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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   4327 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 23, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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This is in between Small Scale Sunday and Friday Fun...

Refuse to pay for Twitter has become a culture war signal there. Even going so far as the #BlockTheBlue hashtag.

Elon appears to be trolling prominent accounts by giving them free blue checkmarks.

It's quite amusing.

Dril has been going nuclear in response, last time I checked he'd finally shed the blue, and was implying Elon was a pedo. I guess that's one way of ensuring Elon loses interest!

Ah, this suddenly makes a lot more sense. I thought it was some form of sarcasm I wasn't getting.

Also, unless there really are so many people who bought a twitter subscription, Nitter seems to have joined the culture war by giving the checkmark to literally every account. It's a bit annoying. I'd prefer it if they just took it away from everybody because the damn thing is distracting.

I'm also starting to be surprised how much Elon can dick around with Twitter without it having much of an impact on the company / platform. I mean, I always thought their monopoly position gives them a lot of leeway, but my eyebrows are beginning to rise at just how far he can push it with seemingly no repercussions.

I'm also starting to be surprised how much Elon can dick around with Twitter without it having much of an impact on the company / platform

I'm not. Woke Twitter tried to make a break for it but the network effect pulled them right back in, especially because (apart from things like this) they were never actually banned from the service nor did their ability to enjoy its platform degrade ("I had to see an opinion I didn't like" is a fake complaint). Elon seems to have predicted (correctly, in my opinion) that the modern public square is enclosed simply by the apathy of said public.

It's not like Tumblr (and soon Imgur) where they basically banned everything worthwhile about their service, and it's not like the Digg to Reddit migration (or the larger phpBB to Reddit migration) because the Mastodon mesh is strictly worse than Twitter (ActivityPub is a fundamentally flawed system due to the way it prioritizes operators over users, it's difficult for even technical people to understand, and the clients are still garbage).

Update: after a day of browsing I finally ran into a bunch of accounts with no checkmark, so it's not nitter. Probably not a representative sample, but Jesus, it looks like Elon is making bank off this.

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