Category: [Social media]

Free speech

Will THIS finally be the straw that breaks the X’s back? …Eh, probably not. Considering the other shitty thing’s he’s said and done that haven’t hitherto deterred people from using Twatter (including me, let’s be honest), I can’t see even this making much difference. Indeed, I’m seeing one source claiming that Oolong actually can’t do this, cos if he did then the Apple Store and Google Play would refuse to stock the app; apparently the ability to block users is a key requirement of theirs for making social media apps available. Whatever, though, it’s just another thing making Shitter unappealing… I mean, I suppose the mute button is still there and for some accounts that really is all you need, but other times blocking is absolutely necessary. Wonder how long the mute option will last…

Talking of things making Twitter unappealing: the end of Tweetdeck came about the other day, as threatened a few weeks ago… I discovered this when trying to go there and it redirected me back to Twitter immediately, whereupon the latter just as immediately tried to convice me to pay $135 a year for the privilege of having a functional way of using the service… and then when I angrily clicked that off I found it then opened on the “for you” colum rather than my actual follow list. So yeah, so much for me and Twitter at last, it would appear… there’s still a handful of accounts there I still want to follow, which is why I’m not deleting the account entirely (can’t follow them without one), although one of those is a friend who’s now saying she’ll be on Bluesky (which I still can’t get onto) and Tiktok (which I am, though I rarely use it) more often from now on. So that’s at least one less Twitter account I’ll need to check regularly, I suppose.

More Mastothoughts

Here’s an interesting essay from the other day, written by Erin Kissane (who has a couple of other Masto meditations) on the theme of why people have stopped using Mastodon… basically she popped the question on Bluesky (still waiting for that invite, JACK), collated the 500-odd responses she got back, and the title “Mastodon is easy and fun except when it isn’t” kind of sums up the whole thing. An excerpt:

The most common—but usually not the only—response, cited as a primary or secondary reason in about 75 replies—had to do with feeling unwelcome, being scolded, and getting lectured. Some people mentioned that they tried Mastodon during a rush of people out of Twitter and got what they perceived as a hostile response.
About half of the people whose primary or secondary reasons fit into this category talked about content warnings, and most of those responses pointed to what they perceived as unreasonable—or in several cases anti-trans or racist—expectations for content warnings. Several mentioned that they got scolded for insufficient content warnings by people who weren’t on their instance. Others said that their fear of unintentionally breaking CW expectations or other unwritten rules of fedi made them too anxious to post, or made posting feel like work. […]
There obviously are unwelcoming, scoldy people on Mastodon, because those people are everywhere. I think some of the scolding—and less hostile but sometimes overwhelming rules/norms explanation—is harder to deal with on Mastodon than other places because the people doing the scolding/explaining believe they have the true network norms on their side.

There’s definitely something to this. One of my own least favourite aspects of Masto is the evangelising (one thing about Twitter is I almost never see anyone arguing how great it is; no idea if this is also true of Bluesky or Threads, cos as noted I still haven’t had an invite to the former (JACK) and I can’t even download the Threads app to see what it’s like cos my phone is such a piece of shit the Google Play store refuses to add it); it’s like, yeah, if we’re happy on here we already know why, we don’t need to be further convinced and you just look like you’re trying to convince yourself more than anyone else… and the bit about “true network norms” is a part of that, a sort of “the way, the truth, the life” thinking; we’ve found a thing that works for us, therefore it’s the way everyone should follow.

The responses I’ve seen so far on Mastodon itself have been interesting, including one chap who seemed to miss the point of the exercise and take some offence at it:

Like, good for Wyatt and the other people who have no issues with Mastodon, but… they weren’t the subject of Kissane’s question. The question was about people not happy with their Mastodon experience, and about 500 people on Bluesky reported dissatisfaction. Think that it might be YOU, Wyatt. Anyway, he attracted a certain amount of irritation, leading to a bit of a pile-on… of the sort you might have found on Twitter. Who says Mastodon’s nothing like Twitter at all…

Twitter’s pining for the fjords…

Oh good GRIEF. This bullshit is Oolong’s latest… I don’t even know what to call it, “business decision” seems wrong somehow. Basically he’s decided it’s time to get rid of the last thing that’s worth anything about Twitter, namely 17 years of brand name recognition, by rebranding it as X Corp. This is evidently not a sudden decision, as he was thinking about forming a holding company of that name for Tesla and SpaceX as early as 2012 and he apparently started forming the holding company when he started on his epic quest to… do whatever it was he was thinking when he offered to buy the birdsite. Why now? Why anything that Musk does?

Because the letter X by itself is such a unique and immediately recognisable logo that will make the company stand out because there aren’t dozens of other companies whose corporate logo resembles an X in some way… apart from these ones, anyway. Similarly, it’s not like the bird wasn’t one of the most recognisable corporate symbols in the world, if you don’t count the fact that it was:

…as I saw someone post on Twitter. As for supposed CEO of …whatever the fuck it’s now called, here’s what she had to say:

I don’t really know what purpose Linda Yaccarino serves. Dickhead is clearly still the one making all the decisions, and since she’s only been CEO since June, she can’t exactly claim any credit for this X thing in any way. What is she even there for? I don’t even see her drawing fire away from Oolong, which I thought would be her main task…

As for the logo design…

…this seems weirdly hard to beat somehow.

