Posts about Twitter (RSS, JSON)

5PM — In anticipation to the release of Threads, Facebook’s Twitter competitor, Jack Dorsey, Twitter co-founder, former chief executive, posted a screenshot of Thread’s data-privacy statement from Apple App Store, alongside the smug comment “All your Threads are belong to us”. To which Musk replies “Yeah.”

I find it hard to believe that Twitter is any more privacy-friendly than Facebook, after all both companies rely on detailed user information to sell targeted ads. It’s in their business model. So let’s compare the privacy statements of both both apps, Threads and Twitter, as posted on Apple App Store.

Data Used to Track You

Threads does not provide this information.

Data Linked to You

Third-party advertising

Developer’s Advertising or Marketing

Analytics

Product Personalisation

App functionality

Other purposes

Data Not Linked to You

Third-Party Advertising

Threads does not provide this information.

Developer’s Advertising or Marketing

Threads does not provide this information.

Analytics

Threads does not provide this information.

App Functionality

Threads does not provide this information.

It’s true that Threads collects more information about you, including what feels like more sensitive data, like financial information, health and fitness data, and whatever is behind “Sensitive Info.” It really does look like the Facebook lawyers ticked all of the boxes when they submitted Threads to the app store; just in case, it allows them to move faster and break more things.

But the list of data shared by Twitter is very long too. Dorsey and Musk aren’t in a position to point fingers at anyone when in regards to personal-data collection and sharing. That’s not to defend Facebook’s Threads—they are both equally data-hungry apps.

8AM — Spot-on analysis by Alex Pareene, writing for Defector:

The internet’s best resources are almost universally volunteer run and donation based, like Wikipedia and The Internet Archive. Every time a great resource is accidentally created by a for-profit company, it is eventually destroyed, like Flickr and Google Reader.

The implosion of Twitter and recent shenanigans at Reddit are like a livestream allowing us to observe the decline of once beloved platforms unfold in real time. What we know from history helps us better anticipate the future, and it doesn’t look good:

We are living through the end of the useful internet. The future is informed discussion behind locked doors, in Discords and private fora, with the public-facing web increasingly filled with detritus generated by LLMs, bearing only a stylistic resemblance to useful information. Finding unbiased and independent product reviews, expert tech support, and all manner of helpful advice will now resemble the process by which one now searches for illegal sports streams or pirated journal articles.

The internet as an information wasteland is a bleak outlook, but one that isn’t off the charts; it’s likely even, given the track record of those who currently drive the development of major platforms. Just look at who’s building Twitter clones at the moment: Instagram, Substack, and I’m sure others are experimenting with similar ideas.

The alternative, as always, is to build your own place, a website, host it somewhere you control or at a least makes it easy to move, and double down on open standards and protocols.

4PM — This post on Mastodon concerning the 15-minute city demonstrates what I’ve been saying all along: When you purely look at how people argue, Mastodon isn’t any different than Twitter.

Here’s the post:

“My hot take on ‘15 minute cities’ is if you can get to the coffee shop within fifteen minutes, but the barrista who makes your drink can’t afford to live closer than a half-hour away, then you live in a theme park.” - Gareth Klieber #cities #urbanism #housing #transit #cycling

The take is not wrong. But it condenses one opinion about a hot-button topic to 278 characters. It’s pointed and missing nuance, which makes it more provocative aiming to receive more interaction, comments and shares. And it worked; it landed on Kottke’s blog, which has tens of thousands of readers.

Mickey Mouse and Goofy won’t be parading down the street at noon if the staff in a coffee shop have to travel more than fifteen minutes to work. The idea of the 15-minute city—to have all important amenities, including work, available within a short walk from your home—that ideal just isn’t fulfilled in the scenario. Although closer to the truth, phrasing it this way sounds rather boring. So many important questions are not asked: Is the ideal 15-minute city even attainable? What needs to happen to change our current cities? What role does public transport play? Would the car-manufacturing lobby play along?

And the replies: Pseudo-philosophic ramblings about privilege. Someone has to point out a small typo, to which the original author obviously needs to reply. Another person says “working class,” and the discussion only spirals around that for a while. Only a few comments dissect the issue with the original statement.

Is that any different from Twitter? Is that the nirvana of civility that the loudest advocates of Mastodon promised a couple of months ago? We’re past the honeymoon period now with Mastodon. A lot of people have joined the platform, and more conversations involve more participants. And the people that were the loudest on Twitter become the loudest on Mastodon: People with a puffed-out sense of mission, confidence and extroversion. None of this is worth moderating; there’s no bullying, nothing illegal or offensive in this conversation. But there’s no exchange of ideas, no listening—it’s people talking at each other instead of with each other.

