Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Accountability, motherfuckers.

If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.

It’s a doggy dog world.

A democracy can’t function when people can’t distinguish facts from lies.

We are builders in a constant struggle with destroyers. let’s win this.

Thanks to your bullshit, we are now under siege.

Let us savor the impending downfall of lawless scoundrels who richly deserve the trouble barreling their way.

Do not shrug your shoulders and accept the normalization of untruths.

Jack be nimble, jack be quick, hurry up and indict this prick.

fuckem (in honor of the late great efgoldman)

Bad news for Ron DeSantis is great news for America.

Schmidt just says fuck it, opens a tea shop.

Make the republican party small enough to drown in a bathtub.

I’m sure you banged some questionable people yourself.

Some judge needs to shut this circus down soon.

Good lord, these people are nuts.

Come on, media. you have one job. start doing it.

You can’t attract Republican voters. You can only out organize them.

Too often we hand the biggest microphones to the cynics and the critics who delight in declaring failure.

Republicans can’t even be trusted with their own money.

… among the most cringeworthy communications in the history of the alphabet!

“I never thought they’d lock HIM up,” sobbed a distraught member of the Lock Her Up Party.

Accused of treason; bitches about the ratings. I am in awe.

This isn’t Democrats spending madly. This is government catching up.

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Incompetent Edgelords Open Thread: The Latest Twitter ‘ Temporary Emergency Measure’

Incompetent Edgelords Open Thread: The Latest Twitter ‘ Temporary Emergency Measure’

by | 160 Comments

This post is in: , , ,

If you currently try to access Twitter without logging in to your user account, you’ll be unable to see any of the content that was previously available to the wider public. Instead, you’ll meet a Twitter window that asks you to either sign in to the platform or create a new account, effectively blocking you from viewing tweets and user profiles or browsing through threads unless you’re a registered Twitter user.

Twitter didn’t immediately make a public announcement, making it unclear if this was an intentional update or another technical mishap. Later on Friday, however, Twitter owner Elon Musk tweeted, claiming in a reply that the change is a “Temporary emergency measure,” blaming “data pillaging” for degrading the service for all users…

… Mashable recently reported that even people who pay the steep new rate for API access say they’ve seen unannounced changes, bugs, and no customer support. From the outside, we don’t know if that’s because of the scrapers Musk notes or his own attempts to cut costs that included layoffs within the teams that help keep Twitter’s servers running and reportedly leaving a Google Cloud bill unpaid for months before recently resuming payments, according to Bloomberg…

The move manages to both contradict and support other actions that owner Elon Musk has taken in the past year. In 2022, Musk hired noted iPhone hacker George Hotz to fix its search feature and get rid of the login prompt that prevents unregistered users from browsing the website. Hotz resigned less than halfway through his 12-week internship with the company, claiming he “didn’t think there was any real impact I could make there.” In April this year, Twitter then eliminated the platform’s search feature for unregistered users entirely.

Free Twitter account holders can still access publicly posted tweets and other information, though many of the features that enhance user experiences (such as editing tweets and user verification) are locked behind a Twitter Blue subscription, and more of the platform’s core features could soon follow. The company could probably use the cash injection from users paying for premium features — Twitter’s US advertising revenue between April and May this year plummeted by 59 percent compared to the previous year.


[User query: If you are not registered on Twitter, can you tell me if you can still go directly to the Variety article by clicking on the variety.com line in the embedded tweet right above this?]


Smells like pigsh*t, Muskrat!

Twitter owner Elon Musk made an abrupt announcement Saturday morning: the social media service has instituted a “temporary limit” on the amount of posts that users can read. Verified accounts that have paid for a Twitter Blue subscription can view 8000 posts per day, while unverified accounts — the vast majority of Twitter users — may only view 800 posts per day.

Newly registered unverified accounts get even less at 400 per day, though Musk did not specify how old an account must be to qualify for that tier…

Musk explains that the guardrails have been created “to address extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation.” The announcement come a day after Twitter’s Friday action to block access to the website for anyone who isn’t signed in as a registered user.

“Temporary emergency measure. We were getting data pillaged so much that it was degrading service for normal users!” Musk wrote on Friday afternoon. He also claimed that “several hundred organizations” were scraping Twitter data more aggressively, impacting user experience…

Musk appointed Linda Yaccarino, NBCU’s former top advertising sales exec, as Twitter’s new CEO in early June. Through her new role, Yaccarino oversees business operations with a goal of driving up advertising revenue. In addition to changing leadership, Musk laid off around 80% of Twitter’s employees since taking over the site. He has since shared that he would attempt to rehire some of those employees after the platform has faced technical issues, including the poor execution of a Twitter Spaces live audio event with Ron DeSantis, who used the occasion to announce his 2024 presidential campaign.

All the engines are spewing smoke and bits are falling off, but Elon totally meant for that to happen. Presumably Yaccarino was hired to take some of the flak — at least from the paying customers, and I don’t mean sad little blue-check suckups — while prying Musk’s ketamine-fueled fingers off the levers. (She did, for instance, ‘persuade’ him to start paying the most essential bills.) He was always going to be an outsized screaming toddler about the transition, but if I were Yaccarino, I’d be somewhat relieved that the parlous physical state of the platform has now been made clear across all global media.

The Latest Twitter 'Improvement' - STOCKPILE

Reader Interactions

160Comments

  3. 3.

    Jerzy Russian

    Christ, what an asshole!

    A back-of-the envelope calculation shows that Musk pissed away an amount of money equivalent to ~70 times the value of the endowment at my university.   He could have given each student here a free ride (all ~30,000 of them) for several years.  What a waste.

