Why is everything to do with this story completely unsurprising.
Because we’ve all come to accept that Elon Musk doesn’t know how to run a social media site?
He knows how to run a social media site into the ground…
Which is probably the whole point. Make it seem like the site is failing because of mismanagement, and not that its failure was intended right from the start with a leveraged buyout saddling the business with an untenable $13bn of debt.
No, he’s just dumb!
I don’t know that he does.
We’re still hearing about twitter and people are still using it.
I think what we’re learning is that social media has more inertia than we might have thought, and it’s actually incredibly difficult to kill it. This is a very bad thing as it allows someone like Musk to deeply alt-rightify what is fundamentally a public resource in private hands, but people will keep using it because…? I couldn’t tell you why really, and I think most of us that have adopted lemmy are by nature not likely to really understand it.
Yup, it’s easy to forget that an important use of Twitter used to be finding out what was happening when propaganda was covering it up. It’s how we learned about Arab spring.
If my life were at risk from my government, I certainly wouldn’t trust Elon to keep me safe from them.
The Arab Spring is exactly one if the reasons Musk took over the site. That, and Peter Thiel’s (Musk’s old partner from PayPal) failed attempts at setting up a rival service.
They couldn’t rope Twitter into line, they couldn’t make a competing service, so instead they saddled Twitter with $13bn of debt so that it would die (or step into line if they felt like paying off the debt).
It’s the same way Toys R Us went under.
Musk’s antics over the last few months have been nothing but a distraction. The very purchase itself was a death sentence.
The best anyone can do right now is to migrate off of Twitter entirely. As long as Musk is in charge (or in charge through his puppet CEOs) the site will be a cesspool of toxicity and hate. I’m honestly not sure why reputable people are still using the site… guess the view and media exposure are better than doing the right thing and leaving?
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Why would anyone want to move to another functionally similar microblogging site if Twitter still has more users?
Perhaps because the quality of the experience is better, even if the number of users is lower. As Twitter appeals more and more to the far right, those might not be the users people want to be hanging around with.
or specific forums like HardOCP/Forum screwing the pooch
ah genmay, that takes me way back
Nothing really replaced LiveJournal. Nothing really replaced Tumblr. SmugMug, Flickr, Blogger were all functionally similar sites that just never got as far. I think we’re going to see a bigger change in the style of the next social media site that reaches popularity more than we are going to see a functionally similar one replace Reddit and reach the same userlevels.
And I think we have the exact same problem with Twitter. Why would anyone want to move to another functionally similar microblogging site if Twitter still has more users? The problem we’re seeing with post, mewe, etc… General people don’t want to split themselves between several sites to keep in touch with everyone they know.
I feel like the Livejournal crowd settled into Tumblr and AO3, and the same people have accounts on both and their online presence intermingled enough you’d recognise a tumblr user on AO3 and vice versa. I feel like forums had yet to make the transition to something like AO3 for fanworks; the creators of the work (user generated data) collectively control their data. AO3 is now collecting and archiving scattered archives and restoring them or planning to restore them; the work is enormous and it is run by volunteers after all. The true legacy of Livejournal users are AO3.
If a forum site can exist where people can have absolute faith in the site like that, people will come. If a true non-profit forum can exist, maybe archives of dead forums can be revived.
But first, there must be the first call and there must be an answer. It was a massive work.
I don’t think lemmy or the fediverse is the answer, not yet. On the other side Meta will undoubtedly dilute the fediverse, unless as strong an entity as the non-profit running AO3 can stand up. A collective body have to exist if only to shelter one massive instance, an instance that welcomes any and all so that the rest too can exist.
Anyone who is still on Twitter has, in my opinion, fewer issues with being a corporate puppet and being associated with all the hatred there than they have with losing views.
I have (had?) plenty of friends on Twitter who loudly proudly boycotted the Harry Potter game due to JKR’s comments about trans people.
But they’ve stayed on Twitter despite its horrible owner and how he runs things.
I’m willing to give a pass to creators who make a living off their online audience. If the audience went off Twitter, so would they.
Everyone else, though? I don’t ever care to hear about what they’re boycotting again if they can’t pull themselves off Twitter.
