Howdy, Stranger!

It looks like you're new here. Sign in or register to get started.

What did Parliament do? – politicalbetting.com

135

Comments

  • DougSealDougSeal Posts: 12,541

    Shane MacGowan, Pogues songwriter and Irish music legend, dies aged 65

    Don't do drink and drugs kids.

    Although as a counterpoint you can live a life on rabbit food, never drink alcohol and still die young. I only hope he enjoyed himself.
    Didn't look like he was towards the end TBH.
  • viewcodeviewcode Posts: 22,194

    viewcode said:

    viewcode said:

    Zeihan has buggered off Twitter and thinks Musk is an old-school Sith Efrikan racist. Who knew? Who could have possibly worked that out?

    "Why I'm Done With Twitter (or 'X' or whatever you call it)", Peter Zeihan, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kwtVbM5o-o

    Are we going through this nonsense of everybody is off to Mastadon again...hows Threads doing these days, seems to have about as much popularity as Piers Morgan tv show.
    Good point. Although I think Truth Social/Telegram provide the same functionality, unlike Bluesky/Mastodon. Neverthless a lot of people who leave Twitter come back. Zeihan's case is slightly different because he uses it to research and disseminate his stuff: the former is compromised by Muskery and the latter is not necessary

    Enshittification is followed by high-value-users buggering off and founding their own communities. YouTube refuseniks are going to Nebula or Armchair History TV or that new gun one. Trump Twitniks went to Truth Social, Russians(?) went to Telegram. Threads/Mastodon didn't get traction because they were difficult to use(?). WhatsApp is its own thing.

    We used to have megathings and now we don't: USENET went to newsgroups went to Geocities went to MySpace went to Facebook and fragmented to YouTube, Twitter, WhatsApp, Nebula, Truth Social, stuff, stuff, more stuff. Each year things become more difficult to analyse and summarise.

    :(
    Most of the people on services like Nebula are on YouTube and use their YouTube videos to drive traffic to Nebula.
    I know. Bloody annoying. Mustard's latest stuff is on Nebula not YT, I think Potential History has stopped publishing new stuff on YouTube.
  • DougSeal said:

    The only Christmas song I can stand, indeed quite like, is "Wombling Merry Christmas" by The Wombles. I think it might be drowned out by one of my least favourites this year.

    I always feel really sorry for retail workers....having to listen to Noddy Holder on repeat for 2+ months every year, that's PTSD inducing.
  • DougSealDougSeal Posts: 12,541

    DougSeal said:

    Shane MacGowan, Pogues songwriter and Irish music legend, dies aged 65

    Don't do drink and drugs kids.

    One of the more surprising alumni of Westminster School. An affiliation, for some reason, he tended not to advertise.
    I thought he got kicked out for doing drugs?
    That's likely why he did advertise it. A proud Kentish Man too.
  • FrancisUrquhartFrancisUrquhart Posts: 82,291
    edited November 2023
    viewcode said:

    viewcode said:

    viewcode said:

    Zeihan has buggered off Twitter and thinks Musk is an old-school Sith Efrikan racist. Who knew? Who could have possibly worked that out?

    "Why I'm Done With Twitter (or 'X' or whatever you call it)", Peter Zeihan, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kwtVbM5o-o

    Are we going through this nonsense of everybody is off to Mastadon again...hows Threads doing these days, seems to have about as much popularity as Piers Morgan tv show.
    Good point. Although I think Truth Social/Telegram provide the same functionality, unlike Bluesky/Mastodon. Neverthless a lot of people who leave Twitter come back. Zeihan's case is slightly different because he uses it to research and disseminate his stuff: the former is compromised by Muskery and the latter is not necessary

    Enshittification is followed by high-value-users buggering off and founding their own communities. YouTube refuseniks are going to Nebula or Armchair History TV or that new gun one. Trump Twitniks went to Truth Social, Russians(?) went to Telegram. Threads/Mastodon didn't get traction because they were difficult to use(?). WhatsApp is its own thing.

    We used to have megathings and now we don't: USENET went to newsgroups went to Geocities went to MySpace went to Facebook and fragmented to YouTube, Twitter, WhatsApp, Nebula, Truth Social, stuff, stuff, more stuff. Each year things become more difficult to analyse and summarise.

    :(
    Most of the people on services like Nebula are on YouTube and use their YouTube videos to drive traffic to Nebula.
    I know. Bloody annoying. Mustard's latest stuff is on Nebula not YT, I think Potential History has stopped publishing new stuff on YouTube.
    Some of it is also YouTube censorship. Particularly history videos can be very tricky because the automated system get twitchy when talking about Nazis, Hitler, etc.
  • SandpitSandpit Posts: 54,656
    Cyclefree said:

    kinabalu said:

    Cyclefree said:


    "A Handbook of British Cock-Ups" with on its cover the quote by @Leon: "a decent writer with interesting opinions".
    😁

    It'll catch fire, trust me.

    The PO affair is an utter scandal, the absolute pits, but I wanted to ask you a more general question:

    Say S69 comes back and there's a case where a vital piece of evidence for the prosecution is some output from a big company's IT system. So the Crown now have to 'prove' this piece of output is ok.

    Can they rely on the Auditors having signed off on the key systems and controls as part of the statutory audit? I mean, would that normally be enough or does the legal process tend to need something more specific and rigorous?
    The answer is no. You need to understand what the auditors are signing off on. What are they testing and what is the margin of error they are happy to accept? If they have tested the bit of the system which produces the data being relied on that might be fine.

    But remember a system may be working fine but the data may still be unreliable eg if what has been inputted is wrong or if the assumptions underlying it are wrong etc.,. That is why you need to understand the whole process. And you generally need to dig deeper than a general sign off on key systems and controls.
    So you’d not want to find both the customer and supplier QA teams that had refused to sign the software off for production, with several hundred bugs outstanding in their records?
  • SandpitSandpit Posts: 54,656

    Shane MacGowan, Pogues songwriter and Irish music legend, dies aged 65

    Don't do drink and drugs kids.

    RIP, that’s at least 30 years more than most of us would have expected of him.
  • viewcodeviewcode Posts: 22,194

    viewcode said:

    viewcode said:

    viewcode said:

    Zeihan has buggered off Twitter and thinks Musk is an old-school Sith Efrikan racist. Who knew? Who could have possibly worked that out?

    "Why I'm Done With Twitter (or 'X' or whatever you call it)", Peter Zeihan, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kwtVbM5o-o

    Are we going through this nonsense of everybody is off to Mastadon again...hows Threads doing these days, seems to have about as much popularity as Piers Morgan tv show.
    Good point. Although I think Truth Social/Telegram provide the same functionality, unlike Bluesky/Mastodon. Neverthless a lot of people who leave Twitter come back. Zeihan's case is slightly different because he uses it to research and disseminate his stuff: the former is compromised by Muskery and the latter is not necessary

    Enshittification is followed by high-value-users buggering off and founding their own communities. YouTube refuseniks are going to Nebula or Armchair History TV or that new gun one. Trump Twitniks went to Truth Social, Russians(?) went to Telegram. Threads/Mastodon didn't get traction because they were difficult to use(?). WhatsApp is its own thing.

    We used to have megathings and now we don't: USENET went to newsgroups went to Geocities went to MySpace went to Facebook and fragmented to YouTube, Twitter, WhatsApp, Nebula, Truth Social, stuff, stuff, more stuff. Each year things become more difficult to analyse and summarise.

    :(
    Most of the people on services like Nebula are on YouTube and use their YouTube videos to drive traffic to Nebula.
    I know. Bloody annoying. Mustard's latest stuff is on Nebula not YT, I think Potential History has stopped publishing new stuff on YouTube.
    Some of it is also YouTube censorship. Particularly history videos can be very tricky because the automated system get twitchy when talking about Nazis, Hitler, etc.
    Indeed. World War II/Time Ghost History very nearly had to leave the site totally, which would be quite the shame. Given the trend, they may still have to... :(
  • FrancisUrquhartFrancisUrquhart Posts: 82,291
    edited November 2023
    IanB2 said:

    Sounds to me like Hancock's doing quite well at the covid inquiry, given how much negative stuff has been thrown at him prior

    If we remember early in the pandemic he ruffled a lot of feathers among PHE, NHS, etc. That absolute nonsense that PHE line was we can't do more than about 10 tests a day, its too hard, we might be able to scale up to 11 in 6 months, excuse after excuse after excuse.

    Now he definitely fiddled that final figure to get his target (but it was actually the right thing to do to project this massive expansionist target) and no doubt he made a lot of enemies forcing the establishment to actually pull their finger out, plus it was solved by getting in private companies because PHE couldn't organise a piss up in brewery #10.

    Early on, they weren't even asking universities etc with kit to get involved. It was this very rigid system that wasn't prepared to change to a fast moving situation.
  • Andy_JSAndy_JS Posts: 32,710
    Sad to hear of the death of Shane MacGowan.
  • bondegezoubondegezou Posts: 11,229

    Security Minister [Tom Tugendhat] agrees Home Office losing 17,000 asylum seekers is an 'absolute shambles'
    https://www.lbc.co.uk/news/security-minister-home-office-missing-asylum-seekers/

    He's right. I listened to extracts from yesterday's HO Select Committee hearing. I normally defend Civil Servants, but the two who appeared yesterday (Rycroft + another) were embarrassingly hopeless - ill-prepared and incapable of answering basic questions. This led to the bizarre scenario of both the Chair (Diane Johnson, Lab) and Lee Anderson joining forces to tell them how useless they were.

    It would appear that in their desperation to meet targets for removing the backlog, at least 17,000 asylum seekers have simply had their claims discontinued. When asked where they were, the response was simply "no idea".
    Small boat crossings peaked at 46k last year, so 17k is about a third of that number. The Tories say small boat crossings are a major problem and they’ve lost a third of them.
  • FrancisUrquhartFrancisUrquhart Posts: 82,291
    edited November 2023
    viewcode said:

    viewcode said:

    viewcode said:

    viewcode said:

    Zeihan has buggered off Twitter and thinks Musk is an old-school Sith Efrikan racist. Who knew? Who could have possibly worked that out?

    "Why I'm Done With Twitter (or 'X' or whatever you call it)", Peter Zeihan, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kwtVbM5o-o

    Are we going through this nonsense of everybody is off to Mastadon again...hows Threads doing these days, seems to have about as much popularity as Piers Morgan tv show.
    Good point. Although I think Truth Social/Telegram provide the same functionality, unlike Bluesky/Mastodon. Neverthless a lot of people who leave Twitter come back. Zeihan's case is slightly different because he uses it to research and disseminate his stuff: the former is compromised by Muskery and the latter is not necessary

    Enshittification is followed by high-value-users buggering off and founding their own communities. YouTube refuseniks are going to Nebula or Armchair History TV or that new gun one. Trump Twitniks went to Truth Social, Russians(?) went to Telegram. Threads/Mastodon didn't get traction because they were difficult to use(?). WhatsApp is its own thing.

    We used to have megathings and now we don't: USENET went to newsgroups went to Geocities went to MySpace went to Facebook and fragmented to YouTube, Twitter, WhatsApp, Nebula, Truth Social, stuff, stuff, more stuff. Each year things become more difficult to analyse and summarise.

    :(
    Most of the people on services like Nebula are on YouTube and use their YouTube videos to drive traffic to Nebula.
    I know. Bloody annoying. Mustard's latest stuff is on Nebula not YT, I think Potential History has stopped publishing new stuff on YouTube.
    Some of it is also YouTube censorship. Particularly history videos can be very tricky because the automated system get twitchy when talking about Nazis, Hitler, etc.
    Indeed. World War II/Time Ghost History very nearly had to leave the site totally, which would be quite the shame. Given the trend, they may still have to... :(
    I think its really dumb that if you have a channel that is clearly about a specific topic that there isn't some sort of system to flag to YouTube that your content discusses this material, that they can't review it in the round.

    If you have made 100 videos and all it is, is historical footage of WWII, narrating the history of famous battles, that is very different from some White Power Fascist Propagandist that they are worried about.
  • kinabalukinabalu Posts: 42,381

    kinabalu said:

    eek said:

    Shane MacGowan, Pogues songwriter and Irish music legend, dies aged 65

    Don't do drink and drugs kids.

    If he had lasted a few more weeks he could have kept Ladbaby away from the Xmas number 1
    Oh god if I have to hear another one of those 'sausage roll' ditties this yuletide I'll break down and weep.
    As I understand it, there is no Ladbaby Christmas single this year.

    Mariah Carey or Wham most likely to be Christmas no 1.
    Now you're talking.
  • Security Minister [Tom Tugendhat] agrees Home Office losing 17,000 asylum seekers is an 'absolute shambles'
    https://www.lbc.co.uk/news/security-minister-home-office-missing-asylum-seekers/

    He's right. I listened to extracts from yesterday's HO Select Committee hearing. I normally defend Civil Servants, but the two who appeared yesterday (Rycroft + another) were embarrassingly hopeless - ill-prepared and incapable of answering basic questions. This led to the bizarre scenario of both the Chair (Diane Johnson, Lab) and Lee Anderson joining forces to tell them how useless they were.

    It would appear that in their desperation to meet targets for removing the backlog, at least 17,000 asylum seekers have simply had their claims discontinued. When asked where they were, the response was simply "no idea".
    Small boat crossings peaked at 46k last year, so 17k is about a third of that number. The Tories say small boat crossings are a major problem and they’ve lost a third of them.
    I think there is more like 100k asylum seeker claims in the system.
  • kinabalukinabalu Posts: 42,381
    DougSeal said:

    The only Christmas song I can stand, indeed quite like, is "Wombling Merry Christmas" by The Wombles. I think it might be drowned out by one of my least favourites this year.

    I like that too. It's a bit underrated imo.
  • NigelbNigelb Posts: 71,522
    .

    hancock claims he told PM on 13th Mar that UK must lockdown.

    KC says - odd, nothing in your book about that date.

    Hmm....

    This is the issue with the inquiry. Rather than the bun fight/blame game exercise we see now, it should have been a truth and reconciliation exercise. Too many of the participants are trying to protect their reputations at the expense of others, and there is a lot of benefit of hindsight going on.
    I don't blame anyone who had been subject of criticism already from trying to counter it, but the whole thing has been unedifying.
    Good morning

    Frankly the whole enquiry is a massive 'gotcha' exercise when it should be a forensic investigation into lessons to be learnt

    Furthermore, hindsight is a wonderful thing but those involved were dealing with a once in a generation pandemic which nobody had had any experience off

    I give everyone involved, including Johnson, sympathy for the decisions they made of life and death with huge unknowns
    It's not even a particularly good gotcha exercise.
    While my sympathy for those involved is distinctly limited, I agree that it would be far more useful if it concentrated on drawing practical lessons from the lengthy recapitulation of the recent past.

    That seems unlikely.
  • Sean_FSean_F Posts: 37,415
    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news

    Is this really much of a story? It's the BBC's lead story.

    Is an allegation against a Premier League player sufficient to result in their suspension? Not in my opinion.
  • Andy_JS said:

    Sad to hear of the death of Shane MacGowan.

    RIP.

    Fairytale is a xmas classic for my generation.
  • NigelbNigelb Posts: 71,522
    HYUFD said:

    Nigelb said:

    Sean_F said:

    In terms of war, if it succeeds, it’s viewed as being morally justified. If it fails, it’s viewed as morally unjustified.

    Had South Vietnam turned out like South Korea (and Rhee’s regime was considerably nastier than the South Vietnamese), the war would be viewed in the same light as the Korean War.

    The USA is neither The Shining City on the Hill, nor The Great Satan. But, I sleep safely in my bed, due in no small part to US firepower, and for that, I am grateful.

    Vietnam was never going to "turn out like South Korea". We've rehearsed why the two conflicts were entirely different quite recently, and at some length.

    Whether the US was mistaken to get involved in the first pace is a matter of legitimate historical debate - but by the time of the '68 election, the war was unwinnable (absent a full scale US military invasion of the north, and possible nuclear conflict) - which was also the Pentagon analysis at the time. And that was nothing to do with the relative nastiness of the regimes in either north or south.

    Kissinger's and Nixon's actions to prolong it were almost entirely for domestic political reasons, and Kissinger's post Vietnam justifications were the purest bullshit.
    Had Congress not withdrawn funding for the war effort, as the Democrat Congress did, it is possible the war would have ended in stalemate like Korea did rather than North Korea capturing the South
    That's a load of cobblers.
  • SandpitSandpit Posts: 54,656

    viewcode said:

    viewcode said:

    viewcode said:

    Zeihan has buggered off Twitter and thinks Musk is an old-school Sith Efrikan racist. Who knew? Who could have possibly worked that out?

