Twitter C/D

i will be tweeting the tux pooh meme, it will be very funny and would have gone viral but

kinda wanna get the Fumble Dimension guys to do a non-sportsie "the last day of Twitter"

what will people be tweeting on the day the world ends

about how the world is just fine and anyone who thinks it’s about to end is not only wrong, but a complete dumbass

Thought he had an easy target. Didn’t realize dude rockin the sandals/jeans/ponytail/solo Bluetooth was born into the shitty internet debate. Molded by it. When Mr TikTok was out partying he was studying Usenet archives and paying for Something Awful…

pic.twitter.com/RDeDaWngWx

— Kristi Yamaguccimane (@TheWapplehouse) December 13, 2023

^Damn, that has to be the stupidest false binary of 2023.

i got partway into that and figgered my desired bearspray finale was not gonna happen. /distraction

https://t.co/VbUvPljNy2 pic.twitter.com/zFUgvgJNkB

— Tom Hackimer (@HackAttackimer) December 14, 2023

Dying @ "Kristi Yamaguccimane"

we gotta replace that aryan proud boy "Yes." guy with this one, it's time for a change pic.twitter.com/ZOnghTp2C8

— j 🇵🇸 (@janhopi) December 14, 2023

Here's X CEO Linda Yaccarino deleting her reply to Kanye West after getting called out for engaging with an antisemite. pic.twitter.com/Fsnwd0sLmk

— Ryan Mac 🙃 (@RMac18) December 16, 2023

Going great: Our local fire department tried to tell people about a fire last night but it didn't post til this morning.

Our last tweet was stuck in the Twitter / X que from last night. This is the same fire.

— Knoxville Fire (@KnoxvilleFire) December 21, 2023

MUSK

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-12-21/thousands-of-x-users-report-issues-on-platform-downdetector

Here’s a fun rumor (I question it’s accuracy since it came from advertising people): Joe Benarroch, joined Twitter with Linda Yaccarino, has been discussing a sale of Twitter in his talks with some of the advertisers that bailed in the past month. Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway also discussed a possible sale on their latest podcast. The people I heard this from also claim Threads is way more popular than what you’d expect. I doubt this too (despite being good news for my 401k). Who knows?

According to various speculations and analyses posted in this thread over the past year of the Xitter debacle seem to agree that the investors behind Musk would have to sacrifice about 60% to 70% of their original investment to get Xitter off their books. I guess they must be able to read the writing on the wall.

yeah i mean twitter is clearly on the verge of being unsalvageable if it hasnt already passed the threshold, these people gotta be thinking about getting whatever they can out of it at this point

Who would buy twitter? You’d have to ban musk immediately for it to make any sense.

i will buy it

I can chip in $420.69, he might go for it.

what's the point when you have FB status updates?

Evergreen post.

I can chip in $420.69, he might go for it.

guessing you'd have more luck w/$14.88

Thread on quitting twitter bcz Elon is fash and the thing is broken and it could break you. Quite interesting little graph because for me that's where the thread breaks down. I don't like the mainstream sources and the sources that 'dominate' the narrative.

Though I consume bits of the former via people despairing at bias against Palestinians.

Want to know who is controlling the narrative Twitter on Israel and Gaza right now? It's not the New York Times or the Washington Post or even Fox News.

It is a network of seven accounts. They are all propaganda. At least one is a neo-Nazi.https://t.co/DVDsJW9ulo pic.twitter.com/cA1l2PPXtB

— Elad Nehorai (@EladNehorai) December 31, 2023

I don't like the mainstream sources either but don't see how neo nazis are an improvement. Ofc when you use twitter you're not looking those up but that is besides the point of the thread.

The graph talks about sources I hardly ever see but then again I joined 5+ years ago and have calibrated a lot of the follows.

The thread seems to be talking about networks that seem to be forming on disinformation, but I think people in the US and Europe are already voting for fascism before Musk took over the site. Not seeing how he is making twitter a lot worse.

