Twitter Blue is coming back—with more colors and assurances from Musk
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ColdWetDog
Ars Legatus Legionis
Somebody else did a better job of this, albeit a bit less succinct.
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Chemical Tribe
Ars Legatus Legionis
It's pretty clear that they can charge whatever they want. Apple has no requirement that your in app price be the same. Never has either.
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Thanks!
BTW, I feel dirty as I accidently loaded that second link without noting it went to the NYP... time for another shower.
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I feel thinking you can control mainstream thought by owning Twitter is a bit like thinking you can reverse time by adjusting your watch.
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Splitting Image did one too quite a while back. It's impossible NOT to here it as CON man:
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mpl2vqIgnL8
(I have seen this clip waaay too many times...)
Did you miss this which has been posted multiple times by now? Hello! You’ve Been Referred Here Because You’re Wrong About Twitter And Hunter Biden’s Laptop
I noticed the downvote-to-oblivion feature seems to be back but it also only seems to function when viewing as a comment section and not in forum view. Or the threshold is different now. I was hoping it would hide posts in forum view too.
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I noticed the downvote-to-oblivion feature seems to be back but it also only seems to function when viewing as a comment section and not in forum view. Or the threshold is different now. I was hoping it would hide posts in forum view too.
That wouldn't be as much of a problem if the drop-down on the main page took you to the comment view the way it used to rather than the forum view. These days, I rarely see the comment view.
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Musk is not a brilliant man. He’s a rich man, but judged on his talk, behaviour and actions, he’s an idiot.
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It just doesn't make sense to have two different views. I wish Ars would settle on one of them and then get everything working there.
Rather than having a mishmash of features between the two views....
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they'll think that no matter what. There's no point in trying to play 3D chess with these people when their only move is flipping the board.
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Engaging with the right wing crazies and letting them define the framing is always a losing game.
The best we can do now is ignore them. Treating their latest crazy obsession like something that needs to be responded to plays into their hands.
Same applies to the trolls and RWNJs here.
Which is why downvote&ignore and "don't feed the troll" is evergreen advice.
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Let me translate what this would actually mean.
What you're saying you want is for the right-wing to be able to dictate what is important news. If the right-wing is talking about something, the mainstream must also be talking about it. That means you want the right to be able to decide what news actually matters.
If they want to live in their own media bubble, that's their choice. It should not force the rest of us to tolerate their nonsense. Giving the right wing echochamber the power to force itself on the rest of us is ridiculous on its face.
Like, I understand what you're saying. Ignoring something that a cloister of people thinks is important furthers their suspicions. But the alternative is worse; giving that cloister the power to decide what is important for everyone furthers their voice.
And it does nothing to stop their further radicalization, because the mainstream will not cover it the way the right wants it to be covered. They will always find some excuse to say that the mainstream is biased.
It's best to just let them get on with it.
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Of course that's all it is, but here's the thing. Nobody had any authority to make Twitter do anything other than Twitter themselves.
Like the latest Fox News piece I read about it said that Trump was banned after Michelle Obama demanded that Twitter ban Trump.
Okay, let's do some hardcore journalistic examination of that. I'm sure that somewhere in the timeline, there is indeed a tweet from Michelle Obama calling for Twitter to ban Trump. Along with probably thousands of other people. All "demanding" that Twitter ban Trump. But here's the thing...absolutely none of those people, Michelle Obama or me or you or any other idiot out there in the world, had the authority to force Twitter to do what they did.
This could literally have been a phone conversation between Twitter and Michelle Obama over the issue -
Twitter: <answers phone> hey, Shelly! What's crackin'? How's the kids? How's Barry O?
Michelle: Look, Twitter, I need you to ban Donald Trump.
Twitter: Oh, yeah, sorry...I'm not gonna do that. He's good for engagement.
Michelle: Twitter, I'm not fucking around here! I demand that you ban Donald Trump!
Twitter: Nope. <click>
Obviously they did choose to ban him, but the point is, nobody within or without the United States Government had the authority to coerce Twitter to ban Donald Trump. Or to censor any crap about Hunter Biden's laptop. Or to demand that Twitter ban all people named George.
