Elon refusing to pay google for hosting could be behind the instability issues.
Elon refusing to pay google for hosting could be behind the instability issues.
It’s possible that the enforcement of a rate limit isn’t because of AI scraping, but rather because they failed to migrate before the June 30th deadline.
It's so fucking funny how Twitter and Reddit are imploding on the exact same day lmao.
14Spez did say Musk's Twitter was something to be admired and emulated lol
9Is reddit actually imploding or is it just business as usual?
1Depends on where you go.
Subs like r/worldnews and r/tech have bottom of the barrel comments, but still manage to get some posts.
r/IAmA had many of the mods leave, so the remaining ones are stopping all "out of Reddit" activities, like recruiting celebrities, verifying identities, and so on. It's pretty much worthless now.
Small niche subs are still working, but the equivalent communities on Lemmy are getting better quality right now.
2It's too early to tell but I'm spending more time on Lemmy.
1
Not to sound paranoid, but it’s kind of worrying.
In recent years, these sites have been used to pass information quickly during crisis. This can be anything like natural disaster, or uprising and protests.
These big aggregators being incompetently, mismanaged and taken down from public use at the same time, makes me wonder if it’s an attempt to quash communication that’s not coming from a government or mega-corp.
The revolution will not be televised.. by the people.
0Yeahhhh, I've been getting less news information since moving to Lemmy. The communities are here, but they have some growing to do.
And then there's the issue of them growing into the correct servers. For example, my first day here I caught a mod on lemmy.ml banning a user for posting an Axios article about China on World News because "Orientalism". The article was a pretty common western take on the Xi Xinping succession plan. Really nothing uniquely anti-China. That especially raises eyebrows given the many conversations had about Lemmy's communist roots from its devs.
Which isn't to say Lemmy as a whole is tainted - just the dev community, lemmy.ml. So I ethically feel the need to avoid their World News community and only use lemmy.world's World News community, but that places me into an even smaller and more split community, giving me even less information. All I can think is that I need to be the change I want to see and intentionally post to/comment on the lemmy.world World News community.
0
I, and many others, truly believe it is deliberate and orchestrated, primeraly to shut down the likes of r/superstonk and other subs that are fighting wall street corruption.
-1Permanently Deleted
-1
I used to work for a local company that sold parts to Tesla. They were a huge nightmare and wouldn’t pay us. I think that is their whole deal. Not paying the small companies.
FUCK them
5Unfortunately that sort of behaviour is common in many sectors where large companies subcontract with smaller companies.
The tactic basically created the whole factoring concept (buying invoices, or using invoices as security for a "loan"/credit).
Over here in Sweden it was construction companies that initially fuelled the development, and the large companies basically required very long payment terms (60+ days) from their subcontractors and then waited to the very last day to dispute the invoice by complaining on some part of the work, further delaying payment. A small subcontractor could often not front being out that much money (2+ months of salaries, materials and other operating costs, cost of fighting the dispute etc) and ended up going bust. Enter financial institutions buying (or "lending" with the invoice as security) the invoice, letting the subcontractor get paid immediately, but of course not the full amount since the factoring company wants to profit from the deal. The factoring companies being backed by large financial institutions (banks typically) have enough money that they can sit out those long payment terms and other "bullshit" since they know those large construction companies ARE good for the money they are owed EVENTUALLY.
Still carves into the margins for the small actors.
1
Image Transcription: News Article Screenshot:
[A screenshot of a section of an article by the news outlet "Engadget". Text reads as follows.]
More platform instability could be in Twitter's near future. In 2018, Twitter signed a $1 billion contract with Google to host some of its services on the company's Google Cloud servers. [Hyperlink begins] Platformer reports [Hyperlink ends] Twitter recently refused to pay the search giant ahead of the contract's [Highlighted in yellow] June 30th renewal date. [Highlighting ends] Twitter is reportedly rushing to move as many services off of Google's infrastructure before the contract expires, but the effort is "running behind schedule," putting some tools, including Smyte, a platform the company [Hyperlink begins] acquired in 2018 [Hyperlink ends] to bolster its moderation capabilities, in danger of going offline.
^I'm a human volunteer transcribing posts in a format compatible with screen readers, for blind and visually impaired users!^
5You're doing important work! Just wanted to drop a small correction, the news outlet is actually called "engadget" Cheers!
1Autocorrect I swear to God...
Sorry about that! I was doing some quickly this morning while on hold calling the doctor's office so I guess I didn't proofread it great. Thank you!
1
Don't you know? Paying your bills is woke
4"Bills" is now considered a slur on Twitter.
4
I don't know what will happen with Twitter. Maybe it succeeds, maybe it fails, maybe it just keeps humming along in mediocrity. But what I do know is that wherever it ends up, there was surely a much simpler way to get there.