     

    We need to bring back the 70% tax brackets and the nut-kicking robots.

  5. 5.

    TheOtherHank

    I am not logged in to twitter on this browser. I clicked on the variety.com line and went to the article.

  6. 6.

    Another Scott

    Yes, clicking on the “variety.com” link in the tweet (or the black graphic or the text below it that is a link) gets me to the story.  Clicking “@variety” above the black graphic takes me to the Twitter login popup.  (I have not Twitter account.)

    Thanks.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  7. 7.

    Krista (RedKitten That Was)

    And of course, this at a time when essential services — here anyway —  have grown to rely on Twitter as a real-time comms tool. 😬

    It’s hard to not think he broke the damn thing on purpose — the path off the cliff was certainly unerring.

    (Hi everybody- it’s been awhile!)

  8. 8.

    dmsilev

    User query: If you are not registered on Twitter, can you tell me if you can still go directly to the Variety article by clicking on the variety.com line in the embedded tweet right above this?]

    Yes, that worked.

  9. 9.

    Jeffro

    Josiah is totes fire and Matt Levine makes a GREAT point.

    And between the two, I’ll take Levine’s point: I’d suddenly have a net hour or two more of time per day if Twitter swirled down the drain.

    What’s that FDR quote*, again?  Something about “I know what we should (or must) do…now MAKE me do it?”  That would be awesome!  As in, ‘make me just delete Twitter off my phone already, and force me off to another site that takes a while to spark my interest/engagement’ (please!)

    *I don’t care if it’s a real quote from him or not, it rocks

  12. 12.

    dmsilev

    In 2022, Musk hired noted iPhone hacker George Hotz to fix its search feature and get rid of the login prompt that prevents unregistered users from browsing the website. Hotz resigned less than halfway through his 12-week internship with the company, claiming he “didn’t think there was any real impact I could make there.”

    A guy noted for his ability to break into phones is hired to write infrastructure software for a large scale distributed system, despite not having demonstrated any ability or knowledge of same. It is a fiasco.

    Truly, Elon Musk’s Excellent Twitter Adventure is fractal in its egregious incompetence.

  13. 13.

    mrmoshpotato

    @Krista (RedKitten That Was):

    And of course, this at a time when essential services — here anyway — have grown to rely on Twitter as a real-time comms tool. 😬 

    Exactly!  Twitter has become invaluable for real-time news updates of important (even life-threatening) events!  Even if it’s not from an official news agency’s account.

  16. 16.

    Art

    I was following the war in Ukraine, in large part, through Twitter without registering. There have been bumps. I figure Musk has a raging hard-on for Putin. He empathizes with and is jealous of authoritarians who run entire countries, particularly those who routinely murder their opposition without consequence. So it makes sense Musk would screw with sites in opposition to the Russian party line.

    This time it is all the feeds. I followed about six or eight sites on Twitter. Probable a couple hundred tweet views. Alas … no more. I am done with Twitter and anything to do with Musk. I’m starting to explore Reddit. More content, fewer controls.

  17. 17.

    Jeffro

    Meanwhile the Florida GOP is tweeting that “Florida just got more free!” b/c permit less concealed carry went into effect today.  Yayyyyy!  Good job, Florida GOP!!

    I can’t imagine the mind-set that says (whether in my head or out loud), “surely the way to be more free is to have more randos walking around carrying concealed firearms in public spaces!”  But then again, I don’t have voices in my head or a circle of friends with an average IQ of 35.

  18. 18.

    Ohio Mom

    Ages ago I opened a twitter account when for some reason or another— this was before Elon took it over— I couldn’t read the tweets I always look at on my usual morning route through (expanded) blogtopia.

    The other day, blocked out, I took a stab at guessing my old login and guessed right (helps to have one all-purpose secret code for all my login needs).

    One of the first things that popped up were a trio of suggestions of whom I might want to follow, topped by Mr. Musk himself. I rolled my eyes and snorted.

    I have noticed many more ads than ever before, usually it is the same ad over and over in a comment thread. Maybe Musk is printing them for free to make it look like things are fine.

  19. 19.

    Betty Cracker

    Media orgs (ex: Variety quoted above) should stop categorizing Twitter users as “verified” and “unverified” since the only thing a blue check now verifies is that the account owner is willing to cough up $8 per month for Phony Stark.

    @dmsilev:

    Truly, Elon Musk’s Excellent Twitter Adventure is fractal in its egregious incompetence.

    Well said!

  21. 21.

    piratedan

    @mrmoshpotato: part of the issue is with those that refuse to leave the sinking ship…. It would take a similar effort for these content creators to simply open up instances on other platforms or even just pick one (maybe two) and begin posting there.  Inform those that follow on birdchan that you’re leaving for more reliable shores and tell them how they can continue to enjoy your content.

    Will it involve work, yes… yes it will.  Do you want your brand/content to continue to only be accessed at the whim of someone who is clearly either narcissistic asshat or someone who wants to destroy social media/control it for their own reasons.  Not to mention his penchant for equating Fascism and Nazis with the “freedom of ideas in an open forum”.

  22. 22.

    mrmoshpotato

    @Art:

    I figure Musk has a raging hard-on for Putin. He empathizes with and is jealous of authoritarians who run entire countries, particularly those who routinely murder their opposition without consequence. So it makes sense Musk would screw with sites in opposition to the Russian party line. 

    Very out of character for an apartheid, emerald mine, rich shit. /S

  23. 23.

    SpaceUnit

    What a pud.  Good thing we’re not depending on this fruit loop for something vital like our space program.

  25. 25.

