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

[Northern_Piper]

@Cervaise

Interesting article from a current Twitter engineer who predicts service problems and increasing instability over the coming days and weeks:

Here’s how a Twitter engineer says it will break in the coming weeks | MIT Technology Review

from that article:

He presents a dystopian future where issues pile up as the backlog of maintenance tasks and fixes grows longer and longer. “Things will be broken. Things will be broken more often. Things will be broken for longer periods of time. Things will be broken in more severe ways,” he says. “Everything will compound until, eventually, it’s not usable.”

Twitter’s collapse into an unusable wreck is some time off, the engineer says, but the telltale signs of process rot are already there. It starts with the small things: “Bugs in whatever part of whatever client they’re using; whatever service in the back end they’re trying to use. They’ll be small annoyances to start, but as the back-end fixes are being delayed, things will accumulate until people will eventually just give up.”

Krueger says that Twitter won’t blink out of life, but we’ll start to see a greater number of tweets not loading, and accounts coming into and out of existence seemingly at a whim. “I would expect anything that’s writing data on the back end to possibly have slowness, timeouts, and a lot more subtle types of failure conditions,” he says. “But they’re often more insidious. And they also generally take a lot more effort to track down and resolve. If you don’t have enough engineers, that’s going to be a significant problem.”

Sounds like the last days of SDMB on vBulletin.

[Biffster]

@dtilque

I predict Mastodon will overtake Twitter as the place to post very soon. Maybe a couple months at most, likely sooner. I have no special internal knowledge of either platform. Hell, I never even heard of Mastodon until very recently. It’s just the way these kinds of things go.

People don’t care for tyrants in charge. Elon Musk is looking very much like a tyrant here and I wouldn’t be too surprised if the mighty Twitter dies as a result.

[suranyi]

If the people I follow move to Mastodon, I will gladly follow. But so far it mostly hasn’t happened. Bear in mind, I follow a lot of foreign music accounts and they mostly don’t know about US politics, and they definitely don’t care about it.

[wolfpup]

@Northern_Piper

Sidebar please: what the heck is he wearing?

I have no idea, but it’s pretty conclusive confirmation that, as I always suspected, the man isn’t completely sane.

[Northern_Piper]

It looks like a D&D symbol on his chest?

Mods: this is not a hijack; it is part of the attempt to analyse the psychological basis for the Musk persona, which in turn will assist us in understanding his seemingly erratic behavour and therefore contribute to the questions posed in this thread.

[Johnny_Bravo]

It looks like a ram skull with an upside-down cross. Definitely not the D&D symbol.

[enipla]

A LOT of people depend on Starlink. No other choice including myself. So if he can keep that up and running I will be happy.

[CaveMike]

Not sure if I am being whooshed, but it’s his Halloween costume for this year:

Elon Musk Gets Armored and Gothic in Warrior Costume With Mother Maye as...

[wguy123]

I just heard a rumor that you will soon have to get a blue checkmark on Twitter to keep your Starlink account. And also save your credit card into in Twitter since Starlink billing will be handled there as well. Expect that to go live tomorrow.

[Sam_Stone]

Cite for that? Musk has made a lot of dumb moves with Twitter, but this sounds unlikely. We shouldn’t spread rumors. But if there’s a good cite for that, cool.

[wguy123]

I made that up (sorry, thought it would be obvious). But I don’t think it’s actually that out of the realm of possibility with the way Musk is fumbling around.

[dtilque]

@suranyi

If the people I follow move to Mastodon, I will gladly follow.

This is exactly why Twitter is going to die. Or at least become a pale shadow of itself. When a few A-listers move to the same place, others will follow. Pretty soon there will be a stampede. People will be dumbfounded about how fast it happens. I chose Mastodon for the likely new site just because I’ve heard it several times recently. That’s all that’s needed.

[k9bfriender]

IOW, give it a day or two, and there will be a cite for it.

[pulykamell]

Don’t worry. It was obvious.

[JohnT]

Elmo had a call with advertisers today. Here is a live-tweet thread of that call:

Nandini Jammi

[Maserschmidt]

He sold a bunch of shares today, and the stock is down 7.2% (55.6% YTD).

[wguy123]

How long till Nandini’s account is suspended?

And wow, read the rest of that thread. Did Elon recently get involved in a Tesla auto-driving accident that resulted in brain injuries?

[wolfpup]

I wonder how Saudi Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal feels about the situation? AFAIK, he and his investment company still own a substantial minority share in Twitter. It’s sort of like being on a plane that Musk is steering straight into a mountain, and you don’t have a lot of options to disembark.

[wolfpup]

From the Nandini Jammi Twitter feed of Musk’s comments:

Musk: -My observation is that content is actually improving - not getting worse.

From CBS News:

Twitter saw an “immediate, visible and measurable spike” in hate speech after Elon Musk takeover, researchers find
Researchers from Montclair State University found that the 12 hours immediately following Musk’s ascension to ownership saw a much more “hostile” environment on Twitter. The team looked at tweets filled with “vulgar and hostile” rhetoric aimed at people based on their race, religion, ethnicity and orientation, such as the “n-word,” “k-word,” and “f-word,” to find out just how bad it got.

And what they found was an “immediate, visible, and measurable spike.”

In the week leading up to Musk’s acquisition, researchers said there were no more than 84 hostile tweets an hour on the platform. But from midnight on October 28 – the day Musk took ownership – to noon the next day, there were 4,778 hate-filled tweets. That accounts for more than 398 tweets an hour, about 4.7 times higher than the seven-day average leading up to that day. The potential reach for those tweets was more than 3 million, researchers found.
Twitter saw an "immediate, visible and measurable spike" in hate speech after Elon Musk takeover, researchers find - CBS News

[Maserschmidt]

@wolfpup

I wonder how Saudi Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal feels about the situation? AFAIK, he and his investment company still own a substantial minority share in Twitter. It’s sort of like being on a plane that Musk is steering straight into a mountain, and you don’t have a lot of options to disembark.

Hopefully it puts the prince in financial straits, and he lowers the price of oil to generate some quick cash flow.

I can dream, anyway.