Government postpones decision on Cumbria coal mine AGAIN.
How serious can they pretend to be about plugging a fiscal hole, when they continue to kick the can on this project?
Whatever one's view of the rights and wrongs of the plans, announcing the opening of a new coal mine in the week the PM is at the COP meeting does seem to be rather bad optics.
The decision delay is a month. It won't be the end of the project just because of a delay.
I've no idea if they'll work, but they're more interesting ideas than charging for blue ticks. The latter in particular may utterly change Twitter's business model.
But it does seem odd that he comes out with it now. I wonder if he has fully thought it through?
Having a native Patreon-like capability could transform it completely.
I don't think charging for blue ticks was ever meant to be the end of the story.
Twitter can steal a lot of people's lunches, from Onlyfans to Substack. Integrating payments to consume content is the key.
e.g.
A perv can follow their favourite pornstar on Twitter and get "premium" access for $5 a month. Or I can read the latest Bari Weiss article by clicking through from Twitter and paying a microtransaction of $0.02 - $0.10 per article. If Twitter can take a percentage of that action, they are laughing.
The great thing about twitter is if you're a perv, you don't have to interact with the journalism, and if you're on twitter for the journalism, you don't have to be exposed (pun intended) to the porn - you just follow the creators you're interested in and pay for what you want to consume.
That is the business model going forward. Monetising content creators through subscriptions or microtransactions.
You can kiss advertisers goodbye - most payment processors too - if Twitter becomes a commercial porn site, because of the risk that they would be paying for obscene materials depicting children, distribution of obscene images to children, modern slavery, etc.
You are aware that Onlyfans exists and can be accessed via your credit card?
Twitter is already a porn site, if you look hard enough in that direction - it's a "free samples" page that directs you to an onlyfans subscription - this aspect of it just isn't being monetised by Twitter at the moment.
Yes, you can turn it into a much smaller business than Twitter after removing all the advertisers and establishing a critical dependence on the only payment processor that will touch your business. The minute you "monetise" the free activity, your service providers are participating in its encouragement - that's the problem.
Talking of which, we’re well overdue a dog picture in here
Fuck. I am against non working dogs anyway, but some look better than others. That picture I am not even sure which end of the animal it is, but if the cost of living crisis is hitting you hard I am sure the PDSA will help you having it put to sleep. Kindest thing.
But you are a big supporter of the complete waste of space that is the horse?
To be clear: it does not appear the $8/month blue checkmark actually grants you a blue checkmark. The feature is not working. The one specific feature that he had to get right https://twitter.com/edzitron/status/1588980881204838401
It's also a massive fight for not much money. $8 per month * 12 months * 400,000 blue ticks * let's say 50% compliance. That's $20m a year on a company with revenue of $5bn.
He won't get anything like that number.
The strange thing about the whole twitter saga is we are judging Musk on his first week in the job.
Twitter was stagnant and losing money for years, despite an active userbase and no serious competition (instagram doesn't do the same thing, facebook doesn't do the same thing, ticktock doesn't do the same thing etc).
It's what he does with it over the next couple of years that interests me. Number one on my list would be integrating micropayments so, say, a journalist could tweet a link to their latest substack and you could pay 2p to read it.
Facebook has been a dead platform for years, Instagram is utterly passé now. And yet nobody is piling on Zuckerberg for having the most powerful media platforms of our time and blowing it all by driving away most of the userbase with pointless algos and tweaks that make the platforms less and less desirable places to be.
I will judge Musk on where Twitter is in a year or two's time. Zoom out.
I’ve acknowledged it’s not completely impossible that he might turn the thing around. But on the evidence of his first week, he doesn’t have a clue what he’s doing. And it’s completely irrational to spend $44 bn on a platform, and then use the first week in control sacking half the talent and alienating a large part of the user base.
Your Zuck comment is an odd one; Meta has lost three quarters of its value in the last year. So yes, the market is judging him.
And yet Facebook has been dead since 2016-ish, yet it continued to spin its legs, wil-e-coyote-style, long after falling off the cliff.
Hence why I'm puzzled as to why you think my Zuck comment is an odd one. As I have said, more than once, we seem to be writing off Musk's vision for Twitter in less than a week. The rot at Facebook started years ago.
It feels to me like people want Musk to fail, either because they don't like him, or because they don't like his politics.
It's probably better to wait and see what the platform becomes in a year or two's time.
A pivot to a microtransaction/subscription based content creator platform as opposed to an ad supported one makes a lot more sense than Zuck's freaky "metaverse" pivot.
But perhaps give it more than a week before passing judgement?
As of July 2022 Facebook had just under 3 billion active users with 1.7 billion using the service on a daily basis. The idea it is dead just because teenagers with a 15 second attention span no longer see it as cool is laughable.
I'd suggest it's engagement that's the problem. I'm one of those 3 billion users, but I've not posted a goddamn thing on there since 2016. Ditto most of my friends.
It's a dead Myspace walking. Absolute ghost town. The markets have finally cottoned on to this, hence the 60% drop in value, so far.
Talking of which, we’re well overdue a dog picture in here
Fuck. I am against non working dogs anyway, but some look better than others. That picture I am not even sure which end of the animal it is, but if the cost of living crisis is hitting you hard I am sure the PDSA will help you having it put to sleep. Kindest thing.
I do have pictures of the other end, to help you put yourself straight? But perhaps I should save them for a better occasion…
I am genuinely not anxious to see what your dog's head looks like. Save it for twitter.
But perhaps give it more than a week before passing judgement?
Perhaps.
But it was obvious in less than a week that the Truss experiment was a dud.
Twitter feels the same right now
And yet it's exactly the opposite. Truss was sunk because she announced a load of policies with a hefty price tag and no apparent way to pay for them.
Musk has taken over a company that loses money and has cut useless staff - does Twitter really need an entire "ethics in AI" department, for example? - and has immediately started looking for ways to make it profitable.
Did you imagine Musk was going to take over a company losing $2m a day and go, "yup, let's keep doing that, that seems to be working?"
It feels to me like you're trying to make a comparison between Musk and Truss that really doesn't make sense.
One is an experienced businessman taking over a loss making company and seeking ways to make it profitable. The other is a completely inexperienced politician announcing enormous tax giveaways without explaining how to pay for them. But hey, you do you.
You missed out the bit about him trying for months to get out of a contract which obliged him to buy it. Having apparently not understood what 'specific performance' means. And then loading it up with debt, the interest ion which most likely accounts for the bulk of the daily losses you cite.
I don't think many people would have disputed that Twitter could be run better. The new management isn't automatically going to be an improvement, though.
What sort of profit would make sense for Musk on twitter? $4bn? $5bn? And what revenue would it need to generate? $20bn?
So how can you get $20bn in revenue? You could try charging 100m people $200 a year to be on twitter. That's if he doesn't want advertising. My guess is he would need advertising revenue as well.
To be clear: it does not appear the $8/month blue checkmark actually grants you a blue checkmark. The feature is not working. The one specific feature that he had to get right https://twitter.com/edzitron/status/1588980881204838401
It's also a massive fight for not much money. $8 per month * 12 months * 400,000 blue ticks * let's say 50% compliance. That's $20m a year on a company with revenue of $5bn.
He won't get anything like that number.
The strange thing about the whole twitter saga is we are judging Musk on his first week in the job.
Twitter was stagnant and losing money for years, despite an active userbase and no serious competition (instagram doesn't do the same thing, facebook doesn't do the same thing, ticktock doesn't do the same thing etc).
It's what he does with it over the next couple of years that interests me. Number one on my list would be integrating micropayments so, say, a journalist could tweet a link to their latest substack and you could pay 2p to read it.
Facebook has been a dead platform for years, Instagram is utterly passé now. And yet nobody is piling on Zuckerberg for having the most powerful media platforms of our time and blowing it all by driving away most of the userbase with pointless algos and tweaks that make the platforms less and less desirable places to be.
I will judge Musk on where Twitter is in a year or two's time. Zoom out.
I’ve acknowledged it’s not completely impossible that he might turn the thing around. But on the evidence of his first week, he doesn’t have a clue what he’s doing. And it’s completely irrational to spend $44 bn on a platform, and then use the first week in control sacking half the talent and alienating a large part of the user base.
Your Zuck comment is an odd one; Meta has lost three quarters of its value in the last year. So yes, the market is judging him.
And yet Facebook has been dead since 2016-ish, yet it continued to spin its legs, wil-e-coyote-style, long after falling off the cliff.
Hence why I'm puzzled as to why you think my Zuck comment is an odd one. As I have said, more than once, we seem to be writing off Musk's vision for Twitter in less than a week. The rot at Facebook started years ago.
It feels to me like people want Musk to fail, either because they don't like him, or because they don't like his politics.
It's probably better to wait and see what the platform becomes in a year or two's time.
A pivot to a microtransaction/subscription based content creator platform as opposed to an ad supported one makes a lot more sense than Zuck's freaky "metaverse" pivot.
But perhaps give it more than a week before passing judgement?
As of July 2022 Facebook had just under 3 billion active users with 1.7 billion using the service on a daily basis. The idea it is dead just because teenagers with a 15 second attention span no longer see it as cool is laughable.
I'd suggest it's engagement that's the problem. I'm one of those 3 billion users, but I've not posted a goddamn thing on there since 2016. Ditto most of my friends.
It's a dead Myspace walking. Absolute ghost town. The markets have finally cottoned on to this, hence the 60% drop in value, so far.
Yes, it's MySpace
In my entire social circle (friends, acquaintances, colleagues, wider family) of 200-300 I'd say 3 or 4 still post on it regularly
Tiny tiny numbers. And they are all over 50. It's doomed
With just three days until Election Day, voters in 11 Senate battleground states are turning out early at rates that nearly match the blowout numbers from the last midterms in 2018.
Democrats are outpacing Republicans by 3.5 percentage points among the nearly 14 million Americans who have already cast ballots in those states, according to the latest update from TargetSmart, a Democratic data company that incorporates early vote numbers along with its own proprietary estimates.
TargetSmart classifies Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, New Hampshire, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Utah and Wisconsin as Senate battleground states. Republicans need to flip just one seat currently held by Democrats to retake the majority.
To be clear: it does not appear the $8/month blue checkmark actually grants you a blue checkmark. The feature is not working. The one specific feature that he had to get right https://twitter.com/edzitron/status/1588980881204838401
It's also a massive fight for not much money. $8 per month * 12 months * 400,000 blue ticks * let's say 50% compliance. That's $20m a year on a company with revenue of $5bn.
He won't get anything like that number.
The strange thing about the whole twitter saga is we are judging Musk on his first week in the job.
Twitter was stagnant and losing money for years, despite an active userbase and no serious competition (instagram doesn't do the same thing, facebook doesn't do the same thing, ticktock doesn't do the same thing etc).
It's what he does with it over the next couple of years that interests me. Number one on my list would be integrating micropayments so, say, a journalist could tweet a link to their latest substack and you could pay 2p to read it.
Facebook has been a dead platform for years, Instagram is utterly passé now. And yet nobody is piling on Zuckerberg for having the most powerful media platforms of our time and blowing it all by driving away most of the userbase with pointless algos and tweaks that make the platforms less and less desirable places to be.
I will judge Musk on where Twitter is in a year or two's time. Zoom out.
I’ve acknowledged it’s not completely impossible that he might turn the thing around. But on the evidence of his first week, he doesn’t have a clue what he’s doing. And it’s completely irrational to spend $44 bn on a platform, and then use the first week in control sacking half the talent and alienating a large part of the user base.
Your Zuck comment is an odd one; Meta has lost three quarters of its value in the last year. So yes, the market is judging him.
And yet Facebook has been dead since 2016-ish, yet it continued to spin its legs, wil-e-coyote-style, long after falling off the cliff.
Hence why I'm puzzled as to why you think my Zuck comment is an odd one. As I have said, more than once, we seem to be writing off Musk's vision for Twitter in less than a week. The rot at Facebook started years ago.
