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I think people are really over-analyzing this move. I think it's motivated by prestige, not money, nor is free speech the heart of the matter. Twitter is a sta

by fleddr 5y ago

I think people are really over-analyzing this move. I think it's motivated by prestige, not money, nor is free speech the heart of the matter. Twitter is a stagnant company. They have thousands of engineers that in the span of a decade don't seem to produce much at all, nothing visible or memorable anyway. Long-lasting Twitter problems (culture, spam, algorithm issues) never seem addressed. User growth is stagnating as Twitter fails to appeal to "normies" in a way Facebook and other networks can. A perfect target for Musk to come in, do a few sweeping changes, and get out. Thereby proving once again that he gets shit done where others can't. Case closed. It doesn't take much. People have been begging for an edit button for a decade. If he'd get only that feature implemented, it will be remembered forever.

grenoire 5y ago
thank you Papa Musk for the edit button <3
deanCommie 5y ago
Counterpoint: Twitter is the only social network I use where I get an unfiltered balance of ideas big and small - CEOs and random Joes. It's where memes are born and proliferate everywhere else (other than TikTok). Twitter WORKS. If it's profitable, it doesn't need more growth. Facebook got ruined because it thought everyone's parents and grandparents should be on it, and now that's the only people on it. My parents and grandparents are scared of Twitter, and that's how I like it. It also doesn't try to charge me for access to my own followers like Facebook does. Twitter may have problems but I like the balance they've struck. An edit button by the way would RUIN it because people who have gone viral with a bad take would simply edit it away.
- martin_a 5y ago
  > If it's profitable, it doesn't need more growth. Stakeholders will think otherwise. > An edit button by the way would RUIN it because people who have gone viral with a bad take would simply edit it away. Just add a change history like (I think) FB has. No big deal.
  - Talanes 5y ago
    >Just add a change history like (I think) FB has. No big deal. If the Hacker News crowd isn't even sure that the feature exists, there's no way the majority of users are actually checking it. That may solve the problem for the most careful of users, but the conversation is going to be driven by the people who just react to what's in front of them.
    - martin_a 5y ago
      I've deleted my FB account several years ago, but this is what I remember: There was a note like "Bearbeitet" ("changed") right in the post header, when a post had been changed after initial posting. You could click on that and see at least one previous version of the post. A note like this, with a changelog, should therefore be fine for twitter and counter all "I never posted sth. like that!" talk, as it would be easily to be debunked.
- ejb999 5y ago
  >>Twitter is the only social network I use where I get an unfiltered balance of ideas If you think you are getting 'unfiltered balance' from twitter, then you don't know twitter very well.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- fleddr 5y ago
  lol "unfiltered". It's an extremist network that filters in particular sanity. "Twitter WORKS. If it's profitable, it doesn't need more growth." You don't get to decide that. It's a publicly traded company. Which means you do need more growth. "My parents and grandparents are scared of Twitter, and that's how I like it." Strange thing to be proud of. I guess your own family isn't "cool" enough. Finally, an edit button can have a timer, as every edit button ever has had for decades.
- nirav72 5y ago
  People have deleted bad tweets and they still have gone viral.
- MisterMower 5y ago
  Username is deanCommie... I'm going to go out on a limb here and say he enjoys reading Pravda, er, Twitter.
  - deanCommie 5y ago
    Only on "hackernews" do people expect a username to have any alignments with people's political beliefs. This seems to come up regularly here, and never on any other forum or irc channel I've used this ID. If I was a communist, why would I self identify as a "commie"?? And not even consistently: Are you a lawn mower? A landscaper even?
orblivion 5y ago
Why would Elon Musk spend his capacity to get things done on something like Twitter? He's got planets to colonize. Interesting point to question his motives, but for now I take him at his word regarding the free speech thing. I guess it could be something more nefarious as well.
- fleddr 5y ago
  Like I said, prestige. When you're the richest man in the world, and your main companies are on track, what is it that motivates billionaires? Prestige. Visibility. Legacy.
- trashtester 5y ago
  - chc 5y ago
    You see both white nationalism and civil rights as political antipatterns? What do you consider a healthy political environment? Complete stagnation where people who got theirs are OK but no one else can ever rise to that level? Or do you mean something different by "woke" than its usual meaning of "aware of inequities and desiring to fix them"? Edit: I see the free speech proponents are here to try to make my comment invisible. Come on guys, don't give in to cancel culture like this!
    - da39a3ee 5y ago
      Woke is a disparaging term used to refer to people espousing broadly left wing “progressive” ideologies, who are obsessed with issues affecting minorities and “inclusion”, yet fail to recognize that their intolerance and refusal to respect differing views are utterly exclusionary.
      - chc 5y ago
        So what you're saying here is that helping minorities and making them equal members of society is a political antipattern if opponents of civil rights don't like when you do it? I don't see how that's an antipattern. If that's what you mean, it's basically just saying "A healthy political landscape is one where civil rights are never granted to anyone," which doesn't sound healthy at all. As a side note, I don't think there are very many people who are unaware that being intolerant of bigotry is exclusionary toward overt bigots. Can you give an example of someone you think has this attitude but doesn't realize that it excludes the people they would consider bigots?
KerrAvon 5y ago
> A perfect target for Musk to come in, do a few sweeping changes, and get out. Thereby proving once again that he gets shit done where others can't. Case closed. Whatever merit or lack thereof Musk on the Twitter board has, I would bet money this particular scenario does not happen. Musk is not a turnaround expert or corporate savior (and for the record he's not claiming to be).
- bennysomething 5y ago
  Well he did turn tesla round in a way, as in he wasn't a founder.
- HeavyStorm 5y ago
