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Elon Musk owns Twitter: The story so far
- mikkergp 4y agoApparently He laid off the data engineering team. That term is pretty vague, anyone know what they do? https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/28/departing-twitter-employees-say-layoffs-have-started-as-elon-musk-takes-over.html https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/28/departing-twitter-employees-... Edit: this may have been a prank.
- dang 4y agoThat is discussed in this thread, but it's not clear what's going on with that story (comments are saying it was a prank, and the originally submitted tweet has been deleted): Departing Twitter employees say layoffs have started as Elon Musk takes over - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33374597 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33374597 - Oct 2022 (108 comments)
- xfour 4y agoNot specific to Twitter but as I understand it. Generally a data engineering team will setup the pipelines and ETL processes to turn transactional data into aggregate data necessary to run analytics.
- mikkergp 4y agoYeah which seems like a bland day-one target.
- wwweston 4y agoThat sounds like the move of someone who wants specifically-selected very loyal people designing systems which would tell you what's actually happening on the platform.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- bpodgursky 4y agoThis might have been a prank.
- slg 4y agoWho knows if that rumor is true, but it would be another red flag with Elon's approach. I can understand clearing out the old leadership team on day 1, but how quickly could Musk possibly know that there is no one on this team that could provide value to Twitter with different management or in some other role? Shooting first and asking questions later is not a good approach to managing a billion-dollar company.
- ajmurmann 4y agoTypically a lot of investigations into products and teams already take place before close. This was a weird acquisition though, so who knows if that actually was possible beforehand.
- slg 4y agoYes, but there is a difference between "I don't think what this team is currently working on provides value to the company" and "I don't think this team or anyone on it can provide value to the company". That second viewpoint is much more definitive and should require more time and evidence to reach.
- szastamasta 4y agoFunny how we give advice on how to manage a billion dollar company to guy who owns 2 of these . I’m not sure how many do you own, but I unfortunately don’t have any.
- slg 4y agoThe idea that only people who have done a job can criticize a person doing that job is silly. We all can criticize the President for example without having led a country. Isn't that principle supposedly the underlying reason Musk bought Twitter?
- mikkergp 4y agoSince it looks like it was a prank and he didn't actually do this, it seems like good advice.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- vishnugupta 4y agoHigh chance it's a prank. https://twitter.com/wealthycfo/status/1586053744269340672 https://twitter.com/wealthycfo/status/1586053744269340672
- tibudiyanto 4y agoI think this might be a prank. One of the guy is saying his name is Rahul Ligma lmao
- jdoliner 4y agoThis story looks like it was a hoax, it has an editors note now.
- DesiLurker 4y agoMaybe it was a prank but there is strong reason to believe that he'd want to use his Dojo AI engine to do heavy data engineering for twitter. that may mean some overlap & slightly different technical profile than existing team. Oh and um .. Loyalists!
- dang 4y agoAll: please don't post low-information, high-indignation comments, such as flamebait or ideological battle. We want thoughtful, curious conversation on HN. If you're going to comment, please make sure you're up to date on the site guidelines and are following them: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
- hartator 4y agoIt can be great for freedom of speech. Hopefully, it won't distract Elon too much from SpaceX, Tesla, and other important work. I still don't get how he managed to be CEO of multiple high-complexity companies. It's already not easy to be CEO of just one.
- als0 4y ago> I still don't get how he managed to be CEO of multiple high-complexity companies One can assume he knows how to delegate.
- bpodgursky 4y agoGwynne Shotwell @ SpaceX is incredible, at minimum.
- kevbin 4y agoThat’s a great name for the president/coo of a rocket company.
- MetaWhirledPeas 4y agoThat, and he still knows how to keep his hand near the steering wheel when the Management Autopilot begins to stray. Geez now that I think about it, his fascination with FSD makes perfect sense.
- Meekro 4y agoSome people just seem to have more hours in their day. It's quite impressive what Musk can do.
- afterburner 4y agoTelling other people to do things doesn't take that much time.
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- halfmatthalfcat 4y agoPrediction: Brain drain at Twitter begins as Elon starts enacting unpopular policies. Valuation tanks. Morale becomes non-existent and Twitter slowly starts to fade from existence while competitors begin to fill the void. I give it 3-5 years before it's gone full husk.
- hartator 4y agoWith a strong vision for freedom of speech and actual value enforcement (edit: of the transparency value, not just start censoring the other side), it would attract the right people. We can argue the recent dilution of Twitter's values to meddle with U.S. politics was the actual brain drain.
- hexator 4y agoTwitter's problems began way before the 2016 election.
- vibrio 4y agowhat is actual value enforcement?
- candiddevmike 4y agoI don't understand how those two things (freedom and enforcement) are compatible with each other.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- lovich 4y agoThey’re not, they come in opposition to each other so the more you value one aspect the weaker the other becomes. I don’t know how people who describe themselves as free speech absolutists and claim no one will be censored are even given the time of day when they simultaneously discuss enforcement policies. We already have and had multiple sites for absolute free speech short of actual government intervention on the internet. They are either small(the various chans) or go out of business(voat and the like) because no advertiser wants to associate with the content that is created, and free speech absolutists only appear to value free speech as long as someone else is covering the costs for propagating said speech.
- davidw 4y agoI think the thing to watch will be ads and other revenue streams. Most companies aren't going to want their ads next to 'free for all' content, so we'll see what happens.
- bobiny 4y agoI hope ads will die some day. To me they are just annoying and very rarely informative.
- davidw 4y agoWhere's the funding come from, then? That was not a cheap purchase.
- bobiny 4y agoI wasn't talking about Twitter specifically. Ads are a dominating revenue model: Youtube, Instagram, Facebook etc. I had an idea of people using crypto payments instead of likes. A platform would take a cut.
- WJW 4y agoI'd expect like counts to fall precipitously if you had to pay for every single one.
- LegitShady 4y agoyou can see with youtube premium that the value of individual ad views is basically nothing, and getting users to pay a reasonable monthly fee ends up being much more profitable. nobody will do the 'pay per video' thing because its not as profitable as just getting a monthly sub.
- bobiny 4y agoI wouldn't pay for each video I watch now, but I could probably watch less. It's like eating junk food now: you can eat nonstop but it doesn't nourish.
- mlindner 4y agoI feel like this techcrunch article itself violates hacker news policies because it has numerous personal attacks and deriding commentary throughout the article. Including calling the purchase of twitter a "toy". More so calling it "crowning himself CEO" as if that wouldn't be automatically required if you layoff the existing CEO. A temporary CEO would be required until a new CEO is found. I think it's also important to consider the idiom "A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on"
- NaturalPhallacy 4y ago>I feel like this techcrunch article itself violates hacker news policies because it has numerous personal attacks and deriding commentary throughout the article. Including calling the purchase of twitter a "toy". HN is little different from big tech ideologically, and your comment is already fading out of existence. I expect it will be completely censored soon.
- regularjack 4y agoThis site has a downvote button and an upvote button. The fact that people use that feature of the site (downvote), means the site is working as intended. It is not censorship.
- NaturalPhallacy 4y ago"It's not censorship if we use a bunch of ideologically identical people to do it rather than one."
- freejazz 4y ago"If we use" doing a lot of work here
- Covzire 4y agoMusk just tweeted this 5 mins ago: "Twitter will be forming a content moderation council with widely diverse viewpoints. No major content decisions or account reinstatements will happen before that council convenes."
- PartiallyTyped 4y agoIronic considering Babylon Bee was just unbanned even though they violated TOS. Also ironic that his goal was to promote free speech and painted moderation as evil. —- It is beyond me that I am downvoted for pointing the irony of the situation. So many proponents of free speech have so few regards to give for TOS and have the audacity to demand service without abiding to it. It seems that HN is no longer a bastion of honest discussion and has been overrun by certain individuals.
- the_optimist 4y ago“Major”
- dpkirchner 4y agoMajor, in this context, is a weasel word. It lets them off the hook for nearly any unbanning.
- the_optimist 4y agoIs it really valuable to prevent certain people from posting letters on certain internet sites? What does the industry around this look like?
- dpkirchner 4y agoIt's certainly valuable to Twitter's largest customers. Think GM, Coca-Cola, et al. I suspect the industry won't look much different after Twitter has gone private and "new" policies have taken hold.
- tibbydudeza 4y agoTik Tok Conversations coming soon ...
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- jjtheblunt 4y agoDoes Elon Musk own Twitter, or does a group of bankers orchestrated by him jointly own it with him?
- danjoredd 4y agoMusk himself owns it. He is now the CEO of the place
- whatshisface 4y agoMusk might own it, but musk's lenders now own a sizable piece of him.
- crhulls 4y agoHe might be the majority shareholder, but there is a known syndicate of coinvestors so he does not own it all himself - much of this is public information.
- mazurnification 4y agoSource? Surprisingly hard to find in quick search - drowned by fluff articles.
- danjoredd 4y agoSeems I was wrong about him being CEO. Still, he owns the place helped in part to the bank lenders he will need to repay. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter,_Inc. He got rid of the last CEO and will presumably either take the position himself or put his own guy in the chair
- cutenewt 4y agoI hope he buys Google next. Search really sucks.
- paxys 4y agoMusk has majority ownership of Twitter.
- soumyadeb 4y agoWould be interesting if he makes Twitter more dev friendly (open APIs etc)
- sevenf0ur 4y agoMaybe if they go private they can work on user focused stuff. I'd like to be able to use the site again without being forced to sign in.
- phailhaus 4y agoDue to the loans Elon had to take out, Twitter now has to make interest payments of over one billion dollars a year. Expect more features that try to wring every cent out of the userbase.
- skohan 4y agoReally could not have picked worse timing: a year ago capital was so much cheaper
- pmoriarty 4y agoTwitter may become the official platform for communicating to/from Musk's planned Mars missions. There's a lot of monetezation potential right there, as Earthlings tune in to follow every tweet from future Martians.
- root_axis 4y agoMars missions aren't happening for the foreseeable future.
- pmoriarty 4y ago"Would be interesting if he makes Twitter more dev friendly (open APIs etc)" How open and dev friendly is Tesla?
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- elololololmusk 4y ago
- strangattractor 4y ago
- TSiege 4y agoI would really like to hear how he's financing this deal. His net worth has dropped since he's made this play. Most of his money is tied up in equity. So who's funding this deal? The fact that this isn't well talked about and that the company is going private is raising a lot of red flags to my eyes
- skizm 4y agoAssuming the same financing as prior to trying to cancel, it will be $13B from banks loaned to Twitter the company. ~$7B from friends of Elon. Then I think something like half of the remaining was supposed to be margin loans against TSLA stock, but since the stock has tanked recently the margin requirements were too high and Musk has indicated he plans to simply sell a bunch of TSLA stock (or otherwise directly from his personal assets).
