Does This Button Do Something? the twitter end days
— kilgore trout, death to putiner (@KT_So_It_Goes) November 14, 2022
HE’S TRASHING THE PLACE, AND IT’S NOT HIS PLACE.
Twitter’s been very useful to me, and I don’t want to have to learn a whole new RSS-substitute system, dammit!
musk's basic problem is that twitter was not being run by lefty sjw types surpressing free speech, it was being run by business people who were trying to make money. with the same aim he'll end up trial-and-erroring his way back to their exact policies
— Shaun (@shaun_vids) November 8, 2022
getting some pushback on this tweet from musk fans claiming i'm wrong because twitter was unprofitable. au contraire! it proved to be extremely profitable for them, didn't it, when they sold it to a chump
— Shaun (@shaun_vids) November 8, 2022
From @ZoeSchiffer and I, an account of one of the most chaotic days in Twitter’s history. We’re making it free for everyone to read because we think the whole story needs to be told.https://t.co/9yI7Yqul2L
— Casey Newton (@CaseyNewton) November 11, 2022
Everything went from bad to worse at Twitter on Thursday. Today let’s talk about a truly chaotic 24 hours at the company, and the mounting fears over what it means for the service that still serves as the heartbeat of the global news cycle.
On Wednesday morning, amid mounting concerns from advertisers that the new Twitter would not prove to be a safe home for brands, Elon Musk held an hour-long Spaces call designed to reassure them.
Joining Musk on the call were his head of trust and safety, Yoel Roth, a seven-year veteran of the company who had served as a steady hand during a tumultuous transition; and Robin Wheeler, the company’s de facto head of sales, who had spent a decade selling ads for the company across several key roles.
On the call Musk performed his usual routine, offering a scattershot set of product announcements that were almost certainly news to the people who would soon be called upon to build them. Soon the timeline would comprise mostly tweets from paid subscribers, he said, with the rest relegated to a zone comparable to Gmail’s spam filter. The site would soon enable … longer video downloads? …
we are witnessing one of the most spectacular corporate disasters of living memory. hulu and netflix will make competing miniseries about this. brendan fraser will win an emmy for playing elon in the better one https://t.co/kTP6GLEy26
— David Mack (@davidmackau) November 10, 2022
I guess Musk’s misplaced confidence they everyone would pay for Twitter makes more sense when you realize how little he actually knows about Twitter
— Elizabeth Nolan Brown (@ENBrown) November 13, 2022
I’m not saying he won’t do a ton of damage but he has certain hard parameters to work within in order to maintain control of the business and he seems to only fleetingly understand any of that
— jason wilson (@jason_a_w) November 14, 2022
1. This platform does not make money for reasons that will only become exacerbated over time
2. He has to make large, regular payments to his creditors
3. He’s trying to figure out new ways of making money but all of his ideas suck
4. Most of his wealth is not liquid— jason wilson (@jason_a_w) November 14, 2022
So so many people do not seem to be allowing for the likelihood that the previous owners saw Elon coming a mile off and sued in order to keep him on the hook to pony up the best price they were ever going to get for this thing
— jason wilson (@jason_a_w) November 14, 2022
Update: company sources tell me that yesterday Twitter eliminated ~4,400 of its ~5,500 contract employees, with cuts expected to have significant impact to content moderation and the core infrastructure services that keep the site up and running.
People inside are stunned.
— Casey Newton (@CaseyNewton) November 13, 2022
Before the first round of layoffs, employees were reminding each other to keep their heads down and out of the way of Musk.
If they got laid off, they'd get severance. But if they pushed back against Elon? They'd get fired. No severance.
Very normal work environment. pic.twitter.com/o9dQAHJCPn
— Ben Collins (@oneunderscore__) November 14, 2022
driving armored trucks of cash directly into the sun https://t.co/uEeBUnpo7E
— kilgore trout, death to putiner (@KT_So_It_Goes) November 13, 2022
(As a Masshole, I should perhaps remind the rest of you what happened the last time a rich nepotism kid thought he could challenge Sen. Markey and win. And Joe Kennedy III knew a lot more about politics than Elon… )
I sincerely hope that, given how many high-profile users have demonstrated their attachment to Twitter, that some cannier billionaire / business is either setting up to take the company over, or about to announce their lookalike-only-better version…
it’s no big deal he’ll just sign up uhhhh a hundred million new subscribers instead, bang, revenue fixed https://t.co/ddpG8y7Nib
— kilgore trout, death to putiner (@KT_So_It_Goes) November 14, 2022
Baud
I’m not a huge twitter fan, but you have my sympathies, AL. You have given Twitter more value than Elon Musk has.
Lapassionara
I lived many years without Twitter, but now I can’t imagine how I’ll get along with out it. Will there be a 12-step program for people like me?
SpaceUnit
I wonder if some tech giant such as Apple isn’t beginning to view this as an enormous opportunity.
Falling Diphthong
At this point I figure either:
a) Elon thinks he will gain something if he can destroy Twitter in the next few months. Maybe the other billionaires dared him to do it, and he’ll get a commemorative plate if he can pull it off?
b) This is as dumb as it looks. He really believes that all the ideas he’s tossing out are brilliant–that by Thanksgiving people will be eagerly giving Twitter access to their bank accounts, that the FTC just gives fines and you pay them and it’s no biggie, that he is establishing a new reign of citizen journalists for truth via linking to right wing fake news sites.
Going with (b) at this point.
Baud
@SpaceUnit: It seems unlikely that Apple will want to get into social media. But maybe Google. I think Facebook would have a tough time from an antitrust perspective.
PaulB
Ironically, there is probably greater engagement by Twitter users these days than there was before Musk acquired it. Sadly for Musk and Twitter, people will eventually get tired of it and move on to the next shiny toy. Only then will we get a handle on whether, and how much, Musk has damaged it.
Baud
@PaulB:
Musk can keep upping the stupid to keep them engaged. But I’m not sure how long the technical and financial side will last.
MattF
It’s interesting as a study in system degredation- how much dysfunction can a system take before it just stops working. We shall see.
Baud
@MattF:
Nominated!
Dorothy A. Winsor
Musk’s actions are astounding. Does he not realize the people running twitter have real knowledge? His “brilliant” ideas are just stupid
SpaceUnit
@Baud:
I’d be surprised if someone out there in the world of big tech isn’t thinking seriously about it.
