had a couple friends question why I won’t make an insta or twitter or tiktok and I wanted to say something semi intelligent about the unique culture and user interaction of this hellsite and unfortunately every salient point went through the car wash of my brain and it came out like
Oh something I’m saying when I say it’s feeling pretty ‘80s, that’s a reactionary period. We’ve had 3 major ones in the 20th century – the Reagan '80s, the 50s, and the post-WWI “return to normalcy”, and they were all marked by processes that wrecked the things that came out of progressive tendencies since the last one, wiped the board, and reset the clock. So maybe take brace position for that.
1980s: Blacks and cities get chewed up by crime, drugs, and general “urban decay”, gays have AIDS to deal with. The “Farm Crisis” also pretty much ends America’s vs long and historically quite central tradition of family farming. A rising Christian conservatism lays claims on the culture
1950s: the Second Red Scare digs out leftism which had established itself throughout national institutions through the Depression and Popular Front '40s. The Third KKK; attempts to suppress Black agitation fail largely for lack of cross-sectional unity, however, and the Civil Rights Era kicks off. Significant cultural backlash: the stifling conformity dramatized in say Pleasantville (1998) was only The Way Things Had Always Been to Boomers going through childhood; adults who had been paying attention lamented its sexual, intellectual, and cultural impoverishment compared to what came before
(1919-early) 1920s: the post-WWI Return to Normalcy. Major themes of semireligious utopianism and pacifism that had been common and somewhat challenging to wartime stance faded. The First Red Scare. The Palmer Raids rounding up leftists and deporting them to the new Soviet Union. The second KKK, Red Summer, and 2 years later the Tulsa Race Riot that Watchmen depicted, postwar Black ambition checked.
Now: well, Musk taking Twitter and deleftizing it definitely counts. Ellsworth Toohey, from Ayn Rand’s 1943 The Fountainhead was a maybe overdone portrait of a real tendency seen in period journalism of dismissively, sentimentally moralized leftism, that was part of what the '50s wiped away. The Asian split to the right in California, other minorities in general, whatever Black/Jewish shit is going on.
Some rightists think that pressing on queer stuff will work, I personally think that’s mistimed and they’ll lose that one like race in the 50s, in the process stigmatizing complaints about “pedophilia”. Covid and the fact that there’ll be appeals on behalf of the lonely and vulnerable to spend resources and control on protecting them that no government will be able to survive indulging and so will have to culturally pivot to normalize ignoring, ending the era since Clinton’s “feel your pain”.
(“The trigger warning social media” now is Mastodon, which mainstream media restorationists have been branding as “for hall monitors” so no one has to care about them)
So looking at Twitter and active fronts of combat now include Covid-worriers vs. normie libs and… young unionization fans? While Mastodon is apparently schisming – and given its federated architecture that’s not hyperbole –between bluecheck journalists and… trans activists?
Like, I know I had predicted this year would see the online left start to fracture solidarity and fall into infighting, but that’s some Mad Libs shit right there
The team is >=4 engineers for minimum viable oncall coverage, ideally 6 because you know someone’s being onboarded at all times. and < about 12
88% attrition in 2 weeks. How many teams no longer exist? What were they responsible for? How many of those are actually important?
iPhone notification counts already don’t work. Is that… important? Supposedly, the tweet storage service was down to 2 engineers BEFORE 80% of the company quit. Because if they’re down to 0, that is definitely important and if that service sails in a straight line until it hits the metaphorical reef, that’s the end of Twitter.
And you know, I might ask why your architecture was so micro-serviced up that only iPhone notification counts broke 2 weeks ago and Musk probably has a point there that you were bloated and overstaffed… and fixing that will take a bit. And people. And knowledge that just walked out the door.
as someone who emphatically does not know how big websites work–why is their software so rickety that it could run for (max) a couple of weeks before it breaks so completely? is this normal for big websites?
Twitter’s tech stack is rumored to be worse than normal, but not that much worse. So yes, if you just walk away from a big website in general you don’t have too much time before something causes a cascading failure - a website like Twitter has a billion moving pieces that just have random failure rates, which is usually fine because someone’s there to fix the little piece that broke. But if there’s nobody there, the little piece starts breaking things higher up the stack until it all falls apart.
That was all pretty general, so here’s a tweet thread on the specifics of what might go wrong. I can vouch for a lot of this since I was close to operations at both Bing and AWS. Read it while you still can!
Can’t help but notice that half of these are in some sense political, and of those, like they range from “governments want something from us” to “the content we serve can radically change facts on the ground” to “governments want to influence what we serve as a tool to control facts on the ground”.