- dwater 4y agoMatt Levine at Bloomberg has been talking about it frequently as the deal evolved. You can read back through the articles that reference Musk or Twitter in the headline and get a good idea. "The Wall Street banks involved, led by Morgan Stanley, are also ironing out the steps needed to finalize funding about $13 billion of debt commitments." "Banks that committed to help finance Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter Inc. plan to hold all $13 billion of debt backing the deal rather than syndicate it out, according to people familiar with the matter, in another blow to a market that serves as a crucial source of corporate funding."
- TSiege 4y agoInteresting, and thanks for the heads up on where to look. I head read that some of the original financial backers backed out of the deal
- HWR_14 4y agoAs I understand it, the financing is $13 billion in money from banks as a loan ~$4 billion in pre-owned Twitter stock (he doesn't have to pay himself) ~$7-8 billion in commitments from other investors (Ellison, a16z, the Bitnance CEO etc.) ~$8-10 billion in TSLA stock he sold in like May when he announced the purchase at $900-$1000/share when he said it was specifically to buy TWTR ~$1 billion in a major investor (I don't recall whether it was a specific Saudi businessman or the Saudi investment fund or the royal family directly) asking to keep his ownership of the company and trade out the shares for teh new compnay shares That still leaves ~$9-11 billion unaccounted for in a very public fashion. At one point, Merrill had promised him a $12.5 billion margin loan backed by his Tesla shares. He claimed not to need it (and removed it from being a contingency on the deal a while ago). Or maybe he secretly used it. It's less than 5% of his net worth, so it seems reasonable to assume he can get or borrow it easily.
- julianeon 4y agoIn the spirit of trying to be high-information and add value: Where Musk is going, there are no maps. So it's very very hard to project. But we can predict likely developments. At a very high level, it's going to involve: bringing back controversial personalities like Donald Trump; increasing Twitter's commitment to 'free speech'; assuaging skittish advertisers; retaining users who might be concerned, while bringing in new ones; managing the exodus of users (size:?) that will happen regardless; cutting a large amount of staff, while keeping Twitter's lights on; open sourcing the code, discussing the impending rearchitecture; and - long term - folding this into Elon's vision of America's WeChat, and ultimately expanding Twitter, under X.com. That's a lot. But at a high level, I think that's correct. I would expect Elon to take the fight to the media. Whether he's going to focus on neutrally spreading a message, going more on the attack on media outlets that would support him, or doing something in between, is unknown. Musk has an unusually large amount of media power: that's his unique value add, in a way. I would expect this to be a 'bigger deal' as a story, as multiple stories, than I would for any other company undergoing a takeover. We'll be hearing a lot more about Twitter in the weeks to come, since the developments will keep piling up, and the press/public loves to read & discuss stories about Twitter & Musk. We'll see how it goes.
- the_jesus_villa 4y ago>managing the exodus of users (size:?) that will happen regardless In the same vein, the influx of new users who had avoided Twitter due to its censorious, hostile community norms.
- aredox 4y agoThat's a reality-free comment. Search right now for any insulting, racist, negationist trope and you'll find tons of tweets.
- the_jesus_villa 4y agoThe thing you said and the thing I said are both true imo. >Search right now for any insulting, racist, negationist trope and you'll find tons of tweets. Sounds like the hostile community I'm describing, which turns a lot of people off from Twitter!
- ginger2016 4y agoElon Musk wants to set the bird free. But is the bird going to be free? Even free speech people don’t like speech that is critical of their beliefs, the pressure on Elon Musk to widen the definition of hate speech will be significant. The pressure from advertisers will force him to cave. There will be pressure from platform owners like Apple and Google as well. If the moderation is weak Apple could decide to remove the Twitter app like they did to Parler. Elon buying Twitter isn’t going to set the bird free, for sure it made the cage a little bigger.
- linuxftw 4y ago"Pressure from advertisers" implies the advertisers are paying more than the marginal utility of the ads themselves in some kind of corporate-back-scratching model. If the ads provide a ROI, then other advertisers will gladly jump on board.
- celestialcheese 4y ago100% this. Big advertisers don't stop spending because they have a moral objection to the content, they stop spending when the customers who disagree with the content boycott and make a lot of noise.
- ginger2016 4y agoAlso big advertisers can stop spending because the people who make decisions on ad money spend ideologically disagree with Musk moderation policy. The decision makers are not robots, they have biases too.
- ginger2016 4y agoWSJ is reporting some advertisers are planning to leave if Trump is re-instated.
- linuxftw 4y agoAnd where do the people make noise about these types of things? Twitter. If they just stop promoting that content and turning a few keyboard warriors into news items, then companies will be none the wiser, and will happily spend money. But even in the case they decide to jump ship, other companies will fill the gap. Do you think all the NFL players are going to leave the platform? All the sports journalists? No amount of internet outrage is going to change them, they're too stuck on the platform.
- hn8305823 4y agoHe literally said it will not be a free for all. He may be chaotic, but he's not stupid. There is a huge difference between no moderation (anarchy), and not targeting conservative voices solely based on ideology.
- davidw 4y agoThere are tons of conservative voices on Twitter.
- rglullis 4y agoBut you simply don't know if "the algorithm" is being fair at giving reach to these voices.
- matsemann 4y agoYes, we do. Internal research at Twitter found that right wing tweets actually got promoted more by their algorithms.
- redeeman 4y agoyes, let us ask twitter for their opinion on whether they are doing improper things. its like if a policeman is accused of wrongdoing, he gets to investigate if he did that himself.
- rglullis 4y ago> Yes, we do. No, we don't. This is not an yes/no answer. This is the type of question that should be answered in terms of confidence intervals. > right wing tweets actually got promoted more In relation to what? What is a "right wing" tweet? What is a "left wing" tweet? E.g, if the algorithm is focused on filtering out disparaging extreme messages, and it ends up filtering X amount of "non-extreme right wing content", 3X of "extreme right-wing content" and 5X of "extreme left-wing content", it satisfies the claim that "it promotes more right-wing content" while also silencing conservative voices.
- mkl95 4y agoI find it kind of shocking that Musk likes Twitter that much, but at the same time it makes sense. If you ignore the wealth differential, his behaviour is similar to the average Twitter user. He may be the perfect owner in that sense. I also think it will be a clusterfuck within 5 years like some of his "side project" companies.
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- LegitShady 4y agomusk makes it clear why he likes twitter - because it lets you talk to the public without any filter at all, easily. Musk himself is whimsical and trollish on twitter but its not clear how much of that is real vs public image
- remram 4y agoHe bought it on the last possible day a court would allow, so I don't know how much he likes it really. He did try every possible move to get out of it.
- saalweachter 4y agoThe weirdest part to me about this saga is the extent to which Elon Musk is getting away with pretending he didn't spend the last six months trying very hard not to purchase Twitter.
- s1artibartfast 4y agoWell he clearly wanted to own Twitter. He also clearly regretted the price that he was paying. I don't think the second point negates the first.
- edmundsauto 4y agoMore precisely, at one point and for an instant, he wanted to own Twitter. His subsequent behavior could be interpreted as not wanting it at that price, but his actions were to try and stop the sale - not negotiate a different price. I think Elon has mental health / behavioral issues that drive this, but because he's a billionaire, we don't really care all that much. As long as he doesn't go full Kanye (which is a line he is scarily close to).
- fitzroy 4y agoI'm still surprised that Google didn't just clone or buy Twitter in the 2009 "Fail Whale" era. Seems like they had 95% of the work done already: a highly-scalabile real-time infrastructure that took Twitter years to catch up to. (Yes, Google+ came later, but the UX of the boundaries, of where the network started and stopped on the web, felt too amorphous for most people as a social media destination)
- mFixman 4y agoRemember Google Buzz? Google tried to copy Twitter and automatically added it to the front page of every Gmail account, fucked up the launch by having everything be public by default, and finally declared it a failed product and abandoned it a year later. In retrospect, the whole thing was a mini-Google+.
- ttepasse 4y agoIf I remember correctly, Buzz would have had a certain interoperability with other services via open protocols. G+ then was mostly closed.
- johannes1234321 4y agoGoogle+ wasn't their first attempt. That was Google Buzz. But the issue is: you have to get a critical mass of users. Some dedicated groups and then it has to get to a scale which is relevant for Google ...
- MichaelCollins 4y agoRemember when Google tried to make their own video website? It flopped hard and some company called "youtube" started doing it better, so Google bought them. When is the last time Google started their own truly successful project, rather than buying it?
- thehumblehacker 4y agoPrediction: Twitter becomes the defacto free speech public messaging platform for all world leaders regardless of ideology.
- noncoml 4y ago(Deleted)
- the_optimist 4y agoThere’s no foundation for this premise, but sure, “they” found their own app. People can make infinity apps. Or maybe show that there’s more value in the previous censorship and buy it back.
- strangattractor 4y agoCalling Twitter the "defacto online political forum" which the vast majority of US citizens do no use (myself included) seems a little over the top don't you think. Twitter could disappear and I wouldn't miss the incessant whining about the stupid crap people say on Twitter.
- thehumblehacker 4y agoPrediction: Twitter becomes the de facto standard free speech public messaging for world leaders regardless of ideology
- AtNightWeCode 4y agoI think a company like Twitter probably have some sacred cows stopping them from profit. Any new owner might fix that. I deleted my Twitter account years ago because most of the content is spam. Instagram is about the same and I will remove that too soon if it does not improve.
- r721 4y agoRelated recent discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33371297 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33371297 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33365948 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33365948 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33366137 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33366137 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33370270 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33370270 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33371581 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33371581 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33367063 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33367063
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- Animats 4y agoOK, so far, not much. Musk is getting stretched rather thin. Space-X seems to be doing OK with Gwynne Shotwell running things. Tesla, which Musk apparently does really run personally, is doing OK, but their side ventures are not. Self-driving is a mess. Solar panels (yes, Tesla has a solar panel business) are not doing well. The Cybertruck is years late. (Maybe next year.[1]) So is the Tesla Model 2, the low-end vehicle. There's still no low-cost Tesla. The market for high-end cars is somewhat saturated. Tesla's order backlog is now 78 days, much less than usual for Tesla and about typical for the auto industry. Remember, Tesla has to become bigger than Toyota to justify the stock price. It is not possible to do that at Tesla's current price points. There are not enough buyers with that much money. So Tesla has to compete on price with the Chevy Bolt, the Nissan Leaf, etc. Electric compact sedans are a crowded sector. Solving that problem is Musk's job. Twitter is a distraction. [1] https://www.edmunds.com/car-news/tesla-cybertruck-might-finally-become-reality.html https://www.edmunds.com/car-news/tesla-cybertruck-might-fina...
