241–250 of 386 posts
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How many users will stay on Twitter because of this? And how many will leave because of it? My guess: it's an extra indication that Twitter is not a reliable platform to build an audience. Billionaires are billionaires because they build a product that everybody wants.
Twitter and "reliable"? Was that ever really a thing?
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When a game is rigged, you don't have to be competent to win
It is an easy and cynical statement. And I am saying that as a cynical person myself. The game is heavily tilted, but it is still a game with real winners and real losers. I do not want to assume too much though. Would you be willing to elaborate a little? It is difficult to argue Musk is not competent at his various roles. Are you saying he was guaranteed to be where he is now?
Once someone has a lot of money, it becomes very difficult for them to decrease their wealth as capitalism rewards people/institutions that have lots of money and/or influence. If you have money available to purchase your way into owning various companies, then it's not too difficult to keep those companies alive though I would say that Musk has made some good decisions as to which companies to buy. I would consider that Tesla became successful partly due to a new potential market (which Musk should get some credit for spotting) and partly due to reaping the benefits from all the workers there - it's their talents that are making Tesla profitable and Musk is merely ensuring that he doesn't pay them sufficiently so that he can increase his own wealth.
Billionaires benefit from their own lack of morals more than being spectacularly competent.
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Musk's behavior in this whole thing seems far from competent.
He's the CEO of five companies and he just landed in Qatar to party at the world cup. His worth ethic is suspect and the stuff of myths. Supposedly he never stops working but he's an expert at Elden Ring.
There are a LOT of sources on him having worked very long hours at points.
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Lol. Kneecapping competitors is what billionaires do. You dont win capitalism by following all the rules.
It's what all people do when they have the ability.
This is the fatal flaw for every tyrant. They see the mitigation system as a problem rather than a solution, then their worst instincts get the best of them.
The pivot from “I am against censorship that goes far beyond the law”[1] to “I get to use censorship to kneecap a competitor because it’s my site now” was almost comically quick. [1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1519036983137509376
What about the pivot from "This is a private company. Free speech doesn't apply" to "This is censorship of free speech"?
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That server is swamped with registrations and had to pause them. Pick another.
This kind of friction at even getting started doesn’t bode well for Mastodon’s success - forcing people to pick a server: how do they choose? Go with the one everyone talks about? Closed to new signups. Pick some other one, run the risk that it closes (the owner gets bored, it becomes too much work, they find keeping it up and stable too hard). Or else that it gets “defederated”, and hence you get effectively banned,…
How do you choose anything? On joinmastodon.org/servers you're presented with filter options and descriptions. You look at the descriptions and pick one you think you'll like. If you don't, you can do an account move. Plenty of people will be happy to help.
Personally I'm perfectly fine with making people think twice if they're not willing to invest the time to find a server. It's ok - they can pick something else if that works better for them.
> Or else that it gets “defederated”, and hence you get effectively banned, because someone else disagrees with moderation decisions of the owner which are nothing to do with you personally.
This is a highly exaggerated risk unless you go out of your way to find a server full of racists or other people that should instantly make it clear to you it's likely you'll face blocks. Some people will insist this or that mainstream server is banned everywhere (e.g. some say that about mastodon.social), and in reality unless the server is obviously bad it often turns out to be a few inconsequentially tiny instances which block them. Look at the list of banned instances on a handful of servers and you'll see that most places it's not very long and most of it is made up of a core set of common culprits. None of which are listed on joinmastodon.org/servers - it takes effort or really bad luck to end up on a server where this is a big issue.
> then your friend asks you how to join Mastodon, you direct them to the server you use, but it is closed to sign-ups due to popularity, so they have the same issue.
It's an issue particularly now because signups are 10x-20x normal because of Musk. It's a scaling issue which will go away, as the number of new instances is also rapidly going up and people are addressing it. Additionally, if you e.g. go to mastodon.social and press "Create Account" you're offered an explanation and linked to joinmastodon.org/servers to pick another one.
> I can’t be bothered. I’m sure I’m hardly the only one.
That's of course your choice.
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This kind of friction at even getting started doesn’t bode well for Mastodon’s success - forcing people to pick a server: how do they choose? Go with the one everyone talks about? Closed to new signups. Pick some other one, run the risk that it closes (the owner gets bored, it becomes too much work, they find keeping it up and stable too hard). Or else that it gets “defederated”, and hence you get effectively banned,…
> This kind of friction at even getting started doesn’t bode well for Mastodon’s success - forcing people to pick a server: how do they choose? This is exactly the same thing as creating an email address, and as far as I know no-one is complaining because they have to choose a server/domain to use.
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I actually think this is quite a long way away from funny. We've been able to watch Elon Musk get radicalized in real time. That's quite worrying when you consider the amount of resources he has available to him. During the Trump years there was a lot of talk about how Trump is bad, but fundamentally incompetent. Well now we're going to see what extremism looks like when a far more competent person is orchestrating i…
How exactly is he radicalized? Because he suspended 7 journalists for 12-24 hours for doxxing the flight with his kid on it?
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What about the pivot from "This is a private company. Free speech doesn't apply" to "This is censorship of free speech"?
I have seen a bit of that but most including myself still hold the same opinion. A private silo is not a free speech zone. Twitter wasn’t before Elon and isn’t now and never will be. There’s layers of irony here. All the “libs” who were supposedly pro censorship ran off to the actual free speech zone. The Fediverse is almost uncensorable since you can hop instances or just run your own. There is a difference though.…
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This kind of friction at even getting started doesn’t bode well for Mastodon’s success - forcing people to pick a server: how do they choose? Go with the one everyone talks about? Closed to new signups. Pick some other one, run the risk that it closes (the owner gets bored, it becomes too much work, they find keeping it up and stable too hard). Or else that it gets “defederated”, and hence you get effectively banned,…
> This kind of friction at even getting started doesn’t bode well for Mastodon’s success - forcing people to pick a server: how do they choose? This is exactly the same thing as creating an email address, and as far as I know no-one is complaining because they have to choose a server/domain to use.
If Mastodon is successful the same thing will happen again.