All: please don't post low-information, high-indignation comments, such as flamebait or ideological battle. We want thoughtful, curious conversation on HN.
They need to re-free up the API. Early adopters and hackers really did some great work using the API until they walled-gardened it and rate limited it to make it unusable. They need to do this for goodwill at the very least, but I think it will spark the fire to make it popular with techies again.
Based on the recently published discovery chats we will probably see:
* High def video
* Focus on music publication
* The highest revenue sharing cut from any social media platform for content creators to get people to switch.
* Removal of twitter blue but some kind of subscriptions to edit tweets
* Paid push DMs to followers (e.g. follow this account for drops, then the tweeter has to pay to tweet to this group)
The problem isn't the bots, the problem is the lack of differentiation between bots and real accounts. I say open up the API and let people make whatever bots they wish, but if you tweet through the API then you get a big "BOT" tag next to your username on the feed.
I think the "bot" versus "real" account differentiation is quite irrelevant in practice.
For example, every now and then I check what some elected Canadian politicians have tweeted recently.
Even though these are Twitter accounts that would probably be considered "real", and they often have a check mark, pretty much everything they tweet is, in effect, following a script.
Often, these tweets are just a useless acknowledgement of some obscure holiday celebrated by some unrelated ethnic or religious group that they want the votes of, or they're tweets delivering pointless congratulations for an irrelevant "accomplishment", or they're tweets regurgitating some very specific party talking point that a bunch of other representatives from the same party are simultaneously regurgitating.
These accounts are seen as "real" accounts corresponding to "real" people, yet what they produce is consistently some of the most artificial content I've ever seen.
Most politicians are boring. So what? Just don’t follow them.
The problem with bots is not that they are “artificial sounding”. They can and are used for scaming people, they can and are used for manipulating the public discourse.
I think the problem is less that many official accounts are "boring" and more that they are run by staff and don't have the feel of direct communication that makes Twitter interesting to begin with.
Politician social media accounts are mostly run be teams of staffers who are literally paid to manipulate the public discourse. They are no different from bots.
We've arrived to a very satisfying conclusion here: politics has always (mostly) been the biggest of all scams. Wether its a team of script writing artists, or the state of the art machine generated content, its the same worthless junk.
The purpose of a BOT tag isn’t to indicate quality or intent, it’s not even necessarily derogatory. Real people can be asinine and bots can be useful and informative. It’s to indicate the source was a bot. That’s still useful information.
Everything is politics. Without political skills humans wouldn't have landed on the Moon, but it took the shock of a headshot and the legacy of that memory which eventually faded to just about nothing in ten years.
Is it not fact that the manipulation of public discourse using bots on social media has taken place at scale?[0][1][2]
When U.S. Presidential elections can be significantly swayed by information warfare campaigns run by malign actors, I can't help but feel that dismissals in such a context are rather aloof, if not out of touch.
Ah yes, the "Russian Troll" conspiracy theory. Gonna get a lot of big mad downvotes for this one because people actually believe this nonsense.
The public has been able to be swayed by media for a very long time. The CIA in particular has been deeply involved in it [0]. For some reason this was deemed okay, or at the very least acceptable, by the public. The only difference between the CIA controlled media cited and social media is the lack of US government control.
I do appreciate the irony here. That every other election was so-called "free and fair" yet an absolute wildcard gets in for 2016 and the deepest level of coping by every agency in the union was witnessed. I am not a fan of Trump, but if elections are truly "free and fair" then 2016 was legitimate. If 2016 wasn't legitimate, then why would anyone have any reason to believe 2020 was legitimate? I'm not intending to start a conspiracy theory fight here - but rather raise the question that is trying to be asked. If "foreign actors" elected a president in 2016, then whose to say they didn't in 2020? Or 2008? Or 2004? Who can you believe? I'd argue you couldn't believe any agency who might have an interest in having you believe otherwise. Maybe our elections are actually selections and in 2016 the powers that be lost the information war.
It’s possible to believe both that the 2016 result was legitimate, and that Russian Psyops influenced the result. After all it’s incumbent on the electorate to inform themselves and employ critical thinking in the information they consume, but at the end of the day it’s their choice. That doesn’t mean Russian Psyops is ok, it doesn’t mean CIA Psyops is ok (while noting that you didn’t actually say that they are).
As an external observer (full disclosure, conservative Brit) I deplore both those who try to malign the legitimacy of the 2016 result, and the 2020 result. Even so, I hold a special contempt in my heart for those Americans trying to excuse, justify or even in some cases explicitly encourage foreign covert influence on US elections and obstruct efforts to counteract it. Those people are not even borderline traitors and enemies of democracy, they’re all the way over the line. All IMHO, and it’s not my country.
Is it possible that both CIA intervention into public discourse and foreign entities with unknown interests with reach far greater than the largest media outlets in the country[1] are both not ideal? And that one does not excuse the other?
Online discord is being sown because there is real world discord. It’s not coming out of thin air. The college educated upper middle class is increasingly pulling away economically from the middle class, and is being increasingly assertive about their value system which is increasingly diverging from the traditional values held by most of the rest of the country. Institutions are breaking down in different parts of the country in different ways—both red America and blue America are less likely to attend church than before, but what they do instead is creating greater gaps between them. Immigration and globalization are bringing an increased pace of change, and the New York Times is calling anyone who objects to that change bigots and racists.
Because there's been lots of research on how much advertising affects election outcomes and it's minimal.( At the federal/state level, in smaller races where voters lack information about either candidate it can be slightly more influential)
I can't imagine a Russian internet trolls with much a smaller reach and lower budget are going to be that much effective than best political ad minds of America at changing our opinions. (For Russian governmental organizational competency see Ukraine)
And then anecdotally I could have predicted every person's i knows vote a year before based on how they felt about woke culture and their party identification.
I can't speak for JamesBarney's reasons, but agree with them that it's probably minimal.
Facebook and Twitter have better funded research groups focusing just on the sub-task of knowing what my current state is (a necessary part of being able to tell if you've changed my preferences), and for advertising purposes I am categorised as being into nouns I don't recognise, foods and sports which repulse me, and so on.
I expect the three letter agencies to mix me up with the horror film director I share a name with, and also to confuse me with three pet dogs and two pet cats.
I remember back then that there was also evidence that China ran some kind of bot campaign[1] but no one really cared and it was never brought up. Ironically your second source says that but again, no one seems to talk about Chinese bot farms or election interference strangely. That same source talks about all the countries that do this. I assume this is pretty routine and the US probably does it in other countries. I don't know why Russia is focused on for this in 2016. I have my guesses.
But then there were investigations into the Russian election swaying campaign. I remember Facebook said that there was no evidence the ads they bought had any impact on anything[2]. There were also groups the trolls made. It's completely unclear what conclusion to draw from them.[3] The article says people mostly didn't follow the groups but that their posts reached people. What conclusion can be drawn from this? Is there any evidence the posts changed people's opinions? Also, one of the weird and counter intuitive things about it is they targeted left wing people.[4]
So I don't see any evidence that an election was significantly swayed. I didn't see it in those sources. I am not trying to make this a left/right thing. I am just saying that yes, there are bot and troll campaigns all over the place. But I don't know if we should conclude that they significantly swayed an election. It's just something to keep in mind. I brought up the China thing because I would think if it was actually a concern then people would have talked about it but how many knew that China, or Venezuela or Iran, were involved in this?
>So I don't see any evidence that an election was significantly swayed.
Well, in my defense I did say can be swayed. However, I do think there was serious damage done when you take the full scope of Russian influence operations into account.[0]
That said, considering just the troll farm influence alone in an election scenario with tight margins—the 2000 election, for example—it's rather easy to see how it could make the difference.
> Often, these tweets are just a useless acknowledgement of some obscure holiday celebrated by some unrelated ethnic or religious group that they want the votes of
Lol. Yes that's a mandatory part of being a politician. I hardly think that when most people think of the problems of twitter/social media they are thinking of Trudeau tweeting "congrats Mattea Roach on winning 23 consecutive games of Jeopardy" or whatever. Btw, actually I just scrolled through his twitter and his tweets are almost entirely practical https://nitter.it/justintrudeau.
Anyway, the problem here is bot farms creating tens of thousands of sockpuppets posing as "average citizens" to push some sort of narrative and try to manufacture consent, which is qualitatively different from what you are describing.
A politician is an organization, as much as any corporation or brand is. The politician is the owner, spokesperson, and mascot, but the more senior they are the more they have a huge staff that is responsible for what would otherwise be called CEO, CFO, Chief Council, PR, HR, IT, R&D.
And remember that corporations are people too, my friends. But they are very strange kinds of people. When Taco Bell hires a marketing firm to pay a TV station to air a commercial X times, is that a bot? Or even stranger, Taco Bell and Pizza Hut can get into a twitter troll war with each other, even though they're both wholly-owned subsidiaries of Yum! Brands, Inc. and the whole thing could have been written by a marketing firm and scheduled it through TweetDeck. Is that a bot?
Edit: Or every newspaper is basically auto-posting their recent articles, some even just doing it like an RSS feed, where it tweets a link and headline whenever an article is posted. Is that a bot?
> corporations are people too, my friends. But they are very strange kinds of people.
It has been said elsewhere that corporations are a sort of amoral artificial intelligence. The trouble is that they are more powerful than a human citizen, while having none of the community or political interests of a human citizen.
The bigger one is the lack of any consequences whatsoever. For instance, do something that leads to the death of another person, even unintentionally, and you may find yourself behind bars for some significant period of time. Do it as a corporation, even on a large scale, and you'll generally suffer little more than a fine that is generally no more than a few days of yearly revenue, and of course zero consequences for the executives who in many cases are directly culpable - frequently making decisions consciously prioritizing short-term profit over all, including safety. Boeing being the contemporary poster child.
News outlets and fans tweeting sports results. Public event celebration (new year, xmas, father day etc.). The vast majority of these tweets could be managed by bots and we wouldn’t know the difference.
I actually follow many bots on twitter knowingly, but they could be people in disguise I wouldn’t care.
In my opinion, the content of a tweet (is it spam ? is it abusing the platform ?) matters way more than wether it’s a bot or a human doing the spamming/abuse.
> In my opinion, the content of a tweet (is it spam ? is it abusing the platform ?) matters way more than wether it’s a bot or a human doing the spamming/abuse.
What about replies and retweets? EX: If you have high quality (or good faith) content that's supported/attacked by bots vs real people.
I kinda wish engagement had less effect on content visibility and having a swarm of bots "attacking" a comment wasn't decisive.
Talking about HN comments, some have extremely bad but feel good takes that will garner a huge first wave of upvotes, to then get beaten down as it got more attention, to perhaps get some more sympathy votes as timezones shift.
The interesting part to me is the comment can go all the cycles because it stays there, is still visible even when flagged to death and can be rescued.
That's also how I read reddit, with downvoted to death comments and posts in the timeline. People who care enough should probably do the same for Twitter as well.
Disclaimer: I am not politicaly engaged so have less exposure to the nastier battles where thousands of people shout a each other. I still don't understand why anyone would go there in their free time.
PS: I also don't think there is any one size fits all strategy for a service used by millions of people all over the globe. To me the "divide and conquer" approach reddit takes is a better fit, and expecting Twitter, or any social media to have a good mechanism to deal with social swarms is a pipe dream...dealing with abuse when you can have 5000 ton gorillas throwing their weight in the balance would be a tall order for any private company.
[not knowing if a machine or a human wrote a twitter post is a bad thing]
And what difference does it make, wether some content was written by an algorithm or it was written by professional staff, when the objective might be the same: to misguide / influence you to act in someone else's favour
A brief conversation is usually all it takes me to notice even the more elaborate bots. I would share my methods, but I'd prefer they not figure it out too quickly. Suffice it to say bots just don't behave the way a human would.
Why do you want to know if a machine or human wrote a tweet? What difference does it make, and where do you draw the line? If I use Grammarly to correct my language in a tweet then did a machine write it? How about if I generate text using GPT-3 and then manually edit it?
One is more labour intensive and more expensive. The other can be done at scale for cheap. The negative impacts most likely don’t scale linearly, so volume is an outsized concern.
One of the secrets of getting positive value out of Twitter is to block all or most politician accounts you come across. Mute the names of the popular politician for extra measure.
Exactly this. It takes some work to set up, but the reward is plenty. At least the bare minimum tools are available to enable this. In addition, what other platform even lets you block the advertisers, giving you at least some deciding power over the adds you get.
That’s not the bot issue everyone is talking about. It’s bunch of fake/empty accounts posting/replying something what pushes some fakenews, propoganda, etc.
It has been especially noticeable this year, since February 24th
Humans are really creative. One potential outcome is a few well known ppl start using a 3rd party client, tell their followers that’s why it says bot, and the badge loses its meaning.
That's going to be tricky too because I could imagine someone offering a service to actors and other public people to help manage their twitter accounts (maybe discourage them from posting stupid shit at 1 am. I'm looking at you, Elon), in which case you wouldn't even have a 1:1 ratio.
The usual solution, historically, it to provide different levels of service based on your account type. The couple of times I've worked somewhere that the admins had a disjointed set of servers from the users was really a huge stress relief. You want admins to 'see' what the user sees, but to be able to work even if the site is being DOS'ed. And ideally you want users to be able to use the site even if the admins manage to DOS themselves (admin functions tend to have a higher fanout than end user functions, so the danger of catastrophic fanout is always higher).
One option would be to ban custom Twitter clients. As a bonus, enforcing official apps opens more possibilities for monetization. Twitter could even release a special app for advertising agencies who manage multiple accounts on behalf of their customers and charge appropriate subscription.
> Like someone using a custom twitter client as a single user shouldn't get that label, no?
Why not? If it's a niche client not many people use such false positive would be rare. Also such people probably don't have huge audirnce and they and their audiences won't care.
And it might be deterrent against people trying to build popular alternative client that might compete with main twitter app.
I don't think aiming for 100% accurate label is on the table.
Yeah, but that was then and this is now. Thinghs kinda settled down since then.
The real danger of opening the API and marking all tweets made through API as BOT is that this label looses impact if some alternative client that uses API raises to prominence.
I'd say that current setup where users have no indication that something might have been posted by bot is way more horrible.
is there anything stopping me from writing a browser extension to make posts on the site automatically? i did work for a guy on that sort of setup spamming used car dealership ads, and it may have been a hastle keeping it running but we got plenty of ads out.
If the private keys are distributed inside an approved client app then any competent hacker can decompile the binary and extract the keys. At that point the keys can be used by bots or other unauthorized apps, and there's no reliable way for the server to distinguish them.
> the problem is the lack of differentiation between bots and real accounts
Nah, I'd bet that it really is as simple as the fact that the first thing Elon sees under any and everything he tweets is a flood of cryptobot fake posts and scams. That he and we identify them quite easily, and he's just flat-out tired of it.
If clamping down on API access also curtails a significant proportion of those posts, then he'll do it, even if it's just a temporary relief.
When I used twitter a decade ago, I used TweetDeck, which used the API to post to twitter for me. So that would label me as a Bot just because I like a better UX/UI.
Let me solve it as a technical person. Whether management wants it or not is not my forte.
You want an API because other apps are better. Let those apps partner with Twitter to allow only humans and not a second order API. If they do that, they get kicked out faster than Fortnite got kicked out. Both Twitter and the API user need to own the relationship and guarantee its sanctity so it will likely require an investment bigger than $99 to be paid by the API user (app) to Twitter.
So you will not have infinite API apps, just a few of them, those who can pay the cost of providing and validating the API.
If I were to build a bot I wouldn’t even touch the API. Why not simulate everything through a headless browser and stay under the radar. Then build a farm of those simulations and you can publish/promote everything you desire pretty much undetectable.
To me, the draw of twitter was you could text messages (SMS) to 40404 or get texts from 40404 from people I choose to follow. I had unlimited minutes and unlimited texts but I didn't have an app phone back in 2008 when I signed up for Twitter. The world has changed since then...
I'd say if you were to build a bot to tweet about the weather in Sheffield, you are probably better off setting up your own server to write blog posts or something like that? Maybe look into microdata or RSS or something too?
