Elon Musk buys Twitter

[Wowbagger]

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/apr/25/twitter-elon-musk-buy-takeover-deal-tesla

I'm not an avid user, but I do post occasionally. I know there are much more active members of the twitterati on here. Will its change of ownership affect your use thereof?

[Kim]

Only if it affects how it functions.  One evil capitalist with weird ideas about what Twitter is for is as bad as another.

Unless he open-sources the whole thing and winds up the company.  I'd respect him for that.

[Dibdib]

Maybe. I've been meaning to spend less time on Twitter anyway, because it's probably the worst offender for doomscrolling, but it's also where most of my friends are so I'm unlikely to ditch it entirely.

That said, today's purchase by an even more comedy villain tech bro than the previous capitalists has nudged me to sign up to a Mastodon instance with the hope that maybe some of my previous Twitter time will be more pleasantly spent there.

[Kim]

Where's that meme...

[barakta]

Watching with caution. I think Twitter was always pretty evil (only less evil than FB cos it's not as usable for lusers).

I may look into Mastodon. Last time I was considering this there were techbro badness issues at Mastodon too but #AllSocialMediasAreEvil may apply.

[Mrs Pingu]

I am going to wait and see where the accounts I actually follow end up, rather than knee jerk to where all the cool kids are going.

[Mr Larrington]

Space Karen has been muttering about being a freeze peach “absolutist” and how people have been booted off Twitter who didn’t orter of been so we can presumably expect a return for Donald Trump, Hatey Cockpins, Graham Linehan, Tiny Tommeh Ten-Names, Julie Burchill and other prize dickons.

[pcolbeck]

Only if it affects how it functions.  One evil capitalist with weird ideas about what Twitter is for is as bad as another.

Unless he open-sources the whole thing and winds up the company.  I'd respect him for that.

He could open source it but you would still need a company to pay for the servers, bandwidth and power to keep them running. Its not peer to peer.

[ian]

The problem with Twitter is systemic really – it works as a platform for people to promote quick quips and the like, but that's what it does, promotes quickly to your followers through replies and retweets, rapidly pulling in more like-minded people via its algorithms. It's a social signal amplifier. Everything is so siloed that you can say pretty say anything you want and several hundred people will immediately agree. It's rare any dissenting views find their way into the mix because, by definition, there's no option for this, there's no real space to express any kind of complexity within the character limit, so basically it's idea reinforcement and promotion. It's easy to see how that leads to radicalizing, socials groups egging themselves on.

This might be fine when it's about a yawning kitten or something innocuous, but less so when it's something nasty. I don't see how it's avoidable really, and perhaps it's a reflection of any social media, though Twitter does it most sharply. Add in the multiplier which are bots galore, and it's very easy to push and amplify any signal you want. That makes it a platform very amenable to manipulation.

That and the fact that many people on Twitter assume that it is somehow the real world in microcosm, when it's really very not.

Ultimately Elon Musk is one of those men (it nearly always is) who assumes he's rich because he's really smart (and lot's of people make the same mistake), rather than mostly just someone who was already rich and managed to be in the right places at the right times, which is a lot easier when you have the money to enter those places.

[Polar Bear]

Going vegetarian hasn't stopped me taking regular dumps ...

[perpetual dan]

I quite enjoy twitter as a platform. There's people i know there, and it's mostly nicer to use than facebook - while accepting that it functions as one paragraph and photo rather than an in-depth analysis.

There's been lots of maybes about what he'll do. Subscriptions and getting rid of bots could be good. Reinstating Trump, less so. But platforms come and go - and ultimately i've only got the time to engage with a few. So they need to have people i like there, ways of interacting that i like and not be actively encouraging nazis. I don't mind being siloed from some people.

[Kim]

Only if it affects how it functions.  One evil capitalist with weird ideas about what Twitter is for is as bad as another.

Unless he open-sources the whole thing and winds up the company.  I'd respect him for that.

He could open source it but you would still need a company to pay for the servers, bandwidth and power to keep them running. Its not peer to peer.

I didn't say it would work.

If you open sourced Twitter, you'd just have another Mastodon, switching the problems of capitalist corporations for those of hobby sysadmins.

As YACFers, we understand the trade-offs.  We know that Dez (who is a real person some of us know, rather than a faceless team of underpaid employees somewhere in ABROAD) can read our PMs, and that if the community doesn't simply die out because of people spending most of their time on Facebook, it could implode one day because of a petty schism amongst the admins.  But we get to choose what we read in the order in which we read it, there's no advertising and basically no spam, and the trolls are in the 1990s sense of people who like to wind other people up for fun, rather than the systemic attacks the term has come to mean since the rise of social media.

Hobby communities don't scale.  Especially those run by libertarians who don't see a need for moderation, which always seem to end up with a far-right problem.

Maybe the internet just got too big?

[Mr Larrington]

Too big/fast/easy to connect to   All of which mean rampant commercialisation and people like Muskrat being in charge.  Bah!
</grumpy_old_git>

[T42]

Every common-or-garden Twitter user should post "Fuck off, Elon" (or variants thereof) at least once a day for a month.

[ian]

The problems aren't really inherent to the business model, or whether it's commercial or not, they'd be same for Mastodon once more than six people and a cat use it. These are opinion concentrators, that eventually filter out all other opinions, so you're in a mostly singular space. There's no challenge. That goes to either the left or the right or whatever side you pick. The algorithms and bots merely amplify that structural feature (and it is an intentional feature).

