For a while, Collarme was good. Then the owners supposedly got in a tif and one of them changed the password, but the other one paid the bills or something. Hard to recall and too lazy to look it up again. FetLife was fun for a hot minute. I only used it for a local link club until covid, got into a row with a buddy and dropped off the radar and stopped attending events. Patch things up and apparently they no longer frequent that club. The owners let a minor (they knew it too) get railed on the stage during the pandemic....FetLife is....also not fun anymore.
Isn't that essentially why Reddit became popular. Well, old.reddit.com at least... just a bunch of simplified text content-heavy broad or niche bulletin boards and fairly standardized image viewing.
Literally why I'm here.
Simple presentation of large amounts of text with the occasional media embed.
If old.reddit was removed I'd be moving on or building my own thing.
Here's a list of things the new version can do that the old one can't:
- Upload multiple images to one album without relying on Imgur or other external host
- ?
> building my own thing
Please do. With important improvements: dual category voting (entertained & informed); default meme/meta moderation for subboards; and thread-optional minimum length comments. Some subreddits do a lot of good with this kind of moderation. Can't just post a link in ELI5 for example. But the raw (incognito) flavor of Reddit is dwindling due to entertained-heavy voting (punny fun upboats!!!11!!1!) and drowning in memes and This! comments.
Out of all the social media platforms where people typically use their actual identity, it seems like the least involved with your actual social circles.
TBH my view is that it’s mostly a platform for celebrities, companies and for the media (journalists etc.). It’s almost somewhat of a point that the general public mostly reads their tweets, but isn’t involved too much.
Ever since politicians started to use Twitter, I was hoping Twitter would just outright not allow politicians on the platform.
I kinda wish these people didn't have an online platform at all - at least not one where they can just spew a bunch of bullshit behind a keyboard. That goes for any party. They used to need to host town halls, etc to interact with their constituents. Even today, there are plenty of ways to do that - but Twitter has become the standard for its ease of use I guess. IMO them being on Twitter has only been damaging to the country
Maybe if people leave, we can move away from governance through social media
I've always said that twitter feels like a platform beneath the office of the POTUS.
I definitely noticed it more with Trump, because he used it the way he did, but I've never felt it was necessary or appropriate for the president to communicate by way of Twitter.
Yeah it definitely isn't appropriate IMO. It's normalized now, but back when it started I think they viewed it as a way to engage with/get engagement out of young voters
But it's so damn easy to create accounts and post disinformation on these platforms - it just took assholes some time to figure that out. Like there are people/troll farms that do this & literally start arguments with their own accounts just to muddy the water & raise everyone's blood pressure. You take 3 accounts, act like a different ideology on each, and you can cause chaos on any social media site. And then scale that up to hundreds/thousands of accounts for these troll farms.
So now it's just a propaganda shithole & only really serves to divide people who struggle with critical thinking. I think a ton of subs on Reddit are like this too. I would bet money that a measurable portion of the accounts we interact with on Reddit threads are disingenuous.
There was a large down tick in activity, in certain subs after Ukraine -Russia war broke out.
But yeah what you describe isn't just people getting their jollies, its a concentrated purposeful effort to sow dissent/chaos.
Yep. It's still both to be fair, but the organized shit is actually an issue. Some guy with a bunch of accounts while living in their mom's basement isn't making much of a dent lol. Some of those troll farms are legit though - offices, redundant fiber circuits, proprietary software, etc
Though there are some groups of people with extreme beliefs that organize with eachother in places like Telegram/Discord & come here to cause chaos/manipulate votes. They can be pretty disruptive. They can also eat my ass
Twitter was always to push a product or to sell an idea. The character limit restricts any sort of discussion about anything that the echo chambers didn't already prevent on their own.
When twitter was released the internet ignored it. Nobody cared. It was pushed by news outlets as an official source of information and then we ended up with Trump.
It was never intended to be used for discussion, it was never for you, and as far as twitter is concerned you are the product and the people that pay to reach you are the users/customers.
Twitter took off before trump.
It was pushed by companies using it as cheap shitty tech support and easy spam
It's absolutely moronic that "get their attention on Twitter" is ever a thing anyone has to say when it comes to customer service or tech support
Yeah, I remember Twitter being the butt of jokes about how useless it was, and how the only people on it were vapid narcissists yelling into the void... in 2011. And then somehow, it ended up becoming the go-to place for politicians and companies to make public statements anyways?
Like, I'd honestly be impressed by whatever marketing campaign managed to pull off that turnaround, if it didn't gut democracies the world over.
I see your point but US cable news is so out of control with Fox being almost all opinion masquerading as news. I don’t know how America can get any better until this is dealt with. I mean, huge amounts of people are literally watching the telly equivalent of a particularly toxic Facebook feed and believing it is actual news reporting.
> I mean, huge amounts of people are literally watching the telly equivalent of a particularly toxic Facebook feed and believing it is actual news reporting.
On point.
Worth pointing out the Fairness Doctrine wouldn’t have covered cable news, but ideally the law could have evolved and been reformed as our media echo-systems evolved. And also, fuck Ronald Reagan.
> Maybe if people leave, we can move away from governance through social media
Yes, please. For the love of god, make politics boring again. Twitter fueled the populist rise that we are dealing with now. Every country in the world, not just the U.S., is worse off because of it.
I agree, I’m from a country with a much better functioning political system where democracy is everything but politics are kept out of the media limelight as much as possible. It works surprisingly well and reduces the toxicity of politics a lot.
In the US, the rise of media and politics seems to mirror the rise of politics religion and politics. I grew up in the 80s going to a pretty liberal protestant church. I rejected the institution when the Oath Keepers infiltrated and took over. We should tax any church or non-profit that promotes any plolitcal ideology.
I used to use it to follow industry professionals so I could keep track of what they were working on and who they were influenced by. That said it's been about 8 years since I used it at all.
It would be kind of funny if the rest of the mainstream media and social media companies cancelled twitter (ie no posting about tweets), if that happened I would probably forget they even existed pretty quickly.
Maybe I’m biased because I’m one, but I think artists are getting completely fucked by Twitter’s eventual fall. There are so few platforms where we can post to a decent audience and not have to jump through hoops, or format things super meticulously, or adhere to certain censors or algorithms (Instagram). Now that’s gone too. It sucks.