ByRookorbyCrook
I don’t see anyone seeing it as an opportunity. The platform barely made any money. Is there a potentially viable business there? Maybe. I could see a fresh company building up to fill the wreckage field left by Twitter, but Google has tried to enter this space before and it failed. Why would Apple need to enter that space? They would buy up Mastodon or some other alternative rather than build their own.
I am not a Twitter user, but I read an awful lot of tweets referenced on other sites, like here. I wonder how long Musk will hemorrhage money from his more successful businesses before he looks to unload for a pittance to stem the flow? Or will the House of Saud gain a large share of Tesla?
mrmoshpotato
Have you heard of TroofSoshell?
Oh, you said “better version,” not “Nazi rip-off version.”
Major Major Major Major
Oh good, I don’t have to write this up, haha.
God, he’s such an idiot. And nothing good ever happens when a high level manager fancies themselves an application engineer…
@Lapassionara: join mastodon and Reddit!
Citizen Alan
There are 2 kind of billionaires. There are billionaires who want to be rich. And there are billionaires who want to be famous. The first type includes billionaires you’ve never heard of, and if they have their way, you never will. The second type includes the billionaires who take absolute joy in going out in a Hindenburg-type crash because at least everyone will remember their names. Elon Musk belongs in type two.
eclare
@mrmoshpotato: Hahaha…
different-church-lady
What will be the methadone of Twitter?
Matt McIrvin
White edgelord bros believe “go woke, go broke” is a real thing and that both regular media and social media companies are driving themselves into bankruptcy by bowing to political pressure from crazy censorious social justice warriors.
No evidence contrary to this thesis can be accepted or believed. The idea that someone other than white edgelord bros might be a significant part of the market doesn’t register.
So Musk took over, the place immediately began to reek, advertisers started deserting Twitter in droves, and all Musk could conclude was that the woke mob was leaning on them. Couldn’t be that they thought things were becoming awful.
SpaceUnit
@ByRookorbyCrook:
It’s only speculation. I’m not really on social media so I don’t claim to know anything about the various business models, etc. What I do know is that in crisis lies opportunity.
Baud
Brittany Spears was stuck in conservatorship for years for less.
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
Trump’s razor!
MobiusKlein
If I may suggest, every embedded tweet in this site and others may go tits up, at some random time in the future. To preserve the balloon juice content and information, we will need a script to screen capture every front page embedded tweet, and have a replacement image ready for when twitter dies.
Not a joke.
scav
I’d be interested in knowing how many (especially key players) at his other ventures are polishing résumés and putting out feelers. This dumpster fire’s sparks should jump corporate boundaries and that’ll be interesting. Get out ahead of the rush (or the push) basically.
Ken
@MattF: Today’s
confession that he doesn’t know what he’s doingproduct announcement was that they were going to improve efficiency by shutting off the 80% of microservices that aren’t used to deliver content. So “just stops working” gets a boost.Explainer: A “microservice” is a program, usually running constantly for this sort of cloud application. If it’s there, it’s doing something necessary for Twitter to keep working — people don’t just create these for the laughs. Typically these are doing things like monitoring the core services or the underlying infrastructure to detect problems as they occur and alert the SREs. I suppose technically that’s not needed any more, since he fired most of the SREs last week.
CaseyL
How can a social media company make money?
I wouldn’t object to a straight-out subscription model, but it would need to be on the very inexpensive side, and depend on volume to make money. Even that would get complicated: you’d need to consider a tier of subscription prices, so persons and regions which are mired in poverty can still participate.
And, unfortunately, since “limitless, maximal revenue growth” is crack to corporate business owners, even if the subscription model started out OK, they’d soon mess with it to make even more money.
different-church-lady
@MattF: Like what Madman Muntz would do, except if Muntz had just kept snipping away until every component was detached from every other component. And then he smashed all the components with a hammer.
different-church-lady
@Ken:
It’s really hard to believe his self-driving cars have problems.
Suzanne
@Matt McIrvin:
Many, many people delude themselves by thinking that companies want their business. Very few businesses want the edgelords as customers. They’re not aspirational, they’re just gross.
Tony G
Earlier in the year I was chatting with my 31-year old son about the absurd grift of “cryptocurrencies” and “NFTs”. His analysis seemed to be accurate at the time: There are people out there who have so much money that they can afford to burn half of it in a dumpster fire and still have more money than they know what to do with. The same analysis would be true of Elon’s latest plaything. After he finishes destroying Twitter he’ll still have more money than any human should have. (I’m still astonished by how much money he has. How many people are stupid enough to buy Teslas?)
Geminid
@Lapassionara: Mastodon has a 144 step program. Some people think it’s gross, though
different-church-lady
At this point I gotta believe some fired employee could evaporate Twitter just by hacking some esoteric code she/he/they know about.
Ken
@different-church-lady: Google “china tesla deaths” for the most recent incident. (Er, a recent incident; another may have happened while I was typing.)
dmsilev
@Ken: Apparently one of the “superfluous” services Musk ordered shut off was the one that handled SMS “please verify your login is really you” authentications. So, good luck logging into your accounts everyone!
Major Major Major Major
@MobiusKlein: Embedded tweets are blockquotes with some javascript at the end. The blockquotes will still work fine. If Twitter goes belly-up, the images and videos and links to other tweets and profiles will fail.
patrick II
I hope someone saved a complete backup of the Twitter system files version:BeforeMusk so when someone buys it at the coming bankruptcy/firesale they can restore it to that version and maybe have a decent social media app again.
azlib
I still think Musk is deliberately destroying Twitter because he sees it as the best way out of a bad situation. It is clear his purchase of Twitter was way overpriced and Twitter historically never was profitable.
I do wonder if it is even possible to build a platform like Twitter and make it a going business venture. Musk’s inflated ego got him in serious trouble this time. The bottom line is his purchase of Twitter was a really bad business decision.
PaulB
As far as I know, there are four basic choices:
1. Advertising.
2. Selling the data you acquire from your users.
3. Subscriptions of one kind or another, e.g., for “premium” services.
4. Packaging your codebase as a platform and licensing that platform to other companies.
Musk is busy destroying the first option; I’m not sure about the second; he’s busy trying (and failing) to get the third option widely adopted; and I doubt that the fourth option is viable.
