Watching major social media websites actively kill themselves has been nothing if not an experience
Wow…
Is there some kind of tech CEO competition running or something?
“Who can alienate their user base the fastest”
There’s a saying, " never attribute to malice what is easily explained by incompetence".
But we’re quickly reaching the point where it’s no longer easily explained incompetence. Elon is either the most incompetent person in the known universe, which is saying a lot, or he’s doing this on purpose for some reason.
I’m not into conspiracies, but it’s starting to make more sense if he’s actively trying to tank the stock.
There’s no stock to tank. You could argue that he’s trying to tank the company, but there are easier ways to do that.
You could argue that he’s trying to tank the company
I’m kinda lost here. What’s his end goal with it?
Depriving the libs of a favored platform via making it conservative and unruly, and weakening its democratic potential against authoritarian states like Saudi Arabia, is the theory.
Yes there are, but he’s already with the SEC breathing on his neck for other scams so I guess he wants plausible deniability.
There’s no stock or similar security, so the SEC doesn’t care at all. Could be a plausible deniability thing, I just think it’s more likely that he really is that dumb, given the stories about Tesla/SpaceX having teams that basically existed just to control him.
He just wants everyone to be exposed to his right-wing buddies toxic posts.
Yup, he gets a hard-on by exposing people to the “fash n friends” crap.
I mean, 2024 isn’t that far away. It’s pretty clear who he’s pandering to in the name of “free speech” or “townsquare of the internet” or whatever shitty rationalization he uses to explains his nutty behavior.
Once upon a time, long ago, in the very beginning, I liked Twitter as a stream of instant information from all POV. Then Twitter became a haven for bots and a propaganda tool. Is it possible that Musk bought Twitter so that he could take it to the point of absurdity and destroy it?
For real! He’s trying to tank Twitter.
Whats going on with social media CEOs making dumb decisions these days…
Money. Tech was hot and trendy, so VCs were willing to continue pouring cash into a bottomless pit of unprofitable tech platforms, and now they’re not so everyone has to figure out how to make money off of the community. In a surprise to absolutely no one that’s been paying attention, companies filled with people that have never had to be profitable before are really bad at turning their company profitable and instead only manage to light large sections of it on fire. 🤷
At the top levels, they are rich and well-connected enough that they don’t have to worry about failing like regular people.
They can burn millions, billions of dollars and still get out with a fat paycheck, a pat on the back, and another CEO/exec job lined up by one of their many wealthy friends. Either that, or they are “forced” into retirement where they live large for their remaining lives.
I wish somebody would force me into a wealthy retirement…
Conservative money thinks that they can keep there opposition off balance by smashing social networks . Musk did not launch desatitis campaign out of nowhere.
This is exactly it. Social media’s greatest power is the ability for common folk to organise and rally quickly and easily. That cannot be allowed, so these moves are designed to divide and insulate.
Omg this rings so true
it’s not about money. it’s about power
Elon went early and often. He’s a trend setter.
Elongated Muskrat has discovered just how many accounts are blocking him. His ego can’t take that. His FrEeSpEeCh must be heard
My account isn’t blocking him.
At least, not since I deleted it. And stopped visiting Twitter.
I’m skeptical of this, maybe it’s because he’s worried his fascist followers are slowly falling into an echo chamber cause anyone with more than a few braincells blocks them
Oh no please, not the nicknames. Can we leave them?
Nothing makes me cringe harder than the childish nicknames everybody keeps coming up with. Elongated Muskrat isn’t funny or offensive.
Calling his sycophants Muskrats is appropriate though.
Elon Musk is a gaping, farting anus. I pay as much attention to the sounds from a gaping, farting anus, as I do from him.
Kind of rude. Farts can be funny, and they don’t deserve to be disparaged like this.
Very true. I take back the bit about the farting anus.
So he’s run out of engineers that know how to maintain the block feature?
QA: “I’m clicking the block button but it isn’t doing anything anymore!”
Twitter mgmt: “That’s ok, instead of fixing it we’ll just remove the button.”
It would be hilarious if when he is out at twitter we got a twitter files dump that showed the devs that maintained block really are all gone and he’s playing it off like this is some new big idea twitter came up with to make money🤣
it’s unavoidable to center Elon here but can we just take a step back and appreciate how stupid, bad, and completely antithetical to a usable website this idea is? blocking has been a feature on like everything since phpBB forums because it literally just works. it’s an easy way to curate your experience without escalating and it’s a logical imitation of being able to simply avoid a person in real life. the idea of removing this in favor of nothing but mutes is just goofy as fuck (and if you make muting the new “block”, what’s even the difference between them? people will just use them basically the same way!).
Muting means other people can still comment on your stuff, and everyone else but you can see it.
Its so transphobes and homophobes can continue commenting on LGBT people’s content.
