Twitter… what happens next

[Ran]

Twitter's usage is among the lowest of the "major" social media sites. Its impact and importance is overstated precisely because as Mormont says, media and politicians love it and so it holds higher mind share among them. And so they keep writing stories about it as if it's of vital importance, and apparently many of the very online people buy into it because it justifies their addiction to participating in it.

I've been using it for years, it's nice enough, but I would no more shed a tear if it disappeared then I would shed a tear if Facebook disappeared. They are all replaceable. The internet was just fine before them, the internet will be just fine after them. 

As to balkanization, I mean you're talking about a lack of monopolies. Sounds great to me! Diverse means of communications for diverse groups of people should be the goal. 

Edited November 3, 2022 by Ran

[Werthead]

11 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

Elon is very talented in a few ways, but he's not actually a particularly good businessman and the safe bet is that this endeavor of his fails, probably within two years. 

Musk and Bezos are interesting in that they are lauded as super-businessmen when in fact they were Captain Obviouses. It was obvious even in the early 1990s that the internet was going to completely revolutionise shopping. It was just a question of what person would luck out by creating the interface/UI/brand name in the right moment that resonated with people, and it was Amazon. And the same with an online payment system for PayPal.

That doesn't mean they're completely useless or bad businessmen (SpaceX is a good example of one of those seemingly-inevitable ideas that nevertheless needed someone to take it by the horns and make it happen, and Musk was good at doing that), just that they both lucked out by being in the right place at the right time with the resources needed to leverage good inevitable ideas that were coming down the pipe anyway. Those are still impressive achievements, but it is unconvincing to say that other people wouldn't have done them anyway (and they were reliant on the conservatism of existing brands; a bold and innovative WalMart could have created an online shopping space instead, and Blockbuster had the opportunity to become Netflix but turned it down and raced to extinction).

Edited November 3, 2022 by Werthead

[Heartofice]

2 hours ago, mormont said:

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.

I can't say I've seen a single person on this thread who has evoked any of the comments you are describing here. The opposite does appear to be true, much of which you have made clear above. There is a clear assumption that Musk has fucked up, that he's made a massive error in buying Twitter and doesn't know what he wants to do with it. I'd say that is born out of some innate desire for him to fail because he represents 'the enemy' for some people. Well whatever.

It's pretty clear from the evidence of things he has said and done that he does have some bigger picture plan on what he wants to do with Twitter and it isn't Twitter in it's current form. What we don't know is how successful he will be in implementing that vision or whether it's just pie in the sky. I'd say it's probably less of a bullshit idea than the Metaverse, but there are a lot of reasons why doing what he wants to do will be very difficult and might not come off. I'm currently very dubious about any future success but open to seeing what will happen.

If for instance he does want to turn Twitter into some sort of one stop shop then it would need to be demonstrably different to how it is now and attract a much bigger audience. The weakness of twitter is that it really doesn't have that many users compared to other social media platforms and those who do use it are mostly fitting into a small elitist demographic.

2 hours ago, Ran said:

Twitter's usage is among the lowest of the "major" social media sites. Its impact and importance is overstated precisely because as Mormont says, media and politicians love it and so it holds higher mind share among them. And so they keep writing stories about it as if it's of vital importance, and apparently many of the very online people buy into it because it justifies their addiction to participating in it.

I agree that it's usage is low and those who use it seem to overestimate the general awareness of topics discussed on twitter are in the general population. The problem is that it is very much central to journalism and politics right now. Everyone in that sphere is on there and conversations eventually feed through to the real world. Would the 'culture war' exist if it wasn't for dumb discussions on twitter? Would we have gotten Trump? There are a lot of events and movements that have their noise amplified by what people are saying on Twitter. Just because regular people have no awareness of it doesn't mean it won't affect their lives at some point.

2 hours ago, Werthead said:

Musk and Bezos are interesting in that they are lauded as super-businessmen when in fact they were Captain Obviouses. It was obvious even in the early 1990s that the internet was going to completely revolutionise shopping. It was just a question of what person would luck out by creating the interface/UI/brand name in the right moment that resonated with people, and it was Amazon. And the same with an online payment system for PayPal.

It's the old 'Outliers' principle of being the right person in the right place at the right time for many of these endeavours. Having said that, I'm sure a million people had the idea for an 'Amazon' but there is only one Amazon. That is because having a cool idea is practically worthless, it's execution that matters. That people like Bezos and Musk have managed to execture multiple projects with relative or great success should count for something. 

Edited November 3, 2022 by Heartofice

[DMC]

2 hours ago, Ran said:

As to balkanization, I mean you're talking about a lack of monopolies.

Yeah I was gonna mention trust busting and the breaking up of AT&T, but I thought it was a bit heavy handed.