It feels to me like people want Musk to fail, either because they don't like him, or because they don't like his politics.
It's probably better to wait and see what the platform becomes in a year or two's time.
A pivot to a microtransaction/subscription based content creator platform as opposed to an ad supported one makes a lot more sense than Zuck's freaky "metaverse" pivot.
But perhaps give it more than a week before passing judgement?
As of July 2022 Facebook had just under 3 billion active users with 1.7 billion using the service on a daily basis. The idea it is dead just because teenagers with a 15 second attention span no longer see it as cool is laughable.
I'd suggest it's engagement that's the problem. I'm one of those 3 billion users, but I've not posted a goddamn thing on there since 2016. Ditto most of my friends.
It's a dead Myspace walking. Absolute ghost town. The markets have finally cottoned on to this, hence the 60% drop in value, so far.
Yes, it's MySpace
In my entire social circle (friends, acquaintances, colleagues, wider family) of 200-300 I'd say 3 or 4 still post on it regularly
Tiny tiny numbers. And they are all over 50. It's doomed
There are some people who still FB, but I check my account a couple of times a year, which is slightly more often than my LinkedIn. There are a lot of those 3 billion that are completely inactive. My friend who died 5 years ago still has an active account.
Talking of which, we’re well overdue a dog picture in here
Fuck. I am against non working dogs anyway, but some look better than others. That picture I am not even sure which end of the animal it is, but if the cost of living crisis is hitting you hard I am sure the PDSA will help you having it put to sleep. Kindest thing.
But you are a big supporter of the complete waste of space that is the horse?
I own the space my horses are a waste of. I have posted a picture of one of them, once, on here because it was relevant to a conversation.
Twitter made (big) profits in 2018 and 2019 (1.4 billion profit off of 3.4 billion revenue is fairly good I think) . Covid derailed it but even then it loss less money in 2020 and 2021 combined than it made in 2019.
To be clear: it does not appear the $8/month blue checkmark actually grants you a blue checkmark. The feature is not working. The one specific feature that he had to get right https://twitter.com/edzitron/status/1588980881204838401
It's also a massive fight for not much money. $8 per month * 12 months * 400,000 blue ticks * let's say 50% compliance. That's $20m a year on a company with revenue of $5bn.
He won't get anything like that number.
The strange thing about the whole twitter saga is we are judging Musk on his first week in the job.
Twitter was stagnant and losing money for years, despite an active userbase and no serious competition (instagram doesn't do the same thing, facebook doesn't do the same thing, ticktock doesn't do the same thing etc).
It's what he does with it over the next couple of years that interests me. Number one on my list would be integrating micropayments so, say, a journalist could tweet a link to their latest substack and you could pay 2p to read it.
Facebook has been a dead platform for years, Instagram is utterly passé now. And yet nobody is piling on Zuckerberg for having the most powerful media platforms of our time and blowing it all by driving away most of the userbase with pointless algos and tweaks that make the platforms less and less desirable places to be.
I will judge Musk on where Twitter is in a year or two's time. Zoom out.
I’ve acknowledged it’s not completely impossible that he might turn the thing around. But on the evidence of his first week, he doesn’t have a clue what he’s doing. And it’s completely irrational to spend $44 bn on a platform, and then use the first week in control sacking half the talent and alienating a large part of the user base.
Your Zuck comment is an odd one; Meta has lost three quarters of its value in the last year. So yes, the market is judging him.
And yet Facebook has been dead since 2016-ish, yet it continued to spin its legs, wil-e-coyote-style, long after falling off the cliff.
Hence why I'm puzzled as to why you think my Zuck comment is an odd one. As I have said, more than once, we seem to be writing off Musk's vision for Twitter in less than a week. The rot at Facebook started years ago.
It feels to me like people want Musk to fail, either because they don't like him, or because they don't like his politics.
It's probably better to wait and see what the platform becomes in a year or two's time.
A pivot to a microtransaction/subscription based content creator platform as opposed to an ad supported one makes a lot more sense than Zuck's freaky "metaverse" pivot.
But perhaps give it more than a week before passing judgement?
As of July 2022 Facebook had just under 3 billion active users with 1.7 billion using the service on a daily basis. The idea it is dead just because teenagers with a 15 second attention span no longer see it as cool is laughable.
I'd suggest it's engagement that's the problem. I'm one of those 3 billion users, but I've not posted a goddamn thing on there since 2016. Ditto most of my friends.
It's a dead Myspace walking. Absolute ghost town. The markets have finally cottoned on to this, hence the 60% drop in value, so far.
Yes, it's MySpace
In my entire social circle (friends, acquaintances, colleagues, wider family) of 200-300 I'd say 3 or 4 still post on it regularly
Tiny tiny numbers. And they are all over 50. It's doomed
There are some people who still FB, but I check my account a couple of times a year, which is slightly more often than my LinkedIn. There are a lot of those 3 billion that are completely inactive. My friend who died 5 years ago still has an active account.
The people I know who still post on FB have started to look like eccentric loners - or just old. This is not good for any social medium
That said, Facebook GROUPS are still moderately successful, and I know a few people that still use FB Messenger regularly. But this does not = the sturdy foundations of a massive global tech company. Meta could be headed for an almighty collapse in value, quite soon
I was up on Telegraph hill earlier with my son. Plenty of party atmosphere among the 20-somethings of New Cross and 3 groups letting off smallish fireworks. Some distant displays towards London. But nothing like the traditional war zone.
Bonfire night in SE London pre Covid could feel like the front line in Bakhmut. A pall of aromatic gunpowder smoke in the air and a relentless boom boom. This evening, sporadic fireworks, that’s it.
50 to 27, lab down 1 Tory no change, Starmer leads by 5 as best PM 39 to 34
Lab 50 Con 27 LD 7 SNP 4 Green 3
I’m still calling the Opinium the outlier, Obviously with a tad less credibility with another honeymoon busting poll.
Because Opinium is lower? Since their change of methodology they've been consistently lower with Labour leads - their 18% would be in the 20s with most other polling companies.
Indeed. Redfield & Wilton looks more likely to be the outlier.
So you are putting your money on the next Redfield showing a drop in that case, to correct itself? Good luck with your money.
Even so, Tbf the next Redfield and Techne are crucial to the momentum this honeymoon was definitely generating. Take a glance at the wiki graph, big downward line for Labour, big upward line for Conservatives, the pro Sunak movement is real enough.
Last week I was having to defend the position the honeymoon bounce was lower than I expected, now I am having to defend that we can’t be sure the momentum has stopped, truth is we can’t be sure, though next Redfield and Techne can tell us more.
My moneys on other polls going into the thirties and the average higher than this up to the Black Swan of the budget.
Why am I calling it a BS? Because if the media reporting of it tends toward “iceman cometh” it could send government share lower, but if the media coverage is “man with a clear plan - working class have a government on their side” it could propel the Tory share into the mid thirties.
To be clear: it does not appear the $8/month blue checkmark actually grants you a blue checkmark. The feature is not working. The one specific feature that he had to get right https://twitter.com/edzitron/status/1588980881204838401
It's also a massive fight for not much money. $8 per month * 12 months * 400,000 blue ticks * let's say 50% compliance. That's $20m a year on a company with revenue of $5bn.
He won't get anything like that number.
The strange thing about the whole twitter saga is we are judging Musk on his first week in the job.
Twitter was stagnant and losing money for years, despite an active userbase and no serious competition (instagram doesn't do the same thing, facebook doesn't do the same thing, ticktock doesn't do the same thing etc).
It's what he does with it over the next couple of years that interests me. Number one on my list would be integrating micropayments so, say, a journalist could tweet a link to their latest substack and you could pay 2p to read it.
Facebook has been a dead platform for years, Instagram is utterly passé now. And yet nobody is piling on Zuckerberg for having the most powerful media platforms of our time and blowing it all by driving away most of the userbase with pointless algos and tweaks that make the platforms less and less desirable places to be.
I will judge Musk on where Twitter is in a year or two's time. Zoom out.
I’ve acknowledged it’s not completely impossible that he might turn the thing around. But on the evidence of his first week, he doesn’t have a clue what he’s doing. And it’s completely irrational to spend $44 bn on a platform, and then use the first week in control sacking half the talent and alienating a large part of the user base.
Your Zuck comment is an odd one; Meta has lost three quarters of its value in the last year. So yes, the market is judging him.
And yet Facebook has been dead since 2016-ish, yet it continued to spin its legs, wil-e-coyote-style, long after falling off the cliff.
Hence why I'm puzzled as to why you think my Zuck comment is an odd one. As I have said, more than once, we seem to be writing off Musk's vision for Twitter in less than a week. The rot at Facebook started years ago.
It feels to me like people want Musk to fail, either because they don't like him, or because they don't like his politics.
It's probably better to wait and see what the platform becomes in a year or two's time.
A pivot to a microtransaction/subscription based content creator platform as opposed to an ad supported one makes a lot more sense than Zuck's freaky "metaverse" pivot.
But perhaps give it more than a week before passing judgement?
As of July 2022 Facebook had just under 3 billion active users with 1.7 billion using the service on a daily basis. The idea it is dead just because teenagers with a 15 second attention span no longer see it as cool is laughable.
I'd suggest it's engagement that's the problem. I'm one of those 3 billion users, but I've not posted a goddamn thing on there since 2016. Ditto most of my friends.
It's a dead Myspace walking. Absolute ghost town. The markets have finally cottoned on to this, hence the 60% drop in value, so far.
Yes, it's MySpace
In my entire social circle (friends, acquaintances, colleagues, wider family) of 200-300 I'd say 3 or 4 still post on it regularly
Tiny tiny numbers. And they are all over 50. It's doomed
There are some people who still FB, but I check my account a couple of times a year, which is slightly more often than my LinkedIn. There are a lot of those 3 billion that are completely inactive. My friend who died 5 years ago still has an active account.
The people I know who still post on FB have started to look like eccentric loners - or just old. This is not good for any social medium
That said, Facebook GROUPS are still moderately successful, and I know a few people that still use FB Messenger regularly. But this does not = the sturdy foundations of a massive global tech company. Meta could be headed for an almighty collapse in value, quite soon
To be clear: it does not appear the $8/month blue checkmark actually grants you a blue checkmark. The feature is not working. The one specific feature that he had to get right https://twitter.com/edzitron/status/1588980881204838401
It's also a massive fight for not much money. $8 per month * 12 months * 400,000 blue ticks * let's say 50% compliance. That's $20m a year on a company with revenue of $5bn.
He won't get anything like that number.
The strange thing about the whole twitter saga is we are judging Musk on his first week in the job.
Twitter was stagnant and losing money for years, despite an active userbase and no serious competition (instagram doesn't do the same thing, facebook doesn't do the same thing, ticktock doesn't do the same thing etc).
It's what he does with it over the next couple of years that interests me. Number one on my list would be integrating micropayments so, say, a journalist could tweet a link to their latest substack and you could pay 2p to read it.
Facebook has been a dead platform for years, Instagram is utterly passé now. And yet nobody is piling on Zuckerberg for having the most powerful media platforms of our time and blowing it all by driving away most of the userbase with pointless algos and tweaks that make the platforms less and less desirable places to be.
I will judge Musk on where Twitter is in a year or two's time. Zoom out.
I’ve acknowledged it’s not completely impossible that he might turn the thing around. But on the evidence of his first week, he doesn’t have a clue what he’s doing. And it’s completely irrational to spend $44 bn on a platform, and then use the first week in control sacking half the talent and alienating a large part of the user base.
Your Zuck comment is an odd one; Meta has lost three quarters of its value in the last year. So yes, the market is judging him.
And yet Facebook has been dead since 2016-ish, yet it continued to spin its legs, wil-e-coyote-style, long after falling off the cliff.
Hence why I'm puzzled as to why you think my Zuck comment is an odd one. As I have said, more than once, we seem to be writing off Musk's vision for Twitter in less than a week. The rot at Facebook started years ago.