Absent drastic choices, like Musk stepping down as CEO, Twitter will not survive financially. Even before he screwed everything up, his purchase massively increased Twitter’s debt load, requiring an additional billion or so every year to service that debt.
dmsilev
@Baud: Musk doesn’t look nearly as good in a miniskirt.
piratedan
so far, both counter.social and mastodon are out there competing, there may be others in the works as well… I think twitter was doing a better (i.e. less intrusive) job of allowing folks to find each other out there on the web; be it of shared interests or politics; that didn’t involve someone like Zuckerberg selling their data to advertisers and anyone else who was willing to buy it.
different-church-lady
@dmsilev:
What did any of us ever do to you?
Major Major Major Major
@CaseyL:
Yeah, it’s either got to be subscription-based and therefore relatively small, or ad-supported and therefore relatively sparse in features. Facebook is basically the one exception but that’s because they had a huge first-mover advantage.
Ohio Mom
@MobiusKlein: If every tweet goes “tits up” as you suggest is possible, it wil be the contemporary version of the library at Alexandria burning. Yes, lots of snark and jokes on twitter but also a lot of documentation of our times.
Baud
I could see Microsoft buying Twitter. They own LinkedIn.
dmsilev
@patrick II: The thing is, the most valuable part of Twitter by far isn’t the source code or even the physical infrastructure. It’s the user base. You could clone Twitter’s technology right now and it wouldn’t make a difference unless you could simultaneously bring over a large swath of the users.
different-church-lady
@azlib:
To me it’s feeling a lot like The Joker in The Dark Knight: doing crazy shit just because.
Geminid
@Dorothy A. Winsor: Musk’s acquisition of Twitter was a “hung deal,” an offer made in April that Musk tried to wriggle out of but eventually and grudgingly fulfilled in October.
I have a theory that Musk’s behavior now is conditioned by passive aggression. He’s mad at Twitter and mad at the World for his predicament. Musk is also mad at himself, but for him the World is Musk.
Ken
That will roll out simultaneously with the “money market” feature where you link your bank accounts to twitter.
Anne Laurie
Don’t let me stop you, please!
But seriously… there’s probably a profitable opening for some currently un/underemployed tech pro who wants to set up a system to do this. I know Twitter has an ‘archive your tweets’ function, so there’s *some* kind of backup, until Elon manages to break it. If the site doesn’t survive, I suspect I’m not the only person who’d pay to retrieve ‘my’ embeds…
NotMax
@different-church-lady
I bought a used “gutless wonder” Muntz TV (25″, black and white) while in college for, IIRC, $10. Would estimate it was maybe 7 years old then. Later on gave it to my parents, for whom it worked just dandy for a further 20 years or so.
dmsilev
@Ken: I’m just waiting for Musk to announce that the “bank of Twitter” will be some cryptocurrency thing. Seems inevitable at this point.
Major Major Major Major
@Ken: More technical explainer for those inclined: a microservice is generally part of a state machine or pipeline, that is to say, a component in a larger workflow.
Suppose I am running balloon-juice with microservices. When I click ‘publish’ for a post, it would send a message to the publisher microservice, which might send messages to the notification microservice, which emails subscribers and posts a tweet to Cole’s feed.
When you leave a comment, it sends a message to the comment microservice, which marks it as ready to be read for spam. Then the spam microservice validates it and sends it back to the comment microservice, which publishes it.
As systems get more complex, you add microservices for more and more workflows (or parts of workflows). Services that are rarely used might look unused to an idiot who just bought the company and fired all the engineers, because nothing is sending them messages right now–but that doesn’t mean they aren’t important. Indeed, they can be blockers for hugely important processes. If you remove a step from a workflow, things just halt.
Balloon-juice is actually just one big relational database, so none of this happens, but you get the idea.
@Ohio Mom: People are working on building an archive. I’m not super plugged into it though. Maybe I’ll ask around, could make an interesting post.
different-church-lady
@Major Major Major Major:
Okay, so I take back what I said earlier: it’s like Muntzing, only if Muntz had just smashed the entire TV with a sledgehammer all at once.
Geminid
@ByRookorbyCrook: A Saudi investor is reported to have rolled over his $2 billion stake in old Twitter into the new ownership. That gives him a 4% ownership position. He was using Saudi sovereign wealth fund capital and I expect he is facing tough questions from the other princes. They probably do not want a bigger piece of this turkey.
satby
Yeah, I’m going to miss Twitter.
@Major Major Major Major: Yeah, mastodon sounds like way too much bother. Maybe if it actually starts being a real replacement, but everyone I follow on Twitter is staying till the bitter end. Plus, most of them are in YouTube (Beau OTFC, Politics Girl) or have their own blogs.
Hoodie
@Tony G: It’s more like there is so much money out there but a dearth of investments that return short-term profits. Because of this, money flows pretty quickly to grifters offering high returns for no work. A lot of these investments turn into the tech equivalents of MLM schemes. Most investors know jack about crypto, just a bunch of hype about how it will be transformative but no real applications to show for it, but that doesn’t stop them from trying to sell others on the vapor. Hence NFTs, which was largely an attempt to create some use for crypto. Stuff that really matters takes time and no one has patience for that, other than the government. This is why Musk was able to pursue EVs and space flight, i.e., the government was there to provide subsidies.
Aziz, light!
I rely on Twitter for access to reporting and subject matter expertise about Ukraine and Russia, among other complicated topics, and would hate to lose this channel to these voices. I think users and advertisers would pay a subscription fee if it bought them competent content moderation, account verification, and site stability and security. But not the opposite.
Who could have known that dudebro glibertarian bullshit from a bloated narcissist is not a business plan?
Comrade Colette
I’m about 100 meters from Twitter HQ. I’m tempted to go hang out in the cafe on the ground floor and eavesdrop for a while. I’d pick the bar instead, but it closed a while back.
different-church-lady
@Major Major Major Major: I just thought of another thing that’s nuts: what does Musk think he’s achieving by turning these services off? Does he think he’s going to save money if there’s less code or something?
