Tag: Twitter

Repent, the End is Nigh!

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Siva Vaidhyanathan is a professor of Media Studies at the University of Virginia.  So if he tells me Twitter is doomed then it must be!

His proof:

“How long can this Twitter last? It must be a matter of months away from total collapse. Of course, I’ve been saying that for a year now, and I have no special insight into its financial matters. Now, however, things seem to be in a death spiral that is more than financial. It’s technical. While Musk tried his best to distract critics by blaming artificial intelligence companies allegedly scraping Twitter, a glitch in Twitter itself meant its computers were demanding data from its servers in an infinite loop. So Twitter was killing itself. It seems to be a mercy killing.”

Or maybe he’s just a typical Lefty that doesn’t want to pay eight bucks to get back his blue check mark on Twitter.  Waaa!  Waaa!  Waaa!

A Topical Quote for This Fourth of July

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I agree with this.  One of the few pleasant surprises of the last decade is Musk’s purchase of Twitter.  And as for the Orwell quote, the fraud is now well exposed.

 

Elon Musk Throttles the Throttlers

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The US inteligence agencies monitor hundreds of millions of tweets every day (a process known as scraping) to know who their enemies are and to use their friends at Google to throttle these voices on the internet.

Now Elon Musk has turned the tables on these mega-users.  He’s put the following limits on reading tweets:

– Verified accounts are limited to reading 6000 posts/day
– Unverified accounts to 600 posts/day
– New unverified accounts to 300/day

Now notice, these bots reading Twitter probably aren’t even verified accounts paying Elon his eight bucks a month.

So they can only read 600 posts a day.  And if they open new shell accounts those accounts can only read 300.

The feds are going to have fit.

Good!

 

 

Tucker’s First Twitter Commentary

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Tucker’s first opinion piece on Twitter dropped today.  It started out talking about the media pretending that Russia blew up their own dam in Ukraine just like they pretended that Russia blew up the NordStream pipeline.  Then he used this as a jumping off point to show how the media feeds the American public the talking points that the regime wants promulgated and ignores anything that isn’t sanctioned.  As a case in point he mentioned the recent UFO story.  And to drive the point home he compared it to the way information was handled in the Soviet Union.

It was a nice coherent ten minute piece.  It goes without saying there isn’t an opinion piece on any of the cable or broadcast news shows that I would listen to for ten minutes because it would be too painful.

Well done Tucker.  Keep it coming.  And well done Elon.  Without you there would be no place this could be seen.

Observations on Twitter Traffic

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So I’ve been somewhat active on my Twitter account for a few months now.  I currently follow 28 accounts and have 10 “followers.”  My posts get extremely low numbers of impressions.  Typically double digits or possibly low triple digits.  But yesterday I replied to a tweet by Matt Walsh asking opinions on his documentary.  My reply garnered 36,803 impressions, 1,000 likes, forty “retweets” and twenty replies.

So what does this tell me?  I guess not much of anything.  This little blip of viral attention will have no impact on my Twitter visibility.  All it tells me is that Twitter is a megaphone and when it wants to amplify something it has enormous reach and when it doesn’t care one way or another you might as well be talking to a wall.

And maybe that’s reality.  We all live in our own little bubbles and the next bubble over is completely insulated from yours by the impervious medium we float in.  There are all kinds of experts in marketing that supposedly know how to get something noticed.  I wonder if any of it is real.  Well anyway I thought this might be interesting.

 

Podcast Musings on a Friday Morning

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So, I started my Friday as I usually do, listening to the mellifluous tones of the ZMan Power Hour podcast while I exercise.  And as luck would have it, today’s show was made up of several segments about things in the news.  I like this kind of show because he puts his slant on these topics and it gives him a chance to be amusing at the expense of the clowns involved.

For instance, he commented on the recent Banking Sub-Committee meeting that featured Senator John Fetterman.  After a few clips of Fetterman attempting to articulate complete sentences about the recent bank failures ZMan opined that the real takeaway was that the Democrats want Fetterman there because having a brain damaged hobo in the Senate further disrupts the norms of our society.  After all, if the most powerful deliberative body in the world can include a man who can no longer master the use of the definite article, “the” in his sentences then why shouldn’t the country go for decades without negotiating a budget for the federal government.

