X -Where Twitter goes to die.

[Suranis]

Twitter advertising now thinks I am a good audience for NFT sales pitches. I am not. Either the algorithms are failing, or that’s about what they’ve got left to sell me.

Trying to recall which, but wasn't one of the major investors who joined Musk one of the big crypto exchanges?

Ya, Binance.

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/crypt ... 1666962807

[raison de arizona]

Twitter advertising now thinks I am a good audience for NFT sales pitches. I am not. Either the algorithms are failing, or that’s about what they’ve got left to sell me.

Trying to recall which, but wasn't one of the major investors who joined Musk one of the big crypto exchanges?

Yup.

Musk has secured $500 million from the crypto exchange Binance to finance his new acquisition and hired influential Andreesen Horowitz crypto investor and former Twitter executive Sriram Krishnan to come back to Twitter as part of his new team.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technolo ... eep-climb/

[noblepa]

I was behind a Tesla on the highway the other day and the only markings on it at all were the Tesla logo front and back. I had to come home and look up the logo just to make sure that's what it was. Very pretty red color, very ugly body style.

I agree. The thing that annoys me about Teslas is the front end styling.

Of course, there is no radiator, but the front end looks like they just forgot to cut the hole for the grill and radiator. It looks kind of like one of those photos of someone's face, where the mouth has been photoshopped out, leaving just a large swathe of skin.

Other vehicles that had no radiator, such as the original VW beetle and the Porsche 911, restyled the front end, making use of the fact that there was no radiator. When you look at one of those cars, you don't really notice the lack of radiator, because the styling does not draw your attention to the place where, in other cars, there is a radiator. The Tesla does just that.

[Slim Cognito]

He's so clever!
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1589649285880385536

What do you call someone who is a master at baiting?

This is yet another reason why the text of the tweet should be copied and pasted.

If we didn't see it before it got deleted, we no longer have any idea of what was said.

No good reason to mention it other than the joke goes, (as Hubs used to tell it) what do you call someone who is an excellent fisherman.

[noblepa]

Twitter will ban impersonators, Elon Musk says, as users flock to take his name

“Any name change at all” would result in the temporary loss of a verified checkmark, Musk said.

Who cares. He has made the blue check mark worthless.

In fact, I think that it is an outright lie to refer to it as a "verified" checkmark. They are no longer verifying anyone.

He's just pissed that a bunch of people used HIS name. He couldn't care less if you use someone else's name.

[pipistrelle]

I was behind a Tesla on the highway the other day and the only markings on it at all were the Tesla logo front and back. I had to come home and look up the logo just to make sure that's what it was. Very pretty red color, very ugly body style.

I agree. The thing that annoys me about Teslas is the front end styling.

Of course, there is no radiator, but the front end looks like they just forgot to cut the hole for the grill and radiator. It looks kind of like one of those photos of someone's face, where the mouth has been photoshopped out, leaving just a large swathe of skin.

Other vehicles that had no radiator, such as the original VW beetle and the Porsche 911, restyled the front end, making use of the fact that there was no radiator. When you look at one of those cars, you don't really notice the lack of radiator, because the styling does not draw your attention to the place where, in other cars, there is a radiator. The Tesla does just that.

But look at that face.

2022-11-07 18.13.07.png (100.29 KiB) Viewed 1087 times

[somerset]

I was behind a Tesla on the highway the other day and the only markings on it at all were the Tesla logo front and back. I had to come home and look up the logo just to make sure that's what it was. Very pretty red color, very ugly body style.

I agree. The thing that annoys me about Teslas is the front end styling.

Of course, there is no radiator, but the front end looks like they just forgot to cut the hole for the grill and radiator. It looks kind of like one of those photos of someone's face, where the mouth has been photoshopped out, leaving just a large swathe of skin.

Other vehicles that had no radiator, such as the original VW beetle and the Porsche 911, restyled the front end, making use of the fact that there was no radiator. When you look at one of those cars, you don't really notice the lack of radiator, because the styling does not draw your attention to the place where, in other cars, there is a radiator. The Tesla does just that.

