Well, the IMHO thread kept heading off the rails, and is now in the pit.
But I think there’s interest in just following what’s happening to Twitter. Layoffs? Hardcore-only? More traffic? Fewer advertisers? New/broken features? Post about it here. Then go to the pit thread if you feel the need to vent.
Edited to add approximate timeline. I’ll update this when I find the dates, you ask me to add more, etc.
2022-04-14: Musk offers to buy Twitter for a cannabis-related price
Lots of back and forth, and eventually
2022-10-27: Musk actually buys Twitter
2022-10-27: Musk fires CEO, CFO, and other top brass
2022-11-01: Musk announces that verification checkmarks will be sold for $20, no $8/month.
??: Musk lays off x% of staff
??: Musk says, "agree to work hardcore by Thursday, or take 3 months of severance
??% of employees take the severance
??: Musk decides to remove all microservices and breaks two-factor authentication
??: Two-factor authentication restored
??: Musk tells remaining employees (some of them? all of them) to report to headquarters with photocopies of their best code, and a list of what they’ve done for the company
Anything else I ought to include? Any help on dates appreciated. 
Thank you. I’m interested in what’s happening at Twitter, so very NOT interested in wading through Pit sludge to find nuggets of news.
Agreed.
On this front, have any Twitter users here noticed changes in reliability or content? My feed hasn’t really changed, although I used to get a lot of M&M and Gatorade ads, and maybe I’m not anymore?
I haven’t noticed crashes or glitches, or an onslaught of porn, spam, or fascism in my feed.
This was the most recent news story I’ve seen:
No confirmation or denial from Apple, so far as I can tell. If Twitter is booted off Apple Store, that would be a bit of a hit to Twitter’s bottom line, I would think.
I have been seeing a lot more “personal” ads. They arent really gender specific but do include young, partially clad models of both sexes, all of whom are almost offensively young.
Interesting. I have my feed pretty locked down – I found some suggestion for blocking suggested tweets. I only see tweets that the people I follow post, or what they retweet.
I’m surprised there hasn’t been more stability issues.
I didn’t really use twitter much, so didn’t play with the controls much. I am on more now because I like watching train crashes.
A lot of the stability that social media should maintain is not much related to technical issues. Twitter is letting a lot of that stability to falter.
In the weeks since Elon Musk took over Twitter, dozens of people responsible for keeping dangerous or inaccurate material in check on the service have posted on LinkedIn that they resigned or lost their jobs. Their statements have drawn a flood of condolences — and attempts to recruit them.
Overtures arrived from rival tech services, retailers, consulting firms, government contractors and other organizations that want to use the former Twitter employees — and those recently let go by Meta and the payments platform Stripe — to track and combat false and toxic information on the internet.
So far, on my own feed I’ve not noticed much difference. Somewhat sketchier “promoted” tweets, but those are easily ignored. No significant technical glitches.
On the “trending” list, OTOH, there’s quite a bit more right wing items than there used to be. Even that is still overwhelmed by sports and pop culture, just as before.
I don’t have a Twitter account but click on links to tweets all the time. Before the last couple days, if I tried to read more than a few replies, I got a pop-up asking me to sign up or log in. I would click log in, then X out of that screen and continue reading. But now the pop-up has disappeared and I can read everything without interruption. It appears they are no longer trying to get new users by that route.
Getting rid of the login popup like a positive change to me. I don’t have an account, and would just close the Twitter tab rather than create an account. So instead of spending time browsing what’s on Twitter and maybe getting enticed to join, I would leave. Now without the popup, people without accounts may browse for longer, find more interesting stuff on Twitter, and join up. So it may be a good change in the long run.
I’ve noticed that, too. But I’m not sure how much of that is Twitter and how much of that is that I was more likely to respond to the right wing posters to explain why they were wrong, often even getting angry at them.
That said, before it was mostly on left wing topics that right wingers would comment on. Now I see more right wing stuff.
What I see more of is just people commenting on the problems Twitter is having, and then linking to it.
It took two days for hubs to be able to start an account because it kept freezing and locking up. Now that his account is finally active, that issue seems to be gone.
I’m not disputing that Twitter is being spiraled into the ground by Lord Musk, Dipshit Extraordinaire.
But I admit to having a problem comprehending a quote saying revenue down 15 % and bookings down 49%. For sure they’re different things over different time periods, but some more detail would be nice. Not @Kimstu’s fault in any way, it’s a sloppy source.
Agreed, very minimal and unclear information, I’m afraid. A recent tweet by one of the coauthors seems to suggest that what it means is that Twitter ad revenue this year is down 15% from what it was last year, while ad revenue this week is down 49% from what it was last week. (That’s “in key markets”, whose exact extent and composition is not clear, rather than for Twitter as a whole.)
My tentative big-picture takeaway is that European advertisers in particular are reacting negatively to developments at Twitter.
Thanks for the additional clarification.
Drain-circling in inherently a chaotic maneuver. Doubly so as seen from the blood-soaked trenches where 2/3rds of your cow-orkers have disappeared in the last 3 weeks and half the buttons on your work PC elicit errors, not data.
All I can see is a caricature of a WW-II submarine movie where scared men are screaming as water is blasting into their faces in the gathering dark while they madly turn valves and close hatches and such. The big difference now at Twitter is many of these wet cold scared people are women.