I suspect that Threads is just “Instagram Minus Pictures”, under the hood, and an extra data field to shunt any particular post over into the desired app. But, that said, there’s no connection between the two apps from a practical standpoint past inheriting your following list if you happen to be an Instagram user. Signing up fresh for Threads doesn’t subject you to Instagram.
The recommendation engine would just be Instagram’s recommendation engine. As you say, that will be tuned to the experience being sought by tween girls, looking to share glamorous lifestyles. It won’t be tuned to the experience sought by followers-on of celebrities and journalists, wanting to share that lifestyle. But I don’t know that those two agendas are really all that different.
Still, I’d expect the two platforms to slowly disconnect so that they can tune the underlying metadata appropriately and target the different audiences more specifically, more easily.
But, right now, the issue is probably more that there’s not a sufficient bulk of creators on the service yet, and not anything to do with the algorithms. They’re likely to be close enough.
I can buy all that. But what I was getting at is that 100 million signups, while impressive, has to be tempered by the fact that it was incredibly easy for the 1 billion+ Instagram users to sign up just out of curiosity. But if it’s the wrong kind of audience, Threads will either die or become something different than Twitter.
If the creators leave then the people will leave. If I was Zuck, I’d be starting an initiative like YouTube did to finance creators on the platform, offer them boosted rankings, etc.
Assuming that he is, I’d expect a bunch of freelance journalists to start having a larger budget in the next few months.
For celebrities, Zuck could offer to show advertising for their private brands, if they’ll sign a contract to come over and stop posting on Twitter.
Facebook has the advantage of having money and being able to survive some short term losses. Musk is looking to be tapped out. I’m not seeing a path to victory for Musk unless Zuckerberg takes a tepid approach to boosting Threads.
It depends on what industry you’re in. Software engineers generally don’t form unions because 1) the pay and benefits are good enough that you can’t complain too much about it, and 2) software contributions per developer tend to follow a pareto distribution. You can (in theory) drop a lot of the workforce without much loss to total engineering power.
…Andrew Tate, for example, who was recently released from jail on rape and human trafficking charges, posted that he’d been paid over $20,000 by Twitter.
I was going to say after seeing Elmo trying to boost Tucker Carlson’s failing Twit Cast the other day that the only lower he could possibly get would get would be to promote Andrew Tate and was going to respond to your post by saying something about Poe’s Law or reality not being able to get any worse. Then I noticed why Elmo’s promotion of Tucker made me think that while starting to write it up. The Twit Cast of Tucker that Elmo was promoting was an interview of Andrew Tate and I hadn’t consciously noticed it. Or maybe subconsciously repressed letting something so vile enter conscious memory.
Amazingly even Elmo can still manage to disappoint me. Happily, I was late on learning about the piece of human filth known as Andrew Tate until watching this video. It’s still worth it for a laugh.
Sir Sic is great at taking the piss out of creationists, flat-earthers, and other pseudoscientific whackadoodles like Tater Tot here.
I’d advise against digging TOO deep into his back catalogue though - he used to be in the “anti-SJW” camp (as his crusader avatar might have give you a hint at), but he doesn’t do that kind of content anymore and identifies himself as a left-leaning libertarian.
Musk is certainly doing this as well, per the preceding links. The thing is, though, he’s prioritizing and incentivizing literally the worst people on the planet.
Twitter was profitable pre-pandemic. The idea that they were bleeding money is one of Musk’s many lies that only the terminally fucking stupid believe.
Twitter is semi-working again for the non-logged in.
One can now access a Twitter profile, but only by clicking through to it via a tweet. If one doesn’t have access to a tweet from an account, and goes directly to a Twitter profile’s URL, then one gets the sign-in request.
One can only see a few of the latest tweets from a Twitter account, though, and no tweet comments.
No, it was not. In 2020 Twitter posted a 1.13 billion loss. In 2021 they posted a $221 billion loss.
In 2018 and 2019 Twitter posted the only two profitable years it had ever had. Before that was straight losses. Then Twitter went on a giant hiring spree, going from 3,900 employees to 7,500 between 2018 and 2021. That put them back into losses.
Overall, by the time Twitter was purchased by Musk it was still overall in net loss territory. It was easily the worst-managed of the big tech companies.
Here is a page showing how profitable Twitter was between 2010 and 2021.
Correction: 221 million dollar loss. If Twitter had lost 221 billion dollars at any point it would have vanished, it has never been worth more than $50 billion at any point in its history (I don’t think it has ever been worth much more than $40 billion honestly).
ETA: I’m sure this was just a typo Sam, I honestly don’t think you actually meant to say 221 billion.
Those are really bad numbers for a new service. Engagement dropping by 50% in a few days? And the media described a 5% drop in usage at Twitter as ‘tanking’.
No, it was not. It posted a profit in two years since 2008, and was, and is, still in net loss twrritory. It did post a profit in 2018 and 2019, but immediately hired so many people that it dropped into unprofitable territory again…
Also, it posted big losses in the two years before Musk bought it, and was definitely not profitable at that time and had huge structural issues. It also paid out hundreds of millions in fines that are not shown in the operating loss category.
If I had cherry-picked the only two years that the company was profitable, which hapoened to be pre-pandemic, then formulated that as, ‘twitter was profitable pre-pandemic’, I would have rightly been called out for cherry picking the data.
The correct sttement would be, “Twitter has not turned a profit over its history. In 2018 and 2019 it posted its first profits, but immediately raised its costs to the point where it was losing money again, and by the time Musk bought it it was again losing huge amounts of money.”
Saying, “Twitter was profitable before the pandemic” is misleading and cherry picking. It’s also meant to imply that Musk’s changes made it unprofitable, which would not be true.
That’s simplistic to the point of being deliberately false. A number of factors led to Twitter tanking in 2020. They did have a 19% increase in spending, due at least in part to increased hiring (which is understandable when you see the growth it had in the previous two years). But Twitter also had other setbacks in 2020. A number of advertisers stopped using Twitter because they themselves faced financial problems due to the pandemic, as it harmed businesses globally.
Later that year, Twitter suffered from a significant hack which had a number of high profile accounts compromised, and people were scammed for bitcoins.
To conclude that Twitter lost money solely due to hiring a bunch of people is either ignorant or a huge lie. Of course, someone trying to pump up Musk would spin this false propaganda if they were trying to paint a false picture that Musk was a responsible genius for getting rid of so many employees a couple of years later.
This is why you receive so much criticism, Sam. You’ll post a bit of truth but then lie very shamelessly to push a narrative.
