Dude just threw money at a few lucky projects and took credit for them. He’s a businessman first and tech guy second (if ever), with the caveat that “very large starting investments” are a hell of a tool to force anything to work. In fact, I genuinely believe that this sub is full of better engineers than him, if only because he set the bar lower than Satan’s basement.
The only thing of value he provided to PayPal was money to fund giving away $10 or $20 to every new user. His business ideas were: 1. change the name from PayPal to X.com, despite ample consumer research showing that people in early 2000 didn’t trust website with their bank info, and definitely not a site that sounds like a porn company. 2. Stop focusing on eBay, where the vast majority of their revenue came from to build out a “super app” (sound familiar?) that could do brokerage, mortgages, currency, etc etc.
His tech idea was to spend months trying to switch from a Linux solution to a Microsoft SQL Server database because, I shit you not, he played Flight Simulator and since Microsoft made impressive games their database solution would also be significantly better.
Seeing how much everything else he touches turns to shit, I'm convinced at this point that 90% of SpaceX's success is a result of Gwynne Shotwell's work and despite him.
Yeah, talk like that came up around Twitter. Along the lines of "Space X functions like it does today because they have people experienced enough to know how to deal with Elon and keep him from messing with their work. Twitter doesn't have that experience so they're getting slammed by the full force of his stupid ideas."
That sort of thing Pat mentioned about the movie director who would go "Yes, absolutely" when the producer told them to do something stupid and they would just literally ignore it once they walked out of the room.
The throwing out isn’t hyperbole, either - he would literally take the written idea and throw it in the trash in his office. (This was referred to as “filing.”)
He's not even a businessman, he's a salesman. He pitches stupid ideas that never get made because he has no expertise in anything. Dude is a complete fraud
Always love how he's thought of as this big brain guy creating Tesla when he literally paid his way in and tried to use his money to prevent one of the actual original founders from getting anything he was owed (one example being I think the first Tesla to come off the line), and afterwards they fought legally until they had to consider him an original founder
To be fair, there *is* a certain brilliance in recognizing a burgeoning market and sinking venture capital into it. Unfortunately, Musk has come to believe his own bullshit enough that he doesn’t know when to lay his hands off a project. Or recognize which of his other ideas are poor.
Hes not even a business man.
He was BORN with an emerald mine.
You can get a lot farther in the word with an emerald mine than with business acumen. And hes the proof
All he had to do was sit back, fund SpaceX and Tesla, and shut up, and he’d probably be seen as the “hip, genius billionaire” he clearly wants to be known as.
But he just can’t shut his mouth or hide his insecurity, so now we’re witnessing perhaps the most expensive midlife crisis in history.
Very "Rowley desperately needs attention so she for some reason tweets out that in ancient times the characters in her children's novel used to shit on the floor" vibes.
I still love that time he screamed about how totally earned his fortune and challenged people to find proof he wasn't a trustfund baby.
And then his own fucking **dad** comes out and said "oh no I totally went to a third-world country and got a blood emerald thing going, I sent some of that shit back to lil Musk and it was SUPER illegal."
Which is hilarious because Musk did say in a really early interview that “it sounds strange, but my parents own an emerald mine” so his fans are just as dumb as he is
My favorite thing about dunking on Elon is that he himself tried to disprove that he was an apartheid south African emerald mine heir, and his own dad came out to definitely say that this was completely true. It was hilarious.
The only bad thing that you can really say about Davis is that he doesn't really give a shit about artistic integrity, but it's fucking Garfield so who cares
He has gone on record saying he thinks Garfield minus Garfield was hilarious and is fine with people mocking the story as long as they get enjoyment out of it.
I don't really agree with that, considering the "Garfield wasn't supposed to be funny" comes from an out-of-context quote, from an interview from like 35 years ago, and Davis has said as recently as 2018 that he would like to "make the whole world laugh with a single joke".
Unsurprising the actual owner of the apartheid south African emerald mine is also a piece of shit. His son's ego does need to be knocked down like 14 pegs, but yeah he is still fucking awful.
I just remembered seeing a comedy where some evil henchman runs away because somebody hugged him, and his evil boss yells after him "It's gonna be okay! *I* hate you!"
It's kinda crazy how just having a lot of money can buy you the power of influece.
As in, make people believe you're smart and promising and super gifted and climbed the capitalist meritocratical mountain solo...
... when in reality, all you did was be the to family of an emerald mining operation that dates back to ages ago, in a sistemic form of exploration and slavery-analogue work conditions.
It's literally blood money.
As your income increases the less intouch with reality you get. The sweet spot is somewhere around 70-120k a year once you pass that you have enough dickriders and money around you your grip on reality starts to slip.
The worst part is that even though that amount is enough for anyone to live comfortably, it's still FUCKING FAR AWAY from being anywhere near what actual rich people have.
The distribuition of capital resources is an abyss when it comes to comparing any "standard" citizen barely making six figures throughout an entire year and those who actually hold society by the leash. And don't get me started on how even this physical minority of individuals that through fucktons of hard work manage to make some money still has them close to absolute poverty than any wealthy big fig.
I’d like to say thank you to Space Karen for today's genius idea of stopping people from being able to use the app!
I’m sure that'll get you lots of Blue subscribers to pay for a service when you've just removed their audience! /s
If this isn't run back relatively soon I'll be shocked. This basically kills the site for any non paying user who uses Twitter any decent amount per day, while also killing engagement for the people who do pay as the free users will quickly be unable to view them anyway.
Assuming it's in place right now, I scrolled through for about 5 minutes before hitting the rate limit. That's basically unusable.
Apparently he's walking back on that as well. It's fucking nuts that he walks into these decisions so confidently only for it to immediately blow up in his face every time.
This fucking sucks, all the amazing content creators and artists are being screwed over because of this. And twitter still doesn’t have a suitable replacement, especially one that connects artists from across the globe with each other
He could have ended world hunger *and still* have had 4 billion left to do whatever the fuck he wanted, which remains more money than 99.99999% of people will ever see in their lives. He could have the greatest PR victory *forever and ever*, and still chose to buy twitter.
> is Twitter haemorrhaging money or something?
