I try not to be judgmental of people who remain on Twitter because a lot of them make a living through content creation and/or social media, and (for now) it remains an important medium for outreach and audience interaction, but I genuinely can't look at it for five minutes before logging out in disgust. I read something yesterday that suggested that their ad revenue was down 40% yoy, which is great, but that still means something like $2.5 billion (with a 'b') in revenue for the year, which is hard for me to process.
Does anyone else here use lists on Twitter? I only view posts through lists. You just add someone to a list and then the list is shown in post order with no ads and no "suggested tweets" or whatever they are called. I've been using it like that since before shitbrains bought it and honestly, I haven't noticed a difference in my experience there at all.
So I have a poker-twitter list, comedians-twitter list, etc... You could literally just add everyone you follow to a single list called Twitter.
I still feel guilty using it, because of what is reported by others, but if you want to see some tweets and not ads, people you don't follow etc... I suggest making lists.
__________________
"Have no respect whatsoever for authority; forget who said it and instead look what he starts with, where he ends up, and ask yourself, "Is it reasonable?""
I still feel guilty using it, because of what is reported by others, but if you want to see some tweets and not ads, people you don't follow etc... I suggest making lists.
Don't you still get the thing where responses from paying users get listed before other users? That's what killed the appeal for me. Turns out that those willing to pay to have tweets listed preferentially are much less likely to have something to write that is interesting, insightful or amusing. Who knew?
I still feel guilty using it, because of what is reported by others, but if you want to see some tweets and not ads, people you don't follow etc... I suggest making lists.
When I was using Twitter, I had lists on my primary account which I wound up not using. I actually had that account pretty well curated, so I didn't see much that didn't interest me.
I left before the site started promoting paid posters.
I still feel guilty using it, because of what is reported by others, but if you want to see some tweets and not ads, people you don't follow etc... I suggest making lists.
Don't you still get the thing where responses from paying users get listed before other users? That's what killed the appeal for me. Turns out that those willing to pay to have tweets listed preferentially are much less likely to have something to write that is interesting, insightful or amusing. Who knew?
This was a good question and I didn't know the answer. So I checked the next couple times I was on Twitter. The first think I learned is that I don't often read replies, like almost never. I don't think I would have said "I don't read replies" if asked, but using it as normal I found I really don't.
So I checked about 20 tweets that I thought would have multiple replies and it's hit and miss. Quite often (but not always) the first reply is a blue check reply, but then as you scroll down it's a mix of paying and non-paying people. So definitely the paying people are not all up top, but maybe they are weighted more in some way?
Don't know exactly how it was working at the time I last logged in but on hot button tweets with hundreds of replies blue ticks were definitely crowding the top of the list.
Unfortunately, I'm having a hard time finding a non-paywalled article. Let's see if the screenshot from someone's bsky post works:
__________________ Hear me / and if I close my mind in fear / please pry it open See me / and if my face becomes sincere / beware Hold me / and when I start to come undone / stitch me together Save me / and when you see me strut / remind me of what left this outlaw torn
the user in question threatened someone with a SWAT team and then called in something to make the police send one. you know, just youthful hijinks.
__________________ Hear me / and if I close my mind in fear / please pry it open See me / and if my face becomes sincere / beware Hold me / and when I start to come undone / stitch me together Save me / and when you see me strut / remind me of what left this outlaw torn
With the closing of Hyper Loop One, often reported to be Elon's but originally funded by Virgin, the Hyper Loop dream seems to be coming to an end, which has brought up the fact that Musk's Hyper loop was always a scam, a whipped up fantasy to derail the as of yet still not built California High Speed rail because trains aren't cool and futuristic, and if it's not cool and futuristic it's just not worth having.
(To make this twitter relavant, Xtwitter is heading this way too, if he can't make the X.com he imagined in his childhood, he'll burn it down.)
Yeah. Like, the "evacuated tunnel" thing was pretty much always insane, it never made any sense, and the stuff he posted about it was always stupid. I saw one interesting article pointing out that when he posted stress calculations for the supports, that was very grifty. Thing is, any first-year engineering student could have produced those very pretty and colorful pictures, which had nothing in them of any interest. What he didn't do was discuss, at all, things like "how do you make a very long tunnel which handles thermal expansion and contraction without breaking its seal, since it needs to be perfectly sealed".
