Showing posts with label twitter. Show all posts
Showing posts with label twitter. Show all posts

Wednesday, November 8, 2023

Nov 8 2023 - X is now on the spot

 

It has been quite a while since Twitter rebranded to X.  That was July.  Yesterday the change of name showed up on my Mailchimp template which you can see below.

It is called X, formerly known as Twitter at the request of Elon Musk. After the first reference, the stylebook permits a writer to simply call the service as "X" or "the X platform".  It is from the font "Special Alphabets 4" from Monotype's Special Alphabets font family. 

X is Elon Musk's favourite letter.  And the name X has great sentimental value. It was one of his previous companies - was merged with Confinit ywhich was then rebranded to become PayPal.  He subsequently purchased X.com from PayPal, and that was the reason cited - the name had "great sentimental value" to him. 

Various faces of the platform, formerly accessible via usernames like @TwitterSupport or @TwitterSports, now go by handles like @Support.  

Will X remain?  It is expected that it will be sued over copyright.  There are 900 active trademark registrations in the U.S. for the letter X. The most problematic for Musk is Microsoft and Meta have active trademarks for X.  It turns out to be a crowded space.

It seemed to take a while for Mailchimp to change to the new logo and name.

I am expecting frosty leaves in the next little while.  Here's a Japanese Maple from a few years ago.  

Read more daily posts here:
marilyncornwellblogspot.com

Purchase works here:
Fine Art America- marilyncornwell.com
Redbubble - marilyncornwellart.ca

 

Friday, November 4, 2022

Nov 4 2022 - What Next for Twitter

 

My guess is that Twitter will die.  It will be no more.  When might that happen?

There are many headlines in the last few months and weeks along the lines of:   Can Elon Musk kill Twitter or cause Twitter to die?   


The Atlantic October 27th had an article that asks: can Musk kill Twitter immediately?  The article's author thought that unlikely.

The author then goes on to ask the next question: 
Can Musk "kneecap Twitter via inept management?" That was discussed in detail.  It seemed a more likely scenario.  The area of vulnerability is the two key teams of site-reliability engineers and the internal trust-and-safety team which handles content moderation.

The article outlines what would happen if these teams lose engineers.  All kinds of risks are real - hackers/hostile foreign governments, dealing with government subpoenas or law-enforcement requests, fraudsters operating low-level scams on the platform are not stopped, inexperienced engineer "pushes some buggy code and part of the site's functionality goes down".  

There's the possibility that Musk does roll back Twitter's content-moderation rules and reduces tools for monitoring and reporting abuse.  This results in a bad product with more radicalized communities, and so reduced users and advertising and a slow, dwindling death.


We the public likely think like Musk  social media platforms are  "technology".  But moderating content requires intelligence.

 "Those with trust-and-safety experience at the platform told me that a big percentage of the job is dealing with the messy edge cases that are difficult for a computer to decipher 
... Language and the meaning of language always evolves, but on the internet, that happens a billion times faster,” she told me. “And if what online speech governance does is manage the harms of how people communicate, it has to be constantly working and changing. It’s not like an oil change.”

i reference Warzel's article because it gets at the core issue/fact.  Social platforms aren't like the old world organization.   Their product is people interacting in communities. This makes the product  "living and breathing".  

And what is Warzel's conclusion -  seems to me the likely scenario of Twitter's future:

"Living, breathing things do one thing quite reliably: They eventually die, for all kinds of reasons. They die of natural causes, or because of direct harm. They die because of unforeseeable events. Musk very well could kill Twitter out of malice or hubris, or through calculated, boneheaded decisions. But one possibility seems more likely than others. If Twitter dies at the hands of this billionaire, the cause is likely to be tragically banal—neglect.


Let's hope it is neglect and not malice/abuse which he seems to be good at. 


Here's some wall art from a few years ago.  A good title might be "Love Found".
 

Read more daily posts here:
marilyncornwellblog.com

Purchase works here:
Fine Art America- marilyncornwellart.com
Redbubble - marilyncornwellart.ca