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When a blog post starts with saying "twitter is dead" it doesn't really make it worth reading further. "Twitter is dead" was said pretty much as numerously as "

by maxlin 3y ago

When a blog post starts with saying "twitter is dead" it doesn't really make it worth reading further. "Twitter is dead" was said pretty much as numerously as "2 more weeks" but it's off better than ever, with Community Notes having proved themselves and X now having proved its capability to serve its main mission by working as the town square on issues related to OpenAI, Gaza, etc, etc. Eventually, with subscriptions paying most of the bills, I hope the API access per-client is brought back without extra costs too. But even without, X does have pretty much everything it needs, and will only grow with time. You can't put a price on Freedom of Speech.

twelvedogs 3y ago
subscriptions are most of their income, they don't pay the bills at all
- maxlin 3y ago
  That is simply not true. Subscriptions are at best at ~20% but lookin up. And yes they do actually pay bills, no landlord would have had them pause that for this long lol
VerminOctopus1 3y ago
I thought community notes already existed as bird watch before the takeover?
- patcon 3y ago
  Yeah, Elon just rebranded it, and pushed fwd its full deployment I was fully bought into the premise of birdwatch due to it being based on a great tool I've worked with for years (Pol.is), but Elon seemed to have loved it for all the wrong reasons, in a way that irked me. He seemingly just wanted to cut the trust & safety teams, and remove onus of creating policy :/
  - maxlin 3y ago
    "loved it for all the wrong reasons" What? It sounds like you don't actually support the basis of Community Notes and were looking for it to be used selectively. No. Power to the people. Not power to the the bloated team that was on rails to destroy Twitter. I fucking loved the "print your code from the last 30 days" imitative in its crude efficiency. With that team, Twitter/X wouldn't exist in any form anymore even without the takeover.
TheAceOfHearts 3y ago
Twitter is dead, long live X. Twitter as it was no longer exists. Regardless of what one may think of Elon's leadership, he's making big changes to the platform. It's a Ship of Theseus argument. How much does a platformm have to change before it's no longer what it used to be?
enumjorge 3y ago
> [Twitter]'s off better than ever I'd agree that it's hard to take an opinion seriously that pronounces Twitter as dead. As you pointed out, when OpenAI's drama was unfolding, the conversations happened mainly on Twitter. But saying Twitter's current form is the service at its best is also hard to take seriously. I tried to follow said conversation about OpenAI during Altman's ouster and I found the site to be an inconsistently broken mess. To this day, I'm still not sure why I'm able to access certain posts without signing in, but not others. In my experience, the quality of the discussion on the site as a whole has also taken a hit. And again with the whole freedom of speech. It continues to baffle me how people associate Musk with the first amendment. He brands himself as a free speech absolutist, but his actions have continuously shown him to have no problem silencing critics and playing favorites on the platform.
- maxlin 3y ago
  I really recommend just logging in once, the unregistered UX is crappy intentionally. You're the first one to bring up First Amendment. We are not talking about it. Note that "Freedom of Speech" and "First amendment" are different things. Freedom of Speech can mean laws (and there are other nations but just USA) but it also means an idea, an ideal. Crudely, an environment that acknowledges the old saying of "sticks and stones will break my bones but words will never hurt me". If you see the forest from the trees you'd see Elon actually runs a platform that favors Freedom of Speech more than any other platform by a country mile. On X any violations of it are exceptions (the ones you're talking about), NOT the modus operandi.
  - Encrypt-Keeper 3y ago
    You keep saying "See the forest from the trees". It's "See the forest for the trees"
    - maxlin 3y ago
