Meanwhile, my wife is playing the long game on Twitter. She has a specific way of using it that just works for her. She follows a few hundred people, and she's followed by ~5k people, mostly "nobodies", but a handful are impressive: researchers, journalists, politicians, authors. She has conversations with "household names" daily. She even orchestrated an interview been a well known researcher and an ex NYT journalist on substack. Yet she's an be absolute nobody.
If I'm reading my timeline and think "geez, this person sure does post a bunch of political stuff I don't want to see" I either mute specific keywords, or just unfollow the person. Back on Twitter I was aggressive with keyword muting - I don't care about Marvel or people having passionite topics about "MCU", so I muted those phrases and my timeline was free of them.
ehhh, sort of. i tried a few of these before the musk takeover, and it was pretty disappointing. it was essentially a way of opting into more of the trash algorithm-recommended tweets in your timeline. instead of just the normal "recommended for you" stuff, you'd also have "recommended for you because you follow X".
It would be nice if someone with minimal tech skills could just spin something similar up. Related forums could link to each other, like the webrings of the past lol. That would be the ideal structure of interactive communities on the web, at least to me.
Musk has no real idea of the impacts of technical decisions on the platform, but he realized the tweet visibility threshold was too short bac when even his own tweets weren't seeing engagement.
Since then he's created a scheme to grant slightly better longevity to the visibility of tweets by "verified" accounts, but it's really smoke and mirrors... Tweets anyone makes (Except for Elon and his selected Twitter "buddies") only are visible for seconds and to small audiences of people... It kills interaction, growth, and engagement for everyone else, but gives the illusion that the site is still vibrant (because it makes everyone tweet more often).
Deception of this kind will just make everyone burn out and not come back... It defeats the very purpose of Twitter, as visibility of ideas is the only payment most people get on the platforms to begin with, the main problem is that most people on the platform don't know they're mostly invisible, and dropping their tweets into a waste bin.
And the platform is really showing its lack of moderation, even compared to how little it was moderated in the past. I don't really want to click on webdev tweets and find replies full of hate speech and weird pornography.
If you care about science twitter, I wonder if that was the best criteria for filtering your content.
There is a rule of thumb about online services and software: Don't fight the developers, because they have more power than you. If your usage is no longer compatible with the vision of the developers, stop using it. You may find temporary workarounds that make the service useful with a lot of effort, but it won't last. The developers will eventually find new innovative ways of ruining your experience.
Science Twitter was already dying before the takeover, because it was not compatible with the increased focus on recommendations. Musk simply accelerated the process.
Neither of these feels like I'm "fighting with the developers". It's such a trivial thing to do. And almost all social media apps do this. Instagram does this[0], it looks like Tik Tok only allows an algorithmic feed[1], it seems like Reddit has recommendations on by default but I'm seeing mixed things[2], LinkedIn does this (not that linked in is a model to be followed in any regard). In fact, Facebook is the only major social media company I know of that doesn't spit out an algorithmic feed by default.
So, if having to go to a new tab is "fighting the developer", then I think we've failed extraordinarily in this regard on all fronts and Twitter isn't doing anything new here.
[0]: https://help.instagram.com/505299634436870
[1]: https://support.tiktok.com/en/getting-started/for-you
[2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/help/comments/xhxkdc/how_do_i_only_...
Remember when Facebook was about staying in touch with the people you know? Then there was a huge controversy when they introduced the algorithmic feed, made it the default, and always reverted back to it despite user preferences. Today it's a wasteland full of recommendations, promoted content, influencers, silly videos, controversial topics, and other forms of spam, with some interesting content randomly sprinkled around.
Defaults are important, because they influence people's expectations. If algorithmic feed is the default, it encourages posting certain kinds of content and discourages others. Eventually even your manually curated feed will be full of content that would be successful in the algorithmic feed. That is what happened to the part of Science Twitter I was following. People started posting less and eventually left, because Twitter was discouraging the kind of content they were posting.
As for Reddit, I don't consider it a social media platform. It's more like a collection of unrelated message boards that share the same underlying technology. I'm vaguely aware that there is a front page, and I sometimes visit it accidentally, but I never go there on purpose.
Is it? That's not my experience at all; I'd say Facebook has mostly dropped out of the news because it's quietly kept chugging away at what it's good at.