- danjoredd 4y agoThe problem with Musk's solar panel business is that it is more expensive and less effective than normal solar panels. They look nicer than normal panels, but to thrive off of solar you need as much efficiency as possible. Tesla panels don't provide that especially for the cost.
- foobarian 4y agoIs it though? I found that when combined with their battery offering, which triggers additional state incentives, their pricing is quite a bit below the competition. I just have cold feet because of rumors of bad/nonexistent customer service.
- thehappypm 4y agoIve found the service fine. It took a couple weeks to get someone out when I had an inverter issue, but they auto-scheduled the service
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- nightski 4y agoWe can argue about free speech & all that jazz to no end. But at the end of the day it's as simple as not banning elected officials. I don't care how divisive they are, we need to know what they say and do. These are people chosen by the people whether you love or hate them. Secondly, I just visited Twitter today and at the top it has statements about false accusations and fact checking prominently displayed. I follow a bunch of stats and machine learning people on Twitter, very little to no politics. Why are you forcing your political agenda on me?
- Analemma_ 4y agoHard disagree. The whole point of the rule of law is that elected officials are not supposed to be special, they have to follow the same rules as everybody else. If I'd get banned for a tweet, an elected official should also get banned for the same tweet. Your proposal means creating a caste system where special people get more free speech than the rest of us.
- nightski 4y agoI feel like it means exposing elected officials and making them responsible for what they say online. If anything I view it as holding them to a higher standard. In addition, it reduces the extreme polarization in our country. When you silence an elected official, you are silencing all the people who voted for such official without forcing them to realize what that elected official said/did.
- freejazz 4y agoMaking them responsible for what they say online by removing the repercussions that would happen to anyone else saying the same thing online? really?
- systemvoltage 4y agoWhat’s rule of law have to do with banning of elected officials on Twitter?
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- mk89 4y agoI have to admit that a few months ago I wrote on HN that Elon could do anything he wanted in order to let the price go down. And for a while I really believed that he would make it. Apparently there is still some justice in the world, and he paid the initial sum that he proposed, if I understand right.
- thethethethe 4y agoIf I was working at Twitter right now I would be looking for a different job, regardless of what I think of Elon's politics/motives. The talk of layoffs and major policy changes creates massive uncertainty and I don't think I'd risk sticking out the transition. I bet many inside the company feel the same. This begs the question: If there is a major exodus, will it even matter? And, if it does, how will the problems manifest? Reduced reliability? Slower feature velocity? Less innovation?
- LinuxBender 4y agoSlower feature velocity? Less innovation? Based on a few articles I've read, it appears he may be bringing developers from Tesla into Twitter but I have not seen anything from him directly stating that. I doubt they will hit the ground running but with time can probably dig into the code and processes. Sadly I've been in an industry that was focused on taking over after entire IT/engineering/development teams were let go. As rough as it is for the people let go, it is equally demoralizing to pick up the pieces from people either being let go or that were let go. It can be done accepting it will be rough around the edges at first. During the dot-com bust I was one of the people that had to sit with the soon to be let go team members and document their job and automate as much of it as I could. That's all I did for a couple of years.
- snowwrestler 4y agoIf Musk is actually using Tesla devs at Twitter he better have a rock solid contract for service between the two companies. Otherwise he opens himself up to a shareholder lawsuit for misuse of Tesla corporate resources.
- kjksf 4y agoA civil lawsuit is always about money. To win money in a lawsuit you need to show damages. As a shareholder, the damages would be drop in stock price. Good luck convincing all 12 jurors that Tesla's stock price dropped because a few Tesla engineers did a code review of Twitter code. Especially given that Tesla stock tends to go up, not down (recent beatings due to macro nonwithstanding).
- chamakits 4y agoI understand that he has been publicly combative with all the executives; but is it a practical to fire all those key executives right away? Specially, do they not contain any specifically useful knowledge or experience that you should make an attempt at creating a collaborative transition? Is this how these kinds of acquisitions of public companies happen? Isn’t this effectively freezing all significant activities for a significant ramp up time?
- lupire 4y agoMusk is CEO now. He doesn't need another one.
- koonsolo 4y agoHe's also CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, and is involved in some other projects. Are you sure he doesn't need someone to run the business... somewhere? He needs to have a limit at some point, right?
- concinds 4y agoIt's pretty common for the CEO, CFO and general counsel to be dismissed after acquisitions in circumstances (like here) where the acquisition is a disavowal of their vision and leadership. Keep in mind there are far more executives than these three. It's less likely to happen for well-run, profitable companies that are just being acquired for talent or synergy reasons. The size of the acquired and acquiring firms, and the type of acquisition, also plays a part; if Apple buys a startup, they might want to subsume them immediately into existing projects, so they'd likely fire the CEO CFO and GC; but if Google buys Nest or Fitbit (which serve different markets than Google, and are minor hobbies that shouldn't detract from Google's organizational priorities) they're more likely to keep the entire team intact (unless they willingly exit; that's another scenario). He still communicates regularly with Jack Dorsey, so I doubt there's much knowledge and experience being lost.
- skissane 4y ago> He still communicates regularly with Jack Dorsey, so I doubt there's much knowledge and experience being lost. I would not be surprised if Musk convinces Dorsey to come back to Twitter in some kind of formal (but part-time) role. Board member, adviser, consultant, etc
- noncoml 4y ago
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- dustedcodes 4y agoI am not a huge fan of Elon, but I look forward to him changing Twitter. Twitter has an extreme bias and it’s moderation is not balanced and it’s very polarising and having a controversial person who can bring the platform back to the centre and more to balanced without being afraid from a backlash from some fringe extremists is a good thing IMHO.
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- noncoml 4y agoThe year is 2024. Trump wins a second term presidency after having been unbanned from Twitter in late 2022. As he promised soon after he pulls US out of NATO, allowing Russia to annex the rest of Ukraine. The threat of a full scale nuclear war is finally out to rest and the world rejoices! Everyone chanting for a 3rd term presidency!
- mzs 4y agoMusk immediately terminated twitter's general counsel and head of legal policy, trust, & safety - this does not bode well with anticipated 3/4 downsizing: >2. A stripped-down trust-and-safety team is unable to deal with government subpoenas or complex law-enforcement requests. A bare-bones team might, for example, accidentally assist outside efforts to identify anonymous dissidents and activists in foreign countries. >3. The trust-and-safety team is unable to stop coordinated efforts from fraudsters orchestrating low-level scams. Similarly, a strapped trust-and-safety department is unable to combat or monitor child-sexual-abuse material, sex-trafficking efforts, nonconsensual pornography, and copyright violations. … >One former trust-and-safety engineer for a large social network told me that many elements of the job that seem boring or straightforward are actually incredibly fraught, like how to define and take action on different kinds of spam. Trust-and-safety officers in charge of such efforts aren’t just dealing with Viagra ads or crypto-scam bots; they’re figuring out how to handle bulk messages from legitimate political organizers exploiting the platforms for mass messaging. As one person put it, there are good actors and bad actors and also “spammy but not necessarily malicious businesses trying to get you to buy things in between, and all those things can look very similar to machine-learning models.” >Those with trust-and-safety experience at the platform told me that a big percentage of the job is dealing with the messy edge cases that are difficult for a computer to decipher. Programs might be able to address specific product quirks if a user files a clear help ticket reporting an obvious problem. “But if I wrote in, ‘My account has been hacked because it “accidentally” liked a porn tweet on 9/11 and I’m U.S. Senator Ted Cruz,’ that’s going to be a lot for a computer to unpack,” Brian Truebe, a former Twitter trust-and-safety professional, told me over email. >“A lot of things humans say and do are only easily interpretable/decoded by other humans,” he continued. “And when all speech is happening in a few places, those few places need more humans to review, not fewer.” >Reactionary tech figures such as Musk like to imply that content-moderation teams act as a kind of thought police. But these teams largely work on protecting users’ privacy, complying with laws, or keeping the site from becoming overrun by the kind of spam that no human wants to encounter. “To really have a robust security-and-abuse team, you need a massive amount of actual humans to respond and filter things that need to be filtered out,” Southey Blanton, a systems technician who worked in trust and safety at MySpace, told me. Blanton said that cuts to his team led to a skeleton crew of moderators, who had to rely on imprecise AI tools to get rid of bots and spam—which led to many legitimate human accounts getting banned as well. “Overall, a social-media site is under attack, as well as being overwhelmed, basically 24/7, 365,” he said. “I am fully convinced that if Musk does what he is saying he will do, it will be an absolute shitshow.” https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/10/elon-musk-twitter-nightmare-scenarios/671906/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/10/elon-...
- thinkingemote 4y agoThey need to re-free up the API. Early adopters and hackers really did some great work using the API until they walled-gardened it and rate limited it to make it unusable. They need to do this for goodwill at the very least, but I think it will spark the fire to make it popular with techies again. Based on the recently published discovery chats we will probably see: * High def video * Focus on music publication * The highest revenue sharing cut from any social media platform for content creators to get people to switch. * Removal of twitter blue but some kind of subscriptions to edit tweets * Paid push DMs to followers (e.g. follow this account for drops, then the tweeter has to pay to tweet to this group)
- cutenewt 4y agoI think it's going to be more in the other direction. He really hates the bots, so he'll probably close up the API. Until bots gets solved, no developer should expect the API to open up.
- _fat_santa 4y agoThe problem isn't the bots, the problem is the lack of differentiation between bots and real accounts. I say open up the API and let people make whatever bots they wish, but if you tweet through the API then you get a big "BOT" tag next to your username on the feed.
- vanshg 4y agoCould this be the largest purchase ever made by a singular individual?
- rootusrootus 4y agoI think that depends on some definitions. There have been much larger purchases in the past that largely boiled down to one individual. And what about Berkshire Hathaway? That's sort of just another name for Warren Buffett. Certainly some large acquisitions there.
- vanshg 4y agoI'm coming from the POV that a financial decision boiling down to one individual on behalf of some company is different than a purchase made by an individual
- etchalon 4y agoI continue to not understand why anyone would buy Twitter, or care about "free speech!" as a business directive. There are plenty of "free speech!" Twitter like products. They attract a niche, and likely unprofitable demographic. That audience actively turns away more valuable, and broader demographics. This whole thing baffles me.
