Lol at everyone on Twitter freaking out, I think nothing will fundamentally change about Twitter becuase he's too lazy to actually dictate the mundane details of how the platform is run. But he will make a bunch of annoying cosmetic changes like turning the Twitter bird into a Bitcoin for a day or making himself unblockable. Basically how he runs the other companies he owns, as an absentee landlord who occasionally drops by to be insufferable and annoying.
Also if he destroys Twitter through his incompetence, that would be extremely good for the world.
The only way people will abandon Twitter is if he somehow ends up altering the website in a way where random dorks can't yell at celebrities and politicians any more. All most people want to do on there is ratio a sitting congressman.
Some days I feel like the luckiest person in the world to not have a single twitter account
Right there with you. Don't even have a dormant or dummy account. I've simply never signed up.
I was on Twitter for a month during the Floyd uprising when left Twitter was doing the whole "no comrade under 1k" thing. I got up to 1500 followers, I think. I ended up deleting my account because I, someone with no identifying information in my bio or any of my posts, was accused of "whitesplaining" because I told a black woman that Fred Hampton was very much a socialist. It was my ultimate:doomer: moment. Words mean nothing, history means nothing, they're just rewriting the lore to suit the neoliberal agenda.
was accused of “whitesplaining”
I fucking hate neoliberals' appropriation of antiracism, antisexism, gay rights, etc. with the boiling fury of ten thousand suns
I got banned for spamming pictures of Kermit the Frog with a massive dong at libertarians
A former employer once had me create a bunch of fake twitter accounts to give their posts more likes (I know, go ahead and tell me how much that sucks). For a while, every time I got banned I'd just transition one of those into a leftist shitposting account.
Similar thing happened to me. Some chud politician said he wanted to wipe off all Afghanis off the face of the earth after some US soldiers died in the evacuation of Kabul. I tweeted at him that I wish we could wipe him off the face of the earth instead and got a suspension for it. Apparently advocating for genocide is OK as long as you don't specify any individuals.
That's the one! There was also one with a smaller dong I'd use. And one with a Kermit puppet stretching out the hand hole so it looked like his asshole.
I got banned for saying "kill all marketers". I'm very smug about it.
Marketing budgets being one of the most effective metrics for predicting the success of a product is one of the biggest condemnations of "the invisible hand of the free market" as a concept.
The only reason I have an account is to follow people. It would be cool if there were an app that let you subscribe to users without needing an account. A chronological feed would be much better than the shit Twitter gives you anyway.
I feel like there was a golden age of the internet, before modern social media platforms, when everything was just blogs and wordpress sites and bulletin boards and geocities and you subscribed to all of it with an RSS reader.
I don't know for sure, because I wasn't using the internet in that way before social media. And if it did exist I'm sure everything was as shitty as it is today vis-a-vis web discourse. I just suspect that letting a handful of corporations control the means of communication will fuck everything up even worse than it already is.
Like if Nitter could just store a list of accounts in a cookie, that's all I want.
I think there’s a YouTube client that does exactly that. I wonder if you’d have to pull a feed for every followed account at once in order to construct the feed
Yeah, I imagine so, but sites like Nitter should already be caching shit to some degree, (in fact, I know it is because I looked into installing it on my VPS and it makes heavy use of Redis).
You can follow accounts with Nitter like that. Has to be saved as a bookmark or something. You go Nitter.net/dril,byyourlogic etc. and it'll show you a feed with their posts.
Hold my beer I'm about to create the world's longest URL
Wonder if he going to bring Trump back. That's mean the GOP would have significant control of information flow.
Of course he's coming back, Trump is great for user engagement.
Trump says he’s not coming back :trump-anguish:
I'm calling bullshit, there's no way our big wet boi :thicc-trump: could resist the siren song of the bird app if given the chance.
Oh completely, it’s just wishful thinking on his part right now. My hunch that he won’t initially come back, and will maintain plugging Truth Social or whatever nonsense it is for a short while…however once the next thing along the lines of Will Smith slapping Chris Rock happens, he won’t be able to resist it.
"Musk, the richest person in the world, has said that he intends to expand the kind of speech Twitter allows"
Hmmmmmm, what kind of speech might that be?
Jeff Tiedrich must be experiencing a roller coaster of emotions today.
He's probably trying to quickly divest from Tesla because the stock is the 6th most valuable company in the world and they make only 0.6% of the total car inventory per year. He had to quickly spend $40 bil in a way that wouldn't be held up in anti-trust.
