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In 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 lik

In 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 ago
  That'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 ago
    The 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!
concinds 4y ago
Most people are focused on censorship/content issues, but I really think the X.com "mega app" vision is the most significant part of this. It'll be hard to gain a foothold in those markets, and there'll be antitrust challenges, but it really fits perfectly with the rest of Musk's vision: X.com Maps could tie in with Teslas, X.com Carhailing could tie-in with (future) full self-driving; Twitter could be expanded to be more like Telegram + Instagram, with channels, better DMs, "Moments", and more. There's no attempt to create a single, wide-ranging social media platform, with payments, video, shorts, DMs, and more. China's proven that it can be done. It would create a far bigger moat and network effects, and likely be as successful as Microsoft Teams & 365, a highly integrated solution, are for work.
- mNovak 4y ago
  >> There's no attempt to create a single, wide-ranging social media platform, with payments, video, shorts, DMs, and more Umm.. Facebook? Just offering all those features doesn't mean much though, you really have to be dominant in each one, since there's much less moat to debundling consumer apps vs enterprise
  - concinds 4y ago
    Their platforms are siloed off. The point of a mega app is that it's not siloed off; the reels, videos, DMs and tweets would be part of the same experience, and rely on the same usernames, hence the moat.
    - JohnAaronNelson 4y ago
      How dystopian. Why not just build the matrix and be done with humanity.
      - simondotau 4y ago
        Having more competition for YouTube and WhatsApp doesn't seem so dystopian to me?
- 4y ago
mullingitover 4y ago
> managing the exodus of users (size:?) that will happen regardless; This is probably the biggest risk in this acquisition. Twitter wasn't doing anything special, and it's easy to launch a clone of their business model. Elon's talking about taking an axe to the things that keep the lights on at Twitter: effective content moderation and talent.
- Manu40 4y ago
  > taking an axe to the things that keep the lights on at Twitter: effective content moderation and talent. I have experienced the 'effectiveness' of Twitters moderation team on multiple occasions where they were very ineffective at upholding the very clear cut rules surrounding things like doxxing on their website. I had my personal information made public, and they ignored me. Multiple times. I even created a new account with no way for there to be any publicly available personal info; and yet I was still doxxed somehow, and they still ignored me. So, in the spirit of HN's rules, I just want to say this, since end user experience should be allowable to share (I hope.). Effective moderation at twitter is a myth as far as I see it, and their only talent is making it look like they have effective moderation when they care. P.S. I also was doing nothing wrong in any case where this happened. It was all conversations which should have been considered civil (mostly) and one situation where it had nothing to do with politics or philosophy at all. Yet they did nothing. Nothing.
  - mullingitover 4y ago
    I agree that Twitter's content moderation is mostly a vibe, and not really effective. Musk purchasing Twitter is already killing that feeling that content moderation works at Twitter, and I wouldn't be surprised if advertisers put a freeze on their plans the day the purchase went through (hence Musk's panicked-sounding tweet to advertisers).
    - Manu40 4y ago
      Honestly, if what they though Twitter was before was fine to advertise on, despite the lack of actual coherent moderation; then we are all blessed by the lack of those advertisers. And if that makes Elon panic, then we are blessed doubly in that way as well, because he might either actually do something useful to make it a nicer place to be; or he might burn it to the ground. Both are ideal in my personal opinion.
maxerickson 4y ago
What if he just loses a big pile of money while Twitter twists in the wind because there isn't much of a plan? That seems likely enough really.
- merely-unlikely 4y ago
  If that's the case, it won't be so different from when Twitter was run as a public co.
  - _hypx 4y ago
    The social media bubble has burst (see stock prices of other social media companies). This is a quick path to having Twitter shut down or go bankrupt.
    - insanitybit 4y ago
      Given the state of the economy if you go by "look at other X companies" you can say that every industry was a bubble that popped.
      - maxerickson 4y ago
        US GDP increased significantly in the most recent quarter.
  - eigart 4y ago
    Musk Twitter and Musk have way bigger loans than public twitter.
    - falcolas 4y ago
      Which also means Twitter has much bigger payments to make. That will have some impact on its path as well.
      - 4y ago
wellthisisgreat 4y ago
How would Twitter be WeChat of America if WeChat is fundamentally for private messages and private transactions (unless it’s groups) but Twitter is for broadcasting yourself
not2b 4y ago
The difficulty is that some of these objectives conflict with each other. Backing off on moderation is likely to drive advertisers away; bringing back banned people could in some cases cause legal problems in countries where publishing, say, pro-Nazi speech is against the law. Making major changes will require more people, but stopping the financial bleeding will require fewer people.
- kyle-rb 4y ago
  Twitter already has implementations for the Nazi stuff; e.g. images with Nazi flags are allowed in general but if you try to view them from an account with location set to Germany, it will give you a "this content is blocked in your country" error message. I'd definitely be worried about driving advertisers away though. They forced YouTube's hand at least to some degree with the whole adpocalypse thing.
  - throwaway821909 4y ago
    The whole "advertisers don't want their ads appearing next to xyz" has always felt contrived to me, like, I can use Gmail to receive all sorts of wrongthink and I'll still see ads on it, similarly Twitter should be a neutral tool not a magazine. It's up to the users what they see. You'd need a lot of market share and confidence as Musk to actually say "this is silly" but it is silly nonetheless. The big players started down the road of "ok we'll ban the worst stuff" and once they blinked it's been "but what about" all the way down.
    - RickHull 4y ago
      > The whole "advertisers don't want their ads appearing next to xyz" has always felt contrived to me, like, I can use Gmail to receive all sorts of wrongthink and I'll still see ads on it Good point, but... The advertiser mostly cares when "everyone" knows they advertise for Nazis. If it's just you who knows, no biggie. They don't want it to be common knowledge.
      - skissane 4y ago
unity1001 4y ago
