- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
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Because he’s doing everything to make it fail and destroy the platform, isn’t it obvious?
No, you don’t throw away $44 billion just for shit and giggles, not even if you are as rich as Musk. Musk is (probably) a narcissist who thought he could make it work in his delusional mind.
He wanted a mouthpiece for the MAGA crowd, and he probably thought the desire in the population for it, would make it succeed, if he made the platform embrace that. He probably envisioned himself as a great liberator, who would be celebrated for bringing free speech back to America.
Musk has been losing it for a long time, and it seems to only get worse.
Who could of forseen brands not wanting to advertise over hate speech that would turn off half their customer base? I’d love screenshots of my companies products floating around next to seasticas and racism.
Yes that’s so strange, think of all the extra attention the controversies create!! I bet he planned to double the prices for advertising.
Also, I don’t think a narcissist would intentionally and publicly humiliate themselves the way Musk has done (Not a psychologist).
Absolutely true, being humiliated is just about the worst thing for a narcissist.
An example of that, was when Elon Musk called the diver who actually rescued 13 children in Thailand a pedophile. Imagine that, calling the hero of the day a pedophile because you are butthurt!!
No they definitely don’t like to be humiliated, they probably feel that a lot more deeply that non-narcissists. But at the same time, they lack the self-awareness that would help them avoid getting into situations that would lead to humiliation.
He’s being bankrolled to keep it up and running for the next election. It will be interesting to see if the money runs out.
Nah Saudi money goes deep
I think a lot of “hardware” people underestimate software. Historically, hardware was way more complex but the hardware problems have kind of been solved. There’s only so many ways to design a phone or laptop. Software, meanwhile, has only become more complex and challenging.
I agree, but I don’t see the point in this context?
The software to build and run Twitter, is probably not worth much besides for running Twitter. No Twitter means no value in the software for it either.
I agree, but I don’t see the point in this context?
I think they meant Musk thought managing development of the Twitter software would be easier than it was, given his prior… Involvement with Tesla and SpaceX.
I think a lot of “hardware” people underestimate software.
Ah yes, I can see that could make sense. But I think Musk considers himself as much a software guy as hardware, because he works with AI for Tesla. Putting him somewhat on the cutting edge of software too. Twitter should be child’s play by comparison.
Of course Musk has managed to bring Tesla from a competitive position to be way behind the main field, with just a few very stupid decisions. Mercedes, GM and Waymo are now way ahead of Tesla, and Nvidia and MobilEye are probably ahead too.
Of course Musk is now attempting to slow AI development overall, because he is way behind. With suggestions like preventing AI development until we have better regulation and understanding. He is trying to repeat how he stopped investments in public transport with hyperloop. Only this time with AI, because he is losing that battle badly.
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No, you don’t throw away $44 billion just for shit and giggles
Why not? Elon Musk is famously on ketamine, ambien, and a whole slew of mind-altering substances.
Given how the contract was written, and given how much Elon Musk fought against the contract, it was obvious that he made a short-term decision (likely while high on some substance), and then quickly regretted buying Twitter. Within a week or two, he started a court case to NOT BUY TWITTER, despite signing an ironclad contract.
In my mind, its really fucking obvious what happened. Elon Musk partied a little bit too hard with some mixture of ketamine+ambien+alcohol, it mixed weirdly in his brain and he made a bad decision. A few days later, when he sobered up a bit, he realized how shitty of a decision he made but it was too late to roll things back.
Everything else Elon Musk has done is just… shitty reputation management. He’s trying to convince the world he’s still got it, despite making a bad (possibly drug-induced) decision
He made a huge mistake, either because he was under the influence, or because he is delusional. That doesn’t mean he actually intended to throw out $44B just for shit an giggles. Obviously he didn’t when he sobered up.
“He cannot be that self deluded.”
Narrator: He was.
I wonder if he ever had it.
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I truly think this is all his fucking up, nothing else. He was trying to take away features that probably align with the people who gave him money, but had no idea how to make it work and make money and is desperate. Desperation makes you even more stupid.
I don’t see the conspiracy.
My assumption is the investors immediately got what they wanted. They are not stupid.
Money men don’t hand over money to these front men based on promises. This isn’t a Hollywood movie. There was an immediate pay off.
They got SpaceX stock.
Investors will absolutely hand over money to front men making bad, even obviously insane, promises, though. People are always more easily manipulated than they like to believe, but people who’ve convinced themselves they’re infallible titans of industry are even more vulnerable to it. (Especially the ones who think that they see through the scam and won’t be left holding the bag.)
Money men get conned so fucking often it isn’t even funny.
