Never bet against Elon. Starlink alone will make more money than twitter ever could. If you don’t see the potential for Twitter. That’s fine. But don’t write an article about how it’s “hell” if you don’t have the vision for how to improve it. That’s like someone who has no idea how to cook leaving a bad review for food they could never hope to improve on. If Elon listened to Haters/Doubters like this Verge journo, the world would be worse off.
I doubt it because it's a braindead decision. It's also totally out of his wheelhouse. Twitter is not a commercial product, nor is it an engineering project. It's a forum. A really volatile forum. Elon has no experience moderating forums, he's not a site administrator. If he's the one actually calling the shots he's gonna run it into the ground because it simply isn't his field. This is the acquisition the least similar to any of his other successes he's ever made. Such a business simply doesn't run in the same logic as a contractor or manufacturer.
Besides, a huge number of Twitter's core staff just jumped ship the moment they heard the news. That's the relevant experience. That's their product people. They fled. If the brain drain hits the company hard enough and the loosening of moderation goes particularly poorly the whole site is absolutely doomed and he will lose more money than Yahoo acquiring Tumblr did.
Remember that Elon co-founded x.com, which merged with confinity to form PayPal. WeChat is essentially what Elon wanted x.com to become, so it's not totally out of his wheelhouse.
Turning Twitter into WeChat is probably a bigger challenge than sending a rocket to Mars, but...
> WeChat is essentially what Elon wanted x.com to become
Yeah that doesn't count. Stuff you don't do doesn't count.
Similarly with Tesla, legacy automakers will electrify the world. Being a cheerleader on the side doesn't count.
CEOs are people who sign off quality of life for the people who buy the products/services that the company they lead is selling. And that is all there is to it. There is nothing tough or poetic about it. Sane people are scratching their heads at how some people are falling for the cult of the founder which started with Jobs.
> That’s like someone who has no idea how to cook leaving a bad review for food they could never hope to improve on
Ignoring the context of the article, I don’t believe that the example you’ve given here is really fair. It’s perfectly valid to review something which you could not create. If we excluded that whole category, then reviews would mostly cease to exist, and only peer review would be possible.
IMHO, the world would be a better place of people who're qualified in a particular subject would opine in their area of expertise.
Nowadays, we have every Tom, Dick and Harry commenting on anything and everything, regardless of how informed, educated or even experienced in the area they want to criticize.
> IMHO, the world would be a better place of people who're qualified in a particular subject would opine in their area of expertise.
You can go to sites or youtubers that specialise with reviewing stuff.
The problem is that it's just opinion of a single person & they can be easily bought or swayed so even if you have "experts" reviewing it that doesn't mean quality.
Also don't need an expert to tell you some piece of shit of a device fell apart after a month...
But I do wish that the reviews on sites were actually stuff people write month+ after getting the thing instead of "well, I got it, it works, I tried it for 5 minutes"
Totally agree! Peer review is the only valid feedback in many situations. You don’t see many ultra-successful serial entrepreneurs doubting on Elon! You see many of them driving Teslas.
As someone who has been in the kitchen since childhood, I can appreciate how difficult great food is to create! If I taste something inferior I’m going to be specific with my feedback for improvement, highlighting the good points not just focus on the negatives.
Drives me nuts when at a restaurant with friends/family who haven’t put in the time in the kitchen and couldn’t hope to create a delicious meal dissing the food … if you can’t make something better, either shut up or try to be helpful with your feedback! Being critical is so easy and cliché.
The world needs more optimistic Elons not more doubters.
Although I think it’s always kind to be polite and constructive with feedback, I totally disagree that you have to be as capable a cook as the chef to critique their food.
You don’t have to be a culinary wizard to tell when many foods are overcooked, underseasoned, etc. Sometimes chefs just screw up and a dish has outright unpleasant qualities.
Most people have hundreds or thousands of points of comparison for high-quality food even if they can’t make it themselves. If a restaurant bills itself as high-quality and then doesn’t live up to that standard I think it’s perfectly reasonable to say so.
Is peer review more valuable? Probably. But most restaurant guests aren’t chefs so pleasing non-chefs is valuable too.
You can, because your feedback is constructive and specific.
If you said "idk, this phone just sucks, because i feel like it does and idk how it could be made better", that would fall under "useless complaints". But saying "my phone drops calls often" is a specific complaint with a very specific (implied) improvement suggestion ("make phone not drop calls").
So the cooking thing would be totally valid if the person just said "It was too salty?", allowing the relatively uneducated/unskilled to make claims about quality even though they could never reproduce it? That's not how the original claim was framed.
I agree thay even with "it was too salty", it could be entirely baseless. However, "it was too salty" is still infinitely better than "idk it isnt good". Even if "it was too salty" was incorrect. But that is purely a personal opinion, and imo there is nothing that can substantiate it much.
Success does breed success, but it’s not inevitable. There’s still hard work to be done and his big successes have come from hardware (batteries & rockets). Twitter is software in the social / content realm.
To use your cooking analogy, it’s like saying don’t bet against Gordon Ramsey (an expert in the cooking / media / art / experience realm) if he acquired Virgin Records. I’m sure he has connections and some knowledge that helps, but it’s a new field with new challenges.
Long before there was Tesla and SpaceX there was Zip2 and Paypal; both software. Elon is first and foremost a software engineer. Yes, Twitter is social / content. But who better than someone who understands the platform well enough to have 100 Million followers to help take it to the next level?
> Starlink alone will make more money than twitter ever could.
Is there anything other than aspirational thinking behind this statement? Musk himself has said it's a cash incinerator - and that's by Musk standards (read: used to huge public subsidies and constant capital raises).
Fanboying Elon on the twitter deal of all things is just hilarious. He paid $44B with no diligence for a company with hardly a billion worth of revenue, stagnating growth, a last-generation social graph, an incredibly toxic userbase, and a very demoralized staff--and he has no plan for how to fix it either. This will go down as one of the worst deals in history and here you are saying "but Starlink".
It was a serious question. I thought you were talking about the organizing computer science or social principle of the network but it seems you just meant the age the company was founded or became popular, which is unremarkable. Sorry to bother you.
I'm not the person you originally responded to, I was just clarifying what seemed to be the meaning.
But to say the generations are unremarkable isn't quite true -- the whole point is that previous generations are generally stagnant in growth, unlike the newest generation(s) that are still growing. This is a very valid factor in why investing in TikTok might be a smart idea while investing in Twitter is... not.
Ah, sorry. Yes, there is certainly some value in thinking about the age of the company. But it’s also so strsightforward that I wouldn’t have asked about if it they’d used less ambiguous wording. And I’m a little disappointed that I wasn’t able to be pointed to a cool research paper or something. :) I appreciate you clarifying for them; I like to do similarly on HN when I see two people missing each other’s meanings.
Haters are always telling me not to jump into a barbed-wire-covered nettle bush in a tar pit - why don't any of them have the vision to help me succeed at it? :)
Nilay's job is to generate revenue for The Verge and it's shareholders. You generate revenue by increasing ad views. You can increase ad revenue with controversial hot takes with saucy language.
Nilay is doing the exact right thing, in the context of his corporate job.
Your argument falls apart here, since you can review food without being able to cook said food. For example, you don't need to know how to cook to know that something is burnt and therefore critique it based on that.
What you're really arguing here that Elon Musk is more capable than the previous people in charge of Twitter. I won't defend them much, but based on many of his previous actions I'm skeptical he's going to do any better and in fact think he'll probably do worse than the ex-leadership.
And many more have made an absolute fortune. Down more than 40% this YTD, even worst if you go from ATH to current prices.
It's also been a trader's paradise given the volatility and occasional appearance of someone mysteriously placing huge OTM call purchases for that Friday in an effort to force a gamma squeeze. In a market with regulators this would be suspicious and investigated, but we're in post-GFC America.
