Google decimates Twitter search results after Elon Musk imposes limits on reading tweets - AOS for Lemmy.World - A generic Lemmy server for everyone to use.

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Google decimates Twitter search results after Elon Musk imposes limits on reading tweets

2y 11mon ago by lemmy.world/u/DevCat in technology from www.rawstory.com

Google has reportedly removed much of Twitter's links from its search results after the social network's owner Elon Musk announced reading tweets would be limited.

Search Engine Roundtable found that Google had removed 52% of Twitter links since the crackdown began last week. Twitter now blocks users who are not logged in and sets limits on reading tweets.

According to Barry Schwartz, Google reported 471 million Twitter URLs as of Friday. But by Monday morning, that number had plummeted to 227 million.

"For normal indexing of these Twitter URLs, it seems like these tweets are dropping out of the sky," Schwartz wrote.

Platformer reported last month that Twitter refused to pay its bill for Google Cloud services.

Elon going to complain about another conspiracy going on while in reality it's just that when crawlers are not able to open a certain URL they simply assume that the page doesn't exist anymore. Google certainly didn't "retaliate", bots simply couldn't find those pages anymore.

The headline is actually wrong. Google did not do anything to Twitter. Twitter fucked up their own SEO by removing access to its content.

This is correct.

Yeah, that's a pretty easy and reasonable conclusion to come to if you think about if for more than five seconds. I'm not sure Elon has any toes left after he keeps shooting himself in the feet.

If your company cares about it's SEO rankings, you don't make changes like these without considering the SEO implications.

Not even a month later and said company rebranded itself without checking trademarks. Now we have "X", a brand that non only risks infringement of quite a few registered eu-trademarks but didn't even apply for an own eu-trademark...

Just like reddit. Looks like the Speztic and the Elongated Muskrat are caught in an ouroborus of like-minded stupidity.

Elongated Muskrat 🤣

The latest in a seemingly never-ending series of self-owns. Apart from the stress it must put on their devs, it's been entertaining

They have more than one dev left?

No it's just one guy called Dev.

And he's on a H1B visa and can't leave.

Dude was just a marketing intern and is mad stressed and knows he's in WAY over his head now.

Fake it 'till you make it.

Or the multibillion dollar company collapses into a heaping, flaming pile of slag as a result of your actions. One or the other.

It’s a win/win

They screwed up his name tag, because reasons.

His name is actually Dave. But there aren't any other Dave's working there anymore so he is ok with being called Dev.

Deb on the other hand is pretty pissed off.

Or maybe it's this guy, Dev from a canadian tv show called The Listener. They called the hacker 'Dev', I'm assuming it's on purpose.
https://thelistener.fandom.com/wiki/Dev_Clark

Please kindly accept my upvote - made my day!

My understanding is there's group of people whose visa is sponsored by Twitter. If they leave the company, they may well have to leave the country.

That's a big yikes and I hope they will find another way...

Coercing workers built America! They can't leave... because of the implication.

Are you gonna hurt these workers?

Yeah, he lives in the break room on a cot.

Twitter still has devs?

Twitter’s dev(s)

Crawl issues I am sure but also user experience issues. Google is sensitive to sending visitors to sites where metrics indicate users do not, like bounce rates etc. I don't use twt but if it is the case you have the be logged in to see anything now, a non-logged in user will click a link from Google hit a login page, and use the back button. I would assume Google will see that as a bad search result and use it less.

that actually makes a lot of sense

The word bots triggers the muskrat.

I wonder if Google prioritized recrawling all those Twitter links.

If I were making a web crawler, I would make it so that if a crawler finds a domain that appears to have changed dramatically or gone offline it will re-crawl the domain and flag already-crawled pages as potentially obsolete.

My urge to eat a liberal amount popcorn has been triggered a lot by twitter's slow motion train wreck.

Elon, please buy Reddit and repeat your amazing ideas over there. You are so smart.

Spez is already doing his best work to fuck over the platform. Are you certain Elon could do any better?

Spez already said he admires how Elon is running Twitter.

The best part is that Elon is proving to be a pro at losing money left and right while simultaneously inventing new ways to make a social media platform suck to use.

I mean there's admiring a ruthless mob boss - and then there is admiring a petty thief that keeps getting arrested and all his plans blow up in this face.

Spez is losing his tiny mind.

Oh, there's scope to introduce "official" Reddit user badges for 10 bucks a pop and all of sorts of suicidal Musk shenanigans

Wait until you have to be logged in to read any posts on Reddit.

Didn't we achieve this by turning all subreddit NSFW?

Ah, I see. I only used reddit through Apollo, and was only sent to new reddit page by NSFW links, after i deleted my account, it seems.

but isn't there no ad revenue on NSFW subs? I thought I read that

Yes, but when the users and mods who built the site do it, it's petty and selfish. When the ceo does it, it's brilliant, compounds user value, and improves the security of the user experience. /s

I'm down, Spez. What's bad for Reddit is good for us.

Honestly... We're all (or a massive chunk of us are) Reddit refugees. I don't give many fucks about that place. If it thrives, whatever. It's out of my control. I'm not going to hate post here with fantasies of spez seeing it and being like, "WHYYYYY?"

What little I've seen here seems like a disproportionate amount of passionate and quality users came over here. Users that were likely a bit more than casual; ie we we invested enough to use 3rd party clients, some of us are probably former mods who got disillusioned, etc.

