Social Media Companies: Tell it to Earth

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Social Media Companies: Tell it to Earth

How much longer is Twitter going to last?
	A few weeks
	A few months
	A few years
	About as long as the rest of humanity

OneEightHundred: Feb 28, 2008; Soon, we will be unstoppable!

Tarezax posted:

I don't think the migration will really get going until Twitter takes a big visible hit to its function and accessibility, but that kind if event seems inevitable at this point.

Right now the reason anyone is on Twitter is it's because it's where the users are. There isn't really a straightforward replacement (it could have been Facebook if Facebook ever fixed their dogshit UI, but instead they've spent the past year destroying themselves to chase TikTok), so the first phase is going to be everyone testing the waters to figure out where they want to go until enough want to bail to the same place. Once it's obvious where people are leaving to, the accelerating departures phase can start.

I wouldn't bet on Mastodon, it's too atomized. "Decentralized social network" is an oxymoron and the whole thing seems like it was created by the usual FOSS idiot crowd that thinks regular users are ever going to accept any kind of usability hit for the sake of FOSS ideals.

OneEightHundred fucked around with this message at 01:04 on Nov 6, 2022

# ¿ Nov 6, 2022 01:00

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# ¿ May 21, 2024 03:08

OneEightHundred: Feb 28, 2008; Soon, we will be unstoppable!

Epic High Five posted:

It's atomized by design isn't it? I definitely get the appeal but you can't really scale something like that up to replace Twitter unless you're doing a wink-wink nudge-nudge thing where you just run everything through a single portal somehow but just say it's not centralized

"What if it was like Discord or Reddit except instead of having one account on every server/subreddit you had to sign up for every single one and people can take your handle on servers you haven't signed up on?"

Uh, no, that's actually really bad.

And the "original server" which is basically going to be the de-facto default if this takes off is currently getting crushed by traffic and had to disable account sign-up.

# ¿ Nov 6, 2022 01:13

OneEightHundred: Feb 28, 2008; Soon, we will be unstoppable!

Timeless Appeal posted:

If my power goes out for example, I will check the town or the electric company's twitter. If there was a good play in the baseball game I missed, I check the team's twitter. It's an easy way to scoop up information. I think twitter also had an acceptance by traditional media outlets that was helpful, and would take some time to break.

Well good thing the ability to find reliable information from authentic accounts is about to be drastically hobbled for the dumbest reasons possible.

# ¿ Nov 6, 2022 05:45

OneEightHundred: Feb 28, 2008; Soon, we will be unstoppable!

Timeless Appeal posted:

I understand the stuff Musk is implementing is really bad, and especially from lenses like trans rights, healthcare, and having a functioning democracy, I think the changes are dangerous. But I also feel like it�s going to impact the Mets or Duke Energy less.

I think the impact for a lot of entities is actually going to be pretty bad if impersonator accounts are allowed to run amok. The ways that impersonator accounts can do damage is very broad, and will affect the highest-profile users the most. Do the Mets want to be on a service where fake Mets accounts trying to dupe users into visiting merch store/giveaway attack sites for the low price of $8?

RoboChrist 9000 posted:

Meta (lol)

It's actually amazing how Facebook is so comically mismanaged that nobody thinks a mass return to Facebook is a possibility even though it has by far the biggest head start in users.

# ¿ Nov 6, 2022 17:21

OneEightHundred: Feb 28, 2008; Soon, we will be unstoppable!

The moderation doesn't HAVE to be poo poo, and one of the advantages of the siloing is that it gives the community tools to police itself and set its own rules. It's really not a replacement for Twitter (which basically thrives by having everything imaginable) but it is probably a better starting point for a social network.

But then there are also problems like, server admins can't view deleted messages or previous versions of edited messages, which is insane.

# ¿ Nov 7, 2022 01:58

OneEightHundred: Feb 28, 2008; Soon, we will be unstoppable!

https://twitter.com/nandoodles/status/1590411031519825921

https://twitter.com/themaxburns/status/1590563599030063105

A clown show beyond clown shows.

# ¿ Nov 10, 2022 05:45

OneEightHundred: Feb 28, 2008; Soon, we will be unstoppable!

I mean technically they won't have to worry about over-sharing information with advertisers if they have no advertisers, which seems to be the plan.

Inferior Third Season posted:

Not "nobody". Anyone who purchases the $20 per month basic blocking package can block blue check marks. They, of course, cannot block the $50 per month gold check marks - that requires the $75 per month advanced blocking package.

