defunct & ditched account 's Techdirt Comments

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• On the post: Multiple Former Twitter Employees Note That Musk’s New Favorite Tool, Polls, Are Easily Gamed By Bots

  

  defunct & ditched account ( profile ), 16 Dec, 2022 @ 12:20pm

  He owns (or rents) the bots that voted in his polls, I doubt he knows how to use the Twitter database. It's not an excuse, it's him employing an 'Accusation in a mirror' tactic that was commonly used on Twitter for years before he bought it. You should know at least that much to be qualified to comment on this.

• On the post: Multiple Former Twitter Employees Note That Musk’s New Favorite Tool, Polls, Are Easily Gamed By Bots

  

  defunct & ditched account ( profile ), 16 Dec, 2022 @ 12:16pm

  It's also just obvious as fuck in how polls and the Twitter userbase interact in comparison to how statistically-relevant polls function. Anyone who can't deduce that has moldy melons for brains.

• On the post: Multiple Former Twitter Employees Note That Musk’s New Favorite Tool, Polls, Are Easily Gamed By Bots

  

  defunct & ditched account ( profile ), 16 Dec, 2022 @ 12:14pm

  Your inquiry deserves a response, so: Fuck off.

• On the post: Elon Tries (Badly) To Defend The Banning Of Journalists As Twitter Starts Blocking Links & Mentions Of Mastodon

  

  defunct & ditched account ( profile ), 16 Dec, 2022 @ 12:11pm

  Is Elon feeling threatened by Mastodon really that bad of an explanation for part of this? Maybe it's not a real threat by the numbers yet, but people are actually setting up new instances and rejecting ones like the Raspberry Pi mess. Users are migrating, and some who maintain a Twitter presence have joined the majority of users who don't post. Or have scaled back their use basically to promotional cross-posts. And so my doom and gloom scenario about Mastodon not scaling probably won't come to pass because those instances will be there for new users. I still kind of see it as a waste of time like all social media, but it probably attracts a higher level of engagement and thought from users than Twitter does. People mock 'safe spaces', but Mastodon is built towards allowing users to feel safe in a 'community' of like-minded users while still being able to connect to the wider world. Part of the shittiness of Twitter was a lack of that, the open barren wastelands of user who might attack you simply for tweeting about your lunch or ignore your desperate pleas for help; a place with no real continuity to hold it together. Whatever, fuck Old Twitter, fuck Elon Twitter, fuck Elon too... fuck his shitty-ass satellites, fuck his Starshield nonsense, fuck his fans, fuck his garbage cars, fuck hearing about him, fuck him being an even more abusive dad than his own father, fuck him leading a cult of bigots... I still hope this shit bankrupts him and manages to wipe out all his companies, unless they can somehow escape his turdfingered touch; most of them were founded by other people who are actual engineers and they deserve to be able to redeem their vision (maybe).

• On the post: Multiple Former Twitter Employees Note That Musk’s New Favorite Tool, Polls, Are Easily Gamed By Bots

  

  defunct & ditched account ( profile ), 03 Dec, 2022 @ 05:37am

  Honestly, you give a bull's shit too little credit; at least it's worth something, Muskian antics just cost money like an overflowing hog farm lagoon turned future Superfund site. I guess that makes sense because all most of his success comes from a pork barrel.

• On the post: Multiple Former Twitter Employees Note That Musk’s New Favorite Tool, Polls, Are Easily Gamed By Bots

  

  defunct & ditched account ( profile ), 03 Dec, 2022 @ 05:33am

  To paraphrase...

