Or he’s retconning very visible, cascading, costly failures as one big secret plan, and people have a lot invested in propping him up. You decide! https://t.co/ubQU6SXSby
— Ben Collins (@oneunderscore__) November 19, 2022
As I understand it, Kara Swisher is one of Silicon Valley’s most prominent journalistic supporters, so her opinions on Twittermeggedon and the apartheid princeling bitchboy responsible are presumed to have weight. Enough so that NYMag published an article, just this past Tuesday, titled “Elon Musk and Kara Swisher Are No Longer Speaking”. Its closing paragraphs:
Kara Swisher: Today? Hopeless. He’s capable of great things here. He’s behaving … He’s disappointing in how he’s handling himself. And in the midst of all this disappointment, there’s all these really good ideas. It’s just so bossy. “I’m the law.” It’s so narcissistic. And the thing the other day, the advertising thing, someone asked about the difference between Twitter and Elon Musk…
They’re the same thing. He can’t pretend. These wealthy people like to pretend they’re not powerful. It drives me crazy. He’s very powerful. What he says matters. He can hurt people if he wants to, even if he doesn’t mean to. And so, he’s got to have a greater sense of care around what he’s doing and just slightly more kindness. He can still be puckish, and rude and funny, just like I said. He’s all these things like funny, rude, compelling, obnoxious, accessible, easy to deal with, hard to deal with, always on, outspoken to a fault, angry, charming, intense, and also strikingly confident. You can be all those things. That means you’re a human being. But I mean this in the nicest way, Elon, I’m not the asshole.
Nayeema Raza: You want to finish that thought?
Kara Swisher: That’s my thought. I’m not the asshole.
But that was *then*! Today, rebutting the NYTimes, Swisher announces that she’s talked to “smart folks who know Elon” — at least one of whom, I personally suspect, may have been wearing Elon Musk’s socks — and there’s a PLAN!
I spent the last day talking to smart folks who know Elon to try to grok why it feels capricious and what the method is to the seeming madness. Here you are for those who care and for those who don’t, good for you for ignoring chaos monkeys https://t.co/C4QzKSvOMe
— Kara Swisher (@karaswisher) November 19, 2022
For easier reading (there’s a lot of random gifs in Swisher’s thread), I’m gonna intercut Swisher’s tweets with replies from Tom Scocca, professional skeptic:
1. Twitter will not collapse imminently. Probably. It’s a resilient system and things are backed up. But it’s less failsafe and more prone to attacks by hackers who have an easier target. Elon is a gambler and he is betting on odds that fewer staffers will handle. Risky obvi.
2. He is also counting on users to put up with inconveniences like you can’t get your archive or user count. Tech users are used to glitches and they might not leave yet over small jams. He’s probably right even if it’s a sucky attitude toward consumers. Does he give a fuck? No.
His signature AI system, Autopilot, does not work *at all* and one of the bigger and more dangerous reasons it can't work is it can't understand human behavior, so— https://t.co/LSR4Om9x2M
— Tom Scocca (@tomscocca) November 19, 2022
4. All the hand waving meanness & fetid stunt tweeting? It makes folks come look & grows usage, even if it is to see the traffic accident. The look-at-my-frantic-antics is called marketing or snarketing as one Twitter user put it. Growth at all costs? That sounds familiar.
5. The indiscriminate firings? All tech is bloated and so is Twitter and he’s counting on the cuts to remove those who don’t revere him. Then he’ll pack up the circus tent and move it to a more malleable state like Texas, where the pols will suck up like a Hoover on steroids.
Scocca: Not sure how this analysis applies to losing the compliance and payroll departments.6. Does he care that you think he’s an amateur/asshole/wackjob/chode while doing it? He does not. The brand is Elon and always will be that is what you know now more than ever. If it works, he’s done it ONCE AGAIN; if not, it’s mostly OPM and who cares if the Qataris lose $.
Scocca: He’s frantic and visibly anguished about how he’s seized the site and everyone still won’t stop hooting about how bad he is at posting, just an endless barrage of laughing-crying emojis as he lashes out in humiliation.
7. In that vein, a chance to own the media/critics/pols who don’t fellate him is an added bonus? Trolling works as well as inspiring & your sad concerns of decorum & decency do not interest the Silicon Valley I know. Move fast & break things? Destroy things is more like it. Fun!
8. Did I mention marketing? As Trump uses outrage to raise money from suckers, Elon is doing much the same to focus the attention on Twitter. You can’t buy this kind of advertising & the crazier the tweeting, the better. Oh let’s do a poll to see if Donald should return! Burn.
Scocca: Tesla stock dropped from $220 to $180 over the past month.
9. Silicon Valley is cheering him on, whether they say it out loud or not. The tech bigs have lost a step of late for reasons mostly their own fault. So his obstreperous obnoxiousness is welcome & encouraged. He’s a bloated champion but he’s still swinging. Plus 🚀 & 🚘 are cool!
Scocca: I guess this is true if you define “Silicon Valley” as the dickheads with the money rather than the specialized workforce?
10. He still needs revenue and quick. Blue checks nonsense didn’t work. Payments a zillion miles away. Enterprise services too. Advertising is even more fucked. That said, will tech shore up its own & will bankers let him off the hook & will we forget his ugliness? You betcha!
Scocca: The part about how they’ll just eat the losses is probably also true, IDK, it’s almost as if none of this is about business per se.
11. I’m still not paying $8. Fuck that.
From the original NYTimes article yesterday, “Elon Musk’s Twitter Teeters on the Edge After Another 1,200 Leave”:
… Perhaps the most crucial question now is how Twitter can keep running after the giant reduction to its work force in such a short time. The effects of the cuts and resignations have played out across the company’s technology teams, people with knowledge of the matter said.
