Interesting take on Musk's attempts to limit data scraping: https://twitter.com/MikeBenzCyber/st...54646942896128.

 

hish2021, you may like to consider the differences between post #51 and post #46, whilst reminding yourself of what you wrote in post #50...

Interesting link.

https://nitter.net/elonmusk/status/1674226170488057856

That gives me "Tweet not found"

Edit:
So does this:
https://nitter.net/MikeBenzCyber/sta...54646942896128

Yes, because Elon Musk has turned off guest access, thus breaking Nitter.

I guess it was just unlucky timing... or maybe mjolnir is actually Elon... ;)

Oh ok.
https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/30/tw...o-view-tweets/

Shows how much attention I pay to twitter/facebook.

News aggregator sites will need to stop quoting/linking twitter feeds then. It won't drive me to sign up.

Twitter Monetization?

Just stop paying rents and bills. Will probably save a few bucks... for a while...

https://www.techdirt.com/2023/05/22/...y-for-twitter/

Post #46 was this link, https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/30/2...account-tweets, and a quote from there.

Post #51 was this link, https://twitter.com/MikeBenzCyber/st...54646942896128, and my comment: "Interesting take on Musk's attempts to limit data scraping"

Post #50 was a response to mjolnir's post #48.

For post #51, I was logged into my Twitter account (as I usually am). For post #50, I checked whether I could view the link I provided without logging into my Twitter account by using a standby browser.

Business genius, I tell you: https://www.morningstar.com/news/mar...-twitter-users

Maybe the beginning of the end for Twitter: https://about.instagram.com/blog/ann...m-text-feature... now that is a clever business person. Not that I'm a great fan of Zuckerberg either (still haven't signed up to FB), but I can recognise cleverness when I see it.

Edit: 5 million users have signed up in the first 4 hours!

They haven't even started advertising it yet:

https://www.quiverquant.com/threadstracker/

What is the grand genius of business going to do about this?

Oh! I know!

He propose a literal (name of male repoductive organ)-measuring contest... https://futurism.com/the-byte/elon-m...killer-thrives

:rolleyes:

Elon Musk's 5 year countdown: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vYURUiOjZSw

Ads may go down, but at least hate speech is rising :rolleyes:

https://phys.org/news/2023-04-analys...y-twitter.html


Elon - of course - can't see it.

"Do you see a rise of hate speech?" Mr Musk said. "I don't."

He asked our reporter James Clayton for specific examples of hateful content.

When he couldn't pinpoint individual messages, Mr Musk said: "You don't know what you're talking about… you just lied."

From https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-65246394

@Jan K. I don't find your first link to be particularly relevant. The sample rate the team used for their analysis was extracted on a very short timeline before and after Musk's acquisition of Twitter and extended only through 2022 before measures such as 'blue check' verification and others could effectively reduce the load of 'bots' regurgitating trash across the platform.

"Using this methodology, the team extracted timelines of a sample of users who posted hateful tweets one month before and after Musk's purchase and measured their daily rates of hate speech during the same time period. ...Then, they measured the overall volume of hateful tweets throughout 2022."

I'm not a Twitter user, but I thought the blue check thing was a feature that long predated Musk's acquisition? And the only recent change was that is used to be about verifying identity and now it verifies payment?

I should have been more precise. There have been at least 3 different iterations of the 'blue check' process: In the first, Twitter themselves supposedly took steps to verify and distinguish genuine notable account holders, such as celebrities and organizations, from impostors or parodies.
In 2016 Twitter began accepting requests for verification, but it was discontinued the same year.
Three years later Twitter tried again: "This time offering notability criteria for the account categories of government, companies, brands, and organizations, news organizations and journalists, entertainment, sports and activists, organizers, and other influential individuals."
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_verification

After Musk's purchase Twitter introduced paid verification/paid subscription to everyone with a phone #, address and email. 'Bots' probably haven't been eliminated but, IMO, certainly curtailed.

As have the numbers of advertisers and users.

The liberal media hates him, other small minded people are jealous of his success. If I were him I'd probably pull the plug on Twitter and use the rest of my quarter of a Trillion dollars to help the human race become multi-planetary.
"PROFILE
Elon Musk
CEO, Tesla
$250.4B
Real Time Net Worth
as of 7/16/23 #1 in the world today"
https://www.forbes.com/profile/elon-...h=581d9fea7999

Who buys Tesla cars?

Jealousy is one thing... Extreme distaste for ego fuelled decision making is something else entirely.
I'd respect that... but you and I both know that it's never going to happen.

Also, how much of Elon's $240bn is tied up in Tesla stock? The company's latest balance sheet shows that the shares have a book value of less than $14 per share. If Elon were to suddenly liquidate all of his stock, the impact on the share price would be disastrous. He is somewhat stuck.

As you like to say: Time will tell!

