Musk's latest X-periments: No more headlines, old posts vanish, block gets banned Elon Musk's seemingly arbitrary decision making was on display over the past few days at the site formerly known as Twitter, most recently in the billionaire's decree that X will strip titles and text from links on the platform, leaving only a lead image behind. Musk confirmed early this morning that the headline-stripping …
I don't use the thing but as described in the article this sounds like information generally used by accessibility support tools such as screen readers will be lost - is that the case? In many jurisdictions there is a legal requirement to ensure equal access to services for those with accessibility needs.
It looks like it will affect everyone, not just those using accessibility tools. If someone included a link and didn't provide a label of their own, it would show the title of the destination page. Now, it's going to be some opaque mystery link which probably shows a shortened URL. People can either click through to go who knows where or get the link and use the various tricks to get the shortener to tell you what the long URL is. I wonder how many people know those tricks and how many people know that it's useful. I only know the methods for three of the shorteners, and one of them is tinyurl which I don't think people use too much anymore.
In many jurisdictions there is a legal requirement to ensure equal access to services for those with accessibility needs.
(In UK) While true in theory, unless you have a few hundred thousand £££ lying around, such laws are of academic interest only.
Rights you can't enforce aren't rights at all.
Never used twitter myself. But have seen screenshots over the years where "XYZ user has blocked you". So that person who was blocked couldn't see the stuff from the person blocking them, is that how it worked?
I always thought that idea was dumb(maybe for once I agree with Elon, not sure). I mean how hard is it to sign up for another account to get around the block?(assumed it wasn't hard, or even easier perhaps simply view the blocking user's tweets while not logged in to twitter so it doesn't know you are blocked?). Not as if you need to change your primary account to this new account to get around the block, but if you are REALLY interested in seeing what that person(that doesn't like you) has to say, it seems pretty trivial to do regardless of block.
But maybe there is more to blocking than just that aspect. I read recently that users were blocking advertisers(I think? unsure how that works, I assume the intent is so they don't see the ads from those advertisers? but that sounds more like "muting"(can't see the advertiser) vs blocking (advertiser can't see you). But of course never having used the platform, not sure what those terms mean to users on twitter(I mean X).
I agree with you. At least previously, it was possible to see what someone had posted without logging in. This was <del>useful</del> used by me as I didn't have an account but sometimes people would post links to Twitter posts to show what someone had said. In my experience, it always took a long time if I needed to read more than one tweet at a time, but it was an option. As such, it would seem that blocking someone wouldn't stop them from viewing what you'd written very long as all they'd have to do is open a private window and view it anonymously. Maybe I'm missing something, but otherwise the block and mute options sound basically the same from harassment potential.
Block means they can't reply to your threads and you don't see their posts, mute means they can reply to your threads but you don't see the posts.
The difference is RWNJs still get to stomp all over your threads and insult you if they want and your followers get to see that even though you don't.
Some high profile RWNJs convinced Musk to fling their xcretions far and wide. They got blocked by vast numbers of users, to the point that the blocks limited their reach. They complained to Musk and Block->Mute is the immediate result. The longer term result is users will see more gab/truth flavoured xcretions. That should be enough to convince some of them to contact John Mastodon.
Side Note
Over the weekend Twitler got into an argument with some other right-wing douchebag about the whole mute vs block thing and it ended in Twitler blocking the douchebag.
No doubt Twitler will keep the block feature, and maybe eventually it'll be rolled back out as a premium feature for the suckers who actually pay for Twitter. And, no doubt the removal of the block feature is so that the next time Twitler's account "mysteriously" shows up in everyone's feed, they won't be able to block him and it'll make it seem like his engagement figures are much higher. I don't know if the reports of him abusing Ketamine are true, but it does seem pretty clear the guy's abusing something. Cocaine, ketamine, amphetamines... all of the above or some combination thereof.
As posts on Twitter are public by default, the whole blocking thing was always a bit weird. If I make a statement that is then publicly available, why should I then try and restrict access? Muting always made more sense (so people don't see some of the sometimes very hurtful comments about what they've written) but wasn't implemented. This still begs the question as to why go on a public forum if you're afraid of the comments? However, I don't think engineering will be the reason for this decision, not least because most of the engineers have left.
Telegram lets you do both, though, as it doesn't default to a telling the world everything, has less of a problem with trolling.