Yes.
I get push notifications from people I don’t follow and my follow feed has people I unfollowed (though that’s not the nazis except for some that masked off)
some are just rw who mingle with the openly nazi posters too though yeah.
So basically it's the new Facebook
Yes, and a lot haven’t gone to Mastodon. Where are they?
> And this is after aggressively curating my feed
If you're "aggressively curating [your] feed", just mute/block them
Science Twitter in particular has mostly migrated to Mastodon (although it's split between a few different subgroups).
A number of other de facto Twitter communities have migrated to Mastodon. Some have stayed on Twitter. And some have basically died without moving anywhere else.
This is the big problem with Mastodon. Some people want highly curated communities on small instances, and it's great for that. But it's really bad for people who want to make us of network effects - as exemplified by the very phrase '______ Twitter'.
I hope you're enjoying inflation, then.
Genuinely asking because if I know my crypto history it basically says the opposite.
When the US was on the gold standard, the inflationary periods were during the California and Yukon gold rushes, which had the effect of "printing" more gold.
The inflation we see today in the US is due to massive deficit spending, which is enabled by fiat money. All countries today use fiat money, because then they can spend money without limit and without raising taxes. They always blame the resulting inflation on something else.
The value of crypto currency is based on supply & demand. To me it seems more like collecting Beanie Babies than being a substitute for money. We'll see how it fares in the next few years.
It's just like the government deficit printing fiat money.
Sounds like a particular advantage to me, unless you prefer your money to be worth about 3% of what it used to be.
Inflation hurts poor people, too.
Edit in response to your undeclared edit: inflation hurts those who hold cash, by its very nature; on average inflation is a transfer of real value from the rich to the poor, although of course there will be exceptions.
What horror stories?
The wages of the poor do not keep up with inflation.
> inflation is a transfer of real value from the rich to the poor
No, it isn't. It's a transfer from the rich and the poor to the government.
This whole 'pining for the gold standard' is ridiculous. Do you want to go back to zero-sum economics because you don't like the Fed? Everyone hates the Fed, but it happens to be the least bad option that we have come up with so far.
> If there is no 'extra' money when we need it, economies stagnate
The banks create money as needed through supply & demand. This is complex subject, but the fact that the US economy thrived from 1800 to 1914 shows your dire predictions to be simply lacking.
> class mobility
Was very robust in the 1800s. The US moved scores of millions of people from poverty into the middle class, and a lot into the wealthy class.
May I recommend reading some history books about 19th century America.
> it happens to be the least bad option that we have come up with so far.
Your dire predictions didn't happen in the 19th century, and we didn't have endemic inflation.
When you read history do you skip over the parts that don't agree with your philosophy, or do you just assume you would be one of the robber barons?
Also, our economy grew a lot in a large part because we expanded westward exterminating the people who lived on the land and taking it from them and all the resources underneath. We got a lot of that 'extra' money as gold from that expansion.
> You glorifying the gilded aged is quite alarming.
LOL. Read "Historical Statistics of the United States". You can download it for free from archive.org.
> our economy grew a lot in a large part because we expanded westward exterminating the people who lived on the land and taking it from them and all the resources underneath
So "we" stole railroads and steel mills and factories and shops and mills and textiles etc. from the Indians?
> We got a lot of that 'extra' money as gold from that expansion.
Spain looted enormous quantities of gold from S America and transported it to Spain. Did it turn Spain into a wealthy industrial powerhouse? Nope. Is Russia's oil extraction industry making Russia an economic powerhouse? Nope again. How about Saudi Arabia? Nope nope nope. Venezuela? Nopety nopety nope.
Your theory needs a lot of work.
The ability to control boom and bust cycles by messing with the money supply is the whole point. Of course the gold standard is awesome if we ignore the busts and only look at the booms.
Regarding the Spanish -- I fail to see how that refutes anything? They were a poorly run religious monarchy operating in the pre-industrial age. Cool. What's your point? Are you contending that vast amounts of free land are not conducive to rapid economic expansion under capitalism?
Except they're a failure at it. We have boom and bust cycles anyway. Remember 2000, 2008, 2022? Friedman also demonstrates in "Monetary History of the United States" that the hand of the Fed on the tiller results in less stability of the money supply.
