I don't watch videos on mobile so I looked for an explanation to why he was carrying a sink. The reason is that he's an idiot, but if you want more details, the answer is let that sink in. HBO's...
I don't watch videos on mobile so I looked for an explanation to why he was carrying a sink. The reason is that he's an idiot, but if you want more details, the answer is let that sink in.
HBO's Silicon Valley used to be satire. It is now a documentary.
People seem very concerned about him firing execs, but that seems like the most normal part? Isn't it pretty common to clean house at the top after acquiring?
People seem very concerned about him firing execs, but that seems like the most normal part? Isn't it pretty common to clean house at the top after acquiring?
CEOs are often fired after acquisitions, but there's usually a transition period before that. It's advisable to keep the old leadership somewhat close while you learn to ride the business. At the...
CEOs are often fired after acquisitions, but there's usually a transition period before that. It's advisable to keep the old leadership somewhat close while you learn to ride the business. At the very least, it will pay good dividends to maintain a civil relationship with them. And even from a human perspective, the manner he did it was quite savage as well. Not a lot of empathy on this one.
Elon probably took the fact that they filed a lawsuit against him pretty personally. In any case, all three executives are going home with a nice golden parachute so I can't say I feel too bad for...
Elon probably took the fact that they filed a lawsuit against him pretty personally. In any case, all three executives are going home with a nice golden parachute so I can't say I feel too bad for them
The execs didn't sue him, the board did. I wouldn't feel bad for the c-suite per say, but the 25% of staff left who will have an abrupt leadership change.
The execs didn't sue him, the board did.
I wouldn't feel bad for the c-suite per say, but the 25% of staff left who will have an abrupt leadership change.
my bad, I just read in a headline that the CEO led the lawsuit. EDIT: I probably misunderstood this tweet https://twitter.com/AFP/status/1585800506991341568
my bad, I just read in a headline that the CEO led the lawsuit.
Suppose that Elon does manage to turn Twitter around after a 75% layoff bloodbath. He does have a bit of the Midas touch. It would be terrible news for legions of tech workers, whose leaders might...
Suppose that Elon does manage to turn Twitter around after a 75% layoff bloodbath. He does have a bit of the Midas touch.
It would be terrible news for legions of tech workers, whose leaders might contemplate similar bloodbaths. :|
Twitter has been around fifteen years and it's still relatively small and still struggles to make money. Musky's successes have generally come with him creating (or usually just buying) the right...
He does have a bit of the Midas touch.
Twitter has been around fifteen years and it's still relatively small and still struggles to make money. Musky's successes have generally come with him creating (or usually just buying) the right company at the right time - Paypal just as ecommerce was getting going; Tesla just at the start of the EV revolution (and they're losing ground fast now the actual car companies who don't make terrible cars are catching up); SpaceX just as launch requirements were ramping up and NASA's capacity was winding down.
I'm not sure there was ever really a right time for Twitter. I mean sure, they "made" a lot of money from VC for a long time. Then pissed it away on... not sure what, it certainly wasn't features. But now? When it's in decline? Fairly sure Elon has just lost his money. Nobody is going to want to buy it from him. Even he didn't want it. He might be able to take it public again but I'd be amazed if he saw any kind of profit. His fanboys aren't numerous enough to make Twitter a going concern, and plenty of people think he's enough of a dick to make the effort to move somewhere else.
Also he did say he wasn't going to fire 75% of the staff. On the other hand, what the hell are they doing with 7500 staff for a website the size of imgur.com? Reddit is over twice as big and has over ten times fewer employees.
?!?! imgur is static file hosting with some tools, ads and non-time-sensitive comments. Twitter has multiple magnitudes more users, its selling point is its ability to keep everything real-time,...
for a website the size of imgur.com
?!?!
imgur is static file hosting with some tools, ads and non-time-sensitive comments. Twitter has multiple magnitudes more users, its selling point is its ability to keep everything real-time, it hosts governments official channels from all over the world, and they constantly index absolutely everything in there. ON TOP of this, they have their own ad engine, a sizeable business tooling suite for analytics and the ads, and audio live streaming. IN ADDITION to everything imgur itself does (image hosting, video hosting, comments, DMs, ads, content discovery, content analysis…).
Twitter's monthly visitors are about the same as imgur's, around 200-250 million uniques. Twitter is very good at generating shares of it's content on other platforms (usually screenshots, which...
Twitter's monthly visitors are about the same as imgur's, around 200-250 million uniques. Twitter is very good at generating shares of it's content on other platforms (usually screenshots, which they don't like because they are hard to monetise), which is why it has more reach than you'd expect of a site it's size. It's also used by a lot of celebrities which amplifies it's visibility further.
There are many other ways to compare the size of a website and they're all valid in various contexts, but in terms of monthly users, Twitter is relatively small.
I thought by size you meant in terms of how big of a product it is, which is really the only way to answer your question "What are they doing with all these employees". Twitter is just not a very...
I thought by size you meant in terms of how big of a product it is, which is really the only way to answer your question "What are they doing with all these employees".
Twitter is just not a very successful product at making loads of money.
Ah, no I sort of meant size in terms of.. I guess 'success' would be one way to say it? Twitter punches far above it's weight when it comes to mindshare, people tend to assume it's huge and...
Ah, no I sort of meant size in terms of.. I guess 'success' would be one way to say it? Twitter punches far above it's weight when it comes to mindshare, people tend to assume it's huge and all-encompassing like Facebook or Google - but their actual numbers say it's a medium size, medium traffic website at best. It's just got a lot of celebs and brands.
In terms of what are they doing with all those people - reddit is by all metrics much bigger than twitter and deals with pretty much the same soft and hardware challenges (although reddit maintains two parallel front ends, which is impressive), and they manage with ~700 staff. They also roll out new features fairly regularly, unlike Twitter who make glaciers look speedy.
So yeah. What are Twitter doing with all those staff? The only thing I can think is content moderation, which reddit largely farms off to volunteers. 7000-ish paid moderators seems like a lot, but perhaps it isn't.
That's not quite true. The famous book Designing Data Intensive Applications has a number of Twitter case studies. Twitter uniquely has challenges that Reddit doesn't - one big one is the...
reddit is by all metrics much bigger than twitter and deals with pretty much the same soft and hardware challenges
That's not quite true. The famous book Designing Data Intensive Applications has a number of Twitter case studies. Twitter uniquely has challenges that Reddit doesn't - one big one is the existence of users like Elon Musk, contrasting the "average" user.
See, when Musk posts, his tweet needs to go to hundreds of millions of accounts - immediately. It's a read heavy process. On the other hand, for the average user, they are much more write heavy. Reddit is much more distributed - when a user makes a post, it doesn't need to shipped to hundreds of millions of people subscribed to it. It goes onto a sub, or a thread, and then the people there, which even for the most populous of subreddits is in the 100k order of magnitude.
Because of this, Twitter has a dual write system to handle both high follow count users and the low follow count tail. There follows a quite complicated system of local cache servers. This is genuinely a case where a normal RDBMS cannot handle the workload (while Reddit is well distributed enough across writes and reads such that this is not the case).
