Elon Musk owns Twitter: The story so far
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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)
He really hates the bots, so he'll probably close up the API.
Until bots gets solved, no developer should expect the API to open up.
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).
You should be allowed to create your own client for any service you want, that is customized to your input needs.
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.
That's horrible for users.
Twitter's iOS app is a third-party app they bought because it was so much better than their own at the time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tweetie
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.
Hmm...this may turn into "Ban speech from my account that's promoting right/left wing agenda" moderation bots
Let the bot wars begin
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.
If you were to build a malicious bot, sure. If you were to build a bot to tweet about the weather in Sheffield, you might as well use the API.
Discord does something similar, although I feel they've gone way too far with policing it.
I think the only problem would be if this API was used by non-bots (perhaps some relays) and the tag loses its meaning.
What they don't realise is that the comment they are reading right now could well have been written by a bot.
I don't think twitter is that place and it hasn't been for a while if it ever was.
I just watched this video again...
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?
This is a Twitter account that started relatively recently - I like it. https://twitter.com/_restaurant_bot
This sort of bot has had a good place on Twitter for at least a decade, going back to @everyword.
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?
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.
In general, not knowing if a machine or a human wrote a twitter post is a bad thing.
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.
What about replies and retweets? EX: If you have high quality (or good faith) content that's supported/attacked by bots vs real people.
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.
Please define your terms.
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
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.
They simply factor them in as a cost of doing business.
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.
[0] https://intelligence.house.gov/social-media-content/
[1] https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/ICA-dec...
[2] https://www.propublica.org/article/infamous-russian-troll-fa...
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 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.
What degree of sway is up for debate, but given the documented scale and scope of the efforts, it certainly wasn't zero.
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.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_influence_on_public_opinio...
1: https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/09/16/1035851/facebook...
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.
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?
[1]: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-china/trump-...
[2]: https://fortune.com/2017/11/01/facebook-google-twitter-russi...
[3]: https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/09/16/1035851/facebook...
[4]: https://www.reuters.com/article/usa-election-facebook-russia...
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.
It's taken seriously for good reason.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_20...
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.
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?
(Off topic, but I love the juxtaposition of your handle and the topic being discussed. :) )
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.
there's yer problem, eh?
There are worse things in life than polite artifice. Maintaining it is, itself, an achievement.
If there's a flow that a human can go through to oauth with an application, then there's a way to bypass that same flow through a bot.
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.
I want to write a blog engine that posts a summary and a link to my twitter timeline automatically.
Do I have to "partner with Twitter"? How will that look?
But it also allows (even encourages) third party clients, which can act on behalf of ordinary users.
AwareOps tweets every time a solution goes down: https://twitter.com/awareops
Is that spamming bot stuff or useful or both?
How about the kid who wrote an app that tweets everyone position of a billionaire's airplane location?
That's the point.
> but if you tweet through the API then you get a big "BOT" tag next to your username on the feed.
What if I do this through Zapier? What about Hootsuite? Who's a BOT and who isn't?
It has been especially noticeable this year, since February 24th
https://blog.twitter.com/common-thread/en/topics/stories/202...
I have not seen many obvious bot accounts using it, even the “good” ones.
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.
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.
I'd be pretty surprised if those accounts were obviously using the API, too easy to ban them by application.
I would see bots as a major concern if you want to monetize the platform.
Yeah, good luck getting someone like the BBC to pay for embedding tweets.
> and take screenshots instead.
I'd assume that would be against TOS (probably is already.)
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.
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.
Sources:
Specht v. Netscape: https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=958708515918483...
Hines v. Overstock.com: https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=163224540731670...
Nguyen v. Barnes & Noble: https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=110038111392175...
Van Tassell v. United Marketing Group: https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=174994243217056...
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.
It's a minefield, probably.
[1] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/jwherrman/want-to-publi...
Maybe pay for no ads in the embeds?
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.
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...
He shut up about the bots as soon as it was evident the excuse wasn't working. Bots are of no concern otherwise.
Instead of trying to maximize in-house value open ecosystem works better for Twitter.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
So does your argument.
> 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.
[0] https://twitter.com/KimKardashian/status/1586430799884140545
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.
[0] https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/twitter-verificati...
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.
That term bot conflates at least three distinct meanings. Not sure how blocking the API would affect #2 or #3
1) Automated accounts probably using the API that are run by a program to post content. Can be benign. Here's an example:
https://twitter.com/happyautomata/
2) Large accounts that push a particular point of view, often state sponsored, run in teams. Does not need an API. Here's an example:
https://twitter.com/sprintermonitor
3) Small accounts paid to push or disrupt a particular agenda in replies. Often state sponsored. Example I suspect:
How relevant is the API though?
Is it possible to put together a Selenium script that posts a tweet?
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.
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.
* Have URLs not count towards character limit
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".
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].
[1]: https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2021/5/13/social-media-co...
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’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!
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.
It's been the de facto Tesla API for 3rd party devs for a number of years now, and Tesla seems to be perfectly fine with it existing.
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.
We'll see how it goes.
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.
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
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.
If expenditure (hiring) goes up and he's not finding revenue then that's the end sooner rather then later.
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.
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.
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.
Nothing.
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.
Both are ideal in my personal opinion.
So axe away I guess, cause there is no wood to chop. The tree is hollow, from all the woodpeckers eating the grubs.
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.
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.
