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Comment by fleddr | Hacker News Reader

I think people are really over-analyzing this move. I think it's motivated by prestige, not money, nor is free speech the heart of the matter.

Twitter is a stagnant company. They have thousands of engineers that in the span of a decade don't seem to produce much at all, nothing visible or memorable anyway. Long-lasting Twitter problems (culture, spam, algorithm issues) never seem addressed. User growth is stagnating as Twitter fails to appeal to "normies" in a way Facebook and other networks can.

A perfect target for Musk to come in, do a few sweeping changes, and get out. Thereby proving once again that he gets shit done where others can't. Case closed.

It doesn't take much. People have been begging for an edit button for a decade. If he'd get only that feature implemented, it will be remembered forever.

View on HN

"stagnant company"

Why must every company sustain boundless growth and 24-hour engagement? Change and growth for their own sake can be cancers.

Twitter does what it does and people like it (as seen by the fact that they all use it), yet armchair generals cry out that twitter's refusal to turn into "not twitter" is somehow a failure of engineering and management, or some form of incompetence.

So, I disagree, I guess.

Why do they need so many engineers though. It's not like twitter is facebook or gmail or apple tv where things are constantly shifting? I think the point was why does it take so many people? They should be raking in the cash after a 25% cull. Just saying this from the point of view if I was interested in buying their stock.

Because that growth is used as a substitute for profit (or net income or EBITDA - take your pick). For a public company having one or the other (or rarely, both) keeps the ticker price moving in the right direction.

While I agree with you, at the same time if Twitter as a company isn't really doing much, why do they have thousands of developers on staff? I don't think there's anything wrong with being a stable, profitable company, but logically it should also come with a whole lot of layoffs.

Maybe maintenance of current user base itself requires lots of innovation although not ground breaking(thus jobs)?

Why the need for layoffs?

They did make Twitter Spaces and so far, that move alone has shadowed Clubhouse even though itself is not doing well. Also built discontinued Fleets.

> at the same time if Twitter as a company isn't really doing much, why do they have thousands of developers on staff?

...to keep the app running? New devices, new standards, a lot of things change that you need devs to keep up with.

Also, what's up with people saying twitter is stagnant? They've added Spaces, Twitter Blue and Crypto Profile Pictures - all 3 massive features added to their product. They're all trash, but that's besides the point.

Those things you mention hardly justify thousands of expensive developers to maintain and create. I bet a team of 10 top notch engineers could create Spaces+Blue+Crypto pfp's in a couple months and run it at Twitter scale. Don't forget Instagram was acquired when it had 13 employees serving tens of millions of users.

Speaking out of experience, most engineers in big tech are bike shedding on internal tools that don't do anything useful. A small minority deliver the majority of the impact. On top of that at companies like Twitter and Google some of those useless employees spend their time complaining about social justice initiatives rather than doing work.

Speaking out of what experience? You've just appealed to your own authority; it seems not out of line to ask whence that comes.

Working at several big tech companies in industry. I can't say my experience is fully representative but I do start to see a pattern when my experiences line up with that of all my friends. There are a _lot_ of internal tools and anecdotally many of them seem like they're designed to abstract away things which wouldn't need abstracting for a company that exclusively hired high performing engineers.

Plenty of things are abstracted not because they need to be, but because they can be, and doing so increases efficiency, security, the ability to scale, and the ability of engineers to reason about the development.

And do the task consistently and correctly.

I think this is a pretty naive take. Developing anything at Twitter-scale will run into security considerations, infrastructure development or optimization, constructing data workflows, multiple design iterations, UX design (how do people find and use this feature?), i18n, accessibility, product marketing, user testing, copy testing, and other functions and that’s not even considering the actual product development, which is of course across multiple platforms. See also: https://danluu.com/sounds-easy/

Instagram scaled to a 1bn usd valuation with 13 employees. Then they got acquired by facebook.

Instagram is still pretty lean from what I’ve heard.

I don't think Instagram had to seriously tackle the kinds of problems you're replying to prior to that acquisition. But when you're a big time tech company, the minimum bar is simply higher. That means more humans.

Build the product, sure. Build the product to scale across the world?...I strongly disagree.

Pre-revenue that is possible. Post revenue, you'd need at least lawyers and accountants in each country you operate in. Then you need systems to respond to subpeonas and legal requests, that is a hundred people right there.

IG was 13 employees when you had a fraction of the images and they didnt have to be profitable, rather just grow by burning $. Now consider scale and profitability and you need even more people to grow tech cost consciously.

> Now consider scale and profitability and you need even more people to grow tech cost consciously.

This seems intuitively false. Adding more people to tech domains can actually decrease effectiveness with more expense, resulting in lower profits. Obviously, there is a sweet spot, but Twitter is a basic product regardless of how many countries it operates within.

I'm curious about your opinion on this. I may be thinking about this incorrectly.

Suppose you are Twitter and operating in, say, {Ghana, Russia, Korea, Mexico, and Pakistan}. You're served with subpoenas and legal IP requests in each country. If you dont respond in time, your license to operate may be revoked. Each request is in the native language. How do you "scale" this technically? Can one lawyer handle these across the world? How?

First recognize that lawyers are not a technical issue and that mostly they handle independent cases and subpoena requests. Since the work is fairly compartmentalized (unlike software development) throwing more people at the problem has less of a consequence. Hire a law firm in each country to handle your cases; No need to have lawyers all over the world as employees. Have a small team of international lawyers as employees or hire them as contractors to oversee the contracted teams of lawyers around the world and negotiate when needed.

Furthermore, developing tech for managing this is likely to be unnecessary as there are existing software packages already out there. Doing business across the world and handling legal issues is not unique to Twitter.

>> Hire a law firm in each country to handle your cases; No need to have lawyers all over the world as employees. Have a small team of international lawyers as employees or hire them as contractors to oversee the contracted teams of lawyers around the world and negotiate when needed.

I generally agree with your response, but note that you've just converted FTEs to contractors/outsourcers and "reduced" FTEs that way. You'd have to do the same with accountants and many other country-level positions. But w2-->1099 isnt really a "win".

Even highly effective engineers will have trouble delivering features, in a large company, when they could easily deliver the same features in a smaller company. Process and politics is part of it, but the one of the problems with having so many developers, is that these developers end up writing code, all of that code ends up making things more complicated than they need to be, which makes introducing new features more complicated, due to all the systems you need to integrate with.

There is a huge difference between building a clone today on top of today's tools and commodity cloud platforms versus building it originally on what was around in 2006 and then having to constantly add features, change things, and then maintain 15 years worth of accumulated special edge cases forever without downtime.

Comparing to Instagram seems pretty unfair too as it's newer, it was even-more-featured-limited for a long time, is now part of a much larger behemoth and had much lower scale than today's twitter when it was acquired, and my guess would be that it's an easier scaling problem too (lower on post frequency, more read-heavy workload).

> They're all trash, but that's besides the point.

No, that's exactly the point. Just because you make something doesn't mean it was progress.

R&D is not useless.

Law of diminishing returns.

We're talking about a simple platform of people relaying updates of 140 characters with a comment section and a feed algorithm to aggregate the content to everyone with a focus on prolonging everyone's engagement time while also following guidelines on what's "politically correct". There's only so much you can do, unless you venture out into manipulating public discourse, or striving to become a nation-state (or at least its propaganda machinery) or taking over the world (with all the imaginable internet services provided by you - email, storage, encyclopedias, news etc).

