Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

The arc of history bends toward the same old fuckery.

The words do not have to be perfect.

Just because you believe it, that doesn’t make it true.

I know this must be bad for Joe Biden, I just don’t know how.

I’d hate to be the candidate who lost to this guy.

A lot of Dems talk about what the media tells them to talk about. Not helpful.

They’re not red states to be hated; they are voter suppression states to be fixed.

Black Jesus loves a paper trail.

New McCarthy, same old McCarthyism.

Second rate reporter says what?

People are complicated. Love is not.

I really should read my own blog.

When do the post office & the dmv weigh in on the wuhan virus?

Russian mouthpiece, go fuck yourself.

Balloon Juice has never been a refuge for the linguistically delicate.

When someone says they “love freedom”, rest assured they don’t mean yours.

Reality always lies in wait for … Democrats.

It’s the corruption, stupid.

After roe, women are no longer free.

JFC, are there no editors left at that goddamn rag?

The GOP couldn’t organize an orgy in a whorehouse with a fist full of 50s.

Motto for the House: Flip 5 and lose none.

Incompetence, fear, or corruption? why not all three?

I see no possible difficulties whatsoever with this fool-proof plan.

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Excellent Links / Late Night Open Thread: So Much Easier to *Break* Twitter Than to Rule It…

Late Night Open Thread: So Much Easier to *Break* Twitter Than to Rule It…

by | 84 Comments

This post is in: , , , ,

For weeks now, Elon Musk has been preoccupied with worries about how many people are seeing his tweets. Last week, the Twitter CEO took his Twitter account private for a day to test whether that might boost the size of his audience. The move came after several prominent right-wing accounts that Musk interacts with complained that recent changes to Twitter had reduced their reach.

On Tuesday, Musk gathered a group of engineers and advisors into a room at Twitter’s headquarters looking for answers. Why are his engagement numbers tanking?

“This is ridiculous,” he said, according to multiple sources with direct knowledge of the meeting. “I have more than 100 million followers, and I’m only getting tens of thousands of impressions.”

One of the company’s two remaining principal engineers offered a possible explanation for Musk’s declining reach: just under a year after the Tesla CEO made his surprise offer to buy Twitter for $44 billion, public interest in his antics is waning.  

Employees showed Musk internal data regarding engagement with his account, along with a Google Trends chart. Last April, they told him, Musk was at “peak” popularity in search rankings, indicated by a score of “100.” Today, he’s at a score of nine. Engineers had previously investigated whether Musk’s reach had somehow been artificially restricted, but found no evidence that the algorithm was biased against him.

Musk did not take the news well. 

“You’re fired, you’re fired,” Musk told the engineer. (Platformer is withholding the engineer’s name in light of the harassment Musk has directed at former Twitter employees.)…

(Musk being Musk, this firing may be walked back by the weekend — assuming the overtaxed engineering wasn’t just looking for an excuse to flee while fleeing was still possible.)

… An even more obvious reason for the decline in engagement is Twitter’s increasingly glitchy product, which has baffled users with its disappearing mentions, shifting algorithmic priorities, and tweets inserted seemingly at random from accounts they don’t follow. On Wednesday, the company suffered one of its first major outages since Musk took over, with users being told, inexplicably, “You are over the daily limit for sending tweets.”

It turns out that an employee had inadvertently deleted data for an internal service that sets rate limits for using Twitter. The team that worked on that service left the company in November.

“As the adage goes, ‘you ship your org chart,’” said one current employee. “It’s chaos here right now, so we’re shipping chaos.”

Interviews with current Twitter employees paint a picture of a deeply troubled workplace, where Musk’s whim-based approach to product management leaves workers scrambling to implement new features even as the core service falls apart. The disarray makes it less likely that Musk will ever recoup the $44 billion he spent to buy Twitter, and may hasten its decline into insolvency. 

