Google has reportedly removed much of Twitter’s links from its search results after the social network’s owner Elon Musk announced reading tweets would be limited.
Search Engine Roundtable found that Google had removed 52% of Twitter links since the crackdown began last week. Twitter now blocks users who are not logged in and sets limits on reading tweets.
According to Barry Schwartz, Google reported 471 million Twitter URLs as of Friday. But by Monday morning, that number had plummeted to 227 million.
“For normal indexing of these Twitter URLs, it seems like these tweets are dropping out of the sky,” Schwartz wrote.
Platformer reported last month that Twitter refused to pay its bill for Google Cloud services.
Elon going to complain about another conspiracy going on while in reality it’s just that when crawlers are not able to open a certain URL they simply assume that the page doesn’t exist anymore. Google certainly didn’t “retaliate”, bots simply couldn’t find those pages anymore.
The headline is actually wrong. Google did not do anything to Twitter. Twitter fucked up their own SEO by removing access to its content.
This is correct.
Yeah, that’s a pretty easy and reasonable conclusion to come to if you think about if for more than five seconds. I’m not sure Elon has any toes left after he keeps shooting himself in the feet.
If your company cares about it’s SEO rankings, you don’t make changes like these without considering the SEO implications.
Not even a month later and said company rebranded itself without checking trademarks. Now we have “X”, a brand that non only risks infringement of quite a few registered eu-trademarks but didn’t even apply for an own eu-trademark…
Just like reddit. Looks like the Speztic and the Elongated Muskrat are caught in an ouroborus of like-minded stupidity.
Elongated Muskrat 🤣
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The latest in a seemingly never-ending series of self-owns. Apart from the stress it must put on their devs, it’s been entertaining
They have more than one dev left?
No it’s just one guy called Dev.
And he’s on a H1B visa and can’t leave.
Dude was just a marketing intern and is mad stressed and knows he’s in WAY over his head now.
Fake it 'till you make it.
Or the multibillion dollar company collapses into a heaping, flaming pile of slag as a result of your actions. One or the other.
It’s a win/win
They screwed up his name tag, because reasons.
His name is actually Dave. But there aren’t any other Dave’s working there anymore so he is ok with being called Dev.
Deb on the other hand is pretty pissed off.
Or maybe it’s this guy, Dev from a canadian tv show called The Listener. They called the hacker ‘Dev’, I’m assuming it’s on purpose.
https://thelistener.fandom.com/wiki/Dev_Clark
Please kindly accept my upvote - made my day!
My understanding is there’s group of people whose visa is sponsored by Twitter. If they leave the company, they may well have to leave the country.
That’s a big yikes and I hope they will find another way…
Coercing workers built America! They can’t leave… because of the implication.
Are you gonna hurt these workers?
Yeah, he lives in the break room on a cot.
Twitter still has devs?
Twitter’s dev(s)
Crawl issues I am sure but also user experience issues. Google is sensitive to sending visitors to sites where metrics indicate users do not, like bounce rates etc. I don’t use twt but if it is the case you have the be logged in to see anything now, a non-logged in user will click a link from Google hit a login page, and use the back button. I would assume Google will see that as a bad search result and use it less.
that actually makes a lot of sense
The word bots triggers the muskrat.
I wonder if Google prioritized recrawling all those Twitter links.
If I were making a web crawler, I would make it so that if a crawler finds a domain that appears to have changed dramatically or gone offline it will re-crawl the domain and flag already-crawled pages as potentially obsolete.
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My urge to eat a liberal amount popcorn has been triggered a lot by twitter’s slow motion train wreck.
Elon, please buy Reddit and repeat your amazing ideas over there. You are so smart.
Spez is already doing his best work to fuck over the platform. Are you certain Elon could do any better?
Spez already said he admires how Elon is running Twitter.
The best part is that Elon is proving to be a pro at losing money left and right while simultaneously inventing new ways to make a social media platform suck to use.
I mean there’s admiring a ruthless mob boss - and then there is admiring a petty thief that keeps getting arrested and all his plans blow up in this face.
Spez is losing his tiny mind.
Oh, there’s scope to introduce “official” Reddit user badges for 10 bucks a pop and all of sorts of suicidal Musk shenanigans
Wait until you have to be logged in to read any posts on Reddit.
