- cross-posted to:
- enoughmuskspam@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- enoughmuskspam@lemmy.world
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Can we simply stop talking about Twitter? At this time, we’re just drawing traffic to articles about it, encouraging more free advertising for Twitter to be made
Tbh i like this circling around the dying zebu part of media, especially when its about an oligarch slowly consuming himself!
Dying zebu?
Yeah. Like trump, I enjoy it, but it’s like alcohol, I know it’s not a good thing lol
Honest-to-God question: is Elongated Muskrat intentionally screwing up Twitter so people can’t use it as a means to communicate? It sounds like a tinfoil hat conspiracy theory, but it’s the only logical thing I could think of at this point that explains this kind of stuff they’re pulling.
I think initially, he just wanted to do his duty as a right-wing reactionary and use his influence to shame Twitter for deplatforming white supremacists, likely having heard that Truth Social was eying up a plot next to every other dead social network that pandered to fascists.
But like every other figurehead of that crowd, below the bluster and bravado lies a very tiny dick and his preferred method of wearing shorts in the shower is spending millions of dollars in an effort to convince everyone he is the smartest man in the world.
So pretentious screeds about “free speech absolutism” quickly turned into self-aggrandizing posts about how he could do it better and before he even got a chance to call someone a pedo, he’d accidentally made some comments about buying Twitter that he was legally obligated to follow through on.
He tried to squirm out of it for a while, muttering about bots and whatnots, but it seems his lawyers informed him that yes, he had also bragged away his opportunity to back out and he was going to have to follow through.
And so a couple of months later, he walked into a mostly empty office with 4 goals in mind.
First, he needed to get far-right propaganda back on track. Too many people had started to see through the “we’re not neo-nazis we just have the opinions, goals and pundits”, plausible deniability schtick and the far-right funnel just wasn’t flowing how it used to before all the domestic terrorism.
That kicked off a flurry of actions like unbanning mentally ill hip-hop artists, internationally embarrassing politicians and pseudo-intellectuals who’d spent decades striving to achieve mediocrity before they said something bigoted and were immediately placed on a pedestal.
Second, he needed to self-soothe after doing something so stupid in front of so many people. $44 billion dollars down the drain! That’s not what the smartest man in the world would do! Especially not if money was the only thing that made him noteworthy in the first place.
So he marched around unplugging things and pretending he knew what he was talking about and wasn’t just lifting key phrases from more intelligent people like a celebrity parrot.
It was an unconvincing show for anyone in the industry who quickly realised he barely had a junior-level understanding of a single moving part, let alone the hundreds that keep a site like Twitter online.
Third, he needed to claw back every penny he could, carefully balancing things like “gleefully firing all the heartbroken staff” with other important business like “indulging his teenage edgelord”.
But each new idea is even more dogshit than the last. He bought a sinking ship and he’s trying to bail out the water with every piece of cutlery in the kitchen. It’s only a matter of time before the office supplies turn up on ebay.
And fourth and, probably most importantly: “Are there any women in this place worth manipulating into prostitution? I need everybody back in the office tomorrow for a face to face”
Removing the Like button means you can’t be Ratio’d anymore, even compared to the comments of your detractors. That means vile, unpopular opinions will no longer be identifiable by the lack of likes. They get to stand on equal footing with popular opinions, with the average person none the wiser. Also, advertisements take one more step to being indistinguishable from organic posts.
Homogenizing content on Twitter supports Musk’s two two main allies (or people he wishes were his ally): advertisers and fascists.
That’s not what’s happening, although that’s what the headline implies. What’s changing is that you need to click a post to show the options to retweet and like.
That reminds me of this SMBC comic: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/artificial-incompetence
Honestly, that gives Elon just an easy out, making him look as if he is actually competent. Which he is not.
daily reminder that elon doesn’t work on rockets or cars, HIS EMPLOYEES FUCKING DO THAT.
In the way that no boss, manager or team leader works on anything, as they “just” order workers around. You really think his employees came up with something as dumb as the cybertruck on their own?
He’s never worked a day in his life
That’s addressed in the alt text:
It’s remarkable how much nicer the world is when you imagine all bad actions are made in pursuit of higher ends.