I mostly think the same, its difficult for me to judge too as I only see my feed which isn't necessarily reflective of anything other than what I've put there. The misinformation stuff is largely linked to or sent from elsewhere so I've no real way of knowing if thats increasing or people linking to it and sending from elsewhere is increasing, which would be more on them than Musk

That being said, definitely more random stuff that I don't follow manages to insert itself, though this is mainly a) Musk himself, b) people falling over or having accidents and the like

Yes I don't think any of us are in the target group for these sources, it's not partic good propaganda to push your stuff onto ppl you already know will be skeptical/unsympathetic.

I don't think twitter EVER had the power to sway elections (doubt Trump's win was on it any more than it was on Facebook boomers), but if it ever did it certainly won't in 2023/24, its reach has always been chronically overstated due to the amount of journos on there but even before Musk bought it the main concern of ppl working with social media in NGOs and etc already was "no regular people use twitter".

The thing is more that it is quite successful as a niche for nazi recruiting of a specific type of person - and was so before Musk bought it yes, but there were at least some safeguards in place of what counted as bannable and etc. that are now gone.

Yeah, have reported loads of antisemitic posts that are then ruled ‘not a problem’ or whatever their waffle is.

My own follows/mutuals etc are pretty carefully chosen in the first place (and over 13 years) so I don’t see horrible RW stuff by them ever, just antisemitism/Islamophobia/racism/terfs deep in others’ mentions which I report when I think it might be acted upon.

I don't think twitter EVER had the power to sway elections

Directly maybe not, but indirectly and/or as multiplier? Certainly Facebook has? Trinidad and Tobago? Slovakia?

But even then, in close run elections how much does the needle need to move? I'm not saying one way or the other, just not sure how to accurately measure downstream effects and what exactly causes what to move

Facebook absolutely has, the "regular people" evoked in my previous post are all on there! Quick googling suggests FB currently claims to have 2.9 billion active users, twitter 368 million, it's not in the same league imo.

