Elon Musk

The idea of forcing people to pay for blue checks gets Twitter’s value proposition totally backward.

For Twitter to have value, it needs to provide valid information from legitimate sources. If anyone can pay for the appearance of validity, the site losses all value.

— Max Berger (@maxberger) October 31, 2022

I mean yeah that's kind of what the whole appeal of Twitter was, you could hear from celebrities, athletes, and journalists all at once. like 90% of their users joined because a specific person was on it. maybe that's not the case anymore but still this sounds like a remarkably idiotic idea

I don't understand why somebody wants or needs a blue check unless they're actually famous enough for someone to want to impersonate them

I mean it's a cool status symbol I guess. especially if you're a pretty niche writer/artist/musician or whatever

But isn't having the followers the status symbol? Is it high status to have a blue check and, like, 1000 people following you?

seems easier to get followers if you have the check though

wow lol

so my understanding is at twitter HQ, the folks running things in the “war room” are Musk, David Sacks, Jason Calacanis (VCs/Elon pals) Sriram Krishnan (exTwitter/current a16z), Elon’s legal and finance head guys (Spiro, Birchall) and a fleet of Tesla/BoringCo engineers

— rat king (@MikeIsaac) October 30, 2022

Jason c is a podcast content grifter with a get rich quick intro to angel investing book and literally zero management experience. Krishnan is ex Twitter for a reason.

everyone made fun of jason for pledging his sword to elon but whos in the war room now

First task: Get rid of all the spam!
Second task: Get companies to pay to spam your DMs!

Guys. pic.twitter.com/e3G9m4TSLb

— Mike Masnick (@mmasnick) October 31, 2022

twitter only needs one person to pay $20/month. that's enough to buy four tomato plants. after 6 months that's 100 tomatoes. plant them. 6 more months that's 2500 plants. plant them. 6 months it becomes 62,500 plants. 12 months later that's 39MM tomatoes. sell them for $1 each

— leon (@leyawn) October 31, 2022

lmaooo that's a deep cut

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FgXqR1_WAAIoHbq?format=jpg&name=900x900

interesting

Welp, I just got fired from this bird app ya’ll. It’s been grand.

— ttl.eth (@taylorleese) October 31, 2022

The ongoing layoff process is a complete farce and an embarrassment. It’s a bunch of Tesla goons making decisions about people they know nothing about other that number of code commits. It’s complete absurdity.

— ttl.eth (@taylorleese) October 31, 2022

senior managers getting canned for not writing code on a sunday night

I'm sure Elon's goons are goonier than usual, but that also sounds like any number of M&A bloodbaths.

Twitter crashing and burning is probably a good thing, depending on what comes next

xp Firing middle managers for cost efficiencies is expected. Firing middle managers *because* they’ve being doing their job (management) rather than a different job (writing code) is bizarre.

In retrospect, there was no way a little blue checkmark was not going to evolve from a fraud prevention tool into the online equivalent of The Star-belly Sneetches in the minds of these cringe-y losers.

anyone with .eth in their username probably deserves to be fired tbh

Twitter crashing and burning is probably a good thing, depending on what comes next

That's just nonsense. So many marginalised voices have been amplified on the platform. I've learnt a lot from them.

People quitting bcz of Musk are silly. Did you not know the weird people who owned the platform before he came along? Not to defend the cunt but the previous ppl had a contempt for the product and hardly ever tweeted. At least he uses it.

That's just nonsense. So many marginalised voices have been amplified on the platform. I've learnt a lot from them.

This is exactly right. If you think the cumulative cultural impact of the right-wing knuckle-walkers outweighs the cumulative cultural impact of Black Twitter, to pick just one, well, that's on you. It's certainly not my experience.

ive got multiple paul pelosi conspiracies in my trends this morning

a multiplicity of paul pelosis

it’s also simply been a net negative in the world under any objective measure

Would like you to print out the data on this and bring it by my office in 30 minutes.

It's OK to quit sonething because you hate the person in charge of it.

It's OK to hate them more than the previous person in charge of it (esp.given how they behave on it themselves).

I mean these whataboutery complaints about this are pretty weird to me.

In any case I think the vast majority of ppl quitting now are doing so with Musk being the last straw rather than a single reason.

I am querying this guy buying it as being the last straw. Really?

Big portions of the world are carved out for other people's profit (whether that's monetary or cultural). I don't think you escape that by deleting an app.

But you can certainly reduce their ability to rub it in your face.

I mean it does sound like Musk buying was the last straw. Lots of ppl talking about quitting and alternatives.

Funnily enough a couple of Black/Asian posters I saw were like 'it's always been hell it will always be hell', or 'at least I can swear at a dumb blue tick again without getting banned' lol xp = sure, if you think so.

