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It seems like it would be the smart move to hire someone with expertise in social media, give them his high-level vision, and let them implement the details. Th

It seems like it would be the smart move to hire someone with expertise in social media, give them his high-level vision, and let them implement the details. The last few weeks of Elon's micromanagement have been a complete shitshow.

wmf 4y ago
Everyone with expertise in social media hates Elon's high-level vision.
- BulgarianIdiot 4y ago
  Depends what we mean by his high-level vision. If it's the "everything app", I'd say that vision is not bad by default, but the details matter. But if his high-level vision is described by his actions so far... oh my God, yeah, no one would wanna touch that with a thousand mile pole.
  - sqlcommando 4y ago
    "Everything app" seems like a great vision. Let's not get hung up on the details of, you know... everything.
    - ssnistfajen 4y ago
      It's fun to think about until you realize building the company/service portofolio that can support a mega-app would almost certainly attract ire from regulators even within the U.S., ignoring the amount of capital investment required to achieve it. Plus, Uber/Spotify/Doordash/Yelp can barely turn a profit as-is. What incentives will the everything app offer to pull consumers away from these existing competitors other than subsidizing the services with VC money, which would only worsen profitability and sustainability?
      - BulgarianIdiot 4y ago
        Let's imagine Google Cloud, AWS, Azure are resp. Google's / Amazon's / Microsoft's everything apps. They are managing to handle the regulatory weight of supporting applications of all kinds of nature, and if you rethink Twitter as a platform you can do the same as well. Many things are possible, and the Twitter app today may even continue to work as-is. But underneath it will be able to power more apps and more use cases, all tied under a common cohesive set of interactive primitives, much higher level than what cloud applications today support. This means less to reinvent, less to rediscover, and easier more natural integration between apps, services and components. It'd be a lot of work, definitely not a 2-3 month project. So you'd need also a survival strategy that keeps Twitter 1.0 working and profitable.
        ssnistfajen 4y ago
        Google, Amazon, and Microsoft absolutely do not have "everything" apps. Google Maps is the closest to a mega-app and it's still highly focused on things that are location-based. These companies also don't favour their own services over others on their cloud platforms. That's why regulators aren't coming after them. Twitter is not a cloud service provider and it's not hard to see why the argument you presented does not hold up.
        BulgarianIdiot 4y ago
        I'll be brief so you hopefully see my point: 1. A general purpose computing platform is an everything app. 2. Cloud platforms and their APIs are a significant step towards moving higher-level in development platforms compared to, say, compiling a raw binary and running it on Linux. 3. Keep moving in that direction.
        ssnistfajen 4y ago
        1. The "everything app" being talked about is essentially a Chinese tech giant mega-app, which are absolutely not general purpose computing platforms which are not "apps" themselves. 2. Agreed but this has nothing to do with Twitter or mega-apps whatsoever. 3. Transitioning to cloud service is not what Twitter needs to do right now even under the mega-app vision. And attempting so under their current situation is a sure fire way to actually go bankrupt.
    - BulgarianIdiot 4y ago
