Dont get me wrong: I'd love the linux phone "rebel" community to be as large as the android one. But... i doubt it will be anytime soon? The problem is getting the hw investment done first.
Android ecosystem is equivalent to windows one: its open enough to sustain a large number of vendors and tinkerers.
I doubt this scare-campaign (OP link) will drive people constructively towards (effectively) innexistent linux alternatives. It's more likely to do nothing or push people towards iOS
I've been a happy user of several of those "effectively inexistent" devices for nearly two decades now and I'm typing this on one of them. Whether they "exist" for you or not is your choice.
I'm doubtful, I for a bit bought a lot of the Pine64 devices thinking about this eg. not just Android/iOS... but the lack of feature parity eg. missing drivers, lack of apps, old hardware.
That's the depressing part. I keep looking for something I could potential run the likes of kde mobile and maybe waydroid on, but there's really just nobody doing this. You are basically locked into a vendor kernel if it's even available.
People forget how much the mobile hardware industry relies on non-free infrastructure. Infrastructure developed by companies that make the standards. You really can't make a good open-source phone because you, pretty much, have to play by the rules of the companies in these consortiums.
It does. They obscure the usage of non-free hardware/firmware by not shipping it as part of the OS, but as a bundle on separate flash storage that is loaded into the OS by initrd. That blob is updatable as "firmware". The 100% free open-source is just marketing. It's just for the OS. A lot of the hardware and firmware is proprietary.
It's basically taking the blobs that would be normally shipped with the OS in a sensible manner, shuffle it around, then calling it "free" while the same blobs would still be there, just on different flash storage chips.
Because it's true, and I know what he said, I am not confused at all. Did you not read anything at all?
On the Librem laptop, the tampering is done by PureBoot and inject into /run/firmware. The other user was linking the stuff with the laptop.
*On a Librem 5, it is stored on a separate chip, then they read it with the initramfs, then mount it on top of the regular filesystem at /lib/firmware*.
For the record, the "jail" only exists so PureOS (or any other distro) does not have to distribute any blobs within its repositories or include them in their images - though distros still can if they choose to, like postmarketOS does for example. There's very little difference between a firmware blob that's stored in a peripheral's internal flash, NOR flash or OS rootfs when it comes to user freedom, in the end it gets executed the same way on the same hardware. Having a separate place for these blobs only simplifies their management and allows to put a clear distinction of what's free and what's not. The important thing is that, regardless of whether the "jail" is used or not, there's not a single blob that runs on the user's CPU within the user's system on the Librem 5, which isn't a unique property for a phone but rare nevertheless; the peripherals are a different thing and Purism has never claimed that there are no blobs there (in fact, the existence of e.g. the DDRC blob was being highlighted already in very early development).
(also, the NOR flash itself already had to be there because that's what TPS65982 boots from, so the "jail" is just using the 4MB storage that would otherwise remain mostly empty)
I'm tired of arguing with you. I see no effort from your side to come to some understanding or to clarify anything. Here's why.
> On the Librem laptop, the tampering is done by PureBoot
What do you mean by "tampering" here? Is uploading firmware to peripherals a "tampering"? Why is this a problem, compared with other devices? Does anybof those blobs run on the CPU? I don't understand what you are trying to say.
> If you don't know that the firmware for components/peripherals can either be
I do know. How is this relevant? I never denied that the device does have some proprietary blobs.
> I see no effort from your side to come to some understanding or to clarify anything.
Accusing me of your own sins.
> What do you mean by "tampering" here? Is uploading firmware to peripherals a "tampering"? Why is this a problem, compared with other devices? Does anybof those blobs run on the CPU? I don't understand what you are trying to say.
On the laptop, messing with the system memory (/run) and dumping firmware packages in there instead of just shipping it with the OS using a sensible approach like the linux-firmware package is a hack-job and nasty practice. And since it's messing with system memory, that's your "tampering" right there.
On the phone, once again, instead of using a normal, sensible approach like the linux-firmware package on desktop Linux or the vendor partition on Android, they just store the firmware in some chip, then have the OS (or more accurately, the initramfs) mount the content of the chip using overlayfs in /lib/firmware anyways. It's another implementation of the same hackjob. That, and they combine it with using peripherals whose firmware are stored inside of internal flash chips so the OS doesn't have to be shipped with firmware packages that it then needs to load into the peripherals.
What does this entire exercise do for freedom or openness? *Asbolutely nothing*. It's called shuffling the firmware storage around so you can market the OS as "blob free" when it's literally meaningless. If anything, it makes it harder to audit and figure out which firmware version is being run than if the firmware were to be shipped along with the OS.