I didn’t say it was a conspiracy. I said they gave him money after he was already fucking up by paying around 30 billion more than it was worth, firing all the people that did stuff, and generally being a bad CEO so he would do what they want. More of a typical business deal really.
Actually they may not be worth much either.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYURUiOjZSw
Thunderfoot has spend a lot of time analyzing most things Musk, and SpaceX specifically does not have a market (TAM) to achieve what they claim.
So you’ve never heard of theranos or we work?
the only not-on-purpose piece was him having to buy it. idiot was forced to buy twitter, and then turned it into a “lets burn down a bastion of liberal speech” amongst his friends. he knows he wont suffer in any conceivable way, the saudis who fronted a huge chunk get what they want.
this was all setup shortly after he was forced to buy it. every step he has made since is in the playbook of “ruining your business”, including mistakes he has personally made before.
I don’t know. The way it’s going down, it really makes him look like an idiot. He could have just flipped the switch and turned it off as a massive demonstration of power.
Instead he’s making one mindboggingly stupid decision after another, showing the whole world how utterly incompetent he is.
The most logical explanation for me is the easiest one: if he’s making stupid and incompetent decisions, maybe he’s just stupid and incompetent.
You’re saying the guy that has done nothing but look like a total fool for years could actually be a total fool? By the gods, I think you’re onto something!
Because he’s doing everything to make it fail and destroy the platform, isn’t it obvious?
It is tremendously obvious, I agree. At one point it felt kinda hyperbolic to say, but not for awhile now.
I’m not knowledgeable enough to be able to speculate what’s in it for him, but it’s 100% obvious that’s what’s being done.
He might call him self pro free speech, but he actually hates it (as long as it’s not his own free speech). Getting rid of Twitter is a massive blow to free speech. One less platform where he and his companies can get outed and criticized on.
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Twitter was becoming another walled platform (not being able to read the content without being logged in) even before Musk’s take-over.
I’m happy for any walled platform to fail. IMO they have no place on internet.
It’s less nefarious than that. He wants to be a championed business leader. He’s just a fuck up who was forced to buy a platform that he never actually intended to buy (except for maybe a couple of days when he first suggested it). Sure, it will help his side when he runs it into the ground, but that’s not his intent despite being the cause.
I think that’s obvious to everyone. But, if you’re claiming he’s doing it on purpose… That’s just some next level batshit conspiracy theory.
Is it? He’s either a moron or he’s doing it on purpose. There is simply no other explanation.
At this point it’s just too many dumb decisions, if he had done absolutely nothing after taking over he’d be better off than he is now.
Delusional rich guy who’s nowhere near as smart as most people thought he was is the most simple explanation. He’s obviously got some kind of god complex and thinks he’s right about everything.
I mean he has been called a real world Tony Stark for the last decade. Maybe that went straight to his mushy brain and he is still on that high. Back in the day he listened to experts, now whenever he’s at SpaceX they employ “Elon handlers” who just nod to every suggestion and then try to get rid of him.
He got too much positive press and lost it.
He looked like a real world Tony Stark when he was surrounded by teams of smart people doing all the hard parts and PR for him.
What we’re seeing now is pure unfiltered Musk. He was probably always like this, but now he’s off the leash.
If you look back at his ‘making us as multi planet species’ era he had a lot of the same traits but since buying Twitter it’s gone off the charts.
Probably because so many of his big ideas didn’t pan out, when he was talking about Tesla being about the production line not the car I was optimistic but his factories never scaled like they were supposed to, never really got where they needed to be and I think it became clear they weren’t going to get there.
I think he’s had a lot of ego damage and it’s messed with his head
The first one. He’s stupid
Occam’s razor and all that. He is simply a low intelligence person with a fuckload of money.
I mean… he is a moron.
Not sure I agree. I think it would be totally in character for him to want to destroy Twitter just because they forced him to buy it. He’s a petty troll and can afford to lose that money just to show them.
How does destroying it hurt “them” he already bought it? They cashed out way over the value of the company. If I was any major shareholder of Twitter that he bought out Id be gleefully laughing at him running it into the ground now that I’m no longer invested.
True, I didn’t think it through. I stand corrected.
Spite isn’t rational.
I think in the end he will want you to believe that. And will be glad if you do.
That’s like saying “my car may fail after I poured sand into the gas tank and replaced the electrical with speaker wires”
Like others have said, bullshit. He’ll drive it into the ground and pretend that was his plan the whole time, like he’s some undercover genius three steps ahead of everyone, when really he’s just constantly playing catch-up with his narcissistic outbursts.
People told me I was crazy when I said he bought it to shut it down. Look who he hangs out with, people with a fuckton of money who hate free speech. Very powerful people who control media empires and run oppressive regimes.
