Mark Zuckerberg goes in for the kill as Elon Musk’s Twitter bleeds ad dollars

demvoter@kbin.social to Technology@beehaw.org – 43 points – Mark Zuckerberg goes in for the kill as Elon Musk’s Twitter bleeds ad dollars
telegraph.co.uk

Brands fed up with the instability at Twitter may flock to Meta's new offering

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Rich business dudes threatening other rich business dudes with... business.

There's not much "technology" in there.

Technology forums used to be a place to chat about cool new technology, now it's just people complaining about what FAANG did today

Zuckerberg’s company is already courting celebrities and influencers to test the app.

Even if it was someone other than Zuckerberg doing this, reading this bit would immediately turn me off to the platform.

I guess I'm old enough to have gone through they heyday of the internet at an impressionable time in my life, but I have zero time for influencers or opinions by celebrities on literally anything.

You're not the audience they're looking for.

Yes they are. Facebook's audience is as many people as possible, because their business is advertising based on collected data. They would ideally want literally everyone on the platform, but this is the real world and lowest common denominator makes more sense from a business standpoint.

Edit: Getting celebrities and influencers on-board is basically a requirement to get the average person to care, because they're not on the platform to follow other average people.

I never thought I'd say this but Zuckerberg is the lesser of two evils. I don't necessarily hope Threads is a huge success, but I will be quietly happy if it manages to drive the final nail into Twitter's coffin just to teach the Muskrat a lesson.

Meta's incursion in the fediverse might cause very bad effects, there's nothing preventing them from spitting add from their new platform to all other platforms compatible with it.
I really hope that if we come to that, admins will defederate immediately.

Nah admins/owners of instances are gonna get paid to stay

This is what I fear the most tbh

Then those instances will get defederated right along with Meta itself.

Ultimately, there's very little friction for users when it comes to choosing which instance they want to "view" the Fediverse from, so if some of them are ad-laden and others are not they'll gravitate to the non-ad-laden ones. This will be especially easy once account migration features get implemented.

Yeah this is the thing about the fediverse. As long as you can defederate there will always be an instance willing to provide that niche

That is true, the nature of the fediverse does mean that you won't have to interact with fedbook's server if you don't want to.

The fact that instagram users can migrate their accounts to Threads (presumably with very little configuration) is huge. I don't feel like it would impact this side of the internet as much but twitter could look like a very different place a year from now. Doubt they'll be trying to federate.

They're going to quickly realize they're already reaching that audience via Facebook; the people using this service will be the same people.

They might keep those users more engaged with this new app though. The Twitter format might be more successful for facilitating outrage and arguments than the Facebook format is.

And more engagement means more adverts shown and thus more revenue.

Interesting that Twitter is becoming more of a walled garden and the biggest walled garden is looking to create a lesser walled garden.

Hmm, the headline seemed to suggest Zuckerberg planned on buying and absorbing twitter. But no, he plans on releasing his own twitter known as THREADS

I wonder if people would consider switching to yet another platform if they havent already fled twitter. People who consider musk to be toxic probably dont think too highly of facebook, but who knows. If he can snag convince enough celebrities to migrate maybe? (I doubt it)

Advertisers are likely to be much more willing to bank their ad dollars with Zuckerberg than smaller rivals.

I'm fine with any most thing that shows you cannot enable harm-to-discourse as much as Musk has. I would sooner them come to Zuckerberg than crawling back to Twitter because it didn't have an alternative. Twitter is very much a walking corpse right now, but something else coming along to snatch the could-be advertisers secure that it can stay in its fucking pit. (unless various sus governments still somehow see use in keeping it propped up)

It really sucks that the only thing they can think of to monetize their platform is --advertising--

Well I think it's kinda hard to imagine a free service that doesn't do either data collection or advertising or both (read: you are the product), it makes sense through openly being a field that has a lot of money circulating around it

The only other viable model I can personally think of is subscriptions, I find it hard to imagine that only forcing big corporations to pay to use your service, or that having it be donationbased would work with the amount of manpower and serverspace these products from within Silicon Valley typically host where they need millions maybe billions every month until they stop existing

All of the automotive forums I ever used did make their money from advertising, BUT it was relevant advertising. Either it was sponsored by a vendor that specialized in that platform (ipdusa.com) or outright owned by a vendor (modernperformance.com)

These vendors also sold products that the users inherently wanted to buy and discuss. It was a symbiotic relationship. The discussion forum facilitated the business by allowing users to discuss their interest in an automotive platform.

I believe this is why the LTT platform still exists as well.

That is easier to do when your community covers some particular niche. That effectively does the ad targeting for you. An auto parts store knows that most people in a forum about car repair might actually be interested in their product.

It's harder with a more general purpose community like Facebook or Twitter. Most people on these platforms probably have no interest in auto parts. A good chunk of them might not even own cars at all. Initially, this meant that impressions sold in these spaces were dirt cheap, because they so rarely converted into clicks. This is where data collection comes in, because it allows your advertisers to actually narrow the focus of their ad campaigns to users that might actually be relevant. And the more data Facebook has on its users, the more detailed and effective these campaigns can become.

These specialized businesses are also ran by enthusiasts that also participate or even came from the community.

Facebook's model is dead with federation. Why would I as a company pay an advertiser to advertise on Facebook when I can spin up my own instance of some federated service where I can foster genuine interest in my product?