I wrote about how it's going on here, and tried to pin down whatever Twitter Blue Mindset is. https://t.co/1DiK0Zh1um
— David Roth (@david_j_roth) May 14, 2023
A little treat, as we wrap up the weekend…
Because Twitter is so big and open-ended, and because it is a product of the grandiose and impatient and deliriously shallow world of Silicon Valley, the ways in which it has been talked about by the people who talk about it most have mostly been ridiculous. For all the site has been—sometimes also a place where important things happen, more often a place to watch less-important things happen alongside if not truly with other people, always a a wall on which to write graffiti and a periscope that would show you a stranger being weird—it has never been what they said it was. The overheated register in which Silicon Valley types have tended to talk about Twitter—as The Global Town Square, a horizonless agora in which all of humanity can meet to uh engage in free speech together or whatever—is how they always talk about whatever they are selling, right before they move on to selling something else. For better and worse, these people like Twitter—many people do—but they can’t say why, or call it what it is. And so it has to bring people together, for the future’s sake.
You can see the problem. It is a miraculous thing, or anyway an impressive one, to invent a platform on which anyone can speak to anyone/everyone else, about anything. But because these people don’t really value people or togetherness very highly, or have much to say, or consider the future as anything but a place where they will become richer, they don’t really know what to do with that. “Bringing people together” is a value-neutral thing, and a mass of humanity does not become a community—and is not prevented from becoming a mob—simply because they’re all in the same place. Silicon Valley types want whatever’s next big because there might be money in it, but also they are fundamentally not very interested in inhabiting or maintaining the new realities they shape; it’s too much like work. Maintaining things is hard, and requires much more care than making things does…
This is why Elon Musk was always the worst possible person to own Twitter. Musk has long been one of the thirstiest, corniest, most tiresome posters on the site, which is saying quite a bit. More worryingly, though, Musk has used the site—relentlessly, exhaustingly, constantly—in a way that suggested he had no idea what it did, or how people actually used it, or even why they might…
His priorities, upon assuming control, seemed to resolve to firing as many people as possible and bringing the site into line with both his peculiar personal conception of order, his world-historically dire sense of humor, his opaque but ominous personal politics, and his cohort’s metastatic sense of ambition, which dictated that every site’s aspiration should be to become the entire internet. Musk moved quickly, and broke things—the things and systems and livelihoods he was determined to break, but also the technology that prevented the site from boosting animal torture videos. Everything got much worse, and much more like Musk’s own posts and replies. “Basically, he’s taken all the good things about the site and made them very bad,” Dan Ozzi wrote in his REPLY-ALT newsletter. “He invented problems that didn’t exist and ‘fixed’ them in the most comically disastrous fashion.”
This is familiar. For all of Musk’s luridly corny extravagances, he has always been defined by his deficits. He wants very much to be funny, but manifestly is not; he wants to be seen as brilliant and heterodox and fearless, but has the opinions and tastes and politics of a very rich middle-aged man who isn’t especially curious or literate; he sees himself, or anyway sells himself, as a visionary and a pioneer, but has revealed himself time after time to be a classically cretinous capitalist. Musk’s vision for humanity is grandiose and obscure; his impulse to stomp on anyone unlucky to find themselves working under him has always been more clearly and shamelessly expressed. His big ideas unfailingly reveal themselves to be either grubbing for state subsidy or “buy and pave a space, and put up a gate at the entrance.” The first was off the table, and so Musk attempted to turn the free site he’d bought into a subscription-driven business…
This would not work as business because, as Ed Zitron has noted, the ham-handed subscription service that Musk created aligned much more closely with his strange understanding of the site than it did with any observable desire in the marketplace; also characteristically, neither the site itself nor the subscription services worked very well. More broadly, the attempt to bring the site to heel was doomed to fail because Twitter is too messy. This is not an engineering failure; it’s foundational. That mess is functionally what the site is, both the elemental output unit of its users’ labor and, in aggregate, the product that Twitter puts up for sale. Musk tried to impose order where the site was least under control and therefore most vital and valuable, seemingly because he does not really approve of other people; he introduced chaos into the elements of the company that once ordered the mess enough to make it legible to users and sellable to advertisers. He did that part because he’s a showboat and a dunce…
