Twitter… what happens next

[Wade1865]

10 minutes ago, Fire and Jace said:

"X" 

He means to construct cerebro. Good for him. I'm sure he will use it as wisely and well-ly as Professor...

Fire and Jace -- you probably saw Elon's Halloween costume. I'm not tracking what it's from, but he does look like a supervillain. He's back home now, though; couch surfing at a friend's house.

[Zorral]

3 hours ago, Ran said:

All of those things happened on MySpace and Yahoo's email groups and so on

Nobody stormed the Capitol of the USA militantly to oust a legally elected POTUS due to My Space and yahoo.

In other words, there is a reason trump was banned from twitter.

The sooner this place is gone the better.

Over and over we have been seeing in the official investigations of what happened on jan 6 how much a role twitter played  Not only twitter, but twitter was huge nevertheless.

[JGP]

3 hours ago, Wade1865 said:

JGP -- yes, and that's exactly what I want as a consumer; consolidation and convenience. Does the West in general want that, though?

If any conglomerate has a chance at building a successful super app in the West, I'd think it would be Meta and its family of apps. Mark's effort to align those apps with the metaverse (via Horizon Worlds) doesn't anticipate success until further down the road, if Meta can survive that long. For now, investors are angry and Meta's valuation destruction shows it (along with other factors), hahaha.

Elon's chances at building his own super app would most likely be lower, but he's starting simple with a social platform and seems to want to add a banking / payment function. First, he acquired the population; then, he'll provide the services. Integrate these efforts with something called X, which is supposed to be Elon's "everything" app, and you can see he's attempting what Meta has already started (but without its own version of Horizon Worlds, I hope). What both men are doing seems to be in line with how the Asian super apps evolved.

Yeah well, I can't speak for what the West wants or doesn't.

Me personally, after all the absolute breaches of digital privacy we've had over the years I'd think it make us wise to the ramifications of parking most or all data back into the hands of anyone much less someone whose already sold a whole bunch of people out. So no, I'd hope lots of people besides me wouldn't be down with that. 

Likewise Elon but for other reasons, but I've been wrong about clowns before and look at what Trump gets to pour gas on whenever the fuck he wants. You didn't ask about that, but whatever.   

[TheLastWolf]

Good thing I still can't sign into here with twitter. Enough that Zuckerberg has guys watching my feet posts, now Musk gonna charge me for warning points. 

Spoiler

Still btw mods, it would be nice if the twitter feature was rectified 

 

[Wade1865]

4 minutes ago, JGP said:

Me personally, after all the absolute breaches of digital privacy we've had over the years I'd think it make us wise to the ramifications of parking most or all data back into the hands of anyone much less someone whose already sold a whole bunch of people out. So no, I'd hope lots of people besides me wouldn't be down with that. 

JGP -- yes; that's a decisive concern. And even without that issue, I think it's still unlikely the West, or even just the US, would prefer centralization over decentralization. We do have different conditions than the less developed countries, which is what facilitated super apps.

[Wade1865]

7 minutes ago, TheLastWolf said:

Good thing I still can't sign into here with twitter. Enough that Zuckerberg has guys watching my feet posts, now Musk gonna charge me for warning points. 

  Reveal hidden contents

Still btw mods, it would be nice if the twitter feature was rectified 

 

TheLastWolf -- that's an interesting idea. Maybe the board could allow warning point "rehabilitation" in exchange for $8 USD each.

@Ran

[Kalbear]

Firing half the staff and making everyone come back to the office full time. Oy. Sorry folks.

 

[Wade1865]

1 minute ago, Kalnestk Oblast said:

Firing half the staff and making everyone come back to the office full time...

Kalnestk Oblast -- he's going further than I expected; scorched earth.

[JGP]

Oh my fucking god.

I laughed but now I'm not.

  

[Jace, Extat]

2 hours ago, Wade1865 said:

Fire and Jace -- you probably saw Elon's Halloween costume. I'm not tracking what it's from, but he does look like a supervillain. He's back home now, though; couch surfing at a friend's house.

I most certainly had not seen until you displayed. Looks like some kind of Egdod armor. 

The Laveyan cross is a cute touch. Sadly I'm insufficiently versed in this type of heresy for further analysis. My call as Sooth of El prevents me from inquiring after such disruptive mindpaths 

 

Eta: bolded

[Varysblackfyre321]

9 hours ago, polishgenius said:

 

Remember when he wanted to heroball his way to glory by building a rescue submarine from scratch to save those kids in the cave, but when one of the rescue divers on scene told him he wasn't being helpful he publicly called him a nonce? 

Remember when he spent much of the pandemic spreading Covid misinformation and forcing workers to go in to his factories even if there were local lockdown orders?

Remember when he claimed Ian M Banks would have been anti-union because there are no unions in the Culture series?

Remember when Tesla investors had to tell him to stop tweeting for a bit coz he kept posting stupid shit that was tanking their stock?

Remember when he called his kid X Æ A-12?

Remember when he thought a system of underground roads would solve traffic problems?

Like, I'm sure he can tie his own shoes, and he's got a certain cleverness in hiring clever people and persuading them to work on his projects, but the man is a buffoon. 