At some point you should stop and think about your core business. And at some point you should realize that the law of diminishing returns applies. And at some point you should realize that it's fine to provide a stable service to a stable amount of users with a stable amount of features. Not that much R&D required.

Or, rather, this is how our society would have to work in order to stay healthy. Living on a planet with finite resources while using them up like they're not is a sure-fire way to doom. We already know enough about farming for example to make it sustainable. We just don't know how to do it in a way where we don't cut down production considerably and starving a lot of people in the process. Not a nice topic to bring up i your election speech.

But it's nice to ride the train since things seemingly move forward thanks to rising inflation (which is due to the problem in the first place) and the price of your product can go up.

Oh, I might've misunderstood you as well.

/remindme 20 years

Regenerative agriculture practices can allow us to make farming sustainable without cutting down production. In fact, we can actually increase production — or at least avoid loss of production due to soil depletion.

https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0030727021998063

you should make a separate HN post about this

There have already been multiple posts about regenerative agriculture, like this one.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27809279

Economic growth is not only driven by the use of new resources but by the increasingly efficient use of existing resources. The real problem is stated in Jevon's paradox[1], that demand is increasing faster than supply, regardless of efficiency, which points the the real real problem, which is that the population is increasing too quickly (though it may slow down and become stable).

Provide females around the world access to education, birth control, and opportunity in the job market and this problem will fix itself. To do that, however, would mean allowing the kind of discourse that Twitter is inclined suppress and many of its more vocal users would call "racist" i.e. being able to criticise cultures that don't give females these opportunities.

And we're back to Twitter and free speech.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

> it's fine to provide a stable service to a stable amount of users with a stable amount of features

like RSS?

Calling that R&D is disingenuous. You can learn valuable things on your way to making stupidity, of course, but that's not R&D.

Twitter does a fair amount of OSS, though I can't see a lot of contributions that probabilistically out of Spaces.

> Calling that R&D is disingenuous. You can learn valuable things on your way to making stupidity, of course, but that's not R&D.

I don’t necessarily disagree with your take, but for tax accounting, a lot of “stupid” programming counts as R&D.

But more importantly, stupidity is in the eye of the beholder or hindsight, or both.

e.g. I would have called a streaming service for gamers to be watched by adoring fans utter stupidity. Maybe that’s also why I’m not rich.

> I would have called a streaming service for gamers to be watched by adoring fans utter stupidity. Maybe that’s also why I’m not rich.

Is Discord profitable yet? Reported revenue and users is up significantly post-covid, but that does not necessarily mean there are profits. Your instincts may be under-estimated.

Agreed.

However, releasing every half-baked misfeature that comes out of R&D is useless.

FWIW, I have a close friend who worked on Twitter's "Health" team whose job at one point was building mini games for the support/moderation staff to play during company mandated breaks in between looking at racist tweets and CP. He coasted for a while then moved onto a job with more work.

This is entirely anecdotal, but from the little I know from his couple months there, Twitter has no idea what to do with the huge amount of engineers they employ. This is by no means an endorsement of Musk, but the company could use some new direction I think.

I am an ex-Twitter engineer with long tenure. You are sharing hearsay. It's not worth very much.

So....tell us the truth.

At the scale of a company like Twitter, my point of view ain’t worth much either and pretending to hold the truth would be pretentious.

While I understand what you’re getting at, this is basically pointless, because nobody is going to accept hand wavey “you can never know, so don’t even try!”-type answers. Even if that is the best way to go.

I’m not accusing GP of this necessarily, but quite often the view “since we can’t know everything, we can’t know anything” is considered wisdom.

To the GP: we all understand that your experience isn’t the same experience of everyone, but it is AN experience, and would be useful to us who don’t have any experience.

"All models are wrong. Some models are useful."

There is a difference between the truth and a truth. It wouldn't be pretentious to share something of your story and how you saw it in the larger picture.

That’s fair but disinformation and the lack of actions against it was part of why I left Twitter. As such, I feel strongly about my experience not being interpreted as the truth or that a significant portion of the company shares the same views as I do.

I feel like public discourse has increasingly been more and more polarizing and anecdotes and hearsay are being leveraged to create further divisions.

I can certainly share your concern here, but not sure what can be done about this. Since you probably have done more thinking in this space, what are some things you think are possible?

Which part is hearsay?

That seems like an actually valuable, human thing to work on vs the garbage many devs find themselves working on. Mini games can also be super engaging to build and are a showcase for creativity… I’m really not seeing the problem.

Get them a steam account? It's cheaper

They could just give support staff a proper break and let them do whatever they want with that break (including playing the games they want to play if they deem necessary)

> This is entirely anecdotal, but from the little I know from his couple months there, Twitter has no idea what to do with the huge amount of engineers they employ.

I wonder why I keep getting LinkedIn and email notifications about engineering jobs at Twitter.

Spaces is amazing. It was great listening Nayib Bukele, the president of El Salvador talk while they were making history by voting Bitcoin to be adopted as legal tender in the country. He was just looking at his Twitter feed at that time, and was interested in what people are talking about the bill in spaces.

I know he's controversial, but I wish more politicians would make themselves more accessible through Twitter (and I'm not a Trump fan, I just think he used it more effectively than other politicians).

Yeah, they give lunatics like Nayib a voice, by the way good luck going to el salvador and hope to use bitcoin.

But so does Instagram and Facebook and other socials. Politicians doing live QAs on facebook was happening a decade ago already, since live streams were a thing.

Giving people a voice sure seems like a clear downside of this whole internet thing. Or does it simply mean that humanity is fucking destructive (while individual humans generally are beautiful)?

It's not a downside.

The downside is that we don't teach critical thinking to children in school.

So you end up with adults that believe whatever tv tells them or will buy any compelling argument without trying to debunk it first.

And with more opinions available to people, there is less likelihood of a large mass galvanized around one crazy theory (the one that the overlords deem not crazy).

I don't think that's necessarily true. Is QAnon not an issue? The church of scientology? There are a lot of large groups of people "galvanized around one crazy theory." But, maybe you're right that if they're exposed to more, non crazy views that they'll be better off and less galvanized. How would we test the hypothesis? I wonder if you took some fox news viewers and showed them CNN for a month or so if that would change their worldview?

I wish HN had bots, I would write one to debunk this critical thinking fallacy with respect to social media.

Better powers of discrimination, higher IQ, are illusory when it comes to inoculating yourself against propaganda.

So it's amazing at miseducating and misinforming politicians in impoverished countries?

In industrial economies money is credit and countries issue their own money by setting up a banking system to lend it into existence on security of domestic tangible capital to promote wealth formation and create liquidity for domestic employers to make payroll. Since the early 1700s western governments have known how to create stable money from nothing without any gold, private banks, or external investors by lending it into existence through land loan office system.

It looks like El Salvador didn't create its own money before and was just using US Dollars sent back by emigrants though.

> ...to keep the app running? New devices, new standards, a lot of things change that you need devs to keep up with.

I guess, and I imagine at their size they probably run pretty inefficiently. It just seems like a surprisingly big team. From all fronts really, not just development but design too, does it really take that much effort to keep Twitter "twittery"?

> Crypto Profile Pictures

Straight out of a satire piece, I had not heard about that.

> They've added Spaces, Twitter Blue and Crypto Profile Pictures - all 3 massive features added to their product.

