pascalcampion

late night thoughts

  desolationlesbian

Explaining to all companies that the three requirements for me to use a social media with any frequency are:

• A chronological follow-only feed, ideally which I can set as default
• Anonymity (my real name and face are not required)
• Have a desktop version

You may call me boomer or whatever but if a social media doesn’t have bare minimum these three things then I will never use it ever. I won’t even make an account. You can suck at everything else but these are non-negotiable. The fact that they are anathema to profitability does not matter to me. If you cannot provide me these three things then I will simply not use any social media at all.

  clownsaint

Here's my most popular post on twt, a collection of stuff I've animated. An animation reel! This is all OC work.

  yellenabelova

#Neil, i see what you did here

  daisywords

btw I know ppl on this site go on abt mutuals but if you are someone that shows up in my notes regularly who I don't follow, I do notice and I am fond of you and if you reblog something from me I do think "YES I have pleased the follower with good taste"

  alfea

  niennanir

So my post on preserving your fanfic as downloads and potentially prints garnered some attention and I’m not going to call anyone out, because I’m just going to assume they’re very young and don’t know how the internet works and go on about my day. (Because if they’re adults I’m going to lose sleep over that and I don’t sleep as it is)

But this is a PSA: Once you post it on the internet you can’t take it down. You can’t stop it from being saved or printed or stuck in a three ring binder or slapped on a Cricut mug. You -can- stop people from making money off of it, usually, but you can’t stop it from being preserved. Once it’s out there, it’s out there. Forever. You can delete that fic from AO3 or ffnet but there’s probably a copy of it is still out there on someone’s kindle. You can delete the post with your fan art but I can almost guarantee it’s someone’s lock screen right now.

The very first thing I ever did on the internet, back when it was Arpanet in the 90′s, was printscreen a Star Trek fic. I had to distract the librarian at the circulation desk so she wouldn’t see what was rolling off the dot-matrix printer at the end of the pod and then I had to spend half an hour tearing the feed tabs off the paper. The internet is designed for things to live forever. 

Don’t put it on the internet if that’s going to freak you out.

  afloweroutofstone

They’re about to break so many laws it’s not even funny, I can feel it in my bones

  jarmes

It’s about PayPal. This is all about fucking PayPal

He’s still pissed they fired him. He’s still pissed they didn’t like his idea of calling PayPal X

20 years and he has not learned a single thing. He’s still throwing a tantrum about people not liking his bad name suggestion decades ago

  dduane

Yeah, this again. :/

John Bull's Twitter thread takes this on in depth. Warning: contains idees fixe and boardroom backstabbing. :)

  zenosanalytic

some ppl are having difficulty accessing the thread, so Im just going to copy-pasta it into an indent(Edit: apparently tumblr borks if you indent that much text so Im italicizing instead. para=1 tweet, and all credit to John Bull, obvsl):

To understand Musk's renewed obsession with X and focus on financial services, you REALLY need to understand the X/Confinity merger that became PayPal. And, particularly, the Peter Thiel-led coup that kicked Musk out as CEO/Chief Strategist. Here's how that happened

In early 1999 Zip2, the newspaper online directory service Musk had co-founded, was sold to Compaq for $300m. Elon's share of this was about $20m. Elon begins hitting up old connections from his time at ScotiaBank. He says he wants to launch "A Financial Superstore"

Having drummed up support, he founds a new company to take this forward. He immediately buys the http://x.com domain off Pittsburgh PowerComputer for 1.5 MILLION shares of A-Stock in his new company, X. Advisors express concern over X as a brand. Elon loves it.

He describes http://x.com as "the coolest URL on the internet". X, he says, marks the spot for treasure. That's how people will see it he insists. He invests $12.5m of his own cash into X and begins trying to build an 'online bank'.

Musk's obsession with speed and disdain for regulation means X developers love him, but causes worry with the financial expert side. First Western, the banking partner, discover that accounts are being opened under fake names. The finance peeps try (but fail) to coup Elon out.

In early 2000, X hits the news for a vulnerability that allows money to be moved between accounts with just account details. This is fixed, but spooks investors. Elon agrees with investor Mike Moritz from Sequoia to become CTO while Bill Harris (ex-Intuit) becomes CEO.

Meanwhile, over the road (literally), a startup called Confinity is making waves. It's funded by Peter Thiel, who is also its CEO, but is the brainchild of Ukrainian Max Levchin its CTO. Backed by Nokia, Confinity is making a way to 'beam' money between PalmPilots by infrared.