Didn’t we achieve this by turning all subreddit NSFW?
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Ah, I see. I only used reddit through Apollo, and was only sent to new reddit page by NSFW links, after i deleted my account, it seems.
but isn’t there no ad revenue on NSFW subs? I thought I read that
Yes, but when the users and mods who built the site do it, it’s petty and selfish. When the ceo does it, it’s brilliant, compounds user value, and improves the security of the user experience. /s
I’m down, Spez. What’s bad for Reddit is good for us.
Honestly… We’re all (or a massive chunk of us are) Reddit refugees. I don’t give many fucks about that place. If it thrives, whatever. It’s out of my control. I’m not going to hate post here with fantasies of spez seeing it and being like, “WHYYYYY?”
What little I’ve seen here seems like a disproportionate amount of passionate and quality users came over here. Users that were likely a bit more than casual; ie we we invested enough to use 3rd party clients, some of us are probably former mods who got disillusioned, etc.
We’re all giddy and it is the honeymoon phase and I HOPE HOPE HOPE the users’ enthusiasm doesn’t fizzle like Mastodon seems to but I would say, just use this. Enjoy it. Post worthwhile things. I don’t think Reddit is necessarily going away, but if it’s just some weird bot riddled, low effort posts sort of place, why would we want to be there anyway?
The fediverse will probably last as long as the internet does, if the BBS is anything to go by. And I’ve seen people starting to realize federation is an actually decent option at the very least.
I saw people unironically saying this and being upvoted for it in hackernews, completely turned me off from the site lol
Doesn’t sound like retaliation to me, it sounds like their scheduled web crawlers are finding that content they used to index is now no longer viewable and this removed from search results. Pretty standard. My guess is that there were 400 million URLs listed and as the crawler uncovers that they are no longer available, that number will keep dropping to reflect only content publicly viewable. If only 500 URLs are now publicly viewable (without logins) then that’s what they will index. Google isn’t a search engine for private companies (unless you pay for the service) they are a public search engine so they make an effort to ensure that only public information is indexed. Some folk game the system (like the old expertsexchange.com) but sooner or later google drops the hammer.
God, I hated expert sexchange so much. It was a blessing when stack overflow started.
I’m only an amateur but I’m happy to give it a go
I don’t think Twitter would rate limit the Google indexer, though.
It’s probably the increased bounce rate, as people click Twitter links in the search results, get Twitter’s login wall and click back to continue searching instead of creating an account.
I tried to access twitter by impersonating a googlebot. I was denied. The bots aren’t so much rate limited, but unable to access tweets as they don’t have a Twitter account.
Impersonating a Googlebot user-agent isn’t a perfect test though, since you’re supposed to implement IP verification too - either checking against a known list of Google crawler IPs or doing a PTR lookup. See https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/verifying-googlebot
Question is whether or not Twitter has competent software developers implementing stuff correctly anymore. Anyone’s guess at this point.
Good. Hopefully they remove links to pinterest, quora and facebook too while they’reat it.
It’s funny how Spez idolizes a guy who doesn’t pay his bills. It’s also funny watching the hate pplatform Twitter get absolutely destroyed by its owner. The internet in 2023 is a wild and crazily changing place.
I am genuinely curious. What’s the role of the new CEO if this turd keeps doing everything he can to burn this ish to the ground?
She straight up admitted that she was essentially a sock puppet CEO and would offer no friction to anything Musk wanted.
Musk is a manchild who can’t handle being told “no”, so that’s a given.
But it’s smart of her to put that out in advance. It informs Musk that she will stay out of his way, and she doesn’t have to take the blame for idiotic decisions made by him.
He’s the child of an emerald mine owner. Do people think that men like that choose wives based on how good a mother they’ll be? Doubt.
I think it’s called a ”Fucker-Upper“
Someone needs to make this Musk’s official title. Chief-Fuck-Upper. I also heard Chief-Twit circling around.
Can we perhaps add a list of notable titles to his Wikipedia entry?
“CFU of Twitter” does have a nice ring to it
Then Spez could be CFU of Reddit. I kinda miss Ellen Pao. And Chooter.
Edit: A word.
