All: please don't post low-information, high-indignation comments, such as flamebait or ideological battle. We want thoughtful, curious conversation on HN.
They need to re-free up the API. Early adopters and hackers really did some great work using the API until they walled-gardened it and rate limited it to make it unusable. They need to do this for goodwill at the very least, but I think it will spark the fire to make it popular with techies again.
Based on the recently published discovery chats we will probably see:
* High def video
* Focus on music publication
* The highest revenue sharing cut from any social media platform for content creators to get people to switch.
* Removal of twitter blue but some kind of subscriptions to edit tweets
* Paid push DMs to followers (e.g. follow this account for drops, then the tweeter has to pay to tweet to this group)
The problem isn't the bots, the problem is the lack of differentiation between bots and real accounts. I say open up the API and let people make whatever bots they wish, but if you tweet through the API then you get a big "BOT" tag next to your username on the feed.
I think the "bot" versus "real" account differentiation is quite irrelevant in practice.
For example, every now and then I check what some elected Canadian politicians have tweeted recently.
Even though these are Twitter accounts that would probably be considered "real", and they often have a check mark, pretty much everything they tweet is, in effect, following a script.
Often, these tweets are just a useless acknowledgement of some obscure holiday celebrated by some unrelated ethnic or religious group that they want the votes of, or they're tweets delivering pointless congratulations for an irrelevant "accomplishment", or they're tweets regurgitating some very specific party talking point that a bunch of other representatives from the same party are simultaneously regurgitating.
These accounts are seen as "real" accounts corresponding to "real" people, yet what they produce is consistently some of the most artificial content I've ever seen.
Most politicians are boring. So what? Just don’t follow them.
The problem with bots is not that they are “artificial sounding”. They can and are used for scaming people, they can and are used for manipulating the public discourse.
I think the problem is less that many official accounts are "boring" and more that they are run by staff and don't have the feel of direct communication that makes Twitter interesting to begin with.
Politician social media accounts are mostly run be teams of staffers who are literally paid to manipulate the public discourse. They are no different from bots.
We've arrived to a very satisfying conclusion here: politics has always (mostly) been the biggest of all scams. Wether its a team of script writing artists, or the state of the art machine generated content, its the same worthless junk.
The purpose of a BOT tag isn’t to indicate quality or intent, it’s not even necessarily derogatory. Real people can be asinine and bots can be useful and informative. It’s to indicate the source was a bot. That’s still useful information.
Everything is politics. Without political skills humans wouldn't have landed on the Moon, but it took the shock of a headshot and the legacy of that memory which eventually faded to just about nothing in ten years.
Is it not fact that the manipulation of public discourse using bots on social media has taken place at scale?[0][1][2]
When U.S. Presidential elections can be significantly swayed by information warfare campaigns run by malign actors, I can't help but feel that dismissals in such a context are rather aloof, if not out of touch.
Ah yes, the "Russian Troll" conspiracy theory. Gonna get a lot of big mad downvotes for this one because people actually believe this nonsense.
The public has been able to be swayed by media for a very long time. The CIA in particular has been deeply involved in it [0]. For some reason this was deemed okay, or at the very least acceptable, by the public. The only difference between the CIA controlled media cited and social media is the lack of US government control.
I do appreciate the irony here. That every other election was so-called "free and fair" yet an absolute wildcard gets in for 2016 and the deepest level of coping by every agency in the union was witnessed. I am not a fan of Trump, but if elections are truly "free and fair" then 2016 was legitimate. If 2016 wasn't legitimate, then why would anyone have any reason to believe 2020 was legitimate? I'm not intending to start a conspiracy theory fight here - but rather raise the question that is trying to be asked. If "foreign actors" elected a president in 2016, then whose to say they didn't in 2020? Or 2008? Or 2004? Who can you believe? I'd argue you couldn't believe any agency who might have an interest in having you believe otherwise. Maybe our elections are actually selections and in 2016 the powers that be lost the information war.
It’s possible to believe both that the 2016 result was legitimate, and that Russian Psyops influenced the result. After all it’s incumbent on the electorate to inform themselves and employ critical thinking in the information they consume, but at the end of the day it’s their choice. That doesn’t mean Russian Psyops is ok, it doesn’t mean CIA Psyops is ok (while noting that you didn’t actually say that they are).
As an external observer (full disclosure, conservative Brit) I deplore both those who try to malign the legitimacy of the 2016 result, and the 2020 result. Even so, I hold a special contempt in my heart for those Americans trying to excuse, justify or even in some cases explicitly encourage foreign covert influence on US elections and obstruct efforts to counteract it. Those people are not even borderline traitors and enemies of democracy, they’re all the way over the line. All IMHO, and it’s not my country.
Is it possible that both CIA intervention into public discourse and foreign entities with unknown interests with reach far greater than the largest media outlets in the country[1] are both not ideal? And that one does not excuse the other?
Online discord is being sown because there is real world discord. It’s not coming out of thin air. The college educated upper middle class is increasingly pulling away economically from the middle class, and is being increasingly assertive about their value system which is increasingly diverging from the traditional values held by most of the rest of the country. Institutions are breaking down in different parts of the country in different ways—both red America and blue America are less likely to attend church than before, but what they do instead is creating greater gaps between them. Immigration and globalization are bringing an increased pace of change, and the New York Times is calling anyone who objects to that change bigots and racists.
Because there's been lots of research on how much advertising affects election outcomes and it's minimal.( At the federal/state level, in smaller races where voters lack information about either candidate it can be slightly more influential)
I can't imagine a Russian internet trolls with much a smaller reach and lower budget are going to be that much effective than best political ad minds of America at changing our opinions. (For Russian governmental organizational competency see Ukraine)
And then anecdotally I could have predicted every person's i knows vote a year before based on how they felt about woke culture and their party identification.
I can't speak for JamesBarney's reasons, but agree with them that it's probably minimal.
Facebook and Twitter have better funded research groups focusing just on the sub-task of knowing what my current state is (a necessary part of being able to tell if you've changed my preferences), and for advertising purposes I am categorised as being into nouns I don't recognise, foods and sports which repulse me, and so on.
I expect the three letter agencies to mix me up with the horror film director I share a name with, and also to confuse me with three pet dogs and two pet cats.
I remember back then that there was also evidence that China ran some kind of bot campaign[1] but no one really cared and it was never brought up. Ironically your second source says that but again, no one seems to talk about Chinese bot farms or election interference strangely. That same source talks about all the countries that do this. I assume this is pretty routine and the US probably does it in other countries. I don't know why Russia is focused on for this in 2016. I have my guesses.
But then there were investigations into the Russian election swaying campaign. I remember Facebook said that there was no evidence the ads they bought had any impact on anything[2]. There were also groups the trolls made. It's completely unclear what conclusion to draw from them.[3] The article says people mostly didn't follow the groups but that their posts reached people. What conclusion can be drawn from this? Is there any evidence the posts changed people's opinions? Also, one of the weird and counter intuitive things about it is they targeted left wing people.[4]
So I don't see any evidence that an election was significantly swayed. I didn't see it in those sources. I am not trying to make this a left/right thing. I am just saying that yes, there are bot and troll campaigns all over the place. But I don't know if we should conclude that they significantly swayed an election. It's just something to keep in mind. I brought up the China thing because I would think if it was actually a concern then people would have talked about it but how many knew that China, or Venezuela or Iran, were involved in this?
>So I don't see any evidence that an election was significantly swayed.
Well, in my defense I did say can be swayed. However, I do think there was serious damage done when you take the full scope of Russian influence operations into account.[0]
That said, considering just the troll farm influence alone in an election scenario with tight margins—the 2000 election, for example—it's rather easy to see how it could make the difference.
> Often, these tweets are just a useless acknowledgement of some obscure holiday celebrated by some unrelated ethnic or religious group that they want the votes of
Lol. Yes that's a mandatory part of being a politician. I hardly think that when most people think of the problems of twitter/social media they are thinking of Trudeau tweeting "congrats Mattea Roach on winning 23 consecutive games of Jeopardy" or whatever. Btw, actually I just scrolled through his twitter and his tweets are almost entirely practical https://nitter.it/justintrudeau.
Anyway, the problem here is bot farms creating tens of thousands of sockpuppets posing as "average citizens" to push some sort of narrative and try to manufacture consent, which is qualitatively different from what you are describing.
A politician is an organization, as much as any corporation or brand is. The politician is the owner, spokesperson, and mascot, but the more senior they are the more they have a huge staff that is responsible for what would otherwise be called CEO, CFO, Chief Council, PR, HR, IT, R&D.
And remember that corporations are people too, my friends. But they are very strange kinds of people. When Taco Bell hires a marketing firm to pay a TV station to air a commercial X times, is that a bot? Or even stranger, Taco Bell and Pizza Hut can get into a twitter troll war with each other, even though they're both wholly-owned subsidiaries of Yum! Brands, Inc. and the whole thing could have been written by a marketing firm and scheduled it through TweetDeck. Is that a bot?
Edit: Or every newspaper is basically auto-posting their recent articles, some even just doing it like an RSS feed, where it tweets a link and headline whenever an article is posted. Is that a bot?
> corporations are people too, my friends. But they are very strange kinds of people.
It has been said elsewhere that corporations are a sort of amoral artificial intelligence. The trouble is that they are more powerful than a human citizen, while having none of the community or political interests of a human citizen.
The bigger one is the lack of any consequences whatsoever. For instance, do something that leads to the death of another person, even unintentionally, and you may find yourself behind bars for some significant period of time. Do it as a corporation, even on a large scale, and you'll generally suffer little more than a fine that is generally no more than a few days of yearly revenue, and of course zero consequences for the executives who in many cases are directly culpable - frequently making decisions consciously prioritizing short-term profit over all, including safety. Boeing being the contemporary poster child.
News outlets and fans tweeting sports results. Public event celebration (new year, xmas, father day etc.). The vast majority of these tweets could be managed by bots and we wouldn’t know the difference.
I actually follow many bots on twitter knowingly, but they could be people in disguise I wouldn’t care.
In my opinion, the content of a tweet (is it spam ? is it abusing the platform ?) matters way more than wether it’s a bot or a human doing the spamming/abuse.
> In my opinion, the content of a tweet (is it spam ? is it abusing the platform ?) matters way more than wether it’s a bot or a human doing the spamming/abuse.
What about replies and retweets? EX: If you have high quality (or good faith) content that's supported/attacked by bots vs real people.
I kinda wish engagement had less effect on content visibility and having a swarm of bots "attacking" a comment wasn't decisive.
Talking about HN comments, some have extremely bad but feel good takes that will garner a huge first wave of upvotes, to then get beaten down as it got more attention, to perhaps get some more sympathy votes as timezones shift.
The interesting part to me is the comment can go all the cycles because it stays there, is still visible even when flagged to death and can be rescued.
That's also how I read reddit, with downvoted to death comments and posts in the timeline. People who care enough should probably do the same for Twitter as well.
Disclaimer: I am not politicaly engaged so have less exposure to the nastier battles where thousands of people shout a each other. I still don't understand why anyone would go there in their free time.
PS: I also don't think there is any one size fits all strategy for a service used by millions of people all over the globe. To me the "divide and conquer" approach reddit takes is a better fit, and expecting Twitter, or any social media to have a good mechanism to deal with social swarms is a pipe dream...dealing with abuse when you can have 5000 ton gorillas throwing their weight in the balance would be a tall order for any private company.
[not knowing if a machine or a human wrote a twitter post is a bad thing]
And what difference does it make, wether some content was written by an algorithm or it was written by professional staff, when the objective might be the same: to misguide / influence you to act in someone else's favour
A brief conversation is usually all it takes me to notice even the more elaborate bots. I would share my methods, but I'd prefer they not figure it out too quickly. Suffice it to say bots just don't behave the way a human would.
Why do you want to know if a machine or human wrote a tweet? What difference does it make, and where do you draw the line? If I use Grammarly to correct my language in a tweet then did a machine write it? How about if I generate text using GPT-3 and then manually edit it?
One is more labour intensive and more expensive. The other can be done at scale for cheap. The negative impacts most likely don’t scale linearly, so volume is an outsized concern.
One of the secrets of getting positive value out of Twitter is to block all or most politician accounts you come across. Mute the names of the popular politician for extra measure.
Exactly this. It takes some work to set up, but the reward is plenty. At least the bare minimum tools are available to enable this. In addition, what other platform even lets you block the advertisers, giving you at least some deciding power over the adds you get.
That’s not the bot issue everyone is talking about. It’s bunch of fake/empty accounts posting/replying something what pushes some fakenews, propoganda, etc.
It has been especially noticeable this year, since February 24th
Humans are really creative. One potential outcome is a few well known ppl start using a 3rd party client, tell their followers that’s why it says bot, and the badge loses its meaning.
That's going to be tricky too because I could imagine someone offering a service to actors and other public people to help manage their twitter accounts (maybe discourage them from posting stupid shit at 1 am. I'm looking at you, Elon), in which case you wouldn't even have a 1:1 ratio.
The usual solution, historically, it to provide different levels of service based on your account type. The couple of times I've worked somewhere that the admins had a disjointed set of servers from the users was really a huge stress relief. You want admins to 'see' what the user sees, but to be able to work even if the site is being DOS'ed. And ideally you want users to be able to use the site even if the admins manage to DOS themselves (admin functions tend to have a higher fanout than end user functions, so the danger of catastrophic fanout is always higher).
One option would be to ban custom Twitter clients. As a bonus, enforcing official apps opens more possibilities for monetization. Twitter could even release a special app for advertising agencies who manage multiple accounts on behalf of their customers and charge appropriate subscription.
> Like someone using a custom twitter client as a single user shouldn't get that label, no?
Why not? If it's a niche client not many people use such false positive would be rare. Also such people probably don't have huge audirnce and they and their audiences won't care.
And it might be deterrent against people trying to build popular alternative client that might compete with main twitter app.
I don't think aiming for 100% accurate label is on the table.
Yeah, but that was then and this is now. Thinghs kinda settled down since then.
The real danger of opening the API and marking all tweets made through API as BOT is that this label looses impact if some alternative client that uses API raises to prominence.
I'd say that current setup where users have no indication that something might have been posted by bot is way more horrible.
is there anything stopping me from writing a browser extension to make posts on the site automatically? i did work for a guy on that sort of setup spamming used car dealership ads, and it may have been a hastle keeping it running but we got plenty of ads out.
If the private keys are distributed inside an approved client app then any competent hacker can decompile the binary and extract the keys. At that point the keys can be used by bots or other unauthorized apps, and there's no reliable way for the server to distinguish them.
> the problem is the lack of differentiation between bots and real accounts
Nah, I'd bet that it really is as simple as the fact that the first thing Elon sees under any and everything he tweets is a flood of cryptobot fake posts and scams. That he and we identify them quite easily, and he's just flat-out tired of it.
If clamping down on API access also curtails a significant proportion of those posts, then he'll do it, even if it's just a temporary relief.
When I used twitter a decade ago, I used TweetDeck, which used the API to post to twitter for me. So that would label me as a Bot just because I like a better UX/UI.
Let me solve it as a technical person. Whether management wants it or not is not my forte.
You want an API because other apps are better. Let those apps partner with Twitter to allow only humans and not a second order API. If they do that, they get kicked out faster than Fortnite got kicked out. Both Twitter and the API user need to own the relationship and guarantee its sanctity so it will likely require an investment bigger than $99 to be paid by the API user (app) to Twitter.
So you will not have infinite API apps, just a few of them, those who can pay the cost of providing and validating the API.
If I were to build a bot I wouldn’t even touch the API. Why not simulate everything through a headless browser and stay under the radar. Then build a farm of those simulations and you can publish/promote everything you desire pretty much undetectable.
To me, the draw of twitter was you could text messages (SMS) to 40404 or get texts from 40404 from people I choose to follow. I had unlimited minutes and unlimited texts but I didn't have an app phone back in 2008 when I signed up for Twitter. The world has changed since then...
I'd say if you were to build a bot to tweet about the weather in Sheffield, you are probably better off setting up your own server to write blog posts or something like that? Maybe look into microdata or RSS or something too?
It's very common to build bots for Twitter. They post on Twitter because there's an audience there. I'm sure there's lots of places I could get an rss weather subscription, but I stopped using rss.
The idea was about opening the API, and this suggestion was to argument that it makes easier for the malicious bots. So this was suggested to make the API less valuable for that purpose.
I think the only problem would be if this API was used by non-bots (perhaps some relays) and the tag loses its meaning.
I think we need to expand our vocabulary a little on this subject. A lot of people seem to think that these "bots" are just limited to "buy crypto today" type posters.
What they don't realise is that the comment they are reading right now could well have been written by a bot.
I’m not on Twitter, but I can think a myriad of cases where I wouldn’t want to touch the API without my case being malicious. Like extracting data from the platform, or monitor specific accounts, or monitor trends, or whatever. It doesn’t have to necessarily be a troll farm, or a fake users service. I’m sure the API allows most, if not all of these, but there would be usage quota. You bypass it, and then you can even start a business around it. There are thousands of startups out there providing services for social media monitoring, and I seriously doubt all of them are going through the official API.
Those already do kind of exist, I recall scripts existing which can be used to block users from lists, and inevitably those were used for reinforcing echo chambers.
On the other hand, providing users with tools to curate their timelines is much better than having the company shove some arbitrary rulings down everyone's throats.
Edit: In a sense this would be one of the things I have come to really enjoy about running a Misskey instance. The content is all out there on other Mastadon, Pleroma and Misskey instances in the fediverse, both stuff I would enjoy and stuff I would find extremely offensive but that doesn't really matter because what I can see is entirely in my control.
They should try to detect bots not using the API and ban them.
IMO all modern freedom of speech issues stem from not being able to differentiate between humans and bots. And it may be the case that it's not a solvable problem and we should assume any sentiment expressed online is always just noise.
This is just kicking the can down the next level on the issue. They can't tell which bots are bots so what difference does it make it if the solution isn't to ban them but to just limit them? The problem is identifying the bots.
Without an API, the default "I want to write a bot for Twitter" path forward is to automate the human UI -- to some extent, this makes you look like somebody who is trying to evade bot detection.
I suspect there are lots of people in the class of "wants to do something interesting, isn't particularly interested in being malicious but doesn't mind breaking the rules." Maybe an official bot API would dry up that ecosystem?
half of what I tweet could be done by a bot, that is to say answer to writerslift posts with links to books and articles. the other half could not. I'm currently real, but would I be a bot if I automate my bot half?
The 'bots on Twitter' thing is perhaps one of the few things I agree with Musk about. Searching a hashtag like #javascript or #webdev or similar reveals a whole universe of obviously low quality content posting bots getting suspiciously the same number of likes and retweets on every post. Things like "Top 10 Web Languages You Need To Know" and the list is just randomly shuffled with link shorteners everywhere. This stuff is definitely polluting whatever sacred public square Musk seems to think Twitter needs to be. Obviously bots and spam is a monumental problem that transcends Twitter.
IMO framing it as "get rid of the bots" is the wrong way to solve the problem because it's unsolvable, especially as we head more towards a world of content being generated by increasingly sophisticated ML algorithms.
It's probably best to embrace the bots and instead think about it as a problem of categorizing, quantifying, and applying more metadata to messages that let people, agents, or other bots determine the qualities about the information that they want to know.
100%. Allow open, reasonably rats-limited access to the API, and use the absolutely gargantuan amounts of data Twitter has built up to sort through bots. If other services can do it why can’t Twitter?
> IMO framing it as "get rid of the bots" is the wrong way to solve the problem because it's unsolvable,
I think it's super simple actually. Wanna get a blue check-mark to prove you are human? Here, pay us 10$ pledge. You'll lose it, if you break the "rulez". Add financial frictions to the game, and bots strategy won't scale...
I think you hugely over-estimate the importance of “developer APIs” to the number of bots on twitter.
You’re never going to really fully defeat browser automation or HTTP request playback with automatically generated payloads. No one technically needs an API if a web interface exists to automate something. It’s easier with an official API sure, but not super hard without.
Indeed, a truly malicious bot farm would avoid the API altogether and just fake web client requests to look as much like the real thing as possible. Anyone can capture the HTTP messages with just a computer and an open source MITM proxy to decrypt and inspect the SSL message contents for recreating in a bot script or application.
How about making changes to the interface html structure/ids and same for the api. Will break any program using it, but won't bother users. Now record what accounts are silenced by that, do it multiples times and ypu have an idea who is a bot ?
I wonder if this was part of the whole media / video embeds - so a musician could release music and news websites etc would pay for the embeds. Musicians could then get a cut of that money - or a cut of the advertising of it.
Accessing tweets does not seem to require agreeing to any Twitter TOS. They have the option to not serve data to your client (browser), but once they've chosen to, there doesn't seem to be any agreement that would restrict your right to screenshot. Republishing those screenshots could run afoul of copyright restrictions, but no more so than embedding currently does.
> Republishing those screenshots could run afoul of copyright restrictions, but no more so than embedding currently does.
Embedding should be fine because that's being "published" by Twitter who you have already given permission to publish (cf [1]) although I'd have thought (IANAL) that a screenshot would be a good example of "fair use for commentary" except when e.g. news services embed tweets, they're often not commenting on those tweets specifically, just giving a general flavour of sentiment.
Go to a direct link to a tweet from an anonymous browser.
Until a court case says that the act of receiving bytes from an HTTP server constitutes agreement to a contract that was never even presented to you, it's hard to see how you can possibly have agreed to a TOS. The user must be presented with a TOS and have the option to reject it in order to have agreed to it.
Generally all ToS and EULA that do not require an action of explicit consent (an "Agree" button or checkbox, not checked by default) are not enforceable. This is well established case law.
In Specht v. Netscape, the court declined to hold Netscape’s browsewrap (i.e. "putting a link to the ToS somewhere in the web page") enforceable because the hyperlink’s placement at the bottom of the screen failed to put users on notice of Netscape’s terms.
In Hines v. Overstock.com, the court found Overstock.com’s browsewrap unenforceable because the website failed to prominently display the link to the online agreement in a way that would put users on notice of the website’s terms and conditions.
And if you think it's all because "you have to scroll to see the hyperlink" and that Twitter's one is valid because there's always a "Terms and Services" hyperlink in small text on the screen at all times, I can tell you of Nguyen v. Barnes & Noble, in which the court held that Barnes & Noble’s browsewrap was unenforceable despite the fact that the hyperlink was prominently placed next to the buttons users must click in order to complete online purchases.
Van Tassell v. United Marketing Group also states:
> Because no affirmative action is required by the website user to agree to the terms of a contract other than his or her use of the website, the determination of the validity of a browsewrap contract depends on whether the user has actual or constructive knowledge of a website's terms and conditions.
In other words, w.r.t. the enforceability of Twitter's ToS on users that have never agreed to it explicitly, they have the burden of proof and have to give the court convincing proof that you knew about their ToS when you broke it.
This is all based on a rather obvious common law standard:
> An offeree, regardless of apparent manifestation of his consent, is not bound by inconspicuous contractual provisions of which he is unaware, contained in a document whose contractual nature is not obvious.
- Specht v. Netscape
So yes, I have seen cases not enforcing this paradigm.
Lots of ppl already do this on twitter itself - instead of quoting or replying, they'll screenshot another tweet and embed it. I suspect they're trying to defend against the tweet being deleted, but they've just opened up a whole new front of potential abuse - I treat all such fake embeds as suspicious, and I would if they were published on a website too.
It's also partially to avoid boosting the screenshotted content, if you want to for example call something out as being bad or false. I do agree it makes it harder to spot fakes
The only thing that can stop a bad guy with an API (besides policy and moderation) is a good guy with an API. Some of the very best misinfo research and tooling came from academics having access to firehose data.
My little side project is a terribly written bot that brings some joy to a niche group. I hope I don’t get excluded. It’s also brought me a lot of joy along with everything I’ve learned building it. There are a lot of automated accounts that are really interesting. Twitter is worse off right now - and people/communities hate uncertainty. Signed -@BostonTimelaps1
If they think keeping the API closed down or closing it down even more, is an effective defence against the bots… They need a quick refresher course in why the Analog Hole makes perfect DRM impossible outside of completely controlled circumstances.
Even if you required a dedicated twitter device per account, and no api at all… no more twitter website even or read only website … then you would get people building robots to touch the screen as fast as possible to “physically automate “ the devices… if you limit that device to only having one account associated with it, you would need a way to deauthorise a device for when you sell it or upgrade to a new one, so they would just automate the deauthorise workflows and “load balance” across any necessary size pool of devices.
Any efforts like this will drastically increase user friction and drive away customers/users. Simultaneously as far as they go down this path there will be (as long as twitter is still considered relevant, at least) … be state funded propaganda organisations who’s interests align with funding such a device farm, and simultaneously they would want deniability so the operators of such twitter device farms would wind up in the sort of ethically dubious zone as companies like Pegasus group (examples because its after midnight and I don’t feel like looking up exact details, consider these hypothetical examples unless they are correct) selling their hardware to “legitimate governments” to perform a once off inspection of the phone data of someone crossing the border into the USA at JFK airport in New York, and also to counties like Saudi Arabia to hack and monitor dissidents round the clock by installing root kits/exploits.
Effectively there’s no point, they should open up the api and monitor it better.
Might require changing some parameters of the browser / tweaking it a little or getting an older version, because nowadays browsers have a flag that says "hey, I'm being automated!"
But other than that, I don't see how they could prevent it
My guess is he wanted to lower the price... He's friend with Jack Dorsey, who said the bot problem is worse than Twitter is admitting. And nobody want's a social media platform discussion is ran by sucky AI.
As a developer, not really a tweeter, I'd be super-happy if a read-only API was opened up again. It was a gold mine when it came to creating cool things back in the days, especially analysis stuff.
Do you think CA (and others) are restricted by API or non-API? A missing API hurts developers the most, not huge companies who can access the data either way.
The majority of scams are not bots written with the API. They’re stollen accounts of real people that are semi-automated, semi mech turked using a variety of techniques.
If he does find the bot accounts significant enough to identify that he has been "duped" is there any recourse? I suspect this might be the canary in the mine (of social-media businesses) and Elon is passionate enough to release said numbers which could be used as a litmus for all business that marketed 'number of "users"' as something of a validator.
That is what should change. The largest twit accounts, whether they use API or not, should be charged directly by twitter for the value of reaching their many followers. Twitter the firm is infamously bad at improving anything, but this would be a way of recruiting a variety of capable parties into important efforts like fighting bots, spam, harassment, etc. Also there would be lots of money. This was obvious ten years ago.
> > ..ads, which is its primary source of revenue?
> The largest twit accounts, whether they use API or not, should be charged directly by twitter for the value of reaching their many followers
Paid reach is still ads, and narrowing free organic reach so that only the ads people are willing to pay for broad reach for have broad seeming-organic reach drops perceived content quality for consumers directly and reduces the perceived upside for the people creating and developing reach for organic content, getting them to put less effort in on your platform, further reducing consumer-perceived content quality.
Tweets by e.g. Kim Kardashian extolling the virtues of particular beauty products are certainly advertisements, but they function differently and they aren't received as such by many of her followers. AFAICT Kardashian isn't really paying twitter for these tweets? That seems like an ongoing error on twitter's behalf.
Granted, insta posts are probably more valuable for Kardashian, but there are lots of other parties who would also pay twitter for the privilege of tweeting.
> but there are lots of other parties who would also pay twitter for the privilege of tweeting.
In the short term, yes. But when you make paying the only way to get significant reach, you reduxe the quantity of presented-as-organic content that feels organic rather than like ads, which both directly removes the perception advantage of pay-for-“organic”-reach vs. pay-for-adds and also makes the whole platform less attractive to consumers, costing eyeballs, and making it harder to sell either traditional ads or ads in the form of paid “organic” reach.
Organic content that reachers passive/relatively inactive consumers is where your audience comes from. Make people pay to supply that, and you lose the audience you are selling to them and to traditional advertisers.
This argument feels theoretical. Twitter is not just an ad network. It offers unique values to its users. It is already conveying lots of promotional crap from big users to their followers, which doesn't have to change. Both sides of that transaction choose to take part in it. No normal ad network can deliver that value.
If twitter starts charging the followers, sure, that will be a big mistake. I'm not suggesting that. Twitter should start charging the followed, only a little at first, on a sliding scale. They should try different pricing policies, for different users, and should keep adjusting until they have extracted a great deal of money from those twitter users with the most followers. It could be that some highly-followed users don't themselves see much value from their own tweets, so they won't want to pay. Twitter doesn't need those users; they're wasting resources. You may be worried about chasing away small users who will grow into big users, but small users won't be charged. By the time they're big, they will value the relationships they've built with their followers.
A generic social media firm couldn't do this, but twitter is in a unique position.
> Twitter is not just an ad network. It offers unique values to its users.
Yes, it does, and that unique value is noncommercial organic content, which charging for organic reach undercuts.
> If twitter starts charging the followers, sure, that will be a big mistake. I'm not suggesting that.
No, you are suggesting something just as bad: charging people for exactly what gives the followers a reason to be there.
> If twitter starts charging the followers, sure, that will be a big mistake. I'm not suggesting that.
They are producing and providing Twitter with content which people are coming to Twitter to consume. That’s not “wasting resources”, that’s what enables Twitter to sell space to advertisers.
> By the time they're big, they will value the relationships they've built with their followers.
By the time they are even moderate-sized, they’ll be on multiple social platforms, be using each of them (among other things) to inform their followers of the others, and the kind of content they are distributing on them (especially as it changes), and will be, themselves, cobtinuously reevaluating the cost/benefit of each platform for particular content and adjusting their social media strategy.
Facebook uses this strategy, and as they dialed it up, big accounts did direct followers to other platforms to get reliable access to what they were producing.
> A generic social media firm couldn't do this, but twitter is in a unique position.
How? Literally everything you’ve said applies to any large social media platform the same way as it applies to Twitter.
If this [0] is "noncommercial organic content", I quit. It feels like you have a commitment to the abusive unprofitable way that twitter has been managed for at least a decade. I can't imagine why.
I know, right? It seems so dumb that it's hard to believe. They're free to the right sort of people:
Applicants need to be notable in fields such as government, entertainment, sports or political activism, and they need to abide by Twitter's rules including a ban on the glorification of violence. [0]
Which probably means one can get a checkmark if one pays the right PR firm, who kick back to the right twitter middle manager, but twitter shareholders don't get a cut. Twitter has completely ignored an obvious source of revenue for its entire existence.
Maybe as a paid/subscriber feature; even YouTube seems to have a cost problem with high def video. Video ads are barely profitable, I can't imagine serving high quality video content at a loss being a good business decision.
> * Focus on music publication
I think this is a niche that Twitter currently excels at. The music industry constantly has small announcements which is well suited for Twitter's format. Should be fairly easy to add a high quality music player, and that should also save a bit on bandwidth costs since musicians currently upload a video just to play music.
Plus, if you look at musician profiles, many pay for a linktree-like service since Twitter only supports one profile link; they can easily capture much of that business for themselves.
Funnily enough, this is what MySpace tried to pivot to be. Every music brand wants to have some sort of home page they can use for advertising/promoting and communications. Difference is Twitter currently has a critical mass of musicians.
> * Removal of twitter blue but some kind of subscriptions to edit tweets
Just charge for verification. They can even be cute and make different kind of verification checkboxes with additional information like they currently do for politicians (maybe even charge the politicians). Easy ones off the top of my head: business owner with business info, musicians, brands.
> * Paid push DMs to followers (e.g. follow this account for drops, then the tweeter has to pay to tweet to this group)
They kinda did this the other way around, OnlyFans style, which makes sense since there's more people consuming tweet than notable people making tweets. Users can pay/subscribe to get noticed by the tweeter. I believe Instagram also recently launched a similar feature. There's a lot of value in having an OnlyFans feature set without the pornographic association. Or Patreon but with a massive userbase.
In the Fintweet community the wish list is probably something like:
* Ban all spam bots
* Ban all spam bots (it's that bad)
* Ability to edit tweets
* Maybe a slightly better to tack tickers. Currently you'll do something like $META but this gets problematic when there are dual-listings, or the same ticker in different markets.
A lot of Twitter spam can easily be combated with more options under "who can reply/retweet", such as: only paid Twitter Blue subscribers, only followers, only verified users (especially with more ways to get verification), only users with verified phone numbers, etc.
Right now tweets are either completely public, completely private, or close-friends-only. If Twitter wants to easily solve the moderation problem; let people have moderation tools over replies to their tweets.
Then allow those restrictions as filters on the timeline, who can follow, who can DM, or as visibility for their own tweets, which can probably also be paid features.
it's not easy to regain that trust once you lose it. how long would Twitter's API need to remain open until you decide they're not going to reverse course and that it's worth building on? 2 years, minimum? and even then there'd be a bitter taste when i do: it would always be in the back of my mind that "what i'm building is only temporary, they're going to take this away again at _some_ point".
He didn't want to buy it at that price when the market price had dropped by 2/3 or more. Doesn't mean he didn't still want to own it. Don't think he's buying it because he wants more money, it's not a good way to make more money.
Twitter's video serving is embarrassingly woefully bad. Like really, really bad. So much so that Twitter videos buffering is a meme. This should be a core focus.
> They need to re-free up the API
Nobody cares about that. I mean a few developers do but 99.9% of users don't. Nor do they care about the consequences. Time and time again we've seen a growing platform embrace developers until they're large enough not to want to deal with it anymore. This is Lucy and the football at this point. When will we learn?
> They need to do this for goodwill at the very least.
Again, nobody cares about this issue, just like nobody cares about "free speech". They care about not being silenced for their particular positions. Elon's Twitter will reflect this and Elon is very much a conservative (in the US sense).
It's why you only ever hear about "free speech" when it comes to hate speech and never, say, to Palestinians getting silenced on Twitter [1].
> Twitter's video serving is embarrassingly woefully bad
I've never understood why they just refuse to let you click a button to view the higher res version of a video. Instead, it's a game of refreshing and clicking play several times until whatever automation they have realizes that you do, in fact, have enough bandwidth and decoding power to handle a 640p video.
At least youtube-dl bypasses Twitter's shenanigans, but it just seems like such a hostile feature to begin with.
I think the ship has sailed on the API. It was a different time, and the people that used Twitter's API to do fun things didn't just give up...they migrated to mastodon and discord. I don't think the golden years of twitter are coming back.
Discord is a very different product but the demographics of users are very much those that have migrated from hackers on twitter to being in discord groups as of today.
Twitter should remove Communities, Lists, Professional Profiles, Long Notes (their new take on blogging smh) and Spaces (you know that audio thing)?. These are failed experiments no?
Twitter should improve Bookmarks. I bookmark a lot of Tweets since it was introduced to the public and scrolling down for hundreds of tweets is not fun.
With regards to the API, they shut it down because there were people building apps with the stated intention of taking users from twitter and building their own platform.
I’m on my phone and don’t have a source handy, but it was a serious enough concern to force Twitter to do what they did to the API!
In addition to opening the API, it would be cool if twitter became interoperable with ActivityPub. It would be one of the biggest instances and still attract a lot of people. It would be cool but I don't think it will ever happen, sadly.
Yes like GNIP around that time these firehose startups were amazing and it was a golden age of metadata and then Twitter Killed the Golden Goose. Bring back open data! Let Open Source and all the hackers from second order efforts give back value to Twitter's Value.
Sounds like you think he will move in exactly the same direction as all the other social media platforms. He has to make the platform unique in a way that will be difficult for competitors to simply imitate. Or preferably in a direction where there are no competitors at all.
In the spirit of trying to be high-information and add value:
Where Musk is going, there are no maps. So it's very very hard to project. But we can predict likely developments.
At a very high level, it's going to involve: bringing back controversial personalities like Donald Trump; increasing Twitter's commitment to 'free speech'; assuaging skittish advertisers; retaining users who might be concerned, while bringing in new ones; managing the exodus of users (size:?) that will happen regardless; cutting a large amount of staff, while keeping Twitter's lights on; open sourcing the code, discussing the impending rearchitecture; and - long term - folding this into Elon's vision of America's WeChat, and ultimately expanding Twitter, under X.com.
That's a lot. But at a high level, I think that's correct.
I would expect Elon to take the fight to the media. Whether he's going to focus on neutrally spreading a message, going more on the attack on media outlets that would support him, or doing something in between, is unknown.
Musk has an unusually large amount of media power: that's his unique value add, in a way. I would expect this to be a 'bigger deal' as a story, as multiple stories, than I would for any other company undergoing a takeover. We'll be hearing a lot more about Twitter in the weeks to come, since the developments will keep piling up, and the press/public loves to read & discuss stories about Twitter & Musk.
I feel we have a generic tendency of looking at downward trends and assuming that shocking radical change can’t make it worse. As history tells, it sure can.
The old Twitter was a lost cow looking for pasture and moving very little in fear of getting more lost. For better and worse it had stability. We can assume that stability is now gone through the window.
It wasn't strictly cash, it was an agreement to buy $150 million of stock as part of a Judge-approved settlement of a lawsuit which Apple was winning. The settlement was a win-win for both sides, because it meant Apple remained a healthy company and Microsoft got to avoid paying out BILLIONS to Apple. Instead they bought stock which they sold for a tidy profit ($550 million) a few years later.
(Fun fact: if Microsoft hadn't sold this $150 million investment in Apple stock, it would be worth $120 BILLION today and this shareholding would be Microsoft's single most profitable business unit.)
One of the important parts of that deal was Microsoft promising to develop Office for the Mac. There were definitely competing products out there, but the Mac needed Office.
It's really impractical to second guess history, but I don't think Office was quite as necessary as people say. Its absence definitely would have hurt sales on the margins, but it certainly didn't affect the majority of Apple's customers. The reasons why people owned computers was exploding in the late 90s, with the advent of the internet and the home digital media revolution.
What you don’t know is how much worse MS itself would have been without the 550M for whatever they used it for. Unlikely 120B worse off but it would be something.
That might be true on the margins, but it's impossible to know. Maybe they would have not pursued the original Xbox and lost out on that enormous market. Or maybe they would not have pursued Windows Mobile/Windows Phone and saved a few billion dollars on a dead end...
Isn't that kind of the story of Twitter thus far already? Certainly on the financial front they never seemed to have much of a plan, and on the product side things always seemed like a bit of a mess to me as well.
Some fresh leadership might not be a bad thing for Twitter. Whether Musk is the right person for that...
What these comparative analyses keep missing is that Musk Twitter is an LBO company with billions in loans on its books. It's private, which takes public shareholder pressure off, but it's also directly losing billions of dollars in debt service. The pressure to generate some kind of stable income, soon, is probably immense.
It's worth keeping in mind that despite the brave face, Musk didn't want to buy Twitter. In fact: he desperately didn't want to buy Twitter. He's been forced to do so by the Delaware courts.
That would be more plausible if he hadn't savaged the company for months, degrading its value, prior to being forced to consummate. It's below the threshold for plausibility now.
It's probably more or less the case that for the next several years, it will be difficult for Musk to do any big-ticket M&A, despite having some of the biggest pockets in the business, without agreeing to exceptionally seller-friendly terms. All because of how he handled an acquisition of a flailing media company that it is very unclear that he wanted in the first place.
I don't think that's quite right, or rather you're presenting it incorrectly. When musk proposed the twitter deal he was already in the state where any acquisition that he proposed would necessarily be under exceptionally seller-friendly terms, that's why the twitter deal was such. If he already had had to present such terms at that time, what more terms could his proposals possibly provide now after this bullshit?
He had to buy Twitter under exceptionally seller-friendly terms, because Twitter didn't want to change hands or be taken over by Musk; that's the month of drama leading up to the M&A debacle.
What I'm saying is that he'll be getting exceptionally seller-friendly terms from everybody, for years to come, because in the course of this supposed "negotiation" he repeatedly breached the terms of the acquisition agreement, publicly slagged the target over and over again, reneged on the deal, and brought a horseshit case to the Delaware Chancery Court to try to avoid performance when the target held him to the deal he agreed to. Every other company is going to notice that (it's one of the most noticeable things to happen in business in 50 years!), and nobody is going to trust him.
I don't believe he did all of that as a negotiating ploy. If he wanted to get the price down, all he had to do was wait before agreeing to an ironclad, overpriced deal. In fact: "waiting" is what he ended up trying to make happen anyways!
No, he signed a contract to buy something with no contingencies at what everyone quickly came to realize was 2x to 3x what it was worth.
Twitter’s management, acting in the best interest of their shareholders, used the court to force him to hold to the contract when he tried to walk. Musk decided to buy the company for the agreed on price rather than have that imposed on him by court order after (more) embarrassing discovery.
Seeing Musk as a business genius in this deal requires ignoring nearly every event in the saga.
There was a provision that Musk would be on the hook for $1B if a third party (e.g. regulators) blew up the deal in a couple enumerated ways. No such option was available to Musk himself.
It wasn’t an “opt out”, the termination fee was only available under several specific circumstances, neither of which applied to the facts at hand. He was never permitted to walk for $1 billion.
You are reading the terms of the deal incorrectly. He had the option to pay 1b only under the specific case that his financing fell through. That never happened, quite the opposite the banks backing this deal have been adamant that they were ready to go but Musk was dragging his feet.
Meanwhile, Musk was getting absolutely savaged in the Delaware chancery court and they were just in discovery. He was going to lose and that would be more embarrassing (somehow) than this outcome.
All because he went off half cocked and didn’t write bog standard contingencies into his offer.
He’s come off looking like an absolute simpleton in this and that’s the better outcome for him than if the court case had proceeded.
You do that BEFORE legally committing to a purchase price, not after.
He thought he could get away with an "epic troll" for his acolytes to croon over, like the stock price manipulation Tweets. Turns out the Delaware courts have teeth.
I agree. We know they were meeting to discuss a lower price throughout the process, but no agreement was reached. Not surprising if Twitter felt they were very likely to win, why accept less? But they did discuss it.
It's more accurate to say Musk didn't want to buy Twitter for $44 billion. His timing on his bid really sucked. He might have saved half or more if he'd waited a few months.
What baffles me is that he would have just followed the tried and tested procedures of acquiring a company he would have paid less and would have had a chance to reconsider if he reaely wanted to during due diligence.
Instead he made a take-it-or-leave-it offer with a ludicrously tight schedule and locked himself into an unfavorable deal without any obvious reason.
I am certain there is a bad decision in there sometimes and I'm wondering what it it might be.
A small part of me thinks that maybe he was uncertain and scared that he would back out so he took that option off the table preemptively.
That wasn't a general purpose "whoops, takesie backsies" clause, it was contingent on financing falling through for an otherwise best-effort deal.
Those sort of breakup fees are to give the company some compensation for non-bad-faith purchasers having external problems, because a failed acquisition is still an expensive thing for a company to have gone through in those situations. A cold-feet buyer throwing shit at the company in public even though he has the means to close the deal? Different story.
> It's worth keeping in mind that despite the brave face, Musk didn't want to buy Twitter. In fact: he desperately didn't want to buy Twitter. He's been forced to do so by the Delaware courts.
I haven't had a lot of good things to say about Musk as of late but I think this might be an exception, this kind of fortitude is something we should all strive to have. When cornered, he at least didn't complain or cry too much, he actually bit the bullet and has a very convincingly brave face on indeed.
I honestly can't think of a worse example of fortitude than Elon Musk's handling of the Twitter deal, which he entered capriciously, repeatedly violated terms he agreed to, ultimately reneged on the deal, and had to be forced by a court to uphold.
I think that’s potentially charitable - arguably he pumped out some pro Russia tweets to try and get the deal flagged as against national interest to blow up his financing. He wanted pretty badly for this not to happen including trying a couple of 3D chess moves
Looking at all musk has achieved so far - despite (or because of?) boards of experts adamant it couldn’t be done - I think it’s immensely clear a plan is something he clearly has and works very hard towards.
Obviously many people will disagree with his plan, though I’m 100% certain he has one, and will make it happen.
> Looking at all musk has achieved so far - despite (or because of?) boards of experts adamant it couldn’t be done
This is where I think his detractors overlook the real benefits he brings. He is fearless and will willingly take long shot bets down roads where others don’t dare tread. His willingness to take the big risk has resulted in some transformative leaps. He’s either very lucky and not very good, or very good and not very lucky, but more likely has a lot of both going for him.
