In a panic over “data pillagers,” Musk makes things even worse for his remaining advertisers

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Originally published at: In a panic over "data pillagers," Musk makes things even worse for his remaining advertisers | Boing Boing

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It’s just a user agent check. Any “pillaging” level actor will be around it in 5 minutes

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It’s like his memory stack has only has two slots. If a new piece of data comes in, the oldest one has to be pushed out.

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Well, now I know not to bother clicking through on Twitter links. Thanks, Elon!

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Like when he took that home winemaking course and forgot how to drive

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I just wish all the people I read on Twitter hadn’t decided that their fall-back was going to be Blue Sky, which a) I can’t read without an account, b) I can’t get an account, c) I don’t want an account.

In between all this and Youtube blocking ad-block users, I guess that’s enough social media for me. I yearn for the days back before they dropped their blogs in favor of social media…

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Perhaps BB can stop embedding tweets in stories now? They don’t seem to embed in the expanded post on BBS, and I never wanted to click through.

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How soon until screenshots of tweets are blocked?

…Not soon enough!

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“Twitter? What’s Twitter?”

(someday)

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Any company that is still paying Twitter to host their ads deserves whatever they get.

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How to fail at business, without really thinking.

Apologies to Robert Morse.

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Doing it for the benefit of “normal users” is when he declared he was lying.

I’m guessing “data pillagers” refers to all the bots that he despises relies on to inflate engagements.

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Elon’s an idiot, but I run a text based fiction site that has gotten robot scraping multiplied by a few thousand in the past year as ChatGPT rises. Not engagement, of course, and definitely not sales, and it’s porn so not posting it here or talking about it further, but these are likely all fledgling LLMs. None of them are respecting the robots.txt, either.

And if all Twitter did is a UserAgent change, it’s believable that this mitigation is the same.

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I asked ChatGPT to generate a 50 word insult of Elon Musk (I like it):

Elon Musk, your ego eclipses the vastness of the cosmos, yet your achievements pale in comparison. Your overhyped projects are as empty as the promises you make. Your tweets are a cacophony of attention-seeking drivel, revealing a mind desperate for relevance. Your legacy will fade, a footnote of exaggerated mediocrity.

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This effectively killed Twitter for me. I’ve never had an account and only go there when something newsworthy happens there and a website links to it. I noticed this today that I couldn’t read anything after clicking on a link on the guardian. Everyone should seriously just stop using it. F Elon Musk.

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This could be one of those things now… like I heard about the psychology of email scams, that when they are absurd, they weed out the smart people and the only ones who reply are exactly the kind of marks they want. That’s kinda how it feels when I’m at my parents house and I see the “cash for gold” and “my pillow” ads on Fox News. Soon the The kind of people who advertise on Twitter will just be the people preying on people stupid enough to be on Twitter…

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It’s basically a private equity game plan. Cut costs unsustainably, let the company turn to trash while extracting any revenue you can all the way down based on accrued goodwill and bet that you can still make some money on the smoldering husk as link farm and Nazi trolley cesspool with ads for boner pills and fake nutritional supplements run by a skeleton staff.

The difference is, private equity firms use PR to drive down the value of the company before buying it.

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Also they extract revenue rather than just burning it all… First thing Elno did was set fire to the revenue streams and his later attempts to create new ones have just undermined the existing ones. He might have slashed running costs (if we ignore the fines and lawsuits he’s spawned in the process and ignore the other costs he’s just deferred), but he’s slashed revenue even more.

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Also, the vulture capitalists choose to buy the distressed company before they run their bust-out operation. The Boy Genius forced himself into the situation of buying Twitter at a premium.

There was no plan here, just a preening edgelord who thought no-one would call him on his boast.

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