Merged Musk buys Twitter!/ Elon Musk puts Twitter deal on hold....

[Myriad]

I've been thinking about what Twitter could provide to a paid member/user that would make it worth $20 a year to me to subscribe. Not $20 per ******* month, that's daft. Per annum, to make the prospect realistic.

I pay more than that for streaming subscriptions. Those give me access to thousands of movies whose average production costs were in the millions of dollars each.

I don't currently pay more than that for subscriptions to edited periodicals, but I can at least see the potential value of the work someone has done to select and/or create articles of interest with certain quality standards.

I know there are interesting and informative Tweets. I find out about them because someone has linked them or quoted them from a forum like this one, usually because they're interesting and relevant to a topic being discussed. Am I willing to sift through the Scrooge McDuck Money Bin of Post-It Notes myself instead, to find those interesting tidbits on my own? Maybe, I could see taking it up as a pastime, but not enough to pay for the privilege. How about tossing my own pithy insightful Post-Its into the bin (the activity that gives the whole thing its value, supposedly)? Same deal.

Current or recent Twitter users, how does one actually get value out of either reading or posting Tweets? And what would you estimate that value to be, in hard currency?

 

[Axxman300]

Current or recent Twitter users, how does one actually get value out of either reading or posting Tweets? And what would you estimate that value to be, in hard currency?

Hard to say. I can promote the two anthologies with my short stories without paying advertising fees. I follow dozens of stringers for the major news & wire services which allows me real-time information about events in the Middle East, Ukraine, and elsewhere.

Not sure how to put a price on that.

And how do you put a price on the moments that come across your feed, such as the times William Shatner and Carrie Fischer got into snarky arguments. I mean, come on, Captain Kirk vs Princess Leia, how can you top that? What about the thoughts of people recalling historic events they witnessed?

If you set up your Twitter feed by following folks you know, people you respect, people you like because they're in your favorite movies, TV shows, or make music you love, you end up with a handy, educational, and fun way to kill time while sitting in a doctors office, or when you're bored.

I have like 450 followers. I regale them with pictures of my hiking adventures, progress on my model building, whatever home improvement project I'm doing, and pointless observations about whatever the topic of the day may be. It's the online equivalent of a community bulletin board, and the men's room wall.

I have no idea how Twitter makes any money.

 

[a_unique_person]

Umm... it'd be waaaaay too late now, I think. If you started shorting the moment that it was clear that the deal was going through, though, you might be able to turn a pretty penny.

Shorting Tesla is just as good.

 

[dudalb]

What are the odds he REALLY means to wreck it in its current form, takes a massive tax-break from the loss, then tries to build a new one in his image from the scattered parts.

He would lose a lot more then he could gain from a Tax Break.

You are giving the guy too much credit. He simply messed up bigtime.

 

[Samson]

The thought experiment I am having is how much annually would I pay to be here.
I guess somewhere located above zero, so Twitter users can figure.

 

[The Great Zaganza]

new business model: pay for the right to block followers and commenters to your Tweets.
because Money is Free Speech.

 

[Gulliver Foyle]

The TLDR version: to start with he is the son of a wealthy mining operator from South Africa. He saw the value in a startup electric vehicle company called Tesla. He bought a controlling stake in it. They were way ahead in technology and the market valued it at many many many times over its actual earnings. So the value of his share of the company went up thousands of times over what he bought it for.

You forgot about his early investment in paypal (the one truly productive company he bought into), which bankrolled his buyout of Tesla.

Everything he did after buying paypal shares reads like a bad snake oil peddler being incredibly lucky.

 

[catsmate]

Brilliant, but he couldn't immediately grasp what the purpose of the blue tick was?

That would require listening to people who know more than he does.

 

[Rolfe]

That would require listening to people who know more than he does.

I'd have thought it was self-evident.

 

[catsmate]

I'd have thought it was self-evident.

I've made that mistake too.

 

[a_unique_person]

I've been thinking about what Twitter could provide to a paid member/user that would make it worth $20 a year to me to subscribe. Not $20 per ******* month, that's daft. Per annum, to make the prospect realistic.

I pay more than that for streaming subscriptions. Those give me access to thousands of movies whose average production costs were in the millions of dollars each.

I don't currently pay more than that for subscriptions to edited periodicals, but I can at least see the potential value of the work someone has done to select and/or create articles of interest with certain quality standards.

I know there are interesting and informative Tweets. I find out about them because someone has linked them or quoted them from a forum like this one, usually because they're interesting and relevant to a topic being discussed. Am I willing to sift through the Scrooge McDuck Money Bin of Post-It Notes myself instead, to find those interesting tidbits on my own? Maybe, I could see taking it up as a pastime, but not enough to pay for the privilege. How about tossing my own pithy insightful Post-Its into the bin (the activity that gives the whole thing its value, supposedly)? Same deal.

Current or recent Twitter users, how does one actually get value out of either reading or posting Tweets? And what would you estimate that value to be, in hard currency?

As I understand it, Musk is trying to monetise Twitter following the model of a Chinese chat app. It makes a lot of money by offering multiple services like loans and online shopping that integrate into the app.

 

[The Great Zaganza]

BTH, if Twitter would offer banking services to the many people who can't get a "traditional" bank account, that would be a good thing.

 

[catsmate]

BTH, if Twitter would offer banking services to the many people who can't get a "traditional" bank account, that would be a good thing.

Banking tends to have regulations, something Musk isn't good with.

 

[Olmstead]

Musk is an idiot. Twitter users aren't actually their customers, advertisers are. Twitter users are their product, and now he's made the product all sticky and misshapen and promises to make it even stickier and more misshapen in the future.

