|
Social media has pretty much become the backbone of media and communications in the modern era. Even here on SA, a huge percentage of posts are just tweet embeds or discussing stuff we saw on Twitter. Social media's got a lot of impact on discourse, and there's a lot of discussion and theorizing about how it might have impacted the current worldwide trends. We already know Facebook's contributed to at least one genocide. And it's interesting from a business perspective too! Facebook's ad business has had its knees broken by Apple cutting out their ad identifiers, and Zuck has pivoted even harder into disappointing VR worlds with lackluster results: https://twitter.com/MattNavarra/status/1588285145299095552 And of course, we get around to the immediate reason for creating this thread: a bunch of D&D has been abuzz over Twitter's new owner, Elon Musk! It's been a long journey to get here. First, he said he wanted to be on the board. Then he decided he wanted to buy the company instead, offering a significant premium over the market price and pushing a reluctant Twitter to give him a contract to sign ASAP. Then he decided he didn't want to buy Twitter after all, and got dragged to court, where he fought the deal for months before backing down after being thoroughly embarrassed and humiliated in discovery. Just over a week ago, the Twitter deal went through, and new owner Elon Musk walked through the doors of Twitter as its owner for the first time. And what a week it's been! He fired most of the top execs, claiming that it was for-cause firings in order to try to avoid paying out their golden parachutes. He told Twitter employees to print out all the code they wrote in the last sixty days, and brought in Tesla engineers to review the code. He locked down the content moderation tools, revoking access from all but 15 people worldwide (by comparison, D&D has 14 mods). He's converted the blue check to a status symbol, removing the verification requirements and instead making it available to anyone for $8 a month, and he demanded that Twitter employees work weekends and nights to ship it within a week. He laid off half the company, gutting entire teams. He's ranting about how he's going to prioritize free speech over woke political correctness. He's getting into flamewars with AOC. It's been one thing after another. And advertisers hate it! For some reason, they're jumping ship in droves, pausing or pulling their ad campaigns and wrecking Twitter's cashflow.  What does the future of Twitter look like in the hands of a notoriously erratic billionaire who publicly blames his daughter's unwillingness to associate with him on neo-Marxist university teachers teaching her to love communism and hate the rich and who has vowed to fix Twitter's "far-left bias"? There's gonna be plenty to discuss on this wild ride. Be careful of rumors and poorly-sourced info, by the way. There's a lot of pranksters and jokers dishing out fake stuff about the Elon buyout. One reporter sitting outside of Twitter's HQ last Friday managed to get some comments from two people calling themselves Rahul Ligma and Daniel Johnson, claiming to be laid-off Twitter engineers. Main Paineframe fucked around with this message at 21:07 on Nov 4, 2022 |
#
?
Nov 4, 2022 20:56
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 25, 2024 09:25 |
|
|
The Twitter layoffs hit last night and this morning, and the full scope of them is becoming apparent. Entire teams have been cut wholesale, which is starting to give us a look at what Musk doesn't consider important. https://twitter.com/ShannonRSingh/status/1588591603622772736 https://twitter.com/rdassaly/status/1588526469059223552 https://twitter.com/gerardkcohen/status/1588584479072714752 So right off the bat, human rights, content curation/contextualization, and accessibility have all been completely jettisoned. Off to a good start! Rumors are flying about other teams, too - someone in YOSPOS was saying that Twitter Asia and Twitter India were decimated, and that Twitter's PR team was almost completely laid off. The full magnitude of the cuts will probably take a bit to become clear, but it's pretty severe.
|
|
#
?
Nov 4, 2022 21:03
|
|
|
Main Paineframe posted:Rumors are flying about other teams, too - someone in YOSPOS was saying that Twitter Asia and Twitter India were decimated, and that Twitter's PR team was almost completely laid off. The full magnitude of the cuts will probably take a bit to become clear, but it's pretty severe. Things Twitter doesn't really need right now: a PR team, apparently? I've seen impetuous man-baby management, and I've seen brutal strip-out-the-wiring hedge fund management, but this looks like it's managing to be both so far and it's incredible.
|
|
#
?
Nov 4, 2022 21:08
|
|
|
Quorum posted:Things Twitter doesn't really need right now: a PR team, apparently? Musk may also be literally stripping the wires out of the walls- he's reportedly looking into slashing the infrastructure budget too. I remember half-jokingly speculating early in this process that he would destroy twitter by indirectly causing frequent and extended downtime due to staffing disruption. It never occurred to me he would do it intentionally.
|
|
#
?
