• 312@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    This is Musk’s “Reichstag Fire” moment for Twitter.

    The rate limiting is not because of “extreme manipulation”, but because of piss-poor code that Twitter deployed as part of their change to only allow tweets to be viewed if logged in. Twitter is effectively DDoSing itself right now. But, it creates an opportunity for Musk to create a narrative.

    These “temporary” limits will probably remain inevitably, as they provide another benefit to Twitter - they drive Blue subscriptions. Unfortunately, they also repel free users from using the platform entirely, and at a much higher ratio.

    Twitter is going to become even more of a cesspool than it already is at an alarming rate. Crazy how many established social media platforms have decided to crumble at the exact same time.

      • lunarmedic@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        My lord. And they can’t/won’t piece 1+1 together? Hanlon’s razor dictates they are indeed idiots.

        • 312@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          In order to quickly fix it they would probably have to roll back the change to require login to view tweets, which would be admitting that it wasn’t caused by “attacks” on Twitter, which Elon won’t do. Rock and a hard place.

        • zos_kia@lemmy.fmhy.ml
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          1 year ago

          My guess is that they are severely understaffed. Happens when the new boss is a noob in the industry and fires the people he needs…

      • assassinatedbyCIA@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        The self-DDoS truly the height of idiocy. It’s been a good couple of weeks watching billionaires who have never faced consequences fuck around and find out.

      • Nanachi@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Elon was right, firing off many engineers didn’t cause any DDoS attack from outside- as DDoS attacks are now happening from within

    • coldv@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I find it especially bizarre that spez took inspiration and guidance from Musk. I can entertain the possibility of Musk intentionally driving Twitter to the ground (though he sure is taking the scenic route), but Reddit? It just seems like the rich tech bros have collectively lost their minds

        • tsz@reddthat.com
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          1 year ago

          Yes. While he loves to talk about how little reddit makes, he doesn’t mention how much reddit pays him for that.

          • JoeHill@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            He’s rich not because of his salary (what Reddit pays him). He’s rich because of his equity/ownership in Reddit. But he can only monetize that if there are buyers.

            For years this wasn’t a problem because private buyers and banks were happy to buy his shares or lend against them as collateral. However that market has been drying up over the past 18 months.

            So he desperately needs to get to an IPO so he, and his Board of Directors and other stockholders, can dump their shares on an unsuspecting retail public market that doesn’t realize that the “profitability” was only achieved by destroying the user base, and that what they’ve actually bought is a ticking time bomb.

            • jayandp@sh.itjust.works
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              1 year ago

              I really hope the IPO bombs just to spite all the people, including Spez, that drove Reddit into the ground.

              • MerliSYD@lemmy.one
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                1 year ago

                The problem is that if the IPO bombs, it’s the public investors that will lose money, as fuck u/spez and other shareholders will have dumped their steaming pile of shit shares onto the market from the start to reduce their shareholding and cash in.

                • givesomefucks@lemmy.world
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                  1 year ago

                  When people say that, they don’t mean they hope it bombs after the IPO…

                  They mean they hope It bombs before the sale so Huffman and the others with a stake don’t make much money

                  Anyone that buys the stock after the IPO would get a lower price.

                • driving_crooner@lemmy.eco.br
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                  1 year ago

                  It would be the Institucional investors that have the opportunity to buy before the share is open in the market. After that is fair game to anyone stupid enough to buy it.

            • atempuser23@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              It’s not just spez , there are going to be a LOT of folks in reddit willing to burn it to the ground to create valuation for an IPO. The next Mod blackout need to happen the night before and the day of the IPO.

              • JoeHill@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                Thank you for making my point. That’s not salary. That’s equity sold in a secondary.

      • Friend_of_your_moms@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        I really don’t believe at all that he would intentionally drive it to the ground. I can see him claiming that if he manages to actually kill it tho

      • MotoAsh@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        They never had their minds. They just now have enough money to make that all of our problems… This is why no one deserves billions of dollars. It makes you go megalomaniacle.

      • Friend_of_your_moms@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        I really don’t believe at all that he would intentionally drive it to the ground. I can see him claiming that if he manages to actually kill it tho

    • notExactlyI20@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Yo for real, what’s up with all these social media sites literally shooting themselves in the foot as we speak?.

      Youtube planning to antagonize adblock users and limiting video watching, Reddit killing itself with bureocracy style and now Twitter doing this shit. Hopefully shit sites like TikTok or Facebook jump on the wagon too.