      Haha, funny response, but I did say the details matter ;-) I may be projecting my own ideas onto "everything". When Elon took over Twitter, I was inspired by his idea, and combined with concepts from some projects I'm working on, over two weeks or so, in my free time I wrote like 50+ pages of notes on what "Twitter 2.0" might be. Is Elon's idea anything close to so comprehensive, I don't know. We only know he wanted payments in it, but this is barely scratching the surface of what Twitter could be. Twitter's timeline of messages could be seen as a communication platform, computation platform, verified facts registry and so on. The rabbit hole is deep if you let your fantasy run wild. Alas... instead we have this today.
      - pram 4y ago
        You put more thought into it than he did.
- newZWhoDis 4y ago
  And I hate just about anyone you probably consider an experts “vision” on social media, especially since what it ended up becoming was a “”private”” end run around the 1st and 4th amendments. It really is perfect, a not-government entity making wink-wink decisions at the behest of unelected executive branch employees.
- pseudo0 4y ago
  What it looks like Elon is trying to do is: - Level the playing field between the "blue-checks" and everyone else. I think the intent of that is to encourage the 90% of people who passively consume content to engage more, and encourage lurkers without accounts to sign up. - Reduce the dependency on advertisers by pivoting to a model that is partly user-funded. Reddit seems to have had some success with this, for example. - Signal that Twitter is going to be less politically partisan going forward, probably in an attempt to rope back in users who moved to right-wing Twitter clones. I don't think those are objectively terrible ideas, but the implementation so far has been remarkably bad.
  - bb88 4y ago
    > ... probably in an attempt to rope back in users who moved to right-wing Twitter clones. The problem with Twitter isn't free speech, but objective reality. There's only room for one reality on Twitter -- not two, or three, or four. Truth Social and the right wing platforms don't challenge people's view that the 2020 election was a fraud, that pizza gate really happened, so they will probably continue now as they are.
    - pseudo0 4y ago
      For a lot of right-wing people I have spoken to, the Hunter Biden story getting falsely removed for "Russian disinformation" was the last straw. Think of it as a dumb scandal if you want, but the issue was a legitimate news story published by high-profile mainstream news outlets getting removed using counter-disinformation tools. That really damaged Twitter's credibility. Now they would rather hang out on a site where they don't have to worry about overbearing moderation, at the cost of a handful of nutters talking about Satanic rituals or whatever. I think Musk had a plausible route to getting those users back if he could promise slightly more limited and fair enforcement of the rules.
      - bb88 4y ago
        Is it the fact they don't want anyone to question their belief system? Because that's what I see. When they are questioned, they martyrize themselves to spark more outrage. (I'm a victim of the woke left!) And then use that as a crutch to deflect further criticism or questions. If it wasn't Hunter Biden's Laptop, it would be something else, e.g. Pizzagate, Voting Machines, Mail-in Balloting, Fake school shootings, etc. You can't blame the mainstream media if you're the one that's calling "wolf" over and over without facts.
- dotnet00 4y ago
  Most self-proclaimed "experts in social media" seem to be responsible for making it the disaster that it is for our societies. The one thing that has definitely been refreshing about new Twitter is that the leader isn't yet another "social media expert" and just another social media user with similar complaints as millions of other users. Personally I really hope they also get rid of the "UX experts" next, given how shit Twitter's UX is, especially on anything that isn't a phone.
  - sdenton4 4y ago
    The problem is that people who want to do social media will become what they hate, because of the very real constraints which people learn about quickly once they're actually steering the ship. Very few social media places don't suck, and it takes a pretty heavy hand to keep things from going completely to hell. The two places I know which aren't hives of scum and villainy are HN and Metafilter; both are heavily moderated, text only, and basically ad free.
