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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   31386 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 24, 2023

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(reposting because new thread)

Is Twitter finally dead yet?

Usually, I'd be the last person to ask such a provocative question. I used to be one of the people who rolled their eyes or otherwise ignored sensationalized media stories surrounding Elon Musk and his takeover of Twitter, stories which have plagued the news cycle for the better part of almost a year now. It felt like you couldn't go a day or two without an article on the most mundane of things that were only remarkable because of Musk, like him going to the bathroom in the middle of the night.

But I have to - reluctantly - admit, maybe all the media's negative hype had a point.

The latest decision Musk has made is to rebrand Twitter to "X". The URL X.com will automatically redirect Twitter. Twitter is changing its logo from the iconic blue bird into a white "X". Apparently a tweet should now just be called an "X".

The obvious question is: Why? Musk's answer seems to be that he wants to change Twitter into some sort of "super-app" where one can do everything on it, similar to the WeChat app in China. This only raises further questions, like why people couldn't just use other apps, or why it had to be done in this why, or why they couldn't even just go the Meta approach where the company is renamed X (in fact, it's already been "X Corp." for a while) but Twitter gets to still be named Twitter and keep the blue bird logo.

The one thing that everyone in the Musk-Twitter discourse seems to agree on is that Twitter has significant value in its brand. Now, it might not even have that. Who really wants to talk about "'X'-ing on X" when it's far more idiosyncratic to say "tweeting on Twitter", which people have done for the better part of the decade?

But to answer my own question: No, I think it's the wrong approach to look at each change as potentially an outright Twitter-killer. I think the bigger picture should be looked at, and that in the long run, the demise of Twitter will be a death by a thousand paper cuts, where each change isn't quite so negative to kill it entirely, but it keeps Twitter on a downwards and downwards trend. And there's already been several paper cuts - fleeing advertisers, ratelimits, restricted guest browsing, etc.

Gonna try to steelman the X rebranding here.

The one thing that everyone in the Musk-Twitter discourse seems to agree on is that Twitter has significant value in its brand. Now, it might not even have that. Who really wants to talk about "'X'-ing on X" when it's far more idiosyncratic to say "tweeting on Twitter", which people have done for the better part of the decade?

Moving to X could be a very powerful move because specifically of it's weak branding. At this point in time, I think most americans and people who are deep into the american sphere either currently hate or have at some point hated Twitter. Right-wingers because it's been banning them hard under the previous management, mainstream progressivesbecause it stopped banning right wingers under current management. Nazis because it doesn't let them post aggressive slurs at people. Communists because it's a corporation owned by a billionaire. Libertarians because they respond to government requests. Greens because I don't know, computers use electricity. Centrists because everyone is yelling politically charged polarizing content at them on it.

Not only sunsetting the brand, but making the branding less salient can be a smart move. Seeing X branding when clicking on a link to a post somewhere doesn't remind me immediately "oh yeah, its twitter, fuck twitter!" like it used to. And in time, X being so generic might avoid having such strong emotions associated with it; it's more likely to be a liability for the company.

Talking about Twitter ... there was once this app called threads that was supposed to kill it? Anyone knows what became of it?

It got a ton of engagement at first, but that fell off a cliff extremely quickly. Many speculate that this was due to its stricter content moderation compared to Twitter.

I'm not too surprised at that. When Tumblr banned porn, every artist moved to Twitter because they didn't do that. Meanwhile, most anything remotely NSFW on Instagram will get people shadowbanned or just outright suspended. I wouldn't be surprised if the truth was that Threads just could not draw the artists in, who make up a significant portion of Twitter's userbase and indeed make for a strong "minimum reason" to use Twitter in the first place.

he wants to change Twitter into some sort of "super-app" where one can do everything on it,

Have these people not learned from the trashfire that PDFs became because of Adobe's bullshit?

PDFs are ubiquitous, so that example would certainly not deter him.

What were they like before? I thought they were designed from the start to always provide a consistent view at the expense of being mangled garbage internally.

They were postscript, lightweight collection of text. You could also embed fonts, images. When adobe realized they had something on their hand they could fill with random shit to "provide value" and use vendor lock in now they have a whole JS runtime in there, "web forms", "rendering 3d objects", fucking FLASH, god knows what else unspeakable nightmares from beyond the black lagoon.

The one thing that everyone in the Musk-Twitter discourse seems to agree on is that Twitter has significant value in its brand. Now, it might not even have that.

His actions over the past few months have been convincing me more and more that he is that foretold Moshiach who will come and deliver humanity from the Twitter menace. Long may he continue!

The weird hate boner some people in the media have more musk makes me doubt a lot of what I hear. I mean, people want him to fail sooo bad. Just look at all the articles talking about how big threads is going to be... Or remember the victory lap everyone did when a window broke on a tesla truck (after getting hit with a baseball bat)? Or compare the articles talking about musk with the articles talking about meta... There's an obvious bias here.

