Twitter now requiring login in order to view site

June 30, 2023 11:28 AM

BREAKING: Twitter now BLOCKS ALL ACCESS FROM SIGNED OUT USERS (Nitter.net link)

This comes just after they locked down the "with replies" tab and search functionality behind a login.

posted by buffy12 (444 comments total)

Hopefully this results in accelerating the collapse. I can see it going either way, though.
posted by tclark at 11:39 AM on June 30, 2023 [55 favorites]

Embeds still work though so you can look at tweets without logging in, you just can't look at twitter's ads while doing it. Very savvy move on their part.
posted by aubilenon at 11:42 AM on June 30, 2023 [49 favorites]

Does anybody know if this is intentional, or a mistake, or a mistake that will be spun as intentional, or intentional that will be spun as a mistake?
posted by clawsoon at 11:42 AM on June 30, 2023 [53 favorites]

The twitter logo symbolizes user migration to other places.
posted by UN at 11:43 AM on June 30, 2023 [33 favorites]

Does anybody know if this is intentional, or a mistake, or a mistake that will be spun as intentional, or intentional that will be spun as a mistake?

This is the Johari Window of late capitalism.
posted by gauche at 11:46 AM on June 30, 2023 [32 favorites]

A reply to the tweet from someone who works there says that this is temporary. How temporary remains to be seen.
posted by Aleyn at 11:46 AM on June 30, 2023 [4 favorites]

lol
posted by ryanrs at 11:46 AM on June 30, 2023 [6 favorites]

When I moved to a new laptop earlier this year, I didn't log into Twitter in its browser, on purpose so I'd reduce my Twitter time (I still have it on my phone). This will likely cut down further on my use, so, congratulations, Elon, I guess?
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 11:48 AM on June 30, 2023 [5 favorites]

Does anybody know if this is intentional, or a mistake, or a mistake that will be spun as intentional, or intentional that will be spun as a mistake?

@elonmusk: yes. also: 💩
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 11:50 AM on June 30, 2023 [6 favorites]

Unless you're paying for Blue, you probably can't sign in on your laptop at this point. Elon is requiring 2FA for logins and only allowing 2FA via text message if you pay for Blue. If you have other 2FA means, you could maybe log in, but you might have needed to set that up ahead of time.
posted by hippybear at 11:50 AM on June 30, 2023

Well this will cut down on the like one tweet a month or so I read currently.
posted by BrotherCaine at 11:55 AM on June 30, 2023 [10 favorites]

I don't if anyone know if anyone else is in the same boat as me but the Nitter link doesn't work (the tweet obviously doesn't work as I don't have a Twitter account).
posted by Ashwagandha at 11:55 AM on June 30, 2023 [3 favorites]

If Twitter and Reddit are both inaccessible, where are the junk advertising pages that litter my Facebook feed going to get all their posts?
posted by gentlyepigrams at 11:57 AM on June 30, 2023 [26 favorites]

Musk heard the Russians saying they should emulate North Korea and close their borders and cut off contact with other countries and thought "Oooh, let's do that!"
posted by Gorgik at 11:58 AM on June 30, 2023 [2 favorites]

Unless you're paying for Blue, you probably can't sign in on your laptop at this point. Elon is requiring 2FA for logins and only allowing 2FA via text message if you pay for Blue. If you have other 2FA means, you could maybe log in, but you might have needed to set that up ahead of time.

I noticed that, too. I got a new laptop and discovered I couldn't access Twitter. It's been a very nice way of weening myself from the hellsite. Good jorb, Elmusk!
posted by UltraMorgnus at 11:59 AM on June 30, 2023 [6 favorites]

Does anybody know if this is intentional, or a mistake, or a mistake that will be spun as intentional, or intentional that will be spun as a mistake?

The dirty secret about all of this stupid shit Twitter and Reddit is doing is that they know they have a massive dataset to train AI models on. Which means they have value to that industry. An industry that's absolutely flush with cash right now. So they want their piece of it.

So while they could charge users $5/mo for API access and let them use whatever client they want to access the site, that would undermine the real revenue stream which is charging AI companies out the asshole to access the text to train AI models on so they need to restrict wide scale access to it. Because no matter how much you're willing to pay as a consumer, it's guaranteed that VC money looking to make their lottery ticket come good will outspend you every fucking time.

Look at Nvidia. Became a billion dollar company on the back of its regular users. Became a trillion dollar company selling big iron GPU horsepower. Now we get $1,000 GPUs because Nvidia is busy using all that fab space selling to MS/Amazon/Google for their big ass GPU datacenters that train models for AI companies.

We're insignificant. Our anguish in losing Twitter or Reddit as social spaces is a rounding error in how much value can be extracted by our content donations they've accumulated over the years.
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 11:59 AM on June 30, 2023 [120 favorites]

I wondered why I couldn’t see a tweet earlier today. But definitely not getting an account just to see random stuff linked on FB or wherever.
posted by TedW at 12:03 PM on June 30, 2023 [7 favorites]

Completely naive musing here:

I wonder if there are now collections of BOTs finding themselves logged out that are all going to be logged back in at more or less the same time and from a common IP address. Could twitter could use that to ID BOT accounts? Does twitter really care?
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 12:04 PM on June 30, 2023 [2 favorites]

@Ashwagandha and for anyone else wondering why the Nitter link doesn't work: apparently they just cut off access to the API Nitter was using shortly after I made this post.
https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/issues/917
posted by buffy12 at 12:04 PM on June 30, 2023 [7 favorites]

Ah yes, the town square that doesn’t allow anybody in. Unless you make robots (hat tip to excellent comment above, your childhood pet rock).
posted by The River Ivel at 12:05 PM on June 30, 2023 [4 favorites]

Seriously, this is the best you could do for a Metafilter post? A link to a tweet from some random person (and a $8 sucker, at that)?

The Verge has a story with some more context and information. The big question is whether it's deliberate or a fuckup. Fuckups like this have happened before, including the pre-Musk days.

Given that even twitter.com itself is demanding login rather than showing some public timeline as a come-on, my money is on this being a mistake. Or a poorly thought out experiment.
posted by Nelson at 12:05 PM on June 30, 2023 [10 favorites]

Could twitter could use that to ID BOT accounts? Does twitter really care?

Oh they're absolutely doing it but they're doing it to stop bots from AI upstarts scraping the site, not because they give a shit about UX.
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 12:05 PM on June 30, 2023 [2 favorites]

I could imagine being in circumstances where I thought that I wasn't dying fast enough, but I didn't expect a big social media corporation to be there.
posted by Halloween Jack at 12:07 PM on June 30, 2023 [2 favorites]

Musk heard the Russians saying they should emulate North Korea and close their borders and cut off contact with other countries and thought "Oooh, let's do that!"

Juche Elon Musk is a very funny thought.
posted by qxntpqbbbqxl at 12:09 PM on June 30, 2023 [6 favorites]

Musk does seem to have the expectation of North Korean leaders that they will be told that they are experts in everything by everyone.
posted by clawsoon at 12:13 PM on June 30, 2023 [8 favorites]

they know they have a massive dataset to train AI models on

I can only hope (with some pride, I'll admit) that the absolute silliness I've posted to Twitter over the last 2.5 years induces a bit of invalidating insanity in their AI models, in however small a degree.
posted by Greg_Ace at 12:17 PM on June 30, 2023 [5 favorites]

Seriously, this is the best you could do for a Metafilter post? A link to a tweet from some random person (and a $8 sucker, at that)?

I figure buffy12 left a lot of space for other members to fill in details and other links. That was courteous.
posted by GenjiandProust at 12:20 PM on June 30, 2023 [60 favorites]

Well there goes my Garbage Day reading experience.
posted by Peach at 12:29 PM on June 30, 2023 [3 favorites]

The dirty secret about all of this stupid shit Twitter and Reddit is doing is that they know they have a massive dataset to train AI models on. Which means they have value to that industry. An industry that's absolutely flush with cash right now. So they want their piece of it.

Yes, the first few serious LLMs were indeed trained on massive shitpiles of misinformation very large but unvalidated text data like reddit & twitter. But now they're pretty much done with the main goal of this phase, which was language training and some public proof-of-concept beta's.

The next goal for AI rollout is, I believe, specialized training on smaller sets of expert data. So I suspect that if AI training monetization is their goal... Elon and spez have missed the window.

I also suspect (without proof) that AI developers have or will create/curate more condensed, higher-quality language training datasets to produce language capability more efficiently.
posted by Artful Codger at 12:35 PM on June 30, 2023 [18 favorites]

Well, that trashes its utility as a platform for emergency notifications.
posted by Quasirandom at 12:36 PM on June 30, 2023 [47 favorites]

Well there goes my Garbage Day reading experience.

He was having problems embedding the tweets in the newsletter for awhile. I would think he'd now just have to find alternatives and/or screenshots.
posted by Ashwagandha at 12:38 PM on June 30, 2023 [1 favorite]

Kind of unfortunate that it's only temporary, it might be nice for that website to get walled off from the rest of the web cask of amontillado style
posted by N8yskates at 12:38 PM on June 30, 2023 [26 favorites]

I guess Elon heard it was the 10th anniversary of Google's killing off of Reader and said "hold my beer."
posted by chavenet at 12:40 PM on June 30, 2023 [23 favorites]

I get a redirect error when trying to access the site, and the nitter link can't find the tweet. I couldn't even log in if I wanted to.
posted by I-Write-Essays at 12:43 PM on June 30, 2023 [1 favorite]

pfffft. I could login using my computer. then twitter wouldn't let me logout. now twitter won't let me login. Ok fine.
posted by bluesky43 at 12:44 PM on June 30, 2023 [2 favorites]

I also suspect (without proof) that AI developers have or will create/curate more condensed, higher-quality language training datasets to produce language capability more efficiently.

Is this what LoRAs are all about?
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 12:44 PM on June 30, 2023 [1 favorite]

There is nothing about anything Twitter does these days that can be said to be "only temporary". They don't know what they're doing, and I don't know if they even know how they broke this.
posted by hippybear at 12:45 PM on June 30, 2023 [14 favorites]

pfffft. I could login using my computer. then twitter wouldn't let me logout. now twitter won't let me login. Ok fine.
posted by bluesky43

Well, we all know what social network to find you on.
posted by hippybear at 12:45 PM on June 30, 2023 [10 favorites]

now twitter won't let me login. Ok fine.
posted by bluesky43 at 12:44 PM on June 30 [+] [!]

eponysterical

EDIT: damn, beaten to the punch
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 12:47 PM on June 30, 2023 [2 favorites]

Ok
posted by Going To Maine at 12:50 PM on June 30, 2023 [1 favorite]

I haven't made myself a sandwich in a while...
posted by East14thTaco at 12:54 PM on June 30, 2023

this is such a hilarious choice (if it's a choice)
posted by wellifyouinsist at 12:55 PM on June 30, 2023 [2 favorites]

pfffft. I could login using my computer. then twitter wouldn't let me logout. now twitter won't let me login. Ok fine.
posted by bluesky43

Well, we all know what social network to find you on.
posted by hippybear

ahem. that would be blooskee please thanks.
posted by bluesky43 at 1:04 PM on June 30, 2023 [3 favorites]

It's been like that off and on for a long time now.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 1:05 PM on June 30, 2023

Elon is requiring 2FA for logins and only allowing 2FA via text message if you pay for Blue.

Yeah when he did that I switched to the authenticator app method, which it turns out I actually like better. Still working for me. But I guess you wouldn't be able to switch methods until you can log in in the first place.
posted by ctmf at 1:07 PM on June 30, 2023 [1 favorite]

I stripped all the social contacts out of my twitter a couple of days ago, keeping the account so I can get updates from Pet Shop Boys and Pearl Jam and the like. Ever since the 2FA situation changed, I'm convinced at some point I will be logged out and can't get back in. Removing it as a social hangout for myself means I'll miss it but it won't leave a hole in my life. I feel good about this.
posted by hippybear at 1:07 PM on June 30, 2023 [3 favorites]

We're insignificant. Our anguish in losing Twitter or Reddit as social spaces is a rounding error in how much value can be extracted by our content donations they've accumulated over the years.

I know - lets start coming up with a whole, new language; full of slang referents and obscure verb tenses, so that in 24 months, their language models will be dated and useless.
posted by Silvery Fish at 1:07 PM on June 30, 2023 [22 favorites]

It helped a lot that I spent about 6 months doing a build-up of accounts I'm following on Mastodon, so I do still have a social outlet of the same sort.
posted by hippybear at 1:08 PM on June 30, 2023 [6 favorites]

Musk has also now said temporary, for reasons that really don’t make sense (there’s so much scraping going on right now that it’s degrading service? But it’s expected to be temporary??)

But yeah obviously it’s related to this

The dirty secret about all of this stupid shit Twitter and Reddit is doing is that they know they have a massive dataset to train AI models on.

And it’s particularly funny because they were moving in this direction pre-Musk but he got rid of the login nag more or less upon request of one of buddies/toadies. Who of course ended up being correct in saying that it was the biggest thing he could do to improve the site. And now they go all the way with zero notice.
posted by atoxyl at 1:09 PM on June 30, 2023 [2 favorites]

It is way past time government agencies move off of Twitter. Maybe we can leave a little trail of XML files leading to the fediverse or something.
posted by credulous at 1:25 PM on June 30, 2023 [12 favorites]

OhNoAnyway.gif
posted by glonous keming at 1:38 PM on June 30, 2023 [10 favorites]

At work today one of our suppliers had an outage. Their status blog was pretty much just a link to their Twitter, having silently killed their RSS feed months ago (apparently). We tried emailing our rep, but that also bounced. The enshittification of everything continues apace.
posted by Xoder at 1:40 PM on June 30, 2023 [17 favorites]

Musk's explanation (which may or may not be true)

Temporary emergency measure. We were getting data pillaged so much that it was degrading service for normal users!

Curious about the turn of phrase "data pillage". I remember when Twitter used to be committed enough public discourse that it'd send archives to the Library of Congress and make a firehose of data available to anyone who could handle it. Folks above have referenced AI training. But that's a public good and there's no reason Phony Stark should be able to seek rents on the content I created for the previous owners for free.
posted by Nelson at 1:44 PM on June 30, 2023 [7 favorites]

I didn't hear of any twitter user having their experience with service being degraded before this new measure.

And this Musk statement belies the earlier worker statement that it was an accident.

Also, "data pillaging"... short of a DDoS attack, is twitter not robust enough? Oh, yeah, he shut down server farms as part of his takeover.
posted by hippybear at 1:49 PM on June 30, 2023 [2 favorites]

It's not a performance thing, it's as Your Childhood Pet Rock said -- they want some time to figure out how to make AI companies buy their training set rather than just scrape it.
posted by tclark at 1:54 PM on June 30, 2023 [1 favorite]

I still check Twitter, there are a few accounts that I find worth following who are still there and never made the jump to Mastodon, but I 99% of the time use a 3rd party client, either Nitter or Fritter (on Android). I did this long before Musk took over, it was a protective measure against me actually tweeting (they're read-only), which was always a worse experience than reading tweets.

If this sticks then that's a bummer. Nitter was so much better than the native interface.
posted by BungaDunga at 2:08 PM on June 30, 2023 [5 favorites]

buddy, they won't even let me pillage it
posted by delfin at 2:40 PM on June 30, 2023 [18 favorites]

Isn’t data pillaging the definition of what social media companies do to us all every day?
posted by caviar2d2 at 2:43 PM on June 30, 2023 [20 favorites]

No take backs!
posted by Flight Hardware, do not touch at 2:46 PM on June 30, 2023 [1 favorite]

If you're still logged in on at least one device, there's a way in settings to get a one-time backup code that bypasses 2FA.
posted by ctmf at 3:00 PM on June 30, 2023

So wait, Elon walled up access to Twitter, making it harder (or impossible) for casual readers to see what's on, and it may be accidental, or perhaps on purpose, and is only temporary, or not? Ok, am I supposed to be enraged or ecstatic? Right now I'm kind of feeling happy about this but if the cool kids are all enraged I'll happily huff around and act angry. Though where do I post my performance now? Not reddit obvs. Mastadon? Do I have to listen to the band if I do? I'm so confused!
posted by evilDoug at 3:01 PM on June 30, 2023 [1 favorite]

This is not going to look good in the numbers advertisers tend to care about. Between people who can't log in, casual non-accounted surfers, and traffic from news-media embeds (do those still work?), "engagement" and MAUs and whatnot are gonna go down.

If this was Yaccarino's idea, wow, incompetent. If it was Skum's, same poop emoji different day.
posted by humbug at 3:27 PM on June 30, 2023 [2 favorites]

Dude musta been punched in the head a few too many times while training to fight Zuck.
posted by flabdablet at 3:33 PM on June 30, 2023 [4 favorites]

I honestly wonder how valuable the inane, reference-heavy, attempted-humor corpus of Twitter actually is? I mean, Reddit is people talking about relevant things using pretty standard language. Twitter is, well, not.
posted by signal at 3:39 PM on June 30, 2023 [2 favorites]

Depends what you're trying to generate, I guess.
posted by ctmf at 3:45 PM on June 30, 2023

How bad can parents get over their trans children defying them?

This bad.
posted by tigrrrlily at 3:50 PM on June 30, 2023 [13 favorites]

I clicked on a Twitter link in a NYT article and was sent to the Twitter login page. I deactivated my Twitter account shortly after the Muskrat rose. I hope this leads to less Twitter links!
posted by bendy at 4:17 PM on June 30, 2023 [10 favorites]

The mass-scraping thing makes a lot of sense and it has nothing to do with AI.

Up to this point third parties have been using the APIs to access twitter content. Now that the APIs have been priced out of reach they're scraping the site directly. If I had a small business that relied on Twitter it is certainly what I would be doing.

So, to force people to use the API they have to shut down the ability to anonymously scrape content.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 4:24 PM on June 30, 2023 [5 favorites]

Hopefully this is the beginning of the end for the annoying trend of people linking to a tweet that links to a news article or video elsewhere on the internet. Of the minor annoyances of internet life these past tens years or so has been the absurdity of going to Reddit, Metafilter or some other site the having to go through a Twitter landing page to click to the item under discussion.
posted by interogative mood at 4:29 PM on June 30, 2023 [18 favorites]

Oh, and this concept that sites no longer need users is.... weird. These sites are in the business of selling ads and selling your personal data, and anybody who wanted to use their content for AI training downloaded the whole site a long time ago. For example, every once in a while I get to thinking about AI and social media and download all of Metafilter. It isn't hard.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 4:32 PM on June 30, 2023 [2 favorites]

The mass-scraping thing makes a lot of sense and it has nothing to do with AI.

