Steely_D: You managed to include a reference to Hitler! And it was kinda original and actually funny. Well done!
Curious: Are not the chat fora on RP technically speaking 'social media'?
Facebook. Not particularly fond of it but find it useful when something is happening locally, like a murder, wildfire, flooding of Biblical proportions.
Twitter. I have actually learned a few things on Twitter. But I can see it turning rather quickly into the 'same old, same old'. As you point out, there are lots of people whistling past each other. Useful back and forth is the exception.
I am happy to see this proliferation of substitutes for Twitter. Think I will wait for a few glowing reviews of the new sites.
Man, I really wanted credit for the Hamlet quote.
I think of RP as social, surely, but not as widespread as the usual things like FB. I was also very active with some (still) friends on Last.fm but thatâs in the past, and it was also a niche location on the net.
I still have my FB account, since there are people there (from Last.fm) and relatives that I otherwise would hear from a lot less frequently. But it doesnât get my personal life as posts.
I did both. Joined CounterSocial and Mastodon and Gab (really) and a few others just to stake out my four-letter name, and temporarily deactivated (now reactivated so no one could mess with my brand) my Twitter account.
But it all seems so weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable. The same people say the same things, have the same viewpoint. And the counter views are fueled by misinformation and irrational hatred. Sometimes RP gets that way, too, which is something HITLER would say. And then it feels sad: I've been here, like some of you, for a couple of decades. It's no fun to see everyone (including me) start bickering and name calling over something as ephemeral and temporary as elections. Those, too, shall pass.
Steely_D: You managed to include a reference to Hitler! And it was kinda original and actually funny. Well done!
Curious: Are not the chat fora on RP technically speaking 'social media'?
Facebook. Not particularly fond of it but find it useful when something is happening locally, like a murder, wildfire, flooding of Biblical proportions.
Twitter. I have actually learned a few things on Twitter. But I can see it turning rather quickly into the 'same old, same old'. As you point out, there are lots of people whistling past each other. Useful back and forth is the exception.
I am happy to see this proliferation of substitutes for Twitter. Think I will wait for a few glowing reviews of the new sites.
So assuming you're tired of the Twitter noise now, would you join a new platform, or just retreat a bit from social media?
I did both. Joined CounterSocial and Mastodon and Gab (really) and a few others just to stake out my four-letter name, and temporarily deactivated (now reactivated so no one could mess with my brand) my Twitter account.
But it all seems so weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable. The same people say the same things, have the same viewpoint. And the counter views are fueled by misinformation and irrational hatred. Sometimes RP gets that way, too, which is something HITLER would say. And then it feels sad: I've been here, like some of you, for a couple of decades. It's no fun to see everyone (including me) start bickering and name calling over something as ephemeral and temporary as elections. Those, too, shall pass.
So assuming you're tired of the Twitter noise now, would you join a new platform, or just retreat a bit from social media?
As you might expect, there are existing options. As you also might expect, there is the anti-Twitter startup that comes up quickly and is launching now to gain momentum while Elon's house is on fire. The new site is calledPost.news
As part of its one page self-introduction, it states:
Post will be a civil place to debate ideas; learn from experts, journalists, individual creators, and each other; converse freely; and have some fun. Many of today's ad-based platforms rely on capturing attention at any cost â sowing chaos in our society, amplifying the extremes, and muting the moderates. Post is designed to give the voice back to the sidelined majority; there are enough platforms for extremists, and we cannot relinquish the town square to them.
I've never been too active on social media: No FB posts since 2012 (a total of 2 I think in my career), No TikTok account. I have Instagram only to follow beer releases (started 6-8 years ago during the go-go days of NEIPA's), and a total of maybe a dozen Twitter posts over a decade... but signed up to the waitlist to see what it's all about when given access. My longest social media relationship is with LinkedIn. I was actually the 71,490th person to sign up for LinkedIn a few decades ago (to help a friend drive users). I'm not a fan, but today's business world requires some care and feeding on the platform.
So.... If Post is what it suggests it might be, maybe it's a cross between Medium / Wordpress...the non-BS component of LinkedIn... and Twitter... might you give it a whirl? That's a lot to ask of a new platform, but I signed up to get a reasonable username and test the waters.
Emotional development for Musk - like Trump; ceased in adolescence. They still deal with the world from the self-centered perspective of a child.
Well, they are certainly very successful 'children' and both have managed to build massive public followings. How would you characterize the people following these two celebrity narcissists?
I ask because if the American people did not enable these two, they would have no power.
I reckon, he is trying to bail and this is a way of doing it so that he can throw someone else under the bus if/when twitter fails. Still I voted yes because that is the better thing if you think there is anything of value left in the platform.
Remember the 9/11 conspiracy theorists? You'd criticize some cut&paste manifesto and the first response out of their keyboards was "How dare you defend George Bush!" (or the Trilateral Commission, or the International Zionist Conspiracy, or George Soros, or whoever their bugbear was at the moment).
You can hold an ideal of free speech and a fail to live up to it. You can refuse to censor people without sympathizing with their causes.
Musk has turned to the tools he criticized when he was on the outside of Twitter to punish his enemies. You could see that as conclusive proof that he didn't mean a word of it, that he's a fascist* who wants to use Twitter as a megaphone for right-wing propaganda...or you could take a breath, look at his track record (the whole of it, not the quote-mined bits cherrypicked to fit your agenda) and realize that he is a human who is deeply in over his head in waters he has never had to navigate. A lot of the criticism I'm reading here is pure hatred directed at a single human being, and the attention to his every misstep borders on the obsessive.
An electric car company is nothing like PayPal. A space launch company is nothing like an electric car company. Electric cars are nothing like underground trains, which is only peripherally related to tunnel boring, which is unlike home solar power, which is unlike satellite internet, which is unlike a social media company. Not all these ventures succeeded and he wasn't good at running all of them, but they were startups and his bumbling first steps at running them weren't as public as those at Twitter, but enough of them did to make him hard to dismiss. Unless that very success makes you just irrationally hate himâthen the worst things you can imagine are true!
There is a vigorous debate going on about how we communicate with each other, and who gets to decide what gets said and who gets to say it. Twitter, imperfect as it was, was a step forward in opening up that process. Everybody had something to say about how well it did that, including Musk. Now Musk gets to put his money where his mouth is.
I want to emphasize that: his money. If his version fails at that the users who made it a success will abandon it and he'll be thoroughly punished. Maybe not as thoroughly as you'd like, but it'll sting.
* Because he wouldn't keep giving free internet services to the Ukrainians. Who are also fascists. In fact everyone is a fascist except RP and maybe Noam Chomsky.
I'm not as impressed with his earlier success or even current things like Starlink which is much needed. There are/were a lot of small companies working on micro satellite arrays but don't have anywhere near the capital he has to scale up to global internet. And I agree everyone is figuring this out as they go, which is much of the problem with the right-wing attacks on government advocating with twitter for their policies. But in any case that has nothing to do with whether or not he is a wanker that seems to have fallen down the conspiracy theory rabbit-hole. Sure he's over his head, but that's mainly because he thinks he has the answer to everything and his management style has been based on abusing employees (see wanker, above).
