Twitter & its ongoing usage

[dialtone]

You misunderstand how artificial and overvalued Twitter was, and much of Silicon Valley for that matter. They had a pipeline of practically free money for decades. For various reasons the taps have been shutting in recent years leading to things like monied hardware guys buying software firms. Two different worlds; culture clash inevitable. Apple and Google never figured out how to make a car; yet Tesla wrote software and designed chips and boards. Social media has a lot of non back end overhead; you have to ask, for what purpose? Bots, moderation, curation, etc.; the defining chars of Web 2.0. Imagine if Vodafone/Verizon/phone providers started hiring mods and started eavesdropping calls and texts, and banning customers; then you start to understand what social media is and how inefficient it is and completely removed from deserving the 'tech' demonym.

I doubt I misunderstand... the only one misunderstanding was Musk as it was clear when he tried to get out of the deal to acquire Twitter.

Overvalued? Maybe but it was Musk that offered 44 bil to buy it out. As far overvalued companies go... Does Tesla being worth more than the whole car industry globally qualify them for overvalued?

I'm not a big user of social media, I'm not even a medium or small user of social media really. But to come in and trash a culture only to show later how much competence you are missing gives the vibes of the car mechanic joke that rips out the engine to fix your battery charge when the car didn't startup up. Designing chips and stuff is just a matter of hiring electronic engineers with experience and sending orders to a FAB, you can design your own custom board in 15 minutes online, I've built my own air quality monitor by buying sensors and chips from Alibaba and soldering stuff together and writing the embedded software for it, it's not easy but it's not that hard either.
Meta, Google, Apple, Amazon all do it, even Nextflix does it, as do smaller startups in the electronic/chip field like Ampere Computing. Designing boards is something that likely even Twitter did as the scale they had before they moved into Google/AWS likely needed them to have custom servers for cooling, again all social media companies have designed this stuff at the scale they are operating at, unless they run on Amazon/Google which I would advise anyone to do really.

Twitter's issues had nothing to do with bots and that crap, but you'd have to know how advertising works in order to make that comment. Most of the spend in advertising goes towards upper funnel campaigns that look for reach on the web or towards DR campaigns like retargeting or search. Twitter wasn't so big to cover the needs of demand gen/upper funnel, and measurement was anyway always a challenge for them because of Apple's cookie policies (among the many reasons), on top of it their performance, even when measured, was never that good to compete with search, people don't browse Twitter to buy stuff but to absorb news mostly so they don't have much intent, they should have opened an exchange to bring in third party data to drive demand, but they wanted to follow in what Facebook did with their FBX product first that turned into Facebook WCA in 2015 or so by thinking they can earn more by owning the whole exchange and only allowing API users, but they vastly overestimated the market interest and had seriously dumb minimum spend guarantee requirements for new partners.

Anyway... this is super OT. I would say we could continue somewhere else but it's not a topic that is that interesting to me because I don't like the advertising market, despite having worked in it for 17 years, and I don't particularly like Musk anyway.

Setting aside Tesla and SpaceX, on which I don't know that much or anything, on Twitter Musk is showing legendary never-before-seen incompetence, you can choose to believe that he's the great experimenter, or what have you, I'm not going to spend more energy trying to convince you otherwise.

[Willy]

Not sure I fully understand the concern with regards to twitter content being posted on this forum. Is there an issue in creating an account on twitter to view the F1 content? It's a very popular social media platform, regardless of it's merits and I guess majority of the people have an account on it as it's more than decade in it's existence. Should not be a problem for anyone to access.

[Zynerji]

Not sure I fully understand the concern with regards to twitter content being posted on this forum. Is there an issue in creating an account on twitter to view the F1 content? It's a very popular social media platform, regardless of it's merits and I guess majority of the people have an account on it as it's more than decade in it's existence. Should not be a problem for anyone to access.

Don't mind the folks that lost their echo chamber on Twitter. They've been floating in tears for months now. They will be fine.

[organic]

Not sure I fully understand the concern with regards to twitter content being posted on this forum. Is there an issue in creating an account on twitter to view the F1 content? It's a very popular social media platform, regardless of it's merits and I guess majority of the people have an account on it as it's more than decade in it's existence. Should not be a problem for anyone to access.

Twitter has begun rate limiting users to read only a certain number of posts per day that is easily reached simply by scrolling through a couple of pages or reading tweet replies. This limit can be increased by paying for a premium version of the product.