Apparently a rising tide of people - looks like a good place to be 'stuck.'

"Looking at the cumulative data up to May 2023, the best-selling car in the World becomes the Tesla Model Y -up 9 spots- with 427,524 units sold (+85.3%). " https://www.focus2move.com/world-car...revious%20year.


"Despite growing sales at many automakers, Tesla continues to dominate the American EV sector.

The all-electric brand saw its sales rise by 30 percent in the first six months of 2023, as compared to a year earlier. That meant that it sold 336,892 vehicles," https://www.carscoops.com/2023/07/te...ts-all-others/




One thing upon which we can agree.

I think I've read that he owns 15% of Tesla?


Musk is thought to own about 44% of SpaceX.

"The valuation of Elon Musk’s SpaceX hit near $150 billion following a share sale by existing investors announced this week, CNBC has learned.

SpaceX has an agreement with new and existing investors to sell up to $750 million in stock from insiders at $81 a share, according to a copy of the purchase offer sent by CFO Bret Johnsen on Thursday, which CNBC obtained.


The new share price represents an increase of about 5% from its previous secondary sale at $77 each, at a valuation of about $140 billion. SpaceX did not respond to a CNBC request for comment on the purchase offer."
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/07/13/elon...valuation.html

The point of that question is: How many Tesla customers would be conservatives?

I'd be willing to bet that the majority aren't conservative.

OK, so the current market cap of Tesla is $891bn.

15% of $891bn is ~$133bn, so at least 56% of Elon's wealth is tied up in Tesla stock. Note that the 15% figure you see everywhere seems to exclude stock options that he also holds.
The thing to remember about SpaceX is that it is not a "business" in the conventional sense of the word. It's essentially a fund which is being used for research.

It doesn't generate any revenue per se... It receives grants from donors and sponsors for the work it does.

As such, the conventional rules of business cannot be applied to it.

Agreed, but Starlink (subsidiary of SpaceX) appears to be very close to being spun-off to an IPO: "If Starlink goes public, it could be one of the largest IPOs in recent years." https://observer.com/2023/02/spacex-...ofit-ipo-plan/

Of course you don't :D

It was just to point out that some things indeed are going up on tweeter...

Mmmhh, right then. Here's an upcoming lawsuit... 106% rise in hate speech...

"Analysts detected 325,739 English-language antisemitic tweets in the nine months from June 2022 to February 2023, with the weekly average number of antisemitic tweets increasing by 106% when comparing the period before and after Musk’s acquisition. The rate of creation of antisemitic accounts more than tripled in the period after Musk’s takeover.

From https://www.theguardian.com/technolo...ed-hate-tweets

Over 6 tweets, reputedly anti-semetic, alleged to have been reported and either not taken down in a timely manner or in some cases no action at all. The supposed 106% increase of course depends on who's doing the analysis.

Given Germany's actions in WW2 as well as the non-actions of some of the bordering States that stood by under the guise of 'neutrality', it is no surprise that much of Europe is hyper-sensitive to some forms of 'speech.' I fully expect some sort of retaliation against Musk.

Maintaining true "free speech" is a tightrope that is hard to walk.

Quite correct, but I'd take it a step further and say that completely free speech is never really a true possibility in a civilised society.

We have laws against certain behaviors because unfortunately common sense and common decency are both sorely lacking. These laws exist to maintain minimum standards of decorum, because some humans want everyone to live in a cess pit.

"Twitter owner Elon Musk noted the first payouts—which pay creators for the ads that appear in their reply threads—would be cumulative from when he first announced the program in February. ...Musk said last month that the first block of payments for creators would total $5 million. ...Internet hall of fame, one of the platform’s most-followed meme pages, shared its payout Thursday, which apparently amounted to a whopping $107,274." https://www.forbes.com/sites/antonio...h=6e96dd96698e

The payouts were first reported by the Washington Post, which also noted that Musk is favoring specific right-wing influencers who support and agree with him, while excluding those he has had conflicts with . . . suggesting that he’s not applying the site’s terms of service equally to every account. The paper also quoted an anonymous former Twitter executive who said that it appeared as though the payouts were “pulled out of thin air for a specific subset of creators that he wanted to placate.”

https://www.fastcompany.com/90924199...users-to-tweet

Of course, Andrew Tate is a friend and indeed a wonderful person.


Maintaining true "free speech" is a tightrope that is hard to walk.

Twitter speech is only for agreing friends... just do a search for banned users...

Suggesting, anonymous, so many 'buzz' words, lol. Let me know when someone actually proves something factual.

"Elon Musk

@elonmusk
Subscribed
It’s not exactly per impression. What matters is how many ads were shown to other verified users.

Only verified users count, as it is otherwise trivial to game the system with bots.
11:59 PM · Jul 13, 2023" https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1679717154973945856

Here's a scientific paper on it:

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2304.04129.pdf

But I expect you'll dismiss it, as you tend to do when presented with facts.