---
To dumb it down a notch if you really do not understand what I am trying to say:
This makes about as much sense as if I were to take the SSD out of my laptop, destroy the M.2 socket, then advertise it as a "storage free and OS free laptop". To use the laptop, you must plug in external storage through the USB port and load up an OS. But hey, since there is no SSD or OS on the "main" part of the laptop, I am now qualified for some made up certification and can advertise my stuff as "freeing" the user from the shackles of the evil storage system and nastiness of having an OS. Definitely more "open" than other laptops.
> If anything, it makes it harder to audit and figure out which firmware version is being run than if the firmware were to be shipped along with the OS.
For fsflover, what Purism is doing is moving the non-auditable part of the OS onto a separate storage device so that they can claim that the OS is "Fully Auditable" and FSF certified even though the non-auditable and non-free part is mounted into the OS filesystem during boot. It's deceptive marketing and you're spreading that marketing.
Other open mobile OSes aren't trying to hide the fact that there needs to be proprietary components for hardware.
The only thing I concede is that the drivers are FOSS, which is why some performance and functionality is degraded compared to phones using non-free drivers. You could develop an AOSP phone using the same FOSS drivers as well, you'll just have the same issues.
> what Purism is doing is moving the non-auditable part of the OS onto a separate storage device so that they can claim that the OS is "Fully Auditable" and FSF certified even though the non-auditable and non-free part is mounted into the OS filesystem during boot.
Yup, that's part of it.
But remember, even if they didn't do it, there's still a matter of them by using components with internal flash storage for the firmware instead of shipping firmware with the OS and letting the OS upload them. Like that's not a hackjob like the /lib/firmware or /run/firmware stuff or anything, but it's not like it's any more "open" than any other system, if not being a bit more opague. Of course the marketing would still be deceptive then.
Depends where you draw the line. There is not a single non-free blob in the OS that runs there once the bootloader is up (unless you put some there by yourself, which you're of course free to do).
I think you misunderstand what the Purism Firmware Jail is. I don't blame you though. They seem to make it purposefully misleading. It doesn't isolate what runs in the OS. It just isolates the OS updates from the non-free blob updates. The OS still runs the non-free blobs. It just loads it from separate flash.
It is you who is confused here. The first link is completely irrelevant to the Librem 5, and the second one points to a thread where the actual information present has been written by me.
The only non-free piece of code executed by the ARM Cortex-A53 cluster on the Librem 5 is the SoC's mask ROM bootloader. Once the control is passed to u-boot/ATF there is not a single non-free blob that runs there. Some peripherals may need blobs to be uploaded onto them to work, such as DP, DDRC and one of the used Wi-Fi cards (handled by ROM/u-boot/Linux respectively), while others boot from their own internal memories. Not all of those firmwares are non-free, but most are.
In the end, as I said earlier, the assessment depends on where you draw the line. I happen to draw it at the main CPU and the blobs that need to run within the user-controlled OS, which are unacceptable for me and which aren't present on the Librem 5.
Ah. I see. So the blobs are loaded into the separate microprocessors. Either way, it's the same as pretty much any modern phone, where the modem (and other secondary processors) are running some proprietary firmware and is communicating with the OS processor.
I don't see how it's different from running a free open-source ASOP OS. On the mainstream Android devices, the wireless hardware is also isolated and communication is done via IOMMU.
There's some debate as to whether using the USB stack for communication to the modem in the Librem 5 is less secure than IOMMU as well.
Pretty much any modern phone is also full of blobs that run on the main CPU to ensure basic functionality, with only a handful of exceptions. Just consider how many features stop working or get severely degraded on various phones when you use a clean AOSP build on them (provided that you can do it at all in the first place). Android's driver infrastructure effectively encourages non-free blobs in "vendor" partitions, and many things are purposely moved from the GPLv2 kernel to the userspace so they don't have to be copylefted. If you want to run a non-Android OS on these devices you either have to fill the gaps yourself or use these blobs through compatibility layers.
> at that point you still are trusting external communication to those devices with their proprietary blobs
Just as you do with any kind of peripheral, whether it implements what it's doing purely in hardware or with an embedded microcontroller.
> There's some debate as to whether the USB stack for communication to the modem is less secure than IOMMU as well.
You can have "some debate" on absolutely anything, but that doesn't yet mean it makes any sense. You have communication protocols on top of IOMMUs as well which are subject to exactly the same security considerations as potential exploits in the USB stack, so whatever debate you're referring to is unlikely to be held in good faith. I wonder why you mention it unprompted, as it's fairly off-topic here.