The opinion filtering here on yacf is mostly based on some vague notions about the utility of bicycles, so that at least opens the doors to more diverse opinions on other subjects, you aren't consistently being nudged towards the posts from only those people you agree with. That said, I think people are becoming increasingly uncomfortable with opinions that they're not already 100% behind, a bit chicken-and-egg whether is driven by or a result of modern social media. I think there's an element of human nature and comfort of tribal spaces. It can be hard to read something you don't agree with, but I see as something that ought to be essential, it's a skill to explain to yourself why something is wrong, rather than a visceral it's wrong because it doesn't agree with my existing views. Of course, it's easier not to bother. Which is what these platforms base their commercial model on.

[John Stonebridge]

I quite enjoy twitter.  It works best for me as a news prompt (local cycling club, travel news, latest tap list at my favourite edinburgh pubs etc etc) - scenarios where previously I might have had to remember to check a website. 

Again, maybe just my experience but I find the bigger the issue, the less well twitter works.     

I'm not rushing for the exit but I am keeping my eyes open to see if the experience changes materially.  Im not optimistic.     

While I have a user ID I dont actively use Facebook, my first exposure to it was dreadful and it put me off forever.     

[barakta]

I like Twitter for meeting new people I might not have engaged with before, but I do have a fairly hard line blocking of all the right wing troll trash and anyone abusive. I don't have open DMs so I don't get the creepy sexual shit that many women get.

I can quietly read conversations by people in different communities to me, and learn stuff I didn't know without costing them anything which is helpful and fascinating.

[Kim]

Again, maybe just my experience but I find the bigger the issue, the less well twitter works.

That's a reasonable first-order approximation.  As a broadcast-SMS service for your friends, it's great.  As a way of sharing cute cat photos or interesting astrononononomy facts with random strangers, it's fine.  And (until they did a Facebook and made it a PITA for non-logged-in-users) it used to be a convenient way to publish small updates about things you were organising.

The rot sets in when things get a bit P&OBI.  Which isn't to say there isn't good P&OBI content on twitter, but you have to expect to encounter unpleasant views and understand the consequences of stirring the hornets' nest.  Especially if you're a member of a marginalised group who might end up on the receiving end of a coordinated pile-on.

[ian]

Covid twitter has been some measure of fun, if you can call it that, and there are some good, reasoned opinions on there, but the signal-to-noise ratio means it's often easier to find aliens broadcasting prime numbers embedded in the greatest hits of Black Lace on short-wave.

If I had thirty-odd billion to spare, I'd make clean water available to the world and get rid of malaria, that kind of thing, rather than vanity purchase a social media platform. That's just me though.

[Kim]

If I had thirty-odd billion to spare, I'd make clean water available to the world and get rid of malaria, that kind of thing, rather than vanity purchase a social media platform. That's just me though.

Quite.  But you don't get 30-odd billion to spare by thinking like that.

[Woofage]

If I had thirty-odd billion to spare, I'd make clean water available to the world and get rid of malaria, that kind of thing, rather than vanity purchase a social media platform. That's just me though.

This^N, where N =  a very large number

This kind of thing makes me really despair for the future of humanity  .

[MikeFromLFE]

The problems aren't really inherent to the business model, or whether it's commercial or not, they'd be same for Mastodon once more than six people and a cat use it. These are opinion concentrators, that eventually filter out all other opinions, so you're in a mostly singular space. There's no challenge.
(snip)
. That said, I think people are becoming increasingly uncomfortable with opinions that they're not already 100% behind, a bit chicken-and-egg whether is driven by or a result of modern social media. I think there's an element of human nature and comfort of tribal spaces.

Indeed
I enjoy twitter, but find myself engaging less and less.
I'm open to hearing views I don't agree with, but I see the abuse (some) people get when they express a dissenting opinion, and that inhibits me and others from exploring the edges of our personal philosophy.
I have some opinions that I simply will not share on social media for fear of a backlash.

I've had a Mastodon account for several months and it still defeats me - they need to make it much less geeky to get wider acceptance (if that's even a goal)

[ian]

Mastodon seems to appeal to people who still use IRC, if they do they probably don't need Mastodon.

I still scan Twitter, there's some useful stuff on Covid (mostly lab stuff – thought broadly, Twitter is generally an awful medium for science communication) and interesting commentary from actual barristers on newsworthy cases (I've learned more about the law in this country from Twitter than anywhere else, though that might say something about my general level of legal knowledge). I don't post anymore, the effort-to-reward ratio is too high and my professional and personal profiles are easily associated.

There's a story in Jon Ronson's So You've Been Publicly Shamed about a woman who makes a sarcastic joke, gets on a long-haul flight, and lands to find she's the subject of a massive pile-on and cast as a vile racist for a joke that had been completely misinterpreted. That was a good few years back, so it's more intense now, and I'm quite rude.

Covid twitter is quite mad, full-on zero covid maskers and doom prophets, anti-vaccine crusaders and the like. Don't express any opinion on trans-anything, it's culture war accelerant. It even bleeds through to real life, still on the news yesterday they were going on about legislation against drink spiking, which started noodling on about the 'thousands of cases' of needle spiking. As mentioned elsewhere, this never actually happened other than on social media, where people competed to exchange barely credible second-hand stories or pictures of any random red mark.

[Kim]

Mastodon seems to appeal to people who still use IRC, if they do they probably don't need Mastodon.

I resemble that remark.  Looked at Mastodon instances, decided it would probably be less pain in the long run^[1] to run my own.  RTFMed, couldn't be arsed.


_{[1] For much the same reason that it makes sense to register your own domain for email.  Plus I'd always be on the right side of any petty schism.}

[Mr Larrington]

Further Stuffs from Jon Ronson for folks who are un[willing|able] to get past the NYT's paywall.