This May Rank Along With Yahoo

#TWEXIT

What do you do when the majority of your activist (and thus loud) customer base expresses distress, dismay, and disgust with your business decisions, and they start campaigning against you? If you're Mr Musk, you double down. And double down, and then double down some more.

Only - when your doubling down is actually an 80%-10% downsizing each time, it won't be long before that last person standing will be cut in half. And it'll be him at the rate he's going. 

In the Back To The Future series, Yahoo seemed such a good bet that it got a cameo "timesider" trading tip. Today the company's a husk of its former self, for some less than stellar decisions. Some companies don't even have a shadow presence any more. 

Where Twitter is going to fall on this scale is anyone's guess. 

I only heard this on the radio this morning in passing so I'm not sure yet on the details, as I find out I'll update this paragraph. One of Twitter's long-time partners have said that they'll withdraw support for the site because of Musk's policy of reinstating people who've been banned for hate speech and persecution, fomenting strife, etc.

Musk: "Let that stink in."

As far as the news would seem to suggest, a significant percentage of Twitter's advertisers have paused or totally withdrawn their advertising. Fair enough, Musk doesn't have to pay as many staff and contractors now - considering that some estimates place the current original employee and contractor workforce at less than 10% of the pre-purchase payroll - but his SpaceX engineers aren't really going to be able to work out what's going on and where all the buttons are. 

And while I noticed that SpaceX and Starlink seemingly bought (or were given) advertising space on the platform, it's hardly going to keep Twitter afloat financially if he has to rob Peter to pay Paul. 

Another shenanigan was to stack the news feed with weird, irrelevant, and unknown items. Because they served to push the "Trending" stuff further down, trending stuff like "RIP Twitter" and "The End of Twitter" . . . 

None of that's going to keep the site alive and operational. He needs people to sell advertising, to do some PR to cover over the almighty stuff-up he's made of it to date, and - most importantly - to start fixing the bugs that must be accumulating by the hour. He needs tech support people to help Twitter users with their mounting tally of errors. 

And - answer me honestly - would you work in the toxic environment he's created? 

The Bluebird is on life support and
the FailWhale is hovering, sensing
that its time will come again...

To be fair, these techniques have, as the article states, worked for Musk in the past but it's not winning him many fans, and right now there are a dozen or more Chinese EV manufacturers eating his lunch in that market, there's a competitor in the satellite Internet industry, other companies are now making inroads into the rocket market. 

He may have pioneered these industries but each has now become stuck in its paradigm, and much of that was shaped by his panic-mongering and demanding (HIS IDEA OF) perfection, and so is now stuck in particular ways of doing things, so that others can now take the best parts of his innovations and add their own twists. 

So he makes (quite expensive) Tesla cars, using gigapresses and robots? Someone else is making them the old fashioned way with less new-tech investment needed, no fancy self-driving or 27-point camera coverage - but great durability and range - and prices nearly half of what a Model 3 or Y cost. 

Remember when Hyundai made the now ubiquitous (and still on the road, many of them) 2000 Excel? These little cars were cheap, ran on the sniff of an oily rag, and changed the mix of cars on the road in Australia forever. They also decimated sales for many other small economy car manufacturers.

Half a dozen rocket companies have sprung up and aren't tied to Merlin and Kestrel design requirements, and are thus able to produce innovative motors that will probably see Space-X facing competition quite soon now

Similarly, messaging sites have sprung up over the years and many fallen by the wayside, but some (like Mastodon) were created precisely to offer an alternative to single-point-of-control messaging sites. Specifically, Twitter. Because Eugen Rochko, a young Russian who moved to Germany, realised that almost all centralised social media and messaging platforms were vulnerable to a narcissistic sociopathic control freak (oooh Mabel, imagine that!) and so he set about creating alternatives. 

And of course with the many thousand engineers and staff and contractors that Musk fired, it's almost inevitable that a few of them will bear him malice and desire to create mischief' so to speak, and no doubt a few of them will have already contributed to the Mastodon codebase, meaning on top of all its other advantages, it'll gain even more attractive features in the very near future. So very soon it may make as much sense to be on Mastodon as it did to be on Twitter in the last five years. 

What Can We Do?

I've done it. My accounts are still there on Twitter but inactive except when I need to contact the last three or four people that are hold-outs on there. I've already reconnected with most of the other people I know on Mastodon. The paradigm shifts a bit more slowly for some, but as Twitter gets worse, it will shift... 

Make an account now, just to be on the safe side. (I've put a tiny guide together you can refer to.) Use that guide, it even shows you how you can add all your follows and followers from Twitter with nothing more than few mouse clicks. But this needs both sites to be up - and Twitter may or may not be around in its current form very soon, so I say do it now. 

As to that... Musk may well have a Whole New Plan for Twitter and be already busily putting it all into action as I write this. And if Twitter switches over to any new programming, all these tools that we currently rely on to make a painless collection of all our friends may stop working. (How many of your Twitter contact's email addresses or phone numbers do you know? If Twitter crashed could you re-contact even 5% of them? Are you all right with that?)

So even if this all turns out to be BS, even if a cloud of Bluebird Twitter faeries descend on the platform and make it the bestest thing in all the world - all you'll have lost is 20 minutes of your time, and you'll have a backup in case history repeats.

Don't just use Mastodon because I've said it - have a look around there are others to try, Element is a messaging app as are Signal and Telegram, and there are a few social-network sites like Diaspora and Friendica which are more Facebook-like, and it makes sense to have more than one source of contact with friends and family, right? Ask your friends now where they're thinking of making a backup connection, reach a consensus and all go there.

Many Aussie tweeters have gone to the Mastodon aus.social server, but I'm on the mastodon.online server - with something like Mastodon it doesn't really matter, which is why I like it. With federated stuff online, you could even be on Diaspora and we could still follow one another and keep on chatting. 

It's a bit like those walkie-talkies that are in the cupboard in the hallway - one day you might find no mobile coverage, and then they're a good fallback for checking in with Mum a few streets away.

Use hashtags #TWEXIT and #LetThatStinkIn to raise awareness. Share this post and posts like it, that will raise awareness. All messaging systems are ephemeral, social networks break. 

And awareness drives informed decision, and perhaps for many that informed decision will be to move to a messaging service that one man alone can't screw up.