They're 100% going to either paywall blocking, or make paid accounts unblockable. The first thing the Elon reply guy troll crew wants is to feel important, and they got that, so now they need the second thing they crave: Forcing people to listen to them. It also completely fits in with their current modus operandi of finding every available rake and stomping it as hard as possible.

OneEightHundred fucked around with this message at 18:14 on Nov 10, 2022

# ¿ Nov 10, 2022 18:01

OneEightHundred: Feb 28, 2008; Soon, we will be unstoppable!

So I know this is very incomplete math because daily active users aren't unique, but he wants Twitter's revenue to be 50% subscription.

Last year it made $5b in revenue and had 206M daily active users. In order to make 5b of revenue from $8/mo, it needs 52M subscribers. If he just wants to break even with its current revenue plus the additional billion a year in interest, then it needs 31M subscribers.

So we're talking what? Expecting up to 25% of current Twitter users to start paying $8/mo for a blue checkmark and editing tweets? lmao

Also I just realized this whole thing reminds me a ton of Sears/Eddie Lampert, complete with "we're going to reorient our entire business around this new loyalty program that nobody wants" while undermining the company's most valuable assets, loading it up with debt, acting indistinguishably from actively trying to destroy the company, and then blaming its failure on a difficult market that it was just not able to "transform" to adapt to.

OneEightHundred fucked around with this message at 20:18 on Nov 10, 2022

# ¿ Nov 10, 2022 20:06

OneEightHundred: Feb 28, 2008; Soon, we will be unstoppable!

Captain_Maclaine posted:

This. Musk is way too high on his own supply to just take a loss or admit he's not the superior ~*disruptive*~ brain genius he's been fronting as all these years.

It's gonna be 100% Eddie Lampert style "I did everything I could to transform the company but it was just too dysfunctional to survive in a tough market."

Main Paineframe posted:

Mastodon is the closest thing, as a Twitter clone made by open source meganerds. But as you'd expect from an open-source Twitter clone, it's got a lot of UI and usability oddities that make it a pain in the rear end to use and scare off the non-computery types.

Cohost is a rising platform I've heard a lot of good things about, but it's more like Tumblr than like Twitter, and it doesn't even have an app yet.

Even Tumblr is getting in on the feeding frenzy and dunking on Twitter. They recently rolled back the anti-porn rules that drove everyone off, and they just launched a subscription service that'll give you two blue checkmarks for $8/mo, and you can subscribe more than once to increase the checkmarks for two each time.

Mastodon is hobbled by the usual bullshit of thinking anyone will accept a second-rate experience because of FOSS ideals and is already getting crushed by load.

Cohost is fine but doesn't seem like it has a viable business model.

Tumblr's fine from a technical standpoint (except for not being able to figure out where a reblog originally came from which is dumb as hell) but it really caters to a specific type of content and user.

At this point the next-closest thing is Facebook, as terrible as that is, so the real answer is probably going to be whatever the mass staff exodus from Twitter cooks up when they get some VC bucks.

# ¿ Nov 11, 2022 02:53

OneEightHundred: Feb 28, 2008; Soon, we will be unstoppable!

The "Official" checks are back. :lol:

Levitate posted:

Despite working with computer poo poo my career these kind of things like "find a server that works for you and you like!" always feels like just a step I can't be assed to take. I get the idea, but putting it upon the masses to chose what server they want to join is never really gonna work. Everyone will join the same thing or just be put off by it.

poo poo I don't think I ever let Dalnet back in the IRC days

I mean DalNet's key insight was people want to keep their handle consistently, so the lesson from there to Mastodon should be get some sort of centralized identity SSO or gently caress off, but the second layer of that problem is that letting any rando run their own instance would make any SSO system severely vulnerable to malicious instances redirecting to fake login pages.

# ¿ Nov 11, 2022 04:28

OneEightHundred: Feb 28, 2008; Soon, we will be unstoppable!

Tesla's big insight was also that the way to make it all work was to sell it as a luxury product to rich assholes because that's where all the money is.

His biggest actual contribution was SpaceX, which is basically offsetting its actual productive contributions with setting up lower earth orbit to be an unusable debris cloud.

# ¿ Nov 11, 2022 05:24

OneEightHundred: Feb 28, 2008; Soon, we will be unstoppable!

PhazonLink posted:

??

i've never heard of nukes as a method of terraforming, well at least making things warmer and stuff. like nuclear winter isnt warm?

Nuclear winter isn't expected to be caused by blast debris, it's from the massive amount of smoke from stuff in the blast area burning. Things like trees and flammable structures made of wood and other flammable mostly-organic compounds in an oxygen-rich atmosphere. Mars has none of that.