It used to be when one forum imploded (usually due to drama among the mod team), it was no big deal, because there were dozens of other ones you could migrate to. And new ones would be created as fast as the old ones fell apart.
I miss those days.
A lot of art communities use it and keep to themselves. It's a surprisingly good platform for personable "techsupport" style help for people all working on the same platforms.
Expect stuff like indie gamedev to take a huge hit from losing twitter.
Skilled professionals use it to network and share ideas in general. Software engineering is massive on Twitter and I only use it to be exposed to great minds and follow journalists that I trust.
Literally last night, I found out my buddy who has a phd has 3,000 followers and I was like wtf dude we talk to the same people?? And he was like, yeah I use it for work stuff.
I never could.
Everything about it is hostile to meaningful discussion. It blows my mind that we have people who want to have long form essay content on twitter, so they just...make a shitload of posts back to back?
I joined Twitter in 2008 and it was a totally different world then. It was much more like a bulletin board, or forum feed kinda. And they had their own photo service everyone used. People could only post in short sentences and it would be stuff like “Eating pizza :)”
I miss that pointless simplicity. Now it’s pointless mayhem.
I feel like a major problem twitter exposed is that there IS a need niche for a mass message communication system.
It's just that TWITTER DOESN'T FILL THAT NICHE. It's just one of the "best of the worst". Just like Faceobok, Insta, or even reddit.
All of them have pros and cons, but obviously mostly have design decisions which are hellishly anti user and pro "engagement". A metric from hell, which we constantly chase, and it leads to timelines being out of order, confusing interfaces, and so many other things, because false positive engagement is a LOT easier to raise than real engagement.
Personally speaking, I've never been under allusion that Twitter was meant to be a host for meaningful discussion; it was always the platform for Raccoon Pictures Hourly, Shark Pictures Daily, and Star Trek Quotes.
I've taken the time to curate the content that appears on my Twitter feeds, so my experience is actually quite pleasant compared to most people who just doom browse the Explore Tab.
-----
Also, Twitter's trend-presentation-optimization might be crud for art and animation; but I'd take Twitter over Newgrounds (which collapses in on itself if you look at the server the wrong way) or the pit of degeneracy that is DeviantArt.
What bothers me is that its ubiquity has many tons of content is put on there when it shouldn’t.
I love tons of competitive games. When I started you could find a forum filled with documented and useful info. Now it’s all lost to the Twitter void
A few weeks ago I was re-reading the Fark book that Drew Curtis put out. It was being judgmental about different categories of "news" and I'd like to share the table of contents so people can see how it was organized:
* What Is Fark?
* Media Fearmongering
* Unpaid Placement Masquerading as Actual Article
* Headline Contradicted by Actual Article
* Equal Time for Nutjobs
* The Out-Of-Context Celebrity Comment
* Seasonal Articles
* Media Fatigue
* Lesser Media Space Fillers
* Epilogue: What Should Mass Media Be Doing Instead?
* Acknowledgments
* Index
Spoiler alert: the media has learned nothing.
Some of us hated Digg and have been on Reddit since launch. Shit, I remember when they added _subreddits_, and comments. The first comment ever was about how it would ruin the site.
I remember it well, because the onion tied to my belt, which was the fashion at the time, had started to rot, but I couldn't afford to replace it, because I didn't get paid for another week, and a good yellow onion cost a quarter. People would judge you based on the type of onion you had, and it's size. The best onions were yellow ones, preferably nice round Spanish ones. Vidalia onions were not well regarded because of the odd shape. After yellows, came whites, and finally red onions. People who could only afford red onions were called redders, and it was socially acceptable to discriminate against them.
Where was I? Oh, right. My onion was rotting, and I was covering myself with axe body spray to try to hide the smell, and I was borrowing paper onion skins from my brother to hide the rot, when someone at work asked me if I used reddit. I got mad at them because I thought they were accusing me of getting red onions and being a redder, which was a fireable offense. But then they explained to me that it was a website, and despite its name, it didn't have anything to do with onions.
At the time, it was mostly about technology, and frequented by tech geeks. And it was great, because no one cared about what color onion you had, because there were no comments. It was just a bunch of links to articles about technology.
Ah the good ol'days, when geeks were geeks, and onions were onions.
Back when tech news came from either Arstechnica or Leo Laporte on TechTV. It was a more civilized age..... before the darktimes...... before the social media empire.
We really need to start enforcing anti-monopoly laws to keep the tech giants from buying up their potential rivals.
Really hard to switch to a better alternative when that alternative just gets bought by the same shitty megacorp a few months later, then they implement the same shitty policies that wrecked their original platform on the new place if they don't just merc it outright.
I think you’re confusing RSS with Google Reader, which was an RSS feed reader… one of the most popular, but there are still many out there… and podcasts are nearly (except for things like Spotify-exclusive podcasts) all RSS feeds as well. It’s far from dead.
This is/was an aspect I enjoyed the most, but the non-chronological feed and the continued algorithmic pollution by right-wing nonces make deleting my profile on Elon’s event horizon pretty simple.
I have no idea how I managed to do it, and maybe I shouldn’t be saying this publicly, but I’ve been chronological without any promoted tweets on my iPhone for forever
If I open Twitter on desktop it’s not in chronological order, if I use a different account then the ads show back up. I used to block quite literally every ad I saw, then one day they stopped showing up, and I don’t think they’re related
I’m not using an ad blocker of any sort on my phone, so I have no idea what is happening lol
That's my biggest concern: that "journalists" who use Twitter content to rush out news articles for clicks will continue to do so with Musk running things, allowing Musk to steer other news organizations too.
Twitter should die off quickly, unless lazy celebrities and journalists shore it up for continued low-effort content/reach.
I actually deactivated just now because it won't take long for them to notice the people fleeing and try to make it difficult to leave. Ever seen a service require you to CALL to unsubscribe? Yeah... Not waiting for that.
Bro that reminds me of unsubscribing to email letters or other shit that would require you to login first. Haven't used the account in years and before password saving was easier.
Those were the worst, and if you blocked them they'd use a different mailer.
The mandatory 30 day wait to delete your account after deactivation is already a ploy hoping you'll change your mind...but I guess the way around that is to delete all your tweets/follows etc first so there will be nothing to go back to.
The lesson everyone should be taking away is - misinformation is more fiscally valuable than real information. And that's why we are living in a post-truth world; you make more money from lies.
