Musk offers to buy Twitter

Just now hearing on Twitter that anyone can pay $8 and get the blue check, so you can setup an account as Donald J Trump and buy the checkmark for it, it sounds like people have already been doing it with Elon's name and they're having to combat it.

This will be the end of celebrity verification as we know it, totally devaluing its validity.
 
Eric said:
Just now hearing on Twitter that anyone can pay $8 and get the blue check, so you can setup an account as Donald J Trump and buy the checkmark for it, it sounds like people have already been doing it with Elon's name and they're having to combat it.

This will be the end of celebrity verification as we know it, totally devaluing its validity.
Click to expand...
Yeah, this has been all over Twitter the past several days. Many of the well knowns I follow (not celebs as much as well known commentators) are basically telling Elon to stuff it re: paying a monthly fee. I don't blame them.
 
Eric said:
Just now hearing on Twitter that anyone can pay $8 and get the blue check, so you can setup an account as Donald J Trump and buy the checkmark for it, it sounds like people have already been doing it with Elon's name and they're having to combat it.

This will be the end of celebrity verification as we know it, totally devaluing its validity.
Click to expand...

Worse, think about people spoofing politicians, law enforcement agencies, election officials, etc.
 
Eric said:
Just now hearing on Twitter that anyone can pay $8 and get the blue check, so you can setup an account as Donald J Trump and buy the checkmark for it, it sounds like people have already been doing it with Elon's name and they're having to combat it.

This will be the end of celebrity verification as we know it, totally devaluing its validity.
Click to expand...

So I could become Ron DeSantis and give Florida the shock of its life?

Why is Musk doing all this stuff? He overpaid for his toy anyway and now he's trying to drive it into the ground? Guy's writing a new chapter in vulture capitalism? Else there's some tax angle to having the thing approach ground zero in value.
 
shadow puppet said:
Yeah, this has been all over Twitter the past several days. Many of the well knowns I follow (not celebs as much as well known commentators) are basically telling Elon to stuff it re: paying a monthly fee. I don't blame them.
Click to expand...
Right, I guess I didn't realize it meant anyone could just buy it, even the news reporters I saw today were surprised by it.
 
From a conversation Musk had with an advertiser.

IMG_0249.PNG
 
Cmaier said:
Nothing says “do business with my company“ like “and if you ever stop, I’ll tell the world to boycott you.”
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Yup. This is going to be studied for a long time at business schools … and comedy clubs.

Sucks for the people who used to work there though. I get the CEO did his shareholders a huge favor but he screwed everyone else, especially his workers. I mean a lot of them are happy to get out now with severance, but there are people on work visas and not everyone who is getting fired is going to be financially okay even with severance.
 
dada_dave said:
Yup. This is going to be studied for a long time at business schools … and comedy clubs.

Sucks for the people who used to work there though. I get the CEO did his shareholders a huge favor but he screwed everyone else, especially his workers. I mean a lot of them are happy to get out now with severance, but there are people on work visas and not everyone who is getting fired is going to be financially okay even with severance.
Click to expand...

i’ve been laid off (startup went out of business) and it’s not fun, even if you can afford it. Hopefully there are enough job slots open at other good companies to absorb folks.
 
Cmaier said:
i’ve been laid off (startup went out of business) and it’s not fun, even if you can afford it. Hopefully there are enough job slots open at other good companies to absorb folks.
Click to expand...

Yeah me too. There are reports that the workplace has gotten so bad most of them want to get out with severance, but it must be hard especially if had previously liked working there. There are also reports of people trying to be the ones laid off so their colleagues on work visas don't get extra shafted. That's the thing, it's easy to mock the billionaire setting his money on fire (and I'll confess to not being above schadenfreude for people like him) but in the end he isn't going to be as badly hurt as the employees. And as bad as Twitter could be sometimes, for Academia and some other communities it could actually be a net positive - it even effectively started some cool communities. So this is pretty sad. As you say maybe someone can absorb these folks and maybe a competitor can mostly replicate what was lost (people seem to be talking about something called Mastadon?) but still ... :( what a jerk he is.
 
One has to wonder if literally threatening your advertisers is a good strategy. I'll admit that it's sort of fun to watch them implode though, it's hard to imagine how he was ever so successful with Tesla considering what a clueless tool he has proven to be,.

www.salon.com

Elon Musk's Twitter takeover is a disaster. How much longer will the platform hold?

Musk is on his way to creating the Twitter hellscape he claims to want to stop. I've put my account on hiatus
www.salon.com www.salon.com
 
Apparently he has also fired most SREs (Site Reliability Engineers) too. Can't find the direct source now (I saw a few tweets from directly involved people this morning) but Hector Martin has been talking about this as well:
https://www.twitter.com/i/web/status/1588772122125815808/

Several people are also claiming that the layoffs were decided by ranking all of Twitter's engineers by number of lines of code written the last year and firing the bottom half. I think that's actually *worse* than firing 50% at random. I write far less code now than I did when I started learning to code, and I think it's a common trend. And people who spend more time fixing bugs than developing new features will have orders of magnitude less lines of code written.
 
Andropov said:
Apparently he has also fired most SREs (Site Reliability Engineers) too. Can't find the direct source now (I saw a few tweets from directly involved people this morning) but Hector Martin has been talking about this as well:
https://www.twitter.com/i/web/status/1588772122125815808/

Several people are also claiming that the layoffs were decided by ranking all of Twitter's engineers by number of lines of code written the last year and firing the bottom half. I think that's actually *worse* than firing 50% at random. I write far less code now than I did when I started learning to code, and I think it's a common trend. And people who spend more time fixing bugs than developing new features will have orders of magnitude less lines of code written.
Click to expand...
I used to work with a guy who was a really good coder, me not so much. I would write 30 lines of code to perform the same functions he could do in 4 or 5 with better logic.

Another thing people are noticing is how even though Musk is the biggest talk on the internet right now, his name is nowhere or limited in the trends anymore.
 
Cmaier said:
i’ve been laid off (startup went out of business) and it’s not fun, even if you can afford it. Hopefully there are enough job slots open at other good companies to absorb folks.
Click to expand...
Hopefully, but a number of the established tech companies have been in “batten down the hatches” mode expecting a recession, and one or two have done a round of layoffs. So I suspect it will take longer than normal to get these folks situated.

So not only is Musk basically gutting the company’s resources to do work at the start of a possible recession, likely to service the new debt, he’s doing it right before the holidays. May as well start calling him Scrooge at this point.
 

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