It Turns Out Elon Is Speedrunning The Enshittification Learning Curve, Not The Content Moderation One
from the a-race-to-make-the-site-worse-and-worse dept
Our most popular post last year was my post attempting to help Elon Musk “speedrun” the content moderation learning curve. People still talk to me about that post to this day. What’s been somewhat surprising to me, however, is that while nearly every other social media site eventually figures out the basics of the content moderation learning curve, Musk has a Sisyphean ability to slide back down that curve again and again and again.
But I had a realization over the weekend: it’s not the content moderation learning curve that he’s speedrunning. It’s the Enshittification learning curve.
As you’ll recall from Cory Doctorow’s excellent coinage, enshittification happens through the following process:
first, companies are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves.
The key element here is fucking over your users and customers to try to claw back as much value for themselves as possible. When viewed through that lens, the events of the past few days on Twitter make some kind of sense. Because, without that framing, Elon’s moves make zero sense at all.
It started late on Thursday, when Twitter suddenly made it so you could only see tweets if you were registered and logged in. There are other sites where this is true, but it was fundamentally against Twitter’s entire ethos for years. Indeed, Twitter’s early success was driven by that open ability to access the content, and (while people no longer remember this), Mark Zuckerberg’s paranoia about Twitter eating Facebook’s lunch in the early days caused him to pivot the entire company and effectively push more people to publicly revealing their Facebook info in response to Twitter’s openness policy (as an aside, this created one of Facebook’s first big privacy scandals, but… that’s another story).
As has become standard practice, this change was made with no notice or explanation, but a day after it began, Elon explained it in a random reply on Twitter, claiming that “several hundred organizations (maybe more) were scraping Twitter data extremely aggressively, to the point where it was affecting the real user experience.”
This made Twitter a pain to use for many people. It also broke a bunch of things, and even pulled tons of tweets out of Google search. Meanwhile, sometime last night or this morning, it appears that Twitter (again with no explanation and no announcement) rolled back this entire thing and quietly started letting non-logged in users view tweets again.
But, either way, Elon was just getting started. On Saturday, tons of people got messages noting that they were “rate limited” and had exceeded the number of tweets they were allowed to read.
Most people assumed that Twitter had just broken down (again) and was popping out that error. No one actually thought that anyone could possibly be so stupid as to limit the number of tweets that you could see. But, alas, Elon Musk runs Twitter and sees things… um… differently. Hours after tons of users were confused by this, Elon tweeted (not just a reply this time!) that it was all on purpose and most accounts would now be limited to viewing just 600 tweets per day.
If you were willing to pay $8/month, that would be 6000. New accounts could only see 300 tweets. Once again, Musk argued this was because of “data scraping.”
However, multiple people I’ve spoken to, both current and former employees, said that excuse is bullshit. Twitter can easily handle the scraping it’s receiving. It is apparently true that scraping Twitter has increased, but due to Musk’s own policies killing off its API. That move means that many who formerly relied on the API to get data have now resorted to scraping instead. But the actual impact on Twitter from that scraping is not a problem.
Separately, some people noticed that around the same time that all of this was going down, Twitter introduced a very stupid error that meant Twitter was literally DDoSing itself, though it’s not clear if that’s the cause of Musk’s panic either (it is more plausible than scraping, however).
Again, though, if you look at this through the framing of enshittification, it makes more sense. Musk is focused solely on trying to extract all the value of Twitter for himself, not for its users. That this is a ridiculously short-term view, one that drives away those users in the long term, does not seem to have yet occurred to him. But, you know, sometimes he seems a bit slow on the uptake.
Cutting off anything that screams of “freebies” fits well within the enshittification process, because people who get stuff for free need to be mined for value.
Of course, even Elon’s biggest fans seemed to complain that these limits were ridiculous, so he began slowly upping them. A few hours after the initial announcement he upped the limits from 6,000 for people who pay, 600 for most users, and 300 for new users to 8,000/800/400. And a few hours after that, it bumped up again to 10,000/1,000/500.
Amusingly, days later, I’m still seeing tons of people assuming it’s the lower numbers, because this is not how you do product announcements if you actually want people to understand what the fuck you’re doing. I’ve also seen friends insist that he removed all limits, when that does not appear to be the case.