In some of those cases, they lost due to unpunished securities fraud though? Tesla should be a fraction of it's valuation. Short selling is an important part of price discovery and attempts to curtail it should be punished IMO.
The article nails the inherent contradiction in optimizing for "free speech" and optimizing for advertising. He has burned 44 billion. He will bleed advertisers and legit users if it becomes a 4chan's pol board.
> Starlink alone will make more money than twitter ever could
In a world where people are increasingly living in urban areas, fiber will annihilate satellite internet.
Starlink is yet another niche thing which Musk is specialized in pursuing.
In fact all of Musck companies can be summarized with "everybody has heard of them in the financial and technology press, but not many people use them"
The rural market, RV market, boating market will always be an enormous niche. But fiber and other broadband tech like 5g wireless may win out in the long or mid term. Leaving only the very secluded rural market.
I would not have guessed that the satellite tv market would have gone on as long as it has, considering how many satellite customers also have access to cable. And yet, you can drive through any suburb and find plenty of dishes.
> In a world where people are increasingly living in urban areas, fiber will annihilate satellite internet.
Fiber may be way better, but putting a glorified wifi router on top of a million dollars worth of kerosene and stainless steel is a great deal cheaper than digging a 1000km long trench.
There aren't many of them compared to the people in cities, but being able to serve the billion or so people that would have to pay hundreds a month for crappy microwave internet with somewhat less crappy space microwave internet sounds like a the one company he's running that isn't fleecing the taxpayers or investors.
Is the population outside areas that could reasonably be served by mobile connections really a billion? A few hundred people around should already be enough for a single tower.
Well even if you only get 10 million customers you break even in overnight costs on your 60k $1m satellites after 6k each. If starship ever materialises, and after making 20k or so satellites they should get cheaper too.
Those hundred people can't dig a particularly long trench or put in more than a few thousand poles for $600,000.
Seems to work out unless I'm vastly over estimating the bandwidth of whatever the bottleneck in the constellation is.
Plus there's all the people in cities willing to pay extra for low latency.
I doubt that actually. I've got Starlink because I despise Comcast. They're my only wired option, even though I live in a largish city. I realize it's possible I'm an outlier, but on the other hand a lot of other people really hate Comcast too. I even had fiber at my old house and really liked it, but it's just not an option where I currently live, and I'd rather use satellite internet than pay for more fiber to be laid.
The relative ease of throwing up a few satellites and selling internet across the globe vs digging trenches to each and every residence make me think it's going to be a very popular internet option very soon.
It never really made sense to me. But then again I live in country that can do mobile infra. 4G and 5G with good availability and affordable or even cheap prices. And we are not even dense.
So I never really got how any other place has any excuses.
Perhaps you dont realize just how not-dense some of the western US is. Looking through counties in Nevada, some of them have less than 1 person per 10 square km.
Rural Eastern Washington has rotting 1Mbps DSL, line-of-sight towers on a few mountains (good luck seeing them), and overloaded 4G internet. And there are thousands and thousands of people here! Fiber-everywhere futurists are seeming more disconnected than Starlink fanboys.
I think Elon will succeed _and_ I agree with almost everything in this verge article. But Elon has been very inconsistent in what he’s said.
It’s impossible for Elon to accomplish his current vision because it’s not internally consistent. You can’t only moderate what is within the law and make Twitter a more friendly place and make it more attractive to advertisers and grow it to a billion users, and make it the defacto public square and make it the free speech public network and eliminate bots, and make X the everything app and fire 75% of twitter employees.
So while I think Elon Musk will succeed, it’s also interesting to point out the paradoxes and difficulty and in doing so elicit curiosity in how he will accomplish his goal. Conservatives seem to be taking a victory lap today, but it’s one of those things where compromise means no one ends up completely happy.
I think there could be a balance here, allow that which is legal but distasteful but don't promote it or advertise beside it. You could probably repurpose some already pre-existing ML models searching for users to ban over takes that are too hot for twitter to mark as un-monatizable. Cleaning house is the way to make this vision of twitter a reality.
Bots I think is both the harder and existential problem.
> I think there could be a balance here, allow that which is legal but distasteful but don't promote it or advertise beside it
OK, but then it's more like blacklisting rather than banning. You're still free to show up and participate, you just can't get access to the biggest audiences.
So then the conversation turns from "why is Twitter blocking my free speech?" to "why is Twitter penalizing my free speech?".
Plus, what's legal speech is a real grey area. Free speech cases constantly go to the Supreme Court because we're talking about a near infinite number of ideas that can be expressed. And intent usually matters. So when Kanye writes his "death con 3" tweet, is it a direct threat to incite violence (not protected), an ambiguous threat that's not actionable (possibly protected), a joke (very likely protected), or as a brand new idea that hasn't been expressed yet (possibly protected)?
At the end of the day, a human has to make a decision. So, we're just swapping Jack's and Parag's vision of content moderation for Elon's, but it'll still be content moderation - perhaps better, perhaps not.
I think your example in Kanye might be a good one.
Maybe his tweet should stay up, ambiguous speech isn’t clearly illegal. Illegal speech is much easier to recognize.
But Twitter probably wouldn’t want to put that tweet on the trending front page or advertise next to it but he has an audience and can continue to interact with and grow his audience.
Minimal regulation as required by law, no moderation, and maximal participation.
I agree this is definitely possible, but if you do all that, is it still the public square open to debate, if you are selectably promoting / monetizing "tasteful" tweets?
Not really. Look at pretty much any reality TV show, or the magazines at any checkout line. Nonsense and drama is big business from an attention and advertising standpoint.
Plus, you can look at most biased news sources and see the drama that they selectively cover under the guise of news. "1 person did a bad thing" and "here's another reason why this entire group is conspiring against you" are not uncommon tropes.
Fair enough, but that’s also why it’s so hard to define your content moderation policy, because the definition of “distasteful”, etc. varies between people and over time.
Media has been going totally in the left direction after Trump won.
I don't really like him, but cancelling people exactly at the same time by all media companies shows that it's all controlled by a few people. Of course they try everything to say bad things about Elon now...it's funny to see actually.
Love to see somebody use the word cancelled, because it means absolutely nothing.
Louie CK jerked off in front of women, got cancelled and got a Grammy last year. He's still wealthy and does shows. So is Kanye. Cancelling doesn't mean shit.
Ye got his deals with Adidas (and others) cancelled and Louie CK got a Netflix show and comedy tour cancelled. In both of your own examples "shit" happened.
Both still have profitable businesses and communication channels. Both are celebrities that still have large fanbases. If and when they end up poor and forgotten, then they'll be canceled, now they just lost the privilege of being promoted via some media channels.
I'm having a hard time defending wealth people who lost a Twitter account because they acted like dicks. Some of them literally.
There's a vast difference between defending them and saying their actions had no consequences. You seem to think that since they are not immediately forgotten, disowned by the public and de-celebrityfied, and plunged into poverty that nothing happened. That's not true, their actions did have consequences. You can not defend them while also acknowledging something did, in fact, happen when they were cancelled.
Sadly as the monetary system is getting more and more unfair and it's getting harder for people to survive, due process and respect of property and privacy rights are getting thrown out of the window.
I'm a benefitor from the low interest rate environment of the last decades (most of us in tech are), but I can understand the billions of people who haven't.
There are certain swimmers who acted not too fairly in a swimming competition, but Twitter management was defending that person. I have no problem with that as it's all politics, I just prefer not having the same political side in all media.
This is why so much hate is directed at Elon. His repeated success in different domains causes severe cognitive dissonance. It's an in your face painful reminder that success isn't entirely due to luck.
It's a lot easier to dismiss someone's success when it only happens once.
Millions of electric cars, thousands of charging stations, thousands of powerwalls, thousands of Starlink satellites and re-usable rockets weren't delivered?
No one delivers 100%, but that's a historically exceptional track record.
