Ah, the free market in action.
“If you don’t like it, then take your money elsewhere!”
“OK, we will. Bye!”
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The answer to this question is clear when it comes to Twitter.
[Archive]
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From the Brianna Wu post:
Musk has risen to prominence through a series of vague visions of the future he doesn’t have the leadership skills to actually deliver. He talks a big game, but can’t back it up.
Just like his grandpa.
In the 1930s, [Musk’s grandfather Joshua] Haldeman led the Canadian branch of the Technocracy movement, when “technocrat” meant something very different from a bland centrist politician. Then, it was a uniformed movement that marched under the Monad, or yin and yang, symbol, aiming to replace democracy with a society led by engineers.
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I never had a Twitter account, so all the tweets I’ve ever seen (which is a lot) were imposed on me by third parties.
If Twitter was my window on the world, I wouldn’t hear anything from Musk or Turmp or the other horror clowns that fascinate the editor class, because I’d block that nonsense. The reason I can’t stop hearing about it is because every single person in the media thinks Twitter==life, and Earth’s worst turds have become experts in getting their attention.
When Twitter is down to its last hundred users, they will all be NYT and Guardian columnists (and nazis), and every bit of Elon drama will still be front page news. So if anyone is hanging onto their account out of FOMO, I’d say don’t worry about it – you won’t be permitted to miss a god damn thing.
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So I’ve had very little trouble giving up reposting of live links to Tweets. Screenshots are so easy to do instead.
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That would work out about as well as my attempts to block all news about the Wizard Game for mental health reasons (it failed miserably). You don’t just need to block the arseholes, you need to block all the people who follow the arseholes, and the people who are being victimised by them, and the allies of the victimised.
This is also called “burying your head in the sand”.
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Me too. I’m not an active user but I still see a fair amount of Twitter references. I have heard activity is down but not a lot?
It’s my guess that if the users (specifically the small number of popular posters) don’t leave the advertisers will eventually come back. Corporations have the attention span of a gnat and are mostly only motivated to not stand out from the crowd. They don’t want to advertise on stormfront but Ilif there is still a lot of non-nazi posting on Twitter and other companies are advertising there, most of the ones that have suspended will come back.
Of course if Twitter goes bankrupt from lawsuits and debt or the services crash for days at a time because the people who can fix them are gone that’s another issue. But if Twitter can survive a year like this without crashing and burning and still have most of the user base intact I think it’s probably going to recover.
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I’m sure that’s Musk’s hope but it’s unlikely to happen. He was able to make the first interest payment (and may be able to make the next two) but only by setting the company up for a whole raft of labour lawsuits and service outages. Prince Bonesaw and the banks won’t wait until 2024 to start cutting their losses and collecting.
The big corporate advertisers have likely decided to take at least two quarters off this year from Twitter ad buys. They’re not biting at all the desperate deals that Twitter is offering to entice them back. If the user-generated content that Musk allows remains toxic, they won’t come back. The platform will become the social media equivalent of Faux News, where the ads are all for dodgy or shoddy products and services and for ones infused with far-right ideology.
As for the users, most of them will stay put more due to inertia than actual loyalty to the platform, just as they did with MySpace and other dead or dying platforms. Big-name celebrities, journalists, and corporate brands, though, will start (and are) hedging their bets by setting up accounts on Fediverse/ActivityPub platforms both in anticipation of the financial collapse of the business and to avoid being associated with fascists and bigots. Musk is trying to blunt the effects of that by shutting down or restricting the APIs, but that’s ultimately going to alienate more of Twitter’s heaviest users.
There was a time when plots of people would look at this train wreck and say “you don’t understand, Elon Musk has a secret galaxy-brain plan to come out on top”. Those days are over.
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the thing that gets me the most about Musk and his SF obsession is that he’s absolutely the bad guy in the books he claims to love. Like his vision of Mars is based on Kim Stanley Robinson’s novels - where Mars is an Anarchist utopia and capitalists are ruining Earth! Or he named a bunch of SpaceX landing platforms after ships from The Culture when again, it’s a post-scarcity Anarchist society. Bezos loves the Culture as well to the point of licensing Consider Phlebas for a TV adaptation but the Banks estate pulled out of the deal a few years into development.
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He probably read anarchist and thought of “anarcho”-capitalism, even though both Kim Stanley Robinson and Iain M Banks were very clear about what they meant.
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Well, that is why I choose not to play. But I end up having an even worse Twitter feed curated for me by the rest of the internet anyway.
Like with that recent story about Musk’s tweets having shitty engagement on Twitter; I can see why he was confused, because every other website finds everything he says completely electrifying. It’s not just Twitter’s algorithm that surfaces assholes.
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I don’t know who’s current in libertarian SF. What I’ve read of it, it’s usually written so that everyone else is extremely stupid.
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Oddly, Ken McLeod wins the Prometheus Award for Libertarian SF pretty much any time he puts out a novel, and he’s a card-carrying Communist.
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I keep Twitter set to “Following” instead of “For you”, so I imagine that I miss most of the crap. I must be in a minority, though, because I see people complaining about accounts they follow disappearing from their feed. Or are they not actually following those accounts and instead relying on the algorithm to keep them in their feed?
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You normie losers just don’t understand the full brilliance of Elon’s 4-dimensional chess moves.
If brands are unwilling to advertise to Nazis, he just needs to fill Twitter with so many Nazis that they begin creating more Nazis, and eventually the Nazi demographic will become so huge that the brands will be forced to start advertising to Nazis, and then they will all flock back to Twitter, because that’s where the Nazis are. And then … profit!
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Iain M Banks and Charles Stross were both nominated for it too, and they are also definitely not libertarian-capitalists.
I think there was a joke that they were going to rename the award to the Prometheus Award for Libertarian SF Written by a Scottish Socialist.
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I’ll admit I rarely check the Prometheus shortlist but it always amuses me when the awards news comes in from Worldcon and McLeod’s won it again.
It also doesn’t surprise me that socialist and other far-left writers win it as well because their ideals are close to what Libertarians espouse as their ones, but never realise that their methods to get there are… flawed to say the least.
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Please make this a real thing!
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Cory Doctorow has won as many as Ken McLeod, but he isn’t Scottish.
They like to co-opt libertarian-socialist ideas, but hand wave away the bits that point out that capitalism is just another power structure (Which is the main point of libertarian-socialism).
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