Data Intensive is one of the seminal software engineering books of today btw, it's a great read.
That being said, Twitter is likely over-sized - they likely have too many in-house systems, following in the footsteps of Google but never achieving the scale where they reap the rewards. But I think people understate the difficulties of maintaining something like Twitter. Once you scale beyond RDBMS, everything is pain.
edit: Basically, at scale, often the challenge is "how do I shard my data". Reddit is actually extremely well suited for that - you shard by subreddit, and then by thread. Twitter is quite the opposite - the existence of celebrity accounts who have millions of followers across the world means that these users really have no simple way to shard them apart. They don't neatly fit into any arbitrary segments (like subreddits) or natural segments (like geography). You just have to have these massive data fanouts.
I'll add that a lot of great open source technology has come out of Twitter. They were pioneers of the early days of JS, creating Bootstrap and Bower, which paved the way for modern css frameworks...
I'll add that a lot of great open source technology has come out of Twitter. They were pioneers of the early days of JS, creating Bootstrap and Bower, which paved the way for modern css frameworks and build environments. They contribute heavily to the Scala and Hadoop ecosystems. They publish about engineering both on the web and in scientific journals, and are behind a lot of database innovations - very much driven by the needs you highlight - including the Snowflake ID for example.
It's generally true that Musk's companies tend to have a lot of unnecessary drama due to his tendency to make high-risk decisions, spending enormous amounts of money on bets that risk the company...
It's generally true that Musk's companies tend to have a lot of unnecessary drama due to his tendency to make high-risk decisions, spending enormous amounts of money on bets that risk the company and might not pay off. But I don't think we can really say how Twitter will do based on what Musk did at unrelated companies? They have different problems that mostly require different skills. I wouldn't be surprised to either see him succeed or fail badly.
It seems pretty unclear how Tesla will do, too. Are they really losing ground? The stock is down, but revenue hasn't dropped. I'm pretty wary of them, but people seem to like their cars.
I wasn't intending to do that. Musk is a heck of a hype man and one of his better qualities is his risk taking. Like Jobs, he hires people who are good and pushes them hard. But his other...
But I don't think we can really say how Twitter will do based on what Musk did at unrelated companies?
I wasn't intending to do that. Musk is a heck of a hype man and one of his better qualities is his risk taking. Like Jobs, he hires people who are good and pushes them hard. But his other companies have been in areas of rising interest/hype, whereas I think Twitter is going the other direction. Twitter hasn't been new or exciting for well over a decade. Whether it has anything new to offer remains to be seen, but I suspect not.
I see Twitter very differently. Right now, its user growth has slowed and its product growth has stagnated. But I believe it is in an exceptionally strong position, as it has tremendous cultural...
I see Twitter very differently.
Right now, its user growth has slowed and its product growth has stagnated.
But I believe it is in an exceptionally strong position, as it has tremendous cultural power, more so than Facebook and Instagram. TikTok is for discovering random B-listers. Twitter is where A-listers spill the tea.
At least in the gay community, Twitter is the hub for drag culture, amateur porn / OnlyFans culture, gay memes, etc.
I think that with the right product decisions, it will become the dominant platform for Gen Z to create, share, and get the hottest of hot takes, memest of memes, and so on.
Past Twitter leadership have failed to fully capitalize on Twitter's cultural capital. But it's still there, waiting.
I don't really know what age range Gen Z is meant to be, but on past experience of how these things go, Twitter is where the kids's parents are. People who signed up when it was new and cool - and...
Gen Z to create, share, and get the hottest of hot takes, memest of memes, and so on.
I don't really know what age range Gen Z is meant to be, but on past experience of how these things go, Twitter is where the kids's parents are. People who signed up when it was new and cool - and the people who made it new and cool by being there were 18-24 at the time and they are now 33-40. Twitter now is exactly where Facebook was ten years ago. It's had it's day of being new and exciting and where it all happens and now it's on the long slow downslope towards whatever happened to MySpace.
The kids, when they are doing stuff in public (which they increasingly are not, private places like discord/etc are huge), are currently on TikTok, as I'm sure you're aware. The next thing isn't going to be Tiktok, of course, but I very much doubt it's going to be the thing that was cool two social media generations before that.
Don't forget the "A-list" is people who have made it. It took them a decade, just because it's a long way. Most importantly, the A-list are not really cool any more. They're very famous, but the only way to go once you've reached the top, is down. The A-list is what the older people like, because that's how they got to be A-list in the first place - mass appeal to a large demographic.
The biggest users on twitter right now are news organisations, politicians and pop stars over thirty. The b-list are the hot young things. Although realistically, the really cool hot young things aren't even on a list, because they're way too busy being far too cool in places their parents haven't even noticed yet. Do you think it's possible to convince the kids that the place where Donald fucking Trump is shortly to be allowed back to spout his bullshit and hatred is cool? The place where their mum will heart every one of their tweets? Because I don't think so.
That doesn't make Twitter irrelevant, of course. And it doesn't mean interesting stuff isn't happening there. But it does mean it will become slowly less relevant with time. Which makes it, at best, a relatively high risk investment and at worst, a really great way to lose almost fifty billion dollars.
I actually don't think that's the case. Anecdotally, there's a lot of young people on Twitter. The thing about Twitter is that's it's almost like a hybrid between Reddit and something like...
I actually don't think that's the case. Anecdotally, there's a lot of young people on Twitter. The thing about Twitter is that's it's almost like a hybrid between Reddit and something like Facebook or Instagram. A lot of just general, almost anonymous discussion about various niches happen on Twitter. For instance, most of the competitive splatoon stuff happens on Twitter, and most of them are in the mid-late teens, at oldest early twenties. But there's also a decent amount of personal, stream-of-consciousness, tweet about your life stuff.
Because of the former, though, Twitter doesn't have "old people smell" like Facebook does. It's obviously still the most niche of the big social medias, but it has practical longevity with the younger generations as they age into hobbies and interests.
There's a lot of communities that are basically centered around Twitter connecting an archipelago of Discord servers.
Twitter user age demographics Also scroll down a bit to point 13, where "33% of U.S. teens reported using Twitter in 2014-15, but only 23% of teens reported using the platform in 2021". It's not...
Also scroll down a bit to point 13, where "33% of U.S. teens reported using Twitter in 2014-15, but only 23% of teens reported using the platform in 2021". It's not crashing as hard as Facebook for the kids but it's behind Facebook chronologically anyway. I suspect Facebook's trends 8-10 years ago were fairly similar to where Twitter is now. That was roughly when Zuck started to panic and bought up IG and Whatsapp in order to reach younger users.
There's a lot of communities that are basically centered around Twitter connecting an archipelago of Discord servers.
This is really interesting because at that point, Twitter isn't providing something that can't be easily moved. The Discord is where the people actually are, it's relatively easy to take the organisation layer to another service should Twitter go (further) to shit.