 

[Myriad]

Hard to say. I can promote the two anthologies with my short stories without paying advertising fees. I follow dozens of stringers for the major news & wire services which allows me real-time information about events in the Middle East, Ukraine, and elsewhere.

Not sure how to put a price on that.

And how do you put a price on the moments that come across your feed, such as the times William Shatner and Carrie Fischer got into snarky arguments. I mean, come on, Captain Kirk vs Princess Leia, how can you top that? What about the thoughts of people recalling historic events they witnessed?

If you set up your Twitter feed by following folks you know, people you respect, people you like because they're in your favorite movies, TV shows, or make music you love, you end up with a handy, educational, and fun way to kill time while sitting in a doctors office, or when you're bored.

I have like 450 followers. I regale them with pictures of my hiking adventures, progress on my model building, whatever home improvement project I'm doing, and pointless observations about whatever the topic of the day may be. It's the online equivalent of a community bulletin board, and the men's room wall.

I have no idea how Twitter makes any money.

Okay, thanks. I can see there's some value in that. That kind of participation obviously takes a lot of work, but for hobbies there's no contradiction between costing money and requiring effort.

Automated suggestions along the lines of "based on your current feeds, here are some others you might like" would add more value, if only such algorithms weren't so crappy ("if you like Lord of the Rings you might also like Game of Thrones"*) and so tempting for the platform owners to monetize by bumping "sponsored" suggestions.

The attention of other users is limited-sum (not zero-sum, but it increases only by increasing the overall usage of the platform) so "pay for more attention" is an inherently limited commodity. And as others have pointed out, letting deep pockets pay to push their content at everyone just turns the user experience into an ad fest. You can take money from m&ms to disseminate their posts more widely, but you can't also get users to pay for access to those posts if that's not what they want to see.

I can see why the company might look to other areas like games or banking to add value and increase revenue. Those raise other questions though.


*The problem with them is, by nature they're based primarily on popularity, and so end up in a "you like popular things, here are some other popular things you might also like" attractor, when what would really help is "here are some unpopular things you, unlike most people, will probably like." Overall popularity is the DC component of the signal that should be filtered out.

 

[lobosrul5]

You forgot about his early investment in paypal (the one truly productive company he bought into), which bankrolled his buyout of Tesla.

Everything he did after buying paypal shares reads like a bad snake oil peddler being incredibly lucky.

Also x.com before that.. but I was trying to be brief.

 

[Chanakya]

The thought experiment I am having is how much annually would I pay to be here.
I guess somewhere located above zero, so Twitter users can figure.

Here is different than Twitter. I know there's quite a few who seem to find this place every kind of oppressive, but I myself think that, although not perfect, and although there remains scope for improvement, but this place is really great in terms of critical thinking and skepticism and all of that, what it was meant to be all along. In concept and in theory, most certainly; and to a large extent in practice as well.

If I were possessed of a huge fortune with heaps of disposable money lying around --- which unfortunately is not the case, at least so far! --- I'd be more than happy to apportion a good portion of that to furthering the scope and reach and effectivity and the overall experience of this place, or at least offer to. Spending on this place, or offering to, would be near the top of my other-than-personal to-dos, should I come into an unexpected inheritence, or win the Powerball, or some such.

That said, I think making this place subscription based would be a terrible idea. Because it would lock out those who can't afford to pay, and also those who, while well able to shell out some loose change, might nevertheless not be agreeable to putting down money in order to be here. That way we might well lose valuable contributors, and be the poorer for it.

Should this place be in need of money, then I think the way to monetizing this place would be via voluntary donations, whether large amounts towards a capital base, or smaller amounts to help keep the place running, and in either case preferably completely anonymously so that no one ever stands out by virtue of money. I'm completely against ever making this place pay-only, or even irritatingly ad-driven. (I know that when you're not logged in ads tend to pop up, but members never notice it when logged in so I guess it doesn't matter, for those that care enough to be here that they'll take the trouble to sign up. But having ads in the signed-in membership experience, that too is something I'm completely against.)

 

[Darat]

It's hilarious how stupidly Musk has handled this. Had he done the minimal due diligence up front he would have known that, like most popular tech stocks (including Tesla), Twitter was way overvalued. Their board must have been pinching each other when Musk made his offer, then laughing themselves hoarse when he signed and made the offer binding.
Now, instead of paying the billion-dollar kiss-off penalty to abort his terrible deal, Musk has to service loans at what is reportedly a rate of a billion dollars per year.

I think when people blame his ego for this debacle they minimize the role his stupidity plays. Musk is a ******* dummy.

I think this demonstrates the "no one can say no to Musk" that now surrounds him. Many, many commentators at the time couldn't believe he signed the deal he had (that tied him irrevocably into buying Twitter at his offer price or a huge pay-out for nothing). That deal does not indicate someone who is highly intelligent and knowledgeable.

 

[lomiller]

There's an idea: put Liz Truss in charge of Twitter. I understand she's an ideas person.

What this situation calls for is innovative jams and marmalades!

 

[jimbob]

BTH, if Twitter would offer banking services to the many people who can't get a "traditional" bank account, that would be a good thing.

Maybe, but to make it remotely attractive one would need the following to have not resigned at the same time and in response to Musk's actions.

Chief Information Security Officer, Chief Privacy Officer, Chief Compliance Officer, and head of Trust and Safety

ETA

Banking tends to have regulations, something Musk isn't good with.

Also

Musk is an idiot. Twitter users aren't actually their customers, advertisers are. Twitter users are their product, and now he's made the product all sticky and misshapen and promises to make it even stickier and more misshapen in the future.