Is it Legal? Elon Musk ultimatum. Do ‘extremely hardcore’ work or get out

In My Humble Opinion
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I don’t put a lot of stock in what Jack Dorsey thinks. To this internet nobody he seems to be too distracted and disengaged to lead anything. Twitter stagnated under his leadership. Maybe he was too busy dating models, going on sojourns, and buying $2k faucets.

BlueSky is DOA. It solves a problem nobody cares about anymore. Companies don’t want to open their walled gardens to a standard protocol. Throw it in the heap with SIP and XMPP.

There’s a goldmine if someone can recreate WeChat in North America. Maybe Musk and/or Dorsey could pull it off with Twitter and/or Block, but neither seem hungry or focused enough.

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There was a joke back in the 1990’s(?) that the crew of the Enterprise was paid via COBOL programs.

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All good jokes have a core of truth.

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Starfleet uses COBOL?

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Yes - they inherited their payroll system from the US Dept of Defense, which had it written in COBOL and there was never budget or need to do a complete rewrite . . .

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Vernor Vinge’s Deepness in the Sky proposes the concept of software archeology: that in millennia of technological progress, software developers are still using and adapting legacy code to perform critical functions in a spacefaring interstellar trading culture.

The best programmer-archaeologists are the ones who can find that ancient application that solves the exact problem they’re facing at this moment and adapts it for the current environment.

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Sidebar : I think Canadian federal public servants are probably wishing they were still on a COBOL based system, rather than the new & improved Phoenix payroll system.

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So let’s talk about what Twitter might look like if the bits and pieces we’ve heard are roughly correct. Please, for the moment forget about Musk and what you think of him, and let’s just talk about where they may be trying to take it. Assume for the sake of argument that this works, and what it might look like. Afterwards we can discuss all the ways it may go wrong.

First, the idea of Twitter links to paywalled articles being able to bypass the paywall for that article by Twitter making a micropayment to the provider. If we assume that there is good cooperation from paywalled sites, this has a chance to make Twitter basically an intermediary for content links. Want to link to a paywalled article on the SDMB? Go to Twitter, create a link there, then reference the Twitter link here as well as the direct link. Now any Twitter Blue SDMB members can read the article without needing a subscriotion to the site. So instead of having to maintain a dozen subscriptions to various newsppers and magazines, you just need Twitter Blue, unless you want to browse that magazine.

Depending on the revenue from micropayments, this could drive a lot of ,media to take part in the plan. Or, it could be a complete dud. But there is at least a chance of this becoming big and valuable.

There are a LOT of web sites out there where authors link to paywalled articles. They get a lot of complaints from members that they can’t read what is being described. Perhaps they’ll post the direct link and also a link for Twitter Blue members. Every time this happens it’s a little advertisement for Twitter, and adds a little more value to Twitter Blue.

Next, Musk says that Twitter Blue people will have a monetary account they can use to transfer money to content providers, who can set their own prices for content. This basically incorporates a Patreon-style funding mechanism directly into Twitter. This is going to be very enticing to content providers, IMO. Rather than dealing with complex monetization schemes that pay almost nothing unless you are drawing a huge crowd, high-value but low distribution specialty content can now be monetized. A tutorial on how to install a faucet might not get enough hits on Youtube to generate any income for the creator (there is a monetization threshold), but on Twitter they can set whatever price they want and if even one user watches, they make money. Plus you could do tips and maybe subscriptions directly through Twitter. Musk has also said that he wants to enable higher priced content such as training courses.

Today, using Patreon or GiveSendGo is a high friction activity. You have to follow the link to Patreon, log in/sign up, navigate to the payment page, select a payment, yada yada. How much more click-through payment would content receive if there was a ‘Donate 1’ or ‘Donate .10’ one-click link right below the content? Click it, and your account is deducted .10 and the content provider’s is incremented. I’ll bet payment for content would skyrocket if it were that easy. This also means you didn’t need to rely on advertisements in your content to make money. Regular tweeters who are liked but don’t make ‘content’ could put donation links on their home page and make a little money. For instance, I find the ISW (Institute for the Study of War) and their maps highly useful for following the war in Ukraine. A one-click micropayment system would be heavily used by me to support them.

I assume Twitter will take a cut of it all. Hopefully not like Apple’s 30% for app store content.

