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Post by MagdaFR on Nov 18, 2022 9:30:19 GMT
Today I checked twitter and many of the people I follow were saying goodbye as if it were certain that it is the end of twitter. I know some of you commented on the twitter debacle elsewhere but I'm so astonished at what Elon Musk did/is doing that I wanted to open a thread.
How can he be so out of touch on what people and workers think.
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Post by MagdaFR on Nov 18, 2022 9:58:36 GMT
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Post by llminnowpea on Nov 18, 2022 10:28:55 GMT
He is rich and thinks he is smart. It isn't as though he actually invented the Tesla cars. Or, any of the technologies his various companies put out. He just takes the credit.
I am skeptical that it will completely fold overnight. There are plenty of young IT people who would gladly take the jobs of the folks who are leaving, despite the crappy conditions. They will take the job, work until they are burnt out or fired, then move on.
It will probably have a slow decline because of the workers turnover and something else will take its place - I mean, look at all the revenue these places generate.
Or, Musk will send everything somewhere where he can pay workers very low wages and there is no accountability for pay, etc.
He has said so many things then walked them back. So, who knows.
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Post by queenzod on Nov 18, 2022 15:32:41 GMT
Last night was so sad on Twitter I was nearly in tears. It def had the flavor of the Titanic about it. What a great platform and if it goes down it’s loss will be felt keenly all over the world. I relied on it for so much - news, weather, Ben news, pix and gifs, pretty nature and cat/dog photos that were soothing, jokes, snark, idiocy, connection, etc. Elon Musk is a complete, incompetent asshole. Hopefully he’ll find a new owner for it soon and they can get it back up and running. The loss of Dog Rates alone is horrible. 😭
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Post by roverpup on Nov 18, 2022 21:05:47 GMT
It's more of a curiosity with me. I only joined Twitter recently so I'm not that invested in it. I do like certain things... 1) the Cumberbatch things of course, 2) the hockey scores of our local team, 3) the local hydro commission account (it's both useful when there are outages and very funny in times of non-crisis) and 4) I like the immediacy of "happening news" like when the "Freedumb Convoy" was terrorizing our province.
But there is a lot of garbage on it, so if it did shut down it wouldn't break my heart. Almost everyone I know from there, I know from somewhere else.
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Post by mllemass on Nov 18, 2022 23:30:49 GMT
I know! It’s such a cute and wholesome account, and always a bright spot in the day.
I rarely tweet anything (maybe my wordle scores if they’re not horrible), but I follow our city’s account, which is very useful! Most of what I look at is frivolous, but frivolous is necessary sometimes. I have thousands of accounts blocked, though, so I don’t actually see a lot of the garbage out there.
It makes me so sad that it might be over. I have no desire to move somewhere else, so I’ll have to rely on everyone here to keep me informed!
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Post by queenzod on Nov 19, 2022 1:05:48 GMT
It has been a great bulwark against loneliness for me, and I don’t know if I’ll move to another platform yet. I’m just hanging on, waiting to see what will happen. There’s always Tumblr (groan), but so far nothing exactly like Twitter has emerged. Yes, there’s lots of nonsense and garbage on Twitter, but there’s many more really wonderful, clever, insightful people there who share great pieces of their hearts and minds.
