I Did Nazi Crustpunk Bar Fail, Redux [UPDATE-1]
[NB: Check the byline, thanks. Updates to appear at bottom of post. /~Rayne]
Because you people will NOT stop whining about the bird-logoed crustpunk Nazi bar sinking even further below the waterline, I am putting up a dedicated post for that subject.
RULE NUMBER ONE: Nothing but Twitter and social media related comments allowed in this thread.
RULE NUMBER TWO: Do NOT take your comments about Twitter and other social media platforms to other threads.
RULE NUMBER THREE: See the first two rules, and don’t expect this site to have any power to do anything to change the crustpunk Nazi bar or other similarly centralized social media failures like Reddit and that scofflaw Meta (home of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp).
~ ~ ~
UPDATE-1 — 8:30 P.M. ET —
Here’s a rough tick-tock leading to today’s huge uptick in new Mastodon account sign-ups —
Wednesday, May 24 — Ron DeSantis’ live campaign launch via Twitter Spaces was an utter disaster; DeSantis’ supporters try desperately to put a positive spin on it.
Thursday, May 25 — Twitter’s chief engineer resigned.
Friday, May 26 — Apparently Twitter had not paid the software company which provided service for live video feeds used in Twitter Spaces.
Sunday, June 11 — Engadget reports there may be problems ahead for Twitter:
More platform instability could be in Twitter’s near future. In 2018, Twitter signed a $1 billion contract with Google to host some of its services on the company’s Google Cloud servers. Platformer reports Twitter recently refused to pay the search giant ahead of the contract’s June 30th renewal date. Twitter is reportedly rushing to move as many services off of Google’s infrastructure before the contract expires, but the effort is “running behind schedule,” putting some tools, including Smyte, a platform the company acquired in 2018 to bolster its moderation capabilities, in danger of going offline.
Thursday, June 29 — Some folks observe difficult sporadically with accessing Twitter links.
The New York Times reported new Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino ordered Google to be paid after she spoke with the head of Google’s Cloud division.
Friday, June 30 — Persons attempting to access any Twitter page are unable to do so unless they are a logged-in registered user.
Elon Musk later confirmed access has been deliberately cut off for all outside users, claiming Twitter is being scraped aggressively.
There is a lot of speculation the service is degrading because Twitter didn’t pay Google, but NYT’s report suggested otherwise.
Saturday, July 1 — Twitter users note Twitter is down. Musk also tweets that users will be rate limited on the amount of tweets they can read each day.
Before the widespread outage, observers noted Twitter had been DDoS-ing itself:
Sheldon Chang 🇺🇸 @[email protected]
This is hilarious. It appears that Twitter is DDOSing itself.The Twitter home feed’s been down for most of this morning. Even though nothing loads, the Twitter website never stops trying and trying.
In the first video, notice the error message that I’m being rate limited. Then notice the jiggling scrollbar on the right.
The second video shows why it’s jiggling. Twitter is firing off about 10 requests a second to itself to try and fetch content that never arrives because Elon’s latest genius innovation is to block people from being able to read Twitter without logging in.
This likely created some hellish conditions that the engineers never envisioned and so we get this comedy of errors resulting in the most epic of self-owns, the self-DDOS.
Unbelievable. It’s amateur hour.
#TwitterDown #MastodonMigration #DDOS #TwitterFail #SelfDDOS
Jul 01, 2023, 11:03 · Edited Jul 01, 13:02
You can see the videos he shared at the link above.
Techdirt’s Mike Masnick offered his opinion about the rate limiting:
~ ~ ~
Meanwhile, at Mastodon:
Mastodon Users @[email protected]
12,916,975 accounts
+4,614 in the last hour
+34,484 in the last day
+108,119 in the last week[Graphic alt text: Four time-based charts
Upper blue area: Number of Mastodon users
Upper cyan area: Hourly increases of number of users
Lower orange area: Number of active instances
Lower yellow area: Thousand toots per hourFor current figures please read the text of this post]
Jul 01, 2023, 19:00
~ ~ ~
If there is more news in the next 12-24 hours about Twitter, I will update this post.
Here’s an article on the latest problems at Twitter. https:// www. thebiglead. com/posts/twitter-broke-elon-musk-solution-limit-tweets-dead-01h497zsmc00
[FYI — link “broken” with blank spaces because the site has not been vetted by moderators. Community members should use that link with all due caution.
Quake — Please choose and use a unique username with a minimum of 8 letters. We are moving to a new minimum standard to support community security. Thanks. /~Rayne]
My user name on your site has been “quake”for about 20 years. Why do I need to change it now?
[Moderator’s note: Because the site has had instances of duplicate users and trolls attempting to spoof users; the name “Quake” isn’t enough to assure a unique identity especially when users have changed email addresses, homepage URLs, and IP addresses over 20 years time. You are not being assessed any fee to participate, or forced to suffer advertising, or asked to forfeit your personal data. All we ask is that you take this simple measure to help ensure site security and user privacy in order to participate. If you can’t do this, don’t participate in comments. /~Rayne]
Read the note. That’s why. It’s not just you.
Sure thing. Soon as bmaz and rayne go to 8 chars I’ll do it too.
[Moderator’s note: There are about a dozen people who have +1000 comments here and +10 years participation who will be grandfathered as well as the owner/contributors/moderators which include bmaz and me. You have 208 with this comment and do not qualify. It’s been nice seeing you, bye! /~Rayne]
On second thought, why not? From now on (unless I forget) I’m quake888. Viva security!
[Thanks for updating your username to meet the 8 letter minimum. Be sure to use the same username on each future comment. /~Rayne]
Well, it’s a start…..Glad you added three 8s (888) rather than say two 8s (_88)
.. perhaps try Quisp&Quake?
[Thanks for updating your username to meet the 8 letter minimum. /~Rayne]
Oh, the possibilities are simply endless! Moving on now . . .
How does having an 8 character username help security/privacy? Serious question, that seems just as spoofable by a troll. It’s not like it’s a hidden password, where more characters makes it harder to bruteforce.
I don’t really have a horse in this, given my comment history/username, but it doesn’t seem like it’s going to do much for trolling/security/spoofing. For duplicates, it makes sense I guess.
Well, thanks for your continued support two time commenter!
