"Good morning and new product announcement: this week we're starting to roll out Meta Verified -- a subscription service that lets you verify your account with a government ID, get a blue badge, get extra impersonation protection against accounts claiming to be you, and get direct access to customer support. This new feature is about increasing authenticity and security across our services. Meta Verified starts at $11.99 / month on web or $14.99 / month on iOS. We'll be rolling out in Australia and New Zealand this week and more countries soon."
People who say that don't want their identities prostituted. Whether or how useful it is is irrelevant. I don't want to have my identity prostituted based on the degree of how much I get in return.
I've known people with several thousand followers whose accounts get stolen ("hacked") and then they have no way to get Instagram to restore their access, so they're forced to make a new account.
I guess it'd be helpful for people like them to have dedicated support lines.
Seems to be a lazy clone of Musk policy from Twitter... Isn't it crazy that now private companies (not even in conjunction with governments that issue IDs) are selling online legitimacy?
These moves are driven by ignorant (outright) class-ism, and social media is quickly becoming a system of fraud that supports the wealthy while disabling people who don't pay. It's going to corrupt every aspect of life from news to entertainment if it hasn't already.... Trending topics used to be somewhat accurate because they were based on everyone's posts rather than just the posts of people who could afford to pay for verification. Because platforms got greedy and couldn't make platforms work with corporate sponsoring advertiser funding alone, they turn on users, the very people already working for free... This is not sustainable business. These platforms create schemes like crypto and NFT scams, info harvesting, unfair moderation, user account lockout extortion schemes, fake followers, payola promotion, ban extortion, industry plants, and many other criminal things to extort their user base. It's the modern day large-scale criminal enterprise to run a social media site.... The reason it's not obvious is because no one sees the code at work, they just see the end result of content creators.
This is really short-sighted (stupid actually) tech leadership based on profit desperation. I hope people begin to defund these large social media entities, as they are no good for anyone's progress, except for the company CEOs and Investors perhaps... Ugh.
Is this in reaction to, or because of Twitter? Many seemed yo have denounced the paid verification feature, but does this signal that it's something people will pay for?
Uber re-wrote their 1 million loc mobile app in 3 months.
How much time should it take to implement a subscription payment?
With all the respect to Facebook scale, more than 1 month would be a failure.
I'm not saying that Facebook did it because Twitter did it, but the timing of it seems more than a coincidence and they are using the same justification for doing it as Twitter.
It's quite likely that Twitter doing it successfully overcame the risk aversion that large corporations are oversupplied with.
Facebook isn’t a start up, thinks are not moving as quick as you think. The actual development probably went fast but the PM meetings, legal, etc all take a long time. I bet this has been in the works in some form since Apple’s crackdown on tracking.
The format of pages, content structure and reach of facebook, linked to real world profiles and people, means that having a verified account makes a lot more sense.
Twitter is an announcement platform. Facebook is a discussion platform. Comments, replies to comments, no content length limit, ability to upvote, etc.
Perhaps neither. The post indicates that it's rolling out in Australia first. Australia has been, for years, working toward tying social media use to authenticated identity.
Twitter went from an unprofitable business to a very unprofitable business. It may be comforting to call it a “media narrative” but facts are facts. Maybe they can somehow turn it around but I don’t see how.
Advertisers trying to reach the most number of people don’t want to associate with toxic discourse that disparages a lot of the populace. It’s about as free market as it gets.
They replaced their bill for a somewhat productive workforce with a bigger, completely unproductive interest bill. So no, Twitter didn’t become less unprofitable.
Got any financial documents about it that you'd care to share? I'm sure they'd be of interest. I was also under the impression that Musk blew a huge hole in the finances of an already marginal business, but I don't think I or anyone besides Twitter insiders actually have the numbers now.
Which part? It's public knowledge that Twitter was barely afloat before Musk. Since then most of the pumps (advertisers) keeping water out of the ship have been lost overboard.
Twitter's debt management alone is a billion dollars per month.
TBH, that is the definition of media narrative. I don't see any dollar value in the report for twitter losses. It could be that the market is flexible and those advertisers were replaced by someone else(not saying that happened, but the article is hardly proof of twitter's losses)
I think it becomes troublesome when the data is confidential and the company is private. Do we just not talk about anything when we don’t have hard data?
On the other hand, they are reporting a study that they may have even paid for and don’t actually share the details of the study. So I certainly see your point.
On the other other hand, I think the “soft” signals like Elon asking people to hit the like button for ads, or the various reports of orgs pulling their ad campaigns suggests that there is general distress. Which is what’s on my mind when I think it’s more than a “narrative,” which I tend to interpret as hand wavy “media bias” used to explain away anything that doesn’t support one’s own narrative.
By all means go ahead and inform us on the actual reality? This is what I had read:
> Overall, advertising spending by the top 30 companies fell by 42% to an estimated $53.8 million for November and December combined, according to Pathmatics, despite an increase in spending by six of them.
The next sentence of that quote is pretty illustrative.
> Pathmatics said the previously unreported figures on Twitter advertising are estimates. The firm bases its estimates on technologies that track ads on desktop browsers and the Twitter app as well as those that mimic user experience.
> But the company said those estimates do not account for deals advertisers may receive from Twitter, or promoted trends and accounts. “It is possible the spending data could be higher for some brands” if Twitter is offering incentives, Pathmatics said in an email.
It's all speculation across the board - people want musk to finally fail, and that possibility produces some delicious schadenfreude. I am in this industry, and don't trust for a second the estimates "Pathmatics" cites. Everytime I've seen these types estimates on properties where I know the real numbers, they are off significantly, in both directions.
The numbers come from comps, and some sampling of Desktop ad impressions and a twitter client. That's so far away from what the real numbers are that it's just a fuzzy guess.
That's a 4.47% decline year-over-year. Stock -15% YOY vs -5% for the SP500.
Unless they pivot soon, they're in deep trouble, with a declining user base (particularly young people) and a consistent loss in ad revenues. One big problem Meta has is they went "all in" on a VR bet, that isn't working.