We're all giddy and it is the honeymoon phase and I HOPE HOPE HOPE the users' enthusiasm doesn't fizzle like Mastodon seems to but I would say, just use this. Enjoy it. Post worthwhile things. I don't think Reddit is necessarily going away, but if it's just some weird bot riddled, low effort posts sort of place, why would we want to be there anyway?

The fediverse will probably last as long as the internet does, if the BBS is anything to go by. And I've seen people starting to realize federation is an actually decent option at the very least.

I saw people unironically saying this and being upvoted for it in hackernews, completely turned me off from the site lol

Doesn’t sound like retaliation to me, it sounds like their scheduled web crawlers are finding that content they used to index is now no longer viewable and this removed from search results. Pretty standard. My guess is that there were 400 million URLs listed and as the crawler uncovers that they are no longer available, that number will keep dropping to reflect only content publicly viewable. If only 500 URLs are now publicly viewable (without logins) then that’s what they will index. Google isn’t a search engine for private companies (unless you pay for the service) they are a public search engine so they make an effort to ensure that only public information is indexed. Some folk game the system (like the old expertsexchange.com) but sooner or later google drops the hammer.

God, I hated expert sexchange so much. It was a blessing when stack overflow started.

I’m only an amateur but I’m happy to give it a go

I don't think Twitter would rate limit the Google indexer, though.

It's probably the increased bounce rate, as people click Twitter links in the search results, get Twitter's login wall and click back to continue searching instead of creating an account.

I tried to access twitter by impersonating a googlebot. I was denied. The bots aren't so much rate limited, but unable to access tweets as they don't have a Twitter account.

Impersonating a Googlebot user-agent isn’t a perfect test though, since you’re supposed to implement IP verification too - either checking against a known list of Google crawler IPs or doing a PTR lookup. See https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/verifying-googlebot

Question is whether or not Twitter has competent software developers implementing stuff correctly anymore. Anyone’s guess at this point.

Good. Hopefully they remove links to pinterest, quora and facebook too while they'reat it.

It's funny how Spez idolizes a guy who doesn't pay his bills. It's also funny watching the hate pplatform Twitter get absolutely destroyed by its owner. The internet in 2023 is a wild and crazily changing place.

I am genuinely curious. What's the role of the new CEO if this turd keeps doing everything he can to burn this ish to the ground?

She straight up admitted that she was essentially a sock puppet CEO and would offer no friction to anything Musk wanted.

Musk is a manchild who can't handle being told "no", so that's a given.

But it's smart of her to put that out in advance. It informs Musk that she will stay out of his way, and she doesn't have to take the blame for idiotic decisions made by him.

He’s the child of an emerald mine owner. Do people think that men like that choose wives based on how good a mother they’ll be? Doubt.

I think it’s called a ”Fucker-Upper“

Someone needs to make this Musk's official title. Chief-Fuck-Upper. I also heard Chief-Twit circling around.

Can we perhaps add a list of notable titles to his Wikipedia entry?

"CFU of Twitter" does have a nice ring to it

Then Spez could be CFU of Reddit. I kinda miss Ellen Pao. And Chooter.

Edit: A word.

Lol

Lol, this made me chuckle! 🤭

Ever heard of the glass cliff? You might even see a name or two on that list that you recognize.

Yup, I remember the absolute outrage when Ellen Pao became CEO of reddit, though it is nice at least to finally see her vindicated on there now. I hadn't heard of the glass cliff until long after she left, but people have been referencing it left and right on reddit recently. Turns out, Ellen Pao wasn't the problem...

Yeah that's crazy, I was furious when they fired Victoria back in the day. It's nice to see that Alexis Ohanian is the one who deserves the blame for that massive fuckup. Man that gives me a pang of nostalgia for the old days of reddit though. Interesting that the Wiki article points to Obama's presidency and the 08 financial collapse as a "glass cliff" event.

Remember this?

-( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)╯╲___卐卐卐卐 Don't mind me just taking Ellen Pao for a walk

Gotta have someone to push off the glass cliff

Thanks for sharing, I hadn’t heard of that expression or phenomenon.

Both Musk and Huffman seem to think the E in CEO stands for “Enshittification.”

Edit - typo

Blocking users who are not logged in has farther reaching consequences that aren't readily apparent. For example, there was an AMBER Alert a few days ago with a short link to see more info. The link goes back to a Twitter account/tweet. All that time sensitive, useful information was behind a wall where you can't see it unless you log in. Most people aren't going to create an account just to do that.

This is such an incredible and incompetent failure for the amber alert system too though to be fair

Yeah. Moronic to use Twitter for anything even remotely important like emergency alerts

I disagree.

Twitter was one of the largest social media platforms on the planet, and was especially huge in the US. Before Musk bought it it didn't show any signs of failure. It lasted over a decade, and had enough reach that I think it made a lot of sense for things like emergency alerts, government officials, etc. to use it as one means, even a main means, of disseminating information. It was really effective at that until what, a year ago?

I don't think anyone really predicted Elon Musk buying Twitter and running it into the ground within a year. Yes, it was hypothetically possible in our capitalist system, but there was no indication that it would until Elon made a joking tweet.

Because of how the modern internet has organized itself, it was inevitable that critical systems would utilize Twitter for it's reach.