It's very common to build bots for Twitter. They post on Twitter because there's an audience there. I'm sure there's lots of places I could get an rss weather subscription, but I stopped using rss.
The idea was about opening the API, and this suggestion was to argument that it makes easier for the malicious bots. So this was suggested to make the API less valuable for that purpose.
I think the only problem would be if this API was used by non-bots (perhaps some relays) and the tag loses its meaning.
I think we need to expand our vocabulary a little on this subject. A lot of people seem to think that these "bots" are just limited to "buy crypto today" type posters.
What they don't realise is that the comment they are reading right now could well have been written by a bot.
I’m not on Twitter, but I can think a myriad of cases where I wouldn’t want to touch the API without my case being malicious. Like extracting data from the platform, or monitor specific accounts, or monitor trends, or whatever. It doesn’t have to necessarily be a troll farm, or a fake users service. I’m sure the API allows most, if not all of these, but there would be usage quota. You bypass it, and then you can even start a business around it. There are thousands of startups out there providing services for social media monitoring, and I seriously doubt all of them are going through the official API.
Those already do kind of exist, I recall scripts existing which can be used to block users from lists, and inevitably those were used for reinforcing echo chambers.
On the other hand, providing users with tools to curate their timelines is much better than having the company shove some arbitrary rulings down everyone's throats.
Edit: In a sense this would be one of the things I have come to really enjoy about running a Misskey instance. The content is all out there on other Mastadon, Pleroma and Misskey instances in the fediverse, both stuff I would enjoy and stuff I would find extremely offensive but that doesn't really matter because what I can see is entirely in my control.
They should try to detect bots not using the API and ban them.
IMO all modern freedom of speech issues stem from not being able to differentiate between humans and bots. And it may be the case that it's not a solvable problem and we should assume any sentiment expressed online is always just noise.
This is just kicking the can down the next level on the issue. They can't tell which bots are bots so what difference does it make it if the solution isn't to ban them but to just limit them? The problem is identifying the bots.
Without an API, the default "I want to write a bot for Twitter" path forward is to automate the human UI -- to some extent, this makes you look like somebody who is trying to evade bot detection.
I suspect there are lots of people in the class of "wants to do something interesting, isn't particularly interested in being malicious but doesn't mind breaking the rules." Maybe an official bot API would dry up that ecosystem?
half of what I tweet could be done by a bot, that is to say answer to writerslift posts with links to books and articles. the other half could not. I'm currently real, but would I be a bot if I automate my bot half?
The 'bots on Twitter' thing is perhaps one of the few things I agree with Musk about. Searching a hashtag like #javascript or #webdev or similar reveals a whole universe of obviously low quality content posting bots getting suspiciously the same number of likes and retweets on every post. Things like "Top 10 Web Languages You Need To Know" and the list is just randomly shuffled with link shorteners everywhere. This stuff is definitely polluting whatever sacred public square Musk seems to think Twitter needs to be. Obviously bots and spam is a monumental problem that transcends Twitter.
IMO framing it as "get rid of the bots" is the wrong way to solve the problem because it's unsolvable, especially as we head more towards a world of content being generated by increasingly sophisticated ML algorithms.
It's probably best to embrace the bots and instead think about it as a problem of categorizing, quantifying, and applying more metadata to messages that let people, agents, or other bots determine the qualities about the information that they want to know.
100%. Allow open, reasonably rats-limited access to the API, and use the absolutely gargantuan amounts of data Twitter has built up to sort through bots. If other services can do it why can’t Twitter?
> IMO framing it as "get rid of the bots" is the wrong way to solve the problem because it's unsolvable,
I think it's super simple actually. Wanna get a blue check-mark to prove you are human? Here, pay us 10$ pledge. You'll lose it, if you break the "rulez". Add financial frictions to the game, and bots strategy won't scale...
I think you hugely over-estimate the importance of “developer APIs” to the number of bots on twitter.
You’re never going to really fully defeat browser automation or HTTP request playback with automatically generated payloads. No one technically needs an API if a web interface exists to automate something. It’s easier with an official API sure, but not super hard without.
Indeed, a truly malicious bot farm would avoid the API altogether and just fake web client requests to look as much like the real thing as possible. Anyone can capture the HTTP messages with just a computer and an open source MITM proxy to decrypt and inspect the SSL message contents for recreating in a bot script or application.
How about making changes to the interface html structure/ids and same for the api. Will break any program using it, but won't bother users. Now record what accounts are silenced by that, do it multiples times and ypu have an idea who is a bot ?
I wonder if this was part of the whole media / video embeds - so a musician could release music and news websites etc would pay for the embeds. Musicians could then get a cut of that money - or a cut of the advertising of it.
Accessing tweets does not seem to require agreeing to any Twitter TOS. They have the option to not serve data to your client (browser), but once they've chosen to, there doesn't seem to be any agreement that would restrict your right to screenshot. Republishing those screenshots could run afoul of copyright restrictions, but no more so than embedding currently does.
> Republishing those screenshots could run afoul of copyright restrictions, but no more so than embedding currently does.
Embedding should be fine because that's being "published" by Twitter who you have already given permission to publish (cf [1]) although I'd have thought (IANAL) that a screenshot would be a good example of "fair use for commentary" except when e.g. news services embed tweets, they're often not commenting on those tweets specifically, just giving a general flavour of sentiment.
Go to a direct link to a tweet from an anonymous browser.
Until a court case says that the act of receiving bytes from an HTTP server constitutes agreement to a contract that was never even presented to you, it's hard to see how you can possibly have agreed to a TOS. The user must be presented with a TOS and have the option to reject it in order to have agreed to it.
Generally all ToS and EULA that do not require an action of explicit consent (an "Agree" button or checkbox, not checked by default) are not enforceable. This is well established case law.
In Specht v. Netscape, the court declined to hold Netscape’s browsewrap (i.e. "putting a link to the ToS somewhere in the web page") enforceable because the hyperlink’s placement at the bottom of the screen failed to put users on notice of Netscape’s terms.
In Hines v. Overstock.com, the court found Overstock.com’s browsewrap unenforceable because the website failed to prominently display the link to the online agreement in a way that would put users on notice of the website’s terms and conditions.
And if you think it's all because "you have to scroll to see the hyperlink" and that Twitter's one is valid because there's always a "Terms and Services" hyperlink in small text on the screen at all times, I can tell you of Nguyen v. Barnes & Noble, in which the court held that Barnes & Noble’s browsewrap was unenforceable despite the fact that the hyperlink was prominently placed next to the buttons users must click in order to complete online purchases.
Van Tassell v. United Marketing Group also states:
> Because no affirmative action is required by the website user to agree to the terms of a contract other than his or her use of the website, the determination of the validity of a browsewrap contract depends on whether the user has actual or constructive knowledge of a website's terms and conditions.
In other words, w.r.t. the enforceability of Twitter's ToS on users that have never agreed to it explicitly, they have the burden of proof and have to give the court convincing proof that you knew about their ToS when you broke it.
This is all based on a rather obvious common law standard:
> An offeree, regardless of apparent manifestation of his consent, is not bound by inconspicuous contractual provisions of which he is unaware, contained in a document whose contractual nature is not obvious.
- Specht v. Netscape
So yes, I have seen cases not enforcing this paradigm.
Lots of ppl already do this on twitter itself - instead of quoting or replying, they'll screenshot another tweet and embed it. I suspect they're trying to defend against the tweet being deleted, but they've just opened up a whole new front of potential abuse - I treat all such fake embeds as suspicious, and I would if they were published on a website too.
It's also partially to avoid boosting the screenshotted content, if you want to for example call something out as being bad or false. I do agree it makes it harder to spot fakes
The only thing that can stop a bad guy with an API (besides policy and moderation) is a good guy with an API. Some of the very best misinfo research and tooling came from academics having access to firehose data.
My little side project is a terribly written bot that brings some joy to a niche group. I hope I don’t get excluded. It’s also brought me a lot of joy along with everything I’ve learned building it. There are a lot of automated accounts that are really interesting. Twitter is worse off right now - and people/communities hate uncertainty. Signed -@BostonTimelaps1
If they think keeping the API closed down or closing it down even more, is an effective defence against the bots… They need a quick refresher course in why the Analog Hole makes perfect DRM impossible outside of completely controlled circumstances.
Even if you required a dedicated twitter device per account, and no api at all… no more twitter website even or read only website … then you would get people building robots to touch the screen as fast as possible to “physically automate “ the devices… if you limit that device to only having one account associated with it, you would need a way to deauthorise a device for when you sell it or upgrade to a new one, so they would just automate the deauthorise workflows and “load balance” across any necessary size pool of devices.
Any efforts like this will drastically increase user friction and drive away customers/users. Simultaneously as far as they go down this path there will be (as long as twitter is still considered relevant, at least) … be state funded propaganda organisations who’s interests align with funding such a device farm, and simultaneously they would want deniability so the operators of such twitter device farms would wind up in the sort of ethically dubious zone as companies like Pegasus group (examples because its after midnight and I don’t feel like looking up exact details, consider these hypothetical examples unless they are correct) selling their hardware to “legitimate governments” to perform a once off inspection of the phone data of someone crossing the border into the USA at JFK airport in New York, and also to counties like Saudi Arabia to hack and monitor dissidents round the clock by installing root kits/exploits.
Effectively there’s no point, they should open up the api and monitor it better.
Might require changing some parameters of the browser / tweaking it a little or getting an older version, because nowadays browsers have a flag that says "hey, I'm being automated!"
But other than that, I don't see how they could prevent it
My guess is he wanted to lower the price... He's friend with Jack Dorsey, who said the bot problem is worse than Twitter is admitting. And nobody want's a social media platform discussion is ran by sucky AI.
As a developer, not really a tweeter, I'd be super-happy if a read-only API was opened up again. It was a gold mine when it came to creating cool things back in the days, especially analysis stuff.
Do you think CA (and others) are restricted by API or non-API? A missing API hurts developers the most, not huge companies who can access the data either way.
The majority of scams are not bots written with the API. They’re stollen accounts of real people that are semi-automated, semi mech turked using a variety of techniques.
If he does find the bot accounts significant enough to identify that he has been "duped" is there any recourse? I suspect this might be the canary in the mine (of social-media businesses) and Elon is passionate enough to release said numbers which could be used as a litmus for all business that marketed 'number of "users"' as something of a validator.
That is what should change. The largest twit accounts, whether they use API or not, should be charged directly by twitter for the value of reaching their many followers. Twitter the firm is infamously bad at improving anything, but this would be a way of recruiting a variety of capable parties into important efforts like fighting bots, spam, harassment, etc. Also there would be lots of money. This was obvious ten years ago.
> > ..ads, which is its primary source of revenue?
> The largest twit accounts, whether they use API or not, should be charged directly by twitter for the value of reaching their many followers
Paid reach is still ads, and narrowing free organic reach so that only the ads people are willing to pay for broad reach for have broad seeming-organic reach drops perceived content quality for consumers directly and reduces the perceived upside for the people creating and developing reach for organic content, getting them to put less effort in on your platform, further reducing consumer-perceived content quality.
Tweets by e.g. Kim Kardashian extolling the virtues of particular beauty products are certainly advertisements, but they function differently and they aren't received as such by many of her followers. AFAICT Kardashian isn't really paying twitter for these tweets? That seems like an ongoing error on twitter's behalf.
Granted, insta posts are probably more valuable for Kardashian, but there are lots of other parties who would also pay twitter for the privilege of tweeting.
> but there are lots of other parties who would also pay twitter for the privilege of tweeting.
In the short term, yes. But when you make paying the only way to get significant reach, you reduxe the quantity of presented-as-organic content that feels organic rather than like ads, which both directly removes the perception advantage of pay-for-“organic”-reach vs. pay-for-adds and also makes the whole platform less attractive to consumers, costing eyeballs, and making it harder to sell either traditional ads or ads in the form of paid “organic” reach.
Organic content that reachers passive/relatively inactive consumers is where your audience comes from. Make people pay to supply that, and you lose the audience you are selling to them and to traditional advertisers.
This argument feels theoretical. Twitter is not just an ad network. It offers unique values to its users. It is already conveying lots of promotional crap from big users to their followers, which doesn't have to change. Both sides of that transaction choose to take part in it. No normal ad network can deliver that value.
If twitter starts charging the followers, sure, that will be a big mistake. I'm not suggesting that. Twitter should start charging the followed, only a little at first, on a sliding scale. They should try different pricing policies, for different users, and should keep adjusting until they have extracted a great deal of money from those twitter users with the most followers. It could be that some highly-followed users don't themselves see much value from their own tweets, so they won't want to pay. Twitter doesn't need those users; they're wasting resources. You may be worried about chasing away small users who will grow into big users, but small users won't be charged. By the time they're big, they will value the relationships they've built with their followers.
A generic social media firm couldn't do this, but twitter is in a unique position.
> Twitter is not just an ad network. It offers unique values to its users.
Yes, it does, and that unique value is noncommercial organic content, which charging for organic reach undercuts.
> If twitter starts charging the followers, sure, that will be a big mistake. I'm not suggesting that.
No, you are suggesting something just as bad: charging people for exactly what gives the followers a reason to be there.
> If twitter starts charging the followers, sure, that will be a big mistake. I'm not suggesting that.
They are producing and providing Twitter with content which people are coming to Twitter to consume. That’s not “wasting resources”, that’s what enables Twitter to sell space to advertisers.
> By the time they're big, they will value the relationships they've built with their followers.
By the time they are even moderate-sized, they’ll be on multiple social platforms, be using each of them (among other things) to inform their followers of the others, and the kind of content they are distributing on them (especially as it changes), and will be, themselves, cobtinuously reevaluating the cost/benefit of each platform for particular content and adjusting their social media strategy.
Facebook uses this strategy, and as they dialed it up, big accounts did direct followers to other platforms to get reliable access to what they were producing.
> A generic social media firm couldn't do this, but twitter is in a unique position.
How? Literally everything you’ve said applies to any large social media platform the same way as it applies to Twitter.
If this [0] is "noncommercial organic content", I quit. It feels like you have a commitment to the abusive unprofitable way that twitter has been managed for at least a decade. I can't imagine why.
I know, right? It seems so dumb that it's hard to believe. They're free to the right sort of people:
Applicants need to be notable in fields such as government, entertainment, sports or political activism, and they need to abide by Twitter's rules including a ban on the glorification of violence. [0]
Which probably means one can get a checkmark if one pays the right PR firm, who kick back to the right twitter middle manager, but twitter shareholders don't get a cut. Twitter has completely ignored an obvious source of revenue for its entire existence.
Maybe as a paid/subscriber feature; even YouTube seems to have a cost problem with high def video. Video ads are barely profitable, I can't imagine serving high quality video content at a loss being a good business decision.
> * Focus on music publication
I think this is a niche that Twitter currently excels at. The music industry constantly has small announcements which is well suited for Twitter's format. Should be fairly easy to add a high quality music player, and that should also save a bit on bandwidth costs since musicians currently upload a video just to play music.
Plus, if you look at musician profiles, many pay for a linktree-like service since Twitter only supports one profile link; they can easily capture much of that business for themselves.
Funnily enough, this is what MySpace tried to pivot to be. Every music brand wants to have some sort of home page they can use for advertising/promoting and communications. Difference is Twitter currently has a critical mass of musicians.
> * Removal of twitter blue but some kind of subscriptions to edit tweets
Just charge for verification. They can even be cute and make different kind of verification checkboxes with additional information like they currently do for politicians (maybe even charge the politicians). Easy ones off the top of my head: business owner with business info, musicians, brands.
> * Paid push DMs to followers (e.g. follow this account for drops, then the tweeter has to pay to tweet to this group)
They kinda did this the other way around, OnlyFans style, which makes sense since there's more people consuming tweet than notable people making tweets. Users can pay/subscribe to get noticed by the tweeter. I believe Instagram also recently launched a similar feature. There's a lot of value in having an OnlyFans feature set without the pornographic association. Or Patreon but with a massive userbase.
In the Fintweet community the wish list is probably something like:
* Ban all spam bots
* Ban all spam bots (it's that bad)
* Ability to edit tweets
* Maybe a slightly better to tack tickers. Currently you'll do something like $META but this gets problematic when there are dual-listings, or the same ticker in different markets.