    - dotnet00 4y ago
      I feel like to an extent that is the usual response to any sort of attempt at disruption. For example, prior to Falcon 9 the argument used to be that SpaceX too would have to either succumb to relying on expensive cost-plus contracts or go bust like all other space companies before them. Yet, as they pushed up against that attitude and tried their own approach, they became successful and set the model that has now led to hundreds of new private space companies. Similarly, the argument against reusing F9 was that it wouldn't fly often enough to pay for reuse. Thus I think that it isn't too crazy to consider that maybe with all this fiddling around they might stumble upon a more healthy model for social media for their scale. Especially considering that this environment of a large platform with an existing userbase undergoing said change is very unique (in that most other attempts at healthier social media have failed in part due to not being able to rely on pre-existing network effects). Maybe they'll still fail, but I think it's still worth trying (even if it kills Twitter) rather than just appointing another 'expert' to continue to make things worse. Especially because it isn't my own money on the line :)
- notahacker 4y ago
  Does he even have a high level vision beyond generating a reaction? (The "free speech platform" sounded like a vision, but we wouldn't have new banning offences every five minutes if that had been a serious consideration rather than something he said for the likes)
  - ssnistfajen 4y ago
    His high level vision was to create "X the everything app" in the style of mega-apps offered by Chinese tech giants. Not only does this vision require clearing massive regulatory hurdles, secure immense amount of capital funding, and acquire/build a highly diversified portofolio of companies covering multiple unrelated consumer sectors, there's probably nobody willing or capable to take that job.
- LudwigNagasena 4y ago
  I am sure you wanted to make Elon look like a bad guy, but saying that people from Facebook and Tiktok hate Elon's vision does the exact opposite.
  - noirbot 4y ago
    I'm not sure it's meant to make him look good or bad as much as just say "What person who Elon would agree with, who also has an idea of how to run a social media/moderation business, would agree to work for him and implement his vision." The problem with being someone with ideas outside of the rest of your community is that you generally can't find other people with complimentary skills who agree with you.
  - philistine 4y ago
    Two bads don't make a right.
- salamo 4y ago
  More fundamentally, it's not clear there is a coherent high-level vision. You can either - allow all legal speech; or - ban doxxing, publicly available location info, bots, spam, info critical of Musk/Twitter, parody, links to other social media, and Kanye West
bilbo0s 4y ago
Whatever you think about removing Elon as head of Twitter, whether you believe that to be smart or not, this is just not how you go about making decisions as a leader. Think of it this way, will Elon be conducting a new poll on whether or not to fire his replacement in a year's time? (Because that's what this type of decision making process leads to.) This is not sustainable because it does not bring any sort of stability.
sillysaurusx 4y ago
MySpace Tom seemed to be interested: https://twitter.com/myspacetom/status/1604658018213195777?s=61&t=Y6A1xo79ynDA4oNANVRPDg https://twitter.com/myspacetom/status/1604658018213195777?s=... Imagine if Tom ran twitter. We’d truly be in the best timeline.
bouk 4y ago
If only there was someone with expertise in social media at Twitter
CaptainZapp 4y ago
Which high level executive would want to work for this guy after the public shit show on display for the last few weeks? Specifically how he treats his underlings.