The bigger problem is that on a planetary scale, a nuke isn't very powerful and the blast doesn't last very long. They're great for creating a temporarily lethal environment in an area the size of a major human population center. They are not great for creating enough heat energy to melt a loving ice cap.

There are some theoretical writeups of it but basically for enough heat energy to melt one Martian ice cap, assuming 100% of the energy transferred into the ice and actually transferred in a way that melted it instead of vaporizing some of it and left some of it alone, you'd need about 4,000 nuclear bombs, and it wouldn't even stay melted.

OneEightHundred fucked around with this message at 02:38 on Nov 12, 2022

# ¿ Nov 12, 2022 02:33

OneEightHundred: Feb 28, 2008; Soon, we will be unstoppable!

Main Paineframe posted:

The people getting fired right now are not part of a mass layoff, which means that they get just the one-month severance.

Or it's a charade to mass-layoff people and make it look like they're being dropped for performance, which is what he did at Tesla already.

Ratfuckery should be the default assumption now.

OneEightHundred fucked around with this message at 20:04 on Nov 25, 2022

# ¿ Nov 25, 2022 20:01

OneEightHundred: Feb 28, 2008; Soon, we will be unstoppable!

FlamingLiberal posted:

This seems like it won�t end well

That type of job has ultra-high turnover for obvious reasons too so unless they get more it'll be zero before long.

# ¿ Nov 30, 2022 04:39

OneEightHundred: Feb 28, 2008; Soon, we will be unstoppable!

Facebook's UI has always been poo poo and the biggest poo poo point has always been "how do I get this crap I don't want to see out of my feed?" and you can practically hear it saying "you can't hide that, that's our business model!"

Today it's suggested content and their TikTok ripoff, before it was friends trying to get more lives for their lovely Facebook games, before that it was relatives posting garbage that you don't want to see but you don't want to unfriend them.

# ¿ Jul 19, 2023 19:44

OneEightHundred: Feb 28, 2008; Soon, we will be unstoppable!

Re: All the "metaverse" stuff, the origins of the metaverse hype bubble mainly came from one thing: Roblox making a lot of money.

Then it turned into this other thing because Epic wanted to get in on the Roblox train with Fortnite, and was amplified by some courtroom maneuvering in their lawsuit with Apple where it was beneficial for Epic to describe Fortnite as a "metaverse" and not a "game."

Then Zuck decided that this was time to unleash his grand vision: Combining social media, VR, and Second Life!

You might notice that Roblox and "social media VR Second Life" are completely different things and Fortnite is neither of those things, so none of this makes any sense, and you'd be right.

# ¿ Jul 24, 2023 17:45

OneEightHundred: Feb 28, 2008; Soon, we will be unstoppable!

whydirt posted:

How soon after rebranding can someone else swoop in to use the old trademark?

3 years of disuse but AFAIK the bar for "disuse" is very high if the company is actually alive and interested in keeping it.

I would put better odds on them selling it.

# ¿ Jul 25, 2023 01:27

OneEightHundred: Feb 28, 2008; Soon, we will be unstoppable!

haveblue posted:

I'd like to think they missed their window, but they're not going to stop showing the signup link to FB/Insta users and it'll eventually get all the missing features, so it probably won't entirely die

The window re-opens every time Twitter/"X" does some colossal fuckup which is a given at this point, but Threads launched it before it was ready and they're going to need to do another big push for attention when they actually have a ready-to-use app.

# ¿ Jul 26, 2023 05:44

OneEightHundred: Feb 28, 2008; Soon, we will be unstoppable!

It sounds like what they want is to replace block with only mute, which will probably still meet the App Store requirements, but will let people poo poo up your replies and there'll be nothing you can do about it (except report it, which now does nothing).

# ¿ Aug 19, 2023 01:21

OneEightHundred: Feb 28, 2008; Soon, we will be unstoppable!

Boris Galerkin posted:

Someone explain why removing blocking is a bad thing?

Because if some cryptoshit spam bot is spamming my replies, and I mute them, then anyone following me has to wade through that poo poo too, so they get to exploit whatever popularity I have (which isn't much) to spam my followers.

If I block them, then they no longer appear in my replies.

Repeat this problem for any other reason someone would want to spam all of someone's followers.

# ¿ Aug 19, 2023 03:31

OneEightHundred: Feb 28, 2008; Soon, we will be unstoppable!

whydirt posted:

BlueSky can�t replace Twitter until it a) has open registration and b) you can see posts without an account

Everything I've seen suggests that the first point is going to be the main roadblock because they built the entire dumb thing on a technological base that is just not scalable at all.