EDIT a few hours later: just saw this on Mastodon:

Join what? I think there’s a mixed message in that for all of us…

Come to our dark side!

In other use, a bunch more Twitter employees could soon be ex-employees…

Ever since Meta launched its competitor to Twitter last week, Elon Musk has been attempting to tear it down, denouncing Threads’ approach to content moderation, threatening to sue for the supposed theft of “trade secrets,” and even challenging Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to a penis-measuring competition.
Some of his employees, however, are thoroughly enjoying the new app.
“I’m going to get fired for this, but I work at Twitter right now and have never really used it. Threads is just better,” a current staffer wrote on Threads last week. “Here’s to a new world!”
“[Not gonna lie] the signup flow was really nice,” another Twitter employee posted, referring to the process by which users register for an account.
The Daily Beast took a random sample of 133 current Twitter employees, identified by their LinkedIn accounts, and found that 31 of them—nearly a quarter—appeared to already be on Threads. Musk said in April that Twitter employed roughly 1,500 people, suggesting that hundreds of its workers may be using its rival.

Yeah, “random samples” like this always get blown up to produce a spurious number, and I suspect this “hundreds” is really as bullshit as all these other reports you see in media about how 64% of Inner West residents believe in land rights for gay whales, that sort of thing. Still, I suspect that those 31 Twitter staff are indeed not the only ones, and Oolong will use this information to find out who they all are and sack the lot of them, cos if there’s one thing Twitter really needs it’s even less people working there…

Won’t someone think of the journalists and politicos?

John Naughton has a question…

…and he’s using his position at a major media outlet to ask it. I’m not as qualified as John apparently is to answer his question, but I’m going to take a stab at it anyway:

HOW

ABOUT

FUCKING

ANYWHERE ELSE,

JOHN?

I mean… where did they all go before Twitter was a thing? Twitter’s only been around since 2006, so only 17 years. There had to have been options before that, surely? Like, you know, the aforementioned major media outlet for whom you wrote this thing… or even Threads which you specifically name in the title, I don’t see anything stopping journalists and politicians from using that. Twitter isn’t the only option and never has been. John concludes:

All of which leads to the thought that, in our current media ecosystem, if Twitter had not been invented, someone would have to invent it now. The tweet has become the contemporary version of the soundbite. And if Musk does eventually succeed in driving Twitter into bankruptcy, some smart political operator will buy it and make something from its smoking ruins.

Oh bullshit. Other things were invented in the past, then OTHER THINGS were invented that superseded them. Just look at Myspace, for fuck’s sake. The latter still exists for some reason that I frankly don’t understand, and Twitter will probably do the same… it’s just not going to be the biggest of its kind, something else will take its place, with Threads certainly looking like the biggest contender. I do not understand Naughton’s insistence that Twitter specifically has to be, you know, it.

It descends into insanity

Via Taylor Lorenz on Masto. Threads is the literal work of Satan, apparently. The Satanic Panic never fully goes away in the US, does it? Although in this case it’s just been reduced to a particularly shitty tool in a shitty corporate battle between two shitty billionaires, one of whom has evidently inspired some of his his shitty cultists to… whatever the fuck this nonsense is. There is, of course, no dog-whistling involved in using this Satan bullshit to attack Oolong’s business rival when the latter just so happens to be, you know, one of THOSE people. Maybe not a practising or believing one, but one of THEM anyway. Nothing remotely antisemitic going on here at all.

It gets even stupider

Oolong vs Zuck looks like it might actually happen… not in the cage but in court.

Yeah, he’s not happy that Zuck is, allegedly, stealing “trade secrets” by hiring a bunch of people who used to work at Twitter before its current owner fired them. I suspect he’s more unhappy that Threads is now, according to Zuck, already up to thirty million users and this is how he chooses to lash out at that… well, given his propensity to not pay his bills, I hope anyone who might take this silly case on has enough sense to demand payment up front.

As for me, I just decided to reply directly to the prick for once. Personally I think my idea is rather good, which is why I half expect my account to be suspended, if not whacked altogether, for saying it…

Tangled webs, etc

So in the midst of the Twitter meltdown, eventual presumed rise of Bluesky, and whatever’s happening on Mastodon, Mark Zuckerberg has finally rolled out his long-threatened rival to all of the above, called Threads…

…which I gather is not actually named after the infamous nuclear war-themed BBC TV movie from 1984, but that hasn’t stopped an awful lot of people making that connection.

