I think you deserve to get banned off Twitter James I honestly thought it was
a mistake it was so Preposterous stupid what did
you tell Colton again he's Holden set up his Christmas tree in November yes in
November and I said I think it was November 1st I said stop it
I'll kill you and I get that that getting caught by a
robot or an automated system is gonna happen I said the words I'll kill you
like yeah it's exciting violence pretty intense threat yeah but like it's very
clear you know once I say to a human hey
there's been a mistake this is my friend I'm joking right which you did multiple
times yes and apparently a human looked at it and they were still like um
no no and then I got banned for an
undetermined amount of time first it was I thought it was gonna be a 24-hour ban
then I thought maybe through the weekend then maybe one week
yeah how long was it it was like seven months in the end geez Louise that's
messed up yeah and they don't tell you how long it's gonna be so the effect of
it is basically like uh
just erase Twitter from your life forget like the the result of it longer because
I've been reinstated out of the blue random I just like turned on Twitter one
day I was like oh I'm back yeah and the the effect is that I just barely used
Twitter because like my life adjusted to not having Twitter I made new habits I'm
on Reddit now I love Reddit so much better they're like they there's like a
gaslighting element where they have do you have to convince yourself that Twitter never really existed well I just
couldn't maybe I just made that up in my head well habits formed you know
so I learned to live without it so where I where did you go to to get your stupid
thoughts out I don't I just lurk I just lurk now you would lurk on Twitter you'd
come back I was mostly a lurker I I opened Twitter once in a while I just
look at my mentions right right right the jokes are stupid anyway interesting
well that obviously I'm glad that I have you on talk link today to talk about bad
boy well I don't know if I would get banned in elon's Twitter or not I guess
exactly that's kind of the question I mean how do we I guess I'll say that you
know the the way that elon's been handling Twitter has been uh
very interesting to me inept is a word I would use I don't see that's the thing
the thing is like it's strong opinions about about him and who
he is and what his goals are and I just
really don't know like I know that I think he's a narcissist and that he's
basically just kind of trying to you know get his at the end of the day but I
don't know whether he also maybe has an
ideological kind of goal for Twitter like does he actually want it to be
the like free speech platform because the more that he the more the things
have gone on the more that like moderation he's kind of like added back
in I think there's a difference between what he would love it to be in his ideal
if this was just for elon's world yeah and what
everyone else wants right I think it's pretty I think he would have it more
pure Free Speech anything goes platform if he could have his way but I think
he's been shown that a audiences want
moderation B platforms with moderation make more money um
and that's basically it those things I
mean if you can say anything about his handling of the situation uh a you can
say we're doing A's and B's list today okay one you can say that it's
definitely uh chaotic uh and it's like
it seems it kind of gives off the impression that he doesn't really know
what he's doing and he's just kind of like playing it by ear but two
the on the other hand okay this isn't a one-two situation this is a either or on
the one hand it's chaos Julian it's one or zero sure bite you did one binary
yeah Quantum now say zero zero zero
um Elon uh doing all this chaotic stuff and like staying in the news cycle this
basically this whole year I mean like when did all this start I think in April
he like put in the offer or something yeah but he hasn't looked good like the
whole thing was when he was trying to back out actually we need to step back
from this because he has fans right okay he has Die Hard fans to whom he looks
good at all times because they kind of give him the benefit of the doubt you
saw this with Trump as well people going well he's playing 7D chess we just can't
comprehend his moves right with our small brains yeah and I should also I
feel like this is necessary as well uh you almost have to do like a like a
disclaimer like a transparency statement of your thoughts on Elon I will say I
used to be a real Elon fan I read his biography huge fan of SpaceX neural link
boring company I was privy to all of his uh everything he was doing he's saving
the world let's go to Mars big believer
self-driving cars big believer and I I still do think that he's a net positive
force in the world I'm glad he you do exist man we had a big uh debate about
that upstairs well just for the climate change aspect of it and accelerating the
adoption of electric electric cars so but that said ever since like the pedal
boy stuff and probably more now than ever he's really fallen from grace and
he's no longer like my personal hero um so just for the Fanboys you're a