Slightly more than 2 times ;) (Not by much, probably less than 10 over ~6 years. Same name, probably same email, but different IP after moving). More of a lurker, the comments don’t render properly on android mobile browser, makes it impossible to follow when they just turn into columns of single letters :(
Attaching a link (broken up with spaces, as above?) in case it’s helpful, but it’s probably a known limitation with whatever blog software you guys use. Been like this for years : https ://imgur.com /a/ZBa3fe1
missed the edit timer:
But I should also mention I do appreciate all 3+ of y’all. Twitter syndrome, I should remember to post the more pleasant stuff too. Easy to not bother with the hassle but that’s unfair
Oh, bmaz, with all due respect, of course
I’m not going to go into detail about security methods here. Let’s just say that the more data we have about a user, the more we can assure ourselves and the community we’re dealing with a human and one acting in reasonably good faith.
It will be more obvious how this works once we’re able to get coding completed which enforces this change. Established community members are lucky to have a grace period in which to make this adjustment before implementation. After coding is completed, imagine what it will take for a semi-automated troll to get by without meeting the first criteria, a unique name of 8 letters or more.
And gods help them if they try to launch a discussion about RICO or treason in their first comment. :nuclear detonation:
RICO? Crap, I was just gonna invoke that with regard to Twitter, but, yeah, okay, don’t want to cause trouble. Punaise, you are my only hope . . .
Hi Rayne,
I think I’ve settled on a name/email combination but as I can rarely find my previous comments it’s a bit hazy.
Was that limit of 10 years+ and/or 1000 comments arbitrary? It seems harsh in both respects though Prigozhin’s troll farm started around 10 years ago.
Can I plead to you here for the appearance of these comments to be improved for those on phones? The indentation means that this comment will appear 3.5 characters wide in portrait view. I have to type this in landscape where I can see 4 lines + the keyboard.
Finally, on topic, your list should’ve started with Oct 28th 2022: Musk buys Twitter.
Typo ps: observe difficult sporadically
[FYI – noted as to Name/Email. Keep track with a .txt file or sticky note or whatever works best. Also noted re: mobile device formats. /~Rayne]
Here, let me give you a taste of the kind of response you should expect for your complaints about Twitter:
Elmo has some level of self-awareness: he knows he’s peddling shit.
As you’ve speculated, destroying twtr’s general utility and accessibility might be intentional, presumably as part of making it a super right wing version of Faux Noise, or worse, just in time for Nov. 2024. Discouraging general users from relying on social media for positive, necessary communications is presumably another reason. But it’s an awfully expensive transition for lots and lots of people.
And yet it’s been more than a year since Elmo’s offer was accepted and eight months since he took over and fired 80% of the staff — it would have been far less expensive for those “lots and lots of people” to pick up and move away from the sinking ship.
I’m looking very hard right now at all government entities which are still relying on Twitter. What good are those publicly-funded emergency messages if they’re both lost to down time and lost amid absolutely wretched material including Nazi content and animal abuse videos? Every single government department and agency should already have spun up and hosted an RSS-enabled site hosted on its own servers already being used for other services; at a minimum they should host a Mastodon instance which is open source.
And I’m looking extremely hard at journalists who have continued to rely on the kludgy Nazi-lousy POS that Twitter has become. News flash: you done fucked up and hard. Prigozhin’s march last weekend was the first major global news event where I could get all the updates I needed in real time on Mastodon, and the US news media wasn’t on top of it save for NYT which hosted its own real-time posts-as-updates page instead. It was extremely obvious how blind US media has become because of the walls of crap Musk has built up since last October.
All of this was wholly predictable.
I’ve also been telling anyone that will listen to me to avoid this cloaca crap. But, of course we all use the tools that we are used to, and the tools use us.
My additional concern is that musk has already turned over management of communications to some other off-shore entity. Any twit that is sent can be read, manipulated, discarded, redirected, etc. There is no verifiable integrity in this group.
Twitter was breached in January. If you had personal information there, it’s surely been hoovered.
That’s why, even though your security efforts sometimes seem, well, aggressive, I appreciate them, and keep commenting here
The govt entities who engaged with Twitter long ago did so in an effort to connect with their communities. Right now, as severe weather hits my area, I’m thinking of the National Weather Service regional sites that chose to use Twitter to announce warnings to their constituents. Today, with the way in which Twitter is throttling users (as opposed to those who have Twitter accounts), accounts like those connected with NWS local offices are scrambling to find ways to get the word out about local weather.
It must be really frustrating to NWS in particular because they’ve had RSS feed available at their site on a fairly granular basis for a long time. NWS also doesn’t track and sell personal data unlike the other commercial weather services’ apps which in turn are repackaging NWS-generated data.
The main page for NWS RSS feeds: https://www.weather.gov/rss
Sign up page for Alerts/Warnings: https://www.weather.gov/enterprise/
The site I’ve used to obtain my local weather observations and alerts/warnings: https://www.nws.noaa.gov/warnings.php
Once I found the observations page for local weather I needed, I bookmarked it and saved it to my desktop and on my phone.
I suppose I should think about a post for these resources. Feels so retro, like Y2K all over again.
Like the very early Internet days when computer magazines would include a booklet listing all the URL’s!
Link to comment with NWS repeater on Mastodon – it goes through Iowa.
https://www.emptywheel.net/2023/07/01/i-did-nazi-crustpunk-bar-fail-redux/#comment-1000560
My weather app reports all NOAA alerts – and my town also lets residents sign up for SMS alerts (which I get from my mobile network provider). So I know when it’s going to rain in 20 minutes!
My wife’s family, located an hour west of Lake Wobegon, have a NOAA radio in the house as tornado threats are a real concern.
NWS offices should never have drifted away from EAS (Emergency Alert System which replaced the old civil defense era Emergency Broadcast Service (EBS)) — the service that lights off my weather radio every Wednesday between 11:00 and 12:00. If there are concerns about EAS in your area you should contact the Warning Coordination Meteorologist for your NWS office to clarify their services. City and county emergency managers should have a robust relationship with that person.
Those same emergency managers should be migrating to a mix of services, since no single alert and warning system can do the job. Local officials may or may not be aware of what their own staffs are/are not using. During a recent fire that destroyed thousands of housing units within a matter of a few hours, the county administrative officer was under the impression that EAS was only for full evacuation (EAS = Evacuate All Souls?) and did not use it to broadcast general advisories.
Everbridge is a cellular based system that many jurisdictions are now using, but that also has obvious limitations. There are plenty of people who do not have cellular phones, or if they do have them, would never consider signing up for a government service. An advantage for those on the more paranoid side of the political spectrum, “THEY” won’t know if you have one of those weather radios.
When it comes to warnings and alerts, political, economic, or other factors marginalize significant numbers of people, often the most vulnerable. Government over-reliance on services like Facebook and Twitter always bothered me. And now we’re all going to pay the real price of “free” services.