Twitter was bloated. A bunch of people were fired and they're now attacking a notoriously bad code base (a least according to hackernews comments); Things are going to get rough for a while :marseyshrug:

Is there anything specifically you doubt about the above account? The X rename is bizarre, why burn the brand, and the pivot to video-and-banking doesn't seem particularly smart either. I don't see why Twitter Bank/Pay/Card would have an advantage over Apple or Google's offerings or existing fintechs, and Elon has not released even a slight indication about where in the space they're targeting, or if they're doing something new.

The media hating him doesn't prevent them from accurately reporting unforced errors

He wanted to turn PayPal into X - this has been his dream for decades, since the start of his career.

remember the victory lap everyone did when a window broke on a tesla truck (after getting hit with a baseball bat)

You're leaving out how this was in the context of a demonstration of how strong the window was.

You don't have to hate someone to enjoy them failing after bragging about how great something of theirs is. You just need to be human.

after getting hit with a baseball bat

Yes, it was part of a demo. It's funny how that context is always left out.

Who else gets treated like this during a product demo?

What other similarly publicized product demos have included such failures?

Meta? Google glasses?

How many product demos have journos purposely leaving out context?

How many 'twitter is doomed' articles have been written since musk took over.

Do you really believe there is no bias? Honest question...

What specifically did went so badly in a Meta or Google glass demostration event?

When you're talking up your product based on how strong your windows are, it's pretty noteworthy when they fail repeatedly during your demonstration.

There is absolutely bias against musk. But highlighting this failed demo is not an example of it.

This apple conference was famously clowned on back in the day when steve jobs couldnt get the wifi to work. https://youtube.com/watch?v=znxQOPFg2mo

Its just kinda funny to see some megacorp talking up the hot new shit and then it falls flat on its face, even if it doesn't actually represent how the final product is.

"Famously".

Doesn't sound like everyone just ignored his flop.

People love to see the rich, powerfull, and successful fail. It doesn't take a biased media to gin up interest in a car producer saying his windows are strong and then breaking them (twice) during the demonstration of their strength.

I'm not saying people aren't biased against Musk. I'm saying that if you think this is evidence of that bias, you are wrong.

Who else gets treated like this during a product demo?

Everyone? We just passed the 25th anniversary of the time Windows 98 crashed during a live demo. Google it and skim the millions of results. And Bill Gates used to be hated at least as much as Musk is. Today if you heard Gates ranting about "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" you might wonder if he was working on an anti-Anopheles-mosquito gene drive to end malaria, not just trying to crush open computing standards.

Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all

Windows 98 didn't have the equivalent of being hit with a baseball bat, like someone trying to hack it or force it to crash.

Not sure what they were exactly demoing, but "attempting to use multitasking" was kind of like hitting Windows 98 with a baseball bat as I recall...

after getting hit with a baseball bat

Better yet it was beaten with a big sledgehammer. Then later they were able to shot put throw metal weights to crack windows.

The sledgehammer was not applied to the window.

Yes, but the big sledgehammer deforming the door is what caused the window to later break.

So, fun fact, I have it through the grapevine that the actual reason was they were WHALING on the damn thing the night before the demo, and that weakened it enough that the next substantial hit - the demo - was enough to break it. Of course I have no way of personally confirming any of that but I trust the person who told me.

Which is why the second window on the second door also broke, right?

My theory as to the reason why they have this weird hate boner is exactly because he trimmed the fat and bloat at twitter. A lot of that bloat consisted of cultural commissars who made sure to keep Twitter on the Right Side of History. Once you fire all that dead weight, their equally useless companions in other companies and organisations start getting nervous - if one person can just dump the diversity officers and experience no problems, then that's an existential threat to all the diversity officers and social justice consultants employed at other places. As a result, those other diversity officers are now using their position and influence to punish him and make an example of him to prevent anyone else from getting the extremely profitable idea that you don't actually need to pay a bunch of diversity officers to sit around and work on dismantling white supremacist values like being on time, completing work and using mathematics.

My theory is it's larger than just the diversity commissars and is an example of an owner taking back a hugely influential piece of capital from the professional managerial class (PMC) and more directly controlling it again. It's difficult to parse because the cultural commissars are always apart of this PMC and are the most individually identifiable, but it wasn't just the commissars themselves who were removed from Twitter and they weren't the only ones which were effectively controlling the capital many times in explicit conflict with the owner. This was a big issue under Jack with Jack saying one thing (and I genuinely believe he thought what he was saying) and then the PMC actually controlling the capital differently. There are other examples, e.g., Facebook are entirely controlled by the PMC and they regularly make demands on Zuckerberg which he succumbs to. Throughout the 10s, there are some examples of this with his PMC bucking at Zuckerberg allowing content on facebook. I believe a lot of this hate boner from those in the government, media, academia and elsewhere are responding to this attack on the PMC because they either are the PMC or strongly identify with it.