[DMC]

42 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

Would the 'culture war' exist if it wasn't for dumb discussions on twitter? Would we have gotten Trump? There are a lot of events and movements that have their noise amplified by what people are saying on Twitter.

While Twitter certainly amplifies it, the "culture wars" and polarization long preceded Twitter and even the internet.

[Kalnak the Magnificent]

27 minutes ago, DMC said:

Yeah I was gonna mention trust busting and the breaking up of AT&T, but I thought it was a bit heavy handed.

It is less about lack of monopolies and more about lack of interoperability. AT&T is a poor choice there of example (as is cell phones) because the service was well established, understood and had significant technical regulation around it. You could call people anywhere in the world regardless of your carrier using standard items anywhere. 

The same isn't necessarily true in this case. It could be, and something like mastodon could lead that way, but it also could go to thousands of tiny systems.

[DMC]

1 minute ago, Kalnestk Oblast said:

because the service was well established, understood and had significant technical regulation around it.

I mean fair enough on the regulation, but how isn't the service Twitter provides well established and understood?

[Werthead]

I think there's also the argument that Twitter works well for a lot of people as an aggregator for things like news, reviews etc. People like convenience, so why have to visit the BBC, ABC, Fox and the Telegraph (or whatever) individually when you can just subscribe to their Twitter feeds and get all the headlines at once? Convenience often trumps other factors (including cost, see people paying more for something from Amazon because they know they can get it in 24 hours, or people willingly paying more for a game on Steam than on GoG or Epic just to have everything in one list).

Those people aren't "using" Twitter as such, but it serves a useful purpose for them.

[Kalnak the Magnificent]

Just now, DMC said:

I mean fair enough on the regulation, but how isn't the service Twitter provides well established and understood?

Not in the technical sense, no. Not in a way that anyone could build a Twitter service of their own that could talk with other Twitter users or broadcast data to their accounts, or get notified, or have a list of contacts, etc. The API and engineering specifications for how phones work was very well established and distributed and controlled, and made into something anyone on the planet could use in the same way. Twitter doesn't have anything like that right now.

It certainly could, mind you. Technically it's not super complex. Neither were landlines. But not having the standard means everyone does their own shit and interoperability sucks. 

[DMC]

2 minutes ago, Kalnestk Oblast said:

It certainly could, mind you. Technically it's not super complex. Neither were landlines. But not having the standard means everyone does their own shit and interoperability sucks. 

I dunno sounds to me like you could say pretty much the same thing right before AT&T was broken up - indeed you kind of are.

[3CityApache]

18 hours ago, polishgenius said:

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?

And yet, if you bought a Tesla stock at IPO for a thousand bucks, you would be sitting on a pile of money worth roughly $200.000 today. After the stock collapsed this year.

Musk is a very weird personality and many of his ideas seem ridiculous, but I really wouldn't reduce his proficiency as a businessman to the ability to atract talents.

That said, I have no fucking idea what he needed a Twitter for. A new game, perhaps.

[Kalnak the Magnificent]

1 minute ago, DMC said:

I dunno sounds to me like you could say pretty much the same thing right before AT&T was broken up - indeed you kind of are.

Not really. AT&T ran a service that billed people for usage on a very technically understood system that had been copied repeatedly and spread out across the world before it had been split up. There were and are international regulatory bodies that established how exactly phones would talk to each other, how billing long distance would work, how much voltage is in the wires, what specific size the plugs would be...

And all of that was in place before AT&T got broken up. It was put there BY AT&T because interoperability of foreign carriers was an important goal. None of that is true with how Twitter is right now.

Here's a quick thought experiment. Right now this board does embedded tweets. You paste a twitter url and the board understands how to display that into something. That is because Twitter established an API for websites to do that and made sure their service supports it with a bunch of specific calls that have a website be able to ask Twitter for references to pictures, fonts, uri links, etc.

None of that is published anywhere on how anyone else would do it. There is no standard on embedding twitter-like behavior. There is no way to tell a website "embed this like a tweet" save that it starts with twitter.com. All of these things can be done but it takes work and an actual goal of regulation and interoperability, and if you don't have that you likely don't get it, like, ever.

[DMC]

3 minutes ago, Kalnestk Oblast said:

Here's a quick thought experiment. Right now this board does embedded tweets. You paste a twitter url and the board understands how to display that into something. That is because Twitter established an API for websites to do that and made sure their service supports it with a bunch of specific calls that have a website be able to ask Twitter for references to pictures, fonts, uri links, etc.

None of that is published anywhere on how anyone else would do it. There is no standard on embedding twitter-like behavior. There is no way to tell a website "embed this like a tweet" save that it starts with twitter.com. All of these things can be done but it takes work and an actual goal of regulation and interoperability, and if you don't have that you likely don't get it, like, ever.

