[loso]

I knew the end of the cheap money era would cause some businesses to be exposed but wow. We are basically in the middle of watching someone flush 44 billion down the drain. I could understand if it was a 600 posting limit. But a 600 viewing limit? wow. For example, NBA free agency just started. There are types of trades & signings being talked about. Just looking at that information I'm going past the 600 limit in about 30 minutes just by scrolling to see if anything is new. Twitter was nice to get this information from & they showed me a few ads. Decent transaction. But now I'm just going to refresh ESPN to see the latest signings.

[dbish]

It’s wild. Used to checking it frequently which any social media company would love, but can’t even scroll the feed this morning as I hit the rate limit just drinking coffee and catching up. The good thing is this will make me spend far less time on social media since it was the last one I had on my phone.

[dylan604]

Wow, so maybe Musk was society's savior we didn't want to need. Although, maybe if Twitter was no more, people would begrudgingly go back to FB for their doom scrolling needs.

[deeviant]

Between Musk and u/spez, I recovered at least 2 hours a day of normally wasted time.

I've read books, like actual paper ones. Spent some time making a simply 2-d space shooter, just for fun. Spent more time engaged with people I care about. Turns out social media is the least social thing ever and basically sucks.

[pydry]

If you asked me a year ago I wouldnt have guessed that raising interest rates would be the cure to doomscrolling. But here we are.

[Waterluvian]

What’s next? A war in Ukraine that solves the fossil fuel crisis?

[FormerBandmate]

Instagram Threads is going to thrash Twitter. It will be insane, like Snapchat stories but much worse

[partiallypro]

I don't think this is because of the "end of cheap money" (I don't think this high interest rate environment will last that long) but just sheer incompetence by Musk and his staff. Elon has become increasingly erratic on the platform, he just tweeted recently a reply to a Tweet saying Islam would take over France. I don't know if he's always been like this or if the stories of his heavy ketamine usage are true and taking a toll on him.

[phpisthebest]

>>I don't think this is because of the "end of cheap money"

Explain just about all platforms doing revenue adjusting user hostile actions then? Examples include Reddit with the API fees, YT with the Ad Blocking blocking. etc

This is all a reaction to the end of cheap money, aka the cost of capital is going up, so companies need to actually make revenue instead of chasing free capital

>>I don't think this high interest rate environment will last that long

There is no indication this true, most likely the "new normal" is going to be on the order of rates before the 2008 housing crash, not going back to the insanity of 0-1% fed rates...

[partiallypro]

Reddit over hired and is doing other stupid pricing models because they want to IPO, they filed confidential paperwork for an IPO last year. Twitter has been unprofitable since before Musk, and Musk's actions drove their revenue into the ground. Those aren't related to higher interest rates. What other examples do you have? Reddit and Twitter are bad examples.

> There is no indication this true, most likely the "new normal" is going to be on the order of rates before the 2008 housing crash, not going back to the insanity of 0-1% fed rates...

There's no indication that your statement is true either, I think in a 5-10 year span we'll have lower rates simply because virtually every economy is in population decline. In any case, the Twitter and Reddit flubs weren't due to higher interest rates. SVB was, this isn't.

[mlyle]

They're not perfect examples. But what they're saying is:

* High returns from interest means the cost of capital is higher. Comparable safe investments return more, so investors demand more of a return from a riskier one.

* As a result, a lot fewer venture investments make sense with the higher discount rate.

* Companies cannot count on going back to the venture till, so high volatility strategies of chase-IPO-now or monetize-now are increasingly employed.

* Similarly, public companies desperately seek better fundamentals now, because future revenues are discounted so much in investors' opinions.

* As a result, a lot of companies enshittify, going after short term wins that risk the entire company's reputation..

As to the interest rate environment: the Fed has suggested a couple more interest rate hikes are likely later this year. It is likely to take quite awhile to walk rates down after inflationary pressures reduce. Current market prices imply rates will stay relatively high for the next few years.

No one really knows what an aging, contracting population will do to the interest rate environment. It's likely governments will have to borrow a bunch more, which can push up rates... And older workers seem to be more productive than models expected, which adds further upward rate pressure.

[troupo]

> Explain just about all platforms doing revenue adjusting user hostile actions then? Examples include Reddit with the API fees

Bad example. Reddit actions (and Twitter actions) are definitely not due any user hostile actions.

> YT with the Ad Blocking blocking.

This one may be has some merit to it, but we only have Google's word for it, and Google itself doesn't seem to be hurting because of all the bad-no-good ad blocking. Is Youtube hurting? No idea.

[phpisthebest]

>Bad example. Reddit actions (and Twitter actions) are definitely not due any user hostile actions.

The actions are hostile to the users.. Twitter, Reddit, and YT (and others) have changed policies in a way to maximum revenue at the expensive of the users of the platforms.

[gmerc]

It’s price perception shaping. Hey investors look how much we are charging for APIs, that’s how valuable our data is. Can I haz some money

[berkes]

If it truly is "the end of cheap money" (which I believe is the root cause) we can clearly see which management is competent, and which just flailing aimlessly.

"When the tide goes out, you see who's been swimming naked."

[oska]

> he just tweeted recently a reply to a Tweet saying Islam would take over France

Really should provide a source when stating things like this, as many will want to check out for themselves exactly what was said.