    "Why I'm Done With Twitter (or 'X' or whatever you call it)", Peter Zeihan, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kwtVbM5o-o

    Are we going through this nonsense of everybody is off to Mastadon again...hows Threads doing these days, seems to have about as much popularity as Piers Morgan tv show.
    Good point. Although I think Truth Social/Telegram provide the same functionality, unlike Bluesky/Mastodon. Neverthless a lot of people who leave Twitter come back. Zeihan's case is slightly different because he uses it to research and disseminate his stuff: the former is compromised by Muskery and the latter is not necessary

    Enshittification is followed by high-value-users buggering off and founding their own communities. YouTube refuseniks are going to Nebula or Armchair History TV or that new gun one. Trump Twitniks went to Truth Social, Russians(?) went to Telegram. Threads/Mastodon didn't get traction because they were difficult to use(?). WhatsApp is its own thing.

    We used to have megathings and now we don't: USENET went to newsgroups went to Geocities went to MySpace went to Facebook and fragmented to YouTube, Twitter, WhatsApp, Nebula, Truth Social, stuff, stuff, more stuff. Each year things become more difficult to analyse and summarise.

    :(
    Most of the people on services like Nebula are on YouTube and use their YouTube videos to drive traffic to Nebula.
    I know. Bloody annoying. Mustard's latest stuff is on Nebula not YT, I think Potential History has stopped publishing new stuff on YouTube.
    Some of it is also YouTube censorship. Particularly history videos can be very tricky because the automated system get twitchy when talking about Nazis, Hitler, etc.
    Youtube has all sorts of problems this year, they’re trying to avoid politically extreme content, but are instead tripping up a lot of legitimate content. There’s also thought to be political campaigners mass flagging current political content in an attempt to get it taken down, even if only temporarily.

    Speaking of political interference, Rumble has filed a defamation lawsuit against an organisation known as “Check My Ads’, which has been specifically targeting Rumble’s advertisers with misinformation about the company.
    https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/rumble-files-federal-defamation-lawsuit-against-co-founders-of-purported-watchdog-group-1032858785?op=1
  • SandpitSandpit Posts: 54,656

    Andy_JS said:

    Sad to hear of the death of Shane MacGowan.

    RIP.

    Fairytale is a xmas classic for my generation.
    That’s got to be worth a bet for Christmas No.1 this year. There’s a lot of people for whom that’s the greatest Christmas song of all time.
  • Andy_JSAndy_JS Posts: 32,710
    edited November 2023
    Jarnail Singh: "I'm not here to name names".
    Jason Beer KC: "You just did". He'd just named Rob Wilson.
  • FrancisUrquhartFrancisUrquhart Posts: 82,291
    edited November 2023
    Sean_F said:

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news

    Is this really much of a story? It's the BBC's lead story.

    Is an allegation against a Premier League player sufficient to result in their suspension? Not in my opinion.

    They are pushing an agenda. So much for innocent until proven guilty.

    There was a recent case of an Everton player (no idea is we can name them, so won't) that basically has had their career put on hold for 2 years and ended up with no further action was taken.
  • FrancisUrquhartFrancisUrquhart Posts: 82,291
    edited November 2023
    Sandpit said:

    viewcode said:

    viewcode said:

    viewcode said:

    Zeihan has buggered off Twitter and thinks Musk is an old-school Sith Efrikan racist. Who knew? Who could have possibly worked that out?

    "Why I'm Done With Twitter (or 'X' or whatever you call it)", Peter Zeihan, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kwtVbM5o-o

    Are we going through this nonsense of everybody is off to Mastadon again...hows Threads doing these days, seems to have about as much popularity as Piers Morgan tv show.
    Good point. Although I think Truth Social/Telegram provide the same functionality, unlike Bluesky/Mastodon. Neverthless a lot of people who leave Twitter come back. Zeihan's case is slightly different because he uses it to research and disseminate his stuff: the former is compromised by Muskery and the latter is not necessary

    Enshittification is followed by high-value-users buggering off and founding their own communities. YouTube refuseniks are going to Nebula or Armchair History TV or that new gun one. Trump Twitniks went to Truth Social, Russians(?) went to Telegram. Threads/Mastodon didn't get traction because they were difficult to use(?). WhatsApp is its own thing.

    We used to have megathings and now we don't: USENET went to newsgroups went to Geocities went to MySpace went to Facebook and fragmented to YouTube, Twitter, WhatsApp, Nebula, Truth Social, stuff, stuff, more stuff. Each year things become more difficult to analyse and summarise.

    :(
    Most of the people on services like Nebula are on YouTube and use their YouTube videos to drive traffic to Nebula.
    I know. Bloody annoying. Mustard's latest stuff is on Nebula not YT, I think Potential History has stopped publishing new stuff on YouTube.
    Some of it is also YouTube censorship. Particularly history videos can be very tricky because the automated system get twitchy when talking about Nazis, Hitler, etc.
    Youtube has all sorts of problems this year, they’re trying to avoid politically extreme content, but are instead tripping up a lot of legitimate content. There’s also thought to be political campaigners mass flagging current political content in an attempt to get it taken down, even if only temporarily.

    Speaking of political interference, Rumble has filed a defamation lawsuit against an organisation known as “Check My Ads’, which has been specifically targeting Rumble’s advertisers with misinformation about the company.
    https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/rumble-files-federal-defamation-lawsuit-against-co-founders-of-purported-watchdog-group-1032858785?op=1
    I noticed that Rumble are making similar claims like Musk that Media Matters have been setting up profiles and engineering them to get the Nazi post next to an ad by following only the extremists, liking the posts etc, and those accounts are literally the only account that saw such an interaction out of millions / billions of ad serves.

    Its a bit like going into a strip club, throwing money around like it is going out of fashion, accepting an invite to the VIP room, then clutching your pearls when the stripper ask if you might be interested in extras.
  • TazTaz Posts: 14,581
    Sandpit said:

    Andy_JS said:

    Sad to hear of the death of Shane MacGowan.

    RIP.

    Fairytale is a xmas classic for my generation.
    That’s got to be worth a bet for Christmas No.1 this year. There’s a lot of people for whom that’s the greatest Christmas song of all time.
    I wonder if they will bleep out the "problematic" content !!!

    Christmas Wrapping for me.
  • DougSealDougSeal Posts: 12,541
    Alisdair Darling has died.
  • Andy_JSAndy_JS Posts: 32,710
    DougSeal said:

    Alisdair Darling has died.

    That's a shock. RIP.
  • FrancisUrquhartFrancisUrquhart Posts: 82,291
    edited November 2023
    DougSeal said:

    Alisdair Darling has died.

    Crickey, he wasn't that old? Late 60s?

    I didn't realise he had retired from the House of Lords a few years ago. Have to respect that, rather than just turning up with claim their expenses signing in whenever they are in town as far too many in the Lords do.
  • DougSeal said:

    Alisdair Darling has died.

    Crickey, he wasn't that old? Late 60s?
    70 apparently
  • NickPalmerNickPalmer Posts: 21,543

    HYUFD said:

    Nigelb said:

    Sean_F said:

    In terms of war, if it succeeds, it’s viewed as being morally justified. If it fails, it’s viewed as morally unjustified.

    Had South Vietnam turned out like South Korea (and Rhee’s regime was considerably nastier than the South Vietnamese), the war would be viewed in the same light as the Korean War.

    The USA is neither The Shining City on the Hill, nor The Great Satan. But, I sleep safely in my bed, due in no small part to US firepower, and for that, I am grateful.

    Vietnam was never going to "turn out like South Korea". We've rehearsed why the two conflicts were entirely different quite recently, and at some length.

    Whether the US was mistaken to get involved in the first pace is a matter of legitimate historical debate - but by the time of the '68 election, the war was unwinnable (absent a full scale US military invasion of the north, and possible nuclear conflict) - which was also the Pentagon analysis at the time. And that was nothing to do with the relative nastiness of the regimes in either north or south.

    Kissinger's and Nixon's actions to prolong it were almost entirely for domestic political reasons, and Kissinger's post Vietnam justifications were the purest bullshit.
    Had Congress not withdrawn funding for the war effort, as the Democrat Congress did, it is possible the war would have ended in stalemate like Korea did rather than North Korea capturing the South
    The North Vietnamese were 'winning' though. Much more popular support than the increasingly corrupt Southern government.
    The North won by a full scale invasion of the South, not by a popular uprising. Using a massive army, with thousands of Soviet supplied tanks and armoured vehicles.

    The South fought until they ran out of ammunition. Resupply of which was denied by the US.
    There was quite a bit of both - the TET offensive was primarily led by Southern NLF units. It failed to topple the regime but set up the conditions (notably demoralising the US) for the Northern offensive to succeed. I don't think there are many people who think that the US-backed regime retained much popular support at that point.

    Subsequently, Vietnam did indeed turn into a relatively prosperous parallel to South Korea, though as SeanF observes largely abandoning classic communism in the process. They also managed to avoid the grim oppression of countries like North Korea. Subjectively, Ho Chi Minh City strikes me as a lot more fun than Seoul, though that's based on short visits.
  • kjhkjh Posts: 11,858
    Sandpit said:

    Andy_JS said:

    Sad to hear of the death of Shane MacGowan.

    RIP.

    Fairytale is a xmas classic for my generation.
    That’s got to be worth a bet for Christmas No.1 this year. There’s a lot of people for whom that’s the greatest Christmas song of all time.
    Agree. I also like Greg Lake's Christmas song, but I'm guessing I'm in a minority.
  • TazTaz Posts: 14,581
    DougSeal said:

    Alisdair Darling has died.

    Sorry to hear that. He must have been quite young.
  • SandpitSandpit Posts: 54,656
    DougSeal said:

    Alisdair Darling has died.

    Wow. According to wiki his 70th birthday was two days ago. RIP.
  • bondegezoubondegezou Posts: 11,229

    viewcode said:

    viewcode said:

    Zeihan has buggered off Twitter and thinks Musk is an old-school Sith Efrikan racist. Who knew? Who could have possibly worked that out?

    "Why I'm Done With Twitter (or 'X' or whatever you call it)", Peter Zeihan, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kwtVbM5o-o

    Are we going through this nonsense of everybody is off to Mastadon again...hows Threads doing these days, seems to have about as much popularity as Piers Morgan tv show.
    Good point. Although I think Truth Social/Telegram provide the same functionality, unlike Bluesky/Mastodon. Neverthless a lot of people who leave Twitter come back. Zeihan's case is slightly different because he uses it to research and disseminate his stuff: the former is compromised by Muskery and the latter is not necessary

    Enshittification is followed by high-value-users buggering off and founding their own communities. YouTube refuseniks are going to Nebula or Armchair History TV or that new gun one. Trump Twitniks went to Truth Social, Russians(?) went to Telegram. Threads/Mastodon didn't get traction because they were difficult to use(?). WhatsApp is its own thing.

    We used to have megathings and now we don't: USENET went to newsgroups went to Geocities went to MySpace went to Facebook and fragmented to YouTube, Twitter, WhatsApp, Nebula, Truth Social, stuff, stuff, more stuff. Each year things become more difficult to analyse and summarise.

    :(
    Something will replace Twitter, and will look like Twitter because that's the model that works. Either that or Musk will sell it, for one reason or another and its new owners will restore its previous form.

    That 'something' hasn't been created yet and it may be some time before it is. Nonetheless, it's sufficiently broken that when a workable alternative arrives, X will mark the spot at which Twitter is buried.
    BlueSky is the most Twitter-like thing out there. They’re letting numbers grow in a controlled manner. I’d say it’s the favourite to replace Twitter. Mastodon and Threads have both increased significantly in numbers, but neither has really succeeded as a Twitter replacement yet.
  • viewcodeviewcode Posts: 22,194

    Sandpit said:

    viewcode said:

    viewcode said:

    viewcode said:

    Zeihan has buggered off Twitter and thinks Musk is an old-school Sith Efrikan racist. Who knew? Who could have possibly worked that out?

    "Why I'm Done With Twitter (or 'X' or whatever you call it)", Peter Zeihan, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kwtVbM5o-o

    Are we going through this nonsense of everybody is off to Mastadon again...hows Threads doing these days, seems to have about as much popularity as Piers Morgan tv show.
    Good point. Although I think Truth Social/Telegram provide the same functionality, unlike Bluesky/Mastodon. Neverthless a lot of people who leave Twitter come back. Zeihan's case is slightly different because he uses it to research and disseminate his stuff: the former is compromised by Muskery and the latter is not necessary

    Enshittification is followed by high-value-users buggering off and founding their own communities. YouTube refuseniks are going to Nebula or Armchair History TV or that new gun one. Trump Twitniks went to Truth Social, Russians(?) went to Telegram. Threads/Mastodon didn't get traction because they were difficult to use(?). WhatsApp is its own thing.

    We used to have megathings and now we don't: USENET went to newsgroups went to Geocities went to MySpace went to Facebook and fragmented to YouTube, Twitter, WhatsApp, Nebula, Truth Social, stuff, stuff, more stuff. Each year things become more difficult to analyse and summarise.

    :(
    Most of the people on services like Nebula are on YouTube and use their YouTube videos to drive traffic to Nebula.
    I know. Bloody annoying. Mustard's latest stuff is on Nebula not YT, I think Potential History has stopped publishing new stuff on YouTube.
    Some of it is also YouTube censorship. Particularly history videos can be very tricky because the automated system get twitchy when talking about Nazis, Hitler, etc.
    Youtube has all sorts of problems this year, they’re trying to avoid politically extreme content, but are instead tripping up a lot of legitimate content. There’s also thought to be political campaigners mass flagging current political content in an attempt to get it taken down, even if only temporarily.

    Speaking of political interference, Rumble has filed a defamation lawsuit against an organisation known as “Check My Ads’, which has been specifically targeting Rumble’s advertisers with misinformation about the company.
    https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/rumble-files-federal-defamation-lawsuit-against-co-founders-of-purported-watchdog-group-1032858785?op=1
    I noticed that Rumble are making similar claims like Musk that Media Matters have been setting up profiles and engineering them to get the Nazi post next to an ad by following only the extremists, liking the posts etc, and those accounts are literally the only account that saw such an interaction out of millions / billions of ad serves.

    Its a bit like going into a strip club, throwing money around like it is going out of fashion, accepting an invite to the VIP room, then clutching your pearls when the stripper ask if you might be interested in extras.
    Speaking seriously...how else would you do it? There are 500 million tweets per day. Any given phenomenon can be found. If you wanted to demonstrate Nazi content next to, say, IBM (yes I know I know), then you'd have to either look for it or place a trap ad and wait. I don't know how to estimate frequency otherwise. How do you access, trawl and extract data from 500 million tweets?
  • FrancisUrquhartFrancisUrquhart Posts: 82,291
    edited November 2023

    viewcode said:

    viewcode said:

    Zeihan has buggered off Twitter and thinks Musk is an old-school Sith Efrikan racist. Who knew? Who could have possibly worked that out?

    "Why I'm Done With Twitter (or 'X' or whatever you call it)", Peter Zeihan, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kwtVbM5o-o

    Are we going through this nonsense of everybody is off to Mastadon again...hows Threads doing these days, seems to have about as much popularity as Piers Morgan tv show.
    Good point. Although I think Truth Social/Telegram provide the same functionality, unlike Bluesky/Mastodon. Neverthless a lot of people who leave Twitter come back. Zeihan's case is slightly different because he uses it to research and disseminate his stuff: the former is compromised by Muskery and the latter is not necessary

    Enshittification is followed by high-value-users buggering off and founding their own communities. YouTube refuseniks are going to Nebula or Armchair History TV or that new gun one. Trump Twitniks went to Truth Social, Russians(?) went to Telegram. Threads/Mastodon didn't get traction because they were difficult to use(?). WhatsApp is its own thing.

    We used to have megathings and now we don't: USENET went to newsgroups went to Geocities went to MySpace went to Facebook and fragmented to YouTube, Twitter, WhatsApp, Nebula, Truth Social, stuff, stuff, more stuff. Each year things become more difficult to analyse and summarise.

    :(
    Something will replace Twitter, and will look like Twitter because that's the model that works. Either that or Musk will sell it, for one reason or another and its new owners will restore its previous form.

    That 'something' hasn't been created yet and it may be some time before it is. Nonetheless, it's sufficiently broken that when a workable alternative arrives, X will mark the spot at which Twitter is buried.
    BlueSky is the most Twitter-like thing out there. They’re letting numbers grow in a controlled manner. I’d say it’s the favourite to replace Twitter. Mastodon and Threads have both increased significantly in numbers, but neither has really succeeded as a Twitter replacement yet.
    Threads only have lots of users on paper due to tie in with Instagram. Active user count has been dropping all the time. Its failed. Literally nobody is talking about it, even the rampers in the media who are massively anti-twitter / Musk, don't bother anymore.
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 123,401
    DougSeal said:

    Alisdair Darling has died.

