Elon Musk's X drops headlines from articles, as new report details its bleeding ad revenue
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Elon Musk's X revamped its look to eliminate headlines on article links Wednesday, the same day that Reuters reported the platform has seen massive monthly...

X drops headlines from articles, as new report details its bleeding ad revenue::Elon Musk’s X revamped its look to eliminate headlines on article links Wednesday, the same day that Reuters reported the platform has seen massive monthly…

      • gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        42·
        9 months ago

        I’ve seen estimates that put the loss of value of the company itself since Elon took over at something like 90%. If that’s anywhere even close to accurate… impressive. Most impressive.

        • joenforcer@midwest.socialEnglish
          16·
          9 months ago

          Since Twitter is now private, we’ll never know the real numbers, but the paper value of the Twitter brand itself being cast aside is a huge non-monetary loss.

          • Tyfud@lemmy.oneEnglish
            1·
            9 months ago

            That’s not entirely true. There is a company that still holds its Twitter shares even after it went private. They are the ones that everyone points to when looking for real estimates of how much value the company has lost. Every quarter or so they release their estimate of their shares in Twitter, and based on the total shares they own, we can get a good idea of the total company valuation.

            • joenforcer@midwest.socialEnglish
              3·
              9 months ago

              Twitter was a public company before Elon’s acquisition. Not sure what you’re trying to get at with the “profit-driven” comment either… every business is by necessity.

            • Natanael@slrpnk.netEnglish
              1·
              9 months ago

              Don’t mix private vs gov entity with private ownership vs ownership shares open for purchase top the public

              • uis@lemmy.worldEnglish
                1·
                9 months ago

                You forget about NG-NPOs. Linux Foundation is NG-NPO, FSF is NG-NPO.

      • Hiccup@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        51·
        9 months ago

        They’ve gone and Dugg themselves a whole that will never come out of while Musk is there.

  • alienanimals@lemmy.worldEnglish
    5714·
    9 months ago

    Downvote Musk spam.

    The billionaire doesn’t need your help ensuring him and his businesses stay in the headlines every day. Don’t be a useful idiot.

  • schema@lemmy.world
    33·
    9 months ago

    The change had been expected, with Musk tweeting in August: “This is coming from me directly. Will greatly improve the esthetics.”

    Yeah… we figured it’s his doing, since it’s a terrible decision.

    • Anonymousllama@lemmy.worldEnglish
      5·
      9 months ago

      Probably hoping that if they remove titles they can remove context from the link, trying to goad people into click-throughs. Pretty poor experience for the users I’d argue

    • jay9@lemmy.worldEnglish
      28·
      9 months ago

      Probably so people click the link more often to find out what it’s about - which Musk then can take to publishers and say “look how much traffic we generated for you”

    • micka190@lemmy.world
      English
      5·
      9 months ago

      Might just be a way to bypass some countries requiring that social media sites pay news companies when they scrape their articles and show a preview on the page? Something like that’s been passed in Canada recently and companies like Facebook and Google basically just stopped showing summaries of news on their sites to Canadians as a result.

  • qooqie@lemmy.worldEnglish
    142·
    9 months ago

    Guys he doesn’t care, I have a feeling he’s more annoyed or even amused that people are still using Twitter more than anything. He’s doing the whole “I want to push this as far as possible xd” thing. And honestly it is kind of amazing seeing just how much people put up with to use that shit platform

  • ArghZombies@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1913·
    9 months ago

    For people still using Twitter, if you view it in a browser like Brave it will hide all the ads for you. Even better, you can save the webpage view as a Web App in your phone and access it that way and you barely even notice it’s the web version you’re using and not the app. I’ve not seen an ad on Twitter in months since doing that.

    • NocturnalEngineer@lemmy.worldEnglish
      53·
      9 months ago

      Considering they dismantled every control they had to prevent disinformation, and it was already a cesspool to begin with… Why are people still using Twitter?

      • ArghZombies@lemmy.worldEnglish
        194·
        9 months ago

        Sadly these still a lot of folks on there that haven’t moved elsewhere. If you curate your follower lists and don’t venture into the replies of big/ trending accounts then it’s still manageable. Mostly I just use to to read people I follow rather than post anything new myself these days.

        Also, I’ve feeds of decent journalists that I’ve built up over many years that don’t post elsewhere. There’s still that immediacy that you just don’t get elsewhere.

    • BlinkerFluid@lemmy.oneEnglish
      534·
      9 months ago

      Don’t use Brave, they push crypto incentives. Use Firefox and ublock origin, that and BAT’s chart is crap.

      but Blink, you trade crypto

      I guess I’d know, then.

      edit: fuck plebbit too

    • seaQueue@lemmy.worldEnglish
      31·
      9 months ago

      Before I dropped twatter like a bad habit I had it running nicely through Adguard and TwiFucker on Android which blocked ads as well as sponsored twats. Highly recommend if anyone is stuck using that terrible platform for some reason.

  • jray4559@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    51·
    9 months ago

    Man, Elon just never stops, does he? He has made one good addition to what was a perfectly good Twitter (Community Notes), and at least what, 30 bad decisions? Has there ever been a CEO as stupid as Elon has been to Twitter over this year? I mean damn, even being outed as a child molester and forced to resign probably wouldn’t have been as bad.

      • jray4559@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
        4·
        9 months ago

        Did not realize, damn… so that’s zero good decisions I guess. Elon has gotta be the worst owner of any tech company… probably ever, honestly.

  • Fedizen@lemmy.worldEnglish
    31·
    9 months ago

    I feel like this is a broken clock thing where the reality is that headlines often detract from articles but its also a bad solution. User summaries makes more sense but thats harder to figure out

  • postmateDumbass@lemmy.worldEnglish
    36·
    9 months ago

    Does everyone understand that we need to fight the class war?

    The 1% just bought twitter so they could destroy it, removing the leading tool people used to communicate.

    … As we enter what has potential to be the worst election season yet.

    • LexiMax@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      8·
      9 months ago

      Elon never intended to buy Twitter, he always intended to back out of the deal from the beginning, either as a headline-grabbing move or as some form of stock manipulation. His miscalculation is that he didn’t realize that the existing Twitter management was eager to sell due to the site treading water in terms of profitability, and were willing to take him to court to make the deal go through.

      The boat-anchor around his ankle is that he had to borrow a lot of money to honor the purchase. Advertising revenue would’ve always been decimated by his enabling the right, but the enormous debt hanging over his head is why the site is visibly cracking at the seams so soon after his purchase. Of course, he did favors for his political allies, but that was a move made out of opportunism, not conspiracy.

      If I’m making him sound like he’s playing 5D chess, he’s not. He made a dumb decision that blew up in his face. He’s screwed. He knows he’s totally screwed. So he’s doing what any CEO would be doing in his position - cutting costs, lying about why the site is having issues, and coming up with hare-brained ideas to try and generate revenue. It’s 100% performative CYA, because when the site is finally repossessed by his creditors, at least he can claim he tried something.