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by mschuster91 807 days ago
> This sounds disanalogous to me. When you post on twitter, you can be rewarded with engagement and attention and even the possibility of growing your own brand and following.

As someone who co-runs a >>70k account: Yes, that is possible, but it's very very rare for those creating a following primarily via Twitter to actually make money with it. Maybe if you got an 0nlyfans account. Meanwhile, the content you create lures in other people and with them, eyeballs that Twitter can make money with by selling advertising time to these people.

> Meanwhile, twitter has the costs of paying for servers and infrastructure and salaries of those required to support the site

The legitimate costs required to run something like Twitter or Whatsapp can be pretty darn small. Whatsapp ran with 50 employees up until 1 billion (!) users [1]. The point is to not unfocus too much - for all the bad Musk did to Twitter, he did show that there indeed was a lot of dead weight hanging around the place, no wonder it was hemorraging money.

[1] https://blog.quastor.org/p/whatsapp-scaled-1-billion-users-5...

1 comments

> no wonder it was hemorraging money

I love how history has been rewritten such that a company that was profitable was "hemorraging money".

Now that they are actually hemorraging money under new management it is somehow a case study in profitability.

If everyone clicks their heels three times and says it - of course it will be true.

If, instead of selling a product, when one gets regular huge investments from second/third world regimes, which are in reality to pay for salaries 19K+ regional language moderators and censors, 500 programmers for censorship and related algos, but only 500 people to run the actual "freemium" product is not exactly "profitable" either...
The definition is clear and well defined, making up new definitions to justify a lie is deliberately obtuse.

profitable /ˈprɒfɪtəbl/ adjective adjective: profitable

    1.
    (of a business or activity) yielding profit or financial gain.
> I love how history has been rewritten such that a company that was profitable was "hemorraging money".

It was only profitable for 2 out of 8 years post IPO, and had 7500+ in headcount [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter,_Inc.#Finances

It went public in 2013 but seems like it only managed to turn an annual profit in 2018 and 2019, with 2020 and 2021 both back in the red before first half 2022 in the black.

So, after going public, it lost money in 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2020, and 2021.