Goodbye, Twitter. Hello … Mastodon?

Social media sites start out as places where people can meet and interact online and form communities of like-minded people. These are all noble goals and these sites still do serve those goals. But over time, as these platforms become larger and larger, like Twitter and Facebook became, they grow toxic. It seems like that negative spiral is an inevitable consequence of the relentless logic that arises from their dependence on advertising revenue that leads to a Catch-22. To attract advertisers, they need a large user base and for those users to spend a lot of time on the site. That results in the companies creating algorithms that encourage so-called ‘virality’ where large numbers are drawn to some hot topic. This in turn encourages mean and vicious hot takes because that is what seems to get the attention of many people and so pretty soon it is nasty people who dominate the platform and this alienates advertisers who do not want to be associated with hateful content, and they leave.

Some disgruntled users of Twitter have been looking for another home and one that is getting some attention is another platform called Mastodon. This is a decentralized federated network run by volunteers, quite different to the behemoths of the other social media with their centralized management and operational structure and massive servers that are expensive to run. It is not ad-based and is specifically designed to discourage virality and to encourage small groups of like minded people to engage in more meaningful conversations with one another.
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The Twitter soap opera goes on

Although I am the most minimal of users on the platform and would be unaffected if the company went under, I continue to be fascinated by the way Twitter continues to lurch from one crisis to another under the erratic leadership of its new owner Elon Musk, as he tries desperately to recover from what seems like a disastrous investment.

He seems to think that people work best under edicts and threats. In his latest move, he told employees that he only wanted people who were “extremely hardcore” and be “willing to work long hours at high intensity” to build what he calls Twitter 2.0. That could be seen as a hyperbolic motivating speech, like football coaches asking players to give 110%, except that Musk followed up by giving them an ultimatum that they had to sign such a pledge by Thursday or they would be fired. That is just insulting.

Such a management style is the opposite tack that leaders should take in a time of uncertainty, noted Ben Wigert, director of research and strategy of workplace management at Gallup. Poor leadership provides an opportunity for employees to quit, especially when the job market remains tight, as it currently is.

“Saying ‘work harder,’ especially coming out of a pandemic, is tone deaf and it’s hard to undo that damage to your culture,” Wigert said. 

Musk’s implication that Twitter workers aren’t doing their jobs does not “reflect a strong employer brand and culture,” he added. “They don’t reflect that inspiring organization you want to work for.”

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The verdict is in: Trump’s big announcement was boring

The general consensus about Trump’s speech announcing that he is running again was that it was long and boring. It did not help that he had telegraphed what he was going to say a long time ago. It also did not help that much of it was mostly a rehash of the speech he has been giving at rallies. The difference was that he was very low energy. This may have been deliberate in that he was trying to appear ‘presidential’ and reading from a teleprompter, which is not something that he does well. Or it may be because the audience was not the raucous crowds at his rallies that he seems to relish speaking to.

Even Fox News cut away from the speech and Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post had at the bottom of its front page the single line “Florida man makes announcement”. That must sting.

In contrast, the late night talk shows reviewing the speech were pretty funny.

Here is Jimmy Kimmel.

Here is Seth Meyers.

The Twitter albatross around Elon Musk’s neck

Elon Musk is by no means stupid. No one who creates his own company and in the process becomes one of the world’s richest people can do so without having considerable acumen in some areas of life. But such people can be, and often are, jerks and narcissists who get carried away by their success in one area to think that they somehow have a general ability to succeed at whatever they do that they can apply anywhere. That is what seems to have happened with Musk. Musk was a highly successful user of the Twitter platform, having close to 100 million followers, and was able to use it to sway financial markets and bring attention to himself. This must have made it seem that he could easily run it even better and draw even more attention to himself and was why he rashly made an offer to pay $44 billion for it, a figure that analysts said was way too high. After he realized that, he tried to back out of the deal but was sued and had to go through with it. After being forced to buy Twitter, Musk said in a tweet that he did so not “to make more money. I did it to try to help humanity, whom I love”. And there was much laughter in the land.
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Elon Musk and Twitter

I try to avoid reading anything about Elon Musk, even though my news sources constantly bombard me with headlines about something he has said or done. I find people who constantly promote themselves, and Musk is a particularly extreme example of this, to be really annoying. For some reason, the media seem to think that his pronouncements on anything, even world affairs, are to be taken seriously enough as to be relayed to us. Such is the power of money to bestow credibility to people on topics on which they have no expertise whatsoever.

