Anyone else thoroughly enjoying the Twitter dumpster fire?

Chat about stuff other than Transformers.
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Sades
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Anyone else thoroughly enjoying the Twitter dumpster fire?

Post by Sades »

I really have to stop putting the body of my comment in the title, because that's literally all I have to say most of the time.

I've been on Twitter technically for awhile but I rarely used it, I've started using it a lot more recently and I quite enjoyed it, because I have a bunch of science-y/gamer-y people on it and I love the random shit they post so not knowing what's going to happen with it makes me kinds sad, because fb is boring and I haven't got the same balance of science/gamer/biology/cute animal content anywhere else.

Most of my science peeps seem to be migrating to Mastodon, which meh. If things go poof I'm not even going to look at Counter Social. I might Tumblr, I dunno. I'll probs follow most of my science content over if I have to but I'm just gonna stay on Twitter till the house burns down. /fluffbabblefiller
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Denyer
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Re: Anyone else thoroughly enjoying the Twitter dumpster fire?

Post by Denyer »

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPKQSQSVVos

The daily backtracking is quite amusing. There are pockets of important content but it's always been a hellsite. Not been terribly impressed by Mastodon in the past, maybe it's improved in the last few years. Unlikely to bother with new/additional sites if someone trips over a data centre power cable and the whole thing vanishes.

Probably going to delete old direct messages later, if that's even possible, on the assumption that security is also currently a dumpster fire (teams responsible having been fired etc) according to insiders. Plus I'm expecting it to be sold at a fraction of the sale cost in the not too distant future, like certain other platforms -- eg LiveJournal got snapped up by a Russian company, and Yahoo/MySpace/Tumblr etc are now virtually worthless compared to their heydays.

What's interesting is the effect a huge financial failure could have on Musk and his other companies. If nothing else he's becoming radioactive in more circles, and not the benevolent mid-C20th idea of radioactivity that turns people green or gives them spider-powers.

Facebook's also widely considered to be heading for an investment bust with VR/metaverse crap. The wider context is threats to section 230 protections for both sites for not playing ball plus advertisers not wanting to be within a million miles of any platform that's too far-right friendly.
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Clay
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Re: Anyone else thoroughly enjoying the Twitter dumpster fire?

Post by Clay »

My general reaction has been <chef's kiss>

My favorite slice of schadenfreude so far.
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Re: Anyone else thoroughly enjoying the Twitter dumpster fire?

Post by Tantrum »

If I understand this correctly, Musk's main changes to Twitter are:
1) allowing anyone to impersonate a major corporation or celebrity for US$8
2) firing everyone who could check if this process is being abused


Musk has also transferred 50 employees from Tesla to Twitter (source). The article goes into why this won't work well technically, namely that the Tesla and Twitter code are written in different programming languages using different software tools. But, it doesn't cover the legal implications.

Musk owns Twitter, but Tesla is still publicly traded, meaning other people have a say in how it's run. What are these people going to think about their employees being reassigned to the CEO's personal project? From the article, this type of thing has been happening with SpaceX. But, was it widely known to Tesla shareholders?
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Re: Anyone else thoroughly enjoying the Twitter dumpster fire?

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Cyberstrike nTo
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Re: Anyone else thoroughly enjoying the Twitter dumpster fire?

Post by Cyberstrike nTo »

I've been trying Tribel as an alternative to Twitter, but it's more like an alternative to Facebook.
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Re: Anyone else thoroughly enjoying the Twitter dumpster fire?

Post by Denyer »

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technolo ... rmination/

Probable actionable breaches of contract aside, the best thing that could happen at this stage is the rest of the company emptying out and leaving him to try to keep the lights on with contractors.

edit: Seems to be going the way I'd expect; https://twitter.com/alexeheath/status/1 ... 3331577856
https://twitter.com/kyliebytes/status/1 ... 7718113280

edit: And more...
https://twitter.com/ZoeSchiffer/status/ ... 4785504257
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Re: Anyone else thoroughly enjoying the Twitter dumpster fire?

Post by Warcry »

It's been an absolutely beautiful slow-motion car crash, starting months ago with the "Elon is on the board"/"Elon is off the board"/"Elon is going to buy the entire site to spite the board" display of childish pettiness. But I really didn't expect things to get this bad this quickly! I thought he was buying the site so that he could unban Trump and change the rules so that his fanboys wouldn't get banned for saying the n-word. Spending 44 billion dollars just to fire everyone and burn the whole place down is insane.

And Elon Musk's transformation into an alt-right darling who lives to "own the libs" has been one of the craziest storylines of the last few years. I feel bad for anyone who still owns Tesla stock when the CEO's entire personality is now centred around antagonizing their core customer base!
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Re: Anyone else thoroughly enjoying the Twitter dumpster fire?

Post by Tantrum »

Warcry wrote: Thu Nov 17, 2022 4:17 pmAnd Elon Musk's transformation into an alt-right darling who lives to "own the libs" has been one of the craziest storylines of the last few years. I feel bad for anyone who still owns Tesla stock when the CEO's entire personality is now centred around antagonizing their core customer base!
Elon's just demonstrating how much of an a-hole one must be to get conservatives on board with renewable energy.

