He drove me back into using RSS after more than a decade for staying up to date. Much better for the mental health. Thankfully, since Wordpress and also some other CMS have the RSS feature enabled by default, many websites have it even if they’re not advertising it.
When the “large” voices leave in significant numbers - in the UK it is used wildly by public sector and charity organisations, there are official governmental Twitter accounts, all the broadcasters have accounts.
Really wish I could convince local government entities to switch to Mastodon - my local police said it was “subject to O.P.R.A.” and needed to meet retention rules (if you rolled your own…), and the state wildfire commission said they were looking at Threads :/
So instead, both are still stuck on the platform that requires a login to see posts and filled with nazis.
I think Threads federation may actually help with. I’m trying to persuade a health body at the moment to switch from Twitter and to roll their own Mastodon instance, based on the fact that what they really want is the widget on the website, control of their data and the ability to reach people.
Twitter has already screwed the widget with the login/authentication requirements. If
Threads actually allows its users to see Mastodon posts, that’s a big old reachable audience.
At this point Musk has platformed all of the undesirables of the internet. He’s a big, blinking, neon sign that says “there are no adults in the room, do whatever you want.”
That could be a service to the rest of us. It would be nice if, now that they’re all concentrated there, the internet could quietly agree to shadowban the entire site. Just disappear it from search results, conversation, “zeitgeist.” Let all of the toxic users keep each other busy while the rest of us enjoy a cleaner internet.
Twitter was always a very strange place, i know that before musk it has been a super left woke bouble (woke in this case meaning intersectional world view)
Most people he unbanned didn’t actually come back either. Its just dieing all together.
If he wanted to kill it on purpose, he could have just shut it down. Maybe to keep the trademark he could have launched some other telecommunications service and used the brand for that.
Elon Musk is all about convincing people to act against their best interests to benefit him. For example, look at Tesla: it has a manufacturing capacity of ~2 million cars per year. Now look at Toyota: it has a manufacturing capacity of ~9 million vehicles per year. Now look at the market capitalisation of each company: for Tesla it is still about $535B, despite some fall from the peak in 2022. For Toyota, it is $416B (which is a record high).
So Toyota makes almost 5 times as many cars a year, but is worth 78% of Tesla? And the production capacity and value gap was even more extreme in the past? I think the question then is, what is going on?
The answer, of course, is Musk. He is very slick at convincing investors to act against their own best interests (usually by suggesting the possibility of things that happen to have the true objective along the way, like full self-driving cars by 2018 rather than competing with existing auto-makers, or 35 minute travel from San Francisco to Los Angeles, or a colony on mars rather than competing with existing satellite companies). This is the same skill-set as a confidence artist. I don’t mean to imply that Musk has necessarily done anything illegal, but due to the similarity in skill set, and the large scale at which he operates, it would be fair to call him the most successful con artist in history. Looking at it through this lens can help to identify his motive.
So what would a con artist want with a social network, and why would he want to alienate a whole lot of people, and get a lot of haters?
Well, the truth is that a con artist doesn’t need everyone to believe in them to make money - they just need the marks to believe in them. Con artists don’t want the people who see through the con (call them the haters for lack of a better word) to interfere with their marks though. At the small scale - e.g. a street con, the con artist might separate a couple where one partner is the mark, to prevent the other from alerting their partner to the scam. But in addition to separating the marks from the haters, con artists use brainwashing techniques to create a psychological barrier between the marks and the haters. A Nigerian Prince scammer might try to convince a mark that their accountant can’t be trusted. A religious cult con might brainwash followers to think their family are different from them, and if they try to provide external perspective, they are acting as the devil. They try to make the marks the in-group, and everyone else, even family and friends, the out-group who doesn’t care about the in-group.
So what would a con artist in control of a social network do? They would start by giving the con artist the megaphone - amplifying everything the artist says to try to get more marks. In parallel, they’d try to get rid of the haters. They could shadow-ban them so the marks never see what they have to say, or they could put up small barriers the marks will happily jump over, and feel more invested in the platform having done that, but which would scare off the haters. However, the marks and the haters might still interact off the social network - so the scam artist would also want to create a culture war to try to make the marks hate the haters, and ignore anything they say, by amplifying messages hostile to the haters.
So what can you do if you don’t want a world wrecked by divisions sewn just so billionaires can be even richer? My suggestion is don’t buy into the divisions - work to find common ground with people, even if others are saying just to ignore them because they are different and will never get it, and get in early before the divisions are too deep.
I thought that for a bit, but more and more I think it’s just extreme incompetence. Remember, he wanted X to be a thing for a long time, it’s telling that he wanted it to succeed in that he renamed Twitter to X.