I hate to defend him in any way. I'm literally feeling a bit of revulsion typing these sentences. However, he didn't exactly promise that and he had a point in doing what he did. Someone made the suggestion that a payment around that level, I think it was $6 billion, could end world hunger. Musk responded claiming that he would pay for it if they could prove their point, but they, perhaps unsurprisingly, were unable to substantiate the hyperbolic claim that you could eliminate famine and all its causes with that much. I don't think he ever intended to pay it, even if it could have permanently ended it, but he was making a point in an argument, not a promise to donate that amount.
His selfishness aside, I think the general act is logical when someone claims a problem is much easier to solve than it is. Those who like to simplify problems to the point of inaccuracy make it harder to really solve them. Like a cryptocurrency adherent who thinks that adopting Bitcoin as legal tender will eliminate fraud, someone who thinks that a specific piece of software will mean that there will be no more security vulnerabilities, or a politician who says that electing them will mean nothing can go wrong in the country, we shouldn't assume them to be correct. The claim that was made about hunger is equivalent to telling you that you can solve the problems of someone living in a civil war by paying them £50. If that worked, you'd probably be happy to pay it, but you know it won't actually fix their life up. This doesn't mean we should avoid donations, and in fact knowing what can really be done is a reason to donate more if you can, and we owe it to ourselves to understand what we're really doing instead of assuming problems are easier than they really are. Failing to do that will likely result in people giving up when what they were told would solve it proves insufficient.
"I hate to defend him in any way"
Well, don't then. You'll feel better for it.
Even if shown the evidence asked for, Musk would back out - he has form. He tried to back out of buying Ex-Twitter. It doesn't look like the promised dough-boy versus Zuck match is going ahead.
If you read the rest of my comment, you will see that I said the same thing. I think that, if he was presented with evidence that solving world hunger was actually that cheap, he would find some other reason why he didn't have to keep his pledge. The person who couldn't demonstrate it was able to name a lot of useful things that such a donation could do, and that clearly didn't sway him. I'm not defending his selfishness, but I think it is valid to understand that he was not promising to donate anything, thus his failure to donate, while caused by selfishness, is not what it is painted to be.
Musk was deploying the Nirvana fallacy - that you shouldn't do things because they are imperfect answers.
Any billions would make a lot of lives better, not cure the problem but would improve the world for many and wouldn't make it worse
Though if he gave it to health initiatives or climate change mitigation, he would be denounced on formerly-known-as-Twitter as a WEF operative in minutes
Yes, he probably was. I take a more limited view: you should do things that aren't perfect answers, but you really shouldn't claim that they are perfect answers or someone will take you at your word and be disappointed when it doesn't perfectly solve the problem. Of course he should have contributed to solving this problem, which I'm quite sure he never would have done no matter how beneficial it could have been. It doesn't change the fact that the person he was responding to was inaccurately stating the problem and its solution.
Fair enough. However, while $6bn might not be enough to permanently end world hunger everywhere, it would certainly be enough to make a very significant difference in a lot of people's lives. Compared to the near $50bn he spent on Twitter, and what he's done with it since, it would have been a far better use of resources.
I think there has actually been some good research to show that the best way to lift people out of poverty is to actually give the money directly to them, individually, as they are naturally in the best position to know how to spend it to help themselves.
The logic is that if someone is living hand-to-mouth in an undeveloped country, and you give them $100, they use that to take care of their immediate needs, then do things that are useful to themselves, such as buying livestock or crop seeds.
The alternative model, in the US, of "non-profit organisations", and in the UK of "charitable organisations", involves pretty much full-time fundraising and payments to multiple levels of management, and very little of the money ever reaches the people who need it, not least because if NPOs and charities actually solved the problems they set out to solve, they'd have to cease to exist, and all those people would be out of work. That $100 is much more likely to get spent on office rent, or a new pair of trainers for a chugger.
"I think it was $6 billion, could end world hunger. Musk responded claiming that he would pay for it if they could prove their point, but they, perhaps unsurprisingly, were unable to substantiate the hyperbolic claim that you could eliminate famine and all its causes with that much. I don't think he ever intended to pay it, even if it could have permanently ended it, but he was making a point in an argument, not a promise to donate that amount."
Perhaps, but you and I both know that by the time Elon's statements get written up by a 'journalist' and their editor has peed on it, the statement would be boiled down to "Elon promises $6n to end world hunger". Anybody pointed back the original statement when they try to call Elon out on it will see he weaseled, but the purpose of the statement (getting it mangled and making him look good) was accomplished.
Politicians are very good at this sort of thing. They can spew 100 words of pure weasel that sounds like they are in full support of something and making promises to "do something" when, in fact, they are promising nothing at all. The really good ones can do it in far less words. The science of the sound byte.