Chief twit was something he called himself, for all that says
Lol
Lol, this made me chuckle! 🤭
Gotta have someone to push off the glass cliff
Thanks for sharing, I hadn’t heard of that expression or phenomenon.
Ever heard of the glass cliff? You might even see a name or two on that list that you recognize.
Yup, I remember the absolute outrage when Ellen Pao became CEO of reddit, though it is nice at least to finally see her vindicated on there now. I hadn’t heard of the glass cliff until long after she left, but people have been referencing it left and right on reddit recently. Turns out, Ellen Pao wasn’t the problem…
Yeah that’s crazy, I was furious when they fired Victoria back in the day. It’s nice to see that Alexis Ohanian is the one who deserves the blame for that massive fuckup. Man that gives me a pang of nostalgia for the old days of reddit though. Interesting that the Wiki article points to Obama’s presidency and the 08 financial collapse as a “glass cliff” event.
Remember this?
-( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)╯╲___卐卐卐卐 Don’t mind me just taking Ellen Pao for a walk
Both Musk and Huffman seem to think the E in CEO stands for “Enshittification.”
Edit - typo
You’ve heard of a “walled garden”.
But this… this has become a “walled right-wing dumpster”.A “walled swamp”,
What’s there not to like?!
They’ve always wanted to build a wall. Hopefully they wall themselves off from the rest of the world.
Blocking users who are not logged in has farther reaching consequences that aren’t readily apparent. For example, there was an AMBER Alert a few days ago with a short link to see more info. The link goes back to a Twitter account/tweet. All that time sensitive, useful information was behind a wall where you can’t see it unless you log in. Most people aren’t going to create an account just to do that.
This is such an incredible and incompetent failure for the amber alert system too though to be fair
Oh I bet the actual employees are painfully aware. But the lack of funding and government red tape? That’s the real failure.
I’m always totally surprised how willfully European governments have put so much power into the hands of Twitter. Nearly every organization and politician has a Twitter account to be used for official and semi-official communication. And Twitter isn’t and was never really very popular in Europe compared to Facebook and other social networks, which these same organizations and politicians demonized to the max. I hope this is a wake up call: there are no inherently good centralized and commercialized social networks fit for communicating important information to an audience of potentially everyone.
Yeah, I’m still baffled by the fact that all these officials are still on Twitter.
Yeah. Moronic to use Twitter for anything even remotely important like emergency alerts
I disagree.
Twitter was one of the largest social media platforms on the planet, and was especially huge in the US. Before Musk bought it it didn’t show any signs of failure. It lasted over a decade, and had enough reach that I think it made a lot of sense for things like emergency alerts, government officials, etc. to use it as one means, even a main means, of disseminating information. It was really effective at that until what, a year ago?
I don’t think anyone really predicted Elon Musk buying Twitter and running it into the ground within a year. Yes, it was hypothetically possible in our capitalist system, but there was no indication that it would until Elon made a joking tweet.
Because of how the modern internet has organized itself, it was inevitable that critical systems would utilize Twitter for it’s reach.
I think you’re applying hindsight and expecting people to have made decisions based on events that hadn’t happened yet. Before musk bought Twitter it wasn’t at all unreasonable for people to rely on it for information from government officials because it was the format millions of people were accustomed to receiving that information in every day.
Well then since this is hindsight then I hope everyone is learning now that we shouldn’t be relying on single corporate entities to deliver our emergency notifications.
“Retrospectively, it was a bad idea” makes more sense.
It’s like this. Ambulance use the road even if the the hospitals didn’t build it. Now imagine, twitter is the road.
We need to build new roads, and quickly. Actually, we’re on one right now.
Or at least some type of scruffy makeshift forest path.
I hope this results in companies no longer using Twitter for their communications. It’s completely inappropriate.
I’ve missed two trains and had to take and Uber until I recently found the only place the train company reliably posts updates was Twitter, over their own damn website.
Using twitter for any kind of emergency communication is a very bad idea in the first place.
Twitter is doing everyone a favor by demonstrating exactly why that is.
Heck i couldn’t easily check if diablo 4 servers were wonky because I can’t check the blizzard Twitter. Obviously this is less important than an amber alert. As another reply said, I think police need a better way to disseminate emergency information and that is on them. However something like server status is a perfect use of Twitter that is now close enough to impossible to do. If public agencies are going to continue using Twitter for these purposes, then something needs to change. Personally I’d be ok with the government having a little more say in things if we are going to continue viewing Twitter as a public service.