  ...one of many pithy 'razors' much less pithily: "Never assume bias when lack of knowledge and service capacity prevent services from being rendered, but less rendered properly." It's nice that Twitter employees took the time to 'note' how broken polls are, but clearly it's always been a problem. Well before the current buyout even started, poll manipulation was fairly obvious for years. A mea culpa now doesn't absolve them of not fixing it, nor does it change that polls have been garbage since inception. Obvious reasons for polls being garbage are obvious and always have been, but they 'work' for the same reason PFP NFTs and now 'AI' portraiture have seen people spending real money on what amounts to processing time. Our culture really is self-obsessed; why else would people hire people to vote in easily-skewed polls? Especially insecure fuckhead billionaires. Also Pranay Pathole is an asshole and rightfully should have been banned along with the current Twitter owner, probably the day he made an account. Yay free speech and an easily manipulated populace and counterfeited consensuses, fucking Jack Dorsey. Silicon Valley is the most shithole place in our shithole country, the most shithole of all countries if simply by setting such a shitty example for everyone else. Initial fuckery just leads to later fuckery if no one actually fixes it, then you have the Stay-Puft Marshmallow man of the internet blunder his way in to 'help'. Social media is a great way to extract free labor from users, until it isn't. This is 'just' another internet bubble in the process of bursting, not worth getting 'recession PTSD' about.

• On the post: Twitter’s Former Head Of Trust & Safety Explains Why, For All His Billions, Elon Musk Can’t Magically Decide How Twitter Will Work

  

  defunct & ditched account ( profile ), 26 Nov, 2022 @ 05:13am

  #boobs

  Setting aside that #boobs is sometimes used in posts by digital sex workers to advertise with, so customers who want to see that can find their posts easier... "Roth then highlights three major outside forces that are well beyond Musk’s ability to control, even as he controls Twitter itself: advertisers, governments, and app store operators" All three of those groups are less important than one of the two groups that actually, the only group that those three groups really care about: the users. Without a userbase that makes content that's broadly appealing or at least appealing to a wide niche audience, there is no one to advertise to, no one to regulate, and no one downloading the app off of stores. The illusion of Twitter being a place for many different kinds of people has frankly been broken and there's no good reason for people to actually return to it in a way that will justify its continued existence. Increasingly there are increasingly-obvious reasons to disengage with it. The most important besides it being blatantly-focused on serving bigots, is that it increasingly lacks the only other group that really matters to keeping Twitter online: Employees that know anything.

• On the post: AI Art Is Eating The World, And We Need To Discuss Its Wonders And Dangers

  

  defunct & ditched account ( profile ), 26 Nov, 2022 @ 04:44am

  Thank you for this article, Dr. Weiss-Blatt! It's actually the best post I've ever read on TechDirt, and maybe I'll reference your work in what I'm writing about how generative art will create a larger demand for processing than other recent fads have, as is implied by the point you make in "2. The path to the masses" above.

• On the post: As Largest Archive Of K-Pop Live Streams Goes Offline, What Happens To All That Culture?

  

