1871

Tell me the subforum where you did something stupid enough to get a warning PM without telling me the subforum where you did something stupid enough to get a warning PM. :)

1872

I think overall people are just pretty well behaved here even in contentious topics like whether or not Icewind Dale is an rts or not. I know I’ve received a PM if Ive misbehaved before.

1873
1874

Imagine being able to do something of lasting good in the world and instead spending that money on your ego and being a piece of shit.

1875

There must be some memes from Star Trek TOS when the Klingons took over Organia (or more darkly from Schindler’s List)

1876

I have a question.

Elon “supposedly” wants to fight bots. But if bots are eliminated and 50% of the userbase disappears… doesn’t that tell advertisers they’re paying at least 50% too much to advertise there? And as he fired half of the content moderation staff, it will take FOREVER to get awful content removed, which will further push advertisers away… doesn’t this all reek of self immolation?

1877

One can dream.

1878

Ignore musk’s bot ranting on Twitter purposefully miscounting bots - what twitter has always been selling to its paying customers (advertisers) is what they consider to be “real”/“monetizable” users. They already aren’t paying for bots (or at least <~5% bots).

Sure there might be more actual bots on the platform (especially those that swarm around high profile twits like Musk that try to drive a thing) that provide a poor user experience / push propaganda, but that’s a separate thing (and Musk purposefully conflated the two to attempt to get out of his silly deal)

Now 50% of monetizable users disappearing (or advertisers fleeing a hellzone) would certainly be a problem of course.

1879

I wonder if there are some huge stock options that aren’t vested for the majority of developers or other rewards that would make people stick around? If I heard this, I’d instantly be looking for a job. The natural consequence of these sorts of moves is that the best people leave for a more sane job, and the people who can’t get work elsewhere stick around.

1880

Elon Musk bought the company so everyone’s options vested on Monday.

1881

1882

Yeah, I was thinking that too. Maybe a bunch of people will quit, but that just saves Musk severance money. Win/win for him.

The fact that Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon have frozen hiring perhaps complicates things a bit.

But I would certainly have a hard time finding motivation to work 24/7 for a guy who is likely to fire me in a few days.

1883

My friends list is fairly curated. Mostly follow artists/gaming related folks, and I have seen basically zero disruption as far as racist/spamming/other disruptive behavior since Musk took over, but I don’t go looking for it either. The odd political post comes along that is a dumpster fire, but that isn’t unusual by itself and largely generated by recent events. The artists are all publicly stating that they would be happy to leave, and wondering where to go, but there is real fear of losing their audiences and having to rebuild their following that they base their career off of. Big fears of splintering the community overall. If there was a real consensus on a viable alternative to twitter I think a lot of people would be open to it, but right now there doesn’t appear to be a stampede for the exit. Think this will be a slow burn. Will be interesting if Elon will get more erratic over the months as any perceived failures begin to accumulate.

1884

It is interesting that everyone seems to want to get into the short-form video business, but nobody wants to create a real competitor to Twitter.

1885

Probably the economics. I think TikTok is making a lot of money, and Twitter is not.

1886

He has no idea what he’s doing.

Everything you’re saying is probably correct, but he’s a smart guy with an area of expertise, so he doesn’t care. After all, it’s “not complicated,” or whatever. Engineers are notorious for thinking they’re experts outside of their expertise and not understanding how human interactions actually work.

It’s because the moderation hasn’t changed at all. There was a spike of nonsense and generally an elevated level of douchery, but those people are getting hammered by the existing system. Which is why Catturd decided that Elon betrayed him or whatever.

Of course Elon fired a bunch of the people that handle this stuff, so the process will generally be slower. Just today I got a notice that someone I reported for anti-Semitic shit got banned. It was maybe a week after the fact, but it always takes forever for those notifications.

Most people are waiting to see which direction Elon breaks. He has basically 2 options:

  1. The current system, possibly tweaked, but probably not.
  2. pseudo-8chan, what he said he would do until he realized it would cost him (even more) billions of dollars
1887
1888

The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.

1889
1890

That was really good.