"While Twitter had earlier told TechCrunch that it would be “winding down” Smyte’s business with existing clients, what that apparently meant was that it was going to announce the acquisition, then effectively shut off the lights over at Smyte and leave everyone in the lurch."
Just to reiterate because it's not obvious from the excerpt, Smyte is some kind of anti-harrassment API that a lot of large platforms (like npm and zendesk) were using. Twitter acquired it as a solution to their own harrassment problem and immediately shut everyone's access off, even though many companies had multi-year contracts with them! 😂
Not only does Twitter have harrassment issues on its own platform, now they're exporting these issues to other platforms too!
How did nobody on their board see this PR disaster coming. The incompetence keeps surprising me.
@Montse_blanca Sorry I don't speak Spanish!
@Gargron No sabes español?
@Montse_blanca hola! Somos pocos, pero estamos por aquí. Puede que encuentres otra instancia de mastodon pensada para hispanohablantes, esta es mayoritariamente en inglés :)
@Ondo Ah, hay otro en español?.
@Montse_blanca @Gargron Sí, hay gente española por aquí, aunque aparte de mí no sé quién. Catalanes hay muchos más lol.
@espectalll @Gargron Mientras sean de habla española.
@Montse_blanca @Gargron Sí, hay, pero independentistas todos, lo siento.
Sólo se me ocurren otros dos españoles pensándomelo mejor y son republicanos y comunistas, si no me equivoco. Si buscas estar por aquí, tendrás que traerte a gente, lo siento.
@Montse_blanca Hay españolhablantes (y catalanhablantes) en:
https://mastodont.cat/
https://mastodon.uy/
Pero no sé si gente de España esta aquí.
@Gargron At this point it wouldn't surprise me if they had decided to try and make other places as wretched as theirs just so they don't have to deal with their own problems.
@Gargron It's been quite a while since Twitter (company) reached the point where the distinction between malice and incompetence is moot.
@Gargron it's worse than incompetence, it's that by allowing harassment people write more, which creates more data, which is the core of their business.
@nobru @Gargron I found this nice article (from 2013):
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-24397472
It explains how twitter makes some profit from ads, which are embedded in an non-annoying way, so that users keep using twitter.
Also other companies can use the public data to see f.ex. how good a product sells.
A coworker of mine also explained how f.ex. facebook, and other social media, are all the time running experiments, to find out how people react to specific designs.
I hope this answers your questions :)
@Gargron their board allows Jack to continue to be an incompetent boob. Why are your surprised?
@Gargron Twitter innovates by open sourcing harrassment
@Gargron No hay gente de España aquí?