Mastodawn

Lαԃყ Kιƚƚყ ₜₕₑ ᵥₑgₐₙ ₛₒcᵢₐₗᵢₛₜ Jul 2, 2023

How to be An Genius:

1. Pay $44bn for a site worth 1/2 that
2. Sack everyone who knows how it works
3. Release far-right troll army
4. Turn genuine validation into a badge of idiocy
5. Kill most of your ad revenue
6. Inflate API price to recoup money
7. Everyone stops using API and scrapes site instead
8. Massively limit the service to end scraping
9. Service is now unusable
10. Remaining advertising value destroyed
11. Kill a cornerstone of the internet
12. Lose $44bn

Neil Scott Jul 1, 2023

@RussInCheshire

Yeah but, 'disrupting'. Guys an arse, was so predictable he'd royally eff it up

Ben Aveling Jul 2, 2023

@RussInCheshire @Sc0tty sometimes what’s interesting is not the destination but the how you get there

Jeremy Nicholls Jul 2, 2023

@BenAveling @RussInCheshire @Sc0tty The means justify the end?

Ben Aveling Jul 2, 2023

@jern @RussInCheshire @Sc0tty they certainly can’t be considered in isolation

Neil Scott Jul 2, 2023

@BenAveling @jern @RussInCheshire

Not sure what Musks meaning to do with Twitter, but he isn’t half making a mess of it

Ben Aveling Jul 2, 2023

@jern @Sc0tty @RussInCheshire it’s either 5dimensional chess, or musk’s an idiot who’s bought a ppl business while having neither empathy with nor any understanding of ppl.

Christine Burns MBE 🏳️‍⚧️📚⧖Jul 1, 2023

@RussInCheshire Full Self Owning ™️ is out of beta I see 😂

Angel Jul 1, 2023

@RussInCheshire I dunno, $44bn seems like a small price to pay to kill one of the worlds greatest organising tools and sources of real-time news. Revolutions have been born on twitter.

emmatonkin Jul 1, 2023

@chibiusa40 @RussInCheshire
Yes, given Saudi involvement and all that, the only explanation that feels like it makes sense is deliberate malicious action carefully disguised as utter idiocy.

Thing is though, if there ever was a plan of that kind I don't think he'd know it. I think he's just an idiot.

Rick Jul 2, 2023

@emmatonkin @chibiusa40 @RussInCheshire Stupidity trumps Malice

PJ "Vote Green" Coffey Jul 2, 2023

@emmatonkin @chibiusa40

Absolutely a useful idiot. He's driven by ego and the desire to "stick it to the wokes". But even the richest man in the world will struggle with 44bn. So, seeing an opportunity Saudi and Qatar (often pictured with him prior to this bid) kick in some money.

Do they think they're going to make money out it? Ha. No. No one makes money out of social media. They are expecting to break it.

@RussInCheshire

Mr. Completely Jul 1, 2023

@chibiusa40 @RussInCheshire I think it's prob worth it to his Saudi backers and such. For Elmo himself, I don't know, he seems so ego driven, it's hard to see him buying into a plan that makes him take a massive public L that unfolds slowly over months and years. But maybe his funders figured he'd crater it and told him "you'll be great champ, go get em"

emmatonkin Jul 1, 2023

@RussInCheshire

Smoking remnants of the site and data probably ultimately get sold off to another untrustworthy actor.
Shedloads of really confidential data, DMs and so forth are leaked.
World gets even crazier and dumber than it already is.

Scott Miller Jul 2, 2023

@emmatonkin @RussInCheshire

OMG. I hope not - BUT this scenario seems all too likely

Steve In Ashland Jul 1, 2023

@RussInCheshire
The plan was always to kill it off. But to buy it and shut it down straight away would be to obvious.

Erik Jul 1, 2023

@RussInCheshire this looks like how Boris managed the UK in some ways

LadyPeedOffAgain Jul 2, 2023

@ErikBB @RussInCheshire Good analogy. Didn't take either of them long and they are both the puppets of shady masters.