reformed Elon boy so I just want people to know that when I hate on Elon I'm not
like a pure hater like right you know I've been along for the ride you have
you have some cred to be able to say I think so hey guys maybe Elon isn't Jesus
Christ yeah I think I I don't agree with
um detractors who say that he's just a rich guy who just like amplifies other
people's inventions I think he is very smart I think he's taking big bets he's
an audacious character I think he deserves a lot of the praise he gets but
I also think he's a douchebag for sure I mean I've seen some comparisons recently
to Steve Jobs uh in the sense that Steve
Jobs was kind of known as an uh
but he was able to get things done the question is whether
Steve Jobs like because it seems like Steve Jobs wasn't an Internet edgelord
troll so that's like a whole nother yes he's just icky and it sucks yeah it
sucks that he couldn't just be less icky anyways back on topic right so um April
is I was right April is when uh he initially oh no he that's when he bought
9.2 of Twitter yeah without like telling
anyone he did so then I mean that's a douchebag move like that would have
jacked up the stock price but he wanted to buy it at a lower price we screwed
over other shareholders or would-be shareholders yeah that's that's a
douchebag move and that's Lex Luthor move right not a Superman that's a whole
other angle to this never mind the whole like oh is he going to transform Twitter
into a thing a different thing or not like the there's a behind the scenes
type of story where he might just be doing all this to manipulate stock
options so he could make money that way he does do a lot of behind the scenes
things so for example when he looks to
me he looks really bad when he he's coming in firing people and um
the the biggest biggest blemish on the
whole thing is the blue check mark thing for people impersonating George Bush and
saying like 911 was uh pretty cool you know like yeah people are just making
mockery the whole verification system at this point it's unclear whether there's
a point to the blue check mark at all what does blue check mark signify it
just means you're a paying customer that's the whole thing who cares yeah so
that looks like a debacle that looks like an absolute dumpster fire however
my personal feeling is that he'd roll that out in such a quick bad way because
it just meant getting money he just got a bunch of eight dollars he's got a
bunch of eight dollars right away yeah right what was if he spent the time
to like actually develop and roll out a proper functioning feature with kyc or
whatever it would have taken time and he wants to move in he wants to shake it up
right away he wants to change the culture very aggressively with hardcore
people who work long hours changing culture is very hard so you
know he's getting a lot of flack for how he's approaching that but
it was never going to be clean okay that's enough of that I want to talk
about the Twitter blue check mark because uh that was hilarious because so
like as a verified person I got I somehow got verified on Twitter before
yeah I know there was like they opened up verification a while back and a bunch
of people applied like me yeah and I did and uh I I got verified so like as a
verified person it's been interesting for me to watch this because Here Comes
Elon being basically like so that thing that you have
I'm basically gonna make it worthless because if everyone can buy a check mark
then what do the non-bot check marks mean they don't really mean anything
so we so here's here's what happened okay so he came in he's like Twitter
blue we're launching it with the check mark that happened a bunch of people
impersonated existed before Elon though sorry Twitter blue did exist but you
didn't get to check mark and it wasn't expensive enough it was like two bucks a month or something nobody wanted that
crap right you see it you want to give you the other part of the stat of this
uh checkmark thing is the status things need to be sufficiently expensive so
that you think you're getting enough status from them yes and the check mark needs to be sufficiently rare that it's
a status symbol as well so what does the check mark mean does it mean I'm a
verified person like when you're talking to Dunkin Donuts it's the real Dunkin
Donuts and not like a parody it's the real Riley yeah or does it mean if you
want to talk to the people so there's that aspect like you're trying to talk to the real person and there's the other
aspect of like whoa you're famous enough to have a check mark You're the real
right exactly and I mean if I if I if
I'm being honest there's like a little bit of sadness that comes with a check mark because you're like man I kind of
feel like I sold out like I could be like I could have more uh you know Cloud
uh not boots on the ground not cloud like cred street cred that's Cloud now
Twitter timeline cred that's called
yeah but I would call it cred okay uh if I didn't have the check mark but uh
anyways so he launched the check mark as part of Twitter blue a bunch of
impersonation happened uh uh not everybody who did it impersonated people
obviously but obvious enough chaos happened that they took it away again