Alternatively, it’s probably better long-term if those functions become replaced with official Mastodon instances that are for official announcements only.
eg If there were a California.Gov Mastodon instance with a !alerts@california.gov and a !earthquakes@california.gov then everyone in that area could just sub to those communities and if there was something to announce it could go out via those. Of course that presupposes that enough people are in the Fediverse for it to be a good platform to share that info but structurally it’s probably far better than letting a third party commercial interest host these things.
I haven’t looked at Mastodon at all yet so I don’t really know how it works, but from what I have gathered, it is not dissimilar from lemmy but for microblogs. I suppose the main similarity is its distributed network which I agree is a better solution than a centralized server. Hopefully that statement ages well.
This is exactly why we should be encouraging local libraries, universities, law enforcement, city, and county governments how to set up Mastodon servers.
On the one hand, when you have a duty to inform the public, it no longer makes sense to suffer at the whims of tech billionaires. There was a time, for a decade or two, when these sites prioritized access and predictability, but no more. When you have information that you need to have accessible, the only guarantee is to control it yourself. They can still use corporate social media to get the message out to their network, but link it back to their mastodon account. Roll it into their IT departments just like their email server.
On the other hand, it’s a critical step for the success of the fediverse. Universal email adoption came about because it was used by government and universities. What you could call the original social network is still an open protocol, it’s not owned by any single corporation or government, and still the primary form of communication online. About 2 billion emails have been sent since you started reading this.
Twitter was an important unifying communications tool during the Arab Spring. The Arab spring was a threat to biz as usual in places like Saudi Arabia. The second largest investor in Twitter is Saudi Arabia.
Saudi Arabia killed and dismembered a journalist from the US, more or less in plain sight. Elon is now killing and dismembering Twitter in plain sight to limit its power as a unifying tool that stands as a demonstrable, active threat to capitalism and oligarchs around the world.
Billionaires do favors for other billionaires. It’s part of why spez is trying to tank Reddit. Remember how dangerous Reddit was to capitalism’s status quo around the time of GME/Robinhood/Antiwork recently.
The specific moment we’re in right now is meant to shatter consolidated organizing power on Reddit as we splinter into several smaller alternative platforms (or for some, disconnect entirely). Not saying we shouldn’t be in Lemmy, but calling out the larger reality of the moment.
Billionaires do favors for other billionaires.
I like this take, but this is a conspiracy theory take. Change a few words and this would be something regurgitated by Q fanatics.
You know how conservatives project? Think about it as the truth, but with a small change in detail such as the guilty party renamed to an enemy scapegoat. Now rethink what you said.
Conspiracy theories that parallel real conspiracies are the best way to stop people thinking about each view on its own merits. They conflate dumb q stuff with the legitimate similar thing and then refuse to engage intellectually. This is why the internet is so noisy. They KNOW that the Streisand effect will be counterproductive so instead they spam dark strawmen and noise until you just tune out because of the difficulty to process information.
Climate activists drowned out with astroturfed strawmanned groups such as extinction rebellion which de-legitimizes and generates hatred towards activists and allows the passing of totalitarian laws to prevent future protests etc.
Examples
- Climate activists -> Extinction rebellion
- Animal rights activists -> PETA
- Anarchists -> Sovereign citizens
In the end you will hate all the legit groups because of the astroturfed false flag strawmen groups.
This is such a good way to word this kind of phenominon. Conspiracies as distraction.
Its also funny, because its a conspiracy about conspiracies lol
astroturfed strawmanned groups such as extinction rebellion
What’s wrong with XR?
People who aren’t going to do anything either way like to blame XR’s protests for their own inaction.
I’ve thought long and hard about why we fail to make change and I’ve thought about whats best and most reasonable within my own personality, skills and weaknesses. For me, I need to refine my views and then spread awareness, while also reducing our wasted efforts because of false consciousness. Do you want to suddenly become aware that you wasted years of your life to a false idea or would you rather some annoying rando accuse you of having in a false idea, then think about it honestly and reject the false idea years earlier?
