Now that Elon Musk has bought Twitter - now the Pit edition (Part 1)

I would absolutely expect NPR to take legal action if the NPR Twitter handle is used in a way that constitutions “imitation, dilution and confusing or misleading uses.”

Funny enough, the name change was mostly because of legal action taken against them outside of the US. First Switzerland in 1993, then the UK in 2000.

NPR has an update on their article;

Agile WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!

Good. The man-child thinks he’s flexing his awesome power, but he’s actually engaged in slow but inexorable self-destruction. No matter how rich you are, you need partnerships and collaborations, and for that you need to engender trust, competence, and stability – not gratuitous destruction, insults, and poop emojis. Elmo is not ALL bad, as someone said upthread, but except maybe for Trump it’s hard to imagine any asshole more deserving of the comeuppance that’s coming up.

Why not combine with @Kimstu’s comment and lean into the joke?

:united_nations: :jack_o_lantern: :newspaper:

(sorry, best I could do with a limited choice of emojis and time)

Maybe he should get checked for brain tumors or something? Because he’s clearly not well.

At this point I think the brain tumor has to be checked for Elon Musk.

If I’m the biggest Musk sycophant on this board, that’s really telling. I mean, sure, I had to correct and embarrass several of you that were posting casually researched click-baity articles about him, coming up with your own fantasized summary as a ‘gotcha’. Demonstrating that if you were to actually read the content, and (gasp) actually click a level deeper, it really wasn’t what you were claiming, clearly pointing out where you were wrong. But that’s on (the royal) you, not me. When I’m here, I fight ignorance, and that is what I did.

And to repeat myself yet again, there are plenty of reasons not to like Musk and to think he has finally bitten off a bit more than he can chew. There is never a reason to believe pure bullshit just because it agrees with that.

No, you just promised not to post before posting a bunch of shit.

Okay, sure, whatever, but the important question is, how did you do on the applicant aptitude test?

I had to respond with my particular favorite meme about drag shows.

That, and the panda wrestling circuit:

Others have explained what it is. As a concrete and direct example, here’s an API extract of the thread you’re currently reading, starting a couple of posts before yours, viewable at this link: Now that Elon Musk has bought Twitter - now the Pit edition - #4597 by kaylasdad99

Here’s an excerpt of that data:

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  "name": "kaylasdad99",
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  "avatar_template": "/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kaylasdad99/{size}/3398_2.png",
  "created_at": "2023-05-01T21:21:02.579Z",
  "cooked": "<p>I keep seeing the term <em>API</em> in this thread. Since I don’t really use Twitter, I don’t really have any need to learn what API is, but it would be nice to know what the letters stand for.</p>",
  "post_number": 4597,
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  "topic_id": 963442,
  "topic_slug": "now-that-elon-musk-has-bought-twitter-now-the-pit-edition",
  "display_username": "kaylasdad99",
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  "actions_summary": [

If you search that link for “kaylasdad99” you’ll see your own posts (and some other data about you). Someone like me could use this to create an entirely separate website, with my own styling, using this data however I want, just by scraping data from this site’s API.

For example I could build my own Straight Dope Mobile App to display this website’s data, or just embed this data in my own website, or just warehouse all the data for my own scheming purposes.

It’s a valuable and convenient service, so I don’t fault Musk for trying to monetize it. But I can’t imagine a business case where it makes sense to charge $47,000/month for Twitter API access. Musk still doesn’t understand that Twitter’s value isn’t as a content farm, but as an attention farm.

The crap people post on Twitter isn’t worth paying money for*. But for an advertiser, the eyeballs that read that crap are very valuable. So you want people using the API to spread Twitter links far and wide, so they’ll direct attention back to Twitter where their attention can be farmed by advertisers.

*Exception to paying money for Twitter crap: some companies pay millions of dollars for all Twitter content, every single tweet and like, for warehousing, mining, and sentiment analysis. Lucrative but niche business case, and it falls apart if people stop engaging because of Musk’s dumb business practices.

Wildlife Wrestling Federation

Is that people who wrestle wildlife, or wildlife that wrestles with one another?

Clearly the latter, based on the picture.

Still telling yourself that, huh?

And yet even What_Exit could not produce any evidence when asked.

That sealioning assertion had already been addressed in the thread you linked.