Instead, days later, Twitter put out a ridiculously useless “Update on Twitter’s Rate Limits” that is full of corporate speak nonsense and clarifies literally nothing:
To ensure the authenticity of our user base we must take extreme measures to remove spam and bots from our platform. That’s why we temporarily limited usage so we could detect and eliminate bots and other bad actors that are harming the platform. Any advance notice on these actions would have allowed bad actors to alter their behavior to evade detection.
At a high level, we are working to prevent these accounts from 1) scraping people’s public Twitter data to build AI models and 2) manipulating people and conversation on the platform in various ways.
Currently, the restrictions affect a small percentage of people using the platform, and we will provide an update when the work is complete. As it relates to our customers, effects on advertising have been minimal.
While this work will never be done, we’re all deeply committed to making Twitter a better place for everyone.
At times, even for a brief moment, you must slow down to speed up.
We appreciate your patience.
Literally none of that makes any sense at all. First of all, a couple weeks ago we were being told (falsely) that spam and bots had been already eliminated. How many times is Elon planning to go back to that well as an excuse for his own incompetence?
Second, “any advance notice” of this particular change wouldn’t have made one bit of difference. And, on top of that, even if you don’t give “advance notice,” Twitter put out this statement literally 4 or 5 days after the changes were made, which suggest this wasn’t so much about not giving “advance notice,” it was about no one within Twitter knowing what the fuck is actually going on.
But, the “new CEO” has to pretend this all sensible and normal.
Of course, none of this helps with bots or spam. All it really does is drive down usage of Twitter. The main thing left on Twitter that had mostly kept me on the site was some sports accounts, but just trying to follow tweets about a single baseball game would make me lose access in half an hour or so.
What Elon has done with this rationing of tweets is introduce even more friction. Not just in the fact that some people get limited, but in making users have to think about whether or not it’s worth visiting the site at all, as every tweet you see (and each time you load the page, you get about 20 tweets) is worth cutting into your daily allotment.
It’s a mental transaction cost, on top of everything else. That just makes the entire site way, way, way less valuable. And that includes for advertisers (whose tweets appear to count in the tweet ration limit). And those Musk fans who moved their video programs to Twitter as well. Making your site much more difficult to view is just galaxy brain nonsense, unless you’re so focused on trying to squeeze existing users for cash that you forget what made your site valuable in the process.
Oh, and Musk and co weren’t even done.
Over the weekend, power users who rely on Tweetdeck (which always presented Twitter in a much more useful interface) realized that it wasn’t working. Again, many initially chalked this up to “Elon breaking shit” (which has happened a few times now), but then suddenly it was announced that Twitter had shut down the old Tweetdeck, forced everyone to the “new” Tweetdeck (which has been around since the pre-Elon days, but so many users hated it that it was possible to switch back to the old one). And, on top of that, the company announced that the new, much crappier Tweetdeck would only be available to TwitterBlue subscribers.
If you’re not familiar with Tweetdeck, it was a very nice multi-column view for Twitter, allowing you to follow lists, notifications, searches, and more in a single screen, rather than having to pop through a bunch of different pages to find each thing. It was especially popular with professionals and social media managers. And, now it is way worse than it was and costs money, whereas before it was free.
Again, this will drive down usage of the site, especially by Twitter’s most committed users, and those who provide tons of content to the site.
Of course, none of this makes any sense if you’re trying to build a sustainable business and attract more users. It only makes sense if you’re desperate for cash, have no idea why your own site is valuable, and feel the need to go on a rent seeking expedition to try to capture any and all value that the site provides, even if doing so kills off a significant percentage of that value.
No wonder both Mastodon and Bluesky surged in new users over the weekend. Either way, given that he paid no heed to my attempt to help him better run the content moderation learning curve, I have little doubt he’ll also ignore my recommended steps to avoiding enshittification as well.
Filed Under: elon musk, enshittification, extracting value, learning curve, linda yaccarino, ok landlord, power users, rate limiting, registrations, rent seeking, tweetdeck
Companies: twitter
Comments on “It Turns Out Elon Is Speedrunning The Enshittification Learning Curve, Not The Content Moderation One”
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Terminally Online
What a turnaround! The people that wanted to leave Twitter the most and supposedly joined other platforms, are now bitterly complaining that they can’t read tweets. If death by irony were possible, this would be a massacre!
Re:
Are you that fucking stupid? People aren’t complaining that they can’t read tweets. They’re pointing out how this makes the site less useful for those who do use it.