He might be stupid, but the people pulling his strings aren’t.
I keep thinking there must be some high level plan here to destroy twitter for the good of humanity. I mean it’s that or Elon actually just is that stupid. At this point the latter seems the most likely …
Never ascribe to malice what can be ascribed to stupidity.
A bad rule of thumb. Weaponized incompetence is a thing.
Twitter was not the golden bastion to humanity you think it was.
That’s my point. In theory Elon realized how toxic it was to public discourse and sought to destroy it.
If you look at his actions and the actions of a competent person trying to destroy the platform, they are virtually identical
You’ve got it back to front imo. Twitter was a useful tool for disseminating info, whether for protest movements, political movements, whatevs. Pre-Musk, there was a degree of control on twitter re disinfo, harassment, hatred etc. Now, it’s no longer a useful tool for leftwing people to gather and share their thoughts; it’s no longer a useful tool to disseminate information; it’s no longer a tool for rallying protestors.
Look at who invested (Saudi kingdom); look at when Musk took it over (mid-terms); it seems pretty obvious to me that the takeover was a very expensive purchase to make the actions of oligarchs & despots that much easier.
Wah, every other platform is a left wing mouthpiece. But you want your cake and to eat it too? Listen to yourself.
You’re free to “make your own” website. Remember that?
you can always go to “truth social” or whatever that crackpot cooker platform is called if you want a safe space
If he was destroying it for the good of humanity he would have to somehow destroy the concept of it rather than a single platform.
Probably best spending 40 billion on education in the harm social media can do lol.
I really do think he’s just delusional. I won’t call him an idiot because there is clearly intelligence and talent in his head, but he’s gone off the rails in some capacity whether it’s mental health issues or power crazed or who knows.
It’s probably drugs. He changed a lot the last few years.
No he hasn’t. The management of the old x.com (the one that got bought by paypal) threatened to walk if Elon wasn’t removed from the office. He was always this incompetent.
You answer jibes with what I have seen plenty of while working with and funding serial entrepreneurs in the Valley: micro-dosing, coke, molly, steroids, random herbal shit, off-label usage of pharmaceuticals, trendy nootropics, blood transfusions, ayahuasca, and Adderall.
Lay off the Kava Elon!
Definitely.
What if Elon was encouraged to buy twitter by people who knew he would fuck it up in short order for them?
If you want to take down a corporation, there’s two main ways right now. Have Elon take charge, or have Ken Griffin short them into the cellar.
What about Elon Musk makes you think he’d do anything for the good of humanity?
That was my original thought when he came on and immediately fired 75% of the staff. It’s not some savvy slimming down or cost-cutting. It was more like a wrecking ball.
It was fairly clear that his overall desire was the make the platform less useful for liberals and more for conservatives. It seems like he is content to destroy it if he can’t achieve the latter.
“Everything was fine with our system until the power grid was shut off by Dickless here.” — Ray Stantz, Twitter engineer
It’s true. This man has no dick.
Hmm could be are all his kids invetro?
Most of them are IVF/Surrogacy babies, I think.
He has like 18000 children.
Plenty of awesome people are dick-free, and being dick-ful in no way suggests competence or any other positive trait.
Edit: ITT: omg tech bros are so toxic Also ITT: dick measuring
Have you never seen Ghostbusters?
Legit no but apparently I’m the only one.
GO TO A TORRENT SITE RIGHT NOW.
I think it was a joke
https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/cfcee9b0-1b4f-49f0-b857-584bd28c119b
It seems like it was a joke. A joke that easily upsets women and anybody else without a dick. I’m not saying it upset me, but it’s very obvious to see why it would not be received well
Dude what. How thin-skinned does someone need to be to get upset over a joke like that from a random person on the internet?
Does it upset those people? Or are you just making shit up for no reason?
It’s a quick one liner from a movie in the 80’s. Please share with us all these people that have been upset about it since then.
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Although unlikely, it’s possible he has testicles they harvested sperm from and doesn’t actually have a dick. Although, I think it’s far more likely he has a micro penis that’s barely functional, that he uses to impregnate women he’s somehow conned into tolerating him.
You spend a lot of time thinking about this dudes genitals.
You don’t spend nights awake wondering what Elons dick looks like? Guess I need therapy.
How did all of these people replying to you never see Ghostbusters? It’s criminal.
Sure it’s his money but does anyone else feel legitimately frustrated at all the good that this money could have done?
Rich dudes have always had vanity projects, but there is no grand concert hall or library or university to come out of this. Just a ruined company with millions of wasted hours of effort. For nothing.
The horrific opportunity cost inherent to having a billionaire class.