There’s an NWS repeater on Mastodon:
[email protected], where you replace lox with the NWS location you want to follow. (LOX is LA-Oxnard. Got to https://www.weather.gov/srh/nwsoffices (map) for your area. (Grand Rapids is GRR, for example)
I can’t fathom that this is “intentional” in that way. If he wanted to make a right-wing echo chamber, there were much easier and better ways to do it, and certainly without all the technical problems. If he wanted to kill it, he could’ve just shut it down (I honestly wonder if bankruptcy and liquidation of their physical assets, servers and such, might have been less financially painful than trying to limp it along like this).
No, it’s quite clear to me that he is trying to make Twitter more profitable, but without even beginning to understand the business he’s in (in fact, he seems downright hostile to even learning what that might be). He fired the vast majority of the workforce – without understanding that content moderation and, you know, basic stability, were major value propositions for users. He then let people pay to boost their tweets and replies – without understanding that the organic surfacing of the best tweets (as such) was a major value proposition for users. Now he’s restricting 3rd party access to those who pay an arm and a leg – without understanding that alternative interfaces, fun bot accounts, and the general ability to go viral beyond Twitter were major value propositions to users.
The latter two in particular are consistent with a guy whose previous experience is in selling physical products not understanding why this company generates no revenue off the fundamental “product” it “makes”, i.e., the hosting of tweets. Yes, everyone else in the world understands that their real business is selling ad space in the forum they host, but that’s counter to what he’s used to, and he’s too stupid and/or arrogant to see it any other way.
(I guess, being as generous as humanly possible, he could be anticipating an imminent crash in online advertising and is desperately trying to create an alternative revenue stream. Setting aside that people have been predicting an imminent online ad crash since like 2006, his approach is still killing Twitter’s value proposition without offering anything compelling to replace it.)
“consistent with a guy whose previous experience is in selling physical products”
(image via @[email protected])
Let us not forget the spectacular SpaceX Starship (engineering) mishap.
Stand by for the Boring Machine company triggering a major seismic event.
Or the utter “cf in execution” that is the Tesla solar roof.
It’s so difficult to know if certain key investors have encouraged Musk to take bigger risks because they’ve got him propped up financially. Look at the Twitter financiers and at least two of them are also invested in The Boring Company.
ADDER: Oh hell. I knew it was bad but these photos from around the launch site…I just want to pummel that moron Musk with rotten eggs. See: https://blog.esghound.com/p/photos-from-the-spacex-debris-field
This is not the way NASA would ever operate. The total failure of the pad seems to show it wasn’t an engineer that made the decision to go with bare, unprotected concrete. As far as I can tell, NASA never even tried that.
Yes, the photos depict a catastrophic launch failure and decimation of the surrounding nature preserve. I wonder whether Elmo has cleaned up any of that debris. He’s not much good at picking up after himself.
Trusting Musk to do a competent job of wiping his own ass seems grossly negligent. Letting him or his “experienced staff” (read as: suck-up lackey-age) anywhere near protected wetlands is a recipe for making a disaster into a much larger catastrophe as they try to cover up and PR away the damage.
Fck whoever decided to build the pad fast and cheap, rather than correctly. And then assume it will be safe with much larger rockets.
Musk is merely a guy who’s been told since birth that he’s Uniquely Special Genius, and thus believes and acts like it. This induces others who should know better to treat him as if he’s that genius when he has *never* displayed any special ability aside from selling his bizarre self.
Two days ago in the town of Livingston, NY, along the Hudson River, a Tesla ran into a house and exploded in fire killing two people and injuring a third, who is expected to survive. Everything, house and car, was incinerated.
A link to any coverage of that story would be nice.
Here’s one report (another was paywalled): https://wnyt.com/top-stories/two-people-killed-after-car-slams-into-livingston-home/
Thank you. A link to a reported story ensures the comment is perceived as fact and not as a hyperbolic anti-Tesla/anti-Musk claim. It’s the best response to the occasional Musk fanboi who drops in here to troll us.
I don’t think it’s at all clear that he’s trying to make twtr more profitable. He might be flailing in that direction, but if his intent is to generate more revenue – from the twtr operation itself – buying lottery tickets would more likely produce it.
Firing nearly all the staff who run the place, not paying suppliers, and alienating all but the most right wing customers are cultural statements, rejections of past practice, not attempts to raise revenue. Especially not when you fail to replace staff or substitute revised practices.
If running twtr well is his objective, he is deeply in over his head. He is engaging in magical thinking: imagining that a place he wants to fundamentally remake in his own image will run itself, while he haphazardly attempts to change it. All of which suggests Elmo has other plans than making twtr a profitable version of its former self.
I always assumed that him buying Twitter was step one toward building his Everything app. Not sure what tearing it all down first will accomplish, but I suspect he has a plan that is not apparent yet.
Can’t help but notice that Starship has slowed to a crawl while he dicks around with the bird though. I wish he’d get back to things that matter.
I suspect Jack Dorsey’s remark this past week about Twitter and cryptocurrency was a prod to get him back on an everything-app. It only made me even more skeptical about Dorsey.
As for Starship: I hope the FAA nails Musk’s ass down until he pulls head out of it and stops treating aerospace as a means to have some lulz. Launching a Starship from a grossly unprepared pad on 4/20 simply because it was 4/20 merits intense government scrutiny.
But, We Built This City On…..Starship!
“…on bots and trolls!”
Sure, only this time, they DID start the fire.
It is effectively a monopoly based on control of market share. Hence, it is supposed to be regulated by governments.
I work at a cloud-services software company. Because we have customers globally, every year I have to take several courses to cover things like European privacy laws, US laws on insider trading, gift-giving to government employees or their relatives, etc. There are always case studies and examples where the SEC or another government agency has come down in some way on someone who broke these laws.
Would be nice for Twitter or one of these other companies to show up as an example of these laws (like the consent decree) being enforced. Instead of the poor schmuck who worked for a small local rail company in Florida. He was targeted by the SEC in a gross overreach and it took around five years before he was acquitted by jury.
> It is effectively a monopoly based on control of market share.
Twitter’s something like the tenth largest social network; it’s not, in any plausible definition, even vaguely close to being a monopoly.
It’s a real loss for a freeloading knowledge sponge like me. No desire to sign-up. But damn…I may eventually succumb. A ton of my browser bookmarks are smart people on Twitter.
