Twitter C/D

I have never seen a CEO treat a brand so carelessly.

Carly Fiorina at Hewlett Packard comes to mind, but as spectacularly shitty as she was - it wasn't nearly as fast as Twitter incineration now

Also, most shit CEOs don’t actually own the company: if they tank it they walk off with a golden handshake, they’re not pissing away billions of their own money to prove some idiotic point.

at least for me on desktop, the doge appears to be gone.

the emerging western-values/free-speech coalition in action

.@elonmusk, you know that thing where the left eats its own? We mustn’t let that happen to the emerging western-values/free-speech coalition. Many of us who have backed your Twitter play and taken substantial heat for it are thrown by this move. The public square isn’t a monopoly https://t.co/qe1Gn6P6H6

— Bret Weinstein (@BretWeinstein) April 7, 2023

1. Substack links were never blocked. Matt’s statement is false.

2. Substack was trying to download a massive portion of the Twitter database to bootstrap their Twitter clone, so their IP address is obviously untrusted.

3. Turns out Matt is/was an employee of Substack.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 8, 2023

Got it. Please DM so we can take this private.

— Bret Weinstein (@BretWeinstein) April 8, 2023

2. Substack was trying to download a massive portion of the Twitter database to bootstrap their Twitter clone, so their IP address is obviously untrusted.

trying to figure out what he cld be talking about here, i guess substack could be scraping twitter obvs they wouldnt do it from their sites ip tho, prob just some bs tho maybe theres a kernel of truth in there, maybe they were imbedding tweets in their new product and he decided that was theft

lmao what Substack links are obviously getting blocked and/or flagged on Twitter & Taibbi is not an employee but rather just a guy who writes on there, god Elon is so goddamned dumb

its funny he prob thinks hes doing good since all the replies are like oh i see sir great job

thinkin about the substack top earners your yglasias taibbi sullivans and so forth the handful of writers who had a big profiles and took them to substack and are now making bank, what happens to them when the newsletter bubble bursts seems like kind of a dead end situation theyve separated themselves from the wider media world theyre churning out lazy garbage causing the general opinion of them to decline, guess substack trying to become more of its own ecosystem is attempting to address that but not sure if thatll work who wants to go on newsletter twitter, berri weiss launched her own venture backed thing that seems like it will probably fail, maybe substack will roll out tools that are aimed at building news orgs that go beyond the single proprietor model, kind of a weird situation but it is really the only written news thing thats thriving right now

apparently if you search ‘substack’ it now returns results for ‘newsletter’ smh

tbf, while elon is a ridiculous idiot asshole, it’s pretty off-putting seeing people complain about ‘my engagement’s down!’ as if twitter or the world at large owes them individual attention

my engagement is down (two likes) from what it rightfully should be (one million likes)

if taibbi is one of the gang that egg-noggined andreessen first coaxed onto substack as a loss-leader by offering them a big upfront payout then unlike those who merely earn off their subs he *is* a kind of employee imo

also seemingly none of those guys employ sub-editors (bcz editing is like being censored by the cia © g.greenwald), which
(a) fuck you and
(b) lol yeah that'll work out well

kind of funny that elon & co are the only ones who truly care about who they follow and who follows them and make it into a little public ceremony to unfollow people who said mean things about them or offended their little feelings

you’re going to see the mean things anyway in news coverage

taibbis def one of the guy who got a nice deal from substack, a ton of the even much more obscure writers on there are substack is quite generous, but i dont think getting a signing bonus makes you an employee substack isnt like giving him tasks to do, or maybe they are idk

and yeah not being edited is a big part of the whole thing, which also makes them less employable by regular news orgs, you get used to just doing whatever you want and its gonna be hard to go back to getting hassled by someone who cares if the piece is good

it’s pretty off-putting seeing people complain about ‘my engagement’s down!’ as if twitter or the world at large owes them individual attention