Erik Jul 2, 2023

@Beulah @RussInCheshire if shady masters means shareholders we're on the same page😬

Stu Bacon Jul 1, 2023

@RussInCheshire you can’t teach stupid

Kate C Jul 1, 2023

@RussInCheshire

zeno's paradox speedrunner Jul 1, 2023

@RussInCheshire it's possibly a self-harm issue

https://sfba.social/@sysop408/110639435788921057

Sheldon (@[email protected])

Attached: 2 images This is hilarious. It appears that Twitter is DDOSing itself. The Twitter home feed's been down for most of this morning. Even though nothing loads, the Twitter website never stops trying and trying. In the first video, notice the error message that I'm being rate limited. Then notice the jiggling scrollbar on the right. The second video shows why it's jiggling. Twitter is firing off about 10 requests a second to itself to try and fetch content that never arrives because Elon's latest genius innovation is to block people from being able to read Twitter without logging in. This likely created some hellish conditions that the engineers never envisioned and so we get this comedy of errors resulting in the most epic of self-owns, the self-DDOS. Unbelievable. It's amateur hour. #TwitterDown #MastodonMigration #DDOS #TwitterFail #SelfDDOS

SFBA.social

Riley Jul 1, 2023

@RussInCheshire Surely there was an uptick in scraping because of decisions re: API, but that's had time to play out, and the measures taken in the last 24h are far broader than what is needed to rein in scraping. Elon is misdirecting.

daym Jul 1, 2023

@RussInCheshire It's really got that bad then?

GraveRobyn Jul 1, 2023

@mikeday @RussInCheshire
It's a sewer. And then the site keeps going down

Eddie Cooper Jul 1, 2023

@RussInCheshire Well if you're going to be here posting stuff like this then maybe there's life in the old mammoth yet

Andres Jalinton Jul 1, 2023

@RussInCheshire
It's more idiotic than it looks:
https://mastodon.hardcoredevs.com/@Andres/110640020421877485

Andres Jalinton (@[email protected])

How to kill #Twitter in less than an hour: 1.- Make a production change on a weekend that introduces a bug that create a DDoS to itself. (https://sfba.social/@sysop408/110639474671754723) 2.- Rate limit users so they spent all the credits in seconds. 3.- Profit (?)

Hardcoredevs

Catherine is not complacent Jul 1, 2023

@RussInCheshire but but but he’s a genius, he said so.

James Holden Jul 1, 2023

@RussInCheshire We got to step 9 impressively fast.

Garret Beggan 🇺🇦Jul 1, 2023

@RussInCheshire As Darth Putin says in a different context: "I remain a strategic genius" 🤪

ˈdälfən™🐬 💥 🌊Jul 1, 2023

@RussInCheshire ‘How to be a Genius’ for Dummies 😂

And he likely lost more than the original sales price— he sold billions of $ of Tesla stock after his leveraged buyout of Twitter.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/elon-musk-sells-least-395b-tesla-shares-twitter-takeover-rcna56300

Elon Musk sells at least $3.95B of Tesla shares after Twitter takeover

Elon Musk sold at least another $3.95 billion worth of shares in his electric car company Tesla after closing his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter.

NBC News

ˈdälfən™🐬 💥 🌊Jul 1, 2023

@RussInCheshire Tanking one fairly-well performing company for one that wasn’t profitable: brilliant 😂

https://www.forbes.com/sites/dereksaul/2022/12/15/elon-musk-has-now-sold-229-billion-in-tesla-shares-since-buying-twitter-and-dragged-down-teslas-market-cap-by-700-billion-in-the-process/?sh=4f5b35af68b6

Elon Musk Has Now Sold $22.9 Billion In Tesla Shares Since Buying Twitter—And Dragged Down Tesla's Market Cap By $700 Billion In The Process

Musk is using Tesla as his “own ATM machine” to fund Twitter, one firm says.

Forbes

Zep Jul 1, 2023

@RussInCheshire he deplatformed people who use the platform for humanitarian political action and labor unionization

This is considered smart to the wealthy class

The Penguin of Evil Jul 1, 2023

@RussInCheshire I am confused why it's suddenly struggling today. I thought the Wagner Russian troll farm was being shut down 8)

wytchgsd Jul 1, 2023

@RussInCheshire so true.
But have *we* learnt anything?
Certainly. Amongst other things :
Money can’t fix stupid.

Voyager03 Jul 2, 2023

@RussInCheshire Do you want to buy a car?

Axel Foley Jul 2, 2023

@RussInCheshire

Boudica Jul 2, 2023

@Roadwarrior29 @RussInCheshire 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻🤣🤣🤣

TheExecutiveEditor Jul 2, 2023

@RussInCheshire Are you building up for "The week in Elon"?

Demarkus Dickey Jul 2, 2023

@RussInCheshire Elon Musk is smart but he is also dumb

Juliette Odette Jul 2, 2023

@RussInCheshire I cant post on my homepage, it says rate limited everywhere and blocks me and also says something went wrong and blocks me. It is truly appalling.