    RIP Led the No campaign to victory in the 2014 Scottish independence referendum as well as being Chancellor in the financial crisis of course
  • FrancisUrquhartFrancisUrquhart Posts: 82,291
    edited November 2023
    viewcode said:



    Sandpit said:

    viewcode said:

    viewcode said:

    viewcode said:

    Zeihan has buggered off Twitter and thinks Musk is an old-school Sith Efrikan racist. Who knew? Who could have possibly worked that out?

    "Why I'm Done With Twitter (or 'X' or whatever you call it)", Peter Zeihan, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kwtVbM5o-o

    Are we going through this nonsense of everybody is off to Mastadon again...hows Threads doing these days, seems to have about as much popularity as Piers Morgan tv show.
    Good point. Although I think Truth Social/Telegram provide the same functionality, unlike Bluesky/Mastodon. Neverthless a lot of people who leave Twitter come back. Zeihan's case is slightly different because he uses it to research and disseminate his stuff: the former is compromised by Muskery and the latter is not necessary

    Enshittification is followed by high-value-users buggering off and founding their own communities. YouTube refuseniks are going to Nebula or Armchair History TV or that new gun one. Trump Twitniks went to Truth Social, Russians(?) went to Telegram. Threads/Mastodon didn't get traction because they were difficult to use(?). WhatsApp is its own thing.

    We used to have megathings and now we don't: USENET went to newsgroups went to Geocities went to MySpace went to Facebook and fragmented to YouTube, Twitter, WhatsApp, Nebula, Truth Social, stuff, stuff, more stuff. Each year things become more difficult to analyse and summarise.

    :(
    Most of the people on services like Nebula are on YouTube and use their YouTube videos to drive traffic to Nebula.
    I know. Bloody annoying. Mustard's latest stuff is on Nebula not YT, I think Potential History has stopped publishing new stuff on YouTube.
    Some of it is also YouTube censorship. Particularly history videos can be very tricky because the automated system get twitchy when talking about Nazis, Hitler, etc.
    Youtube has all sorts of problems this year, they’re trying to avoid politically extreme content, but are instead tripping up a lot of legitimate content. There’s also thought to be political campaigners mass flagging current political content in an attempt to get it taken down, even if only temporarily.

    Speaking of political interference, Rumble has filed a defamation lawsuit against an organisation known as “Check My Ads’, which has been specifically targeting Rumble’s advertisers with misinformation about the company.
    https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/rumble-files-federal-defamation-lawsuit-against-co-founders-of-purported-watchdog-group-1032858785?op=1
    I noticed that Rumble are making similar claims like Musk that Media Matters have been setting up profiles and engineering them to get the Nazi post next to an ad by following only the extremists, liking the posts etc, and those accounts are literally the only account that saw such an interaction out of millions / billions of ad serves.

    Its a bit like going into a strip club, throwing money around like it is going out of fashion, accepting an invite to the VIP room, then clutching your pearls when the stripper ask if you might be interested in extras.
    Speaking seriously...how else would you do it? There are 500 million tweets per day. Any given phenomenon can be found. If you wanted to demonstrate Nazi content next to, say, IBM (yes I know I know), then you'd have to either look for it or place a trap ad and wait. I don't know how to estimate frequency otherwise. How do you access, trawl and extract data from 500 million tweets?
    Well they aren't using the system in a way that any normal person would be. And they report as if this heavily concocted incident is normal, when according to lawsuit twitter and Rumble say from their data they were 1 of single digit accounts that experienced this.

    The profiles they open aren't even perhaps mirroring activity of say a more normal human, or even say a politically engaged Republican. You could certainly do something like that, look at individuals accounts, follow all the same people, do similar liking / retweeting etc.

    They are pulling every lever possible to get the jackpot they desire, then pester advertisers with claims look, see, this is what happens when you advertise on twitter, everybody is seeing this kind of stuff.
  • kinabalukinabalu Posts: 42,381
    A long lost BBC drama that I think Malcolm would appreciate:
    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-66889553

    Scotch On The Rocks: From 1973. Armed Insurrection in Scotland. Never shown since considered inflammatory.
  • SandpitSandpit Posts: 54,656
    edited November 2023

    Sandpit said:

    viewcode said:

    viewcode said:

    viewcode said:

    Zeihan has buggered off Twitter and thinks Musk is an old-school Sith Efrikan racist. Who knew? Who could have possibly worked that out?

    "Why I'm Done With Twitter (or 'X' or whatever you call it)", Peter Zeihan, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kwtVbM5o-o

    Are we going through this nonsense of everybody is off to Mastadon again...hows Threads doing these days, seems to have about as much popularity as Piers Morgan tv show.
    Good point. Although I think Truth Social/Telegram provide the same functionality, unlike Bluesky/Mastodon. Neverthless a lot of people who leave Twitter come back. Zeihan's case is slightly different because he uses it to research and disseminate his stuff: the former is compromised by Muskery and the latter is not necessary

    Enshittification is followed by high-value-users buggering off and founding their own communities. YouTube refuseniks are going to Nebula or Armchair History TV or that new gun one. Trump Twitniks went to Truth Social, Russians(?) went to Telegram. Threads/Mastodon didn't get traction because they were difficult to use(?). WhatsApp is its own thing.

    We used to have megathings and now we don't: USENET went to newsgroups went to Geocities went to MySpace went to Facebook and fragmented to YouTube, Twitter, WhatsApp, Nebula, Truth Social, stuff, stuff, more stuff. Each year things become more difficult to analyse and summarise.

    :(
    Most of the people on services like Nebula are on YouTube and use their YouTube videos to drive traffic to Nebula.
    I know. Bloody annoying. Mustard's latest stuff is on Nebula not YT, I think Potential History has stopped publishing new stuff on YouTube.
    Some of it is also YouTube censorship. Particularly history videos can be very tricky because the automated system get twitchy when talking about Nazis, Hitler, etc.
    Youtube has all sorts of problems this year, they’re trying to avoid politically extreme content, but are instead tripping up a lot of legitimate content. There’s also thought to be political campaigners mass flagging current political content in an attempt to get it taken down, even if only temporarily.

    Speaking of political interference, Rumble has filed a defamation lawsuit against an organisation known as “Check My Ads’, which has been specifically targeting Rumble’s advertisers with misinformation about the company.
    https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/rumble-files-federal-defamation-lawsuit-against-co-founders-of-purported-watchdog-group-1032858785?op=1
    I noticed that Rumble are making similar claims like Musk that Media Matters have been setting up profiles and engineering them to get the Nazi post next to an ad by following only the extremists, liking the posts etc, and those accounts are literally the only account that saw such an interaction out of millions / billions of ad serves.

    Its a bit like going into a strip club, throwing money around like it is going out of fashion, accepting an invite to the VIP room, then clutching your pearls when the stripper ask if you might be interested in extras.
    There’s a number of these nonprofit groups in the US, who appear to be very well funded and are trying to take down alternative media by going after their revenue sources. We know from filings that Media Matters took $1m from Soros a few years ago.

    I have a feeling that the next 12 months is going to be very difficult for these companies, in the buildup to the election. On the other hand, there’s also organisations such as Public Square that have started up, recommending conservative businesses to the public and to each other. In the media space, there’s companies like Daily Wire throwing huge amounts of money at all sorts of random projects. DW now has 1m monthly subscribers, and annual revenue approaching $250m.
  • bondegezoubondegezou Posts: 11,229

    Sandpit said:

    viewcode said:

    viewcode said:

    viewcode said:

    Zeihan has buggered off Twitter and thinks Musk is an old-school Sith Efrikan racist. Who knew? Who could have possibly worked that out?

    "Why I'm Done With Twitter (or 'X' or whatever you call it)", Peter Zeihan, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kwtVbM5o-o

    Are we going through this nonsense of everybody is off to Mastadon again...hows Threads doing these days, seems to have about as much popularity as Piers Morgan tv show.
    Good point. Although I think Truth Social/Telegram provide the same functionality, unlike Bluesky/Mastodon. Neverthless a lot of people who leave Twitter come back. Zeihan's case is slightly different because he uses it to research and disseminate his stuff: the former is compromised by Muskery and the latter is not necessary

    Enshittification is followed by high-value-users buggering off and founding their own communities. YouTube refuseniks are going to Nebula or Armchair History TV or that new gun one. Trump Twitniks went to Truth Social, Russians(?) went to Telegram. Threads/Mastodon didn't get traction because they were difficult to use(?). WhatsApp is its own thing.

    We used to have megathings and now we don't: USENET went to newsgroups went to Geocities went to MySpace went to Facebook and fragmented to YouTube, Twitter, WhatsApp, Nebula, Truth Social, stuff, stuff, more stuff. Each year things become more difficult to analyse and summarise.

    :(
    Most of the people on services like Nebula are on YouTube and use their YouTube videos to drive traffic to Nebula.
    I know. Bloody annoying. Mustard's latest stuff is on Nebula not YT, I think Potential History has stopped publishing new stuff on YouTube.
    Some of it is also YouTube censorship. Particularly history videos can be very tricky because the automated system get twitchy when talking about Nazis, Hitler, etc.
    Youtube has all sorts of problems this year, they’re trying to avoid politically extreme content, but are instead tripping up a lot of legitimate content. There’s also thought to be political campaigners mass flagging current political content in an attempt to get it taken down, even if only temporarily.

    Speaking of political interference, Rumble has filed a defamation lawsuit against an organisation known as “Check My Ads’, which has been specifically targeting Rumble’s advertisers with misinformation about the company.
    https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/rumble-files-federal-defamation-lawsuit-against-co-founders-of-purported-watchdog-group-1032858785?op=1
    I noticed that Rumble are making similar claims like Musk that Media Matters have been setting up profiles and engineering them to get the Nazi post next to an ad by following only the extremists, liking the posts etc, and those accounts are literally the only account that saw such an interaction out of millions / billions of ad serves.

    Its a bit like going into a strip club, throwing money around like it is going out of fashion, accepting an invite to the VIP room, then clutching your pearls when the stripper ask if you might be interested in extras.
    If your question is whether strippers ask if you might be interested in extras, you’re not going to find out by avoiding going into a strip club.
  • FrancisUrquhartFrancisUrquhart Posts: 82,291
    edited November 2023

    Sandpit said:

    viewcode said:

    viewcode said:

    viewcode said:

    Zeihan has buggered off Twitter and thinks Musk is an old-school Sith Efrikan racist. Who knew? Who could have possibly worked that out?

    "Why I'm Done With Twitter (or 'X' or whatever you call it)", Peter Zeihan, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kwtVbM5o-o

    Are we going through this nonsense of everybody is off to Mastadon again...hows Threads doing these days, seems to have about as much popularity as Piers Morgan tv show.
    Good point. Although I think Truth Social/Telegram provide the same functionality, unlike Bluesky/Mastodon. Neverthless a lot of people who leave Twitter come back. Zeihan's case is slightly different because he uses it to research and disseminate his stuff: the former is compromised by Muskery and the latter is not necessary

    Enshittification is followed by high-value-users buggering off and founding their own communities. YouTube refuseniks are going to Nebula or Armchair History TV or that new gun one. Trump Twitniks went to Truth Social, Russians(?) went to Telegram. Threads/Mastodon didn't get traction because they were difficult to use(?). WhatsApp is its own thing.

    We used to have megathings and now we don't: USENET went to newsgroups went to Geocities went to MySpace went to Facebook and fragmented to YouTube, Twitter, WhatsApp, Nebula, Truth Social, stuff, stuff, more stuff. Each year things become more difficult to analyse and summarise.

    :(
    Most of the people on services like Nebula are on YouTube and use their YouTube videos to drive traffic to Nebula.
    I know. Bloody annoying. Mustard's latest stuff is on Nebula not YT, I think Potential History has stopped publishing new stuff on YouTube.
    Some of it is also YouTube censorship. Particularly history videos can be very tricky because the automated system get twitchy when talking about Nazis, Hitler, etc.
    Youtube has all sorts of problems this year, they’re trying to avoid politically extreme content, but are instead tripping up a lot of legitimate content. There’s also thought to be political campaigners mass flagging current political content in an attempt to get it taken down, even if only temporarily.

    Speaking of political interference, Rumble has filed a defamation lawsuit against an organisation known as “Check My Ads’, which has been specifically targeting Rumble’s advertisers with misinformation about the company.
    https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/rumble-files-federal-defamation-lawsuit-against-co-founders-of-purported-watchdog-group-1032858785?op=1
    I noticed that Rumble are making similar claims like Musk that Media Matters have been setting up profiles and engineering them to get the Nazi post next to an ad by following only the extremists, liking the posts etc, and those accounts are literally the only account that saw such an interaction out of millions / billions of ad serves.

    Its a bit like going into a strip club, throwing money around like it is going out of fashion, accepting an invite to the VIP room, then clutching your pearls when the stripper ask if you might be interested in extras.
    If your question is whether strippers ask if you might be interested in extras, you’re not going to find out by avoiding going into a strip club.
    There is a difference between attending said strip club as a normal punter, engaging in normal behaviour there compared to doing everything possible to seek out this.

    It is why in the UK things like concocting a setup to entrap people by the authorities are a no no.
  • bondegezoubondegezou Posts: 11,229

    viewcode said:



    Sandpit said:

    viewcode said:

    viewcode said:

    viewcode said:

    Zeihan has buggered off Twitter and thinks Musk is an old-school Sith Efrikan racist. Who knew? Who could have possibly worked that out?

    "Why I'm Done With Twitter (or 'X' or whatever you call it)", Peter Zeihan, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kwtVbM5o-o

    Are we going through this nonsense of everybody is off to Mastadon again...hows Threads doing these days, seems to have about as much popularity as Piers Morgan tv show.
    Good point. Although I think Truth Social/Telegram provide the same functionality, unlike Bluesky/Mastodon. Neverthless a lot of people who leave Twitter come back. Zeihan's case is slightly different because he uses it to research and disseminate his stuff: the former is compromised by Muskery and the latter is not necessary

    Enshittification is followed by high-value-users buggering off and founding their own communities. YouTube refuseniks are going to Nebula or Armchair History TV or that new gun one. Trump Twitniks went to Truth Social, Russians(?) went to Telegram. Threads/Mastodon didn't get traction because they were difficult to use(?). WhatsApp is its own thing.

    We used to have megathings and now we don't: USENET went to newsgroups went to Geocities went to MySpace went to Facebook and fragmented to YouTube, Twitter, WhatsApp, Nebula, Truth Social, stuff, stuff, more stuff. Each year things become more difficult to analyse and summarise.

    :(
    Most of the people on services like Nebula are on YouTube and use their YouTube videos to drive traffic to Nebula.
    I know. Bloody annoying. Mustard's latest stuff is on Nebula not YT, I think Potential History has stopped publishing new stuff on YouTube.
    Some of it is also YouTube censorship. Particularly history videos can be very tricky because the automated system get twitchy when talking about Nazis, Hitler, etc.
    Youtube has all sorts of problems this year, they’re trying to avoid politically extreme content, but are instead tripping up a lot of legitimate content. There’s also thought to be political campaigners mass flagging current political content in an attempt to get it taken down, even if only temporarily.

    Speaking of political interference, Rumble has filed a defamation lawsuit against an organisation known as “Check My Ads’, which has been specifically targeting Rumble’s advertisers with misinformation about the company.
    https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/rumble-files-federal-defamation-lawsuit-against-co-founders-of-purported-watchdog-group-1032858785?op=1
    I noticed that Rumble are making similar claims like Musk that Media Matters have been setting up profiles and engineering them to get the Nazi post next to an ad by following only the extremists, liking the posts etc, and those accounts are literally the only account that saw such an interaction out of millions / billions of ad serves.

    Its a bit like going into a strip club, throwing money around like it is going out of fashion, accepting an invite to the VIP room, then clutching your pearls when the stripper ask if you might be interested in extras.
    Speaking seriously...how else would you do it? There are 500 million tweets per day. Any given phenomenon can be found. If you wanted to demonstrate Nazi content next to, say, IBM (yes I know I know), then you'd have to either look for it or place a trap ad and wait. I don't know how to estimate frequency otherwise. How do you access, trawl and extract data from 500 million tweets?
    Well they aren't using the system in a way that any normal person would be. And they report as if this heavily concocted incident is normal, when according to lawsuit twitter and Rumble say from their data they were 1 of single digit accounts that experienced this.

    The profiles they open aren't even perhaps mirroring activity of say a more normal human, or even say a politically engaged Republican. You could certainly do something like that, look at individuals accounts, follow all the same people, do similar liking / retweeting etc.

    They are pulling every lever possible to get the jackpot they desire, then pester advertisers with claims look, see, this is what happens when you advertise on twitter, everybody is seeing this kind of stuff.
    Well, Twitter and Rumble would say that. Neither is exactly a reliable source.
  • FrancisUrquhartFrancisUrquhart Posts: 82,291
    edited November 2023

    viewcode said:



    Sandpit said:

    viewcode said:

    viewcode said:

    viewcode said:

    Zeihan has buggered off Twitter and thinks Musk is an old-school Sith Efrikan racist. Who knew? Who could have possibly worked that out?

