Twitter blocks new accounts from signing up to its $8 Blue subscription
engadget.com
engadget.com
Although many influential/celebrities are not there, and remain on twitter. I guess in part because they want to be where the largest audience is. That is both a good and bad thing.
This is a great Mastodon server: http://mastodon.gamedev.place
1) I grant you that it does seem that way in many respects, but an average person's perception of how Twitter currently is functioning is heavily impacted by journalists who have a direct conflict of interest in keeping their privileged position intact. All I'm saying is, we might not have a perfect picture of how Twitter is actually operating at the moment.
2) Sometimes moving fast and breaking a few things is better in the long run than the perfect plan that never comes into fruition. It might take Elon a bit of time to understand the organization better, but I'd always bet on somebody with an engineering mindset to understand how to a complex system operates.
Especially since Twitter is going republican, I do not feel like being a supporter of it: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1589639376186724354
1) "Twitter going Republican" is a debatable interpretation. First of all, as a company and platform, Twitter is and should be agnostic. As for Musk's personal opinion, what he endorsed in that tweet is a rather common centrist concept: having divided government in place so nothing too crazy gets passed by anybody.
2) Even if "Twitter went Republican" (whatever that means) Republicans are somewhere in the range of ~35-45% of the country on any given day. Is half of the country supposed to hate the other half to the point that we can't even peacefully coexist and discuss stuff on the same platform? To me, this is a shockingly bad point of view to take. If words can't be exchanged, there's only one other way to settle disputes, and it's not a good one.
I know a lot of people think Elon is always a genius (I like spaced and Tesla) but I learned in the last two years he is also a dumbass.
Actually, I think you are. Elon Musk is literally pro-vaccine and agrees with what your position apparently is on that topic, he's just anti-mandate, there's a difference.
> He supported a protest of antivax truckers in my hometown that shut the downtown core for weeks
I think calling them anti-mandate protestors is more accurate, but good for Elon. People should always have the right to peacefully protest. Do we just support democracy and freedom when it's convenient?
> and called our left leaning prime minister a nazi for removing them.
I personally wouldn't call Trudeau a Nazi and think words like that are wrongly used in many cases, but he does appear to have some authoritarian tendencies, to put it politely.
By the way, around the same time he was opposing the trucker protests, Trudeau was supporting farmer protests shutting down India saying that they always stand up for peaceful protests.
> Musk has consistently downplayed the pandemic, especially in the first year
The pandemic is a complicated discussion that I think we wouldn't agree on, but I'd say that downplaying the fear of the pandemic was always the best move. As we start to see some of the economic, health, educational, and other consequences of those years, I think more people will realize that we ruined a generation of humanity for very minimal benefit.
> also promoted quack remedies.
Citation? I think he endorsed the right of people to try and experiment with Ivermectin when there was little concrete information on it and no/few other treatments. But given the low-cost and low-risk of properly administered Ivermectin, that was always arguably the smartest risk-management decision to try.
> You are defending calling Trudeau a Nazi
My comment to you specifically stated that I'm against using that kind of language. I'd call Trudeau a hypocritical authoritarian and have many other potential labels for him, but would never compare him to a Nazi.
> trying to pretend that anti-vax is significantly different than anti-vac mandate
Favoring a medical treatment and favoring forcing people to take it against their will are two completely separate concepts.
> claiming the Ottawa shutdown was an example of a normal peaceful protest
I can't recall if there were any fights or property damage at those trucker protests, but as far as large-scale protests go, the violence and property damage seemed greatly limited compared to other protests that I've seen. I'm not Canadian and wasn't there, so please educate me if my perception is mistaken. Thanks.
> and that promoting Ivermectin is just people's rights.
I'm not 100% sure what Musk said about Ivermectin or other treatments that you object to, but given how you misread much of my commentary, I'd bet money on you misinterpreting what he stated. I asked you for a citation up above, if you wish to provide an example.
> I think you should work as a Russian military PR spokesman's, you'll do great telling me the Russian special operation in Ukraine is going completely as planned.
Russia has nothing to do with any of these comments and other than partisan thinking, I'm not sure why throwing that around as an attempted insult makes sense.
2) Keyword "sometimes". So wait, you completely trust a man who bought a company for multiple billions and doesn't even really understand how to run the organization he took complete control over before starting to take drastic actions? Do engineers do that sort of thing? Sometimes NPD in a person can lead to getting a lot of things done and getting a lot of support for it when needed, but in this case like many others it goes down a destructive path. If he had a clear way out he would have proudly announced it and stuck with it with some signal it's working a long time ago without constantly having to back peddle or drastically switch directions. Maybe he can eventually pull it off, but what he's doing now isn't showing any indication of that.
Who knows how and when people actually end up walking the walk? A chunk of Hollywood swore that they'll move to Canada to protest Trump taking office in 2016 too and that never materialized.
> and multiple features are now either disabled or not functioning properly.
Twitter was arguably at its most loved years ago when fail whales were a constant. A few broken features for a while is forgotten very quickly as long as things improve.
> So wait, you completely trust a man who bought a company for multiple billions and doesn't even really understand how to run the organization he took complete control over before starting to take drastic actions?
I never said I completely trust Musk. In general though, I think that smart engineers can learn to wield complex systems.
> Do engineers do that sort of thing?
Moving fast and breaking a few things is bad if you're designing bridges or buildings or spaceships, but not necessarily the end of the world if you're designing a social media site.
Joining Mastodon doesn't require leaving Twitter. It could take as few as one to join Mastodon and talk about it, to start a trend.