“Everything was fine with our system until the power grid was shut off by Dickless here.” — Ray Stantz, Twitter engineer
It’s true. This man has no dick.
He has like 18000 children.
Plenty of awesome people are dick-free, and being dick-ful in no way suggests competence or any other positive trait.
Edit: ITT: omg tech bros are so toxic Also ITT: dick measuring
I think it was a joke
https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/cfcee9b0-1b4f-49f0-b857-584bd28c119b
It seems like it was a joke. A joke that easily upsets women and anybody else without a dick. I’m not saying it upset me, but it’s very obvious to see why it would not be received well
Dude what. How thin-skinned does someone need to be to get upset over a joke like that from a random person on the internet?
Does it upset those people? Or are you just making shit up for no reason?
It’s a quick one liner from a movie in the 80’s. Please share with us all these people that have been upset about it since then.
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Have you never seen Ghostbusters?
Legit no but apparently I’m the only one.
GO TO A TORRENT SITE RIGHT NOW.
Although unlikely, it’s possible he has testicles they harvested sperm from and doesn’t actually have a dick. Although, I think it’s far more likely he has a micro penis that’s barely functional, that he uses to impregnate women he’s somehow conned into tolerating him.
You spend a lot of time thinking about this dudes genitals.
You don’t spend nights awake wondering what Elons dick looks like? Guess I need therapy.
How did all of these people replying to you never see Ghostbusters? It’s criminal.
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The horrific opportunity cost inherent to having a billionaire class.
Guillotine noises intensify
Definitely prefer the vanity projects of the past. Libraries, city halls etc
Yeah. X makes various things named “Rockafeller” seem downright “not a dumpster fire” in contrast.
The nice thing about our economic system is that value is rarely completely destroyed, the money he paid for Twitter didn’t cease to exist, it went to former Twitter shareholders.
They may be using it in more productive ways than he ever would.
They may be using it in more productive ways than he ever would.
They use it to reinvest and hoard. Because that’s what the investor class does, which is why they’re useless.
Hyperloop, boring tunnels, sending cars to space, etc
Stop me when you’ve heard enough to believe this guy has obvious disdain for all of us.
Could have just bought land in Kentucky and sat on it. Made a nature preserve. Give the beavers and deer a place to chill for a century or more. Pretty lazy way to do charity but it still would have been better.
For the record, It wasn’t failing until Musk came in.
It also wasn’t really successful before he came in either. It rarely was profitable and usually operated at a loss.
I mean Musk has seemingly made every bad move imaginable, I can only imagine the ideas he’s been talked out of.
It was barely profitable but had some one time write offs that pushed it down. It should have returned to barely profitable. But a barely profitable company can become ok profitable with small changes.
Twitter’s success wasn’t monetary. The success came in allowing ordinary people their soapbox at a global town square.
Look at what happened to the price of insulin with a single tweet made back when all the blue checks were in complete free-for-all. A single tweet, made by a random person, thoroughly changed the shape of that one industry. Twitter gave “power” to the people, and those like Musk weren’t comfortable with that.
Ugh. This “global town square” nonsense needs to die.
Twitter’s business was selling ads. They don’t give a flying festerooni about fostering a healthy public discourse. Nearly every part of the technical and UX design was actively hostile to “the people” being able to express themselves in a meaningful way— The entire premise was a character limit that while fun also made it literally impossible to provide meaningful context or nuance to anything, and whether you were just scrolling or trying to reply to people, you never got to see anybody else’s honest opinions either but instead you were fed a carefully algorithmically curated drip of out-of-context ragebait and feelgood fuzzies designed only to keep you stimulated enough to keep on scrolling so they could report a higher number to investors in their next quarterly report and sell you to more ads.
The entire place was always an artificial environment designed to prey on and monetize your attention span; Unless you were replying to somebody you knew, it was never a place for any kind of authentic interaction, much less some kind of grandiose “global town square” that “gave power to the people”.
Twitter may have given certain individuals the tools at some points to trigger positive change. The insulin example was probably the best-case-possible outcome from Musk’s fumbling of the verification system, but it was an accident. And in the meantime, when Twitter does get used deliberately, it has spawned a terrorist group that has murdered and enslaved thousands of people, turbocharged the decline of the most powerful and wealthiest country in the world towards either autocratization or polarized paralysis, and fueled many, many actual full-blown civil wars. (This is what happens when your revolution isn’t built on solid foundations.) Plus, you know, all the harassment, stalking, rape and death threats, political interference, privacy concerns, mental health effects, and actual bots used by malicious actors (which reputable sources tend to estimate at tens of millions in number).
Twitter’s a corporation. They never cared about being a “town square”, only about being seen as such by users so they could line their own pockets. And Elon Musk is just an idiot. He’s not some scheming genius (though he clearly tries to be); he’s the same as any rich idiot discovering the hard way that no amount of ego will make up indefinitely for lack of competence.
