11 ms·

One interesting thing is that unlike Paul Graham, who thought it was possible to launch a Twitter competitor in a month, Elon understands it’s not that easy to

by ctvo 5y ago

One interesting thing is that unlike Paul Graham, who thought it was possible to launch a Twitter competitor in a month, Elon understands it’s not that easy to compete with or build a new Twitter. It’s not a particularly expensive company for its outsized influence in the world. Having said that, boy is Elon the wrong person to own a platform that should respect free speech and be neutral (understanding Twitter hasn’t had a perfect record on either front).

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
oblio 5y ago
Stuff like Reddit or Twitter should be public services or at least non-profits. Edit: Why is this downvoted? How does it make any sense to have them as public, for profit, companies, when we all know what happens when their growth stops? How sleazy they all become? Heck, they're sleazy as-is. Who here likes where Reddit is headed, for example?
- _3u10 5y ago
  I thought twitter was a non-profit, I guess this is why musk is investing now that it isn’t.
- Jcowell 5y ago
  What does this mean or rather what does this look like? When I see these I never understand if it’s for or against governmental free speech. As I understand it , services under governmental control are under even more free speech restrictions than privateer services since they have a duty to crack down on whatever values a government is beholden to (anti-porn, anti-illegal activity, anti-Anonymization). What is the end goal here?
  - oblio 5y ago
    Ok, non profit then. Have some neutral org not chasing profits improve what it has instead of shoving dark design patterns and closing APIs in order to sell more ads.
    - Jcowell 5y ago
      What is “neutral”? As I see it your target 3 different things here. To be honest interpolation is something that will be ripe for abuse by actors like 4Chan just because they can. I’m not seeing a way to ensure the banning of users while allowing interoperability that isn’t solved already by email. If the solution to this is to not allow the banning of users, then how does one combat things such as child porn, revenge porn, etc.
      - oblio 5y ago
        I'm not for decentralized solutions since I don't think their UX can scale. Theoretically maybe they can, but in my eyes it's a P=NP hard problem right now. I'm also not for absolute free speech, so yes, users should be banable in case of abuse. The main thing I'm against is the fact we're taking for granted various methods of online communication (Twitter like broadcast, Reddit-like centralized forums, plus I'd actually put WhatsApp like instant messengers here). And they should just be dumb pipes. They shouldn't try to add a ton of smart features they sell to <<other companies>>. Because their incentives are out of alignment with their direct user needs. They will serve whoever pays them instead of whoever uses them. The classic enterprise software dilemma which in that case creates functionally horrible software. For online software it creates morally horrible software, instead.
- riffic 5y ago
  interoperable protocols are arguably more important. ActivityPub is a W3C specification at the Recommendation stage, which basically means it's ready for production. This would allow groups like, oh, house.gov to run their own platform and assign every congress person their own interoperable user account (AOC@HOUSE.GOV for example) and it works pretty much the same way email works.
  - oblio 5y ago
    I'd really, really want to have that. The problem is, companies know these and they subtly sabotage these standardization efforts. Look at the web. Desktop UI toolkits have had solid components since the start. From the late 80s and early 90s. The web is maybe getting them universally in 2024. I mean, it's great that we have standards, but can you really afford to wait 30-40 years? I'll be frank with you, if you're a professional in our field, 30-40 years is your entire career. Many people in IT actually retire even earlier or move up to management and basically out of regular IT, after 5-10-15 years. And people can only care so much. Heck, many Open Source hackers move on after 5-10 years. Only a handful last 30 years. Faster moving standards are a sort of utopia, it seems.
LewisVerstappen 5y ago
> Elon the wrong person to own a platform that should respect free speech and be neutral (understanding Twitter hasn’t had a perfect record on either front). Does a "right person" exist?
- ctvo 5y ago
  Off the top of my head and solely? Mackenzie Scott (Bezos)? There are quite a few folks who could create structures for shared (vs. sole) ownership of Twitter as a public good.
  - rayiner 5y ago
    What does Mackenzie Scott know about anything other than running Amazon? She’s a busybody who involves herself in stuff that’s none of her business. E.g. knee-jerk donating to anti-Asian front organizations like AAJC just because #stopaapihate was trending and they had “Asian” in the name: http://nwasianweekly.com/2020/08/mackenzie-scott-billionaire-ex-wife-of-jeff-bezos-donates-part-of-fortune-to-asian-charity/ http://nwasianweekly.com/2020/08/mackenzie-scott-billionaire... Musk is an infinitely better influence on something like Twitter.
    - ctvo 5y ago
      To spell it out clearly: Mackenzie Scott will leave running the platform to the people familiar with it. That's exactly why she's the best person to own Twitter and turn it into a public good vs. Elon, who also knows absolutely nothing about running Twitter, but will no doubt intervene.
      - rayiner 5y ago
        Twitter is already a public company left to its own devices. But free speech wise, what Twitter needs is intervention. Scott is plainly in the same bubble as the existing Twitter employees and can’t provide that intervention.
        5y ago
Jyaif 5y ago