So, paying people to use your product (or service) is a sound business strategy?

I dismiss conjecture that is called 'fact.' Again, this paper extracts a timeline as the basis for their measurements that precedes some of the changes that Musk made to the platform, and truncates the period of time that those changes may have had to become effective. For example - reduction of 'bot' accounts:

A bit of truth at the end of 6 pages of speculation:
"Our methods cannot prove a causal relationship between Musk’s takeover and hate speech or bot levels."

"...Social bots have a significant presence on Twitter, estimated to be 9–15% of accounts (Varol et al. 2017). Research found people struggle distinguishing between bots and humans, meaning the presence of bots on Twitter may not be obvious to its user base (Cresci et al. 2017). ..."

There is much speculation that bot accounts greatly increased following Trump's election and that increase followed both sides of the political spectrum as well as instigation from foreign governments.

"As new interventions to combat spam bots require time to be introduced following Musk’s takeover, we checked for differences in distributions of Botometer scores in the period Oct. 27th – Dec. 2nd compared to Dec. 3rd – Dec. 31st. [Once more, a very short timeline.] However, we found no decreases in overall bot scores, rather there were significant increases in certain categories of scores. We caution that this should not be taken as auditing the efficacy of specific bot-prevention policies."

"...First, we extract timelines of a sample of users who posted hateful tweets one month before and after Musk’s purchase and measure their daily rates of hate speech during the same time period. Then, we measure the overall volume of hateful tweets throughout 2022. ..."

and:

"...Overall, we find both hate speech and bot scores increased following Musk’s purchase. While no direct causal relationships between specific changes to Twitter policies or features can be inferred from our analysis, we speculate as to the likely causes of the patterns we document, ..." Emphasis mine.

I also doubt that an API trained in this way is relevant to a World wide user base: "While the Perspective API was trained on New York Times data, it has been verified on a range of social media platforms, including Twitter (Saveski, Roy, and Roy 2021)."

Any scientist worth their salt will tell you that "correlation does not imply causation." The quote you chose to pluck from the document is saying so using different words.

But that doesn't change the fact that hate speech and bot levels both increased after Musk's takeover, as noted in the report:

"We document marked changes in hate speech and bot levels on Twitter following Musk’s takeover."

You can continue to ignore the science if you like... as I'm sure you will.

Is it just me, or does the new rebranded twitter 'X' logo look very much like the X.org 'X' logo?

Fairly similar.

It's a typical Musk decision. Twitter isn't twitter any more. The one bit of it left working was the blue bird and the 'tweet' that had been added to the English language. Now he's broken them also.

If I was hiring him to run twitter, I'd have fired him months ago. We should start guessing when his "asset" will become a liability. End of 2024?

At this point, it is beginning to seem like he's actively sabotaging himself.

I use Twitter via my desktop browser and it works just fine for me.

It's not reaching the site that's being discussed. Do you think Musk is doing a good job?

Hmmm... shouldn't thread title now be "X Monetization"?

Or is using the word "thread" in x/twitter "threads" bad style? :D


Nice transition from twitter to X btw. Seems well thought through and planned.

Good point, but you can't edit a thread title in General. I tried before when I was the OP.

And 'Monetization' doesn't really apply any more. It's a money pit ATM under Musk. Why hasn't hies CEO kicked him off Twitter anyhow?
It's the fastest way to stop it losing money. And he can lose the blue bird, he can try to delete 'tweet' from dictionaries, but the moment he changes twitter.com, the site goes dead.

Might I suggest, "How to claim a $44bn write-off on your taxes..."
Yeah.

I don't understand. What is not reaching which site that's being discussed where?

I don't presume to judge Musk. Related: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3sOuEv0E2I

Elon Musk takes over @x username ...

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business...-musk-rebrand/

... like he doesnt have money to buy it.

Nobody here is judging Mr. Musk... we're only judging the decisions he makes.

Well, his former VP is... https://futurism.com/the-byte/former...sk-swings-rage

Some interesting links therein, but have a search for his X wife to...


That X obcession, why not name the children X-something?

Oh! Meet X AE A-XII... https://pagesix.com/article/elon-musk-children/

:rolleyes:

There's actually an argument that we have too much social media. Facebook's /Meta's / zuckerberg's Threads has apparently tanked, with 100 Million signed up but not using it. Then there's twitter (I refuse the renaming), Meta, snapchat, instagram, tiktok, telegram, all the Google, samsung, Apple Huawei & Communist equivalents. It's well past saturation.

It's actually who is going to get the largest share of a possibly shrinking pie that matters. Because whoever gets a majority is going to attract the rest.

Nice to see Musk's decisions being judged by those who doubtless are competent to judge. OTOH, it may just be the tall poppy syndrome.

As for the distinction ...