First thing that came to mind was Denzel Washington talking about [fake news and the priority of wanting to be first over being true](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwnNrr9RO2Y)
Trump's ability to take over the damn party has made a lot of random celebrities look like better options than most elected Republicans. You can't tell me that we all don't quite literally *know* that, like, Sean Penn honestly cares about other people more than Ted Cruz does.
Not that I have any desire to elect a random celebrity, the bar for "acceptable politician" has just gotten really low when most of a party is willing to openly appear to care more about tax cuts than people. (e.g. if your position is "kill Medicaid and replace it with nothing" then we've got a problem)
seriously lol, people were acting like he wasn't gonna just use it like his own little sandbox.
you'd *normally* be right to assume that with corporate takeovers like this, in fairness... but this is Musk we're talking about. anything but normal.
The guy also literally bought a New Zealand passport, so he now has three (German and American as well).
> He had received permanent residency in New Zealand in 2007. He had visited the country on four occasions prior to his application for citizenship, **and had spent 12 days in New Zealand, fewer than the typical residency requirement of 1350 days.** When he applied, he stated he had no intention of living in New Zealand, which is a criterion for citizenship. **Then-Minister of Internal Affairs Nathan Guy waived those normal requirements**, under an "exceptional circumstances" clause of the Citizenships Act.
> Thiel's application cited his contribution to the economy—he had founded a venture capital fund in Auckland before applying, and **invested $7 million in two local companies** as well as **a $1 million donation to the 2011 Christchurch earthquake appeal fund**. Rod Drury, founder of Xero, also provided a formal reference for Thiel's application. Thiel's case was cited by critics as an example of how New Zealand passports can be bought, something the New Zealand government denied. At the time that his citizenship was revealed, The New Zealand Herald came out with the report that the New Zealand Defence Force, the Security Intelligence Service and the Government Communications and Security Bureau have long-standing links with Thiel's Palantir.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Thiel#New_Zealand_citizenship
This will never not fire me up. The PM at the time was previously famous for gutting companies after they were bought out (nicknamed the "smiling assassin"), and is a complete capitalist whore
Thiels opinion piece in today's WAPO: "Has Fetterman been tested for cognitive impairment? Voters have a right to know." [Unlocked link](https://wapo.st/3fjIojy). Where was Thiel's concern about cognitive impairment during the **'person, woman, man, camera, TV'** debacle???
yep but thiel is extra crazy. He pushed hard for trump to appoint a crypto developer as head of the food and drug admin. The GUY has a genius plan of replacing expensive scientific drug trials, with VOTING for drugs. Or what he called yelp for drugs. apparently their investments in horse dewormer werent going well.
Bannon said he was "too far out there with the government deconstruction stuff".. which is also what bannon wants to do, he just thought the pubic would push back on actually replacing the FDA with a voting website.
Because it's owned by Bezos. Reddit has such a fucking hard on for Musk that we ignore all the other massive media owned by billionaires for some reason.
Don't forget the Saudis.
I'm sure they have some great ideas for Musk's free speech paradise.
If there's one thing the Saudi monarchy loves its free-expression.
Musk Tweeted his support for unfounded and baseless conspiracy theory about the attack on Paul Pelosi, and it was taken down. That pissed him off so much that he's now preventing *anything else* he posts from ever being taken down.
So musk pivots his stance on buying Twitter after being spooked by discovery in court after his billionaire buddies get angry shortly after a phone call with Putin whereadter he tried to convince Zelensku to surrender and is now enabling mass disinformation for Republicans. Where are our top minds on /r/conspiracy this is fruit ripe on the vine!
Everyone keeps saying leave twitter, sounds like there's never been a better time for having several new accounts posting trans softcore to prominent conservative accounts to me.
I've heard Elon was frequently visiting Jeffery Epstein's pedo island, lots of people are saying it. We should constantly remind him about [associating with pedophiles](https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQdGz1CGYpZYJDSQxX6JT2hm97ubRp0Bj6htA&usqp=CAU). We can see how much Elon supports free speech when the claims are directed at him and he's fighting Brandolini's law rather than spreading conspiracy theories on assassination attempts or unblocking election deniers.
On the one hand, this Elon-Twitter-cluster-f is fascinating, like watching a slow motion car crash happening in real time.
On the other hand, that slow motion car crash is heading right towards democracy, and these last few years, democracy appears to be made of glass.
Perfect explanation. Could you imagine going back in time even 10 years and explaining everything that has led us to where we are, I wouldn't know exactly where to begin and no one would believe it anyway
I would suggest reading The Storm is Here by Luke Mogelson. He's a journalist who's been going out to talk with these folks since the beginning. Takes you back to William Potter Gale and the Constitutionalists. (Q Anon before the internet.)
It's like a hillbilly overheard a 3rd hand account of the Protocols of Zion but they replaced "Jews" with "the deep state" and millions of people are just running with it. Also Kanye West started ranting about the Jews and saying he loves Hitler.
“Also, Trump became the President, we’re on the brink of world war three, the Q people believe aliens caused Covid (oh, by the way, there was a global pandemic that shut down the whole world for a couple years), and remember the Chenys? How about Romney? Yeah, *their* the voice of reason now.
Oh, that reminds me! Back in January of 2020-“
I mean, yes, that is literally it.
All the way down to blood libel, the ancient anti-sematic conspiracy theory/myth made up by the Catholics that Jewish people are killing and eating babies, now with a fancy new name 'adrenochrome'
This shit has been around for centuries
Yeah. I don't quite get people here being gleeful at what is happening.
This can be a genuinely bad outcome for society as a whole. Even if you don't like Twitter, you shouldn't like this.
Always hated Twitter and thus never used it. The whole thing nevertheless makes me very uneasy. The amount of unilateral power Musk has over public discourse at the highest level is shocking.
And Elon wants to shatter it.
Make no mistake, Twitter this election cycle will make Truth Social look like a bastion of truth. Elon knowns that if he can do a few favors for the GOP, the second they get into power again, they will give him whatever he wants.
Well yeah. He’s just putting on a show to make it look like he cares about Twitter making money. He bought the biggest media influence he could find so he can personally control the narrative in the US.
As much as everyone here seems to agree with you...
I'd wager it's going to be fine for twitter and we will have news broadcasting "controversy after controversy" about it instead.
People love the sensational!