  Yeah, I was thinking exactly that. Assuming that this is the case - that Musk is joining as a savior - is silly. He doesn't fit the profile nor has the track record for that. He may be a visionary (whatever that means), but a excellent, renowned executive that revitalizes companies, heck, that really has never been the case.
  - fleddr 5y ago
    Strange that both of you would say that. He's a ruthless result-driven executive that doesn't accept excuses. If it's at all impossible for something to get done, he'll get it done. I'm not at all a fan of him, but his power is in execution. A vision is worthless.
    - hooande 5y ago
      yeah, The Boring Company is absolutely killing it. I use that thing every day
      - mensetmanusman 5y ago
        Why are you gambling so much in Vegas?
PostOnce 5y ago
"stagnant company" Why must every company sustain boundless growth and 24-hour engagement? Change and growth for their own sake can be cancers. Twitter does what it does and people like it (as seen by the fact that they all use it), yet armchair generals cry out that twitter's refusal to turn into "not twitter" is somehow a failure of engineering and management, or some form of incompetence. So, I disagree, I guess.
- IIAOPSW 5y ago
  The shareholders ain't here to fuck spiders.
- stjohnswarts 5y ago
  Why do they need so many engineers though. It's not like twitter is facebook or gmail or apple tv where things are constantly shifting? I think the point was why does it take so many people? They should be raking in the cash after a 25% cull. Just saying this from the point of view if I was interested in buying their stock.
- sllewe 5y ago
  Because that growth is used as a substitute for profit (or net income or EBITDA - take your pick). For a public company having one or the other (or rarely, both) keeps the ticker price moving in the right direction.
- 0xffff2 5y ago
  While I agree with you, at the same time if Twitter as a company isn't really doing much, why do they have thousands of developers on staff? I don't think there's anything wrong with being a stable, profitable company, but logically it should also come with a whole lot of layoffs.
  - kyawzazaw 5y ago
    Maybe maintenance of current user base itself requires lots of innovation although not ground breaking(thus jobs)? Why the need for layoffs? They did make Twitter Spaces and so far, that move alone has shadowed Clubhouse even though itself is not doing well. Also built discontinued Fleets.
memish 5y ago
He could do that with any number of stagnant companies. Think bigger picture. Tesla: Sustainable transport SpaceX: Becoming a multiplanetary species Twitter: Free speech in the public square IMO it's actually the most important mission of the 3 since it's the basis for societal progress.
- systemvoltage 5y ago
  I think this is a charitable interpretation of what’s going on, unfortunate to see so many IMO reasonable comments getting downvoted here.
- planetsprite 5y ago
  Here's a more sane interpretation of Musk's "mission" for these companies: Tesla: Gimmicky electric cars as a status symbol SpaceX: Maximizing profits on government space contracts Twitter: Tactical manipulation of stock prices All of them are about increasing Musk's clout and net worth.
  - inglor_cz 5y ago
    "Maximizing profits on government space contracts" That would be the United Launch Alliance, Sir.
  - postmeta 5y ago
    Deeply cynical interpretation?
dieortin 5y ago
In my experience Twitter is way more appealing to younger people than Facebook.
- ejb999 5y ago
  and tiktok is 100X more appealing to them than either of those. Facebook is for grandparents, twitter is for bots.
  - mavhc 5y ago
    Twitter is for journalists who now don't have to walk downstairs to get the pointless opinion of the man on the street
  - mensetmanusman 5y ago
    I wonder how appealing tiktok will remain after the brains are fried from all the blinking lights :)
    - ejb999 5y ago
      personally, I don't understand the appeal of tiktok, guess that makes me too old for the target demographic I guess. I never liked facebook (fake people bragging about their perfect fake lives for all the world to see). I used to find value in twitter - but now I just can't wade thru the all noise to get to the value - gave up all major social media years ago, don't miss it.
  - mrighele 5y ago
    On twitter you can find lot of great people to follow; journalists, scientists, experts of any kind. If you are looking for information, you can find it. The main issue is that all those diamonds are covered by an abundant amount of material of... let's just say lower quality, so the search can be long and tedious.
    - tluyben2 5y ago
      But most people don’t want that info; most people want to be entertained, every second of the day. And for that tik tok now wins until the next, even shorter attention span thing pops. Twitter started that by artificially limiting input of course, but people still had to read. Tik tok was obvious really. But people will come up with better ways to put less info into entertaining seconds people will want to watch 24/7; it will be a unicorn again in the coming years and TikTok will be for old people.
kappi 5y ago
Why does linkedin require 15000 employees? a website to post a glorified fake resume!
colinmhayes 5y ago
> People have been begging for an edit button for a decade. And they haven't implemented it because it's a truly horrible idea. If you messed up your tweet delete it. If it's already got traction, then it shouldn't be changed, especially because the edit feature would mostly be used maliciously to cancel retweeters.
- tomcam 5y ago
  What if it’s accompanied with a history feature that shows all the tweet edits?
  - HWR_14 5y ago
    Yes. Because people won't look through the edit history for the same reason they don't read the fine print or studies that are cited. I'm pretty sure making it easier to misinterpret what tweets say is going to be even worse
    - BeFlatXIII 5y ago
      > I'm pretty sure making it easier to misinterpret what tweets say is going to be even worse Good. Let's stop pretending that meaning is contained in tweets.
      - HWR_14 5y ago
        > Let's stop pretending that meaning is contained in tweets. Let me know how that crusade is going for you.
        BeFlatXIII 5y ago
        I haven't used Twitter in over five years and ignore people who show me screenshots of tweets. Haven't felt any loss in my life over the decisions.
  - Vladimof 5y ago
spsful 5y ago
- Completely redesigning their UI two times over, - Launching a subscription-based service (which seems to make it the first social media network without ads) - Lengthening tweets to 280 characters - Letting users make money off their following (super followers) I'm confused as to how any of this makes it stagnant.
- chc 5y ago
  Four achievements in 10 years isn't actually a lot, and two of those are just "they added more monetization."
  - ALittleLight 5y ago