You forgot the bot cleanup.
- smcl 4y ago
  I guess he has to pretend he cares about bots since he kicked up such a fuss about it, but I don’t think he’ll end up spending much energy on it
ribosometronome 4y ago
"There are no maps" doesn't seem to jive with "WeChat but for America".
- golemotron 4y ago
  China and America are very different. We can't use one map for the other.
qwertox 4y ago
Let's assume he makes Neuralink happen in the sense of really giving a locked-in person the ability to communicate in real words and sentences. He now has the network to connect those people directly to the rest of the world, under his umbrella. Sure, he could have just used (old) Twitter's API, and that's what he'll be using, but it won't be "we (as in 'Neuralink') and Twitter made this happen", but "we (my companies)" made this happen. I also wonder how useful Twitter's infrastructure could be for machine-to-machine communication, where he certainly could have some uses for it with Tesla and Starlink.
- aredox 4y ago
  "under his umbrella"... Is that supposed to be an attempt at imagining the most horrible future possible? Umbrella corporation anyone?
- freejazz 4y ago
  - qwertox 4y ago
    I'm saying this from the perspective that he made a shitty acquisition and trying to see ways he could consider it as a positive thing. If I'd had made this acquisition, specially in the circumstances he did it, I'd probably get so depressed that I'd put and end to it all. I'm not a fanboy, but I'm also not a hater.
    - freejazz 4y ago
      It just reads like inane, nonsensical science fiction.
      - robbiep 4y ago
        ‘Ah yes. We can give your child with locked in syndrome a communications path with the rest of the world, but it can only be through the twitter API. Also his ventilator? Also needs twitter API. Yes, that’s right. His life support and all communication in and out relies on a flimsy message board. Connection outages? Well, it can’t happen. We’ve got starlink on the back of his wheelchair. Tunnels? Oh no, don’t go in tunnels’
sbf501 4y ago
We know one thing: half of the $44B was loans that will cost Twitter around $1B per year, so it has to make some kind of profit. Otherwise who will pay?
- cudgy 4y ago
  Fyi Profit is after expenses. Twitter can make 0 profit and still pay the loans.
  - sbf501 4y ago
    If they made $1B profit before counting the loan, they would spend that profit on the loan. Effectively the same concept: they need to revenue to clear operating expenses PLUS a $1B loan payment. In 2020 twitter had a net loss of $1.14B. The loans will kill twitter. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/twitter-announces-fourth-quarter-and-fiscal-year-2020-results-301225278.html https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/twitter-announces-f...
    - texasbigdata 4y ago
      This is incorrect accounting. Source: myself, CPA. We could drill down further here but it’s not worth 3 paragraphs of nuance for this subtle point.
      - quickthrower2 4y ago
        It might be interesting to know the subtlety if it is in the Twitter context. Is it better to look at cash, loc, and cashflow to determine if they can pay the loan repayments?
        texasbigdata 4y ago
        Essentially, yes. The GAAP income statement is a very poor proxy for cash flow generation ability. That captures 80% of it. There’s also operating leverage. This business should trend to 50-80% gross margins and 30-50% profit / free cash flow conversion, similar to Facebook, Google, or other similar businesses. Further, there’s a bunch of pre- and post- transaction adjustments that hit the financial statements (for example stock based compensation will likely go away in a private company, thus raising profitability), so you can’t just take last years profit and tack on the new debt structure. Last, the amortization on high yield isn’t necessarily linear. In the most extreme example (where the debt costs >12%) you could have pay-in-kind (PIK) interest where the interest payments accrue to the balance of the loan (like a credit card) and for amortization, it could be anywhere from straight line (1/x periods) to a “bullet” with no amortization at all until a end period where it all comes due at once (you typically refinance in that case). All-in, it may be risky, but the bankers that committed billions of capital to the deal aren’t exactly brain dead and all have internal credit approval processes which require them to do all the work outlined above and a bunch more.
yurikoif 4y ago
Saying it is some country’s WeChat is like a curse… as WeChat is notorious for its closed mindedness and probably hated by most of its users… and they won’t even have any other option because Tencent is actively striking down all potential competitors…
- andirk 4y ago
  Yeah wtf would anyone touting freedom of speech bring up China in any way? Tencent, owner of WeChat, said they'd block NBA Houston Rockets games because one of the Rockets' managers tweeted "Fight for Freedom. Stand with Hong Kong." [0]. Granted, I got kicked off of twitter for "misinformation" for saying "some day we'll all die". [0] https://www.npr.org/2019/10/07/767805936/houston-rockets-gm-apologizes-for-tweet-supporting-hong-kong-protesters https://www.npr.org/2019/10/07/767805936/houston-rockets-gm-...
  - bagels 4y ago
    It's two different things: WeChat has a bunch of integrated apps, that's part of what Musk's vision is. The free speech issue is separate from the similarities to WeChat.
    - hedora 4y ago
      How could free speech possibly remain separate at WeChat levels of consolidation? You spout wrongthink in a twitter DM, and now your bank, credit card, email, private messages, facebook, rail pass, amazon, uber, government ID, school accounts, craigslist and tinder are permabanned.
  - oneeyedpigeon 4y ago
    It's difficult to make a judgement on "some day we'll all die" without context. It might've been part of an insightful discussion about the potential of immortality or it could have been directed at the parent of a school-shooting victim.
- illuminati1911 4y ago