Frankensteinbeck
The already suspicious regulators are going to love Elon’s “if the program runs without that code, delete it” initiative. This will definitely fix all of Twitter’s security risk problems.
satby
@dmsilev: and that’s why most people were on it.
dm
@Ohio Mom: Historians are already worried about the ramifications of a Twitter meltdown:
https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/11/11/1063162/twitters-imminent-collapse-could-wipe-out-vast-records-of-recent-human-history/
eldorado
you can of course, not help engagement by not linking to $8chan
different-church-lady
@dm:
Have you seen recent human history?
Major Major Major Major
@satby:
I’ll admit that I genuinely don’t get this. The stuff that makes Mastodon weird and hard to understand doesn’t actually matter if you’re looking to replicate the chronological twitter timeline. Here is how you use it:
You sign up and then you follow people and search hashtags for stuff you’re interested in.
It’s almost exactly like signing up for Twitter.
lowtechcyclist
@Tony G:
It’s more “how many people are stupid enough to buy Tesla stock at already-inflated prices?” because much (most?) of his wealth is in the market value of his share of that stock.
Which fluctuates. And lately it’s been fluctuating downhill. It’s worth ~$191/share today, and was worth almost exactly twice that much on April 4.
patrick II
@dmsilev:
I think you could do that if you didn’t wait too long. It would come back with less debt load. Probably just wishful thinking. I liked Twitter even though I was using it mainly as a headline service at which it excelled.
Plus I think all four of my followers will be disappointed.
JPL
Recently, I’ve begun to accept the loss of twitter. Mastadon has started to fill that void, but there’s no Friday Night zillow, damn it.
NotMax
@NotMax
With no effort involved can still call up the Muntz jingle on ads in the Philadelphia market.
“There’s something about a Muntz TV. POplar 9 oh three oh three.”
:)
Major Major Major Major
@different-church-lady: He has some correct opinions here. He thinks that Twitter services “do too much” when you load the feed or the app, which is bad user experience. The company itself also does too much for how little money it makes–services are far from free. And I’m sure a lot of it could be slimmed down, systems accrue a lot of crap over the years.
However, you don’t fix that by taking an axe to things you don’t understand. This is known as ‘scream testing’–turn it off and see who screams.
Frankensteinbeck
@Tony G:
and
@lowtechcyclist:
Wildly inflated. Tesla stock is worth something like ten times what other stocks with similar profitability are worth. Musk’s gigantic wealth is itself a stock bubble based on his reputation as a genius. It is realistically possible that his childish rampage because Twitter didn’t bow to his every whim will bankrupt him.
Remember, he couldn’t afford to buy Twitter. He had to borrow money from a bunch of people who are now very ill at ease about this investment. He’s not as rich as he looks. Strike that, he is exactly as rich as he looks, and that’s the problem.
Geminid
@ByRookorbyCrook: Now I see you were talking about Tesla. That stock is by a by some standards overpriced. Its price to earnings ratio is five times that of Toyota and eight times Ford’s. I think a lot of this overvaluation is based on Musk’s prestige, which may prove to be a fast depreciating asset.
@Geminid:
Ivan X
@SpaceUnit: Probably, but it ain’t gonna be Apple. At their core, they are brilliant at your relationship with your very individual personal computing devices (and the services that support them), but many of their efforts to branch out from that over decades have failed. They have no feel for social media, and they even had a halfhearted attempt at it built into iTunes many years ago called Ping that, well, didn’t last very long. At core, what Apple knows how to do is sell you a Mac, an iPhone, an iPad, and a Watch, and charge you for iCloud storage to synchronize them and back them up.
CaseyL
@JPL: Maybe Best of Zillow can move to Mastodon.
I’m on Mastodon, and it wasn’t any trouble signing up. There are a couple of things I don’t care for (they’re very big on labeling anything political with “content warning” – though tbh many newcomers aren’t observing that convention) but nothing major.
It’s looking more and more like Twitter anyway, as more people migrate. Not everyone I followed on Twitter has migrated, or at least not yet, but I keep looking and grabbing them when they do.
Posting embeds is an issue, though I have seen at least links to videos so maybe it isn’t an issue anymore. The people who manage the servers (“instances” in Mastodon-speak) are working as fast as they can to increase capacity and features – and bear in mind, they’re all volunteers.
satby
@Major Major Major Major: well, if the people I follow end up posting over there instead of just setting up safety accounts I might, but you’re the first person who said it wasn’t a pain to sign up.
dmsilev
@Frankensteinbeck: Supposedly he also has borrowed a lot of money with Tesla stock as collateral. Enough of a drop in share prices (driven, in large part, by his actions) and he might get hit with margin calls and will have to sell a bunch of shares to cover. Which of course will depress the share price still further.
Repeat as necessary…
Ivan X
@Baud: Let’s not forget Google+, which was their attempt to take on Facebook. It also doesn’t exist any more. Google has many compelling products, but they have no feel for user experience, and that matters for social media. (Though I’ve always found Facebook’s UX to be bewildering through every iteration, which is one reason it’s never stuck to me. But I can see how it’s vaguely attractive in a chain hotel fashion, in a way that Google’s products aren’t.)
cain
@satby: A lot of them are on mastodon – lot of the good journalists, and of course a host of science’y people. Real conversations and no troll bots. No ads. It’s quite pleasant if the only reason you are on it was to just chat and that’s it.
So, it’s a perfectly good fit for people like me. Of course, it’s open source based so all my open source friends are all on it.
I suppose when John McCrankySocialMediaPants Cole gets on there it truly has risen like Jesus on a warm Sunday or am I confusing it with bread?
Matt McIrvin
@Suzanne: I’ve been particularly watching this for the case of Disney, which of course is a super big target because of their fame and dominance and association with kids’ media and theme parks, and because they historically (in the days of Walt) had this intensely square, conservative image.
Any move away from that that happens, like an attempt to scrub old-timey racist imagery from a theme park ride, sends conservatives into paroxysms of rage. DeSantis singled them out as a target (tbf Disney was getting a decades-long sweetheart deal from the state that made them an easy target), and of course they blame any problems the company might be having on “wokeness”, which is kind of absurd–they have a lot of self-inflicted problems that have nothing to do with the culture wars at all, but that’s another story.
But Disney is just trying to adjust, in their dorky awkward way, to a market (and a creative worker force) that are no longer dominated by culturally conservative white people. They often handle it badly.
