Why do I use Twitter? Why I use it for research, not for science, or because I write for it. Why do social media engineers defy Twitter?
An obvious question — one my kids ask me all the time — is why I use Twitter if I detest it so much. The answer is that it is useful for my job. It’s a font of breaking news, a way to quickly survey what lots of different people are saying, a tool for promoting my writing, and sometimes a vehicle for contacting sources. It was on Twitter that I learned that Musk had finally agreed, again, to buy Twitter. As soon as this column is published, I’ll post it there.
But more than professional utility ties me to the site. Twitter hooks people in much the same way slot machines do, with what experts call an “intermittent reinforcement schedule.” Occasionally, at random intervals, some compelling nugget will appear, but it usually is repetitive and uninteresting. Unpredictable rewards, as the behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner found with his research on rats and pigeons, are particularly good at generating compulsive behavior.
“I don’t know that Twitter engineers ever sat around and said, ‘We are creating a Skinner box,’” said Natasha Dow Schüll, a cultural anthropologist at New York University and author of a book about gambling machine design. But that, she said, is essentially what they’ve built. It’s one reason people who should know better regularly self-destruct on the site — they can’t stay away.
This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please email transcripts@nyTimes.com with any questions if you want to quote from this transcript.
Emmergency-pod-elon-musk-owns-twitter: A real, real, and strange story about an employee of Twitter
It sounds a little bit like the movie’s front-page headline about the future. Like, “Space Magnate Buys Microblogging Platform.” (LAUGHING) You know, it’s just, like — but this is real. This happened. I read it with my own eyes just a couple of hours ago.
Yes. Let’s catch up on what has happened. We learned that he was at the headquarters of the company in San Francisco.
This was one of the strangest parts of the whole thing. He shows up at Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco carrying, like, a sink, and the whole point of this was to be able to make a joke on Twitter that said, let that sink in.
He shows up at his place of business. He is meeting with some employees. He apparently makes the rounds and sort of shake some hands, and gets a coffee at Twitter’s, like, in-house coffee place. We did not hear anything on Wednesday.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/28/podcasts/emergency-pod-elon-musk-owns-twitter.html
Twitter CEO Shenanigans: Are You Interested in the Twitter Code? Is Parag Agarwal the Greatest CEO Run of All Time?
By the way, I would like to imagine how that goes, right? You can’t run that on a car because Frank or whoever looked at the twitter code, really couldn’t.
Right, what can you learn about Twitter’s code in a couple of hours, as a car engineer? I would have liked to have been a part of that conversation. Just a few hours ago, we learned that Musk had officially closed his deal.
So Kevin, you mentioned that you and I have both been talking to Twitter employees today. I learned two things that I think are worth sharing. It was reported by The Washington Post earlier this week that the company was going to lay off up to 75 percent of its employees.
It seemed like it was chaos over there. Nobody knew what was going on with the jobs that they had or whonywayanyday them. I don’t think there’s a way to take a private deal for a company with thousands of employees, where many existing employees don’t like the new owner and have said so publicly. So this was always going to be messy, but I was shocked by just how fast it all happened.
I mean, you know, look, I sort of disagree there. You know what you could have done if you wanted to make it less messy. Waited more than 10 minutes to fire the CEO, right?
They couldn’t have held a meeting on Friday and said — had Elon and Parag sitting next to each other and say, this is a big milestone in the history of the company, and Parag is now going to ride off into the sunset, and hi, I’m Elon, and I’m going to appoint a new CEO. The things could have happened, but they didn’t.
Wait a second, let me ask a question. And I’m sorry to interrupt you, but I have to ask right now. Is Parag Agarwal the greatest CEO run of all time? The man will be in November. He’s gone by October. He makes $42 million by mostly just not tweeting, and sending out a weekly email, saying, no new information. Will be in touch when we have more.
Shenanigans are fun, but here’s the thing to keep in mind: Twitter is loaded with debt from the acquisition and needs to pay roughly $1 billion a year on it. In 2021, Twitter made $5 billion in revenue and did not turn a profit. “This isn’t complicated,” says Mike Roberts, a professor at the Wharton Business School at the University of Pennsylvania. “He owes a bunch of money, and he’s gotta raise money somewhere, somehow. What I wonder is about the ability of Twitter to pay this debt.”