A lot of Twitter spam can easily be combated with more options under "who can reply/retweet", such as: only paid Twitter Blue subscribers, only followers, only verified users (especially with more ways to get verification), only users with verified phone numbers, etc.
Right now tweets are either completely public, completely private, or close-friends-only. If Twitter wants to easily solve the moderation problem; let people have moderation tools over replies to their tweets.
Then allow those restrictions as filters on the timeline, who can follow, who can DM, or as visibility for their own tweets, which can probably also be paid features.
it's not easy to regain that trust once you lose it. how long would Twitter's API need to remain open until you decide they're not going to reverse course and that it's worth building on? 2 years, minimum? and even then there'd be a bitter taste when i do: it would always be in the back of my mind that "what i'm building is only temporary, they're going to take this away again at _some_ point".
He didn't want to buy it at that price when the market price had dropped by 2/3 or more. Doesn't mean he didn't still want to own it. Don't think he's buying it because he wants more money, it's not a good way to make more money.
Twitter's video serving is embarrassingly woefully bad. Like really, really bad. So much so that Twitter videos buffering is a meme. This should be a core focus.
> They need to re-free up the API
Nobody cares about that. I mean a few developers do but 99.9% of users don't. Nor do they care about the consequences. Time and time again we've seen a growing platform embrace developers until they're large enough not to want to deal with it anymore. This is Lucy and the football at this point. When will we learn?
> They need to do this for goodwill at the very least.
Again, nobody cares about this issue, just like nobody cares about "free speech". They care about not being silenced for their particular positions. Elon's Twitter will reflect this and Elon is very much a conservative (in the US sense).
It's why you only ever hear about "free speech" when it comes to hate speech and never, say, to Palestinians getting silenced on Twitter [1].
> Twitter's video serving is embarrassingly woefully bad
I've never understood why they just refuse to let you click a button to view the higher res version of a video. Instead, it's a game of refreshing and clicking play several times until whatever automation they have realizes that you do, in fact, have enough bandwidth and decoding power to handle a 640p video.
At least youtube-dl bypasses Twitter's shenanigans, but it just seems like such a hostile feature to begin with.
I think the ship has sailed on the API. It was a different time, and the people that used Twitter's API to do fun things didn't just give up...they migrated to mastodon and discord. I don't think the golden years of twitter are coming back.
Discord is a very different product but the demographics of users are very much those that have migrated from hackers on twitter to being in discord groups as of today.
Twitter should remove Communities, Lists, Professional Profiles, Long Notes (their new take on blogging smh) and Spaces (you know that audio thing)?. These are failed experiments no?
Twitter should improve Bookmarks. I bookmark a lot of Tweets since it was introduced to the public and scrolling down for hundreds of tweets is not fun.
With regards to the API, they shut it down because there were people building apps with the stated intention of taking users from twitter and building their own platform.
I’m on my phone and don’t have a source handy, but it was a serious enough concern to force Twitter to do what they did to the API!
In addition to opening the API, it would be cool if twitter became interoperable with ActivityPub. It would be one of the biggest instances and still attract a lot of people. It would be cool but I don't think it will ever happen, sadly.
Yes like GNIP around that time these firehose startups were amazing and it was a golden age of metadata and then Twitter Killed the Golden Goose. Bring back open data! Let Open Source and all the hackers from second order efforts give back value to Twitter's Value.
Sounds like you think he will move in exactly the same direction as all the other social media platforms. He has to make the platform unique in a way that will be difficult for competitors to simply imitate. Or preferably in a direction where there are no competitors at all.
In the spirit of trying to be high-information and add value:
Where Musk is going, there are no maps. So it's very very hard to project. But we can predict likely developments.
At a very high level, it's going to involve: bringing back controversial personalities like Donald Trump; increasing Twitter's commitment to 'free speech'; assuaging skittish advertisers; retaining users who might be concerned, while bringing in new ones; managing the exodus of users (size:?) that will happen regardless; cutting a large amount of staff, while keeping Twitter's lights on; open sourcing the code, discussing the impending rearchitecture; and - long term - folding this into Elon's vision of America's WeChat, and ultimately expanding Twitter, under X.com.
That's a lot. But at a high level, I think that's correct.
I would expect Elon to take the fight to the media. Whether he's going to focus on neutrally spreading a message, going more on the attack on media outlets that would support him, or doing something in between, is unknown.
Musk has an unusually large amount of media power: that's his unique value add, in a way. I would expect this to be a 'bigger deal' as a story, as multiple stories, than I would for any other company undergoing a takeover. We'll be hearing a lot more about Twitter in the weeks to come, since the developments will keep piling up, and the press/public loves to read & discuss stories about Twitter & Musk.
I feel we have a generic tendency of looking at downward trends and assuming that shocking radical change can’t make it worse. As history tells, it sure can.
The old Twitter was a lost cow looking for pasture and moving very little in fear of getting more lost. For better and worse it had stability. We can assume that stability is now gone through the window.
It wasn't strictly cash, it was an agreement to buy $150 million of stock as part of a Judge-approved settlement of a lawsuit which Apple was winning. The settlement was a win-win for both sides, because it meant Apple remained a healthy company and Microsoft got to avoid paying out BILLIONS to Apple. Instead they bought stock which they sold for a tidy profit ($550 million) a few years later.
(Fun fact: if Microsoft hadn't sold this $150 million investment in Apple stock, it would be worth $120 BILLION today and this shareholding would be Microsoft's single most profitable business unit.)
One of the important parts of that deal was Microsoft promising to develop Office for the Mac. There were definitely competing products out there, but the Mac needed Office.
It's really impractical to second guess history, but I don't think Office was quite as necessary as people say. Its absence definitely would have hurt sales on the margins, but it certainly didn't affect the majority of Apple's customers. The reasons why people owned computers was exploding in the late 90s, with the advent of the internet and the home digital media revolution.
What you don’t know is how much worse MS itself would have been without the 550M for whatever they used it for. Unlikely 120B worse off but it would be something.
That might be true on the margins, but it's impossible to know. Maybe they would have not pursued the original Xbox and lost out on that enormous market. Or maybe they would not have pursued Windows Mobile/Windows Phone and saved a few billion dollars on a dead end...
Isn't that kind of the story of Twitter thus far already? Certainly on the financial front they never seemed to have much of a plan, and on the product side things always seemed like a bit of a mess to me as well.
Some fresh leadership might not be a bad thing for Twitter. Whether Musk is the right person for that...
What these comparative analyses keep missing is that Musk Twitter is an LBO company with billions in loans on its books. It's private, which takes public shareholder pressure off, but it's also directly losing billions of dollars in debt service. The pressure to generate some kind of stable income, soon, is probably immense.
It's worth keeping in mind that despite the brave face, Musk didn't want to buy Twitter. In fact: he desperately didn't want to buy Twitter. He's been forced to do so by the Delaware courts.
That would be more plausible if he hadn't savaged the company for months, degrading its value, prior to being forced to consummate. It's below the threshold for plausibility now.
It's probably more or less the case that for the next several years, it will be difficult for Musk to do any big-ticket M&A, despite having some of the biggest pockets in the business, without agreeing to exceptionally seller-friendly terms. All because of how he handled an acquisition of a flailing media company that it is very unclear that he wanted in the first place.
I don't think that's quite right, or rather you're presenting it incorrectly. When musk proposed the twitter deal he was already in the state where any acquisition that he proposed would necessarily be under exceptionally seller-friendly terms, that's why the twitter deal was such. If he already had had to present such terms at that time, what more terms could his proposals possibly provide now after this bullshit?
He had to buy Twitter under exceptionally seller-friendly terms, because Twitter didn't want to change hands or be taken over by Musk; that's the month of drama leading up to the M&A debacle.
What I'm saying is that he'll be getting exceptionally seller-friendly terms from everybody, for years to come, because in the course of this supposed "negotiation" he repeatedly breached the terms of the acquisition agreement, publicly slagged the target over and over again, reneged on the deal, and brought a horseshit case to the Delaware Chancery Court to try to avoid performance when the target held him to the deal he agreed to. Every other company is going to notice that (it's one of the most noticeable things to happen in business in 50 years!), and nobody is going to trust him.
I don't believe he did all of that as a negotiating ploy. If he wanted to get the price down, all he had to do was wait before agreeing to an ironclad, overpriced deal. In fact: "waiting" is what he ended up trying to make happen anyways!
No, he signed a contract to buy something with no contingencies at what everyone quickly came to realize was 2x to 3x what it was worth.
Twitter’s management, acting in the best interest of their shareholders, used the court to force him to hold to the contract when he tried to walk. Musk decided to buy the company for the agreed on price rather than have that imposed on him by court order after (more) embarrassing discovery.
Seeing Musk as a business genius in this deal requires ignoring nearly every event in the saga.
There was a provision that Musk would be on the hook for $1B if a third party (e.g. regulators) blew up the deal in a couple enumerated ways. No such option was available to Musk himself.
It wasn’t an “opt out”, the termination fee was only available under several specific circumstances, neither of which applied to the facts at hand. He was never permitted to walk for $1 billion.
You are reading the terms of the deal incorrectly. He had the option to pay 1b only under the specific case that his financing fell through. That never happened, quite the opposite the banks backing this deal have been adamant that they were ready to go but Musk was dragging his feet.
Meanwhile, Musk was getting absolutely savaged in the Delaware chancery court and they were just in discovery. He was going to lose and that would be more embarrassing (somehow) than this outcome.
All because he went off half cocked and didn’t write bog standard contingencies into his offer.
He’s come off looking like an absolute simpleton in this and that’s the better outcome for him than if the court case had proceeded.
You do that BEFORE legally committing to a purchase price, not after.
He thought he could get away with an "epic troll" for his acolytes to croon over, like the stock price manipulation Tweets. Turns out the Delaware courts have teeth.
I agree. We know they were meeting to discuss a lower price throughout the process, but no agreement was reached. Not surprising if Twitter felt they were very likely to win, why accept less? But they did discuss it.
It's more accurate to say Musk didn't want to buy Twitter for $44 billion. His timing on his bid really sucked. He might have saved half or more if he'd waited a few months.
What baffles me is that he would have just followed the tried and tested procedures of acquiring a company he would have paid less and would have had a chance to reconsider if he reaely wanted to during due diligence.
Instead he made a take-it-or-leave-it offer with a ludicrously tight schedule and locked himself into an unfavorable deal without any obvious reason.
I am certain there is a bad decision in there sometimes and I'm wondering what it it might be.
A small part of me thinks that maybe he was uncertain and scared that he would back out so he took that option off the table preemptively.
That wasn't a general purpose "whoops, takesie backsies" clause, it was contingent on financing falling through for an otherwise best-effort deal.
Those sort of breakup fees are to give the company some compensation for non-bad-faith purchasers having external problems, because a failed acquisition is still an expensive thing for a company to have gone through in those situations. A cold-feet buyer throwing shit at the company in public even though he has the means to close the deal? Different story.
> It's worth keeping in mind that despite the brave face, Musk didn't want to buy Twitter. In fact: he desperately didn't want to buy Twitter. He's been forced to do so by the Delaware courts.
I haven't had a lot of good things to say about Musk as of late but I think this might be an exception, this kind of fortitude is something we should all strive to have. When cornered, he at least didn't complain or cry too much, he actually bit the bullet and has a very convincingly brave face on indeed.
I honestly can't think of a worse example of fortitude than Elon Musk's handling of the Twitter deal, which he entered capriciously, repeatedly violated terms he agreed to, ultimately reneged on the deal, and had to be forced by a court to uphold.
I think that’s potentially charitable - arguably he pumped out some pro Russia tweets to try and get the deal flagged as against national interest to blow up his financing. He wanted pretty badly for this not to happen including trying a couple of 3D chess moves
Looking at all musk has achieved so far - despite (or because of?) boards of experts adamant it couldn’t be done - I think it’s immensely clear a plan is something he clearly has and works very hard towards.
Obviously many people will disagree with his plan, though I’m 100% certain he has one, and will make it happen.
> Looking at all musk has achieved so far - despite (or because of?) boards of experts adamant it couldn’t be done
This is where I think his detractors overlook the real benefits he brings. He is fearless and will willingly take long shot bets down roads where others don’t dare tread. His willingness to take the big risk has resulted in some transformative leaps. He’s either very lucky and not very good, or very good and not very lucky, but more likely has a lot of both going for him.
I'm 100% certain he is quite literally the biggest internet troll of all time. His words have caused volatility in crypto and stonk markets, and all as jokes to himself. He demanded his California workers continue working in large in-person groups despite a deadly virus pandemic without a vaccine at the time. His plan was to dangle a carrot in front of Twitter that he'd buy, then pull the rug out. He once again violated really commonsense ETF/FCC/whatever laws and once again got bit. He's a genius in many ways, and a playground bully in others.
Which ways is he a genius? I don't know much about him but as far as I can tell he's just an engineer who had a very rich father. Did he invent something that I'm not aware of? Genuinely asking, I would not be surprised to learn that I've missed something.
Lots of people have rich fathers. Almost none of them found multiple multi-billion dollar companies and become the wealthiest person in the world. Do you think there's not anything different?
If "having a rich father" is the only thing that matters, why isn't everyone with a rich father a billionaire?
It’s not the only thing which matters but it’s important to remember because these guys get so much public praise for being visionary geniuses while there are a ton of people who are just as smart and hard working but didn’t have the resources and luck to hit a high-return jackpot. For example, Bill Gates has been the subject of so many business books which love to describe him as a genius but while he’s far from stupid he wasn’t noteworthy compared to his peers: MS BASIC & DOS worked but they weren’t better than the alternatives – but those competitors didn’t have parents on IBM’s board, either. Prior to the Meta debacle, Zuckerberg got tons of laudatory press which tended not to focus on how much his early success was due to leveraging the Harvard network, or the almost forgotten classmate who went around the country getting sororities (and thus fraternities) to use it, great boosting its reputation as a place to be.
That matters personally because you want to set realistic expectations: if you can’t afford to write off a couple of year’s work, launching a startup probably isn’t the best call for you compared to a more staid job which means you don’t need to worry about rent money or health insurance.
It also matters societally because these guys really want to influence our laws, educational system, tax code, etc. and that context is critical. If a billionaire says we should cut taxes on startups to help people climb the ladder, the first question should be how much of the money will go to rich kids from Ivy League schools versus the ones featured in the ad. Similarly, if they’re pushing kids to drop out of college for startups or turning public schools into coding camp, we should be asking how that’ll work out for everyone: the prospects for a kid with affluent high-status parents and a robust social network are quite different from kids who are poor, brown, in the wrong part of the country, etc. and such a policy might be especially dubious if it meant that they have lower negotiating power to get better jobs at the companies run by people making such suggestions.
I've only heard that in the “brilliant kid, what a waste” quote describing his reaction to learning that Gates had left academia to start a company, which is a little less dramatic sounding from a then relatively early career professor but, again, the point is not that Gates was stupid but rather than his intelligence was only part of the story.
If you look at software of that era, he wasn't doing something nobody else could do. They had a BASIC interpreter, but it wasn't the first or notably better. MS-DOS certainly worked, but it was at least heavily inspired by CP/M even if the plagiarism accusations were wrong. Being a capable programmer was necessary to his success but it was far from the reason: there were many others around, and they did well but the legendary wealth came to the person whose mother was on IBM's board when he made that company-defining sale. He subsequently executed well but again not uniquely so — anyone who used Microsoft software of that era could tell you that it wasn't the quality of that software which kept people using it. He executed well, and certainly wasn’t shy about an … aggressive … legal strategy but there was also a substantial portion of nepotism and luck.
The world has many people who were smart and hardworking but will never be close to that level of success because they didn’t have the family connections, startups capitol, friends they made at the right school, or the freedom to make a big gamble.
I think you're looking at this as though it were a merit-based system, and it's unfair that Gates did so well when his merit alone deserves a much less level of success.
If so, what you're missing is that Gates knew how to play "the game." He knew how to close sales, how to navigate the muddy waters of business, and how to leverage success into more success.
