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No One Wants To Buy Twitter (theverge.com)
At one point, it seemed that many were interested in purchasing the micro-blogging social platform (which now calls itself a news service) Twitter, but its fate is quickly drying up. Salesforce (which couldn't buy LinkedIn) showed the most interest in Twitter, but this week its CEO Marc Benioff said his company has "walked away" from making a bid to buy it. The Verge sums up the situation: If you're keeping track, that's now... pretty much everyone who's said they're not interested in buying Twitter. Neither Google nor Disney plan to bid on Twitter, despite reports saying both were interested. Recode says that Apple is likely also out of the picture. And Verizon immediately dismissed speculation that it was considering a bid. Facebook is also said to be uninterested, according to CNBC. And while Microsoft's name has been tossed around, no one seems to think the acquisition would make any sense for an increasingly enterprise-focused company.The situation is so bad that as soon as the news of Salesforce withdrawing its name from the bidding race broke, its stock quickly went up by 6 percent, while Twitter's stock registered a 6 percent drop.
The same kind of moron who'd pay billions for Snapchat.
There are just so many parallels between now and the early 2000s... maybe this bubble is about to burst too.
#DeleteChrome
While distributed social media (like Diaspora) has been an idea floating around for a while, something like the 'twittersphere' is where it could be most useful, having multiple interlinked 'twitterverses' where different rules on acceptability apply. The SJW's can have some, and the anti-politically-correct can run their own free-for-all zones, and so on. What is then needed is the distributed indexing and so on. But for a technology which is basically a glorified indexed array of char[140]'s, it has little that isn't easily copied in terms of functionality. Given that most users' number of followers is in the 100s, a simple PHP script spewing out RSS feeds is almost good enough for that task (and already way more complex than it needs to be). An aggregator simply needs to get a few KB of text from a few hundred URIs every few minutes, and then compose it into an aggregated feed. The trouble with modern social media is that they need to overcomplicate it in order to turn it into something they control. Then they need to give it away free, figure out how to make money from it, and so on. We really need an 'opentwitter' system. Twitter has demonstrated the need and power of this sort of communication, but cannot make a profitable business out of it. Just like email isn't owned, we need a twitter that isn't owned. And preferably before Twitter as a company tanks.
More generally, a rethink about internet communications would be welcome: having more fine grained control about who can send what to whom would make a lot of sense (and can essentially be done via things like cryptographic keys) -- then basic data and document types. (For example, a tweet is basically a char[140], most small things could be considered a json object fitting some schema, and for many web documents, the content part least, could make do with a far lighter weight document type than modern HTML: something where a high quality light-weight renderer wouldn't need something as complex as an operating system, as modern web browsers are.)
John_Chalisque
Twitter touted itself as the "free speech wing of the free speech party" and is now banning people for having opinions that the San Francisco loons disagree with.
However, you're right.
Banning a few people doesn't affect the stock price. But when you ban hundreds of thousands? Then the message gets around that your hard work building an audience can be pissed away by the decision of a blue-haired loon in San Francisco who thinks you used the wrong pronoun.
That's when your audience drops off and no-one wants to us it any more... and that does affect your stock price.
Welcome to the wonder world of Twitter. They committed suicide so that the world could see what pandering to social justice loons means for companies.
Hopefully, some other companies will learn from this and avoid SJWs like the plague they are.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I think you misinterpreted the general thrust of my post there.
The one-dimensional political spectrum is very problematic, yes. One of those problems is the enemy-of-my-enemy problem that has led many progressives to defend Islamists to an extent that they would never dream of defending the Christian extreme right.
Nevertheless, there are many similarities between far right Christians, far right Muslims (i.e. Islamists), and secular fascists. It would be foolish not to comment on this similarity. In fact, it's one of the best tools we have in pushing back against the pro-censorship agendas of many so-called progressives.
How much money does it take to fling 140 character snippets around the interwebs? Few hundred load-balanced servers around the world would cost what, $20k a month? Host the whole platform for a quarter million a year?
So what the fuck do they need to go searching for BILLIONS AND BILLIONS of dollars in profit for?
Yes and there's a very simple model to make it clearer: pre-modern, modern, and post-modern.
Modern is the start of humanistic values. Pre-modern is old empires enforced with mythic and religious identity and so on. Post-modern is currently half baked, a step towards global but still in its early phase, and hasn't worked out yet.
So for example, post-modern often champions the rights of islamists to not be offended because it wants to avoid western cultural imperialism, even though the islamists are trying to return us to the pre-modern Middle Ages. And of course there was no post-modernity back in the Middle Ages, so post-modernity ends up trying to destroy itself. And taking us all down with it.
Personally I think we all just need to re-study modernity and understand what its core value for is for the world, the stuff it advanced and got right, such as the individual and humanistic values and education and so on. And figure out how the world as a whole can configure to develop towards modernity.
Once most of the world is practicing and working at a modern humanistic level, then a real post-modernity can emerge. The current version of post-modernity is a fuckup.
But it doesn't have to be depressing. Many recoil against modernity because it is godless or lacks rules for living. But Buddha already 2500 years ago said you have to cast off the old myths and figure out for yourself, as an individual, what works, including, what's the answer to happiness and compassion. Depending on how you read it, Buddha was teaching humanistic values thousands of years ago.
Pre modern empire structures, basically weaponise religion to control followers and gain power. But if people just put on humanistic glasses, many of these weird cross cultural issues become very clear.