Everybody knows that building a competitor is not the hard part. Elon could build and own 100% a competitor to Twitter for much less than the 3 billion he spent to get 9% of twitter. The problem is getting the competitor to have traction. For that you need to have the idea for a differentiator that will hook people, and unlike engineering talent you can't buy this!
- ShamelessC 5y ago
  Well yeah, you have to actually compete in a competition. Seems pedantic to me.
- kertoip_1 5y ago
  > The problem is getting the competitor to have traction The mere fact that the platform belongs to him can help a lot
  - dagw 5y ago
    Truth Social launched with a real differentiating message compared to Twitter that appeals to a lot of people, had massive media coverage and is fronted by one of the most prolific and famous Twitter users in history. Yet by all accounts it has effectively zero traction.
    - pjc50 5y ago
      As I've said elsewhere, it has the PVP MMO problem: it needs a supply of victims. It's no fun shouting at each other in an echo chamber.
- ctvo 5y ago
  > Everybody knows that building a competitor is not the hard part. Everybody knows this? Truth Social needs to be told. The app can barely launch, and got a head start forking Mastadon as far as we know. They have hundreds of millions (a few billion?) in capitalization. Everyone knows people who haven’t actually tried tend to underestimate the difficulty in other’s work. To be clear, nowhere did I say the engineering is the hardest part.
fallingknife 5y ago
He is specifically buying it because he wants it to respect free speech and it currently doesn't. He tweeted about this before buying. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1507259709224632344 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1507259709224632344
- ctvo 5y ago
  Stating his aspirations and actually following through is something else entirely. If we went by what he aspires, we’d be on our second human mission to Mars with fully autonomous vehicles. Elon has the emotional stability of my 13 year old cousin, and changes his mind as often.
  - ramblerman 5y ago
    That's quite a cynical take, and plainly incorrect. He is still actively pursuing those goals, they are just very difficult projects. Objectively he has done more for promoting space travel than most any other individual today. He has his flaws sure, but people generally admire his willingness to pursue bold aspirations with extreme tenacity.
    - ctvo 5y ago
      Not really. I picked examples of his most successful aspirations. There's a graveyard of others that have died quietly: - Elon wants to take Tesla private and has the capitalization - Elon wants to rescue Thai children stuck in a cave - Elon will sell Tesla stock to end world hunger - Elon wants to fight Putin in a 1-on-1 to end the war in Ukraine - Elon thinks 98% of the US will be covered in Supercharging stations by 2015 - Elon wants to send 2 people into space by 2018 ... Elon has a long history of underestimating how difficult things are and gives up quietly or is proven immediately to be wrong. Edit: Forgot about this site https://www.elonmusk.today/ https://www.elonmusk.today/ which does a better job than my memory of documenting some of Elon's outrageous tweets. Add: - Elon wants to fund the repairs of any house in Flint that's water contaminated. - Elon wants to use bricks from the Boring Company to create low cost housing. - Elon is starting a candy company that will be amazing. - Elon wants to use SpaceX rockets to power aircrafts for quicker trips from New York to London in 29 minutes. - Elon received government approval (verbally) to build a tunnel for the hyperloop from New York City to Washington DC. ...
ramblerman 5y ago
> boy is Elon the wrong person to own a platform that should respect free speech and be neutral Given twitter has not respected free speech, and Elon has no track record (AFAIK) of thwarting free speech, what makes him so wrong?
- jsemrau 5y ago
  I just leave this here. https://www.businessinsider.com/free-speech-absolutist-elon-musk-censors-employees-critics-2022-3 https://www.businessinsider.com/free-speech-absolutist-elon-...
- acallan 5y ago
  Do you have any examples of Twitter arresting or imprisoning people for speech, or acquiescing to government censorship? Perhaps you are instead to moderating their private platform and enforcing community guidelines? I understand the latter can be annoying, but it is a mistake to conflate the two, as free speech is something very special and important and in the US is in fact codified into the Bill of Rights. TL;DR free speech is between you and the government, not between you and someone else or some other company.
  - rmbyrro 5y ago
    They claim to be a platform, not publishers, so they shouldn't be able to invoke publisher rights and be the judge of what can or cannot be published. Let the government do this mediation. Twitter should let people ask a judge to issue content take downs based on the law and just comply with it.
    - acallan 5y ago
      There is simply no meaningful legal distinction between the two in this context. See https://twitter.com/badsec230takes https://twitter.com/badsec230takes
    - pjc50 5y ago
      "Twitter is _not allowed_ to remove porn, spam, doxxing, or death threats without a court order (of what jurisdiction?)" would immediately collapse into goatse chaos.
noxer 5y ago
Hes very much pro free speech why would he be the wrong person? He doesn't have to become the CEO anything if he has enough influence trough his shares he can push twitter to be more open about how it make stuff trending and prevents other stuff from trending etc. There is no doubt hes not happy with the current way Twitter restricts speech which is heavily biased and so he wants to change that.
- RivieraKid 5y ago
  > Hes very much pro free speech Nope, he has a history of silencing or trying to silence opinions that he doesn't like.
  - noxer 5y ago
    Can you name 3 such opinions that he does not like? Can you name 3 incidents where he tried to silence someones opinion?
jsemrau 5y ago
DeSo / Bitclout is a company that had rebuild Twitter on top of a blockchain and its just not that good. The whole Twitter UI paradigm is so 15 years ago.

