15 ms·

Elon Musk and Twitter Reach Deal for Sale

40 points by cube2222 4y ago

sschueller 4y ago
I love the arrogance of Elon and all these people who think it's so easy to make Twitter better. If it where so easy why hasn't Facebook, Reddit, YouTube or any one else figured it out? I have seen this over and over again. Once you reach mass global adaption it becomes practically impossible to operate a "fair" and clean platform. This idea that one platform works for the whole world is like believing in one world government. It doesn't work. It doesn't even work within the United States. People are just too different. IMO, if anything will ever work it's a federated platform that is self governed by its regions. Reddit is somewhat that but there is a single US centric company in control and they ultimately decide which subreddit get deleted.
- commandlinefan 4y ago
  > why hasn't Facebook, Reddit, YouTube Well, until today, Facebook, Reddit, Youtube and Twitter are all doing exactly the same things with regards to content moderation so at least Elon can try doing something different for a change.
  - afavour 4y ago
    There’s a reason all these sites have come to the same solution: it’s the most feasible one. If Musk orders Twitter to relax content moderation it’ll fill to the brim with absolute garbage (at best, at worst it’ll be child porn) and they’ll backtrack. Nothing new here.
    - sieabahlpark 4y ago
      It'd almost be like every single website has those problems in the first place. Do you suddenly think he's going to turn off the csam filter? Those people would still be banned because csam content isn't free speech.
    - mc32 4y ago
      At least the system can aim to be less selective in its application and apply all across the spectrum rather than target some groups and not others.
    - weezin 4y ago
      Why does everyone use child porn as an argument against freedom of speech? Child porn is legally required to be taken down per section 230.
      - bobkazamakis 4y ago
        the argument isn't against freedom of speech, it's against this mythical implementation of free speech in which content moderation is magnitudes better than what is known.
        aeternum 4y ago
        The only method of content moderation that has been tried recently is: upvote/downvote/report and ai-filtering. There's a lot more out there. For example, slashdot has a unique moderation mechanism where random users were temporarily promoted to mods and could assign tags rather than just take things down. Filtering could allow users to choose to block anonymous accounts. Feed algos could prioritize content that presents a quality differing view rather than just reinforce filter bubbles.
      - GauntletWizard 4y ago
        There's a reason that it's constantly brought up - Twitters content moderators are literally pedophiles, as are Facebook's, as are Reddits. They've figured out how to "self-police" as it were, assuring that enough is deleted and the rest is hidden in PMs and moderated with other tags when caught. Speaking for personal experience, I met a Facebook person at Folsom Street Fair, through a friend of a friend who I had already marked as super fucking creepy. They were remarkably upfront about it, being drunk and apparently I have a good poker face. See also the "Aimee Challenor" affair at Reddit, and the fact that their initial defense was "Highly recommended by other staff" - They never looked further into that, for a fact.
    - yucky 4y ago
      >There’s a reason all these sites have come to the same solution: it’s the most feasible one. Are you sure the reason isn't ideological? After all, the people running them are all ideological cousins.
    - manquer 4y ago
      All carmakers said the same thing about electric cars in 2005. Old space told the same thing about reusable rockets. Doesn’t mean Elon will get it right this time, but you cannot fault him for thinking people don’t get it and he can solve it and he has the resources to back his vision . Better than say bezos or elision are doing with their fortunes at least he is trying something. Losing 40 billion isn’t all that much money for him and losing twitter is not all that bad for us either so why not