The Future of Twitter: What Do You Want to Learn from Your Employees? A Conversation with a Senator at a Coffee Shop, During the Supercompetitions Between Twitter and Slack
An employee at the coffee shop sent me a video of an interview with a man who was very excited to work with him, but he was worried that he was about to be fired. And Elon sort of looks up at the ceiling for a second, and he says, well, I don’t know where that number came from.
That number did not come from me. Everyone laughed nervously. But I thought that was interesting, both to see the interaction and to hear him say, at least to those employees, he’s not going to gut the company, at least to the levels that some people have talked about.
He is looking forward to kicking the tires on this thing and figuring out what it does. They say that there are sort of two interesting things. One is, Elon wants subscriptions to be 50 percent of revenue at some point.
He thinks that if the company had more credit cards, it could help it with its bots. But Kevin, talk about what a big percentage of revenue 50 percent would be for Twitter.
I have not. We do know that the next big vesting date for a lot of Twitter employees is November 1. So that’s the date where they’re expecting to receive their next stock grant, or once the company goes private, that will be a cash grant. There’s a race against the clock for the company to come up with a plan for the future of the employees, so they don’t have to pay out their cash grants.
Got it, got it. I think that Musk will not follow this advice and I would not search my name on the first day I get access to social media. Bad idea.
I want to read one more paragraph, which I believe is rich with meaning. And I can’t tell you I can explain all of it, but I think it’s tantalizing for people who are listening to this, wondering, what does Elon owning Twitter mean for the future of content moderation, and just sort of, generally, what his policies will be?
The top line for those two is that. I think that this may have been a meeting with the legal and policy teams. And the VP — again, this is happening in Slack. Content moderation, work with foreign governments, and standards of speech around the world were all discussed, section 230. He was well aware of the importance of this to TWITTER.
So Casey, we have so much more to discuss about this deal. But I just got a very exciting Slack message from my colleague, Kate Conger, who is breaking a lot of the news on Elon and the Twitter deal for “The New York Times” tonight.
It seems like he’s calling himself the Chief Twit now. Is that the official title of his job? Do we know? Is that what he just calls himself?
At least four top executives, including the CEO, were fired by him in his first move. Do you know of any more moves that he will be making in the next few hours?
Possibly, thousands. I mean, that would be a lot, but that’s sort of the magnitude of what’s been expected. So all three of us have been really chasing this deal and reporting on it and talking to people surrounding the deal for months now. And it can be easy to get kind of caught in the sort of frenzy of activity in moments like this, but I think it is worth just taking a step back, and thinking about how major and, frankly, historic this deal is.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/28/podcasts/emergency-pod-elon-musk-owns-twitter.html
What do you think about Twitter? A decade ago when Twitter became a free-for-all hellscape and how advertisers should support it? On the issue of the voice of a founder
I think that this is an important moment in social media history. These companies are almost entirely founder-led and controlled by their owners, right? Someone who has built a product from the ground up has this intimate connection and understanding for the product that they are building.
So I’ve been thinking about a decade ago when Twitter and social media were seen as this liberating force, almost this thing that powerless people, dissidents, marginalized groups were going to use to start revolutions, to Occupy Wall Street, to take down SOPA and PIPA, or whatever people were fighting about on the internet 10 years ago.
And there is something, I think, to having an outsider come in and try to run the company in a different way, and it’s something that we don’t often see in tech, but I feel like we’re going to start seeing more and more of. There are things that remind me of the shift at the company that went from being run by a founder to being run by a new CEO in a very different way.
But it also is something, like you said, where this company is going from a platform that is used by people who do not have a voice and are trying to access a voice. Going into this new era, I think other platforms could be a better place for people to speak out.
You know, a few things that I would say, in the interest of playing devil’s advocate — you know, Twitter was a very poorly run company for a lot of years. If you were a victims of abuse and harassment between 2008 and the present, you probably didn’t feel like you had a voice on the platform, right? A lot of good folks suffered targeted harassment campaigns, so I think that’s worth saying.
He started talking about how much advertisers should support. He says, Twitter obviously cannot become a free-for-all hellscape where anything can be said with no consequences. He talks about how advertisements can inform you, and that they can delight you. It can show you a product or service that is right for you, even if you know nothing about it.
It’s funny that you’re saying, like, who posted on his account. A lot of what he said in that message is very similar to what he said back in April when he announced that he wanted to buy the company. He said, this is important for the future of civilization, and that was kind of how he was sort of fitting the Twitter deal in with his persona as this, like, space explorer, right?
I mean, I think today was the day that Elon Musk realized that 89 percent of Twitter’s revenue is targeted advertising. Like, is there any other explanation?