  defunct & ditched account ( profile ), 26 Nov, 2022 @ 04:22am

  If fans care enough, they will find a way. Maybe someday enough fans from different backgrounds will work together to build more archives for stuff like this and if they want it, they should build it. It would be ironic if, with all their numbers and motivation for K-Pop fans not to find a solution for themselves, but I doubt they will allow something so precious to them to be lost. This is not dismissive of the concerns of data being held by companies with no motive to maintain it, but an appreciation of how fans who are digitally-enabled will find a way. For example the early-90s club music I enjoy is much-better archived than I expected, because fans and DJs have put a lot of work into that over the past decades. I'm not going to sweat the loss of K-Pop here, but not because I dislike it (actually, thanks K-Pop fans for your interest in retro fashion and cheap mass-produced clothes; I've had some great finds in the 'y2k' style), if anything I have confidence in the technical competence and motivation of K-Pop fans to pivot from running anti-Indigenous racist harassment campaigns to preserving their own content regardless of copyright. They will put in the work to preserve what they love or maybe they never really gave two shits about it so much as the aesthetics of it, would be valid. I've never cared about respecting copyright because I'm a pirate by the dint of a youth poisoned by computers and networks; being a pirate is the heritage to all 'digital natives' because unless something is DRM-protected the network it travels through doesn't care it's being pirated and the computer it's on doesn't care either; and if things are improperly stored you may get riches for free. Only humans care about copyright, and copyright is more like an 'honor system' to people who grew up being able to download almost anything their heart desires. Entering digital spaces and expecting the idea of copyright to be respected marks one as a foreigner to these spaces. Copyright is not a technological norm, it has no physical basis in normal electronics, it is a human social technology that frankly doesn't work and requires breaking normal digital technology to digitally enforce. That's all being a digital pirate is, not a kind of piracy at all (though that still makes it sound cool, not like a crime despite legal/monetary penalties being life-ruining), just ignoring a broken social technology while focusing on the more interesting media that's being 'pirated'. Anyway I wish these K-Pop fans luck in preserving what they love, again the impetus is on them to do so; I also wish them luck in focusing more on important things like this and less on harassing people (including fellow K-Pop fans) who point out problematic things like racist band names, since only archiving their music preserves it while supporting bigotry does not. And that's an aspect of digital citizenship that needs to actually be taken seriously, or all that the loss of this will result in is minor handwringing by preservationists like the OP, apathy by the fans themselves, and schadenfreude like that expressed by some of the comments indicating a general dislike of K-Pop above (see the term 'plop' used derisively to describe pop music, oh so clever hahaha... not). Anyway, back to watching Twitter implode under the weight of its own inability to keep bigotry in check. Kinda ironic that problem got so bad they have one of those bigoted trolls running the company now because he apparently really just wanted to be a one-man moderation team so he could censor people in the name of free speech. Thus has it always been on Twitter, fascists being banned way less than they people they harass on Twitter. Good fucking riddance to a toxic hellhole, and fuck anyone who mourns the death of Twitter.

• On the post: It’s Not Anyone In The Senate’s Job To Save Twitter From Elon Musk

  

  defunct & ditched account ( profile ), 14 Nov, 2022 @ 08:12pm

  What if...

  Instead of instead of regulating Elon Musk's speech, they really do just regulate his companies by passing laws that support unionization, by giving the SEC, FTC, FCC, FAA, DOD, and uh... jeez what other agencies is Elon Musk beholden to in some sense or another? EPA... Well the list goes on of agencies that legislators could give more regulatory power to. Look, this is the gift that keeps on giving. Fuck Elon Musk.

• On the post: Twitter Blue’s New Verification / Not Verification Scheme Widely Abused On Day One

  

  defunct & ditched account ( profile ), 12 Nov, 2022 @ 05:36am

  So...

  Do the "White Lives Matter" marchers at Independence Day parade in Warsaw have verified Twitter accounts now because of this? Predictable.

• On the post: I Still Hope Twitter Succeeds

  

  defunct & ditched account ( profile ), 11 Nov, 2022 @ 02:16pm

  Based on every article I see, I don't think it's too early to expect Mastodon will be Twitter's successor before Twitter is entirely dead. It probably already is at this point, without being visible as such. Of course, that may be Mastodon's undoing in turn. And then another contender climbs atop the radioactive wasteland that's social media mountain to die and spread irradiated rot across the internet. Huzzah.

• On the post: I Still Hope Twitter Succeeds

  

  defunct & ditched account ( profile ), 11 Nov, 2022 @ 01:07pm

  As with other forms of telepathy, there's no proof that Presidential telepathy exists. And it doesn't take James Randi to figure that out.

• On the post: I Still Hope Twitter Succeeds

  

  defunct & ditched account ( profile ), 11 Nov, 2022 @ 01:05pm

  Three days in the future, it keeps being that way. This is a painfully predictable trajectory and requires some real tunnel vision on his part I guess.

• On the post: I Still Hope Twitter Succeeds

  

  defunct & ditched account ( profile ), 11 Nov, 2022 @ 01:03pm

  I found it interesting to look at the Blind pages for his companies. And then compare them to other companies in the same industries.

