[Brazelton] Twitter

I think too many people have been "blocking" Elon and he hates the fact he can't go troll their pages anymore.

"But why can't you just mute pe...." No, fuck you. Muting isn't the same as blocking. Sometimes you need to cut people off from your feed, not just make sure they don't appear on yours.
Does anyone know if Elon has pissed off Apple and/or Google? They could potentially argue that this violates their terms & conditions that social media apps need to let users filter harassment & bullying, and then pull the Twitter app from their stores.
 
I think too many people have been "blocking" Elon and he hates the fact he can't go troll their pages anymore.

"But why can't you just mute pe...." No, fuck you. Muting isn't the same as blocking. Sometimes you need to cut people off from your feed, not just make sure they don't appear on yours.
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"Henceforth, it is only I, Elon Musk, who shall be allowed the use of the 'Block' button."

--Patrick
 
I am concerned that it will take some time for any of the space news websites to join Blue Sky. I suspect that they will hesitate posting information to another service out of the fear that the toddler in chief will cut their access to SpaceX.

It used to be that Twitter was the fastest way to get updates on launches. I found it particularly useful at 3am to find out if at launch been delayed or scrubbed. (ie "Do I need to keep staring at this dark sky for another 5 minutes or can I go home and go to bed?") The Spaceflight Now feed used to update faster than their own website. Now, Twitter is so flaky the last time I was trying to keep tabs on a launch, it was running 20 minutes behind the rocket.

YouTube is probably the best alternative, though I would prefer something more clandestine.
 
Does anyone know if Elon has pissed off Apple and/or Google? They could potentially argue that this violates their terms & conditions that social media apps need to let users filter harassment & bullying, and then pull the Twitter app from their stores.

--Patrick
 
I am concerned that it will take some time for any of the space news websites to join Blue Sky. I suspect that they will hesitate posting information to another service out of the fear that the toddler in chief will cut their access to SpaceX.

It used to be that Twitter was the fastest way to get updates on launches. I found it particularly useful at 3am to find out if at launch been delayed or scrubbed. (ie "Do I need to keep staring at this dark sky for another 5 minutes or can I go home and go to bed?") The Spaceflight Now feed used to update faster than their own website. Now, Twitter is so flaky the last time I was trying to keep tabs on a launch, it was running 20 minutes behind the rocket.

YouTube is probably the best alternative, though I would prefer something more clandestine.
Bah.

 
I hate how every other major organization has said something along the lines of "we wanted to leave twitter, but there's no good alternative so we came back after two days".
For ducks' sake, it's not something you need. Companies and ministries and whatever all worked perfectly fine a million different ways before.
 
Yes but nothing else gave them the ability to have a single point of short-form, hassle-free asynchronous contact without having to somehow figure out how to layer it into their own website—IF they even had one.

—Patrick
 

GasBandit

Staff member
I hate how every other major organization has said something along the lines of "we wanted to leave twitter, but there's no good alternative so we came back after two days".
For ducks' sake, it's not something you need. Companies and ministries and whatever all worked perfectly fine a million different ways before.
I've been struggling since this whole mess began to come up with a metaphor or simile to represent the concept of a service that has only been around for 15 years but even otherwise-lefty people would rather support fascism than go without that service. But for these people, social media IS the internet, and twitter has been 50%+ of social media. There are no "websites" or "forums" or "pages," those are all just things you find as part of using twitter, so they may as well be part of twitter. If you lose twitter, you lose all of that. Part of the consequence of moving away from browsers to site-specific apps.

So... I guess it'd be like those of us who remember pre-social-media internet being told we had to discontinue use of the internet entirely.

I don't think I can go back to how being a computer nerd was in the pre-internet 90s. Not even dial up? Just back to looking shit up in out of date encyclopedias (paper most likely, encarta if we were lucky) and spreading memes by junior high word-of-mouth?
 
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Yes but nothing else gave them the ability to have a single point of short-form, hassle-free asynchronous contact without having to somehow figure out how to layer it into their own website—IF they even had one.
It's also still the only social media since the Tumblr purge that allows adult material to be shared and promoted, so if you are a adult content creator you stay on Twitter or hope you don't fade away when all the other sites like Instagram or Threads kick you off. Bluesky might help this, but it's still locked behind early access limits, so the audience isn't there yet.

I wish I could leave, but Twitter is the only thing that helps offset any crowdfunding bleed right now.
 

figmentPez

Staff member
I hate how every other major organization has said something along the lines of "we wanted to leave twitter, but there's no good alternative so we came back after two days".
For ducks' sake, it's not something you need. Companies and ministries and whatever all worked perfectly fine a million different ways before.
Yes, before. Before giant corporations spent a couple of decades actively working against anything that would allow such independence from social media. They've discouraged, sabotaged, and otherwise impeded the growth of things like RSS, Bittorrent, personal websites, email, etc. Giant corporations wanted a userbase they could control, keep captive, and harvest data from. Any alternatives were a threat to that, so they spent a lot of effort to poison the waters.

Saying to a company that they don't need Twitter is like saying to a person that they don't need a car... in a city built around automobiles, without public transportation, and no bike lanes, where the sidewalks are covered in broken glass and bits of sharp metal, and all the shade trees have been cut down, etc, etc.

Corporations wanted a web where they controlled centralized content with a locked-in userbase, because that's the greedy way to try to make ALL of the money. They didn't want people to have control over their internet, and now they're finding out just good a job they've done at taking away choice.
 
I haven't used cable television in like a decade.
I haven't used it either since the digital switchover (2013?), but from the early 80's until the mid-aughts, if you weren't watching whatever was currently playing on HBO/Showtime/ESPN/Cinemax/CNN/TNT/etc, you might as well not even have been watching the "real" television.

--Patrick
 
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