“We haven’t seen much in the way of longer term, cogent strategy,” one employee said. “Most of our time is dedicated to three main areas: putting out fires (mostly caused by firing the wrong people and trying to recover from that), performing impossible tasks, and ‘improving efficiency’ without clear guidelines of what the expected end results are. We mostly move from dumpster fire to dumpster fire, from my perspective.”…

There is also a sense of unease about how recent changes will be reviewed by regulators. As part of an agreement with the Federal Trade Commission, Twitter committed to following a series of steps before pushing out changes, including creating a project proposal and conducting security and privacy reviews. 

Since Musk took over, those steps have become an afterthought, employees said. “His stance is basically ‘fuck you regulators,’” we’re told. 

The FTC plans to audit the company this quarter, we’re told, and employees have doubts that Twitter has the necessary documentation in place to pass inspection. “FTC compliance is concerning,” one says. 

Last year, before Musk took over, the FTC fined Twitter $150 million for breaking its agreement. Another breach would almost certainly result in millions of dollars in additional fines, and a flurry of news coverage — just the thing, perhaps, to get the views on Musk’s tweets trending up again.

The FTC can’t make Musk sell the company, of course… but they probably can make things unpleasant for his biggest financial investors (major banking corporations don’t like having the FTC all up in their business, and Musk’s Chinese and Qatari / Saudi backers presumably aren’t too crazy about that kind of scrutiny either). Interesting times!

Reader Interactions

84Comments

  1. 1.

    gene108

    I’ve met some small business owners that manage their business the way Musk is reported to manage Twitter.

    None of these small business owners have been able to scale up what they do despite efforts at trying to grow beyond what their primary offering is.

    I’m amused that all the VC’s and supposedly sophisticated investors get taken in by the brashest hustlers around.

  2. 2.

    BR

    Every time something craps out at Twitter there’s a new wave of users over on Mastodon. Seems like each time another bunch of folks leaves Twitter for good. I forgot about Twitter entirely (something I didn’t think was possible) for the last month or so, and was only reminded by the recent outage and the people newly on Mastodon talking about Twitter being down. Strange experience. (Also, looks like mastodon.online — one of the official servers — is back open for signups. They were closed briefly for new signups while they were dealing with a flood of new users.)

  3. 3.

    BR

    @gene108: ​
    Yeah, it’s amazing that they’re supposedly the savviest bunch and yet they fall for it every time. Some articles say that the one skill VCs have is that they can read people. They clearly can’t.

  5. 5.

    opiejeanne

    @Chetan Murthy: I had totally forgotten that thing even existed.

    I went to a party thrown for CVs in San Francisco, in 1999 or 2000, because I was chaperoning a troupe of teenage swing dancers hired as entertainment for the event. The music was provided by Lee Press-On and the Nails. The food laid out was impressive, the youngish men wandering around, talking to people with products they might want to invest in, and it felt like there was just money lying around everywhere, waiting to be picked up (even though none was visible). The CVs outnumbered the tech guys, about 3-1.

    It was an interesting evening.

  6. 6.

    Chris T.

    Tesla actually did quite well in their most recent quarter.

    The obvious explanation, of course, is that Musk was too busy fucking up Twitter to do anything at Tesla, which allowed Tesla to do better.

  7. 7.

    BellyCat

    The Tech Bubble created so much instant wealth that it is believed to be the new norm. Its benefactors have the disposable cash to swing for the fence on any and every crackpot idea that a venture capital firm concocts. And VC firms move in herds. The bigger the idea the better.

    Remember the 3D printer bonanza unleashed by MakerBot’s mediocre but well-marketed printers? These NYC youngsters snowed the Cali-Tech Movers to the tune of  $604 million. This set off unicorn thinking which begat TechShop (which quickly died). I just learned last week that Saudi investment money was involved in TechShop from a guy who worked there and watched the wheels come off.

    We can thank rapacious VC firms for putting Cali Tech and Saudi Oil together in the quest for unicorn profits. Then folks like Jarod Kushner simply follow the blood in the water, hoovering up scraps while promising bigger kills ahead.

