Yahoo actually returned more than Microsoft for a while, up until about 2017, thanks to their huge stake in Alibaba. Twitter doesn't have that tho, they're entirely tied to their mediocre product.
> Killing Vine was the dumbest thing they ever did.
100% this. People are always confused why Facebook was allowed to buy Instagram, and this was, I think, a bit part of why.
Vine was completely destroyed by Twitter's incompetent management, and prevailing wisdom was that Facebook would do the same to Instagram. "Okay Facebook has filters now! Time to shut down Instagram!"
TikTok is the biggest app in the world, and in a lot of ways it was initially just the Chinese clone of Vine. Truly mind-blowing how they squandered that opportunity, they could be many multiples higher than 54.20
If nobody has noticed, Twitter aren’t very good at building software, it’s incredibly buggy what they’ve made, I regularly click on tweets that have a comments count but zero comments. It’s seriously glitchy from the notifications to even writing tweets (the MAX chars counter went crazy for me the other day). Don’t get me started on editing tweets their logic is terrible here that you can never design a UX that doesn’t stop people changing the meaning of their message after the event. Finally the spam is just totally next level and they still have people selling Bitcoin scams under every Elon tweet. Asleep at the wheel.
Correct. In internal Twitter jargon, some data is "perspectival" and some for performance reasons isn't. Actually viewing a tweet is calculated on the fly based on your personal perspective, as honoring privacy settings, blocks, etc, is crucial. But that's not true for counts, so those will be off.
People who find this a shocking and objectionable sign of bugs are generally people who have not build software at such large scales.
>People who find this a shocking and objectionable sign of bugs are generally people who have not build software at such large scales.
This leaves such a poor taste in my mouth. Perhaps the proper UX is to then _not display comment counts_ if your performance/cost tradeoff has determined that you can't display comment counts accurately. For higher comment counts it might be fine where a user isn't expected to read all 5000 replies(ignoring the edge case where its 5000 private/blocked accounts replying), but if a tweet has 2 replies then the user who clicks it expects to see those.
Other large platforms have been able to solve this issue either in UX or implementation, so "web scale" isn't a good excuse.
A tweet you can't see still exists. I think it's perfectly reasonable to display accurate counts even if it's based on information you don't have access to.
I understand the idea but it feels a little too online for my taste. I'm probably not the target audience. Just feels like someone decided the tea leaves falling a certain way MUST indicate something.
It's not always the case that a high reply/like ratio is someone being "owned", but it's obviously more concrete than tea leaves. Twitter's lack of a real downvote/dislike incentivizes people to reply to a bad post without leaving a like, and in my experience it's a pretty good metric. (The main exception is when a tweet is a prompt that intentionally asks for people to reply.)
Also I feel like I should add that "ratio" is a confusing term, because it can refer to the above example `reply-count / likes`, but can also be when a reply gets more likes than the tweet it's replying to: `reply-likes / OP-likes`.
Personally, I don't think "solving" minor inconsistency by eliminating a feature people like is the best approach. And from the way you talk about it, I gather you're not much of a Twitter user, so maybe you should give some deference to the people more familiar with the problem to decide whether this is a good choice or not?
If you have proof that other platforms have solved this problem at scale, I would be very interested to see it. Fundamentally, those totals are never going to be perfectly correct because a) people will be adding and removing tweets continuously, and b) even if continuously updating the numbers were worth the resources, people would hate having the numbers changing frequently.
I remember when Twitter worked like this as well. It doesn't any more. When I see a tweet with a dozen replies and only one is visible, even in a private tab, it's very unlikely that eleven out of twelve are from locked accounts. It's even less likely that there wouldn't be at least one visible reply to one of those replies. I see this sort of thing often enough that I have no doubt that twitter is futzing with the visibility both of certain posters and of interactions with certain posters.
No, this happens to me (less replies shown than exist) and it's definitely a caching issue and I am using the app logged in. I have to literally open twitter in my web browser to try and get those tweets to load unless I want to wait until later for whatever caches to be invalidated. I don't block anyone.
> Don’t get me started on editing tweets their logic is terrible here that you can never design a UX that doesn’t stop people changing the meaning of their message after the event.
What if everyone could see full edit history of each twitt?
Perhaps it was too early to be a competitor, but I always see TikTok as the real Vine replacement. Short silly videos you can scroll through. They could have done so well with Vine.
MS offered $44B for Yahoo inclusive of their almost 50% stake in then pre-ipo Alibaba. At the time, Yahoo's investment in Alibaba was valued at more than their entire market cap (negative valuation for Yahoo's domestic operations, or negative value taking into account tax implications of divestiture of these assets, etc).
Yahoo turned down MSFT's offer. Yahoo then spun off its entire company, keeping the name Yahoo with this spin-off subsidiary. The parent company, now named Altiba, retained ownership of the stake in Alibaba. This is where the ~50B valuation remained.
