But I’ve been wondering: why is everyone leaving? Is everyone leaving? What has changed other than the verification thing?
I haven't noticed anything get worse yet. As usual, I get about one spam DM per week. As usual, the app freezes or crashes about three times a week. As usual, the app takes seconds to load what I click on about 5% of clicks.
I'm worried it's not sustainable, though. At this point the vast majority of employees have quit. Musk's attempts to retain them suggest he doesn't understand his employees' thinking, suggesting he'll continue to have problems.
So I'm continuing to use Twitter while actively looking for alternatives.
When I tried mastodon it completely failed to provide the basis functionality I expect. I think that's because it's technically decentralized, but they've then built a centralized service through social coordination on top of that. And that's the worst of both worlds.
Can you describe that? Mastodon is Federated, much like any other decentralized service you have the right to reject or block content from certain users or sites. That's your privilege as a paying administrator of a Mastodon instance. If you disagree with the way a particular server is being run, you can find others who agree with you or host you own instance for less than the price of Twitter Blue.
This is the case with IRC, Matrix, I2P, even Bittorrent. None of these protocols are living in "the worst of both worlds", they're merely taking their architecture seriously and deliberately choosing not to build their software like a product. If you take issue with the social coordination layer of Mastodon... maybe social media isn't for you?
The effect is similar to if a centralized service randomly chose which of a few tens of moderation policies to apply every time they get a report. That's a big disadvantage. You lose because you see content that pushes past what your chosen moderator would prefer, and you don't see content that your chosen moderator would allow.
If Mastodon provided something nice in return I'd consider it, but they consider that disadvantage as their main advantage.
What do you mean by this? I think you may misunderstand the architecture if I'm interpreting you correctly. Mastodon is decentralized and there's no centralized service on top of it. You can just pick any instance you want and don't have to federate with any others (and in some cases can't due to blocking.)
What's centralized on Mastodon? It's just a bunch of autonomous server instances whose users can contact users on other servers.
I can only speak for myself, obviously, but I’ve left. I was definitely over using Twitter before.
> everyone seems to complain that Mastodon is hard to use
I’ve had really no trouble at all with it? There’s an upfront decision about which server to use, but, that’s a social decision, not really a technical one. After that decision I’ve had no trouble at all
I don’t understand why people think Mastodon is difficult. It seems pretty straightforward, and the separate servers are no biggie. I’m enjoying this fresh start here, like moving to a new apartment!
Besides that, I think it’s just a loss of faith in Elon to run the place well. There’s already been so many unforced errors[1], and it’s only been a few weeks. People are trying to migrate their networks off now, because if they wait until the site is broken it may be too late.
[1] laying people off and then asking them to come back, rolling out verification and then pausing it, forcing people back to the office and then locking them out of the office, losing the confidence of advertisers and blaming it on a woke mob, etc.
I have noticed that, on mobile web, the notification thingy about new thingies while you are scrolling has become persistent.
It's newsworthy. It's a leading social network which a billionaire was forced to purchase after trying to weasel himself out of the deal which he got into for dubious reasons, and now said billionaire is doing a corporate anihialation speedrun that threatens to evaporate 45 billion dollars.
Not to mention the impact on other notorious companies such as Tesla and SpaceX.
You require a massively disingenuous take on current events to come up to the conclusion that news coverage of Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter can only be explained in terms of irrational hate.
If you say Twitter and Elon you're going to get more clicks than if you were to say YCombinator and Paul Graham even though the later two are vastly more important and educational for me.
Sections of the site don’t work reliably, searches spin loading, had the site not load at all multiple times, more spam, etc.
Seems the site is just coasting and issues are slowly building up.
But Twitter was specifically bad and hard to use because the content, such as it was, was so diluted by ads and recommendations.
Musk lighting the place on fire was the final straw to get me to delete my account, but I never would have considered myself a twitter user.
Mastadon seems better already. Although it's hard to tell, looks like they still for some reason have threads that are hard to read.
Wow. The people on your list are nuts. Musk hasn’t even changed anything yet. The product is identical to what it was a month (or year) ago.
As well, there have been moderation changes that I disagree with.
It’s just not factually correct to say the product is identical to what it was a year ago. It’s not.
What has changed with either, as it impacts a user? I've looked hard but found zero change whatsoever.
When I come across those statements previously, if it says George Bush with a blue check, I just trusted that George Bush made that statement. Now, I don’t. So, what used to be a fairly reliable way to get to a pretty solid primary source for plenty of statements has become unreliable. I’m not really worried about over the top parody, that’s easy to spot, but more subtle impersonations really concern me.