I think your definition of "massive" is different to mine.

Spaces is at least a new medium. The other two are incremental features that a small (<10 person) team would ship in a few months at another FANG company.

Well even their team disagrees with you, they have for the last years chosen to focus on things like stories (dead), clubhouse (soon dead)instead of working on removing spam/scams

Twitter Spaces is good. Twitter is also very popular in Japan and Spaces isn't only a Clubhouse competitor, it's also a Twitcasting competitor over there.

Though, twitcasting has more monetization options and Twitter only has super followers which nobody actually uses yet.

Twitter Spaces will die, its only a matter of time.

I get what you're saying from a moral point of view, but we live in the real world.

In the real world, Twitter is a public company. It has existed for a long time and has barely every made a penny. It fails in comparison to other high growth networks (Facebook, Tiktok, Youtube).

And it's not an armchair comment. Twitter's own PMs have openly admitted to some of its flaws, it's failure to appeal to the masses. They're self-aware about their own incompetence.

Because investors have options like sitting on their money until a recession comes along and buying things during the fire sale.

> Twitter does what it does and people like it (as seen by the fact that they all use it)

Last I checked not even half the US population is on twitter, not even close to half. Who is this "all" in "they all use it?"

The 217 million active daily users? It is "only" $~80 million in the US, I'd love to know how a quarter of the US population using it daily represents an insignificant user base.

> I'd love to know how a quarter of the US population using it daily represents an insignificant user base

I'd love to know which variant of the English language treats "all" as analogous to not "insignificant".

Near as I have ever seen, most English speakers actually do mean something more like that when they say "all": maybe it would be good to mentally model it as "it feels as if it would be hard to choose at random and not find this statement to be true".

If you say "all" you better at least mean "most".

We're not even over half in this case. If this person actually believes most people are already using twitter, it's clearly a problem when it comes to informing a judgement of stagnant growth.

Sort of? The thing to realize is that your average speaker leans heavily into the "no true scotsman" fallacy in order to make sense of the world quickly, and so they heavily bias that random distribution from which they are selecting candidates. While I wouldn't personally say "all" in this exact case, it certainly does feel to me as if there isn't anyone new for Twitter to really target, as you have to first discount most of the old people, "all" ;P of the young people, and a depressing number of people who really don't have the resources--time or money--to buy into technological society. Do you seriously believe there is some useful untapped market of people using other social networks--or are even in the target market for a social network but who somehow haven't started using one yet--who aren't using Twitter? I hate Twitter--I'd dare say it is by far my least favorite major social network by far--and even I use the damned thing :(.

I read it as "all the people who use twitter" not "all people use twitter"

"People who like using Twitter keep using it" is not exactly revelatory though.

What percentage of those 80 million users are individuals vs companies or bots?

The shareholders ain't here to fuck spiders.

Your post reminded me of one of my favorite quotes.

"Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.” - Edward Abbey

Love it! Thanks for sharing, I just discovered Edward Abbey.

> Abbey also left instructions on what to do with his remains: Abbey wanted his body transported in the bed of a pickup truck and wished to be buried as soon as possible. He did not want to be embalmed or placed in a coffin. Instead, he preferred to be placed inside of an old sleeping bag and requested that his friends disregard all state laws concerning burial. "I want my body to help fertilize the growth of a cactus or cliff rose or sagebrush or tree," said the message. For his funeral, Abbey stated, "No formal speeches desired, though the deceased will not interfere if someone feels the urge. But keep it all simple and brief." He requested gunfire and bagpipe music, a cheerful and raucous wake, "[a]nd a flood of beer and booze! Lots of singing, dancing, talking, hollering, laughing, and lovemaking."

Putting Desert Solitaire on my reading list.

if you're interested in some more hot takes, try Pentti Linkola's "Can Life Prevail".

Be warned about his views of democracy and the US. He opposed the consumerism of the US and sees democracy as "me, me, me" politics, where people vote for what they want now (or what they're told they want) rather doing the uncomfortable thing today for the sake of tomorrow.

I actually started reading it a couple of days ago. :)

I agree with you. Not every company wants to grow.

But Twitter and twitter employees want the company to grow. But they fail to do so.

I think the correct word is a "changing" company. In a static environment, without competing products like IG, FB etc, Twitter can afford to stay the way it is and probably do incremental improvements.

However, in a competitive environment, and with proof that the market is expanding (Newer generation of kids are using social media), if it fails to capture the market, the company will die out.

So, there is this need to focus on user number growth.

I am sure that if the company was only adding older people, the stock would be punished inspite of growing numbers.

Well, if they're not going to develop new things they could take big hunk of the billion dollars a year that they're spending on it and return it to the shareholders.

I agree on one hand, it's a perversion of business that seems to manifest in venture capital bubbles that growth is never satisfied. On the other hand, what are they doing with all that talent?

The question is “what is all that talent doing with Twitter?” Truly talented people are typically restless and discontent with mediocrity. Perhaps, the talent is overrated?

You can disagree but you're wrong. Twitter is the definition of a stagnant company.

The stock has gone nowhere since its IPO and Twitter has never paid a dividend. It has revenue of $5bn but cannot seem to turn a meaningful profit and is not growing.

So far it has been a massive failure for shareholders, who are the stakeholders that the board and management are actually there to serve.

> The stock has gone nowhere since its IPO and Twitter has never paid a dividend.

This is a terribly short-sighted and impoverished definition of stagnation. If Elon shakes things up and Twitter generates 2x the profit and 2x the social destruction as Facebook would you call them a vibrant and successful concern?

If things were radically different would I describe Twitter differently? Yes.

Is Twitter currently generating twice the profit of Facebook? No. Pretty straightforward.

I appreciate this sounds counterintuitive, but even in order to stay where it is, a company needs to grow. "Staying where you are" would mean to grow by at least as much as the current inflation rate - which in Feb 22 was 7.9% annualized in the US. Anything below that would be decline - and we're not even talking about fighting off competition, offsetting the dollar value against other currencies etc.

> Why must every company sustain boundless growth and 24-hour engagement? Change and growth for their own sake can be cancers.

I agree with you on this, but I think the parent commenter was implying that if you're going to be employing thousands of engineers, you ought to have something to show for it.

It's fine to move into a "steady state", but your engineering team should eventually reflect that reality.

> A perfect target for Musk to come in, do a few sweeping changes, and get out. Thereby proving once again that he gets shit done where others can't. Case closed.

Whatever merit or lack thereof Musk on the Twitter board has, I would bet money this particular scenario does not happen. Musk is not a turnaround expert or corporate savior (and for the record he's not claiming to be).

Well he did turn tesla round in a way, as in he wasn't a founder.

Yeah, I was thinking exactly that. Assuming that this is the case - that Musk is joining as a savior - is silly. He doesn't fit the profile nor has the track record for that.

He may be a visionary (whatever that means), but a excellent, renowned executive that revitalizes companies, heck, that really has never been the case.

Strange that both of you would say that. He's a ruthless result-driven executive that doesn't accept excuses. If it's at all impossible for something to get done, he'll get it done.

I'm not at all a fan of him, but his power is in execution. A vision is worthless.

yeah, The Boring Company is absolutely killing it. I use that thing every day

Why are you gambling so much in Vegas?

I know you're being facetious, but the existing tunnel in Vegas only serves the Las Vegas Convention Center.