  This. As someone living in China and having used wechat for years I've always found it ultra cringey when American businessmen/influencers are like "omg have you guys seen what Chinese are doing with wechat! They have this all in one app where..." First of all this idea of a superapp is nothing new. In fact iOS or Android is also a "superapp". Basically a software that has an ecosystem inside of it. Wechat has just created their own ecosystem within a ecosystem, because they want to control everything. Second, when compared to most other Chinese apps I do have to admit that wechat is much more finished, but when compared to other global messaging apps like Telegram, Slack etc. I'd say wechat is about 10-15 years behind in everything and lacking the most fundamental features. The social media aspect of wechat which is called "Wechat Moments" is also extremely limited: Basically like Instagram without you being able to see or follow people you don't know personally. If your friend posts a photo and his friend (who you don't know) makes a comment on it, you cannot see this comment but you can see your friends replies to him/her. Yes, super confusing. Also no images, videos, gifs in the comments etc. Third, a lot of people like to mention that "you can do everything with wechat". You can do a lot of things, but I don't know anyone who only uses wechat. There are a lot of other apps that you need to live comfortably: Alipay (this is another superapp), Taobao (like ebay), Jingdong (like amazon), Dianping (like Yelp), Eleme/Meituan (like Uber eats), Baidu maps, banking apps etc. etc. Wechat does have it's internal "miniprogram" system (alternative to native apps) where you can have some of these apps I previously mentioned, but there are severe app size, memory and performance limitations, proprietary API and the performance and functionality is from early 2010s internet. Laggy and slowly opening pages, collapsing and bouncy layouts etc. Also wechat does not support multitasking: When you are using for example Tim Horton's miniprogram to order coffee, you can't chat with your friends, you can't open a Starbucks/some_other_coffee_company miniprogram on the side and compare prices. You have to close and kill the current "app" and then open a new "app" for new action. This is somewhat understandable due to the iOS/Android limitations of a single app (in regards to performance and memory), but it highlights why this kind of a "superapp" idea is fundamentally flawed. So basically IMO "superapp" is a solution looking for a problem. We already have iOS, Android or web browser. We don't need another forced ecosystem but we need good apps for existing ones.
rednerrus 4y ago
It sounds like Musk is going to tell advertisers to kick rocks and try to monetize the platform. Where are people gonna go if not on Twitter? The left isn't gonna have better luck with their own truth social or parler. The network effect is too big with Twitter. It's not fun if you're not dunking on your enemies. That's the fun of Twitter.
- jimbob45 4y ago
  Facebook could allow for special profiles that are only comprised of statuses. That would be a Twitter clone in a nutshell that would already have high adoption. That would require Facebook to make a shrewd business decision though so never mind.
  - rednerrus 4y ago
    It would also require people, who I am assuming lean left, to trust Zuck over Elon after the last 5 years of talking about how terrible Zuck and his platform are. I don't see that happening. Nobody wants grandma reading their tweets.
- smt88 4y ago
  > Where are people gonna go if not on Twitter? I think you may be over-estimating how much most people "need" something like Twitter. For the vast majority of users, a news feed and private messaging (WhatsApp, iMessage, etc.) are good enough.
  - dereg 4y ago
    I think you're underestimating how much actual users of Twitter use Twitter.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - thwayunion 4y ago
    I think this comment will age well. My guess is that the percent of people who use social media will decrease by half over the coming decade, at least in the US and Europe.
no_butterscotch 4y ago
> cutting a large amount of staff I wonder if he needs to do this. Maybe I've just been working for tech companies in the Bay Area too long. But I don't want to work for a company where I don't have equity that I can cash out. And now all those engineers are working for a company where equity doesn't exist? An exception could be a Netflix model where you make a buttload of money. But Twitter isn't that.
- poszlem 4y ago
  It isn't that yet, presumably.
  - dpkirchner 4y ago
    Guess it remains to be seen if they can make up for the lack of public equity with cash or if the cash will be tied up in loan repayments.
    - biscottigelato 4y ago
      SpaceX has no public equities and has no problem attracting talent. You guys are really thinking Musk is some bozos that have never done anything in his life. Its quite incredible. Last week 4 astronauts went to ISS on his rocket and the first stage landed, again. Tesla is still growing at close to 40/50% top and bottomline when all car companies are contracting, even FAANG. Twitter is yet to be seen. But its quite incredible the dismissiveness around here. Making Twitter work is peanuts comparing to trying to get a car company and a space company (both industries where successful examples are much harder to find than social media companies. Even if we point fingers as Meta and Snap, they are profitable and not bankrupt like most car and space companies in history) to survive through the 2008 Financial crisis.
      - tayo42 4y ago
        if spacex wasnt launching rockets into space they would not have talent there. people arent going to take pay cuts to serve lists of shitposts and ads
SXX 4y ago
> open sourcing the code Why? Elon is not the guy who gonna do it. He wants freedom of speench under his control. Tesla for instance is very much anti open source.
edmundsauto 4y ago
One of his challenges will be to pay $1.2B in interest payments every year while also making good on the principal. That's quite a bit of debt for a struggling financial situation. Cutting HC will help in the short term; it is unclear if those cuts will be well executed. HN opinion that twitter could run with 200 engineers is woefully naive for a massive company that is under FTC consent order - they probably have >200 privacy engineers (and associated legal staff) just to comply with regulations.
- bagels 4y ago
  The consent decree requires that the company be 5x as large as it otherwise would. It really, really, really slows down development. For every engineer, there is also a corresponding engineer whose job is to slow them down.
  - hackernewds 4y ago
    Why is this so? What is an FTC consent order?
    - bagels 4y ago
      https://www.ftc.gov/sites/default/files/documents/cases/2010/06/100624twitteragree.pdf https://www.ftc.gov/sites/default/files/documents/cases/2010... IT IS ORDERED that respondent... establish and implement, and thereafter maintain, a comprehensive information security program that is reasonably designed to protect the security, privacy, confidentiality, and integrity of nonpublic consumer information.
      - hedora 4y ago
        Computer security 101 says that there should be one set of checks for the information (parsimony of mechanism), all access go through that mechanism (complete intermediation), and as few people/things have access to the data as possible (least privilege). Making sure all private data goes in the vault and the vault is secure shouldn't take more than 1% of an organization the size of Twitter. Even if they're doing it poorly, it shouldn't be more than 10%. If it really is 5x (> 80% of their engineering budget), I guarantee you they are in violation of the consent decree -- there is no way to vet that many engineers or audit their work!
RedBeetDeadpool 4y ago
- salmo 4y ago