A lot of those smart people are spending substantially less time on Twitter in the past six months. The network externalities — ie, knowing that just popping into the conversation that there will be someone saying something smart AND interesting — are decreasing dramatically right now. The other micro-blogging sites don’t have the scale to get those externalities (yet) but the value add of Twitter is getting destroyed.
Tweets of Ron Filipkowski, Bradley Moss, et al. have been my main source of MAGA crime and lies news. (I learned of Empty Wheel thanks to them.) Now I can’t read any of them; I refuse to sign up.
I’ve been (or “was”, it seems, rather sadly) viewing Twitter without logging in for about 5 years now. It’s simply a better experience than the bloody “algorithm”: a list of things the person said recently, in the order they said them. What a concept.
I assumed very few people “used” Twitter that way, but now I’m curious if it was actually a substantial portion of the audience.
(For the record, I was a habitual Twitter user/borderline addict for about 10 years, starting in 2009, so I know what the timeline/general user experience was like. I finally deleted when I got fed up with the piss-poor safety team and general proliferation of hateful monsters under Jack Dorsey. I gather this has not improved under the new leadership.)
What you describe is exactly how I have used Twitter. I see all their ads, so it seems like a fair deal to me. I guess Elon disagrees.
(I usually change the year in my screen name every year. I hope that is OK. I applaud emptywheel’s work in building a commenting community that does not spin into chaos).
[Moderator’s note: Please pick a unique username with a minimum of 8 letters and stick with it. Once the update has been coded and implemented, you won’t be able to change your name. We don’t ask community members for much, not even a working email address — just consistency. /~Rayne]
Seems fair. I’ll stick with this one.
Rick Ryan, what you describe is how I have been doing for the two years I have been on the bird platform. I keep a tab up on safari for each twitterer I want to read, and it works for me. I did get a sign on a few months in, to stop the nag pop ups on my phone urging me download the app and join.
I was hopeful that that my own feed of interests and people I follow would be useful and more efficient, but was disappointed: most of space and astronomy interest tweets selected by the algorithm were stale memes rather than actual breaking news.
Other than the actual system outages, my experience has not changed much with all the recent changes that are widely decried. It seems a lot of the changes have mostly been to in-app interface, and not access via browser. The brief doge substitute for the bluebird did show up in the browser view, bu was not a distraction.
Me too. After my twitter account was suspended in 2018. (I said posted something stupid–I shouldn’t have—I tried to appeal initially but my appeal was rejected.) For 5 years I have followed several accounts anonymously without having to log into twitter. I often wondered if others were doing the same thing. But now even though I have tabbed the accounts I follow, I can no longer read the posts… says I have to log-in first.
Long-time reader delurking to provide the datum that I used the birdsite same way. I’ve been finding other sources since the Musk takeover, as it did not require great precognition to see the current state of affairs in advance. I had a list of users I regularly checked: everything from authors I enjoy, to field experts, to, as others have mentioned, my local NWS. (Thank you to those who have provides Mastadon links and pointed out that the NWS does use RSS.)
You had me at “freeloading knowledge sponge” – I found so many smart people on the bird site, but they all can be found elsewhere and I am now finally done. h/t to Ken White and Rayne and many others others who had the cohones to jump off the birdsite long ago. I’m bookmarking and list making so I can find the “smart people” easily. (Emptywheel.net is first on my bookmark list and was the biggest draw for me on the POS birdsite. I will continue to donate to EW and I encourage everyone who can, to give a little more often. I signed up long ago for Mastodon, Post, and Spoutible but haven’t figured out what to do with them. It’s time for me to lockdown my bird account, delete the app from my devices, go cold turkey and figure it all out. Thanks again to this entire community – your posts and comments mean a great deal to me – I’ll keep following.
It was completely down for several hours yesterday, and it crashed again a little before 11am PDT today.
I figure it’s because the owner fired way too many of the people who were keeping it going, hasn’t been paying his bills, and clearly has no clue that people are still using it *in spite* of him.
I heard rumor that Elon let a Cloud contract expire ….Expired yesterday, June 30th/2023
Don’t know if it’s connected to this post viewing limit issue…..Personally, I believe this is something Elon has caused(on purpose) to force everyone to purchase a blue check mark…..
IMO….This maneuver has backfired and won’t bear fruit.
There is no way for Elon to recoup his money, no matter how many on purpose errors Elon makes…..Time for Elon’s version of Twitter to die.
Cheers
I guess I’m in the minority here about the fact that a information sharing platform flawed as it might be and irrespective of the Nazi-crustpunk ideals of its erstwhile owner, is now completely failing and leaves normal folks like me without real time ability to critically assess significant events. Marcy has already shown us how the chattering journalist class isn’t necessarily up to the job.
Thankfully this site and others like it exist, but Marcy can’t be everywhere and know everything all at once.
Depending on how/where/when you want to get your news fixes, I heartily recommend RSS feeds.
They are not as personal as your favorite musician’s tweets, but they are great for seeing news in almost reeal time.
Mine include emptywheel, propublica, icij, etc. There are thousands of these.
Consumers really need to beat on Google about relaunching Google Reader. I have no idea why they couldn’t figure out how to monetize their RSS reader when they haven’t monetized Google News.
I’m using the free Feedly version to track what is left of my curated RSS feeds (about psychology, culture and art) from the Google Reader era.
The sweet spot between information monitoring, broadcasting content, and social interaction seems to me to be a mirage nowadays.
The question for me, the extrovert, is how to justify the time spent attending to one’s ‘profile’ and content provision on a social media platform. Free Twitter provides me with analytics that show me (very) roughly 2% of the persons who follow see my benign art tweets. So, I remind myself: it is a waste of time.
Will Mastodon, LinkedIn, BlueSky, Spoutible, Tribel, etc., waste my time too?
God how I miss Google Reader. God how I miss the local newspaper too…
Monetizing Reader wasn’t the issue; it’s that an RSS reader, even if revenue-generating, is far too small a product (i.e. only tens of millions of users — Google’s forgotten how to count that low) to sustain executive interest, and therefore, staffing: https://www.theverge.com/23778253/google-reader-death-2013-rss-social
Nah. That’s a shit excuse. They’ve had to spend a metric butt tonne of money to create Google News when they could have simply dressed up Reader’s RSS delivery of news.
Not really: it’s organizationally much easier at Google to sustain a large team than a small one; cost is a secondary consideration. I acknowledge that this sounds very weird, but it’s well-known in the industry — and it explains many of the services they’ve killed.