      - misiti3780 4y ago
        that is how I look at it also. if twitter doesnt exist in a few years, the world will be a lot better place if he somehow manages to fix it, that could be great too.
    - legalcorrection 4y ago
      You could just not ban people for saying impolitic things about race, immigration, and homosexuality/transgenderism, or for disagreeing with scientists regarding covid or climate change, or for reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop.
    - scotuswroteus 4y ago
      Or Musk believes it's not garbage.
  - xyzzy123 4y ago
    Generally I think that's true, but I looked at youtube comments the other day and it seems like there have been some radical changes in the past few years. The comments are not really more informative, but they seem a lot less offensive and somewhat more coherent than I remembered. I found it a little unsettling actually, as though the whole community had quietly been ai-rehabilitated or re-educated or something.
- blagie 4y ago
  > If it where so easy why hasn't Facebook, Reddit, YouTube or any one else figured it out? The hard part isn't the technical part, but the human part. Human systems are hard. Beyond around a hundred people, the hard problem is the organizational one. I (and many of the other people on HN) can tell you what Facebook, Google, Twitter, Apple, Microsoft, or many other organizations ought to do. If they did it, they'd be wildly more successful. On the other hand, if you made me the CEO, I (and the other armchair generals) wouldn't be able to make them do it. * Beyond the original founder, the CEO usually doesn't care about the company, but about their annual bonus, their next job, their golden parachute, keeping the board happy, and setting up for their next job. * Employees don't care about the abstract company. They often want to make the world a better place, a decent pay check, interesting work, and good work-life balance ... and so on. Facebook is a bunch of people working on pet projects from monopoly profits. If you make me the CEO, I won't be able to fix that. Google is managed in crazy ways around short-term objectives which don't align to overall success. Can I tell you what it ought to do better? Sure. Could I make it do it? Heck no. Microsoft, I haven't followed in a while, but used to be torn apart by internal feuds. Etc. The upsides Elon has are: - He owns the thing, and has aligned incentives for himself, at least. - He has a pretty good track record with actually getting things like this done in organizations he's been at. From a technical perspective, I know a few people as good as Elon. That's hard, but not that hard. Elon is top 0.01%, probably, which means 1:10,000, which means I can find 30k Americans as good at him, and many more people worldwide. On the other hand, managing thousands of people in a coherent direction? That's *HARD*.
- zackees 4y ago
blagie 4y ago
Personally, I think the value of Twitter will be much higher under Elon Musk than under old management. I don't know if it was undervalued or overvalued, so I don't know if he's going to make money on it, but from the outside, it felt mismanaged. I do think employees will scream "bloody murder," but it will be the wrong employees screaming the hardest. Twitter should be neutral, and support diversity. Twitter employees can't tolerate red states, let alone the diversity of the broader world. Muslims constitute over a billion people. Chinese are over a billion. Toss in Latin America, Slavic countries, and so on, and you have a broad swath of cultures which views out-of-line with woke Twitter employees. If Elon can make Twitter less progressive, white, affluent, Western, blue state value aligned, that's a bigger, broader userbase. On the other side, Twitter hasn't really improved since coming out. The number of employees has more than doubled since 2017, and it's not quite clear why. There's a lot of work to be done on either the cost side or the product improvement side. I don't feel like it has much beyond momentum. A key question is whether Elon will be able to make a workplace environment competitive with FAANG. He's not known as a great guy to work for. He will need that calibre of talent (if not the current quantity).