Musk's takeover wasn't just an attack on the useless diversity bloat, but an attack on the PMC itself harkening back to the days of the captains of industry at the reins before the rapid explosion of PMC through the economy.

I totally agree on this front and I'm really glad to see more people even talking about the managerial class. I don't really have much to add here because I think that we're both correct.

I've seen articles to the effect that DEI positions are already heavily hit with layoffs.

The question is, does Musk have a plan for a super app? Or is he just flailing around with half-baked ideas trying to turn a profit on his unfortunate purchase, like his ridiculous tweets indicate? I'm not sure at this point.

But if there is a plan, X could well work – better than expected given its network effects, I mean, it's not like people can realistically leave for mastodon or Threads lol. «Everything app» like WeChat with its extensions is tacky; but it needn't be, that's just the worst of Chinese culture, failure of global synchrony and principled execution. Musk just needs to deliver something that makes Twitter's UX of yesterday (well, the day before) obsolete in people's minds. I initially thought he'd build it independently when his bid falls through, but he was not allowed to have it fall through, so here we are.

Twitter (or X now, I guess) is loved, like old reddit was, so people don't want it to change. Unlike old Reddit, it already was changed for the better (editing, longtweets) and can be substantially improved again (Ugh, DM chats). I have many gimmicky ideas but, to begin with, it has godawful search – and that's exactly what Musk's xAI thing can help with (though I suppose Igor Babuschkin wouldn't be too interested in that). For starters, just implement decent embedding search to eat www.perplexity.ai before it gets going. And while you're at it, why not make the whole of Twitter into one retrieval-augmented generative canvas, including outgoing links, a collective exocortex in the style of Roam Research (rip)? And indeed, ride the tiger: allow people to traverse a continuous generative surface, while also making it a tool for discovery of like-minded humans; eat dating apps as well. Tiers of users, different scrolling limits can be seen as a prelude to this compute-intensive paradigm shift.

Of course, the cringier outcome is more probable.

It can’t work because in the West the services you can access through super apps (food delivery, taxis, chat, online shopping, payments) already have extensively developed infrastructure and stickiness, and none of them are going to sign over their entire user data and control over their product and a percentage of their revenue to Musk in exchange for…access to the Twitter audience which they almost certainly already have.

Super Apps were a unique response to the fact that smartphone adoption in much of Asia represented the first time hundreds of millions of people got online. For various reasons texting and emails were less common and so were quickly swept away by messenger apps like QQ which ultimately became super apps at exactly the time that online shopping, food delivery, taxis, and mobile payments were becoming popular.

In the West everyone with any money (and therefore the entire lucrative market) is on iPhone where iOS serves most built-in super app functions (single sign on and near-universal payments locked to FaceID and fully integrated with all card issuers/providers, with seamless interchange fee distribution) and people are used to opening apps directly from their Home Screen or search. Even Android now has most of these features.

There’s simply no case for a super app. Why would I open Twitter/‘X’ and navigate a bloated and unwieldy app to get to the food delivery section when I could just open UberEats? Why do I need Twitter/X to pay my friends when I can open PayPal? Apple Cash actually already let’s you text people money through iMessage (by far the most popular messaging app in the US). In Europe, India and South America it seems unlikely people will drop the WhatsApp ecosystem, which itself already has full payments in India and Brazil where it’s most popular.

The Super App experience in China, Indonesia etc is actually worse than the regular smartphone experience in the US because super apps are bloated and slow and require lots of navigation. Why would Americans switch to it?

the services you can access through super apps (food delivery, taxis, chat, online shopping, payments) already have extensively developed infrastructure and stickiness

But I explicitly do not mean that pedestrian stuff. Copying WeChat is not a viable strategy because WeChat is a copy of what the West has. I mean aggregating social media/research services iPhone very much does not provide, and cannot, because they will only exist in that form thanks to a protocol leveraging Twitter data.

I think LLMs herald the complete devaluation of any public information. Anything in the training set will be free. Siri will have it, Google will have it, Bing will have it, public information will become entirely and absolutely commodified and thus worthless. Even Musk cannot keep the scrapers away. The models will be good enough for any normal person to use for information retrieval pretty universally.

So the only research that will have value will be privately commissioned stuff where access is carefully guarded (both legally and practically) to ensure it doesn’t become part of a training set.

But if there is a plan, X could well work – better than expected given its network effects, I mean, it's not like people can realistically leave for mastodon or Threads lol.

That's backwards though, threads shows how FB's network effects failed to translate to a new product. X is the new product Twitter's trying to transfer users to. Google/Facebook/Apple/MS do have diverse offerings, but that's as much because they execute well as because they're entrenched (and google's failure to execute has led to many of their new social products failing).

Twitter should improve search - but it's weird they haven't taken it yet, geohot mentioned it as something to improve when he interned at twitter but nothing big happened.

