https://mashable.com/article/twitter-new-dm-option-verified-only-promotes-twitter-blue-change-it?
Elon Musk just turned your DMs into an ad for Twitter Blue. But you can change it back. Here's how.
Who knew that removing functionality and limiting access to your product was the path to social media success.
Spez literally said in an interview that Musk's handling of twitter is what inspired him so
“This guy lost like $30B under a year. I wanna be just like him!”
How fucking stupid are these people?
The thing to remember is that CEOs aren't typically any smarter than the average person. They ended up in that position from inheritances, personal connections, etc. In the case of Musk, he has so much disposable income around that he can throw $30B at something and still have more than you or I will ever earn in a lifetime.
But you just know he has people that are on the payroll specifically to advise him and develop strategy. Either they’re surrounded by yesmen or they’re too arrogant to listen to the people they pay for advice. Okay, it’s probably both.
Spez sold Reddit for some small $mils before failing his other project and returning as a hired CEO. He is a cheapskate among media magnates. He isn't clever and is a loser. He adores Elon because he wishes he can throw money around just like him, but on the day's end he knows he doesn't have comparable wealth and he is there just because he happened to be around Aaron Swartz and other cool dudes. He himself couldn't create Reddit. And being the top admin of it now is probably the closest thing in corporate world to cuckolding, for he doesn't have a word in managing the 'frontpage of the internet' he once owned, he just follows what the board says him to. Sad piece of shit he is. Won't cry about him tho. Let misery fall onto his little empty head.
They also gifted a statuette to u/violentacrez or what's his handle? for powermodding dozens of nsfw subs, including borderline paedophilic, violent and abusive ones, like revenge porn partners upload after a break up to hurt their ex-couple.
They did great at handling the search of a boston bomber. Fuck ups happen way more often than forum dudes finding ISIS camp by triangulating the sky in a picture. I'm kinda happy to have this viral and well-documented drama to refer.
They rarely ever did their job before the press got involved, or they step into prison sentence territory. My personal favorite waa when altright sub stickied a link to crowdfund a contract killer for a guy who punched a right-wing talking head Robert Spencer on camera. Then, you have fatpeoplehate and other subs that weren't as dense and worked for years. Right before Spez's very eyes. Not to say some mass-shooters were frequenting and were inspired by these spaces too.
While modding jailbait is discussed (like, you could promote to a mod role everyone – that's how he excuse it), these things were consciously enabled by him. He platformed the worst people you can think of. And it sure shall not be forgotten.
Huffman said he saw Musk’s handling of Twitter, which he purchased last year, as an example for Reddit to follow.
How else are we supposed to know that the [removed] comment at the top of r/news or r/politics was the best content in the thread?
I think they also plan to block you viewing Reddit in mobile browsers so you must get their app.
And that will be when I completely stop browsing Reddit. I already dropped my useage by probably 95%. If they do that, it'll drop to about 99.9% since I do most of my browsing away from my desk.
For real lol. It was my “information” app for coffee breaks at work or when I had downtime. I’m only at my computer to game, not browse Reddit
Ad revenue is down (at least) 50% and they just keep making decisions that kick people off their platform.
I’m pretty sure Twitter advertising and Reddit advertising are in a race to the bottom to see who’s going to have to pay companies to put ads on their site first.
It’s insane to watch this happen. I remember watching the rise of Twitter as a kid and it becoming ubiquitous with social media, only to see it crash down this quickly.
I’m speculating, but I’d guess a lot of functionality is being limited because they don’t have dev staff to maintain it, as well as trying to cut server costs as much as possible. I’d honestly be surprised if musk was making these decisions because he thinks it’s good for the health of the platform. There has to be some ulterior motive for it.
It is unfathomable to me how Reddit isn't profitable.
Facebook makes a mint by telling advertisers, "trust us, we'll get your ads in front of people who might buy your product based on a lot of inference around their fairly generic profile data plus some tracking cookies". One guy should be able to sell a billion dollars worth of ads on Reddit. Just put up a form that says, "which subreddit do you want to advertise in?" and "what's your credit card number?". That's it. They have like 10,000 completely segmented markets just sitting there full of hundreds of millions of people who have self-selected to be members of those communities.
We spend hundreds of billions of dollars collectively trying to figure out which google search terms might find us a few more solid leads. Reddit has an amazing list of them for every company in the entire world. How in the everloving fuck have they managed to blindly bumble around for two decades without ever falling into the giant pile of money in front of them?
This theory requires them to have sufficient devs to implement a new feature. That also seems unlikely to me
They have plenty of devs, but they're all the worst in their field. How else could they take a fully developed app and turn it into the dumpster fire itbos today?