wmf 4y ago

Everyone with expertise in social media hates Elon's high-level vision.

BulgarianIdiot 4y ago
Depends what we mean by his high-level vision. If it's the "everything app", I'd say that vision is not bad by default, but the details matter. But if his high-level vision is described by his actions so far... oh my God, yeah, no one would wanna touch that with a thousand mile pole.
- sqlcommando 4y ago
  "Everything app" seems like a great vision. Let's not get hung up on the details of, you know... everything.
  - ssnistfajen 4y ago
    It's fun to think about until you realize building the company/service portofolio that can support a mega-app would almost certainly attract ire from regulators even within the U.S., ignoring the amount of capital investment required to achieve it. Plus, Uber/Spotify/Doordash/Yelp can barely turn a profit as-is. What incentives will the everything app offer to pull consumers away from these existing competitors other than subsidizing the services with VC money, which would only worsen profitability and sustainability?
    - BulgarianIdiot 4y ago
      Let's imagine Google Cloud, AWS, Azure are resp. Google's / Amazon's / Microsoft's everything apps. They are managing to handle the regulatory weight of supporting applications of all kinds of nature, and if you rethink Twitter as a platform you can do the same as well. Many things are possible, and the Twitter app today may even continue to work as-is. But underneath it will be able to power more apps and more use cases, all tied under a common cohesive set of interactive primitives, much higher level than what cloud applications today support. This means less to reinvent, less to rediscover, and easier more natural integration between apps, services and components. It'd be a lot of work, definitely not a 2-3 month project. So you'd need also a survival strategy that keeps Twitter 1.0 working and profitable.
      - ssnistfajen 4y ago
        Google, Amazon, and Microsoft absolutely do not have "everything" apps. Google Maps is the closest to a mega-app and it's still highly focused on things that are location-based. These companies also don't favour their own services over others on their cloud platforms. That's why regulators aren't coming after them. Twitter is not a cloud service provider and it's not hard to see why the argument you presented does not hold up.
        BulgarianIdiot 4y ago
        I'll be brief so you hopefully see my point: 1. A general purpose computing platform is an everything app. 2. Cloud platforms and their APIs are a significant step towards moving higher-level in development platforms compared to, say, compiling a raw binary and running it on Linux. 3. Keep moving in that direction.
        ssnistfajen 4y ago
        1. The "everything app" being talked about is essentially a Chinese tech giant mega-app, which are absolutely not general purpose computing platforms which are not "apps" themselves. 2. Agreed but this has nothing to do with Twitter or mega-apps whatsoever. 3. Transitioning to cloud service is not what Twitter needs to do right now even under the mega-app vision. And attempting so under their current situation is a sure fire way to actually go bankrupt.
  - BulgarianIdiot 4y ago
    Haha, funny response, but I did say the details matter ;-) I may be projecting my own ideas onto "everything". When Elon took over Twitter, I was inspired by his idea, and combined with concepts from some projects I'm working on, over two weeks or so, in my free time I wrote like 50+ pages of notes on what "Twitter 2.0" might be. Is Elon's idea anything close to so comprehensive, I don't know. We only know he wanted payments in it, but this is barely scratching the surface of what Twitter could be. Twitter's timeline of messages could be seen as a communication platform, computation platform, verified facts registry and so on. The rabbit hole is deep if you let your fantasy run wild. Alas... instead we have this today.
    - pram 4y ago
      You put more thought into it than he did.
newZWhoDis 4y ago
And I hate just about anyone you probably consider an experts “vision” on social media, especially since what it ended up becoming was a “”private”” end run around the 1st and 4th amendments. It really is perfect, a not-government entity making wink-wink decisions at the behest of unelected executive branch employees.
pseudo0 4y ago
What it looks like Elon is trying to do is: - Level the playing field between the "blue-checks" and everyone else. I think the intent of that is to encourage the 90% of people who passively consume content to engage more, and encourage lurkers without accounts to sign up. - Reduce the dependency on advertisers by pivoting to a model that is partly user-funded. Reddit seems to have had some success with this, for example. - Signal that Twitter is going to be less politically partisan going forward, probably in an attempt to rope back in users who moved to right-wing Twitter clones. I don't think those are objectively terrible ideas, but the implementation so far has been remarkably bad.
- bb88 4y ago
  > ... probably in an attempt to rope back in users who moved to right-wing Twitter clones. The problem with Twitter isn't free speech, but objective reality. There's only room for one reality on Twitter -- not two, or three, or four. Truth Social and the right wing platforms don't challenge people's view that the 2020 election was a fraud, that pizza gate really happened, so they will probably continue now as they are.
  - pseudo0 4y ago