It makes sense from a “we want to make it harder to do at all” angle, but not from the angle of a temporary performance-related emergency like Musk claimed. Like they are currently frantically Googling how to implement rate limiting?

And it’s unlikely that any of these moves to clamp down on free access to the text history at scale have nothing to do with AI, I mean that’s the current hyped thing that people want a lot of text for.
posted by atoxyl at 4:51 PM on June 30, 2023 [1 favorite]

Maybe people who aren’t on it will stop acting like it’s the center of the world now that their tweet access is cut off. Elon’s just helping everyone move on, now.
posted by Selena777 at 4:53 PM on June 30, 2023 [9 favorites]

Hopefully this is the beginning of the end for the annoying trend of people linking to a tweet that links to a news article or video elsewhere on the internet.

Links to TikToks will be even worse.
posted by paper chromatographologist at 5:12 PM on June 30, 2023 [8 favorites]

It makes sense from a “we want to make it harder to do at all” angle, but not from the angle of a temporary performance-related emergency like Musk claimed. Like they are currently frantically Googling how to implement rate limiting?

Yeah, the "performance-related" thing sounds like a BS excuse. But it sounds better than "people are hacking around our grotesquely priced API".

And it’s unlikely that any of these moves to clamp down on free access to the text history at scale have nothing to do with AI, I mean that’s the current hyped thing that people want a lot of text for.

I guess there may be new players entering the AI field that don't already have copies, although honestly I'm not sure that twitter is a corpus I'd put a lot of faith in.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 5:18 PM on June 30, 2023 [1 favorite]

Like they are currently frantically Googling how to implement rate limiting?

I actually do wonder about that from a technical perspective. If you used a botnet to download thousands of different data sets simultaneously it might be very difficult to tell the difference between that and normal user traffic. Basically it would be a rolling mini-DDOS event -- big enough to be annoying, but not big enough to really disrupt the site.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 5:39 PM on June 30, 2023 [2 favorites]

Picture an endless Nazi sympathizer circle jerk, forever. If your imagination sucks, well, you're in luck.
posted by heteronym at 5:56 PM on June 30, 2023 [3 favorites]

Like they are currently frantically Googling how to implement rate limiting?

Given the departure and/or firing of most of their senior engineers after Musk took over... probably?
posted by clawsoon at 6:03 PM on June 30, 2023 [5 favorites]

I'm so tired of Musk and Zuckerberg and that Reddit guy. So so so tired. So very tired.
posted by JHarris at 6:28 PM on June 30, 2023 [15 favorites]

(That isn't a plea to stop talking about them. I'm just tired of them.)
posted by JHarris at 6:28 PM on June 30, 2023 [20 favorites]

I guess there may be new players entering the AI field that don't already have copies, although honestly I'm not sure that twitter is a corpus I'd put a lot of faith in.

Whether it’s a valuable corpus and whether management believes it to be a valuable corpus are two different things.

I actually do wonder about that from a technical perspective. If you used a botnet to download thousands of different data sets simultaneously it might be very difficult to tell the difference between that and normal user traffic. Basically it would be a rolling mini-DDOS event -- big enough to be annoying, but not big enough to really disrupt the site.

Well it’s one of those arms races, right? But even in an actual DDOS it’s not generally solved by turning off access to the site these days!
posted by atoxyl at 6:37 PM on June 30, 2023 [2 favorites]

The thing that's hilarious to me about training large language models on Reddit and Twitter posts is that a significant percent of those are going to be people complaining about Reddit and Twitter - I just like to picture the AIs of the future having built in bias against Reddit and Twitter and their CEOs.
posted by jason_steakums at 6:57 PM on June 30, 2023 [6 favorites]

lets start coming up with a whole, new language; full of slang referents and obscure verb tenses


Conlangers, your hour is here!
posted by clew at 7:02 PM on June 30, 2023 [4 favorites]

Well it’s one of those arms races, right? But even in an actual DDOS it’s not generally solved by turning off access to the site these days!

I’m not saying it’s not a solvable problem, but this particular activity would not match the signature for a DDOS attack and it might require some time to figure out how to choose what to rate limit.

Sites like Twitter are set up to handle traffic surges and this may look like just an extended surge.

As I say it’s a solvable problem, but they may not have a solution in place right now as they haven’t had a real problem with screen scrapers until now.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 7:04 PM on June 30, 2023

This is not going to look good in the numbers advertisers tend to care about. Between people who can't log in, casual non-accounted surfers, and traffic from news-media embeds (do those still work?), "engagement" and MAUs and whatnot are gonna go down.
posted by humbug

Yeah, I am struggling to see how this works.
posted by Pouteria at 7:05 PM on June 30, 2023 [3 favorites]

It probably doesn't work. Have we got any evidence that Musk actually knows how to run a company? Like, isn't Twitter what you get when he does that without people to distract him from getting in the way of the real work?
posted by gentlyepigrams at 7:07 PM on June 30, 2023 [8 favorites]

Have we got any evidence that Musk actually knows how to run a company?

Yes. He has three solid successes at running engineering based companies under his belt, and despite the massive sour grapes from people who have never come close to acquiring or running a company themselves, you don’t get to three without talent.

Unfortunately for everyone he also has a massive case of Expert’s Disease and thinks his significant talent in one area will make him naturally successful at everything else. It obviously doesn’t, and he clearly is not competent to run a social media company. It would be entertaining to watch if so many people’s lives had not been upended.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 7:20 PM on June 30, 2023 [2 favorites]

SpaceX is run by Gwynne Shotwell, not Musk. Telsa also seems to be run by people who know how to build cars with Musk sometimes meddling from the outside. Not sure what you mean by the third company. The tunnel thing is going nowhere.

I'm not saying Musk doesn't have a skill. He's great at declaring audacious goals, convincing investors he can achieve those goals, and rallying excellent leaders and engineers to achieve those goals. (See also, Steve Jobs). It's not nothing; I'm literally posting this comment via SpaceX/Starlink.

It does make me wonder why he bought a middling social media company and is running it into the ground though.
posted by Nelson at 7:28 PM on June 30, 2023 [38 favorites]

Nelson: "It does make me wonder why he bought a middling social media company and is running it into the ground though."

Because he has the emotional development of 14-year old wannabe edgelord and thinks he's funny and is easily goaded by more advanced edgelords, obviously.
Or was that a rhetorical question?
posted by signal at 7:33 PM on June 30, 2023 [28 favorites]

I think it's more than that. I think he genuinely thought for a brief moment he could run Twitter more effectively. "How hard could it be?" Overestimating his skills and their applicability is a serious flaw.

(The other half of this is he agreed to a bad deal with no outs with spectacularly bad timing. And then realized he was going to be bound to it. That part is hilarious.)
posted by Nelson at 7:37 PM on June 30, 2023 [10 favorites]

Question.... for legal-Mefites et al

Should not 'free speech' equally apply to the hearing, access, and reading of said 'free' speech/information relevant to such? This whole thing throws up a multitude of other (diversionary - so let's stick with Twitter (ergo led by the twatter!) for now) things like pay walls etc. e.g. what is THE 'price' for 'free' speech. If (due to the Supreme Court making it necessary for a huge swathe of Americans to re-enter economic servitude) someone cannot 'afford' access to a public platform due to prohibitory costs, is 'free' actually 'free' or does 'free speech' have a price/cost/value?.... just sayin' here...
posted by IndelibleUnderpants at 8:07 PM on June 30, 2023

Not sure what you mean by the third company.
Maybe Neuralink. The one where he tortures monkeys.
posted by Glinn at 8:09 PM on June 30, 2023 [6 favorites]

MOST PEOPLE WHO USE STARLINK DON'T POST COMMENTS LIKE THIS

We're asking people to review comments with potentially harmful or offensive language.

SpaceX is run by Gwynne Shotwell, not Musk. Telsa also seems to be run by people who know how to build cars with Musk sometimes meddling from the outside. Not sure what you mean by the third company. The tunnel thing is going nowhere.

I'm not saying Musk doesn't have a skill. He's great at declaring audacious goals, convincing investors he can achieve those goals, and rallying excellent leaders and engineers to achieve those goals. (See also, Steve Jobs). It's not nothing; I'm literally posting this comment via SpaceX/Starlink.

It does make me wonder why he bought a middling social media company and is running it into the ground though.
posted by Nelson at 10:28 PM on June 30 [+] [!]

Did we get this wrong?
posted by tigrrrlily at 8:16 PM on June 30, 2023 [7 favorites]

So many of my internet searches have to append "reddit" to the end to be helpful, and some of them also involve appending "twitter." Super excited about our beautiful future of no longer being able to use the internet to answer basic questions!
posted by desert outpost at 8:28 PM on June 30, 2023 [9 favorites]

He has three solid successes at running engineering based companies under his belt

Is that the company that makes cars that self-drive to run over people? Or the one that blows up rockets at launch? Those are his two successful companies that I can think of and they're both questionably successful at achieving significant goals, tbh. Also the initial tech for both of those companies was there when he purchased them, I think (I know that was the case for Tesla, the same way it was for Twitter). Plus he has the tunnel company, the monkey-torturing company, and ... Starlink, which I think of as part of SpaceX? I guess Starlink is successful, but does he run it or is it another one of those things like Tesla and the rest of SpaceX where the working people work around him?

I do agree that Musk has a bad case of engineer disease, but I was a tech writer so I'm used to looking at engineers who think they're geniuses with a jaundiced eye.
posted by gentlyepigrams at 8:37 PM on June 30, 2023 [13 favorites]

There was Pay Pal of course, however much real influence he had in that I can't say.
posted by calamari kid at 8:46 PM on June 30, 2023 [1 favorite]

He has three solid successes at running engineering based companies under his belt,

This seems to assume that the only way to become CEO of a company is to make substantial contributions to the operations, growth, and success of that company. The fact that Elon Musk became CEO of Twitter proves that this is not true.
posted by straight at 9:29 PM on June 30, 2023 [14 favorites]

who the fuck is scraeming "LOG ON" at my house. show yourself, coward. i will never log on
posted by mbrubeck at 9:36 PM on June 30, 2023 [15 favorites]

>He has three solid successes at running engineering based companies under his belt,

This seems to assume that the only way to become CEO of a company is to make substantial contributions to the operations, growth, and success of that company. The fact that Elon Musk became CEO of Twitter proves that this is not true.

And that seems to assume that a company that is taken over by incompetent management will thrive regardless. The fact that Elon Musk is driving Twitter into the ground proves that this is not true.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 9:56 PM on June 30, 2023 [3 favorites]

BREAKING: Twitter.
posted by donatella at 10:32 PM on June 30, 2023 [38 favorites]

There was Pay Pal of course, however much real influence he had in that I can't say.

He was effectively fired from PayPal because of bad decision-making.
posted by ryoshu at 12:32 AM on July 1, 2023 [11 favorites]

I don't remember where I read it, but the claim was that SpaceX has a small team of people whose sole purpose is to steer Musk away from actually doing anything in the company, to prevent him from meddling in anything. Together with leading him past people who have just some code rolling down a screen like in a bad hacking scene in a movie. Maybe it's not true, I don't know, but it sounds plausible.
posted by Pyrogenesis at 1:33 AM on July 1, 2023 [4 favorites]

havent seen it posted, but heres the virgin api user vs chad scaper comic


From years ago, not related to twitter, but when he started his API stuff this is what I first thought of.
posted by Iax at 1:47 AM on July 1, 2023 [2 favorites]

1) Ya'll sure there isn't a user Elon blocked but keeps making fun on him because they can go read/screencap his blocked stuff by just not being logged in?
2) While a data feed has dropped from $25K a month for 1.4MB to pennies for MB/GB it is still an expense. And the ISPs would like to have balance on output to input. Part of the reason Youtube got bought by a firm that needed to balance its flow back in the day. A firm that isn't paying rent and cut back staff due to cash flow might need to balance its traffic flow to cut the expense of a VERY unbalanced flow. The speed this happened before Jun 1 makes me think this is a possibility.
posted by rough ashlar at 3:26 AM on July 1, 2023 [1 favorite]

Elon Musk allows domestic extremists back on Twitter, fueling national security concerns
posted by Artw at 4:31 AM on July 1, 2023 [4 favorites]

It does make me wonder why he bought a middling social media company and is running it into the ground though.

See above.
posted by Artw at 4:40 AM on July 1, 2023

Super excited about our beautiful future of no longer being able to use the internet to answer basic questions

Seems like a real growth opportunity, maybe Metafilter could roll something out.
posted by Mitheral at 5:28 AM on July 1, 2023 [8 favorites]

atoxyl: Like they are currently frantically Googling how to implement rate limiting?

Today all I got for a good while was a "rate limiting" error message, so the last engineer still employed by Twitter probably copied and pasted whatever he found online into the sourcecode and clicked the implement button.
posted by Kattullus at 6:36 AM on July 1, 2023 [1 favorite]

I'm taking this news with about the same level of emotion as if you told me The Red Hot Chili Peppers broke up.
posted by East14thTaco at 7:03 AM on July 1, 2023 [6 favorites]

Musk wrote more explanation

This will be unlocked shortly. Per my earlier post, drastic & immediate action was necessary due to EXTREME levels of data scraping.
Almost every company doing AI, from startups to some of the biggest corporations on Earth, was scraping vast amounts of data.
It is rather galling to have to bring large numbers of servers online on an emergency basis just to facilitate some AI startup’s outrageous valuation.

I think he's either lying or wrong. But taking it at face value, Twitter is in a losing battle. Blocking determined scrapers is incredibly difficult. The next step in this escalation will be scrapers registering millions of user accounts to read tweets. Perhaps Musk will block new accounts next as another "drastic & immediate action".

If only they had some sort of API or "firehose" to provide data to companies in a controllable fashion.
posted by Nelson at 7:13 AM on July 1, 2023 [6 favorites]

I kind of like the sheer lack of self-reflection it takes to be publicly indignant that another entity is trying to enjoy an "outrageous valuation" off of data provided by others. It's greedy-ass turtles with no sense of irony all the way down.

(I could also go post this comment in the still-open Reddit thread, I suppose)
posted by DingoMutt at 7:23 AM on July 1, 2023 [10 favorites]

Blocking determined scrapers is incredibly difficult.

If the dataminer (advertising/influence operation/AI) wants to "hide" they offer up a low cost VPN service to the public and then taunt the service to block these IP addresses.

Real users complaining along with your botnet - what is the service to do?
posted by rough ashlar at 7:42 AM on July 1, 2023 [2 favorites]

While previews are still available they frequently don’t show all media or require clicking through to a thread for context, so it subtly fucks up the use of embeds even if they show up as blank rectangles now.
posted by Artw at 7:44 AM on July 1, 2023

Is this is a good time to start thinking about if we want to link to Twitter threads on Metafilter? It's something I've done before, in the pre-Musk days, but now if you can't even be sure people will be able to see what you're linking to, it seems like a bad idea?
posted by JHarris at 7:59 AM on July 1, 2023 [15 favorites]

Should not 'free speech' equally apply to the hearing, access, and reading of said 'free' speech/information relevant to such? This whole thing throws up a multitude of other (diversionary - so let's stick with Twitter (ergo led by the twatter!) for now) things like pay walls etc. e.g. what is THE 'price' for 'free' speech. If (due to the Supreme Court making it necessary for a huge swathe of Americans to re-enter economic servitude) someone cannot 'afford' access to a public platform due to prohibitory costs, is 'free' actually 'free' or does 'free speech' have a price/cost/value?.... just sayin' here...

The 1st amendment and free speech is the government not arresting you for what you say. That's it. Any exceptions under this amendment have strict scrutiny applied which means the government needs to have a compelling interest and must deal with it in the least restrictive way.

It does not apply to:
* Private actors (unless other state constitutional factors apply, see: Pruneyard in CA.)
* Forcing other people to listen to your speech.
* Forcing other people to give you a platform.
* Consequences of your own speech and other people thinking you're a giant piece of shit for what you say.
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 8:01 AM on July 1, 2023 [17 favorites]

Today all I got for a good while was a "rate limiting" error message

This seems to be a new failure mode for Twitter for a lot of people, judging by the trending topic.
posted by Nelson at 8:16 AM on July 1, 2023 [1 favorite]

Private actors (unless other state constitutional factors apply, see: Pruneyard in CA.)

Well, the Pruneyard case did establish that in California private actors may be forced to provide a platform for certain types of free speech. Twitter is based in California. I don't know if these two facts have collided yet.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 8:41 AM on July 1, 2023

Lol now loading tweets is entirely broken, even when logged in. Any attempt to fetch a single tweet or a timeline yields "Something went wrong. Try reloading." Eventually I get to a rate limiting error. Hilariously the reloading just adds more traffic to the site, probably making it worse.

I managed to load one tweet and their webapp is sending hundreds of XHR requests to their graphql API endpoint, yielding a 429 Too Many Requests response. Twitter seems to be DDOSing itself.
posted by Nelson at 8:43 AM on July 1, 2023 [23 favorites]

Lol now loading tweets is entirely broken, even when logged in.

My main account has been getting the rate-limited messages and not loading any feeds for most of the day now, switching VPN locations didn't work so it doesn't appear to be IP or country based.

Switched over to another account and it works OK so far. It had been dormant for quite a while now, though, as it's the one I used from the phone, but since ditched Twitter on that.

Not that I'd been using the main one much apart from watching the place burn and to keep up with a few accounts, may have liked a couple of comments, possibly even retweeted one, but certainly not anything that should have triggered even the strictest of rate-limits.

Between Mastodon & t2.social finding that my compulsive timeline reloading needs are pretty much catered for.
posted by Buntix at 8:52 AM on July 1, 2023 [2 favorites]

I wonder if this has to do with Twitter not paying its Oracle cloud storage bills. Or just some other idiotic way the site has been managed into the ground.

Either way, I remain convinced that all this will end with Jack Dorsey buying Twitter back for a dollar.
posted by Kattullus at 8:58 AM on July 1, 2023 [10 favorites]

If you have a dormant account that you can still access, you're one of the lucky ones. I went looking for the account of a now-dead friend yesterday to find a pic I knew they had, and that account is gone. Just gone. I looked for a couple of others, and they're gone too. So, don't let things sit dormant too long.
posted by hippybear at 8:59 AM on July 1, 2023 [4 favorites]

If you have a dormant account that you can still access, you're one of the lucky ones.