This would also drive subscriptions to Twitter Blue, because you’ll need to be subscribed and verified before you can use any of the monetization features.

These are just a couple of the things he has been talking about. I could see lots of ways it could crash and burn, but if it works and is executed well, it could be a real game-changer IMO. It would be an entirely new revenue stream for Twitter, and give people a reason to go there other than to bitch about politics. That’s important if he wants to drive up engagement, because right now a tiny percentage of users are responsible for the large majority of tweets, Generalizing Twitter away from political and media commentary would be a good move.

Thoughts?

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I think whatever plans exist for Twitter are irrelevant because the remaining employees will increasingly spend their time putting out fires. None of the stuff you’ve described will ever get built.

I think you under-appreciate what Twitter is working with from a tech stack. Everything is custom. Everything. It was all built before things were standardized. You can’t just bring in some engineer who knows nginx because Twitter wrote their own web server before nginx was mature. And that’s just one example of dozens.

There is so much tech debt. So much. And it’s incredibly difficult to built all of these new features on top of these systems that very few people understand, especially when the people understand are bearing the workloads of perhaps dozens of their former peers.

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The payment scheme is a cash cow - reportedly Starbucks makes a ton off the cash cards people put money on - but I think the problem is there’s no need for yet another. I can already pay via GooglePay (which I never use) and Apple Pay (rarely used. I don’t need another, and doubt many do. That’s leaving out the fact that I’m not enthusiastic about paying for things thru an app that’s fired the security team. :wink:

As for the subscription idea, that seems weak on its face, especially with Musk at the helm, as he’s unloved by all types of media aside from his ability to generate clicks about him.

I do think Twitter would have been better off being bought by a media company like one of the big newspapers or news networks. Everyone keeps saying they’re the main beneficiaries of Twitter anyway, and they’d do a more professional job as far as moderation, fact-checking, and handling advertising. The only downside would be the inevitable perception of left-wing bias that would do with it.

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Okay, let’s pretend your favorite media company bought Twitter and announced these plans. What do you think of the plan itself if it was executed in the right hands?

Yes, there are other payment systems out there. I mentioned two of them. But they all suffer from the same problem: high friction. As Voyager mentioned above (and I seconded), even tiny extra bits of friction between the customer and the provider are devastating. For example, the average newspaper sees over 90% of the people who start the subscription process abandon it before they finish. From here:

The paywall system is incredibly inefficient. It captures very little of actual usage, and was designed on the assumption that people want to browse the content regularly like they do a hardcopy paper. For people who only go to articles in many papers when following a link and have no intention of going back regularly (probably the vast majority) a subscription is way too expensive.

And if 90% of people abandon registration on the same site, imagine the lack of uptake on Youtube if someone asks you to contribute via Patreon. You have to leave Youtube, sign up or log in to another site, then go through a bunch of their forms. Twitter as an intermediary broker for all this makes a lot of sense.

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Could it work, sure, but one of the reasons content creators like Patreon and similar is that it gives them a certain predictability. Single donations are inherently unstable income and finding an audience on Twitter, at least today, dependent on randomly going viral. The patreon model is mostly based on signing up for recurring payments.

Your maker of the “how to fix your faucet” tutorial, might be enticed by a “get paid in tips” policy at Twitter, but for it to be a real success for Twitter they need to establish Twitter as a place where people search for such content, and pay for it, in competition with YouTube, where people search for such content today, and get it for free.

Services that enable you to tip content creators already exist, without tying the content creator to a specific platform for publishing their content.

There’s also the issue that the only people paying will be those paying for Twitter Blue, that’s just as much a barrier as signing up with Patreon.

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I would pay a small monthly fee for a mega-subsciption to normally paywalled sites. A number of people, however, might realize that they already have access to those services through their local library for free. (Well, for taxes they have to pay anyway.)

The main problem I see with doing this via twitter is that the program (←do people still say program, or all they all apps now?) isn’t currently set up to easily see what content is and isn’t available.

