And I still firmly believe that without twitter, the situation in Ukraine looks a lot different. I don’t think the world would be quite so united against Russia without it.
Twitter is pretty much essential for content creators, people who make a living on YouTube and Twitch. I tend to consider that a good thing. I read an interesting thread from a Black author and college professor who credited Twitter wirh his whole career: he argued that Twitter allowed PoC a place to prove their appeal to publishers who had a very narrow idea of what consumers wanted in their PoC authors.
The beauty of microservices is that you can turn them off and on as needed, and their absence would be felt pretty much immediately. So that tells me that Musk either didn’t turn off any critical ones, or (as often) was simply bullshitting and didn’t change anything.
But yeah, my opinion here is not super strongly held. I think a slave ship with a skeleton crew of H1-Bs is capable of running it in maintenance-only mode forever. It might be with more or longer outages. There may be days when we lose some tweets or all tweets. But the site itself won’t simply disappear.
I could be wrong though. There are some big unknowns. Is there any poorly-documented network routing that left the premises in someone’s head? Is the system hardened against destructive intrusions, is there still enough of a security team to keep it that way? Most critically how long is Musk willing to fund the skeleton crew, what’s his red line?
To me the infrastructure stability is a less interesting question of what happens to the experience with the loss of moderation, of the Trust & Safety team. I think the likely outcome is that Twitter turns into a garbage-strewn digital slum overrun by bots, crypto scammers, and right-wing edgelords. Musk will then say “I told you Twitter was a shitscape, maybe I could have fixed it if you libtards hadn’t gotten in the way.” In that previous sentence, substitute “government” for Twitter, and “Trump” for Musk, and you can a certain pattern of self-fulfilling prophecy.
In May 2017, The Times detailed the safety record at Tesla’s Fremont, Calif., factory. Tesla’s injury incident rate topped that of some industries commonly associated with especially dangerous work, including sawmills and slaughterhouses. Tesla did not dispute the numbers but said that it was “learning how to be a car company” and that “what matters is the future.”
The injury rate did improve. But in 2018, the public radio investigative reporting program “Reveal” alleged that Tesla was leaving injuries off the books.
One way Tesla lowered its injury numbers, according to “Reveal,” was by denying ambulance service to some injured factory workers who requested it. Medical staff were told not to call 911 without management permission.
“The electric car maker’s contract doctors rarely grant it, instead often insisting that seriously injured workers — including one who severed the top of a finger — be sent to the emergency room in a Lyft,” “Reveal” said, quoting five former medical clinic employees at Tesla’s Fremont auto assembly plant.
…
Musk’s alleged crossing of personal lines with employees points to a broader issue: a seeming indifference or persistent blindness to issues around race and sex in the workplace.
It will disappear when it becomes a nest of child pornography, white nationalists, and MLM, and has no advertising.
Not indefinitely I would say. Sooner or later some exploit or vulnerability would be discovered that requires an experienced dev team to respond. Running the thing in maintenance mode will work for a while, maybe quite a long while, then very suddenly and catastrophically fail.
So - basically Parler?
Tell me more about these eight foot tall women…
There’s eight of them and they’re one foot tall. What else do you need to know?
I was schadenfreudelistically browsing one of the meltdown summaries on Ars this morning, and read again the text of Musk’s “click here to accept my hardcore! rule” email. And I noticed something.
It says: “Anyone who has not done so by 5pm ET tomorrow (Thursday) will receive three months of severance.”
It does not say: “Anyone who has not done so by 5pm ET tomorrow (Thursday) will be deemed to have accepted the previously offered three-month severance deal.”
That deal came with a non-disclosure requirement.
The email says only “will receive three months of severance,” full stop.
It seems to me that any employee who accepts separation under the terms of the email has an excellent basis to argue that they are not bound by the non-disclosure requirement of the previous deal. It’s an offer for three months of severance, period.
Musk and his minions would strenuously dispute that, of course, but the point is, this shouldn’t even be a possible argument, because a normal professional manager would subject his edicts to specialist review to ensure that these kinds of loopholes are eliminated.
But Musk is an impulsive nitwit, so of course he didn’t bother with any kind of oversight, and shot this message directly from his petulant imperial hip.
If Tanya didn’t fill it out, and Musk is like “o shit we need Tanya” and persuades her to stay on, according to that text, does she receive three months of severance? It reads to me as though she does.
There are lots of websites with similar content that do continue indefinitely. Someone’s funding Parler. The same person might fund Twitter.
And I would argue that Musk would be fine with that alternate outcome. In his ideal world he wanted to to bend public discourse in the way most flattering to him. But he’d also be OK wrecking Twitter and saying “see, I was right about the bots and trolls. It’s too expensive to fix, so maybe it should just die. In fact you should be thanking me for exposing the rot.” (See also: republicans/government)
Then he’ll no longer feel compelled to co-exist in the public sphere with real credentialed elites who remind everyone that he’s a fake intellectual with a fake degree. That’s an OK outcome for him.
I’d argue that if there is some shell of a company with 5% of the former traffic and no advertisers, its not Twitter. Twitter wpuld be gone. The $44b he spent would be gone.
So … What is the alternative? I think a lot of reporters, for instance, depends on Twitter. Where will they turn?
Can’t really argue that, but I was keeping my argument scoped to the question of how long the site itself might stay up and running. Of course Twitter’s brand has been heavily damaged and has lost a lot of credibility.
I think Musk could still sell Twitter to someone who can salvage it, but I’ve come to the realization that Musk does not want that. I can’t emphasize that enough. If the Twitter brand can’t be remade into a Musk-friendly mouthpiece, then he wants it discredited entirely. That can’t happen if it goes into cold storage and returns more or less intact.
Musk needs to keep the Twitter site online so that it can perform the function of annihilating Twitter as a credible brand. That’s why I think it will stay online, just in a much shittier form (as you more or less said). He’ll eventually sell it for a pittance, but only after he’s sure that nobody will ever again see it as a trustworthy source of anti-Musk critique.
Mastodon seems to be gaining steam. I’m seeing more and more of the folks I follow setting up accounts over there, even if they haven’t started using them much.
For me, the Mastodon experience is the same as Twitter (although with fewer people so far) because I never followed trending topics anyway. I just use Twitter for the jokes and to read tweets from people I like and respect.
I would find it inconceivable that an employee termination and qualification for severance could be concluded simply by responding (or not responding) to an email. There would be a formal agreement that could introduce conditions pertaining to non-disclosure, maybe even a non-compete clause, and most importantly, would indemnify Twitter against any future lawsuit for improper dismissal as a condition of severance. Unless, that is, Musk has completely lost his mind, fired the entirety of HR and payroll, and is handling everything himself!
I certainly agree that he’s an impulsive nitwit. His email basically backtracking on his prohibition against working at home was followed about 20 minutes later by an afterthought, that immediate managers would make that decision and that of course said managers would be fired if it didn’t work out. It’s a great example of how much thought and planning he seems to put into any decision he makes, namely, none whatsoever.
Which, frankly, is similar to how I’ve been consuming this very thread.
I think without Twitter we might have seen Clinton beat Trump. Or more likely, we might well have seen Clinton lose to Bush.
I think Twitter has been good to underdogs. That includes a lot of extremists, white supremacists, etc. But yes, it also includes Ukraine, victims of police violence, and rising artists.
And something is going to fill that vacuum. Will it be better or worse?