The problem is that Elon has neither carrot to offer advertisers nor stick to beat them with. Twitter is a small platform, the audience hasn't grown for years, the ad products are terrible both for management and placement, they are uniformly low-quality, non-relevant, and highly redundant to the viewer, and Twitter Blue still has no traction and for all but a tiny sliver of the user base, has become a toxic brand. Elon needs the advertisers far more than they need Twitter.
"Longhouse harridans" is a keeper. The only reason "harridan" fails to inflame leftists yet is its gross underutilization. In two years, people will be canceled as the H-word joins the C-word on the "strictly verboten" list after cracking up too many Substack readers. .
That aside yours is actually the most conservative explanation for what on the service looks like mercurial, even unguided behavior on Musk's part. As you imply, most of us know nothing about marketing and nake shitty inferences because we don't properly understand the incentives (inasmuch as anyone dies in this "Dildos for Tots' world).
Elon's fighting the good fight and all that, right now w/ Twitter & free speech, but.... He's still a rich globalist muthafucker who wants to put a neuralink in all of our heads. Gurandamntee ya that free speech will go poof faster than a SpaceX launch if he ever convinces a bunch of idiots to get chipped (and they survive the process) .... We ain't seen nothing yet, as far as carrots & sticks go....
Capitalism is amoral by design. But, since the Sixties social revolution, now we are engaged in a great civil war between authoritarian billionaires clinging to traditional capitalist amorality... and progressive billionaires who, still believing that capitalists move money to the place of its most efficient use, have realized that 60% of their market is now made up of people who were freed and moralized by the Sixties. The operative emotion of the conservative Right seems to be... repulsion.
This is the main value of FrogTwitter; each of the frogs has different areas of expertise. It's the equivalent of an art scene, a university, a spy network.
The problem is that Elon has neither carrot to offer advertisers nor stick to beat them with. Twitter is a small platform, the audience hasn't grown for years, the ad products are terrible both for management and placement, they are uniformly low-quality, non-relevant, and highly redundant to the viewer, and Twitter Blue still has no traction and for all but a tiny sliver of the user base, has become a toxic brand. Elon needs the advertisers far more than they need Twitter.
Nice post. It reminded me of this post by Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief of the Verge, in October 2022, where he wrote that Musk was in between a rock and a hard place between Twitter users wanting free speech and advertisers demanding censorship: https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/28/23428132/elon-musk-twitter-acquisition-problems-speech-moderation
"Longhouse harridans" is a keeper. The only reason "harridan" fails to inflame leftists yet is its gross underutilization. In two years, people will be canceled as the H-word joins the C-word on the "strictly verboten" list after cracking up too many Substack readers. .
That aside yours is actually the most conservative explanation for what on the service looks like mercurial, even unguided behavior on Musk's part. As you imply, most of us know nothing about marketing and nake shitty inferences because we don't properly understand the incentives (inasmuch as anyone dies in this "Dildos for Tots' world).
Elon's fighting the good fight and all that, right now w/ Twitter & free speech, but.... He's still a rich globalist muthafucker who wants to put a neuralink in all of our heads. Gurandamntee ya that free speech will go poof faster than a SpaceX launch if he ever convinces a bunch of idiots to get chipped (and they survive the process) .... We ain't seen nothing yet, as far as carrots & sticks go....
awesome call to arms....I'd follow that man into battle
"Second, you buy products from the companies, like Apple, that haven’t caved to pressure to pull their advertising."
Right-Wingers buying products from companies like Apple, run by folks like Tim Cook et al, is what got Conservatives into this mess to begin with. . .
https://investor.apple.com/esg/default.aspx
Thank-you for that rundown. I appreciate knowing how these things work.
Capitalism is amoral by design. But, since the Sixties social revolution, now we are engaged in a great civil war between authoritarian billionaires clinging to traditional capitalist amorality... and progressive billionaires who, still believing that capitalists move money to the place of its most efficient use, have realized that 60% of their market is now made up of people who were freed and moralized by the Sixties. The operative emotion of the conservative Right seems to be... repulsion.
Brilliant analysis; this explains so much.
This is the main value of FrogTwitter; each of the frogs has different areas of expertise. It's the equivalent of an art scene, a university, a spy network.