So, really, who’s the top dog here, Twitter or governments? Well, you
Congress and The Hague they have a sense that they’re over everybody but the US and EU. How’ve those been doing since Harambe got shot?
The EU saw Brexit, the Syrian Refugee Crisis, the Visegrad Group challenging West-Euro “Human Rights” hegemony, the Ukraine crisis with Russia now trying to break NATO by breaking (the unity of) the members in the EU. And the US… ::gestures::
Is their supremacy assured, and do Saudi Arabia and the South African expat richest man in the world even want it?
Probably on balance the staff that just left wanted it, bought into whatever it was legitimating itself in the name of (which was increasingly aligning with them!)
The staff that replaces them, drawn to maybe Austin to work for Elon! Musk!, are they particularly invested?
Big shifts in communication media often lead to new world orders as the old order suited to the old one shifts to the new order suited to the new one among much blood and dust clouds – the European Wars of Religion after the printing press, the World Wars amidst mass media (yes, even I, mass-circulation newspapers had made a big change in how governmentality was experienced), I honestly think platforms have the potential to displace nations here.
Really they’ve dallied too long, in like 2007 Facebook should’ve been summoning US officials to hearings for them to be grilled and publicly humiliated, with severe penalties in terms of how it shaped discourse around them if they declined.
any body part is automatically more erotic when viewed from an uncommon angle, like looking up at a dick, sideboob, backsack, etc. this is known as the Rare Sex Pepe Effect
🗨Readers added context they thought people might want to know normal people don’t say things like this. https://www.tumblr.com/logout
I actually think Elon’s not doing a terrible job with Twitter – this isn’t some master plan, no, but we’re getting an effective reset of the employee base and the site culture; it might fail whale for a while but the user base is being reminded that however it is, they need it, and brand loyalty will carry through to relaunch if it’s down for less than a full year
The real issue was that it created a groupthink so strong it captured parts of its own structure – advertisers, staff, finance – and I think whether consciously or not, the people talking about how it would fall apart were trying to speak that into existence.
Musk is really the only figure out there with deep enough pockets, including established personal relationships with funders – like, whatever Anil fucking Dash says wouldn’t come into it, and where would he even say it? – to tank the hit and power through
Also like, breaking that capture will have ripple effects on the tech economy and even national and world cultures – the groupthink was hostile to capital in significant ways – that Huge Capital might find worth the expense in its own right
Re:Mastodon, wasn’t really expecting “content warnings and not appreciating me burping up every last impulse that crosses my mind into your lap is some white bullshit” to become a thing, but I was more generically expecting it to take everyone who would performatively reject Elon Musk’s vision of Twitter and put them at each other’s throats, and I guess that had to happen some ways in particular
every time tumblr or twitter is shit, recommendations for mastodon instances start going around. my criticism of mastodon hasn’t changed for years now, and it’s a variation on “imagine if tumblr drama could result in a website being deleted and your worst ex getting access to every dm you’ve ever sent”
did you know that mastodon admins can read your dms as long as either you or the recepient are on an instance they host, because they’re not encrypted
proponents argue it’s not a problem when it’s actually extremely a problem considering that mastodon (by design) encourages small friend groups to run instances together and have personal relationships with admins
like it’s just not fit for purpose
glad to see mastodon users are handling the light criticism normally
Mastodon is like “what if Twitter was explicitly optimized for minimum influence on the world and maximum leftist infighting and factionalism?”. Like, structurally
When folks switch from Twitter to Tumblr as their primary social media platform, something they’ll often do in order to fill out their initial Tumblr dashboard is to follow a bunch of blogs whose names they recognise from having seen those blogs’ posts circulated as screenshots on Twitter. Consequently, any Tumblr blog that gets screenshotted on Twitter a lot – like this one – will typically see a jump in new followers any time Twitter does something that pisses people off. It’s usually not a big jump, but it’s definitely noticeable.
With that context, there’s this blog’s new followers graph for the past thirty days:
Hey, if y’all need help fleeing from the great powers of the world hmu
Also, I seriously think anyone who was mutuals with her should take your blog private or something, lest the billion-dollar Eye of Sauron fall upon you. There’s an awful lot of very angry crypto people
People on Twitter are already combing over every joke she ever made for Proof Of Evil, and @theunitofcaring has already been pulled into it.
Alternately there’s the chance to open up a great front of this week’s “[tumblr] don’t caaaare” arc
