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It's baffling to me that Elon seems to be taking the opposite of a first-principles view on Twitter. He fails to realize _why_ Twitter uniquely has the reach t
by mvkel 4y ago
It's baffling to me that Elon seems to be taking the opposite of a first-principles view on Twitter.
He fails to realize _why_ Twitter uniquely has the reach that it does. It's because it's platform-agnostic in a lot of ways. It's the base-level social protocol that all other platforms are adjacent to.
By removing that connection, it completely nerfs that influence and Twitter becomes just another social network.
I also fail to see how users could think this is reasonable considering Twitter has no way to upload long-form video. So how could YouTube be a competitor?
And the policy doesn't talk about Tiktok whatsoever, which is arguably an actual threat to Twitter, since it replaced Vine.
Overall, something's fishy.
- rsanheim 4y agoIt isn't baffling at all. It was entirely predictable by looking at his past behavior. The thai cave diver incident and Elon's slander. The hyperloop failure. The continual empty promises of FSD for tesla. His attempts to manipulate the market thru his posts, which the SEC slapped his write for. Why would Elon take a first-principles approach, instead of the selfish, short-sighted approach of an insecure, lonely, overbearing billionaire with too much money and too many adoring fans?
- TOMDM 4y agoHyperloop wasn't a failure at all, it did exactly what it was meant to; kill off attempts to get more railway projects started in California.
- wilg 4y agoThis take on the Hyperloop thing is totally trumped-up. There is no evidence it was meant to kill off new railway projects, nor any evidence that it did. Elon was just paraphrased in a book about how he thought the particular California HSR project was a boondoggle (a view shared by many) and he published an idea for how to do it better.
- jeffbee 4y agoHyperloop wasn't an idea for "how to do it better" because Hyperloop cannot do "it" at all. The nameplate capacity of Hyperloop, granting all of Musk's fantasy parameters, is in the low thousands of passengers per day. High speed rail can land a thousand people every minute.
- wilg 4y agoWhether you think the idea is good is irrelevant to my point.
- jeffbee 4y agoI don't agree. The whole Hyperloop thing was not an alternative implementation it was a pitch for a completely different society altogether. Instead of moving everyone in California at a reasonable price, let's have a giant infrastructure that is at least as large and disruptive as rail but only serves a tiny slice of the ultra-rich, everyone else has to take a car. It wasn't "how to do it better" it was an attempt to reframe the entire question of whether medium-distance mass transportation should exist.
- wilg 4y agoI don’t know where you’re getting this from. The idea has nothing to do with only serving “a tiny slice of the ultra rich”. You’re adding all this dramatic extra stuff about society and reframing.
- rainsford 4y agoIsn't there a pretty solid argument to be made that hyperloop (and especially what Boring Company is actually building) is so dumb that it shouldn't seriously be treated as a good faith solution and other motivations should be considered?
- throwaway2037 4y agoNit pick: About Japan's busiest high-speed rail line (Tokaido Shinkansen), Wiki says: At peak times, the line carries up to 16 trains per hour in each direction with 16 cars each (1,323-seat capacity and occasionally additional standing passengers) with a minimum headway of three minutes between trains. Not exactly "a thousand people every minute", but I agree with the jist of your post. High speed rail has orders of magnitude higher capacity.
- AnimalMuppet 4y agoMind sharing your evidence that that was Hyperloop's intended effect?
- ciabattabread 4y agoCalifornia does a fine job killing railway projects all by itself. It doesn't need Elon Musk.
- jeffbee 4y agoUnfortunately there's not some kind of reward for spotting Musk for the person he really is at first glance.
- fhd2 4y agoThere is; grim satisfaction. I'm enjoying it quite a bit over the last couple of weeks.
- jxf 4y agoI am decidedly not a genius, but TSLA put options are my most profitable investment this year.
- jeffbee 4y agoThat's great for you, congrats. But that was in like year 20 of Elon Musk being a notorious jackass. Someone who shorted Tesla early on based on Musk being a charlatan would have got their face ripped off.
- jxf 4y agoFor sure. I am not claiming to be first, just that I felt thar this year could be the straw that broke the camel's back.
- yokoprime 4y agoWith his other failures, he's gotten away with it since he always had the "genius at work" aura, and investors (and I guess people in general) just subscribed to the idea that these endeavors were works in progress. Now the vail has been lifted for all to see, and some of what made him attractive to investors is fading away
- fluidcruft 4y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ky7DMCHQJZY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ky7DMCHQJZY
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Tiktaalik 4y agoI don't understand how anyone could look at everything Elon has done around the Boring Company and still think he's some sort of genius.
- mmsimanga 4y agoIMHO you can be a genius in a few areas of expertise but you cannot be a genius at everything. There is no such thing as a person who is a genius at everything so every person we call a genius is actually a genius at a few things at most and not all things.
- heavyset_go 4y agoIMO, the only thing Musk is a genius at is using money to create a rabid cult of personality. He's very good at that.
- spoonjim 4y agoOmission of TikTok is because the CCP has Tesla by the short and curlies
- jacquesm 4y agoThat's my reading as well.
- BulgarianIdiot 4y agoHis first principles seem be to get what he wants through brute force. He'll realize that he doesn't have the brute force to control the online communication of 450 million people.
