Elon Musk: Officially a fraud and piece of shit. Official or unofficial war criminal?

[Captain Ron 12873]

2 hours ago, Captain Ron said:

Since I’ve been on twitter for a while, my FOR YOU tab is actually a lot of people I follow, it’s well curated. The following feed isn’t as good.

 Getting rid of for you will end my reason for subscribing to twitter. I’ll just bookmark the accounts I want to read and directly read them. Subscribing and following aren’t needed anymore. 

Let me take this a step further, from what I can tell:

FOR YOU - a curated algorithm that shows you what they think you want. When you've been on the site a while this is a great tab. I really like mine (I don't get the hate).

FOLLOWING - unedited EVERYTHING from your followers. They tweet - there. They like - there, they retweet - there. It's very hard to read.

I think what most people didn't initially get is that the FOR YOU tab is basically what the feed looked like before Musk bought the place. He might have changed the algorithm a touch, but it's not all that different. It got a lot of hate, but really unwarranted.

 

This is another point where he's just wrong. For Musk, $7 a month is nothing. For Me, I'm annoyed, but it isn't breaking the bank. For many people (and I really see this in a lot of poorer countries), that is a burden. I mean Sure, I guess this is equal, but I certainly don't think it's fair.

Edited March 28, 2023 by Captain Ron

[HamsterHookah 112]

If you are a gambling man, seems like staying on at Twitter for the next two years will either be doubling your money or losing it all:

Elon Musk, who paid $44B for Twitter, now reportedly claims it’s worth $20B, telling employees their stock grants would be worth the lower valuation and that he sees “a clear but difficult path” to $250B.

[NoName 16351]

9 minutes ago, HamsterHookah said:

If you are a gambling man, seems like staying on at Twitter for the next two years will either be doubling your money or losing it all:

Elon Musk, who paid $44B for Twitter, now reportedly claims it’s worth $20B, telling employees their stock grants would be worth the lower valuation and that he sees “a clear but difficult path” to $250B.

if you want a laugh, here are some companies worth between 225b and 250b

• Pfizer
• Bank of America
• Oracle
• Pepsi
• Coca cola
• Merck

 

 

[Captain Ron 12873]

Let's be fair - it's tech, they CAN make that valuation (look at all the other over valued tech). But compare them with like tech companies - they aren't close to those companies.

[Captainant 27654]

20 minutes ago, Captain Ron said:

Let's be fair - it's tech, they CAN make that valuation (look at all the other over valued tech). But compare them with like tech companies - they aren't close to those companies.

Well to be fair, it's a significantly different market climate than "big tech" has historically been in. This ain't low interest rate season when risk-taking and failure is relatively cheap, so TWTR is probably going to have a more limited playbook to make the comeback

[HamsterHookah 112]

Agree with everyone-- but just giving employees equity at the $20bn valuation seems like a really cool thing to do if you have any hope or faith that the company will continue to exist and not be sold off for parts or outright fail. I think I read there were 2k employees left-- I would think they are pleased and think of it as a pretty good lottery ticket.

On the other hand, Musk has not shown the most integrity and character with honoring equity and severance payouts for legacy Twitter employees. That might be more of a dynamic, like when a new alpha lion takes over another lions den, he kills all the cubs of the old guard and feeds only his offspring. Who knows with Musk.

[Fudge Nuggets 19190]

16 hours ago, Brisketexan said:

The classic definition of penny wise and pound foolish.  

To wit, "Stepping over dollars to pick up dimes."

[atomheartbevo 89648]

1 hour ago, HamsterHookah said:

Agree with everyone-- but just giving employees equity at the $20bn valuation seems like a really cool thing to do if you have any hope or faith that the company will continue to exist and not be sold off for parts or outright fail. I think I read there were 2k employees left-- I would think they are pleased and think of it as a pretty good lottery ticket.

On the other hand, Musk has not shown the most integrity and character with honoring equity and severance payouts for legacy Twitter employees. That might be more of a dynamic, like when a new alpha lion takes over another lions den, he kills all the cubs of the old guard and feeds only his offspring. Who knows with Musk.

Musk is hurting twitter’s biggest revenue stream - advertising, and thinks he can make that up with subscriptions, but he can’t.  Him allowing the white supremacists, Russian propaganda, anti-semitism, conspiracy bullshit in general, etc. to spread is not only hurting advertising, but is turning many casual users off.  