The projects that are mentioned have the potential to alter our civilization and change things for the better. That is his vision for it. These are things that he has said before. And I think Casey is absolutely right. Now is not the time for it to be unprofitable, more than it has ever been.
He is going to have to begin making interest payments because it is being loaded with debt. And so it is important to assure advertisers that the platform is not going to become a hellscape. Because advertisers have been really worried about that, and worried about, if these content-moderation protections roll back, are their ads going to be running next to really controversial or unseemly content?
Right. I think the content-moderation policy change is coming very soon and that we all expect it. Do you have any indication, Kate or Casey, about when these rules are going to change, when the people who were banned from Twitter previously are going to be let back on, including Donald Trump?
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/28/podcasts/emergency-pod-elon-musk-owns-twitter.html
Emergency podcast: Elon Muskowns Twitter (and he Doesn’t Want to Shut it Down, but I’m Going to Lose It)
I think that this is one of the things that Elon has said that he wants to do and made a top priority. I think those things are going to happen quickly. He took the company over and immediately started firing executives he has been yelling at for a number of years.
And so I think that demonstrates the pace at which he wants to move on some of these priorities. And I think we will likely see him move very quickly to try to unban some people who have been kicked off the platform, and roll back some of the content-moderation policies that Twitter has had in place.
And this is a very interesting time to be making those moves, right? The president of Brazil will be elected this weekend. The midterms in the US are in another week, in a few days or so. In these moments, the integrity of the platform will be put to the test, because they are very important.
And if he decides to roll back some of these rules in the next day or two, then we’re immediately going into elections that are going to be a little bit more of a free-for-all than they have in the past.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/28/podcasts/emergency-pod-elon-musk-owns-twitter.html
Does anybody actually think that the deal closing is the rage-quite moment that Musk did not buy his company, or that he owned it?
Question for Kate, and then for Casey — do you think these people are actually going to leave? Should there be a big number of people getting rid of their accounts over the next 24 hours? Is it just a small but vocal minority?
I think that some people will leave the platform and migrate to another one, like you have mentioned, I have seen some people talk about that on Twitter, and they said they were going to migrate to another place. Follow me there. I don’t know. I mean, these moments of people leaving a platform are so hard to predict.
And I think that they come in these moments of really intense outrage, where the platform has done something, or something has happened on the platform that people find so objectionable, that they just kind of rage-quit the platform. And I think that the deal going through maybe isn’t that moment, but there may be decisions or things that happen at Twitter down the line that are going to be those inflection points that cause people to say, you know what? I’ve had enough. I am done. I’m out of here. But I don’t think that just the deal closing is that outrage moment.
I think that’s exactly right. A very small number of people are angry with Musk for buying his company, even though he has good and bad feelings about him. I think most people will be willing to give him time to recuperate.
They want to know if the steward is going to be a good one. Certainly, during the acquisition process, it didn’t feel like he was being a very good steward of it. He criticized it frequently, but didn’t have a lot of fully fleshed-out ideas for what to do with it.
He was trying to get out of buying it. Right? It is difficult to see that it is a new day, and assume that it is. He has turned over a new leaf. But at the same time, we do have to wait and see, because what other choice do we have?
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/28/podcasts/emergency-pod-elon-musk-owns-twitter.html
What is happening in the App Store? The big picture of how Apple decides to control the digital economy, and what happens when it becomes a fast-growing startup
Yeah I think everyone who is still on Twitter at this point is like a die-hard addict. Like, they’re not going anywhere — (LAUGHING) including me. I was wondering tonight if I really want to.
So Casey, your grand theory about Apple ruling the entire digital economy, and also our conversation with Kate about Twitter and Elon Musk, really brings up this theory that I’ve been rolling around in my brain for the last few weeks. And I want to talk to you about it right after the break.
I have, sort of, but I have to confess that every time a story involves App Store guidelines or privacy policies, my eyes glaze over, and I stop paying attention.
That’s completely reasonable. And yet, that’s why “Hard Fork” is here for you — to walk you through things that maybe sound a little boring, but are actually going to change the entire future of the digital economy.
Without iOS as a platform, none of these apps could exist, and Apple deserves its percentage. But what we see over time is that Apple wants to increase its purview into more and more kinds of economic activity, until it really is just becoming the landlord of the entire digital economy, and the rent is only ever going up. This is a show about the future, and the easiest way to talk about the future is to talk about what is being built. Here is a new product. Here’s a new service. There is a fast-growing startup.
