Something I've been wondering is how many people have left Twitter because of the service's recent instability issues. Because none of the people I know have stopped using the site, despite most being fiercely anti-Musk. It could be that Elon is perfectly OK with letting the site go from 99.99999% uptime to just 99% because he knows nobody will leave, and the engineers behind those extra five 9's were being paid hundreds of thousands.
I stopped using it, mainly because of an “inverse network effect”. Twitter used to be a useful place to keep up on scientific papers. Science Twitter is dead. Now my feed is like 10 percent science, 10 mildly racist / inflammatory content, 10 percent miscellaneous, and 70 percent a certain VC constantly shaking his fist, yelling about crypto, and shitting on fiat currency. And this is after aggressively curating my feed by unfollowing anybody who cheered on Musk’s takeover of Twitter. No thanks.
I think the inherent design of Twitter has a bit of a flaw in that you're friends with people instead of joining communities. So if you think "geez, I have a lot of political content on my feed I don't want to read," you can't just unfollow all the politics topics/forums/subreddits/whatever you are subscribed to, you have to "unfriend" people, which is socially difficult if you're both small enough to follow/recognize each other. On top of that the "for you" page and trending topics seem to be injecting more stuff I don't want to read into my feed than before, which exacerbates the problem.
I used to think that following people was lame and that communities (like on Reddit) were where it was at. Until Reddit shut down a sub I joined. Because it got mass reported. Yes, it had some toxic people on it, but it also held really deep debates, and it wasn't 5% as horrendously hateful as some of the subs that still exist. It just felt wrong to me, that everyone's conversations were shut off by the electric eye, and all history off those debates was lost. How do you even begin to change your mind, or other people's minds, if you can't even talk? Isn't it the foundation of a working democracy, asking with a functioning press?
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.
Twitter does have ways to follow both topics (following a hashtag, basically, iirc) and joining communities. I've never used them because what I want from a Twitter-like network is to follow people who I'm interested in, or have interesting things to say.
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.
What had made Twitter easier to use for me was the aggressive use of filters to just block out most of political Twitter. It didn’t block everything, but you would be surprised what blocking the names of Presidents, former Presidents, Presidential candidates, the clap, and a few popular political slogans can do to really cull the politics from a Timeline in the height of election season down to almost nothing. I was going to investigate targeting shibboleths next but then Twitter killed Tweetbot and Twitter is dead to me without Tweetbot.
I mean, if you use Twitter for political news, then yes. I hadn’t even considered that, but my approach would also wreck your ability to follow political news via Twitter.
The problem is that I'm interested in what people have to say about some topics and not others. Sometimes I'll follow a musician I like and realize when he's not posting about his music he's talking about conspiracy theories I'd rather not look at. Or someone will be pretty funny and interesting but also spend a lot of time interacting with porn. Or just post a lot about a topic that I have no interest in. If it worked differently I could interact with these people on subjects I'd like to without being subjected to every thought that enters their head and everything they want to follow.
>Twitter does have ways to follow both topics (following a hashtag, basically, iirc) and joining communities
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".
Twitter has quite an extensive option to mute things nowadays. Such as keywords, phrases, usernames and hashtags. That's how I can keep following people that sometimes go on political rants.
TBH I prefer traditional forums over Twitter/reddit. There are a few I go to every now and again, and while there is way less content, I feel people are way less inflammatory over random things and conversation is usually way more civil.
That technology exists. It's called newsgroups, it's fast, distributed, hard to censor, without a central authority and based on community of interests. It's also pretty much dead except for sharing pirated contents.
Consider Hacker News. It's a forum that's laid out somewhat similarly to reddit. It has pretty good moderation but in a way that is distinct from reddit. I don't think it would be better as a subreddit.
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.
The public API used to help tweets persist beyond normal (on platform) visibility thresholds. Before it was ruined, people could embed tweets in their own sites, and tweets were more persistent on platforms like tweet deck.
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.
Because it's not the default. Every time you go to Twitter, the first page you see is full of random recommendations.
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.
