If this dude had any experience running an online site he would know how many stolen credit cards are out there.
X is a fly-coated chum bucket.
Hey now....that's really rude! If fly-coated chum buckets could read they would be very very upset!
Was just about to say this.
You know how easy it is these days to get credit card dumps? Legally, I don't know the exact answer, but...
Or PayPal accounts.
This seems like further confirmation of that theory that I saw posted on here that the Saudi oil barons funded Elon’s purchase of Twitter for the sole purpose of destroying it. They want to silence online discussions of climate change and other left wing topics.
Combined with Reddit being owned by Tencent, Facebook being eternally evil, and TikTok being unconducive to any form of coherent dialogue, there are not many places for left wing discourse on the internet anymore.
"climate change and other left wing topics"... I know that's basically how it works in some countries, but it's insane to consider certain scientific facts left wing, and we really shouldn't support such statements.
Thanks for pointing that out. It’s just so normal to think that way here that they’ve even corrupted me into framing climate change that way. It’s not a left wing topic; it’s a reality.
I just hope young people who are thinking of voting conservative here keep in mind that those assholes literally don’t believe in climate change and by extension science and facts. That alone should automatically disqualify conservatives from anyone’s consideration.
It's not a lack of belief, it's just an abundance of "fuck you, I got mine".
Yes, in Europe, most political parties, both left and right, have their own climate change mitigation policies, because if they don't, they risk just not being elected.
Also no mainstream political party in Europe dares to touch Universal Healthcare.
Well, they have privatised it and made it worse and worse, with longer queues and worse quality of care.
That strongly depends on your country.
The access is universal, but its run by private companies now.
That strongly depends on your country.
Politicising climate change was yet another distraction from dealing with it in a cohesive and unified manner. Divide and conquer.
Found the round-earther.
In 2024, anything that makes sense is un-conservative.
The purchase itself was a leveraged buyout, they didn't pay the entire $44bn as Twitter took out a loan to cover $13bn. Like all leveraged buyouts (eg Toys R Us) the purchase itself is meant to kill the business. Even before Musk started screwing the revenue there was little hope Twitter could pay the interest, let along the principle. Now, Twitter is worth less than the debt, by some estimates.
This seems like further confirmation of that theory that I saw posted on here that the Saudi oil barons funded Elon’s purchase of Twitter for the sole purpose of destroying it.
Then why did Twitter needed to sue him to get him to abide by the deal? Musk often promotes stuff in a pump and dump scheme. One of the many examples is when he briefly promoted bitcoin. He made loads of money off that.
I'm guessing he thought he could make a lot of money quickly in some way. But then interest rates rose quickly and whatever he was planning fell through.
It’s possible it was a initially pump and dump that turned into a Saudi funded venture. He’s a useful idiot from the Arabs’ perspective.
Twitter is really big there. It's basically the most used social media by a vast majority compared to other ones. It's way more plausible that some 'too much rich to know what to do with all the money' Saudi princes decided something like a few percent of their wealth to own the biggest social media on their country for bragging rights and admin privilege to be worth it. Plus, they probably thought Twitter was too big to fail and die, They didn't expect Elon would fuck it up so bad.
I don't think anybody expected Elon to fuck it up so bad.
Yeah that’s possible too. It’s all speculation until the Netflix documentary comes out years later lol
Conservatives are desperately trying to force TikTok to sell because even though its format is garbage, it's gathered a large leftwing userbase
Holy shit you might be right
This seems like further confirmation of that theory that I saw posted on here that the Saudi oil barons funded Elon’s purchase of Twitter for the sole purpose of destroying it.
Then why does it still exist? Musk took Twitter private, they could've just pulled the plug if they wanted to.
That terse action would have made mastodon flourish. It had to be gradual.
Why would they spend billions for this when they could (and still can) just block the website? It’s not like you can sue the King in Saudi Arabia (lest you think you have too many heads)
Reddit’s owned by tencent now? When did this happen?
My bad, Reddit is still owned by an American company but Tencent has a large stake in it since 2019, at least enough to influence the platform into complying with pro-CCP censorship and etc
It's completely absurd that he's saying this as an anti-bot measure. The bots exist because they generate revenue for the scumbags behind them, a small fee is just going to be part of doing business for them. He's not trying to stop bots, he's trying to monetize them and use them as an excuse to charge everyone. "The bot problem" will never be fixed and will be used as an excuse for every anti-user measure they put forward.
Anti-user measures on a social media platform
Meanwhile, everyone will bitch about the absurdity of this and how shitty Musk and his followers are, then continue to use the platform daily as though it's an essential service. Anyone who hasn't jumped ship my now is either complacent or wholly supportive.
What’s the alternative for one-to-many communication? I don’t use the platform anymore, but I miss a massive amount of news related to most of my hobbies due to it, normally relying on Reddit users to repost them. It’s incredibly annoying to have to search through 10+ social media pages to check for updates about a race team during a race or an ongoing gaming event.
Mastodon doesn’t have anywhere near the adoption necessary, bluesky still hasn’t taken off.
That's the rub, every social media service with any uptake is bad from a privacy perspective because the only real way to make them profitable is to sell ads.
So, what are you looking to get out of it? RSS is still a thing, services like lemmy are decent at aggregating links (post the content you want, and hopefully others will help), and bookmarks work well if you just need a dozen or so sites.
I honestly never use Twitter, Facebook, etc, and I feel like I'm about to keep tabs on things reasonably well.
I’m looking for live updates from race teams during endurance events, gaming news from specific creators, local traffic notifications and real time updates from sports teams leading up to games.
These things don’t typically have articles to link to, so aggregators don’t work well, and are often behind the curve. RSS has no adoption anymore and doesn’t quite work anyways.
RSS has no adoption anymore
Not true. RSS feeds are the only thing I use these days and know quite a few others that do as well. Sure some sites may not have RSS feeds by default, but there are a ton of services that auto generate RSS feeds for you.
Again, these kinds of news pieces don’t have articles written because they’re real time updates.
On top of that I really have 0 interest in opening a ton of webpages to find simple info. RSS has never been a solution to what I want.
So don't use RSS then? No one's trying to convince anyone to use RSS if they don't want to. I was just correcting the validity of the original statement.
None of those are essential serveices. There is no alternative, those are just not essential things. In order to get those non essential things we will all stay signed into for the neo nazi revenue and messaging machine.
So basically “don’t use it, we can’t offer a replacement, but since it’s not food or water you can go fuck yourself and not have it”
And people wonder why everyone doesn’t join open source projects.
Dude, I'm not your mom for you to complain to about the state of things. What I said is 100% true, and whinging won't make it less true. This is how these huge companies stay in control of our lives, and now this is how they are going to install fascism. Do with that info what you will.
There's no need for an alternative. Twitter is simply not a necessity of any kind in reality.
But use whatever you want, freedom is yours to exercise as you see fit.
Personally I've never wanted to use Twitter, it just made me go "Yuck!" from day 1 of its existence.
There is absolutely a need for an alternative. Just because you don’t think something is important doesn’t mean that others don’t. People aren’t just going to give up features that they expect because “they’re not a necessity” - it doesn’t matter if it’s a necessity. It’s the reason people still use the platform, and until something replaces it people will continue to use it.
People hate FOSS because the people around it are fully ready to condemn you for using anything but, and when you ask for alternatives they tell you that you don’t need an alternative cause your use-case is “not a necessity”
Nope
I don't see that. I see a lot of people who assume these two groups are the same people. But most of us don't use Twitter still. That's why their non-bot userbase is steadily declining. People are leaving. People are abandoning the platform.
No, stop, please, don't kill your platform, no, stop. Eh, nevermind.
Part of me really buys into the idea that Musk is pulling an evil mastermind move with his other billionaire pals, destroying one of the biggest social media sites to keep users fractured. End goal keeping any community small and unable to organize at scale. Then the voice of reason tells me this just another egotistical nepo baby trying to staunch the hemorrhaging of money from his last bad investment.
Stock was at 420 and that was all that matters
This is still my opinion. I hated shitter before boy wonder musk took over. It sucked before and it sucks worse now. Just kill it.
I genuinely have to wonder if Musk is intentionally trying to kill Xitter, because if he's actually trying to recoup his "investment" he's going about it completely the wrong way
There was a theory that he was paid by a country like Saudi Arabia to take it down, sinces it's a powerful tool for a repressed population. Twitter was very important during the Arab Spring.
I scoffed at it before but it's starting to seem very plausible.
It's a numbers and modeling game. If we charge this much, how many users will we lose? If that number is less than what you will make by doing the change, then the change is worth doing.
That works until more of the user base leaves. Whose going to pay to tweet if no one is on the platform. It's "worth" it potentially in the short term, but long term it doesn't seem viable.
At $1/year i expect very few will leave. Now if it were $10 i could see that being more likely.
A lot of decisions at Xitter were made seat-of-the-pants by Muskiboi. No modelling going on and if there is, they're really bad at it.
The purchase itself was a death sentence. $13bn of the $44bn was a loan Twitter took out to buy itself on Musk's behalf, even before Musk started tanking the revenue there was no way Twitter was going to be able to pay the interest on that without further cash investment.