It’s what drove me away from Twitter three years ago and what drove me away from Facebook before that. The underlying protocols and technology can change, but it will always be humans arguing on the Internet—it won’t ever change.

2PM — Going forward, the Twitter API offers two tiers: One is free, write-only and allows bots to post 1,500 times each month. The other costs $100 per month allowing you to send up to 50,000 tweets, capped at 3,000 per user, and to read 10,000 tweets.

These tiers are aimed at preventing third-party Twitter clients, like Twitterific or Tweetbot, from re-emerging. Musk wants you to read Twitter only in official clients so he can control what tweets and ads you see. But contrary to what I wrote before,

The move kills every Twitter bot there is unless their maintainers pay, including those posting links to frequently updated sites, like kottke.org and Daring Fireball,

bots of personal sites shouldn’t be affected by the new pricing. 1,500 tweets per month amount to about 30 tweets per day, which is a lot less than what even the most frequently updated blogs are churning out. If you have more than 30 posts per day on your site you might want to be a little more selective about what you post.

8AM — An article was making the rounds recently, obviously written by one of Musk’s minions, arguing that Twitter is destined to replace traditional media because it provides quicker and less biased access to news. Less biased because users constantly verify and correct what is posted, the author claims, Wisdom of the Crowds in action.

If you usually read your news on The Daily Mail instead of the Guardian or the New York Post instead of the Times, you might as well go to Twitter to read your news. It’s quicker and gives you the impression of an unbiased look at events. But to claim that information on Twitter is less biased after we’ve watched falsehoods and flat-out lies rip through our timelines for years is an interesting point of view.

Anyways, what got me thinking about this piece was how I prefer to read news, particularly how fast I receive news. With the advent of blogs and again with the rise of social media, we’ve seen claims that traditional news media are too slow to feed our hungry brains. I never felt that way. If anything, I want the news to slow down.

When I still had access to a weekly newspaper in Germany, I rarely read any news online. I enjoyed receiving a stack of paper once a week that summarised the latest ongoings in depth and with the necessary critical distance. Instead of reading ten pieces for an event and five opinions, they would print one. One that contained all the essential information, what happened and how, its context, and its effects. Instead of reporting on every breaking news, they would print the ones that matter, which turned out to be relevant. And instead of a never-ending timeline, there’s a page one and a page 60, and everything in between, and after that, it’s finished. There’s nothing more to read.

Most news luckily doesn’t affect me directly, so reading about them later is fine. And I usually notice the events that affect me anyway. I don’t need constant updates about the world’s affairs. Not from news websites, not from Twitter.

5PM — Daring Fireball (and many others) are reporting that Twitter presumably revoked API access for many popular third-party Twitter clients.

Twitter’s website and official apps are notorious for their excessive cruft of irrelevant advertisements, useless recommended tweets and attention-grabbing best-of lists. Until now, third-party clients have been the only way to get around that mess.

I never used third-party apps. I didn’t value Twitter enough to justify paying for an additional app. I made Twitter bearable by strictly only reading the chronological timeline of people I follow and by using a custom stylesheet to rid the website of its cruft.

That still works, but Musk and his team have been acting desperately without a plan. The remaining team will likely make so many changes to the site that it will be hard to keep up and adapt the stylesheet going forward. From here, it’s going to be downhill for a while.

3PM — In Stop Talking to Each Other and Start Buying Things, Catherynne M. Valente describes how online communities die:

These sites exist because of what we do there. But at any moment they can be sold out from under us, to no benefit or profit to the workers—yes, workers, goddammit—who built it into something other than a dot com address and a dusty login screen, yet to the great benefit and profit of those who, more often than not, use the money to make it more difficult for people to connect to and accept each other positively in the future.

We keep losing online communities because they are funded by venture capital. As soon as these companies reach the end of their runway or the investors want some of their money back, their platforms usually deteriorate into a hell hole of attention-grabbing, algorithmically-optimised hot takes, advertising and abuse. It’s the same cycle every time.

And yet, people flock to every new VC-funded website, providing us with a text box to share stuff. Valente, after experiencing a thirty-year rinse and repeat of rising and declining online platforms, writes on Substack. How is Substack different from Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, MySpace or LiveJournal? No one can predict which direction Substack is going in the future, but its owners and investors certainly don’t care about the people and communities they host. Their goal is to become profitable or to find a profitable exit.