It’s usually not the devs who make the decisions on what to implement; that only happens in the early days of a site when the owners are also the devs.
C-levels looking to make money are pulling the strings. The devs at any large site just have a list of user stories to burndown.
Right. Never underestimate the absolute stupidity of hierarchies. (Corp bureaucracy in this case).  Stuff gets done just to make people look good based on who can tell the most convincing lie, not based, primarily at least, even on what would be good for the company as a whole.
 Devs, in most cases, are at the very bottom of this all, and therefore pretty much less responsible and have the least autonomy over what they do
Are you saying you can't find top-tier developers who are willing to work countless hours for no pay?... what now?
It wasn’t cheaper than paying the contractual penalty, but if he had done that, it would have been his debt and not Twitter's.
It’s funny how the biggest fuckups are happening to the platforms that critiqued the billionaire class the loudest.
Hmmm
It wouldn't surprise me if this was what is really going on musk spent 44 billion which is far more than twitter was ever worth he basically got tricked into buying a company that has never made money and now he's trying to get it to make money
He fucked himself into buying it by knowing nothing about how business acquisitions work, no one tricked him. He was and remains still a fucking idiot.
It wouldn't surprise me if this was what is really going on musk spent 44 billion which is far more than twitter was ever worth he basically got tricked into buying a company that has never made money and now he's trying to get it to make money
He didn’t get tricked into anything. He massively over offered and then when Twitter accepted his offer he realized he fucked up
Maybe I'm miss remembering but he made a huge offer realized it wasn't worth anywhere close to that then realized he faced a huge fine and sec investigation if he backed out and was basically forced to buy twitter
The problem with this remembering of events. Is that what would be more costly. 44 billion dollars. Or a fine that he would be able to pay off with an hour or two's earnings. And an uneventful SEC investigation? And if the 44 billion was the better of the two options. Then what is he hiding that the SEC would absolutely own his ass over? And why is it a good thing that he's hiding it?
If you look in to the court case, he was 100% going to be forced to buy it. There was a penalty fee for backing out but it didn't apply
I'm no rich billionaire with insider knowledge but my confident guess is he could finance it on his terms or be forced to liquidate stock to pay straight cash. He chose the option that wouldn't very possible take him out of the top .01%
Only if it went to trial and the contract held up. So no not 100%. And even then he was only in that position due to his ignorance and hubris. Elon isn't a smart man.
Agreed, but the writing was on the wall that he was not going to win - the judge had previously sided with sellers in these kinds of contracts in other cases.
If it had gone to trial and he was ruled against, he would have VERY likely been forced to settle the transaction rapidly with his own capital, rather than have time to arrange for the financing that he ended up using.
I think it's pretty clear in retrospect - he stubbornly tried to get out of the purchase while people who were smarter than him kept telling him he needs to start accepting reality that he's going to own twitter soon. Finally he gave in when he realized he had a lot more to lose than a few billion, or maybe he got a call from daddy who told him to stop being a moron and arrange a loan.
I think he's already been in trouble with the SEC over alleged Tesla stock manipulation (using Twitter to claim he was taking the company private at 420 a share or something), so maybe it could have become a real mess, so he decided to just go ahead with the deal.
He also manipulated crypto with his oversized influence through Twitter, though afaik the SEC can't do shit about that as crypto was (and still is) basically unregulated.
One of the sanctions the SEC seeks for repeat offenders is a ban on serving as an officer of any public company.
We're living in very interesting times indeed.
So we have one billionaire over in Meta, who's been making it very known how predatory in practice he is with getting your data and they fundamentally shatter the functionality of all of their platforms.
Then, we have this billionaire here who under a year, has made a total catastrophe of what was once a thriving platform once worth billions of it's own until he came and acquired it.
And then we have this not-a-billionaire who, is inspired by the self-destruction of the other platforms that they too, must follow suit, in hopes of aspiring success.
I wonder what book they're all reading from in the ways of business, that says if you suck harder, they'll mean a net positive.
I can't think of another product I know more about that I don't use. Just die already, elon is killing you in public to remove the threat of Twitter as an organizing tool for social uprisings and labor as a favor/brownie points/roundabout contracting for other billionaire "buddies".
Just go.
If was always about limiting the ability to organize using Twitter and Reddit. They want things to go differently in 2024, not because of any conservative political ideology even though most of them skew that way. But because they make more money when the monsters are in charge.
