So "X" - nothing to see here. Elon's in control - Part XXX

blackwave

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120409388#Comment_120409388

I think a big part of the issue here is that musk thinks everyone loves Twitter as much as him and will pay money for it. However, its a social media company and people can switch to other platforms easily enough or just choose not to log in any longer. Also telling is that he is admitting that the bots are a problem... Yet he can solve the issue for paid subscribers but not the plebs.

Penn

A bigger issue which is going to come from this is only subscribers being able to vote on polls, which will no doubt lead to enormously skewed polls and results based on only the views of people dumb enough to pay to use Twitter.

Musk already ran polls asking if he should step down as CEO of Twitter and the result was a resounding yes because everyone could vote on it. Now he'll be able to just use polls to have his supporters validate his own opinions. Which let's face it, is pretty much what he wanted to begin with anyway.

archermoo

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120409488#Comment_120409488

I think more to the point he is trying to push everyone that uses Twitter to be a paid subscriber. I expect that at some point in the not too distant future he is going to try and phase out free accounts entirely. Probably touting it as the only way to deal with the bot problem.

Penn

The 'For You' tab will essentially become an ad timeline, where people are literally paying to have you see their tweets, even if it's not a product they're advertising but just their own opinions etc.

If he gets rid of the 'Following' tab, where you see tweets and retweets from the accounts you follow in the order they were posted in, that's me gone. However big a problem he thinks 'bots' may have been, for the vast majority of users they don't warrant the destruction of the site and paywalls to make it in any way functional. Nor will he ever make his money back that way.

silliussoddius

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120409488#Comment_120409488

Part of the issue is probably he thinks people love him on Twitter. Hopefully we get a twoofer here, the digital latrine that is Twitter is no more and Musk is exposed as a vapor ware huckster.

joseywhales

I got an email from Twitter telling me my account is locked for security reasons, haven't used it in about five years. No I'm trying to figure out whether to just ignore or log in change password, just to delete it. I suspect it's an invented security issue to see if my dormant account(and all the others) has any life left in it.

francois

Some info on the "Gab tab"

https://twitter.com/MattBinder/status/1640783422435065857?t=tBaH0Xyr9fa9ql1lBBEzSQ&s=19

Grayson

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120409488#Comment_120409488

The big problem is that Musk thinks people want to be seen. So they'll pay to be on the for you tab. Musk goes on twitter because he loves the attention. So he thinks others are like that. I have no incentive to pay. I don't want to appear on the for you tab. I don't care at all where my tweets appear. But I do care about what's shown to me.

If I refresh my feed now, it automatically switches to the for you tab. And when I go to the for you tab, it's filled with paid for blue ticks now. There's maga heads I've never heard of spewing random crap. If it was factual stuff that I would learn from, that's one thing, but it's just random people shouting about stuff.

Penn

It really is one of the most ill-conceived series of announcements.

Only people who pay for Twitter Blue can have checkmark, thereby greatly affecting actual verification which can lead to false info, impersonation, spam etc.

People who pay for Twitter Blue will have their posts show up in everyone's For You tab, but accounts you follow will also show up in the For You tab, meaning the main difference between the For You and Following tabs is that the For You tab has tweets from Twitter Blue users (so why use the For You tab at all then?).

People who pay for Twitter Blue can hide their checkmark to remove any negative connotations or reveal that they pay for Twitter Blue, though it'll become obvious since they show up in For You tabs of people who don't follow them.

And only Twitter Blue users can vote on polls, making the entire polls system redundant.

Absolute genius.

pjohnson

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120414160#Comment_120414160

He'll probably get rid of the following tab soon.

Quantum Erasure

hmm..

hmmm

pixelburp

Another victory for big brain Musk. Lol. He should have talked to me: I'd have given him free business advice that people won't necessarily, immediately pay for stuff they had been getting for free.

Though watch the apologists simply wave it away with a something something liberal woke newspapers.

Harika

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120409453#Comment_120409453

Financial times had an article where they compared twitter with snap and valued it comparatively at 12 billions

Grayson

Here's the weird thing, I'm at the point where I'd pay to not see people with a blue tick :)

My feed is becoming so full of people who have paid to be there that I would actually pay not to have to see them.

Penn

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120422090#Comment_120422090

That's why they're going to give the Twitter Blue subscribers the option to hide their blue tick.

Grayson

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120422095#Comment_120422095

That's just for embarrassment. :)

They'll still appear in the for you timeline won't they? And the for you timeline will still be useless whether you pay or not.