That's very subjective. "Misinformation" is more moderated than child porn and literal terrorist organizations.
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).
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.
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.
They were almost ready to fold, got a new iCEO, and completely turned around to become the world’s most valuable company two decades 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.)
Twitter is the product though, there's not an underserved market that they can move into.
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.
Some fresh leadership might not be a bad thing for Twitter. Whether Musk is the right person for that...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
This wasn't a negotiating strategy.
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.
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.
anyone who actually think he was forced to pay 43bn when he could have paid 1bn. (even 2bn) are just not thinking correctly.
https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/8/23201004/twitter-to-sue-el...
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.
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.
https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2022/05/13/elon-musk-cant-just-walk...
It is embedded on this link https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/8/23201004/twitter-to-sue-el...
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1418091/000119312522...
“Pay $2B and out” was not a choice available to him.
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.
He decided to buy because he feels its better to own it.
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.
He did but not for this price...
I think it's more precise to say he acted as if "he desperately didn't want to buy Twitter.".
If he's unsure about that, he can hire Zuck which might be free from contract soon if we look at how Meta stock is trading.
Obviously many people will disagree with his plan, though I’m 100% certain he has one, and will make it happen.
If "having a rich father" is the only thing that matters, why isn't everyone with a rich father a billionaire?
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.
Maybe that's Elon, I don't know.
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 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.
Business accomplishments are impressive but I don't think they make someone a genius.
Tesla (the company) didn't invent electric cars, but they were the first to make electric cars that people actually wanted to buy.
Pre-Tesla, the public perception of elecric cars was something like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2HX5wsQVEA (this did not age well)
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.
https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/k1e0ta/eviden...
"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.
Robert Zubrin - Aerospace engineer
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.
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.
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.
> If "having a rich father" is the only thing that matters, why isn't everyone with a rich father a billionaire?
My position is that there are multiple factors and neither is sufficient on their own.
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.
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.
The meat of the claim is "just an engineer [...] Did he invent something that I'm not aware of?"
The money isn't mentioned to disqualify him, but to point out that money isn't enough.
What did he actually do that shows genius?
https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/k1e0ta/eviden...
Elon Musk had no more support than the son of any upper middle class (doctor/pilot/lawyer) household in America would have.
Watching language evolve in real time is fascinating sometimes.
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.
(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 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...
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
The whole "advertisers don't want their ads appearing next to xyz" has always felt contrived to me,
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.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-10-28/gm-tempor...
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
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.
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.
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.
Is that supposed to be an attempt at imagining the most horrible future possible?
Umbrella corporation anyone?
In the same vein, the influx of new users who had avoided Twitter due to its censorious, hostile community norms.
>Search right now for any insulting, racist, negationist trope and you'll find tons of tweets.
Sounds like the hostile community I'm describing, which turns a lot of people off from Twitter!
In 2020 twitter had a net loss of $1.14B. The loans will kill twitter.
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/twitter-announces-f...
We could drill down further here but it’s not worth 3 paragraphs of nuance for this subtle point.
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.
I don't know why you dissed my response, then gave an answer that basically supports it.
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.
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.
[0] https://www.npr.org/2019/10/07/767805936/houston-rockets-gm-...
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.
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.
Is that a technical shortcoming or business logic? It doesn't sound entirely different from how Twitter handles private/blocked accounts.
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.
My guess is that the percent of people who use social media will decrease by half over the coming decade, at least in the US and Europe.
That would require Facebook to make a shrewd business decision though so never mind.
I wonder if he needs to do this.
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.
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.
people arent going to take pay cuts to serve lists of shitposts and ads
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.
Why? Elon is not the guy who gonna do it.
He wants freedom of speench under his control.
Tesla for instance is very much anti open source.
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.
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!
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".
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.
Not exactly onerous since they were a public company before.
If you owe the bank 200,000$ and can't pay it, you are in trouble.
If you owe the bank 1.2 billion dollars and can't pay it, THE BANK is in trouble.
This very very very much applies here.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1586108809772089345?s=46...
Edit: apparently this was “trauma / shock actors” (whatever that means) but it was still picked up by CNBC.
Twitter will function better with 75% of the staff gone.
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.)
"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.
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.
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.
Yeah I think he's going to intensely focus on Twitter for ~6 months, not change much, get bored, and then move onto something else.
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9th_and_12th_Street_Expressway...
> 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
These photos illustrate it well:
https://www.streetroots.org/news/2015/04/03/streets-are-ever...
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.
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.
What makes you believe this? And that Musk was responsible for it?
So, the LVCC was built at 0.54 km/month, while the Channel tunnel was buildlt at 0.7 km/month.
Which part is false?
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.
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.
No.
I don't feel like Musk has really changed, he's always been a bit nuts. He just has a bigger reach now.
Hard stuff takes time. People with no patience and perseverance never gets big stuff done. Musk is not the same.
Basically Musk said that he was just insulting him in a general sense and that the man was not a pedophile
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?
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).
All his tweets on Bitcoin:
https://www.rockwelltrading.com/articles/coffee-with-markus/...
I don't know why people say this when stuff goes wrong for him all the time. He literally just failed to get out of this Twitter deal.
He hasn't given up on self-driving after it turned out to be much harder than he thought. He's still pouring money and time into it.
And he hasn't given up on Starlink, even though it is not nearly as profitable as he hoped originally. He's just launching more satellites.
