Twitter is better

[Plasmodium]

6 minutes ago, jross said:

Is 'running out of money' and 'pending collapse' wishful thinking?  Twitter was roughly break even in April. 

Musk is winning his goal for Twitter: it is the best source for truth, timely and more accurate than big news, and less censored.

Not at all.  It is an objective assessment.  Very weird that a company of that scale is compelled to throttle down it's traffic.

[Wrestleknownothing]

1 hour ago, jross said:

Is 'running out of money' and 'pending collapse' wishful thinking?  Twitter was roughly break even in April. 

Musk is winning his goal for Twitter: it is the best source for truth, timely and more accurate than big news, and less censored.

Twitter no longer releases earnings as a private company. Where did you see April earnings?

[VakAttack]

30 minutes ago, Wrestleknownothing said:

Twitter no longer releases earnings as a private company. Where did you see April earnings?

I'm pretty sure April is when Musk said in an interview that Twitter was "roughly breaking even."  Make of that what you will.

[Husker_Du]

Vak with all due respect, wtf are you talking about? 

it seems pretty clear you're one of those lefty snowflakes hoping Musk's twitter fails

because the govt now can't use it to distort and censor.

 

if that's a wrong read, let me know. 

[VakAttack]

10 minutes ago, Husker_Du said:

Vak with all due respect, wtf are you talking about? 

it seems pretty clear you're one of those lefty snowflakes hoping Musk's twitter fails

because the govt now can't use it to distort and censor.

 

if that's a wrong read, let me know. 

I'm honestly not sure what this is even referring to?  My last post was telling @Wrestleknownothing that I believe @jross saying Twitter was breaking even was referring to Musk's own claims, nit an earning statement. I don't personally care if Twitter lives or dies.  But I do find the idea that Twitter is better nowseems to correlate to your political ideology.  I care about it functioning dependably. The functionality and dependability of the site has gone way down.  Online conservative folk want to cheerlead for the guy because he aligns with them politically.  I don’t care.  I'm left leaning, but i use plenty of businesses owned by conservative people that run just fine.  Twitter function worse than it used to.  There isn't currently a viable alternative, so m stuck.with it for now. 

As to Musk specifically, I think he's a very wealthy man with an overinflated ego and overinflated reputation based on some timely investing rather than his own superior intellect.  That doesn't mean he knows nothing but he's not the tech wizard he holds himself out to be.  Mostly, he employs those people.  He's big idea guy, which is fine, but actually getting those ideas to market?  Not his forte.

[BobDole]

Something interesting I just heard is that everyone that had embedded tweets on their websites... such as this one were blocked. However, the sites would constantly try to retrieve the information from Twitter. Thus that caused almost a self imposed DoDs attack on the Twitter servers!

As you can see here we usually show off the last tweets from InterMat, but it is now not working.

 

[billyhoyle]

10 hours ago, headshuck said:

Interesting. Elon stepped on a rattlesnake.
 

Qanon/flat earther level content right here. 

[jross]

Musk votes blue… so does not align conservative… he just isn’t crazy left.

 Twitter is going to die any day now

[VakAttack]

1 hour ago, jross said:

Musk votes blue… so does not align conservative… he just isn’t crazy left.

 Twitter is going to die any day now

Musk has endorsed Ron DeSantis, who is very right-wing.  Maybe he voted Dem at one point in his life, but he's very obviously shifted his politics now.  It happens.  It happened to me, for example, just reverse of him.

[Wrestleknownothing]

From Matt Levine's Money Stuff newsletter today.

Well, look, if I were the newly hired chief executive officer of a social media company, and if the directors and shareholders who brought me in as CEO had told me that my main mission was to turn around the company’s precarious financial situation by improving our position with advertisers, and if I spent my first few weeks reassuring advertisers and rebuilding relationships and talking up our site’s unique audience and powerful engagement, and then one day my head of software engineering came to me and said “hey boss, too many people were too engaged with too many posts, so I had to limit everyone’s ability to view posts on our site, just FYI,” I would … probably … fire ... him?

I mean I suppose I might ask questions like “Is this because of some technological limitation on our system? Is it because you were monkeying with the code without understanding it? Is it because you tried to stop people from reading the site without logging in, [3] and messed up and stopped them from reading the site even when they logged in? Is it because you fired and demoralized too many engineers so no one was left to keep the systems running normally? Is it because you forgot to pay the cloud bills? Is it because deep down you don’t like it when people read posts on our site and you want to stop them, or you don’t like relying on ad revenue and want to sabotage my ability to sell ads?” Those are all interesting questions, and I suppose having the answers would help my new head of software engineering fix whatever this guy broke. But no matter what the answers are, this guy’s gotta go. If you are in charge of the software engineers at a social media site, and you make it so that people can’t read the site, that’s bad.

Anyway something very funny happened at Twitter this weekend:

Twitter began limiting how many posts users can read on its platform, an unusual move that came as owner Elon Musk says he is fighting companies trying to use its data for developing artificial intelligence programs. 

Musk on Saturday detailed the temporary changes, which involved limiting unverified accounts to reading just 600 posts a day while verified accounts—those paying a monthly subscription—can read 6,000 posts daily. He later announced multiple increases to the number of allowed posts.

“To address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation, we’ve applied the following temporary limits,” Musk tweeted. …

“It’s unprecedented as far as I know since the time of” internet bulletin boards, Jason Goldman, a former Twitter executive who has been critical of Musk’s stewardship, said about the limits. “To set limits so low that it renders the site unusable to average users is just the latest in the purely extractive approach the new ownership is taking.”