I think you're applying hindsight and expecting people to have made decisions based on events that hadn't happened yet. Before musk bought Twitter it wasn't at all unreasonable for people to rely on it for information from government officials because it was the format millions of people were accustomed to receiving that information in every day.

Well then since this is hindsight then I hope everyone is learning now that we shouldn’t be relying on single corporate entities to deliver our emergency notifications.

“Retrospectively, it was a bad idea” makes more sense.

It's like this. Ambulance use the road even if the the hospitals didn't build it. Now imagine, twitter is the road.

We need to build new roads, and quickly. Actually, we're on one right now.

Or at least some type of scruffy makeshift forest path.

Oh I bet the actual employees are painfully aware. But the lack of funding and government red tape? That's the real failure.

I’m always totally surprised how willfully European governments have put so much power into the hands of Twitter. Nearly every organization and politician has a Twitter account to be used for official and semi-official communication. And Twitter isn’t and was never really very popular in Europe compared to Facebook and other social networks, which these same organizations and politicians demonized to the max. I hope this is a wake up call: there are no inherently good centralized and commercialized social networks fit for communicating important information to an audience of potentially everyone.

Yeah, I’m still baffled by the fact that all these officials are still on Twitter.

They go where they can reach the people who keep them in power. There is a very interesting movement called mastodon first which encourages journalists and politicians to use mastodon as the first place that they share new information.

I hope this results in companies no longer using Twitter for their communications. It's completely inappropriate.

I've missed two trains and had to take and Uber until I recently found the only place the train company reliably posts updates was Twitter, over their own damn website.

Using twitter for any kind of emergency communication is a very bad idea in the first place.

Twitter is doing everyone a favor by demonstrating exactly why that is.

Heck i couldn't easily check if diablo 4 servers were wonky because I can't check the blizzard Twitter. Obviously this is less important than an amber alert. As another reply said, I think police need a better way to disseminate emergency information and that is on them. However something like server status is a perfect use of Twitter that is now close enough to impossible to do. If public agencies are going to continue using Twitter for these purposes, then something needs to change. Personally I'd be ok with the government having a little more say in things if we are going to continue viewing Twitter as a public service.

Alternatively, it's probably better long-term if those functions become replaced with official Mastodon instances that are for official announcements only.

eg If there were a California.Gov Mastodon instance with a alerts@california.gov and a earthquakes@california.gov then everyone in that area could just sub to those communities and if there was something to announce it could go out via those. Of course that presupposes that enough people are in the Fediverse for it to be a good platform to share that info but structurally it's probably far better than letting a third party commercial interest host these things.

I haven't looked at Mastodon at all yet so I don't really know how it works, but from what I have gathered, it is not dissimilar from lemmy but for microblogs. I suppose the main similarity is its distributed network which I agree is a better solution than a centralized server. Hopefully that statement ages well.

This is exactly why we should be encouraging local libraries, universities, law enforcement, city, and county governments how to set up Mastodon servers.

On the one hand, when you have a duty to inform the public, it no longer makes sense to suffer at the whims of tech billionaires. There was a time, for a decade or two, when these sites prioritized access and predictability, but no more. When you have information that you need to have accessible, the only guarantee is to control it yourself. They can still use corporate social media to get the message out to their network, but link it back to their mastodon account. Roll it into their IT departments just like their email server.

On the other hand, it's a critical step for the success of the fediverse. Universal email adoption came about because it was used by government and universities. What you could call the original social network is still an open protocol, it's not owned by any single corporation or government, and still the primary form of communication online. About 2 billion emails have been sent since you started reading this.

You've heard of a "walled garden".
But this... this has become a "walled right-wing dumpster".

A "walled swamp",

What's there not to like?!

They've always wanted to build a wall. Hopefully they wall themselves off from the rest of the world.

Twitter was an important unifying communications tool during the Arab Spring. The Arab spring was a threat to biz as usual in places like Saudi Arabia. The second largest investor in Twitter is Saudi Arabia.

Saudi Arabia killed and dismembered a journalist from the US, more or less in plain sight. Elon is now killing and dismembering Twitter in plain sight to limit its power as a unifying tool that stands as a demonstrable, active threat to capitalism and oligarchs around the world.

Billionaires do favors for other billionaires. It's part of why spez is trying to tank Reddit. Remember how dangerous Reddit was to capitalism's status quo around the time of GME/Robinhood/Antiwork recently.

The specific moment we're in right now is meant to shatter consolidated organizing power on Reddit as we splinter into several smaller alternative platforms (or for some, disconnect entirely). Not saying we shouldn't be in Lemmy, but calling out the larger reality of the moment.

Billionaires do favors for other billionaires.

I like this take, but this is a conspiracy theory take. Change a few words and this would be something regurgitated by Q fanatics.

This is such a good way to word this kind of phenominon. Conspiracies as distraction.

Its also funny, because its a conspiracy about conspiracies lol

astroturfed strawmanned groups such as extinction rebellion

What's wrong with XR?

People who aren't going to do anything either way like to blame XR's protests for their own inaction.

Well said, thanks for doing the good work of pointing this out.

See other "grassroots" movements such as the Tea Party, Moms for Liberty, TPUSA, etc for the other side of this. These groups have clear and documented funding from billionaire interest groups and conveniently allow corporate media to conflate such far right groups with progressive movements as the same level of extremism.

I think it's far more simple that humans have a tendency to fractionalize everything they're apart of than it is a projection global conspiracy.