Elon predicted in 2013 that Tesla would be shipping 500,000 cars a year by 2020. That was a crazy insane prediction that he delivered on, among many other similar predictions.
Nobody expects all predictions to come true -- professional futurists have a batting rate of about 10%.
Can't wait to see that hot takes from the free speech absolutists who have never experienced that first-hand on a platform they frequent regularly. We already know what that looks like, it's 4chan/8kun/etc and surprise, it's absolute shit.
4chan is a forum. Everyone who browses a 4chan board sees the same posts. For that reason, these boards are moderated, but apparently not heavily enough for the tastes of some people, to whom for 4chan is the epitome of horror.
Twitter is a platform. Everyone who uses twitter decides who to follow and who to block. Everyone sees different tweets.
Twitter for a long time had almost complete freedom of speech. It described itself as the free speech wing of the free speech party[1]. In that time, it had fewer rules then 4chan. But to use twitter did not feel like using 4chan, unless you decided to follow the kind of people who post on 4chan.
This is simply not true, because Twitter algorithmically pushes content you did not subscribe to in order to drive engagement. You do not have control over what you see, and are subject to the controversial subject of the day regardless of who you follow.
Some people will try to push the idea of individualized user-end moderation but that idea has not been successfully implemented since Usenet's Alt heirarchy faded from the internet's popular consciousness. It simply isn't practical and doesn't address that sometimes you just need to kick someone out of the platform for being a caustic shithead.
The lunatic-proof glasses put on by some users won't help the fact that people new to the site will be scared off by all the diarrhea mixed with the slowly disappearing amount of actual content to the point where the people being awful are the only ones left. Eventually they'll entrench their bullshit until that becomes the character of the whole site. Normal people are repulsed by it at first glance and those left only descend deeper and deeper into their own mad echo chamber.
> Some people will try to push the idea of individualized user-end moderation but that idea has not been successfully implemented since Usenet's Alt heirarchy faded from the internet's popular consciousness. It simply isn't practical and doesn't address that sometimes you just need to kick someone out of the platform for being a caustic shithead
I mean you still need some moderation to push the community the right direction but give people ability to downvote toxic shithole to oblivion and block users and a lot of it is already done. The biggest problem is probably brigading and spamming the space with low effort content but first one is rare and second one don't need that much moderation work compared to trying to moderate every comment.
> sometimes you just need to kick someone out of the platform for being a caustic shithead.
This isn't what people are moderated for on twitter. You can pick a random woman on twitter, and identically reply after every tweet she makes that she's just saying that because she's ugly. You can get your friends to join in and organize under a hashtag. Twitter is not interested in moderating that.
I blame it on the hundreds of celebrity reply guys who just wait for a Trump or an Ilhan Omar to tweet, and reply with abusive non-sequiturs. It really should have been nipped at the relatively-benign bud when Zuckerberg's posts on facebook would be accompanied with thousands of comments filled with friend-me spam, or even way back when "Tom's" posts started the same thing on Myspace.
Internet moderation has become fixated on silencing enemies, when it really should have been focused on removing the irrelevant and facetious. Instead of ever censoring the stupid and the spam, the targets became the naysayers and the contrarians. This is nothing but a boon for government and corporate covert interference, because their aim is to disrupt conversations, not to participate in them.
Reddit became wildly successful as a clone of 4chan's textboards using digg's "comment section of the internet" idea of bare links as threadstarters, and barely moderated anything until a few years ago. For that matter, twitter itself barely moderated either until the lead-up to the 2020 election.
I won't energetically argue with you that 4chan and Reddit aren't shit, but plenty of people would. They've both been massively influential on world culture. I would argue that twitter moderation has been almost strictly political and along culture war lines. Reddit, instead, mainly targeted cruelty and child exploitation for moderation.
> Reddit, instead, mainly targeted cruelty and child exploitation for moderation.
Not a redditor, I see? Reddit crushed almost all right wing related subs, most famously r/The_Donald, and the entire gender critical / TERF / radical-feminist / LGB-non-T space. Among others, transgenderism is not a valid topic of discussion on Reddit.
...for you, 4chan is one of the last places on the internet that feel like the old internet, organic, unfiltered, raw. If you can't handle it, there is Facebook for you.
> If you can't handle it, there is Facebook for you.
And Twitter. Similarly if you don't like the filtered environment of these communities there is 4chan/8kun/etc. So then this is a solved problem and all the hand-wringing around the moderation on these platforms is unnecessary?
I think most people that are happy about Elon taking over aren't free speech absolutists in the sense of the term you're using it.
Rather they're just tired of blatant censorship some individuals face when expressing an opinion that goes against popular politics of the time.
There's a middle ground between allowing literal nazi's to do whatever they want and blatantly influencing discussion on a mass scale by silencing those you disagree with.
Maybe they aren't but they are very vague and hand-wavy about the "blatant censorship". Without specific examples of what is being "censored" it's incredibly difficult to have a good-faith discussion on this. I'm much more forgiving of a handful of on-the-line or even "decent" content being removed if it's the exception not the rule. Like it or not a ton of moderation is fully or nearly fully automated since there isn't a viable alternative (You can argue that these companies should be allowed to exist if they can't accomplish human review/moderation, I'm speaking to the current reality).
I'll also be the first to say that Twitter (and most) moderation isn't 100% evenly handled. Just look at world leaders/political figures and what they can say that others cannot, I fully agree this is not ok and should not be allowed. My issue is that it's to the point that I can't hear "blatant censorship" in connection with social media without hearing the dog whistle. Those people who are so up in arms about FB/Twitter/etc "censorship" seem to be absolutely silent about the Gab/Parlor/Truth Socials of the world.
Unless you live in a cave you cannot possibly be ignorant of the multiple accounts of Twitter censoring people’s discussions. Examples? A quick search on Fox News:
As much as I dislike fox news (and virtually all news orgs now) they're probably among the only people actually tracking things like this. I understand if you dislike their political message, but the links the other commenter provided are all good examples of specific instances of the censorship we're discussing. That the organization as a whole is incredibly biased doesn't alter the fact that the people in those stories were actually silenced.
The fact that you can't easily find any record of these events outside of Fox News is a part of the issue and "mass scale" censorship.
Fox news, and other right-wing outlets, are the only ones who will report truthful negative stories on media companies or politicians that are Democratic party aligned. The centrists closed ranks as a result of what they consider the twinned media failures of Corbyn and Trump. They simply agree as a group not to report on things that are potentially damaging to Democratic centrist candidates or agendas, because they feel that truthful reporting is what sank H. Clinton.
Any of them will explain to you how reporting the facts created a false sense of equivalence between Clinton and Trump for voters. Voters couldn't understand how Trump bragging to a frat boy reporter that he could just grab pussy, his using a nonprofit as a vehicle to dodge taxes on a painting, and his denial that McCain was the best hero were far worse than the 1994 Crime Bill, superpredators, Clinton Foundation associations with dictators, the Iraq War, Russian uranium, Haiti, and Honduras.
That’s a fair criticism. I was looking for examples for my comment and knew that would be a good source for them knowing they are mostly politically right leaning. I just went to cnn.com to get some examples from them to kinda even it out for you. I used the same search criteria “twitter censorship”. I didn’t find a good example in the first 14 pages of search results.
And if you want a more direct analogue if you assume that the problem with 4chan is the culture and not the moderation that the absolute worst most vile Mastadon servers are no moderation to the point where major servers had to just completely blacklist them. If you want to lose all faith in humanity peruse the Gab database dump.
No moderation is a loosing game because any platform that offers better moderation will be attractive to the masses leaving the people whose decorum is so abhorrent that the "free speech" servers are the only ones that will take them.