    And changing the character limit seems unbelievably trivial.
- namecheapTA 5y ago
  As a one man show SAaS with enough customers to basically live my life.. I lol at these achievements.
  - jquery 5y ago
    It’s just an example of the product not being stagnant. There’s a lot of things that go into current Twitter and it’d probably take no less than a couple hundred engineers just to keep the site up assuming no R&D whatsoever. That adds a ton of inertia and friction against changes. Anyway I’m happy with Twitter’s direction. They’ve gone and made it less toxic, and in fact I’ve recently created an account because it has become a pleasure to use.
- astrange 5y ago
  Twitter Blue still has ads and still constantly fights you to try and show you their algorithmic timeline. It also doesn't cover multiple accounts - and my side account, when it switches to the algorithmic timeline every other day, is convinced I want to know about pop musicians and inserts 1000 "suggested topics" about the Grammys and BTS I have to dismiss individually.
kklisura 5y ago
> They have thousands of engineers that in the span of a decade don't seem to produce much at all, nothing visible or memorable anyway. Long-lasting Twitter problems (culture, spam, algorithm issues) never seem addressed. Why do you assume it's engineering problem? I think engineers at twitter are well capable to solve any problems, but it's just not a business need. The real problem are product owners/stakeholders/business people, incapable to transform, envision and lead at Twitter.
lemoncookiechip 5y ago
> It doesn't take much. People have been begging for an edit button for a decade. If he'd get only that feature implemented, it will be remembered forever. Funny you mention that: https://www.ign.com/articles/elon-musk-largest-twitter-shareholder-edit-button-poll-board-of-directors https://www.ign.com/articles/elon-musk-largest-twitter-share...
marstall 5y ago
>Long-lasting Twitter problems (culture, spam, algorithm issues) ... don't see how an edit button will change any of that!
paxys 5y ago
He is a board member, not the CEO/COO. He can demand changes, but how will they magically get done?
- ALittleLight 5y ago
  My intuition is that Twitter's CEO will be looking for big changes to turn Twitter's stock price around. Now his largest shareholder is also a famous entrepreneur with some big ideas.
qsdf38100 5y ago
> A perfect target for Musk to come in, do a few sweeping changes, and get out. Thereby proving once again that he gets shit done where others can't. Case closed. Typical musk cult bullshit. I'm sorry, it sounds so wrong it makes me questions your honesty here. He won't "do a few sweeping changes and get out". The only shit he will get done is abusing his influence over the top of the hierarchy to slowly but surely get more control over what gets fed to twitter users. Remember how Facebook has been crucial for election manipulation over the world? Now Musk gets to play this game too. By the way, that's how he took over Tesla from its original founders. He invested an amount of money large enough so that he could force his way into becoming CEO. Then he fired the few remaining people who could oppose him. So, no, he's not going to get out. Your post sounds more like "nothing to see here" than anything else. There's a big thing to see here. The richest US person calmly and openly taking over one of the largest social network in the world. It's not over-analyzing, it's obvious. But in our troubled times such things are somehow happening in plain sight and nobody bats an eye.
HWR_14 5y ago
I think it's more basic than prestige. Musk's value add is in no small part due to his influencer status among a group of investors who primarily interact with him over Twitter. Leaving such an important part of your value subject to someone else's whims is crazy when you have the money to secure it.
sillysaurusx 5y ago
> Twitter is a stagnant company. They have thousands of engineers that in the span of a decade don't seem to produce much at all, nothing visible or memorable anyway. As a Twitter user since 2019, I’ve seen improvements even in my short time on the platform. The most obvious example is that you can now restrict who can reply to your tweets. You could make the same argument about HN, and it’d be equally mistaken. How quickly we forget the front end redesign that lets you tweet photos when you quote tweet. The old one didn’t. Or that they collapse new tweets into a button you can click, rather than interrupting your reading flow when it loads more. (Admittedly the old site already had this.)
- staindk 5y ago
  Twitter auto-pauses videos when I scroll down past them. It has a couple other UX quirks that I really dislike as well. HN probably has 0-1 devs actively working on it and is (likely still) running on two machines ("master" and "standby")[1] Not sure about the comparison between Twitter and HN. I agree with the comment above yours - IMO Twitter has been stagnant in many regards. Why not spend time really nailing down video/image hosting/viewing etc? Why NFT profile pics? [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28478379 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28478379
jrochkind1 5y ago
Do people on boards of directors get features implemented, is that a thing?
pcmoney 5y ago
5yr returns: Twtr: 235% Fb: 65%
- dnissley 5y ago
  Excellent. Now do returns since IPO through April 1st, 2022: Twtr: -5% Fb: +488%
  - pcmoney 5y ago
    Literally doesnt matter unless you have been holding since 2006. I invested in twtr in Feb 2020. Its been a ride
oneplane 5y ago
The two word combination "Free speech" is so Americanised that it needs a bunch of asterisks to define what it's supposed to mean. Is it the legal thing where the government isn't allowed to arbitrarily censor citizens? Or is it the "I want everything I think to be received by everyone" that a good chunk of people seem to think it means? Or is it "I want to be a dick and everyone has to keep dealing with my shit"? As far as I can tell, unless you're dealing with the government, the most legalese meaning of "free speech" doesn't apply at all.
- nopenopenopeno 5y ago
  It means nobody is allowed to police public discourse and that anyone who wants to be a dick can be a dick and if others don’t want to deal with it they can ignore it. The only complications have always been situations where private enterprise dominates or impedes on public discourse.
  - whimsicalism 5y ago
    Sure, now you're just laundering the explanation into what public discourse is.
    - nopenopenopeno 5y ago
      That is exactly where the conversation should be. It’s a world more productive than implicating false dichotomies of government authority vs. private authority, or polite vs. annoying.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - awb 5y ago