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Post by sgev1977 on Nov 19, 2022 2:32:34 GMT
I have to confess that I’m addicted to Twitter. I spend just too much time there but TBH it’s a horrible site and that’s not new! Lol I kinda agreed with these two tweets, I actually read those tweets of those horrible pathetic beings attacking that woman! And yeah, they tried to disguise their envy with some fake “activism”! Of course, Musk is not the solution AT ALL and I hope not being offensive here but I’m kinda wonder how much of his “odd” behavior is related to him being autistic (and I actually saw an autistic girl claiming she can see some of her extreme reactions on him) but Twitter old management was terrible, too! It was just bullying disguised as fake activism! I can even give you a kinda personal example, I used to report some extreme things just to see what they would do and they were very bad if they weren’t the “right” kinda person the one abused. Remember when I wrote here that a black rights activist called a Mexican actor “taco eater” because he dared to criticize Will Smith? Well, that wasn’t considers racist by Twitter! And there are a lot of “identity” stuff like that! And of course, much more extreme examples with real life consequences. Just look Bryan Fogel documentary about Jamal Khashoggi. Twitter is very popular in Saudi Arabia, much more than in Westerner countries and those extreme regimes try and frequently are successful influencing it. And then there is things like this, endsexualexploitation.org/articles/statement-twitter-sued-by-survivor-of-child-sexual-abuse-and-exploitation/ I saw an activist praising Musk for finally adding the option to report sexual exploitation personal videos after unsuccessfully fighting for it with the old management. She is very “passionated” about the theme so I can’t confirm what she says it’s 100% truth or just activism discourse but that lawsuit seems very real. Elon Musk is awful but “old” Twitter was also awful and I think it was really bad that journalists lived in a small bubble there (just look the numbers! It’s actually not very big in the real world. At least in western countries!). It probably would be good for journalism if it just disappears and confront journalists with reality! It would be good for everyone! Lol I frequently ask myself why things weren’t so extreme a few years ago on Internet and I recently read this book about Free Speech history and it says something interesting: extreme opinions and behavior existed but it was just something on the margins that most sane people just ignored because Internet was democratically controlled by the sane majority. Now we have just a few centered social media sites in where everyone is together so the voice of the extremists seemed louder that they really were and provoked an extreme reaction by others who then provoked another extreme reaction and we now have people screaming extremist stuff to each other! So the solution instead of another eccentric rich guy controlling another social media site would be to return to the more democratic old days with multiple sites controlled by the people: if something is stupidly extreme it would be ignored until oblivion in their small corner instead of being promoted to the theme of the day by deluded journalists publishing multiple articles based on a few comments on an actual very small social site!
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Post by queenzod on Nov 19, 2022 3:35:39 GMT
There was an entire thread today (which of course I can’t find now), of people telling stories of how they were jumped on by hoards of Angry Twitter Folk over something completely innocuous, like that lady sharing a lovely moment of drinking coffee in the garden with her hubby. (Some of us don’t have gardens, or husbands, or coffee, Karen, so you shouldn’t be able to have things like that and certainly not to enjoy them in any way, shape, or form much less admit to it. In public!).
It was hilarious! I’ll keep looking because it’s exactly how/why Twitter gets out of hand so easily. The good thing is there’s plenty of sane people to rein them back in with humor. Or screaming. Whatever. 😂
okay I don’t know if this will work, but if you click on the link in this tweet (punished), that takes you to another thread which is limited, so I can’t link directly to it.
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Post by sgev1977 on Nov 19, 2022 4:18:16 GMT
There are sane people but I don’t think they rein extremists back. They would just continue screaming how evil is anyone who contradict them! I seriously think that because there are a lot of journalists, Twitter has a very bad influence over journalism and that’s not good, especially with sensitive themes that should be analyzed in a measured way without taking sides.
Also about the theme of verified accounts, Musk solution was incredibly stupid but there were indeed a lot of verified people who not were just randoms but sometimes they barely had followers. I remember someone moaning about Musk’s idea of selling verifications just to receive questions about how he was verified when he had only 200 followers! Musk claimed Twitter workers used to sell them but, of course, he isn’t a trustworthy source, right? It was still crazy how some people were verified and others no. I’m mostly talking about journalists. They really searched for it! Some woman claimed it was because they needed it because some incoherent stuff about POC being ignored for jobs if not! Apparently newspapers hire people based on Twitter!
One of the silliest reaction I saw was by a popular activist which cause I agree with and I feel very emphatic with the violent experience in his past but oh, god! This is the second time I have seen him posting something really dumb! He claimed people were on Twitter thanks to verified people like him and if they lost the verifications, people would abandon Twitter! That was extremely narcissistic. I originally subscribed to Twitter because at the time it was very violent here and it was the best way to know if there was a dangerous situation near you. That’s also why a lot of journalists liked it: because it tells you what it’s happening at the moment but the best info usually comes from witnesses at the wrong place in the wrong moment, not the professionals and randoms who filter the news with their own politics. You know, the ones who are sure if the shooter is white or brown before any official confirmation!
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