Twitter C/D

“Can you buy Twitter and then delete it, please? xx"

— text to Elon Musk from ex-wife, March 23, 2022 pic.twitter.com/lDrMtzUWrG

— Chad Loder - @chadlo✧✧✧@kolekt✧✧✧.soc✧✧✧ (@chadloder) November 18, 2022

I posited to bf a couple days ago that I suspected that Elon's attitude toward Twitter was likely coloured by an acknowledgement that the disappearance of the platform would be a net gain for people like himself-- it effectively is the best platform for people to express dissent against plutocrats (in a broad sense) like Elon himself. This isn't to say that I necessarily felt that he intentionally intended to cause it to fail, just that it was a deeper part of his subconscious approach to running the company-- like, "it's OK if I totally fuck this up"

otm. I think that in his totally warped way of thinking, if the site flourished under him it would prove his genius and if not it's because it deserved to die.

i think some have forgotten that the true way forward is X

it's massively iterating

As for my experience, I met my wife through Twitter and got exposed to some viewpoints I found genuinely enlightening, along with some of the most insane thoughts I've ever stumbled across in my life.

Black Lives Matter, protests for racial justice, whatever inroads leftism has made in the U.S. the last few years -- Twitter had a net positive impact on these events and others, didn't it?

Twitter is/was good for quick dissemination of news and information, useful during emergencies. When I worked for city government it was the absolute best and fastest way to get out info about weather, closed streets, all that kind of stuff. Not least because all the media also followed it, so they would immediately retweet to all of their followers. There isn't another platform that does that in the same way.

We need to start an I Love Traffic board

I mean, arguably Twitter is/was the only really useful social media platform, in terms of its potential to quickly convey news and information. I know that's not mostly what lots of people use it for, but in the case of e.g. political protests, natural disasters, war zones, it can come close to actually being the decentralized crowdsourced news system people fantasize about. Always with vulnerabilities to misinformation of course, but still a pretty valuable thing in particular situations.

ilx would be just as good at that if people were looking at it tho

We need a catchy name for our posts, like tweets. Lix?

How about Loves?

Zings, iirc

sry folks, its gotta be Posts, its the poster's way

I don't think Elon Musk would be ELON MUSK RICHEST MAN IN THE WORLD without Twitter. Its disappearance might be a boon for Bill Gates (who won't have to be confronted with Epstein jokes) but Musk (like Trump) depends on public recognition for his entire ecosystem of scams.

Where's the thinkpiece on what this means for the Trump campaign.

All the people on my timeline are bidding emotional farewells and I can’t help thinking it’s going to be like passengers on a troubled plane making declarations of love to one another before an embarrassing failure to crash.

Meanwhile, I don’t know if I’m just a sicko but after 15 years with few exceptions I couldn’t care less if I never hear from any of these people again. Beatles Twitter is nice though, and that one guy who posts threads of old newspaper articles.

nobody declared their love for me, fuck

i don't think it will actually go down permanently, but that might just be a failure of imagination on my part. more so than other platforms, twitter has its own rhythm, its own language, which is maddeningly meta-referential and all that but still capable of produces flashes of insight, humor, and even a weird kind of poetry.

it is also an incredibly harsh and unforgiving space. definitely not a good platform for discussion. more just its own thing.

It may or may not have excruciating outages within days as a result of nobody working there anymore but if it does make it through this employee bottleneck event they’re just gonna completely fuck it up so tomato tomato

It may burn but at least

https://linktr.ee/drilreal

eephus! i like you pretty well!

hope this helps

i bet twitter doesn't die and doubt it will change much

okay

it's never died before, has barely changed in 15 years, and was consistently run by weird asshole dudes. i'm betting on continuity

has it lost thousands of employees in 2 weeks before?

Don't really get the people who go on about what a horrendous cesspit Twitter is - surely you only follow the people you want to follow. It's like saying books are terrible because some terrible books get published. Well you only read the books you want to. Have to say I find Twitter really good for following my niche interests, better than anything else I've found and I'll be sad it it dies.