    Anne Laurie

    @piratedan: Will it involve work, yes… yes it will. Do you want your brand/content to continue to only be accessed at the whim of someone who is clearly either narcissistic asshat or someone who wants to destroy social media/control it for their own reasons. Not to mention his penchant for equating Fascism and Nazis with the “freedom of ideas in an open forum”.

    Problem for me — and, I suspect, a lot of professional media + government services — is that none of the twitter-equivalents has an easy, functional embed function.  You can screenshot a comment from Mastadon or Bluesky or Post, and write your  own commentary around the screenshot, but that’s more complicated.

    Writing / supporting the embed code costs, I assume, more than the ‘volunteer’ services can manage.  If Jack Dorsey and his fellow investors *really* want Bluesky to be The New Improved Twitter (and, so far, it’s my personal fav), they should  be working to enable this ASAP!

  26. 26.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Art:

    I figure Musk has a raging hard-on for Putin. He empathizes with and is jealous of authoritarians who run entire countries, particularly those who routinely murder their opposition without consequence. So it makes sense Musk would screw with sites in opposition to the Russian party line.

    Funny, that’s why I had to get off LiveJournal.

  29. 29.

    Shalimar

    Yaccarino was hired specifically to talk to potential advertisers and get their money, because Elon’s “threaten them and call them names” approach wasn’t working.  I doubt she is involved in any other aspect of the business.

  30. 30.

    Lyrebird

    @Krista (RedKitten That Was): Great to see you hear again!

     

    And sadly great point!  Police and other local services have been using twitter for helping get alerts out.  And for more important stuff like generating awesome content like videos of the young moose or deer in someone’s basement.  Okay I am being flippant because I love seeing those, but your point is serious.

  31. 31.

    piratedan

    @Anne Laurie: I get it AL, have heard that they are working on this over at Mastodon and I believe Charles @ LGF has managed to script together a way to embed Toots into his threads, still believe he’s working on getting it displayable for mobile devices.

  34. 34.

    Ruckus

    I’ve tried the other sites that supposedly are trying to be or replace twit. None that I’ve tried have whatever it is that twitter has/had. But with the new owner trying like hell to screw it up, and succeeding rather well I’d say there has to be something better or at least reasonable and I haven’t seen it.

  36. 36.

    HumboldtBlue

    leave it to the south African to start separating tiers of user

    I spent a few hours this week reading, watching and learning about the Boer War (1899-1902) and while watching one particular video that featured the sons and daughters of Boer veterans it dawned on me that as the Boers suffered mightily under the British in that war, they are BY FAR the least sympathetic victims of British tyranny.

    They were slave-owning self-righteous religious and racial bigots, who, for the first two years, ran rings around the British and who were then crushed by concentration camps and the sheer weight of men and matériel brought to bear by the empire.

    But they elicit no sympathy, they were as vicious as one can be to the native tribes, and despite their doggedness in the face of the British Army, they garner little respect. I see many parallels with the slave-owning South.

  37. 37.

    Soprano2

    Jon Favreau says Elon is making everyone do the Offline challenge! What a moron, Elon probably didn’t pay an essential bill and is trying to cover it up.

  38. 38.

    dc

    @Ohio Mom: ​
     
    I open Twitter less and less these days (I use Mastodon much more), but when I do, I block anyone paying money to advertise there and I never used the algorithm feed and never will. Hopefully, this jerk will either sell the company for a loss or it will go to where other failed social media have gone before.

  40. 40.

    Righteous Hazard

    I know you guys gotta embed tweets because of reasons, but from my standpoint, the sooner everyone just rips off the twitter bandaid and just refuses to link or embed to Musk’s Apartheid Social Media, the better.

    Shit like Musk is pulling never ends well, and he will pull others down with him (I know that sites like this will struggle for a bit without tweet linked traffic), but it is time.

    (and yes, the link works for twitter deleted me)

  41. 41.

    Ken

    @Frankensteinbeck: I assume she’s updating her résumé. Whether she’ll include the last few months…

    (I recall there was a similar joke about the outgoing Trump staffers: Recruiter asks “What’s this gap from 2016 to 2020”, interviewee responds “I was heavily into meth and don’t remember anything.”)

  42. 42.

    Amir Khalid

    @Lyrebird:

    It’s bigger than that, actually. Elon’s sabotage of Twitter has affected public-sector agencies all over the world that were relying on it to communicate with the public. It’s no exaggeration to say that millions of people around the planet are affected.

  45. 45.

    mrmoshpotato

    @Righteous Hazard:

    I know you guys gotta embed tweets because of reasons, but from my standpoint, the sooner everyone just rips off the twitter bandaid and just refuses to link or embed to Musk’s Apartheid Social Media, the better.

    I get your point, but we need a mass migration of Twitter accounts to a different platform for that to be viable.

    I don’t know the size of the user bases on Mastodon, etc, but it’s nowhere close to Twitter.  Also, the current functionality of other platforms isn’t up to current standards – yet.

  47. 47.

    NotMax

    As in most things, there’s a pithy Yiddishism — gantzeh k’nacker.

    Rough translation: big shot know-it-all, someone who thinks he can do everything better than everybody else.

  49. 49.

    Sister Golden Bear

    @Jeffro: The bigots are now free to shoot teachers who “say gay, and trans people using the “wrong bathroom” — and then get away with it without charges because they were “standing their ground.”

    Wanna join the betting pool for how long it’ll take to happen

    I wish I was being sarcastic.

  50. 50.

    HumboldtBlue

    @Sister Golden Bear:

    The bigots are now free to shoot teachers who “say gay, and trans people using the “wrong bathroom” — and then get away with it without charges because they were “standing their ground.”

