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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   27747 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 23, 2023

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Happy Birthday Elon Twitter

We're almost at the one-year anniversary of Elon Musk taking over Twitter X. How have your predictions fared? I'll answer below.

I don’t have a twitter account, mostly for my own sanity. One of the worst new features is that if you are not logged in to twitter you cannot get a chronological feed of an account, it sorts by most popular, which is more than useless. (You can change it if you’re logged in).

Also, unless you’re logged in, you can’t click on a link to a twitter comment and read the replies. Only the actual tweet is displayed.

On the other hand, This has caused my twitter usage to go down to less than a minute a week, which is great.

You can take any twitter url and replace twitter.com with twitter.com and get more or less the old experience without having to sign in. There are some companies that use twitter to post status message when there is an outage etc. and this has been helpful for me.

FYI, the forked code base running this site will autocorrect twitter links to nitter or vice versa depending on settings. So right now your comment says replace <url> with <same url>.

If you click on view source you can still see the original version.

I didn't make any predictions, but my experience is that the site feels mostly the same, except Community Notes are the best feature on any site ever, I get noticeably less random follows from botted onlythot accounts, and people screech about the site dying a whole lot more (while continuing to use it).

I also feel as though my experience is mostly the same, although I'm a "read only" twitter user and mostly follow art bots. The community notes have been generally great, and a good example of how the response to bad speech is more speech rather than censorship.

I agree that the UX is similar (apart from the login to read tweets requirement, which cost me 10 minutes setting up a dummy account), and not enough of the people whose tweets I want to leave have left to woker social media for it to affect me. There are two things I find mildly annoying:

  • Ads no longer look like ads, which makes them harder to ignore.
  • My default feed includes more shit-tier right-wing trolling being manually boosted by Musk (either by retweeting it himself, or by boosting accounts like the proudly foecal CatTurd). The political tweeters I follow are mostly intelligent right-wingers, precisely because I don't want to have to wade through feline excrement.

Frankly, anyone who uses the For You feed instead of the Following feed deserves everything they get. I actually installed a browser thingy to elimnate the For You feed in its entirety. In addition, you can block those accounts if people you do follow regularly rt them, so meh.

One potential problem of assessing any levels of platform stability, is that most large tech companies have incredibly strict starting standards for tech uptime and reliability, so sometimes even a 10x or even 100x change in platform stability might still be completely unnoticeable to a regular end user. Imagine a platform going from 1 minute of downtime a year to 100 minutes. Even 1000 minutes of downtime might be hard to notice depending on when it happens and for what features it happens to.

However, someone is usually going to notice some downtime, and Musk owning the platform meant that bugs on twitter suddenly became newsworthy events, rather than things everyone would just ignore and not care about. So even if overall bugs and uptime remained the same, there might easily be a large change in the number of news stories and people's level of awareness of those bugs.

I would not be surprised if platform stability got significantly worse, but also that most tech companies overspend on platform stability as a point of professional pride and bragging rights. So whether you notice is probably determined by whether you follow bad news about twitter, or how much you blow up the importance of the one or two rare downtime incidents you personally encounter.

Yes, I used to work at a small tech company a long time ago and they advertised the uptime for their API in decimal places after 99% with 99.999% being the goal back then.

Regarding X/Twitter, as a dissident rightist I did a random thought experiment a couple of months ago but never posted in anywhere so far. It might be somewhat relevant here.

Let's suppose that whatever moderation policy X currently has is replaced basically by this:

  1. Any sort of political agitation, regardless of the party, movement, platform, umbrella organization, candidate, nominee, NGO etc. it is done on behalf of, or against, is banned.
  2. Any incitement towards political violence, or political use of the threat of violence as blackmail, is banned.
  3. Doxxing is banned.

How long would it take for X to be dismissed in mainstream discourse as a haven for Nazis? A couple of days?

Item 1 seems impossible to realistically enforce. If someone posts a selfie that has a pride flag in the background, is that political? If someone argues that the Bible forbids homosexuality, is that political?

Yes and yes.

It seems like everything is political if the standard is "can be interpreted as related to a political issue." Posting a picture of yourself wearing Nikes would be political because Nikes are made in sweatshops. Posting a picture with your kids is political because the decision to have or not have kids is politically salient. Etc.

