It all so infuriating. I had a nice little corner in twitter that ran to my liking. It still does for the most part…but people are jumping ship left and right. All other platforms leave quite a bit to be desired, however, Threads promises to add the ability to have a feed that is filled only by those whom you follow. That will help so much. So I wait to see…
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I’ve never been a fan of a guy who co-created (?) some software to rate the faces of girls on campus.
… then later had to be coerced just to make login secure… and who requires PII (birthday) to join.
It’s always been a type of pyramid scheme.
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Remember the innocent times when you thought you could just not give Facebook your PII? And then they had this campaign like “Find your friends more easily by uploading your address book”? So … any of your friends just gave Facebook your full name, full address, phone and email, etc., and you wouldn’t even know they had it? Until they accidentally popped up a dialog “please confirm your phone number”? Which I had not given them? Fun times. 
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You couldn’t make this stuff up.
Twitter has dropped the Twit, and is now just signposted as “Er”. The police have been looking into the matter…
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Jay Leno once remarked that people who used that service were “twits”
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The rebranding is kind of genious actually. No matter if the whole thing succeeds or not, Musk will have a lot of EX-es in the future in any case… whether that be a lot of X’s (what he wants to call tweets in the future) or Ex-moneys, Ex-employees, Ex-companies etc remains to be seen, but he’s definitely going to have them…
And John Cleese once admitted “yes, I tweet with all the other twats!”…
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How naughty!
I wonder “twat” is the new “dick”? Or the blithering female version of it at least.
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I’m still convinced he’s not over his last X, this is all a post break up tantrum over Grimes 
Didn’t they originally meet over Twitter? He’s just cutting her out of all his photos, its normal immature man stuff but on a billionaires scale XD
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Still says twitter and has a bird on my phone. I feel like I exist in a space between worlds. It’s kinda eerie but cool.
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I don’t care what they call since I don’t use it. I sometimes checked in (without an account) on Sean or some other game devs, and the other half of people I had bookmarked have moved off it. 
I was thinking, how does social media work? Some just start as a small thing that grows by accident. E.g. a small student yearbook that adults continue to use. A “what are you doing right now?” silly site that turns into a news stream. Fun videos. It’s as obvious as offering “free cake”, everyone likes SM’s free offers. (SM=Social Media! Not Sean Murray, lol)
If they start charging money for it, it will never take off. What do you do as a business person? You have to pay for servers, hosting, programmers, support, moderators, dedicated CP deleters, psychological help for the CP deleters, and an international legal department. Do you get enough revenue just by selling ad space? (I don’t know, that was the original plan, I don’t think it worked?)
So, next step, how can we make our ad space more valuable? Promise customers that the more expensive ads will be shown to exactly the right target groups (by creating detailed user profiles). Sounds nice for local stores, you check twitter sitting in a cafe, the ad should say “around the corner is a nice XYZ store”. Can local non-chains afford that? (Again, I don’t know)
Who can afford to pay more for highly targeted ads? The ones who spread misinformation about political points or voters’ rights in a political opponent’s voters’ areas…? Can SM companies keep up checking each ad? You would need to pay more staff and legal advisers to keep up with vetting the ads that pay for the staff’s salaries…
I didn’t understand economics. I’m just trying to understand how these businesses even remotely function? Short term, sure, by accident they hang on. But long term…?
Humanity has been luring boars, chicken, bees, and cattle with free food/housing for millennia to get meat and eggs from them. But social media doesn’t get anything from its users. Only indirectly, only sometimes. It’s so weird.
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Sorry, cant read without a subscription but, you get the idea
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A very appropriate analogy. In the case of social media (in fact, of commercial use of the internet in general) we are the harvest. Through our interactions, those who control the internet gain absolute knowledge of our desires, wishes, fears, and opinions. They can know who we talk to, who we avoid, what we like and dislike, and what can sway our opinions.
Whilst it’s difficult to predict how an individual will react to psychological stimulus, predictions of the average behaviour of a mass of people can be extremely accurate.
For centuries our ancestors fought and died to gain some degree of democratic control over our own destinies. And now we’re sleepwalking into giving it all away, for the sake of cute cat pictures.