In 'deep trouble' with 2 billion daily active users on each platform: Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, resulting in the stock doubling in less than 3 months of screaming about the chorus of the end of times for Meta.
I guess betting against HN is somewhat a profitable move when everyone was scared to buy the stock at $88.
What makes you say "isn't working"? VR and the Metaverse are long term bets, they're not meant to be working yet. Far too early to write off as failures.
In the last earnings call it was reported that Facebook had just broke 2 billion MAU. The user base is inclining. Meta's family of apps' MAU increased by 4% year over year.
Genius to announce this after Twitter. Musk gets all the flak and takes the weight so they can do the same thing and everyone will think it's cool as they are used to the idea and Zuckerberg is nothing special to get inflamed about as he keeps himself quiet.
Probably standard PR tactics than genius upon reflection!
In short: A subscription service that lets you verify your account with a government ID, for $11.99/month/web or $14.99/month on iOS. Support included.
If this removed ads, added more controls on what you see and what is shared/sold to 3rd party, I'd actually consider it!
But ads are not mentioned and ads are probably worth more than 12$/user/mo and.. this would probably help them track you "better".
Even if it was 20$/mo (higher than top yearly average), I'd consider it if it became a privacy service and focus shifted from the users to the product.
The problem is that people who are willing to pay $20/mo for privacy are much more valuable to advertisers than those who can't.
If those users go away, the average $/user from ads goes down, because the only people seeing ads are those who are too poor to avoid it.
To an advertiser, poor people who direct their attention towards whatever is put in front of them are worth a lot less than rich people who carefully curate what their attention is directed towards. It's grody, but that's the advertising industry for you.
Right, someone willing to regularly pay $20/month is probably worth closer to $40/month to potential advertisers.
It probably scales all the way up until $10k/month, which is near the upper limit of what super-luxury brands, that would buy ads online, can earn per customer.
So the curious implication is that such services could be 'free' or $20k/month.
But with a changing advertising market and lower budgets, FB might view the alignment of incentives more beneficial.
Counterpoint, the main demographic for this already uses ad/tracker blockers. I'm sure Meta has some ways around that but getting that $20/month is much easier from a willing participant.
The lack of ad blockers on mobile is the real sweet spot. I pay for Youtube 100% to use it on mobile/ipad without ads. So even ad-blocking privacy people still see lots of ads if they use these apps.
Firefox on iOS isn't really Firefox, Apple doesn't allow that. It's a thin skin around the platform-provided web view, essentially Safari. This really limits what Mozilla can support on iOS.
Firefox's usage rate on Android is tiny, among that I doubt even >10-25% know you can install an adblocker (which is generous but they are probably more technical). And I use iOS on mobile.
That is definitely not true. Tech workers and people who are tech savvy use ad/tracker blockers, regardless of how good of an ad target they are. They are a very small slice of consumers with excess income.
In other words, a lot of people who use ad blockers are good ad targets, but the converse is not true.
YouTube seems to make much less from ads per user. Not sure why, you'd think that video ads would be more lucrative. Maybe more people have ad blockers?
I don't think this "subscription service" is actually for the user I think it's for the advertisers. I think the fee is just a smokescreen. I imagine FB having access to something like a driver license gives them your address, height, eye color, signature, data of birth etc. I'm sure they will monetize this in all kinda of new ways. For example maybe political adds since you can target based on voter precinct, auto insurance, neighborhood demographics and of course a premium tier of "blue checkmark verified" eyeballs to advertisers.
As someone who likes to pay for things I use, I'm in the target customer/user group here. Couple of questions -
1. Is it only for FB or across all Meta services (FB, IG, WhatsApp, Oculus etc.)
2. Are ads going to be shown to verified/premium subscribers?
2nd point is particularly important. Especially if key value prop is about security and privacy. Looks like ARPU for Meta is $40 annually. So financially they can afford not to show ads to verified subscribers (annual sub of $100+). However, for verified subscribers it's only about "blue badge" I doubt there will be huge uptick unless it has other "sweetners" like "no ads" like youtube premium.
Overall - this is a great move by Meta. As it gives them ability to diversify revenue streams from ads where they are dependent on 3rd party platform privacy policies. YouTube premium has shown that social platforms can thrive with freemium model and they have roughly 80M subs ($1B+ revenue). Meta is trying to replicate same success with their brands.
YouTube Premium has a clear value prop though w/no ads—I’m still not sure what I’m getting for Meta Verified… a blue check? Direct support if I (probably won’t) need it?
Twitter Blue now allows for longer tweets, and there is (or at least was) cachet around having a checkmark, so there is some cultural heritage there.
Blue checks on Instagram have some clout, but I’ve never heard of someone eager for verification on Facebook. Protecting against impersonation is something these platforms should be doing for free.
If this removed ads across the platforms then maybe there’d be value in this, but I really just don’t understand who this is for or why anyone would pay $100+/year.
It's cute, but the joke's on them: I don't really use Facebook for anything but marketplace these days. Cutting social media use has been a great boost for my mental health.
I’ve actually purchased a number of things through instagram ads, so I would say that they are getting better. Now I can also say I have been disappointed by the quality of some of the stuff I’ve bought through ads… so now if I see something interesting I’ll google/amazon/reddit it. It at least makes me discover new types of things to buy.
$20 is a steep price to pay, but I think users who would pay to see less ads are most likely users who don’t click on ads? So from that perspective it might be a different calculus?
Also, twitter got away with half as many ads or something like this. Personally I’d pay $10 a month, but I don’t know about others.
they invented the concept of paid verification for a major social platform and everybody dunked on them, now others copy them. Kind of like when Apple removes jack port → people dunk on them → then every competitor removes it too.
Hahaha. This is actually hilarious. They won’t budge to change and innovate so instead they copy and paste what Musk did on Twitter and just leave it at “fuck it”.
My first impression of this is literally "So, maybe a good idea, but isn't this Zuckerberg just copying yet another person like he's always done forever?"
Real-Verified is the next logical step. Twitter will being following suit very soon. That said, how does this add value to Meta? Isn't this just another indication that Meta through its products sees less value in actual relationships and more in algo-driven timelines?