Meanwhile, given that the business in unviable, Musk can try all sorts of crazy shit and are what sticks to the wall. Anything that proves successful can be adopted by whatever comes after Twitter or other social media. Charging for API access stuck, this is just the next attempt.
Maybe he's just trying to make it cheap enough for Dorsey to buy it from him.
If he's not careful he's going to make it cheap enough for me to buy it from him.
WHY THE FUCK IS ANYONE ON TWITTER ANYMORE.
It has a "chicken or egg" problem. There are better alternatives, except many don't use them because their userbase is still on Xitter, and said userbase don't want to move away from Xitter because their faves are still there. I deleted it from my phone, but I keep my account in case I need to look up something there, or to not get my identity stolen and exploited.
Don't discount the FOMO factor as well. It's what kept me on Reddit.
twitter has fomo?
Absolutely. Journalists post the latest news. Stuff they don't report on trends. Maybe you'll miss something big if you leave Twitter! That's the thinking anyway.
Bluesky has limited federation active already, planning to enable full federation soon (they want mod tooling to be more robust before they do)
Pretty nice place. The user configurable moderation system with 3rd party labeler services and more is quite cool and it's working even better than hoped (but we'll need to see how it scales)
There's a bridge in development -not associated with the project- that should bridge @Protocol and ActivityPub.
I went to check it out yesterday and I think I actually got dumber in 5 minutes I spent there.
So you'll be returning there tomorrow?
lol I actually never liked Twitter even when I was an early adopter but I'm only interested in it as a professional case study. I do like Mastodon a lot though and so I get the appeal of Twitter done right!
Find any good witch hunts? We cancelling Markiplier because he totally blinked a desire to oppress women and minorities in morse code? That sounds like Twitter
Wrong year for that propaganda
Elon’s Twitter has no interest in canceling anyone for the “oppression of women”, whether it’s true or not
I think they were going for a "it's always been trash" angle
Indeed (Although there are still plenty of internet witch hunts...)
Not really propaganda when it's STILL a common problem for the internet to go on witch hunts against people for "Grooming" and other such thigns based on the flimsiest of evidence, sometimes continuing to do so even after the person was proven innocent.
Porn
There are so, so, so many other platforms for that, and many are far better
And I agree I use mastodon, e621, pornhub, etc.
But when I want to see more of that one particular content creator that is only on Twitter, then I'll utilize Twitter, it's pretty simple.
Absolutely. I'll poke my head in there when there's someone on insta who I'm curious to see if they get naked on Twitter. And that's 100% of my interaction.
For some (few) users, it's required for work. The rest are addicts or Musk fans.
You have to pay him so that you can do the work of creating content for his platform? No thanks
Musky: Hmm, how else can i drive away actual human users?
Add lootboxes and timers.
If you don’t pay to post, there’s a 50% chance of your post getting deleted after anyone sees it. Pay some money to get more favorable odds. Oh, but you don’t but that stuff with money. You gotta use xitter turds first that, and some times you can get those from xitter boxes. In order to buy the lootboxes, you have to spend real money.
If you haven’t bought any lootboxes in a month, xitter will take control of your account and start automatically posting flat earth nazi crypto trash.
And if a post goes viral you have to pay to not have its visibility restricted
And when Xitter starts posting NFT trash in your name, you can restrict the spread of those posts by spending some Xitter Turds, which you can get from the lootboxes.
Oh and the cooldown timers! After every post, you have to wait 24 hours, but you can cut that wait in half by spending some Xitter Turds again. Let me tell you, it’s going to be unlike any service before it. EA and Ubisoft have so much to learn here.
And you can ask your fans to spend gems to remove obnoxious ads from your profile
Pretty much. 1usd per bot is a small price for maintaining a bot farm.
Or do they plan on banning accounts that use the same billing info? If CNN or BBC pay for their employees accounts, would they get banned?
Anyone who still uses Twitter/X is an actual fucking moron.
True to a degee, but too many international journalists still depend on that plattform. Makes it hard to ditch it completly, until finally one of the alternatives really pick up.
International journalists should know better than to use a centralized platform to share information.
Mastodon is picking up steam - it's only a matter of time
Let's hope. But they have to change the way that likes are shown. It always feels lonely over there.
Exactly, their system makes it feel like no one exists there 😂
Never used it. Never plan to do so.
Very aggressive, I use Twitter for porn, I don't know how that's any more moronic than using any other platform that hosts porn.
Who is going to pay to post on twitter? Not only has he destroyed what was there but he's stopping any route for growth with new users. Most people won't bother.
He really has managed to destroy that company with his knee jerk decisions.
If you do your browsing on mobile, check out the Awful app.
Ngl I'm cautious about even looking. Has it devolved into a rw shithole or is it still funny?
The blowtax shock-site days are long gone. With occasional exceptions in containment areas like the pink forum and the debate forum, SA’s culture is acceptable-to-laudable these days. Effortposts on the leftist board are a life-changing force for personal betterment, and goons remain some of the most charitable nerds anywhere.
And despite all of that, it is still funny.
I do miss the culture and spirit of photoshop contests between SA and Fark.
God I'm old.
I really should join up one of these days. Used to read the front page every day for a looong time, but never joined the forums because I couldn't pay online (and was broke af).
I'm guessing it feels a bit like a slice of old internet?
Depends on the subforum, naturally, but the whole place is unquestionably a big waxy cheese wheel of old internet. The paywall, the heavy moderation, regulars who’ve been posting brainy takes in megathreads for years… it still all works like a charm.
Find someone who knows their shit on a topic you care about and hit the ¿ to see their posts and jump in to great moments of earlier discussion. Encounter them again being smart about some other awesome thing. Skip pages of fast threads except for posters you want to see. No upvotes, ya use yer words. That’s a tasty slice of a rare flavor.
Forums are detox for algorithm sickness. Still one of the finest tenbux you can spend.
I’ve seen web writers claim that the original brain trust of Weird Twitter started from a Something Awful clique
That’s not what free speech is, and there never has been free speech on Twitter, and that’s mostly a good thing. Jesus.
That’s not what free speech is
Well yeah, obviously. It's just wordplay based on the two common definitions of free.
Everybody knows what free speech means. It's just a bit of wordplay that you've taken very literally.
Everybody knows what free speech means.
i really dont think so.
free speech is a pretty complicated thing and i feel like many people dont have a solid grasp on it. i think a good number of people think they know what free speech means because they know "it only applies to what the government can do to you", but there's quite a bit more to it than that. like how to deal with hate speech, threats, misinformation, disinformation, etc.
and this is directly related to the problems twitter is facing: elon musk started out by saying hes a "free speech absolutist", but twitter has been slowly rediscovering why "free speech absolutism" doesnt work. and you can see those discoveries in real time with twitter reintroducing moderation policies (among other things)
Ok then. People know enough about what it means to know it doesn't refer to not having to pay a fee to open your mouth.
It's very clear that the headline is a little wordplay joke. It doesn't literally convey that the journalist thought free speech means you don't have to pay to make a twitter post. You're taking it way too literally.
elon musk started out by saying hes a "free speech absolutist", but twitter has been slowly rediscovering why "free speech absolutism" doesnt work.
I'm in agreement that it doesn't work.
But it should also be called to attention that Musk never tried free speech absolutism on his platform (not that I think he actually should). He has been willing to bend over backwards in assisting dictatorships in censoring content, and he culled a lot of left-leaning and anti-Musk accounts/comments on day one. It's always been a lie to pander to the freeze peach crowd.
Elon Musk said free speech like once and then immediately threw a bunch of journalists off the site. And apparently every news article for the rest of my life is going to be about how he was hypocritical instead of whether he wants power or influence or has power and influence or the meaning of giving him those things.
Don’t trust every industrialist you meet even if they invested in one company where competent people make cool space ships. He’s clearly on Ket and some uppers. Grimes divorced him and her music isn’t even good. He’s not that complicated.
Elon and his sycophants have been the idiots talking about free speech on Twitter. It's perfectly fine to use that talking point as criticism. If he's not interested in free speech then what was he doing allowing banned Nazi accounts back on?
Free speech, now only $9.99 per month
or 0.99/post.each retweet would cost you an additional 0.49. you pay less,you get less.
You don’t know what free speech means.
This is like claiming Blizzard is infringing on your free speech because they banned you from world of Warcraft for saying racist shit.
Better yet. This is like claiming blizzard is infringing on your freedom of speech because they deactivated your account as a result of you not paying your subscription.
Do better.
Corporations should be allowed to own vital services so they can ban people from them at will. This is a good thing somehow. I love monopolies that suppress activists and organizers because it would only be bad if the government is doing it.
We could stop thinking of Twitter, Facebook, etc. as "essential services".
They can both fuck right off and most people's lives will not be negatively impacted.
That’s the thing about private property and private services. They can terminate your involvement at will for any reason. It’s in the user agreement you consent to when you sign up.
You’re not entitled to these services. They aren’t your god given right or any other bullshit you’re imagining.
Comparing this to freedom of speech is laughable.
I stole this line from someone else, but its great.
Elon Musk has invented fee speech, not free speech.
It's a clever line, but Musk hasn't invented a single goddamn thing in his life.