I don’t agree with that logic because that means whenever horrible people buy off a platform, even if you do not pay for it, you are obligated to leave rather than push back. There are people who spent decades cultivating their community before Elon Musk had any interest in it. There are people who are right now pushing back against the rise of hate in it. It seems like a Catch-22 where the person either gives up their platform or they are discredited. The end result either way is that Musk’s crowd wins.
rather than push back.
Elon Musk owns Twitter. Every single time a person tweets some kind of “push back,” it’s just more activity on the platform that Elon Musk owns.
Question for you: Would you say all the pushback has been working? Because it seems like every comment out of Elon Musk’s mouth is worse.
Well, given how saddled with debt the place was it wouldn’t be hard to argue that more activity in fact only burdens him more. It’s not a sustainable or profitable place. I also don’t think advertisers will be to thrilled by the activity of shit constantly being flung everywhere.
But more than that, it is a social media platform, not a shop. I think there is inherent value in the people who stay there and highlight the issues going on regarding hate speech and political manipulation, rather than they all leave. That would allow hateful people to mold the platform around a whole lot of clueless people who don’t realize what is going on, and might just go along with it because they are immersed in this environment. Twitter is not made exclusively of bigots, but it could become more like that over time.
Sure there is no amount of tweets that will stop Elon Musk’s mad spiral. But his reputation definitely took some hits.
As far as it compares with JK Rowling, I also think it’s not the same. Say, if we were to compare, as far as engagement and community goes, I wouldn’t expect anyone to drop all their friends and groups they make through their shared love of Harry Potter just because the author is awful.
If anything I’m a bit suspicious from where first came this call for complete disengagement. Because if there are no voices calling for inclusivity and respect in social media platforms and fandoms, they just become breeding grounds for hate.
If anything I’m a bit suspicious from where first came this call for complete disengagement.
lol, seriously? Musk wants to disable blocking on Twitter, while continuing to ratchet up the transphobia.
You’re truly suspicious about people not wanting to wallow in a cesspool of hate?
I’m also on Kbin so you can guess what’s my stance on remaining in bad platforms.
But these are two different arguments: Whether it’s sensible for people to leave, or whether they are obligated out of moral consistency to leave.
Absolutely people have plenty of reasons not want to wallow there and I wouldn’t in a million years say anything bad to anyone who wants to leave. But I also wouldn’t shame those who want to push back against hate, who want to protect the following they gathered, or who want to support the creators who didn’t find an adequate place to rebuild their online presence yet.
What I am suspicious of is from whoever came up with this argument “if you are so opposed to bigots, how about you leave this platform” when the end result is that many of these same marginalized people targeted by hate speech might have less reach because of it.
I think you’re overthinking this. Twitter used to be a place where I could keep up with my friends. Now, it’s a place filled with many forms of hate. Because of this, I no longer wish to use it, so I left.
I personally have no care in the world for what happens with Twitter. Why should I? It becomes overrun with bigots? So what?
Remaining on a platform filled with hate is an indicator that you’re ok with that. I am not, so I left. end of story.
This is not someone randomly joining Parler. Not only minorities don’t always have the luxury to only exist where they are welcomed, they had been accepted and that was taken away from them. They already had built their following and that’s being ruined. To say that trying to hold onto what they’ve built and resist is “being okay with hate” doesn’t sound right to me.
Twitter as a place does not matter to me, but I still have friends and creators that I like that use it, and especially for artists, they need a platform with wide reach for their careers. I can preach the Fediverse and Mastodon as much as I want, but until it’s widely adopted, it’s not going to help them.
There are people who are right now pushing back against the rise of hate in it.
To what end? What do they really hope to accomplish?
It’s owned by a bigot who is making both social and corporate changes to explicitly signal to and allow other bigots to take over the platform. They’re pulling back on moderation and firing all of the people who prevented it from becoming even more of a cesspool. What chance to a bunch of people tweeting about how things should change have against the person who literally runs the platform and his toxic fanatic horde?
I understand that a lot of people have spent a lot of time on there and so it may feel hard to let go, but at this point it’s it’s beyond a lost cause and any further effort is just a sunk cost fallacy. You have to know when to realize that everything around you is on fire and that bucket of water you’re holding isn’t going to be enough.