Not backwards at all, but it's a bit more complex. Facebook users are just not very interested in Twitter-like offering without Twitter network, they can converse between themselves just fine on Facebook; nor are Twitter users interested in Facebook people who don't have Twitter. Everyone has already self-sorted by preference. The only delta Threads has is the meme about rocket man bad.

X is the new product Twitter's trying to transfer users to.

This far it's just a new logo (and optional URL) for Twitter, it's not transfering me anywhere and I expect further changes to be built on top of the same network instead of some separate thing.

geohot mentioned it as something to improve when he interned at twitter but nothing big happened.

People burn out quickly under Musk. Geohot burns out quickly even without Musk. I don't expect anything from him, but search will probably be improved within a year.

A Western ‘Super App’ is ridiculous because of the reason why Asian Super App exist.

In simple terms, they exist because of the various shitty semi-stock versions of Android that dominate the smartphone market in China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and pretty much the rest of Southeast Asia. There are few standardized apps, and for a long time Android Pay didn’t really exist or work. In these markets the Super App serves as a one stop launcher for payments, chat, online shopping, taxis and so on.

In America, the iPhone serves as the ‘super app’. It has messages (iMessage), payments (Apple Pay) and various other integrated services, and through notifications and cross-app integration accessing third party apps like banking and Uber is easy, with shared single sign on and payment via iPhone password or FaceID.

Super Apps evolved to fill a software gap that doesn’t exist in the USA, at least not anymore.

Elon also has to partner with Uber/Lyft/PayPal/Venmo/Amazon/Ebay/booking/Ticketmaster etc. I am sceptic that he will be good in that. Maybe a boring uncontroversial person could pull it of.

For Twitter to tacking a payment option onto itself is a monumental task. How many years would they need to be feature competitive with PayPal?

From a software-philosophical point of view my guess is that it will just bloat the X-Twitter app.

It can't be a Super App if it's not an app and can't be installed on all phones. Even in the US, the iPhone only reached 50% market share in September of 2022: https://www.engadget.com/iphone-overtakes-android-us-market-share-223251196.html

Apple makes a lot of money with their product margins but they don't even dominate the US market for phones, let alone global markets.

And is it not good for the consumer that ** the 'super app' is going to have competition now ? **

My heart bleeds for Apple users. Every time I am forced to use an Iphone - which is every time my boomer doctor father has some problem he can't figure out, I feel like screaming. It's like if someone took an Android phone and lobotomized it.

First time a few years back I found myself in utter disbelief when told the Iphone does not have a file system. There's no simple way for apps to share files.

Why people pay for these abominations is quite unclear. Fashion ? Don't know any better ?

Iphone does not have a file system. There's no simple way for apps to share files.

The file sharesheet (allowing transfer between apps but not saving) was introduced in iOS 8 (2014). A bona fide File system was introduced in iOS 11 (2017).

I agree they were a bit late to the party, but only by a couple years. A file system would not have added any functionality until iOS 4 or so (2010)--the earlier versions were too limited (as were iOS's competitors at that time, to be fair).

The file sharesheet (allowing transfer between apps but not saving) was introduced in iOS 8 (2014).

That was an optional app or something like that ?

No, on iPhone you press the universal share button (a horizontal square bracket with an arrow pointing upward) and then ‘open in’ any of your apps (along a scrollbar which appears automatically) and you can transfer files, documents, pictures, downloads, whatever between pretty much any app that supports that format.

Yeah Share > Open In works in almost every case.

Well… to establish my bonafides I’m a Linux user personally and professionally, but there are some very obvious reasons to use iPhone over Android. One is quality. There’s simply no comparison in build quality from basically any android phone to an iPhone. Second is updates. My iPhone will get quick software updates years and years past the end of (slow and unpredictable) support for most android phones. Third is usability. iPhones are much more usable than any Android I’ve had out of the box. Apple Pay is great. iMessage is great, the camera is great.

I understand the desire to tinker on your devices, I truly do, but the iPhone is superior on basically every metric except tinkering, which means it’s better for almost everyone.

I suspect you're probably only ever seeing cheapest Chinese android phones because in the US Apple has a lock on the market. Comparing between the Motorolas and Iphones my parents use, there's no noticeable difference in build quality.
The only difference is that the Iphone has far, far fewer features, although that might be due to the model perhaps ?

I mean I've owned many Androids over the years... HTC Magic, Samsung Galaxy, Droids, OnePluses... None of them really had the build quality of an iPhone.

What features is the iPhone missing, other than the ability to install software outside of the app store?

What features is the iPhone missing, other than the ability to install software outside of the app store?

It's like Android but worse and crippled in odd ways.

For example, recently saw someone bitch about how hard it is to get a ringtone into it.](https://twitter.com/echetus/status/1683202524789239808) and list some familiar software relatedsounding BS.