Hey that's not fair - he invents his own narrative about reality all the time.
Yeah, pay to post was Something Awful founder lowtax's idea.
SA used to be great. That move actually made the forums a pretty good place for a while because it kept out a few demographics including bots and kids.
Something Awful, YTMND and Newgrounds were basically the comedic engines of the internet back then.
Good 'ol pre-YouTube internet.
I work in bot protection and it's a sound idea but doesn't really work in practice. As long as there's more than 1$ of value to be gained it's worth it for the bot makers.
This also makes it so that botting is only accesible to select few actors that have the required resources i.e. russian troll farms or large bot networks from china, in turn this increases their value. This is very good for them.
Reality is that the only way to stop bots is to constantly change up the detection system. This is called a "cat and mouse" sort of problem and it really is the only way to do it. The attacker always has to catch up and it can be trivial that takes them couple of hours to do but it also reveals behavior patterns for marking bot accounts. This actually works really well in practice but requires a lot of dev resources and many companies low-key like bots which is another thread entirely.
I'll ask anyway. Why do companies like bots?
As Kungen already answered - stats! You can sell bot traffic as real traffic which inflates your numbers.
For stuff like social media, bots increase engagement too. Many new products and networks actually generate a lot of fake content to attract organic growth. I.e. if bot likes your comment you're likely to engage more. If it likes your product review you're likely to review more stuff etc.
Tracking bots can also generate reverse analytics. For example if you know that your competitors are scraping fishing equipment data from your store it could mean they're working on a competing fishing related product.
Lastly, you can feed fake data to bots to manipulate competitors. This is somewhat illegal (no real legal precedent yet afaik though its a clear intent to harm other businesses) but it can really powerful in the wrong hands.
Edit: worth nothing that a lot of bot traffic is good. Sometimes you want to be scraped as it is a form of organic engagement and increases the value of your data and often backlinks growth (e.g. indexers like Google etc)
Perpetual growth/engagement statistics?
How true is the dead internet theory, in your view?
Er du måske en robot??
Nei, jeg er kjøtt og blod og stål og smøreolje som deg
Hmm, jeg tror desværre jeg består af et 100% syntetisk keramisk bomuldsprodukt...
More eyeballs.
Enough updoots or retweets and other algos pick up on it. Some random twitter discussion ends up on BuzzFeed, YTers start making influencer vids, and Reddit / Lemmy repost bots.
Do this enough and it'll gain traction. Now everyone is talking about your stupid fuckin Stanley mug, corporate rumor,or political talking point.
And this can be automated end to end, 24/7, by market and keyword, will real time feedback as to how well it's doing via upvotes, shares, likes, or even data mining emails and convos via Gmail or WhatsApp.
As long as there’s more than 1$ of value to be gained it’s worth it for the bot makers.
That's what I was coming in here to suggest, so I'm glad someone in the field was able to back that idea up. I think it's unlikely many bots that aren't made for fun are being put on Twitter unless they are generating a lot more than $1 for whoever is putting them up.
Bot protection? Call me ignorant but what exactly do you do?
develop systems that can identify unwanted users like bots, spammers, people who abuse the product and break ToS etc. Most bad actors are very dumb but fighting this at scale is actually very interesting. Also most bots (like 90%) are just scrapers (data collectors) especially when it comes to Twitter which has absurd API pricings but cost almost nothing to scrape lol
Oh my god I’m a fuckin idiot. Granted, I’ve had a couple drinks tonight but I thought you were protecting bots… not protecting against them lol
yeah sorry "protection against bots" just doesn't roll of the tongue as easily lol
Protect the bots!!!
people who abuse the product and break TOS
You're welcome.
Hey man it gets me employed and I even get to work on foss on work hours sometimes. Thanks! :)
This also makes it so that botting is only accesible to select few actors that have the required resources i.e. russian troll farms or large bot networks from china, in turn this increases their value. This is very good for them.
I'd bet that is explicitly part of the funding model. Pay to influence consensus, cuz this is a publicly traded stock and numbers need to go up, regardless of who is paying.
Twitter is private. Musk took it private when he bought it.
Yes only Russia and China do bad things with technology!
Never had to deal with attacks originating from US or Europe so thats kinda true actually :)
Go to r/worldnews and r/europe on reddit
The amount of bots is….
I hate that twitter has the seo that it does. I always accidentally click on a link to see the "log in or get fucked" screen.
Its staying power is really annoying TBH.
I guess it could be worse (AKA everyone just going to Discord instead).
Add -twitter to your search queries.
-site:twitter.com
Nah, I don't even want the results where people are talking about the cesspit.
This is not going to stop bots.
here's hoping it stops site growth
Most people don't get out of bed for a dollar so no, it won't outside the usual 10-30% pareto ratio, which is probably already getting impacted by Xitter being run into the ground.
This will absolutely stop by far the most bots, because hostile governments like Russia and China use THOUSANDS of bots, having to pay $1 extra to maintain each bot, will be prohibitively expensive for those governments. Remember this can mean THOUSANDS in extra cost for those programs. No way either Russia or China will be able to afford that. So my guess is this will be 99.99% effective at preventing bots. The problem for Musk that he may not have foreseen is, the same will be true for MAGA racist anti LGBT propaganda bots. So now Twitter will go back to be dominated by liberals and socialists. Making it necessary for Musk to pay for another platform all over again, if he wants to have a free space to blurt his idiocy.
/s
You had me in the first 1/4, NGL
Yes I was joking, the real explanation is of course that most bots are made by underage kids that don't have access to credit cards, and can't afford $1 out of their allowance. 😋
Isn't that the started intent? Like adding a small roadblock or captcha.
I'm not saying I agree but the simple logic should work. It'll likely reduce the user base and still let bits in with cash to burn.
In theory, maybe. In practice, the bots might just pay and post anyway. If they can recoup those costs in the scam, it costs them basically nothing.
So bots pay to continue what they're doing, but Musky now gets money for it?
Ray Charles could see what's going on here.
This is what Craigslist did and now nobody uses it and we're forced to use the garbage platform that is Facebook Marketplace.
When will people stop supporting this clown?
Remember when some people were like "well, I don't support him, but I've had this Twitter account forever, so I'm not leaving." This is what happens. Things just get worse until you gain plausible deniability for continuing to support the bullshit.
Perhaps when his name/companies will stop being on the headlines every single day multiple times. Unless it's something really big that could actually harm his reputation people should restrain from posting and upvoting news about him. This article is about shit that hasn't happened yet, this guy is tricking you all around.
Please. I truly want to see my favorite people on Twitter get driven to a better platform.
Unfortunately, they’re going to Threads. Although I guess that’s technically better. But better in the sense that drinking piss is better than eating shit.
It’s sterile and I like the taste.
Bear?
Does he like to drink pee? Is that what makes him a talented composer? Will I become a talented composer if I drink pee?
Threads is also a barely moderated mess, because they don't want to scare away "moderate" (sic!) conservatives (code word for "fascist not openly identifying as such").
And they're anti politics, except they don't count that as politics
Lol I'm not paying shit, have fun everybody else. X is garbage
I never got the appeal of twitter/x, and I never will. I get other social networks, some more, some less, but Twitter's just stupid IMO. I hope that shit'll die sooner than later.
I can’t get past the og twitter which was everyone blogging minutiae of their life. What they ate for lunch. What street they’re walking down. What they thought of the music on the radio.
Somewhere along the way people tried to make it legit, but also it was people trying to claim firsties for any event worth mentioning.
It’s just a crap platform. Too much bs to wade through to find anything good.
I get the appeal of twitter. I've said this before. You want to know tour dates? When that next book in the series is coming out. When a new game trailer is available? Movie trailer? You want to know about when a vlog creator posts their newest content? Twitter was good for those things. I used to use it for that. Now it's just useless for most things. And I'm back to using RSS feeds, more than half of which don't work properly.
I followed a bunch of artists and content creators and I got annoyed when the entire feed became just interspersed with Musk's ramblings and bullshit. I never followed him and I didn't want promoted content.
It’s still the perfect one-to-many communication method. Best way to get news from people you kinda give a shit about, the rest was just noise.
I miss so much news in racing and gaming due to not being on Twitter anymore
I've never stopped using web sites for those use cases.
There's something to be said for having full control over your online "home".
That is an amazing idea!
We should make a site where people can set up their own internet homepage. Each person can have their own space on the internet! To give the users a sense of ownership let's call it MySpace.
I think my friend Tom will help design the site.
That's fair but not everyone does it this way. I actually switched to twitter from RSS when google and the like basically pushed for it to go away and now I'm back on RSS with mixed results because twitter has become a dumpster fire. Having full control isn't working out great for me and probably a fair few others.
twitter is for food trucks to tell me where they'll be today, and anything else is a misuse of the service
Twitter was great for watching Jan 6 unfold, there's no replacement for the kind of unfiltered crowd sourced information gathering it enabled
okay, so for tracking food trucks and lifted, heavily-financed trucks
Twitter has always been pointless to me except for outage notices etc, and that's just because that's where the companies chose to post. The second there is a "town board" style app with all company announcements etc then it's completely pointless.
