If you haven’t heard, the Social Media Platform Formerly Known As Twitter is trying out charging new accounts $1 a year to post. If they don’t pay, they get limited access, including only being able to read messages.
People that already have an account won’t be charged for full access. For now.
Being able to read any messages without an account has been blocked.
Places like Dork Tower have removed their SMPFKAT feed on their website because it doesn’t work there any more.
Yet another nail in the coffin.
Did Musk go in there with the intention of destorying his investment? 
Edit: destorying was actually a typo, but it fits so I’m leaving it 
HA! Twatter won’t die that easily…
But we shall see… For now I’m also active on twatter.
Oh so am I. I doom scroll more than i should. i just hope there is finally a reason to get me to leave.
I presume this is an attempt to clear the debris of a billion bot channels. The prior management may have done many things better, but policing the membership was not one of them.
El Reg got an update… From $44b to $19b… ouch!!!
Could also be that the former management was making money through bots and garbage. Except I don’t think they were making money then either. But frankly it’s not like he can’t afford to buy companies and drive them into the ground. And out of all the social media Twitter is the worst.
Oh, come on. Everyone knows it loses half its value as soon as you drive it off the lot.
X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter
If every single news article is going to use the above, can we just all agree to keep calling it Twitter?
Or Twatter…
I mean, the website is still TWITTER.COM, right?
Reminds me of “The artist formerly known as Prince” back in the 90s.
Also I think it’s hilarious that a guy who won’t acknowledge his transgender daughter is having his platform deadnamed in the mass media.
As a point of interest, the folder where I have articles bookmarked about this situation is labeled “Musk vs. Twitter”. He’s not doing much, if anything, to make that less true.
I think prior to this week, a major LGBTQ+ group had left Twitter because of his statements. The most recent example of digging the grave deeper is publicly endorsing an antisemetic conspiracy theory.
This latest instance has cost him advertising revenue from the following companies: Apple, Disney, IBM,. Paramount, NBCUniversal, Comcast, Lionsgate and Warner Bros. Discovery. In August, Twitter lost ads from Gilead Sciences and NCTA (National Cable & Telecommunications Association, which kept the initials but changed the name to The Internet & Television Association).
I’m gonna guess that $1/year fee in order to post messages for new accounts is going to get applied to all accounts very quickly to try and make up for this latest self-inflicted shortfall in revenue. I’ll even take it a step further and say it won’t stay as a yearly fee for long.
Update: Musk has decided that the proper response to the companies’ decisions is to sue the Anti-Defamation League for being in cahoots with the companies and making them decide not to advertise on his site any more.
Oh dear. He should just sell off twitter then and cut his losses.
Elon Musk decided that he should go over to Israel to see how things are going. It totally wasn’t an attempt to smooth things over after what happened last week. And it’s totally not because there’s a few people saying the board of Tesla should look at whether he’s still fit to run the company. (From what I read, he and the board members are friends, so that will go nowhere.)
So what does he do for an encore when he gets back to the U.S.? He gave a kind of apology in an interview, but then said, “If someone is going to blackmail me with advertising or money, go f**k yourself.”
There was a pause and the person conducting the interview tried to recover and got as far as “But…” before Musk reiterated “Go. F**k. Yourself. Is that clear?”
There have been no statements that I’ve seen where a company that decided to pause or stop advertising on TSMSFKAT said “We’re doing this until Musk apologizes” or “We’re doing this until he leaves”. It’s been along the lines of “we don’t support what he said” and/or “we don’t want our ads showing alongside these other ads”.
X CEO Linda Yaccarino was in the audience at the time. She’s the one that said “We’re gonna do great things with out do-everything platform” and re-confirmed her commitment not that long ago.
Hey, uh, Linda? There were a few people saying you need to get out of there while you can. You might want to think about that. Just sayin’.
Hey, uh, Linda? Is that flashing exit sign looking a little more appealing now that Walmart decided that the pause they put on advertising on TSMSFKAT is going to be permanent. They haven’t given your site up fully, but they’re going to advertise elsewhere.
For those planning on buying a Tesla Cybertruck, they just went on sale, but it may be 2025 before you can take delivery. And if you wanted to buy one of broken window stickers that just went on sale to put on the window of the left rear passenger window, they’re sold out. It was a callback to the 2019 “unbreakable windows” demonstration.
I look at it and it makes me think they took design cues from VW’s Thing car from years ago or one of the other cars that went for a really angular look. But if they actually had been able to put in unbreakable windows, wouldn’t that be a safety issue when combined with the stainless steel body? That’s a tougher metal to fabricate, so if you were in an accident where you couldn’t get the window or door open, how much longer would it take for the rescue crews to cut through the metal to get you out?