One of Susquehanna’s richest bets was purchasing a 15 percent stake in TikTok’s parent company, #ByteDance, in 2012;
according to the Wall Street Journal, Yass’ personal stake in the company is about seven percent.
@StillIRise1963 You might like @jpjjr1961's blog about #Libertarian's if you haven't checked it out. He has a whole page dedicated to Libertarians enabling #racism throughout history.
I don’t want an internet where 90% of traffic and electricity is wasted to make generative „AI“ and their investors happy while their energy hunger destroys our planet. I want an internet that shares knowledge for free for everyone, so we can build a better world.
There is also state level research, that shows similar results: researchers at the #CATOInstitute, a #CONSERVATIVE#LIBERTARIAN think tank, looked into #Texas in 2019. They found that undocumented #immigrants were 37.1% less likely to be convicted of a #crime.
Dispatches from the #Twitter war:
• The bots have won
• Elon has lost
• Now is the time to encourage defection
• No, NOT to BlueSky
I can elaborate:
The Bots have Won
Back in early 2022, #ElonMusk promised to purchase Twitter and wage war on bots, presumably the ones that were peddling cryptocurrency #scams, romance scams, and all sorts of other scams.
There is a good chance that Elon only said this to try to weasel his way out of purchasing Twitter; basically, if he could claim that the product he was promised didn't resemble what was available in reality, he could undo his promise to purchase the corporation. By claiming Twitter was rife with bots, this was his attempt to do so. But whether it was dishonest or not, Elon stuck to his pledge to try to rid the platform of #bots, in ways that are alternatingly incompetent, silly, and ineffective.
Long story short, Elon never saw his "eliminate all bots" promise through to completion. The ultimate concession to failure was when he changed the Twitter algorithm to favor paying users over regular ones, meaning the best way to be heard on the platform was to give him $8 and say your piece. But that $8 surcharge came at a steep cost: no longer were tweets being amplified based on the content of their quality, but on whether the user had extra money to waste or not.
Initially, maybe this was good for the paying users too. After all, someone with $8 who follows Elon might consider themselves very smart, and those people think they have some very smart things to say. To the average onlooker, though, their "very smart musings" look like complete and utter crap: unfunny jokes, stale memes, cold takes.
It turns out that having money doesn't equal intelligence, and Twitter was providing us evidence at a rapid pace.
Elon has Lost
Let's get the obvious things out first: Elon overpaid for Twitter. That much we know. And the value of Twitter has tanked since then, because even the free market won't continue to honor foolish business decisions.
But today, Elon has started limiting the posts that various users are even allowed to see, as low as 300 posts per day for new users, 600 for normal users, and 6000 for the fools who pay $8 to him.
As I understand it, 300 to 600 posts is not a lot. For comparison, when you click Show More in Mastodon, you're probably loading 20 posts at a minimum. Click Show More 30 times, and you've already seen 600. Depending on your usage habits (maybe you just like to skim!) you can easily breeze through these limits in a fraction of an hour.
And that's just not good for user retention. If somebody is locked out of a website after spending a certain amount of time there, I don't think they're going to cough up a couple extra dollars to keep browsing. When the Bezos-owned Washington Post begs me to subscribe to their newspaper, I turn 180° and look for a different source. And the Post actually has valuable information, it's not a cesspit riddled with self-important idiots who pay money to get their unfunny jokes stuck to the top of comment threads.
Now is the Time to Encourage Defection
Imagine you love Elon Musk, you think he can do nothing wrong, and you even join Twitter just to see how much better it can become under his new leadership. And you get hit with a 300 post maximum before the site stops working and/or begs you to cough up your hard-earned cash, to the guy you're pretty sure is already a billionaire.
Isn't it just disheartening?
Here's a more reasonable scenario: You're a Twitter addict. We've all been there, after all. The conversations suck you in, and they're almost always negative conversations too. Twitter drives its engagement based on negative interactions, using #addiction forming patterns that resemble the casino slot machine more than a public square.
Then, one day, whatever #argument you are watching or participating in, suddenly gets replaced with a "insert $8 to continue" screen. It's straight out of a #MontyPython sketch. For the displeasure of raising your stress levels and your blood pressure, you must now spend money.
This is horrible. All of it is absolutely, totally horrible. Anyone who was lulled into complacency by Twitter should now have their way of life shaken to the point of reconsidering why they use the platform. I used to be among them, and I cannot stress how much I regret giving Twitter my time. There are good people on Twitter, but there is no good Twitter to be had.
Stay Away from BlueSky
Never choose the lesser of two evils, when there are more than two viable choices. It has been a trend, recently, for large influencers to hope to recreate Twitter, verbatim, somewhere or anywhere else. The November 2022 #TwitterMigration seemed to be equal parts #TwitterRefugee and hapless influencer who was simply looking for the most interaction.
Never mind the complexities of Mastodon, most influencers were disappointed by how it was difficult to reassemble the same audience as they had on Twitter. The network effect was in full swing on Twitter: you joined Twitter because people were there, and people were there because you joined Twitter, so not joining Twitter became simply unfeasible for most people.
Influencers do understand one thing: hero worship. And if you were complacent during earlier Twitter, perhaps the easiest hero to worship is #JackDorsey. He created Twitter, after all. And sure, Twitter itself was always toxic ever since it started encouraging arguments. Maybe a lot of people have succumbed to addiction to Twitter, and have decided that Twitter is now only bad because of Elon Musk, and not because it was always bad.