Some animal rights activists believe humans can have beneficial, symbiotic relationships with animals, like working dogs/horses, free range chickens that are well cared for, stuff like that.

Some animal rights activists think the concept of a working dog/horse as abhorrent because animals can't actually consent to that, the power dynamic makes it unethical, and utilizing the labor of an animal for personal gain is basically just slavery for a creature with less intelligence.

These two groups are closer to each other than they are to any right person that doesn't care at all for animals, but are still so dynamically opposed that they simply couldn't operate together because their end goals are dramatically different.

I'm a hardcore progressive. I will work with a capitalist democrat to get my goals met, but I wouldn't associate with them if I had a better option.

This sounds a lot like Hanlon's razor. "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

Do you really believe that people like spez, Zuckerberg, Musk behave like they do because they want to do favors for other billionaires? Isn't it much more likely that they're just ... disturbed? That they are narcissistic, megalomaniac, maybe idealistic in their own believe. And in being that, they make stupid decisions because they literally work differently than regular folks.

Well said. Razors are guides in developing theories, not evidence. To present them as evidence is a fallacy. The above conjecture isn't better explained by stupidity, thats the whole point.

Thank you. I think this is an important nit to pick in the context of this particular discussion.

Ignoring the evidence of Musk's Twitter nonsense benefiting the same people who helped fund his Twitter buy out is something you could attribute Hanlon's razor to.

The only person in the world you can ever truly know is yourself.

So when I ask myself "If I were spez/zuck/musk why would I do this?"

The answer is usually "because someone gave me a lot of money"

I don't know about Spez but I don't think that's how Musk and Zuck are motivated. The money is a secondary effect of their goal of being "Great Men" in history. Seen through that lens, taking control of the main public square, changing the nature of discussion there (and taking as much credit for it as possible) is an end unto itself for Musk. Especially when you consider that, if he is able to both control and maintain Twitter as the main locus of online discussion, it allows him to try to reshape the wider narrative about the value and importance of his work in general.

I'm not so sure Musk is actually motivated by his own hype, I think that's part of his professional self branding that he relies on to juice the valuation of his companies. Seen through that lens, taking control of the main public square is a way to juice his rep further and make even more money.

I'm skeptical of ascribing immaterial motives to billionaires.

EDIT Oh! Also, I think the reason enshitification has accelerated so much recently is because of high interest rates. It's why Silicon Valley Bank imploded, after all. Companies are scrambling to be profitable after the free investor cash has dried up. It's not good enough to be maybe profitable in an undefined future, they need to be profitable now so they can justify investment. The bubble is deflating - though fortunately, it seems like it's going to be a soft landing instead of a pop.

Yeah, I also seriously doubt there's a big conspiracy happening where ultra rich people are helping each other. Have you looked at those people? Most don't give a fuck about anyone but themselves.

Musk bought Twitter around the time he was fighting with this guy that had the private jet tracker. I think it's more reasonable to believe that Musk bought Twitter just to shut that down and now it's a toy he can play with, where every time he merely touches it, media jumps on it, which feeds his ego massively. And once Twitter is dead, he'll discard it and move on to the next thing. Like a cat playing with its prey.

Normally I would tend to agree with you, but look where Musk got his "loans" to buy out Twitter. Saudi Arabia and Russia where big "lenders".

I think it’s more reasonable to believe that Musk bought Twitter just to shut that down and now it’s a toy he can play with, where every time he merely touches it, media jumps on it, which feeds his ego massively.

That's definitely true. I think it's also true that the people who financed it were doing so to take advantage of that to their own ends.

I’m glad I’m not the only person thinking about this. I had no idea about the Saudis owning Twitter like that. All decisions made by the rich are for Money^TM. Usually it’s Money^TM in either the form of growth (profit, short term) or investment (power, stability, long term). Some of spezs actions are easily explained by Money^TM when you take into account LLMs mining reddit. But that does not explain being so insanely hardline with their API. There was absolutely a resolution to that that was profitable and didn’t continue giving away “their” information for free. This is where I think a 3rd Money^TM comes into play: existential investments. These are actions they take to ensure the other two forms of Money^TM continue to function the way they want them to. Such as tanking the two most significant online tools for organizing collective action against them.

Decisions at that level are made for power. Sometimes money is part of that

I mean, yes, but I think “sometimes” really underestimates role money plays in a capitalist world. Money is power. People who tell you otherwise are trying to sell you something.

While I like both takes, I don’t think even the dumbest billionaire or government wouldn’t recognize the value one centralized tool has. It would have been sufficient to control both Twitter and Reddit, moderate the hell out of topics they don’t like and put them offline in crucial moments. Destroying them without a clear, centralized alternative isn’t really sensible.

I personally expected the Reddit IPO to be the end of any “subversive investment advice”, that might have been on Reddit.

Agreed. It's no coincidence that both Twitter and Reddit are shitting the bed at the same time.

Elon is pretty clearly an actual idiot, and has managed to get by thus far by just having a seemingly endless supply of fuck you money, but this is just capitalism doing the Predator bicep meme with foreign oligarchs to consolidate power.

I mean, it sort of is. Unless the fed is involved in this billionaire conspiracy also (which the nature of conspiracy theories will undoubtedly have someone saying of course the fed is in on it with the billionaires).

