Twitter's New "X" Logo Is Reminding Plenty Of People Around X.Org

[lyamc]

Clowns and entertainers are popular, too. It doesn't make them smart and it sure doesn't make them right.

The only entertainers that are both idiots and popular are at least smart enough to know what people like. I also don't know what you mean by smart. Do you mean book smarts? High IQ? Wisdom? None of those 3 are necessarily exclusive but if you're talking about IQ then I suppose you would support an IQ test before one could vote, but I don't suppose you would support an IQ test to pay taxes.

Popularity is a misplaced value, in this case. I'd rather someone be good at their job than charismatic. And no, I'm not saying I like Zuckerberg, either.

Elon is good at his job. He's done like 5 impossible things, one after the other. He knows how to run successful businesses because he's done it over and over.

And popularity can have misplaced value, but that popularity is often short-lived. Something that is all hype always dies in obscurity, only remembered for being a disappointment. Popularity can also be confused with mob mentality which is where everyone shares a really really basic and reactive consciousness to the point where it becomes more like a force of nature and less of a consciousness.

Popularity often is a result of a need or desire being met where there was a vacuum. Say there is a great desire from people to deal with the national debt. Obviously the candidates who promise to do something about it would gain popularity.

Hey, if you think it's a good idea for Twitter to degenerate into something like 4chan, good for you. A lot of people don't, and that's why Twitter's ad revenue plummeted.

4chan is completely anonymous. Not even the same thing.

Elon doesn't actually care about Twitter making a profit as much as he cares about the principle of free speech or else he wouldn't have even entertained the idea of making an offer to Twitter in the first place.

Advertisers go where the people are. If the people stay on Twitter then there's nothing for Elon to worry about anyways.

Also, Elon doesn't really seem to care about bots. What he cares about is freeloading bots. As long as they pay him, he's apparently fine with that.

Same difference. If you put a price tag in front of something like that, it puts up a barrier to entry, so it becomes much harder to abuse and therefore easier to catch those who do abuse the system.

You're apparently unfamiliar with Brandolini's Law.

It's not a new idea, as the old, famous quote supports:

"A lie is halfway round the world before the truth has got its boots on."

I am familiar with it which is why I said: "everyone has equal right to speak but speech is not of equal value. It follows something like the 80/20 rule, or price's law."

However, if the culture does not value truth, it doesn't matter what rules or enforcement will be put in place: If determined organically then people will pick their favourite lies, and if rules are in place, only the approved lies will be allowed.

If the culture does value truth, then people who lie will become known as a liar, and therefore, lose their following which would impact their bottom line.

On top of the order of magnitude disparity Brandolini cites, consider that often only 1% to 10% of the population has a meaningful degree of expertise about a given subject. And of those, most are busy with jobs, families, or academic careers, whereas kids, elderly, unemployed, or professional trolls can post all day long.

You've made an excellent argument for Twitter since the bar for entry for communication is so low that people who otherwise wouldn't have time to engage with the culture are now able to.

Besides that, if I take what you said to its logical conclusion, people shouldn't talk about anything because chances are you don't know anything. But you won't know that you don't know anything until you say something stupid out loud. It's why the ability to think is directly tied to being able to speak.

The compound effect is that high-quality information faces a numerical disadvantage of like 3 or 4 orders of magnitude, before we even consider the possibility of bots being used to spread disinformation. The point is there's a fundamental asymmetry behind people recklessly spreading misinformation or disinformation and the amount of work and capabilities it takes to correct it.

Just like with every other piece of technology, someone comes up with a way to abuse it and others have to come up with counter measures. I doubt you're advocating for the elimination of the concept of the internet despite it solving basically all of your complaints.

Once upon a time, we lived in a world where the capability to spread your ideas was rather difficult and expensive. This tended to limit its use to those of great means or abilities. That had a very real impact on the kind and quality of information being spread, and eventually resulted in the professionalization of journalism.

The way you talk about this "time" is very rose-colored. This is not the first time there has been disruption caused by an increase in information. If you're against lowering the bar for entry then why don't why go back to pre-Martin Luther where everyone followed what experts said based on a book that they couldn't read themselves.

Whoever thinks it's a good idea to give the same megaphone to both highly-educated specialists and the poorly-educated and intellectually lazy really hasn't things through very far. Not to mention other bad actors, such as cyber criminals, corporate astroturf campaigners, political operatives, malicious state actors, and plain old antisocial trolls.

You aren't able to find out who those people are until they open their mouth. You also ignore the problem that listening to highly-educated specialists means that you'll often get an extremely biased perspective, something like "If all you have is a hammer, then everything looks like a nail.", and due to their niche they are more likely to have conflict of interest if the facts do not align with the goal of their financial provider.

In the US Constitution, the First Amendment simply says the government can't censor you. It doesn't guarantee that you'll have the same platform on which to speak as everyone else.

If Twitter is, for all intents and purposes, a public square, then the right thing to do is to let people speak even if you don't like what they say.

[lyamc]

the multiple high profile outages and errors and reports from engineers in the company says otherwise. A lot of that staff was also in the forward thinking R&D, data science (which measures impact of new features w/ iterative test driven development), marketing, their entire press relation core (the email of which just responds now with a literal poop emoji).