Snap seems to be the only social network left that is personal.
It's strange for ID verification to be presented as a subscription offering, given that it should suffice to verify it once (or for relatively long periods).
Obviously, Meta is after that sweet sweet MRR. But the consumer should recognize that they're paying for a one-time or infrequent task as if it involves ongoing effort.
From the consumer standpoint, a one-time fee makes much more sense.
I must not be the target audience for this because I can't see how paying nearly as much as Amazon Prime is worth it so I can get comment priority and a little star next to my FB account, which is friends-only anyway. If they threw something useful in, like a music or video streaming service with a decent catalog or airline miles or a discount at Target, then maybe.
I think it's a response to the incoming AI revolution.
Just because someone writes in your name and your style online won't mean it's you when ChatGPT or the next version can clone your writing style in seconds.
Being verified online is going to be more important for businesses and people as the internet degrades into the quality level of recipe sites.
> Being verified online is going to be more important for businesses and people as the internet degrades into the quality level of recipe sites.
Now someone is thinking and making sense. But I don't think this current AI cycle is anything of a 'revolution'. It is more like a pure hype and mania driven reaction over a hallucinating AI generating sophistry.
There is no breakthrough in this other than 'train it on more data and watch it go off the rails' like what we have seen with Bing AI. This is just Tay 2.0.
No breakthrough for sure, but the usability at an adequate level for almost any text or code generation, doesn't mean we need full AGI to start breaking society.
If feels like people are expecting robocop, but owning an electric table saw, KitchenAid mixer and a electric golf cart - in the year 1800 - would still be revolutionary even if those are just stupid tools.
ChatGPT is a stupid tool, but what that tool, in unskilled human hands can do, will be more revolutionary than ChatGPT becoming some self-aware robot.
I think the bigger news is they’re offering “priority customer support” for a monthly fee. Imagine if this became a trend among other big tech companies.
I believe it's already a thing with a lot of companies.
I worked at a company that had restaurant delivery app, very similar to Uber Eats / DoorDash (but not in the US). ~10% of top spenders there got priority support.
I think it might already be. A few times in the last month I've stumbled across sites with this offering when joining/subscribing (the names escape me now) and everytime I thought who would pay for that? Now you mention it clicked maybe it's a new thing?
This is an interesting sneaky way of making social media a subscription service for many, but I'd think the benefits for any business seriously using social media are probably good enough to justify the fee. That said, why offer 2 different payments for web and mobile? This just introduces too much confusion for an entirely new concept like this.
Anything that gives people some possibility of human contact in the event of a problem is a welcome baby step forward, but this isn't really good enough. If Meta screws up something with blocking/banning your account and you're not subscribed, are you still completely unable to get in touch with anybody, for any price? These are the people slipping through the gaps that I worry about.
>That said, why offer 2 different payments for web and mobile?
Mobile (Google Play, Apple App Store) takes a cut from transactions made through them. Companies don't want to lose money. Companies have been doing this for as long they could. It is not anything new.
Imagine that. No wait, lots of tech companies that have customers (i.e. one way or another directly paying for stuff) offer "priority support" (i.e. 1 on 1 with an actual human). It's expensive and eats i to your profits but it's necessary.
In an ideal world that could be nice. In practice the allure of ignoring support problems under the guise of "the automation says there's nothing we can do" is far too high, and eventually pervades all manner of tech company user accounts unless legislatively punished.
As we see with paid Google customers, business and otherwise.
I don’t really care about my Facebook account but I would absolutely pay $100+/yr to ensure I have some recourse should I ever be locked out of my gmail account.
I have heard about many gotchas that appear if an account is “upgraded” to Workspace. No longer on the happy path, so a variety of services and features no longer work the same as a free account.
tbh, I'd prefer the option of paying for support over literally no support at all, ala. Google.
If my Gmail account is compromised, I'd be pretty fucked, despite doing my best to make backup arrangements - it's still the skeleton key to the rest of my digital life and my primary point of contact for everyone who interacts with me.
I'd happily pay some small fee to have an actual human help me resolve the issue. But right now, that's not even an option.
Love or hate Elon, he could definitely have an impact on the tech industry.
In a few months he could demonstrate that you don’t need as many employees as you thought, that you don’t need the heavy handed moderation/censorship, and that you could actually charge for your services rather than being wholly dependent on advertising.
No. As I mentioned, leaving your feelings about him personally aside, he is challenging the model for social media and now having the approach cloned by the market leader.
I hated the moderations/censorship on these platforms and I dislike the adtech/tracking business model so he has my support on both of those angles.
Meta also appear to be bundling in customer support which is probably my third objection to big tech. So I’ll thank Elon for that one too.
What he has demonstrated so far is that you don't need those things if your goal is to lose money, and you can stay alive a little longer in those situations by simply ignoring several laws wholesale.
He still has yet to demonstrate any other outcomes than making twitter vastly less profitable.
You would love mastodon then. There is no censorship at all, but at the same time everyone is free to ignore you either personally or for their whole instance. Best of both worlds.
No one can stop you from finding or starting an instance with your values. Its the same kind of freedom the copy machine or the home word processor gives.
No, it doesn't let you be a prick with someone elses resources. They have no obligation to listen or amplify you.
Perhaps people's expectations of free speech are a little greedy?
You seem to be confused. No one on mastodon can stop you from speaking. They can just choose not to listen. Censorship would be stopping you from speaking. As long as you're not breaking any laws, no one is going to shut you down and prevent you from being on the network (eg, your hosting company shutting you down). All you stand to lose is a generous system administrator doing the work of staying online for you for free.
Is free speech in your mind something someone automatically has obligation to share? Thats forced, not free.
With 40 billion dollars on the line? I think it’d make more sense to think through things and evolve it over time rather than shooting from the hip constantly. Morale at Twitter must be even lower than Amazon at this point.
There's probably some pyschopaths that enjoy the chaos and power vacuums.
There are a lot that don't want to be there. A lot returned out of necessity. Mostly from h1b visa stuff and avoiding being deported. Or getting a new job isn't as easy right now as some think it is. Teams are tiny so people are over worked and elon is making demands that require people to over work and do things immediately.