- Barrin92 4y ago
  >and you have a broad swath of cultures which views out-of-line with woke Twitter employees. I hope you realize they're also out of line with Elon's eclectic libertarianism, and that those cultures not only disagree with woke employees but also with his 'free speech absolutism' and I hope Elon recognizes this because I have no interest in having American 'free speech' imported.
  - olliej 4y ago
    Elon has classic tech/rich person “libertarianism”. He has benefited his entire life by massive government support: his early money largely coming through growing up with access to what was essentially slave labour, to his modern successes in which he took massive amounts of money from the government, while also refusing to pay taxes. He demands law enforcement protect his interests, while intentionally and repeatedly ignoring the law himself. That is his “libertarianism” is a return to his heritage: he should be a part of a privileged society, where the core cost of keeping the country running should be borne by people have as few rights and resources as possible. Anything he can do to create his childhood utopia he will do.
olliej 4y ago
Could someone tell me what things “woke” Twitter has removed that were wrong to be removed? I am genuinely curious - because I recall terrorists, white supremacists, Nazis, homophobic, transphobic, and antisemitic content. I recall them stopping promotion of the violent overthrow of the US None of this seems bad, unless you are a free speech absolutionist, in which case you also have to publish Al Qaeda, ISIS, child abuse, etc, alongside your storm front streams
- nh23423fefe 4y ago
  checkmate right?
- weezin 4y ago
  Do you honestly think it was ok to stop the spread of the hunter biden story and suspend people for spreading it?
  - olliej 4y ago
    You mean the one with a few leaked emails used to promulgate at repeatedly debunked conspiracy theory? That one? Once it became clear that the conspiracy theory was just that, repeatedly promoting said conspiracy seems to be of questionable value, to anyone other than the GOP, who themselves repeatedly sued twitter for the identity of critics. So yeah, I do think it was reasonable to stop that propaganda after it became clear the conspiracy was false, and "reporting" on the laptop was being used solely to continue promoting that conspiracy. Is that a more borderline case, sure, I'll accept that. Is the literal president promoting the overthrow of the elected US government something that is debatable? nope. Is that something the anti-woke people say was wrong? yup. So I generally equate "anti-woke" with: anti-law, anti-democracy, pro-violence, pro-bigotry, pro-segregation, pro-conspiracy, etc and I have yet to see any evidence that the anti-woke/pro-"free speech" people clamoring for changes to twitter do not fall into those buckets. I have never seen any evidence in fact of an "anti-woke" person not defending hate speech, I have however seen many vigorously demanding that all LGBT content be silenced to "protect children", or that American history be censored or rewritten in school. Given that track record it is hard to see that the "anti-twitter-censorship" folk are operating out of a position of good-faith.
mellosouls 4y ago
Sheesh, of all the millions of news sources covering this, could we not have picked a paywalled one?
- puffoflogic 4y ago
  Other news sources cannot be relied upon for the correct perspective.