One team known as Twitter Command Center, a 20-person organization crucial to preventing outages and technology failures during high-traffic events, had multiple people from around the world resign, two former employees said. The “core services” team, which handles computing architecture, was cut to four people from more than 100. Other teams that deal with how media appears in tweets or how profiles show follower counts were down to zero people.
“Wednesday offered a clean exit and 80 percent of the remaining were gone,” Peter Clowes, a senior software engineer, tweeted on Thursday about the departures on his team. “3/75 engineers stayed.” He said on Twitter that he quit on Thursday.
Mr. Musk is also considering shuttering one of Twitter’s three main U.S. data centers, a location known as SMF1 in Sacramento, which is used to store information needed to run the social media site, four people with knowledge of the effort said. If the data center in Sacramento is taken offline, it will leave the company with data centers in Atlanta and Portland, Ore., with potentially less backup computing capacity in case something fails.
Twitter is still operating, but it may become harder for the company to fix serious issues when they come up, former employees said. One former Twitter engineer likened the service’s current state to Wile E. Coyote, the Looney Tunes cartoon character, as he runs off the edge of a cliff. Though he may still be running in midair for some time, once he looks down, he drops like a stone…
The employee reductions are coinciding with Twitter’s entering one of its busiest periods in terms of visitors to the site. The World Cup, which begins on Sunday, is expected to bring a deluge of traffic to Twitter, which is the world’s fourth most visited website, according to Similarweb, a digital intelligence platform that tracks web traffic. Twitter gets 6.9 billion visits each month, slightly more than Instagram’s 6.4 billion, though far fewer than Google, YouTube or Facebook, according to Similarweb estimates…
If there's anything like a strategy or theory in this soup, it seems to be that Twitter's addicted/committed user base would end up like Tesla stans, sticking up for his objectively busted product. But why would they do that when Musk didn't even build it? https://t.co/3luCg1b6A8
— Tom Scocca (@tomscocca) November 19, 2022
If she keeps hammering that note she’s hoping people will stop dunking on her for telling them to put their retirement in crypto
— Crosby Stills Nash Bridges (@JakesAlterEgo) November 19, 2022
Yeah, I’ve always found her shtick to be annoying (“tech oligarchs respect her because she doesn’t take any guff and speaks truth to power!”) but she’s a water carrier for billionaires who has for years refused to acknowledge that Musk is nuts when anyone has pointed it out.
— ry (@RyanTCarroll) November 19, 2022
Sanibel Update from Jennifer
comrade scotts agenda of rage
Her relationship to the higher end tech bros is not unlike Maga Habs and the Orange Fart Cloud.
Baud
Much like with the election, I don’t see any value in making predictions. The proof is in the
puddingtweeting.RobertDSC-Mac Mini
Watching Space Karen flop on his face every day is emotionally tiring for me. I don’t like to see people fail and he does it daily. I could never function like that and I don’t know how he can stand it.
patrick II
I appreciate the way she calls the NYTimes “chaos Monkeys” while saying Elon actually has a plan which is attracting new users by Elon creating chaos.
Cool.
different-church-lady
They always think, “He’s turned into an asshole” when it’s really that he’s been an asshole all along and they’re finally waking up to it.
VFX Lurker
I used Twitter’s tools to download the few Tweets I made, and I clipped Twitter images and tips I had bookmarked on Twitter to Evernote. I added all of the artists I follow on Twitter to my Instagram feed.
Some of the writers I follow on Twitter have no plans to start anew on another platform, though. Once they’re gone, they’re gone.
different-church-lady
@RobertDSC-Mac Mini: well, it’s obvious you’ll never be a billionaire.
Parfigliano
@different-church-lady: yup
Ned F.
I have two twitter accounts, one many years old. To this day I have never twote a twit. I’ve always thought no one cares what I have to say and I have no need to respond as many smarter people than I will tweet my thoughts.
Anoniminous
It doesn’t matter what the users think. They’re the product. The paying customers are the advertisers and they have bailed. My guess is they are gone for good. Twitter isn’t selling any super secret special sauce. They collect eyeballs, they munge the eyeballs into groups, they sell access to the eyeballs. Just like every other “free” social media platform.
Cameron
Give it up for Elon Ego and the Chaos Monkeys!
different-church-lady
@Ned F.: This makes me realize we should apply the concept of “normies” to Twitter and other social media.
Eolirin
I don’t see how they can recover from those kinds of engineer losses. Even if the site somehow survives the World Cup.
The last time I saw something like this was when EA moved the Origin team out of Austin back to LA, and almost no one opted to make the move. They had a big game that was about to enter into beta, nearly completed, and they ended up having to cancel it because the effort involved in trying to get a new team of engineers on the protect proved impossible.
Dorothy A. Winsor
I try not to watch the twitter news too closely. What will be will be, and I have no control over it.
We drove to Hammond today for the visitation for my son’s FIL. I’m glad we went, but it’s already been a long day
Geminid
Ayn Rand: “Who is John Galt?”
Elon Musk: “Me! Me!”
OB-118
So what if Musk has a Plan; no plan, regardless the wealth of the planner, survives initial contact (execution, initiation, etc.). The question is, can Musk respond successfully to contingencies; so far, it looks like he can’t.
pacem appellant
I’ll take “Always wrong about Silicon Valley for $100, Mayim”. JFC, I live and work in the Silicon Valley. That’s as sh¡t a take as they come. Swisher couldn’t read a room, much less the inside of a paper bag.
different-church-lady
a) Tell me how you’re not describing a cult if personalty?
b) Wasn’t it just last week some other asshole lost 30 billion dollars using this very same business model?
dmsilev
Musk isn’t really ‘tech’ in the Silicon Valley sense. Sure, PayPal, but that was a long time ago. Why would anyone bail him out?
trollhattan
What was her take on Theranos? Fangirl, skeptic, Cassandra?
