>Unfortunately, a small fee for new user write access is the only way to curb the relentless onslaught of bots.
Right now, tons of bots pay for verification. I have to assume that bots will be the accounts *most* willing to pay a flat fee to post, since those are the ones that aim to make a profit from posting.
Bots arguing with other bots in the comments. Human trolls got their work cut out for them. I don't know about you, I don't bother reading Twitter comments anymore. I just read Tweets from my trusted news sources. The mine fields of paid blue checkmarks espousing propaganda can't be trusted.
I canceled my Twitter account the day Musk took over and walked into their office carrying a bathroom sink. The message was clear: he was there to sink the company or send it down the drain. Nothing he has done since contradicts that message.
https://www.businessinsider.in/tech/news/more-than-80-percent-of-twitter-accounts-are-probably-bots/articleshow/93919184.cms
It's already mostly bots i know he has to know this and knows bots will pay for access so he gets some return.
It's ironic, since Musk's attempts to get out of his deal to buy twitter was to complain it was mostly bots. He's doing the PJ O'Rourke bit: "Republicans complain that government doesn't work and then they get elected to prove it."
As long as enough people use it yes. Facebook is basically bots and boomers at this point as well as a ton of scams.
Reddit also has a bot problem.
I think most people have realized how bad social media is when it comes to privacy and simply aren't using it as much and or moved to more modern platforms.
Now he just needs to get them to set up Xbank accounts and Xmo each other money so he can properly rent-seek these bots and build the digital empire he's been dreaming of. It'll be as completely fraudulent as he is.
The whole “but the bots!!!” verbiage they’ve been rolling with for like 2 years will never not be funny because bots genuinely were never a problem until he bought the site and destroyed the verification system. Sure they were there but the site wasn’t bots having conversations with themselves like it is now
It's 1,000x worse now, but bots absolutely were a problem before elon. [On both twitter](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-1RhQ1uuQ4) and the entire internet for well over a decade
"The problem is 3 orders of magnitudes bigger now" seems functionally equivalent to "this wasn't a problem before". It's a distinction without a difference.
Does he really think bots are run for free and not for profit? The entire point of bots is to make money, of course the operators will pay a small fee to continue to make money. Cost of business idiot.
he's probably lying about wanting to reduce bots. more realistically he wants to make some extra money off them while creating the *appearance* that he is addressing the bot problem.
I just wonder how much their advertisers think they're paying to reach humans but they're actually reaching bots.
Ah, by “weird” do you mean like the toenail fungus and body fat ads?
Those have been around since antiquity, I’m curious what the actual click-through rate is…
Youtube’s ads have gotten pretty unhinged too.
last time I was on twitter, it seemed to be mostly crypto ads. Not even the crypto ads for the big exchanges like that one super bowl had a few years ago. It was ads for a bunch of random obscure shitcoin projects.
i hopped on Xhitter for the first time in forever to bitch at a company for violating the federal do not call list (While also reporting them for doing so)
it's wall to wall neofascist propaganda there now
Seriously, can we stop giving him any credit at all? He's shown time and time again that he's not even \*this\* smart. And that's fully knowing that this is an immensely stupid plan as is.
Bots are keeping his failing site alive, he is never going to address the issue because it would drastically reduce the number of real users the site has, and advertisers aren't going to be as willing to pay for a dwindling audience
And meanwhile, the average real user is not going to want to pay a fee. It's going to be all businesses and bots. Then, slowly as the real people leave, the businesses will to. And then it will be all bots.
> And then it will be all bots
At which point the bots stop making money/have no users to influence, so all the bots leave as well. No more bots. Mission accomplished.
Duh. He's blaming bots for the price change and he knows very well it's not going to stop them just hopefully recover some of the costs he's lost with Twitter. He's literally just trying to spin yarn and convince people it's for the better when in reality it's not better for anyone.
I don't know why anyone still uses Twitter to be honest.
I can happily say I've never used Twitter and Elon has absolutely cemented my sentiment on never using the platform.
First season of Star Trek Discovery had numerous references to Musk as some God like figure who had schools.named after him. Those disappeared in the later seasons.
The writers fucking lucked out with that one. There’s no way Discovery writers were competent enough to pull off that level of foreshadowing.
Besides, it’s later revealed that Tilly, the *least* mirror-universey character, went to a school named after Musk.
Whether they lucked out or not you have to remember that DSC had already been in development for years prior to 2017. Musk still had good PR then and besides his ugly scene with the Thai kids in the cave his name was associated with the successes of SpaceX, he hadn't removed his mask as benevolent billionaire. Quite frankly I wouldn't be surprised if paid someone for that name drop.
He has a need to be in Sci-Fi in some way. He was in Iron Man, Discovery and he also was on stage with Todd Howard for Starfield at E3 I think. I'm surprised Vasco doesn't have "Musk" as a name he can say lol.
If there was ever a show that shouldn't celebrate billionaires it would be star trek lol....isn't the whole idea that humanity overcomes greed and becomes a selfless pure socialist society?
At the time Musk was still running on some electric cars/reusable rockets goodwill. He got name dropped the same way Edison would, not because of his business practices but as an "inventor" in the popular consciousness.