It feels to me like people want Musk to fail, either because they don't like him, or because they don't like his politics.
It's probably better to wait and see what the platform becomes in a year or two's time.
A pivot to a microtransaction/subscription based content creator platform as opposed to an ad supported one makes a lot more sense than Zuck's freaky "metaverse" pivot.
But perhaps give it more than a week before passing judgement?
As of July 2022 Facebook had just under 3 billion active users with 1.7 billion using the service on a daily basis. The idea it is dead just because teenagers with a 15 second attention span no longer see it as cool is laughable.
I'd suggest it's engagement that's the problem. I'm one of those 3 billion users, but I've not posted a goddamn thing on there since 2016. Ditto most of my friends.
It's a dead Myspace walking. Absolute ghost town. The markets have finally cottoned on to this, hence the 60% drop in value, so far.
Yes, it's MySpace
In my entire social circle (friends, acquaintances, colleagues, wider family) of 200-300 I'd say 3 or 4 still post on it regularly
Tiny tiny numbers. And they are all over 50. It's doomed
There are some people who still FB, but I check my account a couple of times a year, which is slightly more often than my LinkedIn. There are a lot of those 3 billion that are completely inactive. My friend who died 5 years ago still has an active account.
The people I know who still post on FB have started to look like eccentric loners - or just old. This is not good for any social medium
That said, Facebook GROUPS are still moderately successful, and I know a few people that still use FB Messenger regularly. But this does not = the sturdy foundations of a massive global tech company. Meta could be headed for an almighty collapse in value, quite soon
WhatsApp is still quite popular.
WhatsApp is quite useful, but how does it earn money?
To be clear: it does not appear the $8/month blue checkmark actually grants you a blue checkmark. The feature is not working. The one specific feature that he had to get right https://twitter.com/edzitron/status/1588980881204838401
It's also a massive fight for not much money. $8 per month * 12 months * 400,000 blue ticks * let's say 50% compliance. That's $20m a year on a company with revenue of $5bn.
He won't get anything like that number.
The strange thing about the whole twitter saga is we are judging Musk on his first week in the job.
Twitter was stagnant and losing money for years, despite an active userbase and no serious competition (instagram doesn't do the same thing, facebook doesn't do the same thing, ticktock doesn't do the same thing etc).
It's what he does with it over the next couple of years that interests me. Number one on my list would be integrating micropayments so, say, a journalist could tweet a link to their latest substack and you could pay 2p to read it.
Facebook has been a dead platform for years, Instagram is utterly passé now. And yet nobody is piling on Zuckerberg for having the most powerful media platforms of our time and blowing it all by driving away most of the userbase with pointless algos and tweaks that make the platforms less and less desirable places to be.
I will judge Musk on where Twitter is in a year or two's time. Zoom out.
I’ve acknowledged it’s not completely impossible that he might turn the thing around. But on the evidence of his first week, he doesn’t have a clue what he’s doing. And it’s completely irrational to spend $44 bn on a platform, and then use the first week in control sacking half the talent and alienating a large part of the user base.
Your Zuck comment is an odd one; Meta has lost three quarters of its value in the last year. So yes, the market is judging him.
And yet Facebook has been dead since 2016-ish, yet it continued to spin its legs, wil-e-coyote-style, long after falling off the cliff.
Hence why I'm puzzled as to why you think my Zuck comment is an odd one. As I have said, more than once, we seem to be writing off Musk's vision for Twitter in less than a week. The rot at Facebook started years ago.
It feels to me like people want Musk to fail, either because they don't like him, or because they don't like his politics.
It's probably better to wait and see what the platform becomes in a year or two's time.
A pivot to a microtransaction/subscription based content creator platform as opposed to an ad supported one makes a lot more sense than Zuck's freaky "metaverse" pivot.
But perhaps give it more than a week before passing judgement?
As of July 2022 Facebook had just under 3 billion active users with 1.7 billion using the service on a daily basis. The idea it is dead just because teenagers with a 15 second attention span no longer see it as cool is laughable.
I'd suggest it's engagement that's the problem. I'm one of those 3 billion users, but I've not posted a goddamn thing on there since 2016. Ditto most of my friends.
It's a dead Myspace walking. Absolute ghost town. The markets have finally cottoned on to this, hence the 60% drop in value, so far.
Yes, it's MySpace
In my entire social circle (friends, acquaintances, colleagues, wider family) of 200-300 I'd say 3 or 4 still post on it regularly
Tiny tiny numbers. And they are all over 50. It's doomed
There are some people who still FB, but I check my account a couple of times a year, which is slightly more often than my LinkedIn. There are a lot of those 3 billion that are completely inactive. My friend who died 5 years ago still has an active account.
I think each platform will eventually decline either into a stable long term niche or extinction.
Facebook is slowly fossilising along with its main elderly demographic. Not sure it’ll die completely though: I get the sense it’s more popular in traditional working class communities than other platforms. Like an ITV in the age of on demand TV.
LinkedIn has found a dull but useful niche as a worthy and earnest corporate platform. Can’t see if disappearing any time soon.
Instagram is also settling into a corporate afterlife. It’s where brands and small businesses put their pretty pictures where in the past they would have put an ad in a magazine.
Snapchat I’ve no idea about but I sense my children’s generation are moving off it on to a mix of Discord for chatting and TikTok for content.
Twitter? Who knows. There’s nowhere else as big with remotely the same coverage of famous people alongside a relatively high average IQ.
To be clear: it does not appear the $8/month blue checkmark actually grants you a blue checkmark. The feature is not working. The one specific feature that he had to get right https://twitter.com/edzitron/status/1588980881204838401
It's also a massive fight for not much money. $8 per month * 12 months * 400,000 blue ticks * let's say 50% compliance. That's $20m a year on a company with revenue of $5bn.
He won't get anything like that number.
The strange thing about the whole twitter saga is we are judging Musk on his first week in the job.
Twitter was stagnant and losing money for years, despite an active userbase and no serious competition (instagram doesn't do the same thing, facebook doesn't do the same thing, ticktock doesn't do the same thing etc).
It's what he does with it over the next couple of years that interests me. Number one on my list would be integrating micropayments so, say, a journalist could tweet a link to their latest substack and you could pay 2p to read it.
Facebook has been a dead platform for years, Instagram is utterly passé now. And yet nobody is piling on Zuckerberg for having the most powerful media platforms of our time and blowing it all by driving away most of the userbase with pointless algos and tweaks that make the platforms less and less desirable places to be.
I will judge Musk on where Twitter is in a year or two's time. Zoom out.
I’ve acknowledged it’s not completely impossible that he might turn the thing around. But on the evidence of his first week, he doesn’t have a clue what he’s doing. And it’s completely irrational to spend $44 bn on a platform, and then use the first week in control sacking half the talent and alienating a large part of the user base.
Your Zuck comment is an odd one; Meta has lost three quarters of its value in the last year. So yes, the market is judging him.
And yet Facebook has been dead since 2016-ish, yet it continued to spin its legs, wil-e-coyote-style, long after falling off the cliff.
Hence why I'm puzzled as to why you think my Zuck comment is an odd one. As I have said, more than once, we seem to be writing off Musk's vision for Twitter in less than a week. The rot at Facebook started years ago.
It feels to me like people want Musk to fail, either because they don't like him, or because they don't like his politics.
It's probably better to wait and see what the platform becomes in a year or two's time.
A pivot to a microtransaction/subscription based content creator platform as opposed to an ad supported one makes a lot more sense than Zuck's freaky "metaverse" pivot.
But perhaps give it more than a week before passing judgement?
As of July 2022 Facebook had just under 3 billion active users with 1.7 billion using the service on a daily basis. The idea it is dead just because teenagers with a 15 second attention span no longer see it as cool is laughable.
I'd suggest it's engagement that's the problem. I'm one of those 3 billion users, but I've not posted a goddamn thing on there since 2016. Ditto most of my friends.
It's a dead Myspace walking. Absolute ghost town. The markets have finally cottoned on to this, hence the 60% drop in value, so far.
Yes, it's MySpace
In my entire social circle (friends, acquaintances, colleagues, wider family) of 200-300 I'd say 3 or 4 still post on it regularly
Tiny tiny numbers. And they are all over 50. It's doomed
There are some people who still FB, but I check my account a couple of times a year, which is slightly more often than my LinkedIn. There are a lot of those 3 billion that are completely inactive. My friend who died 5 years ago still has an active account.
The people I know who still post on FB have started to look like eccentric loners - or just old. This is not good for any social medium
That said, Facebook GROUPS are still moderately successful, and I know a few people that still use FB Messenger regularly. But this does not = the sturdy foundations of a massive global tech company. Meta could be headed for an almighty collapse in value, quite soon
WhatsApp is still quite popular.
WhatsApp is quite useful, but how does it earn money?
Apparently it doesn’t much, except a few professional fee based add-ons.
To be clear: it does not appear the $8/month blue checkmark actually grants you a blue checkmark. The feature is not working. The one specific feature that he had to get right https://twitter.com/edzitron/status/1588980881204838401
It's also a massive fight for not much money. $8 per month * 12 months * 400,000 blue ticks * let's say 50% compliance. That's $20m a year on a company with revenue of $5bn.
He won't get anything like that number.
The strange thing about the whole twitter saga is we are judging Musk on his first week in the job.
Twitter was stagnant and losing money for years, despite an active userbase and no serious competition (instagram doesn't do the same thing, facebook doesn't do the same thing, ticktock doesn't do the same thing etc).
It's what he does with it over the next couple of years that interests me. Number one on my list would be integrating micropayments so, say, a journalist could tweet a link to their latest substack and you could pay 2p to read it.
Facebook has been a dead platform for years, Instagram is utterly passé now. And yet nobody is piling on Zuckerberg for having the most powerful media platforms of our time and blowing it all by driving away most of the userbase with pointless algos and tweaks that make the platforms less and less desirable places to be.
I will judge Musk on where Twitter is in a year or two's time. Zoom out.
I’ve acknowledged it’s not completely impossible that he might turn the thing around. But on the evidence of his first week, he doesn’t have a clue what he’s doing. And it’s completely irrational to spend $44 bn on a platform, and then use the first week in control sacking half the talent and alienating a large part of the user base.
Your Zuck comment is an odd one; Meta has lost three quarters of its value in the last year. So yes, the market is judging him.
And yet Facebook has been dead since 2016-ish, yet it continued to spin its legs, wil-e-coyote-style, long after falling off the cliff.
Hence why I'm puzzled as to why you think my Zuck comment is an odd one. As I have said, more than once, we seem to be writing off Musk's vision for Twitter in less than a week. The rot at Facebook started years ago.
It feels to me like people want Musk to fail, either because they don't like him, or because they don't like his politics.
It's probably better to wait and see what the platform becomes in a year or two's time.
A pivot to a microtransaction/subscription based content creator platform as opposed to an ad supported one makes a lot more sense than Zuck's freaky "metaverse" pivot.
But perhaps give it more than a week before passing judgement?
As of July 2022 Facebook had just under 3 billion active users with 1.7 billion using the service on a daily basis. The idea it is dead just because teenagers with a 15 second attention span no longer see it as cool is laughable.
I'd suggest it's engagement that's the problem. I'm one of those 3 billion users, but I've not posted a goddamn thing on there since 2016. Ditto most of my friends.
It's a dead Myspace walking. Absolute ghost town. The markets have finally cottoned on to this, hence the 60% drop in value, so far.
Yes, it's MySpace
In my entire social circle (friends, acquaintances, colleagues, wider family) of 200-300 I'd say 3 or 4 still post on it regularly
Tiny tiny numbers. And they are all over 50. It's doomed
There are some people who still FB, but I check my account a couple of times a year, which is slightly more often than my LinkedIn. There are a lot of those 3 billion that are completely inactive. My friend who died 5 years ago still has an active account.
