I'll miss Twitter when I goes. I think maybe Reddit is a better site. It doesn't work much like Twitter though.
I got a lot out of it for years and even though I drew back to mainly following for news the past few years, I'm still going to be sad if it goes. I still think there will be something at twitter.com for many years, but without new leadership it's likely to turn into something not very recognizable.
The real treasure is the friends you met along the way. Or the $44 billion.
I'm happy enough to see one of our oligarchs eat shit that the rest is trivia to me.
The sad thing is, he probably has the financial backing to eat shit, keep the company propped up with contractors*, and turn it into something truly fucked up.
*Reportedly, lots of the business side also resigned and they might need to hire a company to do payroll.
He can always make good money selling everybody's contact info to spammers.
1. I don't think almost everyone has quit. Right now almost everyone's still on, just being valedictory because it could shut down at any time and even Elmo is posting in a Crying Wojak mien. But who knows, it could still be limping along Monday.
2. Something will probably rise in its place. Some creative renetworking will at least be a change.
3. I don't think Musk will come out positive. He sunk a good deal of his own money into it, even if a good chunk was borrowed on generous terms. He admitted after a certain point that he paid too much. Maybe he'll even lose control of one of his other companies!
"Everyone has quit" referred to the employees.
Yeah, I'm torn between delight at watching Elon's sabotage himself, and a real sense of loss. It took me a while, and I'm only a passive user of Twitter, but I've managed to curate a feed that is funny, interesting, and informative but not stressful. There's nothing like it, and I'll really miss it.
I'm actually becoming pretty skeptical he can even make the loan payments. Twitter has never made enough money to cover them and must make way less now, and Musk's personal wealth is mostly in the form of equity in his other companies, which have all been cratering in value along with Twitter. Maybe the Saudis will bail him out for political reasons or something, but Twitter under his leadership may not be looking like a great political bet either.
I'm laughing! Also I suspect tens of millions of the anglosphere's smarter people remembering how to think more than 280 characters at a time will be an unalloyed good.
I think the lesson here is that most CEOs are radically underpaid, now that we know how much damage a really bad CEO can do how quickly. No, you are not paying that generic middle aged guy in a suit $5 million a year to bring in a brilliant new strategy that will make you the largest producer of packaged luncheon meats east of the Appalachians. You are paying him $5 million a year not to do what Musk has just done.
Agree. Have you tried mastodon? Some of the people o follow are migrating there.
Mastodon looks too hard. The point about social meeja is that it should be as easy to use as a telephone with a rotary dial and you shouldn't have to know what a server is. Otherwise it's restricted to people like the Unfoggerati. I can come here for that, or Faceplant at a pinch. What value does Mastodon add?
I'm sad, but also laughing. I feel like at least Twitter has been burning down beautifully.
I was genuinely a little surprised to see Twitter still up this morning. I'm still surprised that neither Google nor Facebook has launched a Twitter clone.
It's probably too big to do the Trump thing where you go public and offload all the debt to your fan boys?
I know that often billionaires are just venal arseholes who get lucky by being in the right place at the right time, and by having parents who have enough money to bankroll their gambles.
But ... I'm still surprised at how badly Musk is fucking this up. Decisions that are obviously idiotic to anyone who isn't substance-addled or a genuine moron are being made day after day with no respite. It's pretty amazing.
Example 1000 of boards are useless and provide no real oversight, but how is Tesla looking at this and convincing themself that having Musk as CEO maximizes shareholder value?
Twitter has never been better. It's like the scenes in the movie when all the characters realize their planet is doomed and they all run together to hug and tell each other "I love you!" Except there's also jokers that have been saving their best material just for this moment.
And then we wake up the next morning and the asteroid hasn't hit, the hydrogen bombs weren't launched, and everyone is a little embarrassed.
Twitter seems like one of those bands that people who are too old for make a noisy show of truly madly deeply loving.