Re: Re:
Nobody has ever claimed that Koby has any intelligence. Its as if he is an early alpha version of an AI bot that eventually got scrapped. He has no fucking clue what he is saying, but he thinks he’s saying something intelligent.
Re: Re: Re:
Tay definitely had better command of the English language, that’s for sure.
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Re: Re: twits.
I just love how everyone has such great ideas on how something should be and how it should be ran but none of them have accomplished anything relatable to what Musk has. The very same whining twits who keep complaining about twitter have nowhere else to go that is useful and all end up coming back and then complaining on twitter itself. I have an idea for you all. Get a real life and move on.
Re: Re: Re:
You first, traitor.
Re:
Considering you have the empathy of a psychopath, Koby…
It’s highly unsurprising that you gloat about this.
This is beyond stupid and actually harms people, and you celebrate the destruction of thousands of freelancers getting fucked in the middle.
Then again, I suppose you have other ways of harassing people. You ARE commenting on here, for one.
Re:
You assume that the same people who are actively leaving the site are the ones complaining and not, say, people who are not as terminally online as you are and might just be looking for tweets from their local emergency services.
Re:
The fuck you on about then?
Re:
The ability to speak does not make you intelligent.
-Qui-Gon Jinn
Re:
“If death by irony were possible I would be dead thousands of times over.”
Fixed that for ya bruh
Re: So you have that going for you at least.
Bragging about failure is pretty on brand for both you and Elmo.
Re:
No, the people who left before are pointing out why this justifies them or others leaving and how stupid this is, people who didn’t leave before but are leaving now are stating that this is why their leaving, and people who never left or said they were leaving are complaining.
Basically, you’re trying to say that all three of these groups are one and the same. They’re not.
Techdirt: “Tweet limits! He actively sabotaged his own website by limiting the view count for tweets! It’s so dumb.”
Musksimps: “Oh, it’s so dumb, it’s brilliant!”
Techdirt: “No! It’s just dumb.”
Re:
I tested this yesterday and again just now, and it still doesn’t work. I don’t know whether the switch is being flipped back and forth, or different people are getting different behaviors, or what.
Re: Re:
If you view a tweet using a url it seems to work, but none of the replies load. Going to someone’s profile doesn’t work.
Re: Re:
Yeah, I heard from a few people that it’s not working for them. It worked for me on both mobile and desktop earlier today, so I don’t know what’s going on…
Re: Re: Re:
Does anybody at Twitter know what’s going on?
Re: Re: Re:2
With only 26 letters in the alphabet, I’ll bet I can pick the only two necessary ones that will answer your question. I’m banking on “N” and “O”, but how you put them together is up to you.
Re: Re: Re:
What seems to happen for me is this: I can view an individual tweet, if arriving from a direct link. If I then click on a profile, I can see the profile page, but no tweets from the profile. I can’t access a profile page via link.
Re: Re:
I bet it’s Elon’s cat.
Re:
Miles Bron would have made a better Twitter CEO. He was too busy faffing off to his own private island and communicating only by fax machine to micromanage or to become Extremely Online.
Re: Re:
It’s almost uncanny how similar Elon Musk is to Miles Bron.
Re: Re: Re:
I don’t think its uncanny. Its intentional. Miles Bron is a parody of a number of ‘great man’ tech billionaires, and Elon as the most successful gets the most identifiable bits.
Re:
Put it this way, if you rate-limited an IRC server, it’d still be one of the dumbest decisions ever.
And yes, that’s a text-only communications protocol.
It appears that Elon has no idea how to do anything related to the Internet at all.
Re: Re:
Elon Musk knows how to do a capitalism. The problem is, doing a capitalism also means enshittifying the thing upon which someone does a capitalism. After all, The Line Must Be Pleased, and the only way to do that in a world that expects The Line to go up every year is enshittification.
Corporations are, by their very nature, sociopathic. What sucks for everyone who doesn’t run a corporation: The people who run corporations either already are or eventually become sociopaths because of capitalism. That’s how you end up with someone like Elon Musk running a company like Twitter…into the ground.
Re: Re: Re:
What sucks is that corporations are very efficient at becoming friends with politicians, especially in the American system which is practically designed to keep them from preventing it until it’s too late, and using them to help normalize their sociopathy.
