Termoil at Twitter. Elon is accompanied with guards at all times and a plan to charge money for API access broke links and embeds across the web.

[Uttamattamakin]

Summary

Two things which are happening now and related because they are due to the same decision maker, Elon Musk.  Firstly it has been revealed that he is being accompanied by bodyguards at all times due to him not feeling safe at Twitter HQ.  He appears to fear a corporate Coup.  Second today a visible technosignature of what is going on surfaced as API access was broken for about half an hour.  According to Twitter itself this was an unintended consequnce of his plan to charge for API access. 

What does he consider API access? Based on the way embedded tweets broke on my blog it would be like something like this not working. 

 

Quotes

Regarding Twitter being unable to protect users from very bad things. 

Quote

Twitter insiders have told the BBC that the company is no longer able to protect users from trolling, state-co-ordinated disinformation and child sexual exploitation, following lay-offs and changes under owner Elon Musk.

 

Exclusive academic data plus testimony from Twitter users backs up their allegations, suggesting hate is thriving under Mr Musk's leadership, with trolls emboldened, harassment intensifying and a spike in accounts following misogynistic and abusive profiles. -- Per BBC

 

Regarding musk being escorted by bodyguards because he feels so unsafe in Twitter HQ.  

Quote

Current and former employees of the company tell BBC Panorama that features intended to protect Twitter users from trolling and harassment are proving difficult to maintain, amid what they describe as a chaotic working environment in which Mr Musk is shadowed by bodyguards at all times. I've spoken to dozens, with several going on the record for the first time.

 

The former head of content design says everyone on her team - which created safety measures such as nudge buttons - has been sacked. She later resigned. Internal research by Twitter suggests those safety measures reduced trolling by 60%. An engineer working for Twitter told me "nobody's taking care" of this type of work now, likening the platform to a building that seems fine from the outside, but inside is "on fire".  --Per BBC

 The Daily Beast confirms. 

Quote

 A Twitter engineer identified only as Sam told BBC News: “Wherever he goes in the office, there are at least two bodyguards—very bulky, tall, Hollywood movie bodyguards. Even when [he goes] to the restroom.” He said the constant use of bodyguards suggested that Musk, who has sacked a huge number of Twitter staff including coders, does not trust his remaining staff at Twitter HQ in San Francisco.  -- Confirming report per Daily beast

 

Regarding the broken tech. 

Quote

While Twitter is still up, numerous features aren't working. Specifically, you can't view many images, and links aren't working. Worse, when you try to look up the Twitter application programming interface (API) error message, you'll get the same API error message.

 

 

 

sjvn/ZDNET

At 12:19 Eastern, Twitter admitted the network was in trouble. The message read: "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."

 

 

My thoughts

 

 

This report by the BBC says quite a bit about Elon's management of Twitter.  He has made a lot of enemies, fired people who would try to explain to him the difficulties of the changes he wants made and hired new people who don't know the system yet.  The natrual consequence of this is that the technology breaks.  Technology is what we people make of it, think of it and value of it.  If we don't appreciate it, know it, and value it's maintenance it will break.    This is like the now old meme says. 

 

My personal opinion right now is that what Elon Musk is doing to Twitter is a lot like what the barbarian hoards did to the Aqueducts of the Roman Empire.  They didn't know what they were truly worth or understand why they should leave that infrastructure alone.   So they either destroyed it outright or allowed key parts of it to decay. Fun fact though some of the old Aqueducts still flow and the original Roman era sewer still work.  

 

Users and leaders matter in technology.  The wetware, the brains of the people using it, matter.  If Elon wants to build a true Twitter 2.0 from the ground up with a clean sheet he has every right to.  If he wants to break that one little piece that dates back to the 1980's or early 2000's he has every right to.  If he wants to be flanked by guards like his own ... secret service or something... he has every right to.  It's his money,  It's his company. 

It's also really funny.   