The "whole point" of fiat money is to be able to spend money without having to tax it first. That's why the European powers adopted it in WW1 - to finance the war.
> I fail to see how that refutes anything?
It refutes the notion that the quantity of gold in an economy has anything to do with prosperity.
> free land
Why have Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, S Korea, and New York City become economic powerhouses despite little or no land?
Those cycles weren't nearly as bad as the ones that came before it.
> The "whole point" of fiat money is to be able to spend money without having to tax it first. That's why the European powers adopted it in WW1 - to finance the war.
Sure. You haven't explained why this is bad except 'inflation'. I think inflation is a small price to pay for relative stability.
> It refutes the notion that the quantity of gold in an economy has anything to do with prosperity.
No it doesn't. It illustrates that idiotic people with a lot of resources can do stupid things with them.
> Why have Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, S Korea, and New York City become economic powerhouses despite little or no land?
Poor people do become rich, but that doesn't refute that it is a lot easier to become rich(er) when you already have a lot of money.
Twitter had already become less enjoyable than it was back in the day, that started before Musk and isn't his fault. The underlying engagement was no longer there, only inertia. Inertia alone would have kept me there much longer, but without true engagement I wasn't going to start using their crappy official client/site, and the idea of paying for a subscription was laughable.
Twitter won't die like MySpace did, losing to a single party like Mastodon as MySpace did to Facebook. It will die like Craigslist. It will be very slow, still be around a decade from now, having lost its cultural relevance and having been supplanted by a number of different options rather than one. I'm seeing Twitter's niche get fragmented to different places, and everyone has one foot out the door and the engagement is dwindling slowly but intractably. The brand is poison, but people are taking their time to figure out how to deal with that. So I'm not expecting to see an abrupt exodus. Nor do I expect to see Mastodon become as big as Twitter was, or die out completely.
I'm not sure that's true. The site runs best when most employees are out of the office during the last week or two of December and when employees are busy writing peer reviews on the last day or two before that portion of the review cycle ends.
Craigslist without maintenance probably turns into just scams and spam.
For example, we have a process based on the idea of the downtime budget from the SRE book. If the downtime allowed by the SLA of our customers is spent halfway, all changes to the systems have to be approved by leadership. Cosmetic bugs can be tolerated for two weeks in order to not risk anything.
On the other hand, if the necessary maintenance of the supporting infrastructure of a system is stopped, the system is running towards a cliff. It certainly depends on how deep the stack goes and how many redundancies and self-healing ideas are built into a system. If you have redundant storage arrays with redundant drives, with redundant systems built on top of these, with smart failover strategies, the overall infrastructure can tolerate a terrifying amount of damage while still running reliably.
But once that redundancy degrades and rots away, and once that resulting final linchpin drive or system instance fails, it'll result in an unsalvageable clusterfuck very, very quickly. Especially if you fire important core SRE and ops staff.
When was Twitter profitable ?!
Disagree about Mastodon -- I think it or the protocols backing it, will be the glue that holds the rest of social media together. You may not be using something branded "Mastodon" in 2035, but it will probably be Mastodon underneath.
Probably for the better. I read more long form articles and don't get caught up in the outrage of the day. I feel happier too. Sometimes I miss it, go to the site to read, and then immediately close the tab when I can't actually use it because it's so bad.
Now I'll head to Twitter a few times a week as a guilty pleasure to read the people left behind — comedians, political commentators, and journalists. But for stuff that's relevant to my job, Mastodon is great. And my Twitter usage has dropped by over 95%.
I feel sympathy for people who still love the blue bird and don't want anything to go wrong, but this right here is why the ongoing dumpster fire has been very good for me, personally.
I used to love Twitter. I used Twitter way too much. Now I don't post at all and only read a little. It can be hard to realize how bad something is for you when you are in the middle of pulling those sweet endorphins at a steady rate. My life is so much better since a certain someone decided the drug was so good that he should buy the pharmacy. Admittedly I got lucky: if he had valued it correctly or knew what he was doing, then my outcome could have been much different. Cheers to incompetence!
"SREcon is a gathering of engineers who care deeply about site reliability, systems engineering, and working with complex distributed systems at scale."
That’s disappointing for that community. They should just list their website, which should have an RSS (atom) feed.
Besides, most presenters will also list their personal URLs if they have sites they'd like to promote.