by ctvo 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

oblio 5y ago

Stuff like Reddit or Twitter should be public services or at least non-profits. Edit: Why is this downvoted? How does it make any sense to have them as public, for profit, companies, when we all know what happens when their growth stops? How sleazy they all become? Heck, they're sleazy as-is. Who here likes where Reddit is headed, for example?

_3u10 5y ago
I thought twitter was a non-profit, I guess this is why musk is investing now that it isn’t.
Jcowell 5y ago
What does this mean or rather what does this look like? When I see these I never understand if it’s for or against governmental free speech. As I understand it , services under governmental control are under even more free speech restrictions than privateer services since they have a duty to crack down on whatever values a government is beholden to (anti-porn, anti-illegal activity, anti-Anonymization). What is the end goal here?
- oblio 5y ago
  Ok, non profit then. Have some neutral org not chasing profits improve what it has instead of shoving dark design patterns and closing APIs in order to sell more ads.
  - Jcowell 5y ago
    What is “neutral”? As I see it your target 3 different things here. To be honest interpolation is something that will be ripe for abuse by actors like 4Chan just because they can. I’m not seeing a way to ensure the banning of users while allowing interoperability that isn’t solved already by email. If the solution to this is to not allow the banning of users, then how does one combat things such as child porn, revenge porn, etc.
    - oblio 5y ago
      I'm not for decentralized solutions since I don't think their UX can scale. Theoretically maybe they can, but in my eyes it's a P=NP hard problem right now. I'm also not for absolute free speech, so yes, users should be banable in case of abuse. The main thing I'm against is the fact we're taking for granted various methods of online communication (Twitter like broadcast, Reddit-like centralized forums, plus I'd actually put WhatsApp like instant messengers here). And they should just be dumb pipes. They shouldn't try to add a ton of smart features they sell to <<other companies>>. Because their incentives are out of alignment with their direct user needs. They will serve whoever pays them instead of whoever uses them. The classic enterprise software dilemma which in that case creates functionally horrible software. For online software it creates morally horrible software, instead.
riffic 5y ago
interoperable protocols are arguably more important. ActivityPub is a W3C specification at the Recommendation stage, which basically means it's ready for production. This would allow groups like, oh, house.gov to run their own platform and assign every congress person their own interoperable user account (AOC@HOUSE.GOV for example) and it works pretty much the same way email works.
- oblio 5y ago
  I'd really, really want to have that. The problem is, companies know these and they subtly sabotage these standardization efforts. Look at the web. Desktop UI toolkits have had solid components since the start. From the late 80s and early 90s. The web is maybe getting them universally in 2024. I mean, it's great that we have standards, but can you really afford to wait 30-40 years? I'll be frank with you, if you're a professional in our field, 30-40 years is your entire career. Many people in IT actually retire even earlier or move up to management and basically out of regular IT, after 5-10-15 years. And people can only care so much. Heck, many Open Source hackers move on after 5-10 years. Only a handful last 30 years. Faster moving standards are a sort of utopia, it seems.

