Twitter C/D

It's another one of those places that has a fair share of idolatry set up toward its founder (name, cardboard cutouts, etc.)

Founders are so cool

Lol just today noticed a display at Dick’s Sporting Goods about the actual Dick and his brother.

Was the brother's name anything other than DICK?

I just saw a new Freddy's the other day, but it's not close enough to my house to just run by it now and then. It would have to be a destination drive.

the 25k delivery guy came back and said most of it was from feeding multiple people at work which makes sense but was not what he was originally implying

Was the brother's name anything other than DICK?

It was but I didn't linger at the display long enough to remember it or to understand how and why Dick was the one who got to put his name on it. Beyond the obvious fact that he's a Dick.

Leaving out the important information that Dick’s full name was Dick Stack

its really funny to me that on every single web page or app a single "X" denotes "click here to close" whereas on Twitter it now directs you to the home page

like I was on it and couldn't figure out where the home button was because 20 years of internet usage has conditioned me to look past the big X

same esp since I use dark mode on everything, my eyes just breeze past the white-x-on-black-icon on my bookmarks bar

it's good though, it means I'm not always clicking on it

I am on a cheap Huawei phone and just realised that the old twitter logo should've been replaced by now (?)

Libertarian Party of New Hampshire put up this post which AFAICT is straight-up encouraging a spree shooting massacre in congress

https://i.postimg.cc/63z9xh4D/Screenshot-20230814-162858.jpg

it's still up there 17 hours later, I do have to wonder how many seconds it would be up if it were a left winger posting the same and how quickly the feds would be round their house.

Twitter/X is throttling link clicks to the @nytimes website by causing a 5 second delay during the redirect. pic.twitter.com/HCTN99McNy

— Max Woolf (@minimaxir) August 15, 2023

I love the history of petty bullshit like this, like the fact that Instagram links have never created a nice image "card" in tweets purely because they are owned by Facebook

it's like the guelphs and the ghibbelines, in fact it probably *is* them [ /lyndon larouche ]

TweetDeck is dead for non-payers now.

Seriously, how can the destruction of this platform be anything but intentional?

Booooooo, they finally turned off my TweetDeck. Well, whatever, I'll post less.

Apparently he is now floating getting rid of block and only having mute. Terrible idea.

Why do this??

Free speech!

Found myself the other day thinking Twitter, is that still there? Probably a death-knell when non-users start wondering if your business even exists any more!

That's how I think about Threads.

Apart from all the other dumb reasons to rebrand Twitter as X, I feel like it's frayed whatever lingering attachment I have to the app. Twitter was a place where I used to have fun, who knows what the fuck X is.

I accidentally retweeted something the other day and found I couldn’t undo retweet. Don’t know if it’s just an issue with my phone app but I can’t be bothered to log in on desktop to check - either way, it’s just one more thing that no longer works on this stupid site

i open threads multiple times a day and can't say it's a very engaging experience, but I should maybe hunt down more people to follow. problem is I liked a lot of the people I followed on Twitter and it doesn't seem that most of them have migrated elsewhere.

Elon Musk has said large block lists have been a resource drain for Twitter, because they – for some reason – significantly increase their server costs.

Elon has asked that you don’t block people in an effort to save Twitter expenses. If you block lots of ppl, it costs Musk $$$

— LeGate (@williamlegate) March 9, 2023

I'm still kinda using fka twitter out of habit, because I'm generally not seeing a lot of garbage (I really only follow musicians), and because at least a few of the regular posters that I follow are still using it. Kinda wish I could fully quit it out of principle but it's not totally unusable for me yet.

No interest in Threads, bluesky seems fine in concept but right now there's basically nothing of interest there.

What are you talking about, I'm there, ergo it is of interest uh wait hold on.

I heard a lot of people are calling it ex now

I could only talk to these people if irony were dripping off of these xs

jfc the contract between what's in my "following" feed and the "For you" one is insane! like why would any algorithm feed me this crap?

*Contrast not contract

there's an algorithmic list of things it thinks you like. on mobile it's under...

Settings and Support > Settings and Privacy > Privacy and Safety > Content you see > Interests

and is often laughably inaccurate. i find going through that once in a while helps.

still gives me a fuckton of articles about Arsenal though. just them, no other teams.

admittedly I still go on every now and then because some genuinely amusing things are happening, like right now a bunch of people are getting themselves banned by claiming the "free speech absolutist" Babylon Bee guy is a pedophile and human trafficker. idk the "dying forums" vibe is kinda fun

but yeah it's just unusable now, the timeline's all fucked up and the recommendation algo is now shit. as I've said Twitter's one biggest strength I thought was for following sports, now it's real shitty at that. like something that happened in the 3rd inning will pop up on my timeline, then I'll put the game on and find it's already in the 7th. you click on too many Brewers vs. Orioles updates and suddenly it thinks you're a fan of both teams and shows you a bunch of Orioles updaets even weeks later. feel like old Twitter actually figured this stuff out but it just seems to get notably worse here every week.

lol Those interests are so specific.

Am I interested in Sanda Bullock? Not really.
Am I interested in ramen? I don't know. Maybe?

i have four different The Walking Dead entries

Top tip! Things I’m supposed to be interested in beginning with H: Handstands, Hard Rock,Hip-Hop, His Dark Materials, Hungarian Grand Prix, Holby City, Historic Drama and Horror films.

May need a bit of culling.

Confirmed: Yes, Apple and Google require social media apps to have a block feature:

From Apple App Store guidelines:
"The ability to block abusive users from the service."

So, X/Twitter should not be able to remove the block feature.

— scott budman (@scottbudman) August 18, 2023

Yet another thing that *should* get dialled back.

That "server costs" story seems like utter bullshit.

A lot of ppl saying their goodbyes tho'

That "server costs" story seems like utter bullshit.

My immediate impression of that story was that it was obviously designed to get X users to use the block feature even more extensively, because who in their right mind would respond positively to a plea to help one of the world's richest humans 'limit his server costs' by voluntarily denying themselves the ability to block abusive or annoying content?

I think some ex-Twitter employees have confirmed this is the case actually, I think the way block lists are set up they actually do have to make a bunch of server calls so apparently users with large block lists do use a lot of resources. my impression was it's just old code that needs to be refactored, sadly Elon fired everyone

yeah seems like particularly paired with the algo feed blocklists cld have a lot of overhead

apparently users with large block lists do use a lot of resources

could easily be true; the crazy bullshit part is responding to an internal management issue by making a public plea for users to help out the poor multi-billionaire save a few million in annual costs

users with large block lists are basically killing the planet is what I hear

I mean I'm a web dev myself and can think of some similar issues in our system, not uncommon for large lists of things to have to be iterated over and potentially have to make a database call. and yes refactoring this shit can take forever. that is why you don't mind being overstaffed as a software company, because this shit can easily cascade and one bad process can fuck with so much on the other end, in fact you can see this happening right now with Twitter in real time

Perhaps he'll discover that people who post are using too many resources, and shut down posting altogether.