[grin]
Closure, dosed in garlic, staked through the heart and buried in quicklime.
6 Likes
Backup solutions have to be developed for twitter. Write your business social media manager. Write your university IT, write your city council, spin up your own Mastodon instance. We have a short window to transition to something else while Twitter is still functional. If you wait until it collapses, it’ll be too late.
Make every organization you are in regular contact with aware that their social media posts are on a platform that puts their communications in the same feed as extremists and scam advertisements, that they will not moderate their platform, that they show a contempt for accountability and journalism, and that they need to develop some alternatives before things go to shit, or they risk losing their audience and will have to start totally from scratch.
Start now and you have an exit strategy. Wait for the collapse and it’s going to suck much more.
20 Likes
This is a GREAT comment! If I had 300 bot accounts to upvote it I would! (Of course bots are part of the problem, but you get my meaning.) 
6 Likes
I really wish there was something like twitter for public domain stuff that was purely focused on a short-form communications / status platform. It’s one of the things Twitter is actually really handy for is stuff like ‘Hey our company site is offline, but we’re letting you know here!’ or ‘We’re your local department of XYZ letting you know about this thing going on right now’.
4 Likes
I mean it’s not all bad for folks looking to sell shit through twitter
9 Likes
Direct link:
7 Likes
Big things take time to die. AOL and Yahoo are still things, but nobody expects them to be important things ever again.
Twitter cut ad rates by 20%, if they can fill 20% more ads that doesn’t cost them anything in the short run. The quality of the ads has gone down another notch or three which makes them either less amusing or more displeasing. Which will nibble away at people’s capacity to put up with them, and reduce the audience more further devaluing the ads, but that is a really slow feedback loop. I mean look at how long network TV ads blew goats and how many decades network TV was still a primary time sink for the average person!
10 Likes
But that presupposes people are already looking at Twitter on a daily basis. It’s more an argument for mandatory Twitter than Twitter per se.
Which was always the unspoken crux of the conversation about whether we need Twitter. Unspoken because media gatekeepers don’t like to put it so bluntly. But if you replace the phrase “I have to be on Twitter for my career” with “you have to be on Twitter for my career”, that decodes what we’ve really been talking about for the last decade.
It’s not like Turmp or Musk or New York Times writers need Twitter to be heard. What fascinates them is a setting where everyone has to listen. And, sure, we might even want that in limited circumstances, like public notice boards, or the Emergency Broadcast System (another object of Turmpian fascination).
But I’m wary of a con where interested parties “talk past the sale,” pretending we all agreed to Mandatory Twitter without asking anyone. (Because the answer would be “no”)
6 Likes
That isn’t actually what I’m getting at - the point was that if something was wrong with X, you could go to Y, a different platform, to get a quick ‘oh here’s what’s going on’ update from a presumed authoritative source. I don’t ever exist on Twitter except for this specific use case. Remove all the fun shitposting parts of twitter, make it an actual public service, as this is something where there’s an actual need for it.
2 Likes
I have one themed account I now only use to lurk - but I block every single advertiser. Every single one.
2 Likes
The Wheels of Justice Grind Exceedingly Slow. But They Grind Exceedingly Fine.
2 Likes
Or to be more word-for-word accurate to Hemingway about it:
“Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”
3 Likes
I honestly find it distasteful to go to the bird site to read a specific tweet or thread any more. I’d rather people not send me links to it. The best is if the same idea is on Mastodon instead.
7 Likes
I use LibRedirect (a Firefox/Chrome plugin; disable the sites you don’t want redirected) to automatically send me to nitter instead of twitter.
4 Likes
I suppose, but the examples you listed became obsolete and failed to adapt to progressing technology. They’re quietly fading away, rather than being purchased by a narcissistic billionaire man-child who immediately plunged them into a nosedive as hard as he could, to the point where some people thought he was deliberately trying to wreck the company. One would think that would speed things up a bit?
2 Likes
Okay, MySpace. Remember that?
6 Likes
Twitter ads being overrun with dreck doesn’t surprise me. What startles me is just how many of Youtube’s ads have been blatent scams in the past few months.
5 Likes
I haven’t seen but maybe the arse is falling out of the internet advertising scam?
7 Likes
I got one of these a couple weeks ago (reported):
On the other hand, I haven’t seen an ad for Epoch News in ages. (I’d count that as a scam.)
6 Likes
That’s interesting. They use him for lots of scammy shit that I see around the place. I guess if you believe his bullshit, then you’ll believe any old bullshit.
7 Likes