Guillotine noises intensify
Definitely prefer the vanity projects of the past. Libraries, city halls etc
Yeah. X makes various things named “Rockafeller” seem downright “not a dumpster fire” in contrast.
The nice thing about our economic system is that value is rarely completely destroyed, the money he paid for Twitter didn’t cease to exist, it went to former Twitter shareholders.
They may be using it in more productive ways than he ever would.
They may be using it in more productive ways than he ever would.
They use it to reinvest and hoard. Because that’s what the investor class does, which is why they’re useless.
broken window fallacy
Just to add a little explanation to those who don’t get it: the man-hours spent by people working for then Twitter now X as well as resources used, uktimatelly for producing no wealth, could’ve instead been spent for something that did produce wealth.
Same amount of input money either way, but one produces wealth (in the economic sense of the word rather than merelly monetary) and the other just wastes manpower and resources.
There has been value generated by Twitter that will outlive it though.
They established and refined an interface that other ventures like blue sky and mastodon are utilizing, and they delivered open source frameworks like Bootstrap will long outlive Twitter, and have brought value to the broader web development ecosystem.
I was just explaning the concept of a “broke window falacy” (funilly enough without using the actual example that gave the name to it) and how work merelly being done is not a gain and can actually be a loss because of the opportunity cost (i.e. the people and the resources could otherwise have been used elsewhere and actually produce something of worth).
Also I was just thinking about the Musk-era Twitter rather than the entire Twitter timeline.
As you correctly point out, Bootstrap is something of worth (I would be more hesitant on the “interface” side, as I worked in web interfaces back when they started and that stuff is just derivative and not especially great).
Consider whether Twitter was stifling some other growth. If you buy and burn down an advertising billboard, letting light into a market garden–perhaps that is beneficial.
millions of wasted hours of effort. For nothing.
aah, Social Media in a nutshell.
You make a great point. Let’s spend hours and hours discussing it to death here. ;)
The money isn’t gone, it’s just changed hands
It doesn’t work that way. Almost all of the money in the world is debt owed to someone else. Very few things are bought with cash. It is really credit on credit on credit on credit. And all of that depends on trust. My company gets product from your company today with the promise to pay in a month, your company does the same…
When events like the Twitter buyout and burn happen it weakens trust. Which weakens credit. Which means the virtual money is gone.
Could have just bought land in Kentucky and sat on it. Made a nature preserve. Give the beavers and deer a place to chill for a century or more. Pretty lazy way to do charity but it still would have been better.
Hyperloop, boring tunnels, sending cars to space, etc
Stop me when you’ve heard enough to believe this guy has obvious disdain for all of us.
For the record, It wasn’t failing until Musk came in.
It also wasn’t really successful before he came in either. It rarely was profitable and usually operated at a loss.
I mean Musk has seemingly made every bad move imaginable, I can only imagine the ideas he’s been talked out of.
It was losing money, but not much. They could have made some minor changes to make it profitable. However ~8000 people were making good salaries working for them, and tens of thousands of people and businesses benefited from the platform. Now it’s much smaller, less useful, and still not profitable.
It was barely profitable but had some one time write offs that pushed it down. It should have returned to barely profitable. But a barely profitable company can become ok profitable with small changes.
Twitter’s success wasn’t monetary. The success came in allowing ordinary people their soapbox at a global town square.
Look at what happened to the price of insulin with a single tweet made back when all the blue checks were in complete free-for-all. A single tweet, made by a random person, thoroughly changed the shape of that one industry. Twitter gave “power” to the people, and those like Musk weren’t comfortable with that.
Ugh. This “global town square” nonsense needs to die.
Twitter’s business was selling ads. They don’t give a flying festerooni about fostering a healthy public discourse. Nearly every part of the technical and UX design was actively hostile to “the people” being able to express themselves in a meaningful way— The entire premise was a character limit that while fun also made it literally impossible to provide meaningful context or nuance to anything, and whether you were just scrolling or trying to reply to people, you never got to see anybody else’s honest opinions either but instead you were fed a carefully algorithmically curated drip of out-of-context ragebait and feelgood fuzzies designed only to keep you stimulated enough to keep on scrolling so they could report a higher number to investors in their next quarterly report and sell you to more ads.
The entire place was always an artificial environment designed to prey on and monetize your attention span; Unless you were replying to somebody you knew, it was never a place for any kind of authentic interaction, much less some kind of grandiose “global town square” that “gave power to the people”.