That is possible. However, the lawsuit had merit and was ultimately caused by Elon Musk himself. It's hard to feel empathy for anyone here, but I don't have anything specific to criticize in...
That is possible. However, the lawsuit had merit and was ultimately caused by Elon Musk himself. It's hard to feel empathy for anyone here, but I don't have anything specific to criticize in regards to Twitter executives handling of the situation.
Yup, they're apparently getting a combined ~$200M out of this deal. https://www.morningstar.com/news/marketwatch/202210284/elon-musk-on-the-hook-to-pay-more-than-200-million-to-3-fired-twitter-execs
Yup, they're apparently getting a combined ~$200M out of this deal.
Not only is it normal, Twitter is manifestly a terribly run service and company. Even aside from the fact that the executive team basically strong-armed Musk into buying them out and it's clear...
Not only is it normal, Twitter is manifestly a terribly run service and company. Even aside from the fact that the executive team basically strong-armed Musk into buying them out and it's clear there is too much acrimony between them to have a constructive working relationship, why wouldn't you fire them all? In addition to whatever radical changes Musk will have to introduce to make it go from operating at a loss to being profitable enough to justify a $44Bn valuation, it's going from being a public to a private company so that's a ton of reporting and administrative overhead that is no longer needed.
There's nothing to learn from the previous executive team because the new Twitter will, ideally, be nothing like the old Twitter. Keep some of the lower level folks who do the nitty-gritty work around to keep things running but all the "strategic" people, like your directors on up, are dead weight unless they can get on board with completely changing what they've been doing all this time.
FWIW I think it's impossible for Twitter to ever justify a $44Bn purchase price. There is simply not enough value to squeeze out of it. I think it could probably be a very respectable $800M business, maybe even a $1Bn business. But even at that revenue, assuming a generous 20% operating margin, it'll take over 200 years to get $44Bn back! But then again, maybe it's worth it to him to own it at a loss in the same way rich dudes will buy their favorite sports team just to say they have it.
Elon Musk has completed his $44 billion deal to buy Twitter, a source familiar with the deal told CNN Thursday, putting the world’s richest man in charge of one of the world’s most influential social media platforms.
Musk fired CEO Parag Agrawal and two other executives, according to two people familiar with the decision.
…
Musk has said he plans to rethink Twitter’s content moderation policies in service of a more maximalist approach to “free speech.” The billionaire has also said he disagrees with Twitter’s practice of permanent bans for those who repeatedly violate its rules, raising the possibility that a number of previously banned users could reemerge on the platform.
Perhaps most immediately, many will be watching to see how soon Musk could let former President Donald Trump back on the platform, as he has previously said he would do.
The whole Trump thing is infuriating; not even necessarily because of Trump himself at this point but from the fact that I know this is all the news is going to talk about. I'm so sick of tweets...
The whole Trump thing is infuriating; not even necessarily because of Trump himself at this point but from the fact that I know this is all the news is going to talk about. I'm so sick of tweets as "news" and I have real disdain for the organizations that report on Twitter trends as though they're news. If I gave a shit I'd be on Twitter, thanks.
And, I mean, clearly something doesn't line up between how much people are ACTUALLY interested in Trump versus how much the media wants to talk about him: the platforms he's moved to have all been dismal failures. His influence is not enough to bring in anyone besides the most die-hard right-wing cronies, and those people make every place they congregate so absolutely unpleasant that nobody else wants to be there. Even beyond their ugly politics they commit the sin of being generally unlikable - it's not fun to be in the same place that they are. The slums of the internet.
There is something oddly poetic, in a capitalism-meets-Beowulf sort of way, in prioritizing shareholder value so much that you’d bind a flighty contra to a transaction in absolutely certain knowledge that your reward for doing so would be getting fired from one’s cushy job.
Nahhh. Parag played this masterfully. He freed himself of an albatross around his neck and secured the bag for his shareholders by selling the dogshit company he was saddled with for 40x what it's...
Nahhh. Parag played this masterfully. He freed himself of an albatross around his neck and secured the bag for his shareholders by selling the dogshit company he was saddled with for 40x what it's worth. They should canonize him as the patron saint of shareholder value. CEOs and executive boards should make offerings to him before each meeting.
I think that's what McKenzie is saying. It's great for the shareholders. He did the right thing for the shareholders at the expense of everything else, including his own job. He'll be fine, though.
I think that's what McKenzie is saying. It's great for the shareholders. He did the right thing for the shareholders at the expense of everything else, including his own job.
Yeah, I just think people on that level think of their jobs differently. It's not something they care about since it's not where their livelihoods rely on. He secured the bag and doesn't have what...
Yeah, I just think people on that level think of their jobs differently. It's not something they care about since it's not where their livelihoods rely on. He secured the bag and doesn't have what I assume is a stressful job, which is way better than having a stressful job and less money.
Plus he'll probably land a position at some other company too.
He made a massive name for himself and got to pull a golden parachute out of a company that everyone was starting to see the writing on the wall for while making major shareholders in said company...
He made a massive name for himself and got to pull a golden parachute out of a company that everyone was starting to see the writing on the wall for while making major shareholders in said company rich as hell in the process, thus proving to every board at every publicly traded company in the world that he's willing to go the distance to make them money. He's in a fantastic position right now.
I’ve been seeing a lot of people (by people I’m including media pundits who are twitter addicts) saying that they will leave the social media platform soon. Don’t know what the alternative for...
I’ve been seeing a lot of people (by people I’m including media pundits who are twitter addicts) saying that they will leave the social media platform soon.
Don’t know what the alternative for them is, stuff like TikTok and Instagram doesn’t really seem to fit what they like they do. Sure you can give hot takes on there, but recording yourself for a video is less appealing than just casually typing and sending off stuff into the ether.
As for the normal people, I’ve seen people bring up going back to tumblr. Which is interesting. I’m not super familiar with tumblr since the few times I tried to use it I just couldn’t figure it out.
I don't think there's an actual need for something like Twitter. There's certainly a desire, but need? Those are not the same. I'm not convinced that a Twit-like something can be a good thing overall.
I don't think there's an actual need for something like Twitter. There's certainly a desire, but need? Those are not the same. I'm not convinced that a Twit-like something can be a good thing overall.
I never joined twitter because I always felt the very short messages were needlessly restrictive and encourage shallow or sensationalist communication. Terrible for serious discussion, and for...
I never joined twitter because I always felt the very short messages were needlessly restrictive and encourage shallow or sensationalist communication. Terrible for serious discussion, and for quick jokes or hot takes, I'm perfectly happy to wait until the tweet makes its way to another platform I actually use. If it's actually worthwhile it usually does, and I never felt like I missed out on anything important.
But what really grinds my gears is that in the past few years, it seems like a lot of people have started using twitter like a blog. Except it's utterly unsuitable for that purpose. A 30+ tweet chain because you're trying to say something that can't be said in one or two tweets is just a really inferior, terrible UX way of reading a blog post or traditional opinion piece in an online publication.