Hopefully more people change to mastodon now
*keys and *omas are more fun though. mastodon's way too businesslike to encourage a fair share of people to pick it over shitter (it works other way around as well tho)
And make it a shitty place. Lemmy world already is in my block list
I hate to tell you this, but you're in a lemmy.world community right now, so your block list isn't working very well.
😂😂
What? Why?
Bots and politics
That's every instance, not just Lemmy world
Bunch of Hamas apologists/supporters.
🙄
Opps was I not smiling hard enough while sucking Netanyahu's dick? Was there just no enthusiasm in the blow job? My bad ill do better next time.
K bye.
Not that I literally ever said hi.
For real, shit platform with no real life benefit gets even shittier who would’ve thought
Paid speech? Lol
It’s the American way. Aligns with the Supreme Court ruling on Citizen’s United.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Elon Musk confirmed Monday that X (formerly Twitter) plans to start charging new users to post on the platform, TechCrunch reported.
Back when X launched the "Not-A-Bot" program, Musk claimed that charging a $1 annual fee would make it "1000X harder to manipulate the platform."
In a help center post, X said that the "test was developed to bolster our already significant efforts to reduce spam, manipulation of our platform, and bot activity."
X Support confirmed that follower counts would likely be impacted during that purge, because "we're casting a wide net to ensure X remains secure and free of bots."
Musk's plan to charge a fee to overcome bots won't work, experts told WSJ, because anyone determined to spam X can just find credit cards and buy disposable phones on the dark web.
And any bad actor who can't find what they need on the dark web could theoretically just wait three months to launch scams or spread harmful content like disinformation or propaganda.
The original article contains 798 words, the summary contains 165 words. Saved 79%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
I think the real solution is he wants money. If it was solely to reduce spam/bot activities, then there are other ways to do that. Maybe a Bitcoin-style proof of work scheme where evey post needs to show a hash of the message with a nonce. The difficulty needn't be that hard to make mass posting computaionally unfeasible.
In fact, Bitcoin appropriated this proposal to reduce email spam. It never took off with email as it was an open system and network effects and a catch 22 meant that it floundered. But X, née twitter is a closed off dictatorship. They could force it through edict.
For the love of god Elon, stay out of my news feed.
There are extensions for that.
This is just another attempt at establishing a new status quo for other social media before Twitter dies a death due to the insurmountable debt that Musk's purchase saddled it with. We've had a bunch of things tried, so far the only thing that stuck was charging for API access (which reddit soon adopted). Let's not have this as well, please.
Hopefully Twitter dying because of this will give other companies pause (or not, would it really be that bad if facebook kills itself copying him?)
Are these new users in the room with us? lmao
tfw the free speech isn't even free monetarily
Free speech? More like free* speech
*Only $4.99/month, yeah, definitely "free"
Fee speech
Why didn't I think of putting this in my comment?
I'm not a fan of him, nor a twitter user, but as far as free speech is concerned, that should mean your opinion is not censored, but the platform doesn't have to be free to use, but if it doesn't discriminate opinions, and everyone is allowed to make an account, and everyone has to pay the same
That's equal treatment, and isn't going against free speech.
None of that was ever true for Twitter, anyway. It wasn't true before Musk bought it and it's only got worse.
Meh, you still ise Twitter, you get what you deserve.
What does vaggumon digivolve to? MetalVaggumon. ヴァグモン
Indeed I deserve porn, so I get porn.
Free to play speech
Pay to play speech
"Unfortunately, a small fee for new user write access is the only way to curb the relentless onslaught of bots," Musk wrote on X.
...that makes no sense. By "bots" usually we mean accounts that advertise one thing or another to make money. And if there's any cause worth paying money for, it's making more money. But some sports fan or BTS stan or whatever just wanting to cheer on their thing is just gonna stop posting.
Well, you can invest money to get rid of bots, or you can try to make money to get rid of bots. He tries the latter, and will kill the platform doing that.
My tracking app doesn't let this site load at all, so I didn't read the article, but fuck musk. Will he remove ads when people pay them? I forgot my password for Twitter since last year and never bothered to log back into that cesspool
Money is speech? This is clearly in-line with current US legal definitions so what's the problem?
\s
This isn't useful or sufficient. You have to consider how many bots get banned and cost to determine efficacy. If you want 10,000 fake people to manipulate real people $10,000 doesn't seem a high price if you make the fake people act organic enough that they largely aren't banned.
It would be more useful if a singular service verified sufficient credentials to prove you were an authentic human and allowed you to auth to various sites. This in turn creates the problem that verifiers now know a LOT about your online life.
If the verification involved site -> verifier -> government held public key I think you could arrange so that none of the parties had enough info to identify users.
This is desperately needed
Didn't he say this like 5 times already
Well, if nothing else, it does reduce some load on their servers because less people will be posting.
Good news for X alternative Social Media, if pay to post for X I'm exit form X.
Well, one more reason to ignore that platform on it's way to obsolescence.
yeah, I think he is doing it now.
Because if you dont boost, unlikely anyone will see what you tweet.
Free speech is free speech only if your dictator tells you so.
Social media was never about free speech.
You might want to do some research on what free speech means because this is cringe.
🍿
We need a new paradigm for social media. And no, I'm not satisfied with Lemmy either (privacy issues).
Yup. I'm working on something, but it also has some privacy issues as well.
The problem is that the more privacy you have, the more people will post illegal and spammy stuff and the less monetizable the platform is. The more free speech you have, the more moderation costs. So social media companies will generally lean toward less privacy (so more ad revenue) and less free speech.
My focus is on p2p and user-generated moderation, which tries to solve two problems:
instance hosting costs - near zero since data is stored on user devices; you can host a mirror to help
bad mods - automatic moderation - if user A mods like user B, user A will trust user B more and posts they filter will filter for A
But the automatic moderation thing requires public information, like mod reports, categorization, and votes, so it's not going to improve on lemmy in privacy. Anything privacy-respecting would require too much work from users (they'll need to both consent to trust each other). Maybe I'll be able to add it as an option.
But even if my system is perfect (it won't be), it's unlikely to beat something like Twitter or Facebook due to the network effect and sheer amount of engineering and marketing resources available.
Imo, lemmy is good enough for now. People like me will be working on stuff behind the scenes, so if lemmy falls over, hopefully we'll have a ready replacement.
Also, it very much depends on what you mean by "free". If you mean free as in free beer, then absolutely it is no longer going to be free speech. However, if you mean free as in freedom to say what you want, I don't know as I am no longer on the platform.
OPs title is misleading, there's a difference between free speech as in expressing your free speech and the one that OP is referring to is complaining about paying to express your free speech.
That's not misleading, that's sarcasm.
Yes! sarcasm that implies on what I already said.
But no one is being misled, it's very obvious sarcasm.
Welcome to the death spiral
I wonder if introducing an artificial delay, like hitting post, and it taking a minute before it actually goes live, would help. Because then something could scan incoming posts, and if something looked like a bot, it could be pulled before it ever actually went out.
what would an artificial delay do? Litteraly nothing. Also they can scan posts after they have been uploaded. And a scan shouldnt take even a second.
An artificial delay should discourage flood attacks. Either that or do some sort of thing where you figure out how many posts per day the average user does and then not let people post above that limit.
An artificial delay should discourage flood attacks.
You didn't explain how. It doesn't matter to wait a little bit. It's not like they're using only one connection and one account.
It's also not clear to me how waiting longer suddenly charged how easy it is to detect bots.
Well, you have to limit the number of accounts they can possibly have by whatever method possible, either by charging per account or some sort of proof of work or phone number verification or something that limits the amount of accounts that they can have. Once you have done that, what you need to do is cost them something such as how proof of work costs computing resources. If it takes 10 seconds to post a tweet, then sending out 1 million tweets takes 1 million times 10 seconds or 10 million seconds, or 166,666 minutes or 2777 hours or 115.7 days And that's all from a 10 second Proof of work requirement. For a regular user, that's not a problem. For a spammer, that's a huge problem.
What your talking about is rate limiting. And pretty much every social media already does that. The issue with adding requirements like phone number etc, is that it also makes it more difficult and annoying for regular users. Besides, bot account owners litteraly have large amounts of fake valid mobile phone numbers they can use to "verify" their bot accounts. Then they also use change their ip addresses, so rate limiting can't be enforced. Instagram also has a massive bot issue, but its just an endless amount of bot accounts, not just one that is spamming all over the place.
Adding a fake 10 second delay would stop absolutely nothing and make the experience even worse for regular users.
They should do that for meeting people for dating....like a love tax or something... Pay some random so you can talk to people of your interested sex.
Meanwhile, the neuralink patient zero gave a beautiful presentation of what has been happening with that project and it isn't news because it goes against the Elon Bad narrative
If you'd stop attempting to play victim on Musk's behalf long enough to google it, you'd see that that's actually getting plenty of coverage.
Who the heck uses those obscure sites? U am thinking about YouTube and stuffs.
Bro did not just call Reuters, BBC, and WSJ 'obscure' 💀.
The First one sounds like some Ponzi scheme company, the second one, like porn stuff and the third onez like social justice warrior. Me no trust.