Yep, I used to be a free speech absolutist when I was younger, back when I thought the world was black and white and that simple ideas could "solve everything". Then I participated in forums/groups that had zero moderation and it was hell. Even then I didn't recognize the issues fully. It wasn't until I moderated a community myself that it finally clicked. I tried to be unbiased as possible but that lead to me silencing people who stepped over the line who I agreed with and me giving people I didn't agree with a ton of leeway to avoid seeming biased, it nearly killed the community. Once I started trying to enforce right down the center I got to experience the backlash of the people who I had given leeway to (not the same people, same group of people). Death threats, attacks, etc. It was not fun. I didn't want to be seen as a "dictator" but that experience taught me that if you want to have a good environment for discussion/community you have to crack down hard on the people who keep pushing the line. Short-term bans resulted in lots of complaining with zero change in behavior for 99% of the offenders. Permanent bans were the only useful tool, even then they'd still sometimes come back under new accounts but eventually get bored.
People complain about reddit moderation but I totally get it in most cases. If you let people push the line they will just keep going until it gets really bad, much better to nip it in the bud. Especially when we are talking about unpaid moderators. Moderation is not an easy or fun job.
> It wasn't until I moderated a community myself that it finally clicked.
The key is that each community needs to moderate itself. The second you give one entity centralised or external control over moderation it can be used for terrible things.
I can't think of any solution for the toxic communities other than to cut themoff and let them fester. The youtube/facebook/etc strategy of 'all engagement is good, show them more' is incredibly harmful.
It does seem like the problem with twitter is it is one big open subreddit, but that's sort of the vision too. The solution may be to find ways to segment twitter more, but does that fly in the face of the public square goal.
> The key is that each community needs to moderate itself. The second you give one entity centralised or external control over moderation it can be used for terrible things.
Do you have any examples of this in practice? I'm not saying I for "1 person has all the power" but I'm not aware of any community that doesn't require 1+ moderators who have the power to hide/remove/block/etc, even HN has that.
In traditional fora/irc/whatever or even reddit to some extent (subreddit moderators follow the pattern, admins do not) the moderators are the founders of the community or are selected by then community via social processes. The structure resembles a village. Mastodon is the most clear example. Mostof the small servers are their own community with a common interest, usually funded by its members directly or by someone doing it to henefit the members. 'If you don't like it, leave' is a valid sentiment because the moderators are not holding your social network hostage and don't get to choose which other communities you can see or participate in.
In the facebook/tiktok/google/etc model, moderators are minimum wage workers with moderation objectives set by people who own the platform to satisfy advertisers or other central authorities. The structure resembles a mall or maybe a state. The penalty for non-compliance is isolation, and in many cases for facebook and google restriction of access to real services in the real world.
HN fits neither neatly, but is slightly more towards the first.
Add to that, dang also has the power to unhide, unflag, etc. when he notices brigading. Giving the reins entirely to the community totally works for a very small community. Not the whole internet.
> I can't think of any solution for the toxic communities other than to cut themoff and let them fester. The youtube/facebook/etc strategy of 'all engagement is good, show them more' is incredibly harmful.
It's entirely fine. The problem YT/Facebook have is user's lack of control on what gets recommended. Play the "wrong" video once or twice and you will be flooded by stuff you don't want.
The fact someone somewhere on the site says something you don't like is not a problem. The problem is that it's kinda easy to go "you follow Xpotato12" -> "X potato12 is outraged by Y and hates it" -> click to see what is happens -> now YT recommends you Y because you "engaged" with it. There should be a better system to deal with that.
> It's entirely fine. The problem YT/Facebook have is user's lack of control on what gets recommended. Play the "wrong" video once or twice and you will be flooded by stuff you don't want.
This is the same problem I was describing...
Users have no control over what they see, and open communities have little control over where the bar for who should be banned is or what other communities they are in contact with.
The point of free speech is to push the line. Imagine if people stuck with the speech standards of the 1950s. There would be plenty of people here who would be disenfranchised.
With the government? Yes. Within a community? It's more complicated than that. Is someone coming into a community posting the n-word or just being incredibly abrasive/offensive "pushing the line" or just being a troll? Online communities get to set their own rules and if you want to buck that trend then try to get support to change those rules or create your own community where you can make the rules.
Initially, I was confused by what you meant by the word "community". Now that I see that you mean online community in the sense of an online forum, then yes, pushing the line may necessitate someone's removal. After all an online community is in almost every case hosted on private property.
However, there is a problem that mostly is evaded or goes unexamined with many of these arguments: Does a community (in the general sense of the word) have the right to actively police/censor the content of an individual or group of people on the Internet in their own community (such as in the case of Kiwifarms)?
> Does a community (in the general sense of the word) have the right to actively police/censor the content of an individual or group of people on the Internet in their own community (such as in the case of Kiwifarms)?
Does Facebook or any other community have a right to take KiwiFarms off the net? Obviously not. Is Facebook, Cloudflare or any other company allowed to decide that they want nothing to do with content like KiwiFarms and refuse to do business with them? Absolutely.
The point of free speech is to be free. Pushing the line constantly is a tactic that some argue (or rationalize) is a way to maximize that freedom, but it's not the purpose, any more than the purpose of a right to bear arms is to get as many questionable shootings as possible.
Now that I think of it, you're right. I shouldn't have used the word "purpose". A proper reformulation of what I meant would be that free speech will, as a property of its existence, push the line against someone's expectations somewhere at some point in time and that denying free speech many decades ago would have inhibited several rights and expressions of rights we take for granted today.
If you don't eject the extremist elements from your community, your community will be represented by them to outside world.
I do wonder what would happen with social media that had only the up/downvote system as soft moderation but without actual moderators smacking people around
So is twitter. At least in the last years it turned to absolute s*it.
In mid 2021 I resurrected my old long not used account. I made maybe 20 comments in 3 month before I got "banned". I'm probably not really banned I would just have to remove my last comment but I cant do that because I can not login anymore (which may or may not be related to the "banning").
The post in question was an obvious sarcastic wordplay/pun that even if interpreted literally would have meant something along the lines of "dead people wont complain" which is not only factually true its also rather soft dark humor.
As expected they lump everything together in their ToS so they can give you a paragraph of things as a reason and you dont know which rule you actually broke.
I have no specific love for Twitter but a platform is "absolute shit" if you can't make all the jokes you want to make? I mean is HN absolute shit because they ban excessive language, personal attacks, or reddit-style humor? I'd argue it's successful because it has these rules in place.
I also have seen incredibly too much "It's just a joke bro" "defenses" for saying certain things that I have little sympathy for it. Learn the bounds of the platform/community you want to participate in and either stay within those bounds or find somewhere else to participate.
> I also have seen incredibly too much "It's just a joke bro" "defenses" for saying certain things that I have little sympathy for it.
People often seem to fail to understand that humor is inherently a complex system of shared values, consent, trust, and context. The personal jabs my gym bros and I make at each other would be near fighting words of said by a stranger. The sometimes off-color jokes made by my girlfriend and I to each other are understood to be parody, based on years of trust and context around who the other person is, while an outsider would have no way of distinguishing them from the real thing. A person going to a comedy show may well hear jokes they'd never tolerate in a work context. But a certain subset of the population seems to not understand this and think they can just shout out whatever terrible thing they want and everything it should be fine because it's a "joke".
Either that our they are just pretending not to understand to cover their own bad behavior.
I never said I demand that twitter allows anything and if not its shit.
I dont care if they ban jokes if they openly say so. Their platform their rules.
It's the completely arbitrary (or biased) interpretation and enforcement of rules that is the problem.
NH is not a place to make jokes (some still do it) but twitter was a place for jokes since day one. And like I said, even if the joke went over someones head the statement was factual correct and not inciting violence or anything like that.
"It was a joke" was not a defense but rather the reasoning why I would even make a so obviously factual statement.
Another difference is that the bans here are done by @dang and the rest of the mod team. They're not anonymous and they give ample warning in public, typically.
No offense, but I see this a lot from folks claiming they got banned but they never say exactly why and keep it as vague as possible while claiming innocence.
Did you read the post? I dont know why, they wont tell me.