Twitter may have given certain individuals the tools at some points to trigger positive change. The insulin example was probably the best-case-possible outcome from Musk’s fumbling of the verification system, but it was an accident. And in the meantime, when Twitter does get used deliberately, it has spawned a terrorist group that has murdered and enslaved thousands of people, turbocharged the decline of the most powerful and wealthiest country in the world towards either autocratization or polarized paralysis, and fueled many, many actual full-blown civil wars. (This is what happens when your revolution isn’t built on solid foundations.) Plus, you know, all the harassment, stalking, rape and death threats, political interference, privacy concerns, mental health effects, and actual bots used by malicious actors (which reputable sources tend to estimate at tens of millions in number).
Twitter’s a corporation. They never cared about being a “town square”, only about being seen as such by users so they could line their own pockets. And Elon Musk is just an idiot. He’s not some scheming genius (though he clearly tries to be); he’s the same as any rich idiot discovering the hard way that no amount of ego will make up indefinitely for lack of competence.
It’s just the way they are, no silly conspiracies or battle between good and evil required. Twitter’s amoral, rather than immoral, and Musk is immoral, but it’s in a flailing self-destructive way rather than a conniving Machiavellian way. They’re acting out their nature, and we get caught up in it.
How many actual terrorist groups were we going to let this corporation create in their pursuit for profit before finally admitting that maybe the entire idea was bad from the start? Currently, the immoral idiot is destroying both his own credibility and also the amoral corporation for us all, and really, this is probably almost the best possible outcome.
Thank you, finally. It was nothing more than the internet’s comments section.
i was no fan of twitter, but it was on a path to achieve some financial stability. It had plenty of value as a mechanism to distribute emergency (or other) information quickly. was and had being the operative words here.
Yes, I agree. Investors want explosive exponential growth but there is great value in stable, slightly profitable companies that produce social goods. For example,.Twitter was unique in getting emergency information out; in real.time reporting; in sending out traffic and commuting alerts; in directly and quickly communicating issues with private companies.
It isn’t failing, Musk is failing.
twitter was still operating on a hail mary for years, musk just made it more obvious and his erratic handling of operations put a few more nails into the coffin. sadly, the fediverse won’t be the successor we all hoped for,
Once it fails then someone will buy it cheap and rename it twitter.
If there’s anything left to buy aside from tacky merch shirts. I’m sure the creditors will pick it clean and auction off the best bits to the highest bidder.
Maybe, or maybe it’ll be another Bebo level disaster.
…I guess it was indeed a disaster because I can’t remember even hearing that name before.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bebo
originally operated from 2005 until its bankruptcy in 2013
It was announced in January 2021 that it would be returning as a new social media site the month after. By May 2022, it had once again been shut down, without having ever left beta testing.
Bingo.
And since won’t get back all the staff he dismissed; they’re going to have to just slap the Twitter brand on a Mastodon instance.
So with wildfires in Canada there’s evacuation zones near me, but I can’t click on some announcement links from the main site that shows the evacuation zones because they go to twitter and you need to log in now. I think they show some on other pages on the site but they do the quicklink to the twitter announcement in the sidebar so you have to click around a bit to get to it. Yes I know the name but whatever. My point being is when the social media site that was meant for short bits of info isn’t good for emergency notifications where everyone can read, it’s shitty and potentially harmful.
Governments should either be operating their own systems for this or, hell I don’t know, why not just spin up a their ready-to-go Mastodon instance or something else in the fediverse not subject to the delirious whims of a petulant muskrat born with daddy’s money?
Very much agree. I read that the Netherlands already did this!
I’m sorry - as someone who has done some work with disaster response, this was one of my main concerns. When they threatened to take away NWS access to API without huge fees, I was honestly horrified. Thankfully they reversed that decision, but a lot of what my organization did was scour Twitter for official information and also personal accounts of folks who needed help/the conditions on the ground.
It is honestly a travesty that a resource such as this can be reduced to literal 💩 when people need it the most. I wish I had an answer, but I don’t. I hope more and more folks/orgs migrate to a suitable alternative(s) sooner rather than later, but the damage has been done. There’s always a percentage who never do, and you can’t fix that.
Took over Twitter. Ruined it. Then : “The sad truth is that there are no great ‘social networks’ right now,”.
Twitter used to be in much better shape financially before musk took over but implying that it was ever “great” is a bit of a stretch
twitter may have been a shithole in general, but it was great compared to what it is now.
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Yes. Twitter was profitable in 2019. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1418091/000141809120000037/twtr-20191231.htm
Ctrl+F for “Net Income”, which will take you to the $1,465,659 (thousands) figure somewhere in its charts. Net Income is the bottom line: after all revenues, costs, etc. etc. of the year were added up.
Musk took it over with a so called “Leveraged Buyout”, meaning Twitter borrowed $13 Billion to allow Elon Musk to buy it for $44 Billion (meaning Elon Musk only paid $33 Billion, the random +2 Billion to wipeout all the old debt).