    Many reasons to fault Amazon, but they built a juggernaut the old fashioned way: elbow grease and worker exploitation!

  8. 8.

    Tony Jay

    Mmmmm. Nutso billionaire with an overt fascination for things out in Space, likes to be surrounded by compliant yes-men, gets his jollies firing vital workers in huge numbers.

    If Musk starts shaving half his head and covering it with a plastic cup I’m officially worried, because then we have to rely on Bruce Willis and that’s… not optimal.

  9. 9.

    patrick II

    When I was a boy in the suburbs and my parents would take me into Chicago I was overwhelmed by the thought that brilliant people had actually built a place so large, beautiful, and complicated.  It gave me confidence in the future.

    This guy scares me, not just because he is so stupid in most ways, but because in however the cultural system we have now works, this guy has somehow risen to the top.

  13. 13.

    trnc

    EM: “Why’s my engagement tanking?” Also EM: *celebrates getting rid of bots on the platform* I don’t think it takes a rocket scientist to figure this one out

    Maybe. My question is, has Twitter actually succeeded in reducing bots, or are the bots just often not programmed in a way that can navigate the breakages? If the latter, they’ll be reprogrammed and back in force in a few days.​
     

    ETA: Assuming the bots actually have dropped off. Someone on the same thread said they’re actually worse now. I don’t tweet, so I don’t know which is true.

  14. 14.

    Shalimar

    @eclare: I would guess the Pentagon is pretty pissed about Starlink right now.  They gave SpaceX hundreds of millions to buy access in Ukraine, only for Shotwell to be shocked that it was being put to military use.

  16. 16.

    Baud

    Engineers had previously investigated whether Musk’s reach had somehow been artificially restricted, but found no evidence that the algorithm was biased against him.

    It must be the Democrats then! Call Matt Taibbi!

  23. 23.

    lowtechcyclist

    Gotta admit, dunking on Musk is starting to get boring.  Yes, he’s still an idiot. And I figure eventually his idiocy will take down Twitter just due to lack of proper maintenance if nothing else.  And eventually Tesla will be worth very little because once other automakers get good at the EV game, they will build EVs that are more reliable than Tesla’s.

    Meanwhile, in the limited ways that I use Twitter, I still don’t notice any real difference between now and a year ago. It helps that I never look at my own feed; all I do is check out the most recent tweets of other people that I’m interested in, and the look of that hasn’t changed one bit. And since that’s the case, I’ve been too lazy to switch to Mastodon or anywhere else.

    I noticed the other day when it told me I’d hit my daily limit of tweets, when I was trying to post my first tweet in three days.  But that glitch lasted an hour or so, and then it was back to normal.  But this report from behind the scenes is at least a warning that I might should start getting ready in case Twitter has a more serious crash one of these days.

    I’m really more concerned about Starlink and SpaceX, because neither the U.S. nor Ukraine should have to rely on one addled rich dumbfuck’s dubious intentions.  His decisions with respect to Starlink in Ukraine should fall under the category of foreign policy, and that’s the province of the U.S. government.

    There are ways that private citizens have the right to act in the international sphere – speech, of course, and charitable works – but ISTM that Elon’s deciding what Ukraine can and can’t use Starlink for in the process of trying to fight off a foreign invasion has exceeded those limits, and the U.S. government really needs to clamp down on him.  We have a policy on Ukraine, and while he is welcome to undercut it via speech, he shouldn’t be able to undercut it through tangible actions.

  26. 26.

    Frankensteinbeck

    @Baud:

    Musk’s conviction that something in the algorithm is suppressing him is a giant window into his personality, the Twitter situation, and conservatism in general.  He has swallowed hook, line, and sinker all the crazy conservative conspiracy theories about Twitter.