> Just consider how many features stop working or get severely degraded on various phones when you use a clean AOSP build on them.
That's mainly because of device trees. The firmware also isn't distributed via separate flash storage on the device, but I don't consider that making a difference. It's still proprietary firmware running on proprietary hardware. On Qualcomm-based Pixel devices, cellular, WiFi, Bluetooth, and GNSS are all isolated and sandboxed.
> It's also interesting that you mention it unprompted, as it's fairly off-topic here
A primary reason people complain about proprietary blobs is security. People claim that the Librem 5 is more open and secure, but it still uses the same proprietary modules as a Pixel running GrapheneOS. Does Librem 5 have signature checks for the firmware and a tamper-proof bootloader to load the firmware and OS, or can someone sell you a compromised Librem 5?
Is it more free, open, and secure than a Pixel running Android? Because, the only difference I'm seeing is how the firmware is stored and Google Play Services. And with GrapheneOS, only how the firmware is stored. Everything else points to a more insecure system with Librem 5.
Huh? The device tree is the one thing trivially recoverable from the blob. I'm talking about drivers, the same kind as when you install, let's say, the non-free Nvidia driver on a PC. They run as part of the OS and handle various stuff, most commonly comms like VoLTE/VoWiFi, but often also camera ISPs, GPUs, fingerprint readers etc.
> are all isolated and sandboxed
So isolated that you can break them by repartitioning your eMMC/UFS.
> A primary reason people complain about proprietary blobs is security.
The primary reason I care about blobs is freedom and practical aspects that come out of it. Dealing with blobs is always a PITA and severely limits what you can do with the hardware. The peripherals would be nice to have freed, but it's the main CPU and storage that is supposed to be my (the user's) domain and only mine. My Librem 5 came with a GNU/Linux distro on it, but if I wanted to port, say, FreeBSD to it there's all I need to be able to it. I can't do that with an AOSP device fed with blobs from the "vendor" image, at least not without spending years on reverse engineering.
The Librem 5 is one of the handful phones out there that make it this easy. It is also the only one I'm aware about that's still being sold where you have the hardware ECAD and MCAD designs available - and not just to look at, but published on a free license. I think it has earned its bragging rights when it comes to freedom and openness.
> can someone sell you a compromised Librem 5?
Of course, just like any other PC. You want to reflash it before use, obviously.
The SoC supports High Assurance Boot, you can burn your key into its efuses and have it only ever accept software that's cryptographically signed by you.
I see. So it is better in the sense that the drivers are open-source. Though the drivers in Android/GrapheneOS are not open-source, I believe the drivers are also isolated from full kernel-level access.
But it still brings the point that you can't make a phone without proprietary chips and firmware from the mobile industry giants.
> You want to reflash it before use, obviously.
I think that is non-obvious to the majority of users buying a phone.
> The SoC supports High Assurance Boot, you can burn your key into its efuses and have it only ever accept software that's cryptographically signed by you.
An important consideration for consumers is that their data is secure if they lose their phone. Without a secure boot process by default, that's a hard sell for the common masses.
The real question is whether it affects me as a user. The RF spectrum used by cellular networks is highly regulated, so I wouldn't be able to use it freely either way. The PC keyboard I type on right now most likely has some kind of microcontroller running some code in it, but it's of little consequence to me whether it's free or not. I do care about what runs on *my* system though, as that has tangible implications, and I care about it the same way whether it's my laptop or my phone.
> that is non-obvious to the majority of users
Yes, and the consequences of that can be seen in TFA - locking things down due to ill-defined security concerns. Why not go a bit further - the most secure device is the one you can't use to do anything at all.
On a side note, app attestation is already unironically getting us there - you have to either accept that you have no control over "your" device or not be able to use it to interface with the world. For me, any platform that allows applications to attest the environment they run in is insecure by design, as it can be exploited against me.
> An important consideration for consumers is that their data is secure if they lose their phone
Well, it's a good thing that PureOS is LUKS-encrypted by default then. It even has a smartcard reader, so key storage can be decoupled from the phone's hardware.
> Why not go a bit further - the most secure device is the one you can't use to do anything at all.
That's not far off a reasonable criticism of Purism's security model, that a device so wholly compromised it requires one to activate all physical kill switches to disable the hardware in order to so much as safely enter one's device PIN (per Purism's own site content), that it's no longer useful.
Everyone has to make their own trade-offs, but for me that's a model so questionable that its utility value rapidly approaches zero.
