“Twitter is going great” is being sunset
twitterisgoinggreat.com
twitterisgoinggreat.com
Either I'm the one person who isn't seeing this, or this person has a very deranged definition of "white supremacist." I get AI grifter guys in my feed but I can't recall seeing unironic white supremacists.
I'm not a fan of Elon but these people that made their entire personality trying to demonstrate how Twitter is dead are the same ones who were saying it would happen as soon as Musk was confirmed to take over, and if anything are disappointed it's not going as badly as they predicated so they need to make things seem worse than they are.
The biggest problems I've had with Twitter since Elon took over is having to see his unfunny jokes like tweets saying which planet they're sent from or making the logo a doge head for a few days.
I don't know if part of Twitter's algorithm was to filter these out for me, but browsing Twitter without an account is a wild ride, and has led me to believe that the far right has indeed infested the platform thoroughly.
A lot of it did, and still does get removed/hidden that at least gives the impression that the platform is less toxic than it really is but I don't really buy the argument that forceful removal/banning is helpful anymore because it really hasn't worked anywhere online that ive seen, it just escalates things and makes them madder/more vengeful. Then they just make new posts/accounts/do damage elsewhere.
I'd much rather just read a few more empty death and terrorism theats and move on with my day than have twitter esculate them until they actually are mad enough to try and follow through with them.
1. Their definition of "white supremacist" is far, far wider than yours.
2. I don't see white supremacists at all. In fact, aside from Elon's mercurial and adolescent drama and knee jerk policy changes, Twitter is far, far better.
It seems like all the people who whined about other people on Twitter fled to Mastodon or something. And in fact, I stopped using Mastodon because it became a clutter of people complaining about people on Twitter, because those people held different opinions.
"Remember: When I use the term “white supremacy”, I do not use it to refer to extreme hate groups. I use the term to capture the pervasiveness, magnitude, and normalcy of white dominance and assumed superiority."
So it looks like a further redefinition of a word to control language and discourse. In essence, "white culture" (I don't really know if that's a thing?) or what is commonly referred to as "whiteness" today is “white supremacy”. So unless you want to be a "“white supremacist" you will actively fight against it. At the least, you certainly won't disagree with the critical social justice ideology if you want to be an "ally". And if you think you're being a "good white" by not being racist you are actually problematic and need to "do the work".
This is from her extremely popular, celebrated, and mainstream texts and not my opinions.
I honestly have noticed no changes whatsoever in my feed. A lot of people I follow are griping about how bad it is, but I'm not seeing it. Perhaps they are sunsetting this site because it's not all doom and gloom, as much as they may have wanted it to be?
I have no opinion on the entire matter other than it's the same for me, outside of Elon Musk making more frequent odd replies (as you mention). He seems to respond with "we really need to look into this" or "this needs further investigation" on things that border on conspiracies or are easily proven/disproven.
Am I just an outlier for some strange reason?
> I'm not a fan of Elon but these people that made their entire personality trying to demonstrate how Twitter is dead
Yeah, when he laid off a bunch of engineering, lots of people (including Grady Booch, one of the guys behind UML) were insisting that Twitter was going to fall apart, pointing to every single bug as proof of their prophesy (despite that Twitter has always been plagued with bugs--fail whale, anyone?--and many other successful social media platforms thrive as businesses despite far more frequent, egregious bugs). Of course, this isn't an endorsement of Musk in any way, but it will be read as such because we're not allowed to have nuanced opinions on the Internet.
Ah yes, I remember when people had those. I think they phased them out because they didn't fit into the headlines anymore.
Also, it costs less to paint the world with simple black and white.
The most definitively actual of actual Nazis borrowed leftist phrases like “Socialism” right into the name of the party from which “Nazi” is abbreviated, as well as a lot of other leftist language (while radically recontextualizing the meaning.)
Borrowing language from existing left, right, center, religious, and secular groups, and then rearranging and defining them to create the appearance that the natural endpoint of whatever your existing ideology is is Nazism is what actual Nazis do.
