The Scent of Musk (split from Off the Cuff and Whatnot - 2022)

[metirish]

Haha I figured that was you that followed me , tag line gave it away

[A Boy Named Seo]

I feel like there are more invites than actual users over there, but I hope it takes off. I've been hanging out with no one over on Threads.

[TransMonk]

I don't know if it was intended to be part of Elon's plan, but he's succeeded in dispersing all of the mostly sane people to multiple second-tier platforms where it is impossible to replicate the old Twitter community aggregation. I have accounts on Mastadon, Threads, Post and BlueSky. They all try to be as much like legacy Twitter as possible, but the engagement is nowhere near the same.

X gets worse and worse every day as the nutjobs and provocateurs take over. The Israel/Hamas discourse there is unbearable.

[metirish]

Yeah, Threads is absolutely no good, I'm hoping BlueSky will be better, but this morning looking through some prominent accounts and I see many haven't posted there in months

[Johnny Lunchbucket]

I mainly want to bail on Twitter because Musk is such an asshole and I don't feel good supporting his shit

[Edgy MD]

Yeah, I definitely split this thread off anticipating more discussion about "Who is this maniac and how does he have such a profound impact on our lives?" than "Hey, what should I use instead of Twitter?" but that's certainly a very real part of the impact.

The even bigger story is the age of deregulation that allows rich weirdos to go ahead and do Bond villain stuff out in the open while society just stands around watching.

[TransMonk]

It's a problem. I used to love Twitter. I could easily aggregate information from many different sources and find commonality. And there was a lot of great humor...even when times were bad.

I still use Twitter more than anything else, but it's been overrun by porn, racism, tech-bro bravado and shitty takes presented to me from people I don't follow. The amount of disinformation and parroting of obvious propaganda makes it useless to get any information from Twitter about the Middle East.

I don't think it is a coincidence that Musk did this going into an election year in the US.

[whippoorwill]

My biggest use of Twitter (and it was valuable once I found reliable sources) was when there was an escaped killer late this summer in Pennsylvania.
Knew immediately when he got a car, when he got a gun, etc.

It did however reveal how much fakeness there is out there

[Lefty Specialist]

I don't think it is a coincidence that Musk did this going into an election year in the US.

I actually think it is. He impulsively said he'd buy Twitter, and then when he realized how stupid that was, tried to get out of his ridiculously-high offer. The Twitter board, very correctly, sued to make him honor that promise. And here we are. Now he's done everything he can to make it a home for trolls, white supremacists, Russian bots and god knows what else but gutting any moderation functions. But like a lot of things Elon does, he leads with his schwanz and figures it out later.

[metirish]

Wow , can't say I'm surprised by Musk's response here and indeed his endorsement of the tweet he is responding too

[MFS62]

I'd like to start a conspiracy theory that says that electric cars make you sterile.
But the right wing types probably aren't driving electric cars anyhow.
They like big gas guzzler trucks on which they can hang their shotgun racks.
Later

[MFS62]

The companies pulling advertising from X :
https://www.axios.com/2023/11/17/compan ... disney-ibm

Later

[metirish]

Yeah, Threads is absolutely no good, I'm hoping BlueSky will be better, but this morning looking through some prominent accounts and I see many haven't posted there in months

If anything BlueSky is even quieter than Threads , course it only has two million users , anyway , no invites yet

[metirish]

Riots in Dublin last night, Musk replied with this

[MFS62]

"We will pass new laws in the coming weeks ... to make better use of he CCTV evidence collected yesterday."
That's called an ex post facto law and is prohibited by our Constitution. You can't pass a law to prosecute somebody for something that wasn't against the law when they did it.
But they are something I expect Trump and his mob will try to pass to get back at people who didn't support him.
Later

[metirish]

Looks like Bucket is on BlueSky , I got a invite code to share if anyone wants it , I'll DM code to you in here

[metirish]

I finally deactivated my Twitter account, it's a dump

[metirish]

I just deleted my BlueSky and Threads accounts too , absolutely nothing happens on either

[whippoorwill]

Where can we find you and your beautiful birds?

[metirish]

On Instagram

Birds_of_the_bronx

Facebook too

[A Boy Named Seo]

I just deleted my BlueSky and Threads accounts too , absolutely nothing happens on either

Threads has gotten more users but a lot of bots (I guess?) and accounts posting the same shit. At one point it felt like there were way more BlueSky invites than users and I gave up on that one, too.

I think the new social media is gonna be message boards.

[metirish]

Yeah, Threads became very annoying, I would get dozens of followers daily, and my bird pictures did well but there was nothing coherent about it, just a mess

BlueSky with its slow rollout may have screwed itself

[TransMonk]

Still on Twitter, though it only maintains a small fraction of usefulness.

I never open Threads or BlueSky and share the opinions on them shared above.

[metirish]

I got roped back to Twitter the morning I heard Flaco died , mostly just reading and not posting much

It sucks that the alternative sites just aren't good IMO

[metirish]