It's so wild witnessing the degradation of Twitter.
> Twitter's communications shop now simply responds to reporters' emails with poop emojis.
Like, does Musk realize the market of trolls, clowns, and morons who enjoy his adolescent antics is... not worth $44 B?
Though he never really expected it to earn its price back. As a large-fraction-of-a-trillion-aire, he may well have found that having trolls, clowns, and morons to enjoy his adolescent antics is worth $44B in pure enjoyment. He was buying a chance to put a significant thumb on the finger of world culture.
Musk has so much money that he doesn't really care if there's a net positive return to his purchases. He spends money to enjoy it. Which I actually find bizarrely refreshing, compared to the ones who want to use it for the purpose of acquiring more money, plus the occasional conspicuous consumption that seems more like a performance than actual enjoyment (e.g. megayachts).
Too bad he's such an asshole, though.
This is the most disappointing part. I have a hard time imagining that any of these billionaires are "good people" in a way that I would recognize. But before this Twitter thing I felt like at least I can respect the things Musk chooses to spend his time and money on. How much would that $44B have moved the needle on on his Mars dream? Seems like a waste to me.
It would make 0 difference, SpaceX is already moving as fast as possible, throwing money at them would not make things go faster. In the future when actual ships start flying to Mars Elon will still have plenty to fund that personally if he needed to.
In other news, the first flight test of the largest rocket ever built is scheduled for Monday the 17th
I realize that this isn't practical; the causes of poverty are complex and just giving people money won't solve all of it. But it does give some notion of the scope of what could have been accomplished directly.
But if you already have $100 billion dollars; and all you wanted in the world was adoration and accolades from adoring masses; and you didn't care those masses are trolls, clowns, and morons; then maybe $44 billion is the right price.
Fortunately that was actually impossible, but it underscores how a thing like Twitter is also too important to be a plaything of investors and playboys.
Every time someone mentions Mastodon here, we get a bunch of responders saying "they blew their chance" as if they're copy-pasting off of a script… I hate to be conspiracy-brained, but a quick note to those guys: if you are Twitter insiders, you're not being very subtle.
From where I'm sitting, Mastodon — and more importantly, ActivityPub — is doing great. For those that thing the standard is too weird for normies, keep in mind that the way things are going, more startups are going to follow Medium and Substack’s approach.
All the drama around Twitter's also flat-out hilarious if one doesn't care whether Twitter lives or dies, and lots of that drama's on Twitter, so I'd call that an improvement, too.
I take it for what it is, a notification engine for "influencers" and media, and a time-waster, and basically nothing else
it's essentially not good for anything else, if you put too much faith in it to do things like learning or discovering new things, you're going to be disappointed
but at what it does I think it's better than a couple of years ago when I last spent some time using it - it was unmitigated garbage at everything back then
Twitter only has value so long as it has network effect. People leaving diminish it. So why not?
Honestly I kinda like it. I would extend it to any company accepting tax breaks.
Imagine the headline 'The church of the Last days, a state-affiliated non-profit, is warning that the end is near'.
Amazon, a state funded company,... (because they shopped around for the best tax breaks)
Or any single other company that does what a company does by making any deal they can to better their bottom lines by taking tax breaks or gov't funding in any form would need to be called state funded.
It sort of loses its stigma from that view point.
Around the time they left, the label had already been improved to mention funding instead of affiliation.
If they could just be a bit chill about it, is quite possible within a month it might have been replaced with a approximate-percentage-funding label, which should not be particularly offensive.
Would be really slick to see all media accounts have company ownership / funding listed.
and the acting refers to his label changes,
right?
NPR could benefit from a bit of patience also: realize how erratic the counterparty is, and wait a bit to see what shakes out.
at the very least, twitter & elmu have to understand their actions were wrong and show conciliation for wronging them – if they're incapable of that bare minimum, there's obviously no hope of them cleaning up their act
It's a pit of right-wing extremism and some of the most fawning sycophancy I've ever seen.