Proposal to ban X.com links

Damien said:
Bluesky integration is in the works but for technical reasons we don't have a timeframe for it.

In anticipation of some of the responses to this post, yes, we are aware Bluesky integration is on a wide number of XenForo boards, but on here it isn't as straightforward and requires backend work due to some of the requirements for it.
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Ah, I’m familiar with that from my IT department, and it roughly translates to:

“Dream on cnut, it’s not happening”
 
Afaik, Musk hasn't apologized or provided context for his salute. I don't think we should support someone, anyone who does the nazi salutes. So ban twitter.

I've been a long time lurker on this forum, well before twitter became a thing. Forum was fine before and it will be fine without it again.
 
Ban it. Elon Musk is a nazi, and we shouldn't be doing anything to prop up his hate machine. As Reddit sports subs begin to ban it, it will force journalists to other mediums, hopefully Bluesky.
 
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Yeah feck it off. Only just catching up with this story, you can’t be having that shit.
 
I use X only for the football news because most journos post there religiously. Though I wanted to get off it, once mad Musk took over, but never got around doing it. Last year when Musk went full cuckoo and extremely into MAGA shit, I uninstalled it. But I still struggle with links from twitter all over.
So I am so happy to see twitter links go away.

How is bluesky? I know many journos are on it, but are they posting there regularly? But I guess if many people move from twitter to bluesky, that company will also be bought off.
 
Xitter is hot garbage anyway, most of the tweets that find their way here on both footballing and current events forums are a load of tosh anyway. We're really not missing out on much by binning it.

At the very least we should be enabling BlueSky embeds to pave the way for an outright ban.
 
SilentWitness said:
Nothing stopping people using X and relaying that information using the link which is to the article etc. and not X.
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True. Although that still rules out some news sources. For example there are people in Gaza or pro Palestine academics who don’t get published by news sites and there is also live reporting on twitter.

All of which wouldn’t get posted on the forum.

Snow said:
Less informed? We're in this political position because of the amount of misinformation, led by Twitter. Dumb people are being farmed by Russian bots.
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I don’t want to go on a rant and derail the thread but I definitely disagree that our awful politics is the fault of social media.

Snow said:
In relation to football it would get rid of gossip and pretend journalists which are given far too much leeway in the media. Not to mention to people that don't use the site, X links are giant black boxes that show you nothing because you need to have an account to use it.
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Isn’t there’s a tier system to show how trustworthy a source is ? Although I agree ideally we would go back to finding out about transfers with club announcements.

But also I realise there are a lot of very ill and disturbed individuals on the forum who enjoy transfers. They watch flight trackers and post tweets from accounts called SuperFootyAgent69 who calms Vinicius Jr was spotted outside a greggs. It is part of football “culture”.

nimic said:
They're less likely to become idiots. If you follow the right people in Bluesky, you'll get the same information. But there might be less racism in the comments (which a lot of people will read, because... well feck knows why).
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Pretty standard politicians aren’t on bluesky. One of the positives of Twitter is it’s a surprisingly good way to see how full of shit certain politicians are.

Also I might be wrong but you only see the comments under a tweet if you are already signed into twitter.

Cheimoon said:
Why not?
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I got the impression from the thread that the forum not using Twitter would have some
effect which imo isn't true. If there was some wider internet movement to ruin Twitter by everyone not using it then I would be all for it.

But currently banning twitter on here only results in taken away a news source from the forum.
 
I'm all for it. There are other ways to get news sources. This forum started in 1999, before all of this nonsense took hold. We functioned then and we will function now.

I saw on a united subreddit someone posted all the united players who lost their lives fighting Nazis. We can't just ignore this because we don't want to be inconvenienced.
 
/r/reddevils has just moved to a screenshot model for twitter. I think it's a good compromise.

Screenshot twitter content - literally takes 2 minutes to snip and imgur something.

provide the link to bluesky - and bluesky content can be reposted via quotes.

We are too comfortable with tweets just auto-loading. I think trying to prioritise bluesky posts would probably also boost discussion as (i have fallen for this myself), where i just scroll threads until the next twitter embed is located. Prioritising bluesky links and quoting the content in them will force us to engage with content more.

I don't think it should be outright banned as someone might just find it easier to link to really good content from there. But I think admins and the site should probably encourage the use of screenshots to stop redirections or "engagement" when we click on it. Take for example transfers, I'd imagine one twitter embed probably gets hundreds of "engagement" clicks. A screenshot doesn't ban the content, but also gives them nothing for their stats/data. It's essentailly the 1 person that still want to use twitter for whatever reason. It also gets around this potential side effect of assuming Cafe twitter users are somehow endorsing the views of the feckhead. Screenshotting keeps information incoming, doesn't create value judgements on the Caf users and we skew "engagement" to places like bluesky.
 
