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Twitter dies for good in the next six months: 80% probability
By now you know that Elon gave staff a deadline of today (Thursday) to either commit to being "extremely hardcore" or leave (source). Unsurprisingly, most people - roughly 75%, according to some Internet rando - didn't take him up on this. Elon blinked and apparently people still have access.
That won't do much (WaPo):
But that's not even what I was going to write about, just what happened while I was composing the post. (Also let's put aside that he said "microservices are bloat" and then they killed the microservice serving SMS 2-factor login.)
To me, the biggest news is that he axed 80% of the 5500 contractors (source, Casey Newton, or someone with a premium account impersonating him I guess).
The contractors were responsible for things like moderation (source: what are they gonna do, use salaried employees?). If you don't have moderation for basic things like CSAM, you're boned. I know a thing or two about moderation, and if you let the Internet type into a text field, you get some dank shit. And crucially, you can't automate it away, because there's a human on the other side working to defeat whatever you're doing. I mean, the YouTube comment section probably has some of the most expensive automation on the planet working on it and the spam still gets worse every day, and I'm talking the obvious stuff like "HIT ME UP ON TELEGRAM <number>". The only thing that saves you is humans clicking buttons (and getting PTSD, but let's skip that for now). Google had 101k employees but 121k contractors as of March 2019, and that's what the contractors do, click buttons.
If you don't have moderation, you don't get the YouTube comments section, because they at least have contractors backed up by code (at the cost of many expensive engineer-years). You don't even get 4chan, because they at least have Those Who Do It For Free. You get some ungodly shithole most younger Internet users have never experienced. You're getting... the virtual equivalent of your local Greyhound terminal. Whatever happens to someone's chat room side project that gets posted to /b/. Sludge.
Twitter will have to either restrict posting to an unbearable degree or watch as the remaining users get tired of slurs in their replies and bounce.
Remember when Elon was just going to clean up the bots on Twitter?
(Reason for posting: I saw some takes elsewhere on this site that apparently Musk would lead Twitter to success or at least improve it or something, and disagreed.)
People seem to forget that the world is larger than the US. Users across the world don't care as much about this drama as americans. I doubt Indian, Saudi, Japanese or German users care as much about the Musk situation. Twitter tends to be less censored in smaller languages than english as the censors can't understand the content and the AIs aren't as trained.
There may be an increase in spam but most likely a lot of the censors weren't handling pure spambots but more difficult to parse content than "milfs in your area, click here to meet"
The biggest reason for twitter surviving is the user base, unless all the important users migrate at once people will still have a reason to visit twitter.
On the colony bit. Some times I believe foreigners deserve a right to vote in American elections because America influences to them a great extent. Actually made a comment questioning womens right to vote has been bad the other day. So I think thru nuances.
You all should apply to be Puerto Rico and a territory so atleast you get a house rep.
I am genuinely appalled at the extent to which America, my country, has colonized the cultural landscape of our supposed allies. I would apologize but that seems a trifle in the face of what is in some ways a cultural genocide. It seems as though in many countries, there are no genuine foreigners, just Americans who speak a different language.
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Decolonization doesn’t make sense. Economies of scale and trade are good at boosting living standards.
I am conservative but don’t believe in America first. As a global hegemon which I think is good for our living standards we still have debts to our colonies.
Brexxit didn’t work because of geopolitical realities. But America has a broad umbrella some times more important than local politics and you might deserve a say in our view.
Honestly an interesting subject that might be worth a top level posts.
I hate wef and a lot of your politics so don’t even think of 2 senate seats.
Oh I thought you meant decolonize as an American colony.
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