I think Threads is more likely to succeed solely for that reason, if they would hurry the gently caress up with the web version.

# ¿ Aug 20, 2023 04:48

OneEightHundred: Feb 28, 2008; Soon, we will be unstoppable!

Timmy Age 6 posted:

Even awful organizations can sometimes be on the right side of things, so maybe some positive reinforcement of "pick this battle, not the other one where you defend apartheid" is the tack to take rather than "gently caress both of them"?

It's like bringing up MLK's extramarital affairs or something. Like if someone is bringing that up, then they're not wrong, but they're not bringing it up because that is the thing they care about or that matters.

# ¿ Sep 7, 2023 16:22

OneEightHundred: Feb 28, 2008; Soon, we will be unstoppable!

Family Values posted:

The California law does not require Twitter to moderate content, only to publicly disclose whatever moderation policies and actions they have.

It might expose the fact that Twitter isn't enforcing its stated policies; or unevenly enforcing them (it's this one, I bet).

It might be on shaky ground since under the First Amendment there is basically zero legitimate government interest in policing Twitter's moderation policies in any of those categories.

# ¿ Sep 9, 2023 00:50

OneEightHundred: Feb 28, 2008; Soon, we will be unstoppable!

Main Paineframe posted:

The law doesn't actually police the policies in any way, though. It merely requires services to make their moderation policies publicly available. It's a transparency bill, not a policing bill.

It's "transparency" about something that the government has no authority to regulate, and the only way it has teeth is if there are consequences for not reporting or inaccurately reporting what their moderation process is, which puts a burden on their ability to moderate their platform as they choose. I really don't think the courts are going to look at this favorably. It's just as stupid as all of the conservative social media laws that are getting instantly dumpstered in court.

# ¿ Sep 9, 2023 02:07

OneEightHundred: Feb 28, 2008; Soon, we will be unstoppable!

Main Paineframe posted:

Platforms are already required to post their privacy policies publicly; is this really much different? Transparency for consumers can be a legit interest.

Doing things with tracking data and your personal information isn't constitutionally protected.

Content control on a privately-owned platform is.

# ¿ Sep 9, 2023 02:52

OneEightHundred: Feb 28, 2008; Soon, we will be unstoppable!

Family Values posted:

Do you follow the same logic about any other companies that do business with the public? Auto manufacturers: 'forcing us to disclose the contents of our car warranties is a draconian violation of our right not to speak'

Maybe if refusing warranty service could be described as an editorial decision, as opposed to reneging on a legal agreement.

Paracaidas posted:

It requires the companies to submit their terms of service as well as a summary on if their terms of service explicitly define

This on its own likely avoids any 1A or 230 challenges - in large part because the company can decline to include the categories explicitly in its terms of service. To the extent any speech is compelled, it neither impacts nor penalizes editorial judgment.

I suspect this might still run into the problem because the question is what happens if they submit a ToS that is (in some random dipshit's opinion) inconsistent with the moderation actions taken?

If there's any kind of penalty for that, then that puts a burden on their ability to moderate their own site at their discretion, because anything they do (or decline to do), they have to submit an updated policy to the government first.

If there is no consequence for it, then it's just meaningless.

# ¿ Sep 9, 2023 03:57

OneEightHundred: Feb 28, 2008; Soon, we will be unstoppable!

AFAIK they've been rolling the anti-adblock stuff out gradually because they REALLY don't want to be getting false positives. There are a lot of trivial ways to tell that someone is watching a video without watching the pre-roll ad, but a lot of those ways would trigger from network hiccups, programmer flubs, or any other thing that caused ad delivery to fail, and so far they've been lenient and just letting users watch the video even when ad delivery failed so they don't get pissed.

# ¿ Oct 14, 2023 09:32

OneEightHundred: Feb 28, 2008; Soon, we will be unstoppable!

dr_rat posted:

So I'm assuming the reason they don't do that already is just because it's hard to do when your trying to put in tailored ad's to everyone right?

A big technical problem with burned-in ads is that videos are seekable. Adding them to live streams isn't trivial, but it's obvious what the result needs to be at least. Doing it with seekable videos forces them to be skippable, it screws up all the timestamps, it doesn't actually stop ad blockers if the ads are inserted at non-random offsets, it leaves the ad in the stream after it's already been played.

AFAIK it'd be easier for them to do things like dynamic obfuscation of the page and scripts.