Many of these [paid subscriber] users struggle with what the humorist Dave Barry long ago called “humor impairment,” which was less the inability to make or take a joke and more an inability to perceive one. As with Musk himself, there is the sense that somewhere along the line a string of cry-laughing emojis have tragically supplanted the capacity or willingness to laugh. The shape of a laugh is important to how these users express themselves—the jarring mirthless cackle of Tucker Carlson, who revealed last week that he plans to move his show to Twitter somehow, or a burst of ROFL’s that says “I am laughing in a wised-up way at this stranger’s dismay at a school shooting”—but the actual form and content of laughter seems somehow out of reach, or too great a risk…
It makes sense that these users would be drawn to Musk, even to the point of posting like him, because he resembles them in his sour incuriosity, and is aspirational in his impunity and wealth. As it happens, that type of rich authoritarian—distractible, idly vicious, relatable in his proud pissy cretinousness—already has an avatar in American politics. Musk sought out this population of blowhards and temporarily embarrassed grand inquisitors and armchair genocidaires, and they invariably found him, but this is a tough crowd. Where Musk has struggled to keep that constituency happy, it reflects less on his seemingly sincere receptiveness to their hair-trigger credulity, bigotry, and vengefulness and more on the fact that these people are fundamentally unappeasable, and fundamentally opposed to being appeased.
This worldview, as expressed through a sprawling cast of independent operators, is built around not just incubating but selling a very specific type of grievance. Each of those operators is the protagonist of their own dim hero’s journey; so is Musk. But there’s no community or coalition to find, because the selfishness that defines this politics is inherently so unstable. There are just too many enemies in it for the world to make sense as anything but a concentric field of threats. Musk held some appeal in this context as a potential annihilating godhead, but he was always going to disappoint—not because he is clumsy, or insufficiently brutal, but because this politics is grounded in that disappointment…
For all the overwrought ways in which Twitter has been described—Carlson called it “the place where our national conversation incubates and develops” in announcing his move—the comparison that always made the most sense was too small-bore for the big-thinking types. I’ve always thought of Twitter as a house party that I could visit or leave at my leisure. Different things were happening in different rooms, some of them for me and some of them very much not. Over time I learned how to find the scenes and conversations I liked, and came to recognize the people I saw in those rooms as friends. (The owners were of course not around.) This is a fine thing for a website to be, I think.
But if you are the sort of person who goes to parties aiming to win, or just spend your time there haranguing other partygoers to buy the supplements stacked in your garage or agree with your awful political opinions or just interrupt other people’s conversations by saying “whatever!” or “sounds woke!”—in that case, you would not have fun there. Some of those people would leave. Others, because they are more ambitious or angrier or lonelier or some combination of the three, would stay while growing ever more upset about how they were being treated. They would also tend to avoid the other people who seem to be feeling the same way, due to not wanting to associate with less-successful types. They might forget that they could leave; things might get dark.
They might think, while circulating and periodically lobbing hate speech into rooms full of people they’ve come to regard as enemies, that it could be funny, or anyway not entirely undeserved, to just burn the house down with everyone inside it. The more those people navigated that rapidly emptying space—other people were leaving, things suddenly felt edgy and crowded and late—the less sure they would become that they were joking. Maybe they really did want to burn it down, on principle or just out of spite. But you’d need a lot of money to do that.
Speaking of dark… First comment under the post, when I read it:
The Segway figured out how to kill its father far more quickly than Tesla or Space X have, unfortunately.
NotMax
Need it be said? Apparently so.
Blech.
Josie
“less the inability to make or take a joke and more an inability to perceive one”
Wow. I love this. It expresses the truth of certain persons’ lack of a sense of humor so perfectly.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
The nice thing about the blue checks going to chuds now is it that it’s a lot easier to know who to ignore when reading tweets and replies
different-church-lady
Twitter is a toy.
Twitter has never been anything but a toy.