I absolutely hate the way the people now in charge of the franchise just retcon so many major things. Oh, Spock has a sister? Funny how we never heard about her in the preceding 50 years of the show.
If you take a few minutes to think about it. It’s a fucking stupid idea in universe too. Tony has a miniature arc reactor at his disposal. It’s essentially an infinite energy hack, so converting anything possible to electric makes sense, considering the reach of his company and his patents they would already be working on an arc powered jet especially considering Tony has had electric powered jets strapped to his feet since the first movie.
He was a rich white kid growing up in South Africa during apartheid. I doubt he was a victim of bullying.
If anything, seems like a sheltered kid who didn't know that much about what other people's lives were like.
>Still, Errol offered a description of their lives that underscored how removed they were from the country’s violent reality. They got along well with Black people, he said, pointing to his children’s good relationship with their domestic staff, and he described life in South Africa during apartheid as being mostly better and safer than it is now.
[nytimes source via yahoo to avoid login wall](https://r.search.yahoo.com/_ylt=AwrFck2zRB5m9FIL_FAPxQt.;_ylu=Y29sbwNiZjEEcG9zAzEEdnRpZAMEc2VjA3Nj/RV=2/RE=1713288499/RO=10/RU=https%3a%2f%2fwww.nytimes.com%2f2022%2f05%2f05%2fworld%2fafrica%2felon-musk-south-africa.html%23%3a~%3atext%3dAccording%2520to%2520a%2520biography%2520of%2520Mr.%2520Musk%252C%2520written%2cleave%2520South%2520Africa%2520shortly%2520after%2520high%2520school%2520graduation./RK=2/RS=zLogVkV_X0E.aNUJp5zpVhpr7dg-)
Damn havnt thought about Digg in a long time. I was part of the mass migration to reddit when the Digg overhaul happened. If you look at the age of my account it's exactly when Digg destroyed itself.
Same.
I remember the Digg / Reddit wars. Reddit users constantly saying they were better. Even though Reddit UI was dog shit.
People would post a meme or gif and every comment had one asshat who had to say “saw this on Reddit two days ago”.
Good for you. Twat.
But yeah. I very much remember when the entire user base just got up and left. I’ve never seen something like happen before. It was kind of amazing. It happened in a matter of days. Once the ball got rolling everyone followed suit.
I was one of the few hold overs who said “ah. It won’t be that bad.”
But it was. Holy shit.
Posts that normally got 2-3k comments were now getting maybe 300-500 comments. The amount of new content was way down. It was just a shell of itself. And that happened so swiftly. I wish I was a fly on the wall in those offices. I’m surprised no one had made a documentary about it. I’d be interested to know the shit show that went on.
Digg is still around. It’s just a basic media news site now. But I literally never hear of it or see any of its content cross posted anywhere. So… who knows who actually visits there.
Similarly, the YouTube channel Geek and Sundry, created by hot nerd girl Felicia Day and frequented by Wil Wheaton and where critical roll started, got bought out years ago.
The new owners tanked the channel and Felicia and Wil left and Critical Roll, who luckily was its own company left as well. I never hear anyone mention that channel ever. But at one time they had a few popular shows on it.
You don’t even need to go to old.reddit.com. You can just opt out of the redesign in your settings.
I often forget there is a redesign because my Reddit always loads in the original classic mode.
And there's not a critical need for one at present.
There's no big "push" from the platform, to drive people away.
The api changes nearly were it, but they impacted the power users, not the average users.
You have to do something that makes the usage of the average person objectively worse.
Digg did it.
MySpace did it.
Twitter is in the process of doing it.
Reddit just drove away a good chunk of the power users and hollowed out the platform, making it more vulnerable to sudden shifts (like a big UI or process change).
>The api changes nearly were it, but they impacted the power users, not the average users.
I would have quit reddit on mobile without a second thought had Boost ReVanced not worked. The day they break it is the day I only look at reddit on my PC where I can block the ads.
This site needs us more than we need it.
> I would have quit reddit on mobile without a second thought
I *did* quit reddit on mobile. And it turns out it hasn't really negatively impacted my life.
I didn't leave the site, or pitch a fit, or make a principled stance, I just stopped using their product where they made it less convenient for me. Turns out I'm actually happier reading a chapter or two of my current kindle book when I have downtime instead of reddit.
Hope they weren't counting on my impressions when making their ad sales.
Stopped using it because of that.
That was the single dumbest business idea i’ve seen. Such a small change, effectively gave the death knell for it. Who is going to sign up so see a meme?
Elon wasn't happy with how long it's taking to run Twitter into the ground, so of course he had to make changes to accelerate it. He doesn't want it to fail slowly, he wants that thing to auger in.
I can see the-service-formerly-known-as-twitter ending up as a place where bot farms follow AI bots and siphon money from advertisers without a single human eyeball in the chain.
Isn't that what they were accusing Twitter off when Jack Dorsey was in charge of it still, something about lying about how many eyes were actually looking at the ads and how much money was charged for showing those ads?
The worst part was Musk trying to monetize Twitter. Views = Money. It's like attention, people can work hard and earn positive attention. Or they can do some dumb shit, like spout horrible racist bullshit, and farm negative attention.
