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> The problem for Twitter is that politicians and celebrities don't really want to hang around on a platform where they have to deal with abusive content all th

> The problem for Twitter is that politicians and celebrities don't really want to hang around on a platform where they have to deal with abusive content all the time. Maybe. At a certain point, that's probably true, but are we close to that? Sometimes you have to look at what people do, not what they say. It costs a celebrity nothing to say nice things about seeking peace and love and opposing hatred and wanting to fight all of the "hate speech" and "cyber-bullying" they see. In fact, they gain social capital for saying these things, so if you're a celebrity, you're effectively "leaving money on the table" by not talking in a certain way about certain topics. But it costs a celebrity a lot to actually leave a platform where they have some world-shaping influence. My guess is that most celebrities would figuratively crawl through a field of broken glass to get their fix of attention and kudos from their supporters.

mikkergp 4y ago
> My guess is that most celebrities would figuratively crawl through a field of broken glass to get their fix of attention and kudos from their supporters. Yeah I think the network effects are stronger than anyone would like to admit. I think Twitter has a lot of challenges going forward and my analytical read of the situation says he’ll fail, but my gut says he’ll succeed, now it just remains to be seen — succeed at what?
- andsoitis 4y ago
  Instinct is jet fuel to help work through uncertainty.
  - mikkergp 4y ago
    I think most of my instinct is just fear of going against the “smart money” support of Elon.
BryantD 4y ago
A couple of months ago Elon posted some notes on usage that indicated that the users with huge followings were in fact going away. This was later confirmed by a leaked internal research document[1]. So yes; we are close to that and quite possibly are at that point already. It's not clear to me that any of the changes he's made so far are oriented towards reversing that flow. It's possible that he didn't actually care about that, I suppose. 1. https://www.reuters.com/technology/exclusive-where-did-tweeters-go-twitter-is-losing-its-most-active-users-internal-2022-10-25/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/exclusive-where-did-tweet...
mschuster91 4y ago
> Sometimes you have to look at what people do, not what they say. At least in the "science bubble", I've seen a lot of people say they are fed up and moving to Mastodon. And particularly regarding COVID, it's clear why: they already had to fight insane amounts of trolls and deniers before Musk bought Twitter, and now Musk has made clear he's going for the radical-libertarian interpretation of "free speech" - evidenced by a ton of far-right trolls coming back or, worse, getting the real blue checkmark [1]. That means that the sane voices providing facts and context slowly leave, which is objectively bad as it allows misinformation to go uncontested, and leading more people to leave. FFS, even here on Hacker News one can clearly see on any debate that touches COVID that positions advocating for continuing combatting the pandemic get downvoted. [1] https://twitter.com/TabitaSurge/status/1592895889575915523 https://twitter.com/TabitaSurge/status/1592895889575915523
- logicalmonster 4y ago
  > positions advocating for continuing combatting the pandemic get downvoted NOTE: My goal here is not to abjudicate Covid or any other contentious topic, but to try and give a brief explanation of the disconnect between people in the "science bubble" and those you call "far-right trolls". You've never actually been disagreeing about science. You've been disagreeing about risk-management decisions. What I think a lot of scientists have gotten wrong, particularly in the last few years with covid but also with bigger topics like climate change, is that science is a totally different field from risk-management. A scientist can give you data about the world via the scientific method. A scientist can tell you that Covid is ~X% lethal for a woman at 57 years of age or that a medical treatment is ~Y% effective when administered within 48 hours of infection, or that a medical treatment poses ~Z% risk of complications. But a scientist can't tell you what decisions to make in light of that data. A scientist can't use science to tell you objectively whether or not it's worth ruining the world economy and social cohesion to fight a particular illness, or whether or not some individual who experiences X% risk of a disease should take a medication with a Y% risk of complications. That decision making process is never science: that is risk-management. Unfortunately, much of the politicized science in the last few years has taken the form of risk-management. You have scientists on very difficult topics saying things like "The science says we must do X, Y, and Z" when this is false. An objectively correct human action or decision is never the outcome of any science experiment.

mikkergp 4y ago

> My guess is that most celebrities would figuratively crawl through a field of broken glass to get their fix of attention and kudos from their supporters. Yeah I think the network effects are stronger than anyone would like to admit. I think Twitter has a lot of challenges going forward and my analytical read of the situation says he’ll fail, but my gut says he’ll succeed, now it just remains to be seen — succeed at what?

andsoitis 4y ago
Instinct is jet fuel to help work through uncertainty.
- mikkergp 4y ago
  I think most of my instinct is just fear of going against the “smart money” support of Elon.

BryantD 4y ago

A couple of months ago Elon posted some notes on usage that indicated that the users with huge followings were in fact going away. This was later confirmed by a leaked internal research document[1]. So yes; we are close to that and quite possibly are at that point already. It's not clear to me that any of the changes he's made so far are oriented towards reversing that flow. It's possible that he didn't actually care about that, I suppose. 1. https://www.reuters.com/technology/exclusive-where-did-tweeters-go-twitter-is-losing-its-most-active-users-internal-2022-10-25/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/exclusive-where-did-tweet...

mschuster91 4y ago

> Sometimes you have to look at what people do, not what they say. At least in the "science bubble", I've seen a lot of people say they are fed up and moving to Mastodon. And particularly regarding COVID, it's clear why: they already had to fight insane amounts of trolls and deniers before Musk bought Twitter, and now Musk has made clear he's going for the radical-libertarian interpretation of "free speech" - evidenced by a ton of far-right trolls coming back or, worse, getting the real blue checkmark [1]. That means that the sane voices providing facts and context slowly leave, which is objectively bad as it allows misinformation to go uncontested, and leading more people to leave. FFS, even here on Hacker News one can clearly see on any debate that touches COVID that positions advocating for continuing combatting the pandemic get downvoted. [1] https://twitter.com/TabitaSurge/status/1592895889575915523 https://twitter.com/TabitaSurge/status/1592895889575915523

logicalmonster 4y ago
> positions advocating for continuing combatting the pandemic get downvoted NOTE: My goal here is not to abjudicate Covid or any other contentious topic, but to try and give a brief explanation of the disconnect between people in the "science bubble" and those you call "far-right trolls". You've never actually been disagreeing about science. You've been disagreeing about risk-management decisions. What I think a lot of scientists have gotten wrong, particularly in the last few years with covid but also with bigger topics like climate change, is that science is a totally different field from risk-management. A scientist can give you data about the world via the scientific method. A scientist can tell you that Covid is ~X% lethal for a woman at 57 years of age or that a medical treatment is ~Y% effective when administered within 48 hours of infection, or that a medical treatment poses ~Z% risk of complications. But a scientist can't tell you what decisions to make in light of that data. A scientist can't use science to tell you objectively whether or not it's worth ruining the world economy and social cohesion to fight a particular illness, or whether or not some individual who experiences X% risk of a disease should take a medication with a Y% risk of complications. That decision making process is never science: that is risk-management. Unfortunately, much of the politicized science in the last few years has taken the form of risk-management. You have scientists on very difficult topics saying things like "The science says we must do X, Y, and Z" when this is false. An objectively correct human action or decision is never the outcome of any science experiment.