Now it’s a toy owned by a child. And it being redesigned into a toy that’s small enough for democracy to choke to death on.
different-church-lady
@NotMax:
Is this a rotating tag yet?
Edmund dantes
Segway didn’t kill its father. It killed the guy that bought the company.
BeautifulPlumage
The Segway reference is *mwah* perfect
different-church-lady
A bon mot to be sure, but the Segway’s father (Dean Kamen) is alive and well. It’s the step-father who rode the thing off a cliff.
Anne Laurie
… Much as Elon Musk bought Twitter, the company!
Baud
@different-church-lady:
Does that make Balloon Juice a sex toy?
Baud
I kind of wish Mastodon had taken off because Iike the interface more than Twitter. The Twitter UI is one of the things that deterred me from it. Now I’m glad I didn’t invest the time.
bbleh
I can’t help but see WWE as a metaphor for this particular fiasco, as for many others right now. Except in the real world, the WWE performers like Musk and TFG are breaking real things and causing real problems.
Oh well. The show must go on.
BeautifulPlumage
@BeautifulPlumage: OK, not perfect
dmsilev
@Baud: Ordinarily I’d say ‘don’t kinkshame’, but exceptions have to be made.
zhena gogolia
So delighted to see the headlines in my NYT today. P. 16: “Biden’s Sluggish Start Worries Democrats, but Aides Insist All Is Well.” P. 21: “Black Students on a Biden Disconnect and Their Generational Shift.”
Baud
@zhena gogolia:
Sluggish start when the election is over a year and a half away?
This isn’t news that liberals are paying for.
Omnes Omnibus
@Baud: Doubtful.
JaySinWA
I am really having a problem parsing the last paragraph.
The sentences and clauses seem to be a jumble of self contradictory thoughts to me. The prose seems to get in the way of the meaning.
zhena gogolia
@JaySinWA: Cannot read it at all.
JaySinWA
@zhena gogolia: It looks like one of those bad AI generated statements. No clear thought was expressed, or rather too many, but without any clear point being made.
Mai Naem mobile
I haven’t read the piece but I hope Roth mentions Musk being brought in apartheid era South Africa. I do believe that has an affect on Musk’s worldview and its not just the racism. Its his affinity for autocrats and having a ruling class etc etc
NotMax
@bbleh
Just Shows to Go Ya.
:)
Suzanne
Does this not encapsulate a certain cohort of white dude so well?! Like the SNL skit of The One-Up Guy.
Our politics seems to be the primal scream of One-Up Guys who are being ignored.
Brachiator
Twitter has proven to be useful, even fun, in many ways, to those people who like it and use it. But like all social media used by imperfect, messy human beings, it can also bring out the worst in people.
Musk doesn’t realize the value of Twitter and seems determined to destroy it. That’s unfortunate. But he bought it and it is his to wreck.
Bill Arnold
@different-church-lady:
Hard nope.
Twitter is a computational propaganda platform that has had large meat-world impact.
It used to be a semi-transparent computational propaganda platform, with the time-labeled tweet-graph accessible to researchers with a modest budget, who were able to, and did, map out influence operations, in the last year or so in real time.
Musk put a stop to that.
– It is now opaque except to those with substantial financial resources. (The API is now absurdly expensive.) Little and gratuitously nasty changes like removing the parent tweet of a reply from replying tweets in UI, make mapping the web of an influence operation near impossible now for those without substantial funds.
– Shadowbanning (where a user is “demphasized”/downboosted such that even searches do not show a user) for purposes of political manipulation is common now. In the last few days I’ve seen Bellingcat shaddowbanned. I’ve seen shadowbanning for (what appeared to be) simple harsh references of Musk’s decision to put his thumb on the scale in the Turkish election by banning certain users disfavored by the Erdogan regime just prior to the election. (Twitter refused such a request in 2014.)
– The regularization of the realtime use of such tooling (i.e. easy manipulation of “the algorithm”) for political purposes means that Musk is almost certainly toying with making Twitter a propaganda tool for GOP electoral gain in the 2024 US election. This is over and above doing away with most moderation, and reinstating accounts banned for (mostly) good reasons, making the place much more unpleasant for e.g. non-MAGA USA users.
