@hacks4pancakes
If the pundit you are listening to told you how awesome things would be once Elon took over
Why are you still listening to them?

Elon outright blocked the head of an advertising group who dared asked him questions...
Advertisers are how Twitter makes money and he flipped them off in a very public way.

I expect 'vulture capital' debt loading & bankruptcy, data is an asset. Your data selling to who knows for 2 cents on the dollar. Not like the US has real privacy laws

@hacks4pancakes

really like the canary analogy.. if the hackers and the journalists run, you should be alarmed.

List of journalists on Mastodon:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/13No4yxY-oFrN8PigC2jBWXreFCHWwVRTftwP6HcREtA/htmlview?pru=AAABhJYs2hY*7QUy45A9prsi8tqkloIdYA

@hacks4pancakes excellent summary, and I agree. We're probably among the first because we're burdened with knowledge, realism or pessimism IDK what weighs most.

But that's just one thing - our data, which no doubt is way more at risk now, than it was before from public exposure.

Another thing is ethics, both in the ongoing transition, but also the envisioned offering going forward.

It's not like paying for Twitter suddenly makes us not the product. You'll still see ads, and everything you do will still be heavily data mined. That's just a p*ss poor deal all around, even more for those that are actively engaging, and not just consuming what others output.

But if you combine this with the insane treatment and mass firings of people - because Elon overpaid, pissed all the advertisers off, and because he loves going into full "rescue operations mode" (similar stories from Tesla and SpaceX) where you get fired on the spot, decisions are made at a whim and you're expected to sacrifice everything as an employee only to see the decision changed again days later ... well, I'm not a fan.

There's a very ugly Elon pattern here. And it's not pretty at all. He's not getting my $8.

@hacks4pancakes I would not go as far as claiming that "we know better" (perhaps we do, perhaps we don't) and are a canary, it's not beyond Twitter's capability to restaff these departments we, as a community, deem critical. (I am playing the devil's advocate here, I personally don't believe they will before significant damage is done.)

However, we disliked what took place enough to call it quits, that's true but not all. Our community is also filled with diversity, part of us feels threatened by the far-right empowered by the recent shift in tides, and we are tight-knit enough to stick together and try to find safer places and spaces to interact.

(This is, of course, my humble take on why the "hackers and infosec experts" have fled.)

@hacks4pancakes it's always the niche tribes that move and then the trolls follow. The ones who move early are the ones who start conversations & later come the opinionate masses who create noise without adding value.

A lot lies on the shoulders of moderators and instance admins.

@hacks4pancakes I was wondering if the current situation warrants a more general discussion of "Twitter as a concept"?

When a channel/platform has the power to globally affect billions of dollars or, likely, much worse (any sort of government official mentioning a nuclear strike would be liable to cause mayhem), it certainly means it has become (even if it wasn't meant to) a critical communication channel. Does it make ANY sense to "outsource" that channel to a private, for profit company?

@hacks4pancakes I see the entirety of genetics/virology/med comm community already here (including journals, editors and funding agencies), posting much more freely due to the increased difficulty of troll operations here. A good chunk of non-corporate AI/ML is here too.

None of those people are particularly techy, and have gotten through learning curve after they figured the instances stuff.

@hacks4pancakes BTW, if trying to convince non-tech folks that they need somewhere else to go, it might be easier to tell them Elon's going to run out of money, which is also true. He's added a billion dollars a year of debt service to Twitter's other expenses, he's chased away a lot of advertisers who provide almost all of the revenue, they were losing money before he started, and cash reserves are finite.

(Which is, BTW, why he's desperate to monetize users, but that's failing too.)

@hacks4pancakes I think the descriptor of us being a canary is really spot on.

Yes, it sucks that you might have to find a new place, but don't stick around when you see the people who understand how this works leaving. If I saw the same with Meta I would be shutting down my useless FB account ASAP. If I saw this behavior with ANY company, I'd be pulling out if I had any interactions with them.

We try not to be doom and gloom, but when you're in this line of work, it comes with the territory.

@hacks4pancakes

Good analysis.
It's been very interesting watching the small things break as things progressed, so I wholeheartedly agree with the "canary" imagery.