  Twitter’s already headed down the uncool social media curve like Facebook before it. There will be an exodus, but it would have happened either way. Once the parents get on, it starts the decline. When the grandparents are there… The “political” polarization is part of it. The older folks bring it with them. The majority flock to sites for information and escapism. The back and forth is just exhausting. It’s clearer for geek sites. Slashdot died when it got corporate and the content went to crap. Digg was the same. Reddit’s in process except niches. It’ll be same here. For everything there is a season.
  - RedBeetDeadpool 4y ago
    How you said it: > Twitter’s already headed down the uncool social media curve like Facebook before it. There will be an exodus, but it would have happened either way. Once the parents get on, it starts the decline. When the grandparents are there… > The “political” polarization is part of it. The older folks bring it with them. The majority flock to sites for information and escapism. The back and forth is just exhausting. > It’s clearer for geek sites. Slashdot died when it got corporate and the content went to crap. Digg was the same. Reddit’s in process except niches. It’ll be same here. > For everything there is a season. What you sound like: Yes and there shall be an exodus from the Twitters. The parents shall come in, then the grandparents shall follow. Once those generations arrive the decline shall start. Not before. Not long after. But right after the grandparents, whence they arrive. The polarization shall induce the decline. This wrought on by the older generations. And this is when the majority shall flock to sites for information and escapism. Just as Slashdot, and Digg, declined before it, so shall the Twitters decline as well. For everything, there is a season. --- With your prescience, you must be a billionaire. Why don't you just buy Twitter off of Elon?
    - salmo 4y ago
      Not far off. But the parents are already there. Like, uh, me. And most of my Twitter friends are similarly aged. And some of their parents are there. My mute list grows every couple months. I don’t mind political content but get tired of being battered by angry repetitive posts. Most of the people I know who abandoned facebook did it for that reason. The younger folks I know don’t have an account or care. I don’t even know what the cool thing is anymore. That’s probably the point. It’s already in its decline, the user numbers maybe don’t reflect it yet. And it’s not prescient any more than watching any historical trend repeat itself is. There’s more than a billion reasons I’m not a billionaire, including. I’m not brave, smart, or initially wealthy enough are a few. If I were, I wouldn’t buy a social media site. I also wouldn’t buy a TCBY franchise. These are things that might be great short term, but risk increases over time. A 1-2 year old TCBY is packed with kids. A 5+ year old one looks like every near empty ice cream shop. They all have the same smell, it’s weird. Anyway, I’m risk adverse… and that lack of bravery is partly why I’m not wealthy in any sense. I might be wrong about all of this. Just applying what I’ve seen from the past to the present.
ohmyzee 4y ago
There was talk of him using crypto currency as a way of disincentivizing bots. Not sure how well thought out the ideas were, but there might well be some interesting integrations with crypto on the platform
novok 4y ago
I've been in companies where 1/5th of engineer was laid off. The state of company infra and the product dropped significantly and it took a long time to approach recovery, where they hired the same amount of staff back. I can't imagine how dysfunctional twitter would be with %75 of staff gone, I don't even know if it will continue running as a business after that.
- ReptileMan 4y ago
  There is a lot of cruft without touching the engineering department. And there are always those two guys in every team that when they call sick - productivity of the team increases.
  - archon810 4y ago
    The question is, who will decide who to fire? And how many of the wrong people to fire will get fired in the process?
  - seanhunter 4y ago
    Even if that were true the problem with the approach he has taken is that by leaking that you are going to perform swinging cuts, everyone who can get another job immediately starts looking so by the time you actually get around to doing the layoff the team has self-selected and you only have “those two guys” left.
    - ReptileMan 4y ago
      I doubt it because the whole vibe of Musk so far is that the axe will fall on the culture warriors and activists. I think the productive and less political engineers know they are safe. And the zeitgeist seems to have changed lately - so jobs may not be so easier to come by, especially for employees that may be too political for the employer.
      - hackerfromthefu 4y ago
        This! Can't believe how most of the discussion misses this point.
hedora 4y ago
Musk has media attention, but I'm not sure it's much of an advantage at this point. I tried getting a solar system from Tesla, and it convinced me not to consider their cars. I know it is a different side of the company, but I ended up with a used electric BMW. I was resigned to dealing with the B-hole stigma around having a beamer, but whatever. It's a nice car, environmentally friendly, and was inexpensive. That's not what happened. Instead, Tesla owners say things like "I got the Tesla before Musk went nutso roll eyes, and it's actually pretty good, but I'm not sure I'd buy another one..." I'm surprised how quickly the Teslas went from being a status symbol to a faux pas around here. Maybe it's a different story in less liberal areas. However, unless I'm missing something, social signaling / image management is way more important to the Twitteratti than people buying commuter cars / kid taxis. (Again, whatever. It's a car, not a political statement, but I've seen more than one Tesla owner apologize for owning one.)
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- strix_varius 4y ago
  Absolutely. How many times have you heard this statement? "Our next car will be electric... But not a Tesla." I hear that all the time now. My wife, who recently turned 30, would be mortified for her friends to see her in a Tesla. They associate the brand with a creepy, slimy billionaire and a legion of tech bro sycophants.
grogenaut 4y ago
why is open sourcing the code in this list? I don't recall a musk company that's big on open source. is this for visibility into how it works?
Heyso 4y ago
There is not only personalities like Trump, peoples like Silvano Trotta, Christian Perronne, Astrid Stuckelberger, Christine Cotton, should also be unbanned if he do things right. All theses peoples have switched to Telegram, but they might come back on twitter if Musk is serious about free speech and unban them. With their followers...
TimJRobinson 4y ago
I'm excited about the possibility of a more decentralized / open source WeChat coming out of this. Twitter has their BlueSky project for decentralized social media and is bringing on many pro-crypto people into management (e.g. https://twitter.com/sriramk https://twitter.com/sriramk). It would be a great story of USA freedom vs Chinese control that could be really good for the world and Twitter.