they just took they just stopped signups okay
anyway before they stop sign ups they added the official check mark so they
added a second check this one was great this was a gray official check mark uh
that goes under the brands under the names of Sir this is the development of
like a cast system now yeah right where it's like okay you can pay for the blue
check mark which no one else will care if you have one because you just bought
it for eight dollars or you can have the real the new real check mark which is
the gray one which you have to be a public figure or a known brand for or
whatever right check mark the gray official check mark under the the blue
check mark which is white right now because of uh you know dark mode but
anyways it really it begs the question why did does Twitter blue come with a
blue check mark is it because you they think oh I get a
check mark if I buy it sweet I don't really care about these other parts of
the Twitter blue Suite what I care about is having a check mark so I will pay for that but
that like once everyone's paying for that the check mark is meaningless
exactly why do they even include it so that's why they felt the need to add the
second gray official check mark and at first everyone got everyone with a
original Legacy Legacy check mark got
the second gray official check mark and then they were like wait we can't do
that because then all the people who are paying for Twitter blue will just want
that so then they took it all away that
they canceled sign ups or they suspended Twitter blue signups and they took away
the official check mark and they said we won't be doing the official check mark
and then a few days later they brought it back so now
some brands have two check marks okay
some like Brands like PC Gamer and like
companies uh have the original Legacy
check mark and the official check mark I don't you don't have one though I have the
Legacy check mark still okay but I don't have the official so like
it's funny because in an attempt to sort of weird so there's like three check
marks that's weird yeah so like to go
back to the point of a checklist and you're the loser in the situation because people just assume you pay eight
dollars exactly you don't even know you're famous exactly I hope that I hope
that people aren't seeing me reply I'm super famous you guys
he's really famous no but the I I'm
worried that people are gonna see me and think that I paid for Twitter blue not
that that's a big deal the most frustrating thing is that when you do pay like what is the meaning of the
Twitter blue check mark you paid your eight dollars does it mean they scanned
my ID card I'm a real human right I
think it will in the future that was the purpose but now it doesn't because well
as we saw with the George Bush accounts and everything exactly do whatever you
want so initially when he said okay disaster people are gonna pay eight
dollars for Twitter blue and it'll help defeat Bots initially I was kind of like
I can see that because the whole power of bots is in like swarming right uh so
if you want like a million accounts to go and like inflate follower accounts or
or like numbers which Elon benefits from he always has right he's always had a
big bot Army sure and so there's some some uh what do you call that
um but I was always like okay they're not gonna
pay eight dollars per month for each one of these little Bots that they need as part of the swarm no I can't do that but
what you can do with a nation of statement is impersonate people actually
a nation state might do that sure sure and and as people pointed out
uh if there's enough power like you're not paying eight dollars per bot like
all the time you're paying eight dollars
a month per bot so you might absorb the
cost of like paying eight dollars a month for like hundreds of accounts
um in order to have those accounts follow multiple people and like multiple
Point uh posts like it's not like they're single use like you have this
bot Army now you need to do anything but you need to be like an agency to get enough clients to pay for your Bot Army
sure sure I just mean that uh the idea that only humans would pay uh eight
dollars a month for their personal account or whatever is is not really
no you need anybody could do that you need other forms of cable right so it's
not enough for verification by the way kyc means know your customers what they use in banking and even in the crypto
world there's tons of apps where you can you know scan your Biometrics and your
ID and stuff like that how well it works I don't know but I'm sure Elon could figure it out or am I I don't know oh my
gosh so like to me the this whole check mark uh drama was was actually really
important it like it a lot of people used it to like make fun of uh of Elon
and Twitter and stuff and Tumblr launched the ability to like pay eight
dollars per likes to add multiple check marks so you could pay eight dollars for
one then another eight dollars for another one and then you could go up to 24 check marks yeah yeah
um so like it was funny but at the same time it's actually really important
because check marks came about because of the the risk of impersonation
Facebook Instagram uh I think tick tock