I don’t want to support an owner who uses their platform in that way any more than I’d want to watch political opinion shows on TV or subscribe to a political opinion Substack.
If someone owned thousands of very rare collectible beanie babies in the late 90s, on paper worth hundreds of millions, do they actually have hundreds of millions of dollars? Sure they could find one buyer, ten buyers, but thousands of buyers? What can such a bubble handle?
People hate Musk, I get it, but the guy is not the wealthiest in the world. He's sitting on a pile of rare collectible beanie babies.
Beanie babies are a novelty. Stock in market leading companies is not.
Gates, Bezos, etc. have handed over control of their companies to the extent that yes, they could liquidate without impacting the company’s ability to operate. Musk is not far from that if he chooses. Tesla and SpaceX have mature products that plenty of capable CEOs can manage.
I get what you’re saying that the act of mass selling on the open market decreases your net worth. But stock can be used to purchase companies, secure loans, etc., so it’s still a productive asset without needing to convert it to cash. And, if he chose to sell Tesla or SpaceX the acquiring company almost always pays a premium over the market price. It’s not like he would just dump his shares on the market without a strategy. Just like you wouldn’t list your house until it’s staged properly. But your house is still part of your personal wealth even if you couldn’t sell it for a fair price by midnight tonight.
Plus, it’s nearly impossible to rank wealth on any other metric like cash on hand as that information is not public.
And those assets even if they’re not all disposable at the market price can be used as collateral without liquidating them.
So I think it’s still fair to say that Musk, etc. still have the greatest personal financial leverage available to them in the world.
Just because that power can't always be converted to cash 100% in a second doesn't mean it doesn't exist
So, yes, "richest in the world" is really a mapping of timespan (days given to liquidate) to people.
But if I look at that twitter account… it’s pretty dead. Most of the people I followed have either gone to mastodon (my choice) or instagram (which I could never get into) or just dialed back on social media. Just a wasteland of uninteresting stuff it thinks I might like and gambling ads, increasingly.
Mind you, to your point, I didn’t leave due to instability; my breaking point was the purge of the journalists, and if that hadn’t driven me away, the death of the third party apps certainly would have.
I (kind of, my profile timeline is now inconsisntent/corrupt) deleted all my tweets, locked my account, and changed password to something I don't know.
The only source I've been able to find is here https://app.upzilla.co/statistics/32, which shows something like 99.9% uptime since November '22.
Any simple "upstate" tacker won't notice those things. For me it is notable, though, while I use Twitter a lot less, which of course impacts perception.
It's where I go for access to global establishment personal. The CEO's, the Presidents of nations, the boards of banks, etc...
I don't find them anywhere else. Twitter is my only choice for world business.
A year ago this time, Mastodon was a curiosity. Today, it feels like Twitter circa 2010. That's something.
Which isn't a total failure, it can be a small self-sustaining network but it fails to have a broad appeal.
That competition feels/looks like early 00s blogging -- less mass, pre-eternal-September, Gibsonian ham-radio-postcards -- but then again that's what grew up into what we have now.
Mastodon will likely never get anyone but tech folks. And the era of tech folks being the trendsetter on the intarweb pipes is probably over.
This has never been adequate to explain how MS treated IE.
Microsoft also won the desktop decisively, arguably more decisively than the browser front. And yet far from abandoning windows, it pretty consistently iterated via major releases and service updates, even when competitors were almost rounding errors and when they had a business base that often valued backward compatibility as much or more than anything else.
Microsoft doesn't abandon things just because they achieved dominance.
IE was abandoned because MS of the early 00s still thought most computing would stay on the desktop, in network-aware applications, maybe even using different runtimes, but still desktop apps.
> It's ridiculous to say that in 2006/7 Microsoft thought web was a fad
It's ridiculous of you to choose 2006/2007 when you're responding to a comment that specifies "circa early 00s."
And yes, by 2006/2007, MS realized they'd made a mistake and the web was becoming something that could deliver experiences competitive with desktop apps.
It really was just tech-oriented and tech-oriented-LGBTQ* groups that fully abandoned Twitter for Mastodon. Which has been frustrating, I want to support Mastodon but I'm also mostly on Twitter for a good time with a smattering of tech concerns, and it seems like people on Mastodon are generally only talking about tech, having a bad time in their lives, or they're simply bad at being funny.
