Say the line Bart!
Free speech absolutist
Twitter is throttling traffic to websites Elon dislikes
Submitted 1 year ago by negativenull@lemm.ee to technology@lemmy.world
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/08/15/twitter-x-links-delayed/
Comments
mojo@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Rapidcreek@reddthat.com 1 year ago
Stop enabling his childish tactics by continuing to treat his platform as some kind of essential tool for communication. It simply isn’t.
theneverfox@pawb.social 1 year ago
It was - and it’s not that the need has gone away or been fulfilled elsewhere, it’s just that it’s no longer viable.
I think paying close attention to this is important though. It’s a case study that just keeps giving - every couple weeks we get an important reminder that billionaires and billion dollar companies aren’t a good thing - their interests are not aligned with ours
Furbag@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I have never used Twitter or X even once in my life. It’s definitely not essential. I really don’t understand how people have convinced themselves that short format screamposting into the void is somehow the peak of communication. Just quit and let your followers know why.
If people actually cared about what you had to say, they’d go wherever you go to hear you say it. If not, were they really all that interested in the first place? or was it just convenient because they were already on Twitter and so were you?
ptsdstillinmymind@lemmy.studio 1 year ago
This is the correct and only take. Stop using these shit services.
o_0@slrpnk.net 1 year ago
at this point, with twitter being inaccessible to non logged in user, the ‘public square’ thing is totally done,. Get off twitter now. There are alternatives.
Thorny_Thicket@sopuli.xyz 1 year ago
People demanding others to leave Twitter often seem to forget that not everyone has the same experience on that platform. If one wants to argue that I should leave to make some sort of a statement then fair enough, but to claim I should leave because it has now become something it wasn’t before doesn’t at all resonate with my personal experience. Besides the obvious UI changes I haven’t noticed anything else to be different. No one is forcing right wing/conspiracy propaganda down my throat there. My highly curated feed has the same content it always has and when I see something I’m not interested about I block it and it’s gone. Lemmy is way better alternative for Reddit than Mastodon is for Twitter.
Daft_ish@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Do what you want but just be sure to know shit is going down hill. It’s not effecting you now but doesn’t hurt to start looking for an alternative for when these wide sweeping changes do start effecting you.
redcalcium@lemmy.institute 1 year ago
I don’t give a xit about Xitter.
teft@startrek.website 1 year ago
Wait, I was told net neutrality wasn’t needed.
elscallr@lemmy.world 1 year ago
This has nothing to do with net neutrality. Either you didn’t read the article, you didn’t understand what you read, or you don’t understand what net neutrality means.
To your credit, the use of “throttles” in the headline is (likely intentionally) deceptive. It’s the wrong term entirely. What Xitter did was make their own servers wait ~5 seconds before serving an http redirect.
teft@startrek.website 1 year ago
Net Neutrality.
The principle that internet service providers should enable access to all content and applications regardless of source and without favoring, blocking, or throttling particular products or websites.
Sounds exactly like he is disregarding net neutrality to me.
brygphilomena@lemmy.world 1 year ago
It definitely draws direct parallels to net neutrality. It also shows the consolidation of web services into the hands of a few large corporations and the impact it has on the internet.
Im sure Twitter would argue that it’s not throttling, they don’t limit the speed in any way. But it does make it appear to end users as if the web site is loading slower.
It would be interesting if these sites could see a noticeable drop in traffic during the period Twitter was imposing delays on the redirect. If so, thats potential lost revenue and a basis for a lawsuit.
Alexstarfire@lemmy.world 1 year ago
What is Twitter?
aranym@lemmy.name 1 year ago
A Mastodon alternative apparently. Seems they haven’t implemented ActivityPub yet? I’ll stay away.
BroccoliFarts@lemmy.world 1 year ago
It’s an older platform that no longer exists. You’re thinking of X. Which is newer than Mastodon but still hasn’t implemented activitypub.
QuazarOmega@lemy.lol 1 year ago
Birdy don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me, no more
alienanimals@lemmy.world 1 year ago
People eat Elon Musk’s garbage PR like it’s dinner.
Every damn day they post about some inane shit just so Elon can stay in the 24 hour news cycle.
kameecoding@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I am not sure being a petty anti-competitive cunt here is inane exactly,if anything it highlights the issues with rich cunts owning access control.
Veedem@lemmy.world 1 year ago
These companies either need to rip the bandaid off and leave Twitter or, at least, start establishing themselves elsewhere and encourage their users to find the content wherever that place is.
fluxion@lemmy.world 1 year ago
On Tuesday afternoon, hours after this story was first published, X began reversing the throttling on some of the sites, dropping the delay times back to zero. It was unknown if all the throttled websites had normal service restored.
Who there didn’t see that coming? They thought nobody was gonna notice 5s delays on NYT links?
That new CEO must be locked in a cage somewhere at this point because she is definitely not calling the shots on this, or “X”, or any of the other nonsense that’s still been occurring because only one billionaire egomaniac is capable of this absolute fucking trainwreck.
cyborganism@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
Doesn’t that go against net neutrality?
vector_zero@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Is Twitter an ISP?
SendMePhotos@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Yes.
TheWoozy@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Twitter is website that contains “links to” the other 5 websites. Those “links to other sites” are really links to Twitter scripts that do database queries before finally linking to the other sites for real. It is easy for elmo to insert delays in the process.
smileyhead@discuss.tchncs.de 1 year ago
Net neutrality is about Internet itself. Twitter/X is a service build on top of the Internet, so no.
It is for example when your Internet provider Gomes you 100Mb/s, but only when accessing these particular sites, otherwise it’s 1Mb/s. It has nothing to do with data caps or overall speed limit, as some suggest, or with speed on the other end.