Not to sound like musk here, but how many people do you really need to keep it running?

(I honestly have no idea)

How many people does it take to keep ILX running? Multiply that number by the ratio of ILXors to Twitter users.

I'm with Zelda.

i don't think its going to die completely but it has already "changed much" in terms of workforce and revenue and those changes will start to manifest on the actual site

on the one hand, it used to run with a headcount smaller than the current headcount, so why not.

on the other hand, it's a more complicated system than when they had 1000 employees, and it's not really designed to run with that many people any more, and the people who understand (and no how to make it simpler or fix it if it breaks) it are exactly the people who've left.

(left in a hurry without writing anything down or training replacements)

Yeah like cmon this is absolutely an experiment in how long a complex pile of services can keep running when nobody who built them is left

Like operating this stuff at scale is a complicated dance that generates incidents on the regular and requires frequent operator intervention even when nobody is changing shit. If they’ve got any hope of getting through the next couple months until they can onboard a bunch of overseas contractors and babbling Musk sycophants it’s because they’re in a full on code freeze. But if the wrong infrastructure component goes screwy, none of the people who knew how to fix it work there anymore and the consequences are likely uncharted

I would expect that death will be temporary rather than a Friendster/Myspace permanent demise, it comes back with fewer users after Musk is forced to step away or the equity partners/debtors take it away from him completely.

Like evidently literally none of the engineers who worked on the service that served tweets are still there.

Yeah I mean it’ll have some hilarious outages, maybe they’ll be chapter 11 in a few months, some lenders will impound it and try to make advertisers like them again

Like our overly-domineering and high on his own supply former colleague who left over three years ago left us with some hot garbage we don’t understand. It hasn’t completely stopped working but it fucks up a lot and we have to manually restart things to avoid a cascade of failure. This is one service in a university IT shop! When the people who know how the thing works leave you are kinda fucked

Shit at AWS breaks spectacularly 4 times a year because some service in us-east-1 runs out of numbers

Time for RSS to make a big comeback

never stopped using it via Feedbin, which is excellent. When I've made efforts to not waste time looking at twitter, the few people I really wanted to follow I follow just be reading them in Feedbin.

And to people who complain that Facebook is just shitty relatives and high school friends, I just don't get it. Hide and unfollow a few people. I keep saying this. I see none of that. Instead I have great discussions with interesting and likeminded people. If the company itself wasn't evil I'd probably have no problem with it.

Don't really get the people who go on about what a horrendous cesspit Twitter is - surely you only follow the people you want to follow.

I mostly have a good time on twitter but this is surely not true - even if you turn off seeing the likes and retweets of the people you follow you also get tweets recommended "based on your interests" (dubiously).

You don't see those if you just use Latest Tweets though

No one under 35 uses Facebook. That may be largely true of Twitter but at least music Twitter isn’t all so long in the tooth.

I also find it very hard to engage with strangers in a meaningful way on FB (same with IG really). It really takes digging to find someone who wants to have a discussion with a random on those massive Meta sites where so much of the engagement is merely manufactured.

Echoing these thoughts on Samuel Delaney’s idea of socialization based on random contact vs networking:

Okay all of your final tweets made me finally realize why I love Twitter so much. It's kinda serious but bear with me for a sec. It's these two ideas that Samuel Delany calls contact vs. networking. I'll try to explain it in a quick thread.

— Read Jackson Rising by @CooperationJXN (@JoshuaPHilll) November 18, 2022

This doesn’t seem great

https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/17/23465274/hundreds-of-twitter-employees-resign-from-elon-musk-hardcore-deadline

not now, we’re signing twitter yearbooks https://t.co/CJ9EBsM9yV

— whitney medworth (@its_whitney) November 18, 2022

banks in 1929: well look at how many people want to visit our banks right now pic.twitter.com/cn0TSM5Nom

— Ken Cheng twitch.tv/kenchengcomedy (@kenchengcomedy) November 18, 2022

twitter is good because its a cesspool, cant imagine trying to use it in a *extremely nerds voice* i have curated a perfect feed way