Elon Musk completes Twitter takeover, Nextcloud to ship their own social network app

Quoting: Purple Library Guy(Biden does sometimes outright lie, but it's usually something the media has already popularized, the kind of lie you can't question without being unpatriotic, like "The United States has the best (X) on earth" or "US intentions in 'international leadership' are benevolent" or such like)

I think he said the world envies the US for its great election system, which, well, the world does not. :)

I really don't get why so many people are cracking up about Musk buying twitter. For years, the platform has been a pit of narcissists convinced of their divine missions, moderated by "fact checkers" that care for nothing but conformity with their world view.
The only importance of twitter has been given by journalists, who are reading there all the time, because citing tweets is easier than doing real research, so they spun headlines out of a bunch of people using specific hashtags. Trump had mastered using twitter for effect long before Musk.

Why has this suddenly become a Problem?

Quoting: ArehandoroNextcloud is cool, but for people with scarce time, or zero knowledge, or too lazy, etc, they should offer a subscription as a service model (similar to what thegood.cloud does, but with full on functionality for emails, photo AI for organising them, etc). Otherwise, their market share will be still in the niche.

https://github.com/nextcloud/providers

It is a very deliberate decision to separate the business of running the cloud from the development. And I am very sceptical about the feature creep of my beloved Nextcloud. First it became NC Hub with videoconf and groupware and all, now social media. I hope the core functionality does not get neglected, otherwise it's home-made extend before extinguish

Quoting: Nateman1000The rich class now has 100% control of the biggest discussion platform ever. Disgusting

What changed? Were the previous owners of twitter middle class? What discussion platform or media has ever not been owned by rich people? Already in ancient Athens, democracy was for the 10% wealthy people with citizenship.

I never liked Twitter and I never used it and it's main purpose in recent years seems to be trying to push fascist agendas. This is good news as far as I'm concerned.

Quoting: TheodisThe only thing that's going to keep twitter from turning into a complete crapshow is that advertisers do not want to be associated with the worst of it which is why Elon's first announcement was pretty much begging the advertisers to stay telling them that he won't let it get too bad.

Spoiler alert: He's going to let it get that bad.

I deleted my Twitter account a couple days ago. I had it for years, but pretty much never used it. I'm just not a social media person, and I actively dislike Twitter.

Signed up with Mastodon back in August and used it for a while. I like it better than Twitter, but I eventually ran into the same problem; I'm not a social media person. However, I will keep my Mastodon (Fosstodon) account active, in case I decide to use it again.

Quoting: CyborgZetaI deleted my Twitter account a couple days ago. I had it for years, but pretty much never used it. I'm just not a social media person, and I actively dislike Twitter.

Signed up with Mastodon back in August and used it for a while. I like it better than Twitter, but I eventually ran into the same problem; I'm not a social media person. However, I will keep my Mastodon (Fosstodon) account active, in case I decide to use it again.

Ha, I literally created a Twitter account only because that is where Rockstar was posting fixes for GTA V... and I looked at it about three times, and gave up. Twitter has always been something that I apparently am just 'too out of touch' to consider useful in any way. Granted I also hate Facebook, but generally use it for getting project updates where people post there first before old forums and such. Forums are still far more useful than Facebook/Twitter, as you can then search through years of posts for the info you need.

Here's what I think is most likely:

Over the next year, monetization of the platform will go absolutely batshit. Musk has roughly a billion per year to service the loans he took out for the purchase, and currently Twitter doesn't make anywhere near that. And other than selling more stock, it's unclear where else he'd get it from.

Expect foreign governments to be all over this. China has wanted to make serious inroads on Twitter for a while, and they have leverage over Musk due to him wanting to manufacture and sell Teslas there. They're already publicly asking to stop having their government news services tagged as such. Apply the same to other countries where Tesla or Starlink operate.

There's going to be a very delicate dance between making the "Freeze Peach" crowd happy and able to say awful shit without consequence, and keeping brands and celebrities from feeling like the place is too hostile and bailing. And remember, their presence is one of the big draws of the platform. And Musk is NOT a delicate dancer.

Musk also has to navigate a lot of contractual and international law stuff which he normally likes to pretend doesn't exist. Which is one reason his wave of firings is going to net him (as sole CEO) a hell of a lot of lawsuits, which, well....we saw how he handled himself when he tried to back out of the deal. And he, like Trump, is supremely bad at damage control or keeping his damn mouth shut, even when it's definitely not in his own best interest.

Musk and his friends, as we saw in the texts released during the legal proceedings, have a lot of really dumb ideas on how to run the place. They are going to try to implement those ideas. Probably all at once. It'll be a confusing mess.