My sides
Please
If this dude had any experience running an online site he would know how many stolen credit cards are out there.
X is a fly-coated chum bucket.
Hey now....that's really rude! If fly-coated chum buckets could read they would be very very upset!
Was just about to say this.
You know how easy it is these days to get credit card dumps? Legally, I don't know the exact answer, but...
Or PayPal accounts.
This seems like further confirmation of that theory that I saw posted on here that the Saudi oil barons funded Elon’s purchase of Twitter for the sole purpose of destroying it. They want to silence online discussions of climate change and other left wing topics.
Combined with Reddit being owned by Tencent, Facebook being eternally evil, and TikTok being unconducive to any form of coherent dialogue, there are not many places for left wing discourse on the internet anymore.
"climate change and other left wing topics"... I know that's basically how it works in some countries, but it's insane to consider certain scientific facts left wing, and we really shouldn't support such statements.
Thanks for pointing that out. It’s just so normal to think that way here that they’ve even corrupted me into framing climate change that way. It’s not a left wing topic; it’s a reality.
I just hope young people who are thinking of voting conservative here keep in mind that those assholes literally don’t believe in climate change and by extension science and facts. That alone should automatically disqualify conservatives from anyone’s consideration.
It's not a lack of belief, it's just an abundance of "fuck you, I got mine".
Yes, in Europe, most political parties, both left and right, have their own climate change mitigation policies, because if they don't, they risk just not being elected.
Also no mainstream political party in Europe dares to touch Universal Healthcare.
Well, they have privatised it and made it worse and worse, with longer queues and worse quality of care.
That strongly depends on your country.
The access is universal, but its run by private companies now.
That strongly depends on your country.
Politicising climate change was yet another distraction from dealing with it in a cohesive and unified manner. Divide and conquer.
Found the round-earther.
In 2024, anything that makes sense is un-conservative.
Reality has a left-wing bias.
And yet, here we are :/
The purchase itself was a leveraged buyout, they didn't pay the entire $44bn as Twitter took out a loan to cover $13bn. Like all leveraged buyouts (eg Toys R Us) the purchase itself is meant to kill the business. Even before Musk started screwing the revenue there was little hope Twitter could pay the interest, let along the principle. Now, Twitter is worth less than the debt, by some estimates.
Then why did Twitter needed to sue him to get him to abide by the deal? Musk often promotes stuff in a pump and dump scheme. One of the many examples is when he briefly promoted bitcoin. He made loads of money off that.
I'm guessing he thought he could make a lot of money quickly in some way. But then interest rates rose quickly and whatever he was planning fell through.
It’s possible it was a initially pump and dump that turned into a Saudi funded venture. He’s a useful idiot from the Arabs’ perspective.
Twitter is really big there. It's basically the most used social media by a vast majority compared to other ones. It's way more plausible that some 'too much rich to know what to do with all the money' Saudi princes decided something like a few percent of their wealth to own the biggest social media on their country for bragging rights and admin privilege to be worth it. Plus, they probably thought Twitter was too big to fail and die, They didn't expect Elon would fuck it up so bad. I don't think anybody expected Elon to fuck it up so bad.
Yeah that’s possible too. It’s all speculation until the Netflix documentary comes out years later lol
Conservatives are desperately trying to force TikTok to sell because even though its format is garbage, it's gathered a large leftwing userbase
Holy shit you might be right
Then why does it still exist? Musk took Twitter private, they could've just pulled the plug if they wanted to.
That terse action would have made mastodon flourish. It had to be gradual.
Why would they spend billions for this when they could (and still can) just block the website? It’s not like you can sue the King in Saudi Arabia (lest you think you have too many heads)
Reddit’s owned by tencent now? When did this happen?
My bad, Reddit is still owned by an American company but Tencent has a large stake in it since 2019, at least enough to influence the platform into complying with pro-CCP censorship and etc
It's completely absurd that he's saying this as an anti-bot measure. The bots exist because they generate revenue for the scumbags behind them, a small fee is just going to be part of doing business for them. He's not trying to stop bots, he's trying to monetize them and use them as an excuse to charge everyone. "The bot problem" will never be fixed and will be used as an excuse for every anti-user measure they put forward.
Anti-user measures on a social media platform
Meanwhile, everyone will bitch about the absurdity of this and how shitty Musk and his followers are, then continue to use the platform daily as though it's an essential service. Anyone who hasn't jumped ship my now is either complacent or wholly supportive.
What’s the alternative for one-to-many communication? I don’t use the platform anymore, but I miss a massive amount of news related to most of my hobbies due to it, normally relying on Reddit users to repost them. It’s incredibly annoying to have to search through 10+ social media pages to check for updates about a race team during a race or an ongoing gaming event.
Mastodon doesn’t have anywhere near the adoption necessary, bluesky still hasn’t taken off.
That's the rub, every social media service with any uptake is bad from a privacy perspective because the only real way to make them profitable is to sell ads.
So, what are you looking to get out of it? RSS is still a thing, services like lemmy are decent at aggregating links (post the content you want, and hopefully others will help), and bookmarks work well if you just need a dozen or so sites.
I honestly never use Twitter, Facebook, etc, and I feel like I'm about to keep tabs on things reasonably well.
I’m looking for live updates from race teams during endurance events, gaming news from specific creators, local traffic notifications and real time updates from sports teams leading up to games.
These things don’t typically have articles to link to, so aggregators don’t work well, and are often behind the curve. RSS has no adoption anymore and doesn’t quite work anyways.
Not true. RSS feeds are the only thing I use these days and know quite a few others that do as well. Sure some sites may not have RSS feeds by default, but there are a ton of services that auto generate RSS feeds for you.
Again, these kinds of news pieces don’t have articles written because they’re real time updates.
On top of that I really have 0 interest in opening a ton of webpages to find simple info. RSS has never been a solution to what I want.
So don't use RSS then? No one's trying to convince anyone to use RSS if they don't want to. I was just correcting the validity of the original statement.
None of those are essential serveices. There is no alternative, those are just not essential things. In order to get those non essential things we will all stay signed into for the neo nazi revenue and messaging machine.
So basically “don’t use it, we can’t offer a replacement, but since it’s not food or water you can go fuck yourself and not have it”
And people wonder why everyone doesn’t join open source projects.
well said. you’re supposed to have roses with your bread, fellas
Dude, I'm not your mom for you to complain to about the state of things. What I said is 100% true, and whinging won't make it less true. This is how these huge companies stay in control of our lives, and now this is how they are going to install fascism. Do with that info what you will.
There's no need for an alternative. Twitter is simply not a necessity of any kind in reality.
But use whatever you want, freedom is yours to exercise as you see fit.
Personally I've never wanted to use Twitter, it just made me go "Yuck!" from day 1 of its existence.
There is absolutely a need for an alternative. Just because you don’t think something is important doesn’t mean that others don’t. People aren’t just going to give up features that they expect because “they’re not a necessity” - it doesn’t matter if it’s a necessity. It’s the reason people still use the platform, and until something replaces it people will continue to use it.
People hate FOSS because the people around it are fully ready to condemn you for using anything but, and when you ask for alternatives they tell you that you don’t need an alternative cause your use-case is “not a necessity”
Nope
I don't see that. I see a lot of people who assume these two groups are the same people. But most of us don't use Twitter still. That's why their non-bot userbase is steadily declining. People are leaving. People are abandoning the platform.
No, stop, please, don't kill your platform, no, stop. Eh, nevermind.
Part of me really buys into the idea that Musk is pulling an evil mastermind move with his other billionaire pals, destroying one of the biggest social media sites to keep users fractured. End goal keeping any community small and unable to organize at scale. Then the voice of reason tells me this just another egotistical nepo baby trying to staunch the hemorrhaging of money from his last bad investment.
Stock was at 420 and that was all that matters
This is still my opinion. I hated shitter before boy wonder musk took over. It sucked before and it sucks worse now. Just kill it.
I genuinely have to wonder if Musk is intentionally trying to kill Xitter, because if he's actually trying to recoup his "investment" he's going about it completely the wrong way
There was a theory that he was paid by a country like Saudi Arabia to take it down, sinces it's a powerful tool for a repressed population. Twitter was very important during the Arab Spring.
I scoffed at it before but it's starting to seem very plausible.
It's a numbers and modeling game. If we charge this much, how many users will we lose? If that number is less than what you will make by doing the change, then the change is worth doing.
That works until more of the user base leaves. Whose going to pay to tweet if no one is on the platform. It's "worth" it potentially in the short term, but long term it doesn't seem viable.
At $1/year i expect very few will leave. Now if it were $10 i could see that being more likely.
A lot of decisions at Xitter were made seat-of-the-pants by Muskiboi. No modelling going on and if there is, they're really bad at it.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/priceelasticity.asp
The purchase itself was a death sentence. $13bn of the $44bn was a loan Twitter took out to buy itself on Musk's behalf, even before Musk started tanking the revenue there was no way Twitter was going to be able to pay the interest on that without further cash investment.
Meanwhile, given that the business in unviable, Musk can try all sorts of crazy shit and are what sticks to the wall. Anything that proves successful can be adopted by whatever comes after Twitter or other social media. Charging for API access stuck, this is just the next attempt.