This is why decentralized and federated platforms like Mastodon and Lemmy are the only real answer. Otherwise you’re just swimming in someone else’s pool and hoping they don’t shit in it.
This is to my eyes the core problem with centralized corporate social networks. Ultimately, where you intend it or not, your presence is in support to the core mission of the corporate entity holding the platform. Twitter has 16 years of history at this point, and I think can be viewed in three periods. First was the tech experiment to bring online interactions more into the real world. This was Twitter’s shortest period. It lasted a month or so at most. In this phase, the mission was to create a bridge between online interactions and real world experiences using cell phone technology. Second was the venture capital chasing profits period. This was the longest and least successful period of Twitters history. In this phase, the mission was to make some money. I don’t think Twitter had a mission beyond that, and that ultimately they tried to curate an environment that would appease advertisers and drive engagement (even if it was mostly through outrage). In this phase, I don’t hold all that much against anyone who engaged with the platform. I don’t think Twitter was doing anything egregiously unethical (beyond the usual bullshit every tech company does). I lost interest in Twitter in this timeframe because the outrage engagement model bummed me out. All this brings us to now…
At this point. Twitter is Elon Musk’s personal messaging platform. Its purpose is to inflate and normalize Elon Musk’s world view, and those of his cronies. Anyone who remains on the platform his helping him and his shift right mission, preferring to respect the requests of authoritarian right wing governments vs common sense consumer protections requested by more free governments. There are people on Twitter who disagree with this, but their presence still supports Musk in his mission. Whether you were there before Musk or not is immaterial. Its his personal platform, and it’s for his mission
Yeah, I’m still there. I’m not letting the right-wing trolls win. I’m there until it implodes.
Much like Reddit, if you curate your feed, stay away from the big accounts and avoid the Trending Topics and don’t talk politics then it’s still a decent place to be.
This is to my eyes the core problem with centralized corporate social networks. Ultimately, where you intend it or not, your presence is in support to the core mission of the corporate entity holding the platform. Twitter has 16 years of history at this point, and I think can be viewed in three periods. First was the tech experiment to bring online interactions more into the real world. This was Twitter’s shortest period. It lasted a month or so at most. In this phase, the mission was to create a bridge between online interactions and real world experiences using cell phone technology. Second was the venture capital chasing profits period. This was the longest and least successful period of Twitters history. In this phase, the mission was to make some money. I don’t think Twitter had a mission beyond that, and that ultimately they tried to curate an environment that would appease advertisers and drive engagement (even if it was mostly through outrage). In this phase, I don’t hold all that much against anyone who engaged with the platform. I don’t think Twitter was doing anything egregiously unethical (beyond the usual bullshit every tech company does). I lost interest in Twitter in this timeframe because the outrage engagement model bummed me out. All this brings us to now…
At this point. Twitter is Elon Musk’s personal messaging platform. Its purpose is to inflate and normalize Elon Musk’s world view, and those of his cronies. Anyone who remains on the platform his helping him and his shift right mission, preferring to respect the requests of authoritarian right wing governments vs common sense consumer protections requested by more free governments. There are people on Twitter who disagree with this, but their presence still supports Musk in his mission. Whether you were there before Musk or not is immaterial. Its his personal platform, and it’s for his mission
Yeah, I do still have my twitter account but I try to avoid going on it and only still have it because there are a few niche times where it’s still unfortunately the best place to get current information on local issues (last Sunday for example there was a power outage in my area and the power company’s twitter is a bit better at giving updates than their official site so I was checking both).
I really wish I could just delete my account and maybe I still will (and just create an empty dummy account for those rare cases so twitter doesn’t harass me to log in). But to be honest I’m less stressed about social media in general ever since I left twitter and I suspect over time a similar thing will happen with being off Reddit.
We (most of the people here), already did. Thats how mastadon was born!
Musk is a proponent of near-absolute free speech
Anything goes, so long as it doesn’t hurt his feelings personally
As long as you don’t use the term cisgender :)
People are also not allowed to say the word "cisgender” over there
Woah dude, cool it with the c-bombs.