I don’t remember what it was that got me off Twitter, but I remember that the decision was easy, to the point where it hardly even felt like a decision. I had spent embarrassing blobby swathes of just about every day on Twitter for something like a dozen years, and my brain had degraded not just accordingly but in perfect synchronicity with the ways that such an experience would cause a brain to degrade. But, as with some other lousy habits I kept alive for longer than was healthy or gratifying, there was an aspect that I hadn’t considered that made quitting easier than it might otherwise have been. It is hard to stop doing something that you really like doing, even when it is not good for you; I know this because I have never done it. Posting on Twitter was one of those, but at some point I was honestly rather relieved to find that the habit, and the little perks and spikes that it provided, started losing ground first slowly and then much less so to the sense that continuing to do it would feel worse.
The pleasures of the routine flattened out, relative to the accumulating challenge to what I had come to consider a vestigial sense of self-respect that was inherent in simply hanging out there at all. I wouldn’t even say that my experience of the site got worse, beyond a general uptick in technical jankiness. I knew that the cheesy tech dork who’d bought it was losing his shit in increasingly dire ways somewhere else on the site, but that had always been true of cheesy dorks on the site. It was the nature of Twitter that whenever something sufficiently embarrassing was happening someone you followed would drop it at your doorstep, like a well-meaning Labrador bringing you a dead pigeon it had found. I just stopped wanting it, and then I stopped. (I do still check in with my DMs from time to time, mostly to see how my fellow mentally ill Mets fans are holding up; I can report exclusively that everyone seems more or less “fine” with the Adrian Houser/Tyrone Taylor trade.)
It’s hard to give myself too much credit for any of this; I just took a very obvious hint. The party crashed itself, and whatever is wrong with Elon Musk just kept getting worse, as such things invariably do for people like this who have problems like these. It does not help that Musk’s super-class of dipshit futurists is awakening as one, in its senescent and furious middle age, to its ancient and ugly native impulses. They’re mostly fascists, in the same ways that so many other previous boring industrialists discovered, late or early, that they actually believed the highest and most fundamental purpose of the state was to serve them.
If it is helpful to see and hear these powerful people as what they are, without the old euphemism and grandiose feigned altruism, they nevertheless remain very rich. They are, as far as I can see, not the future of anything, up to and including Weird Nerds You Would Avoid At A Party. They are the avatars of a present that is unsustainable not because it is too unjust—that sort of thing can last for a very long time—but because they themselves do not have the range, or focus, in large part because their experiences on social media were even more deranging than everyone else’s.
More than that, though, this is an old and uninteresting and unremarkable type of person to be. We are going on a century of knowing what this type of person is, and where they tend to go, and only the most sentimental or motivated observer could have projected much else onto this cheesy cadre of vibe-killers. Most people will realize that they do not want to be around people like this in the same unconscious way that they know not to eat a hot dog they see discarded in a puddle.
Still, it’s hard not to resent this, both because of who has won and because of the specific shape that their triumphant desecration has taken. Whatever Twitter was from one moment to the next, it felt surprising and open in ways that most things increasingly do not. It also made people go insane in variously lurid and grim ways, one of the most reliably lurid and grim of which was generating incentives for them to perform more strident and parodic versions of themselves; the incentive, hilariously, was a few numbers that either would or wouldn’t go up as a result. Everyone that has ever posted on there felt this pressure, but one of the site’s strengths was that it was broad enough that there were so many shapes and directions that this derangement could take. It wasn’t always great, either on balance or on the merits, but it felt vast.
It is unsurprising to anyone who ever loved the site that Musk’s decision to spring all the various varieties of Slimer contained in Twitter’s Ghostbusters Containment Device made it not more chaotic and lively but less. Even people with actual personalities and values were warped in some ways by being on Twitter; people who have neither, and whose whole identity is mashing away on the soundboard of hoary reactionary shit that Musk and his cohort find so thrilling, are subsumed entirely by those incentives. One of the less remarked-upon things about the goblins to whom Musk has more or less turned over the site is that, in addition to being creeps and bigots, they are extremely boring. Their discourse is indistinguishable from AI noise; they mostly just rephrase their buddies in increasingly dense code.
Any private platform would be free to ban these donkeys without apology, simply because of how uniquely and comprehensively they befoul every space that affords them entry. The usual adult libertarian lorem-ipsum pap about the marketplace of ideas that Musk’s cohort offer to justify their (repeated, unmistakable) service of this group does not really apply here, both because these ideas have been thoroughly defeated and discredited everywhere they have been debated (and, I guess, also at Nuremberg) and because these are not really ideas. There are not two sides to the question of who or what type of person is subhuman. It’s just a disgusting thing that a person could say if they couldn’t think of anything else.
At some point, you just have to take these people—the sociopathic aspiring gurus; the reactionary provocateurs with their realtor grins or hooded Garfield eyes; the powerfully repellent apostate academics; the various button-mashing mediocrities selling this sort of derangement by subscription—at their word. You wouldn’t ask a clown who has just fashioned a balloon animal for a child, “What did you really mean by that?” The pitchmen, supplicants, and actual committed creeps ascendant on Twitter are not just like Musk himself, but sell what someone as cretinous as Musk would like, and which most everyone else can identify from 40 paces as an absolute and instant pass.
"Musks (sic) goal with X is to create a group mind or collective consciousness where every person is part of that group mind or collective consciousness," one of the Krassenstein brothers, it does not matter which, tweeted the week before Christmas. "Think of it as a giant brain." At the risk of handing it to either of the co-authors of How The People Trumped Ronald Plump, I don’t really have a problem with that. That is indeed the kind of party that Musk’s Twitter is becoming, and as such it is a very easy one to leave—it is not so much a giant brain as a honking simulacrum of Musk’s own small mind. It was once more than that, which is what I miss about it, but it was never claustrophobic until the very end. None of these guys ever knows what the fuck they’re talking about, and wouldn’t tell the truth about it if they did. You wouldn’t share a brain with people like that any more readily than you’d split a cab with them.
- David Roth

https://defector.com/the-worst-of-2023

otm, I didn't stop using Twitter as a personal stand against Elon Musk or his fascist worldview, I did it because the site sucks now, particularly for this reason:

One of the less remarked-upon things about the goblins to whom Musk has more or less turned over the site is that, in addition to being creeps and bigots, they are extremely boring. Their discourse is indistinguishable from AI noise; they mostly just rephrase their buddies in increasingly dense code.

especially since Elon's Twitter now *boosts* these folks to the top. yes at first it was kind of infuriating to deal with people whining about M&Ms going "woke", but outrage generates engagement, now that it's just incredibly boring I really don't give a shit anymore

I think it was a bit of a personal stand for me but obviously the site had already become a nightmare even before he took over. But his moronic tweets and degree to which the site catered to him and promoted him already made me grumpy, and I didn't think it would get better with him in charge. Spoiler, it didn't.

