Elon Musk: Always A Douche

[crazy canuck]

Preservation letters (which this is) have become a routine litigation tactic.  It puts the party receiving the letter to a considerable expense and administrative burden.

[FunkMonk]

Elon threatening to sue a rival platform because he drove away his own customers to it is immense bozo energy.

[FunkMonk]

Threads isn't even available on the Web?  Seriously? 

Yeah but no one really cares about that tbh. It's 2023, everyone uses their phone for this stuff.

The biggest deal breaker is you can't curate your own feed via lists, at least not yet. You also can't view your feed chronologically.

These are supposedly in the works but who knows if that is true or not.

Anyway, I've actually been using it and after a couple days of liking and following people who I would normally read on Twitter, Threads' algorithm has mainly worked out the kind of stuff I use social media for. It's okay so far.

[crazy canuck]

Elon threatening to sue a rival platform because he drove away his own customers to it is immense bozo energy.

Yes and it might be the only hope he has to recoup at least a part of the investment he made. 

[DGuller]

Yeah but no one really cares about that tbh. It's 2023, everyone uses their phone for this stuff.

Not everyone, I don't.

[Sheilbh]

How dare you poach staff I fired en masse!

[OttoVonBismarck]

Yeah but no one really cares about that tbh. It's 2023, everyone uses their phone for this stuff.

Not everyone, I don't.

Sir you're so far out of the demographic the social media titans are searching for you might as well be living on Easter Island.

[OttoVonBismarck]

Threads isn't even available on the Web?  Seriously? 

Yeah but no one really cares about that tbh. It's 2023, everyone uses their phone for this stuff.

The biggest deal breaker is you can't curate your own feed via lists, at least not yet. You also can't view your feed chronologically.

These are supposedly in the works but who knows if that is true or not.

Anyway, I've actually been using it and after a couple days of liking and following people who I would normally read on Twitter, Threads' algorithm has mainly worked out the kind of stuff I use social media for. It's okay so far.

My guess is they are genuinely working on it--but I also think they were happy to launch without it "by design." They didn't want new users opening an empty feed, so they wanted to have a big faucet running of "popular" posters so people felt they had something to engage with, find new accounts to follow etc.

My guess is they may even have the feed filtering stuff already ready to go and are waiting for a certain threshold of user mass before turning it on.

[Syt]

I assume Elon's lawyers would prefer he hadn't tweeted this last year?

[Syt]

It is kind of funny because there is little doubt in my mind Facebook has done more to allow the spread of virulent extremist ideologies on the right than any other platform. Not necessarily because they have the worst moderation (although their moderation was and has been pretty terrible), but I think mostly because Facebook is just so huge--and its user base in terms of very active users tilts much older than other social platforms so it has a lot of older white folks on it, who make up most of those embracing these sort of ideologies.

Overcoming the inertia of leaving an established platform with an established user base is a challenge. I'm not following Twitch much anymore, but I keep seeing news that they're making things worse for streamers, but there's no *real* alternative to them (maybe YouTube, but I think they're still nowhere near Twitch's market share for live gaming streams?), and the ... (trying to word this neutral) ... "changes" at Twitter has a lot of people ready to jump ship if there's an option that provides reasonable continuity for the users.

I guess this comic sums it up.

[Josquius]

Keep thinking I should sign up there just to secure a user name...but facebook.

[Sheilbh]

Yeah.

Purely from a data and ethics perspective I think Facebook are vastly worse than Twitter. Though obvs I still use WhatsApp and Instagram.

I see lots of people pointing out that Insta and Twitter people are different and I think there is something to that. I always remember a Buzzfeed article on it about politicians (back from when Ed Miliband was leader) that basically on 90% of social media (especially Twitter) literally anything a politician said would be met with a torrent of abuse in the replies and quotes - the exception was Insta where the likes rolled in and people who left comments were basically being positive and nice

[OttoVonBismarck]

I largely think Twitter's goose is cooked.