Betty
I saw her interviewed about Twitter and was not impressed. She has that Silicon Valley swagger. I could hardly believe it when she said she had talked to Elon before the takeover and thought he was the right person to make a success of Twitter. She was just a bit surprised it wasn’t going well. Sure hasn’t gotten better since then!
Ken
She covered that in point 8, “You can’t buy this kind of advertising”. Which apparently means the kind that (1) damages the company’s reputation and (2) brings in absolutely no money.
The mention of crypto is apt; it’s becoming ever more obvious that particular emperor has no clothes, as company after company goes bankrupt because their business plan was “become famous and people will give us money”.
dmsilev
@Ken: Maybe Twitter should put Musk’s tweets behind a paywall. I’ll bet there’d be a fair amount of income from people who just want to rubberneck the wreckage.
Falling Diphthong
I think what’s been happening at Twitter is adequately explained by a bunker mentality mixed with a bunch of hallucinogens and uppers.
Ken
And now that the company has no compliance officer for the FTC consent decree; no European compliance office for GDPR; and reportedly no payroll department to send withheld taxes to the IRS and its equivalent in a dozen other countries — there will be plenty of government agencies shouting “look down”.
dexwood
Yup, Musk is an asshole much the same as asshole trump. They expect, require, loyalty without the first idea about how to be loyal in the first place. One way streets, both of them. Fuck ’em both for the damage they cause.
PJ
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: Her description of Musk
(“He’s all these things like funny, rude, compelling, obnoxious, accessible, easy to deal with, hard to deal with, always on, outspoken to a fault, angry, charming, intense, and also strikingly confident.”)
is pretty similar to the descriptions of TFG by various pundits and journalists (often as not on the far left.)
Anyone who would find Musk or TFG funny or charming has no sense of humor and terrible taste in human beings.
Geminid
@Ken: The reputational effect Musk’s Twitter fiasco has on the value of Tesla stock could be substantial. The stock price might be a bubble inflated by Musk’s personal prestige.
The gas may be leaking out of it already. Tesla stock is down well over 50% so far this year.
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
@different-church-lady: True that. I saw Kara Swisher on MSNBC last night (Stephanie Ruhle’s show), and she was supposed to explain all. Unfortunately, she really didn’t have much to say that was very insightful. She has interviewed him numerous times, apparently liked him, and does not recognize this incarnation. She did say a few things about the tech bros who all think they are brilliant. I was disappointed, but Stephanie seemed thrilled (sigh). I generally like Stephanie, but that interview was a waste
ETA: I see Betty at #21 got there first.
PJ
@different-church-lady:
What they’re waking up to is that he’s visibly flushing $44B away and blowing up the company so he can get likes from basement dwelling brain dead trolls. If he were successful, they would say, “Oh, that’s just Elon being Elon!” and laugh. But he is a public loser, so that frees them to say, “Huh, I guess he is just an asshole.”
smedley the uncertain
I frankly don’t give a shit. Let the Narcissist die. All the whining, mewling, oohing and sniveling is a fucking waste of time. And certainly Elon pays little attention to this crowd.
Gin & Tonic
@dmsilev: Not quite on point, but I just have to say that “rubbernecking” is one of my favorite words in the American lexicon.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
Elon Musk: Walking argument for confiscatory tax rates
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
@Ken: Ever since AL started posting about crypto (which was where I first heard about it, and NFTs), it sounded like BS to me. Subsequent events have not changed my mind. All the kool kids are buying it! Not a reason to invest, IMHO.
dr. bloor
Silicon Valley and its acolytes are a far more dangerous manifestation of Dunning-Kruger than idiotic Trumpists ever were.
Another Scott
(He has a book out now, it’s on Amazon.)
Cheers,
Scott.
dmsilev
@Gin & Tonic: It’s a good word. Very evocative and descriptive.
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
@Geminid: And I read that a lot of Musk’s Tesla stock is bachis collateral for the loans he got to buy Twitter. So he may have to sell a bunch of stock to meet the payment demands, which will depress the price even further. Negative spiral.
kindness
Yea. She’s tech’s Maggie H. The GD NY Times. Foisted another one on us.
RSA
To me, one of the most annoying things about Elon is his combination of moral certitude with astounding ignorance. I’m thinking of his saying it would be “morally wrong to withhold functionalities that improve safety” in the context of Tesla Autopilot (which is neither auto- nor pilot).
The Washington Post has an article about one implication of Twitter going dark, “In crises, officials tweet crucial info. What if Twitter dies?” (Gift article link.) It includes statements from local officials in charge of emergency management, law enforcement, fire fighting, and public health who have come to depend on the platform to get information out.
Which reminded me of Elon’s moral position. Fucking up a system that a lot of people depend on to save lives seems like a moral failing to me. Want to take responsibility, Elon? … I didn’t think so.
different-church-lady
Musk = Trump
Twitter = presidency
Swisher = Haberman
FYNYT = FYNYT
Bill Arnold
@patrick II:
I assume she is joking about chaos monkey.