- SevenNation 4y ago> Elon’s first official acknowledgement on Twitter of his new toy post-deal close was a tweet reading simply “the bird is freed.” This was quickly rejoined by European Commission Internet Market Commissioner Thierry Breton, who responded with a reminder that freedom isn’t free. > Notably, Breton has previously met with Musk in person and even recorded a video in which he says that he explained to Musk the EU’s Digital Services Act, and in which Musk basically says he’s aligned to everything it contains. Wikipedia summarizes the DSA as so: > The Digital Services Act (DSA) is an EU regulation to modernise the e-Commerce Directive regarding illegal content, transparent advertising, and disinformation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Services_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Services_Act And later, > The DSA proposal maintains the current rule according to which companies that host other's data are not liable for the content unless they actually know it is illegal, and upon obtaining such knowledge do not act to remove it.[15] This so-called "conditional liability exemption" is fundamentally different[16][17] from the broad immunities given to intermediaries under the equivalent rule ("Section 230 CDA") in the United States. > In addition to the liability exemptions, the DSA would introduce a wide-ranging set of new obligations on platforms, including some that aim to disclose to regulators how their algorithms work, while other obligations would create transparency on how decisions to remove content are taken and on the way advertisers target users. That Musk agrees (or at least did agree) to essentially everything in here suggests that a good chunk of the work going forward will be around policing "illegal" content. In this light, the last point in the TechCrunch article sounds a little ominous: > One of Musk’s first big leadership decisions appears to be to install a content moderation council that will help decide matters like who gets banned on the platform and for what — similar to Facebook’s Oversight Board. > Twitter does already have a trust and safety council that acts in an advisory capacity, but that’s a large group that seems to act more behind the scenes to inform product decisions, whereas this would be a ‘Supreme Court’ of sorts for decisions on who gets to tweet and what in cases of controversy.
- edmcnulty101 4y agoWill Elon bring Jack back? They seem to be friends.
- remram 4y agoDoes Jack want to be back? I think he could have stayed if he had really wanted to.
- norwalkbear 4y agoJack will 100% consult
- williamsmj 4y agoI'm interested to see what happens to the drive to repeal Section 230 now. IIUC, a lot of the impetus for that came from the right (e.g. the Texas AG), but it provides a liability shield to the owner of the platform, which presumably Musk would like to retain.
- Cupertino95014 4y ago(I searched the whole thread and it appears no one's mentioned this yet) * He will move the HQ to Austin. The current SF Tenderloin location is a major turnoff for everyone, including most of the employees, I'd bet. And it certainly can't be cheap. Most likely the people who refuse to move, he mostly wants to get rid of anyway.
- lopkeny12ko 4y agoDoesn't work with Javascript disabled. An error occurred with this part of the page, sorry for the inconvenience.
- wzyoi 4y agoI always wonder: how much honesty is in him? For example, he stopped talking about the bot population on the platform altogether after he could not get out of the deal. Was he honest about this being a big issue in the first place? For me, it’s not easy to believe this because this bot issue appeared right after Twitter staff did not like his speech, and talks with the CEO fell apart. Am I mistaken about how it all played out? If not, do you think being deceitful to a certain degree is okay? From your point of view, do you consider him deceitful?
- Rapzid 4y agoI believe it's pretty much the widely held belief right now that he was just trying to get out of a terrible deal due to the market downturn. If the case everything should be viewed through that lens. > From your point of view, do you consider him deceitful? With no judgement of morality here; this is Elon Musk. Yes absolutely he is.
- munificent 4y agoEvery one of us has run into situations where choosing to be honest has materially cost us. You accidentally scratch a parked car on your way out. Do you stop and leave a note with contact info or not? The richer you are, the more leverage you have and larger the material cost for these situations. A fellow rich friend gives you a little insider info that a stock you hold is about to crater. Do you sell some? In other words, being honest is a tax, and the wealthier you are, the higher that tax rate. Given that, I think the only way to reach certain levels of wealth is by not paying that tax. Therefore, I treat anyone at Musk's level of wealth as intrinsically untrustworthy. You don't get to be a billionaire by being a normal honest human. And if by miracle you should happen to, being a billionaire I think fundamentally changes your psychology such that you cease to be normal and honest. There may be exceptions, but I think they are exceedingly rare. Billionaires are functionally a different species.
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- bambax 4y agoThe reason why Musk eventually bought Twitter, when he did, and at the price he paid, was to avoid having to testify under oath in the lawsuit against him. He was going to be deposed, exposed, and in the end he was also going to lose and suffer the indignity of having to pay a high price for something he fiercely said he didn't want anymore. Better bite the bullet earlier than later. Now that doesn't explain why he wanted to buy Twitter in the first place, but there doesn't necessarily need to be a strong reason. He got frustrated as a user, he got bored, he thought "hey why not buy that thing" and that set a series of cogs in motion that couldn't be stopped before it was too late. (He's the richest guy in the world; one would assume there are armies of people around him making sure his desires are met fast. If he says "let's buy Twitter", then those people make it happen.) I don't think he has the beginning of a plan. He said "free speech!", and then also "but not hellscape!" But, some amount of free speech without being a pure hellscape is close to what Twitter is right now. That's not a plan for the future, that's an observation of how things are at present. If he can simply wait for Twitter to be worth as much as he paid for it, so that he can sell it again and cover his losses, that will be a fairly good outcome. Easier said than done, though.
- narrator 4y agoThe job of a good lawyer is to predict what the judge is going to say after the client has wasted his money on litigating. The main purpose of going all the way to trial is if someone is lying. Then that's the job of the jury to determine who's lying and who's telling the truth.
- rburhum 4y agoHe implied in a few interviews that he wants to turn it into a WeChat version of the west. Doesn't 200M+ daily active users opens up that door.
- djvdq 4y agoYou have to remember that those 200M+ users are located in many, many countries, with different laws and customs
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- kubota 4y agoI think he would've gotten much better value for his money if he acquired Reddit instead
- NaturalPhallacy 4y agoReddit is privately owned by Advance Publications which is privately owned by the Newhouse family. Nobody can just buy it if they're not willing to sell it.
- RedBeetDeadpool 4y ago
- cbeach 4y agoI find it really distracting that the mainstream media writes about Musk in such derisive style. Do journalists find him threatening in some way? Do the leftwing-dominated media resent him for supporting Republicans? Do they think we’re not smart enough to critically appraise Musk ourselves?
- jcadam 4y ago> Do journalists find him threatening in some way? Do the leftwing-dominated media resent him for supporting Republicans? Do they think we’re not smart enough to critically appraise Musk ourselves? maybe, yes, most definitely yes.
- cwkoss 4y agoIt is fashionable to dislike Elon, and many people who call themselves journalists have been coasting for the past 6 years by simply saying whatever is in fashion with little or no investigation. Twitter was the primary seat of that power, so change of twitter is perceived as a threat to their cultural relevance. There are also a lot of good reasons to dislike Elon. But the media groupthink you're identifying lies mostly in this, IMO.
- swayvil 4y agoDerision is the minimum-investment method for participating in a conversation. You expend a speck of opinion, you get a speck of attention. I guess the numbers work out better than "just ignore".
- dathinab 4y agoI always find it strange when he positions himself as pro-democratic and pro-freedom when his actions say pretty much the opposite: He is pushing for a political system/values which: - doubles down on money == power, to a point where only money is power - uses pretext of "freedom" to remove protections which limit in how much companies can abuse people, mainly in forms which move money from them to the companies. But if you systematically make it easier to wide spread systematically move money from the demos (populace) to a selected few and make sure only money is power that is pretty clear cut anti-democratic. (I mean it basically remove the demo from democraty). And sure this is somewhat true for all democratic states, but the question is how much and if you push for it getting worse. Which AFIK Musk does. (It's also why a lot of people which had looked into such power dynamics will look at you strangely when you tell them the US is a beacon of democracy, it isn't and never was. It is a beacon for capitalism combined with wealth, western culture, military might (in some order) and only then democracy. At least in my opinion.) So what does that have to do with Twitter? One of the main complains Musk has with it is how it did restrict "freedom of speech", except it mainly did so when that freedom was abused for spread hatred and misinformation, often with the intend to manipulate democracy to elect people pushing for less democracy. And he wants to remove that. Now without question Twitter did a bad job at moderation, still I would be really surprised if Musk would improve that. I would love being surprised. Another problem is that Musk has shown to be a petty person and has shown to abuse the power he has over his companies, e.g. to cancel a Tesla pre-order because of someone saying something he took offense with. Putting such a person in charge of a platform like Twitter looks like a recopy for disaster. Especially given that it's also used a lot by some minorities Musk seems to personally have a rather strong dislike for... Now I would love to be wrong about this assessment. I personally might not be the biggest fan of Musk but what does that matter if he does manage to create a better twitter. And even if he fails it might have positive effects, by e.g. enabling a better alternative platform to take it's place.
- xwowsersx 4y ago> doubles down on money power, to a point where only money is power What has he said or done that indicates he is pushing for such a system? Are you suggesting the mere fact of his purchasing a company and being a billionaire means he is pushing for such a system or was there something else he said or did? I'm asking genuinely because I may very well have missed some important news item or other piece of information. What's your basis for this assertion?
- victor106 4y agoI didn’t do it for the money, I did it for “humanity” so I want to appease advertisers to make money and save humanity even though I hate advertising. Oh, also there are more than 30% bots on the platform but I still bought this thing because I want the trial to end because I don’t want to answer any more questions and reveal things that would put me in legal jeopardy. Does he really think people are that stupid? I agree he is super smart but the rest of us are not that stupid.
- boppo1 4y ago> reveal things that would put me in legal jeopardy. Like what?
- victor106 4y agoWe don’t know what. But it’s obvious he didn’t want the trial to go on and wanted it to end immediately when the judge wanted him to testify
- freejazz 4y agoWe didn't have to buy twitter in order to avoid any more legal discovery of our text messages in relation to the lawsuit, so we don't know
- koonsolo 4y agoI was a big Elon Musk fanboy for what he was able to accomplish on both Tesla and SpaceX. I had the impression that he was very genuine and really wanted to "save humanity". I ignored the crazy things he said on twitter. I think his accomplishments overshadowed his less favorable behavior. But after his tweets about Ukraine, it really started to dawn on me that his "save humanity" was not really save humanity, but just a really good sales pitch. He fooled me, I confess. Right now, I see him as a very successful businessman. But if he can choose between making money or "doing the right thing", I think it's clear by now that he would go for the money (like jump into bed with Russia or China in a heartbeat, as long as it delivers the extra buck). Buying Twitter seems like a really bad idea, for both society and his pocket. I think we're seeing "Haughtiness comes before the fall" (I didn't use 'pride' because in Dutch this expression seems better)
- Ferrotin 4y agoSo the whole “let’s not escalate to nuclear war” thing is what convinced you he didn’t want to save humanity.
