Welcome to Hell, Elon
theverge.com
theverge.com
And don't bet against politicians wanting to affiliate with his celebrity/interact with his clout giving him subsidies.
It's also been a trader's paradise given the volatility and occasional appearance of someone mysteriously placing huge OTM call purchases for that Friday in an effort to force a gamma squeeze. In a market with regulators this would be suspicious and investigated, but we're in post-GFC America.
I agree it's like that but disagree there's a problem with that. Ultimately it's the consumers that are the judges if it's a business.
Ignoring the context of the article, I don’t believe that the example you’ve given here is really fair. It’s perfectly valid to review something which you could not create. If we excluded that whole category, then reviews would mostly cease to exist, and only peer review would be possible.
As someone who has been in the kitchen since childhood, I can appreciate how difficult great food is to create! If I taste something inferior I’m going to be specific with my feedback for improvement, highlighting the good points not just focus on the negatives.
Drives me nuts when at a restaurant with friends/family who haven’t put in the time in the kitchen and couldn’t hope to create a delicious meal dissing the food … if you can’t make something better, either shut up or try to be helpful with your feedback! Being critical is so easy and cliché.
The world needs more optimistic Elons not more doubters.
Um, your response is not agreement.
If you said "idk, this phone just sucks, because i feel like it does and idk how it could be made better", that would fall under "useless complaints". But saying "my phone drops calls often" is a specific complaint with a very specific (implied) improvement suggestion ("make phone not drop calls").
You don’t have to be a culinary wizard to tell when many foods are overcooked, underseasoned, etc. Sometimes chefs just screw up and a dish has outright unpleasant qualities.
Most people have hundreds or thousands of points of comparison for high-quality food even if they can’t make it themselves. If a restaurant bills itself as high-quality and then doesn’t live up to that standard I think it’s perfectly reasonable to say so.
Is peer review more valuable? Probably. But most restaurant guests aren’t chefs so pleasing non-chefs is valuable too.
Nowadays, we have every Tom, Dick and Harry commenting on anything and everything, regardless of how informed, educated or even experienced in the area they want to criticize.
I would like to hear an expert's opinion on this though.
You can go to sites or youtubers that specialise with reviewing stuff.
The problem is that it's just opinion of a single person & they can be easily bought or swayed so even if you have "experts" reviewing it that doesn't mean quality.
Also don't need an expert to tell you some piece of shit of a device fell apart after a month...
But I do wish that the reviews on sites were actually stuff people write month+ after getting the thing instead of "well, I got it, it works, I tried it for 5 minutes"
What you're really arguing here that Elon Musk is more capable than the previous people in charge of Twitter. I won't defend them much, but based on many of his previous actions I'm skeptical he's going to do any better and in fact think he'll probably do worse than the ex-leadership.
In a world where people are increasingly living in urban areas, fiber will annihilate satellite internet.
Starlink is yet another niche thing which Musk is specialized in pursuing.
In fact all of Musck companies can be summarized with "everybody has heard of them in the financial and technology press, but not many people use them"
I would not have guessed that the satellite tv market would have gone on as long as it has, considering how many satellite customers also have access to cable. And yet, you can drive through any suburb and find plenty of dishes.
Not that many people need internet access in the middle of the ocean.
Fiber may be way better, but putting a glorified wifi router on top of a million dollars worth of kerosene and stainless steel is a great deal cheaper than digging a 1000km long trench.
There aren't many of them compared to the people in cities, but being able to serve the billion or so people that would have to pay hundreds a month for crappy microwave internet with somewhat less crappy space microwave internet sounds like a the one company he's running that isn't fleecing the taxpayers or investors.
Those hundred people can't dig a particularly long trench or put in more than a few thousand poles for $600,000.
Seems to work out unless I'm vastly over estimating the bandwidth of whatever the bottleneck in the constellation is.
Plus there's all the people in cities willing to pay extra for low latency.
So I never really got how any other place has any excuses.
The relative ease of throwing up a few satellites and selling internet across the globe vs digging trenches to each and every residence make me think it's going to be a very popular internet option very soon.
I don't really like him, but cancelling people exactly at the same time by all media companies shows that it's all controlled by a few people. Of course they try everything to say bad things about Elon now...it's funny to see actually.
Louie CK jerked off in front of women, got cancelled and got a Grammy last year. He's still wealthy and does shows. So is Kanye. Cancelling doesn't mean shit.
I'm having a hard time defending wealth people who lost a Twitter account because they acted like dicks. Some of them literally.
I'm a benefitor from the low interest rate environment of the last decades (most of us in tech are), but I can understand the billions of people who haven't.
Nilay is doing the exact right thing, in the context of his corporate job.
