Twitter likely to take idiots offer to buy them for $43 billion

[Don2 (Don1 Revised)]

Neuralink is testing its device, Musk should shut the fuck up until there are actual findings to report.

I think that in assessing Musk, an analysis of how fucked up Neuralink has been is in order.

The Wikipedia page is pretty telling and really lets you into the poor management style of Musk. It makes me wonder if these companies he has taken control of would survive and thrive whether or not he was at the helm. Neuralink, though, also seems to be the fake-it-til-you-make-it model. Perhaps one day they will do something adjacently related to their claims as tech miniaturizes more and more...seems plausible especially when you have tons of resources being put into it year after year. In the meantime, yikes.

Recent news coming in....but first some more background.

Background

Terrible Things Happened to Monkeys After Getting Neuralink Implants, According to Veterinary Records

An investigation by Wired reveals the grisly complications of Neuralink brain implants in monkeys, including brain swelling and paralysis.

futurism.com

Autopsy Found That Neuralink Implant "Ruptured" Monkey's Brain

Neuralink scientists kept the monkey alive even thought it was clear that it was already terminal from its severe brain swelling.

futurism.com

Recent News

This started out as a great story. The guy could do some great things like play Civ and all kinds of computer things. Then it started going downhill. This is scary what may happen to him.

After Accident With First Patient, Neuralink Seeks Volunteer for Second Implant

Neuralink cofounder Elon Musk is now seeking a second volunteer to receive the company's next experimental brain implant.

futurism.com

 

[Loren Pechtel]

The Turd claiming the left was trying to squash free speech on Shitter:

Twitter Kept Entire 'Database' of Republican Requests to Censor Posts

Elon Musk's "Twitter Files" focus on Democrats, but former administration officials and Twitter employees say Trump’s team and other Republicans routinely demanded posts be taken down

www.rollingstone.com

As always, projection.

 

[Patooka]

The Turd claiming the left was trying to squash free speech on Shitter:

Twitter Kept Entire 'Database' of Republican Requests to Censor Posts

Elon Musk's "Twitter Files" focus on Democrats, but former administration officials and Twitter employees say Trump’s team and other Republicans routinely demanded posts be taken down

www.rollingstone.com

As always, projection.

Taibbi must be having some serious buyers remorse right about now.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

The Turd claiming the left was trying to squash free speech on Shitter:

Twitter Kept Entire 'Database' of Republican Requests to Censor Posts

Elon Musk's "Twitter Files" focus on Democrats, but former administration officials and Twitter employees say Trump’s team and other Republicans routinely demanded posts be taken down

www.rollingstone.com

As always, projection.

So when they say "abortion on demand"...

 

[Don2 (Don1 Revised)]

Elon Musk takes several shots at CrowdStrike after global outage — including taking aim at company’s DEI policy

Musk responded Friday to a CrowdStrike post on X from March 2022, announcing its Gold partnership with Bright Network’s panel on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).

nypost.com

I guess it's short women again.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Elon Musk takes several shots at CrowdStrike after global outage — including taking aim at company’s DEI policy

Musk responded Friday to a CrowdStrike post on X from March 2022, announcing its Gold partnership with Bright Network’s panel on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).

nypost.com

I guess it's short women again.

Is this the same guy who has idiots paying close to $10k to beta test his Full Self Driving platform which is at version 12.5 and still can't self drive?!

 

[blastula]

Elon Musk takes several shots at CrowdStrike after global outage — including taking aim at company’s DEI policy

Musk responded Friday to a CrowdStrike post on X from March 2022, announcing its Gold partnership with Bright Network’s panel on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).

nypost.com

I guess it's short women again.

Meanwhile,

Tesla issues 2 recalls of its Cybertruck, bringing total number to 4

Tesla has recalled the stainless steel-clad Cybertruck four times since it went on sale November 30.

www.cbsnews.com

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Elon Musk takes several shots at CrowdStrike after global outage — including taking aim at company’s DEI policy

Musk responded Friday to a CrowdStrike post on X from March 2022, announcing its Gold partnership with Bright Network’s panel on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).

nypost.com

I guess it's short women again.