They chose to do all of that all on their own. They could have made the other choice, but they didn't. As is their prerogative.
And now they're under new ownership, and choosing to unban a bunch of those people. As is also their prerogative.
This is all so fucking stupid, my brain hurts for having even looked into it.
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Elon says his "pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci". He's just completely mask-off wingnut conservative now.
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From what I've been able to find, it has been covered and there is nothing of substance there. Read my summary on the previous page.
The only thing the Twitter Files proves is that Twitter banned people. Okay, great. They're allowed to.
I thought Republicans were all about empowering businesses and keeping government out of interfering with how said businesses choose to conduct business. Now here comes along a business that does just that, and they're all upset over it.
What the fuck.
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His mask came off a long time ago. At least when he decided to let an antisemite back on the platform, if not well before that.
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That was the old GOP. The new GOP just wants them to bend the knee.
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The problem is "reporting the controversy" like that implicitly sends the message that there are two valid sides. This is exactly why fringe theories get traction so easily. Pretty soon people are like, "so why ARE there so many stories about seagull surveillance drones? Why won't the government investigate? Maybe we should vote in some of these seagull drone theorists so they can find out what's really going on."
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One more time, it has been reported on. Know how I know that? I can Google "the twitter files" (which I did) and get thousands of matches from news sources, "news" sources, blogs, vlogs, and whatever else passes for "reporting" these days. I read a bunch of them. There's nothing there that is of any noteworthiness other than a business choosing how to conduct their business. The horror! OMG! Democracy is dead! ....
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Well before that, IMO. Back when he made his initial bid to purchase Twitter, he sent out this tweet (no, I'm not linking it...go look it up yourself, if you're so inclined) on May 14th.
"Whoever thought owning the libs would be cheap never tried to acquire a social media company!"
The mask had been slipping for years before that point, but for me, that's when he fully tore it from his face.
What's that old saying about what you should do when people tell you and show you who they are?
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OK, what's actually your beef? All sorts of networks like Fox, Infowars, OANN , are reporting on the Twitter files Is your beef that Sane America sees the whole sordid mess as a gigantic pile of rancid manure that has has much newsworthyness as drying paint?
I mean, the whole "controversy:" can be summed up as "Elon Musk Releases Files that tell us what we already knew".
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When you have a few hundred billion, the money takes care of making itself.
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If everything else fails, raise the limit:
https://9to5mac.com/2022/12/11/twitter-blue-features-price/
I can already see a mess this will cause.
https://9to5mac.com/2022/12/11/twitter-blue-features-price/
I can already see a mess this will cause.
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4,000 char limit for Twitter will likely be a disaster. Brevity is a big thing that differentiates Twitter. With 4,000 chars, that's about 850 words max per Tweet. According to Google, the average novel has about 300-350 words/page for comparison.
4,000 chars is a pretty long blog post. Twitter would just be another blog, and your feed would get cluttered. Including a lot of TL;DR rambling in general.
Apartheid Boy really has no clue what made Twitter... Twitter.
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So, with the caveat that I haven't done programming much above the "hobbyist/small business" level, increasing the max allowed tweet length strikes me as a non-trivial task that is likely going to illuminate various bugs and assumptions built into various random areas of code that were expecting 140 or 280 chars.
Again, with no knowledge of how it's all set up, it still seems inevitable you'll get situations where parts of messages get mistaken for metadata, or some sort of logging will hit max integer or memory limits...and oh god I hope they're not logging tweets as arrays...
My point is, with even limited experience, I wouldn't want to roll out a major change like that on a skeleton crew. It's not the obvious bugs that would worry me, it's the random library that no one has updated in years because it just worked, and has nothing to do with the feature directly, that's what should scare them.
Again, with no knowledge of how it's all set up, it still seems inevitable you'll get situations where parts of messages get mistaken for metadata, or some sort of logging will hit max integer or memory limits...and oh god I hope they're not logging tweets as arrays...
My point is, with even limited experience, I wouldn't want to roll out a major change like that on a skeleton crew. It's not the obvious bugs that would worry me, it's the random library that no one has updated in years because it just worked, and has nothing to do with the feature directly, that's what should scare them.