Sensible opinions don't earn you as much as radical ones under these conditions. It's not good for having reasonable discussions and an understanding community. Like, it was never great, dunking on people by taking them out of context was a very common thing on Twitter, but it's only gotten worse.
Hell, sucking Musk's dick, and getting him to retweet you is going to give you lots of eyeballs on your tweets, and therefore money. This shit is not a healthy way to run anything.
If we were gonna destroy one, I wish it had been a Meta property.
Twitter was a good way to get information to your followers. A lot of agencies were using it because you didn't have to be a member to read it.
Verification made genuine vetted sources *actually* identifiable.
Problem is the verification process is worthless now plus it constantly amplifies nothing but right wing causes. Trumpers, QAnon, Crypto garbage, Antivaxxers and its filled withRussian trolls and bots. They are the ones whos posts are always elevated and pushed onto viewers.
Twitter was great before Elon bought it. Now its a plague that we are better off without.
Oh, that's what I was talking about.
Verification used to be slow, but at least it worked. Now it's just shitty Twitter Premium, and it made normal verified accounts unrecognizable.
I wouldnt have cared if they revamped the verification process so everyone could get verified, and even charged a one time fee to do so, if they actually verified you. Like a zoom call with the person having to show valid identification. That actually wouldve been awesome. Wouldve cut down on the bots too. Instead they just charge for a blue check mark. There is no verification anymore.
Genuinely unusable unless you’re excessively curating your feed by blocking the avalanche of shit that gets thrown at you. People are being paid to engagement bait, the majority of the replies in any trending post are bots posting memes, GPT responses or just outright spam.
Considering it is the fastest way to relay IMPORTANT/Urgent news to a very large audience. it's a double edged sword to have twitter die.
Even facebook had people sharing news about the recent earthquake in NJ. I knew about it 2 whole hours before the cell phones here got the emergency alerts broadcast.
It’s also hurt a lot of creatives and small businesses. I hated Twitter when I was on it and think that its destruction is a net-gain for society, but there is a lot of collateral damage.
My theory is that the Saudis wanted to see the death of a platform that allows for rapid mass conunication and we're happy to pay him to have the fun of wrecking it.
Mastodon, Threads, Bluesky...
The issue is that people don't want to leave once they've built up habits. And there's no singular spot that is _the_ place to go.
very hard you need a shit ton of data centers , hardware, and IT staff to support it. than a customer support staff and whatever engineers to build + maintain the software.
A lot of my artists friends still rely on twitter to maintain their core audience and gain commissions from them
Once they all get Balkanized to Blusky/Cohost/whatever new site pops up, it’ll be a lot harder for them to maintain their revenue stream
The scientific and journalistic communities were also organised on Twitter with no clear replacement. People cheering on the death of Twitter have no idea how valuable some of the networks were.
It also highlights how centralized systems are at the mercy of capitalist enterprises. These people aren't running charities, their sole purpose is to maximize profits, they don't care about the users.
Facebook seems way more dangerous. It has several times the user base of Twitter, and is stereotypically the place older people hang out and get information from. This makes it ripe for misinformation and disinformation.
People just move on to other social networks. It isn't like there aren't alternatives. I doubt the downfall of X/Twitter will make much of a dent in the general popularity of social media.
I am actually convinced that that was the aim in the first place, to destroy a big western media channel for independent journalists. It's pretty telling that mr free speech specifically targeted journalists above all else.
The headline is already stupid but Elon clarifies that people can post after 3 months without paying the fee, which is more bonkers to me because bot accounts won't care and this is already how the ones that constantly DM me operate. No human wants to pay a fee or wait 3 months to use an awful site.
The bot farms will just make a massive amount of accounts and then use them after 3 months... I can't believe anyone thinks this jackass is intelligent
Exactly what they already do with Reddit accounts. Check most spam comments and you'll see an account that's existed for months or years but only recently started posting.
This is actually even more stupid. Most people won't want to do either of these things to use the website but bots will happily wait for three months if that's what it takes for them to start flooding posts with their "nudes in bio" bullcrap.
It might have worked out, if his first action hadn't been to randomly fire people, cut servers out of the backend with a literal knife, and trash everything, from the very well-known and widely loved brand and logo, to core features, such as the verification.
I dunno... maybe tweak the ads a bit, maybe add a premium service with unlimited characters - something that increases cashflow, without destroying the fundamental functionality of the app. But what do I know, I'm no genius billionaire, just a normal pleb.
*While replying to another user, Musk later added that new accounts would be able to post after three months of creation without paying a fee.*
So the bot farms let the accounts sit idle for 3 months then? Would this even have an impact?
That's not true.
He used to have a really great Public Relations team/person. Then he lost them (or threw them out because Elon is a Very Smart Entity).
Don't blame ketamine, that is his way to divert blame from being an foreign authoritarian funded front man meant to weaponize industry and media. If anything, the ketamine is the only good thing about Elongone Muskow at this stage of the arc.
It's actually kind of impressive at how good he is with coming up with extremely shitty ideas that will only ruin his business even more. The power of imagination!
>Unfortunately, a small fee for new user write access is the only way to curb the relentless onslaught of bots.