So many local services tweet updates: where is the wildfire, what was that noise, what's the predicted snowfall.... I wonder where they're going to go.
We used to have to listen to am radio to learn if school was canceled because of snow. We managed.
I'm going to be very sad when Twitter goes down, which it will eventually. It's been endlessly entertaining, informative, I've made friends and had significant relationships because of it. Though I do find the way it's been lit of fire to be absolutely hilarious.
It would be a fitting Viking funeral, except I'm pretty sure something of it will survive and it will be just horrible.
I think I'm going to miss Twitter too. There'll never be a better place where one can go to be exposed to the opinions of a huge variety of people named Matt, Dylan, or Josh.
14: I follow epidemiologists and am interested in organizing and local politics. I don't know those people. It's not a community in the same way as unfogged.
Facebook doesn't allow anonymous users as much and it's more about friends than following feeds.
Why will it go down? If they are not adding new services and are just focused on keeping what they have running, how many people do they need? Even if the site starts to fail, it seems like that failure would express itself as becoming inaccessible for a period of time, and probably not a long period of time. A 95% uptime is not that different from an end user's perspective than a 99.99% uptime.
Not a computer scientist but:
https://twitter.com/MosquitoCapital/status/1593541177965678592
https://twitter.com/dmofengineering/status/1593479832490295297
https://twitter.com/Ramin_DK/status/1593457083919306753
Also: https://twitter.com/mkelly_io/status/1593604041199828992
@29, 30
Okay, but don't these sound a lot like the "the Russians are about to run out of ammo" posts that we have been seeing for 8 months now? Remember the US logistics expert who said that, based on his analysis of tires in photos of Russian supply trucks, that the Russians would suffer incredible logistics breakdowns due to deferred or unperformed maintenance and would be unable, within weeks, to supply their troops?
This could all be true, but i suspect that the degree of certainty expressed is unwarranted. Elon may be ruining twitter, but there is a great deal of ruin in twitter.
Okay, but don't these sound a lot like the "the Russians are about to run out of ammo" posts that we have been seeing for 8 months now?
The ones that were followed by all those "Russia desperately seeks ammunition supplies from Iran and North Korea" posts?
Remember the US logistics expert who said that, based on his analysis of tires in photos of Russian supply trucks, that the Russians would suffer incredible logistics breakdowns due to deferred or unperformed maintenance and would be unable, within weeks, to supply their troops?
No, I don't, actually. I remember a blogger called Trent Telenko who used to work in defence contract management - which is a valuable skill, but isn't the same as logistics - and who posted about poor maintenance on truck tyres and elsewhere. I'd love to see a link to him ever saying "within weeks the Russians will be unable to supply their troops".
31: Sure. Now, imagine Putin fires half the mechanics in the army.
Sending them into combat as infantry with no training.
23: Sure, but if they'd shut down KDKA over a weekend, your parents would have been scrambling, even if they had learned about local events via semaphore.
@32
https://www.newsweek.com/russian-army-days-away-running-out-resources-military-experts-say-1688025
That was in March. The Russians rained holy hell on Lysychansk in June and July. With regards to trucks specifically:
https://www.cnn.com/2022/04/14/europe/ukraine-war-russia-trucks-logistics-intl-hnk-ml
"I don't see how the Russians can maintain their current positions, let alone make any offensive moves with their current truck fleet," he says.
Narrator: That summer the Russians made further offensive moves.
All of that is based on Telenko's thread. A guy who oversold his expertise and got way over his skis (I remember subsequent posts opining about the dark Slavic soul and shit). If you follow genuine experts like Michael Kofman, Rob Lee, Mark Hertling, (all on Twitter btw!) ISW, et al, you'd have a better picture of what has been going on. Kofman in particular has always been very careful not to speculate about matters for which he doesn't have reliable info. As I recall it PGMs have long been in low supply which is now critical, artillery ammo hasn't been an issue until very recently (hence Russia trying to source 152mm shells from DPRK.