I don’t see the logic in making this change. Is someone supposed to want to join blue just so they can DM people that haven’t changed the default setting?
edit: crap gifs don't work on lemmy yet
https://tenor.com/view/can-we-get-much-higher-the-one-piece-is-real-whitebeard-gif-26587931
They do seem to work on Connect (though not the original linked gif, but the one further down).
Funnily enough I was about to attach a screenshot to show it, just to have realization smack me in the head with why that wouldn't work for a couple of reasons lol
I think it's important to remember that musk has never actually done anything to innovate the companies he's been a part of. He didn't create PayPal, he just bought his way in and made a series of dumb suggestions. He didn't create Tesla, he bought Tesla right after they had fine tuned their models, and then he made a series of changes that likely resulted in a worse product.
Elon Musk is not a good businessman, he's just rich and has a habit of purchasing profitable companies. Anyone could do this with his wealth. I'm not even really convinced that he's offered many technical ideas or designs for any of his companies, as it seems that would be the first thing he would mention every single time someone brought up one of his companies.
But open AI wouldn't even exist without him! After all, he contributed less than 10% of their raise and he suggested the name. You can't have a company called Open AI if nobody names it Open AI.
He's a dumbass, and his worshipers deserve him.
I think it was the submarine thing where the mask slipped for all to see.
Musk: "I'm making a magic submarine to rescue those poor boys. Oh it doesn't work, hang on a bit."
Diver: "It's alright, I rescued them the old fashioned way!"
Musk: "... Pedo."
Nothing like a big strop in front of everyone to show us all the thin skinned narcissist he was all along.
And you're relying on anyone else you want to DM changing that setting too. Otherwise, you're SOL even if you've changed it on your end.
Damn, Mr. Musk could have made more money betting on stocks mentioned in r/wallstreetbets, and they ALWAYS lose money. Dude seriously needs to have twitter do the opposite of what he thinks.
I have never seen a billionaire try to go from billions to zero so hard in my life. It is like he is showing the U.S. government why billionaires shouldn’t exist.
Is there a fund that lets me do long term shorts on rich people?
Who is still interested in that stite it's actually baffling at this point that there are still people on there.
Habit and familiarity, really. I saw a YouTuber recently argue against Mastodon and Threads because "people simply don't change platforms so I'm sticking with Twitter, despite its issues." Which is an insane take, imo, but one from a user.
I've seen YouTubers also say "nothing else has any users". I think this is generally the public sentiment and the reason people stick around. I would say that even if there's no alternative, just leave but... Unfortunately people feel like they "need" Twitter.
And people say social media isn't addicting.
Journalists and politicians love Twitter for some reason. They're the only people keeping it alive right now.
Pundits in general. I really enjoy The Majority Report, but it pisses me off how much they criticize Twitter but still talk about what they're saying on it.
Check the news. Twitter is/was used all over the place as a source for stories. The death of twitter removes the source of some really easy reporting income.
I only use it to get updates and breaking stuff from NFL, ESPN, POTUS, etc. I don’t actually go on it to browse. I wish there was another place where I could the same level of breaking/interesting news/updates
Those probably have a twitter mirror on mastodon by now. As long as there's no need to interact a mirror bot would probably work.
I've been there since 2014 and if I wasn't aware of the constant whining about how bad twitter is on other sites but twitter I wouldn't know anything has changed. For me it's the same it has always been. It's also the only platform where I have any kind of following so I don't just leave like I did from reddit.
So the bottom half of any twitter comment thread has ALWAYS been crypto scammers, gofundme scammers, bots hawking t shirts and maga chuds responding off topic?
Guys why are we down voting a Twitter user for giving their perspective?
This thread started with someone complaining that it's baffling and they can't understand why people are still using the platform.
That is why that site we shall not mention has died, let people discuss for discussion's sake
That’s so interesting, our Twitter consumption habits are really different. What do you use Twitter for? Just sending out updates to your followers?
Also as an aside, I hate how lemmy users are like Redditors and downvote any information contrary to what they want to see
I hate how lemmy users are like Redditors and downvote any information contrary to what they want to see
I was thinking the same. There's one person being honest about why they use Twitter - in a thread asking about why it's still used - and the only thing people can do here is downvoting him? It's sad.
It's not all users, it's the server culture. Try a different server and you'll see a different user culture.
Servers are not isolated from each other, people participate in communities regardless of the server they have their account on, that's how the federation works.
Tho if by "server" you actually mean "community" then yes, each community can have its own "culture" like different subs on reddit did.
I only post pictures and only follow people that post pictures. I basically use it like Instagram in 2014. I just don't get any engagement on Instagram so I stopped using it. On Twitter I got like 1600 followers and I'm not even consistent with my updates.