If this leads to an exodus towards more traditional blog-like platforms, I'm all for it.
I’m not super familiar with tumblr since the few times I tried to use it I just couldn’t figure it out.
Tumblr is a lot more like a traditional blog, but with a social media network attached. You can make arbitrarily long posts, although the service is geared towards short form content like sharing links and photos. It has reblogs, which are like retweets for blogs; and likes, which are like, well, likes; and you can follow other users to see their stuff in your feed, which is called the Dashboard and functions like a feed in other social media. That's pretty much it.
It won't. Blogs are dead because most people don't have the time, patience or know how to discover new blogs. It's never been about writing. It's always been about reading and discoverability,...
If this leads to an exodus towards more traditional blog-like platforms, I'm all for it.
It won't. Blogs are dead because most people don't have the time, patience or know how to discover new blogs. It's never been about writing. It's always been about reading and discoverability, even for people who write because they themselves want to be heard the most. That's what twitter allows and that's what blogs are terrible at. I don't think anyone's writing those long twitter threads because they love the UX, they write despite it, because the need for being heard triumphs every other consideration.
I too wish we'd live in a world where people share their ideas, feelings, knowledge, and humor using long lasting protocols that are not at the whims of some vest wearing Silicon Valley technocrats who think they know how the world works because they know how a computer works, but blogs are never coming back. When the scale of the internet was minuscule compared to today, blogs served a purpose and they still do, but they will continue to be niche.
What needs to be done is for twitter to take advantage of this need and design a better product around this user behavior, but I doubt anyone even works there anymore, in the practical sense.
I do agree with everything you said, a hundred percent, even the part where you want the blogs to come back (though I do some caveats, as implied above), but I just think that's in the past. I hope I'm wrong though!
I will add the bloggers will still post on Twitter, and even write a series of tweets, after posting to their blogs. Journalists will write tweets about articles they wrote for a newspaper. Book...
I will add the bloggers will still post on Twitter, and even write a series of tweets, after posting to their blogs. Journalists will write tweets about articles they wrote for a newspaper. Book authors will use Twitter to talk about their books. Musicians will post links to videos.
These aren't people who lack a place to publish. Whatever else it is, Twitter is a way of promoting your content, for free, to people who aren't your subscribers. Many people who are serious about publishing content also post on Twitter, even though they don't "live" there.
Facebook and Reddit and Hacker News can also be places to promote your content, due to the size of the audience. Tildes can't do that because we're not nearly big enough, and I'm not sure that Mastodon is big enough either due to fragmentation and discovery problems.
I use http://counter.social pretty regularly. It's actually struggling a bit under the number of new sign-ups (though the admin is keeping up with it pretty well) and just hit 100k accounts today.
I use http://counter.social pretty regularly. It's actually struggling a bit under the number of new sign-ups (though the admin is keeping up with it pretty well) and just hit 100k accounts today.
Yeah - it was working a few minutes before my post, the admin said he'd "thrown money at the problem", but it appears it wasn't enough! It's been quite a busy day there.
Yeah - it was working a few minutes before my post, the admin said he'd "thrown money at the problem", but it appears it wasn't enough! It's been quite a busy day there.
I joined counter.social a little while ago too. Lot of cloudflare errors but when you get through it's running smoothly. I think the only problem right now is that it's genuinely hard to rebuild a...
I joined counter.social a little while ago too. Lot of cloudflare errors but when you get through it's running smoothly. I think the only problem right now is that it's genuinely hard to rebuild a social graph. Twitter had a lot of celebs and journalists and such to follow and it was good at recommending them. The recs weren't great, but they trickled in and slowly over time you can start following enough people that you have some worthwhile content to look at.
I have no clue how to start this on CounterSocial. All I see is the "Community Firehose" but I don't care about these people.
Yes, it's a bit strange going from a feed that's suggested and curated for you to one that you basically 100% curate yourself. I'm also pretty new to it, but my approach so far has been to post an...
Yes, it's a bit strange going from a feed that's suggested and curated for you to one that you basically 100% curate yourself. I'm also pretty new to it, but my approach so far has been to post an #introduction, check out some tags, and start following the friendly randos who interacted with me who indicated similar interests. I'm hoping to kind of organically grow it from there, pruning or adding as I go. This kind of mirrors my experience starting tumblr a decade ago, or however long it was.
Yeah. I've been on Twitter basically since it launched and my follower list kind of grew organically from back when it was just a place for random bloggers to joke around with each other and some...
Yeah. I've been on Twitter basically since it launched and my follower list kind of grew organically from back when it was just a place for random bloggers to joke around with each other and some of my friends to post their food. The ways people use social media has evolved a lot over that time and I don't know if there is any way I can replicate that.
It's also why I think my Twitter feed tended to be less noxious than a lot of others. I selected people to follow slowly mostly based on the work they did elsewhere, like Cracked/College Humor or various blogs I followed. I never followed people based primarily on their twitter activity until the past few years. But I notice there's a definite trend with people I follow on Twitter due to their tweets being more exhausting to deal with and listen to than people who use Twitter as a secondary channel to promote some other thing.
I started on CounterSocial ("CoSo") a week ago, when the Musk deal was said to be all done but the ink. I've absolutely loved it so far. There's a vibe there that Twitter doesn't have. I think...
I started on CounterSocial ("CoSo") a week ago, when the Musk deal was said to be all done but the ink. I've absolutely loved it so far. There's a vibe there that Twitter doesn't have. I think they call it "welcoming", but I don't follow social media jargon. It's nice, though.
I used Tweetdeck (raw Twitter blurred by too fast) and the layout was immensely familiar. Just remember that Community firehose = raw feed, all other columns are basically categories curated from...
I used Tweetdeck (raw Twitter blurred by too fast) and the layout was immensely familiar. Just remember that Community firehose = raw feed, all other columns are basically categories curated from that.
As for who to follow... you see someone say something and you want to see more of that, follow them. :) If you have a name, there's a search field in the upper right of the window (right above where you compose), type the name in, one of the links will be their profile, which you can click on to follow.
Yeah - I'm starting to find my way around a bit. I kind of wish you could view posts that you've favorited in the past, without necessarily following the person. Or that you could add a group of...
Yeah - I'm starting to find my way around a bit. I kind of wish you could view posts that you've favorited in the past, without necessarily following the person. Or that you could add a group of hashtags to view in a column. Part of it may just be that I was never really into twitter, and I prefer the slower pace of something like reddit or tildes.
View all of your favorites -- I double checked that I could see favorites from people I've never followed. :) Follow multiple hashtags in one column, using the advanced interface
View all of your favorites -- I double checked that I could see favorites from people I've never followed. :)
On mobile, it’s in the hamburger menu. I can’t remember where it is in the advanced interface. You should be able to go to /web/favourites to find it (prefixing with your instance domain).
On mobile, it’s in the hamburger menu. I can’t remember where it is in the advanced interface. You should be able to go to /web/favourites to find it (prefixing with your instance domain).