    "Why I'm Done With Twitter (or 'X' or whatever you call it)", Peter Zeihan, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kwtVbM5o-o

    Are we going through this nonsense of everybody is off to Mastadon again...hows Threads doing these days, seems to have about as much popularity as Piers Morgan tv show.
    Good point. Although I think Truth Social/Telegram provide the same functionality, unlike Bluesky/Mastodon. Neverthless a lot of people who leave Twitter come back. Zeihan's case is slightly different because he uses it to research and disseminate his stuff: the former is compromised by Muskery and the latter is not necessary

    Enshittification is followed by high-value-users buggering off and founding their own communities. YouTube refuseniks are going to Nebula or Armchair History TV or that new gun one. Trump Twitniks went to Truth Social, Russians(?) went to Telegram. Threads/Mastodon didn't get traction because they were difficult to use(?). WhatsApp is its own thing.

    We used to have megathings and now we don't: USENET went to newsgroups went to Geocities went to MySpace went to Facebook and fragmented to YouTube, Twitter, WhatsApp, Nebula, Truth Social, stuff, stuff, more stuff. Each year things become more difficult to analyse and summarise.

    :(
    Most of the people on services like Nebula are on YouTube and use their YouTube videos to drive traffic to Nebula.
    I know. Bloody annoying. Mustard's latest stuff is on Nebula not YT, I think Potential History has stopped publishing new stuff on YouTube.
    Some of it is also YouTube censorship. Particularly history videos can be very tricky because the automated system get twitchy when talking about Nazis, Hitler, etc.
    Youtube has all sorts of problems this year, they’re trying to avoid politically extreme content, but are instead tripping up a lot of legitimate content. There’s also thought to be political campaigners mass flagging current political content in an attempt to get it taken down, even if only temporarily.

    Speaking of political interference, Rumble has filed a defamation lawsuit against an organisation known as “Check My Ads’, which has been specifically targeting Rumble’s advertisers with misinformation about the company.
    https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/rumble-files-federal-defamation-lawsuit-against-co-founders-of-purported-watchdog-group-1032858785?op=1
    I noticed that Rumble are making similar claims like Musk that Media Matters have been setting up profiles and engineering them to get the Nazi post next to an ad by following only the extremists, liking the posts etc, and those accounts are literally the only account that saw such an interaction out of millions / billions of ad serves.

    Its a bit like going into a strip club, throwing money around like it is going out of fashion, accepting an invite to the VIP room, then clutching your pearls when the stripper ask if you might be interested in extras.
    Speaking seriously...how else would you do it? There are 500 million tweets per day. Any given phenomenon can be found. If you wanted to demonstrate Nazi content next to, say, IBM (yes I know I know), then you'd have to either look for it or place a trap ad and wait. I don't know how to estimate frequency otherwise. How do you access, trawl and extract data from 500 million tweets?
    Well they aren't using the system in a way that any normal person would be. And they report as if this heavily concocted incident is normal, when according to lawsuit twitter and Rumble say from their data they were 1 of single digit accounts that experienced this.

    The profiles they open aren't even perhaps mirroring activity of say a more normal human, or even say a politically engaged Republican. You could certainly do something like that, look at individuals accounts, follow all the same people, do similar liking / retweeting etc.

    They are pulling every lever possible to get the jackpot they desire, then pester advertisers with claims look, see, this is what happens when you advertise on twitter, everybody is seeing this kind of stuff.
    Well, Twitter and Rumble would say that. Neither is exactly a reliable source.
    Well we will see if it ever gets to court. They have shown some data, that will be tested in court. They will have all the records on what these accounts did and how many ads they were shown.
  • eekeek Posts: 28,444
    HYUFD said:

    Nigelb said:

    HYUFD said:

    Leon said:

    The frigging post office scandal? Again?

    Some interesting points but it is more law than politicalbetting really and quite a long article again
    The article is about the serious failure of Parliamentary legislation.
    What do you think the purpose of governments should be, if not to legislate wisely ?
    Yes but this website is called 'Politicalbetting.Com' not 'In depth scrutiny of Parliamentary legislation.com'.

    Now we have some posts on other topics eg sports betting, Eurovision winner and occasionally broader political topics but this is quite a loose expansion of the heading of the site. Which is fine but that is what it is
    Sorry but this site is about Politics and if needs X headers a day which no one actually needs to read unless they want to.

    @Cyclefree ‘s posts may be long but every single one of them is interesting.


    And over the years we’ve lost / seen chased away a number of header writers many of whom I now follow elsewhere as that’s the only option
  • SandpitSandpit Posts: 54,656
    So you can live your life like Shane McGowan and make it to 65, or live your life like Alistair Darling and only get five years more?

    (Orders another pint)

    A busy day for the obituary writers.
  • GhedebravGhedebrav Posts: 3,860
    viewcode said:



    Sandpit said:

    viewcode said:

    viewcode said:

    viewcode said:

    Zeihan has buggered off Twitter and thinks Musk is an old-school Sith Efrikan racist. Who knew? Who could have possibly worked that out?

    "Why I'm Done With Twitter (or 'X' or whatever you call it)", Peter Zeihan, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kwtVbM5o-o

    Are we going through this nonsense of everybody is off to Mastadon again...hows Threads doing these days, seems to have about as much popularity as Piers Morgan tv show.
    Good point. Although I think Truth Social/Telegram provide the same functionality, unlike Bluesky/Mastodon. Neverthless a lot of people who leave Twitter come back. Zeihan's case is slightly different because he uses it to research and disseminate his stuff: the former is compromised by Muskery and the latter is not necessary

    Enshittification is followed by high-value-users buggering off and founding their own communities. YouTube refuseniks are going to Nebula or Armchair History TV or that new gun one. Trump Twitniks went to Truth Social, Russians(?) went to Telegram. Threads/Mastodon didn't get traction because they were difficult to use(?). WhatsApp is its own thing.

    We used to have megathings and now we don't: USENET went to newsgroups went to Geocities went to MySpace went to Facebook and fragmented to YouTube, Twitter, WhatsApp, Nebula, Truth Social, stuff, stuff, more stuff. Each year things become more difficult to analyse and summarise.

    :(
    Most of the people on services like Nebula are on YouTube and use their YouTube videos to drive traffic to Nebula.
    I know. Bloody annoying. Mustard's latest stuff is on Nebula not YT, I think Potential History has stopped publishing new stuff on YouTube.
    Some of it is also YouTube censorship. Particularly history videos can be very tricky because the automated system get twitchy when talking about Nazis, Hitler, etc.
    Youtube has all sorts of problems this year, they’re trying to avoid politically extreme content, but are instead tripping up a lot of legitimate content. There’s also thought to be political campaigners mass flagging current political content in an attempt to get it taken down, even if only temporarily.

    Speaking of political interference, Rumble has filed a defamation lawsuit against an organisation known as “Check My Ads’, which has been specifically targeting Rumble’s advertisers with misinformation about the company.
    https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/rumble-files-federal-defamation-lawsuit-against-co-founders-of-purported-watchdog-group-1032858785?op=1
    I noticed that Rumble are making similar claims like Musk that Media Matters have been setting up profiles and engineering them to get the Nazi post next to an ad by following only the extremists, liking the posts etc, and those accounts are literally the only account that saw such an interaction out of millions / billions of ad serves.

    Its a bit like going into a strip club, throwing money around like it is going out of fashion, accepting an invite to the VIP room, then clutching your pearls when the stripper ask if you might be interested in extras.
    Speaking seriously...how else would you do it? There are 500 million tweets per day. Any given phenomenon can be found. If you wanted to demonstrate Nazi content next to, say, IBM (yes I know I know), then you'd have to either look for it or place a trap ad and wait. I don't know how to estimate frequency otherwise. How do you access, trawl and extract data from 500 million tweets?
    As I've probably said on here before, advertisers are leaving Twitter because it has always been a fairly substandard advertising channel; miles behind meta and google in terms of creative formats and targeting, and therefore a very easy drop now that Elon is actively telling the people who ought to be paying the bills to go f*ck themselves (on top of everything else).

    There's no conspiracy theory here. Twitter is a shit place to advertise, and you can by and large reach the same people more easily, accurately with better creative elsewhere; it's easy enough for a big campaign to write off that bit of additional audience cover Twitter might have given you. If Musk had bought Meta or Google, I doubt as many would be jumping ship as it would have a real-life effect on bottom lines.

    There will be exceptions, of course - if I was running an NFT scam, for example, X would probably be my first port of call.
  • FrancisUrquhartFrancisUrquhart Posts: 82,291
    edited November 2023
    Sandpit said:

    So you can live your life like Shane McGowan and make it to 65, or live your life like Alistair Darling and only get five years more?

    (Orders another pint)

    A busy day for the obituary writers.

    Although not sure past 10 years McGowan's life could be described as living, more existing.....I would take the extra 15.
  • TheuniondivvieTheuniondivvie Posts: 42,053
    edited November 2023
    Are we going to get any cringey tweets from pols about MacGowan? Not famous enough I guess.

    Some good general advice on the death thing, very much not taken by u-kno-who.











  • SandpitSandpit Posts: 54,656

    viewcode said:



    Sandpit said:

    viewcode said:

    viewcode said:

    viewcode said:

    Zeihan has buggered off Twitter and thinks Musk is an old-school Sith Efrikan racist. Who knew? Who could have possibly worked that out?

    "Why I'm Done With Twitter (or 'X' or whatever you call it)", Peter Zeihan, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kwtVbM5o-o

    Are we going through this nonsense of everybody is off to Mastadon again...hows Threads doing these days, seems to have about as much popularity as Piers Morgan tv show.
    Good point. Although I think Truth Social/Telegram provide the same functionality, unlike Bluesky/Mastodon. Neverthless a lot of people who leave Twitter come back. Zeihan's case is slightly different because he uses it to research and disseminate his stuff: the former is compromised by Muskery and the latter is not necessary

    Enshittification is followed by high-value-users buggering off and founding their own communities. YouTube refuseniks are going to Nebula or Armchair History TV or that new gun one. Trump Twitniks went to Truth Social, Russians(?) went to Telegram. Threads/Mastodon didn't get traction because they were difficult to use(?). WhatsApp is its own thing.

    We used to have megathings and now we don't: USENET went to newsgroups went to Geocities went to MySpace went to Facebook and fragmented to YouTube, Twitter, WhatsApp, Nebula, Truth Social, stuff, stuff, more stuff. Each year things become more difficult to analyse and summarise.

    :(
    Most of the people on services like Nebula are on YouTube and use their YouTube videos to drive traffic to Nebula.
    I know. Bloody annoying. Mustard's latest stuff is on Nebula not YT, I think Potential History has stopped publishing new stuff on YouTube.
    Some of it is also YouTube censorship. Particularly history videos can be very tricky because the automated system get twitchy when talking about Nazis, Hitler, etc.
    Youtube has all sorts of problems this year, they’re trying to avoid politically extreme content, but are instead tripping up a lot of legitimate content. There’s also thought to be political campaigners mass flagging current political content in an attempt to get it taken down, even if only temporarily.

    Speaking of political interference, Rumble has filed a defamation lawsuit against an organisation known as “Check My Ads’, which has been specifically targeting Rumble’s advertisers with misinformation about the company.
    https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/rumble-files-federal-defamation-lawsuit-against-co-founders-of-purported-watchdog-group-1032858785?op=1
    I noticed that Rumble are making similar claims like Musk that Media Matters have been setting up profiles and engineering them to get the Nazi post next to an ad by following only the extremists, liking the posts etc, and those accounts are literally the only account that saw such an interaction out of millions / billions of ad serves.

    Its a bit like going into a strip club, throwing money around like it is going out of fashion, accepting an invite to the VIP room, then clutching your pearls when the stripper ask if you might be interested in extras.
    Speaking seriously...how else would you do it? There are 500 million tweets per day. Any given phenomenon can be found. If you wanted to demonstrate Nazi content next to, say, IBM (yes I know I know), then you'd have to either look for it or place a trap ad and wait. I don't know how to estimate frequency otherwise. How do you access, trawl and extract data from 500 million tweets?
    Well they aren't using the system in a way that any normal person would be. And they report as if this heavily concocted incident is normal, when according to lawsuit twitter and Rumble say from their data they were 1 of single digit accounts that experienced this.

    The profiles they open aren't even perhaps mirroring activity of say a more normal human, or even say a politically engaged Republican. You could certainly do something like that, look at individuals accounts, follow all the same people, do similar liking / retweeting etc.

    They are pulling every lever possible to get the jackpot they desire, then pester advertisers with claims look, see, this is what happens when you advertise on twitter, everybody is seeing this kind of stuff.
    Well, Twitter and Rumble would say that. Neither is exactly a reliable source.
    But Media Matters, Check My Ads, and Stop Funding Hate, are perfectly reliable sources who never misspeak about the organisations they aggressively target?
  • bondegezoubondegezou Posts: 11,229
    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    viewcode said:

    viewcode said:

    viewcode said:

    Zeihan has buggered off Twitter and thinks Musk is an old-school Sith Efrikan racist. Who knew? Who could have possibly worked that out?

    "Why I'm Done With Twitter (or 'X' or whatever you call it)", Peter Zeihan, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kwtVbM5o-o

    Are we going through this nonsense of everybody is off to Mastadon again...hows Threads doing these days, seems to have about as much popularity as Piers Morgan tv show.
    Good point. Although I think Truth Social/Telegram provide the same functionality, unlike Bluesky/Mastodon. Neverthless a lot of people who leave Twitter come back. Zeihan's case is slightly different because he uses it to research and disseminate his stuff: the former is compromised by Muskery and the latter is not necessary

    Enshittification is followed by high-value-users buggering off and founding their own communities. YouTube refuseniks are going to Nebula or Armchair History TV or that new gun one. Trump Twitniks went to Truth Social, Russians(?) went to Telegram. Threads/Mastodon didn't get traction because they were difficult to use(?). WhatsApp is its own thing.

    We used to have megathings and now we don't: USENET went to newsgroups went to Geocities went to MySpace went to Facebook and fragmented to YouTube, Twitter, WhatsApp, Nebula, Truth Social, stuff, stuff, more stuff. Each year things become more difficult to analyse and summarise.

    :(
    Most of the people on services like Nebula are on YouTube and use their YouTube videos to drive traffic to Nebula.
    I know. Bloody annoying. Mustard's latest stuff is on Nebula not YT, I think Potential History has stopped publishing new stuff on YouTube.
    Some of it is also YouTube censorship. Particularly history videos can be very tricky because the automated system get twitchy when talking about Nazis, Hitler, etc.
    Youtube has all sorts of problems this year, they’re trying to avoid politically extreme content, but are instead tripping up a lot of legitimate content. There’s also thought to be political campaigners mass flagging current political content in an attempt to get it taken down, even if only temporarily.

    Speaking of political interference, Rumble has filed a defamation lawsuit against an organisation known as “Check My Ads’, which has been specifically targeting Rumble’s advertisers with misinformation about the company.
    https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/rumble-files-federal-defamation-lawsuit-against-co-founders-of-purported-watchdog-group-1032858785?op=1
    I noticed that Rumble are making similar claims like Musk that Media Matters have been setting up profiles and engineering them to get the Nazi post next to an ad by following only the extremists, liking the posts etc, and those accounts are literally the only account that saw such an interaction out of millions / billions of ad serves.

    Its a bit like going into a strip club, throwing money around like it is going out of fashion, accepting an invite to the VIP room, then clutching your pearls when the stripper ask if you might be interested in extras.
    There’s a number of these nonprofit groups in the US, who appear to be very well funded and are trying to take down alternative media by going after their revenue sources. We know from filings that Media Matters took $1m from Soros a few years ago.

    I have a feeling that the next 12 months is going to be very difficult for these companies, in the buildup to the election. On the other hand, there’s also organisations such as Public Square that have started up, recommending conservative businesses to the public and to each other. In the media space, there’s companies like Daily Wire throwing huge amounts of money at all sorts of random projects. DW now has 1m monthly subscribers, and annual revenue approaching $250m.
    Oh, wow, straight to people being “very well funded” and Soros as a source of all evil?
  • bondegezoubondegezou Posts: 11,229

    Sandpit said:

    viewcode said:

    viewcode said:

    viewcode said:

    Zeihan has buggered off Twitter and thinks Musk is an old-school Sith Efrikan racist. Who knew? Who could have possibly worked that out?