As an example. Lots of people fell victim to what you suggest… nazi philosophy was painted as “we have the cure! just blindly follow our legit seeming propaganda” and then people acted instead of thinking… you know what happened after. People like me were trying to deprogram nazis but then we had to run or got holocausted. Also, do you notice how National socialism has a strange… misdirection that doesn’t line up with its stated name? MEGAHINT HINT. also tankies cough cough
What do you think is wrong with conservatives? They work hard for the values they haven’t investigated
You are absolutely right about us needing to take action, i just worry the average person will be super counterproductive with all the noise intended to misguide us.
I would have explained in more detail before but its hard to write a small book each reply haha. I’m glad you asked. So with XR there are a ton of things I can say but I’ll probably ramble, so my apologies.
XR popped up at a time when revolutionary energies especially around the idea of climate apocalype type emergencies were at a local high. They openly stated in their website or whatevs that they allow police and landlords which if you are in the know, you know. Landlords and police are some of the most primary enablers of the climate apocalypse and capitalistic evils. Then there’s their method of making change, which if you watch mass media, shows that they glue their unshaved armpits to the road or paintings, in the most “hate me, hate us” type of way possible. Effective climate activism doesn’t come in the form of “hate us” activism, it comes in the form of making leaflets and dropping them in a thousand mailboxes, making community groups to discuss and spread truth about our govts complicity and support of negative and increasing changes that are damming us etc etc. I could list a lot more… ugh :(
Each step of XRs path helped them to pass law after law to reduce our legal rights to protest while also making the general population hate protest+climate activists. Imagine getting blocked from getting to work by what the idiot box calls hippies. You’d slowly hate your heroes. Unfortunately lots of unthinkers fell into the XR bandwagon, even myself to some degree before i realised they allowed cops and had expensive non representing their base(humans) matching signs and uniforms. Easiest way to spot astroturfed groups is money spent on media like signs and uniforms. Any legit group will be censored to hell and will struggle to even have a website up.
Sorry for the mess.
I think it’s far more simple that humans have a tendency to fractionalize everything they’re apart of than it is a projection global conspiracy.
Some animal rights activists believe humans can have beneficial, symbiotic relationships with animals, like working dogs/horses, free range chickens that are well cared for, stuff like that.
Some animal rights activists think the concept of a working dog/horse as abhorrent because animals can’t actually consent to that, the power dynamic makes it unethical, and utilizing the labor of an animal for personal gain is basically just slavery for a creature with less intelligence.
These two groups are closer to each other than they are to any right person that doesn’t care at all for animals, but are still so dynamically opposed that they simply couldn’t operate together because their end goals are dramatically different.
I’m a hardcore progressive. I will work with a capitalist democrat to get my goals met, but I wouldn’t associate with them if I had a better option.
What you and I are saying can happen naturally as well as artificially. I’m mostly talking about how that regardless of if they are co-opting delegitimisation propaganda in origin or natural in origin, that the incorrect one gets amplified through common media in clearly suspicious and divisive ways. There certainly are a lot of differences in each group, some legit and some not. What if the different groups can have a correct subset and an incorrect subset? We are meant to discuss and reject the incorrect subset.
You know how conservatives tend to have this one cherry picked crazy example of us sometimes? Those always feel like propaganda campaigns and if you trace and investigate them more you can see they have questionable roots. An example would be the /r/antiwork mod that interviewed on television. notice how he was the worst possible example of us and went on tv after everyone said that it was a lose/lose scenario, that if they air it, you lost, and if you win they wont air it therefor you still lose.
Why does every group have a very heavily advertised and mysteriously promoted subset that betrays the movement in effect but looks valid superficially? I’ve seen a hundred times more about sovereign citizens than I’ve seen about actual anarchists talking about ideals.
I’m a hardcore progressive. I will work with a capitalist democrat to get my goals met, but I wouldn’t associate with them if I had a better option.
This hurts :( My whole life feels dishonest because I cant find the right people to associate with in real life. I feel your pain.
Well said, thanks for doing the good work of pointing this out.
See other “grassroots” movements such as the Tea Party, Moms for Liberty, TPUSA, etc for the other side of this. These groups have clear and documented funding from billionaire interest groups and conveniently allow corporate media to conflate such far right groups with progressive movements as the same level of extremism.