“You know who else drank water? Hitler!”
Am I joking, or am I pointing out the silliness of taking something as mundane as “humor” and portraying it as something uniquely fascist?
This isn't some kind of nuanced topic, the facts of the matter are evident, there's just nazis and nazi-enablers playing interference and trying to fabricate uncertainty many of which are in this very thread.
As we learned long ago there are very effective tools that defeat social conservatives such as nazis, entertaining their ideas is not one of those tools.
All democrats are commie socialists that want to take away your individuality.
All republicans are white supremacist nazis that want to impose their will.
All of that thanks to Musk. But I'm not complaining, my microblog experience has gotten much better now that Mastodon's userbase is much more diverse.
It's popular here because people don't feel able to express themselves to others outside of such an online platform. That and prostitution
Elon wants to export this dystopia to the rest of the world... I joke, I doubt he has any clue about anything beyond the user counts.
This is true for all companies though. It's arguably happening to Google now, and to Facebook, and, hard as it is to imagine, will happen to Apple some day, even if that day is decades away. GE was an icon of corporate competence in the 80s and is now in parts. Toyota has long seemed invincible but now has to make it through the transition to electric vehicles. Intel, Microsoft, etc.
The hard part is not predicting that a corporation will decline, it's getting the timing right. (Just ask Michael Dell, who in the mid 1990s famously said he'd shut down Apple and sell it for parts if he was in charge. Red Herring magazine kept predicting Amazon's imminent collapse and at least half the people reading this don't even know who that is because they very much died first.)
I know people love to crib Hemingway's turn of phrase, but I don't think it makes sense here. Because it's the opposite, right? Sudden first, and then gradual. There's some big catalyst, and what remains afterwards slowly dissipates seemingly interminably towards zero. Even in notable cases like MySpace, which still exists, it's just "gradual" at first and then it's still "gradual" later, too.
From an information perspective, that makes tracking it over time more relevant, not less. But of course also means it's a lot more work.
A 1% conversion rate is pretty much what I would expect from an online business.
As long as that move doesn't somehow end up solely responsible for burning the site to the ground, I can't imagine he'll regret it.
When I was doing research on paywalls, this was my experience too, and some paywalls are much cheaper than $8/month. (Sites like Wired are always running random deals for $5 for an entire year.) Many sites came out of the gate at 1.5% or even 2%, but then dropped to 0.5% once all the fanatics were scooped up in the first few months. Pubs more often than not think their paywall or analytics must be “broken,” because they can’t believe the drop-off.
Elon Derangement Syndrome is not as prolific as TDS but it's still definitely a thing.
> hero of the left [...] omg Mars!
"The left" doesn't give a shit about Mars. Some space-romantics who may or may not be on the left, give a shit about Mars.
[1] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/elon-musk-thai-...
But it seems pretty absurd to charge Elon Musk with under-delivering. Do you not remember what the idea of an electric car meant prior to 2005? Or the possibilities and economics of reusable spacecraft just 5 years ago?
This gets the details wrong. The backlash towards the Twitter acquisition was essentially immediate and a consequence of the fact that Elon was the one behind it. The antipathy towards all things Elon had already been in slow foment leading up to the announcement of the proposed acquisition last Spring.
A kind of mimetic hatred
Then that only means you were surrounded by your own small bubble. I had taken a hiatus from Twitter because I despised how the "algorithm" banned accounts that I was following earlier only because it was from the right of political spectrum in my Country (India). One of those accounts was an account that set right historical facts about Indian history which was distorted by leftist historians after India gained Independence. These new facts were cross verified and revealed to be true. So what did Twitter India decide to do? It banned the said account.
It was only after Elon took over, all those accounts were re-activated. So I have an opposite experience to you. Most of the accounts that I followed were banned by erstwhile regime have been now reinstated. So it is an opposite of an exodus for me.