Community notes are awesome. Very often useful. Sometimes hilarious

I have mixed feelings on Community Notes. Indeed, they're very often useful and sometimes hilarious. In fact, almost always useful and very often hilarious from my experience. Yet it is also a way of putting the thumb on the scale in terms of the way information is communicated on Twitter. I'd prefer it if every tweet were to be judged on its own merits, with bad, misinforming, or even disinforming tweets being called out by other tweets made by other Twitter users, not by some big box placed below the tweet by official Twitter UI through the input of other Twitter users. Having that official box there just because a bunch of Twitter users wanted to put that box there is just tyranny of the majority. If some bad piece of information spreads like wildfire on Twitter because a misinformed tweet didn't get properly called out by other people tweeting, then so be it, that's Twitter working as intended, and I think the world in which that misinformation gets spread and misleads people is better than the world in which that misinformation gets suppressed by high-minded, well-intentioned authorities other users merely on the basis that they believe it's misinformation.

Yet, again, I've found Community Notes very helpful personally, as every time it's corrected a Tweet, and I've decided to do independent research, the Notes have ended up being the more correct one, often times actually correct while the tweet is actually incorrect. Hence the mixed feelings.

Having that official box there just because a bunch of Twitter users wanted to put that box there is just tyranny of the majority.

All the other forms of feedback - getting ratiod, getting dragged in quote tweets by high-clout accounts, etc - are also basically just tyranny of the majority. The problem is that if, say, the BBC posts something absurdly wrong, and a swarm of users points it in the replies, many people won't bother reading the replies, and even when they do official institutions will have a clout-shield by virtue of being official institutions. The reason Community Notes is awesome is that that official box lets the opinion of the common people be put on par with the mainstream media, NGOs, factcheckers, etc. This is why Elon is never getting any brownie points for fighting misinformation on social media, even though he probably did the most to stop it out of all SocMeds - none of it was ever about misinformation, but about imposing the official opinions on the common people.

I don't think I could have written a better steelman of the "pro-Community Notes" position than this. It is a highly convincing argument, but it's just one that I don't find convincing against the counterargument.

Which is that there's something meaningfully different about the "tyranny of the majority" that forms within the medium (Twitter in this case) due to the way people use it and gain reputation there and the one that forms when the medium itself puts a thumb on the scale. When BBC tweets some misinformation, people believe it not because Twitter gave them any sort of special privileges, people believe it because of the reputation BBC built off Twitter. The way to combat that is to give people a more accurate view of the reputation BBC deserves, both off Twitter and on Twitter by Twitter users using tweets. Twitter's role shouldn't be to adjudicate the truth value of a statement so that its users get a more accurate view of the world by the standards of Twitter and its community members, and neither should it be to manage the reputation or credibility of its users. Those are things that will play out naturally by people using Twitter for its role, which should be to be the dumbest, fastest, most reliable pipes in the world for delivering 140-character (280 to 10,000 now, but I'd prefer to go back to 140 - this isn't a key issue here, though) snippets to one's followers, with as little regard for what's in those snippets as possible.

If a bunch of Twitter users got together and made an organization to tweet out the equivalent of Community Notes and then manipulate their behavior to make the algorithm put their reply at the top of the view when seeing a tweet, I'd consider that just fine and things working as intended. The fact that Twitter itself blesses it and puts it in a special box whose mere presence says that Twitter itself decided to manipulate this Tweet to appear differently from other Tweets, because the contents of this tweet are wrong by Twitter's standards. That's Twitter putting their thumb on the scale.

Which is that there's something meaningfully different about the "tyranny of the majority" that forms within the medium (Twitter in this case) due to the way people use it and gain reputation there and the one that forms when the medium itself puts a thumb on the scale.

I get where you're coming from. If I remember right the predecessor to Community Notes was a very similar infobox that Twitter slapped onto one of Trump's tweets, my argument against was exactly what you outline here. I think there's a difference between that, and what Community Notes has become. By making it democratic it is no longer a thumb that Twitter-the-company is putting on the scale, it's just an extra meta layer added onto the game, any user, including the BBC can participate in it, downvote the notes they don't like, or add their own. I'm fine with the mechanism as long as it remains relatively evenhanded the way it is now, but if you prefer OG Twitter, I can respect that too.

Pretty much all of them: The service is substantially shittier to use in general; and slightly shittier to use from a technical perspective.

The general shittieness has risen to the point where I actually use it much less.