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.
NotMax
@Baud
Thing I learned this week.
The original title for the (not very good) 1941 movie Bahama Passage was Dildo Cay.
Baud
@NotMax:
That deserves to be remade as the author intended.
Baud
@Bill Arnold:
I agree that Musk will try to influence the election next year.
BR
I have been enjoying all the nature and animal posts today across various Mastodon servers, a nice antidote to toxic social media:
https://kolektiva.social/@BigJesusTrashcan/110369201652077233
https://mstdn.social/@stshank/110368696320054806
https://photog.social/@IanCykowski/110367829183138548
Gin & Tonic
@JaySinWA: There was a bit that I think Jon Lovitz did on SNL, where he’d over-emote and call it act-ING!!! I feel that Dave Roth is doing write-ING!!!
bbleh
@Bill Arnold: um, eek. Any reason to suppose his efforts are limited to supporting the GOP? Countries tend to have rather substantial, ah, resources to devote to this sort of thing, and the general story seems to be that Elon is rather underwater on this particular purchase.
NotMax
@Gin & Tonic
Gotta link another.
;)
bbleh
@JaySinWA: I get the “angry late-night party-hanger-on” vibe, and I can SORTA connect it to disconnected tech-bro or angry MAGAt, but the last sentence leaves me … ???
satby
@different-church-lady: disagree, but for a different reason than Bill. We tend to look at everything based only how it affects things in the U.S.
I sent this link to AL a while ago because I thought it explained how important Twitter has been for democracy and resistance movements all over the world:
Twitter established a conversation between journalists, politicians, and public figures who are shaping the public imaginary with people who would otherwise never have had access to those levels of influence. For instance, Twitter allowed people from the academic world to share with a broader audience what they think and observe – and thereby inject their analysis and commentary into the public debate to an entirely unprecedented degree (yes, that’s people like me, a historian from Germany who, four years ago, was sitting on the other side of the Atlantic with almost zero connections outside German academia and no public platform at all).
Most importantly, Twitter has been instrumental in amplifying the voices and demands of traditionally marginalized groups. That’s where it really demonstrated its democratizing potential. Much of the moral panic over “cancel culture” – which animated Musk to buy Twitter in the first place – is a reaction to precisely this: Traditionally marginalized groups have gained enough influence and have acquired the technological means to affect the political debate.
Twitter has been crucial in this uphill struggle of traditionally marginalized groups finally making their demands heard, being able to extract a political cost for certain discriminatory speech and behavior: a tool for organizing, a platform, a global amplifier. It has enabled people with absolutely no traditional access to power, no powerful institutions to back them up, to speak to elites directly, criticize them in the public square. How valuable this has been is evidenced by the fact that many of those elites are so consistently bemoaning “persecution” – and, like Musk, wish to sabotage and destroy this instrument for public criticism. To the extent that traditional societal elites – and elite white men, in particular – face a little more scrutiny today than in the past, that they have been deprived of their supposed “right” to unquestioned deference and affirmation, Twitter has helped democratize public life. Edited to add emphasis
JaySinWA
@bbleh: The Saudi’s have a significant stake in the Musk Twitter takeover. They have interests in the US and around the world.
Scout211
Elon Musk Hired Twitter CEO 3 Days Ago. She Says She Started 3 Months Ago
The big announcement was a bit inaccurate? A dog and pony show? A clown show? Clown shoes?
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Gin & Tonic:
I saw that you mentioned in last night’s Ukraine thread that you and your wife had some friends in Ternopil where there were missile strikes. Just wanted to say I hope they’re all okay
satby
@satby: and apologies for not blockquoting,. Highlighting text inevitably puts the “copy/cut/paste” dialogue on top of the text tool bar. Frustrating.
Fair Economist
@BR: Yeah, a nice thing about Mastodon is that you can pick the kind of things you want to see without Musk’s algorithms shoving obnoxious comments into your time line. I get plenty of bunnies and art along with my politics there, and no wingnuts in sight.