The people in this mindset are more than happy to follow Jack Dorsey to his next terrible creation, which appears to be BlueSky. Right now, the website is simply a Twitter clone, and it's begging influencers to come to it because soon, it infers, it will be the Twitter for people who aren't quite as extreme as Elon Musk.
I hate to use the term, and I do not use it lightly, but #BlueSky is "virtue signaling" about being #federated. Right now, there is only one BlueSky server, and it is invite only. Something cannot be federated if there's nothing to federate with, especially if it's closed off from the world to begin with.
But do you know why BlueSky is #VirtueSignalling? Quite simply: it has nothing else to offer. Mastodon is, as most foundational level, a federated Twitter clone. BlueSky is, at ITS most foundational level, a Twitter clone with nothing to separate it from Twitter. But being federated is what all the cool kids want, so Jack Dorsey weaseled the word into its description to make people think it might be like Mastodon, if not compatible with it.
Jack Dorsey has always been a fundamentally bad person, a #libertarian#techbro who has no qualms about supporting the far right when it helps him.
Dorsey is friends with #Jan6 promoter, #StopTheSteal believer, and all-around right wing disinfo peddler #AliAlexander, for example. He has always had constant, open dialogues with conservatives who want to accuse him of being too biased against them, and he is often stooped to appease them without questioning whether they were lying to him the entire time.
Dorsey has also become more obsessed with #cryptocurrency in recent years, with a huge donation to the Twitter-like #Nostr social network, a place where almost all conversations are one-sided cryptocurrency plugs, and sending cryptocurrency over it was one of the defining features.
And Nostr wants to be #PayToWin too, the same way Twitter currently is.
Final thoughts
Succinctly: Mastodon is good, actually. It has a lot of flaws, it has a lot of user experience issues to work out, but I am incredibly thankful it is not being driven into the ground by venture capitalists hell-bent on extracting as much time, money, and attention out of the average human being as possible.
Jim Wright has a very valid point about #Libertarian booing of Trump: "#Libertarians hate everybody including themselves. They'd heckle their own candidate."
Can support this from my own experience of movement Libertarians. Most of them have no consistent moral system beyond "I should be allowed to do whatever I want."
Live shot of Chase Oliver patiently explaining to @reasonmagazine the obvious #libertarian position on trans healthcare for youth, and Liz Wolfe derangely appealing to Jesse fucking Singal. 🤦♂️
Libertarian outsider Javier Milei will be Argentina's next president, said his rival, Economy Minister Sergio Massa, who conceded defeat after Sunday's election.
Today 10 years ago Aaron Swartz committed suicide, after being arrested by MIT police and prosecuted by the then U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts Carmen Ortiz for massively downloading academic journal articles from JSTOR. He was charged $1 million in fines and 35 years in prison. He was 26 years old.
He believed that, above anything else, information should be free.
Workers unite! Form unions to gain collective strength against bosses. Recognize that harm to one worker reflects the systemic exploitation affecting all workers. We have a world to win!
If we live in a good place, with opportunities and prosperity, we should invite other people to join us and share in those opportunities and prosperity.
At minimum, we should not prohibit others from moving for a better life for them and their family.
The folks at #Macrodose are talking perfectly seriously about something called "anarcho-capitalism". I'm embarrassed for them.
No, guys, that does not work. It is a contradiction in terms. It cannot exist. If there are no laws, there is no property. Which means that no one can own the means of production, no one can own the land, no one can sell their labour...
If you want a system in which there are no laws except those which protect the rich and powerful, that's not any kind of anarchism. If those laws can't be overturned by the will of the people, then it's an oligarchy, and an oligarchy of the most authoritarian kind.
Anyone who claims to be either an #Anarchist or a #Libertarian but wants to preserve the right to property is a liar and a fraud. Distrust everything they say.
Robert Nozick, a #libertarian#philosopher, wanted you to imagine that you are offered a sophisticated machine which can perfectly simulate all the things you deem most pleasurable.
He asks you now: would you prefer this to real life?
Nozick assumes you don't & uses that as a justification against (#ethical) hedonists.
"Starchild (who is assaulted in this video) has been a mainstay at #Libertarian events for decades.
"He has served in positions of leadership at virtually every level. A dedicated activist, his recognition was so widespread, even speculation on his next outfit became a ritual before every convention.
"To watch him get and assaulted by #MAGA insurgents—for holding a sign saying "No Wannabe Dictators" at his own convention—speaks volumes as to what #MisesPAC has done to the #LibertarianParty"
I didn't see anybody cover this #LibertarianParty activist get assaulted by MAGAts, despite #Trump's speech going on at the same time.
#MisesPAC is not just pro-#MAGA but pro-fascist, having come together right after #Charlottesville. Libertarians actually kicked them out for the "Blood and soil" shit.
JFC. The brazen and naked hypocrisy of the leader of a third party openly using the party's platform and funds to support a different party's candidate is just revolting. That the candidate being supported is a fascist with polar-opposite ideals to #libertarianism is just icing on the cake. The #Libertarian party deserves better. McArdle is a pathetic crony MAGA sham.
QT: https://mastodon.social/@fakertarians/112554694716492550
Argentina's Milei Wins Presidential Election, Massa Concedes (www.barrons.com)
Libertarian outsider Javier Milei will be Argentina's next president, said his rival, Economy Minister Sergio Massa, who conceded defeat after Sunday's election.