Getting the same errors on that one now as well now.

Have got one other that still seems to work, and not showing errors, guessing I was probably getting close to losing it as it was dormant long enough that I got 'welcome back' messages and prompts to check who I am following etc.
posted by Buntix at 9:11 AM on July 1, 2023

Such a beautiful way for the site to die - everyone can send tweets, no-one can read tweets. It's perfect.
posted by thatwhichfalls at 9:25 AM on July 1, 2023 [29 favorites]

Is this is a good time to start thinking about if we want to link to Twitter threads on Metafilter?

At minimum Twitter thread based FPPs where you don’t see anything without logging in seen a bad idea.
posted by Artw at 9:27 AM on July 1, 2023 [6 favorites]

Now getting the 'retry' message on the 'For You' tab on the third account, and intermittently on the 'Following'.

Thinking it may be creating the timelines that is where the limit problem is happening as that account only follows 74 others, with very little content on the 'Following' timeline as it was mostly for poetry related stuff.

That would fit in with it being caused by reduced capacity on Twitter's end (either due to the Oracle thing, or there's also a suggestion/rumour that they are down a bunch of servers due to a hosting contract coming to an end without being renewed).

Which could also be why it's been hours and it's still going + getting worse and they haven't just rolled it back to rethink, as would have been the sensible course if it was due to code updates to handle the alleged data Vikings pillaging them.
posted by Buntix at 9:34 AM on July 1, 2023 [1 favorite]

(Col, Bluesky): I think we should start conducting organized raids of the twitter coastline for resources.

(Generic Pseudonym, Bluesky): Arrr, be careful. There be fail whales in these waters.
posted by Wordshore at 9:49 AM on July 1, 2023 [4 favorites]

Such a beautiful way for the site to die - everyone can send tweets, no-one can read tweets. It's perfect.

Ed Zitron on Twitter:

Twitter is now in single player mode.
posted by the duck by the oboe at 9:58 AM on July 1, 2023 [17 favorites]

This is hilarious. Twitter appears to be DDOSing itself.
posted by Artw at 10:14 AM on July 1, 2023 [23 favorites]

decided to speed run hitting the 600 tweet rate limit for unverified accounts, got it in three minutes of scrolling, who will shatter my current world record with novel speed-scrolling strats
posted by cortex at 10:25 AM on July 1, 2023 [5 favorites]

This is going to be like Digg all over again. A change that actively forces users to break their habit of using the site and actively drives them to alternatives for the same dopamine hit. Once the habit is broken the usage drops off catastrophically.
posted by interogative mood at 10:30 AM on July 1, 2023 [13 favorites]

I’m sure all those advertisers who cancelled when Musk took over that they’re now trying to win back with their new serious proper CEO in charge are hugely reassured by the fact the site is now arbitrarily hugely limiting the audience for their adverts and disintentivising spending time on the site. Advertisers love spending money on ads no-one ever sees.
posted by parm at 11:26 AM on July 1, 2023 [9 favorites]

> who will shatter my current world record with novel speed-scrolling strats

mobile or PC? Knowing if you have a spacebar is important
posted by Pronoiac at 11:33 AM on July 1, 2023 [3 favorites]

Oh, the details of rate-limiting haven't been mentioned here yet I think. Elon Musk, Imgur screencap, sigh, Wayback of the Imgur link:

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

- Verified accounts are limited to reading 6000 posts/day
- Unverified accounts to 600 posts/day
- New unverified accounts to 300/day

posted by Pronoiac at 11:42 AM on July 1, 2023 [3 favorites]

I wonder if the outage might have something to do with all the developers they shed while Elon Musk LOL'd it up a few months ago, or if it might have been abated if they hadn't shut down that data center in Sacramento?
posted by JHarris at 11:52 AM on July 1, 2023 [5 favorites]

Hacker News can't even figure out which thread to talk about this latest disaster in. The "right" thing would be to link to a tweet but then no one can read it so instead they're using a screenshot. The conversation over there is universally negative, btw. It's saying a lot that Musk has lost all support even on Hacker News.
posted by Nelson at 11:53 AM on July 1, 2023 [8 favorites]

BTW, Behind the Bastards (which did a ton of episodes in June!) just did two on a lawsuit being brought against Musk by former Twitter employees. It's a good reminder of how hateful Musk is. Part the first, part the second.
posted by JHarris at 11:57 AM on July 1, 2023 [5 favorites]

(Bluesky, Bluesky): "Our systems are currently experiencing some degraded performance as a result of record-high traffic. You may notice some slowness in-app as a result. Our team is working to resolve this issue."

Possibly/probably due to (a) Twitter users who'd set up a Bluesky account but quickly lost interest as it was very quiet and wandered back to Twitter, now giving Bluesky a second go, many at the same time and/or (b) Twitter users who have been sitting on an invite code for a while deciding to sign up now, again many at the same time.
posted by Wordshore at 12:00 PM on July 1, 2023

Breaking news guys, Musk has heard your complaints and says that shortly he's going to raise the limits to...

...8000 for "verified", 800 for unverified, 400 for new unverified! This will surely satisfy everyone.
posted by foxfirefey at 12:03 PM on July 1, 2023 [2 favorites]

> who will shatter my current world record with novel speed-scrolling strats

Not sure if my rework of that blue-blocker scriptlet still works, but figure it could be tweaked to do it fairly quickly.

Although, also wondering how few spins of the scroll wheel it would be possible to do it in, my MX Master 3 can keep spinning for a ridiculously long time.

Could do it Taskmaster style: fastest and most innovative way to get limited, your time starts...

Those blanket limits really don't make sense in terms of preventing scrapers, it wouldn't really be rocket science to figure out historical averages for time served accounts, or just limit accounts that actually are scraping more than humanly readable.

Smells a lot more like they have just lost the capacity to serve their actual human audience.
posted by Buntix at 12:04 PM on July 1, 2023 [1 favorite]

I'm pretty sure all the Best And Brightest have left twitter or been fired by now, so he may not be working with people who can even think along those lines.
posted by hippybear at 12:07 PM on July 1, 2023 [3 favorites]

Where can I follow Best of Dying Twitter now? I need my schadenfreude fix.
posted by tigrrrlily at 12:07 PM on July 1, 2023 [6 favorites]

Musk has heard your complaints and says

Big Emperor Nero vibes here.
posted by Nelson at 12:07 PM on July 1, 2023 [1 favorite]

Although, also wondering how few spins of the scroll wheel it would be possible to do it in, my MX Master 3 can keep spinning for a ridiculously long time.

Somebody please bait a youtube craftperson into building a mouse with a flywheel mousewheel
posted by cortex at 12:14 PM on July 1, 2023 [4 favorites]

@elonmusk 11:29 AM · Jul 1, 2023 "Rate limited due to reading all the posts about rate limits"

Hmm, yes, a serious man dealing with a serious problem
posted by foxfirefey at 12:15 PM on July 1, 2023 [4 favorites]

I'd thought foxfirefey was joking, but no, the rate limits are being bumped up by a third, according to a tweet from Elon Musk, which of course could be a joke in one sense or another.

Speedrunners, track your timestamps, so we know which limit you're working with. And device, because the momentum scrolling on mobile seems useful.
posted by Pronoiac at 12:22 PM on July 1, 2023 [1 favorite]

Leave it to Musk to identify the central obsession that is the focus of every ounce of energy of every social media network, getting users to consume more of your content, and ban that. It’s been said before, but if his goal was simply to destroy Twitter while maintaining a veneer of plausible deniability, how would his behavior be different?
posted by Horace Rumpole at 12:27 PM on July 1, 2023 [12 favorites]

Somebody please bait a youtube craftperson into building a mouse with a flywheel mousewheel

I mean I do have a spare, battered but still function MX3, and a large number of old film cameras, many with mechanical delayed shutter releases...

Although, with a wireless mouse it would also be possible to do the whole Pythagoras Switch kinetic machine approach. Twitter could actually be fun again.

This is going to be like Digg all over again. A change that actively forces users to break their habit of using the site and actively drives them to alternatives for the same dopamine hit.

He really is speed-diving @garius's Trust Thermocline [WARNING: this is a Twitter link and will cost you over 2.5% of your daily tweet ration.]
posted by Buntix at 12:33 PM on July 1, 2023 [4 favorites]

Most plausible-to-me thing I've seen speculated is Amazon throttling his AWS for non-payment.
posted by ctmf at 12:36 PM on July 1, 2023 [10 favorites]

>> Somebody please bait a youtube craftperson into building a mouse with a flywheel mousewheel

> I mean I do have a spare, battered but still function MX3, and a large number of old film cameras, many with mechanical delayed shutter releases...

> Although, with a wireless mouse it would also be possible to do the whole Pythagoras Switch kinetic machine approach. Twitter could actually be fun again.

Tool-assisted speedruns have a separate scoreboard. Bonus points for style if powertools are involved!
posted by Pronoiac at 12:42 PM on July 1, 2023 [2 favorites]

I've said this before, but I've thought from the start of the Elon era that Twitter was already in a death spiral, and he was just the dingbat who was dumb enough not to realize it. There's no good way for Twitter to become profitable, and everything its owners could do to make it profitable would inevitably piss off users and therefore make it harder to make Twitter profitable. Even before Musk started alienating advertisers, they couldn't earn enough advertising revenue to fund Twitter. They need users to pay for Twitter, and users aren't going to pay for Twitter. I think the thing is doomed and probably always has been. And in the future, social media platforms are going to have to start thinking about profitability from the get-go, rather than assuming that if you're popular enough the profits will follow.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 12:50 PM on July 1, 2023 [5 favorites]

Mefi's Own Nelson getting a little nod from Mefi's Own Andy Baio over on waxy.org.
posted by urbanwhaleshark at 12:55 PM on July 1, 2023 [3 favorites]

social media platforms are going to have to start thinking about profitability from the get-go,

Why would they, when the finance providers aren't caring about how they're going to get their money back?
posted by ctmf at 12:57 PM on July 1, 2023 [3 favorites]

Interesting point from @[e-mail]:

Do the news organizations paying hefty fees to still be a part of Twitter appreciate that their content is being paywalled whether they want it to be or not?

He's nuking everyone's reach via Twitter, including the orgs and advertisers who pay for it.

Most plausible-to-me thing I've seen speculated is Amazon throttling his AWS for non-payment.

There's also a google cloud contract that expired yesterday, that maybe they didn't supposedly start repaying after all: Twitter has supposedly started paying its Google Cloud bill again [enGadget]

Twitter has resumed paying its Google Cloud contract, according to Bloomberg. If you missed the initial news of the impending showdown, Platformer reported on June 10th that Twitter had been refusing to pay Google for its cloud services ahead of their contract’s June 30th renewal date. The possibility of losing access to Google’s infrastructure led to a frantic rush at Twitter to migrate as many of its services off of Google’s servers. However, that effort was reportedly “running behind schedule,” opening the door for some of the company’s in-house tools to go offline come the end of the month.

(Although seen suggestions that the google cloud services may have been used for content moderation rather than delivery, so that my be a coincidence.)
posted by Buntix at 12:57 PM on July 1, 2023 [4 favorites]

It is suspicious that it's right at a typical bill due date, end of the month.
posted by ctmf at 1:00 PM on July 1, 2023 [5 favorites]

(Matt, Bluesky): Imagine getting into a SpaceX spaceship lol
posted by Wordshore at 1:01 PM on July 1, 2023 [6 favorites]

Twitter may have gone logged in view only recently and blown up a bunch of stuff, but Bluesky I've never able to look at at all, because it's all behind a log in wall and invite only.
posted by foxfirefey at 1:09 PM on July 1, 2023 [13 favorites]

I'm now unable to see any tweets when I go onto anyone's profile page, including my own.
posted by Kattullus at 1:16 PM on July 1, 2023 [2 favorites]

And speaking of that dopamine hit:

https://twitter.com/RobFreeman/status/1675200067203112960 : "600 posts is literally ten minutes worth on a day like Cameron fucking a pig or knicker TERF woman."

The next time there is any sort of big event, people will have to jump ship to keep participating, or even tracking what's going on.

This gives Rishi Sunak the opportunity to do the funniest thing ever...
posted by Buntix at 1:17 PM on July 1, 2023 [3 favorites]

but Bluesky I've never able to look at at all

Indeed, everyone linking what I guess are Bluesky posts? I can't see them.
posted by ctmf at 1:19 PM on July 1, 2023 [1 favorite]

I mean I do have a spare, battered but still function MX3, and a large number of old film cameras, many with mechanical delayed shutter releases...

I had pictured more a disk of depleted uranium (maximum sized to mass as much as possible but still nominally fit in a mouse) suspended on jeweled bearings. Something capable of storing so much energy how strong your finger is would noticeably affect spin time.
posted by Mitheral at 1:25 PM on July 1, 2023

So far I'm just taking people's word for it there's some kind of limit. It's been working normally for me all morning, and I'm definitely over 600 by now.

(And by "normally" I mean I occasionally get an error or "can't load right now", but It's always done that. (browser on twitter web site, not mobile app)
posted by ctmf at 1:28 PM on July 1, 2023

I think adafruit has this covered:

Doomscroll and Chill - A Wireless BLE Scroll Wheel Remote
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 1:30 PM on July 1, 2023 [1 favorite]

Mastodon is undergoing another round of growing pains at the moment. The culture there is so different from twitter everyone has to be retrained. But it's pretty easy, content warnings and alt descriptions for pics are the main thing.
posted by hippybear at 1:30 PM on July 1, 2023 [4 favorites]

Is it for clicking on and opening a tweet's thread, or just scrolling the timeline? I probably don't EVER actually click 600 tweets in a day.
posted by ctmf at 1:32 PM on July 1, 2023

That would be one per minute for 10 hours, definitely automated bot territory.
posted by ctmf at 1:34 PM on July 1, 2023

Pretty sure it's just for scrolling, I had the rate-limit message pop up after having clicked on a screenshot post and then scrolling down the replies on the RHS sidebar.

Having switched through 3 accounts and had varying delays before they got limited I am guessing they are either rolling it out sequentially somehow, or possibly once you draw their attention.

Wondering if it also includes ads; which given they've been hitting a rate of 1 every 3 tweets in a timeline or thread really could reduce the limit.
posted by Buntix at 1:37 PM on July 1, 2023

This will probably seem like something judgey or whatever, but it's really not - I fully expect it to go away as soon as they work out it's still there - but, as I've mentioned before, I'm using the old Tweetdeck and it works perfectly. No ads, no "recommended posts", no data limit (as far as I can tell), no fascists (unless you want them for some reason). Embeds (like embedded previews of web pages) don't work, but basic tweets are completely fine. I'm just saying this to bring home the fact that all the ways Twitter is broken is stuff they're deliberately doing to the feed. I assume they're doing it very badly.

That said, when I've tried to use normal Twitter on my ancient laptop or my newish desktop, for weeks now, it's been completely broken. Nothing at all. I no longer bother to follow Twitter links as they just take me to a blank page.
posted by Grangousier at 1:38 PM on July 1, 2023 [2 favorites]

by the by, I thought to myself, after making my last comment, that if anyone's Twitter profile page had a whole-ass server dedicated to it still being up, it would Elon Musk's, but no, his profile page also show's me not a single tweet by him
posted by Kattullus at 1:38 PM on July 1, 2023

I've had a years-long policy of clicking the three dots and picking "Not Interested In This Ad" for every ad I see on Twitter. For a couple of years, I actually saw zero ads on twitter, I think because of this but I have no idea really. Then ads reappeared, but I defeated them. Just in the past couple of weeks, ads have come back for me, vanities of which I've never seen before, and I think just as I've stopped using twitter for social interaction I've defeated the ads again.

Now that I'm following many many fewer accounts, my timeline is much slower so I will see fewer ads even if they are intruding once again.
posted by hippybear at 1:40 PM on July 1, 2023

twitter is dead to me.
posted by bluesky43 at 1:43 PM on July 1, 2023 [3 favorites]

Is it for clicking on and opening a tweet's thread, or just scrolling the timeline?

Just scrolling past counts. That three minute run was just paging down on my feed.

Tool-assisted speedruns have a separate scoreboard. Bonus points for style if powertools are involved!

You know, I was just the other week saying I should finally buy a dremel, and…
posted by cortex at 1:44 PM on July 1, 2023 [5 favorites]

now the home-feed isn't loading new tweets either

if this is how Twitter dies, at least it was really, really stupid, and reeeeaaally expensive
posted by Kattullus at 1:58 PM on July 1, 2023 [13 favorites]

From a Forbes article (but I'm too bored to try this)
How can users circumvent the new limits? First, log in to your Twitter account and then visit tweetdeck.twitter.com. You’ll be asked to add your account and the website has the option of providing a guided tour on how Tweetdeck works. Tweetdeck allows users to create columns with specialized parameters, including a user’s lists or even a specific keyword search. Users can also create a column that’s just for direct messages or organize all of the lists in a system called Decks. Users can also customize columns by changing the width of content or viewing tweets in chronological order or reverse chronological order. Unfortunately, Tweetdeck isn’t available in a mobile app, but it can be opened in a phone’s internet browser. This solution isn’t ideal, obviously, but it’s the best workaround I’ve found so far.
posted by bluesky43 at 2:01 PM on July 1, 2023 [2 favorites]

Mastodon is undergoing another round of growing pains at the moment. The culture there is so different from twitter everyone has to be retrained. But it's pretty easy, content warnings and alt descriptions for pics are the main thing.

That's similar to Bluesky (e.g. alt descriptions on pics are now easier to do). In addition to the current load problems, the (too small) team have been discovering the hard way that (good) moderation is (very) difficult.

Indeed, everyone linking what I guess are Bluesky posts? I can't see them.

If they are just text posts and MeFites on Bluesky cut-and-paste them here (with acknowledgement of the poster, and a courtesy/optional link to the post on Bluesky), then you can read them here with no need to go to Bluesky. Three examples:

(turner lobey, Bluesky): I have a new kink and it’s bad things happening to elon musk.

(tim coe, Bluesky): mastodon 100% has middle-period metafilter vibes

(E, Bluesky): I would pay a thousand dollars to watch trump and elon try to do a Wednesday crossword together. They don't know a single answer. Can't define most of the words in the clues. Neither can figure out how to operate the pen.

