X drops headlines from articles, as new report details its bleeding ad revenue::Elon Musk’s X revamped its look to eliminate headlines on article links Wednesday, the same day that Reuters reported the platform has seen massive monthly…
Ad revenue in August was down 60% year over year, the report said.
Good
Holy shit, that’s brutal. That company is dead
I’ve seen estimates that put the loss of value of the company itself since Elon took over at something like 90%. If that’s anywhere even close to accurate… impressive. Most impressive.
Since Twitter is now private, we’ll never know the real numbers, but the paper value of the Twitter brand itself being cast aside is a huge non-monetary loss.
Right?? Like, it was one of the most known brands in the world. You don’t throw that away if making money is your goal.
That’s not entirely true. There is a company that still holds its Twitter shares even after it went private. They are the ones that everyone points to when looking for real estimates of how much value the company has lost. Every quarter or so they release their estimate of their shares in Twitter, and based on the total shares they own, we can get a good idea of the total company valuation.
Twitter always was private and profit-driven.
Twitter was a public company before Elon’s acquisition. Not sure what you’re trying to get at with the “profit-driven” comment either… every business is by necessity.
Don’t mix private vs gov entity with private ownership vs ownership shares open for purchase top the public
You forget about NG-NPOs. Linux Foundation is NG-NPO, FSF is NG-NPO.
They enshittified themselve to death
They’ve gone and Dugg themselves a whole that will never come out of while Musk is there.
B-but Elon told me advertisers were returning!
How about we respond by dropping X from headlines and articles?
I think “dropping X” might have been a factor in this decision.
Hey, don’t do my homegirl Molly dirty like that—she just wants the world to feel good.
Please help me find Molly Hi, I’m looking for Molly I’ve been searching everywhere And I can’t seem to find Molly
Do you know where I can find Molly? She makes my life happier, more exciting She makes me want to dance Dance, dance
Oh, don’t do that, I’ve still got half a bag of popcorn left.
Jesus, how big was that bag to start with?!
Oh, just normal serving size…
I’m sure there are movie communities in the fediverse who can recommend great movies to go with the popcorn!
It’s just wrong kind of X. We need to talk about X.org.
Weyland disagrees
Wayland is developed by X.org
Did you mean “X”, formerly Twitter?
I believe they meant “Xitter”.
I’ve wondered, would that be pronounced similar to “Shitter” or “Exiter”?
“Shitter”.
Tweets are now “xits”. As a verb: “xit”, past-tense: “xat”.
“Zitter” like a big ol zit
Isn’t that the platform that is just Cartman and Alec Baldwin?
Maybe X.org
What’s support to go in place of X?
It’s called ‘Twitter’.
Xitter is also acceptable in my book.
Just needs to be popped.
It’s “the service formally known as twitter” to be fair. They changed the name to something
Ƭ̵̬̊witter
Idk to call that shit show Twitter is kind of an insult to Twitter at this point
Yeah I know but at this point also; if it might piss off Musky then I’ll deadname it.
IWNBAX
I have no idea what this means.
Internal Walrus Nutella Banana Anthill Xylophone?!?!?
it will never be an X
Perhaps: Impressively Wrong Newspaper Benefits Absolute Xenophobia?!?
As opposed to journalists, who drop articles from headlines.
Downvote Musk spam.
The billionaire doesn’t need your help ensuring him and his businesses stay in the headlines every day. Don’t be a useful idiot.
But it makes me so happy…
The change had been expected, with Musk tweeting in August: “This is coming from me directly. Will greatly improve the esthetics.”
Yeah… we figured it’s his doing, since it’s a terrible decision.
Probably hoping that if they remove titles they can remove context from the link, trying to goad people into click-throughs. Pretty poor experience for the users I’d argue
What even is the point of this change?! What could it possibly improve?
Probably so people click the link more often to find out what it’s about - which Musk then can take to publishers and say “look how much traffic we generated for you”
Yeah, I see it. Horrible for the users though…
Elon Musk’s mood for a few minutes.
Might just be a way to bypass some countries requiring that social media sites pay news companies when they scrape their articles and show a preview on the page? Something like that’s been passed in Canada recently and companies like Facebook and Google basically just stopped showing summaries of news on their sites to Canadians as a result.
Guys he doesn’t care, I have a feeling he’s more annoyed or even amused that people are still using Twitter more than anything. He’s doing the whole “I want to push this as far as possible xd” thing. And honestly it is kind of amazing seeing just how much people put up with to use that shit platform
He bought it to destroy it. The Saudis helped fund his purchase, and they hated Twitter. They imprison and execute people for tweeting things they don’t like and wanted him to break the platform
I believe this. Given that he states that he thinks Twitter corrupted his daughter, who now wants nothing to do with him, I can see him buying the platform to help his friendly Saudi regime and get to pick a personal bone as well.
