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I would love to talk to one of the people that kept saying “you all don’t understand. Musk runs billion dollar companies, he knows what he is doing. He will fix

I would love to talk to one of the people that kept saying “you all don’t understand. Musk runs billion dollar companies, he knows what he is doing. He will fix Twitter” now that this is happening. What is the grand plan now in their world view?

dbreunig 4y ago
Well you could ask paulg, who said that. But use email, not twitter.
- ColinWright 4y ago
  Or use Mastodon ...
bioemerl 4y ago
I had hopes. Twitter was terribly run and there was all sorts of examples of them being a typical social media platform trying to push various ideas using their control. Elon could have come in, aligned the website to be a lot more neutral, slimmed down the employee count and pushed for more features and more payments for features to get away from dependence on advertisers. I saw some headline a few weeks ago about Japanese trending on Twitter went from a whole bunch of political stuff to more neutral cultural stuff. Stuff like that is what I wanted to see. Instead we're getting this hilarious situation where Elon is using his authority to ban everything he doesn't like. It's worse than it was.
- causality0 4y ago
  I miss the Elon Musk of a decade ago.
  - falcolas 4y ago
    He was totally better at masking a decade ago, I'll agree with that.
    - capableweb 4y ago
      There is also the fact that some people change over time. Not saying Musk wasn't always like this, but it's possible that he wasn't before, and turned into it over time. Like my mother always used to say: "You're a liberal now, but when you get older you'll be more conservative!". Not that she was right about me, but in general I think she was right that sometimes people change.
- themitigating 4y ago
  Nepotism? Was that even an accusation against the previous Twitter?
  - bioemerl 4y ago
    I use that word roughly to mean that they had their own internal clique, standards that they wanted to apply to the rest of the world, and that small group of people was trying to govern a very large group of people. I changed my phrasing to remove that term, because that's not quite what it means.
- DiNovi 4y ago
  the fact that you thought the site wasn’t already neutral but just overwhelmed with content reports and that it is simply impossible to fairly moderate is a good indication you’re being duped in other areas, fyi
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - bioemerl 4y ago
    I still don't think the site was neutral, I just also think the current person is also not neutral and is worse.
- djur 4y ago
  The one good thing that's come out of Musk's ownership of Twitter is that we now have extensive public evidence that Twitter staff bent over backwards to maintain objective moderation standards even in the face of unprecedented challenges. The "leftist cabal" theories are thoroughly disproven now. And we see now the kind of actions that an actual ideological cabal would take if they controlled Twitter.
  - beaned 4y ago
    This seems like gaslighting? My interpretation of the recent files reports were the opposite.
  - imwillofficial 4y ago
    Wait what? Not my take on this at all.
  - paganel 4y ago
    > The "leftist cabal" theories are thoroughly disproven now. Just the other day there was a post in here of the FBI getting actively involved in censoring Twitter content, if it had been only the "leftist cabal" involved (btw, there's nothing genuinely "leftist" about those people, but that's another story) things would have been way better.
    - djur 4y ago
      The FBI passed along reports they received of possible violations of Twitter TOS (something we already knew they did), and the evidence is clear that they did not limit these reports to conservative accounts (something that has been claimed, but which never made sense, considering the FBI's historical Republican lean).
      - paganel 4y ago
        > The FBI passed along reports they received of possible violations of Twitter TOS (something we already knew they did), I.e. censorship. Why the heck does the FBI get involved in the TOS enforcement of some website on the Internet? (if not for controlling the discourse, that is).