Building good technology is hard. It takes time and money. Successful online platforms operate at a scale that is not viable as a hobby. We can only sustain online communities by paying to use the platforms. But even if there was one, funded by the community, free of advertising and algorithms, how long would that last? People’s interests change, their lives change, they spend less time online, they spend more time online elsewhere. Mastodon, at the moment, looks like it’s on the right track. They rejected VC funding to keep the not-for-profit status, and the project receives enough donations so their maintainer earns a salary. But how much of people’s current drive to fund alternative social media platforms is down to Musk’s shenanigans at Twitter?

The only certain, long-term approach to secure an online community’s existence is to build the technology yourself or use open-source software and run the service on machines you maintain yourself.

5PM — If Twitter continues to cull features from their website, we might end up with a calmer version of the website, one that doesn’t scream “here, engage with this too” from every corner. Just kidding, attention-grabbing features will continue to spoil the experience forever because attention is the only way for Twitter to make money.

But I want to read, not engage, so I created a custom stylesheet, which removes annoying and useless clutter from Twitter’s website. The opinionated list of cruft hidden by the style sheet includes:

• Explore, Communities, Bookmarks, and More links; and the Tweet button from the left-hand menu,
• The complete right-hand column, including the “What’s happening” and “Who to follow” sections,
• The toggle to switch between top tweets and latest tweets timelines because nobody needs an algorithmically curated timeline,
• Navigation from the user profile that includes Tweets, Tweets and replies, media and likes,
• Any user and tweet statistics:
  • The user’s joined date,
  • Follower and following counts, and
  • Retweet and like counts
• Promoted tweets in the timeline, and
• The “Who to follow” section in the timeline.

Get the stylesheet now and add it as a custom CSS in your favourite browser.

5PM — There have been enough comments about the last couple of weeks at Twitter. Many strange things have happened, I’m going to post my short list with link here for future reference.

• The new owner, on his first day, carries a sink into the company headquarters, “Let that sink in,”
• Actors pretending to be staff that were fired,
• Engineers print out code for review with external engineers,
• People are sleeping in the office to meet ridiculous deadlines. Obviously, some are cool with that,
• Employees are sacked via email, the equivalent of being dumped via text,
• Some of the engineers who remained are fired for criticising Musk in public and privately, and
• People are asked to commit to inhumane working conditions, many leave.

The list is likely incomplete, I might add more links in the following weeks.

9AM — A birdwatch note has disappeared from one of Elon Musks tweets, where he was moaning about losing advertising money. I don’t know if Musk ordered to have the note removed or if this resulted from a community review — and I don’t want to speculate.

According to official statements, Birdwatch notes cannot be edited or deleted by Twitter staff. Obviously, this is only partially true.

This blog is built with Jekyll, and a Git repository is its database. I can delete a post quickly, but it will still be available in the commit history. With a little more effort, using git rebase, I can purge the post entirely from history as if it never existed.

There might not be a user interface for Birdwatch notes that Twitter staff can use to remove and delete notes quickly. But the note lives in a database alongside tweets, user information, and likes. In that database, you can amend entities and their relationships. If you have direct access to the database and if you know how to google the SQL command you need, you don’t need a graphical user interface to make changes.

Usually, only a few people in an organisation have this kind of access. But if you own the place, you can find that person, and from there, it’s as simple as DELETE FROM birdwatch_notes WHERE tweet_id = '1588538640401018880';

Anything in a database can be deleted. And here lies a potential problem with Musk’s ownership of Twitter. Nothing can stop him from ordering content removal if pressed by the authoritarian regime of a country where he wants to sell Teslas.

2PM — It has finally happened: Elon Musk has taken over Twitter today.

It’ll be interesting to see what happens next. Some expect chaos others think it continues to be a necessary evil. Maybe a right-wing mob equipped with pitchforks and torches will overrun and force out all remaining humble and honest people from the platform. Perhaps not; who knows?

Whatever happens, may I interest you in a couple of alternatives, just in case:

• micro.blog is a, well, micro-blogging service built on top of open APIs. It’s not free but has no ads, and you own your content, which you can syndicate to other platforms.
• The distributed social network Mastodon has been around for some time but has yet to take off. Maybe its time will come (Remember the pitchforks). Different communities run Mastodon nodes; you can pick one that fits your interests.
• Blogs are still a thing. You can write your own; it’s fun. 

You can also do what old people generally do and spend less time online. Because the decontextualised arguments, the self-aggrandisement, and the flat memes — you’ll find them anywhere online. Read a book, go for a walk, start taking photos, or cook yourself dinner, instead of having it delivered by a bloke on a scooter.