Twitter Blue is coming back—with more colors and assurances from Musk
- Thread starter JournalBot
- Start date
You (and Musk) have a different idea of who represent "obvious trolls" from other people. And there are plenty of advertisers still staying away precisely because they have different ideas about what stuff they want their products being advertised next to.
Apple came back, sure. But Musk is still down at least $1.5 billion in ad sales from pre-Musk Twitter.
Upvote
25
(25
/
0)
Upvote
20
(20
/
0)
You can't separate the cultural/political element. The entire Hunter Biden story has been a tool of the right to smear Biden intially during the 2020 election and now in the lead up to 2024. You can't really blame news sites for not wanting to be a tool for Trump's next shot to try and be President.
Also you could argue that treating non-credible stories with credibility has helped disinformation really settle into this country. Take climate change for an example, for years news would invite both sides to argue on the air when in reality there was barely any argument as to whether it existed or not.
Intertia isn't a catch all, especially when overall Twitter is about even with Reddit as far as active users go. I remember Digg, management there decided to change up how the website worked, got rid of downvotes, made it easier for businesses to promote their content and when people complained they indicated that it was a loud minority, then their userbase fled for Reddit. Digg got sold for peanuts and is now something else. Musk is catching it because of him wanting to allow hate speech on Twitter once again, this has caused him rightfully to catch hell for it and has made the company he purchased worth substantially less in a short time. His plan to charge people is something that it's fairly unheard of in social media, not because no one has thought of it, but because no one is willing to pay to use a social media site. So the users who drive a lot of traffic are more likely to disengage and normal people are also going to disengage more when trending topics like "The Jews" start happening more and more and all it takes is for the next thing to come along and be the Reddit to Twitter's Digg.
There's also the fact that Twitter was being run as a fairly successful business before Musk showed up, it wasn't profitable, but the advertisers they had were happy with how things were going and most of the users were fine with the fact that white supremacists were being shown the door. Musk hasn't brought real value to the platform and his input has only served to damage it among most of its users and many of its advertisers. The reason why Truth Social, Gab, Parler, and the rest of them never caught on was because they were specifically built to create a safe space for the detritus that was shoveled out the back door of Twitter.
Upvote
37
(37
/
0)
Longmile149
Ars Scholae Palatinae
Oh, Elon.
Has it really come to this?
https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/11/business/twitter-headquarters-auction/index.html
What a perfectly normal thing for a very well-run, extremely stable business that’s totally not having any financial difficulties to be doing.
Has it really come to this?
https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/11/business/twitter-headquarters-auction/index.html
What a perfectly normal thing for a very well-run, extremely stable business that’s totally not having any financial difficulties to be doing.
Upvote
24
(24
/
0)
Eh. I remember when people were talking about how MySpace's rapid growth and frequent addition of new features had relegated the relatively stodgy Facebook to permanent second-place status.
Anybody who says they know how this will shake out is an overconfident fool.
Upvote
16
(17
/
-1)
I agree with that... with one caveat.
I think the mainstream media made a huge mistake ignoring all of the 2020 election lawsuits. From the perspective of most people, Jan 6th came out of nowhere. But from the perspective of people who were watching those lawsuits play out, it was clear that they were attempts to subvert the election. From fake electors to other shenanigans, Jan 6th was the last ditch effort in a month's long scheme.
But the mainstream media barely reported on their existence. They tried their best to treat the 2020 transition of power as normal, to treat what Trump and his minions were doing as immaterial and irrelevant.
What the mainstream media needed to do was, sometime around the time of the electors' votes, to do a large expose on what Trump and his minions were alleging and systemically deconstruct the entire fucking thing. Take apart each and every allegation. And then treat any further lawsuits as a direct threat to democracy, banging the drum loudly about how dangerous things were becoming.
When the right starts getting dangerous, mainstream media needs to pay attention. Not so much to the thing they're talking about, but the fact that they're getting dangerous.
Upvote
18
(20
/
-2)
Sounds like a moving sale.
How many vacant buildings are there in Boca Chica, since he ran off the locals?
Upvote
18
(18
/
0)
Upvote
14
(14
/
0)
Upvote
27
(27
/
0)
And what about all of the other "obvious trolls"? Most antisemites aren't stupid enough to Tweet out a Swastika inside a Star of David.
... that's 30%. That's 30% of Twitter's entire revenue. On what planet is it that "not as big of a number as it seems"?
Upvote
34
(34
/
0)
Upvote
36
(36
/
0)
I would have agreed with you if they still had the pre-Musk amount of people working on the code and the institutional memory of the people who worked on the code. On top of that there is the problem of how Musk thinks coding works, how many lines of code can you spit out per hour of work (which goes against everything I learned myself and at school about being a good/effective programmer). And the final cherry on the cake is the massive shortage of people that can work on this (I doubt the 150 people he shanghaied from Tesla and Space-X will be much help for at least three months if they aren't used as a roving fire brigade to put out the latest fire created by the shortage of people working for Twitter let alone the shortage of people working for Twitter knowing the systems).