AndrewJRenko

No surprise there

https://twitter.com/ccdhate/status/1641878289995145217?s=46&t=3l1OhjvjsuAh4w9RMjlH8g

pixelburp

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120425150#Comment_120425150

Something something blue hair? As often, those who shout most about "freedom of speech" essentially bemoan the inability to be prejudicial díckheads without fear of consequence. Not always and everyone, obviously, but the narrative has been coopted by the performative díckhead.

Maybe Musk truly believes in total freedom of speech as an ideal, but then he's simply a patsy - and it's easy being a rich straight man to trumpet freedom of speech. If there are no atheists in foxholes, I doubt there are many gay free-speech absolutists on Twitter.

AndrewJRenko

And he’s taking money out of the pockets of charities

https://twitter.com/zoeschiffer/status/1641875618039238656?s=46&t=3l1OhjvjsuAh4w9RMjlH8g

silliussoddius

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120425246#Comment_120425246

He banned Alex Jones, so he has some limits.

AndrewJRenko

Cringe

https://twitter.com/esjesjesj/status/1641961377303494657?s=46&t=3l1OhjvjsuAh4w9RMjlH8g

AndrewJRenko

I won’t have a bad word said about the blue tick scheme

francois

Thread

https://twitter.com/NathanCHubbard/status/1641857750639443968?t=vCwukAjPBQyyaynEjsgcvQ&s=19

pixelburp

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120429287#Comment_120429287

Of the many reasons I hate twitter, it's this thing of having multiple paragraphs posted as 20 or so tweets. That constant attempt to use the platform in a way it wasn't designed for.

Interesting perspective though, especially the note there were times Twitter sought to pay high profile people to join Twitter. It'd be hilarious if that were Trump, after all that histrionic chatter about Liberal Twitter. This new policy is ostensible madness and is a huge gamble in changing the value proposition of Twitter - irrevocably, potentially

Bass Reeves

One of the real interesting financial thinking on social media is the word MONETISING in other words trying to extract money from users.

In a digital age where media platforms struggle to get consumers to pay for content, Musk has decided to charge the content creator's.

Now eight follow per month may seem minimal. However when you consider that DisneyX and Netflix's do not charge much more you have to wonder about the financial acumen of the person that considered this a success strategy.

Then again you have to question the financial acumen of a business person that paid 40 billion for a company and now has it devalued to 25% of that value.

The charging for blue ticks is a significant change in policy. Now Musk has been bounced into it by his failure to understand the value of his advertising revenue.

The real issue now is how this new policy will impact on the advertising revenue that is left and if a significant percentage of content creators decide not to pay how this will effect the viability of the platform

ForestFire

They really need to take age verification more seriously on twitter 😔

"The real tragedy of @NYTimes is that their propaganda isn't even interesting"

"Also, their feed is the Twitter equivalent of diarrhea. It's unreadable,"😳

Quantum Erasure

It's an over 13s app, so sounds about right...

McHardcore

Folks who tweet on the Ukrainian war were complaining about their posts getting down ranked since Elon Musk took over the company.

It looks like they were right. In the recent Twitter code release, they found that the ranking system was explicitly hardcoded to include Ukraine alongside:

• Medical Misinformation
• Violence
• Hateful content
• NSFW Content
• Generic misinformation

https://news.yahoo.com/analysis-twitter-algorithm-code-reveals-072800540.html

Quin_Dub

Another thing that has become clear in the analysis of the Twitter algorithm is that there is a specific carve out in the code to explicitly promote Musks tweets.

https://twitter.com/wongmjane/status/1641884551189512192?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1641878497907073029%7Ctwgr%5E06c669e01713fdfb3d66b5a7b236663dea4e3404%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theverge.com%2F2023%2F3%2F31%2F23664849%2Ftwitter-releases-algorithm-musk-open-source

Something I think that most people already thought to be the case, but seeing it right there in the actual code just confirms how utterly, painfully insecure and pathetic this multi-billionaire truly is.

silverharp

I have to say the Reader's notes is almost worth 40bn on its own , its glorious to see media being fact checked though it probably takes time

https://twitter.com/nypost/status/1642451364750999552

https://twitter.com/votedegrammont/status/1642793517893181441

Cordell

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120434717#Comment_120434717

Yes that's a brilliant feature, too bad twitter will collapse any day now.

pixelburp

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120434707#Comment_120434707

That's so pathetic I almost feel sorry for the guy, that he's that riven with insecurities..