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I think the point for those who invest and pay money for what is essentially a system that will never make a massive profit, is the power it offers. They may lose money on their Social Media investments but their ability to spread influence and narrative is the whole point. It brings them revenue in the other areas of industry and capital that they are invested in. The data it gives them of the people, whose money they want all of, is unprecedented.
We need only look at the Media Moguls of the 20th/21st century and their modern equivalents to see the people at the head of these empires are more happy to spread fear and misunderstanding because they can steer a populous to a place that benefits the Mogul easier if they’re misinformed and have had their emotions set next to nitro-glycerine.
It’s why they and those of their ilk did everything in their power to shut down GDPR or SOPA and all those other attempts at dismantling net neutrality.
Before GDPR, my country was known for having one of the best digital protection privacy act in the world (now all of EU does), a lot of Facebooks invasive features were non existent here, we basically saw a different front end to everyone else.
I’m speaking of 12 years ago (so some dope could have undone this, i dont care enough anymore to bother checking), and facebook actually tried lobbying here, against it, which I guess they didn’t do their research because that shit does not work outside of US/the Commonwealth.
They wouldve had a better chance if they came forward as a corrupt landlord since thats basically what our government officials are; all own property, all very happy to see it stay expensive to rent or buy. Which, with the worldwide housing crisis, has only made the situation worse.
It’s funny because they moved their international Headquarters here and I guess they thought they’d be able to leverage some of our data protection away(sadly my country has become a tax haven, but how else do you convince someone to set up business on an island in a capitalists world?) '^_ ^
But no, our data protection commissioner was on to them quite a bit getting them to change how their website operates outside of US/Canada with regards to data protection, tracking and invasion. Gdpr seemed to bring the rest of EU in line with these principles though other nation states were also enacting similar protections for its citizens before GDPR too.
This is why I chose to get a cat ("chose"isnt really the word, a kitten decided to live in my shed during lockdown 
). I get my cute cat photos from a natural source. Your move, Zuck.
I think I can use Sinead O Connors life and struggle as a great example of how the lowest wretches (and the most read, sadly) of news/social media are happy to shut someone down if it might effect their or their friends positions of power, or their control over the will of a populous.
She spoke out against the church and its abuse, long before the evidence truly surfaced, and she was lambasted in the press for it, to the point a country still in the grips of the church, was convinced to turn its back on her.
Every tabloid story that came out about her in the last thirty years was taking stabs at her mental health struggles, her addictions, how her outspoken views are “crazy” etc any time she spoke up for people or against government or business, how she cant even write good music anymore etc. Today those same papers are praising her for her voice and her passion but hey wouldnt ya know it they’re leaving out a lot, or keep pointing out she converted to Islam and leading with her in a Jihab looking distressed (cos oooh, remember, you’re supposed to be scared of islam, woogy boogy! Those refugees are coming for your kids jobs! OooOoOOoOOOoo)
Sadly its the track record for tabloids, harrass celebrities who have mental health struggles, print every embarrasing photo, mishap, personal moment, berate them for not being perfectly idealised humans, and then when they die, put on a big show of remorse that doesnt mean shit.
Amy Winehouse is another good example. Greatly struggled with addiction, media absolutely lambasted her while alive, praised her after she died.
I feel like I’ve gone way off track here, my point is, the people investing in Media sites, be they the newspaper companies of yore or the social media hubs of today are all about control and power, not profit. (lets face it, social media IS news media too.)
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Hari Sheldon would agree.
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To diversify from all the x/twitter angst for 1 sec, seeing as you mentioned Hari Seldon.
This is the only thing I want this year except a NMS update.
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I think they missed a trick with the logo.
This dudes creation would have made the whole transition much less jarring…
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Apparently Musk doesn’t want “X” to be just another social platform. He envisages a whole new comprehensive infrastructure (whatever that means).
Perhaps he could launch new hardware to run it on?
Just off the top of my head, maybe he could call it “X-Box”.
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Thanks for providing a translation.
Lovely segue to remind people hopefully of the real world outside of their computers and phones! The loss of an insignificant logo-bird vs the destruction of real species.
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