I'm 100% certain he is quite literally the biggest internet troll of all time. His words have caused volatility in crypto and stonk markets, and all as jokes to himself. He demanded his California workers continue working in large in-person groups despite a deadly virus pandemic without a vaccine at the time. His plan was to dangle a carrot in front of Twitter that he'd buy, then pull the rug out. He once again violated really commonsense ETF/FCC/whatever laws and once again got bit. He's a genius in many ways, and a playground bully in others.
Which ways is he a genius? I don't know much about him but as far as I can tell he's just an engineer who had a very rich father. Did he invent something that I'm not aware of? Genuinely asking, I would not be surprised to learn that I've missed something.
Lots of people have rich fathers. Almost none of them found multiple multi-billion dollar companies and become the wealthiest person in the world. Do you think there's not anything different?
If "having a rich father" is the only thing that matters, why isn't everyone with a rich father a billionaire?
It’s not the only thing which matters but it’s important to remember because these guys get so much public praise for being visionary geniuses while there are a ton of people who are just as smart and hard working but didn’t have the resources and luck to hit a high-return jackpot. For example, Bill Gates has been the subject of so many business books which love to describe him as a genius but while he’s far from stupid he wasn’t noteworthy compared to his peers: MS BASIC & DOS worked but they weren’t better than the alternatives – but those competitors didn’t have parents on IBM’s board, either. Prior to the Meta debacle, Zuckerberg got tons of laudatory press which tended not to focus on how much his early success was due to leveraging the Harvard network, or the almost forgotten classmate who went around the country getting sororities (and thus fraternities) to use it, great boosting its reputation as a place to be.
That matters personally because you want to set realistic expectations: if you can’t afford to write off a couple of year’s work, launching a startup probably isn’t the best call for you compared to a more staid job which means you don’t need to worry about rent money or health insurance.
It also matters societally because these guys really want to influence our laws, educational system, tax code, etc. and that context is critical. If a billionaire says we should cut taxes on startups to help people climb the ladder, the first question should be how much of the money will go to rich kids from Ivy League schools versus the ones featured in the ad. Similarly, if they’re pushing kids to drop out of college for startups or turning public schools into coding camp, we should be asking how that’ll work out for everyone: the prospects for a kid with affluent high-status parents and a robust social network are quite different from kids who are poor, brown, in the wrong part of the country, etc. and such a policy might be especially dubious if it meant that they have lower negotiating power to get better jobs at the companies run by people making such suggestions.
I've only heard that in the “brilliant kid, what a waste” quote describing his reaction to learning that Gates had left academia to start a company, which is a little less dramatic sounding from a then relatively early career professor but, again, the point is not that Gates was stupid but rather than his intelligence was only part of the story.
If you look at software of that era, he wasn't doing something nobody else could do. They had a BASIC interpreter, but it wasn't the first or notably better. MS-DOS certainly worked, but it was at least heavily inspired by CP/M even if the plagiarism accusations were wrong. Being a capable programmer was necessary to his success but it was far from the reason: there were many others around, and they did well but the legendary wealth came to the person whose mother was on IBM's board when he made that company-defining sale. He subsequently executed well but again not uniquely so — anyone who used Microsoft software of that era could tell you that it wasn't the quality of that software which kept people using it. He executed well, and certainly wasn’t shy about an … aggressive … legal strategy but there was also a substantial portion of nepotism and luck.
The world has many people who were smart and hardworking but will never be close to that level of success because they didn’t have the family connections, startups capitol, friends they made at the right school, or the freedom to make a big gamble.
I think you're looking at this as though it were a merit-based system, and it's unfair that Gates did so well when his merit alone deserves a much less level of success.
If so, what you're missing is that Gates knew how to play "the game." He knew how to close sales, how to navigate the muddy waters of business, and how to leverage success into more success.
I think success takes a lot of hard work and little luck. Great success takes a little more hard work and a lot more luck.
I think Bill Gates, Elon Musk are all examples of great success. It doesn't mean they are vastly different from the similar hard working people in their fields. It just means that they did a "little" more combined with lots of other factors that put them where they are.
I guess the point is that the working 16 hours a day for years on something that might return billions but might also return nothing, is a lot more rational if you have a safety net that means you'll still have somewhere to live if it doesn't work out.
> Almost none of them found multiple multi-billion dollar companies and become the wealthiest person in the world. Do you think there's not anything different?
Lots of stuff is different. I know lots of people with very very wealthy parents. They don't want to run businesses... so they don't. The number of people who have the will and means is probably quite a lot smaller than the people who have the means.
Anyway you've just dodged the question by implying "surely there must be something" but I'm asking what it is. To clarify further, I would consider the marks of a genius to be someone who is either a prodigy (ie: exhibits mastery of a subject at a very early age or with little experience) or who has made significant and particularly novel contributions to a field or multiple fields.
> exhibits mastery of a subject at a very early age or with little experience
He wrote and sold a computer game at 12 years old after teaching himself to program at 10.
> significant and particularly novel contributions to a field or multiple fields.
Made eletric cars a viable economic prospect, pioneered reusable rockets. Obviously not making every single technical contribution himself, but leading the process.
I don't know, I guess if you're just predisoposed to follow journalists who want to push him as nothing as a cringy nerd, you might not consider that significant, but clearly the market does.
> I don't know, I guess if you're just predisoposed to follow journalists who want to push him as nothing as a cringy nerd, you might not consider that significant, but clearly the market does.
I literally said I don't follow anything about him and was genuinely asking why people call him a genius. He's obviously a cringy nerd but that's not what I'm looking for.
Anyway I guess the game thing seems somewhat impressive, I'm not sure I'd qualify it as "genius" but that's something.
I mean, if you were actually curious you could have spent 5 minutes reading Wikipedia or any number of other sources for what people attribute to him. It's not like the information is hard to find. Like, the guy builds one company that literally becomes the most valuable in the world, and another company that builds rockets that a lot of people said were literally impossible and you just write that off as "oh he didn't do anything special, he just had a rich dad". I mean come on, it's hard to believe you're arguing in good faith.
I didn't expect a "why he's considered a genius" on the wikipedia page but I can check that out. I expected a pretty simple answer. I asked this about Kanye the other day and got a great response explaining how his music was novel.
Business accomplishments are impressive but I don't think they make someone a genius.
Why would business accomplishments not make someone a genius? Business requires creativity and intelligence just as much as any other field of human endeavor.
Tesla (the company) didn't invent electric cars, but they were the first to make electric cars that people actually wanted to buy.
They were expensive, small, underpowered, and had poor range. Musk took a weakness (expensive) and turned it into a strength (luxury status symbol) by just embracing that making a high-performance electric car was going to be really expensive and marketing it as a toy for rich people to show off how rich they are. Then, he used the profits from that to scale production and bring down the price for future models.
I don't know if he invented this business strategy, but it's a least a pretty brilliant application of it, along with the admirable goal of reducing fossil fuel emissions by putting more electric cars on the road. He also open-sourced all patents developed by Tesla, so other manufacturers could benefit from whatever they discovered along the way.
"Elon is brilliant. He’s involved in just about everything. He understands everything. If he asks you a question, you learn very quickly not to go give him a gut reaction.
He wants answers that get down to the fundamental laws of physics. One thing he understands really well is the physics of the rockets. He understands that like nobody else. The stuff I have seen him do in his head is crazy.
He can get in discussions about flying a satellite and whether we can make the right orbit and deliver Dragon at the same time and solve all these equations in real time. It’s amazing to watch the amount of knowledge he has accumulated over the years."
Kevin Watson - chief of avionics at Launcher
Elon is definitely an engineer. He is deeply involved with technical decisions at spacex and Tesla. He doesn’t write code or do CAD today, but he is perfectly capable of doing so.
John Carmack
When I met Elon it was apparent to me that although he had a scientific mind and he understood scientific principles, he did not know anything about rockets. Nothing. That was in 2001. By 2007 he knew everything about rockets - he really knew everything, in detail. You have to put some serious study in to know as much about rockets as he knows now. This doesn't come just from hanging out with people.
Check out Ashley Vance’s biography of Musk. One anecdote that sticks out in my memory is he was both scientifically knowledgeable enough and knee-deep enough in what SpaceX was doing to realize that they didn’t need to buy a certain hundred dollar (or something) existing part to use it for their rockets because they could make their own that did the specific thing they needed it to do for a few cents.
The "he had very rich parents" is often used to reduce one's achievements. A quick google search shows there are over 60 million "millionaires" in the world, yet less than 1% know how to turn it into a billion.
There is some pretty good evidence that wealth accumulation accelerates. In particular if you go above a certain threshold things will only go up (and go up faster). If that is the case and if we add some noise to the system. Some percentage of people will always become billionaires just by luck alone (and importantly never loose that status). I'm not saying that Musk got there by just luck, but the existence of a billionaire does not proof he is a genius.
I think the Tesla's are cool, SpaceX is immpressive, I enjoy his online trolling but I don't think he is a genius. The rocket scientist he employs at SpaceX is a genius. I got caught up on the way you phrased your response-- I felt that it was written in bad faith with "he's just an engineer who had a very rich father, Did he invent something that I'm not aware of? ". However seing as you were responding to someone who elevated him to Genius I can see why.
So the assumption to be a genius is that you must start from zero? I completely reject that assumption. It’s false for so many true geniuses, like von Neumann. His dad was well connected, the same is true for John Stuart Mill and a bunch of others I can’t think of now.
This idea that every genius must be formed in a vacuum and can only be considered a “true” one if they can bootstrap themselves from nothing is an absurd idea peddled by underachievers who somehow find solace in their own mediocrity by nullifying the accomplishments of others who don’t fulfil their arbitrary starting conditions.
One doesn't need to be able to point to a specific thing which they invented while alone in their garage with no help from anyone else in order to be a remarkable person. Elon is intimately involved in the minutae of SpaceX engineering and damn, if landing orbital rockets on a floating barge isn't impressive enough for you, I don't know what is.
That's certainly possible. But which of the following would you think is most likely to succeed?
(a) a company trying to build electric cars at a time when there was zero consumer demand for them and the battery technology was nowhere near good enough
(b) a company trying to launch things into space when the vast majority of nations in the world were unable to do so and even NASA seemed like it had lost its way
(c) a popular social media app with 400M users and maybe some issues with product direction
You gotta look both at odds and also at returns...
You bet on (a) and (b) because nobody else has pulled it off so if you can do it, you can win big, and you aren't just one of many players in a crowded sea.
(c) is a rough bet since you're already huge but you still have a lot of competition and it's a crowded market and you haven't always made as much money per user as people would like...
Musk has media attention, but I'm not sure it's much of an advantage at this point.
I tried getting a solar system from Tesla, and it convinced me not to consider their cars. I know it is a different side of the company, but I ended up with a used electric BMW. I was resigned to dealing with the B-hole stigma around having a beamer, but whatever. It's a nice car, environmentally friendly, and was inexpensive.
That's not what happened. Instead, Tesla owners say things like "I got the Tesla before Musk went nutso roll eyes, and it's actually pretty good, but I'm not sure I'd buy another one..."
I'm surprised how quickly the Teslas went from being a status symbol to a faux pas around here. Maybe it's a different story in less liberal areas.
However, unless I'm missing something, social signaling / image management is way more important to the Twitteratti than people buying commuter cars / kid taxis.
(Again, whatever. It's a car, not a political statement, but I've seen more than one Tesla owner apologize for owning one.)
Absolutely. How many times have you heard this statement?
"Our next car will be electric... But not a Tesla."
I hear that all the time now. My wife, who recently turned 30, would be mortified for her friends to see her in a Tesla. They associate the brand with a creepy, slimy billionaire and a legion of tech bro sycophants.
The difficulty is that some of these objectives conflict with each other. Backing off on moderation is likely to drive advertisers away; bringing back banned people could in some cases cause legal problems in countries where publishing, say, pro-Nazi speech is against the law. Making major changes will require more people, but stopping the financial bleeding will require fewer people.
Twitter already has implementations for the Nazi stuff; e.g. images with Nazi flags are allowed in general but if you try to view them from an account with location set to Germany, it will give you a "this content is blocked in your country" error message.
I'd definitely be worried about driving advertisers away though. They forced YouTube's hand at least to some degree with the whole adpocalypse thing.
The whole "advertisers don't want their ads appearing next to xyz" has always felt contrived to me, like, I can use Gmail to receive all sorts of wrongthink and I'll still see ads on it, similarly Twitter should be a neutral tool not a magazine. It's up to the users what they see.
You'd need a lot of market share and confidence as Musk to actually say "this is silly" but it is silly nonetheless. The big players started down the road of "ok we'll ban the worst stuff" and once they blinked it's been "but what about" all the way down.
> The whole "advertisers don't want their ads appearing next to xyz" has always felt contrived to me, like, I can use Gmail to receive all sorts of wrongthink and I'll still see ads on it
Good point, but...
The advertiser mostly cares when "everyone" knows they advertise for Nazis. If it's just you who knows, no biggie. They don't want it to be common knowledge.
Can’t they just give the advertiser the ability to control what kind of content they want their ads to appear alongside? Actually, don’t they do that already?
> The advertiser mostly cares when “everyone” knows they advertise for Nazis.
There are likely some advertisers who would have no qualms about targeting Nazis for advertisements, and little or no qualms about anyone knowing that they do either: criminal lawyers, divorce lawyers, mental health treatment services, drug and alcohol treatment services, certain kinds of charities (such as extremism prevention or anti-racism), etc.
It’s not just what content they’re next to, brands don’t want to be associated with certain types of content in any way. Because to a lot of consumers a brand is a part of their identity, and most people don’t identify with Nazis.
YouTube/Reddit/Facebook/etc are full of all kinds of crazy unhinged content - they may ban Nazis, but there’s many other species of crazy they don’t ban. But “A allows people (who go looking for it) to find crazy unhinged content of kind B” and “Company C advertises on A” are just completely unrelated facts in my head - and I think that’s true for most people.
Eh, no it's about the publics interpretation of appearance. Your Gmail filters out a metric shitton of spam. If they stopped doing that and all you got was thousands of penis enlargement emails per day the number of advertisers would drop significantly because the tools utility would drop significantly.
The reason 'xyz' gets banned where xyz is negatively viewed is because it tends to end up everywhere and reduce the utility of the platform.
The whole "advertisers don't want their ads appearing next to xyz" has always felt contrived to me,
lol
General Motors just suspended all advertising on Twitter. I've no idea how much their Twitter ad spend compares to that of other companies but certainly GM is not a small company. While I'd love to see it come out that GM doesn't want to be associated with high profile antisemites and conspiracy theorists like Ye, I'd bet it's much more straightforward: GM doesn't want its ad dollars to fund or otherwise be associated with a direct competitor (Tesla).
The problem with a Musk owned Twitter is that there is such a vast range of conflicts of interest. With Musk at the helm it's just that much harder for a company facing social/political pressure to justify doing business with Twitter.
>While I'd love to see it come out that GM doesn't want to be associated with high profile antisemites and conspiracy theorists like Ye
Any company trying to claim this now should justify why they had no problem advertising on Twitter while Iran and Al Qaeda had official Twitter accounts
It is silly, except to the disingenuous opportunists of all political stripes and persuasions who hold companies (they likely rarely patronized) hostage.
It's reasonable to moderate content beyond the pale. But that's on the platforms.
Running to advertisers feels like defiantly going to the other parent when you don't receive the answer you want.
I've never drawn the conclusion Bark Box or Toyota stand firmly beyond some crackpot on YT because their ad played before some content.
> Twitter already has implementations for the Nazi stuff
Those implementations will be defeated by motivated adversaries and they will not have the expertise remaining to rebuild it. There will be many lessons learned again at great cost.
By implementations I mean the general infrastructure for enforcing country-specific laws locally, but not as a general rule of Twitter.
Non-motivated non-adversaries already defeat these systems by accident, which I assume are mostly based on user-reports. But apparently Germany's regulators are satisfied enough with Twitter's implementation, since I haven't heard about any issues with it.
One of his challenges will be to pay $1.2B in interest payments every year while also making good on the principal. That's quite a bit of debt for a struggling financial situation. Cutting HC will help in the short term; it is unclear if those cuts will be well executed. HN opinion that twitter could run with 200 engineers is woefully naive for a massive company that is under FTC consent order - they probably have >200 privacy engineers (and associated legal staff) just to comply with regulations.
The consent decree requires that the company be 5x as large as it otherwise would. It really, really, really slows down development. For every engineer, there is also a corresponding engineer whose job is to slow them down.
IT IS ORDERED that respondent... establish and implement, and thereafter maintain, a comprehensive information security program that is reasonably designed to protect the security, privacy, confidentiality, and integrity of nonpublic consumer information.
Computer security 101 says that there should be one set of checks for the information (parsimony of mechanism), all access go through that mechanism (complete intermediation), and as few people/things have access to the data as possible (least privilege).
Making sure all private data goes in the vault and the vault is secure shouldn't take more than 1% of an organization the size of Twitter. Even if they're doing it poorly, it shouldn't be more than 10%.
If it really is 5x (> 80% of their engineering budget), I guarantee you they are in violation of the consent decree -- there is no way to vet that many engineers or audit their work!
5x may be hyperbole, but every change you make has to go through a privacy review. Sometimes even proposing to make a change can be met with great friction.
Any security architecture that requires every single engineer has to do everything exactly right 100% of the time is bound to fail. The order to put in reasonable privacy protections doesn't say "and do it in the most expensive, error prone fashion possible".
It’s actually pretty standard operating mode for many big tech adjacent, regulated industries. They don’t necessarily expect you to be 100% perfect, but they do expect you to build in such a way that their privacy tools can inspect things and you get urgent tasks filed if something doesn’t meet spec.
What they want is additional work, and technical implementation that the agreements are being enforced in code. It’s a fascinating area for a career, but the tools are not well developed and engineers not trained to code this way. Ends up being like a 40% tax on a lot of peoples work, plus the people who write and operate the verification systems.
It’s probably what the security field should have done years ago, but there were never as expensive of fines as for privacy violations.
The bankers aren’t naive, they modeled this out. Sure it could go bad and I wonder if Elon PG’ed (personal guarantee) the debt, but you don’t underwrite your a default out of the gate. It’s one of the worst faux pas of debt capital markets.
He's really not. The banks are only involved so that he doesn't have to sell as much of his Tesla shares. And that's to say nothing of his private ownership of SpaceX, probably also worth a decent chunk.
The covenants on a low leverage transaction are likely highly limited: a)make interest payments, b) make principal payments, c) don’t make illegal dividends, d) don’t cross certain covenants such as EV/EBITDA, fixed charge coverage ratio, or similar, and e) get an audit every year and submit financials to the banks every 90 days.
Not exactly onerous since they were a public company before.
I've been in companies where 1/5th of engineer was laid off. The state of company infra and the product dropped significantly and it took a long time to approach recovery, where they hired the same amount of staff back.
I can't imagine how dysfunctional twitter would be with %75 of staff gone, I don't even know if it will continue running as a business after that.
Will Musk actually cut 75%? Musk tends to do a lot of “thinking out loud” - so even if he really spoke that number, he won’t hold himself to it.
Whatever the actual figure is, it is unlikely to be the same figure across all departments - likely some departments will be cut much more than others. Probably engineering will experience significantly less cuts than marketing, PR, HR, government relations, business development, etc. Even in engineering, some cuts may be due to things like adjusting the manager:IC ratio.
Threatening to fire 75% of the staff might have been a last ditch attempt to turn public, shareholder, board and/or Parag’s opinion against the deal.
It didn’t work, and I doubt he’ll follow through on it. Otherwise, it’s sure to freeze almost all future initiatives and turn the team into caretakers instead of innovators and I’m not sure what the point of that would be.
It cannot have been a threat to staff because it was never uttered by Elon to the staff. It cannot have been a way to influence public/shareholder sentiment because it was never said in public.
If he ever did say it, it was allegedly said to other investors in a private setting. More than likely it's a fabrication by someone who hates Elon (as unlikely as that sounds) laundered into the media as from an anonymous source.
Another slant, considering the (is this true btw) the rumor he asked engineers to print the last 30 days of code they submitted: he’s signaling “hey if you’re lazy, I’m going to fire you, so go ahead and leave on your own”. Which might just work.
Innovations? Initiatives? Like edit button and lengthening strings over 160 characters?
Just look at their Web UI, horribly slow and lagy.
Twitter is horribly bloated and unprofitable company. Several thousands people could be justified if there are sales and profits. 75% is not enough, current people must go, regardless of politics.
There is a lot of cruft without touching the engineering department. And there are always those two guys in every team that when they call sick - productivity of the team increases.
Even if that were true the problem with the approach he has taken is that by leaking that you are going to perform swinging cuts, everyone who can get another job immediately starts looking so by the time you actually get around to doing the layoff the team has self-selected and you only have “those two guys” left.
I doubt it because the whole vibe of Musk so far is that the axe will fall on the culture warriors and activists. I think the productive and less political engineers know they are safe.
And the zeitgeist seems to have changed lately - so jobs may not be so easier to come by, especially for employees that may be too political for the employer.
> managing the exodus of users (size:?) that will happen regardless;
This is probably the biggest risk in this acquisition. Twitter wasn't doing anything special, and it's easy to launch a clone of their business model. Elon's talking about taking an axe to the things that keep the lights on at Twitter: effective content moderation and talent.
> Elon's talking about taking an axe to the things that keep the lights on at Twitter: effective content moderation and talent.
I don't think it's clear this is the case. It's just the network effect that keeps it in such a dominant position. Plenty of Twitter clones have been created, yet neither conservatives have migrated to Truth/Parler/Gab/whatever, nor have or will liberals/the anti-Musk contingent to Mastodon, or whatever the left-leaning equivalent Twitter clone coming in the next few weeks is.
Honestly, Twitter's biggest draw to most users is probably the lack of content moderation on something that gets buried beneath the politics and culture discussions: porno, porno, porno. Twitter is one of the few social media sites where porn is still allowed, for the most part. It's always funny to see a "viral" politics/culture war tweet that has "blown up" with 50k, 100k likes; any given lewd picture of Ganyu from Genshin Impact by a popular artist is going to run double those numbers.
> It's just the network effect that keeps it in such a dominant position.
Exactly. Just ask Friendster or MySpace or any of the other failed social networks how deep and wide the network effect moat is in the long run. I'd argue that for all the hype, Twitter was already in the 'long goodbye' phase before Musk bet the farm on it.
> Twitter is one of the few social media sites where porn is still allowed, for the most part.
And they're completely at the mercy of Google and Apple's policies here. Both of those app stores could put their feet down next week and this 'feature' of Twitter's suddenly becomes a liability.
> taking an axe to the things that keep the lights on at Twitter: effective content moderation and talent.
I have experienced the 'effectiveness' of Twitters moderation team on multiple occasions where they were very ineffective at upholding the very clear cut rules surrounding things like doxxing on their website. I had my personal information made public, and they ignored me. Multiple times. I even created a new account with no way for there to be any publicly available personal info; and yet I was still doxxed somehow, and they still ignored me.
So, in the spirit of HN's rules, I just want to say this, since end user experience should be allowable to share (I hope.).
Effective moderation at twitter is a myth as far as I see it, and their only talent is making it look like they have effective moderation when they care.
P.S. I also was doing nothing wrong in any case where this happened. It was all conversations which should have been considered civil (mostly) and one situation where it had nothing to do with politics or philosophy at all. Yet they did nothing.
I agree that Twitter's content moderation is mostly a vibe, and not really effective. Musk purchasing Twitter is already killing that feeling that content moderation works at Twitter, and I wouldn't be surprised if advertisers put a freeze on their plans the day the purchase went through (hence Musk's panicked-sounding tweet to advertisers).
Honestly, if what they though Twitter was before was fine to advertise on, despite the lack of actual coherent moderation; then we are all blessed by the lack of those advertisers.
And if that makes Elon panic, then we are blessed doubly in that way as well, because he might either actually do something useful to make it a nicer place to be; or he might burn it to the ground.
Not really, since the other poster was saying Elon would be axing things like moderation. I'm saying essentially it doesn't matter if he does or doesn't, because it barely exists at all anyways.
So axe away I guess, cause there is no wood to chop. The tree is hollow, from all the woodpeckers eating the grubs.
It was an eye opener to see official Taliban accounts.
As abhorrent as I may find their ideas, if they play the rules, I'd actually prefer to allow them on the platform.
The eye opener was seeing others cheer on the silencing of academics, politicians,and physicians who's ideas may be out of step with the zeitgeist (or the mob's interpretation of what's apprpos).
To a lesser extent, same thing with ISIS. When LiveLeak was gone, and their propaganda videos were pretty much scrubbed from the web, we lost a lot of actual history, as abhorrent as it all was. It's going to be easy for people to forget how bad all of that was, and more importantly for me- most of the countless videos of them using American supplied TOWS against Assad while also filming the mass genocide...all that is gone, and it's much harder to prove the connection was ever there.
Same thing with Libya and Gaddafi, gruesome stuff was done by western backed rebels, including a revival of the black African slave trade and just killing black immigrants in Libya, and all of that is nigh impossible to prove now.
Exactly. Regardless of how horrible war videos are, they are still directly true history, and their loss is seriously concerning. I knew people who, despite knowing very little of the war, were cheering on FSA attacks against civilians, because of "Assad support".
When a video of them throwing a teenage boy into the back of a pickup truck and sawing his head off started making the rounds, their opinion changed completely. Even if they were full of crackpots, these sites documented objectively just how terrible and extremely brutal these wars are.
Pretty sure that's 85% of the people who comment on this site. Only thinking about the purely technical side of things, never the issues and limitations that come from other people.
> Twitter wasn't doing anything special, and it's easy to launch a clone of their business model.
And yet nobody has done it? People think social media is easy to start and succeed. FYI, its like catching lightning.
Most people are focused on censorship/content issues, but I really think the X.com "mega app" vision is the most significant part of this. It'll be hard to gain a foothold in those markets, and there'll be antitrust challenges, but it really fits perfectly with the rest of Musk's vision:
X.com Maps could tie in with Teslas, X.com Carhailing could tie-in with (future) full self-driving; Twitter could be expanded to be more like Telegram + Instagram, with channels, better DMs, "Moments", and more.
There's no attempt to create a single, wide-ranging social media platform, with payments, video, shorts, DMs, and more. China's proven that it can be done. It would create a far bigger moat and network effects, and likely be as successful as Microsoft Teams & 365, a highly integrated solution, are for work.
Are you serious? Why would I ever use that app? I already don't use twitter and there are market leaders that would have much better service (given they aren't trying to do every single thing in the world) compared to X and also, most of those services pretty much stink, so I would never think that X, while trying to do everything in the world, would also be better.
Well, you wouldn't do it by choice. I guess Musk really wants to build the WeChat equivalent for America, where to get anything done you really have to go through his app. They don't need to be best - they just need to make it inconvenient to not use it. And yes, it's an awful vision of the world.
Because it would be incredibly convenient. Link a restaurent to your friends in a chat, talk about going there, all of them have the location and you can split the bill, all in the same app.
It might not have the best business index, or the best chat, or the best map, or the best payment manager, but it would be far, far superior to trying to coordinate all of those services through different apps.
And it's not that you need to want all of this, it's that if people around you use it you have enormous pressure to use it as well, because in the previous scenario if you are the guy who doesn't use such app then you have to be catered to specifically through and through, which is annoying for everyone.
>> There's no attempt to create a single, wide-ranging social media platform, with payments, video, shorts, DMs, and more
Umm.. Facebook? Just offering all those features doesn't mean much though, you really have to be dominant in each one, since there's much less moat to debundling consumer apps vs enterprise
Their platforms are siloed off. The point of a mega app is that it's not siloed off; the reels, videos, DMs and tweets would be part of the same experience, and rely on the same usernames, hence the moat.
I wonder how this jives with his stated plan to lay off a lot of people? If he wants to implement that he'll need a lot more engineers and related support staff.
I think this was mostly bluster, sure hell have to lay off a lot of people to change the company direction but his pitch to investors said the company would grow to like 12000 people.
Then he's in real trouble because he's taken on a whole lot more loans, and Twitter is not growing that quickly and liable to actually shrink now. The US market for it is saturated.
If expenditure (hiring) goes up and he's not finding revenue then that's the end sooner rather then later.
Yeah, he’s said a lot of conflicting things and put himself in a precarious position. I both wouldn’t be truly surprised if he grows twitter nor if he laid 75% of people off on Monday.
There's a cluster of things around transport and then... also Twitter? I get that in the end you want to do everything but what makes microblogging a more important day 1 feature than food delivery or gaming or online dating. It's like if Amazon did just book delivery and online photo storage.
the everything-app thing would be significant if realized, the thing about that is it has to compete not just against all the tech giants, but also against all the smaller companies who are already mostly succeeding in those verticals. having to install another app isn't really an impediment to acquiring users.
it's an interesting vision to be sure, but i'm not sure how buying twitter actually helps it - twitter has already been struggling to expand outside their core product - none of the experiments like moments, spaces, fleets, etc have really taken off. it kind of seems like twitter users just want tweets and nothing else. so now he's taken on a whole bunch of debt to acquire a userbase who is hostile to the app expanding into any other markets? I don't really see a whole lot of evidence that twitter is a good launch platform for an everything-app.
Saying it is some country’s WeChat is like a curse… as WeChat is notorious for its closed mindedness and probably hated by most of its users… and they won’t even have any other option because Tencent is actively striking down all potential competitors…
I think that means WeChat in the sense that in China WeChat isn't just an communications app, it's an app through which many/most people do a great deal of transactions -- shopping, p2p payments, paying utility bills, customer support, ride hailing, banking, etc., It encompasses what about 10 apps in the US do. You cannot understate how pervasive its use is in ways that have little to do with social media. That's what Elon wants to turn Twitter into.
Yeah wtf would anyone touting freedom of speech bring up China in any way? Tencent, owner of WeChat, said they'd block NBA Houston Rockets games because one of the Rockets' managers tweeted "Fight for Freedom. Stand with Hong Kong." [0]. Granted, I got kicked off of twitter for "misinformation" for saying "some day we'll all die".
It's two different things: WeChat has a bunch of integrated apps, that's part of what Musk's vision is. The free speech issue is separate from the similarities to WeChat.
How could free speech possibly remain separate at WeChat levels of consolidation?
You spout wrongthink in a twitter DM, and now your bank, credit card, email, private messages, facebook, rail pass, amazon, uber, government ID, school accounts, craigslist and tinder are permabanned.
It's difficult to make a judgement on "some day we'll all die" without context. It might've been part of an insightful discussion about the potential of immortality or it could have been directed at the parent of a school-shooting victim.
This. As someone living in China and having used wechat for years I've always found it ultra cringey when American businessmen/influencers are like "omg have you guys seen what Chinese are doing with wechat! They have this all in one app where..."
First of all this idea of a superapp is nothing new. In fact iOS or Android is also a "superapp". Basically a software that has an ecosystem inside of it. Wechat has just created their own ecosystem within a ecosystem, because they want to control everything.
Second, when compared to most other Chinese apps I do have to admit that wechat is much more finished, but when compared to other global messaging apps like Telegram, Slack etc. I'd say wechat is about 10-15 years behind in everything and lacking the most fundamental features.
The social media aspect of wechat which is called "Wechat Moments" is also extremely limited: Basically like Instagram without you being able to see or follow people you don't know personally. If your friend posts a photo and his friend (who you don't know) makes a comment on it, you cannot see this comment but you can see your friends replies to him/her. Yes, super confusing. Also no images, videos, gifs in the comments etc.
Third, a lot of people like to mention that "you can do everything with wechat". You can do a lot of things, but I don't know anyone who only uses wechat. There are a lot of other apps that you need to live comfortably: Alipay (this is another superapp), Taobao (like ebay), Jingdong (like amazon), Dianping (like Yelp), Eleme/Meituan (like Uber eats), Baidu maps, banking apps etc. etc.
Wechat does have it's internal "miniprogram" system (alternative to native apps) where you can have some of these apps I previously mentioned, but there are severe app size, memory and performance limitations, proprietary API and the performance and functionality is from early 2010s internet. Laggy and slowly opening pages, collapsing and bouncy layouts etc. Also wechat does not support multitasking: When you are using for example Tim Horton's miniprogram to order coffee, you can't chat with your friends, you can't open a Starbucks/some_other_coffee_company miniprogram on the side and compare prices. You have to close and kill the current "app" and then open a new "app" for new action.
This is somewhat understandable due to the iOS/Android limitations of a single app (in regards to performance and memory), but it highlights why this kind of a "superapp" idea is fundamentally flawed.
So basically IMO "superapp" is a solution looking for a problem. We already have iOS, Android or web browser. We don't need another forced ecosystem but we need good apps for existing ones.
> If your friend posts a photo and his friend (who you don't know) makes a comment on it, you cannot see this comment but you can see your friends replies to him/her.
Is that a technical shortcoming or business logic? It doesn't sound entirely different from how Twitter handles private/blocked accounts.
It sounds like Musk is going to tell advertisers to kick rocks and try to monetize the platform.
Where are people gonna go if not on Twitter? The left isn't gonna have better luck with their own truth social or parler. The network effect is too big with Twitter. It's not fun if you're not dunking on your enemies. That's the fun of Twitter.
I think you may be over-estimating how much most people "need" something like Twitter. For the vast majority of users, a news feed and private messaging (WhatsApp, iMessage, etc.) are good enough.
Based on what? Social media is addictive. For people to get off of it, they're going to need some help. We don't currently have facilities to help people kick the habit.
I appreciate your perspective. I used Twitter to follow industry news. But the people I cared about left and so did I. It’s so boring and pointless now. Absolutely no value to me anymore.
Facebook could allow for special profiles that are only comprised of statuses. That would be a Twitter clone in a nutshell that would already have high adoption.
That would require Facebook to make a shrewd business decision though so never mind.
It would also require people, who I am assuming lean left, to trust Zuck over Elon after the last 5 years of talking about how terrible Zuck and his platform are. I don't see that happening. Nobody wants grandma reading their tweets.
he bragged that he didn't care about making a profit in one of those public Q&A rountables this year. a lot of weird statements about a company that he seems to hate despite using it to pump his fortune
Maybe I've just been working for tech companies in the Bay Area too long. But I don't want to work for a company where I don't have equity that I can cash out.
And now all those engineers are working for a company where equity doesn't exist? An exception could be a Netflix model where you make a buttload of money. But Twitter isn't that.
SpaceX has no public equities and has no problem attracting talent.
You guys are really thinking Musk is some bozos that have never done anything in his life. Its quite incredible. Last week 4 astronauts went to ISS on his rocket and the first stage landed, again. Tesla is still growing at close to 40/50% top and bottomline when all car companies are contracting, even FAANG.
Twitter is yet to be seen. But its quite incredible the dismissiveness around here. Making Twitter work is peanuts comparing to trying to get a car company and a space company (both industries where successful examples are much harder to find than social media companies. Even if we point fingers as Meta and Snap, they are profitable and not bankrupt like most car and space companies in history) to survive through the 2008 Financial crisis.
> SpaceX has no public equities and has no problem attracting talent.
I'm no Musk hater and interested to see where he takes Twitter. That said, SpaceX is at the forefront of space travel, and they want to put man on Mars. Twitter sells advertisements on the internet, with the lofty goal of selling some more ads.
We know one thing: half of the $44B was loans that will cost Twitter around $1B per year, so it has to make some kind of profit. Otherwise who will pay?
If they made $1B profit before counting the loan, they would spend that profit on the loan. Effectively the same concept: they need to revenue to clear operating expenses PLUS a $1B loan payment.
In 2020 twitter had a net loss of $1.14B. The loans will kill twitter.
It might be interesting to know the subtlety if it is in the Twitter context. Is it better to look at cash, loc, and cashflow to determine if they can pay the loan repayments?
Essentially, yes. The GAAP income statement is a very poor proxy for cash flow generation ability. That captures 80% of it.
There’s also operating leverage. This business should trend to 50-80% gross margins and 30-50% profit / free cash flow conversion, similar to Facebook, Google, or other similar businesses.
Further, there’s a bunch of pre- and post- transaction adjustments that hit the financial statements (for example stock based compensation will likely go away in a private company, thus raising profitability), so you can’t just take last years profit and tack on the new debt structure.
Last, the amortization on high yield isn’t necessarily linear. In the most extreme example (where the debt costs >12%) you could have pay-in-kind (PIK) interest where the interest payments accrue to the balance of the loan (like a credit card) and for amortization, it could be anywhere from straight line (1/x periods) to a “bullet” with no amortization at all until a end period where it all comes due at once (you typically refinance in that case).
All-in, it may be risky, but the bankers that committed billions of capital to the deal aren’t exactly brain dead and all have internal credit approval processes which require them to do all the work outlined above and a bunch more.
> for example stock based compensation will likely go away in a private company, thus raising profitability
They're paying out vests on the sales price in cash, which was higher than the value of the company. Normally equity comp places the price fluctuation risk on the employee, but in this case, they're directly eating this cost.
If they don't offer salaries that are competitive with other companies total comp, they will bleed employees, and won't be able to hire talented engineers.
So, no, this really doesn't help, and if anything it increases their direct costs.
You didn't dispute my point that they still need another $1.2B/year. And even looking at their 10 past years (where 2020 was the highest income), it's still bleak.
I don't know why you dissed my response, then gave an answer that basically supports it.
Do you try to save tax every year by “maximising your losses”? Or aka claiming as many expenses ad possible. This reduces your income! But even if you took 100k off your income aka “profit” this way you could still afford your mortgage, right… infact it makes it more affordable as you paid less tax!
Sigh. Sure. There’s 7 banks or so in the lending group, each with 5 to 12 FTEs touching or reviewing this deal before funding.
But sure, you’re smarter than them all combined, they’re wrong and underwrote a faulty deal and you’re right, particularly when having no info on the post transaction capital structure.
How would Twitter be WeChat of America if WeChat is fundamentally for private messages and private transactions (unless it’s groups) but Twitter is for broadcasting yourself
Let's assume he makes Neuralink happen in the sense of really giving a locked-in person the ability to communicate in real words and sentences.
He now has the network to connect those people directly to the rest of the world, under his umbrella. Sure, he could have just used (old) Twitter's API, and that's what he'll be using, but it won't be "we (as in 'Neuralink') and Twitter made this happen", but "we (my companies)" made this happen.
I also wonder how useful Twitter's infrastructure could be for machine-to-machine communication, where he certainly could have some uses for it with Tesla and Starlink.
‘Ah yes. We can give your child with locked in syndrome a communications path with the rest of the world, but it can only be through the twitter API. Also his ventilator? Also needs twitter API. Yes, that’s right. His life support and all communication in and out relies on a flimsy message board. Connection outages? Well, it can’t happen. We’ve got starlink on the back of his wheelchair. Tunnels? Oh no, don’t go in tunnels’
I'm excited about the possibility of a more decentralized / open source WeChat coming out of this. Twitter has their BlueSky project for decentralized social media and is bringing on many pro-crypto people into management (e.g. https://twitter.com/sriramk). It would be a great story of USA freedom vs Chinese control that could be really good for the world and Twitter.
There was talk of him using crypto currency as a way of disincentivizing bots. Not sure how well thought out the ideas were, but there might well be some interesting integrations with crypto on the platform
Twitter’s already headed down the uncool social media curve like Facebook before it. There will be an exodus, but it would have happened either way.
Once the parents get on, it starts the decline. When the grandparents are there…
The “political” polarization is part of it. The older folks bring it with them. The majority flock to sites for information and escapism. The back and forth is just exhausting.
It’s clearer for geek sites. Slashdot died when it got corporate and the content went to crap. Digg was the same. Reddit’s in process except niches. It’ll be same here.
> Twitter’s already headed down the uncool social media curve like Facebook before it. There will be an exodus, but it would have happened either way.
Once the parents get on, it starts the decline. When the grandparents are there…
> The “political” polarization is part of it. The older folks bring it with them. The majority flock to sites for information and escapism. The back and forth is just exhausting.
> It’s clearer for geek sites. Slashdot died when it got corporate and the content went to crap. Digg was the same. Reddit’s in process except niches. It’ll be same here.
> For everything there is a season.
What you sound like:
Yes and there shall be an exodus from the Twitters.
The parents shall come in, then the grandparents shall follow. Once those generations arrive the decline shall start. Not before. Not long after. But right after the grandparents, whence they arrive.
The polarization shall induce the decline. This wrought on by the older generations. And this is when the majority shall flock to sites for information and escapism.
Just as Slashdot, and Digg, declined before it, so shall the Twitters decline as well.
For everything, there is a season.
---
With your prescience, you must be a billionaire. Why don't you just buy Twitter off of Elon?
But the parents are already there. Like, uh, me. And most of my Twitter friends are similarly aged. And some of their parents are there. My mute list grows every couple months. I don’t mind political content but get tired of being battered by angry repetitive posts. Most of the people I know who abandoned facebook did it for that reason.
The younger folks I know don’t have an account or care. I don’t even know what the cool thing is anymore. That’s probably the point.
It’s already in its decline, the user numbers maybe don’t reflect it yet. And it’s not prescient any more than watching any historical trend repeat itself is.
There’s more than a billion reasons I’m not a billionaire, including. I’m not brave, smart, or initially wealthy enough are a few.
If I were, I wouldn’t buy a social media site. I also wouldn’t buy a TCBY franchise. These are things that might be great short term, but risk increases over time. A 1-2 year old TCBY is packed with kids. A 5+ year old one looks like every near empty ice cream shop. They all have the same smell, it’s weird.
Anyway, I’m risk adverse… and that lack of bravery is partly why I’m not wealthy in any sense.
I might be wrong about all of this. Just applying what I’ve seen from the past to the present.
I am the older folks. My Twitter friends are the older folks. And my mute word list grows every election or scandal to cover the copy/paste rhetoric from “both” sides. Maybe 1/3 of my follows hit that.
It’s not a statement that all or even most older people do it. I anecdotally see it more from older demographics. I might be wrong. I probably am tiptoeing the line of “ist” there. Definitely don’t mean to say all or most older people, but I am generalizing on a demographic. I’ll have to think about that more.
I don’t think statements like that should be “disallowed” anywhere except places like employment, etc. And it’s never OK to say that a generalization applies to an individual because they are within a demographic.
I think if Musk pulls off what he’s trying to, it’ll be better than now. I block and mute Trump, Biden, etc. anyway. When I want to get politics I reach out for it in a format >280 characters.
I don’t idolize or demonize Musk. He’s just another person with talents and flaws like the rest of us. He does some smart stuff. He does some head scratching things. He likes attention, can be hilarious, clever, or, as my kids say, “cringey.” But I don’t want him to be anything other than he wants to. We need all of that in the world.
This is more a statement that Musk isn’t going to ruin Twitter. I think it will follow the same historical curve as all social media and it has 0 to do with him. And pre social media things as well, since at least WWII. “The kids” set trends. By the time the majority latches on, they’ve moved on. Heck, you can probably see that in slang’s impact on “proper” language much longer.
I’ll be happy if/when “epic” leaves slang. For some reason that one irritates my pedantry more than any other.
There is not only personalities like Trump, peoples like Silvano Trotta, Christian Perronne, Astrid Stuckelberger, Christine Cotton, should also be unbanned if he do things right. All theses peoples have switched to Telegram, but they might come back on twitter if Musk is serious about free speech and unban them. With their followers...
1. Musk is going to discover (and maybe admit?) that fixing Twitter is harder than he thought. It will be just like self-driving, which seems straightforward, but which actually has thousands of edge cases which are hard to solve with a single general system. Nevertheless, he will persist, because that's what he does.
2. Current Twitter makes a profit on advertising, which means Twitter needs to encourage high levels of engagement, which means they need controversial (emotional) content, but not so emotional (toxic) as to drive people away. They need to be as close to the line as possible, which is why they spend so much effort on moderation. Musk's solution is, I predict, to try different revenue sources so that engagement with the feed is not the primary metric.