- misiti3780 4y agoI really dont understand why his Ukraine tweets were controversial. He clearly has done in support of Ukraine with providing Starlink etc. He doesnt have control of arms shipments or policy decisions that the Western powers are making (sanctions, etc). Yet another example of how polarized the US (maybe the West) is, where if you say *any* that questions our unilateral support of Ukraine (even if that has to do with increased chances of nuclear war) you're an asshole. I'm sorry, but this situation has a lot of nuance - quit acting like it doesnt. You can cautiously support Ukraine but also realize that the US has little to gain as each day goes by with Russia getting smoked by Western weapons and training.
- koonsolo 4y ago> He clearly has done in support of Ukraine with providing Starlink etc. Do you know that Ukrainians are buying and paying subscriptions for that. I'm sure the return on investment is very well calculated. Ok, so we give up a part of Ukraine to avoid nuclear war. Works very good for Russia. In a few years Russia takes the rest of Ukraine. Are you going to risk nuclear war then? No? Great! Then Russia invades the Baltic states. Want to risk nuclear war now? Of course not. Then they take the rest of central Europe that was under their control. Is East-Germany worth the risk of nuclear war in your opinion, or not?
- blippage 4y agoI said that Musk would never own Twitter, and that it seemed like a drunken bar bet to me. His later actions seemed to signal that he was trying to weasel out of the deal. I concede that I was wrong. However, it still seems like and act of hubris gone wrong to me. The terms of the financing of the acquisition look nasty.
- scotty79 4y agoFrom what I heard he bought twitter months ago. The drama since then was about whether he'll need to be taken to court to pay for it and recieve the package.
- bena 4y agoOh, it totally is. All the weird performative porcelain stunts won't change the fact that he tried like hell to back out. He just escalated things too far before he realized what he was doing. So now he's acting like everything's all cool now so people stop talking about what a colossal clusterfuck this entire thing was.
- yawnxyz 4y agoThis is probably his Brexit moment...
- nmilo 4y ago> Musk hasn’t said all that much since the takeover on Twitter, but he has replied to a couple of users who have complained about platform censorship in the past. One is a user called “catturd2” who claims he’s shadowbanned and who tweets COVID misinformation among other things. The other is Canada Proud, a right-wing propagandist group that also spreads COVID misinfo and focuses on attacking Canadian PM Justin Trudeau. What a nasty comment from an otherwise fine article. A reply is not an endorsement, and not even linking the tweets in question really lets the author hide the evidence and twist the paragraph into whatever he wants it to mean. Besides, it's not like Justin Trudeau is lacking on things to attack him for.
- goatcode 4y ago>I bet he wasn’t feeling too great about that bit of litigation the deal closing helped him escape. >Maybe one of the cronies who were cozying up to him >freedom isn’t free. There are a few nasties in the article. This nerd writer got so angry his writing even got pretty sloppy in his section (3). Seething is in fashion!
- markdown 4y agoI don't think it's a secret that Musk has been cosying up to the Trump right for a while now. It's only a nasty comment if you find those individuals deplorable, and Musk clearly doesn't.
- conorcleary 4y agoTrump will never entirely forgive people like Musk who left his advisory committee(s).
- freejazz 4y agoWhat about it is nasty? It doesn't say he endorsed those posters, it literally just says he interacted with him. I think the point is that he is interacting with these kinds of posters instead of, like doing something useful or relevant, or like anything else at all? I can see why you'd think it'd be nasty if you have an incredibly partisan view that has to sort everything into either being for or against something.
- mwint 4y agoThe immediate change Elon should make is to remove the high-pressure “login/open in app” stuff… it’s ironic that I can’t even read his tweets (without being logged in, at least)
- throwaway742 4y agoJust click login and then click the X in the top left corner to dismiss the modal.
- mcculley 4y agoI love the description, "whimsical chaotic energy". I would like to meet that man. I'm not sure that is the best way to describe the man who labeled a critic as "pedo guy".
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- redog 4y agoI deactiveated my hardly used account at twitter and am considering joining the autonomy as automaton!
- mark_l_watson 4y agoI have what is probably an unpopular opinion. I would like to see two things happen: 1. more people use and support by generating content platforms like Mastodon where there is some expectation of privacy and openness. I like Mastodon. 2. I also like Twitter, and I would like to see it a more self regulated platform, with some form of effective real ID, probably charging $1 to $2 dollars a month for its use. This might reduce the number of bots, or not. I am also in favor of allowing people I very much disagree with to be on the platform, with some form of no hate speech moderation. EDIT: and no doxing, etc.
- cowtools 4y agoThere needs to be some form of sybil resistance, perhaps allowing unlimited post size, but charging 1 cent per character. Spam needs to be expensive. The users should be allowed to decide for themselves what they see. My perspective is that hate speech is basically an identical problem to spam. If you can solve spam, you solve hate speech and self-advertisements and whole other classes of problem. Also, it's a social media platform. You basically dox yourself. The current service requires you to give them your phone number and encourages you to use your real name and location on your profile. It doesn't get much worse than that.
- mark_l_watson 4y agoI like your idea of charging 1 or 2 cents per character. I forgot that Twitter already requires a phone number for registration. My phone number is not public, but I definitely use my real name, put my location, and try to send people to my web site by posting that link.
- reocha 4y agohttps://joinmastodon.org/ https://joinmastodon.org/
- JasserInicide 4y agoAh yes, the solution to the social media echo chamber is to join an even worse echo chamber!
- arisu 4y agoHow exactly is it supposed to be worse? Have you even ever been on the fediverse before? My guess is that you just want it to be worse.
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- chatterhead 4y agoI'm the only one who can run that business for him and he knows it.
- swayvil 4y agoMy indignation is high, beyond that I have zip to say. JK. Good on Elon. In my opinion a good centralized twitter government is impossible. The only path to goodness that I can see is to empower the individual twitterers with a box of tools for filtering their own personal twitterscape. Beyond that leave twitter 100% freespeechy. But then that's my default opinion for all social media.
- smm11 4y agoIMO he won't do anything to improve the Twitter experience until he allows a number of high-profile banned persons back on, which will cause mass account deletions, and Twitter will become a functional Truth Social within weeks.
- causality0 4y agoIt's very strange to me he intends to un-ban Trump when he gave up trying to work with him on that advisory council thing early in Trump's presidency.
- rafaelturk 4y agoFreedom of speech, even Trump deserves it
- causality0 4y agoI don't think everybody else is going to receive the same degree of patience.
- eatsyourtacos 4y agoWhat does freedom of speech have to do with posting on twitter?
- Siira 4y agoWhat does the freedom of speech have to do with having access to the internet?
- Tomis02 4y agoWhat does freedom of speech mean, in your mind? Is it ok to shout "fire" in a crowded theatre?
- memish 4y agoWhy is that strange? It's a principled position unrelated to not liking him or not wanting to work with him.
- causality0 4y ago"Principled positions" aren't exactly Musk's forte. See also: sending private investigators after the guy he falsely called a pedophile, his vendetta against a single lawyer, trying start up an "alternative facts" news site after mainstream media wrote a series of articles about poor safety conditions in Tesla facilities, etc. Don't get me wrong, I agree with his statements that Twitter and the internet at large need less censorship and thicker skin. I just don't have any faith those statements are going to be backed up because Elon Musk is a petulant child.
- seydor 4y ago- That is not a kitchen sink - Twitter is a telegraph office. Journalists love twitter because it makes their job easier by stealing stories/news from each other. For the world outside media twitter is pretty much meh. - Musk unbanning someone doesnt mean much. trump might have sent out tweets with carrier pigeons and the mass media would still pick it up because it sells. twitter bans have very little effect, from the covid misinformation to ukraine stuff - Twitter is not even cool , why is musk so obsessed about it? he will be spending a ton of time in media battles that are pointless , truly
- drjasonharrison 4y agoIt was supposed to be "let this sink in"
- anamexis 4y agoWho claimed it was a kitchen sink?
- seydor 4y agohttps://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2022-10-27/why-did-elon-musk-walk-into-twitter-with-a-kitchen-sink https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2022-10-27/why-did-elo... https://news.yahoo.com/elon-musk-shows-twitter-hq-192220624.html https://news.yahoo.com/elon-musk-shows-twitter-hq-192220624.... https://www.marketwatch.com/story/elon-musk-shows-up-at-twitter-headquarters-carrying-a-kitchen-sink-ahead-of-expected-deal-closing-01666813693?mod=mw_latestnews https://www.marketwatch.com/story/elon-musk-shows-up-at-twit... https://www.bbc.com/news/business-63408384 https://www.bbc.com/news/business-63408384 in twitter fashion i should tag this as #fakenews
- bauble 4y agoSloppy reporting? In MY mainstream media?! Currently the linked story, from TechCrunch, doesn't call it a "kitchen" sink. Kudos to them.
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- cbeach 4y agoAs a developer with a few years of commercial Scala experience I’ve been approached by Twitter in the past. Working there appealed on many levels. They have a lot of Scala talent and a huge influence on world affairs. I turned down the interview request though, because I suspected l’d feel marginalised working at Twitter. My views do not align with leftism/authoritarianism/groupthink/TheCurrentThing, and it’s clear to me that Twitter leans in those directions. Their handling of discussion the Hunter Biden laptop story was sinister beyond belief, and for them to leave Taliban accounts up while banning the democratically-elected leader of the free world just beggars belief. Knowing Elon Musk is in charge makes Twitter appealing to me now. Musk is a visionary. His achievements and capability speak for themselves. He is a rocket scientist, electrical engineer, mechanical engineer, mathematician and computer scientist. Self taught. And he has a sense of humour and doesn’t take himself seriously. Not many CEOs have these qualities. Not many companies have the reputation of SpaceX and Tesla. I’d be proud to work for Twitter under Musk.
- fleddr 4y agoAs for free speech vs censorship, a lot of people think in absolutes. It should be absolutely possible or impossible to say this thing. And this particular individual should be banned or not. What I think is far more important is the level of amplification. Currently, the most unhinged extremists from every political angle are massively amplified. They know exactly how to play the engagement game. Twitter rewards the wrong thing. Those stoking controversy get the engagement, after which that account is injected as "recommended" into all kinds of places, snowballing those accounts into power. That situation should be flipped. Reasonable people should be amplified, not crazy ones.
- jahewson 4y ago> Twitter rewards the wrong thing. Those stoking controversy get the engagement This is human nature, not Twitter. And I think that’s the problem - a neutral platform simply reproduces human nature, amplified.
- fleddr 4y agoIt's both. It's human nature amplified. The amplified part is technical, very much possible to tweak.
