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from the explained-in-140-characters dept.
Despite the introduction of advertising, live video streaming, and the visibility of high-profile users like the President of the United States, Twitter remains unprofitable:
For all the buzz the San Francisco company has created as the preferred platform for U.S. President Donald Trump and other high-profile figures, Twitter has lost more than $1.5 billion cumulatively since it went public in late 2013.
The company has almost $1 billion in cash on hand, and the losses are due in part to employee stock compensation, a non-cash expense. That is little comfort, though, for shareholders who end up footing the bill for those costs in the form of dilution.
Further, the company said it was revisiting core advertising strategies, suggesting a quick turnaround on revenue was not likely. Fourth-quarter revenue of $717 million was well short of analysts' expectations.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 11 2017, @05:50AM
Banning Nazis and KKK and MikeeUSA? Popular, you say? Hmm, I wonder what circles you roll in, our mindless
AC! (If twitter had balls, they'd ban Trump! But do you know why birds shit and pee out of the same hole? The eat with their pecker! And Trump has a very small, tweet. )
(Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 11 2017, @06:45AM
Trump is probably driving more traffic to that site than anyone else.
Twitter has a crazy amount of stats on what you do and who you are even if you do not 'use' their site. They are just about everywhere like facebook and google. They have web bugs everywhere.
They are however slow rolling banning people. A form of temp shadowbanning. Basically they know who are the key point players in many conversations. They have quite the conundrum. Ban the big draw to their site yet still try to look like they are 'doing something'. This will have a sad effect of removing the very people who make their platform worth using as they will feel they are not heard (because they are not). Twitter will not go away much like digg and myspace is still around. It will however slowly die and become that thing where people go 'oh yeah forgot about that'.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAAUD7jtFas [youtube.com]
Think about trumps twitter feed. I would think it is pretty much 100% impossible for every single comment under his comments to be negative. Yet there we are. 62 million people liked him more than the other raging narcissists. The media who is used to being the 'bringers of truth' do not like the idea they are being cut out of the loop. So that bunch of narcissists are turning on the other narcissist who is pulling all the oxygen out of the room. Because he actually sided with the group they have been set out to demonize for the past 40+ years. He is playing them like a fiddle because he is just as good at it, if not better. Because he knows what would piss him off. He has written many books on exactly what he is and how he works. They somehow think the normal tools they use will work. They do not see he is one of them and they do not realize it does not work. It only feeds him. As that is the fuel of a narcissist.
Don't think so? Don't think these people are a bunch of narcissists? Watch them. Watch their power plays to gaslight you. They are 'always' right (fact check, fake news). It is not their fault (not sure who voted for him). It is your fault because (racist, nazi, white, demographic, misleading polls, etc). Using flattery and popularisim to manipulate you. Such as 'you are not stupid?' 'you can see what he really is'. 'everyone hates him as everyone around me says so'. Watch how they edit themselves to make themselves look good and make others look 100% unreasonable. They do that by misquoting and editing. If that does not work resort to base speculation in the form of news or 'logical arguments'. Never back down even if you are wrong, if you do just drop the issue, if that does not work deflect, if that does not work blame the messenger.
Here are two different but eerily similar opinions from narcissist experts.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdq1yNcf13Q [youtube.com]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGgT5QkkTQ4 [youtube.com]
What these people are doing is not for your benefit. It is theirs. You are their plaything. Recognize that and you will be much more happy in life. They do not want the best for you. They want you to have to fail as that is the only way they perceive that they win. They even use that as a way to ingratiate themselves to you. As if you go back to them they can continue to berate you and make sure you understand they are the only way to be saved from yourself.
Watching them fight is kind of frightening. They all seem to be well funded. Plane tickets, signs, hotels, permits, and bus rides do not just buy themselves. The scale of watching the billionaires/millionaire narcissists fighting over our future is sad and maddening at the same time.
"Political Correctness is fascism pretending to be manners" - George Carlin, He would probably also be one of the ones saying 'fuck Trump'. As their is one thing a narcissist hates more than anything else in the world, is one better at it than them.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 11 2017, @08:33AM
Marked troll... nice. Proving the point BTW. Both groups are using narcissistic techniques to silence their competitors. In this case that someones opinion is not even worth hearing. You are being a tool of them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNqp05zHCHk [youtube.com]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzpX2Ozt7tc [youtube.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 11 2017, @09:26PM
Twitter has a crazy amount of stats on what you do and who you are even if you do not 'use' their site. They are just about everywhere like facebook and google. They have web bugs everywhere.
You can block their shitty web bugs. I do.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 11 2017, @10:17PM
Why can't they just let us take cute young girls (female children) as brides like the muslims or ancient jews did?
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Saturday February 11 2017, @05:23PM
They do not ban any of those. At most they shadowban them, slow roll their posts, etc. until they give up. But as a ganeral rule they do not even bother with those measures because none of those types get enough followers to be ban worthy. Because that is what it is about, they do not care what you say, they about how many people hear it. A tight knit community can be as zany as they want so long as the general population never notices and they never grow large enough to trend a hashtag and thus draw the "eye of Jack."
No, what they spend all their days on now is, as another poster observed already, finding ways to deep dive into the social graph to find the smallest number of key nodes to knock out to disrupt "crime think" on their network. They want to keep the followers as users if they also follow politically neutral information streams but they are determined to silence any political opposition that is actually harmful to the Narrative. So they reserve the banhammer for anyone who is a dirty doubleplus ungood crimethinker with a lot of followers, i.e. they are cutting a big part of the reason people have an account in the hope they keep their account anyway.
@realDonaldTrump is their key problem. He is the reason for the effort but by the time they started it was already far too big to ban him. Now if they did it their stock value would tank even before Trump took to the air to bombard them or strike back more directly with the various levers of government power now under his nominal control. Their nightmare would be Trump leading a few million of his followers to Gab. Social networks always have a large first mover advantage, once people are on one they tend to stay on it, the value proposition for an upstart is difficult to communicate, following Trump is that argument in a tweet size bite for millions; enough to jump start a new service to viability. Suspect Jack might not quite be bright enough to understand but people around him obviously are. So Trump stays and Jack seeths.
The real problem at Twitter is revealed in the numbers in that report though. They are paying (internet imaginary math probably at work) a buck a head in base costs, hosting and other charges. They make over two per set of eyeballs and are losing money anyway. They fix that or they die, just that simple. Trump or no Trump. Milo or no Milo.
How are they losing that much? They have no advertising costs, like Facebook they leverage everyone else in the media into keeping them household words at zero expense. So what are they pissing away a dollar an account for? They need to give up the bubble dream of being worth hundreds of billions of dollars and accept that a service company that provides little actual value other than network effect is not going to be worth more than a couple of bucks per account and adjust their finances accordingly to match their revenue and burn rate while they still have a little to burn. But of course they won't because the stock price (and the options) are priced based on them eventually becoming Google.