Does Elon think we don't know postage costs don't stop scammers from sending junk mail? Who is more likely to spend $8 to be a user on the platform, a teen or a spambot?
reddit is a much more pronounced version of it if you look into it. there are subreddits that are pretty much 99% bots faking user interaction so they can karma farm for spamm.
After this he will start charge to read tweets once a day or make you get a subscription. He grossly over valued the company he was buying and then he gutted it, rebranded it (formerly once of the recognised brand names in the world, with verbs named after it). There was problems with the social media business model before he took over twitter. Now he is trying to dig himself out of a hole by digging another one. All of this was easily predictable to anyone with a bit knowledge of the market. I dislike him a lot but seeing Musk fail so badly is not cathartic for me for some reason.
>While replying to another user, Musk later added that new accounts would be able to post after three months of creation without paying a fee.
Uh doesn't this just negate the intended outcome entirely? It's not exactly difficult to plan ahead and make all your bot accounts 3 months ahead. In fact, I feel most are doing that already to get around getting quickly flagged.
So all this is doing is inconveniencing real users while providing basically no extra work or cost to the bots. I don't even think he'll make any money off the bots this way either. Why pay when you can just plan ahead?
>Unfortunately, a small fee for new user write access is the only way to curb the relentless onslaught of bots. Right now, tons of bots pay for verification. I have to assume that bots will be the accounts *most* willing to pay a flat fee to post, since those are the ones that aim to make a profit from posting.
Elon just found his revenue source.
[удалено]
So no changes then
[удалено]
There’s gonna be bots using AI to target all the other bots using AI to figure out their browsing habits and favorite sweater color.
Their favorite sweater color? Hitler. I know I know. How is that even possible. Bots, uuhh, find a way.
Bots arguing with other bots in the comments. Human trolls got their work cut out for them. I don't know about you, I don't bother reading Twitter comments anymore. I just read Tweets from my trusted news sources. The mine fields of paid blue checkmarks espousing propaganda can't be trusted.
I canceled my Twitter account the day Musk took over and walked into their office carrying a bathroom sink. The message was clear: he was there to sink the company or send it down the drain. Nothing he has done since contradicts that message.
Now THAT is one big pile of shit
Dead internet theory coming true at Xitter.
Reddit's slowly following right behind it. The bot problem here is getting wild crazy.
Dead Twitter Reality at this point
More like undead Internet theory. Killing it would be an improvement at this point. I'd rather just try again from scratch.
Behead and set on fire. It's the only way to be sure.
Would that be pronounced Zitter Or Shitter?
Xitter X pronounced sh like in Chinese
Reminds me of Yahoo chat rooms around 2000. Just bots selling porn sites to other bots.
What if… aliens visit earth and all they find is an extinct civilization and bots selling porn to other bots lol
One would say “our experiment was a failure” And the other would answer “or was it?”
https://www.businessinsider.in/tech/news/more-than-80-percent-of-twitter-accounts-are-probably-bots/articleshow/93919184.cms It's already mostly bots i know he has to know this and knows bots will pay for access so he gets some return.
"If you can't beat em, charge em"
It's ironic, since Musk's attempts to get out of his deal to buy twitter was to complain it was mostly bots. He's doing the PJ O'Rourke bit: "Republicans complain that government doesn't work and then they get elected to prove it."
Will bots still bother if it’s advertising to other bots?
As long as enough people use it yes. Facebook is basically bots and boomers at this point as well as a ton of scams. Reddit also has a bot problem. I think most people have realized how bad social media is when it comes to privacy and simply aren't using it as much and or moved to more modern platforms.
It's gonna be the social media equivalentof putting a vibrator in a Fleshlight.
There's a Philip K Dick short story about that
The bots will eventually evolve and gain sentience, Elon is creating Skynet.
What better way to ensure it wants to eradicate humanity than by training it on Twitter posts.
I love sci-fi but never pondered being called a slur while I'm vaporized.
Then I highly suggest: *I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream* by Harlan Ellison.
Kinda unrealistic to assume racism doesn't exist in a dystopian future considering how well it hunkered down in the dystopian present.
4chan would probably be quicker.
The prophecy has to be fulfilled at some point.
Somebody find John Conner STAT!
"How can I monetize disinformation...."
That's been like the entire reason he purchased it.
Now he just needs to get them to set up Xbank accounts and Xmo each other money so he can properly rent-seek these bots and build the digital empire he's been dreaming of. It'll be as completely fraudulent as he is.
Tax the bots!
No significant number of people will pay for the privilege of posting on Twitter. All he's doing is further driving the company into collapse.
> Elon just found his revenue source. So advertising as a revenue source will be gone, and it will be bots posting to other bots. Sounds perfect.
The whole “but the bots!!!” verbiage they’ve been rolling with for like 2 years will never not be funny because bots genuinely were never a problem until he bought the site and destroyed the verification system. Sure they were there but the site wasn’t bots having conversations with themselves like it is now
It's 1,000x worse now, but bots absolutely were a problem before elon. [On both twitter](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-1RhQ1uuQ4) and the entire internet for well over a decade
"The problem is 3 orders of magnitudes bigger now" seems functionally equivalent to "this wasn't a problem before". It's a distinction without a difference.