I think success takes a lot of hard work and little luck. Great success takes a little more hard work and a lot more luck.
I think Bill Gates, Elon Musk are all examples of great success. It doesn't mean they are vastly different from the similar hard working people in their fields. It just means that they did a "little" more combined with lots of other factors that put them where they are.
I guess the point is that the working 16 hours a day for years on something that might return billions but might also return nothing, is a lot more rational if you have a safety net that means you'll still have somewhere to live if it doesn't work out.
> Almost none of them found multiple multi-billion dollar companies and become the wealthiest person in the world. Do you think there's not anything different?
Lots of stuff is different. I know lots of people with very very wealthy parents. They don't want to run businesses... so they don't. The number of people who have the will and means is probably quite a lot smaller than the people who have the means.
Anyway you've just dodged the question by implying "surely there must be something" but I'm asking what it is. To clarify further, I would consider the marks of a genius to be someone who is either a prodigy (ie: exhibits mastery of a subject at a very early age or with little experience) or who has made significant and particularly novel contributions to a field or multiple fields.
> exhibits mastery of a subject at a very early age or with little experience
He wrote and sold a computer game at 12 years old after teaching himself to program at 10.
> significant and particularly novel contributions to a field or multiple fields.
Made eletric cars a viable economic prospect, pioneered reusable rockets. Obviously not making every single technical contribution himself, but leading the process.
I don't know, I guess if you're just predisoposed to follow journalists who want to push him as nothing as a cringy nerd, you might not consider that significant, but clearly the market does.
> I don't know, I guess if you're just predisoposed to follow journalists who want to push him as nothing as a cringy nerd, you might not consider that significant, but clearly the market does.
I literally said I don't follow anything about him and was genuinely asking why people call him a genius. He's obviously a cringy nerd but that's not what I'm looking for.
Anyway I guess the game thing seems somewhat impressive, I'm not sure I'd qualify it as "genius" but that's something.
I mean, if you were actually curious you could have spent 5 minutes reading Wikipedia or any number of other sources for what people attribute to him. It's not like the information is hard to find. Like, the guy builds one company that literally becomes the most valuable in the world, and another company that builds rockets that a lot of people said were literally impossible and you just write that off as "oh he didn't do anything special, he just had a rich dad". I mean come on, it's hard to believe you're arguing in good faith.
I didn't expect a "why he's considered a genius" on the wikipedia page but I can check that out. I expected a pretty simple answer. I asked this about Kanye the other day and got a great response explaining how his music was novel.
Business accomplishments are impressive but I don't think they make someone a genius.
Why would business accomplishments not make someone a genius? Business requires creativity and intelligence just as much as any other field of human endeavor.
Tesla (the company) didn't invent electric cars, but they were the first to make electric cars that people actually wanted to buy.
They were expensive, small, underpowered, and had poor range. Musk took a weakness (expensive) and turned it into a strength (luxury status symbol) by just embracing that making a high-performance electric car was going to be really expensive and marketing it as a toy for rich people to show off how rich they are. Then, he used the profits from that to scale production and bring down the price for future models.
I don't know if he invented this business strategy, but it's a least a pretty brilliant application of it, along with the admirable goal of reducing fossil fuel emissions by putting more electric cars on the road. He also open-sourced all patents developed by Tesla, so other manufacturers could benefit from whatever they discovered along the way.
"Elon is brilliant. He’s involved in just about everything. He understands everything. If he asks you a question, you learn very quickly not to go give him a gut reaction.
He wants answers that get down to the fundamental laws of physics. One thing he understands really well is the physics of the rockets. He understands that like nobody else. The stuff I have seen him do in his head is crazy.
He can get in discussions about flying a satellite and whether we can make the right orbit and deliver Dragon at the same time and solve all these equations in real time. It’s amazing to watch the amount of knowledge he has accumulated over the years."
Kevin Watson - chief of avionics at Launcher
Elon is definitely an engineer. He is deeply involved with technical decisions at spacex and Tesla. He doesn’t write code or do CAD today, but he is perfectly capable of doing so.
John Carmack
When I met Elon it was apparent to me that although he had a scientific mind and he understood scientific principles, he did not know anything about rockets. Nothing. That was in 2001. By 2007 he knew everything about rockets - he really knew everything, in detail. You have to put some serious study in to know as much about rockets as he knows now. This doesn't come just from hanging out with people.
Check out Ashley Vance’s biography of Musk. One anecdote that sticks out in my memory is he was both scientifically knowledgeable enough and knee-deep enough in what SpaceX was doing to realize that they didn’t need to buy a certain hundred dollar (or something) existing part to use it for their rockets because they could make their own that did the specific thing they needed it to do for a few cents.
The "he had very rich parents" is often used to reduce one's achievements. A quick google search shows there are over 60 million "millionaires" in the world, yet less than 1% know how to turn it into a billion.
There is some pretty good evidence that wealth accumulation accelerates. In particular if you go above a certain threshold things will only go up (and go up faster). If that is the case and if we add some noise to the system. Some percentage of people will always become billionaires just by luck alone (and importantly never loose that status). I'm not saying that Musk got there by just luck, but the existence of a billionaire does not proof he is a genius.
I think the Tesla's are cool, SpaceX is immpressive, I enjoy his online trolling but I don't think he is a genius. The rocket scientist he employs at SpaceX is a genius. I got caught up on the way you phrased your response-- I felt that it was written in bad faith with "he's just an engineer who had a very rich father, Did he invent something that I'm not aware of? ". However seing as you were responding to someone who elevated him to Genius I can see why.
So the assumption to be a genius is that you must start from zero? I completely reject that assumption. It’s false for so many true geniuses, like von Neumann. His dad was well connected, the same is true for John Stuart Mill and a bunch of others I can’t think of now.
This idea that every genius must be formed in a vacuum and can only be considered a “true” one if they can bootstrap themselves from nothing is an absurd idea peddled by underachievers who somehow find solace in their own mediocrity by nullifying the accomplishments of others who don’t fulfil their arbitrary starting conditions.
One doesn't need to be able to point to a specific thing which they invented while alone in their garage with no help from anyone else in order to be a remarkable person. Elon is intimately involved in the minutae of SpaceX engineering and damn, if landing orbital rockets on a floating barge isn't impressive enough for you, I don't know what is.
That's certainly possible. But which of the following would you think is most likely to succeed?
(a) a company trying to build electric cars at a time when there was zero consumer demand for them and the battery technology was nowhere near good enough
(b) a company trying to launch things into space when the vast majority of nations in the world were unable to do so and even NASA seemed like it had lost its way
(c) a popular social media app with 400M users and maybe some issues with product direction
You gotta look both at odds and also at returns...
You bet on (a) and (b) because nobody else has pulled it off so if you can do it, you can win big, and you aren't just one of many players in a crowded sea.
(c) is a rough bet since you're already huge but you still have a lot of competition and it's a crowded market and you haven't always made as much money per user as people would like...
Musk has media attention, but I'm not sure it's much of an advantage at this point.
I tried getting a solar system from Tesla, and it convinced me not to consider their cars. I know it is a different side of the company, but I ended up with a used electric BMW. I was resigned to dealing with the B-hole stigma around having a beamer, but whatever. It's a nice car, environmentally friendly, and was inexpensive.
That's not what happened. Instead, Tesla owners say things like "I got the Tesla before Musk went nutso roll eyes, and it's actually pretty good, but I'm not sure I'd buy another one..."
I'm surprised how quickly the Teslas went from being a status symbol to a faux pas around here. Maybe it's a different story in less liberal areas.
However, unless I'm missing something, social signaling / image management is way more important to the Twitteratti than people buying commuter cars / kid taxis.
(Again, whatever. It's a car, not a political statement, but I've seen more than one Tesla owner apologize for owning one.)
Absolutely. How many times have you heard this statement?
"Our next car will be electric... But not a Tesla."
I hear that all the time now. My wife, who recently turned 30, would be mortified for her friends to see her in a Tesla. They associate the brand with a creepy, slimy billionaire and a legion of tech bro sycophants.
The difficulty is that some of these objectives conflict with each other. Backing off on moderation is likely to drive advertisers away; bringing back banned people could in some cases cause legal problems in countries where publishing, say, pro-Nazi speech is against the law. Making major changes will require more people, but stopping the financial bleeding will require fewer people.
Twitter already has implementations for the Nazi stuff; e.g. images with Nazi flags are allowed in general but if you try to view them from an account with location set to Germany, it will give you a "this content is blocked in your country" error message.
I'd definitely be worried about driving advertisers away though. They forced YouTube's hand at least to some degree with the whole adpocalypse thing.
The whole "advertisers don't want their ads appearing next to xyz" has always felt contrived to me, like, I can use Gmail to receive all sorts of wrongthink and I'll still see ads on it, similarly Twitter should be a neutral tool not a magazine. It's up to the users what they see.
You'd need a lot of market share and confidence as Musk to actually say "this is silly" but it is silly nonetheless. The big players started down the road of "ok we'll ban the worst stuff" and once they blinked it's been "but what about" all the way down.
> The whole "advertisers don't want their ads appearing next to xyz" has always felt contrived to me, like, I can use Gmail to receive all sorts of wrongthink and I'll still see ads on it
Good point, but...
The advertiser mostly cares when "everyone" knows they advertise for Nazis. If it's just you who knows, no biggie. They don't want it to be common knowledge.
Can’t they just give the advertiser the ability to control what kind of content they want their ads to appear alongside? Actually, don’t they do that already?
> The advertiser mostly cares when “everyone” knows they advertise for Nazis.
There are likely some advertisers who would have no qualms about targeting Nazis for advertisements, and little or no qualms about anyone knowing that they do either: criminal lawyers, divorce lawyers, mental health treatment services, drug and alcohol treatment services, certain kinds of charities (such as extremism prevention or anti-racism), etc.
It’s not just what content they’re next to, brands don’t want to be associated with certain types of content in any way. Because to a lot of consumers a brand is a part of their identity, and most people don’t identify with Nazis.
YouTube/Reddit/Facebook/etc are full of all kinds of crazy unhinged content - they may ban Nazis, but there’s many other species of crazy they don’t ban. But “A allows people (who go looking for it) to find crazy unhinged content of kind B” and “Company C advertises on A” are just completely unrelated facts in my head - and I think that’s true for most people.
Eh, no it's about the publics interpretation of appearance. Your Gmail filters out a metric shitton of spam. If they stopped doing that and all you got was thousands of penis enlargement emails per day the number of advertisers would drop significantly because the tools utility would drop significantly.
The reason 'xyz' gets banned where xyz is negatively viewed is because it tends to end up everywhere and reduce the utility of the platform.
The whole "advertisers don't want their ads appearing next to xyz" has always felt contrived to me,
lol
General Motors just suspended all advertising on Twitter. I've no idea how much their Twitter ad spend compares to that of other companies but certainly GM is not a small company. While I'd love to see it come out that GM doesn't want to be associated with high profile antisemites and conspiracy theorists like Ye, I'd bet it's much more straightforward: GM doesn't want its ad dollars to fund or otherwise be associated with a direct competitor (Tesla).
The problem with a Musk owned Twitter is that there is such a vast range of conflicts of interest. With Musk at the helm it's just that much harder for a company facing social/political pressure to justify doing business with Twitter.
>While I'd love to see it come out that GM doesn't want to be associated with high profile antisemites and conspiracy theorists like Ye
Any company trying to claim this now should justify why they had no problem advertising on Twitter while Iran and Al Qaeda had official Twitter accounts
It is silly, except to the disingenuous opportunists of all political stripes and persuasions who hold companies (they likely rarely patronized) hostage.
It's reasonable to moderate content beyond the pale. But that's on the platforms.
Running to advertisers feels like defiantly going to the other parent when you don't receive the answer you want.
I've never drawn the conclusion Bark Box or Toyota stand firmly beyond some crackpot on YT because their ad played before some content.
> Twitter already has implementations for the Nazi stuff
Those implementations will be defeated by motivated adversaries and they will not have the expertise remaining to rebuild it. There will be many lessons learned again at great cost.
By implementations I mean the general infrastructure for enforcing country-specific laws locally, but not as a general rule of Twitter.
Non-motivated non-adversaries already defeat these systems by accident, which I assume are mostly based on user-reports. But apparently Germany's regulators are satisfied enough with Twitter's implementation, since I haven't heard about any issues with it.
One of his challenges will be to pay $1.2B in interest payments every year while also making good on the principal. That's quite a bit of debt for a struggling financial situation. Cutting HC will help in the short term; it is unclear if those cuts will be well executed. HN opinion that twitter could run with 200 engineers is woefully naive for a massive company that is under FTC consent order - they probably have >200 privacy engineers (and associated legal staff) just to comply with regulations.
The consent decree requires that the company be 5x as large as it otherwise would. It really, really, really slows down development. For every engineer, there is also a corresponding engineer whose job is to slow them down.
IT IS ORDERED that respondent... establish and implement, and thereafter maintain, a comprehensive information security program that is reasonably designed to protect the security, privacy, confidentiality, and integrity of nonpublic consumer information.
Computer security 101 says that there should be one set of checks for the information (parsimony of mechanism), all access go through that mechanism (complete intermediation), and as few people/things have access to the data as possible (least privilege).
Making sure all private data goes in the vault and the vault is secure shouldn't take more than 1% of an organization the size of Twitter. Even if they're doing it poorly, it shouldn't be more than 10%.
If it really is 5x (> 80% of their engineering budget), I guarantee you they are in violation of the consent decree -- there is no way to vet that many engineers or audit their work!
5x may be hyperbole, but every change you make has to go through a privacy review. Sometimes even proposing to make a change can be met with great friction.
Any security architecture that requires every single engineer has to do everything exactly right 100% of the time is bound to fail. The order to put in reasonable privacy protections doesn't say "and do it in the most expensive, error prone fashion possible".
It’s actually pretty standard operating mode for many big tech adjacent, regulated industries. They don’t necessarily expect you to be 100% perfect, but they do expect you to build in such a way that their privacy tools can inspect things and you get urgent tasks filed if something doesn’t meet spec.
What they want is additional work, and technical implementation that the agreements are being enforced in code. It’s a fascinating area for a career, but the tools are not well developed and engineers not trained to code this way. Ends up being like a 40% tax on a lot of peoples work, plus the people who write and operate the verification systems.
It’s probably what the security field should have done years ago, but there were never as expensive of fines as for privacy violations.
The bankers aren’t naive, they modeled this out. Sure it could go bad and I wonder if Elon PG’ed (personal guarantee) the debt, but you don’t underwrite your a default out of the gate. It’s one of the worst faux pas of debt capital markets.
He's really not. The banks are only involved so that he doesn't have to sell as much of his Tesla shares. And that's to say nothing of his private ownership of SpaceX, probably also worth a decent chunk.
The covenants on a low leverage transaction are likely highly limited: a)make interest payments, b) make principal payments, c) don’t make illegal dividends, d) don’t cross certain covenants such as EV/EBITDA, fixed charge coverage ratio, or similar, and e) get an audit every year and submit financials to the banks every 90 days.
Not exactly onerous since they were a public company before.
I've been in companies where 1/5th of engineer was laid off. The state of company infra and the product dropped significantly and it took a long time to approach recovery, where they hired the same amount of staff back.
I can't imagine how dysfunctional twitter would be with %75 of staff gone, I don't even know if it will continue running as a business after that.
Will Musk actually cut 75%? Musk tends to do a lot of “thinking out loud” - so even if he really spoke that number, he won’t hold himself to it.
Whatever the actual figure is, it is unlikely to be the same figure across all departments - likely some departments will be cut much more than others. Probably engineering will experience significantly less cuts than marketing, PR, HR, government relations, business development, etc. Even in engineering, some cuts may be due to things like adjusting the manager:IC ratio.
Threatening to fire 75% of the staff might have been a last ditch attempt to turn public, shareholder, board and/or Parag’s opinion against the deal.
It didn’t work, and I doubt he’ll follow through on it. Otherwise, it’s sure to freeze almost all future initiatives and turn the team into caretakers instead of innovators and I’m not sure what the point of that would be.
