Tag: twitter

If you need to find me…

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Here is a page with all of my internet details:

Find 6000

I know that it’s all a bit complicated with everyone wondering where to migrate to while the Loud Mouth Space Wanker kills what’s left of twitter, but this blog – and the page that I have linked to above – will remain, so that you can always find me.

You lucky, lucky people.

There’s no one clear alternative standing out at the moment, and thus everything is rather diluted, but I’m currently pinning my hopes on BlueSky, so that’s probably the best place to start from a social media POV.

6000coza on Bluesky

That said, I’m only starting there today, so it’s going to take a while.
In the meantime, all the other links are also all completely valid and worth a look.

Quiche

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“Fancy a quickie for dinner?”
“I think you’ll find that it’s pronounced QUICHE!”

But this is a quickie. Hugely busy day and still stuff to do before this evening, when we are also doing stuff.

So here are a couple of links:

Is it because it’s driving through a horrific bit of Sheffield where bus peltage is actually the least of your worries? Spoiler: it is.

Also, this:

Decency long left the building at X. It flows from the very top. When former executive Yoel Roth, whom Musk wrongly accused of being a pedophile, warned recently about hate speech on X, CEO Linda Yaccarino’s first reaction was to play down his concerns. On Monday, Musk followed up: “I have rarely seen evil in as pure a form as Yoel Roth.”

More final nails are being added at an alarming rate.

When you know…

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We’re not all experts at everything. If we were, not only would it be extremely taxing to keep up to date with all our areas of expertise (that being all of them), but also, it would rather diminish the use of the word “expert” in any sort of comparative sense. And so we should probably stick to our own lane, and get on with our own expert stuff, rather than trying to be a master of all trades, and a jack of none.

Or something.

I’ve mentioned on here more than once about the eye-opening experience of finding out just how many people considered themselves experts on microbiology when Covid came around. And just how misguided and plainly incorrect much of that “expertise” actually was. Because it’s reasonable to think that someone sharing their apparently learned opinion on something you don’t know about, should probably be talking sense until they start talking about something you know a lot about, and then you realise just how little they actually understand.

I’m not alone in feeling this way. This has been doing the rounds again today:

This, as the Loud Mouth Space Wanker drags what’s left of the rotting corpse of Twitter uphill in the driving rain, through the acidic, rocky mud towards the inevitability of the waiting teeth of the scrap grinder.
And while this is just an opinion piece, it’s an opinion piece by a real expert: one with over 18 years experience in covering media and technology stories:

Put it all together, and X isn’t just worth less than Musk paid for it, but likely less than its debt. Assume that the company’s revenue last year was $4.7 billion, based on results before it was taken private. If advertising has dropped by half, then this year’s sales should be a bit over $2.5 billion. Put that on the same enterprise-value-to-sales multiple as Snap, which is down to a mere 3 times, and X is worth around $8 billion.

Just because he has a lot of money (less now, of course) and a big mouth, doesn’t mean that he’s an expert at everything. Or perhaps, anything.

By all means stay away from his cars and rockets. It’s easily done.
There’s every chance that his software might not be around much longer for you to stay away from.

Can Jetpack still share blog posts to Twitter?

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Look, we’ve been through this. Firstly here, and then more recently, here. But twitter is falling apart.

The third party mobile apps disappeared, and then the first party web app stopped working. Instagram won’t share images to Twitter anymore, and yesterday, when I posted this post, the Jetpack plugin failed to connect to Twitter. And it doesn’t seem like the issue is at this end:

Jetpack is the plugin that 6000.co.za (and many thousands of other websites) use to tell people that there’s a new blog post fresh and ready for them to read. And now it’s not working – on Twitter at least. It’s still happily telling my Facebook fans that there’s been an update, and it would still post to LinkedIn if I wanted it to.

I don’t want it to.

Anyway, it seems likely that one of two things has happened here. Either, being allowed to connect to twitter from Jetpack (and Instagram) is now something that is now only allowed for paid accounts (no, I’m not going to), or something at twitter is broken because they (he) sacked all the competent staff.

Either way, there does seem to be a real rush to load a lot of straws onto the camel’s back to see what effect it will have.

EDIT: And, as Ian Betteridge predicted, no, it can’t.

All over for the bluebird?

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It’s the beginning of the end
The car went up the hill and disappeared around the bend
Ask anyone, they’ll tell you that
It’s these times that it tends
To start to break in half, to start to fall apart
Hold on to your heart

It seems that being a bit of an arse to your staff isn’t the best way to be a boss. I think that this is fairly well understood, but sometimes, people get too detached from reality to remember these sorts of things, and so they persist in their being a bit of an arse to their staff, and things break.

It’s been a hilarious rollercoaster ride of fanciful allegations (most of which then turned out to be true), and subsequent backtrackery since the Loud Mouth Space Wanker bought Twitter, and immediately tried to change things that didn’t need changing, just to show what power he could wield.

That’s not to say that some things didn’t need changing. Twitter used to be great, but had more recently become a cesspool of misinformation, insults, hatred and division. Pretty much a metaphor for the rest of the world, but concentrated into one small app, so that the nastiness could really be amplified.

When Musk took it over, the only people smiling about it were the right-wing, anti-vax Trump fans. And that was a pretty good indication of where it was heading. But that was just on the surface. Beneath the crusty exterior, Elon was… well… being an arse to his staff. But apparently, there’s only so much boss arsery that staff are willing to take:

Who knew? Well, even I did: just check out the first sentence of this post.

So, is this the end for Twitter? To be honest, I’d been using it less and less over the past few years. But I’ll still miss it.
Maybe it’s for the best, given the direction it was clearly about to take. Of course, Musk doesn’t think so, but the replies to his tweet are exactly the reason that I’ll miss Twitter so much when it chooses (or I choose) to give up completely.

There are still many, many interesting, erudite, important, humorous and entertaining people on the app, and still plenty of useful information, from valid local and international sources, and it’s sad that those informal bonds and communities seem likely to die the death now.

Everyone is bailing (see Titanic and Old Testament references above) for other places, and yes, I am there (see the link at the top of the sidebar), but I’m really not sure I’m ready to start over with the 13+ years of building things up again. Maybe.

Still, if all else fails, this place will always* be here.

* T&Cs apply