Its just a generic "you violated our rules about offensive content/abuse/self-harm and suicide" or something like that.
Then a link to where you can get help if you have some kind of mental breakdown.
They actually twisted this as If I was suicidal so they can ban me for my own protection.
But I would bet a monthly salary some triggered long time twitter user with high reputation who just didn't understand the joke or does not have a compatible humor reported my tweet and the twitter admins just cater to these people and not to their own rules.
I read your post and it’s still vague as written so it’s not very convincing as an indictment against their policy. I’m not making a claim you are lying, it’s simply not enough to come to reach a conclusion it was all a big misunderstanding.
I'm sure you heard phrases like "Dead people don't lie" or "Dead people don't complain" These are so self-evident they pretty much can only be sarcastic.
Unfortunately (but probably intentional) they do not allow some way to publicly prove these cases of "bad moderation". Yet there is plenty evidence that they get it wrong all the time.
For example thebabylonbee is still banned.
can't wait to see the people advocating against fundamental freedoms to finally get the short end of the "companies are allowed to do whatever they want" stick.
Who is advocating against fundamental freedoms and how do you think they'll get the short end of the "companies are allowed to do whatever they want" stick?
> how do you think they'll get the short end of the "companies are allowed to do whatever they want" stick?
The companies they defended by going "it's private company, they can do what they want" (which I've seen a lot every time someone is criticizing what the big social media company is doing, especially on Reddit) will do what doesn't benefit the group that defends them.
Which companies were defended and for what? Those companies are going to seek retribution towards their defenders, why? I see a lot of Conservatives defending twitter right now, you think Musk is going to go after them?
Ah, but you see, my argument is that companies that big should be broken up or subject to government scrutiny, and if passing multiple threshold, nationalized (airports, railway, most infrastructure actually). And LLC shouldn't exist in its current form.
But i get shit from people pro-LLC (basically libs, neocons and fascists), so when one of those complain about a company banning them, i cannot resist saying "Companies do not have to respect the 1rst!" or something like this. Pure Shadenfreude, because i basically agree with the premise.
It's like anarcho-capitalists ("libertarians"). They have a good intuition about what freedom means, but either don't have to capacity, or the will to push the reasoning further, about what power is, what structured power looks like etc (i think it's the will, their subconscious know that if they reason further, it will cause some cognitive dissonance, so they don't).
By the way, if you're a conservative, you should read Baudrillard, in my opinion he is the only conservative who pushed the reflexion far enough (or rather, he is the only situationist who pushed his reflexion towards conservatism). And if you're leftwing (i mean, for european standards), you should too, to understand what conservatism can be if you help him think.
Somehow I don't feel bad about 4chan .. it's all just complete absurd mayhem but there's no agenda.. Whereas any twitter storm feels a lot heavier. Super strange.
ps: also I don't follow 4chan much, so maybe there were grave events on there
Right. It's going to fester with dark elements of the society and he's going to hire back all the content moderators he fired and then pen another open letter to advertisers.
There's a rich and beautiful irony in seeing a bunch of armchair libertarians gushing about the glories of unfettered speech on HN - a web forum that employs some of the most heavy-handed moderation in the biz.
Not sure how long Alex Jones or Mike Lindell would last in here...
There are numerous examples of tweets which aren't remotely vulgar or crude which were removed from twitter. There is no need to resort to speech like in the platforms you mentioned to bring twitter closer to a true free speech platform.
Fascinating that the OP compares Twitter to “living at Disney World”! I can’t stand the obviously fake facades and carefully curated costumes and fake smiles at Disney in large doses and never understood the mindset that could drive adults to want to live full-time at the park.
Twitter addiction has wasted the best minds of my generation and if it implodes and takes Musk with it… win-win!
My first thought when Musk bought Twitter was "His engineering has team figured out content moderation" but I've seen no evidence or talk of that. So I think it's true that he impulsively bought himself his worst nightmare.
And if Tesla engineers are working on content moderation for Twitter I think a few Tesla share holders would be interested in why they're bankrolling Musk's other enterprises.
Space X bailed out Solar City with NASA money by buying its junk bonds. Tesla bailed them out with a fake shingle presentation to drum up an acquisition.
In the past the board of SpaceX got angry at its workers and resources working for Boring Company:
> The arrangement alarmed some longtime investors in SpaceX, including its largest outside backer, Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, some of the people said. The investors learned in recent months that despite the diversion of SpaceX resources and staffing to the fledgling Boring startup, it was Musk who was in line to receive almost all of any future profits, these people said.
It was basically embezzlement, but they ended up with a quiet settlement giving SpaceX some shares:
> In early 2018, The Boring Company was spun out from SpaceX and into a separate corporate entity.[27] Somewhat less than 10% of equity was given to early employees, and over 90% to Elon Musk. Subsequent concerns by SpaceX shareholders resulted in a December 2018 reallocation of 6% of The Boring Company's equity to SpaceX.
Hot take: there is overlap between Dojo (Tesla’s self driving ML system they feed data into to tune “FSD” models) and ingesting Tweets and signal to automate content moderation.
How good will it be? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ DALL-E is pretty good, let’s see where this goes.
Yes, I was thinking of something like this when I heard he bought Twitter. He's not stupid obviously. Turning over content moderation to an AI that is open source might shut a lot of people up. Have a complaint? Go look at the source code to see how you are getting filtered.
> His engineering has team figured out content moderation
Depending on how you define content moderation this is literally not possible, 1. Because content moderation is adversarial and has to adapt and 2. Content moderation is subjective, as the original article says content moderation is the product that companies sell, and it will likely have to change as time goes on (I’m not just talking “what’s popular/offensive” but like do you allow videos, how long are the videos, do videos get prioritized above text or audio, 280 character vs 144 character tweets, editing tweets, dislike button, etc.
You mean like he did with Zip2 at over $300 million, and X.com at over $1.5 billion? As far as I know Starlink isn't getting subsidies either. Tell us about your experience at growing companies - do you know something about this that Elon doesn't?
I'm pretty sure every MBA ever is laughing at the implicit assumptions in the article and these comments. It might not be pretty but there are other ways than growth to make a company more profitable/valuable...
Even if Twitter is a complete financial loss (and I think he will lose a lot of it), Elon will still be a billionaire. His personal life will feel zero of that impact.
He doesn't know what he's doing unless his main goal was always just to distract a bunch of people away from something bigger. On the concrete end I think he'll eat shit like Verizon/Oath/Yahoo did when they lost $0.8 Billion dollars on from their initial purchase price reselling Tumblr after ~6 years of ownership after running its userbase into the ground and scaring away all of its most competent original staff.
Perhaps Elon has heard of K-Means Clustering, and you haven't...
"Solving" content moderation is a losing battle -- there is no way to humanly moderate anything at the rate it can be produced, and Elon knows this. It's insane, so he probably won't do it.
But, allowing content to be produced, but making sure no real person ever sees it, until the content producer earns their way into "your" group -- now that can be automated.
Elon has access to Exascale hardware, so K-means Clusters with arbitrarily large dimensionality is at his disposal.
Oh sure, we can talk about Voronoi cells all day, but the Weber problem indicates an increasing number of k-medians and and a decreasing number of k-medoids. Anyone with the slightest familiarity with the Rocchio algorithm knows that.
So, if you know that Fermat-Weber had fast approximation solutions (O(logn)) published by 2003 (Bose, Mahashwari & Morin), and Rocchio "training" is linear O(|D| + |C|) (where D is the Document set (tweets) and C is the Class set (agents)), why wouldn't Elon maybe be able to use his existing automatic "Labelling" AI workflow to implement something like Rocchio and/or Fermat-Weber?
I didn't meant to be rude; but, you claiming "I've seen no evidence of that" also seemed rude. Sorry for responding "in kind", and not assuming the best.
But, seriously; I immediately thought "Wow, I've seen evidence of that", straight from Elon's latest "AI Day" presentation...