And he hasn't given up on Starship even though it is years late. He's doubling down on its development.
But I conceded that he might not see Twitter as critical for his ultimate goals. Maybe he'll just sell it to a bigger fool in a few years?
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.
Then there's Tesla, where the Model Y, despite being double the price of a Corolla, outsold the Corolla - https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2022/10/tesla-model-y-passing-...
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).
> https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-snake-charger-elon-musk/
> https://insideevs.com/news/326869/elon-musk-comments-on-fail...
The latter he said was due to low uptake (which is nonsense - you can find YouTube videos of how unfindable the place is).
> https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1017149641991680002
More stuff he has given up on.
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.
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.
so, WeChat?
WeChat in China, LINE in Japan, Gojek in Indonesia... A lot of those platforms are crazy profitable
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.
so, AOL?
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.
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?
* try audacious things and don’t give up
* aggressively, rudely shut down everything around you that’s not contributing to your audacious goal
* spend 80 hours a week working ferociously
… so, if that’s something you can do, it’s replicable
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_D._Griffin#Career
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.
Sources?
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.
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.
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.
Seriously doubt this, please provide sources for these claims.
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.
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.
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.
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 investors to lend him money.
* 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.
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.
[1] https://slate.com/technology/2021/01/trump-twitter-ban-follo...
37% of the world doesn't even have internet.
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.
That is legit the only reason anyone I know of cares at all about this deal.
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.
Funny how the real world works.
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.
Funny how the real world works :)
When/if Blue Origin starts actually launching ships to orbit and then landing them, they'll gain a lot of relevance.
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.
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.
Here’s her Wikipedia page, if you’d like to brush up on any other basic demographic details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vijaya_Gadde
>Elon Musk’s First Move Is To Fire The Person Most Responsible For Twitter’s Strong Free Speech Stance
https://www.techdirt.com/2022/10/28/elon-musks-first-move-is...
This reads like a BuzzFeed article after the author finished squeezing their own head in a vice.
I hope someone pays her buckets of money now to fight at the actual frontline of free speech (Texas government sanctioned book bans perhaps?)
[1]: https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-free-speech-twitter-gl...
EDIT: Citation added upon request.
citation needed
Like the Texas social media law that twitter is fighting (though industry lobby groups) in the supreme court?
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/10/courts-decision-uphold...
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.
Plan?
You say "i don't what his plan is", and then "this was a mastermind move for him to execute his plan".
But by then he couldn’t back out.
Perhaps he’s got a better plan now, perhaps not.
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.
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.
Quite the straw man argument you end with.
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?
If the case everything should be viewed through that lens.
> From your point of view, do you consider him deceitful?
With no judgement of morality here; this is Elon Musk. Yes absolutely he is.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
1. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-06-26/everyt...
2. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-06-22/everyt...
https://internationalbusinessguide.org/trump-business-career...
Alex Jones got away with it for 20 years before his own hubris of not complying with the courts took him down a peg.
Tons of celebrities ran their own pump-and-dump cryptos and their reputations are doing just fine.
Rich people just grift differently imo.
I don’t think Yvon Chouinard is a liar though, for example.
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.
He is brutally honest when it benefits him. But he is completely willing to lie when it suits him. See:
https://elonsbrokenpromises.com/
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.
That's extremely depressing, and I think you want to possibly re-evaluate your general outlook in life.
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*.
------
> 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.
There are legal arguments and then there is being deceitful, there’s quite a lot of distance between the two.
Or government funded/controlled socials.
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.
https://twitter.com/ProfessorShaw/status/1586064942972575746
Also, I assume the point is a presidential run within the next cycle or three.
Elon Musk is not eligible to be President.
Implying that people are dunking on you for being wrong instead of amplifying what you said.
His issue is that he wasn't born a US citizen, not that he was born in South Africa.
Excellent idea, let's deplatform people by creating lots of bot accounts to follow them so that they have to pay for it!
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.
What's your proposal for how Twitter makes money? Just double-down on the harvesting of personal information instead?
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?
I mean, that's no different from Twitter and other platforms currently operate in terms of how they define hate speech or who they cancel.
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.
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.
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".
Can he say "fine"? Sure, technically.
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.
I mean this was his latest tweet: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1586059953311137792?cxt=...
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.
Can't help but smile.
Here's the text of it in case others can't see it:
> Twitter will be forming a content moderation council with widely diverse viewpoints.
> No major content decisions or account reinstatements will happen before that council convenes.
I don't think they've ever had more than 2 9s of reliability.
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.
https://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Racist-tweets-quickl...
"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.
I hope you’re right.
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.
https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Kanye-West-s-Twitter-acc...
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.
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.
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.
Also, many are acting like Musk has free rein in running the company. Yes and no.
Beyond needing employees to actually run the thing, he also has loans to pay back ($13B!) and investors to maintain good relationships with. More on that here: https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/who-is-financing-elon-mus...
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.
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.
Whether that is compatible with their business goals is another question.
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.)
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.
Isn't this Instagram thing - my impression at least - have not used longer than a day or two because it's basically fluff only.
Cutting out negative sentiment - whatever the definition - would make it boring IMO
Will have to prefix tweets with I positively hate...
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
I think if you have a place with useful conversation and also the attention of people, you can make money.
Whether Musk will actually do that: dunno. But I don't think it's inconceivable that Twitter could become something much better than it is today.