- themitigating 4y ago
  "Elon could have come in, aligned the website to be a lot more neutral" How? "slimmed down the employee count" Why would you care about this? How could he know which half of the company should be fired? How does this improve Twitter? " and pushed for more features and more payments for features to get away from dependence on advertisers." Besides paying to be verified, a system which changed rapidly over weeks being enabled and disabled, what else did he do? "I saw some headline a few weeks ago about Japanese trending on Twitter went from a whole bunch of political stuff to more neutral cultural stuff" What does this mean? That the Japanese Twitter population all shifted to discussing culture over politics? Why would they do that? What does it have to do with Elon Musk taking over? "Stuff like that is what I wanted to see." Culture is shaped by politics, at least to some degree. Also "culture wars"
  - bioemerl 4y ago
    How? Look to that example about Japan. The idea is that the Japanese Twitter population did not shift over to discussing culture over politics. Instead, the tags were being pushed towards politics, and once they stopped being pushed they returned back to something neutral. The people who were pushing the tags in that direction were removed. I want to see a website like Twitter have absolutely no people are ever interested in doing something like that. For the employee account, it's not something I care about personally, but from the perspective of Twitter as a business, being able to have a smaller number of better employees is ultimately a win because the company is able to do more with less money, and be more successful as a result. > what else did he do? Not much, which is part of why I'm disappointed.
- anxrn 4y ago
  > there was all sorts of examples of them being a typical social media platform trying to push various ideas using their control. Can you share some of these?
easygenes 4y ago
I mean, PG basically said that a month ago. He’s turned tail pretty quickly. Blocking him might give other more stalwart defenders some pause.
the_snooze 4y ago
What I don't understand is why so many people are so patient to give Musk so much benefit of the doubt, when he's shown zero capacity for even-keeled self-correction.
dingosity 4y ago
- bsuvc 4y ago
  I haven't seen what you're talking about here on HN. My impression is that a lot of people here, including myself, have been taking sort of a wait-and-see approach to Twitter, to avoid overreacting. Are you misinterpreting that as being "Elon orthodoxy" as you called it?
golemotron 4y ago
> What is the grand plan now in their world view? He's getting his enemies to call for free speech and giving them an object lesson in how capricious moderation can be. Sometimes the best way to change minds from a position of power is to get your adversaries to make your case for you.
johnfn 4y ago
Hi, I'm one of those people, I don't have any more grand plans and this is absurd.
deanCommie 4y ago
They're still in denial and posting equivalents of "no one could have ever predicted this" to all the people who absolutely predicted this. There were many of us that could see through Elon's, and Donald's, and SBF's bullshit from day 1. But for too many people, it's just not possible to admit they were wrong, or anyone else might have been right.
panarky 4y ago
pg said almost exactly those words 30 days ago https://imgur.com/a/HtOh4yt https://imgur.com/a/HtOh4yt
riffraff 4y ago
No worries, you can still contact PG on Mastodon.
dm319 4y ago
Honestly, I care less about 'fixing' something so it is profitable, and more about what ethical compass people are using to make their decisions. A couple months ago it was the free speech absolutionists versus those who felt some form of regulation is needed. Now we seem to be asking "if there are limits to free speech, should discussing other media platforms be part of that?". This makes me think that we, as a world, are failing at building an ethical framework for people to work by. Why is it that so many of us struggle to evaluate what is ethical and what isn't? It isn't taught at school, except in the context of religion. We all need to understand the principals of autonomy, beneficience, nonmaleficence & justice for starters.