Cordell

Yeah poor thing I'm sure he falls asleep crying, something like this

McHardcore

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120434707#Comment_120434707

As well as demonstrating how painfully insecure and pathetic Elon can be, the up ranking of his posts and the down ranking of Ukraine posts show how bullshit his “freedom of speech” story was.

Quin_Dub

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120435122#Comment_120435122

I think Elon is definitive proof that money cannot buy you happiness.

pixelburp

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120435122#Comment_120435122

Rich guy is rich? Wow Cordell, you're blowing our minds.

You'd think with that much money he wouldn't have the world's largest social platform reconfigured to artificially boost his brain farts. What is they say about backsides?

Nobody doubts his wealth so it's like 🤷 ok so what? ... just his personality that demands the world loves or pays attention to him is pretty pathetic for someone with that wealth.

But hey, if he was just a normal billionaire like Bezos or Arnault we'd not be here talking about his really public, really needy persona. Gotta pass the time somehow before we all die - may as well laugh at our "betters" eh?

pixelburp

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120435190#Comment_120435190

If we wanted to run Devil's Advocate, I suppose there could be an argument that it was trying to down rank violent imagery and video from the Ukraine War, rather than discourse about the war itself - but it wouldn't pass the smell test that I'd be serious about the theory. By all accounts, violent or sexual imagery should be carefully moderated on any public platform.

But the argument kinda falls flat when Musk himself has proposed another "genius" peace plan that has amounted to - quelle surprise - giving Russia what it wanted, making it pinky swear it won't invade a third time, and de-arming Ukraine. On a related note, it might also astound to hear that his plan for peace in Taiwan was to also give the bigger country what it wanted. Musk's attempt to do business in China no doubt having nothing to do with letting Taiwan cease to be. Glad he wasn't about during the GFA - god knows what he'd have thought a good solution to that would have been.

The sad overall part of this is that "freedom of speech" is itself a very noble, foundational part of everything from countries' constitutions to super-awesome Irish discussion boards. But like Boards and Irish law, there are ceilings to speech and the greatest fallacy on the subject is assuming the "freedom" bit is or should be absolute. It never was, not even before the Internet came along but unfortunately, the phrase has become coopted by ássholes wanting to punch down without consequence.

silliussoddius

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120435190#Comment_120435190

I still think he was serious about freedom of speech, he wouldn’t get the Saudis to invest if he wasn’t.

McHardcore

Yea, he also showed how serious he was about “freedom of speech” when he banned journalists from Twitter that wrote about him.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/amp/nation/journalists-who-wrote-about-owner-elon-musk-suspended-from-twitter

Does anyone know if Musk designed that hilariously ugly cybertruck abomination himself? Its got serious microdick energy.

silliussoddius

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120436043#Comment_120436043

..

ohnonotgmail

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120435784#Comment_120435784

this is sarcasm, right? i find it much more difficult to discern these days.

silverharp

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120434826#Comment_120434826

can you give me a timeline?

silliussoddius

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120436103#Comment_120436103

Indeedin it was

Cordell

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120436118#Comment_120436118

Any day now. He just need to fire the last critical employee, the last one with the keys to the datacenter or something. Just ask the experts here, they are predicting Twiter's collapse ever since the first employees were let go. They were all critical, you know?

It always had its hellish areas, but Twitter's becoming really unpleasant to use. All I ever get now is weird bots following me with links to crypto currency spam or porn sites. Every day I've had to block up to 20 of them.

When I tweet, I rarely get replies, and I used to in the past, so I assume the algorithms don't rate my account as worth highlighting.

In general nowadays it seems like a load of far right trolls in some weird circlejerk, endless bots and some angry people who seem to be trying to hold out to somehow 'save twitter'. It's gone! The Twitter of a few years ago no longer exists. Let it fizzle out in peace.

silverharp

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120436178#Comment_120436178

if we have learned anything its that every employee in Social media companies are absolutely mission critical

silliussoddius

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120436043#Comment_120436043

Can you just imagine what he'd have you drive around Mars in?

...Ghost...

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120436307#Comment_120436307

Absolutely. Powered by Vegan gruel and Vlogs of them not working. So critical 😂

We are all still waiting for the predicted collapse....prophecy of the left.

pjohnson

Christ if ye can't see the joke twitter has become ye really do overdose on your Lord and Saviour Musky.