Almost 24 hours later and still no official/unofficial info from inside Twitter. I'm going to continue as if this was all done on purpose.
What now? Ivory goes into hyper mode with just the absolute minimum 3-4 things that have to be done finished up and then off to Apple. Probably going to be a bunch of things I'm not super happy with but I guess we'll fix it in post.
Hopefully everyone knows what we're capable of and can live with some, hopefully not long lived, rough edges/missing features.
I think the thing that bothers me the most is the lack of communications. If you are going to kill people off, own it. Don't just do it and act like nothing has happened.
Even during the darkest Twitter 1.0 days they were pretty open about what they were doing. I remember getting a call prior to the 4 quadrants token limit where they explained what was going to happen and answered questions. I wasn't happy but at least felt there was respect.
@paul I wonder if the selective crippling of some (but not all) third-party apps was not simply about forcing all Twitter users to watch ads, but was actually punitive. In other words, maybe doing it this way with no notice or chance to respond was a deliberate "fuck you" to businesses like Tapbots that were "fraternizing with the enemy" by building clients for competing platforms.
Musk is a petty and vindictive man. It's not like this wouldn't be on-brand for him.
@angusm @paul I have no doubt it was for all those reasons, plus the fact that 3rd party apps allowed much more curation of what one did and did not want to see, as well as when.
They made Twitter a place that one could control one's experience I had not logged into a twitter app or web version in years.
Not going to now, so .... to me: twitter is offline. It's down. Timeline stopped night before last.
Really cuts down on my doomscrolling. 🤔
Certainly possible. It's a known phenomenon in autocratic regimes that underlings will try to anticipate what the Big Boss would like and then do it in the hopes of earning his favor.
The historian Ian Kershaw, writing about Nazi Germany, called this "working towards the Führer". In a sense, this is just how organizations work -- but in autocracies, the incentives and penalties are more extreme, and the results more pathological and destructive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Kershaw#%22Working_Towards_the_F%C3%BChrer%22_concept
@angusm "working towards the Führer" <- I'm going to steal/use that.
Not in so far as I then work towards a Führer, but as a descriptive phrase.
To be clear.
@rootless @paul @glowrocks I Am Not a Lawyer, but ... if banning third-party apps from your platform was ruled anti-competitive, that would open a substantial can of worms. It would amount to mandating at least some aspects of the kind of interoperability that @doctorow (among others) dreams of.
Not saying it wouldn't be a good thing, just that I'm not aware of any precedent for precisely this. Although they did go after MSFT for merely _favoring_ their own browser over other people's. Hmm ...
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