For those of us who went from BBSes to IRC to message boards to Myspace to etc. etc. it doesn't seem that weird to just move on and go somewhere else. Of course, my livelihood does not depend on social media basically at all so that made it easy for me to split.

yeah elon or someone just like him being the main character of the day every day really killed the vibe, theyre so dull, we want bean dads

especially since Elon's Twitter now *boosts* these folks to the top.

Scrolling thru blue checks to get to anyone with anything useful to say is a serious drag, especially on a viral thread that's got hundreds or thousands of responses.

yeah ruining replies really fucked things up, youd think you couldnt make replies worse, but in fact you could, much worse

I tried blocking blue checks at first but there are just too many

the thing with replying is you don't want to be the guy to say the same thing someone else said, so you scroll a little to make sure no one else said it

the blue checks being at the top just makes you not reply. they'll never say what you'd want to say (and if they do, it makes you consider seppuku) but they just never stfu so you just close the app and walk away

just solved every global dispute, you're welcome 🥰 pic.twitter.com/odo8rNBSIi

— саша (@rystbelt) January 4, 2024

There’s so much more to do on X — no wonder new users are becoming heavy users 3 times faster than before. https://t.co/QQ9pA6moSr

— Linda Yaccarino (@lindayaX) January 5, 2024

nice! if they keep those growth rates up then everyone on earth will be on x by the summer.

is that 360 seconds at a time, or 360 seconds per day?

In the last week or so, I've been getting the same ad embedded after every third tweet, so obnoxious.

This morning, before I blocked it, it was for a reality cooking competition show from.... OnlyFans.

Bill Ackman is worth $4 billion dollars. He should be eating grilled baby panda on an island somewhere, unbothered. Instead he accidentally humiliates his wife because he's too online. This is still a powerful website.

— Osita Nwanevu (@OsitaNwanevu) January 7, 2024

reminds me of ryan broderick's diagnosis of twitter's significance:

The reason for its success, if you can argue that it was ever really successful, wasn’t that it was cooler than Facebook. It was because of its proximity to power. The reason it was so popular with activists, extremists, journalists, and shitposters was because what you posted there could actually affect culture. The thing that ties together pretty much everything that’s happened on Twitter since it launched in 2006 was the possibility that those who were not in power (or wanted more) could influence those who were.

he goes on to say:

And I don’t think it’s an accident that a deranged billionaire broke that, nor do I think it’s accident that we’re suddenly being offered smaller, insular platforms or an offshoot of a Meta app as replacements. The folks in charge clearly don’t want that to happen again.

it's happening again with this ackman stuff, but this feels like the first time in a long time.

lol https://www.ft.com/content/f1c31251-4c06-47e6-8495-106c2e4a6118

I think Twitter users were able to partially puncture that early 2010s Tedtalky bubble of people thinking they were sages because they were rich. Like, sure, everyone at your conferences will tell you you're a genius, but a bunch of overeducated nobodies will mock you mercilessly.

lol this one really sounds like bateman

"I did meditate when I was going through challenging times. I need to take it up again. Very powerful."

And I don’t think it’s an accident that a deranged billionaire broke that, nor do I think it’s accident that we’re suddenly being offered smaller, insular platforms or an offshoot of a Meta app as replacements. The folks in charge clearly don’t want that to happen again.

imo this is basically true tho its at least somewhat more subconscious and institutional than its is intentionally diabolical

lol this one really sounds like bateman

i got all of them right except that one!

Man when Financial Times is clowning you, it’s time to log off.

xp re: broderick’s “actually affect culture”

i am not sure whether this sounds true or quite deluded. like, the lures on the line were sure dancing faster tho