I'd like to be snarky about this, but it's sad to watch #Twitter's slow death. That stupid, beautiful site has been vital to me in my development as a poet. And as someone who can probably be described as Very Online, I used to find the site good in a bunch of other ways as well. But at some point, you have to go. He's deleting old tweets to save a bit of money on storage space. And meanwhile, all the tweets on the Arab Spring, the Mumbai attacks, etc, are gone. They're just...gone.
@juliancday Also, thoughts and prayers for historians of the recent past and all other researchers who would have used that vast primary source. It's like burning an archive
@juliancday you can help to prevent this, though. Archive Warriors are always looking for volunteers. There's a dedicated project for short urls to backup e.g. Twitter's t.co links. This might be some way to archive precious contents which where Linked on Twitter.
Yeah, as someone who have hated Twitter from day one and have longed for its downfall, I have definitively tried to reign down my glee out of respect to all the individual users who have tragically lost stuff. 😭
Twitter was bad—that doesn't mean I have to victim blame everyone who was on there.
@juliancday oh no, all of #Stan_lee tweets will be gone forever. That’s half of tweets from his time and history of when Disney Marvel started. All gone.
@juliancday@eobeara
Sure it's a bad move from Musk. But it should also be an eye opener. The same can happen with Facebook, Youtube, instagram, Medium... Whenever content is hosted at a company's property. If that company goes down or decides it has to cut costs... All that content goes into the void. That's the price for our convenience.
Musk is just a symptom of the bigger problem. And... Yes.. It took Musk for me as well to really realize this problem
@hikingdude Moreover, this can happen with any Mastodon or other non-commercial project as well - due to lack of funding, admin burnout and other reasons. Meanwhile, I am not aware at #Mastodon and other #ActivityPub software any effort about implementing " #backup my data" button/functionality. If it exists somewhere, there, let me know.
@juliancday In a way, this is as bad as the burning of the library in Alexandria, and will probably be remembered for as long. Musk has now shown himself to be a philistine as well as incompetent.
@juliancday from an archivist's perspective, this is not only sad... it's a disaster. The possibility of doing scientific research on twitter is seriously compromised, if not made impossible. #Twitter
@juliancday Oof. The Arab Spring is how I ended up on there in the first place. It's sad to see how fucked up the platform has become over the intervening period
@Infoseepage It's awful. Supposedly a billionaire but can't even pay data costs? I'd love to let off a nihilistic lmao, but I can't. Just, fuck all this.
@Stolfidobranch@Infoseepage It's entirely possible this was a political move. But he also famously refused to pay a bunch of cloud provider bills at the end of June, hasn't been paying office rent, etc; it sounds like money has either run out or is insufficient, and so I'm not gonna discount the easiest explanation.
@juliancday@Stolfidobranch Back in the early days of Musk's meddling with Twitter, I tried to parse the possible rationales for what he was doing and you end up with a bunch of separate clusters of motivations/causes. I stopped trying to assign unitary "he's doing this because of X" causes a while ago, as it was just driving me nuts. I got off the bus and deleted my account.
@NatureMC@Infoseepage@juliancday
Thank you. The "meanwhile" is not the side effect. It's the goal. We, as faulty humans, just enjoy feeling clever and thinking that we're smarter than them.
@NatureMC@Infoseepage@juliancday I don't think it's on purpose. These look like the actions of a narcissist who takes everything personally while being convinced he's a genious, but gets used by and tries to use other powerful people. It's super dangerous, but I think things happen much more as a cascade than they are following a real plan.
@megueyb Remembering how people would always say that once it's online, it's there forever, though in recent years we've been seeing just how true this is.
@juliancday It’s another case study in how history gets processed and tidied up. SO much of the last 20 years has been documented extensively by regular people with cell phones, and that will be largely lost to future researchers. 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, all the grassroots movements since 2008. Just an incredible amount of the most ephemeral information about how people lived, the parts that don’t wind up in textbooks or other ‘official reports’, gone.
@juliancday I don't think he's actually meant to do this, and to the best of my knowledge, the tweets aren't lost. It's just it's breaking because he's fired the people who maintained it.
@juliancday The name “Twitter” was so right at the beginning. It conjured up an image of people happily chattering away like birds, sharing things close to heart.
Now it’s simply an “X”. When something’s wrong you usually put an “X” through it, and it’s generally seen as a very negative term. My “Ex” girlfriend for example, or a phrase associated with deletion.
To me the “X” is an abbreviation for “Exit”, which is what Twitter users should do. Preferably as quickly as possible.
I actually agree with you. It is sad to watch. I loved Twitter, pre-Musk. It was my favorite app, and I literally spent hours on there. To see what it is now is pathetic, really. As hard as it was to say goodbye, it's opened up this door at Mastodon.
It simply illustrates why social media, an expression of culture, history in the making and documentation of it should not be in the hands of biased private enterprise, and certainly not in the hands of a right wing megalomaniac like Musk.
Social media belong in the public domain and in distributed hands.
There should be a lawsuit for this, the fact he owns it now does not mean he can destroy it. It is not his intellectual property.
@juliancday Muskrat is an authoritarian wannabe and one of the first things that authoritarians do is destroy historical artifacts and documents. Peel away the protective camouflage from an alleged "free-thinking" Libertarian Techlord, find an insatiable Colonizer underneath.
@juliancday I’ve heard it said that destroying twitter as an organizing platform was one of the key goals of the people who bankrolled his acquisition of the company, namely the Saudis.
@juliancday i have no idea what is really going on or what the motivations are, but I would like to point out that Twitter did not launch video hosting at all until Jan 27 2015. Animated GIFs came in Jun 2014. And images I believe were in 2011. Prior to these dates, tweets merely linked to media, so there would have been been no cost to host.
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