Elon Musk Buys Twitter

[Edge-]

You’d think he’d have me?

Seriously, tho, id rather not immediately look at this as the ‘sky is falling’. Let it play out, see what happens.

Who's looking at it like that, Blossom? It seems like we're all just having a laugh.

[Rustedsaint]

Idk the inner workings of Twitter. If it’s bad, it’s bad. If it helps, it’s helps. Musk has shown that he’s open to hearing the people and changing things quickly to adapt. Im sure they’ll work it out, but my reactions to most things is that I don’t get worked-up about things I can’t control.

Just let it ride, man…

If that were true he would never have bought Twitter in the first place, he’s behind payments for multiple things that Twitter needs to function. Honestly I’m expecting him just to close Twitter down for a month then launch a brand new twitter 2.0

[korijenkins]

I'm not saying Musk is a genius. I'm asking what makes Trump so smart.

Trump knows how to appeal to functioning human beings, who happen to be stupid. Most of Musk's musketeers are complete bottom feeders who are essentially simping for him.

Trump isn't intellectual, but he knows how to manipulate a crowd. I don't think Elon knows how to do the latter, but weird internet nerds are all over him.

[unfilteredJW]

Ironically, he just tweeted that comedy is legal on the platform lol

Unless he or one of his alt right turds are the butt of the joke.

[Kathranis]

Eh, I'm of the opinion that Musk is trying to appeal to the younger generations.

His end goal... I'm not sure yet.

Maybe he's a pedophile.

[Breccia]

If that were true he would never have bought Twitter in the first place

Well let's take it one step further, by looking at the specific situation.
1) Twitter has no limits.
2) Elon puts on a limit of 600 without warning.
3) People, having signed up for Twitter when there was no limit, are upset that there is now a limit of 600, also known as "15 minutes".
4)

He changed it to 800 now so I should be golden.

That is not "adapting". That's still a sudden, easily-reachable limit created out of thin air for "data scraping" reasons when most users aren't data scraping. If the original limit had been 800 and he hadn't moved it, it'd be the same shitty result.

Let's try it a different way: you're going about your daily business as usual. Someone with a gun shows up and says "I am going to shoot you four times". You say "No, please don't do that" and he says "fine" and shoots you three times.

Do you praise this person for their adaptiveness? Or has he still shot you?

- - - Updated - - -

Eh, I'm of the opinion that Musk is trying to appeal to the younger generations.

With a limit to the number of posts you can read? No, you don't think that's appealling to the youth. That's a lie. No sane human being would say "This person is trying to appeal to the youth by making them spend less time on social media". I thought you had kids.

[Elegiac]

Maybe he wants to be their leader on Mars.

We're not colonizing Mars in his lifetime, so.

Not exactly a smart plan either.

[Kathranis]

Maybe he wants to be their leader on Mars.

No but seriously. You'd have to be a terribly poor judge of character to look at Musk's behavior and not be able to figure out what he's doing or why he's doing it, as public as this all is.

Musk is a needy, attention-seeking narcissist who wants to be perceived as cool, but he's also an awkward, unfunny dork.

I think you can really trace all of this back to his appearance on JRE, where he became a meme for, let's be honest, succumbing to peer pressure. That moment put him on the radar of the alt right, tech and finance bros, groypers, and other such scumbags.

Sensing attention, he started playing to that crowd. His purchase of Twitter -- which, reminder, started out as a stunt that he tried to get out of -- has been a blatantly transparent attempt to get them to like him by giving them preferential treatment.

Pretty much every business decision he's made over the last year has been either to curry favor with his "friends" or a desperate attempt to cut costs because, again, he didn't really want to spend all this money on Twitter.

So, basically, this is the developmentally stunted billionaire version of a 13-year-old power tripping reddit mod who spends too much time on 4chan.

[unfilteredJW]

Interestedly enough, NASA is having astronauts 'depart' for a year inside a mock Mars base

No it’s not.

It’s you filling the first thing off of google you found, didn’t read it, and posted it here to make a point.

[Kathranis]

Interestedly enough, NASA is having astronauts 'depart' for a year inside a mock Mars base

NASA has been doing human analog missions for decades, it doesn't mean we're any closer to colonizing Mars.

Nevermind that the only viable reason to try and colonize Mars would be the extraction of rare earth minerals.

[unfilteredJW]

Are you referring to CHAPEA? That's what I linked, which is a link to NASA. It's a field test, or simulated habit of Mars

CHAPEA is a series of analog missions that will simulate year-long stays on the surface of Mars. Each mission will consist of four crew members living in Mars Dune Alpha, an isolated 1,700 square foot habitat. During the mission, the crew will conduct simulated spacewalks and provide data on a variety of factors, which may include physical and behavioral health and performance.

The 3D printed habitat will include private crew quarters, a kitchen, and dedicated areas for medical, recreation, fitness, work, and crop growth activities, as well as a technical work area and two bathrooms.

Just because you can copy paste doesn’t mean you read it lol.

[Benggaul]

Unless he or one of his alt right turds are the butt of the joke.

He also didn't "just" tweet it. That's from October of last year when he bought it. Practically everything the Shrew posts here is either a lie or bullshit GOP propaganda at this point.

[unfilteredJW]

He also didn't "just" tweet it. That's from October of last year when he bought it. Practically everything the Shrew posts here is either a lie or bullshit GOP propaganda at this point.

This is my position @Winter Blossom

[Breccia]

Interestedly enough, NASA--

The topic of this thread is not NASA.

On topic, and highly relevant: No One Believes Elon Musk’s Explanation For Breaking Twitter

Well, he finally did it. Elon Musk has broken Twitter so badly that it might as well be offline at this point.

