My sides
Please
If this dude had any experience running an online site he would know how many stolen credit cards are out there.
X is a fly-coated chum bucket.
Hey now…that’s really rude! If fly-coated chum buckets could read they would be very very upset!
Was just about to say this.
You know how easy it is these days to get credit card dumps? Legally, I don’t know the exact answer, but…
Or PayPal accounts.
This seems like further confirmation of that theory that I saw posted on here that the Saudi oil barons funded Elon’s purchase of Twitter for the sole purpose of destroying it. They want to silence online discussions of climate change and other left wing topics.
Combined with Reddit being owned by Tencent, Facebook being eternally evil, and TikTok being unconducive to any form of coherent dialogue, there are not many places for left wing discourse on the internet anymore.
I’ve had the same theory for a while. They saw the Arab Spring and other populist movements. With their vast oil wealth, tanking Twitter was a small price to pay to re-fracture descent and silence the left. The concentration of wealth has given insane power to wealthy who skew overwhelmingly on the side of themselves. The rise of the right is a direct result of billionaires funding across numerous avenues. The right aligns best with their self interest. They played the long game because they only have to pay people and let them do it for them. Regular folks have to stay engaged in the battle after working to support themselves. Billionaires are the matastasized cancer of capitalism.
The purchase itself was a leveraged buyout, they didn’t pay the entire $44bn as Twitter took out a loan to cover $13bn. Like all leveraged buyouts (eg Toys R Us) the purchase itself is meant to kill the business. Even before Musk started screwing the revenue there was little hope Twitter could pay the interest, let along the principle. Now, Twitter is worth less than the debt, by some estimates.
Twitter is really big there. It’s basically the most used social media by a vast majority compared to other ones. It’s way more plausible that some ‘too much rich to know what to do with all the money’ Saudi princes decided something like a few percent of their wealth to own the biggest social media on their country for bragging rights and admin privilege to be worth it. Plus, they probably thought Twitter was too big to fail and die, They didn’t expect Elon would fuck it up so bad. I don’t think anybody expected Elon to fuck it up so bad.
Yeah that’s possible too. It’s all speculation until the Netflix documentary comes out years later lol
This seems like further confirmation of that theory that I saw posted on here that the Saudi oil barons funded Elon’s purchase of Twitter for the sole purpose of destroying it.
Then why did Twitter needed to sue him to get him to abide by the deal? Musk often promotes stuff in a pump and dump scheme. One of the many examples is when he briefly promoted bitcoin. He made loads of money off that.
I’m guessing he thought he could make a lot of money quickly in some way. But then interest rates rose quickly and whatever he was planning fell through.
It’s possible it was a initially pump and dump that turned into a Saudi funded venture. He’s a useful idiot from the Arabs’ perspective.
Holy shit you might be right
Conservatives are desperately trying to force TikTok to sell because even though its format is garbage, it’s gathered a large leftwing userbase
This seems like further confirmation of that theory that I saw posted on here that the Saudi oil barons funded Elon’s purchase of Twitter for the sole purpose of destroying it.
Then why does it still exist? Musk took Twitter private, they could’ve just pulled the plug if they wanted to.
That terse action would have made mastodon flourish. It had to be gradual.
Why would they spend billions for this when they could (and still can) just block the website? It’s not like you can sue the King in Saudi Arabia (lest you think you have too many heads)
Blocking the website locally doesn’t halt the movement globally. What was Twitter doing before it was bought? Unionizing people around the globe against police brutality, against voter suppression, against protesting raised retirement ages, against protesting hijab requirements and for women’s equality, and more. Now these protests, which were supported globally, have been heavily impacted by the loss of Twitter. Now what we discuss is almost entirely controlled by the media, instead of ourselves communicating across barriers.
Here? Yeah, sure we can still say that we’re getting some discourse and sharing our lived experiences. But, that’s not at all the same as when Reddit was in full swing, or Twitter.
The rich bought out the internet to divide and control the lower class. We were getting too uppity, and they didn’t like that.
deleted by creator
Meanwhile, everyone will bitch about the absurdity of this and how shitty Musk and his followers are, then continue to use the platform daily as though it’s an essential service. Anyone who hasn’t jumped ship my now is either complacent or wholly supportive.