 
Imagine a web 3.0 where embedding a  Tweet, or a Youtube video did not work.  Or perhaps you had to somehow pay for it via ... letting your browser use computer cycles to mine for some crypto or NFT's or some other terrible thing. It would look like web 1.0 but worse in every way.
 

Sources

https://www.thedailybeast.com/bodyguards-follow-elon-musk-everywhere-at-twitter-hq-even-to-restroom-says-engineer Daily Beast

 

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-64804007 BBC - you know the British news kind 

 

https://www.zdnet.com/article/did-twitter-just-break-itself/ - Regarding Twitters API break. 

[Vishera]

11 minutes ago, Uttamattamakin said:

Regarding Twitter being unable to protect users from very bad things. 

Twitter allows terrorist organization to promote themselves and glorify their actions,

And the BBC is busy complaining about trolls...

[Kisai]

8 minutes ago, Uttamattamakin said:

Summary

Two things which are happening now and related because they are due to the same decision maker, Elon Musk.  Firstly it has been revealed that he is being accompanied by bodyguards at all times due to him not feeling safe at Twitter HQ.  He appears to fear a corporate Coup.  Second today a visible technosignature of what is going on surfaced as API access was broken for about half an hour.  According to Twitter itself this was an unintended consequnce of his plan to charge for API access. 

 

Corporate coup would be the best outcome at this point. He fired/let-go/alienated everyone who cared about Twitter, and the only people left are people who never understood how it worked in the first place.

 

It has to be said, time and time again, you DO NOT fire, abuse, outsource or otherwise replace tech people. They are the people who keep your damn corporation working. If you don't know what they do, bloody ask them, because outside of a company like Microsoft, Apple or Google, they can't be replaced with someone else with experience with the company's software. Microsoft, Apple, and Google eat their own dog food (something that not even Facebook/Meta does), and when you piss off the tech people who work there, you're going to end up with various levels of corporate sabotage, even if it was not intended, nobody will be there to understand not to remove someone's 500 byte code hack holding the company website from failing.

 

Like I've seen this every time some dip-doo-doo company decides they are going to outsource. What happens is the outsources loyalty is not to your company, it's to their outsourcer, and even then, they might not even be paid enough to care to do the job correctly, just "enough" so they get paid.

 

There is no way there is anyone at Twitter doing tech work without being held at metaphorical gunpoint. They are letting the site fail, because the owner throws too many tantrums and consuming the resources on the owner's vanity garbage.

 

 

[emosun]

in short : Out of touch billionaire boomer terrible at running thing he knows nothing about.

[Needfuldoer]

Maybe making Twitter a load-bearing component of Web 2.0 was a bad idea after all...

[Uttamattamakin]

1 hour ago, Vishera said:

Twitter allows terrorist organization to promote themselves and glorify their actions,

And the BBC is busy complaining about trolls...

Among other things they are willing to cover and promote "neutrally". 

 

1 hour ago, Kisai said:

There is no way there is anyone at Twitter doing tech work without being held at metaphorical gunpoint. They are letting the site fail, because the owner throws too many tantrums and consuming the resources on the owner's vanity garbage.

Pretty much.  Why would anyone of those engineers work hard for a company that treats them like an enemy?  You know.  At Space X it makes sense since if they screw up rockets go BOOM maybe with people on board. 

Also, choom, wanted to say thinking of a corporate coup where in having or not having some huscle is very CP2077.  How anyone can cease Twitter from him at this point would be if some relative of his could gain conservatorship or guardianship over him.  I can't see any other way.  The people at Twitter could say yes sir and do every insane thing he ask for as a way of getting rid of him.

 

1 hour ago, emosun said:

in short : Out of touch billionaire boomer terrible at running thing he knows nothing about.

Like Monty burns running the nuclear plant. 

 

1 hour ago, Needfuldoer said:

Maybe making Twitter a load-bearing component of Web 2.0 was a bad idea after all...

That pretty well describes what it is.  Think of how many websites depend on Twitter existing and working as expected.  Think of all the Embedded tweets breaking.  Think of all of the apps that interface with Twitter to share things breaking.  You know.  Twitter is such an old part of Web 2.0 it would be like if Google shut down Youtube.   