In the US the problem with public housing isn't so much that there isn't money for it (although that is "a" problem.) The insurmountable difficulty is no one wants it to be built near anything they own, and homeowners have outsized political influence.
"In the US the problem with public housing isn't so much that there isn't money for it (although that is "a" problem.)"
There isn't a way to build affordable housing. The costs are too high for new construction. The last time I wanted to get a sheet of plywood I nearly had a stroke over the price. A 5'x5' sheet of nice birch ply for cabinets can be $150. The cost of the humble 2x4 and 4x4 is crazy too. I've been getting short pieces, with permission, from building site scrap piles.
I also work in real estate and subsidized housing is abused like you wouldn't believe. The damage and smell is more than even I, not the most fastidious of people, could come to cause. That leads to bad pest problems and huge costs to renovate. If you talk with somebody that rents properties, they can show you how long it takes to recoup the cost of replacing carpet/flooring, repairing walls and repainting to get a property ready for a new tenant. If the previous tenant had to be removed through legal processes, it might take 2-3 years to break even on a cash basis (not including paying down principal on a loan and other increases in equity).
Why not just move straight to the desired end destination? Elon can get 250 Neuralink electrodes wired into his brain, connect the cables to the internet, then retire to a nutrient fluid cylinder and simply broadcast his commands thoughts and other people's messages he approves off to his legion of followers 24 hours a day.
'The pair of orders follow claims from the world's richest man on Friday that X would also eliminate blocking from the platform, except for direct messages, which many users feared would enable more harassment on the platform.'
To Elmo, more harassment on the platform is a /feature/. That is why he decided to buy it in the first place, to make it for friendly for racists, nazis, and right wing trolls. He even said this, though he didn't explicitly name them as racists, nazis, and right wing trolls for some reason *cough*.
Also, can you just stop calling them X in the headlines? It's still Twitter, f@#$ Elmo. Don't give him the satisfaction of playing along with his every stupid whim. You could call it Twxttxr, or if you need it for the SEO, then say 'Twitter (aka X)'.
"Musky-boy still has plenty of funds to flush away promoting hatred rather than doing anything useful with it"
Not likely. His wealth is based on his Tesla stock and most of that is pledged against loans. He's a lot less wealthy in reality according to the sorts of entities that track that sort of thing. If you look at the House of Windsor, their wealth is in land, going businesses, etc and isn't highly leveraged. It's not apples and apples. Somebody such as Warren Buffet is very diversified so while his wealth is tied up in many stocks, it's not just one. Warren's concept of a "producing/productive asset" is one I really like. I'm also fond of things like land as a store of wealth. While taxes eat away at the value, many assets require maintenance costs so it's a matter of holding time and how much those costs are. If I can buy the lot next to my house at tax sale, if I keep it separate, the property tax could remain as low as $50/year if I don't build anything on it. My plan is to use it as a large garden so I don't want to combine lots and wind up paying more tax.
Well, yes, cutting them off at the knees will reduce their height, but maybe, just maybe, they will also lose a bit of functionality?
(Resisting the temptation for the obvious comment, about "maybe if we demonstrate cutting off at the knees on Musk, he'll get the idea").
> "The sad truth is that there are no great 'social networks' right now," Musk's xit said on Saturday. "We may fail, as so many have predicted, but we will try our best to make there be at least one," the X owner added.
So which one will that be? As he X-its the social space, will he put his backing squarely behind Make America OnLine Great Again?
He bought it with a lot of his own money, so he's not coming out ahead on the deal it unless it becomes a LOT better at making money than it ever was before he bought it. And obviously it is doing worse now than it was before with half of the advertisers having fled and many who remain seriously cutting back on their spending.
He provided over $20 billion of his own money, raised from selling Tesla stock, to make the deal happen. Not including the Twitter shares he already owned. The other half came from bank loans, equity investments from Larry Ellison and the Saudis, etc.
"I cannot see a problem, he's on track."
The large banks that had planned to flip the debt but couldn't after all of the delays meant the market wouldn't buy it off of them could cause problems not just for Elon, but any company he is a prominent part of. There's also that Saudi wealth fund that put a stack of money in. Somehow I don't think they'll be chuffed to have Elon lose all of the cash they put in. I expect that Elon may find pressure being applied in unpleasant ways and possibly in a very permanent way. All completely deniable, of course. He should already know all of this, right? He's a genius (eyes rolling).
"Give him another year and twatter will shut down. What could be better?"