    Yup.

  51. 51.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    @Jerzy Russian: We need to bring back the 70% tax brackets and the nut-kicking robots.

    I suspect nut kicking robots wouldn’t work for a dimwit like Emmo.  Considering the number of bodyguards Musk insists on having, it’s safe bet that he’s been sucker-punched repeatedly  by people he’s offended with his douchbaggery and he still hasn’t learned.

  57. 57.

    Lyrebird

    @Amir Khalid: ​
     

    [shakes head in consternation]

    I am so sick of thse billionaires, real ones (Musk) and fake ones (Trump), who think it’s fine if lots of other people suffer or even die because they feel like pouting or breaking stuff.

  58. 58.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    @Art: I figure Musk has a raging hard-on for Putin. He empathizes with and is jealous of authoritarians who run entire countries, particularly those who routinely murder their opposition without consequence

    Musk comes across as more transactional than just a simple wannabe dictator. I think if he has a hard on for Putin, it would be for that oligarch money to fund various Musk grifts.

  59. 59.

    NotMax

    @RandomMonster

    In the before times, used to be granted carte blanche to root around the rudimentary company-wide mainframe computer system at the ad agency where I was employed by inputting “admin” as the password at any workstation.

  60. 60.

    Jerzy Russian

    @different-church-lady:   I think the high tax brackets and the nut-kicking robots were around during the Eisenhower Administration, although my memory of this is a bit fuzzy since it has been many years since I took American history in school.

  61. 61.

    PhoenixRIsing

    you all haven’t seen me a lot since I started grad school, but that’s partly school + work and partly the time I used to spend here going to Twitter to build the relationships I needed to get a new thing going.

    My defense date is August 11. This was my first 5 day weekend of writing every day. The timing for Elon failing to pay his outstanding invoice with Amazon Web Services was…honestly, I am reconsidering my longstanding atheism. Not only IS there a G-d, She cares about me.

  62. 62.

    Bill Arnold

    @Jeffro:

    Meanwhile the Florida GOP is tweeting that “Florida just got more free!” b/c permit less concealed carry went into effect today. Yayyyyy! Good job, Florida GOP!!

    I am free to never set foot again in Florida. Safety first! Visiting a state with a right to murder with an permit-less concealed weapon is a choice.

  64. 64.

    Jackie

    @Jackie: And for those who post Twitter after Twitter, I have to just scroll on by. You, who continue to post Twitter links after being told repeatedly we can’t open need to stop. It’s frustrating to us who aren’t registered to Twitter and refuse to register.

  67. 67.

    mrmoshpotato

    @Jackie: Yeah.  We caught the end of that during the Chicago  rain delay.  Had dinner and played a game of cribbage during most of that ballgame.

  69. 69.

    mrmoshpotato

    @Bill Arnold:

    Top 10 for 2022 were: 

    password 123456 123456789 guest qwerty 12345678 111111 12345 col123456 123123

    How did 8675309 not make the top 10?!

  73. 73.

    piratedan

    @Ruckus: I gotta believe all that registration data might well be worth something to someone.  Unless you want to believe that when you unsubscribe or attempt to delete your account that it actually happens.

  74. 74.

    Another Scott

    @mrmoshpotato:

    MastodonUserCount:

    12,937,830 accounts
    +4,370 in the last hour
    +52,068 in the last day
    +129,233 in the last week

    Yup, still pretty small. But the birdtsite numbers are going the wrong direction pretty quickly.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  80. 80.

    Bill Arnold

    @Betty Cracker:

    blue check now verifies is that the account owner is willing to cough up $8 per month for Phony Stark.

    Use the “8 dollars” browser plugin (available for chrome family and firefox family browsers, at least). It differentiates between verified and paid (or fake-paid because Musk declares everyone with 1M+ followers as paid, and some selected others as well)
    For twitter reasons that they have not disclosed, the twitter UI does not differentiate.

  82. 82.

    Joey Maloney

    @Geoduck: In order to run Twitter (unless they made it a read-only service where only government entities could post) the government would have to solve the moderation-at-scale problem, which appears basically unsolvable. And it’s certainly going to be unsolvable if it’s a government agency that Gym Jordan can demand hearings about.

    (“This fascist kills machines” – classic!)

  83. 83.

    Bill Arnold

    @piratedan:
    No. The blame is with the asshat who bought twitter and is destroying it as a communications platform All of the blame. Please, no moralizing that blames the users.

  84. 84.

    Bill Arnold

    @Righteous Hazard:

    I know you guys gotta embed tweets because of reasons, but from my standpoint, the sooner everyone just rips off the twitter bandaid and just refuses to link or embed to Musk’s Apartheid Social Media, the better.

    Absolutely uninterested in your moralizing. Blame Mr. Elon Musk, not the low-wealth people who are using twitter to attempt to increase the reach of their communications.
    You are punching down.

  85. 85.

    piratedan

    @Bill Arnold: disagree…. they were using that platform to publish their content and the new boss has shown his colors.  Staying there puts money in HIS pocket.  Yes, Musk is entirely to blame for enshittifying the platform.  Have I disputed that?  Letting him continue to put money in his pocket on their work is a choice they are making.  No one has said it doesn’t suck.  No one has said that starting over on a different platform would be a walk in the park.  It hurts a whole boatload of people and agencies that grew to trust what Twitter could do for them, as a public service.  The guy who owns it now doesn’t give a shit and the sooner it turns into having the same relevance as AOL the better.  Need to accept the fact that Musk pissed away a LOT of money to ensure that the platform dies a painful ugly death.

  87. 87.

