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