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Comment by luciusdomitius | Hacker News Reader

"Free speech absolutism is possible and is beneficial once you ensure that someone is not gaming the system, i.e. someone pretending to be more than one person."

This is probably the core motivation behind the $2/month blue checkmark fee proposed by him. You don't need to moderate social media if you can just send the cops credit card details of the person spam-posting swastikas, agitating for violence or breaking other established laws. I hope we all agree that laws against libel, glorification of crime, threatening people are not exactly censorship.

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It’s not such a bad idea, and it was the initial intent of blue checks: proving that an account wasn’t impersonated. But they couldn’t roll out verification at scale, so they only verified high-ish profile accounts. As a result, over time, the blue check has come to be a sort of class signifier and lost its original purpose (I sometimes see verified anon accounts, what even was verified?)

Rolling it out at scale could improve the rampant spam/astroturfing problem, even if it would be imperfect.

I think about Twitter occasionally and I'm always amazed that the company has thousands of employees.

If he charged $2 / month for an individual to get a blue check and $100 / month for a company to get verified then eliminated ads, could he get the staff count down to under 100 people?

I remember when Facebook bought Instagram. Instagram had something like 13 employees. Why does Twitter need two orders of magnitude more?

So to replace Twitter's current revenue at those rates, you'd need something like 170 million blue check marks or 3 million corporate accounts.

How many do you think is realistic? Reducing your revenue by an order of magnitude to reduce your headcount by an order of magnitude seems like a bad plan.

Electric cars are a bad plan if you are an oil company, its a great plan for the rest of society

Electric cars are a great plan if you're an electric car company, though.

Why focus on revenue rather than profit?

Revenue puts a ceiling on profit. You can't sell at a loss and make it up in volume, but you also can't make more profits than revenue.

Right now there are 360,000 blue check marks on Twitter. If I spot you the first million blue checkmarks and the first 100,000 business profiles, that's only $144M of revenue per year. Even if that is 90% profit, $130M / year profit on a $50B investment is not particularly brag-worthy.

I assume Musk needs Twitter to be profitable, but as somebody trying to sell cars, and satellites and big solar projects and space launches around the world, the platform can help him in other ways too.

> I think about Twitter occasionally and I'm always amazed that the company has thousands of employees.

Once a company gets big enough, 95% of an employees job is navigating the bureaucracy. So the head count goes way up.

> I remember when Facebook bought Instagram. Instagram had something like 13 employees. Why does Twitter need two orders of magnitude more?

Companies tend to hire more employees as long as the marginal benefit to doing so is greater than the marginal cost. Even minor improvements to a product like Twitter can boost revenue by millions. Reducing the headcount might not maximise their income.

There will be exceptions though. Valve does lot more than most video-game companies with far fewer employees.

> Valve does lot more than most video-game companies with far fewer employees.

Wait a minute when did Valve go back to being a video game company?

A "video-game company" doesn't necessarily have to be a game developer, and being a distributer is enough. Consider how "music company" aptly applies to Spotify.

Elon will be able to remove 90% and turn twitter HQ into a homeless shelter. SF and the world will be better off.

Of the fewer than 100 employees:

• How many are engineers?

• How many work in customer service?

• How many are in compliance?

• How many are in marketing?

• How many are ICs and how many are managers?

• How many are in HR?

• How many are in finance?

Do you happen to know the breakdown of Instagram's 13 employees?

No. But I know that Twitter today is a very different company from Instagram in 2012.

Definitely is. I'm just wondering if they can move closer to that model.

They can not.

> glorification of crime

This runs into a problem because of the inherent inequality of "crime".

The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges.

Any argument for legalizing something illegal can be seen as "glorification of crime".

> I hope we all agree that laws against libel, glorification of crime, threatening people are not exactly censorship.

As far as I'm concerned, if you want to force a business to censor speech, get a court order.

That sounds like the opposite of free speech absolutism. This is the government silencing speech!

>This is the government silencing speech!

Which they can do, once you get over a very high bar indeed.

We have literally seen the Supreme Court protect speech advocating for violence against the Government.