Part of me hopes this will lead to a resurgence of blogging and (Gods willing) a return of complete, fully-formed and edited thoughts to the discourse. But I know that's a fool's hope. Being too...
Part of me hopes this will lead to a resurgence of blogging and (Gods willing) a return of complete, fully-formed and edited thoughts to the discourse.
But I know that's a fool's hope. Being too into Twitter for too long evidently turns people into clout addicts and I don't think many will actually have the discipline to maintain a blog without the validation of hearts and retweets and other forms of engagement. And that's assuming they can have the same reach, which is a BIG if. I'm guessing they will stay on Twitter as long as it keeps providing that supply, and continue whinging about how bad and poorly moderated it is just as they've always been.
People might go to Mastodon, but Mastodon replicates much of what's bad about Twitter, combining it with what was bad about forum culture (the cliquishness and self-absorption), all while being pretty opaque to the general user as to what it's for.
CounterSocial may also be good, it is basically a Mastodon fork but at least there is no confusion as to what instance you need to join. But also, what is going to drive non-technically inclined clout demons to stuff like this?
I mean, it's the user base, really, but the technology? It's a blog with a character limit. A character limit that breaks any meaningful message because it's "rolled up" (or whatever) in tiny...
I mean, it's the user base, really, but the technology? It's a blog with a character limit. A character limit that breaks any meaningful message because it's "rolled up" (or whatever) in tiny pieces marked with "31/n" or something. Get 100k people and a few relevant people onto a competing platform and it should work.
Matt Levine pointed out that Musk is trying to break contracts again, and will probably lose: [...] [...]
Matt Levine pointed out that Musk is trying to break contracts again, and will probably lose:
I want to make a couple of points here. One is, I cannot believe we’re doing this again.
Another point is that he absolutely did not fire them for cause, as you can easily tell by reading their employment agreements.
[...]
I am not going to spend a lot of time parsing through that language here, because Elon Musk doesn’t care, as we know from past experience. But did the fired Twitter executives do any of those things? Obviously not. Does Musk have any arguments that they did? Obviously not. Is he even pretending to have any relevant arguments? Obviously not. (“The value of the company’s stock would have collapsed”: not on the list.) Will his lawyers try to clean up the mess by pretending that he had cause to fire the executives, saying that they allowed too many spam bots and that’s “gross negligence” or whatever? Obviously. Will he eventually have to pay them their full severance? Obviously. Is this exactly in every respect like his decision to ignore the merger agreement? Pretty much, except that Musk essentially ended up having to pay Twitter’s legal bills for that, but these executives will have to pay their own lawyers to go after Musk for this money. (Also Twitter could sue him in Delaware court, while the executives will have to bring their claims to arbitration.) Very annoying!
[...]
CEOs tend to receive whomping great “golden parachutes” for selling their companies, even if they’ve only been there a short time and haven’t done a very good job. Every time this happens, people complain about it, but you shouldn’t think of the golden parachute as a reward for being the CEO. It’s an incentive to stop being the CEO: If the CEO knows he’ll get paid $100 million for quitting in a merger, that might overcome his natural aversion to doing the merger.
Here, the golden parachutes worked perfectly. Agrawal and his management team clearly did not like Musk or want him to buy the company, and they clearly knew he would fire them, but they negotiated a deal with him anyway, because it was in the best interests of shareholders. They put shareholder value above their own careers and interests, perhaps because they are noble people who love shareholder value, but perhaps also because they stood to get huge bags of money as a reward for this sacrifice.
If he could do one good thing with Twitter, this would be letting not-logged-in users to view tweets and comments unlimitedly again, as it used to be the case.
If he could do one good thing with Twitter, this would be letting not-logged-in users to view tweets and comments unlimitedly again, as it used to be the case.
Mark my words: after the midterms, he's going to try to sell quickly. He's a political troll who's trying to curry favor with the right by manipulating discourse so close to the elections.
Mark my words: after the midterms, he's going to try to sell quickly. He's a political troll who's trying to curry favor with the right by manipulating discourse so close to the elections.
There are lots of people stupid enough to buy Twitter. The number of people stupid enough to buy Twitter and with forty billion to drop on it is almost certainly exactly one. (At least, it was...
there's also always a bigger sucker
There are lots of people stupid enough to buy Twitter.
The number of people stupid enough to buy Twitter and with forty billion to drop on it is almost certainly exactly one. (At least, it was yesterday.)
He's not going to try to flip it, he's gong to dump it. It will have served its purpose by then, and there's no way he went into this thinking it was ever going to reach that value. Unless he's...
He's not going to try to flip it, he's gong to dump it. It will have served its purpose by then, and there's no way he went into this thinking it was ever going to reach that value.
Unless he's even worse with money than I already think he is.
I don't watch videos on mobile so I looked for an explanation to why he was carrying a sink. The reason is that he's an idiot, but if you want more details, the answer is let that sink in.
HBO's Silicon Valley used to be satire. It is now a documentary.
It was always a documentary.
People seem very concerned about him firing execs, but that seems like the most normal part? Isn't it pretty common to clean house at the top after acquiring?
CEOs are often fired after acquisitions, but there's usually a transition period before that. It's advisable to keep the old leadership somewhat close while you learn to ride the business. At the very least, it will pay good dividends to maintain a civil relationship with them. And even from a human perspective, the manner he did it was quite savage as well. Not a lot of empathy on this one.
Elon probably took the fact that they filed a lawsuit against him pretty personally. In any case, all three executives are going home with a nice golden parachute so I can't say I feel too bad for them
The execs didn't sue him, the board did.
I wouldn't feel bad for the c-suite per say, but the 25% of staff left who will have an abrupt leadership change.
my bad, I just read in a headline that the CEO led the lawsuit.
EDIT: I probably misunderstood this tweet https://twitter.com/AFP/status/1585800506991341568
Suppose that Elon does manage to turn Twitter around after a 75% layoff bloodbath. He does have a bit of the Midas touch.
It would be terrible news for legions of tech workers, whose leaders might contemplate similar bloodbaths. :|
Twitter has been around fifteen years and it's still relatively small and still struggles to make money. Musky's successes have generally come with him creating (or usually just buying) the right company at the right time - Paypal just as ecommerce was getting going; Tesla just at the start of the EV revolution (and they're losing ground fast now the actual car companies who don't make terrible cars are catching up); SpaceX just as launch requirements were ramping up and NASA's capacity was winding down.
I'm not sure there was ever really a right time for Twitter. I mean sure, they "made" a lot of money from VC for a long time. Then pissed it away on... not sure what, it certainly wasn't features. But now? When it's in decline? Fairly sure Elon has just lost his money. Nobody is going to want to buy it from him. Even he didn't want it. He might be able to take it public again but I'd be amazed if he saw any kind of profit. His fanboys aren't numerous enough to make Twitter a going concern, and plenty of people think he's enough of a dick to make the effort to move somewhere else.
Also he did say he wasn't going to fire 75% of the staff. On the other hand, what the hell are they doing with 7500 staff for a website the size of imgur.com? Reddit is over twice as big and has over ten times fewer employees.