Ugh. I didn't consider that. That is about 2 pages worth of text. Makes it actually viable to spam those screeds they have stored somewhere. That alone will allow them to spam away anything their enemy du jour gets from replies unless you are prepared to deathscroll through that.
[edit]added: pre-Musk[/edit]
Last edited:
Upvote
16
(16
/
0)
Upvote
27
(27
/
0)
"Twitter is too well established to fail"
If you wanna run with a hypothesis which renders Musk as incidental to success...whilst making failure an even more damning testament.... who am I to argue? ¯\(ツ)/¯
If you wanna run with a hypothesis which renders Musk as incidental to success...whilst making failure an even more damning testament.... who am I to argue? ¯\(ツ)/¯
Upvote
23
(23
/
0)
So the guy is basically saying gay kids need a place to form some kind of online community. I'm going to lazily read a little bit into it and add, otherwise they are at an even higher risk of suicide.
And Musk is screeching "Groomer!"
Upvote
41
(41
/
0)
Tesla has admitted that it is a failure.
Tesla says its self-driving technology may be a ‘failure’ — but not fraud
Upvote
21
(21
/
0)
Every time I read Twitter Files, I inadvertently substitute in my mind Rockford Files. Then I consider that even Angel wouldn't consider such a stupid scenario as the so called Twitter Files. Anyway, apologies for the Boomer TV reference, but at least I can post this face palm gif.
Upvote
16
(17
/
-1)
That button isn't connected to anything anymore. It's become pretty obvious that people get banned or unbanned based only on Elon's personal whim.
Upvote
33
(33
/
0)
$1.5 billion divided by 5,000 people is $300,000 per-person. CA minimum wage is not nearly that high.
If you're going to try to pass off bullshit like that, do it on a site where people are unlikely to be able to do a 5th grade word problem.
Upvote
45
(45
/
0)
Every time I read Twitter Files, I inadvertently substitute in my mind Rockford Files. Then I consider that even Angel wouldn't consider such a stupid scenario as the so called Twitter Files. Anyway, apologies for the Boomer TV reference, but at least I can post this face palm gif.
"And you think Twitter Files is cool
But there are some things
That you would change
If it were up to you
So think about your masterpiece (yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah)
Watch the Twitter Files
And call to see if Paul can score some weed.
Do you never rest
Fighting the battle of who could care less
Unearned unhappiness
That's all right I guess"
Upvote
4
(5
/
-1)
The difference here being that upgrading to Vista wasn't, like, required. You could, and many did, stick with WinXP until Win7 came along.
People can't stick with pre-Musk Twitter.
Upvote
33
(34
/
-1)
And don’t forget about the 20% (or more) in new costs to service the acquisition debt he imposed on Twitter. Basically, the company went from 'revenue roughly equal to expenses' to ‘revenue is maybe half of expenses' the moment he walked in the door carrying that sink. No wonder he’s been desperately scrambling for other revenue sources and has been slashing deeply and indiscriminately at the workforce.
Upvote
30
(30
/
0)
Upvote
33
(33
/
0)
a) I don't remember anyone seriously proposing that;
and b) the thing about Microsoft is they do lots of market research so they can course-correct if something isn't going over well. Elon seems allergic to that, making decisions on the fly based on his own gut feelings about how HE likes to use Twitter.
Basically it's like if a heroin junkie whose thing was injecting it directly into his eyeballs bought the heroin factory and announced that all future shipments would be packaged in eyeball syringes.
Upvote
24
(24
/
0)
It’s just so stupid. Everyone knows you make drones out of turtles and albatross, not seagulls.
Upvote
17
(17
/
0)
What a disingenuous human being Musk is. Stoking stochastic terrorism on people who call him out.
Upvote
33
(33
/
0)
British understatement. The words in my head are somewhat more Anglo Saxon.
Upvote
13
(13
/
0)
Gonna say this as one who has pretty much exclusively used Linux for 15 years, including distros from Gentoo through Ubuntu, and is currently well paid as a Linux sysadmin, your claims are pretty much bullshit. Sure you can find a few posts by Richard Stallman groupies that might resemble what you posted, but generally "Linux people" never thought that. I'm speaking as a Linux person.
So, congratulations, I guess? You have succeeded in posting obvious nonsense on at least two topics in one thread.
Upvote
33
(34
/
-1)
Which it isn't anymore.
And Aurich has been clear that Ars is fully bought into voting. (Which seems fine to me.)
So, let's just get one view where all the promised features work. Rather than having some work in one view and others in a different view.
(I recognize that migrations are hard. And Ars has done a good job with this migration.)
Upvote
11
(11
/
0)
Chemical Tribe
Ars Legatus Legionis
Upvote
27
(27
/
0)