It cannot have been a threat to staff because it was never uttered by Elon to the staff. It cannot have been a way to influence public/shareholder sentiment because it was never said in public.
If he ever did say it, it was allegedly said to other investors in a private setting. More than likely it's a fabrication by someone who hates Elon (as unlikely as that sounds) laundered into the media as from an anonymous source.
Another slant, considering the (is this true btw) the rumor he asked engineers to print the last 30 days of code they submitted: he’s signaling “hey if you’re lazy, I’m going to fire you, so go ahead and leave on your own”. Which might just work.
Innovations? Initiatives? Like edit button and lengthening strings over 160 characters?
Just look at their Web UI, horribly slow and lagy.
Twitter is horribly bloated and unprofitable company. Several thousands people could be justified if there are sales and profits. 75% is not enough, current people must go, regardless of politics.
There is a lot of cruft without touching the engineering department. And there are always those two guys in every team that when they call sick - productivity of the team increases.
Even if that were true the problem with the approach he has taken is that by leaking that you are going to perform swinging cuts, everyone who can get another job immediately starts looking so by the time you actually get around to doing the layoff the team has self-selected and you only have “those two guys” left.
I doubt it because the whole vibe of Musk so far is that the axe will fall on the culture warriors and activists. I think the productive and less political engineers know they are safe.
And the zeitgeist seems to have changed lately - so jobs may not be so easier to come by, especially for employees that may be too political for the employer.
> managing the exodus of users (size:?) that will happen regardless;
This is probably the biggest risk in this acquisition. Twitter wasn't doing anything special, and it's easy to launch a clone of their business model. Elon's talking about taking an axe to the things that keep the lights on at Twitter: effective content moderation and talent.
> Elon's talking about taking an axe to the things that keep the lights on at Twitter: effective content moderation and talent.
I don't think it's clear this is the case. It's just the network effect that keeps it in such a dominant position. Plenty of Twitter clones have been created, yet neither conservatives have migrated to Truth/Parler/Gab/whatever, nor have or will liberals/the anti-Musk contingent to Mastodon, or whatever the left-leaning equivalent Twitter clone coming in the next few weeks is.
Honestly, Twitter's biggest draw to most users is probably the lack of content moderation on something that gets buried beneath the politics and culture discussions: porno, porno, porno. Twitter is one of the few social media sites where porn is still allowed, for the most part. It's always funny to see a "viral" politics/culture war tweet that has "blown up" with 50k, 100k likes; any given lewd picture of Ganyu from Genshin Impact by a popular artist is going to run double those numbers.
> It's just the network effect that keeps it in such a dominant position.
Exactly. Just ask Friendster or MySpace or any of the other failed social networks how deep and wide the network effect moat is in the long run. I'd argue that for all the hype, Twitter was already in the 'long goodbye' phase before Musk bet the farm on it.
> Twitter is one of the few social media sites where porn is still allowed, for the most part.
And they're completely at the mercy of Google and Apple's policies here. Both of those app stores could put their feet down next week and this 'feature' of Twitter's suddenly becomes a liability.
> taking an axe to the things that keep the lights on at Twitter: effective content moderation and talent.
I have experienced the 'effectiveness' of Twitters moderation team on multiple occasions where they were very ineffective at upholding the very clear cut rules surrounding things like doxxing on their website. I had my personal information made public, and they ignored me. Multiple times. I even created a new account with no way for there to be any publicly available personal info; and yet I was still doxxed somehow, and they still ignored me.
So, in the spirit of HN's rules, I just want to say this, since end user experience should be allowable to share (I hope.).
Effective moderation at twitter is a myth as far as I see it, and their only talent is making it look like they have effective moderation when they care.
P.S. I also was doing nothing wrong in any case where this happened. It was all conversations which should have been considered civil (mostly) and one situation where it had nothing to do with politics or philosophy at all. Yet they did nothing.
I agree that Twitter's content moderation is mostly a vibe, and not really effective. Musk purchasing Twitter is already killing that feeling that content moderation works at Twitter, and I wouldn't be surprised if advertisers put a freeze on their plans the day the purchase went through (hence Musk's panicked-sounding tweet to advertisers).
Honestly, if what they though Twitter was before was fine to advertise on, despite the lack of actual coherent moderation; then we are all blessed by the lack of those advertisers.
And if that makes Elon panic, then we are blessed doubly in that way as well, because he might either actually do something useful to make it a nicer place to be; or he might burn it to the ground.
Not really, since the other poster was saying Elon would be axing things like moderation. I'm saying essentially it doesn't matter if he does or doesn't, because it barely exists at all anyways.
So axe away I guess, cause there is no wood to chop. The tree is hollow, from all the woodpeckers eating the grubs.
It was an eye opener to see official Taliban accounts.
As abhorrent as I may find their ideas, if they play the rules, I'd actually prefer to allow them on the platform.
The eye opener was seeing others cheer on the silencing of academics, politicians,and physicians who's ideas may be out of step with the zeitgeist (or the mob's interpretation of what's apprpos).
To a lesser extent, same thing with ISIS. When LiveLeak was gone, and their propaganda videos were pretty much scrubbed from the web, we lost a lot of actual history, as abhorrent as it all was. It's going to be easy for people to forget how bad all of that was, and more importantly for me- most of the countless videos of them using American supplied TOWS against Assad while also filming the mass genocide...all that is gone, and it's much harder to prove the connection was ever there.
Same thing with Libya and Gaddafi, gruesome stuff was done by western backed rebels, including a revival of the black African slave trade and just killing black immigrants in Libya, and all of that is nigh impossible to prove now.
Exactly. Regardless of how horrible war videos are, they are still directly true history, and their loss is seriously concerning. I knew people who, despite knowing very little of the war, were cheering on FSA attacks against civilians, because of "Assad support".
When a video of them throwing a teenage boy into the back of a pickup truck and sawing his head off started making the rounds, their opinion changed completely. Even if they were full of crackpots, these sites documented objectively just how terrible and extremely brutal these wars are.
Pretty sure that's 85% of the people who comment on this site. Only thinking about the purely technical side of things, never the issues and limitations that come from other people.
> Twitter wasn't doing anything special, and it's easy to launch a clone of their business model.
And yet nobody has done it? People think social media is easy to start and succeed. FYI, its like catching lightning.
Most people are focused on censorship/content issues, but I really think the X.com "mega app" vision is the most significant part of this. It'll be hard to gain a foothold in those markets, and there'll be antitrust challenges, but it really fits perfectly with the rest of Musk's vision:
X.com Maps could tie in with Teslas, X.com Carhailing could tie-in with (future) full self-driving; Twitter could be expanded to be more like Telegram + Instagram, with channels, better DMs, "Moments", and more.
There's no attempt to create a single, wide-ranging social media platform, with payments, video, shorts, DMs, and more. China's proven that it can be done. It would create a far bigger moat and network effects, and likely be as successful as Microsoft Teams & 365, a highly integrated solution, are for work.
Are you serious? Why would I ever use that app? I already don't use twitter and there are market leaders that would have much better service (given they aren't trying to do every single thing in the world) compared to X and also, most of those services pretty much stink, so I would never think that X, while trying to do everything in the world, would also be better.
Well, you wouldn't do it by choice. I guess Musk really wants to build the WeChat equivalent for America, where to get anything done you really have to go through his app. They don't need to be best - they just need to make it inconvenient to not use it. And yes, it's an awful vision of the world.
Because it would be incredibly convenient. Link a restaurent to your friends in a chat, talk about going there, all of them have the location and you can split the bill, all in the same app.
It might not have the best business index, or the best chat, or the best map, or the best payment manager, but it would be far, far superior to trying to coordinate all of those services through different apps.
And it's not that you need to want all of this, it's that if people around you use it you have enormous pressure to use it as well, because in the previous scenario if you are the guy who doesn't use such app then you have to be catered to specifically through and through, which is annoying for everyone.
>> There's no attempt to create a single, wide-ranging social media platform, with payments, video, shorts, DMs, and more
Umm.. Facebook? Just offering all those features doesn't mean much though, you really have to be dominant in each one, since there's much less moat to debundling consumer apps vs enterprise
Their platforms are siloed off. The point of a mega app is that it's not siloed off; the reels, videos, DMs and tweets would be part of the same experience, and rely on the same usernames, hence the moat.
I wonder how this jives with his stated plan to lay off a lot of people? If he wants to implement that he'll need a lot more engineers and related support staff.
I think this was mostly bluster, sure hell have to lay off a lot of people to change the company direction but his pitch to investors said the company would grow to like 12000 people.
Then he's in real trouble because he's taken on a whole lot more loans, and Twitter is not growing that quickly and liable to actually shrink now. The US market for it is saturated.
If expenditure (hiring) goes up and he's not finding revenue then that's the end sooner rather then later.
Yeah, he’s said a lot of conflicting things and put himself in a precarious position. I both wouldn’t be truly surprised if he grows twitter nor if he laid 75% of people off on Monday.
There's a cluster of things around transport and then... also Twitter? I get that in the end you want to do everything but what makes microblogging a more important day 1 feature than food delivery or gaming or online dating. It's like if Amazon did just book delivery and online photo storage.
the everything-app thing would be significant if realized, the thing about that is it has to compete not just against all the tech giants, but also against all the smaller companies who are already mostly succeeding in those verticals. having to install another app isn't really an impediment to acquiring users.
it's an interesting vision to be sure, but i'm not sure how buying twitter actually helps it - twitter has already been struggling to expand outside their core product - none of the experiments like moments, spaces, fleets, etc have really taken off. it kind of seems like twitter users just want tweets and nothing else. so now he's taken on a whole bunch of debt to acquire a userbase who is hostile to the app expanding into any other markets? I don't really see a whole lot of evidence that twitter is a good launch platform for an everything-app.
Saying it is some country’s WeChat is like a curse… as WeChat is notorious for its closed mindedness and probably hated by most of its users… and they won’t even have any other option because Tencent is actively striking down all potential competitors…
I think that means WeChat in the sense that in China WeChat isn't just an communications app, it's an app through which many/most people do a great deal of transactions -- shopping, p2p payments, paying utility bills, customer support, ride hailing, banking, etc., It encompasses what about 10 apps in the US do. You cannot understate how pervasive its use is in ways that have little to do with social media. That's what Elon wants to turn Twitter into.
Yeah wtf would anyone touting freedom of speech bring up China in any way? Tencent, owner of WeChat, said they'd block NBA Houston Rockets games because one of the Rockets' managers tweeted "Fight for Freedom. Stand with Hong Kong." [0]. Granted, I got kicked off of twitter for "misinformation" for saying "some day we'll all die".
It's two different things: WeChat has a bunch of integrated apps, that's part of what Musk's vision is. The free speech issue is separate from the similarities to WeChat.
How could free speech possibly remain separate at WeChat levels of consolidation?
You spout wrongthink in a twitter DM, and now your bank, credit card, email, private messages, facebook, rail pass, amazon, uber, government ID, school accounts, craigslist and tinder are permabanned.
It's difficult to make a judgement on "some day we'll all die" without context. It might've been part of an insightful discussion about the potential of immortality or it could have been directed at the parent of a school-shooting victim.
This. As someone living in China and having used wechat for years I've always found it ultra cringey when American businessmen/influencers are like "omg have you guys seen what Chinese are doing with wechat! They have this all in one app where..."
First of all this idea of a superapp is nothing new. In fact iOS or Android is also a "superapp". Basically a software that has an ecosystem inside of it. Wechat has just created their own ecosystem within a ecosystem, because they want to control everything.
Second, when compared to most other Chinese apps I do have to admit that wechat is much more finished, but when compared to other global messaging apps like Telegram, Slack etc. I'd say wechat is about 10-15 years behind in everything and lacking the most fundamental features.
The social media aspect of wechat which is called "Wechat Moments" is also extremely limited: Basically like Instagram without you being able to see or follow people you don't know personally. If your friend posts a photo and his friend (who you don't know) makes a comment on it, you cannot see this comment but you can see your friends replies to him/her. Yes, super confusing. Also no images, videos, gifs in the comments etc.
Third, a lot of people like to mention that "you can do everything with wechat". You can do a lot of things, but I don't know anyone who only uses wechat. There are a lot of other apps that you need to live comfortably: Alipay (this is another superapp), Taobao (like ebay), Jingdong (like amazon), Dianping (like Yelp), Eleme/Meituan (like Uber eats), Baidu maps, banking apps etc. etc.
Wechat does have it's internal "miniprogram" system (alternative to native apps) where you can have some of these apps I previously mentioned, but there are severe app size, memory and performance limitations, proprietary API and the performance and functionality is from early 2010s internet. Laggy and slowly opening pages, collapsing and bouncy layouts etc. Also wechat does not support multitasking: When you are using for example Tim Horton's miniprogram to order coffee, you can't chat with your friends, you can't open a Starbucks/some_other_coffee_company miniprogram on the side and compare prices. You have to close and kill the current "app" and then open a new "app" for new action.
This is somewhat understandable due to the iOS/Android limitations of a single app (in regards to performance and memory), but it highlights why this kind of a "superapp" idea is fundamentally flawed.
So basically IMO "superapp" is a solution looking for a problem. We already have iOS, Android or web browser. We don't need another forced ecosystem but we need good apps for existing ones.
> If your friend posts a photo and his friend (who you don't know) makes a comment on it, you cannot see this comment but you can see your friends replies to him/her.
Is that a technical shortcoming or business logic? It doesn't sound entirely different from how Twitter handles private/blocked accounts.
It sounds like Musk is going to tell advertisers to kick rocks and try to monetize the platform.
Where are people gonna go if not on Twitter? The left isn't gonna have better luck with their own truth social or parler. The network effect is too big with Twitter. It's not fun if you're not dunking on your enemies. That's the fun of Twitter.
I think you may be over-estimating how much most people "need" something like Twitter. For the vast majority of users, a news feed and private messaging (WhatsApp, iMessage, etc.) are good enough.
Based on what? Social media is addictive. For people to get off of it, they're going to need some help. We don't currently have facilities to help people kick the habit.
I appreciate your perspective. I used Twitter to follow industry news. But the people I cared about left and so did I. It’s so boring and pointless now. Absolutely no value to me anymore.
Facebook could allow for special profiles that are only comprised of statuses. That would be a Twitter clone in a nutshell that would already have high adoption.
That would require Facebook to make a shrewd business decision though so never mind.
It would also require people, who I am assuming lean left, to trust Zuck over Elon after the last 5 years of talking about how terrible Zuck and his platform are. I don't see that happening. Nobody wants grandma reading their tweets.
he bragged that he didn't care about making a profit in one of those public Q&A rountables this year. a lot of weird statements about a company that he seems to hate despite using it to pump his fortune
Maybe I've just been working for tech companies in the Bay Area too long. But I don't want to work for a company where I don't have equity that I can cash out.
And now all those engineers are working for a company where equity doesn't exist? An exception could be a Netflix model where you make a buttload of money. But Twitter isn't that.
SpaceX has no public equities and has no problem attracting talent.
You guys are really thinking Musk is some bozos that have never done anything in his life. Its quite incredible. Last week 4 astronauts went to ISS on his rocket and the first stage landed, again. Tesla is still growing at close to 40/50% top and bottomline when all car companies are contracting, even FAANG.
Twitter is yet to be seen. But its quite incredible the dismissiveness around here. Making Twitter work is peanuts comparing to trying to get a car company and a space company (both industries where successful examples are much harder to find than social media companies. Even if we point fingers as Meta and Snap, they are profitable and not bankrupt like most car and space companies in history) to survive through the 2008 Financial crisis.
> SpaceX has no public equities and has no problem attracting talent.
I'm no Musk hater and interested to see where he takes Twitter. That said, SpaceX is at the forefront of space travel, and they want to put man on Mars. Twitter sells advertisements on the internet, with the lofty goal of selling some more ads.
We know one thing: half of the $44B was loans that will cost Twitter around $1B per year, so it has to make some kind of profit. Otherwise who will pay?
If they made $1B profit before counting the loan, they would spend that profit on the loan. Effectively the same concept: they need to revenue to clear operating expenses PLUS a $1B loan payment.
In 2020 twitter had a net loss of $1.14B. The loans will kill twitter.