The simple answer really does make the most sense here. Interest rates are on the rise, and platforms like twitter and reddit have been around for a very long time and none of the venture capital backing them has ever turned a real profit despite the money being pumped into them. Investors will pull out money from the riskiest items first when interest rates rise, and the riskiest items are social media platforms that haven't demonstrated monetization potential even after a decade of use and monolithic control within their spaces. If a link aggregator like Reddit, which is really the only major player in its brand of social media can't turn a profit with basically no competition why would you continue supporting it?

Great point, and I do think you're right because that is the most sensible answer to what the motives behind these recent decisions are. There has been a nonstop flow of cheap debt for years that the fed is just now tightening up on.

But these business decisions also happen to align with the interests of deep pocketed bad actors. The why's of that are conspiracy theories.

Saudi Arabia murdered Khashoggi because he was defying their army of Twitter trolls with a network of volonteers he bankrolled.

Mind you this is not Google doing it on purpose. This is just Musk's genius idea of blocking tweets without being logged in. Others will drop as well, they just need some time to expire. Also, if you are wondering if they can show tweets to crawler but not show it to others Google doesn't look favorably on that. Content must appear the same to crawler as well as humans.

Note that Google allows plenty of login gated content which is actually against their indexing terms.

The key is not to force it for every viewer or give a few view credits. The fact that Mollusk gang doesn't know this is very reflective of their current capabilities. There's no real talent left at Twitter.

Broken people breaking things.

Throw money around recklessly, regard your broken self as some great lord of a realm, treat people as your slaves, then fiddle with little pet peeves in utter ignorance of how and why they work, watch a cascade effect spiral out of control, blame anyone and everyone but yourself.

This is a right-wing pattern. Look at the orange cock holster and the bullshit he was fixated on while squatting in the White House. The mind of a petulant child.

Could also be realted to not paying the bills google sent him.

people really need to get over this nonsense. yeah, twitter wasn't paying their bills. but now they have paid it. it was just for some internal analytics services, not the main site, and had nothing to do with twitter's recent downtime.

google's not going to retaliate against them after they paid.

In general: cloud provider’s marginal costs for continue to host something while a customer doesn’t pay is negligible. Keeping it running while incurring more receivables, or blocking access while making it clear there is an easy way to reclaim data and functionality, are immensely more profitable. Nothing to “retaliate” really.

I really hope google spammed musk's phone with calls about the outstanding balance.

The reality is that this guy leading the company is refusing to pays bills for other services like he is on a bankruptcy spree. So not surprising that people don't get over his 'he paid it on this one item, so stop'.

Just because he orderer a massive dinner, and finally paid for the drinks, does not make that guy a person of illl repute.

I honestly doubt it is that, but it might affect things in the long run. Musk could be trying to cut costs, but that's no less worse than trying to force people to pay.

Great. Do Pinterest next.

Ahh the genius that is Elon Musk, I'm sure we're all cowering at his superior intellect.

Tesla and SpaceX must be full of smart people if they can succeed despite Elon Musk shenanigans.

That is literally the complaint from ex-employees of his companies. He is Tony Stark meets Michael Scott. So much money it compensates for sheer stupidity.

I have never heard a more perfect description of Elon Musk.

Michael Scott's heart can be in the right place, Musk is straight cruel.

Did we see the same show? Micheal Scott is incredibly cruel all the time and his heart is rarely in the right place lol

"Can be", not "always is"

Literally all you need is enough money and you can pay smart people to do impressive things, while taking all the credit.

SpaceX has a lot to benefit from the fact that a lot of people love the idea of working with rockets but the actual job market was very limited with places like NASA only taking the best of the best. Which doesn't mean SpaceX has subpar engineers and scientists, humanity just has a lot more to offer than NASA and other smaller space agencies could afford to employ.

It's absolutely beyond me why these idiots don't pay people to think of clever things and discourage dumb things.

Imagine having your own "think tank", it works be like living life on cheat mode.

Smart rich people have advisors they listen to.

Rich people who are too “smart” to listen to advice have sycophants.

I read a quote somewhere from a former Space X engineer that they basically had to create a system to manage Musk and his fragile ego so that they can function normally without Musk getting in the way.

So basically, Gwynne Shotwell is the one actually calling the day-to-day shots, and happens to be a good Elon-whisperer.

I wonder if other companies, particularly VC-funded ones, have staff dedicated to "managing" the crazy person with the checkbook...

So it takes rocket scientists to manage this guy in such a way to keep him from burning everything down around him?

You’re probably right. And it’s wild to think that safely flying astronauts to the ISS probably wasn’t the hardest part of their day that day.

Short answer: he didn't.

He didn't create SpaceX, he bought it.

Now do Quora.

Quora has to be one of the most useless, misdirecting "resources" out there. No idea how much of this changes once you make an account, but every single question is filled up with ads and other people's responses to other questions. It looks so confusing and messy. Who would want to sign up for a site that seems so disjointed?

All signing up for Quora gets you is email roundups that keep coming no matter how many times you unsubscribe.

I finally managed to unsubscribe to that crap. Took me forever!

I haven't gotten any in a while but I'm up to 9 Quora email addresses in my block list.

This became bad enough at my job (I'm a school sysadmin) that I blocked quora.com in our spam filter...students had a habit of signing up for it and like you said, it's damn near impossible to unsubscribe, let alone show 200+ kids how to unsubscribe.