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
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.
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.
https://www.poynter.org/fact-checking/2022/70-percent-republ...
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.
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.
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.
It doesn't sound too complicated to me
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".
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.
This isn't Bezos buying the Post outright and running it as a vanity project, Musk has stakeholders.
What you predict (financial ruin) will probably happen if he doesn't do that.
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.
I know this sounds like a cynical question, but without a name your comment seems a little bit fanatical.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/golden-parachutes-3-fired...
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.)
There are a few publicly known partners, and a few who got turned away. They have equity.
This is a misconception.
Outsiders don't know anything about ads.
Twitter needs to be more useful, especially to iOS users. It users outside of major US metros. It needs older users.
It will need better targeting and science.
Then it will increase ad revenue.
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'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.
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.
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
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'
Have you heard of reddit?
- 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).
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?
If it was, then we would have seen a left exodus years ago and not suddenly coming up now. This comment has me so confused.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/28/23428132/elon-musk-twitt...
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.
That's fine, I won't see any of their ads anyways and neither should any of you.
Now, can we please get over this era of _advertising companies_ deciding what is acceptable in the digital town square?
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
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.
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.
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?
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)
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?
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.
> It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
> it makes boring reading.
> it makes boring
> boring
> boring
> boring
Oh my! HackerNews has an escape hatch for banhammering something they idealogically don't like!
Thanks for making me aware.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 10, 2022
He has since deleted the Tweet, but it is an indicator of how out of touch he is when it comes to providing a free and equitable platform.
https://euronewsweek.co.uk/tech/elon-musk-hints-at-paid-twit...
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).
For one, he has access to every single politicians DMs on Twitter
For example, he has an evidence of which execs ignored the fake news concern raised by an employee.
It is 7000 people company. At least, one has pointed out about fake news that might help trump won election.
It is going to be fun if he goes after those execs.
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.
Of course he would try to back out. He couldn't predict the economic downturn, could he?
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.
https://reclaimthenet.org/biden-admin-alex-berenson-twitter-...
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?
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 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
I honestly wonder if Jack Dorsey did not just con his “buddy” out of a boatload of cash.
This "Welcome to Hell, Elon" article sums up most of my points so I won't bother to repeat them all here.
https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/28/23428132/elon-musk-twitt...
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.
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.
If the ads provide a ROI, then other advertisers will gladly jump on board.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Social media has to deal with something more ambiguous.
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 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.
He just escalated things too far before he realized what he was doing.
So now he's acting like everything's all cool now so people stop talking about what a colossal clusterfuck this entire thing was.
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.
Twitter is a distraction.
[1] https://www.edmunds.com/car-news/tesla-cybertruck-might-fina...
Check out W&S in Flagstaff (https://www.solar-electric.com/) (no affiliation) for components.
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.
Given ~20% efficiency I’d guess they heat up by ~20%
They probably mean there is an issue with getting approval from city/utility company to connect them to the grid.
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.
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.
Did you mean Panasonic?
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.
And yes, I do mean "car", not "electric car". Model Y is outselling Peugeot 208, a car half its price.
https://electrek.co/2022/10/28/tesla-model-y-best-selling-ca...
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/teslas...
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).
Find Gwynne Chatwell for Twitter, and Bob's our uncle!
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.
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.
A kitchen sink app in which..
- 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!
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.
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?
I am tired of my every sneeze being tracked by the rest of the world. It is dystopia.
P.S. I do not downvote any posts no matter what.
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.
Real identity has those most vulnerable get more threats, the majority get less.
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.
In other words, how many people with hard wired fiber/coax will change to Starlink or will be be useful only for the rural/remote segment.
Yes, there's some international, marine, flight etc. market, but, again, how big is that.
Serious question - is there any real data?
Fiber beats starlink by orders of magnitude.
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.
That's just in U.S. Starlink is world-wide.
Back of envelope calcs:
$100/month == $1k a year.
1 million * $1k = $1 billion
10 million = $10 billion.
Estimated cost to replace all Starlink satellites every 5 years: $10 billion.
That's $2 billion a year.
Cost: $2 billion/year. Revenue: $10 billion/year. Profit: $8 billion/year.
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).
https://www.npr.org/2022/05/11/1098368187/42-million-america...
42M Americans = ~10M households (assuming 4 per household).
Starlink is $110/month and upfront $599, which puts it outside many/most of these remote folks.
10M household is the TAM, so SOM would be just 5-10% of that, about 500K-1M households, or even less.
Regarding the cost of replacement of satellites and their operational costs, I have no clue.
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...
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.
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.
> https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UOI7b5flgAjJrPs2HDa64p_ZABc...
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.
You can understand the confusion.
By only needing 5000 "towers".
So, it can be competitive.
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.
(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.)
It is atrocious, and millions of people will jump ship the second they can
I’ve used it in Canada and Australia and it’s flawless
https://www.reddit.com/r/BoringCompany/comments/xugxdl/comme...
Remember, the first SpaceX launch attempts didn’t make orbit. Did that make them quit because they ‘failed’?
Improvement is the name of musks game
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
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.
Honestly though I'm just entertaining the idea. I'm not too worried about Musk's acquisition of Twitter
[0]: https://hir.harvard.edu/rated-c-for-censored-walt-disney-in-...