Citing an article [0], a post[1] on the site states, "Security researchers over the years have discovered ways to detect what you are typing on the screen simply by looking at variations in the accelerometer." (Infomercial-esque strikethrough not retained here.)
Purism's solution, apparently, is hardware switches. As I understand it, the accelerometer isn't disabled via hardware switches unless all hardware switches are disabled, as there is no discrete accelerometer switch: "To trigger Lockdown Mode, just switch all three kill switches off. When in Lockdown Mode, in addition to powering off the cameras, microphone, WiFi, Bluetooth and cellular baseband we also cut power to GNSS, IMU, and ambient light and proximity sensors."[1]
I don't care much about hardware kill switches myself - but many people clearly do. I've seen it when I was involved in the Neo900 project, I've seen it in discussions about the Librem 5 and PinePhone, I've seen it in reactions when Purism has released a tablet that lacked them. I guess it's because, unlike software, they're easy to understand and easy to trust. Most people don't understand or particularly trust software, for various reasons. Even with Android's security model, I don't think a regular user trusts that Google Play Services that run on their phone always do what they told them to, so they often long for something tangible that would give them a peace of mind. Hardware switches do that.
There's a matter of the modem being a whole separate device that's not really under the user control too. The only way to be sure that it's actually off is to not give it access to power. You can trust your OS, but the modem could still do its own thing regardless of what you asked it to, so I can get that too.
> The Purism model increasingly looks fatally flawed for anyone who doesn't have a very particular and narrowly defined threat model: one who trusts all software they run from the kernel to their applications completely, trusts their hardware completely, yet for [reasons] somehow fully mistrusts the sum total of the device at very specific, limited, and irregular intervals.
The Librem 5 is a general purpose computer that you can run whatever you want to on. I have no reason to distrust the GNU/Linux distribution that runs on it, but I could very well run Android, perhaps even with Play Services, on it if I had to for some reason, just like I used to boot into Windows on my PC many years ago. If I wanted to make sure that it won't access the radios or sensors while I do so, the switches would indeed not just be helpful, but effectively effortless.
The "lockdown mode" in particular is an answer to a UX issue. People want to have switches for various things, but if you just gave them all they ask for you'd end up with nothing but tons of switches around the screen. I believe the main motivation for the lockdown mode was squeezing the control over GNSS in when it was decided to use at most three switches, and the sensors then followed as adding them there could be done almost for free. You could do the thing PinePhone did, with plenty of tiny inaccessible switches behind its back cover; Purism opted for a limited amount of easily accessible switches, and I'm actually glad they did (it happened long before I got involved), because...
> Per Purism, it's perfectly usable in the same way any Linux slab with no radios or sensors of any kind is perfectly usable, yes, but that's stretching things in practical terms for a phone, and it's all very divorced from the reality of what most people expect from their phones.
I said that I personally don't care about the switches, but I also have to say that I surprised myself and ended up using them quite a lot. Not the mic/cam one, this one stays basically unused, but I'm using the cellular and Wi-Fi ones regularly - they're just super convenient. Whenever I want to save power or not be bothered by anything, I toggle the switches. If I had to unlock the phone and swipe through some menus, I probably wouldn't bother most of the time, but I don't have to, so I do. I used to be completely indifferent to these switches, but they ended up being really nice to have when I actually started using the phone. Let's not pretend that having an airplane mode option on a phone makes it a "slab with no radios", there are contexts where you do want to disable some things and continue to use the others.
> Still, it's entertaining. The marketing, the switches, the sweeping technical proclamations and bold self-assessments of high corporate ethics.
I don't see anything wrong in Purism providing what people have often requested. This is not exactly a kind of device that will just market itself, the more niches it can serve and differentiators it can tuck in without diminishing other aspects of the device the easier it will be to sell. I don't think the Librem 5 project would be economically viable if it only ever targeted people interested in Linux. Kill switches, modularity, smart card reader, replaceable battery, separate GNSS module, audio jack etc. are all attempts to extend its appeal and serve a yet another niche, as a device like this would never be able to compete on thinness or specs with what's offered mainstream. It makes perfect sense to me. Some of these things I enjoy, some I don't care about, but none bothers me.
> Beyond all that, installing packages from Debian stable on a mobile phone is a very enjoyable thing. I'm a former N900 and PinePhone user who's not opposed to making reasonable compromises for significant upsides, and would love a truly viable and fully open Linux phone that can run a variety of distros, but I remain unconvinced that the Librem 5 is that device.
