Twitter Dee & Twitter Dumb

[Thad]

Twitter’s Big Ad Plan: Violate FTC Consent Decree, California Privacy Law & EU Privacy Laws To Force Users To Hand Over Info For Ad Targeting

[Mongrel]

do it do it

[Thad]

Thursday Night Purge: Elon Musk’s Twitter Bans Tons Of High Profile Journalists

Yeah, well, show me in the Constitution where it says freedom of speech has anything to do with freedom of the press.

[Mongrel]

Twitter hacked, 200 million user email addresses leaked and posted an online hacking forum

Who could have possibly foreseen thi-

There were no clues to the identity or location of the hacker or hackers behind the breach. It may have taken place as early as 2021, which was before Elon Musk took over ownership of the company last year.

Oh. Hm.

Well it's still Muskie's mess to clean up now.

[Mongrel]

Only a matter of time before these disappear too.

[Mongrel]

[Thad]

Twitter will charge developers to access its API starting February 9th

They haven't said anything about breaking third-party scraping tools like the Unofficial API. I assume that's next. And that it's going to be hilarious when they start accidentally delisting Twitter from search engines trying to block scraping.

[Mazian]

The proposed pricing is out, and it's ridiculously, absurdly expensive. The best bargain tier is $2500/month for 10,000 API requests. No, that price tag is not missing a decimal. EDIT: This appears to be for the search API - which is still absurdly expensive, but the regular API may be less expensive. Or it could end up at $4.20/query, who knows.

For comparison, that price should get you something in the neighborhood of 2 million Google Maps embeds, possibly even more - their cost estimator doesn't even have a way to show prices that high.

Anyhow, expect either some furious backpedaling, or Twitter embeds everywhere are going to stop working in a week.

[Thad]

Anyhow, expect either some furious backpedaling, or Twitter embeds everywhere are going to stop working in a week.

Don't threaten me with a good time.

[Mongrel]

I may use the hellsite a lot and might even miss it a little when it's gone (hey I've got a lot of artists follows on there), but I'm right here with you Thad on watching it burn to the ground with popcorn in hand.

[Thad]

I'm being glib, of course. There's a lot I hate about Twitter, and I haven't been shy about the what and the why. I think most of what's wrong with it is the logical conclusion of a format that makes substantive discussions difficult and encourages bumper-sticker sloganeering, and those problems are exacerbated and accelerated by everything that's gone wrong with the modern Internet: it's centrally controlled by a corporation whose business model relies on engagement and inevitably rewards outrage clicks. It was Donald Trump's favorite social network for a reason. And all that was before Musk took it over and converted it from a passively fascist model to an actively fascist one.

That said, I acknowledge there was plenty of good stuff on there too. A lot of artists to follow, like you say, and other creators of various stripes posting wonderful things. It's been a powerful tool for organizing (for both good and bad). I feel for the people who rely on it for business or networking; the problems with Twitter aren't their fault, and there's no easy replacement that will serve the same function as well. (I've been using Mastodon for the past few weeks and I've been having fun with it, but it's got serious issues with discoverability.) I won't be sorry to see it go, but I want to direct my schadenfreude at the correct targets; there are a lot of people who are going to be hurt by this through no fault of their own and I recognize that, even if I think on the whole Twitter's been a net negative and its collapse will be a net positive.

[Mongrel]

It's main value was that, for all its warts, it was the centralized conversation site for the entire world. You could engage nearly anyone on any topic. You could get into shitposting arguments over asinine topics with kings and queens and CEOs and politicians of all stripes and the brightest scientists in their fields, and also watch them do the same with each other. Sometimes the shitposting was even meaningful and useful! Sometimes. Its UI was and is fairly crap, but not half so horrible as say, Facebook (ahahahahaha), and just about every site had developed embeds for it which increased its reach even further.

It was a de facto universal communication platform, and - on balance - a democratizing one. A great deal of what was most awful about it could be laid at the feet of those who owned it and wished to profit from it.

Losing that universality is the main loss, but as various groups have started moving to other spaces, be they Mastodon or "Truth", that's a ship that sailed when Muskie bought it (and which had been rotting away at Dorsey's pier for a while, so it's not like we're that far off it sinking).

[Thad]

But you're just describing centralization. The good news is that it's convenient and everybody's using it; the bad news is that it's run by greedy assholes who will someday run it into the ground. You could have posted the same thing twenty years ago to describe AOL and you wouldn't have to make many changes.

[Mongrel]

I wouldn't say that "everyone" was on AOL though. Or ICQ's brief tenure, etc.

There was a variety of factors that led people to not just make accounts, but actually engage with others on Twitter in ways previous platforms hadn't. I can't quite put my finger on what those factors were, but it certainly possible one of them was simply timing - that it was "that stage" in the internet's development as a feature of human life.

[Thad]

Yes, yes. This time it's different. And the next time will be different too. And the time after that will also be different.

The details are always going to be different. If the fundamental differences between centralized proprietary silos and the open Internet change, that's the part that's going to surprise me.

[Upthorn]

I mean, I think federation at least provides a framework under which it becomes theoretically possible to shake up some of those fundamental differences between centralized silos and open internet and have some of the primary benefits of centralized siloing while maintaining many of the benefits of open internet.

[Mongrel]

Yes, yes. This time it's different. And the next time will be different too. And the time after that will also be different.

The details are always going to be different. If the fundamental differences between centralized proprietary silos and the open Internet change, that's the part that's going to surprise me.

Uh, I think we're actually talking past each other here? Feels like you're replying to something else entirely?

I'm not making a value judgment. I don't think there was anything special about Twitter the company at all - I think Twitter was the beneficiary of circumstances outside its control, some right-place, right-time shit. I also think that moment has passed; it may or may not be reproducible in future, but because it was a combination of factors, that may be difficult for any one party to deliberately replicate.

I do think what happened on Twitter was to some extent unprecedented, but not thanks to Twitter or any one platform or company.

[Mongrel]

Gizmodo: Twitter Blue Bug Seems to Let Users Keep Their Checkmark Without Paying

Okay, I love the phrase "verified freeloaders".

[beatbandito]

[Thad]

I don't know if this is accurate but given everything that's happened so far I find it entirely believable: I'm seeing reports that people who send DMs with links in them are getting their accounts locked, presumably because Musk still hasn't worked out that blocking spam isn't a challenge, blocking spam while not blocking non-spam is.

Like, I know a really easy way to block 100% of all spam, with no false negatives. It's just that, y'know, its false positive rate is 100%.