My sides
Please
No, stop, please, don’t kill your platform, no, stop. Eh, nevermind.
Part of me really buys into the idea that Musk is pulling an evil mastermind move with his other billionaire pals, destroying one of the biggest social media sites to keep users fractured. End goal keeping any community small and unable to organize at scale. Then the voice of reason tells me this just another egotistical nepo baby trying to staunch the hemorrhaging of money from his last bad investment.
This is still my opinion. I hated shitter before boy wonder musk took over. It sucked before and it sucks worse now. Just kill it.
WHY THE FUCK IS ANYONE ON TWITTER ANYMORE.
It has a “chicken or egg” problem. There are better alternatives, except many don’t use them because their userbase is still on Xitter, and said userbase don’t want to move away from Xitter because their faves are still there. I deleted it from my phone, but I keep my account in case I need to look up something there, or to not get my identity stolen and exploited.
Bluesky has limited federation active already, planning to enable full federation soon (they want mod tooling to be more robust before they do)
Pretty nice place. The user configurable moderation system with 3rd party labeler services and more is quite cool and it’s working even better than hoped (but we’ll need to see how it scales)
There’s a bridge in development -not associated with the project- that should bridge @Protocol and ActivityPub.
Don’t discount the FOMO factor as well. It’s what kept me on Reddit.
twitter has fomo?
Absolutely. Journalists post the latest news. Stuff they don’t report on trends. Maybe you’ll miss something big if you leave Twitter! That’s the thinking anyway.
I went to check it out yesterday and I think I actually got dumber in 5 minutes I spent there.
Find any good witch hunts? We cancelling Markiplier because he totally blinked a desire to oppress women and minorities in morse code? That sounds like Twitter
Wrong year for that propaganda
Elon’s Twitter has no interest in canceling anyone for the “oppression of women”, whether it’s true or not
Not really propaganda when it’s STILL a common problem for the internet to go on witch hunts against people for “Grooming” and other such thigns based on the flimsiest of evidence, sometimes continuing to do so even after the person was proven innocent.
Porn
There are so, so, so many other platforms for that, and many are far better
And I agree I use mastodon, e621, pornhub, etc.
But when I want to see more of that one particular content creator that is only on Twitter, then I’ll utilize Twitter, it’s pretty simple.
Absolutely. I’ll poke my head in there when there’s someone on insta who I’m curious to see if they get naked on Twitter. And that’s 100% of my interaction.
Anyone who still uses Twitter/X is an actual fucking moron.
True to a degee, but too many international journalists still depend on that plattform. Makes it hard to ditch it completly, until finally one of the alternatives really pick up.
Mastodon is picking up steam - it’s only a matter of time
Let’s hope. But they have to change the way that likes are shown. It always feels lonely over there.
International journalists should know better than to use a centralized platform to share information.
Very aggressive, I use Twitter for porn, I don’t know how that’s any more moronic than using any other platform that hosts porn.
Never used it. Never plan to do so.
Musky: Hmm, how else can i drive away actual human users?
Add lootboxes and timers.
If you don’t pay to post, there’s a 50% chance of your post getting deleted after anyone sees it. Pay some money to get more favorable odds. Oh, but you don’t but that stuff with money. You gotta use xitter turds first that, and some times you can get those from xitter boxes. In order to buy the lootboxes, you have to spend real money.
If you haven’t bought any lootboxes in a month, xitter will take control of your account and start automatically posting flat earth nazi crypto trash.
And if a post goes viral you have to pay to not have its visibility restricted
And when Xitter starts posting NFT trash in your name, you can restrict the spread of those posts by spending some Xitter Turds, which you can get from the lootboxes.
Oh and the cooldown timers! After every post, you have to wait 24 hours, but you can cut that wait in half by spending some Xitter Turds again. Let me tell you, it’s going to be unlike any service before it. EA and Ubisoft have so much to learn here.
And you can ask your fans to spend gems to remove obnoxious ads from your profile
Pretty much. 1usd per bot is a small price for maintaining a bot farm.