dbreunig 4y ago

Well you could ask paulg, who said that. But use email, not twitter.

ColinWright 4y ago
Or use Mastodon ...

bioemerl 4y ago

I had hopes. Twitter was terribly run and there was all sorts of examples of them being a typical social media platform trying to push various ideas using their control. Elon could have come in, aligned the website to be a lot more neutral, slimmed down the employee count and pushed for more features and more payments for features to get away from dependence on advertisers. I saw some headline a few weeks ago about Japanese trending on Twitter went from a whole bunch of political stuff to more neutral cultural stuff. Stuff like that is what I wanted to see. Instead we're getting this hilarious situation where Elon is using his authority to ban everything he doesn't like. It's worse than it was.

causality0 4y ago
I miss the Elon Musk of a decade ago.
- falcolas 4y ago
  He was totally better at masking a decade ago, I'll agree with that.
  - capableweb 4y ago
    There is also the fact that some people change over time. Not saying Musk wasn't always like this, but it's possible that he wasn't before, and turned into it over time. Like my mother always used to say: "You're a liberal now, but when you get older you'll be more conservative!". Not that she was right about me, but in general I think she was right that sometimes people change.
themitigating 4y ago
Nepotism? Was that even an accusation against the previous Twitter?
- bioemerl 4y ago
  I use that word roughly to mean that they had their own internal clique, standards that they wanted to apply to the rest of the world, and that small group of people was trying to govern a very large group of people. I changed my phrasing to remove that term, because that's not quite what it means.
DiNovi 4y ago
the fact that you thought the site wasn’t already neutral but just overwhelmed with content reports and that it is simply impossible to fairly moderate is a good indication you’re being duped in other areas, fyi
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- bioemerl 4y ago
  I still don't think the site was neutral, I just also think the current person is also not neutral and is worse.
djur 4y ago
The one good thing that's come out of Musk's ownership of Twitter is that we now have extensive public evidence that Twitter staff bent over backwards to maintain objective moderation standards even in the face of unprecedented challenges. The "leftist cabal" theories are thoroughly disproven now. And we see now the kind of actions that an actual ideological cabal would take if they controlled Twitter.
- beaned 4y ago
  This seems like gaslighting? My interpretation of the recent files reports were the opposite.
- imwillofficial 4y ago
  Wait what? Not my take on this at all.
- paganel 4y ago
  > The "leftist cabal" theories are thoroughly disproven now. Just the other day there was a post in here of the FBI getting actively involved in censoring Twitter content, if it had been only the "leftist cabal" involved (btw, there's nothing genuinely "leftist" about those people, but that's another story) things would have been way better.
  - djur 4y ago
    The FBI passed along reports they received of possible violations of Twitter TOS (something we already knew they did), and the evidence is clear that they did not limit these reports to conservative accounts (something that has been claimed, but which never made sense, considering the FBI's historical Republican lean).
    - paganel 4y ago
      > The FBI passed along reports they received of possible violations of Twitter TOS (something we already knew they did), I.e. censorship. Why the heck does the FBI get involved in the TOS enforcement of some website on the Internet? (if not for controlling the discourse, that is).
themitigating 4y ago
"Elon could have come in, aligned the website to be a lot more neutral" How? "slimmed down the employee count" Why would you care about this? How could he know which half of the company should be fired? How does this improve Twitter? " and pushed for more features and more payments for features to get away from dependence on advertisers." Besides paying to be verified, a system which changed rapidly over weeks being enabled and disabled, what else did he do? "I saw some headline a few weeks ago about Japanese trending on Twitter went from a whole bunch of political stuff to more neutral cultural stuff" What does this mean? That the Japanese Twitter population all shifted to discussing culture over politics? Why would they do that? What does it have to do with Elon Musk taking over? "Stuff like that is what I wanted to see." Culture is shaped by politics, at least to some degree. Also "culture wars"
- bioemerl 4y ago
  How? Look to that example about Japan. The idea is that the Japanese Twitter population did not shift over to discussing culture over politics. Instead, the tags were being pushed towards politics, and once they stopped being pushed they returned back to something neutral. The people who were pushing the tags in that direction were removed. I want to see a website like Twitter have absolutely no people are ever interested in doing something like that. For the employee account, it's not something I care about personally, but from the perspective of Twitter as a business, being able to have a smaller number of better employees is ultimately a win because the company is able to do more with less money, and be more successful as a result. > what else did he do? Not much, which is part of why I'm disappointed.
anxrn 4y ago
> there was all sorts of examples of them being a typical social media platform trying to push various ideas using their control. Can you share some of these?

easygenes 4y ago

I mean, PG basically said that a month ago. He’s turned tail pretty quickly. Blocking him might give other more stalwart defenders some pause.

the_snooze 4y ago

What I don't understand is why so many people are so patient to give Musk so much benefit of the doubt, when he's shown zero capacity for even-keeled self-correction.

dingosity 4y ago

bsuvc 4y ago
I haven't seen what you're talking about here on HN. My impression is that a lot of people here, including myself, have been taking sort of a wait-and-see approach to Twitter, to avoid overreacting. Are you misinterpreting that as being "Elon orthodoxy" as you called it?

golemotron 4y ago

> What is the grand plan now in their world view? He's getting his enemies to call for free speech and giving them an object lesson in how capricious moderation can be. Sometimes the best way to change minds from a position of power is to get your adversaries to make your case for you.

johnfn 4y ago

Hi, I'm one of those people, I don't have any more grand plans and this is absurd.

deanCommie 4y ago

They're still in denial and posting equivalents of "no one could have ever predicted this" to all the people who absolutely predicted this. There were many of us that could see through Elon's, and Donald's, and SBF's bullshit from day 1. But for too many people, it's just not possible to admit they were wrong, or anyone else might have been right.

panarky 4y ago

pg said almost exactly those words 30 days ago https://imgur.com/a/HtOh4yt https://imgur.com/a/HtOh4yt

riffraff 4y ago

No worries, you can still contact PG on Mastodon.

dm319 4y ago

Honestly, I care less about 'fixing' something so it is profitable, and more about what ethical compass people are using to make their decisions. A couple months ago it was the free speech absolutionists versus those who felt some form of regulation is needed. Now we seem to be asking "if there are limits to free speech, should discussing other media platforms be part of that?". This makes me think that we, as a world, are failing at building an ethical framework for people to work by. Why is it that so many of us struggle to evaluate what is ethical and what isn't? It isn't taught at school, except in the context of religion. We all need to understand the principals of autonomy, beneficience, nonmaleficence & justice for starters.