The death of Twitter

[Ashley]

Well Elon Musk seems to be on the cusp of completely breaking his new toy with most of the staff having either quit or been fired by the petulant man child and reports that at the moment nobody can get into the building because the person in charge of badge access has left and the badges aren't working. 

So as another social media platform seems destined to fail why not talk about it? The good and the bad, the funny and the sad. 

I've been using it for over a decade now and it's the one I'm most active on but recently slowed that down and unfollowed a lot of accounts as I realised I just want to see what my friends are up to. It's so easy to delve into hatred on that site that I'm trying to back away from that (for example yesterday someone retweeted a video of a cyclist crossing a pelican crossing and a driver nearly hitting them and the replies contained a lot of blood lust). Plus it's gotten worse for pushing content I don't wish to see. 

[Hero-of-Time]

I welcome the death it. Now let's see the same happen to TikTok and Facebook.  Saying that, it's how I get my images from my Switch on to here. You see, this is why Miiverse should have remained! 

[bob]

I welcome the death it. Now let's see the same happen to TikTok and Facebook. [emoji14] Saying that, it's how I get my images from my Switch on to here. You see, this is why Miiverse should have remained! 

It's boggling that both Nintendo and Sony use Twitter as their primary method of sharing pictures and screenshots. It's not even a primarily picture sharing website! I wonder if they'll bother setting up an alternative of Twitter folds.


I'll admit to being uninformed about such things, but I don't really understand how a website like Twitter employed that many staff in the first place. Especially programmers and engineers. The basic site functionality hasn't changed that much from the beginning, do what do they all do every day?

[MindFreak]

57 minutes ago, bob said:

It's boggling that both Nintendo and Sony use Twitter as their primary method of sharing pictures and screenshots. It's not even a primarily picture sharing website! I wonder if they'll bother setting up an alternative of Twitter folds.


I'll admit to being uninformed about such things, but I don't really understand how a website like Twitter employed that many staff in the first place. Especially programmers and engineers. The basic site functionality hasn't changed that much from the beginning, do what do they all do every day?

Regarding the first point, I think that Twitter is easy to integrate and since you can have hashtag and stuff like that, it basically acts as a channel for advertising. 

And to your second point, I also heard this and then they compared that to similar companies with at most half the staff. The company as a whole is apparently run very ineffeciently which I guess is what Musk is trying to rectify, even though he from an outside perspective doesn't do very well. 

[BowserBasher]

I use it pretty much exclusively for uploading my Switch photos and videos. I follow some accounts but I don't sit and scroll through my feed to see what's happening. I'm sure we will get another way to upload our Switch files if it goes under. I don't care either way what happens to it as I don't use it for anything other than this.

[Ike]

I don't want to see Twitter go away, but I want to see Elon to lose money. Maybe then he'll shut up with promises he had no intention of keeping in the first place. He was clearing manipulating the crypto market stocks and seemed to get away with it.

I heard Nintendo withdrew from advertising on Twitter but I've seen Pokemon ads so not sure if that was true or it was too late or something.

People are jumping to Mastodon, but that just makes want to do the Rower Rangers role call every time I hear the name.

[Iun]

I used Twitter for about three days several years ago. I got bored.

 

I am very much enjoying seeing Elon Musk implode in-real time.

[Jonnas]

I never liked Twitter. The character limit has always rubbed me the wrong way, it has always looked like a way to limit the kind of speech and discussions one can have on the platform.

As time went on, I disliked it more and more. Suddenly, any and all celebrities were using it to launch soundbytes (well, textbytes), catchphrases, and drama into the atmosphere. In the same environment that companies were putting out public announcements, and other serious matters. Wouldn't be so bad per se, but Twitter gave equal recognition to the comments in each and every one of these publications. The most visible public forum of our times had the same quality as an average IRC channel. I think it's fair to say that Donald Trump's account encapsulated everything I disliked about Twitter, leading to several years of moronic public discourse regarding the politics of the biggest economy on earth.