    Betty Cracker

    @Jackie: I think Taj Bradley is starting for the Rays tomorrow. He’s super talented but can be uneven. I hope he’s up for the challenge!

  88. 88.

    Bill Arnold

    @piratedan:
    No, what I object to is blaming the users. (It also is not clear that Musk wants to destroy the platform.)
    I said this a month or so back, and stand by it:

    TL;DR twitter is (and has been) a dangerous platform, that is rapidly becoming a platform which must be destroyed, because it is a tool in support of the [fascist] agenda.

    But blaming people who are continuing to use it while it continues to work <em>for them</em> is wrong, especially when there is literally no workable alternative. IMO.
    You’ll note that the recent twitter-damaging events have been entirely self-inflicted. The blocking of non-twitter-users may have even been a kill shot, if it continues. This is fine.
    This is a disagreement about tactics, mainly.

  89. 89.

    Shalimar

    @piratedan: You’re right that everyone will need to migrate away from Twitter as they are able, but “work faster and harder, assholes” probably isn’t the right message to encourage people to actually do it.

  90. 90.

    Yutsano

    @Jackie: ​There’s just…something about beating the hottest team in baseball. Although nothing tops shellacking the FTFYankees in the Bronx. Again: sorry not sorry Betty!

  91. 91.

    Sister Golden Bear

    @piratedan: Way to go with the victim blaming. There’s a number minority group — including trans people — continue posting to Twitter because has (or maybe now, had) the reach to share critical info, to organize, and to fight back right now, not when other platforms grow their reach, not when other platform match functionality, not when they can rebuild their following elsewhere, but right fucking now.

    So spare me the moralizing.

    Should we broaden out to other platforms? Of course. But doing that requires time and energy—time and energy that needs to focus on the fight for our lives.

  93. 93.

    piratedan

    @Shalimar: I’m not saying that “work harder and faster, assholes”, Unlike being unable to move out of state if the majority of its residents have elected a shitpotfull of asshats and you are in a group of society that is a favorite target.  This is different.

    What I am saying is that these folks have an opportunity and a choice to move to a different platform, and it may take a presence on multiple platforms (you know, like facebook, twitter, pinterest and tiktok) in order to find a place that works for them.

    It’s like when any business enterprise shits the bed and makes a bunch of truly unforgivable and heinous choices, YOU decide if you wish to continue to be associated with them.  YOU don’t have to buy a goddamn Tesla, there are other models out there, and yeah, that Tesla may have been a sweet ride and if you can reconcile owning that sweet ride, even knowing the guy who runs the shop is a Nazi-adjacent jack-hole, then that’s a choice you have to freedom to make.

  96. 96.

    piratedan

    @Sister Golden Bear: so begging people to move to a different social media platform that isn’t run by the same people persecuting LGBTQ+ people is ‘victim blaming”?

    got it…

  98. 98.

    Shalimar

    @piratedan: I paraphrased.  What I’m saying is that your goal is right and admirable, but you’re showing no empathy at all for the difficulties well-meaning people will have in achieving it.  There is no place to go yet.  When there is an obvious better choice, more people will have faith in moving.

  99. 99.

    Shalimar

    @piratedan: You think they don’t know their own situation?  Try listening when they tell you it isn’t as simple in reality as it is in your head.

  100. 100.

    Chetan Murthy

    I don’t have a twitter account (or at least, it’s been blocked for *years* (an intemperate tweet, and really, I’m glad of it)) and I block all twitter cookies.  So literally twitter cannot track me.  Until some months ago, I was able to read twitter; then that stopped working, and read twitter via nitter.net.  Then that stopped working this morning.  So now I don’t see twitter at all.  And that won’t change, b/c I’m not about to get a Twitter account.

    I used to use Twitter for only one thing: to read Josh Marshall’s Ukraine Crisis twitter lists.  Some months ago, I wrote him asking if he’d thought about moving them to Mastodon.  He replied, explaining that most of the analysts that he follows in those lists, were simply not on Mastodon.  They were only on Twitter.  Today, I checked again, and …. he says that things haven’t changed: https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/twitter-now-demanding-you-sign-up

    .The one thing this really impacts is those lists I sometimes flag to your attention — a couple about Ukraine, one about electoral number crunching, one about COVID. I find those immensely valuable tools for keeping abreast of key topics.

    I don’t have any solution to this problem. While I personally am trying out Bluesky (one of several Twitter clones), none of the current competitors offer a solution or a replacement right now for this particular use. It’s simply that Twitter remains where most people are. Most of the people following Ukraine on that list aren’t on Mastodon or Post or Bluesky. It’s the network effects that make those lists such a resource.

    For now I just wanted to reference the problem, make clear we’re aware of it. We’ll look for workarounds if they present themselves

    It’s all well and good to say to people like us (civilians, little people) that we should leave Twitter.  But the simple fact is, when so many of the movers and shakers haven’t moved, what that amounts to is shutting off your access to information.  There are many, many extremely learned analysts I used to access via Josh Marshall’s Twitter lists, and starting today, I no longer access them.  That’s a loss.

    But it gets worse.  What @Sister Golden Bear: perhaps *might* have said (so I hope I’m not putting words in their mouth) is that one of the *important functions of Twitter is to allow people who care about issue X, to discover others who do also.  That is very, very difficult on other platforms (perhaps not so hard on Facebook, but then, that’s run by a Fascist too (and I don’t use that either, to be clear)) and basically what you’re asking people to do, is to return to a world where it was *harder* to find like-minded people in the world.