Don't worry, somehow it will be cheaper and more efficient to build a subway that just has cars driving through it!

Never mind the fact that throughput would be limited to however many cars can fit in one lane of tunnel, that's just details.

Musk never said you can't put trains in his tunnels. He happens to have a car company to help, but I bet if he had a train company sitting around they would develop something for the tunnels.

Boring company tunnels are wider than London subway tunnels.

Squandering an entire companies potential as a PR move for your other company is hardly big brain executive work though. Film executives do that all the time, and they're some of the dumbest people doing supposedly intellectual work.

The vision may be worthless on its own, but in people like Musk or Jobs, the combination if the vision and the ability to execute is absolutely explosive.

Both sell/sold products that hardly need any marketing.

His power is in blood diamond money from mummy and daddy during apartheid. His power is in ignoring regulations and laws he doesn't like. His power is in being a modern-day version of PT Barnum.

Execution and result-driven like that giant coffin-box he tried to claim could be used to rescue boys from a cave where rescuers were swimming through spaces so narrow they couldn't wear their diving gear?

Result-driven, power-in-execution executive who took a decade to build a luxury car that had initial quality, paint, NVH, and interior quality equal to an economy sedan made by Ford or Honda. His cars often literally don't line up the same way on the right side as they do on the left. Oh, and also about a decade to get the motor/drivetrain unit on the Model S to not destroy itself every 10,000-20,000 miles. It still can't handle being driven through too large a puddle without ingesting water through the speedo sensor port...

Autopilot routinely "phantom brakes", and FSD "Beta" likes to drive at telephone poles, veer at cyclists, and pedestrians standing on street corners.

I wish I could find the article describing his efforts to get the model 3 production fixed. Endless issues because the robots weren't assembling the cars precisely enough. He was told they needed to go back to workers assembling the cars. Ran around screaming profanity at people, demanding they fix automation. Bunch of people got up and quit to his face.

Months more of delays and issues until he finally listened to someone who had been saying all along that they needed to grow capacity by having more people assembling the cars. Boom, production volume and quality issues gone.

Musk is a rich man-baby who has relied on shouting at people to get things done.

This is very true, and another thing is, he wasn't even a founder of Tesla. He swooped in about a year after it was founded with wads of investment cash, and with his now well-known egotistical drive, decided to make the company all about him. When of course all the actual work was being done by the experts rather than this arrogant dilettante who did more to impede their work than effectively manage it.

This isn't true. The employee account was 2 or 3 (depending on accounts) at the time when he supplied almost their entire funding round after basically no one else would, and continued to supply funding rounds. Saying "in about a year after it was founded" implies that they had done real work in that year when in fact they couldn't even pay their own salaries. The company would have ended right there, just like so many other "two guys and some incorporation papers" companies.

Musk invested in the company, became chairman of the board and quickly became active in their normal everyday operations.

> His power is in blood diamond money from mummy and daddy during apartheid.

It's weird that people made up a fake biography just because they don't like when he tweets on Ambien.

In particular I don't think this was an advantage, I think it was a disadvantage, and at most he started with no more privilege than any other Stanford grad. (Which is a lot!)

> I wish I could find the article describing his efforts to get the model 3 production fixed. Endless issues because the robots weren't assembling the cars precisely enough. He was told they needed to go back to workers assembling the cars. Ran around screaming profanity at people, demanding they fix automation. Bunch of people got up and quit to his face.

I read that article and it was obviously made up. It claimed people were being sent through the air by machinery exploding like they were DBZ characters.

Emeralds from a mine in Zambia, a country that had similar apartheid laws stemming from the fact that they were ruled by the same Britain that ruled South Africa, isn't exactly lying. The OP's details were just a bit fuzzy.

The Musks lived in the biggest house in the richest neighborhood of segregated Pretoria, and Elon was able to avoid the draft from the same apartheid South African military that his father engineered for.

You'd definitely need to have a certain amount of privilege to do that, and to leave adolescence with anecdotes about selling pocketfuls of your dad's emeralds, like this[1]:

> A teenage Elon Musk once walked the streets of New York with emeralds in his pocket. His father, Errol Musk, had a casual attitude towards the family’s considerable wealth, including the stones that came from the Zambian emerald mine in which Errol owned a half share. Elon, by his father’s recollection then probably 16 years old, and his brother Kimbal, decided to sell emeralds to Tiffany & Co. on Fifth Avenue in New York – one of the world's most famous jewellers – as his father lay sleeping. "They just walked into Tiffany’s and said, ‘Do you want to buy some emeralds?’

[1] https://www.businessinsider.co.za/elon-musk-sells-the-family...

And none of that matters. He has a lot of money solely because PayPal investors gave it to him for no real reason, just like Peter Thiel. But nobody pretends Thiel is some kind of racist old-money villain. (Although they do call him a vampire and he is a lot of other things.)

Btw, now that he's rich because Tesla investors keep on wanting to give him a lot of money for no reason, seizing/nationalizing the company and giving it to the poor wouldn't work, because those investors don't want to give _them_ money.

I was addressing your claim that the OP was a lie and that Musk had no more privilege than others. Those facts do matter when addressing your claims.

Who said anything about seizing the company? And what do easily duped retail investors have to do with anything I posted?

So why is Kimbal Musk a nobody, while Elon isn't? They grew up in the same house, shared the same privilege, are children of the same parents etc. If all this matters so much, Kimbal should grow up to be someone like Elon.

> Emeralds from a mine in Zambia, a country that had similar apartheid laws stemming from the fact that they were ruled by the same Britain that ruled South Africa, isn't exactly lying. The OP's details were just a bit fuzzy.

Zambia wasn't apartheid.

> Emeralds from a mine in Zambia, a country that had similar apartheid laws

Notice that I said similar here, because Zambia did have laws that were similar to apartheid laws in South Africa.

Zambia notably had an African (black person) president though.

You really hate and despise that guy, don't you? I guess this is driven by Tesla. People are less dismissive about Musk if they concentrate on SpaceX and not Tesla.

Like it or not, Musk has a talent for attracting young talented engineers and giving them a huge playground to show what they can do. That is the main reason why SpaceX took off so massively, not any shouting to get things done (everyone can do that, but successful space startups are rare, so it isn't an obvious path to success). SpaceX engineers are allowed to have some initiative and aren't kept in a narrow corridor set up by typical corporate bureaucracy.

Contrast this to Bezos, arguably a very strict businessman who used to be much richer than Musk - several orders of magnitude, in fact. Bezos isn't any softer than Musk on his employees, arguably even harder; less shouting, but more pressure. But Blue Origin is a snail compared to SpaceX, even though it was founded 2 years earlier. They have enough money, but they have a problem attracting engineering talent and retaining it.

But he isn't a Twitter executive. He has one seat on the board. He'd have to persuade other board members if he wants to force changes.

Musk has proven to be a 'get shit done' kind of guy though, so if he did want to push through changes he certainly has the capability to do it.

It's only useful if the shit that is "gotten done" is actually an asset to the company and its bottom line or service to the public. Change for change-sake is almost always a bad thing.

Well he has the money. Money talks, always.

He often doesn't do things "by the book" and will not wait for what he thinks is unnecessary red-tape. He will skirt around regulations and taunt the process the entire way. We've seen it many times before, and it's always purely in the benefit of whatever company he's helping at the time.