    He can’t accept that his bigotry is wrong.  He can’t accept that being a mean, petty shit (which he is, the classic internet troll) is wrong.  These are some of the greatest joys that give his life meaning.  There’s no way in Hell he’s going to even ask the “Are we the bad guys?” question.

    He owns the damn company now.  He has all the answers in front of him.  He’s seen all the secrets and has for months.  But the truth is that the majority think bigoted assholes are gross, and that is the only force oppressing him.  So he keeps asking the same question again.  And again.  He stepped on a 44 billion dollar rake and he keeps stepping on it, over and over.

    Look at the clusterfuck the House hearings already are, with Republicans pantsing themselves repeatedly.  Same thing.  That’s conservatism.  Now that their bigotries are unacceptable to the majority, this isn’t going to stop.

  27. 27.

    tobie

    Venture capitalists and entrepreneurs live in some kind of circle jerk, each fueling the myth of the other. How many times do we have to go through this pattern of hailing someone as a latter-day Thomas Edison only to discover they are frauds? The whole mystique around Musk reminds me of the adulation of Elizabeth Holmes. There’s no there there. And yet these are the folks venture capitalists and the media choose to hype. Is it because they promise the moon instead of something more mundane–like a light battery retains power for long periods?

  28. 28.

    lowtechcyclist

    @eclare:

    Another prime example of why we need confiscatory tax rates on the uber-wealthy.  Money gives people like him way too much power.

    Tru dat. In a democracy, nobody should have the sort of outsized power that people with tens and hundreds of billions of dollars have in our society.

    Political power inevitably follows economic power.  You can try to build dams against that, but eventually the money finds ways around the dams, even if the Supreme Court doesn’t tear them down a la Citizens Rich People United.

    It’s just going to be hard to preserve a democracy if people can get that rich in the first place.  We need wealth taxes and high brackets of income rates where the taxes are confiscatory.  That won’t happen in this Congress because the Rethugs would love rich people even if the rich people weren’t paying for their campaigns, but it needs to happen sometime soon.

  29. 29.

    Geminid

    I’m hoping John Fetterman is released by the hospital today. He was admitted Wednesday evening after feeling lightheaded, but tests showed he did not have a stroke.

    With a campaign to fight, Fetterman got only the bare minimum of the rest and recuperation he needed after his stroke last May. I hope he gets more now. If he mainly limits work to showing up for floor votes and important committee votes, that’s plenty for now I think.

  30. 30.

    satby

    I’m still on the bird app. But I joined Spoutible too and every day more people I follow on Twitter are on there as well. Cleaner experience and running on Bot Sentinal’s infrastructure so that bots are detected and removed. I only lasted on mastodon a few hours before bailing, so I’m glad there’s an enjoyable alternative to Twitter and mastodon. Musk’s slo-mo destruction of his reputation, companies, and personal fortune is so very well deserved, but sad when you consider the incredible waste and collateral destruction of other people’s lives.

  31. 31.

    Chief Oshkosh

    @Shalimar: Not sure why those tax dollars didn’t come with some pretty thick strings attached. It sounds like Shotwell does a good job running the company, but nobody is irreplaceable.

  32. 32.

    mardam422

    “The move came after several prominent right-wing accounts that Musk interacts with complained that recent changes to Twitter had reduced their reach.”

    Is Twitter silencing/shadow banning/violating the First Amendment rights of conservatives???????????????

  37. 37.

    Chief Oshkosh

    @tobie:

    How many times do we have to go through this pattern of hailing someone as a latter-day Thomas Edison only to discover they are frauds?

    Actually, Thomas Edison may well have been the prototype.

     

    ETA: Another Scott beat me to it, and with a tidbit I’d not heard prior.

  39. 39.

    Ken

    Based on that Rod Hilton quote, Musk is the Immanuel Velikovsky of this generation.

    (From a story that after Worlds in Collision came out, a couple of academics were discussing it.

    HISTORIAN: “I found the astronomical evidence he’d gathered absolutely compelling, but his treatment of history was nonsense.”