Need to skip A LOT here. But jump forward a bit and both X and Confinity ACCIDENTALLY create the same killer product as an offshoot of their main one: The ability to exchange money via email. Confinity pivot to this exclusively. X don't. Musk's goal is financial superstore.

The strength and focus that HAS gone on X's email payment processor has mostly been due to David Sacks, one of Elon's hires who he trusts and who spotted the huge potential. He keeps Musk grounded with eyes on this while Elon is ALSO pushing into riskier financial service stuff

But Harris (X CEO) sees Confinity and X are BOTH in a death spiral. They are BLEEDING cash fighting. He speaks to Thiel. Thiel suggests a merger. Musk fights this. But ahead of another funding round, Harris threatens to quit, spooking investors Elon: "He held a gun to my head."

The firms merge. Harris and Thiel insist the new firm (X) focus on email payments, ideally on Confinity's PayPal platform. Elon INSISTS financial superstore is the future. When Thiel and Harris fall out over strategy, Elon persuades Thiel to help coup Harris out. Elon is now CEO

Thiel, and Levchin, are initially fine with this. Musk has promised to focus on email payments, and to improve PayPal first. Financial superstore a "future thing". But over months Levchin realises that Elon has become obsessed with porting PayPal ENTIRELY to Microsoft not Linux.

Months of dev time, with X burning $12m a month, is lost to Musk's obsession with PayPal V2. A complete rework on Microsoft. It's BEYOND a bad plan. Microsoft servers and MSSQL CANNOT scale enough at the time. But Elon decrees it. He even decrees a launch with no rollback option.

Elon also orders the killing off the PayPal brand. He orders http://paypal.com routed to http://x.com. Logos phased out. Decrees it should now be referred to as X-PayPal and described as part of the X family of financial services. He's not letting the dream go.

This obsession with X as a brand causes enormous concern as it CONTINUALLY goes down terribly with consumers. Vivien Go on focus group testing: "Again and again, the theme of 'Oh God, I wouldn't trust this website. It's an adult website' and 'I just wouldn't trust that"

Meanwhile, Thiel finds out via X's financial wizard, Roelof Botha, that the financial superstore side stuff is WORSE than Musk has let on. X is offering credit on almost no identity checks. Combined with the V2 fiasco, Thiel and others realise X is on the verge of failing.

Thiel and some other key figures approach Elon and BEG him to abandon Paypal V2, and his strategy of trying to become a one-stop global financial service. Thiel points out they only have $65m left in the bank. Musk refuses. They have to go for "the grand prize" he insists.

Thiel, Levchin, Botha and Sacks now cross the rubicon. They decide to coup Elon. They quietly gather the signatures of a lot of the Confinity loyalists on a mass-quit threat. On 19th Sep 2000, as Elon is taking off for Europe on his honeymoon, they make their move.

Thiel and Levkin are board members. The other four are Musk, Malloy (repping another major investor), Moritz and Hurd (Chair). As Elon is in the air, Thiel asks Hurd to summon an emergency board meeting by phone.

Over the phone, Thiel and Levkin reveal the PayPal V2 and financial issues to Malloy, Moritz and Hurd, who had no idea about them. They're sympathetic to Elon as founder and visionary, but horrified this was all done without board approval and at the mass-resignation letter.

With Elon out of the country, he can't work his in person magic. He insists over the phone that the financial superstore is the big win. All this is in service of that. It doesn't work. Malloy, Moritz and Hurd side with Thiel and Levkin. Elon is out as CEO before he can fly back

Musk is devastated and furious. "Sneaky Backstabbing Bastards." He describes them as, but to his credit recognises he can't fight it and presents a public image it was a mutual decision. Thiel becomes interim (and later permanent) CEO, orders the end of V2 and a focus on PayPal

Hopefully you can see the roots of this whole X pivot thing now. Musk has decided that the way to save Twitter and regain his genius status is to fall back on his unrealised vision from 1999. Build "the world's financial nexus" as he described it then.

I think it's a TERRIBLE idea. The world's moved on. He's doing the tech equivalent of drunk-DMing his highschool girlfriend to tell her she's still hot. But you can see the origins now. He thinks this is the genius idea that got away. And that this time nobody can coup him.