This sounds a lot like Hanlon’s razor. “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”
Do you really believe that people like spez, Zuckerberg, Musk behave like they do because they want to do favors for other billionaires? Isn’t it much more likely that they’re just … disturbed? That they are narcissistic, megalomaniac, maybe idealistic in their own believe. And in being that, they make stupid decisions because they literally work differently than regular folks.
I’m picking at nits here… but
This sounds a lot like Hanlon’s razor. “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”
Are you really suggesting that no action has ever been malicious that seems stupid? Copying people on the internet doesn’t make
youtheir idea right lol. I personally believe that phrase is damaging and possibly propaganda in origin, same as “absolute power corrupts absolutely”As for the other things you said, I think you can both be correct at the same time.
Well said. Razors are guides in developing theories, not evidence. To present them as evidence is a fallacy. The above conjecture isn’t better explained by stupidity, thats the whole point.
Thank you. I think this is an important nit to pick in the context of this particular discussion.
Ignoring the evidence of Musk’s Twitter nonsense benefiting the same people who helped fund his Twitter buy out is something you could attribute Hanlon’s razor to.
Yeah, I also seriously doubt there’s a big conspiracy happening where ultra rich people are helping each other. Have you looked at those people? Most don’t give a fuck about anyone but themselves.
Musk bought Twitter around the time he was fighting with this guy that had the private jet tracker. I think it’s more reasonable to believe that Musk bought Twitter just to shut that down and now it’s a toy he can play with, where every time he merely touches it, media jumps on it, which feeds his ego massively. And once Twitter is dead, he’ll discard it and move on to the next thing. Like a cat playing with its prey.
Normally I would tend to agree with you, but look where Musk got his “loans” to buy out Twitter. Saudi Arabia and Russia where big “lenders”.
I think it’s more reasonable to believe that Musk bought Twitter just to shut that down and now it’s a toy he can play with, where every time he merely touches it, media jumps on it, which feeds his ego massively.
That’s definitely true. I think it’s also true that the people who financed it were doing so to take advantage of that to their own ends.
The only person in the world you can ever truly know is yourself.
So when I ask myself “If I were spez/zuck/musk why would I do this?”
The answer is usually “because someone gave me a lot of money”
I don’t know about Spez but I don’t think that’s how Musk and Zuck are motivated. The money is a secondary effect of their goal of being “Great Men” in history. Seen through that lens, taking control of the main public square, changing the nature of discussion there (and taking as much credit for it as possible) is an end unto itself for Musk. Especially when you consider that, if he is able to both control and maintain Twitter as the main locus of online discussion, it allows him to try to reshape the wider narrative about the value and importance of his work in general.
I’m not so sure Musk is actually motivated by his own hype, I think that’s part of his professional self branding that he relies on to juice the valuation of his companies. Seen through that lens, taking control of the main public square is a way to juice his rep further and make even more money.
I’m skeptical of ascribing immaterial motives to billionaires.
EDIT Oh! Also, I think the reason enshitification has accelerated so much recently is because of high interest rates. It’s why Silicon Valley Bank imploded, after all. Companies are scrambling to be profitable after the free investor cash has dried up. It’s not good enough to be maybe profitable in an undefined future, they need to be profitable now so they can justify investment. The bubble is deflating - though fortunately, it seems like it’s going to be a soft landing instead of a pop.
While I don’t think there is a specific conspiracy, I do believe that the upper classes enforce class interest and still have a strong sense of class solidarity, something they worked very hard (through their hegemonic control of the media) to excise from the societies they inhabit and predate upon.
Someone like Rupert Murdoch won’t necessarily take action on behalf of specific individuals, but he will fight tooth and nail for the privileges of his fellow billionaires.
I’m glad I’m not the only person thinking about this. I had no idea about the Saudis owning Twitter like that. All decisions made by the rich are for MoneyTM. Usually it’s MoneyTM in either the form of growth (profit, short term) or investment (power, stability, long term). Some of spezs actions are easily explained by MoneyTM when you take into account LLMs mining reddit. But that does not explain being so insanely hardline with their API. There was absolutely a resolution to that that was profitable and didn’t continue giving away “their” information for free. This is where I think a 3rd MoneyTM comes into play: existential investments. These are actions they take to ensure the other two forms of MoneyTM continue to function the way they want them to. Such as tanking the two most significant online tools for organizing collective action against them.