?!?!
imgur is static file hosting with some tools, ads and non-time-sensitive comments. Twitter has multiple magnitudes more users, its selling point is its ability to keep everything real-time, it hosts governments official channels from all over the world, and they constantly index absolutely everything in there. ON TOP of this, they have their own ad engine, a sizeable business tooling suite for analytics and the ads, and audio live streaming. IN ADDITION to everything imgur itself does (image hosting, video hosting, comments, DMs, ads, content discovery, content analysis…).
Twitter's monthly visitors are about the same as imgur's, around 200-250 million uniques. Twitter is very good at generating shares of it's content on other platforms (usually screenshots, which they don't like because they are hard to monetise), which is why it has more reach than you'd expect of a site it's size. It's also used by a lot of celebrities which amplifies it's visibility further.
There are many other ways to compare the size of a website and they're all valid in various contexts, but in terms of monthly users, Twitter is relatively small.
I thought by size you meant in terms of how big of a product it is, which is really the only way to answer your question "What are they doing with all these employees".
Twitter is just not a very successful product at making loads of money.
Ah, no I sort of meant size in terms of.. I guess 'success' would be one way to say it? Twitter punches far above it's weight when it comes to mindshare, people tend to assume it's huge and all-encompassing like Facebook or Google - but their actual numbers say it's a medium size, medium traffic website at best. It's just got a lot of celebs and brands.
In terms of what are they doing with all those people - reddit is by all metrics much bigger than twitter and deals with pretty much the same soft and hardware challenges (although reddit maintains two parallel front ends, which is impressive), and they manage with ~700 staff. They also roll out new features fairly regularly, unlike Twitter who make glaciers look speedy.
So yeah. What are Twitter doing with all those staff? The only thing I can think is content moderation, which reddit largely farms off to volunteers. 7000-ish paid moderators seems like a lot, but perhaps it isn't.
That's not quite true. The famous book Designing Data Intensive Applications has a number of Twitter case studies. Twitter uniquely has challenges that Reddit doesn't - one big one is the existence of users like Elon Musk, contrasting the "average" user.
See, when Musk posts, his tweet needs to go to hundreds of millions of accounts - immediately. It's a read heavy process. On the other hand, for the average user, they are much more write heavy. Reddit is much more distributed - when a user makes a post, it doesn't need to shipped to hundreds of millions of people subscribed to it. It goes onto a sub, or a thread, and then the people there, which even for the most populous of subreddits is in the 100k order of magnitude.
Because of this, Twitter has a dual write system to handle both high follow count users and the low follow count tail. There follows a quite complicated system of local cache servers. This is genuinely a case where a normal RDBMS cannot handle the workload (while Reddit is well distributed enough across writes and reads such that this is not the case).
Data Intensive is one of the seminal software engineering books of today btw, it's a great read.
That being said, Twitter is likely over-sized - they likely have too many in-house systems, following in the footsteps of Google but never achieving the scale where they reap the rewards. But I think people understate the difficulties of maintaining something like Twitter. Once you scale beyond RDBMS, everything is pain.
edit: Basically, at scale, often the challenge is "how do I shard my data". Reddit is actually extremely well suited for that - you shard by subreddit, and then by thread. Twitter is quite the opposite - the existence of celebrity accounts who have millions of followers across the world means that these users really have no simple way to shard them apart. They don't neatly fit into any arbitrary segments (like subreddits) or natural segments (like geography). You just have to have these massive data fanouts.
I'll add that a lot of great open source technology has come out of Twitter. They were pioneers of the early days of JS, creating Bootstrap and Bower, which paved the way for modern css frameworks and build environments. They contribute heavily to the Scala and Hadoop ecosystems. They publish about engineering both on the web and in scientific journals, and are behind a lot of database innovations - very much driven by the needs you highlight - including the Snowflake ID for example.
Reddit does FUCK ALL.
Ok, which means that they have a huge amount of additional workload and costs by comparison. That's not necessarily a good thing.
Unrelated to what I'm refuting.
It's generally true that Musk's companies tend to have a lot of unnecessary drama due to his tendency to make high-risk decisions, spending enormous amounts of money on bets that risk the company and might not pay off. But I don't think we can really say how Twitter will do based on what Musk did at unrelated companies? They have different problems that mostly require different skills. I wouldn't be surprised to either see him succeed or fail badly.
It seems pretty unclear how Tesla will do, too. Are they really losing ground? The stock is down, but revenue hasn't dropped. I'm pretty wary of them, but people seem to like their cars.
I wasn't intending to do that. Musk is a heck of a hype man and one of his better qualities is his risk taking. Like Jobs, he hires people who are good and pushes them hard. But his other companies have been in areas of rising interest/hype, whereas I think Twitter is going the other direction. Twitter hasn't been new or exciting for well over a decade. Whether it has anything new to offer remains to be seen, but I suspect not.
I could be wrong, of course.
I see Twitter very differently.
Right now, its user growth has slowed and its product growth has stagnated.
But I believe it is in an exceptionally strong position, as it has tremendous cultural power, more so than Facebook and Instagram. TikTok is for discovering random B-listers. Twitter is where A-listers spill the tea.
At least in the gay community, Twitter is the hub for drag culture, amateur porn / OnlyFans culture, gay memes, etc.
I think that with the right product decisions, it will become the dominant platform for Gen Z to create, share, and get the hottest of hot takes, memest of memes, and so on.
Past Twitter leadership have failed to fully capitalize on Twitter's cultural capital. But it's still there, waiting.
I don't really know what age range Gen Z is meant to be, but on past experience of how these things go, Twitter is where the kids's parents are. People who signed up when it was new and cool - and the people who made it new and cool by being there were 18-24 at the time and they are now 33-40. Twitter now is exactly where Facebook was ten years ago. It's had it's day of being new and exciting and where it all happens and now it's on the long slow downslope towards whatever happened to MySpace.
The kids, when they are doing stuff in public (which they increasingly are not, private places like discord/etc are huge), are currently on TikTok, as I'm sure you're aware. The next thing isn't going to be Tiktok, of course, but I very much doubt it's going to be the thing that was cool two social media generations before that.
Don't forget the "A-list" is people who have made it. It took them a decade, just because it's a long way. Most importantly, the A-list are not really cool any more. They're very famous, but the only way to go once you've reached the top, is down. The A-list is what the older people like, because that's how they got to be A-list in the first place - mass appeal to a large demographic.
The biggest users on twitter right now are news organisations, politicians and pop stars over thirty. The b-list are the hot young things. Although realistically, the really cool hot young things aren't even on a list, because they're way too busy being far too cool in places their parents haven't even noticed yet. Do you think it's possible to convince the kids that the place where Donald fucking Trump is shortly to be allowed back to spout his bullshit and hatred is cool? The place where their mum will heart every one of their tweets? Because I don't think so.
That doesn't make Twitter irrelevant, of course. And it doesn't mean interesting stuff isn't happening there. But it does mean it will become slowly less relevant with time. Which makes it, at best, a relatively high risk investment and at worst, a really great way to lose almost fifty billion dollars.