Musk is currently CEO of 3 companies: Space-X, Tesla, and Twitter. Even if he only spends the standard 40 hours per week on each, that's 120 hours per week. A week has 168 hours, leaving 48 hours per week. That's less than 7 hours per day for everything else Elon does including, but not limited to: Neuralink, the Boring company, sleep, parenting his children, hygiene, and sexually harassing flight attendants.

In other words, there's no way this guy who's demanding "hardcore" overtime from his employees is putting even the standard amount of time into his positions. He may be spending more than 40 hours/week on Twitter now, but that's only possible by neglecting his other responsibilities. When the boards of those other companies demand their CEO do his job(s), or when he gets bored of Twitter, he'll cut back.

On the other hand, maybe the boards of the other companies are happy Elon's out of their hair. For now.
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Re: Anyone else thoroughly enjoying the Twitter dumpster fire?

Post by Sades »

I'm trying to create a Mastodon account but the servers bs is tripping me up. Help, I'm old :laugh:

I don't like my options. There's no science. There's no bones. There's no Archaeology. *grumps*

Yay, I still have a Tumblr \o/ I forgot about my Tumblr. 2016 me was still a bit annoyingly angsty it seems, but overall I think it's still less cringe than I used to be so it can stay.
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Re: Anyone else thoroughly enjoying the Twitter dumpster fire?

Post by Denyer »

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Re: Anyone else thoroughly enjoying the Twitter dumpster fire?

Post by Denyer »

And the site's now forcefully logging people out:

https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/01/twitt ... e-welcome/
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Re: Anyone else thoroughly enjoying the Twitter dumpster fire?

Post by Warcry »

Who would have thought that the product might suffer after you fire a huge percentage of your developers? Truly, no one could have predicted this!
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Sades
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Re: Anyone else thoroughly enjoying the Twitter dumpster fire?

Post by Sades »

I'M NOT ENJOYING IT ANY MORE

I'm just waiting for the house to burn down at this point.

.... Both online and off, for my city of abodement (ha) is currently ringed by a series of wildfires.

I'm not nervous, you are! :glance:

(we're good, I'm just being stupid)
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Re: Anyone else thoroughly enjoying the Twitter dumpster fire?

Post by Denyer »

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-66284304

Destroying years of branding and the fact that 'tweet' and 'retweet' have become dictionary and household words. Apparently, though unsurprisingly, all of the SEO experts on staff were amongst those who left.
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Re: Anyone else thoroughly enjoying the Twitter dumpster fire?

Post by Warcry »

Apparently the rest of the day consisted of people bombarding Musk with Xvideos.com jokes. Possibly to the point where he banned the porn site from TwitterX out of spite, but that last part might just be people mocking him for being a petty manchild. The entire situation has gotten so silly that I can't even tell what is meant to be satire anymore!
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Re: Anyone else thoroughly enjoying the Twitter dumpster fire?

Post by Denyer »

As usual, the El Reg coverage is fairly decent;
https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/26/ ... o_meaning/
https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/26/ ... _again_to/

And consensus seems to be on Xitter and to a lesser extent Xits since the Xi has a Sh sound.
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Re: Anyone else thoroughly enjoying the Twitter dumpster fire?

Post by Tantrum »

Denyer wrote: Mon Jul 24, 2023 8:15 am https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-66284304

Destroying years of branding and the fact that 'tweet' and 'retweet' have become dictionary and household words. Apparently, though unsurprisingly, all of the SEO experts on staff were amongst those who left.
So, Musk paid above market rate to buy twitter. Then, he got rid of a bunch of people, meaning he didn't want (much of) the workforce. Now, he's ditching the branding, so he didn't want that, either. Apparently, he's going to use the remnants to build this X thing he's wanted to do for a while. Any reason he couldn't have just hired some people to make the X thing itself? This seems like paying aftermarket price for Flamewar and buying some blue paint to make a Prime Arcee.
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Re: Anyone else thoroughly enjoying the Twitter dumpster fire?

Post by Denyer »

A lot of it's just an ego trip. Troll boy wants to get a reaction. But there's a lot of other people's money tied up in this, and if they were unhappy enough some of them would have no problem with having him killed and dismembered.

So assuming that e.g. the Saudis are happy enough to lose the money and leave the bone saw in the toolbox, what do they gain from letting Musk take a wrecking ball to Twitter and encourage hate groups? Well, many are fairly far to the right anyway and having a disinformation-friendly platform is a general plus. But also Twitter came with 15+ years of data, including direct messages, contact details and context which is a gift to certain regimes and interests, as an asset to trade as much as directly exploit. Some of it was already there for the taking because if you look at the testimony of their ex security chief the company was already a sieve;

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technolo ... -sec-spam/
https://edition.cnn.com/2022/08/23/tech ... index.html

Private ownership and almost complete staff turnover only multiplies that.
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Re: Anyone else thoroughly enjoying the Twitter dumpster fire?

Post by Sades »

If anyone has a bluesky invite I'm looking for another social media platform to abandon.
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