The Twitpocalypse may have begun, as datacenter migration reportedly founders Twitter suffered a panoply of significant glitches on Wednesday, reportedly coinciding with a consolidation of its datacenters and reducing its reliance on Google's cloud. Some users were unable to post to the service and, when they tried to do so, were told they had exceeded Twitter's daily limit of 4,400 tweets – even if …
Also he doesn't understand:
1) Free Speech. It's stuff that doesn't annoy him.
2) It's not people standing in street corner preaching or people in a pub, they are am Internet site and it should have the same laws applied as radio talk shows or letters in newspapers.
Re point 2
I used to be a moderator & later on as admin on a UK based forum for about 10 years
It was drilled into us on day one that the forum was a publication & governed by the same laws that govern newspapers, it was nothing like a chat between people in a pub
Plus the forum was responsible for all content published, so while the police might go after the OP of some actionable post they made, they'd also be coming for us for allowing it
Going forward, Twitter will be broadly... going backward.
The guy's bored out of his skull.
He's gone from 'Disrupting' (which is kinda fun) to 'Influencing' (which is just f'king sad).
Develop a new machine please, Elon. And nothing 'Boring'.
Elon Musk has inferred--and, it is believed, to have claimed outright--that he is "...an engineer...".
What has happened to all his tremendous amount of outstanding engineering expertise which would immediately solve this problem?
Of course, it would be not be politically correct to suggest that Elon Musk--to use somewhat dated terminology--doesn't know shit from Shinola about engineering....any type of engineering, at all.
Cheerful corrections and abject, deepest apologies will, of course, be forthcoming upon presentation of valid proof of the completion of formal engineering training of Mr. Musk---at an internationally-recognized School of Engineering, of course.
Since most people don't know what engineering actually is, and since most people are under the impression that Elon is a "genius", it's all the same thing. Therefore, he is whatever he claims to be.
"valid proof of the completion of formal engineering training"
Speaking as an engineer with four decades in practice, formal engineering training does not make one an engineer. It's just the starting point for eventually becoming one on the basis of accumulated demonstrable competent performance with progressively greater personal responsibility (starting from working on defined tasks under strict supervision).
“The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter. ’tis the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”
― Mark Twain, The Wit and Wisdom of Mark Twain
Maybe things work differently at Twitter, but in my firm, those that are working on things like new features are unlikely to be particularly well trained at maintaining server stability. OK they could certainly be trained on it, but is that actually going to help things in the short term as training takes week time.
Just ordering people to switch jobs rarely has the desired effect...
I'm sure they weren't just ordered to change jobs (of course that wouldn't work on its own, but Musk isn't that stupid)
They were probably also told to change their email sig, their profile updated in the corporate directory, and maybe given a new T-shirt with the job title on it.
4400 tweets/day limit? Limits are generally derived from actual experience (or, alternatively, from the laws of physics).
If one tweets non-stop for 16 hours a day that works out to a tweet every 13 seconds. Clearly only a bot can possibly achieve that. I doubt any human can type 10 characters a second on a phone. Or click a retweet button after actually looking at someone else's missive once every 13 seconds[*]. So, figure out some reasonable maximal tweet rate for a seriously engaged human with staff, like Biden or a Kardashian, let's say a tweet every 5 minutes for 16 hours a day. That works out to 192 - round it up to 200. Any account that tweets more than that on a regular basis must be a bot, and Musk can now count them and publish the result.
Inquiring minds want to know...
[*] Disclaimer: having never used Twitter I am imagining the mechanics.
Though it rather depends on how tweets are counted. For example, a reply, a retweet and a quote tweet of the same thing can be done very quickly.
And the continuing lack of an edit function sees numerous replies to tweets just to minor correct typos. Often within seconds. Which can ramp up tweet numbers for those of us with fat fingers.
It has also been suggested that non-payers will be limited in likes they can apply.
Consider corporate use. I really don't understand why people will turn to Twitter for a customer service issue with Grittish Bass, for example, but they do.
Do you want to be one of the ones they can't respond to because they've hit their 200 tweets for the day?
"Twitpocalypse" indeed, like Twitter is the first service to experience an outage or two. I'm not Elon's biggest fan, but I'm sincerely rooting for him to successfully turn the bloated pile of poop that was Twitter around, just to watch him silence all the smug haters that jump on every little issue as proof of Elon's failure.
but I'm sincerely rooting for him to successfully turn the bloated pile of poop that was Twitter around
I admire your sentiment, but unfortunately it seems more than likely he'll turn that bloated pile of poop into a swirling cesspool of shit, piss, blood, guts and maggots, full of ranting fucktards who seem to be under the illusion that anyone else gives the slightest fuck about their awful opinions...