    For a lot of right-wing people I have spoken to, the Hunter Biden story getting falsely removed for "Russian disinformation" was the last straw. Think of it as a dumb scandal if you want, but the issue was a legitimate news story published by high-profile mainstream news outlets getting removed using counter-disinformation tools. That really damaged Twitter's credibility. Now they would rather hang out on a site where they don't have to worry about overbearing moderation, at the cost of a handful of nutters talking about Satanic rituals or whatever. I think Musk had a plausible route to getting those users back if he could promise slightly more limited and fair enforcement of the rules.
    - bb88 4y ago
      Is it the fact they don't want anyone to question their belief system? Because that's what I see. When they are questioned, they martyrize themselves to spark more outrage. (I'm a victim of the woke left!) And then use that as a crutch to deflect further criticism or questions. If it wasn't Hunter Biden's Laptop, it would be something else, e.g. Pizzagate, Voting Machines, Mail-in Balloting, Fake school shootings, etc. You can't blame the mainstream media if you're the one that's calling "wolf" over and over without facts.
dotnet00 4y ago
Most self-proclaimed "experts in social media" seem to be responsible for making it the disaster that it is for our societies. The one thing that has definitely been refreshing about new Twitter is that the leader isn't yet another "social media expert" and just another social media user with similar complaints as millions of other users. Personally I really hope they also get rid of the "UX experts" next, given how shit Twitter's UX is, especially on anything that isn't a phone.
- sdenton4 4y ago
  The problem is that people who want to do social media will become what they hate, because of the very real constraints which people learn about quickly once they're actually steering the ship. Very few social media places don't suck, and it takes a pretty heavy hand to keep things from going completely to hell. The two places I know which aren't hives of scum and villainy are HN and Metafilter; both are heavily moderated, text only, and basically ad free.
  - dotnet00 4y ago
    I feel like to an extent that is the usual response to any sort of attempt at disruption. For example, prior to Falcon 9 the argument used to be that SpaceX too would have to either succumb to relying on expensive cost-plus contracts or go bust like all other space companies before them. Yet, as they pushed up against that attitude and tried their own approach, they became successful and set the model that has now led to hundreds of new private space companies. Similarly, the argument against reusing F9 was that it wouldn't fly often enough to pay for reuse. Thus I think that it isn't too crazy to consider that maybe with all this fiddling around they might stumble upon a more healthy model for social media for their scale. Especially considering that this environment of a large platform with an existing userbase undergoing said change is very unique (in that most other attempts at healthier social media have failed in part due to not being able to rely on pre-existing network effects). Maybe they'll still fail, but I think it's still worth trying (even if it kills Twitter) rather than just appointing another 'expert' to continue to make things worse. Especially because it isn't my own money on the line :)
notahacker 4y ago
Does he even have a high level vision beyond generating a reaction? (The "free speech platform" sounded like a vision, but we wouldn't have new banning offences every five minutes if that had been a serious consideration rather than something he said for the likes)
- ssnistfajen 4y ago
  His high level vision was to create "X the everything app" in the style of mega-apps offered by Chinese tech giants. Not only does this vision require clearing massive regulatory hurdles, secure immense amount of capital funding, and acquire/build a highly diversified portofolio of companies covering multiple unrelated consumer sectors, there's probably nobody willing or capable to take that job.
LudwigNagasena 4y ago
I am sure you wanted to make Elon look like a bad guy, but saying that people from Facebook and Tiktok hate Elon's vision does the exact opposite.
- noirbot 4y ago
  I'm not sure it's meant to make him look good or bad as much as just say "What person who Elon would agree with, who also has an idea of how to run a social media/moderation business, would agree to work for him and implement his vision." The problem with being someone with ideas outside of the rest of your community is that you generally can't find other people with complimentary skills who agree with you.
- philistine 4y ago
  Two bads don't make a right.
salamo 4y ago
More fundamentally, it's not clear there is a coherent high-level vision. You can either - allow all legal speech; or - ban doxxing, publicly available location info, bots, spam, info critical of Musk/Twitter, parody, links to other social media, and Kanye West

bilbo0s 4y ago

Whatever you think about removing Elon as head of Twitter, whether you believe that to be smart or not, this is just not how you go about making decisions as a leader. Think of it this way, will Elon be conducting a new poll on whether or not to fire his replacement in a year's time? (Because that's what this type of decision making process leads to.) This is not sustainable because it does not bring any sort of stability.

sillysaurusx 4y ago

MySpace Tom seemed to be interested: https://twitter.com/myspacetom/status/1604658018213195777?s=61&t=Y6A1xo79ynDA4oNANVRPDg https://twitter.com/myspacetom/status/1604658018213195777?s=... Imagine if Tom ran twitter. We’d truly be in the best timeline.

bouk 4y ago

If only there was someone with expertise in social media at Twitter

CaptainZapp 4y ago

Which high level executive would want to work for this guy after the public shit show on display for the last few weeks? Specifically how he treats his underlings.