Bluecheck morons getting top billing instead of whoever has the best one liner has killed my interest in using twitter as twitter; I now only use it to follow specific people for updates on scheduled appearances/articles/ FILTHY FUCKING PORNOGRAPHY.

I'm shocked by what a difference this makes. I went from scrolling for a couple mins. each time i checked my feed for the latest incredibly specific porn / current events in the Palm Oil Killings / when is video game coming out to basically never actually going deeper than the very top level of the thread.

He has turned it into a more expensive rss feed for me.

FILTHY FUCKING PORNOGRAPHY.

Nice.

He has turned it into a more expensive rss feed for me.

The most annoying thing about the changes is that they constantly get in the way of me using Twitter as an RSS feed. I used to have a feed reader attached to a local nitter instance, but the arms race between them and the Twitter login-only access kept blowing my setup up. Seems like things have finally gotten more stable, so I might try again.

FILTHY FUCKING PORNOGRAPHY

If you’re serious about this, that’s disgusting. If you’re joking about this, that’s also disgusting.

Hell yeah brother!

If you’re serious about this, that’s disgusting. If you’re joking about this, that’s also disgusting.

If you're serious about this, it's textbook shaming, which is against the rules. If you're joking about this, you've failed to speak plainly, which is also against the rules.

This is a pretty minor infraction, all things considered, but... a little more effort, please.

I was being serious, for the record, and you're right, this is not an appropriate place to casually assert that pornography is disgusting anymore than 'x-ideology is bad' or 'y-group is out'. Warning deserved.

That does cede the ground to folks who casually think it isn't, however, like the guy to whom i was responding. shrugs

(I know, I know, all views from all places, etc. But just as a drive-by nazism or pedoism wouldn't be welcome, it'd be cool if porn was in the same category)

(I know, I know, all views from all places, etc. But just as a drive-by nazism or pedoism wouldn't be welcome, it'd be cool if porn was in the same category)

Interestingly enough, porn is in the same category--but it is porn that is in the same category, not conversations about porn.

Twitter won't be removed for the same reason Fox News is still on every major cable package. It isn't some minor service, its the primary use case for the smart phone for tons of people.

Interestingly, I overestimated the resilience of Fox News. I still can't believe they forced out Tucker Carlson despite having the most popular show on cable news.

They can all go fuck themselves as far as I'm concerned they have literally NOONE left on that network even remotely close to being human. Gutfeld comes close but his writing staff is milktoast as fuck.

I still can't believe they forced out Tucker Carlson despite having the most popular show on cable news.

Tucker was on tape saying that Trump lost in 2020 and Fox's coverage suggesting otherwise was deliberate lies. This was going to be played if the Dominion lawsuit went to trial. Being a legal liability on that scale is a sufficient condition for firing anybody.

How much of a hit did Fox take? I know it dipped in the short term, but I figured there wouldn’t be any major consequences, like getting dropped from packages. I don’t know what could replace it in the “boomer background noise” market niche. Not the streaming services.

I still can't believe they forced out Tucker Carlson despite having the most popular show on cable news.

The popularity didn't matter because it couldn't be translated into dollars, thanks to the ad boycott.

Basically what happened to Glenn Beck.

How have your predictions fared?

Decently. Graded:

  • ✅ 99%: Trumps Twitter ban has been lifted
  • ✅ 95%: At least one case of Twitter moderation has happened for which the NY Times or WaPO has written a story highlighting hypocrisy
  • ✅ 90%: Hate speech rules for protected classes remain, neither being retracted nor expanded to cover everyone
  • ✅ 70%: Misgendering and deadnaming no longer fall under this category, however.
  • ✅ 70%: Payment processors, cloud service providers, banks, and the US government have NOT taken measures to leverage or punish Twitter for content policies. (This one is tricky to adjudicate so I'll leave it to you.)
  • ❌ 70%: The EU HAS taken measures to leverage or punish Twitter for content policies. (Same.)
  • ✅ 60%: Twitter's medical misinformation rules have been modified.
  • ❌ 60%: Twitter's election misinformation rules have been modified.

Vibes-wise, I've been surprised by how full-throatedly dissident conservative Elon Musk has been in his tweets. And while "hate speech" is still against TOS, I've been subjectively impressed by how much far right accounts have been able to test the limits without being deleted, banned, or throttled from at least my feed.

❌ 70%: The EU HAS taken measures to leverage or punish Twitter for content policies. (Same.)