🐾BillinGlendaleCA
@Gin & Tonic: The Jon Lovitz bit came up today at work with one of my co-workers, he’s an actor and was being funny.
JaySinWA
@bbleh: I need a David Roth deobfuscator to decode this tangle. There is some good imagery in the writing but more emotion evoking than thought provoking. …??? indeed.
Carlo Graziani
I thought the whole thing was brilliant. Could have used a bit of editing (editors are under-rated), but nevertheless in a class with 1966-1976 Hunter Thompson. Bravo.
This:
I’d read, and laughed at, and subsequently forgotten about that Dave Barry pearl. But not until today did I realize that it contained a bit of profound philosophical wisdom. The key to humorlessness is not the inability to laugh at a joke, but rather the inability to perceive that something is supposed to be funny in the first place! That’s on a par with Harry Frankfurt’s perceptions on the inner nature of bullshit, and how it differs from lying (liars acknowledge the existence of truth, bullshitters think that truth is bullshit).
Brilliant. Thank you, Dave Roth, for bringing that out.
Anne Laurie
Well, it’s clearer if you read the whole article (which I can’t reprint in full; extracting is hard!).
Roth uses the ‘house party’ analogy for Twitter.
Then he compares the Angry Blue Check Subscribers to the people who ruin house parties, by being obnoxious / clueless / dangerous to others.
He has already called Musk a paramount example of the Angry Blue Check Subscriber.
Guys like Catturd don’t, individually, have the power to destroy Twitter completely (burn down the metaphorical house party).
But Elon Musk, now…
Another Scott
Teri Kanefield has a long post up on Twitter, BlueSky, Mastodon, CounterSocial, etc.. Very level-headed and thoughtful, as always.
Worth a click.
Cheers,
Scott.
BellyCat
@different-church-lady:
UPVOTED
oatler
@🐾BillinGlendaleCA:
“Look! The face of Death is near! and so I flail!”
Sister Golden Bear
@different-church-lady: Trans Twitter activists would beg to differ. It’s been invaluable is getting out news about the Republican trans genocide that largely been ignored by the press, when they’re not actively encouraging it — looking at you FTFNYT.
It’s also been an invaluable source of info for us trans people trying to survive the genocide. I’ve contributed to far too many GoFundMes for trans families escaping Florida in other states, ones that I only heard about via Trans Twitter.
Just because you find it to be a toy doesn’t make that true for others. Yes, sometimes we do need to use the masters’ tools. (And for the record, the popularized version of andre lourde’s quote are both incomplete, and miss her actual point.)
Carlo Graziani
@Another Scott: That’s a deep dive, and thought-provoking.
I do get a bit irritated at the misuse of the term “algorithm,” when what is intended is “heuristic.” An algorithm is a mathematically-defined procedure, that gives results guaranteed by theorems given well-defined inputs. A heuristic is an intuitively motivated code whose structure is tuned to produce desired results.
This may seem like nerd-lawyerism, but it’s not, really. Many of the pathological aspects of modern “AI” (quotes intended and necessary) derive from the abandonment of principled algorithmic thinking by computer scientists, in favor of pragmatic heuristic procedures that seem to do something useful and/or interesting, but offer no guarantees of predictability or correctness. In fairness to Kanefield, she is only repeating the corrupted language pushed by the Silly Valley CS types who promote “algorithm” as dispassionate, value-neutral, objective distillation of necessary truth. But it is an abuse of language. There is nothing dispassionate or objective or known-correct, or, for that matter, “true”, that those terabytes of heuristic code do with our data.
JaySinWA
@Anne Laurie: Sorry, I did read the whole article, checking to see if the last paragraph got scrambled somehow. The party analogy starts in the paragraph above.
Perhaps you’ve read enough of the author to parse the prose, but to me that makes it sound like the kind of inside baseball that makes RW arguments unintelligible if you haven’t been steeped in the string of conspiracies that constructs their bubble.