Did you not know the weird people who owned the platform before he came along?

sure but Dorsey seems like your standard issue libertarian techbro while Elon is more of a Trumpy figure whose ultimate goal is to make every single thing on Twitter about him. the idea of him moderating a giant online forum gives me Lowtax vibes...hopefully it ends the same way

ive got multiple paul pelosi conspiracies in my trends this morning

― lag∞n, Monday, 31 October 2022 bookmarkflaglink

Musk himself is pushing some of them lol.

fwiw Dorsey didn't own Twitter the way Musk does now (public v. private)

for my part it was the combination of already waning enthusiasm/enjoyment/utility plus now having to hear about twitter+musk constantly everywhere else on the internet. Also quitting social media platforms feels really good, I recommend it

ive never consciously quit a social media but twitter is the only one i still use

something that's occurred to me is that we're kind of past the era where people who were rich and/or had power had to be serious people; as in, they at least had decent instincts or knew how to listen to people who did. thanks to the way the media works, plus the general entropy of wealth, where random kids are inheriting vast sums of money, or investing in the right startup, or getting big into crypto at a lucky time, you now have a lot of unserious people with a lot of power. the whole appeal of Elon Musk is that he is that "if I had a billion dollars, I'd [something which sounds nice but is obviously stupid and impossible]" guy. very much an extension of the Trumpy "everything is actually easy" mentality. kinda scary but hey if a guy like that is gonna blow his fortune on something a dying social network is a pretty funny way to go

fwiw Dorsey didn't own Twitter the way Musk does now (public v. private)

for my part it was the combination of already waning enthusiasm/enjoyment/utility plus now having to hear about twitter+musk constantly everywhere else on the internet. Also quitting social media platforms feels really good, I recommend it

oh yeah another reason to quit is how funny it would be if this fails quickly

lol gyac, I am of course part of my own problem there, so maybe it's like cutting out wine while continuing to drink beer & liquor

I drink whiskey but not wine or beer, I see no problem with this.

me neither! that analogy was inspired by true events

oh yeah another reason to quit is how funny it would be if this fails quickly

― rob, Monday, October 31, 2022 9:52 AM (seven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

quitting works but prob the best thing to contribute to musk twitter failing is for a lot of people to use any new freedom from moderation to to post wildly advertiser unfriendly things, also could be funny

chaotic evil is fun because lawful evil is so consistently against me.

Years back a friend of mine verified me as a prank. You could disable the verification in the settings. Maybe it’s no longer possible (e.g., I lost my verified status, rightfully, when Twitter did an audit of verified users back in 2016). But, assuming that option still exists, it’s funny to me when verified users complain about being verified.

I still think centralized verification is dumb and I think we’d be in a far better situation if, for individuals, publicly verifiable identity proofs were used. It’s embarrassing Reddit’s AMA subreddit does this better than Meta or Twitter! But I also understand this isn’t a mistake. Twitter doesn’t want to provide links to Meta services. Meta services don’t want to provide links to Twitter. Everyone knows but won’t admit that this shit is (or is potentially) valuable.

I apologize for the barrage of posts, but this story is enraging for so many reasons. Last point, Jack, whatever you think about him, is likely right about the need for decentralized authentication and authorization. Do I trust him or his proposed implementation? I haven’t looked at it closely but I’m obviously skeptical because of the source. Nevertheless, it’s an idea that I truly believe would make the web a little safer and nicer.

tangential since this is more about the mechanism of sign-in authentication and not authentication of real life identity:

lol remember when oauth was going to be the end-all, where people could bring their own auth wherever they wanted, only to be followed by oauth2 being kind of a corporate-led mess, to the extent one of the oauth creators quit the project after its release and spent the next year doing talks at conferences explaining how bad oauth2 is?

I remember a handful of sites very briefly allowing either a handful of providers or, kind of insanely, allowing you to plug in your own provider
the only vestige that remains is "sign in with google/facebook/twitter" which basically get dumped as soon as a service gets large enough they realize they're missing out on some data by not making people use their own auth

that isn't to say the two couldn't be linked, obviously. if you signed in with an identity provider explicitly linked to your organization (maybe something like the ACME mechanism LetsEncrypt uses to verify domain ownership) and that was flagged as legit by twitter, then verification of identity linked to that org could be streamlined

quitting works but prob the best thing to contribute to musk twitter failing is for a lot of people to use any new freedom from moderation to to post wildly advertiser unfriendly things, also could be funny

I don’t he has this one covered tbh

Jack, whatever you think about him, is likely right about the need for decentralized authentication and authorization. Do I trust him or his proposed implementation? I haven’t looked at it closely but I’m obviously skeptical because of the source. Nevertheless, it’s an idea that I truly believe would make the web a little safer and nicer.

― Allen (etaeoe), Monday, October 31, 2022 10:34 AM (thirteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

i found the developer page

https://atproto.com/guides/overview

I wonder how many fake accounts there are

Also its funny he wants to charge 20$ a month to be verified - so like if Beyonce doesn't pay she is going to lose her blue logo?

Why not make it more first of all or base the fee on how many followers you have