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 ago
That'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 ago
  The 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!

concinds 4y ago

Most people are focused on censorship/content issues, but I really think the X.com "mega app" vision is the most significant part of this. It'll be hard to gain a foothold in those markets, and there'll be antitrust challenges, but it really fits perfectly with the rest of Musk's vision: X.com Maps could tie in with Teslas, X.com Carhailing could tie-in with (future) full self-driving; Twitter could be expanded to be more like Telegram + Instagram, with channels, better DMs, "Moments", and more. There's no attempt to create a single, wide-ranging social media platform, with payments, video, shorts, DMs, and more. China's proven that it can be done. It would create a far bigger moat and network effects, and likely be as successful as Microsoft Teams & 365, a highly integrated solution, are for work.

mNovak 4y ago
>> There's no attempt to create a single, wide-ranging social media platform, with payments, video, shorts, DMs, and more Umm.. Facebook? Just offering all those features doesn't mean much though, you really have to be dominant in each one, since there's much less moat to debundling consumer apps vs enterprise
- concinds 4y ago
  Their platforms are siloed off. The point of a mega app is that it's not siloed off; the reels, videos, DMs and tweets would be part of the same experience, and rely on the same usernames, hence the moat.
  - JohnAaronNelson 4y ago
    How dystopian. Why not just build the matrix and be done with humanity.
    - simondotau 4y ago
      Having more competition for YouTube and WhatsApp doesn't seem so dystopian to me?
4y ago

mullingitover 4y ago

> managing the exodus of users (size:?) that will happen regardless; This is probably the biggest risk in this acquisition. Twitter wasn't doing anything special, and it's easy to launch a clone of their business model. Elon's talking about taking an axe to the things that keep the lights on at Twitter: effective content moderation and talent.

Manu40 4y ago
> taking an axe to the things that keep the lights on at Twitter: effective content moderation and talent. I have experienced the 'effectiveness' of Twitters moderation team on multiple occasions where they were very ineffective at upholding the very clear cut rules surrounding things like doxxing on their website. I had my personal information made public, and they ignored me. Multiple times. I even created a new account with no way for there to be any publicly available personal info; and yet I was still doxxed somehow, and they still ignored me. So, in the spirit of HN's rules, I just want to say this, since end user experience should be allowable to share (I hope.). Effective moderation at twitter is a myth as far as I see it, and their only talent is making it look like they have effective moderation when they care. P.S. I also was doing nothing wrong in any case where this happened. It was all conversations which should have been considered civil (mostly) and one situation where it had nothing to do with politics or philosophy at all. Yet they did nothing. Nothing.
- mullingitover 4y ago
  I agree that Twitter's content moderation is mostly a vibe, and not really effective. Musk purchasing Twitter is already killing that feeling that content moderation works at Twitter, and I wouldn't be surprised if advertisers put a freeze on their plans the day the purchase went through (hence Musk's panicked-sounding tweet to advertisers).
  - Manu40 4y ago
    Honestly, if what they though Twitter was before was fine to advertise on, despite the lack of actual coherent moderation; then we are all blessed by the lack of those advertisers. And if that makes Elon panic, then we are blessed doubly in that way as well, because he might either actually do something useful to make it a nicer place to be; or he might burn it to the ground. Both are ideal in my personal opinion.

maxerickson 4y ago

What if he just loses a big pile of money while Twitter twists in the wind because there isn't much of a plan? That seems likely enough really.

merely-unlikely 4y ago
If that's the case, it won't be so different from when Twitter was run as a public co.
- _hypx 4y ago
  The social media bubble has burst (see stock prices of other social media companies). This is a quick path to having Twitter shut down or go bankrupt.
  - insanitybit 4y ago
    Given the state of the economy if you go by "look at other X companies" you can say that every industry was a bubble that popped.
    - maxerickson 4y ago
      US GDP increased significantly in the most recent quarter.
- eigart 4y ago
  Musk Twitter and Musk have way bigger loans than public twitter.
  - falcolas 4y ago
    Which also means Twitter has much bigger payments to make. That will have some impact on its path as well.
    - 4y ago

wellthisisgreat 4y ago

How would Twitter be WeChat of America if WeChat is fundamentally for private messages and private transactions (unless it’s groups) but Twitter is for broadcasting yourself

not2b 4y ago

The difficulty is that some of these objectives conflict with each other. Backing off on moderation is likely to drive advertisers away; bringing back banned people could in some cases cause legal problems in countries where publishing, say, pro-Nazi speech is against the law. Making major changes will require more people, but stopping the financial bleeding will require fewer people.

kyle-rb 4y ago
Twitter already has implementations for the Nazi stuff; e.g. images with Nazi flags are allowed in general but if you try to view them from an account with location set to Germany, it will give you a "this content is blocked in your country" error message. I'd definitely be worried about driving advertisers away though. They forced YouTube's hand at least to some degree with the whole adpocalypse thing.
- throwaway821909 4y ago
  The whole "advertisers don't want their ads appearing next to xyz" has always felt contrived to me, like, I can use Gmail to receive all sorts of wrongthink and I'll still see ads on it, similarly Twitter should be a neutral tool not a magazine. It's up to the users what they see. You'd need a lot of market share and confidence as Musk to actually say "this is silly" but it is silly nonetheless. The big players started down the road of "ok we'll ban the worst stuff" and once they blinked it's been "but what about" all the way down.
  - RickHull 4y ago
    > The whole "advertisers don't want their ads appearing next to xyz" has always felt contrived to me, like, I can use Gmail to receive all sorts of wrongthink and I'll still see ads on it Good point, but... The advertiser mostly cares when "everyone" knows they advertise for Nazis. If it's just you who knows, no biggie. They don't want it to be common knowledge.
    - skissane 4y ago

unity1001 4y ago

You forgot the bot cleanup.

