I’ve had this feeling that since there are forces that do not want us to have free speech, and that the destruction of Reddit and Twitter does this effectively, creating a chilling effect, destroying social links and communities. Might it not be an intentional effort to stifle the ability of the downtrodden to organize and fight the power?
There are so many other ways things are engineered to benefit the minority and prevent the majority from gaining power, why not this too?
Just a thought rattling around in my head.
I don’t think it’s a conspiracy. “Don’t attribute to malice what could be explained by incompetence.”
This ^^. It turns out that Elon is just a narcissistic idiot who doesn’t actually have good business sense, at least in the software world. The types of things he’s been trying are better explained as someone who wants Twitter to make more money but doesn’t understand how people actually think and behave and doesn’t realize that these decisions will alienate users and destroy the product. Spez decisions seem similar, although on the whole I think he’s less of a people idiot than Elon, and is probably just under tons of pressure to improve the financials right now and is making bad short-sighted decisions as a result.
Great take on this. Elon is a lot like the dog who caught the car. He has no idea what to do now.
Either this ^^ or whatever has been lost is just a series of casualties in the search for money. There’s not much money to be made by hosting free speech alone - that social media companies do what they do to enable free speech is a popular misconception. Above all they want to make money, and if you need to do that free speech thing at a net loss for a couple years before you start milking your users for all they’re worth, then so be it.
As for Twitter, it could be argued that His Muskiness has been kind of a trial-and-error guy for his entire career - so far it’s worked out pretty well for him. Twitter is just special in that his random ‘let’s just try this and see if it sticks’ decisions instantaneously affect (and piss off) millions of people in a very public way. Maybe that’s why Twitter is such a challenge for him.
As for Reddit, Spez doesn’t exactly keep his admiration for Elon a secret. If Elon joked about improving Twitter’s ‘bottom’ line by shoving a cucumber up his arse, Spez would probably be spotted in the closest supermarket’s produce section within the hour.
I appreciate your sense of humor, regarding cucumbers.
I was never really under any illusion that they weren’t in the business to try and make money but your pointing it out does really highlight that their motives are profit driven above all else and merely short-sighted and intended to improve quarterly gains Rather than actually being organized.
I guess it turns out that allowing profit to be the only motive it’s just generally bad, right?
Edit: speech to text.
That helps. Thanks. Maybe I should drink less anxiety juice, ie coffee.
Edit: I had to look it up because I wanted to provide the link: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor
It’s not a conspiracy, it’s just capitalism, which is worse.
Conspiracy of the rich and the economic policies which they use to make more money and ruins them as well as everyone else.
I’m related to rich people. It’s not a conspiracy, it would be easier if it was. It’s just… imagine you’re playing a game and if you’re in a certain position and you’re motivated to win there are just certain obvious moves to make. Everyone in the world is forced to play the game of capitalism and almost everyone in the position to “win” makes those obvious moves (and always has, for all of history). The ONLY solution is to change the rules of the game, but one of the obvious moves if you’re “winning” is to do everything you can to prevent the other players from doing that.
If it was a conspiracy, you could call out the people involved, deal with them and we could all move on.
I say, they don’t have to conspire, because they all think alike.
The president of General Motors and the president of Chase Manhattan Bank really are not going to disagree much on anything, nor would the editor of the New York Times disagree with them. They all tend to think quite alike, otherwise they would not be in those jobs
— Gore Vidal (Wikiquote source, emphasis mine)
Spez is trying to tie up what he thinks are loose financial ends to make (what he thinks) is an appealing IPO.
Elon is feeling the pinch as Twitter continues to bleed advertising partners and users and it becomes more apparent it will not make back either his purchase cost or Twitter’s existing debt. He’s the spoiled son of a rich mine boss and has no idea what he is doing. He is used to having far more capable people running his companies for him.
The mine went bankrupt in '89, just a few years after Errol bought shares in it. The boss was someone else.
*fall guy
Businesses do not become unprofitable in two years, they were always shells and someone sold it to a pansy.
Mines can absolutely become suddenly unprofitable. You don’t know how much good stuff is in the ground until you dig it up.
So conspiracy probably isn’t the right term, although there are common factors that are causing - or at least influencing - a lot of these trends.
With inflation being a major issue, central banks are reacting by increasing interest rates. These rate hikes have the effect of making credit and borrowing more expensive.
This is significant because central rates had been low (nearly 0%) since basically 2008, with quantitative easing (cash printing) pumping billions of additional dollars into the stock markets in particular.
The effect of loaned cash being effectively free is an explosion of activity from investor hedge funds who were willing to take huge risks on speculative projects. This fuelled the massive boom in tech startups across the 00s.
The trouble is, many of those startups weren’t profitable, they were ‘potentially profitable’ and fuelled by credit. Or they had the underpants gnome model of profit where the means and mechanism of the ‘???’ stage would be figured out later (WeWork).
Investors were happy to fund those losses to create products that controlled markets (Uber) or amassed huge userbases that could be flipped from potential to profit in the future (Reddit).
Only now the rates have gone up, and credit is suddenly expensive. Business models that rely on running at a loss suddenly aren’t viable, and those startup investors that owns chunks of those businesses are now insisting on actual returns on their investments.
You can see the effects all over social media and tech, but Reddit (urgently need to get profitable for a stock launch, need the stock launch for funding) and Twitter (basketcase debt load at the worst possible time for debt) are the most obvious examples.
Techbro austerity means worse products for consumers or aggressive monetization policies which users will likely dislike. So not a conspiracy, but decades of reckless investment by hedge funds that have been caught with their pants down by interest risk.
Spez said in an interview he admires Musk. If you haven’t noticed yet, the corporate world is just 1 giant game of follow the leader.
“Oh X laid 13% of their staff off? I’m gonna do that too even though I don’t really need to”
“Oh Twitter charged ridiculous amounts for their API and didn’t crumble? Me too”
Remember when Google was doing those dumbass interviews where you have to figure out how many manhole covers in NYC or whatever? Every tech company and their mom was OBSESSED with those types of questions even long after Google figured out how useless they were.
Remember when you paid outright for things and everything wasn’t a subscription model?
Thankfully Twitter is actively dying now, but if they somehow manage to turn it around we are all fucked. If they show people will stay around while you strongarm them into paying AND having limits to save server costs that is going to be adopted by basically everyone.
