Twitter now blocking all DMs from non-Twitter Blue subscribers by default
Elon Musk just turned your DMs into an ad for Twitter Blue. But you can change it back. Here's how.
Ad revenue is down (at least) 50% and they just keep making decisions that kick people off their platform.
I’m pretty sure Twitter advertising and Reddit advertising are in a race to the bottom to see who’s going to have to pay companies to put ads on their site first.
It’s insane to watch this happen. I remember watching the rise of Twitter as a kid and it becoming ubiquitous with social media, only to see it crash down this quickly.
I’m speculating, but I’d guess a lot of functionality is being limited because they don’t have dev staff to maintain it, as well as trying to cut server costs as much as possible. I’d honestly be surprised if musk was making these decisions because he thinks it’s good for the health of the platform. There has to be some ulterior motive for it.
It is unfathomable to me how Reddit isn't profitable.
Facebook makes a mint by telling advertisers, "trust us, we'll get your ads in front of people who might buy your product based on a lot of inference around their fairly generic profile data plus some tracking cookies". One guy should be able to sell a billion dollars worth of ads on Reddit. Just put up a form that says, "which subreddit do you want to advertise in?" and "what's your credit card number?". That's it. They have like 10,000 completely segmented markets just sitting there full of hundreds of millions of people who have self-selected to be members of those communities.
We spend hundreds of billions of dollars collectively trying to figure out which google search terms might find us a few more solid leads. Reddit has an amazing list of them for every company in the entire world. How in the everloving fuck have they managed to blindly bumble around for two decades without ever falling into the giant pile of money in front of them?
Yes, yes fucking exactly, how is it not an automatic gold mine!? This vexes me as well.
This theory requires them to have sufficient devs to implement a new feature. That also seems unlikely to me
It’s funny how the biggest fuckups are happening to the platforms that critiqued the billionaire class the loudest.
Hmmm
It wouldn't surprise me if this was what is really going on musk spent 44 billion which is far more than twitter was ever worth he basically got tricked into buying a company that has never made money and now he's trying to get it to make money
He fucked himself into buying it by knowing nothing about how business acquisitions work, no one tricked him. He was and remains still a fucking idiot.
It wouldn't surprise me if this was what is really going on musk spent 44 billion which is far more than twitter was ever worth he basically got tricked into buying a company that has never made money and now he's trying to get it to make money
We're living in very interesting times indeed.
So we have one billionaire over in Meta, who's been making it very known how predatory in practice he is with getting your data and they fundamentally shatter the functionality of all of their platforms.
Then, we have this billionaire here who under a year, has made a total catastrophe of what was once a thriving platform once worth billions of it's own until he came and acquired it.
And then we have this not-a-billionaire who, is inspired by the self-destruction of the other platforms that they too, must follow suit, in hopes of aspiring success.
I wonder what book they're all reading from in the ways of business, that says if you suck harder, they'll mean a net positive.
And then there's Maud
I can't think of another product I know more about that I don't use. Just die already, elon is killing you in public to remove the threat of Twitter as an organizing tool for social uprisings and labor as a favor/brownie points/roundabout contracting for other billionaire "buddies".
Just go.
If was always about limiting the ability to organize using Twitter and Reddit. They want things to go differently in 2024, not because of any conservative political ideology even though most of them skew that way. But because they make more money when the monsters are in charge.
I don’t see the logic in making this change. Is someone supposed to want to join blue just so they can DM people that haven’t changed the default setting?
Yes.
It's a pay-to-harass scheme.
Everytime, they raise the bar
edit: crap gifs don't work on lemmy yet
https://tenor.com/view/can-we-get-much-higher-the-one-piece-is-real-whitebeard-gif-26587931
I think it's important to remember that musk has never actually done anything to innovate the companies he's been a part of. He didn't create PayPal, he just bought his way in and made a series of dumb suggestions. He didn't create Tesla, he bought Tesla right after they had fine tuned their models, and then he made a series of changes that likely resulted in a worse product.
Elon Musk is not a good businessman, he's just rich and has a habit of purchasing profitable companies. Anyone could do this with his wealth. I'm not even really convinced that he's offered many technical ideas or designs for any of his companies, as it seems that would be the first thing he would mention every single time someone brought up one of his companies.
But open AI wouldn't even exist without him! After all, he contributed less than 10% of their raise and he suggested the name. You can't have a company called Open AI if nobody names it Open AI.
He's a dumbass, and his worshipers deserve him.
Dead platform
But you can change it back. Here's how.
At this point, why even bother?
And you're relying on anyone else you want to DM changing that setting too. Otherwise, you're SOL even if you've changed it on your end.
Just leave the god damn platform :)
I never had a Twitter to begin with. I'm certainty not going to get one now lol.
Same here, never had a Twitter account, never will.