    In the US, this isn’t accurate at all. > It means nobody is allowed to police public discourse No, it means the government cannot restrict speech. > Freedom of speech, also called free speech, means the free and public expression of opinions without censorship, interference and restraint by the government. [0] Most people assume “free speech” means “nobody” can restrict it, but it is in fact only “by the government”. For example, you do not have freedom of speech at my house. I am free to demand anyone who says the word “blue” on my property to immediately leave. You also don’t have free speech on the public comment section of my blog. I can delete (or not approve) any comments that don’t adhere to a list of approved words, or are not sufficiently praiseful of my views. There are some state and federal laws that protect free speech at private companies, but they are mostly around employment as you can read about in the article. That’s why I think OC is stating that the definition of “free speech” is important. Are we talking about US law, or about an abstract concept that “nobody can restrict public discourse” that doesn’t exist in reality? > The only complications have always been situations where private enterprise dominates or impedes on public discourse. Not true. There are many, many complications to free speech. > Categories of speech that are given lesser or no protection by the First Amendment include obscenity (as determined by the Miller test), fraud, child pornography, speech integral to illegal conduct, speech that incites imminent lawless action, and regulation of commercial speech such as advertising. [1] These types of speech can be legally restricted, punished and censored. This list was not created in 1776, it was created over time because the line isn’t clear. What’s always been clear though is that there have always been complicated edge cases concerning free speech. The issue is so complicated it’s been litigated in the Supreme Court possibly hundreds of times [2]. Keep in mind that the Supreme Court only takes on a case if it presents a novel problem or if they thought a previous Supreme Court mad an egregious error in judgement. So the sheer volume of cases means that there continue to be many unique, complicated facets to “free speech”, not all of which involve private enterprise. Protesting, freedom of assembly, freedom of association, freedom to petition, compelled speech, false speech, etc. all can be complicated issues concerning individuals or public institutions. [0], [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech_in_the_United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech_in_the_Uni... [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_Supreme_Court_cases_involving_the_First_Amendment https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_Suprem...
stevebmark 5y ago
Twitter took out Clubhouse in about a week with what is now Twitter spaces. They've introduced Twitter Blue. Not that stagnant, and if you think it's stagnant, an edit button wouldn't be thing that changes that.
gfodor 5y ago
Sounds like you’re saying Elon is lying when he says it’s about freedom of speech and open algorithms. Weird.
martin1975 5y ago
Edit, with a history of edits visible. Otherwise, it's b.s.
mandeepj 5y ago
>A perfect target for Musk to come in, do a few sweeping changes, and get out. Thereby proving once again that he gets shit done where others can't. Case closed. Ha! You are drinking straight from the hose pipe and having a hangover. Not having a Edit button was a strategic decision from Twitter and not a competency one. For the longest time, Facebook did not have Dislike button and still don't; sometime back, they added few options instead. It was their product vision that drove the decision behind their feature selections.
squegles 5y ago
Twitter is adding an edit button. See https://twitter.com/TwitterComms/status/1511456430024364037?s=20&t=PIXOBKqO4psOBZtQEsFE6w https://twitter.com/TwitterComms/status/1511456430024364037?...
ehnto 5y ago
> They have thousands of engineers that in the span of a decade don't seem to produce much at all I have always wondered. Are there "projects" adjascent the core product that I'm not aware of? I can understand the infrastructure side of the work is pretty busy, but feature development and bugfixing don't require that many people even in a fast paced product development phase. What's everyone doing?
- sytelus 5y ago
  Tweeter has released steady slew of new features: https://twitter.com/i/release_notes https://twitter.com/i/release_notes People on HN are great at making irresponsible claims and they are the clueless ones. You can bet that thousands of engineers there are very very busy.
  - ehnto 5y ago
    Irresponsible is a bit rich, I have no responsibilities owed to twitter. Perhaps ignorant would be fair. I am not exactly floored by those releases compared to the team size, but it does show they're not twiddling their thumbs. As mentioned in another comment, they might be a bit inefficient at the size they are now, and the responsibilities they have to internal operations aren't particularly obvious to outsiders.
tlear 5y ago
Supposedly he was talking to the Babylon bee just before about how they got banned. I am very curious what he will do. He is anything but conventional, he is not there to go for low hanging fruit I don't think
fortran77 5y ago
I will never like or retweet anything ever if what I had endorsed could be edited later.
jollybean 5y ago
1) 'publicity' not 'prestige' so much. We're all going to be talking about it. 2) "do a few sweeping changes, and get out. Thereby proving once again that he gets shit done where others can't. " I'm doubtful as a board member he'll have the influence to make material changes. More like a series of publicly visible things. Twitter doesn't have an 'edit button' because they're incompetent, it's just an odd choice they've made, and I think there are good reasons there. And 'edit button' is not any kind of material change. 3) I'll bet the speech issue is on his radar. On the whole, I don't see how musk really changes the nature of what Twitter is, it's a mature product.
bruhhh 5y ago
a proof that he get shit down? Yah just like he got the underground tunnel project don-... oh wait, he ended up building 10% of the original plan and it sucked
jsemrau 5y ago
I was following this discussion on finclout (https://app.finclout.io/t/dD66Ww2 https://app.finclout.io/t/dD66Ww2) and also don't think that Parak will not be CEO in 12 months (probably earlier)
VeejayRampay 5y ago
no one that is using Twitter right now wants "normies" on the platform
Salgat 5y ago
Twitter facilitates knowledge transfer and communication. I'd argue they are one of the largest sources for communication on the internet, and with 200 million visitors every day, I'd say they are doing what they're supposed to be doing.
endofreach 5y ago
Just stopping by to say i love this discussion. Very HN.