Maybe he's just trying to make it cheap enough for Dorsey to buy it from him.
If he's not careful he's going to make it cheap enough for me to buy it from him.
WHY THE FUCK IS ANYONE ON TWITTER ANYMORE.
It has a "chicken or egg" problem. There are better alternatives, except many don't use them because their userbase is still on Xitter, and said userbase don't want to move away from Xitter because their faves are still there. I deleted it from my phone, but I keep my account in case I need to look up something there, or to not get my identity stolen and exploited.
Don't discount the FOMO factor as well. It's what kept me on Reddit.
twitter has fomo?
Absolutely. Journalists post the latest news. Stuff they don't report on trends. Maybe you'll miss something big if you leave Twitter! That's the thinking anyway.
Bluesky has limited federation active already, planning to enable full federation soon (they want mod tooling to be more robust before they do)
Pretty nice place. The user configurable moderation system with 3rd party labeler services and more is quite cool and it's working even better than hoped (but we'll need to see how it scales)
There's a bridge in development -not associated with the project- that should bridge @Protocol and ActivityPub.
I went to check it out yesterday and I think I actually got dumber in 5 minutes I spent there.
So you'll be returning there tomorrow?
lol I actually never liked Twitter even when I was an early adopter but I'm only interested in it as a professional case study. I do like Mastodon a lot though and so I get the appeal of Twitter done right!
Find any good witch hunts? We cancelling Markiplier because he totally blinked a desire to oppress women and minorities in morse code? That sounds like Twitter
Wrong year for that propaganda
Elon’s Twitter has no interest in canceling anyone for the “oppression of women”, whether it’s true or not
I think they were going for a "it's always been trash" angle
Indeed (Although there are still plenty of internet witch hunts...)
Not really propaganda when it's STILL a common problem for the internet to go on witch hunts against people for "Grooming" and other such thigns based on the flimsiest of evidence, sometimes continuing to do so even after the person was proven innocent.
Porn
There are so, so, so many other platforms for that, and many are far better
And I agree I use mastodon, e621, pornhub, etc.
But when I want to see more of that one particular content creator that is only on Twitter, then I'll utilize Twitter, it's pretty simple.
Absolutely. I'll poke my head in there when there's someone on insta who I'm curious to see if they get naked on Twitter. And that's 100% of my interaction.
For some (few) users, it's required for work. The rest are addicts or Musk fans.
You have to pay him so that you can do the work of creating content for his platform? No thanks
Musky: Hmm, how else can i drive away actual human users?
Add lootboxes and timers.
If you don’t pay to post, there’s a 50% chance of your post getting deleted after anyone sees it. Pay some money to get more favorable odds. Oh, but you don’t but that stuff with money. You gotta use xitter turds first that, and some times you can get those from xitter boxes. In order to buy the lootboxes, you have to spend real money.
If you haven’t bought any lootboxes in a month, xitter will take control of your account and start automatically posting flat earth nazi crypto trash.
And if a post goes viral you have to pay to not have its visibility restricted
And when Xitter starts posting NFT trash in your name, you can restrict the spread of those posts by spending some Xitter Turds, which you can get from the lootboxes.
Oh and the cooldown timers! After every post, you have to wait 24 hours, but you can cut that wait in half by spending some Xitter Turds again. Let me tell you, it’s going to be unlike any service before it. EA and Ubisoft have so much to learn here.
And you can ask your fans to spend gems to remove obnoxious ads from your profile
Pretty much. 1usd per bot is a small price for maintaining a bot farm.
Or do they plan on banning accounts that use the same billing info? If CNN or BBC pay for their employees accounts, would they get banned?
Anyone who still uses Twitter/X is an actual fucking moron.
True to a degee, but too many international journalists still depend on that plattform. Makes it hard to ditch it completly, until finally one of the alternatives really pick up.
International journalists should know better than to use a centralized platform to share information.
Mastodon is picking up steam - it's only a matter of time
Let's hope. But they have to change the way that likes are shown. It always feels lonely over there.
Exactly, their system makes it feel like no one exists there 😂
Never used it. Never plan to do so.
Very aggressive, I use Twitter for porn, I don't know how that's any more moronic than using any other platform that hosts porn.
Who is going to pay to post on twitter? Not only has he destroyed what was there but he's stopping any route for growth with new users. Most people won't bother.
He really has managed to destroy that company with his knee jerk decisions.
People with "hot link in bio" and all that jazz
Gotta get them 44 billion back somehow.
Well, this ain't it chief
Who would have thought that Twitter would become the new Somethingawful forums, and that Musk would take the role of Lowtax.
aoh man. So apt and too soon.
Is SA still around?
Yes, and it still kicks ass. Come home, goon.
If you do your browsing on mobile, check out the Awful app.
Ngl I'm cautious about even looking. Has it devolved into a rw shithole or is it still funny?
The blowtax shock-site days are long gone. With occasional exceptions in containment areas like the pink forum and the debate forum, SA’s culture is acceptable-to-laudable these days. Effortposts on the leftist board are a life-changing force for personal betterment, and goons remain some of the most charitable nerds anywhere.
And despite all of that, it is still funny.
I do miss the culture and spirit of photoshop contests between SA and Fark.
God I'm old.
I really should join up one of these days. Used to read the front page every day for a looong time, but never joined the forums because I couldn't pay online (and was broke af).
I'm guessing it feels a bit like a slice of old internet?
Depends on the subforum, naturally, but the whole place is unquestionably a big waxy cheese wheel of old internet. The paywall, the heavy moderation, regulars who’ve been posting brainy takes in megathreads for years… it still all works like a charm.
Find someone who knows their shit on a topic you care about and hit the ¿ to see their posts and jump in to great moments of earlier discussion. Encounter them again being smart about some other awesome thing. Skip pages of fast threads except for posters you want to see. No upvotes, ya use yer words. That’s a tasty slice of a rare flavor.
Forums are detox for algorithm sickness. Still one of the finest tenbux you can spend.
I’ve seen web writers claim that the original brain trust of Weird Twitter started from a Something Awful clique
That’s not what free speech is, and there never has been free speech on Twitter, and that’s mostly a good thing. Jesus.
Well yeah, obviously. It's just wordplay based on the two common definitions of free.
Everybody knows what free speech means. It's just a bit of wordplay that you've taken very literally.
i really dont think so.
free speech is a pretty complicated thing and i feel like many people dont have a solid grasp on it. i think a good number of people think they know what free speech means because they know "it only applies to what the government can do to you", but there's quite a bit more to it than that. like how to deal with hate speech, threats, misinformation, disinformation, etc.
and this is directly related to the problems twitter is facing: elon musk started out by saying hes a "free speech absolutist", but twitter has been slowly rediscovering why "free speech absolutism" doesnt work. and you can see those discoveries in real time with twitter reintroducing moderation policies (among other things)
Ok then. People know enough about what it means to know it doesn't refer to not having to pay a fee to open your mouth.
It's very clear that the headline is a little wordplay joke. It doesn't literally convey that the journalist thought free speech means you don't have to pay to make a twitter post. You're taking it way too literally.
I'm in agreement that it doesn't work.
But it should also be called to attention that Musk never tried free speech absolutism on his platform (not that I think he actually should). He has been willing to bend over backwards in assisting dictatorships in censoring content, and he culled a lot of left-leaning and anti-Musk accounts/comments on day one. It's always been a lie to pander to the freeze peach crowd.
Elon Musk said free speech like once and then immediately threw a bunch of journalists off the site. And apparently every news article for the rest of my life is going to be about how he was hypocritical instead of whether he wants power or influence or has power and influence or the meaning of giving him those things.
Don’t trust every industrialist you meet even if they invested in one company where competent people make cool space ships. He’s clearly on Ket and some uppers. Grimes divorced him and her music isn’t even good. He’s not that complicated.
Elon and his sycophants have been the idiots talking about free speech on Twitter. It's perfectly fine to use that talking point as criticism. If he's not interested in free speech then what was he doing allowing banned Nazi accounts back on?
Free speech, now only $9.99 per month
or 0.99/post.each retweet would cost you an additional 0.49. you pay less,you get less.
You don’t know what free speech means.
This is like claiming Blizzard is infringing on your free speech because they banned you from world of Warcraft for saying racist shit.
Better yet. This is like claiming blizzard is infringing on your freedom of speech because they deactivated your account as a result of you not paying your subscription.
Do better.
Corporations should be allowed to own vital services so they can ban people from them at will. This is a good thing somehow. I love monopolies that suppress activists and organizers because it would only be bad if the government is doing it.
We could stop thinking of Twitter, Facebook, etc. as "essential services".
They can both fuck right off and most people's lives will not be negatively impacted.
That’s the thing about private property and private services. They can terminate your involvement at will for any reason. It’s in the user agreement you consent to when you sign up.
You’re not entitled to these services. They aren’t your god given right or any other bullshit you’re imagining.
Comparing this to freedom of speech is laughable.
I stole this line from someone else, but its great.
Elon Musk has invented fee speech, not free speech.
It's a clever line, but Musk hasn't invented a single goddamn thing in his life.
Hey that's not fair - he invents his own narrative about reality all the time.