- beebmam 4y agoIt's the same with dating services. Whatever grabs attention wins. Deeply toxic stuff.
- gw99 4y agoActually on dating, whatever grabs attention grabs attention. What wins is the genuine connections made. Twitter lacks the latter. It's just attention.
- boplicity 4y agoThis is exactly what good moderation can help with -- promote thoughtful and reasonable content, while making sure that inflammatory commentary gets less attention. I've run an online forum for over a decade; it's not that hard, really, to encourage thoughtful participation, with the right type of leadership. See what dang wrote: > please don't post low-information, high-indignation comments, such as flamebait or ideological battle. We want thoughtful, curious conversation on HN. The problem is that big social media is so large and "open" that they don't want to have any community leadership. Who is setting the tone on Twitter, or any major social network? Who is acting as a leader, both enforcing quality commentary, and also setting a good example? Nobody. I doubt this will change. Smaller communities, such as HN, are where we can have reasonable discussion. A good correllary: many local city council meetings, where almost anyone can have a chance to talk. They're not pretty. But at least the decision makers are there (and held accountable), and limits are set. Creating an environment where good discourse can thrive is hard. It's like fighting entropy. You can do it. But it's an uphill battle.
- dogman144 4y agoI would take any instability that is coming in exchange for forcing the issue of opening up algo-curated feeds to the public. Same with the what the FB whistleblower was arguing for. sounds like Musk might do it. Second, if Lightning is integrated, that would be a fascinating experiment and step forward in tech payments. Back to the open box: There is so much very needed tech policy that is impossible to start because the curation is a black box and policymakers have no idea where to start and the public has no idea how to parse the information they get. Now, it's very likely the box is opened, nobody looks or still doesn't understand, and that's that. But I don't see anyway to get past "the internet is a series of tubes" or "Senator, we sell ads" or spam filters getting accused of causing bias or.... without at least getting the information out in the open vs. trusting tech companies' explanations which lost all credibility as good-faith operators years ago.
- skilled 4y agoSadly even after dang has stated that conversations should be thoughtful, people are still posting provoking and low-quality disingenuous comments. I don't even understand how a human being can get so invested in something they will never have control over, even more so now that Twitter is owned by a private person.
- ausbah 4y agoAs rational and high minded as folks on hacker news like to position themselves, everyone here is just as susceptible to being drawn in towards drama involving their own set of celebrities and companies.
- jwilk 4y agoArchived copy without GDPR nag screen: https://web.archive.org/web/20221028175053/https://techcrunch.com/2022/10/28/elon-musk-owns-twitter-the-story-so-far/ https://web.archive.org/web/20221028175053/https://techcrunc...
- entropicgravity 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- gjsman-1000 4y agoPotentially of intellectual interest: I said this on another Elon-Twitter post, but a common quote by supporters of moderation about censorship of potentially harmful content is that SCOTUS quote, "you can't yell fire in a crowded theater." It's actually a legal myth. The decision it was mentioned in was overturned in 1969. Equally "as false as saying robbing a bank is legal." And it was never the law of the land, just an allegory. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33377347 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33377347
- fleddr 4y agoRandom thoughts. 1. I think any effort to figure out rational motives for this buy are in vain. It seems things just pop into his head and if considered a fun challenge, then why not? A child-like YOLO attitude. 2. Town square. The one thing that keeps Twitter standing is its cultural relevance. It is the town square for the elite (politicians, celebrities, experts). There isn't really anywhere else to go. An exodus to what? The fact that Twitter has almost never made money in its entire history yet is still so culturally relevant is quite telling. 3. Brain drain. I expect the exact opposite. This is the part where Musk thrives and also where he's at his cruelest. He will remove slackers and non-performers without mercy and surround himself with class A players only. Next he'll overload them with near impossible targets and you can't bullshit yourself out of it. You deliver or you're out. I would expect him to run this for a year or so and accomplish more than Twitter's dysfunctional product team did in their entire history. 4. Free speech. His goals are good: focusing on the 80% bandwidth of free speech, but getting there for sure is going to be tricky. This has to be by far the biggest risk factor. Concluding, I'm mildly optimistic. I wouldn't care if Twitter totally sinks, but it's so bad currently that in a way the only way is up.
- k__ 4y agoWhile I'm no fan of Elon anymore, I think some change is desperately needed for Twitter.
- strangattractor 4y agoFree speech argument is BS. Free speech cannot repay his investors. He plans to launch a TwitCoin or some other scammy type endeavor.
- memish 4y agoHow do you know?
- strangattractor 4y agoObviously my opinion but based on some observations. He is not unfamiliar with the fintech space (Paypal). Remember the old joke about printing money - with TwitCoin he would be doing it - literally. Biannce is an investor. He cannot get rid of bots even if he wants to. People do not hand you billions of dollars without some hope of being paid back - even if you are Elon Musk.
- echobear 4y agograbs popcorn
- the-printer 4y agoNo reason to take my word on this, but I think that this will blow up in his face agonizingly in a way similar to Zuckerberg/Meta. I think that US-owned social media platforms as we them are beginning to flounder into a sort of soft irrelevancy. In other words, they are stagnating and their user bases will likely plateau in terms of growth and overall culture of the platforms. Culturally Twitter has been dead for almost a decade as far as the quality of the posts go and the general “vibe” of the place, sort of like Reddit. I really think social media has become low-brow entertainment with a little more reading involved than a Television. Social media is almost an online iteration of the airport bookstore.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- deeblering4 4y agoWhat worries me is this — Outrage creates “engagement”. A site like Twitter could easily capitalize on this and allow/promote outrage content in the near term, boosting their profits and causing long term side effects to societies as a whole.
- GMoromisato 4y agoMy predictions: 1. Musk is going to discover (and maybe admit?) that fixing Twitter is harder than he thought. It will be just like self-driving, which seems straightforward, but which actually has thousands of edge cases which are hard to solve with a single general system. Nevertheless, he will persist, because that's what he does. 2. Current Twitter makes a profit on advertising, which means Twitter needs to encourage high levels of engagement, which means they need controversial (emotional) content, but not so emotional (toxic) as to drive people away. They need to be as close to the line as possible, which is why they spend so much effort on moderation. Musk's solution is, I predict, to try different revenue sources so that engagement with the feed is not the primary metric. 3. Musk has already stated that his goal is the Everything App (which he calls X). The Everything App has news, social media, games, videos, and a payment infrastructure (both to pay for content and to get paid). He wants Twitter to replace Facebook, Instagram, Google News, YouTube, Twitch and PayPal, etc. Will he be able to pull it off? I expect he will deliver the 20% of those services that are high-value, but pitch it as a complete solution. That might actually be good enough for most people. 4. If he accomplishes #3, then the revenue source is obviously: they will take a cut out of every transaction going on in the network. Maybe ads are a component, but they don't have to be a major component. If engagement is no longer the most important metric, then it's possible to allow every person to have a radically personalized feed. Even something as simple as only showing you tweets from people you follow (what a concept!) would revolutionize the experience and drastically reduce the need for moderation. 5. Since Twitter is private, Musk can front-load #4 even before the Everything App is ready. If he hasn't already burned the current team, he can make the experience better relatively quickly and worry about profit later. 6. Now for my safest prediction: No matter what he does, some people will hate him for it.
- animitronix 4y agoAll I know is that permanently suspended accounts have not been reactivated yet, despite all his blundering about it
- jwmoz 4y agoDoes nobody remember akismet?
- eecc 4y agoI wonder if he’ll really get the dev teams to defuse flame wars. The TL algorithm will push any account that trends and those strongly networked, it will also promote and make you curate your own strong network. Whenever these two adversarial groups collide is bloody warfare, yet it’s so obvious to detect such incidents: likely confrontational accounts collide, strongly connected accounts start to systematically love and retweet friendlies, text sentiment turns to aggressive and taunting. It’s probably a take-at-home assignment for a data science position to detect these dynamics. Yet Twitter introduced precious little to suppress this rage machine, just “block” to further entrench bubbles and long, lawyerly drawn out questionnaires for manual report. I’d say the most half-hearted attempt since Facebook’s. So if he’s really serious about driving away the trolling flame throwing, I guess it’ll be that.
- activitypea 4y agoThis list of news makes it abundantly clear that the US is little more than a playground for the rich. That's true of most countries nowadays, but the US' overwhelming influence on the rest of the world makes this one sting even more.
- ausbah 4y agoI think the only big take away is Musk said too much stuff and is now left holding a culturally relevant, but monetarily flailing company. My expectation is he will do whatever it takes to be successful; cut staff, add more ads and paid features, etc. I believe he will also do certain things under the verneer of "free speech", but will eventually do a 180 because it will hurt the bottom line of the company.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- user3939382 4y agoIMHO politically alienating half the country is not helping their bottom line.
- MarkMc 4y agoWhenever I go on vacation overseas Twitter shows me ads in a language I cannot understand. This is one of many clearly-identifiable problems that are not rocket science to fix. And Elon Musk has a reputation for fixing problems. When Twitter shares are publicly traded again in a few years, Musk's purchase price of $44 billion will look like a bargain. My prediction: In 5 years Twitter's market cap will exceed $150 billion.
- smt88 4y ago> Elon has a reputation for fixing problems. Based on Tesla, he not only isn't good at fixing problems, he actively pushes forward broken products and processes to save his stock price.
- trap_goes_hot 4y agoCan you be more specific? There are plenty of satisfied customers.
- dragontamer 4y agoFull Self Driving still regularly crashes into balloon children over-and-over again reliably, despite a huge amount of R&D since 2014 (8 years ago). https://twitter.com/patrickmoorhead/status/1478766165723779077 https://twitter.com/patrickmoorhead/status/14787661657237790... Hitting the (fake) kid is SOOOOOO reliable, that Luminar used Tesla as their "crashes into dummy" car in CES 2022. IE: They're so confident that Tesla will hit that balloon child, they are using it for live in-person demos of their technology.
- trap_goes_hot 4y agoWe just have a disagreement. I don't think that bugs in beta software means "he actively pushes forward broken products". It may still be wrong to inflict beta software on humans, but that is a separate ethical consideration.
- ur-whale 4y agoThe reason Musk bought Twitter is the same reason other billionaires own newspapers even though they're money-losing flame dumpsters: they're a tool to control the narrative. When you're the richest man in the world, money does not matter any more. Power and influence do. And Twitter is a big league weapon in that game. I don't think he cares at all about making Twitter profitable or catering to advertizers. He just bought himself the largest megaphone in the world, one with which he'll be able to sculpt the perception of the public at large any way he sees fit.
- kirenida 4y agoAs an European who doesn't use Twitter that much because it seems that every other post is about US politics, how much should I care about this?