      • ashok36@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        For reddit at least, The money from VCs dried up. They have to monetise fast or go broke.

        Elon way way way overplayed for Twitter and the company is hemorrhaging money paying the loans he took out to pay for the purchase.

        Google in general is in decline. Ad sales are down as the net becomes SEO’d to death. Marketing teams just aren’t willing to pay for Google ads like they used to since the roi isn’t there anymore.

        • fidodo@lemmy.sdf.org
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          1 year ago

          But there are so many ways Reddit could have played this better. It wasn’t just about monetizing. The API changes were in bad faith and meant to kill 3rd party apps without flat out doing it. Users would have been understanding if they charged a reasonable amount of started injecting ads into the API feeds, but instead they went full aggro and disrespected not just the devs working to make their platform better, but the users as well. If they wanted 3rd party apps to show their ads or charge a fee to remove ads I would have been understanding, but because of the disrespect I’ve dropped them.

          • jscummy@sh.itjust.works
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            1 year ago

            I forgot the actual numbers, but it’s downright bizarre that Reddit can’t figure out how to make money. They have a massive platform that is user-moderated for free, filled with free user-created content, with third party developers creating solid apps and features, again for free. Reddit should be able to do fuck all and make money

            • givesomefucks@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              but it’s downright bizarre that Reddit can’t figure out how to make money.

              Because of (venture) capitalism…

              They made more from people giving it to them. If the company posted a profit, they’d have to pay taxes

              So they pay themselves and amass assets.

              If it fails you keep your salary and sell the assets. If you owe more than that’s worth, declare bankruptcy. If not, collect a check.

              Startups stay in this phase right up till IPO, where they try to flip to profits as fast as possible. Then you can not only declare x profits, but y% increase in profits.

              Tldr:

              They’re nonprofitable by choice. This method just doesn’t work during a recession.

          • SwallowsDick@lemmy.ca
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            1 year ago

            That plus their own app being abysmal. The official Reddit app is a terrible experience without the necessary features of the old ones

        • knightry@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          In general, i agree with your post, but GOOG is up ~ 30% in the last 6 months. Specific parts of Google may be dwindling but their overall business is thriving right now.

          • SJ_Zero@lemmy.fbxl.net
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            1 year ago

            The stock is not the company, that’s important to remember. The PE ratios for tech companies are totally out of whack compared to basically any other company.

            Google stock is doing ok in part because they have Bard which means they’re participating in the AI boom. I think that’s going to turn out to be mostly hot air, but in the meantime it’s helping a small number of companies stay afloat

        • Hamartiogonic@sopuli.xyz
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          1 year ago

          I really hope this the end of an era of milking the users for data and then selling that for ad money. Twitter and Facebook are switching to a subscription model, but I’m not so sure it’s actually going to reduce the amount of data they try to get from everyone.

      • Unaffiliated_User@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Twitter successfully sold itself to a private investment firm for over market value. That’s the dream for tech startups and never-made-a-profit digital services.

        Anyone still using Twitter is an addict or a boomer, but that’s exactly the audience that Musk wanted to purchase.

        • Corkyskog@sh.itjust.works
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          1 year ago

          The only reason twitter was popular is because you could check it for information. Towns and organizations would post updates there, it drove traffic, eyeballs, ads and revenue. This is the dumbest thing ever, even if he wanted to promote nazi ideology, it’s idiotic because your only preaching to the choir. You cannot convert people when you drive them all away, so even if it wasn’t about money, it’s dumb.

      • Meowoem@sh.itjust.works
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        The tin foil part of my brain says that they’re trying to destroy media ahead of the election so they can control the narrative but really I think it’s just that we’ve reached a point where no one is pouring free money into literally any old internet nonsense and it’s turned out that this ‘they’re selling your data and making billions!’ was never actually very true.

        They pushed their website as ‘we’re having massive growth and with enough investment we can dominate the market!’ so all the idiot ‘angel Investors’ threw monkey into it but that can only last so long before people say ‘ok you dominate the market, now what?!’

      • Meowoem@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        The tin foil part of my brain says that they’re trying to destroy media ahead of the election so they can control the narrative but really I think it’s just that we’ve reached a point where no one is pouring free money into literally any old internet nonsense and it’s turned out that this ‘they’re selling your data and making billions!’ was never actually very true.

        They pushed their website as ‘we’re having massive growth and with enough investment we can dominate the market!’ so all the idiot ‘angel Investors’ threw monkey into it but that can only last so long before people say ‘ok you dominate the market, now what?!’