JTode@lemmy.world 1 year ago
They repealed that anyways.
salient_one@lemmy.villa-straylight.social 1 year ago
The most immature billionaire. Scary.
Rounddog@feddit.ch 1 year ago
It’s Elon Musk. So it’s not surprising.
Spacebar@lemmy.world [bot] 1 year ago
Companies need to abandon Xwitter already
Hildegarde@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I love the article has an image of the letters T, W and @ from the building.
Good one
Gork@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Just like the GTA Internet cafes
FlembleFabber@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
Thank you for saying twitter
NeoNachtwaechter@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Isn’t it called Ex-Twitter?
sour@kbin.social 1 year ago
the website formerly known as twitter
JTode@lemmy.world 1 year ago
There are those of us who were on the Internet before the capital showed up, and all of us said that it was a bad idea to use these corporate silos, that there were implications that were not great to handing what we knew would one day be the public square over to private interests. We were not listened to, of course, and for the thirty years that the government kept the house of cards propped up with zero interest they created a real illusion that it might actually work.
But maybe I have to reassess Elon. I have heretofore considered him something of a bad man, a Senator Palpatine with his “saving the world through capitalism” schtick, but with an Emperor lurking in his twisted mind. And here we have that very Emperor, taking off the mask. But perhaps… perhaps… perhaps Musk is actually Vader. Perhaps in revealing, to all with eyes to see, the very problems we Libre’d zealots have been crying out in the wilderness about, perhaps he is the one who will restore balance to the Internet.
Nah he’s just an apartheid rich boy who talked a good line while he could keep pulling free money out of the bag, but now that he has to put money back in the bag he’s taking whatever work he can get.
EmperorHenry@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
“It’s a private company and they can do what they want!”
Is what people say to me when I advocate for the free speech rights of everyone. Now that you don’t like what the private company is doing it’s suddenly bad. All censorship and all throttling is bad.
HeavyDogFeet@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I mean, it is a private company and they can do what they want. It’s a shitty and childish thing that Musk is choosing to do but it’s his $44B dumpster fire to fuel as he pleases.
Advocating for free speech rights for a private American company to be beholden to is stupid because it misunderstands everything about free speech laws work and how companies and content moderation work.
The people who think Elon brought free speech to Twitter tend to also be the people who think free speech starts and ends at your right to use slurs without social consequences.
EmperorHenry@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
Advocating for free speech rights for a private American company to be beholden to is stupid because it misunderstands everything about free speech laws work and how companies and content moderation work.
Social media platforms have a liability shield. If they get to be completely faultless for everything that happens on their platform, why do they also get to control what happens on their platforms?
Bongles@lemm.ee 1 year ago
It’s a private company and they can do what they want… And people who use the service can complain about it getting worse.
xuxebiko@kbin.social 1 year ago
slaves kowtowing to their fascist master
crowsby@kbin.social 1 year ago
I cannot believe that there are companies and non-wingnuts who are still actively using that site at this point. Like maybe at the start it was ha-ha funny watching him flail about with code printouts and unplugging random microservices leading to outages, but I feel like the moment he started actively funneling money to alt-right knuckleheads and human traffickers should have been enough of a kick in the pants for even folks heavily reliant on the platform to make their exit.
Sanctus@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Thats the worst part about the real world, nobody gives a shit whose at their table as long as they get to eat.
emogu@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Yep. It’s easy to complain or change your profile picture or share a link but if putting your money where your mouth is results in even the slightest discomfort or change to your comfort zone, that’s usually where people stop having a problem with the latest offense.
As long as our lives keep moving unaffected we’ll abide anything 😞
CafecitoHippo@lemm.ee 1 year ago
The problem is that there isn’t a great replacement for it now. The same with reddit. I’m on here and I’m on Bluesky. The main uses I have for both Reddit and Twitter/X is sports news and discourse. Reddit for the discourse and Twitter for the news. There aren’t the communities here to have that. I want to talk Orioles baseball but the Orioles community here literally has zero comments other than bot comments updating scoring updates/pitching changes during the game threads. I’m trying to do my part and comment/post stuff to them but without any actual responses or conversation it feels like yelling into the wind.
LostDeer@infosec.pub 1 year ago
Yea a lot of the niche communities haven’t and probably won’t migrate to these smaller sites like Lemmy and Mastodon. Don’t know how to solve the issue either.
In this case, the Orioles would have to announce they have an official mastodon to get most fans to move to it.
Personally I’ve just stopped using the internet for checking on my niche hobbies. A good number of Reddit clones have been trying to populate communities with bots to just post links but without any discourse, it’s the same effect as just googling “topic” and filtering for links from this week. I’m sure it will get better with time. Maybe
Kerrigor@kbin.social 1 year ago
Porn is the only reason to use it now
ICastFist@programming.dev 1 year ago
That’s the power of critical mass. Person 1 won’t leave because they have too many followers and follows Persons 2, 3 and 4, who also have too many followers and only follow person 5 and 6 there, who…
The decline is gradual, but will hardly be complete. Facebook isn’t as used as some years ago, but it’s still absurdly big. Xitter is likely to lose some relevancy, but there’s not much that can be done to truly “kill” it. One way to speed that up is if space karen x decides to block all porn.
sj_zero 1 year ago
I'm really shocked that anyone would be surprised.
So many people that used to be really amazing creators ended up down the Twitter rabbit hole. At first their content suffered, and then dried up completely. And now all you ever hear from them is about whatever Twitter tells them to hate this week.
Hating Twitter is just the latest thing to hate on Twitter. And all these people are going to keep on going to get their hit during the 2 minutes of hate, and then a bunch of them will run off and write articles about how much they hate Twitter based on all the stuff that they read on Twitter.