He has no problem throwing people/money/etc. at the problem to get the result he wants and if someone so much as says the opposite, they are removed from the equation (fired, publicly ridiculed, etc.).

I personally don't see what benefit he can bring to Twitter other than shaking up the culture. Who knows, he may even come in, take over, and claim to be a founder of Twitter, just like he did with Tesla.

Considering where Tesla was when he joined and what they have become, I’d say it’s fair to call himself a late-joining founder. This would obviously not be true of Twitter.

> He has no problem throwing people/money/etc. at the problem to get the result he wants and if someone so much as says the opposite, they are removed from the equation (fired, publicly ridiculed, etc.).

Not just fired or ridiculed, Musk and Tesla have also tried to have a whistleblower murdered by accusing them of being a mass shooter and having them SWAT'd[1].

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-03-13/when-elon...

> Early on, according to Gouthro, a company lawyer told him that the previous head of security at the Gigafactory, Andrew Ceroni, had left after a bitter dispute. The lawyer said Ceroni had spied on a union meeting on Musk’s orders and then threatened to tell the world about it when he left the company.

Jesus, what a megalomaniac.

It's amazing what people make up to discredit Musk.

> I personally don't see what benefit he can bring to Twitter other than shaking up the culture. Who knows, he may even come in, take over, and claim to be a founder of Twitter, just like he did with Tesla.

He didn't "come in", in as much as he "made the company". The company was "two guys and some incorporation papers" before Musk's involvement. The company, for all intents and purposes, did not exist before Musk's involvement.

Whether that made him a founder is irrelevant, but it's important to not imply that he just "bought" a company that already had a product. There was no product.

> People have been begging for an edit button for a decade.

And they haven't implemented it because it's a truly horrible idea. If you messed up your tweet delete it. If it's already got traction, then it shouldn't be changed, especially because the edit feature would mostly be used maliciously to cancel retweeters.

What if it’s accompanied with a history feature that shows all the tweet edits?

Yes. Because people won't look through the edit history for the same reason they don't read the fine print or studies that are cited. I'm pretty sure making it easier to misinterpret what tweets say is going to be even worse

> I'm pretty sure making it easier to misinterpret what tweets say is going to be even worse

Good. Let's stop pretending that meaning is contained in tweets.

> Let's stop pretending that meaning is contained in tweets.

Let me know how that crusade is going for you.

I haven't used Twitter in over five years and ignore people who show me screenshots of tweets. Haven't felt any loss in my life over the decisions.

It depends how it is implemented

OK, I can believe this has non-engineering issues. Still cannot "edit as new" for when you want to edit what you posted in the exact some editor state as when you posted it. What you edit and what gets posted can differ radically. This is well-trodden territory in the email world. Accordingly, Fastmail service has "Edit as New" and Apple's iOS Email App has "Send Again" for email.

I'm pretty confident Twitter could manage "edit as new" for Tweets, and it would be useful with or without tweet editing.

Retweet could show the version of the tweet as it was when it was retweeted. If you see a tweet that has a new revision ready you could see a "latest" link. If you see the latest version of a tweet with a version history you could see a "history" link which would show you a revision history.

We've suddenly turned a "simple" feature into something with potentially major architectural changes[0] on how retweeting works too, just in a few minutes here! I wonder what other dragons await the ... lucky ... engineers who will get to size this feature soon. ;)

[0] No idea how it works internally, but it would hardly surprise me if the lack of edit functionality caused early design decisions around stuff like this that would be pretty tough to unwind.

Edit has obvious options for misuse. Mitigating misuse might be complicated but that's no reason not to do it. The feature I've just described is not complicated. The feature might have architectural implications but resolving those is literally the job of software development teams (including design, PM, etc).

I think it's pathetic to say of a feature that it's too hard because there may be some complications or architecture changes. It's especially pathetic to say of a basic feature like edit which exists on other platforms and is obviously possible. This defeatist attitude is, no doubt, partially to blame for Twitter's inability to improve.

Just rewrite twitter as a simple github client. You could tag the version the person retweeted or liked. Since you don't mind the repository being public, you could actually use a free account.

As a not user of twitter, you really made me confirm my "no way, ever" stance, as far as the platform goes. With editing, as you describe it, enabled? "Absolutely not a fucking chance", is the most polite phrase i can think of. Imagine replying to me, me changing my reply, then you having to extra-click to wade through various re-writes i could manufacture.

Don’t forget that Twitter likes are also soft retweets.

When I follow you and you like a tweet from someone I don’t follow, the Twitter algorithm may show the tweet to me in my timeline, marked as “X liked this”, even several days later.

There’s a lot of interaction models built into Twitter that assume immutability.

They can instead add a link for "Original" in edited tweets. So everyone effortlessly see the latest update but if people see it controversial, they can click "Original" to see what it looked like when it was retweeted. The problem with likes still remains but eventually social contract might form that if tweet was editted you cannot harass people for retweeting or liking it.

> especially because the edit feature would mostly be used maliciously to cancel retweeters.

This could turn out to be a good thing in the long run: force the public to confront the fact that the commentary they are seeing may have, in fact, originally been on something entirely different than the context it is currently presented in.

> force the public to confront the fact that the commentary they are seeing may have, in fact, originally been on something entirely different than the context it is currently presented in.

How is this a good thing? I’d have 0 confidence that a reply was in fact to the tweet I’m currently seeing. Then how can I accurately reply to that initial reply?

And what’s to stop someone from selling the ‘edit’ on their viral tweet? If you edit a tweet does your like and RT count get reset so your tweet is no longer trending?

> I’d have 0 confidence that a reply was in fact to the tweet I’m currently seeing.

As you should already be doing every time you see screenshots.

That doesn't make any sense.

“Retweet if you like ice cream!” then after a bunch of retweets change it to “Retweet if you love pedophilia!” No thanks. I’d never retweet it like anything again. Editing is a terrible idea.

> especially because the edit feature would mostly be used maliciously to cancel retweeters

It's almost like cancelling was always a garbage idea centered around lies ans deception from the start

The two word combination "Free speech" is so Americanised that it needs a bunch of asterisks to define what it's supposed to mean. Is it the legal thing where the government isn't allowed to arbitrarily censor citizens? Or is it the "I want everything I think to be received by everyone" that a good chunk of people seem to think it means? Or is it "I want to be a dick and everyone has to keep dealing with my shit"? As far as I can tell, unless you're dealing with the government, the most legalese meaning of "free speech" doesn't apply at all.

It means nobody is allowed to police public discourse and that anyone who wants to be a dick can be a dick and if others don’t want to deal with it they can ignore it.

The only complications have always been situations where private enterprise dominates or impedes on public discourse.

Sure, now you're just laundering the explanation into what public discourse is.

That is exactly where the conversation should be. It’s a world more productive than implicating false dichotomies of government authority vs. private authority, or polite vs. annoying.

In the US, this isn’t accurate at all.

> It means nobody is allowed to police public discourse

No, it means the government cannot restrict speech.

> Freedom of speech, also called free speech, means the free and public expression of opinions without censorship, interference and restraint by the government. [0]

Most people assume “free speech” means “nobody” can restrict it, but it is in fact only “by the government”.

For example, you do not have freedom of speech at my house. I am free to demand anyone who says the word “blue” on my property to immediately leave.

You also don’t have free speech on the public comment section of my blog. I can delete (or not approve) any comments that don’t adhere to a list of approved words, or are not sufficiently praiseful of my views.