    • simplecyphers@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      There are several negatives to the limitation too. Advertisers (which are already leaving in droves) are even further discouraged from placing ads that have a much smaller chance of being seen.

      Edit: spelling

    • fidodo@lemmy.sdf.org
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      1 year ago

      It goes deeper than that.

      This all started with the API changes. Before they were charging a fair price for the API and companies happily paid it for the convenience. Then Elon got greedy he started charging a ridiculous amount for the API so those companies decided it would be worth it to just deal with the annoyance and switch to scraping the website instead. But when you hit the website it’s way less efficient than hitting the API because it’s doing a bunch of mixing and ranking which is a lot more complicated and costly than serving static content, which costs a small fraction of real time algorithmic ranking. So now instead of making money off companies that want their data they’re losing money on the cloud costs to serve the scrapers.

      More recently, they haven’t been paying their hosting bills to Google and their service was set to expire at the end of last month. What just happened at the start of this month? They added the limitations. That can’t be a coincidence. Now the Google services weren’t hosting the site itself, otherwise they’d probably be fully down right now, but it was hosting their trust and safety services for things like fighting spam. That could have also been hosting anti scraper services as well. Since they’re so under staffed they probably couldn’t swap the services in time, so instead of having anti scraping services like every other big company on the internet, they decided to cut service instead. It’s just built up incompetence coming to a head.

    • assassin_aragorn@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Unfortunately, they also repel free users from using the platform entirely, and at a much higher ratio.

      This is really, really bad for Twitter. The whole reason so many groups and people use it for official communications and announcements is because their audience can easily and freely see it. Rate limiting and requiring an account completely destroy that. And without it, Twitter really doesn’t have much to offer.

      Plus this goes directly against advertising lol

    • nitefox@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      How is that even possible? By limiting access the load should be lower, there is no way

    • br3d@lemmy.fmhy.ml
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      1 year ago

      Much like the case of Reddit, Musk might want to reflect on who actually produces all the content he’s guarding so jealously, and ask himself what’s likely to happen to the value of his site if he makes it difficult for millions of us to write all his content for free

      • Socsa@sh.itjust.works
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        I don’t think this is that complicated. The hypothesis Musk and Spez are pursuing is that right wingers are easier to monetize because they are stupid. They are basically purging the old, liberal web2.0 userbase, under the premise that they are going to build back something which is more friendly to the conservative social media space.

      • Mangoguana@lemmy.world
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        He just wants a private club with a familiar venue. He knows people like twitter, so he buys it for himself to play king among the plebs and rubbing it into the faces of his “critics” who truly know who he is. Sometimes I wonder if he actually acknowledges the outside world at all since his 5 minutes of fame. Anyways, the emperor has no clothes, and his self destruction is highly entertaining.

  • BornVolcano@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Image Transcription: Twitter Post:


    Elon Musk, @elonmusk

    To address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation, we’ve applied the following temporary limits

    • Verified accounts are limited to reaching 6000 posts/day
    • Unverified accounts to 600 posts/day
    • New unverified accounts to 300/day

    ^I’m a human volunteer transcribing posts in a format compatible with screen readers, for blind and visually impaired users!^

  • Khrounose@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I see that a lot of people complain about reddit, twitter, and whatever mainstream website completely fuck the consumer, but fail to realize one crucial thing. The only time change happens in mob settings is when the pain of no change is greater than the pain of change. I applaud Elon, spez, and who ever else wishes to put there services behind their paywall whether it’s an API or just simply viewing tweets. Anyone in the know knows that it’s a crock of shit and anyone who isn’t is annoyed to the point where change is preferable. The sooner people figure out posting information, entertainment, and other forms of media/knowledge to the benefit of a company is horrendous the better. Now we have the opportunity to get rid of the corporate greed and basically open-source peoples knowledge from around the globe. Although like with reddit, mob mentality poses a real threat to communities like this one, I trust that you all are normal and level headed individuals who can come to disagreements but still respect eachother (as corny as that sounds). I much prefer it over giving more information to companies who use it to profit off of my content, while I receive nothing.

    *Edit: Thank you kind stranger for the reddit gold! Glad you spent real hard cash so I can have reddit premium and reddit coins! The lovely people at reddit will be spending your money sitting on a yacht eating grapes in one hand and lobster in the other. I’m sure they are real thankful too! :) *

  • scottywh@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    That man has got to legitimately be one of the stupidest motherfuckers to ever luck his ass into a pile of money.