My theory on "why" so many smart Google / Meta / Twitter / ... people have not implemented K-Means Clustering? Because it gives power back to the Agents in the system -- they can't shove their pre-selected content in your face to drive Ad clicks. I think Elon doesn't care so much about that. Or, sees how giving back authority to the agents will eventually attract orders of magnitude more agents / interaction into the system, offsetting the per-agent reduction in Ad revenue.
EDIT: Sorry, O(nlogn) deterministic or O(n) time-random approximations for Fermat-Weber.
> Twitter is a disaster clown car company that is successful despite itself
Isn't this the best kind of company to acquire ? A product that has such inherent value that even a bumbling clown car of company could not sabotage its ability to retain users. Imo, Reddit and Twitter have monopolized 2 of the most effective forms of communication to have existed on the internet: Forums and memes (memes in the Dawkinian sense) and their tiny size is entirely a result of terrible leadership.
While musk didn't buy it for a particularly cheap price (at least in Winter 2022 prices), He should be able to justify the net worth as well as any competing tech company will be able to.
To quote Charlie Munger:
> Never underestimate the man who overestimates himself. These weird guys who overestimate themselves occasionally knock it right out of the park. I would never buy Tesla stock and I would never sell it short.
Elon isn't worried about valuation. His consideration could be 'can I fix low hanging fruit and provide value'
If elon is right the current content moderation has gone wrong, and it has. Then by fixing this it should provide a return on his investment. Not to mention the counter force of those who cannot allow free discussion who may buy him out in order to stop it.
But more important, what elon also understands. What is a billion $? Elon is wealthy enough he can own any toy or thing he ever wants. It has less to do with some currency and himself. He has surpassed this point in economics placing him amongst a select few who have won this game.
Now he has the chance to use this excess wealth to form the future. Which scares people.
"Are you excited for the Chinese government to find ways to threaten Tesla’s huge business in that country over content that appears on Twitter? Because it’s going to happen."
This will happen and not only with China. Just think about Bezos, the Washington Post and Saudi Arabia. But on the other side I think Tesla and SpaceX shouldn't do business with dictatorships anyway. So maybe in the end this will be a good thing.
Nilay Patel is a national treasure. Every word is true, but especially this:
>The essential truth of every social network is that the product is content moderation, and everyone hates the people who decide how content moderation works.
Hell indeed. A problem space with intractable non technical challenges. The saddest part for me is the distraction from the potential of his other businesses, most specifically SpaceX. I just want to see Starship succeed.
Is Twitter not dying? The youth don’t care, the elderly don’t care, and those in the middle (late twenties, early forties) are ending their terminally online lives for families, careers, travel, etc.
Twitter is being distilled into a political tool - both side, endlessly crying into the void, appealing to their confirmation biases.
Hop on over to /pol/ to see what unregulated politic speak turns into.
I don’t think it’ll be like /pol/ if you mean that it’ll be a right wing monopoly. There are too many leftists for that to happen.
There wasn’t a right wing monopoly 10 years ago when Twitter barely had any moderation and people were more conservative. There won’t be one in the future, unless Elon bizarrely goes fascist and bans all the liberals.
Everyone who owns mass media[1] and now will be competing with Elon is playing a game of throwing rotten hate tomatoes in his direction, very entertaining to watch.
If I wanted comments where I could correctly guess what the first ten most popular posts would be if I had an encyclopaedic knowledge of memes, I'd go to Reddit. I don't think that this is a uncommon view to hold here. Just different cultures, as you say.
I think a lot of the people here also just haven't outgrown the "Elon Musk real life iron man" mode of thinking. You see a lot of apologism for it everywhere on this site, even on things like safety incidents.
He said it was about free speech but Twitter is already about as free as it's possible to be without permitting a whole bunch of content that is NOT protected under the first amendment (CP, calls to violence etc).
And if it is about free speech then it cannot be an automated moderation play, because there is nothing to moderate if you're a pure free speech platform.
The best I can guess, is it's a political play? Turn down politicians who he dislikes? Or he just had a drunk/high/bipolar period and did it without a plan.
> Or he just had a drunk/high/bipolar period and did it without a plan.
I'm still convinced this is how he makes more than half of all of his decisions (see for example, him 'building a submarine' or 'boring/loop'). His success seems to be because he sometimes takes already-known-obvious-good bets that no other person could take first because they aren't billionaires.
> The best I can guess, is it's a political play?
I don't think it's a political play, so much as he got angry and impulsive and jumped in without thinking, couldn't back out, and desperately needs to ret-con this into making any sense, so is pivoting in into a political play.
I've just assumed this is the new version of buying media outlets. Bezos bought the Washington Post, Musk decided to buy Twitter. I'm sure it won't be long before Musk hating gets you kicked off the platform.
< He said it was about free speech but Twitter is already about as free as it's possible to be without permitting a whole bunch of content that is NOT protected under the first amendment (CP, calls to violence etc).
There are plenty of things that are nothing of the sort, merely “sins against wokeism” that will get you instantly banned until you repent. Look, I would prefer conservative people treat feminists and trans people with more sensitivity, but examples that come up over and over are people getting banned for making jokes about there actually being innate differences between men and women, or the ways that slogans like “trans women ARE women” might be a bit too strongly worded.
Who do you believe legally won the 2020 presidential election? And do you think that that is a subject that has fruitful ground for discussion and compromise?
> Twitter is already about as free as it's possible to be without permitting a whole bunch of content that is NOT protected under the first amendment
This is just wildly untrue. There is a huge range of gender-critical views, vaccine skepticism, any combination of race/gender/genetics/IQ discourse, and a ton of other topics that will get you banned, that come nowhere near first amendment protections.
You might think that's a good thing, that's a valid argument, but it's simply untrue to imply that the limit is similar to 1A protections.
You are suggesting the only people banned from twitter are those posting "CP, calls to violence etc" - not true. Also, other than bans there are suspensions such as the New York Post for a story on Hunter Biden.
Plus there are plenty posting call to violence who are not banned, but are suspiciously on the "right" side of politics.
"Literally true" is a good standard for individual libel, but a rarely applicable standard for content moderation. The classic example is, if I post crime statistics, part of which shows that black people commit more crime, then: If I am using it to imply that we should hate black people or treat them differently, it would be reasonable to moderate away; and if I am not, e.g. my post is intended only in some legitimate legal/statistics context and is not part of social politics shitposting, then it makes sense not to moderate.
This can of course get very subjective, and that's true of most moderation decisions. Calls-to-violence is another good example. How explicit is it? How actionable? How serious/non-joking? How influential is this person? How obvious is any implicit portion? The line gets blurry, and part of that is because the people posting know there's a line. When people are arguing, they would like things to be objective ("but it's true"), but that's unrealistic/irrational.
One of the results is that people use this complexity as wiggle room to support the position they emotionally hold ("my side of politics is being oppressed"), when usually the cases they point to are not clear cut, and those that are truly clear cut are vanishingly few or do not outnumber the politically reversed cases.
> If I am using it to imply that we should hate black people or treat them differently, it would be reasonable to moderate away; and if I am not, e.g. my post is intended only in some legitimate legal/statistics context and is not part of social politics shitposting, then it makes sense not to moderate.
Or just allow it to be downvoted away. No need for moderation if people can just chose to not see something community thinks is shit. Or block the person. No need for overbearing moderation, we're not babies that need cuddling. Reddit is kinda nice example here, on few bigger subreddits like /r/games mod play police by deleting stuff that's already downvoted to oblivion and think they're helping.
> The line gets blurry, and part of that is because the people posting know there's a line. When people are arguing, they would like things to be objective ("but it's true"), but that's unrealistic/irrational.
The other side of it is that biased moderators will cut way before what would be considered a line for most and so you can get to the place where honest question might get banned, just because it is entirely impossible to interpret based on the text alone and mods get into habit of assuming bad will at every step.