      Yes. Continuously bringing up a few random exceptions like the ElonJet case, while ignoring the massive shift Twitter went thru to go from one of the most censorious common western internet places. That is the problem how 100% of negative responses I've received to praising the FoH improvements at X have received. It is missing the whole while looking at details. Losing the big picture. Not properly managing one's preference for detail autism, for the tech business/lead spectrum types. EDIT: Noted your fix was a sematic one. Ok. For how I often see written, and what also logically makes sense, the sentences are identical. "For" replacing "Because of" isn't that uncommon and is usually readable.
Timwi 3y ago
> When a blog post starts with saying "twitter is dead" That's not what they said. They said “it’s the day that, for me, Twitter died.” I read that as meaning “I personally don't want to use Twitter anymore.” I personally feel the same about Reddit. I was a very regular reader and contributor, but since the big brouha about third-party apps I decided that it's dead to me. I'm no longer using it. That doesn't mean it has died as a platform, but it does mean that I personally have moved on from it.
- jhugo 3y ago
  I wanted to move on from Reddit when all of that was going down, but it's really the only place on the Internet where I could get (just from the memory of the last 24h) a decent range of discussion/advice from real people about pizza stones, indoor plants, descaling a coffee machine, learning piano as an adult, and the answer to the question "TV show where someone sings Chattanooga Choo Choo", all from a single website that isn't heavily polluted by ads. As long as "[query] reddit" makes Google so much better, I can't really consider Reddit dead.
- maxlin 3y ago
  I guess there is a distinction but considering how people usually talk, the thing said registers the same, especially as the guy did wrote in the form that he was "biding his time" expecting Twitter to actually die and for everything being done there being uncontroversially bad for the platform. I would differentiate those things the same way you did in a different context. Reddit was by far the most common platform for me to visit. Overall community there has degraded over the years (more than in places like HN!), not helped by moderation being seemingly all over the place nowadays, possibly affected by the culling. I reported someone for a relatively minor but reportable infraction and their 10 year account got instantly permabanned. All while I had to send appeals 15 days continuously to get my alternate account and subreddit unbanned, with a very reasonable plea that my subreddit is doing the same as another one that has existed for ~7 years, after which it got unbanned for one day of no action.
snailmailman 3y ago
“Better than ever” when it’s constantly promoting hate speech? And Elon is too? And advertisers are dipping out? And Twitter definitely doesn’t have free speech. People still get banned, or have their posts artificially limited, but they do allow more hate speech. Nearly everyone I followed on Twitter is on Mastodon now. It works great. Conversations still happen there on news topics. I deleted my Twitter account a while back because my feed stopped being people I followed and became people promoting conspiracy theories. The site doesn’t even work properly anymore. People link to threads of tweets but only the first tweet displays. And profiles never show latest tweets. (I think these might work when logged in? But also don’t show any errors when logged out? I don’t know as I’ll never login again)
- maxlin 3y ago
  More and more of the time when someone mentions "hate speech" they're just angry something isn't being moderated like Reddit. One needs to have perspective and if you have zero accusations of enabling hate speech as a platform that big, you're actually the bad guy. X does have the best model of Free Speech. Nothing can be perfect but they're the F1 car of the effort when others are oxcarts on rails. Yes conversations happen even on Facebook, I have frequented it this month. Doesn't mean they are that meaningful or capable of actually working as the critically-needed Town Square. X requires login for many things, as it did during the Twitter times. Congratulations for shooting yourself in the foot by impulsively deleting your account I guess? Like, what in earth would that benefit you instead of just having a pause ...
