Now that Elon Musk has bought Twitter - now the Pit edition (Part 1)

The BBQ Pit
3044

The real impediment to all the micropayment systems ideas is that the actual cost for the multiple participants to move the money and track the accounting means the minimum vig for a viable business is too big of a percentage.

I would love to be able to buy, e.g. NYTimes or Forbes articles for $0.25 each. But not when the payments platform vendor fees mean content providers have to sell for a $1.00, plus I pay $0.50 to the payments platform for the privilege of using it.

And that’s before the first successful micropayments system realizes it has a captive two-ended monopoly and decides to jack the fees simply because it can.

3045

I don’t really see the micro transaction model working for Twitter. Most people don’t care that much about the people they follow. I get the sense that many people are on Twitter as a fun way to pass the time. If they had to start paying, they would find some other free way to pass the time. There are endless ways to waste time on the internet. Sure, some people are really interested in what a celebrity or reporter has to say and would pay for that access, but I think that’s just a tiny percentage of the Twitter user base. I think for most people, Twitter is something to idly scroll through while they’re standing around waiting for something like their coffee to ready. It probably doesn’t matter a whole lot to them if they’re wasting their time on Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, SDMB, etc. For a content creator to get their audience to pay for content, their content has to be really, really compelling. Most of Twitter’s content is not nearly compelling enough to get people to pay for it.

3046

Twitter was stagnant, why did they add those people? (They were growing.) Those people weren’t doing anything anyway - but the remaining people need to work 80-hour weeks. That’s just so company won’t lose $4M/day. Except it wasn’t, until the new owner put billions in debt on the balance sheet. But the biggest contradiction is that Twitter was a woke, broke, overstaffed mess… worth $44B dollars.

(And Warren Buffett got shit for spending a billion on Coca-cola stock in the 80s…)

Pre-Elon Twitter was inching towards consistent profits before the buyout, in no small part because their moderation of the more hateful content was letting them attract advertisers. At its core, Musk’s idea of an unmoderated social media platform surviving on advertising revenue is unworkable. And his cheerleaders don’t seem to notice that even he is acknowledging that, because the whole “If I build it, they will come” narrative has been dropped for an escalating series of cash-grab schemes - subscriptions, videos, access-levels, now payment processing.

And the most annoying bit? He’ll wind up creating something that’s nothing like pre-Elon Twitter or the platform he promised, and his sycophants will crow about how he saved it because it there’s a 3-rd tier Venmo-app with the same name.

3047

And there is also the fact that there were security concerns before Musk fired most of the security staff.

I’m not too keen on giving twitter my credit card number.

3048

Yeah, I missed that distinction the first time around. And you’re right - the MMM doesn’t apply to an organization as a whole. But it could, if the company’s management has allowed MMM thinking to bloat a whole bunch of projects.

Truth is, none of us know why people were layed off, and how the decisions were made. Overall skepticism/disdain of Musk makes some think he did this capriciously without thought like a bull going through a China shop.

My thinking is based on looking at his track record, where he has succeeded at a number of companies in the face of people saying he would fail. Maybe he’ll fail this time, but I wouldn’t bet against him. I might not bet for him in this case either - social media may be different than what he’s used to. But assuming he’s made terrible choices and broken the company assumes facts not in evidence.

Also, he’s not an outlier. If cutting staff is obviously a bonehead move, how do you explain the cuts throughout Silicon Valley? I think you can make the case that the easy money created by a decade of zero interest rates and ‘quantitative easing’ and Covid relief money caused enormous bloat in Silicon Valley, and that’s now being corrected.

Of note:

In August Snapchat laid off 20% of its workforce - 1,000 employees.
Robinhood cut 23% of its staff, 780 people. That’s after laying off 9% the year before.

In November while we all paid attention to Twitter cutting half its work force, Lyft layed off 13% of its work force - about 700 employees. In the same month Meta laid off 13% of its employees - 11,000 people!

In January Amazon announced it was laying off 18,000 people, and Salesforce layed off 8,000 employees - 10% of its work force.

Also in January, Coinbase laid off 20% of its workforce, and Microsoft announced its cutting 10,000 jobs, or about 5% of its work force.

