Timex
3416
I understand the idea that it doesn’t matter if we use Twitter, and abandoning it would be inconvenient.
But I think it does in fact matter, and the inconvenience caused by not using it is essentially trivial.
Twitter had the capacity to be a very bad force for society. Indeed, it already has been. Trump’s attempt to overthrow the US government is a real thing that actually happened, and it was largely orchestrated via Twitter. Even as I type those words, it strikes me as crazy how we all just kind of moved on from that. The president actually tried to destroy our system of government.
Twitter attempted to respond to that after the fact, and now Musk is undoing those changes.
I don’t want to be part of that. I don’t want to support it in even the smallest way.
I used Twitter a ton, and now I don’t. Is that somewhat an inconvenience? Sure, but again, I don’t want to be part of Musk’s bullshit here.
JonRowe
3419
Thank you for your service
It’s become screamingly obvious that Twitter, like Facebook before it, is and will continue to be actively damaging to our democracy. There’s not a hell of a lot I can do about that from here, but I can at least decline to create content for it and hope that those I follow will note their decreasing follower count and have that much more reason to jump ship.
Which is also a very US centric view of what Twitter brings to the table… Sucks. But also a reflection of the limited and divided largely in 2 US electoral system, more than just Twitter.
A medium-sized business with an annual $80M ad spend?
If Twitter disappeared, I think I would give up on social media until a proper, single instance alternative came along.
I honestly have no idea how to even approach joining Mastodon and following the news commentators, small TTRPG streamers, the TTRPG authors and reviewers, the boardgame players, reviewers and companies, the sports teams I follow and the random people I’ve met over time.
Most of those communities seem to be experimenting with different platforms and different communities. And, honestly, it’s just easier to say “fuck it” and keep the status quo until a proper replacement exists. Mastodon and Hive are not it, IMO. But they do a great job of fragmenting the current communities across the digital map.
About using Amazon, there are 2 things to remember.
-
where they actually make their money is AWS, not shopping
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the alternative is worse. If it wasn’t Amazon, it would be Walmart
DoubleG
3426
Is that weird? With that I’d expect them to be at like $600-800M in revenue, which sounds about right.
FWIW, I avoid Amazon with a small-to-moderate effort, but still have my Twitter account, so we can balance each other out. ;)
jsnell
3428
Wouldn’t read too much into it. The original source is an anonymous post on Blind, which makes it pretty much impossible to gauge the reliability of the story.
rei
3429
You have a year to use Amazon’s Wickr Me social network they just announced they’re shutting down.
jsnell
3430
Musk firing some more people, unsurprising. But how the hell do you have an all-hands meeting on a Sunday evening on any other subject than this?
He probably told them to bring screen prints of their 5 best sales pitches, then used them to select the victims.
(I don’t mean this seriously.)
Thrag
3432
I so hate the term “all hands on deck”. You know when all hands are called away from their watches and duties to get up on deck? When the ship is being abandoned.
Who exactly financed this Twitter deal? The Saudis? Is it worth $44 billion to dismantle the progressive left’s biggest information outlet? I’m not just talking about the US. If Twitter goes down does that help the Iranian regime? Russia? Other repressive governments?
The “burn it down” conspiracy theory is looking better and better…
jsnell
3435
$27 billion Musk, $7 billion other investors (including $2 billion from the Saudis basically keeping their existing investment rather than selling), $13 billion in debt taken by the company.
