Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
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.