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

[Blotto 23,418]

7 hours ago, atomheartbevo said:

TweetDeck isgoing to be blue subscribed/pay only by the end of the month.  
https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/3/23783092/twitter-tweetdeck-new-preview-force-legacy-apis

Musk and the new CEO kept staff and advertisers in the dark about the rate limiting

 

[Eastwood 4,394]

21 hours ago, HonkeyVape said:

Ben Thompson said:

"It does seem notable that Ford, GM, and Rivian all had to announce agreements with Tesla, not just adoption, and that various reports say that the adapters they will send to current owners are locked to their vehicle. That definitely suggests a licensing regime. Which, I would note, fits with Tesla’s patent pledge, which explicitly rules out directly competing designs or products, of which the NCAS adapter surely is one."

Ford and GM wouldn’t do this if they were confident that Tesla’s automobile division is no longer a threat to their business model. You don’t throw a disrupting competitor a lifeline by giving them cash flow opportunities. They know that Tesla’s time as a serious competing automobile manufacturer is limited, at least as far as economy consumer vehicles are concerned. 
 

If you want your gull winged door electric SUV $100k shitbox, you can keep your gull winged door electric SUV $100k shitbox. The serious automotive companies will make EVs that middle class families can afford. 

[Baboontyme 2,807]

Killing third party APIs almost had me out. Until I discovered tweetdeck. Price is right horn. Someone hurry up and invent something usable. 

[Samson's Wig 3,168]

On 6/21/2023 at 11:21 AM, Grade of D as in David said:

He's going to make a robot for fucking.

Trying to upgrade from king of the incels to incel God I guess 

You know, if someone came out with an affordable fuck robot, I bet we'd see a significant drop in mass shootings (and probably a significant drop in public sightings of aggies).  Maybe we should let Elon explore this one.

[hornian 5,201]

1 hour ago, Eastwood said:

If you want your gull winged door electric SUV $100k shitbox, you can keep your gull winged door electric SUV $100k shitbox. The serious automotive companies will make EVs that middle class families can afford. 

The Tesla Model 3 is one of the most affordable EVs out there. After the $7,500 tax credit (which is real money in your pocket when you file your tax return), a brand new Model 3 starts around $32,500 - and it's $40,000 without the tax credit. That's less expensive than the VW ID.4 or the Kia Niro or the Hyundai Ionic. It's so cheap these days that it's a full 20% less than the median new car price in the US (without the tax credit). If anything, they are producing so many of them and they are so cheap that they are losing any sort of cachet that they used to have (before Elon went full Space Karen), and the leagcy automakers are trying to compete in the "luxury EV" space more than the economy EV space (GM just killed the Bolt for example). 

 

 

[DefinitelyNotHollywoodColt 12,301]

1 hour ago, Samson's Wig said:

You know, if someone came out with an affordable fuck robot, I bet we'd see a significant drop in mass shootings (and probably a significant drop in public sightings of aggies).  Maybe we should let Elon explore this one.

Also less mass shootings. I have a wild idea to have government subsidized brothels. The world is a better place if everybody gets laid.

[atomheartbevo 89,362]

2 hours ago, Eastwood said:

Ford and GM wouldn’t do this if they were confident that Tesla’s automobile division is no longer a threat to their business model. You don’t throw a disrupting competitor a lifeline by giving them cash flow opportunities. They know that Tesla’s time as a serious competing automobile manufacturer is limited, at least as far as economy consumer vehicles are concerned. 

They also know how much they pay Tesla in CAFE/carbon credits, and how much of that is going away (it's been free money for Tesla) as they increase their lines.

[royiv 9,131]

50 minutes ago, hornian said:

The Tesla Model 3 is one of the most affordable EVs out there. After the $7,500 tax credit (which is real money in your pocket when you file your tax return), a brand new Model 3 starts around $32,500 - and it's $40,000 without the tax credit. That's less expensive than the VW ID.4 or the Kia Niro or the Hyundai Ionic. It's so cheap these days that it's a full 20% less than the median new car price in the US (without the tax credit). If anything, they are producing so many of them and they are so cheap that they are losing any sort of cachet that they used to have (before Elon went full Space Karen), and the leagcy automakers are trying to compete in the "luxury EV" space more than the economy EV space (GM just killed the Bolt for example). 