This. Also his ongoing policy of stock manipulation and Tesla bot & influencer strategy instead of traditional marketing.
:my-hero: had a baby tantrum and didn't like negative reactions when he posted cringe. The end goal, in his emotionally stunted mind, is to make everyone love and praise him forever and ever where he wins forever like the winningest hero of Ready Player One.
That is not a joke. That's how I see it.
The worst thing imaginable would be if Musk was actually shrewd and diligent and his public dipshittery is entirely a media production. that would break me.
Elon Musk has became the world’s richest man by using his personal brand to manipulate the stock market through social media and secure absurdly lucrative government contracts.
Buying Twitter is an extremely natural move for Elon. It makes a lot of sense for a lot of reasons.
Firstly, as the valuation of his companies is so dependent on him personally hyping them on social media daily, being deplatformed for whatever reason (which twitter has been increasingly willing to do, first with Trump, then the crackdown on the left, and now the censorship of dissenting voices on the Ukraine war) would be ruinous. Buying out his main social media platform is a way of addressing that risk.
Secondly, Elon has a lot of raw capital, and an impressively large (if messy) personal brand but very little actual institutional, political or cultural power. Buying Twitter is a way to use raw capital from his overvalued companies to buy the other three, giving him more power to effect actual change in a similar way to Bezos buying WaPo or Murdoch’s media machine giving him outsized influence to his nominal wealth. Musk probably personally cares about this, but it’s also a smart move for his businesses as
The second pillar Elon’s wealth is built on is lucrative government contracts. Musk owning outright the main forum for public political discourse will give SpaceX and Tesla an enourmous advantage in securing government contracts. Where previously Musk has been able to consistently keep SpaceX and Tesla publically visible with overall good PR (both things politicians care a lot about) and offer the usual large sums of money, so did several other actors. Owning Twitter puts Musk in a Murdochlike position of having something politicians cannot do without or afford to offend.
Twitter is a far more essential part of our social, economic and political world than SpaceX or Tesla are and likely ever will be. It’s absurd that Twitter is “valued” at only 1/9th of Musk’s net worth and trading one for the other greatly stabilises his (previously tenuous) position and increases his effective power.
This is a very good explanation. It also gives him a handy way to exit a large chunk of his stake in Tesla.
This is it. We have reached "You will live to see man-made horrors beyond your comprehension" status. Let’s GOOOO0O0¡!
No, that was a month ago when Patrick Lancaster gave me the please like and subscribe and join the patreon youtuber spiel while in a bombed out ambulance fleeing a combat zone driving past corpses in the street
Reminds me of stories from early in the US civil war where people were packing picnic lunches to go watch the battles from a nearby hill. I wonder if that was apocryphal, it sounds pretty deranged to write it out but people were hard up for entertainment back when the only books were The Bible and The Bible 2.
This did happen at the First Battle of Bull Run, which was the first major battle of the Civil War. Public belief was that the civil war was not much more than a kind of theatrical petty dispute over slavery happening yet again, because that's what the public was accustomed to. There had been a whole whole lot of powderkeg moments leading up to the civil war that didn't seem to start a huge war, like Bleeding Kansas, the caning of Sumner, the Boston riots.
Everyday people had no reason to believe the declaration of the confederacy would be anything different. They thought this battle would be another in a long line of goofy displays where maybe a dozen people get killed, then everyone goes home and the issue of slavery is further kicked down the road.
They had no idea it was actually gonna get serious and be a war lasting 5 years and killing 700,000 people. Those picnickers were largely well off Washington DC folk who saw the politics of the city as a grand spectacle. Then they watched a bunch of teenagers get obliterated by cannon fire, then went home as quickly as they could. Also death to America, of course.
5 years and killing 700,000 people
To the modern US those are rookie numbers
I think it's very funny to read the stories about the workers of Twitter thinking now the company they work for has turned evil.
:squidward-chill: Delegating moderation to the Atlantic Council
:squidward-nochill: A South African "Techno King" bought out the company and a month later the department which maintains the build and deployment toolchain has been renamed "the plantation"
When I saw Mastodon shoot up into the millions of users I got so excited. I've seen so many free software social networks fail before. Mastodon is the first one I ever saw really take off. It ain't perfect, but it isn't a ghost town either.
TBH, Mastodon has pretty much the same cultural problems as Twitter. Don't know if it's the format, or some kind of founder effect, or what, but it's hip deep in self-promoting radlibs.
It's 100 percent the format. There are no good posts on twitter outside of "heh that was funny" for like 30 seconds. It's also very easy to artificially pump interaction.