If, say, the Defense Minister of a foreign country posts something provocative, it’s much harder for me to know if they really posted that or not.
It doesn’t impact me as a user who posts things, but it has a serious impact on me as a user who wants to validate that X person really did say Y.
My experience has been that there have been a TON of impersonators over the past 5 years, and the largest number I've come across have been impersonating Elon Musk and Vitalik Buterin.
Trusting all blue checks a year ago would have been a very, very foolish strategy. From what I've seen, the verification hasn't gotten at all worse in the last week.
Trust is a spectrum, and the old system wasn’t perfect, but it was vastly vastly better. I wouldn’t have absolute trust that an account was who it purported to be before, but I had much higher confidence that I did before.
> From what I've seen, the verification hasn't gotten at all worse in the last week.
Then we’ve had vastly different experiences. Did you miss the part where he sold verification for $8, but stopped doing the verification as part of that?
It seems preposterous to claim nothing changed in this regard, while they literally introduced a new feature that entirely changed this aspect of the product.
Edit: to clarify, I don’t think it’s preposterous to claim that your experience is better or unchanged in the new system. What seems preposterous to me is the claim that it’s unchanged from a month ago, when this specific area has undergone a drastic functional change.
If anything, the number of fake Vitaliks and fake Elons with blue checks running scams (usually starting with an offer to give away crypto) I've stumbled across has been lower than it was early in the year.
Perhaps there will be large changes over time due to the more open verification process recently announced, but they would take time to ripple out and have any impact on us more normal users.
the experience is absolutely not the same as it was a month or a year ago.
here's a screenshot attempting to load twitter.com/home just 3 minutes ago [7]. these intermittent failures to load have been increasingly happening for me on multiple computers on multiple different networks. if you have been digging into this as much as you imply, you've surely seen the many, many other people discussing this.
[0] https://www.wired.com/story/twitter-two-factor-sms-problems/
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/twitter-chaos-end...
[2] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2022/11/failures-in-t...
[3] https://twitter.com/TwitterSupport/status/159261861552149299...
[4] https://www.techradar.com/news/live/live-blog-twitter-chaos-...
[5] https://www.pcmag.com/how-to/twitter-two-factor-authenticati...
[6] https://www.androidauthority.com/twitter-sms-2fa-3234698/
That's a dishonest characterization. I haven't been digging into it at all. I've just been using the site as normal and haven't seen any issues, which is why I'm asking more motivated people (such as yourself) who have been digging, for specifics.
I have zero interest in the maelstrom of negative US media coverage, but seeing an actual broken part of the app would have been interesting if you'd been able to provide a link.
> What has changed with either, as it impacts a user? I've looked hard but found zero change whatsoever.
...i mistook that to mean you had been looking hard. sorry bout that.
In the course of tweeting, reading tweets, etc, I've kept an eye open for any kind of breakages / downtime but haven't seen any.
Have you personally been locked out of your account due to a 2FA problem or was that just something you read about?
i have personally experienced an increase in spam.
i have personally experienced a drastic increase in trolls.
i have personally seen a _dramatic_ increase of outright abusive accounts.
unlike the vast majority of twitter's users, our organization uses physical hardware devices for our 2fa, but after we started seeing the reports, we didn't log out at all--at the time it wasn't clear exactly what was causing the failure, and obviously we didn't want to lose access.
i am genuinely glad that you haven't noticed any of the sites problems tho. i truly do hope they can get it back to the sanity it was pre-october. im pretty skeptical on this tho, i tend to think he's set on turning it into some kind of "be shitty to each other" site, and that will obviously turn it into a ghost-town when compared to what it once was.
ok, thanks... it's a useful data point even if I haven't encountered the issues.
I moved to Mastodon about a week ago mostly because the developers I was following did the same. No clue if everyone's leaving, I doubt it.
As for what's actually changed:
- Twitter Blue Verified was basically a satirists' wet dream and Musk wants to try it again
- A number of high profile Twitter CxOs jumped ship, including their information security officer
- Elon had every SWE in the company print out their code(?!) and physically deliver it to Musk, including an explanation of how much they wrote (presumably to try the old manager trick of rating projects on SLoC written)
- Elon publicly blasted his own developers on Twitter for the performance of the Android app. When the head developer replied and explained what was actually wrong and how to fix it, he was fired by tweet.
- Elon Musk issued a "Twitter 2.0" ultimatum to the remaining Twitter staff which were rejected by 75% of the company immediately resigning.
