Twitter C/D

Did your brain fall out of your head, Yglesias? The choice is have Twitter throttled in its entirety or limit access to some tweets. Which one do you want?

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 13, 2023

“Did your brain fall out of your head, Yglesias” is a good line.

i see that elon tweeted out some pepe shit at 3 am about the first amendment being the freedom to share memes with your alt right friends and the second amendment being the solution for when "they" try to prevent the sharing of memes. then the first several dozen replies are blue checkmarks with a bunch of people who love pepe and cryptocurrency

z_tbd - I want to point out that that specific spelling of friends - "frens" - is specifically white supremacist and anti-semetic.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/after-9-months-reddit-finally-bans-group-spreading-thinly-veiled-anti-semitism/

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/sites/frenworld

thanks, and jeez, how is he consistently even worse than one expects

Twitter used to routinely challenge Turkey’s takedown requests

Erdogan actually had Twitter banned in Turkey in 2014 for refusing to comply. (the courts later ended the ban.)

but that was on the “censorship” version of Twitter, not this new “free speech” one https://t.co/z1fO9JfkpU

— Matt Binder (@MattBinder) May 13, 2023

This is where I put a roulette chip on the 0/00 line that predicts when Twitter will "comply" in opening up to the PRC.

Can anyone join Bluesky with an invite from a current user, or are things in lockdown mode while they upgrade stuff? I want to ditch Twitter but I’d rather keep my account active until I switch so I can try to find the accounts I currently follow on the new platform. Like, if somebody on here had an account could they invite me, or do you have a limited number of invites?

circa 20 years ago user/drummer/electronic beats purveyor Jordan gave me a gmail invite. i'm hardly going to abandon him now

xp most people get one invite per two weeks. you can get more if you beg or ask to invite someone specific they want. you get less if you invite people who end up causing trouble, or if the person who invited you causes trouble.

hmu if you’ve got an extra bluesky invite

Roth on Twitter:

https://defector.com/burning-down-the-house

not sure what I've done but For You is now all writers shilling their books. #writerslift

apparently that was 'based on your likes' and checking those there were a few things that got liked just because my thumb sometimes hits like when i scroll

Does blocking someone on Twitter actually do anything beyond hiding them from you? That is, does it affect anything on their end?

it hides you from them, where muting only hides them from you

But if I'm not posting at all, then blocking someone just means I won't see them on anyone else's thread, right?

they wouldn't be able to see your profile either

its also an input to the algo

Yeah, that's what I'm getting at. If an account keeps getting blocked by people, will the algorithm eventually tag it as problematic and stop promoting it as much? I don't post on Twitter, and a lot of the limited stuff I follow doesn't have a lot of replies I'd bother blocking, but if blocking assholes I'd otherwise ignore hurts them, it could be a fun thing to do when I have some downtime. Like popping bubblewrap.

yeah when they opened sourced the algo it was revealed that getting blocked dings you a lil

I just bought a Kevin Kruse book, but I gotta say, his level of twitter use makes me a little weary. Anyone read any of his stuff?

lmao 48 hours and counting from a $8 account

Disney Ratatouille Movie pic.twitter.com/BQh90jwaD0

— . (@ToDanHD) May 15, 2023

among others https://twitter.com/ToDanHD

when I was 18 one of my friend's parents were out of town so he threw this gigantic party. it was a weird vibe and a lot of assholes showed up but it was also pretty fun because a ton of people I knew were there. anyway the cops got called because someone hit another car and that person absolutely freaked out. no one got underages though and once the cops left we tried to restart the party but the vibe was just dead. some people stayed and tried to have a good time but it felt really weird. anyway that's what Twitter reminds me of now

That stage where everybody is talking about going and pissing in that asshole’s trunk while he’s still inside

Lmao jack invited jimmy fallon to bluesky and his first “hello” post has 500 replies telling him to pay his writers (500 is a lot, a post needs 12 likes to get on “what’s hot” which is like the global feed)

haa

the way I caused this 💀 https://t.co/QwQEcKEMqR pic.twitter.com/qFHMd1JyL7

— Hurt CoPain (@SaeedDiCaprio) May 17, 2023

now that it's been a few weeks, does anyone have thoughts on bluesky? i'm still on the waiting list. i haven't really heard much chatter about it, so i figure there's not enough activity on there to warrant much discussion

I just don't get why people would go there rather than Mastodon.

because it literally takes 5 minutes to find and follow a single person on there, there is no lazy discovery. it's a pain in the ass.

i will give it another shot when and if search becomes even a little easier.

didn't mean that to sound so aggro, it's just that i wanted it to work but can't deal with another steep learning curve in my life atm. also to be very real i have been net happier since being locked out of twitter, so like, do i really need a twitter alternative?

Ha, well, not needing any twitter alternative is the healthiest attitude, I think.

Following people on other instances has got a tiny bit better, I think, but still a bit of a faff sometimes. I've found myself actually using hashtags for the first time in my life, as joining in a general conversation on a theme seems less scary there than it ever did on twitter or similar platforms (this will probably change as Mastodon grows, but for now it's a pleasant thing). I also follow a couple of hashtags that put all posts about that topic directly into my main feed, and that's worked well for hearing about niche things and finding people I might want to follow.

thanks for sharing that info - i may try again with that strategy

i found the mastodon ux a pain in the ass, and i don't think i ever once laughed at a post.

bluesky seems to have settled down a bit, not as funny as it was. there are now a few journalists so it's starting to fulfil the "free bloomberg terminal" twitter use case. they're about to launch the custom algorithms thing, which is like twitter lists or following a hashtag, but much more general. e.g. you can define (or follow) a feed of "all new account first posts" or "all friends of friends".

i guess instagram's twitter clone is launching soon too https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/19/everything-we-know-about-instagrams-twitter-clone-due-this-summer/

custom algorithms thing seems promising

looking into it

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/23/us/politics/desantis-elon-musk-twitter.html

The event on Twitter Spaces is planned for 6 p.m. Eastern.

We officially live in the future now

his politics are so mysterious

That piece contained no exclusive quotes and no new information (as they admit, NBC News had the announcement first). But somehow it required four reporters to assemble.

So what? The NYT employs 2,600 journalists, and I bet a lot of their stories involve more collaboration than is indicated by a typical byline.

What's sad is that it's the only story those four reporters have broken all year

"discover more" random tweets showing up after replies might be what finally breaks me

seems like search is favoring blue checks now too, smart to show more of the worst posts

30 mins of technical difficulties, then "looks like we're ready to go here", then it cut out.

So far (5 minutes) on this twitter space, the app has crashed 4 times, DeSantis has been demoted from speaker to listener 3 times, and Elon and David seem to have their mics in the same room pointing at each other so there's constantly feedback. https://t.co/N9jOSzrg1I

— Paul E Williams (@PEWilliams_) May 24, 2023

they're going to say "he broke the internet", but streaming low bitrate audio to ~1m people is, well, it's probably not what spaces is designed for, but it's not a insolubly hard problem either. twitch and youtube both regularly have streams to 5m+ with full video and comments.

I tried to listen but just got the message “Spaces isn’t available for ipad yet.” Ok

this is probably a fitting launch to a doomed campaign

Nobody is happier than Fox News, which is going to make sure every Republican primary voter sees this one pic.twitter.com/3xti2wVg8c

— Ben Smith (@semaforben) May 24, 2023