A similar approach to Twitter, which also means that (a) people who don't want to go to Twitter - understandably - can still read the tweets, and (b) if Twitter irreversibly fails, the text is still on MetaFilter. An example is the “Eichhörnchen!” Twitter thread / MetaFilter post - whatever happens to Twitter, those tweets are on MetaFilter to enjoy forevs.
posted by Wordshore at 2:06 PM on July 1, 2023 [5 favorites]

I have a new kink and it’s bad things happening to elon musk.

sado-muskachism
posted by cortex at 2:12 PM on July 1, 2023 [15 favorites]

not my best work but it’s Saturday
posted by cortex at 2:13 PM on July 1, 2023 [6 favorites]

Sad, O Musk, a schism
posted by flabdablet at 2:15 PM on July 1, 2023 [11 favorites]

Oh lordy, what a day for the NYT to tweet their "best clitoral vibrator" rundown (after "130 total hours of research and testing"!). Now all those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. 😢
posted by taz at 2:22 PM on July 1, 2023 [23 favorites]

It's like that part in a SimCity-like game where it's not going the way you wanted and you're starting to lose interest, so you just start fucking around doing stupid shit
posted by ctmf at 2:24 PM on July 1, 2023 [16 favorites]

This vibrator, it vibrates?
posted by cortex at 2:38 PM on July 1, 2023 [1 favorite]

A special middle finger goes out to Jack who tweeted out a reference to touching grass a few hours ago.

My part of Japan just went through some heavy rains and some flooding. People didn't need twitter to get info - on Friday I got disaster alerts throughout the night - but it sure did help. This is all so stupid.

Things trending in Japan: Twitter終わり (Twitter is done), Twitter不具合 (Twitter bug)

And oops, I just got rate limited on Tweet Deck.
posted by LostInUbe at 2:40 PM on July 1, 2023 [13 favorites]

Oh lordy, what a day for the NYT to tweet their "best clitoral vibrator" rundown (after "130 total hours of research and testing"!). Now all those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. 😢

I don't know if rain is the liquid I've been crying into in that context, but...
posted by clawsoon at 2:53 PM on July 1, 2023 [3 favorites]

Like they are currently frantically Googling how to implement rate limiting?

Good luck with that. Google's also broken for most technical searches these days.
posted by srboisvert at 2:55 PM on July 1, 2023 [6 favorites]

Good luck with that. Google's also broken for most technical searches these days.

Largely due to the ongoing Reddit situation.

I feel like we're in a stage of The Internet where a lot of crows are coming home to roost, and maybe not in the ways The People Who Built Things were expecting.
posted by hippybear at 3:02 PM on July 1, 2023 [11 favorites]

> Most plausible-to-me thing I've seen speculated is Amazon throttling his AWS for non-payment.

Via twitter screenshots on imgur:

Rubin Safaya @rubinsafaya

Ok so I'm a Data Analytics Manager. Our tech stack is on an AWS S3 cluster. Let me explain in plain English for y'all how absofuckinglutely b.s. Elon's claim is. First, you don't prevent scraping by cutting off your own app's access to its OWN database. However... /1

Rubin Safaya @rubinsafaya

Let's say you are a huge platform on AWS, like Twitter is, and you aren't paying your bill. The first thing they're going to do is meter your usage, then they're going to throttle your usage. So, what Elon is really admitting is that he DIDN'T PAY HIS F--KING AMAZON BILL. /2

Alejandra Caraballo @Esqueer

My guess is that this is the first day of Q3 and Twitter literally has no cash flow to pay its cloud vendors so they have to cut usage substantially.

It's about to go bankrupt and Linda will be thrown off the glass cliff.

1:45 am 2/7/2023 from Earth 89.5K Views

Lawrence Krubner @krubner 42m

In other circumstances I'd feel badly for her, but this time it was so obvious. Like, lady, you are being set up, clearly, they are going to pin the blame on you, why would you take this job?

posted by sebastienbailard at 3:07 PM on July 1, 2023 [17 favorites]

Good luck with that. Google's also broken for most technical searches these days.
Largely due to the ongoing Reddit situation.

Arguably Google should never have relied so much on Reddit for search results. Sending people to Reddit was always too easy a solution, especially considering it helped encourage Reddit's cultural problems before r/The_Donald was shut down and concomitant (17 points) reining-in. Reddit's rapid decline just revealed how terrible Google has gotten generally.
posted by JHarris at 3:16 PM on July 1, 2023 [1 favorite]

Oh Google's worthless. I finally switched my default to DuckDuckGo a while back, not because it got better, but because Google somehow got worse than that.

I remember reading something about Twitter way way back in the day when it was first starting. Back when I could get a four-letter username. It was social media as a search engine, and it really stuck with me. You ask it a question, it gives you a personalized crowd-sourced answer, from real people who know you and know what you like, what your values are, etc. Super helpful. As long as you curate your follows/followers to some extent and evaluate answers with a grain of salt.

Which is not really much harder than wading through all Google's pages of irrelevant garbage anymore. Good for certain things I guess - maybe none of your friends know how to build a shed either, and then you're back to Google.
posted by ctmf at 3:27 PM on July 1, 2023

Twitter DDOSing itself wouldn't surprise me. Whenever I use the app for even a little bit, it rockets to the top of my battery usage chart. I assume that it's calling out to all these Twitter services that simply... no longer exist and are stuck in an endless loop, but no one has the knowledge or time to fix those problems.

Someone on Mastodon recorded this behavior on the Twitter web page too: This is hilarious. It appears that Twitter is DDOSing itself.

Also good: this means that Trump will probably not return to Twitter as expected after his Truth Social contract is over: Trump Is Reportedly Mulling A Return To Twitter After Truth Social Exclusivity Deal Expires
posted by meowzilla at 3:48 PM on July 1, 2023 [1 favorite]

The possibility of losing access to Google’s infrastructure led to a frantic rush at Twitter to migrate as many of its services off of Google’s servers.

The obvious question is, "To whose servers do you migrate them? Especially when you're looking to not pay for the servers you already have."
posted by mikelieman at 4:06 PM on July 1, 2023 [6 favorites]

"To whose servers do you migrate them? Especially when you're looking to not pay for the servers you already have."

So, Twitter servers are like Trump lawyers?
posted by Calvin and the Duplicators at 4:09 PM on July 1, 2023

Interesting point from @[e-mail]:
Do the news organizations paying hefty fees to still be a part of Twitter appreciate that their content is being paywalled whether they want it to be or not?
He's nuking everyone's reach via Twitter, including the orgs and advertisers who pay for it.

This was where my head was with the whole thing, just because most of the people I "follow" (I don't have an account, I just find usernames I know and read their tweets) are sports journos. So, here we are in the NBA free agency season and Adrian Wojnaroski can't really do anything with the insider info he comes across at 2am.
posted by LionIndex at 4:12 PM on July 1, 2023

What if this leads to a sudden influx in usage of Truth Social?
posted by interogative mood at 4:22 PM on July 1, 2023

What if this leads to a sudden influx in usage of Truth Social?

That would seem to be a them problem, and a rest-of-the-world-who-aren't-openly-or-dallying-with-fascist/m bonus.
posted by Buntix at 4:48 PM on July 1, 2023 [4 favorites]

I feel like we're in a stage of The Internet where a lot of crows are coming home to roost, and maybe not in the ways The People Who Built Things were expecting.

I have been an Internet Geek since I was a tiny kid and still harbor an implausible amount of love for Online despite *gestures wildly* and I want Edgar Allan Poe levels of retribution to befall these motherfuckers. Even if it's also tragic, terrifying, and a little heartwrenching to think about just how much ill these people have done.
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 4:55 PM on July 1, 2023 [15 favorites]

I was bangpathing FidoNet messages when I was in high school. And I had a university unix account I accessed through an AT&T dumb terminal over a 300 baud modem for a long while in the late 80s/early 90s. Usenet and Gopher and everything was text. And then Mosaic and all the things after that.

I'm becoming more convinced than ever that anyone who wants to express themselves in the open space needs to pay for their own printing press, whether that's a website or an actual newspaper. This "user-generated content" hidden behind the wall of "we host it, we didn't create it, we aren't responsible" is a firewall of responsibility that prevents the speakers of speech from consequences of the speech.

The First Amendment is only about the government arresting you for what you've said. It is not a guarantee for having a printing press or a soapbox or a guarantee for you being free of consequences for what you have said. If you're an asshole, you should be treated like you're an asshole, whether that's social consequences or, if you're a really egregious asshole, being sued into oblivion for what you've said. That's not the government silencing you; that's your fellow citizens saying you're an asshole.

The vision of "everyone's speech being as free as possible all the time in every way" might be a bit of a canard. A better vision might be "everyone's speech being as free as possible as they're willing to make it free and visible with their own efforts and means", and that might mean a soapbox in a park or might mean a giant bill at the copy store or might mean creating a web server they pay for. But it's possible that this era of "I host the thing you post" might largely be coming to an end.
posted by hippybear at 5:08 PM on July 1, 2023 [2 favorites]

@jack steady lads.
posted by bluesky43 at 6:34 PM on July 1, 2023

Hello Mastodon Newcomers 🐘✨!

It seems there is a fresh wave of people joining or coming back to Mastodon today ​🌊​:mastodon:​ :rainbowdance:

If you feel a little lost,
I wrote this external guide that might help you, or that you can share with friends: https://controlaltdelete.technology/articles/the-mastodons-guide-to-the-fediverse.html

On this toot (post), you will find links to each category of the guide separately: https://infosec.exchange/@Em0nM4stodon/109995537816857661

On this toot you will find a list of short Mastodon toot-guides: https://infosec.exchange/@Em0nM4stodon/109323504324459171

For Fediverse tips all year long you should follow the excellent @feditips !

Welcome! :awesome:​✨

#TinyMastodonTip #Mastodon #Fediverse


posted by Artw at 6:45 PM on July 1, 2023 [9 favorites]

I guess my 600-tweet viewing ration will go a lot farther if I block all the blue checks.
posted by ctmf at 7:31 PM on July 1, 2023 [3 favorites]

If you only look at your Following feed and you aren't following any blue checkmarks, you won't have any problem with having to block them.
posted by hippybear at 7:40 PM on July 1, 2023 [2 favorites]

the ceo should really get rid of whoever's in charge of tech over there
posted by clawsoon at 8:39 PM on July 1, 2023 [1 favorite]

I was rate limited. Then I was not. Then I was again. Then I wasn't on Tweetdeck. And maybe I will. And on and on. Good times.

Anyway, Misskey, a fediverse something or other, is currently three (one each for Misskey in romaji, katakana and hiragana) of the top ten trending topics on twitter. Not a good sign for the site's second biggest userbase.
posted by LostInUbe at 8:45 PM on July 1, 2023 [8 favorites]

> The conservatives want to yell at people they disagree with.

Indeed:
Al Jazeera: Climate scientists flee Twitter as hostility surges

Scientists suffering insults and mass spam are abandoning Twitter for alternative social networks as hostile climate-change denialism surges on the platform following Elon Musk’s takeover.

Researchers have documented an explosion of hate and misinformation on Twitter since the Tesla billionaire took over in October 2022, and now experts say communicating about climate science on the social network – on which many of them rely – is getting harder.

One issue for Musk: are soft-fascists and climate-change deniers a good market for electric cars?
posted by sebastienbailard at 10:07 PM on July 1, 2023 [5 favorites]

One issue for Musk: are soft-fascists and climate-change deniers a good market for electric cars?

They will be in the next 5-10 years when the far right will probably fully commit to eco-fascism. Elon doesn't know how to run a social media site, he may not have yet lost the ability to go where the puck is headed, like he did with Tesla and SpaceX.
posted by tclark at 10:18 PM on July 1, 2023 [2 favorites]

I was rate limited. Then I was not. Then I was again.

That's what happens when you are drinking from the leaky bucket.
posted by donio at 11:11 PM on July 1, 2023 [2 favorites]

I haven’t been able to read anything since about 5 hours ago, and even that was slim but just enough to trade some regional discord links. I gotta say when the ship went down I thought it would be because something random blew up, not because the owner was ranting about too many people using it before he turned off the service.

Weird.
posted by Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drug at 11:45 PM on July 1, 2023 [2 favorites]

It's about to go bankrupt and Linda will be thrown off the glass cliff.

In other circumstances I'd feel badly for her, but this time it was so obvious. Like, lady, you are being set up, clearly, they are going to pin the blame on you, why would you take this job?

You know how Teslas are programmed to disengage Full Self Driving in the seconds before an accident so that their programming can't be blamed for killing anyone? Thus will Musk maintain his reputation among his most credulous followers.
posted by JDHarper at 12:11 AM on July 2, 2023 [7 favorites]

Also it's insane to me that people are going to this BlueSky website.

It's led by the same dumbass that made twitter, which was already being called the Hellsite BEFORE Musk bought it. Only this time, it's got Cryptocurrency tech built into the structure. Their approach to moderation is "what if we didn't." There's a literal racism dial, because it's being run by weird libertarians! It's a trap!
posted by JDHarper at 12:52 AM on July 2, 2023 [34 favorites]

It's all a masterclass in something.
posted by Pouteria at 12:59 AM on July 2, 2023

Why would anyone need to consider alternatives when we’re up to 10k, 1k & 0.5k!. Just turning a dial that says rate limiting and looking back at the audience like a contestant on The Price is Right.
posted by foxfirefey at 1:27 AM on July 2, 2023 [2 favorites]

Remember John Mulaney's "horse in the hospital" metaphor? This entire Musk / Twitter saga feels like someone let the pig enter the raccoon room.
posted by taz at 4:09 AM on July 2, 2023

I mean, people are going to Bluesky because it offers a similar experience to Twitter, only the people using it (for now) are more fun and less awful. There's no deeply-considered ethos behind it. And the reason why people are going to Bluesky instead of Mastodon is that Bluesky offers an enjoyable Twitter-like experience out-of-the-box, rather than an experience which requires you to read longform toots about the deeply-considered ethos etc etc.
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 4:10 AM on July 2, 2023 [23 favorites]

He's done it! Musk has built the Torture Nexus.
posted by chavenet at 4:11 AM on July 2, 2023 [3 favorites]

I don't intend that to be a blanket pan of Mastodon, but its community has got a lot of similarities to the Linux community in some ways. And one of the tricky things about social networks is that part of their appeal is the sort of audience that decides to post on them. I typically only use(d) Twitter to follow funny people goofing around, and most of those people decided that Mastodon was extremely not the vibe they were looking for. A lot of them are on Bluesky now, so now I check Bluesky instead of Twitter.

None of that has to do with thinking Jack is any less of an idiot asshole, but also: it's a free product, I don't pay for it, and additionally it costs $0, so I'm fine with using Bluesky up until I don't like using it anymore, which was the same mentality with which I approach(ed) Twitter itself.
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 4:15 AM on July 2, 2023 [9 favorites]

Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted: don't intend that to be a blanket pan of Mastodon, but its community has got a lot of similarities to the Linux community in some ways. And one of the tricky things about social networks is that part of their appeal is the sort of audience that decides to post on them. I typically only use(d) Twitter to follow funny people goofing around, and most of those people decided that Mastodon was extremely not the vibe they were looking for.

I hesitate to ask what brings you to Metafilter...
posted by clawsoon at 4:56 AM on July 2, 2023 [8 favorites]

Twitter was down
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 5:26 AM on July 2, 2023 [35 favorites]

I typically only use(d) Twitter to follow funny people goofing around, and most of those people decided that Mastodon was extremely not the vibe they were looking for. A lot of them are on Bluesky now, so now I check Bluesky instead of Twitter.

I don’t think Mastodon is perfect by any means but federation does mean that it’s a lot less consistent of an experience since it depends more on what instance you’re on and who you follow. The downside is less reach but the upside has also been that I see more people who aren’t playing for internet points hoping the algorithm will promote them.

There’s a list of MeFites which might be of interest.
posted by adamsc at 5:42 AM on July 2, 2023 [8 favorites]

Some people are reporting the usual slowdowns when there’s a big influx of Twitter users, others (including me) haven’t noticed it at all, which is also the federation playing out. Broadly speaking I think it’s ridden out this stress test better than previous ones.

The downside that the big “starter” instances are the most likely to wobble under the strain exactly when people are trying to join them en masse remains.

Also the fediverse currently has a lot of drama as Facebook/Instagram are about to release a big activityPub driven project so everyone is falling over themselves performatively defederating it, denouncing each other for not defederating it enough, defederating each other over this etc…

Back when Bluesky was the big media darling there was a lot of fediverse criticism of it for not going with activePub and instead using it’s own goofy crypto based protocol - I suspect if it had used activePub the exact sams thing would have happened.

All of which seems a bit limiting.
posted by Artw at 5:58 AM on July 2, 2023 [7 favorites]

My social media of choice these days is cohost.org. It's like what if tumblr was a worker-owned coop run by communist furries instead of being run by the Verizon Corporation. It's small but the vibes are good.

It's specifically designed to avoid some of the worst addictive/incendiary elements that other social media sites are built around. For example: there is no place to see how many favorites or reposts a post has. No one but you can see who you follow or who follows you (so no brigading against people because they follow someone you don't like). No one else can see what tags you follow. There's no algorithm: posts show up in chronological order from everyone you follow. There are no ads--currently their only income stream is from cohost plus subscriptions and merch sales, but they're also working on a Patreon-like system.

And critically, it allows NSFW content. It has a robust system for tagging and blocking posts and content warnings. And there's no app so the prudes at Apple and Google can't force them to stop allowing NSFW content like they did to Tumblr.

And because it's a centralized system with paid employees, it isn't dependent on volunteer labor (like Mastodon), and it can be moderated. Moderation is generally focused on keeping out Nazis and TERFs.

The biggest strike against it is that it can be a little bit of a challenge to find people to follow at first (since there's no algorithm to tell you what the best/most popular posts are). This post has some suggestions on that. I personally followed the people from Friends at the Table over to cohost, and then added the staff users (there's only 4 of them!) and a few other users who were posting on tags for things I like or who interacted with posts I made.

Anyway, commercial over. I just really like cohost. It's thoughtfully designed and run by cool people and I want it to succeed.
posted by JDHarper at 6:15 AM on July 2, 2023 [16 favorites]

There's an interesting thread from @maggiepint

This is weird to say out loud, but I actually am kinda an expert in rate limiting, so I'm gonna explain some stuff.