    I’m not saying that there are any easy answers.  And I reiterate that I’m not a Twitter user, and won’t become one, and starting today I’ll get by without that information feed I used to have about the Ukraine war and foreign policy generally.  But I’m not going to go judging others who continue to use it, because I know it’s difficult to replace Twitter, and “well, you just have to spend some time to find your community of people on Mastodon” isn’t an answer, as Josh Marshall makes clear.

    There’s a story/joke about the early days of Twitter, they used to tell at Twitter when it was 12-person company.  They would refer to the Dave Winer problem (he was (maybe still is?) an early RSS proponent and all-around tech influencer).  It was that Dave Winer wouldn’t switch to a new platform unless enough of his fanbase were already there.  And Dave Winer’s fans wouldn’t switich to a new platform unless Dave was already there.

    It’s a problem.  It’s a big problem.  And I’ll note that everything above is purely *social*.  There are also ENORMOUS TECHNICAL PROBLEMS with Mastodon that I could describe to anybody who understands the modern way we build scaled transactional systems.  Saying “well, it’ll get bigger and it’ll all work out” is ….. not an answer.  I personally predict it’ll choke on its own growth, b/c they don’t understand what they’re doing.

    OK, I’ll stop.  But really, I think it’s unhelpful to upbraid little people for using Twitter.  Yes, it’d be nice if people stopped.  But hell’s bells, even Josh Marshall can’t find his information sources on Mastodon: if he can’t, how can anybody expect *us* to do so?

  101. 101.

    Chetan Murthy

    @Chetan Murthy: I want to add that I’m *lucky*: I follow  Ukraine, but since I’m not a mover-and-shaker, it’s mostly for my education, and if I’m less-educated, it won’t be life-or-death.  But I can recognize that for others (for example, for Ukrainians who use Twitter as means of reaching the world, or for young LGBTQ folks in some shithole Texas town like East Incest where I grew up, who use Twitter to find people to reassure them that “It gets better’) it might indeed be life-or-death.

  102. 102.

    gwangung

    @piratedan: What I am saying is that these folks have an opportunity and a choice to move to a different platform,

    And what these people are telling you…repeatedly…is that you are wrong because you don’t know their needs and opportunities.

    Being a great ally here, guy.

  103. 103.

    Ruckus

    @Sister Golden Bear:

    Should we broaden out to other platforms? Of course. But doing that requires time and energy—time and energy that needs to focus on the fight for our lives.

    This.

    I’m pretty sure he’s going to screw up twit. There is more than one reason that twit got where it was and how. It got there because no matter how bad it was, it worked well enough, the timing was good and it grew at the time when they were for all intents and purpose, the only game in town. So now that others have seen the errors they are trying to build something. But some of those errors are what make it work. They didn’t have the number of employees they did because it helped make them look good. They did that because it was hard, it required a lot to keep it going and it takes a lot to get it even somewhat reasonable. Now some of the new sites will make some things better, but will they be twit? No they will not. Not even with the exposure to twit and em fucking up, well everything. They might be better at some point but none of them seem better to me. The only thing that might help them is em screwing the pooch. And does anyone think that he won’t?

  104. 104.

    Mai Naem mobileI

    I’m still on Twitter. I tried mastodon and I found it too difficult to navigate. I signed up on spoutible and was placed on some sort of waiting list and never bothered going in when I finally was told I could go in. I signed up for countersocial which at the time seemed the closest to Twitter but Cain told me it was run by some unsavory techbros types so I didn’t/ continue with countersocial. I thought bluesky was invite only but maybe not anymore?? I figure it’s just a matter of time before bluesky replaces twitter.

  106. 106.

    Anoniminous

    To offer something close to the user functionality and bandwidth of Twitter on a global scale NewKidz, Inc. are going to have to find a bunch of suckers to throw billion of dollars at them.   Twitter raised a total of $12.9B in funding over 15 rounds and was a marginal business before Elon larded on the debt and gutted the income stream.  Social Media is a mature business.  Lot’s of luck trying to find that kind of capital in today’s business environment to throw into a low profit/low growth business sector.

  107. 107.

    Anoniminous

    @Mai Naem mobileI:

    From Wikipedia:
    “Bluesky was described in 2021 as an initiative to develop a decentralized social network protocol where multiple social networks, each with its own systems of curation and moderation, would interact with other social networks through an open standard.”

    Sounds like a bunch of people who have never heard of 4chan.

  114. 114.

    Bruce K in ATH-GR

    Look, for good or ill, Twitter has been a useful, easy-to-use tool to communicate with others and to disseminate information. Like Sister Golden Bear says, marginalized communities under threat don’t have the luxury of picking and choosing what tools they’ll use; they need to use all the tools available to them in order to stave off genocide and extinction, and I wish I was exaggerating. It’s a tool for getting information between members of a group, between groups, and out to the world at large.

    Or at least it was until the end of June 2023.

    I get the sense that Elmo truly doesn’t get the true value of what he’s destroying, that he still doesn’t understand Twitter’s place in the information ecosystem, which is what gave it its (perceived) value.

    Hell, Twitter still advertises itself as the place where important conversations happen. That’s a big part of what drew people to it, and what made it attractive to advertisers. If Twitter goes under, there’s a void that’ll take its place, and who knows what’ll fill that void.

  116. 116.

    bjacques

    @Bruce K in ATH-GR: on the other hand, if Muck understood the value of what he’s destroying, he’d be doing it more effectively (happily, he doesn’t understand a lot of other things either). The effectiveness of troll farms like the Internet Research Agency formerly owned by Pringles depended largely on Twitter as a functioning platform, so he nobbled them too.

  117. 117.

    Baud

    Meta is exploring a new decentralized, text-based social network that could compete with Elon Musk’s Twitter.

