Twitter Dee & Twitter Dumb

[Thad]

Bluesky

[Mongrel]

Not my preferred landing pad, but it sure beats Threads (ahahahaha), and Mastodon hasn't really emerged as a consensus alternative.

If another site becomes "It" none of us have any qualms about moving, but we do need a simple place to shitpost that isn't Twitter. My guess is that the clear successor to Twitter won't emerge until Twitter dies, or at least becomes indisputably moribund.

Hell, it's not impossible that we end up back at Twitter if it's seized by Musk's (non-Saudi) creditors and transformed again. But "Not impossible" only means that and no more than that.

[KingRoyal]

I don't think anyone will ever go back to Twitter at this point, no matter what happens. That ship has well and truly sailed at this point. And, honestly, it seems to be dovetailing with a general hollowing out of all the major social media sites that aren't TikTok at this point. Facebook is a shell, Instagram still kind of works but Meta is struggling to get Threads to go anywhere, and Twitter drove out all the journalists, the only people who ever made the site feel more relevant than it probably ever was.

There's Bluesky and Masto for now, but Bluesky is not that popular and is still best described as Bad Twitter, and I while I think Masto has legs for the long term, it's decentralized which means it'll just be a different way of running a forum

Between overall waning interest and the rising of the interest rates causing VC cash to start drying up, social media may be in some trouble

but we do need a simple place to shitpost that isn't Twitter.

Someone is spending time and money to give that to you right now

[Mongrel]

but we do need a simple place to shitpost that isn't Twitter.

Someone is spending time and money to give that to you right now

I mean that particular group of friends - the "Borscht Belt" ones I know from Twitter (or from older forums who then moved on to Twitter) - not this one.

[Thad]

Twitter drove out all the journalists

Did it? AFAICT a depressingly high number of them have stuck around up to this point.

It'd be depressing but entirely believable if making their links less useful was the thing that finally drove them out after all the other shit that didn't.

(It does appear that the text removal was intentional and not a bug as I first guessed.)

[KingRoyal]

Twitter drove out all the journalists

Did it? AFAICT a depressingly high number of them have stuck around up to this point.

It'd be depressing but entirely believable if making their links less useful was the thing that finally drove them out after all the other shit that didn't.

Maybe not all, but both the NYTimes and NPR seemed to flirt with leaving the site. And it certainly seems to have driven out a lot of the people who covered Twitter as Twitter. And this is bolstered by Musk's genuine effort to make Twitter content inaccessible outside of Twitter. We're probably not the only site running into issues with linking to tweets

I'll admit to not being as up to date on what's going on over there since I completely left the site when Musk gave like $20k to Andrew Tate

Also, I do think Musk is intentionally trying to convert the site to a right-wing rag, but I don't think that was his original goal. Pretty sure he just wanted to manipulate the stock price, got in too deep with the FTC and after being forced to buy it was suddenly faced with the prospect of what to do. And since part of his current business model involves keeping the Republican government of Texas happy, he's more than willing to try to offer up gifts to try and appease the conservatives

That said, none of that is incompatible with the idea that he's just flat out incompetent and never had any ideas for Twitter since he didn't mean to buy it in the first place

[Mongrel]

I mean, he's high as a fucking kite all the time and his decision-making is severely impaired. I don't actually think this should be discounted.

Nor is it a defence in this case, of course. He hung around with nazis and assholes while sober too.

The journalists who remain which I follow are generally loath to abandon the site because they're fully aware that it retains a large (albeit shrinking) userbase out of inertia and understand that if they cease posting it only amplifies the place as a nazi echo chamber. While casual users like us might be fine leaving to let the site boil in its own juices, professionals face a tougher choice if fighting disinformation is explicitly part of their job.

[Thad]

Nor is it a defence in this case, of course. He hung around with nazis and assholes while sober too.

And the inverse of that is that plenty of intoxicated people still don't think nazis are cool.

The journalists who remain which I follow are generally loath to abandon the site because they're fully aware that it retains a large (albeit shrinking) userbase out of inertia and understand that if they cease posting it only amplifies the place as a nazi echo chamber. While casual users like us might be fine leaving to let the site boil in its own juices, professionals face a tougher choice if fighting disinformation is explicitly part of their job.

When somebody keeps doing the same routine they've been doing for years and claims the reason they're not changing their habits is because they're taking a moral stand, I'm not inclined to believe that's the real reason.

[Mongrel]

Most of the journalists I'm talking about are ones specifically involved in Ukraine or anti-fascist reporting, including many who've only been seriously active on Twitter for the last two years even if they were on it before, and who fight misinformation moreso as an existential issue than a strictly moral one. Very different situation from that of idiots like Glenn Greenwald, who I wouldn't even call a journalist anyway.

[nosimpleway]

but we do need a simple place to shitpost that isn't Twitter.

Someone is spending time and money to give that to you right now

So clearly the solution is to invite all our buddies and get another wave of new, not-necessarily-porn-seeking users here, right

(Do signups/forum registration even work anymore)

[KingRoyal]

Bring them in from the cold

[sei]

we do need a simple place to shitpost that isn't Twitter

[Mongrel]

rawwr!

[Destynova]

Merry Christmas!

[Mazian]

I'd heard the claims that advertisers were "returning to Twitter", but I hadn't realized how much the footnote was "...in the most token way possible, so they don't have to deal with Musk unleashing angry fanboys on them."

Via Mediamatters:

[AT&T] has spent just $781 in the last 12 weeks — 99.96% less than the more than $1.77 million it spent during the 12 weeks before Musk’s acquisition.

Visa and Nissan are similarly spending just a fraction of what they spent pre-Musk. Visa spent just $10, and Nissan spent just $687, in the last 12 weeks — 99.99% and 99.77% less than they respectively spent during the 12 weeks before Musk’s acquisition.

[Cait]

I wonder how comparable that is in the desperately cash hungry Musk era. For all we know, $781 now might pay for the same amount of ad impressions as $1.77M did last year.

[beatbandito]

I can attest I have seen less from all big advertisers combined than I have from one particular guy with ads asking the department of defense to take out the implants they forced on him.

[Mongrel]

[Mongrel]

Well that didn't take long.

Not that I think anyone assumed it would.

[Thad]

Two days ago, Nitter's dev posted a response to a bug report that said, simply, "Nitter is dead."

Looks like Twitter finally blocked whatever means Nitter uses for scraping. Frankly I'm surprised it took this long.