There’s a lot of clever word play here but not enough clarity. I think I have a clue about what he is trying to say, but damned if I can make those final words jell into a coherent thought. Too clever by half.
kindness
I’m admittedly an outlier. I don’t have a Twitter account, so I don’t tweet. I read other people’s threads when they post tweets and read the comments under those tweets. I’m not drawn to it as a social media site. And the Edgelord Musk thinks he is bores the shit out of me. He’s a wealthy asshole. Seems to try to swing his BDE around which leads me convinced he’s kinda lacking something down in the nether regions.
Aussie Sheila
@zhena gogolia:
NYT is going to NYT. I am not a political optimist, but I have to say there are many things I am following now, like Simon Rosenberg, that give me some optimism about 2024 and going forward for the non maga forces in the US.
I take no notice of msm papers of ‘record’. Their punditry is uniformly terrible.
In 2016 I believed trump would win. Now I don’t believe he can in 2024.
Mai Naem mobile
Bottom line is Elon paid too much for Twitter. Its actually kind of like Jared Kushner over paying for the 666 building in Manhattan You subsidize it or sell it and eat the loss. Or if you’re able to you turn to wealthy dictators to help save your ass.
JaySinWA
@JaySinWA: Okay, if I just take the last two paragraphs and do some mental sentence diagramming I can see a certain sense of it. But he makes it hard work, with a lot of throat clearing baggage.
West of the Rockies
@JaySinWA:
I felt the same way about much of the piece. I’m glad I’m not the only one!
West of the Rockies
@Scout211:
I wish Musk would receive 2 billion poop emojis every time he tweets. That stupid, juvenile poop emoji that Twitter now uses with journalists should receive so much pushback.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
I have to say it always makes me laugh when a member of the press accuses other people of being shallow and impatient.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
I wish all the people who love Twitter so much would just move to another platform so it becomes a sad bot driven echo chamber like Truth Social. He’s actively destroying it. Time to say your goodbyes, mourn the loss, and move on. The less interesting it is because of a lack of interesting people, the more obvious Musk’s failure.
prostratedragon
I’m generally sympathetic, but … the emptying, crowded room?!
Bruce K in ATH-GR
I’m getting the impression that it’s not so much that Elmo is deliberately destroying Twitter, but that he’s trying to alter it at a fundamental level in ways that he doesn’t seem to realize that it won’t survive. He said flat-out that he wants to use Twitter as a foundation for his own version of China’s WeChat, with social, commercial, banking, and all the other functions involved.
But he can’t accept that he doesn’t know how to make that happen. Arguably he’s demanding the impossible in principle, regardless of the how, but his methods are like an adolescent trying to implement what they think is a genius idea and wondering why it keeps failing so catastrophically, not realizing that they’re failing to account for something fundamental in the nature of how the world works.
Like, say, a design that depended on the flow of the luminiferous aether through which light travels, when there’s no such thing.
But one fundamental problem is that trust in Twitter is declining as Musk continues his mismanagement, and there isn’t enough dependence on Twitter to compensate.
errg
I’m really enjoying Mastodon, it takes a little while to get started, because when you first sign up you’re not following anyone, so you don’t see anything. So originally I just started following anyone I knew from elsewhere (including some jackals from here). And then anyone who seemed interesting.
Once you are following a reasonable number of people, you see everything that they post or boost, which (presumably) is what you want to see. You don’t have the feeling that anything is being pushed at you to try to drive your engagement.
lowtechcyclist
@Brachiator:
Now I’m hearing this in the vocals of Florence Welch of Florence + The Machine:
To wreck, to wreck, did I buy this site to wreck?
different-church-lady
@Bruce K in ATH-GR: Think of it this way. Twittter is a cruise ship. Musk is a guy on that cruise ship. He loves being on that cruise ship, but they keep telling him he has to keep his pants on and stop blowing air horns in the other passenger’s faces.