What does that mean? Well, you’re a developer. You have a new app. Maybe you have a Twitter replacement that you’ve just put together and you want to put it into the App Store. To show up, it needs to have approval from Apple’s human reviewers. And that’s really good, right? It keeps a lot of really terrible things out of the App Store. But over time — and, well, from the start, but also increasingly over time, reviewers are using that process to dictate what kinds of businesses can and cannot be formed on this platform. This week the company updates 700 words revising the App Store guidelines and here are a few things that come out of that.
They say digital purchases for content that is experienced or consume in an app are the number one reason for this policy, along with the sales of advertisements to display in the same app. I understand how boring this sounds.
The tomatoes are better this season, you can post a photo on your farmer’s market page. And then, you decide to boost that. Facebook has been able to collect the money up until today.
Yes, that is right. So they’re going to get 30 percent of all that, going forward. There are boosts on the micro-Blogging website. There is a dating app that has boosts. And they’ve already been using in-app purchases for those boosts, but Meta hasn’t. Apple is asking Meta to cough up an additional 30 percent with this update.
Small businesses, large businesses that may have used targeted advertising to reach their customers are finding that is no longer effective. And so they’re spending less on the platform. And basically, Tim Cook and Apple, by making it harder for apps to track users across the internet, have essentially killed or threatened the entire social media industry.
Right. And this 30 percent cut has been at the heart of a lot of the attacks on Apple. To be clear, 30 percent is the rate that the top apps pay. I think you have to generate more than $1,000,000 a year in revenue to get that 30 percent. I think for smaller apps, it’s more like 15 percent.
Right. And so the question is, why do this now? Facebook has been doing this forever. Apple is printing money. But you know, inflation is out there. It wants to maintain its gross profit margins. So what does it have its reviewers do? We can look at where we can squeeze out an additional by going back to those app guidelines.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/28/podcasts/emergency-pod-elon-musk-owns-twitter.html
Why Apple is refusing to publish an audiobook on Spotify, and what I would do if I had tried to buy an NFT inside an app?
Number two — Spotify. There is a competition between Apple and Spotify. There’s a music streaming service from Apple. It does as well. The reason Apple has an advantage is that it doesn’t have to pay 30 percent of sales for people who subscribe through the app.
It is a real challenge for the business of selling music to continue, as they did before. So it decided to make a change. We are going to take over the entire industry, so we can better compete with Apple. And then, they introduce sort of a new plank in that strategy, which is that they’re going to sell audiobooks.
There is a problem here as well. Because you know, if you’ve ever tried to buy a book on your phone, you can’t, right? It just sort of says, mysteriously, mm, you can’t complete this purchase here for some reason. Maybe you can go to the web. Right?
So Spotify runs into a similar situation. And three different times, Apple rejects Spotify’s app from getting any updates at all, because it doesn’t like the language through which Spotify is trying to tell its own customers how they can go buy an audiobook on Spotify.
I read about it. “The New York Times”— small, local newspaper — ran a story about this, written by my colleague Tripp Mickle. It described the process that had to be followed for Spotify to work. I have never tried to buy drugs on the dark web but I suppose it is easier to buy drugs on the dark web than it is to buy an audiobook.
Apps may allow users to browse NFT collections owned by others, provided that the apps may not include buttons, external links, or other calls to action that direct customers to purchasing mechanisms other than In-App Purchase.”
Great. So here it is. One, it means that if you want to sell an NFT inside an app on iOS, then you’re going to have to pay Apple your 30 percent. I think that is standard.
I think I will buy an NFT on OpenSea. I might buy it on Coinbase. Apple does not get its cut when I do that. I would like an NFT to be attached to a service, but what if I am a developer?
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/28/podcasts/emergency-pod-elon-musk-owns-twitter.html
Is Apple Ready or Not? Three Stories About the Digital Economy that Apple Cannot Dial: The Case for Fortnite, NFTs, and Other Digital Services
You have no recourse other than to hope Tim Cook will change his mind at some point, as this means a pillar of the vision for Web3 gets wiped out overnight.
Yeah, it’s really interesting. And I feel like this has been a story that I’ve been kind of observing from afar for a while now, but I’m glad that you’re explaining it to me, because it does feel like Apple has gotten just more brazen about this. I mean, there was that trial.
Last year, Epic Games, the makers of Fortnite, had sued Apple over, basically, this issue, where Apple was being too aggressive and acting like a monopoly, and setting up this, basically, toll booth, that anything that happens on the iPhone has to go through.