Re: Re:
All modern IRC servers are rate-limited. That was done by the late 1990s, to stop spam-bots. Search the ircd-hybrid source code for “flood”, for example, or just try pasting a few hundred lines of text into a channel.
Re: Re: Re:
Now try rate limiting the number of lines you can read per day on an IRC channel. They were not talking about limiting posting (Except for your number of reads decreasing when you post a reply and the whole shebang reloads).
Bonus points for it being an IRC channel that doesn’t rate limit the s̵p̵a̵m̵m̵e̵r̵s̵ posters.
Re: Re: Re:
AFAIK no IRC-server ever rated-limited reading.
Re: Re: Re:
Let me know when you learn the difference between reading posts and writing them, then we can talk about rate limits on IRC servers vs. rate limits on Twitter.
This Where We At?
I don’t know about the rest of you, but I feel like rationing usage of a website has to be the single dumbest policy decision one could make. Isn’t the whole goal of running an app or a website to ENCOURAGE usage instead of discouraging it?
Re:
Maybe Elon has realized people are better of elsewhere and is trying to help then break any remaining bad habits.
There’s enshittification, and then there’s Elonification.
Twitter isn’t JUST being enshittified, it’s being Elonified.
I think she left out a word. Should have been:
Re:
s/big//g
Bah, miss remember the quote :/
Re:
She’s not there to save Twitter.
She’s there so she can get a better job in the “conservative” business world.
Re: Re:
She’s also there to take the heat for any decision Musk makes. (Not that it’s working, since everyone who isn’t kissing Elon’s ass has already blamed him for this weekend’s bullshit.)
Re: Re: Re:
If she’s taking any heat, it’s apparent she either isn’t being targeted yet or doesn’t care.
Considering her political position, I believe she doesn’t care as long as she lives long enough to get her endorsement from white supremacy’s richest member. Destroying a liberal bastion of speech would only add to her resume.
Limits
I’m not a Twitter user, at least directly. I don’t have and have never had a Twitter account. However, many of the news sites I read illustrate their stores/breaking news with links to videos posted on Twitter. Currently, I am unable to view these because I cannot log into Twitter.
This is just one more way that the entrenched news organizations continue to support Twitter. If Twitter does not want people to view its content, other web sites should stop linking to it.
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Re: how many news websites offer a paywall
So i guess the NYT paywall is “enshittification” too.
Re: Re:
Yes. It is. Paywalls for news suck.
Re: Re:
Congratulations on having a thought. Hope it didn’t hurt too much.
Re: Re:
Yes.
Re: Re:
Bob? Is that you?
Re: Re: Re:
Did we finally name the revenge pornographer’s one braincell?
Re: Re: Re:2
No, I was making a reference to an old troll who would find all sorts of ways to call Mike a hypocrite for denouncing paywalls, but since he was a troll, there was always incoherence.
Re: Re:
Congratulations! You’re starting to understand it now!
Yes, lots of news websites are engaging in enshittification using paywalls and such. Indeed, there’s an article on this site all about that. Glad to see you’re finally catching up to the rest of us!
Seriously, did you think this was some sort of “gotcha”? Because it’s not. Paywalls have been a major criticism made on this site pretty much since day 1.
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Hey, guess what, a JUDGE ruled that the gov engaged in censorship by proxy
Something you continually pretend didn’t happen and finding out about was probably the main benefit of Musk buying Twitter. (y’know, in addition to stopping the damn censorship)
So whatever you think “Shitty” is, I Probably want more of that.
You’re like Jim Cramer, but for tech and censorship. Just the literal opposite of whatever you say, please.
Re:
lmao fuck off
Re:
Christ, what a fucking idiot.
You must be a rapist as you are always forcing yourself on people who don’t want you around.
Re:
Oh you mean the judge for the federal district of Western Louisiana who just concluded that the federal government asking social media sites to do something about misinformation both deliberate and regurgitated with regard to infectious diseases is censorship.
The logic in the ruling is quite impressive even for a MAGAdiot stochastic bioterrorist.
Oh and the ruling has already been shredded as nuts, and unlikely to survive a challenge, for declaring that mere communication from the US federal government to others is censorship.
Re: Re:
Especially when said behavior was to warn sites to beef up their security because, wouldn’t ya know, that actual security threats were about to fuck them up?
Then again, MAHAts are, unwittingly or not, doing the work of Russian hackers, useful idiots, and whatnot…
So anything that comes out of their mouths should be treated as admissions of treason, at best.