I'm a former Neo Freerunner and N900 user, and a current Librem 5 user (with a PinePhone around too, but I already had a Librem 5 when I got it so I barely ever used it). Installing Debian packages is the only way I know how to use a smartphone. Well, okay, I used opkg in the past too :) I got involved in the project because it was clear to me that this was the device worthy of being the successor of my N900 and I'm happy with it and proud of what we, both Purism and the wider community, managed to achieve with it. In fact, I'm starting to get worried about it aging with no viable successor in sight. It's still fine today, but the arrow of time only points one way.
>> An important consideration for consumers is that their data is secure if they lose their phone
> Well, it's a good thing that PureOS is LUKS-encrypted by default then.
My bad, I meant leave their phone unattended. Wherein someone can compromise the device from boot, so that when unlocked, the device is fully compromised.
You don't have to lock things down to solve that either - see the measured boot process with Librem Key for an example.
(that said, this is a completely different threat vector that I doubt the common masses actually care about; and if I really had to choose between openness and evil-maid resistance, I'd choose the former)
I think the common masses just expect it in the first place. If you told someone that leaving their phone unattended could lead them to getting their data stolen, they would probably be surprised. I know this isn't a surprise to the HN crowd, but it is for regular people.
I would also guess that the common masses would choose the opposite as shown by them choosing convenience over openness. It's convenient to not have a separate key to prevent evil-maid attacks.
To be frank, I'm tired of this security theater. Yes, let's lock things down to prevent evil-maid attacks and bring in the technological dystopia in the process, who cares that the same evil maid could put your finger onto the fingerprint sensor and unlock the phone while you sleep without ever fiddling with the bootloader.
"The masses" used to use completely unencrypted devices for decades. That doesn't mean they don't deserve security, but it's up to us, the technologically savvy ones, to determine how to implement it and which trade-offs are worth making to provide it. The term "security" only ever has any meaning when paired with a threat model, and some threats are more plausible than others. Some people will absolutely require proper evil-maid resistance, some wouldn't care the slightest. The common masses would be equally surprised if you told them that they can't change the boot animation on their phone without preventing access to their bank app, so go figure.
I'm pretty sure that most of the actual evil-maids out there are phone owner's partners that they tend to share their bed with at night.
And yes, I don't think those are the only two available choices either. I already mentioned not just one, but two other ones above. They have some tradeoffs, but so does anything. Personally I'd choose a slightly less convenient option over a tech dystopia without second thoughts, but not everyone is tech savvy enough to even recognize the tradeoffs being made, and ultimately in the vast majority of cases it's not the users who make that choice, but Google and Apple.
> You can have "some debate" on absolutely anything, but that doesn't yet mean it makes any sense.
Sure, but from the fact that anything can be debated it does not follow that any given debate is nonsensical, which is kind of what you did there.
> ...whatever debate you're referring to is unlikely to be held in good faith.
I don't know which is odder, that assertion, or the notion that two completely different security models can't be debated in good faith because they're effectively identical, because of hand-wavy reasons like, "You have communication protocols on top of IOMMUs as well which are subject to exactly the same security considerations as potential exploits in the USB stack..."
Certainly there's some kind of argument to be made that the Librem 5 is relevant to this post as its adherents see it as a viable alternative to iOS and/or Android-based devices. I disagree, but everyone's willing to make different compromises and that's fair.
I only mention that because a contingent of voices as high in volume as they are few in number endlessly shoehorning the Librem 5 into numerous threads no matter how much of a non-sequitur it takes, has me suddenly paying more attention these days to what's coming from the Purism camp. The more I do the more disingenuous the rhetoric seems.
It may just be a coincidence, but for a project with such a fraught history and tarnished reputation, it doesn't do anything to increase my trust in it.
> I only mention that because a contingent of voices as high in volume as they are few in number endlessly shoehorning the Librem 5 into numerous threads no matter how much of a non-sequitur it takes, has me suddenly paying more attention these days to what's coming from the Purism camp. The more I do the more disingenuous the rhetoric seems.
It seems to be mainly fsflover. You can search “Librem 5” messages in HN and it’s flooded with messages by them.
At least I don't reply to every comment about GrapheneOS with "it's not as free as Librem 5 and you have to pay Google, and you have to rely on blobs running on the main CPU" etc. This is exactly what the GrapheneOS crowd is doing with my comments.
I explained in the other comment why I thing that GNU/Linux phones are relevant, where I posted. You can discuss my arguments, but you can't just dismiss them all with a single general wording like this.
> a project with such a fraught history and tarnished reputation
Another unsubstantiated attack on a free software project from the GrapheneOS crowd, with no links or argumentation.