The people I know who still post on FB have started to look like eccentric loners - or just old. This is not good for any social medium
That said, Facebook GROUPS are still moderately successful, and I know a few people that still use FB Messenger regularly. But this does not = the sturdy foundations of a massive global tech company. Meta could be headed for an almighty collapse in value, quite soon
WhatsApp is still quite popular.
WhatsApp is quite useful, but how does it earn money?
🤷♂️ storing so called private messages to later blackmail politicians and celebrities in a James Bond villain kind of way? Fiendish!
Thing is, it is very difficult to create a new social medium - alternative to Twitter - just like that. See Parler, Truth Social. Etc. The same will happen to Mastodon, it will be a ghetto of the Left like Parler is a ghetto of the Right. It won't work
Unless everyone on Twitter, of left right or whatever, agrees on the next alternative (and how do they do that?), then people will reluctantly stick with Twitter
True fact, in 2006/7 I was having to build a MySpace integration. Having got down with the kids, I heard about this Facebook thing and pivoted the company to that, I won some Brownie points
https://twitter.com/somebadideas/status/1588876465915166721 If you don’t pay the $8 your tweets will be suppressed by an algorithm. Not making this shit up he said it to a room of investors yesterday & claimed this would solve hate speech. “You’ll have to scroll really far to see unverified users”…
This wrecks twitter. In his own words caught on camera “you won’t really see’ what your friends are posting - even in your own replies - if they don’t pay for it.
It is just scorched earth. Who cares about whether people have been screwed over pensions if you are not in government? Leave the mess for Labour to deal with.
A further Bank Holiday though on 8th May for the Coronation though.
Another day on which those on ZHC don't get paid. Adds millions to the UC budget. And piles more stress on the low paid. While the comfortably off can relax and virtue signal. God Save the King!
Apart from most people on ZHC work for business that function on bank holidays such as uber, deliveroo etc
I don’t believe this to be remotely true, but it would be rather interesting if social media and habitual web use turned out to be a long-lasting fad. A modern day hula hoop.
And the internet settles down to be a deathly dull medium like radio or telephone, taking far less time and attention for itself. The tech companies became uninteresting low profit commodities.
It’s something like In The Thick Of It when the Daily Express publishes thought patterns straight from Leaky Sue’s brain - does she have a staffer dating a picture editor? Tonight her thought patterns to front page are “a new system” will double the claims dealt with by each caseworker (rod and electricity springs to mind) and Paraguay ARE on Sievella’s side and set to join Rwanda in taking our “outsourced asylum seekers”
The Observers asylum story is the government hiring asylum decision makers from customer service and sales positions at McDonalds, Tesco and Aldi.
I suppose the job interview could be quick “do you see it as an invasion and do you want any of these beggars to stay?” Provided you answer correctly the jobs yours. And that 4% figure can become 70% quite quickly utterly humiliating Starmer in the House of Commons.
But, if the quantity increases, but the quality of the work decreases, could that lead to any issues? 95% first rejected winning on appeal if new staff coming in don’t get decent training?
To be clear: it does not appear the $8/month blue checkmark actually grants you a blue checkmark. The feature is not working. The one specific feature that he had to get right https://twitter.com/edzitron/status/1588980881204838401
It's also a massive fight for not much money. $8 per month * 12 months * 400,000 blue ticks * let's say 50% compliance. That's $20m a year on a company with revenue of $5bn.
He won't get anything like that number.
The strange thing about the whole twitter saga is we are judging Musk on his first week in the job.
Twitter was stagnant and losing money for years, despite an active userbase and no serious competition (instagram doesn't do the same thing, facebook doesn't do the same thing, ticktock doesn't do the same thing etc).
It's what he does with it over the next couple of years that interests me. Number one on my list would be integrating micropayments so, say, a journalist could tweet a link to their latest substack and you could pay 2p to read it.
Facebook has been a dead platform for years, Instagram is utterly passé now. And yet nobody is piling on Zuckerberg for having the most powerful media platforms of our time and blowing it all by driving away most of the userbase with pointless algos and tweaks that make the platforms less and less desirable places to be.
I will judge Musk on where Twitter is in a year or two's time. Zoom out.
I’ve acknowledged it’s not completely impossible that he might turn the thing around. But on the evidence of his first week, he doesn’t have a clue what he’s doing. And it’s completely irrational to spend $44 bn on a platform, and then use the first week in control sacking half the talent and alienating a large part of the user base.
Your Zuck comment is an odd one; Meta has lost three quarters of its value in the last year. So yes, the market is judging him.
And yet Facebook has been dead since 2016-ish, yet it continued to spin its legs, wil-e-coyote-style, long after falling off the cliff.
Hence why I'm puzzled as to why you think my Zuck comment is an odd one. As I have said, more than once, we seem to be writing off Musk's vision for Twitter in less than a week. The rot at Facebook started years ago.
It feels to me like people want Musk to fail, either because they don't like him, or because they don't like his politics.
It's probably better to wait and see what the platform becomes in a year or two's time.
A pivot to a microtransaction/subscription based content creator platform as opposed to an ad supported one makes a lot more sense than Zuck's freaky "metaverse" pivot.
But perhaps give it more than a week before passing judgement?
As of July 2022 Facebook had just under 3 billion active users with 1.7 billion using the service on a daily basis. The idea it is dead just because teenagers with a 15 second attention span no longer see it as cool is laughable.
I'd suggest it's engagement that's the problem. I'm one of those 3 billion users, but I've not posted a goddamn thing on there since 2016. Ditto most of my friends.
It's a dead Myspace walking. Absolute ghost town. The markets have finally cottoned on to this, hence the 60% drop in value, so far.
Yes, it's MySpace
In my entire social circle (friends, acquaintances, colleagues, wider family) of 200-300 I'd say 3 or 4 still post on it regularly
Tiny tiny numbers. And they are all over 50. It's doomed
There are some people who still FB, but I check my account a couple of times a year, which is slightly more often than my LinkedIn. There are a lot of those 3 billion that are completely inactive. My friend who died 5 years ago still has an active account.
It looks like Facebook has lost the PB market, but it's a mistake to think that means it's dead.
While it appears to have plateaued, that plateau is way above just about every other site. Surely having nearly 2 billion daily active users makes it very, very far from "tiny tiny numbers"? It's the third most visited website in the world (with only Google and YouTube above it), and Facebook also made profits of $40b last year, which is a hell of a lot more than MySpace is making.
A bit late to the discussion of national anthems, but I would like to add that four of those lines in"God Save the King" could be about Putin, especially the last:
Scatter our enemies, And make them fall! Confound their politics, Frustrate their knavish tricks.
(For the US national anthem, I'd prefer something singable by ordinary people
It’s not a serious proposal, because of course it doesn’t need to be what with the LDs being at or under 10% in the polls. As you say, if either main party tried to introduce this it would thoroughly piss off renters (though in most cases their landlord would benefit and probably have less urgency to raise rents). But I quite like the idea sometimes of the government just paying families directly rather than spending the same or more to intervene in the market. I personally think that would have been a better idea than the energy price cap, similar to the excellent plan not yet adopted anywhere of a comprehensive carbon tax with 100% dividend to every citizen.
They (we) are quite good at acting like a parliamentary think tank sometimes though. A kite flyer for Labour or occasionally the Tories to nick from. Done it twice this year: first to propose a windfall tax on upstream oil revenues, and first to propose an energy price cap for this winter.
Lib Dems propose something that has a kernel of an interesting idea but isn’t fully worked through. It either sinks without trace or others then take it and refine it. Quite a useful service to the big parties. Land tax may be the next example.
To be clear: it does not appear the $8/month blue checkmark actually grants you a blue checkmark. The feature is not working. The one specific feature that he had to get right https://twitter.com/edzitron/status/1588980881204838401
It's also a massive fight for not much money. $8 per month * 12 months * 400,000 blue ticks * let's say 50% compliance. That's $20m a year on a company with revenue of $5bn.
He won't get anything like that number.
The strange thing about the whole twitter saga is we are judging Musk on his first week in the job.
Twitter was stagnant and losing money for years, despite an active userbase and no serious competition (instagram doesn't do the same thing, facebook doesn't do the same thing, ticktock doesn't do the same thing etc).
It's what he does with it over the next couple of years that interests me. Number one on my list would be integrating micropayments so, say, a journalist could tweet a link to their latest substack and you could pay 2p to read it.
Facebook has been a dead platform for years, Instagram is utterly passé now. And yet nobody is piling on Zuckerberg for having the most powerful media platforms of our time and blowing it all by driving away most of the userbase with pointless algos and tweaks that make the platforms less and less desirable places to be.
I will judge Musk on where Twitter is in a year or two's time. Zoom out.
I’ve acknowledged it’s not completely impossible that he might turn the thing around. But on the evidence of his first week, he doesn’t have a clue what he’s doing. And it’s completely irrational to spend $44 bn on a platform, and then use the first week in control sacking half the talent and alienating a large part of the user base.
Your Zuck comment is an odd one; Meta has lost three quarters of its value in the last year. So yes, the market is judging him.
And yet Facebook has been dead since 2016-ish, yet it continued to spin its legs, wil-e-coyote-style, long after falling off the cliff.
Hence why I'm puzzled as to why you think my Zuck comment is an odd one. As I have said, more than once, we seem to be writing off Musk's vision for Twitter in less than a week. The rot at Facebook started years ago.
It feels to me like people want Musk to fail, either because they don't like him, or because they don't like his politics.
It's probably better to wait and see what the platform becomes in a year or two's time.
A pivot to a microtransaction/subscription based content creator platform as opposed to an ad supported one makes a lot more sense than Zuck's freaky "metaverse" pivot.
But perhaps give it more than a week before passing judgement?
As of July 2022 Facebook had just under 3 billion active users with 1.7 billion using the service on a daily basis. The idea it is dead just because teenagers with a 15 second attention span no longer see it as cool is laughable.
I'd suggest it's engagement that's the problem. I'm one of those 3 billion users, but I've not posted a goddamn thing on there since 2016. Ditto most of my friends.
It's a dead Myspace walking. Absolute ghost town. The markets have finally cottoned on to this, hence the 60% drop in value, so far.
Yes, it's MySpace
In my entire social circle (friends, acquaintances, colleagues, wider family) of 200-300 I'd say 3 or 4 still post on it regularly
Tiny tiny numbers. And they are all over 50. It's doomed
There are some people who still FB, but I check my account a couple of times a year, which is slightly more often than my LinkedIn. There are a lot of those 3 billion that are completely inactive. My friend who died 5 years ago still has an active account.
Nope wrong. According to the organisations that monitor these things the 3 billion is active members - defined as accessing their accounts at least once a month. And 1.7 billion accessing on a daily basis.
To be clear: it does not appear the $8/month blue checkmark actually grants you a blue checkmark. The feature is not working. The one specific feature that he had to get right https://twitter.com/edzitron/status/1588980881204838401
It's also a massive fight for not much money. $8 per month * 12 months * 400,000 blue ticks * let's say 50% compliance. That's $20m a year on a company with revenue of $5bn.
He won't get anything like that number.
The strange thing about the whole twitter saga is we are judging Musk on his first week in the job.
Twitter was stagnant and losing money for years, despite an active userbase and no serious competition (instagram doesn't do the same thing, facebook doesn't do the same thing, ticktock doesn't do the same thing etc).
It's what he does with it over the next couple of years that interests me. Number one on my list would be integrating micropayments so, say, a journalist could tweet a link to their latest substack and you could pay 2p to read it.
Facebook has been a dead platform for years, Instagram is utterly passé now. And yet nobody is piling on Zuckerberg for having the most powerful media platforms of our time and blowing it all by driving away most of the userbase with pointless algos and tweaks that make the platforms less and less desirable places to be.
I will judge Musk on where Twitter is in a year or two's time. Zoom out.
I’ve acknowledged it’s not completely impossible that he might turn the thing around. But on the evidence of his first week, he doesn’t have a clue what he’s doing. And it’s completely irrational to spend $44 bn on a platform, and then use the first week in control sacking half the talent and alienating a large part of the user base.