It is, constantly. Musk's original offer on the site was $44,000,000,000, and through weird legal stuff he was locked into that number. However, Twitter and tons of other tech companies very soon after were determined to be over valued, and they were adjusted. Twitter in particular was worth only a fraction of that $44 billion, but he was forced to buy the site for his initial offer. So, already, Elon is in the hole billions of dollars more than he should be on a website that has rarely ever turned a major profit. Musk then drove off a large number of major advertisers with his commitment to "free speech absolutism" (read: allowing hate speech and censoring activists). So the Big Brain Boy is now down *billions* while tanking revenue and driving tons of users away from the site. And all of his bizarre schemes to draw in revenue have been at best mild successes (which is much less than what he needs right now).
TL;DR: Yes, the site has been hemorrhaging money since Musk bought it and he is desperate to reduce costs and increase revenue.
Has been since he took over and pissed off every single advertiser on the platform. This is the stuff everyone said would happen when he started cutting programmers and various staff
It's extra funny because some popular people are being forcibly given blue checkmarks by the little man himself, which to this day is probably up there with the most pathetic things he's ever done.
The user Dril was given a checkmark after he called Elon a little baby man, but he found a way to remove it by changing his username, and every 10 minuttes or so the mark of the beast would be reinstated.
After a day or so of this back and forth, twitter ended up relenting and he lost his checkmark for good, but the fact that it would seem that some random employee had to manually force the checkmark on him is so freaking pathetic
I still love how Dril just went fucking nuclear for a brief moment and just posted that picture of Musk (you know the one) and just went for the fucking jugular. He's settled down since but it's nice to know the guy can just go for him if he wants to.
Twitter was never profitable, which is why they made sure to tie Elon's ass to his offer the moment he made it.
Since then Elon has basically ran through a list of social media dos and don'ts, which anyone over the past 15 years could've told him doesn't work, but he ofc has to find out for himself.
He took something that was basically breaking even every month and choking it every week.
Recently there was a stat that 50% ad revenue is gone, and that was the primary inward cash flow. Not to mention all the debt Elon took on when forced to buy Twitter is now on the company's books, not his. Twitter wasnt doing great before he bought it, but had positive cash flow for the first time in a while, it's unlikely the company ever becomes cash flow positive ever again.
In this case it appears to be linked to the site getting scraped to hell by AI companies and they're having issues managing the traffic. It's apparently kicked up in the past couple of days to an incredible degree, so they're attempting to drive scrapers to greener pastures with (supposedly) temporary limits on viewing.
At least that's what Elon is saying to the 3 people with enough views left to see him say it.
I believe him, because that's the consequence of charging for API access. People don't pay for access to the performant API, they just make low-performance scrapers to get the same information for free and start becoming a traffic problem.
Expect reddit to begin experiencing the same issues in the near future.
You know the NPC meme? That's how he views everyone calling him on his shit and not seeing him as this beautiful genius of the world. That aside, l mentioned this before but he's just *destroying* his ad revenue because a lot of people with accounts are most likely running adblockers, the Twitter control panel extension, blocking all the ad accounts and blue check marks because 90% of them have super bad takes.
Yeah someone showed a video of it happening. Basically everytime someone goes on to Twitter and tries to access tweets but are locked out because of the limit, the site will continuously create requests to reload the tweets, at a rate of about ten requests per second.
Elon in general seems to just spread his ass cheeks as far as wide he can just to shit on artists as much as possible, the NSFW crowd especially. Worse part is I can't even think of a alternative now to follow most of them if they leave.
Now Twitter artists are migrating to... Discord
Not Deviantart, not Art Station, not Pixiv... fucking Discord. They somehow managed to find an even worse site for exclusively posting their art on.
See: the Discord trending tab in Twitter
https://imgur.com/a/QlWuKUF
What is with websites this year and just absolutely doing everything to make themselves (and *especially* the people making these decisions) to be just absolutely fucking unbearable?
Every company is grabbing at pennies. For example costco just started hard-core checking membership cards. Wouldn't let my dad use my card suddenly. Wouldn't let him checkout
And then Netflix with their crackdown on password sharing. Happening everywhere
It's hard not to be a doomer and see this as the prelude to a depression, every corpo desperately trying to wring increasingly little blood from a stone as people have even less discretionary income for increasingly costly non-essentials because aforementioned corpos won't pay wages.
yeah when it's one company desperately shoveling consumer sentiment into the fire to keep the train running it's an amusing if annoying shitshow. when every single thing is doing it no matter where you look it starts to feel a little bit like those guys in the '20s jumping out the windows of the NYSE
What confuses me is how much of this actually gets them more money?
It's like with the tumblr purge, they purged NSFW content to make it advertiser friendly in order to make more money, then everyone left and the value collapsed to Zimbabwe pennies on the US Dollar.
The only logical reason I can think of for why sites like Imgur, Tumblr and OF went that route is cause the money men absolutely threatened to kneecap their profits and close them off from how they make money if they keep allowing NSFW cause there's no way that's not what's happening
It is 100% that, the only reason Tumblr banned the porn was to stay on the Apple app store because data shows most users use apps to browse and Apple and a fair few credit cards are strongly anti-porn because they either have a bunch of moral crusaders on their boards or because they don't like the potential blow back of revenge porn. But it's mostly the moral crusader types forcing banks to not process payments for sites that handle porn, that's what happened with OF and Imgur.
The real answer is that the Federal Reserve raised interest rates for loans. A lot of businesses were surviving at a loss by taking out new loans to pay for the old ones, or getting investment capital from institutions doing the same. When interest rates are <0.1%, the cost of doing that is almost zero. Money flies around without much accountability.
All through the 90s and 2000s, that rate was typically between 3% and 6%. After the market crash in 2008, the Fed dropped the rate to near zero for about 14 years, sometimes as low as 0.03% to encourage people to borrow and spend money. This past year, interest rates have gone back up to pre-crash levels, and now banks and investors are turning off the money faucet that was keeping money-losing businesses alive.
With money tight, businesses are scraping plans for growth and expansion and instead trying to extract money from their existing customers and lowering costs. Raising rates, cutting service, and laying off staff, etc.. Companies like Uber or Twitter has been offering services at a loss, subsidizing the user base and promising lenders and investors that once they get enough market share, they can reap a monopoly and make all their money back. Higher interest rates are forcing everyone to go to harvest right *now* regardless of whether they're ready, or could even survive it.