Decisions at that level are made for power. Sometimes money is part of that
I mean, yes, but I think “sometimes” really underestimates role money plays in a capitalist world. Money is power. People who tell you otherwise are trying to sell you something.
While I like both takes, I don’t think even the dumbest billionaire or government wouldn’t recognize the value one centralized tool has. It would have been sufficient to control both Twitter and Reddit, moderate the hell out of topics they don’t like and put them offline in crucial moments. Destroying them without a clear, centralized alternative isn’t really sensible.
I personally expected the Reddit IPO to be the end of any “subversive investment advice”, that might have been on Reddit.
Agreed. It’s no coincidence that both Twitter and Reddit are shitting the bed at the same time.
Elon is pretty clearly an actual idiot, and has managed to get by thus far by just having a seemingly endless supply of fuck you money, but this is just capitalism doing the Predator bicep meme with foreign oligarchs to consolidate power.
I mean, it sort of is. Unless the fed is involved in this billionaire conspiracy also (which the nature of conspiracy theories will undoubtedly have someone saying of course the fed is in on it with the billionaires).
The simple answer really does make the most sense here. Interest rates are on the rise, and platforms like twitter and reddit have been around for a very long time and none of the venture capital backing them has ever turned a real profit despite the money being pumped into them. Investors will pull out money from the riskiest items first when interest rates rise, and the riskiest items are social media platforms that haven’t demonstrated monetization potential even after a decade of use and monolithic control within their spaces. If a link aggregator like Reddit, which is really the only major player in its brand of social media can’t turn a profit with basically no competition why would you continue supporting it?
Great point, and I do think you’re right because that is the most sensible answer to what the motives behind these recent decisions are. There has been a nonstop flow of cheap debt for years that the fed is just now tightening up on.
But these business decisions also happen to align with the interests of deep pocketed bad actors. The why’s of that are conspiracy theories.
Saudi Arabia murdered Khashoggi because he was defying their army of Twitter trolls with a network of volonteers he bankrolled.
Mind you this is not Google doing it on purpose. This is just Musk’s genius idea of blocking tweets without being logged in. Others will drop as well, they just need some time to expire. Also, if you are wondering if they can show tweets to crawler but not show it to others Google doesn’t look favorably on that. Content must appear the same to crawler as well as humans.
Note that Google allows plenty of login gated content which is actually against their indexing terms.
The key is not to force it for every viewer or give a few view credits. The fact that Mollusk gang doesn’t know this is very reflective of their current capabilities. There’s no real talent left at Twitter.
Broken people breaking things.
Throw money around recklessly, regard your broken self as some great lord of a realm, treat people as your slaves, then fiddle with little pet peeves in utter ignorance of how and why they work, watch a cascade effect spiral out of control, blame anyone and everyone but yourself.
This is a right-wing pattern. Look at the orange cock holster and the bullshit he was fixated on while squatting in the White House. The mind of a petulant child.
Could also be realted to not paying the bills google sent him.
people really need to get over this nonsense. yeah, twitter wasn’t paying their bills. but now they have paid it. it was just for some internal analytics services, not the main site, and had nothing to do with twitter’s recent downtime.
google’s not going to retaliate against them after they paid.
In general: cloud provider’s marginal costs for continue to host something while a customer doesn’t pay is negligible. Keeping it running while incurring more receivables, or blocking access while making it clear there is an easy way to reclaim data and functionality, are immensely more profitable. Nothing to “retaliate” really.
I really hope google spammed musk’s phone with calls about the outstanding balance.
The reality is that this guy leading the company is refusing to pays bills for other services like he is on a bankruptcy spree. So not surprising that people don’t get over his ‘he paid it on this one item, so stop’.
Just because he orderer a massive dinner, and finally paid for the drinks, does not make that guy a person of illl repute.
I honestly doubt it is that, but it might affect things in the long run. Musk could be trying to cut costs, but that’s no less worse than trying to force people to pay.
Ahh the genius that is Elon Musk, I’m sure we’re all cowering at his superior intellect.
Tesla and SpaceX must be full of smart people if they can succeed despite Elon Musk shenanigans.