I have to admit that I had a kind of knee-jerk reaction there, as this "debate" is very often brought up in FUD pieces without much substance behind it.
Nearly all non-banking apps work with very few exceptions. A large majority of banking apps work. A growing number of banking apps were adding checks for Google certification but now a growing number of those are explicitly allowing GrapheneOS via the Android hardware-based attestation system it supports which can be used to verify the hardware, OS and app with an alternate OS or non-Google-certified hardware if it adds the hardware support for it.
Can't believe USA is becoming such a third world these days. What happened to tiktok is something that would normally happen in a banana Republic. It's so sad to see.
I heard that. I was wondering if that puts people in danger, can't the Iranian government just some how pin point where those frequencies are getting broadcasted from?
My partner's ecommerce business spends millions a year on marketing and is typical of the type of SME that represents the bulk of total advertising spend.
Twitter/X has always been a far distant third to Meta and Google. It's targeting performance is poor, return on ad spend poor and the capabilities of the ad platform poor. Maybe for some niches e.g. AI startup it was useful but for most SME it was useless and their percentage of overall ad spend reflects this.
For large brands what it was good for was brand awareness. Nothing makes you appear relevant than being alongside the latest trends or news which Twitter excelled it. Which is why when their ads appeared alongside hate speech they were so quick to move. Because they didn't have any real money being generated with them anyway.
You can't put the Elon BS aside because it continually impacts the efficacy of ads on the X/Twitter.
A larger percentage of the ads are scams surrounding trends like NFTs because of his dictated moderation and staffing changes.
Views are amplified for himself and his preferred posters - which for all you know may land your company's logo next to Alex Jones.
> Putting all of the Elon BS aside. Can someone in marketing shine some light on how does X compare to other platforms?
Brand/PR/Reputation is a liability and most big enterprises will continue to optimize for diminishing liabilities by moving to more reliable platforms.
The “BS” label is important though: that hints that GP does indeed think it can be ignored/doesn’t exist. A retort to this isn’t unwarranted if you believe that Musk’s actions does impact ad spending.
I agree, for the purpose of scholarly dissection of the subject, it’s perfectly fine.
My point was that lining it up by calling it “BS” invites counter arguments, which is what happened here. If you’re not happy to implicitly accept the “BS”, you’ll have to address it.
Dropping the “BS” label would have led to a more focused discussion. It matters _how_ you ask a question.
I see your point and agree that clarity may have helped. I read "BS" a little differently, as acknowledgement that all of the Elon stuff is a shambolic mess.
It also seems to be the case that some people didnt just disagree with the BS classification, but fundamentally disagree that anything besides Elon is a valid topic of conversation.
IT does matters how you ask a question, but some people will reject or change the topic no matter how you ask it.
Right, it might read as "Musk's bullshit" or "the bullshit aimed at Musk." Either way, the ambiguity doesn't help. It might tick off both Musk-huggers and Musk-whippers, depending on how they read it.
Comes off as abrasive IMO. Someone might as well reply "I don't care that you don't care" then. You're more likely to get a good response from cutting all of that out and just leaving the meat: "I want to know about the current ROI for Twitter advertising, in standard marketing metrics."
The abrasiveness picks up in your replies. It comes off as if you went in looking for a fight. I don't know if you did or not, but the quality of the response reflects the attitude in which your question was posed. In my opinion.
And he's saying there's almost no point in asking that question because Elon's way of running the company has been so impactlful to the platform that considering it without him is pointless.
Musk fired the majority of people working at Twitter, changed the brand, unbanned very controversial users, alienated most of the advertisers, etc etc etc. Talking about Twitter without talking about his leadership is to have a conversation without merit. What other topics are there? He owns the company. Every policy change over the past year has been his personal decision.
Most of the major corporations who were advertising on Twitter seem to be worried about their brand getting placed next to some neo-nazi shit right now. That is directly related to decisions Musk has made. Additionally, he took it private so it's not like we can read their quarterly reports. It's impossible to have a meaningful conversation about this company without talking about the new owner. Any conversation that doesn't somehow relate to him is going to be incomplete. That's much less true if we were talking about Meta, or Google, or Apple. But we're talking about Twitter, which is currently in the process of being managed into the ground.
It seems like you simply cant imagine that someone else might have a different conversational topic or interest. I genuinely feel sorry for you.
It is like people that interject wokeism, Obama, or Trump into any conversation, even if you are talking about the weather. A conversation about the sunset is not "complete" or "meaningful" without ranting about what they want. They just cant comprehend someone having a different interest.