He also doesn’t seem to have a handle on the bot situation (and admits it) and his response is to instead say they will have to charge subscriptions because in his mind, bots won’t subscribe.  And yet we have already seen the bot owners subscribing, because it now legitimizes those bots and the misinformation or scams they are spreading are finding their way into more people’s feeds.

This latest change with the “For You” stuff is also going to drive many away or at the very least, will lower engagement.  I’m with @Captain Ron on it having been very useful and working well for me.  I’ve been slowly migrating away from Twitter, but still have my accounts (which all lost their blue checks and I won’t be subscribing to get them back) for followers who haven’t left, but I still used the For You stuff to find new people/websites/etc. that I was interested in or would reach out to.  He’s now going to destroy it in the hopes of making more people subscribe.

I really do believe the endgame here will be a complete subscription service.  Maybe by the end of this year even, but I think the days of being able to use Twitter without paying are on a timer.  He just doesn’t get that we users were the product and the advertisers were the customers and  he’s going to try and make users the customers and Twitter itself the product.

 

[HamsterHookah 112]

1 minute ago, atomheartbevo said:

Musk is hurting twitter’s biggest revenue stream - advertising, and thinks he can make that up with subscriptions, but he can’t.  Him allowing the white supremacists, Russian propaganda, anti-semitism, conspiracy bullshit in general, etc. to spread is not only hurting advertising, but is turning many casual users off.  

He also doesn’t seem to have a handle on the bot situation (and admits it) and his response is to instead say they will have to charge subscriptions because in his mind, bots won’t subscribe.  And yet we have already seen the bot owners subscribing, because it now legitimizes those bots and the misinformation or scams they are spreading are finding their way into more people’s feeds.

This latest change with the “For You” stuff is also going to drive many away or at the very least, will lower engagement.  I’m with @Captain Ron on it having been very useful and working well for me.  I’ve been slowly migrating away from Twitter, but still have my accounts (which all lost their blue checks and I won’t be subscribing to get them back) for followers who haven’t left, but I still used the For You stuff to find new people/websites/etc. that I was interested in or would reach out to.  He’s now going to destroy it in the hopes of making more people subscribe.

I really do believe the endgame here will be a complete subscription service.  Maybe by the end of this year even, but I think the days of being able to use Twitter without paying are on a timer.  He just doesn’t get that we users were the product and the advertisers were the customers and  he’s going to try and make users the customers and Twitter itself the product.

 

The thing I'm most interested in right now is:

Do I think Twitter will grow in valuation from $20bn (and do I want to invest and gamble that?) or do I think Musk will continue tanking Twitter and it will fail or be sold for parts?

This is probably because I never cared for Twitter in the first place as a social media tool.

[NoName 16351]

42 minutes ago, HamsterHookah said:

The thing I'm most interested in right now is:

Do I think Twitter will grow in valuation from $20bn (and do I want to invest and gamble that?) or do I think Musk will continue tanking Twitter and it will fail or be sold for parts?

This is probably because I never cared for Twitter in the first place as a social media tool.

here is the issue.

let's say he takes it behind a paywall. let's say that every single one of the 41.5 million mDAU in the United States pays for it at $84 / year. that comes out to $3.4 billion

globally twitter has ~237 million mDAU. if he can convert 20%, which is a truly incredible number in a time where youtube premium is at 3% for example, at $84 per member that comes out to almost 4 billion. let's round it up.

in 2022 Twitter's ad revenue was 4.46 billion.

so he has to convert somewhere around 20% of his current users to Twitter Blue.

as of January that conversion rate was estimated to be 0.2% of monthly active users, or about ~180,000 in the US and ~290,000 globally.

there is fucked, then there is whatever boat Twitter is in.

[wildcat09 29349]

I love the stance Elon's supporters have to take now, which is basically "sure he's obviously been fucking it up horribly and is giving every indication that he will continue to fuck it up until Twitter actually dies, but there's still like a 50% chance he makes Twitter worth as much as Pfizer (who I sometimes think secretly runs the entire world)!"

[HamsterHookah 112]

45 minutes ago, wildcat09 said:

I love the stance Elon's supporters have to take now, which is basically "sure he's obviously been fucking it up horribly and is giving every indication that he will continue to fuck it up until Twitter actually dies, but there's still like a 50% chance he makes Twitter worth as much as Pfizer (who I sometimes think secretly runs the entire world)!"