I thought EU has started enforcing the new Digital Services Act, and Twitter was named one of the big platforms that need to comply?.

Tbf, the changes don't seem that intense. And they target everything from Google Search, Google Maps (?!), to Apple's App store, to Wikipedia (!), to Tiktok, to Amazon's app store... and to Twitter.

Did you mean that it wasn't specifically towards Twitter?

The EU is threatening to enforce the DSA against Twitter, and smart EU-watchers are saying they look serious, but they haven't got to the point of actually doing anything yet. So if the prediction had an explicit one-year deadline, it adjudicates as "false".

Premium Twitter seems to be paying off. It was almost embarrassing or shameful at first to actually shell out for the blue check but more and more people are clearly doing that.

Grey Enlightenment has talked about this alot.

Premium users get a significant algorithm visibility boost, so seeing more of them doesn't necessarily mean there's more of them.

Okay. I've seem quite a few blue checks who don't seem to get any more engagement than if they had never shelled out for that. You can't get lower than zero likes or replies.

But maybe they're just really terrible at getting attention, or agreeing enough with any subculture of Twitter users. Premium gives them no boost.

I said is it gives them a visibility boost, not a boost to engagement. Back in the day, visibility was largely based on engagement. This has some issues like creating a paradox where no one sees your tweet unless someone sees your tweet, but it worked well enough. If I check the replies on a viral tweet nowadays, there's a barren wasteland of very low engagement tweets (0 likes/replies), but they still show up at the top because they're from Premium users. The complaint about pay-to-boost is precisely that it degrades the experience for users by showing them more uninteresting tweets primarily/only because the other person paid money.

Not much has changed. I don't think I participated in that particular thread but I am quite sure my opinion would be that nothing much would change.

Normalcy bias is a good starting point for any prediction and will outperform inexperienced forecasters.

I would say, in this case, there have been LOTS of changes.

  1. Twitter laid off 80% of staff with no technical degradation of the site, and in fact improved features!

  2. Much less censorship than before

  3. Advertiser boycott (perhaps showing that Twitter advertising was never actually effective)

  4. Blue checkmarks open to anyone willing to pay

I wouldn't be surprised if Twitter was actually running a profit now. Sure, revenue is down. But costs are WAY down. I'm most of the way through the Musk biography. The dude is a maniac at cost-cutting.

I don't mean to claim that Musk has done literally nothing, but I remember distinctly at the time people here and in my social circles were making wild claims about how Twitter had weeks to live and I was pretty sure end users would see minimal changes.

I see that I had no involvement in that particular thread, and as a matter of fact I can't even recall if I had an (active) Twitter account at the time of the purchase.

I do recall strongly pushing back against suggestions made by some, with @2rafa being one I concretely remember, that Threads would either dismantle Twitter or grossly undermine its userbase. Given that Threads quickly devolved into a wasteland of brands going "How do you, fellow kids?" at each other, and the odd influencer who would be better served by keeping their mouth shut and making people suspect they were stupid instead of opening it and removing all doubt.. Yeah, I'm taking all the imaginary points for that one.

At any rate, I'm mostly content with Twitter, at least from the perspective of a lurker. I didn't rely on third party apps, so the withdrawal of the API wasn't as pissing off as it was when Reddit did it. Community Notes are great, and ought to be a feature in pretty much any social media. Right wing or contrarian accounts seem to be safe, and I also get a laugh out of people like Cremiuex and i/o confronting milquetoast liberals with uncomfortable hate facts and statistics. Sure, I'm not particularly right wing myself, showing up as a centrist on most surveys of political affiliation, but we're tugging on the rope in the same direction, to the extent that's inevitable when all incentives encourage polarization into two symmetrically opposed parties.

I'd rate it as a 7.5/10 experience, I can reliably doomscroll and get something more informative than Reddit out of it, and it's not like there's anything larger than the Motte I can point to as doing better in terms of quality.

I didn't have much familiarity with Elon Musk at the time, but I was willing to give him the benefit of doubt given his successes with Tesla and SpaceX. I think this has borne out for Twitter from a technical perspective, because barring a few minor hiccups, I'm impressed at how reliable of a platform it has remained despite significant reductions in staff. The constant cataclysmic predictions over the last year seem obviously off-base.