  1. https://twitter.com/echetus/status/1684272662485295104

  2. https://twitter.com/echetus/status/1684273095169789953

As a mature human male, this seems like a trivial complaint.

Trivial or not, it's worse re: apps and it's more expensive and the money goes to people who hate me.

Staying with Android is really a no brainer.

Also a linux user. Samsung's Galaxy S series is generally the same or even better build quality than an IPhone and these days gets functionality updates for at least 4 years plus security updates for a few years after that point, and they come out pretty quickly too once the Android version is officially released.

Maybe Samsung has actually figured out the software updates, but a few years ago they had not.

Samsung is probably closest to Apple in terms of build quality.

But they’re very expensive even compared to iPhones, or at least the flip versions are.

My other concern is privacy, or such remnants of it that remain. As far as I’m aware Apple is (mostly) content to make money from the hardware and the App Store and actually implemented pretty good privacy features, whereas android is riddled with Google spyware. Or is that not the case anymore?

I think the name change is silly and the Twitter brand is very big and valuable as to drop it. Nonetheless, as a lurker on Twitter, I don't understand the arguments for "everything is worse" or "musk is ruining Twitter". All I can see is more features and improved functionality in a sort time. Video uploads, long text, subscription for money, encrypted dms?, Group conversations/streaming. A lot of new stuff.

Maybe some real users of Twitter can tell me how is it worse, but everything seems tribal hate. I even heard journalists say "now anyone can buy the blue check" as in pure garbage functionality. In that case is status loss.

Concrete ways twitter has gotten worse recently, for me:

1) Blue reply boosting. It's less a "boost" and more that all blue replies are prioritized over all non-blue replies, no matter the quality. Together with twitter blue being a class marker for 'median-iq crypto conservative', this makes replies to large tweets uniformly garbage, for no reason whatsoever. This is the biggest one. It's basically just burning the commons for profit.

2) Blocking logged-out browsing. This is just incredibly inconvenient, and also a big one. I think this is related to elon's strange ideas around bots stealing data for AI or something. I strongly suspect it's not stopping scraping.

3) Spam: Spam has gotten a bit worse. Not that much worse, though.

4) Ads are incredibly obnoxious when on a platform without ublock (which isn't that common for me, but I imagine it is for others), and blue doesn't even remove them all...

5) not personally, but DM limit gated by blue. Doesn't actually bother me, but it does for many. Incredibly strange choice.

Concrete ways it's improved, for me:

1) Less strict moderation. It's not more competent, the % of bans that are unjustified has if anything increased, but I can gawk at all sorts of creatures I couldn't a year ago. This is quite nice!

video uploads, long text, encrypted dms, streamings ... I just don't use these at all

The combination of 1 and 2 makes it net negative for me.

Totally fair, thanks for the reply. I've only lurked Twitter and lately I've been following the with_replys of Musk.

Why do you suspect the rate limiting didn't stop the scraping? Also why would it be strange to think that bots scrap data for ai training.

The blocking logged-out browsing also think is bad user experience, but the argument to stop the scraping along the rate limit seems coherent. Always suffered the "Log in to continue browsing" pop up as a lurker and it's really annoying.

Why do you suspect the rate limiting didn't stop the scraping

I mean, nitter still works, which means logged-out scraping is still possible. Even without that, because scrapers are determined and can just pretend to be real users, and because of how dumb musk's recent ratelimit change was.

Also why would it be strange to think that bots scrap data for ai training.

That is happening, I was referring to Elon's many incorrect claims about bot AI scraping in the past and his bizzare attempts to combat it.

I think most of the narrative for "Musk is ruining Twitter" is actually "Musk is allowing people that we hate back on Twitter". For some people - especially in the Blue Tribe - Twitter used to feel like a "safe space", run by friendly tribesmen and allowing them to get the respect they deserve (blue checks, etc.). Now Musk came and he's not their tribesman, the space is no longer safe, the blue checks are available to all kinds of plebeians and in short, the whole thing is ruined. I personally can't really sympathize and don't have an opinion on whether there's a kernel of truth in it or not - I have deleted my twitter account years ago once I figured out it doesn't allow to do anything I want to do, and using it just pisses me off.

I would not be surprised if the new BlueSky app stays in invite-only mode for precisely this reason. A private Twitter probably has more appeal/value to the blue media class than a public Twitter at this point. Like a super-powered Journolist.

Perhaps but then you run into the same failure mode ad Google+, which was a functionally great social media platform with a lot of good ideas and was very hot when it first launched. The invite only character made it exclusive and exciting...for a few months when everyone realized that the appeal of social media is having that un-gated garden of millions of other people to potentially interact with. Interest and use dried up as suddenly as it came and the rest is history.

Confirming that this is not a strawman; I've heard someone complain about this precise issue IRL.

the space is no longer safe,

That's completely untrue. Thanks to the megablock 'nuke' feature built on the request by Mike Solana, you can find a particularly retarded tweet and then block everyone who liked it.