To my understanding most people there are moreso hanging on because either they have nothing else lined up or because their H1B visa is going to be automatically revoked if they quit Twitter, which would force them out of the country with no grace period.
Reports from inside the company suggest a rather grim attitude. Musk has fired several engineers, even those directly aligned with his vision for the site, often over fairly minor errors and mistakes. There's no sense of loyalty to either the company, the product, the boss or even the vision, Musk has basically eroded all of that.
Musk has been treating the employees as completely expendable. He fired one of his last two principal engineers for daring to suggest that the reason he had less views was just because people weren't into his antics anymore. Then he forced 80 employees off of their current tasks just after the Superbowl to artificially boost his own priority in the algorithm over the weekend because Joe Biden got more views on his Superbowl tweet than Musk did.
I gave an example of someone who doesn't need an H1B visa and who has been involved in the tech scene for a long time. Someone who could likely get another job relatively easy.
People want to find doom and gloom, but the reality is that if Musk wants priorities changed, he is the boss and should be able to do so. 'Forced' is a pretty strong word given that he's paying their salaries and people should be able to switch tasks if the boss wants it.
Well sure. Musk risked a lot more than that and almost lost Tesla on the Model3 ramp. He risked a lot more than that on reusable rockets, he's risking a lot more than that on Starlink & Starship.
If you want to do something extremely impactful, you've gotta take big risks.
Playing the safe game is pretty mundane and boring, and to be honest it's not a very exciting way to live, and not a very fast way to improve something.
Twitter had many profitable quarters before Musk bought it, and lots of cash on hand with a lot of runway. It was not dying in any meaningful sense. His changes have only destroyed profitability by substantially reducing advertising revenue.
The company had some profitable years pre-covid, and Elon's first action was to nearly double their debt _and_ slash their income.
He may have done far worse things as well but that depends on your opinion of his product/feature changes. But the additional debt he has saddled them with and the revenue he deprived Twitter of aren't really arguable, and his attempts to cut costs by short term slash and burns don't make anywhere near the dent needed to offset them.
He may very well prove that you can make a social media service more profitable by making it more harmful to users and damaging to the community in general.
I'm not sure selling sausages made out of sawdust is a big win or even that interesting of a business solution. It's a short-cut that most companies could take if they were to chuck their ethics out of the window (and possibly be willing to break the law).
But if it makes money a large swath of the tech industry will hail it as an innovation and follow suit. Which is kind of sad. And also, at the end of the day, why we need laws against selling sausages made out of sawdust.
> He may very well prove that you can make a social media service more profitable by making it more harmful to users and damaging to the community in general.
By removing the very politically-biased censorship he already did a very healthy move for the whole world.
The first link is just straight speculation and bad reporting as it shows the authors disdain and bias for the subject matter. The second link is even worse beginning with an editorialization of “thin skinned” the whole rest of the article is moot. We can’t know if any of it is accurate if the author starts off with such bias against the very subject of the article. The third link has nothing to do with Elon. It’s a low profile block of an account that was breaking multiple laws. Not sure what you expect there.
He did but we see both the liberal and autocratic governments of the world lament that they wish Elon would be open to government censorship. Now, some people don’t want to have this be acknowledged but it’s what we’re seeing.
People are actually going to start arguing that Twitter and other social media were healthy up until he bought Twitter just to spite bad meme man, aren't they?
> He may very well prove that you can make a social media service more profitable
I'm not sure that anyone should be looking at Twitter and thinking, "this is a good strategy for making things more profitable." Is Twitter making more money? They were already losing money before, and my understanding is that post-transition a bad situation has turned into a crisis.
What are the odds that Twitter ends up being seen as something to emulate in business and not as a cautionary tale? I mean, never say never, but the impression I've gotten about Twitter's financial prospects is not optimistic.
I think Elon started the ‘disk defragmentation’ process for employee efficiency and other companies are seeing the benefit. There is a lot of slack in tech companies. When staff have time to unironically have video shorts on how pampered they are and how little work they get to do, there is a lot of ‘defragmentation’ opportunities.
Companies were afraid to be first but Elon plus the new malaise economy gives them the right condition to follow suit and start it.
The most unexpected angle to me was how people who just do their job become the prime targets to get rid of. If you want promotion or simply for people to stop laughing at you behind your back you have to drop your productivity way way down to average - ideally below.
Those companies haven't really trimmed back to even where they were at the start of 2022 yet. They over hired a little, but nobody is going to cut 50% or more like Musk did. Those useless moonshot products they're "wasting money" on sometimes turn out to be the next ChatGPT. Of course, ChatGPT is a bit of empty hype, but there is an enormous amount of money to be made. Can you imagine if Google just had nothing like that ready because they were too afraid to accidentally over hire?
FB was losing money due to Apple clamping down on privacy policy. It should not surprise anyone that FB would look for different revenue stream. IMHO FB had no choice, and I wouldn't be surprised if their introduce other paid products.
I wish FB would have a free verification service so everyone can be verified...so when I look through comments I can filter by such.
Not sure your point...if I lost 20% of my salary I'm gonna find a way to make more money which may include changing employer. If you don't mind parting with a 20% loss every year, I'll let you know where to venmo me some money.
Too early to tell any of those things. The layoffs on sales might make the business worse in the mid term. The layoffs on product and engineering might make the product worse, even obsolete in the mid term. There is absolutely no way to tell if light handed moderation will work. There is no way to know if the service revenue makes any difference compared to ad revenue.
You are wishful thinking the best case scenario for Musk decisions. It is just as likely, in my opinion, that in a year or two the worst scenario will be the outcome of Musk tenure.
The worst case scenario, in my view, is something like the revenue never recovering to pre-acquisition levels (which weren’t great already), the product not having any significantly valuable new feature, and suffering from long outages and ended up being sold for ~$10bi.
Overstaffing a company doesn't mean it makes great products too, it tends to create more bureaucracy, deep hierarchy structure, and pointless products (some companies putting more effort on these products then focusing on their best ones...).
