They instead cripple it by restricting important functionality to native apps, e.g. WebGL and push notifications, and by preventing users from modifying the system to remove these artificial limitations.
Two competing interests: let's ban our political opponent and let's keep our cash cow.
The middle management & line workers of Twitter can monetize their small Twitter stock portfolios pretty quick without shifting the market all that much. Jack, on the other hand, would take a major hit if he tried to sell off his.
=edit=
Clarification on content_sesh's good point: I don't assume whether Jack agrees or disagrees with Trump's points. They are billionaires, might be "frenemies" for all we know. I do assume Jack likes a cash-cow for his major property, Twitter - and tries to balance the upsides & downsides of hosting Trump's contentious content.
I"m not sure where you're getting the idea that Jack disagrees with most or even many of Trump's policies.
edit to clarify in response to parent's edit (lol):
I don't doubt Twitter enjoyed being the primary platform for our extremely online president. I was getting at the "political opponents" thing. I feel there's a tendency where people like Jack and Zuckerburg get categorized as "not on the right politically", because they work in tech and live in California I guess. I disagree with that characterization, and my main reason is how they've allowed their platforms to be used.
For a very long time now, I've personally seen Twitter being used to amplify regressive, right-wing views while quashing (via suspension or permanent suspension) leftist voices that challenge them. The best way I can describe it succinctly would be a pervasive double-standard when applying their rules. So I, personally, specifically do not believe that Jack or Twitter leadership have aligned themselves politically against the right.
There's clear and strong undercurrent of Twitter employees and middle management expressing opposition to Trump, and also expressing sympathy to various left wing causes. Similar to other tech firms, like Google or Facebook.
That's why I point out conflict of interest inside Twitter. Might be partly ownership stake matter, partly cultural matter - employees tend to be a generation younger than management, and tend to have gone through a different path through life.
I think that's a bit cynical. This is the President of the USA we're talking about. His words matter for the sake of history. I believe it was smart to capture a log of his statements. It will be essential to the record. They should have also disallowed him from deleting tweets, but I suspect they have a copy of everything he ever posted since they claimed it was significant discourse.
The responsibility of archiving presidential records should really not fall on a private company. If I had to put money on whether Twitter will be around a couple of decades from now, it'll be an easy "no".
Bingo. Think back to 2015 and how Twitter was doing back then. I don’t know how many millions of real users they’ve added since then, but the Trump presidency has been a boon for them. Way more people on the platform, and tons of them will stick around even after the ban.
I always thought it was the perfect solution, if by accident. The network is segmented, and people can connect to who they tolerate. It avoids censorship but still lets people curate their own experience. Win/win.
Gab used to be federated through to Mastodon (not directly of course, but via a hop or two). For some reason they stopped, but there are other "non-conforming" Mastodon instances out there.
I thought so too, until I saw how this works from inside. Segmented networks sound fine in principle, but there's a pathological behavior happening: there's a group of people around the core instances that like to take offense over things, who then try to pressure the administrator of that person's instance to ban that person, or else they'll defederate the whole instance. The source of offense may be some wrongthing the person posted, or reposted from another instance, or any "known association", etc. Also defederation because of incompatible codes of conduct is a thing, and as you expect, this creates a pressure towards CoC extremism.
The Gab thing was funny to watch, lots of people behaving as if that service was a literal existential threat to Fediverse, and banning - or advocating to ban - anything related to it up to two degrees of separation. It also revealed an interesting pattern - Mastodon itself may be decentralized and instances are theoretically independent, but there for sure is a community of Fediverse people that's pretty hiveminded. And left-leaning. Gab definitely wasn't welcome, and wouldn't be able to benefit much from federating through Mastodon, even if technically nobody could stop them.
(To be clear: I don't like Gab, never interacted with it, and I don't particularly care about it. It was just weird to see the degree of moral panic on Mastodon happening the moment they said they are considering joining the network.)
Mastodon is therefore an interesting experiment in how the ideal of distributed web - of virtual archipelago[0] - falls to realpolitik. Freedom of curation is limited by your ability to deal with threats of defederation.
In this sense, when you're switching from Twitter to Mastodon, you're switching from a stable tyranny to highly volatile sorta-democracy. Pick your poison, I guess. I stick to Mastodon, and try not to give the admin a reason to get me banned for going against the party line.
All, Signal is a 501c3 nonprofit. Your company probably matches donations. If they don't, they are eligible to be added to your company's portal. I encourage you to throw some of your wealth their way and take the extra step to get matching. This is important.
Great call to action. With other nonprofits I would immediately agree, matching is important. Is Signal in more need than other nonprofits, though? I imagine they’re still sitting on some of the $40 million the Signal Foundation got from Brian Acton, former WhatApp CEO.
Yes, it’s brought out as a negative because those companies are actively using that data to influence your behavior and serve you ads. Apple does not do this.
Out of curiosity, did you ever try the voice commands in the Tesla? I'm used to these systems being garbage, but Tesla's is quite good. I've moved to using it entirely while driving, even using auto-pilot.
Never assume that it's equally easy for anybody to use voice commands. Or that you won't ever catch a cold.
Just imagine that when you'll be at a certain age, mind control will be the thing you'll be told "but it's so much easier", even if you'll not be able to master it.
isn't it still faster to just move your hand and rotate the temperature knob than using a voice command "XXXX increase temperature by X degrees"? Using muscle memory feels to me like using the least resources while articulating a phrase utilizes more resources.
I'm sure it is faster to use your hand. But I'm not sure faster is the right metric. Safety is probably higher on my list, and I'd say voice commands are safer than taking your hand off the wheel for any reason.
I enjoyed Simple for their amazing app, but in the end found that the 1 or 2 times a year I sold something for cash on Craigslist meant I always needed a branch. So I gave up and moved to a credit union.
There is a middle ground between taking your ball and going home and playing by the new rules without complaint.
Adding another app — my vote goes to Signal - and making a lot of noise on WhatsApp is one option. If I recall correctly, WhatsApp has statuses. Changing yours to “Keeping WhatsApp for business transactions only — find me on Signal for private chat” is one idea. The people on this board have the power to move their friends away from terrible software. Use it.
