We're feeling pretty anti about these social networks

Social networks, once thought to have all-encompassing power to change our mood or voting strategy, have been hitting wall after wall this week. On Wednesday came the news that Meta's Facebook and Instagram are facing a ban on their personalized ad business in the EU unless they sort themselves out. Meta's also under the cosh …

[Omnipresent]

I'm currently perusing a thread

about 80's greatest music, and not one bot has mentioned Madonna. Not one. That tells me everything I need to know: It's all a lie. Everything digital is fabricated.

[Dave559]

Re: I'm currently perusing a thread

Well, obviously. That's what happens when you're not living in a material world…

[tiggity]

Re: I'm currently perusing a thread

Why would a thread on great music feature Madonna?

.. I will give her huge credit for great marketing though, gained lots of success with fairly mediocre music.

[Groo The Wanderer]

It takes a truly special gift for business to lose half a megacorp's value in a single year... :)

[Winkypop]

As Bachman–Turner Overdrive once sang

You ain’t seen nothing yet.

[the Jim bloke]

Re: As Bachman–Turner Overdrive once sang

Seeing more and more nothing every day...

[43300]

Or alternatively, the alleged value was massively over-hyped in the first place (which might well apply to a lot of big tech businesses)

[Pete Sdev]

Valuation

I've wondered about that.

Normally a company's worth is it's assets + potential future profits.

Twitter didn't as far as I know have any tangible assets of note - infrastructure like offices and servers were rented.

It had intangible assets in it's skilled workforce - which has been vastly reduced for no benefit apart from slightly reducing running costs, and it's data - how much of a subjective value that has is anyone's guess but likely to be far less than $44 Billion.

Running costs were (and probably still are) greater than income from advertisers, so unless something drastically/magically changes there's no potential future profits to be factored in.

The valuation probably was, and still is, off by several orders of magnitude. I wouldn't have paid more than £44 ;-)

[AbortRetryFail]

Re: Valuation

Most of Twitter's value was in its goodwill, userbase, and advertisers willing to advertise to that userbase. Musk curled a big one off on all of that.

So, yes, perhaps it was overvalued but Musk has also actively devalued it at every step too.