Like for example (from few years back) asking what is about those pronouns next to the person's name ? Random troll might use it as bait, my mom would ask that as genuine questions as she's not exactly, well, "modern"
You could even say that simply replying "the Earth is round" is harassment if it's repeatedly targeted at an individual or flat earthers as a group. But this is what the block or mute button is for. Everyone has the right to curate what they hear or see. They don't have the right to curate what I or you hear or see.
Silencing "the Earth is round" at the platform level for everyone is where it becomes objectionable.
People didn't get banned for saying men are not women, they got banned for harassing people and inciting violence. That's how Libs of TikTok avoids the banhammer, by going as close as she can to the line without crossing it.
If people are getting banned for saying 'men are not women' I would not expect Colin Wright to be able to tweet it and get over 3000 likes. A single reported tweet does not lead to a suspension.
I frankly find it hard to believe the accusation of "gaslighting" is honest here (and the many other places it appears in this context) - sorry. You may find it disagreeable for political reasons that there are multiple colloquial definitions of the words "man" and "woman" (genetic, sexual identity, whatever), and you may disagree that she was implying we should hate or disrespect people for sex identity related stuff (and you may be right! I have no idea because the context of her post wasn't posted for some reason). But neither of those things are what you expressed. You're choosing to avoid them.
I'm betting that something like the Google Circles gets implemented but at a higher level. In order to engage with certain people you have to be a member of certain groups/circles or not a member of certain circles/groups. These groups would be moderated by the people that run them. So instead of having Twitter pick and choose who is allowed on the platform, you crowdsource it to the people who want to moderate their groups - and lots of these people exist.
> I'm betting that something like the Google Circles gets implemented
This would actually be a great outcome IMO. Supporting shared blocklists would have similar effect, and probably be easier to implement. Unfortunately, I very much doubt than Elmo Nutsack would allow that. Despite all his claims about "free speech" I'm pretty sure enabling those who would silence people they deem too "woke" via harassment is very much part of the reason behind his takeover. Check out the #TwitterTakeover tag to see the hordes slavering at the prospect (but be aware that it's hard on the stomach if you're a decent person).
Sounds like Mastodon/Fediverse blocking of entire instances, which is workable. Kind of fun to see Elon's Twitter taking and implementing ideas from the Fediverse to be honest.
Circles are more like trusted connections between people. Like how society works.
I should be able to see the content “everyone” makes or be able to limit myself to exclude certain groups or only include certain groups of people.
This way if there is content that you consider harmful to yourself or you are unable to live with it, you can still participate on the platform. It’s an individuals choice, not a corporations.
"Content moderation is what Twitter makes" - that's a brilliant summation of the problem. These social networks have turned themselves into publishers (by centering the recommendation algorithms where else could you end up?). That's the thing no one wants to think too hard about because of the very uncomfortable implications...
A lot of worrying here about moderation in the new Twitter. Musk though will just whip up a version of Full Self Driving to automate the moderating and problem solved, I'm pretty sure.
This is quite a ridiculous blog post. Hyperbole is way too common these days, and this is the type of submission that drove away many of the smartest HN users.
I will always remember when I first learned about bitcoin here in 2010 when the white paper was linked.
Now we have shrieking missives warning about mean people writing stuff on the internet.
Full of spite. We'll see. But moderation was kinda solved at Something Awful by demanding to pay 10 bucks at sign up. Mr. Musk may use something like this; he can demand 10 dogecoins in order to unblock someone mischievous. Hell, it could even be proportional to the reach of the account.
The key quote which other comments are overlooking:
> Here are some examples: you can write as many polite letters to advertisers as you want, but you cannot reasonably expect to collect any meaningful advertising revenue if you do not promise those advertisers “brand safety.” That means you have to ban racism, sexism, transphobia, and all kinds of other speech that is totally legal in the United States but reveals people to be total assholes. So you can make all the promises about “free speech” you want, but the dull reality is that you still have to ban a bunch of legal speech if you want to make money. And when you start doing that, your creepy new right-wing fanboys are going to viciously turn on you, just like they turn on every other social network that realizes the same essential truth.
The one thing that can be counted on Elon doing is Elon doing what makes him the most money.
Elon has also talked about open sourcing "the algorithm" or letting people customize the algorithm that suggests content for them, etc. I suspect that plays in here - by default, Twitter users (and unauthenticated browsers) will probably continue to see Twitter the same way as today, with relatively safe, moderated content.
Logged-in folks will also have the option to go into unmoderated mode, which will drop you into the cesspool if you so desire. Presumably respectable companies will only advertise on the default layer; ads in the cesspool will be for "edgy" t-shirt companies and extremist politicians and others who don't care about their brand being displayed next to questionable content (or prefer it!).
Illegal content of course must continue to be moderated regardless.
Well, giving users of social media tools to filter stuff they want to see themselves rather than making site's moderators be moral guardians of the site (lmao) is certainly a better approach.
To play the devil's advocate: So why haven't advertisers abandoned Fox News? As long as Musk limits his newly acquired toy to being no worse than Fox News (which is plenty bad!), he can still keep advertising dollars coming in.
Because Fox News is stable, banal, they play the respectability card. Internet users on the other hand can be fucking volatile. Advertisers don't care how hot the takes are on cable news, they just want to sell shit to the elderly, they do care if their ads are placed around overt fascists because that's where their association attracts bad press. Same thing that happened to Youtube in 2017. People gave a bunch of large brands bad mainstream press because their ads played on fringe/conspiratorial/violent content and they, responding to the bad press they receivdd specifically, gave Youtube a heavy ultimatum about keeping ads off that sort of content before they abandon the platform. The rest is history.
There are some outrageous takes on Fox News sometimes, and advertisers do abandon certain talking heads from time to time. But Fox isn't non-stop firehose of bile. Twitter is by default, even with it's current moderation. It's already worse than Fox News.
So yeah actually, I was thinking about this but advertisers have abandoned Fox News in droves. They have a relatively narrow advertising block it's mostly middle of the road car and insurance companies and other big brands with big money who don't mind focusing on that particular segment. (Don't get me wrong it is a lot of companies, but I don't think twitter has the grab to be this picky yet)
I suspect part of the problem with Twitter is that then you probably are ending up trying to build a conservative social network, and I suspect there isn't a big enough market for a conservative social network, at least as big as the one that Twitter wants to be. Maybe as time goes on and more conservatives end up younger.
According to their latest quarterly report they had $1.18B in revenue, $1.08B from advertising. Is there really enough potential in "premium users" or something else to forgo that billion dollars per quarter?
“ Twitter, the company, makes very little interesting technology; the tech stack is not the valuable asset. The asset is the user base: hopelessly addicted politicians, reporters, celebrities, and other people who should know better but keep posting anyway. You! You, Elon Musk, are addicted to Twitter. You’re the asset. You just bought yourself for $44 billion dollars.”
Yeah, I think this absolutely nails it, and what I find interesting is that in all the time this acquisition has been up in the air Musk has failed to ever engage in the detail of how to address these issues. Elon Musk is interestingly probably the worst person to run Twitter, because whilst the previous guys running twitter weren't very competent, they had their product and they were navigating through issues under extreme pressure. Musk on the other hand, has 1,000 pain points to press on that everyone who previously tried to coerce twitter will now be looking at. Whether it be the federal government pressing on SpaceX, Union busting at Tesla, or whether it's Texas coming after Twitter for abortion information, he is going to be so much more exposed.
Both, even within what we learned about through the chancery discovery and the leaks (lots of information leaked about what Musk presented to the bankers and investors as the business plan which is where the 75% cut number came from)
Can you tell me more about his private teams and their interactions with Elon? How often have they been reaching out to Elon, what do those communications look like, and what does it look like when Elon declines to provide them that information?