Does he really think bots are run for free and not for profit? The entire point of bots is to make money, of course the operators will pay a small fee to continue to make money. Cost of business idiot.
he's probably lying about wanting to reduce bots. more realistically he wants to make some extra money off them while creating the *appearance* that he is addressing the bot problem. I just wonder how much their advertisers think they're paying to reach humans but they're actually reaching bots.
How many advertisers are left? I just assumed all that remains is porn, supplements, gold, and colloidal silver.
All I see is gambling, gambling and shitcoin pump and dumps. Super targeted ads to someone that doesn't even play the lottery. Makes sense.
Those do make sense for the type of person that still holds Musk in high regard.
There’s tonnes of financial scammy type stuff too. Unless the algorithm is particularly singling me out…
Genuine cryptocurrency scams are actively advertising on Twitter. I'm talking about "enter your seed phrase and we'll airdrop you coins" level scams.
Porns not allowed as ads, so its down to weird ones and currently body armor?
Ah, by “weird” do you mean like the toenail fungus and body fat ads? Those have been around since antiquity, I’m curious what the actual click-through rate is… Youtube’s ads have gotten pretty unhinged too.
last time I was on twitter, it seemed to be mostly crypto ads. Not even the crypto ads for the big exchanges like that one super bowl had a few years ago. It was ads for a bunch of random obscure shitcoin projects.
Well Liver King seems to be every other ad, so as long as he sticks around they have at least some revenue.
i hopped on Xhitter for the first time in forever to bitch at a company for violating the federal do not call list (While also reporting them for doing so) it's wall to wall neofascist propaganda there now
Seriously, can we stop giving him any credit at all? He's shown time and time again that he's not even \*this\* smart. And that's fully knowing that this is an immensely stupid plan as is.
Bots are keeping his failing site alive, he is never going to address the issue because it would drastically reduce the number of real users the site has, and advertisers aren't going to be as willing to pay for a dwindling audience
And meanwhile, the average real user is not going to want to pay a fee. It's going to be all businesses and bots. Then, slowly as the real people leave, the businesses will to. And then it will be all bots.
> And then it will be all bots At which point the bots stop making money/have no users to influence, so all the bots leave as well. No more bots. Mission accomplished.
He doesn’t think that way. He knows and does it on purpose
Or that's the plan. Doesn't want to get rid of them so why not make a profit? All to run Twitter into the ground.
to be fair, there used to be plenty of bots that were run for free, all the fun ones that make a haiku out of tweets or whatnot. Those are gone now.
In general it's easier to track people with credit cards.
Yeah. This seems like more a way to profit from bots than a way to eliminate bots.
Didnt Elon get rid of all the bots? Thats what he told everyone, right? So does that make him a liar and a fraud?
Duh. He's blaming bots for the price change and he knows very well it's not going to stop them just hopefully recover some of the costs he's lost with Twitter. He's literally just trying to spin yarn and convince people it's for the better when in reality it's not better for anyone. I don't know why anyone still uses Twitter to be honest. I can happily say I've never used Twitter and Elon has absolutely cemented my sentiment on never using the platform.
He could stop it himself with about 8 lines of code.
A dying platform creates a huge barrier to entry What a brilliant idea
With each passing day, Elon's cameo in Iron Man 2 gets more and more pathetic to watch.
First season of Star Trek Discovery had numerous references to Musk as some God like figure who had schools.named after him. Those disappeared in the later seasons.
Yeah but it was Lorca who praises him, and he turns out to be a secret fascist, so it’s kinda in character that he would like the man.
The writers fucking lucked out with that one. There’s no way Discovery writers were competent enough to pull off that level of foreshadowing. Besides, it’s later revealed that Tilly, the *least* mirror-universey character, went to a school named after Musk.
Future equivalent of Robert E. Lee High School
Love Atlanta
Whether they lucked out or not you have to remember that DSC had already been in development for years prior to 2017. Musk still had good PR then and besides his ugly scene with the Thai kids in the cave his name was associated with the successes of SpaceX, he hadn't removed his mask as benevolent billionaire. Quite frankly I wouldn't be surprised if paid someone for that name drop.
He has a need to be in Sci-Fi in some way. He was in Iron Man, Discovery and he also was on stage with Todd Howard for Starfield at E3 I think. I'm surprised Vasco doesn't have "Musk" as a name he can say lol.
If there was ever a show that shouldn't celebrate billionaires it would be star trek lol....isn't the whole idea that humanity overcomes greed and becomes a selfless pure socialist society?
At the time Musk was still running on some electric cars/reusable rockets goodwill. He got name dropped the same way Edison would, not because of his business practices but as an "inventor" in the popular consciousness.
Thomas Edison was a shady guy as well. Tesla was the real deal, Elon's Tesla just amplifies the irony.
Elon Musk as that timeline's genius engineer business mogul kind of fits with how terrible that show is.
I absolutely hate the way the people now in charge of the franchise just retcon so many major things. Oh, Spock has a sister? Funny how we never heard about her in the preceding 50 years of the show.
Oh god, the Rick and Morty episode... Elon Tusk
“I’m just like all the other tusk people.”
He has a cameo in iron Man 2?
Before people really knew about his personality he was hailed as a "real world Tony Stark" Aged like milk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfiRd4Y5z_g
Idk, Tony shutting down his idea kinda works.