It turns out, the hard part isn't "supports for an elevated rail", which is an extremely solved problem, but "large evacuated tunnel", which we're pretty sure is actually impractical at our tech level.
__________________ Hear me / and if I close my mind in fear / please pry it open See me / and if my face becomes sincere / beware Hold me / and when I start to come undone / stitch me together Save me / and when you see me strut / remind me of what left this outlaw torn
A major problem is that it's a solution looking for a problem.
From SF to LA on current trains is 9.5 hours.
The same when driving varies between 6 - 8 hours.
If you really need to get there fast Airplanes take somewhere around 1 hour to 1.5 hours.
There's a huge gap there, and a market for those that don't want to kill most of their day to travel but also aren't in such a rush they need to be there in under an hour and oh look, the planned high speed train is expected to take around 3 hours.
With the closing of Hyper Loop One, often reported to be Elon's but originally funded by Virgin, the Hyper Loop dream seems to be coming to an end, which has brought up the fact that Musk's Hyper loop was always a scam, a whipped up fantasy to derail the as of yet still not built California High Speed rail because trains aren't cool and futuristic, and if it's not cool and futuristic it's just not worth having.
(To make this twitter relavant, Xtwitter is heading this way too, if he can't make the X.com he imagined in his childhood, he'll burn it down.)
It took me some time to understand that this was separate from the tunnel under the Las Vegas Convention Center where people are transported by (brace yourself) cars.
This looks like interest rates doing a long overdue herd-thinning.
The Cars in single lane tunnels project has apparently gotten the go ahead to add 25 more miles of single lane death tunnels under the desert to eventually be inhabited by the mutant mole people.
I am so in awe of the incredible stupidity of the Boring Company. Like, the name is a joke, that's it, that's the contribution of value to humanity. Apart from that it was massively overhyped and doesn't actually appear to be successfully doing things except where people want to curry favor with Musk.
__________________ Hear me / and if I close my mind in fear / please pry it open See me / and if my face becomes sincere / beware Hold me / and when I start to come undone / stitch me together Save me / and when you see me strut / remind me of what left this outlaw torn
A major problem is that it's a solution looking for a problem.
From SF to LA on current trains is 9.5 hours.
The same when driving varies between 6 - 8 hours.
If you really need to get there fast Airplanes take somewhere around 1 hour to 1.5 hours.
There's a huge gap there, and a market for those that don't want to kill most of their day to travel but also aren't in such a rush they need to be there in under an hour and oh look, the planned high speed train is expected to take around 3 hours.
Thing is with check-in, security lines, boarding and baggage claim (if you take a large suitcase, which you can easily do on rail and wouldn't need to check) and the fact that airports are not located in the city center, a one-hour flight will definitely be at least 2 hours, and can easily end up as 3 hours in total travel time (depending on where your destination is relative to the airport).
So the train would often end up being faster if your starting point and destination are convenient to the train station.
Add in that trains are less restrictive with baggage, easier to bring snacks and drinks on, more comfortable and easier to move around in (to stretch or whatever) and a three-hour train from LA to SF would definitely cut into the number of people taking flights...
Free speech 'public square' platform Xtwitter goes through another round of unexplained suspensions of left-wing accounts.
Proving himself an excellent businessman Elon looks to repeat the reasons TruthSocial and other right wing sites failed, the lack of honest liberals to fight and or troll. Twitter worked where TruthSocial failed because there's a reason for liberals to be there besides trolling the nazis and cultists, and the nazis and cultists need people to fight to feel the winning.
Why would anyone point out the obvious? That the rename from Twitter to X was only done to make Elongated Muskrat shut up for a few seconds and that none of the staff care about doing it thoroughly or consistently?
Man pays twitter $50 to have smoke blown up his ass by a few bots.
Whatever metric twitter uses for clicks is quite different than what everyone else uses, making it seem like they've advertised his page to people who care when it was just bots giving the appearance of engagement.