It tech, it is a technique pioneered (or rather, formalized and named) by Neflix; essentially, regularly randomly killing virtual server instances in a production environment to verify that redundancy/failover works.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_engineering#Chaos_Monkey
Musk started wacking random things with a big piece of rebar, and shooting other random things with variously weapons including a grenade launcher. He could have come in, and assembled a team to accurately assess over several months what could be safely cut and how his desired changes could be made. He did not do this.
JoyceH
New subject – why do you suppose Naomi Biden had an outdoor wedding? Looked like a small guest list; I’d think the East Room would work fine. And it’s nippy out there today! (Good news for attendees – the evening party is indoors!)
different-church-lady
@RSA:
In retrospect, perhaps that was a mistake?
sukabi
@patrick II: she needs to step back a bit and LOOK at what’s going on without being spun by Musk and his entourage….
there are chaos monkeys afoot, but it’s not the reporters….
ColoradoGuy
Rubbernecking: When you’re driving on the freeway and something (it can be anything) happens in the opposite-direction lanes. People slow down, some stare a bit too long, and car crashes happen. Not theoretical, it happened to me. 10-car pileup. My beautiful 1980 Honda Accord totaled. Scale up by a million, and that’s what Elmo is doing to Twitter … because he can.
As for Tesla stock price … it was valued at more than all other car companies combined. So at least 90% of the stock price was, and is, nothing more than speculative market fizz.
different-church-lady
@Bill Arnold: Maybe she meant chaos Muppet?
steve g
Can Twitter survive as a social network? Sure, in the sense that Gab, Parler, Gettr, MeWe, Minds, or Truth Social, or various others, can survive as a social network. The question is can it be Twitter, which was miles ahead of all the others in its range and number of communities and users. I think the tech bros understand how to make it a Gab or a Parler, but have no idea how to make it real Twitter again.
sukabi
@different-church-lady: thing is Elon may have bought the company but the BRAND has been established and grown over the last 15 years…Elon walked in on day one, after spending the previous several months badmouthing the company, let loose his plans to fire half the company and turn out a new product without understanding the basics of the established product….
way worse execution than New Coke back in the 90s….
JPL
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: So true.
Bill Arnold
@different-church-lady:
If I was feeling ungenerous (i am), I’d assume that she heard the term in some social engagement being used as a metaphor and didn’t realize that was an actual thing being used as a metaphor. Or maybe I’m out of touch and this is now regularly and primarily used as a metaphor in techbro circles. (Am in tech, but in research.)
SFAW
@Ken:
Except she means publicity, not advertising. There’s a difference, one would have hoped she knew/knows what it is.
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony: Oh yeah, you are so right
C Stars
I’m so bored of all the Twitter obsessing and I don’t really have anything to add to this conversation other than today I learned from my 12 year old that middle schoolers call him “Melon Husk”
PaulB
The best way to follow the trainwreck: “Best of Dying Twiter” [sic], from the same person who brought you the Best of NextDoor. https://twitter.com/bestofdyingtwit
davecb
Hmmn, from over here, she and Scott Galloway have been calling Elon erratic and deranged _forever_.
different-church-lady
@SFAW: Based on just this small sample, I’d say the ass/elbow distinction might also lie outside her ken.
Ohio Mom
@JoyceH: I wondered the same thing.
If you want to get married on the White House Lawn, maybe pick a warmer month? September, first part of October would have worked. April and May too. But November?
Omnes Omnibus
@sukabi: “He came in here and he trashed the place and it’s not his place.”
PaulB
And now he’s going to lay off more people in sales & marketing, to “balance” the company now that most of the technical staff have left. https://twitter.com/sarahfrier/status/1594105916915187713
C Stars
@JoyceH
@Ohio Mom:
Covid, maybe? But then the evening party doesn’t make sense.
Geminid
@ColoradoGuy: Tesla stock has dropped 55.97% since January 1st. It’s Price to Earnings ratio is still unusually high, at ~55.
By contrast, Toyota’s P/E is 11.07. Tesla stock would have to drop 80% more for this basic measure of stock value to align with Toyota’s. And the stock might.
Miss Bianca
@Ken: Whenever I hear this kind of contrarian hot take, I keep thinking about Season 2 of Slings and Arrows, my favorite TV series ever next to Deadwood, where a major plot point is the Marketing Director for the New Burbage Theater searching for PR firm to do a new marketing campaign and getting conned into signing with the hot, trendy new firm, “Frog Hammer”, which proceeds to take a blowtorch to the Theater’s image and reputation, in the name of “shaking things up” and “Youthquake!”
(Without going into too many spoilers, let’s just say that that escapade pays off a lot better than I see the Twitter thing playing out.)
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
@C Stars: That’s a great malapropism!
OB-118
@C Stars: “Melon Husk”, a wonderful name :-)
different-church-lady
@Miss Bianca:
You gotta admit, Space Elmo has really taken this “DISRUPTIVE!” thing to heart.
Ohio Mom
@C Stars: It’s the Whote House, I think everyone who wants to come on the grounds gets tested for Covid before they are allowed in.
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
@Ohio Mom: It seems reasonable to me that she would want to wait until after the election. But I don’t understand the outside part either. Brrr.
Omnes Omnibus
@JoyceH: Some people love this season.
C Stars
@Ohio Mom: Yeah, true. Hmm maybe she just really wanted to have an outdoor wedding but couldn’t wait until May because a little Biden is on the way…
RSA
@different-church-lady:
It’s hard to know! We tend to think of the Internet as just being there, stable and reliable, but most of what makes it work is not owned by any government. If someone like Elon were somehow to gain control of a major telecom, for example, we’d see orders of magnitude more disruption. The way the Internet was conceptualized and designed, it’s hard to see how to avoid that.