There are some state and federal laws that protect free speech at private companies, but they are mostly around employment as you can read about in the article.

That’s why I think OC is stating that the definition of “free speech” is important. Are we talking about US law, or about an abstract concept that “nobody can restrict public discourse” that doesn’t exist in reality?

> The only complications have always been situations where private enterprise dominates or impedes on public discourse.

Not true. There are many, many complications to free speech.

> Categories of speech that are given lesser or no protection by the First Amendment include obscenity (as determined by the Miller test), fraud, child pornography, speech integral to illegal conduct, speech that incites imminent lawless action, and regulation of commercial speech such as advertising. [1]

These types of speech can be legally restricted, punished and censored. This list was not created in 1776, it was created over time because the line isn’t clear. What’s always been clear though is that there have always been complicated edge cases concerning free speech.

The issue is so complicated it’s been litigated in the Supreme Court possibly hundreds of times [2].

Keep in mind that the Supreme Court only takes on a case if it presents a novel problem or if they thought a previous Supreme Court mad an egregious error in judgement. So the sheer volume of cases means that there continue to be many unique, complicated facets to “free speech”, not all of which involve private enterprise. Protesting, freedom of assembly, freedom of association, freedom to petition, compelled speech, false speech, etc. all can be complicated issues concerning individuals or public institutions.

[0], [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech_in_the_Uni...

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_Suprem...

Yes, but the paradox is that, because the government can't properly regulate speech (outside of the categories you listed), speech is heavily regulated by private operators, starting with you at your house, going to newspapers, TV, and Twitter, Facebook, etc. Everyone has their own rules, some explicit, some secret, most entirely arbitrary, and there is never a proper appeals process.

Thank you. And these complications are nothing new. Newspapers have long been regulated and the Fairness Doctrine defined the period during which Americans almost universally trusted the news media.

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine

> Everyone has their own rules, some explicit, some secret, most entirely arbitrary, and there is never a proper appeals process.

That’s by design.

The government creates a framework within which you can then create your own private experience.

The free market, freedom of choice, freedom of association, etc. is the balancing act to self-regulate private party practices.

If we start centralizing and standardizing free speech requirements from the government all the way down to your blog, we’d be putting all our eggs in 1 basket. The government does not restrict repetitive speech for example, yet you’d now be powerless to regulate spam. You’d also be powerless to moderate HN or any other topical social community, as off-topic speech is protected at the federal level.

The variety in free speech rules is a feature not a bug.

This is inconsistent. If the rules were changed so that speech was regulated by the government, then the rules could also be changed to fight spam.

It won't happen, unfortunately, since "free speech" has become an article of faith in the US. Yet there are democracies where this works well; the choice isn't between freedom and slavery, the US or North Korea.

> If the rules were changed so that speech was regulated by the government, then the rules could also be changed to fight spam.

Yes, but there are very valid reasons to curtail speech at a private level that don’t make sense at a national level like curating content, creating unique social spaces, topical content, etc.

Constraints make things interesting sometimes. Like Twitter’s original character limit, or Google Shorts clip length, or HN’s moderation policies. They restricted speech in order to create a unique experience that people liked. My freedom to post pop culture gossip is restricted on HN and I’m OK with it.

With bottom-up free speech rules, you can create this interesting landscape of private content.

With top-down free speech rules, a government can’t react quickly enough to accommodate all of these entrepreneurial reasons for privately restricting speech.

If I want to create a positive social network where every post has to have a positive sentiment analysis as determined by an AI, then why do you need to have the ability to share your negative thoughts on my private platform that I pay for? You already have the ability to do that in a public square, or on your own private website.

What does society gain by forcing me to accept all legal speech on my private site? It sounds like a recipe for stifling innovation.

Ah, come on, man...

{tearfully removes Eiffel 65 from karaoke party playlist}

Implying a clear line between private authority and government authority is just dishonest.

The real question is if private owners have rights over their property to police behavior.

The second consideration is what recourse private owners have to disallowed speech. It's not jail or execution. Typically just dismissal.

I do not understand the argument that a platform is not allowed to police itself.

What is the difference between a society and a private entity? Are they interchangeable? Does ownership constitute absolute authority? Historically, I know of no such society which has considered them interchangeable so I find it outrageous to act like they are.

> anyone who wants to be a dick can be a dick and if others don’t want to deal with it they can ignore it

The problem is that in the real world you can't silo off dicks like that. Bad opinions (e.g. racial hatred) can spread through the society and cause tremendous damage.

If you're going to argue for zero content moderation, the only good faith way to do so is to first admit that this could be a problem, and secondly admit that you have no problem if Twitter became like 8chan. If you just pretend like these kinds of things aren't possible, I can only conclude you're arguing from a position of ideology.

I've been on the internet for quite some time, and I just haven't seen a lot of the bad stuff, or even the dumb stuff, that people say is unavoidable.

I struggle to think of examples, and the worst ones are things that might be described as "sounds kinda racist but the person who wrote it is probably not the cross-burning type".

Sure, I could find it if I went looking. But I don't.

You could argue that this is because of some kind of benevolent filtering, and I'll grant that dang (of HN) does a great job. But I think it's mostly because I don't delve into the kinds of places where that would happen.

So I'm honestly just not sure what you mean when something will devolve into 8chan. I've heard of that but I don't know anyone on there, so I don't even really know what it is or how the devolution might happen. Mechanically, what would take place? Would I follow a friend, and then start getting weird flat-Earth stuff because of their second cousin?

There is automated moderation of Twitter, Youtube, etc, that aggressively blocks or downweights such comments, so it is not surprising that you don't find it. Go and make a Twitter account and start spewing racial hatred, and see what happens. Do you remember all the anti-semitic crap in the Youtube comments from a few years ago (all the triple parentheses etc) that are now mostly gone thanks to AI moderation? The comments section is now actually alright. So your argument is based on the incorrect premise that the sanitized nature of these online spaces is organic. It is actually heavily engineered.

> Mechanically, what would take place?

You would likely get three things:

- Informal networks of political extremists with a recruitment platform of global reach. Similar to r/genzedong in extremism, but far worse. Think ISIS, The Base.

- A tool that authoritarian regimes can use to exercise influence over open societies via coordinated misinformation and sowing division. This centralized effort to divide Western societies via coordinated social media manipulation is already being done.

- A society overtaken by conspiracy theories, with unpredictable consequences. Empirically, sunlight isn't the best disinfectant.

I make these claims by observing the local gradient and extrapolating.

It's Americanized because most other countries on Earth don't enshrine it as a principle at any level, whether private or public. The topic is hairy in the US because the government is actually obligated to care, so there are various grey areas when it comes to the interaction between US laws/constitution/government/private businesses.

Compare this to say the UK where neither corporations nor the government enshrine free speech, so these estuaries don't exist.

"Or is it the "I want everything I think to be received by everyone" that a good chunk of people seem to think it means?"

Tweets aren't forced upon anyone. Twitter isn't a megaphone in a library. It's a flexible medium that allows you to follow the people who write/retweet stuff you want to read, and ignore others.

Face it: if you interfere between Sally who writes something she wants Bob to read, and Bob who wants to read what Sally wrote, that's censorship.

(No, I am not making a legal argument. And no, I'm not interested in exploring extreme exceptions to the general principle.)