I actually don't think that's the case. Anecdotally, there's a lot of young people on Twitter. The thing about Twitter is that's it's almost like a hybrid between Reddit and something like Facebook or Instagram. A lot of just general, almost anonymous discussion about various niches happen on Twitter. For instance, most of the competitive splatoon stuff happens on Twitter, and most of them are in the mid-late teens, at oldest early twenties. But there's also a decent amount of personal, stream-of-consciousness, tweet about your life stuff.
Because of the former, though, Twitter doesn't have "old people smell" like Facebook does. It's obviously still the most niche of the big social medias, but it has practical longevity with the younger generations as they age into hobbies and interests.
There's a lot of communities that are basically centered around Twitter connecting an archipelago of Discord servers.
Twitter user age demographics
Also scroll down a bit to point 13, where "33% of U.S. teens reported using Twitter in 2014-15, but only 23% of teens reported using the platform in 2021". It's not crashing as hard as Facebook for the kids but it's behind Facebook chronologically anyway. I suspect Facebook's trends 8-10 years ago were fairly similar to where Twitter is now. That was roughly when Zuck started to panic and bought up IG and Whatsapp in order to reach younger users.
This is really interesting because at that point, Twitter isn't providing something that can't be easily moved. The Discord is where the people actually are, it's relatively easy to take the organisation layer to another service should Twitter go (further) to shit.
That is possible. However, the lawsuit had merit and was ultimately caused by Elon Musk himself. It's hard to feel empathy for anyone here, but I don't have anything specific to criticize in regards to Twitter executives handling of the situation.
I didn't mean to imply the lawsuit was frivolous or meritless. Elon just has a habit of lashing out against people for things he takes personally.
Oh, I'm sorry for misinterpreting you, then.
Yup, they're apparently getting a combined ~$200M out of this deal.
https://www.morningstar.com/news/marketwatch/202210284/elon-musk-on-the-hook-to-pay-more-than-200-million-to-3-fired-twitter-execs
Not only is it normal, Twitter is manifestly a terribly run service and company. Even aside from the fact that the executive team basically strong-armed Musk into buying them out and it's clear there is too much acrimony between them to have a constructive working relationship, why wouldn't you fire them all? In addition to whatever radical changes Musk will have to introduce to make it go from operating at a loss to being profitable enough to justify a $44Bn valuation, it's going from being a public to a private company so that's a ton of reporting and administrative overhead that is no longer needed.
There's nothing to learn from the previous executive team because the new Twitter will, ideally, be nothing like the old Twitter. Keep some of the lower level folks who do the nitty-gritty work around to keep things running but all the "strategic" people, like your directors on up, are dead weight unless they can get on board with completely changing what they've been doing all this time.
FWIW I think it's impossible for Twitter to ever justify a $44Bn purchase price. There is simply not enough value to squeeze out of it. I think it could probably be a very respectable $800M business, maybe even a $1Bn business. But even at that revenue, assuming a generous 20% operating margin, it'll take over 200 years to get $44Bn back! But then again, maybe it's worth it to him to own it at a loss in the same way rich dudes will buy their favorite sports team just to say they have it.
This is true. That's so much exposure to risk from the SEC though.
…
The whole Trump thing is infuriating; not even necessarily because of Trump himself at this point but from the fact that I know this is all the news is going to talk about. I'm so sick of tweets as "news" and I have real disdain for the organizations that report on Twitter trends as though they're news. If I gave a shit I'd be on Twitter, thanks.
And, I mean, clearly something doesn't line up between how much people are ACTUALLY interested in Trump versus how much the media wants to talk about him: the platforms he's moved to have all been dismal failures. His influence is not enough to bring in anyone besides the most die-hard right-wing cronies, and those people make every place they congregate so absolutely unpleasant that nobody else wants to be there. Even beyond their ugly politics they commit the sin of being generally unlikable - it's not fun to be in the same place that they are. The slums of the internet.
Huh. Well this seems worrying.
Patrick McKenzie on Twitter
Nahhh. Parag played this masterfully. He freed himself of an albatross around his neck and secured the bag for his shareholders by selling the dogshit company he was saddled with for 40x what it's worth. They should canonize him as the patron saint of shareholder value. CEOs and executive boards should make offerings to him before each meeting.
I think that's what McKenzie is saying. It's great for the shareholders. He did the right thing for the shareholders at the expense of everything else, including his own job.
He'll be fine, though.
Yeah, I just think people on that level think of their jobs differently. It's not something they care about since it's not where their livelihoods rely on. He secured the bag and doesn't have what I assume is a stressful job, which is way better than having a stressful job and less money.
Plus he'll probably land a position at some other company too.
He made a massive name for himself and got to pull a golden parachute out of a company that everyone was starting to see the writing on the wall for while making major shareholders in said company rich as hell in the process, thus proving to every board at every publicly traded company in the world that he's willing to go the distance to make them money. He's in a fantastic position right now.
I’ve been seeing a lot of people (by people I’m including media pundits who are twitter addicts) saying that they will leave the social media platform soon.
Don’t know what the alternative for them is, stuff like TikTok and Instagram doesn’t really seem to fit what they like they do. Sure you can give hot takes on there, but recording yourself for a video is less appealing than just casually typing and sending off stuff into the ether.
As for the normal people, I’ve seen people bring up going back to tumblr. Which is interesting. I’m not super familiar with tumblr since the few times I tried to use it I just couldn’t figure it out.
I wonder what happens though.
I don't think there's an actual need for something like Twitter. There's certainly a desire, but need? Those are not the same. I'm not convinced that a Twit-like something can be a good thing overall.
I never joined twitter because I always felt the very short messages were needlessly restrictive and encourage shallow or sensationalist communication. Terrible for serious discussion, and for quick jokes or hot takes, I'm perfectly happy to wait until the tweet makes its way to another platform I actually use. If it's actually worthwhile it usually does, and I never felt like I missed out on anything important.
But what really grinds my gears is that in the past few years, it seems like a lot of people have started using twitter like a blog. Except it's utterly unsuitable for that purpose. A 30+ tweet chain because you're trying to say something that can't be said in one or two tweets is just a really inferior, terrible UX way of reading a blog post or traditional opinion piece in an online publication.
If this leads to an exodus towards more traditional blog-like platforms, I'm all for it.
Tumblr is a lot more like a traditional blog, but with a social media network attached. You can make arbitrarily long posts, although the service is geared towards short form content like sharing links and photos. It has reblogs, which are like retweets for blogs; and likes, which are like, well, likes; and you can follow other users to see their stuff in your feed, which is called the Dashboard and functions like a feed in other social media. That's pretty much it.
It won't. Blogs are dead because most people don't have the time, patience or know how to discover new blogs. It's never been about writing. It's always been about reading and discoverability, even for people who write because they themselves want to be heard the most. That's what twitter allows and that's what blogs are terrible at. I don't think anyone's writing those long twitter threads because they love the UX, they write despite it, because the need for being heard triumphs every other consideration.