YouTube is the same way (if I'm understanding this correctly, I don't use Twitter). You don't immediately land on a page full of your subscriptions. On the TV app I have to arrow left, arrow down 3 times to subscriptions, then I see my curated feed. On mobile I click the notification icon or the subscription tab.
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.
All social media platforms I've used have eventually become useless for the purpose I wanted to use them.
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.
> 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.
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.
It's just so much more noisy and garbage filled. Maybe I was in the minority, but I used it mostly to follow some bands/artists/game designers and keep up with their projects - I rarely engaged with the twitter userbase in general and it feels like that's what is being amplified and it's a lot of noise, toxic speculation, and useless opinions.
Who are these people getting all this in their feed? Are you outing yourself or something? Why would the algorithm give you a bunch of nazi content? Never seen anything of the sort, and I follow some very edgy crypto twitter accounts among other sketchy ones. Your bar for what constitutes “nazi” content must be low.
You don't get pushed anything if you are not using the "For You" tab. If you still see "Nazi" content (though I'm aware that many people on the US American left are now using the term in an inflationary way, which, as a German, I find highly objectionable) then it is because you follow people who post this content.
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)
actual nazis - they post hitler content and all, polls about why you are/aren’t a nazi too, etc. reporting sometimes works but it’s no longer permanent, you’re allowed back after some weeks if you post rule violating nazi content now. some of these nazis who were previously permanently banned learned that you just contact support and say you were banned for right wing views and they get let back in. there are a lot of active nazis who are open about it.
some are just rw who mingle with the openly nazi posters too though yeah.
Nazi and antifa are not equivalents in any way whatsoever. I think the only equivalence you might find is that both tendencies are somewhat open to the concept of political violence? But beyond that, banning nazi content while allowing antifa is a perfectly reasonable stance for any platform to take.
Science today is exactly like the Catholic Church 500 years ago. We are supposed to worship the Gods of science and listen to everything the priests have to say. I have given up on any reformation coming from the West though because I think it is too corrupt and too powerful and don't see how it can change in the near future. I am hoping it will be from India and/or China when they catch up.
My Twitter feed started showing hot takes from more and more right-wing nutjobs, probably because I am naturally slightly conservative (small-c) in my views. Eventually I got fed up with seeing so many posts from Lotus Eaters / Alex Jones / Katie Hopkins / <insert fascist>, was thinking of leaving, then Musk took over, fired everyone and tried to charge me $8, so a good opportunity to go. Account deleted and I haven't been back since.
Where do you go for AI news? I haven't found anywhere close to as good as Twitter for AI stuff (admittedly I didn't unfollow anyone because I just ignore political tweets)
The "I dont like this tweet" function is completely broken. I don't like blocking or muting, but I have to tell Twitter over and over I don't want to see certain people (including King Joffrey) but it never works.
Is there really a dichotomy between 1. Someone providing "proof" that you will accept, and 2. This being what you claim without evidence or justification is the "usual" smearing?
> Did science twitter migrate to somewhere else? Where would you go to keep up with scientific papers?
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.
(although it's split between a few different subgroups)
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'.
The history of fiat money is always one of endemic inflation, sometimes really wild inflation.
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.
Interestingly, when Spain looted the New World of gold and silver, it did not make Spain any wealthier. The result was just inflation - the gold was worth less. The more gold that was imported, the lower the value the gold had.
It's just like the government deficit printing fiat money.
I prefer my society to allocate valuable goods and services to those who are contributing positively to it today over those who had the luck to be born earlier and/or to wealthy families, so a stable but nonzero inflation suits me very well thank you.
Compared to the horror stories of the gold standard days? Yes. 0% -> 5% overnight is not nothing but it compares favourably to most assets one could pick.
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.
The fact of the matter is that the ability for the government to print money when needed and not be beholden to a scarce element for currency and wealth reserves has allowed our economy (and the world economy, and trade) to grow. If there is no 'extra' money when we need it, economies stagnate. The side-effect of 'extra' money is inflation. However, I think that we have a lot to show for it -- considering that economic disasters haven't completely destroyed the wealth of entire generations of people since we started doing it this way, and we have a least a passable system of class mobility.
