Hacker News Reader

Comment by mikkergp | Hacker News Reader

I think this is certainly true. But my understanding of Twitter - and this may be flawed - was that it was always a mission driven company over a profit driven one. Elon said he wanted to continue that tradition, but with the debt load Twitter is literally in an existential crisis.

So this begs the question, can Twitter be successful being “twitter”? My guess is no, Musk can make a lot of money going after video or micropayments, or X or whatever (well this has yet to be seen, My gut says Twitter is in a worse position then anyone realizes when you combine all the factors, but some people work best backed into a corner, and he’s backed by investors with deep pockets) but the free speech public square open forum has to be a passion project. There’s too many constraints otherwise.

Ship of Theseus adjacent, when does Twitter stop being “twitter”?

View on HN

I think Twitter can continue to operate and even be profitable. But without completely adding a new product offering it's hard for me to imagine it growing to be worth a lot more than what Elon paid for it.

> I think Twitter can continue to operate and even be profitable

Im curious to hear more on this, in my mind the biggest problem with adding a new product offering would be diluting the text based content which may drive people to more “entertaining / TikTok” content than text content, I think one reason Twitter works as the public square is _because_ text is low effort for celebs/politicians/journalists/etc. Hard to imagine journalists driving as much traffic to their articles over video, especially if you go the Instagram route of starting to prioritize video over classic format (text/images) Again twitter as public square, not Twitter as some yet to be defined TikTok rival)

I just think there's a limit to how far optimizing the code and cutting costs is going to get him. I heard twitter was making a push to be more worldwide in its reach which could maybe work I guess. As it is though I don't know how much more he can drive usage of this product. I don't have any real product ideas for them myself. But they either need to drive ad revenue or come up with a compelling paid option. Maybe they can build on tweetdeck and make that a premium $$ feature? Maybe they start charging for api access.

> Ship of Theseus adjacent, when does Twitter stop being “twitter”?

When the users that people are interested in - politicians, news organizations, certain brand accounts, celebrities - go away. The problem for Twitter is that politicians and celebrities don't really want to hang around on a platform where they have to deal with abusive content all the time.

> The problem for Twitter is that politicians and celebrities don't really want to hang around on a platform where they have to deal with abusive content all the time.

Maybe. At a certain point, that's probably true, but are we close to that?

Sometimes you have to look at what people do, not what they say.

It costs a celebrity nothing to say nice things about seeking peace and love and opposing hatred and wanting to fight all of the "hate speech" and "cyber-bullying" they see. In fact, they gain social capital for saying these things, so if you're a celebrity, you're effectively "leaving money on the table" by not talking in a certain way about certain topics.

But it costs a celebrity a lot to actually leave a platform where they have some world-shaping influence. My guess is that most celebrities would figuratively crawl through a field of broken glass to get their fix of attention and kudos from their supporters.

> My guess is that most celebrities would figuratively crawl through a field of broken glass to get their fix of attention and kudos from their supporters.

Yeah I think the network effects are stronger than anyone would like to admit. I think Twitter has a lot of challenges going forward and my analytical read of the situation says he’ll fail, but my gut says he’ll succeed, now it just remains to be seen — succeed at what?

Instinct is jet fuel to help work through uncertainty.

I think most of my instinct is just fear of going against the “smart money” support of Elon.

A couple of months ago Elon posted some notes on usage that indicated that the users with huge followings were in fact going away. This was later confirmed by a leaked internal research document[1]. So yes; we are close to that and quite possibly are at that point already.

It's not clear to me that any of the changes he's made so far are oriented towards reversing that flow. It's possible that he didn't actually care about that, I suppose.

1. https://www.reuters.com/technology/exclusive-where-did-tweet...

> Sometimes you have to look at what people do, not what they say.

At least in the "science bubble", I've seen a lot of people say they are fed up and moving to Mastodon. And particularly regarding COVID, it's clear why: they already had to fight insane amounts of trolls and deniers before Musk bought Twitter, and now Musk has made clear he's going for the radical-libertarian interpretation of "free speech" - evidenced by a ton of far-right trolls coming back or, worse, getting the real blue checkmark [1].

That means that the sane voices providing facts and context slowly leave, which is objectively bad as it allows misinformation to go uncontested, and leading more people to leave.

FFS, even here on Hacker News one can clearly see on any debate that touches COVID that positions advocating for continuing combatting the pandemic get downvoted.

[1] https://twitter.com/TabitaSurge/status/1592895889575915523

> positions advocating for continuing combatting the pandemic get downvoted

NOTE: My goal here is not to abjudicate Covid or any other contentious topic, but to try and give a brief explanation of the disconnect between people in the "science bubble" and those you call "far-right trolls".

You've never actually been disagreeing about science. You've been disagreeing about risk-management decisions.

What I think a lot of scientists have gotten wrong, particularly in the last few years with covid but also with bigger topics like climate change, is that science is a totally different field from risk-management.

A scientist can give you data about the world via the scientific method. A scientist can tell you that Covid is ~X% lethal for a woman at 57 years of age or that a medical treatment is ~Y% effective when administered within 48 hours of infection, or that a medical treatment poses ~Z% risk of complications.

But a scientist can't tell you what decisions to make in light of that data. A scientist can't use science to tell you objectively whether or not it's worth ruining the world economy and social cohesion to fight a particular illness, or whether or not some individual who experiences X% risk of a disease should take a medication with a Y% risk of complications. That decision making process is never science: that is risk-management.

Unfortunately, much of the politicized science in the last few years has taken the form of risk-management. You have scientists on very difficult topics saying things like "The science says we must do X, Y, and Z" when this is false. An objectively correct human action or decision is never the outcome of any science experiment.

While I think you're absolutely correct in theory there are a lot of people on the risk management side using bad data to argue the opposite. Personally I know for people in my life it's not enough to discuss the fact that the COVID Vaccine may or may not be as effective as the media says, we're not talking percentages of effectiveness, but they'll send me articles with no data implying that vaccines kill kids (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3170075/). Or Articles like Alex Berensons misleadingly taking half of a graph from a 40 page report out of context: https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/nov/30/alex-beren...

I think there's a pretty narrow set of people actually trying to have the debates you mention, and I agree the world would be a much better place if we did.

I suspect it's because if you want an audience, it's really hard to get people excited about a few percentage points of different risk.

Looking at some content there, „abusive“ is relative to say the least.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com