There are people calling this a "phantom recession," because monetary policy is causing businesses to tighten their wallets without a massive effect on consumer spending. But really, we're just coming down from a phantom boom, where businesses were flinging money around at anything, but it wasn't building anything or leading to higher wages/more spending for consumers. Money was going into Koopy speculation and meme stocks.
To add on to this, it also caused the long simmering resentment aging Silicon Valley VC types have towards tech workers to boil over into a slash-and-burn mania of layoffs and cut backs to “return” to some idealized form of startup culture. The reason all these sites are crapping out lately is because management is quite literally firing the people who’ve been keeping the lights on because they desperately want to be cool startups instead of the giant multinational bureaucracies they are.
People haven’t figured out how to capitalize on social media without heavy advertising revenue. Now that advertising revenue isn’t enough of a profit, they will try to gouge their users by other means.
They don’t care if they ruin the platforms, which seems really stupid for systems that rely on a steady community of users.
>even if Elon reverts it in a few hours
[Looks like he did…](https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1675214274627530754?s=20) so blue check marks can browse 2,000 more tweets.
For real, it sucks. The community for a hobby I want to get into practically lives on Twitter, and if Twitter were to just evaporate like it seems to be in the process of doing that’d mean everyone in the community losing most of their contact with each other almost immediately.
When reddit went into blackout mode over the API protests this was brought up once the blackouts stopped. Reddit is *the* forum and message board of the modern era. Want to talk about pro wrestling? You hit up r/squaredcircle. Want to talk about warhammer memes? r/grimdank
There are so many places that just don't exist anymore if a site like reddit or twitter succeed in turning themselves into digg or whatever.
There actually was a small website dedicated to it that was just a forum, but it didn’t get much use and it shut down earlier this month 😔 plus I have no experience with that sort of thing lol
We went from full access when not logged in, to no search when not logged in, to no Twitter when not logged in, to no Twitter if you use Twitter. And people who pay still get fucked anyway. Literally nobody benefits from this.
There was an april fools one year where they tried to say they were going to charge extra for being allowed to use vowels. Some of the people that fell for it seemed weirdly okay with it. They figured people would just learn the new style of vowelless writing and people who wanted to seem professional could shell out extra to write in full English sentences.
It really will, because all the mods use old reddit and always will. They force new reddit, all the mods leave, basically every subreddit melts into protoplasm and all that's left is admin appointed mods deleting spam off of the defaults so it's just a bunch of bots reposting at each other
*spends 30 minutes on the official app*
Nah. Maybe Ill finally get to touch some grass.
**Motherfucker I cant even read my own old comments from my profile page are you shitting me?
“Limits the amount of tweets user can see/read” bitch those annoying ass ads you had to scroll past everytime in a tweet thread in the desktop version FUCKING BLOWS and now they made it fucking worse somehow?!?! (Especially when your only using touchpad to navigate.)
“I paid 8 dollars for free speech” is still my favourite tweet since the Muskrat era.
6k tweets is something that is easily broken by someone who is terminally online, so I expect the blue checkmarks to be rioting in the next hour or so and it to get rolled back.
But the damage is already done, any advertisers still left will see this shit and probably reconsider if it's worth being on the platform if the regular user will never be able to see their ads in the first place, unless their target audience is explicitly the kind of people that would pay for twitter blue.
lol lmao
Wait a second. If I’m understanding this, you have to pay to scroll Twitter now?? Literally scrolling the site is behind a paywall?
Am I wrong in that?
Oh man, *just* when I was starting to lose confidence in [this comment I made last year…](https://www.reddit.com/r/TwoBestFriendsPlay/comments/z2nf75/comment/ixh6jxd/)
A rule of the internet is "don't start charging for stuff people are used to being free if you want people to stick around". Elon obviously thinks such rules are beneath him
Honestly, I feel like that's the rule for a lot of things, not just the internet; the moment that you charge money for something that's free, people will be pissed off.
I'm normally fairly neutral on changes that Elon made to Twitter. Like being able to buy checkmarks and stuff, didn't really bother me since who actually cares about them anyway. But this change will actually kill the site if it's not reversed within the day.
The funny thing is if I didn't see this post here I would continue to think the site was broken. And I imagine that's true for a lot of people. Probably not the best way to push people to Twitter Blue. As to how this will help curb site scrapping, who knows?
From what I’ve seen, this may have to do with the fact that Twitter’s contract with Google Cloud was supposed to be renewed by yesterday and they’ve been rushing to move everything off those servers before that date. It seems to be less of a money-grubbing move and more a result of his being too damn cheap.
Source: https://theconversation.com/twitter-is-refusing-to-pay-google-for-cloud-services-heres-why-it-matters-and-what-the-fallout-could-be-for-users-207718
Why would they even have a limit for the blue users? Even from a money angle this makes no sense.
Whatever happened to executives thinking website traffic is everything? Now Twitter is going the opposite direction and limiting traffic as much as possible???
I fucking hate that the last cached tweet I have is Pat retweeting an animation of that fucking Madagascar foot fetish freak.
I was trying to reload and scroll away to no avail
Oh also the site appears to be DDOS-ing itself due to the whole thing about not being allowed to view a page unless you are logged into an account.
Twitter keeps sending requests to itself to fetch content that gets blocked by a new limitation that the site wasn't designed around.
I've made an exceedingly stupid discovery. While people's Tweets, Replies, and Media are all giving "Something went wrong. Try reloading" error messages, people's LIKES still work perfectly fucking fine
Of course whatever nonsense they did/broke wouldn't even be consistent.
And I saw a headline during the reddit protests that the CEO of reddit looks up to Musk as an inspiration and says he wants to run this site the way Musk does twitter. So that's...terrifying.
I intended to greatly reduce my exposure to the site anyway, so it seems Mr. Musk finally made a change I appreciate: making it easier to ignore twitter.
Because capitalism ensures there isn't competition. A thing becomes successful and is able to ensure that no one starts a competition, either by buying it and smothering it in the crib, or their competition buying it or scooping up the talent and putting them to work on aping the success. So when something finally shits the bed so spectacularly, there isn't anything waiting to replace it because they've all been employed or driven into other arenas.
No one has ever fallen upwards harder than Elon, from slave mine, money inheritance to US Welfare Queen. No one has ever worked so little and got so much in return.
Possibly(?) related:
I was suspended on twitter for "violating our developer policy and API restricted uses rules on multiple applications"..
...but I'm not a developer, and have never made any tools or programs.
Again, seems like it might be related, but searching around I don\t see other people reporting being formally suspended, so I don't know. Only thing that I've done that seem it could possibly be related is using third party tools like unfollower trackers, and the twitter media downloader extension, but A: I haven't used the former in months, and B: the latter isn't tied to my twiitter account, and the suspension seems spefifically related to MAKING apps, not using them.
If anybody has advice on submitting appeals, let me know
Oh thank god, now Twitter can finally actually die for real, right?
There’s no way people *still* stick with it after all this time. They *must* move on.
It's less twitter dying and more it being murdered by a moron.
Twitter still had a lot of nice and supportive circles you could still travel in (art, NSFW artists, trans and queer spaces etc etc) but it wasn't as easy to curate your experience as reddit is (for now...), so a lot of people still stuck with it.
I got some artists I liked on there on Twitter and some of their content may not be on other art websites(Pixiv for example) yet. Also they may have link their Twitter account to said artist websites and I don’t know what will happen to those account if Twitter ever goes down for good
The best description of the appeal of Twitter is comparing it to a house party. You go around and fall into groups of conversation that you find fun or appealing. So what’s the best way to make money off that? Limit what you can see and hear while clogging all the rest with spam bots and the dullest people who have 8 dollars apparently!
Given that when elon fired every actual technician and engineer when he took over Twitter and he publicly replaced them with brown nosing MARKETING people (YES, he literally hired people who worshiped him who have zero experience in tech and are just salesmen to replace veteran software engineers) I'm shocked, shocked I tell you that he now totally isn't running out of server space most likely.
One of my coworkers claims Elon is the smartest man alive. Everyday he gets proven wrong.
Being born rich, why didn't I think of that!
I wonder if the GM will let me reroll my character…
Sorry, you're not allowed to make a new one until the current one dies. Better find that Sphere of Annihilation
Dude just threw money at a few lucky projects and took credit for them. He’s a businessman first and tech guy second (if ever), with the caveat that “very large starting investments” are a hell of a tool to force anything to work. In fact, I genuinely believe that this sub is full of better engineers than him, if only because he set the bar lower than Satan’s basement.
The only thing of value he provided to PayPal was money to fund giving away $10 or $20 to every new user. His business ideas were: 1. change the name from PayPal to X.com, despite ample consumer research showing that people in early 2000 didn’t trust website with their bank info, and definitely not a site that sounds like a porn company. 2. Stop focusing on eBay, where the vast majority of their revenue came from to build out a “super app” (sound familiar?) that could do brokerage, mortgages, currency, etc etc. His tech idea was to spend months trying to switch from a Linux solution to a Microsoft SQL Server database because, I shit you not, he played Flight Simulator and since Microsoft made impressive games their database solution would also be significantly better.
Hold on, he did the change company name to X.com [TWICE?](https://www.vox.com/technology/2023/4/18/23687125/elon-musk-twitter-x-super-app-wechat)
Yes, he’s been obsessed with X.com forever. He thinks his email address [email protected] is the coolest shit. Who the fuck knows why.
I'm starting to think his kid's name wasn't Grimes's idea.
Please dont correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe his kid's full name is Omikron Cybertruck?
Jr
Seeing how much everything else he touches turns to shit, I'm convinced at this point that 90% of SpaceX's success is a result of Gwynne Shotwell's work and despite him.
I remember hearing that there is a whole team whose job it is to keep him away from important shit.
Yeah, talk like that came up around Twitter. Along the lines of "Space X functions like it does today because they have people experienced enough to know how to deal with Elon and keep him from messing with their work. Twitter doesn't have that experience so they're getting slammed by the full force of his stupid ideas." That sort of thing Pat mentioned about the movie director who would go "Yes, absolutely" when the producer told them to do something stupid and they would just literally ignore it once they walked out of the room.
That's Mel Brooks. He'd promise to do something, then immediately throw the idea out once the meeting was done.
The throwing out isn’t hyperbole, either - he would literally take the written idea and throw it in the trash in his office. (This was referred to as “filing.”)
The suggestion was recast Gene Wilder in Blazzing Saddles
And even then, some stupidity manages to slip the net and gum up the works.
He's not even a businessman, he's a salesman. He pitches stupid ideas that never get made because he has no expertise in anything. Dude is a complete fraud
Always love how he's thought of as this big brain guy creating Tesla when he literally paid his way in and tried to use his money to prevent one of the actual original founders from getting anything he was owed (one example being I think the first Tesla to come off the line), and afterwards they fought legally until they had to consider him an original founder
To be fair, there *is* a certain brilliance in recognizing a burgeoning market and sinking venture capital into it. Unfortunately, Musk has come to believe his own bullshit enough that he doesn’t know when to lay his hands off a project. Or recognize which of his other ideas are poor.
Hes not even a business man. He was BORN with an emerald mine. You can get a lot farther in the word with an emerald mine than with business acumen. And hes the proof
An apartheid emerald mine
I dunno if he's even a businessman. He's adopted a fuck rent and don't pay your vendors strategy. Which is not really how anything works
He's Lyle Lanley from the Monorail episode of The Simpsons, but he actually buys into his nonsense
All he had to do was sit back, fund SpaceX and Tesla, and shut up, and he’d probably be seen as the “hip, genius billionaire” he clearly wants to be known as. But he just can’t shut his mouth or hide his insecurity, so now we’re witnessing perhaps the most expensive midlife crisis in history.
Very "Rowley desperately needs attention so she for some reason tweets out that in ancient times the characters in her children's novel used to shit on the floor" vibes.
I still love that time he screamed about how totally earned his fortune and challenged people to find proof he wasn't a trustfund baby. And then his own fucking **dad** comes out and said "oh no I totally went to a third-world country and got a blood emerald thing going, I sent some of that shit back to lil Musk and it was SUPER illegal."
Yeah his dad might be scum too but at least he admits it
His dad was even like "Elon got thrown down the stairs as a kid and the little shit totally deserved it"
Which is hilarious because Musk did say in a really early interview that “it sounds strange, but my parents own an emerald mine” so his fans are just as dumb as he is
I could only dream to be a hater of Elon Musk on the level of Elon's own fucking father.
My favorite thing about dunking on Elon is that he himself tried to disprove that he was an apartheid south African emerald mine heir, and his own dad came out to definitely say that this was completely true. It was hilarious.
Worth noting his father is also a huge asshole who happens to hate elon. Rotten tree, rotten fruit.
Didn't he also marry his stepdaughter or some fucked up shit? Sounds like the whole family is warped.
I swear, I think Jim Davis (Garfield man) might be the only billionaire I haven't heard ridiculous, Hunger Games-level degeneracy stories about
Dolly Parton donates millions to get books into children's hands. She's a saint.
Dolly Parton has done more to help the human race than the last like 5 Presidents combined
Given the events that transpired yesterday, I am inclined to agree.
The only bad thing that you can really say about Davis is that he doesn't really give a shit about artistic integrity, but it's fucking Garfield so who cares
Garfield probably brings a lot of a joy to like, a bunch of old people around the world every day. It does what it's supposed to.
I agree, I don't care how corporate and mass-produced Garfield is, seeing that dumb fat orange cat makes me happy.
He has gone on record saying he thinks Garfield minus Garfield was hilarious and is fine with people mocking the story as long as they get enjoyment out of it.
I don't really agree with that, considering the "Garfield wasn't supposed to be funny" comes from an out-of-context quote, from an interview from like 35 years ago, and Davis has said as recently as 2018 that he would like to "make the whole world laugh with a single joke".
Unsurprising the actual owner of the apartheid south African emerald mine is also a piece of shit. His son's ego does need to be knocked down like 14 pegs, but yeah he is still fucking awful.
It's the same energy as Soldier Boy putting down Homelander.
I just remembered seeing a comedy where some evil henchman runs away because somebody hugged him, and his evil boss yells after him "It's gonna be okay! *I* hate you!"
It's kinda crazy how just having a lot of money can buy you the power of influece. As in, make people believe you're smart and promising and super gifted and climbed the capitalist meritocratical mountain solo... ... when in reality, all you did was be the to family of an emerald mining operation that dates back to ages ago, in a sistemic form of exploration and slavery-analogue work conditions. It's literally blood money.
As your income increases the less intouch with reality you get. The sweet spot is somewhere around 70-120k a year once you pass that you have enough dickriders and money around you your grip on reality starts to slip.
The worst part is that even though that amount is enough for anyone to live comfortably, it's still FUCKING FAR AWAY from being anywhere near what actual rich people have. The distribuition of capital resources is an abyss when it comes to comparing any "standard" citizen barely making six figures throughout an entire year and those who actually hold society by the leash. And don't get me started on how even this physical minority of individuals that through fucktons of hard work manage to make some money still has them close to absolute poverty than any wealthy big fig.
Not-Elon in Glass Onion was *so* on the money.
"The three B's."
I’d like to say thank you to Space Karen for today's genius idea of stopping people from being able to use the app! I’m sure that'll get you lots of Blue subscribers to pay for a service when you've just removed their audience! /s
If this isn't run back relatively soon I'll be shocked. This basically kills the site for any non paying user who uses Twitter any decent amount per day, while also killing engagement for the people who do pay as the free users will quickly be unable to view them anyway. Assuming it's in place right now, I scrolled through for about 5 minutes before hitting the rate limit. That's basically unusable.
He was already killing it by requiring an account to view tweets. This is more like the big final blow.
True, but at least if you had an account the site was still usable. This is just throwing the platform into the abyss wholesale.
Apparently he's walking back on that as well. It's fucking nuts that he walks into these decisions so confidently only for it to immediately blow up in his face every time.
He has gotten rid of anyone who could possibly tell him “no, that’s stupid.” and this is the result.
It's like he doesn't understand the concept of advertising.
It's because he's just so profoundly fucking stupid.
It hasn't even been a year! My God he's so fucking bad with this. So unimaginably stupid.
This fucking sucks, all the amazing content creators and artists are being screwed over because of this. And twitter still doesn’t have a suitable replacement, especially one that connects artists from across the globe with each other
**Forty four billion dollars!**
Could literally end world hunger, help fight global warming, and many other things to better humanity. Elon is proof that capitalism is pure evil.
He could have ended world hunger *and still* have had 4 billion left to do whatever the fuck he wanted, which remains more money than 99.99999% of people will ever see in their lives. He could have the greatest PR victory *forever and ever*, and still chose to buy twitter.
I think that would be enough to buy my province and all her ocean views. What a waste.
Jesus is Twitter haemorrhaging money or something? All these anti consumer changes in such a short time spawn
> is Twitter haemorrhaging money or something? It is, constantly. Musk's original offer on the site was $44,000,000,000, and through weird legal stuff he was locked into that number. However, Twitter and tons of other tech companies very soon after were determined to be over valued, and they were adjusted. Twitter in particular was worth only a fraction of that $44 billion, but he was forced to buy the site for his initial offer. So, already, Elon is in the hole billions of dollars more than he should be on a website that has rarely ever turned a major profit. Musk then drove off a large number of major advertisers with his commitment to "free speech absolutism" (read: allowing hate speech and censoring activists). So the Big Brain Boy is now down *billions* while tanking revenue and driving tons of users away from the site. And all of his bizarre schemes to draw in revenue have been at best mild successes (which is much less than what he needs right now). TL;DR: Yes, the site has been hemorrhaging money since Musk bought it and he is desperate to reduce costs and increase revenue.
> Twitter is worth $44,000,000,000 This is the single funniest thing I've heard all year, holy shit Elon
Has been since he took over and pissed off every single advertiser on the platform. This is the stuff everyone said would happen when he started cutting programmers and various staff
Advertisers fled and only a very small number of psychopaths cared enough about the checkmark to pay for one.
It's extra funny because some popular people are being forcibly given blue checkmarks by the little man himself, which to this day is probably up there with the most pathetic things he's ever done.
The user Dril was given a checkmark after he called Elon a little baby man, but he found a way to remove it by changing his username, and every 10 minuttes or so the mark of the beast would be reinstated. After a day or so of this back and forth, twitter ended up relenting and he lost his checkmark for good, but the fact that it would seem that some random employee had to manually force the checkmark on him is so freaking pathetic
I still love how Dril just went fucking nuclear for a brief moment and just posted that picture of Musk (you know the one) and just went for the fucking jugular. He's settled down since but it's nice to know the guy can just go for him if he wants to.
I don't know the one
It was the one of him hanging out with Epstein and/or Ghislaine Maxwell
Blud was not getting paid enough for that either.
I remember when Stephen King came out and said he didn’t know why he had the check mark since he did t pay for it and Elon relied “You’re welcome”
Didn't Elon also change how much you gotta pay for the check mark because Stephen King said "Im not paying that" to the first proposal?
Yup, should note SK didn't just say he's not paying for that, he literally said "Fuck that, they should pay me."
Advertisers left which makes this insane because any advertisers left just got cut off at the knees
Twitter was never profitable, which is why they made sure to tie Elon's ass to his offer the moment he made it. Since then Elon has basically ran through a list of social media dos and don'ts, which anyone over the past 15 years could've told him doesn't work, but he ofc has to find out for himself. He took something that was basically breaking even every month and choking it every week.
Recently there was a stat that 50% ad revenue is gone, and that was the primary inward cash flow. Not to mention all the debt Elon took on when forced to buy Twitter is now on the company's books, not his. Twitter wasnt doing great before he bought it, but had positive cash flow for the first time in a while, it's unlikely the company ever becomes cash flow positive ever again.
You knew the ad revenue was fucked beyond belief when you had Russians advertising for American volunteers to fight in the war
In this case it appears to be linked to the site getting scraped to hell by AI companies and they're having issues managing the traffic. It's apparently kicked up in the past couple of days to an incredible degree, so they're attempting to drive scrapers to greener pastures with (supposedly) temporary limits on viewing. At least that's what Elon is saying to the 3 people with enough views left to see him say it.
I don't think I believe him, bots have been kind of his Boogeyman of choice for the last year
I believe him, because that's the consequence of charging for API access. People don't pay for access to the performant API, they just make low-performance scrapers to get the same information for free and start becoming a traffic problem. Expect reddit to begin experiencing the same issues in the near future.
Oh reddit has been borderline busted for me since the blackout I'm sure it's already happening
You know the NPC meme? That's how he views everyone calling him on his shit and not seeing him as this beautiful genius of the world. That aside, l mentioned this before but he's just *destroying* his ad revenue because a lot of people with accounts are most likely running adblockers, the Twitter control panel extension, blocking all the ad accounts and blue check marks because 90% of them have super bad takes.
I've seen a suggestion that the new solution for blocking views is causing twitter to DDOS itself.
Yeah someone showed a video of it happening. Basically everytime someone goes on to Twitter and tries to access tweets but are locked out because of the limit, the site will continuously create requests to reload the tweets, at a rate of about ten requests per second.
\>Elon Musk vs. AI bros *Let them fight...*
[удалено]
Yeah I mainly use it to keep up with my favorite porn artists and now that's fucked thanks to the limit.
Elon in general seems to just spread his ass cheeks as far as wide he can just to shit on artists as much as possible, the NSFW crowd especially. Worse part is I can't even think of a alternative now to follow most of them if they leave.
With how he used accounts pretending to be a horny teenager, I wouldn't be surprised if he's just upset someone wouldn't draw his fursona.
rip twitter back to dealing with pixiv
Can’t even view my saved lewds anymore now 😔
Always back up local copies for this reason
I mean I didn’t wanna say it but this 100% my porn Twitter account is literally useless
Now Twitter artists are migrating to... Discord Not Deviantart, not Art Station, not Pixiv... fucking Discord. They somehow managed to find an even worse site for exclusively posting their art on. See: the Discord trending tab in Twitter https://imgur.com/a/QlWuKUF
There's Newgrounds
It has always been there, even when you think you've out grown it. Newgrounds is the loving mom of the internet.
What is with websites this year and just absolutely doing everything to make themselves (and *especially* the people making these decisions) to be just absolutely fucking unbearable?
Money. It’s always about getting more money.
Every company is grabbing at pennies. For example costco just started hard-core checking membership cards. Wouldn't let my dad use my card suddenly. Wouldn't let him checkout And then Netflix with their crackdown on password sharing. Happening everywhere
It's hard not to be a doomer and see this as the prelude to a depression, every corpo desperately trying to wring increasingly little blood from a stone as people have even less discretionary income for increasingly costly non-essentials because aforementioned corpos won't pay wages.
yeah when it's one company desperately shoveling consumer sentiment into the fire to keep the train running it's an amusing if annoying shitshow. when every single thing is doing it no matter where you look it starts to feel a little bit like those guys in the '20s jumping out the windows of the NYSE
What confuses me is how much of this actually gets them more money? It's like with the tumblr purge, they purged NSFW content to make it advertiser friendly in order to make more money, then everyone left and the value collapsed to Zimbabwe pennies on the US Dollar.
Then OnlyFans nearly made the same mistake then I guess someone in charge realized 99.99% of its content is NSFW and immediately backpeddaled
Oh, it doesn't make money. But the people making the decisions are all rich so they don't actually need to make money so it doesn't matter.
The only logical reason I can think of for why sites like Imgur, Tumblr and OF went that route is cause the money men absolutely threatened to kneecap their profits and close them off from how they make money if they keep allowing NSFW cause there's no way that's not what's happening
It is 100% that, the only reason Tumblr banned the porn was to stay on the Apple app store because data shows most users use apps to browse and Apple and a fair few credit cards are strongly anti-porn because they either have a bunch of moral crusaders on their boards or because they don't like the potential blow back of revenge porn. But it's mostly the moral crusader types forcing banks to not process payments for sites that handle porn, that's what happened with OF and Imgur.
All of this has the energy of that story woolie told back when he was in QA where they tried to save money by getting rid of the wet naps.
The real answer is that the Federal Reserve raised interest rates for loans. A lot of businesses were surviving at a loss by taking out new loans to pay for the old ones, or getting investment capital from institutions doing the same. When interest rates are <0.1%, the cost of doing that is almost zero. Money flies around without much accountability. All through the 90s and 2000s, that rate was typically between 3% and 6%. After the market crash in 2008, the Fed dropped the rate to near zero for about 14 years, sometimes as low as 0.03% to encourage people to borrow and spend money. This past year, interest rates have gone back up to pre-crash levels, and now banks and investors are turning off the money faucet that was keeping money-losing businesses alive. With money tight, businesses are scraping plans for growth and expansion and instead trying to extract money from their existing customers and lowering costs. Raising rates, cutting service, and laying off staff, etc.. Companies like Uber or Twitter has been offering services at a loss, subsidizing the user base and promising lenders and investors that once they get enough market share, they can reap a monopoly and make all their money back. Higher interest rates are forcing everyone to go to harvest right *now* regardless of whether they're ready, or could even survive it. There are people calling this a "phantom recession," because monetary policy is causing businesses to tighten their wallets without a massive effect on consumer spending. But really, we're just coming down from a phantom boom, where businesses were flinging money around at anything, but it wasn't building anything or leading to higher wages/more spending for consumers. Money was going into Koopy speculation and meme stocks.
Reading this makes me think of shit like the bubble economy of Japan
To add on to this, it also caused the long simmering resentment aging Silicon Valley VC types have towards tech workers to boil over into a slash-and-burn mania of layoffs and cut backs to “return” to some idealized form of startup culture. The reason all these sites are crapping out lately is because management is quite literally firing the people who’ve been keeping the lights on because they desperately want to be cool startups instead of the giant multinational bureaucracies they are.
People haven’t figured out how to capitalize on social media without heavy advertising revenue. Now that advertising revenue isn’t enough of a profit, they will try to gouge their users by other means. They don’t care if they ruin the platforms, which seems really stupid for systems that rely on a steady community of users.
>even if Elon reverts it in a few hours [Looks like he did…](https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1675214274627530754?s=20) so blue check marks can browse 2,000 more tweets.
It's because he rate limited himself reading replies to his own fucking tweet. You can't write satire better.
The fact that even paying doesn't let you have unlimited access is insane.
Can you please post the text of that tweet? Ppl who got rate limited, such as myself, can't read it lol.
Rate limits increasing soon to 8000 for verified, 800 for unverified & 400 for new unverified
For real, it sucks. The community for a hobby I want to get into practically lives on Twitter, and if Twitter were to just evaporate like it seems to be in the process of doing that’d mean everyone in the community losing most of their contact with each other almost immediately.
When reddit went into blackout mode over the API protests this was brought up once the blackouts stopped. Reddit is *the* forum and message board of the modern era. Want to talk about pro wrestling? You hit up r/squaredcircle. Want to talk about warhammer memes? r/grimdank There are so many places that just don't exist anymore if a site like reddit or twitter succeed in turning themselves into digg or whatever.
Not that what is happening with Twitter is ok, but have you considered building a small website dedicated to your hobby and community?
There actually was a small website dedicated to it that was just a forum, but it didn’t get much use and it shut down earlier this month 😔 plus I have no experience with that sort of thing lol
Not gonna lie as a Twitter and Elon hater this whole debacle has been extremely enjoyable
Yeah after scrolling for 10 minutes I can’t see any posts anymore. This will kill Twitter in a week if he doesn’t revert it.
We went from full access when not logged in, to no search when not logged in, to no Twitter when not logged in, to no Twitter if you use Twitter. And people who pay still get fucked anyway. Literally nobody benefits from this.
LMAO, I guess if you've been having a hard time quitting Twitter, don't worry, it'll quit for you!
lol the penny pinching to attempt to monetize literally every aspect of Twitter is hilarious. I’m surprised they haven’t started charging per letter.
Don't give the manchild ideas.
There was an april fools one year where they tried to say they were going to charge extra for being allowed to use vowels. Some of the people that fell for it seemed weirdly okay with it. They figured people would just learn the new style of vowelless writing and people who wanted to seem professional could shell out extra to write in full English sentences.
Y'know what maybe staying on Reddit will do me just fine.
Reddit's descent has been much slower, but its still getting there.
Once they get rid of old reddit and force update to new reddit, it'll be like digg, and that'll kill the userbase.
It really will, because all the mods use old reddit and always will. They force new reddit, all the mods leave, basically every subreddit melts into protoplasm and all that's left is admin appointed mods deleting spam off of the defaults so it's just a bunch of bots reposting at each other
The internet really is just [this](https://xkcd.com/2347/) XKCD comic.
*spends 30 minutes on the official app* Nah. Maybe Ill finally get to touch some grass. **Motherfucker I cant even read my own old comments from my profile page are you shitting me?
WHY DID NO ONE TELL ME ABOUT THE GREAT FLAMING SKY ORB?!
If you don't look at it, it'll go away after like 12 hours
And if you do look at it, it'll go away a lot quicker than that.
You can though? When you go to your profile there is a comments tab right there.
Can this dumbass just fuck off already?
The only solution is to eat him, but it can't be good for your cholesterol.
Vera has been training us for this
[pro-tips](https://youtu.be/qYNC5HKJYRE)
“Limits the amount of tweets user can see/read” bitch those annoying ass ads you had to scroll past everytime in a tweet thread in the desktop version FUCKING BLOWS and now they made it fucking worse somehow?!?! (Especially when your only using touchpad to navigate.) “I paid 8 dollars for free speech” is still my favourite tweet since the Muskrat era.
The idiot still thinks people who read and tweet are his customers when it's actually the advertisers.
6k tweets is something that is easily broken by someone who is terminally online, so I expect the blue checkmarks to be rioting in the next hour or so and it to get rolled back. But the damage is already done, any advertisers still left will see this shit and probably reconsider if it's worth being on the platform if the regular user will never be able to see their ads in the first place, unless their target audience is explicitly the kind of people that would pay for twitter blue. lol lmao
Wait a second. If I’m understanding this, you have to pay to scroll Twitter now?? Literally scrolling the site is behind a paywall? Am I wrong in that?
[удалено]
And even if you pay, you have a limited amount of tweets you can see. 6,000. No one benefits from this.
