continued lulz at twitter

glennmagusharvey

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/01/musk-led-twitter-faces-another-lawsuit-alleging-it-failed-to-pay-bills/

glennmagusharvey

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/29/technology/twitter-elon-musk.html

The company has stopped paying rent at its Seattle office, leading it to face eviction, two people familiar with the matter said. Janitorial and security services have been cut, and in some cases employees have resorted to bringing their own toilet paper to the office.

Those cuts may be yielding consequences. On Wednesday, users around the world reported service interruptions with Twitter. Some were logged out, while others encountered error messages while visiting the website. Twitter has not explained what caused the temporary outage. Three people familiar with the company’s infrastructure said that if the Sacramento facility had still been operating, it could have helped alleviate the problem by providing backup computing capacity when other data centers failed.

(from later in the article:)

Mr. Musk tweeted that Twitter remained online, “even after I disconnected one of the more sensitive server racks.” That evening, the system Twitter uses to triage reports of illegal and harmful content went offline briefly, according to an internal message written by Ella Irwin, the company’s head of trust and safety.

I'm not sure whether he did it on purpose knowing this or whether he just didn't actually care and simply thought that his dramatic moves would be a good thing.

Amusingly...

Twitter, which has eliminated its communications department, and Mr. Musk did not respond to a request for comment.

At Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters, where the company has missed rent payments, Mr. Musk has done the same, consolidating workers onto two floors and closing four. He also canceled janitorial services this month, after those workers went on strike for better wages.

That has left the office in disarray. With people packed into more confined spaces, the smell of leftover takeout food and body odor has lingered on the floors, according to four current and former employees. Bathrooms have grown dirty, these people said. And because janitorial services have largely been ended, some workers have resorted to bringing their own rolls of toilet paper from home.

Look, I don't like the term "manchild" (which I've seen used often to describe Musk) as an insult, but I have to admit that the disregard of hygiene is unfortunately playing right into that stereotype.

Mr. Musk’s erratic and hands-on style has thrown off a number of workers, as he often interrupts meetings seemingly at random, talking for long stretches and asking some top leaders to be sounding boards for his ideas, two people familiar with his management of Twitter said.

This really does sound like a guy who fell into success due to some lucky charisma-based rolls charisma rather than intelligence. Or wisdom for that matter.

glennmagusharvey

also FYI it's possible to post Mastodon links on Twitter again

apparently it's been possible for a while now

likely because it's probably illegal to do so by EU law (or will be soon, from what I've heard)

lrdgck

This really does sound like a guy who fell into success due to some lucky charisma-based rolls rather than intelligence. Or wisdom for that matter.

My general take is that he's obviously smart enough to whip up that whole electric car-and-also-rockets business, but by twitter he's hit the wall and it turned out he's not as smart as he thought he was. If the initial successes are to be attributed to charisma, then that'd probably mean he thought he's a charismatic genius rather than just charismatic.

glennmagusharvey

Well to be fair there are also different skillsets applicable to different industries and situations.

IIRC, both the spacecraft and electric vehicle industries were basically poorly developed at the time SpaceX and Tesla got their start. Opportunism and disruption made more sense there than it does for trying to run Twitter, an established big name in an industry that is already very filled competitively.

glennmagusharvey

https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/09/tech/twitter-layoffs-severance-offers

After months of uncertainty and feeling left in the dark, many former Twitter employees impacted by a mass layoff in early November began receiving their severance offers over the weekend. But some are frustrated by the offer and the conditions attached to it.

The severance offer promises one month’s pay in exchange for agreeing to various terms, including a non-disparagement agreement and waiving the right to take any legal action against the company, according to Lisa Bloom, a lawyer representing dozens of former Twitter employees affected by the layoffs.

Many were dissatisfied by the offer, according to public posts and attorneys representing ex-employees, saying it falls short of the “3 months of severance” that new owner Elon Musk had previously promised would be provided. (That time period appeared to include pay for the 60-days advanced notice Twitter was obligated to provide under various state laws.) The amount is also significantly less than provided at rivals like Facebook-parent Meta, which laid off thousands of workers around the same time and guaranteed them 16 weeks of base pay plus two additional weeks for each year they were employed at the company.

The former Twitter employees are now stuck deciding whether to accept the money or join the hundreds of others who have already filed arbitration demands or lawsuits against the company.

* can't keep promises
* can't offer a competitive severance package to butter up people on the way out

The severance fight comes as Musk scrambles to cut costs at the company he bought in October for $44 billion, including a significant amount of debt.

Let's remember that this is debt that Musk chose to create on his own, as a way of getting out of the trouble Musk got himself into, and it's debt that he's now foisted onto the company and onto the backs of others.