Source? Their last earnings show that energy business part has improved this quarter
That's more than twice that of all of Porsche, VW (which owns Audi), Mercedes, BMW, Ferrari and Volvo put together.
Without selling down into the mass-market and out-competing Chevy in that segment, that price premium cannot be justified.
But they're not.
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 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.
[1] https://insideevs.com/news/504078/what-cars-tesla-buyers-tra...
The Leaf and Bolt both have starting MSRPs around $28k, and most probably sell in the mid-$30k range, so there is a significant price difference.
I would definetly put BMW and Tesla in a different class, with Tesla being the budget option.
> 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.
Both those cars look hideous to me.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Cars are so confusing these days - $40k USD just seems like the average price now.
My neighborhood has so many Tesla roofs I was actually surprised by your comment - but that’s fascinating! I thought they would be doing much better.
They had a $35k version, it was just off menu as recently as early 2020[0]. But it was discontinued around November of 2020[1].
[0]: https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1127490_the-35k-tesla-m...
[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2020/11/16/21569524/tesla-model-3-3...
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.
36 Lyriqs 782 Hummers 22,012 Bolts
For comparison Tesla sold around 32,000 Model S in 2014
Further, the future market for affordable EVs is better represented by affordable ICE sales, as that is what they will be replacing.
Or it could be used as a huge influence platform. Guys like Elon might feel that they got to own it. Fishing out my old tinfoil hat ...
"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."
$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.
- 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
Currently the linked story, from TechCrunch, doesn't call it a "kitchen" sink. Kudos to them.
This is false, the ban on Trump had a massive effect on online misinformation. [1] Platforms really do matter.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/01/16/misinfo...
> 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
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.
Twitter seems to have become a cool kids club and now everyone is panicked that someone bought there it was in.
There's a lot of monetezation potential right there, as Earthlings tune in to follow every tweet from future Martians.
How open and dev friendly is Tesla?
That's not very open.
[1] - https://www.detroitnews.com/story/business/autos/2020/02/26/...
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.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2022/10/28/eu-schools-elon-twitter-wi...
And as a twitterer, he's been an active part of the low-information cesspool.
Because the value dropped precipitously (along with everything else in the market). Trying to back out under whatever guise possible is pretty expected.
"Twitter will be forming a content moderation council with widely diverse viewpoints.
No major content decisions or account reinstatements will happen before that council convenes."
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.
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.
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.
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.
Get it from the horse's mouth:
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1519036983137509376?lang...
> Dear Twitter Advertisers (...)
> 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
In retrospect, the whole thing was a mini-Google+.
But the issue is: you have to get a critical mass of users. Some dedicated groups and then it has to get to a scale which is relevant for Google ...
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.
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.
Do the investors care in this specific case, or did they invest in this plan knowing specifically that his goal was to prefer free speech over profit?
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.
https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/who-is-financing-elon-mus...
Firms like:
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 :)
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.
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 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.
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?
Elon Musk texts Parag Agrawal (now fired)
https://twitter.com/TechEmails/status/1585804674170355712/ph...
In reality if we want a public square, we ideally want it to be a public utility not a for profit corporation.
I would absolutely not want a social network to be ran by any government, no thanks.
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?
And no, when you make hundreds of thousands of $ per year, you're not "exploited".
And yes, quite a few people would love to work for Musk just because he's Musk. Exciting things happen around him.
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.
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.
Disagree that Musk cares more about making money. Given his financial position in this whole ordeal, it's hard to see how he comes out without a loss.
Power and influence over political speech though... priceless.
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
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.
Edit: If I am wrong (possible), help me understand why.
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.
But like I said, interesting litmus test.
[0]https://twitter.com/Azealiaishere [1]https://www.pinknews.co.uk/2020/10/14/azealia-banks-suspende...
I think the real litmus test is a possible Trump unban. That's would be earth shattering.
"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.
https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/suspensio...
He was absolutely and obviously questioning and denying the election results. Maybe that should be a bannable offense, but that isn't what they did.
And ginning up the capital mob.... but keep ignoring the context.
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!"
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.
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.
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.
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
That's not what they did.
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.
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
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.
It does not have to be aggressive.
The side that is attempting to stop people being who they want to be is correct?
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.
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.
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?
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.
To win money in a lawsuit you need to show damages.
As a shareholder, the damages would be drop in stock price.
Good luck convincing all 12 jurors that Tesla's stock price dropped because a few Tesla engineers did a code review of Twitter code.
Especially given that Tesla stock tends to go up, not down (recent beatings due to macro nonwithstanding).
Now let’s say that instead of a check, he gifts himself $100,000 of Tesla engineering time.
Two different calibre of engineers, doubt this will work out very well.
OP seems to assume anyone who works for Tesla must be inferior to anyone from Twitter.
Dubious.
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.
The median MIT student is of the same caliber as the median University of Miami student, and suggesting otherwise is snobbery.
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.
And he said "caliber" not "amount of experience."
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
secondly, you are incorrect about it being "young."
It was founded March 21, 2006, making it 16 years old. For a web company, that's an eternity.
Can you find some companies you think are comparable?
RingCentral - 23 years old - R&D Expenses increasing for the last 3 or 4 years https://seekingalpha.com/symbol/RNG/income-statement
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?
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.
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.
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.
If the layoffs are large all he need do is give 60 days notice to those being terminated.
*technically, notice. But companies can opt to pay 3 months pay in lieu of the notice, if they want to cut ties immediately.