E.g. this way even people who were being hunted by the deformed NAFO trolls for daring to disagree on the glorious eastern crusade against the subhuman vatniks could lower the risk of brigade mass reporting to essentially zero.

Same thing with reddit really. The laptop class managed to push out all the right leaning mega subs and now its 'theirs'. Only the barest figleaf of political neutrality is given and only milktoast conservatives are allowed to come into the town square. (There's still a few wild far right 'cabin in the woods' style subs like /r/cwr still around)

Yes, Reddit has been left-leaning for a long while, but because of subreddits, for a while the red tribe had been allowed to exist in their own bubbles. But it could not last and it didn't. Now it's probably the leftest of the social media platforms (at least if we take the major ones). Even not explicitly political subs - like local ones - are insufferably woke. But still there's some quality content in some subs. On Twitter, I can't really find many redeeming features.

People have seemingly shortish memories as to what Twitter was before.

Users would request seemingly simple features for months or years, and eventually get the literal opposite of what they were asking for.

It would go down on a regular basis, and seemed to have NO CLUE how to monetize the userbase.

There was that massive breach where huge accounts got exploited for a crypto scam.

Like, how can one pretend that the site before was a paragon of stability, usability, or security compared to now?

Nothing of that magnitude has occurred since the takeover.

The site clearly, CLEARLY never needed staffing at the level it had. So long as Musk doesn't break the core feature of short-form messages in easy-to-follow threads it isn't going anywhere in the near term.

And let me be clear, I say this as someone who would much prefer Twitter (and insta, and reddit, and quite a few other sites) died a quick death and have for a long time.

My headcanon has always been that he's destroying Twitter on purpose as a favor to humanity. So far everything tracks. Shine on you crazy diamond.

I wouldn't mind that. Even with (slightly improved) freedom of speech Twitter looks like a net negative.

I dearly hope you're right. Twitter has been the worst thing that's happened to the political discourse in Finland by a large margin. I've said for years that politicians and journalists should have been forbidden from writing, reading or discussing anything on Twitter or seen there with the threat of a heavy fine or jail sentence.

Facebook is equally bad or worse, and it has been (sensibly) argued that any publicly accessible or accountable forum as such is a detriment to politics.

[before replying, please read the linked post , the excerpt does not explain the reasoning sufficiently well.]

Excerpts:

The other significant effect of the loss of secrecy is a catastrophic decline in dishonesty in politics.* It’s no longer possible to pretend to adopt a political position but to secretly work against it.* It’s not possible to express a claim confidently as a bargaining position, and yet negotiate to minimise the risks.** If you have publicly expressed confidence, you have to publicly act in line with that expressed confidence**. And you can only act publicly.4

When politics was carried out within powerful institutions with social and organisational coherence, political factions could keep secrets. They could plan to carry out actions, and to present arguments, without publicly announcing what they were going to do. Today that is not the case.** Because political factions are open and meritocratic, collective decisions can only be reached in public.**

The effects go further: because all communication within a faction is essentially public, the only way to advance within the faction is through public statements. If you can plan privately and then act, you can be responsible for the consequences of your actions. If you can only contribute to a public debate, then you are responsible for nothing but your public statements.** The loss of institutional power has led, through the loss of secrecy, to a loss of responsibility.**

Facebook is equally bad or worse

Facebook has effectively zero effect on the political discourse in Finland now that Covid is just another flu (it had a very small effect as a breeding ground for fringe groups but their actual effect was minimal). As for what effect Facebook has on that side of the pond, I simply don't care.

Facebook has effectively zero effect on the political discourse in Finland

I don't believe that. Do the major political figures not use Facebook, or are their Facebook pages dead with little interaction ?

Politicians' FB pages are used more or less exclusively for preaching to the choir - that is, people who would vote for them anyway. Almost nothing on them enters the wider discourse in any meaningful way. Meanwhile most journalists and far too many politicians are constantly importing stupid ideas from US Twitter or reporting what this or that person posted on Twitter (to the extent that US domestic politics are given more space in papers than the rest of EU combined).

The excerpt contained faulty reasoning which immediately jumped out at me but when I actually read the article it became clear that the author didn't understand what happened in the first example that got brought up.

The failed coup against Trump is a good example of the phenomenon: If there was an actual conspiracy it was tiny, and most of the work of making the Russia frame stick on Trump was done by people who genuinely believed it was real, and therefore adopted the wrong tactics. At a stretch, it’s possible there was no real conspiracy at all: Hillary and her team were making up excuses for their failure, and some intel people were just nuts (an occupational hazard) or were showing off to their friends. It’s important to understand that the publicly claimed positions get internalised. Even if they start as cynical lies, in the absence of private meetings where everyone agrees, “yes we said that, but it’s not really true”, people end up really believing what they pretend to believe.