About half of incidents in large-scale production systems involve having more requests than you can serve. There are two categories of this kind of incident:
1. Top-Down overload or "Reddit Hug of Death": This is what Bluesky experienced today - suddenly there was a HUGE demand surge and the servers just *couldn't* for a while. This also happens after superbowl ads or when pop stars announce tours or during DDOS attacks.
2. Bottom-up: This is the less obvious and more common scenario, when something inside the system fails, that makes the system unable to serve normal load.
If you lose a redis cache and everything is reading to DB, you will drastically reduce your ability to serve requests.
Similarly, if a database replica, cloud region, or cluster goes down, you will be in a really tough spot for serving normal workload.

[snip]

BEGIN PURE SPECULATION, I DO NOT KNOW!
My hypothesis - Twitter lost a big part of a critical back end system - maybe they stopped paying their GCP bill, maybe they lost a critical cache and everything was reading other data, I truly do not know.
At this point, their probably very good adaptive rate limiter said 'ohshit' and brought the number of requests WAY WAY down throughout the system.

The infinite loop screenshot floating around? Front end code sees the 429 and retries, but without exponential backoff.
Then of course Elon gonna Elon so it's intentional 🤷‍♀️.

But really when you have a major outage you are intentionally going to do what Twitter engineering was doing, and have your requests come back in gradually to ensure you don't overload - their smart rate limiter can do that.
END SPECULATION

[snip]

The full thread on threadreaderapp.com
posted by Buntix at 6:40 AM on July 2, 2023 [5 favorites]

You know how Teslas are programmed to disengage Full Self Driving in the seconds before an accident so that their programming can't be blamed for killing anyone

The Internet really needs to decide if Musk is an evil genius or a blundering idiot. The whipsaw is starting to get to me.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 7:05 AM on July 2, 2023

Evil idiot and blundering genius
posted by hippybear at 7:24 AM on July 2, 2023 [4 favorites]

Dan Hon:

> I think people underestimate the prevalence of the other option: some third kind of thing that sits at the intersection of incompetentence *and* malice.
posted by parm at 7:29 AM on July 2, 2023 [14 favorites]

.

Is it time for one of those yet? Does twitter recover?
posted by Bottlecap at 7:31 AM on July 2, 2023 [1 favorite]

> And in the future, social media platforms are going to have to start thinking about profitability from the get-go, rather than assuming that if you're popular enough the profits will follow.

the problem is that a social media platform that’s profitable is inherently worse than one that’s not profitable, because everything that can be done to make a social media platform profitable negatively impacts the user experience, like, dramatically so.

i don’t think this marks the end or whatever of the delusion that websites should make money, but nevertheless the simultaneous collapse of tweddit demonstrates precisely the contours of the mutual incompatibilities between developing a platform worth using and developing a platform that makes money.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 7:40 AM on July 2, 2023 [5 favorites]

The Internet really needs to decide if Musk is an evil genius or a blundering idiot. The whipsaw is starting to get to me.

The George W. Bush of multibillionaires.
posted by JDHarper at 8:12 AM on July 2, 2023 [4 favorites]

(The giganto-comment I had posted earlier, then asked to be deleted for being an incredible derail, I have put up, with a little more editing, over at Everything2. It's about the issues with Mastodon and things users should know about it. If you're interested, there it is.)
posted by JHarris at 8:15 AM on July 2, 2023 [16 favorites]

Wait, everything2 is still alive?

How's kuro5hin doing?
posted by clawsoon at 8:19 AM on July 2, 2023 [8 favorites]

The Internet really needs to decide if Musk is an evil genius or a blundering idiot. The whipsaw is starting to get to me.

It’s like Trump - most of the “genius” is just being prepared to be a criminal jerk and to lie a lot, and starting with the money T never to be called on it.
posted by Artw at 8:24 AM on July 2, 2023 [5 favorites]

(Everything2 is still alive, and doing much better than kuro5hin! I kind of think, as an idiosyncratic, general-use wiki-like object with voting and a remaining community of thougtful diehards, its hour may have returned.)
posted by JHarris at 8:26 AM on July 2, 2023 [1 favorite]

Also, more relevantly--I've seen speculation that it may not have been random that this happened on July 1. The date is halfway through the year and ticks over into a new quarter. It's possible some service that Musk decided he didn't need to pay for vanished, and all of this could be the finding out to his fucking around.
posted by JHarris at 8:37 AM on July 2, 2023 [4 favorites]

the problem is that a social media platform that’s profitable is inherently worse than one that’s not profitable, because everything that can be done to make a social media platform profitable negatively impacts the user experience, like, dramatically so.

I just wrote a kinda-viral essay about how difficult it is to launch a social network, and one of the big things I wrote about is that it's so difficult to get people to use a new social network to begin with that virtually anything you do that adds even a little friction to that experience can seriously fuck it up. Because the weird thing about a social network is that its value comes from what other people post on it, so you're in a weird place of needing to not only attract users, but also compel those users to be interesting and valuable, somehow. Any user who doesn't find value in the other users will leave, which means they won't provide value, so most social networks are in a perpetual state of scrambling out of quicksand, always, all the time.

The most reliable way to provide value is to have a lot of users, which is why "growth hacking" (ugh) has become such a part of the industry. But growth hacking costs money, and sustaining a web site for lots of users costs money, so one of the (many) invisible problems with the contemporary Internet is that every big social network received hundreds of millions of dollars of investment money just to become what it is, most of which it eats through before it earns a cent. When it finally needs to make money, that need is often desperate and overwhelming, which is why so many sites seem to evolve and "innovate" in such sheer states of panic. So the issue isn't just that "profitability" makes social networks worse—it's that most social networks couldn't exist without an insane financial expenditure to begin with, and trend towards monopolistic because it's almost hard to make money without a monopoly you can abuse.

It's just hard to operate at that scale. It's hard to make a social space for tens of millions of people at a time. But social networks that don't have tens of millions of users often don't have the gravity to keep people invested—and the simpler and slighter your mechanics are, the truer that will be, because the volume of people becomes the thing you offer that nobody else does.

But let's say you do have users. How do you make money off of them? Getting them to pay you money directly would be nice—but the more valuable the thing you charge them for is, the more your userbase will resent you for charging money for it. Ads can work, but advertisers want their ads to be unbearably intrusive, and even then won't give you as much money as you need. You can try selling some form of exclusive content, but that involves basically launching a brand-new business; you can try to sell products, but that too is sort of orthogonal to the social network you're trying to make work. And if you push too hard, your users leave and your value collapses, because the users are the value.

Defederated network-of-network approaches are going to be interesting to see develop, but similar networks-of-networks have been attempted in the past, and we're already seeing the issues with Mastodon that we've seen before: tensions between instances, unreliable community managers or servers, and added product complexity all make the product as a whole more fraught, especially when people perceive these difficulties as a fundamental part of the experience.

Scale is just hard, full-stop. And we're talking about a ludicrous, cartoonish level of scale. The easiest solution would be to convince people to socialize in groups slightly closer to human-scale, and plenty of people do that and have a great time doing it. But that's antithetical to the Silicon Valley version of the utopian Internet dream, so for now we're still stuck in that fucking quicksand, watching the worlds around us continually collapse.
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 9:07 AM on July 2, 2023 [14 favorites]

The Internet really needs to decide if Musk is an evil genius or a blundering idiot. The whipsaw is starting to get to me.

Trick question. Elon Musk is a blundering fascist. He knows how the systems built by and for genocidal slavers function, which can make him look smart. Though, mostly just to those who believe systems built by and for genocidal slavers can demonstrate meaningful intellect. (E.g. white men,
intended beneficiaries of western imperialism, reactionaries, those further insulated from global fascism and climate collapse, intellectualizers, etc)
posted by CPAnarchist at 9:08 AM on July 2, 2023 [11 favorites]

(If I may...)

metafilter: watching the worlds around us continually collapse.
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 9:11 AM on July 2, 2023 [5 favorites]

It'd be a fine thing if Metafilter persisted for decades and decades more, preserving a record of internet trends coming and going, always here, waiting patient, eternal.
posted by JHarris at 9:26 AM on July 2, 2023 [18 favorites]

JHarris - would largely co-sign all of your everything2 post.

The odd thing though is over time I’m less and less in the Twitter 2.0 camp, not because I don’t want it to grow and federated protocols to become the norm over billionaire owned single points of failure, or even because I sign on to the anti-discoverability/anti-virality ideology (I mostly don’t? Core exception being I think algorithmic feeds are bad)… I just thibk it deserves to grow and mature and he it’s own thing away from having to be a drop-in Twitter replacement and I’m confident in it enough that I think it’s going to do fine without everyone suddenly moving over there.

For now everyone wanting a Twitter do-over has Bluesky and I guess when it does it’s inevitable heel turn we have the “Madtodon as Bluesky 2.0” conversation.
posted by Artw at 9:37 AM on July 2, 2023 [4 favorites]

The Internet really needs to decide if Musk is an evil genius or a blundering idiot. The whipsaw is starting to get to me.

Evil savant? Or alternatively, evil stopped clock?
posted by dirigibleman at 9:48 AM on July 2, 2023

Though, mostly just to those who believe systems built by and for genocidal slavers can demonstrate meaningful intellect. (E.g. white men,
intended beneficiaries of western imperialism, reactionaries, those further insulated from global fascism and climate collapse, intellectualizers, etc)

But wouldn't that describe Twitter?
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 9:55 AM on July 2, 2023

It'd be a fine thing if Metafilter persisted for decades and decades more, preserving a record of internet trends coming and going, always here, waiting patient, eternal.

I laughed when I read The Verge's piece on Google Reader, saw the screenshot of the first-ever Reader prototype, and the two feeds it was subscribed to were Slashdot and MetaFilter.
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 9:57 AM on July 2, 2023 [20 favorites]

Metafilter, Slashdot, and other early social sites bring to mind the Elk Lodges and Moose Lodges and Loyal Orders of Buffalo. Nobody in the wider world is really sure if anybody comes here anymore, but they do know that if anybody does, it's a bunch of old people.
posted by clawsoon at 10:09 AM on July 2, 2023 [21 favorites]

Scale is just hard, full-stop. And we're talking about a ludicrous, cartoonish level of scale.

I'm sure this has probably been explored to death and there are a ton of reasons it wouldn't work, but I keep idly wondering about a more peer-to-peer approach to social media. Like, seed what you read.
posted by jason_steakums at 10:59 AM on July 2, 2023 [1 favorite]

Mastadon seems to be more usable these days. I created an account on mstdn.social and just started following a few tags. Simple. The main barrier was the omG what server do I pick portion of it.
posted by interogative mood at 11:03 AM on July 2, 2023 [1 favorite]

If we're gonna keep calling it Mastodon, I'm fine with the hot take industry settling down on Bluesky tbh.
posted by cendawanita at 11:06 AM on July 2, 2023 [1 favorite]

As it is, there is credible evidence that for a number of global south countries (I've seen confirmed: Indonesia, Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda), the move is to Truth Social.
posted by cendawanita at 11:10 AM on July 2, 2023 [4 favorites]

Last comment: and it's Misskey instances in Japan, not to mention a big one in Indonesia, that're having to handle an influx of new accounts into the federated spaces. All this is happening while the various Kbin and Lemmy servers are trying to handle the ongoing reddit move.

Mastodon is still relevant, don't worry - after all Instagram is about to launch Threads and they intend to plug into the Mastodon flavour of ActivityPub.
posted by cendawanita at 11:15 AM on July 2, 2023 [3 favorites]

Mastodon at large, or at least the vocal pets of it, incredibly does not want to be part of Facebooks plans Re:threads and is kind of on a witch hunt against any server admins that might be supportive of it or merely indifferent to it.

Given that it’s Facebook I guess that’s a fair point but boy is it a growth limiter.

That said, as fediverse people will repeatedly point out, activityPub is more than just Mastodon*.

* it’s an entire ecosystem of federated systems each of which individually want to tell Facebook to fuck off, probably.
posted by Artw at 12:11 PM on July 2, 2023 [1 favorite]

As it is, there is credible evidence that for a number of global south countries (I've seen confirmed: Indonesia, Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda), the move is to Truth Social.

Well that’s hugely unfortunate.
posted by Artw at 12:12 PM on July 2, 2023 [9 favorites]

So nice of Musk to push this just before a long weekend so that the devs can spend all of their holiday at work scrambling to try to fix it.
posted by clawsoon at 12:36 PM on July 2, 2023 [11 favorites]

Looking at comments on r/Twitter, it seems that today's message most commonly locking out users is:

This request looks like it might be automated. To protect our users from spam and other malicious activity, we can't complete this action right now. Please try again later.

Bot-fighting measure gone horribly wrong?
posted by clawsoon at 12:40 PM on July 2, 2023 [3 favorites]

I typically only use(d) Twitter to follow funny people goofing around,

Yeah same. It's not that I don't want the more serious activist stuff, but the way MY (I'll specify) mastodon experience started was kind of relentlessly serious and strident and vry srs stuff(tm). (it's better now.) Turns out that for me that was a matter of follow list curation, which is just that much, almost imperceptably, harder on mastodon. I know people love to hate "the algorithm" but it did make it much easier to jump-start your experience getting a critical mass of stuff you do like to see on Twitter vs. mastodon.
posted by ctmf at 12:50 PM on July 2, 2023 [4 favorites]

Bot-fighting measure gone horribly wrong?

Lol, no. Parts of their infrastructure are going down, probably for non-payment, and Musk is lying about it.
posted by ryanrs at 12:51 PM on July 2, 2023 [7 favorites]

This whole... thing... this past however-long-it's-been-since-Musk-took-over, has been putting me in mind of Thorstein Veblen's The Engineers and the Price System. There's been nothing like the overthrow of capital by the technocracy that he called for - on the whole, they remain "consistently loyal, with something more than the hired-man's loyalty, to the established order" - but the seeming consensus among qualified senior engineers to not work for Musk at Twitter might be the closest we've gotten to Veblen's "soviet of technicians".
posted by clawsoon at 1:05 PM on July 2, 2023 [2 favorites]

something more than the hired-man's loyalty

We can't construct our grand designs without someone to sign the checks and beat the workers.
posted by ryanrs at 1:29 PM on July 2, 2023 [1 favorite]

>As it is, there is credible evidence that for a number
>of global south countries (I've seen confirmed: Indonesia, Nigeria,
>Kenya, Uganda), the move is to Truth Social.

Well that’s hugely unfortunate.

Is it? One of my fantasies for Truth Social was that it would be taken over by liberals. Having it dominated by foreign voices that alienate its current core would be equally acceptable.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 1:38 PM on July 2, 2023 [10 favorites]

Is it? One of my fantasies for Truth Social was that it would be taken over by liberals.

There are quite sizeable religious-conservative groups in all of the above countries, and my expectation is those groups are the ones lured by Truth Social.
posted by tclark at 2:06 PM on July 2, 2023 [17 favorites]

The one thing we seem to be missing this time around is insiders willing to spill the tea on what's going on internally. A benefit of ruling through fear and loyalty tests, I guess...
posted by clawsoon at 2:35 PM on July 2, 2023 [1 favorite]

Given that it’s Facebook I guess that’s a fair point but boy is it a growth limiter.

I imagine that federating with Facebook would result in something like Eternal September 2, except with Facebook instead of AOL. Imagine if Metafilter and Reddit were on the Fediverse and then imagine Metafilter choosing to federate with Reddit. It would just be totally unmanageable, every thread would fill up with Redditors.
posted by BungaDunga at 2:36 PM on July 2, 2023 [2 favorites]

A benefit of ruling through fear and loyalty tests, I guess...

He also presumably has fired everyone who showed any evidence of independent thinking, either because they're true believers or can't risk being fired for leaking.
posted by BungaDunga at 2:38 PM on July 2, 2023 [3 favorites]

As a programmer who’s worked on some big sites and been through a few crazy shot shows, this is actually really funny because it isn’t happening to me.
posted by interogative mood at 2:51 PM on July 2, 2023 [23 favorites]

The big fear I see being expressed on Mastodon isn't that the Facebook people would be difficult, but that Meta would use their connection to the Fediverse to do mass data harvesting on a platform that is intended to not have data harvesting taking place. I mean, I survived the Eternal September, with a few scars but still... I'm sure the Fediverse could absorb Facebook people over time, but they really don't want the fibroids of Meta in their systems.

Plus, it's an actual stated goal of Meta to use this engagement with the Fediverse to destroy the Fediverse.
posted by hippybear at 2:51 PM on July 2, 2023 [9 favorites]

Whether it is or isn't I leave up in the air, but where do they say that?
posted by JHarris at 3:58 PM on July 2, 2023 [5 favorites]

> I'm sure this has probably been explored to death and there are a ton of reasons it wouldn't work, but I keep idly wondering about a more peer-to-peer approach to social media. Like, seed what you read.

webrings. web. rings.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 4:04 PM on July 2, 2023 [8 favorites]

There are quite sizeable religious-conservative groups in all of the above countries, and my expectation is those groups are the ones lured by Truth Social.

I’m sure you’re right, but I wasn’t thinking it would be the politics of those new users that would alienate the Truth Social core. But who knows, there have been stranger bedfellows.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 4:21 PM on July 2, 2023 [1 favorite]

Lol, no. Parts of their infrastructure are going down, probably for non-payment, and Musk is lying about it.

This is one of the things I am 3 standard deviants sure of.

* When you're writing a harvesting spider, way over 50% of the work is avoiding the limits and making it look organic (admittedly it's been a decade or two, but guessing that hasn't changed).
* Twitter deals with a massive amount of traffic, and has/had planetary sized infrastructure: short of some massive trojan bot army nothing should even cause them to blink that they couldn't just easily firewall off.
* There is presumably less load on the system anyway since they paywalled the API out of most peoples' pockets. Also peeps moving to more clement climes. And all the advertisers leaving.

That it's down to Musk nickel-and-diming the infrastructure is fairly certain.

That there Total Recall movie was fairly prescient.
posted by Buntix at 4:38 PM on July 2, 2023 [8 favorites]

Imagine living on Mars* with the fucker.