It’s just the way they are, no silly conspiracies or battle between good and evil required. Twitter’s amoral, rather than immoral, and Musk is immoral, but it’s in a flailing self-destructive way rather than a conniving Machiavellian way. They’re acting out their nature, and we get caught up in it.
How many actual terrorist groups were we going to let this corporation create in their pursuit for profit before finally admitting that maybe the entire idea was bad from the start? Currently, the immoral idiot is destroying both his own credibility and also the amoral corporation for us all, and really, this is probably almost the best possible outcome.
Took over Twitter. Ruined it. Then : “The sad truth is that there are no great ‘social networks’ right now,”.
Twitter used to be in much better shape financially before musk took over but implying that it was ever “great” is a bit of a stretch
twitter may have been a shithole in general, but it was great compared to what it is now.
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Yes. Twitter was profitable in 2019. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1418091/000141809120000037/twtr-20191231.htm
Ctrl+F for “Net Income”, which will take you to the $1,465,659 (thousands) figure somewhere in its charts. Net Income is the bottom line: after all revenues, costs, etc. etc. of the year were added up.
Musk took it over with a so called “Leveraged Buyout”, meaning Twitter borrowed $13 Billion to allow Elon Musk to buy it for $44 Billion (meaning Elon Musk only paid $33 Billion, the random +2 Billion to wipeout all the old debt).
Note that $13 Billion in loans costs somewhere between 10% to 14% right now, depending on how much of the loan was fixed and how much of it was adjustable. At 10%, this means that Twitter took on $1.3 Billion/year in interest payments as Elon Musk bought the company. There’s pretty much no hope for Twitter to ever be profitable again, they’d have to execute as perfectly as 2019 despite losing 80% of their staff (Elon Musk also fired everyone when he took over the company).
The company was “barely profitable” in 2019, and “just barely losing money” in 2020, 2021. But add on a $1.3+ Billion/year loadstone, and its just… not… going to ever be profitable again.
The funniest part, though, is that the $13 billion in debt to Twitter is held by lenders who would be first in line to get any payout from a Twitter bankruptcy. If the enterprise value as a whole drops below $13 billion, then Musk would get nothing out of the bankruptcy, and would lose his entire $30b+ investment with nothing to show for it. Unless, of course, Musk decides to put good money after bad, and pony up a new investment of even more money, that the lenders would agree to take.
As much as I’m happy to see both Twitter and Musk fail, your comment reminds me yet again that leveraged buyouts are fundamentally fucked up and ought to be illegal.
Twitter was never great, just reactionaries yelling about shit they only know 15% of.
How did he ruin it though? I hear that all the time but I myself haven’t noticed any changes. Well, except for a logo but that’s very minor
I myself haven’t noticed any changes
So you haven’t noticed the 80% reduction in staff leading to incredible amounts of Twitter Downtime, the rise in hate-speech due to the firing of the moderators, the loss of mainstream advertisements, and the replacement with ridiculous low-quality advertising because the mainstream advertisers have grown concerned about the hate-speech?
And you haven’t noticed the increase in downtime as the website continuously crashes? The loss of the blocking feature? The inability to block Elon Musk specifically? (and how he keeps appearing on everyone’s feed even when you try to get rid of it?). The loss of API access?
Comment quality and overall quality of discussion has declined significantly on Twitter as well, as Twitter has fallen from top10 on the App/Play store to #55 or later, because it turns out that Americans are too stupid to search for “X” rather than “Twitter”. There has been a precipitous decline in the already crappy quality discussion.
Finally, Threads and Mastodon have sucked out many high-quality posters and sub-communities.
“no, not really” is the answer to all of those, honestly. But I rarely use twitter, hence why I was asking. Just blocked Elon by the way, really curious if what you’re saying about blocking him is true.
Cool you barely use twitter and didn’t notice any of the declines detailed above but “no, not really” thanks for the high quality discussion
Are we speaking a different language or something? The comment above prefaces all questions "you haven’t noticed " - no I haven’t noticed none of those precisely because I don’t use twitter much. What’s the discrepancy here?
You asked how elon ruined the experience, someone explained it to you, you then said you don’t even use the platform and hadn’t noticed any of that. Like. Why did you ask in the first place and why are you dismissing the fairly detailed and accurate answer you got?
Edit: I’ll leave my response but I think you’re actually just curious from the perspective of someone who doesn’t use twitter a lot. I think I knee jerk reacted as though you were trying to defend musk as his fans are fairly obnoxious. Having reread this whole conversation, I think I’m coming off more aggressive than I should be.
