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| Author | Twitter about to lose its feathers (Read 13562 times) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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68040
512 MB  Posts: 950 68k - thy kingdom come, thy will be done ! 
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on: November 18, 2022, 15:28
Seem like Elon Musk's greatest acquisition might also become his last. To be frank, for me Twitter (together with Facebook) symbolizes so much what went wrong with the Internet, that we old geezers helped lift from obscurity, that I can not work up any serious sorrow about its (possible) imminent demise. And as much as I admire Elon for his courage, he was warned often enough by both friend & foe "If you buy it, don't touch it!" about this deal. But he did buy it and then tried to turn a fragile giant 180 degrees around on a postage stamp. Now Humpty Dumpty broke and I doubt that Elon with all of his men can put him back together again. |
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Bolkonskij
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Administrator 1024 MB  Posts: 2023
Reply #1 on: November 18, 2022, 16:41
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While I share your sentiment about (anti-)social media like Twitter and the like, I think the fish was rotten from the get-go. Did Twitter actually ever earn anyone money except for the inflated management? I think he realized at one point that he is paying waaaay too much for it and desperatedly tried to get out by getting others to get him out ("Free speech absolutist", "Musk is a security threat" etc.) Anyway, let it go down in flames. Fine with me.
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68040
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512 MB Posts: 950 68k - thy kingdom come, thy will be done !
Reply #2 on: November 18, 2022, 17:44
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On one hand I admire Musk for his gutsyness but on the other I am astonished about his buffoonery. Everyone knew that Twitter was one of those PC timebombs: Its a commercial corporation yet the mainstream insists on having it regulated like publicly owned government property. As a result the bills accumulate while the abillity to increase profits is pretty much non-existent. Twitter's company policy is discussed as a matter of public safety or worse, a threat to democracy itself. For the life of me I can't figure how any reasonable person could have expected to turn that shop profitable under such restraints. Much less squezze back the ~$44 billion Musk poured into this deal. So much of today's Internet biz is about hype, with next to no substance to it. Facebook lost over half its value in less than a week and I am certain many more of those outfits will end up like a million $ piece of "fungible art" w/o its keychain token. Just digits, waiting to get zeroed.
Last Edit: November 18, 2022, 17:46 by 68040
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Neal_SE30
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256 MB Posts: 401 System 7 Newcomer!
Reply #3 on: November 18, 2022, 18:19
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I do like Elon’s anti-establishment, free speech mentality but I agree. I blame the likes of Facebook, Twitter etc for the downfall of society and chaos we have today. Woke weirdness of gen-z, climate alarmist rhetoric, extremism, misinformation from not only our enemies but also our own governments all of which are pushed on these platforms. Blah I say bring back the bulletin boards of the 1990s
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68040
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512 MB Posts: 950 68k - thy kingdom come, thy will be done !
Reply #4 on: November 18, 2022, 19:10
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I don't like hyperbole, not from the left and not from the right either. Yes, we have a serious problem with a rapidly changing climate, but we also used to worry about acid rain and the hole in the ozone layer. Yet that was before we got our heads stuck in the pressure cookers of (anti-)social media platforms. Back then we forced coal fired power plants to install sulfur filters and convinced the refrigerator industry to change the chemicals they use: Problem solved. But now we got "influencers" and oppinionated "journalists" telling us 24/7/365 what (not) to think, eat and drink. We are being told - in detail - whom to (dis)like and every breakfast comes with a ton of mass-generated morallity attached. Most teenies spend more time online nowadays than they do with friends and family in what we oldies used to call "the real world". BBS'es were slow, they took time to navigate and it took even longer to work up a (good) reputation on them. You thought about your sentences, before you posted them. And you needed the help of real people - not brainless algorithms - to spread your word beyond 1 server. That was one important BS filter that's missing today. W/o today's Internet Covid would have been memorized as one bad flu season and could have served as a wake-up call to modernize and shore up our crumbling healthcare systems. But the social-media-amplifiers of Facebook, Youtube & Co. turned it into yet another "the end of the world is nigh!" battle cry and the hysteria that followed made any reasonable weighing of options impossible. The result was a hasty shutdown of the world's leading economies, financed by massive amounts of government debt and that in turn - not Putin's ill thought-up invasion - lead to the double digit inflation rates Western countries are now suffering under. I am surely not impartial in this but I am convinced that the speed of our modern day media platforms has by far outpaced the abillity of the human brain to comprehend and digest this massive influx of pseudo-information in any meaningful way. Only those who scream the loudest can still get through and only the strongest of emotions - fear and hostillity - yield the desired results for the screamer. Twitter is just 1 symptom of what went wrong with the "digital revolution". But it might become the most costly one. 😳
Last Edit: November 19, 2022, 02:30 by 68040
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Neal_SE30
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256 MB Posts: 401 System 7 Newcomer!
Reply #5 on: November 18, 2022, 21:42
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Nicely put!
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ReleaseTheGeese
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32 MB Posts: 37 Division 1 Computer Support
Reply #6 on: December 07, 2022, 22:45
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The experience of this takeover feels weirdly like old 'forum drama' from back in the day, only on a global scale. Elon could've just installed phpBB instead :L
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Neal_SE30
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256 MB Posts: 401 System 7 Newcomer!
Reply #7 on: December 11, 2022, 16:11
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or aol messaging, even msn messaging; bring them back, it was as good as twitter anyway 
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ReleaseTheGeese
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32 MB Posts: 37 Division 1 Computer Support
Reply #8 on: December 18, 2022, 20:25
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In fairness, I haven't found a modern messenger that has been as enjoyable or as feature-complete as MSN 7-8. The entire messenger happily shunted my (always very kind) messages back and forth, while asking for a fraction of what a modern javascript webapp would require. It also allowed for a bit of fun.
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68040
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512 MB Posts: 950 68k - thy kingdom come, thy will be done !
Reply #9 on: December 19, 2022, 00:05
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Elon's cash crunch must be humongous as he's now trying to create a fenced of ecosystem by force. He already had to sell US$40 billion worth of Tesla stock to finance this nonsense takeover and as "unworthy" as many of us old timers consider Twitter to be, I just got off some Twittspace conferences were so called "content creators" are panicking at the mere thought of loosing even a single link opportunity to or fro their Twitter account. A huge part of what's left of the industry in the Western half of the world revolves around nothing more than vaporware: Female online game contents creators scared of their male customer base; Salesmen for Wordpress merchandise and commercial Bloggers from Pakistan (Urdu anyone?) If Twitter falls then Elon's fumble is gonna take down an entire biosphere of digital hairdressers and telemarketers. The part of the population Douglas Adams hadn't deemed worthy of preservation in his famed novel "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy". But back when he wrote his masterpiece we still had a manufacturing industry that actually manufactured stuff. Now the "expendables" by far outnumber the rest of us and I highly doubt they'll vanish quietly into the night.
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