- influxmoment 4y agoGood observation. Dealing with non mechanical objects is not his strength
- AJ007 4y agoThe message over the past week has been pretty clear -- the rules change without notice and will be changed based on what pisses elon off. That make Twitter now a niche message board. All of the elaborate justifications and explanations for buying Twitter and what was going on wrong over there while it was public have been thrown out the window, no matter what your point of view was. The fact that this most recent one targeted nearly the entire user base across nearly every interest group is probably Twitter's equivalent event of what happened to Digg and Myspace. There may be nothing he can do now to reverse a network collapse. This should be a good thing, if the user base is able to migrant to open platforms. If they head back to Facebook and Instagram, then its a loss. Elon might be getting margin called on Tesla right now, which could wipe him out financially. That would go a long way to explaining the poor decision making.
- cesarb 4y ago> Twitter's equivalent event of what happened to Digg and Myspace. A closer equivalent might be what happened to Freenode.
- stanleydrew 4y ago> Elon might be getting margin called on Tesla right now, which could wipe him out financially. I don't think this is how margin calls work. Presuming your broker is properly managing risk, then a margin call is explicitly designed to not wipe you out financially. You have to put up more capital or sell positions in order to maintain a certain amount of equity in your account, and that required amount is never zero (again, if your broker/lender is managing risk properly). Of course it is a stressful situation, and he may need to sell assets at "unfavorable" prices which would effectively lock-in some reduced paper wealth. But I don't think a margin call is going to wipe him out.
- Eji1700 4y agoDepends on your definition of wiped out. In order to get the loans for this he wound up putting up a ton of Tesla stock. He won’t be poor, but he could possibly lose control of Tesla and likely by extension things like space x. He’ll likely never be poor but he’ll lose his relevance
- wereallterrrist 4y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33991851 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33991851 Why is it so plainly obvious to many of us and so god damn impossible for others to see it. Elon is not a genius. You got duped. Just accept it and realize he's a petty tyrant whose ego is exploding. It explains every single thing that has happened, and yet people are so desperate not to accept it.
- mistermann 4y ago> Why is it so plainly obvious to many of us and so god damn impossible for others to see it. Technically? That is the nature of consciousness. Though that's no fun, so how about: some people are just stupid - the ones who have a different opinion than the observer.
- Eji1700 4y agoHe’s a less self aware Steve Jobs. For whatever reason people will throw themselves on the tracks for them.
- actionfromafar 4y agoYes, well put. Steve was ... scary, but at least he seemed to know it.
- zamalek 4y agoElon is a yes-man. Steve Jobs was a no-man. Being a yes-man doesn't make you categorically stupid, but a no-man is strictly further along in some of the dimensions of intellect and creativity.
- cloutchaser 4y agoI don't think you can build tesla and spacex without being a no-man in certain fields. It's just that Elon got bored, and he entered a new realm of a social network product, not an engineering product, and he's finding out quickly how different that is. At the same time, I do think Elon's asperger type genius is definitely more suited to engineering startups, and Job's super sensitive artist level narcissism is more suited to UX intensive startups. Elon ventured where he shouldn't have.
- rufus_foreman 4y ago>> It's the base-level social protocol that all other platforms are adjacent to I have no idea what this means.
- reneberlin 4y agoi think: http is meant. The "link" is one or "the" feature that makes the whole thing work. And it is not meant to be restictive. You link to whereever you want. That was the idea of the WWW (tim bernes lee). No restrictions at all in the base of the protocol. The opposite is true: everythink is and has to be inter-linkable. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypertext_Transfer_Protocol https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypertext_Transfer_Protocol
- mvkel 4y agoWhat I meant was if you were primarily on YouTube, you still had a Twitter. On insta? You still had a Twitter. LinkedIn? Twitter. Blog/website? Twitter. Everyone had a Twitter regardless of where their meat and potatoes content was.
- rufus_foreman 4y ago
- wholinator2 4y agoI have no idea what _you're_ talking about. I feel like they've explained their point. What about it do you not understand/disagree with?
- gonehome 4y agoHe’s just being intentionally obtuse, not worth engaging with that type of commenter. I know it’s a bit of a trope, but HN has really declined. Lots of topics just have no valuable discussion here anymore and unfortunately anything Elon Musk related is one of them (anything cryptocurrency related is another).
- mr_toad 4y ago> It's baffling to me that Elon seems to be taking the opposite of a first-principles view on Twitter. Power corrupts. The radical idealist who becomes a despotic tyrant is practically a meme.
- rainsford 4y agoI think power can in fact corrupt, but I think the simpler explanation in many cases (as it almost certainly is with Elon and Twitter) is that the expressed ideals were in fact complete bullshit and despotic tyranny was always the intended outcome. Noble ideals are always a good cover for less than noble goals, and while actual idealists definitely exist, everything Elon Musk has ever said or done suggests it's smart to assume he's in the former camp until proven otherwise.
- andreyk 4y agoI use Twitter, and most users are totally baffled, even more than they have been before with prior bans. Musk just keeps finding new ways to alienate users. It was one thing to ban links to Mastodon, but to Instagram and Facebook and link tree? That's going to piss off a lot of people...
- whatyesaid 4y agoLong form video is a paid feature of Twitter Blue marked as 'coming soon'.