Nov 4, 2022 21:11
|
|
|
I'm along for the ride to watch the Twitter death spiral.
|
|
#
?
Nov 4, 2022 21:22
|
|
|
So, Elon Musk is going to make a lot of bad choices that gently caress up a lot of people's lives and suffer no consequences for his actions, right? Is that where this is all headed?
|
|
#
?
Nov 4, 2022 21:26
|
|
|
Space Cadet Omoly posted:So, Elon Musk is going to make a lot of bad choices that gently caress up a lot of people's lives and suffer no consequences for his actions, right? Is that where this is all headed? Election is next week! All the fact check-y type of people at twitter got fired today!
|
|
#
?
Nov 4, 2022 21:28
|
|
|
Here is a tracker of tech start up layoffs: https://layoffs.fyi/ 743 startups w/ layoffs ∙ 99251 employees laid off in 2022
|
|
#
?
Nov 4, 2022 21:28
|
|
|
Space Cadet Omoly posted:So, Elon Musk is going to make a lot of bad choices that gently caress up a lot of people's lives and suffer no consequences for his actions, right? Is that where this is all headed? Most likely. But he committed the only crime that might actually result in punishment, losing rich people's money, so who knows. He's also doing significant damage to the one thing he values more than money, his reputation as a big brain tech genius idea guy. His personal wealth is also tied up in a stock most people agree is very overvalued and riding for a fall (Tesla), so let's see what happens. The idea that the richest man in the world might post his way to not being the richest man in the world is extremely funny even if nothing fundamentally changes haveblue fucked around with this message at 21:41 on Nov 4, 2022 |
|
#
?
Nov 4, 2022 21:34
|
|
|
davecrazy posted:I'm along for the ride to watch the Twitter death spiral. I'm here to see what happens when the entire site is nothing but infinite Adarn Schefter tweets. Nothing but blue checkmarked @Metaliica accounts pushing crypto and white nationalism
|
|
#
?
Nov 4, 2022 21:37
|
|
|
Space Cadet Omoly posted:So, Elon Musk is going to make a lot of bad choices that gently caress up a lot of people's lives and suffer no consequences for his actions, right? Is that where this is all headed? This entire thing has been Elon scoring own goal after own goal on himself, and has not been without consequences. It's not great for Elon when it looks like he forced himself into a situation where he overpaid for an already troubled company, and his immediate, overdramatic mismanagement is causing the ad revenue to freeze up while he does a very public Trump impersonation. Twitter may implode within a matter of weeks at this point.
|
|
#
?
Nov 4, 2022 21:42
|
|
|
Sodomy Hussein posted:This entire thing has been Elon scoring own goal after own goal on himself, and has not been without consequences. It's not great for Elon when it looks like he forced himself into a situation where he overpaid for an already troubled company, and his immediate, overdramatic mismanagement is causing the ad revenue to freeze up while he does a very public Trump impersonation. Twitter may implode within a matter of weeks at this point. I think people are underestimating the degree to which this contagion could spread. Remember: Elon is the world's richest person because he has a massive stake in Tesla. Tesla stock has taken a beating, but it trades at about 60 times earnings today. For reference, the S&P trades about 20. That basically means people are paying three times as much for each dollar of current earnings from Tesla as they pay on average. That means, in essence, Tesla's stock price currently has a completely massive "Elon Musk" premium: fanboys believe that tesla is going to earn scads more money in the future because of the brilliance of Elon Musk. Tesla also really sells its cars (and earns its current earnings) based on a similar effect - a lot of people buying it because Autopilot is going to "work" someday. Elon is very very good at creating a self-image of himself as a techno visionary who will do great things in the future even if that future keeps being a little farther in the future than predicted, every time. Elon is currently taking a sledgehammer to that; and the more he does that, the more Tesla's share price will crumble and the less people are going to trust the cars in the first place enough to buy them.
|
|
#
?
Nov 4, 2022 21:52
|
|
|
Sodomy Hussein posted:This entire thing has been Elon scoring own goal after own goal on himself, and has not been without consequences. It's not great for Elon when it looks like he forced himself into a situation where he overpaid for an already troubled company, and his immediate, overdramatic mismanagement is causing the ad revenue to freeze up while he does a very public Trump impersonation. Twitter may implode within a matter of weeks at this point. Yeah, that's kind of my point. Twitter dies, Musk remains rich and moves on to gently caress up something else, and the people who suffer are independent artists who rely on the platform for commission work. I'm just so tried of incompetent rich people getting to ruin things again and again and again.
|
|
#
?
