Twitter C/D

tipsy check upthread for a tweet calling the NY Times "the most robust news organization in the English speaking world" - there obv are ppl who care about the sanctity of these news orgs. conversely the poster you quote has made it clear they do NOT view Elon's action as "anything except another sign of what he's turning Twitter into".

liberals going to bat for like the sanctity of npr or nytimes or whatever is almost more cringe than elon

instead of 'liberals' how about we call them low-information leftists?

because they're not leftists...but maybe we don't need to have that convo on yet another thread

Well tbh I'm not sure that's an inaccurate description of the NYT depending on how you define "robust." Maybe the BBC is comparable? Hard to think of anyone else who can compete on sheer scale, almost nobody actually tries to cover the world journalistically.

But my problem as a journalist doesn't have to do with "don't trash the NYT and NPR," it has to do with why. The things Musk hates about legacy media aren't all of the things legacy media does badly, it's the times they actually do journalism well. He hates journalism. He hates the idea that his ideas and diktats about the world (and himself) can be challenged by facts and data. I just think it's important to keep the streams separate. He's not attacking the NYT and NPR for their real-world flaws, he's attacking them as avatars of an entire approach to data and information.

low info leftists believe... very different things lol

Well yes as I said no one is under the illusion that this is not the case, everyone itt knows what Musk is.

xpost

i'm going to bow out of this convo. i agree with everyone. but also it's the same deal of certain people not really caring where i'm coming from and wanting to be right more than anything. "the currency of otm." i'd suggest to some they might benefit from not listening to only themselves so much but that would be demonstrably foolish.

xp yes to daniel

I mean, I've worked in and around journalism for 30 years. Pretty much my life's work! I recognize its many flaws as a practice, both historically and contemporaneously. But I still think a free press is net plus, society-wise, and attacks on the free press from people like DeSantis or Musk are dangerous no matter how flawed the specific institutions they're attacking are. They don't give one single shit about leftie criticisms of centrist media, they just hate the free press full stop.

now doing all my social media posting in a https://wavelength.app/ group chat with just me and the ai bot.

Ew

jfc

Elon Musk, in a remarkable show of maturity, has removed the "w" from Twitter's logo outside their San Francisco HQ. The company now reads as "Titter" pic.twitter.com/0i914uEygX

— LeGate🤠 (@williamlegate) April 6, 2023

one of America's greatest minds

interesting

no elon

For a guy who has racked up so many recent Ls, it is crazy that he is just getting rid of the only W he had

— Matt McGillvray (he/him) (@MattMcGillvray) April 6, 2023

You took out the W cause the W ain’t in you

Is there any benefit to him for destroying twitter? I have never seen a CEO treat a brand so carelessly.

people would stop making fun of him on twitter if twitter didnt exist i guess

twitter is where comedy lives

Like the way he changed the verified system is still mystifying to me. He just made it impossible to sort out real tweets from prominent accounts from imposters, rendering the site less usable.

Just seems like a lunatic to me.

he believes a lot of very dumb things about twitter

He seems to believe in making it into a worthless asset.

thats certainly the result at least

I guess he thinks he is tapping into some kind of iconoclastic energy that reminds him of his early days at paypal.

And now that Substack has come out with its own Twitter-esque thing ("Substack Notes"), you can no longer embed tweets in Substack newsletters.

Wait till he finds out how he's spoken of here...

Oopsy

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/06/technology/twitter-lawyer-resigns-christian-dowell.html

I don't think Musk actually has or has ever had a plan for Twitter. But I also think that him degrading its value as a medium for independent news and information serves his purposes even if it's kind of by accident, or maybe instinct is a better word.

the impression i got when he did an all hands was that he held not just current leadership but the premise of twitter.com in total contempt. either that or he is literally slow-witted. those seemed like the only two possibilities.

theyre not exclusive options

how soon we forget the lessons of the last

https://www.salon.com/2013/12/10/ayn_rand_loving_ceo_destroys_his_empire_partner/

banning substack on twitter is lol for many reasons but my favorite is that bari weiss and matt taibi are in the top 25 most paid substack writers https://pressgazette.co.uk/newsletters/highest-earning-substacks/

It’s been shown that the algorithm was making posts about Ukraine less visible so there’s an argument Musk is not really concerned with profitability if he can help his financiers push their agendas. He probably gets financially compensated in other ways

We're investigating reports that Twitter embeds and authentication no longer work on Substack. We are actively trying to resolve this and will share updates as additional information becomes available.

— Substack (@SubstackInc) April 6, 2023

Twitter has disabled retweets on this particular tweet. Wonder why👀 https://t.co/miVW6LiIIJ pic.twitter.com/y7pMxpVoBL

— Jacob Rubashkin (@JacobRubashkin) April 7, 2023

Ah yes

oh god here we go pic.twitter.com/ycCKdDHh0X

— kilgore trout, blue check free since 2003 (@KT_So_It_Goes) April 7, 2023

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