Oh man! Musk, the head of Twitter's software and servers teams, is gonna be in so much trouble when his boss, Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino, gets to the office today.

Oh I kid, I kid, but what a weird job that must be. The CEO job I mean. The software-and-servers job isn’t that weird — he’s in charge of a website — but he manages to make it weird.

[jross]

Matt Levine knows nothing about engineering, is not paying attention, or cannot comprehend.  

[mspart]

57 minutes ago, Wrestleknownothing said:

Musk on Saturday detailed the temporary changes, which involved limiting unverified accounts to reading just 600 posts a day while verified accounts—those paying a monthly subscription—can read 6,000 posts daily. He later announced multiple increases to the number of allowed posts.

Is this a thing average users do, read 600-6000 posts a day?   Every day?   That seems like more than a full time job worth of time.   Not being on Twitter, I'm astounded.   So it doesn't seem like much of a limit.  

600 posts a day is 75 posts/hour for an 8  hour day.    That's more than 1 per minute. 

6000 posts a day is 750 posts/hour for 8 hour day. 

mspart

[Wrestleknownothing]

5 minutes ago, mspart said:

Is this a thing average users do, read 600-6000 posts a day?   Every day?   That seems like more than a full time job worth of time.   Not being on Twitter, I'm astounded.   So it doesn't seem like much of a limit.  

600 posts a day is 75 posts/hour for an 8  hour day.    That's more than 1 per minute. 

6000 posts a day is 750 posts/hour for 8 hour day. 

mspart

Not on Twitter either, but my daughter's fiance said he can go through 600 tweets in minutes.

[mspart]

In 10 minutes, that is 60 tweets a minute, which is one tweet a second.   I could do that but would not actually understand anything.   So I guess it depends on if he means 10 minutes or 180 minutes or more when he says minutes.  

mspart

[headshuck]

Not on Twitter either, but my daughter's fiance said he can go through 600 tweets in minutes.

That’s a special skill like speed reading a textbook.

[Wrestleknownothing]

9 minutes ago, mspart said:

In 10 minutes, that is 60 tweets a minute, which is one tweet a second.   I could do that but would not actually understand anything.   So I guess it depends on if he means 10 minutes or 180 minutes or more when he says minutes.  

mspart

I assume if you scroll past tweets without reading them that counts against your quota. I also assume he exaggerated a bit.

[Plasmodium]

My understanding is a reply is also a tweet, so scrolling adds up fast.   I don't have an account, but I click on embedded tweets fairly often and I can no longer read those on Twitter.  That use case seems very common to me and surely drives ad revenue.  This policy leaves money on the table.

Edited July 3, 2023 by Plasmodium

[Wrestleknownothing]

3 minutes ago, Plasmodium said:

My understanding is a reply is also a tweet, so scrolling adds up fast.   I don't have an account, but I click on embedded tweets fairly often and I can no longer read those on Twitter.  That use case seems very common to me and surely drives ad revenue.  This policy leaves money on the table.

It does not. Twitter sells ads based on monetizable daily active users. 

Twitter discloses the monetizable daily active usage (mDAU), which defines as a number of logged accounts that were identified by Twitter and were able to show ads. Twitter has 206 million daily active users.

The number of mDAU was the center of Musk's attempt to back out of the merger. As an aside, the argument he attempted to make would never have worked as a means to invalidate the binding merger agreement he signed.

[BobDole]

1 hour ago, mspart said:

Is this a thing average users do, read 600-6000 posts a day?   Every day?   That seems like more than a full time job worth of time.   Not being on Twitter, I'm astounded.   So it doesn't seem like much of a limit.  

600 posts a day is 75 posts/hour for an 8  hour day.    That's more than 1 per minute. 

6000 posts a day is 750 posts/hour for 8 hour day. 

mspart

Hey Boomer, you don't always read every tweet. Most of the time people scroll for something they want to read. 

[GreatWhiteNorth]

9 hours ago, jross said:

Matt Levine knows nothing about engineering, is not paying attention, or cannot comprehend.  

You post as if you're an expert. Would be interested in hearing your insight... Say more.

[jross]

6 hours ago, GreatWhiteNorth said:

You post as if you're an expert. Would be interested in hearing your insight... Say more.

I am a software engineer that has owned rate limited APIs.  I’ll go with the industry explanation and trust what Musk said his reasons are.

Edited July 4, 2023 by jross
Clarify that I created rate limited APIs to avoid confusion that I just consumed them in code.

[BobDole]

35 minutes ago, jross said:

I am a software engineer that has owned rate limited APIs.  I’ll go with the industry explanation and trust what Musk said his reasons are.

Whether you believe Musk or not, limiting the amount of time I can be on Twitter isn't good for advertisers.

[VakAttack]

20 minutes ago, BobDole said:

Whether you believe Musk or not, limiting the amount of time I can be on Twitter isn't good for advertisers.

A classic in the "this terrible thing that happened to me is ACTUALLY good!" genre.

[Wrestleknownothing]

49 minutes ago, BobDole said:

Whether you believe Musk or not, limiting the amount of time I can be on Twitter isn't good for advertisers.

Part of Levine's take is also something I said a long way back in this thread (I believe) about how terrible it would be to be Musk's "boss" as CEO. Of course, you get paid well to be miserable and laughed at. That is, assuming you can collect.

[Wrestleknownothing]

1 hour ago, jross said:

I am a software engineer that has owned rate limited APIs.  I’ll go with the industry explanation and trust what Musk said his reasons are.

As a software engineer would you want to work for Musk at Twitter?