    "Why I'm Done With Twitter (or 'X' or whatever you call it)", Peter Zeihan, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kwtVbM5o-o

    Are we going through this nonsense of everybody is off to Mastadon again...hows Threads doing these days, seems to have about as much popularity as Piers Morgan tv show.
    Good point. Although I think Truth Social/Telegram provide the same functionality, unlike Bluesky/Mastodon. Neverthless a lot of people who leave Twitter come back. Zeihan's case is slightly different because he uses it to research and disseminate his stuff: the former is compromised by Muskery and the latter is not necessary

    Enshittification is followed by high-value-users buggering off and founding their own communities. YouTube refuseniks are going to Nebula or Armchair History TV or that new gun one. Trump Twitniks went to Truth Social, Russians(?) went to Telegram. Threads/Mastodon didn't get traction because they were difficult to use(?). WhatsApp is its own thing.

    We used to have megathings and now we don't: USENET went to newsgroups went to Geocities went to MySpace went to Facebook and fragmented to YouTube, Twitter, WhatsApp, Nebula, Truth Social, stuff, stuff, more stuff. Each year things become more difficult to analyse and summarise.

    :(
    Most of the people on services like Nebula are on YouTube and use their YouTube videos to drive traffic to Nebula.
    I know. Bloody annoying. Mustard's latest stuff is on Nebula not YT, I think Potential History has stopped publishing new stuff on YouTube.
    Some of it is also YouTube censorship. Particularly history videos can be very tricky because the automated system get twitchy when talking about Nazis, Hitler, etc.
    Youtube has all sorts of problems this year, they’re trying to avoid politically extreme content, but are instead tripping up a lot of legitimate content. There’s also thought to be political campaigners mass flagging current political content in an attempt to get it taken down, even if only temporarily.

    Speaking of political interference, Rumble has filed a defamation lawsuit against an organisation known as “Check My Ads’, which has been specifically targeting Rumble’s advertisers with misinformation about the company.
    https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/rumble-files-federal-defamation-lawsuit-against-co-founders-of-purported-watchdog-group-1032858785?op=1
    I noticed that Rumble are making similar claims like Musk that Media Matters have been setting up profiles and engineering them to get the Nazi post next to an ad by following only the extremists, liking the posts etc, and those accounts are literally the only account that saw such an interaction out of millions / billions of ad serves.

    Its a bit like going into a strip club, throwing money around like it is going out of fashion, accepting an invite to the VIP room, then clutching your pearls when the stripper ask if you might be interested in extras.
    If your question is whether strippers ask if you might be interested in extras, you’re not going to find out by avoiding going into a strip club.
    There is a difference between attending said strip club as a normal punter, engaging in normal behaviour there compared to doing everything possible to seek out this.

    It is why in the UK things like concocting a setup to entrap people by the authorities are a no no.
    Nothing described would count as entrapment.
  • FrancisUrquhartFrancisUrquhart Posts: 82,291
    edited November 2023
    Ghedebrav said:

    viewcode said:



    Sandpit said:

    viewcode said:

    viewcode said:

    viewcode said:

    Zeihan has buggered off Twitter and thinks Musk is an old-school Sith Efrikan racist. Who knew? Who could have possibly worked that out?

    "Why I'm Done With Twitter (or 'X' or whatever you call it)", Peter Zeihan, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kwtVbM5o-o

    Are we going through this nonsense of everybody is off to Mastadon again...hows Threads doing these days, seems to have about as much popularity as Piers Morgan tv show.
    Good point. Although I think Truth Social/Telegram provide the same functionality, unlike Bluesky/Mastodon. Neverthless a lot of people who leave Twitter come back. Zeihan's case is slightly different because he uses it to research and disseminate his stuff: the former is compromised by Muskery and the latter is not necessary

    Enshittification is followed by high-value-users buggering off and founding their own communities. YouTube refuseniks are going to Nebula or Armchair History TV or that new gun one. Trump Twitniks went to Truth Social, Russians(?) went to Telegram. Threads/Mastodon didn't get traction because they were difficult to use(?). WhatsApp is its own thing.

    We used to have megathings and now we don't: USENET went to newsgroups went to Geocities went to MySpace went to Facebook and fragmented to YouTube, Twitter, WhatsApp, Nebula, Truth Social, stuff, stuff, more stuff. Each year things become more difficult to analyse and summarise.

    :(
    Most of the people on services like Nebula are on YouTube and use their YouTube videos to drive traffic to Nebula.
    I know. Bloody annoying. Mustard's latest stuff is on Nebula not YT, I think Potential History has stopped publishing new stuff on YouTube.
    Some of it is also YouTube censorship. Particularly history videos can be very tricky because the automated system get twitchy when talking about Nazis, Hitler, etc.
    Youtube has all sorts of problems this year, they’re trying to avoid politically extreme content, but are instead tripping up a lot of legitimate content. There’s also thought to be political campaigners mass flagging current political content in an attempt to get it taken down, even if only temporarily.

    Speaking of political interference, Rumble has filed a defamation lawsuit against an organisation known as “Check My Ads’, which has been specifically targeting Rumble’s advertisers with misinformation about the company.
    https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/rumble-files-federal-defamation-lawsuit-against-co-founders-of-purported-watchdog-group-1032858785?op=1
    I noticed that Rumble are making similar claims like Musk that Media Matters have been setting up profiles and engineering them to get the Nazi post next to an ad by following only the extremists, liking the posts etc, and those accounts are literally the only account that saw such an interaction out of millions / billions of ad serves.

    Its a bit like going into a strip club, throwing money around like it is going out of fashion, accepting an invite to the VIP room, then clutching your pearls when the stripper ask if you might be interested in extras.
    Speaking seriously...how else would you do it? There are 500 million tweets per day. Any given phenomenon can be found. If you wanted to demonstrate Nazi content next to, say, IBM (yes I know I know), then you'd have to either look for it or place a trap ad and wait. I don't know how to estimate frequency otherwise. How do you access, trawl and extract data from 500 million tweets?
    As I've probably said on here before, advertisers are leaving Twitter because it has always been a fairly substandard advertising channel; miles behind meta and google in terms of creative formats and targeting, and therefore a very easy drop now that Elon is actively telling the people who ought to be paying the bills to go f*ck themselves (on top of everything else).

    There's no conspiracy theory here. Twitter is a shit place to advertise, and you can by and large reach the same people more easily, accurately with better creative elsewhere; it's easy enough for a big campaign to write off that bit of additional audience cover Twitter might have given you. If Musk had bought Meta or Google, I doubt as many would be jumping ship as it would have a real-life effect on bottom lines.

    There will be exceptions, of course - if I was running an NFT scam, for example, X would probably be my first port of call.
    This is what some of us said way before Musk took over. The genius of Meta is how much they know about everybody, the genius of Google / Apple is they have become the top of pyramid when it comes to controlling ad market on the internet.

    Twitter knows f##k all about them in comparison. TikTok has piss poor revenue despite being wildly popular.

    EggProfile105353 isn't very valuable to an advertiser.

    What twitter does have is oversized influence among people with power and influence. That is why they get so angry about Musk and Musk controlling it. He now owns "their" toy and they don't like what he is doing with it. The whole "its a private company, they can do what they like" line seems to have gone out of fashion rather quickly.
  • Andy_JSAndy_JS Posts: 32,710
    edited November 2023
    Apparently Survation have released an MRP study, (a few days ago), which includes projecting Eastbourne as a Labour gain. The result there at the last election was Con 49%, LD 41%, Lab 7%.

    https://vote-2012.proboards.com/thread/1244/survation?page=78
  • kinabalukinabalu Posts: 42,381
    Sandpit said:

    DougSeal said:

    Alisdair Darling has died.

    Wow. According to wiki his 70th birthday was two days ago. RIP.
    Yes. He always came over to me as able and in politics for the right reasons. Three score and ten but that's a life cut short by today's expectations.
  • TazTaz Posts: 14,581
    Sandpit said:

    So you can live your life like Shane McGowan and make it to 65, or live your life like Alistair Darling and only get five years more?

    (Orders another pint)

    A busy day for the obituary writers.

    The day is not over yet either !!!!
  • SandpitSandpit Posts: 54,656

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    viewcode said:

    viewcode said:

    viewcode said:

    Zeihan has buggered off Twitter and thinks Musk is an old-school Sith Efrikan racist. Who knew? Who could have possibly worked that out?

    "Why I'm Done With Twitter (or 'X' or whatever you call it)", Peter Zeihan, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kwtVbM5o-o

    Are we going through this nonsense of everybody is off to Mastadon again...hows Threads doing these days, seems to have about as much popularity as Piers Morgan tv show.
    Good point. Although I think Truth Social/Telegram provide the same functionality, unlike Bluesky/Mastodon. Neverthless a lot of people who leave Twitter come back. Zeihan's case is slightly different because he uses it to research and disseminate his stuff: the former is compromised by Muskery and the latter is not necessary

    Enshittification is followed by high-value-users buggering off and founding their own communities. YouTube refuseniks are going to Nebula or Armchair History TV or that new gun one. Trump Twitniks went to Truth Social, Russians(?) went to Telegram. Threads/Mastodon didn't get traction because they were difficult to use(?). WhatsApp is its own thing.

    We used to have megathings and now we don't: USENET went to newsgroups went to Geocities went to MySpace went to Facebook and fragmented to YouTube, Twitter, WhatsApp, Nebula, Truth Social, stuff, stuff, more stuff. Each year things become more difficult to analyse and summarise.

    :(
    Most of the people on services like Nebula are on YouTube and use their YouTube videos to drive traffic to Nebula.
    I know. Bloody annoying. Mustard's latest stuff is on Nebula not YT, I think Potential History has stopped publishing new stuff on YouTube.
    Some of it is also YouTube censorship. Particularly history videos can be very tricky because the automated system get twitchy when talking about Nazis, Hitler, etc.
    Youtube has all sorts of problems this year, they’re trying to avoid politically extreme content, but are instead tripping up a lot of legitimate content. There’s also thought to be political campaigners mass flagging current political content in an attempt to get it taken down, even if only temporarily.

    Speaking of political interference, Rumble has filed a defamation lawsuit against an organisation known as “Check My Ads’, which has been specifically targeting Rumble’s advertisers with misinformation about the company.
    https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/rumble-files-federal-defamation-lawsuit-against-co-founders-of-purported-watchdog-group-1032858785?op=1
    I noticed that Rumble are making similar claims like Musk that Media Matters have been setting up profiles and engineering them to get the Nazi post next to an ad by following only the extremists, liking the posts etc, and those accounts are literally the only account that saw such an interaction out of millions / billions of ad serves.

    Its a bit like going into a strip club, throwing money around like it is going out of fashion, accepting an invite to the VIP room, then clutching your pearls when the stripper ask if you might be interested in extras.
    There’s a number of these nonprofit groups in the US, who appear to be very well funded and are trying to take down alternative media by going after their revenue sources. We know from filings that Media Matters took $1m from Soros a few years ago.

    I have a feeling that the next 12 months is going to be very difficult for these companies, in the buildup to the election. On the other hand, there’s also organisations such as Public Square that have started up, recommending conservative businesses to the public and to each other. In the media space, there’s companies like Daily Wire throwing huge amounts of money at all sorts of random projects. DW now has 1m monthly subscribers, and annual revenue approaching $250m.
    Oh, wow, straight to people being “very well funded” and Soros as a source of all evil?
    He’s the Democrat version of the Koch brothers, willing to spend quite literally billions of dollars on politicians and political campaigns in the US over a period of decades.

    It’s not controversial, that’s just how the US political system works, as much as it seems very weird to outsiders for presidential candidates to spend $1bn each in six months, and for every election down to the dog catcher (but mostly judges and DAs) to attract serious money to push a particular agenda.
  • Andy_JS said:

    Apparently Survation have released an MRP study, (a few days ago), which includes projecting Eastbourne as a Labour gain. The result there at the last election was Con 49%, LD 41%, Lab 7%.

    https://vote-2012.proboards.com/thread/1244/survation?page=78

    Interesting. Is the Brightonization of Eastbourne now a thing?
  • viewcodeviewcode Posts: 22,194
    edited November 2023

    viewcode said:



    Sandpit said:

    viewcode said:

    viewcode said:

    viewcode said:

    Zeihan has buggered off Twitter and thinks Musk is an old-school Sith Efrikan racist. Who knew? Who could have possibly worked that out?

    "Why I'm Done With Twitter (or 'X' or whatever you call it)", Peter Zeihan, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kwtVbM5o-o

    Are we going through this nonsense of everybody is off to Mastadon again...hows Threads doing these days, seems to have about as much popularity as Piers Morgan tv show.
    Good point. Although I think Truth Social/Telegram provide the same functionality, unlike Bluesky/Mastodon. Neverthless a lot of people who leave Twitter come back. Zeihan's case is slightly different because he uses it to research and disseminate his stuff: the former is compromised by Muskery and the latter is not necessary

    Enshittification is followed by high-value-users buggering off and founding their own communities. YouTube refuseniks are going to Nebula or Armchair History TV or that new gun one. Trump Twitniks went to Truth Social, Russians(?) went to Telegram. Threads/Mastodon didn't get traction because they were difficult to use(?). WhatsApp is its own thing.

    We used to have megathings and now we don't: USENET went to newsgroups went to Geocities went to MySpace went to Facebook and fragmented to YouTube, Twitter, WhatsApp, Nebula, Truth Social, stuff, stuff, more stuff. Each year things become more difficult to analyse and summarise.

    :(
    Most of the people on services like Nebula are on YouTube and use their YouTube videos to drive traffic to Nebula.
    I know. Bloody annoying. Mustard's latest stuff is on Nebula not YT, I think Potential History has stopped publishing new stuff on YouTube.
    Some of it is also YouTube censorship. Particularly history videos can be very tricky because the automated system get twitchy when talking about Nazis, Hitler, etc.
    Youtube has all sorts of problems this year, they’re trying to avoid politically extreme content, but are instead tripping up a lot of legitimate content. There’s also thought to be political campaigners mass flagging current political content in an attempt to get it taken down, even if only temporarily.

    Speaking of political interference, Rumble has filed a defamation lawsuit against an organisation known as “Check My Ads’, which has been specifically targeting Rumble’s advertisers with misinformation about the company.
    https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/rumble-files-federal-defamation-lawsuit-against-co-founders-of-purported-watchdog-group-1032858785?op=1
    I noticed that Rumble are making similar claims like Musk that Media Matters have been setting up profiles and engineering them to get the Nazi post next to an ad by following only the extremists, liking the posts etc, and those accounts are literally the only account that saw such an interaction out of millions / billions of ad serves.

    Its a bit like going into a strip club, throwing money around like it is going out of fashion, accepting an invite to the VIP room, then clutching your pearls when the stripper ask if you might be interested in extras.
    Speaking seriously...how else would you do it? There are 500 million tweets per day. Any given phenomenon can be found. If you wanted to demonstrate Nazi content next to, say, IBM (yes I know I know), then you'd have to either look for it or place a trap ad and wait. I don't know how to estimate frequency otherwise. How do you access, trawl and extract data from 500 million tweets?
    Well they aren't using the system in a way that any normal person would be. And they report as if this heavily concocted incident is normal, when according to lawsuit twitter and Rumble say from their data they were 1 of single digit accounts that experienced this.

    The profiles they open aren't even perhaps mirroring activity of say a more normal human, or even say a politically engaged Republican. You could certainly do something like that, look at individuals accounts, follow all the same people, do similar liking / retweeting etc.

    They are pulling every lever possible to get the jackpot they desire, then pester advertisers with claims look, see, this is what happens when you advertise on twitter, everybody is seeing this kind of stuff.
    No I understand that. What I was wondering is how it could be done properly.
  • SandpitSandpit Posts: 54,656
    Taz said:

    Sandpit said:

    Andy_JS said:

    Sad to hear of the death of Shane MacGowan.

    RIP.

    Fairytale is a xmas classic for my generation.
    That’s got to be worth a bet for Christmas No.1 this year. There’s a lot of people for whom that’s the greatest Christmas song of all time.
    I wonder if they will bleep out the "problematic" content !!!

    Christmas Wrapping for me.
    BBC have been running an edited version for some time, I assume that iTunes and Spotify still have the original, which is how most people find music these days.
  • TazTaz Posts: 14,581
    kinabalu said:

    A long lost BBC drama that I think Malcolm would appreciate:
    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-66889553

    Scotch On The Rocks: From 1973. Armed Insurrection in Scotland. Never shown since considered inflammatory.

    Missing two of the five episodes also cannot help.
  • GhedebravGhedebrav Posts: 3,860

    Ghedebrav said:

    viewcode said:



    Sandpit said:

    viewcode said:

    viewcode said:

    viewcode said:

    Zeihan has buggered off Twitter and thinks Musk is an old-school Sith Efrikan racist. Who knew? Who could have possibly worked that out?