But there’s this other part of the future, which is the stuff that isn’t getting built, because it can’t get built. And so those three stories I just walked you through is a story about the digital economy that can’t exist, right? We can’t have a world where social media companies can come up with quick and easy ways to boost their revenue without handing a huge chunk of it to Apple.
We cannot buy audio books with an easy way to do so. And if you want to make NFTs, the foundation of some kind of new digital service, mm, it’s actually not going to work on iOS, so your best bet is to get people to sideload it through Android, or the entire thing just has to exist on the web.
I remember after this lawsuit from Epic, they did change a little bit of the sort of guidelines for whether, basically, how apps could direct people outside of the App Store to buy things. So there have been some minor changes. But why do you think Apple is dialing this up?
It is not a very good business because Apple does not have to pay itself 30 percent of revenue, right? So I think that there is an actual harm to consumers there, where we don’t have the very best services, because Apple is able to give itself an advantage in so many ways. I want to see the playing field leveled out so that it is easier for me to buy an audiobook.
It is possible to slowly extend those tendrils. Despite years of complaining, a Congress has not passed a single new law relating to the regulation of tech companies. It is sort of free to get in there and do what it wants.
So who does that leave? It leaves the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice with the choice of doing antitrust action against Apple. And we should say, there have been antitrust actions against Apple in Europe, and I imagine that we’ll see more of those around the world, as regulators sort of get wind of this.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/28/podcasts/emergency-pod-elon-musk-owns-twitter.html
Is Apple trying to shut down the App Store or is Apple really going to close on it? Or: Does Apple really need a cut?
It feels very brazen in the meantime. And I think it would be worth thinking about, what are the costs of living in a world where some of these services can never be built?
Right. In order to see it from a different point of view, I think it is worth doing. Apple knows that these criticisms are out there. And I think what it has said in the past is, look, we built the App Store. We built the device.
They say exactly what you said. I believe that I am sympathetic to that. I think that they do deserve a cut, right? There is a wide array of services that they could probably charge a flat fee for, right? Is it really necessary for you to get 1/3 of my revenue?
But I do think that there ought to be limits on it, particularly when it comes to competitive services, right? I believe that there is a good music service such as Spotify but it has become less of a service over time because it is not a very good business.
Yeah, you have to be able to buy copies of my audiobooks easily. That can not take nine steps. I wonder if this comes from Apple feeling like the door is about to close on them. Because as you mentioned, there are all these antitrust actions happening in Europe.
This Epic Games lawsuit is still out on appeal, so there’s still a chance that a judge, or even the Supreme Court, could force Apple to open its App Store and reduce its cut. So I wonder if Apple is just saying, well, this whole party that we’ve been throwing for the last decade — like, it might be coming to an end. We might have to take out our toll booth, so let’s just really crank the dials while we still have them.
And if that’s the case, it would certainly help explain why this week, Apple also increased the price of Apple TV+ by, what, 40 percent, to $6.99 a month? Enjoy “Ted Lasso” at a higher cost.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/28/podcasts/emergency-pod-elon-musk-owns-twitter.html
What’s happening with the social media industry? Emergency-pod-elon-musk-owns-twitter
And across the board this quarter, it’s just been really bad. According to the report, it is losing money. It lost $359 million in the third quarter. Its stock is down about 80 percent this year.
Meta reported that its profits have gone down 52 percent from a year ago, while spending was up by 19 percent. Its stock is down more than 50 percent for the year. In the third quarter of the year, revenue at the video sharing site fell as well, and is one of the most stable social media companies.
There are three explanations for how badly the social scene is, one being the economy, two being a lack of discipline and the third being Apple’s fault.
So the first is that it’s just the economy. The economy is not doing as well as it could. Inflation is high. We’re maybe entering a recession. recessions are bad for advertising businesses.
The advertising budget is one of the first things to be cut when there is a downturn.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/28/podcasts/emergency-pod-elon-musk-owns-twitter.html
An Empirical Study of Emergency Podcast Elonon: Why some companies are so big that they are too lazy and undisciplined
Meta has drifted into the land of excess, too many people, too many ideas, not much urgency, in a zero-rate world. Meta needs to be in top shape and focused. To accomplish this goal, we recommend a three-step plan that will double FCF,” Free Cash Flow, “to $40 billion per year and focus the company’s teams and investments.” Three recommendations were made by them. One is, reduce headcount by at least 20 percent — so lay off at least 20 percent of workers. CapEx should be reduced by at least $5 billion and investment should not be over $5 billion a year. So Altimeter is saying what a lot of tech investors have been saying recently, which is that these companies — they just got too big, too fast.
