Register a SA Forums Account here!
JOINING THE SA FORUMS WILL REMOVE THIS BIG AD, THE ANNOYING UNDERLINED ADS, AND STUPID INTERSTITIAL ADS!!!

You can: log in, read the tech support FAQ, or request your lost password. This dumb message (and those ads) will appear on every screen until you register! Get rid of this crap by registering your own SA Forums Account and joining roughly 150,000 Goons, for the one-time price of $9.95! We charge money because it costs us money per month for bills, and since we don't believe in showing ads to our users, we try to make the money back through forum registrations.
Should I step down as head of twitter
This poll is closed.
Yes 420 4.43%
No 69 0.73%
Goku 9001 94.85%
Total: 9490 votes
[Edit Poll (moderators only)]

 
  • Post
  • Reply
Ralph Crammed In
May 11, 2007

Let's get clean and smart


Musk hits it and twits it

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

digital penitence
Jan 3, 2008

https://twitter.com/alexcornell/sta...s1_c10&ref_url=

Buce
Dec 23, 2005

is Max Deboosted taken yet???

worm girl
Feb 12, 2022

Can you hear it too?

Nelson Mandingo posted:

Is there a way to read this without paywall? I'm genuinely interested.

Open it in incognito mode.

priznat
Jul 7, 2009

Let's get drunk and kiss each other all night.

goatface posted:

A metric fuckton of copyright infringing videos will be posted every game.

No express written consent?!?

Entropic
Feb 21, 2007

patriarchy sucks

Withnail posted:

twitter should just start using some banner ads

porblem solved

Is Project Wonderful still around?

Waffle House
Oct 27, 2004

You follow the path
fitting into an infinite pattern.

Yours to manipulate, to destroy and rebuild.

Now, in the quantum moment
before the closure
when all become one.

One moment left.
One point of space and time.

I know who you are.

You are Destiny.


Its gonna be like maybe a week before Musk gets frustrated incompetently enough to pursue the classic lib-owning tactic of belligerent accelerationism and just starts selling everyone to the Russian government and Iran Twitter

Azhais
Feb 5, 2007
Switchblade Switcharoo

Nelson Mandingo posted:

Is there a way to read this without paywall? I'm genuinely interested.

https://archive.ph/RrDw6

Waffle House
Oct 27, 2004

You follow the path
fitting into an infinite pattern.

Yours to manipulate, to destroy and rebuild.

Now, in the quantum moment
before the closure
when all become one.

One moment left.
One point of space and time.

I know who you are.

You are Destiny.


Still can't believe how much of this guy is just raw misrepresentation. He's a loving walking bullshit golem lol

Ehud
Sep 19, 2003

football.

killer crane posted:

None of the embeds are working. Did it die?

E they're working again. :(

I feel like they're loading much slower right now.

Insanite
Aug 30, 2005

Nelson Mandingo posted:

Is there a way to read this without paywall? I'm genuinely interested.

there's archive.org, there's turning off js in your browser, or there's my method of choice: installing a terminal-based browser like lynx and view paywalled articles there.

similar really to shutting off js in your normal browser, but more fun, somehow. embrace the old.

ScRoTo TuRbOtUrD
Jan 21, 2007

Insanite posted:

there's archive.org, there's turning off js in your browser, or there's my method of choice: installing a terminal-based browser like lynx and view paywalled articles there.

embrace the old.

lynx loving rules

Insanite
Aug 30, 2005

ScRoTo TuRbOtUrD posted:

lynx loving rules

yes. yes, it does.

B-Rock452
Jan 6, 2005
:justflu:
Just had a thought of if anyone at Twitter was still left to handle subpoenas from law enforcement agencies. Since Twitter is going to see a huge influx of CSAM as content moderation dies I am sure the FBI or other agencies are going to love not getting responses to their search warrants

IBroughttheFunk
Sep 28, 2012

Nelson Mandingo posted:

Is there a way to read this without paywall? I'm genuinely interested.

I have access to the Times through work, here you go!

NY Times posted:

Earlier this month, I chose to leave my position leading trust and safety at Elon Musk’s Twitter.

As the company’s head of policy, my teams were responsible for drafting Twitter’s rules and figuring out how to apply them consistently to hundreds of millions of tweets per day. In my more than seven years at the company, we exposed government-backed troll farms meddling in elections, introduced new tools for contextualizing dangerous misinformation and, yes, banned President Trump from the service. The Cornell professor Tarleton Gillespie called teams like mine the “custodians of the internet.” The work of online sanitation is unrelenting and contentious.

Enter Mr. Musk.