Re: Re:
Reminder that being a Trump judge is such a low bar of qualification, that pretty much anyone here but Chozen and Matthew is capable of understanding the law better than one.
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Re: Re: take your meds
schitzo
Re:
Have you figured out yet that Elmo will never know who you are?
Re:
…said nobody mentally competent, ever.
Re: Who cares?
So what, Bennett? So we got a limited hangout, where Elmo revealed the parts of Twitter’s censorship that advanced his narrative in exchange for him destroying the site entirely?
And btw, Twitter still censors users all the time. Just not Nazis, child abusers, or non-consentual pornographers. So congrats, if having a completely broken site filled with trash, and a stream of propaganda passed off as a leak is what you wanted, looks like you got it.
Re:
One Trump-appointed judge known for his bias made a ruling saying that conspiracy theories about the government can prove that mere communications by the government are censorship-by-proxy. We all knew he would do this, and it’s gonna be torn up on appeal.
Even the LLMs are smarter than Elon and co.
So, here’s something hilarious: I asked ChatGPT (an AI that, I remind you, has no idea what it’s talking about) how to avoid enshittification. (I told it the enshittification lifecycle, just in case, but I don’t think I had to.) And guess what, even its smarter than Elon. Just for shits, here’s it’s response:
I’m pretty sure these strategies are a rewriting of the rules that Mike wrote. If a large language model even knows how to avoid enshittification, and Elon/Spez/… don’t, you truly know who’s dumber.
Re:
A language-learning model can produce a gameplan for running a service like Twitter that is less sociopathic than the standard operating procedure of capitalist dipshits like Musk. That’s depressing—and hilarious.
I think this story is incomplete without a mention what else Elon’s devoted his time to while it was all happening, particularly since TechDirt discusses policy matters as well. Specifically, he decided to boost Islamophobia and replacement theory, put the blame on white women and approve the idea of second-class citizenship.
https://i.imgur.com/mt96SHL.png
At this point i’m not even sure it’s a enshittification learning curve, i think there’s a good chance it’s a deliberate destruction curve. Hanlon’s razor’s getting pretty worn out.
Re:
Yeah, the entire ElonTwitter saga is incomprehensible unless you factor in that Musk is a nazi. Then his decisions don’t seem so crazy. After all, the worst case scenario for him isn’t the end of Twitter, it’s Twitter continuing on and being useful to his political enemies. If he can successfully turn it into 8chan/gab/etc then he has a big win for team nazi, and if not then at least there is one less large non-nazi website.
Re: Re:
Specifically, Elon is a child of apartheid.
Re:
The only two things thst have increased on twitter, are CSAM and Nazism.
Anyone who says Twitter is better under Musk, only says so because they enjoy participation in one or both.
Re: Re:
That now quite truth! There’s also crypto scam, copyright infringement, misinformation of various sorts, trolling, hate speech, algorithm manipulation, glitches and unwanted UI elements. Most importantly, the percentage of the users that enjoy and proliferate one or several of those things, making the place unusable.
“And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.” You click on most trending terms, imagine the worst and there it is, simultaneously scratching the confirmation bias and diminishing the faith in humanity and brighter future.
Re: It's dead, Jim
Twiiter is in self-induced hospice
Re: Finally
Well I’ll be damned (very likely:), it looks like somebody has finally seen through the mist.
A bunch of really rich Conservofascists paid the idiot king Elmo to publicly destroy the site in order to send a message to any other site that might refuse to do their bidding in future.
Not really a new tactic but an ever-effective one.
‘Fuck with us and we will legally buy your livelihood out from under you and destroy it and you financially.’
Someone really oughta quietly release that backers list to as many sites as possible. As a public service. 🙂
That would be incredibly interesting.
A list of the Wealthiest American Traitors in America, and maybe a couple of America’s foreign enemies abroad as well.
That’d be a nice read.
Re: Re:
What a non sequitur, as those bought out have the money to invest elsewhere, while it is the buyer that is losing their shirt.
This is the first time Elon has done any good for the world
He broke Nitter. I’m free. I never have to use Twitter again.
