Andrew Canion

“The standard you walk past, is the standard you accept.”

— Lieutenant General David Lindsay Morrison AO

Upon reflection, I have determined that my values are inconsistent with those of Twitter’s post-acquisition by Elon Musk.

Rather than continue to use the service - even within my safe #NBL23 bubble - I believe the correct and appropriate action is to cease use of the platform.

I am available on Mastodon @canion@social.lol and micro.blog @canion 🫡

I’ve always been an RSS completionist. Since the days of Bloglines, which was before Google Reader. I have a few hundred feeds and I work through them — usually on a daily basis — to ensure they are read and down to ‘inbox zero’.

I achieve this with Inoreader and a combination of NetNewsWire and Reeder.

I’m wondering though, should I be using FraidyCat? I tried it years ago and it didn’t stick. Maybe I should try again?

It’s good to see new accounts and activity on micro.blog. I hope a reasonable proportion stick around.

The best thing to remember about micro.blog is that it is a personal blog host as much as it is a social network. Blogs are a permanent place for your writing, and in my opinion, this makes them more weighty, and less transient, than tweets. It provides an opportunity to build a corpus of thoughts in the form of text, pictures, video and audio over time.

Slowly but surely you end up with years of posts that you can look back upon - and link to.

Micro.blog is not Twitter, it’s not Mastodon, and that is its strength.

Ed Zitron has published “The Fraudulent King”, a marvellous explainer on the latest happenings at Twitter, but at the same time, outlined what a petulant, unimpressive person Elon Musk is — and how the world now knows it.

There were so many great lines in this article, it was hard to know which to highlight as an extract:

…we are in the process of watching said timeline wholesale reject Elon Musk and his ideology. Musk has paid $44 billion to purchase a website that has all told him to go fuck himself.

…

Under the largest spotlight in the world, Musk has proven himself to be a petty charlatan who lacks any meaningful skills necessary to run a company. While we may have been able to fool ourselves that Musk could have successfully run three or four companies at once, the truth is more likely that SpaceX and Tesla have survived his tenure as CEO rather than thrived under his leadership.

…

When given absolute power and the world’s undivided attention, Elon Musk has managed to economically destroy his company, publicly (and repeatedly) humiliate himself, ostracize most of Silicon Valley’s engineering talent, and dispel any belief that he is a Tier 1 Genius Operator.

Honestly, read the entire article.

Elon Musk walked into Twitter HQ carrying a sink; in hindsight it should have been a toilet, because Twitter is now circling the bowl.

Elon Musk eases return-to-office order - The Washington Post

One Twitter staff member said the numbers of employees seeking to leave had alarmed Twitter’s managers, who had formed “war rooms” to determine which employees should be asked to stay on.

Resignations and departures were already taking a toll on Twitter’s service, employees said. “Breakages are already happening slowly and accumulating,” one said. “If you want to export your tweets, do it now.”

Hate speech and other abuse was also likely to spike, employees said. Most of Twitter’s Trust and Safety team, consisting of up to 40 people, was expected to resign.

Is it surprising that engineers are opting to leave and take a 3-month severance package, as opposed to staying where they have to work extensive hours for a mercurial owner, without the joy of working with colleagues?

Musk really doesn’t seem to understand that employment is a two-way street. These people are not indentured servants. If the deal isn’t good, they can/should/will walk.

Last one out, please switch off the lights.

What’s the bet that in a couple of months, Twitter is employing remote-work engineers working out of India?

Musk fires Twitter engineers after critical posts on Twitter and Slack:

Musk had already tweeted Monday that he had fired at least one engineer who publicly criticized him on Twitter. The latest terminations come in the wake of Musk’s decision to let go of about half of all Twitter employees in a bid to cut costs.

Some Twitter employees confirmed the layoffs on their verified accounts.

“Looks like i just got fired for s—posting too ✌️” one wrote in response to another person who said they had been let go.

It’s never smart to criticise your employer in public, although some of this criticism was published on an internal Slack. A mature manager would probably look at the recent unrest and seek to counsel their employees. Not Elon, who has shown not maturity to date and continues to exhibit none. He fired the complainers, and gloated about it publicly afterwards:

“I would like to apologize for firing these geniuses,” he (Musk) wrote on Twitter. “Their immense talent will no doubt be of great use elsewhere.”

Good to see he can criticise those individuals publicly without recourse, hey?