3. Musk has already stated that his goal is the Everything App (which he calls X). The Everything App has news, social media, games, videos, and a payment infrastructure (both to pay for content and to get paid). He wants Twitter to replace Facebook, Instagram, Google News, YouTube, Twitch and PayPal, etc. Will he be able to pull it off? I expect he will deliver the 20% of those services that are high-value, but pitch it as a complete solution. That might actually be good enough for most people.
4. If he accomplishes #3, then the revenue source is obviously: they will take a cut out of every transaction going on in the network. Maybe ads are a component, but they don't have to be a major component. If engagement is no longer the most important metric, then it's possible to allow every person to have a radically personalized feed. Even something as simple as only showing you tweets from people you follow (what a concept!) would revolutionize the experience and drastically reduce the need for moderation.
5. Since Twitter is private, Musk can front-load #4 even before the Everything App is ready. If he hasn't already burned the current team, he can make the experience better relatively quickly and worry about profit later.
6. Now for my safest prediction: No matter what he does, some people will hate him for it.
The way he got bored running Tesla and SpaceX for ~20 years?
I really don't get where this meme of "impulsive, erratic, hotheaded Musk" comes from given he demonstrated ability to stick with a business in the toughest of times.
Tesla was literally days away from bankruptcy at one time and Musk made it work.
After first 3 failed launches he was about to run out of money and yet he financed another launch, which worked.
He hasn't had a business failure yet.
Is that a guy who gets bored and moves on to something else?
The Boring Company is a failure. He's had many other failures within companies: automated driving, Tesla solar panels
Though he's the CEO of SpaceX, it's really run by Gwynne Shotwell.
You look at his wikipedia, and there's like 10 different things he's currently involved with, so yes, he looks like a guy that gets bored and moves on the other things.
The Boring Company is not a failure. It's actually a major success, for Tesla. It successfully led a generation of politicians and journalists think that there's no need for public transportation, that Elon Musk will solve all our infrastructure needs. It's a modern day GM Streetcar.
California high speed rail (the only real attempt at high speed rail in the US) didn’t need Musk to kill it, it killed itself due to incompetence in building quickly and affordably. This is a shame, because an actually affordable, working high speed rail system in America would be amazing, but won’t happen until we learn how to build again quickly and affordably in America. And who knows how to do that? Elon Musk!
I don't think it makes sense to compare a giant, multibillionaire organization like Twitter to something like the Boring Company, which was never really intended to be a main venture.
They already launched a "Loop" in Vegas, and it's a small tunnel with manned taxis running in it, operated by the city. And it took longer from project start to inauguration, per mile, than the Channel tunnel linking the UK and France.
The LVCC Loop started boring in 15 November 2020 and opened to the public on 15 April 2021 - so 5 months, for the 2.7km. The Channel tunnel began construction in June of 1988 and opened for freight trains in June of 1994, so 72 months for the 50.4km.
So, the LVCC was built at 0.54 km/month, while the Channel tunnel was buildlt at 0.7 km/month.
Isn’t it expected that a longer tunnel would take less time to build per mile than a shorter one? That just seems obvious. Just like how a 2000 square foot house isn’t going to take twice as long to build as a 1000 square foot house.
I didn't say anything about cost in my initial post. Still, you're right that the cost difference is hugely in favor of the LVCC tunnel if we only look at length.
However, if we look at freight+people crossing the tunnels, the Channel tunnel surely wins again - it may be roughly 10 times more expensive per km, but it carries orders of magnitudes more, by rail + by car.
I expect creating tunnels 20 years from now as important as right now.
Traffic jams are not going away magically, but automation can bring the cost of creating tunnels down, which can increase the total market significantly.
Time is helping the company (just like other projects Elon has started), so there's no rush to scale up and turn profit.
Tunnels don't really solve the problem well - they cost too much for what they do, and don't even do it well. Public transport (specifically expanding trains + e-bikes) is a much better, easier and already available solution.
Why didn't the workers cone off a lane from the street to make space for the bikes? Cars usually have easier alternatives, they can just take another lane.
EDIT: But anyway, the real viable alternative to cars is probably not bikes, it's trains and buses.
Because 1) literally no cars. And 2) there’s a bike lane on the other side of the road. The bike lane is bidirectional and the width of a car lane. All the parking in the street was removed for bike lanes.
Don’t quote me on this but the last time I checked it was roughly…
~600 deaths 35,000 hospitalisation due to car accidents.
~85 deaths 13,000 hospitalisation due to cycling accidents.
But in any case when walking in the city I feel safe walking with cars. But I don’t feel safe with cyclists. They rush through red lights. Rush through intersections while people are crossing. I’ve witnessed accidents occur due to cyclists not following the laws. If they followed the laws and slowed down. Stopped and gave way like they are meant to. I wouldn’t have an issue.
The Boring Company takes machines made by other companies, and digs tunnels that anyone with those machines can dig to provide a solution that is largely impractical.
Pretty easy to get rid of traffic jams actually, you just get rid of the cars. Never been stuck in traffic in places where there aren't cars.
In cities? Yes. You start preferencing more space efficient modes of transport, and traffic jams go away, while transport time decreases.
If you’re going to put a tunnel with fixed access points under a city, it makes a lot more sense to run trains than private cars.
If you’re going to have a 4 lane road reserve two of the lanes for super high capacity vehicles (busses).
Traffic jams are a byproduct of the limits of physics. Once you reach a certain density it is simply impossible to provide enough private car parking and lane capacity.
But does rerouting traffic through other bypasses actually alleviate traffic?
> Motorways and bypasses generate traffic, that is, produce extra traffic, partly by inducing people to travel who would not otherwise have done so by making the new route more convenient than the old, partly by people who go out of their direct route to enjoy the greater convenience of the new road, and partly by people who use the towns bypassed because they are more convenient for shopping and visits when through traffic has been removed
A traffic network's purpose is to move people from point A to point B. If you double the lanes and they fill up, you've doubled the throughput. If traffic doesn't move any faster, it's because the old traffic jams were a bigger problem than was visible. You've still alleviated the issue by allowing twice as many people to reach their destination in the same amount of time.
There's an argument that assumes that building more lanes does not increase the number of people who travel, only the number of people who choose to do so by car. Then with fewer lanes, the same number of people still get from A to B but on bicycles or using public transport instead of cars.
Do look at the "Studies" section of the same article, too.[1] It is far from established that induced demand outweighs the capacity increase from road construction.
Mayors of big towns are clearing city centers from cars and making them walkable again anyways (at least in Europe, I don’t know how it is being done in other places). If tunnels are the shortest path to get from one part of the city to another (like in Zurich), cars will use them.
Less cars on the road solves traffic jams. Not more roads.
Traffic jams are insane, we see a single person sitting alone in a 3+ ton box idling his time and instead of seeing how absurd it is, we want to make bigger roads for more almost empty boxes.
Nuts.
The solution to traffic jams is excellent public transportation and last mile mobility. Not more roads and definitely not tunnels.
> I really don't get where this meme of "impulsive, erratic, hotheaded Musk" comes from
The same guy who tweeted "Funding secured". His tweets about starting boring company, and buying twitter. His email exchanges that are now public. He is VERY impulsive and erratic (maybe not hotheaded).
> I really don't get where this meme of "impulsive, erratic, hotheaded Musk" comes from
His behavior like… every day and the fact that he apparently accidentally just bought a $44B company doesn’t at least let you see where people are coming from?
These musk heads are insane. The projection is ridiculous, portraying the characterization of musk as impulsive as a "meme" when they are so deeply steeped in reality denial... drives me insane. They need a serious correction, crypto style.
> The way he got bored running Tesla and SpaceX for ~20 years?
For all practical purposes, doesn't Shotwell run SpaceX and Elon just shows up to give "input", whenever the capital raise du-jour is necessary, and to do the marketing and PR?
It does seem to me he will need another Shotwell for either Tesla or Twitter, though. You can be CEO of as many companies as you want, but if the CEO is also doing the Operations part of the work, then you're constrained to pretty much one company at a time. I wonder if we'll see Jack come back to Twitter.
For all practical purposes, doesn't Shotwell run SpaceX and Elon just shows up to give "input", whenever the capital raise du-jour is necessary, and to do the marketing and PR?
Those companies are solving problems with logistics and engineering.
Twitter is fundamentally trying to solve a people problem, which is much fuzzier. Every impression I've had from "public Elon" is that he is absolutely wretched at people-problems-at-scale. I'm also not sure there is any human ever who has been able to solve people problems at Twitter's scale.
Could you elaborate? He wrote a book that many considered important, but how specifically did he solve people problems? To me it sounds like he understood emergent behaviors in economics, but didn’t those economicists also believe in the rational actor? That is not an accurate assumption about humanity.
Keynes’ solutions to human problems on a macro scale lifted millions upon millions of people out of poverty in the post-war era
keynesianism eventually failed because corporations and large capital holders will not act rationally towards the whole when they have interests that benefit themselves. so I suppose you’re right. but that doesn’t change the fact that for a good 30 years his ideas and solutions made life better for a huge number of people
there are people worshipping him like he is Jesus, something is really wrong here, how do people say he has not had a business fail? seriously SpaceX was a failure without the government stepping in at the last moment even he admits it.. look how he scammed the US government to keep Tesla going... i guess these are not "real" failures but from his own words government shouldn't be subsidizing business .... never mind all the failures he has had.
Autonomous Tesla's were also ready by the end of the year 5+ years ago. He's always been the way he is, the difference is the number of people who have caught on to his schtick by now.
People just don't know Musk. Falcon Heavy was delayed for 8 years. It took 8 years longer. He still got it to work. With all 3 rockets landing simultaneously at the same time.
SpaceX also beat Boeing with a smaller budget (NASA gave more to Boeing) in sending astronauts to the ISS. Boeing still is not able to get a successful test launch 2 years after SpaceX got the first astronauts to ISS from US domestic soil.
If you can stumble into so many achievements by luck. Or just by oh, lean on a few Shotwells and engineers.... then why are companies like Meta and Snap etc in the trash bin? Why is Boeing still stuck on the ground? Why after a half a decade of Tesla killers than nobody is getting killed but legacy automakers (all declining revenue and deliveries).
For what it's worth, two of the Falcon Heavy cores landed simultaneously at the launch site, the third was intended to land on a barge at sea, but came in too hot and crashed into the ocean.
I think it's not exactly fair to compare Twitter with his other endeavours. Others are very hard problems. What Musk will do with twitter is figure out an action plan: IMO changing twitter into X will be a viable way of letting it survive. He's gonna chart a course of action that could work and give the reins to someone else for execution.
Musk's time is valuable given that he's leading a lot of companies. He's not going to sit around and mull over twitter. The best thing he can do is spend time => chart a plan => hire a capable CEO who is best at execution (Tim Cook for instance). If he spends more time on twitter, his other bets will get hurt disproportionately.
Twitter is a very hard problem because it’s not a technological or engineering challenge.
It’s politics, politics, politics. From all angles and perspectives, in the possibly most annoying way. You have to make so many politics and policy decisions that all have many up- and downsides and that are just plain hard to make.
From a technology perspective Twitter is not at all interesting and the rest is just plain annoying. Plus, it’s a small social network, mostly relevant because important people (imagine myself rolling my eyes here) are on it. So doing other social media stuff that rely on network effects? (Messenger, payment, ...) Not really realistic. Not because the technology is infeasible. None of this is a technological challenge. It’s just politics and network effects.
This is my guess as well, but on a bit longer timescale. I think we'll see some noteworthy features over the next year as he tackles low hanging fruit(the reply button for example, although it sounds like that was already in development). This will be followed by a year or two of slow down as they run into social/technological issues, followed by Musk selling off the company.
Seriously considering #3 a solid idea to even discuss is a delusion. Twitter already has videos (YouTube, Twitch), a feed (Facebook, Google News), images (IG), etc. did it replace any of the above mentioned services or do you think the only missing element in this massive intercontinental cross-technological enterprise is Elon Musk?
They just need his guidance and leads, PMs, design, engineers, … and, most importantly, users of these existing platforms will all align and populate this brave new super app.
4) don't overestimate cut of transaction and underestimate ad revenue (promoting the transaction seekers). Let's use Amazon as an example: They run a 3P marketplace with a transaction cut business model, and it's not very profitable. Vs. their ads based sponsored product which is extremely profitable (soon to larger than AWS for profit at Amazon). This is a very different ad business than twitter's current performance marketing ad product.
I think first party ads promoting commerce on your platform can be very lucrative. And % of transactions tend not to be, with the exception of Android / iOS app store markets.
I haven't done the math because nobody is paying me to. But your example of Amazon might reinforce my point in that all three components (retail, ads, AWS) reinforce each other. Amazon is trying to be the "Everything App" also because they see synergies (even if only in shared infra).
And Amazon can afford to be less agressive with ads because it's a smaller part of their business, compared to (e.g.) Meta or Twitter. Apple is in a similar place: they can afford to care more about privacy because they don't make money from ads.
The more revenue Twitter can get from non-ad sources, the better the user experience (in my opinion).
But you're right that there's no guarantee that they will be able to get much non-ad revenue.
> Even something as simple as only showing you tweets from people you follow (what a concept!) would revolutionize the experience and drastically reduce the need for moderation.
You can do that right now by turning off retweets for the people you follow. You have to do that individually for every user you follow but it allows for a highly curated timeline. I turn of retweets for about 80% of the people I follow because I am interested in their original content but not in their random retweets. The other 20% introduce me to new content through their retweets.
I had a chance to buy 76.com before the oil company realized they should buy it. Had I any access to capital as a kid I would have bought it for $2k. well at least I get it as a trump in dns stories missed out on.
Having used WeChat, LINE and the like I shudder. Not just because they naturally become bloated slow ugly behemoths to use but also because they more generally become de-facto monopolies. Not having to compete with anyone is the ultimate killer of innovation.
As much as people dislike Musk, he draws excitement and captivation not only to himself, but to whatever he touches. Now for the first time people actually care about the "future" of Twitter, or in a sense, have a vision for its future that isn't defined by its frequent moderation-related controversies.
Is Musk's financial success and unparalleled cultural relevance a science that can be replicated? I mean, as much as people don't like him he has gotten to a financial position where anything he wants seems easily achievable. Is it the fact that he always carries the implied promise of "bold new future that will change your life" more than any other cultural entity?
Obviously Mark Zuckerberg is trying the same thing with Meta, but that's been a failure.
People hate Musk's personality, but no companies occupy the reverence in people's mind as much as SpaceX and Tesla. Even a man for a while much richer than Elon, Bezos, couldn't muster much in terms of cultural relevance for Blue Origin than a PR stunt with William Shatner.
Does Musk have a internal "toolbox" of guiding principles and behaviors that tremendously advantage him in his current position as outgoing tech CEO, or is he just extremely lucky? Is it merely because of his seeming utopian ambitions that make him more than a guy merely obsessed with financial success that he has ended up much more wealthy than if he were a much more grounded, brass-tacks CEO?
The rocket landing stuff largely borrow from DC-X and the spinoff work at NASA (+Lars Blackmore), all originally Strategic Defense Initiative stuff.
He used all that money from Mike as collateral for loans to Tesla.
He deserves some credit for impressive financial engineering and attracting talent under the guise of purpose ("going to Mars") but he took a lot of shady money along the way. And then there is the Saudis..
Most people who work with Musk 1:1 know he's unpredictable but pretty mentally unimpressive.
If it were just a matter of money, any of the other billionaires who tried to build rocket companies would have succeeded. SpaceX got payload to orbit with ~$100M. The only other company that has come close to this is Rocket Lab with a bit over $200M invested.
By comparison, Bezos has been sinking > $1B per year into Blue Origin for nearly a decade without making it to orbit, and probably won't until 2024 at the earliest.
> Bezos has been sinking > $1B per year into Blue Origin for nearly a decade
Not to claim a false SpaceX-Blue equivalence here, but this is misleading. Most of the early work at Blue Origin was on a fairly tight budget, and SpaceX has always had significantly more development money than Blue.
It is true that Blue has taken much longer to get to orbit, but they're starting with effectively a Saturn V class vehicle (a bit smaller, but partially reusable), whereas SpaceX started their orbital ambitions with the vastly smaller Falcon 1.
The gap in technical competence and effectiveness is still huge, but it's not as stark as the money-to-orbit metric would have it seem. New Sheppard could have reached orbit long ago, if it was designed to be orbital; it's just there's no money (in a Bezos sense) in small launch, and that wasn't the tech it was designed to prove out, so it wasn't.
My preferred way to estimate this is with employee counts instead, and the difference there is also stark, and then in the early days it's also possible to prove on first principles since Bezos wasn't rich enough at the time to compete with SpaceX's early NASA contracts.
Blue has ramped up a lot recently, as in the last couple of years, but you can also check SpaceX's recent investment rounds and they are burning money like crazy (a lot of this will be Starship and Starlink, since the former is a cost sink and the latter is still a ways off breaking even).
There is an argument to be made that the nature of this money was different, but SpaceX has always done the Amazon thing of reinvesting every penny they make, and certainly in the early days their costs were especially R&D dominated.
His "save humanity" messaging helped attract talent, something Bezos never learned how to do. But once people get to know Elon, it's clear his idealisms about Mars are manipulations and not sincerely held. He really means Strategic Defense Initiative. Elon is super pro-military technology (a hint is naming his kid after spy planes).
He basically believes his purpose is to build what the US DoD has been asking for for decades.. a space-based defense system, powered by AI to project force across the planet ("for our own good"). People who know him closely are aware. For example Grimes leaked a lot of this.
To be fair, Elon believe he's doing what he's supposed to / what is "right". It's just not the same as what he says to get people to work for him or be his fans. Talented people often won't work on military technology if they know that's what it's for, so he bends the truth.
It could be that his "save humanity" schtick actually attracts the wrong type of talent. See, when I was a full time programmer, about a decade ago, I really believed in Musk. It was only later, when I had more time on my hands that I started to fact check his claims, resulting in spiraling disillusionment.
So, I think Musk companies must be recruiting people who are young, and somewhat niaeve. I can't imagine many mature engineers being attracted to the crypto-bro atmosphere, unless they, themselves, are as conceited as Musk and happy to be in on the con.
This is true. I had a friend who programmed part of one of SpaceX's satellites, basically working as an unpaid intern. He spent 80 hours a week working on it non stop, sleeping in the lab, all while finishing his undergraduate CS degree.
The same thing with Elon's Hyperloop pod competitions. A completely meritless future technology still saw millions of free man-hours poured into being the creators of the first step into the future. As smart as everyone who participated in it was, the prestige of everything Elon blinded them.
* Convincing talented people to come work on his projects.
And he lies convincingly. His methods sometimes do get results (Tesla electric cars, SpaceX), so to his fans, he's a genius. Most of his projects fail (Tesla self-driving, boring company, hyperloop, robotaxis, crypto, stonks, every single thing he's tweeted about), but his fans are happy to forgive or forget all about those.
With Twitter he may have bitten off more than he can chew.
People who don't like him really downplay his past achievements. I currently don't like him, but he's been involved in PayPal, Tesla and Space X, all companies which had/have a big impact in our world.
Some will say he bought some of these, or the engineers did the real work, or he got government and family funding. But so what? Lots of companies with funding and good engineers don't get anywhere. So I don't know what, but he's been doing somethings right for a very long time.
More recently? Only crap shots, in my opinion. The boring tunnel sucks. Self driving will likely never become a reality. The Twitter deal feels off. I miss the visionary Mars seeking Musk, what we have now is the libertarian boomer Musk and he's disappointing.
You keep talking about people as if you they are one homogenous block that you deeply understand and represent.
Most people really couldn't care less about SpaceX, Tesla or the future of Twitter. And they definitely wouldn't put Musk at the pinnacle of cultural relevance.
It's a minority of the population that is on sites like this that care. And for many of us there is a much more discerning and skeptical attitude towards Musk and his antics.
SpaceX is cool. I think musk definitely draws excitement and his companies have great brand reputation. Tesla sells an idea, a lifestyle. When you look at the product, its not great. ill-thought out features (camera rain sensor, parking sensors being taken out), crappy materials, and promises that might never be delivered (self-driving).
I think musk really just is an optimist and a big thinker that is driving constantly towards the future, and people love that. Even if he accomplishes 10% of what he sets out to do, thats still a massive step forward.
Honestly I think we’re all just scared he is going to help get the boy king elected and if that’s the case, if that happens there’s a good chance that will be the end of civilization as we know it.
That is legit the only reason anyone I know of cares at all about this deal.
The drama is unbecoming. Contrary to claims, civilization didn't end when Trump took office. The economy didn't crash, it grew. Food prices didn't soar, they went down. Unemployment didn't go up, it went down, especially for minorities. Gas prices didn't hit $7 in California. Home energy bills went down. People had more disposable income and less tax burden. We didn't experience wild inflation. There was no prospect for a third world war.
But then Biden took office and many of those predictions came true through a variety of factors, not the least of which was the incompetence of State Governors, Chinese Communists and Democrats.
The guy lost the election and did everything in his power to hang onto it, this is a serious and dangerous threat to modern western democratic civilization.
There was no prospect for a third world war.
Who is being dramatic now?
We didn't experience wild inflation.
No but the Trump administration helped cause it? Inflation is not something that just happens because Joe Biden likes inflation, it happens because of policy.
... and now the media is like "this is fine (but it won't be if any conservative goals are accomplished)" while the world burns; whereas it was saying "the world is ending" while Trump was in office.
> Even a man for a while much richer than Elon, Bezos, couldn't muster much in terms of cultural relevance for Blue Origin than a PR stunt with William Shatner.
When/if Blue Origin starts actually launching ships to orbit and then landing them, they'll gain a lot of relevance.
I mean, yeah? If I personally started launching ships to orbit and landing them, I would gain a lot of relevance too.
The point is, somehow SpaceX is able to do things Blue can’t. Combined with Tesla being able to do things other automakers can’t, it seems there’s a common factor.
Firing Vijaya is a hell of a move here. Parag had been in the CEO seat for less than a year and had no real experience, and Twitter's not such a unique company financially that the CFO is anything special, but Vijaya had been in charge of legal and policy for a decade at a company that regularly has to tangle with nation state governments, as well as navigate all the other kinds of various policy hell that is Twitter's product - that kind of unique direct experience and learned wisdom is not easily replaceable.
You are spot on. That style of working or perspective towards policy is exactly what Musk wants to remove at the grassroots level.
Agreed that this wisdom and experience is not replaceable. But Musk intends to replace it with something else. If you think about it, Vijaya's perspectives and intuition is only going to pull back Musk's vision however vague that might be. Musk doesn't want to sit around and convince Vijaya of his opinion towards content moderation. I think if Vijaya showed appreciation or interest towards Musk's policy on some level at least, she would have had a non-zero chance to be around. The difference of opinion is at a stark contrast in my opinion.
This is the fastest and brutal way of Musk moving forward with his plan.
I don't think you have to claim to know what his plan is, to know what it is not. Why would he pay $50 billion dollars to buy Twitter only to leave the same people in charge of what he thinks was a broken platform?
I agree with that assessment. It’s good to keep in mind though that he at some point realised that whatever his plan might be, it wasn’t worth a $50B price.
Yes, but he presumes her "overly woke" perspectives towards community and censorship were anathema to his approach to libertarian free speech and also resulted in deplatforming Trump so away she goes! Why do you need someone in charge of legal and policy if you're going to stop caring about those things wholesale?
Just watching Tim Poole throw hard questions at her and her dodging for two hours on Rogan is enough to make me understand why Musk would fire her. She doesn’t share Musks vision at all when it comes to censorship.
AFAICT he's planning on folding to any authoritarian governments demands [1], while fighting for free speech mostly in the American context (and that too, just online). For that, he probably doesn't need Vijaya.
I hope someone pays her buckets of money now to fight at the actual frontline of free speech (Texas government sanctioned book bans perhaps?)
You're forgetting he has access to teams of competent lawyers (and their networks) who will already have to interact with international law for Tesla et al.
There's a reason lawyers specialize. No one is as qualified to fight for speech on Twitter as the person who's done it through the company's most tumultuous decade. The next most qualified person is probably Facebook's general counsel since they deal with all the same problems, and the places they differ probably still benefit from the portable experience. After that, there aren't a lot of people leading work on speech policy at this scale. You can't just drop in an IP lawyer or a real estate lawyer and hope for the best.
The only speech she fought for was for her ideological-religion.
Free, open, and fair debate were never permitted on twitter. She flat out ensured that their opinion became your opinion or you were out, one way or the other.
"No one is as qualified to fight for speech on Twitter as the person who's done it through the company's most tumultuous decade."
That's putting forward a ton of assumptions, none of which you cited supporting evidence for; length of time is quite a weak-shallow argument point.
Let's also bring up the fact that maybe they stayed in those positions so long because they were willing to take a knee to the fascists in governments, willingly toeing the line for them - so then therefore lacking principles and integrity - which is an unacceptable foundation to be fighting from for anything.
> but Vijaya had been in charge of legal and policy for a decade at a company that regularly has to tangle with nation state governments
In charge of, but almost certainly not the DRI, or related talent, for any of that. Her direct experience is most certainly minimal, compared to the people actually doing that work. This assumes there's not significant corruption of course.
So the questions would be, will Elon see the value in those groups responsible, and will those groups stick around on their own? I imagine so.
I’m sure there was exposure and involvement, but I would find it incredibly hard to believe if the brute force of the work was not a group of lawyers, with that exposure and involvement being easily exchanged for another, or even more hands off, CEO.
For example, he stopped talking about the bot population on the platform altogether after he could not get out of the deal.
Was he honest about this being a big issue in the first place?
For me, it’s not easy to believe this because this bot issue appeared right after Twitter staff did not like his speech, and talks with the CEO fell apart.
Am I mistaken about how it all played out?
If not, do you think being deceitful to a certain degree is okay?
From your point of view, do you consider him deceitful?
Every one of us has run into situations where choosing to be honest has materially cost us. You accidentally scratch a parked car on your way out. Do you stop and leave a note with contact info or not?
The richer you are, the more leverage you have and larger the material cost for these situations. A fellow rich friend gives you a little insider info that a stock you hold is about to crater. Do you sell some?
In other words, being honest is a tax, and the wealthier you are, the higher that tax rate. Given that, I think the only way to reach certain levels of wealth is by not paying that tax.
Therefore, I treat anyone at Musk's level of wealth as intrinsically untrustworthy. You don't get to be a billionaire by being a normal honest human. And if by miracle you should happen to, being a billionaire I think fundamentally changes your psychology such that you cease to be normal and honest. There may be exceptions, but I think they are exceedingly rare.
Billionaires are functionally a different species.
Being honest is an investment in an honest society and a just future. Of course, the problem with being honest is that, as with any ideological conflict, those who volunteer for the front lines make the most sacrifices, and have to trust that the tide will someday turn in favor of their side, even though they may never see it happen. So there's a lot of "you go first" noise instead of active effort to walk the talk.
Nonetheless this trending fad of referring to any cost that has no obvious immediate benefit to the payer a tax is starting to outgrow the original, and usefully narrow, scope it once had.
It would be equally valid, semantically, (and I would argue more valid prescriptively) to observe that having to constantly verify at great expense what in an honest society you could you could otherwise trusted at nearly zero expense, is the more costly and pernicious "tax" on total human productivity.
I probably should have been clearer that I believe strongly that it's a tax worth paying. My point was just that I think it's statistically extremely unlikely for a consistently honest person to become obscenely wealthy because the cost/benefit proposition gets worse and worse the richer you are. It's relatively easy to walk away from a dishonest deal that nets you a hundred bucks. But it takes a lot more character to walk away from a dishonest deal that nets you a hundred million.
I tend to assume (possibly without sufficiently compelling evidence, but I'm allowed to believe what I want) that anyone who's reached stratospheric wealth has done so by not walking away from some of those shady deals.
You may be right that "tax" is not a good metaphor.
> to observe that having to constantly verify at great expense what in an honest society you could you could otherwise trusted at nearly zero expense, is the more costly and pernicious "tax" on total human productivity.
I agree 1000%. The value of a society made of honest people is radically improved efficiency.
> My point was just that I think it's statistically extremely unlikely for a consistently honest person to become obscenely wealthy because the cost/benefit proposition gets worse and worse the richer you are.
From experience this completely lines up with what I have seen, in my almost 40 year career. I've watched serial entrepreneurs to things I would never dream of. It was then I knew, I'd never be rich.
The only quibble I have with your idea: it's not just billionaires. Of course, there are more millionaires who are still honest, but the percentage compared to the non-millionaire working population is much lower.
When you own and run a business, you are constantly confronted with decisions that have a good and bad path. The bad path, for me, is when I answer "yes" to the question "will this make it harder for me to sleep well at night?" Those decisions came up so often early in my career. I pride myself on how well I sleep at night, but I'm not rich.
If anything I'd say it's the opposite. A random person can get away with cons and scams for a long time. Whenever they get caught, they can just set up shop somewhere else. They can change their name (or simply lie to others about their name). Famous people can't do that. If you're famous, you can commit one scam before your reputation is ruined. Even if the story manages to avoid the news, people talk and word spreads. The incentives are such that a purely selfish billionaire sociopath is better off being honest.
Also, being extremely rich makes you a target for ambitious or activist prosecutors. Everything everywhere is securities fraud.[1][2] Whether you're hung out to dry or not is determined by how much your behavior has annoyed people in certain departments of the US government, or how much you've annoyed their friends.
He paid the price for that (and other things) via lawsuit settlements. Trump also had successful business ventures, so people saw him as a mixed bag. On another note, you don't need to be virtuous to be elected - just look at most politicians.
Then why can't I go to any news site without seeing a fresh new story of some rich/famous person getting caught red-handed being terrible and then gaining popularity from it?
I think what you are talking about is morality and not honesty. Musk is brutally honest - with the people he works with, with the investors, with his followers on twitter and everyone. He is brutally honest by letting them know on their face what he thinks is right and wrong. I would argue that not being honest about something wouldn't make you move forward.
You can be brutally honest and immoral at the same time. Not leaving a note for scratching a parked car is being immoral to someone.
Morality doesn't get you up the ladder because there are certain hard decisions you need to make. You may argue that dishonesty can take you up. I think dishonesty can only take you so far. It definitely can't get you to become someone like Musk.
> Musk is brutally honest - with the people he works with, with the investors, with his followers on twitter and everyone. He is brutally honest by letting them know on their face what he thinks is right and wrong.
He is brutally honest when it benefits him. But he is completely willing to lie when it suits him. See:
Or search for "Musk broken promise" or "Musk failed prediction" to see many other examples. You might argue that, "Well, he honestly intended these things to pass." But at his level of power, I believe there is a moral obligation to be reliable in one's public predictions.
The wealthier you are, the bigger the cost of certain actions, sure.
I'm not at all convinced that the rate gets higher. I'll go ahead and bet the opposite, that the cost of being honest represents a smaller fraction of your wealth as you have more.
Somewhat analogous to "fuck you money". If you badly need a job, you have to be silent about many issues.
It was a legal dispute over billions of dollars, nobody was telling the truth it is all a game to win a case and a negotiation tactic to get a favorable deal. It wasn’t an opportunity for an honest conversation with internet commentators with no actual stake in what happened.
There are legal arguments and then there is being deceitful, there’s quite a lot of distance between the two.
Many people say they dislike Musk because of his ego, his shitposting, his tendency to lash out at critics, etc. I like him specifically because of those attributes: he may be the richest man on the planet, but he never gives the impression of being a lizard person like e.g. Bezos does. He's a normal guy, including plenty of normal-guy flaws, just an extremely successful one.
You (statistically, possibly not literally) know someone, and call them a friend, who is, as a person, worse than Elon. But you don't view billionaires the way you view people you know - billionaires are supposed to be perfect people chiseled out of ivory. I don't know where the façade comes from, but Elon never does that. And so I can have just a little bit more faith in him than in any other tech billionaire, because I know the motivation and vision he acts like he has is the one he actually has.
> You (statistically, possibly not literally) know someone, and call them a friend, who is, as a person, worse than Elon.
No, I don't, because if I find out someone I called a friend behaves like Elon does, *I cut them out of my life*.
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> billionaires are supposed to be perfect people chiseled out of ivory.
Billionaires have the outsized ability to strongly impact/harm FAR more people then some jerk who works a normal day-job and just says racist things to their friends over beers on the weekend.
So yes, I think it is a moral obligation of people who have the ability to impact thousands or millions of people's lives to take said responsibility seriously.
The fact that Elon has so much leverage over the world, and continues to act like a flaming dickbag in public I think should cause far more castigation of his behaviour.
I think the thing to watch will be ads and other revenue streams. Most companies aren't going to want their ads next to 'free for all' content, so we'll see what happens.
I'm very skeptical of the idea that Twitter can become a place where people discuss things with civility. It seems like the mechanics of the conversation encourage outrage.
On top of that, historically internet forums have required fairly strict moderation to remain civil for any significant amount of time. Without that, one quickly ends up with an incredibly unpleasant space that repels more people than it attracts.
For some people this is enough: but HackerNews is only great for discussion within the context of socially acceptable topics.
Want to have some open and honest discussions about programming languages, databases, APIs, careers, or math? There are few places where you can read more interesting and intelligent discussions on things like this.
Want to have some civil, but honest discussion about anything truly contentious: say race, religion, crime, homelessness, foreign affairs, IQ, sexuality, immigration, etc? Fully open and honest discussions on these sorts of topics are just not possible unless you have a very commonplace and milquetoast viewpoint.
Maybe it would be even greater as a free speech paradise, where we could express opinions in the words and manner we choose.
Perhaps some kind of "HN gloves off" mode might work. Or HN After Dark. Then the traditional civil mode could be retained, while allowing the more wild tangents to run their course in a separate but related area or mode. I think this is inevitable for online discussion. Politicians have their formal, respectful discourse zones, but gloves come off in certain places and contexts where heated exchange is not only acceptable, but expected. And these are the people running things. So to deny the same for the general population, will never sit well.
Civil discussion requires decorum and rules, and Musk and other conservatives view those as "censorship".
It's the same reason none of the reddit clones have ever taken off, turns out most people don't want to participate in a virtual space free of censorship because it just turns into a cesspool
Respectfully, I have not found that to be true. No one side has a monopoly on the lunatics or the level headed.
It's unfortunate ad hominems, logical fallacies, and the "mic drop one liner" get so much traction and amplification.
When I find myself making snap judgments about an issue, I dive in to the opposition, doggedly seek out the underpinning ideas, from academic or level headed folks.
It's helped strengthen my personal convictions on some matters and moderated my pre held notions.
>Respectfully, I have not found that to be true. No one side has a monopoly on the lunatics or the level headed.
I really disagree. I think you have fringe folks on the left but outlandish ideas are mainstream amongst conservatives. For example, 70% of republicans believe Joe Biden did not legitimately win the 2020 election.
You just aren't going to find such strong belief in anything that absurd on the left.
>When I find myself making snap judgments about an issue, I dive in to the opposition, doggedly seek out the underpinning ideas, from academic or level headed folks.
I agree! Obviously some subjects like anti-vaxxers or election deniers don't have level-headed or academic folks who can support them.
That's really why you need intense moderation because quality content doesn't rise to the top. An 'anything goes' environment tends to promote the absolute worst ideas, as people like Gwyneth Paltrow and Joe Rogan have a far wider audience that actual scientists. If you allow them to lie about important issues, the lie is going to suffocate any academic or level-headed person who has something to say.
> You just aren't going to find such strong belief in anything that absurd on the left.
The 4 years of russian meddling? It genuinly seems to have been widespread to me.
And with the biden one, AFAICT it is not directly about stealing it, but rather enacting stuff that resulted in an unfair benefit to democrats, that seemed unlawful. (Mail in voting by default, for example)
So, no, I don't believe it's mostly one side. But rather that both sides have the loud, crazy, minority.
>The 4 years of russian meddling? It genuinly seems to have been widespread to me.
You mean the highly documented russian interference in our elections? Is that what you're talking about?
>And with the biden one, AFAICT it is not directly about stealing it, but rather enacting stuff that resulted in an unfair benefit to democrats, that seemed unlawful. (Mail in voting by default, for example)
I'm not going to delve too deep into the idiotic conspiracy theories behind the 'stop the steal', the reality is that there is zero evidence impropriety.
The idea that making it easier to vote by mail is a benefit to one party speaks volumes about what conservatives believe.
The fight against vote-by-mail has nothing to do with lawfullness. Conservatives focus on making it hard to vote/voter disenfranchisement because they know they are a minority party.
None of the censorship people complain about on Twitter is to do with enforcing politeness or decorum, it's all censorship of specific information or opinions regardless of how politely phrased. And that lack of fixed rules is part of the problem. Trying to paint this as "conservatives hate politeness" is just dishonesty.
Can you give an example of what you're talking about? There are plenty of TERF and transphobic accounts on Twitter right now. You can express transphobic ideas on Twitter.
Yeah, they banned folks from lying about vaccines and the COVID-19 pandemic. You can be pro-covid or talk about how you don't want to get the vaccine. You just aren't allowed to spread conspiracy theories and lies.
I'm pretty sure most of those Reddit clones get flooded with "undesirable" bots as a way of killing them off. The people who currently run bots on Reddit, have massive power over public opinion etc, they want to keep their victims centralised, and on familiar territory.
Or, the majority of people are fine with limiting hatefullness and so you end up with just the people who want to spread hate online, which in turn makes it a cesspool
The mechanics of most social media platforms encourage outrage.
1. Most are optimizing to maximize user engagement, and it seems like most platforms have concluded that emotionally charged hot takes are the best way to keep the feed scrolling and the likes and shares flowing.
2. Most don't have the small communities or active moderation necessary to build a culture of civility. (HN is an outlier, though even here I think there are still some topics where the site becomes echo chamber-y.)
If that were really their goal, theoretically they could be. For instance, this forum has features, like invisible vote counts, and exponential cool-down periods which encourage healthy conversations.
Whether that is compatible with their business goals is another question.
This forum also has an educated crowd of nerds at the heart of its community. Twitter used to have that too and was a much more civil but also less interesting space when I joined in 2008.
Are you the davidw from reddit? Do you ever go on /r/portland? It's moderated to the max yet its still neither civil or engaging. Moderation matters but I think HN does a lot better due to the features that promote well thought out posts and don't really allow trolls to get much traction.
The moderation on HN helps retain civil community members as well. I've been thinking about moderation as a chicken-or-egg situation but maybe it's more of an equilibrium issue. I should go over my old slashdot comments and see if I remember what pushed me out.
I'm stereotyping Musk here, but it wouldn't surprise me if he decided to solve it with AI (sentiment analysis specifically) so the algorithm promotes positive tweets and downranks negative ones. Might even work, since the field has made huge progress in recent years.
AI moderation has spectacular faulure modes (as banned Twitter users know). Imagine a tweet like "The thought of $NAME being unalived brings a smile to my face" would be enough to get through the positivity filter[1].
The word "unalive" itself was coined and became popular to escape such basic filters that have no sense of meaning.
1. I just tried the following on the first online sentiment analysis tool I found, and scored 85% positive: You sound very 'smart'. I have warm and fuzzy feelings at the thought of you being unalived, with your genius
That breaks down with coded language. If groups use code words or emojis they can change their coding faster than sentiment analysis models can be updated. Even if those models can be updated quickly the coding by users can be changed arbitrarily. They can also trivially add trivial positive text alongside the codes to get amplified.
Just as an example take the insipid "let's go Brandon" slogan. Sentiment analysis would rate that as a positive statement unless it was specifically flagged. That's a trivial example. There's untold numbers of covert meanings for emojis, even for banal things.
It depends on incentives. Right now histrionics and outrage get boosted and sober, nuanced analysis goes nowhere. Invert that boosting algorithm and maybe Twitter can become useful. I'm not sure what would mean for revenue though.
I think the tweet format is directly opposed to having thoughtful, or even civil, discourse. It's hard to express anything complicated in 280 character, and if you want to have a discussion you need that time to express yourself. Without the short tweet format, what is twitter?
I think the fundamental limitation is that a small character limit removes the opportunity for nuance. It is a trade off though - not many people will spend time reading nuanced essays. I’d say this is a big part of the polarization - there’s only enough room to basically say left or right and maybe indicate some magnitude to your belief, so you naturally end up with two parties.
It's a good sentiment, but he kind of has to say that right? He just spent $44B taking this company private, if advertisers flee and it starts running at a substantial loss, it could mean financial ruin for him
I would think that advertisers would eventually notice anyway. If lead quality decreases due to poor ad targeting or high-value users leaving the platform then they'll start pulling their advertising dollars back.
I have to wonder if there was already some pushback from larger advertisers that prompted Elon's tweet in the first place. Time will tell but we've already got 4chan and some users and advertisers would rather go to a "mall-like" experience to not have to deal with the "crap".
Advertising is an old boy's club. They spend money based on personal relationships, brand image, reputation, reliability, and trust.
The actual quality of the advertising product almost doesn't matter, it's not like any of the advertisers can reasonably independently validate the claims or performance, they're trusting them as given.
Elon has never been a member of the advertising club, he famously chooses to have his company refuse to even be a client, and he doesn't have a reputation for any of those values. Wouldn't at all be surprised if major clients put a hold on their Q4 spend with Twitter the moment they got news of the completed acquisition.
Google, Facebook, and Snap all had major advertising earning misses, the agencies would be pressuring for better deals regardless.
I can't see advertising being part of the long term plan here. He's a payments guy, and there is much more money in turning Twitter into an economy in of itself. This would be tricky if he needed to rely on banks etc, but more recently, he is also a crypto guy. It will be interesting to see how creative he gets in that area, but I would think that his dream would be to create a fluid online economy. I would expect him to first attempt reinventing the concepts of cash, and loose change, but in a digital platform, rather than one's pocket.
He only has $24 billion at risk. I mean, he has a lot of his reputation invested, but only $24 billion in actual dollars. The rest is from other investors and debt that the Twitter company itself (and not Musk) actually has.
I mean, if someone's talking about "financial ruin" because someone losing ~10% of their net worth, which would still leave them the richest person in the world, I think it's perfectly reasonable to say "it's only $24 billion"
Firing the person who fought against government censorship and worked to establish a balanced content policy for almost a quarter billion people across the planet is not a great move if he wants anyone to believe that. The only people who even know who she is either know the good work she does or had it out for her over the reluctant and long-delayed ban of Trump. She just kind of quietly kept Twitter from turning into a complete snake pit while making sure the maximum number of people could speak. Evidence that keeping your head down and doing good work isn't enough if the people who decide these things don't know about it.
Can you include this one person's name in your comment or reply so that people like me who are unfamiliar can evaluate such a glowing endorsement of "her" "good work."
I know this sounds like a cynical question, but without a name your comment seems a little bit fanatical.
The weird thing is, I didn't think Tim Pool was completely wrong. I, too, prefer having removed speech available but contextualized. There have been times where I wanted to answer a "prove it!" but couldn't find the video/tweet/whatever because it was completely removed with no explanation.
I also understood Vijaya Gadde and pre-Musk Twitter's position better even if I still think their systems end up hitting marginalized people more than the people who want to marginalize them. The task is harder than Musk realizes, and he fired the person who's been working hardest on it for most of the last decade and understands the problem space best.
The problem with that person though was their obvious bias, as Pool pointed out. She needed someone to challenge her at work, not just on a podcast. Clearly, other Twitter employees were not going to do that as they agreed with those biases.
Ideological clone of Musk or Gadde? I'd imagine that if there's more freedom in what can be written then it doesn't matter, a censor that supports free speech is no censor at all.
I think you're broadly correct. I'm curious to see where it all ends up. Content moderation is not fun or easy, and I could see him getting thoroughly sick of all of it.
Yes they do. Not the banks. The billionaires who came in as junior partners. Larry Ellison is supposed to be in for a billion. a16z and Andreessen personally are reported to have equity investments. One of the Binance founders, or Binance as a company is supposed to have hundreds of millions of equity. The very large Saudi investor (I don't know if it was an individual or the sovereign wealth fund) when Twitter was public is still involved.