 

 

But you're leaving out that amazing $15k FSD option!!!

[atomheartbevo 89,362]

Instagram users only have to login Threads with their Instagram accounts. There are over 2 billion active Instagram accounts.  Even if only 10 percent try it out, that's a few hundred million people instantly using it.

https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-rate-limits-cut-costs-former-employee-elon-musk-2023-7

Quote

Rumman Chowdhury, an ex-Twitter employee who left the company in November, told BBC News it was unclear if AI companies' data scraping was behind the policy changes.

"Frankly, I think I'm in a majority of people who believe that it's due to his lack of payment of his bills," she told the news outlet, "and he's attempting to reduce his costs."

Quote

Twitter's former head of trust and safety, Yoel Roth, also expressed skepticism in a Saturday post to Twitter rival, Bluesky. Roth wrote: "Scraping was the open secret of Twitter data access. We knew about it. It was fine."

"It just doesn't pass the sniff test that scraping all of a sudden created such dramatic performance problems that Twitter had no choice but to put everything behind a login," he added, in reference to Musk's decision to block unregistered users from viewing tweets.

 

 

[atomheartbevo 89,362]

And we have an update.

https://business.twitter.com/en/blog/update-on-twitters-limited-usage.html

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.

 

[royiv 9,131]

6 minutes ago, atomheartbevo said:

And we have an update.

https://business.twitter.com/en/blog/update-on-twitters-limited-usage.html

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.

 

[trza-hawk 269]

Black Twitter has been mentioning the Spill app lately,

 

 

[Lurch 5,919]

Black Twitter has been mentioning the Spill app lately,
 
 

Common discussion on Mastadon is that Black Twitter refused to embrace it for some reason.

[Francisco 2.0 32,290]

4 hours ago, Baboontyme said:

Killing third party APIs almost had me out. Until I discovered tweetdeck. Price is right horn. Someone hurry up and invent something usable. 

 

Tweetdeck was the dark secret of using Twitter on a computer.  Could see multiple tweet threads and whatnot....and without ads.

Alas.

 

 

 

[cactusflinthead 27,593]

Elon Musk's decision to limit access to registered users, and to sharply rate-limit how many tweets they can read, "really broke Twitter this time," writes Charlie Warzel for The Atlantic.

First, Twitter set a policy requiring that web users log in to view tweets—immediately limiting the potential audience for any given post to people who have Twitter—and later, Musk announced limits to how many tweets users can consume in a day, purportedly to counter "extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation." Although these measures will supposedly be reversed, as others have been during Musk's tenure, they amount to a sledgehammering of a platform that's been quietly wasting away for months: Twitter is now literally unusable if you don't have an account, or if you do have an account and access it a lot. It is the clearest sign yet that Musk does not have his platform under control—that he cannot deliver a consistently functional experience for what was once one of the most vibrant and important social networks on the planet.

Here's the thing: everyone asking "doesn't Elon know you can't serve ads on views that aren't happening?" isn't realizing that he doesn't really care. The new reality that media folks can't quite adapt to is that Twitter is now Elon Musk's personal website. To even think of it as a modern equivalent of a Hearst newspaper is a media-brained search for meaning only fleetingly in play. The reason that all this is difficult to understand (and the reason we keep talking about Twitter at all) is because journalists are stuck there out of professional obligation and inertia. It used to be the social network of record and it takes a while for that to drain away. Gradually, then suddenly.

 

 

[atomheartbevo 89,362]

39 minutes ago, cactusflinthead said:

The reason that all this is difficult to understand (and the reason we keep talking about Twitter at all) is because journalists are stuck there out of professional obligation and inertia. It used to be the social network of record and it takes a while for that to drain away. Gradually, then suddenly.

