• dog@yiffit.net
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    1 year ago

    these kind of shenanigans make me weary of telsas. there’s no way elon’s antics are contained only in twitter. he has to be cutting corners and making awful grease-fire decisions there, too.

    • Satouru@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      I don’t think that there’s any conspiracy or ill intent there.

      It’s just that the tech bubble is exploding and investors are running out of money - or rather are running out of willing to spend money for these social media platforms.

      So they go public or get bought by some ultra rich people.

      There’s also the issue that as communities grow to insanely bit proportions, the operating costs also grow exponentially. Server costs of course, but then you also need to start investing in teams of lawyers, support, community managers, dedicated DevOps and developers… all of that while the community loses its sense of being part of a “little village” and get less inclined to financially help foot the bill.

      These social media services have pretty much committed suicide - or egocide rather because I don’t believe that they will go anywhere. They’ll stay afloat without issues, but they’ve lost their souls a long time ago. They’re working for money now, and not for their community or users anymore.

      And they cannot go back either, because the operating costs don’t just go down by themselves, so they need to act greedy in order to survive. There’s nothing the Reddit or Twitter leadership could do to stop that now. It’s a one-way byproduct of uncontrolled growth.

      The right “moral choice” for these leaders would probably be to just let their platform slowly die while alternatives emerge - but that’s a very painful thing to do when you invested 20+ years of your life into it. Dorsey managed to do it for example, which is impressive and quite commendable.

      I’ll add that it’s unlikely that the Fediverse will suffer from the same fate, because… there’s no management. There’s an “agreed upon” structure but everyone can do their own thing and that’s what’s beautiful about it. It cannot “lose its soul” because as a contract/protocol, the “soul” of the Fediverse is the only thing that makes it exist. It might splinter, it might evolve into different “universes”, but it will never die.

      It’s pretty much a re-creation of how the 2000’s internet worked. Which had its problems, yeah, but which was also a very resilient and independent place.

    • MyOpinion@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      The fediverse has now come to my rescue twice now. Mastodon and now Lemmy. All hale the new social king.

  • GraceGH@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    Deeply funny stuff. Keep it coming Elon, you’ll burn your site to the ground yet!

    • PascalPistachios@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      Everyone shits on the guy, but hey, he’s living the dream of making a billionaire go broke while also destroying one of the hell pits on the internet.

  • A1kmm@lemmy.amxl.com
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    1 year ago

    Apparently the threshold in the US before courts can appoint a liquidator to take over a corporation following an involuntary bankruptcy petition is debts (with no bona fide dispute about them) totaling US$10,000 or more above the securities the creditors hold.

    If there is any truth to all this discussion of Elon Musk arranging that Twitter’s debts for rent, cloud services, etc… not be paid, surely it is only a matter of time before creditors file such a petition, and he loses control of Twitter.

    • ericjmorey@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      You may have mixed up you terminology here. Bankruptcy is something that is filed by a debtor to get protection from creditors. That is, the entity that borrowed is seeking relief from the contract that binds them to repay lenders.

  • Kichae@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    Twitter was the catalyst for some big progressive social movements. I think the ruling class got its money worth out of hamstringing them.

    They shouldn’t have. Organizers should have just picked up and moved to Mastodon, but of the few of them that I saw scout it, all but one left after a few days because they were totally unwilling to learn new tools.

    “We don’t have the time for that,” they’d said.

    They then turned around and turned to Twitter, where they are effectively shadow banned.

    • mayooooo@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      You are right, but mastodon is just a bad experience for a lot of users. Come to think of it, this place has none of the strange vibes mastodon has.

      • Kichae@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        Mastodon had a relatively large and active group of users who were there for a certain set of reasons, and those reasons included being hidden away from other people.

        They didn’t take well to the influx of difference. But then, that influx outnumbered them 4:1 and could have just ignored them.

        Here, though, the influx outnumbered the existing user base by several thousand to one, and no thought has been given to whether anyone should care about lemmygrad. They can, and will, continue to do their own thing.

  • lixus98@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    Since Musk’s acquisition, Twitter has cut costs dramatically and laid off thousands of employees. Musk ordered the company to cut infrastructure costs, such as spending on cloud services, by $1 billion, a source had told Reuters in November.

    Can Elon keep Twitter afloat with all the money it’s been losing?

    • overlordror@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      I don’t see how. It’s possible to block most ads you see on the platform and there aren’t enough companies advertising to replace them so you end up with a mostly ad-free feed.

      The point is to kill Twitter. Elon Musk is beholden to the Saudis with his investment. They used Twitter tracking to find and kill Jamal Khashoggi. What you see happening to Twitter is entirely on purpose, so it can’t be used to stir up uprisings again like the Arab Spring in Egypt, or the organization of Hong Kong protesters.

  • jpv@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    Musk ordered the company to cut infrastructure costs, such as spending on cloud services, by $1 billion, a source had told Reuters in November.

    At some point all these numbers seem like magic space money. Not that that’s what they spend, but that’s what they could reasonably (for whoever’s definition thereof) cut?

    • Mars@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      Sometimes there are inefficiencies. Sometimes you can cut features. But it’s a process that takes time, and has repercussions, and limits. The 1$ Billion mark could come from extensive evaluation of the current infrastructure, but it comes from Elon’s vibes and massive incurred debt from the leveraged acquisition.

      Elon thinks that he can use office space and not pay for it. He is delusional. And he knows less about cloud services and code than he knows about leases.

      Twitter is still online because providers can’t believe THE AUDACITY, and are hopping they will get paid. Let’s see how long they can justify the hole in the books and keep subsidizing Musk’s House of Hate Speech.

  • Nechesh@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    I can’t wait for the “find out” phase to catch up with Elon Musk. He’s one of those guys that constantly seems to avoid consequences.

  • buhala@sopuli.xyz
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    1 year ago

    Wonder if Google pulling the plug would affect twitter. Depends on what sorts of things they use it for. Does anyone know if twitter is primarily a Google house?

  • RomanceDailies@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    Now will Google look the other way because of Twitter’s pull like they do with YouTube’s drain or will this lead to further disruption between the two companies?

    • ericjmorey@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      YouTube is part of Google (Alphabet if you want to use the legal name). It’s a much different decision when an unrelated company is using a lot of your resources and not paying for them.