Twitter… what happens next

[Mlle. Zabzie]

7 minutes ago, Week said:

He fired much of the leadership -- allegedly for 'cause' to avoid golden parachutes -- and is cutting significant numbers of jobs. His viewpoints of the moderation policy and account banning is well known.

All of the above does not happen in a vacuum. From personal experience across witnessing, being impacted by (fortunately never riffed though picking up the job of colleagues), and then planning significant organizational change (significant reorga, relocations, riffs, overall business transformation etc) -- there is a profound impact at all levels. Managers, VPs, and individual contributors responses run the gamut of refusing to do their job, fearing for their job, schmoozing and angling to expand spheres of influence, etc. etc. The company does not function the same way - it simply cannot.

If I saw the top leaders in my company fired for some bullshit and treated terribly -- I would not expect to have a very happy future at that company. Fortunately, that would be antithetical to our core values -- something that some companies actually take seriously.

Yeah, the “cause” thing is probably a headline.  Documenting and proving cause is not … easy … without proven misconduct and if these are execs with employment contracts I would guess there is a tight and limited definition of cause.  So, my guess (I have absolutely no knowledge on this) is that the “cause” part doesn’t stick and the severance/parachutes end up getting paid, quietly, and no one the wiser because the company won’t be public.  I believe all of the debt is unregistered, so there won’t be any public filings.  

[LongRider]

2 minutes ago, polishgenius said:

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

I don't remember that, but what about union organizing on Twitter, how fast would he shut that down?  That is concerning to me.    

[Jace, Extat]

5 hours ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

  What will Musk do with his new toy?

Discuss…

Allow you all to type yourselves towards death instead of taking action while he purchases the rest of the parts of the solar system worth having with his billionaire buddies.

There's a reason castles were built on all of the best ground.

But I'll see myself out now. 

 

Eta: remove, actually, odd punctuations

[Kalbear]

So here's another thing that $8 checkmark do, at least once or twice. 

It is easy for a nation state to spend a few million to create an army of verified users to massively amplify anything you want. It isn't hard to block after you figure it out but by then you've ruined the checkmark for legitimate users and also likely had a major effect on whatever that issue was. 

[Ran]

Verification requires proof of ID. It's not going to happen.

Twitter is not that important. I really don't get why people are spending so much time worrying about it. Did people freak out about MySpace going under? Yahoo's collapse? Come on.

[Kalbear]

1 minute ago, Ran said:

Verification requires proof of ID. It's not going to happen.

Twitter is not that important. I really don't get why people are spending so much time worrying about it. Did people freak out about MySpace going under? Yahoo's collapse? Come on.

Verification today requires proof. That is one of the things that is going away as part of this feature.  

Also, do you really think it's hard for Russia to provide id of users that is fraudulent? It isn't even hard to do that in the US as a random dude.

[felice]

48 minutes ago, Knight Of Winter said:

Far more interesting discussion is one of Twitter's monopoly in its intended market. Whether you think "old" Twitter did some stupid stuff or "new" Twitter will start doing stupid stuff under Musk's regime - core problem underpinning all of it is that it has basically no competition. There is not another billions-users-wide platform for exchange of short messages and statement.

Hopefully Mastodon will become the competition, or replacement.  It works like email - rather than a single centralised site, there are many Mastodon servers, and you can sign up with any one of them. You can follow other Mastodon users irrespective of what server their account is on, just like you can email someone irrespective of what domain their email is on. The interface is a lot like Twitter, except no ads, no algorithm, just see what the people you follow post when they post it. And there's no way for Musk or anyone like him to buy it out.

It does need time to grow, though. A lot of servers are currently restricting signups because there's already a (relatively) huge influx of new users. And it needs a lot more specialised servers, eg the official site currently lists 34 regional servers, but a lot are for individual cities, and there's unlikely to be one for where the average random would-be user lives. Anyone can start a server; there are thousands not in the official directory, and you can even run one just for your own account and nobody else, if you wish. Moderation is up to the individual server, but servers that don't moderate well are likely to get blocked by more responsible servers. You can pick a server with a moderation/blocking policy you're comfortable with.

And you can switch to a new server and get all your followers automatically redirected to the new account (assuming the old server doesn't go offline without warning).

[Denvek]

1 hour ago, polishgenius said:

 

Why wouldn't you doubt that? He provides evidence to doubt it all the time.

For example, he bought Twitter.