Google recently announced it is cutting its workforce by 12,000 jobs. Spotify also anounced it is cutting 6% of its work force.

While Twitter’s cuts are the largest in terms of percentage of the work force, it’s clear that this is part of a trend going through Silicon Valley. The era of cheap money and easy venture capital is coming to an end, and the Valley is adjusting. And this is just the start.

3049

…I don’t know what its like over in North America, but here in New Zealand and much of the rest of the world if I want to transfer payment to another person here, I ask them for their bank account number, then I log into my bank account, enter their bank account number into my payment details then I pay them. Same with vendors.

When I have to “go off site” that normally involves a couple of seconds while a new page loads, then I fill out all the details as normal or click “pay with PayPal”, there is another pause for about a second before it takes me back to the original screen.

The process is so seamless now that you barely even notice you’ve been taken off site at all. It’s designed that way. So what value is there to Twitter to bring it all in house? In all the time I’ve had a Twitter account there have been a total of zero times I’ve had the need to pay anybody else, and zero times I’ve had the need to pay a vendor.

So what is the target market here? Who is going to be using this? It won’t be existing users. Because very little of this sort of thing is actually going on now on the platform. At the very least he would have to launch this alongside a revamped Twitter Shopping (which was effectively sidelined last year when the team got fired) so that people would have something to use payments for. And in order to make it viable you would need a significant investment in marketing so that people would know that it even exists.

I don’t think the idea of an “everything app” is an inherently bad idea. But that app isn’t going to be Twitter.

I mean: it could try. But my online shop uses Paypal and Stripe. They are convenient, trusted in the marketplace, and just work. Can you sell me on why I would switch/add Twitter as well?

I think we’ve discussed this before. Twitter would need to prove that any new system would offer better long-term value than what the newsrooms currently are already doing. That we haven’t already seen a move towards micropayments seems to indicate the value isn’t there. The media aren’t going to completely overhaul their existing business models because Elon needs another revenue stream.

And here’s another important thing to consider. This is my news recommendations as of a few minutes ago:

Can you see how many New Zealand news topics the algorithm is recommending to me? Zero.

And when I click on “Satanic Temple” does it take me to a range of newspaper articles posted by their respective news organizations that would enlighten me on why it happens to be number one on my news recommendations? Nope.

If I was a news organization and if this is the kind of news recommendations that would pop up on my feed, I’d be running quickly in the other direction. That Nick Fuentes (the well-known white supremacist, anti-Semitic, Holocaust denialist, founder of Groypers AKA the Groyper Army AKA racist far-right activists/provocateurs/trolls, and Youtuber) is the fourth trending “news” topic is not a great advertisment for newsroom micropayments. And the complete lack of localization would mean that no newsroom here in NZ would even consider it.

And the thing is: it didn’t use to be like this. The news recommendations used to be actually useful and used to point to the actual news. Now its just a game of Mad Libs.

I suspect Youtube has nothing to fear from Twitter. Twitter video is still unstable, with about at least 5% of videos that show up on my feed not even loading properly and the quality being mid at best.

And with both uploading longer videos and 1080p videos being restricted to only Twitter Blue users, that means the majority of videos currently being shared are all shorter and lower quality, currently making Twitter a terrible showcase for video.

Any single one of these ideas might be viable. But they are all impossible to develop in an environment that is unfocused, chaotic, that thinks its being “agile” but in reality is just flinging shit at the wall. You can’t develop a product without doing the market research first. A “good idea” simply isn’t enough.

3050

Here in the US, third party payment apps have become hugely popular because most people absolutely do not want to share their bank account numbers due to fraud concerns. (I finally convinced Mom to stop writing checks as gifts when mobile deposits became so popular…what happens to that check after it’s electronically deposited?) The last time I had to collect money at work for a group gift, many people used Venmo instead of handing me cash; it was just a matter of exchanging user names. My mom even pays for her lawn care service with Zelle, a payment option offered by her bank; she and the lawn care guy never see each other’s actual account information.

3051

…yeah, but the thing is, that’s a US only thing. Around most of the rest of the world, it’s a solved problem, and it’s been solved for probably decades. We use bank accounts for everything here. I pay my power bill, my phone bill, I pay invoices, I deposit funds into my friends and families accounts without even batting an eyelid.