And that last part could happen with 'Threads' since many of the news organizations have some kind of presence on Facebook and/or Instagram.  If Threads rolls out even just a little smoothly, with most of twitter's features, and all of the sudden there are hundreds of millions of users using it from day one, news organizations, influencers, advertisers, etc. will jump ship from twitter.

This week could decide if Twitter is going to remain relevant or not.

Edited July 4, 2023 by atomheartbevo

[Pods 7,522]

7 minutes ago, atomheartbevo said:

And that last part could happen with 'Threads' since many of the news organizations have some kind of presence on Facebook and/or Instagram.  If Threads rolls out even just a little smoothly, with most of twitter's features, and all of the sudden there are hundreds of millions of users using it from day one, news organizations, influencers, advertisers, etc. will jump ship from twitter.

This week could decide if Twitter is going to remain relevant or not.

Twitter is already dead. We're just watching to see how long it takes the corpse to rot at this point. 

[cactusflinthead 27,593]

9 minutes ago, atomheartbevo said:

news organizations

This is what separated Twitter from FB. It's in the way the feed worked. @Pancho hit on it the other day. In an immediate event it was like the old movies of a ticker tape of live feed. It was inaccurate in the same way any reporting is done. Early returns are not always the same as the final outcome. 

But, it was what was hitting. Right fucking then. FB went away from it and it was one of the first things that Elon changed about the feed. You have to force FB to show you the chronological order. Otherwise it is going to show you stuff from a week ago. It's nearly impossible to keep track of an emerging event. News orgs don't post on FB first. It was breaking on Twitter. It hit FB way after the fact. 

Then he let us have his curated feed just especially for you! Or whoever you subscribe to which was still kinda sorta in order of happening.

Unless Threads or whatever Zuck calls it has the immediacy of happening now it's worth nothing. It's becoming fractured, but until I can get the news somewhere else as it's happening I am probably going to stick around the hellscape of Twitterville.

[Francisco 2.0 32,290]

Idle thoughts while mowing the lawn this afternoon.

There's been a lot of talk about lack of moderation on Twitter.  But if Twitter eventually becomes a full paid on service to access, will moderation even be needed?  Point being; why the hell would Musk want to moderate a place where everyone who is there paid to be there?  I know media companies will use the DMCA on Twitter, but aside from that, does Musk even legally need to have moderation if it is a pay site?

 

 

 

 

 

[Blotto 23,418]

5 minutes ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

Idle thoughts while mowing the lawn this afternoon.

There's been a lot of talk about lack of moderation on Twitter.  But if Twitter eventually becomes a full paid on service to access, will moderation even be needed?  Point being; why the hell would Musk want to moderate a place where everyone who is there paid to be there?  I know media companies will use the DMCA on Twitter, but aside from that, does Musk even legally need to have moderation if it is a pay site?

 

I think you still have to moderate because enough vile shit could discourage people from paying. In other words, if 9 out of 10 posts were Shaggy-style scat posts, you've limited the pool of people who will pay to access to your service to a bunch scat freaks. That may or not be elmo's thing. 

[atomheartbevo 89,362]

4 minutes ago, Blotto said:

I think you still have to moderate because enough vile shit could discourage people from paying. In other words, if 9 out of 10 posts were Shaggy-style scat posts, you've limited the pool of people who will pay to access to your service to a bunch scat freaks. That may or not be elmo's thing. 

And if there's no moderation, and people are posting illegal shit, there's a point where shit will get dicey from a legal point of view, since his business and at least some servers are  here in the US.  And the crowd of people he's been attracting will push to see how far they can go.

But given that Elmo's view of the world is shaped by 4chan, he may not care until it's too late.

[Parliament 14,112]

45 minutes ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

Idle thoughts while mowing the lawn this afternoon.