I think the conflict of interest issue remains a serious problem. I wrote about the stark difference between Old Twitter's willingness to duke it out with censorious governments, compared to Musk Twitter's policy of acceding to takedown requests. Musk also flip-flopped from initially claiming his devotion to free speech includes the 'elonjet' account [Yes the tweet is still up though it has a Community Note, which remains Twitter's greatest feature, and Musk's deserves credit for not making his own tweets immune], only to change his mind afterwards. Musk has maintained a vendetta against Substack ever since they launched the Twitter-like Notes, and Substack links were initially prohibited outright for a few days (Musk claims Substack was "scraping" data or something) but they still don't generate any previews like other URLs.

That elonjet shift illustrates some of Musk's erratic behavior, because his argument for wanting to ban the account claiming that it provides "real-time doxxing", and in support of that argument he posted a video purporting to show a "crazy stalker" who had been following him as a result of elonjet (also claimed he was going to take "legal action" against the guy behind elonjet). He never provided any additional details of who this person was and how exactly elonjet was implicated, and the last update I was able to find was almost a year ago and says the apparent "crazy stalker" in the video was being treated as the victim by police (which of course isn't conclusive).

Because Twitter is now privately-owned, we don't have exact numbers on how well it's doing financially but the few indicators available indicate a significant decline in revenue from advertisers (the overwhelming source of revenue) apparently fleeing the platform. Musk claimed that advertising revenue was down as much as 60%, but it's hard to know how seriously to take that number since he revealed it during his feud with the ADL.

Musk appears to wants to shift away from a reliance on advertisers and towards a user subscription model. People can pay $8/month to get Verified status which (among other things) provides a visibility boost on the algorithm. The old Blue Check system was needlessly cloistered, and the other current Verified benefits are fine, but the pay-to-boost feature has been really annoying, because it more likely than not ends up artificially boosting inane posts no one would otherwise care about. Musk also wants a $1/year subscription to tweet, and claims paid subscriptions are how to prevent spam and bots but there are countless current examples of Verified accounts spamming everyone with t-shirt advertisements or hawking crypto scams.

We don't have exact numbers about "engagement" but as far as I can tell Twitter remains the haven for the journalistic class, despite their grumblings and promises to evacuate to bluesky/threads/mastodon.

I still believe that Musk is an extremely competent leader for engineering projects. His biographies paint him as someone able to wrest impossible results through what appears to be sheer will and stubbornness. His personality does not seem like a good fit for a social media company that has to wrangle conflicting directives from users, advertisers, and governments. It's difficult for me to imagine Twitter entering a new golden age under his watch, so I predict he'll either quit or significantly step back from his responsibilities. I can't imagine how a user paywall would stop the money hemorrhage, and I haven't seen any encouraging signs from him about a commitment to free speech (except Community Notes, which remains the GOAT).

Of course, I'll still use it.

High confidence (75%): Twitter will continue to be a money pit.

https://www.reuters.com/technology/elon-musk-says-twitters-cash-flow-still-negative-ad-revenue-drops-2023-07-15/

Looking pretty good. For all the attention it gets, Twitter has never really been profitable

I doubt there's going to be a huge boost to freedom of discourse on twitter. Nor will there be a mass exodus - the cost of moving to a new platform (which platform, anyway?) is too high. In the mean time, Twitter's moderation practices will continue to be erratic and arbitrary.

Also looking good. Twitter's user base is reportedly shrinking, but it certainly hasn't collapsed (if it does, I think it is likely to be replaced by nothing/replaced by a balkanized collection of platforms).

there's a low-but-not-that-low (in the proud tradition of made up confidence levels: 33%) chance he tries something aggressive/ambitious and kills twitter. Here's hoping.

Well, he hasn't done it yet, but he's floated it a few times and subsequently been talked down, so I think this was roughly calibrated correctly.

Medium confidence (50%): Musk will try to divest himself from twitter in the next four years.

I have three more years, but so far I'd say this prediction is faring poorly. Musk doesn't seem to be trying to dump twitter (at least not publicly).

Also looking good.

"No boost of freedom of discourse" seems pretty wrong to me.

My opinion of Musk is very low, I think he's essentially a fraud, so I don't have much hopes for his ability to improve Twitter.

Even if he does end up being a competent leader, I worry he will simply be unable to do much. It turns out Dorsey was a libertarian-leaning idealist all along, and he was unable to push his own company in that direction, and had to wait until retirement to actually start making idealistic noises again. If Musk does do anything, we're going to see another round of "No Clicks For Hate" or that WSJ article about Youtube that triggered the Adpocalypse.

