Elon Musk: Always A Douche

[Josquius]

Time for an 80s style joke :

Person 1 : They nuked Sheffield.

Person 2 : Really? How could they tell?


Northern cities were at their nadir round about 1984; I remember passing through Manchester then (a city I didn't know back then) and it really resembled a disused car park.

I went to Manchester just before covid.
It's pretty much the same. Just with more glass. 

[mongers]

Yeah I think that's very deliberate. Nuclear devastation destroying our cities and society: we're already there.

I mean the writer wrote Kes and was a long time collaborator with Loach. Although my favourite Threads trivia is that the director would later go on to direct The Bodyguard

Separately and just on the AI angle Google have just updated their public terms that basically says if you publish anything on the internet that's open, they will use it to train their AI models. They've amended the section that referred to using it for the language models and Google Translate to also include their AI models, Bard and Cloud AI.

There's a technical side and an IP side (and a wider rights side in relation to individuals putting data on social media) - not sure Musk's "solution" will work, but I'm not sure there's not a real issue there.

I wonder what the AIs are 'learning' from Languish?

[Grey Fox]

Killing tweetdeck is a deal breaker. This is how I've always use twitter. I am not learning a new way.  Hopefully Threads will have the same functionality.

[Legbiter]

Time for an 80s style joke :

Person 1 : They nuked Sheffield.

Person 2 : Really? How could they tell?


Northern cities were at their nadir round about 1984; I remember passing through Manchester then (a city I didn't know back then) and it really resembled a disused car park.

Speaking of Threads I only saw it first a few years ago on Youtube of all places. I still have the sex-for-rats barter scene seared into my brain.   

[OttoVonBismarck]

When I briefly looked into Mastodon and saw that there were a whole bunch of different networks, I rolled my eyes and stopped looking further.  How can you build a network without understanding the network effect?

It ends up that really isn't relevant if you're just looking to follow a bunch of news sources. Something like 85% of Mastodon servers are federated with each other, and most of that 15% are all people in instances that are very deliberately curated spaces where their users expect not to be linked with a lot of other instances.

As best I can tell no one involved in the Fediverse (best thought of as a buzz word name for the open source AcitivityPub Protocol) is actively very interested in building a big social network. Mastodon has no shareholders, and no one makes money off of more people coming to the platform, so the sort of incentives a regular network cares about just don't exist for the open source developers or the instance operators. In fact--the opposite may actually be true, right now if you're running a big instance you probably are considering shutting down sign ups, most of the instances actually cost their hobbyist admins out of pocket money to run. This is because all the big instances are just funded by donations, and unfortunately the userbase isn't very generous with donating.

It is honestly better compared to a technology like IRC than a corporate owned "platform" like Facebook or Twitter.

IRC was largely used by enthusiasts, was largely not something that became a major profit driver for anyone, and was essentially just a useful communication protocol for the people who wanted to use it. Due to the nature of IRC it would have been difficult to monetize it, which is why all the people who went on to monetize internet chat deliberately chose to use private chat protocols they controlled.

[Syt]

Well, Threads has launched with huge sign up numbers ... except in the EU because the whole data privacy that has been a headache for Meta previously still needs sorting out.

[OttoVonBismarck]

Hard to say how big Threads gets--the fact that multiple big players are gunning for Twitter users certainly doesn't help Musk with all the other negatives swirling around Twitter.

You can definitely tell Meta is a little more in tune with how social networks work--Threads was clearly designed around the understanding that the celebrity / influencer users who basically create the lion's share of the "content" people consume are extremely valuable, and the "social graph" is very valuable to them. Threads is designed to let those people "port" their social graph over to Threads.

Now on a societal level is it a net good for Zuckerberg to own the next Twitter? No--in fact for various reasons privacy advocates, media supporters etc should be very leery of anything Zuck touches. But most people aren't picking social media based on how they think the platform will affect society. And in truth picking between Musk and Zuck is basically a classic "pick your poison" situation.

I don't fully think Twitter as it existed before Musk ever gets replaced, feels more likely to me that no direct analogue really develops, for a number of reasons. Twitter itself likely is in a decline that won't be reversed, but it has a few hundred million users so the tail end on that decline will be long.

However the financial realities of them owing $1bn/yr in debt payments and losing 50% of their revenue (which was not enough to keep them in the green before they had those debt payments) suggests a reckoning may come sooner or later. Musk has the personal wealth to simply bail Twitter out if he wants, but it is unclear if he wants to do so if it comes to it, he has been fighting pretty hard to avoid paying any of Twitter's bills, which suggests he has some level of fiscal hesitance at just rolling money into the company.

[Barrister]

Hard to say how big Threads gets--the fact that multiple big players are gunning for Twitter users certainly doesn't help Musk with all the other negatives swirling around Twitter.

You can definitely tell Meta is a little more in tune with how social networks work--Threads was clearly designed around the understanding that the celebrity / influencer users who basically create the lion's share of the "content" people consume are extremely valuable, and the "social graph" is very valuable to them. Threads is designed to let those people "port" their social graph over to Threads.

Now on a societal level is it a net good for Zuckerberg to own the next Twitter? No--in fact for various reasons privacy advocates, media supporters etc should be very leery of anything Zuck touches. But most people aren't picking social media based on how they think the platform will affect society. And in truth picking between Musk and Zuck is basically a classic "pick your poison" situation.

I don't fully think Twitter as it existed before Musk ever gets replaced, feels more likely to me that no direct analogue really develops, for a number of reasons. Twitter itself likely is in a decline that won't be reversed, but it has a few hundred million users so the tail end on that decline will be long.

However the financial realities of them owing $1bn/yr in debt payments and losing 50% of their revenue (which was not enough to keep them in the green before they had those debt payments) suggests a reckoning may come sooner or later. Musk has the personal wealth to simply bail Twitter out if he wants, but it is unclear if he wants to do so if it comes to it, he has been fighting pretty hard to avoid paying any of Twitter's bills, which suggests he has some level of fiscal hesitance at just rolling money into the company.

The thing about Twitter is the network effect.  People use Twitter not because it's the best technical platform - they use it because other people they are interested in also use it.

Which is why I won't be using Threads any time soon - I'm a content consumer, not creator, so I'd need to see Threads having just as much content as Twitter.

Musk has the wealth to support Twitter, but not the cashflow.  I doubt very much he's willing to just keep selling Tesla stock in order to roll it into Twitter.

[OttoVonBismarck]

Well that is where Threads is pretty ingenious. Thread is built off of Instagram, which is full of content creators--in fact Instagram is about 2.5x larger than Twitter, and Meta made sure to do a roll out the red carpets move so almost all the major "high profile" (aka blue check) accounts on Instagram already had accounts before Threads even went public.

One of the big things I noticed on Threads is basically every single major news outlet in America and Britain, and all the sports outlets, had presences before it went live. Largely because all of those entities already had Instagram presences and Threads just let them migrate over.

It's a real risk to Twitter as I see it.

Threads has apparently hit 30 million accounts already.

That's pretty scary if you're Twitter, most of these accounts are going to be North American, where Twitter only had around 65 million accounts (back before Musk, when they reported user data.)

[Syt]

[Grey Fox]

Which is why I won't be using Threads any time soon - I'm a content consumer, not creator, so I'd need to see Threads having just as much content as Twitter.

It does look like every content creator is already there tho.

[OttoVonBismarck]

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.

[Syt]

[DGuller]

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

[HVC]

So no one can hire people twitter fired?