[Sophelia]

18 minutes ago, Ran said:

Twitter is not that important. I really don't get why people are spending so much time worrying about it. Did people freak out about MySpace going under? Yahoo's collapse? Come on.

Hey - for some of us it's a big deal!  As an academic I have my personal learning network on twitter - people from all over the world with similar interests who I can ask questions or have group chat sessions with (e.g. on education topics), plus I also follow a lot of accounts by experts e.g. on my academic area, anti-racism or political activist accounts, or latest covid research, as well as getting a lot of news on there and I follow accounts like bellingcat etc. (I even follow a few entertainment things like random medieval manuscripts as well as cat pics!). 

[Jace, Extat]

8 minutes ago, felice said:

Hopefully Mastodon will become the competition, or replacement.  It works like email - rather than a single centralised site, there are many Mastodon servers, and you can sign up with any one of them. You can follow other Mastodon users irrespective of what server their account is on, just like you can email someone irrespective of what domain their email is on. The interface is a lot like Twitter, except no ads, no algorithm, just see what the people you follow post when they post it. And there's no way for Musk or anyone like him to buy it out.

It does need time to grow, though. A lot of servers are currently restricting signups because there's already a (relatively) huge influx of new users. And it needs a lot more specialised servers, eg the official site currently lists 34 regional servers, but a lot are for individual cities, and there's unlikely to be one for where the average random would-be user lives. Anyone can start a server; there are thousands not in the official directory, and you can even run one just for your own account and nobody else, if you wish. Moderation is up to the individual server, but servers that don't moderate well are likely to get blocked by more responsible servers. You can pick a server with a moderation/blocking policy you're comfortable with.

And you can switch to a new server and get all your followers automatically redirected to the new account (assuming the old server doesn't go offline without warning).

Decentralized communication hubs dependent on counter-checking one another to ensure fidelity? 

I imagine that a corruption from one hub would be automatically compared to last data received by said hub by the rest of the network? 

Hypothetical example: Hub77 receives data (xyz), the record exists in Hub22 that it transferred (xyz) to Hub77. This is the correct transmission.

However, when Hub77 transfers the data to Hub44 it reads (xzy). The rest of the hubs should be easily programed to confirm that Hub77's data is corrupted and implement repair on their own initiative. 

This seems like a good system. Many systems verifying the integrity of the individual contributor networks. The many correct the few. 

But what if 50.01% of all information hubs receive corrupted data at the same time?

[Heartofice]

I think Musk is planning on using some crypto digital token to replace ID as a verification method in the long term, that ties in heavily to plans to monetise the platform and synergies it with payments. Like most crypto stuff it’s probably all bullshit but that seems to be the direction 

[Wade1865]

2 minutes ago, Sophelia said:

Hey - for some of us it's a big deal!  As an academic I have my personal learning network on twitter - people from all over the world with similar interests who I can ask questions or have group chat sessions with (e.g. on education topics), plus I also follow a lot of accounts by experts e.g. on my academic area, anti-racism or political activist accounts, or latest covid research, as well as getting a lot of news on there and I follow accounts like bellingcat etc. (I even follow a few entertainment things like random medieval manuscripts as well as cat pics!). 

Sophelia -- that's what I love about Twitter, the various spheres. Finance Twitter, Black Twitter, Funny Dogs Twitter, Alt-Right Twitter, War Twitter, Media Twitter, and on and on. The alternates seem to focus only on leftism or rightism, which isn't enough.

[Jace, Extat]

7 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

I think Musk is planning on using some crypto digital token to replace ID as a verification method in the long term, that ties in heavily to plans to monetise the platform and synergies it with payments. Like most crypto stuff it’s probably all bullshit but that seems to be the direction 

Government IDs don't do anything to empower Mr. Musk. He would have no interest in them. 

A corporate ID, though? Y'all're'll so enthusiastic about giving your names, money, and information (including your heart rate and caloric intakes!) to gratifying applications. This is a logical exploit of an illogical mass. 

Just good business. I wish I had that kinda money. James Cameron taught us that folks will kill themselves for the (infinitesimal) possibility of living in a cartoon. God, but I wonder what I could get you people to do just by overloading your sensory input systems for a few days.

 

[Wade1865]

7 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

I think Musk is planning on using some crypto digital token to replace ID as a verification method in the long term, that ties in heavily to plans to monetise the platform and synergies it with payments. Like most crypto stuff it’s probably all bullshit but that seems to be the direction 

Heartofice -- Dogecoin 2.0 would be amusing.