Elon Musk really fucking hates his trans daughter. Dad of the century, right here.
Seriously good on his daughter for dropping his scumbag ass. She deserves far better from a parent.
I wasn’t aware he had more children than the one with the weird-ass name. The private life section on wikipedia is a ride…
He ascribes to Longtermism and like his associate Jeffery Epstein, he thinks his genes are magically special, and so he wants as many offspring as humanly possible: while not actually giving one shit about the quality of life for any of them.
It’s really interesting, because he fucking hates his own father (Errol is also a creep who fathered a child with his step-daughter, who he raised from childhood), but can’t put together that he is exactly the fuck the same as his creep ass father.
Longtermism doesn’t have to do with one’s own personal genetics or lineage, though, and it certainly doesn’t belong to Elon.
Longtermism is a notion coming out of population ethics, that since there will be more people in the future than there are today, that we should take the well-being of all those future people into account when making decisions today.
This can be taken in lots of different directions — ranging from humanist environmentalism, to space migration, to concern about exotic existential risks.
But a fixation on one’s own personal DNA is not really related to it at all. That’s more of a misunderstanding of evolutionary biology.
Lemmy’s “block” is essentially a “mute” function, too. It makes it so that you don’t see any more content from a user, but they can still make comments on your stuff.
lemmy, at least, would have the excuse of being constantly a work in progress and i guess that not having such a large community that hard blocking is necessary. but twitter would be appallingly bad without blocks–it already is with them!
Also, Lemmy has the bonus of federation allowing instances to defederate entirely from abuse and spam-happy instances. The smaller instances can have more tight-knit communities and defederating from instances full of jerks might be as worthwhile as a “block.”
IIRC from reading about Bluesky, its strategy for dealing with spammer, trolls, hate speech, etc., was to have various servers in the Federation tag posts, users & servers with a “Spam” tag or “Hate speech” tag, and server admins can set their servers to not display posts so tagged, and to not pass them on to other servers.
I hope it stays this way. It would suck being excluded from unrelated content on Lemmy just because I had a disagreement with someone at some point in the past (depending on how block happy people are of course).
It’s interesting to me that they made the argument that blocking is increasing server costs.
- How is that even possible, on a technical level?
- If true, how is changing to a “stronger mute” going to reduce said costs?
I mean, it’s plainly clear that Musk has no idea what is going on at any of his companies and the narrative of him being a genius of some kind was simply that: a narrative.
In a way, I could imagine it increasing server costs by like 0.001%, if even that, because if the algorithm finds a post to recommend but then realises it’s from a blocked account, it would have to search again (ofc it’s probably optimised so that it realises that at an earlier stage).
But we’re talking about such small details it literally doesn’t matter and is outweighed by the functionality lost one hundredfold.
I expect it’s accurate to say; their architecture is not like a database where you can add an index on a blocked state and then join against it. You have to get a list of potential posts that the user might want to see and then eliminate any in the block list. There will be a few edge case users who have thousands of block entries and a multithreading strategy is likely required to swiftly filter it in a reasonable timeframe.
However, an architecture I’ve seen that works around this is to build this timeline in the background and present it to the user from a cache, I don’t know if this is what Twitter does as I never worked on that. However, if you want to not have a block feature but have some kind of mute feature anyway I don’t see how there is a meaningful difference.
Yeah, sounds like that’s the case. Funny how flaws in system architecture gets exposed to the public through vapid excuses these days.
My guess is muting would likely result in a decrease of overall visibility. Every account gets a mute score.
Haha, that’s a throwback to the days when I helped to manage a phpBB board and there were a few members that would just continuously get into arguments so I edited the database so both of them had each other on their block list. It was very telling when I discovered they unblocked each other a few weeks later and got back to arguing and derailing thread topics.
You took away their hobby.
logical
Stop right there. This is Elon Musk we are talking about
“Hang on, Steve. Reddit can not and will not beat Twitter.” -Elon
“Hold my beer, Elon! I’m probably going to shutdown the mobile reddit website.” -Steve
Let’s be real, he’s doing this because he’s upset about people blocking Twitter blue accounts, this in no way increases server costs or any bull shit like that
Elon, for all of his smarts, seems to not understand the game theory behind social networks. I get it, we have had the status quo for over a decade, but the fundamental rules are still the same.
Frankly I’m happy to seem them falling apart and a return to how social was meant to be on the internet.
That doesn’t make sense. Social media rules aren’t written in stone.
All forms of communication/media/technology evolve over time. Going backwards is regressive.
Depends on what going backwards means, from a technical perspective this is fine and more forward than the centralized providers would have you believe. The only step back im seeing is mainly UI and tooling. The bones here are fine and the UX im seeing on Lemmy and Kbin are inline with reddit just a few years ago.