I've never made text posts there and I never read what other people are writing. It's a bad platform for that in my opinion.
Are you trying to move to another platform that might also get you followers/help you maintain those.followers (Threads, BlueSky). If I had a photo account, and dining post anything personal about myself, I would probably try any and all platforms. But I don't use SM like that. Does Twitter allow mentions of other platforms you're on? (When he banned mentions of Substack that got me interested in it and it led me to download the app and create an account there.)
you don't know how bad twitter was or what has changed because you were just ignorant. The issues are still there. If you say there is no starving children because you don't see them, your opinion is irrelevant.
Am I supposed to leave twitter because other people don't like it or what's the issue here? Like I said; I've had no problems with it. My feed is 99% what I want to see and the rest is cat videos
The worst thing is that the blue checks swarm the replies and are prioritized, so when a fucking dumbass says something idiotic you don't even get the catharsis of watching them get ratioed and dragged. It's all just sycophant idiots now.
I doubt Jesus shared pictures of himself dressed in girls clothes, but other than that yeah kinda like Jesus.
Nah, Jesus was just about showing off his abs and that weird yoga pose he was always doing.
"How to burn 44 billion dollars within a year" by Elon Musk
✅ alienated advertisers ✅ alienated right wing by curbing free speech despite saying the opposite ✅ alienated left wing by letting the right wing go rampant ✅ restricting core functions
Wow how is that going to be profitable for him? I don't see it.
It must be nice to be able to burn 44 billion dollars and not miss it at all.
I could live comfortably for the rest of my life on 1/10,000th of what Musk wasted.
With 44 billion us dollars Elon could have built a small home for every homeless us citizen.
Ignoring that there is zero chance such a hateful sociopath whose entire life is built on apartheid would do that:
No, he couldn't. Because the housing crisis is less about money and more about zoning. People HATE multifamily housing and new construction. The moment any attempt at new construction starts you get all the whahoos coming out of the woodwork to talk about how that overgrown field full of abandoned tires is actually a fundamental part of the culture of the town and where their children play and that new construction can't happen because The Poors might invade.
Fixating on money is a trap. It isn't about money. Slumlords would LOVE to build out apartment complexes they can gouge people on and to increase overall population density. It is all about the politicians and the zoning laws.
I Florida apartment complexes are being built to increase population density and gouge money. Rent here is $1600 - $2000.
New-build apartment complexes charge what the market will bear. The market will bear such a high price because the zoning code restricts supply by limiting where the apartments can be built and mandates expensive amenities (most notably, dedicated parking spaces).
Relax the zoning code and more, cheaper, apartments would be built.
I would also add on that Florida is very atypical (oh no, I am a prejudiced elitist!). if only because of the high probability of flooding and hurricane damage coupled with insurance companies actively leaving the state.
Although I acknowledge that those issues are real and important, I'm skeptical about assigning too much weight to them in terms of causes of high housing costs. Frankly, prices in most other parts of the country are similarly bad even without those factors in play.
It actually seems like the right can still say what they want, and the right was never actually for free speech.
They're for their own speech being unrestricted, mostly to say hateful things and incite violence. But you better believe the same standard isn't applied to the left.
alienated right wing by curbing free speech despite saying the opposite
They don't care. They don't want actual free speech, they just wanted their speech forced to everyone without fact checking or throttling.
To be honest, this is the only reason why I still have Twitter. I use it to contact various companies and ask for tech support. If I can't do that now, then there's no point to keep the account alive. Self-proclaimed genius is kind of an idiot. Just recently he complained about 50% drop rate in ad revenue, after killing ability to view tweets without account.
It is not meant for companies and companies who regularly talk to customers on twitter will definitely turn this feature off. So you will likely still be able to talk with any company that wants to talk with its customers on twitter.
It is meant for regular folks who get lot of unsolicited spam in their inboxes. It puts an immediate stop to those. So in that sense, it’s a tricky but good move.
I went and checked and you are right. All those companies that matter to me don't have the blue thing.
They don’t need a blue thing just to talk. They can just turn the feature off and they will be available to receive messages again from their customers. It’s just as simple as it was earlier to keep your messages open or closed to general public.
I sure hope they check regularly; the setting seems to reset every other days to "only blue people".
The didn't buy Twitter for a profit.
He bought Twitter to destroy it because big free horizontal communication platforms are bad for billionaires.
He can't just close it, so he just destroy it little by little until it is no more.