At the same time, I recognize it lead to independent artists and freelance workers to better build a contact/professional network. I figure a more specialized network would be better for that, but what works, works. It ultimately doesn't do much to mitigate my negative feelings on Twitter, though.

Regarding Elon Musk, I always figured he was an eager, ambitious forward-thinker, investing in promising technological projects all around, but... I always found it weird that he never seemed to spend too much time in a single project. SpaceX, Tesla, the infrastucture he was investing in São Tomé (I figure this last one wasn't that well known, he was doing a lot of shit). At one point, I realised he wasn't an engineer, he was businessman, so that made more sense, he was there to allocate money, not actually run or develop the cutting-edge technology on display.

Seeing Twitter crashing down a cliff, alongside exposing Elon Musk for the blowhard that he is, has been one of the most fascinating and satisfying events from the last several years. I am glad Twitter is finally receding from public discourse, and I am glad at least one of the modern Rockefeller-wannabes is being taken down a notch.

It's also, you know, a bit of a historic event. This is huge! One of the biggest and most relevant institutions on earth is spontaneously combusting, likely to die in less than 6 months (or even less than one Liz Truss term). How often does something like this happen, ever?

[Fierce_LiNk]

I quite enjoy Twitter, tbh. If you follow a range of accounts, you get a huge variety of stuff and I quite like dipping in and out. I don't live my life on there and see it as more of a casual browsing thing, but it's pretty good at being able to obtain information that you wouldn't always be able to find, or certain issues get highlighted there that are quite an interesting read. It's not a bad thing every now and again to see what exactly is going on in the world, and there are a lot of things that often go unreported or don't get the media attention they deserve. 

At the same time, Musk really, really fucks me off, and I hope he crashes and burns with this. He's a tyrant. 

[Sméagol]

So is it dead? Or are those reports greatly exaggerated?

I was actually considering getting rid of my account at some point, but for other reasons. I think Twitter's getting more and more annoying, on the other hand, it still occasionally keeps me in the loop on certain things, so I'm not sure yet.

What are you guys doing?

[BowserBasher]

1 hour ago, Sméagol said:

So is it dead? Or are those reports greatly exaggerated?

I was actually considering getting rid of my account at some point, but for other reasons. I think Twitter's getting more and more annoying, on the other hand, it still occasionally keeps me in the loop on certain things, so I'm not sure yet.

What are you guys doing?

I think the initial reports were greatly exaggerated and many people just wanted it to fail because it was Elon Musk. It seems to me that there has been no difference in usage.

I'm keeping my as I use it for Switch photos and videos to share with people here. 

[Glen-i]

Yep, pretty much the same. I can post my stupid gameplay videos there really easily and that's all I need.

[Ashley]

17 minutes ago, BowserBasher said:

I think the initial reports were greatly exaggerated and many people just wanted it to fail because it was Elon Musk. It seems to me that there has been no difference in usage.

I'm keeping my as I use it for Switch photos and videos to share with people here. 

In fairness at the time I posted it the issue seemed to be more that the mass firings meant it seemed likely at some point something would snap and it would go down without intent, rather than a huge group of people leaving. Now it feels more like it'll be a slow drain away of people and advertisers and become more and more right wing and less relevant over time. I think it just needs a decent alternative to crystallise and that hasn't happened yet. 

I'm considering giving it up. Recently I cut my following count right down to primarily people I know, or people I occasionally interact with. Put a chunk of those on mute (polite following) and turned off retweets for many because I just wanted to see people I know posting about themselves. However I still see other things get through and end up seeing tweets and then making the mistake of looking at responses and seeing the dregs. 

I could be more disciplined, but I think maybe just giving it up in the new year. 

[sumo73]

In Charlie Brooker's 'How videogames changed the world', he says Twitter is the number 1 game 'Twitter is a massively multiplayer online game in which you choose an interesting avatar and then roll player persona loosely based on your own. Attempting to accrue followers by repeatedly pressing lettered buttons to form interesting sentences'.

