Re: Twitter
Posted: Fri Nov 11, 2022 6:53 am
Ditto, wouldn't even know how to start. The mobile phone isn't the centre of my life.
A Convivial Aviation Discussion Forum for Aviators, Aviatrices and for those who think Flying Machines are Magic.
https://ops-normal.org/
Interesting, it wasn't paywalled for me. I don't give them money and they don't seem to block my access.Fox3WheresMyBanana wrote: ↑Fri Nov 18, 2022 1:12 amArticle is paywalled, Llondel.
This happened at Meta
Meta Employees, Security Guards Fired for Hijacking User Accounts
Some workers allegedly accepted thousands of dollars in bribes
If Musk is only keeping the "best people" then he surely must stand down himself. His response is lame however, because under such duress, it is generally the best people who leave because they are confident that they will get another job.Nov 17 (Reuters) - Hundreds of Twitter employees are estimated to be leaving the beleaguered social media company following an ultimatum from new owner Elon Musk that staffers sign up for "long hours at high intensity," or leave.
In a poll on the workplace app Blind, which verifies employees through their work email addresses and allows them to share information anonymously, 42% of 180 people chose the answer for "Taking exit option, I'm free!"
A quarter said they had chosen to stay "reluctantly," and only 7% of the poll participants said they "clicked yes to stay, I'm hardcore."
Musk was meeting some top employees to try and convince them to stay, said one current employee and a recently departed employee who is in touch with Twitter colleagues.
While it is unclear how many employees have chosen to stay, the numbers highlight the reluctance of some staffers to remain at a company where Musk has hastened to fire half its employees including top management, and is ruthlessly changing the culture to emphasize long hours and an intense pace.
The company notified employees that it will close its offices and cut badge access until Monday, according to two sources. Security officers have begun kicking employees out of the office on Thursday evening, one source said.
Musk took to Twitter late on Thursday and said that he was not worried about resignations as "the best people are staying."
.You f@ck!d up real good, kiddo.
Twitter is a disaster clown car company that is successful despite itself, and there is no possible way to grow users and revenue without making a series of enormous compromises that will ultimately destroy your reputation and possibly cause grievous damage to your other companies.
I say this with utter confidence because the problems with Twitter are not engineering problems. They are political problems. Twitter, the company, makes very little interesting technology; the tech stack is not the valuable asset. The asset is the user base: hopelessly addicted politicians, reporters, celebrities, and other people who should know better but keep posting anyway. You! You, Elon Musk, are addicted to Twitter. You’re the asset. You just bought yourself for $44 billion dollars.
The problem when the asset is people is that people are intensely complicated and trying to regulate how people behave is historically a miserable experience, especially when that authority is vested in a single powerful individual.
What I mean is that you are now the King of Twitter, and people think that you, personally, are responsible for everything that happens on Twitter now. It also turns out that absolute monarchs usually get murdered when ***** goes sideways.
Here are some examples: you can write as many polite letters to advertisers as you want, but you cannot reasonably expect to collect any meaningful advertising revenue if you do not promise those advertisers “brand safety.” That means you have to ban racism, sexism, transphobia, and all kinds of other speech that is totally legal in the United States but reveals people to be total assholes. So you can make all the promises about “free speech” you want, but the dull reality is that you still have to ban a bunch of legal speech if you want to make money. And when you start doing that, your creepy new right-wing fanboys are going to viciously turn on you, just like they turn on every other social network that realizes the same essential truth.
Actually, there’s a step before trying to get the ad money: it turns out that most people do not want to participate in horrible unmoderated internet spaces full of **** racists and not-all-men fedora bullies. (This is why Twitter is so small compared to its peers!) What most people want from social media is to have nice experiences and to feel validated all the time. They want to live at Disney World. So, if you want more people to join Twitter and actually post tweets, you have to make the experience much, much more pleasant. Which means moderating more aggressively! Again, every “alternative” social network has learned this lesson the hard way. Like, over and over and over again.
Also, everyone crying about “free speech” conveniently ignores that the biggest threat to free speech in America is the **** government, which seems completely bored of the First Amendment. They’re out here banning books, Elon! President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump have identical policy positions on Section 230: they both want to repeal it. Do you know why? Because the First Amendment prohibits them from making explicit speech regulations, so they keep threatening to repeal the law that allows social networks to even exist in order to exert indirect pressure on content policy. It’s not subtle!
State governments are even less subtle: both Texas and Florida have passed speech regulations that overtly tell social media companies how to moderate, in open hostility to the First Amendment. Figuring out how to comply with these laws is not an engineering problem (not least because compliance might be impossible). It is a legal problem because these laws are blatantly unconstitutional, and the only appropriate response to them is to tell the government to shut up and go away. (A big problem here is that the courts are pretty stupid about the internet!) A challenge to these laws, partially funded by Twitter, is headed to the Supreme Court, which is the polar opposite of a predictable system: it is a group of uncool weirdos with lifetime appointments that can radically reshape American life however it wants.
You can’t deploy AI at this problem: you have to go out and defend the actual First Amendment against the bad laws in Texas and Florida, whose taxes you like and whose governors you seem pretty fond of. Are you ready for what that looks like? Are you ready to sit before Congress and politely decline to engage in their content capture sessions for hours on end? Are you ready to do any of this without the incredibly respected policy experts whose leader you first harassed and then fired? This is what you signed up for. It’s way more boring than rockets, cars, and rockets with cars on them.