They hired too many people. They don’t put people out of work. And so they’re just all kind of inefficient, and that they basically need to get fit. So that’s one other explanation.
Yeah. I am pretty confident that some of the employees are not getting all that much work done when you have tens of thousands of employees. I can see why someone would think that one of Meta’s problems is that it has too many ideas.
I think that is a sort of hot take. Like, this company has two ideas — like, clone TikTok and build VR. And if they’re not doing a good job, that seems like a different question than, do they have too many employees.
Yes, right. So that’s one theory that’s out there — these companies are just lazy and undisciplined. The third theory is basically the “it’s all Apple’s fault” theory. And this is what you’ll hear from executives at some companies, including Meta.
Like, a story that popped up this week is that developers are really mad, because they’re selling their podcasts or productivity apps, and suddenly, they began to see ads for Casino gambling games that were appearing on their App Store pages. Now, Apple has since walked that back, but it seems clear that Apple is building a huge advertising business on the backs of these changes that it has made.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/28/podcasts/emergency-pod-elon-musk-owns-twitter.html
Emergencypod-elon-musk-owns-twitter: What is the story behind the adversarial trend?
Oh, oh! You know, I don’t know, because honestly, Kevin, I would throw a couple other things in there. Like, one is competition. Right? Like, TikTok is in there somewhere, and I’d be curious to know what you make of TikTok.
And then, two — and I think it’s sort of related — is like, these platforms are getting a little old and stale, right? Like, every social platform is essentially just kind of chewing gum that loses the flavor after a little bit too long. Some of the platforms are starting to lose their appeal.
I think they have a lot to contribute to what’s going on. I do think that when the economy recovers, some of these platforms will have a much easier time.
Like Snap, for example — their users are still growing. That is not an app that’s going away. They are not making money because of the Advertising market not being there. I like the idea of a app that when the economy improves, advertisers will come back, and the users will be there.
I don’t think their problem is that they are losing popularity, but that they are in much bigger trouble because even if and when advertisers do come back, their usage is declining. Users want to come back and spend hours a day on these apps, which is what makes the whole equation work.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/28/podcasts/emergency-pod-elon-musk-owns-twitter.html
Social Media Apps Need Both Communication and Mass Broadcast, and Where Should We Go From Here? — A Counterexample to TikTok
All the explanations miss something for me, which is I think there is something bigger going on right now. This is an idea that is weakly held, and it’s a strong view. Like, I maybe only have 70 percent confidence in it.
So I think it has to have both a communication layer, where you and I are sharing things with our friends, and a broadcast layer, where we can share something that then millions of people could see. I believe that a true social media platform needs both communication and mass broadcast.
And then, I think social media apps, generally, are fueled by targeted advertising. The business model that allows them to be free, gives them the ability to work, and uses data to make the advertising experience better is what it is.
When you said that, essentially, there’s no public square anymore because we’re starting to see social media fragment into places where Republicans and Democrats are going to different places, the counterexample to that is TikTok. TikTok is fast growing in the country. Both Republicans and Democrats are present.
Republicans and Democrats are spreading their talking points the same way. I think that you have a place where everyone is going to discuss. Look at the comment section for any TikTok.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/28/podcasts/emergency-pod-elon-musk-owns-twitter.html
Emurgence-pod-elon-muskowns-twitter: What is the impact of social media, Twitter, Facebook and Twitter?
It’s very, very sort of vibrant. It is getting the attention. So I think by some large measure, TikTok has just replaced Facebook as the place where we go to get our information, our entertainment.
It just introduced a B-Reel clone, because it wants all my friends posting, like, a daily selfie to give me another reason to engage. So all of these things are kind of constantly morphing and transforming into versions of each other. Even though it is a big broadcast platform, TikTok wants to build in all the features of a messaging service and keep it there as long as possible.
Every time I use the app, it says we found this person in your contacts. They’re on TikTok. Do you want to follow them? It has a Friends tab so I will be able to see my friends there if they ever post a TikTok.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/28/podcasts/emergency-pod-elon-musk-owns-twitter.html
Are Private Messages a Temporary Transition? Is That Happening to Live-Shopping Shows, Isn’t It?
And then, third, I think you’re right. Apple really is hurting these businesses with app-tracking transparency, but what that is causing is for these companies to diversify their businesses. It means Meta is trying to become more of a hardware business.