There are a few publicly known partners, and a few who got turned away. They have equity.
My limited experience is that people with money can still influence companies, even if there aren't formal paths. Share owners still have influence.
And people who lend money typically have contracts and the ability to seize assets if they don't get paid. (I have no idea what the $13B of loans looked like, but can't imagine they were personal, non-recourse loans.)
But we can see Twitter being supported by extreme right foundations.
I'm from Brazil and the extreme right is abusing all the communication platforms. it's a complete madness in what people believe right now. Our society is on the verge of crumbling.
the same could said about the far left in America. well i guess it could be said about the far right too. its up to the folks in the middle, the progreservatives (or consegressives depending on how you look at it), to end the madness but most of us are too busy living our own lives to care about how crazy the fringes of society are beyond the entertainment value of it all.
there is no far left in the US. The 'left' here would be center/right in most other countries. The right/conservatives are the true evil who are responsible for basically every bad thing here and the real problem is that most of this country is conservative, and thinks this country is 'special'.
Far left in the US is the group that promotes things like:
- extreme intersectionality
- the original non-diluted Marxism-inspired version of CRT (e.g. punctuality and objectivism in academia are “white values”)
- literal dissolution of police (not just creating better social services)
and much more. So they are far left not in the classic sense. This term has been somewhat redefined in the context of culture war (similar to far right).
Yeah, as a European whenever people say "the left in the US would be considered right-wing in Europe" I shake my head. When it comes to social issues, the extremes in the US are far more pronounced, both on the right and the left.
Right. At least you didn't call me a Nazi. You sound like one of the people who think CRT is "just history" without reading any of the actual books on CRT.
How do you define far left in the US? People who advocate for the redistribution of income and wealth and for a brotherhood of all workers?
Media Matters and Vox publicly campaigned for a year to demonetize YouTube, by methodically threatening brands with publication of screenshots of ads next to niche controversial content. This happened via private emails to executives, followed by viral social media posts when the brands did not satisfy their demands in a timely manner. This culminated in the "adpocalypse", which consisted of those targeted Fortune 500 brands pulling out and disavowing YouTube. YouTube implemented sweeping policies that demonetized political channels on both sides and even LGBTQ+ channels. In the end, everyone lost.
Can you give me a source for that? I'm asking because where I live a company sprang up during that time, who employed the exact same tactic. Posted those sorts of screenshots, not of Youtube but of our company's display ads on platforms like Seekingalpha and other sites they deemed to be fake news or extremist, and when our digital marketing didn't respond to them, they sent the screenshots to executives within the company. This ultimately led to us having to buy their brand safety monitoring service because the CEO was scared of backlash.
Hunter Biden laptop that the FBI have confirmed real
Banning Andrew Tate when Pierce Morgan and many others think he is opinionated but should not be banned.
And hell they banned Jordan Peterson?
I don't know what kinda echo chamber you operate in to think the 'left' is not 'trying to influence communication platforms'
isn't it the far left that's all up in arms about musk buying Twitter in the first place? to me the average left leaning person could give two shits about who owns Twitter, yet a ton of Twitter employees vowed to quit if the deal went through. subjective as it is, those of which I'd consider far left.
You don't have to view everything through such a political lens.
Musk constantly shits on the work those people did and says he's going to change it all. I bet they have some pride in what they built and it would feel insulting for some outsider to constantly criticize without knowing the reasons why they did what they did. I'd feel hurt too. Plus his companies have a reputation for chewing you up and spitting you out again. People might not like the cultural U-turn.
Please stop talking about the far left. It's just silly. It's like 12 people who share these extreme views and comparing them to the far right is really misleading. The far right are organised and training with weapons. The far left are arguing on Twitter with anime profile pics.
that could very well be the reason why some are leaving, but its not those people that are broadcasting their intentions. you could also say his organizations have a standard of excellence that many feel they can achieve, but few are capable of.
saying that the far left is in no way comparable to the far right is pretty silly. they both exist, they both have violent sects, both have anime fans, and there are most definitely more than 12 of them
So the far left wants to control twitter because there are people that want to leave twitter if musk runs it, and these people must be from the far left because...
...of the intolerant views that they subscribe to that have been covered time and time again during this saga over the last few months.. oh but wait, there is intolerant views on the right too? id wager a fair bit that any right leaning employees of Twitter, intolerant as they may be, are snug as a bug in a rug right now, as are the centrists
There are many such examples. Look at the group "Stop Funding Hate" in the UK that constantly harasses companies who advertise in newspapers and news channels that aren't dominated by the left.
haha! perfect! without preservatives, the pros and cons would sour society in no time. sure, they may cause cancer in some, but overall they are a benefit to everyone.
Probably because you seemed to have partisan worms in your brain. Twitter HAS been burdened by the "extreme right" abusing its platform. Its the entirety of the debate around what should be moderated on twitter. Insisting that this can't be true because "the left" hasn't had an exodus doesn't seem to make sense to me.
There is simply not many places to go. You can’t really keep running t from madness all the time since with social media platforms the destination must be at least somewhat inhabited, and also the exodus must be coordinated.
It’s more like moderate left left left, the extreme right were expelled, and extreme left stayed out of grit and also because Twitter was sort of left to them .
The 'brand safety' super omnia argument isn't nearly as straightforward as it's made out to be. Twitter already has an enormous amount of content that is perfectly within the terms of service, yet that you wouldn't think most companies would want their ads next to. Hardcore pornography, for example. It more or less works out, because Twitter ads aren't associated with particular tweets in the same way that YouTube ads are associated with particular videos.
The argument only goes through when you look at the platform reputation as a whole. That's why platforms like Parler have trouble attracting ads. There are a lot – a lot – of people trying to hit Twitter's platform reputation right now, but their problem is that the best place to degrade companies' (and people's) reputations is Twitter.
Well, speaking in those terms, I think the thing to watch will in fact be censorship. Elon is extremely idealistic, so it will be fascinating to watch him melt down when confronted with the reality of how complex free speech and censorship issues really are. I predict that he will succeed in turning Twitter into the rightwing safehaven that "Truth" Social, Parlor, etc have all been trying to become.
He's making a deal with the devil to fund Twitter, and if that means selling out to guys like Peter Thiel and other conservative power brokers, then he will do it. Just in time for the 2024 presidential election media cycle too...What could possibly go wrong?
Elon Musk has been talking about how awesome Gigafactory Shanghai is for the past year, thanks to Chinese workers who don't talk back to their boss and work harder than their American counterparts.
Dude loves his Chinese anti-speech factory. Or at least, he already is pretending to do that so that he gets his Chinese sales numbers up.
Musk makes the public statements he needs to do business. He has no morals outside of money as far as I can tell. Dude is 100% willing to spout off anti-American propaganda / stereotypes to serve his Chinese masters (at least, this year when his Chinese factory is opening up. We will see if he really believes those words or if he's just playing dumb or something...)
EDIT:
> I think there will be some very strong companies coming out of China. There’s just a lot of super talented and hardworking people in China that strongly believe in manufacturing. And they won’t just be burning the midnight oil. They’ll be burning the 3am oil. So they won’t even leave the factory type of thing. Whereas in America, people are trying to avoid going to work at all.
I view this as America needs to do better. Not sure why that's anti-American. You fan be good to somebody to tell them the truth and for them to apply themselves. Lie to them and speak American exceptionalism is not pro-America. Its brainwash
Elon Musk wouldn't comply with American COVID19 restrictions in his first factory.
But when China goes 100% lockdown for the past year, he turns a blind eye to it and calls them hard workers instead. His anti-American bias, at least when talking with the Chinese, is pretty darn obvious.
Of course, it all disappears when he flies back to the USA. My point is he's a two-faced double-talking political type. He says what he needs to say to get the money and prestige he needs to do what he wants. Expect more pro-Chinese sentiment from him. The Chinese factory is one of the most important elements of Tesla's strategy right now.
This is why I’ve gotten tired of him. He’s yet another thermometer just reading the temperature to figure out how to profit. No surprise that reading changes everywhere he goes.
He’s a politician/actor for business, and people love it. Everybody claims to hate politics, but it’s become yet another reality tv drama to which we’ve become addicted. Elon is a great actor and he’s paid very well for it. He knows the game he’s playing, and has no moral compass to hold him back.
Unfortunately, it’s the most real form of reality tv yet, where we all eventually bear the consequences. Personally, I have never and will never use or read Twitter. My concern for most social media platforms is whether or not they’re going to damage society.
It’s not like we have a choice anyway. So take a good look at your surroundings, and a year or two from now, ask yourself if we’re better or worse off than now.
> I predict that he will succeed in turning Twitter into the rightwing safehaven that "Truth" Social, Parlor, etc have all been trying to become.
I actually don't think so, I think this was bluster, or if they are safe haven it will be safe in the way that a subreddit is safe. You can freely talk amongst eachother but that content won't be promoted to people who don't want to see it.
My prediction is he ends up growing twitter into a fairly bland chat/communications app/social network, and the focus on global political and social debates slowly weans over time.
My prediction is he ends up growing twitter into a fairly bland chat/communications app/social network, and the focus on global political and social debates slowly weans over time.
So far Musk's brought back a very high profile antisemite (Ye) and a bunch of others took the hint to return to Twitter. I'm pretty sure bland isn't the right word.
"Elon now controls twitter. Unleash the racial slurs. K---S AND N-----S," said
one account, using slurs for Jews and Black people. "I can freely express how
much I hate n-----s . . . now, thank you elon," another said.
…
Some of the Twitter influx was organized on other platforms, including the pro-Trump
forum TheDonald, where its top posts Friday morning showed tweets celebrating lies
about Trump's 2020 election loss and memes criticizing transgender people under the
headline "When you can't get banned on Twitter anymore."
My prediction is Musk flails about, burns a pile of money, and decimates any goodwill his associated companies (e.g. SpaceX, Tesla, Starlink) currently have.
Musk earlier today he didn’t bring Kanye back. I mean he’s certainly riling up the dregs of humanity and now not like a good person but I don’t think he’s going to burn 44 bil
> My prediction is Musk flails about, burns a pile of money, and decimates any goodwill his associated companies (e.g. SpaceX, Tesla, Starlink) currently have.
This morning NY Daily News was claiming Ye was allowed back. It'd be nice if that were wrong or has since been redacted, but I'm not going to hold my breath.
As for Musk, he's playing with other people's money. At that scale he can afford to tell the American banks to go fuck themselves. The foreign investors are probably cheering on this nonsense. The Saudis want pro-oil republicans, the Russians are going to relish the chaos, and at the very least the Chinese will cheer on the loss of a TikTok competitor. There aren't a lot of guardrails here.
Really the Ye thing doesn’t matter because I under minded my own argument :-) I think all those terrible things are coming but he’s going to thread the needle around discoverability to make it palatable. Too much chaos isn’t good for anyone even bad actors if the site becomes irrelevant, but we’ll see, I’m not super convinced youre wrong. Maybe Twitter has enough momentum to stay in the public eye in spite of itself.
personally I think he's going to try to grow it, but if he's smart a competitor to youtube along with the social media portion would be a huge move that twitter is actually positioned well to pivot to.
Oh that's what I mean - he will enforce his own definition of free speech and censorship. It will be usual "Rules for thee but not for me" kinda thing. It will be a constantly shitfing goalpost, and he will always have some bullshit justification for why whatever he decides is correct. It won't be free speech, it will be Elon speech. He is a petulant child with too much money, and not enough humility. His sink stunt tells you everything you need to know - this is all about Elon. God help us all.
> that's no different from Twitter and other platforms
Exactly -- and I think that's the source of most folks' pre-schadenfreude. A lot of us have been around long enough to have seen "free speech" platforms come and go and this feels no different, so far.
I think the point is that while right now, 'unfair' things might happen, perhaps they will become even more uneven in the future, as he exerts more personal sway into what's ok and what's not, rather than attempting to stick to some guidelines.
The simple (and inevitable) solution is for some accounts or tweets to be withheld in certain countries. No company can avoid complying with the law; but they can't be forced to take down a tweet worldwide either.
> No company can avoid complying with the law; but they can't be forced to take down a tweet worldwide either.
Sure they can. "You take down tweets we don't like, or Tesla loses China as a market, we arrest all the employees currently in China, and take your factories and other assets there".
No one said his ideals are good, and his father's mine and government subsidies are completely unrelated to whether he had ideals. Maybe his ideals are for government investment.
Not saying it's necessarily a bad thing. It is that idealistic thinking that got us SpaceX and all that, so clearly the visionary aspect of his thinking is great, but it is a double edged sword. He thinks free speech is a problem he can solve solve, but I am saying that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. He is smart, but clumsy, and I seriously question his motives.
he should make the platform $5/month to post and free to read. That would likely increase the quality of content and provide another source of revenue.
I don’t think $5/month would stop the biggest offenders: content farms. I have reported dozens of accounts that have posted tens of thousands of tweets in the last few years. Accounts that spam US politicians with things like “I am a democrat and I will not vote for Biden because he is neo-Nazi…” and so on and so forth. Accounts that ruin the discussion, waste attention. Accounts that are obviously not authentic users but are a part of a foreign propaganda campaign. These accounts can afford to pay $5/month.
Content farms use a lot of accounts , they have to - impersonate realistic users easy to shadow ban block otherwise that $5/user/month quickly adds up.
The reason this idea does not go far is because the people who pay usually do not necessarily post good quality content , that degrades the quality of UGC and view time therefore ad revenue loss
Paying for a million fake users would be peanuts to a state actor. Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, etc... These users post on average 2 tweets per hour (my personal observation, not a reliable data point). A million users tweeting twice every hour that's 1.5B tweets. Per month.
I agree that introducing paid accounts would make it harder for content farms to exist - primarily due to the fact that they would need a very large number of bank accounts and/or payment cards. However I don't think it's a real solution to this problem. Maybe as a part of some holistic anti-bot system? Yes, that could work.
Companies will want their content next to specific content which they will pick when placing bids based on a reputation value which will be computed by a secret algorithm. Whoever has a better reputation will attract more ads and get more cuts from the money twitter collects.
Like, I want to show my gun ads next to Trump's posts and want to show abortion clinics next to Biden's. Nothing wrong with this. Want to show public works ads next to Bernie's ads.
Then when you want to post wild things, anonymous mode will kick in and those posts will not be posted in an identifying fashion. They will be posted in an area that cannot lead to the post owner being "accurately" identified. That way nobody knows who posted it. That should reduce some legal issues. If the poster decides to post it as the owner and successfully gets past the Nazi filter, their reputation will be affected depending on the public reception of their post.
Just like in real life. You stay away from people who you don't like.
I guess we'll have to wait and see. The signals coming from the "liberal" side are certainly tipping the balance on the "non-liberals" being the more level-headed ones, at least that's what the recent nonsense written by The Verge editor [1] makes me believe.
I wasn't talking about Twitter specifically. Ads are a dominating revenue model: Youtube, Instagram, Facebook etc. I had an idea of people using crypto payments instead of likes. A platform would take a cut.
I think there is a need for smaller existing community-based social networks. They can be paid for by certain people or crowdfunded once in a while like Wikipedia.
Yes. I feel that "liking" is a consumerist approach to conversation. Buy/no buy, swipe left/right. It's more nuanced in real world. We don't always agree or disagree with people, sometimes we just listen and exchange words. So yeah, there would be less "likes", but they would be more substantial.
Or maybe they wouldn't because it's just twitter and why would anyone pay to "like" something? seems more like the crypto fantasy for a world where everything is a financial transaction. I don't think its a realistic assessment of how people actually value money and speech.
you can see with youtube premium that the value of individual ad views is basically nothing, and getting users to pay a reasonable monthly fee ends up being much more profitable. nobody will do the 'pay per video' thing because its not as profitable as just getting a monthly sub.
I wouldn't pay for each video I watch now, but I could probably watch less. It's like eating junk food now: you can eat nonstop but it doesn't nourish.
How about charging anyone with more than X followers? Or pay to be verified? or pay for support? Supported bot accounts or corporate accounts? There are many options they could pursue. Twitter was not helped having Jack as a part-time CEO for all of those years.
Verified accounts means it’s somebody well known outside of Twitter. So it’s beneficial to Twitter to have them.
I see today’s Twitter as a chat app where popular people promote their content to less popular. Maybe it would make sense to help populars sell stuff directly and get a cut.
That tweet doesn't seem to exist when I click the link. Unless I'm missing some context if you're saying Elon will run for president I don't think that can happen because he was born in South Africa.
Most people have concluded that the "natural born" clause doesn't mean "born in," otherwise Ted Cruz would never have bothered to run. Of course, it hasn't been tested by the Supreme Court yet.
His issue is that he wasn't born a US citizen, not that he was born in South Africa.
Which is probably why they deleted the tweet. They were probably getting ratio'ed to hell. So they decided to delete their shame rather than take their lumps.
Personal info harvesting is at the core of most ad based businesses. Like Google of FB. I’d help people sell things. Like be a platform to sell books, nudes, news etc.
I always find it strange when he positions himself as pro-democratic and pro-freedom when his actions say pretty much the opposite:
He is pushing for a political system/values which:
- doubles down on money == power, to a point where only money is power
- uses pretext of "freedom" to remove protections which limit in how much companies can abuse people, mainly in forms which move money from them to the companies.
But if you systematically make it easier to wide spread systematically move money from the demos (populace) to a selected few and make sure only money is power that is pretty clear cut anti-democratic. (I mean it basically remove the demo from democraty).
And sure this is somewhat true for all democratic states, but the question is how much and if you push for it getting worse. Which AFIK Musk does. (It's also why a lot of people which had looked into such power dynamics will look at you strangely when you tell them the US is a beacon of democracy, it isn't and never was. It is a beacon for capitalism combined with wealth, western culture, military might (in some order) and only then democracy. At least in my opinion.)
So what does that have to do with Twitter?
One of the main complains Musk has with it is how it did restrict "freedom of speech", except it mainly did so when that freedom was abused for spread hatred and misinformation, often with the intend to manipulate democracy to elect people pushing for less democracy. And he wants to remove that.
Now without question Twitter did a bad job at moderation, still I would be really surprised if Musk would improve that. I would love being surprised.
Another problem is that Musk has shown to be a petty person and has shown to abuse the power he has over his companies, e.g. to cancel a Tesla pre-order because of someone saying something he took offense with. Putting such a person in charge of a platform like Twitter looks like a recopy for disaster. Especially given that it's also used a lot by some minorities Musk seems to personally have a rather strong dislike for...
Now I would love to be wrong about this assessment. I personally might not be the biggest fan of Musk but what does that matter if he does manage to create a better twitter.
And even if he fails it might have positive effects, by e.g. enabling a better alternative platform to take it's place.
This is just, like, normal economic liberalism? The think to keep in mind is that such liberals tend not to share your priors, and hold beliefs like ‘free trade is positive sum’ and ‘optionality is good.’
> doubles down on money power, to a point where only money is power
What has he said or done that indicates he is pushing for such a system? Are you suggesting the mere fact of his purchasing a company and being a billionaire means he is pushing for such a system or was there something else he said or did?
I'm asking genuinely because I may very well have missed some important news item or other piece of information. What's your basis for this assertion?
So... only vaguely "famous" people should be able to get verified? The current system is much worse than that, you can find PR firms online right now that charge $5-10k to get an article written about you in Forbes, come up with a fake Spotify profile so that you're a "musician," etc so that you can be verified.
Wtf, how fast am I supposed to respond to you and why should I bother down-voting you?
Anyway, no it has nothing to do with him buying Twitter. It about the thinks he himself has tweeted in the past, and how he acted in the past especially wrt politics.
Should be obvious if you had followed him in the past with an objective mind and don't just blindly assume things, but I guess that's to much to ask (EDIT: the blindly assuming things, the other part is opinionated)
Oh I was only confirming the downvote, not the lack of reply.
But "it should be obvious.." is the Proof by Assertion fallacy. It's not obvious to me so I asked you what your basis is for saying this. Since I haven't followed Musk to the degree you apparently have or come to your conclusion based on the amount I have followed him, can you point me to some specific tweets or actions of his that substantiate your assertion?
Yes, it's not supper obvious and that was a bad choice of words.
But it's also not hidden. I which I had the time to point out a (long) list of twitter tweets which paint the picture, but I don't have that. And there is also the problem that he (understandable) deleted some of his tweets. But pointing out a specific tweet is pointless as someone could always come up with some arbitrary reason why this specific tweet means something else. It's about the broader picture.
To name some examples:
- He is currently actively trying to undermine labor protection law (as well as contractual clauses he agreed to when buying twitter) by masquerading mass firings at twitter to be supposedly all based on failed performance reviews. But if you take a closer look at 1) `the method used for the reviews` and 2) `who is let of` (especially in context of him being a petty person and had personal beef with some of the people on twitter due to how he (verbally) attacked twitter in the past) it is very clearly that it's not related to performance. (But US labor protection law is at best bad joke, so...)
- His repeated stance against labor and/or buyer protection in other cases, too. Like wrt. Tesla factories.
- Him repeatedly abusing his influence to hinder improvements to public transportation, often buy pushing red hearing projects which do only improve the situation for a few wealthy people but can be used as an excuse to kill/hinder other public transportation projects. One of the examples would be his boring tunnel company promising fixing the traffic situation but instead build fast lanes for a few wealthy people while making is majorly harder to fix the traffic situation for the general public. (He knew what he was doing.)
It might not be obvious how this example matter. this
But they increase how companies can take advantage of the general population both in ways which reduce the money they effectively have and reduce other ways they can take political influence.
And they are just some random examples I can drop of my hat before going to bed which I remember good enough to write down, there are many more.
I find it kind of shocking that Musk likes Twitter that much, but at the same time it makes sense. If you ignore the wealth differential, his behaviour is similar to the average Twitter user. He may be the perfect owner in that sense. I also think it will be a clusterfuck within 5 years like some of his "side project" companies.
He bought it on the last possible day a court would allow, so I don't know how much he likes it really. He did try every possible move to get out of it.
The weirdest part to me about this saga is the extent to which Elon Musk is getting away with pretending he didn't spend the last six months trying very hard not to purchase Twitter.
More precisely, at one point and for an instant, he wanted to own Twitter. His subsequent behavior could be interpreted as not wanting it at that price, but his actions were to try and stop the sale - not negotiate a different price.
I think Elon has mental health / behavioral issues that drive this, but because he's a billionaire, we don't really care all that much. As long as he doesn't go full Kanye (which is a line he is scarily close to).
Many big companies have retention policies, where all messages are automatically deleted after X months unless specifically persisted / pinned. It's highly unlikely that Twitter has much internal emails from 2019-2020, let alone 2015-2016.
This could be true. The last 3 years had even more fake news though.
Google docs and etc. don't usually have retention policy.
Imagine a bigger problem: an employee comments in a doc about Russian propaganda/fake news, and execs decided not to invest in eliminating them. Now it's borderline national security issues.
musk makes it clear why he likes twitter - because it lets you talk to the public without any filter at all, easily. Musk himself is whimsical and trollish on twitter but its not clear how much of that is real vs public image
I‘ve been an Elon fanboy since pre-Falcon 1 times and all the time I could simply follow his first principles to the core, be it the switch to electric cars, flight control using a quorum cluster of non-space-rated processors or the viability of methane and stainless steel for Starship against all previous failures.
With Twitter, I‘ve lost that feeling and I don‘t know how it would be possible: Free speech, happy advertisers, satisfied governments globally, increasing or just persisting audience. There‘s just no way he will keep all those targets at the same time.
This is the easy part if he really wants to choose the free speech absolutist route. Close the European offices (which will probably happen anyways due to mass firings), bank accounts and move it all to America or other friendly jurisdiction if needed for tax purposes. They can sue all they want in Europe but American courts won't enforce a judgement that isn't compatible with American law. European governments can decide to block Twitter but then they'll have a bunch of unhappy voters. But this is unlikely.
You're worried about Europe, but how is the US a friendly jurisdiction for free speech? The Biden Admin targeted specific users on Twitter, and insisted those users were banned:
What if Musk's Twitter doesn't listen to those requests? Don't you think the DOJ would apply pressure to Google/Apple to ban Twitter from the App Store? What happened to Parler? You can cherry-pick users "instigating violence" on any platform, including Facebook and reddit. The difference with those platforms is they censor who the government wants censored. It will be interesting to see Musk navigate both corporate media hit pieces and all political forces aligned against him.
Yes, left wing parties are not particularly keen on free speech, but the difference is that in the EU they've placed themselves in an unassailable dictatorship which had just announced it will censor content with a China style system in which bureaucrats sure in dedicated committees inside the organization. The USA has a long way to go to match even a fraction of that level of censorship.
Why would we want this? I don't see this kind of pro-advertiser slant anywhere else but here. Is it because of the google/facebook employee presence here?
I understand that he has been publicly combative with all the executives; but is it a practical to fire all those key executives right away?
Specially, do they not contain any specifically useful knowledge or experience that you should make an attempt at creating a collaborative transition?
Is this how these kinds of acquisitions of public companies happen? Isn’t this effectively freezing all significant activities for a significant ramp up time?
It's pretty common for the CEO, CFO and general counsel to be dismissed after acquisitions in circumstances (like here) where the acquisition is a disavowal of their vision and leadership. Keep in mind there are far more executives than these three.
It's less likely to happen for well-run, profitable companies that are just being acquired for talent or synergy reasons.
The size of the acquired and acquiring firms, and the type of acquisition, also plays a part; if Apple buys a startup, they might want to subsume them immediately into existing projects, so they'd likely fire the CEO CFO and GC; but if Google buys Nest or Fitbit (which serve different markets than Google, and are minor hobbies that shouldn't detract from Google's organizational priorities) they're more likely to keep the entire team intact (unless they willingly exit; that's another scenario).
He still communicates regularly with Jack Dorsey, so I doubt there's much knowledge and experience being lost.
> It's less likely to happen for well-run, profitable companies that are just being acquired for talent or synergy reasons.
Even then, it happens. My current company (mid sized, ~6000 employees) was recently acquired. Taken from public to private in the process. There's no broad plan to change what we do or how we do it, we are in an established market with pretty solid revenue numbers. They still axed the top three executives immediately.
> He still communicates regularly with Jack Dorsey, so I doubt there's much knowledge and experience being lost.
I would not be surprised if Musk convinces Dorsey to come back to Twitter in some kind of formal (but part-time) role. Board member, adviser, consultant, etc
Parag Agrawal just made $42 million as a severance package. His 2021 pay package was around $30 million. You'd save around $10 million by shifting him over into an advisor role, telling him to go home and lounge by the pool, and calling him any time you needed whatever insight he might be able to offer. I don't expect you'd call him very often, since I don't think he did an insanely great job as CEO, but maybe he's got the password to the office safe or something.
I'm too lazy to look up the details for the other execs who were fired, but the same kind of math likely applies.
I assume that they're no less limited in what they can say publicly than they would be if they were still employed as officers of the company. Severance agreements often come with NDAs. So that's probably a wash.
It is possible that there's some value in sending the message that nobody is safe. My personal opinion is that managing from fear like that isn't long-term valuable, and I think moving them into clear advisory roles sends the same message, but I could be wrong there.
> since I don't think he did an insanely great job as CEO
TBF he did the one thing he needed to do - sell Twitter at an absurdly high valuation, great for all stockholders especially in this market. And, he kept Twitter chugging along without any failures. I can't expect more from a CEO.
EDIT: I see the rest of your comment is about why Elon wouldn't need him. With that, I can somewhat agree, though Parag has been at Twitter for a long time, and as CTO as well.
Elon started out thinking he could work with these people, and then as he prepared to join the board, rapidly became disillusioned, and became convinced that they had no idea what was good for Twitter and the only exec who ever did was Jack. I would recommend looking at some of the text exchanges between Elon and Parag/Jack, they've been published and talked about pretty much everywhere, if you want to understand the vibe shift that basically guaranteed this would be his first act.
He's also CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, and is involved in some other projects. Are you sure he doesn't need someone to run the business... somewhere? He needs to have a limit at some point, right?
I think the only big take away is Musk said too much stuff and is now left holding a culturally relevant, but monetarily flailing company. My expectation is he will do whatever it takes to be successful; cut staff, add more ads and paid features, etc. I believe he will also do certain things under the verneer of "free speech", but will eventually do a 180 because it will hurt the bottom line of the company.
I am not sure what Elon's vision of a "free speech" platform is, but if you allow absolutely all legal free speech, with limited/no moderation, it will turn into a cesspool.
This "Welcome to Hell, Elon" article sums up most of my points so I won't bother to repeat them all here.
I’m not sure the latter two are actually counterexamples. The internet has some pretty dark places and e2e encrypted messaging isn’t visible enough for us to really know what goes on in there.
What do you even mean by this? "America" is not a forum or platform, it's a country.
>the Internet
most forums on the Internet are moderated. Forums without moderation quickly are known to become toxic cesspools. Even sites like 4chan needs to moderate beyond legal requirements.
>e2e encrypted messaging
again, not sure what you mean by this. A messaging platform doesn't need central moderation because users chose who they want to message.
Elon Musk wants to set the bird free. But is the bird going to be free? Even free speech people don’t like speech that is critical of their beliefs, the pressure on Elon Musk to widen the definition of hate speech will be significant. The pressure from advertisers will force him to cave.
There will be pressure from platform owners like Apple and Google as well. If the moderation is weak Apple could decide to remove the Twitter app like they did to Parler.
Elon buying Twitter isn’t going to set the bird free, for sure it made the cage a little bigger.
> Even free speech people don’t like speech that is critical of their beliefs
Indeed. The fastest I've ever been banned anywhere on the Internet was forums that were ostensibly focused on "free speech." The term seems to be used ironically.
> Even free speech people don’t like speech that is critical of their beliefs
This is like saying people that like apple pie don't like apple pie. Yes, there are liars and hypocrites out there but those aren't the true believers.
That said, despite the challenges out there, that doesn't mean you just give up the fight for free speech. There will always be bias but the goal here is to even the playing field so we can return to a time where the rules are applied evenly to all players.
"Pressure from advertisers" implies the advertisers are paying more than the marginal utility of the ads themselves in some kind of corporate-back-scratching model.
If the ads provide a ROI, then other advertisers will gladly jump on board.
That's not quite how pressure from advertisers work. Ads can't provide ROI if people aren't looking at them, and turning Twitter into a hellscape a la Truth Social/Parler/Gab/etc. is a surefire way to drive away users, which drives away advertisers. They also don't want their ads to be shown next to that kind of content, which will further pressure Musk to bolster content moderation.
100% this. Big advertisers don't stop spending because they have a moral objection to the content, they stop spending when the customers who disagree with the content boycott and make a lot of noise.
And where do the people make noise about these types of things? Twitter. If they just stop promoting that content and turning a few keyboard warriors into news items, then companies will be none the wiser, and will happily spend money.
But even in the case they decide to jump ship, other companies will fill the gap. Do you think all the NFL players are going to leave the platform? All the sports journalists? No amount of internet outrage is going to change them, they're too stuck on the platform.
Also big advertisers can stop spending because the people who make decisions on ad money spend ideologically disagree with Musk moderation policy. The decision makers are not robots, they have biases too.
Groups can force advertisers to leave the platform. YouTube doesn’t monetize content that is not palatable to advertisers. Similarly whole of Twitter can become unpalatable if problematic speech is not moderated.
E.g. Musk said in the past he will draw the line at legal speech. Assume that Ye (Kanye) posts his early morning rant next week, and it is critical of several groups of people based on religion or race. That speech is legal, but highly problematic, is Musk owning Twitter going to make a difference in the way Ye’s problematic speech is handled in the future, I think not.
High-indignation, low information commentary is... I feel, almost inevitable here.
Elon himself has not really, IMO, provided any information about his plans. His points about making Twitter free, bot problems and such are themselves low-information, high-indignation. The "business plan" regarding advertisers, revenue and such that we have seen so far is basically boilerplate. It reads like generic business school wordage, rather than an actual plan. We don't really know anything.
So... what we're left with is a detached, high-level commentary that is more about the commentor's broader views than Twitter or this acquisition specifically.
I suspect that ambiguity isn't just a communications strategy. I don't think there is a real, ready-to-use conceptual model for free speech on social media. Elon doesn't have one. These problems aren't Twitter specific. Facebook, youtube and other meta/alphabet sites have even deeper issues. Those sites are just less prone to meta debates about the platform itself.
Compare modern social media to Wikipedia, for example. Does Wikipedia uphold free speech? You could argue either yes, no or n/a. I would argue not applicable. Meanwhile, Wikipedia has been far more resilient to misinformation, politicisation, and such. This despite being a high value target with far less resources than comparably important sites. Also despite being more user-controlled.
So... I think free expression related issues are artefacts of what Twitter is, not what the CEO of Twitter does. One giant, centralised, social media site will have the characteristics of a Twitter. The focus may shift around. The political orientation may shift left or right. Maybe content policies go from being US-centric to something else.
> Meanwhile, Wikipedia has been far more resilient to misinformation, politicisation, and such
How could you tell? It's wikipedia (well, the information aggregate that includes wikipedia as a major component) that decides what is or isn't misinformation.
>Wikipedia has been far more resilient to misinformation, politicisation, and such
wikipedia outsources the duty of figuring out what is misinformation or not by trusting secondary sources, which themselves can and quite often are wrong. And while sure, they do have far less politization as twitter I'm unconvinced that isn't just due to a difference in mediums, because there is a massive amount of politization under the hood there. Just go into any mildly controversial figure's talk page and you'll find out.
I said that Musk would never own Twitter, and that it seemed like a drunken bar bet to me. His later actions seemed to signal that he was trying to weasel out of the deal.
I concede that I was wrong. However, it still seems like and act of hubris gone wrong to me. The terms of the financing of the acquisition look nasty.
From what I heard he bought twitter months ago. The drama since then was about whether he'll need to be taken to court to pay for it and recieve the package.
Musk is getting stretched rather thin. Space-X seems to be doing OK with Gwynne Shotwell running things. Tesla, which Musk apparently does really run personally, is doing OK, but their side ventures are not. Self-driving is a mess. Solar panels (yes, Tesla has a solar panel business) are not doing well. The Cybertruck is years late. (Maybe next year.[1]) So is the Tesla Model 2, the low-end vehicle.
There's still no low-cost Tesla. The market for high-end cars is somewhat saturated. Tesla's order backlog is now 78 days, much less than usual for Tesla and about typical for the auto industry. Remember, Tesla has to become bigger than Toyota to justify the stock price. It is not possible to do that at Tesla's current price points. There are not enough buyers with that much money.
So Tesla has to compete on price with the Chevy Bolt, the Nissan Leaf, etc. Electric compact sedans are a crowded sector. Solving that problem is Musk's job.
Disclaimer: Previously worked in Toyota's EV R&D division, opinions my own.
> Remember, Tesla has to become bigger than Toyota to justify the stock price. It is not possible to do that at Tesla's current price points. It is not possible to do that at Tesla's current price points.
Long term Tesla has to create a balance sheet and a narrative that convince people that it's current valuation is justified. Based on my time in R&D I think Tesla might achieve that through lower cost vehicles - they were taking some very bold steps in manufacturing that might be hard for others to catch up to - but could also achieve it through other means.
One thing I was very aware of at my time at Toyota was how many of the nascent supplies of Lithium and Cobalt Tesla was snatching up directly or indirectly. Even if other companies can deliver a lower cost of production it may not matter if they can't supply the batteries. 3-5 years from now those investments might pay off substantially in lower costs for Tesla's rather than other vehicles even if the bets in manufacturing don't work out.
As long as Tesla doesn't own the Li suppliers or mining rights, it doesn't matter how much Tesla got in the past, because going forward all other EV makers, or battery makers, will get their volumes as well. Prices will spike, in which case past contracts can help to buffer that.
And assuming Tesla has a squezze on Li supplies, laws prevent the use of that control to hurt competitors. Braking these laws carries enough fines in all major markets that they will be adhered to.
> As long as Tesla doesn't own the Li suppliers or mining rights, it doesn't matter how much Tesla got in the past
My understanding is that Tesla is leveraging long-term contractual lock-ins in various shapes. One particular one I heard was that in exchange for fronting some of the up-front cost for the mine Tesla would retain the right to buy X% of the mine's output at a maximum markup of Y% over cost to produce.
This kind of contractual lock-in can achieve the desired goal without using either of the mechanisms you listed.
These types of contracts are not new or innovative.
They're usually used by mining companies to hedge future market variance, and are not exclusive to Tesla either. On top of other companies having these contracts in place as well, mining companies will pay to break these contracts if a high enough bidder comes along or flat out pays them to break it.
With demand pricing spiking for batteries, these lock ins are not very strong.
> These types of contracts are not new or innovative.
Agreed.
> On top of other companies having these contracts in place as well
Yes, but scale is important. My analysis at the time was that Tesla was locking in significantly more material behind contracts than Toyota or other companies.
> mining companies will pay to break these contracts if a high enough bidder comes along or flat out pays them to break it.
This assumes the contract is written in such a way that Tesla does not have to consent to the contract being broken. My understanding was that Tesla was trying to get into as many contracts as they could without such clauses.
It is illegal to abuse your access to certain things in order to squeeze competitors, if Tesla actually has contracts that would secure enough Lithium to have negative effects on competitors (no idea if that really is the case), abusing this position would expose Tesla to all kinds of legal troubke caused by this anti-competitive behaviour. Lithium supplier might then be legally obliged to supply Tesla's competitors at the same conditions as Tesla if not enough Lithium is availavle to fulfill orders. Working with Li suppliers to starve competitors of Li deliveries would even be worse. Given Musk's, and Tesla's, cavalier attitufe when it comes to rules and regulatuons, I wouldn't be surprised if they tried so.
Source: More compliance trainings I can count and enough real life experience with monopolistic raw material suppliers to know that abusing market position to hirt competitors is a really bad idea.
Any contract between major market suppliers and consumers that do not have a break clause is open to being interpreted by a civil court judge as okay to break without much, if any, penalty.
What I want to see is Tesla come up with a sequel which is another hit. I feel like their car styling was comfortably out there when electric cars first came on to the scene but now it's become incredibly safe. Other companies, now they are building specific EVs rather than throwing some batteries in the back of an existing car and calling it an EV, are really starting to play with the concept and are making some great looking cars. Cars like the Ionic 5 and the Honda-E for example are making the Tesla's look old hat.
I would argue objectively that you are wrong, or at least that a significant percentage of the population disagree with you. The Ionic 5 at the moment has such a long waiting list that people are selling them second hand for more than they actually cost to buy new.
Regardless, it doesn't change the fact that the Tesla aesthetic is due for a refresh. Whether they have to go as unconventional as some other manufacturers have is up for debate but that they need to come up with something new surely isn't.
Twitter is also a risk, not just a distraction; now foreign governments can demand access and control in Twitter by holding Tesla revenue hostage (e.g., China's approval or disapproval of Tesla purchase tax exemptions), so he's basically paid a lot of cash to give bad actors additional levers to affect his other businesses.
I don't buy that at all. Twitter has been able to withhold tweets from certain countries (e.g. EU) based on local laws, for many years. They can just keep doing that with China. You can't be held hostage if you just comply with the law and take a bunch of tweets down in China, which every company must do.
> if you just comply with the law and take a bunch of tweets down in China
Note the last qualifier in your statement. "in China". I think the concern is that a potential adversary could influence Musk outside of their jurisdiction too. So "in China" becomes "everywhere". Which means that one day your might find that you're not able to criticize Putin or Xi Jingping or whoever else on Twitter because Musk has a large Tesla presence in that country
Fair, but I doubt that would be in China's interest. For example, we haven't seen China try to do that with Apple Podcasts, Apple News or (less significantly) Apple Music content that might be anti-China. I'm not seeing a track record here.
China will do what it always did before with other companies: try to hack Twitter to get sensitive data, and try to place spies in high places to obtain trade secrets, IP, and technology.
I'm not sure if China even needs to actively do anything in order to create a chilling effect on Musk. Maybe he will just censor things on the platform proactively to appease the relevant authorities/interests. That's of course speculation, but there's precedent for it happening already (see Disney[0])
Honestly though I'm just entertaining the idea. I'm not too worried about Musk's acquisition of Twitter
Also physical assets like a production plant. Which I'm sure would never be threatened with a shut down over miscellaneous health and safety or permit violations.
He should not bring in anyone from existing social media if he wants to change the direction of twitter like he claimed when he bought it.
Bringing in a "Traditional" Social media Exec will just result in repeating the same policies all social media companies have, including the clear political bias all of these companies have
I think Sheryl Sandberg running Twitter would be a great idea. She definitely has a ton of experience, is used to dealing with complicated founders and executing on their vision, the only place that she could move up in her career is to be the CEO of not just a large corporation but something meaningful.
In a way Twitter and Facebook are no longer as directly competitive as they were in the old days when it was just FB and Twitter.
I expect Tesla will still be his "crown jewel". He's already announced he's searching for a Twitter CEO. I doubt it would take him much time out of his day to set a general vision for Twitter.
Jeff Bezos for example owns the Washington Post, but doesn't run it (which will likely be the case with Musk and Twitter in a few months), and it doesn't seem to have detracted from anything while he was still CEO of Amazon.
Finding the right CEO will be the challenge, and I surprisingly haven't heard any speculation on who could get the job.
Depends on what we mean by that; SpaceX might be what he takes the most pride in (due to the much longer-term vision, and more "grandiose" nature of space exploration). What I meant was that Tesla is his first priority, which he micromanages the most and spends the most time at.
- Use Twitter to pay for parking (tired of downloading tons of apps in different cities to do this)
- Musk should find other verticals where ppl have to download multiple apps to do the same thing.. just do it in Twitter
- Make Twitter a public Internet identity system. You want to troll online use your fake account... you want to be serious, comment online using your verified Internet ID that Twitter has verified you in many ways
- Free speech .. cesspool continues and worse via anonymous/fake Twitter accounts. Slightly less when one uses their verified account
I think he could triple his investment with a kitchen sink app!
> - Free speech .. cesspool continues and worse via anonymous/fake Twitter accounts. Slightly less when one uses their verified account
From what I've seen, non-anonymity doesn't do much to reduce the vitriol of online discussion. What it probably has a larger impact on is on potentially persecuted minorities (say, trans people), where non-anonymity makes it easier to threaten them in real life.
Well i dont see a way ever to force everyone to use their verified public Internet identity, but such a system is needed. Especially with deepfakes technology getting more evolved and easier to use.
Hmmm...on a different note...Getting downvoted and would enjoy hearing why if anyone cares to explain. Are you not tired too of downloading tons of apps just to pay for parking?
cool and thanks, but that's what Musk has said he wants to do and just sharing some thoughts/ideas around that.
You don't have to use it, but many others who desire a simplest user experience for X will and that's a money maker I believe. A way to reap his investment and then some.
I would very much prefer that he focuses on SpaceX and Tesla, in this order, seeing as he's more or less custom-built for those jobs, and there aren't that many people like that around.
Running Twitter OTOH? There's an endless supply of "captains of industry" in the Silicon Valley, who would be willing and able to do it.
The problem with Musk's solar panel business is that it is more expensive and less effective than normal solar panels. They look nicer than normal panels, but to thrive off of solar you need as much efficiency as possible. Tesla panels don't provide that especially for the cost.
The problem I hear with their solar panel business is customer service. A friend of ours had their panels installed for months but couldn't get Tesla to actually turn them on.
We went with a local company and it it took a couple weeks longer to install than estimated and they were turned on immediately after install. The power company has even changed out the meter now, so we're fully installed and done.
How do you turn solar panels on (or off)? I thought they just generate energy whenever light shines on them - if you don't take it out as electricity, they'll just heat up instead. Is that what you meant?
I sold my house and I still have the panels showing in my Tesla account as pending install ... except they installed them two years ago. Repeated emails to them and I still have access. Kinda tempted to try hitting the cancel install button to see what happens.
I live in Phoenix and a lot of people have been turned off on solar in general for their home because a lot of the companies are aggressive and shady. Seems like a missed opportunity for Tesla to have stepped in to be a "reliable" solar company simply by pricing competitively and not going out of business a year after installation.