In a news release announcing his agreement to acquire the company, Mr. Musk laid out a simple thesis: “Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated.” He said he planned to revitalize Twitter by eliminating spam and drastically altering its policies to remove only illegal speech.

Since closing the deal on Oct‌. 27‌‌, many of the changes implemented by Mr. Musk and his team have been sudden and alarming for employees and users alike, including rapid-fire layoffs and an ill-fated foray into reinventing Twitter’s verification system. A wave of employee resignations caused the hashtag “#RIPTwitter” to trend on the site on Thursday — not for the first time — alongside questions about whether a skeleton crew of remaining staff can keep the 16-year-old service afloat.

And yet when it comes to content moderation, much has stayed the same since Mr. Musk’s acquisition. Twitter’s rules continue to ban a wide range of “lawful but awful” speech. Mr. Musk has insisted publicly that the company’s practices and policies are unchanged. Are we just in the early days — or has the self-declared free speech absolutist had a change of heart?

The truth is that even Elon Musk’s brand of radical transformation has unavoidable limits.

Advertisers have played the most direct role thus far in moderating Mr. Musk’s free speech ambitions. As long as 90 percent of the company’s revenue comes from ads (as was the case when Mr. Musk bought the company), Twitter has little choice but to operate in a way that won’t imperil the revenue streams that keep the lights on. This has already proved to be challenging.

Almost immediately upon the acquisition’s close, a wave of racist and antisemitic trolling emerged on Twitter. Wary marketers, including those at General Mills, Audi and Pfizer, slowed down or paused ad spending on the platform, kicking off a crisis within the company to protect precious ad revenue.

In response, Mr. Musk empowered my team to move more aggressively to remove hate speech across the platform — censoring more content, not less. Our actions worked: Before my departure, I shared data about Twitter’s enforcement of hateful conduct showing that, by some measures, Twitter was actually safer under Mr. Musk than it had been before.

Marketers have not shied away from using the power of the purse: In the days following Mr. Musk’s acquisition, the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, a key ad industry trade group, published an open call to Twitter to adhere to existing commitments to “brand safety.” It’s perhaps for this reason that Mr. Musk has said he wants to move away from ads as Twitter’s primary revenue source: His ability to make decisions unilaterally about the site’s future is constrained by a marketing industry he neither controls nor has managed to win over.

But even if Mr. Musk is able to free Twitter from the influence of powerful advertisers, his path to unfettered speech is still not clear. Twitter remains bound by the laws and regulations of the countries in which it operates. Amid the spike in racial slurs on Twitter in the days after the acquisition, the European Union’s chief platform regulator took to the site to remind Mr. Musk that, in Europe, an unmoderated free-for-all won’t fly. In the United States, members of Congress and the Federal Trade Commission have raised concerns about the company’s recent actions. And outside of the United States and the European Union, the situation becomes even more complex: Mr. Musk’s principle of keying Twitter’s policies on local laws could push the company to censor speech it has been loath to restrict in the past, including political dissent.

Regulators have significant tools at their disposal to enforce their will on Twitter and on Mr. Musk. Penalties for noncompliance with Europe’s Digital Services Act could total as much as 6 percent of the company’s annual revenue. In the United States, the F.T.C. has shown an increasing willingness to exact significant fines for noncompliance with their orders (like a blockbuster $5 billion fine imposed on Facebook in 2019). In other key markets for Twitter, such as India, in-country staff work with the looming threat of personal intimidation and arrest if their employers fail to comply with local directives. Even a Musk-led Twitter will struggle to shrug off these constraints.

There is one more source of power on the web — one that most people don’t think much about, but which may be the most significant check on unrestrained speech on the mainstream internet: the app stores operated by Google and Apple.

While Twitter has been publicly tight-lipped about how many people use the company’s mobile apps (rather than visiting Twitter.com on a browser), the company’s 2021 annual report didn’t mince words: “Our release of new products … is dependent upon and can be impacted by digital storefront operators” that decide the guidelines and enforce them, it reads in part. “Such review processes can be difficult to predict and certain decisions may harm our business.”

“May harm our business” is an understatement. Failure to adhere to Apple and Google’s guidelines would be catastrophic, risking Twitter’s expulsion from their app stores and making it more difficult for billions of potential users to access Twitter’s services. This gives Apple and Google enormous power to shape the decisions Twitter makes.

Apple’s guidelines for developers are reasonable and plainly stated: They emphasize creating “a safe experience for users” and stress the importance of protecting children. The guidelines quote the Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart’s “I know it when I see it” quip, saying the company will ban apps that are “over the line.”