As to the links I posted, as I said IANACS, but these people are and to me they seem to know what they're talking about. There's a lot more of that out there if you care to find it. As for Musk he seems to think code comments make software bloated but what do I know?
42.1 should be amended to be only about that CNN story.
I'll be kind of glad to see Twitter dead, if it does shut down. I scroll it all day myself, but I don't like it as much as the things it replaced (all right, blogs. I'm still nostalgic for when blogs were king). I really hate the lack of context -- being asked to react to a screenshot of something because linking to whatever is would be giving it undeserved attention always annoys the crap out of me.
So, something will replace it and it probably won't be worse.
the dark Slavic soul and shit
I don't know about the first, but eating beets will do the second.
I disagree that social media is nothing if it's not super easy to enter. People had to get used to Twitter, and over time it built up network effects.
44.last: When was the last time the internet got *better* rather than worse? I assume the replacement will be worse. The internet has been in a pretty steady secular decline for at least a decade.
When was the last time the internet got *better* rather than worse?
Um, hello "It's Corn!" remix with that cute little kid.
I think the reason Facebook and Google haven't built a twitter clone* is that they're larger companies that make more money than twitter ever did.
* Was Google+ a Facebook clone? Hard to remember.
@42 Koffman makes few falsifiable predictions. Which makes his predictive ability hard to evaluate.
But here he is on March 21:
What is clear is that the Russian military doesn't stand a good chance of achieving its initial political aims, and that the Russian leadership has had to revise their war aims substantially towards a settlement since regime change is not an option. Now they're just trying to put themselves in the best possible position for that negotiation, and the Russian military probably only has a couple of weeks left in terms of combat effectiveness left inside Ukraine.
Now Russia withdrew in the North two weeks later, but not because they wanted to negotiate. They immediately concentrated in the South & East.
"being asked to react to a screenshot of something because linking to whatever is would be giving it undeserved attention always annoys the crap out of me."
I feel you but isn't this just a general feature of the world that criticizing things gives them fuel?
The main reason I never fully clicked with Twitter is that the ratio of ads/junk to content seems distractingly high, compared with IG/FB/Reddit. Although I ditched FB mostly a few years ago as well.
I'm now on FB and Twitter a little more, using my local alter ego to engage in local politics, and I get a really high ratio of crap on FB as well. Worse than I remember it being in the past.
Unfogged for the win! Where I literally get to write the crap that separates the real content in the comments!
I will miss Twitter's ability to connect me to experts and people interested in specific topics, especially local politics (Minneapolis Twitter was critical to understand what was happening during the uprising), but what I will really miss is the absurdist shitposting. The current blaze of glory has been phenomenal for gallows shitposting and I'm doing everything I can to experience it before the lights go out.
Then actually do ignore it, don't make a fuss about how awful it is without making it convenient for me to see for myself what I'm being asked to be outraged about in context.
I mean, no one has to communicate the way I want them to, that's just a method of communication I dislike.
48: Fair point, I can't argue with that.
"Hi, it's Corn, I'm the problem it's Corn."
They were already attacking the south and the east. Most of the gains Russia made after that were in the east and not in the south. Other than his take about negotiation (and not, he's a military not a political/IR analyst) I fail to see where he was wrong there.
But this is about the Twitters going down. And I suppose we'll soon find out.
FB is awful. Maybe I like twitter more than other people do because for some reason it never gives me ads.
Would be hilarious if Twitter keeps working but the ads totally break.
I do work in systems stuff now (albeit at a much smaller scale) and I understand what people are saying about likely outages at twitter, and I still think a lot depends on who actually left and how long it takes to get new people (if they can). They probably would take the site down if they were making changes right now but they've frozen everything. Even myspace still seems to be around and they had some huge problem a couple years ago where they lost a bunch of data.
My guess is there will be some outages, possibly the worst ones when they try to add or change features, but that the finances will determine if the company survives.