It might be interesting to know the subtlety if it is in the Twitter context. Is it better to look at cash, loc, and cashflow to determine if they can pay the loan repayments?
Essentially, yes. The GAAP income statement is a very poor proxy for cash flow generation ability. That captures 80% of it.
There’s also operating leverage. This business should trend to 50-80% gross margins and 30-50% profit / free cash flow conversion, similar to Facebook, Google, or other similar businesses.
Further, there’s a bunch of pre- and post- transaction adjustments that hit the financial statements (for example stock based compensation will likely go away in a private company, thus raising profitability), so you can’t just take last years profit and tack on the new debt structure.
Last, the amortization on high yield isn’t necessarily linear. In the most extreme example (where the debt costs >12%) you could have pay-in-kind (PIK) interest where the interest payments accrue to the balance of the loan (like a credit card) and for amortization, it could be anywhere from straight line (1/x periods) to a “bullet” with no amortization at all until a end period where it all comes due at once (you typically refinance in that case).
All-in, it may be risky, but the bankers that committed billions of capital to the deal aren’t exactly brain dead and all have internal credit approval processes which require them to do all the work outlined above and a bunch more.
> for example stock based compensation will likely go away in a private company, thus raising profitability
They're paying out vests on the sales price in cash, which was higher than the value of the company. Normally equity comp places the price fluctuation risk on the employee, but in this case, they're directly eating this cost.
If they don't offer salaries that are competitive with other companies total comp, they will bleed employees, and won't be able to hire talented engineers.
So, no, this really doesn't help, and if anything it increases their direct costs.
You didn't dispute my point that they still need another $1.2B/year. And even looking at their 10 past years (where 2020 was the highest income), it's still bleak.
I don't know why you dissed my response, then gave an answer that basically supports it.
Do you try to save tax every year by “maximising your losses”? Or aka claiming as many expenses ad possible. This reduces your income! But even if you took 100k off your income aka “profit” this way you could still afford your mortgage, right… infact it makes it more affordable as you paid less tax!
Sigh. Sure. There’s 7 banks or so in the lending group, each with 5 to 12 FTEs touching or reviewing this deal before funding.
But sure, you’re smarter than them all combined, they’re wrong and underwrote a faulty deal and you’re right, particularly when having no info on the post transaction capital structure.
How would Twitter be WeChat of America if WeChat is fundamentally for private messages and private transactions (unless it’s groups) but Twitter is for broadcasting yourself
Let's assume he makes Neuralink happen in the sense of really giving a locked-in person the ability to communicate in real words and sentences.
He now has the network to connect those people directly to the rest of the world, under his umbrella. Sure, he could have just used (old) Twitter's API, and that's what he'll be using, but it won't be "we (as in 'Neuralink') and Twitter made this happen", but "we (my companies)" made this happen.
I also wonder how useful Twitter's infrastructure could be for machine-to-machine communication, where he certainly could have some uses for it with Tesla and Starlink.
‘Ah yes. We can give your child with locked in syndrome a communications path with the rest of the world, but it can only be through the twitter API. Also his ventilator? Also needs twitter API. Yes, that’s right. His life support and all communication in and out relies on a flimsy message board. Connection outages? Well, it can’t happen. We’ve got starlink on the back of his wheelchair. Tunnels? Oh no, don’t go in tunnels’
I'm excited about the possibility of a more decentralized / open source WeChat coming out of this. Twitter has their BlueSky project for decentralized social media and is bringing on many pro-crypto people into management (e.g. https://twitter.com/sriramk). It would be a great story of USA freedom vs Chinese control that could be really good for the world and Twitter.
There was talk of him using crypto currency as a way of disincentivizing bots. Not sure how well thought out the ideas were, but there might well be some interesting integrations with crypto on the platform
Twitter’s already headed down the uncool social media curve like Facebook before it. There will be an exodus, but it would have happened either way.
Once the parents get on, it starts the decline. When the grandparents are there…
The “political” polarization is part of it. The older folks bring it with them. The majority flock to sites for information and escapism. The back and forth is just exhausting.
It’s clearer for geek sites. Slashdot died when it got corporate and the content went to crap. Digg was the same. Reddit’s in process except niches. It’ll be same here.
> Twitter’s already headed down the uncool social media curve like Facebook before it. There will be an exodus, but it would have happened either way.
Once the parents get on, it starts the decline. When the grandparents are there…
> The “political” polarization is part of it. The older folks bring it with them. The majority flock to sites for information and escapism. The back and forth is just exhausting.
> It’s clearer for geek sites. Slashdot died when it got corporate and the content went to crap. Digg was the same. Reddit’s in process except niches. It’ll be same here.
> For everything there is a season.
What you sound like:
Yes and there shall be an exodus from the Twitters.
The parents shall come in, then the grandparents shall follow. Once those generations arrive the decline shall start. Not before. Not long after. But right after the grandparents, whence they arrive.
The polarization shall induce the decline. This wrought on by the older generations. And this is when the majority shall flock to sites for information and escapism.
Just as Slashdot, and Digg, declined before it, so shall the Twitters decline as well.
For everything, there is a season.
---
With your prescience, you must be a billionaire. Why don't you just buy Twitter off of Elon?
But the parents are already there. Like, uh, me. And most of my Twitter friends are similarly aged. And some of their parents are there. My mute list grows every couple months. I don’t mind political content but get tired of being battered by angry repetitive posts. Most of the people I know who abandoned facebook did it for that reason.
The younger folks I know don’t have an account or care. I don’t even know what the cool thing is anymore. That’s probably the point.
It’s already in its decline, the user numbers maybe don’t reflect it yet. And it’s not prescient any more than watching any historical trend repeat itself is.
There’s more than a billion reasons I’m not a billionaire, including. I’m not brave, smart, or initially wealthy enough are a few.
If I were, I wouldn’t buy a social media site. I also wouldn’t buy a TCBY franchise. These are things that might be great short term, but risk increases over time. A 1-2 year old TCBY is packed with kids. A 5+ year old one looks like every near empty ice cream shop. They all have the same smell, it’s weird.
Anyway, I’m risk adverse… and that lack of bravery is partly why I’m not wealthy in any sense.
I might be wrong about all of this. Just applying what I’ve seen from the past to the present.
I am the older folks. My Twitter friends are the older folks. And my mute word list grows every election or scandal to cover the copy/paste rhetoric from “both” sides. Maybe 1/3 of my follows hit that.
It’s not a statement that all or even most older people do it. I anecdotally see it more from older demographics. I might be wrong. I probably am tiptoeing the line of “ist” there. Definitely don’t mean to say all or most older people, but I am generalizing on a demographic. I’ll have to think about that more.
I don’t think statements like that should be “disallowed” anywhere except places like employment, etc. And it’s never OK to say that a generalization applies to an individual because they are within a demographic.
I think if Musk pulls off what he’s trying to, it’ll be better than now. I block and mute Trump, Biden, etc. anyway. When I want to get politics I reach out for it in a format >280 characters.
I don’t idolize or demonize Musk. He’s just another person with talents and flaws like the rest of us. He does some smart stuff. He does some head scratching things. He likes attention, can be hilarious, clever, or, as my kids say, “cringey.” But I don’t want him to be anything other than he wants to. We need all of that in the world.
This is more a statement that Musk isn’t going to ruin Twitter. I think it will follow the same historical curve as all social media and it has 0 to do with him. And pre social media things as well, since at least WWII. “The kids” set trends. By the time the majority latches on, they’ve moved on. Heck, you can probably see that in slang’s impact on “proper” language much longer.
I’ll be happy if/when “epic” leaves slang. For some reason that one irritates my pedantry more than any other.
There is not only personalities like Trump, peoples like Silvano Trotta, Christian Perronne, Astrid Stuckelberger, Christine Cotton, should also be unbanned if he do things right. All theses peoples have switched to Telegram, but they might come back on twitter if Musk is serious about free speech and unban them. With their followers...
1. Musk is going to discover (and maybe admit?) that fixing Twitter is harder than he thought. It will be just like self-driving, which seems straightforward, but which actually has thousands of edge cases which are hard to solve with a single general system. Nevertheless, he will persist, because that's what he does.
2. Current Twitter makes a profit on advertising, which means Twitter needs to encourage high levels of engagement, which means they need controversial (emotional) content, but not so emotional (toxic) as to drive people away. They need to be as close to the line as possible, which is why they spend so much effort on moderation. Musk's solution is, I predict, to try different revenue sources so that engagement with the feed is not the primary metric.
3. Musk has already stated that his goal is the Everything App (which he calls X). The Everything App has news, social media, games, videos, and a payment infrastructure (both to pay for content and to get paid). He wants Twitter to replace Facebook, Instagram, Google News, YouTube, Twitch and PayPal, etc. Will he be able to pull it off? I expect he will deliver the 20% of those services that are high-value, but pitch it as a complete solution. That might actually be good enough for most people.
4. If he accomplishes #3, then the revenue source is obviously: they will take a cut out of every transaction going on in the network. Maybe ads are a component, but they don't have to be a major component. If engagement is no longer the most important metric, then it's possible to allow every person to have a radically personalized feed. Even something as simple as only showing you tweets from people you follow (what a concept!) would revolutionize the experience and drastically reduce the need for moderation.
5. Since Twitter is private, Musk can front-load #4 even before the Everything App is ready. If he hasn't already burned the current team, he can make the experience better relatively quickly and worry about profit later.
6. Now for my safest prediction: No matter what he does, some people will hate him for it.
The way he got bored running Tesla and SpaceX for ~20 years?
I really don't get where this meme of "impulsive, erratic, hotheaded Musk" comes from given he demonstrated ability to stick with a business in the toughest of times.
Tesla was literally days away from bankruptcy at one time and Musk made it work.
After first 3 failed launches he was about to run out of money and yet he financed another launch, which worked.
He hasn't had a business failure yet.
Is that a guy who gets bored and moves on to something else?
The Boring Company is a failure. He's had many other failures within companies: automated driving, Tesla solar panels
Though he's the CEO of SpaceX, it's really run by Gwynne Shotwell.
You look at his wikipedia, and there's like 10 different things he's currently involved with, so yes, he looks like a guy that gets bored and moves on the other things.
The Boring Company is not a failure. It's actually a major success, for Tesla. It successfully led a generation of politicians and journalists think that there's no need for public transportation, that Elon Musk will solve all our infrastructure needs. It's a modern day GM Streetcar.
California high speed rail (the only real attempt at high speed rail in the US) didn’t need Musk to kill it, it killed itself due to incompetence in building quickly and affordably. This is a shame, because an actually affordable, working high speed rail system in America would be amazing, but won’t happen until we learn how to build again quickly and affordably in America. And who knows how to do that? Elon Musk!
I don't think it makes sense to compare a giant, multibillionaire organization like Twitter to something like the Boring Company, which was never really intended to be a main venture.
They already launched a "Loop" in Vegas, and it's a small tunnel with manned taxis running in it, operated by the city. And it took longer from project start to inauguration, per mile, than the Channel tunnel linking the UK and France.
The LVCC Loop started boring in 15 November 2020 and opened to the public on 15 April 2021 - so 5 months, for the 2.7km. The Channel tunnel began construction in June of 1988 and opened for freight trains in June of 1994, so 72 months for the 50.4km.
So, the LVCC was built at 0.54 km/month, while the Channel tunnel was buildlt at 0.7 km/month.
Isn’t it expected that a longer tunnel would take less time to build per mile than a shorter one? That just seems obvious. Just like how a 2000 square foot house isn’t going to take twice as long to build as a 1000 square foot house.
I didn't say anything about cost in my initial post. Still, you're right that the cost difference is hugely in favor of the LVCC tunnel if we only look at length.
However, if we look at freight+people crossing the tunnels, the Channel tunnel surely wins again - it may be roughly 10 times more expensive per km, but it carries orders of magnitudes more, by rail + by car.
I expect creating tunnels 20 years from now as important as right now.
Traffic jams are not going away magically, but automation can bring the cost of creating tunnels down, which can increase the total market significantly.
Time is helping the company (just like other projects Elon has started), so there's no rush to scale up and turn profit.
Tunnels don't really solve the problem well - they cost too much for what they do, and don't even do it well. Public transport (specifically expanding trains + e-bikes) is a much better, easier and already available solution.
Why didn't the workers cone off a lane from the street to make space for the bikes? Cars usually have easier alternatives, they can just take another lane.
EDIT: But anyway, the real viable alternative to cars is probably not bikes, it's trains and buses.
Because 1) literally no cars. And 2) there’s a bike lane on the other side of the road. The bike lane is bidirectional and the width of a car lane. All the parking in the street was removed for bike lanes.
Don’t quote me on this but the last time I checked it was roughly…
~600 deaths 35,000 hospitalisation due to car accidents.
~85 deaths 13,000 hospitalisation due to cycling accidents.
But in any case when walking in the city I feel safe walking with cars. But I don’t feel safe with cyclists. They rush through red lights. Rush through intersections while people are crossing. I’ve witnessed accidents occur due to cyclists not following the laws. If they followed the laws and slowed down. Stopped and gave way like they are meant to. I wouldn’t have an issue.
The Boring Company takes machines made by other companies, and digs tunnels that anyone with those machines can dig to provide a solution that is largely impractical.
Pretty easy to get rid of traffic jams actually, you just get rid of the cars. Never been stuck in traffic in places where there aren't cars.
In cities? Yes. You start preferencing more space efficient modes of transport, and traffic jams go away, while transport time decreases.
If you’re going to put a tunnel with fixed access points under a city, it makes a lot more sense to run trains than private cars.
If you’re going to have a 4 lane road reserve two of the lanes for super high capacity vehicles (busses).
Traffic jams are a byproduct of the limits of physics. Once you reach a certain density it is simply impossible to provide enough private car parking and lane capacity.
But does rerouting traffic through other bypasses actually alleviate traffic?
> Motorways and bypasses generate traffic, that is, produce extra traffic, partly by inducing people to travel who would not otherwise have done so by making the new route more convenient than the old, partly by people who go out of their direct route to enjoy the greater convenience of the new road, and partly by people who use the towns bypassed because they are more convenient for shopping and visits when through traffic has been removed
A traffic network's purpose is to move people from point A to point B. If you double the lanes and they fill up, you've doubled the throughput. If traffic doesn't move any faster, it's because the old traffic jams were a bigger problem than was visible. You've still alleviated the issue by allowing twice as many people to reach their destination in the same amount of time.
There's an argument that assumes that building more lanes does not increase the number of people who travel, only the number of people who choose to do so by car. Then with fewer lanes, the same number of people still get from A to B but on bicycles or using public transport instead of cars.
Do look at the "Studies" section of the same article, too.[1] It is far from established that induced demand outweighs the capacity increase from road construction.
Mayors of big towns are clearing city centers from cars and making them walkable again anyways (at least in Europe, I don’t know how it is being done in other places). If tunnels are the shortest path to get from one part of the city to another (like in Zurich), cars will use them.
Less cars on the road solves traffic jams. Not more roads.
Traffic jams are insane, we see a single person sitting alone in a 3+ ton box idling his time and instead of seeing how absurd it is, we want to make bigger roads for more almost empty boxes.
Nuts.
The solution to traffic jams is excellent public transportation and last mile mobility. Not more roads and definitely not tunnels.
> I really don't get where this meme of "impulsive, erratic, hotheaded Musk" comes from
The same guy who tweeted "Funding secured". His tweets about starting boring company, and buying twitter. His email exchanges that are now public. He is VERY impulsive and erratic (maybe not hotheaded).
> I really don't get where this meme of "impulsive, erratic, hotheaded Musk" comes from
His behavior like… every day and the fact that he apparently accidentally just bought a $44B company doesn’t at least let you see where people are coming from?
These musk heads are insane. The projection is ridiculous, portraying the characterization of musk as impulsive as a "meme" when they are so deeply steeped in reality denial... drives me insane. They need a serious correction, crypto style.
> The way he got bored running Tesla and SpaceX for ~20 years?
For all practical purposes, doesn't Shotwell run SpaceX and Elon just shows up to give "input", whenever the capital raise du-jour is necessary, and to do the marketing and PR?