> Face it: if you interfere between Sally who writes something she wants Bob to read, and Bob who wants to read what Sally wrote, that's censorship.

What about national security, NDAs, illegal content, etc.?

Two consenting parties doesn’t mean the speech is legal or good for society.

> And no, I'm not interested in exploring extreme exceptions to the general principle.

The Supreme Court is (to the count of hundreds of times) because the devil is in the details. “Free speech” sounds good on paper, but when you start trying to define it and enforce it it gets complicated with tons of edge cases.

Thanks for providing a textbook example of “Whataboutism”. I used to not understand the term well.

Maybe you still don’t?

Whataboutism tries to argue two unrelated things.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism

> Whataboutism or whataboutery (as in "what about…?") is a variant of the tu quoque logical fallacy, which attempts to discredit an opponent's position by charging hypocrisy without directly refuting or disproving the argument.

“Tommy stole my lunch money.” “What about that time you stole Sally’s pencil?”

That would be whataboutism. It avoids debating the act of stealing someone's lunch money, by instead charging hypocrisy.

Just using the words “what about” doesn’t make it whataboutism.

I used the words “what about” to ask about a subsection of speech: NDAs, National security, illegal content, etc., that is covered by OC's definition of what it means to censor speech. I'm not charging hypocrisy or avoiding disproving the argument, I'm examining OC's claim. In this case "What about" is used to examine pertinent edge cases, and isn't whataboutism.

For example, in a scenario where Bob (US government) has nuclear launch codes he wants to talk about and Sally (domestic terrorist) wants to hear what he has to say, should someone intervene and restrict Bob's speech? By OC's definition, if they do, that is censorship. OC's only conditions are two consenting parties.

> Face it: if you interfere between Sally who writes something she wants Bob to read, and Bob who wants to read what Sally wrote, that's censorship.

Others, like the Supreme Court prefer to say that free speech has limitations that are not covered by the 1st amendment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech_in_the_Unite...

> The Supreme Court of the United States has recognized several categories of speech that are given lesser or no protection by the First Amendment and has recognized that governments may enact reasonable time, place, or manner restrictions on speech

So, in the case of two consenting parties discussing nuclear launch codes, OC calls that "censorship", but the Supreme Court says that the speech wasn't protected in the first place.

>A perfect target for Musk to come in, do a few sweeping changes, and get out. Thereby proving once again that he gets shit done where others can't. Case closed.

Ha! You are drinking straight from the hose pipe and having a hangover. Not having a Edit button was a strategic decision from Twitter and not a competency one. For the longest time, Facebook did not have Dislike button and still don't; sometime back, they added few options instead. It was their product vision that drove the decision behind their feature selections.

- Completely redesigning their UI two times over, - Launching a subscription-based service (which seems to make it the first social media network without ads) - Lengthening tweets to 280 characters - Letting users make money off their following (super followers)

I'm confused as to how any of this makes it stagnant.

Four achievements in 10 years isn't actually a lot, and two of those are just "they added more monetization."

And changing the character limit seems unbelievably trivial.

As a one man show SAaS with enough customers to basically live my life.. I lol at these achievements.

It’s just an example of the product not being stagnant. There’s a lot of things that go into current Twitter and it’d probably take no less than a couple hundred engineers just to keep the site up assuming no R&D whatsoever. That adds a ton of inertia and friction against changes.

Anyway I’m happy with Twitter’s direction. They’ve gone and made it less toxic, and in fact I’ve recently created an account because it has become a pleasure to use.

Twitter Blue still has ads and still constantly fights you to try and show you their algorithmic timeline.

It also doesn't cover multiple accounts - and my side account, when it switches to the algorithmic timeline every other day, is convinced I want to know about pop musicians and inserts 1000 "suggested topics" about the Grammys and BTS I have to dismiss individually.

Twitter's UI didn't get vastly better with the redesigns, it just looked different, which is an example of a company stagnating IMO.

> They have thousands of engineers that in the span of a decade don't seem to produce much at all

I have always wondered. Are there "projects" adjascent the core product that I'm not aware of? I can understand the infrastructure side of the work is pretty busy, but feature development and bugfixing don't require that many people even in a fast paced product development phase. What's everyone doing?

Tweeter has released steady slew of new features: https://twitter.com/i/release_notes

People on HN are great at making irresponsible claims and they are the clueless ones. You can bet that thousands of engineers there are very very busy.

Irresponsible is a bit rich, I have no responsibilities owed to twitter. Perhaps ignorant would be fair. I am not exactly floored by those releases compared to the team size, but it does show they're not twiddling their thumbs. As mentioned in another comment, they might be a bit inefficient at the size they are now, and the responsibilities they have to internal operations aren't particularly obvious to outsiders.

1) 'publicity' not 'prestige' so much. We're all going to be talking about it.

2) "do a few sweeping changes, and get out. Thereby proving once again that he gets shit done where others can't. " I'm doubtful as a board member he'll have the influence to make material changes. More like a series of publicly visible things.

Twitter doesn't have an 'edit button' because they're incompetent, it's just an odd choice they've made, and I think there are good reasons there. And 'edit button' is not any kind of material change.

3) I'll bet the speech issue is on his radar.

On the whole, I don't see how musk really changes the nature of what Twitter is, it's a mature product.

> Twitter is a stagnant company. They have thousands of engineers that in the span of a decade don't seem to produce much at all, nothing visible or memorable anyway.

As a Twitter user since 2019, I’ve seen improvements even in my short time on the platform. The most obvious example is that you can now restrict who can reply to your tweets.

You could make the same argument about HN, and it’d be equally mistaken.

How quickly we forget the front end redesign that lets you tweet photos when you quote tweet. The old one didn’t.

Or that they collapse new tweets into a button you can click, rather than interrupting your reading flow when it loads more. (Admittedly the old site already had this.)

Twitter auto-pauses videos when I scroll down past them. It has a couple other UX quirks that I really dislike as well.

HN probably has 0-1 devs actively working on it and is (likely still) running on two machines ("master" and "standby")[1]

Not sure about the comparison between Twitter and HN. I agree with the comment above yours - IMO Twitter has been stagnant in many regards. Why not spend time really nailing down video/image hosting/viewing etc? Why NFT profile pics?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28478379

> They have thousands of engineers that in the span of a decade don't seem to produce much at all, nothing visible or memorable anyway. Long-lasting Twitter problems (culture, spam, algorithm issues) never seem addressed.

Why do you assume it's engineering problem? I think engineers at twitter are well capable to solve any problems, but it's just not a business need. The real problem are product owners/stakeholders/business people, incapable to transform, envision and lead at Twitter.

Why does linkedin require 15000 employees? a website to post a glorified fake resume!

I think it's more basic than prestige. Musk's value add is in no small part due to his influencer status among a group of investors who primarily interact with him over Twitter. Leaving such an important part of your value subject to someone else's whims is crazy when you have the money to secure it.

Sounds like you’re saying Elon is lying when he says it’s about freedom of speech and open algorithms. Weird.

Twitter is adding an edit button. See https://twitter.com/TwitterComms/status/1511456430024364037?...

In my experience Twitter is way more appealing to younger people than Facebook.

and tiktok is 100X more appealing to them than either of those.

Facebook is for grandparents, twitter is for bots.