It seems almost obsessive compulsive. Someone asks what letter comes after X, and they cant talk about Y, because any discussion of the alphabet is "incomplete" or "meaningless" without starting at A, B, & C and discussing it at length. All letters come after A, so all conversations are about A.
IF you tried, can you even come up with 3 questions and answers about twitter without making it about Musk?
IIRC Twitter charges a fair bit more per impression than IG/FB/etc. (like $3 vs $.50?) but they also average higher engagement/click-through's than their contemporaries, like 10-15x (again if memory serves). It's been a while since I looked at these stats though.
What I don't recall is the amount of ads flowing on each site. I do believe facebook generally has more ads happening than the rest.
The thing is you can't put it aside. People are leaving in droves, as are advertisers. At this point brands don't want to even be on X, much less advertise there. That compares _badly_ to other platforms, needless to say.
I was chatting with someone recently who is still on Xitter and he was wondering why so many of his followers had recently been "suspended". I got to wondering: if a lot of people are leaving and X doesn't want that to be something the remaining people focus on are they just calling people who have deleted their accounts "suspended"?
I stopped posting to Twitter some time last year but most of the people I follow on Twitter/X are still active and haven't moved. It is still the biggest platform compared to any of the alternatives (Mastodon/Bluesky) and despite the downward spiral it will be with us for a long time (just like Facebook).
I am not and have never been on Twitter so I can't speak for what's happening on the platform but the places I frequent that post news that's broken on Twitter haven't stopped doing that so, at the very least, influential people are still breaking news there at the same place.
I can't help but think that the people leaving Twitter meme is wishful thinking by people who dislike Musk.
The valuation really tells the story, I think. There's no way to square "Twitter's valuation drops 75%" and "everyone is still on Twitter and just as engaged as ever". These cannot possibly both be true at once.
Sure they can. You assume the valuation is directly proportional to the traffic of twitter. It's likely more about the ad customers on twitter, and they very much are leaving in droves from what I'm hearing. That doesn't mean the users aren't still there.
I'll ask the corollary question to rein this in: where are people going if they aren't on twitter anymore? Tiktok? Instagram? It sure isn't Bluesky at the moment.
I sure wish they were. I think that's exactly why for this brief moment the GP wants to focus more on he business realities than the same drama that's happened for the past 6 months.
Anyone still left on Twitter at this point has clearly signaled that the terminally online nature of it is more important than anything else. IE, they are signalling that getting the most banal comments from important people the very second they make them is more important to them than getting quality content, or not supporting an actively hostile system, or doing actual journalism.
I really really don't need up to the second information about whatever Corey Doctorow is saying, as I read his books almost twenty years ago and they still seem to accurately portray his thoughts on many things, also he has a blog. Doomscrolling a tiny cachet of "important to me" people, isn't actually important or useful. You lived just fine before Twitter, surely you will do okay getting your news 24 hours behind some person who hasn't left twitter but somehow is able to sort through all the dross to pull out what little signal is still there.
Sure, I agree. And I also think that the lion's share of people prefer convenience over quality 99.99% of the time. I don't know if that's a mentality that can be changed, and Twitter captured most of that market.
You can only become the next twitter and be subject to the same flaws or try to seek out the relative minority that is seeking quality over noise.
Twitter/X seems to have good engagement and there are active Geopolitics, Israeli/Zionist, Palestinian/Muslim, Russian, Ukrainian (NAFO), Covid, anti-MSM, anti-Disinfo, populist, Crypto/NFT, Black American, sports, and many Indian and African spaces on an ongoing regular basis, several running concurrently at many times of the day. I like that I can go into multiple spaces at different times and hear radically different perspectives unfiltered. This is why the platform appears to be getting much more sticky.
The Spaces bug where you can't hear people is the most annoying thing about it, other than the link interception.
I'm bothered by the 3 levels of subscription - the basic, premium and premium+. The premium still has ads everywhere, and the + does not, but costs more. I think both should be ad-free. I hate ads particularly when I am already paying for the service!
https://help.twitter.com/en/using-x/x-premium#tbpricing-byco...
Given that Premium users are supposed to see 50% less ads, I cannot imagine what kind of ad hellscape it would be if I was not at premium level. I block every ad X account I see.
It is a good place for breaking news and unfiltered data. There is still weaponization of the CommunityNotes, and active shilling and astroturfing by intelligence agencies doing propaganda online.
I have not used Grok at all so I cannot comment there
Many of the people that I engage with on Twitter have been censored on other platforms, folks that are described as the Classical Left, Libertarian Left, Libertarian Right, Populists, the Antiwar types, and now it includes both Palestinian and Zionist perspectives,
I'd like to hear these viewpoints without going through gatekeeper MSM
Since I am a paying customer and I block all ads, I am not sure how much the ad stuff matters. I hate ads!