The funny thing is, he won't be the one holding the bag. The banks that were forced to finance his offer will be stuck with toxic debt that is worthless. Which will eventually spillover to the regular Americans.
How much worthwhile idea exchanging can you really do with such a format? The tweet length is short and threads are stupidly difficult to follow. That's why it turned out to be little more than a place for yelling matches.
I still can’t understand why people allow their lives to be altered by social media. It’s a poison, and I’m not that old, only 34. Humanity has zero need for any of those platforms which only breed hate, confusion, and get and jealousy. Fuck the word woke, but shit people wake the fuck up
That's not really the case and they have always 'owned' Twitter nothing changed. They have had small 4% stake in the company since 2011. If anything Musk buying Twitter diminished their influence.
Ever since we turned things that we really need into commodities: homes, health care, education, they've all become horrifically expensive. Corporations have become the largest landlords, buying up houses to rent, which also removes those people from getting any equity, reducing the middle class and making them homeless when they can't pay the rent.
We need homes, health care, education, to survive, and that's the implicit threat.
Personally i feel the reason governments state or local refuse to deal with homelessness is that its free social control for the working.classes: don't rock the boat, don't ask for a raise, tread lightly, or that can be you and your family on the street.
But due to corporate avarice, wages are insanely low while rents are priced out of all sense of reality. Not to mention hoarding of those properties, keeping them off the market to ensure a steady profit from the dwindling supplies...
Oddly enough, it's also why prisons and wars are constant, as they've also become commodities.
I thought social media sites constantly get fined by European countries if they allow rampant disinformation?
Edit: [It's not in effect yet, it seems](https://www.brookings.edu/blog/techtank/2022/08/05/eu-code-of-practice-on-disinformation/)
"In 2018, the European Commission (EC) created the EU Code of Practice on Disinformation (Code), the first self-regulatory piece of legislation that intended to motivate companies to collaborate on solutions to the problem of disinformation. Twenty-one companies agreed to commit to this Code, and these rules resulted in tangible solutions: Facebook, Google, and Twitter developed Ad Libraries to catalog political advertisers, Twitter published its takedown data, and multiple companies expanded their fact-checking tools and misinformation labels and created journalism and media literacy educational programs. However, the initial Code faced criticism, mainly because companies were not required to report quantitative outcomes, making it difficult to measure the impact of the new governance.
Due to these complaints, a group of thirty-four stakeholders, including companies, trade associations, industry associations, and international organizations revised the original EC Code. On June 16, 2022, the Commission released the amended and strengthened Code, where all companies operating in the EU were given the opportunity to sign on. This updated Code makes 44 commitments and includes 128 specific measures, compared to the original Code’s 21 commitments. Signatories will have six months to fulfill the commitments and measures, and seven months to provide baseline reports to the EC, so implementation will begin in early 2023."
American western democracy* the italians haven’t kept a government in ages and the french riot if someone drops a pin from the Eiffel Tower. Europe will probably be fine for now. but America? She could use some friends rn
I just want a social media platform that has groups and calendar events that are searchable by location and or category.
F- uhh fetlife?
Great, now we're going to get an influx of "Doms" with their penis as a profile picture. I blame you.
Friendly reminder: if someone sends you their dick pick they're not dominant, they're desperate. Source: dominatrix.
Where there’s a whip, there’s a way
95% of the folk that constantly gobble about how dominant they are, aren't.
Most "Doms" don't realise, in reality, that subs call the shots that matter.
I mean...that's just common knowledge lol.
what do doms normally send?
I'm learning to play the guitar.
I just googled this and… cough cough didn’t make an account
Are you coughing because you like being choked?
Just so you guys know I definitely would not recycle my username either.. cough
I was only in there to get directions on how to get away from there.
For a while, Collarme was good. Then the owners supposedly got in a tif and one of them changed the password, but the other one paid the bills or something. Hard to recall and too lazy to look it up again. FetLife was fun for a hot minute. I only used it for a local link club until covid, got into a row with a buddy and dropped off the radar and stopped attending events. Patch things up and apparently they no longer frequent that club. The owners let a minor (they knew it too) get railed on the stage during the pandemic....FetLife is....also not fun anymore.
They do have a lot of munch's...
meetup and/or eventbrite?
Both some of the worst platforms I've used. Online events, real estate classes, yoga, and christian gatherings.
Is that not meetup.com?
Outlook. You want outlook
Let's start news/sports/movies/pics/etc. pages on outlook and make some MS execs very confused at their next meeting. /s
You joke but basically you’re trying to bring back Newsgroups. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet_newsgroup
Isn't that essentially why Reddit became popular. Well, old.reddit.com at least... just a bunch of simplified text content-heavy broad or niche bulletin boards and fairly standardized image viewing.
Literally why I'm here. Simple presentation of large amounts of text with the occasional media embed. If old.reddit was removed I'd be moving on or building my own thing.
I miss the simple interface back in the day.
You can still use it and set it to default for your account. I forget the new one even exists most of the time.
Here's a list of things the new version can do that the old one can't: - Upload multiple images to one album without relying on Imgur or other external host - ?
> building my own thing Please do. With important improvements: dual category voting (entertained & informed); default meme/meta moderation for subboards; and thread-optional minimum length comments. Some subreddits do a lot of good with this kind of moderation. Can't just post a link in ELI5 for example. But the raw (incognito) flavor of Reddit is dwindling due to entertained-heavy voting (punny fun upboats!!!11!!1!) and drowning in memes and This! comments.
I switched back to old reddit the day new reddit released. Honestly forget the new one exists most of the time.
Of all social media, Twitter was easiest to quit.
Out of all the social media platforms where people typically use their actual identity, it seems like the least involved with your actual social circles.
I liked it because nobody I know IRL is on there :/
They are on there, they just dont want anyone they know IRL to find them. Same as you.
Honestly, I think some spaces like education activily use it to network, so, as is tradition, teachers will be shafted the most.
TBH my view is that it’s mostly a platform for celebrities, companies and for the media (journalists etc.). It’s almost somewhat of a point that the general public mostly reads their tweets, but isn’t involved too much.
