Bless that thread because now verified Jesus mythology exists:
Or does it?
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That was my thought, they should all explain they can’t come in more than twenty hours a week, as they’re running an electric car company on the side.
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Working from the office is not some magical way to get people to be more productive. It can be the opposite effect on some people.
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Twitter has always been in a hole that it probably dug too deep to get out of. Not saying it is impossible, but overpaying and then completely scaring away advertisers is a good way to make its demise happen sooner.
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There isn’t anything inherently wrong with trying to be more profitable through advertising. Giving the impression and making it your intention to open the platform up to more “free speech” while making inane conspiracy posts for lulz is a hell of a way to completely cripple your efforts to generate ad revenue. No one wants to advertise on 4chan, for example.
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I disagree on this point - having the internet dominated by advertising revenue (and tech companies really being advertising networks, not technology companies) is how we got here. It warps how the platforms work and that warping gets passed on to users (scroll down to the chum boxes for an example)
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Elon Musk may be the first CEO in history who likely devalued his own company by billions of dollars in a matter of days simply by using the company’s flagship product.
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Dumbest man on the planet.
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Well how they set up the sites to promote engagement is how we got here. The reality is, servers to handle the traffic of millions of people a day is costly. I am not sure how else you create a Twitter or a Facebook where EVERYONE is on it and some how afford to run it with out finding someway to make money off of it.
I think the only way someone could out match his feat, is to buy Ford and say how reliable and safe Ford cars will be under your ownership, and then get into a Taurus, turn the key, and have it explode.
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I got PTSD flashbacks reading that letter - it reads as if the NPD business “partner” I used to have wrote it.
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Just don’t. We don’t need it
ETA: it’s kinda like saying “I can’t see how we can build the Torment Nexus without the neural agonizer”.
Don’t build the Torment Nexus at all!
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I guess, but at the same time some people like it. I do find facebook groups easier to navigate for interests I have, vs trying to navigate a dozen different forums.
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I get it, but I think the harms of huge platforms driven by advertising have been shown over time. I have a ton of diverse interests, but I don’t use Facebook, Twitter (except to read tweets I see elsewhere), reddit (except the occasional search result) etc and I feel like I pretty well informed and up on what’s going on in my interests.
I prefer an internet of like minded people getting together and building their own communities, rather than slapping everything together into a one size fits all corporate vision. In the 90s I was super into a particular 3-d modeling program, so I started a mailing list for users. It took off, I got to interact with some of the most talented and informed users, and eventually passed it over to the developers of the software, who immediately made it into a marketing channel. And destroyed it. This is sorta where I come at this from.
Mastadon kinda does the distributed smaller communities social networks thing but I think without a lot more work it is too complex and clunky for norms.
I think it is telling though that when you design a system the “right way” like Mastadon is (loosely coupled, distributed hardware, local admins, server local policies, being noncommercial, users having control of their data etc) it creates a system that people find too complicated. I think it shows that maybe the goal of putting everyone in one place was never a good idea
ETA: thrilling personal anecdote
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Because up until now he’s managed to have the good luck (certainly not good judgement or planning) to
- buy into something which has promise,
- because it has promise, it has a strong team building it
- make a lot of noise about how much of a genius he is while not actually doing enough damage to actually prevent the people who know what they’re doing from doing good things.
Paypal was going to happen either way. Electric cars were going to happen either way. Private space travel was going to happen either way, if more slowly without his money.
He is the apotheosis of the demonstration that the main thing a CEO can do to help a company like that is “stay out of the way of the people who know what they’re doing”.
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That was me in the 90s/2000s. There is a reason though that most of those communities migrated to other platforms or are a shell of their former selves as far as regular users. Convenience and being able to expand functionality with videos and images is what did in a lot of places.
And TBF - we had News Groups which was more or less a centralized location for networking, separated into specific groups. Similar to Reddit, I suppose.
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That is very true. And mastadon is not unlike an evolution of newsgroups in the way it works Usenet, unfortunately, fell out of favor because it was too complicated for most users (and because it was a barely moderated cesspool in many cases)
I think though that the reason the smaller communities died was not because they are naturally going to, they died because the giant corporate platforms took all the oxygen in the room. Without Facebook we would still be living in a webring paradise (I kid. Sorta)
Eta: has anyone pointed out to Elon yet that for $8 a month you can get a whole fucking website of your own?
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One good thing about this absolute shit show: Lynda Carter moved to tumblr, and is fitting in perfectly. She also asked people to make fanart of Wonder Woman riding Mothman (the cryptid, not the obscure comic character).
Ryan Reynolds also moved in, but he’s teetering on the edge. He’s very used to posting like a Brand on twitter and YouTube, which will get him torn apart on a platform where even the corporate side barely tolerates advertisers.
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