The part I don't get: why is Elon still tweeting ideas for improving Twitter and shaking things up?
The part I don't get: why is Elon still tweeting ideas for improving Twitter and shaking things up?
That is weird, trolling doesn't seem like Elon's thing at all.
As an actual troll he hasn't really done much but post tired memes until buying a large stake in Twitter. Time will tell whether he's actually going to do anything interesting with this stake but based on track record I'm going with no.
Most of what qualifies him as a troll could be gleaned from a ten minute crash course in /b.
Or is it about making the most people the angriest?
It's like arguing about whether McDonald's is good food.
Some people think that suggesting an Edit button is telling.
"Here is the only imaginable use of an edit button. You post a tweet saying “I love puppies” with a picture of a cute puppy. A thousand people retweet your tweet; a thousand more quote-tweet it with comments like “what a good boi!” A week later, you edit the tweet to say “I think the Nazis got a bad rap,” with a picture of Hitler. Years later, a professor is denied tenure because someone digs through her old tweets to find that she called Hitler “a good boi.” This is absolutely the only purpose for the edit button, and oh man does accomplished Twitter troll Elon Musk know that. "
(Matthew Levine last week)
Limit the time the tweet is editable, and postpone publishing tweets until that timer has run out.
Or show a history of what the post has looked like.
The latter... perhaps, I guess? But then why bother? Are people so desperate to keep their internet points proxies by retweets and likes that they can't fathom reposting if there was an egregious error?
To me the whole exercise is one of malicious populism. It's an idea that appears liberty-generating on the surface and is used to gather a mob but has no real utility.
He's still the largest shareholder and he has a lot of soft power to sway opinions in the public sphere.
Maybe he'll use his influence to replace the board with people who are less politically polarized. Maybe his new board will re-write the charter so he can eventually become CEO.
I don't think this game is over.