Your Zuck comment is an odd one; Meta has lost three quarters of its value in the last year. So yes, the market is judging him.
And yet Facebook has been dead since 2016-ish, yet it continued to spin its legs, wil-e-coyote-style, long after falling off the cliff.
Hence why I'm puzzled as to why you think my Zuck comment is an odd one. As I have said, more than once, we seem to be writing off Musk's vision for Twitter in less than a week. The rot at Facebook started years ago.
It feels to me like people want Musk to fail, either because they don't like him, or because they don't like his politics.
It's probably better to wait and see what the platform becomes in a year or two's time.
A pivot to a microtransaction/subscription based content creator platform as opposed to an ad supported one makes a lot more sense than Zuck's freaky "metaverse" pivot.
But perhaps give it more than a week before passing judgement?
As of July 2022 Facebook had just under 3 billion active users with 1.7 billion using the service on a daily basis. The idea it is dead just because teenagers with a 15 second attention span no longer see it as cool is laughable.
I'd suggest it's engagement that's the problem. I'm one of those 3 billion users, but I've not posted a goddamn thing on there since 2016. Ditto most of my friends.
It's a dead Myspace walking. Absolute ghost town. The markets have finally cottoned on to this, hence the 60% drop in value, so far.
Nope you are not one of those 3 billion because that refers to people who access their account at least once a month.
I don’t believe this to be remotely true, but it would be rather interesting if social media and habitual web use turned out to be a long-lasting fad. A modern day hula hoop.
And the internet settles down to be a deathly dull medium like radio or telephone, taking far less time and attention for itself. The tech companies became uninteresting low profit commodities.
I doubt we’ll spend less time online but I could well believe the internet settles down to be simply a medium, like print. Just as telecoms and the fibre optic infrastructure that underpin the internet are now essentially regulated utilities.
Will the social media giants still dominate the online world in a decade? I don’t reckon so. The ones making the really big money on tech are those with vast B2B offerings: Microsoft, Amazon, Google/Alphabet. Amazon is even fast catching up with Facebook on ad revenue alone - a mere footnote in its accounts - and will probably overtake it soon.
I had this idea to "migrate" to Mastodon but I've ended up with a totally different feed over there with different people having different conversations, so now I have two problems.
To be clear: it does not appear the $8/month blue checkmark actually grants you a blue checkmark. The feature is not working. The one specific feature that he had to get right https://twitter.com/edzitron/status/1588980881204838401
It's also a massive fight for not much money. $8 per month * 12 months * 400,000 blue ticks * let's say 50% compliance. That's $20m a year on a company with revenue of $5bn.
He won't get anything like that number.
The strange thing about the whole twitter saga is we are judging Musk on his first week in the job.
Twitter was stagnant and losing money for years, despite an active userbase and no serious competition (instagram doesn't do the same thing, facebook doesn't do the same thing, ticktock doesn't do the same thing etc).
It's what he does with it over the next couple of years that interests me. Number one on my list would be integrating micropayments so, say, a journalist could tweet a link to their latest substack and you could pay 2p to read it.
Facebook has been a dead platform for years, Instagram is utterly passé now. And yet nobody is piling on Zuckerberg for having the most powerful media platforms of our time and blowing it all by driving away most of the userbase with pointless algos and tweaks that make the platforms less and less desirable places to be.
I will judge Musk on where Twitter is in a year or two's time. Zoom out.
I’ve acknowledged it’s not completely impossible that he might turn the thing around. But on the evidence of his first week, he doesn’t have a clue what he’s doing. And it’s completely irrational to spend $44 bn on a platform, and then use the first week in control sacking half the talent and alienating a large part of the user base.
Your Zuck comment is an odd one; Meta has lost three quarters of its value in the last year. So yes, the market is judging him.
And yet Facebook has been dead since 2016-ish, yet it continued to spin its legs, wil-e-coyote-style, long after falling off the cliff.
Hence why I'm puzzled as to why you think my Zuck comment is an odd one. As I have said, more than once, we seem to be writing off Musk's vision for Twitter in less than a week. The rot at Facebook started years ago.
It feels to me like people want Musk to fail, either because they don't like him, or because they don't like his politics.
It's probably better to wait and see what the platform becomes in a year or two's time.
A pivot to a microtransaction/subscription based content creator platform as opposed to an ad supported one makes a lot more sense than Zuck's freaky "metaverse" pivot.
But perhaps give it more than a week before passing judgement?
As of July 2022 Facebook had just under 3 billion active users with 1.7 billion using the service on a daily basis. The idea it is dead just because teenagers with a 15 second attention span no longer see it as cool is laughable.
I'd suggest it's engagement that's the problem. I'm one of those 3 billion users, but I've not posted a goddamn thing on there since 2016. Ditto most of my friends.
It's a dead Myspace walking. Absolute ghost town. The markets have finally cottoned on to this, hence the 60% drop in value, so far.
Yes, it's MySpace
In my entire social circle (friends, acquaintances, colleagues, wider family) of 200-300 I'd say 3 or 4 still post on it regularly
Tiny tiny numbers. And they are all over 50. It's doomed
There are some people who still FB, but I check my account a couple of times a year, which is slightly more often than my LinkedIn. There are a lot of those 3 billion that are completely inactive. My friend who died 5 years ago still has an active account.
It looks like Facebook has lost the PB market, but it's a mistake to think that means it's dead.
While it appears to have plateaued, that plateau is way above just about every other site. Surely having nearly 2 billion daily active users makes it very, very far from "tiny tiny numbers"? It's the third most visited website in the world (with only Google and YouTube above it), and Facebook also made profits of $40b last year, which is a hell of a lot more than MySpace is making.
The mistaken PB view of Facebook is quite similar to people's views of that other once ubiquitous addiction, smoking. Ask most people in the UK or US about smoking rates and they would say that they been steadily dropping for years. Just because, in their communities, rates of smoking are a fraction of what they once were, they think this is worldwide trend. And yet in 2021 more people were smoking around the world than ever before - 1.1 billion of them.
Thankfully the effects of Facebook are not on a par with those of smoking - another reason why it will be around a lot longer than people think. There are a lot more active FB users on here than you would think as well. Even good old Leon, for all his denials, still makes use of it occasionally.
To be clear: it does not appear the $8/month blue checkmark actually grants you a blue checkmark. The feature is not working. The one specific feature that he had to get right https://twitter.com/edzitron/status/1588980881204838401
It's also a massive fight for not much money. $8 per month * 12 months * 400,000 blue ticks * let's say 50% compliance. That's $20m a year on a company with revenue of $5bn.
He won't get anything like that number.
The strange thing about the whole twitter saga is we are judging Musk on his first week in the job.
Twitter was stagnant and losing money for years, despite an active userbase and no serious competition (instagram doesn't do the same thing, facebook doesn't do the same thing, ticktock doesn't do the same thing etc).
It's what he does with it over the next couple of years that interests me. Number one on my list would be integrating micropayments so, say, a journalist could tweet a link to their latest substack and you could pay 2p to read it.
Facebook has been a dead platform for years, Instagram is utterly passé now. And yet nobody is piling on Zuckerberg for having the most powerful media platforms of our time and blowing it all by driving away most of the userbase with pointless algos and tweaks that make the platforms less and less desirable places to be.
I will judge Musk on where Twitter is in a year or two's time. Zoom out.
I’ve acknowledged it’s not completely impossible that he might turn the thing around. But on the evidence of his first week, he doesn’t have a clue what he’s doing. And it’s completely irrational to spend $44 bn on a platform, and then use the first week in control sacking half the talent and alienating a large part of the user base.
Your Zuck comment is an odd one; Meta has lost three quarters of its value in the last year. So yes, the market is judging him.
And yet Facebook has been dead since 2016-ish, yet it continued to spin its legs, wil-e-coyote-style, long after falling off the cliff.
Hence why I'm puzzled as to why you think my Zuck comment is an odd one. As I have said, more than once, we seem to be writing off Musk's vision for Twitter in less than a week. The rot at Facebook started years ago.
It feels to me like people want Musk to fail, either because they don't like him, or because they don't like his politics.
It's probably better to wait and see what the platform becomes in a year or two's time.
A pivot to a microtransaction/subscription based content creator platform as opposed to an ad supported one makes a lot more sense than Zuck's freaky "metaverse" pivot.
But perhaps give it more than a week before passing judgement?
As of July 2022 Facebook had just under 3 billion active users with 1.7 billion using the service on a daily basis. The idea it is dead just because teenagers with a 15 second attention span no longer see it as cool is laughable.
I'd suggest it's engagement that's the problem. I'm one of those 3 billion users, but I've not posted a goddamn thing on there since 2016. Ditto most of my friends.
It's a dead Myspace walking. Absolute ghost town. The markets have finally cottoned on to this, hence the 60% drop in value, so far.
Yes, it's MySpace
In my entire social circle (friends, acquaintances, colleagues, wider family) of 200-300 I'd say 3 or 4 still post on it regularly
Tiny tiny numbers. And they are all over 50. It's doomed
There are some people who still FB, but I check my account a couple of times a year, which is slightly more often than my LinkedIn. There are a lot of those 3 billion that are completely inactive. My friend who died 5 years ago still has an active account.
It looks like Facebook has lost the PB market, but it's a mistake to think that means it's dead.
While it appears to have plateaued, that plateau is way above just about every other site. Surely having nearly 2 billion daily active users makes it very, very far from "tiny tiny numbers"? It's the third most visited website in the world (with only Google and YouTube above it), and Facebook also made profits of $40b last year, which is a hell of a lot more than MySpace is making.
I checked the figures. Sites 1-2 are of course owned by one company, as are sites 3 and 7.
Isn't "saving" £50b for canning HS2, a bit like me saying I just "saved" myself £100,000 by sticking with my old motor and not taking out a lease agreement on a new £100k Porsche.
Anyway as it would have eventually cost four times the assumed budget, I calculate the saving to be £200b. Tax cuts all around!
To be clear: it does not appear the $8/month blue checkmark actually grants you a blue checkmark. The feature is not working. The one specific feature that he had to get right https://twitter.com/edzitron/status/1588980881204838401
It's also a massive fight for not much money. $8 per month * 12 months * 400,000 blue ticks * let's say 50% compliance. That's $20m a year on a company with revenue of $5bn.
He won't get anything like that number.
The strange thing about the whole twitter saga is we are judging Musk on his first week in the job.
Twitter was stagnant and losing money for years, despite an active userbase and no serious competition (instagram doesn't do the same thing, facebook doesn't do the same thing, ticktock doesn't do the same thing etc).
It's what he does with it over the next couple of years that interests me. Number one on my list would be integrating micropayments so, say, a journalist could tweet a link to their latest substack and you could pay 2p to read it.
Facebook has been a dead platform for years, Instagram is utterly passé now. And yet nobody is piling on Zuckerberg for having the most powerful media platforms of our time and blowing it all by driving away most of the userbase with pointless algos and tweaks that make the platforms less and less desirable places to be.
I will judge Musk on where Twitter is in a year or two's time. Zoom out.
I’ve acknowledged it’s not completely impossible that he might turn the thing around. But on the evidence of his first week, he doesn’t have a clue what he’s doing. And it’s completely irrational to spend $44 bn on a platform, and then use the first week in control sacking half the talent and alienating a large part of the user base.
Your Zuck comment is an odd one; Meta has lost three quarters of its value in the last year. So yes, the market is judging him.
And yet Facebook has been dead since 2016-ish, yet it continued to spin its legs, wil-e-coyote-style, long after falling off the cliff.
Hence why I'm puzzled as to why you think my Zuck comment is an odd one. As I have said, more than once, we seem to be writing off Musk's vision for Twitter in less than a week. The rot at Facebook started years ago.
It feels to me like people want Musk to fail, either because they don't like him, or because they don't like his politics.
It's probably better to wait and see what the platform becomes in a year or two's time.
A pivot to a microtransaction/subscription based content creator platform as opposed to an ad supported one makes a lot more sense than Zuck's freaky "metaverse" pivot.
