Big Tech Twits Get Dumber and Corrupter!

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

People never learn. This is always how the mad military scientist ropes you in. The three of you would probably also run upstairs when trying to escape in a slasher film. 

[karaddin]

My wife hasn't updated her Twitter app on her phone since Elon took over which has a bunch of effects like not even seeing the bought blue check marks. We were surprised yesterday to find that she was able to use it all day without hitting the rate limiter, which seemed insane - that they'd implement it as a client side check instead of server side.

Just saw this today though

If you can bypass it with an alternate client then it is indeed client end, which is just baffling. But so is coding the client to loop until it gets a success exit code then making it require login which prevents that same page from getting a success and DDOSing yourself.

At this point I'm wondering if the staff are trying to undermine his changes in a deniable way.

[DanteGabriel]

Holy crap. Never trust the client!

[Starkess]

Done!

[Wilbur]

10 hours ago, karaddin said:

...At this point I'm wondering if the staff are trying to undermine his changes in a deniable way.

Anecdotally, engineering and technical personnel at Twitter have been steadily exiting the company even after Musk's purge.  As a result the personnel mix left at Twitter has been trending to a higher and higher percentage of foreign workers on H-1B visas.

Since their right to stay in the country is based on their continuing employment by Twitter, they are chained to their desks.  But the entire H-1B visa process has been perverted by many corporations to hire foreign workers at much lower wages than they would have to pay American workers, so as to reduce the payroll bill.  And that hasn't exactly enriched the quality of this echelon of employees.

So Twitter taking the cheap-and-easy way to slap a quick coat of paint over Elon's scatter-shot command damage, rather than a systematic and long-term approach to solve problems doesn't surprise me at all.

[karaddin]

I find it hard to think that implementing it on the client side is "easier" than server side though. That's a mistake that might happen from poor judgement, but I doubt it's from doing the least work (for this specific case). And yeah most of the workers that remain are the ones most exploitable, but that's also why I wouldn't be surprised by malicious compliance with dumb instructions.

[A Horse Named Stranger]

11 hours ago, karaddin said:

At this point I'm wondering if the staff are trying to undermine his changes in a deniable way.

denial of service way you mean.

[LongRider]

18 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

People never learn. This is always how the mad military scientist ropes you in. The three of you would probably also run upstairs when trying to escape in a slasher film. 

Why go upstairs when you can go downstairs to the dark basement with all the spider webs?  That's where I'd go!

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

1 hour ago, LongRider said:

Why go upstairs when you can go downstairs to the dark basement with all the spider webs?  That's where I'd go!

You'll be safe in the room with all the hooks and knives.

The basement of the house I lived in until I was 9 or 10 was the creepiest shit ever. It was huge, but didn't look like anything had been fixed in decades. There was a giant koi pond in it, a room that looked like it was meant to torture people in, a grow room for weed and a darkroom. I always hated going down there. After my dad died I had to repair some shit down there before we sold the house and it was still creepy as fuck 20 years later.

[Sophelia]

OK I was an idiot and said I'd test the new tweetdeck preview and it deleted some of my columns and now I can't get out again into the old one (it said I would be able to and gives instructions for doing so, but the option does not appear for me).  This might be what does it for me...

(I have been 10 years on twitter and have a huge personal network of academics in my area so I really have got a lot out of it, but this is just no good...)

[LongRider]

48 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

After my dad died I had to repair some shit down there before we sold the house and it was still creepy as fuck 20 years later.

I remember as a little girl visiting my maternal grandma, somewhere in her big house, maybe the cellar was a dress form.  Creepy as fuck to me!  Seriously, scared me.       What a wimpy little girl.

[Varysblackfyre321]

21 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

People never learn. This is always how the mad military scientist ropes you in. The three of you would probably also run upstairs when trying to escape in a slasher film. 

What if that’s where my gun is? Then like I’d be trapping the slasher with me.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

1 hour ago, LongRider said:

I remember as a little girl visiting my maternal grandma, somewhere in her big house, maybe the cellar was a dress form.  Creepy as fuck to me!  Seriously, scared me.       What a wimpy little girl.

It's funny the weird shit you find in your grandparents' basements. I still laugh that my grandmother had so many fancy purses she never used stuffed with cash that were only discovered after she died along with a ton of high end heels. 

23 minutes ago, Varysblackfyre321 said:

What if that’s where my gun is? Then like I’d be trapping the slasher with me.

Eh, guns are not that great unless you're a good shot and/or have a shotgun. I've got a few close to where I sleep, but I'll always got for my katana. 

[A Horse Named Stranger]

Why does the idea of you with a sword of any kind invoke a certain scene from Wayne's World 2?