― mookieproof, Saturday, April 8, 2023 10:21 AM (ten minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

true but ultimately I think Twitter needs these people more than they need Twitter

theres prob also a substack effect where due to the analytics and replies you have access to you start writing specifically for the tastes of your relatively small group of paid subscribers and the whole thing just gets weirder and more insular all the time

said it before, but these people just don’t have a shtick that passes the test of time. if you’re bitching about politics and it’s not during the trump presidency or a presidential election year then you’re only going to get the most dedicated sickos

there are only so many “you used to be able to throw a ball in the street” posts. pivot into funny videos or weird dashcam footage. whatever people are into now

he's a substack employee like the leprechaun is a lucky charms employee

the leprechaun writes better tho

lag∞n otm about the feedback insularity loop

branding and marketing is terrible but they’re benign compared to the human instinct to give people more of what they want and the most vocal people are weirdos

at the tough school of ilx i learnt to give readers what they definitively do *not* want and im doing it again now

pic.twitter.com/LcP8PaAAdV

— 𐑕𐑦𐑷 𐑜𐑧𐑴𐑻𐑞𐑒 𐑵𐑕𐑕᠅𐑓𐑹𐑦𐑤𐑞 𐑧𐑴𐑫𐑞𐑾🝮 (@ImpressedYou) April 8, 2023

That, BTW, in reply to this:

Substack’s CEO says Musk’s claims are false pic.twitter.com/BHfZuabmu4

— Ken Klippenstein (@kenklippenstein) April 8, 2023

ha yeah stealing twitters database was using the api that they make publicly available

you’re not supposed to use the api is what i’m hearing these days

i will never stop using the api (unless make me pay for it) f the haters

also i will not update my c0de to the new system until the old one stops working which is hopefully never

There is now a non-zero chance of Elon being beaten to death with his own shoes.

The question rather is who will do it cos the line is growing longer by the minute

he just comes off as a more pathetic individual every day and for every hater that gets bored and stops caring, he creates two more

you have nothing of importance to say, yet you want to attract more engagement? study the time-tested methods of trolls!

Super interesting code breakdown for the dumpster fire that is Twitter:

Elon Musk released the Twitter feed algorithm on Git yesterday as open-source. I know how to read code and know Git, so I had a brief looksy.

First of all, holy hell, I can't believe he let this algorithm see the light of day. It reveals some INSANE biases which are the REAL "Twitter Files", if anyone besides engineers gets interested. My only thought as to why he publicized the code is that Twitter is a wreck and he fired most of his engineering team, the remainder of whom now can't keep up, so he's hoping that by open-sourcing the code, engineers like me will fix it for free. And indeed, you can make pull requests on his repository if you have a Git account (and I do.) I'm not about to help.

(For laymen, a pull request is when you pull the code to your local machine, alter it, and then make a request that your changes get integrated into the repository, which the owner of the repository must approve.) I use Git for version control. Meaning every change is documented and approved. Undoubtedly, Musk will task a remaining engineer with reviewing these Git pushes, and potentially approving them.

Remember when people started complaining that all they saw were tweets from Elon Musk, even though they didn't follow him? Or all they see are right-wing lunatics, even though they didn't choose to see that? There's a literal carve-out in the code to artificially boost Musk and right-wing lunatics. Narcissist much? The code also arbitrarily dumps you into "categories" like Democrat, Republican, Power User, etc. He's also artificially restricting tweets about The Ukraine and bolstering Russia. I wonder who's paying him! Not a mystery.

Every interaction with your tweets gets ranked. Every like is worth a lot. Replies and retweets are worth less. This is opposite of normal (I used to write algorithms for search engines), where a like is passive interaction, retweets and comments are active interaction, which should be weighted more heavily. Negative interactions are also weighted. If you've been blocked or reported, you're punished for that. Your tweets get seen less.

The most insane part of the algorithm (in my opinion) is that if you follow a lot more people than follow you, you get artificially suppressed as "unimportant." That means someone like you or me doesn't get seen. I follow around three times as many people as follow me, which means I effectively do not exist on Twitter. This means that bad actors and bots (who follow nobody, because they aren't human, get artificially amplified.)

Including a video or an image in your tweet artificially boosts you. Including a link to an external website (like a news site) hurts you. Misinformation gets downgraded for normal people. Blue checks boost you insanely. This effectively results in blue-checked people being able to spread misinformation with impunity. As you know, now anybody can pay Elon $8 for that sweet sweet blue checkmark, including bots and foreign actors.

Y'all. Twitter is a DISASTER. If you've used it since Musk took over, you at least suspected it. Musk is a foreign actor and at best, a narcissist. At worst, he's deliberately bolstering the right-wing looniverse (as evidenced by my personal observations, and now confirmed by inspection of his algorithm.)