So an alternative for Venmo or Zelle is really only a thing that would be of interest to the US market: something I’m not entirely sure that Elon Musk has figured out. Most users for Venmo are based in the US, and Zelle is exclusively US based. Musk isn’t going to ever be able to compete with Alipay. So at best he’s looking at going after a market that is no bigger than the US, where one competitor has a name synonymous with “friends wiring friends money”, and the other is literally owned by the biggest banks in America.

ELON MUSK: “I’ve got a plan so cunning you could put a tail on it and call it a weasel.”

BENOIT BLANC:

3052

I understand why people get so frustrated with you, Sam. We actually know a lot about why people were layed [sic] off, and how decisions were made. This is one of the most public clusterfucks that’s ever been. We’ve got leaked emails, leaked video calls, insider reports, and, if you haven’t cottoned on by now, I personally got an inside view of the chaos from someone who watched it all go up in flames.

Elon did axe some whole departments when he first took over, and those decisions may have been strategic. But the vast, vast majority of people who left Twitter quit, because Elon reversed the WFH policy and then made people commit to working “extremely long hours at high intensity.” Thus, there was an exodus. And the capriciousness of his demands almost guaranteed that the exodus lacked strategic vision, because the more people who quit from your area, the dumber you’d be to stay. Hence, whole shops left. Whole bodies of knowledge. There was no vision. If this doesn’t strike a “Bull in a China shop” chord with you, then Christ. What would?

And then you come here and say “None of us know what really happened.” The fuck we don’t.

3053

Echoing this, as a European resident. Anything that involves a financial transaction, there’s a bank account number on it (or a QR code equivalent that works with various apps). I mean, we get charity flyers in the mailbox: “Want to feed children in South Asia?” or whatever. “Here’s our IBAN!”

Maybe the prospect of using peer-to-peer money transfers with online counterparties sounds like high tech wizardry in North America, but I guarantee you, if Twitter really is intending to pitch that here, it will land with a loud thud.

Of course, given that Musk is giving GDPR agencies here the finger, it’s quite possible he’s written off Europe entirely and will just geoblock us and call it good.

3054

Remember: every accusation is a confession. He doesn’t really know so he believes nobody does.

3055

Interestingly, in the US, if you have someone’s bank account number, it’s actually hard to put money in, but not that hard to take money out.

That’s why in the US, it’s a number we rather keep private.

3056

While continuing to recruit other workers, and in the following month rehiring some of the very engineers they laid off.

Not claiming that the mass layoffs aren’t significant or don’t reflect a major rebalancing in the company structure, but the naive interpretation of “oh noes Meta and the whole tech sector henceforth can only shrink” is an overreaction.

Whatever that means. If it means “there will be some more net job loss at many major tech companies in the near future coming off the pandemic boom, even as they continue to expand selected parts of their enterprises”, that’s probably true. If it means “tech sector companies are now just going to get smaller and smaller indefinitely”, it’s probably not.

3057

OK, I started doing this today. I’m not sure yet if it’s working, but I’m enjoying the hell out of it.

3058

This morning I was looking on Reddit and saw a post about this in a subreddit for a mobile game I play, and the initial announcement caused some panic that it would affect accounts that were using Twitter as an account login. It doesn’t appear this was the case for now. But I doubt it creates any goodwill or trust that it may be affected down the line.

3059

…as per an hour ago, the top trending news topic was simply “The Chinese.” I’m simply too scared to click onto that one to see what that is all about. Nick Fuentes is still there: he’s not going anywhere. Beijing, Geraldo, Socialism, Venezuela, Muslim American. All important topics to us down under, obviously.

Nothing about the biggest stories down here, the Auckland flooding or Mayor Wayne Brown.

3060

That is completely fucked up.

3061

As an American who transplanted to Europe and has firsthand experience with local finance practices, I can confidently state that American retail banking is at least twenty-five years behind the curve in terms of infrastructure, security practices, and consumer transparency.

3062

I blame the 80-year-olds who still insist on paying with a check at the grocery store.

3063

Particularly the ones that pull out the checkbook after you give them their total. :rage: