“Who gave the dog $8?”
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One of the big agencies is now recommending “pausing” ad spending on Twitter. IPG did the same two weeks ago. Group M, apparently the largest media buying agency, was telling customers that Twitter was “high risk” as of yesterday.
And of course, like anyone with three connected braincells, the existing Twitter staff pointed out the problems with selling “verified” blue ticks for $8/month. They were ignored. Apparently, they were going to be $99/year, until Musk had a conversation with Steven King. Yes, the horror writer. Taking advice from an elderly horror writer with a sense of humour might not have been the best of ideas.
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I used to work for a (publicly traded) company whose top executives came up with a new plan and announced it during an all-hands meeting where they essentially said, “we have ideas and we have no idea what will and what won’t work, so we’re going to just try everything to see what happens” and then proceeded to do a bunch of things that I, personally, could have told them wouldn’t work because I have common sense.
The company is no longer in business.
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I thought it was a simple Twitter exchange. Musk floated $20/mo. and King fired back that the check mark was not worth that much to him, and that with the views he brings Twitter should be paying him, and if it was instituted, he’d just leave. Musk then suggested $8/mo.
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Fair enough, but that’s not the entertaining view.
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More from Musk where he asks Twitter staff to work beyond their contracts for no more money. He brands this as ‘being hardcore’. While I wouldn’t judge anyone for staying, the fear of no job is something I understand. But if all remaining staff took the severance it would be amazing.
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That’s a very dotcom-era attitude and ten years ago it might still have worked. But these days young people can look at older burned-out dotcom workers and say “you know, actually I’d rather have a life”.
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I guess that’s the sort of request one might consider if you had great respect for and confidence in your boss and their vision for the business. I’m presuming that describes roughly zero percent of the remaining employees. Leaving now with three months severance sounds like an absolute no-brainer to me, given the apparent alternative is enforced unpaid overtime for the forseeable future.
Judging from what’s happened so far, three months might be as much job security as any of them could hope for in any case.
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If everyone did leave we’d get to find out how good Musk is at code. I like the idea of it just being him alone in the building and twitter finally dying when he pushes something that doesn’t work, working straight to master as it’s just him in the company. I imagine him feeling satisfied momentarily, picturing how his reputation will increase when he single handedly saves twitter while doomsday ticks along in the background. Then boom! No more twitter.
Obviously this won’t happen, the company would die before it was just him but if he can make twitter how he wants it’d be a danger to us all, so it’s nice to imagine briefly him looking even more stupid.
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Just to interject with some actual code.
Today I opened a file in the project that I just built sucessfully and it was full of compile errors… it is testcode. Probably java upgrade issues but … wow.
In any case, I am getting to do some abstraction and cleaning up and it is mostly fun.
But I am noticing that intellij stops recognizing sql when the sql is not right next to the query object. 
PS: deleting lines of code and making file much shorter. Am I getting fired be Elol tomorrow?
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I’ve just been poking at undocumented Kobo internals to get it to display series information for epubs I’ve loaded myself. Success!
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Yup. The other problem is “How does the new Twitter get an income?”
Selling advertising space in million-dollar blocks requires sales and account management staff and requires them to the able to influence company policy. Those people have mostly gone, and nobody will believe that new ones can influence Musk.
Big-bucks advertising also requires good brand safety and moderation. If Musk believes he can create automated moderation that people can’t work around by tinkering with phrasing and pictures, he’s likely to have a very expensive disappointment.
Overall, the Musk/Twitter crisis is very educational.
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I know virtually nothing about Elon Musk other than a name association with the Tesla car company (and I know very little about them either, other than that they make electric cars, and that time he did a live demonstration of an unbreakable car window by breaking it, which did the video rounds), and that he is (was, I guess) very rich (although I couldn’t have imagined “44 billion” rich – and tangentially, does anyone know how many or few people that figure got split between on the receiving end? It’s extraordinary to consider lots of people becoming billionaires from the same single sale).
Anyhow, what I meant to ask was: is this kind of behaviour in any way par for the course? Because it sounds indicative of someone who is officially “not well”, mentally. Did he really get to make that purchase offer all on his own, without any Advice from people who might have prevented it? It’s all so bizarre to me.
Right, so he had the Advice in spades, but it sounds like he still got to choose to do this by himself, without any other approval. Well… I suppose I can see how it might happen… it doesn’t make it seem less extraordinary (or less like the actions of someone who isn’t well), though.
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He lives in a pro-Twitter echo chamber it seems. The name of the pro-Twitter echo chamber? Twitter.
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That‘s the thing with those super-rich people they get to take decisions all by themselves that affect millions and millions of people. And if those decisions are as dumb as buying a company for the lulz… ah well…. I don‘t know that Twitter as it is or rather was is worth lamenting its probable demise… I am more lamenting the fact that one person was able to unilaterally decide to take over a piece of social infrastructure like this and „succeed“.
Imagine he decided to buy out some other kind of infrastructure possibly something more tangible and run it into the ground? Edit: I take back that last argument on second thought… tangible stuff isn‘t destroyed quite so easily and I do assume that some new site will rise if Twitter really goes down.
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I have seen comments that Twitter used to be a nice place to work.
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There are a number of extwitter people where I work, and they say the same thing.
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Musk is (was?) the worlds richest person, worth $100 billion or more, because of his control of tesla, and the stupid deal the board gave him. Everything else you need to know about Musk is this: he called a hero rescue diver a pedeophile because the diver said that Musk’s plan to use a robotic submarine that didn’t exist to rescue a bnch of kids trapped in a flooded wouldn’t work. his behavior since has been about like that. He’s also a darling of the right.
Twitter was a public company, it had 700-some million shares outstanding when he bought it. The biggest owners were Musk, a bunch of institutional buyers (presumably as part of funds), some hedge funds. I think Dorsey still had a bundle, and presumably the leadership did too.
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I checked Debirdify again and since my last check ~2 weeks ago there are now twice as many Accounts (32/211 up from 16) from people I follow on Twitter who are now also on Mastodon (and possibly no more on Twitter but the tool is not looking for that just who linked a mastodon profile in their Twitter Bio) and I am happy to say this is happening across ALL the various communities I was “following” on Twitter (which I wasn’t doing since the start of the pandemic). Still, if it doubles again in another two weeks… I wouldn’t mind.
I am especially surprised that Clarkesworld and a number of writers now have accounts.
Also NPI has made an account 
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I haven’t mentioned anywhere how upset I was to find out about mastodon because a couple of months ago I was thinking to myself, “there should be a distributed social media platform where different organizational entities can run their own instance but also have cross instance federation”. Somebody took my idea (before I even had it! That’s how sinister this conspiracy is, I tell you).
Of course, I had been thinking about primarily regional community-based instancing; a key problem I see in social media, in my experience, is finding global-scale echo chambers of like-minded people. I think community and a feeling of belonging to where you live is important for a number of reasons and it would be nice for a social medium to emphasize where you live and reinforce that everyone has different opinions and that’s okay.
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