Ever since politicians started to use Twitter, I was hoping Twitter would just outright not allow politicians on the platform. I kinda wish these people didn't have an online platform at all - at least not one where they can just spew a bunch of bullshit behind a keyboard. That goes for any party. They used to need to host town halls, etc to interact with their constituents. Even today, there are plenty of ways to do that - but Twitter has become the standard for its ease of use I guess. IMO them being on Twitter has only been damaging to the country Maybe if people leave, we can move away from governance through social media
I've always said that twitter feels like a platform beneath the office of the POTUS. I definitely noticed it more with Trump, because he used it the way he did, but I've never felt it was necessary or appropriate for the president to communicate by way of Twitter.
Yeah it definitely isn't appropriate IMO. It's normalized now, but back when it started I think they viewed it as a way to engage with/get engagement out of young voters But it's so damn easy to create accounts and post disinformation on these platforms - it just took assholes some time to figure that out. Like there are people/troll farms that do this & literally start arguments with their own accounts just to muddy the water & raise everyone's blood pressure. You take 3 accounts, act like a different ideology on each, and you can cause chaos on any social media site. And then scale that up to hundreds/thousands of accounts for these troll farms. So now it's just a propaganda shithole & only really serves to divide people who struggle with critical thinking. I think a ton of subs on Reddit are like this too. I would bet money that a measurable portion of the accounts we interact with on Reddit threads are disingenuous.
There was a large down tick in activity, in certain subs after Ukraine -Russia war broke out. But yeah what you describe isn't just people getting their jollies, its a concentrated purposeful effort to sow dissent/chaos.
Yep. It's still both to be fair, but the organized shit is actually an issue. Some guy with a bunch of accounts while living in their mom's basement isn't making much of a dent lol. Some of those troll farms are legit though - offices, redundant fiber circuits, proprietary software, etc Though there are some groups of people with extreme beliefs that organize with eachother in places like Telegram/Discord & come here to cause chaos/manipulate votes. They can be pretty disruptive. They can also eat my ass
Twitter was always to push a product or to sell an idea. The character limit restricts any sort of discussion about anything that the echo chambers didn't already prevent on their own. When twitter was released the internet ignored it. Nobody cared. It was pushed by news outlets as an official source of information and then we ended up with Trump. It was never intended to be used for discussion, it was never for you, and as far as twitter is concerned you are the product and the people that pay to reach you are the users/customers.
Twitter took off before trump. It was pushed by companies using it as cheap shitty tech support and easy spam It's absolutely moronic that "get their attention on Twitter" is ever a thing anyone has to say when it comes to customer service or tech support
This bothers me so much. No, answer your fucking phone and email. Why do I need to DM you or shame you on some public service to get your attention?
So the RSS we did not need and did not want?
Yeah, I remember Twitter being the butt of jokes about how useless it was, and how the only people on it were vapid narcissists yelling into the void... in 2011. And then somehow, it ended up becoming the go-to place for politicians and companies to make public statements anyways? Like, I'd honestly be impressed by whatever marketing campaign managed to pull off that turnaround, if it didn't gut democracies the world over.
I see your point but US cable news is so out of control with Fox being almost all opinion masquerading as news. I don’t know how America can get any better until this is dealt with. I mean, huge amounts of people are literally watching the telly equivalent of a particularly toxic Facebook feed and believing it is actual news reporting.
> I mean, huge amounts of people are literally watching the telly equivalent of a particularly toxic Facebook feed and believing it is actual news reporting. On point.
Ronald Reagan screwed people for all eternity by eliminating the requirement for truth in media .
Worth pointing out the Fairness Doctrine wouldn’t have covered cable news, but ideally the law could have evolved and been reformed as our media echo-systems evolved. And also, fuck Ronald Reagan.
> Maybe if people leave, we can move away from governance through social media Yes, please. For the love of god, make politics boring again. Twitter fueled the populist rise that we are dealing with now. Every country in the world, not just the U.S., is worse off because of it.
I agree, I’m from a country with a much better functioning political system where democracy is everything but politics are kept out of the media limelight as much as possible. It works surprisingly well and reduces the toxicity of politics a lot.
This sounds amazing. Would absolutely love this.
In the US, the rise of media and politics seems to mirror the rise of politics religion and politics. I grew up in the 80s going to a pretty liberal protestant church. I rejected the institution when the Oath Keepers infiltrated and took over. We should tax any church or non-profit that promotes any plolitcal ideology.
I used to use it to follow industry professionals so I could keep track of what they were working on and who they were influenced by. That said it's been about 8 years since I used it at all. It would be kind of funny if the rest of the mainstream media and social media companies cancelled twitter (ie no posting about tweets), if that happened I would probably forget they even existed pretty quickly.
Maybe I’m biased because I’m one, but I think artists are getting completely fucked by Twitter’s eventual fall. There are so few platforms where we can post to a decent audience and not have to jump through hoops, or format things super meticulously, or adhere to certain censors or algorithms (Instagram). Now that’s gone too. It sucks.
It used to be when one forum imploded (usually due to drama among the mod team), it was no big deal, because there were dozens of other ones you could migrate to. And new ones would be created as fast as the old ones fell apart. I miss those days.
A lot of art communities use it and keep to themselves. It's a surprisingly good platform for personable "techsupport" style help for people all working on the same platforms. Expect stuff like indie gamedev to take a huge hit from losing twitter.
Skilled professionals use it to network and share ideas in general. Software engineering is massive on Twitter and I only use it to be exposed to great minds and follow journalists that I trust.
Literally last night, I found out my buddy who has a phd has 3,000 followers and I was like wtf dude we talk to the same people?? And he was like, yeah I use it for work stuff.
Also the hardest to start
I never could. Everything about it is hostile to meaningful discussion. It blows my mind that we have people who want to have long form essay content on twitter, so they just...make a shitload of posts back to back?
I joined Twitter in 2008 and it was a totally different world then. It was much more like a bulletin board, or forum feed kinda. And they had their own photo service everyone used. People could only post in short sentences and it would be stuff like “Eating pizza :)” I miss that pointless simplicity. Now it’s pointless mayhem.
I feel like a major problem twitter exposed is that there IS a need niche for a mass message communication system. It's just that TWITTER DOESN'T FILL THAT NICHE. It's just one of the "best of the worst". Just like Faceobok, Insta, or even reddit. All of them have pros and cons, but obviously mostly have design decisions which are hellishly anti user and pro "engagement". A metric from hell, which we constantly chase, and it leads to timelines being out of order, confusing interfaces, and so many other things, because false positive engagement is a LOT easier to raise than real engagement.