    ASTRONOMER: “Really? I thought his historical data was fascinating, but his astronomy is bullshit.” )

  40. 40.

    Kay

    I’m relieved. I thought we were looking at another Fox news. I guess Roger Ailes would never get rid of the people who keep the thing running.

  42. 42.

    Ken

    @trnc: Assuming the bots actually have dropped off. Someone on the same thread said they’re actually worse now.

    What I’ve heard and seen is that the advertising bots have increased, while the fake-follower bots that exist just to give someone a thumbs-up have declined.

    So there’s more “That’s a great observation, Mr. Trnc! Have you considered how Spots-A-Way Cleaning Product might help you discuss bots on twitter?”, and fewer upvotes, which is why Musk has a sad.

  44. 44.

    Betty Cracker

    @Kay: Yeah, maybe we dodged a bullet there. Twitter wasn’t a great investment if profit was the motive, especially at the ridiculous price Musk paid for it. But if increasing rightwing oligarchs’ influence on culture and media was the goal, you could do worse than Twitter! 

  45. 45.

    Ken

    @Baud: That’s a great observation, Mr. Baud! Have you considered how Spots-A-Way Cleaning Product might help your presidential ambitions?

  47. 47.

    Kay

    @Betty Cracker:

    I loved Twitter (as a lurker – it’s weirdly ideal for lurkers) and still dip in occasionally, but I’m glad I broke the habit. But- I completely understand how it plays a much different and more important role for communities that need a central gathering place. I’m glad it survived for them.

  49. 49.

    Ken

    @m.j.: He walked in with a sink and it should have been a toilet.

    I dunno, he’s doing a pretty good job sinking the company.

  52. 52.

    evodevo

    @Geminid: Plus, who knows how many meds he is on, and what there interactions/side effects are?  I’ve found most MDs are pretty ignorant in that area, and if you complain about something, they just pile on yet another med, without having any idea what the total effect is going to be…

  55. 55.

    Geminid

    I thought coverage of Vice President Harris’s visit yesterday to the St. Cloud, Minnesota New Flyer electric bus plant was a good illustration of the prevalent Harris-as-struggling VP narrative.

    Out of the dozen stories that my search easily found, half were put up in recent days by national news sites, describing her “problems.” The other half were from Minnesota news sites covering Harris’s visit, and her remarks on the administration’s commitment to the electric vehicle industry as a driver of economic development.

    I’m not sure this visit got any coverage in national news sites besides EV industry publications.

  56. 56.

    Betty Cracker

    @Kay: I’m conflicted about Twitter’s downfall for selfish reasons. Losing a time suck is a good thing! But I miss reading and interacting with the people whose accounts I’d curated into my own personal bubble over the years, especially when something is happening in real time. I’ve not been able to recreate that elsewhere. If Musk wanders off to focus on a different shiny object, I’ll probably go back.

  57. 57.

    zhena gogolia

    NYT continues its great streak. Today it’s Pamela Paul telling us that “Liberals Can Learn a Lot from DeSantis.”

    How to implement a Putler-style fascist regime?? Is that what we can learn, Pamela?

  60. 60.

    PaulWartenberg

    The movie “Glass Onion” was ahead of the fcking curve.

    Musk is such a clueless meddler he should have been exposed for idiocy years ago. Our culture’s horrifying habit of worshipping CEOs as geniuses needs to die a painful death.

  63. 63.

    Tarragon

    One of the company’s two remaining principal engineers…

    Holy carp!

    Being down to one principal engineer deserves some kind of weird trophy.

  65. 65.

    Kay

    @zhena gogolia:

    She admires DeSantis! Agrees with him and is glad he is “owning” the “woke Left” because owning the “woke Left” is now the point not just for conservatives but for a whole group of anti woke pundits.

    Why these people won’t just admit this is beyond me. It’s always jammed into this dishonest frame of “advice for liberals” or “a warning for liberals”. Why they have to speak THROUGH liberals is beyond me. Just back DeSantis! Own your individual opinions!

