Any Tesla investors out there? He might be onto something.
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I donât disagree at all with what Erin Reed is saying but isnât there a little bit of irony in posting âEvery dime you give him hurts usâ on Twitter? Having an active Twitter account and driving traffic by posting popular comments (over 1300 retweets) helps to directly fund Twitter and Musk with more ad revenue.
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This is the most important thing to take from the reporting. /s
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Well, we canât talk about active genocide unless we do it the right way⌠/s
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at this point, it sounds like every twitter account is costing money. including and especially posts like the one featured. iâm definitely not buying a tesla any time soon though. or ummm⌠buying any rockets.
Ok, Iâll accept that I may be wrong then. But for my benefit can you explain that a little further? Are you saying that Twitter would be more valuable as a company without any accounts? What financial value does the company have other than accounts that deliver eyeballs to advertisers?
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based on the rapid devaluation, the servicing of the debt, the cost of staffing and running the service, and the fact advertisers can no longer protect against impersonation, arbitrary reprisal, and hate speech - twitter sinks further each day into a financial black hole.
other companies have been in similar situations before - for example uber - where more customers was less money. but for uber, the goal was to undermine existing services and then raise rates. twitter doesnât have that path available to it.
personally, i believe the gravity of the situation is insurmountable. and yes, i quite honestly believe - at this point - theyâd be losing less money with fewer users
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Already mentioned upthread, posted for additional infos/links:
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This is an interesting take and I havenât heard it before.
I have been wondering what will happen as their hardware becomes uncompetitive. You canât just lay off your servers if theyâre underperforming and theyâre only getting more expensive too. I imagine then if the Europeans boot Twitter though then in some ways Twitter will actually benefit, or at least maybe try to spin it that way.
Lay off a lot of people, close any local offices and be done with rent, look ma so much profit this year! 
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I wouldnât call it the most important, but it is kind of ironic. A lot of this stuff gets posted on Mastodon (and some on Bluesky), but those networks of services are limited by the fact that the individual services are careful not to add more users than they can afford to host. It isnât as straightforward as, say, a single corporate address.
But I suppose it will change soon, because the ability to be seen, the main advantage of Twitter, is slowly dying. Geeks I follow like John Gruber note that the interaction has dropped off a cliff on Twitter, far fewer retweet or reply, or he never sees their replies. But on Mastodon, he can see boosts and favorites across the fediverse (that is, from other Mastodon servers) and gets more responses that seem more thoughtful at the same time. So he said on his podcast that he has shifted to mostly using Mastodon and only looking at Twitter when the tweet is posted elsewhere.
By the way, fellow BBSâers, did ad revenue ever recover on Twitter? My last understanding was that most major brands had abandoned it, leaving the market open to the grifters that used to prey on Parler and Truth Social rubes?
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From David Thiel at the Stanford Internet Observatory:
We used the waning days of our Twitter API access for a project studying the failure of CSAM controls on Twitter and elsewhere. Weâll have a more detailed report out later this week.
and from Alex Stamos:
In the course of conducting a large investigation into online child exploitation, our team at the Stanford Internet Observatory discovered serious failings with the child protection systems at Twitter.
This discovery, that Twitterâs systems for stopping the posting of known child sexual abuse material (CSAM) had failed, occurred in the context of a larger project that we will release later this week alongside the Wall Street Journal.
For the part of our investigation that involved Twitter, we gathered tweet metadata via Twitterâs API. As a precaution, we used an ingest pipeline that did not store media, but sent media URLs to PhotoDNA, Microsoftâs service for detecting known CSAM.
Our tooling automatically reports any instance of known CSAM to NCMEC without our team viewing it. The investigation discovered problems with Twitterâs CSAM detection mechanisms and we reported this issue to NCMEC in April, but the problem continued.
Having no remaining Trust and Safety contacts at Twitter, we approached a third-party intermediary to arrange a briefing. Twitter was informed of the problem, and the issue appears to have been resolved as of May 20.
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From the precautions they took, they probably suspected it would be bad.
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I left out the bit about Twitter not being the only platform studied, and thereâs a reply to which Stamos confirmed they will also have a report about CSAM on Mastodon. Iâll speculate that their methodology is partly that they didnât want to implicate Stanford in storing or transmitting it. It also seems like they were being objective about whatâs classified as CSAM; if they could build an automated tool to detect these samples, then Twitter (and other platforms) should be able to.
Thinking about this some more, I canât help but wonder if Twitterâs automated tools might have used PhotoDNA up until Elonâs spat over Microsoft & OpenAI, or whether he stopped paying the bill well before starting his own AI company in April.
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