mcintyre1994 3y ago
I’m unconvinced that subscriptions are ever going to make enough money to pay the bills. Musk has been pretty clear he needs to get advertisers back. I don’t think his approach of specifically telling Bob Iger to fuck off is going to help with that, but he isn’t hiding that he needs to figure it out pretty quickly.
- maxlin 3y ago
  Sure, in the short term yes. You can't fix the lack of funds from advertisers with subscriptions in a few days. But eventually I hope it will. Being dependent on advertisers is kryptonite for platforms of user speech, regardless if it's YouTube or X.
prmoustache 3y ago
Well twitter doesn't exist anymore so yes it is dead. Also it is funny that for a lot of people including me, slashdot, digg, twitter and reddit are already a thing of the past while we are still visiting regular old forums.
- maxlin 3y ago
  Semantics. Sure, Twitter is dead. For the benefit of everybody. X again is more lively than ever, for the good of not just current civilization, but near and far future. X will have some trouble shedding some of Twitter's old behaviors and such though, and it can't really scale down to a boutique-level platform like HN. But these are fundamentally different types of platforms due to the kind of people they attract.
latexr 3y ago
> When a blog post starts with saying "twitter is dead" That is not what it says. Please don’t straw man and misquote. > it's off better than ever By which metric? Certainly not financial. https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/15/business/twitter-cash-flow-elon-musk/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/15/business/twitter-cash-flow-el... > X now having proved its capability to serve its main mission by working as the town square on issues related to OpenAI, Gaza, etc, etc. Those conversations happened all around. There was nothing special about Twitter. > Eventually, with subscriptions paying most of the bills That’s an astronomical assumption. > X does have pretty much everything it needs, and will only grow with time. So does it have everything it needs, or will it grow? Those don’t make sense at the same time. > You can't put a price on Freedom of Speech. If you’re a free speech absolutist, Twitter is definitely not the platform for you. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ElonJet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ElonJet https://slate.com/technology/2023/05/elon-musk-turkey-twitter-erdogan-india-modi-free-speech.html https://slate.com/technology/2023/05/elon-musk-turkey-twitte... https://thewire.in/tech/musk-twitter-takedown-government-compliance https://thewire.in/tech/musk-twitter-takedown-government-com...
- maxlin 3y ago
  It is not a straw man. Considering how the post starts, the writer fully expected the platform to die. Also literally "twitter is dead" "twitter is dead to me" "twitter is quite dead" go inside a reasonable interpretation considering there's always loss. Other parts can only be considered incorrect if you lose sight of the big picture! As I said, you can't put a price on Freedom Of Speech. And considering the platform is technically very operational, it is being protected. Your other points like "subscriptions will NEVER pay for everything!" are only the kinds of things that do actually end up turning true to unique tech companies, which X absolutely is like now. >> X does have pretty much everything it needs, and will only grow with time. >So does it have everything it needs, or will it grow? Those don’t make sense at the same time. Wrong. It has everything it needs to function, and will eventually grow. Like with anything, usually the prerequisite for growth is sustainability in a stable state. If you're a free speech absolutist, and not a total idiot who doesn't see forest from the trees, Twitter for sure wasn't the platform for you, but X is pretty much the only one due to its popularity and successfully driven iniatives to protect it. Pointing out things like ElonJet (of whose handling was reasonable anyway due to security), or some Twitter's old behaviours not being handled yet due to international complications is not seeing the forest.