Mind you Jack Dorsey Twitter was not really profitable. Musk Twitter is definitely going to be a lower userbase version of the platform--lots of people have already left, Musk won't share numbers but insiders have leaked some of it, and it is unlikely it is going to grow again. Remember, Dorsey Twitter was no longer really growing much either, its growth curve had long been stagnant.

I think the "style" of Twitter has more limited appeal to a lot of people than the mega platforms, always had.

Threads feels a lot more like Instagram--fun celeb posts, sports, local news. Twitter has always been rough and political, and note that Instagram has like 2.5x the users of Twitter, the simple reality is more people are looking for a simple fun experience than they "whatever" Twitter is.

When I see a lot of my local news outlets, literally every national media outlet, all the big sports outlets--including many of the major sports media figures, major pop stars, major celeb influencers, major athletes, etc on Threads day 1 and Threads is already at 60m--the platform has all the stuff it needs right now to be a viable alternative to Twitter.

[OttoVonBismarck]

Beyond Musk's typical mismanagement, his current stuff at Twitter is actually breaking the core "network effect" of Twitter as a platform. It is making it harder for Twitter users to communicate with each other, harder for certain institutional uses of Twitter (which drive overall Twitter engagement) and it has also eviscerated a traditional strength of Twitter--being a service one can use to "link" information to people off platform. This has always been a good thing for Twitter because it gets more eyeballs on their feed.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jul/07/twitter-national-weather-service-safety

New Twitter rules restrict US weather service, raising safety fears

Limits on number of tweets users can see have prevented National Weather Service from receiving key reports

Twitter's new volume limits on viewing posts suddenly left several National Weather Service (NWS) offices across the US unable to receive tweets from storm spotters who help with tracking extreme weather, including during storms this week – prompting safety warnings.

NWS Boulder in Colorado announced on 4 July that due to Twitter's limits, implemented as part of Elon Musk's abrupt changes to the platform's usability late last month, "we are unable to access most tweets at this time. Send reports to our other social media accounts or direct through our email/phone lines." The story was first reported by the Denver Post.

"If you are a storm spotter, head to weather.gov/bou/spotters for additional info," the office said, adding shortly afterwards: "While we have found some workarounds to view specific tweets, we are not able to efficiently sift through this during active severe weather events. Thank you for your understanding. Automated watches and warnings will still disseminate as normal, but no other tweets are planned."

The NWS office in Wakefield, Virginia, announced similar impacts, local media reported, saying: "Due to new limits on the number of tweets an account can view per day, we may be unable to see tweeted reports of severe weather and associated damage. Please contact our office directly at 757-899-2415 with any reports."

The Wilmington, North Carolina, office tweeted the same message and directed users to submit their severe weather alerts to a Google Form instead.

In response to a user saying, "Someone said if you access twitter through their website instead of the app that the limits don't apply. I'm assuming it's worth a try," the Wakefield office replied: "Unfortunately, it doesn't matter on our end. We still have significant problems using Twitter on both a mobile device and a PC."

Musk imposed a viewing limit on the majority of users who use the service, restricting unverified accounts to viewing 600 tweets a day. A day later, the limit increased to 1,000.

In a statement to the Guardian on Thursday, the national office of the NWS said: "Twitter's new post-viewing limits serve as a reminder for people to have multiple ways of receiving weather information and alerts. Our use of Twitter is impacted by the new changes. However, Twitter is supplemental to other ways we receive storm reports and disseminate watches and warnings, not an official channel."

The tweets by NWS offices triggered backlash against Musk and Twitter, the platform he took ownership of last year, with some saying the change was potentially life-threatening.

"This is dangerous, @elonmusk. Thousands of people in Colorado depend on information from the National Weather Service in times of severe weather (as is currently happening) to stay safe. There must be another way to fix whatever you deemed to be wrong at Twitter," one TV news producer in Denver wrote.

An Appalachian user wrote: "As a storm chaser I have communicated with federal agencies as well as news companies in both the US and Canada through the years, and Twitter is by far the easiest way to do this. Twitter is a major tool in helping warn the public of dangerous weather conditions and a collapse or severe degradation of the website is going to ultimately end up with somebody being killed."

[Jacob]

It's truly a wonder to behold.