Meanwhile,

Tesla issues 2 recalls of its Cybertruck, bringing total number to 4

Tesla has recalled the stainless steel-clad Cybertruck four times since it went on sale November 30.

www.cbsnews.com

Correct me if I'm wrong, but a large number of the Cybertrucks that were released were the more expensive Foundation versions, for the wickedly early adopters. And quality control on even those was Gung Ho-ish.

 

[blastula]

Elon Musk denies reported $45 million a month pledge to Trump, says he doesn't 'subscribe to cult of personality’

Though the billionaire said he has created a new super political action committee (PAC) to fund the Republican candidate.

fortune.com

“I don’t prescribe to [a] cult of personality,” Musk said. But, he added that Trump demonstrated “great courage” after being shot by an attempted assassin on July 13, and that strength helps intimidate America’s enemies.

 

[bilby]

Yeah, he was courageously totally unaware that he was being shot at until after he received a minor injury.

How brave is that!

 

[blastula]

 

[lpetrich]

Bluesky boom worries Chinese media | Semafor - Nov 25, 2024, 2:57pm PST

Chinese state media is reportedly troubled by the latest exodus of X users flocking to Bluesky. State outlets, which put considerable resources into amassing millions of followers on Elon Musk’s social media platform — including by buying ads, deploying bots, and hiring influencers — have recently seen their growth plateau.

The growing popularity of Bluesky, which has a largely liberal base and harder-to-manipulate algorithm, has sparked “worried chatter within Chinese state media circles,” a former Xinhua and China Daily employee wrote in his newsletter. He predicted the accounts will migrate to Bluesky, though it may take time. For now, the sector’s focus has shifted back to domestic, Mandarin-language channels and platforms like Bilibili, WeChat, and Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok.

 

[lpetrich]

Bluesky Sees Greatest Sustained Growth So Far in the US and UK | Similarweb - November 18, 2024

Since election day in the US, usage of the Bluesky app is more than 500% higher in the US and over 350% higher in the UK.

Bluesky, the social networking service originally created as a spin-off from Twitter, is seeing the most sustained growth since it emerged from an extended invite-only beta test period. The growth is linked to users either leaving X or investing more time in exploring a promising alternative.

Traffic on Bluesky, an X competitor, is up 500% since the election. How will it handle the surge? : NPR - November 19, 20245:13 PM ET

On Elon Musk's X, more than 115,000 users deactivated their accounts, the largest-ever mass exit from the platform. At the same time, traffic on Bluesky, a smaller rival to X, began to soar, with daily usage climbing some 500% in the U.S., according to data from Similarweb.

"We've been growing by about a million users a day for several days," said Bluesky CEO Jay Graber in an interview with NPR on Monday. "It's proving out the model that we thought would be the right approach to social [media]: Give people the tools to control their experience and they'll have a better time."

Users have more control in Bluesky than in some similar sites.

Rather than having one "master algorithm," Bluesky allows for a more personalized experience. By default, there are three main feeds: One shows accounts you follow, another shows what your friends follow and a "discover" feed surfaces posts linked to your interests.

One can also create a custom feed for whatever one might be interested in.

And Bluesky, she argues, is "billionaire-proof," since the company is not one centralized feed of content, but rather a "protocol" from which endless feeds can be created. Think of a protocol like email, or the internet itself, Graber says. It would be difficult for a single person or company to control it, since the underlying technology is open-sourced and maintained by many contributors, like Wikipedia.

"My concern with the internet is it's just too controlled by a few powerful interests, and people don't have the ability to control their own fate, so we wanted to build social [media] that's built by the people, for the people," Graber said.

Since Musk took over Twitter two years ago, the site has collapsed content guardrails, laid off more than 80% of employees and turned the site's verification badges into a pay-to-play system where users can pay to amplify the reach of their posts. In the months leading up to the election, Musk, a major Trump donor, surrogate and now White House advisor, has used the platform to boost his support of the former president and promote right-wing views.

That, in turn, has led to a mass exodus — also dubbed the "X-odus." For many, Bluesky has become a refuge.

