I've run out of the mental energy to give Musk the benefit of the doubt. His capricious and poor decision-making is ruining one of my favorite products day and day. It's so frustrating to watch, a complete train wreck in slow motion. I'm simultaneously beyond caring and unable to ignore it at this point.
I remember being on a hacker camp ca. 2016 and arguing the position that he is not the genius as which he was presented, because some of the stuff he said made no sense at all and ao I checked a little deeper and there was more of that. Back then he still had many convinced. Or at least they accepted thst the guy was supporting the cool companies. That was 7 years ago.
Nowadays that guy is a joke in the same circles because it has become glowingly obvious just how much of his persona was a lie.
The one thing I can give him credit for is that he knew which companies to bet on... and apparently the damage he could do was limited by others there. Now that he is in full control his style of doing things is out there in the daylight.
And quite frankly: I don't even know why it is out in the daylight — Elon could have done the smart thing and let the company do it's thing and give them goals that they should find a route to in the next years. But Elon being Elon he just had to make it about himself and micromanage Twitter into chaos.
So if you have run out of mental energy to give the guy the benefit of the doubt, that is a bit late, but hey, better late then never.
I had a coworker who would have anger lines come out of his skull if you said Musk had anything to do with PayPal success. It was like Barney Stinson talking about Ralph Macchio.
Then Tesla and SpaceX happened and I was like, “hmm, maybe he was wrong” and then Twitter happened and I’m thinking, “no, I get it now”.
Recently, I have a theory that Musk is a politician, not an entrepreneur. It just so happened that he wasn't born in the US to formally pursuit the politician career (yes, I know that President is nominally the only office limited to US-born citizen. That isn't the point, it's still vastly harder to be a high ranking politician without being born in the country)
From that viewpoint, it makes sense as to how he could be successful in some venture and not so in others. The hypothesis would mean that he's very good at organizing, dealing with bureaucracy, doing PR etc. Not so much at actually building things, designing, engineering, or basically building consumer business.
I have the opposite view. Musk is a fantastic engineer, but a terrible politician. He’s the kind of man who starts a rocket company and knows exactly how everything on the rocket works, but then impulsively smokes a joint on a podcast and risks his security clearance and defense funding to said rocket company.
Musk has no political sense whatsoever, he’s far too impulsive. But the impulsiveness does make headlines which people mistake as media savvy.
That’s how he got himself into this mess in the first place. Musk impulsively decided to offer to buy Twitter with no due diligence, then sensibly tried to back out when he came to his senses (helped a bit by the Fed), but was forced to purchase it anyway. Of course it’s a disaster. He bought it on a whim and has no idea how to run a social media company.
His approach to refactoring Twitter, I mean in terms of org structure, culture, and the code itself... is frankly giving me a zero engineering intuition impression.
Also he didn't design the SpaceX rocket. He had a hand in the first prototype, which crash and burned. Literally. That's his contribution in terms of engineering.
His overall contribution is PR and attracting capital. That's really it. I'd say sits closer to a politician.
I think Musk is a celebrity, not a politician or an engineer or an entrepreneur.
Politicians have to answer to their constituents, engineers have to answer to the laws of physics, and entrepreneurs have to answer to the laws of economics.
Celebrities are beholden to nothing but marketing, and until recently, Musk (or someone on his team) has been doing a pretty good job of selling his image.
As someone who knows nothing at all about the success of PayPal, can you elaborate on why?
I'm also curious about his role in the success of Tesla and SpaceX. I personally find those to be two of the most interesting startups in a long while, and have been inclined to think that Musk being involved in both to be unlikely to be a coincidence.
At least in the book, PayPal Wars, there is a notion that Musk effectively bought his way in to PayPal. He was running a competing payment service, named "X" or something like that. PayPal had better mindshare and tight eBay integration. Competition was intense.
So the two companies merged, and focused on just one brand: PayPal's. Reading between the lines, it wasn't an easy marriage.
The Book Founders at Work's first chapter is about Max Levchin at PayPal. One paragraph
>We had this merger with a company called X.com. It was a bit of a tough merger because the companies were
really competitive — we were two large competitors in the same market. For a while, Peter took some time off. The guy who ran X.com [Musk] became the CEO, and I remained the CTO. He was really into Windows, and I was really into Unix. So there was this bad blood for a while between the engineering teams. He was convinced that Windows was where it's at and that we have to switch to Windows, but the platform that we used was, I thought, built really well and I wanted to keep it. I wanted to stay on Unix.
And eventually to stop Musk breaking the thing by rewriting it for windows at a time they were very busy fighting fraud on the network, Peter Thiel kicked him out as CEO.