    "Why I'm Done With Twitter (or 'X' or whatever you call it)", Peter Zeihan, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kwtVbM5o-o

    Are we going through this nonsense of everybody is off to Mastadon again...hows Threads doing these days, seems to have about as much popularity as Piers Morgan tv show.
    Good point. Although I think Truth Social/Telegram provide the same functionality, unlike Bluesky/Mastodon. Neverthless a lot of people who leave Twitter come back. Zeihan's case is slightly different because he uses it to research and disseminate his stuff: the former is compromised by Muskery and the latter is not necessary

    Enshittification is followed by high-value-users buggering off and founding their own communities. YouTube refuseniks are going to Nebula or Armchair History TV or that new gun one. Trump Twitniks went to Truth Social, Russians(?) went to Telegram. Threads/Mastodon didn't get traction because they were difficult to use(?). WhatsApp is its own thing.

    We used to have megathings and now we don't: USENET went to newsgroups went to Geocities went to MySpace went to Facebook and fragmented to YouTube, Twitter, WhatsApp, Nebula, Truth Social, stuff, stuff, more stuff. Each year things become more difficult to analyse and summarise.

    :(
    Most of the people on services like Nebula are on YouTube and use their YouTube videos to drive traffic to Nebula.
    I know. Bloody annoying. Mustard's latest stuff is on Nebula not YT, I think Potential History has stopped publishing new stuff on YouTube.
    Some of it is also YouTube censorship. Particularly history videos can be very tricky because the automated system get twitchy when talking about Nazis, Hitler, etc.
    Youtube has all sorts of problems this year, they’re trying to avoid politically extreme content, but are instead tripping up a lot of legitimate content. There’s also thought to be political campaigners mass flagging current political content in an attempt to get it taken down, even if only temporarily.

    Speaking of political interference, Rumble has filed a defamation lawsuit against an organisation known as “Check My Ads’, which has been specifically targeting Rumble’s advertisers with misinformation about the company.
    https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/rumble-files-federal-defamation-lawsuit-against-co-founders-of-purported-watchdog-group-1032858785?op=1
    I noticed that Rumble are making similar claims like Musk that Media Matters have been setting up profiles and engineering them to get the Nazi post next to an ad by following only the extremists, liking the posts etc, and those accounts are literally the only account that saw such an interaction out of millions / billions of ad serves.

    Its a bit like going into a strip club, throwing money around like it is going out of fashion, accepting an invite to the VIP room, then clutching your pearls when the stripper ask if you might be interested in extras.
    Speaking seriously...how else would you do it? There are 500 million tweets per day. Any given phenomenon can be found. If you wanted to demonstrate Nazi content next to, say, IBM (yes I know I know), then you'd have to either look for it or place a trap ad and wait. I don't know how to estimate frequency otherwise. How do you access, trawl and extract data from 500 million tweets?
    As I've probably said on here before, advertisers are leaving Twitter because it has always been a fairly substandard advertising channel; miles behind meta and google in terms of creative formats and targeting, and therefore a very easy drop now that Elon is actively telling the people who ought to be paying the bills to go f*ck themselves (on top of everything else).

    There's no conspiracy theory here. Twitter is a shit place to advertise, and you can by and large reach the same people more easily, accurately with better creative elsewhere; it's easy enough for a big campaign to write off that bit of additional audience cover Twitter might have given you. If Musk had bought Meta or Google, I doubt as many would be jumping ship as it would have a real-life effect on bottom lines.

    There will be exceptions, of course - if I was running an NFT scam, for example, X would probably be my first port of call.
    This is what some of us said way before Musk took over. The genius of Meta is how much they know about everybody, the genius of Google / Apple is they have become the top of pyramid when it comes to controlling ad market on the internet.

    Twitter knows f##k all about them in comparison. TikTok has piss poor revenue despite being wildly popular.

    EggProfile105353 isn't very valuable to an advertiser.
    Yep - their ad model is quite silly too (TikTok, I mean) cause again, their formats are crap and advertisers are going straight to the popular creators and influencers and paying them, rather than the platform.
  • FrancisUrquhartFrancisUrquhart Posts: 82,291
    edited November 2023
    viewcode said:

    viewcode said:



    Sandpit said:

    viewcode said:

    viewcode said:

    viewcode said:

    Zeihan has buggered off Twitter and thinks Musk is an old-school Sith Efrikan racist. Who knew? Who could have possibly worked that out?

    "Why I'm Done With Twitter (or 'X' or whatever you call it)", Peter Zeihan, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kwtVbM5o-o

    Are we going through this nonsense of everybody is off to Mastadon again...hows Threads doing these days, seems to have about as much popularity as Piers Morgan tv show.
    Good point. Although I think Truth Social/Telegram provide the same functionality, unlike Bluesky/Mastodon. Neverthless a lot of people who leave Twitter come back. Zeihan's case is slightly different because he uses it to research and disseminate his stuff: the former is compromised by Muskery and the latter is not necessary

    Enshittification is followed by high-value-users buggering off and founding their own communities. YouTube refuseniks are going to Nebula or Armchair History TV or that new gun one. Trump Twitniks went to Truth Social, Russians(?) went to Telegram. Threads/Mastodon didn't get traction because they were difficult to use(?). WhatsApp is its own thing.

    We used to have megathings and now we don't: USENET went to newsgroups went to Geocities went to MySpace went to Facebook and fragmented to YouTube, Twitter, WhatsApp, Nebula, Truth Social, stuff, stuff, more stuff. Each year things become more difficult to analyse and summarise.

    :(
    Most of the people on services like Nebula are on YouTube and use their YouTube videos to drive traffic to Nebula.
    I know. Bloody annoying. Mustard's latest stuff is on Nebula not YT, I think Potential History has stopped publishing new stuff on YouTube.
    Some of it is also YouTube censorship. Particularly history videos can be very tricky because the automated system get twitchy when talking about Nazis, Hitler, etc.
    Youtube has all sorts of problems this year, they’re trying to avoid politically extreme content, but are instead tripping up a lot of legitimate content. There’s also thought to be political campaigners mass flagging current political content in an attempt to get it taken down, even if only temporarily.

    Speaking of political interference, Rumble has filed a defamation lawsuit against an organisation known as “Check My Ads’, which has been specifically targeting Rumble’s advertisers with misinformation about the company.
    https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/rumble-files-federal-defamation-lawsuit-against-co-founders-of-purported-watchdog-group-1032858785?op=1
    I noticed that Rumble are making similar claims like Musk that Media Matters have been setting up profiles and engineering them to get the Nazi post next to an ad by following only the extremists, liking the posts etc, and those accounts are literally the only account that saw such an interaction out of millions / billions of ad serves.

    Its a bit like going into a strip club, throwing money around like it is going out of fashion, accepting an invite to the VIP room, then clutching your pearls when the stripper ask if you might be interested in extras.
    Speaking seriously...how else would you do it? There are 500 million tweets per day. Any given phenomenon can be found. If you wanted to demonstrate Nazi content next to, say, IBM (yes I know I know), then you'd have to either look for it or place a trap ad and wait. I don't know how to estimate frequency otherwise. How do you access, trawl and extract data from 500 million tweets?
    Well they aren't using the system in a way that any normal person would be. And they report as if this heavily concocted incident is normal, when according to lawsuit twitter and Rumble say from their data they were 1 of single digit accounts that experienced this.

    The profiles they open aren't even perhaps mirroring activity of say a more normal human, or even say a politically engaged Republican. You could certainly do something like that, look at individuals accounts, follow all the same people, do similar liking / retweeting etc.

    They are pulling every lever possible to get the jackpot they desire, then pester advertisers with claims look, see, this is what happens when you advertise on twitter, everybody is seeing this kind of stuff.
    No I understand that. What I was wondering is how it could be done properly.
    As I say, you attempt to shadow the account activity of a distribution of normal accounts. There is plenty of academic research that looks at social media, I am sure there are best practices in the literature of how to do this. Same way as there are best practices on how to do polling properly, it isn't going around Nick Griffin's and Tommy Robinson's houses and only asking them.
  • bondegezoubondegezou Posts: 11,229
    Sandpit said:

    viewcode said:



    Sandpit said:

    viewcode said:

    viewcode said:

    viewcode said:

    Zeihan has buggered off Twitter and thinks Musk is an old-school Sith Efrikan racist. Who knew? Who could have possibly worked that out?

    "Why I'm Done With Twitter (or 'X' or whatever you call it)", Peter Zeihan, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kwtVbM5o-o

    Are we going through this nonsense of everybody is off to Mastadon again...hows Threads doing these days, seems to have about as much popularity as Piers Morgan tv show.
    Good point. Although I think Truth Social/Telegram provide the same functionality, unlike Bluesky/Mastodon. Neverthless a lot of people who leave Twitter come back. Zeihan's case is slightly different because he uses it to research and disseminate his stuff: the former is compromised by Muskery and the latter is not necessary

    Enshittification is followed by high-value-users buggering off and founding their own communities. YouTube refuseniks are going to Nebula or Armchair History TV or that new gun one. Trump Twitniks went to Truth Social, Russians(?) went to Telegram. Threads/Mastodon didn't get traction because they were difficult to use(?). WhatsApp is its own thing.

    We used to have megathings and now we don't: USENET went to newsgroups went to Geocities went to MySpace went to Facebook and fragmented to YouTube, Twitter, WhatsApp, Nebula, Truth Social, stuff, stuff, more stuff. Each year things become more difficult to analyse and summarise.

    :(
    Most of the people on services like Nebula are on YouTube and use their YouTube videos to drive traffic to Nebula.
    I know. Bloody annoying. Mustard's latest stuff is on Nebula not YT, I think Potential History has stopped publishing new stuff on YouTube.
    Some of it is also YouTube censorship. Particularly history videos can be very tricky because the automated system get twitchy when talking about Nazis, Hitler, etc.
    Youtube has all sorts of problems this year, they’re trying to avoid politically extreme content, but are instead tripping up a lot of legitimate content. There’s also thought to be political campaigners mass flagging current political content in an attempt to get it taken down, even if only temporarily.

    Speaking of political interference, Rumble has filed a defamation lawsuit against an organisation known as “Check My Ads’, which has been specifically targeting Rumble’s advertisers with misinformation about the company.
    https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/rumble-files-federal-defamation-lawsuit-against-co-founders-of-purported-watchdog-group-1032858785?op=1
    I noticed that Rumble are making similar claims like Musk that Media Matters have been setting up profiles and engineering them to get the Nazi post next to an ad by following only the extremists, liking the posts etc, and those accounts are literally the only account that saw such an interaction out of millions / billions of ad serves.

    Its a bit like going into a strip club, throwing money around like it is going out of fashion, accepting an invite to the VIP room, then clutching your pearls when the stripper ask if you might be interested in extras.
    Speaking seriously...how else would you do it? There are 500 million tweets per day. Any given phenomenon can be found. If you wanted to demonstrate Nazi content next to, say, IBM (yes I know I know), then you'd have to either look for it or place a trap ad and wait. I don't know how to estimate frequency otherwise. How do you access, trawl and extract data from 500 million tweets?
    Well they aren't using the system in a way that any normal person would be. And they report as if this heavily concocted incident is normal, when according to lawsuit twitter and Rumble say from their data they were 1 of single digit accounts that experienced this.

    The profiles they open aren't even perhaps mirroring activity of say a more normal human, or even say a politically engaged Republican. You could certainly do something like that, look at individuals accounts, follow all the same people, do similar liking / retweeting etc.

    They are pulling every lever possible to get the jackpot they desire, then pester advertisers with claims look, see, this is what happens when you advertise on twitter, everybody is seeing this kind of stuff.
    Well, Twitter and Rumble would say that. Neither is exactly a reliable source.
    But Media Matters, Check My Ads, and Stop Funding Hate, are perfectly reliable sources who never misspeak about the organisations they aggressively target?
    Everyone who uses Twitter says the same thing: the user experience gets worse and worse, and there are more and more far right nutjobs. Musk, who regularly says antisemitic things, has explicitly said he wants Twitter to be more welcome to the nutjobs. Ergo, I find Media Matters’ claims quite plausible.
  • GhedebravGhedebrav Posts: 3,860

    Sandpit said:

    So you can live your life like Shane McGowan and make it to 65, or live your life like Alistair Darling and only get five years more?

    (Orders another pint)

    A busy day for the obituary writers.

    Although not sure past 10 years McGowan's life could be described as living, more existing.....I would take the extra 15.
    I saw The Pogues live about ten years ago (I think) at Manchester Apollo and they were great - surprisingly good actually, MacGowan was in great form. They did all of Rum, Sodomy & The Lash - a brilliant album - plus a few other faves.

    Lively old crowd too; fair few fist fights breaking out, everyone singing along. Good action all round.
  • bondegezoubondegezou Posts: 11,229
    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    viewcode said:

    viewcode said:

    viewcode said:

    Zeihan has buggered off Twitter and thinks Musk is an old-school Sith Efrikan racist. Who knew? Who could have possibly worked that out?

    "Why I'm Done With Twitter (or 'X' or whatever you call it)", Peter Zeihan, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kwtVbM5o-o

    Are we going through this nonsense of everybody is off to Mastadon again...hows Threads doing these days, seems to have about as much popularity as Piers Morgan tv show.
    Good point. Although I think Truth Social/Telegram provide the same functionality, unlike Bluesky/Mastodon. Neverthless a lot of people who leave Twitter come back. Zeihan's case is slightly different because he uses it to research and disseminate his stuff: the former is compromised by Muskery and the latter is not necessary

    Enshittification is followed by high-value-users buggering off and founding their own communities. YouTube refuseniks are going to Nebula or Armchair History TV or that new gun one. Trump Twitniks went to Truth Social, Russians(?) went to Telegram. Threads/Mastodon didn't get traction because they were difficult to use(?). WhatsApp is its own thing.

    We used to have megathings and now we don't: USENET went to newsgroups went to Geocities went to MySpace went to Facebook and fragmented to YouTube, Twitter, WhatsApp, Nebula, Truth Social, stuff, stuff, more stuff. Each year things become more difficult to analyse and summarise.

    :(
    Most of the people on services like Nebula are on YouTube and use their YouTube videos to drive traffic to Nebula.
    I know. Bloody annoying. Mustard's latest stuff is on Nebula not YT, I think Potential History has stopped publishing new stuff on YouTube.
    Some of it is also YouTube censorship. Particularly history videos can be very tricky because the automated system get twitchy when talking about Nazis, Hitler, etc.
    Youtube has all sorts of problems this year, they’re trying to avoid politically extreme content, but are instead tripping up a lot of legitimate content. There’s also thought to be political campaigners mass flagging current political content in an attempt to get it taken down, even if only temporarily.

    Speaking of political interference, Rumble has filed a defamation lawsuit against an organisation known as “Check My Ads’, which has been specifically targeting Rumble’s advertisers with misinformation about the company.
    https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/rumble-files-federal-defamation-lawsuit-against-co-founders-of-purported-watchdog-group-1032858785?op=1
    I noticed that Rumble are making similar claims like Musk that Media Matters have been setting up profiles and engineering them to get the Nazi post next to an ad by following only the extremists, liking the posts etc, and those accounts are literally the only account that saw such an interaction out of millions / billions of ad serves.

    Its a bit like going into a strip club, throwing money around like it is going out of fashion, accepting an invite to the VIP room, then clutching your pearls when the stripper ask if you might be interested in extras.
    There’s a number of these nonprofit groups in the US, who appear to be very well funded and are trying to take down alternative media by going after their revenue sources. We know from filings that Media Matters took $1m from Soros a few years ago.

    I have a feeling that the next 12 months is going to be very difficult for these companies, in the buildup to the election. On the other hand, there’s also organisations such as Public Square that have started up, recommending conservative businesses to the public and to each other. In the media space, there’s companies like Daily Wire throwing huge amounts of money at all sorts of random projects. DW now has 1m monthly subscribers, and annual revenue approaching $250m.
    Oh, wow, straight to people being “very well funded” and Soros as a source of all evil?
    He’s the Democrat version of the Koch brothers, willing to spend quite literally billions of dollars on politicians and political campaigns in the US over a period of decades.

    It’s not controversial, that’s just how the US political system works, as much as it seems very weird to outsiders for presidential candidates to spend $1bn each in six months, and for every election down to the dog catcher (but mostly judges and DAs) to attract serious money to push a particular agenda.
    Yes, that’s free speech. He can give his money to who he wants. Meanwhile, the US (and Hungarian) right have turned him into a hate figure, with lots of wink-wink conspiracy theories implied, lots of echoes of “Jews control the media”.
  • bondegezoubondegezou Posts: 11,229

    viewcode said:

    viewcode said:



    Sandpit said:

    viewcode said:

    viewcode said:

    viewcode said:

    Zeihan has buggered off Twitter and thinks Musk is an old-school Sith Efrikan racist. Who knew? Who could have possibly worked that out?