There was a time when quora was genuinely interesting/useful as an a2a site for all your 'expert opinion' questions. Now it's just another social media

And Pinterest. I want my quality searches back.

Use google and add "site:Pinterest.com" then search by images. Works better than Pinterest. Also works for Poshmark.

Good advice except you forgot the minus symbol, this tip will ONLY get Pinterest links.

I think the point is to NOT have pinterest spam your search results that you cannot see without an account.

For one thing, this is sad because even more of the Internet is no longer reachable. The Internet shrinks, and will continue to get smaller as enshittification continues.

But on the other hand, this is really starting to look like the death knell of Twitter. It's quickly becoming extremely inconvenient to see any tweets on Twitter now.

Fine by me. I never saw any value in it, even well before Musk took over. The character limit is guaranteed to eliminate any nuance, and the interface makes it incredibly difficult to follow what discussion there is.

I think originally when Twitter was created, the idea was that it would also be accessible via SMS and so the limit was imposed in order to allow a a tweet to fit into one SMS message.

We’ve had Twitter since SMS cost per-message on most plans.

It was great for following breaking news and not much else.

It worked quite well as an internet notice board where everyone could post important information to be shared/linked to.

Now whenever that is tried I just get a login screen

For one thing, this is sad because even more of the Internet is no longer reachable. The Internet shrinks, and will continue to get smaller as enshittification continues.

This was only a problem because of improper centralization in the first place. From that perspective, this is the Internet self-correcting a defect.

Yes, but it will suck in the meanwhile. People expect these links to last. But instead a huge amount of content will no longer be reachable.

I think it's more along the lines of:

Musk: You can't see tweets unless you're logged in.

Google: Challenge accepted.

Was already pretty shit with embeds, now it's just shit all around

I feel like Google is going to have to find a way to effectively index federated content at some point. The only way to really get human information is from sites like Reddit and Twitter. And both of those platforms seem to be dedicated to completely imploding at the moment.

Fuck Google, if Lemmy continues to take off we can just develop better search tools within the fediverse. The wider internet has been colonized, the path forward cannot rely on big tech corporations.

I'm not a programmer/developer so I don't even understand the scale of the work that has yet to be done. But I am deeply committed to upsetting the status quo, and this platform feels distinctly revolutionary. Can't wait to see what the future holds for Lemmy.

There's nothing about the content being federated that makes it hard or impossible to index. Each instance is just a website with a public webpage that a bot can read. That all a search engine needs to index it. The worst case scenario is the bot will find the same content on multiple instances.

I did read that the website is loaded entirely through JavaScript and that maybe the Google bot doesn't execute JavaScript so can't see the text. I don't know if that's still a problem in 2023, though.

This article says it's not a problem, but I didn't read past the tl;dr, so maybe there's a caveat. Like maybe it has to use a popular framework like React or something to work.

https://searchengineland.com/tested-googlebot-crawls-javascript-heres-learned-220157

It's already indexing it.

Isn't it automatically indexed? I mean, I can go to lemmy.world in a browser and see the content, wouldn't Google's indexing bots do the same?

It already is.

Just put ‘site:lemmy.world’ into Google to see what it has indexed on that instance for example. I don’t think Lemmy is optimised for search yet, but I saw some GitHub threads around the topic.

Isn't it automatically indexed? I mean, I can go to lemmy.world in a browser and see the content, wouldn't Google's indexing bots do the same?

Honestly, and I hate this, but I doubt they will. The majority of people will never go federated, even though it's so easy, because they suck.

It's the difference between a mom and pop restaurant and McDonald's.

We don't need everybody to go to the mom and pop restaurant. Just enough of us to keep it afloat.

The Porndex says otherwise

You can tell from how many upvotes this has that there are just as many idiots here as on reddit lol

Google can definitely index Lemmy

decimates

Twitter absolutely DESTROYED by RATE LIMITING and ELON

Um actually 🤓 decimating it would be 47 million links 🤓 not 227 million

Um actually a word's etymology does not define its modern usage. 🤓

It does if people use it correctly

Found the language prescriptivist! Linguists, let’s all point and laugh at them!

Hah hah! Oh wait...

You’ve fallen victim to one of the classic blunders

You do realize that there are multiple definitions for the word "decimate", yes?

proscriptivists btfo lmao

Good goob, booby froob.

Except when that word still has a literal meaning which is used by people to represent the original idea.

Your first paragraph illustrates the point you were making very well. The last paragraph was absolutely not necessary.

Calm down

Um ackshually, decimating only means removing 1/10th, so what happened is actually many times worse than a decimation.

Well that's what happens when you don't want to pay the bills.

Musk is moving on to the FO part of FAFO.

Between the garbage fire that is Twitter and the soulless corporate greed of Reddit, there couldn't be a better time for people to explore federated alternatives. These social media giants think they're going to generate more profit by these moves, but they're setting themselves up to go the way of MySpace.

Obviously, you remember when MySpace was big. "No one is going to use Facebook....everyone is setup on MySpace." We see how that went. So when people say "Aw nobody's going to leave this platform..." I just smile.

Also, leaving a platform isn't hard! Like, I get that the fediverse is a little wonky compared to current social media but at the end of the day, its create an account and go. People act like having to pick an instance is some great huge barrier to entry, but the main demographics all grew up using computers. It's like saying not installing a shortcut on the desktop will prevent people from using your program in a generation that grew up with file paths.