smcl 4y ago
I guess he has to pretend he cares about bots since he kicked up such a fuss about it, but I don’t think he’ll end up spending much energy on it

ribosometronome 4y ago

"There are no maps" doesn't seem to jive with "WeChat but for America".

golemotron 4y ago
China and America are very different. We can't use one map for the other.

qwertox 4y ago

Let's assume he makes Neuralink happen in the sense of really giving a locked-in person the ability to communicate in real words and sentences. He now has the network to connect those people directly to the rest of the world, under his umbrella. Sure, he could have just used (old) Twitter's API, and that's what he'll be using, but it won't be "we (as in 'Neuralink') and Twitter made this happen", but "we (my companies)" made this happen. I also wonder how useful Twitter's infrastructure could be for machine-to-machine communication, where he certainly could have some uses for it with Tesla and Starlink.

aredox 4y ago
"under his umbrella"... Is that supposed to be an attempt at imagining the most horrible future possible? Umbrella corporation anyone?
freejazz 4y ago
- qwertox 4y ago
  I'm saying this from the perspective that he made a shitty acquisition and trying to see ways he could consider it as a positive thing. If I'd had made this acquisition, specially in the circumstances he did it, I'd probably get so depressed that I'd put and end to it all. I'm not a fanboy, but I'm also not a hater.
  - freejazz 4y ago
    It just reads like inane, nonsensical science fiction.
    - robbiep 4y ago
      ‘Ah yes. We can give your child with locked in syndrome a communications path with the rest of the world, but it can only be through the twitter API. Also his ventilator? Also needs twitter API. Yes, that’s right. His life support and all communication in and out relies on a flimsy message board. Connection outages? Well, it can’t happen. We’ve got starlink on the back of his wheelchair. Tunnels? Oh no, don’t go in tunnels’

sbf501 4y ago

We know one thing: half of the $44B was loans that will cost Twitter around $1B per year, so it has to make some kind of profit. Otherwise who will pay?

cudgy 4y ago
Fyi Profit is after expenses. Twitter can make 0 profit and still pay the loans.
- sbf501 4y ago
  If they made $1B profit before counting the loan, they would spend that profit on the loan. Effectively the same concept: they need to revenue to clear operating expenses PLUS a $1B loan payment. In 2020 twitter had a net loss of $1.14B. The loans will kill twitter. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/twitter-announces-fourth-quarter-and-fiscal-year-2020-results-301225278.html https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/twitter-announces-f...
  - texasbigdata 4y ago
    This is incorrect accounting. Source: myself, CPA. We could drill down further here but it’s not worth 3 paragraphs of nuance for this subtle point.
    - quickthrower2 4y ago
      It might be interesting to know the subtlety if it is in the Twitter context. Is it better to look at cash, loc, and cashflow to determine if they can pay the loan repayments?
      - texasbigdata 4y ago
        Essentially, yes. The GAAP income statement is a very poor proxy for cash flow generation ability. That captures 80% of it. There’s also operating leverage. This business should trend to 50-80% gross margins and 30-50% profit / free cash flow conversion, similar to Facebook, Google, or other similar businesses. Further, there’s a bunch of pre- and post- transaction adjustments that hit the financial statements (for example stock based compensation will likely go away in a private company, thus raising profitability), so you can’t just take last years profit and tack on the new debt structure. Last, the amortization on high yield isn’t necessarily linear. In the most extreme example (where the debt costs >12%) you could have pay-in-kind (PIK) interest where the interest payments accrue to the balance of the loan (like a credit card) and for amortization, it could be anywhere from straight line (1/x periods) to a “bullet” with no amortization at all until a end period where it all comes due at once (you typically refinance in that case). All-in, it may be risky, but the bankers that committed billions of capital to the deal aren’t exactly brain dead and all have internal credit approval processes which require them to do all the work outlined above and a bunch more.

yurikoif 4y ago

Saying it is some country’s WeChat is like a curse… as WeChat is notorious for its closed mindedness and probably hated by most of its users… and they won’t even have any other option because Tencent is actively striking down all potential competitors…

andirk 4y ago
Yeah wtf would anyone touting freedom of speech bring up China in any way? Tencent, owner of WeChat, said they'd block NBA Houston Rockets games because one of the Rockets' managers tweeted "Fight for Freedom. Stand with Hong Kong." [0]. Granted, I got kicked off of twitter for "misinformation" for saying "some day we'll all die". [0] https://www.npr.org/2019/10/07/767805936/houston-rockets-gm-apologizes-for-tweet-supporting-hong-kong-protesters https://www.npr.org/2019/10/07/767805936/houston-rockets-gm-...
- bagels 4y ago
  It's two different things: WeChat has a bunch of integrated apps, that's part of what Musk's vision is. The free speech issue is separate from the similarities to WeChat.
  - hedora 4y ago
    How could free speech possibly remain separate at WeChat levels of consolidation? You spout wrongthink in a twitter DM, and now your bank, credit card, email, private messages, facebook, rail pass, amazon, uber, government ID, school accounts, craigslist and tinder are permabanned.
- oneeyedpigeon 4y ago
  It's difficult to make a judgement on "some day we'll all die" without context. It might've been part of an insightful discussion about the potential of immortality or it could have been directed at the parent of a school-shooting victim.
illuminati1911 4y ago
This. As someone living in China and having used wechat for years I've always found it ultra cringey when American businessmen/influencers are like "omg have you guys seen what Chinese are doing with wechat! They have this all in one app where..." First of all this idea of a superapp is nothing new. In fact iOS or Android is also a "superapp". Basically a software that has an ecosystem inside of it. Wechat has just created their own ecosystem within a ecosystem, because they want to control everything. Second, when compared to most other Chinese apps I do have to admit that wechat is much more finished, but when compared to other global messaging apps like Telegram, Slack etc. I'd say wechat is about 10-15 years behind in everything and lacking the most fundamental features. The social media aspect of wechat which is called "Wechat Moments" is also extremely limited: Basically like Instagram without you being able to see or follow people you don't know personally. If your friend posts a photo and his friend (who you don't know) makes a comment on it, you cannot see this comment but you can see your friends replies to him/her. Yes, super confusing. Also no images, videos, gifs in the comments etc. Third, a lot of people like to mention that "you can do everything with wechat". You can do a lot of things, but I don't know anyone who only uses wechat. There are a lot of other apps that you need to live comfortably: Alipay (this is another superapp), Taobao (like ebay), Jingdong (like amazon), Dianping (like Yelp), Eleme/Meituan (like Uber eats), Baidu maps, banking apps etc. etc. Wechat does have it's internal "miniprogram" system (alternative to native apps) where you can have some of these apps I previously mentioned, but there are severe app size, memory and performance limitations, proprietary API and the performance and functionality is from early 2010s internet. Laggy and slowly opening pages, collapsing and bouncy layouts etc. Also wechat does not support multitasking: When you are using for example Tim Horton's miniprogram to order coffee, you can't chat with your friends, you can't open a Starbucks/some_other_coffee_company miniprogram on the side and compare prices. You have to close and kill the current "app" and then open a new "app" for new action. This is somewhat understandable due to the iOS/Android limitations of a single app (in regards to performance and memory), but it highlights why this kind of a "superapp" idea is fundamentally flawed. So basically IMO "superapp" is a solution looking for a problem. We already have iOS, Android or web browser. We don't need another forced ecosystem but we need good apps for existing ones.

