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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   31724 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 24, 2023

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I think the bigger picture should be looked at, and that in the long run, the demise of Twitter will be a death by a thousand paper cuts, where each change isn't quite so negative to kill it entirely, but it keeps Twitter on a downwards and downwards trend. And there's already been several paper cuts - fleeing advertisers, ratelimits, restricted guest browsing, etc.

It's not a bad heuristic in general that companies/sports teams/countries that change all the time are probably doing badly, while sticking to the tried and true is indicative of success. While the media frequently trumpets a new coach, a new CEO, a new rebrand, a fresh constitution, as indicative of improvement and a new winning strategy, but more often than not it is "the noise before defeat." This is the concept of Lindy applied in reverse. The more big change you see, the more likely it is to be a sign of failure. Good change, slow adaptation, happens so slow that if you don't zoom in you miss it.

Every change Musk makes might be bad for Twitter on its own, but it is definitely indicative of problems at Twitter in general. I've made the joke since I joined Reddit an embarrassingly long time ago that nobody hates Reddit more than Redditors. The same applies to Twitter users, who all love to complain about Twitter and other Tweeters. Left wing blue checks hate the racist CHUDs in their replies; Right Wingers decry censorship and the dominance of Blue Check blue hairs. Because Elon is essentially a twitter power user, the equivalent of the bar fly who buys the bar, he lives in that world. So he thinks Twitter's brand is low value and must be dumped.

In terms of rebrands, maybe - obvious comparison is Meta. But, eh, with the rate of technological and social change large companies trying new things is very good. Amazon going in on cloud computing despite being an online store was valuable, AWS was responsible for 3/4 of their profit recently. Similarly for MS's investments in AI and Google's lead in AI research (that they very poorly translated to actual products). Twitter's changes aren't indicative of any good strategy, they aren't low-probability high-payoff experiments, they're just dumb.

My prior is that any directional strategy change is probably a bad sign. Not a bad choice, just a bad sign. A good toy example: hiring a new head coach in the NFL: a new coach typically sees a bump of one and a third wins yet over time the number of coaching changes made by a franchise negatively correlates with winning percentage, even moreso if you weight extra for playoff success.

Now obviously changing coaches isn't always a bad decision, at some point coaches like Bill Belichek and Mike Tonlin were hired. And my own favorite Franchise just made a big strategic choice to move on from a recently successful head coach and found their way back to the big game just a couple years later. But most coaching changes are rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

Similarly, here, I don't have perfect or even good data on twitters underlying numbers and values. I do know that musk himself tried to evade actually buying the company once he actually saw the numbers.

I've made the joke since I joined Reddit an embarrassingly long time ago that nobody hates Reddit more than Redditors.

I feel like that was more of a post ~2012ish stance, maybe post 2010 in certain places (I was also on reddit for an embarrassingly long time).

Around the time of the Great Digg migration, I remember the site being really proud of itself (I'll let others decide if that was deserved or not).

Thinks like this were emblematic of the time. Reddit just really seemed like it was a better place to be than everywhere else. This is also the era when I heard it described as "4chan with a condom", so take that for what you will.

But that was a long time ago. If you'll excuse me, I need to go be nostalgic for a while.

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