These are all hunches. I’ll add my own: he was initially just posturing about buying it but when he was forced to do it he was motivated by many things (his personal dislike of Twitter’s userbase -which was only partly leftist though it was a very vocal and hip even if sometimes unhinged and somewhat puritanical brand of leftism-, what he perceives happened to his daughter, the Saudi interests, his “I’m not owned! I’m not owned!” personality, etc.). Motivated to do what? Well initially it seems to me he wanted to transform it into more of a right-wing Elon cult (and he somewhat succeeded with the right-wing part). But the mass reaction was a destruction of his reputation. Before this he was usually clowned just by leftists but now it’s by a good chunk of the general public. My hunch is that he has started to like more and more the idea that he is “sabotaging Twitter from the inside” as revenge for the aforementioned reasons or just “for the lulz” (it seems he likes to think he does grave things for the lulz, maybe it’s desperation to fit in or cope). Wether this intentional sabotage is something that crossed his mind from the very start or something he picked up from his fans (“he… he can’t be taking these kinds of decisions, right guys? He’s a genius! He must be doing it all on purpose! He wants to tank Twitter”) it does sound like something that mends his ego a bit and also the only move that could maybe help restore his old PR image of brilliant player, real life Tony Stark.
Enshittification as planned
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Xitter can you stop being a bitch for like, a minute?
For people still using Twitter, if you view it in a browser like Brave it will hide all the ads for you. Even better, you can save the webpage view as a Web App in your phone and access it that way and you barely even notice it’s the web version you’re using and not the app. I’ve not seen an ad on Twitter in months since doing that.
Considering they dismantled every control they had to prevent disinformation, and it was already a cesspool to begin with… Why are people still using Twitter?
Sadly these still a lot of folks on there that haven’t moved elsewhere. If you curate your follower lists and don’t venture into the replies of big/ trending accounts then it’s still manageable. Mostly I just use to to read people I follow rather than post anything new myself these days.
Also, I’ve feeds of decent journalists that I’ve built up over many years that don’t post elsewhere. There’s still that immediacy that you just don’t get elsewhere.
Some people have to use it for work. I can’t explain the others.
Don’t use Brave, they push crypto incentives. Use Firefox and ublock origin, that and BAT’s chart is crap.
but Blink, you trade crypto
I guess I’d know, then.
edit: fuck plebbit too
Before I dropped twatter like a bad habit I had it running nicely through Adguard and TwiFucker on Android which blocked ads as well as sponsored twats. Highly recommend if anyone is stuck using that terrible platform for some reason.
Man, Elon just never stops, does he? He has made one good addition to what was a perfectly good Twitter (Community Notes), and at least what, 30 bad decisions? Has there ever been a CEO as stupid as Elon has been to Twitter over this year? I mean damn, even being outed as a child molester and forced to resign probably wouldn’t have been as bad.
Community Notes predate Musk.
Did not realize, damn… so that’s zero good decisions I guess. Elon has gotta be the worst owner of any tech company… probably ever, honestly.
I feel like this is a broken clock thing where the reality is that headlines often detract from articles but its also a bad solution. User summaries makes more sense but thats harder to figure out
What’s up with right wingers and “esthetics”?
It’s a bullshit claim to tradition
Does everyone understand that we need to fight the class war?
The 1% just bought twitter so they could destroy it, removing the leading tool people used to communicate.
… As we enter what has potential to be the worst election season yet.
Elon never intended to buy Twitter, he always intended to back out of the deal from the beginning, either as a headline-grabbing move or as some form of stock manipulation. His miscalculation is that he didn’t realize that the existing Twitter management was eager to sell due to the site treading water in terms of profitability, and were willing to take him to court to make the deal go through.
The boat-anchor around his ankle is that he had to borrow a lot of money to honor the purchase. Advertising revenue would’ve always been decimated by his enabling the right, but the enormous debt hanging over his head is why the site is visibly cracking at the seams so soon after his purchase. Of course, he did favors for his political allies, but that was a move made out of opportunism, not conspiracy.
If I’m making him sound like he’s playing 5D chess, he’s not. He made a dumb decision that blew up in his face. He’s screwed. He knows he’s totally screwed. So he’s doing what any CEO would be doing in his position - cutting costs, lying about why the site is having issues, and coming up with hare-brained ideas to try and generate revenue. It’s 100% performative CYA, because when the site is finally repossessed by his creditors, at least he can claim he tried something.