They're aggressive and shady (pun intended?) because of government tax breaks that mess with the natural economics of the market. It's become a cash grab by installers to sign up as many people as they can to move money from state coffers to their bank accounts.
That's one reason I did my own build myself. It's a pretty trivial matter for the average high-IQ HNer to spec, design, and build. The "hardest" part is understanding and adhering to the construction codes, and dealing with inspection bullshit.
The problems with the solar panel business probably start with it not being Musks to begin with, rather it was his cousins failing business that he bailed out against Teslas better interests.
Is it though? I found that when combined with their battery offering, which triggers additional state incentives, their pricing is quite a bit below the competition. I just have cold feet because of rumors of bad/nonexistent customer service.
The profit margin on cars looks good. If the 3 and Y cost around $35k and $40k to Tesla, they have a lot of room to respond to competitive pressures.
I think Tesla's battery moves are spot on. Investing in extraction, processing, refining, and manufacturing is going to pay off big time in the future.
I think this is the future for Tesla as a business, frankly. They should be a manufacturer of batteries and other EV components.
Tesla is the king of battery manufacturing. Their EV drivetrains are the most efficient on the market today. But their cars kinda suck overall and they are not going to be competitive with the traditional auto makers in the long run. Better to sell batteries & motors to Toyota, and sell power walls & solar to consumers / resellers. That is their core competency.
> Do explain how a kinda sucky car, Model Y, became best selling car in Europe in September and is tracking to be best selling car world wide in 2023.
Because gas is obscenely expensive in Europe, so EVs are in high demand and there are very few "real" EVs available. Especially in the form factor of the Y, which is especially popular these days.
The model 3/Y are over priced, have poor build quality, and are a nightmare to have serviced. But there are no real competitors (yet).
Exactly my point. So, it will always be limited in market size and hence it may be a gamechanger for a subset of the use-cases, such as the ones I mentioned, but not from an financial standpoint.
With coax it depends on how it's set up. Plenty of existing lines have worse upload speed than starlink because of frequency allocations that are expensive to change.
Phone wires are very bad at carrying data and are usually much slower than starlink.
Assuming only 25% of Americans currently without high-speed internet will opt for Starlink, not counting world-wide users, not counting commercial applications (boats, planes, gas stations), not counting using Starlink as internet backbone (i.e. alternative to under sea fiber).
Most likely Starlink will be a cash cow (and finance Mars colonization).
2.5 people per household. So 7.5% of 42 million people would be 1.3M households. The current price is $1.3k a year, so that's $1.7B of service revenue just from the US. And there are more households that are interested even if they have "high speed" service already. So even with those numbers it looks pretty good.
I was excited about it also, until I looked into it deeper. It is internet service of last resort. I would default to Hughesnet or skyblue first if I didn't have access to DSL, fiber or cable.
This has me intrigued, why? Hughesnet has ludicrously low data caps.
(Asking as someone that fits your description. DSL is offered where I live, at 3mbps. :( Cable/fiber are offered if I want to shell a quarter million to help them build their infrastructure... so no.)
By Musk's own admission, it can never be competitive against the cellular providers - they have the advantage in simple radio/physics terms over satellites.
I have some doubts - 4G/5G access is more and more prevalent throughout the US, and it provides better speeds and lower latency for less cost. T-Mobile's latest "home broadband" router that has an integrated 5G modem is surprisingly fast and affordable now, as one example. Starlink simply can't compete there, ever, seemingly. Cellular coverage grows and grows. Maybe there truly are enough customers cellular will never reach to justify low cost satellite internet? I have no doubts a market exists for expensive satellite internet for those that really need it. I pulled 600mbps over the air the other day on a Verizon 5G connection, just sitting in a store in a small town.
There is absolutely a risk Starlink will be an amazing technical invention, but not one enough people actually need to buy to justify continuing an affordable service. I think even owning a 2nd internet connection outside of your devices could become weird in the future - who wants wifi if the device can just have connectivity embedded from the factory, skipping wifi, routers and broadband connections altogether unless you want them? Smartphones and watches have already ditched the physical sim cards...
The metro/urban bias on HN is rarely more prevalent than when the subject is cars or Internet access.
I live on a wooded lot in a reasonably developed area in Ohio. DSL was brought out to my address in ~2004. Today it is limited to 15Mbps down, 768kbps up. 4G has been available since Verizon rolled it out in the area. I have no idea how long ago that was, maybe ten years ago. Today it's good for 25Mbps/2Mbps on a good day, no carrier on bad. I've had Starlink since Feb of 2021. Around November of last year it had become reliable enough that I could use it as my primary Internet access method. The numbers vary, but I would say my average is 140Mbps down and 25Mbps up.
So in my specific case, Starlink is the best Internet access, hands down. It has the lowest latency, it has the highest raw and average performance, and it is the most reliable. It has been this way for approximately a year. So in circumstances where the customer is anywhere outside of a urban/suburban area, Starlink is incredibly competitive and may in fact be the best option available.
I totally agree with you! But thanks for accusing me of bias anyway.
The only question I ask is, "is there a sustainable market for affordable satellite internet access?". There is no debate it is the best connection for some people right now, but if it is unsustainable that's good for no one in long term. Before Starlink, satellite internet was far more expensive.
Yet to turn a profit, and some big headwinds in way of competitive pressures from other cheaper technologies.
I am also a Starlink customer and live in the middle of nowhere, so... For the little my example is worth as well, I haven't seen anything like as good as those speeds where I am in Washington State, for some time. Over the same period, cellular has appeared in places it wasn't before.
Cellular doesn't need to reach everyone to be big enough to end the dream of affordable satellite access, and the cellular providers fight for the same government money many countries provide to improve connections for the most poorly connected regions. Assuming you are free of trees (a big problem!), Starlink so far only works well at really low density deployments - a huge detractor in many assessments comparing it to cellular deployments, even in remote regions.
Leaked slide deck from company declared optimum deployments is 100 customers per 300km squared, their "100 per 300 rule". Maybe this is better today and gets better with time, but cellular has a lot of radio advantages and a lot of existing infra to expand from. Also doesn't need spaceships.
> I totally agree with you! But thanks for accusing me of bias anyway.
Well your first line was "By Musk's own admission, it can never be competitive against the cellular providers" and then the rebuttal was based around a strong example of it beating cellular providers inside their coverage range.
Not really? How are you going to be competitive with the cellular companies by selling something to what reflects a very small percentage of their customer base?
> How are you going to be competitive with the cellular companies by selling something to what reflects a very small percentage of their customer base?
If you want to make facetious arguments, starlink only needs up to “42,000 satellites, thousands of launches to install and ultimately maintain, plus a fleet of space ships”… I’m being charitable and not mentioning that each of those potential 42,000 needs replacing on a 5 year cycle - they don’t just go up there and stay there forever.
5000 or whatever towers ain’t insurmountable - the USA already has a huge percentage of the population covered today - and has nice benefit of being an already profitable business to be in, and construction can be done by anyone with hands, tools and a vehicle. The tower probably even lasts longer than 5 years.
Emphasis on up to. They only have 3000 right now and it already works. If they go above 5000 it's because they think they will make more money that way, not because they need more than 5000.
> 5000 or whatever towers ain’t insurmountable
The US has hundreds of thousands of towers, and that number gets a lot bigger with 5G.
And while that covers "a huge percentage of the population", not all of that is fast, and reaching the rest of the population gets harder and harder.
> replacing on a 5 year cycle
> The tower probably even lasts longer than 5 years.
Let's say a cell tower lasts 20 years, which is a bit longer than two cell technology generations. So that means starlink needs to launch about a thousand satellites per year to maintain their network over the whole planet. And cell providers need to rebuild 20 thousand cell sites per year just in the US, more if they try to cover everyone.
Starlink can launch that many satellites with about $300M. Let's round way up to $500M a year to keep satellites and base stations running.
Each year cell companies are pulling in hundreds of billions and putting tens of billions into towers, just in the US.
Significantly less money to be made, and even more significantly less cost per square mile of coverage. Especially when a lot of that coverage range for towers can't do tens of megabits per second.
Yeah actually I think this is a very important point. A lot of people are either super worried or super excited about what Musk will do with Twitter, but both of those positions share the assumption that he'll be successful in whatever he's trying to do but I'm not so sure that's warranted. As you point out, he fails sometimes, and honestly the way he talks about Twitter doesn't really impress upon me the intuition that he'll be successful (this whole X thing sounds ill-conceived to me at this point.)
I don’t think many people are cross-shopping Teslas with Bolts or Leafs. The difference in performance and technology is big enough to put them in a different vehicle class. Most of the people I know who are buying Teslas are coming from Audi and BMW, and never would have considered buying a Chevy.
I did. I was coming from a Toyota Corolla and wanted an electric car. Never considered a BMW or Audi, which didn't have electric options available at the time. Tesla won on range and comfort--I'm a big guy and the Leaf and Bolt were both a bit cramped.
Tesla has actually released stats on what cars their buyers trade in [1]. Most of them are not premium brands. Toyota is the largest single brand.
The anecdote about the people you know who are buying Teslas may be more reflective of who you know than who is buying Teslas.
That article is misleading because it doesn't break down the Tesla purchases by model or even price range. Obviously most of them are model 3s. The model 3 is not a luxury car by any stretch and many model S and X owners will say the same about those models. Still, the people coming from the common luxury brands are not typically buying the "cheap" model 3.
I was responding to a claim about people buying Teslas in general. I responded with statistics about people buying Teslas in general. It is absurd for you to come in saying the data is misleading because it's not broken out in a way that nobody else was talking about until you just brought it up.
On a trailing four quarter basis; BMW has more revenue than Tesla ($135bn vs $67bn), better operating margin than Tesla (18.6% vs 16.2%) and therefore also higher earnings ($25bn vs $11bn).
... and Tesla does have debt; in fact, it just for the first time got upgraded from junk to investment grade this month.
Tesla sells every car they produce before they build them, and there are multi-month waiting lists. They don't need to go downmarket. If they build many more of the cars they already sell, they will make a lot more money.
But they sell everything they produce with good margins. Cheaper vehicles can be introduced when needed, it’s not necessary to announce them too early and it could even reduce the sales of existing more expensive cars.
That really depends on where you are. I'd say that Tesla is the cheap kind of car that "everyone" have, at least in Norway. Polestar 2 has gotten quite popular too. A BMW i4 M50 with equipment is around ~1.5x the price of a Model 3 Performance.
I would definetly put BMW and Tesla in a different class, with Tesla being the budget option.
Serious question, don’t they all cost about the same amount of money? 35-45k? I understand not comparing an individual 18k Chevy sedan to a 35k BMW sports car. But with regard to price, most EVs seem to be in the same ballpark.
The base model 3 starts at 48,490. They were supposed to have a $35K version. I think they sold one to a guy once at that price with bike tires and folding chairs as seats.
Ford’s average transaction price (ATP) edged 4% higher to $54,008, according to Cox Automotive calculations. By comparison, Ford’s ATP was about $40,000 in Q3 2017.
he scammed me ... years ago he said to buy a Telsa because next year they would make you 30,000$ a year being a robotaxi... i fell for it.. no idea what he was doing say these things
still no golden goose the "robotaxi" he promised was coming out years ago and told people to buy the Tesla now since they would be updated with this feature... i got scammed, should of known a car making me 30,000$ a year was to good to be true.
I would really like to hear how he's financing this deal. His net worth has dropped since he's made this play. Most of his money is tied up in equity. So who's funding this deal? The fact that this isn't well talked about and that the company is going private is raising a lot of red flags to my eyes
$13 billion in money from banks as a loan
~$4 billion in pre-owned Twitter stock (he doesn't have to pay himself)
~$7-8 billion in commitments from other investors (Ellison, a16z, the Bitnance CEO etc.)
~$8-10 billion in TSLA stock he sold in like May when he announced the purchase at $900-$1000/share when he said it was specifically to buy TWTR
~$1 billion in a major investor (I don't recall whether it was a specific Saudi businessman or the Saudi investment fund or the royal family directly) asking to keep his ownership of the company and trade out the shares for teh new compnay shares
That still leaves ~$9-11 billion unaccounted for in a very public fashion. At one point, Merrill had promised him a $12.5 billion margin loan backed by his Tesla shares. He claimed not to need it (and removed it from being a contingency on the deal a while ago). Or maybe he secretly used it. It's less than 5% of his net worth, so it seems reasonable to assume he can get or borrow it easily.
Matt Levine at Bloomberg has been talking about it frequently as the deal evolved. You can read back through the articles that reference Musk or Twitter in the headline and get a good idea.
"The Wall Street banks involved, led by Morgan Stanley, are also ironing out the steps needed to finalize funding about $13 billion of debt commitments."
"Banks that committed to help finance Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter Inc. plan to hold all $13 billion of debt backing the deal rather than syndicate it out, according to people familiar with the matter, in another blow to a market that serves as a crucial source of corporate funding."
Assuming the same financing as prior to trying to cancel, it will be $13B from banks loaned to Twitter the company. ~$7B from friends of Elon. Then I think something like half of the remaining was supposed to be margin loans against TSLA stock, but since the stock has tanked recently the margin requirements were too high and Musk has indicated he plans to simply sell a bunch of TSLA stock (or otherwise directly from his personal assets).
The entire point of buying twitter was to give Musk an excuse to sell some of his tesla stock. He did just that, and now combined with twitter leveraged buyout loan and the other investors he's brought in he only needs a few billion in loans against tesla shares to close the deal.
- Twitter is a telegraph office. Journalists love twitter because it makes their job easier by stealing stories/news from each other. For the world outside media twitter is pretty much meh.
- Musk unbanning someone doesnt mean much. trump might have sent out tweets with carrier pigeons and the mass media would still pick it up because it sells. twitter bans have very little effect, from the covid misinformation to ukraine stuff
- Twitter is not even cool , why is musk so obsessed about it? he will be spending a ton of time in media battles that are pointless , truly
> The new research by the San Francisco-based analytics firm reported that conversations about election fraud dropped from 2.5 million mentions to 688,000 mentions across several social media sites in the week after Trump was banned from Twitter.
> Zignal found that the use of hashtags affiliated with the Capitol riot also dipped considerably
100% agree that Twitter is only really important because it's where all the people with voices on other platforms (Youtube, journalists, traditional celebrities, politicians, etc.) spend their time. This gives the platform cultural relevance because these talking heads endlessly feedback on each other, but there aren't enough talking heads or enough of their followers to scale to the size of Facebook.
It's just a really bad pun on Elon's part. I don't think you can blame the mainstream media for that. I certainly didn't realize what he meant by it until I saw something explaining "let that sink in" because it was never my perspective about this whole thing
This list of news makes it abundantly clear that the US is little more than a playground for the rich. That's true of most countries nowadays, but the US' overwhelming influence on the rest of the world makes this one sting even more.
They need to stop ruining the experience for those of us without an account. Everyone was using Twitter as basically an open bulletin board and then they go and make it visitor-hostile. I look at ads either way.
You can get a much better experience by using nitter[0]. Easiest way to do it is by replacing twitter.com with nitter.it (or some other nitter instance) in your link.
It always loads much faster than Twitter for me. Maybe it depends on which instance you're using, if nitter.net is slow for you, the other popular instances I know of are nitter.42l.fr and nitter.kavin.rocks; these two have been around for some time and been stable, you can settle on whichever one is fastest for you.
+1, for anyone who doesn't stay signed in it's a "go away" signal - which is ironic because those people are more likely to sign in if they are allowed to read more.
On Android I use Fritter. You can even follow people and get notification without an account. Great for following news and feed type accounts that are only on Twitter.
This is literally THE reason I don’t use twitter. Somehow my 2FA is associated with an old phone number and I’ve tried once or twice to fix but… bleh, at least let me read.
Absolutely. Too many people (especially managers) have Monthly Active Users drilled into their heads and can't comprehend that there is a bottom line ($$$) that is the real KPI.
It's possible that the reduced usage from a bad experience costs less than the gain from de-anonymizing visitors. Because they are under FTC consent orders, their ability to connect shadow profiles to anonymous visitors for improved targeting may be limited, and they are willing to piss you off because that's more effective from a metric perspective.
Not saying it's the right way of doing business or that it won't bite them in the butt... but they definitely don't "need" to do it to save the business if the analytics point otherwise.
I agree, it is super annoying. I can see why they do it though. They want to be able to serve you more lucrative ads, and they want to be able to count you as an active user. (Now that I think about it, they probably count anon visitors somehow, but IDK how they would count them without massively overcounting.)
There are a few ublock filters that solve those issues. Alternatively, disabling cookies for twitter used to get rid of a lot of the nagware features since they would only pop up on the 'second' interaction that would cause a page load.
not sure if you have seen it today but they added a "x" (ability to close) the nag screen that shows up after a few seconds while browsing not logged in, and the main page now goes to a generic feed of news posts and cat videos instead of the signup page. was probably a few clicks in the a/b testing system.
...and then there are stories like this[1] where Tesla is refusing to release autopilot data to an owner who claims Tesla's autopilot caused his car to crash.
Due to the loans Elon had to take out, Twitter now has to make interest payments of over one billion dollars a year. Expect more features that try to wring every cent out of the userbase.
I will say this; I've been really disappointed with the journalism coming out about this - especially TechCrunch. There was an article yesterday [1] that read like a high-schooler writing about their favourite popstar getting dumped.
Twitter is a cesspool of bots, ads & angry slacktivists - simply too much noise to be usable (I left months ago). IMO - Musk could actually be a really good thing for it, I've definitely thought about opening an account again.
How could he be a good thing for it, when he's been completely unserious about it from the beginning? Remember he wanted to get out of the deal he signed off, and he said everything and its opposite about twitter. Nobody knows his plans for twitter not because he's kept them secret, but because he doesn't have any. This is a pure vanity project for him, and completely out of his area of expertise.
And as a twitterer, he's been an active part of the low-information cesspool.
> Remember he wanted to get out of the deal he signed off
Because the value dropped precipitously (along with everything else in the market). Trying to back out under whatever guise possible is pretty expected.
> Twitter obviously cannot become a free-for-all hellscape, where anything can be said with no consequences! In addition to adhering to the laws of the land, our platform must be warm and welcoming to all, where you can choose your desired experience according to your preferences
Ironic considering Babylon Bee was just unbanned even though they violated TOS.
Also ironic that his goal was to promote free speech and painted moderation as evil.
—-
It is beyond me that I am downvoted for pointing the irony of the situation.
So many proponents of free speech have so few regards to give for TOS and have the audacity to demand service without abiding to it. It seems that HN is no longer a bastion of honest discussion and has been overrun by certain individuals.
Or The Bee went through the little Maoist Struggle Session that Twitter built to get themselves unbanned.
For those that aren't aware they were suspended but could get unsuspended by deleting their own tweet which includes an explicit admission that they're evil no good sinners as part of the process.
Which The Bee rightfully chose not to do at the time and let it lie for months.
It likely just means trump and that gay conservative guy who would say things for the shock value. The Bee is satirical site and banning them for anything makes as much sense as banning the onion.
If the onion starts spouting off un-funny, non-satire, completely standard talking points and trying to hide behind "satire" when it isn't, I would absolutely want them banned too.
I’m not gonna get into the weeds with you about what is and isn’t funny. But I think you prove why Musk is facing an uphill battle, the issue with twitter isn’t technological or better moderation.
It’s cultural, we have many people (like you) who believe they’re the arbitrators of truth. They alone understand and know what is fact and what is fiction, even if that fact is a moving target that changes by the hour, the hypocrisy of that is totally lost on these folks (ie you).
Additionally, the fact-setters refuse to even entertain the idea that maybe their “facts” are not based on reality, and they label anyone who disagrees with them as evil. And everyone agrees that evil must be culled. They will often use extreme epithets (nazi, bigot, hitler, white supremacist) to get their point across, no matter how inappropriate, contradictory, or ahistorical that insult might be in context.
Until people can step out of their bubble and be willing to admit that the world is a million shades of grey we’re not gonna solve this problem.
We can call people who exhibit many of Umberto Eco’s characteristics of fascism as fascists when they act in such a manner.
Why should people tolerate the intolerant? Why should people tolerate those who can’t even follow basic TOS and behave as adults?
Why should the world tolerate people like that ex president who mocked a reporter with disabilities, who said he grabs women by their genitals, who has received multiple accusations of sexual assault, has been on Eipstein’s island and likely touched little girls?
Why should reasonable people be tolerant to dysfunctional adults who support such a president and share his dog-whistle soundbites? Why should the world tolerate people who are actively calling for their murder? Why should reasonable people give space to people like Pence who want to shove their Christianity down the throat of everyone else?
I will exercise my free speech and call fascists the fascists they are until they stop behaving like fascists. The intolerant deserve no tolerance.
I'm not so sure. It's something like Christians vs Transvestites, then you ban one of the groups and that's valuable because otherwise the other one will attack Pepsi?
not sure if it was intentional but in case it wasn't, you probably shouldn't use the term transvestite as it's pretty outdated. depending on what you mean by it, transgender, cross-dresser, or genderfluid are some of the modern equivalents.
It's certainly valuable to Twitter's largest customers. Think GM, Coca-Cola, et al. I suspect the industry won't look much different after Twitter has gone private and "new" policies have taken hold.
I'm still surprised that Google didn't just clone or buy Twitter in the 2009 "Fail Whale" era. Seems like they had 95% of the work done already: a highly-scalabile real-time infrastructure that took Twitter years to catch up to.
(Yes, Google+ came later, but the UX of the boundaries, of where the network started and stopped on the web, felt too amorphous for most people as a social media destination)
Remember Google Buzz? Google tried to copy Twitter and automatically added it to the front page of every Gmail account, fucked up the launch by having everything be public by default, and finally declared it a failed product and abandoned it a year later.
In retrospect, the whole thing was a mini-Google+.
Remember when Google tried to make their own video website? It flopped hard and some company called "youtube" started doing it better, so Google bought them.
When is the last time Google started their own truly successful project, rather than buying it?
1. I think any effort to figure out rational motives for this buy are in vain. It seems things just pop into his head and if considered a fun challenge, then why not? A child-like YOLO attitude.
2. Town square. The one thing that keeps Twitter standing is its cultural relevance. It is the town square for the elite (politicians, celebrities, experts). There isn't really anywhere else to go. An exodus to what? The fact that Twitter has almost never made money in its entire history yet is still so culturally relevant is quite telling.
3. Brain drain. I expect the exact opposite. This is the part where Musk thrives and also where he's at his cruelest. He will remove slackers and non-performers without mercy and surround himself with class A players only. Next he'll overload them with near impossible targets and you can't bullshit yourself out of it. You deliver or you're out. I would expect him to run this for a year or so and accomplish more than Twitter's dysfunctional product team did in their entire history.
4. Free speech. His goals are good: focusing on the 80% bandwidth of free speech, but getting there for sure is going to be tricky. This has to be by far the biggest risk factor.
Concluding, I'm mildly optimistic. I wouldn't care if Twitter totally sinks, but it's so bad currently that in a way the only way is up.
Class A players don't work for controlling managers who overload them with near impossible targets. Class A players have plenty of options in tech, and have no need to tolerate having their skills called into question or disrespected by pointy-haired middle managers.
When Bill Coughran was asked how he was able to successfully manage so many famously high performers (engineers like Jeff Dean), Bill explained how that caliber of engineer tends to have strong opinions and you basically have to build a whole team around them and give them the freedom to do their thing.
This is exactly how he runs things at Tesla and SpaceX. Class A players are well compensated and love working on challenges that are extreme and/or world relevant. They live and breath what they do.
If you're that type of player, Musk will respect you and your opinion.
Everyone I know that worked at SpaceX left due to substandard compensation. I don't think it's a secret that you work at SpaceX for "the mission" versus "the money".
Depends on how they value their stock options, no? SpaceX grows rapidly and if you believe in the mission you might believe the sky is (not) the limit.
I know Musk is widely disliked, but there will never be a shortage of talented engineers wanting to work with him, on interesting challenges, for very high compensation.
> I know Musk is widely disliked, but there will never be a shortage of talented engineers wanting to work with him, on interesting challenges, for very high compensation.
But how many talented engineers want to work with him, on interesting challenges, for very low compensation. Because historically with his other companies that's what he offers.
> But how many talented engineers want to work with him, on interesting challenges, for very low compensation. Because historically with his other companies that's what he offers.
But people still take those jobs at the other companies. Whatever he wants in his employees, recruiters will offer the lowest it takes to hire them, just like anywhere else.
That’s true, but does working for Twitter inspire employees the same way that Tesla and SpaceX do? The koolaid goes down easy if you are working on cutting edge problems like self driving cars and rockets. A social media (i.e. advertising) company doesn’t do the same for me.
Astronauts and physicists are separate categories of human. Obviously those who thrive on danger and those who thrive on puzzles are different. Though, it could be risky to present such an upfront contradiction to someone with an established worldview.
> Class A players are well compensated and love working on challenges that are extreme and/or world relevant.
I wouldn't exactly call an aging social media company from the 2010s "extreme and/or world relevant."
People still dream about spaceflight. It's something you can work on that feels like it matters. Skimming ad revenue off of millions of humans collectively trolling each other 280 characters at a time just doesn't capture the imagination in quite the same way, y'know?
Except Tesla and SpaceX operate in industries where there aren’t a lot of options for people who are passionate about those kinds of technologies. There are tons of tech companies they support strong engineers. Why would you want to work for an abusive boss if you don’t have to?
"Frankly, I hate doing mgmt stuff. I kinda don't think anyone should be the boss of anyone. But I love helping solve technical product design problems."
Class A players especially don't like working with slackers and non-performers. If Elon cracks the whip and gets the bozos out of the performers way, they'll love him for it.
> 3. Brain drain. I expect the exact opposite. This is the part where Musk thrives and also where he's at his cruelest. He will remove slackers and non-performers without mercy and surround himself with class A players only. Next he'll overload them with near impossible targets and you can't bullshit yourself out of it. You deliver or you're out. I would expect him to run this for a year or so and accomplish more than Twitter's dysfunctional product team did in their entire history.
Is Musk planning on paying Twitter employees substantially more than other tech companies? Why would any class A player want the privilege of being "overloaded" with work when they can make similar or better money elsewhere and also have better work-life balance? Why do all the Elon worshippers seem to assume that everyone is as enamored him as they are and will happily volunteer to be exploited by him so the world's richest man can get even richer?
Musk is famous for paying meager wages relative to other companies in exchange for being able to say "I worked at Tesla". And those are on public companies where you have to keep up with the quarterly earnings rat race. Normally you'd expect to see better wages in a private company, but given that it's Musk who knows.
If you work harder than the B players and don't get paid more than them, then you are not an A player, you are just a gullible rube who lets other people exploit them. A players may or may not work harder than the B players, but they definitely command more money than them.
> And no, when you make hundreds of thousands of $ per year, you're not "exploited".
Yes you are, if other equally qualified people can make more money working less.
> And yes, quite a few people would love to work for Musk just because he's Musk.
Musk has a cult of personality and there are some people out there with no self-respect who will let themselves be exploited by him. Those people are not A players, though.
In your last point, you reveal your true point: you just don't like him. I don't necessarily do either, but that shouldn't get in the way of a rational discussion.
Weird how you ignore the point where he describes how if you work more than someone else who is also getting paid more than you, then you are getting a bad deal...
I'd work for twitter if they were less driven by political ideology. Maybe I am wrong, but it looks from the outside that one would have to walk the thought line to succeed in many of these west coast companies.
Edit: If I am wrong (possible), help me understand why.
IME for engineering at these companies is that the social or political side of things is mostly irrelevant for Eng. Some folks want to be involved in internal activism but it’s easy to ignore and basically never comes up in Eng work. Ppl just avoid politics like normies and talk about average stuff like “how’s your kid?” not “let’s go to that protest”. Lots of good smart technical peeps more likely to nerd out on cool tech stuff than be political.
>His goals are good: focusing on the 80% bandwidth of free speech, but getting there for sure is going to be tricky. This has to be by far the biggest risk factor.
What I think will be the real litmus test is Azealia Banks, whose account currently remains suspended [0]
She was banned for allegedly transphobic tweets [1] which were political speech by any reasonable definition (she was banned because the way she said it, not the content of the idea).
Why I don't think she'll be allowed back is because she has a personal relationship with Musk/Grimes where she sends that same kind of hate their way.
It's hard to imagine the Trump ban staying given what he was actually banned for. I'm not a Trumper but he tweeted:
"To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th.”
Twitter interpreted this to be an incitement for terrorist attack on the inauguration and banned him, the sitting president of the US, for that. It is hard to imagine any platform with a semblance of free speech stand behind that kind of logic. If you are willing to read into statements that deeply, any speech is bannable.
That's pretty much entirely devoid of the context of everything else he tweeted and the rest of his actions and you can pretend that none of that matters but it obviously does.
Oddly enough, this is the first time I have read their reasoning for the ban. I did not know they had an article on it until now.
Having read the link given to Twitter's interpretation of "context" of the other tweets he made, my conclusion is that it is impossible to dispassionately read the cited tweets and come to the conclusion they did without having a number of unstated priors, based entirely in partisan animus.
The tweets literally do not say what Twitter claims they say. Up until now I had taken it on faith (well, more like widely reported media exposure) that he had actually "incited violence"; but after reading the cited tweets, I am left scratching my head. "Wait, that's it?" was the thought I had. It is election conspiracy mongering, sure, and perhaps that is not something Twitter wants to be in the business of carrying, but that is not the reasoning they used here.
No violence incitement exists in those tweets. Pure and simple. "I am not going to the inauguration" is such a plain, short, and inoffensive statement that reading anything else into it says more about the person doing the reading than it does the speaker.
"Having read the link given to Twitter's interpretation of "context" of the other tweets he made, my conclusion is that it is impossible to dispassionately read the cited tweets and come to the conclusion they did without having a number of unstated priors, based entirely in partisan animus."
Really? I completely disagree. You'd have to burying your head in the sand to come to this conclusion IMO. Twitter isn't even saying that his tweets say "xyz", as you just described it. They go on length on how the tweets are being viewed and interpreted.
Yeah, I thought it was eye-opening as well and it obviously stuck in my mind. If you judge speech based on the worst possible interpretation that could be made by the worst or most delusional people in society, there is nothing that can pass the test.
Certainly doesn't help that Donald Trump did in fact employ dog whistles and subtext during his time as president.
I'm not sure where this leaves us aside from in a post-factual reality where imagination can't be differentiated from the real world. People are compartmentalized by their priors and have no common facts worth discussing
"If you judge speech based on the worst possible interpretation that could be made by the worst or most delusional people in society, there is nothing that can pass the test."
That is precisely what they did. "(Objectively innocuous statement X) is being understood by certain people to mean (Y) instead".
Count how many times weasel words like "is being understood as" or "could mean" are used. Understood by who? How many people? Based on what? "Could" mean? This kind of unsourced and unsourceable fuzziness is a telltale sign that you are reading someone's opinion, not a recounting of facts.
Well they certainly didn't read his mind, and they certainly didn't interpret it the way I would come from any other English speaker.
If all just comes back to my point about lack of common ground. You and I can read the exact same press release and come to vastly different conclusions, and we don't even have a republican in the room
Like I said, I dont like Trump, but didn't and dont read it that way.
I think it is absolutely a situation where peoples priors are feeding into the conclusions they come to.
What you obviously read as ginning up a violent capital mob, someone else can read as encouraging peaceful protest.
Trump was so divisive and loaded that some people come to conclusions completely independent of his actions statements. When he said the quote below [1], some people argued that he was encouraging violence, and it should be read with some kind of reverse meaning. My point is not to debate the actual intent, but illustrate that once you reach this level of interpretation and distrust, there is really no rational common ground for debate or analysis. Anyone can claim anything and there is no substance.
"I am asking for everyone at the U.S. Capitol to remain peaceful. No violence! Remember, WE are the Party of Law & Order – respect the Law and our great men and women in Blue. Thank you!"
> What you obviously read as ginning up a violent capital mob, someone else can read as encouraging peaceful protest.
There has been an entire set of Congressional hearings, with extensive testimony from the people surrounding him, to answer precisely which of those was the case.
The evidence conclusively points to the former, there's really no question at this point. This isn't a matter of opinion anymore or "agree to disagree" -- it's just overwhelming facts, based on undisputed testimony, now.
You can play ostrich all you want, I'm just not sure why you seem to think it makes you look reasonable to stick your head in the sand and ignore everything around you.
> The trans debate is extremely polarizing and aggressive on both sides. I'll leave it at that.
While that might sadly be true in some countries, please know there are many where people are perfectly happy to let people be whoever they want to be.
Unless there is a rational, defensible argument (which I have not heard) of how a free speech platform can repay the investors (investors require more money back than they put in) I cannot see how an investor cannot care - legally. You have to remember that the money they are investing, in part or in whole, is likely other peoples. It would be naive in my opinion to think otherwise.
> You have to remember that the money they are investing, in part or in whole, is likely other peoples.
I think this is the crux of the argument.
I don't believe it is, in this specific case, other peoples money.
I don't have a full list of investment money sources or terms, but IIRC at least $26 billion of that is his personal cash and personal loans secured against his other Tesla shares, and he did have enough to do it all by himself if his goal was "screw the rules, I have money".
While he clearly isn't always aware of the consequences of his choices, it is at least possible that some investors (either in this case, whose names I don't have, or in general) did so equally unwisely just because of his Midas-like reputation, and they don't have such a restriction.
NYT article "Mr. Musk, who took on about $13 billion in debt to finance the deal for Twitter, must also pay lenders about $1 billion in interest payments annually."
Guess we will have to agree to disagree. Never said he was going to make a profit. In fact the opposite. What you are describing is not an Investor but a Donor. Take a look at these equity investors/donors - not lenders.
Fidelity Management & Research Company
DFJ Growth IV Partners
Honeycomb Asset Management
Sequoia Capital Fund
All these financial companies have accepted money from retirement funds, pensions etc on the assumption that they will get more money in return. Please don't troll me by saying they could have given him money without seeking returns. We both know that just isn't the case.
Given the headlines I'd seen, I was thinking more like "convinced Larry from Oracle" when hypothesising someone could have given him money without seeking returns.
I'd agree that isn't the case for many on this list :)
Obviously my opinion but based on some observations. He is not unfamiliar with the fintech space (Paypal). Remember the old joke about printing money - with TwitCoin he would be doing it - literally. Biannce is an investor. He cannot get rid of bots even if he wants to. People do not hand you billions of dollars without some hope of being paid back - even if you are Elon Musk.
You can't just start a shitcoin and print it, you need to back it up with real assets. See SEC and what happened to Facebook's libre.
Getting rid of bots has to be stupidly easy. They start posting the second he tweets. Hundreds of them with the same avatar and slightly misspelled name.
OMG: And what assets back up Bitcoin? Dogecoin? XXXCoin. In Tether we trust:) Those are just the stupid obvious bots. Linkedin recently purged half the accounts that had people claiming to work for Apple and AWS. It is far from as easy as you think. It cost pennies per fake account creation. As they say in the QANON universe - do your research.
I expect #3 to be true to an extent. Elon is very good at attracting very high performing, industry leading engineers to join him but they never last long. He burns out the high performers just as much as the low performers.
> It is the town square for the elite (politicians, celebrities, experts)
Only for a subset of those elites who conform to certain ideological views. The rest have been actively censored or banned from Twitter.
> There isn't really anywhere else to go.
And that has been the problem for those with non-preferred views. Twitter clones have been actively denigrated and, in some cases, forced to shut down.
IMO, Twitter needs to add up and down voting, like HN has.
Open discourse is not for the faint of heart. Never was - it can get your adrenaline up and teach you self control.
My belief is marketing. Toyota spends 1.3 billion in marketing world wide. Tesla has no marketing team but Elon himself is the marketing engine on Twitter.
With Elon owning Twitter he can automate the marketing for whatever companies he runs now and in the future. Also he can invisibly or visibly promote his own tweets. On top of that the company makes 5 billion a year.
I think Elon probably has a very techy view that marketing is bad. And if he has to do it, he will do it in his own weird way with 100% control of how it will be done.
To your point number 2: perhaps part of the reason why Twitter is the town square is because it is not super profitable. If it was as chock full of ads as Facebook I think it would cease to be usable.
In reality if we want a public square, we ideally want it to be a public utility not a for profit corporation.
Corporation or government is not the only choice. It could be a non-profit. It could be a protocol. It could be run by universities or public libraries.
People fail to see that 'the government' running something important to the public does not have to operate as if it were the DMV. Publicly funded can mean many different things.
>Town square. The one thing that keeps Twitter standing is its cultural relevance.
Social networks rise and fall. Twitter is no more the town square than MySpace, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, YouTube, TikTok, Mastadon, Snap, LinkedIn, etc. are, and the attempts to redefine them as such are only a means to political end.
Musk cares more about making money than anything else - he didn't become a billionaire by being altruistic and he's not going to start now after this investment.
More obviously part of his work as CEO and owner will be to develop a meaning and provide Direction.
Maybe he can get people to drink the Kool-Aid that Twitter is and well will be the future of productive Democratic conversation. If I actually believe that, I would want to work there
Regarding #3: I think the stated missions of e.g. SpaceX and Tesla are the main draw of talent. The rest is loyalty, without which most talent would leave for less a less stressful work environment. At the very least I think we can expect much higher turnover and a distinctly younger talent pool. Sounds almost good if you don’t have concerns about the chaotic whims of ruthless and impatient leadership.
> Plus, for the Twitter top legal brass, I bet he wasn’t feeling too great about that bit of litigation the deal closing helped him escape.
By firing General Counsel Sean Edgett it seems Elon's pride is clouding his judgement.
Edgett demonstrated great skill by drafting a watertight legal agreement at very short notice, then expertly using litigation to prevent Musk from wriggling out of the deal.
If I was working at Twitter right now I would be looking for a different job, regardless of what I think of Elon's politics/motives. The talk of layoffs and major policy changes creates massive uncertainty and I don't think I'd risk sticking out the transition. I bet many inside the company feel the same.
This begs the question:
If there is a major exodus, will it even matter? And, if it does, how will the problems manifest? Reduced reliability? Slower feature velocity? Less innovation?
Twitter spends more on R&D as a percentage of sales than 5 other large tech companies, even Facebook, and moreover, the percentage is increasing. Where is this "innovation"?
It's not a new platform. Its market is, arguably, saturated; I don't see a "next billion users" (as they say at Google) coming from anywhere.
So the answer to "If there is a major exodus, will it even matter?" is pretty clear: No, as long as it's not the operations people.
Some of that might be differences in business areas. Have you had to do paperwork for R&D tax deductions? It’s pretty flexible. Like “did you do a design doc for a new thing?” “Did you have to solve a problem for which the answer wasn’t obvious ahead of time?” So a lot of “normal engineer” activities are R&D. So maybe they have too many engineers, or maybe they have less non-engineers and just not a lot of revenue due to their niche market coverage. Aka I’m not sure R&D equals innovation equals revenue.
That's true. I could make the argument that, on the macro scale, it all evens out. So maybe some activities are counted that shouldn't be, and some aren't counted that should be. On the scale of billions of dollars, it probably doesn't matter.
You can buy that, or reject it. I won't try too hard to persuade.
Our whole system of financial reporting is based on trying to make things comparable, and CFOs are very well versed in the current doctrines and IRS rulings on R&D. But we'd be headed into the weeds if we went any further.
To be clear I’m not saying it’s in accurate I’m just saying it depend on the rest of the domain. Social media is different than cloud providers, and require different investments. Social media doesn’t require a hoard of sales and support and legal for B2B and B2G clouds for example. So we can note that in the list the closest example is Facebook to twitter, which also has the closest business domain. So maybe Facebook is bloated too or maybe both just have more engineers as a percentage of their workforce because of the domain. (Sorry I didn’t read the article if this is addressed their)
All good points. If you look online for industry-wide comparisons, you tend to find them behind paywalls. That's why I used SEC filings, which are public. It's also very tedious. I suppose that's why people think they can charge for having done it.
A list of "comparables" for Twitter might be hard to compile. If you take a really new company, of course they have to invest in R&D, a lot. Twitter really isn't coming out with radically new products, AFAICT.
I can't look at seekingalpha without being logged in, which I refuse to do for publicly available information.
Anyway: Palantir is developing lots of new products, being in the security area, I imagine, while I don't know what RingCentral is doing.
In any case, getting aggregate info or industry info, seems inordinately difficult without having a paywall in the way. That's why I went straight to SEC filings, which are public. And that brings me to:
* So you found a couple other big spenders and you want to single out those as your comparables. I'll be more impressed when you define a class of tech companies that you think are comparable. We can argue about whether they are, but in any case: where does TWTR rank in that class?
And then the subjective question: what have they delivered to shareholders for all that spending?
Based on everything I read so far the plan seems to be to make Twitter a much smaller company by headcount so they could sustain themselves primarily through their users rather than advertisers.
My guess is Elon is restructuring the company so it's not beholden to advertisers. He knows that Twitter is going to always be inherently controversial and he wants to structure their revenue so they aren't always having to react to every new controversy. All the social media giants seem to be very reactionary to any controversy, and I think that's because any time a new controversy comes up they are scrambling to make sure they don't loose their advertisers. If your revenue is coming from the users who know what they are signing up for, you can weather those controversies much better without having to take any reactionary measures.
Paid features, possibly. There is Twitter Blue, although I'm very unclear on how widespread it is, how much money it makes (if any), and what the extra features are (other than edit?).
Based on a few articles I've read, it appears he may be bringing developers from Tesla into Twitter but I have not seen anything from him directly stating that. I doubt they will hit the ground running but with time can probably dig into the code and processes.
Sadly I've been in an industry that was focused on taking over after entire IT/engineering/development teams were let go. As rough as it is for the people let go, it is equally demoralizing to pick up the pieces from people either being let go or that were let go. It can be done accepting it will be rough around the edges at first. During the dot-com bust I was one of the people that had to sit with the soon to be let go team members and document their job and automate as much of it as I could. That's all I did for a couple of years.
If Musk is actually using Tesla devs at Twitter he better have a rock solid contract for service between the two companies. Otherwise he opens himself up to a shareholder lawsuit for misuse of Tesla corporate resources.
U wot. If Tesla engineers do work for free for a company owned by one of the shareholders, there's clear damage there in the form of misallocation of resources.
Uh huh. Let’s say Musk writes himself a check from Tesla for an extra $100,000. He cashes it, but the next day TSLA is up. No problems there? No legal risk?
Now let’s say that instead of a check, he gifts himself $100,000 of Tesla engineering time.
I've done that too, it really sucks. My boss wasn't thrilled about it either but it was a directive from a lot higher up than she was. I took that as cue to look for a new job myself, as did others. Not everyone left but enough such that between the layoffs and the devs/BAs that quit caused a project to slip such that they had to pay "fines" as designated in the contract and a couple senior leaders were let go.
In UI, there's a lot of overlap. A lot of Apple people went to Tesla to build their touchscreen. Those people are qualified to work on the Twitter app itself.
Taking your comment in good faith: A lot more engineering goes into "make people click on ads" than you seem to be realizing. And like or not but monetization is at the core of Twitter's business.
If you meant my comment, I have nothing but respect for all engineers and developers. What I meant by not hitting the ground running is that Tesla engineers and developers would not have any of the tribal knowledge from within Twitter and if they were already let go it may be incredibly difficult for any person to reverse engineer things.
I'm talking in aggregates, of course I don't assume that because it would be totally illogical.
I'll be explicit in my assumption. If it were actually possible to rank engineers in some measure of productivity/effectiveness, the median at Twitter would be more product/effective than the median at Tesla. This gap would widen if we are talking about productivity/effectiveness at tasks necessary for Twitter's business.
I've met lots of MIT and Stanford students (can't say the same for Miami).
I've also met lots of Big Ten students, and UT Austin / Duke / Utah / U. Washington /SUNY students. We can compare one to the other in terms of analyzing & fixing software and I'll take that bet anytime.
I mean, if you're a huge fan of him you'd probably stay.
If you're not, you'd probably stay for the severance package, and do absolutely no work in the meantime. No company or recruiter will be holding the fact you were fired against you if/when you're swept away in the layoffs.