I am personally hoping that Twitter will break Elon Musk, and then go out of business. That would be the best possible outcome. I am not holding my breath that it will happen, but it would be incredible.
To people downvoting this message - I do sincerely hope we get to live in two separate lifetimes: me in the one where SpaceX succeeds and you in the one where it fails.
This is such a tired take. Tesla was worth, at most, a few million dollars when Elon became their largest investor. They had no products. They had no sales. He turned a $2 million company into a $700 billion company, but he's not the founder because he wasn't in the paperwork for the first year of its existence in which very little happened? Ok.
I think it's as broad and uncharitable as saying Republicans are racist. It's not that there aren't a lot of people who fall into the category, it's that, by itself, the phrase adds nothing and acts only as an insult to the entire group. You can certainly say that same thing as part of a larger, refined context that trims away the implied spit-at-the-feet of the broader group.
Yeah, had the same thought. People seem to be perfectly happy to participate in horribly moderated internet spaces full of people who are exactly like not-all-men fedora bullies, but in the other direction - mostly because there's no alternative (yet).
There are and have been many alternatives, but the balance between moderation and userbase is delicate. Assuming a minimum of "only moderate illegal content": Too much moderation and you might get a large userbase, but you get boring content or loud complaints from those moderated, and it discourages real conversation. Too little moderation and you get fun but chaotic/edgy content that drives away an even bigger chunk of people, and also discourages real conversation.
It seems to me that people who want Twitter to moderate less are either looking for the best of both worlds, which might be impossible, or really just want Twitter to be like 4chan, not because they really think it's "what's best", but because they want to attack their enemies in the social/political war, and that would be a big symbolic win.
Right, I think Elon's idea is moving censorship into everyone's own responsibility, something like: Follow who you want to, ignore who you don't, it's not your responsibility nor your right to silence other people off a monopoly platform just because you disagree with them.
So Twitter will stop recommending things? No more trending topics? Because right now it actively tries to spread engagement through topical controversy.
Exactly and he more or less spells this out in his letter. He compares his vision for Twitter to that of how how video games and movies work today. People choose what they want to hear and see and everything else is ignored. Pornography exists with Disney movies which exists with violent movies, etc, and we pick and choose what we want to see.
I think it would be great if users could join communities that the members of moderate and regulate and can set rules such as only people that are members of a particular group or "friend groups" can engage with the group. This is more closely how the real world works.
And yes there will be scumbags but they'll just not be able to engage with groups of people that aren't interested in them.
While I agree with the author on many things, this one upset me:
> fucking government... They’re out here banning books, Elon!
I don't believe that repeating a lie will make it true. The government is not banning any books, Nilay. Parents do. And not globally, but at a local level.
It's another question whether they should or not, but I'd expect more precision and integrity from a prominent journalist. Most people don't fact check everything and if they learn something from a reputable source, they believe it.
The local township library and school board are both literally the government, and the book banning is largely happening based on local election results (typically county positions and/or school board positions -- both from election ballots)
It's not wrong at all to say the government is banning books -- that statement is objectively correct, it's just happening at the lowest levels of government.
I understand that they are public institutions, but there is a crucial distinction. When you say "the government wants to ban arms/restrict free speech" I assume you mean the state or federal government wants to introduce a new law. Whereas in this case it was the parents who were concerned and asked relevant institutions. It doesn't matter if the books promote violence against minorities or LGBT+ themes, if parents of the kids feel uncomfortable with them and use a lawful process to limit their kids exposure to them in education, I find it quite an exaggeration to say that "the government does it." Or maybe it's become common usage to call local initiatives government, I don't know.
I disagree, there's no meaningful distinction whatsoever.
> I assume you mean the state or federal government wants to introduce a new law.
Why? If it were any other issue, no one would care about the distinction. If Allegan County, Michigan banned firearms, people would still claim it's an infringement of 2nd Amendment rights, even though it's just "concerned parents asking relevant institutions at the local level" and not necessarily a state/federal law. But when that same exact county bans books and/or libraries instead, suddenly it "doesn't count" for some reason?
This article makes no sense; it sounds like leftist propaganda.
Advertisers only care about 'brand safety' to the extent that it impacts their ability to sell stuff.
So long as users keep using the platform, advertisers will keep coming back - They're not going to vacate the platform and let their competitors get all the eyeballs... If they did, those competitors would gain market share and make incumbents irrelevant.
Users have made it clear that they want free speech on social media platforms so I don't see how giving users what they want would cause them to leave.
The problem with Twitter so far is that they sold out to big governments and big corporations and completely neglected their users in the process. Having front-row access to users, Twitter is actually in a position to dictate the rules; it should not be taking orders from politicians and corporate executives when those orders are harmful to its users.
It does sound a bit like someone panicking that the Twitter might stop censoring stuff they don't agree with.
And the whole "content moderation" argument is really weak, sites worked entirey fine without the heavy content moderation (including Youtube, porn and copyright violation was removed but for good part of site's existence pretty much anything went). It only got more heavy because Google wanted to appease the ad market
Sure you can argue you have to take account laws and such and that will take effort but social sites don't exactly stop there.
> Having front-row access to users, Twitter is actually in a position to dictate the rules; it should not be taking orders from politicians and corporate executives when those orders are harmful to its users.
It's a corporation so priority will always be money one way or another. Now putting themselves as "open" might work, but so might doing what Twitter (and google, and facebook, and pretty much any big tech with social media) does and nudge the visibility of content to stuff they want to happen. "Censorship" isn't even needed, it isn't removed, it just won't show up in search results or recommendations. Pretend people don't click it and of course nobody can verify that and you're all good.
> sites worked entirely fine without the heavy content moderation
Everyone keeps referencing the internet of yesteryear. I would love to go back to the internet of yesteryear with the limited audience it had but Youtube's revenue is 2022 is seven times what it was in 2015! Twitter grew four x since 2011. The Content Moderation story has completely changed.
If that initial statement about not caring about the ad's context were true the advertising companies wouldn't have torched Youtube's as revenue 5 years ago because explicitly their ads were played on unsavory content. It turns out they do care, probably not for moral reasons but presumably because some bean counter actively calculated that they'd lose more than they gained from such perception of being associated with Fringe viewpoints.
The problem seems to be that large companies don't want to be associated with certain 'deplorable' content but at the same time, they don't want to vacate those spaces and thereby allow other companies (I.e. competitors) to target and acquire those 'deplorable' customers... They'd prefer it if those 'deplorable' spaces simply did not exist on these platforms.
If this is the case, it is anti-competitive. Companies should not prevent new markets from forming around growing new ideologies and communities (regardless of how deplorable they find them). Companies have to choose; stay true to their current ideology and miss out on new market opportunities or embrace changing ideologies and risk losing some of their existing user base.
This makes no sense because people on Twitter choose who they follow. If some 'deplorables' want to follow some other deplorables, then let them; I'm sure some companies will still want to advertise to them.
The people who only want to consume government and corporate propaganda will only see content from like-minded people anyway; they will get the safe experience that they want. No problem! Companies can target them and sell them cricket flour, dried maggots, lab-grown meat and COVID booster vaccine number 27... These people won't even realize that the deplorables also use Twitter because they will be in a different filter bubble.
Well you can unsubscribe from those people who tend to retweet stuff you don't agree with. You are free to seal yourself into your filter bubble as much as you want... Just don't try to seal other people into filter bubbles that they never agreed with. You should only have a say about your own filter bubble.
If someone wants to be brainwashed in a particular way by limiting their exposure to alternative ideas, they are free to do that to themselves! But if someone wants to expose themselves to as many diverse ideas as possible and open up their minds as much as possible, then they should also be free to do that!
If this ends up posing a threat to a small number of elites... Maybe it means that these people have too much exposure and power anyway. Maybe society should be reorganized so that power is more spread out; giving up some power is a good way to reduce the number of one's problems and enemies. That's what the British Royal family did; and that's why they still have their heads on their shoulders.
