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I made a Twitter account a long time ago but rarely posted. But maybe two years ago, I started using it to follow academics in my field, and now I post semi-regularly. It's actually be a great resource in that regard, and quite different (i.e. better) than FB for connected with other researchers.

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But the alternatives to twitter, like mastodon? all seem kind of labor intensive, so I'm kind of watching and waiting right now.

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Originally posted by Steve Miller:
I don’t post to Twitter but I do read a news feed.

I’ve noticed it’s changed over the last week or two. Much more right wing propaganda, less useful info. Lots more ads.

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Elon Musk sent a flurry of emails to Twitter employees on Friday morning with a plea.

“Anyone who actually writes software, please report to the 10th floor at 2 p.m. today,” he wrote in a two-paragraph message, which was viewed by The New York Times. “Thanks, Elon.”

About 30 minutes later, Mr. Musk sent another email saying he wanted to learn about Twitter’s “tech stack,” a term used to describe a company’s software and related systems. Then in another email, he asked some people to fly to Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco to meet in person.

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Some internal estimates showed that at least 1,200 full-time employees resigned on Thursday, three people close to the company said. Twitter had 7,500 full-time employees at the end of October, which dropped to about 3,700 after mass layoffs this month.

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One team known as Twitter Command Center, a 20-person organization crucial to preventing outages and technology failures during high-traffic events, had multiple people from around the world resign, two former employees said. The “core services” team, which handles computing architecture, was cut to four people from more than 100. Other teams that deal with how media appears in tweets or how profiles show follower counts were down to zero people.

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“Wednesday offered a clean exit and 80 percent of the remaining were gone,” Peter Clowes, a senior software engineer, tweeted on Thursday about the departures on his team. “3/75 engineers stayed.” He said on Twitter that he quit on Thursday.

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Employees were also having difficulties figuring out who was still on staff, and what areas of infrastructure needed more support to keep things up and running.

One worker who wanted to resign said she had spent two days looking for her manager, whose identity she no longer knew because so many people had quit in the days beforehand. After finally finding her direct supervisor, she tendered her resignation. The next day, her supervisor also quit.

Others were spending hours trying to track down which teams they were on. Some said they were asked to oversee duties they had never handled before.

The changes were occurring in a near total information vacuum internally, employees said. Twitter’s internal communications staff has been laid off or left, and workers said they were looking outward for information from media articles. Mr. Musk has increasingly downplayed the role of traditional media over the past few months, citing Twitter as one of the best platforms for the rise in “citizen journalism,” as he put it.

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Twitter has suspended the account dedicated to tracking the location of billionaire Elon Musk’s private jet.

The account, @ElonJet, was run by Florida college student Jack Sweeney and had amassed more than half a million followers. It tracked Musk’s plane’s location using publicly available flight data and appears to have been suspended Wednesday morning.