by fleddr 5y ago

grenoire 5y ago

thank you Papa Musk for the edit button <3

deanCommie 5y ago

Counterpoint: Twitter is the only social network I use where I get an unfiltered balance of ideas big and small - CEOs and random Joes. It's where memes are born and proliferate everywhere else (other than TikTok). Twitter WORKS. If it's profitable, it doesn't need more growth. Facebook got ruined because it thought everyone's parents and grandparents should be on it, and now that's the only people on it. My parents and grandparents are scared of Twitter, and that's how I like it. It also doesn't try to charge me for access to my own followers like Facebook does. Twitter may have problems but I like the balance they've struck. An edit button by the way would RUIN it because people who have gone viral with a bad take would simply edit it away.

martin_a 5y ago
> If it's profitable, it doesn't need more growth. Stakeholders will think otherwise. > An edit button by the way would RUIN it because people who have gone viral with a bad take would simply edit it away. Just add a change history like (I think) FB has. No big deal.
- Talanes 5y ago
  >Just add a change history like (I think) FB has. No big deal. If the Hacker News crowd isn't even sure that the feature exists, there's no way the majority of users are actually checking it. That may solve the problem for the most careful of users, but the conversation is going to be driven by the people who just react to what's in front of them.
  - martin_a 5y ago
    I've deleted my FB account several years ago, but this is what I remember: There was a note like "Bearbeitet" ("changed") right in the post header, when a post had been changed after initial posting. You could click on that and see at least one previous version of the post. A note like this, with a changelog, should therefore be fine for twitter and counter all "I never posted sth. like that!" talk, as it would be easily to be debunked.
ejb999 5y ago
>>Twitter is the only social network I use where I get an unfiltered balance of ideas If you think you are getting 'unfiltered balance' from twitter, then you don't know twitter very well.
- deleted 5y ago
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- deleted 5y ago
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fleddr 5y ago
lol "unfiltered". It's an extremist network that filters in particular sanity. "Twitter WORKS. If it's profitable, it doesn't need more growth." You don't get to decide that. It's a publicly traded company. Which means you do need more growth. "My parents and grandparents are scared of Twitter, and that's how I like it." Strange thing to be proud of. I guess your own family isn't "cool" enough. Finally, an edit button can have a timer, as every edit button ever has had for decades.
nirav72 5y ago
People have deleted bad tweets and they still have gone viral.
MisterMower 5y ago
Username is deanCommie... I'm going to go out on a limb here and say he enjoys reading Pravda, er, Twitter.
- deanCommie 5y ago
  Only on "hackernews" do people expect a username to have any alignments with people's political beliefs. This seems to come up regularly here, and never on any other forum or irc channel I've used this ID. If I was a communist, why would I self identify as a "commie"?? And not even consistently: Are you a lawn mower? A landscaper even?

orblivion 5y ago

Why would Elon Musk spend his capacity to get things done on something like Twitter? He's got planets to colonize. Interesting point to question his motives, but for now I take him at his word regarding the free speech thing. I guess it could be something more nefarious as well.

fleddr 5y ago
Like I said, prestige. When you're the richest man in the world, and your main companies are on track, what is it that motivates billionaires? Prestige. Visibility. Legacy.
trashtester 5y ago
- chc 5y ago
  You see both white nationalism and civil rights as political antipatterns? What do you consider a healthy political environment? Complete stagnation where people who got theirs are OK but no one else can ever rise to that level? Or do you mean something different by "woke" than its usual meaning of "aware of inequities and desiring to fix them"? Edit: I see the free speech proponents are here to try to make my comment invisible. Come on guys, don't give in to cancel culture like this!
  - da39a3ee 5y ago
    Woke is a disparaging term used to refer to people espousing broadly left wing “progressive” ideologies, who are obsessed with issues affecting minorities and “inclusion”, yet fail to recognize that their intolerance and refusal to respect differing views are utterly exclusionary.
    - chc 5y ago
      So what you're saying here is that helping minorities and making them equal members of society is a political antipattern if opponents of civil rights don't like when you do it? I don't see how that's an antipattern. If that's what you mean, it's basically just saying "A healthy political landscape is one where civil rights are never granted to anyone," which doesn't sound healthy at all. As a side note, I don't think there are very many people who are unaware that being intolerant of bigotry is exclusionary toward overt bigots. Can you give an example of someone you think has this attitude but doesn't realize that it excludes the people they would consider bigots?

KerrAvon 5y ago

> A perfect target for Musk to come in, do a few sweeping changes, and get out. Thereby proving once again that he gets shit done where others can't. Case closed. Whatever merit or lack thereof Musk on the Twitter board has, I would bet money this particular scenario does not happen. Musk is not a turnaround expert or corporate savior (and for the record he's not claiming to be).

bennysomething 5y ago
Well he did turn tesla round in a way, as in he wasn't a founder.
HeavyStorm 5y ago
Yeah, I was thinking exactly that. Assuming that this is the case - that Musk is joining as a savior - is silly. He doesn't fit the profile nor has the track record for that. He may be a visionary (whatever that means), but a excellent, renowned executive that revitalizes companies, heck, that really has never been the case.
- fleddr 5y ago
  Strange that both of you would say that. He's a ruthless result-driven executive that doesn't accept excuses. If it's at all impossible for something to get done, he'll get it done. I'm not at all a fan of him, but his power is in execution. A vision is worthless.
  - hooande 5y ago
    yeah, The Boring Company is absolutely killing it. I use that thing every day
    - mensetmanusman 5y ago
      Why are you gambling so much in Vegas?