But perhaps give it more than a week before passing judgement?
As of July 2022 Facebook had just under 3 billion active users with 1.7 billion using the service on a daily basis. The idea it is dead just because teenagers with a 15 second attention span no longer see it as cool is laughable.
I'd suggest it's engagement that's the problem. I'm one of those 3 billion users, but I've not posted a goddamn thing on there since 2016. Ditto most of my friends.
It's a dead Myspace walking. Absolute ghost town. The markets have finally cottoned on to this, hence the 60% drop in value, so far.
Yes, it's MySpace
In my entire social circle (friends, acquaintances, colleagues, wider family) of 200-300 I'd say 3 or 4 still post on it regularly
Tiny tiny numbers. And they are all over 50. It's doomed
There are some people who still FB, but I check my account a couple of times a year, which is slightly more often than my LinkedIn. There are a lot of those 3 billion that are completely inactive. My friend who died 5 years ago still has an active account.
It looks like Facebook has lost the PB market, but it's a mistake to think that means it's dead.
While it appears to have plateaued, that plateau is way above just about every other site. Surely having nearly 2 billion daily active users makes it very, very far from "tiny tiny numbers"? It's the third most visited website in the world (with only Google and YouTube above it), and Facebook also made profits of $40b last year, which is a hell of a lot more than MySpace is making.
The mistaken PB view of Facebook is quite similar to people's views of that other once ubiquitous addiction, smoking. Ask most people in the UK or US about smoking rates and they would say that they been steadily dropping for years. Just because, in their communities, rates of smoking are a fraction of what they once were, they think this is worldwide trend. And yet in 2021 more people were smoking around the world than ever before - 1.1 billion of them.
Thankfully the effects of Facebook are not on a par with those of smoking - another reason why it will be around a lot longer than people think. There are a lot more active FB users on here than you would think as well. Even good old Leon, for all his denials, still makes use of it occasionally.
To be clear: it does not appear the $8/month blue checkmark actually grants you a blue checkmark. The feature is not working. The one specific feature that he had to get right https://twitter.com/edzitron/status/1588980881204838401
It's also a massive fight for not much money. $8 per month * 12 months * 400,000 blue ticks * let's say 50% compliance. That's $20m a year on a company with revenue of $5bn.
He won't get anything like that number.
The strange thing about the whole twitter saga is we are judging Musk on his first week in the job.
Twitter was stagnant and losing money for years, despite an active userbase and no serious competition (instagram doesn't do the same thing, facebook doesn't do the same thing, ticktock doesn't do the same thing etc).
It's what he does with it over the next couple of years that interests me. Number one on my list would be integrating micropayments so, say, a journalist could tweet a link to their latest substack and you could pay 2p to read it.
Facebook has been a dead platform for years, Instagram is utterly passé now. And yet nobody is piling on Zuckerberg for having the most powerful media platforms of our time and blowing it all by driving away most of the userbase with pointless algos and tweaks that make the platforms less and less desirable places to be.
I will judge Musk on where Twitter is in a year or two's time. Zoom out.
I’ve acknowledged it’s not completely impossible that he might turn the thing around. But on the evidence of his first week, he doesn’t have a clue what he’s doing. And it’s completely irrational to spend $44 bn on a platform, and then use the first week in control sacking half the talent and alienating a large part of the user base.
Your Zuck comment is an odd one; Meta has lost three quarters of its value in the last year. So yes, the market is judging him.
And yet Facebook has been dead since 2016-ish, yet it continued to spin its legs, wil-e-coyote-style, long after falling off the cliff.
Hence why I'm puzzled as to why you think my Zuck comment is an odd one. As I have said, more than once, we seem to be writing off Musk's vision for Twitter in less than a week. The rot at Facebook started years ago.
It feels to me like people want Musk to fail, either because they don't like him, or because they don't like his politics.
It's probably better to wait and see what the platform becomes in a year or two's time.
A pivot to a microtransaction/subscription based content creator platform as opposed to an ad supported one makes a lot more sense than Zuck's freaky "metaverse" pivot.
But perhaps give it more than a week before passing judgement?
As of July 2022 Facebook had just under 3 billion active users with 1.7 billion using the service on a daily basis. The idea it is dead just because teenagers with a 15 second attention span no longer see it as cool is laughable.
I'd suggest it's engagement that's the problem. I'm one of those 3 billion users, but I've not posted a goddamn thing on there since 2016. Ditto most of my friends.
It's a dead Myspace walking. Absolute ghost town. The markets have finally cottoned on to this, hence the 60% drop in value, so far.
Yes, it's MySpace
In my entire social circle (friends, acquaintances, colleagues, wider family) of 200-300 I'd say 3 or 4 still post on it regularly
Tiny tiny numbers. And they are all over 50. It's doomed
There are some people who still FB, but I check my account a couple of times a year, which is slightly more often than my LinkedIn. There are a lot of those 3 billion that are completely inactive. My friend who died 5 years ago still has an active account.
It looks like Facebook has lost the PB market, but it's a mistake to think that means it's dead.
While it appears to have plateaued, that plateau is way above just about every other site. Surely having nearly 2 billion daily active users makes it very, very far from "tiny tiny numbers"? It's the third most visited website in the world (with only Google and YouTube above it), and Facebook also made profits of $40b last year, which is a hell of a lot more than MySpace is making.
The mistaken PB view of Facebook is quite similar to people's views of that other once ubiquitous addiction, smoking. Ask most people in the UK or US about smoking rates and they would say that they been steadily dropping for years. Just because, in their communities, rates of smoking are a fraction of what they once were, they think this is worldwide trend. And yet in 2021 more people were smoking around the world than ever before - 1.1 billion of them.
Thankfully the effects of Facebook are not on a par with those of smoking - another reason why it will be around a lot longer than people think. There are a lot more active FB users on here than you would think as well. Even good old Leon, for all his denials, still makes use of it occasionally.
No, I don't
I am friends with you, you plonker. As are a number of other people on here. We know exactly when you post on it. Not often admittedly - hence my use of the word occasionally.
Isn't "saving" £50b for canning HS2, a bit like me saying I just "saved" myself £100,000 by sticking with my old motor and not taking out a lease agreement on a new £100k Porsche.
Anyway as it would have eventually cost four times the assumed budget, I calculate the saving to be £200b. Tax cuts all around!
These people are economically illiterate;
“Greg Smith, the MP for Buckingham and a member of the Commons transport select committee, said scrapping HS2 “could solve virtually all of the Treasury’s problems right now”.”
Sunak needs to find £40-50bn A YEAR. The HS2/3 costs are one-offs.
I get that a pile of tories - and the tele - hate hs2, but really, this is terrible campaigning/reporting. I demand a refund of my tele subscription! Not that I pay one, obviously. “Reader mode” sidesteps the paywall, with one click.
To be clear: it does not appear the $8/month blue checkmark actually grants you a blue checkmark. The feature is not working. The one specific feature that he had to get right https://twitter.com/edzitron/status/1588980881204838401
It's also a massive fight for not much money. $8 per month * 12 months * 400,000 blue ticks * let's say 50% compliance. That's $20m a year on a company with revenue of $5bn.
He won't get anything like that number.
The strange thing about the whole twitter saga is we are judging Musk on his first week in the job.
Twitter was stagnant and losing money for years, despite an active userbase and no serious competition (instagram doesn't do the same thing, facebook doesn't do the same thing, ticktock doesn't do the same thing etc).
It's what he does with it over the next couple of years that interests me. Number one on my list would be integrating micropayments so, say, a journalist could tweet a link to their latest substack and you could pay 2p to read it.
Facebook has been a dead platform for years, Instagram is utterly passé now. And yet nobody is piling on Zuckerberg for having the most powerful media platforms of our time and blowing it all by driving away most of the userbase with pointless algos and tweaks that make the platforms less and less desirable places to be.
I will judge Musk on where Twitter is in a year or two's time. Zoom out.
I’ve acknowledged it’s not completely impossible that he might turn the thing around. But on the evidence of his first week, he doesn’t have a clue what he’s doing. And it’s completely irrational to spend $44 bn on a platform, and then use the first week in control sacking half the talent and alienating a large part of the user base.
Your Zuck comment is an odd one; Meta has lost three quarters of its value in the last year. So yes, the market is judging him.
And yet Facebook has been dead since 2016-ish, yet it continued to spin its legs, wil-e-coyote-style, long after falling off the cliff.
Hence why I'm puzzled as to why you think my Zuck comment is an odd one. As I have said, more than once, we seem to be writing off Musk's vision for Twitter in less than a week. The rot at Facebook started years ago.
It feels to me like people want Musk to fail, either because they don't like him, or because they don't like his politics.
It's probably better to wait and see what the platform becomes in a year or two's time.
A pivot to a microtransaction/subscription based content creator platform as opposed to an ad supported one makes a lot more sense than Zuck's freaky "metaverse" pivot.
But perhaps give it more than a week before passing judgement?
As of July 2022 Facebook had just under 3 billion active users with 1.7 billion using the service on a daily basis. The idea it is dead just because teenagers with a 15 second attention span no longer see it as cool is laughable.
I'd suggest it's engagement that's the problem. I'm one of those 3 billion users, but I've not posted a goddamn thing on there since 2016. Ditto most of my friends.
It's a dead Myspace walking. Absolute ghost town. The markets have finally cottoned on to this, hence the 60% drop in value, so far.
Yes, it's MySpace
In my entire social circle (friends, acquaintances, colleagues, wider family) of 200-300 I'd say 3 or 4 still post on it regularly
Tiny tiny numbers. And they are all over 50. It's doomed
There are some people who still FB, but I check my account a couple of times a year, which is slightly more often than my LinkedIn. There are a lot of those 3 billion that are completely inactive. My friend who died 5 years ago still has an active account.
It looks like Facebook has lost the PB market, but it's a mistake to think that means it's dead.
While it appears to have plateaued, that plateau is way above just about every other site. Surely having nearly 2 billion daily active users makes it very, very far from "tiny tiny numbers"? It's the third most visited website in the world (with only Google and YouTube above it), and Facebook also made profits of $40b last year, which is a hell of a lot more than MySpace is making.
The mistaken PB view of Facebook is quite similar to people's views of that other once ubiquitous addiction, smoking. Ask most people in the UK or US about smoking rates and they would say that they been steadily dropping for years. Just because, in their communities, rates of smoking are a fraction of what they once were, they think this is worldwide trend. And yet in 2021 more people were smoking around the world than ever before - 1.1 billion of them.
Thankfully the effects of Facebook are not on a par with those of smoking - another reason why it will be around a lot longer than people think. There are a lot more active FB users on here than you would think as well. Even good old Leon, for all his denials, still makes use of it occasionally.
I absolutely do not believe 3 billion people access facebook once a month. Simple reason is companies like facebook live on ad revenue so they tend to count things that you or I wouldn't really count as accessing facebook in there numbers. Plenty of sites for example use log in with google / facebook etc credentials and I would bet that facebook count that as an account access even though those people may not have been near the actual site for a year or more. Google will too as it makes their pitch to advertisers look so much better
Gavin Williamson is one of those odd people that you get in politics sometimes that just keep coming back time after time after time like a turd you can never quite flush away...
Similes don't come more original than that. you must be very proud.
You starting again? You've already been banned once for abusing me!
If that's as lame as that after an edit, I'd hate to think how it started life.
You are a sycophant to a sycophant (unless you are a sockpuppet, in which case we can eliminate one layer). But respect for your extraordinarily original trope about Williamson. Let us showcase it in all its glory:
"like a turd you can never quite flush away."
Utterly original comic genius. How do you come up with stuff like that? I mean genuinely, does it just pop up while you are in the shower?
OK lets go through this step by step.
This all started because @LostPassword posted that you exposed @Charles identity and he left this site as he was no longer comfortable being here. "Charles" was always nice to me and I didn't know much about you but had seen you posting for a while so I just asked some questions about this.
