Elon calls NYT poop
Elon Musk had a tantrum and grabbed the NY Times’s blue tick away. So nyah!
Twitter has started removing verification badges from accounts which already had a blue tick, after announcing they would be part of a paid subscription from 1 April.
The New York Times, along with several other organisations and celebrities, said they would not pay for the tick.
It prompted Elon Musk to launch a volley of insults at the newspaper.
“The real tragedy of @NYTimes is that their propaganda isn’t even interesting”, Mr Musk, who owns Twitter, wrote on the platform.
“Also, their feed is the Twitter equivalent of diarrhea. It’s unreadable,” he added.
Well, yes, but does he expect any kind of digestive byproduct to be readable? None of it is useful in that way.
Under Twitter’s new rules, blue ticks which once showed official, verified accounts, will start to be removed from accounts which do not pay for it.
Organisations seeking verification badges instead have to pay a monthly fee of $1,000 (£810) to receive a gold verification tick, while individual accounts must pay $8 (£6.40) a month for a blue one.
Someone clever pointed out yesterday that this whole plan is silly, because Twitter gets all this valuable content for free. It’s the NY Timeses and LeBron Jameses who generate revenue for Twitter for nothing, so Spaceguy is shooting himself in the foot by demanding money from them.
Exactly so, and this combined with the concept of community trust was well understood by the previous management. They may not have done a perfect, or at times even good job, but they at least understood the point. Elon on the other hand is trying to bend reality, or at least the market of ideas, to his will. it’s not going to work as true content creators who drive significant dialogue and material have been leaving in droves. There are others who cling on for now, but the last account I regularly check is teetering – the others have all left or gone defunct. They’re an OSINT who reports mostly on aspects of the Russian war on Europe. They’ve said when Twitter breaks, or when the algorithm reboots them significantly they’ll just stop rather than try and migrate to a new platform. They’re volunteers after all doing this significant work in their spare time. Since the war started they’ve gone from ~100k followers to in excess of 420k, and they’ve received public commendation from major media sites and western military and intelligence organisations. Just one example.
I recommend an interview in the Guardian of March the 23rd with Jaron Lanier:
Tech guru Jaron Lanier: ‘The danger isn’t that AI destroys us. It’s that it drives us insane’
The interview is by Simon Hattenstone.
It is a fascinating interview with a man who is genuinely intelligent and does not, like the infantile Musk, suppose that success lies in appearing wealthy and powerful, and ensuring that you are constantly in the headlines for whatever trivial reason. Nor does he suppose that parroting libertarian & Randian talking-points constitutes thought, or that indulging in Trumpian tantrums when disagreed with is the mark of a serious person.
So much for the noble cause of free speech. So much for the ideal of a digital town square. So much for verifying people are who they say they are. As usual, and as predicted, this will be turned into a profit machine, and that is all. Just like the luxury golf carts he sells, costing twice as much as other comparable cars because, well, status. People will pay for status, and the power it affords them over other people who play the status game. A blue tick now only means subscriber, and a gold tick? Even sillier corporate subscriber. Musk likes the status game, he’s good at it. People think success at the status game makes Musk a good person, and that his level of wealth makes him a genius. He’s neither of those things. He’s a salesman who sells things under false pretenses. Twitter is only so much snake oil. The ad revenue isn’t enough, people must be categorized by those who are stupid enough to pay to play Musk’s game, and those who aren’t. Let’s charge the stupid ones a small fee, so Musk can further control the narrative and make more money.
“I didn’t do it to make more money. I did it to try to help humanity, whom I love. And I do so with humility, recognizing that failure in pursuing this goal, despite our best efforts, is a very real possibility”
Yeah, lying to people is very humble. Such a humanitarian.
Fecking moron.
Re: blue checks
https://explosm.net/comics/the-takeover#comic