not sure has check marks to like the point is to say this is the real account
and on Twitter Elon is coming in here
and I see what he's trying to do he's trying to like verify real humans but
not trying very hard he's not trying very hard and what he actually might do
is erase the power of the check mark like a
race its ability to actually denote someone important or just to someone who
may be in person well we're hoping that I'm hoping that it like there's just
more verification in the future what they have done is banned impersonation
so that people have read this as okay
rules for thee but not for me like free speech unless you're making fun of Elon
Musk like Kathy Griffin and now she's banned um but the thing with the
impersonate it doesn't solve the bot problem because these Bots are not
impersonating real people they're not impersonating real identities they're
generated identities they're fake names they're made up so the impersonation
band does nothing to solve the ball the bot problem yeah
I guess I wish that uh Elon came in and
just went straight for the like moderation stuff
because that is another like that that to me is like the most interesting
aspect of what he wants to do with Twitter he wants to take it from being
this like very heavily moderated uh you know you say something that might offend
people then you get banned you get you say something that is obviously a joke
but could be like interpreted by a robot as like a death threat or something and
well it's unclear if elon's Twitter changes that right like because he still
he has some rules and I think inciting violence or actual harassment is still
against the rules so I'm I might still get banned for that and maybe the people
who work for Elon if a human looks at my case and they're one of elon's humans I
would they would reinstate me I don't know well I mean if anything Twitter
just has less resources to be able to like put spiritual humans towards those
kind of things because he got he gutted the words that's the thing maybe his intention was to be like you know what
Twitter should be a utility it should be like a public service and so let's just
make it accessible to all and it's the Town Square yeah you know but then he
was like damn it I don't have enough money to afford this town square so now I need to do things to monetize This
Town Square yeah and that's where now he has to not really make the thing
that he wants to make and I think that's that's if if there's a biggest criticism
of Elon and his handling of Twitter after he actually acquired Twitter I
would say that it's like going after the monetization first instead of like
making the changes that you want to make in terms of moderation and then being
like all right because he tried to he's basically like this is what every
startup has to do they have to make a business model prove that they have
something that kind of works smoothly and then
you know up till that point investors have signed
on and then they have to prove to those investors after a while that they can monetize it and then they bring in the
money uh but what he tried to do with Twitter is like okay you guys have been
on that cycle for a long time and Twitter has never really been profitable uh consistently and so he's like we need
the monetization now but that left led us into this stupid
situation where we're launching technology we're launching them and the
advertisers are leaving and advertising exactly advertisers like moderation
because they don't want their their ad to be beside a tweet with the n-word in
it or something exactly he came in trying to like do the monetization right
away yeah and instead he actually lost a ton he's also just a poor Steward of the
platform for two reasons like when you look at Bezos with the Washington Post
that has been a success because he's been hands off the Washington Post I
need to let them continue to do their thing and he just kind of saved it
monetarily and Elon could have done that but he he's such a he's a power user
he's the biggest of him and Trump I guess 80 million subs or followers he's
the biggest user of Twitter so he's already kind of like two two in the
water with Twitter to really be a good Steward of the second aspect of it which
is even worse is his reliance
on China for his personal income oh Tesla relies heavily on China
they have they have gigafactories in China right China doesn't not give a
that Tesla is a separate company than Twitter that's not how China rolls
China leverages all leverages that are
possible and so if if China goes hey we didn't we don't like
the messages you're amplifying on Twitter we don't like all the Taiwan
trending hashtags on Twitter uh so Tesla's gonna get hurt unless you change
your town square uh to be China friendly
Tesla's gonna get hurt he is so beholden
to the the CCP that how that Twitter
just cannot be uh a western town square
Free Speech Mecca really this is no way how confident are you in the fact that
if China is upset with something that elon's doing he's going to have that
trickle down into the way that he runs Twitter well it's a source of all his
wealth do you think he wants to be poor he seems to enjoy being rich would he
change ask your ask the former part of you that