If you genuinely like your job there and don't feel strongly about Musk either way, that's probably the toughest situation, and you should come to terms with the fact that even if you keep your job at Twitter it will likely feel like an entirely different workplace in a couple months.
So everyone who is canned will get a severance package? Not sure where this expectation comes from. Does everyone get an employment contract with a golden parachute these days?
If the layoffs are large all he need do is give 60 days notice to those being terminated.
Well, California mandates at least 3 months *pay for salaried employees in many layoff scenarios. There’s some further complexities, but I imagine most employees at Twitter in SF qualify.
*technically, notice. But companies can opt to pay 3 months pay in lieu of the notice, if they want to cut ties immediately.
In many cases a severance package is attached to an NDA and non-disparagement agreement, or whatever else an employer may want to protect against ex-employees doing. In exchange for signing, the employee gets X weeks/months pay, or a bonus of $X, etc.
I think one can acknowledge Musk's entrepreneurship, ability to hire top talent, and risk-taking while at the same time pointing out his immaturity and petulance.
I don't know about being a fan of the guy, he's pretty erratic, he's also done some cool stuff. But even if I was a huge fan of the guy, no way would I ever work for him.
Generally severance is structured such that it's voluntary, and comes earlier than layoffs. You don't get a big package if you wait for a layoff to be fired. That produces a moral hazard that encourages exactly the kind of fraud you're suggesting.
(And yes, what you're suggesting is straight up fraud.)
>And, if it does, how will the problems manifest? Reduced reliability? Slower feature velocity? Less innovation?
I got a good laugh out of that. Twitter is easily the worst operating social platform I've used. Still, it will be interesting to observe if there is a slow and steady degradation of their software stack. Everything in the world degrades naturally and needs to be maintained to fight against entropy.
Elon himself once said: "The organizational problems of a company manifest themselves in the product". Knowing that it will be interesting to witness what "organizational problems" we can derive from the product as Elon takes over.
No doubt some people have / will leave. I think there is a very interesting opportunity too - even if it's just to see what happens from the inside, but more actively to try and be part of a different vision for the company. It seems in one sense like being acquired, which can suck but can also be interesting. And in another sense (possibly) the opposite of being acquired, optimistically going from corporate bureaucracy and overhead and lots of rules and politics to something leaner and more interesting. In any case, it would be cool to see it from the inside
> Reduced reliability? Slower feature velocity? Less innovation?
Slower feature velocity usually means higher reliability as changes to systems are usually what causes big systems to fail or enter degraded performance modes.
If Musk ramps up development and forces out more features faster, that'd lead to lower reliability most commonly.
Haven't you ever worked at a company where the only thing that keeps the product going is ongoing heroic intervention by people with deep subject matter expertise; even in the absence of any actual feature-driven change?
> Haven't you ever worked at a company where the only thing that keeps the product going is ongoing heroic intervention by people with deep subject matter expertise; even in the absence of any actual feature-driven change?
Often coupled with a mindless executive team that has no idea that's the case, and eventually lays off the SMEs because they're "too expensive."
This comment makes me sad because I left a place like this but I know good people who stayed behind even though it ruins their health and relationships.
That was my first thought, too. On the other hand, if you're a local engineer who feels stuck in their current position it could be a good opportunity to fill the void.
I think that is the goal of the announcements, it is always better for everyone if there are voluntary separations instead of layoff's and/or terminations.
For nostalgia's sake, I hope the code responsible for rendering the fail-whale[0] wasn't deleted in the past few years[1]. Seeing it again will be like seeing an old friend.
>"If I was working at Twitter right now I would be looking for a different job, regardless of what I think of Elon's politics/motives."
Imagine already being a bit nervous about your future and then seeing that one of the first priorities of the new CEO was to show up to the office and parade around the lobby with a porcelain sink in his arms?
If your politics don't conflict with Elon's irreconcilably, and you don't get fired, I'd think it'd probably be a better situation than before. Elon is not a bad chief executive and has run several highly successful tech companies that have performed far better than Twitter.
These are times of tremendously unnatural opportunity for people who stick with it. If you doubt your objective value or just don’t like high-stress environments, then yes, start looking elsewhere now.
Can you elaborate what you mean by "unnatural opportunity"? The way Musk has treated employees so far seems to indicate that he doesn't really care about them.
If the company is in a time of chaos, one has an opportunity to be an agent of order. This may come in the form of stepping into managerial or leadership roles or stepping into gaps in the talent pool as an individual contributor. These opportunities can often represent shortcuts in a career track, where in simpler times one may have faced more competition for a position or longer delays waiting for vacancies to open up.
Further, these are great and rare times to learn about aspects of the business to which one has not hitherto been exposed, which in the long term is incredibly valuable practical education. When filling the breach, during mergers or downsizing, one finds many opportunities to wear multiple hats outside of what one’s traditional qualifications would warrant.
I can’t speak about Musk, obviously, but some people will leave because they feel Musk does not sufficiently “care about them”. Others will step forward into those vacancies potentially because they don’t need Musk to care about them, but recognize that Musk cares about the job being done, and they are in a position to get it done, and are willing to do it particularly if getting the job done represents some measure of reward (promotion, accelerated career, exposure, etc).
My own career advice would be that Musk “caring about you” is a ridiculous distraction in the short term, and that you should look at the professional skill development, education, and trial by fire opportunities with very lusty excitement. Truly, IME these are some of the most exciting times in a career if you can stand the heat and they produce very long lasting professional relationships and bonds that may pay dividends down the road.
Alternatively, a boring job with a CEO who pretends to care about you is an option too, but “wherever you go, there you are.” If one has issues with high blood pressure, anxiety or has a busy life outside of work, this may very well be a better option.
Musk immediately created a huge power vacuum within Twitter. There's absolutely going to be senior staff trying to climb into executive roles with golden parachutes.
tbh you don't require 7k employees to run something like twitter. there's a lot of dead ballast there and as a private company you can't allow for that.
Something like Twitter perhaps, but Twitter itself? I wouldn't be surprised if those engineers created enough servers that need to be maintained and require the manpower. Cutting engineers without cutting servers/code would be a nightmare.
I wonder if he’ll really get the dev teams to defuse flame wars.
The TL algorithm will push any account that trends and those strongly networked, it will also promote and make you curate your own strong network.
Whenever these two adversarial groups collide is bloody warfare, yet it’s so obvious to detect such incidents: likely confrontational accounts collide, strongly connected accounts start to systematically love and retweet friendlies, text sentiment turns to aggressive and taunting.
It’s probably a take-at-home assignment for a data science position to detect these dynamics. Yet Twitter introduced precious little to suppress this rage machine, just “block” to further entrench bubbles and long, lawyerly drawn out questionnaires for manual report. I’d say the most half-hearted attempt since Facebook’s.
So if he’s really serious about driving away the trolling flame throwing, I guess it’ll be that.
I continue to not understand why anyone would buy Twitter, or care about "free speech!" as a business directive.
There are plenty of "free speech!" Twitter like products. They attract a niche, and likely unprofitable demographic. That audience actively turns away more valuable, and broader demographics.
"Principled positions" aren't exactly Musk's forte. See also: sending private investigators after the guy he falsely called a pedophile, his vendetta against a single lawyer, trying start up an "alternative facts" news site after mainstream media wrote a series of articles about poor safety conditions in Tesla facilities, etc.
Don't get me wrong, I agree with his statements that Twitter and the internet at large need less censorship and thicker skin. I just don't have any faith those statements are going to be backed up because Elon Musk is a petulant child.
> Musk hasn’t said all that much since the takeover on Twitter, but he has replied to a couple of users who have complained about platform censorship in the past. One is a user called “catturd2” who claims he’s shadowbanned and who tweets COVID misinformation among other things. The other is Canada Proud, a right-wing propagandist group that also spreads COVID misinfo and focuses on attacking Canadian PM Justin Trudeau.
What a nasty comment from an otherwise fine article. A reply is not an endorsement, and not even linking the tweets in question really lets the author hide the evidence and twist the paragraph into whatever he wants it to mean. Besides, it's not like Justin Trudeau is lacking on things to attack him for.
What about it is nasty? It doesn't say he endorsed those posters, it literally just says he interacted with him. I think the point is that he is interacting with these kinds of posters instead of, like doing something useful or relevant, or like anything else at all? I can see why you'd think it'd be nasty if you have an incredibly partisan view that has to sort everything into either being for or against something.
Musk owns 80-90% of Twitter. A few high-profile investors own the other 10-20%. The group of bankers have a huge lien on the company ($13 billion) but assuming that they are paid on time have no equity.
The distinction between "having a lien" and "owning the company" is a false dichotomy. "Owning the company" and "controlling the company" are different, though.
> The distinction between "having a lien" and "owning the company" is a false dichotomy.
It's 100% not. It's secured debt, that's it. If Twitter becomes worth $17 billion, they get - $15 billion. If Twitter becomes worth $170 billion, they get - $15 billion.
To say nothing of if Musk misses a payment, are they really going to foreclose? Or would they renegotiate?
What if the shareholders do not agree to sell their shares? How does he justify his current power over Twitter? Did he buy his 80-90% outside of the free float market?
I think Twitter is owned by a holding company controlled by Musk. I think he had at least two holding companies, “X Holdings I” and “X Holdings II”, with the later a subsidiary of the former, and the acquisition was legally a merger between Twitter and the subsidiary. That’s a quite typical way to legally structure acquisitions.
I’m not sure exactly how the coinvestors fit in the picture, but I expect they (or more likely their own holding companies) own minority stakes in the parent holding company. The debt is probably the parent company’s also, although Musk may have personally guaranteed much of it.
Also, probably even the parent holding company is not directly owned by Musk. Probably owned by one or more trusts he controls.
He might be the majority shareholder, but there is a known syndicate of coinvestors so he does not own it all himself - much of this is public information.
I'm interested to see what happens to the drive to repeal Section 230 now. IIUC, a lot of the impetus for that came from the right (e.g. the Texas AG), but it provides a liability shield to the owner of the platform, which presumably Musk would like to retain.
IMO he won't do anything to improve the Twitter experience until he allows a number of high-profile banned persons back on, which will cause mass account deletions, and Twitter will become a functional Truth Social within weeks.
Yes, lots of people are fearful that they no longer have control over the discussion. The same people who had no business being arbiters of truth in the first place, and demonstrated with stunning brilliance why.
You hit the nail on the head. Mess or not, it was a controlled mess with people getting to shape not just their message, but in many cases actual public debate.
Elon Musk's ideological takeover won't save Twitter. It's too late for that. Twitter has lost too many active users to make a comeback.
I deleted my Twitter account this year. I had it for 16 years. My Twitter account was boring. I'm not a right-wing or left-wing anything. My political commentary is less about ideology and more about practicality and appearances. It was also rare.
Mostly, I used my account to post schematics for projects I had built and to interact with colleagues.
I replied in a thread with a friend about some silly information security "debate" on Capitol Hill. I said that these politicians would be "tarred and feathered" over some stupid grandstanding they were making over information security, and my comment was flagged for inciting violence. Inciting violence? Seriously? It was a figurative statement about how they were going to be lambasted by the press -- no one is going to literally "tar and feather" anyone in this day and age -- leading to my comment being flagged and my account being suspended with a cool-down period.
The real problem is that this automated action changed my score on the platform. It put me in the cross-hairs of their moderation algorithm, which means that any future post I made would be further scrutinized by their poorly written AI. I was at the start of a vicious cycle that I had no intention of propagating. I've had my account since a few months after it was possible to have a Twitter account. I hit the delete button without hesitation, as many others have. I know the horror stories, and I'm not interested in getting stuck on their moderation treadmill. I'll catch my friends on IRC, Discord, or Slack. Twitter's purpose is meaningless the moment one can no longer effectively communicate on the platform.
This bot discussion is just very strange to me. If it is a bot, just attach a bot icon next to the name. Let people filter bots all together, or keep some that they like. If the status was changed or the message was sent via API, print a computer icon above it. Let people know. And again, let people filter those as well.
The spam part is also a solved problem. Gmail solved it 20 years ago. Spam filters are a thing. Activate them to stop elon bots harm.
API discussions are also out of this world. Let people use read-only APIs freely to see their timeline. Give them atom and rss. Vet apps that want to use write APIs. Wall garden your search API all you like. It is a waste of money and time anyway. Even Quora has better results. You may also decentralize search to take some load off your servers and incentivise index hosting. This is a perfect fit for de-fi.
About the toxic waste dump that is the Twitter user base, just teach them some morals and manners. Be courteous and precise, and let people know that they should do better for all humankind and not write everything their inside voice tells.
It would seem that Elon Musk might know that cash is needed for the internal revamp of infrastructure to move and transition from social graph to AI graph feeds in that behind the scenes is making an attempt to cut costs to get an amount of cash needed for such a transition.
What that would do:
1. Attract top creators back as it is more money revenue speculative in revenue one could gain as a creator.
2. Creators coming back would then attract advertisers
His issue with free speech was always a red herring as he has stated many times that h wants free speech under what the law requires which some includes even
the voluntary items twitter has to do to meet the congress lawful section they have to follow that was passed by congress for all sm platforms and all internet platforms in general.
But then again this is conjecture as taking it private will close certain inquiry angles until Elon desires some PR and becomes somewhat forthcoming.
Should be interesting to see the switch to AI feeds if Elon is able to pull it off.
While this might be a boon for the returning of free speech, I wonder if Musk will succeed in monetizing the platform, a task where previous CEOs failed.
Also, had he waited a couple more weeks before making the offer, he could have bought Twitter for half the price.
Even if he manages to make the acquisition worth, I would expect it would take at least 5 - 10 years, so it isn't the best investment he could made.
It seems his impetuous and histrionic side made him act when he should allow him more time for reflection.
I'm not saying he isn't capable of making Twitter a financial success, after all he has a record for stuff like that, but if I was an investor in one of his enterprises it would gave me some food for thought.
Potentially of intellectual interest: I said this on another Elon-Twitter post, but a common quote by supporters of moderation about censorship of potentially harmful content is that SCOTUS quote, "you can't yell fire in a crowded theater."
It's actually a legal myth. The decision it was mentioned in was overturned in 1969. Equally "as false as saying robbing a bank is legal." And it was never the law of the land, just an allegory.
The reason Musk bought Twitter is the same reason other billionaires own newspapers even though they're money-losing flame dumpsters: they're a tool to control the narrative.
When you're the richest man in the world, money does not matter any more. Power and influence do. And Twitter is a big league weapon in that game.
I don't think he cares at all about making Twitter profitable or catering to advertizers. He just bought himself the largest megaphone in the world, one with which he'll be able to sculpt the perception of the public at large any way he sees fit.
I predict he will open-source the recommendation algorithms and allow users to choose their own experience in the UI. He will also allow users to pay to verify their real ID. In the next 5 years, he will work with the blueskyweb.org team to migrate the backend to use the open protocol which will enable his "wechat-style" x.com vision of an app ecosystem bootstrapped off the Twitter social graph. Then he will go after all the other social platforms simultaneously and try to build the most valuable company in the world.
The immediate change Elon should make is to remove the high-pressure “login/open in app” stuff… it’s ironic that I can’t even read his tweets (without being logged in, at least)
I have mixed feelings towards the whole acquisition story but the amount of racism and vitriol towards Gadde due to her highly controversial content moderation policies is obscenely high. I spent five minutes in Musk's "utopian" Twitter mostly going through the trending news topic of the acquisition and right wingers from US and India have been spamming the threads with ad hominems against her. Makes me glad I don't browse Twitter in general.
I think he might evolve Twitter to a more complex, FB like platform with longer text modes, groups, chat, marketplace, job postings and maybe apps. Maybe Instagram and TikTok like functionality.
If his platform will be more free than others and if it does have the functionality people are accustomed to, I can see a massive flock of users to Twitter.
If he has the user base, why not grow it and keep it more on the platform?
As a developer with a few years of commercial Scala experience I’ve been approached by Twitter in the past.
Working there appealed on many levels. They have a lot of Scala talent and a huge influence on world affairs. I turned down the interview request though, because I suspected l’d feel marginalised working at Twitter. My views do not align with leftism/authoritarianism/groupthink/TheCurrentThing, and it’s clear to me that Twitter leans in those directions. Their handling of discussion the Hunter Biden laptop story was sinister beyond belief, and for them to leave Taliban accounts up while banning the democratically-elected leader of the free world just beggars belief.
Knowing Elon Musk is in charge makes Twitter appealing to me now. Musk is a visionary. His achievements and capability speak for themselves. He is a rocket scientist, electrical engineer, mechanical engineer, mathematician and computer scientist. Self taught. And he has a sense of humour and doesn’t take himself seriously. Not many CEOs have these qualities. Not many companies have the reputation of SpaceX and Tesla. I’d be proud to work for Twitter under Musk.
Based on an interview I saw I suspect Musk will strive to make Twitter a platform for user-to-user messaging and payment services. Community moderation without banning might be possible by establishing "spheres" akin to reddit boards so things people see is to some degree curated.
Whatever Twitter "reinvents" itself into, it needs to be in a social-networking niche that's not already served. Otherwise, their competitors will just have an edge-up on them.
Video games? Twitch will beat them.
Longer form videos? Youtube.
Short form videos? Tiktok.
Etc. etc. Twitter needs to figure out how to make money without simply becoming a clone of something else. Otherwise, the community just moves over to the already existing, better integrated platform.
Discord has message history, push support on phones, easier registration than NickServ, support for videos, live-streaming, voice calls and even group voice conferences.
There's a lot that Twitter needs to do before they can get all these features. And if Twitter doesn't get these features, I'm not switching off of Discord.
I have to admit that a few months ago I wrote on HN that Elon could do anything he wanted in order to let the price go down. And for a while I really believed that he would make it.
Apparently there is still some justice in the world, and he paid the initial sum that he proposed, if I understand right.
There is one feature in Twitter which was promised and I am really need but it does not work for me without any error codes. This is ability to publish twitter using nothing more except SMS (no Internets required). Does anybody used it ever? Does anybody knows will it be available?
I think a company like Twitter probably have some sacred cows stopping them from profit. Any new owner might fix that. I deleted my Twitter account years ago because most of the content is spam. Instagram is about the same and I will remove that too soon if it does not improve.
> Elon’s first official acknowledgement on Twitter of his new toy post-deal close was a tweet reading simply “the bird is freed.” This was quickly rejoined by European Commission Internet Market Commissioner Thierry Breton, who responded with a reminder that freedom isn’t free.
> Notably, Breton has previously met with Musk in person and even recorded a video in which he says that he explained to Musk the EU’s Digital Services Act, and in which Musk basically says he’s aligned to everything it contains.
Wikipedia summarizes the DSA as so:
> The Digital Services Act (DSA) is an EU regulation to modernise the e-Commerce Directive regarding illegal content, transparent advertising, and disinformation.
> The DSA proposal maintains the current rule according to which companies that host other's data are not liable for the content unless they actually know it is illegal, and upon obtaining such knowledge do not act to remove it.[15] This so-called "conditional liability exemption" is fundamentally different[16][17] from the broad immunities given to intermediaries under the equivalent rule ("Section 230 CDA") in the United States.
> In addition to the liability exemptions, the DSA would introduce a wide-ranging set of new obligations on platforms, including some that aim to disclose to regulators how their algorithms work, while other obligations would create transparency on how decisions to remove content are taken and on the way advertisers target users.
That Musk agrees (or at least did agree) to essentially everything in here suggests that a good chunk of the work going forward will be around policing "illegal" content.
In this light, the last point in the TechCrunch article sounds a little ominous:
> One of Musk’s first big leadership decisions appears to be to install a content moderation council that will help decide matters like who gets banned on the platform and for what — similar to Facebook’s Oversight Board.
> Twitter does already have a trust and safety council that acts in an advisory capacity, but that’s a large group that seems to act more behind the scenes to inform product decisions, whereas this would be a ‘Supreme Court’ of sorts for decisions on who gets to tweet and what in cases of controversy.
I would take any instability that is coming in exchange for forcing the issue of opening up algo-curated feeds to the public. Same with the what the FB whistleblower was arguing for. sounds like Musk might do it.
Second, if Lightning is integrated, that would be a fascinating experiment and step forward in tech payments.
Back to the open box:
There is so much very needed tech policy that is impossible to start because the curation is a black box and policymakers have no idea where to start and the public has no idea how to parse the information they get.
Now, it's very likely the box is opened, nobody looks or still doesn't understand, and that's that.
But I don't see anyway to get past "the internet is a series of tubes" or "Senator, we sell ads" or spam filters getting accused of causing bias or.... without at least getting the information out in the open vs. trusting tech companies' explanations which lost all credibility as good-faith operators years ago.
Reddit is privately owned by Advance Publications which is privately owned by the Newhouse family. Nobody can just buy it if they're not willing to sell it.
I expect mainly an integration of some annoying monetization schemes and, of course, dogecoins. Moderation is a cursed issue and an influx of toxic content/users from Parler/GAB/Truth will only aggravate it.
I love the description, "whimsical chaotic energy". I would like to meet that man. I'm not sure that is the best way to describe the man who labeled a critic as "pedo guy".
I think that depends on some definitions. There have been much larger purchases in the past that largely boiled down to one individual. And what about Berkshire Hathaway? That's sort of just another name for Warren Buffett. Certainly some large acquisitions there.
I'm coming from the POV that a financial decision boiling down to one individual on behalf of some company is different than a purchase made by an individual
I hope they put an end to the unsolicited promoted tweets and recommendations that aren't of interest to me AND are interleaved with stuff I'm explicitly following.
I have what is probably an unpopular opinion. I would like to see two things happen:
1. more people use and support by generating content platforms like Mastodon where there is some expectation of privacy and openness. I like Mastodon.
2. I also like Twitter, and I would like to see it a more self regulated platform, with some form of effective real ID, probably charging $1 to $2 dollars a month for its use. This might reduce the number of bots, or not. I am also in favor of allowing people I very much disagree with to be on the platform, with some form of no hate speech moderation. EDIT: and no doxing, etc.
There needs to be some form of sybil resistance, perhaps allowing unlimited post size, but charging 1 cent per character. Spam needs to be expensive.
The users should be allowed to decide for themselves what they see. My perspective is that hate speech is basically an identical problem to spam. If you can solve spam, you solve hate speech and self-advertisements and whole other classes of problem.
Also, it's a social media platform. You basically dox yourself. The current service requires you to give them your phone number and encourages you to use your real name and location on your profile. It doesn't get much worse than that.
I like your idea of charging 1 or 2 cents per character.
I forgot that Twitter already requires a phone number for registration. My phone number is not public, but I definitely use my real name, put my location, and try to send people to my web site by posting that link.
Whenever I go on vacation overseas Twitter shows me ads in a language I cannot understand. This is one of many clearly-identifiable problems that are not rocket science to fix. And Elon Musk has a reputation for fixing problems.
When Twitter shares are publicly traded again in a few years, Musk's purchase price of $44 billion will look like a bargain.
My prediction: In 5 years Twitter's market cap will exceed $150 billion.
Hitting the (fake) kid is SOOOOOO reliable, that Luminar used Tesla as their "crashes into dummy" car in CES 2022. IE: They're so confident that Tesla will hit that balloon child, they are using it for live in-person demos of their technology.
We just have a disagreement. I don't think that bugs in beta software means "he actively pushes forward broken products". It may still be wrong to inflict beta software on humans, but that is a separate ethical consideration.
Yeah, I experience the same thing on YouTube. It's entertaining, so I'm not really complaining, but it's of course wasted money for an advertiser to try to sell me a subscription to a local streaming service or buy shampoo that I've never heard of.
It shouldn't be that hard to realize I'm only visiting a place and that they should keep serving me whatever ads I would see at home (or maybe tourist related stuff).
> Whenever I go on vacation overseas Twitter shows me ads in a language I cannot understand. This is one of many clearly-identifiable problems that are not rocket science to fix.
I like this feature. For a brief moment, I can't be marketed to.
My indignation is high, beyond that I have zip to say.
JK. Good on Elon.
In my opinion a good centralized twitter government is impossible. The only path to goodness that I can see is to empower the individual twitterers with a box of tools for filtering their own personal twitterscape. Beyond that leave twitter 100% freespeechy. But then that's my default opinion for all social media.
The reason why Musk eventually bought Twitter, when he did, and at the price he paid, was to avoid having to testify under oath in the lawsuit against him. He was going to be deposed, exposed, and in the end he was also going to lose and suffer the indignity of having to pay a high price for something he fiercely said he didn't want anymore. Better bite the bullet earlier than later.
Now that doesn't explain why he wanted to buy Twitter in the first place, but there doesn't necessarily need to be a strong reason. He got frustrated as a user, he got bored, he thought "hey why not buy that thing" and that set a series of cogs in motion that couldn't be stopped before it was too late.
(He's the richest guy in the world; one would assume there are armies of people around him making sure his desires are met fast. If he says "let's buy Twitter", then those people make it happen.)
I don't think he has the beginning of a plan. He said "free speech!", and then also "but not hellscape!" But, some amount of free speech without being a pure hellscape is close to what Twitter is right now. That's not a plan for the future, that's an observation of how things are at present.
If he can simply wait for Twitter to be worth as much as he paid for it, so that he can sell it again and cover his losses, that will be a fairly good outcome.
> If he can simply wait for Twitter to be worth as much as he paid for it, so that he can sell it again and cover his losses, that will be a fairly good outcome.
This is a leveraged buyout.
That means that $13 Billion was borrowed from Morgan Stanley to make this deal happen, and Twitter is the owner of that debt. Estimates are ~$1.3 Billion / year in interest payments (the most risky $3 Billion is unsecured loans, expected to be CCC-rated, and CCC-rated debt is around 16% right now). So I think 10% is a reasonable estimate for what this financing will cost.
In 2021, Twitter made... _NEGATIVE_ 200-million bucks.
So... yeah. Add $1.3 Billion of interest payments on top of that, and I think we got a problem here folks. Another note: TWTR's revenue (mostly advertisements) is $5 Billion/year. I really dunno where they're gonna find $1.3 Billion/year from.
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What Musk bought here is a white elephant. It will cost tons of money just to stay afloat, let alone "make money" or even "retain value". If Elon Musk holds onto this and "only" loses a few dozen billion over the next few years, I think he'd have done a good job. I have no expectation that TWTR will remain a $44 Billion company over the next decade. Selling the company off for $20 Billion 5 years from now (IE: a $24 Billion loss) would be a herculean effort as it is IMO.
The debt payments and IR -- was this the trick to have the money upfront, then sell the debt, so banks, do they own any amount of Twitter or did they get a payout immediately after "the ink dried", and now this $1.3bb scenario is going to be offloaded onto someone else? Financial engineering that leads to Musk's ownership and banks payout. And now is the when the price of that debt is highest, so the highest possible payout (?). Because you've pointed out the paradoxical financials, IR payments seem whimsical, or a way to eventually sell more TSLA stock...
The banks own the debt and will try to syndicate it out to new investors later. This is standard in an LBO. The banks provide "bridge financing" for the deal while they line up end debt investors. But the banks are ultimately on the hook if the debt market freezes up, as happened here.
ETA: Financing the Merger section of the proxy lays all this out:
Pursuant to a debt commitment letter (which we refer to as the “debt commitment letter”), Morgan Stanley Senior Funding, Inc. and the other financial institutions party thereto committed to provide to Acquisition Sub (which we collectively refer to as the “bank debt financing”):
• a senior secured term loan facility in an aggregate principal amount of $6.5 billion;
• a senior secured revolving facility in an aggregate committed amount of $500.0 million;
• up to $3.0 billion in aggregate principal amount of senior secured bridge commitments (which commitments may be replaced by the proceeds of the issuance of one or more series of senior secured notes (in escrow or otherwise) pursuant to a Rule 144A offering or other private placement, as contemplated by the debt commitment letter); and
• up to $3.0 billion in aggregate principal amount of senior unsecured bridge commitments (which commitments may be replaced by the proceeds of the issuance of one or more series of senior unsecured notes (in escrow or otherwise) pursuant to a Rule 144A offering or other private placement, as contemplated by the debt commitment letter).
This is why banks always take it in the shorts really badly during downturns. They’re always chasing yields and behind the curve while being in the stereotypical ‘conservative’ financial position of low information about how anything actually works.
I’m amazed we haven’t had several high profile ‘jumped out of window’ events related to this already. Seriously, who thought it was a good idea to sign off in this from the financier side?
tbh i've heard quite a few CLOs are sitting with warehouses now open for upwards of 200 days, so MS may just be waiting for them to get desperate to fill up so they don't take so much of a haircut. my guess is the overall prime to sub-IG spread isn't going to be moving down, but this is kinda an advantage for illiquid 144a offerings.
I don't recall the full details. But I think it was roughly 50% effectively fixed (in April 2022) and 50% effectively adjustable.
Thus: the estimate for ~10% for the overall debt deal. The fixed-portion of the debt is already hilarious to look at, IIRC Morgan Stanley expected 11% yields for the CCC tranche, but are now looking at 16%+. Morgan Stanley's losses are already in the hundreds-of-millions.
My understanding is that normally the banks would have sold this debt long before the deal closed. However due to Elon's putting the deal "on hold" and what followed, the bank wasn't able to do the usual road show to sell the debt to investors. The banks are on the hooks for this now. And while they will likely be able to package and sell it still, they will be doing so in a much different environment than back in April when Elon made the offer to buy the company.
One "cost savings" will come in the form of employee layoffs and then the following payroll reductions. IF twitter retains it's advertisers and continues to add additional advertisers this will make it profitable in short order. In fact, if I was in the marketing division at twitter I would be drumming up business.
If it is possible for Twitter to layoff employees, retain previous customers, and add more... I dunno, what was the previous management doing? I mean it is of course possible that Musk is just much more competent than them.
I think you can read through the exact same thing Musk was questioning in those leaked convos between him and Twitter's CEO. That'll be his game for sure, cut down on cruft. The hell does twitter need 7500 people for even at current state of affairs if not moderation or sheer incompetence?
Musk runs his existing employees very hard. Most tech companies don’t. There maybe room to squeeze out more juice per employee. Surely this will push some out, but new people will come in and replace them.
This isn't just a white elephant, that title belongs to projects like the unfinished Dubai islands, which "only" cost about $8b. A forced purchase worth $44b for a company that's lost up to $1.5b in a year is a sword of Damocles hanging one inch over Elon's head. It has a very good chance of sinking him financially.
Sounds like you are defining a hood job solely on financial parameters which i don’t think should be the goal markers. That said I realize you are responding to the financial aspect of the question.
Also he likely has a plan to get more revenue otherwise he likely (caveat he is quite impulsive) wouldn't have jumped in. Theres clearly an idea to a path for a better company - well see if that can execute.
I'd actually say that the macro market changed so dramatically during the debacle that he got cold feet given that his other assets devalued and still had to pay the asking price for an overpriced company is why he tried to back out.
Though he might not have a plan - that's also plausible.
Firing 1,000 non-contributing engineers is easier said than done. There will be enough false positives in that number that a lot of essential knowledge about the systems may walk out of the door too.
On your second point, how does eliminating content moderation boost revenue? Twitter’s revenue comes from advertisers, and they generally don’t want their ads to be shown next to offensive user-generated content. Nobody in corporate America is clamoring to buy banner space on 4chan — sites with the least moderation are also the least attractive to advertisers.
When normal people get drunk and have bad ideas they phone an ex-girlfriend or sign up to a marathon. When you are the richest man in the you blow half your fortune on a social media platform.
The job of a good lawyer is to predict what the judge is going to say after the client has wasted his money on litigating. The main purpose of going all the way to trial is if someone is lying. Then that's the job of the jury to determine who's lying and who's telling the truth.
It had to be a hell of a problem he faced should the suit move forward:
Twitter is worth perhaps half the price Elon paid
Tesla is worth half what is was when Elon started accumulating shares
IOW Elon used money that cost him 2X what is did last year to buy something worth 0.5X what he just now paid (assuming the check clears).
Even for the Richest Man Ever that will sting.
Innovation may take a back seat to cost cutting, like a basic LBO. Elon has creditors who lent him about $13B that got used to buy a thing worth half what was paid. What are the covenants on that? Twitter has about $4B in existing long term debt. Twitter free cash flow is negative, and 3X more negative than a year earlier. Where will debt service come from?
These are the mundane, apolitical reasons Twitter faces more headwinds now than before. Elon is much about doing more with less. He will need a lot of that to happen.
He said exactly why he bought Twitter. Yet you dismiss his reasons out of hand. Don’t even mention them in your analysis. And presents this theory of a very reactive, fearful personality who is motivated by money and has little vision for the future.
(People will agree with you. Because the question they ask is: “How is Elon Musk a smaller person than I am?”. They ask that not because they want to understand. But because they think this was somehow some form of personal competition. “If Elon is good I am bad“. Nietzsche said, another persons vanity triggers us only if we feel their vanity to stand in the way of our own. And sometimes, that leads us to see vanity where there might be none. Because what we’re looking at, really, is the mirror.)
Yeah. There are too many bots and therefore he doesn't want to buy Twitter. In fact, Twitter is lying about their bot numbers, so please Mrs. Judge, don't force me to buy Twitter. Its such a bad value no one should buy it at $44 Billion.
Also, I don't wanna do the deposition Mrs. Judge, I'll go through with the $44 Billion transaction. Also, I wanna buy Twitter now and its going to be amazing and called "X", the everything company. Please get Twitter's lawyers off of me and don't drag me through this trial anymore.
He's said any number of things that are either not true or at least misleading over the years. Taking tweets at complete face value with Musk is... unwise.
Not my experience, at all. He’s been very consistent about what he values throughout the years. And he has also been very honest about when he had been wrong (say about “having egg on his face” about FSD timelines, or “seeing the world in radar”).
> A U.S. judge has determined that Elon Musk's 2018 tweets that funding had been secured to take electric car maker Tesla private was inaccurate and reckless, saying "there was nothing concrete" about financing from Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund at that time.
Neither do you. Are you referring to the bots saga? He initially said he wanted to buy Twitter because he wanted to rid it of bots. Then he said he didn't want to buy Twitter because there were too many bots. That doesn't make a lot of sense.
It doesn't for the same reason there isn't already a "WeChat" of the west.
Additionally Twitter has as far as I can tell (speculative) a much much less stable foundation in the EU then it seems if you just look at daily users count.
EDIT: It's not only what everyone has (WeChat in China), instead of just many people (WhatsApp in EU). It's also the default payment service, you pay through it all the time in all kinds of situations. It's like WhatsApp but more monopolistic combined with PayPal but also more monopolistic. And both with full government support so no worries some bank lobby gets in you way.
I can't square that ambition with the idea that Twitter is 4x overstaffed and needs to shed 75% of its workforce, though.
If he has ambitions to turn Twitter into an Everything App, he'll need to diverrt a significant portion of the workforce onto that project, leaving him with a fraction of a fraction of the current workforce to keep Twitter's microblogging and ad shilling platform up and running.
Twitter is a pool of highly capable people, a large user base, and, currently, opportunity. A messaging platform added to their microblogging service is not outside the realm. It already has DM and Vine-like video.
He mentioned "the everything app" I think once? But -- IMHO -- people who tweet don't fit the profile of people who would need such an app. They're trying to sell stuff, not buy stuff.
They are also demonstrating that they're likely to use specialized services for specific tasks - Twitter is a very specialized tool. This is the exact opposite from someone who draws any profit from an "everything app".
If not even Facebook with its userbase of people already using a single mediocre tool for different purposes manages to crack the "everything app for the west" nut, Twitter is bound to fail.
Maybe everyone is bound to fail simply because the concept does not fly in the west.
I've read some speculation that Musk did it because he wanted to dump a bunch of Tesla stock without tanking its price (with the justification being to help fund the Twitter buyout) and thought he could somehow back out of the agreement unscathed.
I have no idea how accurate that is, though, and I'm certainly not a lawyer.
I think he has handed people enough rope to hang themselves.
It is now very clear if those figures were dodgy the deal was off so everyone involved knew the stakes were incredibly high.
He now has access to all the data, all the communications and all the time he wants to prove his case.
If it turns out twitter has been misleading everyone then it just takes 1 or 2 people threatened with criminal charges to make deals and everyone turns on everyone and it all collapses with enough evidence for many lawsuits to claw back money.
If the evidence isn't there because they didn't mislead anyone then that's also fine, he agreed a fair deal at the time based on accurate information.
> But, some amount of free speech without being a pure hellscape is close to what Twitter is right now. That's not a plan for the future, that's an observation of how things are at present
I think the issue is that a lot of people disagree with your assessment and think the censorship has gone too far for far too long. You might not think so, but a significant portion of the population does.
I view Elon's purchase of Twitter the same as other ultra wealthy people that purchase a news or media business (The Atlantic - Laurene Powell, Washington Post - Bezos), a way to shape narratives and control information.
The question is, was a new media platform worth the price compared to a "newspaper" or magazine?
What I don't understand is the lawsuit from Twitter. There's an high risk that this is going to damage the company in the long run, so why did the company decided to force him to finish the deal? Sounds a bit kinda suicidal
Or it could be that he was tired of Ideologues controlling the narrative and deciding what is right/wrong/misinformation/fake news etc for the rest of us.
The political effects Musk is after are mostly accomplished by removing bans on a small number of people and accounts. The rest can stay (roughly) the same.
I find it really distracting that the mainstream media writes about Musk in such derisive style. Do journalists find him threatening in some way? Do the leftwing-dominated media resent him for supporting Republicans? Do they think we’re not smart enough to critically appraise Musk ourselves?
It is fashionable to dislike Elon, and many people who call themselves journalists have been coasting for the past 6 years by simply saying whatever is in fashion with little or no investigation. Twitter was the primary seat of that power, so change of twitter is perceived as a threat to their cultural relevance.
There are also a lot of good reasons to dislike Elon. But the media groupthink you're identifying lies mostly in this, IMO.
> Do journalists find him threatening in some way? Do the leftwing-dominated media resent him for supporting Republicans? Do they think we’re not smart enough to critically appraise Musk ourselves?
Derision is the minimum-investment method for participating in a conversation. You expend a speck of opinion, you get a speck of attention. I guess the numbers work out better than "just ignore".
Prediction: Brain drain at Twitter begins as Elon starts enacting unpopular policies. Valuation tanks. Morale becomes non-existent and Twitter slowly starts to fade from existence while competitors begin to fill the void. I give it 3-5 years before it's gone full husk.
Prediction: Twitter becomes more efficient, focused and profitable than they ever have been. And it will return to the platform neutrality and free speech ideals it had prior to 2015ish.
"If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor"
Of course, it's not always clear what injustice is and reasonable people might disagree, but I think there are certain minimum standards, like "anti-semitism and blatant racism are bad".
In my experience with Twitter, and most situations, the who is the oppressor and who is the oppressed is largely subjective. There is very little objectivity. The old twitter way was; "any speech that makes me offended or uncomfortable is oppressive" ...which would ultimately lead to a shadow ban or permanent "suspension" of the account labelled as "oppressive."
A great example of this is the thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of accounts, which were permanently banned in October of 2021. Their own thought crime was posting revelations from Ashely Biden's diary and Hunter Biden's laptop. The excuse was " Russian disinformation" but news of late have proven Twitter's statement as clear disinformation in itself.
Musk had already said content that is illegal won't be permitted, and troublemakers will be dealt with, and that perma-ban will be final course, not the first & only.
The American constitution has done a uniquely good job of enumerating those limits. It seems like a stretch to paint a de facto adherence to free speech (as outlined by the law of the land in a given jurisdiction) as oppressive, when the status quo has been unilateral normative judgements of relevant political speech by an unrepresentative cabal of employee-activists.
> The American constitution has done a uniquely good job of enumerating those limits.
Assuming you're referring to constitutional law jurisprudence here and not the First Amendment's meager words here, I don't think I can agree with this statement. The short summary of the jurisprudence is that the government has no powers of censorship whatsoever, and the margins of where speech can become illegal are so far away that it's basically impossible to reach them (e.g., to reach the bar in Brandenburg, you more or less need to be at the head of a literal mob getting ready to lynch somebody). Unless you're a student.
As a guideline for moderation, it's absolute shit. There's ample evidence that absence of moderation will cause forums to degrade into cesspools, and the guideline of First Amendment jurisprudence is that the government is not permitted to be a moderator.
The American constitution contains like ten words about free speech, zero of which provide any explanation for what free speech means. Maybe you could say that the particular legal interpretation of those words in the US has done a good job enumerating the limits of free speech - but the text of the constitution sure as hell hasn't.
Legal interpretation of the constitution has also very clearly found that a huge collection of actual literal Nazis marching around shouting "death to jews" at the top of their lungs is a-okay. Excuse me if I'm not super excited for that to be present on various social media platforms.
Sorry, I should have been clearer, I thought it'd be evident that I meant the legal understanding that emerged from the constitution, rather than the text itself.
Of course I despise the vitriol spewed on twitter as much as anyone else, but I'd sooner that idiocy be exposed and ridiculed than cede control over acceptable speech to ideologically motivated moderators in the inevitable instances where the ethical lines are blurrier. I realize that's a bit of an antiquated view, and the prevalent opinion is that these people can't be reasoned with and thus shouldn't be platformed, but I truly believe that that cynicism is a greater threat to our liberal institutions than the odd troll or bigot making racist remarks with 25 followers.
I think it is rather important. Because once you recognize that this is the legal understanding rather than the text itself a really critical thing emerges. Interpretation has not been the same throughout history. When was the time when our interpretation of the constitution produced optimal social media moderation policy? If it is now, what happens when in the future interpretation of speech rights changes? Or even right now? "Bong hits for Jesus"-kid was punished and that was upheld as consistent with the 1st amendment.
> but I'd sooner that idiocy be exposed and ridiculed than cede control over acceptable speech to ideologically motivated moderators in the inevitable instances where the ethical lines are blurrier.
Great. Will you also be willing to be the person who experiences a torrent of hate speech directed at them? This is not an abstract thing where somebody else can "expose and ridicule" proponents of hate. You need to be willing to have the Nazis literally protest at your home and your job every single day and not leave.
> the odd troll or bigot making racist remarks with 25 followers.
If you think this is an honest portrayal of the state of hate on social media when moderation is reduced to "everything that isn't illegal" then you are grossly mistaken.
The fact that legal interpretation has changed over time is a feature; the essential point is that it is within the democratic institution of the judicial system that the debate over and enforcement of acceptable speech should occur.
Yes, I am committed to backing up my philosophical attachment to free speech at the expense of personal inconvenience. I realize that's an empty statement without actually being subjected to that reality, but that's the best I can do.
If I'm wrong about the extent to which hate speech proliferates in unmoderated spaces (absent the adverse selection effect for sites like 4chan), then that's all the more reason to address that undercurrent of our societies. If anything, I'd argue pushing people off platforms where they might encounter dissenting views exacerbates radicalization.
I don't believe that it is the best you can do. What you can do is become an active ally, through your time or money, for the people who will suffer by having hate invade their spaces.
> Legal interpretation of the constitution has also very clearly found that a huge collection of actual literal Nazis marching around shouting "death to jews" at the top of their lungs is a-okay.
Not okay, but not illegal, and better than the alternative i.e. a society without freedom of speech (as the Reich was, or Weimar Germany).
2. I probably take the threats to your elections more seriously than you (I read whole of the the Antrim County computer forensics report, I'll never get that time back but I put in the effort).
3. To label ideological opponents with the label of a mental illness simply for disagreement is a poor show.
4. I take anyone being banned from anything for speech that should be free (which is almost all speech) very seriously.
5. "haha Nazis are shit" is below par for HN. Try not to waste my time and others with stuff you can safely spew out on Twitter and get likes for even though it's vapid.
> I probably take the threats to your elections more seriously than you (I read whole of the the Antrim County computer forensics report, I'll never get that time back but I put in the effort).
I don't think that's true, since you think that people being banned on social media is a greater threat to a fall to authoritarianism.
> To label ideological opponents with the label of a mental illness simply for disagreement is a poor show.
