Fuck Elon Musk (Part 1)

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Any Tesla investors out there? He might be onto something.

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I don’t disagree at all with what Erin Reed is saying but isn’t there a little bit of irony in posting “Every dime you give him hurts us” on Twitter? Having an active Twitter account and driving traffic by posting popular comments (over 1300 retweets) helps to directly fund Twitter and Musk with more ad revenue.

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This is the most important thing to take from the reporting. /s

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Well, we can’t talk about active genocide unless we do it the right way… /s

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at this point, it sounds like every twitter account is costing money. including and especially posts like the one featured. i’m definitely not buying a tesla any time soon though. or ummm… buying any rockets.

Ok, I’ll accept that I may be wrong then. But for my benefit can you explain that a little further? Are you saying that Twitter would be more valuable as a company without any accounts? What financial value does the company have other than accounts that deliver eyeballs to advertisers?

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based on the rapid devaluation, the servicing of the debt, the cost of staffing and running the service, and the fact advertisers can no longer protect against impersonation, arbitrary reprisal, and hate speech - twitter sinks further each day into a financial black hole.

other companies have been in similar situations before - for example uber - where more customers was less money. but for uber, the goal was to undermine existing services and then raise rates. twitter doesn’t have that path available to it.

personally, i believe the gravity of the situation is insurmountable. and yes, i quite honestly believe - at this point - they’d be losing less money with fewer users

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Already mentioned upthread, posted for additional infos/links:

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This is an interesting take and I haven’t heard it before.

I have been wondering what will happen as their hardware becomes uncompetitive. You can’t just lay off your servers if they’re underperforming and they’re only getting more expensive too. I imagine then if the Europeans boot Twitter though then in some ways Twitter will actually benefit, or at least maybe try to spin it that way.

Lay off a lot of people, close any local offices and be done with rent, look ma so much profit this year! :chart_with_upwards_trend:

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I wouldn’t call it the most important, but it is kind of ironic. A lot of this stuff gets posted on Mastodon (and some on Bluesky), but those networks of services are limited by the fact that the individual services are careful not to add more users than they can afford to host. It isn’t as straightforward as, say, a single corporate address.

But I suppose it will change soon, because the ability to be seen, the main advantage of Twitter, is slowly dying. Geeks I follow like John Gruber note that the interaction has dropped off a cliff on Twitter, far fewer retweet or reply, or he never sees their replies. But on Mastodon, he can see boosts and favorites across the fediverse (that is, from other Mastodon servers) and gets more responses that seem more thoughtful at the same time. So he said on his podcast that he has shifted to mostly using Mastodon and only looking at Twitter when the tweet is posted elsewhere.

By the way, fellow BBS’ers, did ad revenue ever recover on Twitter? My last understanding was that most major brands had abandoned it, leaving the market open to the grifters that used to prey on Parler and Truth Social rubes?

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From David Thiel at the Stanford Internet Observatory:

We used the waning days of our Twitter API access for a project studying the failure of CSAM controls on Twitter and elsewhere. We’ll have a more detailed report out later this week.

and from Alex Stamos:

In the course of conducting a large investigation into online child exploitation, our team at the Stanford Internet Observatory discovered serious failings with the child protection systems at Twitter.

This discovery, that Twitter’s systems for stopping the posting of known child sexual abuse material (CSAM) had failed, occurred in the context of a larger project that we will release later this week alongside the Wall Street Journal.

For the part of our investigation that involved Twitter, we gathered tweet metadata via Twitter’s API. As a precaution, we used an ingest pipeline that did not store media, but sent media URLs to PhotoDNA, Microsoft’s service for detecting known CSAM.

Our tooling automatically reports any instance of known CSAM to NCMEC without our team viewing it. The investigation discovered problems with Twitter’s CSAM detection mechanisms and we reported this issue to NCMEC in April, but the problem continued.

Having no remaining Trust and Safety contacts at Twitter, we approached a third-party intermediary to arrange a briefing. Twitter was informed of the problem, and the issue appears to have been resolved as of May 20.

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