was an Elon Fanboy would he uh compromise Twitter uh and like because
his whole thing is like free speech blah blah and so is he going to completely
throw that aside uh if or would he just
jettison Twitter would he just try to like get rid of it well he might let's
say that he is just like a uh he's a human computer he might uh prioritize
his like hierarchy of need or of like values right he might go okay I one of
my values is Free Speech in this town square Twitter platform one of my values
is reducing climate change and
accelerating the adoption of electric cars which one do I care more about
if I care more about reducing climate change because that's an existential
risk to humanity things that Elon cares a lot about yeah then he might
prioritize saving Tesla above saving Twitter
um although there are other companies other than electric cars I feel like he would
if he had to if he had to save one he would obviously save Tesla
not Twitter because here's the the reality of the situation now is that
that's what get where he gets his money like yeah for sure the view I just
outlined is the charitable of you but like really the more narcissistic and like
self-preservation view is that he just like saves the thing that makes him the
most money yeah and he'll probably justify that mentally by going well if
I'm rich I can do great things with my money right right the world is better off if I'm rich because I do great
things with my money I can spend my money better than a government can even beside the whole point of like okay
Financial uh survivorship
Financial viability for Elon Musk uh the
fact of the matter is that a lot of people are looking to other social media
platforms right now because of all the instability that's happening at Twitter
so I mean I know that I I have not made
accounts on anything else yet because I'm like Twitter is probably gonna
survive in some way I mean how do you feel about that do you think that like
there's a world in which Twitter just like stops it's possible but Network
effects are very strong um and even if Twitter kind of sucks it
probably has excess momentum right whereby it it remains in place unless
like yes there is a cornucopia of other
of other things to hop on but that's actually a weakness we need one other
thing that's clearly awesome and emerging that we all hop onto so it gets
Network effects it gets inertia and can usurp the social landscape yeah and I've
seen a couple Alternatives kind of like come up in the uh in the conversation
and like there was a time when master Don was kind of the front runner and
then people were talking about co-host this week so far as there's been a lot
of talk about Hive social which is
um kind of like a mix between Instagram and Twitter
but as far as I can tell it it doesn't have a web interface right now it's just
an app it's probably just an iOS app too so it's like that's how it goes each one
of these things has has like a specific problem like Mastodon you have to it's
it's sort of like it's like Reddit but instead of having like each it would be
like if each subreddit was run entirely on and this and the server was run by
the mods as if it's like it's not just part of the Reddit site that you can
kind of control it's like you can you can like suspend people's whole Mastodon
accounts within the server and then they can't go and join another server unless
the mod that suspended them from that from the previous server unsuspense them
so it's like there's there's a lot of control there and I've I've heard people
uh complaining about Mastodon because it's like it has kind of a higher
technical barrier of Entry you kind of have to like set things up and it's not
just like log in and boom you're there um and co-host I think I I don't know
enough about these other ones but um okay so you you don't you don't view
any of the Alternatives as viable really not yet but we'll see what happens we'll
see what happens I think people will probably stick with Twitter I agree um
one of the questions maybe the last question uh
what do we want from social media like what do you what do you go to social
media for and what do you think people should be going there for information
humor I mean you want the the thing the
public health of it is really the that is the crisis uh nobody wants to see
platforms amplifying fake news we don't
want to see platforms being manipulated by other nation states influencing
elections or public sentiment you know the tick tock problem the Facebook
problem 2016. um we don't want to log on and see
like Gore from a car accident or Isis beheadings like you want that kind of
moderation right um mostly just want to look at cat
photos you know and on social media and that's Instagram
well I don't I don't I don't use Instagram you want to see like
statements from politicians and noteworthy people hilarious jokes yeah I
guess a lot of people do want like they go on Instagram just to see like photos
and videos and stuff I feel like for me for me Twitter the reason why I love it
is not only just the fact that it's just text but that it's like so low effort
like on Instagram and and Tick Tock and I mean I'm not even going to talk about