There was an actual conspiracy, it wasn't tiny, most of the people involved genuinely and definitively knew that it was garbage and they adopted the best tactics they could in order to make the false claims stick and hamstring Trump's presidency without putting themselves in too much risk. You can just go back and read the text messages that got leaked - so let's just do that (time read what were formerly private communications!) and compare them to what this author said.

“You and I both know the odds are nothing. If I thought it was likely, I’d be there no question. I hesitate in part because of my gut sense and concern there’s no big there there.”

Here we have one of the FBI agents who was involved with both the illegitimate surveillance of the Trump campaign and the Mueller investigation that followed - and he's directly, flat out contradicting the author of this piece. The publicly claimed positions were not internalised and the nature of the scheme meant that this couldn't happen. The intel people were not nuts and the Clinton team knew what they were doing and started the Steele dossier nonsense before they even lost. I'm sure that the people buying Mueller votive candles earnestly believed those public statements, but those people just aren't relevant to the decision-making process here. I disagree with the main thrust of the piece as well for the record, but I don't think I even need to get into that when his first example was so blatantly wrong.

Political factions keeping secrets can let them negotiate in private and prevent them from being second-guessed by ignorant members of the public. But that's not the only effect of political factions keeping secrets. Whether they know more than the public may be less important than whether they have the same interests as the public, and keeping secrets makes it easy to get motivated reasoning and principal/agent problems, or even just plain old corruption.

Principal/agent problems are inherent to a republican government, and public debate doesn't solve them one bit.

Consider for example the housing issue - where people prevent the new construction to conserve value of their own, or the pensions issue, where they're getting nice pensions paid for by money taken from wages of people who are never going to get anything once they're old.

But how does keeping secrets solve either of those issues?

You could probably be more likely to pass a reform of construction if you are able to lie about it. Developers paying off a party, even though it's going to suffer a short-term electoral setback is possible, because they know in the long term it's needed and they'll get something out of it.

Under public conditions, it's impossible, no? They'd get destroyed and coordinating a vote out in the open would be extremely hard.

You can probably be more likely to pass something to benefit yourself and your cronies and hurt the people if you are able to lie about it too, which seems like it would be a bigger effect.

More comments

I’m not a big fan of his super app idea, but on the other hand the Twitter changes are quite interesting to look at. I suspect a lot of businesses dogma these days is to some extent bullshit, which nevertheless keeps repeating itself because no-one is willing to put their money or career on the line to test it. Well Musk just did. You think that these changes will end Twitter. Now what if they don’t? Should we then concede that "brand value" is not a real thing, at least to the extent it is assumed to be, and that it’s all just the network effect all the way down?

As a casual Twitter user, I noticed the new logo today in the app, and found that I didn’t care in the slightest about how it looks like. Are all (most of?) the users like that? We’ll see.

Personally twitter seems to be doing better than ever for me. I never understand why people complain about it. My user experience is better than ever.

The rebranding I don’t get but Musks always wins so I assume he knows what is doing. He’s basically god and his vision always ends up happening.

He’s basically god and his vision always ends up happening.

Hah, sometimes I feel this way too. It's so bizarre how the public discourse can cover him so negatively while he's done so many incredible, seemingly impossible things.

Literally two of the most important technology innovations of this century, cheap space travel and electrical motors, have been shoved forward by him. Not only that, but generative AI, probably the most important invention ever was created by OpenAI, which he founded as well! It is literally insane how effective he is. Like Midas, everything he touches turns to gold. (Except the Boring Company, we don't talk about that one.)

When I read Tim Urban's series on SpaceX, it really opened my eyes to how utterly wrong, and not just wrong but totally out of touch with reality the mainstream media could be. That was my intro into rationalist spaces more generally.

This is also my experience.

Not only do I find myself using the app substantially more, but spam seems to have mostly gone away, the service is fast and responsive, I don't think I've ever had an error/app crash that people talk about, and I'm really excited about the new features that they've shipped.

I've already got friends trying to pull me to twitter messenger away from facebook/signal/etc. that we're using.

It just seems like...yeah, actually, he really is doing it, and the people insisting that somehow twitter is falling apart are just coping.

Twitter is markedly worse for me. Setting aside the app frequently crashing or buffering endlessly, there's a very noticeable increase in the amount of crypto spam beneath comments, and every day I have to block some new porn bot that's decided to follow me. The basic functionality of the site has been compromised, but as long as journalists and government institutions are still using Twitter, it'll keep standing. I'm bearish on a competitor site taking over - if Threads (terrible name) can't do it even after importing users from Instagram, I don't see what will.

Seconded. I mainly use it for sports and Ukraine news. Sports has gotten markedly worse, with replies full of nft scams and weird knockoff jersey websites to the point of uselessness. Ukraine news has gotten moderately worse for info, but I will note that the annoying "Ukraine is falling apart" spam is probably showing up because of reduced censorship. I use it less and less.