Also:

To add insult to injury, at least one former employee claimed on Twitter that the severance offer went to their email’s spam folder.

This is elaborated on here:

https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-twitter-employee-severance-agreements-2023-1

In the early hours of Saturday, the former Twitter employees laid off on Nov. 4 received a message from "twitterseparation@cptgroup.com," an email not associated with any internal department at the company, several people familiar with the situation told Insider.

The email was designated as "spam" for most people who received it. After digging it out of spam folders, the message directed people to a website operated by CPT Group for access to the full separation agreement.

The article largely repeats the information mentioned above, and also mentions another comparison for mass layoff benefits:

Snap offered its workers four months of severance in its late August layoffs.

Also, screwing around with the law, or at least some degree of problematic ignorance:

As for the separation agreements, they appear to be mostly boilerplate, offering one month of pay to laid off employees as severance. On November 4, Musk tweeted that "everyone exited" was offered 3 months of severance, saying that was 50% more than legally required. The tech billionaire may have been conflating periods of "non-working" employment that later saw thousands of workers continue to be paid since November, while they waited for severance. State labor laws require companies to give certain notice periods for mass layoffs.

glennmagusharvey

Also I don't use any Twitter app nor do I use iOS but I've heard that there was an update to the iOS Twitter app that broke the UI for accessing tweets in the Notification Center.

glennmagusharvey

https://twitter.com/CaseyNewton/status/1613303513240702976

I'm told Twitter employees were just walked out of its Singapore office — its Asia-Pacific headquarters — over nonpayment of rent. Landlords walked employees out of the building

Twitter•Today at 5:35 PM

glennmagusharvey

https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-auctioning-off-inactive-username-handles-elon-musk-report-2023-1

if you have old twitter accounts, time to fire them up

glennmagusharvey

https://tweesecake.social/@JonathanMosen/109706069254214115

So yeah, Twitter broke their API and broke various apps that people use to tweet and stuff.

it's almost like twitter wants to devalue itself lol

glennmagusharvey

https://techcrunch.com/2023/01/25/elon-musk-twitter-antisemitic-hate-speech-lawsuit-germany/

it appears that getting rid of the content moderation staff and letting on a bunch of formerly banned nutjobs were bad ideas. who'd have thunk?

glennmagusharvey

FWIW there's a whole thread about this

https://mastodon.social/@atomicpoet/109752130615602128

that thread also mentions these stories

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-01-25/new-twitter-whistleblower-says-privacy-lapses-ran-into-musk-era

https://cointelegraph.com/news/hackers-take-over-robinhood-s-twitter-account-to-promote-scam-token

glennmagusharvey

https://twitter.com/stevanzetti/status/1619155606132383746

A leaked internal Twitter message reviewed by Bloomberg appears to show that Elon Musk directly ordered staff to suspend left-wing anti-fascist activist Chad Loder's account

"Suspension: direct request from Elon Musk" the message reads.

Yesterday at 21:09


lol freedom of speech

lrdgck

lol freedom of speech

bUt AnTiFa TeH rEaL nAzIs!!!11one

glennmagusharvey

how to make a website worse

https://twitter.com/TwitterDev/status/1621026986784337922

Starting February 9, we will no longer support free access to the Twitter API, both v2 and v1.1. A paid basic tier will be available instead [thread emoji]

Today at 1:05 AM

It's not much of a thread. There are two more tweets:

Over the years, hundreds of millions of people have sent over a trillion Tweets, with billions more every week.

Twitter data are among the world’s most powerful data sets. We’re committed to enabling fast & comprehensive access so you can continue to build with us.

We’ll be back with more details on what you can expect next week.

I should go post the Mastodon stuff already.

glennmagusharvey

https://twitter.com/MattNavarra/status/1621558412386476036

Twitter is reportedly emailing businesses offering gold check mark verification for $1000 PER MONTH!

And affiliate account verification for $50 each per month

Today at 12:17 PM

someone's desperate for money after making a bad business deal

glennmagusharvey

https://twitter.com/oneunderscore__/status/1623445068203040768

FYI: It's not just you. Twitter's broken right now.

Sending Tweets is down. DMs are down. You can still schedule tweets a minute in advance.

Today at 5:14 PM


Twitter turned off their API...which apparently broke more than just the API in the process.

glennmagusharvey

https://www.platformer.news/p/elon-musk-fires-a-top-twitter-engineer

the full title is "Elon Musk fires a top Twitter engineer over his declining view count"

yes

One of the company’s two remaining principal engineers offered a possible explanation for Musk’s declining reach: just under a year after the Tesla CEO made his surprise offer to buy Twitter for $44 billion, public interest in his antics is waning.