Yeah, pay to post was Something Awful founder lowtax's idea.
SA used to be great. That move actually made the forums a pretty good place for a while because it kept out a few demographics including bots and kids.
Something Awful, YTMND and Newgrounds were basically the comedic engines of the internet back then.
Good 'ol pre-YouTube internet.
I work in bot protection and it's a sound idea but doesn't really work in practice. As long as there's more than 1$ of value to be gained it's worth it for the bot makers.
This also makes it so that botting is only accesible to select few actors that have the required resources i.e. russian troll farms or large bot networks from china, in turn this increases their value. This is very good for them.
Reality is that the only way to stop bots is to constantly change up the detection system. This is called a "cat and mouse" sort of problem and it really is the only way to do it. The attacker always has to catch up and it can be trivial that takes them couple of hours to do but it also reveals behavior patterns for marking bot accounts. This actually works really well in practice but requires a lot of dev resources and many companies low-key like bots which is another thread entirely.
I'll ask anyway. Why do companies like bots?
As Kungen already answered - stats! You can sell bot traffic as real traffic which inflates your numbers.
For stuff like social media, bots increase engagement too. Many new products and networks actually generate a lot of fake content to attract organic growth. I.e. if bot likes your comment you're likely to engage more. If it likes your product review you're likely to review more stuff etc.
Tracking bots can also generate reverse analytics. For example if you know that your competitors are scraping fishing equipment data from your store it could mean they're working on a competing fishing related product.
Lastly, you can feed fake data to bots to manipulate competitors. This is somewhat illegal (no real legal precedent yet afaik though its a clear intent to harm other businesses) but it can really powerful in the wrong hands.
Edit: worth nothing that a lot of bot traffic is good. Sometimes you want to be scraped as it is a form of organic engagement and increases the value of your data and often backlinks growth (e.g. indexers like Google etc)
Perpetual growth/engagement statistics?
How true is the dead internet theory, in your view?
Er du måske en robot??
Nei, jeg er kjøtt og blod og stål og smøreolje som deg
Hmm, jeg tror desværre jeg består af et 100% syntetisk keramisk bomuldsprodukt...
More eyeballs.
Enough updoots or retweets and other algos pick up on it. Some random twitter discussion ends up on BuzzFeed, YTers start making influencer vids, and Reddit / Lemmy repost bots.
Do this enough and it'll gain traction. Now everyone is talking about your stupid fuckin Stanley mug, corporate rumor,or political talking point.
And this can be automated end to end, 24/7, by market and keyword, will real time feedback as to how well it's doing via upvotes, shares, likes, or even data mining emails and convos via Gmail or WhatsApp.
That's what I was coming in here to suggest, so I'm glad someone in the field was able to back that idea up. I think it's unlikely many bots that aren't made for fun are being put on Twitter unless they are generating a lot more than $1 for whoever is putting them up.
Bot protection? Call me ignorant but what exactly do you do?
develop systems that can identify unwanted users like bots, spammers, people who abuse the product and break ToS etc. Most bad actors are very dumb but fighting this at scale is actually very interesting. Also most bots (like 90%) are just scrapers (data collectors) especially when it comes to Twitter which has absurd API pricings but cost almost nothing to scrape lol
Oh my god I’m a fuckin idiot. Granted, I’ve had a couple drinks tonight but I thought you were protecting bots… not protecting against them lol
yeah sorry "protection against bots" just doesn't roll of the tongue as easily lol
Protect the bots!!!
You're welcome.
Hey man it gets me employed and I even get to work on foss on work hours sometimes. Thanks! :)
I'd bet that is explicitly part of the funding model. Pay to influence consensus, cuz this is a publicly traded stock and numbers need to go up, regardless of who is paying.
Twitter is private. Musk took it private when he bought it.
Yes only Russia and China do bad things with technology!
Never had to deal with attacks originating from US or Europe so thats kinda true actually :)
Go to r/worldnews and r/europe on reddit
The amount of bots is….
I hate that twitter has the seo that it does. I always accidentally click on a link to see the "log in or get fucked" screen.
Its staying power is really annoying TBH.
I guess it could be worse (AKA everyone just going to Discord instead).
Add
-twitterto your search queries.-site:twitter.com
Nah, I don't even want the results where people are talking about the cesspit.
This is not going to stop bots.
here's hoping it stops site growth
Most people don't get out of bed for a dollar so no, it won't outside the usual 10-30% pareto ratio, which is probably already getting impacted by Xitter being run into the ground.
This will absolutely stop by far the most bots, because hostile governments like Russia and China use THOUSANDS of bots, having to pay $1 extra to maintain each bot, will be prohibitively expensive for those governments. Remember this can mean THOUSANDS in extra cost for those programs. No way either Russia or China will be able to afford that. So my guess is this will be 99.99% effective at preventing bots. The problem for Musk that he may not have foreseen is, the same will be true for MAGA racist anti LGBT propaganda bots. So now Twitter will go back to be dominated by liberals and socialists. Making it necessary for Musk to pay for another platform all over again, if he wants to have a free space to blurt his idiocy.
/s
You had me in the first 1/4, NGL
Yes I was joking, the real explanation is of course that most bots are made by underage kids that don't have access to credit cards, and can't afford $1 out of their allowance. 😋
Isn't that the started intent? Like adding a small roadblock or captcha.
I'm not saying I agree but the simple logic should work. It'll likely reduce the user base and still let bits in with cash to burn.
In theory, maybe. In practice, the bots might just pay and post anyway. If they can recoup those costs in the scam, it costs them basically nothing.
So bots pay to continue what they're doing, but Musky now gets money for it?
Ray Charles could see what's going on here.
This is what Craigslist did and now nobody uses it and we're forced to use the garbage platform that is Facebook Marketplace.
When will people stop supporting this clown?
Remember when some people were like "well, I don't support him, but I've had this Twitter account forever, so I'm not leaving." This is what happens. Things just get worse until you gain plausible deniability for continuing to support the bullshit.
Perhaps when his name/companies will stop being on the headlines every single day multiple times. Unless it's something really big that could actually harm his reputation people should restrain from posting and upvoting news about him. This article is about shit that hasn't happened yet, this guy is tricking you all around.
Please. I truly want to see my favorite people on Twitter get driven to a better platform.
Unfortunately, they’re going to Threads. Although I guess that’s technically better. But better in the sense that drinking piss is better than eating shit.
It’s sterile and I like the taste.
Bear?
Does he like to drink pee? Is that what makes him a talented composer? Will I become a talented composer if I drink pee?
Threads is also a barely moderated mess, because they don't want to scare away "moderate" (sic!) conservatives (code word for "fascist not openly identifying as such").
And they're anti politics, except they don't count that as politics
Lol I'm not paying shit, have fun everybody else. X is garbage
I never got the appeal of twitter/x, and I never will. I get other social networks, some more, some less, but Twitter's just stupid IMO. I hope that shit'll die sooner than later.
I can’t get past the og twitter which was everyone blogging minutiae of their life. What they ate for lunch. What street they’re walking down. What they thought of the music on the radio.
Somewhere along the way people tried to make it legit, but also it was people trying to claim firsties for any event worth mentioning.
It’s just a crap platform. Too much bs to wade through to find anything good.
I get the appeal of twitter. I've said this before. You want to know tour dates? When that next book in the series is coming out. When a new game trailer is available? Movie trailer? You want to know about when a vlog creator posts their newest content? Twitter was good for those things. I used to use it for that. Now it's just useless for most things. And I'm back to using RSS feeds, more than half of which don't work properly.
I followed a bunch of artists and content creators and I got annoyed when the entire feed became just interspersed with Musk's ramblings and bullshit. I never followed him and I didn't want promoted content.
It’s still the perfect one-to-many communication method. Best way to get news from people you kinda give a shit about, the rest was just noise.
I miss so much news in racing and gaming due to not being on Twitter anymore
I've never stopped using web sites for those use cases.
There's something to be said for having full control over your online "home".
That is an amazing idea!
We should make a site where people can set up their own internet homepage. Each person can have their own space on the internet! To give the users a sense of ownership let's call it MySpace.
I think my friend Tom will help design the site.
That's fair but not everyone does it this way. I actually switched to twitter from RSS when google and the like basically pushed for it to go away and now I'm back on RSS with mixed results because twitter has become a dumpster fire. Having full control isn't working out great for me and probably a fair few others.
twitter is for food trucks to tell me where they'll be today, and anything else is a misuse of the service
Twitter was great for watching Jan 6 unfold, there's no replacement for the kind of unfiltered crowd sourced information gathering it enabled
okay, so for tracking food trucks and lifted, heavily-financed trucks
Twitter has always been pointless to me except for outage notices etc, and that's just because that's where the companies chose to post. The second there is a "town board" style app with all company announcements etc then it's completely pointless.
Hopefully more people change to mastodon now
*keys and *omas are more fun though. mastodon's way too businesslike to encourage a fair share of people to pick it over shitter (it works other way around as well tho)
And make it a shitty place. Lemmy world already is in my block list
I hate to tell you this, but you're in a lemmy.world community right now, so your block list isn't working very well.
😂😂
What? Why?