I did not do this. Nor is this just "simply for disagreement." Argument over the best way of funding retirement savings programs is distinct from arguments over whether or not to throw gay people in prison, for example.
> I take anyone being banned from anything for speech that should be free (which is almost all speech) very seriously.
I'm sure you do. I hope that you also donate your time and money to those who suffer at the hands of people spreading hate.
> haha Nazis are shit" is below par for HN. Try not to waste my time and others with stuff you can safely spew out on Twitter and get likes for even though it's vapid.
Nazis are shit. You are treating me like a child. You use this "you talk like you are on Twitter" move pretty often as a way of talking down to people.
> you think that people being banned on social media is a greater threat to a fall to authoritarianism.
That's a strange reading that seems to assume that free speech goes hand in hand with authoritarianism, a laughable notion. Free speech is the antithesis of authoritarianism. No authoritarian has ever allowed anything approaching freedom of speech within their jurisdiction and sometimes even enforce it far beyond. As such, what you think is wrong.
> > To label ideological opponents with the label of a mental illness simply for disagreement is a poor show.
> I did not do this.
A phobia is a mental illness, you call your ideological opponents transphobes, so you did do this. It's pathetic name calling.
> I hope that you also donate your time and money to those who suffer at the hands of people spreading hate.
I'm here right now spending my time doing just that because you quite clearly do hate your opponents.
> Nazis are shit. You are treating me like a child.
No one here has claimed that Nazis aren't shit but you're acting like a teenager high on self righteousness that thinks proclaiming that is some kind of insight for the rest of us. It is childish.
As I wrote, HN isn't the place, and one reason I bring it up far too often is because far too often of late I see people, like yourself, treating it as such. I make no apologies for wanting the standards to remain high.
Wow. You complain about the quality of discourse and then resort to arguing that transphobia means something completely different than its ordinary use (and obviously my intention) based entirely on definition-by-etymology. Of everything in this thread between you and me, this is the most clearly in bad faith.
Tell you what. I'll change all my words if it'll make you take me seriously. Substitute "bigots against trans people." It'll change none of my meaning.
It's ordinary use is the one I'm complaining about. It's a slur that implies irrational hatred, disgust and fear - that is a mental illness, hence why phobia is appended to the objects of fear.
There's a reason such a misnomer is used, and there's a reason why those using it such as yourself, seem to overlook its utterly mistaken connotations.
> Substitute "bigots against trans people." It'll change none of my meaning.
I know, but you're begging the question, while being an ironic hypocrite. How about you substitute a specific and accurate term for those you disagree with, or would it be too difficult for you to actually drop the ad hominem for even a moment out of fear of being shown up?
It's tricky because these platforms are huge, and are a public square in many ways. But they are also companies. The local newspaper is not required to print some anti-semitic screed. A local bar can kick out nazis. People do have alternative ways of freely expressing themselves.
Due to the massive size of these platforms, it feels a bit different, though in that being removed from one could really alter your online presence.
I don't have all the answers. And I suspect that Elon Musk does not, either, but we will have to wait and see...
Sure, I agree Musk underestimates the scope of the challenge.
I'm personally of the belief that network effects have granted Twitter a relatively unassailable cultural position, or at least enough of a moat to greatly reduce competitive pressures, and so should be subjected to different standards than a local bar or paper -- and if the analogy is to a newspaper, then Twitter should be treated as a publisher with all the attendant regulatory baggage that carries. It's hard for them to argue they have a right, as a private company, to shape the conversation, and in the same breath claim they're shielded from legal responsibility for what takes place on their site.
It's definitely a tricky debate, but in my personal value stack I place individuals' freedom of speech much higher than a private company's right to refuse service, so that's where I fall.
If twitter held itself to the same standard as the government regarding free speech everyone would leave within a year. Unmoderated platforms have never been successful.
As with many of the things Elon has tweeted or said, appearing to value free speech for Twitter was just him appealing to conservatives, upset with their perception of cancel culture.
Wait to see if Elon actually makes any TOS and policy changes in the next month, and debate then.
The classic definition was basically the freedom to criticize your government without repercussions.
Conservatives now define it as the permission to spread deliberate misinformation and overt racism and bigotry without consequences from either the government OR private entities.
Because liberal used to mean "supporting liberty" (the classical definition). But it has come to mean "agreeing with a certain set of beliefs and policies", and (recently) trying to de-platform anyone who publicly disagrees. And, in our bipolar political spectrum, those who disagree with the "liberals" are the "conservatives", who are therefore the ones the "liberals" are trying to de-platform.
So the "conservatives" believe very strongly in free speech (at the moment) because it's their speech that is currently getting crimped. And, seeing the trends, they think it's likely to get worse in the future. (As, say, anything disagreeing with the current "liberal" position gets labeled "racist" or "transphobic" or something, designed to make it virtuous to censor.)
free speech is a liberal value. The conservatives, however, have tried to hide behind 'free speech' in order to compel speech from private entities, and have tried to pretend that they don't have a hammerlock on the mainstream media, and have tried to pretend that 'big tech' is nebulously conspiring against them whenever it enacts basic decency community standards.
Liberalism is now conservative. Note that conservative and progressive as labels apply relative to the status quo - what was in your youth is not necessarily any longer.
Conservatives have shown they have a blind spot for perceived persecution, at least from the perspective of moderates on the sidelines.
It leaves conservatives open to being conned by everything from Chinese electronics manufacturers [1] to bankrupt reality TV stars [2]. Misconstruing TOS agreement violations as censorship persecution makes it easy for billionaires to win conservative admiration without actually doing anything.
There's a lot of people on twitter who just want to say the n-word, want to say Kanye is right about Jewish people, want to say LGBT people are groomers, etc. I personally don't see the justice in letting people who want to cause material harm to others - people who'd put me in a camp if they had their way - like that have a platform, no-questions-asked
There's a philosophical thing here and people have different views. The ACLU used to defend the right for the KKK and neo-nazis to parade around in jewish neighborhoods doing holocaust denial, etc, and if I remember correctly many of their lawyers doing such work were Jewish. The view if those people are idiots, and they can say this if they want, and more decent people (who outnumber the bigots) will counter the bigoted speech with their own.
No one can credibly deny that some speech is harmful. We'd all like to suppress some speech that we don't like, but the reason free speech advocates take the position they take (generally) is that once speech is prohibited the status quo regime will ban legitimate criticisms. So the good has to be accepted with the bad.
It's a tough issue. If I'm honest I favor censorship of views that I believe are harmful, but would object strenuously if my point of view is censored. I also think being called slurs, etc, is an unpleasant user experience, to say the least, so from a business perspective if nothing else I get why that is censored. Still, the censorship has gone too far in my view. We need to figure out a way to circle this square.
There's quite a difference between Twitter and public street demonstration permits. Allowing Nazis to get the same opportunity to gather on a public street as any other interest group is inherently limited. If they were gathering in front of every house of every Jewish person in the country 24/7/365, that would no longer be protected speech. It would be harassment.
Granting, of course, Twitter goes beyond this. They ban all hate speech at all, no matter how limited it is, but they're a private platform, which gets to the real heart of the issue. Everyone that cares deeply about this who is in agreement with Elon's side and isn't just being petulant about having personally been banned seems to equate Twitter with some kind of true public square or some necessary platform that handicaps a political movement if it can't access it. I just don't see this. The public streets, the government itself, I have no choice but to use and participate in. Everyone has to. But I have never had a Twitter account, never visit the site, and seem to have gotten along fine like that for over 40 years. Trump got banned and is still likely to win his party's presidential nomination in two years. It hasn't materially impacted his ability to get his message out and reach followers at all. Everything Kanye says is still going to be on every headline in every news service in the country the same day, and if he releases an album, his fans will still know. He doesn't need Twitter. I just don't see how that isn't definitive proof that Twitter is not this true common carrier people seem to think it is. You don't need access to one specific private platform to be heard. They're not like an electric utility with a local monopoly that is truly your only option to access a critical service. Trump and Kanye were both well known with hoards of followers before Twitter ever existed, and people would still hang on their words if Twitter completely disappeared tomorrow.
They still take these cases. (It is a bit complicated, individual ACLU chapters have a lot of autonomy, and they do not all agree with each other in all ways.)
So I see a substantial difference.
On one hand, you have lawyers from a nonprofit arguing in court that, while someone's views may be abhorrent, they are legal, and the principle matters more than the harm.
On the other, you have a for-profit entity tilting the landscape upon that speech rests, and as the raging debates about this stuff have shown, is difficult to distinguish profit from other motives.
Running a company with specific ideological priors looks a lot different to me than defending assholes for past speech on principle.
I suppose I have a biased view on this, as a holder of some beliefs that already get censored by normal society, but I really just see it as the cost of doing business. It isn't the end of me as an active agent in society who tries to spread my views, in the same way that blocking Nick Fuentes would end Nazism; just something you work with or around.
Following that logic, I support censoring/deplatforming fascists et al. because I want to hurt their ability to do fascism, not for some higher principle of striving towards a perfect, values-neutral marketplace of ideas. Speech is just another front on the plains of power.
I'd be curious to hear examples of views that people consider reasonable that are censored by normal society. Not implying that they don't exist, just that most of the views that are "censored by normal society" that I'm personally aware of are views that I have no interest in defending.
Beyond all that, which is a tough issue, Twitter is also a company, and if people are freely throwing around the N word and crazy conspiracy garbage, normal people are going to leave. Advertisers are going to leave with them.
I guess Musk is going to put less emphasis on outright bans, and more on “quarantining”. He might not ban an account posting racial slurs all day long, but it won’t be recommended, it won’t come up in search unless you set some special flag, and non-followers who visit it will get some kind of warning interstitial “Many users have reported this content as highly offensive, are you sure you want to view it?” Ads will only be displayed if the advertiser explicitly opts in.
> I personally don't see the justice in letting people who want to cause material harm to others - people who'd put me in a camp if they had their way - like that have a platform
Should Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Northrup Grumman, and Smith & Wesson be allowed to have Twitter accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers each?
Honestly, if you want to be really consistent, almost every world government should have its officials off Twitter. Any US politician who was in power between 2001 and 2020 did far more "material harm to others"[0] than any given teenager who wants to say racial slurs.
> Should Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Northrup Grumman, and Smith & Wesson be allowed to have Twitter accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers each?
> Any US politician who was in power between 2001 and 2020 did far more "material harm to others"[0] than any given teenager who wants to say racial slurs.
That comparison is invalid because those companies don't commit their purported harm on Twitter. Same with government officials. Even Kim Jong Un has a Twitter account https://twitter.com/official_kju
The "teenager" (or billionaire influencer) dropping racial slurs and either targeted or broad threats uses social media as the method of the harm they inflict. Mainstream social media companies are concerned with their platforms being used for harm.
"Material harm"? As in physical harm via threats of violence or calls to violent behavior? Or emotional and damaging harm? I honestly think people should generally just be nicer, it's more productive.
Kayne saying "death", but he has since claimed he reversed "def" and "death", that tweet is understandably considered violence. I don't believe hate is violence. I believe this is a common misconception of people who haven't experienced actual violence or true personal danger. I in no way claim this should be some right of passage. Speach isn't deformative or physically damaging. The idea speach is a "frontier" or is the "catalyst" is misleading. Many organizations have direct calls to action for violence and are still posting today.
I think they should be free to say it. I don't think it should promoted by twitter. I'd like that tweets by people with followers over 1 million be subject to some sort of accuracy standards
Hasn’t ISIS been allowed to be on Twitter? Who could possibly be worse than ISIS?
My neighbor Sam down the street likes to say the n-word sometimes and thinks offering hormones to kids is grooming. Still, I don’t think all the Sams in the US would ever be able to do as much material harm by having access to Twitter as ISIS does in one afternoon. Could be wrong.
I don’t think ISIS is currently on Twitter. They were some years back, but was that because Twitter had decided to allow them, or was that just tardiness in enforcement?
ISIS is a sanctioned entity. Knowingly allowing them, or anyone identified as a member, to post on Twitter, would likely be illegal under sanctions laws.
To the extent that Twitter’s approach to ISIS is not mandated by sanctions laws-I don’t see Musk changing Twitter’s corporate policies on ISIS-he has zero sympathy for them and no doubt views them as a threat to humanity’s future.
Musk is likely good news for Donald Trump, Babylon Bee, Jordan Peterson, Libs of TikTok, etc - but no change for ISIS.
The Taliban is somewhat of a different situation - they are the de facto government of Afghanistan, and are far less extreme than ISIS. While they have supported anti-Western terrorist attacks in the past, they claim to have changed, and it looks like their claim may be true.
I still wonder about the legalities of Twitter allowing them to use the site, given they are still under US sanctions. It is possible, however, that the US government has (quietly) asked Twitter to allow it, as a diplomatic/political calculation. Sanctions concerns disappear if the government is asking you to disregard them (they can give you a formal legal exemption from them - even secretly; even without a formal exemption, if the government asks you to do something, that is an estoppel against them taking legal action for acceding to your request.)
What is your point? I am not sure why I even have to mention this, because to me it is apparent, but statements and opinions that are already a part of the currently shared belief system do not need protections at all. It is the all the other stuff that is often ugly, which is why it DOES require protection ( precisely because people are scared of things that make them uncomfortable and will seek to restrict them as much as possible ).
<<people who'd put me in a camp if they had their way
Eh. This train is never late. Just wait until you find out that eventually all the out groups are thinned out and you are identified as the next one in line. That is the normal course of things. People are assholes. Freedom of speech is a basic safety valve.
I dislike that I even have to explain those. All this stuff should be covered in basic social studies.
I don't think views deserve protection just by dint of existing and being expressed. Someone calling me Jew, Jew, Jew isn't a brave or novel thought that lamestrain society is too square to stomach, it's just a pretense to murder.
If you want to talk about basic social studies, I'd suggest the paradox of tolerance.
It is not about being new or being novel ( edit1: or breaking new ground, or waking up squares, being hip or any of those labels ). It is about something a lot simpler than that and this goes to the crux of the matter.
Would you feel comfortable if your opinion that you just expressed above was being targeted for no other reason that it exists and someone somewhere finds it abhorrent. Do you not agree it is a rather bad standard just because, well, it is very general and can be applied to anything down the line?
Edit2:
Yes, I am invoking the "what if that was done to you".
edit3:
<<I'd suggest the paradox of tolerance.
There is no paradox. What you have is a conflict of values. From my perspective, things are either in balance or they are not. I personally would postulate that "escape from freedom" is a much more applicable here, where the pendulum swings from one extreme to the other.
Personally, I do find it mildly amusing that the groups that were persecuted not that long ago are embarking on their own witch hunts shortly thereafter. It is a fascinating insight into the human condition.
<<If you say yes, then...well there's no further discussion to have, and you scare me.
Heh. I too would love to live in such a binary word, where things are simply black or white and there are no shades of grey. I also love how you think this allows to bow out of the discussion. For the record, it does not and I challenge you to openly discuss it. Otherwise, and I am not using this phrase lightly here, you are an intellectual fraud pretending to engage in a good faith argument.
Now, the actual response to:
<< Should I be allowed to hold a rally and say "Someone needs to start lynching some $RACIAL_SLURs"?
Is that even a real question? Are you really drawing a line at name calling? This the hill you are willing to die on? I might be willing to accept some limits along the lines of the precedent that happens to include relatively conclusive standard of "immediate and present danger", but KKK members going through the streets shouting slogans using words you find offensive is absolutely something I am willing to defend, because I actually happen to believe in the founding document of this nation. Hell, I actually promised I will uphold it. I was not born into it and blessed with apathy. I voluntarily chose that path, because I happen to believe in ideals it espouses.
If you think I am the person to be scared of, I feel genuinely concerned for you. I would recommend less.. whatever it is that got you wound up.
Wait.
Are you arguing that "Someone needs to start lynching" equates to clear and present danger", because I am relatively certain a lot would depend on the context AND the resulting consequences? Like.. not to search very far, and to put things in perspective, to what extent did BLM protest rhetoric contributed to the resulting riots. Should we start locking them up?
I can give you that it is a close call, but nowhere near as clear you as you make it seem.
Either way, you may want to reconsider your argument a little. Those same rules are supposed to protect everyone. There is a reason for it.
Edit:
<< How far are you willing to take the notion of Freedom of Speech?
Notion. It is an idea enshrined in god damn law. It is a right. And it is one of the few things founders agreed upon. And it is the very first one.
You know what is a notion? Deconstructionism. There is a difference.
"Consequences" are enacted by an authority. The thing that happens on Twitter is "mob justice". EDIT: I did not read carefully before commenting, this comment is irrelevant.
The 'authority' mentioned was an employer, who is free to hire and fire people at will in he US, in many cases. Turns out that employing, say, a nazi, is not popular at many companies.
This can certainly go to far, but it's kind of up to the employer, isn't it.
In that case, it is impossible for Twitter to achieve neutrality (in that they can't control how viewers respond to a particular individual's odious tweets). If anything removing these sorts of tweets was a nice gift to bigots, covering their tracks for them.
Neutrality is neutrality. <---- that's a big period. Last time I went to Switzerland, didn't look like an oppressive place to me. Actually the rest of the world did.
Yes, my guess is they piss off the least amount of people right now, Musk is likely to make it much worse. Still, I might get an edit button so I'll be happy about that!
What is this pre-2015 neutrality you speak of? Wikipedia mentions a 2015 campaign of trying to ban ISIS propaganda accounts. Are you talking about that?
Twitter is already biased towards right-wing sources, despite the right being the loudest at claiming persecution. [1] If Twitter actually became more platform neutral, then ironically we should see a shift towards the left.
> And it will return to the platform neutrality and free speech ideals it had prior to 2015ish.
I'm not sure that's possible. Even if you could magically roll back Twitter to pre-2015 (staff, code, rules, etc.), the world has changed and the average Twitter user has changed.
For all of Musk's proponents' claims that this is a boon for "free speech", such free speech is anathema to corporate interests, particularly advertisers and corporate partners (we only need to look at the recent Ye + Adidas bustup).
Thus, it will likely devolve into "Free Speech (TM)", the my-way-or-the-highway speech policing that we see in places like /r/conservative where any criticism of Musk's preferred views is silenced. Again, we only need to take his own history towards criticism to see what Musk with a bullhorn is likely to do.
And, thus, we can only hope that it becomes such a cesspool of hatred such as Parler and other so-called liberterian free-speech platforms that it becomes toxic for investors and users, save for those who relish the echo-chamber.
It wasn't that early. YouTube was, and still is, full of vine compilations. It really blew up for a while just serving 6 second videos at a low/moderate resolution. It could have been TikTok easily.
That's a great point tbqh. Had vine lived I'm guessing they would have had to play catch up with that feature and who knows maybe they would have been too late.
The entire platform essentially died in 2015 and then was resurrected by Donald Trump being obsessed with it, which got a ton of political and finance people to join. None of their recent initiatives have moved the needle. Musk is going to lose a lot of money on this deal, but they'd probably be better off under him if not for the crushing debt load
There are still a lot of smart people there that are working on hard at scale problems. Just because the stock is stagnant doesn't mean there aren't smart people there keeping it running.
For some reason, people seem to assume that people will like virtual reality. It all seems very forced to me, much like 3D TVs, and won't live up to the hype.
VR mini golf with my friends is the closest thing to hanging out in person without actually doing so. It’s a pretty dramatic difference over a phone call or other type of video game together.
Have you tried it Oculus or similar tech? I found it to be a different level than 3D TV and 3D cinema, both of which were cool when you first saw them but quickly lost their novelty factor. To me, VR hasn't, and the immersive experience is still great.
I haven't tried the Metaverse and have no clue whether that'll take off, I'm more talking about the general technology. I have to admit, I'm still surprised it hasn't taken off stronger.
Brain drains usually happen due to low or uncompetitive pay, not because of corporate ideology. Otherwise Facebook/Meta would have had a brain drain years ago.
I know one insider at Meta that I could ask about this. I suspect they can't really retain talent like they used to.
The only other anecdote I have is an acquaintance who was early (i.e. the first web-dev) at YouTube. He _hated_ working for Google and left as soon as his shares vested. That was my first experience with someone simply rejecting a fat paycheck because _Google_ was to buttoned down for them.
People are strange (and software engineers are a whole different level of people).
> He _hated_ working for Google and left as soon as his shares vested. That was my first experience with someone simply rejecting a fat paycheck because _Google_ was to buttoned down for them.
It's easier to reject a fat paycheck after your shares vest, I imagine.
I think I will disagree here. Admittedly, I base this on anecdata only, but among my work colleagues, political affinity got weirdly important. To me it is odd, because I genuinely doubt that outside outliers like Ben and Jerry, companies care about anything other than their specific bottom line ( and policies supporting it ).
The companies might not care, but the perception of working for them might matter. I wonder if your colleagues would care if nobody knew who they worked for, when it's "do I want to work for this company", not "do I want my neighbors to know that I work for this company".
I doubt that will happen, I’m no Elon fanboy but he is a very capable business leader. He has clear plans to increase growth, and increase revenue. Both of those require policies that don’t push either users or advertisers away.
I suspect he will surprise us with some product decisions, but I wouldn’t bet against him.
I’m sure he will upset some users and some advertisers, but on the whole he understands that in order for his investment to make a return Twitter needs to be popular.
Elon may be notorious for his big statements, and he has certainly made a few around twitter, but I don’t believe he is doing anything other than investing in a business that he is personally interested in. That’s his MO, it’s about growth not ideology.
If you haven’t seen them take a look at the released email/text exchanges between Elon and the Twitter CEO and board from the lawsuit. They offer a good insight into what his thought process is.
Tesla and SpaceX have hired a ton of hard-to-hire talent. I don't understand why people might want to work for those companies because as far as I know the working condition is horrible. But again, his companies hire really good people to work on their problems.
From the software engineering side, it's still an opportunity to work on one of the highest traffic web sites on the internet. There's not a massive number of opportunities to do that.
They also made a whole lot of progress on those big problems before Musk's public face-heel turn.
IMO Tesla -- we owe them a bit, for revitalizing electric cars. Now that the big brands have come around, I'm not sure Tesla has such a huge draw (?). Like if you are an engineer, you could work on the same problems at Ford, but with fewer CEO antics, your designs will probably be implemented with better build quality, and I bet your employment would be more stable.
They're given the opportunity to work on big, macro problems (efficient space travel, energy generation/storage/security, climate change, etc). What's not to get?
What valuation? Per the article, it's being delisted and taken private. Which, may attract talent who wants to build something for the long term rather than being pinned to quarterly reports.
My money would be on software developers with certain personality quirks being drawn to Musk's leadership while those who have been building Twitter's compliance and moderation infrastructure would be repulsed. But, I don't think we'll really ever know because - as a private company - I expect Twitter to not disclose that information in the future.
Maybe - they better make sure to negotiate a killer employee contract given they won't be getting stock which is fungible. BTW - all software developers have certain personality quirks:)
I have zero information on how X (i.e. Musk's holding company for Twitter) is structured but it's possible to issue stock in a private company. The difference is that you cannot sell that stock on the public markets and need to find a buyer through a secondary market. Your requirements for selling are also typically more restricted.
There are many people who support Elon and the policies he intends to enact. And if you don’t believe that’s the case, then I’d encourage you to have more conversations with people who don’t align with your views. I’m fairly confident he’ll have no shortage of talent willing
to help implement his vision.
Not going to lie, whoever owns it, I have an inner hatred for that hell site. The way I see it, it can go two ways...either Musk somehow manages to actually make the site tolerable, or it dies. Its going to be one or the other...nobody really knows which way yet. Either direction is a win in my eyes though. If it changes for the better: great! If it dies: even better! More social media sites will take its place.
This is my thought. One way or the other, Twitter is going to be less of a blight on society a year from now. I consider them far worse than Facebook, even though Facebook gets more criticism.
Agreed. Although I do think following just a few hand curated accounts has a lot of value as a topical news feed. Or to get local news in near real-time. The rest of it is worthless to me.
For one, the lack of any nuance. 240 characters is not enough to accurately articulate a persons thoughts, so people infer meaning from otherwise harmless statements. Places that allow for longer comments, like HackerNews, have better discussion because you can post what you actually think.
Second, I just don't like the site. You go to the site, click on the news ticker for any topic, and you see a million of the worst takes ever dreamed up by mankind. The format also encourages mob mentality which I find very disturbing.
Not the person you asked, I wouldn't say I have a visceral hatred for twitter but I do have a strong dislike.
One issue I find just generally with social media is that it incentivizes some inherent qualities in people that are detrimental to a functioning society. The nature of twitter encourages two behaviors that seem antithetical to constructive dialog.
Tweets are short. This makes it extremely difficult to have nuance in any conversation and makes it really easy for people to take a tweet that might be part of a larger thread or a series of replies out of context. There are lots of examples of a tweet blowing up someone's life and then you come to find out that the reality was, unsurprisingly, unable to be captured in 140 (or 280) characters.
Tweets are algorithmically promoted based on engagement. This really isn't just a Twitter thing, most social media works this way. The problem comes when you combine this with the first issue. "Hot takes" and things that outrage are pretty engaging and end up going far on the site.
So you take these two things together and what you end up with is a lot of content that takes complex topics and turns them into snappy hot takes. People then engage with those and our natural tribal tendencies take over and people fall into camps of either agreeing or disagreeing with the tweet. Now their agreement or disagreement might not be total, but in comes the format of twitter, it's hard in so few characters to express a nuanced opinion like "Well I agree with these parts of the tweet because of XYZ but I disagree with ABC and I think it totally misses the complexities of JKL."
In my experience a lot of twitter ends up devolving into a rabid sort of tribalism. But that's not universal, many people carefully curate who they follow and derive a great deal of value from the site. I think though when people have a strong negative reaction to it, they are probably considering what they (and I) perceive to be the majority case of people following popular twitter accounts (by definition they are popular because they have lots of followers) and taking part in the lower quality dialog trap I described above.
Twitter clearly has a problem of technical competence somewhere. It may be withing the people he is planning to change, or it may be somewhere else and those people are the only reason it barely works.
But the one thing that is obvious is that everything there is not fine.
In this age of remote work if they open positions remotely to anyone in the world on SF salaries they will have access to an infinite pool of competent engineers, taking into account that Twitter isn't rocket science, and also that Elon has his fans. Brain drain is not a risk.
If this is a normal Silicon Valley deal, until Twitter relists or sells the valuation at vest of the already granted RSUs will be $54.20. So from an employee perspective the valuation will stay high.
I would be really surprised if this remains privately-held for very long. It's a LOT of capital (and a lot of it borrowed) so my guess would be that he has an eye on Zuckerberging it (issuing himself a class shares with all the votes, but marketing another class of shares without them).
It sure was. I’ve been on HN for more than 10 years with my real name.
I know it sounds silly that I’d use a throwaway to say I want to work for Twitter now.
But if I do end up working there I have a feeling some in my network may not be so happy about this. I’d have to come to terms with that and plan some things out.
Maybe I’m overreacting, maybe not. But it’s on my mind these days when I say I support free speech within the confines of existing US law.
This is a honest question. Why do people talk about "free speech" because there is no such thing outside of 1st Amendment which is to ensure that Govt. cannot do anything to an individual. For private businesses, where is this free speech coming from ? Twitter banning someone (whether you agree or disagree) is not a violation of free speech unless the definition has changed.
Yes, that’s fair. I’m using colloquial shorthand on mobile.
What I mean to say is that I support a company freely choosing to adopt a content moderation policy that aligns as closely as possible to the US 1st Amendment.
I think the US 1st Amendment is among (if not the) strongest free speech laws in the world, and it would be beneficial to society to have a major social media platform adopt that ideal as their North Star.
Right now presents an interesting and rather unique opportunity to convert a major social media platform from an ad-driven model with shareholders seeking endless growth to a sustainable, long-term business model with a revenue model that aligns closer to users. And sprinkle on top the idea of making the platform more inclusive to diverse groups and opinions with less echo-chamber. That interests me.
Freedom of speech is a principle. The US 1st Amendment is one specific implementation of that principle, but generally people asking for free speech are making a moral argument, not a legal one.
They don't need to worry about valuation, they're just going to cut costs and extract revenue.
Politicians and sports media aren't going to abandon twitter any time soon, so I expect revenue will hold for quite some time.
It seems that many people abandoned FB already. If those same people abandon twitter, where will they go? I personally don't use twitter because I don't want to see updates from random people on the internet, but is there a replacement for that? I'm not sure.
With a strong vision for freedom of speech and actual value enforcement (edit: of the transparency value, not just start censoring the other side), it would attract the right people. We can argue the recent dilution of Twitter's values to meddle with U.S. politics was the actual brain drain.
I think the Venn Diagram of free speech absolutists and competent developers is a lot smaller than Elon and most people realize.
Twitter has never been nor propertied itself to be a bastion of free speech, so I always find this pearl-clutching at "meddling in X" funny. It's a private company, it can do as it please.
I think there are hardly any free speech absolutists these days. Who's standing up for free speech when it's free speech they detest? Instead it's a bunch of people loudly defending their free speech.
I propose a new term for the "Free speech" to say whatever hateful, bad-faith, trolling and ignorant thing anyone wants to say on someone else's website: "Platform entitlement".
>With a strong vision for platform entitlement and actual value enforcement, it would attract the right people. We can argue the recent dilution of Twitter's values to meddle with U.S. politics was the actual brain drain.
After all, the ideological concept of "free speech" as is commonly used in the United States and regarding political freedom is the freedom from government persecution to say whatever you want. It is being transformed by propagandists and those who would see our democracy crumble to mean "being allowed to freeload off of dominant viral message boards to spread whatever misinformation is deemed beneficial to my worldview".
I respect the idea that the Internet is a prerequisite to effective political speech in the Western world for audiences larger than a small town. I believe that certain layers of the World Wide Web, namely DNS/TLS/Network/Hosting do have a "common carrier" obligation to some extent which should possibly be codified.
I do, however, take issue with the idea that individual websites currently have any obligation to be "neutral", though I do believe in being transparent in any potential bias. I also believe it's misleading to call taking down trolls and bad faith bots as "biased".
To be straight to the point, I honestly doubt the motive of anyone who actively criticizes about free speech issues on twitter, given the kinds of democracy-destroying people who have been largely affected by their moderation policies.
Very well put. It should go both ways, and the perception that the platform is fair to each respective stakeholder need not be symmetrical. It should be possible that one political demographic is "deplatformed" more, based purely on their promotion of values that are antisocial and immoral in a community setting. Fairness cannot be determined on a demographic basis alone.
They’re not, they come in opposition to each other so the more you value one aspect the weaker the other becomes.
I don’t know how people who describe themselves as free speech absolutists and claim no one will be censored are even given the time of day when they simultaneously discuss enforcement policies.
We already have and had multiple sites for absolute free speech short of actual government intervention on the internet. They are either small(the various chans) or go out of business(voat and the like) because no advertiser wants to associate with the content that is created, and free speech absolutists only appear to value free speech as long as someone else is covering the costs for propagating said speech.
Musk specifically has described himself as one several times. On a less public note, I run into people online describing themselves as such fairly frequently as well
Social media are free because they act as a lubricant for commerce, especially e-commerce, via advertising. The whole freedom of speech thing, the public square, section 230 they are a bunch of distractions.
At the end of the day you gotta do what media entrepreneurs have always done: shove stuff down people's throats in exchange for money. That's it. There is nothing tough, poetic or ideological about it.
Twitter has been trying to monetize its users but they had scarce success. That was without an ideologue at the helm. Or an ideologue-lite when Dorsey was in charge.
With an ideologue at the helm the bird will fly right into the ground. Twitter needed somebody who knows how attract the crowd which buys stuff online. Paradoxically Bezos was the right fit for the bird app.
Alex Jones. Gavin McInnis. James O'Keefe. Breitbart, which is banned 2/3rds of the time.
Fox News is for your 65+ year old uncle. It's harmless, controlled opposition. Look at the Jan 6th coverage. It exists for the left to point at and say, "see, there it is! Right wing bias!" - for one example.
Read the article, can't argue with numbers. Twitter biases towards recommending right-wing sources. Your personal experience will differ because everyone is placed in their own echo chamber.
> According to a 27-page research document, Twitter found a “statistically significant difference favouring the political right wing” in all the countries except Germany. Under the research, a value of 0% meant tweets reached the same number of users on the algorithm-tailored timeline as on its chronological counterpart, whereas a value of 100% meant tweets achieved double the reach.
There are crazy left-wing sources that are also banned, are you going to use that as "proof" that Twitter is biased against the left? You're cherrypicking.
If you think the most popular singular news source, with all it's own personalities, funding, controlling executives, and consistent for decades opinions is "controlled opposition", I just don't know what to tell you anymore.
There are a few reasons technical people go to work.
1. Interesting challenges
2. Exchange labor for money
3. Good working environment
4. As a nice to bullet point on their resume
It would be a very naive thing to work for a for profit company owned by a billionaire to think that you have any other “mission” than to line the pockets of a reluctant owner.
And most people who “believe in their company’s mission” aren’t working for one. Mostly it’s naive employees with statistically worthless “equity” in a startup who believed the founders Ted Talk hype.
Even if the founder sincerely believes that, once he takes VC money it doesn’t matter what he believes.
Or Elon fixes San Francisco’s “use your platform” “inclusion by exclusion” culture as thousands of those kind of people disassociate and are replaced with a reversion to the mean of people that just want a paycheck
They aren't comparable in any meaningful way. They have quite different classes of problems, not to mention the scale of Twitter completely dwarfs that of Wikipedia.
The brain drain was well under way already. A bunch of people I know who used to work at Twitter started looking the moment the deal was announced, and have already landed elsewhere.
You’re wrong, as a staunch advocate of free speech on the web and as a near victim of cancel culture I would gladly work at twitter as long as I were paid more than what I earn now, and I’m sure many people would feel the same. Twitter was already a crappy place to work before Elon with all its woke polítics, now though it may become more tolerable.
"as long as I were paid more than what I earn now" is such a funny term to include. There's a lot of places I'd consider working if they offered me a raise!
Since I go to work exclusively to exchange labor for money, if, most other things being equal, I can find a job that allows me to exchange more money for the same amount of labor, who wouldn’t I be looking for another job anyway?
Working for Twitter in 2022 sounds about as exciting as working for Yahoo as it was going through the same type of turmoil.
>Ethically challenged software engineer working for a major tech company you know. Used to have close to 1000 karma, got destroyed over time by hackernews cancel culture and a change in downvote algorithms. But now that the algorithm has been changed back to classic style, I'm rising up again.
The doctors are indeed worried about his karma count. It's dropped a lot because he is ethically challenged. But it's sounds like the doctors are working hard to bring that karma count back up.
That’s very anecdotal. You’re not going to get the best engineers who could get a job anywhere giving up much better compensation because of “idealism”
I was a big Elon Musk fanboy for what he was able to accomplish on both Tesla and SpaceX. I had the impression that he was very genuine and really wanted to "save humanity".
I ignored the crazy things he said on twitter. I think his accomplishments overshadowed his less favorable behavior.
But after his tweets about Ukraine, it really started to dawn on me that his "save humanity" was not really save humanity, but just a really good sales pitch. He fooled me, I confess.
Right now, I see him as a very successful businessman. But if he can choose between making money or "doing the right thing", I think it's clear by now that he would go for the money (like jump into bed with Russia or China in a heartbeat, as long as it delivers the extra buck).
Buying Twitter seems like a really bad idea, for both society and his pocket. I think we're seeing "Haughtiness comes before the fall" (I didn't use 'pride' because in Dutch this expression seems better)
I really dont understand why his Ukraine tweets were controversial. He clearly has done in support of Ukraine with providing Starlink etc.
He doesnt have control of arms shipments or policy decisions that the Western powers are making (sanctions, etc). Yet another example of how polarized the US (maybe the West) is, where if you say *any* that questions our unilateral support of Ukraine (even if that has to do with increased chances of nuclear war) you're an asshole.
I'm sorry, but this situation has a lot of nuance - quit acting like it doesnt. You can cautiously support Ukraine but also realize that the US has little to gain as each day goes by with Russia getting smoked by Western weapons and training.
> I really dont understand why his Ukraine tweets were controversial
Because peace at this point means the aggressor keeps territories.
If Canada moved troops into a bunch of US states - NY, NH, Maine, Pennsylvania etc. would you be willing to just cede that territory over so that everybody can have "peace"? Ok, let's have peace, I guess Canada gets New England now.
> If Canada moved troops into a bunch of US states - NY, NH, Maine, Pennsylvania etc. would you be willing to just cede that territory over so that everybody can have "peace"? Ok, let's have peace, I guess Canada gets New England now.
As a New Yorker... please? How soon after annexation do I get my healthcare?
Comparing Russia invading territories that Americans haven't even been to let alone heard of is nothing like Canada, of all countries, invading the continental US.
Ya I get it, and that is one option, of many, for resolving this conflict. How do you think this ends if the Western powers keep funding the war and Ukraine takes Crimea? Do you think Putin will just say "OK" ?
Comparing Russia to Canada is in bad faith. Canada is a democracy, not run by a dictator.
> Comparing Russia to Canada is in bad faith. Canada is a democracy, not run by a dictator.
Isn't that an even bigger reason to not let the dictator get his way? In Putin's latest speech he reiterated that Ukraine isn't a real state and that Ukrainians and Russians should live together in one country, Russia. Giving in to any of his demands will not deter him or bring peace, it will embolden him and prove that he was right to invade, and he will do it again.
> How do you think this ends if the Western powers keep funding the war and Ukraine takes Crimea? Do you think Putin will just say "OK" ?
You mean if Ukraine returns to their sovereign borders and has a crap ton of weapons and can physically repel any Russian attacks? Doesn't matter what Putin says.
> Comparing Russia to Canada is in bad faith.
What? Ok, how about just pretend Russia takes over the Alaska and the western seaboard. Does that work for you?
>You mean if Ukraine returns to their sovereign borders and has a crap ton of weapons and can physically repel any Russian attacks? Doesn't matter what Putin says.
If Ukraine takes Crimea and Russia nukes Ukraine, it matters to everyone.
I think NATO or the West is playing a very strategic game here. They don't offer Ukraine 100% more firepower than Russia, which would end the war quickly. They offer them a bit more so that Russia is struggling. And notice that when Russia would try to subdue Ukraine with more powerful weapons like a tactical nuke, NATO already made it clear that they would move in. They are basically exhausting Russia to death. Right now, Russia is really scraping to throw everything they got into this war. If this war keeps going, it will totally destruct Russia's economy and society. Unfortunately, Ukraine is paying a very heavy price for this. But from a NATO strategic standpoint, we're now in an ideal scenario.
> He clearly has done in support of Ukraine with providing Starlink etc.
Do you know that Ukrainians are buying and paying subscriptions for that. I'm sure the return on investment is very well calculated.
Ok, so we give up a part of Ukraine to avoid nuclear war. Works very good for Russia. In a few years Russia takes the rest of Ukraine. Are you going to risk nuclear war then? No? Great!
Then Russia invades the Baltic states. Want to risk nuclear war now? Of course not. Then they take the rest of central Europe that was under their control.
Is East-Germany worth the risk of nuclear war in your opinion, or not?
Of course, any business is a win-win for both parties. But don't act as if it's from of the kindness of the heart.
> Last time I checked, Germany was a member of NATO.
Funny, because last time I checked, the Baltic states are too. But I guess NATO could give those up to avoid nuclear war. You didn't respond to them being taken over by Russia, did you?
A conflict with NATO has a higher chance of turning nuclear than a conflict with Ukraine. So maybe we should exclude the Baltic states and give them to Russia? To avoid a nuclear war?
You are defending Elon, who said to give Crimea to Russia to "prevent nulcear war". I'm just wondering how much stuff you want to give to Russia to "prevent nuclear war".
So give Crimea to Russia, yes. Donbas too? Baltic states you said no. Can they take the rest of Ukraine to prevent nuclear war?
For me, the line is pretty easy: Russia respects the borders as internationally defined. And I don't really give a shit how much they threaten with nuclear war.
For you and Elon, you seem to want to give Russia some stuff and hope it ends there. Well, it never ends there, so that's why I ask where you will draw the line.
No, the "Crimea clearly belongs to Russia" part, among other things. And submitting to Russia does not equal "saving humanity" in my book. Far from it in fact.
Also the "cost" of keeping Starlink alive in Ukraine, while it clearly has or will have a return on investment. (Ukrainians are already buying and paying subscriptions for that).
Edit: What was also disgusting was to ask what Kasparov did except tweet. And after it became very clear that he was protesting the Putin regime for many years already, Elon had the guts to up the ante and state that he's an "idiot". Sorry, but such things reveal what kind of person you are.
I think a lot of people in the United States do not fully understand the Crimea thing and Ukraine's stance on the area (before the conflict). I don't have an opinion on the matter other than to say it is probably worth learning more about Crimea and its history before jumping to conclusions.
I agree and I fully understand. I'm from EU working with Ukrainian colleagues, so for me it's closer.
I was never too bothered with other wars that were "far away", so I understand for US it's "far away'. But it was really strange to see all these rich US Silicon Valley guys wanting to share their uninformed opinion, and then get trashed by people who do know.
Giving Russia Crimea would just return to the de-facto borders of 2021 and formalizing them. Of course that's a concession to Russia, but to deescalate you have to give both sides something to claim as victory.
Sure, in 2004 they poisoned Yushchenko. In 2014 they illegally annex Crimea and invade a part of the Donbas. Then by Elon and your suggestion, in 2022 they legally take Crimea, and after killing all the locals let's have some official elections in the landbridge areas. Ukraine stays "neutral", just like they already were (seemed to work out great for them!)
Given that conceding Crimea would make the entire war eerily similar to the Winter war, my prediction for 2030 would be that either Germany or China attacks the West in all out war, and we join forces with Russia to fight them (/s)
Conceding territory isn't great if your main goal is to dissuade Russia, but nobody ever claimed that that was Musks goal. His purported goal is reducing the risk of human extinction, even from some less likely risks. It's a different risk assessment that leads to different priorities.
> and your suggestion
I didn't suggest it, I merely tried to show that Musk's suggestion is completely in line with "saving humanity" and completely in character.
It's a little more complex than that. You probably don't want to send the geopolitical message that you can have whatever you want if you threaten to use nuclear weapons. If that's the case, then North Korea gets South Korea, China gets Taiwan, etc.
You can't just immediately concede to bullies, or all that will be left are bullies. That doesn't save humanity.
He also gave concrete steps on how to achieve that, and everyone got up in arms because those steps involved throwing Russia a bone so they can spin the peace as a win domestically.
Of course that's unpopular right now because Ukraine is winning the war and everyone wants to go with "let's push Russia out and hope they take it with dignity". But Musk has a different risk profile and would prefer de-escalation. And I'm not sure how you would deescalate without some concessions to both sides.
I wouldn't assume anything Musk tweets has anything to do with "risk profiles". He recently tried to commit fraud to get out of the Twitter acquisition, and when his lawyers told him it would go very badly for him he closed the deal. He is compulsively dishonest.
The New York times reports that Musk "suggested in a newspaper interview that China could be appeased if it were given partial control of Taiwan." You don't think he's trying to suck up to the Chinese government since he has business interests there?
Of course he's very good at inventing "plausibly deniable" motivations for his toxic behavior, but I wouldn't take anything he says at face value.
People are claiming he cares about free speech because he claims he does, which is laughable. He is suggesting free speech be taken from the people of Taiwan. And for realsies, not the "If I'm kicked off Twitter I'm oppressed" version of free speech.
I'm not sure that "try to conquer the country, fail, and still get to keep 20% of it" is the precedent that we want to set. But that's where "some concessions on both sides" is going to get you. (Concessions less than that - I presume - won't be regarded as "some concessions" by Russia.)
I've been following Ukraine and read his tweets and I'd say he was just a bit under informed which is not surprising given he's busing running like five companies and doesn't have a background in Russian/Ukrainian history.
It's easy to think you should get peace by giving away some land until you look into the details. Though ask any of the Eastern Europeans who have lived their lives near Russia and they will generally point out flaws with that scheme. (To name but one subtlety Ukraine signed an agreement with Russia and the US in 1994 to secure its borders in return for giving up its nukes. Do we now say disarmament agreements are worthless and the aggressive countries can just say ha ha suckers and take land if you don't have nukes? - would be a bad precedent.)