by maxlin 3y ago

twelvedogs 3y ago

subscriptions are most of their income, they don't pay the bills at all

maxlin 3y ago
That is simply not true. Subscriptions are at best at ~20% but lookin up. And yes they do actually pay bills, no landlord would have had them pause that for this long lol

VerminOctopus1 3y ago

I thought community notes already existed as bird watch before the takeover?

patcon 3y ago
Yeah, Elon just rebranded it, and pushed fwd its full deployment I was fully bought into the premise of birdwatch due to it being based on a great tool I've worked with for years (Pol.is), but Elon seemed to have loved it for all the wrong reasons, in a way that irked me. He seemingly just wanted to cut the trust & safety teams, and remove onus of creating policy :/
- maxlin 3y ago
  "loved it for all the wrong reasons" What? It sounds like you don't actually support the basis of Community Notes and were looking for it to be used selectively. No. Power to the people. Not power to the the bloated team that was on rails to destroy Twitter. I fucking loved the "print your code from the last 30 days" imitative in its crude efficiency. With that team, Twitter/X wouldn't exist in any form anymore even without the takeover.

TheAceOfHearts 3y ago

Twitter is dead, long live X. Twitter as it was no longer exists. Regardless of what one may think of Elon's leadership, he's making big changes to the platform. It's a Ship of Theseus argument. How much does a platformm have to change before it's no longer what it used to be?

enumjorge 3y ago

> [Twitter]'s off better than ever I'd agree that it's hard to take an opinion seriously that pronounces Twitter as dead. As you pointed out, when OpenAI's drama was unfolding, the conversations happened mainly on Twitter. But saying Twitter's current form is the service at its best is also hard to take seriously. I tried to follow said conversation about OpenAI during Altman's ouster and I found the site to be an inconsistently broken mess. To this day, I'm still not sure why I'm able to access certain posts without signing in, but not others. In my experience, the quality of the discussion on the site as a whole has also taken a hit. And again with the whole freedom of speech. It continues to baffle me how people associate Musk with the first amendment. He brands himself as a free speech absolutist, but his actions have continuously shown him to have no problem silencing critics and playing favorites on the platform.

maxlin 3y ago
I really recommend just logging in once, the unregistered UX is crappy intentionally. You're the first one to bring up First Amendment. We are not talking about it. Note that "Freedom of Speech" and "First amendment" are different things. Freedom of Speech can mean laws (and there are other nations but just USA) but it also means an idea, an ideal. Crudely, an environment that acknowledges the old saying of "sticks and stones will break my bones but words will never hurt me". If you see the forest from the trees you'd see Elon actually runs a platform that favors Freedom of Speech more than any other platform by a country mile. On X any violations of it are exceptions (the ones you're talking about), NOT the modus operandi.
- Encrypt-Keeper 3y ago
  You keep saying "See the forest from the trees". It's "See the forest for the trees"
  - maxlin 3y ago
    Yes. Continuously bringing up a few random exceptions like the ElonJet case, while ignoring the massive shift Twitter went thru to go from one of the most censorious common western internet places. That is the problem how 100% of negative responses I've received to praising the FoH improvements at X have received. It is missing the whole while looking at details. Losing the big picture. Not properly managing one's preference for detail autism, for the tech business/lead spectrum types. EDIT: Noted your fix was a sematic one. Ok. For how I often see written, and what also logically makes sense, the sentences are identical. "For" replacing "Because of" isn't that uncommon and is usually readable.

Timwi 3y ago

> When a blog post starts with saying "twitter is dead" That's not what they said. They said “it’s the day that, for me, Twitter died.” I read that as meaning “I personally don't want to use Twitter anymore.” I personally feel the same about Reddit. I was a very regular reader and contributor, but since the big brouha about third-party apps I decided that it's dead to me. I'm no longer using it. That doesn't mean it has died as a platform, but it does mean that I personally have moved on from it.

jhugo 3y ago
I wanted to move on from Reddit when all of that was going down, but it's really the only place on the Internet where I could get (just from the memory of the last 24h) a decent range of discussion/advice from real people about pizza stones, indoor plants, descaling a coffee machine, learning piano as an adult, and the answer to the question "TV show where someone sings Chattanooga Choo Choo", all from a single website that isn't heavily polluted by ads. As long as "[query] reddit" makes Google so much better, I can't really consider Reddit dead.
maxlin 3y ago
I guess there is a distinction but considering how people usually talk, the thing said registers the same, especially as the guy did wrote in the form that he was "biding his time" expecting Twitter to actually die and for everything being done there being uncontroversially bad for the platform. I would differentiate those things the same way you did in a different context. Reddit was by far the most common platform for me to visit. Overall community there has degraded over the years (more than in places like HN!), not helped by moderation being seemingly all over the place nowadays, possibly affected by the culling. I reported someone for a relatively minor but reportable infraction and their 10 year account got instantly permabanned. All while I had to send appeals 15 days continuously to get my alternate account and subreddit unbanned, with a very reasonable plea that my subreddit is doing the same as another one that has existed for ~7 years, after which it got unbanned for one day of no action.

snailmailman 3y ago

“Better than ever” when it’s constantly promoting hate speech? And Elon is too? And advertisers are dipping out? And Twitter definitely doesn’t have free speech. People still get banned, or have their posts artificially limited, but they do allow more hate speech. Nearly everyone I followed on Twitter is on Mastodon now. It works great. Conversations still happen there on news topics. I deleted my Twitter account a while back because my feed stopped being people I followed and became people promoting conspiracy theories. The site doesn’t even work properly anymore. People link to threads of tweets but only the first tweet displays. And profiles never show latest tweets. (I think these might work when logged in? But also don’t show any errors when logged out? I don’t know as I’ll never login again)