  67. 67.

    geg6

    @evodevo:

    Myself, I think it’s simply that he’s been doing an awful lot just after having a stroke and now that things have calmed down a bit, his body said time to slow down, big guy.  Plus, I have a great many doubts that Giselle Fetterman is not completely on top of every aspect of his treatment.  She’s a lovely, stylish pitbull.

  69. 69.

    Shalimar

    @evodevo: I have had that same problem with my grandmother and now my mom. I went to her doctor months ago so he could justify the 15 medications she is taking.  I was worried about interactions and side effects.  All he did was patiently explain what each did and why it was helpful.  Which I already knew.  And he indirectly told me he has no clue what adverse interactions there might be.

    With that many medicines, it’s almost definite there are some.  I can’t do anything about it though, because he is an old family friend and she thinks he is the perfect doctor.

  70. 70.

    J R in WV

    @Shalimar: ​
     

    And he indirectly told me he has no clue what adverse interactions there might be.

    With that many medicines, it’s almost definite there are some.

    I have found that the documents available for medications frequently have lists of other meds which may interact with them. Some of this is listed on the paperwork I receive with each prescription and more is available online from the manufacturer web sites.
    Also, pharmacists are more trained in this arena than MDs. Perhaps you can find a PharmD to help?

    The prescriber won’t be able to help with this issue as he is causing it — if he were to admit there was a problem he would be liable for the damages! I take a lot of meds, and the pharm tech discusses interactions sometimes. Most of my meds are really common, tho.

  71. 71.

    WereBear

    @gene108: Currently reading Bad Blood, about the Theranos scandal.

    The rosy picture is all taken for granted until someone asks a direct question of the CEO and gets fired. Very Musk-ish.

  73. 73.

    opiejeanne

    @Shalimar: I saw a cardiologist yesterday because my doctor was alarmed that I was having dizzy spells. (It’s amazing, the difference in their reactions between when you are 26 and 73.) He determined that I had low blood pressure, and in looking at my prescribed meds, decided that I was probably on too high a dose of BP medication.

    He changed the prescription, removing the diurectic and lowering the dosage.

    I’m also having a “stress test” and an ECG in a couple of weeks, just to have a look at what’s going on, just to be safe.

  75. 75.

    Bill Arnold

    I only ever look at a Musk tweet to use the replies to build up the block list on an account that uses my name. He rarely has anything interesting to say, excepting the SpaceX tweets, which are sometimes interesting. The “Eight Dollars” plugin (free) that redraws bluechecks as verified(legacy), paid, is helpful. “Paid” is for loudmouths unless proven otherwise.

  78. 78.

    EmbraceYourInnerCrone

    @PaulWartenberg: People who has worked for Musk and have pointed out problems / safety issues etc have been fired and sometimes threatened with lawsuits, bogus criminal charges or actually sued if they dared mention the problem to anyone:

    Musk fired anyone who disagreed with him at Tesla

    Is Elon Musk a bad boss?

    “Another whistleblower, Martin Tripp, moved to Hungary to escape the wrath of Musk after the news site Insider ran a story about excessive scrap waste at Tesla’s battery factory in 2018. Private investigators hired by Musk to identify the source named Tripp, a factory employee.

    Tripp was fired. Tesla said he stole company data. Musk later called a reporter to say he’d heard Tripp was on his way to the factory with a gun. The local sheriff’s department later said, no, he was miles away in Reno, with no gun and no evidence he had one.”

    Cross the man at your peril.

  79. 79.

    Shana

    @m.j.: That was such a stupid joke. When I saw the picture at first I thought it would be something like “everything but the kitchen sink” kind of joke, but “let that sink in”? Just dumb.

  84. 84.

    H-Bob

    He convened that meeting to diagnose his personal engagement/impression statistics, not company business!

Comments are closed.