My basic question was; Is it normal behavior to expose someone's identity on an internet forum? Others said "Charles" exposed himself by being a "braggart" but to me that felt a little like "victim shaming" but I admitted I didn't know the full "ins and outs" of the situation and was curious to find out more....
So I asked some questions. Nothing more, nothing less. And when I saw how angry you was at my probing I even apologized to you in an attempt to "defuse" the situation as I generally don't like confrontation either in real life or online.
Since I asked those questions about you exposing "Charles" I myself have been exposed to on-going bullying and harassment from you on this website (you received a 24hr ban from @PBModerator on 12th October for your totally unwarranted abuse of me and after a period of not interacting with me it seems you have now started up again)
When you came back from your 24hr ban for abusing me I was perfectly happy to just ignore you and for you to ignore me and so we'd never need to interact in this forum again. I have not once mentioned you or responded to any of your posts since you came back from your 24hr ban. But... here we are. You have decided to start poking at me again despite no provocation from me whatsoever...
I have been on this website since 2006 (I'm certainly NOT a "sock puppet" of anyone as I believe I was here before both you were here and maybe Charles too) and in all that time here I have never encountered anyone like you at PB.COM)
So here's the thing.
I believe the more your harass me here, the more you confirm my original suspicion that something isn't right with you. That within the "eccentricity" of your grumpy, maybe elderly, persona there's actually a "malevolence" which is lurking underneath... And I don't want any part of it.
At this point it's all getting pretty dark... so I'll let @MikeSmithson@rcs1000 and @TheScreamingEagles work out what they want to do about all of this because I've had enough honestly!
It’s not a serious proposal, because of course it doesn’t need to be what with the LDs being at or under 10% in the polls. As you say, if either main party tried to introduce this it would thoroughly piss off renters (though in most cases their landlord would benefit and probably have less urgency to raise rents). But I quite like the idea sometimes of the government just paying families directly rather than spending the same or more to intervene in the market. I personally think that would have been a better idea than the energy price cap, similar to the excellent plan not yet adopted anywhere of a comprehensive carbon tax with 100% dividend to every citizen.
They (we) are quite good at acting like a parliamentary think tank sometimes though. A kite flyer for Labour or occasionally the Tories to nick from. Done it twice this year: first to propose a windfall tax on upstream oil revenues, and first to propose an energy price cap for this winter.
Lib Dems propose something that has a kernel of an interesting idea but isn’t fully worked through. It either sinks without trace or others then take it and refine it. Quite a useful service to the big parties. Land tax may be the next example.
I very much hope that Land Tax is taken up by one or other of the two large uninspired parties. If by that we mean site value taxation. In other words, the value of the site as if it were empty, the value then being whatever could be done with it.
This would solve once and for ever the gambling in land, because its value would be determined by its potential for development. Once the land is identified as suitable for development, it is taxed as though it were already developed. No more land-hogging by the big developers.
I doubt that this very sensible policy would be taken up by the Conservative Party, because they delight in speculation and rigging the odds in their own favour. They are more likely to water it down to suit the ends of their financial backers.
To be clear: it does not appear the $8/month blue checkmark actually grants you a blue checkmark. The feature is not working. The one specific feature that he had to get right https://twitter.com/edzitron/status/1588980881204838401
It's also a massive fight for not much money. $8 per month * 12 months * 400,000 blue ticks * let's say 50% compliance. That's $20m a year on a company with revenue of $5bn.
He won't get anything like that number.
The strange thing about the whole twitter saga is we are judging Musk on his first week in the job.
Twitter was stagnant and losing money for years, despite an active userbase and no serious competition (instagram doesn't do the same thing, facebook doesn't do the same thing, ticktock doesn't do the same thing etc).
It's what he does with it over the next couple of years that interests me. Number one on my list would be integrating micropayments so, say, a journalist could tweet a link to their latest substack and you could pay 2p to read it.
Facebook has been a dead platform for years, Instagram is utterly passé now. And yet nobody is piling on Zuckerberg for having the most powerful media platforms of our time and blowing it all by driving away most of the userbase with pointless algos and tweaks that make the platforms less and less desirable places to be.
I will judge Musk on where Twitter is in a year or two's time. Zoom out.
I’ve acknowledged it’s not completely impossible that he might turn the thing around. But on the evidence of his first week, he doesn’t have a clue what he’s doing. And it’s completely irrational to spend $44 bn on a platform, and then use the first week in control sacking half the talent and alienating a large part of the user base.
Your Zuck comment is an odd one; Meta has lost three quarters of its value in the last year. So yes, the market is judging him.
And yet Facebook has been dead since 2016-ish, yet it continued to spin its legs, wil-e-coyote-style, long after falling off the cliff.
Hence why I'm puzzled as to why you think my Zuck comment is an odd one. As I have said, more than once, we seem to be writing off Musk's vision for Twitter in less than a week. The rot at Facebook started years ago.
It feels to me like people want Musk to fail, either because they don't like him, or because they don't like his politics.
It's probably better to wait and see what the platform becomes in a year or two's time.
A pivot to a microtransaction/subscription based content creator platform as opposed to an ad supported one makes a lot more sense than Zuck's freaky "metaverse" pivot.
But perhaps give it more than a week before passing judgement?
As of July 2022 Facebook had just under 3 billion active users with 1.7 billion using the service on a daily basis. The idea it is dead just because teenagers with a 15 second attention span no longer see it as cool is laughable.
I'd suggest it's engagement that's the problem. I'm one of those 3 billion users, but I've not posted a goddamn thing on there since 2016. Ditto most of my friends.
It's a dead Myspace walking. Absolute ghost town. The markets have finally cottoned on to this, hence the 60% drop in value, so far.
Nope you are not one of those 3 billion because that refers to people who access their account at least once a month.
Given the large number of users who login in less than once a month, there must be another billion ot two, which doesn't seem plausible, that approaches the entire population of the globe.
I make a conscious decision to log out of FB, and don't use FB Messenger, but the system is set up to not log out when closed (Vanilla too) which presumably inflates the figure of daily users, via tracking for advertising and data trawling.
The French anthem is bouncy and cheering - it’s a top ten - but it’s really hard to sing which is a key failing. The Welsh anthem is considerably more stirring
I’d put the Welsh first, then Russia, then France third
Scotland bottom
Scotland doesn't really have a national anthem. They just play a Corrie's song, and pretend it's the national anthem.
I'd put the US bottom. The Star Spangled Banner is weak musically, and utter nonsense lyrically.
Neither of you have any taste it seems.
If you like the US national anthem, you're in no position to criticise others for lack of taste.
I am genuinely surprised incidentally that one thing the SNP have never done as part of their usually rather inept attempts at nation building is decide on an official national anthem.
Where in your fevered imagination did I mention USA, I merely commented that they had no taste re Scottish anthem. @ydoethur
Gavin Williamson is one of those odd people that you get in politics sometimes that just keep coming back time after time after time like a turd you can never quite flush away...
Similes don't come more original than that. you must be very proud.
You starting again? You've already been banned once for abusing me!
If that's as lame as that after an edit, I'd hate to think how it started life.
You are a sycophant to a sycophant (unless you are a sockpuppet, in which case we can eliminate one layer). But respect for your extraordinarily original trope about Williamson. Let us showcase it in all its glory:
"like a turd you can never quite flush away."
Utterly original comic genius. How do you come up with stuff like that? I mean genuinely, does it just pop up while you are in the shower?
OK lets go through this step by step.
This all started because @LostPassword posted that you exposed @Charles identity and he left this site as he was no longer comfortable being here. "Charles" was always nice to me and I didn't know much about you but had seen you posting for a while so I just asked some questions about this.
My basic question was; Is it normal behavior to expose someone's identity on an internet forum? Others said "Charles" exposed himself by being a "braggart" but to me that felt a little like "victim shaming" but I admitted I didn't know the full "ins and outs" of the situation and was curious to find out more....
So I asked some questions. Nothing more, nothing less. And when I saw how angry you was at my probing I even apologized to you in an attempt to "defuse" the situation as I generally don't like confrontation either in real life or online.
Since I asked those questions about you exposing "Charles" I myself have been exposed to on-going bullying and harassment from you on this website (you received a 24hr ban from @PBModerator on 12th October for your totally unwarranted abuse of me and after a period of not interacting with me it seems you have now started up again)
When you came back from your 24hr ban for abusing me I was perfectly happy to just ignore you and for you to ignore me and so we'd never need to interact in this forum again. I have not once mentioned you or responded to any of your posts since you came back from your 24hr ban. But... here we are. You have decided to start poking at me again despite no provocation from me whatsoever...
I have been on this website since 2006 (I'm certainly NOT a "sock puppet" of anyone as I believe I was here before both you were here and maybe Charles too) and in all that time here I have never encountered anyone like you at PB.COM)
So here's the thing.
I believe the more your harass me here, the more you confirm my original suspicion that something isn't right with you. That within the "eccentricity" of your grumpy, maybe elderly, persona there's actually a "malevolence" which is lurking underneath... And I don't want any part of it.
At this point it's all getting pretty dark... so I'll let @MikeSmithson@rcs1000 and @TheScreamingEagles work out what they want to do about all of this because I've had enough honestly!
Not good to hear that GIN, I know Ishmael is quite forceful but not seen him as a bully. Hope you get it sorted out. I have problems with Foremain , a Johnny come lately who just dogs me all the time , most unpleasant and no humour at all and he obviously has major issues.
The French anthem is bouncy and cheering - it’s a top ten - but it’s really hard to sing which is a key failing. The Welsh anthem is considerably more stirring
I’d put the Welsh first, then Russia, then France third
Scotland bottom
Scotland doesn't really have a national anthem. They just play a Corrie's song, and pretend it's the national anthem.
I'd put the US bottom. The Star Spangled Banner is weak musically, and utter nonsense lyrically.
Neither of you have any taste it seems.
If you like the US national anthem, you're in no position to criticise others for lack of taste.
I am genuinely surprised incidentally that one thing the SNP have never done as part of their usually rather inept attempts at nation building is decide on an official national anthem.
Where in your fevered imagination did I mention USA, I merely commented that they had no taste re Scottish anthem. @ydoethur
@malcolmg the post you were replying to merely commented that Scotland doesn't have one, and the only aesthetic comment it made was on the American national anthem.
The French anthem is bouncy and cheering - it’s a top ten - but it’s really hard to sing which is a key failing. The Welsh anthem is considerably more stirring
I’d put the Welsh first, then Russia, then France third
Scotland bottom
Scotland doesn't really have a national anthem. They just play a Corrie's song, and pretend it's the national anthem.
I'd put the US bottom. The Star Spangled Banner is weak musically, and utter nonsense lyrically.
Neither of you have any taste it seems.
If you like the US national anthem, you're in no position to criticise others for lack of taste.
I am genuinely surprised incidentally that one thing the SNP have never done as part of their usually rather inept attempts at nation building is decide on an official national anthem.
Where in your fevered imagination did I mention USA, I merely commented that they had no taste re Scottish anthem. @ydoethur
@malcolmg the post you were replying to merely commented that Scotland doesn't have one, and the only aesthetic comment it made was on the American national anthem.
Ydoethur, you were a naughty boy, and American one is mince in any case.
The French anthem is bouncy and cheering - it’s a top ten - but it’s really hard to sing which is a key failing. The Welsh anthem is considerably more stirring
I’d put the Welsh first, then Russia, then France third
Scotland bottom
Scotland doesn't really have a national anthem. They just play a Corrie's song, and pretend it's the national anthem.
I'd put the US bottom. The Star Spangled Banner is weak musically, and utter nonsense lyrically.
Neither of you have any taste it seems.
If you like the US national anthem, you're in no position to criticise others for lack of taste.
I am genuinely surprised incidentally that one thing the SNP have never done as part of their usually rather inept attempts at nation building is decide on an official national anthem.
Where in your fevered imagination did I mention USA, I merely commented that they had no taste re Scottish anthem. @ydoethur
@malcolmg the post you were replying to merely commented that Scotland doesn't have one, and the only aesthetic comment it made was on the American national anthem.