Employees showed Musk internal data regarding engagement with his account, along with a Google Trends chart. Last April, they told him, Musk was at “peak” popularity in search rankings, indicated by a score of “100.” Today, he’s at a score of nine. Engineers had previously investigated whether Musk’s reach had somehow been artificially restricted, but found no evidence that the algorithm was biased against him.

Musk did not take the news well.

“You’re fired, you’re fired,” Musk told the engineer.

he wants to be king of the castle and call everyone who doesn't kiss his feet a dirty rascal

It has now been seven weeks since Twitter added public view counts for every tweet. At the time, Musk promised that the feature would give the world a better sense of how vibrant the platform is.

“Shows how much more alive Twitter is than it may seem, as over 90% of Twitter users read, but don’t tweet, reply or like, as those are public actions,” he tweeted.

Almost two months later, though, view counts have had the opposite effect, emphasizing how little engagement most posts get relative to their audience size. At the same time, Twitter usage in the United States has declined almost 9 percent since Musk’s takeover, according to one recent study.

Twitter sources say the view count feature itself may be contributing to the decline in engagement, and therefore views. The like and retweet buttons were made smaller to accommodate the display of views, making them harder to easily tap.

counterproductive measure lol

then again, it's a feature that's literally meant to try to tell people to look at how big the numbers are and be impressed

there's a vulgar comparison about measuring the size of something to be made here, and it doesn't exactly reflect well on this

lrdgck

the full title is "Elon Musk fires a top Twitter engineer over his declining view count"

For some reason I thought of that scene in 300 about Xerxes angry at his generals.

glennmagusharvey

https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/10/tech/twitter-top-advertiser-decline/index.html

glennmagusharvey

https://www.platformer.news/p/yes-elon-musk-created-a-special-system

glennmagusharvey

I've missed some more recent lulz on Twitter, such as their reportedly locking 2FA behind a paywall.

But here's more...

https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/twitter-refused-to-pay-aws-bill-so-amazon-refused-to-pay-for-ads/

and there's also apparently been another outage just today

glennmagusharvey

For the record:

https://twitter.com/TwitterSupport/status/1632792942262747136

Some parts of Twitter may not be working as expected right now. We made an internal change that had some unintended consequences. We’re working on this now and will share an update when it’s fixed./quote]
Today at 12:19 PM

glennmagusharvey

well i guess it got back up enough for this stuff to trend lol

lrdgck

Meanwhile, over here trends are more like:

• paedophile
• John Paul 2
• son of a bitch
• bullying kills
• glory to Ukraine

I mean, I know it's not on topic and I'm letting it out of relevant thread, but we've had such a perfect storm that I don't think anybody ever had time to notice anything's not right with Twitter itself. Apparently local Twitters are polite enough not to interrupt an emerging flame war even when the central's going down.

glennmagusharvey

https://twitter.com/williamlegate/status/1633176820072816640

turns out the disabled Twitter employee who Elon publicly ridiculed for asking about the status of his employment sold his company to Twitter for ~$100 million, and the deal was structured in a way which requires payment for the entire deal upon his termination—whoops

Yesterday at 1:44 PM



so there's been an update on this

https://twitter.com/kenklippenstein/status/1633261069534724096

Before vs. after the lawyer calls

Yesterday at 7:19 PM

glennmagusharvey

https://twitter.com/anothercohen/status/1633110778147491851

I’m just now realizing that Elon may not know what Figma is and thinks this is a Ligma-esque joke

Yesterday at 9:22 AM

FYI, Figma is this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Figma_(software)

(In addition to an anime figurine brand, for that matter.)

glennmagusharvey

oh, someone just pointed me to this

https://twitterisgoinggreat.com

there's some more lulz here that i missed

glennmagusharvey

https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/08/tech/ftc-twitter-privacy-investigation/index.html

The Federal Trade Commission has acknowledged a wide-ranging investigation into Twitter’s privacy practices after a House subcommittee on Tuesday disclosed a dozen letters from the agency to the company seeking information about its operations under new CEO Elon Musk.

The acknowledgment marks a rare public confirmation of a probe linked to alleged violations of an FTC settlement, which Twitter first signed in 2011, and which was designed to force the company to improve its protection of user data. It also highlights the intense scrutiny surrounding both Twitter and its regulator as officials try to determine whether violations of the settlement may have occurred under Twitter’s new management — which could broaden the company’s already vast legal exposure.

etc.

glennmagusharvey

https://www.wired.com/story/twitter-data-api-prices-out-nearly-everyone/