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 you don't think the US economy didn't grow enormously from 1800-1914, what can I say?
> 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.
There were huge economic busts in the 19th and first half of the 20th. They made the 2008 crisis look like nothing. You glorifying the gilded aged is quite alarming.
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.
What theory are you speaking of? My point was that you claim that the USA was better off under the gold standard economically. We weren't -- we were subject to incredibly large booms and busts. Just because there was a railroad boom doesn't mean there wasn't a bust.
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?
> The ability to control boom and bust cycles by messing with the money supply is the whole point.
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?
> Except they're a failure at it. We have boom and bust cycles anyway. Remember 2000, 2008, 2022?
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.
I left the day my client stopped working. Broke a decade-long daily habit.
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.
Craigslist has had the benefit that its infrastructure is very simple, and takes almost no maintenance to run. Something at the complexity level of Facebook would probably die in weeks if the servers were left to run unmaintained. That may happen to Twitter if the slow bleed continues and the service becomes unprofitable to run.
> Something at the complexity level of Facebook would probably die in weeks if the servers were left to run unmaintained
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.
Well, yes. Hate me, but slowing down changes and only applying changes very deliberately makes a system more stable. The idea of continuous deployments in order to reduce the size of changes, in order to reduce the risk of changes is good. But if the goal is reliability, it's hard to compete with the idea of only doing well-planned, well-coordinated changes geared towards improving reliability.
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.
Sure, but it used to be the go-to place for a bunch of more mainstream verticals. It's not a place to find jobs anymore, personals are gone, and for apartments it's become synonymous with scams.
One of our new recruiters unbeknownst to the rest of the team posted a job on Craigslist as well as the typical places and more than one interviewee mentioned to me that they thought the job may be a scam before googling us.
I think for many people Facebook Marketplace has replaced Craigslist for them, but thats the only thing I can think of that is a comparable service. Craigslist is still pretty much the standard for online classifieds
Maybe. That depends entirely on the extent to which Musk can keep it together -- past Mastodon growth spurts correlate with his erratic and sometimes unhinged policy changes and outbursts. But I don't know what will make comedians and polticos move out; I suspect it'll be individuals coming over to Mastodon here and there and then suddenly it'll reach critical mass.
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.
2035 is a long way away. If you’d told someone in 13 years ago that in 2022 a decentralised social network started making headway, they’d probably have guessed it was RSS-based. I definitely wouldn’t bet on ActivityPub being The Thing in another 13 years.
Same here. I thought Musk would bring some good change to the site, but stopping third party client access was my limit on bad changes. No way I was going to use their terrible official client or website - they are so bad to be unusable. So I stopped two months ago.
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.
I was struck by how many presenters at SRECon last week listed Mastadon handles instead of Twitter ones: well over half were on Mastadon, and I'd say around half didn't even list a Twitter username. Of course, that's a highly specific population.
Yes, a large chunk of engineers & computer scientists have shifted to Mastodon, which makes it great if you follow that crowd. It's the largest collective action I've seen in that cohort since people stopped using IE6 in favour of Firefox.
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 just never read twitter links anymore because when I follow them now I get a pop up shaking me down to buy twitter premium or to disable 2FA with no way to view the post. So it's convenient for me that most of the people who used to link interesting content on twitter are now being linked via their mastodon handle instead.
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."
Why? A blog is a very different use-case than social media (even social media based on microblogging). Yes, many social media communities are toxic, but many of them (or at least parts of them) can be incredibly enriching. There are plenty of Mastadon communities run with open governance structures.
Besides, most presenters will also list their personal URLs if they have sites they'd like to promote.
Maintaining your own site instead of using a common, sensible, resilient solution might be antithetical to some notions of being an SRE. A personal blog is also not a replacement for social media. Hacker News is something that an individual would be hard-pressed to replicate on their own.
yeah... ideally, there should be a reachable identity system for everyone, independent to centralized database. Content can be anywhere, RSS is nice, a content authentication system is nice too, but what's missing is an identity system.