Its just one more change that shows Twitter in its current state is too unstable to rely on as much as we do to view content. It takes less than 20s to copy the content across and format it in a way that makes it clear what has been done, and makes all content accessible retroactively even if these tweets later (in a few years?) become inaccessible. I find myself going into old threads sometimes looking for a piece of information I know was in there; it's a valuable library of information. Yes it's an overreaction based on what's happened so far but I'm suggesting futureproofing the information we're posting now against Twitter's current instability

[Zynerji]

Not sure I fully understand the concern with regards to twitter content being posted on this forum. Is there an issue in creating an account on twitter to view the F1 content? It's a very popular social media platform, regardless of it's merits and I guess majority of the people have an account on it as it's more than decade in it's existence. Should not be a problem for anyone to access.

Twitter has begun rate limiting users to read only a certain number of posts per day that is easily reached simply by scrolling through a couple of pages or reading tweet replies. This limit can be increased by paying for a premium version of the product.

Its just one more change that shows Twitter in its current state is too unstable to rely on as much as we do to view content. It takes less than 20s to copy the content across and format it in a way that makes it clear what has been done, and makes all content accessible retroactively even if these tweets later (in a few years?) become inaccessible. I find myself going into old threads sometimes looking for a piece of information I know was in there; it's a valuable library of information. Yes it's an overreaction based on what's happened so far but I'm suggesting futureproofing the information we're posting now against Twitter's current instability

The AI scraping will settle down. Temporarily restrict so it doesn't crash seems 200iq.

[vorticism]

I'm forced to invent a framing for the logical fallacy present ITT. "The enemy of my argument is the friend of my enemy." ? I'm not complementing Musk I'm saying his detractors are cringe, lack self awareness, and have bad arguments; that's why I'm saying it reads like all the EV FUD from the past 10 yrs (and I'm not a big EV supporter, this should be apparent already in my post history).

Does Tesla being worth more than the whole car industry globally qualify them for overvalued?

Twitter's issues had nothing to do with bots and that...

It probably is overvalued, but this says more about high finance than it does about Tesla, which would underline the points I've made.

It's extensively the bots, mods, and algos issue. The value of social media is the illusion of democracy it provides, like legacy media and press before it often erroneously claiming to be the voice of the people. That's why it's tied at the hip to state security apparatuses.

[hollus]

Not everyone has (or wants) a twitter account. I sure don’t (and don’t). I am willing to bet that more users here don’t than do.
So access suddenly disappearing is a potential issue. When imageshack went from free to pay, a huge number of threads lost most images, all at once.

[Just_a_fan]

Not sure I fully understand the concern with regards to twitter content being posted on this forum. Is there an issue in creating an account on twitter to view the F1 content? It's a very popular social media platform, regardless of it's merits and I guess majority of the people have an account on it as it's more than decade in it's existence. Should not be a problem for anyone to access.

Don't mind the folks that lost their echo chamber on Twitter. They've been floating in tears for months now. They will be fine.

Musk has let them back in to their echo chamber, however. Even the Orange Idiot, although he prefers his very own echo chamber that is Truth Social. Is that the most ironic name for an echo chamber?

[balex]

+1 to everyone who quotes tweets on here so they are visible without visiting twitter, thank you. I think it is good for the long-term health of this site. For example to quote "Provide context for links" on StackOverflow's guidelines:

Links to external resources are encouraged, but please add context around the link so your fellow users will have some idea what it is and why it’s there. Always quote the most relevant part of an important link, in case the external resource is unreachable or goes permanently offline. Links to other websites should always be helpful, but avoid making it necessary to click on them as much as possible.

P.S. I don't understand why everybody wastes so much energy fighting for their favourite billionaires these days; is this the 21st century version of religion?

[ValeVida46]

Twitter is most definitely in a downward spiral, it won't fail because it's still too big, people still use it, and most importantly the competition is still not quite there, but the issue is accessibility of the content linked, and the person in charge has shown that he doesn't really care (or know for the matter) how Twitter works and became what it was before he bought it.

linking + copying I think is a good compromise.

Twitter is way better than 12 months ago. It just wasn't under attack like it is now.

How is it better?

It now refuses to translate Ukrainian for a host of Osint accounts, it has throttled users to access content, it then bases that throttle on how much you pay, it has withdrawn shadow-ban visibility(previously you could see the ghost bans), it's added a bunch of accounts into my list I don't want to follow, has muted accounts I do follow, validated and verified fake accounts because they give him 8 dollars a month, which has led to fraudulent activities for obvious reasons(and Musk was warned about).

Musk has also cut 80% of staff, with racist, misogynistic, sexist abuse is rampant and in some cases remains up even after an investigation has been completed, due to lack of staff and in some cases exhaustion.
And this weekends latest debacle was in no small part to him not wanting to pay Google cloud server bills that were due. There is way more reasons why it's a poorer experience under Musk's ownership, and the markets are in agreement when the valuation of the company has dropped from 23B to 15B in the space of a year, and a 2/3s less than what he paid for it at 44B.