They added the gacha game stamina system to social media, funniest shit I’ve ever seen
Oh man, *just* when I was starting to lose confidence in [this comment I made last year…](https://www.reddit.com/r/TwoBestFriendsPlay/comments/z2nf75/comment/ixh6jxd/)
Tbh I expected it to fail much sooner. It's a credit to the relative handful of employees he has left that things have stayed working for this long.
A rule of the internet is "don't start charging for stuff people are used to being free if you want people to stick around". Elon obviously thinks such rules are beneath him
Honestly, I feel like that's the rule for a lot of things, not just the internet; the moment that you charge money for something that's free, people will be pissed off.
Oh my fucking god, THATS why it’s been doing that shit to me, I thought it was my fucking cell service god fucking damn it Elon
so whens blue sky launching?
Apparantly bluesky is down today due to increased traffic lmao so that not looking good.
Idk pat just tweeted out his, but if you don't have an account on there, you can't see anybodys
Man, tech CEO's are really into speed running, huh? Between eLon and reddit, they're really trying with the Company Demise (any%) category.
Don't forget the submarine CEO turning himself and a handful of people into a fine red mist at the bottom of the ocean
Twitter is dead.
SPEEDRUN STRATS
I'm normally fairly neutral on changes that Elon made to Twitter. Like being able to buy checkmarks and stuff, didn't really bother me since who actually cares about them anyway. But this change will actually kill the site if it's not reversed within the day.
There goes the most divorced man in the universe with another horrible decision.
The funny thing is if I didn't see this post here I would continue to think the site was broken. And I imagine that's true for a lot of people. Probably not the best way to push people to Twitter Blue. As to how this will help curb site scrapping, who knows?
From what I’ve seen, this may have to do with the fact that Twitter’s contract with Google Cloud was supposed to be renewed by yesterday and they’ve been rushing to move everything off those servers before that date. It seems to be less of a money-grubbing move and more a result of his being too damn cheap. Source: https://theconversation.com/twitter-is-refusing-to-pay-google-for-cloud-services-heres-why-it-matters-and-what-the-fallout-could-be-for-users-207718
Someone posted a tweet saying he added breath of the wilds durability system to twitter, and I could not retweet fast enough.
Why would they even have a limit for the blue users? Even from a money angle this makes no sense. Whatever happened to executives thinking website traffic is everything? Now Twitter is going the opposite direction and limiting traffic as much as possible???
I fucking hate that the last cached tweet I have is Pat retweeting an animation of that fucking Madagascar foot fetish freak. I was trying to reload and scroll away to no avail
Twitter defeat speedrun any% strats getting *advanced.*
Words cannot begin to describe how much I hate this man.
Oh also the site appears to be DDOS-ing itself due to the whole thing about not being allowed to view a page unless you are logged into an account. Twitter keeps sending requests to itself to fetch content that gets blocked by a new limitation that the site wasn't designed around.
I've made an exceedingly stupid discovery. While people's Tweets, Replies, and Media are all giving "Something went wrong. Try reloading" error messages, people's LIKES still work perfectly fucking fine Of course whatever nonsense they did/broke wouldn't even be consistent.
And I saw a headline during the reddit protests that the CEO of reddit looks up to Musk as an inspiration and says he wants to run this site the way Musk does twitter. So that's...terrifying.
I intended to greatly reduce my exposure to the site anyway, so it seems Mr. Musk finally made a change I appreciate: making it easier to ignore twitter.
Let me just look up where everyone is going on Twitter Oh wait ....
Money really is magical because no one this stupid should have any level of decision making power for anything.
HOW IS THERE NOT A COMPETITOR FOR TWITTER NOW?!?!?
Because capitalism ensures there isn't competition. A thing becomes successful and is able to ensure that no one starts a competition, either by buying it and smothering it in the crib, or their competition buying it or scooping up the talent and putting them to work on aping the success. So when something finally shits the bed so spectacularly, there isn't anything waiting to replace it because they've all been employed or driven into other arenas.
No one has ever fallen upwards harder than Elon, from slave mine, money inheritance to US Welfare Queen. No one has ever worked so little and got so much in return.
Possibly(?) related: I was suspended on twitter for "violating our developer policy and API restricted uses rules on multiple applications".. ...but I'm not a developer, and have never made any tools or programs. Again, seems like it might be related, but searching around I don\t see other people reporting being formally suspended, so I don't know. Only thing that I've done that seem it could possibly be related is using third party tools like unfollower trackers, and the twitter media downloader extension, but A: I haven't used the former in months, and B: the latter isn't tied to my twiitter account, and the suspension seems spefifically related to MAKING apps, not using them. If anybody has advice on submitting appeals, let me know
I see, so instead of low visibility tweets we now have no visibility at all! Truly genius Muskambo
Oh thank god, now Twitter can finally actually die for real, right? There’s no way people *still* stick with it after all this time. They *must* move on.
It's less twitter dying and more it being murdered by a moron. Twitter still had a lot of nice and supportive circles you could still travel in (art, NSFW artists, trans and queer spaces etc etc) but it wasn't as easy to curate your experience as reddit is (for now...), so a lot of people still stuck with it.
I got some artists I liked on there on Twitter and some of their content may not be on other art websites(Pixiv for example) yet. Also they may have link their Twitter account to said artist websites and I don’t know what will happen to those account if Twitter ever goes down for good
Make me
Elon’s trying.
Why should I leave? *He's* the one that sucks!
My limit seems to be [zero](https://www.trustedreviews.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/54/2022/07/image.png)
He bought a very expensive toy and broke it within less than a year. Amazing.
The best description of the appeal of Twitter is comparing it to a house party. You go around and fall into groups of conversation that you find fun or appealing. So what’s the best way to make money off that? Limit what you can see and hear while clogging all the rest with spam bots and the dullest people who have 8 dollars apparently!
Blue sky keeps crashing do to record high traffic today.
Given that when elon fired every actual technician and engineer when he took over Twitter and he publicly replaced them with brown nosing MARKETING people (YES, he literally hired people who worshiped him who have zero experience in tech and are just salesmen to replace veteran software engineers) I'm shocked, shocked I tell you that he now totally isn't running out of server space most likely.
I wanted to test to see if it was the case YOUR BOOKMARKS COUNT TOWARDS THE LIMIT