A lot of people are just mad that Musk controls their favorite toy.

This is responsible for a lot of it, but these single-sentence own comments don't add much value imo. People have made the case for this at length elsewhere

Cool.

Single-sentence comments are not good, single-word comments are bad. More effort and less passive-aggressiveness, please.

I think it really is just this. All claims that twitter is dying are attempted consensus building as far as I can tell. I had a discussion on a game subreddit about it. Someone noticed that interaction on a recent social media campaign was less than before and attributed it to twitter "dying". I pointed out that most of the interaction comes from the Japanese community and they would have no reason at all to care about Americans throwing a shit-fit over the rocket man.

I think the bigger picture should be looked at, and that in the long run, the demise of Twitter will be a death by a thousand paper cuts, where each change isn't quite so negative to kill it entirely, but it keeps Twitter on a downwards and downwards trend. And there's already been several paper cuts - fleeing advertisers, ratelimits, restricted guest browsing, etc.

It's not a bad heuristic in general that companies/sports teams/countries that change all the time are probably doing badly, while sticking to the tried and true is indicative of success. While the media frequently trumpets a new coach, a new CEO, a new rebrand, a fresh constitution, as indicative of improvement and a new winning strategy, but more often than not it is "the noise before defeat." This is the concept of Lindy applied in reverse. The more big change you see, the more likely it is to be a sign of failure. Good change, slow adaptation, happens so slow that if you don't zoom in you miss it.

Every change Musk makes might be bad for Twitter on its own, but it is definitely indicative of problems at Twitter in general. I've made the joke since I joined Reddit an embarrassingly long time ago that nobody hates Reddit more than Redditors. The same applies to Twitter users, who all love to complain about Twitter and other Tweeters. Left wing blue checks hate the racist CHUDs in their replies; Right Wingers decry censorship and the dominance of Blue Check blue hairs. Because Elon is essentially a twitter power user, the equivalent of the bar fly who buys the bar, he lives in that world. So he thinks Twitter's brand is low value and must be dumped.

In terms of rebrands, maybe - obvious comparison is Meta. But, eh, with the rate of technological and social change large companies trying new things is very good. Amazon going in on cloud computing despite being an online store was valuable, AWS was responsible for 3/4 of their profit recently. Similarly for MS's investments in AI and Google's lead in AI research (that they very poorly translated to actual products). Twitter's changes aren't indicative of any good strategy, they aren't low-probability high-payoff experiments, they're just dumb.

My prior is that any directional strategy change is probably a bad sign. Not a bad choice, just a bad sign. A good toy example: hiring a new head coach in the NFL: a new coach typically sees a bump of one and a third wins yet over time the number of coaching changes made by a franchise negatively correlates with winning percentage, even moreso if you weight extra for playoff success.

Now obviously changing coaches isn't always a bad decision, at some point coaches like Bill Belichek and Mike Tonlin were hired. And my own favorite Franchise just made a big strategic choice to move on from a recently successful head coach and found their way back to the big game just a couple years later. But most coaching changes are rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

Similarly, here, I don't have perfect or even good data on twitters underlying numbers and values. I do know that musk himself tried to evade actually buying the company once he actually saw the numbers.

I've made the joke since I joined Reddit an embarrassingly long time ago that nobody hates Reddit more than Redditors.

I feel like that was more of a post ~2012ish stance, maybe post 2010 in certain places (I was also on reddit for an embarrassingly long time).

Around the time of the Great Digg migration, I remember the site being really proud of itself (I'll let others decide if that was deserved or not).

Thinks like this were emblematic of the time. Reddit just really seemed like it was a better place to be than everywhere else. This is also the era when I heard it described as "4chan with a condom", so take that for what you will.

But that was a long time ago. If you'll excuse me, I need to go be nostalgic for a while.

Meta is different products from one large company. X wants an app in which you can send money or chat with your friend all in one app. Facebook and VR-gaming headsets are different products and therefore they have different names. Alphabet is a parent company yet, we have google search, docs, slides, mail etc. Google drive isn't incompatible with search.

WeChat is a model that can work in the same way a larger google ecosystem works. Musk made his initial fortune with online payments and banking. A twitter that allows for small transactions could be immensely useful. With that said keeping the twitter name for it could have been better.

X wants an app in which you can send money or chat with your friend all in one app.

But people don’t want that. People want Twitter.

Beyond that, the new branding is just bad. The aesthetic of a social network should be bright, lighthearted, and fun. “𝕏” is a good dudebro logo for a car or rocket company, but it comes off as vaguely threatening for a company that knows everything you like and everyone you love.

should be bright, lighthearted, and fun

Why ? Twitter is serious business.

Should rightly be called 'hellsite' to drive off the faint of heart.

BTS stans, football fans, and Ben Shapiro retweeters don't consider twitter to be a 'hellsite', that's a specific subculture of smarter, more ironic politics people.

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