The other problem is that at least some of us have been watching Netflix, Amazon, etc., and noted that instead of having to pay for one thing, we have a monthly subscription that allows little more than access to the ability to pay more for subsequent tiers. So I imagine that a Twitter eager for cash will allow me the cheap subscriptions for my $10 / month, but for high-demand things, I’ll have to pay extra, and I’ll have to do it through their specific Twitter Wallet. For me, that’s just enough complexity to make it no longer worth it. I don’t need Twitter to entertain me, and I don’t need Twitter to find out what’s going on in the world.

Moreover, I think there’s an issue in that a large part of the value of Twitter for content providers is simply advertisement: we are already supersaturated with advertising, and no barrier between your brand and eyeballs is desireable. They’re going to have to provide some decent content for free, or we’ll go elsewhere: the masses are fickle.

So I don’t think it’s a terrible idea, but frankly he’d have been better off investing the $44 bn in that idea and getting it up and running first.

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I would assume that they would continue to post their content elsewhere. Most Youtube content providers simulpost their content to multiple locations. I’m willing to bet that huge numbers of content providers will add their content to Twitter if it gives them another revenue stream, just as they currently post to Patreon, Instagram, Tiktok, etc. Of course people could post their content for free on Twitter and just offer donation buttons.

Again, high friction. Go look at a Youtube channel that has patreon support, and look at the ratio between their subscribers on Youtube and their Patrons. Generally it’s a small fraction. So small that a video with a million views can call out their new patrons by name.

By the way, a million views on Youtube will earn you between $1200 and $6,000. But here’s the rub: you can’t monetize anything on Youtube until you have at least 1,000 subscribers, and 4,000 watch hours in the past 12 months. For niche channels that can be a hard bar to get over.

If 1/10 of the same viewers on Twitter gave you a penny, that’s $1,000. Of if you are making a faucet installation video you might charge $1, and make a few hundred bucks you simply can’t make on Youtube.

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While I agree that Patreon and GiveSendGo are high friction (though I support quite a few people via Patreon myself). I don’t see a need for Twitter’s owners to re-invent the wheel. There’s all this foofaraw about how people only use the Android and iOS apps, so a button using those right in the apps seems the way to go; the only downside is sharing with those platforms and whatever paper you’re linking to. Most users are already signed up and trust the security.

I do think most of the papers online would do better to collect a token fee for links to some articles rather than trying to get people to subscribe; the vast majority of people only use them intermittently.

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Especially the local papers.

I have a couple subscriptions to major national papers, and one to my local, but when I want to read an article that wants me to subscribe to some local paper halfway across the country, I’m not that interested.

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I agree. The biggest issue is that the Twitter UI will have to be substantially changed, and that’s dangerous betcause Twitter’s ‘charm’ is the very low friction required to browse it. A bad UI design will fail the video content and could risk breaking what makes Twitter unique. I’ve seen that kind of thing happen before to perfectly good UIs as peoole add features.

Tesla has some pretty good UX people who focus on low-friction activities. Maybe Musk will pull a few of them over to help out. But this is certainly a risky area.

I’m not sure. I don’t think the big money is in the subscriptions. Musk even suggested they might just deposit that money in your account and you can use it for micropayments. On the phone call I lnked to, he even said that they might ‘seed’ user accounts with $10 each or something to kick-start the payment system.

Of course, if you make a lot of payments you could run out of momey and have to refresh your account with some cash or link a bank account, just as you do today at Patreon or Paypal.

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I once tracked how many subscriptions I would need to avoid all the paywalls I hit in one day, and it was a LOT. And some of them were crazy expensive, like The Economist. Paywalls do not work for people whose primary interaction with a content site is by following a link from other content.

The other problem with paywalls is that they contribute to political polarization. I’m not going to buy a subscription to The Nation, and a liberal is not going to buy a subscription to National Review. So now we can’t even read the same media and we get more locked into our respective bubbles. That’s not good for society.

Micropayments have been the suggested answer forever, but there was never a workable system for it. Twitter as a micropayment broker might actually be its killer app, IF they can get buy-in from enough content providers. And if it turns out to be more profitable for content providers than the paywall system, they’ll all come running regardless of their hatred of Elon Musk. Money talks.

The trick would be setting the micropayment high enough for the paper to be enticed in, but not so high that it’s unaffordable for Twitter or its users. I’m not sure at this point what the feasibility of that is.

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…any single one of these ideas would need both a substantial investment in market research and buy-in from customers and vendors.