    "Why I'm Done With Twitter (or 'X' or whatever you call it)", Peter Zeihan, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kwtVbM5o-o

    Are we going through this nonsense of everybody is off to Mastadon again...hows Threads doing these days, seems to have about as much popularity as Piers Morgan tv show.
    Good point. Although I think Truth Social/Telegram provide the same functionality, unlike Bluesky/Mastodon. Neverthless a lot of people who leave Twitter come back. Zeihan's case is slightly different because he uses it to research and disseminate his stuff: the former is compromised by Muskery and the latter is not necessary

    Enshittification is followed by high-value-users buggering off and founding their own communities. YouTube refuseniks are going to Nebula or Armchair History TV or that new gun one. Trump Twitniks went to Truth Social, Russians(?) went to Telegram. Threads/Mastodon didn't get traction because they were difficult to use(?). WhatsApp is its own thing.

    We used to have megathings and now we don't: USENET went to newsgroups went to Geocities went to MySpace went to Facebook and fragmented to YouTube, Twitter, WhatsApp, Nebula, Truth Social, stuff, stuff, more stuff. Each year things become more difficult to analyse and summarise.

    :(
    Most of the people on services like Nebula are on YouTube and use their YouTube videos to drive traffic to Nebula.
    I know. Bloody annoying. Mustard's latest stuff is on Nebula not YT, I think Potential History has stopped publishing new stuff on YouTube.
    Some of it is also YouTube censorship. Particularly history videos can be very tricky because the automated system get twitchy when talking about Nazis, Hitler, etc.
    Youtube has all sorts of problems this year, they’re trying to avoid politically extreme content, but are instead tripping up a lot of legitimate content. There’s also thought to be political campaigners mass flagging current political content in an attempt to get it taken down, even if only temporarily.

    Speaking of political interference, Rumble has filed a defamation lawsuit against an organisation known as “Check My Ads’, which has been specifically targeting Rumble’s advertisers with misinformation about the company.
    https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/rumble-files-federal-defamation-lawsuit-against-co-founders-of-purported-watchdog-group-1032858785?op=1
    I noticed that Rumble are making similar claims like Musk that Media Matters have been setting up profiles and engineering them to get the Nazi post next to an ad by following only the extremists, liking the posts etc, and those accounts are literally the only account that saw such an interaction out of millions / billions of ad serves.

    Its a bit like going into a strip club, throwing money around like it is going out of fashion, accepting an invite to the VIP room, then clutching your pearls when the stripper ask if you might be interested in extras.
    Speaking seriously...how else would you do it? There are 500 million tweets per day. Any given phenomenon can be found. If you wanted to demonstrate Nazi content next to, say, IBM (yes I know I know), then you'd have to either look for it or place a trap ad and wait. I don't know how to estimate frequency otherwise. How do you access, trawl and extract data from 500 million tweets?
    Well they aren't using the system in a way that any normal person would be. And they report as if this heavily concocted incident is normal, when according to lawsuit twitter and Rumble say from their data they were 1 of single digit accounts that experienced this.

    The profiles they open aren't even perhaps mirroring activity of say a more normal human, or even say a politically engaged Republican. You could certainly do something like that, look at individuals accounts, follow all the same people, do similar liking / retweeting etc.

    They are pulling every lever possible to get the jackpot they desire, then pester advertisers with claims look, see, this is what happens when you advertise on twitter, everybody is seeing this kind of stuff.
    No I understand that. What I was wondering is how it could be done properly.
    As I say, you attempt to shadow the account activity of a distribution of normal accounts. There is plenty of academic research that looks at social media, I am sure there are best practices in the literature of how to do this. Same way as there are best practices on how to do polling properly, it isn't going around Nick Griffin's and Tommy Robinson's houses and only asking them.
    Twitter have blocked most of the tools that allowed this sort of academic research on the platform.
  • bondegezoubondegezou Posts: 11,229
    Right, I’ve got to go vote! Local by-election today. Hard fought between Labour and the Greens.
  • squareroot2squareroot2 Posts: 6,757
    edited November 2023
    Deleted
  • viewcodeviewcode Posts: 22,194
    edited November 2023

    viewcode said:

    viewcode said:



    Sandpit said:

    viewcode said:

    viewcode said:

    viewcode said:

    Zeihan has buggered off Twitter and thinks Musk is an old-school Sith Efrikan racist. Who knew? Who could have possibly worked that out?

    "Why I'm Done With Twitter (or 'X' or whatever you call it)", Peter Zeihan, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kwtVbM5o-o

    Are we going through this nonsense of everybody is off to Mastadon again...hows Threads doing these days, seems to have about as much popularity as Piers Morgan tv show.
    Good point. Although I think Truth Social/Telegram provide the same functionality, unlike Bluesky/Mastodon. Neverthless a lot of people who leave Twitter come back. Zeihan's case is slightly different because he uses it to research and disseminate his stuff: the former is compromised by Muskery and the latter is not necessary

    Enshittification is followed by high-value-users buggering off and founding their own communities. YouTube refuseniks are going to Nebula or Armchair History TV or that new gun one. Trump Twitniks went to Truth Social, Russians(?) went to Telegram. Threads/Mastodon didn't get traction because they were difficult to use(?). WhatsApp is its own thing.

    We used to have megathings and now we don't: USENET went to newsgroups went to Geocities went to MySpace went to Facebook and fragmented to YouTube, Twitter, WhatsApp, Nebula, Truth Social, stuff, stuff, more stuff. Each year things become more difficult to analyse and summarise.

    :(
    Most of the people on services like Nebula are on YouTube and use their YouTube videos to drive traffic to Nebula.
    I know. Bloody annoying. Mustard's latest stuff is on Nebula not YT, I think Potential History has stopped publishing new stuff on YouTube.
    Some of it is also YouTube censorship. Particularly history videos can be very tricky because the automated system get twitchy when talking about Nazis, Hitler, etc.
    Youtube has all sorts of problems this year, they’re trying to avoid politically extreme content, but are instead tripping up a lot of legitimate content. There’s also thought to be political campaigners mass flagging current political content in an attempt to get it taken down, even if only temporarily.

    Speaking of political interference, Rumble has filed a defamation lawsuit against an organisation known as “Check My Ads’, which has been specifically targeting Rumble’s advertisers with misinformation about the company.
    https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/rumble-files-federal-defamation-lawsuit-against-co-founders-of-purported-watchdog-group-1032858785?op=1
    I noticed that Rumble are making similar claims like Musk that Media Matters have been setting up profiles and engineering them to get the Nazi post next to an ad by following only the extremists, liking the posts etc, and those accounts are literally the only account that saw such an interaction out of millions / billions of ad serves.

    Its a bit like going into a strip club, throwing money around like it is going out of fashion, accepting an invite to the VIP room, then clutching your pearls when the stripper ask if you might be interested in extras.
    Speaking seriously...how else would you do it? There are 500 million tweets per day. Any given phenomenon can be found. If you wanted to demonstrate Nazi content next to, say, IBM (yes I know I know), then you'd have to either look for it or place a trap ad and wait. I don't know how to estimate frequency otherwise. How do you access, trawl and extract data from 500 million tweets?
    Well they aren't using the system in a way that any normal person would be. And they report as if this heavily concocted incident is normal, when according to lawsuit twitter and Rumble say from their data they were 1 of single digit accounts that experienced this.

    The profiles they open aren't even perhaps mirroring activity of say a more normal human, or even say a politically engaged Republican. You could certainly do something like that, look at individuals accounts, follow all the same people, do similar liking / retweeting etc.

    They are pulling every lever possible to get the jackpot they desire, then pester advertisers with claims look, see, this is what happens when you advertise on twitter, everybody is seeing this kind of stuff.
    No I understand that. What I was wondering is how it could be done properly.
    As I say, you attempt to shadow the account activity of a distribution of normal accounts. There is plenty of academic research that looks at social media, I am sure there are best practices in the literature of how to do this. Same way as there are best practices on how to do polling properly, it isn't going around Nick Griffin's and Tommy Robinson's houses and only asking them.
    Oh, I'm sure there's plenty of academic research, but academics don't do logistics, like how do you get a random sample of normal accounts from Twitter? Bugger, you've got me thinking now... :(
  • squareroot2squareroot2 Posts: 6,757
    kinabalu said:

    Sandpit said:

    DougSeal said:

    Alisdair Darling has died.

    Wow. According to wiki his 70th birthday was two days ago. RIP.
    Yes. He always came over to me as able and in politics for the right reasons. Three score and ten but that's a life cut short by today's expectations.
    Indeed it is and he saved the nation from the excesses of McDoom whom I think he privately loathed.?
  • Andy_JSAndy_JS Posts: 32,710
    Sandpit said:

    So you can live your life like Shane McGowan and make it to 65, or live your life like Alistair Darling and only get five years more?

    (Orders another pint)

    A busy day for the obituary writers.

    And Ken Clarke is still going strong despite puffing on all those cigars over the years.
  • viewcodeviewcode Posts: 22,194
    Taz said:

    kinabalu said:

    A long lost BBC drama that I think Malcolm would appreciate:
    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-66889553

    Scotch On The Rocks: From 1973. Armed Insurrection in Scotland. Never shown since considered inflammatory.

    Missing two of the five episodes also cannot help.
    (Sighs in Power of the Daleks)
  • Ghedebrav said:

    Sandpit said:

    So you can live your life like Shane McGowan and make it to 65, or live your life like Alistair Darling and only get five years more?

    (Orders another pint)

    A busy day for the obituary writers.

    Although not sure past 10 years McGowan's life could be described as living, more existing.....I would take the extra 15.
    I saw The Pogues live about ten years ago (I think) at Manchester Apollo and they were great - surprisingly good actually, MacGowan was in great form. They did all of Rum, Sodomy & The Lash - a brilliant album - plus a few other faves.

    Lively old crowd too; fair few fist fights breaking out, everyone singing along. Good action all round.
    Saw a them a couple of times at Barrowlands, a venue entirely suited to them in all its sticky lagered glory, one of them a pre Christmas gig. As you say surprisingly tight as I recall, though it was a veeerrryyy long time ago.
  • SandpitSandpit Posts: 54,656
    edited November 2023

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    viewcode said:

    viewcode said:

    viewcode said:

    Zeihan has buggered off Twitter and thinks Musk is an old-school Sith Efrikan racist. Who knew? Who could have possibly worked that out?

    "Why I'm Done With Twitter (or 'X' or whatever you call it)", Peter Zeihan, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kwtVbM5o-o

    Are we going through this nonsense of everybody is off to Mastadon again...hows Threads doing these days, seems to have about as much popularity as Piers Morgan tv show.
    Good point. Although I think Truth Social/Telegram provide the same functionality, unlike Bluesky/Mastodon. Neverthless a lot of people who leave Twitter come back. Zeihan's case is slightly different because he uses it to research and disseminate his stuff: the former is compromised by Muskery and the latter is not necessary

    Enshittification is followed by high-value-users buggering off and founding their own communities. YouTube refuseniks are going to Nebula or Armchair History TV or that new gun one. Trump Twitniks went to Truth Social, Russians(?) went to Telegram. Threads/Mastodon didn't get traction because they were difficult to use(?). WhatsApp is its own thing.

    We used to have megathings and now we don't: USENET went to newsgroups went to Geocities went to MySpace went to Facebook and fragmented to YouTube, Twitter, WhatsApp, Nebula, Truth Social, stuff, stuff, more stuff. Each year things become more difficult to analyse and summarise.

    :(
    Most of the people on services like Nebula are on YouTube and use their YouTube videos to drive traffic to Nebula.
    I know. Bloody annoying. Mustard's latest stuff is on Nebula not YT, I think Potential History has stopped publishing new stuff on YouTube.
    Some of it is also YouTube censorship. Particularly history videos can be very tricky because the automated system get twitchy when talking about Nazis, Hitler, etc.
    Youtube has all sorts of problems this year, they’re trying to avoid politically extreme content, but are instead tripping up a lot of legitimate content. There’s also thought to be political campaigners mass flagging current political content in an attempt to get it taken down, even if only temporarily.

    Speaking of political interference, Rumble has filed a defamation lawsuit against an organisation known as “Check My Ads’, which has been specifically targeting Rumble’s advertisers with misinformation about the company.
    https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/rumble-files-federal-defamation-lawsuit-against-co-founders-of-purported-watchdog-group-1032858785?op=1
    I noticed that Rumble are making similar claims like Musk that Media Matters have been setting up profiles and engineering them to get the Nazi post next to an ad by following only the extremists, liking the posts etc, and those accounts are literally the only account that saw such an interaction out of millions / billions of ad serves.

    Its a bit like going into a strip club, throwing money around like it is going out of fashion, accepting an invite to the VIP room, then clutching your pearls when the stripper ask if you might be interested in extras.
    There’s a number of these nonprofit groups in the US, who appear to be very well funded and are trying to take down alternative media by going after their revenue sources. We know from filings that Media Matters took $1m from Soros a few years ago.

    I have a feeling that the next 12 months is going to be very difficult for these companies, in the buildup to the election. On the other hand, there’s also organisations such as Public Square that have started up, recommending conservative businesses to the public and to each other. In the media space, there’s companies like Daily Wire throwing huge amounts of money at all sorts of random projects. DW now has 1m monthly subscribers, and annual revenue approaching $250m.
    Oh, wow, straight to people being “very well funded” and Soros as a source of all evil?
    He’s the Democrat version of the Koch brothers, willing to spend quite literally billions of dollars on politicians and political campaigns in the US over a period of decades.

    It’s not controversial, that’s just how the US political system works, as much as it seems very weird to outsiders for presidential candidates to spend $1bn each in six months, and for every election down to the dog catcher (but mostly judges and DAs) to attract serious money to push a particular agenda.
    Yes, that’s free speech. He can give his money to who he wants. Meanwhile, the US (and Hungarian) right have turned him into a hate figure, with lots of wink-wink conspiracy theories implied, lots of echoes of “Jews control the media”.
    The problem obviously isn’t “Jews”, the problem is the likes of Soros, the Kochs, Murdoch, Gates et al controlling the media, and aggressively going after new media that doesn’t toe the line, telling lies to their advertisers and trying to deprive them of revenue. Hence the lawsuits.

    I’m expecting it to get a lot worse in the next 12 months, with lots of pressure on large companies to not advertise on any platform that’s not considered mainstream.
  • JosiasJessopJosiasJessop Posts: 42,971

    Sandpit said:

    viewcode said:



    Sandpit said:

    viewcode said:

    viewcode said:

    viewcode said:

    Zeihan has buggered off Twitter and thinks Musk is an old-school Sith Efrikan racist. Who knew? Who could have possibly worked that out?

    "Why I'm Done With Twitter (or 'X' or whatever you call it)", Peter Zeihan, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kwtVbM5o-o

    Are we going through this nonsense of everybody is off to Mastadon again...hows Threads doing these days, seems to have about as much popularity as Piers Morgan tv show.
    Good point. Although I think Truth Social/Telegram provide the same functionality, unlike Bluesky/Mastodon. Neverthless a lot of people who leave Twitter come back. Zeihan's case is slightly different because he uses it to research and disseminate his stuff: the former is compromised by Muskery and the latter is not necessary

    Enshittification is followed by high-value-users buggering off and founding their own communities. YouTube refuseniks are going to Nebula or Armchair History TV or that new gun one. Trump Twitniks went to Truth Social, Russians(?) went to Telegram. Threads/Mastodon didn't get traction because they were difficult to use(?). WhatsApp is its own thing.

    We used to have megathings and now we don't: USENET went to newsgroups went to Geocities went to MySpace went to Facebook and fragmented to YouTube, Twitter, WhatsApp, Nebula, Truth Social, stuff, stuff, more stuff. Each year things become more difficult to analyse and summarise.

    :(
    Most of the people on services like Nebula are on YouTube and use their YouTube videos to drive traffic to Nebula.
    I know. Bloody annoying. Mustard's latest stuff is on Nebula not YT, I think Potential History has stopped publishing new stuff on YouTube.
    Some of it is also YouTube censorship. Particularly history videos can be very tricky because the automated system get twitchy when talking about Nazis, Hitler, etc.
    Youtube has all sorts of problems this year, they’re trying to avoid politically extreme content, but are instead tripping up a lot of legitimate content. There’s also thought to be political campaigners mass flagging current political content in an attempt to get it taken down, even if only temporarily.

    Speaking of political interference, Rumble has filed a defamation lawsuit against an organisation known as “Check My Ads’, which has been specifically targeting Rumble’s advertisers with misinformation about the company.
    https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/rumble-files-federal-defamation-lawsuit-against-co-founders-of-purported-watchdog-group-1032858785?op=1
    I noticed that Rumble are making similar claims like Musk that Media Matters have been setting up profiles and engineering them to get the Nazi post next to an ad by following only the extremists, liking the posts etc, and those accounts are literally the only account that saw such an interaction out of millions / billions of ad serves.