Anyway, LiveJournal is Russian now.
53 It truly is a glorious moment for shitposting.
Update: he apparently emailed out to the remaining engineering team to "anyone who can write code" to make a bulleted list of what they achieved with it and report to the 10th floor at 2pm... when keycards are still supposed to be frozen.
And to think I thought he didn't know what he was doing.
He also asked them email him screenshots of their "most salient" code. He's been weirdly obsessed with the details of code throughout this whole saga.
It's like with the cave thing. He can't admit someone can do something he can't and doesn't realize that people who have reason to hate you and you aren't giving money (or enough money) to won't think of a face-saving way to get you out of the dilemma.
@63 I think that is an excellent read of the situation...
He's got this weird macho sense that coding is "real work" and everything else is fake. So he gets rid people like product and interface designers.
But the problems he's facing aren't coding problems. Like the problem with the blue check thing wasn't a coding problem. The problem, which would be obvious to anyone who isn't Musk, is that a system for verifying identity that really only verifies whether you have eight dollars isn't going to do what users want it to do.
But he can't see any of that, because understanding the way human interaction works is fake work. Coding is real work.
I'm mean, advertising and marketing are obviously bullshit. At least I can think that. I don't run a company that depends on advertising and as long as someone keeps assigning me jobs, marketing is someone else's problem.
He's got this weird macho sense that coding is "real work" and everything else is fake.
I am a coder and that is such bullshit.
This is a good list of, "things that can go wrong, running a social media site" https://nitter.net/MosquitoCapital/status/1593541177965678592#m
66: depends on the kind of marketing. Advertising is bullshit, but much like sales, there are marketing people who keep their fingers on the pulse of their customers' needs.
I think in one of his early companies he did a lot of the coding for something enough to get some venture capital, then the actual team that let them hire had to basically rewrite everything. I wonder if that exacerbated his inferiority complex.
Have mostly given up following Ukraine because although interesting, it's also incredibly sad and anxiety-making. However, I remember Kofman being one of the most wrong about Russian capability before they crossed the border: he thought they'd steamroller the Ukrainian army.
Anyway, predictions in Ukraine are hard to make I guess in part because one key variable is the type and quantity of aid sent by Ukraine's allies. Everything Russia tries runs into a measured counter, albeit with a lag of a few weeks.
One thing that might have been thought about more - maybe? - is how well the Ukrainians understand their own terrain and have played its attributes for their best defensive advantage.
71.1 Everyone thought that before actual contact and he's spoken about that and why at length in some of the WotR podcasts. I think everyone was surprised at just how shit the Russian army was at doing war shit., including the Russian army itself.
So many local services tweet updates: where is the wildfire, what was that noise, what's the predicted snowfall.... I wonder where they're going to go.
My city and county services have SMS feeds. I am, for instance, subscribed to news about only my two major buslines. Plus, IIRC, I got to choose something like a degree-of-disastertude for the general messages.
I think their web interfaces to the feeds were their Twitter feeds, but all the agencies have websites anyway, they could blog.
Just saw something on Twitter saying Musk is only terrorizing their US workers, and stuff is running as normal in Europe. So maybe that's part of why it hasn't totally broken?
It's been a really useful news aggregator, plus cat pictures and randoms whose voices I enjoy. I'll miss it when it goes.
I'm surprised more mastodon servers haven't gone down. There's definitely been a lot of trouble with servers keeping up with new traffic. I've been in a quiet corner of that world and have never seen anything like this level of traffic. The server I'm on isn't huge* and doesn't have a lot of new users, so it's been an interesting vantage point to watch everything else fly by. But there's basically one person, part-time, managing it, and three moderators.
* it's sort of topically based, definitely not general interest, more like the kind of common professional interests that also lead to mailing lists
Maybe it's because when strain is being put on them they usually stop accepting new people at least temporarily, and new entrants find other servers?