Quite frankly, this is not just me in India who felt this. I am pretty sure it was widespread as Twitter was extremely left leaning in its ideology (from employees to the CEO). There was actual stifling of alternative viewpoints - though many on that side of the political spectrum will refuse to even acknowledge this.
Anyways I only brought this up to counter your point on there being some "platform exodus". There is only disgruntled developers who don't like Elon (especially after he openly said he would prefer voting Republican) and his centre-right leaning ideology and left the site. There is no "rational" reason for the hate.
Sorry to put it bluntly. I have always tried to be restricted in what I say lest I get "cancelled" by the woke mob (have been banned twice on HN itself for having contrary opinions). But at this point, I don't care anymore if people feel hurt by my ideological/political/social stances. I am tired of being censored every step of the way. By both Big Tech and Government. I respect your ideological point of view and I hope to get the same treatment back in return. At one point I identified with liberal causes, of being "for free speech" and not against it. Sadly, I find myself moving farther and farther away from what has now become of liberal ideology. It is no longer liberal in that old sense. It has turned fascist. And I can't stand that any more. I find myself on the right side of the aisle which ironically is "for free speech" while the liberal left, which was supposed to stand "for free speech" has adopted cancel culture and censorship as tools to counter opposing viewpoints. People who refuse to see this or accept this are just living in delusion.
Sorry for the rant.
The decrease in activity on twitter is also not a personal anecdote, the number of companies advertising and using platform has decreased substantially.
And lastly, this is exactly my point, you're concerned about some woke mob cry baby crap when the average user doesn't care about either side, this is the kind of dumb shit I see all over twitter when I'm literally scrolling past a highlight for a sports reel highlight and as I said the recommended tweets are random paid low follower people using hysterics to try to get attention. The reality is people don't care what you have to say, and doubly so if you get wound up about a random website not making you feel better about shouting into the void.
> The reality is people don't care what you have to say, and doubly so if you get wound up about a random website not making you feel better about shouting into the void.
So why the censorship/bans then? Censorship does nothing but aggravate the situation even more. Isn't it better to just let people "shout into the void" than stifle their expression and cause harm in real world?
> when the average user doesn't care about either side, this is the kind of dumb shit I see all over twitter when I'm literally scrolling past a highlight for a sports reel highlight and as I said the recommended tweets are random paid low follower people using hysterics to try to get attention.
You say you don't care about it, and yet you are commenting on it. So you do actually care about what is happening on Twitter. If you consider yourself an average user you wouldn't be concerned about Twitter rising in popularity or drowning in loss. You would see your sports reel highlight and close it while being unconcerned about everything else.
> The decrease in activity on twitter is also not a personal anecdote, the number of companies advertising and using platform has decreased substantially.
What you are saying here is again talking points of MSM. Which is another bubble of its own. Neither you nor I have any access to actual data on how many companies are advertising and if the number has gone up or gone down apart from the few knee jerk reactions in the beginning of the takeover. The only real source of information for this would be Musk himself. And he says things are back to normal so I'll take him at his word [1]. Everything else is just conjectures and speculations as Twitter is no longer a public company.
> This is hilarious. For one, I don't even have a twitter so I have no "bubble"
I assumed you are a user because you seemed to talk about Twitter from the point of view of an actual user.
> I stated this is the default top recommendations for anonymous users, which is super important for converting people onto the platform.
Twitter is too big at this point to worry about "converting people onto the platform". It is not like people are discovering Twitter for the first time in 2023. That number (of new users) is going to be very less - possibly those kids who are coming of age and who Twitter is not a target audience for anyways. So Twitter has probably already saturated the market it can tap into and all those who are still joining are just based on whatever is the regular trajectory of Twitter growth. You can't expect any sort of exponential growth in Twitter usage after it has already been in business for over a decade now. It is not an early stage startup where you talk about conversions for anonymous users. Now any conversion metrics that we should focus on would be advertising revenues (not the number of advertisers as that is meaningless), API revenues (which was recently announced with a huge price bump), number of people subscribing to Twitter Blue, number of people subscribing to Creators, MSM/News media subscriptions, paid tweets and lets not forget deals with Governments. This is where the real numbers are going to come from. And unless Twitter releases these numbers we will never know (as Twitter is now a private company).