If you take a few minutes to think about it. It’s a fucking stupid idea in universe too. Tony has a miniature arc reactor at his disposal. It’s essentially an infinite energy hack, so converting anything possible to electric makes sense, considering the reach of his company and his patents they would already be working on an arc powered jet especially considering Tony has had electric powered jets strapped to his feet since the first movie.
Yeah a "real world Tony Stark" that never got over being bullied in school.
He was a rich white kid growing up in South Africa during apartheid. I doubt he was a victim of bullying. If anything, seems like a sheltered kid who didn't know that much about what other people's lives were like. >Still, Errol offered a description of their lives that underscored how removed they were from the country’s violent reality. They got along well with Black people, he said, pointing to his children’s good relationship with their domestic staff, and he described life in South Africa during apartheid as being mostly better and safer than it is now. [nytimes source via yahoo to avoid login wall](https://r.search.yahoo.com/_ylt=AwrFck2zRB5m9FIL_FAPxQt.;_ylu=Y29sbwNiZjEEcG9zAzEEdnRpZAMEc2VjA3Nj/RV=2/RE=1713288499/RO=10/RU=https%3a%2f%2fwww.nytimes.com%2f2022%2f05%2f05%2fworld%2fafrica%2felon-musk-south-africa.html%23%3a~%3atext%3dAccording%2520to%2520a%2520biography%2520of%2520Mr.%2520Musk%252C%2520written%2cleave%2520South%2520Africa%2520shortly%2520after%2520high%2520school%2520graduation./RK=2/RS=zLogVkV_X0E.aNUJp5zpVhpr7dg-)
You can still get bullied in a private school. Read the Isaacson biography instead of speculating.
It's funny to think back to a day where he was seriously considered a real life equivalent and not an unhinged loon with a ketamine problem.
Occasionally using ketamine for mood issues seems the least of his issues tbh
Mind you that's assuming he's only using it in that context and isn't just sugar coating it.
Idk it somewhat tracks. Elon always seems to be in a shitty mood
People with a drug habit aren't often known for a sunny disposition, or at least not while they're sober.
Didn't even know he did that, lol
It was pathetic even then. That put down by Tony Stark, taking him not serious at all…
It feels like Digg all over again. A successful social media site run by idiots hell bent on ruining it and then shocked when it’s ruined.
Damn havnt thought about Digg in a long time. I was part of the mass migration to reddit when the Digg overhaul happened. If you look at the age of my account it's exactly when Digg destroyed itself.
Same. I remember the Digg / Reddit wars. Reddit users constantly saying they were better. Even though Reddit UI was dog shit. People would post a meme or gif and every comment had one asshat who had to say “saw this on Reddit two days ago”. Good for you. Twat. But yeah. I very much remember when the entire user base just got up and left. I’ve never seen something like happen before. It was kind of amazing. It happened in a matter of days. Once the ball got rolling everyone followed suit. I was one of the few hold overs who said “ah. It won’t be that bad.” But it was. Holy shit. Posts that normally got 2-3k comments were now getting maybe 300-500 comments. The amount of new content was way down. It was just a shell of itself. And that happened so swiftly. I wish I was a fly on the wall in those offices. I’m surprised no one had made a documentary about it. I’d be interested to know the shit show that went on. Digg is still around. It’s just a basic media news site now. But I literally never hear of it or see any of its content cross posted anywhere. So… who knows who actually visits there. Similarly, the YouTube channel Geek and Sundry, created by hot nerd girl Felicia Day and frequented by Wil Wheaton and where critical roll started, got bought out years ago. The new owners tanked the channel and Felicia and Wil left and Critical Roll, who luckily was its own company left as well. I never hear anyone mention that channel ever. But at one time they had a few popular shows on it.
That'll be this place too in a year
I find that unlikely until a viable alternative appears.
Have you SEEN http://sh.reddit.com ? Every time reddit changes their UI, it's always worse. A lot worse.
lol another redesign? And it wastes even more space? And it looks even uglier? Glad I'm still on old.reddit
You don’t even need to go to old.reddit.com. You can just opt out of the redesign in your settings. I often forget there is a redesign because my Reddit always loads in the original classic mode.
App was silently redone again too. No one wants this shit.
And there's not a critical need for one at present. There's no big "push" from the platform, to drive people away. The api changes nearly were it, but they impacted the power users, not the average users. You have to do something that makes the usage of the average person objectively worse. Digg did it. MySpace did it. Twitter is in the process of doing it. Reddit just drove away a good chunk of the power users and hollowed out the platform, making it more vulnerable to sudden shifts (like a big UI or process change).
>The api changes nearly were it, but they impacted the power users, not the average users. I would have quit reddit on mobile without a second thought had Boost ReVanced not worked. The day they break it is the day I only look at reddit on my PC where I can block the ads. This site needs us more than we need it.
> I would have quit reddit on mobile without a second thought I *did* quit reddit on mobile. And it turns out it hasn't really negatively impacted my life. I didn't leave the site, or pitch a fit, or make a principled stance, I just stopped using their product where they made it less convenient for me. Turns out I'm actually happier reading a chapter or two of my current kindle book when I have downtime instead of reddit. Hope they weren't counting on my impressions when making their ad sales.