It does seem to me he will need another Shotwell for either Tesla or Twitter, though. You can be CEO of as many companies as you want, but if the CEO is also doing the Operations part of the work, then you're constrained to pretty much one company at a time. I wonder if we'll see Jack come back to Twitter.
For all practical purposes, doesn't Shotwell run SpaceX and Elon just shows up to give "input", whenever the capital raise du-jour is necessary, and to do the marketing and PR?
Those companies are solving problems with logistics and engineering.
Twitter is fundamentally trying to solve a people problem, which is much fuzzier. Every impression I've had from "public Elon" is that he is absolutely wretched at people-problems-at-scale. I'm also not sure there is any human ever who has been able to solve people problems at Twitter's scale.
Could you elaborate? He wrote a book that many considered important, but how specifically did he solve people problems? To me it sounds like he understood emergent behaviors in economics, but didn’t those economicists also believe in the rational actor? That is not an accurate assumption about humanity.
Keynes’ solutions to human problems on a macro scale lifted millions upon millions of people out of poverty in the post-war era
keynesianism eventually failed because corporations and large capital holders will not act rationally towards the whole when they have interests that benefit themselves. so I suppose you’re right. but that doesn’t change the fact that for a good 30 years his ideas and solutions made life better for a huge number of people
there are people worshipping him like he is Jesus, something is really wrong here, how do people say he has not had a business fail? seriously SpaceX was a failure without the government stepping in at the last moment even he admits it.. look how he scammed the US government to keep Tesla going... i guess these are not "real" failures but from his own words government shouldn't be subsidizing business .... never mind all the failures he has had.
Autonomous Tesla's were also ready by the end of the year 5+ years ago. He's always been the way he is, the difference is the number of people who have caught on to his schtick by now.
People just don't know Musk. Falcon Heavy was delayed for 8 years. It took 8 years longer. He still got it to work. With all 3 rockets landing simultaneously at the same time.
SpaceX also beat Boeing with a smaller budget (NASA gave more to Boeing) in sending astronauts to the ISS. Boeing still is not able to get a successful test launch 2 years after SpaceX got the first astronauts to ISS from US domestic soil.
If you can stumble into so many achievements by luck. Or just by oh, lean on a few Shotwells and engineers.... then why are companies like Meta and Snap etc in the trash bin? Why is Boeing still stuck on the ground? Why after a half a decade of Tesla killers than nobody is getting killed but legacy automakers (all declining revenue and deliveries).
For what it's worth, two of the Falcon Heavy cores landed simultaneously at the launch site, the third was intended to land on a barge at sea, but came in too hot and crashed into the ocean.
I think it's not exactly fair to compare Twitter with his other endeavours. Others are very hard problems. What Musk will do with twitter is figure out an action plan: IMO changing twitter into X will be a viable way of letting it survive. He's gonna chart a course of action that could work and give the reins to someone else for execution.
Musk's time is valuable given that he's leading a lot of companies. He's not going to sit around and mull over twitter. The best thing he can do is spend time => chart a plan => hire a capable CEO who is best at execution (Tim Cook for instance). If he spends more time on twitter, his other bets will get hurt disproportionately.
Twitter is a very hard problem because it’s not a technological or engineering challenge.
It’s politics, politics, politics. From all angles and perspectives, in the possibly most annoying way. You have to make so many politics and policy decisions that all have many up- and downsides and that are just plain hard to make.
From a technology perspective Twitter is not at all interesting and the rest is just plain annoying. Plus, it’s a small social network, mostly relevant because important people (imagine myself rolling my eyes here) are on it. So doing other social media stuff that rely on network effects? (Messenger, payment, ...) Not really realistic. Not because the technology is infeasible. None of this is a technological challenge. It’s just politics and network effects.
This is my guess as well, but on a bit longer timescale. I think we'll see some noteworthy features over the next year as he tackles low hanging fruit(the reply button for example, although it sounds like that was already in development). This will be followed by a year or two of slow down as they run into social/technological issues, followed by Musk selling off the company.
Seriously considering #3 a solid idea to even discuss is a delusion. Twitter already has videos (YouTube, Twitch), a feed (Facebook, Google News), images (IG), etc. did it replace any of the above mentioned services or do you think the only missing element in this massive intercontinental cross-technological enterprise is Elon Musk?
They just need his guidance and leads, PMs, design, engineers, … and, most importantly, users of these existing platforms will all align and populate this brave new super app.
4) don't overestimate cut of transaction and underestimate ad revenue (promoting the transaction seekers). Let's use Amazon as an example: They run a 3P marketplace with a transaction cut business model, and it's not very profitable. Vs. their ads based sponsored product which is extremely profitable (soon to larger than AWS for profit at Amazon). This is a very different ad business than twitter's current performance marketing ad product.
I think first party ads promoting commerce on your platform can be very lucrative. And % of transactions tend not to be, with the exception of Android / iOS app store markets.
I haven't done the math because nobody is paying me to. But your example of Amazon might reinforce my point in that all three components (retail, ads, AWS) reinforce each other. Amazon is trying to be the "Everything App" also because they see synergies (even if only in shared infra).
And Amazon can afford to be less agressive with ads because it's a smaller part of their business, compared to (e.g.) Meta or Twitter. Apple is in a similar place: they can afford to care more about privacy because they don't make money from ads.
The more revenue Twitter can get from non-ad sources, the better the user experience (in my opinion).
But you're right that there's no guarantee that they will be able to get much non-ad revenue.
> Even something as simple as only showing you tweets from people you follow (what a concept!) would revolutionize the experience and drastically reduce the need for moderation.
You can do that right now by turning off retweets for the people you follow. You have to do that individually for every user you follow but it allows for a highly curated timeline. I turn of retweets for about 80% of the people I follow because I am interested in their original content but not in their random retweets. The other 20% introduce me to new content through their retweets.
I had a chance to buy 76.com before the oil company realized they should buy it. Had I any access to capital as a kid I would have bought it for $2k. well at least I get it as a trump in dns stories missed out on.
Having used WeChat, LINE and the like I shudder. Not just because they naturally become bloated slow ugly behemoths to use but also because they more generally become de-facto monopolies. Not having to compete with anyone is the ultimate killer of innovation.
As much as people dislike Musk, he draws excitement and captivation not only to himself, but to whatever he touches. Now for the first time people actually care about the "future" of Twitter, or in a sense, have a vision for its future that isn't defined by its frequent moderation-related controversies.
Is Musk's financial success and unparalleled cultural relevance a science that can be replicated? I mean, as much as people don't like him he has gotten to a financial position where anything he wants seems easily achievable. Is it the fact that he always carries the implied promise of "bold new future that will change your life" more than any other cultural entity?
Obviously Mark Zuckerberg is trying the same thing with Meta, but that's been a failure.
People hate Musk's personality, but no companies occupy the reverence in people's mind as much as SpaceX and Tesla. Even a man for a while much richer than Elon, Bezos, couldn't muster much in terms of cultural relevance for Blue Origin than a PR stunt with William Shatner.
Does Musk have a internal "toolbox" of guiding principles and behaviors that tremendously advantage him in his current position as outgoing tech CEO, or is he just extremely lucky? Is it merely because of his seeming utopian ambitions that make him more than a guy merely obsessed with financial success that he has ended up much more wealthy than if he were a much more grounded, brass-tacks CEO?
The rocket landing stuff largely borrow from DC-X and the spinoff work at NASA (+Lars Blackmore), all originally Strategic Defense Initiative stuff.
He used all that money from Mike as collateral for loans to Tesla.
He deserves some credit for impressive financial engineering and attracting talent under the guise of purpose ("going to Mars") but he took a lot of shady money along the way. And then there is the Saudis..
Most people who work with Musk 1:1 know he's unpredictable but pretty mentally unimpressive.
If it were just a matter of money, any of the other billionaires who tried to build rocket companies would have succeeded. SpaceX got payload to orbit with ~$100M. The only other company that has come close to this is Rocket Lab with a bit over $200M invested.
By comparison, Bezos has been sinking > $1B per year into Blue Origin for nearly a decade without making it to orbit, and probably won't until 2024 at the earliest.
> Bezos has been sinking > $1B per year into Blue Origin for nearly a decade
Not to claim a false SpaceX-Blue equivalence here, but this is misleading. Most of the early work at Blue Origin was on a fairly tight budget, and SpaceX has always had significantly more development money than Blue.
It is true that Blue has taken much longer to get to orbit, but they're starting with effectively a Saturn V class vehicle (a bit smaller, but partially reusable), whereas SpaceX started their orbital ambitions with the vastly smaller Falcon 1.
The gap in technical competence and effectiveness is still huge, but it's not as stark as the money-to-orbit metric would have it seem. New Sheppard could have reached orbit long ago, if it was designed to be orbital; it's just there's no money (in a Bezos sense) in small launch, and that wasn't the tech it was designed to prove out, so it wasn't.
My preferred way to estimate this is with employee counts instead, and the difference there is also stark, and then in the early days it's also possible to prove on first principles since Bezos wasn't rich enough at the time to compete with SpaceX's early NASA contracts.
Blue has ramped up a lot recently, as in the last couple of years, but you can also check SpaceX's recent investment rounds and they are burning money like crazy (a lot of this will be Starship and Starlink, since the former is a cost sink and the latter is still a ways off breaking even).
There is an argument to be made that the nature of this money was different, but SpaceX has always done the Amazon thing of reinvesting every penny they make, and certainly in the early days their costs were especially R&D dominated.
His "save humanity" messaging helped attract talent, something Bezos never learned how to do. But once people get to know Elon, it's clear his idealisms about Mars are manipulations and not sincerely held. He really means Strategic Defense Initiative. Elon is super pro-military technology (a hint is naming his kid after spy planes).
He basically believes his purpose is to build what the US DoD has been asking for for decades.. a space-based defense system, powered by AI to project force across the planet ("for our own good"). People who know him closely are aware. For example Grimes leaked a lot of this.
To be fair, Elon believe he's doing what he's supposed to / what is "right". It's just not the same as what he says to get people to work for him or be his fans. Talented people often won't work on military technology if they know that's what it's for, so he bends the truth.
It could be that his "save humanity" schtick actually attracts the wrong type of talent. See, when I was a full time programmer, about a decade ago, I really believed in Musk. It was only later, when I had more time on my hands that I started to fact check his claims, resulting in spiraling disillusionment.
So, I think Musk companies must be recruiting people who are young, and somewhat niaeve. I can't imagine many mature engineers being attracted to the crypto-bro atmosphere, unless they, themselves, are as conceited as Musk and happy to be in on the con.
This is true. I had a friend who programmed part of one of SpaceX's satellites, basically working as an unpaid intern. He spent 80 hours a week working on it non stop, sleeping in the lab, all while finishing his undergraduate CS degree.
The same thing with Elon's Hyperloop pod competitions. A completely meritless future technology still saw millions of free man-hours poured into being the creators of the first step into the future. As smart as everyone who participated in it was, the prestige of everything Elon blinded them.
* Convincing talented people to come work on his projects.
And he lies convincingly. His methods sometimes do get results (Tesla electric cars, SpaceX), so to his fans, he's a genius. Most of his projects fail (Tesla self-driving, boring company, hyperloop, robotaxis, crypto, stonks, every single thing he's tweeted about), but his fans are happy to forgive or forget all about those.
With Twitter he may have bitten off more than he can chew.
People who don't like him really downplay his past achievements. I currently don't like him, but he's been involved in PayPal, Tesla and Space X, all companies which had/have a big impact in our world.
Some will say he bought some of these, or the engineers did the real work, or he got government and family funding. But so what? Lots of companies with funding and good engineers don't get anywhere. So I don't know what, but he's been doing somethings right for a very long time.
More recently? Only crap shots, in my opinion. The boring tunnel sucks. Self driving will likely never become a reality. The Twitter deal feels off. I miss the visionary Mars seeking Musk, what we have now is the libertarian boomer Musk and he's disappointing.
You keep talking about people as if you they are one homogenous block that you deeply understand and represent.
Most people really couldn't care less about SpaceX, Tesla or the future of Twitter. And they definitely wouldn't put Musk at the pinnacle of cultural relevance.
It's a minority of the population that is on sites like this that care. And for many of us there is a much more discerning and skeptical attitude towards Musk and his antics.
SpaceX is cool. I think musk definitely draws excitement and his companies have great brand reputation. Tesla sells an idea, a lifestyle. When you look at the product, its not great. ill-thought out features (camera rain sensor, parking sensors being taken out), crappy materials, and promises that might never be delivered (self-driving).
I think musk really just is an optimist and a big thinker that is driving constantly towards the future, and people love that. Even if he accomplishes 10% of what he sets out to do, thats still a massive step forward.
Honestly I think we’re all just scared he is going to help get the boy king elected and if that’s the case, if that happens there’s a good chance that will be the end of civilization as we know it.
That is legit the only reason anyone I know of cares at all about this deal.
The drama is unbecoming. Contrary to claims, civilization didn't end when Trump took office. The economy didn't crash, it grew. Food prices didn't soar, they went down. Unemployment didn't go up, it went down, especially for minorities. Gas prices didn't hit $7 in California. Home energy bills went down. People had more disposable income and less tax burden. We didn't experience wild inflation. There was no prospect for a third world war.
But then Biden took office and many of those predictions came true through a variety of factors, not the least of which was the incompetence of State Governors, Chinese Communists and Democrats.
The guy lost the election and did everything in his power to hang onto it, this is a serious and dangerous threat to modern western democratic civilization.
There was no prospect for a third world war.
Who is being dramatic now?
We didn't experience wild inflation.
No but the Trump administration helped cause it? Inflation is not something that just happens because Joe Biden likes inflation, it happens because of policy.
... and now the media is like "this is fine (but it won't be if any conservative goals are accomplished)" while the world burns; whereas it was saying "the world is ending" while Trump was in office.
> Even a man for a while much richer than Elon, Bezos, couldn't muster much in terms of cultural relevance for Blue Origin than a PR stunt with William Shatner.
When/if Blue Origin starts actually launching ships to orbit and then landing them, they'll gain a lot of relevance.
I mean, yeah? If I personally started launching ships to orbit and landing them, I would gain a lot of relevance too.
The point is, somehow SpaceX is able to do things Blue can’t. Combined with Tesla being able to do things other automakers can’t, it seems there’s a common factor.
Firing Vijaya is a hell of a move here. Parag had been in the CEO seat for less than a year and had no real experience, and Twitter's not such a unique company financially that the CFO is anything special, but Vijaya had been in charge of legal and policy for a decade at a company that regularly has to tangle with nation state governments, as well as navigate all the other kinds of various policy hell that is Twitter's product - that kind of unique direct experience and learned wisdom is not easily replaceable.
You are spot on. That style of working or perspective towards policy is exactly what Musk wants to remove at the grassroots level.
Agreed that this wisdom and experience is not replaceable. But Musk intends to replace it with something else. If you think about it, Vijaya's perspectives and intuition is only going to pull back Musk's vision however vague that might be. Musk doesn't want to sit around and convince Vijaya of his opinion towards content moderation. I think if Vijaya showed appreciation or interest towards Musk's policy on some level at least, she would have had a non-zero chance to be around. The difference of opinion is at a stark contrast in my opinion.
This is the fastest and brutal way of Musk moving forward with his plan.
I don't think you have to claim to know what his plan is, to know what it is not. Why would he pay $50 billion dollars to buy Twitter only to leave the same people in charge of what he thinks was a broken platform?
I agree with that assessment. It’s good to keep in mind though that he at some point realised that whatever his plan might be, it wasn’t worth a $50B price.
Yes, but he presumes her "overly woke" perspectives towards community and censorship were anathema to his approach to libertarian free speech and also resulted in deplatforming Trump so away she goes! Why do you need someone in charge of legal and policy if you're going to stop caring about those things wholesale?
Just watching Tim Poole throw hard questions at her and her dodging for two hours on Rogan is enough to make me understand why Musk would fire her. She doesn’t share Musks vision at all when it comes to censorship.
AFAICT he's planning on folding to any authoritarian governments demands [1], while fighting for free speech mostly in the American context (and that too, just online). For that, he probably doesn't need Vijaya.