I put a question up yesterday on Reddit and got no engagement with it in like 12 hours. Maybe no one that knows anything is answering questions now. I guess we will see.
No I did not. Financial forum her is kind of dead. Not sure what other tax related forums there are on lemmy. My question was about some specific issues related to getting an incorrect 1095-C. I think I have decided on a cousre of action now but was looking for others thought too.
At least thats kind of reassuring in a way, that part of it is people dont want to associate with that stuff. (Though I realize that isnt the only reason)
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: !technology@beehaw.org
A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.
Yes, this is what happens when you take a big shit in people’s cereal. They tend to leave. I, too, could be an analyst.
Yeah telling your advertising megacustomers to go F… themselves on TV and naming them explicitly. Wow. That’s some kind of nasty.
It totally proved Disney right, too.
I never liked Twitter to begin with, once it became an unabashed environment for hate it was a piece of cake to close my account.
He drove me back into using RSS after more than a decade for staying up to date. Much better for the mental health. Thankfully, since Wordpress and also some other CMS have the RSS feature enabled by default, many websites have it even if they’re not advertising it.
WordPress powers over 40% of the web, so that’s a very large number of sites/blogs that have RSS. WordPress has sites per category/tag too, so you can subscribe just to a subset of posts. For example, I’m subscribed to TheFlightDeal.com but just for flights from San Francisco (https://www.theflightdeal.com/category/flight-deals/sfo/feed/).
But Lonnie said they’re doing great? /s
So at what point does/did it reach death spiral?
There’s probably a sociology theory that would apply, but my guess would be a loss of 33% of active users over the course of 6 months.
It isn’t so much a spiral as it is a series of 90 degree turns.
When the “large” voices leave in significant numbers - in the UK it is used wildly by public sector and charity organisations, there are official governmental Twitter accounts, all the broadcasters have accounts.
Really wish I could convince local government entities to switch to Mastodon - my local police said it was “subject to O.P.R.A.” and needed to meet retention rules (if you rolled your own…), and the state wildfire commission said they were looking at Threads :/
So instead, both are still stuck on the platform that requires a login to see posts and filled with nazis.
I think Threads federation may actually help with. I’m trying to persuade a health body at the moment to switch from Twitter and to roll their own Mastodon instance, based on the fact that what they really want is the widget on the website, control of their data and the ability to reach people.
Twitter has already screwed the widget with the login/authentication requirements. If
Threads actually allows its users to see Mastodon posts, that’s a big old reachable audience.
the death spiral is in progress, elon’s just rich so he can pay bills (or let leases go resulting in eviction…) for a while
It’s morbid but the only use it has to me is info on live shitty events.
At this point Musk has platformed all of the undesirables of the internet. He’s a big, blinking, neon sign that says “there are no adults in the room, do whatever you want.”
That could be a service to the rest of us. It would be nice if, now that they’re all concentrated there, the internet could quietly agree to shadowban the entire site. Just disappear it from search results, conversation, “zeitgeist.” Let all of the toxic users keep each other busy while the rest of us enjoy a cleaner internet.
Off to ItsownSpace it goes /s
He’s making X into a “whites only” platform. What did he expect?
Is there some evidence of this outrageous claim or it is just something that sounded cool in your head?
Twitter was always a very strange place, i know that before musk it has been a super left woke bouble (woke in this case meaning intersectional world view)
Most people he unbanned didn’t actually come back either. Its just dieing all together.
I remain convinced he’s killing it on purpose. I don’t know a plausible motive, but I guarantee it’s on purpose.
If he wanted to kill it on purpose, he could have just shut it down. Maybe to keep the trademark he could have launched some other telecommunications service and used the brand for that.
Elon Musk is all about convincing people to act against their best interests to benefit him. For example, look at Tesla: it has a manufacturing capacity of ~2 million cars per year. Now look at Toyota: it has a manufacturing capacity of ~9 million vehicles per year. Now look at the market capitalisation of each company: for Tesla it is still about $535B, despite some fall from the peak in 2022. For Toyota, it is $416B (which is a record high).
So Toyota makes almost 5 times as many cars a year, but is worth 78% of Tesla? And the production capacity and value gap was even more extreme in the past? I think the question then is, what is going on?
The answer, of course, is Musk. He is very slick at convincing investors to act against their own best interests (usually by suggesting the possibility of things that happen to have the true objective along the way, like full self-driving cars by 2018 rather than competing with existing auto-makers, or 35 minute travel from San Francisco to Los Angeles, or a colony on mars rather than competing with existing satellite companies). This is the same skill-set as a confidence artist. I don’t mean to imply that Musk has necessarily done anything illegal, but due to the similarity in skill set, and the large scale at which he operates, it would be fair to call him the most successful con artist in history. Looking at it through this lens can help to identify his motive.