>like jump into bed with Russia or China in a heartbeat, as long as it delivers the extra buck
doesn't really fit with him supplying loads of Starlinks much to Russia's annoyance.
> SpaceX. I had the impression that he was very genuine and really wanted to "save humanity".
One think I which people would realize more is that you can't "safe humanity" by populating mars or anything like that.
Even if earth becomes extremely hostile due to climate change, or lets say a catastrophic event like it killed the Dinos it would still be docents if not even hundred of times easier to live on earth then on mars.
Just to double down on it. It is even true if every single tree on earth burned down, the equator regions are frequently over 100C, the oceans are completely dead and no mice can survive on the surface. Even then it would not only be simpler to survive on earth then on mars it also would still be much much more easy to make earth livable again the it would be to do so with Mars...
Or in other words geo-forming/(long term, self sustainable, growable populating) Mars is technologically so far away that implementing faster then light traveling might turn out easier. It's _that_ hard. And SpaceX at most contributes to getting there and nothing more. And sure you have to start at some point. But SpaceX never was about saving humanity it always was about making money. And what provides reliably more money then getting state investment for rockets for a mars mission?
Same goes for Tesla. Transporting people in a sustainable way is what public transports do, already, not electric cars with 1,1 passengers. Electric cars do make tons of money, however.
That, and he still knows how to keep his hand near the steering wheel when the Management Autopilot begins to stray. Geez now that I think about it, his fascination with FSD makes perfect sense.
It's not actually clear to me that free speech (in the constitutional sense) is Elon's driving factor here.
His calculus seems to be: 1. People will find a way to say what they think online. 2. If everyone splinters into their own little self reinforcing bubbles and we can't hear each other, that is quite dangerous in the long term.
That is to say, he arrives at a similar position, but it seems to be driven more by pragmatism than idealism.
1) They don't actually spend much time on any one thing per week, on average.
2) Many of the things that count as "work" for them, at their level, are more fun—and even recuperatory—than, say, wrangling spreadsheets at your desk and attending dull-ass compulsory meetings for no reason all day. (put another way: when you have enough money, everything you do is kinda an optional hobby and not something you have to do even if you hate it)
3) They can pay to not have to worry about 90+% of the non-work shit the peons have to. Laundry? Making appointments? Arguing with insurance? Making high-quality, tasty meals? Shopping for the ingredients for those meals? Driving yourself and others places? All strictly optional. That's 10-30 hours of soul-draining bullshit per week just gone (and you can keep any of the parts that you don't find soul-draining—cook, but never have to shop for ingredients, for instance)
That skill can also be delegated away, you just need to trust the person or team doing the hiring. Delegation is one of the most scalable processes precisely because it is recursive.
On the contrary - not telling other people to do things doesn't take that much time. Especially with SpaceX, if you have a team in place you trust, you don't have to even think about telling them what to do. They present a plan you can accept or push back on.
It doesn't take much time to be the front-man to several organizations. And Musk excels at it. Being the public face of an excelling team that you assembled is a rare skillset (at the level Musk operates).
I totally disagree. Context switching a million times a day is _hard_. I'm sure Elon isn't running every little thing day to day in his companies, but it's absolutely impressive what he's able to get done.
I don't like the guy, I don't like tsla, etc. But you have to appreciate what he's been able to do. He's clearly not a dumb guy.
> not targeting conservative voices solely based on ideology.
This literally does not happen, and is entirely made up in a form of projection. In fact, Twitter has been found to be biased towards recommending right-wing sources. [1]
That's a very selective reading of the article. Twitter boosts things that attract more views and shares. Outrage generates those views. But why would mainstream right-wing politicians and articles generate more outrage on Twitter than non-rightwing content?
That only makes sense if Twitter is predominantly anti-right wing, and people who are anti-rightwing get outraged by rightwing nonsense more than leftwing nonsense, and thus rage-click, share and comment on that content more.
There's another theory that fits the data: rightwing sources are more likely to share things that are enraging to rightwing readers. After all, rightwing sources are mostly followed by rightwing readers, same as with leftwing. Usually they just stay in their bubble. As to why rightwing sources would do this, I can think of a couple of reasons, but they are outside of the scope of my comment.
But claims that right wing voices are being censored would come from... right wing sources, no? Are those valid but not the left wing sources? If so, why?
Claims that right wing voices are being censored are from my own observations. including the examples I cited in my comment. To be clear I do not think left voices should be censored, I am 100% opposed to all censorship, banning ect
In the 90's I was fighting conservatives that wanted to censor the much smaller and newer internet from things like violence (games) and porn.
Today it is the left that is attempting to censor the internet over much more nebulous and undefined terms like "misinformation" and "hate speech" all of which have very subjective definitions and seem to be a moving target.
What I'm hearing here is "my viewpoint is valid because I observed it, and the viewpoint that disagrees with me is biased". Your observations may happen to generalize and be correct, and the other viewpoint may be biased, but that doesn't mean the argument you made in the previous post was correctly reasoned.
If data or research can't support "right wing voices are being censored", while you're perfectly entitled to believe that based on seeing a couple specific voices get censored, it's a bit unreasonable to dismiss claims to the contrary as "left wing bias" when the data simply isn't there to support it.
I personally wouldn't be surprised if you end up with political bias in automated censorship and filtering algorithms, the training set is going to be full of bias and it will be hard to filter that out. But they also quite possibly managed to come up with something that isn't leaning in any particular direction.
Between the two possibilities "Twitter is suppressing <x> speech" and "Twitter is not suppressing <x> speech and a few people are crying censorship to try and get unbanned/get attention" I think occam's razor suggests the latter, personally, because we know it has been an effective tactic in the past and that sort of speculative claim gains traction regardless of whether you can prove it.
Lots of people claim to be shadowbanned when they're not, similarly.
>>If data or research can't support "right wing voices are being censored"
You seemed to have missed my primary assertion which has nothing to do with banning or shadowbanning or even the research into those topics
My primary assertion is the terms of service, the rules under which content moderation is governed is a left political bias in many area's include gender, what is considered "hate speech", what is "misinformation"
I do not need to point to any examples of banning to highlight this as it self evident for anyone that reads the terms of service.
I.e. Analyzing Twitter suspensions shows that users’ sharing of links to misinformation sites was as predictive of being suspended as was the users’ political orientation. "Conservative" accounts share more misinformation, and violate with greater frequency policy rules.
A study that although argues twitter has a bias, readily admits in it's data sampling that the banned/suspended accounts violate terms and conditions at a mich higher rate.
Reasons listed for banning these individuals in Hanania’s own data sheet include “violent threats,” “harassment,” “inciting violence,” “targeted abuse,” “doxxing,” “pro-Nazi tweets,” and “racist slurs.” Additionally, about a quarter of the accounts listed are still active and no longer suspended.
Kicking off a bunch of Nazis and trolls isn’t very compelling evidence that your average conservative is getting unfair treatment on Twitter. The majority of the “victims” here seem to have been engaged in abuse, and it’s reasonable for a private company like Twitter to kick off people who are undermining the quality of their platform by harassing or threatening other users.
" We then investigated potential political bias in suspension patterns and identified a set of 9,000 politically engaged Twitter users, half Democratic and half Republican, in October 2020, and followed them through the six months after the U.S. 2020 election. During that period, while only 7.7% of the Democratic users were suspended, 35.6% of the Republican users were suspended. The Republican users, however, shared substantially more news from misinformation sites – as judged by either fact-checkers or politically balanced crowds – than the Democratic users. Critically, we found that users’ misinformation sharing was as predictive of suspension as was their political orientation. Thus, the observation that Republicans were more likely to be suspended than Democrats provides no support for the claim that Twitter showed political bias in its suspension practices. Instead, the observed asymmetry could be explained entirely by the tendency of Republicans to share more misinformation."
“We were surprised,” says González-Bailón, an associate professor in Penn’s Annenberg School for Communication. “Previous work has documented that Twitter users tend to have a liberal bias. But we found that across the board, the news most often shared has a right-leaning bias. This increases the visibility of conservative voices, even in the context of protest mobilizations with liberal goals.”
>>. During that period, while only 7.7% of the Democratic users were suspended, 35.6% of the Republican users were suspended. The Republican users, however, shared substantially more news from misinformation sites –
The key flaw here was "misinformation" at that time included what is now considered "fact" about COVID Policies, and "science", including mask effectiveness, vaccine effectiveness, Lab leak theory, and a whole host of other things that were "misinformation" in 2020 but not in 2022. that is the entire problem with the "misinformation" narrative
Science after all is not "experts telling us what to think" but instead is in reality it the act of continual questioning of established narrative
Shutting down debate for "misinformation" is itself anti-science
Actually, you're wrong. Read the paper. And I quote:
"Reasons listed for banning these individuals in Hanania’s own data sheet include “violent threats,” “harassment,” “inciting violence,” “targeted abuse,” “doxxing,” “pro-Nazi tweets,” and “racist slurs.” Additionally, about a quarter of the accounts listed are still active and no longer suspended."
Twitters Covid misinformation policy didn't come into effect untill the end of Dec, 21. So 2020 is incorrect.
Why don't you read the actual policy instead of making stuff up?
The entire Hunter Biden laptop saga isn’t enough for you?
Days before a national election they deliberately censored a story pertaining to corruption of one of the candidates, censored anyone that shared the story, and censored anyone that mentioned the censoring of the story.
What about the laptop suggested anything unethical done by Joe Biden?
Ultimately that's the reason the story was "censored", it was fake. Something vaguely suspicious sounding about Hunter used to try and malign his dad, and ethical news sites and journalists wanted nothing to do with it.
To this day, there's no evidence of any actual wrongdoing, and even Trump's own justice department failed to charge Hunter, or even continue the investigation, because it was so clearly nothing of note.
The problem is that a lot of miscreants hide behind the label "conservative voice". Like people who spread hate, misinformation and conspiracy theories online. We need to differentiate between these fake "conservative voices" and real conservatives. Pretty sure people in the second category are not being targeted.
The label of "hate" very often does get slapped on real conservative voices. Supporting sex-segregated sports is considered hate speech by many, for instance. If your label of "hate" encompasses typical conservative view, then it's just a shallow attempt to deflect from the fact that conservative views are indeed being suppressed.
I implore you (all) to consider this angle when complaining about "left" boogeymen. Do the fixie-riding anarchists represent the left? Do the alt-right racist and misanthropic school shooters represent the right? What of each side encourages these extremities? Further, which ones do commit societal (psychological, economic, etc.) damage?
> I'd love to see some clear examples of conservative voices being targeted solely based on ideology, cause I don't think they exist.
Certain biases are baked into Twitter's content moderation policies. For instance, on COVID and gender. It just so happens that conservatives statistically disagree with the positions taken by those policies significantly more than liberals.
Is that an anti-conservative bias? Well, liberals often make the argument that the drug war was prejudicial against black people because the laws specifically targeted drugs that were more common in black communities. If you accept this argument, by parity of reasoning, you should also accept that Twitter's rules are prejudicial against conservative views.
For examples of prominent cancellations, there was Alex Berenson, Megan Murphy, Jordan Peterson, among others. These people aren't all strictly conservatives, but they were banned for views that conservatives mostly agree with.
What claims do you want data for? That conservatives had opinions COVID that often ran contrary to mainstream narratives? Or that conservatives have views favouring traditional gender roles and their identification with biological sex? Or that both of these sets of conservative views run afoul of Twitter's policies?
The entire interview with JRE Vijaya Gadde can be referenced. Like Tim Pool or not he clearly shows the bias, Jack is mostly silent on those instances.
suppression of the hunter biden story was the clearest one. (let me know if you need details or citations on the NY Post article & account being banned by twitter before the election).
Also Alex Berenson's lawsuit with Twitter revealed that public officials leaned on twitter to suppress his voice. I think these emails are revealing on the 'coziness' between the current administration and twitter policy team.
https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/the-white-house-privatel...
Can you imagine if the Trump administration put pressure on twitter to suppress reporters they thought was 'epicenter of disinfo'?
I'm not sure why GP was downvoted. There are many, many examples. You would probably see them if your primary news sources weren't the NYT, the Washington Post, CNN, or MSNBC. Twitter is the poster child for authoritarian leftist social media!
There is still, today, multiple years after the start of the pandemic, no strong evidence that masks did anything significant to slow the spread of COVID. I can provide many citations if you need them. In fact, much of what big tech censored turned out to be true or still plausible today, like: the lab leak theory, natural immunity being more effective than the vaccine (even Bill Gates admits this now!), and so on.
Free rhetorical tip: stop using the word "leftist" if you want people to take you seriously. Just because people are opposed to the Republican Party doesn't mean they are leftists. Suggesting they are is to present a false dichotomy.
I appreciate the tip, but what word should I use instead? Progressive? I think just about everything being done on the left today is regressive. Liberal? I think the left in general today is about is illiberal as it gets. Non-conservative? I think it includes too many people, because I do believe there are moderates, independents, and people who could care less either way.
I agree that "leftist" can be divisive, but I haven't found a different word to use that doesn't also convey what I believe to be a falsehood. I also carefully use the word "conservative" instead of "Republican", because I don't think those two are the same thing either. It's also hard to use equivalent language because, while you can say "leftist", you can't really say "rightist".
Fundamentally, a conservative wants to preserve the status quo because they think proposed changes would make it worse. A progressive wants to change the status quo because they think they can improve it. But often when we use these words we are instead referring to a set of political ideals and beliefs supported by a group of people. There are lots of things conservatives would want to change today because they think we've gone in the wrong direction, and there are plenty of wins the left wants to preserve that are under assault by conservatives.
I think your approach is correct, but you landed on the wrong word. I'm not sure what the correct word is, but the asymmetry you mention goes deeper than word choice.
Say what you want about the integrity of mainstream journalism and big tech platforms, but their foibles are nothing compared to the state of Republican-leaning journalism in the United States. It hardly requires a "leftist" political ideology to acknowledge the moral and intellectual decline of the Republican Party and the respective decline of its media apparatus.
None of this excuses selective censorship, obviously, but the suggestion that right-wing journalism deserves equal time and consideration presupposes a credibility and seriousness that it's lacked for twenty years.
Thank you for your response. Unfortunately, you did not help me come up with a better word. I also don't agree with your reasoning for the word asymmetry. "Progressive" is the word that would be symmetric to "conservative". I purposely do not use that word, though, for reasons I've already explained. Also, I fail to see how the word "rightist" not being in use, as opposed to "leftist", is caused by, to paraphrase you, the Republican party being stupider than the Democrat party.
It's filled with people making their guesses and having very little evidence to back it up. My favorite is: "I’ve heard people on the political right called “rightists” before, but for some reason that doesn’t roll off the tongue as well as “leftist."
The definition they provide at the end is: "a person who believes that government should be active in supporting social and political change”. That sounds completely synonymous with "progressive," which is generally about using the force of government to cause change in the world. But that really has nothing to do with what liberal has meant in the past, or with the root of the word, or with related words like liberty.
As a side note, if you think the Republican party is intellectually inferior to the democrat party, then I think you have a serious bias problem. I regularly debate people on the left, and they tend to follow similar patterns:
* They make strong claims but never give any evidence to back them up or bother to cite any sources.
* They have major logical inconsistencies in their arguments.
* They very often rely on appeals to authority or credentials. They are right because their sources are always right, and you are wrong because your sources are always wrong.
* They very often rely on personal attacks, or quickly devolve to them.
* They don't seem to understand how scientific research is conducted, including its limitations.
And, finally, if we're going to get back on topic with respect to censorship, I provided multiple examples in other comments of conservatives being unfairly censored, and of leftists violating the rules worse than the conservatives and not getting censored. Nothing in this thread has done anything to change my opinion. Elon Musk, who has historically voted Democrat his entirely life, and who still leans left on many issues, spent 44 billion on twitter in part because he believes it unfairly censors conservatives. What is your evidence to the contrary?
That's a not-peer-reviewed study that the media went wild with that concluded, yes, conservatives are censored more, but it's just because they share more misinformation. If you dig into the paper, you quickly find they rely on "professional fact checkers" to do so. As someone who has read a lot of fact checks that themselves need to be fact-checked, I can attest that this approach is likely deeply flawed.
They actually rely on the "trustworthiness" of different news sites, but that is itself based on the opinions of fact checkers. To quote this insane stupidity that passed as research: "Nonetheless, we find that Republican users in our dataset shared news from domains that were on
average rated as much more untrustworthy than Democratic users, based on either the fact-checker ratings or the politically-balanced layperson ratings."
This is nothing but a glorified credentials argument wrapped in a research paper! This is the kind of "intellectual" superiority" that you find on the left, unfortunately.
If you didn't only read conservative news maybe you'd know about canceled leftists. Actually you wouldn't know about canceled leftists since there is no left wing popular media. We have corporate media and equally powerful far right media. That's it.
You reference the dailywire so much when even your own source (mediabiasfactcheck) rates them just short of "extreme right" and rates their "Factual Reporting" as "MIXED"?
Why would anyone take the time to respond to each of your points any more than they would a random Facebook post?
This is part of what makes political discourse so challenging today. It's really easy to conjure up evidence in the form of poorly written articles with bad sources (or outright fabrications), but exponentially more difficult to go and fact check every one of these sources any time they are trotted out.
And, from your own wikipedia article: " A study published in Scientific Reports wrote: "While [Media Bias/Fact Check's] credibility is sometimes questioned, it has been regarded as accurate enough to be used as ground-truth." Thanks for the source! I love being given more material that backs my claims!
What does it mean to rigorously and objectively classify a news site as on the left or on the right? More importantly, what's your alternative classification system that is more objective and rigorous? It's so easy to criticize, and yet so hard to come up with something better. Again, you bring absolutely nothing to the conversation. How do you intend to convince anyone of anything?
>Thanks for the source! I love being given more material that backs my claims!
None of your dailywire claims have been backed up. You keep dodging that fact.
>Again, you bring absolutely nothing to the conversation.
All I'm trying to "bring to the conversation" is the fact that your "sources" are just links to a site nobody could possibly trust. But since that's clearly good enough for you to take as fact, you're exactly the kind of person they hope to rope in.
You're assuming the Daily wire is not a trustworthy source. I do not share that assumption. If you want to debunk them, do it yourself. Otherwise, they stand as solid supporting evidence!
>You're assuming the Daily wire is not a trustworthy source.
I'm not assuming anything, remember? That's according to the source you were crowing about.
>Thanks for the source! I love being given more material that backs my claims!
The folks at mediabiasfactcheck (which you've continuously defended) gave the Daily Wire a "Mixed" ranking for Factual Reporting. They couldn't even make it to "mostly factual" (which seems like a pretty low bar).
You're being very dishonest, and we both know it. If a news source is legitimately mixed in factual reporting, that would mean you can't assume what they are saying is false, because some of what they say is true by definition. But you just outright dismissed the entire site!
Anyways, you didn't actually catch me on anything. I knew long before that Daily Wire had a "mixed" rating on that site. I had also already clicked on all their examples of false reporting, and all of them were climate change-related articles from years ago where they found a scientist who disagreed with the reporting. So, uh, don't trust Daily wire for climate change articles?
From NPR: "The articles The Daily Wire publishes don’t normally include falsehoods (with some exceptions), and the site said it is committed to “truthful, accurate and ethical reporting.”"
Please come talk to me again when you're willing to have an honest discussion about a topic, and not when you're just trying, and failing, to score points.
I'll never understand how people can justify seeing the world in such binary terms. You don't honestly think someone is "bad" or "good" based on political ideology, do you?
It's easy to summarize the world in binary terms based on empirical evidence that comes from your own experiences. In my experience, conservatives are far more likely to back up their claims with evidence than those on the left. Is it always true? Of course not. But it certainly is a generalization I am convinced that is supported by reality.
The Babylon Bee has been suspended for this tweet.[1] Meghan Murphy was permanently banned for a tweet that simply said, "Men aren't women."[2] The majority of Americans agree with these banned views. In the latest Pew polls, 60% of US adults say that gender is determined by one's sex at birth and cannot be changed.[3] Whether that view is right or not, it's pretty silly to issue bans for saying something that most people believe.
I've seen accounts get banned for replacing "white" with "black" in popular hateful tweets. Apparently only one kind of racism is allowed on Twitter.[4]
If you read Twitter's reasoning for suspending Trump, you'll see it's based on two tweets, neither of which calls for violence.[5] Twitter had to use the excuse that some people might be emboldened to commit violence by his tweets. That's true for almost any politician. But the president of South Africa's Black First Land First party can threaten to kill white people and only get a seven day suspension.[6] Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of Iran, still has a Twitter account[7] despite endorsing the fatwa against Salman Rushdie. Rushdie is now blind in one eye and has lost the use of an arm after an assassination attempt in August.
> In the latest Pew polls, 60% of US adults say that gender is determined by one's sex at birth and cannot be changed …
What is “gender” in the above sentence?
It’s a 1950s attitude that males are born masculine and females feminine - that was largely rejected from the 70s onward, people being held to be unique individuals and gender stereotyping deemed sexist and oppressively limiting.
I was under the impression that young people think gender identity is determined biologically independently of reproductive sex - hence (to them) “Trans women are women” because of their innate gender identity.
Which (if either) is right? - The issue appears to me to be very philosophically confused.
It’s a highly semantic issue. “Woman” historically denotes sex. Some people want to change that to make it denote gender. The people formerly known as women were generally not consulted about this change.
> In since-deleted tweets, the account specifically accused Chasten Buttigieg and The Trevor Project organization of grooming.[40][32][94]
And outright misinformation isn't really an "ideological difference."
> The account has been criticized for spreading hoaxes, including the litter boxes in schools hoax about bathrooms accommodations for students that identified as cats, and a false claim that students in a second-grade class in Austin, Texas were being taught about furries.[12][95][94]
Outright lies are destructive to "public square"-style communication, and Twitter definitely can't be seen, legally, facilitating libel.
Is it worse to be called a groomer or a Nazi? I guess, if you're twitter, it's worse to call a leftist a groomer than it is to call a conservative a Nazi. @NYCAntifa clearly gets away with the latter!
> The account has been criticized for spreading hoaxes, including the litter boxes in schools hoax about bathrooms accommodations for students that identified as cats, and a false claim that students in a second-grade class in Austin, Texas were being taught about furries.[12][95][94]
Libs of tik tok spread the misinformation, but they didn't create it. They cited someone else. If you don't think it's ok to cite someone else, later find out they lied, and then retract your statement, well, you probably have two standards, one for yourself and one for people you disagree with.
> Outright lies are destructive to "public square"-style communication, and Twitter definitely can't be seen, legally, facilitating libel.
>Is it worse to be called a groomer or a Nazi? I guess, if you're twitter, it's worse to call a leftist a groomer than it is to call a conservative a Nazi.
"Groomer" is a noun that describes someone's actions. "Nazi" is a noun that describes someone's political beliefs. It is absolutely worse to be called a "groomer" because that is a direct claim of immoral and often illegal behavior. "You are doing something bad" is a more serious accusation than "you believe something bad".
If your belief system allows you to support genocide, does that make you better than someone who is doing something bad now that doesn't support genocide? No, I don't think your moral compass is any less subjective than mine, here. People act on and are motivated by their beliefs, and, if you're a Nazi, you're going to do things that move the world in a particular direction.
>If your belief system allows you to support genocide, does that make you better than someone who is doing something bad now that doesn't support genocide?
Many people who use the term "groomers" as loosely as LibsOfTikTok already think of this "grooming" as equivalent to a genocide. That is my point. "Groomers" implies that the bad is already happening while "Nazi" implies the bad is a belief with undefined actions. It is the difference between being call a murderer and a psychopath. One says you already did something bad. The other says you might be capable of something bad.
False accusations of being a Nazi have on occasion led to successful libel claims, so I’m not sure it a whole lot less serious than a false accusation of child abuse (if that’s what groomer is supposed to mean).
To groom is to "prepare or train (someone) for a particular purpose or activity."
It also has a more specific definition: "the act of deliberately establishing an emotional connection with a child to prepare the child for child abuse".
Today, I think people are using the word to mean a hybrid of the above two definitions, namely, to train or indoctrinate a child into sexual deviancy, even if the person doing the grooming does not take part in it directly.
I think some uses today are also just synonyms for indoctrination, which fits only within the more general definition of grooming.
> Is it worse to be called a groomer or a Nazi? I guess, if you're twitter, it's worse to call a leftist a groomer than it is to call a conservative a Nazi. @NYCAntifa clearly gets away with the latter!
I can see why you are being downvoted, but I've been observing this trend lately too. Its popular on some social media sites to call half of the country nazis or at least nazi sympathizers.
Neither side has clean hands, but this vilification is extremely harmful.
In order for something to be libel, you have to know it is false and intend for people to believe it is true. The litter box story for example was spread by a trolling organization with the intention of fooling people like LoTT and Tucker. It's not libel because they fell for it — it's stupid, but it's not libel. Likewise, the criticism of the The Trevor Project likely reflects a sincerely held belief that the known activities of TTP constitute "grooming", and not a measurable claim that TTP staff are actively engaging in activities conventionally understood as pedophilia. Also not libel.
Defamation (libel and slander) in the US is distinct depending on how well known the victim is. For a famous victim, yes you must essentially know the statement was false.
But if the victim is not a public individual, you need only act with negligence (e.g. violate the reasonable person standard). The litter box story, for example, doesn't involve famous people, it's like random local school districts, and no reasonable person would believe it to be true. The Trevor project likely does constitute a public organization, so the standard is higher, but only requires actual malice, which means "reckless disregard" for the truth of the statements. It's probably not met, because it is a high standard, but it doesn't actually require that they know themselves to be lying.
I do agree that the content that particular user finds and shows to me is very disturbing, especially given that it is often teachers taking care of very impressionable people(children) in a position of authority.
Are we looking at the same page? The majority of these are just a person frothing mad about a grand conspiracy of teachers who will stop at nothing until they have "trans"-ed all kids. They're completely unhinged
This is not an accurate representation of what LibsofTiktok is and what content they post.
There are specifics about what false claims. All they do is repost TikTok’s insanity.
In some ways, LibsofTiktok has done world a whole lot of good, by exposing and immunizing against extreme left ideologies that even the most devout progressives reject.
We need more of this that exposed extremes of either ideology. Because clearly the media has totally failed to do this.
Why was he banned? Someone at Twitter that day felt a duty to prevent the person who led his violent supporters to the capitol from continuing to speak through their platform. Are you saying this was a purely political decision?
If their intention was to reduce violence from his supporters, then why did they delete the video he uploaded at 4:16 that stated
“I know your pain. I know you’re hurt. We had an election that was stolen from us,” he said. “It was a landslide election, and everyone knows it, especially the other side. But you have to go home now. We have to have peace. We have to have law and order. We have to respect our great people in law and order. We don’t want anybody hurt.”
The president called it a “very tough period of time,” calling the election “fraudulent.”
“But we can’t play into the hands of these people,” Trump said. “We have to have peace. So go home. We love you. You’re very special. You’ve seen what happens, you see the way others are treated that are so bad and so evil. I know how you feel. But go home and go home in peace.”
> who led his violent supporters to the capitol
The capitol was breached while Trump was still speaking to the larger crowd several blocks away.
if twitter's goal was reduction of violence, then they would have amplified Trump's video calling for peaceful dispersion, not delete it.
Given that he claims that he won the election in that video, yeah it makes sense to delete it.
> We had an election that was stolen from us,” he said. “It was a landslide election, and everyone knows it, especially the other side.
Is not a call for the peaceful transition of power and for people to go home. Speaking out of both sides of your mouth is not a call for peace. Trump's tweet wasn't an effort to reduce violence, it was an effort to continue to stoke the flames while appearing to help, and people didn't fall for it.
"The 75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me, AMERICA FIRST, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, will have a GIANT VOICE long into the future. They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!"
and
"To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th."
Kanye West was not targeted "solely based on ideology."
> In one post on Twitter, Ye said he would soon go “death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE,” according to internet archive records, making an apparent reference to the U.S. defense readiness condition scale known as DEFCON.
>targeting conservative voices solely based on ideology.
Clearly happening, yet even here already we have four people so far claiming that it doesn't, and people flagging/downvoting you for telling the truth.
They banned a conservative satire publication ffs. The Babylon Bee.
"The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command."
The problem is that when leftists and centrist say "censored for conservative views" they think of lower taxes and deregulation, but when conservatives point to examples of which views get censored, it is always "Oh, you know the ones"[1].
The Babylon Bee was suspended for targeted harassment. Harassment is not a conservative view.
That's only "targeted harassment" when redefining words in an arbitrary and disingenuous fashion. The article is not even especially mean hearted, let alone "targeted harassment." And then factor in the fact that the subject is a high ranking and public political figure on top of all of this.
The article is saying that Levine's entire gender identity is a lie. You honestly don't see anything mean spirited about that?
Levine is a random bureaucrat that no one in the public would know the name of if she wasn't trans. By singling her out, conservative media and the Babylon Bee are encouraging people to harass her for no other reason than her transness.
So why aren't there any sources demonstrating this "clear bias" you're so sure of? There are actual numbers demonstrating pro-right-wing bias, and yet your only response is "no there isn't! I saw a right wing person get banned the other day!" How is this supposed to be convincing?
Stating that humans are sexually dimorphic? That a man claiming to have transitioned to female is still a man? That got the Babylon Bee sanctioned, for satire.
I would also hope that's not a "conservative" view as it's simply a scientific fact.
It's easy to say that when you define conservative opinions as breaking the rules or harassment. So they get banned for hate and harassment instead of just being conservative or right leaning. Congrats you won on a technicality.
So both sides are right, and yet the conversation between the extremes moved backwards instead of finding common ground.
>It's easy to say that when you define conservative opinions as breaking the rules or harassment.
That's literally what they did. "misgendering someone" is hatespeech/harassment. When from a sane perspective outside the woke cult: Humans aren't clownfish and cannot change their gender.
>Humans aren't clownfish and cannot change their gender.
Hit the nail on the head here. Hence, the medical community's current response is to adjust the individual's body, appearance and treatment from others to match their gender as closely as possible.
No, we don't. This is not an yes/no answer. This is the type of question that should be answered in terms of confidence intervals.
> right wing tweets actually got promoted more
In relation to what? What is a "right wing" tweet? What is a "left wing" tweet?
E.g, if the algorithm is focused on filtering out disparaging extreme messages, and it ends up filtering X amount of "non-extreme right wing content", 3X of "extreme right-wing content" and 5X of "extreme left-wing content", it satisfies the claim that "it promotes more right-wing content" while also silencing conservative voices.
This is not exclusive to Twitter, but here's a recent research papaer on the comparative advantage of "the right" in dissimination of information on social media.
As for free speech vs censorship, a lot of people think in absolutes. It should be absolutely possible or impossible to say this thing. And this particular individual should be banned or not.
What I think is far more important is the level of amplification. Currently, the most unhinged extremists from every political angle are massively amplified. They know exactly how to play the engagement game.
Twitter rewards the wrong thing. Those stoking controversy get the engagement, after which that account is injected as "recommended" into all kinds of places, snowballing those accounts into power.
That situation should be flipped. Reasonable people should be amplified, not crazy ones.
This is exactly what good moderation can help with -- promote thoughtful and reasonable content, while making sure that inflammatory commentary gets less attention. I've run an online forum for over a decade; it's not that hard, really, to encourage thoughtful participation, with the right type of leadership.
See what dang wrote:
> please don't post low-information, high-indignation comments, such as flamebait or ideological battle. We want thoughtful, curious conversation on HN.
The problem is that big social media is so large and "open" that they don't want to have any community leadership.
Who is setting the tone on Twitter, or any major social network? Who is acting as a leader, both enforcing quality commentary, and also setting a good example? Nobody. I doubt this will change.
Smaller communities, such as HN, are where we can have reasonable discussion.
A good correllary: many local city council meetings, where almost anyone can have a chance to talk. They're not pretty. But at least the decision makers are there (and held accountable), and limits are set.
Creating an environment where good discourse can thrive is hard. It's like fighting entropy. You can do it. But it's an uphill battle.
Indeed, the forum-style moderation will not work on Twitter.
What I'm saying is that all of these things: low-information, high-indignation comments, such as flamebait or ideological battle...
...can and perhaps should be allowed on Twitter. It shouldn't be removed, it should stop being amplified. When you do any of those things, your post should rank low, not high. It should get organic attention only, and no algorithmic boosting. It should have a low visibility and it should not lead to a massive amount of new followers.
+1. When you expand a tweet it shouldn't always be the most outraged or sycophantic responses that are on top. Very hard problem, but I agree people should be able to express themselves but the algorithm shouldn't always funnel people to the poles.
I think with the current system, users start moving towards the extremes because they see the most ridiculous level of discourse of the opposite side (I think the extreme opinions of one's own side are not as influential, you filter them as not representative, but don't allow that to the majority of people you disagree with). And the tweeters are hurt by trying to compete by saying the angriest things they can think of.
I set the tone for my feed by choosing who to follow. I then want to see whatever they have to say in chronological order. If I don't like somebody's comments, I stop following them. Why do I need anyone else to interfere with this process?
That is discussed in this thread, but it's not clear what's going on with that story (comments are saying it was a prank, and the originally submitted tweet has been deleted):
That sounds like the move of someone who wants specifically-selected very loyal people designing systems which would tell you what's actually happening on the platform.
Who knows if that rumor is true, but it would be another red flag with Elon's approach. I can understand clearing out the old leadership team on day 1, but how quickly could Musk possibly know that there is no one on this team that could provide value to Twitter with different management or in some other role? Shooting first and asking questions later is not a good approach to managing a billion-dollar company.
Typically a lot of investigations into products and teams already take place before close. This was a weird acquisition though, so who knows if that actually was possible beforehand.
Yes, but there is a difference between "I don't think what this team is currently working on provides value to the company" and "I don't think this team or anyone on it can provide value to the company". That second viewpoint is much more definitive and should require more time and evidence to reach.
Funny how we give advice on how to manage a billion dollar company to guy who owns 2 of these . I’m not sure how many do you own, but I unfortunately don’t have any.
The idea that only people who have done a job can criticize a person doing that job is silly. We all can criticize the President for example without having led a country. Isn't that principle supposedly the underlying reason Musk bought Twitter?
Not specific to Twitter but as I understand it. Generally a data engineering team will setup the pipelines and ETL processes to turn transactional data into aggregate data necessary to run analytics.
Maybe it was a prank but there is strong reason to believe that he'd want to use his Dojo AI engine to do heavy data engineering for twitter. that may mean some overlap & slightly different technical profile than existing team. Oh and um .. Loyalists!
I am not a huge fan of Elon, but I look forward to him changing Twitter. Twitter has an extreme bias and it’s moderation is not balanced and it’s very polarising and having a controversial person who can bring the platform back to the centre and more to balanced without being afraid from a backlash from some fringe extremists is a good thing IMHO.
We can argue about free speech & all that jazz to no end. But at the end of the day it's as simple as not banning elected officials. I don't care how divisive they are, we need to know what they say and do. These are people chosen by the people whether you love or hate them.
Secondly, I just visited Twitter today and at the top it has statements about false accusations and fact checking prominently displayed. I follow a bunch of stats and machine learning people on Twitter, very little to no politics. Why are you forcing your political agenda on me?
Elected officials in America at least are just normal people, the rules apply to them just the same as anybody else. The idea of giving elected officials special exemptions ought to be odious to anyone who considers themself to have American values. I mean it is a private company, so they can implement this sort of thing, but we should be clear that having a special rules for the political class is utterly unamerican in spirit.
> the rules apply to them just the same as anybody else
Wasn't Trump forbidden from blocking people on Twitter by court order?
> "The First Amendment does not permit a public official who utilises a social media account for all manner of official purposes to exclude persons from an otherwise open online dialogue because they expressed views with which the official disagrees," Circuit Judge Barrington Parker wrote, citing several Supreme Court decisions.
Are you also for allowing elected officials to shout "fire!" in a theatre when there is no fire? What if someone dies in the rush to the exit, when there was no fire?
People have already died because of lies being spread. People's lives have been ruined. It's only going to get worse, especially if the election deniers get voted in en masse in Nov.
It's not like the news media stopped quoting every little controversial thing Trump said after he was banned from Twitter... they thrive on sensationalism.
The only thing that's stopped him from being quoted even more is that he's no longer President, so for anything unrelated to his lawsuits or his potential run for Presidency it matters a lot less what he says.
If the Republicans do poorly in the midterms and/or they don't manage to win the Presidency back under Trump's leadership, he'll be ignored even more.
His presence or absence from Twitter has nothing to do with it.
He has his own social network now anyway, so it's not like journalists and his fans don't know where to find him.
Trump wasn't the only elected official removed. I just don't think the president of the U.S. or any democratically elected official should be removed from a public platform such as this.
It's insane. They should be held to the same standards as everyone else. Most of their complaints center around being outraged when the rules they've grown accustomed to being above are finally applied to them.
Hard disagree. The whole point of the rule of law is that elected officials are not supposed to be special, they have to follow the same rules as everybody else. If I'd get banned for a tweet, an elected official should also get banned for the same tweet. Your proposal means creating a caste system where special people get more free speech than the rest of us.
I feel like it means exposing elected officials and making them responsible for what they say online. If anything I view it as holding them to a higher standard.
In addition, it reduces the extreme polarization in our country. When you silence an elected official, you are silencing all the people who voted for such official without forcing them to realize what that elected official said/did.
Just about now Donald Trump is realising he's forgotten his twitter password, because he had people for that, and he can't remember which email account he used.
Meanwhile president@whitehouse.gov is very carefully NOT clicking on those links ...
Musk immediately terminated twitter's general counsel and head of legal policy, trust, & safety - this does not bode well with anticipated 3/4 downsizing:
>2. A stripped-down trust-and-safety team is unable to deal with government subpoenas or complex law-enforcement requests. A bare-bones team might, for example, accidentally assist outside efforts to identify anonymous dissidents and activists in foreign countries.
>3. The trust-and-safety team is unable to stop coordinated efforts from fraudsters orchestrating low-level scams. Similarly, a strapped trust-and-safety department is unable to combat or monitor child-sexual-abuse material, sex-trafficking efforts, nonconsensual pornography, and copyright violations.
…
>One former trust-and-safety engineer for a large social network told me that many elements of the job that seem boring or straightforward are actually incredibly fraught, like how to define and take action on different kinds of spam. Trust-and-safety officers in charge of such efforts aren’t just dealing with Viagra ads or crypto-scam bots; they’re figuring out how to handle bulk messages from legitimate political organizers exploiting the platforms for mass messaging. As one person put it, there are good actors and bad actors and also “spammy but not necessarily malicious businesses trying to get you to buy things in between, and all those things can look very similar to machine-learning models.”
>Those with trust-and-safety experience at the platform told me that a big percentage of the job is dealing with the messy edge cases that are difficult for a computer to decipher. Programs might be able to address specific product quirks if a user files a clear help ticket reporting an obvious problem. “But if I wrote in, ‘My account has been hacked because it “accidentally” liked a porn tweet on 9/11 and I’m U.S. Senator Ted Cruz,’ that’s going to be a lot for a computer to unpack,” Brian Truebe, a former Twitter trust-and-safety professional, told me over email.
>“A lot of things humans say and do are only easily interpretable/decoded by other humans,” he continued. “And when all speech is happening in a few places, those few places need more humans to review, not fewer.”
>Reactionary tech figures such as Musk like to imply that content-moderation teams act as a kind of thought police. But these teams largely work on protecting users’ privacy, complying with laws, or keeping the site from becoming overrun by the kind of spam that no human wants to encounter. “To really have a robust security-and-abuse team, you need a massive amount of actual humans to respond and filter things that need to be filtered out,” Southey Blanton, a systems technician who worked in trust and safety at MySpace, told me. Blanton said that cuts to his team led to a skeleton crew of moderators, who had to rely on imprecise AI tools to get rid of bots and spam—which led to many legitimate human accounts getting banned as well. “Overall, a social-media site is under attack, as well as being overwhelmed, basically 24/7, 365,” he said. “I am fully convinced that if Musk does what he is saying he will do, it will be an absolute shitshow.”
Calling Twitter the "defacto online political forum" which the vast majority of US citizens do no use (myself included) seems a little over the top don't you think. Twitter could disappear and I wouldn't miss the incessant whining about the stupid crap people say on Twitter.
There’s no foundation for this premise, but sure, “they” found their own app. People can make infinity apps. Or maybe show that there’s more value in the previous censorship and buy it back.
At this point what happens with Twitter the service is not as interesting anymore. Everyone is going to be watching what the X app is and how Twitter fits in it
Wonderful news. I'm curious to see how the platform will change, hopefully for better, under his leadership. We need to find a way to foster free speech, and not only have Twitter as a liberal echo chamber.
What worries me is this — Outrage creates “engagement”.
A site like Twitter could easily capitalize on this and allow/promote outrage content in the near term, boosting their profits and causing long term side effects to societies as a whole.
Sadly even after dang has stated that conversations should be thoughtful, people are still posting provoking and low-quality disingenuous comments.
I don't even understand how a human being can get so invested in something they will never have control over, even more so now that Twitter is owned by a private person.
As rational and high minded as folks on hacker news like to position themselves, everyone here is just as susceptible to being drawn in towards drama involving their own set of celebrities and companies.
(I searched the whole thread and it appears no one's mentioned this yet)
* He will move the HQ to Austin. The current SF Tenderloin location is a major turnoff for everyone, including most of the employees, I'd bet. And it certainly can't be cheap.
Most likely the people who refuse to move, he mostly wants to get rid of anyway.
I didn’t do it for the money, I did it for “humanity” so I want to appease advertisers to make money and save humanity even though I hate advertising.
Oh, also there are more than 30% bots on the platform but I still bought this thing because I want the trial to end because I don’t want to answer any more questions and reveal things that would put me in legal jeopardy.
Does he really think people are that stupid? I agree he is super smart but the rest of us are not that stupid.
The year is 2024. Trump wins a second term presidency after having been unbanned from Twitter in late 2022.
As he promised soon after he pulls US out of NATO, allowing Russia to annex the rest of Ukraine.
The threat of a full scale nuclear war is finally out to rest and the world rejoices! Everyone chanting for a 3rd term presidency!
This is all good, but unlss @realDonaldTrump unblocked I will never use Twitter again. I don't care if you agree or disagree with what was said. But if even a pressident of united states can be banned, best not use such platforms. Period!
If even a president of the USA can behave so poorly and break rules so flagrantly that a service like Twitter -- that has tremendous incentive to keep him on the platform -- sees that they have to block him from the platform, best not to rely on such presidents.
No reason to take my word on this, but I think that this will blow up in his face agonizingly in a way similar to Zuckerberg/Meta. I think that US-owned social media platforms as we them are beginning to flounder into a sort of soft irrelevancy. In other words, they are stagnating and their user bases will likely plateau in terms of growth and overall culture of the platforms.
Culturally Twitter has been dead for almost a decade as far as the quality of the posts go and the general “vibe” of the place, sort of like Reddit. I really think social media has become low-brow entertainment with a little more reading involved than a Television. Social media is almost an online iteration of the airport bookstore.
I feel like this techcrunch article itself violates hacker news policies because it has numerous personal attacks and deriding commentary throughout the article. Including calling the purchase of twitter a "toy".
More so calling it "crowning himself CEO" as if that wouldn't be automatically required if you layoff the existing CEO. A temporary CEO would be required until a new CEO is found.
I think it's also important to consider the idiom "A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on"
>I feel like this techcrunch article itself violates hacker news policies because it has numerous personal attacks and deriding commentary throughout the article. Including calling the purchase of twitter a "toy".
HN is little different from big tech ideologically, and your comment is already fading out of existence. I expect it will be completely censored soon.
This site has a downvote button and an upvote button. The fact that people use that feature of the site (downvote), means the site is working as intended. It is not censorship.
If you're going to comment, please make sure you're up to date on the site guidelines and are following them: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.