The opposite stance is weirder to me. If you hate Musk and think he's an idiot, then watching Twitter fail should be a source of great joy and humor, instead of being mad at him about it. He will have lost $44bn on a stupid hobby project that he mismanaged to zero if that is the case which should please everyone except the 1% of the human population who actually liked Twitter.

[Foosters 17850]

30 minutes ago, HamsterHookah said:

 If you hate Musk and think he's an idiot, then watching Twitter fail should be a source of great joy and humor

what is it that you think we're doing here?

[Brisketexan 105095]

25 minutes ago, Foosters said:

what is it that you think we're doing here?

Actually, I'm kinda here to lament the destruction of a platform that is and can be used for some good purposes, and has been.  For example, a lot of govt entities have used it as a means to disseminate important emergency information during disasters and whatnot, to provide public updates of ongoing situations, etc.  Really and truly, local governments nationwide have Twitter communications as part of their citizen communication protocol.  

It's also a decent place for dissident voices of repressive regimes to get information out there.

I never viewed it at "TWITTER IS THE KEY TO SAVING HUMANITY!", and it sure as shit always had its dark side, too.  But as he destroys it, we'll surely lose the good it can do and has done.

[cactusflinthead 27598]

It was a good news aggregator. If you wanted that. If you wanted cats or sports or any number of niche interests it served that purpose. It gave you the chance to speak with other like minded individuals or polar opposites, positively or negatively. 

I miss the timeline function. The For You is ok, but it lacks the immediacy of previous versions. Instead of camping on one news feed you could have dozens hit all at once. Local on site, national, international all hitting post within seconds. That's gone. I might be willing to pay for getting the news, not bullshit news of Fox, the Daily Fail or the NY Post. Those fuckers get blocked. I'll hear their talking points because I can't avoid them, but I don't need their bullshit cluttering up my feed. 

It's still got some usefulness but it's not what it was. 

He thinks it's worth 20b? Yeah, sure. He also thinks we're going to shell out money for an obviously downgraded product. 

That ain't happening. I don't know where Cats of Yore is going to take her pictures but I don't think she's going to shell out money to post there. It's going to be a pain in the ass to bounce around the internet trying to keep up on election nights, but I'll do it. 

He still thinks we're the customers. That we are all going to shell out money to stay in his shit flinging playground. We shall come for his hilarious takes and wisdom.

He's a fucking idiot. And he's getting dumber.

[Schulz2.0 28951]

2 hours ago, NoName said:

here is the issue.

let's say he takes it behind a paywall. let's say that every single one of the 41.5 million mDAU in the United States pays for it at $84 / year. that comes out to $3.4 billion

globally twitter has ~237 million mDAU. if he can convert 20%, which is a truly incredible number in a time where youtube premium is at 3% for example, at $84 per member that comes out to almost 4 billion. let's round it up.

in 2022 Twitter's ad revenue was 4.46 billion.

so he has to convert somewhere around 20% of his current users to Twitter Blue.

as of January that conversion rate was estimated to be 0.2% of monthly active users, or about ~180,000 in the US and ~290,000 globally.

there is fucked, then there is whatever boat Twitter is in.

Are you saying Elon went full Tobias?

[NoName 16351]

7 minutes ago, Schulz2.0 said:

Are you saying Elon went full Tobias?

Twitter Blue Users:

[wildcat09 29349]

40 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:

Actually, I'm kinda here to lament the destruction of a platform that is and can be used for some good purposes, and has been.  For example, a lot of govt entities have used it as a means to disseminate important emergency information during disasters and whatnot, to provide public updates of ongoing situations, etc.  Really and truly, local governments nationwide have Twitter communications as part of their citizen communication protocol.  

It's also a decent place for dissident voices of repressive regimes to get information out there.

I never viewed it at "TWITTER IS THE KEY TO SAVING HUMANITY!", and it sure as shit always had its dark side, too.  But as he destroys it, we'll surely lose the good it can do and has done.

At its best, and entirely by accident, Twitter was able to serve a kind of intermediary function between the public and private sectors that I imagine a lot of people would have celebrated as an example of a great public/private partnership (the lack of legal accuracy of that description notwithstanding), had they ever really conceptualized it that way. Specifically for the kind of thing you're talking about, it really was a great example of a non-big government solution, and it's funny that its creators probably never even imagined it being used that way when they first built it. Entirely by accident, that really was a great example of the promise of what tech could give us, if we didn't tax and regulate them. 