Note that $13 Billion in loans costs somewhere between 10% to 14% right now, depending on how much of the loan was fixed and how much of it was adjustable. At 10%, this means that Twitter took on $1.3 Billion/year in interest payments as Elon Musk bought the company. There’s pretty much no hope for Twitter to ever be profitable again, they’d have to execute as perfectly as 2019 despite losing 80% of their staff (Elon Musk also fired everyone when he took over the company).
The company was “barely profitable” in 2019, and “just barely losing money” in 2020, 2021. But add on a $1.3+ Billion/year loadstone, and its just… not… going to ever be profitable again.
Twitter was never great, just reactionaries yelling about shit they only know 15% of.
How did he ruin it though? I hear that all the time but I myself haven’t noticed any changes. Well, except for a logo but that’s very minor
I myself haven’t noticed any changes
So you haven’t noticed the 80% reduction in staff leading to incredible amounts of Twitter Downtime, the rise in hate-speech due to the firing of the moderators, the loss of mainstream advertisements, and the replacement with ridiculous low-quality advertising because the mainstream advertisers have grown concerned about the hate-speech?
And you haven’t noticed the increase in downtime as the website continuously crashes? The loss of the blocking feature? The inability to block Elon Musk specifically? (and how he keeps appearing on everyone’s feed even when you try to get rid of it?). The loss of API access?
Comment quality and overall quality of discussion has declined significantly on Twitter as well, as Twitter has fallen from top10 on the App/Play store to #55 or later, because it turns out that Americans are too stupid to search for “X” rather than “Twitter”. There has been a precipitous decline in the already crappy quality discussion.
Finally, Threads and Mastodon have sucked out many high-quality posters and sub-communities.
“no, not really” is the answer to all of those, honestly. But I rarely use twitter, hence why I was asking. Just blocked Elon by the way, really curious if what you’re saying about blocking him is true.
Cool you barely use twitter and didn’t notice any of the declines detailed above but “no, not really” thanks for the high quality discussion
Are we speaking a different language or something? The comment above prefaces all questions "you haven’t noticed " - no I haven’t noticed none of those precisely because I don’t use twitter much. What’s the discrepancy here?
You asked how elon ruined the experience, someone explained it to you, you then said you don’t even use the platform and hadn’t noticed any of that. Like. Why did you ask in the first place and why are you dismissing the fairly detailed and accurate answer you got?
Edit: I’ll leave my response but I think you’re actually just curious from the perspective of someone who doesn’t use twitter a lot. I think I knee jerk reacted as though you were trying to defend musk as his fans are fairly obnoxious. Having reread this whole conversation, I think I’m coming off more aggressive than I should be.
Anyway, yeah you’re right you probably wouldn’t have noticed the negative changes musk has brought about. As a former daily user of twitter I’m fairly angry at the destruction of the site. I think twitter was an extremely important venue, it gave regular people direct access to interaction with the rich and powerful, it gave access to unfiltered news from on the ground people and it allowed people from remote/poorer parts of the world a way to interact with the west. Losing that in the society we live in is a real bummer.
For a product the logo and brand recognition are not minor. Twitter was so well known and ubiquitous that the word “tweet” was included in dictonaries around the world. He threw that away and replaced it with a generic X, and no one can figure out how to call posts on that platform now.
But other than that, he has a very particular stance on moderation and free speech. He thinks hateful comments are just fine, as long as they aren’t strictly against the law. But he also doesn’t apply the same standards to himself, removing stuff he doesn’t like even though it would be ok according to his own rules. He also gutted the Twitter/X staff, particularly the tech departements, leading to numerous outages and technical problems. All this has made it an even worse platform for civil public discourse, and it wasn’t all that great before he took over imo.
and no one can figure out how to call posts on that platform now.
I will continue to call them twats
I like Xeets. Pronounced shits.
Thanks for the explanation. For me none of that, well, except for content moderation, really matters. I just didn’t understand why people blame Elon when the platform has already been overrun by bots way before he took over. Whenever I look at it, It’s all crypto and political spam. Who cares what logo looks like, or how many people work on it, when there’s no good content to begin with?
You’re being extremely disingenuous. Those things exist on that platform and every other social media platform. If that’s literally all you’re seeing, you are not using it right… in fact you have to be going pretty far out of your way to make that the entirety of the content shown to you. It wasn’t hard at all to find quality posters and filter out the bullshit.
Right now, I opened twitter, and out of 16 trending topics, 7 are crypto spam, 3 are political spam, 2 are just spam, 2 are generic words, and the remaining two I have zero interested in. Today I also got a “trending tweet” notification that was in some foreign language I don’t know. Went on a homepage and every third post is some kind of spam, so I had to block like a couple dozen accounts just so they never pop up again. I have no idea how you are supposed to find good creators when spammers are gaming the system so easily. And it’s been like that for a few years already. No other social network has this problem, I would’ve quit internet if that was the case.