PostOnce 5y ago

"stagnant company" Why must every company sustain boundless growth and 24-hour engagement? Change and growth for their own sake can be cancers. Twitter does what it does and people like it (as seen by the fact that they all use it), yet armchair generals cry out that twitter's refusal to turn into "not twitter" is somehow a failure of engineering and management, or some form of incompetence. So, I disagree, I guess.

IIAOPSW 5y ago
The shareholders ain't here to fuck spiders.
stjohnswarts 5y ago
Why do they need so many engineers though. It's not like twitter is facebook or gmail or apple tv where things are constantly shifting? I think the point was why does it take so many people? They should be raking in the cash after a 25% cull. Just saying this from the point of view if I was interested in buying their stock.
sllewe 5y ago
Because that growth is used as a substitute for profit (or net income or EBITDA - take your pick). For a public company having one or the other (or rarely, both) keeps the ticker price moving in the right direction.
0xffff2 5y ago
While I agree with you, at the same time if Twitter as a company isn't really doing much, why do they have thousands of developers on staff? I don't think there's anything wrong with being a stable, profitable company, but logically it should also come with a whole lot of layoffs.
- kyawzazaw 5y ago
  Maybe maintenance of current user base itself requires lots of innovation although not ground breaking(thus jobs)? Why the need for layoffs? They did make Twitter Spaces and so far, that move alone has shadowed Clubhouse even though itself is not doing well. Also built discontinued Fleets.

memish 5y ago

He could do that with any number of stagnant companies. Think bigger picture. Tesla: Sustainable transport SpaceX: Becoming a multiplanetary species Twitter: Free speech in the public square IMO it's actually the most important mission of the 3 since it's the basis for societal progress.

systemvoltage 5y ago
I think this is a charitable interpretation of what’s going on, unfortunate to see so many IMO reasonable comments getting downvoted here.
planetsprite 5y ago
Here's a more sane interpretation of Musk's "mission" for these companies: Tesla: Gimmicky electric cars as a status symbol SpaceX: Maximizing profits on government space contracts Twitter: Tactical manipulation of stock prices All of them are about increasing Musk's clout and net worth.
- inglor_cz 5y ago
  "Maximizing profits on government space contracts" That would be the United Launch Alliance, Sir.
- postmeta 5y ago
  Deeply cynical interpretation?

dieortin 5y ago

In my experience Twitter is way more appealing to younger people than Facebook.

ejb999 5y ago
and tiktok is 100X more appealing to them than either of those. Facebook is for grandparents, twitter is for bots.
- mavhc 5y ago
  Twitter is for journalists who now don't have to walk downstairs to get the pointless opinion of the man on the street
- mensetmanusman 5y ago
  I wonder how appealing tiktok will remain after the brains are fried from all the blinking lights :)
  - ejb999 5y ago
    personally, I don't understand the appeal of tiktok, guess that makes me too old for the target demographic I guess. I never liked facebook (fake people bragging about their perfect fake lives for all the world to see). I used to find value in twitter - but now I just can't wade thru the all noise to get to the value - gave up all major social media years ago, don't miss it.
- mrighele 5y ago
  On twitter you can find lot of great people to follow; journalists, scientists, experts of any kind. If you are looking for information, you can find it. The main issue is that all those diamonds are covered by an abundant amount of material of... let's just say lower quality, so the search can be long and tedious.
  - tluyben2 5y ago
    But most people don’t want that info; most people want to be entertained, every second of the day. And for that tik tok now wins until the next, even shorter attention span thing pops. Twitter started that by artificially limiting input of course, but people still had to read. Tik tok was obvious really. But people will come up with better ways to put less info into entertaining seconds people will want to watch 24/7; it will be a unicorn again in the coming years and TikTok will be for old people.

kappi 5y ago

Why does linkedin require 15000 employees? a website to post a glorified fake resume!

colinmhayes 5y ago

> People have been begging for an edit button for a decade. And they haven't implemented it because it's a truly horrible idea. If you messed up your tweet delete it. If it's already got traction, then it shouldn't be changed, especially because the edit feature would mostly be used maliciously to cancel retweeters.

tomcam 5y ago
What if it’s accompanied with a history feature that shows all the tweet edits?
- HWR_14 5y ago
  Yes. Because people won't look through the edit history for the same reason they don't read the fine print or studies that are cited. I'm pretty sure making it easier to misinterpret what tweets say is going to be even worse
  - BeFlatXIII 5y ago
    > I'm pretty sure making it easier to misinterpret what tweets say is going to be even worse Good. Let's stop pretending that meaning is contained in tweets.
    - HWR_14 5y ago
      > Let's stop pretending that meaning is contained in tweets. Let me know how that crusade is going for you.
      - BeFlatXIII 5y ago
        I haven't used Twitter in over five years and ignore people who show me screenshots of tweets. Haven't felt any loss in my life over the decisions.
- Vladimof 5y ago

spsful 5y ago

- Completely redesigning their UI two times over, - Launching a subscription-based service (which seems to make it the first social media network without ads) - Lengthening tweets to 280 characters - Letting users make money off their following (super followers) I'm confused as to how any of this makes it stagnant.