Or do they plan on banning accounts that use the same billing info? If CNN or BBC pay for their employees accounts, would they get banned?
You have to pay him so that you can do the work of creating content for his platform? No thanks
Who is going to pay to post on twitter? Not only has he destroyed what was there but he’s stopping any route for growth with new users. Most people won’t bother.
He really has managed to destroy that company with his knee jerk decisions.
People with “hot link in bio” and all that jazz
I hate that twitter has the seo that it does. I always accidentally click on a link to see the “log in or get fucked” screen.
Its staying power is really annoying TBH.
I guess it could be worse (AKA everyone just going to Discord instead).
That’s not what free speech is, and there never has been free speech on Twitter, and that’s mostly a good thing. Jesus.
That’s not what free speech is
Well yeah, obviously. It’s just wordplay based on the two common definitions of free.
Everybody knows what free speech means. It’s just a bit of wordplay that you’ve taken very literally.
Everybody knows what free speech means.
i really dont think so.
free speech is a pretty complicated thing and i feel like many people dont have a solid grasp on it. i think a good number of people think they know what free speech means because they know “it only applies to what the government can do to you”, but there’s quite a bit more to it than that. like how to deal with hate speech, threats, misinformation, disinformation, etc.
and this is directly related to the problems twitter is facing: elon musk started out by saying hes a “free speech absolutist”, but twitter has been slowly rediscovering why “free speech absolutism” doesnt work. and you can see those discoveries in real time with twitter reintroducing moderation policies (among other things)
Ok then. People know enough about what it means to know it doesn’t refer to not having to pay a fee to open your mouth.
It’s very clear that the headline is a little wordplay joke. It doesn’t literally convey that the journalist thought free speech means you don’t have to pay to make a twitter post. You’re taking it way too literally.
elon musk started out by saying hes a “free speech absolutist”, but twitter has been slowly rediscovering why “free speech absolutism” doesnt work.
I’m in agreement that it doesn’t work.
But it should also be called to attention that Musk never tried free speech absolutism on his platform (not that I think he actually should). He has been willing to bend over backwards in assisting dictatorships in censoring content, and he culled a lot of left-leaning and anti-Musk accounts/comments on day one. It’s always been a lie to pander to the freeze peach crowd.
Elon Musk said free speech like once and then immediately threw a bunch of journalists off the site. And apparently every news article for the rest of my life is going to be about how he was hypocritical instead of whether he wants power or influence or has power and influence or the meaning of giving him those things.
Don’t trust every industrialist you meet even if they invested in one company where competent people make cool space ships. He’s clearly on Ket and some uppers. Grimes divorced him and her music isn’t even good. He’s not that complicated.
I work in bot protection and it’s a sound idea but doesn’t really work in practice. As long as there’s more than 1$ of value to be gained it’s worth it for the bot makers.
This also makes it so that botting is only accesible to select few actors that have the required resources i.e. russian troll farms or large bot networks from china, in turn this increases their value. This is very good for them.
Reality is that the only way to stop bots is to constantly change up the detection system. This is called a “cat and mouse” sort of problem and it really is the only way to do it. The attacker always has to catch up and it can be trivial that takes them couple of hours to do but it also reveals behavior patterns for marking bot accounts. This actually works really well in practice but requires a lot of dev resources and many companies low-key like bots which is another thread entirely.
Bot protection? Call me ignorant but what exactly do you do?
develop systems that can identify unwanted users like bots, spammers, people who abuse the product and break ToS etc. Most bad actors are very dumb but fighting this at scale is actually very interesting. Also most bots (like 90%) are just scrapers (data collectors) especially when it comes to Twitter which has absurd API pricings but cost almost nothing to scrape lol
Oh my god I’m a fuckin idiot. Granted, I’ve had a couple drinks tonight but I thought you were protecting bots… not protecting against them lol
yeah sorry “protection against bots” just doesn’t roll of the tongue as easily lol
Protect the bots!!!
I’ll ask anyway. Why do companies like bots?