I bailed. The richest person on the planet (at the time), buying up a premier media platform and then actively posting political content like how to vote in an election was the nail in the coffin for me.
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 Musk was the richest person on the planet, then FTX actually had billions in assets holding onto their FTT tokens or whatever made up tokens they had. Is a person actually "the richest person in the world" if there's not enough liquidity in the world to realize their holdings? If Musk sells his Tesla / SpaceX shares, can he really do it at CurrentSpotPrice x NumberOfSharesHeOwns?
Sure, but when you call someone "the richest person in the world" this is just what you mean. And you're generally referring to power and influence in the world rather than literally how much physical cash he could come up with in 24 hours. I think the normal way of counting the richest people in the world is pretty reasonable.
Meme stocks are fairly liquid, somewhat by definition of their memetic popularity. Musk was not in a position to liquidate his entire net worth, but nobody with an appreciable net worth is.
I was mainly referring to those FTT tokens, but the problem with a meme stock (or similar) is that those buying and selling it are fickle and it's a bubble, it's a liquidity issue in the future not now. Due to the memetic popularity _today_ you can buy and sell very easily. Whether you can do that tomorrow is a different question. If Musk goes on a selling spree, how long will it take until the bottom is hit?
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.
> 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.
People also always ignore the whole "Controls giant corporations" thing. You have significant leeway to direct companies you control into things you want without falling foul of regulations. Consider Musk bringing in Tesla software developers to Twitter.
Just because that power can't always be converted to cash 100% in a second doesn't mean it doesn't exist
Capitalism is a farce and a complete house of cards. Remember when we realized during the pandemic that the most important people in society were grocery store clerks and gas station attendants? We learned nothing from that. Broken system.
It probably depends on a lot on your social group. I maintain a twitter account because, damnit, I’ve had it since 2007, back when they had visible numeric ids it was in the six figures, and I don’t want someone to squat it; everything changes and twitter may once more have competent leadership.
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.
You don't have to maintain your twitter account just to have someone to not take your username.
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.
Do you have a source for the actual reliability of the site going down since Musk took over? All I have ever seen is these general claims without substantiation. What's especially funny is that the fail whale was a common theme for much of Twitter's early years, so even if the reliability was lower, it's less of a change and more of a return to those early days.
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.
Being up unfortunately isn't enough. Failures are in different components (Microservices?) Today for example I was greeted by "Internal server errors" when attempting to login to my tweetdeck. A few days bay I hit a bug, where I clicked a link to a Twitter message and was redirected to my home (apparently to refresh my session as I didn't use Twitter in that. Browser for a while and second attempt worked)
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.
There is an article on here every other week about twitter being down for hours at a time. Plus you can't even tell anymore given how many features are cut.
Mentions have been reduced to zero for any mid-size Twitter account since the culling started. That's a silent failure that led to a lot of tech people leaving.
There also weren't any functional alternatives to Twitter at the time. The following+unthreaded discussion model has only been replicated by Mastodon, and Mastodon obviously has much stronger competition!
No it isn't. I know someone who runs a specialist news outlet and cross-posts everything to Mastodon. It yields only a trickle of traffic/engagement despite the target market being pretty anti-Musk. Indeed, I'm told traffic/engagement on Twitter has actually improved since the takeover. What people say and how they behave are two different things. A lot of people still check Twitter every day because train wrecks are interesting.
Every time someone shares a link to a Mastodon post, I click on it and eventually realize it's not my instance, so I can't just click to follow the person or return to my feed by clicking. And that is only one example of how the decentralized experience is fundamentally broken.
You shouldn't be downvoted as you're factually right. MAU have been tanking since Dec 22. They lost almost 50% from the peak, and the line continues to go down, losing a few thousand active users every single day.
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.
Actually, yeah, it did have competitors with money. You ever wonder why IE and specifically IE 6 just got abandoned in stasis forever? Because like a number of other big incumbents circa early 00s, MS really thought the web was a fad. They envisioned an app ecosystem. Maybe XAML, maybe Java, maybe something else. But not these dumb little browsers.