[Zorral]

Inside Twitter’s Extended Weekend of Doom

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/inside-twitters-extended-weekend-of-doom

Quote

 

.... Most of the drama about Musk and Twitter over the eight months since he took over the site has focused on his antic involvement in the online culture wars, a kind of public midlife crisis played out on the stage of a $44 billion vanity purchase. Probably the best way to understand Musk is that he’s another rich middle-aged divorced guy whose hot new girlfriend is white nationalism. But there’s a whole other part of the drama. He also made draconian staffing cuts, dramatically reduced the core technical capacity to keep the site online and also simply refused to pay various bills, figuring that he and the site are big enough that vendors won’t have the nerve to cut off services. While this was going on Musk’s public antics have savaged the company’s advertising revenues. They come together in a self-reinforcing cycle of budget cuts and revenue shortfalls. Since Twitter is no longer a public company it’s hard to know precisely what mix of expedients led to this weekend’s drama. But that big picture is clear enough.

The ongoing drama since last December has spawned a number of Twitter clone sites offering a refuge to those who want to escape Musk’s Twitter. But each has come up against the same challenge. What makes Twitter Twitter is that everyone’s there. It’s a classic case of inertia and network effects, a basic problem of collective action. Even if most of the site’s users would like to be somewhere else, those network effects keep most of them locked in place. The increasing instability of the site’s infrastructure has that effect even on those who are indifferent to Musk’s politics and conspiracy theories -— which is certainly the bulk of the site’s users. Most of the sites also lack the vast sums of money required to succeed at it. Musk has clearly relied on this fact and mostly he’s been on firm ground doing so.

I frequently note the subject lists I curate on Twitter — resources I find immensely helpful for keeping up on the news topics that interest me most. You can’t reproduce these on the competitor sites because the people I put on the lists aren’t there. Or maybe one or two of them are on one site and a couple on another. But that’s the same difference. Everybody being there is what makes Twitter Twitter.

But now something’s different. In the background, clearly sensing the expanding opportunity, Meta (née Facebook) has been prepping a Twitter replacement. Just as this absurd chaos was enfolding over the weekend they announced that “Threads” will go live tomorrow, July 6. It’s hard to know just how this will play out. But if anyone has the cash and network power to put Twitter out of its misery, it’s Meta. Unsurprisingly, since Facebook is terminally uncool and now basically the social network of old people, Threads will be launched as a discussion app that is part of Instagram. It will be its own separate app but in brand and possible account terms it will be part of Instagram.

This opens a number of possibilities. Numerous celebrities have millions or tens of millions of followers on Instagram. If they can simply port that clout to Threads, or if that’s a quick and relatively simple transition, that really does make it a potentially existential, near-term threat to Twitter.

Your guess is as good as mine how it will pan out. I tend to side with the people who think there won’t be a Twitter replacement. Even Twitter also won’t be the Twitter replacement. It’s probably on a glide path to Friendsterization where Musk acolytes and alt-righters will continue to taunt and own an ever-dwindling number of normal people who keep logging in. You’ll have fragmentation without a single place where everyone is. But whatever … I’m not here to do any big think on that front. What’s notable to me is that Elon Musk is clearly the best thing that ever happened to Mark Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg and Facebook became the symbol, if not always the reality, of everything bad about the platforms and social media: the threats to privacy, monopoly, hate speech, inequality, election subversion, society-wide short attention spans. But Musk — through his mix of billionaire grievance and adolescent rage — has managed to make Zuckerberg now appear to be a comparatively benign figure.

I mean, think about it: His big pitch in 2020 was personally cutting a check for various local governments to fund their pandemic emergency election work. That may have been PR to make up for the disaster of 2016. But in comparison to Elon Musk it looks visionary. And there are worse things than doing good things at least in part for the PR boost. There was never anything about Zuckerberg that made you think he set out to do bad things for the sake of it. That’s been Musk’s calling card with Twitter: transgressive behavior, owning the libs. After all the essence of the whole story, the root of everything that followed, is that he was motivated to purchase Twitter because of his enmity toward the site’s most prominent users. Like Trump, predation is his thing.

I’ve seen tons of people cheering on Threads and hoping it deals a death blow to Twitter because Musk is such a loathsome and dystopic figure. No shame: I’m cheering Zuckerberg too. This may be Musk’s greatest accomplishment — making people cheer on Mark Zuckerberg, in its own way a more improbable and challenging feat than creating Space X or developing Tesla.

 

 

[DanteGabriel]

4 hours ago, Zorral said:

Inside Twitter’s Extended Weekend of Doom

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/inside-twitters-extended-weekend-of-doom

 

That's a take I hadn't thought of: Zuckerberg becoming less of a pariah just because he is not actively malicious. In some ways it reminds me of our current grotesque phenomenon where corporations like Budweiser are... sympathetic because they currently find it profitable to support some tolerant/non-regressive policies.

Edited July 5, 2023 by DanteGabriel

[mormont]

I have to admit if you'd asked me before the Musk takeover, I'd have said Facebook would die before Twitter. It was actively worse to use. Now, Facebook's no better than it was, but Twitter is significantly worse than it was. I'd still pick Twitter as a user experience, but the gap has really narrowed.

[Soylent Brown]

On 7/2/2023 at 8:45 PM, Starkess said:

I do have some Bluesky invites if anyone wants one...

They're probably all long gone now, but if you have one to spare, I'd love to jump ship!

[kairparavel]

WTF is Threads? I see some authors and a few other people I follow on Instagram posting about it, today. 

[Spockydog]

Zuck's twitter rip-off.