Not to mention who knows how much back end stuff is done via Twitter.  There was a web outage... years ago where Google Analytics was down and a huge portion of the WWW broke. 

 

[ravenshrike]

2 hours ago, Uttamattamakin said:

Firstly it has been revealed that he is being accompanied by bodyguards at all times due to him not feeling safe at Twitter HQ.  He appears to fear a corporate Coup. 

No, he fears being attacked, Possibly by the someone like the member of the SLPC just arrested on domestic terrorism charges. 

2 hours ago, Uttamattamakin said:

The natural consequence of this is that the technology breaks. 

Properly commented and tested code doesn't break nearly as often, but given that all Twitter code commits are immediately live because Twitter never bothered to set up a beta series of servers, I'm betting that all the rest of the code is complete shite as well.

 

2 hours ago, Uttamattamakin said:

Regarding Twitter being unable to protect users from very bad things. 

That's hilarious, Musk has done more(Note more is not a perfect elimination thereof) to stamp out child exploitation on Twitter in the past six months than Twitter did in the previous decade. 

 

 

[Uttamattamakin]

7 minutes ago, ravenshrike said:

No, he fears being attacked, Possibly by the someone like the member of the SLPC just arrested on domestic terrorism charges. 

The story doesn't support that.   The issue of a corporate coup isn't like something out of a game that would have like armed combat.  It's more a matter of having to deal with leaks, leakers, etc.  Corporate espionage by people who want to push him out. 

7 minutes ago, ravenshrike said:

Properly commented and tested code doesn't break nearly as often, but given that all Twitter code commits are immediately live because Twitter never bothered to set up a beta series of servers, I'm betting that all the rest of the code is complete shite as well.

Could be, could be.  The thing is wouldn't great, flawless, world beating engineers study a system and all its dependencies before making a change?  The stack of dependencies, built on dependencies is so deep a lot of people don't know and cannot document the whole thing.   You know?  Twitter could all depend on some level on some server somewhere that dates to the early mid 00's.   Some key basic function that is either executed on a piece of old hardware or better/worse lives on an obscure VM running in some corner of a server farm.    

That old thing would expect things to work in a certain way.  

So many other websites that Twitter depends on ,and that depend on Twitter would just take for granted that certain behaviors of Twitter would never change. 

7 minutes ago, ravenshrike said:

 

That's hilarious, Musk has done more(Note more is not a perfect elimination thereof) to stamp out child exploitation on Twitter in the past six months than Twitter did in the previous decade. 

The media report cites actual data not just opinions though.  Can you tell us what exactly he has done regarding this?   Can you back up any such assertion with a neutral third party source? 

[ravenshrike]

19 minutes ago, Uttamattamakin said:

33 minutes ago, ravenshrike said:

 

The media report cites actual data not just opinions though.  Can you tell us what exactly he has done regarding this?   Can you back up any such assertion with a neutral third party source? 

No it very much DID NOT. No data was referenced whatsoever regarding child exploitation, just 

 

Quote

 

My investigation also reveals:

 

• Concerns that child sexual exploitation is on the rise on Twitter and not being sufficiently raised with law enforcement

 

 

 

 

Which from an author with a clear axe to grind means exactly bupkiss. as for "academic data" regarding trolls, that is almost certainly worth less than the photons outputting it on the computer screen the author read it off of. Oh, and as for the bodyguards, as the photo in

this Times piece shows, he goes everywhere with them. Which makes sense when you consider he is one of the richest men on earth and regularly pisses people off.

 

[StDragon]

3 hours ago, emosun said:

in short : Out of touch billionaire boomer terrible at running thing he knows nothing about.

Let us know when you can create a rocket company as good as SpaceX.

[Uttamattamakin]

49 minutes ago, ravenshrike said:

No it very much DID NOT. No data was referenced whatsoever regarding child exploitation, just 

Read the whole story.  This is just a part of it  read all of it. 