I distinctly remember seeing memes being shared in 2019 that read, "Stop trying to make TikTok happen... it's not going to happen". That sure aged like milk.

Very good. An evil corporation doing evil things to an evil agenda.

So much for that ad revenue

Limiting people's ability to view ads was only the start, it seems. Genius!

That post image.

Is it just me, or is Elon looking more and more like a movie villain as time goes by?

I keep seeing it used for media articles because it's fucking perfect and accurately displays his disdain for the poors. The fact that anyone with less than a billion dollars in net value thinks he cares about them is both baffling and hilarious.

his disdain for the poors.

Correction: his disdain for everyone who isn't himself. He doesn't even treat his own kids well. His trans daughter changed her name to not be associated with him.

But he'll gladly suck some Saudi dick if it marginally increases his net value.

Side note; I'm so glad that one of his daughters is trans because it helped expose him for the absolute fucking bigot he is. I stopped being a fanboy after the whole 'pedo guy' incident, and it's been nice to have people finally come to the same realisation I've had and apologise for trying to defend him back then.

Except for Bill Gates.

It's one of media's best tools for passive-aggressively shaming someone they don't like. So more than anything his appearance over time is an effect of media turning on him.

Well, I won’t be shedding any tears for him. He is an asshole.

Ah, that's gonna sting. Google is still most people's gateway to finding stuff.

What would be a good search engine alternative?

I don't know, I'm one of the google-using lemmings. Somebody else can prob answer though.

Google is fine.

Duckduckgo if you want an alt.

Can someone please ELI5 what his end game is? I refuse to pay attention to twitter, but Elon, he's crazy.

Elon's goal is to destroy twitter, per his wife.

"Google decimates Twitter search results" makes it sound like it's something Google did intentionally, rather than a simple refresh of Google's cache, now that they can't spider their way through Twitter's network.

In other words, it's Twitter that did this, not Google.

I don't support either in particular, but this shouldn't be immediately assumed as retaliation.

Yeah it's very much more correct to say, "Twitter decimated Twitter's search ability"

I imagine Bing is impacted too, though I haven't heard/teated myself

Can I please get this guy's face off my front page? ._.

One of my coworkers absolutely loves Musk and I can't understand why... The guy's a joke. I feel like people think Musk is smart just because he's eccentric and has money, I hope eventually everyone comes to see just how normally intelligent he actually is

This is such a great example of the potential consequences of making a decision without understanding the landscape/context. It's obvious this would happen in hindsight.

This was my thought too. Their crawler is marking links unreachable as it re-crawls them.

People with power shouldn't be allowed any control over platforms that give power to "the people". I believe this is all intentional. If it was just Twitter, or just Reddit, or just 1 TV network, I wouldn't think that but they're sabotaging all the mainstream platforms at once and making it incredibly obvious. They're trying to collapse our means of communication ahead of 2024.

Wait... so google can just do that? Guess Pinterest bought the premium cloud services and never misses a payment. And tips.

Let Them Fight

Nice analogy. Only problem, neither of the combatants is Godzilla, so there's no one for us humans to cheer for. It's more like Ghidorah versus another Ghidorah, the latter being nothing but Kevin heads.

I stopped at them both being monsters, haha, but I agree with your correction.

I saw the result with 227 million earlier, but I just checked again and now it's 648 million. Odd.

It might be catching and data mirrioring. When you run something as large as google there are hundreds of servers that need to be synced. Deleting large chunks of data can take an extremely long time to propagate.

Pretty sure that number doesn't mean shit anyway.

I'm currently seeing 287 million and 0.4 seconds.

I’m seeing 229M. It seems to be cache at the moment causing discrepancies.

I don't think it's BS necessarily - I saw the exact same number they reported earlier in the day. I just don't think that number is as consistent or meaningful as the author thinks it is.

Not that I frequented Twitter that often, but damned if forcing me to login is going to happen.

I'm not trying to do anything to increase their traffic or numbers.

I've never had a Twitter account. I've never wanted one or needed one to be honest. I do feel like the easiest way to make yourself irrelevant is to gate keep yourself and allow a competitor to just copy your entire platform which appears to be what's happening.

I had, have, one a decade or more ago and then forgot the password to both it and the email address associated. Never really felt the need to re- engage.

While I understand the value that (once?) existed, I also am happy to see this self-immolation. I was troubled by the lazy reporting, that was becoming so common, of people simply reporting on tweets and responses to them, with no analysis outside of said reactions. But you could fill screen inches with all those links.

I'm enjoying watching Twitter go up in flames in real time. 🍿

Musky is probably wondering how to charge search engines indexing his site for free

Sorry for off topic, but what is rawstory? It's on some tracking blocklist and that url is funny. Although it looks just like any other news site.

It's a left-wing news outlet. I don't think there's anything malicious there in terms of security.

These blocklists are wack sometimes, I need to keep adding exceptions...

Usually when I get a warning of that sort, I manually retype the url for safety’s sake, or double-check the site on Wikipedia or Whois it. There may be some characters that look identical to others. Article on it.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2021/04/30/fact-check-hackers-use-similar-looking-characters-phishing-schemes/4891437001/

Good point. Btw this is Rethink DNS on my phone with a ton of active blocklists, which are quite often overzealous... So then I visit the url in Tor Browser instead.

As per usual, the LPT is buried in the comments.