I just went to the federated timeline and the first post was someone recommending not posting videos for a few days.
I've now followed David Roberts, Ken White, and the single-stair passivhaus monomaniac on Mastodon. Nature is healing?
Limiting sign-ups definitely helps, and as I understand it from asking the admin of my instance the federated flow isn't too big of a resource hog. But we couldn't post photos for a while and videos are strictly limited, all based on a small number of new people and returning people posting more.
You can use Fedifinder https://fedifinder-backup2.glitch.me/success.html to find your twitter follows on Mastodon. First choose them, then scroll down and download the cvs, import using the instructions. Was easy and painless for me.
There's options to pick and choose for people who subscribe to a ton of lists or have a lot of followers
Meanwhile, Musk's supporters are getting into idolatry. More than they already were, that is.
None of this [gestures towards tech and politics] is helping me write something I need to write, which has resulted in me becoming extremely online again.
Comparing Musk/Twitter to Russia/Ukraine causes me to think that we ought to ban analogies on this blog.
I mean seriously: Does someone really want to make the argument that military commentators have generally underestimated the capacity of Russia to make war? Are you fucking kidding me?
Since there is apparently going to be no analogy discipline whatsoever here, allow me to make a sensible analogy: An arrogant asshole made a series of uninformed decisions that will inevitably lead to failure. The only remaining question is the scope of the disaster, and how much damage will be done in the process and to whom.
And the key to the fiasco is a lack of respect work that is essential but unglamorous.
I understand that individual people get a huge amount of value out of Twitter. But like the Internet itself, I think we should consider the possibility that the world at large might be better off without it.
I have similar thoughts about alcohol but I don't think a billionaire could destroy that for everyone.
I regret to inform you that you are mistaken.
50: you have misread all the sources you quote (admittedly some of them were not well written), and you need to learn what words like "culminate" mean before you get into this any further.
Instagram I find baffling and overwhelming. Maybe because you can't observe it before you participate. Twitter is like blogs in that respect.
76: I want to join a mastodon server. I was thinking about social, since I'm not a expert on anything and don't want to join med twitter, but if it's overwhelmed that might not be such a hot idea.
I had been slow in downloading my data from Twitter. Finally requested it for two accounts early this week. Got the one on Wednesday (very small). When i tried the second I got a "Feature temporarily unavailable" message for several days, but just now was able to download it.
Overall, I think the site will be able to keep running for the most part longer than many think. I think in some ways people's assessment of the importance of the tech staff for day-to-day running. But we will see.
My plan had been to leave after the election. Just too lazy to get going on alternatives.
It's probably a mistake, but not signing insults is antisocial.
I suspect that 92.2 is right. I'm thinking there's a chance it survives as Truth Social 2.0 or something.
I like Instagram. As with anywhere else, it's just knowing who to follow. I follow a bunch of mid-century interior design and vintage photos and history accounts. I like getting the story behind an odd historical photo. Also I follow a bunch of animal/nature accounts. But it's not terribly informative and I don't spend a ton of time on it.
I thought Instagram was all about butts.
Anyway, I think loudly expecting that Twitter is about to die within the week is just giving Musk a lower bar to jump before he can call "win" than would otherwise be the case.
96: Instagram shows you exactly what you most want to see.
Then they messed up. I'm into boobs.
I dealt with pre-operative anxiety by setting up a little Mastodon instance for me and a couple friends, and now Ad/am To/oze is following me? He follows many hundreds of people; I guess his extremely broad interests extend to my face surgery, which, to be fair, probably is part of the polycrisis.
101: How are you? I mean, feeling good enough to comment is good, but things are going okay I hope?
Or am I wrong and the surgery hasn't happened yet?
I thought we were reliably informed that the surgery happened.
More than one surgery.
I thought so too but I've gotten confused about timelines before.