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y agoThey need to stop ruining the experience for those of us without an account. Everyone was using Twitter as basically an open bulletin board and then they go and make it visitor-hostile. I look at ads either way.
- humanistbot 4y agoAbsolutely. Too many people (especially managers) have Monthly Active Users drilled into their heads and can't comprehend that there is a bottom line ($$$) that is the real KPI.
- matttb 4y agoI have an account and every time I hit that signup/in wall I just close the page rather than sign into my account
- tomxor 4y ago+1, for anyone who doesn't stay signed in it's a "go away" signal - which is ironic because those people are more likely to sign in if they are allowed to read more.
- TylerLives 4y agoYou can get a much better experience by using nitter[0]. Easiest way to do it is by replacing twitter.com with nitter.it (or some other nitter instance) in your link. 0: https://nitter.net/about https://nitter.net/about
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y agoI use it but it's slow at times. Other than that it's great.
- sundarurfriend 4y agoIt always loads much faster than Twitter for me. Maybe it depends on which instance you're using, if nitter.net is slow for you, the other popular instances I know of are nitter.42l.fr and nitter.kavin.rocks; these two have been around for some time and been stable, you can settle on whichever one is fastest for you.
- srj 4y agoBased on an interview I saw I suspect Musk will strive to make Twitter a platform for user-to-user messaging and payment services. Community moderation without banning might be possible by establishing "spheres" akin to reddit boards so things people see is to some degree curated.
- dragontamer 4y agoYou mean a crappier version of Discord? Whatever Twitter "reinvents" itself into, it needs to be in a social-networking niche that's not already served. Otherwise, their competitors will just have an edge-up on them. Video games? Twitch will beat them. Longer form videos? Youtube. Short form videos? Tiktok. Etc. etc. Twitter needs to figure out how to make money without simply becoming a clone of something else. Otherwise, the community just moves over to the already existing, better integrated platform.
- throwaway742 4y agoThe impression I got is he wants it to be everything. One app to rule them all so to say.
- srj 4y agoIsn't discord itself a crappier version of IRC? You can always out execute.
- dragontamer 4y agoDiscord has message history, push support on phones, easier registration than NickServ, support for videos, live-streaming, voice calls and even group voice conferences. There's a lot that Twitter needs to do before they can get all these features. And if Twitter doesn't get these features, I'm not switching off of Discord.
- lob_it 4y ago
- endymi0n 4y agoI‘ve been an Elon fanboy since pre-Falcon 1 times and all the time I could simply follow his first principles to the core, be it the switch to electric cars, flight control using a quorum cluster of non-space-rated processors or the viability of methane and stainless steel for Starship against all previous failures. With Twitter, I‘ve lost that feeling and I don‘t know how it would be possible: Free speech, happy advertisers, satisfied governments globally, increasing or just persisting audience. There‘s just no way he will keep all those targets at the same time.
- from 4y ago> satisfied governments globally This is the easy part if he really wants to choose the free speech absolutist route. Close the European offices (which will probably happen anyways due to mass firings), bank accounts and move it all to America or other friendly jurisdiction if needed for tax purposes. They can sue all they want in Europe but American courts won't enforce a judgement that isn't compatible with American law. European governments can decide to block Twitter but then they'll have a bunch of unhappy voters. But this is unlikely.
- hackernewds 4y agoThe world is a much larger and diverse place than just America and Europe
- from 4y agoNot in terms of CPMs.
- halfjoking 4y agoYou're worried about Europe, but how is the US a friendly jurisdiction for free speech? The Biden Admin targeted specific users on Twitter, and insisted those users were banned: https://reclaimthenet.org/biden-admin-alex-berenson-twitter-ban/ https://reclaimthenet.org/biden-admin-alex-berenson-twitter-... What if Musk's Twitter doesn't listen to those requests? Don't you think the DOJ would apply pressure to Google/Apple to ban Twitter from the App Store? What happened to Parler? You can cherry-pick users "instigating violence" on any platform, including Facebook and reddit. The difference with those platforms is they censor who the government wants censored. It will be interesting to see Musk navigate both corporate media hit pieces and all political forces aligned against him.
- dr_dshiv 4y agoBring back open standards like FOAF!! Mid-2000s internet vibe was the best.
- dirkg 4y agoWould be real funny, and fitting, if he demands Twitter switch all servers over to Windows.
- mancerayder 4y agoI hope they put an end to the unsolicited promoted tweets and recommendations that aren't of interest to me AND are interleaved with stuff I'm explicitly following.
- holyBatmans 4y agoTwitter has historically had too many developers. I wonder if there will be big rounds of layoffs.
- Genghis_9000 4y ago
- nus07 4y agoDoes Elon Musk want to become the Rupert Murdoch of the digital era and become king maker ?
- ohmyzee 4y agoHe who controls the memes....
- x0x 4y agoThis is all good, but unlss @realDonaldTrump unblocked I will never use Twitter again. I don't care if you agree or disagree with what was said. But if even a pressident of united states can be banned, best not use such platforms. Period!
- DanHulton 4y agoLet's look at this from another angle. If even a president of the USA can behave so poorly and break rules so flagrantly that a service like Twitter -- that has tremendous incentive to keep him on the platform -- sees that they have to block him from the platform, best not to rely on such presidents.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- planetsprite 4y agoAs much as people dislike Musk, he draws excitement and captivation not only to himself, but to whatever he touches. Now for the first time people actually care about the "future" of Twitter, or in a sense, have a vision for its future that isn't defined by its frequent moderation-related controversies. Is Musk's financial success and unparalleled cultural relevance a science that can be replicated? I mean, as much as people don't like him he has gotten to a financial position where anything he wants seems easily achievable. Is it the fact that he always carries the implied promise of "bold new future that will change your life" more than any other cultural entity? Obviously Mark Zuckerberg is trying the same thing with Meta, but that's been a failure. People hate Musk's personality, but no companies occupy the reverence in people's mind as much as SpaceX and Tesla. Even a man for a while much richer than Elon, Bezos, couldn't muster much in terms of cultural relevance for Blue Origin than a PR stunt with William Shatner. Does Musk have a internal "toolbox" of guiding principles and behaviors that tremendously advantage him in his current position as outgoing tech CEO, or is he just extremely lucky? Is it merely because of his seeming utopian ambitions that make him more than a guy merely obsessed with financial success that he has ended up much more wealthy than if he were a much more grounded, brass-tacks CEO?
- erikpukinskis 4y ago* rapid, consistent posting cadence * try audacious things and don’t give up * aggressively, rudely shut down everything around you that’s not contributing to your audacious goal * spend 80 hours a week working ferociously … so, if that’s something you can do, it’s replicable
- georgeg23 4y agoHe had help from the government, specifically Mike Griffin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_D._Griffin#Career https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_D._Griffin#Career The rocket landing stuff largely borrow from DC-X and the spinoff work at NASA (+Lars Blackmore), all originally Strategic Defense Initiative stuff. He used all that money from Mike as collateral for loans to Tesla. He deserves some credit for impressive financial engineering and attracting talent under the guise of purpose ("going to Mars") but he took a lot of shady money along the way. And then there is the Saudis.. Most people who work with Musk 1:1 know he's unpredictable but pretty mentally unimpressive.
- yalogin 4y agoAt this point what happens with Twitter the service is not as interesting anymore. Everyone is going to be watching what the X app is and how Twitter fits in it
- steele 4y agoVine.
- dr-detroit 4y ago
- roughly 4y agoFiring Vijaya is a hell of a move here. Parag had been in the CEO seat for less than a year and had no real experience, and Twitter's not such a unique company financially that the CFO is anything special, but Vijaya had been in charge of legal and policy for a decade at a company that regularly has to tangle with nation state governments, as well as navigate all the other kinds of various policy hell that is Twitter's product - that kind of unique direct experience and learned wisdom is not easily replaceable.
- loceng 4y agoYou're forgetting he has access to teams of competent lawyers (and their networks) who will already have to interact with international law for Tesla et al.
- Kye 4y agoThere's a reason lawyers specialize. No one is as qualified to fight for speech on Twitter as the person who's done it through the company's most tumultuous decade. The next most qualified person is probably Facebook's general counsel since they deal with all the same problems, and the places they differ probably still benefit from the portable experience. After that, there aren't a lot of people leading work on speech policy at this scale. You can't just drop in an IP lawyer or a real estate lawyer and hope for the best.
- PM_me_your_math 4y agoCome on. "fight for speech?" The only speech she fought for was for her ideological-religion. Free, open, and fair debate were never permitted on twitter. She flat out ensured that their opinion became your opinion or you were out, one way or the other.
- loceng 4y ago"No one is as qualified to fight for speech on Twitter as the person who's done it through the company's most tumultuous decade." That's putting forward a ton of assumptions, none of which you cited supporting evidence for; length of time is quite a weak-shallow argument point. Let's also bring up the fact that maybe they stayed in those positions so long because they were willing to take a knee to the fascists in governments, willingly toeing the line for them - so then therefore lacking principles and integrity - which is an unacceptable foundation to be fighting from for anything. Quite the straw man argument you end with.
- martin1975 4y agoWhat's the plan to get rid of bots?
- valeg 4y agoI expect mainly an integration of some annoying monetization schemes and, of course, dogecoins. Moderation is a cursed issue and an influx of toxic content/users from Parler/GAB/Truth will only aggravate it.
- Taniwha 4y agoJust about now Donald Trump is realising he's forgotten his twitter password, because he had people for that, and he can't remember which email account he used. Meanwhile president@whitehouse.gov is very carefully NOT clicking on those links ...
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- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- MarkMc 4y ago> Plus, for the Twitter top legal brass, I bet he wasn’t feeling too great about that bit of litigation the deal closing helped him escape. By firing General Counsel Sean Edgett it seems Elon's pride is clouding his judgement. Edgett demonstrated great skill by drafting a watertight legal agreement at very short notice, then expertly using litigation to prevent Musk from wriggling out of the deal.
- CheekyBlunders 4y agoSo much to ingest/digest here.
- thecleaner 4y agoAnybody know what would the legal cost if he actually went to court ? I am thinking why not even put up a fight rather than just do a 50B purchase ?
- anshumankmr 4y agoI have mixed feelings towards the whole acquisition story but the amount of racism and vitriol towards Gadde due to her highly controversial content moderation policies is obscenely high. I spent five minutes in Musk's "utopian" Twitter mostly going through the trending news topic of the acquisition and right wingers from US and India have been spamming the threads with ad hominems against her. Makes me glad I don't browse Twitter in general.