chc 5y ago
Four achievements in 10 years isn't actually a lot, and two of those are just "they added more monetization."
- ALittleLight 5y ago
  And changing the character limit seems unbelievably trivial.
namecheapTA 5y ago
As a one man show SAaS with enough customers to basically live my life.. I lol at these achievements.
- jquery 5y ago
  It’s just an example of the product not being stagnant. There’s a lot of things that go into current Twitter and it’d probably take no less than a couple hundred engineers just to keep the site up assuming no R&D whatsoever. That adds a ton of inertia and friction against changes. Anyway I’m happy with Twitter’s direction. They’ve gone and made it less toxic, and in fact I’ve recently created an account because it has become a pleasure to use.
astrange 5y ago
Twitter Blue still has ads and still constantly fights you to try and show you their algorithmic timeline. It also doesn't cover multiple accounts - and my side account, when it switches to the algorithmic timeline every other day, is convinced I want to know about pop musicians and inserts 1000 "suggested topics" about the Grammys and BTS I have to dismiss individually.

kklisura 5y ago

> They have thousands of engineers that in the span of a decade don't seem to produce much at all, nothing visible or memorable anyway. Long-lasting Twitter problems (culture, spam, algorithm issues) never seem addressed. Why do you assume it's engineering problem? I think engineers at twitter are well capable to solve any problems, but it's just not a business need. The real problem are product owners/stakeholders/business people, incapable to transform, envision and lead at Twitter.

lemoncookiechip 5y ago

> It doesn't take much. People have been begging for an edit button for a decade. If he'd get only that feature implemented, it will be remembered forever. Funny you mention that: https://www.ign.com/articles/elon-musk-largest-twitter-shareholder-edit-button-poll-board-of-directors https://www.ign.com/articles/elon-musk-largest-twitter-share...

marstall 5y ago

>Long-lasting Twitter problems (culture, spam, algorithm issues) ... don't see how an edit button will change any of that!

paxys 5y ago

He is a board member, not the CEO/COO. He can demand changes, but how will they magically get done?

ALittleLight 5y ago
My intuition is that Twitter's CEO will be looking for big changes to turn Twitter's stock price around. Now his largest shareholder is also a famous entrepreneur with some big ideas.

qsdf38100 5y ago

> A perfect target for Musk to come in, do a few sweeping changes, and get out. Thereby proving once again that he gets shit done where others can't. Case closed. Typical musk cult bullshit. I'm sorry, it sounds so wrong it makes me questions your honesty here. He won't "do a few sweeping changes and get out". The only shit he will get done is abusing his influence over the top of the hierarchy to slowly but surely get more control over what gets fed to twitter users. Remember how Facebook has been crucial for election manipulation over the world? Now Musk gets to play this game too. By the way, that's how he took over Tesla from its original founders. He invested an amount of money large enough so that he could force his way into becoming CEO. Then he fired the few remaining people who could oppose him. So, no, he's not going to get out. Your post sounds more like "nothing to see here" than anything else. There's a big thing to see here. The richest US person calmly and openly taking over one of the largest social network in the world. It's not over-analyzing, it's obvious. But in our troubled times such things are somehow happening in plain sight and nobody bats an eye.

HWR_14 5y ago

I think it's more basic than prestige. Musk's value add is in no small part due to his influencer status among a group of investors who primarily interact with him over Twitter. Leaving such an important part of your value subject to someone else's whims is crazy when you have the money to secure it.

sillysaurusx 5y ago

> Twitter is a stagnant company. They have thousands of engineers that in the span of a decade don't seem to produce much at all, nothing visible or memorable anyway. As a Twitter user since 2019, I’ve seen improvements even in my short time on the platform. The most obvious example is that you can now restrict who can reply to your tweets. You could make the same argument about HN, and it’d be equally mistaken. How quickly we forget the front end redesign that lets you tweet photos when you quote tweet. The old one didn’t. Or that they collapse new tweets into a button you can click, rather than interrupting your reading flow when it loads more. (Admittedly the old site already had this.)

staindk 5y ago
Twitter auto-pauses videos when I scroll down past them. It has a couple other UX quirks that I really dislike as well. HN probably has 0-1 devs actively working on it and is (likely still) running on two machines ("master" and "standby")[1] Not sure about the comparison between Twitter and HN. I agree with the comment above yours - IMO Twitter has been stagnant in many regards. Why not spend time really nailing down video/image hosting/viewing etc? Why NFT profile pics? [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28478379 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28478379

jrochkind1 5y ago

Do people on boards of directors get features implemented, is that a thing?

pcmoney 5y ago

5yr returns: Twtr: 235% Fb: 65%

dnissley 5y ago
Excellent. Now do returns since IPO through April 1st, 2022: Twtr: -5% Fb: +488%
- pcmoney 5y ago
  Literally doesnt matter unless you have been holding since 2006. I invested in twtr in Feb 2020. Its been a ride

oneplane 5y ago

The two word combination "Free speech" is so Americanised that it needs a bunch of asterisks to define what it's supposed to mean. Is it the legal thing where the government isn't allowed to arbitrarily censor citizens? Or is it the "I want everything I think to be received by everyone" that a good chunk of people seem to think it means? Or is it "I want to be a dick and everyone has to keep dealing with my shit"? As far as I can tell, unless you're dealing with the government, the most legalese meaning of "free speech" doesn't apply at all.

