Everything published on Twitter except for DMs is open to the whole internet to crawl. It is a public platform. I think it's fair game to serve you ads about Doritos if you are tweeting about potato chips and following Frito Lays.
Location based, privately identifiable, data is a bridge too far for me. But we also know for a fact other social media apps already do this if Twitter's app does not already do this currently.
The hype about Twitter being an unwise purchase is just noise from the peanut gallery. You should take such noise with a grain of salt.
Twitter was always under pressure to maximize value to shareholders. Same with every other tech company. Different companies sometimes make different trade-offs. I fail to see why Musk is somehow going to do any worse than what we've seen from social media companies over the past 15 years. But I do think there's a reasonable chance he'll do better.
Here’s the thing: it can be a bridge too far for you! It’s certainly a bridge too far for me. But neither of us matter, because it’s not our money on the line. It’s his money, a lot of his money, and the longer it hangs the more systemic risk it poses to his other ventures.
When I say it was an “unwise purchase,” what I mean is this: the stock market did not think Twitter was worth that much. Even when Elon was legally committed to purchasing Twitter, the deal seemed so manifestly absurd to the market that the price did not rise to meet his offer (which is as close as you can get to free money in the market). Is that the peanut gallery? Sure, but in no larger a sense than that our entire economy and value drive is controlled by the same system.
What you fear from Musk is the current status quo for all social media and other data mining tech cos like Google and Amazon. I really don't get the deep concern here about Musk upholding the status quo. He cannot do worse than Google, Facebook, TikTok, etc. And whatever data mining is going to occur on your tweets will happen anyways. It's a very public platform, it does not even have the intimate relationship graph or intimate private dm access that other social apps have.
The stock market did think Twitter was worth that much a year ago (Q2 2021 mcap was $51B). Of course the entire stock market shed trillions in market cap this year as the Fed relentlessly hiked rates. Musk clearly was trying to get a steeper discount factoring for the macro environment after the original offer, but it didn't work out. Can't say I blame him, if you can stall things in court to get an extra 10-20% discount from a $40B purchase like that, it's worth a shot.
When you offer to buy up an entire company and all the liquid shares on the market, you have to pay a premium. That's always the case for any buyout. For a while it looked like Musk was going to get away with walking away from the deal. That's why the market walked away from "free money".
The media's job is to dramatize everything. Especially when it's the drama machine itself, Twitter, at the center of it all. The media will do everything in its power to portray the Twitter purchase as chaotic, haphazard, unplanned, ill-considered, etc, because their own engagement metrics are driven by such takes.
At any rate I repeat my assertion that no worse can be done by Musk that has not already been done by Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, Google, et al. There's little to exploit there that hasn't already been exploited. Perhaps his subscription revenue ploy will work and he'll monetize with micropayments and other integrations. I hope so. I think there's a chance that version of Twitter is healthier than the ad and blue check insider peddling platform that has existed. Not guaranteed but it's a chance.
> What you fear from Musk is the current status quo for all social media and other data mining tech cos like Google and Amazon. I really don't get the deep concern here about Musk upholding the status quo.
Musk's entire publicly stated justification for purchasing Twitter was doing better than the status quo. He harped for months about Twitter as a public service, the importance of transparency in moderation, made extraordinary claims about Twitter falsifying its ad and engagement numbers, and so forth.
"He can't be worse" is simply not the point. His stated goal was to be better; we've seen no earnest attempt to do so (and plenty of earnest attempts at value extraction).
> "He can't be worse" is simply not the point. His stated goal was to be better; we've seen no earnest attempt to do so (and plenty of earnest attempts at value extraction).
Sure, we have. We've seen him charge an earnest fee for a premium service that Twitter previously withheld behind a mysterious bureaucracy that arbitrarily decided who did and did not get a blue check mark. We found that employees at Twitter were charging as much as $15K to pull strings for people for that blue check.
That's already objectively better. $8 a month to verify you are who you represent yourself to be and to get less ads, more access to revenue generation features from your audience, etc? Sounds fine. It's absurd to have some mysterious service that no one really knows the rules or thresholds for. It creates the very pay for play schemes that were the status quo.
Location based, privately identifiable, data is a bridge too far for me. But we also know for a fact other social media apps already do this if Twitter's app does not already do this currently.
The hype about Twitter being an unwise purchase is just noise from the peanut gallery. You should take such noise with a grain of salt.
Twitter was always under pressure to maximize value to shareholders. Same with every other tech company. Different companies sometimes make different trade-offs. I fail to see why Musk is somehow going to do any worse than what we've seen from social media companies over the past 15 years. But I do think there's a reasonable chance he'll do better.