Musk has turned Twitter around. It was climbing - making a small profit. Musk came along and switched to a full powered powered dive by adding $13B of debt - far more than enough to wipe out any profits with interest payments. He drove away more than half of Twitter's existing revenue stream - deliberately so Twitter would not be beholden to advertisers and the whims of their customers. To some extent he brought in new advertisers - the scammers that the former staff would rejected for being scams. His attempts to bring in new revenue streams backfired in ways that were pointed out to him before implementation started: the verified blue check mark for anyone who pays a small fee even if they are clearly not the owner of the trade name they are maligning.
Next up: firing most of the employees, not paying redundancy and offering a potential promise (Funding secured!) to pay some of what he owes if former employees sign a giant gag order (Free Speech!). Add in not paying rent, hosting fees and any bills. You may find this an outstandingly shrewd business move but it brings in scorn from anyone who has been stiffed by non-payment of an invoice and drives away new and existing suppliers. Finally (well there is actually far more) Musk has been working hard at turning Twitter into the new Gab/Parler/Truth. Those platforms have microscopic user bases for a reason.
I am impressed by the skill of the former Twitter staff that the platform has survived this long despite Musk's best efforts. The direction Musk was taking Twitter was obvious months ago and he has worked hard to earn the consequences.
One of the silliest things on Twitter is a single post split into a series of posts to form a thread. It means Twitter has to provide a whole bunch of tools to manage this workaround. And it renders search less useful when you land in the middle of a thread. It's something that should have been fixed a long time ago.
And I imagine the kind of people who regularly issue long threads could afford to pay. But maybe it's now too deeply ingrained in the culture.
Ah yes, but His Genius Musk The First thinks he knows better than to respect the original concept and idea of a business. No more utterings that you can read in one go on a small mobile phone screen, so, now there's space for War and Peace diatribes which nobody in their right mind or gainfully employed will have the time to read, absorb and reply to (read: engage with), especially since the main audience for this "service" has an attention span that rarely exceeds 15 seconds.
Or, in short: not worth paying for. Again.
I thought the whole point of twitter was to make a succinct point in a very small number of characters
Indeed. The pain of long twitstreams isn't a bug; it's a feature, there to punish the idiots who compose long twitstreams and the greater idiots who try to read them.
None of it interests me – I stopped even clicking on Twitter links in articles once they required enabling scripting on their site to read them, and as far as I can tell, anything of actual importance that appears on Twitter very shortly appears elsewhere in a more generous, informative, and palatable form. But if Twitter is going to exist, it ought to at least remain true to its genre.
Twitter is supposed to be a microblogging platform - if people are trying to use it to post longer content then they are misusing the tool, and to my mind that doesn't warrant a redesign.
Many years ago I used to work with a customer who had an obsession with trying to abuse Lotus-123 into being a word processor - the solution to that problem was not to implement a bunch of new macros to make Lotus-123 behave more like Wordstar
But there are tonnes of things that were invented for completely different purposes to how we use them today. (Quick google: apparently bubble wrap was invented as wallpaper. Play-doh was invented in 1933 to clean soot from wall paper. Frisbees were pie containers. Chainsaws were bone saws. Superglue was invented for wound closing. The mauve dye was invented for malaria. And countless drugs were invented for other purposes.)
What made sense back when SMS was all we had to communicate, doesn't make sense now every phone has the internet. What's useful about Twitter is not the short-ness of its posts - it's that everybody is positing into one pool in a standardized way so I can quickly collate posts round a topic, and follow those who are consistently useful. And every time I want to read something really useful, I have to wade through dozens of post fragments or, as I said, land in the middle, and have to try and track back to the head.
It's time for Twitter to grow up. It might even be, that the terse argumentative world of Twitter becomes a little nicer and less bullying when there is space for nuance.
From AC, above:
"...I thought the whole point of twitter was to make a succinct point in a very small number of characters."
Elon Musk's elegant engineering skills, which have already been touched upon, would dictate that his solution, unerringly, would be to make a succinct point--any succinct point--in as many characters as possible.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"He can compress the most amount of words into the smallest possible idea better than any man I know."--Abraham Lincoln
'Until today, though, the former micro-blogging service has not really experienced major incidents on Musk's watch.'
How many weeks ago was it that the entire login system failed for 4+ hours? That was on Elongated Muskrat's watch. Existing sessions still worked for me but if I tried to open Twatter in a new tab (yes, I'm troglodyte who uses Twitter web) I just got a generic error message when I logged in that tab.
It's worth noting that 4k characters is a fairly densely filled A4 page. Most of the Twitterati won't have the attention span to get through an entire posting :-)
This gives the "influencers" and other with an agenda the chance to do what a lot of "the press" do. Start with a clickbait headline, lead with a paragraph or two telling you lies and finally explaining the actual facts near the end where many people never reach.
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