>...I was like,"You gotta go,man."My whole argument to him was, "We can't switch to Windows now. This fraud thing is most important to the company. You can't allow any additional changes. It's one of these things where you want to change one big thing at a time, and the fraud is a pretty big thing. So introducing a new platform or doing anything major—you just don't want to do it right now." That was sort of the trigger for a fairly substantial conflict that resulted in him leaving and Peter coming back and me taking over fraud.
Controversial take: I believe that Twitter has significantly improved as a platform, with extended tweet lengths, enhanced media quality, a consistent reverse chronological timeline, reduced advertisements, broader access to verification, and initial steps towards algorithm transparency.
The issue lies with the users, as the overwhelming criticism of Elon tends to eclipse any reasonable discourse about the platform.
In my opinion, Twitter had reached a plateau and required some revitalization. As time goes on, we can expect further enhancements to emerge.
One recurring trend in Musk's successes has been mockery. When SpaceX was still a tiny upstart, their ideas of reusable rockets were actively mocked by "experts" in the industry, which proclaimed they'd already long since researched such ideas, and they simply weren't economically viable.
And similarly with Tesla. It's claimed he didn't start Tesla, which is technically true but misleading. He joined when it was 4 guys with some big ideas, but the "real" founders of the company would "leave" before Tesla's first product, The Roadster, hit production. Beyond that, electric cars were largely seen as a "radical" (as in dubious) idea at the time, with the status quo being hybrids which tended to look weird and be poor performing, more serving as a means of virtue signaling environmentalism than anything else.
Basically, it all gets back to Henry Ford. If you ask people what they want, they'd have said faster horses. When an innovator takes over a company, his ideas are going to look dumb to most people, which is why most people are not innovators.
This is not the first or the last time a media company / social network is censoring links to its competitors. It’s not to the benefit of the users. It may look like it breaks with the spirit of twitter.
Ultimately and sadly, making a worse service when a competitor stands to benefit more from an organic cooperation via link sharing may be the strategic choice.
I see that “Musk takes editorial control of users’ content by banning URLs he doesn’t like” isn’t in your list of improvements.
Given your username is “Freedom2”, I don’t understand how “longer tweets” makes it worth it. To me it’s all worthless if you can’t even post your words.
Frankly, Musk's attention is so short and fleeting compared to the censorship engine that existed before. It's more personal and self enriching than party lines.
It's a net win over the previous government censorship and blue check system.
You misunderstand me. Objectivity is mostly fiction. I'm am happy that there is more variety in the viewpoint bias of one major platform. Not that I subscribe to Musk's personal brand. I disagree with him in many places. I'd hope for a few more major brands that depart from being plugged into the government censorship platform.
This is the moral equivalent of telling people to stop hitting themselves. Musk starts damaging something people care for very much (people found friendship and community on Twitter and it became a big part of their lives), they get upset about it, and the fact that they are emotionally invested is presented as evidence they are unserious and their views can be dismissed. Even outright mocked.
If they don't immediately abandon the platform (because they want to stay connected to that community) that's presented as evidence their views are shrill whinging, that they actually consent to their mistreatment, and can again be dismissed and derided.
This is just a rhetorical device to deflect criticism.
It's the behavior and rationale of people opposing Musk that's being mocked. People are running around framing every single issue as if it's the end of the world for their experience, and downvoting any and everything they can, except comments which indulge similar histrionics.
I mean this change is something I personally oppose, but the people whinging about it would generally be cheering it on rapturously had it been done under 'Old Twitter' leadership. In other words, the criticisms are not being made in good faith.
Why do you think everyone who criticizes Musk falls into a single bucket? What makes you think you are able to know how they would behave in an alternative history? If all his critics are shrill and hysterical as you say, but you actually share this criticism, why is it you are uniquely exempt from being shrill and hysterical?
From where I'm standing, this seems like just another empty rhetorical device to dismiss people you'd rather not engage with, to paint them with a broad brush and then hold them accountable for hypothetical scenarios you invented. (Not wanting to engage with people is fine, framing that as being about their being hysterical rather than you being disinterested isn't.)
If the previous post was the moral equivalent of telling someone to stop hitting themselves, claiming they'd have supported this policy without Musk without any evidence (which I find extremely hard to believe, people get very upset when platforms do anything like this) is the equivalent of getting upset with your spouse because you had a dream they were unfaithful.
> I think you're taking a silly website way too seriously.
What may be a silly website to you is a major revenue channel, community lifeline, platform for change, or a free and safe space for others.
Twitter is many different things to many different people. It clearly has its flaws, and always has, but dismissing it as a "silly website" does disservice to the impact and importance it has on people's lives.