It's extremely difficult to find the right balance, almost impossible when the company is sky rocketing, like Twitter was.
Trying to analyze it from a business man perspective, I see that Elon's trying to find that balance and I see that as positive. He can be wrong, things can go wrong, but sometimes you must make this kind of decision, take the consequences, and adjust to fix what you broke.
Or … none of those could end up being true. I remember a lot of projection about how Elon was going to restore Twitter to the ‘early days’, and none of that has come to pass either.
I’d rather judge on things that have actually happened than have to deal with a new set of forward looking projections about what could happen every few months.
I remember having a bit of hope that an easy win could be he making changes to regain trust from developers and make Twitter a more dynamic platform with a more open API. Turns out, he did exactly the opposite and led to even more distrust from third party developers.
It adds nothing to reply to someone saying that the changes at twitter could be good and influential by saying "but they could also be bad." It's already implied in the could.
> I’d rather judge on things that have actually happened than have to deal with a new set of forward looking projections about what could happen every few months.
If you're leaving all prediction and forecasting to other people, why complain when they do it?
I'm not pointing out that they could be bad — I'm pointing out that there's a good track record of them not happening at all, particularly when it comes to Musk.
That's a really good question that I think is also too early to see. Certainly Twitter lost a lot of developer confidence, I think people's perception of the service has changed. But does that matter? I'm not sure.
A bunch of 3rd-party devs jumped ship, and it's tempting to say "they'll remember that" if Twitter tries to lure them back,but we don't know yet if that's true or not. A bunch of advertisers jumped ship, but they could come back. The cost is that users look at these decisions and trust the platform less.
But we don't know the cost of that cost, if that makes any sense. We don't know if this ends up sparking a death spiral or if everyone complains about the decisions and then forgets about it by the end of 2023.
He also exposed that radical leftists executives were colluding with US govt to promote propaganda, censor topics and fundamentally manipulate election outcomes, through established journalists.
There has been light to no coverage from mainstream press as it doesn't advance the left's current agenda.
The “exposure” has been underwhelming, with plenty of evidence that twitter fulfilled the wishes of republicans, including modifying their own moderation policy wrt xenophobia to accommodate Trump tweets.
he's not the first to even do this... Snapchat added a premium tier with actual (small) perks way ahead of others, and they have 2.5M subs for it. telegram did it too. People only focus on musk cause he's loud but he's following the trends of the industry, he's not inventing the ideas from thin air. Remember when he said he'd make twitter a "super app"? kinda like how IG, wechat, Snapchat and others have been for a while.
>In a few months he could demonstrate that you don’t need as many employees as you thought
Fact: The site has repeatedly had significant technical issues since he took over, with repeated down time, massive waves of complaints from top users about flakey behaviour.
Fiction:
> that you don’t need the heavy handed moderation/censorship
Fact: His first move at Twitter resulted in a collapse in ad revenue and massive stock market shocks for companies as impersonators announced new policies on the platform. Since then he has taken far more overarching, far more capricious, moderation decisions than the previous management.
Fiction:
>and that you could actually charge for your services rather than being wholly dependent on advertising.
Fact: Twitter revenue is in freefall. The revenue from Twitter Blue is entirely inconsequential and the loss of ad revenue has completely eclipsed it. It is an open secret Musk is fundraising to cover his enormous losses.
I think this tells us one very clear thing that we've known about the industry for a while. It operates on vibes not facts. Does everyone love the idea of a subscription based model rather than Ads? Sure! People were talking about that for years before Musk turned up. Does that mean Musk has succeeded? Fuck no! He's made an absolute mess of it. Welcome to Twitter Blue, perks include everyone on twitter thinking you're a mug for paying Elon Musk $8 for your brand new blue badge.
I have heard through the grapevine that a lot of companies in SF/SV were hoarding employees they did not need to prevent competitors from getting them. Elon Era Twitter seems like a confirmation of that (or at least a data point).
A lot of people thought Twitter would collapse immediately due to all the cuts. Granted, as you wrote, it isn't as good as it was, so he probably cut too much.
Again, it's been a theory for a long time that top companies like Google were hoarding talent, but there just isn't any evidence for it. Not least, because if that were the plan Google is doing a shockingly poor job of it. People are getting confused by the timing, but two things happened. 1: Elon Musk got angry that the Babylon Bee got kicked off twitter and became so online that he burnt $45Bn pursuing an unhinged vendetta. Separately to that interest rates suddenly went from a historic low to shooting up - the result being these high growth companies saw their forward returns crushed and their stock values cut in half, so the equation of "invest for growth" vs. "Return cash" tipped massively. It's easy to conflate these two things, but they really have nothing to do with each other, it just so happened that Musk managed to time it incredibly badly. Big Tech is responding to macro trends, Elon Musk is personally accusing his own employees of being pedophiles, there's a slight difference.
>>In a few months he could demonstrate that you don’t need as many employees as you thought
The notifications feature on Android App is already broken and hasn't been fixed since like eternity now. Messenger notifications don't show up either. It takes hours, at times even days for the notifications to show up. There are times when the messages are not properly ordered. They just removed 2FA. Messaging was a nice way to talk to people of common interests, and that's barely working these days.
The app/website are randomly down and you often have to scream on Twitter to get it up and running.
Nothing is really working in Twitter at this point in time, It could get fixed eventually but the strategy has clearly backfired.
Perhaps people underestimate what sort of effort it takes to run operations of that magnitude. If you have a $50 billion site. It is not really a bad idea to pay a few people to keep something like notifications and messenger running. The sheer amount of losses in terms of user trust, experience and eventually money numbers themselves would far exceed expenses paid in salaries.
Why would that merit a recurring charge? In other words, what ongoing expense is incurred by the company to display a particular icon next to your name?
You know I hope this is the start of finally normalizing paid subscriptions for social networks, because it means eventually someone may try to build a social network funded purely by subscriptions rather than ads, and then we might finally have simple timelines again that aren’t focused on maximizing user views and retention through algorithms. The result can be a less enraging and addicting experience for users.
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[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 386 ms ] threadSometime ago it was "if it's free, you are the product". Let's change that to "you are always the product".