But trying to fit it all into “go woke go broke” is not going to work. I mean, they just put out a second Black Panther movie and from what I heard it’s doing pretty damn well. I saw it the other day and a more quote unquote “woke” product being greenlit by the Disney monster is hard to imagine, and while not perfect, it was entertaining and cool much like the first one and I think people generally like it.
cain
@Major Major Major Major: ikr?? I think it’s the fact that you don’t go to one place because there are choices. The thing is pick one – and sometimes it’s subject based – it’s like finding the right neighborhood – maybe you want one with a lot of pets, but you can still keep in touch with your old neighbors and others.
Ivan X
@MobiusKlein: If I was still 16-30 I’d have written a bot to do it.
I’m not still 16-30.
cain
@JPL: But you know what twitter doesn’t have that mastodon has?? #blackcatsaturday!!!!!!
Dangerman
Someplace, the “brains” behind New Coke is breathing a sigh of relief. Worst fuckup of a business I’ve ever seen, all because they wanted their free space to advocate for eating horse paste or pencil lead or whatever the fuck these idiots consider to be “free speech”.
MisterDancer
I’m not certain anyone is able to play social media games at scale, anymore. Musk is showing us a slice of the challenges in realtime.
Among them: Ad revenue is harder to get. Overall funding is drying up. Federal Regulations are still pretty likely, and note that floating turd of a law from Texas that, if SCOTUS holds up, will make being anywhere on the ‘Net a time bomb for hosting Conservative harassment.
I’m not sure you could pay me to make a big social media play right now. And note that most of the services we keep talking about as “taking over for Twitter” have actually been out here for a while. We just never noticed ’em until now.
We’ll likely have to “make do” with what’s out there, right now, y’all.
different-church-lady
So nobody is willing to go anywhere new because everyone else isn’t there yet?
Major Major Major Major
@satby: to pick a random instance you can just sign up at this one https://mindly.social/explore
Matt McIrvin
@Ivan X: I always liked G+’s user interface more than Facebook’s, but Facebook had a head start and massive network effect on its side, and most users found it “good enough” and had no reason to move to G+ when Facebook already existed. So G+’s early adopters were mostly the minority who hated Facebook for one reason or another enough to decamp.
Major Major Major Major
@cain: maybe we really should make a BJ mastodon instance.
Gin & Tonic
@Major Major Major Major: A million or so years ago, in IBM-land we called that APPC.
Matt McIrvin
@different-church-lady: That’s the “network effect” hurdle in a nutshell.
With G+, the articles about it always said “it’s a ghost town”, because although there were thriving communities there, the people you already knew weren’t there. Users expected to drop in, have it read your contacts and find that half of them already had an active account.
Ivan X
@Tony G: Tesla’s are pretty great cars, with an unrivaled charging network. If I were in the market for a car, I don’t know that I’d buy one, but that has more to do with Elon’s odiousness and the competitors catching up. (I mean, I can’t listen to some bands any more either because their singer is such a public tool. Same story. Doesn’t mean the music was bad.)
Matt McIrvin
@Ivan X: I’ve been hearing terrifying things about deteriorating Tesla build quality, “whompy wheels” and such. Can’t gauge if it’s actually more than any major car company would have.
What I don’t like about them is just the dashboard design, with nearly all conventional controls abandoned for a big touchscreen TV in the middle. That seems bad.
lamh36
Buona serata BJ!
I’m back from Italy. I have SOOOO many pics and I plan to post several posts on my blog soon as I get a chance
I somehow managed to NOT gain any weight while I was on vacation in Italy. I’m thinking it’s cause of all the damn walking I had to do. Cause I ate some good food!
Matt McIrvin
@lamh36: Oh, it sounded like it was going to be such a great trip.
Baud
@lamh36:
Welcome back! Italy is wonderful for tourists. Glad you didn’t gain weight lol.
KrackenJack
People rely on social feedback to moderate their behavior. Being rich / powerful / famous short-circuits that. Even people who aren’t actively sucking up to you are deferential acting as though the slightest inconvenience is a terrible thing. Even if you were highly competent and reasonably decent, it’s guaranteed to rot your judgement and turn you into a massive sphincter.
twbrandt (formerly tom)
I’m a software engineer, and the total derision he is receiving from across the universe of engineers is something to see. He clearly hasn’t a clue what he is doing, and is too damn stupid and arrogant to realize it. Kinda reminds of a recent president.
luc
The ”services” that push ads into Twitter seem to work better than ever.
I get to see more ads than ever before – irrelevant ads, though.
Gin & Tonic
@lamh36: Glad you had a great time. But you hit on the primary reason you see a lot fewer really obese people in Europe: they walk.
Paul in KY
@Falling Diphthong: Maybe he’s going to leverage his stake to build a super-spaceship that will take him & his chosen ones off to Alpha Centauri, where he will meet a young Zefram Cochrane & mentor him & get a stake on the ground floor of warp drive technology!
Oh, will the libs (on Earth) be owned then….
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Falling Diphthong: I am going with option C:
(C): Musk is a workaholic and his subconscious is self sabotaging him in a desperate attempt to force Elon to run away before Elon stokes out from the physical stress of decades of 18 hour work days with out a break.
Anonymous At Work
In Elon’s defense, how often do you get to push the giant red button that says “Atomic Core” or “Self-Destruct” in real life?
Edmund Dantes
@different-church-lady: welcome to the catch-22 of network effects on any new service that relies on users.
you need users to generate your content that draws in users, and you need content to draw in your users to generate content
Uber/Lyft also had similar issues. You need drivers to get users to use your service, and you need enough users to make it worth the drivers time to be on the service to drive those users.
Rinse and repeat
Edmund Dantes
@Edmund Dantes: electric cars and charging networks for them had the same problem.
credit Musk there for sinking the money into the charging network.
danielx
@SpaceUnit:
Why not? Yahoo paid $1.1 billion for Tumblr and just sold it to WordPress for $3 million.
LeftCoastYankee
If I had to guess, I’d say it’s more likely that if Mastodon “replaces” Twitter, someone will figure out to monetize their instance of Mastodon enough to move beyond “volunteer” workers.
I could see some large Tech company buying that for licensing/brand exposure/interoperability with their other products, while still being compatible with the Open Source version.