Twitter/X hasn't traditionally been cheaper than other brand-awareness ad spends, and has performed worse. The best argument for Twitter/X was always that the audience size mattered less than the audience influence.
This is why the abandonment of Twitter/X by large audience segments has been such a compounding effect. Even if they can replace 1:1 people they're losing with new users, if the users aren't the right type of demographic, ad spend is going to collapse.
It will depend on what you are looking to get out of advertising - immediate sales or engagement/awareness.
If you are an eCommerce business selling a widget then you can easily get a cost per conversion, and then it's pretty easy to optimise your spend to maximise profits (i.e. If I spend $30 on ads, I can sell a product I buy for $40 for $90 making $20). I've seen businesses with this revenue model who will spend the equivalent of c.30-40% of revenue to get the sales due to the high margins often involved.
Your conversion will depend a lot on your product, target market, the ad etc (if you are selling a business rolodex your CPC might be better on linkedin, if you are selling a selfie-stick your CPC might be better on insta etc).
The effectiveness of advertising for engagement/brand awareness is much softer, and the spend will be much more discretionary as it is harder to track. It's these ads which are more likely to fall away IMO.
This could not have been better timed for me. I was diagnosed with ADHD yesterday.
Apparently for me, the working memory is a major issue.
If anyone has any tips here I really appreciate it if you could comment your suggestions here.
My biggest technique is just making indented outlines. The most important thing is having low friction to getting started on them. All other parts of 'the system' basically do not matter and you dont need to spend any time on it.
I either use a sticky note (I keep a few loose ones in my wallet), or I activate onenote with win+n and can type on that immediately. Anything higher friction than that isn't gonna work, which is why I don't use a phone app. Getting to the writing screen in any notes app is too much.
I also like to take meeting minutes because I otherwise cannot focus on meetings at all.
* Create your own reminders, like setting alarms and reminders. Leave Post-It notes on areas you frequently look at.
* Habit stacking. If you constantly forget chores, you can stack them on top of something you regularly do. For example, you may put a load of laundry in while brewing your usual cup of coffee.
It's basically pomodoro, but with different way to visualize about it, and it somehow feels...better? At least for my ADHD brain. The author wrote blogs for years, and just diagnosed with ADHD a couple years ago, and somehow his lifelong struggle suddenly explainable(you know, like many of us ADHDer did)
That aside, his blog is usually a joy to read.
This is me talking. I have more problems than just ADHD.
This is a long comment. If you just want a strategy for dealing with working memory inside your head, skip to the end and read 3.
For me increasing working memory was a dead end and I found it far more effective to optimize how do use what I have. The vast majority of my advice and strategies revolve around mental health. Mental and physical health alone can add one or two slots of working memory because your brain is working better.
Some advice:
- Do not limit yourself to doing daily things the normal or accepted way. Do not let yourself or other people tell you that you need to do things a certain way. If you can find a way to not lose your keys, it doesn't matter how crazy or stupid that way is because the end result is you don't lose your keys. (Please be considerate of other people.)
- Half measures are okay.
- Half done is usually better than not done. If you're stuck, walk away and get something else done. The feeling of accomplishment on a small task can recharge you. Then you can go back and finish the other task.
- Failing doesn't mean you need to fail completely. For example, if you're on diet and start annihilating a large number of small high-calorie snacks, that's not an excuse to finish the bag. :)
Strategies
1. Reduce your baseline cognitive load. That's basically what my advice is trying to do. The less you are fighting your own expectations and limitations, the more you can focus on getting things done. (Cognitive behavioral therapy is solution here.)
2. Remove stress or distractions. This is the same strategy as cognitive load, only applied to your environment. For me sometimes I just have to clean before I can get work done.
3. Map and reduce. This is involved and difficult to explain. I recommend using paper until you get good at this.
The goal is you need to do is take complex ideas that use multiple slots of working memory and make them take one or zero slots. There are several ways to do this.
Paper is the easiest method to explain. Write out what is in your memory and then rewrite it so that it compacts into one thing you understand. What you should be able to do is look at the paper and immediately understand what is going on without having to think about it. This frees up all your working memory to make connections to other things.
This can also be done with short term memory. You think about the problem and reduce it to a single idea or process. When you understand something well enough, you can hold a pointer to it in a slot of working memory.
Long-term memory is just regular learning. Programming languages and that embarrassing thing you said eight years ago are stored in long-term memory.
reply