That is literally the complaint from ex-employees of his companies. He is Tony Stark meets Michael Scott. So much money it compensates for sheer stupidity.
I have never heard a more perfect description of Elon Musk.
Michael Scott’s heart can be in the right place, Musk is straight cruel.
Did we see the same show? Micheal Scott is incredibly cruel all the time and his heart is rarely in the right place lol
“Can be”, not “always is”
Literally all you need is enough money and you can pay smart people to do impressive things, while taking all the credit.
SpaceX has a lot to benefit from the fact that a lot of people love the idea of working with rockets but the actual job market was very limited with places like NASA only taking the best of the best. Which doesn’t mean SpaceX has subpar engineers and scientists, humanity just has a lot more to offer than NASA and other smaller space agencies could afford to employ.
It’s absolutely beyond me why these idiots don’t pay people to think of clever things and discourage dumb things.
Imagine having your own “think tank”, it works be like living life on cheat mode.
Smart rich people have advisors they listen to.
Rich people who are too “smart” to listen to advice have sycophants.
This. This baffles me. How he was able to run a company which makes rockets which shuttles between earth and outerspace?
I read a quote somewhere from a former Space X engineer that they basically had to create a system to manage Musk and his fragile ego so that they can function normally without Musk getting in the way.
So basically, Gwynne Shotwell is the one actually calling the day-to-day shots, and happens to be a good Elon-whisperer.
I wonder if other companies, particularly VC-funded ones, have staff dedicated to “managing” the crazy person with the checkbook…
So it takes rocket scientists to manage this guy in such a way to keep him from burning everything down around him?
You’re probably right. And it’s wild to think that safely flying astronauts to the ISS probably wasn’t the hardest part of their day that day.
Short answer: he didn’t.
He didn’t create SpaceX, he bought it.
Great. Do Pinterest next.
Now do Quora.
Quora has to be one of the most useless, misdirecting “resources” out there. No idea how much of this changes once you make an account, but every single question is filled up with ads and other people’s responses to other questions. It looks so confusing and messy. Who would want to sign up for a site that seems so disjointed?
All signing up for Quora gets you is email roundups that keep coming no matter how many times you unsubscribe.
I finally managed to unsubscribe to that crap. Took me forever!
I haven’t gotten any in a while but I’m up to 9 Quora email addresses in my block list.
This became bad enough at my job (I’m a school sysadmin) that I blocked quora.com in our spam filter…students had a habit of signing up for it and like you said, it’s damn near impossible to unsubscribe, let alone show 200+ kids how to unsubscribe.
There was a time quora was genuinely interesting/useful as an a2a site for all your ‘expert opinion’ questions. Now it’s just another social media
And Pinterest. I want my quality searches back.
Use google and add “site:Pinterest.com” then search by images. Works better than Pinterest. Also works for Poshmark.
Good advice except you forgot the minus symbol, this tip will ONLY get Pinterest links.
I think the point is to NOT have pinterest spam your search results that you cannot see without an account.
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For one thing, this is sad because even more of the Internet is no longer reachable. The Internet shrinks, and will continue to get smaller as enshittification continues.
But on the other hand, this is really starting to look like the death knell of Twitter. It’s quickly becoming extremely inconvenient to see any tweets on Twitter now.
Fine by me. I never saw any value in it, even well before Musk took over. The character limit is guaranteed to eliminate any nuance, and the interface makes it incredibly difficult to follow what discussion there is.
I think originally when Twitter was created, the idea was that it would also be accessible via SMS and so the limit was imposed in order to allow a a tweet to fit into one SMS message.
We’ve had Twitter since SMS cost per-message on most plans.
It was great for following breaking news and not much else.
It worked quite well as an internet notice board where everyone could post important information to be shared/linked to.
Now whenever that is tried I just get a login screen
For one thing, this is sad because even more of the Internet is no longer reachable. The Internet shrinks, and will continue to get smaller as enshittification continues.
This was only a problem because of improper centralization in the first place. From that perspective, this is the Internet self-correcting a defect.
Yes, but it will suck in the meanwhile. People expect these links to last. But instead a huge amount of content will no longer be reachable.
I think it’s more along the lines of:
Musk: You can’t see tweets unless you’re logged in.
Google: Challenge accepted.
Was already pretty shit with embeds, now it’s just shit all around