Or maybe Jack Dorsey can with his latest windfall from his
markbuddy.Paul in KY
@different-church-lady: The electricity used when those code thingys are activated.
Major Major Major Major
@LeftCoastYankee: yeah I’m very curious to see what comes out of Dorsey’s new project.
cain
@Ivan X: The first iteration of google+ was pretty good – but they kept making changes there at the end that eventually finished off the service. I think their problem was that they couldn’t figure out how to monetize it.
Baud
@cain:
IIRC, Google never opened it up beyond the invite only beta, and potential users lost interest.
different-church-lady
@lamh36:
That is exactly how Italy works.
cain
@Major Major Major Major:
That sounds good! But we’re going to need an army of moderators for all the trolls! :-)
cain
@Ivan X: I’d probably only by the older models – I’m not sure I trust the newer ones. As a former Tesla owner, I really loved the vision and thought in the car – it truly was a fun car to drive.
trollhattan
@Baud: Google+ is in Mountain View Storeroom 5-12-A, second rack on the left-hand wall, fourth shelf up. Unbox that sucker and LFG!
WaterGirl
@lamh36: I tried to conjure you up last night by putting up a post about Idris Elba. I guess it worked, but the signal must have been slow! :-)
Major Major Major Major
@cain: that’s what the block button is for!
Paul in KY
@Anonymous At Work: Once, at the most.
Baud
@WaterGirl:
I blame the microservices.
frosty
@Major Major Major Major: IIRC from my one and only (barely passed) encounter with software, your microservices sound a lot like what we used to call subroutines within a program. Like the one I had that turned into an infinite DO loop.
piratedan
@Major Major Major Major: hearing that Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs may be working on something as well…. who knows what the tide may bring?
Baud
Musk seems like a capitalist version of Ralph Nader. His early work was good but then he went off the deep end.
lamh36
@Matt McIrvin: it really was fantastic!
lamh36
@Baud: Yes…it was really great. I cannot complain about any of our treatment. It’s always touch and go as an American tourist in some places, but ESPECIALLY as an African Americna tourist in some places
danielx
@danielx:
I was incorrect. Verizon bought Yahoo and in turn sold Tumblr to the owner of WordPress. Yet another episode of How To Set Shareholder Money On Fire.
lamh36
@Gin & Tonic: SOOOOO much walking. I am literally still feeling pangs from all the walking today! And I’ve been back since Saturday
WV Blondie
“News,” by itself, has never been a particularly profitable field. If you look at the histories of storied newspapers – WaPo, the FTFNYT, and the LA Times, to name examples – their (family, private) owners didn’t build their fortunes on the papers, they did it in another field, then decided they wanted to have an impact on public opinion. They were content for the newspapers to be loss leaders, in exchange for which they got feted for their public service.
If someone like Jeff Bezos wanted to use his personal fortune to buy Twitter (figuring that he’s learned something about the requirements of media, social or otherwise), he might be able to do an okay job running it. He’d understand the centrality of both the technology and the moderation.
PaulB
A thread on the financing costs. TL;DR – they’re worse than I thought, with debt service potentially as high as $1.7 billion a year.
(I’m not enough of a financial guy to know whether this random tweeter’s numbers are accurate but he does seem to make a good case, particularly in how much rising interest rates have affected things since the original package was put together.)
lamh36
@WaterGirl: Last night I was seeing Black Panther:Wakanda Forever.
And most of the day I was soo jet lagged, I slept mostly all day Sunday…LOL
Fair Economist
@dm: We need government run social media so it won’t go under with the companies.
Ken
Congratulations, you have written a microservice!
(Just a joke, because many of them run forever. There are also ones that run at regular intervals, like once an hour, day, week, or month. Hmm, come to think, when did Musk start ripping bits out of Twitter? It’s possible the failure is already baked in, and it’ll keel over when some end-of-month job doesn’t run.)
Major Major Major Major
@frosty: basically. the idea is to decompose larger programs into smaller pieces that can manage themselves via persistent message buffers.
Comrade Scrutinizer
@Matt McIrvin:
Isn’t that a bit redundant?
Roger Moore
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
I don’t think he does. Musk has gotten where he has by being good at sales while hiring good people to do the main business of running the company behind the scenes, e.g. Gwynne Shotwell at SpaceX. It’s an effective approach for a startup company, where attracting attention and business is a major problem that needs high-level attention.
While it can work well for a startup, it is unlikely to work well for a corporate takeover. Twitter isn’t a small company where Musk can effectively take control by bringing in a few key people, and it isn’t a company whose main problem is that the people who might benefit from it don’t know it exists.
Critically, Musk has done a really terrible job. Twitter is a well established company with a bunch of critical infrastructure that needs to keep working for the company to stay in business. He has fired, laid off, or driven away the people who know how to do that. Even if he brings in a bunch of geniuses to fix stuff, they can’t do that while keeping the lights on.
narya
@Major Major Major Major: Yes. I’ve dabbled a teeny bit, to follow Marcy Wheeler and Quinn Cummings (the latter is trying a few different things), and I think Marcy has some links/explainers. I do NOT know all the bits and pieces, but those explainers might be useful in assessing the BJ situation.
Redshift
@Ken: Based on rumors supposedly from former Twitter engineers, one of the “unnecessary” microservices is the one that makes two-factor authentication work. It’s “not serving content,” right? That’s the level of idiocy we’re dealing with here.
lamh36
@WaterGirl: oooh…don’t know if anyone mentioned the live-action Jungle Book, but Idris playe Shere Khan(sp?) and his voicework was sinisterly good!
WaterGirl
@lamh36: Are you really thinking of going to law school? That’s the rumor!
LeftCoastYankee
@Major Major Major Major:
Judging from his Twitter feed he’s promoting bitcoin, apologizing to former Twitter employees and promoting the fact his current employees (Block/Square) are using CashApp to get paid.
I hope there’s something new.
Daoud bin Daoud
WaterGirl
@lamh36: No one mentioned that, I have never heard of it. I will have to check it out. He does have a great voice. Among other things.
Kristine
@lamh36: Welcome back! Looking forward to photos and food talk.
Italy is on my travel bucket list. Hoping to go in the next few years.
different-church-lady
@Roger Moore:
Musk doesn’t give a shit. Musk just takes what it wants.