I guess it'd be helpful for people like them to have dedicated support lines.
https://www.indy100.com/viral/only-fans-sex-facebook-employe...
(I think it's if you run a page with over a certain number of followers or something)
These moves are driven by ignorant (outright) class-ism, and social media is quickly becoming a system of fraud that supports the wealthy while disabling people who don't pay. It's going to corrupt every aspect of life from news to entertainment if it hasn't already.... Trending topics used to be somewhat accurate because they were based on everyone's posts rather than just the posts of people who could afford to pay for verification. Because platforms got greedy and couldn't make platforms work with corporate sponsoring advertiser funding alone, they turn on users, the very people already working for free... This is not sustainable business. These platforms create schemes like crypto and NFT scams, info harvesting, unfair moderation, user account lockout extortion schemes, fake followers, payola promotion, ban extortion, industry plants, and many other criminal things to extort their user base. It's the modern day large-scale criminal enterprise to run a social media site.... The reason it's not obvious is because no one sees the code at work, they just see the end result of content creators.
This is really short-sighted (stupid actually) tech leadership based on profit desperation. I hope people begin to defund these large social media entities, as they are no good for anyone's progress, except for the company CEOs and Investors perhaps... Ugh.
How much time should it take to implement a subscription payment?
With all the respect to Facebook scale, more than 1 month would be a failure.
I'm not saying that Facebook did it because Twitter did it, but the timing of it seems more than a coincidence and they are using the same justification for doing it as Twitter.
It's quite likely that Twitter doing it successfully overcame the risk aversion that large corporations are oversupplied with.
https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/uber-app-rewrite-yolo/
Twitter is an announcement platform. Facebook is a discussion platform. Comments, replies to comments, no content length limit, ability to upvote, etc.
Imagine paying for this...
Facebook… apparently.
Edit: 625 out of 1000 top companies advertising in sept weren't advertising in first weeks of Jan.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/10/tech/twitter-top-advertiser-d...
Threatening your customers[0] in the process is probably also not a winning formula.
[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-name-shame-adverti...
Twitter's debt management alone is a billion dollars per month.
https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2023/02/10/tech/twitter-top-advertis...
On the other hand, they are reporting a study that they may have even paid for and don’t actually share the details of the study. So I certainly see your point.
On the other other hand, I think the “soft” signals like Elon asking people to hit the like button for ads, or the various reports of orgs pulling their ad campaigns suggests that there is general distress. Which is what’s on my mind when I think it’s more than a “narrative,” which I tend to interpret as hand wavy “media bias” used to explain away anything that doesn’t support one’s own narrative.
> Overall, advertising spending by the top 30 companies fell by 42% to an estimated $53.8 million for November and December combined, according to Pathmatics, despite an increase in spending by six of them.
Is that inaccurate and if so, why?
> Pathmatics said the previously unreported figures on Twitter advertising are estimates. The firm bases its estimates on technologies that track ads on desktop browsers and the Twitter app as well as those that mimic user experience.
> But the company said those estimates do not account for deals advertisers may receive from Twitter, or promoted trends and accounts. “It is possible the spending data could be higher for some brands” if Twitter is offering incentives, Pathmatics said in an email.
It's all speculation across the board - people want musk to finally fail, and that possibility produces some delicious schadenfreude. I am in this industry, and don't trust for a second the estimates "Pathmatics" cites. Everytime I've seen these types estimates on properties where I know the real numbers, they are off significantly, in both directions.
The numbers come from comps, and some sampling of Desktop ad impressions and a twitter client. That's so far away from what the real numbers are that it's just a fuzzy guess.
1 - https://www.euronews.com/next/2023/01/19/twitter-musk-consum....
They've made a massive gamble on pivoting to VR to save them from irrelevance but that seemingly has already flopped.
$120B in revenue, $20B in profit last year
Unless they pivot soon, they're in deep trouble, with a declining user base (particularly young people) and a consistent loss in ad revenues. One big problem Meta has is they went "all in" on a VR bet, that isn't working.
In 'deep trouble' with 2 billion daily active users on each platform: Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, resulting in the stock doubling in less than 3 months of screaming about the chorus of the end of times for Meta.
I guess betting against HN is somewhat a profitable move when everyone was scared to buy the stock at $88.
user base is growing 1.75% YoY
In the last earnings call it was reported that Facebook had just broke 2 billion MAU. The user base is inclining. Meta's family of apps' MAU increased by 4% year over year.
Stock price has little to do with company financial health.
Now that they are coming back a closer to normal, providing normal services start to make a bit more sense for companies.
Probably standard PR tactics than genius upon reflection!
Although I do wonder if this is the opening salvo in sending "Facebook: it's free and always will be" the same way as Google's "don't be evil"...
So it begins....
If this removed ads, added more controls on what you see and what is shared/sold to 3rd party, I'd actually consider it!
But ads are not mentioned and ads are probably worth more than 12$/user/mo and.. this would probably help them track you "better".
And then there's the problem that the users most likely to pay are more valuable than average to advertise to.
[1] Worldwide quarterly ARPU x4: https://www.statista.com/statistics/251328/facebooks-average...
If those users go away, the average $/user from ads goes down, because the only people seeing ads are those who are too poor to avoid it.
To an advertiser, poor people who direct their attention towards whatever is put in front of them are worth a lot less than rich people who carefully curate what their attention is directed towards. It's grody, but that's the advertising industry for you.
It probably scales all the way up until $10k/month, which is near the upper limit of what super-luxury brands, that would buy ads online, can earn per customer.
So the curious implication is that such services could be 'free' or $20k/month.
But with a changing advertising market and lower budgets, FB might view the alignment of incentives more beneficial.
Interesting, firefox on my iphone mobile[0] does not allow this...
[0] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/add-ons-firefox-ios
In a similar vein, the world does not lack ICE cars because a minority of them are electric.
In other words, a lot of people who use ad blockers are good ad targets, but the converse is not true.
There's a reason their products are so engaging and sticky—they're enjoyable to use!
And they'd be significantly more enjoyable if you didn't have the Eye of Sauron watching you and trying to manipulate you at all times.