Edit: The extra panel, too.
I’ve been thinking exactly the same thing. Facebook, Twitter and Reddit. Each of them a complete shit show of disinformation and censorship. Blogs and personal web sites are pretty much dead. It’s getting harder and harder for anyone without buckets of money to stand on equal ground.
Higher intrest rates are dynamiting an already sketchy busniess model. Once the era of the cirpo macrowebsite ends santiy will return to the web
I think he knows it is a money pit that will never be profitable so is intentionally trying to kill it. It will never make him money only cost him money. He can’t just shut it down without seriously damaging what credibility he has left. Seriously, what are his options to stop this ‘money leak?’
I think shuttering it would have saved more of his credibility than whatever the fuck this is he’s doing.
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
The capability of stupidity to explain things adequately when it comes to business and politics is very limited. In both those fields there are people constantly enacting malicious schemes and playing dumb.
There are people that benefit from Twitter sinking (foreign governments, the US government, Twitter’s Saudi investor), so this has been my theory as well. I don’t think it’s a scenario where he’s aware though. I think he’s a useful idiot that can be manipulated.
So the Saudi investor invests in something that he wants to go broke?
That’s precisely why they invested in it. Sinking that ship means that one of the few remaining lifelines for working class communication around the world goes down in flames. When mass protests, school shootings, the Capitol invasion, and police violence occurred, which social media platform was almost always the place you’d end up reading about it from someone on the ground? Twitter. Think about how much easier the narrative can be controlled when Twitter is gone (or at least behind walls).
You may underestimate the amount of money the Saudi government has
foreign governments yes (Saudi) but how does the US government benefit…?
If Twitter is at least hindered, it no longer works as a platform that gives people on-the-ground information about what’s going on in the country. When Twitter was at its peak, it was a tool for the working class to stay connected about protests and other events occurring in real time. That makes it more difficult for a government to control the narrative. Since the media can’t be trusted, Twitter would often become the place people go for information about shady shit a company is doing, outing cops trying to blend into protests, and other corrupt shit.
Now that Twitter is becoming almost entirely paywalled and stripped of any real value, one of the last bastions of information for the working class is essentially gone. It’s no longer a hub that people use for such things. If you want to stay connected to a mesh network of people in a mass protest or something like that, Twitter is no longer a viable option to get information out immediately.
Destroying Twitter was always his goal. He really thought the “blue checks” were some cabal of liberal elites that Twitter facilitated so they could suppress the speech of others, and day one his whole purpose was to break that imagined control.
You give him far too much credit. Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by stupidity.
Malice and stupidity aren’t exclusive, though. His actions can be stupid and malicious
Seriously, everyone here, if you know somebody still using Twitter, you should take the time to inform them about mastodon and explain why continuing to use that dying abusive platform and give Musk legitimacy is a bad idea.
You’re not going to argue them out of Twitter. If they’re still there, it’s not for rational reasons. It’s because of nostalgia, or because they’re part of communities that are stuck facing the Fiddler on the Roof problem.
Shaming them for staying isn’t going to work, either. We need to make a space for them to move to, not away from, and, frankly, the Fediverse just isn’t that right now.
The moment you get actual content creators to move off twitter and provide their content on mastodon, I’m deleting it too. Until then I don’t really see mastodon being a proper replacement, if anything it looks like bsky is taking the lead in that area unfortunately. Besides, half of mastodon community is seemingly against the idea of becoming mainstream anyway… so I dunno if it’s ever going to work out that way.
As somebody who produces content (with a full time job so not as often as I like) it’s so much harder to get engagement on mastodon without the algorithm tbh. I’m trying to get my name out there but engagement is slim to none compared to say, Instagram. I’m not on Twitter but both BlueSky and Mastodon have been a struggle. I don’t see myself devoting too much energy into them as far as posting content goes tbh.
I’m sorry but that’s because you are treating Mastodon like an advertising platform, not a social network.
engagement is slim to none compared to say, Instagram
This is because Instagram is an ad platform with social features.
I’m fully aware of that thanks, I was responding to:
The moment you get actual content creators to move off twitter and provide their content on mastodon, I’m deleting it too.