Baud
@different-church-lady:
Musk Smash!
The Thin Black Duke
Elon Shrugged.
lamh36
@WaterGirl: I was thinking out loud about it on twitter.
I was saying I know I should be all done with schooling, but trying to decide if I’m just old to try. As ya know I’m in healthcare, and after getting my masters a couple of years ago…I found a general health care law class very interesting,
So if I do decide to do it, it will be with a focus on healthcare law, a farily newish concentration I think?
Right now though, it’s just thoughts and researching.
Paul in KY
@lamh36: Very glad you had a wonderful time!
Princess Leia
@Major Major Major Major:
Thank you!! I am now a Mastadon -er!
lamh36
@Kristine: I planned the entire trip myself with help from a FB group for Italy trip planning. so I have some def tips I’ll try to put together when I post the pics later this week
Geminid
@lamh36: Glad you had a safe and happy trip!
I hope you will grace an On the Road post with some pics. I have never been to Italy and don’t expect to go, either. I’d really like to see some of what you got to see.
Redshift
@Major Major Major Major:
One addition: and then you just read your Home feed and ignore Local and Federated or whatever. If all you care about is the people you follow, all the complexity you read about with servers and communities and stuff is irrelevant, and you don’t need to learn any of it.
lamh36
@Geminid: ooh…yes…I can def do that.
I forget, who do I email for that?
Layer8Problem
@Gin & Tonic: Ooo, that’s giving me a VTAM-accented eye-twitch.
Redshift
@cain:
You know McCrankySocialMediaPants is already on Mastodon, right?
Roger Moore
@Tony G:
Not that many. Musk is insanely rich mostly because people are convinced he’s a business genius and Tesla will soon dominate the automotive industry. IIRC, there was a point where Tesla was worth more than all the other car companies combined. It made no sense, and Tesla’s value still doesn’t. That, among other reasons, is why I think Tesla’s value will continue to decline.
Tesla had, and still has, an advantage in electric drivetrains, but they’re way behind in the other parts of making a good car. The other car makers are catching up in the electric department much faster than Tesla is catching up in the car department. Unless Tesla fixes that quickly, the legacy car companies are going to crush it.
Burnspbesq
It’s only a matter of time before the secured lenders (or a vulture fund that bails out the secured lenders at a deep discount) owns Twitter. It won’t be Goldman; its approach to risk is too rigorous.
Dan B
@lamh36: Great to hear you had a good trip. I’ve been twice. First time on my own and on a budget. There’s a lot of crummy cheap food and miserable accommodations. Second time was with a wealthy friend who paid for the travel and rooms. Fantastic trip since he also spoke fluent Italian. Italy has many Africans who are typically well off. My guess is France would likely be less welcoming. I hope the German tourists weren’t overwhelming in Firenze.
CaseyL
@lamh36: Hey, fantastic to see you here again! Very happy your Italy trip was great, and eagerly await the details.
When WG said you might be going to law school, my reaction was “She wants to go to school again??” You need to do the whole enchilada – 1L, which is supposed to be brutal, and I think 2L, too – before you can elect a speciality area.
You might consider something law-adjacent: paralegal, or advocate. You don’t get to give actual legal advice, but as a paralegal you manage the case, and as an advocate you can suggest and explain optimal courses of action.
WaterGirl
@lamh36: Whatever you decide to do, I’m sure you’ll make a success of it.
WaterGirl
@lamh36: There’s a form in the sidebar! And in the category menu up top.
Submit Photos to On the Road
Sometimes folks do several posts from a trip, highlighting different things. Whatever you would want to do, I’m sure we would love it. (10 posts maximum for each OTR post)
RSA
…in part by hiring people Elon fired, maybe? It would be the Twitter of Theseus.
Layer8Problem
@Redshift: “Don’t think of it as taking a sledgehammer to login security, think of it as streamlining the user experience! Jeez, you people worry about everything!”
Redshift
@Baud: I could see Google possibly doing it, they’ve had long-running non-money making projects before. They might snap it up and rebuild the guts while keeping the user-facing parts that they weren’t as good at in this space. But they’ve also abandoned ventures like that without warning.
Dan B
@lamh36: There’s an On the Road submission on BJ. It’s straightforward
And WG got there first.
AWOL
@Citizen Alan:
Three types of billionaire parasites.
The Koch Family neither crashed or burned. They just effectively destroyed and raked it all in, now three generations strong going back to the mid-Soviets. Beyondi donating token amounts to museums to honor dinosaurs for their petrol remains and pervert PBS further, they generally remain quiet and even their spawns avoid doing porn for attention.
sanjeevs
@PaulB: Twitter already sells the data it acquires to external companies – it’s part of Gnip.
Advertising is (or was) 90% of revenue so it doesn’t seem to make a whole lot of money
Major Major Major Major
@Princess Leia: follow me at @[email protected] ! And look through the people I follow/who follow me to find more Juicers and other interesting people.
Baud
@Major Major Major Major:
IMHO, the two @s will be an insurmountable hurdle to widespread adoption.
frosty
@lamh36: LOL who do you email for everything on this site? WG of course. And she’ll tell you there’s a form in the sidebar to submit pix and captions. It’s a piece of cake; I’ve done it several times.
ETA And I’m late again!
ETA2 Good to see your nym!
catclub
the way for twitter to make money is to monetize the addicts. One is named Elon Musk. Charge him for every tweet and every follow.
The Golux
@lamh36:
Good to see your nym!
Our first trip to Europe was Rome / Firenze / Venice, 26 years ago. Italy wouldn’t have been my first choice; my sister-in-law suggested we travel together.
I was blown away from the moment we landed.
surfk9
@lamh36:
My wife was 45 when she started. She took four years because she just did evening classes. She loves practicing law.
Poe Larity
Musk is just doing his due diligence to get himself out of a bad deal he got himself stuck in.
Rileys Enabler
@satby: it’s not. I’ve joined a coffee-themed “instance”, but have followed many of my old Twitter people.
It does have an entirely different feel. It’s slower and definitely less anxiety-inducing. I’ve found some new voices that toot (ugh) about baking and cats and-yes- politics. I have not seen ads or trolls.