On a day-to-day level, local and national government have to look at what’s available for communication. You can imagine that if there were a public emergency and some relevant agency didn’t tweet it out, people would be asking, “Why not?”
You’re right that some fallback is needed, and we have it in the form of Web sites, 911, Facebook and other social media, etc. It will be a painful transition, though, to something other than Twitter, in part because it’s not really an issue of technology but rather of network effects. The people who say that some other service will take the place of Twitter are correct, but I think a reasonable counter is Keynes’s observation (in its full context):
Nora Lenderbee
@A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan):
But she takes no guff and keeps it real You can tell by the way she says “fuck” a lot
ColoradoGuy
Interesting parallels between Putin, T****, and Elmo. All were billionaires, Master of the Universe types, and stunningly arrogant and surrounded by many layers of yes-men. Putin starts a war and a genocide … because he can. T**** screws around while 400,000 die from a hideous disease, and to top it off, attempts a violent coup for the first time in American history. Elmo takes a successful company used all across the world, and blows it apart just so he can re-instate his pal and billionaire-buddy, T****.
None of these actions made them richer than they already were, or more powerful. They did these things because they could, as a demonstration of power over the rest of us, while their paid propagandists and mass of cult followers cheered them on. In reality, away from the propaganda veil, the three billionaires have destroyed billions of dollars of value and ruined hundreds of thousands of lives … by acting on a whim, like the evil kings of fairy tales.
different-church-lady
@ColoradoGuy:
“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy – they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
Ruckus
@RobertDSC-Mac Mini:
He ignores the failures, it’s easy for him, he’s practiced at it.
One would think that in order to become the world’s wealthiest “human” one would have to be somewhat good at what one does. But as anyone who is looking or listening could tell, he might be grand at making money from having money but making actual things that work, rather than owning the company, he seems to be NWAS.
Jackie
@Ohio Mom: The only thing I can think of is Covid. Would an indoor wedding have required masking?
But, again, a more temperate month would have been preferable.
I did catch a snippet of news saying the wedding was planned due to Biden’s birthday being tomorrow – with a low-key celebration BECAUSE of the wedding…
Starfish
Ok, so not that Musk has let Trump back, can we stop with the posts driving so much traffic to Twitter?
There is a Mastodon instance for a lot of the content you are looking for. It is journa.host.
Mastodon is not as conducive to long threads, but the character count is higher.
Ruckus
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony:
Elon Musk: Walking argument for confiscatory tax rates
Absolutely THIS.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
and only social media websites. Most of the Valley does some really boring stuff.
PJ
@different-church-lady: Yep.
Subsole
@PJ:
This.
I would like her to explain, in detail, what this jelly-headed chanboard limpet has done that is funny.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
I don’t work hardware, but I find it hard to believe those staffs were bloated. This sounds like the kind of job that’s high stress, not glamorous and upper management watches and questions costs.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Eolirin: Not mention it sounds like most of the management, payroll and HR is gone. So who exactly is going to do the hiring for Musk’s Twitter 2.0 Shit Goblin version.
Subsole
@PJ:
Yep.
Tanked an interesting construct and ruined thousands of peoples’ careers because he’s having a midlife crisis.
Just like Sacks, or Thiel. Guy cannot deal with being old(ish). I mean, dude is trying to be pick-me cool-boy to a bunch of maladjusted meatbots – and some databots, too. Which is even more uproariously sad.
Again. Classic alt-right douchebro: cannot handle his own mortality…
Starfish
@Subsole: How many years does a midlife crisis go on for?
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Twitter users aren’t Musk’s customers, it’s the advertisers.
Poe Larity
Who do you call to order a ransomware strike on a app?
Martin
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony: Yep. That’s literally the only lesson to come out of this. If you believe there should be a public square, make sure nobody is rich enough to buy it.
Ruckus
@steve g:
I don’t think twitter will survive. It has grown because it works. It isn’t everything everyone wants but it has done a decent job at communicating, without having to approach the density and size of War and Peace.
Elon eliminated all the people that make that happen. And done it so badly that very few who have any idea how to make it work will likely take a job there. And because Elon has zero idea how to make it work he has zero idea how to hire anyone who can. I call it SPM. Supremely Pompous Arrogance.
Martin
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: Musk has no idea the advertisers are even there. The whole point of this was to restore institutional control to the alt-right. That’s been done.
Musks customers are the fascists that will suck up to him. That’s pretty obvious through all of this. He burned the advertisers, the users, and the workers. The only people who won so far are Jordan Peterson and Donald Trump. Everyone else lost.
But Trump’s reinstatement was all the reason I needed to finally delete the app. Kept my account. Might as well rent seek off of his real estate for a change.
Wyatt Salamanca
@Starfish:
You should check out this article:
Journalists want to re-create Twitter on Mastodon. Mastodon is not into it.
https://www.cjr.org/analysis/journalists-want-to-recreate-twitter-on-mastodon-mastodon-is-not-into-it.php
Starfish
@Ruckus: Elon’s busy turning Twitter into a Parler or a Gab.
When you do that Nandini Jammi will come after you and make sure you have zero advertising dollars.
Sanjeevs
@Ruckus:
CBS News dropping Twitter
https://mobile.twitter.com/errolbarnett/status/1594131148862390272?cxt=HHwWgICg1a71vp8sAAAA
Wonder when governments follow suit
Martin
@Poe Larity: Well, Russia, but they’re pretty stoked about this so I don’t think they’ll take your business.