But a bunch of rich loser tech nerds decided that people on twitter didn't worship them enough, so the richest, biggest fucking loser of them all had to destroy what might have been the best proof-of-concept for the entire goddamned tech sector. Sure Twitter had plenty of problems, but it was a hell of a lot more useful to more people than anything else Silicon Valley had come up with since the iPhone (yes Facebook is a bigger platform with more users, but fuck Facebook, nobody likes it or actually finds it useful). Good job, dipshits.

[atomheartbevo 89648]

2 hours ago, HamsterHookah said:

The opposite stance is weirder to me. If you hate Musk and think he's an idiot, then watching Twitter fail should be a source of great joy and humor, instead of being mad at him about it.

I will laugh at him losing $44 billion and am laughing at the fact that he's put his tremendous amount of insecurity on full display, and he can't seem to keep a lid on it.  His desire to be liked by anonymous idiots on the internet and the amount of effort he puts into being liked is insane, even putting aside the fact that he spent $44 billion.  The fact that some consider him to be "smart" and yet he falls for the dumbest fucking conspiracy theories is also quite amusing.

And it is funny that after around 5-6 months of his being completely in charge, and the fact that he supposedly has a degree in economics, he still doesn't understand how social media work, and that users are the product and advertisers are customers.  Honestly, it's fucking hilarious that a "smart" guy doesn't get something this simple (then again he doesn't understand "free speech" so simple concepts maybe hard for him).

But it is not funny that he's destroying a platform that, while it was certainly flawed, was also useful for many people in the world. I personally used it to connect with a lot of people, even drove traffic to some websites I manage or write for, and I also used it as a news aggregator.  I contributed to twitter and its revenue (advertising) with my activity and with my followers (which granted, is no where near a Shatner or King or whoever, but it certainly brought revenue to twitter).  

Now Elon wants me to pay for the privilege of retaining a "legitimacy" I had earned with being an authority in a few areas that met the previous blue check criteria, and that authority is now merely derived from a credit card, and not from any kind of actual work.  And he also wants me to pay for the chance at being in people's "For You" feed, when in the past I earned that place because, again, I posted authoritative content that people were interested in. 

Now, the only thing that matters is paying the $8 a month, which granted, is not much money(although if I were to pay $8 a month per account it would add up fast), but it's not the money, it's the fact that nothing else matters but that $8 a month.  Pay $8 a month, post stupid white supremacy or conspiracy bullshit, and you are golden.

[atomheartbevo 89648]

@HamsterHookah (I forget if this is your 9th or 10th version on Surly), here's what it boils down to:

You could have a doctorate in some arcane topic and be the absolute authority on that topic, have published extensively on it, be interviewed across many publications and shows for it, and your peers could consider you to be the face of that area of interest, and it's documented how well and thoroughly you researched the topic, with the proper sources, etc. and twitter in the past recognized your work and gave you the blue check and you would pop up in searches and "For You" for people interested in that topic.

However, if you don't pay Elon the $8 a month, then this can happen:   @dogpoop69 is a mentally ill high school dropout, drives for uber when his mom lets him borrow the car, and lives in his mom's basement.  @dogpoop69 can pay $8 a month and start posting bullshit conspiracy theories about the topic that you are the authority on, and he will replace you in things like the "For You" feeds, and when people search on your topic, he will rise to the top of searches rather than you.

That's very fucked up, especially since before Elon, you were most likely bringing in a lot more than $8 a month in revenue to twitter with advertising and affiliate stuff.

[Chuckie Finster 22694]

 

 

[Chopper 17230]

Much shit will hit the fan when the blue checkmark goes away for people and companies anyone may actually give a fuck about. This is just a small example.

 

[Chopper 17230]

WHO HAS TWITTER BLUE? Losers and bots.

 

Edited March 28, 2023 by Chopper

[Brisketexan 105095]

Elon: "Misinformation is BEST information!  That's how you know democracy is working.  FREE SPEECH ABSOLUTIST!!!!*"

 

 

*  "Wait.....some of what's being posted on Twitter is negative, but true, information about me?  BAN THEM!"

[Chooky 13307]

 

Ha! Sam Hyde memes are becoming mainstream information simply because posts are boosted due to someone's mom having a master card. This is the dumbest fucking genius the world has ever known. 