I'd pay considerably for that.
1. Is it only for FB or across all Meta services (FB, IG, WhatsApp, Oculus etc.) 2. Are ads going to be shown to verified/premium subscribers?
2nd point is particularly important. Especially if key value prop is about security and privacy. Looks like ARPU for Meta is $40 annually. So financially they can afford not to show ads to verified subscribers (annual sub of $100+). However, for verified subscribers it's only about "blue badge" I doubt there will be huge uptick unless it has other "sweetners" like "no ads" like youtube premium.
Overall - this is a great move by Meta. As it gives them ability to diversify revenue streams from ads where they are dependent on 3rd party platform privacy policies. YouTube premium has shown that social platforms can thrive with freemium model and they have roughly 80M subs ($1B+ revenue). Meta is trying to replicate same success with their brands.
Twitter Blue now allows for longer tweets, and there is (or at least was) cachet around having a checkmark, so there is some cultural heritage there.
Blue checks on Instagram have some clout, but I’ve never heard of someone eager for verification on Facebook. Protecting against impersonation is something these platforms should be doing for free.
If this removed ads across the platforms then maybe there’d be value in this, but I really just don’t understand who this is for or why anyone would pay $100+/year.
Then I remember my account is blocked because I failed at the opportunity to do this for free.
If it targeted normal users like me (I pay for twitter blue, for example) then it would let me do things like:
- set chronological newsfeed
- see less or no ads
That’s it. That’s enough to get me to pay
Is it worth $20 / month to get no ads and a chronological feed?
Also, twitter got away with half as many ads or something like this. Personally I’d pay $10 a month, but I don’t know about others.
Obviously, Meta is after that sweet sweet MRR. But the consumer should recognize that they're paying for a one-time or infrequent task as if it involves ongoing effort.
From the consumer standpoint, a one-time fee makes much more sense.
Maybe the logic with paying goes that, if you loose access to the account for any reason - you can just stop paying and it will no longer be verified.
I must not be the target audience for this because I can't see how paying nearly as much as Amazon Prime is worth it so I can get comment priority and a little star next to my FB account, which is friends-only anyway. If they threw something useful in, like a music or video streaming service with a decent catalog or airline miles or a discount at Target, then maybe.
Just because someone writes in your name and your style online won't mean it's you when ChatGPT or the next version can clone your writing style in seconds.
Being verified online is going to be more important for businesses and people as the internet degrades into the quality level of recipe sites.
Now someone is thinking and making sense. But I don't think this current AI cycle is anything of a 'revolution'. It is more like a pure hype and mania driven reaction over a hallucinating AI generating sophistry.
There is no breakthrough in this other than 'train it on more data and watch it go off the rails' like what we have seen with Bing AI. This is just Tay 2.0.
If feels like people are expecting robocop, but owning an electric table saw, KitchenAid mixer and a electric golf cart - in the year 1800 - would still be revolutionary even if those are just stupid tools.
ChatGPT is a stupid tool, but what that tool, in unskilled human hands can do, will be more revolutionary than ChatGPT becoming some self-aware robot.
I worked at a company that had restaurant delivery app, very similar to Uber Eats / DoorDash (but not in the US). ~10% of top spenders there got priority support.
Anything that gives people some possibility of human contact in the event of a problem is a welcome baby step forward, but this isn't really good enough. If Meta screws up something with blocking/banning your account and you're not subscribed, are you still completely unable to get in touch with anybody, for any price? These are the people slipping through the gaps that I worry about.
Mobile (Google Play, Apple App Store) takes a cut from transactions made through them. Companies don't want to lose money. Companies have been doing this for as long they could. It is not anything new.
https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answ...
As we see with paid Google customers, business and otherwise.
If my Gmail account is compromised, I'd be pretty fucked, despite doing my best to make backup arrangements - it's still the skeleton key to the rest of my digital life and my primary point of contact for everyone who interacts with me.
I'd happily pay some small fee to have an actual human help me resolve the issue. But right now, that's not even an option.
In a few months he could demonstrate that you don’t need as many employees as you thought, that you don’t need the heavy handed moderation/censorship, and that you could actually charge for your services rather than being wholly dependent on advertising.
All positive developments for the industry IMO.
I hated the moderations/censorship on these platforms and I dislike the adtech/tracking business model so he has my support on both of those angles.
Meta also appear to be bundling in customer support which is probably my third objection to big tech. So I’ll thank Elon for that one too.
He still has yet to demonstrate any other outcomes than making twitter vastly less profitable.
No, it doesn't let you be a prick with someone elses resources. They have no obligation to listen or amplify you.
Perhaps people's expectations of free speech are a little greedy?
Thanks for confirming my point, glad you agree.
Is free speech in your mind something someone automatically has obligation to share? Thats forced, not free.
Yes, I can write what I want in my personal word editor but quite obviously that's not the topic at hand in a discussion on social networks.
Personally, I'd rather try something and have it not work out and learn the lessons than sit around saying "what if" for the rest of my life.
Why would you say that though? The people who've hung on this long probably want to be there.
https://twitter.com/leahculver/status/1625961159894663169
There are a lot that don't want to be there. A lot returned out of necessity. Mostly from h1b visa stuff and avoiding being deported. Or getting a new job isn't as easy right now as some think it is. Teams are tiny so people are over worked and elon is making demands that require people to over work and do things immediately.
Reports from inside the company suggest a rather grim attitude. Musk has fired several engineers, even those directly aligned with his vision for the site, often over fairly minor errors and mistakes. There's no sense of loyalty to either the company, the product, the boss or even the vision, Musk has basically eroded all of that.
Musk has been treating the employees as completely expendable. He fired one of his last two principal engineers for daring to suggest that the reason he had less views was just because people weren't into his antics anymore. Then he forced 80 employees off of their current tasks just after the Superbowl to artificially boost his own priority in the algorithm over the weekend because Joe Biden got more views on his Superbowl tweet than Musk did.