Twitter isn't really the software, or the business that owns it. It's the people who use it, the community. Sadly that's been forgotten under its current ownership.
That was when he attempted to ban links to other social networks and to things like linktree. No surprise that people would have left if he’d gone ahead with that, but he rolled it back.
Web software that's built well is robust and survives even when things fail. Twitter's engineers clearly built a solid foundation, and we know this because it's still running without them. The only people who said Twitter would collapse were people who had no faith in Twitter's engineers. Musk himself must have believed it'd survive without them because he trusted the business wouldn't collapse when he fired 75% for the staff.
What people who understand tech said was that Twitter will find it hard to build new things with those people. Recent changes have been updating the logo and blocking retweets if the tweet has a specific domain in it. If you want evidence that Musk is crippling Twitter, it's right there. Twitter is not moving forwards.
I personally grow tired of watching the same crowd saying “go build your own Twitter” throw the world’s largest and loudest hissy fit when Twitter got bought and ran in a different direction.
And where has all this outrage been posted to? Twitter.
Damn the weekly ""mistake"" that Musk makes. That reminds me of this quote by a famous hypocrite "The acid test for any two competing socioeconomic systems is which side needs to build a wall to keep people from escaping? That’s the bad one!"
There's no second tweet in the linked thread. The tweet pg is talking about is this one [0]. Seems like Twitter disabled retweets and likes of tweets that link to Substack.
It’s a tricky place for both parties because Twitter has the distribution and the network effect; and writers have a premium (but gated) content.
And Substack is in a bad place to because does not have the social graph and platform power of the first and needs the pay the latter.
On top of that Twitter needs to generate some revenue in the worst moment of the company history that was the end of ZIRP.
Being purely speculative here, I think in Elon’s head Twitter would be the “public square for free speech” but in reality every writer is using the platform only to get the network effect and the vitality aspect to generate leads to their gated communities and/or brand awareness/social status.
One aspect that cannot be forgot is that Elon is the man with the bomb vest, because he’s willing to break the company and has so much less to lose than writers and Substack; and they know that they depends of Twitter.
I do not think that Matt Taibbi or Michael Shellenberg had other platform options to get millions of impressions [1][2]; or Substack can pay and play the game of “let’s build our own network via social graph” due to their financial situation [3].
So is Myspace as far as that goes. So just that fact that the lights are still on isn't saying a whole lot. And considering how much trouble Twitter seem to be having just paying their bills, I wouldn't be surprised if the lights literally do go out before much longer. shrug
> "Still running" is a pretty low bar. Is that really how success should be measured? Yahoo! and AOL are also "still running".
I'm no Musk fan, quite the opposite (check my old comment history), but "still running" is exactly the opposite of what I (and many other naysayers) thought would happen if a tech company laid off over 50% of their staff.
Whether you like it or not, "still running" is the bar for success for every business.
And the absolutely embarrassing doomsaying in those threads is up for all to see. People were seriously claiming it will crash forever in a matter of weeks or even days. Later they revised it to some sort of "slowly will fall apart as the secret lore is now gone with the amazing engineers who left and the certs will expire and nobody will be able to fix it eventually". One does not simply walk into Mordor bla bla..
It was just dumb and simply wishful thinking because of a personal animosity towards Elon. Like sheesh, I get not liking the guy, but why oh why throw shade like middle school girls?
Eventually you will just get a tantrum induced aneurism. And no, I am not an Elon fanboy, don't care what happens to Twitter personally.
I'm anti-tantrums is all. Criticize him rationally without losing face by all means.
If just still running was the goal, any company that raised money would just take it and keep a mailbox open in perpetuity, and do nothing else, thus achieving the bar for success.
However, in reality, growth is the bar for success in nearly every business.
> If just still running was the goal, any company that raised money would just take it and keep a mailbox open in perpetuity, and do nothing else, thus achieving the bar for success.
Firstly, that's not what "a running business" is generally understood to mean. I apologise if english is not your first language and the phrase was misunderstood by yourself.
Secondly, twitter is operating, they are not simply keeping the address alive. They have far surpassed that "bar" of merely keeping an address alive.
Thirdly, growth is not the bar for success in any business, nevermind "nearly every business". For shareholders, sure, they'd love to see growth (which you have left undefined), but any business that can meet it's monthly expenses is considered a successful business.
Considering the Musk haters were frothing at the mouth shouting Twitter would come crashing down, yes: "Still running" shuts down their frothing pretty hard.
Could you please stop posting in the flamewar style to HN? You've unfortunately been doing it a lot. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
You can't reply to, or retweet, or like, or bookmark any tweet that has a Substack link in it because Musk wants Twitter's newsletter thingy to take off instead.
