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Musk’s takeover turbocharged VC Twitter usage

66 points| MaxLunn | 3 years ago |maddyness.com | reply

62 comments

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[+] neom|3 years ago|reply
What I find interesting is that, anecdotally, recently my VC network on LinkedIn has started treating it like facebook. I always thought LinkedIn was basically just an address book for people you've interacted with professionally, increasingly I see it turning into family photos and mediocre thought leadership.
[+] oxfordmale|3 years ago|reply
LinkedIn is a hallucinogenic social media platform. Because people are using their professional identity on that platform, you can post that 1+1=3 and have people profusely thanking you for your valuable insights.

I have half considered to create a fake LinkedIn account to comment on all the BS that is posted, however life is too short.

[+] sveme|3 years ago|reply
LinkedIn has increased its value for me because I can follow companies and learn what they are up to - either as competitors or potential employers. These mediocre linkedin influencers are a scourge on the platform, though. If I encounter one of these posts, I quickly unfollow the person that liked or shared it.
[+] WA|3 years ago|reply
I joined LinkedIn two weeks ago for the first time and have never used it before. It feels very much like Facebook to me with a touch of business-LARPing.
[+] inductive_magic|3 years ago|reply
People do that either to push their brand/being visible, or to appear relatable to their network. It's like most ads - not meant to convince you of the product, but to reinforce your awareness of it.
[+] neuronic|3 years ago|reply
For me it is 3/4 just this type of address book or my company's talent search posts.

The other 1/4 is a flood of r/linkedinlunatics material which is getting increasingly more common and worse. Platitudes about leadership, work life and mediocre, thoughtless hot takes on whatever field the OP is working in.

It feels very much the same as Instagram influencers superficial bullshit posts but now it targets the professional world rather than potential consumers.

[+] hashtag-til|3 years ago|reply
True. I'm not in VC or anything, just a regular engineer.

I've been considering ditching LinkedIn altogether for many months now, due to increased rubbish content. The only bit I'd miss is to be able to look into others profiles to basically access their CVs.

I wonder if there in an opportunity for a paid solution for something which is "the old Linkedin" which means your online CV with very limited social stuff... perhaps some text messaging and that's all.

[+] bawolff|3 years ago|reply
> mediocre thought leadership.

Mediocre is being generous

[+] baxtr|3 years ago|reply
This sounds more like correlation than causation. VCs have a hard time right now. Money is not flowing like before. LPs are getting nervous and putting the pressure high. These could also be underlying reasons why VCs have become much more socially active than before.
[+] darekkay|3 years ago|reply
Twitter is indeed going great [0].

[0] https://twitterisgoinggreat.com/

[+] carabiner|3 years ago|reply
This reminds me of those "X president is doing great/horribly" bullet lists. It works because with any sufficiently huge system, you can cherry-pick points to reflect your desired viewpoint.

The fact is, the mass exodus from twitter hasn't materialized. It's still the primary medium of discourse for all of the major actors who used it before. Musk has maintained 95% of functionality while drastically reducing costs. When the dust settles, MBA's will be studying this for decades.

Another list idea: compile all of the "twitter will die in a week if you mess with this system" tweets from senior twitter engineers that Musk fired a few months ago.

[+] concordDance|3 years ago|reply
I'd really like to see some people put their money where their mouth is and place some metacalculus bets.

Things like whether twitters losses in 2023 will be higher or lower than 2022. Whether user numbers will go up or down. Whether revenue will go up or down. Number of minutes of outages. Etc

Personally I'd bet on less losses, revenue slightly down (10% ish) and user numbers approximately the same this year compared to last.

Longer term I think the loss of verified status for journalists will stop it being a big source for their news stories, which will decrease its popularity. But that's next year at the earliest.

[+] localplume|3 years ago|reply
Honestly any kind of obsession with Musk is weird, and this is included. What happened to the exodus of people leaving Twitter for Mastodon saying Twitter's collapse was imminent? I've seen people coming back after making such a dramatic event of it. I've been using Twitter throughout all of this and honestly nothing has actually changed. It's just so weird people so obsessed with Musk, even hating him with such fervor and putting him under this weird hyper scrutiny.
[+] xrd|3 years ago|reply
Isn't this saying that overall usage went down? And that advertisers fled the platform? I understand why VCs would want Musk's story to be true, that drastically cutting staff would increase profitability. But that doesn't indicate anything other than virtue signaling more or less.
[+] mittermayr|3 years ago|reply
I've built a Mastodon analytics platform, hoping for masses of people to start shifting over and with them brands and businesses, eventually too... so far... it's been reasonably quiet over there :/
[+] cypress66|3 years ago|reply
If you ignore the musk drama, Twitter is almost identical. So it's not surprising to me.
[+] dodgerdan|3 years ago|reply
2+2=5. VC’s look super active right now because they’re fighting for a small number of solid investments. LP’s have turned off the money taps and fake investment marks no longer pay the bills. They need startups that will actually generate revenue, finding them requires a lot more work and thats what we’re seeing. Soon we’ll start to see broke B & C tier investment funds turn into zombies.
[+] onion2k|3 years ago|reply
There was something to talk about. People who are interested and knowledgable about it talked. News at 11.
[+] jcutrell|3 years ago|reply
Title change recommendation: add “during”, so that causation is not drawn. Alternatively, replace “turbocharged” with “came with a significant increase in”
[+] seydor|3 years ago|reply
> Although widely agreed-upon figures for users and tweet volumes are harder to come by

I mean come on, that data is not hard to find and it doesn't show any slump in users/usage

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=...

TBH i don't think the wider audience of twitter noticed much after Musk bought it, but journalists definitely did

[+] input_sh|3 years ago|reply
That doesn't tell you anything about actual usage, only how frequently people search for Twitter on Google.

While Twitter was a public company there was an obligation to share the number of daily active users, so you can see the numbers compiled over time for example here: https://www.statista.com/statistics/970920/monetizable-daily...

Since Musk took it private, there's no longer an obligation to share such data. Nobody outside Twitter knows how that number changed, we can only make somewhat educated guesses.

[+] rsynnott|3 years ago|reply
At best, from that Google Trends, all you can really say is that people are _more interested in news about Twitter_ than previously (which is frankly unsurprising); it tells you nothing about usage of Twitter one way or another.