Ohio Mom
@Jackie: Oh, the wedding as camouflage for Biden’s 80th — a diversionary tactic. And hold it outside so it’s very visible, so no one can miss that this is the weekend of the wedding. Got it.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
A lot of what people think about the Valley is bullshit, like WTF is “Silicon Valley Swagger”? That sounds like reporters who talk way to much with Marketing and Sales VPs, as opposed to actual Valley CEOs and workers “Nerds, weirdos, dorks and other introverts as far is the eye can see” is more like it. But that “OMG! I am getting old” is a pretty common problem in the Valley.
Starfish
@Wyatt Salamanca: I have been following the discussion on Mastodon itself. People are trying to create rules for the entire fediverse, and that is not a thing. Some of the journalists have adopted some of these Mastodon customs.
If you don’t want CW on all the journalism, you join a smaller instance that is not moderating that content.
Anyway, the people who wanted to moderate content like that are cute because the moderators of the largest instances are struggling under the influx of people.
Some moderator from not-my-instance just posted, “If you do not quit reporting people who are not doing anything wrong, I will ban you from my instance.”
JaneE
It is looking more and more like Musk bought Twitter to help facilitate the violent overthrow of the government the next time Trump tries it.
Ruckus
@Starfish:
A bloated ego makes a midlife crisis go on for a long, long time.
Because a bloated ego means one thinks of one’s self as the absolute top of the pile and a midlife crisis is the worlds way of telling one that the world is over you and your bloated ego. And the world always wins.
different-church-lady
@JaneE:
Firing everyone who makes the thing function is an odd way of doing that.
CaseyL
The SOB put TFG back on Twitter. People are leaving in droves, leaving just the RW nutjobs: practically all the trending topics are welcoming the traitorous POS back. I requested my archive; when it arrives, I’m deactivating.
Subsole
@Starfish:
Depends.
Normally, the ferryman can remain patient longer than you can remain solvent, to borrow a phrase.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
I think the word “providers” more applies to those clowns. He’s basically paying them 44 billion to pretend to be his friends for the few months to a year it takes Twitter to implode.
Starfish
@Ruckus: What stage of a middle life crisis is Trump in right now?
Martin
@Wyatt Salamanca: That article is pretty much bullshit.
Mastodon is made up of thousands of servers, each with their own moderation policies. Across them is this concept of the fediverse – basically a superset of those servers with similar moderation policies that don’t block each other. Most servers are in the fediverse.
You’re always going to have a dozen or more servers blocking any given server. The nazis will block the reporters because fake news, etc. That’s not a deal breaker for the platform. It’s built into the platform. Someone like Trump doesn’t lose his account, but he does wind up on one of those servers that everyone blocks. Problem solved. Meanwhile, the reporters can choose to not block them from their instance.
Yes, there are conventions. Mastodons conventions won’t all survive. It had a couple million users a month ago. Twitter has 400 million. If a sizable part of Twitter moves to mastodon, the mastodon culture will be fairly overrun. Some will hold, but much will not. It’ll be enforced to some degree on individual instances and not on others.
The media should love Mastodon because it much more closely mimics the traditional media structure rather than the centralized Twitter structure. They can change a lot of what they don’t like. They can decide who is and isn’t verified by who they invite onto their instance.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@CaseyL: Meh, the MSM’s slavish reposting of Trump’s every stupid email and post to Truth basically negated the Twitter ban.
different-church-lady
@Starfish:
All of them, Katie.
RaflW
The rutabaga-hued Turnip has been reinstated, with all his previous hate, gibberish and narcissistic logorrhea.
“Why the hell would anyone reasonable want to produce content, click like, or provide eyeballs on that shitsite?” I ask myself while unable, so far, to hit the ‘delete my account’ button.
Ruckus
@Starfish:
@Sanjeevs:
I don’t believe that he thinks he needs the ads. Or advertiser’s money. Because I don’t think he’s doing this to make money, he’s doing it to have a hard right website. Yes it cost him a bundle and he likely could have gotten it for less, but his wealth (at least on paper if not in the bank) still makes him one of the wealthiest people in the world. Sure he can’t get anything back from this with no advertising, but a political following might just be worth a lot. He may be looking to out trump SFB in the election arena.
Subsole
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
I wasn’t taking a swipe at the Valley, really. That inability to imagine a world that buries them and rolls merrily right on down the road without missing a beat just seems to be a common thread to a lot of alt-right fixtures.
Bannon, oddly enough, seems to be the exception. And I do wonder sometimes if his obsession with building a future for white children is just him sublimating his desire for immortality onto a racial template.
Mike in NC
It would be delicious if Melania dumped The Donald for Elon Musk, who’s you know, an actual billionaire for the time being.
Subsole
@Starfish:
Midlife nothing.
That tub of microwaved septic tank overflow never outgrew adolescence.
Ruckus
@different-church-lady:
Actually it’s not.
He’s cut out the tech bro load so payroll won’t be all that, he’s cut one data center out of 3 so that saves money. If he’s just trying to set up twitter to be the communications network for political mayhem then the cost is minimal – to him. He’s invested around 1/10 of his known wealth. It’s a tidy sum but cheap in the long run, if that is his goal.
Starfish
@Ruckus: A lot of folks drew their hard line at letting Trump back. A few of us just deactivated. I hope more follow.
I hope Anne Laurie starts to find some other resources to aggregate her posts and quits driving traffic to Twitter.
Jinchi
He’s not going to get a political following by turning Twitter into 8-chan. The site will just collapse into obscurity.
Urza
I realize that the UN isn’t designed for this, but things like Twitter that are a global public good should be managed by something UNlike. A place that would police hate speech but not really interfere with much else.