But for a technology which is basically a glorified indexed array of char[140]'s, it has little that isn't easily copied in terms of functionality. Given that most users' number of followers is in the 100s, a simple PHP script spewing out RSS feeds is almost good enough for that task (and already way more complex than it needs to be).
The problem is if you want replies to tweets, you'll run into the same uncontrolled spam / troll / junk / harassment / propaganda problem that has driven users from distributed systems towards centralized sites and why so many blogs and other sites disable comments. You need some kind of CAPTCHA for rate control and it needs to be replaced/updated as it is broken. And ideally you'd have some third party moderators following guidelines, because no moderation is troll heaven and owner moderation lets you silence all opposing views and criticism. That's the hard part, not making a char[140] aggregator.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
The fact Twitter is full of people with views similar to, or more extreme than, Nero, and the fact it took two or three years before Twitter dropped the banhammer (during which time Nero had numerous tempbans for similar behavior), shows this "Poor Nero, persecuted for his opinions by eeeeeeeeevil 'SJWs' " narrative is ridiculous.
Twitter banned Nero for having a history of blatant ToS violations, and no other reasons. Twitter remains completely full of people spouting the same rhetoric as Nero et al, but none of those people felt the need to fake tweets from other Twitter users in an effort to encourage harassment against them (as one obvious example, and the last straw as far as Twitter was concerned) so they get to keep their accounts.
Nero is a piece of shit. He may be popular, but he makes his money from lying about people and siccing his supporters on them. No social network worth its salt wants people like that sucking the humanity out of their systems, whatever their opinions.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
99% of Twitter users have never heard of these people, and if they had they'd probably sympathize with a company enforcing its ToS against users who, for example, are posting screenshots of forged tweets in an attempt to increase harassment of perceived "enemies".
Twitter growth has slowed (and on occasion gone into reverse) lately. The real reason it probably that the platform has changed fairly radically in the last 3-4 years, with changes that completely undermine the "read lots of quick, short, messages" selling point.
Some of the changes that have broken Twitter include:
1. Making messages take up about 1/5 of the screen, because of attached images, movies (WTF?), link summaries, etc.
2. Adding ads in a way that means the user has already read them by the time they realize they're in an ad, making them 10x as obnoxious (and, funnily enough, actually creating negative value for advertisers. Nobody trusts a Twitter advertiser, because you feel tricked when you've read their ad.)
3. Messing with the timelines. Even with their "optimized" version turned off, they frequently make the third "tweet" a pages long summary of tweets you've already read, entitled "In case you missed it", and there's no way to turn this off.
These have made Twitter change from being a nice way to keep up with your friends and the news to being an absolute chore to read.
The idea that these have had no effect on subscribers, while the banning of a self-admitted Troll and some others who have no self control, somehow has is ridiculous. Sure, a handful of people who wanted a network that made it easier to send a rape threat to a black actress or female CEO might feel that a crackdown on harassment or the banning of people who forge Tweets would turn them off, but they're not really the kinds of people who a social network wants, and they are the kinds of people who drive away more people than they attract.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Ps
Massive irony: I got the twitter account because they never verified email addresses used to open accounts. I got a password reset and took the account that some annoying oik used my email address to open.
So basically they don't care about security, they just want peoples phone numbers because advertising revenue.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
Funny, you think everyone who isn't like you is an SJW. The difference being that "conservative" describes a political philosophy and is not an insult. Your tactic is to accuse people of labelling you when of course labelling is only a problem when the label is negative. It's a classic silencing tactic.
Making assumptions again? Figure you would have learned by now not to do that. Despite all those regressive liberals that use it as an insult and as something dangerous, whether it be individuals, the media at large right? Which is a really good silencing tactic right? After all, if using SJW which is their self-applied label was a silencing tactic they wouldn't have so much face time in the media.
As I said, you want to silence other people and use every low down trick you can think of to do it. It allows you to be authoritarian while pretending not to be.
Really? I'm sure you can prove that. I'll wait, after all I'm not the one out there turning around and doxing people, sticking their faces on posters, and claiming they're rapists for the dangerous thing of wanting to have a discussion on "mens rights" for example on campus.
And then, as if you anticipated by point and decided to help by proving it, you start ranting about Eich again with the unwritten subtext that being allowed to criticise him is somehow a bad thing because it had negative repercussions for his career. To your credit, your assault on other people's free speech, their right to criticise, is relentless and consistent (in that it only applies to views you don't like).
So wait, I'm authoritarian for making the statement that a persons individual opinions shouldn't be grounds for the harassment they receive at the hands of those who don't like his ideology. How does that work again?
You are everything you claim your worst enemies are.
Sorry, what part of expecting people to be allowed to have contrary opinions and not attacking them for is it makes me "everything I claim my worst enemies are." Besides, the implication that you think they're my enemies. How's that assumption stuff going again?
Om, nomnomnom...
I know I've said this before: "Twitter should have been an RFC, not a company".
Remember RFCs and when there were clients other than HTTP that people cared about? This. Twitter's 140 character messages could be just UDP if you don't care about them making it, or a really quick TCP connection to some server that then redistributes the messages. Heck, it could even be blockchain based and distributed with no central server; but it never should have been a company. The only reason it's a company is because of the way VC money sloshes around in the Valley, and it's a casino where retail investors play against the house and always lose.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?