LewisVerstappen 5y ago

> Elon the wrong person to own a platform that should respect free speech and be neutral (understanding Twitter hasn’t had a perfect record on either front). Does a "right person" exist?

ctvo 5y ago
Off the top of my head and solely? Mackenzie Scott (Bezos)? There are quite a few folks who could create structures for shared (vs. sole) ownership of Twitter as a public good.
- rayiner 5y ago
  What does Mackenzie Scott know about anything other than running Amazon? She’s a busybody who involves herself in stuff that’s none of her business. E.g. knee-jerk donating to anti-Asian front organizations like AAJC just because #stopaapihate was trending and they had “Asian” in the name: http://nwasianweekly.com/2020/08/mackenzie-scott-billionaire-ex-wife-of-jeff-bezos-donates-part-of-fortune-to-asian-charity/ http://nwasianweekly.com/2020/08/mackenzie-scott-billionaire... Musk is an infinitely better influence on something like Twitter.
  - ctvo 5y ago
    To spell it out clearly: Mackenzie Scott will leave running the platform to the people familiar with it. That's exactly why she's the best person to own Twitter and turn it into a public good vs. Elon, who also knows absolutely nothing about running Twitter, but will no doubt intervene.
    - rayiner 5y ago
      Twitter is already a public company left to its own devices. But free speech wise, what Twitter needs is intervention. Scott is plainly in the same bubble as the existing Twitter employees and can’t provide that intervention.
      - 5y ago

Jyaif 5y ago

Everybody knows that building a competitor is not the hard part. Elon could build and own 100% a competitor to Twitter for much less than the 3 billion he spent to get 9% of twitter. The problem is getting the competitor to have traction. For that you need to have the idea for a differentiator that will hook people, and unlike engineering talent you can't buy this!

ShamelessC 5y ago
Well yeah, you have to actually compete in a competition. Seems pedantic to me.
kertoip_1 5y ago
> The problem is getting the competitor to have traction The mere fact that the platform belongs to him can help a lot
- dagw 5y ago
  Truth Social launched with a real differentiating message compared to Twitter that appeals to a lot of people, had massive media coverage and is fronted by one of the most prolific and famous Twitter users in history. Yet by all accounts it has effectively zero traction.
  - pjc50 5y ago
    As I've said elsewhere, it has the PVP MMO problem: it needs a supply of victims. It's no fun shouting at each other in an echo chamber.
ctvo 5y ago
> Everybody knows that building a competitor is not the hard part. Everybody knows this? Truth Social needs to be told. The app can barely launch, and got a head start forking Mastadon as far as we know. They have hundreds of millions (a few billion?) in capitalization. Everyone knows people who haven’t actually tried tend to underestimate the difficulty in other’s work. To be clear, nowhere did I say the engineering is the hardest part.