I have not issue with Twitter going away. People will just go someplace else and either FB will see Threads take first place or some other thing come to the fore.
The issue is all of the houses of cards will be impacted. TBC and Neuralink aren't a big deal, but Tesla and SpaceX would both go through some major upheavals and restructuring. That will cause waves in all sorts of arenas. Think of pension funds losing gobs of value if the price of their Tesla stock cuts in half. Remaining investors in SpaceX might call for a comprehensive audit which could turn up some problems that have to be addressed if brought to the light.
"How every decision of his makes Twitter worse. He hasn't made a single change that has improved it!"
All it see is Elon flailing around with no planning. He just gets and idea and runs with it. I suppose at this point he's fired anybody that had the rocks to question any of his decisions.
No, man. You WILL fail.
This is on you.
You have a CEO, why are you making more decisions ?
Are you really that stupid that you don't see how bad you are at decision making ?
To think that this waste of air is the one who got lucky with PayPal and swims in money.
Sometimes Lady Luck would need some sort of consequence alert.
Thiel's (spit) Confinity merged with Musk's x.com. The result was run by Musk but before he could do lasting damage he was fired by Thiel. Thiel changed the name to PayPal, made the business valuable and sold it to eBay. Musk still owned a large proportion of the merged company so he got a huge payday from Theil's work and got to keep the x.com domain name. I am not sure I would call it luck. I would go with acting. He acted like x.com was worth merging with. He acted like he could run a company. The acting was good enough for a while but not good enough to fool Thiel for too long. Musk's acting might have improved but more likely the audience at Tesla was less discerning than at xfinitypal.
The banks that loaned TwitterV2 money to buy TwitterV1 thought that Musk's acting was good enough and they could sell the debt on to greater fools. The timing was bad because the greater fools ran out of money leaving the banks with a problem. The previous solution was to sell Florida Man's debt to Deutsche Bank who got caught selling it to Alfa. I am not sure Alfa can afford to buy Musk even if they wanted to - or if anyone would risk trading with them now.
Pure speculation on my part, but I'm betting the person who sold the idea of investing in Twitler's hostile takeover of Twitter at each respective bank has long since been fired. The only exception might be the Saudi wealth fund, and only because I'm sure the Saudi's don't really care if Twitter lives or dies, but for however long it does live they now have all kinds of leverage to get info on any dissident citizens in their country using Twitter as a means of communicating with one another or spreading dissent.
《Musk's acting was good enough and they could sell the debt on to greater fools.》
Was it not that sort of acting that got Elizabeth Holmes her eleven year federal all expenses paid holiday?
If you are going to piss "greater fools" ill gotten gains up against the wall ensure they aren't from the real movers and shakers and especially those that have form with basement furnaces.
I used to read a few accounts on Twitter periodically, mostly of subject-specialists who could be reasonably relied upon as authoritative sources.
When the log-in requirement appeared, I continued to do so, but rather less frequently on nitter until it was broken and then on twstalker - but that now too has seemingly ceased to function.
Musk isn't really in the business of engagement, he only wants users on his own terms. That's his prerogative, but it will be hard to make a going concern of a social media site that is essentially aimed at an audience of one.
Twitter's users are split into two groups. The group that fear the removal of blocking because it will enable harassment and the group that are looking forward to the removal of blocking because it will enable harassment.
I find that I have had less time to tweet anyway and since Muskrat took it over I've had even less inclination to post. If he really does enact these latest edicts against that which was once called Twitter then I suspect that I may be one of many that will be removing ourselves following all those others that have already said goodbye.
Let's face it; Elon is a spoilt brat with more money than sense. Paypal only became successful after he went, Tesla has a record of making shoddy product and now the little whiner is doing everything that he can to kill off Twitter to try and make something that nobody asked for.
And to think that I broke my long silence here just to say all that! What a waste!
I really didn't expect we'd be hearing anything from a CEO that wasn't Elon. The media follows Elon around and he isn't the sort of person that can delegate so Linda's role is going to be purely sacrificial if she isn't careful.
If the problem was people blocking advertisers, it would have made sense to define a class of account for advertisers and if they did harass, intimidate or impugn others on the service, there would be big problems. In the mean time, those accounts couldn't be blocked. There's a very good reason that blocking was put in place and I'd think that the CEO, one with an advertising background, would have done things musk differently.
Linda can't reign in Elon and she's not going to do herself any favors sticking around. Elon isn't going to listen to her and that appears to be pretty obvious since she's come on board.
The captain is the last person to leave a sinking ship. If you see me leaving, you are to assume the rank of captain.
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