Damn, Mr. Musk could have made more money betting on stocks mentioned in r/wallstreetbets, and they ALWAYS lose money. Dude seriously needs to have twitter do the opposite of what he thinks.
I have never seen a billionaire try to go from billions to zero so hard in my life. It is like he is showing the U.S. government why billionaires shouldn’t exist.
Is there a fund that lets me do long term shorts on rich people?
There’s an inverse Cramer fund but I think that’s as close as you’ll get
Hey now, I actually made some money on GameStop and AMC thanks to WSB.
I made a lot of money from GME. I bought a bunch of shares early on for $10-$50 and sold the morning when Robinhood yanked the buy button. However, most WSB plays are money losers.
Who is still interested in that stite it's actually baffling at this point that there are still people on there.
I've seen YouTubers also say "nothing else has any users". I think this is generally the public sentiment and the reason people stick around. I would say that even if there's no alternative, just leave but... Unfortunately people feel like they "need" Twitter.
And people say social media isn't addicting.
Journalists and politicians love Twitter for some reason. They're the only people keeping it alive right now.
Pundits in general. I really enjoy The Majority Report, but it pisses me off how much they criticize Twitter but still talk about what they're saying on it.
So, only shitshows happening there. Can be ignored.
Check the news. Twitter is/was used all over the place as a source for stories. The death of twitter removes the source of some really easy reporting income.
I only use it to get updates and breaking stuff from NFL, ESPN, POTUS, etc. I don’t actually go on it to browse. I wish there was another place where I could the same level of breaking/interesting news/updates
Those probably have a twitter mirror on mastodon by now. As long as there's no need to interact a mirror bot would probably work.
I still don't understand what it was ever for in the first place.
People I like post hentai on Twitter
only valid reason any one has replied...
I've been there since 2014 and if I wasn't aware of the constant whining about how bad twitter is on other sites but twitter I wouldn't know anything has changed. For me it's the same it has always been. It's also the only platform where I have any kind of following so I don't just leave like I did from reddit.
"How to burn 44 billion dollars within a year" by Elon Musk
✅ alienated advertisers ✅ alienated right wing by curbing free speech despite saying the opposite ✅ alienated left wing by letting the right wing go rampant ✅ restricting core functions
Wow how is that going to be profitable for him? I don't see it.
It must be nice to be able to burn 44 billion dollars and not miss it at all.
I could live comfortably for the rest of my life on 1/10,000th of what Musk wasted.
It actually seems like the right can still say what they want, and the right was never actually for free speech.
They're for their own speech being unrestricted, mostly to say hateful things and incite violence. But you better believe the same standard isn't applied to the left.
alienated right wing by curbing free speech despite saying the opposite
They don't care. They don't want actual free speech, they just wanted their speech forced to everyone without fact checking or throttling.
Its still profitable for him because people still use that site.
To be honest, this is the only reason why I still have Twitter. I use it to contact various companies and ask for tech support. If I can't do that now, then there's no point to keep the account alive. Self-proclaimed genius is kind of an idiot. Just recently he complained about 50% drop rate in ad revenue, after killing ability to view tweets without account.
It is not meant for companies and companies who regularly talk to customers on twitter will definitely turn this feature off. So you will likely still be able to talk with any company that wants to talk with its customers on twitter.
It is meant for regular folks who get lot of unsolicited spam in their inboxes. It puts an immediate stop to those. So in that sense, it’s a tricky but good move.
The didn't buy Twitter for a profit.
He bought Twitter to destroy it because big free horizontal communication platforms are bad for billionaires.
He can't just close it, so he just destroy it little by little until it is no more.
The same way conservative groups bought Tumblr because it was too sexual liberating for their conservative views.
he offered to buy twitter for a joke, and he actually did buy twitter because a court forced him to. not because this was some grand plan to accomplish anything - he literally spent months in court arguing that he shouldn't have to buy twitter, and he lost. that's the only reason he owns twitter now.
Yeah, he owns it because he's a dumbass and he's running it into the ground like a dumbass
You cannot make a "joke" offer file it with the SEC and expect to get out of it.
the court didn't force him, he could have paid a penalty that was much lower than his current losses.
He bought Twitter by mistake, and was forced into it by Twitter shareholders who saw the opportunity to make bank.
You give Musk too much credit. The fucking guy is a big baby with impulse issues - who happens to have billions of dollars at his disposal. He is running Twitter exactly as I would think a dipshit narcissistic tantrum baby would run it, although dismantling Twitter does coincidentally benefit the top .1% for now
Why couldn't he just close it, if that was his goal? He owns it outright doesn't he? He could announce that Twitter was ceasing operations, sell off the remaining assets, cover (or default on) the debts, and then Twitter would be no more.
So no, I don't think destroying it was his aim. He's just really, really bad at this.