There's been a lot of talk about lack of moderation on Twitter.  But if Twitter eventually becomes a full paid on service to access, will moderation even be needed?  Point being; why the hell would Musk want to moderate a place where everyone who is there paid to be there?  I know media companies will use the DMCA on Twitter, but aside from that, does Musk even legally need to have moderation if it is a pay site?

 

 

 

 

 

Next time you have an ideal like that...keep it to yourself.

[bolverk 29,360]

46 minutes ago, Parliament said:

Next time you have an ideal like that...keep it to yourself.

Know how I know you're from the Midwest?

[atomheartbevo 89,362]

Here’s my idle thought: Elon is EA, and Twitter is SimCity (2013). 

In 2013, SimCity fans wanted SimCity 5.  

EA was like “nah, I’m going to give you this other SimCity”

A few years later Paradox and Colossal Order was like “hey, SimCity fans, check out this Cities: Skylines thing”

SimCity fans were like “hell yeah, yes please!”

Is Facebook Paradox/Colossal Order and will Threads be Cities:Skylines?

[Goredho 17,302]

47 minutes ago, atomheartbevo said:

Here’s my idle thought: Elon is EA, and Twitter is SimCity (2013). 

In 2013, SimCity fans wanted SimCity 5.  

EA was like “nah, I’m going to give you this other SimCity”

A few years later Paradox and Colossal Order was like “hey, SimCity fans, check out this Cities: Skylines thing”

SimCity fans were like “hell yeah, yes please!”

Is Facebook Paradox/Colossal Order and will Threads be Cities:Skylines?

I wish this post were longer so I would have TL; DR.

[atomheartbevo 89,362]

5 minutes ago, Goredho said:

I wish this post were longer so I would have TL; DR.

Elon = Electronic Arts

Twitter = SimCity franchise

[Fudge Nuggets 19,118]

Shit. 

Edited July 5, 2023 by Fudge Nuggets

[Fudge Nuggets 19,118]

4 hours ago, atomheartbevo said:

Elon = Electronic Arts

Twitter = SimCity franchise

You = Dork

[Goredho 17,302]

6 hours ago, atomheartbevo said:

Elon = Electronic Arts

Twitter = SimCity franchise

I get the analogy, I’m just giving you shit for it🙂

[mdmost 42,775]

Threads is in the app store with a Thursday release date. Already have it ready to go when it loads tomorrow. If you have an Instagram account, you can transfer your username over to it. Can't wait to be done with this shitty app. 

[Parliament 14,112]

Is this gonna be as big as the great Shaggy Texas to Surly Horns migration of 2018?

[Schulz2.0 28,752]

I've seen a decent amount of journalists on Twitter tweet out that they're joining Blue Sky.

[NoName 16,271]

2 minutes ago, Schulz2.0 said:

I've seen a decent amount of journalists on Twitter tweet out that they're joining Blue Sky.

i would love to join and have been on the invite list for ages without getting in.

that's their issue.

[Brian Fantana 6,654]

8 minutes ago, NoName said:

i would love to join and have been on the invite list for ages without getting in.

that's their issue.

Their site would explode if they opened it up right now.

Trickling in is a decent strategy as long as it doesn't take too much longer.

[NoName 16,271]

2 minutes ago, Brian Fantana said:

Their site would explode if they opened it up right now.

Trickling in is a decent strategy as long as it doesn't take too much longer.

they opened their waitlist 10 months ago. the app has been out like 5 months.

they blew their opportunity being MONTHS ahead and Threads is now going to be out in ~72 hours.

it's wild they are still not out with all that has happened at Twitter in the last 60 days alone, much less in CY2023.

[Blotto 23,418]

6 minutes ago, NoName said:

they opened their waitlist 10 months ago. the app has been out like 5 months.

they blew their opportunity being MONTHS ahead and Threads is now going to be out in ~72 hours.

it's wild they are still not out with all that has happened at Twitter in the last 60 days alone, much less in CY2023.

yeah, they can rationalize it anyway they want, but not being able to take all comers at this time is a huge fail. They certainly haven't been acting with the urgency typical of a startup. 

