Twitter Dee & Twitter Dumb

[Mongrel]

FWIW, it's still X stuff for me, at least when I went and checked just now. Tried clearing cache, but still came up with the X logo, etc.

[KingRoyal]

I'm seeing X on Chrome, Twitter on Firefox no matter what I do. And I used to see X stuff on Twitter prior to today

[Thad]

True! Though I also noticed that x.com is redirecting back to twitter.com rather than the other way around,

AFAIK that's how it's been the whole time? At least, that's what I heard a few days ago.

[Büge]

[Thad]

Elon Musk’s X is throttling traffic to news and websites he dislikes

The site formerly known as Twitter has added a five-second delay when a user clicks on a shortened link to the New York Times, Facebook and other sites Musk commonly attacks, a Washington Post analysis found

[Friday]

somewhere, Ajit Pai has a massive erection

[Thad]

Twitter accused of helping Saudi Arabia commit human rights abuses

This one's actually not on Musk (though I'm sure he's not any less deferential to the Saudi government than Dorsey was).

It centers on the events surrounding the infiltration of the California company by three Saudi agents, two of whom were posing as Twitter employees in 2014 and 2015, which ultimately led to the arrest of al-Sadhan’s brother, Abdulrahman, and the exposure of the identity of thousands of anonymous Twitter users, some of whom were later reportedly detained and tortured as part of the government’s crackdown on dissent.

Lawyers for Al-Sadhan updated their claim last week to include new allegations about how Twitter, under the leadership of then chief executive Jack Dorsey, willfully ignored or had knowledge of the Saudi government’s campaign to ferret out critics but – because of financial considerations and efforts to keep close ties to the Saudi government, a top investor in the company – provided assistance to the kingdom.

[Thad]

Shot: The Batshit Crazy Story Of The Day Elon Musk Decided To Personally Rip Servers Out Of A Sacramento Data Center

Chaser: DOJ To Court: Here Are The Many, Many Reasons Why The FTC Can & Should Be Investigating Elon Musk’s Handling Of User Data

[Brantly B.]

Of course it looks like "it was stupid but it worked" from an eagle eye view, but those of us who've ever been in the trenches know exactly what happened: It didn't fucking work, but because 7500 people rely on the damn thing not breaking to keep putting food in their mouths, they were collectively able to wipe Elon's ass before any of his shit actually hit the fan.

How much time and money was wasted on that? Only one person can really tell you, and he's the person who wasted it all in the first place so of course he's not going to. That's the problem with these "move fast and break things" motherfuckers though; they either don't know or don't care how much the "break things" part of the equation actually costs, usually because it's not their own money that they're fucking around with. Twitter might be the first thing Elon's tried to run that's actually pulling cash out of his own pocket, and both emotionally and intellectually he has absolutely no idea how to handle that.

[Thad]

Also there's the part where Twitter went down 4 days later.

[Mongrel]

Oh he's finally going there: Musk is thinking of charging everyone for Twitter.

[Crick]

A decision only done when things are definitely going well.

[Mongrel]

They're already backpedalling, saying they were "only" talking about more tiers for Premium users.

I literally cannot not laugh at "Premium Twitter".

[Büge]

Elon Musk's attempts to become Lowtax are proceeding apace, I see

[Mongrel]

He needs to hurry up and get to the grand finale.

[Büge]

nah nah, let's let Uwe Boll beat him up first

[Mongrel]

nah nah, let's let Uwe Boll beat him up first

I would say yes, but he hasn't fought Zuck yet either after challenging him.

Unless there's a way to get either of them into Muskie's place...

[Yoji]

This is still the thread about stupid shit happening on and/or being done to Twitter?

I ask because The Big Man seems to have removed captions from posts with links. So now instead of "Trump Eaten By Wild Boars" and a picture of his stupid face, you just get his stupid face and a domain like yahoo.com.

I can't imagine anyone who could've asked for such a change, and I guess it's small news in the grander scope of things. But I heard that a lot of his destruction of might not be just brain-melting incompetence, but deliberate sabotage. I'm suddenly worried this might be something like the old Nazi Bar plan, to slowly but surely turn it into such a shit hole that only shitty people will use it while everyone else is left in the cold.

[Thad]

I feel like there's a tendency, even among Musk's critics, to act like he's some super-genius playing twelve-dimensional chess.

I find it very easy to believe he's just an idiot.

That's not to say he's not a useful idiot to people who did want to damage Twitter -- the Saudi royal family, say -- but no, I don't buy for a second that anything he's done has been thought out in advance.

And my first guess for why the headlines and ledes disappeared from article embeds is that somebody broke something, not that it was intentional. Same as all the other shit on Twitter that's broken over the past year. Could be I'm wrong about that and Musk has some dumbass reason he believes article embeds shouldn't have text, but this feels for all the world like a "Musk started unplugging servers and then Twitter went down" situation.

[Mongrel]

Twitter really does seems to be turning into a wasteland. All the Nazi stuff is just starting to be too much volume to ignore and now likes are being visibly manipulated in real time (albeit incompetently).

The core gang I know moved full time to Bluesky including not even checking Twitter, either this week or last, myself included. Though I personally have a narrow subset of accounts I'm still checking on Twitter, mainly official ones which can't drop a platform as easily and are actually asking for followers to remain engaged as the amount of Elon meddling and number of nazi bots rises.