Re:
As someone who uses Nitter to keep up with a relatively small number of accounts: It has been nice for my (most likely) ADHD-having ass to get a break from checking those accounts at least once every hour. 🤣
Still broke
Site’s still broken, too. Try to report someone for breaking any rule, click through until you get to the “Add Other Tweets” button. No matter who you’re reporting, the system claims it can’t find any other tweets by that person! So their own system still can’t see the other tweets.
This tracks well with $1bn of debt servicing interest annually.
The people I feel sorry for are those holding accounts with the banks that backed those loans. The banks are going to end up holding “expensive wall paper”, even if the stock certificates end up being digital these days.
'People are still using this junkheap?! Quick, shoot it a few more times!'
It’s amazing how stupid someone can act when they fire everyone who knows anything about the business they are running and their ego refuses to accept that other people might know more than they do and could give good advice as a result.
The value of a platform like Twitter comes not from advertisers but the users both those with an account and without and their interactions with the service. Posting, viewing, and most importantly sticking around to do those things so of course he hamstrung the most important piece of the company in an attempt to force people to buy the worse-than-useless ‘verification’ status…
Twitter
I dont think it’s Elons fault that
numerous advertisers left because
of Democrats leaving and Republicans
that joined Twitter.
Instead of civil debate between left and
right twitter users people were just
shitposting eachother. I don’t like the
far left or the far right and I think
that it’s sad people are sticking with
either.
Re:
What far left?
Also this is not the place for both sides. There is one side, the far right, that consists of extremists, bigots, hate mongers, and wannabe murders on genocidal scale. And Musk welcomed them with open arms, only kicking a few out again after they went so openly bad that it was affecting Musks reputation.
Further even if there was an active far left as big as the far right, which there isn’t, there is nothing there that demands the silencing (in whatever form) of the outgroup.
Re:
I dont think it’s Elons fault that numerous advertisers left because of Democrats leaving and Republicans that joined Twitter.
Out of curiosity what reason not related to Elon do you think would have caused a shift like that?
Re:
You can’t have a “civil debate” with people who are dedicated to making others suffer and spreading hatred. Or do you really think there’s a “middle ground” to be found in a discussion on, say, whether LGBTQ+ people deserve the same civil rights as everyone else?
Re:
If not Elon’s own actions why did Democrats leave it and Republicans suddenly flock to it? Mind control rays? Reptoid aliens? The Deep State (TM)?
Also, the far right has several billionaires backing their playbook. There is no such thing as a far left billionaire. Where’s the far left version of Uganda’s Kill the Gays law. Where’s the far left’s version of Trump? There isn’t one. Those on the left don’t support abusive behavior while too many on the right think violence is a legitimate tool for their grievance that America is no longer 100% dominated by the power of white male Christians.
Re: Re:
George Soros would like a word.
Re: Re: Re:
Is that word “anti-Semitic”? Because unless you have some actual proof that George Soros’s politics would ever qualify as “far left” in the United States, what you’re doing is anti-Semitic. That may be acceptable in some of the places you go, but this is not one of those places.
Re:
Please point to me where in the fucking UNIVERSE where there’s a communist power bloc.
There’s no commies in Russia (a capitalist dictatorship), China (an authcap totalitarian state), and those that claim to be socialist or communist are embracing capitalism. No, you cannot use Vietnam, Argentina or Cuba because they have even less power than, let’s say, Italy.
And no, there are no commies in space, despite Tim Curry’s antics in Red Alert 3.
Re: Re:
Not to mention that Vietnamese citizens have a positive view of the US.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2015/04/30/vietnamese-see-u-s-as-key-ally/
We lost the war but we gained an ally.
BlueSky
I am certainly willing to try alternatives. I’m already on Mastodon and that has been a great experience. Getting a lot of interactivity that exceeds anything I ever got on Twitter which is quite impressive.
I can admit I know much less about Bluesky. It has a waitlist just to join and things are still (I’m guessing?) in the testing phase. I’m not entirely sure it makes sense to try and join at this point, but the idea of waiting until the network is open to the public also gives me some pause too. I’m admittedly on the fence on that. Does anyone have some thoughts on what a small news site should do with respect to that?
If not Bluesky (and I’m very happy with Mastodon already), would there be better alternatives out there I should consider if Bluesky may not be the best choice for me if I do choose to try and set up shop on a new platform?
Curious about thoughts on that.
Re:
Not…really? I mean, Threads looks like a shitshow from the get-go, and there aren’t any other major competitors to Twitter beyond the Fediverse (and Bluesky, at least once it goes public). At this point, you’d be better off hoping Twitter survives Elonification.