The spin-off company (valued in the negative by the market) was then sold for $4.5B to Verizon. Altiba retained its $56B market cap during this time.
Yahoo, inclusive of Altiba, out-performed MS's offer. It was a far better deal for shareholders to turn down MSFT. The net value to shareholders exceeded $60B.
There were a lot of poorly written articles at the time, which confused the sale of the subsidiary (YHOO) with the previous offer (for both YHOO and what became AABA) so your confusion is understandable. But this perspective is simply wrong.
You are thinking of the wrong era. We're talking about the 2008 offer to buy Yahoo. Alibaba was worth around $10b when Microsoft offered to buy Yahoo for $45b.
Alibaba was pre-ipo at the time and did not have a market valuation. The most effective way to estimate a market value for Alibaba at this time is the 2008 MSFT offer itself.
MSFT didn't offer $44B for Yahoo's internet business. The offer was in large part for the Alibaba stake.
Regardless, MSFT priced it all at around $44B, which is less than it eventually was valued at.
I amend my statement a little: They actually IPOed on the Hong Kong stock exchange in late 2007 before delisting in 2012. They IPOed at $10bn. They traded as high as $25bn the first day. But I have no other data.
Alibaba was delaying going public because they wanted to get back the 40% they had sold to Yahoo. Their expected market cap was $200B, so the 40% that Yahoo owned would eventually be worth $80B. Hence MSFT offered $44B, which was a lowball offer.
Eventually Marissa made amends with Jack Ma and Yahoo was allowed to keep 24% of their stake, and then BABA went public. But before Marissa came on board, there was Carol Bartz who was a total fuck up of the highest order; a potty-mouthed prick if there was one. She pissed Jack off when they first met, and Jack took Alipay from out of under her. I'm surprised more people don't blame Bartz for the screwups at Yahoo.
Reddit is infected with the same problem as Twitter and YouTube though. It use to be a place with free communities and free speech.
But now, if you dare to post anything that doesn't align with what the MSM agenda for the day is. Your comment, post or even your whole sub-reddit gets banned.
> if you dare to post anything that doesn't align with what the MSM agenda ...
i think that this notion has lost its teeth as the MSM has been converted into some boogeyman and/or strawman. MSM certainly caters to an audience, and people are drawn to likeminded people, sometimes deluding themselves into believing that participating in a near-homogenous echo chamber would be an ideal expression of peaceful living. once there, though, they realize that it's still not quite perfect. foxnews not "right" enough for me so let's create newsmax or oan. biden's not "left" enough and so we should have nominated warren or sanders. people are going to disagree and that's fundamentally a good thing. how we disagree is where things seem to have degenerated.
the whole "MSM agenda" seems like an incorrect and lazy narrative. they have agendas and they cater to the people who demand those agendas. i doubt, though, that newsmax employs people to troll my tweets disagreeing with desantis' signing of the florida abortion bill today, reporting them in an attempt to get me banned. the people trying to get me banned are the audience and they believe they're doing the correct thing to advance their cause by attempting to squelch me.
MSM pours fuel on the fire, but they don't start it. same for reddit - it's going to be the collective of people and their ability to tolerate differentiated thinking. they're not brainwashed zombies, they're collectives of similarly-minded people who give in to their predisposed biases as exploited by MSM/social media for profit.
Yeah, a powerful apparatus that is MSM, would never be used to influence opinions and install beliefs.
> they're not brainwashed zombies, they're collectives of similarly-minded people who give in to their predisposed biases as exploited by MSM/social media for profit.
you ever heard of the 50 cent army? do you think only China has that, doesn't exist in the US?
i'm not saying it doesnt exist, just that it's not as prevalent as people want it to be. i'd argue that even then, most of the time it's an exploitation of biases and not a new installation of foreign beliefs.
> But now, if you dare to post anything that doesn't align with what the MSM agenda for the day is. Your comment, post or even your whole sub-reddit gets banned.
Where on earth does this opinion come from? All sorts of vile stuff gets posted to both Reddit and Twitter, and they rarely-if-ever take any action against it. Certain subreddits will still moderate, but community moderators (users of some sort) generally control the moderation of those places, not Reddit or their staff directly.
And in cases where Twitter/Reddit directly take action, it certainly isn't based on an "MSM agenda", it mostly seems to only happen to limit their legal or financial liability.
a lot of subreddits are basically marketing departments of some corporates.
those have paid employee mods where only posts and comments favourable to corporate goals are allowed. not quite the MSM, but I'd guess corporates would want to remain within the prevailing politically correct Overton window.
WTF? I see a constant never ending stream of shit on reddit that goes against the "MSM agenda". And those are the types of places are very quick to ban posters.
yahoo was the goto place for new email accounts. It was the goto place for instant messaging too. It was also in top # for search and other features. And it still is...
