X apparently added 5-second delay for links to sites Musk doesn’t like
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BuckarooBuzzsaw
Smack-Fu Master, in training
Does Mush have access to a high-power laser? Don't anyone tell him about Chairface Chippendale's plan.
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Ugh, I regret to admit that it was fun and tongue-in-cheek at the time. Why not?? Amidst a sea of Corollas and Explorers and Tahoes, it was back when Tesla seemed exciting. It would still be cute, at least, if Musk wasn't such a weapons-grade fuckup. (Note that cute isn't necessarily smart or mature, but we've degraded to the state such that the poop emoji is now in several legal documents. At this point, I'd take S, 3, X, Y as the lowest common denominator of humor, but the common denominator just keeps getting lower and lower.)
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As much as we'd all like to believe Musk is actually Tinkerbell, and he'd simply fade away to nothing if only we just stopped paying attention to him, that's not the way life works.
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I have been inactive for many months on Twitter beyond reading the occasional news article making references that linking to it but no more. Its transition to X means Musk has completed its speedrun into turning it completely into a flaming landfill, I'm out for good. Its officially an even worse cesspool than it was before Musk. Too Nazi and racist friendly for anyone sane to keep using it on good conscience.
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I don't have a dog in this fight but isn't those post basically just that?
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While I have not confirmed this with a professional marketer, as a Japanese native speaker I am fairly sure that one of the reasons why Xbox has never been more than an abject failure in Japan was because ekkusu bokkusu just doesn’t roll off the tongue smoothly in Japanese. Compare and contrast with Playstation, which is colloquially abbreviated by Japanese users to an easily pronounced and memorable puresute. Which one do you think sounds more approachable to the typical non-English-literate Japanese parents: ekkusu bokkusu shiriizu ekkusu or puresute faibu?
Now, it would be unreasonable to expect Musk to know about such gotchas in multilingual branding. But it is reasonable to expect him to ask his marketing people in various countries to see if there is a problem with ”X.”
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Wombling_Free
Seniorius Lurkius
Ah, yes. The Australian accent. Of course here in Australia we say (and hear) 'Ecks', but the pretty much the rest of the world hears an Australian say 'Icks'. New Zealanders are just more extreme.
True story: while staying in a youth hostel in Chicago a few mates and I played cards with some German lads. The learned the English names of the cards from us, and we noticed they said 'Ice of Spides'. No, we said, it's 'Ace of Spades' Yah, they said, 'Ice of Spides'. Also the local Americans couldn't understand us when we asked for a 'Sprite', we had to pronounce it as 'Sprayte' to get the right drink.
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"We contacted X today and will update this article if we get a response"
I think every news outlet should have an Athazagoraphile on staff for handling this. That way someone is at least getting pleasure out of being ignored by the X/Twitter media contact.
I think every news outlet should have an Athazagoraphile on staff for handling this. That way someone is at least getting pleasure out of being ignored by the X/Twitter media contact.
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He didn't have final say, and that was probably the compromise.
The part that's most fun about Musk's failures here is that he's not just destroying his reputation at Twitter, but retroactively undoing it for everything else he's been involved with. This behaviour isn't new, it's just that at his other companies he had people who were working to provide a buffer between him and the product. Literally people babysitting him and using distractions so that the actual engineering and marketing people could do their jobs. At Twitter, he has a live feed into the product, and the results are causing everyone to re-evaluate what they thought about him previously.
Those car model names are there because Musk is a childish idiot, but someone had to say to him "no, Elon, we can't literally call a car "sexy"". Then, the 3 is there because he thought through the strategy so poorly he didn't realise another manufacturer already had the trademark on Model E, but was so committed to the childish bit that he had to do it in a way that revealed it to everyone.
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Twitter doesn't hold anything close to a monopoly position in social media. Facebook is far larger, for example.
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If the update had actually been planned out and done all at once he could call it X.com and that would also be useful for news articles and such. But since x.com just forwards to twitter.com and everyone just uses twitter.com that doesn't even work.
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Yep. But this kind of behavior is making it clear that X is no longer a reliable partner for commercial interests. That means it's just helping people in the long run to conclude their money, time and trust are better spent elsewhere.
We're seeing a fast evolution into a repeat of Tumblr and MySpace trajectories. The only reason it's taking longer is because Twitter is falling from a greater height.
