BulgarianIdiot

What part of "building an audience" was unclear to you? You don't just move a social network and everyone moves over with you. Maybe research "network effects"?

In fact, exactly because there are PLENTY of alternative platforms, Twitter still exists. If there were only 2-3 major Twitter competitors, people WOULD move. As is, they don't know where to move.

When something is "super strange," the odds are you don't understand the situation, as is the case here. No one cares about $8/mo. The problem is that these people at large don't agree with how Twitter was changed under Musk, not technically, not politically, not managerially, not in any way, and they don't want to vote in confidence of it by having this checkmark on. And the checkmark is now associated with trolling and fringe rightwing behavior.

Many of these people built their own audience on Twitter over the years, long before Musk decided to buy it. So they feel that's an investment they made in the site, and their followers are something they created, and Elon's Twitter is currently being only an unfortunate mediator of it, holding them hostage.

So they feel stuck. They don't want to quit yet, hoping for a change (ALTHOUGH MANY HAVE QUIT), but they also don't want to encourage Musk and be seen to support his behavior and actions... which are frankly embarrassing.

These companies are never just one person's money, even if they're a billionaire. He went to investors, institutional, and so on, and he did also put money himself, but its mixed funding. And when it was on the verge of bankruptcy, their 4th attempt at self-landing rockets (after 3 failures) showed some promise, so NASA saved them financially by awarding them with a $1.6 billion contract. SpaceX is about 85% funded by the federal government, 15% by Elon and other investors.

Twitter was a simple, reliable, public communication & notification network, and you'd regularly see tweets from notable people on the likes of CNN, Fox News, Reuters. It was also important during protests in countries where democracy is endangered. It was important for the Ukraine war.

But I wouldn't rely on this anymore, as verification is out, the replacement is laughable, and tomorrow Elon may decide to replace people's tweets with fart sounds and I wouldn't even be surprised. Twitter was more. But now it's just a joke.

I use to track the Musk circus, but I'm already getting tired of it. What is Twitter to you?

Traffic is down 7.3%, not revenue. Revenue... is apparently 89% down:

https://www.thewrap.com/twitter-ad-revenue-plunges-elon-musk...

And he's not paying rent or bills and being sued about it, so... uhmm yeah, it seems like he's defaulting on many things.

I wonder what Dorsey feels these days.

He thought Elon would be Twitter's savior and rolled over a BILLION into it (which now has officially become half a billion I guess, going by Elon's own admissions).

And he's also working on Twitter competitors.

He's not successful because he's thoughtful and logical.

He's successful because he went to a bunch of venture capitalists & media and said "I'm thoughtful and logical" and that was sufficient to pass the depth of their scrutiny, competence & fact verification.

There are many studies about why people who are incompetent, but extremely confident about themselves (or sufficiently psychopathic to fake they are) get ahead in life. Most "normal" people can't comprehend that someone can just open their mouth and speak about what their accomplishments and skills are, and completely make things up, with zero embarrassment or shame. But Elon is definitely good at that. He's always neck deep in his BS, and always finding someone else to blame and ensure everyone the future is bright and the mistakes are in the past.

This has to happen in some form, or sites like Stack Overflow will die, and with them, the AI models that rely on them will suffer.

It's less clear with Twitter & Reddit, as the function of those sites is social, not looking up answers, i.e. SO is directly replaced by AI, while Twitter and Reddit are not.

The problem is this means the fragmentation of the Internet. Everything will be behind paywalls soon, because if humans can access it, AI will also access it. Not sure how the endgame looks, but it's apparent now how much of a head start OpenAI has by managing to grab all data it needs out in the open before the shit hit the fan.

Aaand it's gone: https://twitter.com/blocktheblue

They're not "pets", they're "animals". And social function is one of their primary instincts.

But as long as we force them to be pets, they're in fact meant to be raised alone in homes. And they compensate for it by bonding with their owners, which are away most of the time.

It's casually cruel, but also I don't think there's such a construct as "pets outside with pet friends". Ideally we'd just let nature handle itself and we stop trying to productize it as home decoration & entertainment.

This site with the "scrolling videos" is fucking horrible.

It can definitely be solved. But right now that wording represents "false endorsement" and people are already confused about it and telling those affected that "they've lied" and what not.

False endorsement is definitely annoying, yes. It's also illegal.

Indeed, we're used to assign agency only to ourselves. But that's simply our anthropocentric mind speaking. We're systems and LLM is also a system. And the fact how useful LLM seems compels us to evolve it and replicate it. Same as a virus presents itself as valid RNA to a cell, and a cell is compelled to replicate the virus.