For a TikTok, it means that they’re going to lean really hard into e-commerce and creating live shopping shows to try to get you buying stuff there. It will let you buy digital gifts and tips for creators who are live-streaming, right? Maybe it’s going to let you subscribe to those creators to get some extra content from them.
So the businesses are all evolving in reaction to what Apple did, but they’re not going to wither and die by that alone. I think that you are correct that in one sense, this era where we would all use Facebook every day and post our status and comments on each other’s posts, that feels a bit different.
But I do think a new era has arrived, and that era is, we see funny stuff that was made mostly by kind of pro creators, or really talented amateurs, and then we discuss that over private messages. I think that is the reason it feels different. It feels like we used to be talking in public. It used to be very in-your-face, right?
You would post when you change your relationship status. But now, it’s like, look at this funny thing. LOL. Look at this funny thing. And that is the present of social media.
Right. I don’t believe that shift to private messaging is a temporary trend, as my view differs from yours. I think that is a species-level evolution.
We had these 10 years where we were all just going ham on social media, posting our innermost thoughts and things that we would normally just share with a tight group of people. All of a sudden, we were posting it to everyone that we went to high school with, everyone that we work with.
It was this kind of, like, era where we didn’t know how many people were listening. And so we were just dancing like nobody was watching. Right? Everyone is watching, we kind of realized. I might get in trouble.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/28/podcasts/emergency-pod-elon-musk-owns-twitter.html
Emergency-pod-elon-musk-owns-twitter: A look at a time when people were really excited about Facebook and Twitter
Because that is where people want privacy but also security, which means you can’t target ads there, because some people want it. It’s also just not a place where people have traditionally had a lot of targeted advertising. I think if iMessage started putting ads into our group chats, we’d be like, what the hell?
Sorry, whichever Apple VP is writing a memo to insert ads into iMessage. But I do think that that’s sort of a thing that we’ve all learned in the last decade. I think there was a time when we didn’t know how powerful the apps were.
Yeah, I think we’re changing our relationship with that audience, and we’re being much more selective about when we want to be the performer and when we want to be the audience. I think it was a time when we were very happy to be together. We are choosing and choosing our moments, which feels more sustainable for the future of the species.
Yeah. If you don’t have giant platforms where people can communicate both privately and publically, you end up with a much smaller business.
Yeah. I mean, I’m happy to live in a world where every person doesn’t feel like they need to be posting 24/7 for clout, just so they can get a job or have friends, right? It feels a lot more chill, maybe, where most of us use the apps for entertainment only, and to communicate with friends a few times a day.
It caused a lot of drama in my school. It was like, did you see it? Did you see Scott and Bethany just changed their relationship status? I think there was a level of naivete on our parts as the users, as these platforms got bigger, about how — about who we were talking to.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/28/podcasts/emergency-pod-elon-musk-owns-twitter.html
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Bringing Back the Dust with a New Look at Hard Fork in Pseudoscalar Mesons
And I think that era is really over. If the economy improves, I think these businesses should recover most of their revenue and profits. I think there is a bigger change going on with the users that aren’t going to reverse themselves.
That is correct. And you know how this era is going to end? When the content gets so good that you don’t even have to share it with anyone else, and it’s specific to your taste, then we enter a mode of pure consumption.
Yes! “Hard Fork” is produced by Davis Land. Paula Szuchman is the person who edits us. This episode was fact-checked by Caitlin Love. Today’s show was engineered by Corey Chappelle.
Original music by Dan Powell, Elisheba Ittoop, and Marion Lozano. Special thanks to Hanna Ingber, Nell Gallogly, Kate LoPresti, Shannon Busta, Mahima Chablani, and Jeffrey Miranda. You can send us an email. That’s all for this week. We’ll see you down the dusty trail.
Laziks: When Twitter goes AWOL, it’s Not a Wolf-Howl: Elon Musk is Not Locked Here
Musk fired off a thought that seemed to have bubbled up from a fish-bowled dormitory room, that small talk was so small it felt like it was from his own mind. Congratulations: We all live in Tiny Talk Town where there is a lot of discussion about Musk.
Mastodon or Post are alternative networks that have many high-profile users already migrated to. Or should you stay and hope things turn around? It would be nice if we stopped posting about this on social-media entirely, and freed up some time. As you consider your options, take a look at these things.