Ehh, I get ~3 pages of 3rd party crap, most of which is on block lists. Red = explicitly blocked, 3rd party scripts and XHR blocked by default (I do also block google.com, gstatic.com and facebook.com whenever they're a 3rd party, but every other red domain is considered dodgy by default).

One.

Two.

Three.

uMatrix FTW

Edit: Also I should say that if I were to enable things more stuff would almost certainly load up.

That's a fact of any news site these days.

Btw uBlock on FF + Rethink DNS ftw

Left-leaning, mostly accurate, sensation stories.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raw_StoryProbably on the blocklist purely because of the word "raw"

Some block lists will include newly registered or rarely visited domains.

The article quotes their source as https://www.seroundtable.com/twitter-google-search-drop-35648.html,which are just showing the decrease in search results each day on Google for site:twitter.com.

And that, good folks, is how you run a service into ground.

He used Twitter to destroy Twitter

a part of me wants this to get worse so that people finally realize elon is insane once and for all

#BoycottGoogle #BoycottMusk #BoycottBillionaires

If only that did anything

It does. People need to band together to hold these deranged billionaires to account.

Yep they do but boycotting rarely works if even possible. There are/were better tools to holding rich and powerful people accountable.

Do it all. Everything helps.

I mean, Twitter is not a life or death thing, they can just scooch over a bit to ignore then

What is his endgame

I guess that's what happens when you don't pay your hosting fees.

This morning, I needed to use image search for a bit and basically 4/5 links leading to Twitter wouldn't load for various reasons. That was not on Google, but I imagine, they have (had) similar problems.

Well, and for normal search, Twitter results are completely worthless to me, as I don't have an account. So, at this rate, no results from Twitter would be the optimum.

Imagine the mailbox getting all the “there are unresolved Mobile Usability issues with your site Twitter.com” and “new page indexing issues discovered” from Google Search Console Team

"ding dong the bird is dead!"

that's it folks!

Maybe they could allow some of the text to show in order for spiders to index the tweets correctly, something like the first 280 characters could work.

is there a human behind such decisions or is it just an automated algorithm?

Not entirely related, but I wonder how things like Lemmy/mastodon/other fediverse things compare to Reddit/twitter in terms of search engine indexing. Would posts like this even be indexed? Since posts are accessible through many instances would it be indexed multiple times? Would this affect ranking?

From what I've understood, every post gets indexed for every instance and that affects ranking a lot. I've seen people speculate that if the fediverse gets big enough Google will adapt its indexing to display it better, but I don't think it's going to be anytime soon.

Has anyone noticed too that if you put AI Blockers on your website Google delists it from their search?

I am genuinely curious. What's the role of the new CEO if this turd keeps doing everything he can to burn this ish to the ground?

Queue the person on the forums telling you that it’s your fault and not the search engine because somehow you’re doing it wrong.

Who would have thought

Could this, in part, be retaliation for twitter’s refusal to extend their contract with Google?

No: https://www.reuters.com/technology/twitter-resumes-paying-google-cloud-bloomberg-news-2023-06-21/

Rumor has it that it's because they failed to pay their debts.

It was so briefly mentioned that I skimmed past it on first reading. Surely that detail is worth more than two sentences. What a baffling decision, to stiff the company that has the single greatest chokehold on the internet.

Testing testing

I think it worked 😉

I am genuinely curious. What's the role of the new CEO if this turd keeps doing everything he can to burn this ish to the ground?

Obviously, this is political and dangerous, and Musk should send a letter to HQ telling them to, well, go to sleep and just not wake up. Google knows exactly what they're doing. We already know Google has blacklisted Truth and Rumble, and other sites it doesn't like, and they're about to do it to Twitter. They didn't do this to Reddit when it went private. Also, if you don't believe me, use Bing and search for Truth and Rumble and everything is correctly indexed, then look at Google, and it doesn't index hardly anything.

I've been saying for a while now that Google is one of the most dangerous companies in the world, and one of the most partisan if anything.

If you think I'm being dramatic, just look at some leaked footage to understand how this company operates. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6162889/Leaked-Google-conference-video-shows-founder-comparing-Trump-voters-extremists.html

I won't even mention their news tab, advertising business, insanely biased search results or anything like that, but google in its entirety is an insanely dangerous company that takes action based on their political beliefs, and because of the scale of Twitter and Google, it's definitely discrimination and shouldn't be tolerated. I'm just happy that Google is getting less popular every day.

So, in addition to the "haha lol get fucked Elon", it simultaneously feels a little shady for Google to immediately do this immediately after payment stops. Not saying it's a direct retaliation but it's a bad look all the same. There are a lot of sites that do shit exactly like what Musk is doing to Twitter, and they get put in results all the time. I've had to use add-ons to de-pintreat my results.

And just for the record, Elon musk is a dangerous idiot and he needs brought down in the most extravagant way possible. I'm not bringing this up in defense of his bullshit.

feels a little shady for Google to immediately do this immediately after payment stops. Not saying it’s a direct retaliation

It's not: https://www.reuters.com/technology/twitter-resumes-paying-google-cloud-bloomberg-news-2023-06-21/

I guess that was boring so it didn't get much attention.

This is just how search engine works, if the page they try to access fails or doesn't host the content you are searching they first get demoted and eventually removed. Twitter is login only for several days now so it's pretty normal that this is happening and it's likely happening on other search engine too.