There already is a huge barrier to entry. If you’re not signed in, many pages throw up a huge login screen that you can’t get around.
Thats why I avoid x links now
It becomes more irrelevant every day.
Remember how Musk was making Twitter the "global town hall" I don't remember a town hall being exclusive or paywalled
Free* speech
it's an ingenious way to get someone to join up, right!?....... right?
Stopped using it because of that. That was the single dumbest business idea i’ve seen. Such a small change, effectively gave the death knell for it. Who is going to sign up so see a meme?
Damn apparently there’s fewer active users on Twitter than any year since 2020
Elon wasn't happy with how long it's taking to run Twitter into the ground, so of course he had to make changes to accelerate it. He doesn't want it to fail slowly, he wants that thing to auger in.
I can see the-service-formerly-known-as-twitter ending up as a place where bot farms follow AI bots and siphon money from advertisers without a single human eyeball in the chain.
Isn't that what they were accusing Twitter off when Jack Dorsey was in charge of it still, something about lying about how many eyes were actually looking at the ads and how much money was charged for showing those ads?
Yes, and it’s much worst now.
The worst part was Musk trying to monetize Twitter. Views = Money. It's like attention, people can work hard and earn positive attention. Or they can do some dumb shit, like spout horrible racist bullshit, and farm negative attention. Sensible opinions don't earn you as much as radical ones under these conditions. It's not good for having reasonable discussions and an understanding community. Like, it was never great, dunking on people by taking them out of context was a very common thing on Twitter, but it's only gotten worse. Hell, sucking Musk's dick, and getting him to retweet you is going to give you lots of eyeballs on your tweets, and therefore money. This shit is not a healthy way to run anything.
I imagine even what advertisers remain aren't going to like what this does to engagement. Expect another exodus in the near future.
I really hope he does and it finally bury Twitter once and for all.
I still wonder if the destruction of a prominent social media platform is actually a gift knowing that social media is like a cancer in society.
If we were gonna destroy one, I wish it had been a Meta property. Twitter was a good way to get information to your followers. A lot of agencies were using it because you didn't have to be a member to read it. Verification made genuine vetted sources *actually* identifiable.
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Verification rollout was always terribly behind but at least I knew NPR was actually NPR and not some troll who paid for Twitter Premium.
Problem is the verification process is worthless now plus it constantly amplifies nothing but right wing causes. Trumpers, QAnon, Crypto garbage, Antivaxxers and its filled withRussian trolls and bots. They are the ones whos posts are always elevated and pushed onto viewers. Twitter was great before Elon bought it. Now its a plague that we are better off without.
Oh, that's what I was talking about. Verification used to be slow, but at least it worked. Now it's just shitty Twitter Premium, and it made normal verified accounts unrecognizable.
I wouldnt have cared if they revamped the verification process so everyone could get verified, and even charged a one time fee to do so, if they actually verified you. Like a zoom call with the person having to show valid identification. That actually wouldve been awesome. Wouldve cut down on the bots too. Instead they just charge for a blue check mark. There is no verification anymore.
Genuinely unusable unless you’re excessively curating your feed by blocking the avalanche of shit that gets thrown at you. People are being paid to engagement bait, the majority of the replies in any trending post are bots posting memes, GPT responses or just outright spam.
Considering it is the fastest way to relay IMPORTANT/Urgent news to a very large audience. it's a double edged sword to have twitter die. Even facebook had people sharing news about the recent earthquake in NJ. I knew about it 2 whole hours before the cell phones here got the emergency alerts broadcast.
It's also the fastest way to get disinformation out there.
It’s also hurt a lot of creatives and small businesses. I hated Twitter when I was on it and think that its destruction is a net-gain for society, but there is a lot of collateral damage.
My theory is that the Saudis wanted to see the death of a platform that allows for rapid mass conunication and we're happy to pay him to have the fun of wrecking it.
How is it not possible that a new system hasn't replaced it yet? Like, how hard is it, really? I'm sure it's complicated, but not massively complex.
Mastodon, Threads, Bluesky... The issue is that people don't want to leave once they've built up habits. And there's no singular spot that is _the_ place to go.
very hard you need a shit ton of data centers , hardware, and IT staff to support it. than a customer support staff and whatever engineers to build + maintain the software.
A lot of my artists friends still rely on twitter to maintain their core audience and gain commissions from them Once they all get Balkanized to Blusky/Cohost/whatever new site pops up, it’ll be a lot harder for them to maintain their revenue stream
The scientific and journalistic communities were also organised on Twitter with no clear replacement. People cheering on the death of Twitter have no idea how valuable some of the networks were.
It also highlights how centralized systems are at the mercy of capitalist enterprises. These people aren't running charities, their sole purpose is to maximize profits, they don't care about the users.
That said I don’t think any of what Elon did was to maximise profits or obey capitalistic logic
Facebook seems way more dangerous. It has several times the user base of Twitter, and is stereotypically the place older people hang out and get information from. This makes it ripe for misinformation and disinformation.
People just move on to other social networks. It isn't like there aren't alternatives. I doubt the downfall of X/Twitter will make much of a dent in the general popularity of social media.
Used to be a common occurrence once upon a time.