The logic you’re clinging to is still flawed. Just because a well-established piece of technology like RSS exists doesn’t mean a large team can’t be assigned to it. Google could have fucking spent energy and resources on improving UX over an RSS news reader and gleaned even more user data sooner. They’d probably have avoided lawsuits about their use of news media as well because RSS makes content available to all on the internet.
I am really goddamned mad about this because I’ve owned GOOG before it became GOOG and GOOGL and they’ve consistently pissed away so much opportunity for the lack of foresight.
I’m describing how Google behaves, not how it ought to behave. As a (long-term) shareholder myself, I share your point of view on pissing away opportunity.
“Marcy can’t be everywhere and know everything all at once.”
I’m not sure about this. The first clause might be true, but I’m not convinced you are right about the latter one.
Having no Twitter account I noticed it yesterday reading an MSM article. Journalists have become so used to embedding Tweets in their pieces that it’s now disruptive to the narrative when they fail to work. Presumably they will change their practices if this instability continues beyond the “emergency measure”.
This applies many times over for those who have become used to providing vital public information over Twitter: “Henceforth, hurricane warnings will not be accessible to non-subscribers or subscribers who have viewed more than 500 Tweets in the past 24 hours. Thank you for your understanding.”
The disruption to links is why news outlets should host and maintain their own Mastodon instances — can’t be taken down by unrelated third parties.
If reports are correct that this is driven by Musk trying to stop outside companies from scraping Twitter for data they can use, I’m loving the irony that a lot of this would be driven by Musk firing so much of his technical expertise.
California has strong limits on noncompete clauses, and you can bet that a lot of his layoffs went to work for companies wanting to pull data from Twitter for uses like training AI.
One of the good things the Biden administration has done is push for national limits on noncompete clauses in a similar manner as California. It’s one of the things that make tech and finance bros hate Biden so much, but it’s actually good for the economy overall.
..thanx ~rayne for this post,, at issue bobbbobcon is shutting out the ‘Non Account’ Holders’ or ‘casual readers’, if you will, from accessing posts & threads that are more sought after than *his blue-check bottboyz. Ask a non-twitter friend to try & load a post or thread, they’ll get ‘join the cult’ pages instead. elmo’s a barely funtioning moron at this point.
The only twitter I’ve missed the last couple days is Marcy’s (and the only one I actively go to, as opposed to following links).
This morning I found a work-around posted at Lawyers, Guns and Money that lets me see her tweets. Won’t post it since I don’t know if it’s acceptable or safe. It begins with “https://syndication.twitter . com” It’s still working as of a few minutes ago.
I know how much good people and organizations depend on twitter, so can’t quite cheer for it to sink beneath the waves, especially if that has been Musk’s ultimate goal all along.
Just to update, was able to use that alternate url for various people’s tweets for two days, but it’s dead now. Managing well enough without twitter, expect it will get easier as this continues. (Thanks Rayne for the weather links!)
I refuse to get a twit account, but do miss Dr. Wheeler’s always illuminating threads. Hope she remembers us regular readers here when she posts things of interest there. (Are you still posting at twitter? I do check on Mastodon.)
Mastodon is crap. Do a private and protected twitter account or don’t.
Mastodon has some serious issues for me, with my low vision. I have figured out a partial fix, but the site is not pleasant for me. Post has other problems. Spoutible is usable, but I have a couple of issues there too.
I hope that the people I follow will congregate on a single site, or that we figure out a way to automatically post to several sites at once. The I can focus on tailoring that site to my issues.
Which 3rd party apps have you tried for Mastodon? Let me know and I’ll try to ask some visually impaired friends what they suggest as an alternative.
I use Tusky on my phone; the experience is very Twitter-like, but its one weak spot is Lists. I use the native Mastodon app on my desktop in both light and dark backgrounds depending on the account I’m using.
Many iOS users swear by Ivory but I don’t know if that app works well for the visually impaired.
ADDER – 10:50 P.M. ET – Mastodon users say the Mona app for iOS is the best low-sighted users as it has the greatest range of adjustments for accessibility. Not certain if you’re using a screen reader or other aides at this point so I couldn’t ask if there were any issues related to specific aides. I was told Mona offers a free two-week trial as well, assuming you’re an iOS user.
This guide was also suggested: https://blindjournalist.wordpress.com/2022/05/01/mastodon-for-writers-and-readers/
Let me know what additional questions you might have. :-)
My first post here. I’ve been a lurker for about a year. I am not sophisticated enough to be very active beyond reading and learning from you here. What prompted me to join in was the ‘options’ to using Twitter. Mike Masnick at TechDirt has numerous posts on this topic and from things I have read, I look forward to the options expanding and developing. I love this website and the quality of its discourse. I will try to be a good citizen and less verbose in the future.
eta: spelling
Mike Masnick has been very helpful wrt to moving away from Twitter.
Welcome to emptywheel!
I apologize in advance, but I can’t help laughing at you coming out as a lurker and at the same time apologizing for being too verbose. “Once a year I offer a six-line comment. Sorry for talking too much.”
Thanks for de-lurking, and by all means, do comment more than once a year!
Thanks, Rayne.
That is the problem, isn’t it? Where do you find the people you need to find?
Hashtags. I asked a question on Mastodon using the appropriate hashtags and my question went viral. I got an array of responses — about 50 direct replies in total — to my question about best apps from around the globe in less than 8 hours time.
Thank you, Rayne, for providing this space to air grievances about Twitter. I’ve been using Mastodon since you first mentioned it, months ago. It is difficult to find everyone I’d like to follow–especially the journalists and government entities still available on Twitter. One thing that works as a substitute is the ability to follow hashtags. For unfolding events in Europe, Mastodon has served me better than Twitter. I wish Twitter would fail so completely that the holdouts in journalism, etc., would be forced to find an alternative.
I used Feedly after Google Reader was killed off but I left Feedly last year because of a change in its business model where it appeared to be tracking protests. *insert nope-nope-nope-octopus gif*
See https://www.pcmag.com/news/feedly-faces-backlash-over-protest-tracking-ai-models
I don’t give a flying fuck how they explain it. There’s nothing good about tracking First Amendment protected speech.
ADDER: sorry, broke away to deal with something else and I meant to respond to your comment re: Twitter’s analytics. First, Twitter has analytics because it was built as a for-profit enterprise and it relied on engagement to ensure users remained on the site, consuming ad content. The analytics were provided to users as a means to encourage themselves to push for more measurable engagement to the benefit of its profits.
You need to ask yourself what is it you want from social media? Measurable engagement? or specific kinds of interaction with others you can’t obtain in real world/face-to-face meat space? No one can answer that except you, and I suspect that you’ve come to rely on Twitter’s corporatized measure of performance rather than whether you are satisfied with relationships you are building in social media.