I hope someone pays her buckets of money now to fight at the actual frontline of free speech (Texas government sanctioned book bans perhaps?)
You're forgetting he has access to teams of competent lawyers (and their networks) who will already have to interact with international law for Tesla et al.
There's a reason lawyers specialize. No one is as qualified to fight for speech on Twitter as the person who's done it through the company's most tumultuous decade. The next most qualified person is probably Facebook's general counsel since they deal with all the same problems, and the places they differ probably still benefit from the portable experience. After that, there aren't a lot of people leading work on speech policy at this scale. You can't just drop in an IP lawyer or a real estate lawyer and hope for the best.
The only speech she fought for was for her ideological-religion.
Free, open, and fair debate were never permitted on twitter. She flat out ensured that their opinion became your opinion or you were out, one way or the other.
"No one is as qualified to fight for speech on Twitter as the person who's done it through the company's most tumultuous decade."
That's putting forward a ton of assumptions, none of which you cited supporting evidence for; length of time is quite a weak-shallow argument point.
Let's also bring up the fact that maybe they stayed in those positions so long because they were willing to take a knee to the fascists in governments, willingly toeing the line for them - so then therefore lacking principles and integrity - which is an unacceptable foundation to be fighting from for anything.
> but Vijaya had been in charge of legal and policy for a decade at a company that regularly has to tangle with nation state governments
In charge of, but almost certainly not the DRI, or related talent, for any of that. Her direct experience is most certainly minimal, compared to the people actually doing that work. This assumes there's not significant corruption of course.
So the questions would be, will Elon see the value in those groups responsible, and will those groups stick around on their own? I imagine so.
I’m sure there was exposure and involvement, but I would find it incredibly hard to believe if the brute force of the work was not a group of lawyers, with that exposure and involvement being easily exchanged for another, or even more hands off, CEO.
For example, he stopped talking about the bot population on the platform altogether after he could not get out of the deal.
Was he honest about this being a big issue in the first place?
For me, it’s not easy to believe this because this bot issue appeared right after Twitter staff did not like his speech, and talks with the CEO fell apart.
Am I mistaken about how it all played out?
If not, do you think being deceitful to a certain degree is okay?
From your point of view, do you consider him deceitful?
Every one of us has run into situations where choosing to be honest has materially cost us. You accidentally scratch a parked car on your way out. Do you stop and leave a note with contact info or not?
The richer you are, the more leverage you have and larger the material cost for these situations. A fellow rich friend gives you a little insider info that a stock you hold is about to crater. Do you sell some?
In other words, being honest is a tax, and the wealthier you are, the higher that tax rate. Given that, I think the only way to reach certain levels of wealth is by not paying that tax.
Therefore, I treat anyone at Musk's level of wealth as intrinsically untrustworthy. You don't get to be a billionaire by being a normal honest human. And if by miracle you should happen to, being a billionaire I think fundamentally changes your psychology such that you cease to be normal and honest. There may be exceptions, but I think they are exceedingly rare.
Billionaires are functionally a different species.
Being honest is an investment in an honest society and a just future. Of course, the problem with being honest is that, as with any ideological conflict, those who volunteer for the front lines make the most sacrifices, and have to trust that the tide will someday turn in favor of their side, even though they may never see it happen. So there's a lot of "you go first" noise instead of active effort to walk the talk.
Nonetheless this trending fad of referring to any cost that has no obvious immediate benefit to the payer a tax is starting to outgrow the original, and usefully narrow, scope it once had.
It would be equally valid, semantically, (and I would argue more valid prescriptively) to observe that having to constantly verify at great expense what in an honest society you could you could otherwise trusted at nearly zero expense, is the more costly and pernicious "tax" on total human productivity.
I probably should have been clearer that I believe strongly that it's a tax worth paying. My point was just that I think it's statistically extremely unlikely for a consistently honest person to become obscenely wealthy because the cost/benefit proposition gets worse and worse the richer you are. It's relatively easy to walk away from a dishonest deal that nets you a hundred bucks. But it takes a lot more character to walk away from a dishonest deal that nets you a hundred million.
I tend to assume (possibly without sufficiently compelling evidence, but I'm allowed to believe what I want) that anyone who's reached stratospheric wealth has done so by not walking away from some of those shady deals.
You may be right that "tax" is not a good metaphor.
> to observe that having to constantly verify at great expense what in an honest society you could you could otherwise trusted at nearly zero expense, is the more costly and pernicious "tax" on total human productivity.
I agree 1000%. The value of a society made of honest people is radically improved efficiency.
> My point was just that I think it's statistically extremely unlikely for a consistently honest person to become obscenely wealthy because the cost/benefit proposition gets worse and worse the richer you are.
From experience this completely lines up with what I have seen, in my almost 40 year career. I've watched serial entrepreneurs to things I would never dream of. It was then I knew, I'd never be rich.
The only quibble I have with your idea: it's not just billionaires. Of course, there are more millionaires who are still honest, but the percentage compared to the non-millionaire working population is much lower.
When you own and run a business, you are constantly confronted with decisions that have a good and bad path. The bad path, for me, is when I answer "yes" to the question "will this make it harder for me to sleep well at night?" Those decisions came up so often early in my career. I pride myself on how well I sleep at night, but I'm not rich.
If anything I'd say it's the opposite. A random person can get away with cons and scams for a long time. Whenever they get caught, they can just set up shop somewhere else. They can change their name (or simply lie to others about their name). Famous people can't do that. If you're famous, you can commit one scam before your reputation is ruined. Even if the story manages to avoid the news, people talk and word spreads. The incentives are such that a purely selfish billionaire sociopath is better off being honest.
Also, being extremely rich makes you a target for ambitious or activist prosecutors. Everything everywhere is securities fraud.[1][2] Whether you're hung out to dry or not is determined by how much your behavior has annoyed people in certain departments of the US government, or how much you've annoyed their friends.
He paid the price for that (and other things) via lawsuit settlements. Trump also had successful business ventures, so people saw him as a mixed bag. On another note, you don't need to be virtuous to be elected - just look at most politicians.
Then why can't I go to any news site without seeing a fresh new story of some rich/famous person getting caught red-handed being terrible and then gaining popularity from it?
I think what you are talking about is morality and not honesty. Musk is brutally honest - with the people he works with, with the investors, with his followers on twitter and everyone. He is brutally honest by letting them know on their face what he thinks is right and wrong. I would argue that not being honest about something wouldn't make you move forward.
You can be brutally honest and immoral at the same time. Not leaving a note for scratching a parked car is being immoral to someone.
Morality doesn't get you up the ladder because there are certain hard decisions you need to make. You may argue that dishonesty can take you up. I think dishonesty can only take you so far. It definitely can't get you to become someone like Musk.
> Musk is brutally honest - with the people he works with, with the investors, with his followers on twitter and everyone. He is brutally honest by letting them know on their face what he thinks is right and wrong.
He is brutally honest when it benefits him. But he is completely willing to lie when it suits him. See:
Or search for "Musk broken promise" or "Musk failed prediction" to see many other examples. You might argue that, "Well, he honestly intended these things to pass." But at his level of power, I believe there is a moral obligation to be reliable in one's public predictions.
The wealthier you are, the bigger the cost of certain actions, sure.
I'm not at all convinced that the rate gets higher. I'll go ahead and bet the opposite, that the cost of being honest represents a smaller fraction of your wealth as you have more.
Somewhat analogous to "fuck you money". If you badly need a job, you have to be silent about many issues.
It was a legal dispute over billions of dollars, nobody was telling the truth it is all a game to win a case and a negotiation tactic to get a favorable deal. It wasn’t an opportunity for an honest conversation with internet commentators with no actual stake in what happened.
There are legal arguments and then there is being deceitful, there’s quite a lot of distance between the two.
Many people say they dislike Musk because of his ego, his shitposting, his tendency to lash out at critics, etc. I like him specifically because of those attributes: he may be the richest man on the planet, but he never gives the impression of being a lizard person like e.g. Bezos does. He's a normal guy, including plenty of normal-guy flaws, just an extremely successful one.
You (statistically, possibly not literally) know someone, and call them a friend, who is, as a person, worse than Elon. But you don't view billionaires the way you view people you know - billionaires are supposed to be perfect people chiseled out of ivory. I don't know where the façade comes from, but Elon never does that. And so I can have just a little bit more faith in him than in any other tech billionaire, because I know the motivation and vision he acts like he has is the one he actually has.
> You (statistically, possibly not literally) know someone, and call them a friend, who is, as a person, worse than Elon.
No, I don't, because if I find out someone I called a friend behaves like Elon does, *I cut them out of my life*.
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> billionaires are supposed to be perfect people chiseled out of ivory.
Billionaires have the outsized ability to strongly impact/harm FAR more people then some jerk who works a normal day-job and just says racist things to their friends over beers on the weekend.
So yes, I think it is a moral obligation of people who have the ability to impact thousands or millions of people's lives to take said responsibility seriously.
The fact that Elon has so much leverage over the world, and continues to act like a flaming dickbag in public I think should cause far more castigation of his behaviour.
I think the thing to watch will be ads and other revenue streams. Most companies aren't going to want their ads next to 'free for all' content, so we'll see what happens.
I'm very skeptical of the idea that Twitter can become a place where people discuss things with civility. It seems like the mechanics of the conversation encourage outrage.
On top of that, historically internet forums have required fairly strict moderation to remain civil for any significant amount of time. Without that, one quickly ends up with an incredibly unpleasant space that repels more people than it attracts.
For some people this is enough: but HackerNews is only great for discussion within the context of socially acceptable topics.
Want to have some open and honest discussions about programming languages, databases, APIs, careers, or math? There are few places where you can read more interesting and intelligent discussions on things like this.
Want to have some civil, but honest discussion about anything truly contentious: say race, religion, crime, homelessness, foreign affairs, IQ, sexuality, immigration, etc? Fully open and honest discussions on these sorts of topics are just not possible unless you have a very commonplace and milquetoast viewpoint.
Maybe it would be even greater as a free speech paradise, where we could express opinions in the words and manner we choose.
Perhaps some kind of "HN gloves off" mode might work. Or HN After Dark. Then the traditional civil mode could be retained, while allowing the more wild tangents to run their course in a separate but related area or mode. I think this is inevitable for online discussion. Politicians have their formal, respectful discourse zones, but gloves come off in certain places and contexts where heated exchange is not only acceptable, but expected. And these are the people running things. So to deny the same for the general population, will never sit well.
Civil discussion requires decorum and rules, and Musk and other conservatives view those as "censorship".
It's the same reason none of the reddit clones have ever taken off, turns out most people don't want to participate in a virtual space free of censorship because it just turns into a cesspool
Respectfully, I have not found that to be true. No one side has a monopoly on the lunatics or the level headed.
It's unfortunate ad hominems, logical fallacies, and the "mic drop one liner" get so much traction and amplification.
When I find myself making snap judgments about an issue, I dive in to the opposition, doggedly seek out the underpinning ideas, from academic or level headed folks.
It's helped strengthen my personal convictions on some matters and moderated my pre held notions.
>Respectfully, I have not found that to be true. No one side has a monopoly on the lunatics or the level headed.
I really disagree. I think you have fringe folks on the left but outlandish ideas are mainstream amongst conservatives. For example, 70% of republicans believe Joe Biden did not legitimately win the 2020 election.
You just aren't going to find such strong belief in anything that absurd on the left.
>When I find myself making snap judgments about an issue, I dive in to the opposition, doggedly seek out the underpinning ideas, from academic or level headed folks.
I agree! Obviously some subjects like anti-vaxxers or election deniers don't have level-headed or academic folks who can support them.
That's really why you need intense moderation because quality content doesn't rise to the top. An 'anything goes' environment tends to promote the absolute worst ideas, as people like Gwyneth Paltrow and Joe Rogan have a far wider audience that actual scientists. If you allow them to lie about important issues, the lie is going to suffocate any academic or level-headed person who has something to say.
> You just aren't going to find such strong belief in anything that absurd on the left.
The 4 years of russian meddling? It genuinly seems to have been widespread to me.
And with the biden one, AFAICT it is not directly about stealing it, but rather enacting stuff that resulted in an unfair benefit to democrats, that seemed unlawful. (Mail in voting by default, for example)
So, no, I don't believe it's mostly one side. But rather that both sides have the loud, crazy, minority.
>The 4 years of russian meddling? It genuinly seems to have been widespread to me.
You mean the highly documented russian interference in our elections? Is that what you're talking about?
>And with the biden one, AFAICT it is not directly about stealing it, but rather enacting stuff that resulted in an unfair benefit to democrats, that seemed unlawful. (Mail in voting by default, for example)
I'm not going to delve too deep into the idiotic conspiracy theories behind the 'stop the steal', the reality is that there is zero evidence impropriety.
The idea that making it easier to vote by mail is a benefit to one party speaks volumes about what conservatives believe.
The fight against vote-by-mail has nothing to do with lawfullness. Conservatives focus on making it hard to vote/voter disenfranchisement because they know they are a minority party.
None of the censorship people complain about on Twitter is to do with enforcing politeness or decorum, it's all censorship of specific information or opinions regardless of how politely phrased. And that lack of fixed rules is part of the problem. Trying to paint this as "conservatives hate politeness" is just dishonesty.
Can you give an example of what you're talking about? There are plenty of TERF and transphobic accounts on Twitter right now. You can express transphobic ideas on Twitter.
Yeah, they banned folks from lying about vaccines and the COVID-19 pandemic. You can be pro-covid or talk about how you don't want to get the vaccine. You just aren't allowed to spread conspiracy theories and lies.
I'm pretty sure most of those Reddit clones get flooded with "undesirable" bots as a way of killing them off. The people who currently run bots on Reddit, have massive power over public opinion etc, they want to keep their victims centralised, and on familiar territory.
Or, the majority of people are fine with limiting hatefullness and so you end up with just the people who want to spread hate online, which in turn makes it a cesspool
The mechanics of most social media platforms encourage outrage.
1. Most are optimizing to maximize user engagement, and it seems like most platforms have concluded that emotionally charged hot takes are the best way to keep the feed scrolling and the likes and shares flowing.
2. Most don't have the small communities or active moderation necessary to build a culture of civility. (HN is an outlier, though even here I think there are still some topics where the site becomes echo chamber-y.)
If that were really their goal, theoretically they could be. For instance, this forum has features, like invisible vote counts, and exponential cool-down periods which encourage healthy conversations.
Whether that is compatible with their business goals is another question.
This forum also has an educated crowd of nerds at the heart of its community. Twitter used to have that too and was a much more civil but also less interesting space when I joined in 2008.
Are you the davidw from reddit? Do you ever go on /r/portland? It's moderated to the max yet its still neither civil or engaging. Moderation matters but I think HN does a lot better due to the features that promote well thought out posts and don't really allow trolls to get much traction.
The moderation on HN helps retain civil community members as well. I've been thinking about moderation as a chicken-or-egg situation but maybe it's more of an equilibrium issue. I should go over my old slashdot comments and see if I remember what pushed me out.
I'm stereotyping Musk here, but it wouldn't surprise me if he decided to solve it with AI (sentiment analysis specifically) so the algorithm promotes positive tweets and downranks negative ones. Might even work, since the field has made huge progress in recent years.
AI moderation has spectacular faulure modes (as banned Twitter users know). Imagine a tweet like "The thought of $NAME being unalived brings a smile to my face" would be enough to get through the positivity filter[1].
The word "unalive" itself was coined and became popular to escape such basic filters that have no sense of meaning.
1. I just tried the following on the first online sentiment analysis tool I found, and scored 85% positive: You sound very 'smart'. I have warm and fuzzy feelings at the thought of you being unalived, with your genius
That breaks down with coded language. If groups use code words or emojis they can change their coding faster than sentiment analysis models can be updated. Even if those models can be updated quickly the coding by users can be changed arbitrarily. They can also trivially add trivial positive text alongside the codes to get amplified.
Just as an example take the insipid "let's go Brandon" slogan. Sentiment analysis would rate that as a positive statement unless it was specifically flagged. That's a trivial example. There's untold numbers of covert meanings for emojis, even for banal things.
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