rednerrus 4y ago

It sounds like Musk is going to tell advertisers to kick rocks and try to monetize the platform. Where are people gonna go if not on Twitter? The left isn't gonna have better luck with their own truth social or parler. The network effect is too big with Twitter. It's not fun if you're not dunking on your enemies. That's the fun of Twitter.

jimbob45 4y ago
Facebook could allow for special profiles that are only comprised of statuses. That would be a Twitter clone in a nutshell that would already have high adoption. That would require Facebook to make a shrewd business decision though so never mind.
- rednerrus 4y ago
  It would also require people, who I am assuming lean left, to trust Zuck over Elon after the last 5 years of talking about how terrible Zuck and his platform are. I don't see that happening. Nobody wants grandma reading their tweets.
smt88 4y ago
> Where are people gonna go if not on Twitter? I think you may be over-estimating how much most people "need" something like Twitter. For the vast majority of users, a news feed and private messaging (WhatsApp, iMessage, etc.) are good enough.
- dereg 4y ago
  I think you're underestimating how much actual users of Twitter use Twitter.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- thwayunion 4y ago
  I think this comment will age well. My guess is that the percent of people who use social media will decrease by half over the coming decade, at least in the US and Europe.

no_butterscotch 4y ago

> cutting a large amount of staff I wonder if he needs to do this. Maybe I've just been working for tech companies in the Bay Area too long. But I don't want to work for a company where I don't have equity that I can cash out. And now all those engineers are working for a company where equity doesn't exist? An exception could be a Netflix model where you make a buttload of money. But Twitter isn't that.

poszlem 4y ago
It isn't that yet, presumably.
- dpkirchner 4y ago
  Guess it remains to be seen if they can make up for the lack of public equity with cash or if the cash will be tied up in loan repayments.
  - biscottigelato 4y ago
    SpaceX has no public equities and has no problem attracting talent. You guys are really thinking Musk is some bozos that have never done anything in his life. Its quite incredible. Last week 4 astronauts went to ISS on his rocket and the first stage landed, again. Tesla is still growing at close to 40/50% top and bottomline when all car companies are contracting, even FAANG. Twitter is yet to be seen. But its quite incredible the dismissiveness around here. Making Twitter work is peanuts comparing to trying to get a car company and a space company (both industries where successful examples are much harder to find than social media companies. Even if we point fingers as Meta and Snap, they are profitable and not bankrupt like most car and space companies in history) to survive through the 2008 Financial crisis.
    - tayo42 4y ago
      if spacex wasnt launching rockets into space they would not have talent there. people arent going to take pay cuts to serve lists of shitposts and ads

SXX 4y ago

> open sourcing the code Why? Elon is not the guy who gonna do it. He wants freedom of speench under his control. Tesla for instance is very much anti open source.

edmundsauto 4y ago

One of his challenges will be to pay $1.2B in interest payments every year while also making good on the principal. That's quite a bit of debt for a struggling financial situation. Cutting HC will help in the short term; it is unclear if those cuts will be well executed. HN opinion that twitter could run with 200 engineers is woefully naive for a massive company that is under FTC consent order - they probably have >200 privacy engineers (and associated legal staff) just to comply with regulations.

bagels 4y ago
The consent decree requires that the company be 5x as large as it otherwise would. It really, really, really slows down development. For every engineer, there is also a corresponding engineer whose job is to slow them down.
- hackernewds 4y ago
  Why is this so? What is an FTC consent order?
  - bagels 4y ago
    https://www.ftc.gov/sites/default/files/documents/cases/2010/06/100624twitteragree.pdf https://www.ftc.gov/sites/default/files/documents/cases/2010... IT IS ORDERED that respondent... establish and implement, and thereafter maintain, a comprehensive information security program that is reasonably designed to protect the security, privacy, confidentiality, and integrity of nonpublic consumer information.
    - hedora 4y ago
      Computer security 101 says that there should be one set of checks for the information (parsimony of mechanism), all access go through that mechanism (complete intermediation), and as few people/things have access to the data as possible (least privilege). Making sure all private data goes in the vault and the vault is secure shouldn't take more than 1% of an organization the size of Twitter. Even if they're doing it poorly, it shouldn't be more than 10%. If it really is 5x (> 80% of their engineering budget), I guarantee you they are in violation of the consent decree -- there is no way to vet that many engineers or audit their work!

