I have noticed a large difference in the past couple of days in my timeline. Every time I load the page there are 4 Elon tweets in the top 100 (with Elon being the top entry every single time). There are also an increasing number of ads in my timeline, every 4-5 tweets has an ad.
I finally had to mute Elon with the terrible memes and too many tweets in the feed. I could have sworn I did this a couple of months ago, so I'm surprised I had to do it again.
His tweet around "absolute block versus percent block" made sense to me, but even so every single time I load twitter his tweets are at the top of my page, it's too much and I wouldn't be surprised if he does have a factor enabled due the changes I have seen recently.
It's always been apparent, but the Dave Chappelle debacle was the final proof that he genuinely believes himself to be a universally beloved figure hailed as a genius comedian except for a handful of woke saboteurs. He really does seem baffled why "jokes" like this tweet don't go over.
I hadn't checked his feed in a good while. Scrolling to find the tweet above, and going a little further, it really is just a single stream of memes now. Bad ones, at that. Yet he's somehow shocked enough his views are down to warrant firing the guy who filled him in on it, despite the existence of the public view count that he introduced.
He's been rich a long time. People around him may encourage his 'messageboard moderator from 2002' brand of humour, but it falls horribly flat if he takes one step outside his echo chamber.
It took a little over a minute for that page to load the tweet! Granted, that's only twice what it used to take, but I cannot understand how a "microblogging" platform has that bad of performance. Maybe he should fire more people, that'll surely fix the problem.
This story lacks the back story. Musk was prompted to investigate engagement issues about 3 weeks ago by a bunch of people doing the “take your account private” test and nearly all of them reporting increased engagement when private. Musk did it for a day, I personally did not see his result. About 5 days ago he posted about the team fixing two major engagement bugs. Point is he has had them focused on engagement for at least a couple of weeks.
I see people holding these sorts of theories about Facebook algorithms, too. They tend to be entirely bullshit.
The folks taking their accounts private aren't doing any sort of scientific test, and there are folks who try it who don't see engagement go up. Unless you're somehow doing statistically significant tests with large groups of users, the same content, at the same time, there are an immense number of confounding variables here.
Here's what he found subsequent to taking his account private. You can judge for yourself it these were major bugs or not. But the absolute vs. proportional block count is clearly an error that would effect engagement.
To me it seems logical, if you find a certain type of error like that, you go searching elsewhere to see where previous coders made the same kind of mistake. (Even when previous coder = myself)
The problem is you can’t believe him. Were those real issues? Maybe, but what we know now that anyone who told him his lack of engagement was organic got fired. So all that’s left is to come up with some reason to justify why Elon is less popular than he thinks he should be. Whether it’s true or false doesn’t matter, because he’ll keep firing people until someone tells him what he wants to hear.
It's deeply sad and funny that he's gutted Twitter so badly that, instead of having a team that could investigate these user complaints and determine whether they have merit and what the cause is, the CEO of a major tech platform resorted to "Huh, weird, let me try. LOL that's crazy."
> CEO of a major tech platform resorted to "Huh, weird, let me try. LOL that's crazy."
Brings into question what the CEOs of Tesla and SpaceX are doing with their time. Also investigating bugs at Twitter, you say? Amazing that the CEOs of three companies are all working to solve Twitter’s problems. Must be the off season in space.
They investigated nothing. They just 1000x-ed his tweets. All problems go away if the one twit that matters is happy. Not to mention that the guy who suggested that Elon's popularity went down (with charts) because his content is at the level of a 12-year-old, that guy got fired on the spot.
Nothing, it's Musk drones rushing to defend their god. The parent leaves out that Musk fired an engineer in a meeting where he demanded to know why his tweets weren't getting enough engagement.
Why do you guys get so vitriolic? The parent is attempting to logically explain. What is the need for making intense moral characterizations? Don't you see the dichotomy here?
Well, the author of the article presumes to know his intent in asking for that change. Could be narcissism, or it could be an engineer running a test. The truth is the author doesn't know what his intent was.
Elon, if you're reading this: this is the one true path to monetization. Prioritize tweets like ads: a bidding war per timeline. They'll say they hate it, but they'll pay through the nose.
Well, I've been using "hard" lists for months now. I only see what I want to see. Works like magic. The day Elon fanboys get "god mode" and lists go away, call the time of death on the whole thing.
Lots of things get claimed hiding behind "sources say", "reportedly" and other weasel words. These aren't the Pentagon Papers where anonymity is essential to one's continuing to have a heartbeat. While it wouldn't surprise me if it were true, without some actual evidence, its office gossip muckraking of the type you used to have to purchase a tabloid to read about.
Umm, considering that the most senior people have literally been fired on the spot for as little as merely suggesting at look at data that Dear Leader Musk's popularity may have declined, and he has a history of similar vindictiveness (hiring PI's to investigate & harass disgruntled employees, etc.), there are very real consequences here that people need to worry about, so journalistic protection of sources is clearly warranted if we want to get any news at all.
> its office gossip muckraking of the type you used to have to purchase a tabloid to read about.