I really think you're overstating Twitter's uniqueness irt "interoperability."

[Kalnak the Magnificent]

32 minutes ago, DMC said:

I really think you're overstating Twitter's uniqueness irt "interoperability."

I'm not saying it's uniquely able to do it because it's somehow special or generous It's uniquely able to do it because it is the only one. And none of those APIs are standardized or written down anywhere. 

Again this isn't particularly hard tech to do. Mastodon is trying to do something like it, and I hope they succeed. But there is no guarantee that that will be the case, and it is relatively easy to have it not work - largely because things like users being able to migrate freely and easily is actually a drawback for companies. They would much rather make it really hard to move around, and in fact Facebook specifically put steps in place to make it even harder to get your data and leave.

[Darzin]

I suppose everyone could just use Weibo.

lol I actually wonder what the Chinese would do if they recieved a huge influx of foriegners into their intranent sandbox. 

Edited November 3, 2022 by Darzin

[mormont]

4 hours ago, Ran said:

Twitter's usage is among the lowest of the "major" social media sites. Its impact and importance is overstated precisely because as Mormont says, media and politicians love it and so it holds higher mind share among them. And so they keep writing stories about it as if it's of vital importance, and apparently many of the very online people buy into it because it justifies their addiction to participating in it.

I wouldn't agree with that last bit. The last sentence suggests that in 'reality', Twitter isn't truly important. I'd say rather that Twitter is important because certain people believe it's important and that becomes a self-fulfilling proposition (remind you of any parables in a book you might've read?)

That power has been declining and now is set to decline further and faster. But just because something is an illusion, doesn't mean it isn't important. 

4 hours ago, Ran said:

I've been using it for years, it's nice enough, but I would no more shed a tear if it disappeared then I would shed a tear if Facebook disappeared. They are all replaceable. The internet was just fine before them, the internet will be just fine after them. 

I still miss LiveJournal sometimes. Not enough to go back though. 

[Zorral]

3 hours ago, Werthead said:

why have to visit the BBC, ABC, Fox and the Telegraph (or whatever) individually when you can just subscribe to their Twitter feeds and get all the headlines at once?

Because I don't want headlines, I want the stories.  I like going to all those sites, because I want different perspectives regarding The Story, not what the caption writers for The Story, that they don't write, write.  So very often the caption/headline is at best misleading, and at worst, a deliberate lie.  This is very bad in terms of the average reader knowing what's really going on.  This is part of the reason all those dayemed romperworshippers thought he was a great biz guy, when anybody who knew anything about him going way back already, knew it was just the opposite.

I deleted my LJ account, finally, after all these years of not going there.  I should have done it sooner.  But I do like the Dream Width site, where I've been since the lemmings all fled LJ back in the days of the Crimean War -- not understanding -- or caring -- that the Crimean opposition and their supporters gathered on LJ.  IOW, LJ itself wasn't part of the problem, but you know lemmings.  Also thinking LJ was really only about US sf/f fandom, evidently.

Edited November 3, 2022 by Zorral

[Kalnak the Magnificent]

This is an interesting article on what Jack Dorsey's new thing - Bluesky - means to do and how it is a collaboration with Twitter. And what the vision of Dorsey is, and what Musk's might be. This also explains a bit better about what I mean when I talk about making something like Twitter a common system instead of it going into the massively fragmented route and how Bluesky is working toward that goal.  

https://davetroy.medium.com/no-elon-and-jack-are-not-competitors-theyre-collaborating-3e88cde5267d

 

[Heartofice]

5 minutes ago, Kalnestk Oblast said:

This is an interesting article on what Jack Dorsey's new thing - Bluesky - means to do and how it is a collaboration with Twitter. And what the vision of Dorsey is, and what Musk's might be. This also explains a bit better about what I mean when I talk about making something like Twitter a common system instead of it going into the massively fragmented route and how Bluesky is working toward that goal.  

https://davetroy.medium.com/no-elon-and-jack-are-not-competitors-theyre-collaborating-3e88cde5267d

 

Well that article started out well and went downhill quick 

[Zorral]

Nice overview:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/nov/03/he-is-poised-to-open-the-floodgates-can-twitter-survive-elon-musk-or-even-thrive

Among the many interesting bits:

Quote

.... The payouts will almost certainly arrive eventually, after Musk plays a mini version of the same courtroom drama that led to him being forced to buy the company in the first place. According to a Financial Times report, his argument is that were it not for his bid, the value of the company’s stock would have collapsed. Others note that the fact that the executives fought so hard to force Musk to complete the purchase suggests that they did their job very well indeed, securing a multibillion payout for shareholders that would have evaporated if they had let him walk away. ....

So much for greatly effective biz man.