Twitter is for journalists who now don't have to walk downstairs to get the pointless opinion of the man on the street

I wonder how appealing tiktok will remain after the brains are fried from all the blinking lights :)

personally, I don't understand the appeal of tiktok, guess that makes me too old for the target demographic I guess.

I never liked facebook (fake people bragging about their perfect fake lives for all the world to see).

I used to find value in twitter - but now I just can't wade thru the all noise to get to the value - gave up all major social media years ago, don't miss it.

On twitter you can find lot of great people to follow; journalists, scientists, experts of any kind. If you are looking for information, you can find it.

The main issue is that all those diamonds are covered by an abundant amount of material of... let's just say lower quality, so the search can be long and tedious.

But most people don’t want that info; most people want to be entertained, every second of the day. And for that tik tok now wins until the next, even shorter attention span thing pops. Twitter started that by artificially limiting input of course, but people still had to read. Tik tok was obvious really. But people will come up with better ways to put less info into entertaining seconds people will want to watch 24/7; it will be a unicorn again in the coming years and TikTok will be for old people.

Supposedly he was talking to the Babylon bee just before about how they got banned. I am very curious what he will do.

He is anything but conventional, he is not there to go for low hanging fruit I don't think

> It doesn't take much. People have been begging for an edit button for a decade. If he'd get only that feature implemented, it will be remembered forever.

Funny you mention that: https://www.ign.com/articles/elon-musk-largest-twitter-share...

>Long-lasting Twitter problems (culture, spam, algorithm issues) ...

don't see how an edit button will change any of that!

I was following this discussion on finclout (https://app.finclout.io/t/dD66Ww2) and also don't think that Parak will not be CEO in 12 months (probably earlier)

Twitter facilitates knowledge transfer and communication. I'd argue they are one of the largest sources for communication on the internet, and with 200 million visitors every day, I'd say they are doing what they're supposed to be doing.

Twitter took out Clubhouse in about a week with what is now Twitter spaces. They've introduced Twitter Blue. Not that stagnant, and if you think it's stagnant, an edit button wouldn't be thing that changes that.

Edit, with a history of edits visible. Otherwise, it's b.s.

a proof that he get shit down? Yah just like he got the underground tunnel project don-... oh wait, he ended up building 10% of the original plan and it sucked

He is a board member, not the CEO/COO. He can demand changes, but how will they magically get done?

My intuition is that Twitter's CEO will be looking for big changes to turn Twitter's stock price around. Now his largest shareholder is also a famous entrepreneur with some big ideas.

I will never like or retweet anything ever if what I had endorsed could be edited later.

5yr returns: Twtr: 235% Fb: 65%

Excellent. Now do returns since IPO through April 1st, 2022:

Twtr: -5%

Fb: +488%

Literally doesnt matter unless you have been holding since 2006. I invested in twtr in Feb 2020. Its been a ride

Do people on boards of directors get features implemented, is that a thing?

Just stopping by to say i love this discussion. Very HN.

no one that is using Twitter right now wants "normies" on the platform

Why would Elon Musk spend his capacity to get things done on something like Twitter? He's got planets to colonize. Interesting point to question his motives, but for now I take him at his word regarding the free speech thing. I guess it could be something more nefarious as well.

Like I said, prestige.

When you're the richest man in the world, and your main companies are on track, what is it that motivates billionaires?

Prestige. Visibility. Legacy.

his sense of vanity?

thank you Papa Musk for the edit button <3

He could do that with any number of stagnant companies. Think bigger picture.

Tesla: Sustainable transport

SpaceX: Becoming a multiplanetary species

Twitter: Free speech in the public square

IMO it's actually the most important mission of the 3 since it's the basis for societal progress.

I think this is a charitable interpretation of what’s going on, unfortunate to see so many IMO reasonable comments getting downvoted here.

Here's a more sane interpretation of Musk's "mission" for these companies:

Tesla: Gimmicky electric cars as a status symbol

SpaceX: Maximizing profits on government space contracts

Twitter: Tactical manipulation of stock prices

All of them are about increasing Musk's clout and net worth.

Deeply cynical interpretation?

"Maximizing profits on government space contracts"

That would be the United Launch Alliance, Sir.

Counterpoint: Twitter is the only social network I use where I get an unfiltered balance of ideas big and small - CEOs and random Joes. It's where memes are born and proliferate everywhere else (other than TikTok).

Twitter WORKS. If it's profitable, it doesn't need more growth. Facebook got ruined because it thought everyone's parents and grandparents should be on it, and now that's the only people on it.

My parents and grandparents are scared of Twitter, and that's how I like it.

It also doesn't try to charge me for access to my own followers like Facebook does.

Twitter may have problems but I like the balance they've struck.

An edit button by the way would RUIN it because people who have gone viral with a bad take would simply edit it away.

> If it's profitable, it doesn't need more growth.

Stakeholders will think otherwise.

> An edit button by the way would RUIN it because people who have gone viral with a bad take would simply edit it away.

Just add a change history like (I think) FB has. No big deal.

>Just add a change history like (I think) FB has. No big deal.

If the Hacker News crowd isn't even sure that the feature exists, there's no way the majority of users are actually checking it. That may solve the problem for the most careful of users, but the conversation is going to be driven by the people who just react to what's in front of them.

I've deleted my FB account several years ago, but this is what I remember: There was a note like "Bearbeitet" ("changed") right in the post header, when a post had been changed after initial posting. You could click on that and see at least one previous version of the post.

A note like this, with a changelog, should therefore be fine for twitter and counter all "I never posted sth. like that!" talk, as it would be easily to be debunked.

>>Twitter is the only social network I use where I get an unfiltered balance of ideas

If you think you are getting 'unfiltered balance' from twitter, then you don't know twitter very well.

lol "unfiltered". It's an extremist network that filters in particular sanity.

"Twitter WORKS. If it's profitable, it doesn't need more growth."

You don't get to decide that. It's a publicly traded company. Which means you do need more growth.

"My parents and grandparents are scared of Twitter, and that's how I like it."

Strange thing to be proud of. I guess your own family isn't "cool" enough.

Finally, an edit button can have a timer, as every edit button ever has had for decades.

People have deleted bad tweets and they still have gone viral.

Username is deanCommie...

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say he enjoys reading Pravda, er, Twitter.

Only on "hackernews" do people expect a username to have any alignments with people's political beliefs. This seems to come up regularly here, and never on any other forum or irc channel I've used this ID.

If I was a communist, why would I self identify as a "commie"??

And not even consistently: Are you a lawn mower? A landscaper even?

> A perfect target for Musk to come in, do a few sweeping changes, and get out. Thereby proving once again that he gets shit done where others can't. Case closed.

Typical musk cult bullshit. I'm sorry, it sounds so wrong it makes me questions your honesty here.

He won't "do a few sweeping changes and get out". The only shit he will get done is abusing his influence over the top of the hierarchy to slowly but surely get more control over what gets fed to twitter users. Remember how Facebook has been crucial for election manipulation over the world? Now Musk gets to play this game too.

By the way, that's how he took over Tesla from its original founders. He invested an amount of money large enough so that he could force his way into becoming CEO. Then he fired the few remaining people who could oppose him.

So, no, he's not going to get out. Your post sounds more like "nothing to see here" than anything else. There's a big thing to see here. The richest US person calmly and openly taking over one of the largest social network in the world.

It's not over-analyzing, it's obvious. But in our troubled times such things are somehow happening in plain sight and nobody bats an eye.

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