In practice, the enforcement of these rules is fraught.

In my time at Twitter, representatives of the app stores regularly raised concerns about content available on our platform. On one occasion, a member of an app review team contacted Twitter, saying with consternation that he had searched for “#boobs” in the Twitter app and was presented with … exactly what you’d expect. Another time, on the eve of a major feature release, a reviewer sent screenshots of several days-old tweets containing an English-language racial slur, asking Twitter representatives whether they should be permitted to appear on the service.

Reviewers hint that app approval could be delayed or perhaps even withheld entirely if issues are not resolved to their satisfaction — although the standards for resolution are often inferred. Even as they appear to be driven largely by manual checks and anecdotes, these review procedures have the power to derail company road maps and trigger all-hands-on-deck crises for weeks or months at a time.

Whose values are these companies defending when they enforce their policies? While the wide array of often conflicting global laws no doubt play a part, the most direct explanation is that platform policies represent the preferences of a small group of predominantly American tech executives. Steve Jobs didn’t believe porn should be allowed in the App Store, and so it isn’t allowed. Stripped bare, there’s a dismaying lack of legitimacy to the decisions here.

It’s this very lack of legitimacy that Mr. Musk, correctly, points to when he calls for greater free speech, and for the establishment of a “content moderation council” to guide the company’s policies — an idea Google and Apple would be right to borrow for the governance of their app stores. But even as he criticizes the capriciousness of platform policies, he perpetuates this same lack of legitimacy through his impulsive changes and tweet-length pronouncements about Twitter’s rules. In appointing himself “Chief Twit,” Mr. Musk has made clear that at the end of the day, he’ll be the one calling the shots.

It was for this reason that I ultimately chose to leave the company: A Twitter whose policies are defined by unilateral edict has little need for a trust and safety function dedicated to its principled development.

So where will Twitter go from here? Some of the company’s decisions in the weeks and months to come, like the near-certainty of allowing Donald Trump’s account back on the service, will have an immediate, perceptible impact. But to truly understand the shape of Twitter going forward, I’d encourage looking not just at the choices the company makes but at how Mr. Musk makes them. Should it materialize, will the moderation council represent more than just the loudest, predominantly American voices complaining about censorship — including, critically, the approximately 80 percent of Twitter users who reside outside of the United States? Will the company continue to invest in features like Community Notes, which bring Twitter users into the work of platform governance? Will Mr. Musk’s tweets announcing policy changes become less frequent and abrupt?

Longer term, the moderating influences of advertisers, regulators and — most critically of all — app stores may be welcome for those of us hoping to avoid an escalation in the volume of dangerous speech online. Twitter will have to balance its new owner’s goals against the practical realities of life on Apple and Google’s internet — no easy task for the employees who have chosen to remain. And as I departed the company, the calls from the app review teams had already begun.


Orange Cat
Feb 26, 2013

Clyde Radcliffe posted:

There's so many stories about all-weekend crunches or sleeping on the office floor, usually related to startups or games companies, people forget that working for a well-established tech company is often a really great work environment.

I was supposed to send out interview invites to some folk on Tuesday morning, but something came up on Monday evening meaning I had to take a couple of hours off the next day. So I sent them about 7pm on Monday instead. The next day my boss politely asked me not to do that again, as sending them out of hours might give candidates an impression that late hours were part of our culture.

Your boss is cool and good and you should name your workplace for the positive.

Lucky Guy
Jan 24, 2013

TY for no bm

IBroughttheFunk posted:

I have access to the Times through work, here you go!

quote:

Since closing the deal on Oct‌. 27‌‌, many of the changes implemented by Mr. Musk and his team have been sudden and alarming for employees and users alike, including rapid-fire layoffs and an ill-fated foray into reinventing Twitter’s verification system. A wave of employee resignations caused the hashtag “#RIPTwitter” to trend on the site on Thursday — not for the first time — alongside questions about whether a skeleton crew of remaining staff can keep the 16-year-old service afloat.

oh, that explains why he wanted it so badly

Orange Cat
Feb 26, 2013

Waffle House posted:

Its gonna be like maybe a week before Musk gets frustrated incompetently enough to pursue the classic lib-owning tactic of belligerent accelerationism and just starts selling everyone to the Russian government and Iran Twitter

This was always the endgame.

Trixie Hardcore
Jul 1, 2006

Placeholder.

Clyde Radcliffe posted:

There's so many stories about all-weekend crunches or sleeping on the office floor, usually related to startups or games companies, people forget that working for a well-established tech company is often a really great work environment.