Personally, I don’t measure my relationships by numbers, benchmarking interaction against previous frequency of interaction. I assess my relationships based on their quality — do we feel good about interaction? have we done something beneficial for each other? Twitter could never tell dick about quality, only quantity.
By the way, Mastodon’s art community thrives. Hashtags will help you find the niche/genre you’re looking for, like #MastoArt. Today is #SilentSunday — I see a lot of gorgeous work today, especially photography.
Thanks for your detailed reply, Rayne,
You remind me “building relationships” would be measured by actual relationships initiated online.
Posting artworks is gratifying as a form of outreach, but ‘brain chemistry.’
I’ll give Mastodon some consideration.
Just play around in some different Mastodon servers with hashtags. You don’t need to make a commitment. Use hashtags to look for content on a couple of the biggest instances like https://mastodon.social/explore and https://mstdn.social/explore.
Go to https://joinmastodon.org/servers and use the tool to find a server instance matching your tastes and explore that one.
Keep in mind Mastodon is only one arm of the federated universe — the fediverse. There are other social media platforms serving different communities, functions, genres of content, like Pixelfed which shares images like Instagram, or Lemmy and Kbin which are Reddit alternatives. It’s easy to share between other project platforms. See https://joinfediverse.wiki/Main_Page for more information.
Hope you will find many more likeminded people who will feed and support your interests.
The journalism problem is US journalists. They have developed a deeply entrenched circle jerk and they can’t find their way out in spite of folks like CUNY’s Jeff Jarvis (@[email protected]) explaining how to join Mastodon and Arizona State University’s Dan Gillmor (@[email protected]) exhorting an exit from Twitter.
You may find if you look at government websites that there has been RSS feed available which may serve your needs. The continuing problem is Congress — its members need to move off a for-profit centralized platform because their continued presence is a tacit form of endorsement as well as an abuse of the public’s right to access taxpayer-funded information. Our representatives are hanging out in a crustpunk Nazi bar and they needed to leave it last year.
I only found this site in 2017 because of Marcy Wheeler’s posts on Twitter, where I’ve never had an account but which I browsed until that became impossible for unregistered visitors yesterday. I had generally found it to be a useful way of curating my news reading. And as others have said, a bunch of government agencies have used it to disseminate important information. I was seriously considering signing up for a (non-verified) account today before I saw elsewhere that new users will be able to view very few tweets. What a shame how messed up it’s become.
One of my acquaintances who still uses Twitter says every third tweet is a promoted tweet/advert now. Ugh, that’s simply unusable.
I wonder how quickly this current chaos takes advertising revenue to 0.
There’s been another problem with Amazon’s AWS hosting which at one point wasn’t paid; Amazon threatened not to pay for its advertising.
Haven’t seen any word that Twitter paid that yet.
(a) I don’t generally check my feed (I use bookmarks)
(b) I also use ad-blockers
I used Lists on Twitter a LOT. It’s the one thing which hasn’t quite worked as well for me in Mastodon. On the other hand I don’t need to rely on Lists to screen out the cruft like I did on Twitter.
Also use ad blockers but they never seemed to work on Twitter very well. Now there are no ads in Mastodon.
I feel that EFF’s Privacy Badger is a good compromise between your need to not be tracked and the site to pay for itself. It can break certain sites though, so it’s not quite so easy to use as other ad blockers, but it also does more to protect you.
Cookies are ofcourse only the low tech method of tracking you, more advanced sites are using other metrics.
I can access it, but it’s apparently restricting responses. (Great way to keep people around, Elmo. /s)
That certainly was an entertaining and informative article. Comments were fun also.
Musk carried in a sink on his first day. Should have been a toilet.
Never signed up for Twitter or that sort of stuff.
Why Musk is doing this? To make money but in his greed and lack of imput from others, he fxxked up. He may have bought the company in an attempt to control information around the world and then start making money from it. He just didn’t know how to do it and fired his engineers. Looks good on him.
Hope I didn’t break any rules. Apologies if I did.
Interesting point about governments notifying the public. Perhaps he had dreams of charging the governments for using twitter.
In British Columbia don’t know what they use. Cell phones make a funny noise and then there is an amber alert.
Governments might want to stop relying on private enterprise to get information out.
Elon Musk may be a narcissist, but he isn’t stupid. He couldn’t have bought Twitter to make money. It wasn’t making any money under rational management, and many of his business moves were counterproductive on their face. If he’s maximizing anything, it’s not profit, but rather attention for him, and perhaps his standing among fascists.
He can be stupid – he has other people doing cleanup.
“Why Musk is doing this? To make money…”
There may be a fundamental error in understanding how Musk makes money from buying Twitter. We don’t know anything about the financial internals of the business now that Twitter is privately held and incorporated in Nevada, having been moved from Delaware.
For someone with his obscene amount of capital, $44 billion is nothing. The amount some of his investors like a Saudi prince and Qatar have staked in this venture is worthwhile if they can destroy the main nerve center for climate change organizers who can drive up or down the value of any stock or commodity — including oil — with a few viral tweets. $44 billion was the profit margin for one quarter last year for Saudi Aramco, IIRC. What’s a couple billion they have invested in Twitter to assure the profits continue?
Looking at the other entities invested, we don’t know how many have overlapping and/or conflicting interests. How much does Saudi Arabia’s and Qatar’s sovereign funds have invested in the other financiers? Which of them *doesn’t* have money invested in Tesla which is the primary source of Musk’s wealth? How much has Tesla’s stock price been propped up by the investment of these other financiers since Musk offered for Twitter?
For all his posturing as a “tech bro”, Musk didn’t understand how/why Twitter worked. Still doesn’t.
Maybe Elon doesn’t care how it’s broke, just so long as it’s broken somehow to slow down the media-sphere, in preparation for Putin escalating in Ukraine, and blaming it on Ukraine and/or USA.
A variant of this is exactly my concern.
Thanks to the EW team for keeping this going for so long, always great info to toss back at my right wing brother.
But – “crustpunk nazis”? I know lots of anarchist punks, some of the crusty variety, they all hate nazis. Every time i’ve been to any anti nazi/klan/white supremacist protest it’s been full of punk kids loudly voicing their disapproval.
One can certainly criticize or disaprove of the crusty’s lifestyle, appearance, and sometimes smell,
but they are firmly anti nazi.