  • Snapz@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Twitter was an important unifying communications tool during the Arab Spring. The Arab spring was a threat to biz as usual in places like Saudi Arabia. The second largest investor in Twitter is Saudi Arabia.

    Saudi Arabia killed and dismembered a journalist from the US, more or less in plain sight. Elon is now killing and dismembering Twitter in plain sight to limit its power as a unifying tool that stands as a demonstrable, active threat to capitalism and oligarchs around the world.

    Billionaires do favors for other billionaires. It’s part of why spez is trying to tank Reddit. Remember how dangerous Reddit was to capitalism’s status quo around the time of GME/Robinhood/Antiwork recently.

    The specific moment we’re in right now is meant to shatter consolidated organizing power on Reddit as we splinter into several smaller alternative platforms (or for some, disconnect entirely). Not saying we shouldn’t be in Lemmy, but calling out the larger reality of the moment.

    Billionaires do favors for other billionaires.

  • 👁️👄👁️@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    I mean I see why Reddit and Twitter are doing it. We’re in a really weird transitional period of the internet right now, for better or for worse. They’re doing it to prevent scraping, because why would you read all these garbage tweets to get to the information you need when an ChatGPT can spit out the exact information without fluff? It’s taking their content without any funding back to them, effectively stealing their revenue.

    So what are these companies to do? Honestly I hope this is birth to a new form of social media, and this benefits the fedi greatly. It will be unsustainable to run large social media companies like theirs who profit off of user data and content. Whereas tons of fedi servers ran by hobbiest, effectively ran out of pocket or by donations, is much more sustainable. They’re doing it for community and more pure content that everyone wants without corporate fluff. If ChatGPT scrapes the fedi community, that’s okay because the fedi isn’t designed to make money so nothing is lost.

  • ???@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    “Extreme levels of data scraping” my ass. This is probably meant to reduce server costs because Elon put a huge hole in this boat and now he does a very loud “look-what-you-made-me-do” scream. And what on earth would “system manipulation” exactly mean? Sounds like some pseudo-profound bullshit.

    • Sol@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      who had two social media companies dying on their bingo board?

      • SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca
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        1 year ago

        I’m betting on the Trifecta.

        We’re still not quite halfway through the year. I just need Zuck to require a VR hat to access facebook and I’ll get a big payout!

        Come on Zuck, Metaverse is the future, man! Don’t listen to the naysayers, everyone wants to live in a legless world, you just gotta give them that final push!

      • 0xD@infosec.pub
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        They have never properly turned a profit - and relied solely on VC money. It was kind of “obvious” from the beginning - this house of cards of completely free services is increasingly unstable.

        • nbafantest@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Both could have been profitable overnight if they wanted to. Reddit doesn’t need 2000+ employees. It’s a simple forum, led by volunteers. It is definitely possible to run it profitably on ads and volunteer premium services.

          Spez is simply a moron. Reddit doesn’t need multiple chat/messaging features. It doesn’t need NFTs. It doesn’t need to be tik tok.

          • rookie@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            the biggest thing to me, in terms of server load, is that reddit does not need to host videos/images. It’s a link aggregate.

            I’m only a layman in this particular field, but I imagine it’s a lot lighter on resources to direct people to sites streaming video than to host and serve it all yourself.

            • lamp@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              Text and database entries are, indeed, Vastly lighter on resources (compute and bandwidth). Bandwidth cost for text is practically free. Managing voting is surely not easy though; every single vote is an additional database entry which means that they cost money to store. Then the vote sorting algorithm has to run pretty frequently. Comments themselves are probably nothing compared to the votes.

              But managing voting and sorting is a one-time-cost. Reddit doesn’t let you vote on old things which means that they can completely discard the votes and keep the totals and never resort ever again. They have no real ongoing costs there.

          • 0xD@infosec.pub
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            1 year ago

            Oh yeah, I completely agree with that. However, don’t forget that setting up the IT infrastructure for such large sites to be performant and scalable takes a ridiculous amount of resources. And people expect snappy, quick websites with the perfect algorithm for constant dopamine shots.

            That’s the reason why I think the Fediverse is the future of social media - but it’s still very young and will take a lot more work to be friendly for the masses.

            • nbafantest@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              It is very noticable the snappiness/responsiveness coming to Lemmy.world. My smaller mastodon instance is generally fine but images and stuff are noticably slower.

          • sauerkraus@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            They could have even made a profit from third party apps if the pricing wasn’t 100x a reasonable rate.