Continue reading “Tangled webs, etc”

Well that didn’t take long

I said the other day I’d probably finally stop using Twitter if anything happened to Tweetdeck, and, well, it’s like Elon heard me:

Twitter users will soon need to be verified in order to use the online dashboard TweetDeck, the company announced on Monday.
The popular and previously free tool allows users to organize the accounts they follow into different columns to easily monitor content. It has been popular with businesses and news organizations.
The new policy will take effect in 30 days, the company said in a tweet, and could bring a revenue boost to Twitter, which has struggled to retain advertisers under Elon Musk’s ownership. […]
The TweetDeck change could be an attempt to push more users to the Twitter Blue program, through which users can pay for verification. The subscription service costs $11 per month in the US (on iOS or Android), £11 in the UK and $19 in Australia, and includes the blue checkmark, a demarcation previously free to politicians, journalists and other notable public figures.
The service attracted just 150,000 subscribers in its first weeks – a small portion of the platform’s global user base of nearly 400 million. As of 30 April, the number of paid subscribers had fallen to about 68,000, according to reports from Mashable.

I was a little perplexed, if not indeed a little concerned, when Tweetdeck suddenly launched a new design at me last night. I no longer remember when I started using it, but it was certainly at least back in the days when it still supported Facebook, and it stopped doing that in May 2013. And in 10 (plus?) years I don’t believe it’s ever changed its design until now. I am not a fan of the new look, which now makes it look and behave more like the web version of Twitter which I am not a fan of either. I was puzzled by what this new design indicated… and I’m guessing this is it.

And if I’m going to have to pay to use a version of Tweetdeck that just looks like the web version of the site within the next few weeks then, well, I’m not. If the site lasts long enough I’ve no doubt the web version will also require payment to use it (on top of how you currently already need an account to see anything). So once Tweetdeck starts demanding cash, I’m gone.

For what it may be worth, while on Mastodon yesterday, someone posted this interesting theory…

…but, as nice as it looks, I don’t buy it. The whole idea outlined here is simply too complicated for me to believe it, and the fact that we now know Jack Dorsey is no longer as keen on that “singular solution” as he was last October doesn’t help. Also, it kind of relies in some degree on Oolong actually knowing what he’s doing… which is debatable at best.

Also, I joined the queue for Bluesky the other day. We’ll see how that goes. If it does.

Masto… do?

So, a few days ago I posted something about why I still have a Twitter account and Mastodon is an imperfect alternative. And the latter still is, but… well…

Yeah. Twitter had an outage a couple of nights ago, and Elon’s response has been 1) make Twitter visible only to people who have Twitter accounts and 2) limit the number of tweets those people can see.

Verified accounts were temporarily limited to reading 6,000 posts a day, Musk said, adding that unverified accounts and new unverified accounts were limited to reading 600 posts a day and 300 posts a day respectively.
The temporary reading limitation was later increased to 10,000 posts per day for verified users, 1,000 posts per day for unverified, and 500 posts per day for new, unverified users, Musk said in a separate post without providing further details. […]
Musk had said that hundreds of organisations were scraping Twitter data “extremely aggressively”, affecting user experience.
He had earlier expressed displeasure with artificial intelligence firms like OpenAI, the owner of ChatGPT, for using Twitter’s data to train their large language models.The social media platform had previously taken steps to win back advertisers who had left Twitter under Musk’s ownership and to boost subscription revenue by making verification check marks a part of the Twitter Blue programme.

I feel like there has to be some way to stop the data scrapers from negatively affecting users that doesn’t also negatively affect those same users, but then again I am not the genius that Elon’s cultists insist he is, as can most clearly be seen by the fact that I didn’t pay an excessive price for a social media platform that wasn’t actually worth the $44b he paid for it and that I then didn’t ruin by firing thousands of staff, some of whom could probably have produced that solution to the data scrapers in a few minutes.

Oy, and indeed, gevalt.

Supposedly this is just a temporary solution, probably until the advertisers start complaining (“you Boer fuckwit, we want people to SEE our ads!”), and one of my Twitter followers suggests it’s actually only happening on the Twitter app rather than the actual website. So it may not be as bad as it initially looks. And, frankly, I don’t think I even read that many tweets per day anyway. It’s still not a good look when you do something like this and it makes major international news; at some point his co-funders are going to start wanting a return on their investment.

Parenthetically, the day this shit started happening was also the day Twitter’s contract with Google Cloud expired, with Oolong apparently refusing to pay the billion dollar tab he owes Google. I’m sure this has no connection to this rate-limiting bullshit.

Anyway, at least one result of the latest Musk-up is a bunch of people coming back to Mastodon, or indeed coming to it for the first time… but whether or not that sticks is something we’ll have to wait and see, cos it didn’t quite do that for a lot of people last November; and this time I suspect that once Bluesky gets over its own current issues, Twitter users wanting to flee the hellsite are more likely to end up there than on Masto… But I have been wrong about many things in the past, and this may well be another one of them. As for me, I’m waiting to see what happens with Tweetdeck, which is pretty much the only way I can use Twitter; I don’t need the phone app and the actual website is just… ergh. If this fucks up Tweetdeck—which I’m surprised Elon hasn’t terminated already—then that probably will be the final end of Twitter and me…