And saying from the perspective of a content creator, that’s an issue that’s hard to overlook. So mastodon won’t get to that point of having all the content creators if there isn’t something to help them share their content. I don’t know what the solution would be, maybe a separate feed with an algorithm that people can switch to if they want.
Edit: and the antisocial comments below is why mastodon will never take off with the larger population and therefore never really compete with Twitter, Threads, or BlueSky for content.
My point was that creators should want to disconnect from these artificial engagement driven systems that make people care about their “brand” and all that corpo bullshit.
I don’t think mastodon has to do anything to draw creators to it, it is what it is and many people like it that way. I don’t like the fake, engagement driven, clout goblin mentality that infests instagram and if mastodon started doing things to cultivate that vibe I would consider it a bug not a feature.
You’re bunding all of it together. I don’t want EA to run their marketing campaign or mastodon (although why not - it’d add legitimacy to the platform and I can easily block/not follow them), but I do want smaller youtubers posting there, I want artists to share news or boost other artists. I want developers to post announcements about what they are working on or when an update drops for their game. I want developers to have their personal accounts there and share stories about the development too.
All of this i get on twitter. I haven’t gotten any of it on mastodon because none of these people have moved off twitter, and never will because mastodon doesn’t want to give them a platform on which they can reach the same audience.
Right. I guess I just loathe the relentless commodification of our social interactions and one of the things I like about mastodon isthath the “always be promoting your personal brand” thing is notably absent. It reminds me of early social media, before people became brainrotted chasing the influencer lifestyle. I guess I just don’t think you can have an algorithm for that kind of thing because then the connections aren’t real.
I never understood the appeal of twitter before Elon bought it, and I understand it less with every news report about it since.
It was a great place to share information in a short and clear manner. You could subscribe to journalists working in your area, a professor from MIT or another university, follow sport journalists, war analysts - you name it. They all posted their thoughts and links to their articles, interviews or podcasts with them, they shared information about their new books. Twitter was like an RSS feed, where you could subscribe to authors directly. You could write them and get a reply! It was and probably still is a great tool, though Musk is taking a lot of steps to destroy it.
To be fair, the only thing I ever used it for was emergency reporting.
If he scales it back so that the only free and public feature is tweets of 250 characters or less, I may actually visit it again. Assuming my ad blocker works.
I’m just waiting for
“After moving all features behind a paywall, Musk hides the Login button.”
At this point, he’s obviously just trolling.
At this point, he’s obviously just
trollingan idiot.
making the experience worse to force people to click on tweets and drive up impressions inflating user counts
2 weeks from now “Elon musk plans to lock the ability to like and retweet behind subscription”
How to make 44B$ disappear: For aspiring billionaire magicians with no control over their tongue or egos.
He can always not pay the bank who actually paid for Twitter. It is already worth less than his debt.
Here’s an empty bucket to yell into so you can hear your own voice. That’ll be $12/month. Thanks.
Who used them?
deleted by creator
Can confirm Im an idiot and use kbin…
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
This is a bit tongue-in-cheek, but kbin generally requires its users to be either unaware it is written in PHP or OK with using something written in PHP. That has to exert some selective pressure.
Says the person on a website programmed by tankies
And here comes the kbin ad hominem strawman. Didn’t take long.
When I was in kbin and could see who voted because voting metadata is visible there, almost always left wing comments (e.g. supportive of trans rights) received downvotes from someone on lemmy.world while the upvotes were from multiple, varied instances. So I’m not sure kbin is the biggest problem unless things have changed since then
There are two problems: federation works best with a variety of instances of like-minded people, and people on open-registration generalistic instances abusing that to wreak havoc on other instances.
Same as Instances can fully de-federate from other instances, they should also be able to de-federate voting from “non-friendly” instances.
So the other 55% of the time it’s a Lemmy user? I.e. the majority of the time!? There is so much irony in your post.
Is Lemmy just one instance? Or is your gotcha that if you add all of the lemmy instances together this one kbin.social instance just BARELY doesn’t account for over half of the problems people notice. Because that’s not quite the win you were going for.
