Dear Twitter Advertisers from Elon Musk | Hacker News Reader

Dear Twitter Advertisers from Elon Musk

twitter.com

15 pointspgrote7 comments

Probably a response to a WSJ article on advertiser pressure[1].

Instead, Musk should make it easier for individuals to advertise on twitter. Many derrive some direct financial benefit from twitter - for their career, for their business. Add a "promote" or "boost" button to every tweet.

[1]: https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musk-will-face-an-early-tw...

Won't that lead to the facebook issue where the incentives are for facebook to not show anything that isn't boosted? And you ahve to "boost" your posts jsut so people who follow you can see them over teh other boosted ones?

The only reason that twitter doesn't have that problem is that no one wants to advertise there. If you have a good advertising business, why show anything but ads?

> You can choose your desired experience according to your preferences.

> highly relevant ads are actually content!

Doesn't sound like you can choose your desired experience to be ad-free though.

Mmmm... the banks are in for 13B on this deal. I think they think making money is more important than... establishing a digital town hall for 229 million users, some number of which may or may not be bots.

> Anything can be said with no consequences.

> You can choose your desired experience according to your preferences.

These things do not contradict each other. People can be both free to say anything without consequences, and to choose whom to listen to.

No, this is the rapid realization that “absolute” free speech is not protected in the US, or in any legal jurisdiction.

When you buy a company and now have skin in the game, idealism turns into realism.

It’s a good lesson for anyone that follows anyone that doesn’t have skin in the game but is just pontificating. These rabble rousers seek attention which is converted into money. All while not providing a product or service but just selling you the privilege to listen to an untested idea that they have no intention of implementing.

“Absolute” free speech is a popular catch phrase. It’s also illegal:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_ex...

Musk has skin in the game with many of his endeavors and they’ve worked out brilliantly.

But, it was clear to see from day 1 that “absolute” free speech was a pie in the sky idea that he couldn’t possibly implement legally or palatably.

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