I can boil these down further into two reasons why any software should jump ship immediately:
1. Data security & stability. Twitter is basically running on autopilot now since a large amount of people left or were fired. Expect basically all of your data on Twitter to get breached.
2. Solidarity. The Twitter 2.0 ultimatum is basically a demand for constant crunch time. This is very harmful to both Twitter and it's employees. Even if you don't work at Twitter and don't give a shit about the word "solidarity", you should still make an example out of the company anyway purely so that other boneheaded PHBs don't try the same trick.
"Running on autopilot" is probably an even better analogy than you intended. There have been incidents of pilot incapacitation in aircraft, in which the aircraft continues flying for a long time following its programmed autopilot targets, until the fuel gets exhausted and it crashes. See for instance the 1999 South Dakota Learjet crash (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_South_Dakota_Learjet_cras...), the 2000 Australia Beechcraft King Air crash (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_Australia_Beechcraft_King...), and a few others (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncontrolled_decompression#Gra...).
I've been on Twitter off and on since fall 2007. In the early 'fail whale' days they had a live stream that didn't move ridiculously fast(when it wasn't broken) of all tweets.
It became a huge 'surveillance capitalism' data mining product that has had some issues around free speech and political bias meddling by the company and obviously the big media companies. The platform is plagued by bots and trolls, automated attack agents that are presumably programmed to append derogatory comments to tweets by unknown actors.
Now the mysterious Musk is reorging the platform, maybe to emulate the 'WeChat' 'everything app' Chinese approach. Who knows...if it's free you are the product...
Twitter used to be owned by the blue tribe.
Now it's owned by a member of the red tribe.
That's all there is to it.
Nothing. People describing what has changed since Musk took over offer vaguer symptom lists than Morgellons sufferers. If anything, right-wingers who fell for the huge anti-Musk media campaign are getting upset because nothing at all seems to have changed other than the unfunny Babylon Bee getting their account back.
It's not left vs right, it's a shitty platform getting worse after just a few days with Musk.
Nope, saw that.
> servers are now dog slow,
Missed that.
> 2FA stopped working
That's bad, but remember how they just got sued for using as an excuse to harvest phone numbers? I feel like we were upset about that back in the old days two months ago.
> scamming is at all time high.
Missed that, too.
> It's not left vs right
It's not, it's oligarch vs. oligarch, and I don't care who wins other than the people who had it were poor stewards so I'm pro-change.
> it's a shitty platform getting worse
Infinitesimally worse, within the first few weeks of a hostile transition.
> after just a few days with Musk.
Maybe give him a few more days then. Your tweets won't get cold.
The whole Twitter furore is so obviously at its base a political one that I have to take issue with your comment.
From my observations the 'sky is falling', butt-hurt, desperate for Twitter to now fail group are very firmly on one end of the cultural-political spectrum. They're angry and affronted that "their guys" have lost control of it, because it's a very important thing to be in control of.
We should stop dancing around it and acknowledge that there's a political aspect to this whole thing.
I'm leaving Twitter is the new I'm moving to Canada.
The calls for advertiser boycotts started as soon as the takeover was announced, well before it actually went through. I think users threatening to leave and calling for other users to leave also started at the same time.
I rather suspect that this is due to Musk being from a different pillar[1].
(It's all gotten turned up to 11 now that he's actually in charge and seems to be showing off his :tableflip: skills, but it was already started before that happened.)
You're casually glancing over Elon Musk's reiterated announcements that he would eliminate Twitter's moderation, and you're completely ignoring marketing execs stating publicly and in no uncertain terms that Elon Musk's decision and actions were a liability in terms of "brand safety/suitability".
AFAIK he's still banning trolls. Like for example that exchange regarding Alex Jones that got re-shared.
.
So, unless that meeting didn't match what's public, why would less political censorship be a "brand safety/suitability" issue?
You're disingenuously glancing over the fact that Elon Musk repeatedly said and did different things. As the Twitter thread I linked early clearly shows, Elon Musk was repeatedly giving assurances to marketing execs behind closed doors that he would continue moderating hate speech and extremist content on Twitter just as before.
The marketing industry is not manned by fools, and once Elon Musk fired basically all content moderators then the industry called Elon Musk out on his bullshit and promptly yanked ad spending on Twitter, explaining quite clearly that cutting moderation was a major liability.
It's amusing how people like you prefer to resort to puerile convoluted conspiracy theories to explain why ad companies stopped paying for ads on Twitter when the people who made that decision already stated in no uncertain terms how Elon Musk's actions turned Twitter into a liability.
Dude. I am agreeing with this. They do not want to be seen with content from a different pillar.