* hermetically sealed apocalypse bunker, since there’s no way he’s getting to Mars.
posted by Artw at 4:50 PM on July 2, 2023 [2 favorites]

I keep thinking to do an FPP or at least someone should about Threads (which popped up on Play store already before being yanked away) and Fedi but re: what could be their intentions, much remains to be speculation. But this was, as of a few days ago, a pretty good recap of the discourse: Should The Fediverse Welcome Its Surveillance Capitalist Overlords? Spicy title indicates the strong point of view but it's pretty even-handed. Maybe once I'm over my Eid holiday mood I'll make a post.

Zuck's timing is pretty trollishly good when it comes to poking at Musk about Twitter, it must be admitted. But that's as far as I'll go.
posted by cendawanita at 6:10 PM on July 2, 2023 [9 favorites]

* When you're writing a harvesting spider, way over 50% of the work is avoiding the limits and making it look organic (admittedly it's been a decade or two, but guessing that hasn't changed).
[...]
That it's down to Musk nickel-and-diming the infrastructure is fairly certain.

There's still the issue that people are going to be harvesting the site directly to get around the fact that they can't use the API anymore.

So the question is if there really is a performance problem, or if their attempts to catch organic-looking harvesters are catching organic users.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 8:00 PM on July 2, 2023 [2 favorites]

NAFO is upset about the Twitter situation.
posted by interogative mood at 8:04 PM on July 2, 2023

Matthew Sweet @DrMatthewSweet

Elon Musk is like a Scooby Doo villain
who dresses up as a ghost to scare
everyone away from the theme park
but forgets that his business is theme
parks

posted by sebastienbailard at 12:06 AM on July 3, 2023 [21 favorites]

One peculiar thing about all this is that Musk has clearly either formally or simply effectively NDA'd Twitter's remaining staff so all of this drama becomes extremely speculative with absolutely no one at Twitter willing to go on record about what is happening. So the free speech absolutist has turned his company that runs a social media site for infovores into a blackhole that only radiates out unverifiable garbage. Which I guess is perfect content for the twitterers.
posted by srboisvert at 3:13 AM on July 3, 2023 [6 favorites]

Free speech absolutist NDAs are the best NDAs there are.
posted by flabdablet at 4:40 AM on July 3, 2023 [7 favorites]

The big fear I see being expressed on Mastodon isn't that the Facebook people would be difficult, but that Meta would use their connection to the Fediverse to do mass data harvesting on a platform that is intended to not have data harvesting taking place.

As with the opposition to federated search, this feels like the privacy equivalent of fighting climate change by banning plastic straws. Mastodon is very public by design – even “private” accounts are just restrictions on follower permission in the UI –so anyone so inclined could already harvest that data. It seems like the only thing being part of the fediverse would give them is access to the private DMs of the people who would be on their server instead of another one.
posted by adamsc at 4:47 AM on July 3, 2023 [1 favorite]

I posted above how I read somewhere how SpaceX stage managed Musk. Here it is.
posted by Pyrogenesis at 5:07 AM on July 3, 2023 [4 favorites]

A pre-coffee thought this morning: Thinking of how vital Twitter has been to protest movements worldwide, Musk's seemingly deliberate sabotage of Twitter is a preemptive cyber-attack against anti-capitalist organizing.
posted by ob1quixote at 6:40 AM on July 3, 2023 [8 favorites]

And as long as we're making guesses how about a fine hail Mary:

https://newrepublic.com/post/171832/elon-musk-twitter-fines-hate-speech

To avoid the fine he'll get the "user" count to under 2 million.

As for the 'glass cliff' idea - whomever was in charge was going to be offered up as the sacrifice. The Trumpesque way of running a business via not paying vendors is going to make your job as CEO hard. But with a large enough golden parachute who's not gonna take the job? And there exists the outside chance you'll be the hero with better odds to a payout than buying a lotto ticket.

As long as you had the parachute money in escrow of course.
posted by rough ashlar at 6:47 AM on July 3, 2023 [1 favorite]

A pre-coffee thought this morning: Thinking of how vital Twitter has been to protest movements worldwide, Musk's seemingly deliberate sabotage of Twitter is a preemptive cyber-attack against anti-capitalist organizing.

I have assumed this is the motive for breaking Twitter all along (if there is an actual motive, never attribute to malice that which can be attributed to stupidity and all that). When people find solidarity, that force is irresistible, so any effective tool or system that allows people to find each other and gather along shared interests must be destroyed when that interest becomes the common welfare of the people.

"You ever stop to think who it is we assassinate?"
posted by LooseFilter at 6:57 AM on July 3, 2023 [3 favorites]

Interesting that there are zero mentions of Spoutible in this thread so far. I guess I wasn't the only one getting Nate Silver vibes off its founder.
posted by Lentrohamsanin at 7:06 AM on July 3, 2023 [1 favorite]

As with the opposition to federated search, this feels like the privacy equivalent of fighting climate change by banning plastic straws.

True, from a technical point of view. And yet.

The fight here isn't just technical; it's social. To date, no social platform I can think of has managed to remain both independent and viable when directly targeted by one of the ten-ton gorillas. (Pour one out for FriendFeed, which I still miss. Long live Mokum, however.) If Mastodon can pull that off, show it's possible, well.

Big if, of course. Scuttlebutt on the fedi is that Eugen Rochko is going to cave to Meta with respect to mastodon.social federation. Unsurprising; Eugen has never struck me as particularly trustworthy. For my part, I'll keep co-modding the Mastodon instance I'm on, and I will keep hoping.
posted by humbug at 7:21 AM on July 3, 2023 [2 favorites]

A pre-coffee thought this morning: Thinking of how vital Twitter has been to protest movements worldwide, Musk's seemingly deliberate sabotage of Twitter is a preemptive cyber-attack against anti-capitalist organizing.

I've already seen one conspiracy theory floating around that the Twitter outages are happening during the French protests in order to protect "woke" President Macron. I have no idea who came up with that one.
posted by clawsoon at 7:24 AM on July 3, 2023 [1 favorite]

Honestly he has too many direct ways to fuck with people to bother with that. If a Nazi wants you banned, you are banned, no rate limiting needed.
posted by Artw at 7:29 AM on July 3, 2023 [2 favorites]

I think it's interesting ascribing all these elaborate motivations to how Musk is running Twitter into the ground. It's a conspiracy to help Nazis! Hurt Macron! Avoid some fines in Europe by driving off all the users!

The simpler explanation is Musk is just not very good at running Twitter. For which there is plenty of evidence. All the enabling of Nazis and stuff is a happy accident for him, aligned with his poorly thought out politics. But mostly he's just not very competent at taking over a social media company.
posted by Nelson at 7:43 AM on July 3, 2023 [20 favorites]

I think part of it is we're just not used to having months-long hot mic incidents, which is by dint of Musk's own lack of self-control and lack of effective minders what his tenure at Twitter has been. It's alien to see someone just so constantly narrate their own shittiness in such a protracted way with such a lack of guard rails; the pattern-matching mind tries to construct some more coherent explanation, something satisfying to the expected world of at least careful, competent exploitative assholes.

The closest analogy I can think of for this kind of opposite-of-restraint is Trump, but for that particular shithead being incapable of shutting his mouth was borderline praxis a lot of the time, god help us. Musk just...says dumb shit that doesn't get him anything, tells lies that don't pay off, descends constantly and willingly from the podium some diehard simps try to imagine him occupying. He dumb-asshole-who-can't-shut-upped himself into buying Twitter and now he's dumb-asshole-who-can't-shut-upping himself into breaking it and losing himself even more money than he did the day he drove it off the lot.

It only feels inconceivable that it's this stupid and straightforward because we're used to shitty rich people having—wanting—decent PR handlers.
posted by cortex at 8:00 AM on July 3, 2023 [23 favorites]

💩
posted by Nelson at 8:24 AM on July 3, 2023 [2 favorites]

As with the opposition to federated search, this feels like the privacy equivalent of fighting climate change by banning plastic straws.

Separate from privacy/safety, you might find this more compelling: How to Kill a Decentralised Network (such as the Fediverse), about what happened after Google 'embraced' the open-source XMPP, taking a page from the (old) Microsoft embrace-extend-extinguish playbook.

All the enabling of Nazis and stuff is a happy accident for him

This part not being an accident is the one thing there are receipts for. The Sacramento Bee getting banned from old-Twitter seems to have been an animating event for him and his ex-wife, who (jokingly?) suggests he buy Twitter in text messages revealed during discovery for the make-him-buy-Twitter-since-he-signed-contracts-saying-he-would lawsuit last year:

Riley: Can you buy Twitter and then delete it please!?xx
America is going INSANE
The Babylon Bee got suspension[sic] is crazy. Raiyah and I were talking about it today. It was a fucking joke. Why has everyone become so puritanical?
Or can you buy Twitter and make it radically free-speech?
So much stupidity comes from Twitter.

Musk: Maybe buy it and change it to properly support free speech xx

Riley: [...]Please do something to fight woke-ism. I will do anything to help! xx

posted by nobody at 8:32 AM on July 3, 2023 [14 favorites]

(Typo in my text above: Babylon Bee, not Sacramento Bee.)
posted by nobody at 8:43 AM on July 3, 2023 [6 favorites]

I often feel like Elon, Reddit CEO, and others feel like they are the protagonists in an Ayn Rand novel... Hopefully they all will just go to Galt's Gulch.
posted by evilelf at 9:42 AM on July 3, 2023 [2 favorites]

Hopefully they all will just go to Galt's Gulch.

(obligatory link)
posted by LooseFilter at 11:11 AM on July 3, 2023 [10 favorites]

Musk: Maybe buy it and change it to properly support free speech xx

The best space engineers want to make rockets go to space, so Elon gets the best rocket engineers at SpaceX.

The best electric car engineers want to make electric cars, so Elon gets the best electric car engineers at Tesla.

The best web engineers do not want to create a 4chan hellscape, so Elon does not get the best web engineers at Twitter.
posted by clawsoon at 11:23 AM on July 3, 2023 [12 favorites]

Yes, the simplest answer is Mr. Musk is not good at running things. Combined with his liking money, having a lot of it, and living by the idea of "you don't get rich by buying your own blue point oysters" (aka spending other people's money) the idea this all can get tied back to his cost cutting/not paying bills is the simplest.

people in not-the-US using Truth Social

Light moderation and it not being blocked by nation-state firewalls would seem to be the low hanging explanation.

Macron ... I have no idea who came up with that one.

It seems Macron at one point called out to social media companies to stop posting about the riots. His making the statement in public could then prompt the idea and it have more legs then, say, The Aliens don't want twitter wasting bandwidth on starlink but instead find humans making fools of themselves on TikTok a very tradeable black market infohazard due to stupor induction.
posted by rough ashlar at 11:36 AM on July 3, 2023

Is Google starting to drop Twitter results? A Google search for "elon musk twitter" no longer shows a list of his tweets. (It does still work for "dril twitter" and "catturd twitter", though.) This person claims to be seeing a drop of 50% in Google indexed twitter URLs since Friday, though I have no idea if this is a normal weekend thing or if it's special to this weekend.
posted by clawsoon at 12:16 PM on July 3, 2023 [2 favorites]

I mean, Google's spider (like the majority of organic search users) is going to see a generic login screen at every single link, right? The whole site should be dropped from results!
posted by nobody at 12:27 PM on July 3, 2023 [4 favorites]

Dril tweeted a link to his Linktree, where he can be found on other social media sites.
posted by cheshyre at 12:30 PM on July 3, 2023 [1 favorite]

nobody: I mean, Google's spider (like the majority of organic search users) is going to see a generic login screen at every single link, right? The whole site should be dropped from results!

What I'm finding with a quick search is that Google has had direct access to the "Twitter firehose" since 2015, which means your tweets will be indexed unless you've limited who can see your tweets. But who knows how the recent changes have affected that?
posted by clawsoon at 12:37 PM on July 3, 2023 [2 favorites]

#BlackLivesMatter tweets vanishing - Ten years after #BlackLivesMatter began on Twitter, more than a third of tweets with the hashtag have disappeared, according to a new analysis from the Pew Research Center.
posted by Artw at 12:43 PM on July 3, 2023 [5 favorites]

And as long as we're making guesses how about a fine hail Mary:

https://newrepublic.com/post/171832/elon-musk-twitter-fines-hate-speech

To avoid the fine he'll get the "user" count to under 2 million

Puts a new spin on the old classic: Yes, we're losing money on every sale, but we'll make it up in a lack of volume!
posted by Flunkie at 4:13 PM on July 3, 2023 [1 favorite]

I'm not going to say it's NOT nefarious deletions by Twitter, but it could be that Twitter is deleting accounts that have been left idle for more than X amount of time, I think 30 days, and a lot of the accounts that created those #BlackLivesMatter posts might have been dormant long enough to be deleted.
posted by hippybear at 4:18 PM on July 3, 2023

Musk could be both an idiot, and deliberately breaking Twitter (or at least trying to make it oligarch friendly).

But the evidence so far is that he is mostly an idiot.
posted by Pouteria at 4:33 PM on July 3, 2023

Tweetdeck is about to go for pay only.
posted by Nelson at 4:40 PM on July 3, 2023

I'm not going to say it's NOT nefarious deletions by Twitter,

No need for Twitter to be the 'nefarious' actor.

Data scraping works to many ends.

Data scrape for the hashtag. If an account used the hashtag pass the user to have its posting past scraped. Then use NLP (natural language processing) and look for things that could be a TOS. Have your actual bot army report the TOS. Accounts get reviewed and yeeted. Then the yeeted get mad at Elon for deleting them. Overall anger in the universe increases over what should be greeted with a shrug. The person who's doing that gets to feel like they've done something and gets a warm feeling, kinda like peeing in the bathtub you are sitting in.
posted by rough ashlar at 4:42 PM on July 3, 2023

Deleting dormant accounts on twitter is nefarious in and of itself.
posted by hippybear at 4:46 PM on July 3, 2023 [5 favorites]

As with the opposition to federated search, this feels like the privacy equivalent of fighting climate change by banning plastic straws.

Separate from privacy/safety, you might find this more compelling: How to Kill a Decentralised Network (such as the Fediverse), about what happened after Google 'embraced' the open-source XMPP, taking a page from the (old) Microsoft embrace-extend-extinguish playbook.

Yeah, I’m not saying the risk isn’t real, only that I don’t think simple de-federation is going to be effective. There are two separate concerns - one is privacy, where it really doesn’t make sense to worry about what Facebook will do with their own instance when everyone (even “private” accounts) provides custom public Atom feeds.

The other question is about control and I think that’s more interesting because it really gets to the question of how decentralized systems can compete. Email is the best example - unlike in the XMPP case, Google captured a large chunk of the market but it’s still not hard to use the host of your choice and they’re declining. I think part of that was a historical coincidence – XMPP was poorly suited for mobile devices right when the iPhone came out – but some of that also came out to the size of the established community. I’m curious whether the Mastodon community is big enough to keep it more like email or the web than XMPP – it’s certainly demonstrated more of a commitment to avoid being steamrollered.
posted by adamsc at 5:46 PM on July 3, 2023 [1 favorite]

I suspect that Google went into including XMPP support in Talk with pure intentions, it was a time when the company was a lot more into interoperation and not trapping people in their ecosystem. But in a large corp with people leaving and joining all the time, it is inevitable that someone will be put in charge of a feature with less altruistic motives, and the result looks exactly like they had planned it all along, so, what's the difference really?

Nowadays, they're much more solidly/obviously into capitalizing on lock-in. What else is serving so many ads in Youtube than taking advantage of the fact that everyone has their videos there? Two of their premium "features" are things their app could easily do without paying the Googleship monthly for them: downloading videos for offline play, and allowing sound to keep playing even when the device is sleeping. They're two of the clearest signs yet that the company is just another typically rapacious internet business now.
posted by JHarris at 6:37 PM on July 3, 2023 [5 favorites]

According to various Reddit posts Google has removed or is the process of removing Twitter from search results. It sounds like the main reason Google search satisfaction metrics for users visiting Twitter links since the login and limits were implemented.
posted by interogative mood at 8:39 PM on July 3, 2023 [2 favorites]

BlackLivesMatter tweets vanishing - Ten years after #BlackLivesMatter began on Twitter, more than a third of tweets with the hashtag have disappeared, according to a new analysis from the Pew Research Center

More specifically Pew says they "have become inaccessible." Equally annoying but not nearly as exciting as saying they "disappeared."
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 8:48 PM on July 3, 2023

Guardian: Instagram’s Threads app to launch 6 July as users leave Elon Musk’s Twitter.
posted by Wordshore at 10:34 PM on July 3, 2023 [1 favorite]

Just to keep you posted: OG TweetDeck has finally given up the ghost. So that's that - I couldn't visit Twitter on my computers even if I wanted to. Given Instagram gives me two ads, three "sponsored" posts from people I've never heard of and three random cat videos (out of a pool of about ten) per post by someone I actually follow, I'm not sure they're getting my attention either.
posted by Grangousier at 12:14 AM on July 4, 2023 [2 favorites]

For me Twitter's "funny people goofing around" always felt like everybody was struggling to come up with something funny every day. It got very tiresome over time. My Mastodon experience over the past 6 months has been less "funny" but a lot more... wholesome I guess. I am sure it's not like that for everybody, you more or less find what you seek out. Which I much prefer over the algorithm pushing stuff into my face.
posted by donio at 12:22 AM on July 4, 2023 [5 favorites]

The fediverse is a privacy nightmare

…To reiterate: you absolutely should not post anything on the fediverse or Mastodon that you are not comfortable with being archived permanently by the absolute worst people you can think of.

To me this is less “reason not to use it” and more “thing to keep in mind”. Probably a principle I’d apply to Mastodon alternatives such as Bluesky or Twitter as well.

Also it does make some of the Meta upset kind of pointless.
posted by Artw at 6:05 AM on July 4, 2023 [6 favorites]

This last few days it's felt, every time I've looked across social media, that friends and colleagues on (or previously on) Twitter are now choosing between Bluesky and Mastodon in real time.

Amusingly, or notably, the number who have expressed an interest in moving from Twitter to ZuckerThreads is, erm, zero. Two academic game researchers (one of the communities or loose networks I'm on the edge of) who maintain a presence on seemingly every social media are both notably cool-through-to-hostile on starting on Threads (one is on the verge of nuking her Instagram/FB presence).

There are surely some people out there who will enthusiastically jump onto Threads. I just don't know any of them. [BBC article that hmmmmm, is problematic in several places, such as "Mark Zuckerberg has a history of borrowing other company's ideas - and making them work."]

