[FormerBandmate]

YouTube and Hulu did it very successfully. Twitter has just done it in a really stupid way, because their management values politics over the actual business of running a social media platform (moreso now than before, but still very much before)

[DeathArrow]

X switches to subscription exactly because politics forces them to, by trying to scare and shame advertisers.

Once subscription revenue is enough, scare and shame won't work and politics won't have anything to do with the future of the business.

[altacc]

Complaining about the advertisers leaving X is true "leopards ate my face".

Politics has been a significant part of Twitter's success, driving relevance & audience size. Politics was fuel for growth and Twitter was influential partially because of it's openness. The moderation was there because being a relatively balanced & hate free spare without too much controversy was essential for the majority of advertisers.

To reverse those parameters and turn it into a walled garden of Musk-like right wing edge lords that increasingly promotes right wing edge lord content that significantly reduces its safety for advertisers and then complaining that it's purely down to other people making the advertisers flee requires some major cognitive dissonance or a very blinkered world view.

Musk's aim for X.com is to make it an everything app, which is obviously impossible if it does not appeal to almost everyone. As an owner he has every right to make it into a smaller, politically homogeneous message board but he shouldn't simultaneously complain about the very obvious & easily predicted effects of that.

[pharmakom]

Elon could have bought 4chan and saved himself a bunch of time and money.

[wegfawefgawefg]

im sure that sort of stuff is on there, but all the stuff my friends and i see on there is memes, and Id guess thats representative of most of the 20s age userbase. We didnt notice any change during the buyout or rebrand except some different meme recommendations for a bit.

There are a lot more ads between my memes now though. It hit a critical density where we dont use it anymore. 40% ads

[StreetChief]

So to summarize, you have stopped using twitter because of ad increases since elon took over?

[wegfawefgawefg]

I have a very low tolerance for ads. I mostly dont use it anymore. Id say five of the ten in the group stopped altogethor. That was in the past three or four months or so where the density really really increased.

That does differ from what people are saying which is that somehow elon lost all the ad companies support and so is unable to serve ads, or that twitter is an alt right cesspool.

The only political tweets we ever saw were elons, and hes 52 and we are from texas, so it just seemed like normal old people stuff.

[moomin]

I’m not sure you understand what advertising cares about. They care about reach and brand value, both of which have dropped for Twitter. “Politics” is a component of brand value, but it’s got nothing to do with reach, which is falling through the floor.

But equally “politics” doesn’t explain the drip in brand value, either. The FIFA World Cup has _dreadful_ politics, advertisers don’t care because it’s still a great brand with a huge reach.

Musk is rich and connected enough to be able to ignore commercial reality for a basically unlimited amount of time, but I seem to recall you were arguing elsewhere on this thread that company owners should only care about the money a company makes.

[DeathArrow]

> “Politics” is a component of brand value, but it’s got nothing to do with reach, which is falling through the floor.

I think reach was falling because of political pressure.

> I seem to recall you were arguing elsewhere on this thread that company owners should only care about the money a company makes.

I was arguing that the goal of a company is to generate profit. That should be the goal. If business owners do that or don't, it's up to them. And I am not arguing that Musk does a good thing if he doesn't have the profit as the objective.

[moomin]

I'm not sure what mechanism you're ascribing to reach falling due to "political pressure". Who's exerting this pressure? On whom? Why am I still using the site despite being a dyed in the wool leftie?

You say a company should have the goal of generating profit. According to what moral imperative?

[DeathArrow]

>You say a company should have the goal of generating profit. According to what moral imperative?

According to market economy, not to a moral imperative.

[moomin]

Honestly think at this point I should recommend hbomberguy’s video on “Woke Brands”.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=06yy88tLWlg

I’ll appreciate his politics are way to the left of yours and he’s making this point for a left wing audience, but the TL;DR is: a lot of what you’re perceiving as politics here is literally the market economy acting to maximise profit.

His perspective is that _left-wing_ people shouldn’t be conned into thinking this is about anything other than profit maximisation.