Going back to the monetization thing, experience tells us that when a company (we see it a lot with game companies) either fail at monetization, or worse, succeed at monetization, they will in both cases double down on that monetization. The only difference really is that in the former case, it'll tend to be more gimmicky and slapped together in a hurry.

None of this even gets into the misinformation, harassment, slur-throwing, conspiracy theorizing, and all the other ills that are already there but about to get worse. This is only based on the capabilities, or more notably the lack of same, of Musk himself, amply demonstrated in public many times.

tl;dr Start looking for alternative social networks/advertising platforms/announcement spaces, because this one's gonna get self-sabotaged by an idiot who bought his own "genius" marketing.

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: Mountain Man

Quoting: Renzatic Gear

Quoting: Mountain ManOne of Joe Biden's many whoppers has already been flagged with an "additional context" notice. That would have never happened under the previous leadership.

I'm pretty sure our news sources fact checking our presidents has been a thing since at least the late 18th century.

First, Twitter isn't a news organization. And second, this is, to my knowledge, the first time Twitter has "fact checked" Joe Biden despite his many, many questionable statements.

I agree that Biden makes many questionable statements. Biden usually lies the way politicians always used to lie in the old days--by omission, by half-truth, by implication. And there isn't that much a fact-checker can say about that kind of thing.

There is a contrast here with Trump, who just lies constantly by simply saying the flat out opposite of reality--simple downright factual lies. Indeed, often things that are the opposite of other things he also said. Many Republican figures seem to have decided to emulate him. It's a very different style (and volume) of falsehood. But it's also something fact-checkers can readily check: These people are claiming things are facts which are totally not facts.

(Biden does sometimes outright lie, but it's usually something the media has already popularized, the kind of lie you can't question without being unpatriotic, like "The United States has the best (X) on earth" or "US intentions in 'international leadership' are benevolent" or such like)

Yeah, I don't really buy your rationalization that old Joe is somehow a more virtuous liar than Trump.

Quoting: Mountain Man

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: Mountain Man

Quoting: Renzatic Gear

Quoting: Mountain ManOne of Joe Biden's many whoppers has already been flagged with an "additional context" notice. That would have never happened under the previous leadership.

I'm pretty sure our news sources fact checking our presidents has been a thing since at least the late 18th century.

First, Twitter isn't a news organization. And second, this is, to my knowledge, the first time Twitter has "fact checked" Joe Biden despite his many, many questionable statements.

I agree that Biden makes many questionable statements. Biden usually lies the way politicians always used to lie in the old days--by omission, by half-truth, by implication. And there isn't that much a fact-checker can say about that kind of thing.

There is a contrast here with Trump, who just lies constantly by simply saying the flat out opposite of reality--simple downright factual lies. Indeed, often things that are the opposite of other things he also said. Many Republican figures seem to have decided to emulate him. It's a very different style (and volume) of falsehood. But it's also something fact-checkers can readily check: These people are claiming things are facts which are totally not facts.

(Biden does sometimes outright lie, but it's usually something the media has already popularized, the kind of lie you can't question without being unpatriotic, like "The United States has the best (X) on earth" or "US intentions in 'international leadership' are benevolent" or such like)

Yeah, I don't really buy your rationalization that old Joe is somehow a more virtuous liar than Trump.

Clearly, you're capable of buying or not buying whatever you want.

But it's also pretty clear that for sheer volume and ready verifiability of lies, Trump is way ahead of any politician in American history, if only due to social media making it easy to say far more stuff to the public. There's an odd genius in it--Trump realized that in the age of Twitter, he no longer needs to even pretend to tell the truth--that rather than say what he thinks people want to hear within the constraints of some degree of realism, he can just say absolutely whatever he thinks people want to hear, no matter how completely and obviously false and even ridiculous, and even if it both can be and is quickly fact-checked and rebutted, even if anyone who just thinks for ten seconds would know half of it can't be true, none of that matters as long as people want it to be true and some substantial online community will repeat it, creating a resource that those who want to be fooled can go to for their "truth". This lets him pander to people far more completely, spinning whatever fantasy they need, even multiple contradictory fantasies, so there's a big upside.

Given the many channels available to him to pump these fantasies up, the downside prospect of conventional media checking his facts and calling him a liar becomes less important . . . and less important still since American conventional media first created a fairly explicitly Republican wing (notably talk radio, then Fox news) which led to a polarization where nearly all American media is now either Republican or Democrat, neither willing to fact check their own side. Truth was much more important in the Walter Cronkite era, when either party could expect to be excoriated if they got too obviously far from reality in their claims.

Biden, and the Democrats in general, are not so much more honest as more traditionalist.


Last edited by Purple Library Guy on 1 November 2022 at 8:27 pm UTC