Bots and politics
That's every instance, not just Lemmy world
Bunch of Hamas apologists/supporters.
🙄
Opps was I not smiling hard enough while sucking Netanyahu's dick? Was there just no enthusiasm in the blow job? My bad ill do better next time.
K bye.
Not that I literally ever said hi.
For real, shit platform with no real life benefit gets even shittier who would’ve thought
Paid speech? Lol
It’s the American way. Aligns with the Supreme Court ruling on Citizen’s United.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Elon Musk confirmed Monday that X (formerly Twitter) plans to start charging new users to post on the platform, TechCrunch reported.
Back when X launched the "Not-A-Bot" program, Musk claimed that charging a $1 annual fee would make it "1000X harder to manipulate the platform."
In a help center post, X said that the "test was developed to bolster our already significant efforts to reduce spam, manipulation of our platform, and bot activity."
X Support confirmed that follower counts would likely be impacted during that purge, because "we're casting a wide net to ensure X remains secure and free of bots."
Musk's plan to charge a fee to overcome bots won't work, experts told WSJ, because anyone determined to spam X can just find credit cards and buy disposable phones on the dark web.
And any bad actor who can't find what they need on the dark web could theoretically just wait three months to launch scams or spread harmful content like disinformation or propaganda.
The original article contains 798 words, the summary contains 165 words. Saved 79%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
I think the real solution is he wants money. If it was solely to reduce spam/bot activities, then there are other ways to do that. Maybe a Bitcoin-style proof of work scheme where evey post needs to show a hash of the message with a nonce. The difficulty needn't be that hard to make mass posting computaionally unfeasible.
In fact, Bitcoin appropriated this proposal to reduce email spam. It never took off with email as it was an open system and network effects and a catch 22 meant that it floundered. But X, née twitter is a closed off dictatorship. They could force it through edict.
For the love of god Elon, stay out of my news feed.
There are extensions for that.
This is just another attempt at establishing a new status quo for other social media before Twitter dies a death due to the insurmountable debt that Musk's purchase saddled it with. We've had a bunch of things tried, so far the only thing that stuck was charging for API access (which reddit soon adopted). Let's not have this as well, please.
Hopefully Twitter dying because of this will give other companies pause (or not, would it really be that bad if facebook kills itself copying him?)
Are these new users in the room with us? lmao
tfw the free speech isn't even free monetarily
Free speech? More like free* speech
*Only $4.99/month, yeah, definitely "free"
Fee speech
Why didn't I think of putting this in my comment?
I'm not a fan of him, nor a twitter user, but as far as free speech is concerned, that should mean your opinion is not censored, but the platform doesn't have to be free to use, but if it doesn't discriminate opinions, and everyone is allowed to make an account, and everyone has to pay the same
That's equal treatment, and isn't going against free speech.
None of that was ever true for Twitter, anyway. It wasn't true before Musk bought it and it's only got worse.
Meh, you still ise Twitter, you get what you deserve.
What does vaggumon digivolve to? MetalVaggumon. ヴァグモン
Indeed I deserve porn, so I get porn.
Free to play speech
Pay to play speech
...that makes no sense. By "bots" usually we mean accounts that advertise one thing or another to make money. And if there's any cause worth paying money for, it's making more money. But some sports fan or BTS stan or whatever just wanting to cheer on their thing is just gonna stop posting.
Well, you can invest money to get rid of bots, or you can try to make money to get rid of bots. He tries the latter, and will kill the platform doing that.
My tracking app doesn't let this site load at all, so I didn't read the article, but fuck musk. Will he remove ads when people pay them? I forgot my password for Twitter since last year and never bothered to log back into that cesspool
Money is speech? This is clearly in-line with current US legal definitions so what's the problem?
\s
This isn't useful or sufficient. You have to consider how many bots get banned and cost to determine efficacy. If you want 10,000 fake people to manipulate real people $10,000 doesn't seem a high price if you make the fake people act organic enough that they largely aren't banned.
It would be more useful if a singular service verified sufficient credentials to prove you were an authentic human and allowed you to auth to various sites. This in turn creates the problem that verifiers now know a LOT about your online life.
If the verification involved site -> verifier -> government held public key I think you could arrange so that none of the parties had enough info to identify users.
This is desperately needed
Didn't he say this like 5 times already
Well, if nothing else, it does reduce some load on their servers because less people will be posting.
Good news for X alternative Social Media, if pay to post for X I'm exit form X.
I like to be on x-twitter now
O.K. by me on x-twitter now
Every speech free on x-twitter now
...
For a small fee on x-twitter now.
Yea hey xitter my xitter now
Pay to be free like me on xitter now
Speech is only money on xitter now
...
Take it in the the xitter now xitter now
What's this to the tune of?
America
https://youtu.be/_Tihl3pzWRc
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/_Tihl3pzWRc
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
See now, I'd have guessed it was another Nuni o-rig-in-all. He is a musical gennious.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
another Nuni o-rig-in-all
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Would not give him 56 cents
That's 56 too much
We're going to be 🤑 rich! Rich I tell you!
lmfao fuck off musk sure it is
Keep digging Musk. Lmao
Well, one more reason to ignore that platform on it's way to obsolescence.
yeah, I think he is doing it now. Because if you dont boost, unlikely anyone will see what you tweet.
Free speech is free speech only if your dictator tells you so.
Social media was never about free speech.
You might want to do some research on what free speech means because this is cringe.
🍿
We need a new paradigm for social media. And no, I'm not satisfied with Lemmy either (privacy issues).
Yup. I'm working on something, but it also has some privacy issues as well.
The problem is that the more privacy you have, the more people will post illegal and spammy stuff and the less monetizable the platform is. The more free speech you have, the more moderation costs. So social media companies will generally lean toward less privacy (so more ad revenue) and less free speech.
My focus is on p2p and user-generated moderation, which tries to solve two problems:
But the automatic moderation thing requires public information, like mod reports, categorization, and votes, so it's not going to improve on lemmy in privacy. Anything privacy-respecting would require too much work from users (they'll need to both consent to trust each other). Maybe I'll be able to add it as an option.
But even if my system is perfect (it won't be), it's unlikely to beat something like Twitter or Facebook due to the network effect and sheer amount of engineering and marketing resources available.
Imo, lemmy is good enough for now. People like me will be working on stuff behind the scenes, so if lemmy falls over, hopefully we'll have a ready replacement.
Also, it very much depends on what you mean by "free". If you mean free as in free beer, then absolutely it is no longer going to be free speech. However, if you mean free as in freedom to say what you want, I don't know as I am no longer on the platform.
OPs title is misleading, there's a difference between free speech as in expressing your free speech and the one that OP is referring to is complaining about paying to express your free speech.
That's not misleading, that's sarcasm.
Yes! sarcasm that implies on what I already said.
But no one is being misled, it's very obvious sarcasm.
Welcome to the death spiral
I wonder if introducing an artificial delay, like hitting post, and it taking a minute before it actually goes live, would help. Because then something could scan incoming posts, and if something looked like a bot, it could be pulled before it ever actually went out.
what would an artificial delay do? Litteraly nothing. Also they can scan posts after they have been uploaded. And a scan shouldnt take even a second.
An artificial delay should discourage flood attacks. Either that or do some sort of thing where you figure out how many posts per day the average user does and then not let people post above that limit.
You didn't explain how. It doesn't matter to wait a little bit. It's not like they're using only one connection and one account.
It's also not clear to me how waiting longer suddenly charged how easy it is to detect bots.
Well, you have to limit the number of accounts they can possibly have by whatever method possible, either by charging per account or some sort of proof of work or phone number verification or something that limits the amount of accounts that they can have. Once you have done that, what you need to do is cost them something such as how proof of work costs computing resources. If it takes 10 seconds to post a tweet, then sending out 1 million tweets takes 1 million times 10 seconds or 10 million seconds, or 166,666 minutes or 2777 hours or 115.7 days And that's all from a 10 second Proof of work requirement. For a regular user, that's not a problem. For a spammer, that's a huge problem.
What your talking about is rate limiting. And pretty much every social media already does that. The issue with adding requirements like phone number etc, is that it also makes it more difficult and annoying for regular users. Besides, bot account owners litteraly have large amounts of fake valid mobile phone numbers they can use to "verify" their bot accounts. Then they also use change their ip addresses, so rate limiting can't be enforced. Instagram also has a massive bot issue, but its just an endless amount of bot accounts, not just one that is spamming all over the place.
Adding a fake 10 second delay would stop absolutely nothing and make the experience even worse for regular users.
They should do that for meeting people for dating....like a love tax or something... Pay some random so you can talk to people of your interested sex.
Meanwhile, the neuralink patient zero gave a beautiful presentation of what has been happening with that project and it isn't news because it goes against the Elon Bad narrative
If you'd stop attempting to play victim on Musk's behalf long enough to google it, you'd see that that's actually getting plenty of coverage.
Who the heck uses those obscure sites? U am thinking about YouTube and stuffs.
Bro did not just call Reuters, BBC, and WSJ 'obscure' 💀.
The First one sounds like some Ponzi scheme company, the second one, like porn stuff and the third onez like social justice warrior. Me no trust.