 

 

49 minutes ago, ravenshrike said:

 

Which from an author with a clear axe to grind means exactly bupkiss. as for "academic data" regarding trolls, that is almost certainly worth less than the photons outputting it on the computer screen the author read it off of. Oh, and as for the bodyguards, as the photo in

this Times piece shows, he goes everywhere with them. Which makes sense when you consider he is one of the richest men on earth and regularly pisses people off.

 

Cite your data.  As for having an axe to grind.  I am sorry but Twitter Broke today.  It broke as a direct result of something Elon admitted was part of his effort to charge for API access.  (You know so you can embed Twitter content on other sites and send content from other sites to Twitter).  

 

18 minutes ago, StDragon said:

Let us know when you can create a rocket company as good as SpaceX.

He's pretty good at that.  Give me 10 years and 5 billion dollars and 5 billion in tax breaks for 5 years and I will give the USA a better rocket that Starship. 

By Buying Sierra Space and scaling up their dream chaser. 

[Godlygamer23]

1 minute ago, Uttamattamakin said:

Sierra Space and scaling up their dream chaser

First time I've seen anyone mention them - I work for one of their suppliers lol.

[ravenshrike]

5 minutes ago, Uttamattamakin said:

Read the whole story.  This is just a part of it  read all of it. 

My reading comprehension is clearly WAYYYYYY better than yours. Any and all academic data is in reference to online "hate". Not a whit of it is in reference to child exploitation. 

 

5 minutes ago, Uttamattamakin said:

As for having an axe to grind.  I am sorry but Twitter Broke today. 

If you think that this dudette whipped this entire article up from scratch because Twitter broke today I have some bottom land on the continent of Mu to sell you. She used it to boost the article she had already been writing. 

[StDragon]

25 minutes ago, Uttamattamakin said:

He's pretty good at that.  Give me 10 years and 5 billion dollars and 5 billion in tax breaks for 5 years and I will give the USA a better rocket that Starship. 

By Buying Sierra Space and scaling up their dream chaser. 

Sure, can't do anything without money first. But it also takes a type of personality that's a visionary, embodies leadership, tenacious, and not only accepts failure, but embraces it, and wields it as a tool to further his endeavors.

Not many people are of that caliber.

As for Twitter, it was mostly in the red and only turned a profit in 2018 - 2019 since going public in 2013. It was, and arguably still is a flaming dumpster fire. IMHO, it was purely out of ego that Elon bought Twitter. But now that he's stuck with it, he's having to shed the dead-weight and driftwood. But then again, I'll give the benefit of the doubt he knew the risks of what he was getting himself into.

[Uttamattamakin]

1 hour ago, Godlygamer23 said:

First time I've seen anyone mention them - I work for one of their suppliers lol.

Which is terrible since the manned dream chaser is the most reasonable post Dragon option for getting Americans to space.  A spaceplane without the problems of the space shuttle.   Just make it a little bigger ... attach a larger cargo module, and a larger booster and it's there. 

 

1 hour ago, StDragon said:

Sure, can't do anything without money first. But it also takes a type of personality that's a visionary, embodies leadership, tenacious, and not only accepts failure, but embraces it, and wields it as a tool to further his endeavors.

Not many people are of that caliber.

I'd compare Musk to Howard Huges.  The same was true of him.  He was also madd as a hatter. 

1 hour ago, StDragon said:

 

As for Twitter, it was mostly in the red and only turned a profit in 2018 - 2019 since going public in 2013. It was, and arguably still is a flaming dumpster fire. IMHO, it was purely out of ego that Elon bought Twitter. But now that he's stuck with it, he's having to shed the dead-weight and driftwood. But then again, I'll give the benefit of the doubt he knew the risks of what he was getting himself into.

This is all the more reason to proceed with caution.

1 hour ago, ravenshrike said:

My reading comprehension is clearly WAYYYYYY better than yours. Any and all academic data is in reference to online "hate". Not a whit of it is in reference to child exploitation. 