I'm not a big fan of social media in general and there have been multiple studies showing the link between increased social media usage and depression, so I try to avoid it as much as possible. Seeking validation from others in that way seems false.

As much as some journalists want to see Elon and Twitter self explode it won't, and after a few months I think things will get back to some level of stability. Twitter is a business and it needs to turn a profit and people need their dopamine hit.

[Ashley]

So this week Captain Apartheid has managed to:

1. Go against a former promise to not ban the account that tweets info on his private jet flights (public information)

2. Ban journalists who covered the story

3. Run a poll asking when they should be allowed back with a few options. When "now" won did another with just 2 options and when "now" won again unbanned *most* of them

4. During this joined a Spaces with most of them present (turns out if you're banned you can still join) and left in a huff

5. An app update a few hours later removed the spaces icon from the bottom shelf

6. An update sometime later returned it

7. Has stated that tweets that reference most other social media sites, or linking to them in your account, is against the rules and will be removed and you may be suspended. This has already resulted in legal experts saying this is against the law in various places

[Ronnie]

Just when we get rid of one obnoxious, petulant child in Trump, another comes into the spotlight.

[Jonnas]

The only reason Twitter ever had any credibility to begin with was because journalists believed it did. If "Captain Apartheid" (love that name) starts going after journalists for inane reasons, that's truly the point of no return.

Also, if Twitter dies, it'll be from the all the lawsuits that Musk has to deal with from breaking so many EU laws. What an impulsive manchild.

[Ashley]

And while I've been asleep...

That policy update was removed and reversed and now he's put out a poll asking if he should step down (allegedly his investors have told him to step down and this is him trying to make it look like he's just listening to the people but obviously speculation). 

How some people still think of him as some kind of genius is beyond me. I wish more places would start pointing out he's been involved with a lot of successful companies rather than having created because a) he didn't create them and b) clearly they've worked in spite of him rather than because of him

[Ashley]

After being down most of the day it's now back with some changes:

I know he says it's temporary but nothing says "successful social media platform" like limiting how much people can look at it per day. 

[bob]

One theory is that the bill for their cloud services use kicked on the 1st July, and they couldn't pay it, and they were frantically trying to transfer everything from Google over onto their own servers, but couldn't get it done in time, so the whole website fell over.

[Ashley]

That and on the 30th they switched off being able to view Twitter without being logged in which then caused embedded tweets to fail but continuously try, thus essentially DDOSing themselves. 

Business genius. 

[Iun]

This is like Idiotsincars, but "Billionaires ruin stuff".

[Ashley]

7 hours ago, Iun said:

This is like Idiotsincars

My favourite of all the dinosaurs

[Ike]

Accessing the site via a browser seemed to be fine, seemed to just be the app.

Bit hard to know exactly what happened and what was exaggerated, but I totally buy Elon not paying his bills and hoping they didn't notice. Or wasn't able to migrate the data fast enough with as little staff that is left these days.

The bots have gotten worse and so have the ads, probably because most of the big names have dropped advertising there.

When is that new he appointed CEO supposed to take over?

[Ashley]

47 minutes ago, Ike said:

Accessing the site via a browser seemed to be fine, seemed to just be the app.

Bit hard to know exactly what happened and what was exaggerated, but I totally buy Elon not paying his bills and hoping they didn't notice. Or wasn't able to migrate the data fast enough with as little staff that is left these days.

The bots have gotten worse and so have the ads, probably because most of the big names have dropped advertising there.

When is that new he appointed CEO supposed to take over?

Well given he's being sued by a company in multiple countries for not paying the rent yeah I can see him trying to skimp on bills. 

She's taken over already but he's in charge of tech still because he's obviously the best for that. She's basically in charge of trying to get advertises back and I'm sure "we're limiting how many people can see tweets" is going to help her.