Hmmm. You can still create an account on MySpace...
posted by Wordshore at 6:16 AM on July 4, 2023 [4 favorites]

So from what I'm seeing here and elsewhere, the drawbacks to the best-known Twitter alternatives seem to be:

Mastodon: not easy for non-technical users, plus a lot of gatekeepers who want to keep those non-technical users off it

Bluesky: Jack Dorsey has an unimpressive track record when it comes to hate speech on Twitter

Threads: Zuck

Spoutible: looked like a possibility until Christopher Bouzy started responding to criticism and even offers of help by attacking (as in the Courtney Milan business)
posted by Epixonti at 7:43 AM on July 4, 2023

Artw: "…To reiterate: you absolutely should not post anything on the fediverse or Mastodon that you are not comfortable with being archived permanently by the absolute worst people you can think of."

I'm quite surprised by the idea that someone has ever thought any social network is private in any way or form.

I always try to post as if my mom, my future employer, and some CIA goon are standing behind me.
posted by signal at 9:06 AM on July 4, 2023 [11 favorites]

That is the way.

Mastodon is kinda different in that it has some sort of private looking posting options, but you’re best off thinking of them as a courtesy measure to avoid messing up peoples timelines rather than real privacy.

The way to DM privately on Mastodon is “don’t”.

(Same as it os anywhere else without full end to end encryption or end to end encryption implemented by reluctant employees of a skinflint fashy edgelord who can’t get real experts)
posted by Artw at 10:48 AM on July 4, 2023 [2 favorites]

Talking of skinflint fashy edgelords, LOL at this release note.
posted by Artw at 10:49 AM on July 4, 2023 [3 favorites]

This last few days it's felt, every time I've looked across social media, that friends and colleagues on (or previously on) Twitter are now choosing between Bluesky and Mastodon in real time.

(as referenced upstream) I really kinda like t2.social (wikipedia entry) - created by an ex Twitter dev and (ex) one of their Trust & Safety team. It's just rather nice. That said also only just now on the verge of going past 10k users, what's the Dunbar number for a social network anyway?

[got 5 invites going spare if anyone wants to kick the tyres]

Yet to hit the 1k tweet view limit on Twitter, and suspect that's because it isn't sticky for me anymore and the time is split between (mostly) Mastodon, here, t2, picking garlic, watching Kongen Befaler (it is literally impossible to watch and do stuff in another window and keep up, well unless you speak Norwegian).
posted by Buntix at 10:52 AM on July 4, 2023

…To reiterate: you absolutely should not post anything on the fediverse or Mastodon that you are not comfortable with being archived permanently by the absolute worst people you can think of.

How is this different from every public site ever? Including this one?
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 12:16 PM on July 4, 2023 [4 favorites]

I don't know if Telegram or Discord are visible from the outside or not. I'm pretty sure SnapChat, if it even still exists?, has never been. WhatsApp? No clue.
posted by hippybear at 12:23 PM on July 4, 2023

There's a reflection up at the Verge about the extent to which we might be at an inflection point towards the end of the modern social web. It's not a terrible read - it hits a bunch of the points that have come up on this thread and the Reddit threads, and accurately enough highlights both some of the things that'd be lost (and gained) in a shift back towards more fragmented communities. But in the comments, someone notes:

being a Something Awful Forums member while this Twitter disaster is going on owns; it's like being a coelacanth loafing about in the benthic depths while the atmosphere goes incandescent with fire storms and the dinosaurs burn away and just not giving a shit because there's still plenty of worms and barnacles to eat down here

And, well, here in another deep crevice in the ocean...
posted by ASF Tod und Schwerkraft at 1:46 PM on July 4, 2023 [12 favorites]

There's been much made on Mastodon about how much information the Threads app will be gathering on its users vs any Mastodon client.

And yes, MetaFilter is another deep crevice in the ocean.
posted by hippybear at 1:53 PM on July 4, 2023 [1 favorite]

According to various Reddit posts Google has removed or is the process of removing Twitter from search results.

Looks like whatever was happening with Google searches for Twitter stuff, it seems to be resolved, at least from a couple of quick searches I did now. Did Twitter pay its Google bills? Did Twitter's firehose get broken and then fixed? Who knows?
posted by clawsoon at 2:41 PM on July 4, 2023 [2 favorites]

If you're moving to mastodon, there's a still-functioning twitter-to-activitypub bridge: bird.makeup

It's not perfect, but I have been very happy using it to follow some of the remaining people on twitter.
posted by vibratory manner of working at 3:24 PM on July 4, 2023 [2 favorites]

Looks like whatever was happening with Google searches for Twitter stuff, it seems to be resolved, at least from a couple of quick searches I did now. Did Twitter pay its Google bills? Did Twitter's firehose get broken and then fixed? Who knows?

I thought the reason Google was cutting back was that the Twitter search results are now useless to anyone not logged into Twitter. That's a big change.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 4:42 PM on July 4, 2023 [3 favorites]

Tweetdeck is about to go for pay only.

This eventuality and taking away the classic tweetdeck interface make my migration to mastodon much smoother because the new tweetdeck interface really feels like mastodon. I don't particularly like either but if I am going to dislike the interface I can do it on the less Trump/Elon/Nazi social media space.
posted by srboisvert at 6:19 PM on July 4, 2023 [2 favorites]

omg they’re officially going with “we instituted rate limits with zero notice to catch the bots.”

Any advance notice on these actions would have allowed bad actors to alter their behavior to evade detection.

I think Musk wrote this himself. Or maybe Saks did. Either way it’s like reading a Trump press release it’s so delusional.
posted by Room 101 at 7:04 PM on July 4, 2023 [13 favorites]

Not sure if it's a horrific new development, or I've only just noticed an example, but it appears blue check people can now use bold in their tweets. The user I've found doing it is making every tweet (including replies on other peoples' threads) entirely bold.
posted by Buntix at 3:58 AM on July 5, 2023 [4 favorites]

[...] it appears blue check people can now use bold in their tweets. The user I've found doing it is making every tweet (including replies on other peoples' threads) entirely bold.

SHOUTING IS SHORTHAND FOR COOL!
posted by Clever User Name at 5:05 AM on July 5, 2023 [10 favorites]

Give them colors.
posted by Artw at 6:31 AM on July 5, 2023 [4 favorites]

Colors, bold/italic/underline, more font choices, just go full "email forwards from Grandma" with it. It would suit the vibe of what Musk wants to turn the place into better.
posted by jason_steakums at 7:58 AM on July 5, 2023 [14 favorites]

RIP the blink tag
posted by achrise at 8:01 AM on July 5, 2023 [6 favorites]

MARQUEE
posted by nobody at 8:09 AM on July 5, 2023 [5 favorites]

EXACTLY the THING TO "TRIGER"😭😭 ALL YOU WOKE "SNOWFLAKE'S"❄️🤣🤣🤣
posted by hangashore at 8:46 AM on July 5, 2023 [9 favorites]

RIP the blink tag

That is not dead which can eternal lie...

https://www.w3docs.com/snippets/css/how-to-create-a-blinking-effect-with-css3-animations.html
posted by Buntix at 8:47 AM on July 5, 2023 [2 favorites]

Ashley Belanger, Ars Technica: Twitter refuses to pay for arbitration it forced on ex-employees.
posted by mbrubeck at 10:19 AM on July 5, 2023 [2 favorites]

TechCrunch: Twitter silently removes login requirement for viewing tweets

🙃
posted by donatella at 10:30 AM on July 5, 2023 [3 favorites]

That honestly feels like they already broke the thing and now they're trying to unbreak it. I'm very curious to see what happens from here, but twitter has been abandoned by anyone who was using it to broadcast information, like fire agencies in my area announced they did 2 days ago. It's losing utility so quickly it will never be rebuilt.
posted by hippybear at 10:33 AM on July 5, 2023 [1 favorite]

Links to individual tweets are working without login for me but not links to whole Twitter accounts or the generic public timeline at twitter.com itself.
posted by Nelson at 10:50 AM on July 5, 2023 [3 favorites]

So they did remove the login to view a specific tweet, but not its replies or the timeline of the user who tweeted it. Which is the sole way ads were served to people without an account. But it makes embeds work I suppose.
posted by Room 101 at 10:51 AM on July 5, 2023

Only mostly useless.
posted by Artw at 11:01 AM on July 5, 2023

Twitter not suited for emergency communications, Dutch say after storm
posted by Artw at 11:50 AM on July 5, 2023 [4 favorites]

SkyBridge is a magical server that translates Mastodon requests into Bluesky ones, allowing you to unlock the power of incredible Mastodon apps like Ivory and use them on the Bluesky network.
posted by Artw at 11:51 AM on July 5, 2023 [1 favorite]

Link to a tweet (don't want people to get rate limited):

Japan's Meteorological Agency uses Twitter to share severe weather and flood warnings. NTV noted today that Elon Musk's decision to place limits on the number of tweets users can read meant that many people could not see important warnings.
posted by LostInUbe at 2:08 PM on July 5, 2023 [3 favorites]

Grim tidings - the TERFS have landed on Bluesky.
posted by Artw at 2:38 PM on July 5, 2023 [2 favorites]

Eugen Rochko: What to know about Threads
posted by Artw at 5:15 PM on July 5, 2023 [3 favorites]

Does anybody have an invite to BlueSky they’d like to send my way?
posted by computech_apolloniajames at 6:32 PM on July 5, 2023

I've been thinking for a while about how Elon was bankrolled by the rich and right-wingers exactly because progressives/leftys were so successful with Twitter threatening to eat into the rich, and right-wingers were abjectly sucktastic at organizing or achieving any kind of critical mass for political or social change. Thus, Twitter had to die, and Elon is the perfect useful idiot to play bull in a china shop about it. They don't care how it dies, just as long as the organizing power is neutralized. Meanwhile Elon gets to generate as much attention as he can muster, being that he doesn't have any real friends, talk about himself, troll people, and drag everything down without recourse or consequence. That's the true value of installing Elon at Twitter: it's pure folly for him. His reputation can scarcely get any worse.

I don't think the right/rich will get any better at online organizing in the absence of Left-Twitter any more than the Proud Boys were (and for similar ends), but they already have churches in which to organize.

(Everything2 is still alive, and doing much better than kuro5hin! I kind of think, as an idiosyncratic, general-use wiki-like object with voting and a remaining community of thougtful diehards, its hour may have returned.)

Everything's coming up Milhouse!
posted by rhizome at 12:32 AM on July 6, 2023 [4 favorites]

Eugen Rochko: What to know about Threads

The rate at which Threads has been taking off is pretty spectacular, all the brands and organisations are showing up, along with celebs and other big names.

@edballs has "Ed Balls"'d

It even seems entirely likely it's going to be close to hitting 10% of Twitters active monthly users (450m) before the day's out.
posted by Buntix at 3:51 AM on July 6, 2023

From the article above on Threads: It will not be available in the EU and will not support federation at launch.

Apparently because it's a privacy nightmare.
posted by UN at 4:45 AM on July 6, 2023 [4 favorites]

Seriously though who names their radioactive social network site after a film like that?
posted by polytope subirb enby-of-piano-dice at 5:09 AM on July 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

Threads is basically unusable as a Twitter alternative. There are no has tags or topics. Discovering people to follow is impossible.
posted by interogative mood at 5:59 AM on July 6, 2023

@[e-mail]: threads is like when you intro one friend group to another friend group and you’re like “oh fuck actually maybe this was a bad idea”
posted by Artw at 7:35 AM on July 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

It seems like the main thing Threads has going for it is the ability to auto-follow everyone you follow on Instagram. So if you are a heavy Instagram user and other people in your network are also trying out Threads, the discovery problem is solved. If you don't use Insta or don't know enough people there to pre-populate your Threads network, then it’s a lot harder to find a reason to use it. (I’m in the latter camp.)
posted by mbrubeck at 8:38 AM on July 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

It seems like the main thing Threads has going for it is the ability to auto-follow everyone you follow on Instagram.

Also that there are 2.35 billion monthly active users on Instagram compared to the 450 million on Twitter. Anecdotally at least, it seemed to me that initially there were quite a lot of photographers and influencer types turning up who weren't on Twitter, or any similar short form social network. So for them it could be more an Instagram extension rather than a Twitter replacement.
posted by Buntix at 11:06 AM on July 6, 2023

There's now a thread (ha) for discussion of Threads.
posted by Epixonti at 11:55 AM on July 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

Twitter now call for genocide in France , if you needed more reason to leave.
posted by Artw at 7:41 AM on July 7, 2023

I assume Artw is referring to how "France has Fallen" was trending as a hashtag a few days ago. It is a fascist expression, one used to collect a lot of hate speech. There's a lot of those kinds of trends and discussions on Twitter now since they effectively stopped moderating and Musk invited in a bunch of very bad people. About once a day there's some trending hashtag that's about as bad.
posted by Nelson at 8:31 AM on July 7, 2023 [2 favorites]

How Twitter lost its place as the global town square
posted by Artw at 10:13 AM on July 7, 2023 [4 favorites]

That's interesting, although it also has a 34-year-old calling himself a boomer. Maybe it's a colloquial expansion of the term?
posted by JHarris at 1:24 PM on July 7, 2023

a 34-year-old calling himself a boomer. Maybe it's a colloquial expansion of the term?

Yeah a lotta people just use "boomer" to mean "someone who's old", even if the person is genx or younger. Sorta like how one doesn't need to actually have grandchildren to be called grandpa.
posted by aubilenon at 3:59 PM on July 7, 2023 [4 favorites]

Twitter Blue accounts fuel Ukraine War misinformation
posted by Artw at 3:34 PM on July 9, 2023 [2 favorites]

It used to be fairly difficult to get your tweets promoted and featured. Now you just need to pay $8/month. Probably saves a lot of time and money for the Russian propaganda outfits.
posted by Nelson at 4:33 PM on July 9, 2023 [1 favorite]

It used to be fairly difficult to get your tweets promoted and featured. Now you just need to pay $8/month. Probably saves a lot of time and money for the Russian propaganda outfits.

That and the algorithm. It was created to deal with downrating and removing dodgy content (misinformation and assorted fash) when there were quite a lot of people to feed it with info on what was dodgy. A _lot_ of those who would do so on the left have left. The weightings on the algorithm have been adjusted (by Musk) to be more fash friendly possibly without taking into account it was predicated on historic values that no longer make sense, so there's sort of an exponential descent going on.

So it's getting to be all fash all the time (and those who like fighting them).
posted by Buntix at 12:41 PM on July 10, 2023

Hey, what's the Twitter situation like currently? Are posts still massively blocked or has the situation eased and seem to be getting better?
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 6:33 AM on July 11, 2023

You can now view individual tweets without login but you don’t see replies. Nitter is back online. Cloudflair says twitters traffic has declined significantly. Twitter has dropped out of the top ten social media apps on the Apple App Store. Elon Musk called Mark Zuckerberg a Cuck and then proposed an actual dick measuring contest. Apparently the only way Elon Musk can give a sick burn is if you buy one of his cars.
posted by interogative mood at 6:51 AM on July 11, 2023 [7 favorites]

Twitter's API keeps breaking, even for developers paying $42,000.
posted by Nelson at 8:09 AM on July 11, 2023 [4 favorites]

Blaseball is gone now, but maybe we can still kill gods by ignoring all their social media sites.
posted by JHarris at 11:07 AM on July 11, 2023 [4 favorites]

In reality lapping satire and irony once again, we have Tesla investors investigating if company resources were misused to build Musk a glass house.

Can't make this shit up, not enough drugs in the world.
posted by NoxAeternum at 1:21 PM on July 11, 2023 [5 favorites]

A long time ago, back in January 2023 Twitter rolled out an updated web font (TwitterChirp) to make it easier to differentiate characters that are typically very similar, such as capital I and lowercase L, and zero.
Intended to make it easier to differentiate real from fake accounts.
That has now disappeared, presumably to save on the bandwidth cost.
posted by Lanark at 4:31 AM on July 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

I'm still seeing TwitterChirp. (Chrome, Windows, Twitter web while logged in). Given how many things are randomly breaking at Twitter every day I'd assume it was a system failure.

Yesterday I couldn't load timelines at all for about 15 minutes. Notifications have been inconsistent for months. Also the site has greatly degraded functionality if you're not logged in, although that last breakage is deliberate.
posted by Nelson at 7:39 AM on July 13, 2023 [2 favorites]

New lawsuit: Twitter owes ex-employees $500m in severance, lawsuit claims

Courtney McMillian, who oversaw Twitter’s employee benefits programs as its “head of total rewards” before she was laid off in January, filed the proposed class action in San Francisco federal court.

I love they got Musk's first head of benefits named in the class action lawsuit. I bet she knows a whole lot of interesting things to share with the court.
posted by Nelson at 7:40 AM on July 13, 2023 [2 favorites]

So now Elon's ad revnue sharing system has started paying out to verified "content creators."

Mmm..would you like to join the ranks of the Krassenstein brothers and a writer from the Babylon Bee and get paid? Give us eight dollars and your soul first!
posted by LostInUbe at 3:59 PM on July 13, 2023 [2 favorites]

Elon Musk sues four unknown individuals for scraping Twitter’s data
posted by Artw at 4:37 PM on July 13, 2023 [3 favorites]

Right-wing misinformers and bad actors have already earned tens of thousands of dollars under Twitter’s new ad revenue sharing program
posted by Artw at 5:20 PM on July 13, 2023 [5 favorites]

Twitter is trying to weasel out of FTC oversight.
posted by mbrubeck at 5:30 PM on July 13, 2023 [5 favorites]

The platform is paying high profile creators, including Andrew Tate, thousands of dollars for posting to the app
posted by Artw at 6:53 PM on July 13, 2023 [2 favorites]

That last article about the content payments is great. When I read the first announcement I was like "huh, Twitter is doing something right". But that WaPo article makes it sound like they picked some of the most deplorable people and then made some arbitrary payments to them.

Former Twitter staffers who worked on creator-focused products expressed skepticism over the rollout, with several calling it a PR stunt. One former Twitter executive who worked on creator partnerships and who asked to remain unnamed to avoid retaliation, said that, “any kind of content monetization we’ve done in the past was based on a revenue model. This just feels pulled out of thin air for a specific subset of creators that he wanted to placate.”