All of this is not to say, drop Twitter, or to espouse an opinion of what you should do. I'm going to hang out and see what happens. I'm just telling you, as a person who writes these kinds of algorithms professionaly, what the code Elon Musk provided publicly, indicates.

— Emily Parker

The most insane part of the algorithm (in my opinion) is that if you follow a lot more people than follow you, you get artificially suppressed as "unimportant." That means someone like you or me doesn't get seen. I follow around three times as many people as follow me, which means I effectively do not exist on Twitter. This means that bad actors and bots (who follow nobody, because they aren't human, get artificially amplified.)

This is interesting to me because I have almost 4500 followers but I only follow 225 people, a practice I ported over from when I was running Roadrunner Records' account. Our strategy was to follow people who were "meaningful" (other labels, our artists, rock and metal websites, etc.) and have interactions with them, and everybody else was the audience. Which is kinda how I look at Twitter to this day; I tweet back and forth with a couple of dozen people, and anybody who's following me gets to be the "audience" for those conversations. And lately my tweets have been getting more likes than they were before, so I wonder if I'm getting a (small) push.

nothing in the algo seems worthy of the tone of that post lol, also she could have put the actual multiples for the buffs like every other piece did

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FtOfyMIXsAI2pen?format=jpg&name=medium

lol restacks

Every interaction with your tweets gets ranked. Every like is worth a lot. Replies and retweets are worth less. This is opposite of normal (I used to write algorithms for search engines), where a like is passive interaction, retweets and comments are active interaction, which should be weighted more heavily.

this makes sense to me. retweet means the people who follow you will see it when they see the retweet itself in their feed, it would be double-dipping to also boost a tweet for getting RT'd

The most insane part of the algorithm (in my opinion) is that if you follow a lot more people than follow you, you get artificially suppressed as "unimportant." That means someone like you or me doesn't get seen. I follow around three times as many people as follow me, which means I effectively do not exist on Twitter. This means that bad actors and bots (who follow nobody, because they aren't human, get artificially amplified.)

i was under the impression that bots follow millions of people all the time, exploiting the fact that you get notified when someone follows you to get free publicity. also lol @ publicizing her loser 3-to-1 ratio

i looked into at a little bit and apparently the having a bad follower/following ratio is part of a larger formula called tweepcred that seemingly no one has bothered to really figure out prob cause its too hard, there is a page for other buffs that just says basically 1 like == 20x boost, tho now that i think about it im not sure what that really means, anyway thats only for people who use the algo timeline which is bad

>>>I have almost 4500 followers but I only follow 225 people,

WELL WELL WELL LA DI DA

one weird twitter thing is accounts like this with half a million followers that get just no interactions

PETER HITCHENS: As Paris acts, why do we STILL have to live in fear of the e-scooter menace? https://t.co/V34hR6xEeo pic.twitter.com/zG27K8czi6

— Daily Mail US (@DailyMail) April 9, 2023

I think that Emily person misread some of the flags that are made to calculate metrics as code to boost tweets but w/e because it’s all busted

Some bleedover into the Taibbi shenanigans here as well but I found this piece very useful on this facet of the whole mess

https://www.emptywheel.net/2023/04/08/when-techbros-circle-jerk-becomes-a-circular-firing-squad/

yikes

It looks like Twitter is *globally* withholding a tweet in response to a legal demand in India. This is a disaster for free speech online. Indian law dictating social media speech rules globally—a worst case scenario for free speech and content moderation. https://t.co/J5azU3gPFC pic.twitter.com/SstrIveehb

— Sarah McLaughlin (@sarahemclaugh) April 10, 2023

Capitalism-based social media by its very nature is going to accede to authoritarian demands for censorship whenever non-compliance sufficiently threatens profits. Their main concern is doing it quietly enough or apologetically enough that it doesn't provoke a backlash that also threatens profits.

finally, a threat to Twitter's profits

trying (and failing) to understand this https://nitter.net/

isn’t that site for browsing someone’s feed without being logged in?

it's just a really lightweight frontend that'll probably get blocked if it gets enough traffic to be noticed, not a whole lot to understand

ah okay

some have already lost them i noticed

All legacy verified accounts will lose their blue tick on 4/20, Elon Musk reveals.

This includes blue ticks belonging to celebrities and other notable figures. pic.twitter.com/NMh2e7fxE0

— Pop Crave (@PopCrave) April 11, 2023

🙄