Nov 4, 2022 21:56
|
|
|
Quorum posted:Things Twitter doesn't really need right now: a PR team, apparently? Honestly, I'm surprised anyone's left at all. Tesla dissolved their entire PR department two years ago, and has been trucking along ever since with Elon as their sole public voice. Space Cadet Omoly posted:So, Elon Musk is going to make a lot of bad choices that gently caress up a lot of people's lives and suffer no consequences for his actions, right? Is that where this is all headed? The entire Machine Ethics, Transparency, and Accountability Team is the latest confirmed casualty of the layoffs. Who needs ethics and accountability? https://twitter.com/JoanDeitchman/status/1588430085035474944 Politico is reporting that half of Twitter's public policy team was cut, too. Really, the amazing part is that nobody wins here, except Twitter's shareholders (who all got bought out at far more than the stock was worth). Musk hates this, Twitter's execs hate this, Twitter's workforce hates this, the banks that loaned Musk the money hate this, advertisers hate this, much of Twitter userbase hates this, and hell, even the far right hates it (because Musk isn't going full Gab yet). But putting that aside, he's driving the company into the ground far faster than even the naysayers expected. Laying off literally half the company literally a week after buying it is guaranteed to be a big disruption to the basic task of keeping the site running, especially when he's also demanding major cuts to infrastructure costs. And sending the advertisers fleeing en masse this quickly isn't easy.
|
|
#
?
Nov 4, 2022 22:02
|
|
|
I'll admit that I was convinced we'd go back to the heady days of constant Trump tweets driving journos mad and sending out breaking news alerts every hour or so. This is so, so much better.
|
|
#
?
Nov 4, 2022 22:06
|
|
|
Space Cadet Omoly posted:Yeah, that's kind of my point. Twitter dies, Musk remains rich and moves on to gently caress up something else, and the people who suffer are independent artists who rely on the platform for commission work. There will be a rocky period as people re-assess where to move their business, and that pain is real and worth accounting for, but I think the world can ultimately do without Twitter.
|
|
#
?
Nov 4, 2022 22:07
|
|
|
evilweasel posted:I think people are underestimating the degree to which this contagion could spread. Remember: Elon is the world's richest person because he has a massive stake in Tesla. Tesla stock has taken a beating, but it trades at about 60 times earnings today. For reference, the S&P trades about 20. Yeah, and the broader market is arguably rich, trading at 20x, particularly given that Fed is tightening monetary policy, fiscal spending from the government is more or less out of the question, and the economy is overall slowing. Moreover, other car companies trade at like 6-8x trailing earnings and have multiples that expand cyclically during periods of economic expansion and contract in downturns. I don't know that Tesla is necessarily the catalyst that brings everything down, but this is something of a precarious situation.
|
|
#
?
Nov 4, 2022 22:09
|
|
|
What I'm interested in are the larger structural / economic changes that might be contributing to this. I don't pay much attention to Musk but I wonder how much of this was initially him months ago trying to come up with a new way to kick the can of his own unsustainable businesses down the road by buying Twitter and turning it into an "everything app" that can summon your robo-Tesla -- not feasible but useful to generate enough PR to keep investment flowing as internal pressures at Tesla mounted and the free-money spigot started to get turned off. Then Twitter's shareholders were looking to cash out at the same time.
|
|
#
?
Nov 5, 2022 01:36
|
|
|
I'm absolutely fascinated in how a rapidly collapsing social media site will balkanize content. This seemingly isn't like Myspace which just slowly withered away due to millennial preference. This is sheer imploding capitalism. Could we see a larger number of registrations in the coming weeks? 
|
|
#
?
Nov 5, 2022 01:58
|
|
|
Are their any 3rd parties have any analysis of Twitter user trends the past week? Are accounts hemorrhaging followed as people quit the platform or has that not registered yet?
|
|
#
?
Nov 5, 2022 02:37
|
|
|
davecrazy posted:Are their any 3rd parties have any analysis of Twitter user trends the past week? Mastodon registration has blown up, but only on the scale of tens of thousands more. The content moderation team/election misinformation teams were just slaughtered in roughly the last 24 hours, so we don't yet know how hosed it's going to get. Name Change fucked around with this message at 02:53 on Nov 5, 2022 |
|
#
?
Nov 5, 2022 02:50
|
|
|
I don't think the migration will really get going until Twitter takes a big visible hit to its function and accessibility, but that kind if event seems inevitable at this point.
|
|
#
?