 

1 hour ago, ravenshrike said:

 

If you think that this dudette whipped this entire article up from scratch because Twitter broke today I have some bottom land on the continent of Mu to sell you. She used it to boost the article she had already been writing. 

Of course not.  rolled these two stories together.  

Musk is doing this kind of thing at Twitter AND Twitter also broke due to something he asked for.  Given they both involve his decision making they are related.   Musk is the wet ware operating system of Twitter 2.0 and is  in need of debugging. 

 

[williamcll]

7 hours ago, Vishera said:

Twitter allows terrorist organization to promote themselves and glorify their actions,

And the BBC is busy complaining about trolls...

Can't violate their free speech :^)

[Kisai]

1 hour ago, Caroline said:

If they don't like Twitter they can just, you know, leave and use another website. It isn't that hard, I don't even use Twitter by the way, it's just hilarious to see all the whining over "trolls" or whatever.

 

I'm sick of seeing certain symbols, names and news about certain topic on the internet but don't consider those who write and promote that kind of content trolls, morons perhaps, but not trolls. Word was so abused by normies it's losing its actual meaning.

 

 

Nope. Troll comes from "troll" as in fishing. You put out the bait, and then you wait for someone to bite.

 

Anytime you post something on the internet with the INTENT of baiting someone into doing something you know they will do, that is trolling. All trolls are bullies, but not all bullies are trolls. Many "troll" websites are just straight up misinformation, bait for people who don't know how to fact check. 

 

Right-wing people fall for one kind of troll bait, and left-wing people fall for another. You can never craft bait that will not be called BS by enough people to fool everyone. Have you ever read an "The Onion" article? Reputable newspapers sometimes report stuff that originated in The Onion, or other satire publications because they don't know it's satire. They failed to fact check.

 

Certain internet sewage sites, go one further and not only try to bait people, but try to get them killed in the process. That has always been the MO for various forums, image boards and reddits. "This subculture/marginalized group are full of themselves" Hell, one of these sites keeps track of how many people they've bullied into killing themselves.

 

[soldier_ph]

Down the endless fire pit Twitter goes...

[wanderingfool2]

5 hours ago, Uttamattamakin said:

Read the whole story.  This is just a part of it  read all of it. 

Did you?  Even what they presented on that, it's a speculation by an ex-employee that it's not being handled as well as it use to be.

 

They even watered down the statement on child exploitation as "concerns", they didn't claim that was backed by their data.

 

In the article the guy who talked about it literally was using a conditional statement as well, not a statement of fact.

 

6 hours ago, Uttamattamakin said:

The media report cites actual data not just opinions though.  Can you tell us what exactly he has done regarding this?   Can you back up any such assertion with a neutral third party source? 

The media "cites actual data", looks at the media in regards to the child exploitation which you are talking about.  Yea, no they didn't cite data.  The data they seem to cite involves hate speech towards specific people (but they pretty much leave it up to the reader to go hunting around for the data they might be talking about, and I'm not going to bother with that). 

[Vishera]

4 hours ago, williamcll said:

Can't violate their free speech :^)

It ain't free speech if it's truly harmful, just like you can't threaten to kill people you shouldn't be allowed to promote and glorify terrorism.

5 hours ago, Caroline said:

Not sure if godlike sarcasm or actually serious.

The trolls have evolved into terrorists now? man, ain't that something.

Nope, It's just you misunderstanding what i wrote.

10 hours ago, Uttamattamakin said:

Among other things they are willing to cover and promote "neutrally".

Here is a funny one:

The Wikipedia page of a certain “Specially Designated Global Terrorist entity" wrongly states that it's banned on twitter among other platforms,

Well... They are still active on Twitter and not banned.

[05032-Mendicant-Bias]

This twitter adventure is not looking good for Elon Musk so far. All failures, including minor ones are very public, and turning twitter into a conservative highly monetized social media, runs against his other progressive companies like Starlink, SpaceX and Tesla. "catturd2" isn't going to buy a tesla, no matter how much engagement Musk gives them.