Anyway, hope that's useful context. None of what's going on is surprising if you lived through it or have studied it. You just have to get past the hagiography Silicon Valley creates around it's "great men" If this was useful you can buy me a coffee here: Ko-Fi

FURTHER READING: Probably the most readable (and least hagiographic) account of all the above I've read over the years is "The Founders" by Jimmy Soni. Available as both a book and audiobook, and if this kind of stuff fascinates you it's well worth your time.

  theabstruseone

I slept in and just woke up, so here's what I've been able to figure out while sipping coffee:

• Twitter has officially rebranded to X just a day or two after the move was announced.
• The official branding is that a tweet is now called "an X", for which there are too many jokes to make.
• The official account is still @twitter because someone else owns @X and they didn't reclaim the username first.
• The logo is 𝕏 which is the Unicode character Unicode U+1D54F so the logo cannot be copyrighted and it is highly likely that it cannot be protected as a trademark.
• Outside the visual logo, the trademark for the use of the name "X" in social media is held by Meta/Facebook, while the trademark for "X" in finance/commerce is owned by Microsoft.
• The rebranding has been stopped in Japan as the term "X Japan" is trademarked by the band X JAPAN.
• Elon had workers taking down the "Twitter" name from the side of the building. He did not have any permits to do this. The building owner called the cops who stopped the crew midway through so the sign just says "er".
• He still plans to call his streaming and media hosting branch of the company as "Xvideo". Nobody tell him.

This man wants you to give him control over all of your financial information.

Edit to add further developments:

• Yes, this is all real. Check the notes and people have pictures. I understand the skepticism because it feels like a joke, but to the best of my knowledge, everything in the above is accurate.
• Microsoft also owns the trademark on X for chatting and gaming because, y'know, X-box.
• The logo came from a random podcaster who tweeted it at Musk.
• The act of sending a tweet is now known as "Xeet". They even added a guide for how to Xeet.
• The branding change is inconsistent. Some icons have changed, some have not, and the words "tweet" and "Twitter" are still all over the place on the site.
• TweetDeck is currently unaffected and I hope it's because they forgot that it exists again. The complete negligence toward that tool and just leaving it the hell alone is the only thing that makes the site usable (and some of us are stuck on there for work).
• This is likely because Musk was forced out of PayPal due to a failed credit line project and because he wanted to rename the site to "X-Paypal" and eventually just to "X".
• This became a big deal behind the scenes as Musk paid over $1 million for the domain X.com and wanted to rebrand the company that already had the brand awareness people were using it as a verb to "pay online" (as in "I'll paypal you the money")
• X.com is not currently owned by Musk. It is held by a domain registrar (I believe GoDaddy but I'm not entirely sure). Meaning as long as he's hung onto this idea of making X Corp a thing, he couldn't be arsed to pay the $15/year domain renewal.
• Bloomberg estimates the rebranding wiped between $4 to $20 billion from the valuation of Twitter due to the loss of brand awareness.
• The company was already worth less than half of the $44 billion Musk paid for it in the first place, meaning this may end up a worse deal than when Yahoo bought Tumblr.
• One estimation (though this is with a grain of salt) said that Twitter is three months from defaulting on its loans taken out to buy the site. Those loans were secured with Tesla stock. Meaning the bank will seize that stock and, since it won't be enough to pay the debt (since it's worth around 50-75% of what it was at the time of the loan), they can start seizing personal assets of Elon Musk including the Twitter company itself and his interest in SpaceX.
• Sesame Street's official accounts mocked the rebranding.

  dduane

When Statler and Waldorf go after you for your life choices, you seriously need to sit down and have a rethink.

  thatswhatsushesaid

hi yes i would like to file a complaint regarding the narrative's reaping to sowing ratio, I--

/panicked sweating, y-yes I'll hold

  mariomarc

ALT

How did X get even stupider.

  squigglyexplosive

THIS BITCH EMPTY

XEET

  rinokami

I'm pronouncing it "ex-eet" because that's what everyone should be doing on that website who hasn't already.

  aquitainequeen

David Slack warning against AMPTP trying to turn the unions against each other, and stating the facts.

  expertpedestrian

ALT

  fernacular

When a centaur runs full speed what do they do with their arms i need to know for science

  fernacular

Which one looks least silly

  frankenmouse

I’d vote last one. Although the second one makes the most sense from a “human body move like horse head” perspective, it just kinda gives me the heebie jeebies.