(And yes, what you're suggesting is straight up fraud.)
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.
0. http://www.yiyinglu.com/?portfolio=lifting-a-dreamer-aka-twi...
1. If it was, may an outgoing Twitter engineer please add it back as a last commit. I'll buy you a beer.
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 my job was approving the work of the guy who approves the work of the guy who writes emails for a living, then I'd be looking elsewhere.
I think that's who Musk is going to be targeting with the layoffs.
These people know who they are.
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.
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.
This whole thing baffles me.
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.
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.
>Maybe one of the cronies who were cozying up to him
>freedom isn’t free.
There are a few nasties in the article. This nerd writer got so angry his writing even got pretty sloppy in his section (3).
Seething is in fashion!
It's only a nasty comment if you find those individuals deplorable, and Musk clearly doesn't.
He got rid of the last CEO and will presumably either take the position himself or put his own guy in the chair
That's not an option. They all have to sell their shares. It was a corporate decision.
In fact their was another vote that meant Musk couldn't accumulate more than 15% on the open market.
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?
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.
Lots of people are fearful twitter will change dramatically.
I suspect that Elon might find it easier to criticize Twitter, than to run it :)
Moderating discourse is not a task I would want.
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.
-- a fediverse user
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.
We disrupted the old ways of thinking, so the new ones had a path to walk upon. Let us not fret, as this is the way of the world.
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.
I'm sure you know much better than the guy and all his advisors who spent a year trying to buy it.
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.
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.
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?
https://web.archive.org/web/20221028175053/https://techcrunc...
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.
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.
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.
Apparently there is still some justice in the world, and he paid the initial sum that he proposed, if I understand right.
> 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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Services_Act
And later,
> 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.
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.
Where is the popcorn while I am enjoying this show - code reviews by Musk.
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.
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 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.
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.
Based on Tesla, he not only isn't good at fixing problems, he actively pushes forward broken products and processes to save his stock price.
https://twitter.com/patrickmoorhead/status/14787661657237790...
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.
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).
I like this feature. For a brief moment, I can't be marketed to.
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.
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.
Easier said than done, though.
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.
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.
iMessage? (US)
WhatsApp? (EU)
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.
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.
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.
-----
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.
Any good resources on the deal structure?
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.
Here's an archived Bloomberg quick-take back when the debt was financed last April.
Here's some commentary on the subject:
* https://fortune.com/2022/10/05/elon-musk-flipflop-twitter-ba...
* https://www.axios.com/pro/media-deals/2022/10/05/musk-twitte...
ETA: Financing the Merger section of the proxy lays all this out:
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1418091/000119312522...
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).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?
I’m amazed
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.
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 mean, just 3 weeks ago he went to court trying to get out of this deal.
I don't think he actually wanted to buy Twitter anymore. As these numbers came in, it became obvious that this was a bad deal for him.
Though he might not have a plan - that's also plausible.
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?
Eliminating the draconian content moderation policies and reinstating high-engagement accounts ought to boost revenue.
I think you're largely correct that this is a bad deal for Musk, but I doubt it will be quite as bad as it seems, when restructuring is completed.
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.
The question is, was a new media platform worth the price compared to a "newspaper" or magazine?
I have no idea how accurate that is, though, and I'm certainly not a lawyer.
TSLA is down by half from last year. If you believe the TSLA bulls he sold at the bottom to buy something that instantly loses him half what he paid.
(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.)
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.
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/court-...
> 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.
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.
EDIT: Alternatively, you can point out where my summary is wrong. I did put some effort into it after all.
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.
If not, what exactly are you referring to?
He said he was buying it because there were too many bots. Then he said he was not gonna buy it because there were too many bots.
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.
Twitter is worth perhaps half the price Elon paid
Tesla is worth half what is was when Elon started accumulating shares
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.
Twitter was badly run by several metrics.
maybe, yes, most definitely yes.
There are also a lot of good reasons to dislike Elon. But the media groupthink you're identifying lies mostly in this, IMO.
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.
Are there actually people like that? Whenever I see this phrase it's used to vaguely describe some group that's obviously in the wrong.
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.
"We are the free speech wing of the free speech party"[1]
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2012/mar/22/twitter-tony-w...
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/oct/22/twitter-a...
They can't be biased towards stuff they ban. They are biased towards controlled opposition, which makes people feel warm and fuzzy. Big difference.
All the right-wing sources I followed on twitter were banned. Therefore I didn't get ANY content sent to me.
How is that a bias FOR right-wing sources?
> 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.
What do you consider an "actual right-wing source" if not Fox News?
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.
It'll be interesting to see if Twitter gives them a megaphone too.
If their "reporting" was so egregious that they got banned, I'd question how accurate their "news" was.
Maybe you're just wrong?
The social media company called Gab is the antithesis to that statement:
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/03/rookie-coding-mistak...
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.
5. For the greater good
Whether you think the 'reluctant billionaire owner' is in it for the greater good as well is not relevant.
Now, with regard to Twitter, I have little notion of what 'for the greater good' means. But I'm sure some people do.
Even if the founder sincerely believes that, once he takes VC money it doesn’t matter what he believes.
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.
>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.
He could be right or wrong.
But the one thing that is obvious is that everything there is not fine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_2016_presidential...
My guess would be that parent commenter is talking about the time before Twitter was fighting back against the “alt right”.
