Comment by HarHarVeryFunny
1 day ago
Twitter is essentially dead. If I go to my "For You" tab, it is literally 100% pro-Trump bot posts.
Musk keeps it running as a mouthpiece/propaganda and vanity project, but it's not a viable business anymore due to all the $13B Musk borrowed to acquire it, as well as loss of advertizers. It's estimated to break even on an operational basis, but loses about $1B/yr when you include interest on the debt.
Is it dead? I feel like this is more of a "you" thing than you might realize. At least for sports, twitter is 100% still the dominant medium for reporting.
I'm looking at the same post on a players status for this weekend from 2 hours ago on 3 platforms:
- Threads: 5 likes, 2 comments, 15 shares
- BlueSky: 19 likes, 3 comments, 3 shares
- Twitter: 1500 likes, 105 comments, 281 shares
Doesn't really seem like twitter is the one that's almost dead...
How much of that Twitter activity is human vs bot?
For anything politics related the activity is almost all bots.
Just because you are not the target audience, does not mean the company has no income.
Just because a company "has income" doesn't mean it's a viable business lmao
Uh isn’t the “for you” literally the algorithm based feed for your direct interests? My for you page shows zero trump. And this is exactly the reason why it’s still so valuable, it can feed the echo chambers for individuals and keep them engaged (and seeing ads)
That means they think you're already in the fold. Advertising is to convince people that are not yet convinced.
Trump has a 30% approval rating and will never run for office again. Rest assured that anyone engaged in a sophisticated right-wing propaganda racket would not be talking about Donald Trump.
I've no idea how the "For You" works, and my interests certainly do not include Trump propaganda. The only Twitter content I engage with is from people I follow, which is basically just AI/ML.
This is one of those funny times people don't realize "For You" is personalized. It's like when Google rolled out personalized search by default and people started asking "why do all my search results have porn in them" and it's like uhh dude because you look at porn all the time.
Turns out you just love Trump.
Well, not sure what the intent of the algorithm is - I'd guess increased engagement vs echo chamber (i.e. could be stuff you hate just as much as stuff you like), but in any case it's a failure since I'm not going to read stuff that is a) annoying and b) posted by bots.