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Sweet Square said:
I got the impression from the thread that the forum not using Twitter would have some
effect which imo isn't true. If there was some wider internet movement to ruin Twitter by everyone not using it then I would be all for it.

But currently banning twitter on here only results in taken away a news source from the forum.
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But there is a wider movement. Right now, a substantial number of people and sites are leaving X - just look at the examples mentioned in this thread alone. It's not huge, but it can only get bigger if more people do it, to keep the momentum going and hopefully grow it.

I mean, if this doesn't count for you, what does? Or even, what possibly could? Musk can't become much more abhorrent than this, and waiting for X to somehow become unstable or outdated is a cop-out. So what better moment could you imagine? Also, this wave of attention for Musk's salute will drop soon, and then the momentum will definitely be very hard to sustain.

So this is excellent timing, I would say. And even if it still won't amount to enough in total, at least it's something. What else can we do about US politics? While whatever Musk and Trump get up to does affect the wider world. So at least doing this, and 'attacking' the root of Musk's status (which comes from his wealth, which comes from his companies) seems like a good idea under the circumstances.

And yeah, we'll have a bit less access to certain news and whatever random other stuff is available through X (both good and bad), especially while BlueSky is still ramping up. Is that really more important? It seems more like lazy convenience to me.
 
Old enough to remember the before times of no internet and yet still managed to stay informed.
I binned Twitter in 2017. It’s a toxic wasteland. Seems it’s an addiction others aren’t willing to give up. I would happily not click on another Twitter link ever again.
 
Can we bin facebook as well? golden blunder is the only one here who uses it anyway
 
We need to make a concerted effort to get the football journalism community onto Bluesky. I'm sure most of them are there, but it needs to become their default option for posting,over Twitter.

Redcafe generates a lot of hits for them, we can use that for leverage. The more we post bluesky links, the more it'll bed in that Bluesky is the natural replacement
 
I'd ban it. It's time to take a stand. Unsurprising a certain individual is against it but you can do your shitty political point scoring by writing meaningful posts with less green smilies.
 
Didn't a load of sites try and move off it a couple of years ago? I think the alternative at the time was called Threads and it was pretty rubbish. Bluesky doesn't look much better at the moment, with a lot of journos having not posted anything in months. There are a few who seem to have only just signed up to it though.
 
There's a wider movement going on against Twitter now, I am not on social media so have no need for twitter, this forum also has no need for twitter.

News sources can be found elsewhere easily enough, might take more work for it to be uploaded on here, but it's worth it to not support facists.
 
Do it. Scummy platform ran by scummy people. Why continue endorsing it and I’d ask that to everyone who still uses it.
 
Snow said:
In relation to football it would get rid of gossip and pretend journalists which are given far too much leeway in the media. Not to mention to people that don't use the site, X links are giant black boxes that show you nothing because you need to have an account to use it.
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I don't have a twitter account but tweets show up fine here or on other sites. They also show up if not logged into redcafe or other sites so I'm not sure what you mean?
 
redshaw said:
I don't have a twitter account but tweets show up fine here or on other sites. They also show up if not logged into redcafe or other sites so I'm not sure what you mean?
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Depending on your browser and privacy settings the twitter embeds can look like this:

y9IeTcU.jpeg

So not an account issue, rather a settings issue.
Although of course people without accounts can only see individual linked posts, no replies and and no account reels.
 
SalfordRed18 said:
Out of interest, who has deleted their x profile?
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I haven't yet as it's still my main news source for football and other sports but I don't post on it. I have certain words muted and a lot of accounts blocked so my timeline is ok for the most part. Hopefully most the journalists and news accounts make the jump over to Bluesky then I can delete it for good.
 
SalfordRed18 said:
Out of interest, who has deleted their x profile?
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Tom Van Persie said:
I haven't yet as it's still my main news source for football and other sports but I don't post on it. I have certain words muted and a lot of accounts blocked so my timeline is ok for the most part. Hopefully most the journalists and news accounts make the jump over to Bluesky then I can delete it for good.
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Did it a few days ago after the salute. Was clinging on because it was still the best place for football news and rumours but not worth it to support that piece of shit.
 
SalfordRed18 said:
Out of interest, who has deleted their x profile?
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Never had one. First it wasn't necessary as I could do everything I wanted with it without an account, and then when Musk bought it and limited its accessibility to people without an account I had already decided that I'd never make an account there as long as he was the owner. It was plenty clear what a vile scumbag he is long before he went full nazi salute a few days ago.
 
I would be for it, X might be seen as a unstoppable behemoth at the moment but a lot of companies and organisations are starting to delete their accounts from there, the company i work for recently did it too, i only expect this trend to continue, so yeah we should join this movement even if it feels insignificant right now.
 
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