Ydoethur, you were a naughty boy, and American one is mince in any case.
I'm naughty for being logical?
Well, it's a view.
However, if you think it's mince, I withdraw my accusation you have no taste.
The French anthem is bouncy and cheering - it’s a top ten - but it’s really hard to sing which is a key failing. The Welsh anthem is considerably more stirring
I’d put the Welsh first, then Russia, then France third
Scotland bottom
Scotland doesn't really have a national anthem. They just play a Corrie's song, and pretend it's the national anthem.
I'd put the US bottom. The Star Spangled Banner is weak musically, and utter nonsense lyrically.
Neither of you have any taste it seems.
If you like the US national anthem, you're in no position to criticise others for lack of taste.
I am genuinely surprised incidentally that one thing the SNP have never done as part of their usually rather inept attempts at nation building is decide on an official national anthem.
Where in your fevered imagination did I mention USA, I merely commented that they had no taste re Scottish anthem. @ydoethur
@malcolmg the post you were replying to merely commented that Scotland doesn't have one, and the only aesthetic comment it made was on the American national anthem.
Ydoethur, you were a naughty boy, and American one is mince in any case.
I'm naughty for being logical?
Well, it's a view.
However, if you think it's mince, I withdraw my accusation you have no taste.
I never took it as an accusation , just a jest. Only banter.
Comments
The decision delay is a month. It won't be the end of the project just because of a delay.
Disco Zuck.
I'd suggest it's engagement that's the problem. I'm one of those 3 billion users, but I've not posted a goddamn thing on there since 2016. Ditto most of my friends.
It's a dead Myspace walking. Absolute ghost town. The markets have finally cottoned on to this, hence the 60% drop in value, so far.
And then loading it up with debt, the interest ion which most likely accounts for the bulk of the daily losses you cite.
I don't think many people would have disputed that Twitter could be run better. The new management isn't automatically going to be an improvement, though.
So how can you get $20bn in revenue? You could try charging 100m people $200 a year to be on twitter. That's if he doesn't want advertising. My guess is he would need advertising revenue as well.
In my entire social circle (friends, acquaintances, colleagues, wider family) of 200-300 I'd say 3 or 4 still post on it regularly
Tiny tiny numbers. And they are all over 50. It's doomed
Democrats are outpacing Republicans by 3.5 percentage points among the nearly 14 million Americans who have already cast ballots in those states, according to the latest update from TargetSmart, a Democratic data company that incorporates early vote numbers along with its own proprietary estimates.
TargetSmart classifies Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, New Hampshire, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Utah and Wisconsin as Senate battleground states. Republicans need to flip just one seat currently held by Democrats to retake the majority.
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/11/05/us/elections-midterms-updates?smid=url-share#democrats-are-outpacing-republicans-in-early-voting-in-senate-battleground-states
That said, Facebook GROUPS are still moderately successful, and I know a few people that still use FB Messenger regularly. But this does not = the sturdy foundations of a massive global tech company. Meta could be headed for an almighty collapse in value, quite soon
I was up on Telegraph hill earlier with my son.
Plenty of party atmosphere among the 20-somethings of New Cross and 3 groups letting off smallish fireworks. Some distant displays towards London. But nothing like the traditional war zone.
Bonfire night in SE London pre Covid could feel like the front line in Bakhmut. A pall of aromatic gunpowder smoke in the air and a relentless boom boom. This evening, sporadic fireworks, that’s it.
Even so, Tbf the next Redfield and Techne are crucial to the momentum this honeymoon was definitely generating. Take a glance at the wiki graph, big downward line for Labour, big upward line for Conservatives, the pro Sunak movement is real enough.
Last week I was having to defend the position the honeymoon bounce was lower than I expected, now I am having to defend that we can’t be sure the momentum has stopped, truth is we can’t be sure, though next Redfield and Techne can tell us more.
My moneys on other polls going into the thirties and the average higher than this up to the Black Swan of the budget.
Why am I calling it a BS? Because if the media reporting of it tends toward “iceman cometh” it could send government share lower, but if the media coverage is “man with a clear plan - working class have a government on their side” it could propel the Tory share into the mid thirties.
Facebook is slowly fossilising along with its main elderly demographic. Not sure it’ll die completely though: I get the sense it’s more popular in traditional working class communities than other platforms. Like an ITV in the age of on demand TV.
LinkedIn has found a dull but useful niche as a worthy and earnest corporate platform. Can’t see if disappearing any time soon.
Instagram is also settling into a corporate afterlife. It’s where brands and small businesses put their pretty pictures where in the past they would have put an ad in a magazine.
Snapchat I’ve no idea about but I sense my children’s generation are moving off it on to a mix of Discord for chatting and TikTok for content.
Twitter? Who knows. There’s nowhere else as big with remotely the same coverage of famous people alongside a relatively high average IQ.
https://twitter.com/somebadideas/status/1588876465915166721
If you don’t pay the $8 your tweets will be suppressed by an algorithm. Not making this shit up he said it to a room of investors yesterday & claimed this would solve hate speech. “You’ll have to scroll really far to see unverified users”…
This wrecks twitter. In his own words caught on camera “you won’t really see’ what your friends are posting - even in your own replies - if they don’t pay for it.
His genius idea is shadowbanning free users??
And the internet settles down to be a deathly dull medium like radio or telephone, taking far less time and attention for itself. The tech companies became uninteresting low profit commodities.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-63514047
That’s not a serious proposal, surely?
What about renters?
The Observers asylum story is the government hiring asylum decision makers from customer service and sales positions at McDonalds, Tesco and Aldi.
I suppose the job interview could be quick “do you see it as an invasion and do you want any of these beggars to stay?” Provided you answer correctly the jobs yours. And that 4% figure can become 70% quite quickly utterly humiliating Starmer in the House of Commons.
But, if the quantity increases, but the quality of the work decreases, could that lead to any issues? 95% first rejected winning on appeal if new staff coming in don’t get decent training?
While it appears to have plateaued, that plateau is way above just about every other site. Surely having nearly 2 billion daily active users makes it very, very far from "tiny tiny numbers"? It's the third most visited website in the world (with only Google and YouTube above it), and Facebook also made profits of $40b last year, which is a hell of a lot more than MySpace is making.
Scatter our enemies,
And make them fall!
Confound their politics,
Frustrate their knavish tricks.
(For the US national anthem, I'd prefer something singable by ordinary people
And when I am in a mischievous mood, I think it could be the "Battle Hymn of the Republic".
Content warning for some of you: https://www.austincc.edu/dlauderb/1302/Lyrics/BattleHymnoftheRepublic.htm
During our great Civil War, Union soldiers added many verses, including one about hanging Jeff Davis to a sour apple tree.)
They (we) are quite good at acting like a parliamentary think tank sometimes though. A kite flyer for Labour or occasionally the Tories to nick from. Done it twice this year: first to propose a windfall tax on upstream oil revenues, and first to propose an energy price
cap for this winter.
Lib Dems propose something that has a kernel of an interesting idea but isn’t fully worked through. It either sinks without trace or others then take it and refine it. Quite a useful service to the big parties. Land tax may be the next example.
Like the revival in vinyl?
Will the social media giants still dominate the online world in a decade? I don’t reckon so. The ones making the really big money on tech are those with vast B2B offerings: Microsoft, Amazon, Google/Alphabet. Amazon is even fast catching up with Facebook on ad revenue alone - a mere footnote in its accounts - and will probably overtake it soon.
Thankfully the effects of Facebook are not on a par with those of smoking - another reason why it will be around a lot longer than people think. There are a lot more active FB users on here than you would think as well. Even good old Leon, for all his denials, still makes use of it occasionally.
Visits /10^9 for Sep 2022:
1 Google.com 88
2 Youtube.com 69
3 Facebook.com 12
4 Twitter 7
5 Wikipedia 6
6 Reddit 5
7 Instagram 4
8 Amazon 4
9 Readmanganato 4
10 Lectortmo 4
The top 7 sites in the world are owned by 5 outfits headquartered in California.
By ownership, just going by the above figures:
1 Google (Alphabet) 157
2 Facebook (Meta) 16
3 Twitter 7
4 Wikipedia 6
5 Reddit 5
6 Amazon 4
7 Readmanganato 4
8 Lectortmo 4
Has anyone got a figure for the total number of visits to ALL websites in the world? I wonder whether Google get an absolute majority of visits.
They also get informed when almost every IP calls every website they DON'T own, because of the call to fonts.googleapis.com in the HTML header.
And yet still people get obsessed with almost irrelevant cr*p such as the WEF.
Imagine having 10 times the clout of your nearest competitor.
@elonmusk
Twitter will soon add ability to attach long-form text to tweets, ending absurdity of notepad screenshots
Anyway as it would have eventually cost four times the assumed budget, I calculate the saving to be £200b. Tax cuts all around!
“Greg Smith, the MP for Buckingham and a member of the Commons transport select committee, said scrapping HS2 “could solve virtually all of the Treasury’s problems right now”.”
Sunak needs to find £40-50bn A YEAR. The HS2/3 costs are one-offs.
I get that a pile of tories - and the tele - hate hs2, but really, this is terrible campaigning/reporting. I demand a refund of my tele subscription! Not that I pay one, obviously. “Reader mode” sidesteps the paywall, with one click.
This all started because @LostPassword posted that you exposed @Charles identity and he left this site as he was no longer comfortable being here. "Charles" was always nice to me and I didn't know much about you but had seen you posting for a while so I just asked some questions about this.
My basic question was; Is it normal behavior to expose someone's identity on an internet forum? Others said "Charles" exposed himself by being a "braggart" but to me that felt a little like "victim shaming" but I admitted I didn't know the full "ins and outs" of the situation and was curious to find out more....
So I asked some questions. Nothing more, nothing less. And when I saw how angry you was at my probing I even apologized to you in an attempt to "defuse" the situation as I generally don't like confrontation either in real life or online.
Since I asked those questions about you exposing "Charles" I myself have been exposed to on-going bullying and harassment from you on this website (you received a 24hr ban from @PBModerator on 12th October for your totally unwarranted abuse of me and after a period of not interacting with me it seems you have now started up again)
When you came back from your 24hr ban for abusing me I was perfectly happy to just ignore you and for you to ignore me and so we'd never need to interact in this forum again. I have not once mentioned you or responded to any of your posts since you came back from your 24hr ban. But... here we are. You have decided to start poking at me again despite no provocation from me whatsoever...
I have been on this website since 2006 (I'm certainly NOT a "sock puppet" of anyone as I believe I was here before both you were here and maybe Charles too) and in all that time here I have never encountered anyone like you at PB.COM)
So here's the thing.
I believe the more your harass me here, the more you confirm my original suspicion that something isn't right with you. That within the "eccentricity" of your grumpy, maybe elderly, persona there's actually a "malevolence" which is lurking underneath... And I don't want any part of it.
At this point it's all getting pretty dark... so I'll let @MikeSmithson @rcs1000 and @TheScreamingEagles work out what they want to do about all of this because I've had enough honestly!
If by that we mean site value taxation. In other words, the value of the site as if it were empty, the value then being whatever could be done with it.
This would solve once and for ever the gambling in land, because its value would be determined by its potential for development. Once the land is identified as suitable for development, it is taxed as though it were already developed. No more land-hogging by the big developers.
I doubt that this very sensible policy would be taken up by the Conservative Party, because they delight in speculation and rigging the odds in their own favour. They are more likely to water it down to suit the ends of their financial backers.
I make a conscious decision to log out of FB, and don't use FB Messenger, but the system is set up to not log out when closed (Vanilla too) which presumably inflates the figure of daily users, via tracking for advertising and data trawling.
I have problems with Foremain , a Johnny come lately who just dogs me all the time , most unpleasant and no humour at all and he obviously has major issues.
Well, it's a view.
However, if you think it's mince, I withdraw my accusation you have no taste.