More bullshit.

A few points I left out last time.

This one won’t be nearly as long as last night’s rant. It’s mostly happening because I forgot some stuff.

So — last night, I shared a lengthy post about the ways that Twitter’s collapse and Warner Bros. Discovery’s current ongoing troubles are very clearly linked through the lens of avarice, hubris, and American capitalism. I won’t get into all that again, but you can read it here if you really want to.

There are a few things I wanted to touch on. All of these were things that originally were supposed to make it into the post, but then I got sidetracked.

Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter is (marginally) more complicated than I made it out to be.

As is widely known, Musk made a joke offer to buy Twitter for $54.20 per share — well above market value, and basically just a “tee-hee! 420!” joke. But he has since made it a point to say he is willing to take a loss on Twitter in order to maintain his vision for free speech, which we have seen is primarily focused on allowing transphobia, anti-vax, and other right-wing misinformation to thrive.

It’s easy to look at Musk’s catastrophic management of Twitter and say that he’s been willing to lose a lot of money to make a political point. It’s a little more complex than that — but not much.

The company is profoundly in debt, so regardless of what he, personally, wants, Twitter and its parent company X Corp have debtors who can (and have threatened to) take him to court if he doesn’t keep up regular payments and try to find a path to viability for Twitter. Those financial obligations seem to be what’s motivating Twitter Blue, and all of the seemingly bizarre cost-cutting measures Musk has implemented.

Reddit is almost as bad as Twitter, and because of the complexities involved with Musk’s Twitter acquisition and his personal politics, arguably have gone farther than Twitter to implement consumer-hostile practices.

The politics of Twitter and Reddit are pretty terrible, but ultimately, those platforms are not real life. They have an outsized impact because the media obsesses on them, but as they are becoming increasingly toxic, more and more media outlets are avoiding that.

So it isn’t that there’s no reason to worry about Musk’s politics, or the overall dumpster fire vibe of Twitter currently. But as much as anything, I think all of that is a symptom of what I keep calling “consumer-hostile” practices. Big companies that resent their customers and implement things that do way more to harm the customers or make their experience unpleasant, than they do to benefit the company.

That’s something we are seeing more and more. Whether it’s Netflix cracking down on passwords, Twitter throttling people’s service while cutting support staff, or Reddit’s current disaster.

The company, like Twitter, has dramatically increased the cost of API access, effectively killing most of the third-party apps that have been able o interact with the platform over the years. In the case of Reddit, there are a number of accessibility apps that can no longer afford to function, essentially cutting off access to the platform for people with vision problems or blindness.

Moderators have revolted, trying a number of things to get the attention of Reddit’s CEO, but all that has happened is that Reddit has replaced moderators, tried to punish subreddits engaged in protest, and threatened anyone trying to fight back with permanent bans. Reddit is privately owned so, like Twitter, a lot of its financials are pretty opaque, but the key issue here is that it appears as though they are making the site significantly less accessible to handicapped people in order to increase profits. Which leads to the third point, and something that ties into all of these issues:

The aversion to long-term investing is bad business, yes, but it’s also rooted in the need for perpetual growth that publicly-traded corporations demand in America.

I talked last time about how streaming is expensive, and it takes years to become profitable. Ultimately, this is a long-term investment. The issue here is that American businesses are addicted to growth. It isn’t enough to break even and build a plan for the future; you have to make record profits year after year.

Never-ending growth is not a realistic expectation, but companies that have to deal with activist shareholders (like Disney) or deeply unstable executives (like Twitter) aren’t going to hear that and understand it.

Something related to this, which I want to dig into a little more in a later post: Hollywood executives seem simply unwilling to face the new realities of Hollywood. Instead of slashing costs, punishing actors and writers, and being hostile to their consumers, what Hollywood should be doing is figuring out a viable plan to profitability within the context of the new normal we saw take over during the pandemic. Instead, we’re getting…well…this. That’s why you have writers and actors striking right now.