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Haven't been on twitter for a while but just noticed they have stopped labeling ads? Pretty sure that's not even legal in many countries ... ?
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It has an actual effect. A lot of people expect a near-instant response to clicking on a link, and if nothing happens for a couple of seconds they abandon it.
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These are the folks who are being harmed the most, because there is no doubt in my mind that if he had the power, Elon would have them--how shall I put this politely?--removed from society. Whether it's the disability community, the trans community, or any other decentralized minority group that found a home on social media, hyper-wealthy assholes like him are all too happy to accept whatever money he can fleece out of the captive audience while simultaneously enacting and advocating for policies that do them harm.
While it's true that sometimes the energy that would go into finding a new place to build a community is already "bookmarked for survival", there's a gigantic difference between survival and palliative care. Staying on Twitter in order to access your community is 100% the latter.
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How do you explain Musk unbanning someone who posted CSAM ?
Because that's the kind of thing that the law restricts even more heavily than copyright violations, for good reason.
I don't think Musk cares about the law, except when he can use it as an excuse for whatever he wanted to do.
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Yeah, currently they don't even allow* animated GIFs.
* by policy, not a technical issue.
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This is one of those situations where it would be tempting to say this was deliberate, if any of those companies had ever pissed off Musk. But I think it's far more likely that Twitter is simply making little-to-no effort to ensure ads are placed appropriately.
Which is arguably worse, of course.
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I still use it cos Japanese Twitter is still a very vibrant corner of the shitty site and many Japanese celebrities and artists only uses Twitter and god forbid, TikTok, to post updates.
There’s no fucking way I’m going to start using fucking TikTok over Twitter.
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I just de-activated my Twitter account which I built up to 300 actual followers (I blocked over 300+ bots)
Social Media makes people think they need these followers. It's all about engagement and not about actual friendships. If you have friends on Twitter, ask if they have Discord or other chat software, then see if you need Twitter.
If you're a big YouTuber or something like that, maybe... but if you're not a big corpo or influencer, you're not gonna miss anything from leaving Twitter.
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“Fucking TikTok” sounds very …. educational. I’ll have to checks that out sometime. /s
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What I don't understand is why it's so hard for people to just not use the fucking thing. Stop talking about it. Stop using it. Block it at your gateway if you have to. Maybe stop writing about every dumb thing a fatass narcissist does?
It's a trash fire. It always has been. From the rise of Donald Trump to all the excuses the self-serving "ethics" people made for him ("newsworthy", etc.). They justified hate speech with predictable consequences and now we all suffer for their naevete.
Fuck Yael Roth and every other prick who enriched themselves giving that pile of shit a polish. His end at Twitter was like Ernst Rohm's. Hoisted on his own petard. That's what happens when you give fascists the benefit of the doubt. Fucking idiot.
It's a trash fire. It always has been. From the rise of Donald Trump to all the excuses the self-serving "ethics" people made for him ("newsworthy", etc.). They justified hate speech with predictable consequences and now we all suffer for their naevete.
Fuck Yael Roth and every other prick who enriched themselves giving that pile of shit a polish. His end at Twitter was like Ernst Rohm's. Hoisted on his own petard. That's what happens when you give fascists the benefit of the doubt. Fucking idiot.
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Except, of course, content that is only posted to Twitter. Of which there is an obnoxious amount.
Part of this is that there simply is no replacement. Bluesky's response to all of this Twitter drama was to drastically reduce the rate at which they gave out invites. Threads is still as useless as it was when it launched. Turns out the "followers only" view - the only change since launch - doesn't show you everything from people you follow, it's still algorithmic in some way and only shows you some of what people you follow post. There's no trending tab, so there's no way to see "social" conversations, so there's no real way to grow your network of people. You're just left with an algorithmic feed of posts from people you don't know. Most people who tried Threads have already given up on it.
Which means that you're left with groups where the only way to know what they're up to is to follow what they post on what used to be called Twitter. There's just nothing out there that replaces it yet.
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I think of it as "the website formerly known as Twitter" or TWAT for short.
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Sometimes... see Walter Duransky. An atypical case, I know.
Still, I cannot imagine Ars commentators letting them off quite so easily if they proposed equally sympathetic explanations of similar rhetoric in other settings.
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Wouldnt slowing the links to competing news sources run foul of anticompetitive laws? Kind of like MS making sure chrome runs bad in windows.
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