      • Fredselfish@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Definitely not me. Crazy I hear talks of MySpace making a come back. That’s one social media site I enjoyed and would love to visit again.

  • ArgonautVehicle@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Elon Musk, the latest billionaire owner of the online screaming match known as Twitter, sat slumped at his desk, staring at a wall of monitors blinking with a technicolor smorgasbord of error messages. The reason? He’d just let Twitter’s hosting contract with Google lapse because he thought it’d be fun to see if he could migrate it somewhere else. The results? Not so fun.

    A comment on Reddit had caught his eye, and he couldn’t shake it. “Every now and then Elon must have a moment of clarity. Where it occurs to him ‘Maybe I am just stupid?’ But then he violently buries the thought.”

    “Stupid?” he scoffed aloud to his empty office, sending a mini landslide of Mars Rover prototypes tumbling off his desk. “I’m a genius.”

    He remembered how smart he’d felt when he decided to axe the account verification system, only to reinstate it after a week of high-profile mix-ups that included the Dalai Lama being mistaken for a llama enthusiast.

    And the content moderation! Who needs it? Well, as it turned out, everyone. Without it, Twitter had turned into a feral wilderness of conspiracy theories, insult slinging, and more unsolicited pictures of eggplants than a greengrocer’s catalog.

    And then there was Kanye. “Free Kanye!” he’d declared one afternoon after one too many rocket fuel coffees. But after the notorious rapper had declared war on flannel shirts and clogged up the site with CAPS LOCK tweets, the ban was back on faster than you can say “Kim Kardashian for president.”

    “Stupid?” he muttered again, watching as Twitter spontaneously DDOS’d itself like a robotic bull in a digital china shop.

    There was a pause. Then a grin spread slowly across Elon’s face, as if he’d just understood the punchline to a particularly tricky joke. “Naaaah,” he laughed, slapping the desk.

    He looked at the chaos on the screens, the digital calamity his decisions had wrought, and couldn’t help but chuckle. There was something amusing about being this absurdly, cosmically, hilariously brilliant.

    “Back to the drawing board,” he chuckled, picking up a Mars Rover and making it do little jumps across his desk.

    • x4740N@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Remember elon musk isn’t smart

      We shouldn’t credit him for Tesla, spacex, etc because it’s the employees that actually put in the effort and contribute

      Elon is just a Mr moneybags that thinks he smart because the things he funded have been good ideas when he actually never contributed anything to those ideas

      I can’t wait until the companies he’s finding push him out completely

      • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        People call him an inventor. He’s not an inventor, he’s an investor. He’s not an engineer. He doesn’t know how to make cars or rockets. He didn’t invent the Tesla and he just plowed money into SpaceX. His brilliant ideas are things like having the Tesla make a fart noise. His experience is in coding and, based on comments of former Twitter engineers, he’s not even very good at that.

        • SolarNialamide@slrpnk.net
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          1 year ago

          He doesn’t even have experience in coding either. He always pretends to but the only degree he has is in business or something.

          • JusticeForPorygon@lemmy.world
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            2 months ago

            Of course he’s a fucking business major
            Probably wanted to do Computer Science but failed Comp Sci 101.

            /s if it wasn’t obvious

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      1 year ago

      Right, it’s oddly calm and peaceful here. It’s nice watching it burn from the other side of the river. - trying to delete this double comment but can’t. I’m guessing just press post once even if it says that it failed?

    • Cornpop@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Right, it’s oddly calm and peaceful here. It’s nice watching it burn from the other side of the river.

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    1 year ago

    That has been his goal since he got forced to actually buy it rather than just boosting the stock so he could make a profit, which like most of his antics was really the only goal (publicity and money)

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    1 year ago

    He’s impulsive and doesn’t know when to shut up. I got the distinct impression that, initially, he was absolutely not serious about buying Twitter. It was a joke/jest. BUT, because his antics affected their stock price he actually got forced into the purchase and now he’s desperately trying to figure out how to make the purchase worth what he actually paid, which is fine and all, except he seems to be leading by impulse, not by consensus or logic. He wakes up in the morning, has some random ass idea and implements it without any oversight. Even his new CEO straight up admitted that she is basically a straw man CEO who will offer no friction to anything Elon wants to do.

    • wampus@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      This is pretty much what ive thought all along. He already owned a huge chuck of twotter when he said he’d buy it. The Ftc called him out and accused him of market manipulation. He then tried everything thing he could to weasel his way out of buying twitter but failed. Now he’s purposely trashing the site so he can declare bankruptcy and get his money back. That’s my theory at least.

      • SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca
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        1 year ago

        When a company declares bankruptcy the only money anyone gets back are the value of the company’s assets. Which some quick googling indicates is somewhere around $14B. So $30B less than what he paid for it.

        I’ve heard Twitter was actually worth somewhere around $25B when he bought it. If he did nothing and left it alone for a year and then sold it, yeah he’d have lost around $20B from the whole mess, but that’s still better that driving it into bankruptcy.

        I think it’s more an ego thing. He obviously overpaid for Twitter, and he can’t admit he made a mistake, so he’s trying to find a way to blame the mistake on the “woke” left or whatever.

        • TehWorld@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          I’m really intrigued what the composition of that 14B is. I’m doubting that they have big investments in the stock market, or oil fields, or whatever. It’s clear that the core IP of Twitter can be largely re-coded by a few bored guys (we’re here aren’t we?). If the actual value of Twitter is in the name and userbase, and that gets trashed, then it’s certainly not worth 14B.

          • SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca
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            1 year ago

            The code needed to handle as many users as Twitter has isn’t trivial.

            But yeah most of the value is in the brand and the userbase. A big factor with social media is how it allows people to build friend networks that are bound to the platform. People can esily move to another platform, but convincing all of their friends to do the same is much more difficult. It’s insidious how it locks people in.

            The fact that Musk is behaving like a complete asshat and people re staying there anyway just goes to prove how valuable that social media lock in is.

            Of course AOL was valued similarly… just before the dot com bubble burst.

      • TehWorld@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Get his money back from whom? It’s not like a toaster that he can bring back to the store.

    • Bizzacore@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      He even tried to get out of it by claiming Twitter had a bot problem. Courts ruled that he stepped too far into the shit to back out of it.

      And now, it seems, the alleged bot problem is worse than it’s ever been. Sheesh.

    • wampus@lemmy.world
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      This is pretty much what ive thought all along. He already owned a huge chuck of twotter when he said he’d buy it. The Ftc called him out and accused him of market manipulation. He then tried everything thing he could to weasel his way out of buying twitter but failed. Now he’s purposely trashing the site so he can declare bankruptcy and get his money back. That’s my theory at least.

  • Grumpis@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Great for the fediverse! I suspect that these changes to twitter and reddit are mainly a response to the growing hunger of generative artificial intelligence companies who are hoovering up data, basically for free. Change is never easy, but i’m optimistic that this is the break open source and federated communities needed to start taking off. I hope people can see the value in decentralizing and help support these open source projects financially so that they can really start to scale. The reality is, scaling is expensive, and we all need to help where we can. These Ai companies will not hesitate to suck up federated data also. If we want to live in an ad free world its gonna cost us.

    • SSTF@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Question: Can’t AI companies just as easily Hoover up language content from the fediverse? Or is it something that we just kind of accept but don’t care about since it isn’t eating into fediverse finances?

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        1 year ago

        I would assume it’s even worse for the fediverse considering the limited resources we have to run the servers. I wonder how the devs/server owners will handle this.

        • tryagain@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          I don’t think (completely wild guess here) AI content crawlers should have any more impact than the dozens and dozens of spiders that make up must of my own site’s traffic.

          The impact was magnified for Twitter because it generates so much new content every second. That wasn’t an issue when Twitter had a nice, properly cached API and it shouldn’t be an issue for fediverse instances either because we have RSS and caching and we’re not so stupid as to turn those off. Like, what kind of moron would do that?

          • Gestrid@lemmy.ca
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            1 year ago

            The issue comes when those AI bots start commenting and posting here. From what I understand, bots are a large reason why Beehaw keeps defederating from instances with open registration: bots are difficult to moderate without good moderation tools.

        • tryagain@lemmy.world
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          I don’t think (completely wild guess here) AI content crawlers should have any more impact than the dozens and dozens of search spiders that make up must of my own site’s traffic.

          The impact was magnified for Twitter because it generates so much new content every second. That wasn’t an issue when Twitter had a nice, properly cached API and it shouldn’t be an issue for fediverse instances going forward because we have RSS and caching and we’re not so stupid as to turn those off. Like, what kind of moron would do that?

  • 👁️👄👁️@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    This isn’t mildly infuriating, Musk is being the biggest fedi advocate out there! He’s selflessly nuking his own site so he can drive traffic to decentralized alternatives. This is a good thing lol, and should be an important lesson on link rot, and that social media should never be the primary method of communication.