Thanks for asking! I'm not sure how my surgery or surgeries mapped onto that succession of texts that lurid got on Tuesday, but something definitely happened and I'm now home from it! Surprisingly little pain, mostly feels like having a bad cold; can't breathe through my nose, the constitution is run down, already tired of the liquid diet, etc. lurid's mom (cis ally of the year) has come out to help around the house. My head is all bandaged up in a sort of mummy-wimple and it's anyone's guess what I actually look like under there. Perhaps a partial unveiling at the post-op on Monday.
The stupidest part of it is that, AIMHM, my best friend was supposed to get the same procedures from the same surgeon two days after me, but with 72 hours to go she had to go to the ER with a freak abdominal obstruction and they kept her overnight. She's home and fine now, but of course they canceled the surgery and because of the absurd wait list she's now been postponed till August 2023, which is Just. The. Worst. I feel so bad for her; this was supposed to be a two-woman mission.
the constitution is run down
Same.
Surprisingly little pain is awesome news! I figure what the results look like is a matter for multiple weeks/months, give all the healing, but home and not in pain is great. Lousy about your friend, though -- at least she'll have knowledgeable support from you when it's finally her turn.
Congratulations on being out and feeling okay! It seems nerve-wracking to have to wait to know what you look like. (And that's shitty news about your friend.)
so happy to hear from you post op lourdes! am absurdly envious you are getting to experience the full-on 1940's woman's weepy movie experience of big head bandages and then a dramatic reveal! your bette midler moment!!! v sorry for your friend, ugh.
davis!!! bette davis! omg so sorry to throw midler in there :-( so many apologies.
Thank you all, and no worries - everybody gets one free inadvertent Bette Midler reference. Looking forward to the soft focus and swelling strings on Monday.
I don't think I've ever seen a Bette Davis movie all the way through.
Hollywood missed out on a chance to make a movie start with Bette Davis and end with Bette Midler playing the same character, with surgery, bandage, reveal somewhere in the middle.
Trump is being reinstated. Let it burn.
He was never not going to be reinstated.
At least the twitter that Trump returns to is the twitter as it exists at the end of the past three weeks. Sort of like how the medal that Belicheck turned down was the medal of freedom after having been devalued by Trump.
I thought Belicheck would be happy with something deflated.
92: the world is full of people whose jobs used to belong to someone indispensable.
117: the Guardian is reporting this as fact on the basis of the poll tweet, the archive of tweets is visible, but the most recent is 8th January 2021
123 tl;dr:
The aristocrats internet. [Editorial note: this comment refers to a now-deleted giant spam comment. LB]
122: I think being able to see the account's tweets is the result of un-banning. I saw somewhere that he might not actually want to come back.
||
Would love a thread on the Colorado Springs nightclub shooting. How does that tie in to the whole Air Force evangelical culture?
|>
124: They reinstated the account but so far Trump has refused to use it. The whole thing continues to be grimly hilarious.
Trump is obviously going to get back on Twitter at some point. I'm sure he signed something saying he would only use whatever the thing from his grift is. But he's a huge liar and Twitter has more people to pay attention to him.
Maybe? He also might want to humiliate Musk. He really likes to bully people who toady up to him.
Both 129 and 130 seem plausible to me. I guess we'll see.
I'm also enjoying the fact that truth social is running on a version of mastodon software.
This Twitter thread on SBF is a nice example of how useful Twitter can be. What I can't grasp is: Why can't that thing be accomplished in a non-crappy format? (Like, say, a blog?)
133: I like that thread. There's a line from a Josephine Tey mystery novel that's stuck with me over the years, despite not being really applicable to my own moral reasoning as an atheist: one character is faced with a dilemma where the consequences of her actions are really unclear, and another responds with "Do the obvious right thing, and let God dispose."
This guy should be in a Russian novel that I'll never finish reading.
I never did read far enough to see what happened to the guy who killed the rich of lady so he could go on to do great things, but from the second half of the title, I'm assuming it didn't work as he planned.