 

Still, it's not like twitter is space technology. It's a social media saddled with enormous debt. Musk is the richest man in the world, he'll figure it out even if he'll be less rich at the end of it. His wealth is unfathomably large now, and will still be unfathomable after the twitter saga stabilizes.

15 hours ago, Uttamattamakin said:

Imagine a web 3.0 where embedding a  Tweet, or a Youtube video did not work.  Or perhaps you had to somehow pay for it via ... letting your browser use computer cycles to mine for some crypto or NFT's or some other terrible thing. It would look like web 1.0 but worse in every way.

That's the whole point of web 3. The web we already have, but more of a walled garden that can be monetized by large corporations. But even Elon Musk had the good sense of turning down Sam Bankman Fried offer to move twitter to blockchain.

[Isuck Assimov]

12 hours ago, StDragon said:

Let us know when you can create a rocket company as good as SpaceX.

 

[Uttamattamakin]

9 hours ago, Caroline said:

People I disagree with = trolls

Politicians I don't like = state co-ordinated disinformation

People I disagree with the most = pedos

 

British Broadcasting Circus in a nutshell.

 

I'd agree if it weren't for the fact that I've seen hard core pornography on Twitter.  Full frontal, even hard core FFFFFFing on Twitter in video.  I'd not be surprised if there is some peadobait on there too. Thankfully I've not observed this myself.  Then that type will get hot looking at a normal regular picture of a kid.    It was the reason Youtube Demonetized any video that had children in it at all a ways back. 

9 hours ago, Caroline said:

I'm sick of seeing certain symbols, names and news about certain topic on the internet but don't consider those who write and promote that kind of content trolls, morons perhaps, but not trolls. Word was so abused by normies it's losing its actual meaning.

I just block and ignore the shitposters, avoid MSM websites, big social media -like Twitter that's an echo chamber for MSM content- and move on, can't get mad over every article.

This.  and this

 

7 hours ago, Kisai said:

 

Nope. Troll comes from "troll" as in fishing. You put out the bait, and then you wait for someone to bite.

 

Anytime you post something on the internet with the INTENT of baiting someone into doing something you know they will do, that is trolling. All trolls are bullies, but not all bullies are trolls. Many "troll" websites are just straight up misinformation, bait for people who don't know how to fact check. 

Basically people who have a pre existing bias seek out information that will confirm their biases.  This then deepens how biased they are.  This can happen left and right and it most troubling when it is 100% on the internet.  It's one thing to be on a forum about something you have real life affinity for (like tech), it's something else when it is a forum about something unconnected to your real life. Lived reality is the best fact check. 

 

7 hours ago, Kisai said:

Certain internet sewage sites, go one further and not only try to bait people, but try to get them killed in the process. That has always been the MO for various forums, image boards and reddits. "This subculture/marginalized group are full of themselves" Hell, one of these sites keeps track of how many people they've bullied into killing themselves.

 

Isn't that one of 2 final states of an internet forum?  Either it's not moderated at all and becomes a sewer OR it's over moderated and has like 5 users, all moderators who post once every 4-8 months.   It becomes like a Black hole at the end of the Heat death of the universe. 
 

5 hours ago, wanderingfool2 said:

The media "cites actual data", looks at the media in regards to the child exploitation which you are talking about.  Yea, no they didn't cite data.  The data they seem to cite involves hate speech towards specific people (but they pretty much leave it up to the reader to go hunting around for the data they might be talking about, and I'm not going to bother with that). 

The BBC says they have the data and they are one of the most trusted news sources in the world.   Plus another source also double checked them and found the same or similar.   What do you want a scientific publication of the data that gets the Nobel Prize in economics first? 

[Lightwreather]

2 hours ago, 05032-Mendicant-Bias said:

Musk is the richest man in the world

Actually, not anymore.

It's now Bernard Arnault, a French guy

https://www.forbes.com/real-time-billionaires/#686ea6ca3d78

 

[NF-A12x25]

I love elon musk meatriders they make my day every time with how absolutely ridiculous they are