Twitter under Elon Musk

[brilokuloj]

I have a whole writeup I've been doing. But I have some ~Exciting~ news to post first that made me want to start this thread sooner, so consider this post...

RESERVED

[brilokuloj]

Here's the fun news that made me start this thread:

Twitter has started blocking unregistered users

Twitter didn’t immediately make a public announcement, making it unclear if this was an intentional update or another technical mishap. Later on Friday, however, Twitter owner Elon Musk tweeted, claiming in a reply that the change is a “Temporary emergency measure,” blaming “data pillaging” for degrading the service for all users.

In a reply to Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney complaining about how pay and account walls break the internet, Musk claimed, “Several hundred organizations (maybe more) were scraping Twitter data extremely aggressively, to the point where it was affecting the real user experience” without providing any more specifics.

Twitter's latest user-unfriendly move requires an account just to read

Back in 2022, Musk took an inclusive approach, enlisting the skills of George Hotz, a well-known iPhone hacker and the author of the Towelroot exploit for Android. Hotz's mission was to streamline the search function and eliminate the login prompt that inconvenienced guests. However, this mission came to a sudden halt with Hotz's abrupt resignation, which led to Twitter completely removing the search function for unregistered users this April.

I use a third-party reader (Nitter through LibRedirect) and I can confirm this has fucked me. I can imagine this is the exact kind of thing he's trying to figure out how to fight, especially with the recent Reddit news.

[brilokuloj]

Sorry, I'm currently on mobile for a while or else I'd back this up. But apparently Elon Musk has now made it that users can only read 600 tweets a DAY. Holy shit. This was one day after Paula explained to me that Nitter should be fine because a lot of instances have their accounts linked

[huckleton]

apparently the official numbers are:

• 6,000 posts for verified users
• 600 posts for unverified users
• 300 posts for new unverified users

[brilokuloj]

We'll soon be implementing some changes in our effort to reduce spam in Direct Messages. Unverified accounts will have daily limits on the number of DMs they can send. Subscribe today to send more messages: [link to Twitter Blue]

Good grief. Just kill the site at this point.

[brilokuloj]

Elon is now trying to change Twitter's name and branding to X. Just the letter X. Good lord

[huckleton]

something i forgot about the shittification of twitter is how likely it is by making a normal tweet that you get bombarded by bots. somehow twitter bots are like 500x angering than tumblr, i roll my eyes at tumblr bots but twitter bots make me actively mad

[brilokuloj]

something i forgot about the shittification of twitter is how likely it is by making a normal tweet that you get bombarded by bots. somehow twitter bots are like 500x angering than tumblr, i roll my eyes at tumblr bots but twitter bots make me actively mad

I started experiencing this towards the tail end of me being on Twitter, and it really made me feel like punching something, holy shit.

I slept in and just woke up, so here's what I've been able to figure out while sipping coffee:

1. Twitter has officially rebranded to X just a day or two after the move was announced.
   
2. The official branding is that a tweet is now called "an X", for which there are too many jokes to make.
   
3. The official account is still @twitter because someone else owns @X and they didn't reclaim the username first.
   
4. The logo is ? which is the Unicode character Unicode U+1D54F so the logo cannot be copyrighted and it is highly likely that it cannot be protected as a trademark.
   
5. Outside the visual logo, the trademark for the use of the name "X" in social media is held by Meta/Facebook, while the trademark for "X" in finance/commerce is owned by Microsoft.
   
6. The rebranding has been stopped in Japan as the term "X Japan" is trademarked by the band X JAPAN.
   
7. Elon had workers taking down the "Twitter" name from the side of the building. He did not have any permits to do this. The building owner called the cops who stopped the crew midway through so the sign just says "er".
   
8. He still plans to call his streaming and media hosting branch of the company as "Xvideo". Nobody tell him.
   

This man wants you to give him control over all of your financial information.

Point #7 is some Bojack Horseman "Hollywoo" bullshit.

I think something making me really mad about this right now is that the website title and URL is still Twitter, so like, the logo is perfectly happy making no fucking sense.

[brilokuloj]

In light of "X" I finally committed to a Mastodon account (https://zirk.us/@brilokuloj). The instance seems perfect for me: art-focused but not topic-enforced, no required content warnings, self-promotion OK, bots allowed, Threads will be shadowbanned, etc. It's "academic" so probably a bit pretentious, but I'm pretentious, I can deal.

I still don't like Twitter or anything imitating it, so who knows if I'll use it much, but it's nice to be able to follow accounts of people who are mainly or exclusively on there. Staying to less fandom-oriented instances also gives me the impression it's less emotionally manipulative than Twitter. Maybe I can find a Mastodon reader that meets my needs; I have never benefited from seeing people's followers or following, for example.

[brilokuloj]

I haven't seen anyone discussing what Twitter's recent walled garden status has done to like, 99% of pre-existing online journalism:

This is a disaster.