[Neonmoon 38,127]

Yeah if Threads is anywhere close to stable, it will take huge market share. 

Mastadon is too weird and hard to use. 

Tribel and Post aren't good enough to keep people. 

 

[G650 13,989]

2 minutes ago, Blotto said:

yeah, they can rationalize it anyway they want, but not being able to take all comers at this time is a huge fail. They certainly haven't been acting with the urgency typical of a startup. 

100%

[MAUFRAIS 6,571]

Always kind of liked that weird cherry coke when I’d go over to somebody’s house who had hippie parents.

[mdmost 42,775]

1 minute ago, Neonmoon said:

Yeah if Threads is anywhere close to stable, it will take huge market share. 

Mastadon is too weird and hard to use. 

Tribel and Post aren't good enough to keep people. 

 

With the others you only have the motivation to have something unique for social media. For Threads, you have Zuckerberg wanting to destroy Elon. So he's going to make sure Threads is stable and something that can take down Twitter. Again, Zuck's a shitbag but I'll take what I can get over what Elon has done to Twitter. 

[NoName 16,271]

Elon Musk sends fired Twitter employees to arbitration, then he just doesn’t show up, new lawsuit claims

https://fortune.com/2023/07/03/twitter-elon-musk-fired-employees-arbitration-lawsuit-layoffs/

Spoiler

Twitter Inc. is refusing to engage in arbitration with ex-employees who were fired when Elon Musk took over the company after pushing them to use that process to resolve claims that they weren’t paid, didn’t get promised severance, or were discriminated against, according to a lawsuit.

The company now known as X Corp. has been accused in multiple suits of numerous labor and workplace violations, including its failure to pay thousands of workers laid off late last year after Musk’s acquisition. About 2,000 former Twitter employees have resorted to fighting their claims in arbitration as the company has demanded — but Twitter hasn’t shown up, according to a complaint filed Monday in San Francisco federal court. 

Shannon Liss-Riordan, a lawyer representing former Twitter employees, said she continues to file arbitrations and is fielding calls from current employees filing such claims who argue the company hasn’t paid last year’s bonuses. 

The social media platform won a ruling in January requiring workers who had signed arbitration agreements to resolve their grievances in closed-door hearings overseen by private judges instead of through a class-action lawsuit in open court. It’s the legal equivalent of hand-to-hand combat, usually against a better-armed and financed opponent. Studies have shown that a benefit for companies is that workers will often give up rather than pursue their fight in arbitration.

Realizing the expense required for Twitter to arbitrate the claims, as required by its employment agreements, the company is now refusing to do so, Liss-Riordan said. “Now that it has made its bed, it doesn’t want to lie in it,” she added. Liss-Riordan represents Twitter workers in several suits against the company.

Twitter declined to comment.

Musk fired about half of Twitter’s 7,500 workers in November, following his $44 billion purchase of the company. Layoffs continued into 2023, reportedly bringing the company’s headcount under 2,000.

The case is Fabien Ho Ching Ma v. Twitter, 23-cv-03301, US District Court, Northern District of California (San Francisco).

as part of blocking unregistered users, those morons at twitter also blocked Google from crawling and indexing Twitter content on Monday. guess that was a great move for them and had to absolutely decimate views for everything across the board but they fixed it in the last 24 hours - evidently Google was showing 50% fewer twitter links than they used to lol

 

 

[Neonmoon 38,127]

4 minutes ago, mdmost said:

With the others you only have the motivation to have something unique for social media. For Threads, you have Zuckerberg wanting to destroy Elon. So he's going to make sure Threads is stable and something that can take down Twitter. Again, Zuck's a shitbag but I'll take what I can get over what Elon has done to Twitter. 

Agree. I hate Zuck and Facebook, but I use Instagram for work and the app doesn't suck. Could easily parlay that into Threads. 