I have also not seen local late breaking news, which was my fave part about Twitter. It was enormously helpful during a couple of hurricanes and such.
The learning curve is slight, IMO. The feel of it is…different.
Geminid
@Roger Moore: If this is true, we’re gonna need a bigger dumpster!
Amir Khalid
Sad news, this: the BBC reports that Roberta Flack has been diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, causing her speech difficulties and making it impossible for her to sing. Flack, who is 85, still intends to stay active in music.
Ken
@Redshift: I was thinking of things like not renewing their TSL certificates at the end of the month, but locking out their users is pretty stupid too.
dnfree
@Major Major Major Major: so, what we used to call subroutines?
Baud
@Ken:
Were you here when Cole forgot to re-register the URL for balloon juice?
Can totally see that happening to Twitter.
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
There’s a subreddit for that!
NotMax
Tesla is a product known to occasionally burst into flames.
Twitter is now that writ large.
Obvious Russian Troll
@Baud: Not actually true. For a few years they were pushing Google Plus heavily and trying to tie it into successful Google products. For instance, you needed a Google Plus account to do things like comment on Youtube.
Which you probably didn’t notice because what kind of loon comments on Youtube anyway?
The thing is, most people still just ignored it and Google had no idea how to promote it effectively or make money off of it, so (like so many other Google products) they eventually gave up on it.
Geminid
@lamh36: When she was in her forties, Deb Haaland earned a law degree from the University of New Mexico. Haaland never put that degree to use as a member of the Bar, but the knowledge she gained stood her in good stead working in Tribal administration, as Chair of New Mexico’s Democratic Party, then Congresswoman and now Secretary of the Interior.
Just don’t forget the little people. On Balloon Juice.
Frank Wilhoit
@frosty: Except that subroutines are synchronous and microservices are asynchronous. In theory — queuing theory — that allows services to be faster. The key is making the size of your thread pools adaptive.
Another Scott
He’s trolling the whole tech world. Just amazing.
(via jonrog1)
Cheers,
Scott.
Roger Moore
@sanjeevs:
Yes. People talk about Meta making money from ads, but the big money isn’t serving ads on their social media sites. Meta, along with Google, is one of the titans of online advertising. They function as a middle man in the ad business. They aggregate supply of ad space from a zillion web sites that are too small to make it worthwhile setting up their own ad services, and the demand for ad space from the zillion small time advertisers who don’t want to hunt for the place for their ads.
On top of that Meta (and Google, another of the big ad brokers) claims to have detailed profiles of just about everyone in the world to know which ads to serve. They can promise advertisers that their ads will be shown to the right people based on the information they’ve harvested from their social media sites*. That’s the real value proposition of Facebook, Instagram, etc. isn’t the ads Meta can place there; its as a system for harvesting users’ interests to sell ads to them more effectively.
Twitter is big enough that it can buy and sell ads on its own platform, and they probably do OK with those ads- or did before Musk set fire to their ad revenues. But they don’t have a huge ad network outside their own site. Without that, they are never going to be hella profitable the way Meta was in its heyday.
*Google does something similar, but using data they’re harvested from search, YouTube, and from Android phones.
Major Major Major Major
@Baud: oh no, punctuation
everybody thought twitter’s one @ was stupid at first, and don’t forget how ridiculed hashtags were
Major Major Major Major
@dnfree: no. They are asynchronous workflows that communicate through persistent message buffers. If one microservice crashes, it doesn’t take the rest of the application down with it, though the downstream inputs will dry up until the problem is resolved.
Kevin
Twitters former CEO should be in the hall of fame for selling this mess at a massive premium. I hope he’s on a beach somewhere enjoying the shit show or totally ignoring it, whichever he prefers.
Matt McIrvin
@Obvious Russian Troll: Google had this idea that the actual product in Google+ was its account system, that a Google+ account was going to be Google’s new cross-product notion of identity. The social network was just the come-on to draw people in to sign up. And then when that didn’t work, because most people didn’t actually want to be on the social network, they just started forcing it on people to use other things and stirred up resentment
It also created other kinds of friction–for instance, for a while Google was trying to enforce the use of government-verifiable real names on Google+, which almost everyone pushed back against.
NotMax
While on the subject of tech —
CaseyL
Ugh. Dave Wasserman just tweeted:
Dave Wasserman
@Redistrict
·
46m
I’ve seen enough: Juan Ciscomani (R) defeats Kirsten Engel (D) in #AZ06. Dems’ path to the House majority virtually non-existent now.
Xecky Gilchrist
I’m not so sure. Didn’t they take a bunch of their buyouts in stock?
Shana
@lamh36: Welcome back! Looking forward to pictures and hope you had a better experience than we did. 2 week cruise followed by 2 days in Venice before coming down with covid. Spent 4 extra days in a hotel beyond our original plan. A hotel room in Venice is still just a hotel room unfortunately. Did get one day at the Bienale before covid. Oh, and my lumpectomies had to be rescheduled for this Friday.
Origuy
I was in Italy in July. Four days in Rome, then nine in Vieste on the Adriatic coast, then four days in Naples, ending up in Fiumicino near the Rome airport. No Covid, although almost everyone I was with in Vieste got it. I’ve been planning to post some pictures of Vieste, which gets few non-Italian tourists. That’s a shame, it’s marvelous.
Ivan X
@Matt McIrvin: My brother just bought one, and it IS bad, notably worse than whatever iteration he had of the same models several years ago. It’s super dumb, and ugly too, just having a great big LCD in lieu of physical controls. The new racing-car-style steering wheel is stupid too.
Ivan X
@CaseyL: Well, that sucks.
Randal Sexton
@Major Major Major Major: A little addition to that service/microservice description: each service thingy can be running on a distinct computer or be a distinct process on a bunch of computers , and whatever data it needs to do its job, and data it needs to write might be different computers. so -in theory- it can be stopped/started easily, replicated easily, versioned easily. But can also be kinda arcane finding out and maintaining the dependencies/ inter dependencies. Saying you are going to get rid of a bunch of microservices without knowing what they are is like me trying to simplify my car by removing all the parts of the engine/tranny that I dont know what they do. There are a bunch of gizmos under the hood now that I dont know WTF they are.
Quaker in a Basement
@Tony G: He doesn’t make money selling cars. He makes it selling carbon offsets.