Oh my god it should absolutely not be on anyone's mind. We've been given a gift, we're free of a restrictive website that doesn't allow for any meaningful discussion and is trivial to astroturf by corps and inteligence agencies and your response is "we should go to another one!" Between this and facebook's decline, we're close to being free. It sucks Reddit hasn't had a proper decline yet but ideally all of these websites would be relegated to bots or people over the age of 50 and everyone else either fucks around on specialized websites again (like, hear me out, forums or blogs) or preferably logs off.
If you're going to a mastodon honeypot, I think that's an awful decision. It's either going to be pointless infighting, or if it becomes an even slightly influential platform, Langely posters will put the fed back in fediverse.
When Carnegie and Rockefeller built libraries, did they dictate which books go in them?
but it was, actually. and the people rejoiced for the spectacle stopped for a day and they got to touch grass.
eh, twitter's reach isn't particularly good - it just has all the journalists and shit so it has more influence than it ought to.
Influential people need to get off their ass and move, because that's all anyone else sticks around for. We should bully them (but not in a way which makes us seem unhinged). There are dozens of reasons why left twitter should have left twitter by now but now that we can add the apartheid emerald mine racism factory failson to the list we can really rub some noses in the shit.
A few platforms already demonstrated that you can't just get influencers to move platforms and expect their audiences to follow. Facebook failed at streaming despite paying hundreds of streamers to use it exclusively and there have been others. I imagine the same issue will occur with twitter.
Things have to start at the grassroots early-adopter level, and then there is a weird chasm between the enthusiasts and the middle people called " the chasm " in marketing. It is the point of make-or-break for most projects, either you find a way to cross it or you don't and eventually fall to obscurity when you excited enthusiasts and early-adopters move onto something else promising.
This is definitely true, but I think things work a bit differently in political / activism circles compared to general media and entertainment. Entertainers are drawn to the biggest platforms like moths to a flame, and their followers tend to be hogs who don't care whether their slop is coming from Mr. Beast or The King of Random. Even for entertainers with cult followings like PewDiePie, their cult accounts for a minuscule fraction of their total audience.
On the other hand, in left politics, thought leaders and genuine evangelists are quite scarce, and are generally confined to the fringes to begin with. YouTube is never going to promote Breht Oshea as replacement for Vaush, for instance. These people have relatively small audiences, but they are very loyal, ideologically committed, and (I'm willing to bet) much more willing to make the jump along with them.
It doesn't have to be an exclusive thing either (unless they get banned). Realistically, anybody in left media should be syndicating their posts across Twitter and Mastodon.
I have no idea how to use mastodon. It's completely impenetrable to me, and I've tried learning it like five times now.
i dont know how to use it either, but i also dont use twitter because i hate the format (well, i use it insofar as i get links from here and other places and look at tweets, but i dont have an account)
There’s not much to know. It all comes down to finding a home instance that you vibe with
Oh okay. Short answer is a mastodon instance a single server within the Fediverse. There’s two ways to think about it: structurally and socially.
Structurally, it’s like email. If you get your email through Google, you can message anyone on any email server, but google is the one who actually gathers up that content and presents it to you. Gmail is your “local instance”.
Socially, your local instance is like the people in your apartment building. You throw a block party and these are the people who will come and shoot the shit. You can access the full Fediverse from any instance, but it’s nice if the wider Fediverse gets chaotic to switch over to sorting by local-only and seeing what your local instance peeps are up to. You can get to know them
Okay I guess I get the concept. But it also kind of seemed like fifty different twitter clones when I tried using it before.
Yeah you can choose your frontend but the big ones aren’t different enough to obsess over unless you’re into that. Finding an instance you like affects the experience way more
I don't understand the point of a leftist twitter. I don't want to shitpost at leftists, I want to shitpost at hogs.
I'm more morbidly curious about where this will go if anything :joker-troll:
I wonder what will happen with employee compensation since a lot of tech companies pay most of the employee salary in stock.. Could lead to an exodus of employees?
Edit: yeah ok im looking at dell compensation on levels and they dont really do stock as part of the offer, and the base pay isnt really any better than what you'd get at a public company. So if this turns out to be anything like Dell they're just going to have a really hard time competing for good people. Probably worse than a startup because at a startup there's always the dream of IPO or acquisition.
Probably a very good long-term business decision to cash out stocks in his companies to buy something more stable. He'll stay just as wealthy when Tesla goes belly-up, and he gave a reason to pivot so that it wouldn't look too suspicious.