As Kungen already answered - stats! You can sell bot traffic as real traffic which inflates your numbers.
For stuff like social media, bots increase engagement too. Many new products and networks actually generate a lot of fake content to attract organic growth. I.e. if bot likes your comment you’re likely to engage more. If it likes your product review you’re likely to review more stuff etc.
Tracking bots can also generate reverse analytics. For example if you know that your competitors are scraping fishing equipment data from your store it could mean they’re working on a competing fishing related product.
Lastly, you can feed fake data to bots to manipulate competitors. This is somewhat illegal (no real legal precedent yet afaik though its a clear intent to harm other businesses) but it can really powerful in the wrong hands.
Edit: worth nothing that a lot of bot traffic is good. Sometimes you want to be scraped as it is a form of organic engagement and increases the value of your data and often backlinks growth (e.g. indexers like Google etc)
More eyeballs.
Enough updoots or retweets and other algos pick up on it. Some random twitter discussion ends up on BuzzFeed, YTers start making influencer vids, and Reddit / Lemmy repost bots.
Do this enough and it’ll gain traction. Now everyone is talking about your stupid fuckin Stanley mug, corporate rumor,or political talking point.
And this can be automated end to end, 24/7, by market and keyword, will real time feedback as to how well it’s doing via upvotes, shares, likes, or even data mining emails and convos via Gmail or WhatsApp.
As long as there’s more than 1$ of value to be gained it’s worth it for the bot makers.
That’s what I was coming in here to suggest, so I’m glad someone in the field was able to back that idea up. I think it’s unlikely many bots that aren’t made for fun are being put on Twitter unless they are generating a lot more than $1 for whoever is putting them up.
This also makes it so that botting is only accesible to select few actors that have the required resources i.e. russian troll farms or large bot networks from china, in turn this increases their value. This is very good for them.
I’d bet that is explicitly part of the funding model. Pay to influence consensus, cuz this is a publicly traded stock and numbers need to go up, regardless of who is paying.
Twitter is private. Musk took it private when he bought it.
Yes only Russia and China do bad things with technology!
Never had to deal with attacks originating from US or Europe so thats kinda true actually :)
Go to r/worldnews and r/europe on reddit
The amount of bots is….
Free speech, now only $9.99 per month
You don’t know what free speech means.
This is like claiming Blizzard is infringing on your free speech because they banned you from world of Warcraft for saying racist shit.
Better yet. This is like claiming blizzard is infringing on your freedom of speech because they deactivated your account as a result of you not paying your subscription.
Do better.
Corporations should be allowed to own vital services so they can ban people from them at will. This is a good thing somehow. I love monopolies that suppress activists and organizers because it would only be bad if the government is doing it.
That’s the thing about private property and private services. They can terminate your involvement at will for any reason. It’s in the user agreement you consent to when you sign up.
You’re not entitled to these services. They aren’t your god given right or any other bullshit you’re imagining.
Comparing this to freedom of speech is laughable.
or 0.99/post.each retweet would cost you an additional 0.49. you pay less,you get less.
I stole this line from someone else, but its great.
Elon Musk has invented fee speech, not free speech.
It’s a clever line, but Musk hasn’t invented a single goddamn thing in his life.
Hey that’s not fair - he invents his own narrative about reality all the time.
Yeah, pay to post was Something Awful founder lowtax’s idea.
Lol I’m not paying shit, have fun everybody else. X is garbage
Please. I truly want to see my favorite people on Twitter get driven to a better platform.
Unfortunately, they’re going to Threads. Although I guess that’s technically better. But better in the sense that drinking piss is better than eating shit.
It’s sterile and I like the taste.
Bear?
Does he like to drink pee? Is that what makes him a talented composer? Will I become a talented composer if I drink pee?
Threads is also a barely moderated mess, because they don’t want to scare away “moderate” (sic!) conservatives (code word for “fascist not openly identifying as such”).
And they’re anti politics, except they don’t count that as politics
K bye.
Not that I literally ever said hi.