nopenopenopeno 5y ago
It means nobody is allowed to police public discourse and that anyone who wants to be a dick can be a dick and if others don’t want to deal with it they can ignore it. The only complications have always been situations where private enterprise dominates or impedes on public discourse.
- whimsicalism 5y ago
  Sure, now you're just laundering the explanation into what public discourse is.
  - nopenopenopeno 5y ago
    That is exactly where the conversation should be. It’s a world more productive than implicating false dichotomies of government authority vs. private authority, or polite vs. annoying.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- awb 5y ago
  In the US, this isn’t accurate at all. > It means nobody is allowed to police public discourse No, it means the government cannot restrict speech. > Freedom of speech, also called free speech, means the free and public expression of opinions without censorship, interference and restraint by the government. [0] Most people assume “free speech” means “nobody” can restrict it, but it is in fact only “by the government”. For example, you do not have freedom of speech at my house. I am free to demand anyone who says the word “blue” on my property to immediately leave. You also don’t have free speech on the public comment section of my blog. I can delete (or not approve) any comments that don’t adhere to a list of approved words, or are not sufficiently praiseful of my views. There are some state and federal laws that protect free speech at private companies, but they are mostly around employment as you can read about in the article. That’s why I think OC is stating that the definition of “free speech” is important. Are we talking about US law, or about an abstract concept that “nobody can restrict public discourse” that doesn’t exist in reality? > The only complications have always been situations where private enterprise dominates or impedes on public discourse. Not true. There are many, many complications to free speech. > Categories of speech that are given lesser or no protection by the First Amendment include obscenity (as determined by the Miller test), fraud, child pornography, speech integral to illegal conduct, speech that incites imminent lawless action, and regulation of commercial speech such as advertising. [1] These types of speech can be legally restricted, punished and censored. This list was not created in 1776, it was created over time because the line isn’t clear. What’s always been clear though is that there have always been complicated edge cases concerning free speech. The issue is so complicated it’s been litigated in the Supreme Court possibly hundreds of times [2]. Keep in mind that the Supreme Court only takes on a case if it presents a novel problem or if they thought a previous Supreme Court mad an egregious error in judgement. So the sheer volume of cases means that there continue to be many unique, complicated facets to “free speech”, not all of which involve private enterprise. Protesting, freedom of assembly, freedom of association, freedom to petition, compelled speech, false speech, etc. all can be complicated issues concerning individuals or public institutions. [0], [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech_in_the_United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech_in_the_Uni... [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_Supreme_Court_cases_involving_the_First_Amendment https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_Suprem...

stevebmark 5y ago

Twitter took out Clubhouse in about a week with what is now Twitter spaces. They've introduced Twitter Blue. Not that stagnant, and if you think it's stagnant, an edit button wouldn't be thing that changes that.

gfodor 5y ago

Sounds like you’re saying Elon is lying when he says it’s about freedom of speech and open algorithms. Weird.

martin1975 5y ago

Edit, with a history of edits visible. Otherwise, it's b.s.

mandeepj 5y ago

>A perfect target for Musk to come in, do a few sweeping changes, and get out. Thereby proving once again that he gets shit done where others can't. Case closed. Ha! You are drinking straight from the hose pipe and having a hangover. Not having a Edit button was a strategic decision from Twitter and not a competency one. For the longest time, Facebook did not have Dislike button and still don't; sometime back, they added few options instead. It was their product vision that drove the decision behind their feature selections.

squegles 5y ago

Twitter is adding an edit button. See https://twitter.com/TwitterComms/status/1511456430024364037?s=20&t=PIXOBKqO4psOBZtQEsFE6w https://twitter.com/TwitterComms/status/1511456430024364037?...

ehnto 5y ago

> They have thousands of engineers that in the span of a decade don't seem to produce much at all I have always wondered. Are there "projects" adjascent the core product that I'm not aware of? I can understand the infrastructure side of the work is pretty busy, but feature development and bugfixing don't require that many people even in a fast paced product development phase. What's everyone doing?

sytelus 5y ago
Tweeter has released steady slew of new features: https://twitter.com/i/release_notes https://twitter.com/i/release_notes People on HN are great at making irresponsible claims and they are the clueless ones. You can bet that thousands of engineers there are very very busy.
- ehnto 5y ago
  Irresponsible is a bit rich, I have no responsibilities owed to twitter. Perhaps ignorant would be fair. I am not exactly floored by those releases compared to the team size, but it does show they're not twiddling their thumbs. As mentioned in another comment, they might be a bit inefficient at the size they are now, and the responsibilities they have to internal operations aren't particularly obvious to outsiders.

tlear 5y ago

Supposedly he was talking to the Babylon bee just before about how they got banned. I am very curious what he will do. He is anything but conventional, he is not there to go for low hanging fruit I don't think

fortran77 5y ago

I will never like or retweet anything ever if what I had endorsed could be edited later.

jollybean 5y ago

1) 'publicity' not 'prestige' so much. We're all going to be talking about it. 2) "do a few sweeping changes, and get out. Thereby proving once again that he gets shit done where others can't. " I'm doubtful as a board member he'll have the influence to make material changes. More like a series of publicly visible things. Twitter doesn't have an 'edit button' because they're incompetent, it's just an odd choice they've made, and I think there are good reasons there. And 'edit button' is not any kind of material change. 3) I'll bet the speech issue is on his radar. On the whole, I don't see how musk really changes the nature of what Twitter is, it's a mature product.

bruhhh 5y ago

a proof that he get shit down? Yah just like he got the underground tunnel project don-... oh wait, he ended up building 10% of the original plan and it sucked

jsemrau 5y ago

I was following this discussion on finclout (https://app.finclout.io/t/dD66Ww2 https://app.finclout.io/t/dD66Ww2) and also don't think that Parak will not be CEO in 12 months (probably earlier)

VeejayRampay 5y ago

no one that is using Twitter right now wants "normies" on the platform

Salgat 5y ago

Twitter facilitates knowledge transfer and communication. I'd argue they are one of the largest sources for communication on the internet, and with 200 million visitors every day, I'd say they are doing what they're supposed to be doing.

endofreach 5y ago

Just stopping by to say i love this discussion. Very HN.