40 points by cube2222 4y ago

I love the arrogance of Elon and all these people who think it's so easy to make Twitter better. If it where so easy why hasn't Facebook, Reddit, YouTube or any one else figured it out? I have seen this over and over again. Once you reach mass global adaption it becomes practically impossible to operate a "fair" and clean platform. This idea that one platform works for the whole world is like believing in one world government. It doesn't work. It doesn't even work within the United States. People are just too different. IMO, if anything will ever work it's a federated platform that is self governed by its regions. Reddit is somewhat that but there is a single US centric company in control and they ultimately decide which subreddit get deleted.

commandlinefan 4y ago
> why hasn't Facebook, Reddit, YouTube Well, until today, Facebook, Reddit, Youtube and Twitter are all doing exactly the same things with regards to content moderation so at least Elon can try doing something different for a change.
- afavour 4y ago
  There’s a reason all these sites have come to the same solution: it’s the most feasible one. If Musk orders Twitter to relax content moderation it’ll fill to the brim with absolute garbage (at best, at worst it’ll be child porn) and they’ll backtrack. Nothing new here.
  - sieabahlpark 4y ago
    It'd almost be like every single website has those problems in the first place. Do you suddenly think he's going to turn off the csam filter? Those people would still be banned because csam content isn't free speech.
  - mc32 4y ago
    At least the system can aim to be less selective in its application and apply all across the spectrum rather than target some groups and not others.
  - weezin 4y ago
    Why does everyone use child porn as an argument against freedom of speech? Child porn is legally required to be taken down per section 230.
    - bobkazamakis 4y ago
      the argument isn't against freedom of speech, it's against this mythical implementation of free speech in which content moderation is magnitudes better than what is known.
      - aeternum 4y ago
        The only method of content moderation that has been tried recently is: upvote/downvote/report and ai-filtering. There's a lot more out there. For example, slashdot has a unique moderation mechanism where random users were temporarily promoted to mods and could assign tags rather than just take things down. Filtering could allow users to choose to block anonymous accounts. Feed algos could prioritize content that presents a quality differing view rather than just reinforce filter bubbles.
    - GauntletWizard 4y ago
      There's a reason that it's constantly brought up - Twitters content moderators are literally pedophiles, as are Facebook's, as are Reddits. They've figured out how to "self-police" as it were, assuring that enough is deleted and the rest is hidden in PMs and moderated with other tags when caught. Speaking for personal experience, I met a Facebook person at Folsom Street Fair, through a friend of a friend who I had already marked as super fucking creepy. They were remarkably upfront about it, being drunk and apparently I have a good poker face. See also the "Aimee Challenor" affair at Reddit, and the fact that their initial defense was "Highly recommended by other staff" - They never looked further into that, for a fact.
  - yucky 4y ago
    >There’s a reason all these sites have come to the same solution: it’s the most feasible one. Are you sure the reason isn't ideological? After all, the people running them are all ideological cousins.
  - manquer 4y ago
    All carmakers said the same thing about electric cars in 2005. Old space told the same thing about reusable rockets. Doesn’t mean Elon will get it right this time, but you cannot fault him for thinking people don’t get it and he can solve it and he has the resources to back his vision . Better than say bezos or elision are doing with their fortunes at least he is trying something. Losing 40 billion isn’t all that much money for him and losing twitter is not all that bad for us either so why not
    - misiti3780 4y ago
      that is how I look at it also. if twitter doesnt exist in a few years, the world will be a lot better place if he somehow manages to fix it, that could be great too.
  - legalcorrection 4y ago
    You could just not ban people for saying impolitic things about race, immigration, and homosexuality/transgenderism, or for disagreeing with scientists regarding covid or climate change, or for reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop.
  - scotuswroteus 4y ago
    Or Musk believes it's not garbage.
- xyzzy123 4y ago
  Generally I think that's true, but I looked at youtube comments the other day and it seems like there have been some radical changes in the past few years. The comments are not really more informative, but they seem a lot less offensive and somewhat more coherent than I remembered. I found it a little unsettling actually, as though the whole community had quietly been ai-rehabilitated or re-educated or something.
blagie 4y ago
> If it where so easy why hasn't Facebook, Reddit, YouTube or any one else figured it out? The hard part isn't the technical part, but the human part. Human systems are hard. Beyond around a hundred people, the hard problem is the organizational one. I (and many of the other people on HN) can tell you what Facebook, Google, Twitter, Apple, Microsoft, or many other organizations ought to do. If they did it, they'd be wildly more successful. On the other hand, if you made me the CEO, I (and the other armchair generals) wouldn't be able to make them do it. * Beyond the original founder, the CEO usually doesn't care about the company, but about their annual bonus, their next job, their golden parachute, keeping the board happy, and setting up for their next job. * Employees don't care about the abstract company. They often want to make the world a better place, a decent pay check, interesting work, and good work-life balance ... and so on. Facebook is a bunch of people working on pet projects from monopoly profits. If you make me the CEO, I won't be able to fix that. Google is managed in crazy ways around short-term objectives which don't align to overall success. Can I tell you what it ought to do better? Sure. Could I make it do it? Heck no. Microsoft, I haven't followed in a while, but used to be torn apart by internal feuds. Etc. The upsides Elon has are: - He owns the thing, and has aligned incentives for himself, at least. - He has a pretty good track record with actually getting things like this done in organizations he's been at. From a technical perspective, I know a few people as good as Elon. That's hard, but not that hard. Elon is top 0.01%, probably, which means 1:10,000, which means I can find 30k Americans as good at him, and many more people worldwide. On the other hand, managing thousands of people in a coherent direction? That's *HARD*.
zackees 4y ago