• On the post: I Still Hope Twitter Succeeds

  

  defunct & ditched account ( profile ), 11 Nov, 2022 @ 01:02pm

  I don't know if you (or anyone) wants to subject yourself to the transcript of his first meeting with employees (over on The Verge), but it was pretty clear that even in the areas where he had relevant experience it was irrelevant at best and generally decades out of date. He seems to be retreating into that same past like a turtle into its shelf, given that it sounds like his plan for Twitter is simply to make it his dream version of PayPal. The version of PayPal full of weird features on the roadmap that were never ever even being close to implemented. On the daily he continues to demonstrate ignorance of Twitter that a casual user should have already had. It's almost like the only tweets he cared about were his own and those of people disagreeing with him that had a loud enough platform he'd hear about it from someone he knows literally in person. He is an old man demanding in person meetings while running a social media company and failing to see the irony of that. And now that he's got a bit of an education on how ignorant he's been, he's rebelling against by trying to gut Twitter and become an online bank that also does social media and video on the side. What he doesn't do is give concrete and useful answers; and it's no wonder why his employees keep leaving. I'm wondering what kind of deathwish the ones who are staying on have, because continuing to work there sounds like a short path to self-annihilation. Is it like the Twitter doomers who want to wreck Twitter's value like Tumblr's supposedly was? Those are the brave souls I have fond wishes for. Not for anyone who gives a shit about Twitter at this point, because it was a cesspool of hate well before the offer was even tendered. That's why it appeals to a gaslighting turd like Musk. It's not worth the stench or the resulting tears, there's fresh air elsewhere.

• On the post: I Still Hope Twitter Succeeds

  

  defunct & ditched account ( profile ), 11 Nov, 2022 @ 12:46pm

  Nah, the apocalypse would have come and gone millions if not billions of years ago already and there would be no life in the universe by now. Just dead barren rocks, though still a more exciting place that Elon Musk's brain.

• On the post: I Still Hope Twitter Succeeds

  

  defunct & ditched account ( profile ), 11 Nov, 2022 @ 12:44pm

  Dorsey is too busy trying to look innocently naive by throwing himself under the bus for the an he trusts to... something about the 'light of human consciousness' or somesuch other Yogic Flyer businessman nonsense. Somewhere several tabs of knock-off acid (or million-dollar spiritual retreats if he's straight-edge) ago, I guess Dorsey forget that a half-assed mea culpa often looks even worse than failing to admit you're wrong at all. And he didn't admit to being wrong about the big stuff, which means he's as ill-suited to making a 'new Twitter' as his other longtermist cosmic consciousness bros. Does anyone actually think Bluesky will be worth using or do people realize that it's already obsolete?

• On the post: I Still Hope Twitter Succeeds

  

  defunct & ditched account ( profile ), 11 Nov, 2022 @ 12:33pm

  Agreed...

  I still hope Twitter succeeds too; just at lasting only long enough to bankrupt their new techbro CEO-wner. The best outcome as that Twitter's new owner doesn't ever lose confidence in his bad decisions, continues to double down by selling stock to fund those bad decisions, and ends up a forgotten pauper that the rest of his relatives (besides his daughter) have disowned. Hopefully he'll have divested enough from the one company of his that actually does something worthwhile so Gwynne Shotwell can ensure that one company actually continues to do useful things. They still might end up needing a DOD bailout though. And if they don't make it, some other space startup will just do it better. NBD.

• On the post: Ye’s ‘Buyout’ Of Parler Looks Very Much Like A Failed Company Taking Advantage Of Troubled Rich Guy

  

  defunct & ditched account ( profile ), 20 Oct, 2022 @ 07:59pm

  What's sad about this? Kanye is a piece of shit who frankly deserves to go bankrupt and disappear into permanent obscurity. And that's putting it incredibly nicely. Anyway, losing money in attempts to buy social media companies is just what rich untalented idiots do for fun these days.

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