If having to deal with UX issues is a huge problem the just wait and come back when its more developed, most of what you use in your day-to-day computing is OSS code, if its good enough for your daily work, its good enough for socials.
You know, maybe I didn’t understand the full meaning of your comment - I assumed you were referring to not having the ability to block a user as a “return to how social was meant to be on the internet”
why would I not be able to block a user on the internet? I was able to block them on every system from the beginning. Centralized services will have you think you need thier magic code to do that but we used to do it with clients all the time.
I still run IMAP email clients with a boat load of personal rules, though I did move the blocks to my server for efficiency. Still its MY server, like im posting to you now from my fediverse instance. If i wanted to block someone here they can be annoying sure but at the end of the day I have many of the same tools i had before, though there might be more cat and mouse. That said nothing stops you from having entirely private instances and since we technically can completely control our servers and clients its entirely possible to have things like one-way servers and nodes that are more picky about what they forward. If the network grows you will see an increased sophistication in management tools.
But we were talking about Twitter specifically, not any sort of self-hosted platform or personal site.
I don’t disagree with you, I’m just confused when the discussion moved from Twitter to an anecdote about one’s IMAP email client
my bad, im in “fuck these guys lets all setup nodes” mode atm and still getting used to the UI
Recently, here on lemmy, someone explained Usenet in its days, and said that you yourself couldn’t block others, but only ask the ISPs to. Isn’t that “social” without being able to block others?
Besides, I feel like @[email protected] didn’t want to suggest that you were not able to block others in the past, just stating what he assumed you meant, without evaluating.
I dont remember being able to block people on irc in the 90s. Or maybe there wasnt a need to block anyone. Honestly cant remember anymore
In retrospect, I should probably just learn to read.
Blocking Twitter Blue users is the only way to make threads make sense again after he decided to weight them higher. Any time you open a tweet there’s like 10 Twitter Blue trolls with 3 followers that are sorted above the good comments.
Another great ideea from greatest Genius of our age! Of God how could we live without him until now! /s
It’s insane how ludicrous his ideas in particular seem to be, especially with Twitter. This has to be trolling, surely? Or does he not want to allow people to block him?
He’s already overridden people blocking him. You still see his posts.
He’s just trying to make sure it stays useful as a weapon for fascists like himself is all.
He’s mask off now and he wants his very own version of free speech in your face. That means him and his nazi friends will abuse you to no end and if you reply he’ll ban you like the thin skinned bitch he is.
If you have your personal “ban from plattform entirely” button, why would you need a block button? Jeez you guys it’s so obvious.
Except for his account, I’d bet.
Why would he need to block when he can ban? 🤷♀️
Fun fact: a block feature is required to be accepted by the Apple AppStore review process. So Twitter will disappear from Apple devices with this change.
Since this got some votes and became visible, here’s the source:
Apps with user-generated content present particular challenges, ranging from intellectual property infringement to anonymous bullying. To prevent abuse, apps with user-generated content or social networking services must include:
- A method for filtering objectionable material from being posted to the app
- A mechanism to report offensive content and timely responses to concerns
- The ability to block abusive users from the service
- Published contact information so users can easily reach you
https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/#user-generated-content
Hmm. Hate to be a downer, but that sounds like there needs to be a way for the service itself to block (ban) users and material, not for users to be able to block other users. So I wouldn’t be too optimistic about Apple’s response…
Apple’s review process is inconsistent at best. I used to work for an iOS app and it took several years before they blocked our release for not having a report feature on products. Never had the ability to block users, despite the ability to DM people.
Plus, for an app the size of Twitter, Apple will likely ignore most rules that doesn’t lose them money.
With Mastodon as a strong alternative I really don’t understand why people use twitter at all anymore. There have been so many negative changes that have happened to twitter over the past 2 years.
On one hand, Twitter lost 5% of its user base. It’s not a ton. On the other, it’s 15 million people give or take. That 5% is probably the sort I want to hang out with the most. Likewise for Reddit. 5% of Redditors are awesome and likely now Lemmy/KBin users. Those are the people I care about. It also allows for more quality connections when you have fewer people in your circle. Close connections are more valuable than more connections.
Yeah, all i want is it to be active enough. Having less users is a selling point to me. Using the internet way back in the day was the same way. You had to put effort in, and the people that are willing to put the effort in are less likely to trash the place.
undefined> Close connections are more valuable than more connections.
It depends. Close connections of subject matter experts when discussing technical topics? Sure. When doing general research or looking for alternate solutions for something, you need mass. The difficulty of onboarding users into a federated environment hinders this.
I meant from social connections not technical experts. Frankly social media isn’t the place to get technical answers. It’s typically not great and most of the time is a hive mind mentality. Even on Reddit or stack exchange. I’ve seen decades of questions in my field and the answers with the most points are the ones that match the general hive mind not actual facts. It’s typically not worth it to get answers from social media.