>Brandenburg v. Ohio, 395 U.S. 444 (1969), was a landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court interpreting the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The Court held that the government cannot punish inflammatory speech unless that speech is "directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action".

Specifically, the Court struck down Ohio's criminal syndicalism statute, because that statute broadly prohibited the mere advocacy of violence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandenburg_v._Ohio

I much prefer the rule of law to the rule of Twitter mob.

But what about free speech absolutism! “Yeah of course the government can silence people” doesn’t sound like absolutism to me.

Wait, just for clarification... do you believe a company should be allowed to censor speech on its own platform if it wants to do so? Or are you saying a business should not be allowed to remove any posts unless a court has given its approval?

I which counter?

The assumption that cops in the US actually care about someone posting swastikas is questionable. We already have lots of people posting about crimes on twitter accounts under their real names, and the cops very frequently don't do anything about it. A sizable number of the swastika posters are cops, too, as demonstrated by the periodic investigations into police departments that reveal those sorts of things.

P.S. Requiring someone to have a credit card doesn't feel like free speech absolutism to me. A pretty big number of people don't have the ability to make credit card payments. Do their voices not matter?

Also makes it a lot harder to set up an army of bots.

Also, if there are people complaining of censorship you can always give them a '4-chan mode' and watch them come back asking how to switch it off after 5 min.

> Also, if there are people complaining of censorship you can always give them a '4-chan mode' and watch them come back asking how to switch it off after 5 min.

I'm not so sure what a four chan mode would look like. Can you please elaborate? Inspite of the constant mockery of the janitors, my understanding is they work practically around the clock for zero pay trying to keep the boards (not that I go to /b/ much) as clean as possible. It definitely is not a free for all and my understanding is most people gladly support heavy handed IP bans for example if someone posts commercial pornography on a "work safe" four channel board like technolo/g/y.

Moreover, some of the boards are very slow to the point that frequenters seem to get annoyed by a low quality post pushing down better posts by saying things like "thank you for your blog post" (I assume sarcasm, I don't know for sure) or "a thread died for this".

Also there are (from what I've read) filters available to filter out posts with certain keywords and people coming up with ways to have their posts show up for people with filters using different techniques.

I don't post anything on 4chan as I don't feel like a part of the in-crowd though and would genuinely like to know what a 4 Chan mode would look like.

> I don't post anything on 4chan as I don't feel like a part of the in-crowd though and would genuinely like to know what a 4 Chan mode would look like.

I don’t think there is a requirement for being part of the in crowd to post on 4chan. Then again, I’ve never posted there either.

I think the point is that 4chan mode would be the “absolute free speech” mode. And if that is where we are going, it will be quite a ride. I can’t imagine Twitter surviving it, but it will be interesting.

> I think the point is that 4chan mode would be the “absolute free speech” mode. And if that is where we are going, it will be quite a ride. I can’t imagine Twitter surviving it, but it will be interesting.

I think what I've learned from 4chan is that words like (redacted) shit general in /g/ or calling OP a (redacted) is ok on 4chan specifically. Except the name(redacted) and trip(redacted), we are all pseudonymous there so when someone says you are a (redacted), they don't mean to say you are of a specific ethnicity or gender. It means you are acting like an idiot or something they disapprove of?

I can imagine a 21+ social media network that has no explicit moderation but you would still need protection from spam, flooding, and other bad actors once you get to a certain size.

I will be honest, my experience on 4c was 15+ years ago and only on /random. I just used it (most probably incorrectly) as an example of anarchy.

Meh, the "containment board" model used by 4chan and some other "freedom of speech" oriented forums work surprisingly well.

> I hope we all agree that laws against libel, glorification of crime, threatening people are not exactly censorship.

No, this isn't free speech absolutism, and adding a paywall to any conversation on twitter would kill the site.

> he would be sued for enabling the NYC subway terrorist

The problem with that is that yesterday it was swastikas, today is the letter Z, tomorrow who knows what else we might have in store?

Also, putting in prison all the people who have displayed their swastika-love thingie online [1] would have meant Mariupol falling sooner to the Russians, a thing contrary to the beliefs of many who propose laws like that.

[1] https://twitter.com/tyengeni1954/status/1503955204059938817

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