I went and found the tweet that I assume is being referenced. It's here :

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1675205751902486529

Elon says "He is right". So he is referencing the Imam in the video of the tweet he is replying to (not the tweeter, who appears to be female). The video of the Imam's speech has subtitles, so you can see what Elon is saying 'is right'.

[slawton3]

It's even funnier when Elon confirmed that scrolling through a tweet counts as a read.

[oneeyedpigeon]

Isn't that obvious though? What else would count as a read?

[blowski]

Yes it's obvious, but it's so bizarre that I assumed the title had to be clickbait or poorly written. But no, it's absolutely correct.

[codezero]

having worked on products where analytics matter, it's important to be specific about behavior of those who use your products, and a better metric would be related to lingering, did you stop scrolling and if there are many tweets in this feed where you stopped, did you move your mouse towards one of those tweets? was your lingering intentional or related to inattention? It's important to develop an understanding of which in the list is the one you are lingering on (or what even is that list). It's important for behavior monitoring but also to make sure you are serving ads in a way that aligns with attention (assuming you run an ad supported platform, like Twitter) and that you can have accurate measurements for ad impressions (scrolling past an add without even stopping shouldn't cost an advertiser more than the base cost of the ad, and should cost more if someone lingers for even a half second.)

Other random ideas for what you would consider counted? you replied, you liked, you clicked a link through the tweet, you expanded a shortened version of a long tweet. There are so many ways to determine "read" and assuming it's always the naive "it was served" is like building a business based off of page views and not actual engagement.

[KnobbleMcKnees]

It's impossible to know for real if someone has read a tweet -especially on Twitter where several tweets appear on the screen at once - however "dwell time" is a common measurement that is usually enough to appease marketers.

In this case it doesn't matter though because the aim is to mitigate cost, so equating an impression with engagement is fine.

[x86x87]

Stop complaining or it's going to be 600 characters or less! Including the headers for your requests! /s

[6510]

O noes, not the headers!

[x86x87]

Taps head...ers! This is how you make money!

[mrtksn]

What I wonder is, how people who paid for verified account feel about it? First you pay for the reach(more features and priority to display) and then your followers or those who are supposed to reached need to pay to read your content. Some people are actually paying non trivial amounts for business accounts.

Normally I'm inclined to think that Musk is a great product person but this one move seems like a jerk reaction to some numbers not meeting expectations and designing a product to improve numbers without thinking about how the product actually works.

[rsync]

rsync.net has a verified (gold star ?) account which we neither asked for nor paid for. I think it comes with having an advertising balance ?

Interestingly, we have had (for the first time in years) decent advertising traction on Twitter in the first half of 2023 and I was planning on expanding that.

Advertising a product like ours has been very difficult because the venn diagram of "people who understand rsync.net" and "people who don't use an adblocker* has a very tiny overlap.

So between suspending our reddit promotions due to the dysfunction there and seeing some (very marginal) success with Twitter ads called into question I suspect we're headed back to square one ...

[timwis]

Hi! I’m one of the people who fall in the middle of the Venn diagram, and just wanted to let you know I was reading your website and the menu hamburger button doesn’t seem to work on my iPhone 14 on Safari or Firefox, so I couldn’t get to the pricing page etc. I’ll take a note to read it when I’m on my desktop but just wanted to pass it along.

[kxrm]

> iPhone 14 on Safari or Firefox

Rendering engine is all Safari on iPhone, so trying another brand of browser won't help with rendering issues.

[ismokedoinks]

I've just been googling "Damian Lillard" every 5 minutes I don't know what to do with myself

[sp332]

https://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/37852244/nba-free-agency... has very rapid updates.

[esskay]

I managed to hit the limit during the F1 sprint race as theres a ton of threaded comments for that. Genius level move on how to screw up your own business.

[Kye]

An account on an ESPN Mastodon instance that comes with and logs in with that Disney+/Hulu/ESPN bundle would probably be popular. Doesn't even have to federate.

[tomjakubowski]

bah gawd that's RSS's music

[Kye]

Based on the post I replied to, it sounds like realtime updates are an important feature. All the accounts would have RSS feeds if someone wanted it in that format.

[freewizard]

There will be cost and consequence of moderation, with very limited benefit given its content subscription model.

[Kye]

I was thinking read/boost-only for all but select users, like sports celebrities.

[fotta]

FWIW I turned on notifications for Woj and Shams and I’m still getting them even though I’m rated limited too.

[william-]

'Likes' tab on a profile also appears to be unaffected by rate-limit as well.

[seydor]

Tesla keeps going up

[revscat]

And what is Musk’s attention primarily directed at these days?

[phpisthebest]

>>We are basically in the middle of watching someone flush 44 billion down the drain.

Odd statement given that Fidelity just cut its valuation of reddit, but increased it valuation of Twitter.

[WJW]

> The Fidelity Blue Chip Growth Fund has reduced the market value of its equity stake in Twitter for a third time, now putting it at $6.55 million. That’s down from the nearly $20 million the Fidelity fund valued its stake at in October.

From today, according to https://apnews.com/article/twitter-fidelity-musk-value-08c64.... It doesn't sound like it increased its valuation of twitter in any way tbh.

[phpisthebest]

TIL that June 1st is "today" July 1st...

In reality that was a month ago, and on June 30th they increased the value

https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/30/fidelity-deepens-valuation...

[tyrust]

> The financial giant also readjusted the value of its holding in Twitter to $6.86 million, up from $6.55 million from a month prior, but still down 65% since the original investment.

Still significantly down.