[Kalbear]

Also, @Ran - really? MySpace? Twitter has absurdly more DAU, more users, and more corporate, government, financial and news use than myspace ever did. The days where social media was used for cat pics and LiveJournal drama are long past.

The reason it is a big deal is both things like what @Sophelia uses it for (along with other people with good legit uses) and that it is a major source of news for people and other news organizations. It is not quite as big as Facebook but for news and politics it is probably as big. Having a major social media system that is abused for misinformation and abuse is not a small thing, especially when as of now there is no particularly good alternative to it.

It is especially sad to me because of the loss of what Twitter could occasionally be great for - letting people in marginalized areas get word out of various massive world events as they happen. Losing that would suck. There are a number of outcomes that may be bad here. One is it turning into a shitty 4chan replacement. Another is it dying entirely. Another is it turning into another Facebook system of misinformation spread, or at least worse than it is now. All of these things are newsworthy and worth more discussion than the loss of myspace.

[polishgenius]

I had a look at Mastodon a while back, but my first impression is while it might work for certain in-groups it won't replace twitter in any usefully mass way because even aside from several other problems, actual and potential, people are raising (community moderation and user-run servers is a nice idea in principle, but it leaves you at the mercy of 'local'  moderators and server owners, and also since your account is tied to a specific server you (1) run the risk of losing it if the server shuts down with little notice and (2) I don't know the process exactly but I gather a server owner can decide which other servers are linkable to the one you're on, making it difficult/impossible to crosspost/converse across them), it's got one huge fatal flaw:

it just looks too complicated for casual user to get into. Or, not even complicated necessarily in the end, but with a high bar for entry by social media standards. I mean, there's a learning curve to twitter, but it's very low. With Mastodon it asks you to choose your instance before you even start up, and how the fuck is just a random person looking to browse supposed to know where to start? And once you're in, even the most supportive accounts suggest it's tricky to figure out how to find people to follow etc. The thing about algorithms is, yes, they make an awful mess, but the reason they exist at all is they reduce the burden on the casual user of making the experience work at all. 

[Week]

58 minutes ago, Mlle. Zabzie said:

Yeah, the “cause” thing is probably a headline.  Documenting and proving cause is not … easy … without proven misconduct and if these are execs with employment contracts I would guess there is a tight and limited definition of cause.  So, my guess (I have absolutely no knowledge on this) is that the “cause” part doesn’t stick and the severance/parachutes end up getting paid, quietly, and no one the wiser because the company won’t be public.  I believe all of the debt is unregistered, so there won’t be any public filings.  

100% agree, I think you are absolutely correct here.

Which, again, the new leader of your company is *trying* to ratfuck former leadership AND is almost certainly unable to actually do so (to the point of potentially throwing away money in aggressive legal action). He is trying to send a message which is absolutely being received and has an impact.

[Ran]

27 minutes ago, Sophelia said:

  As an academic I have my personal learning network on twitter - people from all over the world with similar interests who I can ask questions or have group chat sessions with (e.g. on education topics), plus I also follow a lot of accounts by experts e.g. on my academic area, anti-racism or political activist accounts, or latest covid research, as well as getting a lot of news on there and I follow accounts like bellingcat etc. (I even follow a few entertainment things like random medieval manuscripts as well as cat pics!). 

Academic mailing lists are a thing and still exist, as I'm sure you're aware! Private FB groups, Discords, IRC, Substack and Medium, Telegram, etc. etc. -- Twitter is just a thing that came out at a certain time and "everyone "used it, just as for a certain span of time Tumblr or MySpace were. It's not some indelible future watercooler. If it goes away, there will be other things to fill the niche. Where Vine went, Tik Tok followed. Where Twitter goes, others will no doubt follow.

[Sophelia]

3 minutes ago, Kalnestk Oblast said:

It is especially sad to me because of the loss of what Twitter could occasionally be great for - letting people in marginalized areas get word out of various massive world events as they happen. Losing that would suck. 

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. So long as you know that early tweets are often speculative, you can feel the immediacy and connection with ordinary people who are there, and form a good idea of the situation on the ground far ahead of any reporting by official news sites (even the BBC often now quotes tweets in its live reporting anyway), and also get a fuller picture of the human side, and aftereffects, which are often missing from other news sites which soon drop things to move on to the next big thing.

[Week]

Staying on brand (and on platform) -- he's tweeting through it. It's not going well.