It’s obvious that many Elon fans are elated that all these people are losing their jobs because they were so outraged at the idea of employees genuinely enjoying their employment, taking pride in the work or caring about their co-workers. The replies under any post an ex-employee makes is rapidly filled up by guys explaining how work should only be misery and wanting to be paid for your labor is wanting handouts and talking about how much you valued your co-workers is weak baby poo poo.

BigBadSteve
Apr 29, 2009

Waffle House posted:

I think this is a good time to point out that Elon Musk suddenly disappearing would have a net effect of positive change for the world.

This thought will surely more than cross the minds of both fired Twitter 1.0 employees defaulting on their mortgages, and hyper-stressed 16/7 Twitter 2.0 employees, increasingly over the next few months.

Sadly, if Musk does eat a bullet, he'll become a saint to the Alt Right, and be a role model for them even more than currently.

kdrudy
Sep 19, 2009

Bad Purchase posted:

only the most hardcore posters will be allowed to remain

Print out your 10 best posts and report to Jeff's office, pronto!

Bad Purchase
Jun 17, 2019




kdrudy posted:

Print out your 10 best posts and report to Jeff's office, pronto!

it's just 10 instances of me empty-quoting the pig balls

Nelson Mandingo
Mar 27, 2005





Thanks to you and worm girl, and funk.

Nelson Mandingo fucked around with this message at 22:35 on Nov 18, 2022

Nessus
Dec 22, 2003

After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!



Trixie Hardcore posted:

It’s obvious that many Elon fans are elated that all these people are losing their jobs because they were so outraged at the idea of employees genuinely enjoying their employment, taking pride in the work or caring about their co-workers. The replies under any post an ex-employee makes is rapidly filled up by guys explaining how work should only be misery and wanting to be paid for your labor is wanting handouts and talking about how much you valued your co-workers is weak baby poo poo.
the weird specific impulse to just go around and tell people to be miserable seems like it should have some kind of German name.

Tiny Timbs
Sep 6, 2008

Trixie Hardcore posted:

It’s obvious that many Elon fans are elated that all these people are losing their jobs because they were so outraged at the idea of employees genuinely enjoying their employment, taking pride in the work or caring about their co-workers. The replies under any post an ex-employee makes is rapidly filled up by guys explaining how work should only be misery and wanting to be paid for your labor is wanting handouts and talking about how much you valued your co-workers is weak baby poo poo.

it’s called economic anxiety

Buce
Dec 23, 2005

Tiny Timbs posted:

it’s called economic anxiety

that's one hard-workin euphamism. has to cover a lot of bases.

Carwash Cunt
Aug 21, 2007

Whenever I get excited about Twitter failing, I flash back to the SA experts of 2016 repeating “Hillary’s got this” because of the polls and shouting anyone down for corncobbing as things got worse and worse. I hope this isn’t another mass gaslighting.

ymgve
Jan 2, 2004


:dukedog:
Offensive Clock

MikeJF posted:

Gwynne Shotwell does the actual running of SpaceX, Musk just makes big statements and insists on dumb things with the Starship project.

I wonder if Musk is so hands-on with Twitter because it's his first chance in a while to be a "real" decision maker and not just some figurehead that throws ideas at the wall. Which is also why it all has gone to poo poo - turns out he's a bad leader.

learnincurve
May 15, 2014

Smoosh

Nessus posted:

the weird specific impulse to just go around and tell people to be miserable seems like it should have some kind of German name.

"Sack Scheiße Mann"

Decon
Nov 22, 2015


Carwash oval office posted:

Whenever I get excited about Twitter failing, I flash back to the SA experts of 2016 repeating “Hillary’s got this” because of the polls and shouting anyone down for corncobbing as things got worse and worse. I hope this isn’t another mass gaslighting.

That was goons underestimating how loving dumb people are and trusting polls. In this situation, many goons are actually professional computer touchers, and know firsthand you can't just hire a self-proclaimed genius 21 year old and have him fixing critical prod issues on something of Twitter's scale by the end of the week, and even well-made, well-run software has poo poo hit the fan from time to time.

Zulily Zoetrope
Jun 1, 2011

Muldoon

Nessus posted:

the weird specific impulse to just go around and tell people to be miserable seems like it should have some kind of German name.