But I was vaguely interested in the saga of his on-again, off-again effort to buy Twitter and the deal was finally completed on Friday. Musk uses Twitter as his main vehicle for drawing attention to himself and may have thought that owning Twitter would enable him to get even more exposure by being his own personal platform. He has plans to take the company private by buying up all its shares.
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Time to tune out the news?

(WuMo)

I tend to follow the news quite closely but this is the time of year when I find the news to be dreary for three reasons and feel tempted to follow the example of the family in the cartoon.

The first reason is because with just three weeks to go before the mid-term elections in the US, the discussion here consists almost exclusively of pundits examining the polls and tea leaves and trying to predict the outcome, thus inevitably going over the same ground again and again, trying to make sense of tiny fluctuations in numbers. At least politics in the UK is dealing with serious policy issues in addition to the leadership drama.
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Unnecessary reporting

Surely everyone should know by know that hurricanes involve very strong winds, heavy rainfall, flooding, and flying debris. And yet, each new hurricane has news channels sending some hapless weather reporter out into the storm to show them getting buffeted by the forces of nature. This is serious malpractice since the reporter could very easily get hurt or killed by getting hit with some flying object, as can be seen in this footage.

Fortunately this reporter was not hurt but I suggest that they preserve this clip and show it every time there is a hurricane to remind people how bad it can be, without risking anew the life of a reporter.

Morning Edition goes over the top with funeral coverage

Since I get my news online, I have managed to avoid coverage of the non-news of Queen Elizabeth’s funeral. My morning routine is to listen to the news headlines on NPR and the news program Morning Edition while I prepare and have my breakfast. I listen online instead of on the radio and yesterday (Monday) when I scanned the show’s website, I found that 16 out of the 20 items were about the funeral. Only one item, lasting about three minutes in the two-hour program, dealt with hurricane Fiona that was hitting Puerto Rico hard, dumping a lot of rain, cutting off all power to the island, and causing catastrophic damage.

So I listened to a podcast of This American Life instead.
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Just give me the facts: Part 2

I posted before about my irritation with journalists who do not provide basic facts about elections, such as the date of the election they are discussing or the vote tallies after the event, instead giving us their commentary and conclusions. This failure was clearly apparent in the special election that was held on August 16 to complete the term for the single congressional seat in the state of Alaska vacated by the death of the incumbent. On August 31, Democrat Mary Peltola was declared to have won the election, defeating two Republicans Sarah Palin and Nick Begich.

The election was notable in that Peltola becomes the first Native Alaskan to go to Congress and the reports dutifully reminded us of that fact. But there was another very interesting feature in the election. It was the first time that Alaska was using a combination of an open primary, in which all the candidates were pooled together on one ballot (with over 45 competing) with the top four going on to the general election, and then using ranked choice voting to decided the winner among those four, provided none of the four got more than 50% of the vote in the first round.
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Brace ourselves for wall-to-wall Queen Elizabeth coverage

[UPDATE: She has in fact died.]

You may recall the massive coverage given last April to the death and funeral of Prince Philip, the husband of Queen Elizabeth, with the BBC pre-empting coverage of all other programming. This was a bit much even for some Britons, who complained that their favorite programs were being replaced with endless blathering about him. The idea that the whole nation was in mourning for a long time over the death of a 99-year old man was always preposterous.

If that was done for her husband, imagine what the coverage will be like for Elizabeth when she dies. We already have in place what looks like a death watch because she seems to be having some health issues, which is not surprising for someone who is 96 years old.

Elizabeth has had a remarkably long reign. She seems to be physically tough and one wonders what she thinks of newspeople eagerly anticipating her death. It would be nice if she recovers from whatever currently ails her and lives for some time, just to spite these ghouls.

But if and when she eventually dies, we can be sure that the US media, inexplicably devoted to covering the minutiae of the lives of a family that has no discernible connection to the US, will follow the British media in going with over the top coverage for days on end, displacing much more important and relevant news, even if there really is no public appetite for such excess.