    Tech newsletter Platformer reported that the project, codenamed P92, would be built as a stand-alone app, but that users would log in using their Instagram credentials. The move could help Meta attract some of the Twitter users who are looking for alternatives after Musk took over and changed some of the site’s rules.

    “We’re exploring a standalone decentralized social network for sharing text updates,” a Meta spokesperson told CNBC on Friday. “We believe there’s an opportunity for a separate space where creators and public figures can share timely updates about their interests.”

  118. 118.

    bjacques

    @Baud: yah, good luck with that, Zuck. Thanks to years of arbitrary censorship on Facebook by burnt out Filipino moderators and lame AI, there won’t be any compelling reason to learn how to use it. P92 will be just another social medium people can take or leave—mostly leave, because who has the time these days?

    Bluesky is a no-go because its Terms and Conditions will almost certainly preclude any progressive social or political messaging that goes against whatever Peter Thiel or Don Mescalito and the Machine Elves told fash-adjacent CEO Jack Dorsey is in humanity’s long-term interest.

    I’m sticking with Twitter, still. It’s not putting money in Emo’s pocket if every dime he gets goes straight to creditors and child support.

  119. 119.

    JPL

    @Baud: Interestng.

    Since  folks that I follow are jumping ship and signing up on Post.news.     I did that yesterday.

  121. 121.

    Betty Cracker

    @Baud: bjacques makes a great point at #116 — it will take capital, and that’s something Meta has. I think the people behind Bluesky are loaded too? I’m not sure. Anyhoo, Anne Laurie is right about the importance of the embed function. That’s what makes Twitter so useful to media outlets and organizers of all stripes, as well as to lowly blog folk like us.

    The first would-be Twitter successor to get that right may scoop up all the marbles. I don’t think it will be Mastodon because they intentionally disallow quote-tweeting. I understand their rationale, but it prevents good virality along with the bad.

  122. 122.

    Baud

    @Betty Cracker:

    I agree about embed.  I wouldn’t have thought it was hard to program, but maybe it is.

    I thought someone said Mastodon was implementing quoting.

  123. 123.

    lowtechcyclist

    @Bill Arnold:

    This is a disagreement about tactics, mainly.

    No, you were right the first time: it’s about punching up v. punching down.  One can be wrong to punch up, but punching down is almost never right.

  124. 124.

    HeartlandLiberal

    Kudos for the Woody Guthrie reference at the end of the article!​
     
    In other news, schools of business nationwide will be using Elon’s destruction of Twitter forevermore as a cautionary example of how NOT to run a business.

  125. 125.

    Ken

    @Chetan Murthy: There’s a story/joke […] they used to tell at Twitter when it was 12-person company.

    I wonder if it’s made a comeback, now that Twitter’s back down to 12 people.

  126. 126.

    Ken

    @Anoniminous: Lot’s of luck trying to find that kind of capital in today’s business environment to throw into a low profit/low growth business sector.

    Recent news suggests that venture capitalists aren’t all that bright, don’t really do any research, and are herd animals. So a pitch “It’s like twitter but with generative AI, and on the blockchain” stands a fair chance of getting a couple hundred million.

  128. 128.

    Dorothy A. Winsor

    To me, the most incomprehensible part of this is that Musk thinks he can refuse to pay bills and there will be no consequences. Is this a rich guy mindset? WTH?

  130. 130.

    Ken

    @Baud: Great. And I didn’t even have to explain how investors will be recompensed with “series A” crypto tokens, which can only be sold after the company goes public. It’s the modern version of phantom shares.

    (This is not a joke, much of the “investment” in crypto startups is on these terms. Also, because the techbros starting crypto companies are babes in the woods when it comes to finance, and because there is usually a greater fool out there, the investors do sell their unsellable tokens and recoup their money almost immediately.)

  132. 132.

    Dorothy A. Winsor

    Ironically, twitter sent me a notice that it’s the anniversary of the day I joined in 2009. I don’t think I have the energy to start over someplace else. And if I do, it should probably be tiktok and/or instagram.

    I think I’m depressed. I haven’t written anything in several months. That’s a bad sign for me.

  138. 138.

    JPL

    @Dorothy A. Winsor: it’s easy to become depressed when there are so many things out of our control.   Just take care of yourself.

    I’m going to get some chores done this morning, and then watch Are You There God? It’s me Margaret.   

  139. 139.

    Barry

    “[User query: If you are not registered on Twitter, can you tell me if you can still go directly to the Variety article by clicking on the variety.com line in the embedded tweet right above this?]”

    I am a registered user, but I was  able to do that in a private Firefox window, for what that’s worth.

  140. 140.

    Anne Laurie

    @Ken: At this point, I suspect the cheat code would be to find the right billionaire(s) and whisper ‘Well, *Elon* couldn’t make it work, but you could certainly do better than *that* little putz… ‘

  144. 144.

    Tony Jay

    @Dorothy A. Winsor:

    Have you had a crack at writing insulting dialogue to put into the mouths of oddball Republican politicians? It never fails to brighten my mood. 🤞🏻

    I keed. Look after yourself. There’s a lot of people here happy to help in whatever way they can.

  145. 145.

    Percysowner

    @Art: Reddit is having its own growing pains now. They are trying to charge APIs a lot of money for them to be used, including ones that provide accessibility for blind users, so you may want to hold off. I don’t use a lot of subs so I can’t talk to notification updates.
    ​
     

    @Ohio Mom: ​
     Yeah, I get tons of “bras for small breasts” ads, which is 1) amusing since I had a bilateral mastectomy and 2) somewhat offensive because I keep getting pictures of women with only their bras on, which is fine if that’s what I’m looking for, but jarring in the middle of comments on a serious article.