I think the best case scenario we can realistically hope for is that he drives Twitter into the ground.

Too blackpilled, I thought the change of ownership wouldn't amount to anything tangible, but he is facing some of the pressures I predicted. The ADL led advertiser boycott happened, and though not perfect, he's holding on surprisingly well.

Some things I didn't predict, that stood out over the year:

  • Community Notes was a great idea, and for all the whining about misinformation from the powers that be, it actually does more to address the issue than anything I've seen from them.

  • Who would have thunk it, making tweets editable isn't actually rocket science.

  • Dropping, what was it, 80% of his workforce? Ballsy move, it's simultaneously crazy how well it worked out, and not surprising at all

  • Cutting off Substack was lame.

  • Sealing off access without a login was also lame. Reddit followed his steps by shutting off the APIs, and YouTube is trying to block the adblockers. Combined with the previous point it feels like it marks the beginning of the "cyberpunk" era of the internet. Open access is no longer a given.

  • I don't think the rebranding hurt the company, but I have no idea what was the point of that.

Reddit followed his steps by shutting off the APIs, and YouTube is trying to block the adblockers.

I don't think this is a "Reddit follows where Elon leads" thing, I think they're all reacting to the same root cause. Borrowing suddenly became more expensive than it had been for a decade and a half, during which time a whole bunch of business plans involved loading up on cheap debt and playing with business models and focusing on growth with a vague notion of getting profit margins in the black eventually, and now those have to get replaced by flailing panicky attempts to make businesses profitable soon instead. Spending a bunch of money offering free services for years may just have been what the kids call a "Zero Interest Rate Phenomenon".

I don't think the rebranding hurt the company, but I have no idea what was the point of that.

He's been wanting to brand his stuff as "X" for decades. It seems pretty stupid to me. But Musk's life story is a series of "everybody told him that trying to do a thing would be stupid, then he did the thing and made billions of dollars from it" chapters, so I'm only like 90% confident here. On the other hand, this isn't a "make Starship from carbon fiber" sort of stupid idea, where you can test it and discover its flaws and pivot to something smarter without much loss; marketing is a lot more fuzzy than engineering.

I don't think this is a "Reddit follows where Elon leads" thing, I think they're all reacting to the same root cause.

I agree with this but think that the root cause is different. Specifically, I think that the root cause is generative AI datasets. In order for your massive database of text posts to have value, it can't be easily harvested for free by some random on the internet. This means there's a big incentive for people with these massive platforms to prevent automated scraping, because that prevents them from charging OpenAI/Meta/Microsoft for access to their data.

Spending a bunch of money offering free services for years may just have been what the kids call a "Zero Interest Rate Phenomenon".

With apologies to Ned Flanders, indeed-ily doob-ily. The whole Internet did that good decade or so; there's a wonderful Hollywood-focused substack called The Ankler which has been covering the phenomenon's entertainment industry manifestations.

I'm increasingly convinced history will look back on the turn of the millennium and discover in Michael Lewis a prophet of the age on the order or Upton Sinclair or Thomas Paine.

I hadn’t thought of the potential causation from Twitter wall to Reddit and YouTube walls.

Is there a reliable way to dodge the Youtube countermeasures yet? I switched to Firefox, thinking it wouldn’t make it quite so easy for Google. Not sure if it worked or if YouTube just boils the water slowly on “new” consumers or devices.

I imagine the Pihole solution is still valid, at least.

Update your ublock origin filters, it fixes the YouTube BS.

Youtube was never able to stop Newpipe, they can't force ads on you, just make it more difficult to avoid them and hope the average user gets dissuaded from adblocking. If you want to persevere you will be able to, come hell or high water.

Some dude on drama mentioned all this anti-ablock stuff isn't all that bad because 1) Some people's time is worth a lot more and they're more likely to be technically competent/get someone technically competent enough to jump through the new hurdles, so in terms of value damage the hit is a lot less than if you look at it in pure time terms 2) the kinds of people who're going to end up watching extra ads because of this are so base that the slop they want to watch probably isn't any better than the ads themselves, so it doesn't hurt them much at all to show them ads.