    Its a bit like going into a strip club, throwing money around like it is going out of fashion, accepting an invite to the VIP room, then clutching your pearls when the stripper ask if you might be interested in extras.
    Speaking seriously...how else would you do it? There are 500 million tweets per day. Any given phenomenon can be found. If you wanted to demonstrate Nazi content next to, say, IBM (yes I know I know), then you'd have to either look for it or place a trap ad and wait. I don't know how to estimate frequency otherwise. How do you access, trawl and extract data from 500 million tweets?
    Well they aren't using the system in a way that any normal person would be. And they report as if this heavily concocted incident is normal, when according to lawsuit twitter and Rumble say from their data they were 1 of single digit accounts that experienced this.

    The profiles they open aren't even perhaps mirroring activity of say a more normal human, or even say a politically engaged Republican. You could certainly do something like that, look at individuals accounts, follow all the same people, do similar liking / retweeting etc.

    They are pulling every lever possible to get the jackpot they desire, then pester advertisers with claims look, see, this is what happens when you advertise on twitter, everybody is seeing this kind of stuff.
    Well, Twitter and Rumble would say that. Neither is exactly a reliable source.
    But Media Matters, Check My Ads, and Stop Funding Hate, are perfectly reliable sources who never misspeak about the organisations they aggressively target?
    Everyone who uses Twitter says the same thing: the user experience gets worse and worse, and there are more and more far right nutjobs. Musk, who regularly says antisemitic things, has explicitly said he wants Twitter to be more welcome to the nutjobs. Ergo, I find Media Matters’ claims quite plausible.
    One analysis of Twitter's lawsuit I sae basically said that Twitter had admitted Media Mattters' claims in the lawsuit document, which will make it hard to win. It's also interesting that he's chosen to lodge the case in Texas, rather than states that Media Matters or Twitter are based in,

    Others say that it's a case designed to make Musk - and Twitter - seem like victims amongst his fans, and move attention away from the fact that he's ****ed up Twitter. It's someone else's fault, you see. The massive rich bullyboy billionaire is a victim...
  • Andy_JS said:

    Sandpit said:

    So you can live your life like Shane McGowan and make it to 65, or live your life like Alistair Darling and only get five years more?

    (Orders another pint)

    A busy day for the obituary writers.

    And Ken Clarke is still going strong despite puffing on all those cigars over the years.
    He's looking well.


  • SandpitSandpit Posts: 54,656

    Sandpit said:

    viewcode said:



    Sandpit said:

    viewcode said:

    viewcode said:

    viewcode said:

    Zeihan has buggered off Twitter and thinks Musk is an old-school Sith Efrikan racist. Who knew? Who could have possibly worked that out?

    "Why I'm Done With Twitter (or 'X' or whatever you call it)", Peter Zeihan, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kwtVbM5o-o

    Are we going through this nonsense of everybody is off to Mastadon again...hows Threads doing these days, seems to have about as much popularity as Piers Morgan tv show.
    Good point. Although I think Truth Social/Telegram provide the same functionality, unlike Bluesky/Mastodon. Neverthless a lot of people who leave Twitter come back. Zeihan's case is slightly different because he uses it to research and disseminate his stuff: the former is compromised by Muskery and the latter is not necessary

    Enshittification is followed by high-value-users buggering off and founding their own communities. YouTube refuseniks are going to Nebula or Armchair History TV or that new gun one. Trump Twitniks went to Truth Social, Russians(?) went to Telegram. Threads/Mastodon didn't get traction because they were difficult to use(?). WhatsApp is its own thing.

    We used to have megathings and now we don't: USENET went to newsgroups went to Geocities went to MySpace went to Facebook and fragmented to YouTube, Twitter, WhatsApp, Nebula, Truth Social, stuff, stuff, more stuff. Each year things become more difficult to analyse and summarise.

    :(
    Most of the people on services like Nebula are on YouTube and use their YouTube videos to drive traffic to Nebula.
    I know. Bloody annoying. Mustard's latest stuff is on Nebula not YT, I think Potential History has stopped publishing new stuff on YouTube.
    Some of it is also YouTube censorship. Particularly history videos can be very tricky because the automated system get twitchy when talking about Nazis, Hitler, etc.
    Youtube has all sorts of problems this year, they’re trying to avoid politically extreme content, but are instead tripping up a lot of legitimate content. There’s also thought to be political campaigners mass flagging current political content in an attempt to get it taken down, even if only temporarily.

    Speaking of political interference, Rumble has filed a defamation lawsuit against an organisation known as “Check My Ads’, which has been specifically targeting Rumble’s advertisers with misinformation about the company.
    https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/rumble-files-federal-defamation-lawsuit-against-co-founders-of-purported-watchdog-group-1032858785?op=1
    I noticed that Rumble are making similar claims like Musk that Media Matters have been setting up profiles and engineering them to get the Nazi post next to an ad by following only the extremists, liking the posts etc, and those accounts are literally the only account that saw such an interaction out of millions / billions of ad serves.

    Its a bit like going into a strip club, throwing money around like it is going out of fashion, accepting an invite to the VIP room, then clutching your pearls when the stripper ask if you might be interested in extras.
    Speaking seriously...how else would you do it? There are 500 million tweets per day. Any given phenomenon can be found. If you wanted to demonstrate Nazi content next to, say, IBM (yes I know I know), then you'd have to either look for it or place a trap ad and wait. I don't know how to estimate frequency otherwise. How do you access, trawl and extract data from 500 million tweets?
    Well they aren't using the system in a way that any normal person would be. And they report as if this heavily concocted incident is normal, when according to lawsuit twitter and Rumble say from their data they were 1 of single digit accounts that experienced this.

    The profiles they open aren't even perhaps mirroring activity of say a more normal human, or even say a politically engaged Republican. You could certainly do something like that, look at individuals accounts, follow all the same people, do similar liking / retweeting etc.

    They are pulling every lever possible to get the jackpot they desire, then pester advertisers with claims look, see, this is what happens when you advertise on twitter, everybody is seeing this kind of stuff.
    Well, Twitter and Rumble would say that. Neither is exactly a reliable source.
    But Media Matters, Check My Ads, and Stop Funding Hate, are perfectly reliable sources who never misspeak about the organisations they aggressively target?
    Everyone who uses Twitter says the same thing: the user experience gets worse and worse, and there are more and more far right nutjobs. Musk, who regularly says antisemitic things, has explicitly said he wants Twitter to be more welcome to the nutjobs. Ergo, I find Media Matters’ claims quite plausible.
    One analysis of Twitter's lawsuit I sae basically said that Twitter had admitted Media Mattters' claims in the lawsuit document, which will make it hard to win. It's also interesting that he's chosen to lodge the case in Texas, rather than states that Media Matters or Twitter are based in,

    Others say that it's a case designed to make Musk - and Twitter - seem like victims amongst his fans, and move attention away from the fact that he's ****ed up Twitter. It's someone else's fault, you see. The massive rich bullyboy billionaire is a victim...
    The Rumble lawsuit is quite different, they’re alleging that the campaign group has been making materially incorrect statements about the company’s sources of revenue, and refused to retract when given the opportunity. Rumble is a listed company, so this can affect the share price.

    https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/rumble-files-federal-defamation-lawsuit-against-co-founders-of-purported-watchdog-group-1032858785?op=1
  • bigjohnowlsbigjohnowls Posts: 22,701
    RIP Margaret Hodge
  • Andy_JSAndy_JS Posts: 32,710
    edited November 2023
    This is the first time I've seen an interactive map of the new parliamentary constituencies. (Scroll down and click on "New boundaries map".

    It's the new Survation MRP study.

    https://lodestonecommunications.com/election-hub
  • RIP Margaret Hodge

    Fckn hell, carnage!
  • geoffwgeoffw Posts: 8,747
    RiP Alistair Darling.
    Now all my Edinburgh New Labour neighbours have passed away - John Smith, Robin Cook and now Alistair Darling. I knew them all in the streets in the newsagents in the surgeries.
    Ave atque vale
  • FrancisUrquhartFrancisUrquhart Posts: 82,291
    edited November 2023

    RIP Margaret Hodge

    Well somebody just tweeted this from her account 3 mins ago,

    Incredibly sad news about Alistair Darling’death. A hugely important figure during the Labour government who helped navigate us through the financial crisis. Great dry sense of humour with a strong hinterland. All thoughts with Maggie and family

    https://x.com/margarethodge/status/1730217226081304887?s=20
  • bigjohnowlsbigjohnowls Posts: 22,701

    Deleted

    Deleted fell for a sick fuck on Twitter reporting death of Margaret Hodge

    Apologies
  • DougSealDougSeal Posts: 12,541

    RIP Margaret Hodge

    Really? Where did you see that?
  • viewcodeviewcode Posts: 22,194

    RIP Margaret Hodge

    Why do you think she's dead?
  • Andy_JSAndy_JS Posts: 32,710

    Deleted

    Deleted fell for a sick fuck on Twitter reporting death of Margaret Hodge

    Apologies
    I was about to ask you what the sources were for that information. Just Twitter isn't enough.
  • mwadamsmwadams Posts: 3,624
    Andy_JS said:

    Sandpit said:

    So you can live your life like Shane McGowan and make it to 65, or live your life like Alistair Darling and only get five years more?

    (Orders another pint)

    A busy day for the obituary writers.

    And Ken Clarke is still going strong despite puffing on all those cigars over the years.
    I raise you Tom Baker.
  • Sad news about Darling.

    Someone I know knew him a little bit. He was a thoroughly nice fellah by all accounts.
  • Sales of luxury kitchen and homeware brands have plummeted as the cost of living crisis continues to bite - with Aga cookers, Le Creuset cookware and Farrow & Ball wallpaper and paint among the goods falling out of favour.

    Accounts for firms specialising in premium home products show, in some cases, a double digit decline in sales to the end of 2022, with no designer brand seemingly immune to the tightening of British wallets.

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12808861/le-creuset-aga-cookers-farrow-ball-plummet-cost-living.html

    Seems like Mrs U might be the one propping up these companies.
  • GhedebravGhedebrav Posts: 3,860

    Ghedebrav said:

    Sandpit said:

    So you can live your life like Shane McGowan and make it to 65, or live your life like Alistair Darling and only get five years more?

    (Orders another pint)

    A busy day for the obituary writers.

    Although not sure past 10 years McGowan's life could be described as living, more existing.....I would take the extra 15.
    I saw The Pogues live about ten years ago (I think) at Manchester Apollo and they were great - surprisingly good actually, MacGowan was in great form. They did all of Rum, Sodomy & The Lash - a brilliant album - plus a few other faves.

    Lively old crowd too; fair few fist fights breaking out, everyone singing along. Good action all round.
    Saw a them a couple of times at Barrowlands, a venue entirely suited to them in all its sticky lagered glory, one of them a pre Christmas gig. As you say surprisingly tight as I recall, though it was a veeerrryyy long time ago.
    Cities with a big working class Irish background population would always have been cracking places for a Pogues gig.

    It was quite nice at the time to see him doing relatively OK. If anything, their music is more suited to the diaspora; it was always a sort of hyper-real Irishness in their stuff, packed with mythos and an idea of Celtic identity that is slightly alien to reality. Blake-ish, in a way.

    Rum, Sodomy and The Lash is a magnificent album - I'd quite like I'm A Man You Don't Meet Every Day at my funeral - but otherwise a great mix of originals like The Old Main Drag mingling seamlessly with covers like the heartbreaking The Band Played Waltzing Matilda.

    Highly recommend giving it a listen if all you know them for is Fairytale and The Irish Rover.
  • eristdooferistdoof Posts: 5,065

    RIP Margaret Hodge

    It's a busy day for the obituary writers.
  • bigjohnowlsbigjohnowls Posts: 22,701

    Deleted

    Deleted fell for a sick fuck on Twitter reporting death of Margaret Hodge

    Apologies
    RIP Alistair Darling, Henry Kissenger and the wonderful Shane Macgowan
  • LeonLeon Posts: 55,771
    Sad news about Trump. RIP
  • Andy_JSAndy_JS Posts: 32,710
    eristdoof said:

    RIP Margaret Hodge

    It's a busy day for the obituary writers.
    This one isn't true.
  • Leon said:

    Sad news about Trump. RIP

    Snooker is in mourning
  • bondegezoubondegezou Posts: 11,229
    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    viewcode said:

    viewcode said:

    viewcode said:

    Zeihan has buggered off Twitter and thinks Musk is an old-school Sith Efrikan racist. Who knew? Who could have possibly worked that out?

    "Why I'm Done With Twitter (or 'X' or whatever you call it)", Peter Zeihan, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kwtVbM5o-o

    Are we going through this nonsense of everybody is off to Mastadon again...hows Threads doing these days, seems to have about as much popularity as Piers Morgan tv show.
    Good point. Although I think Truth Social/Telegram provide the same functionality, unlike Bluesky/Mastodon. Neverthless a lot of people who leave Twitter come back. Zeihan's case is slightly different because he uses it to research and disseminate his stuff: the former is compromised by Muskery and the latter is not necessary

    Enshittification is followed by high-value-users buggering off and founding their own communities. YouTube refuseniks are going to Nebula or Armchair History TV or that new gun one. Trump Twitniks went to Truth Social, Russians(?) went to Telegram. Threads/Mastodon didn't get traction because they were difficult to use(?). WhatsApp is its own thing.

    We used to have megathings and now we don't: USENET went to newsgroups went to Geocities went to MySpace went to Facebook and fragmented to YouTube, Twitter, WhatsApp, Nebula, Truth Social, stuff, stuff, more stuff. Each year things become more difficult to analyse and summarise.

    :(
    Most of the people on services like Nebula are on YouTube and use their YouTube videos to drive traffic to Nebula.
    I know. Bloody annoying. Mustard's latest stuff is on Nebula not YT, I think Potential History has stopped publishing new stuff on YouTube.
    Some of it is also YouTube censorship. Particularly history videos can be very tricky because the automated system get twitchy when talking about Nazis, Hitler, etc.
    Youtube has all sorts of problems this year, they’re trying to avoid politically extreme content, but are instead tripping up a lot of legitimate content. There’s also thought to be political campaigners mass flagging current political content in an attempt to get it taken down, even if only temporarily.

    Speaking of political interference, Rumble has filed a defamation lawsuit against an organisation known as “Check My Ads’, which has been specifically targeting Rumble’s advertisers with misinformation about the company.
    https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/rumble-files-federal-defamation-lawsuit-against-co-founders-of-purported-watchdog-group-1032858785?op=1
    I noticed that Rumble are making similar claims like Musk that Media Matters have been setting up profiles and engineering them to get the Nazi post next to an ad by following only the extremists, liking the posts etc, and those accounts are literally the only account that saw such an interaction out of millions / billions of ad serves.

    Its a bit like going into a strip club, throwing money around like it is going out of fashion, accepting an invite to the VIP room, then clutching your pearls when the stripper ask if you might be interested in extras.
    There’s a number of these nonprofit groups in the US, who appear to be very well funded and are trying to take down alternative media by going after their revenue sources. We know from filings that Media Matters took $1m from Soros a few years ago.

    I have a feeling that the next 12 months is going to be very difficult for these companies, in the buildup to the election. On the other hand, there’s also organisations such as Public Square that have started up, recommending conservative businesses to the public and to each other. In the media space, there’s companies like Daily Wire throwing huge amounts of money at all sorts of random projects. DW now has 1m monthly subscribers, and annual revenue approaching $250m.
    Oh, wow, straight to people being “very well funded” and Soros as a source of all evil?
    He’s the Democrat version of the Koch brothers, willing to spend quite literally billions of dollars on politicians and political campaigns in the US over a period of decades.

    It’s not controversial, that’s just how the US political system works, as much as it seems very weird to outsiders for presidential candidates to spend $1bn each in six months, and for every election down to the dog catcher (but mostly judges and DAs) to attract serious money to push a particular agenda.
    Yes, that’s free speech. He can give his money to who he wants. Meanwhile, the US (and Hungarian) right have turned him into a hate figure, with lots of wink-wink conspiracy theories implied, lots of echoes of “Jews control the media”.
    The problem obviously isn’t “Jews”, the problem is the likes of Soros, the Kochs, Murdoch, Gates et al controlling the media, and aggressively going after new media that doesn’t toe the line, telling lies to their advertisers and trying to deprive them of revenue. Hence the lawsuits.

    I’m expecting it to get a lot worse in the next 12 months, with lots of pressure on large companies to not advertise on any platform that’s not considered mainstream.
    I don't see anyone "aggressively going after new media that doesn't toe the line". I see people saying the obvious, that Nazis and antisemitism are commoner and commoner on Twitter. Soros does not control the media and his influence here is massively overstated. References to "Soros" by the US MAGA right are a dogwhistle referencing antisemitic conspiracy theories. See https://antisemitism.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Final-George-Soros-Briefing.pdf

    Also, I am always baffled why you, personally, go in to bat for a bunch of people who back Putin over Ukraine.
This discussion has been closed.