blagie 4y ago

Personally, I think the value of Twitter will be much higher under Elon Musk than under old management. I don't know if it was undervalued or overvalued, so I don't know if he's going to make money on it, but from the outside, it felt mismanaged. I do think employees will scream "bloody murder," but it will be the wrong employees screaming the hardest. Twitter should be neutral, and support diversity. Twitter employees can't tolerate red states, let alone the diversity of the broader world. Muslims constitute over a billion people. Chinese are over a billion. Toss in Latin America, Slavic countries, and so on, and you have a broad swath of cultures which views out-of-line with woke Twitter employees. If Elon can make Twitter less progressive, white, affluent, Western, blue state value aligned, that's a bigger, broader userbase. On the other side, Twitter hasn't really improved since coming out. The number of employees has more than doubled since 2017, and it's not quite clear why. There's a lot of work to be done on either the cost side or the product improvement side. I don't feel like it has much beyond momentum. A key question is whether Elon will be able to make a workplace environment competitive with FAANG. He's not known as a great guy to work for. He will need that calibre of talent (if not the current quantity).

Barrin92 4y ago
>and you have a broad swath of cultures which views out-of-line with woke Twitter employees. I hope you realize they're also out of line with Elon's eclectic libertarianism, and that those cultures not only disagree with woke employees but also with his 'free speech absolutism' and I hope Elon recognizes this because I have no interest in having American 'free speech' imported.
- olliej 4y ago
  Elon has classic tech/rich person “libertarianism”. He has benefited his entire life by massive government support: his early money largely coming through growing up with access to what was essentially slave labour, to his modern successes in which he took massive amounts of money from the government, while also refusing to pay taxes. He demands law enforcement protect his interests, while intentionally and repeatedly ignoring the law himself. That is his “libertarianism” is a return to his heritage: he should be a part of a privileged society, where the core cost of keeping the country running should be borne by people have as few rights and resources as possible. Anything he can do to create his childhood utopia he will do.

olliej 4y ago

Could someone tell me what things “woke” Twitter has removed that were wrong to be removed? I am genuinely curious - because I recall terrorists, white supremacists, Nazis, homophobic, transphobic, and antisemitic content. I recall them stopping promotion of the violent overthrow of the US None of this seems bad, unless you are a free speech absolutionist, in which case you also have to publish Al Qaeda, ISIS, child abuse, etc, alongside your storm front streams

nh23423fefe 4y ago
checkmate right?
weezin 4y ago
Do you honestly think it was ok to stop the spread of the hunter biden story and suspend people for spreading it?
- olliej 4y ago
  You mean the one with a few leaked emails used to promulgate at repeatedly debunked conspiracy theory? That one? Once it became clear that the conspiracy theory was just that, repeatedly promoting said conspiracy seems to be of questionable value, to anyone other than the GOP, who themselves repeatedly sued twitter for the identity of critics. So yeah, I do think it was reasonable to stop that propaganda after it became clear the conspiracy was false, and "reporting" on the laptop was being used solely to continue promoting that conspiracy. Is that a more borderline case, sure, I'll accept that. Is the literal president promoting the overthrow of the elected US government something that is debatable? nope. Is that something the anti-woke people say was wrong? yup. So I generally equate "anti-woke" with: anti-law, anti-democracy, pro-violence, pro-bigotry, pro-segregation, pro-conspiracy, etc and I have yet to see any evidence that the anti-woke/pro-"free speech" people clamoring for changes to twitter do not fall into those buckets. I have never seen any evidence in fact of an "anti-woke" person not defending hate speech, I have however seen many vigorously demanding that all LGBT content be silenced to "protect children", or that American history be censored or rewritten in school. Given that track record it is hard to see that the "anti-twitter-censorship" folk are operating out of a position of good-faith.

mellosouls 4y ago

Sheesh, of all the millions of news sources covering this, could we not have picked a paywalled one?

puffoflogic 4y ago
Other news sources cannot be relied upon for the correct perspective.