So he comes up with a way of buying the cruise ship. The idea that he doesn’t actually know how to operate a cruise ship doesn’t bother him, as long as he can take his pants off and blow air horns. Soon there are no other passengers except the ones who have also taken their pants off. The ship no longer goes anywhere, but he thinks that’s someone else’s fault. It sits there in the harbor while he screams, “LOOK AT MY FUCKIN’ CRUISE SHIP!! BALLLS!!!!” drunkenly from the helm. He figures there’s gotta be a way to make money on this thing, it’s a fuckin’ cruise ship after all. Maybe a kiosk with some scratch tickets…
different-church-lady
@West of the Rockies: “What it would look like if an 8 year old ran a major tech company” for $600, whoever Alex is now.
The Thin Black Duke
Elon will destroy Twitter for the same reason an abusive husband will kill the wife threatening to leave him: If I can’t have you, nobody else will.
AxelFoley
@satby:
This. Everything you said here.
different-church-lady
@satby:
Every time somebody says this, I remind them that Twitter has also been instrumental in the rise of groups that will oppress those same marginalized groups.
Matt McIrvin
@Bill Arnold: AI tech opens up so many new possibilities for abuse here.
For instance, it wouldn’t be too hard to go beyond shadowbanning and selectively alter posts. You make a tweet. To you, it looks normal. To a user who is not logged in, it looks normal. But to some selected fraction of logged-in users with identities that are not yours, the text is subtly altered by a large language model to promote Elon Musk’s political agenda.
How long would it take people to detect that? If it was defaming you in some way to get you dogpiled, maybe not long, but suppose they just slant your phrasing a little. Maybe even toy with the algorithm some more so that you don’t see responses that might uncover the ruse.
The Thin Black Duke
@different-church-lady: The point is, hate groups will always be able to find a forum to broadcast their hateful propaganda; marginalized groups don’t. But Twitter will be gone so sooner or later, so it’s all good, right?
Chris Johnson
@JaySinWA: It’s really not that difficult, it just elides the final point.
It says, Twitter is like some big house party. And some people who go to the party might be so twisted and vindictive that they would want to burn the house down, killing everybody. But it sure would cost a lot of money if you wanted to do THAT!
Note how much money Elon has burned on twitter, and view the devastating parting shot in that light. In that light, it was not about making money off Twitter. It cost him that much to weaponize and destroy it. This is what he’d always meant to do with it, and it’s going as planned.
Hoodie
@different-church-lady: Herein lies the problem with the “toy” analogy. Twitter is a tool, like a firearm. It can be useful, but also very dangerous, particularly in the wrong hands. Some people treat tools like they’re toys, much like some Americans treat guns, e.g., they’re for cosplay, for making asinine political statements. It’s not exactly clear how Musk views Twitter, as he sometimes treats it like a toy but other times appears to have darker (or at least more dangerous) motives. As we’ve seen recently with SpaceX, Musk can do some very damaging things because he appears to have more than an average level of sociopathy, which is not uncommon in the wealthy.
different-church-lady
@The Thin Black Duke:
If you’re looking for my honest view, I’d say nothing is good. Not one single thing.
I’d also say nihilism is slowly becoming my only worldview. And I ain’t happy about it.
RaflW
@Baud: Saw the other day that the NYT added 190,000 new subscribers in the last quarter. I dunno who those newbies are, but it does seem like it is the news that comfy white suburban centrists™ are paying for.
My guess on who their base is. As city newspapers get Gannetted and gutted (or VC’d and gutted, who can tell the difference), people with a newspaper habit I think are heading for the Times and the Post (and maybe the LAT if west coasters).
We’ll soon have a few mega papers and USA Today with one ‘local’ page of flimsy news.
RaflW
@kindness: If, at its peak, Twitter had 350M users, it’s the users who are the outliers. There’s an estimated 4.9Bn people with internet access. A 7% rate of uptake in our incredibly fractured ‘wired’ world is impressive, but clearly also leaves out a massive majority.
WhatsMyNym
@RaflW:
They probably took advantage of a low entry deal. How many subscribers renewed last quarter at full price, that will tell you more.
Marmot
The comments here are great. That is all.
cedichou
For the record, it’s the owner of Segway who died in a Segway accident. He had recently purchased the company. The creator of Segway (Dean Kamen) is still alive.