Do you need an always on machine to have a ‘server’?
The for dummies version is "just go sign up on a instance with open sign ups and reasonable moderation", I'd recommend hachyderm.io to the tech crowd. It doesn't matter that much what server you're on.
Which server you join doesn't particularly matter, but most of them offer some sort of "see all of the messages on this server" functionality, so if you pick one with a lot of people who have common interests, you'll have a better default experience.
I remember about 6-8 years ago fervently trying to get my friends and family off of FB and Twitter. It was completely useless. I even offered running my own Diaspora server with zero luck. I was constantly pushing decentralized platforms including Mastodon and others for years before finally giving up.
Its crazy what it takes nowadays to get someone to move off of a social media platform for good. I know many have left Twitter because of Musk, but many haven't stayed away and have come back. Its like a drug for some people, its incredibly hard to just walk away from.
To offer another data point, some of the people I know have actually stopped using Twitter and started using other platforms more. Then again, none of them said the site’s uptime was the reason.
The reason Twitter attracts its current audience is a) celebs & politicians, and b) Twitter-specific creators - think of all the thread writers and serial memers.
All of these people rely on third party tools to schedule their tweets. No one is going to manually craft 1/30 thread series or tweet 8 times a day.
If the cost of running third party tools goes up 10x, a lot of creators, especially on the lower-end, will leave. I can pay $10/month for a tweet scheduling app, but if I had to pay $100 (because the app has to now pay 20x), I won't bother.
A few people seem to have just logged off completely.
Twitter doesn't make money primarily by someone continuing to 'use twitter'. They make money with ad impressions. If everyone who used twitter still continues to use twitter, but 10% of them end up using it 30% less because they get annoyed when the site isn't working, that still costs the company millions of dollars.
I've also unfollowed many people, and they still show up in my feed.
Musk also said only paid accounts will show up in the For You feed, but then later said it will also include people you follow.
My 'for you' feed is a mix of a sprinkling of the people I follow, with a hefty helping of 'entertainment', crazy people, politics (most of these accounts are still on my blocklist, which apparently doesn't function anymore) and a host of other stuff that do no interest me.
See a lot of people saying they are presented with nazi posts, but I have not seen anything at all like that. I do see more right wing / conservative posters but they are very far from Nazis.
I could even see it helping. When reddit was down everyone lost their shit and there would be posts "where were you during the outage of '21" and "today I actually went outside", etc.. Kinda adds to the hype.
It seemed at the time that twitter was beginning to crumble already as they were unable to maintain such a simple feature, I couldn't imagine at the time that they would fail to even maintain the API.
The claim is that twitters api business had a revenue of $400m with ~$360m in profit, and that it is now effectively abondoned.
Also, seven nines of uptime allows for just over 3 seconds of downtime per year, they would never have had that.
Switched to getting my news from RSS feeds instead.
Haven't really switched to Mastodon since there's no one to follow on Mastodon and the platform itself is rather bad.
https://www.neowin.net/news/major-media-outlets-wont-be-payi...
Edit: It's quite telling that the various personal stories and anecdotes are receiving upvotes, while my comment, which contains links to concrete data, is being downvoted.
[0] https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/elon-musk-twitter-...
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/the-mastodon-bump-is-now-a-slump...
Revenue has tanked and other services are nibbling at their market. This should at least suggest to you that it's not growing .
A lot of people like to hate on Musk and act like he is clueless yet they haven't build or done anything, let alone at the scale Elon has been able to run things at, yes he has a lot of people around him, yes he might get a lot of the credit when it belongs to them, but he is still the person that bought everything together.
There has got to be something that he is doing right and a lot of it to me seems to be getting rid of the nonsense that doesn't matter, not having much respect for norms or the way it is normally done, much like the first principles framework he has used successfully in many things he has done.
A lot of programers and startups love a huge amount of frameworks, processes and to be honest nonsense, because that is just how that industry works, musk tore up a lot of that and people then start calling him crazy, but as you point out, do people really care if Twitters uptime is 99% or 99.999999% engineers and people that are so stuck to industry standards do, the rest of the world and reality not so much.
People commenting on current affairs might when they can't comment on events.
Sports fans, etc.
Also, the article is about twitters api, not the availability of the site.