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.
“climate change and other left wing topics”… I know that’s basically how it works in some countries, but it’s insane to consider certain scientific facts left wing, and we really shouldn’t support such statements.
Thanks for pointing that out. It’s just so normal to think that way here that they’ve even corrupted me into framing climate change that way. It’s not a left wing topic; it’s a reality.
I just hope young people who are thinking of voting conservative here keep in mind that those assholes literally don’t believe in climate change and by extension science and facts. That alone should automatically disqualify conservatives from anyone’s consideration.
It’s not a lack of belief, it’s just an abundance of “fuck you, I got mine”.
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Yes, in Europe, most political parties, both left and right, have their own climate change mitigation policies, because if they don’t, they risk just not being elected.
Also no mainstream political party in Europe dares to touch Universal Healthcare.
Well, they have privatised it and made it worse and worse, with longer queues and worse quality of care.
That strongly depends on your country.
The access is universal, but its run by private companies now.
That strongly depends on your country.
Politicising climate change was yet another distraction from dealing with it in a cohesive and unified manner. Divide and conquer.
Found the round-earther.
The reason it’s overwhelmingly called “climate change” instead of global warming now is because of language change pushed by billionaire foundations. The Koch network specifically focus grouped and created the term change. Whether we want it considered left wing or not, the billionaire backed right has made such statements left wing.
The reason it’s overwhelmingly called “climate change” instead of global warming now is because of language change pushed by billionaire foundations.
I do think “global warming” struggles to convince some more simple people anyway, unfortunately. Because while the average temperature of the globe is increasing and causing the changes in climate that we’re seeing, I’ve come across far too many comments from people saying things like “global warming must be a myth because it snows more than it used to” and things themselves smarter than all climate scientists combined for that observation.
Of course, those same people probably think global warming is good because they like their summer holidays so perhaps their opinions shouldn’t matter much either way!
Climate change was adopted because global warming doesn’t intuitively line up with winters being much colder on top of the average temperature being higher.
Is this really true?
Idiots would walk around on cold days saying “see - this global warming stuff is bullshit”.
Climate change describes the danger much more aptly.
You should read “Dark Money” by Jane Mayer. Goes into it and a lot of other very eye opening stuff about how the billionaire foundations changed this country.
In 2024, anything that makes sense is un-conservative.
Reality has a left-wing bias.
And yet, here we are :/
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.
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.
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
Conservatives are desperately trying to force TikTok to sell because even though its format is garbage, it’s gathered a large leftwing userbase
Holy shit you might be right
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)
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Reddit’s owned by tencent now? When did this happen?
My bad, Reddit is still owned by an American company but Tencent has a large stake in it since 2019, at least enough to influence the platform into complying with pro-CCP censorship and etc
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It’s completely absurd that he’s saying this as an anti-bot measure. The bots exist because they generate revenue for the scumbags behind them, a small fee is just going to be part of doing business for them. He’s not trying to stop bots, he’s trying to monetize them and use them as an excuse to charge everyone. “The bot problem” will never be fixed and will be used as an excuse for every anti-user measure they put forward.
Anti-user measures on a social media platform
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.
Again, these kinds of news pieces don’t have articles written because they’re real time updates.
On top of that I really have 0 interest in opening a ton of webpages to find simple info. RSS has never been a solution to what I want.
So don’t use RSS then? No one’s trying to convince anyone to use RSS if they don’t want to. I was just correcting the validity of the original statement.
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.
So basically “don’t use it, we can’t offer a replacement, but since it’s not food or water you can go fuck yourself and not have it”
And people wonder why everyone doesn’t join open source projects.
well said. you’re supposed to have roses with your bread, fellas
Dude, I’m not your mom for you to complain to about the state of things. What I said is 100% true, and whinging won’t make it less true. This is how these huge companies stay in control of our lives, and now this is how they are going to install fascism. Do with that info what you will.
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.
There is absolutely a need for an alternative. Just because you don’t think something is important doesn’t mean that others don’t. People aren’t just going to give up features that they expect because “they’re not a necessity” - it doesn’t matter if it’s a necessity. It’s the reason people still use the platform, and until something replaces it people will continue to use it.
People hate FOSS because the people around it are fully ready to condemn you for using anything but, and when you ask for alternatives they tell you that you don’t need an alternative cause your use-case is “not a necessity”
Nope
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.
I genuinely have to wonder if Musk is intentionally trying to kill Xitter, because if he’s actually trying to recoup his “investment” he’s going about it completely the wrong way
There was a theory that he was paid by a country like Saudi Arabia to take it down, sinces it’s a powerful tool for a repressed population. Twitter was very important during the Arab Spring.
I scoffed at it before but it’s starting to seem very plausible.
It’s a numbers and modeling game. If we charge this much, how many users will we lose? If that number is less than what you will make by doing the change, then the change is worth doing.
That works until more of the user base leaves. Whose going to pay to tweet if no one is on the platform. It’s “worth” it potentially in the short term, but long term it doesn’t seem viable.
At $1/year i expect very few will leave. Now if it were $10 i could see that being more likely.
A lot of decisions at Xitter were made seat-of-the-pants by Muskiboi. No modelling going on and if there is, they’re really bad at it.
The purchase itself was a death sentence. $13bn of the $44bn was a loan Twitter took out to buy itself on Musk’s behalf, even before Musk started tanking the revenue there was no way Twitter was going to be able to pay the interest on that without further cash investment.
Meanwhile, given that the business in unviable, Musk can try all sorts of crazy shit and are what sticks to the wall. Anything that proves successful can be adopted by whatever comes after Twitter or other social media. Charging for API access stuck, this is just the next attempt.
Maybe he’s just trying to make it cheap enough for Dorsey to buy it from him.
If he’s not careful he’s going to make it cheap enough for me to buy it from him.
WHY THE FUCK IS ANYONE ON TWITTER ANYMORE.
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.
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)
There’s a bridge in development -not associated with the project- that should bridge @Protocol and ActivityPub.
Don’t discount the FOMO factor as well. It’s what kept me on Reddit.
twitter has fomo?
Absolutely. Journalists post the latest news. Stuff they don’t report on trends. Maybe you’ll miss something big if you leave Twitter! That’s the thinking anyway.
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…)
Not really propaganda when it’s STILL a common problem for the internet to go on witch hunts against people for “Grooming” and other such thigns based on the flimsiest of evidence, sometimes continuing to do so even after the person was proven innocent.
Porn
There are so, so, so many other platforms for that, and many are far better
And I agree I use mastodon, e621, pornhub, etc.
But when I want to see more of that one particular content creator that is only on Twitter, then I’ll utilize Twitter, it’s pretty simple.
Absolutely. I’ll poke my head in there when there’s someone on insta who I’m curious to see if they get naked on Twitter. And that’s 100% of my interaction.
For some (few) users, it’s required for work. The rest are addicts or Musk fans.
You have to pay him so that you can do the work of creating content for his platform? No thanks
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 is 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?
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
Let’s hope. But they have to change the way that likes are shown. It always feels lonely over there.
Exactly, their system makes it feel like no one exists there 😂
Never used it. Never plan to do so.
Very aggressive, I use Twitter for porn, I don’t know how that’s any more moronic than using any other platform that hosts porn.
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
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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
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
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.
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.
