zlacker

>>waxpan+(OP)
Excellent, balanced post.

We’re at the end of a grand experiment of “you can take VC money and deliver a tech with new values, one that people want.”

The only people still claiming you can just haven’t run out of their last funding round… yet.

We have 20 years of evidence on what tech businesses can be built on the Internet that make money. It’s narrow and mostly can’t solve the problems that remain.

The escape hatch is always subscription revenue.

It’s true you can build a unique business on unique values for a unique community.

But it’s a long slog in the MicroSaaS world where anyone can & many will straight up copy you - forever.

X.com is probably the only & last experiment on whether switching to subscription rev is achievable at scale. Looks pretty clear so far that it’s not.

This might seem a negative outlook, but it could be quite positive if founders know & accept it.

The secret is out now that, mostly, founders make the same amount of money in the same amount of time whether they go the VC or bootstrapped route (when it’s a winning business).

There will always be opportunities for finance-backed cartel-busting mega runs.

But if you are a founder that cares about anything - anything - the route that gets you there is founder control, patience, and a customer base that pays.

>>sirspa+9s1
YouTube and Hulu did it very successfully. Twitter has just done it in a really stupid way, because their management values politics over the actual business of running a social media platform (moreso now than before, but still very much before)

>>Former+uF1
X switches to subscription exactly because politics forces them to, by trying to scare and shame advertisers.

Once subscription revenue is enough, scare and shame won't work and politics won't have anything to do with the future of the business.

>>DeathA+Ki2
Complaining about the advertisers leaving X is true "leopards ate my face".

Politics has been a significant part of Twitter's success, driving relevance & audience size. Politics was fuel for growth and Twitter was influential partially because of it's openness. The moderation was there because being a relatively balanced & hate free spare without too much controversy was essential for the majority of advertisers.

To reverse those parameters and turn it into a walled garden of Musk-like right wing edge lords that increasingly promotes right wing edge lord content that significantly reduces its safety for advertisers and then complaining that it's purely down to other people making the advertisers flee requires some major cognitive dissonance or a very blinkered world view.

Musk's aim for X.com is to make it an everything app, which is obviously impossible if it does not appeal to almost everyone. As an owner he has every right to make it into a smaller, politically homogeneous message board but he shouldn't simultaneously complain about the very obvious & easily predicted effects of that.

>>altacc+hy2
im sure that sort of stuff is on there, but all the stuff my friends and i see on there is memes, and Id guess thats representative of most of the 20s age userbase. We didnt notice any change during the buyout or rebrand except some different meme recommendations for a bit.

There are a lot more ads between my memes now though. It hit a critical density where we dont use it anymore. 40% ads

>>wegfaw+Jt3
So to summarize, you have stopped using twitter because of ad increases since elon took over?

>>Street+wU3
I have a very low tolerance for ads. I mostly dont use it anymore. Id say five of the ten in the group stopped altogethor. That was in the past three or four months or so where the density really really increased.

That does differ from what people are saying which is that somehow elon lost all the ad companies support and so is unable to serve ads, or that twitter is an alt right cesspool.

The only political tweets we ever saw were elons, and hes 52 and we are from texas, so it just seemed like normal old people stuff.