> IE 6 was abandoned because Microsoft won the browser war.
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's obvious that none of the non-tech elite/journalist/media types were able to wean themselves off Twitter, and the bulk of the normie population barely registered it.
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.
I closed my 13-year-old account last Fall, when the new management explicitly welcomed US-based domestic terrorists onto the platform. I've moved on to a couple of Discords where people I used to follow on Twitter hang out, and Cohost. It's been a positive change for me, Twitter was quite a drag for the past couple years even before Musk, and it's good to change things up now and then anyway.
I have reactivated my Mastodon server this week, and unlike when I last attempted in mid-2020, there are actually people I want to follow on there now.
To have your own, yes, more or less (it handles downtime to some extent). Running your own server is not the "for dummies" version.
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.
Basically Mastodon is a bunch of different social networks, but you can follow/subscribe people who are using any of them. If you want your own server, you need to leave it on somewhere for it to pull messages from other people and push yours out. Otherwise, you can just pick a server and set up an account on it.
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've been wondering is how many people have left Twitter because of the service's recent instability issues.
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.
I left because the official twitter client is garbage and all the third party clients were killed off by Musk. If someone links a Tweet I'll still look at it, but I haven't logged in since Tweetbot stopped working.
I stopped using it not long after he took over, not because of any principled objection just because how much crap I had to sort through to get to anything worthwhile had greatly increased.
None of this really has any impact because of social stickiness. Unless Twitter has repeated multi-hour outages preventing people performing basic actions, like reading their main feeds or replies or posting tweets, the continued service degradation metrics will not be acknowledged.
> none of the people I know have stopped using the site, despite most being fiercely anti-Musk
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.
imo, this particular move will likely hurt Twitter more.
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.
I've checked in on people who supposedly fled to mastadon, and at least in my network they've basically stopped posting there, and have come back to twitter.
A few people seem to have just logged off completely.
>Something I've been wondering is how many people have left Twitter because of the service's recent instability issues.
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.
It's not just uptime. They are making weird changes like making it so that replies show up in the Following feed as if it were a regular tweet without context.
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.
Just checked in again after 2 months and noticed that roughly half of the people I follow have reduced posting or stopped posting altogether. I'm also not seeing a lot of posts from people that I follow until I go to their profile page.
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.
I still enjoy it. There is the occasional minor bug for example lately I have noticed that the image carousel acts as if you double clicked the next button on the 2nd or 3rd image and skips it. I also get followed by a new asian woman (bot) every day. Other than that, not really too bad. I like the lists feature for following news.
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 mean, back when it first became a thing it was down frequently (fail whale), but people kept coming back anyway. Downtimes have never been a deterrent for Twitter.
Reddit survived a long time with absolutely horrendous stability. They still have pretty bad uptime: 99.72 % uptime (web). Their community was very vocal about it, but they continued to grow.
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.
I entirely left twitter, and 15k+ followers account, when they deprecated the html version and never went back.
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.
You may be right but it sets a terrible precedent if anyone other than social media tries this. If your probability of a service working is only 99% the probability of an overall failure is .99 to the power of the number of services you depend on, which could be a lot.
he still has to figure out some way to make money and apparently most major news outlets will not be paying for Twitter Blue because they rightly realize it means nothing. The "status symbol" that was the blue checkmark is over and only an idiot would pay for it, Twitter has a lot of idiots but it seems likely the vast majority of them will also figure this out
Interesting--I think a large chunk of my friends have stopped using twitter. Certainly anyone I had on my main list has moved to mastodon or just stopped posting.
My guess is not much at all. It was even independently reported that Twitter was growing under Elon Musk[0]. Also, "Mastodon's users have dropped significantly" according to a report by Wire[1].
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.
Upvoted. There is a significant HN backlash against Twitter - where any data even remotely positive for Twitter or even mentioning the stuff in the Twitter files that contradict known "facts" about Twitter's previous "fairness" will get you downvoted by the dozen.
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.
