people would stop making fun of him on twitter if twitter didnt exist i guess
― lag∞n, Thursday, 6 April 2023 19:51 (one year ago) link
twitter is where comedy lives
― it's a new day in the international landscape (z_tbd), Thursday, 6 April 2023 19:53 (one year ago) link
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.
― treeship., Thursday, 6 April 2023 19:55 (one year ago) link
Just seems like a lunatic to me.
he believes a lot of very dumb things about twitter
― lag∞n, Thursday, 6 April 2023 19:57 (one year ago) link
He seems to believe in making it into a worthless asset.
― treeship., Thursday, 6 April 2023 19:58 (one year ago) link
thats certainly the result at least
― lag∞n, Thursday, 6 April 2023 19:59 (one year ago) link
I guess he thinks he is tapping into some kind of iconoclastic energy that reminds him of his early days at paypal.
― treeship., Thursday, 6 April 2023 20:05 (one year ago) link
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...
― but also fuck you (unperson), Thursday, 6 April 2023 20:07 (one year ago) link
Oopsy
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/06/technology/twitter-lawyer-resigns-christian-dowell.html
― Ned Raggett, Friday, 7 April 2023 02:02 (one year ago) link
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.
― a man often referred to in the news media as the Duke of Saxony (tipsy mothra), Friday, 7 April 2023 02:27 (one year ago) link
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.
― 𝔠𝔞𝔢𝔨 (caek), Friday, 7 April 2023 10:13 (one year ago) link
theyre not exclusive options
― micah, Friday, 7 April 2023 12:04 (one year ago) link
how soon we forget the lessons of the lasthttps://www.salon.com/2013/12/10/ayn_rand_loving_ceo_destroys_his_empire_partner/
― mh, Friday, 7 April 2023 13:13 (one year ago) link
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/
― 龜, Friday, 7 April 2023 15:41 (one year ago) link
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
― I am using your worlds, Friday, 7 April 2023 16:46 (one year ago) link
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
― lag∞n, Friday, 7 April 2023 17:32 (one year ago) link
Twitter has disabled retweets on this particular tweet. Wonder why👀 https://t.co/miVW6LiIIJ pic.twitter.com/y7pMxpVoBL— Jacob Rubashkin (@JacobRubashkin) April 7, 2023
― lag∞n, Friday, 7 April 2023 17:34 (one year ago) link
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
― Ned Raggett, Friday, 7 April 2023 22:03 (one year ago) link
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
― Elvis Telecom, Saturday, 8 April 2023 02:35 (one year ago) link
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.
― Tsar Bombadil (James Morrison), Saturday, 8 April 2023 12:03 (one year ago) link
at least for me on desktop, the doge appears to be gone.
― Judi Dench's Human Hand (methanietanner), Saturday, 8 April 2023 12:21 (one year ago) link
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
― lag∞n, Saturday, 8 April 2023 14:31 (one year ago) link
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
― lag∞n, Saturday, 8 April 2023 14:39 (one year ago) link
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
― frogbs, Saturday, 8 April 2023 15:09 (one year ago) link
its funny he prob thinks hes doing good since all the replies are like oh i see sir great job
― lag∞n, Saturday, 8 April 2023 15:18 (one year ago) link
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
― lag∞n, Saturday, 8 April 2023 15:19 (one year ago) link
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
― mookieproof, Saturday, 8 April 2023 15:21 (one year ago) link
my engagement is down (two likes) from what it rightfully should be (one million likes)
― lag∞n, Saturday, 8 April 2023 15:22 (one year ago) link
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
― mark s, Saturday, 8 April 2023 15:24 (one year ago) link
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
― mark s, Saturday, 8 April 2023 15:26 (one year ago) link
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 feelingsyou’re going to see the mean things anyway in news coverage
― mh, Saturday, 8 April 2023 15:28 (one year ago) link
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
― lag∞n, Saturday, 8 April 2023 15:32 (one year ago) link
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
― frogbs, Saturday, 8 April 2023 15:32 (one year ago) link
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
― lag∞n, Saturday, 8 April 2023 15:35 (one year ago) link
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 sickosthere 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
― mh, Saturday, 8 April 2023 15:37 (one year ago) link
he's a substack employee like the leprechaun is a lucky charms employee
― mark s, Saturday, 8 April 2023 15:39 (one year ago) link
the leprechaun writes better tho
lag∞n otm about the feedback insularity loopbranding 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
― mh, Saturday, 8 April 2023 15:39 (one year ago) link
at the tough school of ilx i learnt to give readers what they definitively do *not* want and im doing it again now
― mark s, Saturday, 8 April 2023 15:44 (one year ago) link
pic.twitter.com/LcP8PaAAdV— 𐑕𐑦𐑷 𐑜𐑧𐑴𐑻𐑞𐑒 𐑵𐑕𐑕᠅𐑓𐑹𐑦𐑤𐑞 𐑧𐑴𐑫𐑞𐑾🝮 (@ImpressedYou) April 8, 2023
― Ned Raggett, Saturday, 8 April 2023 15:45 (one year ago) link
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
― lag∞n, Saturday, 8 April 2023 15:48 (one year ago) link
you’re not supposed to use the api is what i’m hearing these days
― mh, Saturday, 8 April 2023 15:48 (one year ago) link
i will never stop using the api (unless make me pay for it) f the haters
― lag∞n, Saturday, 8 April 2023 15:53 (one year ago) link
also i will not update my c0de to the new system until the old one stops working which is hopefully never
― lag∞n, Saturday, 8 April 2023 15:54 (one year ago) link
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
― Trout Fishing in America (Neanderthal), Saturday, 8 April 2023 16:05 (one year ago) link
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
― mh, Saturday, 8 April 2023 17:04 (one year ago) link
you have nothing of importance to say, yet you want to attract more engagement? study the time-tested methods of trolls!
― more difficult than I look (Aimless), Saturday, 8 April 2023 17:19 (one year ago) link
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
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
― Trout Fishing in America (Neanderthal), Saturday, 8 April 2023 22:04 (one year ago) link