What’s the alternative for one-to-many communication? I don’t use the platform anymore, but I miss a massive amount of news related to most of my hobbies due to it, normally relying on Reddit users to repost them. It’s incredibly annoying to have to search through 10+ social media pages to check for updates about a race team during a race or an ongoing gaming event.
Mastodon doesn’t have anywhere near the adoption necessary, bluesky still hasn’t taken off.
That’s the rub, every social media service with any uptake is bad from a privacy perspective because the only real way to make them profitable is to sell ads.
So, what are you looking to get out of it? RSS is still a thing, services like lemmy are decent at aggregating links (post the content you want, and hopefully others will help), and bookmarks work well if you just need a dozen or so sites.
I honestly never use Twitter, Facebook, etc, and I feel like I’m about to keep tabs on things reasonably well.
I’m looking for live updates from race teams during endurance events, gaming news from specific creators, local traffic notifications and real time updates from sports teams leading up to games.
These things don’t typically have articles to link to, so aggregators don’t work well, and are often behind the curve. RSS has no adoption anymore and doesn’t quite work anyways.
RSS has no adoption anymore
Not true. RSS feeds are the only thing I use these days and know quite a few others that do as well. Sure some sites may not have RSS feeds by default, but there are a ton of services that auto generate RSS feeds for you.
None of those are essential serveices. There is no alternative, those are just not essential things. In order to get those non essential things we will all stay signed into for the neo nazi revenue and messaging machine.
There’s no need for an alternative. Twitter is simply not a necessity of any kind in reality.
But use whatever you want, freedom is yours to exercise as you see fit.
Personally I’ve never wanted to use Twitter, it just made me go “Yuck!” from day 1 of its existence.
I don’t see that. I see a lot of people who assume these two groups are the same people. But most of us don’t use Twitter still. That’s why their non-bot userbase is steadily declining. People are leaving. People are abandoning the platform.
No, stop, please, don’t kill your platform, no, stop. Eh, nevermind.
Part of me really buys into the idea that Musk is pulling an evil mastermind move with his other billionaire pals, destroying one of the biggest social media sites to keep users fractured. End goal keeping any community small and unable to organize at scale. Then the voice of reason tells me this just another egotistical nepo baby trying to staunch the hemorrhaging of money from his last bad investment.
Stock was at 420 and that was all that matters
This is still my opinion. I hated shitter before boy wonder musk took over. It sucked before and it sucks worse now. Just kill it.
Musky: Hmm, how else can i drive away actual human users?
Add lootboxes and timers.
If you don’t pay to post, there’s a 50% chance of your post getting deleted after anyone sees it. Pay some money to get more favorable odds. Oh, but you don’t but that stuff with money. You gotta use xitter turds first that, and some times you can get those from xitter boxes. In order to buy the lootboxes, you have to spend real money.
If you haven’t bought any lootboxes in a month, xitter will take control of your account and start automatically posting flat earth nazi crypto trash.
And if a post goes viral you have to pay to not have its visibility restricted
And when Xitter starts posting NFT trash in your name, you can restrict the spread of those posts by spending some Xitter Turds, which you can get from the lootboxes.
Oh and the cooldown timers! After every post, you have to wait 24 hours, but you can cut that wait in half by spending some Xitter Turds again. Let me tell you, it’s going to be unlike any service before it. EA and Ubisoft have so much to learn here.
And you can ask your fans to spend gems to remove obnoxious ads from your profile
Pretty much. 1usd per bot I’d a small price for maintaining a bot farm.
Or do they plan on banning accounts that use the same billing info? If CNN or BBC pay for their employees accounts, would they get banned?
You have to pay him so that you can do the work of creating content for his platform? No thanks
Who is going to pay to post on twitter? Not only has he destroyed what was there but he’s stopping any route for growth with new users. Most people won’t bother.
He really has managed to destroy that company with his knee jerk decisions.
People with “hot link in bio” and all that jazz
Gotta get them 44 billion back somehow.
Well, this ain’t it chief
Who would have thought that Twitter would become the new Somethingawful forums, and that Musk would take the role of Lowtax.
aoh man. So apt and too soon.
Is SA still around?
Yes, and it still kicks ass. Come home, goon.
If you do your browsing on mobile, check out the Awful app.
Ngl I’m cautious about even looking. Has it devolved into a rw shithole or is it still funny?