Nov 5, 2022 04:09
|
|
|
I don't know a whole lot about how Twitter advertising works. Is this take accurate? (It's a thread) https://twitter.com/GoAngelo/status/1588696157794242560
|
|
#
?
Nov 5, 2022 18:14
|
|
|
Since it's about to become even more acutely relevant, here's one of the key recommendations from my OP material in the Media Analysis and Criticism thread:quote:Oh my god, log off of Twitter Even before Musk's purchase, twitter's very close to the worst case scenario for accurately communicating about or discussing things. It's practically optimized to strip information of context and drive people down alienating, radicalizing, ingroup-outgroup oriented approaches to information. I'm going to work up a post on social network analysis methods for that thread and I'll crosspost it here- I've been putting it off because it's a difficult subject to explain concisely without a bunch of example images.
|
|
#
?
Nov 5, 2022 18:33
|
|
|
Prism posted:I don't know a whole lot about how Twitter advertising works. Is this take accurate? (It's a thread) https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1588676939463946241
|
|
#
?
Nov 5, 2022 19:17
|
|
|
https://twitter.com/ContextFall/status/1588904729903439872?t=4FquoDtQZPOPw8J7WGj7lQ&s=19
|
|
#
?
Nov 5, 2022 19:41
|
|
|
Is twitter not archived somewhere? Individual accounts have always been able to delete their own tweets.
|
|
#
?
Nov 5, 2022 19:45
|
|
|
Archiving every tweet that gets made at the moment it gets made is a major project. For one thing, you need a special arrangement with twitter to receive that data, you can’t just make an account that follows every other account. For another, it takes a good deal of computer to properly handle that kind of scale. The Library of Congress used to do it but I think they stopped a while ago.
haveblue fucked around with this message at 21:49 on Nov 5, 2022 |
|
#
?
Nov 5, 2022 20:00
|
|
|
BrutalistMcDonalds posted:What I'm interested in are the larger structural / economic changes that might be contributing to this. I don't pay much attention to Musk but I wonder how much of this was initially him months ago trying to come up with a new way to kick the can of his own unsustainable businesses down the road by buying Twitter and turning it into an "everything app" that can summon your robo-Tesla -- not feasible but useful to generate enough PR to keep investment flowing as internal pressures at Tesla mounted and the free-money spigot started to get turned off. Then Twitter's shareholders were looking to cash out at the same time. You overestimate the amount of planning. Anything of that nature was post-hoc rationalization by Musk. He was caremad about his gf leaving him after folks told him not to do slurs, because he's a horrible misogynistic breeding fetish racist redditor with a emerald fortune, and everything that has come is the direct result of that.
|
|
#
?
Nov 5, 2022 20:11
|
|
|
Digamma-F-Wau posted:https://twitter.com/ContextFall/status/1588904729903439872?t=4FquoDtQZPOPw8J7WGj7lQ&s=19 Journos and the masses of commentariat will be the last to abandon the platform, though they'll be complaining all the way to the bitter end. That Kendzior tweet is a good example, completely deranged inflation of the importance of social media as though it's some holy sword in the hands of a paladin and not just another propaganda and consensus manufacturing outlet wholly owned and operated by the same sort of people who run Fox News, like what it replaced and will replace it. No timeline of corruption no matter how meticulously and lovingly crafted is a threat to anybody. It's stuff for textbooks by people who will not be writing them. If the choice is to archive all of it or archive none of it the latter is the better choice by far. Save dril and the world bollard association I guess.
|
|
#
?
Nov 6, 2022 00:16
|
|
|
Epic High Five posted:Journos and the masses of commentariat will be the last to abandon the platform, though they'll be complaining all the way to the bitter end. That Kendzior tweet is a good example, completely deranged inflation of the importance of social media as though it's some holy sword in the hands of a paladin and not just another propaganda and consensus manufacturing outlet wholly owned and operated by the same sort of people who run Fox News, like what it replaced and will replace it. No timeline of corruption no matter how meticulously and lovingly crafted is a threat to anybody. It's stuff for textbooks by people who will not be writing them. I agree about the paladins part, but is the textbook thing a reference to climate change / a fascist dark age or something? Because it is possible to study history using biased sources, so long as they're recognized as such.
|
|
#
?
Nov 6, 2022 00:57
|
|
|
Tarezax posted:I don't think the migration will really get going until Twitter takes a big visible hit to its function and accessibility, but that kind if event seems inevitable at this point. I wouldn't bet on Mastodon, it's too atomized. "Decentralized social network" is an oxymoron and the whole thing seems like it was created by the usual FOSS idiot crowd that thinks regular users are ever going to accept any kind of usability hit for the sake of FOSS ideals. OneEightHundred fucked around with this message at 01:04 on Nov 6, 2022 |
|
#
?