Right now? Probably. Musk has super-fucked it and I won’t have anything to do with the guy or his projects. You argued it’s always been this way, though. It was not if you took a moment to use it correctly and follow people you like and ignore those you don’t. I give my friends shit (jokingly) for using “X” and the answer is the same “It’s the best way to keep tabs on my favorite creators.”
Think about this. Staff soon may not have a place to work if they don’t work from home. Musk hasn’t been paying vendors or rent on Twitter offices for some time now. His failure to pay server costs caused outages and a scramble from what staff remained to move that info off google servers he didn’t want to pay for and onto servers he owns. This kind of thing may not effect all users on a daily basis, but imagine if your landlord just decided not to pay the utilities bill out of your rent. Eventually the city or municipality would shut off the electric or water. You can’t have a domicile that doesn’t have electric and water. The place would be condemned and all renters would be out of their homes. That’s basically a very similar scenario to what’s happening at Twitter.
If you don’t notice the changes, you were part of the people he bumped up at all costs that turned it into a terrible service
Well, maybe, but then it’s a terrible bid, because I only use twitter to shit on brands. And I’m definitely not buying the check mark.
EDIT: accidentally removed “not”
This is the one thing I am going to miss more than anything: Twitter worked for resolving issues with companies. It was the single good thing about it. Now that is going away, companies can ignore you.
Seriously I have been on the phone, email, on hold, trying to get things resolved. One tweet and suddenly I am important and they want to help. A lot of companies have different support teams to monitor social media and that is where shit gets done.
The “blue check” system which was previously used to denote verified users were who they claimed to be suddenly became a complete cash grab for $8 a month, even more for companies to have verified checks or sets of them? Then when not everyone was buying in those users were pushed to the top of replies to users posts. This of course caused tons of people to just get blocked outright because of their checks.
Additionally i believe he has threatened to remove some companies handles because they stopped using them most notably NPR.
Now he has floated the idea of removing the blocking feature because reasons? Who knows what he thinks. So the functionality has not changed a ton, for now, the quality of what you get has gone down.
Oh also he made a specific exception and unbanned some user who posted literal child porn
He likely saw a report that showed he was the most blocked user, so he got sads
Also, his bluetlicker losers likely see the “you can’t see this because you are blocked” message everywhere they went and they complained
Now they’ll just be “muted” and not know people shut off their loser ass
there’s only been about 7,000 articles every week about it
Jesus Christ. How dense are you?
Willfully obtuse should be used as the catchall term for those who wish to express poorly concealed admiration for public figures that are eterna shitheads on a global stage.
Keep it civil, Mr. DickHandler
That’s doctor dick handler, he didn’t go to internet medical school for 8 years to be called Mr.
Are you sure dick handling is a part of medical school curriculum? I’m pretty sure it’s part of gender studies
Mr? Show some respect. He’s a Dr!
He had to inject his own persona into the platform by making inflammatory, discriminatory tweets and being a general troll on his platform, and then making unpopular decisions like forcing people to pay for a blue checkmark, increasing API costs, not banning Nazi posters, and of course, the nonsensical rebranding. It drove away people and advertisers who didn’t want to be on the same platform as literal Nazis and bigoted TERF people, and companies who couldn’t afford the ridiculous API pricing.
Honestly if he had simply not used his own platform as his own bullhorn, he could have enacted some of the more unpopular changes to become profitable.
Wtf?
I’m sorry but if you didn’t get mad at every reply on any decently large post being filled with NPC- ass boomer tier memes and replies and attempts at self promo, you might be a boomer NPC.
X may fail. Twitter didn’t fail. Twitter was bought by a twat who decided to shut it down piece by piece.
Oopsie we repeatedly keep taking away you most valuable organizational tools
- The 1%
This take is exhausting. It’s like the political version of narcissism: here’s how everything that happens in the world is actually a conspiracy against me!
If Musk was a plant to sabotage Twitter on the behalf of the 1%, why would he have done it slowly with a series of increasingly bad decisions that caused a mass migration to distributed open-source platforms? Why not just flip the switch and kill it in one go? Or: why not start a program of bots to talk about how awesome Teslas are, and make Trump seem cool, while shadow-censoring criticism of Musk’s friend’s companies or governments?
You think They are competent and dastardly enough to plan a takeover of Twitter, but then too bumbling to make better use of it than slowly discrediting it with a series of half-baked ideas from a deranged and detestable front man?