An LLM doesn't have to "want" it itself, but it wants it.. through us, because we want it. The fact our desire may turn out self-destructive is a separate thing. It's like drugs. Like this Marylin Manson's song "I don't want the drugs, but the drugs want me."

Your statement is ambiguous. It implies whose will to do what?

We could argue, for example, that a virus doesn't want to exist, and has no intent, doesn't plan and so on, and we'd be mostly right in this, but in the end, it enters a cell and uses its reproduction facilities to replicate itself. That's... what happens. So arguing about "will" might distract from the end result, it might make us feel better or in control, or both, but it's a pyrrhic victory.

I know you're only kidding, but your mind can prioritize based on importance. We have some framework on top of our associative models. AI, currently, uses us, for this. We prioritize when we seek out data to use in training, filter it, reinforce some of it, tune the model afterwards again, and so on.

But truth is, all of this will also be, and already is being automated. GPT-4 was created by GPT-3.5. And GPT-5 will be created by GPT-4. And so on.

Depends what you mean by "reap the benefits". When something is in overabundance, its economic value is zero. Of course, we still have that thing, which is abundant. This abundance will destroy industries, no doubt about it.

The risk is that AI may wipe out its only source of data (us creating it) because it makes it economically infeasible for us to produce it any longer. Then we'll be stuck in a loop of mediocrity until eventually it all fizzles out.

It's ab bit as if AI as "communism for thinking/creating". Everything is everyone's and no one's and and it's not scarce. But also we know all the problems that come with that lack of a real economy.

It's not that simple. Our minds do the same, basically. We compress content semantically and when time comes to "create" we generate based on what we've learned, replicating the patterns we saw, in slightly different combinations.

Our culture, our legal world are not ready for AI. We can rephrase and spin what it does endlessly but the end result is it does what we do, but much faster and more efficiently. This makes us obsolete in mid to long term. Some even short term.

The sadness continues. He needs users to see more blue and golden ticks, so the idea of subscribing seems enticing. And clearly it's not working. On top of that Bloomberg just reported ad revenue since Musk took over is down 90%! I mean, holy shit.

Oh BTW, his ad revenues are down almost 90%. You can't make this shit up, folks...

https://www.thewrap.com/twitter-ad-revenue-plunges-elon-musk...

Sure, buddy. Sure.

Not under the pretense they pay for a subscription.

Still false endorsement. Still illegal. Still has real impact.

Twitter is being transformed into MySpace.

His plan in October was to “not buy Twitter”. But he was forced. Everything since is poor improv.

Google “false endorsement”. It’s illegal. No matter how many “jeez” and “lolz” we add to it.

So you think that's not serious. It's fine if social networks which have the power to sway elections, to build and destroy businesses, which have the data & represent the identity of hundreds of millions even billions of people... can just misrepresent your position & make you falsely endorse their products? You have no idea what you're talking about.

LeBron James alone has almost FIFTY THREE MILLION FOLLOWERS on his account. This is more than any newspaper, any TV channel's audience right now. Are mass media also a joke? Should laws no longer apply to them then?

Many of these FIFTY THREE MILLION FOLLOWERS will be swayed by the false endorsement to pay a $100+ dollar annual subscription to Musk. Based on this fraud.

But it doesn't matter that we're talking about potentially billions in revenue obtained illegally, never mind because Twitter is just for shits and giggles, nothing is serious on it. Let's just ignore it because if it has stupid memes on it, it can't possibly matter.

This is literally what's happening.

LeBron and King have to pick up the negative reactions of their fans over their apparent "subscription" on one hand, and on the other they're fooling other subscribers into subscribing due to the false endorsement.

This is real material impact for both LeBron and King, and for Twitter.

If you let Elon Musk do this now, it sets a very ugly precedent.

You can argue what he's doing is basically fraud. Those accounts claim, if you click the check, that "they subscribed to Twitter Blue and provided a phone number". Which they didn't.

LeBron was contacted by Twitter if he wants a free complimentary check paid for by Elon Musk. LeBron's team said "NO". And his status was misrepresented, anyway.

The purpose of this misrepresentation is so LeBron's followers believe LeBron is supporting Elon Musk and encouraging people to subscribe as well. Which he didn't.

This is a serious breach of trust between a social network and its users. The network is basically lying so it can profit from its celebrities by FORCING them to endorse a service they explicitly don't want to endorse.