Or you could just follow the CEO's Twitter:
"Musk participated in a Twitter Spaces Friday night about childhood exploitation, and responded to one of the participants on Saturday after she linked to an old tweet of Roth’s.
“Looks like Yoel is arguing in favor of children being able to access adult Internet services in his PhD thesis,” tweeted Musk, with an excerpt from the 300-page dissertation."
The first half of the title might be verifiable and interesting fact; the second half is lazy, drivel, mind reading; makes the journalist seem like they care more about riding todays hype train than about reporting facts
The source this article mentions doing the "reporting" has been single-mindedly focused on attacking Elon Musk's reputation ever since he took over Twitter and made it clear he was investigating the prior management's moderation decisions. They've been hunting down any and every disgruntled ex-employee they can looking for dirt and they have no appetite for any positive stories.
I'd take any of their claims with a huge grain of salt.
That's not an accurate representation of what I said and it's completely tangential to this article. Given that you have "Fuck Elon Musk" in your Twitter bio, I'm guessing that this is a major issue for you and possibly part of your identity.
That said, doxxing people's location in real-time absolutely is a security risk and kidnapping is nothing to laugh about.
I believe it's an unethical choice to donate to the legal fund of someone intentionally and stubbornly engaging in that kind of behavior (and even working around technical barriers built by regulatory bodies to do so).
>Even with the knowledge that the doxxing is leading to stalkers endangering not just the wealthy target but also his young child, you would fund the doxxer? That’s pretty monstrous. If there is a kidnapping or murder down the line, your money will have helped enable it.
It looks like there was a perfectly accurate representation of what you said. At least your current claim is a little more tempered:
>I believe it's an unethical choice to donate to the legal fund of someone intentionally and stubbornly engaging in that kind of behavior
Your characterization of supporting @ElonJet seems to have changed from complicity in child murder to merely making an "unethical choice". That's quite the walk-back.
No, it’s not. I still do think the donation would be monstrous, and that if there were a murder or kidnapping enabled by the doxxing, that it would be on the donor’s conscience for the rest of their life.
That doesn’t mean I have to help ceejayoz derail and inflame this thread, more than two months later. Phrasing my position less aggressively was an intentional choice.
Also, taking the most extreme snippet of what I said in an extended conversation out of context is not an accurate representation.
A key part of what I said is the conditional you quoted from my post that ceejayoz removed. I said, if there were a murder or kidnapping caused by the doxxing activity then the money donated in support of it will have…supported it.
> Given that you have "Fuck Elon Musk" in your Twitter bio, I'm guessing that this is a major issue for you and possibly part of your identity.
Part of my job is working with the Twitter API. If someone gave you a week's notice of a major breaking change, with no details, then delayed it multiple times - still without any details, to this date! - you'd be feeling some frustration with Musk as well.
One of my friends had a big hassle with the Twitter API back in the day, when they reversed their previous policy of actively encouraging devs to make 3rd party clients.
It definitely gives some context that you're dealing with similar issues now, so thanks for sharing that point.
> The claim that ADS-B tracking results in kidnappings is laughable.
Please respond in good faith. As you know, the account in question was doing extra work to de-anonymize planes enrolled in the Privacy ICAO Address (PIA) program. You also know that rich people and their children are very common kidnapping targets. At no point did I say "ADS-B tracking results in kidnapping". I said the doxxer was creating a clear security risk.
> They've been hunting down any and every disgruntled ex-employee they can looking for dirt
The cheek! What do they think they are, investigative journalists?!
> and they have no appetite for any positive stories.
That's Tesla's PR department's job, or would be, if it still had one. The broader news media does not generally prioritise praising companies to the heavens.
Seriously, this is all completely normal. There's no market for repeating what a company says publicly; most writing about companies is at least sceptical, and sometimes adversarial.
> The cheek! What do they think they are, investigative journalists?!
As ridiculous as it is, they probably do think of themselves that way.
It's too bad they gave up on truth-seeking and gravitated towards tabloid drama and reputational attack. There's a huge void when it comes to high-quality reporting on tech entrepreneurs. Sadly, it really does tend to either be hit pieces or press releases with little in between.
I wouldn't say they're telling outright lies, but I also don't believe that truth-seeking is a primary goal for them. They have a big axe to grind and that their coverage of tech companies is of poor quality, IMO.
One example completely unrelated to Twitter, that I saw as a sign of shockingly poor research, was when the founder went on the Big Technology Podcast and spoke at length about "John Carmichael" and VR work at Meta. It's hard to believe that anyone actually in the software world, especially someone talking about VR with such confidence wouldn't be familiar enough with John Carmack to get his name right.
I finally had to mute Elon with the terrible memes and too many tweets in the feed. I could have sworn I did this a couple of months ago, so I'm surprised I had to do it again.
His tweet around "absolute block versus percent block" made sense to me, but even so every single time I load twitter his tweets are at the top of my page, it's too much and I wouldn't be surprised if he does have a factor enabled due the changes I have seen recently.