Rayne’s referencing a story that made it’s way around social media – I originally saw it on Twitter, but with that being…well, Musked I’ll link to a Reddit post summing it up:
https://www.reddit.com/r/TalesFromYourServer/comments/hsiisw/kicking_a_nazi_out_as_soon_as_they_walk_in/
TL;DR – Twitter was a crust punk bar. The bartender didn’t kick the Nazis out when they came in to have a drink, now it’s a Nazi bar.
Dude. The original tweet thread about the shitty crustpunk bar is in the post I linked in my first sentence of this post.
sillybill eventually went to read that post as should you instead of citing yet another crustpunk bar which is undergoing enshittification as Cory Doctorow has coined it.
Sorry about that last Rayne, I looked again and followed the link you had to previous post about the crustpunk bar invaded by nazis. It all makes sense now.
Funny how that works, eh? LOL
This may be a dumb question.
Since Twitter appears down. I went to Mastodon to see if Marcy has current posts. The last I see and promoted is June 1st.
Is Marcy posting a real time feed on another platform?
I’ve appreciated her amazing effort to catch and confront propaganda in real time. Honestly, a heroic effort.
Maybe her heroic efforts made Elmo lose it!
She has a Mastodon account at https://mstdn.social/@[email protected] but she’s not using it as intensely as she has Twitter. We haven’t found an automated crossposting tool which will avoid the bullshit fees Elmo wants for access to Twitter’s API.
If journalists and government personnel (and some other personalities including potential subjects and targets) weren’t stuck in their fucking circle jerk on Twitter, I suspect she’d be on Mastodon far more often. I’m sure she’ll have something to say about all of this *waves around at the Twitter flames*
I didn’t “get” Twitter for the longest time, but this last year I’ve been using it to follow various trials, and of course, to see what Marcy might be posting here (because often the basics will show up on Twitter before being refined into a posting. Now I can’t get into Twitter at all without creating an account, so for me, the latest changes make it simply inaccessible. Disappointing, and I will have to hunt around for ways to follow Marcy without using Twitter.
As to ads, I run an adblocker and I’ve never once seen an ad pop up on anybody’s Twitter feed.
Thank you Rayne.
Musk claimed he is a “free speech absolutist.” Paid 44 billion for Twitter. He is charging for something that was free and now placing more limits. Current advertisers might question how this is working as a business plan to make money.
No customers, no readers, no traffic, no Twitter.
Evolution selects configurations borne of Memory & Time so “selected” memory appears borne of the “ambition” to shape a singular outcome — vector continuity.
New vectors conditionally emerge when existing configurations fail against the shock of chaos.
Elon’s form of product evolution depends on destructive physical analysis. First, break it, then fix it. Both acts utilize Memory & Time to condition the operative configuration.
To this Twitter lurker, the “ambition” of continuity applies to the message content — especially ew’s ontological critiques — more than the messages’ delivery vector.
Twitter may disassemble under duress. Also, too, (lol) it may continue to evolve over time. We don’t yet know what it will become.
Nevertheless, the pursuit of continuity is behavioral and may seem antithetical and alien to observers in dissimilar frames of reference.
“The spatiotemporally constrained perspective by which we are bound permits us only limited epistemic accessibility to other spatiotemporal regions.”
“The journalism problem is US journalists.”
Is that entirely fair? US media, both local and national, is consolidated in the hands of half-a-dozen conglomerates. Staff were slashed to ‘save money’. For those remaining, Twitter was a handy resource for their articles. Investigative journalism is a dying art, now mostly the province of a few stalwarts (who rely on readers’ voluntary subscriptions).
I don’t have a Twitter account. I only accessed the site because some news item I was reading contained a link which seemed worth pursuing. So I’m now lost to Twitter. But I doubt Twitter advertisers cared how anyone’s eyeballs got there?
Yeah. It’s fair. All corporate-paid journalists need do is point to Twitter booting off the journalists who worked for the US Govt — like Voice of America’s Steve Herman.
Especially when Twitter refuses to answer press inquiries with anything other than a poop emoji –a “crude automated reply” as the Associated Press euphemistically calls it.
There’s little stopping them from mirroring their Twitter posts in an alternative open source environment.
To add to the pile of evidence that Megan McArdle is dumb and lazy:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/02/19/elon-musk-twitter-layoffs-tech/
She was actually dumb enough to write “If Twitter can get by for three months on a fraction of its staff, how many of those folks were actually necessary?”
It only would have taken an hour of reading and phone calls to find out why three months was far too short a time frame to make that kind of judgment. But that was obviously either too much effort, or too hard for her to understand, or both.
That was an amazingly dumb article written by McCardle. It’s almost a setup paid for by Eloon. And how/why does the WaPo management/ownershiip accept this type of hagiography if not complicit?
McCardle is the fair and balanced libertarian opinion person at the Post and most of what she writes is amazingly dumb. I often wonder if she is really as uninformed and ignorant as she pretends to be.
The most generous description of Megan McCardle is that she is obtuse. To describe Twtr’s imploding business as “getting by” – that Elon fired the great majority of twtr’s staff is only one of the problems he’s caused – is like describing a factory burning from an arson attack as still a going concern. Like the business stenographer she is, she is focusing on the labor problem Musk invented, while implying that he fixed it rather than created it.
I have a number of friends who are administrators at various local school districts. Every one of these districts use Twitter to connect with parents and students, to connect with the wider community, and to connect with their peers in other districts.
I haven’t spoken to them since Twitter started melting down this past week, but they have to be pulling their hair out, because Elon locked them out of using Twitter to connect with anyone who wants to look at it. Twitter was not the only tool these folks used, but I know that it played — past tense — a strong part of their communications strategy.
They’ve got about a month to get a communications plan together that does not involve Twitter. I suspect a lot of July vacations will either be cancelled to stay home and work on this, or will be useless as they will go on vacation but spend the time off second guessing that decision as they worry about what they will come back to.
What a nightmare. I guess this is one area where underfunded districts may have an unintentional advantage. My kids’ district stayed away from social media for communication even during Covid because there were too many families without online access, and they always relied on phone calls.
I wouldn’t be surprised if more districts with a lot more funding than ours go back that way.
Long time reader, first time poster here. (Rayne — this should follow the unique username policy and general site policies, but if I botched it lmk.)
My question is how do we solve the dilemma of rich arseholes swooping in and buying out large centralized media spaces like Twitter?
Because, for a lot of us who remember LiveJournal being acquired by Russia or Tumblr’s earlier acquisition and questionable bans, this is far from our first rodeo (especially for those of us from queer circles that platforms-in-vogue have dodgy histories of supporting). And the parallels to Sinclair, NatGeo, and other media spaces being bought out for probably-or-definitely-nefarious ends are notable parallels to what Elmo is doing to Twitter.