But look at that face.
2022-11-07 18.13.07.png

The S and X look a little more conventional. The 3 and Y have no "grill" at all. You get used to it

[Dave from down under]

Not that it is going to make a difference...

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-11-08/ ... /101628988

Australia's eSafety commissioner writes to Elon Musk concerned about Twitter's direction

Australia's eSafety Commissioner says Twitter is in for a "bumpy ride" under Elon Musk and has written to the self-dubbed "chief twit", expressing concern about the new direction of the social media platform.

Key points:
Elon Musk has foreshadowed an overhaul of key policies on Twitter
Australia's eSafety Commissioner says it could allow misinformation to flourish
She has written to Musk clarifying that Australia's cyberspace laws will be complied with

[pipistrelle]

I wonder about Twitter's power: It's used by journalists to broadcast news, by fundraisers, etc., etc., but many like me don't use it much, and I'm the only person in my (not large) circle who uses it at all, yet it seems to have outsized power.

[June bug]

If those Australian laws aren’t complied with, are there any consequences that matter?

[Dave from down under]

If those Australian laws aren’t complied with, are there any consequences that matter?

hahahahahahahaha.....

[June bug]

If those Australian laws aren’t complied with, are there any consequences that matter?

hahahahahahahaha.....

That’s what I figured.

[raison de arizona]

Musk discusses putting all of Twitter behind a paywall
Will he go through with it? PLUS: Botched layoffs, how the new Blue could lose money, and more

If Friday brought massive layoffs to Twitter, Monday brought fresh evidence that the company will never be the same. Musk has discussed putting the entire site behind a paywall, Platformer has learned. Meanwhile, the company is scrambling to lure back employees who it laid off mere hours ago, and some workers say the economics behind its soon-to-relaunch Twitter Blue subscription could actually lose the company money.

All of this took place against the backdrop of a company that still has yet to hear anything official from Musk, via email or a companywide meeting. As Monday began, after losing thousands of their colleagues days earlier, many employees didn’t know who their managers are.

Meanwhile, Musk’s increasingly erratic leadership, coupled with his habit of tweeting in eye-watering bad taste, gave many current and former employees I spoke with a sinking feeling about the future of their company.

Today let’s talk a bit more about how the company botched its layoff process, what happened inside Twitter on Monday, and what that paywall might look like.

https://www.platformer.news/p/musk-disc ... of-twitter

[RTH10260]

Some employees are nervous that if Twitter can’t get them to return voluntarily, the company will formally rescind the notice they received Friday laying them off. Under the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act, businesses with more than 100 full-time employees are required to give 60 days notice if they lay off 33 percent or more of the staff. At Twitter, that notice included a promise to pay people for the next 60 days and give them a month of severance.

Now workers fear that if they they refuse to return voluntarily, Twitter will fire them for abandoning their jobs, depriving them of what otherwise would have been three months’ pay.

Some workers have begun to consult with lawyers over their options in the event that they are recalled. Others are in open revolt, tweeting public threads about various aspects of the organization that have been broken after the ready-fire-aim disaster of Musk’s layoffs process.

[RTH10260]

As today began at Twitter, there were essentially two groups at the company, one employee told me: those working on projects that Musk has been deeply involved in, such as the revamped Twitter Blue subscription, and everyone else.

“The couple of teams that are on his pet projects are doing 20-hour days,” one employee told me. “But the majority of the company is kind of just sitting around. No chain of command, no priorities, no organization chart, and in many cases, no idea who your manager or team is.”

[RTH10260]

Other employees have warned about a secondary feature of the new Blue that Musk added at the last minute: reducing ad load in the Twitter app by half. Estimates showed that Twitter will lose about $6 in ad revenue per user per month in the United States by making that change, sources said. Factoring in Apple and Google’s share of the $8 monthly subscription, Twitter would likely lose money on Blue if the ad-light plan is enacted.

[RTH10260]

Elsewhere in Twitter: Elon Musk’s celebrity lawyer, Alex Spiro, played a key role in the Twitter layoffs, during which the company fired more than 90 percent of its staff in India, leaving it with just 12 employees in a key growth market.