[atomheartbevo 89648]

1 hour ago, Brisketexan said:

*  "Wait.....some of what's being posted on Twitter is negative, but true, information about me?  BAN THEM!"

I fully expect him to ban this kind of stuff, because he'll claim it's being used to hurt the platform and therefore is open to being banned, just like information on his plane.

[Neonmoon 38129]

4 hours ago, wildcat09 said:

But a bunch of rich loser tech nerds decided that people on twitter didn't worship them enough, so the richest, biggest fucking loser of them all had to destroy what might have been the best proof-of-concept for the entire goddamned tech sector. Sure Twitter had plenty of problems, but it was a hell of a lot more useful to more people than anything else Silicon Valley had come up with since the iPhone (yes Facebook is a bigger platform with more users, but fuck Facebook, nobody likes it or actually finds it useful). Good job, dipshits.

Are Twitter and Facebook the best VC produced companies? God that’s sad 

[Schulz2.0 28951]

 

[Captain Ron 12873]

21 hours ago, HamsterHookah said:

Agree with everyone-- but just giving employees equity at the $20bn valuation seems like a really cool thing to do if you have any hope or faith that the company will continue to exist and not be sold off for parts or outright fail. I think I read there were 2k employees left-- I would think they are pleased and think of it as a pretty good lottery ticket.

On the other hand, Musk has not shown the most integrity and character with honoring equity and severance payouts for legacy Twitter employees. That might be more of a dynamic, like when a new alpha lion takes over another lions den, he kills all the cubs of the old guard and feeds only his offspring. Who knows with Musk.

As an employee I would see this as nothing more that a rotten turd painted orange hung out as a carrot.

First - given how Musk has handled so many of the departures, his word is worthless. So I would either want cash money or I would walk. I wouldn't trust him to honor any agreement at this point. So his stock grants would be worthless to me.

Second - this is a lotto ticket that isn’t going to happen. He can say 10x all he wants, you just need to look at the product and see that. It’s a waste of time. 

Finally - given the environment I would start looking elsewhere. Despite the public layoffs, companies are still hiring. I would move on and be done with that place.

Hopes and dreams only to so far and given the crater that has been left behind; I wouldn’t stick around.

[Chopper 17230]

Really all you need to know about the reputation of twitter and twitter blue is that if you buy it, twitter will let you hide your blue check mark so that you can avoid the stigma and stank of supporting toxic elron.

 

[Chopper 17230]

Techcrunch weighs in

Quote

 

Genuine users are rightly outraged at the idea of being blackmailed into paying Musk to prove who they are. These people — the signal amid the Twitter noise — are, after all, a core component of the value of the network. So of course they shouldn’t (and won’t) pay — and so their visibility on Twitter will decay. Which, in turn, will trigger more damage — as any remaining users wanting to find quality information will find it increasingly hard to come by… It’s death by irrelevance.

 

In a further twist, only paying users will get a vote in future Twitter policy polls — meaning Musk will guarantee populist decision-making is rigged in his fanboys’ favor. (But actually this just looks like pure trolling since he doesn’t stick to the outcome of poll results he doesn’t like anyway.)

 

The upshot is Musk is turning Twitter into the opposite of a meritocracy. He’s channeling pure chaos — just like the cartoon ‘chaotic evil’ villains love to. (And, well, as we’ve said before, Twitter is Musk’s calamity masterpiece.)

Nor does this gambit look like a moneyspinner for Musk, either. He’s clawed in just $11 million in subscription revenue since relaunching Twitter Blue three months ago, per Sensor Tower.

 

 

[Hook1997 5354]

https://flip.it/QtEDdl

Elon and others saying how the machines are closer then we think to killing us.  

[CooterBrown 18006]

https://flip.it/QtEDdl
Elon and others saying how the machines are closer then we think to killing us.  

To be fair, some teslas have killed people on their own.

[wildcat09 29349]

These guys have all read the same like 3 fictional books and are absolutely certain they're all perfectly accurate predictions of the future.

[HamsterHookah 112]

18 minutes ago, wildcat09 said:

These guys have all read the same like 3 fictional books and are absolutely certain they're all perfectly accurate predictions of the future.

Snow Crash, and which other two?

Did you ever read "I have no mouth, and I must scream"?

[atomheartbevo 89648]

2 hours ago, wildcat09 said:

These guys have all read the same like 3 fictional books and are absolutely certain they're all perfectly accurate predictions of the future.