"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".
Twitter as a company/platform never went after anyone's job.
Free speech does not mean that speech is without consequences.
This can certainly go to far, but it's kind of up to the employer, isn't it.
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.
See this bit of discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33375286
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
<<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.
If you want to talk about basic social studies, I'd suggest the paradox of tolerance.
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.
Should I be allowed to hold a rally and say "Someone needs to start lynching some $RACIAL_SLURs"?
If you say yes, then...well there's no further discussion to have, and you scare me.
If no, then it's clear you and I both agree that there SHOULD be SOME limits on speech, we just disagree where the line is.
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.
Notion.
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.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_Afghanistan_(2001%E2%80...
> 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.
I'll absolutely screenshot it and report it to your employer, should it be truly heinous behavior that would make your coworkers uncomfortable.
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 (absurd, imho) belief that such a right should preclude any sort of government regulation is a libertarian value.
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.)
Conservative and liberals have flip flipped on worker rights, corporate power and speech
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.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/foxconn-sharply-scales-back...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/08/us/politics/trump-save-am...
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.
Which, in a world where anything you don't like or agree with must be one of those things, is kind of unavodiable.
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.
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...
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.
Hard to say... there are massive network effects, but switching costs are also pretty low. Facebook seemed pretty solid not so long ago.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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).
I do find the continued attempts to paint social media kicking transphobes off their platforms as equivalent to the actual Nazis hilarious, though.
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 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Minimum western standards.
Anti-semitism is a “good” if you’re a Palestinian.
Racism similarly can be “good” for members of a minority fighting for literal survival.
Are you going to be correct all the time? Or even majority of the time?
If you believe in your capability to be correct all the time, might as well make billions in the market and help fight injustice everywhere.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/oct/22/twitter-a...
The results are unsurprising.
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.
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.
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.
What do you hate about it?
I've never used it because it always seemed pretty shallow and vapid to me, but I don't have a visceral reaction against it. What am I missing?
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.
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.
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.
SpaceX is still pretty impressive though.
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.
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.
Referring to yourself as "ethically challenged"? Complaining about cancel culture?
That profile just reeks of "WHY CAN'T I SAY THE N-WORD!?"
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).
It's easier to reject a fat paycheck after your shares vest, I imagine.
Still, no real data to back that claim up though.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1586059953311137792
Or if I'm wrong and there is clear vision which these people support, can you please elaborate?
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.
I’d like to think I can provide a net positive to the org with 15 years experience as a developer, founder and CTO.
Maybe it’ll end up being a net zero brain swap.
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.
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.
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.
Starlink gives free twitter access for everyone in the world, without internet access required, basically what FB tried to do.
Elon starts loving ads xD
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.
One can dream.
An actual stated policy that is followed by the company instead of some arbitrary internal morality police like the last lot.
It's a good thing he got through middle school before it became a meme.
Twitter, with roughly the same measly feature set it had 15 years ago, is operated by 7500 people.
Maybe some "brain drain" would not be a bad thing?
In what terms? Can you share some numbers maybe?
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2022/10/21/twitter-musk-wa...
It was clear she didn't do much of anything. Twitter could probably trim all the adult daycare shit.
the one thing I'm almost certain of is twitter will have better margins under musk.
It may not be worth the $44b though, he's starting at a $20b defecit.
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)
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.
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?
I'm sorry, did the Starlink units not help ?
> Is East-Germany worth the risk of nuclear war in your opinion, or not?
Last time I checked, Germany was a member of NATO.
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?
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.
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.
Comparing Russia to Canada is in bad faith. Canada is a democracy, not run by a dictator.
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.
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?
If Ukraine takes Crimea and Russia nukes Ukraine, it matters to everyone.
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.
As a New Yorker... please? How soon after annexation do I get my healthcare?
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.
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 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.
Any predictions for 2030?
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.
So what lane mass of Russia the same size of Crimea does Ukraine get?. Or do they get nothing of value at all as their “victory”?.
You can't just immediately concede to bullies, or all that will be left are bullies. That doesn't 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?
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.
I still don't get how he managed to be CEO of multiple high-complexity companies. It's already not easy to be CEO of just one.
One can assume he knows how to delegate.
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.
There’s lots of skill involved in finding effective people, developing trust, communicating goals clearly, evaluating outcomes, adjusting.
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).
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)
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.
There is a huge difference between no moderation (anarchy), and not targeting conservative voices solely based on ideology.
its like if a policeman is accused of wrongdoing, he gets to investigate if he did that himself.
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.
The advantage of the right in social media news sharing: https://academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/article/1/3/pgac137/66516...
Upenn article summary: https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/Penn-research-Twitter-gives...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty,_and_doubt
"I was cancelled from Twitter for posting about my conservative views!"
"Oh no, you were cancelled for posting about restrained fiscal policy?"
"LOL no, not that."
"Free trade?"
"Not even close."
"Well... what conservative views are you talking about?"
"Oh, you know the ones" wink
I would also hope that's not a "conservative" view as it's simply a scientific fact.
So both sides are right, and yet the conversation between the extremes moved backwards instead of finding common ground.
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.
The emperor's new dress doesn't make him a woman.
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.
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]
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/oct/22/twitter-a...
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.
The replies so far seem to just confirm my point. Doesn't seem like any of them were banned "solely based on ideology" at all.