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Adam Serwer in The Atlantic on the right wing obsession with their (and only their) “right to post”: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/a...ight-to-post-free-speech-social-media/672406/
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Celery Man
Ars Legatus Legionis
Sure Elon, if you want your pronoun to be “prosecute”, go ahead; it’s definitely not going to trigger “hold my beer” responses by the multitude of lawyers about to descend upon you and Twitter like locusts on a field.
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And now musk is threatening to sue any employees who share information with the media.
So his idea of free speech only covers:
Himself
Information that makes him look good
Information that makes people or groups he dislikes look bad.
Musk is an anti american fascist.
So his idea of free speech only covers:
Himself
Information that makes him look good
Information that makes people or groups he dislikes look bad.
Musk is an anti american fascist.
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The first time they increased the limit was definitely a non-trivial, gigantic, monumental thing.
Depending on how exactly they went about it, I can imagine they have some headroom and making a small increase might actually be relatively easy. Jumping all the way to 4k, not so much.
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Some would say that reducing the problems of Musk!Twitter down to "a small minority of users have an issue with how it's run" is, itself, a cope with the actual reality. Namely, that Twitter has lost over $1.5 billion in advertising, advertisers have good reasons to steer clear of the platform (like not wanting their ads next to hate speech), political discussions being increasingly taken over by far-right fascists, and Musk shoving his own account down people's throats by forcing random accounts to follow him.
Do I think Twitter is going to disappear tomorrow? No. But Twitter is not heading towards profitability in any way, shape, or form. The site is increasingly becoming a right-wing exclusive zone, and that is not a thing most advertisers want to advertise on.
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Oh joy. There was a informative article linked on one of the many Musk/Twitter articles about the battle just to double the limit from 140 to 280. One of the reason was the amount of testing to see where everything would break. So I'm going to treat the expansion to 4000 characters as another FSD vaporware project (the no release date should be a pretty big hint for it being vaporware as well) until he actually gets enough employees for Twitter that the ones he has aren't in permanent firefighting mode and can actually be those hardcore no privatelife lets live at the office coders who work by the KLOC instead of by the GACP (because everyone knows gaps are bad
).Then there is the we're going to lose money (1/2 the ads) on the people who subscribe in the hopes that somewhere in the future they will get an impoverished version of WordPress. Also somewhen soon.
More costs for storing bigger videos. again somewhen soon.
And more people you want to ignore being able to ignore your wish to ignore them since they go the blue scam mark.
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Oh joy. There was a informative article linked on one of the many Musk/Twitter articles about the battle just to double the limit from 140 to 280. One of the reason was the amount of testing to see where everything would break. So I'm going to treat the expansion to 4000 characters as another FSD vaporware project (the no release date should be a pretty big hint for it being vaporware as well) until he actually gets enough employees for Twitter that the ones he has aren't in permanent firefighting mode and can actually be those hardcore no privatelife lets live at the office coders who work by the KLOC instead of by the GACP (because everyone knows gaps are bad
Then there is the we're going to lose money (1/2 the ads) on the people who subscribe in the hopes that somewhere in the future they will get an impoverished version of WordPress. Also somewhen soon.
More costs for storing bigger videos. again somewhen soon.
And more people you want to ignore being able to ignore your wish to ignore them since they go the blue scam mark.
If Twitter employees did their job during the first limit raise, the next one shouldn't be nearly as hard. That being said, the problem is no longer the character count.
The problem is what you want to do with them.
4,000 characters is quite a lot. The more text you allow people to post, the more likely it is that they will want to format that text. Maybe introduce inline images. Maybe inline links to other stuff. Etc.
The more text someone can post, the more likely it is that they will need formatting to make their posts better. At which point, it's just a crappy blogging platform.
No, the main thing this will do is provide real differentiation between the people who pay Musk money and the people who don't. I imagine Muskites will come up with "clever" names for people limited to 280 characters. The ability to make big posts will represent belonging to the in-group, the people who support the New!Twitter.
Musk effectively de-valued the blue checkmark by denying its original purpose. This made Twitter Blue a pretty useless thing to purchase if you weren't a loyal Muskite. By allowing longer posts, his plan is to give it real value.
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