A relatively small group of people power Twitter. According to internal company research viewed by Reuters, heavy users who tweet in English “account for less than 10 percent of monthly overall users, but generate 90 percent of all tweets and half of global revenue.”
It would be easy for an electric car magnate to make a mistake if he followed a lot of people who were very active on the service. (Same goes for journalists.) Half of users on the micro-site don’t post a lot in the way of original content, and most of their posts are replies. They check in on current events, live sports and celebrity news, and then get on with their lives. They are called lurkers.
Lurking isn’t doomscrolling, a practice (and phrase) that took hold during the early days of the Covid pandemic, when many people found themselves stuck at home and grasping at info on social media. It is a simplistic approach to deal with the complexity and chaos found on NewTwitter if you choose to sit back and observe. Check in on Elon Musk’s new toy, sure, then close your app or browser tab. Go ahead and send a tyke, but then disengage. Don’t forget to look at it during basketball games. If you have to use direct message, it’s good to use it. For another time, you should save your original thoughts.
I honestly didn’t think chaos would spread so quickly, but I admit: this rules. This is so hard to own. Awoooou (wolf howl), Twitter is good again. We’re no longer locked in here with Elon Musk — Elon Musk has locked himself in here with us.
Now, Twitter did set up Tips — a way to send cash to people you like — but it doesn’t take a cut of that money. It does take a cut of the revenue from Super Follows, a way to make your tweets a subscription service, but Twitter’s share is dwarfed by the fees taken by Apple for in-app purchases.
This is the internet, and there is drama in the forums. The blue users get a blue check mark which is exactly how verified users get it, but the account with the display name of Nintendo of America put up a reply to a person who posted about Mario. To an unwary user, that might look sufficiently like the actual Nintendo account to do brand damage.
But Musk doesn’t mind. When our own Tom Warren took a screenshot of the tweet, a user replied, “The beauty of this is each account that gets verified paid $8. The account is suspended and the money is kept. It’s genius and I hope more folks do this. It’s free money for the social network. Musk himself replied to that user with a bullseye emoji, a smiley face wearing sunglasses, and a bag of money emoji.
I don’t think a lot of advertisers would want to come back to someone with that attitude toward impersonation, even without an economic downturn. The open question to me is whether users want to stay in that environment — one that’s just gotten a new layer of hoaxing and scammers. The influx of new users has made Mark Cuban’s mentions miserable. Cuban’s thoughts are one reason people stay on the platform — drive him off, and Twitter is less valuable.
Incidentally, Twitter is under a consent decree with the federal government requiring full documentation, in writing, of any foreseeable risks of “any product or service affecting commerce.” The changes toTwitter Blue went live less than two weeks after the deal was done. Do you think there’s full documentation about its risks? It sounds like their lawyers are worried.
B1 rated is risky debt and it is on the lower end of the junk rating spectrum. “Investor appetite for this debt clearly isn’t as large as it was four months ago.” The Moody’s that rated Twitter’s debt cited the company’s governance as a major driver of risk.
There is time to take action as 2023 arrives. Consider it a deadline for those of us who’ve been dithering: Twitter is in crisis, and each user must decide their own course of action.
Mastodon has gotten the lion’s share of attention as alternatives to Twitter have entered the conversation. It launched in 2016 and has a familiar format and feel that doesn’t seem foreign to longtime Twitter users. The character-count limit of 500 is higher than Twitter’s, and there are lots of ways to post images, sound, animations, links, and polls. Unlike on Twitter, you can edit posts, but old versions of the posts are still visible to others, and if your edited post was reposted, others will be made aware of your edits. Mastodon also has a useful content warning feature that allows you to warn followers about sensitive or triggering information in a post.
You may be able to find people with similar interests and feel welcomed more quickly because of the different server instances that you can use. Plus, there are tools to help reconnect with other users who came over from Twitter.
How Many People Visit Facebook? A Study on Mastodon’s Popularity and Users’ Choice (Masktodon, Twitter, PinWord)
Because of its decentralized nature, all of Mastodon’s users aren’t on one server; instead they’re spread across different communities, and new users must choose where they want to start. It could be a problem to start getting started if you’re indecisive.
Mastodon has no process for users to pay for, because of its nature. Users can get links to home pages automatically verified, but not their Mastodon profile itself.
It has close to 6 million users and 3.6 million active ones, but it’s not close to the number of users that sign up for twitosphere. It’s considerably more people to connect with and that includesBots and fake accounts. Still, the rush of users who moved to Mastodon in November caused outages across the platform itself.