2 hours ago, HamsterHookah said:

Snow Crash, and which other two?

Did you ever read "I have no mouth, and I must scream"?

Atlas Shrugged, Foundation, and Dune.

(and technically they didn't read any of them, but they tell everybody they did, and if it comes up, they pop over to Wikipedia and look up the summary).

[Bozo_Casanova 26444]

24 minutes ago, atomheartbevo said:

Atlas Shrugged, Foundation, and Dune.

(and technically they didn't read any of them, but they tell everybody they did, and if it comes up, they pop over to Wikipedia and look up the summary).

To be fair I don't blame anybody for not reading Atlas Shrugged. 

[hayden_horn 11362]

who the fuck is john galt anyways

[Foosters 17850]

[Rudiger 1162]

1 hour ago, Bozo_Casanova said:

To be fair I don't blame anybody for not reading Atlas Shrugged. 

It’s been a long time. It was about trains, right?

[Francisco 2.0 32389]

Following up to those of you who have lamented the loss of utility that Twitter has/had:

 

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/02/elon-musk-twitter-blue-natural-disaster-crisis-emergency-response/673209/?utm_source=twitter&utm_campaign=the-atlantic&utm_medium=social&utm_term=2023-03-29T17%3A15%3A20&utm_content=edit-promo

 

Quote

For years, Twitter was at its best when bad things happened. Before Elon Musk bought it last fall, before it was overrun with scammy ads, before it amplified fake personas, and before its engineers were told to get more eyeballs on the owner’s tweets, Twitter was useful in saving lives during natural disasters and man-made crises. Emergency-management officials have used the platform to relate timely information to the public—when to evacuate during Hurricane Ian, in 2022; when to hide from a gunman during the Michigan State University shootings earlier this month—while simultaneously allowing members of the public to transmit real-time data. The platform didn’t just provide a valuable communications service; it changed the way emergency management functions.

 

 

Quote

That’s why Musk-era Twitter alarms so many people in my field. The platform has been downgraded in multiple ways: Service is glitchier; efforts to contain misleading information are patchier; the person at the top seems largely dismissive of outside input. But now that the platform has embedded itself so deeply in the disaster-response world, it’s difficult to replace. The rapidly deteriorating situation raises questions about platforms’ obligation to society—questions that prickly tech execs generally don’t want to consider.

 

Quote

From the beginning, Twitter executives wanted users to rely on their service in moments of crisis. The company’s founder, Jack Dorsey, told 60 Minutes a decade ago that he got the idea for Twitter in part from listening to a police scanner when he was a child. In a subsequent interview, he suggested that he first understood the platform’s power after a tremor in the Bay Area: “I was in the office on a Saturday, and my phone buzzed, and it was a tweet, and it said simply, ‘Earthquake.’” By 2015, the U.S. Geological Survey was using Twitter to better monitor earthquakes and people’s reactions to those earthquakes in areas where the agency lacked sufficient sensors.

 

Spoiler

Perhaps it and other agencies were naive to depend so much on a private company’s willingness to continue providing a free communications service. But Twitter clearly relished its own importance in times of crisis, which presumably contributed to the platform’s overall popularity. The company provided guidance and best practices to emergency-response agencies. According to Twitter’s website, “crisis and emergency response” is one of its five stated areas of focus.

Successful relief efforts focus on deploying the people, processes, and technology necessary to deliver information and resources quickly. Twitter captured the disaster market, so to speak, because it was a technology with no equal. In a crisis, time is the most sacred commodity; in 1906, the writer Alfred Henry Lewis remarked that “there are only nine meals between mankind and anarchy.” That notion might sound familiar to residents of hurricane-prone areas: “The first 72 are on you” is a well-known slogan reminding citizens to prepare enough home provisions to last at least that many hours after a storm passes.

Unfortunately, the platform is becoming less useful as a way of monitoring chatter about developing events. Twitter announced on February 2 that it would end free access for researchers to its application programming interface—a mechanism that allows people outside the company to gather and analyze large quantities of data from the social-media platform. Relief workers have frequently used API access to determine where supplies and other resources are needed most.

Four days after the company’s API announcement, a massive earthquake hit Turkey and Syria, killing at least 46,000 people. In an enormous geographic area, API data can help narrow down who is saying what, who is stuck where, and where limited supplies should be delivered first. Amid complaints about what abandoning free API access would mean in that crisis, Twitter postponed the restriction. Still, its long-term intentions are uncertain, and some public-spirited deployments of the API by outside researchers—such as a ProPublica bot tracking politicians’ deleted tweets—appear to be breaking down.