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5% of the mdau. So it’s not a soft hit.
Mastodon has a long way to go in the onboarding experience. Most non-technical Twitter users simply will not engage with Mastodon in its current form.
Mastodon right now reminds me of email before web-based services. It’s not friendly enough to pull in the “normies”. It needs a Gmail.
Pick an instance and sign up. I don’t understand this take. Its literally the same as email and we all managed to figure that out when we were 9-11 years old.
Tell me you’ve never worked in tech support without telling me you’ve never worked in tech support.
@legion @TendieMaster69 Are you onboarding using the browser or using the official #Mastodon app? Onboarding online is a lot more understandable than onboarding in the app IIRC
In the browser. It’s not confusing to me, but I’m a software developer. Millions of Twitter users aren’t going to make it past the server selection step. And many that do are going to be confused when they click to Follow someone and get a weird popup (because that someone is on a different Mastodon instance) instead of instantly following the person.
It’s nowhere close to a smooth enough experience for the lion’s share of Twitter users to transition over. I think people that are used to even slightly technical things vastly overestimate what the average end user is capable of handling. These are the people that ask for help to plug in an HDMI cable.
I feel like the hurdles are kind of features. If your elderly parents can’t figure out then they can’t well flood it with trash. Reddit was the same way at first, oh so long ago. People weren’t used to the format and users without any tech savvy were dissuaded from entry. That turned into a libertarian foundation. This time around the generations that are tech savvy aren’t libertarians, they’re progressives. So we’re seeing a progressive foundation in the federation become established, and that’s going to narrate the future culture here, just like libertarians narrated the culture of reddit for so long.
It was simple for me personally, but I guess I’m a more advanced internet enjoyer?
- went to https://joinmastodon.org/
- clicked “create account”
- went to c.im
- then to https://c.im/auth/sign_up
- accepted agreement
- created account
- became mastodon enjoyer
I think people are intimidated by step 3. Don’t ask me why, but for a certain type of web user, it’s an absolute deal breaker for some reason.
Tbh it’s capitalism. It teaches people to be afraid of choices, and to just take what the corporation is handing them. It’s… disconcerting how pervasive this kind of convenience culture has become and what kind of effect it’s having on people’s lives
that is an interesting point. when people are confronted with the choice of where to store their data, they just nope out
Yeah, having to actually choose a place to go was the main impediment for meto create a mastodon account in the first place. I kept stalling and putting it off, once I did it iwas easy enough. I think a lot of people don’t realise at first you can make other fedaration accounts with the same email and how easy it is.
Except I’m I was not a big twitter user in the first place, so I probably should have started with one of the niche feds first, like star trek or the art one, those would prompt me to interact more.
The onboarding for Masterson is the best of all the fediverse sites but I still think the average internet user would get confused.
The Mastodon culture just isn’t there yet. And it’s a bit of work to actually use. Plus “toots” sounds even more stupid than “tweets” and I’m not sure it will ever really take off.
Toots is no longer the official term, which has been replaced by “Posts”. Toots was always mostly a joke anyway
This is major news. I really hated that word.
To be honest, there was years of backlash to the “tweeting” and “googling” but both made it into the lexicon. However it’s smart of Mastodon to just move to a normal terminology
A normal terminology also helps when explaining the concept of federating with other platforms, imagine saying: “When you join a pod, you can then send toots that can be seen by people in different magazines, even if they’re on different platforms!”
I mixed the terminology of some 3 or 4 federated platforms to give an egregious example, but it helps drive the point. If we have a standard (the ActivePub) we can very well have a standard nomenclature for each feature.
This reminds me of the recent Behind the Bastards episodes where Robert reads the court filings of fired Twitter employees who continuously refer to themselves as Tweeps. At Mastadon they’d probably call themselves Tooters.
I’ve built up a community of folk on there, not all of whom have moved to Mastodon. They’re the only people keeping me on there to be honest. I crosspost between the two for the time being
95% of the people or groups I would want to follow are not on Mastodon.
And frankly, the Fediverse isn’t as user-friendly. It is a but tougher when you have to choose an instance, as well as learn how to follow from other instances.
And frankly, the Fediverse isn’t as user-friendly
One component of a system being “user-friendly” is that it must not sabotage or undermine the user on behalf of the system’s proprietor.
Unfortunately, this means that proprietary systems rarely remain user-friendly forever, as most proprietors eventually want to sabotage the user in some way or another, and can rarely resist the temptation forever.
People dont change habbits easily
I have blocked only one person on Twitter: him.
That’s probably why he’s doing it, so you and all the others who blocked him are forced to see his posts again.
Wonder if the mute feature is next on the chopping block…?
:')
…what the fuck???