 

[lpetrich]

Bluesky has been helped by other missteps by its competitors.

Threads, for example, has nearly 300 million monthly active users, benefitting from having built on top of Instagram, but Meta has de-emphasized news and politics from its social networks. That's led users to complain about Threads being full of days-old posts and "engagement bait," or purposefully controversial or outrage-inducing posts aimed at drawing responses.

Also,

Germany-based Mastodon, another X rival, requires users to navigate its many servers, known as "instances," that make up its decentralized system. Confused yet? Some users are, and have given up before even starting. But others have stuck with it, resulting in a 50% bump in app downloads in the last month.

How will Bluesky finance itself? Ads?

Rose Wang, Bluesky's chief operating officer, wrote in a post around the time of the new fundraising round that the company is working on a subscription model that will give users "premium" features, like the ability to upload higher-quality videos and customize profiles with avatars and new colors.

"Paid subscribers won't get special treatment elsewhere in the app," Wang wrote. "We won't sell your data."

 

[lpetrich]

Bluesky and Threads showed us very different visions for a post-X future -Tue, Dec 31, 2024

Threads, of course, is controlled by Meta, which is controlled by Mark Zuckerberg. And though the company has claimed to embrace “public conversation,” it has also consistently put its thumb on the scale to encourage certain types of speech over others. The company throttled “political” content in an election year, forcing users to tweak their settings to enable posts about elections or “social topics” to appear in their “for you” feed.

Then some other moderation missteps.

Bluesky, on the other hand, has taken less of a top-down approach to moderation. While the company employs some of its own moderators to enforce “baseline moderation,” users have a lot of control over how much questionable or harmful content they want to see. Blueksy also allows people to create their own moderation services for an even more custom experience.

Another issue is what to do about links in posts. These point out from the system, so their presence may encourage the system's users to depart from it. Or at least so it might seem.

At a time when Elon Musk has acknowledged that X penalizes posts with links and Threads’ top exec has said that Meta doesn’t want to “encourage” hard news, Bluesky’s leaders have actually tried to foster link sharing, and several publishers have reported seeing significantly more traffic from Bluesky, compared with Threads and X.

What's happening? The social-media site and the linked-to sites are different experiences, and users go to them for different sorts of things.

What do these sites select for their feeds? Bluesky uses reverse chronological order.

And while Meta has recently come out with its own version of custom feeds, the app still defaults to an algorithmic “for you” feed that surfaces a mix of content users actually want and unasked-for drivel that’s so random and bizarre it’s been compared to a gas leak. (Meta said it would test allowing users to make their following feed the default, but hasn’t provided an update.)

So Threads's algorithm tries to pick out what its users might be interested in. But it is evident that it does not work all that well.

How to pay for it?

Though Graber hasn’t entirely ruled out advertising, she’s also been clear that she doesn't want to “enshittify” the service for the sake of advertising.

Threads, on the other hand, is already attached to Meta’s multi-billion dollar ad machine, an entity so intrusive many people believe the company’s apps literally listen to their conversations (a theory that’s been repeatedly debunked.)

Will Meta try to buy BlueSky? Or try to drown it out by spending oodles of money on hyping Threads? Like paying big money for big-name influencers to post on it.

But Bluesky’s vision for an open-source decentralized platform is about much more than becoming the next big social media site. “We set out to change the way social media works from the bottom up,” Graber said during a recent press event. “I want us to have choice over what we see.”

 

[lpetrich]

Bluesky surpasses Threads and X as a referral traffic source

Bluesky's publisher-friendly approach is generating significantly higher engagement than competitors. Some publishers report traffic and conversion rates three to four times higher compared with platforms like Threads and X, despite Bluesky’s smaller user base.

Why this success?

Bluesky explicitly welcomes link sharing, positioning itself as “a lobby to the open web.”

The company’s COO Rose Wang explicitly states the platform's publisher-friendly stance: "Unlike other platforms, we don't depromote your links."

Bluesky's open approach contrasts sharply with other platforms' restrictive policies. X's recent changes have made it increasingly hostile to external link sharing, and the platform has confirmed it demotes posts containing external links.