Okay that all sounds but what is your net worth?

Checkmate Atheist.

[JGP]

Imagine what a fucking mess that would be, Elon texting ahead by like 10 minutes, all like

 

 

 

Hey, in town going to crash at your place a while

I lied. I'm here

 

Hey

Wait

Hmn

I'm going to just throw all this out and restock your fridge 

What

What time you coming home

 

 

[Jace, Extat]

19 minutes ago, JGP said:

Imagine what a fucking mess that would be, Elon texting ahead by like 10 minutes, all like

 

 

 

Hey, in town going to crash at your place a while

I lied. I'm here

 

Hey

Wait

Hmn

I'm going to just throw all this out and restock your fridge 

What

What time you coming home

 

 

Son, when it's me giving you the confusey face you know you done put the "whaaaaaaaaa??????" in 'WTF'

[TheLastWolf]

2 hours ago, Wade1865 said:

TheLastWolf -- that's an interesting idea. Maybe the board could allow warning point "rehabilitation" in exchange for $8 USD each.

@Ran

Oh no! I'm already broke af. And soon to overtake Kal.

[DMC]

12 minutes ago, Fire and Jace said:

Son, when it's me giving you the confusey face you know you done put the "whaaaaaaaaa??????" in 'WTF'

I dunno, you seem generally confused on how most discourse works these days.

[Jace, Extat]

.tahT si eurt

[JGP]

I was riffing off the couch surfing thing, but thank god some things are still funny right now. 

I'm going to go ice my shoulder and be grumpy about the world.

[karaddin]

9 hours ago, Sophelia said:

QFT.  Yes!  Twitter is always well ahead of 'official' news outlets.  Hearing about things like the Beirut explosion or the Halloween crowd crush in Seoul came to me first through twitter with scared people reporting. 

Yeah the explosion in Beirut and the Los Vegas massacre stand out for me as a couple of major disasters I saw unfolding and the response in real time on Twitter. Whether that's good or bad is a separate question, but it was definitely quick at spreading the info.

9 hours ago, Ran said:

People in marginalized areas are increasingly using things like Telegram for that. They will only "lose" it for as long as it takes for them to get the Telegram app and so on.

I just don't see anything about Twitter that is irreplaceable. If it goes away tomorrow, there'll be a month of confusion and a year from now everyone who was on Twitter will be plugging away at something else, while most of the world will fail to notice that anything actually happened.

I'm not going to cry for it, I'm barely using it anymore but I did make some excellent friends through it. I think there's some extra sentiment there for me because it's also symbolic - even though Facebook came first, Twitter was evoking the earlier philosophy of the internet. Everyone could see everything (within reason) and anyone could talk to anyone. That last 15 years has seen so much of the potential for good in the internet ground down by the combination of corporations drastically skewing it for their own ends, and bad actors showing how few malicious people it takes to ruin something good for >90% of people that weren't doing anything. 

Instead of actually positive things when people try throw back to that earlier idea of the internet, instead we get dumb shit like crypto wasting electricity. The whole thing is just levels and levels of grift on all the way down.

That symbolism makes me sad, even if Twitter does not.

[Varysblackfyre321]

I’m amused to see so much of the right feel a sense of betrayal and angst over this.

Perhaps this would get it through some of the far right’s  heads that they weren’t ever “cancelled” from Twitter  because of ideological reasons but because they at a certain point a financial liability.

[mormont]

14 hours ago, Kalnestk Oblast said:

Also, @Ran - really? MySpace? Twitter has absurdly more DAU, more users, and more corporate, government, financial and news use than myspace ever did. 

And yet (and I know you know this) it has fewer users than Pinterest. 

Wert is right about the extended non-platform reach of Twitter though. No social media app has ever been able to generate news stories in the way that Twitter does. Partly that's because journalists and politicians love it, but they were attracted there in the first place because it does have a unique (to date) cultural footprint, for good and bad.

As for news on Twitter: I have some personal experience here. When the Manchester Arena bombing happened in the UK, I was sitting on my phone at 1am scouring Twitter because there was little or nothing on the news sites and I knew my daughter was alive but not much else. Let me tell you, I did not get much useful information from Twitter. But I had to look. 

Personal impact aside, you couldn't ask for a better illustration of the problem. There was news, but none from reliable sources, and no way to filter the bullshit from the truth. Some of the claims I saw on there were horrifying, and utterly false. 

Anyway. Another exemplar in this thread is of what I've said before about the ultra-rich: even when they lose, they win. Musk doesn't have a secret master plan. But plenty of people are willing to say that he does, he must have, just because he's so rich. This can't be all a disastrous mistake that he keeps compounding. He's rich! 

And to some extent it's true. Musk fucked up, but at the end of the day all that means is he overpaid. He still owns Twitter. He can still do what he likes with it. He can still sack whoever he likes for whatever reason he likes. He can still change the site on a whim. He messed up but even the losing scenario is, he burns down Twitter and people will sagely explain it's all part of his master plan for the human race. Even when he loses, he wins. That's what being a billionaire means.