On Saturday afternoon, Musk announced that tweet views would suddenly be limited to the following amounts:

(numbers we know)

This move was, according to him, his latest effort to prevent “scraping” of the site by AI compilers and “system manipulation,” whatever that’s supposed to mean. 600 tweet views for non Blue-payers is roughly the equivalent of a handful of scrolls throughout the day. I went through my allotment over the course of about 45 minutes as I was try to keep track of reactions to this absurd move across every corner of the site. After that, you hit a “rate limit” message, and are unable to see new tweets. The cap has since been raised to 1,000/10,000, but that’s still barely anything for non-Blue users. Somehow, this technical disaster has been used to further encourage Twitter Blue subscriptions in a move only Musk would be capable of.

While Musk first said it was for scraping, he’s since taken to joking around about how he’s crippled the site in order to get people to break their Twitter addiction and go outside

Just a note: Musk is admitting he broke Twitter, the site he paid huge quantities of money for, on purpose, then joking about it. There's "poking fun at yourself" and then there's "admitting you're incompetent and laughing at your customers who took issue".

And he’s laughing about how his tweet announcing the policy has now broken view records on the site. But anyone with any sort of technical knowledge believes that this has little do with scraping or bot prevention or anything he’s actually saying.

There are two main theories about what’s going on here. One involves the possibility that Elon’s big move before this, the new inability to view Twitter when not logged in, created some sort of technical spiral where Twitter is now effectively DDOSing itself based on how these changes were made. The limitation has nothing to do with scraping and everything with trying to keep the site together while this is addressed, according to Sheldon Chang on Mastadon.

*ahem*

Elon has apparently ended up making Twitter DDOS itself...

Tell me again how this dude is a genius.

UD just ninja'd Forbes, you guys.

The second theory has to do with Musk, in an effort to cut costs, refusing to pay his bills to places like Amazon or Google who provide essential services for Twitter. These issues suspiciously correspond with past reporting about this area, though follow-ups indicate that Musk eventually at least paid the Google bill.

*ahem*

Google's Cloud Storage Contract expired yesterday, so you have your answer.

Xyonai also ninja'd Forbes, you guys.

The more likely option is the former, it seems, about the logged-out viewing change badly messing things up.

Of course not everyone doesn’t believe Musk’s stated rationale. There are of course the army of Twitter Blue Checks under all his posts saying things like “great move sir, thanks for making the site better!” seemingly completely detached from the reality that it’s now barely functional.

Aaaaaaaaaand we all know who that is.

Finding tweets to cite here, I was concerned I’d probably run out of views before I even found them. Just a truly ridiculous situation for a site based on constant engagement and endless scrolling. This has also raised questions about Twitter’s remaining advertisers, as they now have severely limited reach based on this change.

And this is why I wanted to post this article. Well, most of it. The "nobody believes you" part was a fun bonus, after a certain genuine, honest poster suggested someone was trying to become more marketable to youth by blocking social media, then leaving the planet. Advertising is a contract. You pay for your message to get on a platform, they put it there. If the platform makes sudden changes to lower their view count, the advertiser would have every reason to be upset. Now, I've never paid for nor sold advertising, but I'm going to guess there's no specific line in there Twitter violated therefore no lawsuit.

But advertisers can just, you know, stop signing contracts. "Thanks, I'll see how YouTube is doing."

Everyone on the site has turned to begging for Bluesky invites, the upstart Twitter rival which has…now paused sign-ups because there were too many coming in. I’ve been on Bluesky for a while and I’m unhappy to report that it’s not very good. It’s a messier version of Twitter where you’re starting your followership over from scratch, and probably 95% of the people you currently follow aren’t on it yet. Its biggest benefit was not being broken (which it now effectively is) and not being run by Elon Musk.

This is easily the worst thing Musk has done since taking over the site, and his most obvious smokescreen saying this is about protecting the site from evil AI scrapers. If that’s true, it’s effectively like burning down your house to kill a couple mosquitos.

[Cthulhu 2020]

Twitter's biggest issue atm is that it's not introducing any new or interesting features, and is instead taking away old features and replacing them with newer, broken or unpopular ones. Twitter Blue hasn't been nearly as effective as Elon would have wanted. The guy hasn't paid his rent on several of Twitter's facilities, has already been evicted from several, and as the internet bills come due the site is hemorrhaging money. It's no secret that Twitter wasn't exactly profitable, but what it had was reach, and a significant effect on politics and policy. The real question is, how much money is someone willing to sink into Twitter to have control of that kind of reach? If it ever becomes too much to keep up, he might let it die. But we also know that Elon's donors are Saudis and Russians. So how much money are they willing to sink into having their thumbs on the scales of politics coming up into the 2024 election?

My guess is Twitter will remain funded up through the election, then left to die.

[PACOX]

One day society will laugh how we allowed egomaniacs to such singular holds on technology, assuming we make it that far.


The right loses its shit when they hear the China limits the amount kids can school the internet on a school night meanwhile billionaires are telling grown people how much they can scroll.

[Dontrike]

Those are things I can control.

No, those are things you WANT to control

[Mekh]

Elon out here amplifying people her reaaaally shouldn't be. Again.

What's it say for those of us who can't view it?

[s_bushido]

What's it say for those of us who can't view it?

Just your typical "Muslims have free speech in this country, therefore it's going to become an Islamic theocracy any day!!!" horseshit. Probably from the same people who are perfectly happy pretending that the USA is their own personal Christian theocracy already.

[The Stormbringer]

Elon out here amplifying people her reaaaally shouldn't be. Again.

What's it say for those of us who can't view it?

Yeah, sadly some of us aren't signed into Twitter at work. /sadbutthat'sprobablyforthebest

EDIT: Ah, someone posted it. That's... gross. Thanks, Elon.