[Big Tea]

Not everyone has (or wants) a twitter account. I sure don’t (and don’t). I am willing to bet that more users here don’t than do.
So access suddenly disappearing is a potential issue. When imageshack went from free to pay, a huge number of threads lost most images, all at once.

I have had a twitter account and posted on it 9 times (in 12 years I think)

I originally opened it to follow Nat Pinkham but she seems not to bother now.

[Zynerji]

Twitter is most definitely in a downward spiral, it won't fail because it's still too big, people still use it, and most importantly the competition is still not quite there, but the issue is accessibility of the content linked, and the person in charge has shown that he doesn't really care (or know for the matter) how Twitter works and became what it was before he bought it.

linking + copying I think is a good compromise.

Twitter is way better than 12 months ago. It just wasn't under attack like it is now.

How is it better?

It now refuses to translate Ukrainian for a host of Osint accounts, it has throttled users to access content, it then bases that throttle on how much you pay, it has withdrawn shadow-ban visibility(previously you could see the ghost bans), it's added a bunch of accounts into my list I don't want to follow, has muted accounts I do follow, validated and verified fake accounts because they give him 8 dollars a month, which has led to fraudulent activities for obvious reasons(and Musk was warned about).

Musk has also cut 80% of staff, with racist, misogynistic, sexist abuse is rampant and in some cases remains up even after an investigation has been completed, due to lack of staff and in some cases exhaustion.
And this weekends latest debacle was in no small part to him not wanting to pay Google cloud server bills that were due. There is way more reasons why it's a poorer experience under Musk's ownership, and the markets are in agreement when the valuation of the company has dropped from 23B to 15B in the space of a year, and a 2/3s less than what he paid for it at 44B.

It wasn't worth what he paid.

It was an activist group, not a business.

It takes me a year to fix small companies, I can only imagine the effort involved in a big one.

It's much better. Sorry that you aren't experiencing the same thing as me.

[Zynerji]

Not sure I fully understand the concern with regards to twitter content being posted on this forum. Is there an issue in creating an account on twitter to view the F1 content? It's a very popular social media platform, regardless of it's merits and I guess majority of the people have an account on it as it's more than decade in it's existence. Should not be a problem for anyone to access.

Don't mind the folks that lost their echo chamber on Twitter. They've been floating in tears for months now. They will be fine.

Musk has let them back in to their echo chamber, however. Even the Orange Idiot, although he prefers his very own echo chamber that is Truth Social. Is that the most ironic name for an echo chamber?

I hope you recover from your TDS soon. It's been 7 years. Most folks have had their eyes opened and recovered from that already. I hope you can catch up with them soon!

[ValeVida46]

It was an activist group, not a business.

What's changed? Catturd is making policies now
If being an activist group was problem before it's even bigger now. Twitters zero tolerance racist/anti semitism policy is now flexible. That is bad practice and not remotely good for long term business strategy. As you fix small companies, you know this.

It takes me a year to fix small companies, I can only imagine the effort involved in a big one.

What effort? All these stem from Musk's direct and intentional decisions.
Links from tweets used to work reliably to certain websites, now it's hit and miss and actually affects what I do.
Trailing big changes with a skeleton crew tech team that repeatedly lead to hacks, compromising of data, and outages.
Ditching 2FA...
3rd part developers are leaving in droves and are pointedly refusing to do any contract work for them.
Staff are dissatisfied, revenues are down, and it's making a bigger loss than before he took over, with a decorrelation to FB who are doing better than expected revenue wise.
They were evicted from Singapore office for non payment, had outages over the weekend which made Twitter unusable, again for non payment. Seattle and San Francisco landlords are suing them too. He even went as far as mocking an engineer with Muscular dystrophy only to tell the guy he was fired.
Turns out Haraldfur Thorleiffson owned a company Twitter aquired and had a 100 million dollar do not fire clause inserted into his contract. Cue cringe Musk reversal.
Where is the due diligence? It's a clown show.
But Cult of Musk will tell you all these people are wrong...sorry the incidents are just too frequent and big in magnitude to ignore now.

It's much better. Sorry that you aren't experiencing the same thing as me.

I'm happy it's working for you, but there's no escaping that the bird app is in serious trouble.
His crypto payment vehicle(why I think he bought it) may not come in time to save it from the vast space available to a competitor. But I'm sure a Dogecoin tweet can pump the price remotely while he unloads his bags on his followers, because Twitter is going to need a ton of cash moving forwards.

[hollus]

And the usual suspects managed to start the shift to politics. Yawn. Find another forum for that, seriously. If you do that in a thread which does not start with a Musk nuance, don't act surprised when the warnings arrive again.

I guess this thread has outrun it usefulness enough that it is not worth fighting the local politicians. So thread locked.