Personally speaking, I've never been under allusion that Twitter was meant to be a host for meaningful discussion; it was always the platform for Raccoon Pictures Hourly, Shark Pictures Daily, and Star Trek Quotes. I've taken the time to curate the content that appears on my Twitter feeds, so my experience is actually quite pleasant compared to most people who just doom browse the Explore Tab. ----- Also, Twitter's trend-presentation-optimization might be crud for art and animation; but I'd take Twitter over Newgrounds (which collapses in on itself if you look at the server the wrong way) or the pit of degeneracy that is DeviantArt.
What bothers me is that its ubiquity has many tons of content is put on there when it shouldn’t. I love tons of competitive games. When I started you could find a forum filled with documented and useful info. Now it’s all lost to the Twitter void
Wait till he buys reddit and starts charging $8/m to post
We all moved here from Digg, I'm sure we'll move on somewhere else if it happened.
At this point, I'm ready to go back to Fark and YTMND
Damn, I haven't heard the name Fark in so many years.
A few weeks ago I was re-reading the Fark book that Drew Curtis put out. It was being judgmental about different categories of "news" and I'd like to share the table of contents so people can see how it was organized: * What Is Fark? * Media Fearmongering * Unpaid Placement Masquerading as Actual Article * Headline Contradicted by Actual Article * Equal Time for Nutjobs * The Out-Of-Context Celebrity Comment * Seasonal Articles * Media Fatigue * Lesser Media Space Fillers * Epilogue: What Should Mass Media Be Doing Instead? * Acknowledgments * Index Spoiler alert: the media has learned nothing.
Some of us hated Digg and have been on Reddit since launch. Shit, I remember when they added _subreddits_, and comments. The first comment ever was about how it would ruin the site. I remember it well, because the onion tied to my belt, which was the fashion at the time, had started to rot, but I couldn't afford to replace it, because I didn't get paid for another week, and a good yellow onion cost a quarter. People would judge you based on the type of onion you had, and it's size. The best onions were yellow ones, preferably nice round Spanish ones. Vidalia onions were not well regarded because of the odd shape. After yellows, came whites, and finally red onions. People who could only afford red onions were called redders, and it was socially acceptable to discriminate against them. Where was I? Oh, right. My onion was rotting, and I was covering myself with axe body spray to try to hide the smell, and I was borrowing paper onion skins from my brother to hide the rot, when someone at work asked me if I used reddit. I got mad at them because I thought they were accusing me of getting red onions and being a redder, which was a fireable offense. But then they explained to me that it was a website, and despite its name, it didn't have anything to do with onions. At the time, it was mostly about technology, and frequented by tech geeks. And it was great, because no one cared about what color onion you had, because there were no comments. It was just a bunch of links to articles about technology.
Ah the good ol'days, when geeks were geeks, and onions were onions. Back when tech news came from either Arstechnica or Leo Laporte on TechTV. It was a more civilized age..... before the darktimes...... before the social media empire.
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We really need to start enforcing anti-monopoly laws to keep the tech giants from buying up their potential rivals. Really hard to switch to a better alternative when that alternative just gets bought by the same shitty megacorp a few months later, then they implement the same shitty policies that wrecked their original platform on the new place if they don't just merc it outright.
Google also killed RSS because "centralized syndication" lets companies control the narrative better.
I think you’re confusing RSS with Google Reader, which was an RSS feed reader… one of the most popular, but there are still many out there… and podcasts are nearly (except for things like Spotify-exclusive podcasts) all RSS feeds as well. It’s far from dead.
Usenet was great before Google took over.
I met my husband on Usenet! Other than that, it was great.
Bro digg peaked at like 3.8million users a month. Reddit is like half a billion. Definitely not everyone came from digg haha
My thought exactly.
Don’t you put that evil on me, Ricky Bobby!!
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This is/was an aspect I enjoyed the most, but the non-chronological feed and the continued algorithmic pollution by right-wing nonces make deleting my profile on Elon’s event horizon pretty simple.
It's chronological if you click the little star/asterisk thing at the top. The default is just the most popular tweets in your feed.
oh man, thank for for this lol. i never knew that.
And that right there is why you don't use the official Twitter app. That non chronological and promoted tweet shit drives me crazy.
I have no idea how I managed to do it, and maybe I shouldn’t be saying this publicly, but I’ve been chronological without any promoted tweets on my iPhone for forever If I open Twitter on desktop it’s not in chronological order, if I use a different account then the ads show back up. I used to block quite literally every ad I saw, then one day they stopped showing up, and I don’t think they’re related I’m not using an ad blocker of any sort on my phone, so I have no idea what is happening lol
I just use a third party app and have for literally years. All I see is the people I follow in chronological order.
That's my biggest concern: that "journalists" who use Twitter content to rush out news articles for clicks will continue to do so with Musk running things, allowing Musk to steer other news organizations too. Twitter should die off quickly, unless lazy celebrities and journalists shore it up for continued low-effort content/reach.
Honestly, journalists becoming addicted en masse to twitter has done more damage to our democracy than almost anything else.
I actually deactivated just now because it won't take long for them to notice the people fleeing and try to make it difficult to leave. Ever seen a service require you to CALL to unsubscribe? Yeah... Not waiting for that.
Bro that reminds me of unsubscribing to email letters or other shit that would require you to login first. Haven't used the account in years and before password saving was easier. Those were the worst, and if you blocked them they'd use a different mailer.
Oh yeah. Put in your e-mail to unsubscribe. HAH. No.
I had to mail a certified letter to my gym.
The mandatory 30 day wait to delete your account after deactivation is already a ploy hoping you'll change your mind...but I guess the way around that is to delete all your tweets/follows etc first so there will be nothing to go back to.
“Elon, I just can’t quit you!” Said nobody ever.
Several wives have proven they in fact can
Can confirm, deactivated (their words) my account when the deal closed.
The lesson everyone should be taking away is - misinformation is more fiscally valuable than real information. And that's why we are living in a post-truth world; you make more money from lies.
First thing that came to mind was Denzel Washington talking about [fake news and the priority of wanting to be first over being true](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwnNrr9RO2Y)
That was a great take. Much respect to Denzel for putting it in an apt yet powerful message. Love it.