RedBeetDeadpool 4y ago

salmo 4y ago
Twitter’s already headed down the uncool social media curve like Facebook before it. There will be an exodus, but it would have happened either way. Once the parents get on, it starts the decline. When the grandparents are there… The “political” polarization is part of it. The older folks bring it with them. The majority flock to sites for information and escapism. The back and forth is just exhausting. It’s clearer for geek sites. Slashdot died when it got corporate and the content went to crap. Digg was the same. Reddit’s in process except niches. It’ll be same here. For everything there is a season.
- RedBeetDeadpool 4y ago
  How you said it: > Twitter’s already headed down the uncool social media curve like Facebook before it. There will be an exodus, but it would have happened either way. Once the parents get on, it starts the decline. When the grandparents are there… > The “political” polarization is part of it. The older folks bring it with them. The majority flock to sites for information and escapism. The back and forth is just exhausting. > It’s clearer for geek sites. Slashdot died when it got corporate and the content went to crap. Digg was the same. Reddit’s in process except niches. It’ll be same here. > For everything there is a season. What you sound like: Yes and there shall be an exodus from the Twitters. The parents shall come in, then the grandparents shall follow. Once those generations arrive the decline shall start. Not before. Not long after. But right after the grandparents, whence they arrive. The polarization shall induce the decline. This wrought on by the older generations. And this is when the majority shall flock to sites for information and escapism. Just as Slashdot, and Digg, declined before it, so shall the Twitters decline as well. For everything, there is a season. --- With your prescience, you must be a billionaire. Why don't you just buy Twitter off of Elon?
  - salmo 4y ago
    Not far off. But the parents are already there. Like, uh, me. And most of my Twitter friends are similarly aged. And some of their parents are there. My mute list grows every couple months. I don’t mind political content but get tired of being battered by angry repetitive posts. Most of the people I know who abandoned facebook did it for that reason. The younger folks I know don’t have an account or care. I don’t even know what the cool thing is anymore. That’s probably the point. It’s already in its decline, the user numbers maybe don’t reflect it yet. And it’s not prescient any more than watching any historical trend repeat itself is. There’s more than a billion reasons I’m not a billionaire, including. I’m not brave, smart, or initially wealthy enough are a few. If I were, I wouldn’t buy a social media site. I also wouldn’t buy a TCBY franchise. These are things that might be great short term, but risk increases over time. A 1-2 year old TCBY is packed with kids. A 5+ year old one looks like every near empty ice cream shop. They all have the same smell, it’s weird. Anyway, I’m risk adverse… and that lack of bravery is partly why I’m not wealthy in any sense. I might be wrong about all of this. Just applying what I’ve seen from the past to the present.

ohmyzee 4y ago

There was talk of him using crypto currency as a way of disincentivizing bots. Not sure how well thought out the ideas were, but there might well be some interesting integrations with crypto on the platform

novok 4y ago

I've been in companies where 1/5th of engineer was laid off. The state of company infra and the product dropped significantly and it took a long time to approach recovery, where they hired the same amount of staff back. I can't imagine how dysfunctional twitter would be with %75 of staff gone, I don't even know if it will continue running as a business after that.

ReptileMan 4y ago
There is a lot of cruft without touching the engineering department. And there are always those two guys in every team that when they call sick - productivity of the team increases.
- archon810 4y ago
  The question is, who will decide who to fire? And how many of the wrong people to fire will get fired in the process?
- seanhunter 4y ago
  Even if that were true the problem with the approach he has taken is that by leaking that you are going to perform swinging cuts, everyone who can get another job immediately starts looking so by the time you actually get around to doing the layoff the team has self-selected and you only have “those two guys” left.
  - ReptileMan 4y ago
    I doubt it because the whole vibe of Musk so far is that the axe will fall on the culture warriors and activists. I think the productive and less political engineers know they are safe. And the zeitgeist seems to have changed lately - so jobs may not be so easier to come by, especially for employees that may be too political for the employer.
    - hackerfromthefu 4y ago
      This! Can't believe how most of the discussion misses this point.

hedora 4y ago

Musk has media attention, but I'm not sure it's much of an advantage at this point. I tried getting a solar system from Tesla, and it convinced me not to consider their cars. I know it is a different side of the company, but I ended up with a used electric BMW. I was resigned to dealing with the B-hole stigma around having a beamer, but whatever. It's a nice car, environmentally friendly, and was inexpensive. That's not what happened. Instead, Tesla owners say things like "I got the Tesla before Musk went nutso roll eyes, and it's actually pretty good, but I'm not sure I'd buy another one..." I'm surprised how quickly the Teslas went from being a status symbol to a faux pas around here. Maybe it's a different story in less liberal areas. However, unless I'm missing something, social signaling / image management is way more important to the Twitteratti than people buying commuter cars / kid taxis. (Again, whatever. It's a car, not a political statement, but I've seen more than one Tesla owner apologize for owning one.)

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
strix_varius 4y ago
Absolutely. How many times have you heard this statement? "Our next car will be electric... But not a Tesla." I hear that all the time now. My wife, who recently turned 30, would be mortified for her friends to see her in a Tesla. They associate the brand with a creepy, slimy billionaire and a legion of tech bro sycophants.

grogenaut 4y ago

why is open sourcing the code in this list? I don't recall a musk company that's big on open source. is this for visibility into how it works?

Heyso 4y ago

There is not only personalities like Trump, peoples like Silvano Trotta, Christian Perronne, Astrid Stuckelberger, Christine Cotton, should also be unbanned if he do things right. All theses peoples have switched to Telegram, but they might come back on twitter if Musk is serious about free speech and unban them. With their followers...

TimJRobinson 4y ago

I'm excited about the possibility of a more decentralized / open source WeChat coming out of this. Twitter has their BlueSky project for decentralized social media and is bringing on many pro-crypto people into management (e.g. https://twitter.com/sriramk https://twitter.com/sriramk). It would be a great story of USA freedom vs Chinese control that could be really good for the world and Twitter.