Dan Shick Jul 2, 2023

@RussInCheshire you forgot “decentralize left-wing comms and win 2024 election for right-wing candidate”

Stephen Cox Author Jul 2, 2023

@RussInCheshire #TheWeekinElon

I'd add order your own feed boosted, and then use that to boost anti-vax, WEF, space laser, far right nonsense.

Ian Watt Jul 2, 2023

@RussInCheshire and leave the Twitter client firing off 10 requests per second to load more content, effectively DDOS-ing your own platform with your own client!

https://sfba.social/@sysop408/110639435788921057

Sheldon (@[email protected])

Attached: 2 images This is hilarious. It appears that Twitter is DDOSing itself. The Twitter home feed's been down for most of this morning. Even though nothing loads, the Twitter website never stops trying and trying. In the first video, notice the error message that I'm being rate limited. Then notice the jiggling scrollbar on the right. The second video shows why it's jiggling. Twitter is firing off about 10 requests a second to itself to try and fetch content that never arrives because Elon's latest genius innovation is to block people from being able to read Twitter without logging in. This likely created some hellish conditions that the engineers never envisioned and so we get this comedy of errors resulting in the most epic of self-owns, the self-DDOS. Unbelievable. It's amateur hour. #TwitterDown #MastodonMigration #DDOS #TwitterFail #SelfDDOS

SFBA.social

Scott Miller Jul 2, 2023

@RussInCheshire
BUT, BUT, BUT....He's a genius!

🤣🤣 🤣

Laurence M 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿Jul 2, 2023

@RussInCheshire also force adverts into every timeline , and more annoying, into every thread of conversation, resulting in advertising client accounts being blocked on wholesale scale, denying them reach.

Mike Knell Jul 2, 2023

@RussInCheshire it seems very likely that 8. is down to “your third party cloud provider massively limiting your quota because you haven’t paid your bills”, especially given that yesterday was the first day of Q3.

Telegram sigue siendo mejor.Jul 2, 2023

@RussInCheshire and this is only a summary. There's more

John bev Jul 2, 2023

@RussInCheshire good to see you on here Russ

@RussInCheshire 13. Blame everyone else.

Susan Lewis Jul 2, 2023

@RussInCheshire I often say, If the results of an action are both foreseeable and inevitable, then they must be deliberate.

TheBossRoss Jul 2, 2023

@RussInCheshire I discovered 🐦 late. It's been a lifeline during Covid. It's taken me a while to master it, but now I've a lovely crowd. I understand not everyone's experience is the same. I've hesitated to come away from it despite everything, bc I didn't want to leave anyone behind. Tbh, I resent that someone who doesn't value any of this, is destroying it. And I think it's rather ironic that while -for no apparent reason- my account is disfunctional, I can still block all advertisers on it.

SomersetWhovian 🇺🇦💙Jul 2, 2023

@TheBossRoss @RussInCheshire
Yes, same here. Currently I can block or retweet, but not like, post or reply.

Just hoping more good people come over here. I know many are going to bluesky, but I've yet to receive an invite, and I've already settled in here, despite not posting as much recently. I don't think I've got the energy to start on another site.

DouglasTroup_Jul 2, 2023

@ClaireCopperman @TheBossRoss @RussInCheshire

I can't do anything at all, it thinks I'm a spambot.

Alan Hasell Jul 2, 2023

@RussInCheshire Difficult to tell if this is malicious or massive incompetence. If you actually wanted to destroy Twitter you couldn't have made many better choices TBH.

Antoinette G Jul 2, 2023

@RussInCheshire exactly!

John Morgun Jul 2, 2023

@RussInCheshire
I see little wrong charging people for a better service. Twitter lost money and Musk is trying to make it a viable business.
Give it time Twitter will become a subscription service. Populated mainly by politicians, journalists and wanna be journalists and politicians, celebrities and corporations.
Not sure how the non English speaking world is reacting. I know in India there is interest in Mastadon. Few in Asia, Africa going to pay to access Twitter apart from Japanese.

PirateRo Jul 2, 2023

@RussInCheshire to be fair, I wrote to him early on to predict this. He didn’t care. Shows the man to be a fool and a complete tool for someone.

Inc Hulk 🧪Jul 2, 2023

@RussInCheshire He is now getting some advertising, I see loads of crap stuff trying to sell what only gullible fools would buy. Must reflect the current demographic (given the political stance of Twitter, this seems to be a truism).