3Well he did try pulling out the cables going into the server clusters. Maybe he got tired and bored before he could pull them all out
1
Imagine if this guy had the controls to the oxygen on Mars
3I see that a lot of people complain about reddit, twitter, and whatever mainstream website completely fuck the consumer, but fail to realize one crucial thing. The only time change happens in mob settings is when the pain of no change is greater than the pain of change. I applaud Elon, spez, and who ever else wishes to put there services behind their paywall whether it's an API or just simply viewing tweets. Anyone in the know knows that it's a crock of shit and anyone who isn't is annoyed to the point where change is preferable. The sooner people figure out posting information, entertainment, and other forms of media/knowledge to the benefit of a company is horrendous the better. Now we have the opportunity to get rid of the corporate greed and basically open-source peoples knowledge from around the globe. Although like with reddit, mob mentality poses a real threat to communities like this one, I trust that you all are normal and level headed individuals who can come to disagreements but still respect eachother (as corny as that sounds). I much prefer it over giving more information to companies who use it to profit off of my content, while I receive nothing.
*Edit: Thank you kind stranger for the reddit gold! Glad you spent real hard cash so I can have reddit premium and reddit coins! The lovely people at reddit will be spending your money sitting on a yacht eating grapes in one hand and lobster in the other. I'm sure they are real thankful too! :) *
1What can i say ? I just don´t care anymore about twitter. Also any misfortune for space Karen is just a plus at this point
1I especially enjoy that, no matter how much he drives the value down, he's always going to owe the full value of the loans.
1Yeah and he used tesla actions as a collateral. So if he is not able to make money to pay for the loans, he will lose control of Tesla. I´m savoring every moment that things are blowing up in his face. After this venture fails, he will probably still be rich, but surely not a billionaire anymore and i will vicariously enjoy his fall from billionaire extraordinaire to just a legacy common stock millionaire.
1
What's up with billionaires and not paying their bills?
1I think it’s more that people who tend to be billionaires tend to also be kinda scummy people.
1You dont make that kind of money being honest and empathetic. The most honest ppl I know that run businesses are barely paying themselves. There's a reason CEOs have higher than normal representation of psychopaths. It allows them to make the best decisions even if it means running the orphan killing machine 24/7.
1
Think I got rich by paying people?
0This is so much more true than I think most people believe.
My husband and I have a small engine business, and I took a free "community entrepreneur bootcamp" class through the local university this spring in the hope that we might learn something helpful. Instead, I learned fun things like leaning on your customers' fears as a marketing tactic (?? 😔🤦) and that the most prominent local accountant - brought in as an expert speaker by the university! - advises his clients to pay as little as possible as late as possible, and most appallingly, I'm not exaggerating, these are the actual words I heard this man say in front of a room full of people: "if one of your employees gets hurt at your business, it's better for you to stand on their neck until they stop breathing than to call for help, because it's so much easier and cheaper to settle a death claim then an injury." And he actually said that it sounds like he's joking but he's not, this is his understanding of the situation.
I genuinely want to see the best in everyone, and I have never before had the experience of fantasizing about a person's death while they were talking in front of me, and it was abhorrent and awful but also... Wtf? How do we even help someone who sees other people as expendable tools the way this person does?
What can we even do about people who not only don't want to live up to their agreements and commitments, but are just straight up out to fuck everyone else over? How do we help/fix that?
1
It's ok guys, Elon told his engineers to just rewrite the stack, so all problems will go away!
1Im enjoying the shit show Elon is providing. It's definitely entertaining watching a "genius" at work.
1Twitter was an important unifying communications tool during the Arab Spring. The Arab spring was a threat to biz as usual in places like Saudi Arabia. The second largest investor in Twitter is Saudi Arabia.
Saudi Arabia killed and dismembered a journalist from the US, more or less in plain sight. Elon is now killing and dismembering Twitter in plain sight to limit its power as a unifying tool that stands as a demonstrable, active threat to capitalism and oligarchs around the world.
Billionaires do favors for other billionaires. It's part of why spez is trying to tank Reddit. Remember how dangerous Reddit was to capitalism's status quo around the time of GME/Robinhood/Antiwork recently.
The specific moment we're in right now is meant to shatter consolidated organizing power on Reddit as we splinter into several smaller alternative platforms (or for some, disconnect entirely). Not saying we shouldn't be in Lemmy, but calling out the larger reality of the moment.
Billionaires do favors for other billionaires.
1The more I've been watching this whole thing play out, the more I'm inclined to believe that something like this is possible.