Come on y'all, show me one example where someone was banned for asking for lower taxes!
> 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.
Leftists accuse conservatives of far worse things than that without ever getting censored. Leftists can event threaten other peoples' lives without getting censored: https://www.dailywire.com/news/7-twitter-accounts-that-have-...
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.
It's amazing how many lies come from the left and never see any twitter censorship: https://www.dailywire.com/news/numerous-leftists-on-twitter-...
"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".
And, here is an article talking about how the Trevor project "does" groom people: https://personandidentity.com/mother-of-trans-child-poses-as...
And another on the same story: https://pitt.substack.com/p/the-trevor-project-undercover-mo...
Are those going to get censored if I post them on twitter?
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.
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.
False accusations of child abuse have on occasion led to jail time for the false accuser.
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.
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.
https://github.com/salcoast/deleted-tweets-archive/blob/main...
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.
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.
Silencing those who oppose: co-ed bathrooms, gender reassignment for tweens and teens or gay marriage. Can we jump to the covid blacklists yet
> 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.
https://apnews.com/article/twitter-inc-entertainment-music-b...
That entirely reads as a threat against Jewish people.
When I saw that, my assumption was that it was a malapropism.
"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."
“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.
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
But you'll find a reason for this example and any other to not to fit your criteria.
Another: Stefan Molyneux.
The easiest way to get censored for ideological beliefs was to state that biological sex is a reality: https://www.dailywire.com/news/twitter-censors-tucker-carlso...
Babylon Bee got banned for harmless satire: https://www.dailywire.com/news/babylon-bee-a-factor-in-musk-...
Libs of tiktok was banned for "hate speech." I'm not sure they ever even let the account owner know exactly what was said that deserved censorship: https://www.dailywire.com/news/twitter-censors-popular-accou...
A classic is when the NY Post got locked out for posting factual information that the left wanted to bury before the 2020 election: https://www.dailywire.com/news/nypost-remains-locked-out-of-...
Twitter censored health experts whenever what they said didn't fit the COVID narrative put forth by the CDC: https://www.dailywire.com/news/twitter-censors-white-house-h...
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.
James Lindsay got locked out for saying "OK groomer". https://www.dailywire.com/news/author-james-lindsay-banned-f...
Leftists have said many, many more vile and hateful things than that without suffering a single consequence, including making threats on others' lives: https://www.foxnews.com/media/libs-of-tik-tok-creator-twitte...
Leftist: makes claims, can't be bothered to cite anything to support them.
If only this weren't a typical pattern!
No leftwing popular media? Are you joking? Even left-leaning "bias" sites show that the biggest names in news as being on the left: https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/new-york-times/
https://www.allsides.com/news-source/new-york-times
And for AP: https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/associated-press/
My only disagreement is to replace "left-center" with far-left.
You reference mediabiasfactcheck.com a hobby site by a creator who says "his methods are not rigorously objective." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_Bias/Fact_Check#Methodol...
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?
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?
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.
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).
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?
Anyways, even a recent hit piece from NPR admitted that daily wire's reporting is mostly factual: https://www.dailywire.com/news/npr-accuses-daily-wire-of-tri...
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.
(link to original NPR hit piece here: https://www.npr.org/2021/07/19/1013793067/outrage-as-a-busin...)
(link to analysis of the hit piece from western journal: https://www.westernjournal.com/fact-check-npr-caught-blatant...)
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.
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.
Incidentally, there's a whole Quora thread on this topic: https://www.quora.com/Why-is-the-term-leftist-more-common-th...
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."
That leaves "liberal" not having an opposite. I think that's the case partially because the word doesn't really mean anything or has too many meetings: https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/liberal-meanin...
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?
Edit: https://psyarxiv.com/ay9q5
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.
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.
The double standard could not be more obvious.
1. https://twitter.com/TheBabylonBee/status/1504155537008697352
2. https://web.archive.org/web/20190407204840/https://lawandcri...
3. https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2022/06/28/america...
4. https://www.informationliberation.com/?id=55863
5. https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/suspensio...
6. https://web.archive.org/web/20181216163405/https://citizen.c...
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.
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.
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'?
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."
—George Orwell, 1984
The Bee was banned for violating the rules and promoting transphobia. Is that the "conservative voices... ideology" you're thinking of?
Nitpick: suspended until they deleted a tweet which they have refused to do.
The Babylon Bee was suspended for targeted harassment. Harassment is not a conservative view.
[1] - https://twitter.com/ndrew_lawrence/status/105039166355267174...
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.
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.
Twitter lacks the latter. It's just attention.
This is human nature, not Twitter. And I think that’s the problem - a neutral platform simply reproduces human nature, amplified.
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.
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.
So don't remove it, make it ineffective.
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 was just thinking the same thing, that the attention economy is incentivizing people to overdraft their 'weirdness points' [1]
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/28/departing-twitter-employees-...
Edit: this may have been a prank.
Departing Twitter employees say layoffs have started as Elon Musk takes over - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33374597 - Oct 2022 (108 comments)
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?
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.
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.
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.
Why can't the DoJ go after those have killed with their lies?
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.
Even if it leads to people getting killed?
Various ISIS leaders were elected officials.
Meanwhile president@whitehouse.gov is very carefully NOT clicking on those links ...
>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.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/10/elon-...
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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.
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.
* 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.
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.
Like what?
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.
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.
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"
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.