Mastodon isn’t exactly a solution, but so far the only compelling option in these cases has been migrating forward when the platform inevitably gets acquired or sacrificed at the altar of ROI (which Masto helps, in terms of portability). Having large platforms fail has always been a horrible experience, especially for vulnerable folks who have difficulty building a presence elsewhere and whose data is then cheerfully hoovered up by the acquirer and turned against them (plenty of examples there, but not citing them here for brevity).
Is it possible to do better than this? If so, how?
I have long advocated a nonprofit co-op model for a social media platform. Mastodon’s open source code provides one framework (there are others including calc.key, and Bonfire in beta), just needs a nonprofit business model for funding and a co-op model for labor related to development/maintenance and moderation.
Most users are willing to chip in some cash to support their instance since they believe the money is going where it’s needed and not into a billionaire’s excessively padded nest egg. With an open and transparent financial reporting process, I think it more likely users will embrace a nonprofit model.
I wonder if this is one of the rare instances when blockchain might have an actual utility ?
No. There’s nothing about either nonprofit operations or co-operative labor which requires the complication of blockchain technology in any way. This is a very simple situation, already very close to it with the operations of existing open source platforms. Adding bells and whistles which don’t add value will more likely become a point of failure.
Especially when it comes to transparency wrt money — this person donated, this entity received it, this is how it was spent. It should be as simple and clear as possible, with the least cost to establish and maintain that transparency.
ADDER: I can think of two rather large nonprofit ventures which fundraise for operations with a volunteer labor force. Their content could be viewed as collaborative endeavors with social media-like features attached to enable collaboration. That’s Wikimedia Foundation and Archive of Our Own. There’s no good reason why a social media platform can’t operate similarly with better documentation about the moderation team involved. In fact, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has already launched a social media platform now in beta, but it is hampered substantially by its operation in the UK which has different laws about speech and may be hampered further by Brexit’s impact on UK wrt EU’s GDPR.
For once I feel lucky being so old. IAL. I worked in tech all my life but was not a techie. I got quite good at things I could see and touch. I spent time in Silicon Valley when it really was mainly about silicon!
But I never ever understood the software bit or how its creators worked. So I learned to simply respect them and assume they mainly knew what they were doing (not always correct but then that’s true of everyone).
Musk, I suspect, has the same failure of understanding as do I but doesn’t do respect. Sorry Rayne but what he has done with cars has been to the overall benefit of mankind, not least making electric motoring credible. Most Teslas work most of the time, just like gas guzzlers.
But the other thing I learned was patience. I have difficulty in my advancing years just keeping up with Marcy here, and have never felt the need or indeed had the necessary mental bandwidth for even faster inputs! I prefer reasoned news with sufficient detail to everything now.
But here’s a thing, UK journalists and politicians are as wedded to the bird as the US and they have not yet noticed what is happening!
You really need to read this bit about Musk the Managed.
https://pleroma.pch.net/objects/5a9bfb64-6589-4e91-a872-c712db161daa
Tesla produces popular EVs in spite of Musk, not because of him. They’re also fucking unsafe and shouldn’t be on the road, but I think you missed the one-day list of burning/failed Tesla stories I posted as an image. The public wouldn’t accept any other brand of vehicle failing like that at a risk to the rest of the public — certainly didn’t when it came to the Ford Pinto, as just one example, or the Chevrolet Corvair which Ralph Nader killed with more opinion than fact.
Nope. Did not miss it, recognise not all Teslas are good, especially early ones. I know the issues of batteries, not just Teslas.
But in fact my point is, and was, that Musk understands just enough physical engineering to enable clever people to make them and he really did sell the idea of EVs to the world, which I insist on thinking is essentially a good idea. I rate climate change as the number one challenge to the world and EVs are one way of helping us stop using fossil fuels. And for what it is worth I have a battery which enables my to run my house for most of the day entirely on solar power and, guess what? It is made by Tesla.
Which does not stop me thinking Musk is a dangerous maniac who does not know what he is messing with.
Tesla went from the car I was most likely to buy in February 2022 to the car I would never buy. We just bought an all electric Volvo XC40 and really like it. We screwed up though because we could have gotten an expenses paid trip to Sweden to pick it out from the factory. But we did get a $7500 coupon from Costco.
[Moderator’s note: Could you please confirm you’ve changed your email address? Thanks. /~Rayne]
I haven’t changed my email address. I may have mistyped it or maybe my iPhone decided to autofill a different one. Or maybe as here I am inconsistent with using initial capital letters. I never use the email address I provided as it is entirely filled with spam.
Sorry for the confusion. I had thought about signing in as Elmohasleftthebuilding, as that would be funny, but would be against the rules.
[Let’s avoid humor in the usernames. If you had used “Elmohasleftthebuilding” you’d have been in moderation longer because that’s a wholly new identity. I will tell you that your address up to your last comment had been “yahoo”; your last comment was “me”. The new address also created a new user identity requiring moderation. You would have had to wait much longer had I not already been doing moderation. /~Rayne]
It was an auto fill probably, as that’s an email I use too. Sorry to make extra work for you. Thanks for making this an excellent site.
We’re going to agree to disagree about “Musk understands just enough physical engineering to enable clever people to make them” because of his racially discriminatory practices.
On that we do not disagree; racism is never acceptable.
Thanks for the update, Rayne. Since I had to take oxycotin due to injuries, twice, I have had experience with potential addictions. Getting off of them the first time was slow. The second time I knew a trick. Marijuana is legal in Colorado. Giving up Twitter wasn’t hard. Ms. Wheeler and Tribel helped.
Are we sure this is real and not a Chaplin movie or a low budget Bill Murray flick? Will Keanu Reeves suddenly step off the set and announce its all fake?
LOL It’s fake on the face of it. Musk is not a competent business manager nor is he an engineer, the latter of which he fought like crazy to avoid disclosing formally during discovery when he was fighting the acquisition of Twitter.
Somebody here or in another social media platform coined the term “malept” during a debate about incompetence and/or malignance in relation to Musk. Many said, “Why not both?” and “malept” emerged.
Malevolence, maybe was the word.
But funny story. And good post and comments, Rayne and community.
—
Quote from recent Wired story about yet another guy trying to create a Twitter replacement:
“We’re all roulette balls spinning around the rim of the social-media wheel, waiting to see where circumstances compel us to land.”
Seems about right.