Every German I've met has told me that the key secret behind their national reputation for efficiency is a cultural understanding that overwork is poo poo work, and the best way to get results is patience and never compromising your coworkers' down time. The word I've heard used for people with the impulse you're describing is "idiot," which is apt, but probably not what you're looking for.

learnincurve
May 15, 2014

Smoosh
I knew a computer toucher who single handedly ran the ordering system for a massive flower importing business, he once told me he did nothing for 6 days 22 hours a week and got paid for the 2 hours things went south because some idiot unplugged something or there was a power outage at 4am, and that's how you knew he earned his massive pay cheque, if he'd been working all day and night it would have meant what he built them was shite.

Hunter Biden
Feb 24, 2022

Carwash oval office posted:

Whenever I get excited about Twitter failing, I flash back to the SA experts of 2016 repeating “Hillary’s got this” because of the polls and shouting anyone down for corncobbing as things got worse and worse. I hope this isn’t another mass gaslighting.

Your skepticism is probably smart.

Elon Musk is an idiot and a dweeb, but failing a hardware crash or debts going wild Twitter isn't going anywhere. We are clowning on Elon but until a substantial number of user move to other places it's going to be here. And let's be honest, 90% of the site has a terminal posting addiction just like Elon. I think we are stuck with the site until the signs of mental issues and attention become to large to ignore and people panic about their usage. (So maybe never.)

Elon definitely just lost a shitload of money either way and twitter just isn't going to be worth that much. So there is a nice part of it.

Waffle House
Oct 27, 2004

You follow the path
fitting into an infinite pattern.

Yours to manipulate, to destroy and rebuild.

Now, in the quantum moment
before the closure
when all become one.

One moment left.
One point of space and time.

I know who you are.

You are Destiny.


Decon posted:

That was goons underestimating how loving dumb people are and trusting polls. In this situation, many goons are actually professional computer touchers, and know firsthand you can't just hire a self-proclaimed genius 21 year old and have him fixing critical prod issues on something of Twitter's scale by the end of the week, and even well-made, well-run software has poo poo hit the fan from time to time.

Most "polls" were Tweets, and some of them probably not so honest or reliable. In fact, I'm gonna guess major news orgs at the time were Twitter dependent and "called" many races based on Tweets.

CommieGIR
Aug 22, 2006

The blue glow is a feature, not a bug


Pillbug

learnincurve posted:

I knew a computer toucher who single handedly ran the ordering system for a massive flower importing business, he once told me he did nothing for 6 days 22 hours a week and got paid for the 2 hours things went south because some idiot unplugged something or there was a power outage at 4am, and that's how you knew he earned his massive pay cheque, if he'd been working all day and night it would have meant what he built them was shite.

Yup. If you build the system right, everything should be scripted and automated. If you are constantly having to fine tune and tweak and manually intervene, its gonna be unsustainable eventually.

But that's what you pay good devs and IT janitors for.

https://twitter.com/petrillic/status/1593686223717269504?s=20&t=R2qWRtpDTi5oR9pyIsjZsA

War Wizard
Jan 4, 2007

:)
Just need to compartmentalize Twitter into partitions. Twitter Red for all the "red pilled" morons, and Twitter Lite for all the normies. Big bang so simple.

BigBadSteve
Apr 29, 2009

unzin posted:

Now this is some salient code

code:

float Q_rsqrt( float number )
{
	long i;
	float x2, y;
	const float threehalfs = 1.5F;

	x2 = number * 0.5F;
	y  = number;
	i  = * ( long * ) &y;                       // evil floating point bit level hacking
	i  = 0x5f3759df - ( i >> 1 );               // what the gently caress? 
	y  = * ( float * ) &i;
	y  = y * ( threehalfs - ( x2 * y * y ) );   // 1st iteration
//	y  = y * ( threehalfs - ( x2 * y * y ) );   // 2nd iteration, this can be removed

	return y;
}


From a few pages back (I'm finding it hard to keep track of all Musk shenanigans in realtime), but for the benefit of non-programmers, would you please explain this joke?

tight aspirations
Jul 13, 2009

War Wizard posted:

Just need to compartmentalize Twitter into partitions. Twitter Red for all the "red pilled" morons, and Twitter Lite for all the normies. Big bang so simple.

Who is Twitter Hardcore for then?

Squibbles
Aug 24, 2000

Mwaha ha HA ha!

BigBadSteve posted:

From a few pages back (I'm finding it hard to keep track of all Musk shenanigans in realtime), but for the benefit of non-programmers, would you please explain this joke?

It's a really hacky but fast/effective but incomprehensible bit of code written by John Carmack of ID Software (I think) for one of the Quake games that was also used in many subsequent things based on the quake engine

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

ProfessorMarvel
Jan 6, 2021

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

That reference is inaccurate. Jack Torrance was addicted to alcohol, not Xanax.

  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
  • Post
  • Reply