So what would a con artist want with a social network, and why would he want to alienate a whole lot of people, and get a lot of haters?
Well, the truth is that a con artist doesn’t need everyone to believe in them to make money - they just need the marks to believe in them. Con artists don’t want the people who see through the con (call them the haters for lack of a better word) to interfere with their marks though. At the small scale - e.g. a street con, the con artist might separate a couple where one partner is the mark, to prevent the other from alerting their partner to the scam. But in addition to separating the marks from the haters, con artists use brainwashing techniques to create a psychological barrier between the marks and the haters. A Nigerian Prince scammer might try to convince a mark that their accountant can’t be trusted. A religious cult con might brainwash followers to think their family are different from them, and if they try to provide external perspective, they are acting as the devil. They try to make the marks the in-group, and everyone else, even family and friends, the out-group who doesn’t care about the in-group.
So what would a con artist in control of a social network do? They would start by giving the con artist the megaphone - amplifying everything the artist says to try to get more marks. In parallel, they’d try to get rid of the haters. They could shadow-ban them so the marks never see what they have to say, or they could put up small barriers the marks will happily jump over, and feel more invested in the platform having done that, but which would scare off the haters. However, the marks and the haters might still interact off the social network - so the scam artist would also want to create a culture war to try to make the marks hate the haters, and ignore anything they say, by amplifying messages hostile to the haters.
So what can you do if you don’t want a world wrecked by divisions sewn just so billionaires can be even richer? My suggestion is don’t buy into the divisions - work to find common ground with people, even if others are saying just to ignore them because they are different and will never get it, and get in early before the divisions are too deep.
The problem with this narrative is that Musk lost money doing so.
I used to think so too, but I don’t know if he is also bad at that because it is taking him longer than I expected.
He would have done good for the world if he would have just pulled the plug on day one.
I thought that for a bit, but more and more I think it’s just extreme incompetence. Remember, he wanted X to be a thing for a long time, it’s telling that he wanted it to succeed in that he renamed Twitter to X.
You think conspiracy theories in general sound reasonable, don’t you
When the only people I saw there were the leftest lefties I ever saw… then he just alienated all of them
What did he do that alienated them?
Musk isn’t gonna pay you for all these apologetics you’re making in this post
Elon is a very odd duck, and not at all in a good way.
With so many options becoming available, increasingly less people will select the platform preferred by Nazis.
Actual Nazis aren’t on Twitter, they have their own platforms nowadays.
Twitter is just becoming more and more toxic as its dieing.
The owner is an actual Nazi
You have no idea what a Nazi is and your usage only waters down its meaning.
Incorrect
Nah, musk is a Faschistoid but not a nazi.
People who associate with and protect Nazis are also Nazis, imo.
Eh. If you go to that point everyone is one as you just created a spiral of what you define nazi.
Not really.
Yes. By your definition everyone is a nazi.
Racist arsehole yes, Nazi is hyperbole and I’m sick of hyperbole
What do you call 10 people having dinner with a nazi?
11 Nazis
What do you call a room with eleven non-Nazis in it?
Eleven Nazis.
— postmodern language freedom technique
Twitter is for fascists & their sympathizers.
Why use a platform that sounds like porn when you can just use one that is for porn?
Reddit’s also dying
We need reddit active. It’s the final frontier of the internet containment zone.
Its a content farm now, time for it to die
No. We still have 4chan and other places. Reddit needs to die.
What is dieing? Digg is long dead.
I put a question up yesterday on Reddit and got no engagement with it in like 12 hours. Maybe no one that knows anything is answering questions now. I guess we will see.
deleted by creator
Maybe that is why I cannot see the answer. I have ublock origin enabled. :)
Did you try posting it on Lemmy? Wonder how good Lemmy is now when it comes to answering very niche or complex questions that old Reddit was good for.
No I did not. Financial forum her is kind of dead. Not sure what other tax related forums there are on lemmy. My question was about some specific issues related to getting an incorrect 1095-C. I think I have decided on a cousre of action now but was looking for others thought too.
At least thats kind of reassuring in a way, that part of it is people dont want to associate with that stuff. (Though I realize that isnt the only reason)
Well, he says X is a free speech platform when it clearly isn’t. Blud can’t even take a joke.
It’s a damn racket when most of the artists I enjoy only post on twatter. Just upload to mastodon too ffs!
Is it really a racket though? Most artists are not tech geeks and desire cultivated feeds instead of … none.