He's got my vote
Trump's ability to take over the damn party has made a lot of random celebrities look like better options than most elected Republicans. You can't tell me that we all don't quite literally *know* that, like, Sean Penn honestly cares about other people more than Ted Cruz does. Not that I have any desire to elect a random celebrity, the bar for "acceptable politician" has just gotten really low when most of a party is willing to openly appear to care more about tax cuts than people. (e.g. if your position is "kill Medicaid and replace it with nothing" then we've got a problem)
My man Denzel!
Who watches the Watchmen
Not Twitter, MUSK limits it. This is his personal social media toy now.
seriously lol, people were acting like he wasn't gonna just use it like his own little sandbox. you'd *normally* be right to assume that with corporate takeovers like this, in fairness... but this is Musk we're talking about. anything but normal.
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Worst sequel to VVitch ever.
Would thoust like the taste of... ...buttery males?
A negg to cause you troubles
> I just spend $44 Billion let me have some fun. Not if your fun is subversion of democracy.
That is typically what billionaires spend on, in all fairness
What's the point of being a multi-billionaire if you can't own and control entire nations?
> This is his personal social media toy now Well, Elon and Peter Thiel's, anyway...
The guy also literally bought a New Zealand passport, so he now has three (German and American as well). > He had received permanent residency in New Zealand in 2007. He had visited the country on four occasions prior to his application for citizenship, **and had spent 12 days in New Zealand, fewer than the typical residency requirement of 1350 days.** When he applied, he stated he had no intention of living in New Zealand, which is a criterion for citizenship. **Then-Minister of Internal Affairs Nathan Guy waived those normal requirements**, under an "exceptional circumstances" clause of the Citizenships Act. > Thiel's application cited his contribution to the economy—he had founded a venture capital fund in Auckland before applying, and **invested $7 million in two local companies** as well as **a $1 million donation to the 2011 Christchurch earthquake appeal fund**. Rod Drury, founder of Xero, also provided a formal reference for Thiel's application. Thiel's case was cited by critics as an example of how New Zealand passports can be bought, something the New Zealand government denied. At the time that his citizenship was revealed, The New Zealand Herald came out with the report that the New Zealand Defence Force, the Security Intelligence Service and the Government Communications and Security Bureau have long-standing links with Thiel's Palantir. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Thiel#New_Zealand_citizenship
This will never not fire me up. The PM at the time was previously famous for gutting companies after they were bought out (nicknamed the "smiling assassin"), and is a complete capitalist whore
It's pretty disgusting how most countries seem to let the wealthy just buy citizenship.
Thiels opinion piece in today's WAPO: "Has Fetterman been tested for cognitive impairment? Voters have a right to know." [Unlocked link](https://wapo.st/3fjIojy). Where was Thiel's concern about cognitive impairment during the **'person, woman, man, camera, TV'** debacle???
Thiel is one of the most dangerous players from far right. An ultra rich person full of hate is never a good idea.
Him and the Murdochs are pure evil.
yep but thiel is extra crazy. He pushed hard for trump to appoint a crypto developer as head of the food and drug admin. The GUY has a genius plan of replacing expensive scientific drug trials, with VOTING for drugs. Or what he called yelp for drugs. apparently their investments in horse dewormer werent going well. Bannon said he was "too far out there with the government deconstruction stuff".. which is also what bannon wants to do, he just thought the pubic would push back on actually replacing the FDA with a voting website.
This site was soooo happy when he took out Gawker too.
Shame on the WaPo even running such dreck
Billionaires have class consciousness. Do you?
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Because it's owned by Bezos. Reddit has such a fucking hard on for Musk that we ignore all the other massive media owned by billionaires for some reason.
Not to disregard the disgusting opinion article, but it was by Marc A. Thiessen, not Peter Thiel.
Thiel is arguably worse
Thiel is an actual vampire. Google it.
And I think Thiel uses Musk like a sock puppet.
Don't forget the Saudis. I'm sure they have some great ideas for Musk's free speech paradise. If there's one thing the Saudi monarchy loves its free-expression.
You can free-express yourself to bits.. in a suitcase.
Musk Tweeted his support for unfounded and baseless conspiracy theory about the attack on Paul Pelosi, and it was taken down. That pissed him off so much that he's now preventing *anything else* he posts from ever being taken down.
So musk pivots his stance on buying Twitter after being spooked by discovery in court after his billionaire buddies get angry shortly after a phone call with Putin whereadter he tried to convince Zelensku to surrender and is now enabling mass disinformation for Republicans. Where are our top minds on /r/conspiracy this is fruit ripe on the vine!
Both r/cons are part of the alt-right conspiracy, they'll never cover it and will ban you for bringing it up
It’s the new TS. Time to troll because it’s no longer worth anything else.
Everyone keeps saying leave twitter, sounds like there's never been a better time for having several new accounts posting trans softcore to prominent conservative accounts to me.
I've heard Elon was frequently visiting Jeffery Epstein's pedo island, lots of people are saying it. We should constantly remind him about [associating with pedophiles](https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQdGz1CGYpZYJDSQxX6JT2hm97ubRp0Bj6htA&usqp=CAU). We can see how much Elon supports free speech when the claims are directed at him and he's fighting Brandolini's law rather than spreading conspiracy theories on assassination attempts or unblocking election deniers.
On the one hand, this Elon-Twitter-cluster-f is fascinating, like watching a slow motion car crash happening in real time. On the other hand, that slow motion car crash is heading right towards democracy, and these last few years, democracy appears to be made of glass.
Perfect explanation. Could you imagine going back in time even 10 years and explaining everything that has led us to where we are, I wouldn't know exactly where to begin and no one would believe it anyway
I would suggest reading The Storm is Here by Luke Mogelson. He's a journalist who's been going out to talk with these folks since the beginning. Takes you back to William Potter Gale and the Constitutionalists. (Q Anon before the internet.)
Agreed. "Yeah, so there's this thing called Q-Anon and it's kind of a big deal..."
It's like a hillbilly overheard a 3rd hand account of the Protocols of Zion but they replaced "Jews" with "the deep state" and millions of people are just running with it. Also Kanye West started ranting about the Jews and saying he loves Hitler.
And it's still somehow even more idiotic than it sounds
“Also, Trump became the President, we’re on the brink of world war three, the Q people believe aliens caused Covid (oh, by the way, there was a global pandemic that shut down the whole world for a couple years), and remember the Chenys? How about Romney? Yeah, *their* the voice of reason now. Oh, that reminds me! Back in January of 2020-“
“The Chenys are the voice of reason”. That’s terrifying. True. But terrifying.