For example on the surface the idea of “Twitter links to paywalled articles being able to bypass the paywall for that article by Twitter making a micropayment to the provider” might be a good idea.

But you need more than an idea.

The problem here is convincing media to buy in. We can’t assume there will be good cooperation from paywalled sites because…why would we? The New York Times has invested heavily in a system that works for them. The suggestion here is that they completely over-haul their business model because Twitter needs another revenue stream. What incentive is there for the New York Times do that? Will it make them more money? Twitter would need to make a business case that not only will it boost revenue (and in turn, profit) but this business model will be sustainable. This isn’t about “what’s in it for Twitter.” This isn’t really about Twitter at all. You need buy-in from the media. And I can’t see them doing that at all.

It takes time to do the market research on something like this. And my guess would be that Twitter most likely have done the research because this is an idea that has been going around for a while.

But right now we are getting multiple reports from advertisers that systems are no longer working. They don’t have a key account manager they can deal with any more because they all got fired. They can’t get metrics because dashboards are no longer updating or giving correct information.

So why would any media organization be confident that Twitter could not only build a working, profitable, sustainable system when right now the basics aren’t working due to lack of staff?

The answer would be…they wouldn’t.

Now multiply that by every other idea behind Twitter 2.0 and all of these issues compound. They are having to develop multiple business/marketing plans and strategies and technologies at speed, all targeting different market segments without any real guarantee that the market exists.

Here’s a viable business idea though that isn’t on the list: Twitter Shopping.

Imagine Shoppable Profiles, Product Drops, Live Shopping, Twitter Shops. Imagine being able to onboard 10,000 merchants during the pilot phase.

Imagine if they had pretty much built the thing. Oh, that’s right, they had.

https://twitter.com/davidfromkansas/status/1597342725212319745

The entire team got laid off.

If this had launched pre-Elon, I would have started a Twitter Shop. It is by far my biggest audience on social with the best engagement. This would have been the perfect service for me.

But even if they did launch in the next few months now, I wouldn’t go near it. I no longer have faith in Twitter as a platform.

And that’s the biggest problem that Elon Musk faces right now. And that isn’t something that can get fixed with either ideas or technology.

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Or, you just try it and see what happens. If it fails, you learn why, refactor, and try afain. That’s how Musk builds rockets. Move fast, try lots, break lots, but in the end you get there faster than if you spent a lot of up-front time trying to make aure everything is exactly right, especially when ghere are unknowns that make ‘right’ hard to predict.

The question is if you can pull that off in public without pissing everyone off. That I’m not sure of. I think Musk has been doing this already, and peoole generally see it as just chaotic and it looks like he’s just winging it. Which he is, pretty much. But it’s a directed ‘winging it’. He’s throwing stuff against the wall to see what sticks. Rinse, repeat.

To make money, obviously. This doesn’t replace the paywall. It only allows the user to bypass it for the article linked on Twitter. Click on another interesting link at rhe site, and you hit the paywall. So this drives traffic to the paper in a way that doesn’t just bang the interested user up against a paywall, which most users simply abandon. This way they get into the site and read an interesting article, which may cause some to subscribe.

Plus, paywalls aren’t doing all that great. Papers have to give away a lot of free content to hook people, the click-through is terrible, 90% of signups are abandoned, etc. It could well be that micropayments are more profitable than the paywall subscriptions. Also, anyone who waned to link to a new paywalled article on Twitter would hav pe to buy a subscription to that paper, since they aren’t following a Twitter link.

This might get them even more subscribers, plus micropayments. And if they get nothing, they still have the pywall. It’s a free roll if it isn’t too expensive to implement.

There are numerous ways this could fail. But if it works, it’s got huge potential.

Twitter Shopping: It sounds like a reasonable idea, but the devil,is always in the details, as it is with the stuff I mentioned above. I didn’t even know there was Twitter shopping. It’s not integrated very well if it’s live.

I agree there is a lot of concern about the stability of Twitter right now. The only way to fix that is time. Musk will have to show that Twitter can run fine with a much smaller workforce. After the whole purchase thing calms down, if Twitter is still running fine and bringing out new features six months from now, no one will care about stability, IMO. And once Elon’s ADHD causes him to hyperfocus on something else, he’ll probably appoint a new CEO or Op manager, and we’ll see a lot less of him.