Meanwhile, Musk’s policy of offering “verified” status to all paying customers is making information on the platform less dependable. Twitter’s blue checks originally signified that the company had made some effort to verify an account owner’s identity. Soon after Musk made them available to Twitter Blue subscribers, an enterprising jokester bought a handle impersonating the National Weather Service. That was witty but not very funny—not when so many people depend on the agency’s tweets about snow, ice storms, and hurricanes.

Tweets were a mechanism for people to seek help. They were a mechanism for public-safety agencies to provide information on what or what not to do. They were a mechanism for legacy-blue-check sources to amplify essential plans. They were a mechanism for crisis managers to, through the API, drive resources where they were needed. Relief-and-response entities came to rely on the company, believing that its mastery of speed was a public service Twitter itself valued.

Dorsey started a company that claimed to have a social mission. Musk’s Twitterverse is a chorus of lols and whatevers. He recently joked that he acquired the “world’s largest non-profit,” and his focus appears to be on cutting costs and making Twitter profitable. But in the process, he has disrupted an emergency-management system meant to be reliable during disruptions.

In contract law, the term reliance interest describes what arises when one party conditions its own choices on statements or promises made by the other party. Even without a formal contract, the former has a legitimate grievance if the latter breaks its promises. To some degree, that idea applies to crisis communications on Twitter: A public-safety apparatus came to rely on a platform that actively courted such reliance. The harm from Twitter’s recent changes may not be measurable in dollars, but it is nevertheless real harm.

 

[atomheartbevo 89648]

1 hour ago, Rudiger said:

It’s been a long time. It was about trains, right?

I think it was about Rand McNally's atlas business suffering in the internet age.

[Neonmoon 38129]

7 hours ago, wildcat09 said:

These guys have all read the same like 3 fictional books and are absolutely certain they're all perfectly accurate predictions of the future.

Musk has proven to be one of the dumbest fucking people, I’m actually optimistic AI might save us now 

[Pig Bellmont 8712]

1 hour ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

To some degree, that idea applies to crisis communications on Twitter: A public-safety apparatus came to rely on a platform that actively courted such reliance. The harm from Twitter’s recent changes may not be measurable in dollars, but it is nevertheless real harm.

Settle down there, chief. (directed at the author, not the surly poster). Yes there’s a valid point that some good things Twitter used to do are gone, but let’s also acknowledge the reality that Twitter was always simultaneously a hellscape.

[Rudiger 1162]

57 minutes ago, atomheartbevo said:

I think it was about Rand McNally's atlas business suffering in the internet age.

That’s right! And in the opening scene, you hear Rand whisper “Gault,” just to find out at the end it was the name of his favorite toy locomotive. 

[Prepuce of Doom 21065]

1 hour ago, Pig Bellmont said:

Settle down there, chief. (directed at the author, not the surly poster). Yes there’s a valid point that some good things Twitter used to do are gone, but let’s also acknowledge the reality that Twitter was always simultaneously a hellscape.

True, and that versatility allowed it to be many different things to many different people. 

Now it's just one thing for one guy. 

[dcbc 14471]

You guys are still on Twitter?

[Prepuce of Doom 21065]

Yeah. It's been much lamer recently, obviously. For me, it's starting to feel like it's circling the drain. I'll probably stick around to some extent until it collapses, gets overwhelmed by racists, or goes pay only.

I will not pay a nickle to Elon for anything if I can help it. 

[Serak The Preparer 3431]

10 hours ago, HamsterHookah said:

Snow Crash, and which other two?

Did you ever read "I have no mouth, and I must scream"?

I was such a dork that I learned about "I have no mouth and I must scream" from playing the computer game. Yeah maybe my mom should have screened my games a little better when I was 10. Read it years later and it made much more sense.

[Captain Ron 12873]

1 hour ago, Prepuce of Doom said:

Yeah. It's been much lamer recently, obviously. For me, it's starting to feel like it's circling the drain. I'll probably stick around to some extent until it collapses, gets overwhelmed by racists, or goes pay only.

I will not pay a nickle to Elon for anything if I can help it. 

I only pay for starlink out of need. We’re supposed to get fiber in April so I will unplug the dish quick.