Anyway, yeah you’re right you probably wouldn’t have noticed the negative changes musk has brought about. As a former daily user of twitter I’m fairly angry at the destruction of the site. I think twitter was an extremely important venue, it gave regular people direct access to interaction with the rich and powerful, it gave access to unfiltered news from on the ground people and it allowed people from remote/poorer parts of the world a way to interact with the west. Losing that in the society we live in is a real bummer.
For a product the logo and brand recognition are not minor. Twitter was so well known and ubiquitous that the word “tweet” was included in dictionaries around the world. He threw that away and replaced it with a generic X, and no one can figure out how to call posts on that platform now.
But other than that, he has a very particular stance on moderation and free speech. He thinks hateful comments are just fine, as long as they aren’t strictly against the law. But he also doesn’t apply the same standards to himself, removing stuff he doesn’t like even though it would be ok according to his own rules. He also gutted the Twitter/X staff, particularly the tech departements, leading to numerous outages and technical problems. All this has made it an even worse platform for civil public discourse, and it wasn’t all that great before he took over imo.
and no one can figure out how to call posts on that platform now.
I will continue to call them twats
I like Xeets. Pronounced shits.
Thanks for the explanation. For me none of that, well, except for content moderation, really matters. I just didn’t understand why people blame Elon when the platform has already been overrun by bots way before he took over. Whenever I look at it, It’s all crypto and political spam. Who cares what logo looks like, or how many people work on it, when there’s no good content to begin with?
You’re being extremely disingenuous. Those things exist on that platform and every other social media platform. If that’s literally all you’re seeing, you are not using it right… in fact you have to be going pretty far out of your way to make that the entirety of the content shown to you. It wasn’t hard at all to find quality posters and filter out the bullshit.
Right now, I opened twitter, and out of 16 trending topics, 7 are crypto spam, 3 are political spam, 2 are just spam, 2 are generic words, and the remaining two I have zero interested in. Today I also got a “trending tweet” notification that was in some foreign language I don’t know. Went on a homepage and every third post is some kind of spam, so I had to block like a couple dozen accounts just so they never pop up again. I have no idea how you are supposed to find good creators when spammers are gaming the system so easily. And it’s been like that for a few years already. No other social network has this problem, I would’ve quit internet if that was the case.
Right now? Probably. Musk has super-fucked it and I won’t have anything to do with the guy or his projects. You argued it’s always been this way, though. It was not if you took a moment to use it correctly and follow people you like and ignore those you don’t. I give my friends shit (jokingly) for using “X” and the answer is the same “It’s the best way to keep tabs on my favorite creators.”
Think about this. Staff soon may not have a place to work if they don’t work from home. Musk hasn’t been paying vendors or rent on Twitter offices for some time now. His failure to pay server costs caused outages and a scramble from what staff remained to move that info off google servers he didn’t want to pay for and onto servers he owns. This kind of thing may not effect all users on a daily basis, but imagine if your landlord just decided not to pay the utilities bill out of your rent. Eventually the city or municipality would shut off the electric or water. You can’t have a domicile that doesn’t have electric and water. The place would be condemned and all renters would be out of their homes. That’s basically a very similar scenario to what’s happening at Twitter.
The “blue check” system which was previously used to denote verified users were who they claimed to be suddenly became a complete cash grab for $8 a month, even more for companies to have verified checks or sets of them? Then when not everyone was buying in those users were pushed to the top of replies to users posts. This of course caused tons of people to just get blocked outright because of their checks.
Additionally i believe he has threatened to remove some companies handles because they stopped using them most notably NPR.
Now he has floated the idea of removing the blocking feature because reasons? Who knows what he thinks. So the functionality has not changed a ton, for now, the quality of what you get has gone down.
Oh also he made a specific exception and unbanned some user who posted literal child porn
The most blocked accounts turned out to likely be the Bluechecks, because these guys paid to be in replies, a d their opinions are 90% trash.
On Twitter I basically always block the new Bluechecks, there’s even a hashtag(that won’t show in the search e.e) called ‘BlockTheBlue’.
He likely saw a report that showed he was the most blocked user, so he got sads
Also, his bluetlicker losers likely see the “you can’t see this because you are blocked” message everywhere they went and they complained
Now they’ll just be “muted” and not know people shut off their loser ass
If you don’t notice the changes, you were part of the people he bumped up at all costs that turned it into a terrible service
Well, maybe, but then it’s a terrible bid, because I only use twitter to shit on brands. And I’m definitely not buying the check mark.
EDIT: accidentally removed “not”
And I’m definitely buying the check mark.
So you want to show to the world that you’re a mindless Pro-Elon Musk simp?
The blue checkmark is a death upon your online reputation. That’s why you’re allowed to hide the blue-check these days, because the internet has begun to realize that you LOSE reputation by buying that checkmark.
