Notices by Rod Hilton (rodhilton@mastodon.social), page 8

@Gargron I have left my facebook, instagram and twitter handles all activated all for the same reason, to reserve my name. Hell, I have my name reserved on gab, cohost, truth.social, post.news, and spoutible, all for the same reason. Bluesky too.

@jawarajabbi @Gargron are folks really going to pretend that Threads, the service built by the largest social media company in the world, with 100 million signed up users in the first weekend (10x the entire fediverse), whose mere existence led to an anti-federation pact signed by over 500 instance admins, which isn't even federating yet, isn't exactly identical to just some random Mastodon instance that someone set up with 100 people on it?

@Gargron I mean, you know why, right?

@Gargron Well for me the point is to make sure I have my name reserved over there.

Threads isn't real for me until there's a Web UI and a (free) API I can use to post with in order to leverage my various automations.

Until then it's just kind of a novel curiosity. Neither of these things seem to be much of a priority but I am enjoying watching Twitter implode because other people are using it.

Can anyone launch a successful social media app without stepping on their own dick within the first 48hrs?

Unless I'm using it wrong (very possible), there is no Home tab that shows you the people you're following. No custom feeds, no lists, no way for your follow graph to have any effect. Following someone, seemingly, does nothing other than boosting their feelgoods.

There's no explore tab, no trending topics, no hashtags. Search only searches accounts.

It's borderline unusable for anything.

And it already has over 2 million signups, lots of big brands, celebs, influencers.

Twitter's fucked.

Here are two things that are true at the same time.

1. Threads, honestly, kinda sucks.
2. Twitter is fucking done for, lower the casket.

Oh wow so apparently Tweet threads are now limited to 25 messages per thread.

I assume this is to drive more signups to Twitter Blue, where the character limit has been increased per-tweet.

The way this guy is shaking down every possible revenue angle like he's broke and the rent is due at the end of the week is really stunning. For a guy that didn't care about the economics of buying #Twitter.

https://www.garbageday.email/p/paying-to-use-a-site-you-cant-use?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

lol you won't even be able to read viral tweet threads or the replies. The people paying to have their replies boosted are going to looooove this.

The best part is that all those "the site functions fine after layoffs!" morons won't realize that it's precisely because of those cuts that the service can no longer handle read traffic and they have to do this.

And the best part is that tracking this still requires write traffic for read status, so he's traded cheap reads for expensive writes.

Omfg I just loaded Twitter for the first time in ages and did some casual scrolling, loading a few threads, standard stuff.

It took me 11 minutes to hit my daily cap. And that included the time I spent posting here to make fun of it.

And the UX when you hit it on reads is just that it says their own site is broken.

It is stunning to think of all the people who were paid money to design & build this office, all to have the company kicked out of the space without anyone ever even using it.

There have been so few people to ever step foot in that building that I would imagine everything is still in absolutely pristine condition, but branded with Twitter design that now has to be ripped out by a landlord who constructed the building just for Twitter, and never collected a dime.

The new office rivaled the SF headquarters in expense if not size, including a full kitchen for in-house chefs to cook meals for employees, but no chefs were ever hired.

I'll bet the vast majority of Twitter Boulder alum reading the headline "Twitter evicted from Boulder office" are picturing Walnut St, completely forgetting that the headlines are referring to the new office, one they never stepped foot in or likely even saw.

Musk completed the purchase of Twitter 4 months later, and almost immediately fired the entire Twitter Boulder team.

The TwitterBoulder Twitter account never even posted about the opening of its new office, the account seemingly abandoned since 2021 save for one Tweet the day Musk began buying shares, advising employees to take care of themselves.

The Site Lead was the only person who even mentioned the opening publicly, in a Tweet replied to almost entirely by ex-employees wanting to "visit"

So there sat this new building. A huge, cavernous waste of money. A monument to a corporate unwillingness or inability to change course in light of new information. A shrine to inflexibility.

Countless art installations from who knows how many local artists, all for an audience of nobody, locked behind badge access.

Engineering areas filled with hundreds and hundreds of dual monitor setups connected to exactly zero computers. A sparkling new, modern constructed abandoned ghost building.

People were asked to come into the office, largely so photos could be taken without it looking abandoned. It didn't work, even the grand opening of the space only brought about 15 people in, 2 of whom were required to be there to staff the front desk.

3 days later, Elon Musk was invited to an all-hands AMA where he was repeatedly asked about remote work and layoffs, to which he was noncommittal about his plans, though he did talk a bit about alien civilizations.

It honestly seemed like something that had just fallen through the cracks. Like the team designing and building it simply never got a memo to stop, and kept at it. Something that someone, somewhere should have seen as a line item and said "no, axe that" to save money in the middle of this acquisition.

It was almost unreal that nothing had stopped it from being completed. And it wasn't just a fake thrown together pseudo-office, this was *gorgeous*.

Twitter iconography everywhere.

I want to expand more on the comedy of errors that led to the eviction of #Twitter from their Boulder, Colorado office.

The story that leads up to this building even existing is bizarre and hilarious, so here goes...

A thread 🧵

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/06/judge-ruled-twitter-must-be-evicted-from-colorado-office-over-unpaid-rent/

By early 2019 people started cramming extra folks into the desks ("desk buddies"). People who were often in meetings (product mostly) were asked to hotdesk.

To alleviate this, Twitter leased the basement of the building, as floors 1 and 2 were leased to other companies. Construction on the basement location was pretty secretive, with the REW (Real Estate and Workplace) team wanting to unveil the new space in a grand opening when complete.

August 2019 the space opened and... everyone hated it.

Twitter operated out of a Boulder office on Walnut St. for years, mostly housing the employees of Gnip, a company that sold Twitter data to enterprise customers which Twitter had acquired.

The Walnut office consisted of the top two floors, 3 and 4.

Slowly the office morphed from being "Gnip" to being a genuine Twitter office, with folks from all kinds of teams working out of the office including Timelines, DMs, Trust&Safety, and Tweets. Most of the teams were geo-distributed.

It grew fast.