Control is the game for people with money and power whether it is graceful or not. Some of what Elon has done seems like he wants to control the narrative around his jet. Some of what Elon is doing seems like he just wants to keep testing the waters to see how many people still use twitter after crippling the system. Like some sort of “I slap them in the face and they ask to be hit harder- that’s how much power I have over them. People are obsessed with me”.
I don’t think his goal was to kill twitter. His goal was to remain on everyone’s lips without his jet being mentioned. And if that’s at the cost of organizational tools being destroyed, so be it- in fact, destroying twitter has had more people taking about him than ever.
Yeah, I think that’s more or less right. Musk has gone off the rails, and is using his fortune as a cudgel in a fit of pique.
It’s our own fault that our “town square” was so easily taken over by a rich bully, though. I was warning people back in 2007 that depending so heavily on Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc, was a bad idea. People did not want to hear it. It’s hard to picture now, but people used to love those companies, and couldn’t imagine them doing harm. But like…it was inevitable.
We need to build on things like Lemmy, Mastodon, Diaspora, whatever. If you hand control of the town square to a corporation, they’re gonna control access and charge fees, and they’ll happily sell it to someone who wants to turn it into a mud-wrestling pit. That’s not the fault of the corporations–it’s our fault.
Not to mention that the 1% already owned it.
Though if anyone is thinking of spending close to fifty billion to destoy a social network then call me - I’ll do it for a billion, or two.
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i implied no intent, you just filled in the obvious gaps and are upset about it.
I mean, you absolutely did imply intent. You may not have meant to, but you did.
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Twitter helped create ISIL, and also POTUS45. When actual autocracies see people even trying to organize on Twitter, they simply ban the whole site anyway. And it also played a major role in the Arab Spring, which while originally talking about high ideals like democracy, liberalisation, and human rights, is these days mostly notable for having ruined several countries for a generation.
In fact, that seems to be the trend: Twitter is very good at making its users feel like they’re organizing and making changes in the world, when in reality all that is being accomplished is/was inflating their own stock price and throwing outrage around with neither factual context nor a long-term plan to turn it into meaningful positive change. People were able to effect social change before Twitter, but they didn’t do it because they saw somebody’s sarky hot take for five seconds right before getting their dopamine hit with the “Like” button and then scrolling past it; they did it because they got sick of the way things were. The public-facing data should be kept around for historians and the rest of the curious, but Twitter was always primarily a predatory ad marketplace that gained relevance by being useful for propaganda, and we’ll all be better off with it gone.
EDIT: Musk, surely, did buy Twitter for the power and attention he thought it would give him. But he’s done it as a petulant, self-destructive manchild, not as some scheme to stifle public discussion— Twitter was already stifling public discussion, just because of what it is.
Musk, surely, did buy Twitter for the power and attention he thought it would give him.
DIsagree. He was trying to do one of his many pump-and-dumps and he fucked around and got found out.
Fair. He talked about buying Twitter for the power and attention he meant to get from talking about it, both from the cryptobro fans and also any shady financial shenanigans. But he didn’t actually mean to go through with paying for it.
For real!? I cannot think of a worse cancer than twitter/X and the horrific abomination that it is cannot whither away quickly enough.
What possible benefit has Twitter ever offered mankind?
@dril
X? Can we collectively decide to forever call it “X, formerly known as Twitter” just to piss him off?
I like the most recent The Verge variant: Twitter, X, or whatever it’s currently called…
TwiX is unfortunately already taken.
Damn, I could go for a twix bar right about now.
I call it Xitter. The X is pronounced with an “sh” sound.
Exitter is also a valid prononciation
I saw someone on Mastodon say something along the lines of “I’ll continue to deadname Twitter for as long as Musk continues to deadname his daughter” and I love that sentiment.
daaaaaaamn. That’s brilliant.
Better to just call it “The site formerly known as Twitter” and don’t mention X at all. That would piss him off more.
“…posted on social media…”
Ooh, even better!
Seems like it will be the website formerly known as existing soon enough.
I just call it Twitter. Just like I call the (former?) rapper Kanye West. I don’t cater to the whims of the 1% if I can help it.
In the same way that car fails when you deliberately drive it 100mph into a brick wall.
So you’ve got experience with Tesla’s autopilot function…
Uh, no. Autopilot was not enabled during that crash.
It disabled itself 0.25s before impact
Nailed it.
Can we start a gofundme to persuade him to take over Facebook?
Best part was he tried to chicken out of his own deal but the feds obv wouldn’t allow him back off on his very own proposal to buy Twitter in the first place!
“Here’s 44 billion USD, I might fail though ¯\_(ツ)_/¯”
Genius.
Especially because he could have bought it for so much less.
Good, shut it down. Time to end Twitter.