['stache 21,743]

I hear very little about Zuckerburg on a day-to-day basis so I don't really care too much about whether we like or hate him as a person. Elon on the other hand is out there being a prick at every level and fostering dangerous lies and misinformation. So I'll go with Zuck on this one, even though I hate the idea of one company owning potentially all three major social media services (FB, Insta, Threads). These monopolies are inevitable though and can't be fixed in todays political climate, so whatever, I guess. With Threads allowing you to use existing Instagram at the press of a button, most major companies, news outlets, and celebs are already on Insta, so it could ramp up immediately with a critical mass of users and content producers to make it a true competitor from day one. I'd be more than happy to see this be the end of Elons ownership of a major social media platform. 

Edited July 5, 2023 by 'stache

[NoName 16,271]

['stache 21,743]

So does that mean the Google check finally cleared?

[NoName 16,271]

1 minute ago, 'stache said:

So does that mean the Google check finally cleared?

naw, basically it sounds like before they were blocking the whole page behind a login screen. now they have an overlay but are loading the text/data behind it so it can still be crawled

[Homercles 10,205]

12 hours ago, Blotto said:

I think you still have to moderate because enough vile shit could discourage people from paying. In other words, if 9 out of 10 posts were Shaggy-style scat posts, you've limited the pool of people who will pay to access to your service to a bunch scat freaks. That may or not be elmo's thing. 

88 Bad Mofo has that market cornered 

[Captainant 27,310]

7 minutes ago, NoName said:

naw, basically it sounds like before they were blocking the whole page behind a login screen. now they have an overlay but are loading the text/data behind it so it can still be crawled

Can't wait for a browser extension to unfuck elmos fuckery then lol

[Blotto 23,418]

1 minute ago, Neonmoon said:

Agree. I hate Zuck and Facebook, but I use Instagram for work and the app doesn't suck. Could easily parlay that into Threads. 

If there's one tech titan you can trust to safeguard all of his site's user data and not ruthlessly exploit that information for profits, its Mark Elliot Zuckerberg. Hard to imagine any negative repercussions here. 

[Francisco 2.0 32,290]

https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/5/23784160/instagram-threads-twitter-competitor-web

 

Quote

nstagram’s new Threads app, a Twitter competitor, isn’t supposed to launch until July 6th, but the web interface went live for a few hours today for everyone to explore. It provided an early look at what to expect from the full Threads app that will launch on iOS tomorrow — and presumably Android, too.

Meta briefly made Threads available on the web before pulling profiles offline a few hours later. The Verge was able to access Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s first thread (is that what we call them?!) using the web app, and many other brands and creators including Netflix, Gary Vee, and Instagram.

 

 

 

Quote

The web interface is fairly basic right now for viewing threads, with options to like, comment, repost, and share — all prompting you to download the mobile app for the time being. If you’re in an unsupported country, like markets in the EU, then you’ll only be able to view threads right now. Much like Twitter, you can view an account’s main posts in one section and the full reply history in another.

The head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri, already has nearly 2,500 followers, and Zuckerberg has less than 2,000, so it’s safe to say that early Threads access has only been provided to a few thousand testers so far. Alessandro Paluzzi has discovered some of the brands and creators that got early access.

 

 

Quote

Fediverse integration won’t be available immediately at the launch of Threads, but it’s clear Instagram is looking to add this soon. Profiles include an Instagram username and link, with a threads.net label that includes the following description:

Soon, you’ll be able to follow and interact with people on other fediverse platforms, like Mastodon. They can also find people on Threads using full usernames, like @zuck@threads.net.

Instagram has been teasing the launch of Threads all week long with App Store and Google Play Store listings revealing the launch date and the main threads.net homepage counting down to the launch of the service. Threads is launching during a particularly chaotic period for Twitter, after unregistered users were blocked from viewing tweets last week, temporary rate limits caused issues, and major changes to TweetDeck rolled out after it broke completely.

 

 

Edited July 5, 2023 by Francisco 2.0