People want to find doom and gloom, but the reality is that if Musk wants priorities changed, he is the boss and should be able to do so. 'Forced' is a pretty strong word given that he's paying their salaries and people should be able to switch tasks if the boss wants it.
Well sure. Musk risked a lot more than that and almost lost Tesla on the Model3 ramp. He risked a lot more than that on reusable rockets, he's risking a lot more than that on Starlink & Starship.
If you want to do something extremely impactful, you've gotta take big risks.
Playing the safe game is pretty mundane and boring, and to be honest it's not a very exciting way to live, and not a very fast way to improve something.
He may have done far worse things as well but that depends on your opinion of his product/feature changes. But the additional debt he has saddled them with and the revenue he deprived Twitter of aren't really arguable, and his attempts to cut costs by short term slash and burns don't make anywhere near the dent needed to offset them.
I don't like Musk but is this a mercy killing?
I'm not sure selling sausages made out of sawdust is a big win or even that interesting of a business solution. It's a short-cut that most companies could take if they were to chuck their ethics out of the window (and possibly be willing to break the law).
But if it makes money a large swath of the tech industry will hail it as an innovation and follow suit. Which is kind of sad. And also, at the end of the day, why we need laws against selling sausages made out of sawdust.
By removing the very politically-biased censorship he already did a very healthy move for the whole world.
About that…¹²³
¹ https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/25/23571103/elon-musk-twitte...
² https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/16/tech/musk-censors-press/index...
³ https://theintercept.com/2022/11/22/elon-musk-twitter-censor...
Unfortunately it isn't possible to have an unmoderated forum. Choosing not to moderate is still a moderation choice.
I'm not sure that anyone should be looking at Twitter and thinking, "this is a good strategy for making things more profitable." Is Twitter making more money? They were already losing money before, and my understanding is that post-transition a bad situation has turned into a crisis.
What are the odds that Twitter ends up being seen as something to emulate in business and not as a cautionary tale? I mean, never say never, but the impression I've gotten about Twitter's financial prospects is not optimistic.
Companies were afraid to be first but Elon plus the new malaise economy gives them the right condition to follow suit and start it.
I wish FB would have a free verification service so everyone can be verified...so when I look through comments I can filter by such.
You are wishful thinking the best case scenario for Musk decisions. It is just as likely, in my opinion, that in a year or two the worst scenario will be the outcome of Musk tenure.
The worst case scenario, in my view, is something like the revenue never recovering to pre-acquisition levels (which weren’t great already), the product not having any significantly valuable new feature, and suffering from long outages and ended up being sold for ~$10bi.
It's extremely difficult to find the right balance, almost impossible when the company is sky rocketing, like Twitter was.
Trying to analyze it from a business man perspective, I see that Elon's trying to find that balance and I see that as positive. He can be wrong, things can go wrong, but sometimes you must make this kind of decision, take the consequences, and adjust to fix what you broke.
I’d rather judge on things that have actually happened than have to deal with a new set of forward looking projections about what could happen every few months.
> I’d rather judge on things that have actually happened than have to deal with a new set of forward looking projections about what could happen every few months.
If you're leaving all prediction and forecasting to other people, why complain when they do it?
He's definitely made a bunch of contrarian decisions but it's too early to speculate that they could be 'impact'.
Buying a company and immediately forcing it to operate on a fraction of its prior resources is not new, btw. It's the private equity formula.
A bunch of 3rd-party devs jumped ship, and it's tempting to say "they'll remember that" if Twitter tries to lure them back,but we don't know yet if that's true or not. A bunch of advertisers jumped ship, but they could come back. The cost is that users look at these decisions and trust the platform less.
But we don't know the cost of that cost, if that makes any sense. We don't know if this ends up sparking a death spiral or if everyone complains about the decisions and then forgets about it by the end of 2023.
The headline says 180,000, but it’s close to 300,000 worldwide — which you can read before the hard paywall cuts you off.
There has been light to no coverage from mainstream press as it doesn't advance the left's current agenda.
>In a few months he could demonstrate that you don’t need as many employees as you thought
Fact: The site has repeatedly had significant technical issues since he took over, with repeated down time, massive waves of complaints from top users about flakey behaviour.
Fiction:
> that you don’t need the heavy handed moderation/censorship
Fact: His first move at Twitter resulted in a collapse in ad revenue and massive stock market shocks for companies as impersonators announced new policies on the platform. Since then he has taken far more overarching, far more capricious, moderation decisions than the previous management.
Fiction:
>and that you could actually charge for your services rather than being wholly dependent on advertising.
Fact: Twitter revenue is in freefall. The revenue from Twitter Blue is entirely inconsequential and the loss of ad revenue has completely eclipsed it. It is an open secret Musk is fundraising to cover his enormous losses.
I think this tells us one very clear thing that we've known about the industry for a while. It operates on vibes not facts. Does everyone love the idea of a subscription based model rather than Ads? Sure! People were talking about that for years before Musk turned up. Does that mean Musk has succeeded? Fuck no! He's made an absolute mess of it. Welcome to Twitter Blue, perks include everyone on twitter thinking you're a mug for paying Elon Musk $8 for your brand new blue badge.
A lot of people thought Twitter would collapse immediately due to all the cuts. Granted, as you wrote, it isn't as good as it was, so he probably cut too much.
The notifications feature on Android App is already broken and hasn't been fixed since like eternity now. Messenger notifications don't show up either. It takes hours, at times even days for the notifications to show up. There are times when the messages are not properly ordered. They just removed 2FA. Messaging was a nice way to talk to people of common interests, and that's barely working these days.
The app/website are randomly down and you often have to scream on Twitter to get it up and running.
Nothing is really working in Twitter at this point in time, It could get fixed eventually but the strategy has clearly backfired.
Perhaps people underestimate what sort of effort it takes to run operations of that magnitude. If you have a $50 billion site. It is not really a bad idea to pay a few people to keep something like notifications and messenger running. The sheer amount of losses in terms of user trust, experience and eventually money numbers themselves would far exceed expenses paid in salaries.
I've had relatives loose two account into limbo, because of this and yes - even after being "verified" on one of them.
I guess the logic is that if someone took over your account, so you're no longer you.