Facebook but it seems to be that you have to like really think about a post
and like spend time and like edit the photo and edit the video and blah blah
and on Twitter it's just like it's just immediate there's a limit
there's a character limit so you have to kind of like edit yourself a little bit
but it's like that's a good constraint you want constraints that uh are
conducive towards making the content better and less effort putting towards
on social media yeah the problem with Twitter though is nobody's listening to you you know what do you mean for most
people they have like zero to ten followers and they're just feeding into
the void and right people don't even I have really talented friends I'm like
man this is hilarious you should put this on Twitter you should have a Twitter and they're like why so no one
can see my stuff right right like how do you get off the ground on Twitter it's
like that's a really unappealing that's a really important point to bring up uh
because we are like you know web personalities and we tweet and people
engage with us because they're like you're the tech link guy you're the LTT
guy uh but most people yeah don't have that imagine you're just a guy oh my
gosh I mean no like that's what's happening with the checkbook before before I got into YouTube I did use
Instagram because that's where my friends were and so like you know I
didn't post very often but like I still felt the need to post there and post on
Facebook and stuff because yes so like I will say that all right I'll take it
back a second because the reason I love Twitter is
like most of the reasons that I love Twitter for are because I'm who I am
right now uh but if I was using it more in like a interact with my immediate
friends and family and Social Circles then I would want something more like
Facebook the early days of Facebook yeah the early days where you know you're not
looking for likes per se you go on a trip and you take a bunch of photos and
then you come home and the first thing you do is upload the full album to Facebook and just post like 40 photos
and then people go through and they're like oh this one's cool whoa you did
that awesome that was great
and I feel like that's the dream that some of these alternative platforms are
trying to get to like we're talking mostly right now about the
Twitter Replacements which are just like what we were talking about where it's
just like you know breaking news and like stupid little thoughts that you
have in the toilet and stuff but if there was like a way to I mean maybe
Hive social is this where it's like back to a simpler time of social media where
you're just like I just wanna I just wanna post something and have it my friends see it and like talk about it
okay the last thing that I just wanted to mention we talked a bit about like
will Twitter survived and the the Alternatives and stuff but I also want
to bring up the fact that it might not be up to anything that Elon does or
anyone else uh at Twitter does uh it might not be up to them whether
Twitter survives or not it might be up to Apple and Google oh yes because Phil
Schiller I mean I don't know if this is like a big red flag or whatever a big
like thing to indicate something but Phil Schiller left Twitter and that's
got people talking about Apple and whether Apple was like hmm uh maybe we
don't like the way that uh Elon Musk is taking Twitter in terms of moderation
trailer left Twitter because he gets a keynote stage to say whatever he wants
on every six months he can still voice his opinion to the World on his own oh
stage I don't think that this is a signal that Apple's gonna ban Twitter
from the App Store I think especially now more than ever the more monetized
Twitter gets the more money Apple makes all those transactions that are
happening on the app are gonna you know a big chunk of them is going to go to
Apple unless lawsuits change things so that's a lot of users that's not the
same as parlor or getter or an app that has like 10 wackos on it well it's a lot
of money that's what I wanted to bring up was the fact that parlor came out and
was like okay we're free speech I mean it sounded a lot like what Elon is
talking about for Twitter and they got banned because you know they kind of
said anything goes yeah but the thing is there's like and it broke the Apple and
Google terms of service for what's allowed there's an app there's cool speech free speech and there's icky Free
Speech right and apple likes cool free speech you know the 1984 commercial yes
they're like yeah yeah like little L liberalism kind of like but but then
then there's like icky like proud boys free speech we're just like ew yes no
and then so there's a whole nother conversation to have there about whether
Apple and Google should be the ones who are you know dictating what uh social
media platforms are allowed to be out there in the world but the fact the
matter remains that uh how Elon continues to run Twitter right now may
have ramifications for whatever yeah is it the cooler icky Free Speech
time will tell and was this a cooler icky talk like do you let us know in the
comments below subscribe to TechLinked that's James you've seen him around
see you later see you later