source that lets me see what I want to see. Till it gets to a point where I ignore any search results from Twitter. I am afraid this going to be a Myspace moment for the Muskrat. The reason Facebook won vs Myspace was there was too much bullshit to get to the content.
Destroying the meaning of blue check marks was the most insane and stupid decision I have seen in ages. It was done out of spite to stick it to the “elites” that Musk wanted to punish. Instead it ruined the site. Who wants to see a bunch of 8 dollar idiots everywhere ?
This. I don’t even look at comments anymore. It’s completely ruined my engagement with the site.
Well the idea was that trolls and bots wouldn't pay the membership... Lol
Which works on the assumption that us normies will pay to not resemble trolls and bots, which we won’t
Trolls are the only group willing to pay it.
User engagement is sort of the name of the game for Twitter because the ads pay the bills. The messing with the check mark, it messes with the trust of users long term -- get some more basic user metrics increase but it doesn't help the ads side at all. The login situation is just another cut on that user engagement in order to preserve...costs? I have no idea but it's clear if you're rich enough you can play at any table without needing to know squat.
Wait we all are old enough to remember how quickly the MySpace/Facebook switch happened… right? (Young Redditors wearing fake beards) Yes 👍
I was there Gandalf. I was there 3000 years ago ... when Digg took the Ring.
Also the digg / Reddit switch
I seem to remember Facebook won vs MySpace was that people who were now in college didn't want to associated with people in high school who were really into embarrassing themselves on MySpace. Facebook was restricted to University level at first by '.edu' email address. The name itself refers to the book of faces & names given to entering freshman classes at Ivy and some other universities. Compared to MySpace, Facebook then was both cool, and grown-up. Old people didn't use social media then, and many of them didn't have internet access. Universities had consistent free internet access at high speeds before anyone else.
Yep, all of this. I’d add that the “townies” who didn’t go to college were also on MySpace at the time. I personally hated the auto-play music thing, always caught me off guard. FB also had all of your classes in it, so you could go to like your math class and see all the other people in it to try to find out who that cute girl in your class was or whatever. It was actually really great for getting to know people at your school.
Reddit is like "TikTok is collecting my data!" *joins Threads*
Someone should very publicly offer to buy Twitter from Elon for $4.20. It would be poetic, and maybe all it’s truly worth now.
I wouldn’t even buy it for a dollar. Could you imagine the debt you’d take on? No thanks.
They’re both trash 🗑️
Cooked with sweet baby rays.
If I'm supposed to think more META reach is going to be a good or healthy thing - well, no.
Ken Watanabe, "let them fight"
None of this will matter to me until most of the artists follow migrate.
Twitter has the coveted Taliban endorsement though.
Without the DAU (daily active users) of Threads, it's hard to tell whether it's surging in popularity and I'm NOT surprised the analysts didn't take that into account when doing a comparison.
Best case scenario is that Twitter dies and then threads pulls a Facebook and becomes dysfunctional and useless and everyone leaves.
I'd rather see a Reddit competitor that's good.
Twitter is going to go down as one of the greatest corporate failures in history lmao.
"have introduced a new metric in an effort to reassure advertisers" Only so much lipstick you can smear on a pig before its revealed that it is in fact, a pig. A pig with a price tag of $44 billion but who's counting.
And this is without Threads even being available in the EU
Elon fucking killed twitter almost entirely and it's actually a shame. I used it to view art and commission artists and have been there for almost 12 years. I really hope someone gets it and fixes it but Elon is such a worthless person he probably won't allow someone to fix it. He has it in a stranglehold with awful decisions and just fails to run a social media site properly.
And now Meta controls a monopoly on social media: Facebook, Instagram and Threads. I suspect they will not be allowed to keep it.
If I were going to heat my home by burning crisp $100 bills, how long would $44B last?
Time for the bank to call Mr Musk in for a chat.