The same way conservative groups bought Tumblr because it was too sexual liberating for their conservative views.
he offered to buy twitter for a joke, and he actually did buy twitter because a court forced him to. not because this was some grand plan to accomplish anything - he literally spent months in court arguing that he shouldn't have to buy twitter, and he lost. that's the only reason he owns twitter now.
You cannot make a "joke" offer file it with the SEC and expect to get out of it.
the court didn't force him, he could have paid a penalty that was much lower than his current losses.
He bought Twitter by mistake, and was forced into it by Twitter shareholders who saw the opportunity to make bank.
"mistake" in this case actually means by shooting his mouth off and thinking he was smarter than everyone else in the room. He fucked around, then immediately began finding out.
But, $420.69, bruh!
It’s so frustrating to be in the Valley, and be subjected to one set of rules to tightly follow, while a group of special sociopaths (e.g., Musk, SBF, Holmes, Neumann) are free to do whatever they like.
Just playing devil's advocate. But aren't two of your examples either on their way or in jail right now?
I should have been more clear: The Valley allows and even encourages certain sociopaths to flout rules and conventions around ethics and reporting, while the rest of us are held tightly to those rules and conventions. For example, Sequoia seemingly didn’t even perform de minimis due diligence when leading a nine-figure round in FTX.
That would involve him backing down and admitting an error, which he's clearly not capable of.
You give Musk too much credit. The fucking guy is a big baby with impulse issues - who happens to have billions of dollars at his disposal. He is running Twitter exactly as I would think a dipshit narcissistic tantrum baby would run it, although dismantling Twitter does coincidentally benefit the top .1% for now
Why couldn't he just close it, if that was his goal? He owns it outright doesn't he? He could announce that Twitter was ceasing operations, sell off the remaining assets, cover (or default on) the debts, and then Twitter would be no more.
So no, I don't think destroying it was his aim. He's just really, really bad at this.
But as the richest man in the world, he could cover their stakes. If the goal was to end Twitter, he has the resources to do so without losing anyone else's money.
He didn't need their money, he just wanted it. Worse comes to worst, he can find enough in the couch cushions to cover them.
He bought Twitter because he (along with the Saudi royal family, the monarchy ruling Qatar, and the larger worldwide cabal of authoritarians) thought he could use it to control public discourse in the same way oligarchs bought up newspapers, radio stations, and TV stations in the past. He's killing it because he never understood what most people liked about Twitter, he only understood what he liked about Twitter (getting a lot of attention and being able to be shitty to people without having to actually socialize).
Exactly. His old friend Peter Thiel couldn't make a rival platform take off, so Musk bought Twitter and saddled it with an untenable $13bn of debt.
This has always been an interesting point for me. If I buy a secondhand Tesla, I've signed none of the agreements made between the initial buyer and Tesla. I wonder if I could disconnect it and hack the interface to unlock the disabled features that don't require network access, or spoof the authorization for some of those?
It's much harder to fuck up so quickly, since a Tesla is not a live service, so there's not a lot that will change about the already sold cars.
I guess if Musk decides to save money by firing engineers and reducing QA on the car software, and insists on pushing really buggy software then it could get gnarly I guess, but I don't think he's that stupid, and I don't think all these Twitter moves are entirely about trying to make a profit; It's so bad I think there is a level of malevolence involved.
Almost the entire vehicle interface is software and screens. If he’s doing it at Twitter he could just as easily start doing weird paywall stuff with Tesla.
The car is effectively a live service.. they've completely changed the UI multiple times.. they can lock out features.. they'll likely disable ultrasonic sensors once they think their camera based version is working..
The only thing they can't do is add hardware.
But you can change is back. Here's how
Why? Why waste the mental resources fighting to make a platform work for you? Just let Twitter die
Watch him ban every mention of Signal or Telegram as well when people try to get around the DM issue.
The longer this shitshow goes on, the dumber Elon looks. Who could idolize him at this point?
My parents, tryna force me to work for him cause "he's such a great person! Could you do a better job than him!".
Mostly my dad suggesting me to be "the next musk" which honestly horrifies me
Could you do a better job than him
"I could've not drunk-bought Twitter, thereby saving $44 billion."
Because he's been fucking them for 6 months and they haven't left.
I did, and some others have. But most people are still sitting there on his platform, whining about how shitty it is, while keeping him in power by staying.
Because the short-term equation is easy:
Would you rather have 10 users paying nothing but taking up server space and bandwidth? Or would you prefer 1 paying user and 9 people leaving? In the short term, option B is a win-win.
And if that leads to Twitter becoming a dead husk of itself, oh well, that's a problem for next quarter
