Comment by phforms

Unfortunate, yes.

Futile? No.

Remember that AT&T once had a firm grip over human communication. That didn't last.

Remember that AOL once had a firm grip over how a massive percentage of the population accessed the internet. That didn't last.

Elon Musk currently has a firm grip on social media (via X) and internet access (via Starlink). This too will not last.

If there were an API or reliable way to delete accounts programmatically, you could create a reverse-kickstarter-like site in which you pledged automatic future deletion of your account once a critical percentage of the people you followed (or who followed you) did the same. Action would be suspended for all participants until that critical threshold was reached.

This isn't a criticism, but I do think this comment actually raises part of the problem. There are people on twitter telling people they should be on twitter, and it's apparently effective enough that at least some people are still signing up or trying to at least. The world needs more of the inverse, people telling those they care about who are on twitter to get off it.

You should prefer to donate accounts to circumvention efforts rather than deleting them.

Photos of your hand?

What is next? Run some arbitrary command? Make photos of your feet?

We really ought to think what is an acceptable way to verify that someone is an actual human.

You know, as a television personality, Jeremy Clarkson is a pretty polarising figure. The gammons see him as all that's wrong with Britain with his pro-EU views, the cartoon student lefties are whining about "oh it's all just about him zoomzoomzooming about dangerously in fast cars", some people actually like him.

But whatever your views, you cannot deny that without his blend of journalistic acumen, wit and humour, and sheer talent, the world would be a poorer place.

Because, quite simply, it would be a world without the "Oh no! Anyway..." meme in it.

And every time I see a link about Twitter losing users or blocking some third-party client, guess what I think?

Where I live currently in Europe utility companies need to inform me even in an offline way. There is no need for internet for this.

I'm reading the news with a two week delay for almost a decade, and I haven't missed anything worthwhile. There are exactly zero reasons to read Facebook/Twitter for it. For example, the value of the current US administration's word is zero. When they say something, there is no change in probability distributions in anything anymore. This two week delay makes this very obvious on the occasions when I checked the latest state of some issues. But others are the same, just for different reasons: in reality you have a very small effect on any highly politicized topics. When parents trust their kids less than politicians, then there is not much to do with everyday tools, like arguing (there are some places where there is a value, but those won't ever move the needle).

The current American government is basically entirely comprised of people who were terminally online on Twitter and communicating with the right politicians - those people got everything they wanted. This seems like evidence that it actually does matter.

> Your utility will post a highly localized service outage that might only affect 1 block of a city or less to their world facing twitter feed? And not simply alert customers via their phone on file as they've done for me forever?

It doesn't match your very contrived example specifically, but yes essential services in my major metropolitan area provide more useful and timely information via twitter/X than other sources. People don't or can't register for updates from the city or county, so government organizations have no means of publishing information for public consumption other than social media, and twitter was the de facto standard.

Also, many local schools, clubs, etc. used it as their "official" source for updates for years.

You are definitely out of the loop if you can't access it, and places are glacially slow to change.

Things like twitter aren't supposed to be worth money anyway :)

In an ideal world nothing would be able to change that.

Edit: not my downvote btw, where did that come from? - - corrective upvote instead contrary to bot action

Not since then, but before it, I could read smart people's opinion there about random topics. Of course, when the takeover happened, almost all of them left already years prior.

There is no such place since. Most of them went back to anonymous internet presence, if at all.

Did it way before that.

Shitter was already bad before Elon bought it.

Thanks for the laugh

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Holy buzzword-salad, Batman!

In any case X is a pretty decent place, as long as you mute the topics that get annoying. But the Algorithm is quite good at serving you what you engage with.

Twitter stopped publishing stats on its user counts when it went private, so we don’t know if those have gone up, down, or sideways. We do have some numbers for Europe since about 2023 because of reporting mandates, and they seem to show a downward trend.

Do we actually have proof that X is more popular now than it was then?

How many of the userbase are real people and how many are bots?

Exactly. I do not use it at all and other than never ending propaganda or ridiculous ragebaiting claims I miss nothing of importance.