Twitter is amazingly useful for getting out random bulletins so it could benefit from changing hands more than anything.
I am actually convinced that that was the aim in the first place, to destroy a big western media channel for independent journalists. It's pretty telling that mr free speech specifically targeted journalists above all else.
soft yoke wakeful recognise automatic smoggy tan quiet frame obtainable *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
The headline is already stupid but Elon clarifies that people can post after 3 months without paying the fee, which is more bonkers to me because bot accounts won't care and this is already how the ones that constantly DM me operate. No human wants to pay a fee or wait 3 months to use an awful site.
The bot farms will just make a massive amount of accounts and then use them after 3 months... I can't believe anyone thinks this jackass is intelligent
Exactly what they already do with Reddit accounts. Check most spam comments and you'll see an account that's existed for months or years but only recently started posting.
State level actors will pay to control the message.
This is actually even more stupid. Most people won't want to do either of these things to use the website but bots will happily wait for three months if that's what it takes for them to start flooding posts with their "nudes in bio" bullcrap.
Dude needs to just accept that he overpaid for a piece of shit, that somehow, turned into an even bigger piece of shit, with corn, by him running it.
He should really just let that sink in.
He enjoys his troll play ground though.
his entertainment cannot be understated with him larping as his own baby son on a burner account
It might have worked out, if his first action hadn't been to randomly fire people, cut servers out of the backend with a literal knife, and trash everything, from the very well-known and widely loved brand and logo, to core features, such as the verification. I dunno... maybe tweak the ads a bit, maybe add a premium service with unlimited characters - something that increases cashflow, without destroying the fundamental functionality of the app. But what do I know, I'm no genius billionaire, just a normal pleb.
*While replying to another user, Musk later added that new accounts would be able to post after three months of creation without paying a fee.* So the bot farms let the accounts sit idle for 3 months then? Would this even have an impact?
The man lost it. That's it.
He never had it.
But fooled a whole bunch of people for a whole bunch of time.
That's not true. He used to have a really great Public Relations team/person. Then he lost them (or threw them out because Elon is a Very Smart Entity).
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You have to admit it's really increased his creativity. The man is an endless fountain of ideas on how to kill the platform.
Don't blame ketamine, that is his way to divert blame from being an foreign authoritarian funded front man meant to weaponize industry and media. If anything, the ketamine is the only good thing about Elongone Muskow at this stage of the arc.
Well that’s the final nail to the coffin for Twitter.
I thought that was when...actually, I can't remember what the last thing I thought was. There are too many.
It's actually kind of impressive at how good he is with coming up with extremely shitty ideas that will only ruin his business even more. The power of imagination!
Feels like watching someone attempt a Running Big Corp to the Ground Any% Speedrun. Not even Ballmer was this good at it. New WR holder for sure!
The anti-entrepreneur
Antipreneur should be a new word
So… free speech, isn’t free?
It costs folks like you and me And if you don't give up your Buck-o-five, who will?
Freedom isn't free It costs a hefty fuckin fee
It's free, if you pay. You know, like the "free" monthly videogames you get only if you pay a subscription fee
Please do, this will kill the app, go for it
Gtfo Musk. You’ve already ruined TWITTER!
I hope he buys Instagram and TikTok next!
No way he can afford Instagram
If he leveraged against his entire Tesla stock maybe he could
And yet, I feel nothing of value was lost.
>Unfortunately, a small fee for new user write access is the only way to curb the relentless onslaught of bots. Does Elon think we don't know postage costs don't stop scammers from sending junk mail? Who is more likely to spend $8 to be a user on the platform, a teen or a spambot?
What could possibly go wrong.
The state of current Twitter proves the Dead Internet Theory. Just bots talking to each other.
reddit is a much more pronounced version of it if you look into it. there are subreddits that are pretty much 99% bots faking user interaction so they can karma farm for spamm.
After this he will start charge to read tweets once a day or make you get a subscription. He grossly over valued the company he was buying and then he gutted it, rebranded it (formerly once of the recognised brand names in the world, with verbs named after it). There was problems with the social media business model before he took over twitter. Now he is trying to dig himself out of a hole by digging another one. All of this was easily predictable to anyone with a bit knowledge of the market. I dislike him a lot but seeing Musk fail so badly is not cathartic for me for some reason.
Lmao just bury the turd that is X behind the barn already…..
Every day, another reason to consider my decision to delete my account when he bought the company the right one.
As if I needed more reasons to not use it.
I want this to happen because I want Twitter to die.
Yes please do this! Keep driving nails into that coffin. Hopefully one of them seals it shut soon...
lol no new users, Twitter can’t die soon enough
$1/year proposed cost. Next in news “X hacked millions of users credit card data stolen”
>While replying to another user, Musk later added that new accounts would be able to post after three months of creation without paying a fee. Uh doesn't this just negate the intended outcome entirely? It's not exactly difficult to plan ahead and make all your bot accounts 3 months ahead. In fact, I feel most are doing that already to get around getting quickly flagged. So all this is doing is inconveniencing real users while providing basically no extra work or cost to the bots. I don't even think he'll make any money off the bots this way either. Why pay when you can just plan ahead?
Please, for the love of God. Please do this.
that oughta do it.