He bought Twitter because he (along with the Saudi royal family, the monarchy ruling Qatar, and the larger worldwide cabal of authoritarians) thought he could use it to control public discourse in the same way oligarchs bought up newspapers, radio stations, and TV stations in the past. He's killing it because he never understood what most people liked about Twitter, he only understood what he liked about Twitter (getting a lot of attention and being able to be shitty to people without having to actually socialize).
test
Exactly. His old friend Peter Thiel couldn't make a rival platform take off, so Musk bought Twitter and saddled it with an untenable $13bn of debt.
What happens to Twitter can also happen to your Tesla. Buyers beware.
A lot of Telsa’s stuff is already paywalled.
This has always been an interesting point for me. If I buy a secondhand Tesla, I've signed none of the agreements made between the initial buyer and Tesla. I wonder if I could disconnect it and hack the interface to unlock the disabled features that don't require network access, or spoof the authorization for some of those?
It's much harder to fuck up so quickly, since a Tesla is not a live service, so there's not a lot that will change about the already sold cars.
I guess if Musk decides to save money by firing engineers and reducing QA on the car software, and insists on pushing really buggy software then it could get gnarly I guess, but I don't think he's that stupid, and I don't think all these Twitter moves are entirely about trying to make a profit; It's so bad I think there is a level of malevolence involved.
Almost the entire vehicle interface is software and screens. If he’s doing it at Twitter he could just as easily start doing weird paywall stuff with Tesla.
The car is effectively a live service.. they've completely changed the UI multiple times.. they can lock out features.. they'll likely disable ultrasonic sensors once they think their camera based version is working..
The only thing they can't do is add hardware.
But you can change is back. Here's how
Why? Why waste the mental resources fighting to make a platform work for you? Just let Twitter die
Gotta save on those server costs.
Watch him ban every mention of Signal or Telegram as well when people try to get around the DM issue.
The longer this shitshow goes on, the dumber Elon looks. Who could idolize him at this point?
My parents, tryna force me to work for him cause "he's such a great person! Could you do a better job than him!".
Mostly my dad suggesting me to be "the next musk" which honestly horrifies me
And you don't immediately respond asking for some startup cash?
Could you do a better job than him
"I could've not drunk-bought Twitter, thereby saving $44 billion."
Just their way of saying they want ten in-vitro grandchildren who all hate you
Racist homophobic incels.
And he panders for that crowd hard, which only makes him look more pathetic.
if it annoys you to worship him they'll do it twice as hard.
Because he's been fucking them for 6 months and they haven't left.
I did, and some others have. But most people are still sitting there on his platform, whining about how shitty it is, while keeping him in power by staying.
Because the short-term equation is easy:
Would you rather have 10 users paying nothing but taking up server space and bandwidth? Or would you prefer 1 paying user and 9 people leaving? In the short term, option B is a win-win.
And if that leads to Twitter becoming a dead husk of itself, oh well, that's a problem for next quarter
Elon: why is our revenue tanking?
Why won't people give me money for what used to he free? I don't get it.
I mean, I would have. If at the beginning of the API mess they had said "Hey, baconreader is now going to be 10$ a month", I wouldn't have blinked.
Elon does not want you to use Twitter. Please let that sink in.
It's Cartmanland and you can't come!
100%. He's not the only one in on it either. Its in many rich peoples interest to destroy the biggest communication platforms the world has ever seen. Same thing is happening at Reddit, and with many TV and radio stations. It's a minor investment for these people.
I don't think so, solely because his ego wouldn't allow it. Tanking Twitter is making him a laughingstock. There's no way he would've done that intentionally.
Seems like Reddit and Twitter are having a race on who can burn their house down faster.
I think Reddit is in a fat trimming stage where they kick everyone off who they aren't monetizing, then scale their systems to drive down costs. Then try to squeeze their user base even further. If they aren't making money off of me, why would they want me using their systems? That's their mentality.
Because you are the product. They want what you have.
That just seems so crazy as they ramp up to an IPO. Yes, let's alienate users. reduce our overall active users, and throw hissy fits at our mods who are volunteers without whom, this site cannot operate. That should establish confidence in the marketplace. I just don't understand the thinking here.
People will say 'enshittification', well okay, but even on paper, all their moves have been so bad lately, and they don't seem to care. It's weird. Seems to me for example a platform with 100 users and 40% monetization is inherently more valuable than a platform with 40 users and 100% monetization. That's just my stupid opinion though.
Ultimately he wants all users to be paying users.
Louis Rossman has stated in a few of his Youtube videos that he would make more money if you sent him $1.00 than if you watched adds in a years worth of videos. I don't imagine that Twitter or Reddit are any better.
I think that what we're actually seeing is the death of advertising supported services. There's just not enough money in adds to be viable and there's no more free investor money to burn.
This is however not something I think we, as consumers, should necessarily celebrate. This also means that we are very likely nearing the end of the "free" web that we are used to.
