Elon Musk: Making Crap Cars since 2003

[Jman220]

Motherfucker, this is slow pony express. This is what we do! We pony the unponyable.

[TheDudeAbides]

[riverman]

[TheHip41]

@TheDudeAbides

fucking ponied by a microsecond fucking unbelievable

The Dom Abides

[MrWookie]

lol, I was just peeking in the Truparbot thread, and all the tweets disappeared on me after a little scrolling. Guess I hit my limit!

[Jman220]

So I clicked on a tweet (and I’m not logged in), and all I got was an error message that the tweet couldn’t load. Not even a note taht I need to log in to see it. The average twitter user is just going to stop using it. This is so lol bad. Network effects are strong, but they can’t possibly be strong enough to overcome continuing shit like this.

[TheDudeAbides]

there are like a million tweets like this lol

[commonWealth]

So let me get this straight… Twitter’s predominant source of revenue is advertising, which is based on how many tweets users read, and he’s rate-limiting how many tweets users can read? Lol big brain stuff there Elon.

[MrWookie]

@commonWealth

Twitter’s predominant source of revenue is

EIGHT

DOLLARS

PER

MONTH

[Jman220]

@MrWookie

Saudi Money Laundering

FYP

[MrWookie]

[goofy]

Levine on Elon today is delicious:

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.

Also:

As the ramification of Musk’s data battle became clear Saturday, some users complained about being limited.

One user tweeted: “Your addiction is about to be broken. We will all be free. See you guys at the park.”

“Touch grass again,” Musk tweeted in reply.

Ha ha ha! Yes! Musk is limiting access to Twitter in order to break its users’ addiction and free them to touch grass. He has correctly diagnosed the problem (Twitter users are too obsessed with it) and implemented a solution (don’t let them see too many tweets). Of course to do this he had to become completely obsessed with Twitter, devote himself full-time to running it, tweet constantly and sink tens of billions of dollars of his own money into buying Twitter and then breaking it. He has sacrificed so much himself so that people like me can spend a bit less time on Twitter; he has taken the burden of Twitter addiction from millions of users and put it all on himself. Thanks!

[pvn]

Tesla reported 466,140 deliveries for the second quarter, and production of...

Elon’s greatest financial move ever may have been spending $44B on twitter, since that took his attention away from spacex and tesla, now those companies are executing on the business without getting bogged down in every dumb idea Daddy has. Result will be multiples of that $44B. Gotta spend money to make money.

[goofy]

I got on Bluesky, it’s pretty raw, it feels like they found a way to make software development more difficult than it should be cause like…this thing’s been in the works for how long now, and it only has these features??

I think if you enjoy Twitter’s chronological feed you’d probably like Bluesky too, but as someone who thought Twitter did a pretty good job of boosting content you’d be interested in on the default timeline (which was certainly better pre-Elon but is still decent) it feels like a bit of a slog. Certainly the content is better, it’s like 95% lefties roasting shitheads.

[BriansHat]

So early appearances are that Threads is legit and zuck’s about to destroy Twitter.

[TheDudeAbides]

god this is somehow worse

the funny part is i bet this was some dumb skunkworks project zuck had in his back pocket for years “just in case”

[goofy]

@BriansHat

So early appearances are that Threads is legit and zuck’s about to destroy Twitter.

Counterpoint:

https://twitter.com/jaredlholt/status/1676802953473060864

If you don’t get the shitposters because you have boomer-Facebook-level moderation, you don’t get a popular site people want to post on.

[smrk5]

Is threads just going to be an app, no incognito browser version? I want to be for all the tears but I’d prefer the number of Zuck apps on my personal cell to be 0.

[Jman220]

Pretty sure there’s a web version.

[Jman220]

Zuckerberg isn’t the hero we need, but he’s certainly the one we deserve.