And it gets worse the second you leave the United States! Germany is a huge market for Tesla. Are you going to flout Germany’s speech laws? I would bet not. The Indian government basically demands social media companies provide potential hostages in order to operate in that country; you can’t engineer your way out of that *****. Are you ready to experience the pressure Twitter faces in the Middle East to block and restrict accounts? Are you ready for the fact that the Iranian government will **** murder people over their social media posts? (Are you ready for how Twitter is being used by Iranians protesting that government right now?) Are you excited for the Chinese government to find ways to threaten Tesla’s huge business in that country over content that appears on Twitter? Because it’s going to happen.
The essential truth of every social network is that the product is content moderation, and everyone hates the people who decide how content moderation works. Content moderation is what Twitter makes — it is the thing that defines the user experience. It’s what YouTube makes, it’s what Instagram makes, it’s what TikTok makes. They all try to incentivize good stuff, disincentivize bad stuff, and delete the really bad stuff. Do you know why YouTube videos are all eight to 10 minutes long? Because that’s how long a video has to be to qualify for a second ad slot in the middle. That’s content moderation, baby — YouTube wants a certain kind of video, and it created incentives to get it. That’s the business you’re in now. The longer you fight it or pretend that you can sell something else, the more Twitter will drag you into the deepest possible muck of defending indefensible speech. And if you turn on a dime and accept that growth requires aggressive content moderation and pushing back against government speech regulations around the country and world, well, we’ll see how your fans react to that
The Verge?We’ll say this: If Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter produces nothing of any value—and gosh, but is that an “if” that feels like an increasingly solid bet as every new day ticks by—at least it will produce one image that will live on for years in our mind’s eye: A scrolling set of insults, including “dictator’s asskisser,” “mediocre manchild,” and, most beautifully, “space Karen,” projected on the side of the social media company’s headquarters tonight. Said building, of course, is currently shuttered, amidst the company’s latest “mass exodus” of employees in the span of a handful of weeks
TheGreenAnger wrote: ↑Fri Nov 18, 2022 12:54 pmThe Verge?We’ll say this: If Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter produces nothing of any value—and gosh, but is that an “if” that feels like an increasingly solid bet as every new day ticks by—at least it will produce one image that will live on for years in our mind’s eye: A scrolling set of insults, including “dictator’s asskisser,” “mediocre manchild,” and, most beautifully, “space Karen,” projected on the side of the social media company’s headquarters tonight. Said building, of course, is currently shuttered, amidst the company’s latest “mass exodus” of employees in the span of a handful of weeks
https://www.themarysue.com/why-is-elon- ... explained/Elon Musk Will Forevermore be Known as ‘Space Karen.’ Here’s How It Started.
So Elon Musk is Space Karen now? Yes, you read that right.
If you were on Twitter Thursday night, hoo boy—after the news that hundreds of remaining Twitter employees had quit and headquarters was shut down, the whole place had the feel of a rave taking place on a spaceship careening toward the sun. Everyone knows they’re going to going to be engulfed in flames, but no one knows when exactly it’s going to happen, so all the partiers just running around blurting out their secrets and trying to find out who has crushes on them.
It was epic. I have a hangover and all I did was scroll social media for awhile.
Meanwhile, in San Francisco, some anonymous hero used a projector to plaster a series of messages onto the outside of the Twitter HQ building.
The message says “Elon Musk,” and then scrolls through a series of epithets: bankruptcy baby, supreme parasite, petulant pimple, apartheid profiteer, dictator’s asskisser, lawless oligarch, insecure colonizer, cruel hoarder, space Karen, mediocre manchild, pressurized privilege, petty racist, megalomaniac, and worthless billionaire.
They’re all pretty great burns, but “Space Karen” is the one that has captured the imaginations of the entire Internet. Someone has already photoshopped a head of coifed blond hair onto
A tweet showing two portraits of Elon Musk with styled blond hair.
Apologies if Twitter has gone dark by the time you read this, and the tweet above has disappeared.
Why Space Karen? The word “Karen” originally meant a white woman leveraging her privilege to hurt and belittle people of color, whether it was by calling the police on a Black man or demanding to speak to a service worker’s manager. Now it’s kind of morphed into any obnoxious white woman (which, yeah, allows white men to use it in a straight-up misogynist way—for example, one guy tried to make “Librarian Karen” a thing when a librarian wouldn’t let him in the library without a mask). So the implication is that Musk is acting entitled, selfish, and high on his own power trip.
And the space part? Well, remember that Elon thinks he’s going to colonize Mars. Or does he still think that? I can’t keep up with this guy’s whims.
Anyway, there you have it—if you’re wondering where Space Karen came from, it’s the brainchild of someone in the California Bay Area with a projector, beef against Elon, and a lot of imagination.
I've heard that many are switching to Mastodon over here as well.Fox3WheresMyBanana wrote: ↑Sat Nov 19, 2022 5:52 pmQuite a few of the Tweeters I have been using for info about the Ukraine war have got themselves a Mastodon account in the last 24 hours.
I am presuming this is just precautionary at the moment.