The blowtax shock-site days are long gone. With occasional exceptions in containment areas like the pink forum and the debate forum, SA’s culture is acceptable-to-laudable these days. Effortposts on the leftist board are a life-changing force for personal betterment, and goons remain some of the most charitable nerds anywhere.
And despite all of that, it is still funny.
I do miss the culture and spirit of photoshop contests between SA and Fark.
God I’m old.
I really should join up one of these days. Used to read the front page every day for a looong time, but never joined the forums because I couldn’t pay online (and was broke af).
I’m guessing it feels a bit like a slice of old internet?
Depends on the subforum, naturally, but the whole place is unquestionably a big waxy cheese wheel of old internet. The paywall, the heavy moderation, regulars who’ve been posting brainy takes in megathreads for years… it still all works like a charm.
Find someone who knows their shit on a topic you care about and hit the ¿ to see their posts and jump in to great moments of earlier discussion. Encounter them again being smart about some other awesome thing. Skip pages of fast threads except for posters you want to see. No upvotes, ya use yer words. That’s a tasty slice of a rare flavor.
Forums are detox for algorithm sickness. Still one of the finest tenbux you can spend.
I’ve seen web writers claim that the original brain trust of Weird Twitter started from a Something Awful clique
WHY THE FUCK IS ANYONE ON TWITTER ANYMORE.
I went to check it out yesterday and I think I actually got dumber in 5 minutes I spent there.
So you’ll be returning there tomorrow?
lol I actually never liked Twitter even when I was an early adopter but I’m only interested in it as a professional case study. I do like Mastodon a lot though and so I get the appeal of Twitter done right!
Find any good witch hunts? We cancelling Markiplier because he totally blinked a desire to oppress women and minorities in morse code? That sounds like Twitter
Wrong year for that propaganda
Elon’s Twitter has no interest in canceling anyone for the “oppression of women”, whether it’s true or not
I think they were going for a “it’s always been trash” angle
Indeed (Although there are still plenty of internet witch hunts…)
It has a “chicken or egg” problem. There are better alternatives, except many don’t use them because their userbase is still on Xitter, and said userbase don’t want to move away from Xitter because their faves are still there. I deleted it from my phone, but I keep my account in case I need to look up something there, or to not get my identity stolen and exploited.
Don’t discount the FOMO factor as well. It’s what kept me on Reddit.
Bluesky has limited federation active already, planning to enable full federation soon (they want mod tooling to be more robust before they do)
Pretty nice place. The user configurable moderation system with 3rd party labeler services and more is quite cool and it’s working even better than hoped (but we’ll need to see how it scales)
That’s not what free speech is, and there never has been free speech on Twitter, and that’s mostly a good thing. Jesus.
That’s not what free speech is
Well yeah, obviously. It’s just wordplay based on the two common definitions of free.
Everybody knows what free speech means. It’s just a bit of wordplay that you’ve taken very literally.
Everybody knows what free speech means.
i really dont think so.
free speech is a pretty complicated thing and i feel like many people dont have a solid grasp on it. i think a good number of people think they know what free speech means because they know “it only applies to what the government can do to you”, but there’s quite a bit more to it than that. like how to deal with hate speech, threats, misinformation, disinformation, etc.
and this is directly related to the problems twitter is facing: elon musk started out by saying hes a “free speech absolutist”, but twitter has been slowly rediscovering why “free speech absolutism” doesnt work. and you can see those discoveries in real time with twitter reintroducing moderation policies (among other things)
Ok then. People know enough about what it means to know it doesn’t refer to not having to pay a fee to open your mouth.
It’s very clear that the headline is a little wordplay joke. It doesn’t literally convey that the journalist thought free speech means you don’t have to pay to make a twitter post. You’re taking it way too literally.
elon musk started out by saying hes a “free speech absolutist”, but twitter has been slowly rediscovering why “free speech absolutism” doesnt work.
I’m in agreement that it doesn’t work.
But it should also be called to attention that Musk never tried free speech absolutism on his platform (not that I think he actually should). He has been willing to bend over backwards in assisting dictatorships in censoring content, and he culled a lot of left-leaning and anti-Musk accounts/comments on day one. It’s always been a lie to pander to the freeze peach crowd.