And I get his point.  But the reward for me is listening to someone who can interlard his speech with a description like “brain-damaged hobo.”  There’s an eloquence, a style there.  We have to enjoy our lives and having someone as witty as that provides the opportunity.  And he has a number of these witticisms.  Some he borrows from impeccable sources.  He has taken Oscar Wilde’s phrase, “It would take a heart of stone not to laugh at …” and used it to very good effect on a number of occasions.  He invented that excellent trope “Xirl Science” where he reads from the published papers of mostly female practitioners of usually social sciences like “gender studies.”  The contents are sometimes hilarious in their use of pseudoscientific jargon and obvious lack of rigor or even coherence.  But my all-time favorite ZMan-ism was when he called David French an obsequious rumpswab.  It doesn’t get better than that.

I don’t always agree with all of the ZMan’s conclusions.  But his analysis of what’s going on is usually very insightful.  And his podcast is extremely well done.  The audio quality is good.  His thought process is clear and well enunciated and there is enough humor with the often-distressing message about our times to keep us from gagging on the medicine.

So, he did a segment on Tucker Carlson’s banishment from Fox News and their replacing him.  And while discussing this he made the point that eliminating Tucker Carlson may have also been a business decision based on the reality of cable news economics.  Not enough people are getting their news from cable channels to make it a lucrative business.  The highest rated news channels get one or two million viewers.  There are YouTube channels that get ten times that.  If Fox News pays Tucker Carlson millions of dollars a year, then there isn’t that much left for their bottom line.  And they would prefer to pay chump change to some kid to read off the teleprompter instead.  And I think he’s right.  They’ll be “retiring” all the high salary pundits and hiring kids who just want a job.

And that makes sense.  If a place like Twitter will give a megaphone to independent contractors like Tucker Carlson it may not be long before cable news is a thing of the past.  And that’s good.  The news channels have been shown to be a racket with their sham objectivity and their willingness to lie for the powers that be.  In a sense what I do is no different from what the pundits perform.  The only difference is the economics.  And honestly, that seems to be shifting too.

The ZMan provides a quality product.  The value proposition he provides is very equitable.  He provides entertainment and valuable information.  That’s much more than you get from many cable news shows.  So, it was a good lesson I took away.

Now to figure out a way to make it pay!

What’s Next for Tucker Carlson?

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Well, now there’s no reason to watch Fox News anymore.  It should be interesting to see how Carlson decides to go forward from here.  I’m assuming he’s not hurting for money.  He should probably start a channel on Rumble and put up a paywall.  He’s one of the more interesting people in broadcasting.  People will pay to get his content.

The other possibility is he goes into politics.  That I see as more problematic.  Politics is a very dirty game.  If you don’t need to use it to make lots of dirty money it won’t be an interesting career.

I think Carlson could form some kind of relationship with the likes of Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald, Salena Zito, Sharyl Attkisson and a few other real journalists to produce a media outlet that would provide the kind of reporting and opinion that can’t be found anywhere else in the media.  They would have believability.  That’s something that is so sorely lacking everywhere else.

If done right and without all the overhead that comes with a Fox News or a CNN, Carlson and a few reporters could break away from the dying landscape of network and cable news shows that no one needs or wants anymore.  News and analysis.  With the internet and a few resources like Rumble and maybe Elon Musk’s Twitter who needs studios and boardrooms?

Come to think of it, Carlson interviewed Musk last week.  Maybe those two could strike up a deal where Tucker’s content was available exclusively on Twitter with some of it behind a paywall.  It could make both of them a lot of money.  And it could serve as a model for the future.  I’ve heard that Musk wants to add a “substack” option to Twitter.  Having someone like Tucker Carlson as his first big “channel” might be just the thing he needs to steer talent to his platform.

So anyway, Tucker’s “firing” could be a very opportune moment to start seeing a new journalism.  Without the bloat of the dinosaur media, a cadre of people who want to tell interesting stories that have some resemblance to objective reality could provide a service that people would be willing to pay for.  I, even I, would pay a little bit for that.

Now it’s also certain that all the usual suspects on the Left will be gunning for Tucker Carlson.  I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s a target for the Justice Department’s attack dogs.  Their hatred for him probably rivals how they feel about Donald Trump.  After all he’s another traitor to his class.  They’ve already once gone after his family at home.  He had to move away from Washington to protect them.  This is not a trivial threat.  Hopefully he’s made enough money to be able to afford professional security services.  But no one is safe from the abuse that the FBI can bring to bear.  We’ll have to see whether these problems crop up for him.

Well, these are interesting times.  Tucker Carlson has been the only truthful voice in mainstream news commentary.  I hope that he will be able to find a way to continue shining a light on the criminal activities of the Washington regime.  There isn’t any other voice out there that has both his reach and credibility.  Hopefully someone like Musk who has the reach and also the money to set up a platform for him will come along and take advantage of this interesting opportunity.