It’s okay, I gave them a c-word pass.
Some of my friends are c-words, so I can use it
Freedom, by Musk… a cologne that’s actually mace with directions to the local old folks home and instructions on how to use InShot.
Kinda far from absolute imo.
I would claim actual free speech absolutists don’t exist.
You’re probably since those that preach about free speech are politically driven, hence biased to protect their stance. Rest of us have realized speech isn’t free of consequence and the last third just doesn’t give a fuck.
Defamation, fraud, hate speech, harassment, collusion, confidentiality, incitement…
No reasonable person actually thinks that free speech is an unlimited right. Plenty of kinds of speech are viewed as too harmful to be legal. The right is well understood to be about political speech only, and even then the edge cases can be hard to pin.
Anyone who claims to be an absolutist on free speech is insane or absolutely full of shit.
you forgot the most important one: being negative against musk/spez/freeSpeechAdmin123/insert any other free speech absolutist authority figure here
Didn’t he also give in to block a few accounts of political opponents in Turkey instead of risking being banned there completely, because he said it would be better to lose a few accounts instead of losing the whole country?
Or when an authoritarian government asks him to block literally anything
“TikTok copycat”
You know, way way back in the pre-Elon days, they had another one. I think it was called Vine?
I still don’t understand why they killed it. Must’ve been a real money sink.
high costs server side, poor quality of the videos, poor-ish internet connections, not enough powerful cell phones, etc. They were ahead of time. They achieved a decent success in the US but not much outside of it because of much of the reasons listed above.
I know peertube already exists, but I wonder if a federated app specifically for short videos (to reduce data storage costs) could find some success?
would probably also need to use some intense video compression technology before upload to further reduce file sizes
There actually is one in development right now! It’s called Goldfish. It’s in pre-alpha right now, but it’s getting somewhere
Yeah, and it closed because they weren’t making money on it. Turns out all you needed was a few years for server costs to go down.
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Does he? Is that even possible?
4chan doesn’t fuck with animal abusers. They fuck their lives up and doxx them.
4chan posts plenty of animal abuse videos because they think it’s funny to make people watch them accidentally
The fediverse is looking like the objective best alternative, more so day by day.
One day the far right has to realize we’re here, and they’ll pile in to hurl abuse etc. When that happens I’ll be looking for instances that moderate and defederate them away. I didn’t realize how much that stuff got me down until I came here from reddit and found people having reasonable conversations, just like in the old days. It’s a rare thing to find on today’s internet. Let the commercial sites go after absolute numbers of users while we pursue a better experience.
I don’t use Tiktok but I gather that this is a big problem over there as well, so it sounds like Twitter is working just as well as the site it’s riffing off.
I don’t either but my understanding from other feedback, and from the article linked, is that no, it’s not a problem there. More accurate algorithm and proper moderation.
it’s not a problem there
It is, because my wife is an avid Tok user and complains about it, and reports it, frequently. She also says there are many animal videos that are “unsettling” but not outright abuse.
What kinda goofy response was this from Musk? AYO!
Try not to link if you can, just screenshot or copy text. Don’t need to drive any traffic to that pit of despair.
Expected from someone who responds with the 💩 emoji
I actually didn’t find much wrong with that, that was funny. But this here is a completely inappropriate response
It might be a funny way to set up your personal email account you only share with your friends, but it’s a wildly unprofessional thing to do with the PR department’s autoreply
are there videos of apes with nualink in their brains?
Many reported being alarmed by a stream of graphic videos they encountered while scrolling through the feed, including videos showing gun violence, police brutality, physical altercations and vaccine misinformation.
So it’s working as intended?
System is working as intended… I guess then huh Elon?
Steve “spez” Huffman calls the feature “visionary” and jokes that he wishes some protesting Reddit moderators be featured in the videos.
Of course Elon would.
As for the free speech claims. I guess it’s code for Elon doesn’t want to pay people to moderate the content.
Except where the word “cisgender” is used, then he brings in the last employee that knows how to work the only machine left in the office with a working version of the software for modding content, while him, Ronnie, and other top members of the Reich look over his shoulder.