- EMM_386 4y agoI am not sure what Elon's vision of a "free speech" platform is, but if you allow absolutely all legal free speech, with limited/no moderation, it will turn into a cesspool. This "Welcome to Hell, Elon" article sums up most of my points so I won't bother to repeat them all here. https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/28/23428132/elon-musk-twitter-acquisition-problems-speech-moderation https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/28/23428132/elon-musk-twitt...
- origin_path 4y agoThat's the left wing perspective, not some universal truth. Obvious counterexamples: America, the internet, e2e encrypted messaging.
- williamtrask 4y agoI’m not sure the latter two are actually counterexamples. The internet has some pretty dark places and e2e encrypted messaging isn’t visible enough for us to really know what goes on in there.
- jensgk 4y agoAmerica???
- origin_path 4y ago... is neither "hell" nor a "cesspool" by any sensible definitions of the words.
- amon22 4y ago>America What do you even mean by this? "America" is not a forum or platform, it's a country. >the Internet most forums on the Internet are moderated. Forums without moderation quickly are known to become toxic cesspools. Even sites like 4chan needs to moderate beyond legal requirements. >e2e encrypted messaging again, not sure what you mean by this. A messaging platform doesn't need central moderation because users chose who they want to message.
- nurettin 4y agoDear Elon, This bot discussion is just very strange to me. If it is a bot, just attach a bot icon next to the name. Let people filter bots all together, or keep some that they like. If the status was changed or the message was sent via API, print a computer icon above it. Let people know. And again, let people filter those as well. The spam part is also a solved problem. Gmail solved it 20 years ago. Spam filters are a thing. Activate them to stop elon bots harm. API discussions are also out of this world. Let people use read-only APIs freely to see their timeline. Give them atom and rss. Vet apps that want to use write APIs. Wall garden your search API all you like. It is a waste of money and time anyway. Even Quora has better results. You may also decentralize search to take some load off your servers and incentivise index hosting. This is a perfect fit for de-fi. About the toxic waste dump that is the Twitter user base, just teach them some morals and manners. Be courteous and precise, and let people know that they should do better for all humankind and not write everything their inside voice tells. -- a fediverse user
- danieltanfh95 4y ago1. Twitter Large Language Model incoming 2. E-shops on twitter supported 3. Twitter communities ala discord incoming
- DeathArrow 4y agoWhile this might be a boon for the returning of free speech, I wonder if Musk will succeed in monetizing the platform, a task where previous CEOs failed. Also, had he waited a couple more weeks before making the offer, he could have bought Twitter for half the price. Even if he manages to make the acquisition worth, I would expect it would take at least 5 - 10 years, so it isn't the best investment he could made. It seems his impetuous and histrionic side made him act when he should allow him more time for reflection. I'm not saying he isn't capable of making Twitter a financial success, after all he has a record for stuff like that, but if I was an investor in one of his enterprises it would gave me some food for thought.
- coldtrait 4y ago> Also, had he waited a couple more weeks before making the offer, he could have bought Twitter for half the price. I'm sure you know much better than the guy and all his advisors who spent a year trying to buy it.
- DeathArrow 4y agoWhat if Elon buys Facebook, too?
- DeathArrow 4y agoI think he might evolve Twitter to a more complex, FB like platform with longer text modes, groups, chat, marketplace, job postings and maybe apps. Maybe Instagram and TikTok like functionality. If his platform will be more free than others and if it does have the functionality people are accustomed to, I can see a massive flock of users to Twitter. If he has the user base, why not grow it and keep it more on the platform?
- nanolith 4y agoElon Musk's ideological takeover won't save Twitter. It's too late for that. Twitter has lost too many active users to make a comeback. I deleted my Twitter account this year. I had it for 16 years. My Twitter account was boring. I'm not a right-wing or left-wing anything. My political commentary is less about ideology and more about practicality and appearances. It was also rare. Mostly, I used my account to post schematics for projects I had built and to interact with colleagues. I replied in a thread with a friend about some silly information security "debate" on Capitol Hill. I said that these politicians would be "tarred and feathered" over some stupid grandstanding they were making over information security, and my comment was flagged for inciting violence. Inciting violence? Seriously? It was a figurative statement about how they were going to be lambasted by the press -- no one is going to literally "tar and feather" anyone in this day and age -- leading to my comment being flagged and my account being suspended with a cool-down period. The real problem is that this automated action changed my score on the platform. It put me in the cross-hairs of their moderation algorithm, which means that any future post I made would be further scrutinized by their poorly written AI. I was at the start of a vicious cycle that I had no intention of propagating. I've had my account since a few months after it was possible to have a Twitter account. I hit the delete button without hesitation, as many others have. I know the horror stories, and I'm not interested in getting stuck on their moderation treadmill. I'll catch my friends on IRC, Discord, or Slack. Twitter's purpose is meaningless the moment one can no longer effectively communicate on the platform.
- quickthrower2 4y agoFree, Most Popular, Perfect Moderation might be a pick 2?
- harshtruths 4y ago
- smcl 4y agoYou're living in a fantasy world if you think Twitter is being moderated in any way by communists
- beardedman 4y agoI will say this; I've been really disappointed with the journalism coming out about this - especially TechCrunch. There was an article yesterday [1] that read like a high-schooler writing about their favourite popstar getting dumped. Twitter is a cesspool of bots, ads & angry slacktivists - simply too much noise to be usable (I left months ago). IMO - Musk could actually be a really good thing for it, I've definitely thought about opening an account again. [1] https://techcrunch.com/2022/10/28/eu-schools-elon-twitter-wings-clipped https://techcrunch.com/2022/10/28/eu-schools-elon-twitter-wi...
- aredox 4y agoHow could he be a good thing for it, when he's been completely unserious about it from the beginning? Remember he wanted to get out of the deal he signed off, and he said everything and its opposite about twitter. Nobody knows his plans for twitter not because he's kept them secret, but because he doesn't have any. This is a pure vanity project for him, and completely out of his area of expertise. And as a twitterer, he's been an active part of the low-information cesspool.
- kortilla 4y ago> Remember he wanted to get out of the deal he signed off Because the value dropped precipitously (along with everything else in the market). Trying to back out under whatever guise possible is pretty expected.
- trh0awayman 4y agoIs the paywall/login blocker for non-users gone for anyone else? I don't get it anymore as of this morning.
- jeanlou 4y agoWonderful news. I'm curious to see how the platform will change, hopefully for better, under his leadership. We need to find a way to foster free speech, and not only have Twitter as a liberal echo chamber.
- fredgrott 4y agoIt would seem that Elon Musk might know that cash is needed for the internal revamp of infrastructure to move and transition from social graph to AI graph feeds in that behind the scenes is making an attempt to cut costs to get an amount of cash needed for such a transition. What that would do: 1. Attract top creators back as it is more money revenue speculative in revenue one could gain as a creator. 2. Creators coming back would then attract advertisers His issue with free speech was always a red herring as he has stated many times that h wants free speech under what the law requires which some includes even the voluntary items twitter has to do to meet the congress lawful section they have to follow that was passed by congress for all sm platforms and all internet platforms in general. But then again this is conjecture as taking it private will close certain inquiry angles until Elon desires some PR and becomes somewhat forthcoming. Should be interesting to see the switch to AI feeds if Elon is able to pull it off.
- dalbasal 4y agoHigh-indignation, low information commentary is... I feel, almost inevitable here. Elon himself has not really, IMO, provided any information about his plans. His points about making Twitter free, bot problems and such are themselves low-information, high-indignation. The "business plan" regarding advertisers, revenue and such that we have seen so far is basically boilerplate. It reads like generic business school wordage, rather than an actual plan. We don't really know anything. So... what we're left with is a detached, high-level commentary that is more about the commentor's broader views than Twitter or this acquisition specifically. I suspect that ambiguity isn't just a communications strategy. I don't think there is a real, ready-to-use conceptual model for free speech on social media. Elon doesn't have one. These problems aren't Twitter specific. Facebook, youtube and other meta/alphabet sites have even deeper issues. Those sites are just less prone to meta debates about the platform itself. Compare modern social media to Wikipedia, for example. Does Wikipedia uphold free speech? You could argue either yes, no or n/a. I would argue not applicable. Meanwhile, Wikipedia has been far more resilient to misinformation, politicisation, and such. This despite being a high value target with far less resources than comparably important sites. Also despite being more user-controlled. So... I think free expression related issues are artefacts of what Twitter is, not what the CEO of Twitter does. One giant, centralised, social media site will have the characteristics of a Twitter. The focus may shift around. The political orientation may shift left or right. Maybe content policies go from being US-centric to something else.
- concordDance 4y ago> Meanwhile, Wikipedia has been far more resilient to misinformation, politicisation, and such How could you tell? It's wikipedia (well, the information aggregate that includes wikipedia as a major component) that decides what is or isn't misinformation.
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- xyse53 4y agoWikipedia doesn't have to deal with opinion, humor, etc. It needs to enforce objectivity by having standards around sources of information. Social media has to deal with something more ambiguous.
- GypsyKing716 4y agoAs we get older, the world gets older with us. The tides are softer, the lines are much more graceful, and the disruption is only in our minds. We disrupted the old ways of thinking, so the new ones had a path to walk upon. Let us not fret, as this is the way of the world.
- slimebot90 4y ago
- jopsen 4y ago> 9. Elon says there will be a content council – but not the one that already exists Lots of people are fearful twitter will change dramatically. I suspect that Elon might find it easier to criticize Twitter, than to run it :) Moderating discourse is not a task I would want.
- PM_me_your_math 4y agoYes, lots of people are fearful that they no longer have control over the discussion. The same people who had no business being arbiters of truth in the first place, and demonstrated with stunning brilliance why.
- qull 4y agoYou hit the nail on the head. Mess or not, it was a controlled mess with people getting to shape not just their message, but in many cases actual public debate.
- eimrine 4y agoThere is one feature in Twitter which was promised and I am really need but it does not work for me without any error codes. This is ability to publish twitter using nothing more except SMS (no Internets required). Does anybody used it ever? Does anybody knows will it be available?
- mikestaub 4y agoI predict he will open-source the recommendation algorithms and allow users to choose their own experience in the UI. He will also allow users to pay to verify their real ID. In the next 5 years, he will work with the blueskyweb.org team to migrate the backend to use the open protocol which will enable his "wechat-style" x.com vision of an app ecosystem bootstrapped off the Twitter social graph. Then he will go after all the other social platforms simultaneously and try to build the most valuable company in the world.
- tibbydudeza 4y ago"He made every Twitter engineer print out the code they wrote in the past 60 days for review before his lawyers warned him that was a bad idea lol" Where is the popcorn while I am enjoying this show - code reviews by Musk.
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- Slava_Propanei 4y ago