Good grief .. I went to that tweet and clicked the substack link to reach the essentially text only article.
Twitter inserted a giant scary WARNING!! page with a tiny continue (if you're really sure you can handle the risk) link
Warning: this link may be unsafe
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/most-technologies-arent-races
The link you are trying to access has been identified by Twitter or our partners as being potentially spammy or unsafe, in accordance with Twitter’s URL Policy.
This link could fall into any of the below categories:
* malicious links that could steal personal information or harm electronic devices
* etc.
I tried to like and retweet Paul's tweet which included a link to Substack and indeed I can confirm I cannot like or retweet it. It says "Some actions on this Tweet have been disabled by Twitter."
Do organisations tend to regret bans, especially if they are willing to hold firm for a few days?
As Reddit banned all its creepy communities, people had a fit for a few days and made similar proclamations about how Voat would beat them as a result, and then life went on. It didn't destroy Reddit at all. Same with the crackdown on the conspiracy subreddits. Off they went to Voat. But Voat is gone and Reddit remains.
Twitter ended up banning Donald Trump and people discussed how it would be a watershed moment that would spawn this massive backlash and fuel Parler and Gab. But Twitter remains king. Parler and Gab haven't been something I have heard of in months.
All of these claims that a ban will cause significant damage to Twitter require people to fear that they will be next. Does Substack really have that kind of reach?
Well...Parler did gain popularity very quickly...but AWS kicked them off the platform & they had to mothball their app until it was reprogrammed using the new hosting platform.
Twitter was also hemorrhaging money. The censorship had a chilling effect on the entire industry.
I think there are qualitative differences between the bans you mention.
Banning "creepy communities" and conspiracy subreddits on Reddit was about trying to make Reddit less of a haven for people who congregate to validate each other's potentially-dangerous ideas.
Banning Trump from Twitter was a straightforward matter of him serially breaking the rules.
Banning Substack links from Twitter is very clearly an attempt to harm a competitor, with no upside for users.
Trying to claim that the latter will be seen in the same light as the former two after some time has passed doesn't seem to follow logically.
Is the Twitter example entirely true though? Arguably Twitters actions helped fuel its buyout from an activist billionaire. That's hardly non-consequence.
Twitter got to sell itself for a significant premium over market that they had to sue to close on, so they won big there.
I see your point though. There are some people willing to take action and if one of those people is the richest in the world, those actions can be quite consequential. But that is one person, not society at large (either the power users of Twitter or the casual users of Twitter). Twitter didn't enter a commercial death spiral for banning Trump.
What do you call it when someone has dug in their heels in contrast to what’s obvious to everyone else? Especially when their fear of being wrong just causes them to be more and more wrong.
It can be a successful temporary strategy for attracting users by lowering sign-up friction. But I think the moment Musk signed that agreement in April 2022, and the disaster that was November 2022, everyone should've migrated away from Twitter SSO months ago.
It's just that people keep hoping decency and common sense is what happens in the end. We just can't believe Musk is that much of a nutjob. Bad mistake, indeed.
Did the ADL push for this? Here's what they said 4 days ago:
Substack’s increasing popularity on Twitter
Measuring the prevalence of Substack links on Twitter provides an important metric to determine the platform’s popularity, as authors often use Twitter to promote their newsletters to potential subscribers. Over the past few years, tweets which include external links to Substack pages, also known as outlinks, have increased demonstrably.
In 2021, the volume of Twitter mentions (including retweets) which included outlinks to Substack exceeded 6.08 million. In 2022, those mentions doubled to more than 12.6 million. In the first two months of 2023, mentions are already over 4.3 million.
This increase begs the question of whether the wealth of misinformation, disinformation and conspiracy theories on Substack – much of which has drawn countless paid and unpaid subscribers to the platform – violates the platform’s existing content moderation policies.
What if this is just his "4D chess" move to condition people that removing ANY links to ANY domain on Twitter is wrong? Twitter pre-Musk would arbitrarily remove links they went against party orthodoxy (The NY Post during the Hunter Biden laptop story was the biggest example I remember).
Just declaring "we won't censor anyone any time" is fine, but you still get all corners clamoring for their "opponent side" to be silenced. If you censor any of the typical outlets (NYTimes, CNN, Fox, Breitbart, etc), their audience will (rightfully) scream censorship but their opponents will be happy.
If you randomly cut 3rd party sites under the false guise of "you may think they're our (Twitter's) competitors" (but then reinstate it after a few days), it draws heat to Musk and Twitter, but then slowly conditions everyone to grudgingly agree that censorship is bad.
Mastodon and now Substack seem like they would fit the bill as appropriate guinea pigs for this temporary experiment.