No, I'm not saying that selling out one's personal integrity is preferable, but if it turns out that advertisement as a business model effectively isn't sustainable, we will just have to accept the reality that we will more and more commonly have to actually pay to access content and services on the web.
I see it more as us going back to the good old days. Websites and social platforms get hosted by interested people with the extra money to get a server going, whether it be for a unique website or an instance in the fediverse or other decentralized networks. Donation supported, nothing required. Maybe some donor icon.
Take the internet back. Quit supporting websites by big companies who have money and whose goal is to use you as the product. Support your fav nerds hosting the platforms you enjoy using. The internet had social websites before FB and twitter. We don't need companies to run the internet for us.
Watch it burn lol
Such an amazing platform. ran by a genius.
s/ran/run into the ground/
This is hilarious
Too bad many good devs and journalists are on twitter mostly, I'm gonna have to create an account just to follow a dev I like...
Unless you guys have a solution to
1)access content without an account
2)"follow" someone, or jist be alerted for new posts (perhaps with a monitoring tool , the kind which scans page for changes?)
Well, you can access their profiles with Nitter now.
Looking forward to when you can follow multiple people easily.
Especially since Fritter dropped Nitter support and the feed.
Well that's pretty stupid.
Does anyone actually DM in Twitter? I’m sure the checkmark bots do it not realizing 85% of the other checkbots are propaganda bot accounts too lol
If you're one of those artists/animators that, for whatever reason, thought basing the entirety of their commission system via Twitter was a good idea, they're definitely going to be affected.
When it used to bypass paywalls i was using it
I did!, but only because I didn’t have a buddy’s new number then became habit, asked for the new number when Elon started to shit on twitter
He's banking on the name "Twitter" still meaning something and there being no viable alternatives. Threads has really shown that twitter isn't as ubiquitous as we all assumed.
Geez, Elon, I already deleted my account two weeks ago! I don't need more convincing to leave!
Haha wow. What next?!
I'm actually surprised anyone is left on that shell of a platform.
What next? It’s time to get some more popcorn, because this story just keeps on getting better and better.
Next will be the inability to switch it off..
Musk wants everyone to pay for twitter. He's insane, but is consistent.
twitter is becomming painful to use everyday
Why not move to Mastodon?
It would be interesting to see it all lead up to some master plan like Elon gaining some hug political favor or something with all his actions with someone.
Why do you think he needs a hug ?
You kinda hope this is leading somewhere and it's not just some crazy dude drunk with power hurtling the ship nose first into an iceberg.
Someone whose name rhymes with pootin.
Step 3: Profit!
That bozo didn't even collect underpants!!
Time for everyone to turn the page and move forward. No sense in giving Reddit et al anymore brain cycles. We'll all end up back inside of an echo ho chamber before you know it :P
So basically any companies that were using that as a customer support channel — I’m thinking of like, American Airlines, etc… will now no longer be able to help customers via DM? Are DM’s only subscriber to subscriber now?
I’ve never seen someone ham-fistedly destroy a company faster than this fucking guy.
Hmm you plebs just don't understand how big our Lord and Savior Elon Musk's brain had to be to come up with something so sophisticated and brilliant. This is truly a step in human evolution.
P2DM
Is it dead yet?
So when is Elon's next move just going to be to remove everybody's ability to tweet?
Non paying users will be limited to 5 free tweets a day. After that it's a) pay-as-you-go @ $0.99/tweet or b) subscriptions from $9.99/mo.
Also lootboxes.
I would not be surprised to see tweeting being limited to blue subscribers in the future.
He really wants to burn it to the ground
Took a page out of the Tumblr handbook.
Elon Musk is so smart and innovative...
...no, I got nothin'.
Apparently neither does he.
Elon wants more people to pay. He will do what it takes.
I've always had twitter but never really used it at all apart from contacting companies when I couldn't resolve things the normal way.
Think it's time to delete it.
I'm astounded that people use it for anything other than this. I have received some decently fast customer service via twitter. However one glance at the content and I got tf out.
It stays on my phone for the sole reason that I have notifications turned on from a local weather account
First Twitter, then Reddit. Can Facebook be the next social media platform to join the race to the bottom?
We need him to find the niveau.
I know! Charge money for each DM they send! Profit!
You will never get into an executive position with that kind of limited thinking. Charge them for each DM they receive...
I checked my settings after I heard this yesterday and they were unchanged.
I kind of like it.
I only use Twitter for sports news and updates that basically don’t exist anywhere else. It would be unfortunate if they destroy the platform with crap like this.
All the major sports news journalists have a Mastodon account that repeats what the post on Twitter as a backup.
Thanks I didn’t know that, I have never used Mastodon. I also follow some athletes and less popular college sports on twitter. I doubt they are there but I’m signing up now to find out.
It’s the enshitification that keeps on shitting.