I too wish we'd live in a world where people share their ideas, feelings, knowledge, and humor using long lasting protocols that are not at the whims of some vest wearing Silicon Valley technocrats who think they know how the world works because they know how a computer works, but blogs are never coming back. When the scale of the internet was minuscule compared to today, blogs served a purpose and they still do, but they will continue to be niche.
What needs to be done is for twitter to take advantage of this need and design a better product around this user behavior, but I doubt anyone even works there anymore, in the practical sense.
I do agree with everything you said, a hundred percent, even the part where you want the blogs to come back (though I do some caveats, as implied above), but I just think that's in the past. I hope I'm wrong though!
I will add the bloggers will still post on Twitter, and even write a series of tweets, after posting to their blogs. Journalists will write tweets about articles they wrote for a newspaper. Book authors will use Twitter to talk about their books. Musicians will post links to videos.
These aren't people who lack a place to publish. Whatever else it is, Twitter is a way of promoting your content, for free, to people who aren't your subscribers. Many people who are serious about publishing content also post on Twitter, even though they don't "live" there.
Facebook and Reddit and Hacker News can also be places to promote your content, due to the size of the audience. Tildes can't do that because we're not nearly big enough, and I'm not sure that Mastodon is big enough either due to fragmentation and discovery problems.
I use http://counter.social pretty regularly. It's actually struggling a bit under the number of new sign-ups (though the admin is keeping up with it pretty well) and just hit 100k accounts today.
You're not kidding! I curiously clicked your link and I've just received a Cloudflare timeout screen. People be keen to depart ships that sink...
Yeah - it was working a few minutes before my post, the admin said he'd "thrown money at the problem", but it appears it wasn't enough! It's been quite a busy day there.
I joined counter.social a little while ago too. Lot of cloudflare errors but when you get through it's running smoothly. I think the only problem right now is that it's genuinely hard to rebuild a social graph. Twitter had a lot of celebs and journalists and such to follow and it was good at recommending them. The recs weren't great, but they trickled in and slowly over time you can start following enough people that you have some worthwhile content to look at.
I have no clue how to start this on CounterSocial. All I see is the "Community Firehose" but I don't care about these people.
Yes, it's a bit strange going from a feed that's suggested and curated for you to one that you basically 100% curate yourself. I'm also pretty new to it, but my approach so far has been to post an #introduction, check out some tags, and start following the friendly randos who interacted with me who indicated similar interests. I'm hoping to kind of organically grow it from there, pruning or adding as I go. This kind of mirrors my experience starting tumblr a decade ago, or however long it was.
Yeah. I've been on Twitter basically since it launched and my follower list kind of grew organically from back when it was just a place for random bloggers to joke around with each other and some of my friends to post their food. The ways people use social media has evolved a lot over that time and I don't know if there is any way I can replicate that.
It's also why I think my Twitter feed tended to be less noxious than a lot of others. I selected people to follow slowly mostly based on the work they did elsewhere, like Cracked/College Humor or various blogs I followed. I never followed people based primarily on their twitter activity until the past few years. But I notice there's a definite trend with people I follow on Twitter due to their tweets being more exhausting to deal with and listen to than people who use Twitter as a secondary channel to promote some other thing.
I started on CounterSocial ("CoSo") a week ago, when the Musk deal was said to be all done but the ink. I've absolutely loved it so far. There's a vibe there that Twitter doesn't have. I think they call it "welcoming", but I don't follow social media jargon. It's nice, though.
Just recently signed up. Not going to lie - I'm completely lost as far as finding who to follow and figuring out the layout.
I used Tweetdeck (raw Twitter blurred by too fast) and the layout was immensely familiar. Just remember that Community firehose = raw feed, all other columns are basically categories curated from that.
As for who to follow... you see someone say something and you want to see more of that, follow them. :) If you have a name, there's a search field in the upper right of the window (right above where you compose), type the name in, one of the links will be their profile, which you can click on to follow.
Yeah - I'm starting to find my way around a bit. I kind of wish you could view posts that you've favorited in the past, without necessarily following the person. Or that you could add a group of hashtags to view in a column. Part of it may just be that I was never really into twitter, and I prefer the slower pace of something like reddit or tildes.
You should be able to do both of these things. I’m not at my computer right now, but I can post some screenshots tomorrow. :)
Huh - I can't seem to find that favorites section anywhere - where on the website is it?
On mobile, it’s in the hamburger menu. I can’t remember where it is in the advanced interface. You should be able to go to /web/favourites to find it (prefixing with your instance domain).
I wonder if it's a pro feature - when I go to /web/favourites, I don't see any of them there.
It could be that your instance has them turned off for some reason, although I can’t imagine why. 🤔
Part of me hopes this will lead to a resurgence of blogging and (Gods willing) a return of complete, fully-formed and edited thoughts to the discourse.
But I know that's a fool's hope. Being too into Twitter for too long evidently turns people into clout addicts and I don't think many will actually have the discipline to maintain a blog without the validation of hearts and retweets and other forms of engagement. And that's assuming they can have the same reach, which is a BIG if. I'm guessing they will stay on Twitter as long as it keeps providing that supply, and continue whinging about how bad and poorly moderated it is just as they've always been.
People might go to Mastodon, but Mastodon replicates much of what's bad about Twitter, combining it with what was bad about forum culture (the cliquishness and self-absorption), all while being pretty opaque to the general user as to what it's for.
CounterSocial may also be good, it is basically a Mastodon fork but at least there is no confusion as to what instance you need to join. But also, what is going to drive non-technically inclined clout demons to stuff like this?
I mean, it's the user base, really, but the technology? It's a blog with a character limit. A character limit that breaks any meaningful message because it's "rolled up" (or whatever) in tiny pieces marked with "31/n" or something. Get 100k people and a few relevant people onto a competing platform and it should work.
I have a Mastodon account set up just in case...
I'm reminded of all the people who supposedly are going to move to voat any day now. (Oops too late now I guess).
Matt Levine pointed out that Musk is trying to break contracts again, and will probably lose:
[...]
[...]
If he could do one good thing with Twitter, this would be letting not-logged-in users to view tweets and comments unlimitedly again, as it used to be the case.
Mark my words: after the midterms, he's going to try to sell quickly. He's a political troll who's trying to curry favor with the right by manipulating discourse so close to the elections.
Sell to whom exactly? Nobody is buying Twitter especially in the current economy. Did you see Meta’s stock dive?
Much like there's always a bigger fish, there's also always a bigger sucker. Also, note that I said "try."
Musk: Anyone know Kanye's number?
There are lots of people stupid enough to buy Twitter.
The number of people stupid enough to buy Twitter and with forty billion to drop on it is almost certainly exactly one. (At least, it was yesterday.)
He's not going to try to flip it, he's gong to dump it. It will have served its purpose by then, and there's no way he went into this thinking it was ever going to reach that value.
Unless he's even worse with money than I already think he is.