  146. 146.

    lowtechcyclist

    @Thor Heyerdahl:

    “So The Combination Is 1, 2, 3, 4, 5? That’s The Stupidest Combination I Ever Heard In My Life!”

    Being of a certain age, maybe I should go with 123whatarewefighting4

    Then if my wife needs my password for one of my accounts, I can sing, “it’s one, two, three, what are we fighting for?”

  147. 147.

    Frankensteinbeck

    @Bruce K in ATH-GR:

    he still doesn’t understand Twitter’s place in the information ecosystem

    He has at least a rough idea.  The whole point of this for Musk was to force liberals communicating online to endure hate speech while they do it.  That’s what the ‘free speech’ and ‘comedy’ shit he goes on about means.  He’s an asshole bigot troll enforcing asshole bigot troll supremacy.

    @lowtechcyclist:

    it’s about punching up v. punching down.

    Superb insight here.  Really brought the debate into focus for me.

  148. 148.

    Jinchi

    @Krista (RedKitten That Was): It’s hard to not think he broke the damn thing on purpose — the path off the cliff was certainly unerring.

    That’s just because he’s a true believer in his own brilliance.

    He was never going to change course, even as he kept hitting the guardrails.

  150. 150.

    Jinchi

    @Bill Arnold: ​
     

    123456 123456789 guest qwerty 12345678 111111 12345 col123456 123123

    These all look like the defaults that someone would enter when they install a system, with the assumption that the actual user will change it.

    And a lot of them don’t

  151. 151.

    mali muso

    I guess I should be grateful that the Twitter implosion is helping me gain back hours of my time.  I was never a registered user (and never will be), but I had a list of bookmarked favorites that I spent time reading, discovering interesting threads, etc.  Glad that this place still works at least! :)

  153. 153.

    Another Scott

    Take care of yourself, D.A.W. (and everyone). It’s hard, but things will get better.

    In the knowledge is power and a guide to action, but we need to act, side of things – Phys.org:

    A warming world is transforming some major snowfalls into extreme rain over mountains instead, somehow worsening both dangerous flooding like the type that devastated Pakistan last year as well as long-term water shortages, a new study found.

    Using rain and snow measurements since 1950 and computer simulations for future climate, scientists calculated that for every degree Fahrenheit the world warms, extreme rainfall at higher elevation increases by 8.3% (15% for every degree Celsius), according to a study in Wednesday’s journal Nature.

    Heavy rain in mountains causes a lot more problems than big snow, including flooding, landslides and erosion, scientists said. And the rain isn’t conveniently stored away like snowpack that can recharge reservoirs in spring and summer.

    “It is not just a far-off problem that is projected to occur in the future, but the data is actually telling us that it’s already happening and we see that in the data over the past few decades,” said lead author Mohammed Ombadi, a Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory hydrologist and climate scientist.

    […]

    More information: Mohammed Ombadi, A warming-induced reduction in snow fraction amplifies rainfall extremes, Nature (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-023-06092-7. http://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06092-7

    (Unfortunately, that Nature article is paywalled.)

    We’re all being affected, and will be affected even more, by these changes to the atmosphere – no matter where we live. One cannot rapidly change gigantic systems that have evolved over billions of years without dramatic consequences.

    :-(

    A recent extension of the “hockey stick” graph was published in Nature in 2021 (21 page .PDF) and is freely available.

    Eyes on the prizes, and keep pushing forward to make things better.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  154. 154.

    mali muso

    @Baud: ​
     Noooo! Having flashbacks to that awful period (was it last year) when the site went dark.

  157. 157.

    way2blue

    Late to the party, but yes—when I click the Variety embed—the article opens in a new tab.

  158. 158.

    Sebastian

    Twitter is going to fail fairly soon. My guess is within a year. The question is what comes after the banks take ownership.

    Coop would be ideal operating model for an entity like Twitter, pretty much like the Green Bay Packers but I don’t see a path to that outcome yet.

  159. 159.

    Tony G

    Politics aside, Elon Musk has demonstrated to the world that he’s a moron and the worst possible kind of manager — a guy who tries to micromanage everything, but who knows nothing.  I’ve read speculation that the latest Twitter screw-ups are due to bad code in a recent change.  Fair enough but … 1) Twitter now has no change-control procedure that makes sure that adequate testing has been done before a change goes live?  2) Twitter has no support team that can react quickly to a problem by determining the root cause of the problem and then either fixing it or backing out the change?  What a Mickey-Mouse operation.

  160. 160.

    mwing

    I’ve always used twitter without logging in. So when this change was made, I tried logging in. OK on laptop.

    But on phone- the login process itself doesn’t work- did not recognize correct password.

    Tried it with Google. OK but then asked for my birthdate, not optional- with, here’s the kicker- no way to type it in- it only goes to an image of a calendar for the current month. With, you can tap to go back one month. One month at a time only.
    This was June, 2023. I was born in 1966. So that would be somewhere around 670 individual taps if I actually wanted to enter it correctly ;-)
    So I went back a year or so and entered the date as if I was about 1 year old, which also did not work, don’t know if that was because the whole thing just doesn’t at all work, or if it knows to reject people claiming to be 1 year old.
    So now I can no longer use twitter on my phone at all, and have been…reading more? I mean, this change wasn’t voluntary but I think it is healthy? I think twitter “addiction” is some kind of a real thing and a mostly destructive one, since most of the content- political twitter anyway- is angry, negative and hostile?
    Like, if you talked to people like that in real life it would be because you were trying to provoke a bar fight?

Comments are closed.