Reddit, facebook, instagram, netflix, or any other service have outages. It is a pretty common thing to have outages after a takeover as well.

Revenue is down what 50%+? They aren't paying rent or hosting costs. What exactly are you smoking?

Their operating expenses from employees is probably down 80% though.

No, Twitter as a platform of a private company decided they didn't want idiots spewing easily dis-proven lies and bullshit on their platform. Same as a grocery store kicking out a crazy person howling to the moon or disturbing their customers.

Wait, are you talking about the Twitter before Elon purchased it? Because the only difference is before there were the approved lies and truth, and the unapproved lies and truth, and now there is only "what is legal".

As someone already pointed out, no, purposeful and dangerous propaganda has no place in public discourse and should be shunned by the public.

If you remove "dangerous propaganda" then all you do is allow the propaganda that you agree with. You're not being intellectually honest here. Maybe you think that you can tell what is and what isn't propaganda, making you immune, but it is people like that who are the most likely to fall for it.

Yeah, I've been designing highly scalable web architecture for decades now: although admittedly the last decade-15 years I've been more on the executive/high level of teams and guidance. I have no idea what Twitter's architecture is, but I certainly can understand and know their scale and guess at what they have to support and the scope of what they do. The irony here, of course, is this is coming from the person who claimed Twitter was a "simple" website, which is the take of someone at best in the first year of computer science at university: so do tell me who is projecting and has the arrogance, but the one calling a massive website built be thousands of engineers over a decade as just a 'simple' thing?

There's thousands of Twitter clones. Twitter itself really is a simple thing. I'm not discounting difficulty with implementing it at scale, but that's something that comes with time and money. As you scale up you can also afford those engineers who help with said scaling up. Scale up too fast and the site is dead. Scale up too slow and the site is dead. Scale up at the right pace but slower than everyone else and the site is dead.

Now the reason why I know you're projecting, in case you're wondering, is because you, like me, are wasting a decent amount of time leaving replies on a forum that (in the grand scheme of things) is read by no one and is otherwise just a place to vent. That makes you about as smart as me, and I'm not very smart, but I'm okay with that.

[karolherbst]

I certainly do not agree with either of those points. What he has done is no different than people taking out a line of credit against home equity: is that morally wrong, and should that be illegal as well?

the difference is, normal folks pay their fair share of taxes while Elon doesn't.

[Mark Rose]

the difference is, normal folks pay their fair share of taxes while Elon doesn't.

Never seen a normal person pay $11 billion in one year. Musk contributes vastly more than most.

[karolherbst]

Never seen a normal person pay $11 billion in one year. Musk contributes vastly more than most.

Ah yes...... how dumb of me. The "rich folks deserved to be rich" kool aid. I've heard of it, didn't take it though. Sorry that I have to break it to you: He got lucky. He didn't deserve any of this. Nobody does. It's just sheer luck. But yes, we should just allow them to not pay taxes or living wages, because *checks notes* he already paid enough.

Sorry, but he didn't. And that he contributes vastly more than anybody else is just untrue. His worker contributed. He just collected that money, which could have been better spent on health insurance and proper infrastructure instead. But I guess the US is a huge shithole for a reason. Trickle-down doesn't work. You boost your nations economy (and actually provide value) by having more money on the poorer folks, who then buy stuff they need (which then boost the economy).

Those tax loopholes for the rich actually hurts society, the economy and democracy. So no, he didn't contribute vastly more than most, the opposite is the case.

[lyamc]

karolherbst

Tell me you don't understand economics without telling me you don't understand economics.


Besides that, you are missing the point. If there are tax breaks and loopholes for rich people, don't blame the rich people for using them, blame the people who make the rules.

Think of any video game. If people are abusing the fact that if their gun auto reloads when swapping guns quickly, then the devs have to patch that. You can blame people who use the exploit but at a certain point all it does is put you at a disadvantage by not using it yourself.

[smitty3268]

karolherbstBesides that, you are missing the point. If there are tax breaks and loopholes for rich people, don't blame the rich people for using them, blame the people who make the rules.

The people who make the rules are the lawyers working for the rich people. Who then bribe... Ahem, sorry. Lobby the politicians to put what their lawyers came up with into the law.

[smitty3268]

How so?

I never cared about using twitter personally, because I think social media is dumb, and filled with even dumber people.

However, I will say my company stopped using twitter internally recently after years of use, because the embed/api stuff we were using just kept going down with no warning or explanations. Even when it worked it would sometimes take 15 seconds to load a feed, which was ridiculous.

After Elon started limiting views it became pretty obvious that things were only going to get worse for our purposes so we ditched it. That said, there's not a good alternative in place right now. Facebook was the nearest thing and it has it's own set of issues.

[lyamc]

The people who make the rules are the lawyers working for the rich people. Who then bribe... Ahem, sorry. Lobby the politicians to put what their lawyers came up with into the law.

Excuse me, but the reason why lobbying happens is because politicians allow it to happen.

The blame for bad rules goes to the rule makers. Simple as.

[toves]

Perhaps this re-brand is just Elon putting his weight in the X11 vs. Wayland debate?
I suspect ihe twitmeister is also not on winner here.
Didn't know the blighter was an asparagus but would explain a lot but never excuse the shame his "pedoguy" slander... ever.