Nov 6, 2022 01:00
|
|
|
Rappaport posted:I agree about the paladins part, but is the textbook thing a reference to climate change / a fascist dark age or something? Because it is possible to study history using biased sources, so long as they're recognized as such. No, just half personal griping that just making note of these things isn't some heroic act because we're pretty firmly in the "oh yeah, what are you gonna do about it?" stage of rightward shifts, and that if you don't win you don't get the write the textbooks. Even in the context you say I don't think an archive of Twitter which is like 99.99% pure garbage is going to have anything worth saving that isn't documented elsewhere. If it's remembered as something on that scale at all, it'll probably be like we look back on leaded gasoline. OneEightHundred posted:I wouldn't bet on Mastodon yet, it's too atomized. It's atomized by design isn't it? I definitely get the appeal but you can't really scale something like that up to replace Twitter unless you're doing a wink-wink nudge-nudge thing where you just run everything through a single portal somehow but just say it's not centralized
|
|
#
?
Nov 6, 2022 01:02
|
|
|
Epic High Five posted:No, just half personal griping that just making note of these things isn't some heroic act because we're pretty firmly in the "oh yeah, what are you gonna do about it?" stage of rightward shifts, and that if you don't win you don't get the write the textbooks. Even in the context you say I don't think an archive of Twitter which is like 99.99% pure garbage is going to have anything worth saving that isn't documented elsewhere. If it's remembered as something on that scale at all, it'll probably be like we look back on leaded gasoline. Well yeah, Twitter definitely has a problem of volume and I don't exactly pity the fools who have to trawl through whatever's left looking for primary or secondary sources. But on the other hand, I was just reading a history study where the author said a certain (paper) primary source had been lost to the ravages of time and they had had to resort to basically hearsay for that one paragraph, so  Twitter as an influencer today right now is definitely a toxic cesspool, for quite a few reasons.
|
|
#
?
Nov 6, 2022 01:06
|
|
|
Rappaport posted:Well yeah, Twitter definitely has a problem of volume and I don't exactly pity the fools who have to trawl through whatever's left looking for primary or secondary sources. But on the other hand, I was just reading a history study where the author said a certain (paper) primary source had been lost to the ravages of time and they had had to resort to basically hearsay for that one paragraph, so Yeah I'm not prepared to write it off as certainly useless for historian marginalia, and maybe our AI overlords take over and they can ignore the garbage with ease, or it's a social science studying the garbage itself. Now that I think about it, it may be an unmatched resource for a few fields. The heroic talk though always reminds me of Qanon people who would talk about how they're saving the world from demonic librarians by posting.
|
|
#
?
Nov 6, 2022 01:11
|
|
|
Epic High Five posted:It's atomized by design isn't it? I definitely get the appeal but you can't really scale something like that up to replace Twitter unless you're doing a wink-wink nudge-nudge thing where you just run everything through a single portal somehow but just say it's not centralized Uh, no, that's actually really bad. And the "original server" which is basically going to be the de-facto default if this takes off is currently getting crushed by traffic and had to disable account sign-up.
|
|
#
?
Nov 6, 2022 01:13
|
|
|
OneEightHundred posted:"What if it was like Discord or Reddit except instead of having one account on every server/subreddit you had to sign up for every single one and people can take your handle on servers you haven't signed up on?" Oh I didn't mean to imply it would be good, just that that's how it'd probably happen if it were Mastodon. The real answer is probably something way more boring like TikTok takes most but Twitter keeps limping along in some form for years.
|
|
#
?
Nov 6, 2022 01:15
|
|
|
Twitter, and to a degree Facebook have a level of utility that I think will protect them for a bit. If my power goes out for example, I will check the town or the electric company's twitter. If there was a good play in the baseball game I missed, I check the team's twitter. It's an easy way to scoop up information. I think twitter also had an acceptance by traditional media outlets that was helpful, and would take some time to break.
|
|
#
?
Nov 6, 2022 03:38
|
|
|
Maybe from a demand standpoint, but twitter still needs to actually *work* for that
|
|
#
?
Nov 6, 2022 03:44
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 25, 2024 09:25 |
|
|
tbh deleting old in active accounts is fine imo, though sitting on usernames and stuff is a weird internet thing that shouldnt be a thing??
|
|
#
?
Nov 6, 2022 05:44
|
|