Elon Musk said free speech like once and then immediately threw a bunch of journalists off the site. And apparently every news article for the rest of my life is going to be about how he was hypocritical instead of whether he wants power or influence or has power and influence or the meaning of giving him those things.
Don’t trust every industrialist you meet even if they invested in one company where competent people make cool space ships. He’s clearly on Ket and some uppers. Grimes divorced him and her music isn’t even good. He’s not that complicated.
Elon and his sycophants have been the idiots talking about free speech on Twitter. It’s perfectly fine to use that talking point as criticism. If he’s not interested in free speech then what was he doing allowing banned Nazi accounts back on?
Free speech, now only $9.99 per month
Upgrade your free speech to premium speech now for only $17.99
or 0.99/post.each retweet would cost you an additional 0.49. you pay less,you get less.
You don’t know what free speech means.
This is like claiming Blizzard is infringing on your free speech because they banned you from world of Warcraft for saying racist shit.
Better yet. This is like claiming blizzard is infringing on your freedom of speech because they deactivated your account as a result of you not paying your subscription.
Do better.
Corporations should be allowed to own vital services so they can ban people from them at will. This is a good thing somehow. I love monopolies that suppress activists and organizers because it would only be bad if the government is doing it.
We could stop thinking of Twitter, Facebook, etc. as “essential services”.
They can both fuck right off and most people’s lives will not be negatively impacted.
That’s the thing about private property and private services. They can terminate your involvement at will for any reason. It’s in the user agreement you consent to when you sign up.
You’re not entitled to these services. They aren’t your god given right or any other bullshit you’re imagining.
Comparing this to freedom of speech is laughable.
This is not going to stop bots.
here’s hoping it stops site growth
Most people don’t get out of bed for a dollar so no, it won’t outside the usual 10-30% pareto ratio, which is probably already getting impacted by Xitter being run into the ground.
This will absolutely stop by far the most bots, because hostile governments like Russia and China use THOUSANDS of bots, having to pay $1 extra to maintain each bot, will be prohibitively expensive for those governments. Remember this can mean THOUSANDS in extra cost for those programs. No way either Russia or China will be able to afford that. So my guess is this will be 99.99% effective at preventing bots. The problem for Musk that he may not have foreseen is, the same will be true for MAGA racist anti LGBT propaganda bots. So now Twitter will go back to be dominated by liberals and socialists. Making it necessary for Musk to pay for another platform all over again, if he wants to have a free space to blurt his idiocy.
/s
You had me in the first 1/4, NGL
Yes I was joking, the real explanation is of course that most bots are made by underage kids that don’t have access to credit cards, and can’t afford $1 out of their allowance. 😋
Isn’t that the started intent? Like adding a small roadblock or captcha.
I’m not saying I agree but the simple logic should work. It’ll likely reduce the user base and still let bits in with cash to burn.
In theory, maybe. In practice, the bots might just pay and post anyway. If they can recoup those costs in the scam, it costs them basically nothing.
So bots pay to continue what they’re doing, but Musky now gets money for it?
Ray Charles could see what’s going on here.
This is what Craigslist did and now nobody uses it and we’re forced to use the garbage platform that is Facebook Marketplace.
I stole this line from someone else, but its great.
Elon Musk has invented fee speech, not free speech.
It’s a clever line, but Musk hasn’t invented a single goddamn thing in his life.
Hey that’s not fair - he invents his own narrative about reality all the time.
Yeah, pay to post was Something Awful founder lowtax’s idea.
SA used to be great. That move actually made the forums a pretty good place for a while because it kept out a few demographics including bots and kids.
Something Awful, YTMND and Newgrounds were basically the comedic engines of the internet back then.
Good 'ol pre-YouTube internet.
I hate that twitter has the seo that it does. I always accidentally click on a link to see the “log in or get fucked” screen.
Its staying power is really annoying TBH.
I guess it could be worse (AKA everyone just going to Discord instead).
Add
-twitterto your search queries.-site:twitter.com
Anyone who still uses Twitter/X is an actual fucking moron.
True to a degee, but too many international journalists still depend on that plattform. Makes it hard to ditch it completly, until finally one of the alternatives really pick up.
International journalists should know better than to use a centralized platform to share information.
Mastodon is picking up steam - it’s only a matter of time