OneEightHundred fucked around with this message at 17:48 on Oct 14, 2023

# ¿ Oct 14, 2023 17:41

OneEightHundred: Feb 28, 2008; Soon, we will be unstoppable!

Fun thing is I'd normally be kinda okay with paying for an ad-free experience but YouTube Premium costs 90% of Netflix for Internet junkfood content, and a large slice of it is thoroughly crapped up by being made for ad monetization.

# ¿ Oct 16, 2023 18:29

OneEightHundred: Feb 28, 2008; Soon, we will be unstoppable!

https://twitter.com/Support/status/1714429406192582896

Wreckage of popular social media service begins shutting off its supply of new users.

# ¿ Oct 18, 2023 01:05

OneEightHundred: Feb 28, 2008; Soon, we will be unstoppable!

haveblue posted:

-you cannot view all of an accounts tweets. Or, well, you can, but in a completely useless order (as far as anyone can tell they're sorted by engagement, which is effectively random)

Pretty sure they're sorted by likes.

It's not even a good engagement algorithm like "recently popular," it's just an intentionally-worthless reel of their best zingers from, probably, years ago.

# ¿ Oct 19, 2023 17:28

OneEightHundred: Feb 28, 2008; Soon, we will be unstoppable!

Giving it a valuation is also really weird in this context because the way the market sees it is like "if Musk sold the company today, what would it be worth?" And baked into that assumption is that post-sale management would almost certainly return to a "value-maximizing" mindset that would almost certainly involve kicking Musk out and reverting the company to its pre-Musk state as much as possible.

If you're talking about the value of a share though, then that's taking a big gamble on Musk actually doing that, and every day he doesn't do that is going further down road of it being a total write-off.

Anybody that buys a share of it right now is basically playing a game of chicken over when he sells the company, or assuming that he's a normal rational person that will start realizing that his decisions are bad and either start making good decisions or cut his losses and sell, and not pricing in the possibility that he's an insane egomaniac who will ride it to zero.

# ¿ Oct 31, 2023 04:25

OneEightHundred: Feb 28, 2008; Soon, we will be unstoppable!

Anchor Wanker posted:

I see they embed threads in my ig feed. I do not have a threads account. Seems p desperate

The embeds will continuously advertise the existence of it to Instagram users, which is probably one of their better strategic ideas for it right now. It's certainly a better idea than calling it "Threads by Instagram" and not being integrated.

It was seriously hurt by being launched in an obviously-undercooked state though. The technical issues it had at launch are gone and it has a web client that works fine now, if they had just held off and launched in this state instead of trying to get ahead of competitors that haven't caught on either then maybe it'd be doing pretty good right now.

# ¿ Dec 2, 2023 02:05

OneEightHundred: Feb 28, 2008; Soon, we will be unstoppable!

Pakistani Brad Pitt posted:

Can I create a Threads account without an Instagram account yet?

I don't think so, but not sure what the downside is to making an Instagram account for it and then just not using Instagram.

Aside from the fact that their current web UI flow doesn't lead you to a signup link which is kinda dumb.

# ¿ Dec 3, 2023 02:03

OneEightHundred: Feb 28, 2008; Soon, we will be unstoppable!

They've started pumping Threads content into Instagram feeds, which is on one hand a legit good way to bolster their usage, but on the other hand makes it harder to tell what a "Threads user" is.

# ¿ Feb 10, 2024 18:06

OneEightHundred: Feb 28, 2008; Soon, we will be unstoppable!

I mean every other big tech company is dogpiling on the AI train while AI-generated garbage degrades their primary product, Elon's just cutting out the middleman.

# ¿ Apr 16, 2024 18:20

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# ¿ May 21, 2024 03:08

OneEightHundred: Feb 28, 2008; Soon, we will be unstoppable!

Goatse James Bond posted:

It only applies to "foreign adversary" countries. You can Ctrl f the tiktok divestment bill (https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/7521/text) for the clause citation to where those are defined, but it's currently apparently: China, Iran, Cuba, North Korea, Russia, Venezuela. So yeah, a Saudi monarchy associated corp could probably buy it.

Or a wealthy Vietnamese communist.

Most of the analysis I've seen on this seems to think there's a high chance that nobody will buy it because, basically, all of the buyers know that ByteDance will be in an absolutely horrible bargaining position, so the buyers are all going to lowball the poo poo out of them to the point that they're going to have to think hard about whether the offer is better than just closing shop and selling the name.

That's on top of the complications of buying a Chinese company.

# ¿ May 7, 2024 08:17

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