this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2023
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[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (6 children)

I get why people are doubtful about Musk. I just wanna see YouTube's monopoly broken and streamers/entertainers get their due. I do not like how YouTube treats content creators. Maybe a competitive alternative is a good thing.

[–] [email protected] 44 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Twitter ran by musk is unlikely to be our savior

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

Given that Twitter's already relatively tiny user base is dwindling, the platform is now account-walled, and Musk is a notorious liar, I doubt any prominent creators are going to even consider cross-posting to Twitter.

A competitive alternative would be great, but Twitter isn't going to be it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Yeah, definitely isn't going to be Twitter.

Musk is too stupid for that.

[–] [email protected] -5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Twitter's already relatively tiny user base

Twitter's MAU count is around 450 million active users. You're not going to find many bigger user bases.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Where did you get that number from? Best I’ve seen is ~350M and dropping. For reference, Pinterest is ~465M.

Twitter had an outsized impact but it’s not at FB or Insta or Youtube numbers, and it’s already struggling to keep working under the load of mostly text and static images.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Here’s one that puts it at 550mil MAU:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-networks-ranked-by-number-of-users/

Is it as big as YouTube or Facebook or Instagram? No. It’s still one of the biggest user bases on the internet though.

Also how has twitter been struggling to keep working?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Interesting. Looking into the sources that Statista uses, you find this graph that paints a very different picture.

Also how has twitter been struggling to keep working?

Did you not hear about all the limiting they had in place recently? 600 or 1000 posts viewable per day for non-paying users, 6000 for paying users. I know the official reason given was to (somehow) limit data scraping, but come on, we all know that's bullshit. And outside of that, there have been a bunch of issues with outages, basic things like search breaking, etc. It's a platform in decline.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That graph literally says "significant anomalies in source data", so they're even saying that it's not an accurate picture though.

Rate limiting isn't "struggling to keep working". It isn't like it was crashing due to people using it too much. Saying "we know their reason is bullshit" doesn't make it true. Nothing indicated that they were having trouble with uptime or performance.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Yes, it says there are anomalies—that doesn't mean it's wrong, just that it's unusual. Almost like there was a moron in charge of the company who was making erratic changes to its infrastructure and driving a mass exodus of users. And even if that number is wrong (it probably is) it's not like the previous number isn't heavily outdated. There have been massive changes to Twitter since then, it would be stupid to assume old data is still accurate.

It was crashing in part because Twitter was DDOSing itself. Twitter rate-limited itself on purpose because they were fucking their own system up, but they gave a BS reason because it would be embarrassing for Musk to have to admit he fired too many people and the skeleton crew that's left can't keep up with his stupid decisions.

Remember, this is a website that primarily serves short text-only posts and was largely stable when it was bought. It's not rocket science, and yet Musk's still managing to make it look hard.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I didn't say it means it's wrong, just that it's not going to be an accurate picture. It might be right, it might be wrong, we have no idea - which is why they put that qualifier there.

There's nothing indicating twitter isn't still largely stable.

Also that's not a DDOS since there was no denial of service. Those calls are likely all just getting stopped at a cloudflare (or alternative) level anyway.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

There was no denial of service because they rate limited accounts. That’s the entire point. Had they not done that, it’s likely they would have overwhelmed their servers and crashed the service, resulting in denial of service.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

But no one knows when that repeated call was added to twitter - it could have been there for years. Like I said, it also likely just gets caught by cloudflare etc when it's doing that, meaning it's not going to overwhelm anything.

You're saying that they did a release, realised it was going to DDOS itself, so then rate limited accounts in another release rather than simply roll back the broken release or fix the call? That doesn't make any sense.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

They didn’t realise it was going to DDOS itself, it was in the process of hammering their servers and they rate limited accounts because they didn’t know what was happening. It was still making excessive calls when they were rate limiting.

It makes no sense because the things they’re doing aren’t the actions of a competent team with a knowledgeable tech lead.

I think I’ve made my point pretty clear by now. If you’d still like to believe they’re not useless, go for gold, but the facts doesn’t support that.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That’s 100% guessing based on nothing more than your wild speculation. You have no facts to support it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I mean, neither do you. This is all speculation since it’s a private company run by a known liar.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I’m not the one making claims, you are. You’ve got nothing to support those claims.

As a developer myself I’m 99.9% sure what you’re claiming didn’t happen because it makes no sense from a dev standpoint.

[–] [email protected] -5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

~~Twitter is not account-walled. Have you been keeping up with the news?~~

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

I just tried it. Twitter won't let me view pages without an account. What do you mean exactly?

@HKayn @HeavyDogFeet

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It hasn't been making headlines this time (they're only talking about Threads and the jet tracker guy), but it's back to needing a login.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Oh, in that case I'm the one who hasn't been keeping up. Damn.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

especially since the closest competitor rn is twitch which is an absolute shithole

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (3 children)

As someone less familiar with twitch, what's making it a shithole?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

Twitch takes 50% revenue. Youtube takes 30%. Twitch has an overly strict TOS to stay relatively kid-friendly. Twitch recently tried to limit content creators from showcasing sponsors in their own videos, but I think they backed away from that plan. Basically, it's at the fully enshittified stage at this point.

Apparently, there's a new twitch competitor, Kick, backed by an online gambling company, which I even worse. They have their content creators do gambling streams where the odds are modified to make it look like their games pay out more. And they explicitly promote bigots and fascists on their platform.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Twitch is overly hostile with its own subscriber base and doesn't pay nearly as much as YouTube. {Recent business decisions](https://digiday.com/marketing/how-twitch-lost-its-grip-on-and-way-with-the-streaming-community/) are really causing it to bleed streamers to other platforms, mostly YouTube.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

~~elon musk purchased it and laid off a ton of staff over time, leading twitter to be very poorly moderated and also have many technical glitches after that~~

edit: oops I'm an idiot. I thought that said twitter.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Twitch is owned by Amazon, Twitter is owned by Musk.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Thanks. I misread that comment. I appreciate the clarification.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

It would take a lot to beat YouTube though, and honestly I'm not sure it can be done given the extreme cost and general lack of revenue.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

What fucking wild times we live in. This whole Elon vs Zuck thing about copyright. And how I see more people want Zuck to win. And now, we've got Musk trying to go after YouTube.

It's a mess.

I in no way want Musk to win. I just think the whole series of events is wild

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Yup, Elon is such an ass that I'm cheering for Mark Zuckerberg of all people. What crazy times we live in

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

When people are rooting for the Zuck instead of for you, that's when you know that you've fucked up beyond any doubt.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I never thought I'd see people rushing to and championing and saying how much they love a new Zuckerberg owned platform like they have with threads lol. Everyone's always saying they want facebook to die, and how they won't use anything with a facebook account, and so on...........and then bam, 100 million users in a few days lol

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I feel like bezos should jump into this to increase the drama level.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Actually. What has he even done recently? Other than, ya know, bring part of THAT group. Isn't he just doing rockets or something? I haven't heard about him for a while.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

The last two things I remember were him getting legally divorced and then popping champagne as William Shatner was trying to talk.