maxlin 3y ago
More and more of the time when someone mentions "hate speech" they're just angry something isn't being moderated like Reddit. One needs to have perspective and if you have zero accusations of enabling hate speech as a platform that big, you're actually the bad guy. X does have the best model of Free Speech. Nothing can be perfect but they're the F1 car of the effort when others are oxcarts on rails. Yes conversations happen even on Facebook, I have frequented it this month. Doesn't mean they are that meaningful or capable of actually working as the critically-needed Town Square. X requires login for many things, as it did during the Twitter times. Congratulations for shooting yourself in the foot by impulsively deleting your account I guess? Like, what in earth would that benefit you instead of just having a pause ...

mcintyre1994 3y ago

I’m unconvinced that subscriptions are ever going to make enough money to pay the bills. Musk has been pretty clear he needs to get advertisers back. I don’t think his approach of specifically telling Bob Iger to fuck off is going to help with that, but he isn’t hiding that he needs to figure it out pretty quickly.

maxlin 3y ago
Sure, in the short term yes. You can't fix the lack of funds from advertisers with subscriptions in a few days. But eventually I hope it will. Being dependent on advertisers is kryptonite for platforms of user speech, regardless if it's YouTube or X.

prmoustache 3y ago

Well twitter doesn't exist anymore so yes it is dead. Also it is funny that for a lot of people including me, slashdot, digg, twitter and reddit are already a thing of the past while we are still visiting regular old forums.

maxlin 3y ago
Semantics. Sure, Twitter is dead. For the benefit of everybody. X again is more lively than ever, for the good of not just current civilization, but near and far future. X will have some trouble shedding some of Twitter's old behaviors and such though, and it can't really scale down to a boutique-level platform like HN. But these are fundamentally different types of platforms due to the kind of people they attract.

latexr 3y ago

> When a blog post starts with saying "twitter is dead" That is not what it says. Please don’t straw man and misquote. > it's off better than ever By which metric? Certainly not financial. https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/15/business/twitter-cash-flow-elon-musk/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/15/business/twitter-cash-flow-el... > X now having proved its capability to serve its main mission by working as the town square on issues related to OpenAI, Gaza, etc, etc. Those conversations happened all around. There was nothing special about Twitter. > Eventually, with subscriptions paying most of the bills That’s an astronomical assumption. > X does have pretty much everything it needs, and will only grow with time. So does it have everything it needs, or will it grow? Those don’t make sense at the same time. > You can't put a price on Freedom of Speech. If you’re a free speech absolutist, Twitter is definitely not the platform for you. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ElonJet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ElonJet https://slate.com/technology/2023/05/elon-musk-turkey-twitter-erdogan-india-modi-free-speech.html https://slate.com/technology/2023/05/elon-musk-turkey-twitte... https://thewire.in/tech/musk-twitter-takedown-government-compliance https://thewire.in/tech/musk-twitter-takedown-government-com...

maxlin 3y ago
It is not a straw man. Considering how the post starts, the writer fully expected the platform to die. Also literally "twitter is dead" "twitter is dead to me" "twitter is quite dead" go inside a reasonable interpretation considering there's always loss. Other parts can only be considered incorrect if you lose sight of the big picture! As I said, you can't put a price on Freedom Of Speech. And considering the platform is technically very operational, it is being protected. Your other points like "subscriptions will NEVER pay for everything!" are only the kinds of things that do actually end up turning true to unique tech companies, which X absolutely is like now. >> X does have pretty much everything it needs, and will only grow with time. >So does it have everything it needs, or will it grow? Those don’t make sense at the same time. Wrong. It has everything it needs to function, and will eventually grow. Like with anything, usually the prerequisite for growth is sustainability in a stable state. If you're a free speech absolutist, and not a total idiot who doesn't see forest from the trees, Twitter for sure wasn't the platform for you, but X is pretty much the only one due to its popularity and successfully driven iniatives to protect it. Pointing out things like ElonJet (of whose handling was reasonable anyway due to security), or some Twitter's old behaviours not being handled yet due to international complications is not seeing the forest.