Re: Re:
Ah. Seems logical. Probably will stick with Mastodon for the most part for now and see what shakes out later, then. Thanks for responding!
What's next?
So I’m wondering which happens next:
– Musk will try out some kind of cap on how many “people” can read your tweet
– Musk freaks out about how many fewer views his own tweets are getting
– Musk offers up a “buy reads for user” option for anyone willing to pay to let someone else view past the quota
Re:
These are reasonable guesses on future activity. i wonder if the gambling world is into this.
Re:
(The real reason is he saw massive drops in replies and interactions on his personal tweets. Also – the lower traffic resulted in significantly less advertising being served to users so he saw a large drop in income for the weekend)
This work is meaningful and on-going.
Great for a t-shirt. Or a headstone.
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Oh surprise – not even the holiday break can interrupt MM’s relentless, disgusting and shameful torrent of anti-Twitter / anti-Musk propaganda.
It’s almost reassuring!
Can’t wait for the next installment.
Re:
Do you have an argument as to why the decision to limit how many tweets a user can see is a good one?
Re:
Who forced you to read this article? C’mon, you can name names here, we promise not to snitch.
Re: relentless, disgusting and shameful
Fucking snowflake.
Re:
jhon pls
did the cops arrest you for suspected scam activities again
Re:
Dude, a bunch of people who don’t normally complain about this stuff have been complaining about this. Lots of people from Japan were complaining about it, for example.
There was another theory floating around surrounding Twitter’s new rate limits: it coincided with the end of the month and when Twitter’s Google hosting bill was due. And if you know how Elon has treated Twitter’s bills…
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Didn’t the insurrectionist supporter he installed brag about getting Elon to pay that bill?
Then again, I’ve also heard rumors that he was also moving Twitter off Gcloud and forcing what’s left of the Twitter tech team to cobble together something skmilar…
Way to go, Elon Musk! Next thing, he’ll have to write a book titled “How to lose 44 billion dollars without trying hard at all” …
Incidentally, “enshitification” seems to be an adequate description of the tech business cycle, as evidenced by this:
https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/23/red_hat_centos_move/
https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/28/rocky_linux_rhel_ripples/
https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/04/rocky_linux_rhel_loopholes/
For what very, very little it’s worth.
As far as I can tell, it’s still the case that you can’t view tweets without logging in though
Hair of the dog
Come to think of it, the cap on the tweets someone can see might be a blessing in disguise.
Instead of being exposed to unlimited doomscrolling, shitposting, main charactering, algorithm-fueled outrage, etc., a limit on tweets works like a hair of the dog during a hangover.
Maybe once the limit is exhausted some people will fill their remaining time with more pro-social, less online activities.
Maybe destroying Twitter is the goal?
Twitter was very useful as a breaking news source with all the organizations with official accounts using it. Now with everyone being able to have a verified account, the checkmark holds no value.
There were also smaller news organizations, activist orgs, and eyewitnesses bring things to light.
Musk and other right aligned people have constantly complained about Twitter being a liberal mouthpiece, yet all investigations, including Twitter’s own show that they were helping the right.
If cracking down on the dissemination of information about authoritarian regimes and reducing the criticism of right wing BS was the goal, killing Twitter and the access to information is a great idea.
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Possible, but unlikely, because Musk is a deeply ignorant and incurious dipshit who apparently graduated from Dunning-Kruger University. He probably believed—sincerely, of course—that buying Twitter and making it a bastion of “free speech” was going to make Twitter much more successful than it was when it tried to do things like moderate speech (including dis- and misinformation).
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Remember that it took the Delaware Chancery Court to force him to buy Twitter.
It may be a remote chance, but there’s definitely a fair bit of spite to some of his actions. And no, I’m not talking about the idiotic choices he’s made on the technical side, like LIMITING TWEETS.
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And of course the “Bastion of Free Speech” declaration was a lie. He’s taken down or restricted tweets on behalf of some government organizations. He has also retaliated against people who have insulted or even just criticized him. The way things are going, if stifling the flow of information is his goal, he’s doing a good job and the people who need clear ways of communicating are (understandably) cheering it on. I’m just saying, if this was a psyop, it would be a rather successful one.
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Being a free speech supporter and being a free speech “absolutist” always seem to be mutually exclusive.