[1]: https://www.reuters.com/technology/elon-musk-says-twitter-is...
"April 12 (Reuters) - Twitter Inc CEO Elon Musk said on Wednesday the social media company is "roughly breaking even," as most of its advertisers have returned and its aggressive cost-cutting efforts have started bearing fruit after massive layoffs."
A little lesson on business, Musk bought it for 44 billion, at time it was not quite a profitable company but had 4.4 billion in revenue, if he slashes the operating budget by a huge margin and laying off everyone, then whoopee it's profitable, but it's nowhere near the amount of revenue/profit it needs to pay back the debt taken on to finance the purchase. private market analysts report on ad spending all project twitter revenues to drop substantially (40%) based on ad spend data.
Eventually everyone will move out of the ad business as ad blockers become more prolific and it no longer is worth the cost to advertise. So there will be alternative ways of earning. Can never rule that out.
Downsides I listed are more frustration with some decisions taken by Elon. Like increasing the price of the API. But I can see why he did that (especially considering news that OpenAI trained on Twitter data too). I just vented it out so if any Twitter employee is reading this, they come up with some way to also help indie developers (many of them shut shop after this debacle).
Also, I really despise it when people want you to choose either black or white. Either you are in the club of hating Elon or glorifying him. I don't want to fall in either of the buckets. I want to express my own opinion on things that are not influenced by the mob. So yeah I can say both good and bad things about Twitter takeover. And that's exactly what I am doing.
(Twitter's auth flow is entirely broken if you had SMS 2FA before the Musk takeover and pay-to-play. It won't let you log in with the only 2FA method you have, and redirects you to a form to reclaim a locked account after the failure which... requires you to be logged in).
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/04/musk-feuds-with-...
If you upset Twitter’s boss, there is a non-zero chance he will retaliate by using his mod powers to customize your profile to say what he wants. This is undisputably true.
The old guard may have banned accounts for reasons you may have disagreed with, but imagine if they went in and wrote “huge loser” on someone’s profile in a way you could never remove unless you capitulated to the CEO’s personal demands.
I don’t understand how anyone can rationally claim that this system is “better”, unless you’re a partisan who’s happy as long as the victims continue to be people you disagree with.
It’s the same thing. It doesn’t matter if the label is factual or not. It’s the intimidation intent behind the label.
Elon is not highlighting, for example, how much funding Tesla receives. He’s selectively applying labels with a political calculus. But I believe you already know that.
This statement is factually correct, does not infringe on anybody’s rights, and you’d have to be naive if it was not done with some kind of purpose.
To be clear, I am not accusing Elon of being transphobic or promoting an anti-vax agenda. I am highlighting how “it’s factually true” does not mean it is appropriate.
Elon only offered to buy Twitter...that offer had to be accepted (and no, the Board was not "legally obligated" to accept the offer)
He has thrown a lot of ideas at the wall, and some that were not well thought out, but it looks like some of them are actually smart like affiliations and allowing media to charge a small fee per article and for allowing content creators to sell subscriptions. Twitter isn't that serious of a thing - it's OK to try things and see what happens. At least they are shipping product now.
> white supremacists increasingly dominate everyone's feeds
I don't really see white supremacists in my feed which may say more about this person than they like. Maybe there's a redefinition of that too? I think there's certainly a better diversity of opinions on Twitter now.
> the platform’s reliability plummets ever downwards
I haven't noticed any issues. Has anyone else?
> and we need a break.
That's good - find something productive and positive to do with your time. Hoping to bask in others failures is a very negative way to live your life and can't possibly be good for your mental health. Go outside and help a person. Be a positive force in the society you wish to see instead of trying to tear down things.
If Elon and Twitter and the white supremacists you see everywhere are bothering you then it's probably best to stay away and do something positive in your life.