The former Twitter executive also cast doubt on Twitter’s revamped metrics, including impressions. “The numbers are totally and completely bogus,” she said. “It’s all completely made up. It really feels like they’re arbitrarily writing checks to people they like, which is not a sustainable creator strategy.”

posted by Nelson at 7:04 AM on July 14, 2023 [4 favorites]

And lots of people who thought they were people they like and didn't get checks are mad. (coughcatturdcough)
posted by Etrigan at 7:16 AM on July 14, 2023 [2 favorites]

So Musk with the full cooperation and participation of Twitter is just straight up funding rapists and human trafficking?

I did not have that on my bingo card.
posted by Mitheral at 7:31 AM on July 14, 2023 [5 favorites]

Advertisers must pull their ads immediately otherwise they are funding hate speech and sex trafficking.
posted by interogative mood at 7:48 AM on July 14, 2023 [2 favorites]

> So Musk with the full cooperation and participation of Twitter is just straight up funding rapists and human trafficking?


And fascists! Their persecution by the Ancien Régime was one of the two or three reasons Ol' Muskey bought twitter.
posted by sebastienbailard at 7:50 AM on July 14, 2023

And lots of people who thought they were people they like and didn't get checks are mad. (coughcatturdcough)

Looks a lot like he’s pissy nobody from Twitter personally set him up a stripe account.
posted by Artw at 7:56 AM on July 14, 2023

The "Make Money FAST on TWITTER!!!" ecosystem must be gearing up right now.
posted by clawsoon at 8:35 AM on July 14, 2023 [2 favorites]

You can make money being a right wing grifter without even selling brain pills or crypto, it’s the dream.
posted by Artw at 8:40 AM on July 14, 2023 [1 favorite]

So Musk with the full cooperation and participation of Twitter is just straight up funding rapists and human trafficking?
I did not have that on my bingo card.

That's the free space.
posted by MrBadExample at 9:29 AM on July 14, 2023 [4 favorites]

I would just assume it’s so built in it’s actually the what the grid lines say if you zoom in enough.
posted by Artw at 9:31 AM on July 14, 2023 [1 favorite]

Musk: "It's not exactly per impression. What matters is how many ads were shown to other verified users.

Only verified users count, as it is otherwise trivial to game the system with bots."

So it's self selecting for the RW grifters and rage-farmers that other blue checks are drawn to.
posted by Buntix at 10:16 AM on July 14, 2023 [3 favorites]

Which is funny because it means that even amongst the blue checks, no one really likes catturd.
posted by LostInUbe at 7:04 PM on July 14, 2023 [2 favorites]

Elon’s tweeted on July 15th 2023 at 12:08am

We’re still negative cash flow, due to a 50% drop in advertising revenue plus heavy debt load. Need to reach positive cash flow before we have the luxury of anything else.

Twitter revenues in 2022 were $4.4 billion.
posted by interogative mood at 9:11 AM on July 15, 2023 [3 favorites]

Might as well just replace install a filter that changes all instances of “Elon Musk” to “guy in hot-dog costume” at this point.
posted by Etrigan at 11:29 AM on July 15, 2023 [4 favorites]

Elon Musk’s Twitter Is Becoming a Sewer of Disinformation - Changes to the platform have systematically amplified authoritarian state propaganda.
posted by Artw at 11:58 AM on July 15, 2023 [6 favorites]

It'll be interesting to see what exactly it'll take to get the left-leaning people still there to abandon it. I sometimes flip through and people I'm surprised at are still tweeting regularly.

I think it has to do with, as revealed in the algorithm source code reveal, how Twitter puts you either into a Democrat or a Republican box (even, it seems, if you're not in the US, those are the terms used in the source) and goes out of its way not to show you stuff from the other side by deboosting it. So there can effectively be two Twitters, depending on where you are on the left/right spectrum. If you search for it, or someone quotes it, you can see things in the Other Twitter, but otherwise you'll be left largely ignorant of it. However, note because of the heavy ideological component of Musk's actions, most of the people with Twitter Blue are right-wingers, so they're the ones getting payouts generally.

It's not sustainable, of course. Those users getting $10,000 payments have certainly not each provided Twitter $10,000 of value, especially if their tweets are only being shown to, at most, half of their userbase.
posted by JHarris at 12:11 PM on July 16, 2023

It'll be interesting to see what exactly it'll take to get the left-leaning people still there to abandon it.

There is absolutely nothing Twitter could do to shift anyone hanging on their on ethical grounds, there will always be an excuse. it needs to either collapse financially or fail technologically, both of which it is fortunately well on track to doing.
posted by Artw at 1:28 PM on July 16, 2023 [3 favorites]

A minor data-point: I was still on twitter (mostly in the hope of it someday helping my nascent writing career) but Musk's Homophobia, Transphobia, Racism, and Sexism, as well as his platforming of others' Homophobia, Transphobia, Racism and Sexism, is directly, physically harming people right now, and I couldn't continue to be a part of it. I deleted all the tweets from my 16 year-old account, set up a notice redirecting people to my mastodon account, and locked it.
posted by signal at 6:19 PM on July 16, 2023 [4 favorites]

Excellent cat pictures, BTW.
posted by Artw at 8:06 PM on July 16, 2023 [2 favorites]

Thank you!
posted by signal at 8:13 PM on July 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

I really think Metafilter should consider banning links to twitter now that the site is actively sending the money it gets from page views to Andrew Tate. I'm not going to link to Twitter any more personal and I encourage others to do the same. If you search for the content on Mastodon or elsewhere on social media you will often find it.
posted by interogative mood at 3:41 PM on July 17, 2023 [9 favorites]

Zelenskyy is still on it.

Musk will probably shadowban him at some point, though.
posted by sebastienbailard at 4:56 PM on July 17, 2023

catturd not mad at all
posted by Artw at 7:57 AM on July 18, 2023 [3 favorites]

So, remember that lawsuit by Tesla investors over Musk's rather...generous compensation deal?

Guess who just settled for nearly three quarters of a billion dollars?
posted by NoxAeternum at 12:25 PM on July 18, 2023

Not as big as the Fox payout. They got stiffed.
posted by flabdablet at 1:11 PM on July 18, 2023

catturd not mad at all

There's a quote from a colleague on a whiteboard at work: "This salt is salty!"

It applies.
posted by clawsoon at 1:44 PM on July 18, 2023 [3 favorites]

Guess who just settled for nearly three quarters of a billion dollars?

I wonder if anybody has ever believed the "no wrongdoing" part of "admits no wrongdoing" in settlements like that.
posted by clawsoon at 1:51 PM on July 18, 2023 [2 favorites]

Admits no wrongdoing, but implies three quarters of a billion dollars of wrongdoing at current market rates
posted by jason_steakums at 1:55 PM on July 18, 2023 [5 favorites]

Admits no wrongdoing, but implies three quarters of a billion dollars of wrongdoing at current market rates

I wonder how many beehives that translates into in Bechbretha.
posted by clawsoon at 2:16 PM on July 18, 2023 [2 favorites]

Elon Sues The Lawyers That Forced Him to Buy Twitter
posted by clawsoon at 2:23 PM on July 18, 2023 [1 favorite]

LegalEagle: "This is going to be one of those cases that's really fun to watch, because at the end of this case, at least one of these parties is going to lose."

Heh.
posted by flabdablet at 12:24 AM on July 19, 2023 [6 favorites]

Twitter’s Surge in Harmful Content a Barrier to Advertiser Return (paywall bypass).

Elon Musk's Twitter acquisition, and the series of content policy changes that ensued, has led to a dramatic spike in hateful, violent and inaccurate posts on the platform, according to researchers.

Twitter responded with the longest marketing communication they've issued in nine months, this megatweet. Hilariously, this message is itself riddled with errors. The post includes the text "<insert link>". It also contains bizarre formatting; random letters are in bold as if the writer were trying to convey a secret message. These errors have persisted for hours despite being pointed out. Either megatweets are completely broken or they just don't care.
posted by Nelson at 11:41 AM on July 19, 2023 [3 favorites]

It also contains bizarre formatting; random letters are in bold as if the writer were trying to convey a secret message.

Srsly. If that's not a "help me!" message, I dunno what is.
posted by clawsoon at 5:04 PM on July 19, 2023 [1 favorite]

I like how everything is 99%!
Doesn't look like made up numbers. Nope.
posted by signal at 5:15 PM on July 19, 2023 [1 favorite]

Twitter will “soon” implement daily limits on the number of direct messages unverified accounts will be able to send in “an effort to reduce spam”
posted by Artw at 4:27 PM on July 21, 2023 [1 favorite]

Or else, prioritize the spam that people who pay them can send.
posted by JHarris at 5:51 PM on July 21, 2023 [1 favorite]

Twitter will “soon” implement daily limits on the number of direct messages unverified accounts will be able to send in “an effort to reduce spam”

And by "soon" they mean "now".
posted by NoxAeternum at 8:05 PM on July 21, 2023 [1 favorite]

So where are we all supposed to go now? - It’s the end of a social era on the web. That’s probably a good thing. But I already miss the places that felt like everyone was there.
posted by Artw at 11:00 AM on July 22, 2023 [2 favorites]

At least we're in a still extant community here, with people who are (mostly) friendly to each other!
posted by JHarris at 5:15 PM on July 22, 2023 [2 favorites]

Oh also, now you can only send DMs to people who you follow, unless they change the default, or you are "Verified." It's so self-defeating, it's like they're trying to make it so the only people who can talk privately with each other are paid members, which isn't true everywhere else.
posted by JHarris at 5:17 PM on July 22, 2023

From the link that Artw posted:

For all its mess, the social networking era did a uniquely good job of just putting people together in a single place. You didn’t have to pick a server or declare your interests ahead of time; you just showed up, set a password, and got to work. Because everyone was together, these platforms were able to make it trivially easy to find people you like and content that interests you. (The platforms) were able to learn about you over time, and proactively show you those people and that content before you even had to ask.

This was never my experience. The only time I've ever felt the algorithm got me was instagram for about a year showing me ads that I clicked on every now and then.
posted by signal at 7:37 PM on July 22, 2023 [2 favorites]

Fox Business reports that Musk plans to drop the Twitter logo and name, renaming the service "X," a change that could go live as soon as he finds a good logo.
posted by JHarris at 2:13 AM on July 23, 2023

I have a logo idea, here:

X
posted by UN at 2:29 AM on July 23, 2023 [7 favorites]

You can just hear the business school profs sighing as they shake their heads and update their PowerPoint slides.
posted by sebastienbailard at 2:39 AM on July 23, 2023 [8 favorites]

very helpful, good reminder not to tap the twitter icon on your phone's homescreen
posted by polytope subirb enby-of-piano-dice at 3:44 AM on July 23, 2023 [3 favorites]

Q = q-anon conspiracies for everyone
Z = Putin's Ruzzia propaganda for tankies
X = right-wing techbro disinfotainment

Makes sense.
posted by UN at 5:17 AM on July 23, 2023 [2 favorites]

Fox Business reports that Musk plans to drop the Twitter logo and name, renaming the service "X," a change that could go live as soon as he finds a good logo.

Is this the part where the curtain is thrown back and we find out he's not a wizard but a boring ol' classic 80's coked-up businessman? Because that would pretty neatly explain a whole lot about this entire saga. This latest decision just screams cocaine in a way that probably qualifies as probable cause.
posted by jason_steakums at 5:22 AM on July 23, 2023 [4 favorites]

Some good potential logos here.
posted by Artw at 6:40 AM on July 23, 2023 [2 favorites]

Also am hoping this plan involves breaking all legacy URLs.
posted by Artw at 6:42 AM on July 23, 2023 [4 favorites]

Perhaps Musk can turn the ends of every X 90 degrees, make a sort of broken X. It'd be very on-brand for the new Reich.
posted by Nelson at 6:57 AM on July 23, 2023

I recommend $8chan as a better name.
posted by Pyrogenesis at 7:20 AM on July 23, 2023 [5 favorites]

Q = q-anon conspiracies for everyone
Z = Putin's Ruzzia propaganda for tankies
X = right-wing techbro disinfotainment

Makes sense.

So you're saying this was a conspiracy of high-scoring Scrabble letters all along?

I fear to think what J will bring us.
posted by clawsoon at 7:55 AM on July 23, 2023 [3 favorites]

Does it make me a bad person that I'm sitting here hoping that in the middle of all this he's forgotten to cure his boneitis?
posted by tigrrrlily at 8:13 AM on July 23, 2023

When I first heard the X news it was in a thread on kbin.social (or maybe it was Lemmy), and someone mentioned in it that Musk had also reputedly been drinking, so I was kind of hoping it'd just go away. But maybe not. It's seeming more and more that Musk is actively trying to kill Twitter, and it's just inertia that's keeping it going.
posted by JHarris at 9:14 AM on July 23, 2023 [1 favorite]

early morning hollering of "the x, where's my x, that's the new logo" at the one person still working in branding leads to a new logotype that's just the cover of Grimes' "Art Angels"
posted by cortex at 9:21 AM on July 23, 2023 [2 favorites]

Musk has moved from denial and anger stages of grief to bargaining. If he can just rebrand it, people will see the genius of his “everything app” vision, and they’ll all go back to considering him a savvy, forward-thinking, totally-not-reactionary-divorced-dad business leader and light-of-the-world savior.

I expect to see him get increasingly chummy with authoritarian-leaning world governments as a strategy for continued growth and to stabilize cash flow through…alternative means. The only alternative at this point would seem to be bankruptcy and I don’t think that would benefit him—not even in some kind of self-deluding way.

Has anyone run the numbers on how long Twitter can survive without positive cash flow or more injection of personal funds?
posted by Room 101 at 9:59 AM on July 23, 2023

Elon Musk is suddenly inspired to change the Twitter name to X.
posted by SPrintF at 10:43 AM on July 23, 2023

On top of everything else I just love how search engine unfriendly a name that is
posted by jason_steakums at 11:12 AM on July 23, 2023 [4 favorites]

A very slight concession: Meta is only slightly less awful.
posted by Artw at 11:27 AM on July 23, 2023 [1 favorite]

Has anyone run the numbers on how long Twitter can survive without positive cash flow or more injection of personal funds?

It wouldn’t need to be personal funds. He can raise more funds from new or existing outside investors (like Cathie Wood, or the Saudis) if he’s willing to lower the valuation sufficiently, as well as dilute his own stake (and the other existing investors). Or he could even take the company public again and probably sell shares at inflated prices to the same WallStreetBets crowd who bid Tesla up to sky-high P/E ratios.
posted by mbrubeck at 11:32 AM on July 23, 2023

I think that the Wall Street crowd would ask a lot more questions now, because Musk is no longer a golden God whose genius is going to be automatically assumed. I don't think he can take the company public. His best bet is probably to get money from various bad actors in exchange for access to users' attention and data.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 11:43 AM on July 23, 2023

Note that I said "WallStreetBets" (the reddit forum where retail investors hype meme stocks), not "Wall Street" (which usually refers to professional investors at banks and hedge funds).
posted by mbrubeck at 11:46 AM on July 23, 2023

Ah, I see.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 11:47 AM on July 23, 2023

Has anyone run the numbers on how long Twitter can survive without positive cash flow or more injection of personal funds?

No one really knows because it's now a private company. He did recently tweet to a random person that "We’re still negative cash flow, due to ~50% drop in advertising revenue plus heavy debt load."

Estimates are the payments on the leveraged buyout financing are $1.2B/year, a debt load 100% of Musk's own making. That's on top of whatever debt Twitter already has, plus all the obligations like paying severance to the thousands of former employees currently suing for it.

My assumption is Musk's plan is to drive Twitter into bankruptcy as soon as he can so that he can weasel out of paying a lot of debts and restructure the company entirely. Which will be a long and ugly court-mediated process.
posted by Nelson at 12:18 PM on July 23, 2023 [1 favorite]

Would Musk even have any equity or control at twitter after a bankruptcy? As I understand it a lot of his Twitter debt is backed by his Tesla and SpaceX shares.
posted by interogative mood at 12:56 PM on July 23, 2023

My assumption is Musk's plan is to drive Twitter into bankruptcy as soon as he can so that he can weasel out of paying a lot of debts and restructure the company entirely. Which will be a long and ugly court-mediated process.

Beats working for a living I guess.

Would Musk even have any equity or control at twitter after a bankruptcy?

He wouldn't have to care unless his ego got in the way (...). His work there will be complete and he will still have more money than he can ever spend. On to the next folly.
posted by rhizome at 2:55 PM on July 23, 2023

It's how business is these days. Huge companies kind of can't just fail any more unless someone really wrongheaded is put in charge, like happened with Sears. Rebrand Twitter to X? People will still use it. People you wouldn't expect will still use it.

My assumption is Musk's plan is to drive Twitter into bankruptcy as soon as he can so that he can weasel out of paying a lot of debts and restructure the company entirely. Which will be a long and ugly court-mediated process.

This has got to be it. It's feeling a lot like he's brainstormed ways to make the company fail. Even Hanlon's Razor ("Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.") can only be taken so far. But maybe it's got to look like he's plausibly tried to turn the company around himself, and he figured that these actions will fool a bankruptcy judge?
posted by JHarris at 3:15 PM on July 23, 2023

I see. Is it okay then to just purposely tank the company in order to get out of paying debts and restructure? Is there a danger in doing that?
posted by JHarris at 3:54 PM on July 23, 2023 [1 favorite]

Elon Musk is suddenly inspired to change the Twitter name to X.

Other candidate names for the-company-formerly-known-as-Twitter included Academ or Constell Holdings, considering the recent gap in the PMC market.
posted by sebastienbailard at 6:23 PM on July 23, 2023

Rock 'em Sock 'em, thank you. That was informative and interesting! I flagged it as fantastic!
posted by JHarris at 9:59 PM on July 23, 2023

@Syn0nymph@twi^D^D^Dx.com has pointed out that the new logo is just the Unicode character “𝕏” (U+1D54F)

http://www.unicode-symbol.com/u/1D54F.html

Not sure what font ex-twitter are using, but the are images around that look identical to the new logo.

It seems this also means he can't trademark it.
posted by Buntix at 6:24 AM on July 24, 2023 [1 favorite]

Think the font may be STIXMathJax_DoubleStruck; at least based on entering

$$ \Huge \mathbb{X} $$

into a jupyter notebook markdown entry bringing up the new logo version.
posted by Buntix at 6:49 AM on July 24, 2023

Can Exene and her band mates put a stop to this “X” nonsense?
posted by TedW at 12:34 PM on July 24, 2023 [1 favorite]