Unfortunately for these dipshits masquerading as geniuses, the genie is out of the bottle, and there's no way he's getting corked back in. The internet is really all we need, and in the event of the mass coordination required to organize a protest or anything of the sort, the first best option will win. Whether that's Signal, or Lemmy, or Facebook, or whatever. Necessity is the mother of invention and the amount of resources that a pissed off population has will always win out in the long-term. Hell, we'll pull a fucking sneaker net if we really have to.
Reddit has already been compromised for a few years now anyways. I noticed when they started banning people for not subscribing to group think or the more recent examples of permabanning users for anti-Russian rhetoric. There are only a few vestiges of Aaron's original dream of Reddit, found in places like Antiwork or WSB, but they're a drop in a bucket full of site-wide dogshit.
1That's a bit too much conspiracy for my taste, but for sure, billionaires don't do anything for our good.
1Exactly. Billionairs look out for themselves first and foremost. They try to maximise their profit.
Musk wants to push more people to pay for verified. The reddit board (not only Spez) wants people to download their app to make it seem like their growing right before their IPO, while simultaneously forcing more ad views. Probably downloading the app also lets them track a lot of extra data about you as well.
No conspiracy needed to explain all this.
1
I'm not going to claim I know what's happening, but I like the self-DDoSing explanation because it's even funnier
1Lmao just how much worse can it get. What a trip Elon
1They paid the google bill. So far it’s the only one I’ve seen them pay and who knows if they’ll continue.
1I think it's probably a combination of self-DDOSing and not paying providers. Which any intelligent experienced dev could've told him, but they all got fired months ago.
1Its almost like the developers were holding the site together.
1
To be fair, Google Cloud is an overpriced and unreliable dumpster fire of a service. I'm surprised Twitter was using them at all. Although, I guess when you're paying billions of dollars, the service you get is different.
0Doesn't change the fact that if you agree to pay someone for their service, you must pay someone for their service. I guess being a deadbeat is different when you're purportedly worth billions of dollars.
2
I thought google charges as-you-go.
0For the average user maybe, but for a client as big as Twitter they're probably going to want to take a more hands-on/careful approach, so whatever's in the contract would probably supersede their standard terms.
0
What is this guy’s problem?
0💀
2When all this crap started, my guess was that he is some sort of captured asset that's using his position to sabotage the platform to hinder free speech. Initially, he was so strongly targeting any anti-trump/anti-republican assets that it seemed blatantly obvious, but my money is on Russia or China. China being the more obvious option, given they supply a lot of Tesla's materials.
That's all conjecture of course, he could just be an insane despot cutting his nose off to spite his face like Steve Huffman.
0I had a similar thought... It stands to reason.
1
Someone owes some Russian & Middle Eastern Oligarchs a lot of money for his Twitter buying fiasco. Same as Trump did for his fiascos. The business model is just them doing what they were told to do.
0
i wonder if we will end using personal webpages with FOSS/affordable domains and integration to forums and video platforms, just to avoid some crazy CEO screwing our content again.
i think social media was good, but we gave the CEOs too much power over our content and accounts.
so... we went from "social media is where society creates media" to "social media is where tech CEO's control and keep society's media hostage".
0i wonder if we will end using personal webpages with FOSS/affordable domains and integration to forums and video platforms, just to avoid some crazy CEO screwing our content again.
That's what we had before. And it never stopped to exist, it just dwindled out for convenience.
- no more personal website but just a "facebook page", for convenience
- no integration between sites, just a few huge ones, for convenience
- no customisation and personal expression but large, uniformised experience, for convenience
- no small hosting and individual presence online, just a few massive (corporate) infrastructures graciously given to us, for convenience
- no control over policies and content, just be happy with what our generous overlord allows us to do, for convenience
The "fediverse" is a step in the good direction, but as long as the general user don't care, these huge services will keep being the "main" internet for the forseeable future. Even abusing the userbase and getting batshit crazy with rules and restrictions isn't stopping them.
Meanwhile, some of us are happy on out littler corner of the internet, using RSS to see what's new on individual websites, and depending on services that are either sanely hosted or even self-hosted and interoperable. But that's not for everyone.
2
At this point I have no idea if twitter dying is a planned thing or mismanagement. I made my profile my freshman year of high school and never logged back on. The only thing I'll miss is having a general place for quick updates on projects that I'm keeping an eye on. Guess it's time to fully utilized discord.
-3At this point I have no idea if twitter dying is a planned thing or mismanagement. I made my profile my freshman year of high school and never logged back on. The only thing I'll miss is having a general place for quick updates on projects that I'm keeping an eye on. Guess it's time to fully utilized discord.
-3Yeah Elon is an idiot, but its hard to believe someone could burn Twitter to the ground this fast unintentionally
0