Also I don’t see it mentioned here yet but bitchboy let the previous guy back on. So he’s pro-insurrection. Pro-addiction. Obviously pro-asshole. And on the other side if the insurrecting addicted asshole goes back to his greatest love, the company he’s propping up and stands to make money off goes up in flames, pissing off lots of people close to him.
Sanjeevs
@Ruckus: CBS News leaving isn’t an advertiser. It’s content. If there is a cascade of similar departures then Twitter really will become gab.
CaseyL
@Starfish:
Do you still need to have your account to get your archive? That’s all I’m waiting on. It’s supposed to be sent to me in ~24 hours, though FSM knows how long it will take since no one’s home right now.
RaflW
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony: Anand Giridharadas has a good OpEd up about how billionaires are having a heck of a week of making your case.
We, the public, tolerate their mass accumulation. We could stop.
Jinchi
My only real interaction with Twitter was driven by links from BJ and news sites. For me, it’s been a one-way, informational source. If Annie, Adam and the rest start linking to other places, I’ll probably abandon it completely.
delphinium
@Mike in NC: Or if the Donald left Melania for Elon. God knows Elon loves him a hell of a lot more.
Jinchi
@delphinium: I don’t think two narcissists can exist in the same space for very long.
Jackie
@Ohio Mom: I didn’t say I *bought* that theory lol
Besides, as a certain commercial says: “Age is just a number.” I hope Biden gets to enjoy his Day and ignores all the breathless media reporting on it.
different-church-lady
The big question here is, “Will the world’s most expensive fucking around result in the world’s most expensive finding out?”
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Something else worth noting. Musk is hardly the first phony baloney claiming to represent Silicone Valley. That honor goes to Scott Adams, the sales twat who posed as an engineer.
Pretty much, anyone in popular culture claiming to be an engineer, isn’t.
Ruckus
@Starfish:
End stage. Most people would be over it by his age but he’s special, as in absolutely not normal in any way. By his age most people have had a successful life, but he’s fucked up every single part of his. You might think monetary but if he had put the $400 million he started adulthood in reasonable investments, he’d be somewhere around 4 times as wealthy as he is on paper now. And he stole a good portion of that from his family. Remember you can’t count SFB as having/being anything normal, he doesn’t have the whatever for normal. He’s SFB.
Tony G
@Starfish: Trump is a lot closer to end-of-life than midlife. He’s 76 years old, and he is not a physically healthy man.
Starfish
@CaseyL: I think so. I used a tweet deleter to delete a lot of my archive.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Musk thinks that because all of his previous companies are hardware manufacturing. There is a big upfront investment hardware in infrastructure, staffing, inventory, R&D and few years later you make your money back on selling the product to the customer.
Twitter is more like a TV channel, it sales access to an audience.
Starfish
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: Randall Munroe?
ian
@Starfish: I’m not sure 77 qualifies as mid-life, and if it does in his case… god help us all.
Ruckus
@Jinchi:
I don’t disagree, I was pointing out why HE might be doing it.
BTW I hope you are correct.
CaseyL
@Starfish:
Grrr. Well, I hope the remaining hamsters in the wheels can give my my archive when they say they will. (I suspect a lot of people have requsted theirs, which will slow things down, too.)
Ruckus
@ian:
It can, in a person who’s never grown up into a mature adult. Tell me that SFB is a mature adult. I won’t need to tell you that I’m laughing, you’ll be able to hear me where ever you are.
He may have been born 76 yrs ago and has lived long enough to have been able to mature but he’s not capable of it, nor has he accomplished maturity.
Starfish
@Ruckus: I thought by SFB, you meant Sam Bankman-Friend (SBF), and what you wrote still made perfect sense until I got to the bit about the age.
zhena gogolia
Dinner party. Who should be our candidate in 2024? Me: Biden. Them: He’s too old!
It’s the new butter e-mails. It’s going to kill us.
eldorado
i suppose it’s too much to ask, but if this site is going to bitch about elon/twitter constantly, can there be a policy of getting mastadon content instead of using the bird app
different-church-lady
@zhena gogolia:
I’m hoping you had the good sense to withhold dessert?
Ruckus
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
I’m not sure I’m getting across my points. I do not disagree with you or most everyone else, but I’m saying a man with as much money and ego as Elon Musk likely does not think the same way as most everyone else does. He spent $44 BILLION for twitter and fired most everyone. Either he’s insane for doing that or he’s insane for wanting twitter for other purposes. But to him $44 billion was actual money but not all that difficult to come up with and he only came up with over half of it. People like Elon and SFB do not think or see the world in the same way most of us do. They just do not. It’s one reason they are who they are.
We are trying to make some logical concepts for how and why people who don’t think like we do, do the insane things they do. And unless you could think like them It’s all just a wild ass guesses. Including mine.
zhena gogolia
@different-church-lady: I was a guest.
ETA: They all quickly changed the subject and looked at me as if I was the crazy one. After they suggested that Tim Ryan be the candidate. I shit you not.
Ruckus
@Starfish:
As you noticed it’s SFB, which stands for Shit For Brains. That should tell you who I’m referring to. He tried to destroy a rather high political office in his 4 yr term but is so incompetent that he couldn’t even do that. He did fuck up a lot trying though.
Citizen Alan
@RaflW: Preaching to the choir. I’ve been yelling for Eisenhower tax policies for decades. I now consider American billionaires to be a greater threat to our democracy and ultimately our planetary survival than any foreign government.
Citizen Alan
@Jinchi: Yeah. I’m pretty sure if BJ stopped posting tweets, I would never go to that site. I still technically have an account, but I’ve been perma-suspended for over a year (something about telling an anti-masker, anti-vaxer that it was fine by me if he caught Covid and died, which IMO was a ridiculous thing to ban someone for given what the rest of Twitter is like).