[neeneko]

I wonder about Twitter's power: It's used by journalists to broadcast news, by fundraisers, etc., etc., but many like me don't use it much, and I'm the only person in my (not large) circle who uses it at all, yet it seems to have outsized power.

It is kinda like the fax networks from the 70s. The final conveying of information is still mostly done by word of mouth, but it can be used to disseminate information across large areas quickly. I guess another analogy would be the banking system,.. most people are interacting with merchants and such, but the real volumes of money going around are in ahc/swift/etc. Twitter is information infrastructure.

[Phoenix520]

Elon alone is enough to make people leave. The people I follow are to valuable to me right now to leave, though. I’ve blocked Elon and until he makes that a punishable offense it’s gonna have to do.

[Sam the Centipede]

Elon alone is enough to make people leave. The people I follow are to valuable to me right now to leave, though. I’ve blocked Elon and until he makes that a punishable offense it’s gonna have to do.

I wouldn't be surprised to see Musk introduce a premium unblockable account subscription, pay say $19.99 per month and no user can block or mute your tweets. Free to the former guy of course.

And/or ordinary users pay $4.99 per month for access to block and mute features? Why not both, charge in both directions!

What value is there in "freedom of speech" if people can choose not to read the rants of right-wing nutjobs?

Off Topic

It will be interesting to see how Twitter changes in coming months, both as a company and a service, because it's clear that it will become a chapter in future textbooks about making social media businesses in this digital age.

[somerset]

I wonder about Twitter's power: It's used by journalists to broadcast news, by fundraisers, etc., etc., but many like me don't use it much, and I'm the only person in my (not large) circle who uses it at all, yet it seems to have outsized power.

It is kinda like the fax networks from the 70s. The final conveying of information is still mostly done by word of mouth, but it can be used to disseminate information across large areas quickly. I guess another analogy would be the banking system,.. most people are interacting with merchants and such, but the real volumes of money going around are in ahc/swift/etc. Twitter is information infrastructure.

And meanwhile, back at the ranch:

Krueger says that Twitter won’t blink out of life, but we’ll start to see a greater number of tweets not loading, and accounts coming into and out of existence seemingly at a whim. “I would expect anything that’s writing data on the back end to possibly have slowness, timeouts, and a lot more subtle types of failure conditions,” he says. “But they’re often more insidious. And they also generally take a lot more effort to track down and resolve. If you don’t have enough engineers, that’s going to be a significant problem.”

The juddering manual retweets and faltering follower counts are indications that this is already happening. Twitter engineers have designed fail-safes that the platform can fall back on so that the functionality doesn’t go totally offline but cut-down versions are provided instead. That’s what we’re seeing, says Krueger.

Alongside the minor malfunctions, the Twitter engineer believes that there’ll be significant outages on the horizon, thanks in part to Musk’s drive to reduce Twitter’s cloud computing server load in an attempt to claw back up to $3 million a day in infrastructure costs. Reuters reports that this project, which came from Musk’s war room, is called the “Deep Cuts Plan.” One of Reuters’s sources called the idea “delusional,” while Alan Woodward, a cybersecurity professor at the University of Surrey, says that “unless they’ve massively overengineered the current system, the risk of poorer capacity and availability seems a logical conclusion.”

Meanwhile, when things do go kaput, there’s no longer the institutional knowledge to quickly fix issues as they arise. “A lot of the people I saw who were leaving after Friday have been there nine, 10, 11 years, which is just ridiculous for a tech company,” says the Twitter engineer. As those individuals walked out of Twitter offices, decades of knowledge about how its systems worked disappeared with them. (Those within Twitter, and those watching from the sidelines, have previously argued that Twitter’s knowledge base is overly concentrated in the minds of a handful of programmers, some of whom have been fired.)

https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/1 ... ing-weeks/

[raison de arizona]

His gun, his foot, doing his damnedest.

[Ben-Prime]

At some point, you have to wonder if he intends to just kamikaze the damn thing into the ground just so he can build something fresh in the new market which arises after Twitter has died.

[humblescribe]

He could call it Phoenix, amirite?

[raison de arizona]

He could call it Phoenix, amirite?

He could, but he already has a name picked out: X