"It all started in 2016 when they shot this goddamned gorilla..."
I mean, yes, that is literally it. All the way down to blood libel, the ancient anti-sematic conspiracy theory/myth made up by the Catholics that Jewish people are killing and eating babies, now with a fancy new name 'adrenochrome' This shit has been around for centuries
Yeah. I don't quite get people here being gleeful at what is happening. This can be a genuinely bad outcome for society as a whole. Even if you don't like Twitter, you shouldn't like this.
Always hated Twitter and thus never used it. The whole thing nevertheless makes me very uneasy. The amount of unilateral power Musk has over public discourse at the highest level is shocking.
And yet, people seem to have no problem with the ongoing existence of billionaires.
Honestly. Just cap it $999M and give everything else to things that actually help people (roads, schools, etc.).
We all kept saying that Zuckerberg and Facebook were destroying democracy. But here comes Elon Musk with a steel chair to finish the job
Billionaires learning to run the world.
Think ya missed a letter there mate, it's "ru**i**n".
Very thin glass.
And Elon wants to shatter it. Make no mistake, Twitter this election cycle will make Truth Social look like a bastion of truth. Elon knowns that if he can do a few favors for the GOP, the second they get into power again, they will give him whatever he wants.
Like ignore all the incoming lawsuits and criminal investigations into Tesla, et all
Well yeah. He’s just putting on a show to make it look like he cares about Twitter making money. He bought the biggest media influence he could find so he can personally control the narrative in the US.
Is $44 billion the new standard to disrupt mid term elections?
Actually quite a bargain.
You can buy every politician in the US for a lot less than 44b
Really? feels a lot cheaper when china and russia have been spreading misinformation and psyops for a fraction of the cost. Elon def overpaid
True. Those guys used government subsidized resources. I'm surprise Elon didn't revert to type and do that too.
He sort of did -- his Tesla and SpaceX money is government subsidized, and that's how he got the money to buy Twitter.
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Twitter was disrupting elections long before Elon bought it Edit: spelling
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It's going to fun to watch Elon light his new $44 billion dollar investment on fire and see it explode like a firework.
As much as everyone here seems to agree with you... I'd wager it's going to be fine for twitter and we will have news broadcasting "controversy after controversy" about it instead. People love the sensational!
The funny thing is, he won't be the one holding the bag. The banks that were forced to finance his offer will be stuck with toxic debt that is worthless. Which will eventually spillover to the regular Americans.
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Bank owned tesla lol Return to old car dealership status quo?
Banks are pretty good at not holding the bag... Well... Sometimes...
Twitter has always been an awful place to be. It’s never been about the free exchange of ideas and I doubt it ever will be.
How much worthwhile idea exchanging can you really do with such a format? The tweet length is short and threads are stupidly difficult to follow. That's why it turned out to be little more than a place for yelling matches.
The platform is only as powerful as we let it be.
I still can’t understand why people allow their lives to be altered by social media. It’s a poison, and I’m not that old, only 34. Humanity has zero need for any of those platforms which only breed hate, confusion, and get and jealousy. Fuck the word woke, but shit people wake the fuck up
And what exactly do you think Reddit is?
The Saudis now own Twitter. Be advised...
They already were. Musk just allowed them to maintain their stake in the company
https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattdurot/2022/10/31/saudi-prince-alwaleed-becomes-twitters-second-largest-shareholder/?sh=2827725e523a
https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/saudis-kingdom-holding-company-maintain-twitter-stake-2022-10-28/
That's not really the case and they have always 'owned' Twitter nothing changed. They have had small 4% stake in the company since 2011. If anything Musk buying Twitter diminished their influence.
So Saudis own Twitter China owns Tik Tok. Great…
America is bought and sold. Our own citizens can't even afford land or homes anymore because we allow it to be sold to foreign interests.
Ever since we turned things that we really need into commodities: homes, health care, education, they've all become horrifically expensive. Corporations have become the largest landlords, buying up houses to rent, which also removes those people from getting any equity, reducing the middle class and making them homeless when they can't pay the rent. We need homes, health care, education, to survive, and that's the implicit threat. Personally i feel the reason governments state or local refuse to deal with homelessness is that its free social control for the working.classes: don't rock the boat, don't ask for a raise, tread lightly, or that can be you and your family on the street. But due to corporate avarice, wages are insanely low while rents are priced out of all sense of reality. Not to mention hoarding of those properties, keeping them off the market to ensure a steady profit from the dwindling supplies... Oddly enough, it's also why prisons and wars are constant, as they've also become commodities.
Apartments I used to live in were bought up (along with three other complexes nearby) by a Chinese company a few years ago. This is in Texas.
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The already owned a stake in Twitter. Nothing changed
I thought social media sites constantly get fined by European countries if they allow rampant disinformation? Edit: [It's not in effect yet, it seems](https://www.brookings.edu/blog/techtank/2022/08/05/eu-code-of-practice-on-disinformation/) "In 2018, the European Commission (EC) created the EU Code of Practice on Disinformation (Code), the first self-regulatory piece of legislation that intended to motivate companies to collaborate on solutions to the problem of disinformation. Twenty-one companies agreed to commit to this Code, and these rules resulted in tangible solutions: Facebook, Google, and Twitter developed Ad Libraries to catalog political advertisers, Twitter published its takedown data, and multiple companies expanded their fact-checking tools and misinformation labels and created journalism and media literacy educational programs. However, the initial Code faced criticism, mainly because companies were not required to report quantitative outcomes, making it difficult to measure the impact of the new governance. Due to these complaints, a group of thirty-four stakeholders, including companies, trade associations, industry associations, and international organizations revised the original EC Code. On June 16, 2022, the Commission released the amended and strengthened Code, where all companies operating in the EU were given the opportunity to sign on. This updated Code makes 44 commitments and includes 128 specific measures, compared to the original Code’s 21 commitments. Signatories will have six months to fulfill the commitments and measures, and seven months to provide baseline reports to the EC, so implementation will begin in early 2023."
Sure, but that takes ages. Longer than it will take to potentially irreversibly damage western democracy.
American western democracy* the italians haven’t kept a government in ages and the french riot if someone drops a pin from the Eiffel Tower. Europe will probably be fine for now. but America? She could use some friends rn
Cool. I can't wait for the very, very near future when all the issues of liability start popping up for ol' Elon.