Citizen Alan
@Starfish: Which might explain why approximately one out of every five XKCD strips is completely incomprehensible to anyone without a STEM degree.
Jackie
@zhena gogolia: I guess as the GQP keep attacking Biden’s age, we need to remind them they just re-elected Grassley. Then change the subject, shut the door, or hang up, accordingly.
zhena gogolia
@Jackie: But these were not Republicans. They were my very “liberal” friends. They just swallow the CW. It’s a replay of 2016.
Baud
@zhena gogolia: That’s why they manufacture the CW.
Jackie
@zhena gogolia: Sigh… There’s always going to be age discrimination no matter from who. Queen Elizabeth was in good health until her last two years or so. The Pope is four years older than Biden. Just two examples of many more, I’m sure.
My Dad lived 99.5 years. His mind didn’t decline at all. Physically, he started declining after his SECOND hip break. That just slowed him down. He continued mowing his yard after his first hip break healed. His heart finally tuckered out after having congestive heart failure for 25+ years.
So I’m biased 😁
Aunt Sue
@Ohio Mom: Had to wait till the midterms were over. I assume it was outdoors to minimize vetting of guests—WaPo said there were three hundred. Beautiful occasion regardless.
Aunt Sue
@Aunt Sue: Probably the real driver was that they had to wait till after the midterms and by then the White House decorators were already putting up Christmas decor which is under wraps until the First Lady reveals it — limiting the useable indoor spaces.
Wilson Heath
If I were Jack DorseyI would have taken all that money from the Twitter buyout and put it into engineering a short of Tesla stock. Wouldn’t that just be the chef’s kiss?
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
The media want a contested primary. Of course their narrative will include “reasons” why Biden shouldn’t run. People will be bored otherwise.
Let the other side be “entertaining”. I’d rather focus normie attention on the right-wing freak show.
Matt McIrvin
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: L. Ron Hubbard made bogus claims of being a brilliant engineer and nuclear physicist, with various bachelor’s and sometimes doctoral degrees (he took some engineering and physics classes at GWU, got poor grades and dropped out).
BruceFromOhio
Lol
Bruce K in ATH-GR
Maybe Elmo’s plan to keep Twitter solvent is wingnut welfare: subsidies from the fascists once they regain power because he’s proven he’s one of them by letting their leader back on the platform.
James E Powell
@zhena gogolia:
Sounds like the collection of barely aware voters in my social circle. They regard me as a pain in the ass because I am a pain in the ass. I expect college educated people who claim to desire certain political outcomes to act in a way that makes those outcomes more likely.
Anne Laurie
Find me that magical site, and I will happily go there instead.
As I’ve said before, I use Twitter — which I still haven’t actually joined! — as an RSS feed. It’s been infinitely useful to me, and now to Adam, for aggregating news of the pandemic and the war in Ukraine. I also enjoy the other twitter feeds I follow, or I wouldn’t follow them!
I already spend many hours a day, seven days a week, collecting material for posts here. I simply do not have the bandwidth to follow a dozen or sixty Mastodon ‘federations’, or frankly to learn the new jargon & procedures that would allow me to do so.
But if there’s another, purer website doing the same level of news aggregation, by all means let us all know!
Eolirin
@Anne Laurie: You shouldn’t need to deliberately follow multiple Mastodon instances, once you join an instance, as long as that instance hasn’t blocked the other instances you need content from, you’ll see the content from all the other instances on your feed as well.
While the technical details of how Mastodon works do in fact have consequences, many of them are somewhat to entirely hidden to the end user. It won’t be as much of a learning curve as it sounds like as long as you land on an okay instance, and I’m sure someone here who’s been using it more can help point you towards one.
Matt McIrvin
@Eolirin: Right, most of the time, a Mastodon user just has one “home instance” and other stuff propagates there over the federated feed.
A lot of people seem to have suddenly dropped onto mastodon.social as sort of the default instance and it’s groaning under the strain, so there’s a push to get people to switch to other instances.
Timill
@Anne Laurie: It’s more of a Usenet model: you pull posts from the server you joined, and the server does the work of collecting them from (most of) the other servers.
Matt McIrvin
@Timill: It won’t attempt to pull everything from all the other instances, though; just, I think, posts that somehow someone on the local instance follows (possibly through intermediates who are “boosting”, the equivalent of RTing). That might limit the amount of serendipitous discovery you do off-instance. On the other hand, it gives the algorithm less arbitrary power to drive what you see.
One interesting difference from Twitter is that there is no concept of a quote-tweet; nothing stops you from manually sharing a link with commentary, but the author deliberately left out a QT button to automate this because he believes it leads to toxic behavior.
Matt McIrvin
Other important differences: the character limit is longer, though still short (500 characters vs. 280, which I do think affects the feel), and there IS an edit button, recently added.
Also, I think the only real control you can have over incoming Mastodon DMs is to block them from people you don’t follow. (At first, they didn’t even have that. And the control is hard to find–it’s under Preferences->Notifications.) That’s better than nothing but given the usefulness of DMs for harassment I do think more is needed.
Tim C,
@JaneE: Correct.
Tim Ellis
@Matt McIrvin: Indeed – if there’s any other Canadians here, our new home is mstdn.ca which is nice to have a central location for us, and it’s holding up decently under the rapidfire growth of the past week (from 500 members last week to 15,000 this week – still small, but growing quick and with decent activity).
One thing I’ve noticed is that Canadian journalists and entertainers are starting to join it, which to me is a good sign that it’s developing the network effects necessary to hold people there.