fallingknife 5y ago

He is specifically buying it because he wants it to respect free speech and it currently doesn't. He tweeted about this before buying. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1507259709224632344 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1507259709224632344

ctvo 5y ago
Stating his aspirations and actually following through is something else entirely. If we went by what he aspires, we’d be on our second human mission to Mars with fully autonomous vehicles. Elon has the emotional stability of my 13 year old cousin, and changes his mind as often.
- ramblerman 5y ago
  That's quite a cynical take, and plainly incorrect. He is still actively pursuing those goals, they are just very difficult projects. Objectively he has done more for promoting space travel than most any other individual today. He has his flaws sure, but people generally admire his willingness to pursue bold aspirations with extreme tenacity.
  - ctvo 5y ago
    Not really. I picked examples of his most successful aspirations. There's a graveyard of others that have died quietly: - Elon wants to take Tesla private and has the capitalization - Elon wants to rescue Thai children stuck in a cave - Elon will sell Tesla stock to end world hunger - Elon wants to fight Putin in a 1-on-1 to end the war in Ukraine - Elon thinks 98% of the US will be covered in Supercharging stations by 2015 - Elon wants to send 2 people into space by 2018 ... Elon has a long history of underestimating how difficult things are and gives up quietly or is proven immediately to be wrong. Edit: Forgot about this site https://www.elonmusk.today/ https://www.elonmusk.today/ which does a better job than my memory of documenting some of Elon's outrageous tweets. Add: - Elon wants to fund the repairs of any house in Flint that's water contaminated. - Elon wants to use bricks from the Boring Company to create low cost housing. - Elon is starting a candy company that will be amazing. - Elon wants to use SpaceX rockets to power aircrafts for quicker trips from New York to London in 29 minutes. - Elon received government approval (verbally) to build a tunnel for the hyperloop from New York City to Washington DC. ...

ramblerman 5y ago

> boy is Elon the wrong person to own a platform that should respect free speech and be neutral Given twitter has not respected free speech, and Elon has no track record (AFAIK) of thwarting free speech, what makes him so wrong?

jsemrau 5y ago
I just leave this here. https://www.businessinsider.com/free-speech-absolutist-elon-musk-censors-employees-critics-2022-3 https://www.businessinsider.com/free-speech-absolutist-elon-...
acallan 5y ago
Do you have any examples of Twitter arresting or imprisoning people for speech, or acquiescing to government censorship? Perhaps you are instead to moderating their private platform and enforcing community guidelines? I understand the latter can be annoying, but it is a mistake to conflate the two, as free speech is something very special and important and in the US is in fact codified into the Bill of Rights. TL;DR free speech is between you and the government, not between you and someone else or some other company.
- rmbyrro 5y ago
  They claim to be a platform, not publishers, so they shouldn't be able to invoke publisher rights and be the judge of what can or cannot be published. Let the government do this mediation. Twitter should let people ask a judge to issue content take downs based on the law and just comply with it.
  - acallan 5y ago
    There is simply no meaningful legal distinction between the two in this context. See https://twitter.com/badsec230takes https://twitter.com/badsec230takes
  - pjc50 5y ago
    "Twitter is _not allowed_ to remove porn, spam, doxxing, or death threats without a court order (of what jurisdiction?)" would immediately collapse into goatse chaos.

noxer 5y ago

Hes very much pro free speech why would he be the wrong person? He doesn't have to become the CEO anything if he has enough influence trough his shares he can push twitter to be more open about how it make stuff trending and prevents other stuff from trending etc. There is no doubt hes not happy with the current way Twitter restricts speech which is heavily biased and so he wants to change that.

RivieraKid 5y ago
> Hes very much pro free speech Nope, he has a history of silencing or trying to silence opinions that he doesn't like.
- noxer 5y ago
  Can you name 3 such opinions that he does not like? Can you name 3 incidents where he tried to silence someones opinion?

jsemrau 5y ago

DeSo / Bitclout is a company that had rebuild Twitter on top of a blockchain and its just not that good. The whole Twitter UI paradigm is so 15 years ago.