The fix isn't even that hard. I use Firefox, so all I got was a dialogue box saying that adblockers weren't allowed, and even that went away when I blocked the element, which took all of 30 seconds. Of course, they could always come up with a way around it, but it seems like a losing battle, since the adblockers will always find a way around the restrictions. Trying to stop ad blocking is like the music labels trying to stop illegal downloading online. Yeah, you can temporarily make it more annoying, but you'll never eliminate it entirely. Music figured out a way around it by giving customers everything they wanted at a reasonable price, but YouTube picked the exact wrong time to do this, as first, they don't have a representative amount of content that people are willing to pay for, and second, people are already burned out enough on needing twelve subscriptions that they aren't likely to spring for number 13 if they haven't already. The ads have also gotten so intrusive that YouTube is nearly unusable without blocking them. Playing an ad at the beginning of a video always made sense, but the constant interruptions of multiple ads at a time shoehorned into content that wasn't designed around ads is a nightmare. To make matters worse, they now made it so you can't turn off autoplay without third party apps, so now it's on all the time. It really sucks if, like me, you like to watch videos while falling asleep, only to have a bootleg of the 2009 Super Bowl permeate your dreams because you were watching a football video and the autoplay always tends towards videos that are three hours plus.

I was using chrome before. First it was the dialogue box. Then that box got a short timer before you could close it. Then I think the timer started getting longer. Then it stopped being closeable at all…

Obviously, blocking an element solves all these problems, unless they stop serving the video entirely. I went ahead and bailed for Firefox, assuming the water would continue to boil. That worked well for a day or two. Then it started with the dialogue box. At this point I assume it will progress through the previous series until it reaches Stage 4 and metastasizes.

I think it’s clear that YouTube does a slow boil on new or “new” users. As a result, it’s encouraging to hear that blocking the element remains effective.

I actually don't mind the login requirement. Employers snoop. Of course you can still see someone's most popular tweets of all time, without logging in. So if you wrote something controversial but also massive hit, you may be in trouble.

Sealing off access without a login was also lame. Reddit followed his steps by shutting off the APIs, and YouTube is trying to block the adblockers. Combined with the previous point it feels like it marks the beginning of the "cyberpunk" era of the internet. Open access is no longer a given.

Yeah this trend has been worrying me. At least I'm at the point where I'm already intentionally limiting my use of the internet.

The whole free with ads model is inherently corrupt and causes massive harm to society anyway, as far as I'm concerned. Just a massive constant pandemic of psychological attacks against consumers on a scale almost too large to fathom.

I've been pretty checked out as far as the day-to-day happenings are concerned, and I don't know how the site looks for someone who has an account, but the thing I'm most curious about as an occasional clicker of links to Twitter is when (if at all) they're going to fully commit to the X branding and start getting "twitter" out of their urls. When will twitter.com redirect me to x.com, rather than vice-versa?

The rebrand only started being rolled out this summer, so we're really only a few months into it. I understand they're probably hesitant to break a whole internet's worth of twitter.com urls and embed systems, but you have to rip the band-aid off at some point, right? If it's not going to be Twitter anymore, at some point it has to not be Twitter anymore.

I didn't weigh in in the original thread, but I'll count myself as having been slightly surprised that the site didn't suffer more critical functionality loss after the possibly-overzealous initial mass layoffs. Some people I was paying attention to on the matter last year were really emphasizing how many critical roles they thought were being naively cast aside as unnecessary. I haven't had a Twitter account in years so I can't speak on the user experience during the transition, but presumably the lights are still on and the site still works, so I guess I'll give that W to Elon. An impression I had was that there were some significant number of people who were let go in the initial wave who ended up having their position offered back to them. There are plenty of people in my information sphere who seem happy to get a dunk in on Musk whenever they can, though, so that might not have been an honest and nuanced appraisal of the situation.

I didn't join in on the thread, but can retro a bit.

  • I had 85% certainty there'd be no major outages as a result of the layoffs
  • I was unsure if there would be a true centralization and loosening of speech restrictions
  • I assumed Elon would make some minor overcorrections towards conservatism/free speech or exposure of his biases

Overall, the supposed death of the platform has been wildly exaggerated and I still have to hear sniggers about how it's an irrelevant ghost town.

Remember when the media pretended Twitter was about to die any day? Every single person in the media seemed to make that joke on every podcast they were on. And remember when they pretended that Threads was a legitimate threat to Twitter? Elon also seems to have outflanked the ADL by appealing to right wing Jews and they are coming to an uneasy truce. It seems like it's more or less the same a year ago except for the name change. Community notes is also a great change.

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