Fuck sorry, I meant not buying, wanted to make it italic but removed instead
Nice try bluetlicker!
;)
You got me. I’m blue…da-ba-dee-da-ba-di-da-ba-dee-da-ba-di
This is the one thing I am going to miss more than anything: Twitter worked for resolving issues with companies. It was the single good thing about it. Now that is going away, companies can ignore you.
Seriously I have been on the phone, email, on hold, trying to get things resolved. One tweet and suddenly I am important and they want to help. A lot of companies have different support teams to monitor social media and that is where shit gets done.
Jesus Christ. How dense are you?
Keep it civil, Mr. DickHandler
That’s doctor dick handler, he didn’t go to internet medical school for 8 years to be called Mr.
Are you sure dick handling is a part of medical school curriculum? I’m pretty sure it’s part of gender studies
Mr? Show some respect. He’s a Dr!
there’s only been about 7,000 articles every week about it
Wtf?
I’m sorry but if you didn’t get mad at every reply on any decently large post being filled with NPC- ass boomer tier memes and replies and attempts at self promo, you might be a boomer NPC.
X? Can we collectively decide to forever call it “X, formerly known as Twitter” just to piss him off?
I like the most recent The Verge variant: Twitter, X, or whatever it’s currently called…
I call it Xitter. The X is pronounced with an “sh” sound.
Better to just call it “The site formerly known as Twitter” and don’t mention X at all. That would piss him off more.
“…posted on social media…”
Ooh, even better!
I just call it Twitter. Just like I call the (former?) rapper Kanye West. I don’t cater to the whims of the 1% if I can help it.
Best part was he tried to chicken out of his own deal but the feds obv wouldn’t allow him back off on his very own proposal to buy Twitter in the first place!
the feds
Delaware Court.
Contract law is weird.
Not really. He entered into a binding contract and agreed to bypass due diligence.
That wasn’t even offered by Twitter, he just agreed without any prompting.
Yes yes yes. But that binding contract was in Delaware. Because contract law is weird.
In practice, most business contracts are enforced by the state of Delaware, not the federal government nor any national-level court. Yes, its a state-level court.
Side fact. Delaware’s has more registered companies then people
Can we start a gofundme to persuade him to take over Facebook?
No, do Jira next pls.
Good, shut it down. Time to end Twitter.
thanks for nothing you clown
I mean, Elon sucks, but I am kind of happy to hear Twitter might fully die. I’ve always hated the idea of forced character limits.
The world needs more critical and expansive discussion, not additional reasons to summerize and minimize important topics into long headlines.
In the case of longer form thought, Twitter provided links. What’s the problem?
People just like to rage over things on the internet. I suspect they also don’t know how to get to the fkn point rather than ramble like they’re waxing poetic on a topic. Reddit is full of that shit.
I think it’s just a human problem. You or I may like to read long form journalism, but we’re in the extreme minority. It’s not dying because it was so hugely profitable.
Logistically too, if you’re trying to parse through the top 100 tweets in a day, and each one takes multiple paragraphs to get to the point, the amount of various viewpoints the average person is able to interact with shrinks dramatically.
Granted, it seems like everyone is taking the forced brevity as an excuse to just write +1 to pile onto their side, since that’s easier.
I feel like there has to be a medium between “Tweets that shoot context in the head” and “Autobiography attached to a macaroni and cheese recipe”. The need for sites to keep you there encourages complete nonsense that doesn’t contribute to the thing I’m there for, and so turns me away from long form anything. I got shit to do and a thousand articles competing for attention, most of which were written by bots and contain nothing. The whole scheme is just broken.
I feel like I had a thesis when I started this comment and I forgot where I was going…
Now all he needs to do is to connect his own management of Twitter to its failure.
Of all his managerial feats, I’m confident that one is beyond him.
Wishful thinking
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Read in Morgan Freeman’s voice.
And somehow it’ll be the “woke mind virus’s” fault. There will be no self reflection at all.
the guy didn’t even want twitter. the whole thing is depressing.
I wouldn’t be surprised this is him urging his cult to buy monthly subscriptions. If we see higher tier subscription be introduced one of these days, that would be the reason for this fear mongering. That said, it’s awesome that he’s getting a reality check. You can be surrounded by as many yes-men as you want but people en masse don’t care and even if they do, they love seeing rich people humbled. No one misses a good shitstorm.
Doesn’t matter. The subscription revenue, which ever musk taint sniffers said would take in billions, barely will probably offset 1 month of lost ad revenue for a whole year worth of subs.
He has added a billion dollars of interest negative revenue at the same time he’s lost half his ad revenue. That’s a bad combo
No doubt, am just trying to read a bit further up because I don’t take him as stupid as he acts.
🍌We’re all trying to find the guy who did this