And the way to make it better would be to go back in time and not make the mistake of buying it.
It’s impossible for Elon to accomplish his current vision because it’s not internally consistent. You can’t only moderate what is within the law and make Twitter a more friendly place and make it more attractive to advertisers and grow it to a billion users, and make it the defacto public square and make it the free speech public network and eliminate bots, and make X the everything app and fire 75% of twitter employees.
So while I think Elon Musk will succeed, it’s also interesting to point out the paradoxes and difficulty and in doing so elicit curiosity in how he will accomplish his goal. Conservatives seem to be taking a victory lap today, but it’s one of those things where compromise means no one ends up completely happy.
Bots I think is both the harder and existential problem.
Plus, you can look at most biased news sources and see the drama that they selectively cover under the guise of news. "1 person did a bad thing" and "here's another reason why this entire group is conspiring against you" are not uncommon tropes.
OK, but then it's more like blacklisting rather than banning. You're still free to show up and participate, you just can't get access to the biggest audiences.
So then the conversation turns from "why is Twitter blocking my free speech?" to "why is Twitter penalizing my free speech?".
Plus, what's legal speech is a real grey area. Free speech cases constantly go to the Supreme Court because we're talking about a near infinite number of ideas that can be expressed. And intent usually matters. So when Kanye writes his "death con 3" tweet, is it a direct threat to incite violence (not protected), an ambiguous threat that's not actionable (possibly protected), a joke (very likely protected), or as a brand new idea that hasn't been expressed yet (possibly protected)?
At the end of the day, a human has to make a decision. So, we're just swapping Jack's and Parag's vision of content moderation for Elon's, but it'll still be content moderation - perhaps better, perhaps not.
Maybe his tweet should stay up, ambiguous speech isn’t clearly illegal. Illegal speech is much easier to recognize. But Twitter probably wouldn’t want to put that tweet on the trending front page or advertise next to it but he has an audience and can continue to interact with and grow his audience.
Minimal regulation as required by law, no moderation, and maximal participation.
Success does breed success, but it’s not inevitable. There’s still hard work to be done and his big successes have come from hardware (batteries & rockets). Twitter is software in the social / content realm.
To use your cooking analogy, it’s like saying don’t bet against Gordon Ramsey (an expert in the cooking / media / art / experience realm) if he acquired Virgin Records. I’m sure he has connections and some knowledge that helps, but it’s a new field with new challenges.
Where do you pull these numbers out of? Twitter's yearly revenue was $5.2 billion.
If you're so off base for the objective metric, want to guess how off you are on the rest of your opinion?
1) Friendster
2) MySpace
3) Facebook
4) Twitter
5) Instagram
6) TikTok
Obviously the exact list is a matter of opinion, but Twitter is definitely not current-generation, I think everyone can agree on that.
Here, have fun exploring when each one was "born" and therefore its generation:
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=t...
But to say the generations are unremarkable isn't quite true -- the whole point is that previous generations are generally stagnant in growth, unlike the newest generation(s) that are still growing. This is a very valid factor in why investing in TikTok might be a smart idea while investing in Twitter is... not.
It's a lot easier to dismiss someone's success when it only happens once.
No one delivers 100%, but that's a historically exceptional track record.
Nobody expects all predictions to come true -- professional futurists have a batting rate of about 10%.
Finance.
Management.
Electric cars.
Charging stations.
Satellites.
Reusable rockets.
Turning Twitter into WeChat is probably a bigger challenge than sending a rocket to Mars, but...
Yeah that doesn't count. Stuff you don't do doesn't count.
Similarly with Tesla, legacy automakers will electrify the world. Being a cheerleader on the side doesn't count.
CEOs are people who sign off quality of life for the people who buy the products/services that the company they lead is selling. And that is all there is to it. There is nothing tough or poetic about it. Sane people are scratching their heads at how some people are falling for the cult of the founder which started with Jobs.
Is there anything other than aspirational thinking behind this statement? Musk himself has said it's a cash incinerator - and that's by Musk standards (read: used to huge public subsidies and constant capital raises).
No moderation is a loosing game because any platform that offers better moderation will be attractive to the masses leaving the people whose decorum is so abhorrent that the "free speech" servers are the only ones that will take them.
People complain about reddit moderation but I totally get it in most cases. If you let people push the line they will just keep going until it gets really bad, much better to nip it in the bud. Especially when we are talking about unpaid moderators. Moderation is not an easy or fun job.
The key is that each community needs to moderate itself. The second you give one entity centralised or external control over moderation it can be used for terrible things.
I can't think of any solution for the toxic communities other than to cut themoff and let them fester. The youtube/facebook/etc strategy of 'all engagement is good, show them more' is incredibly harmful.
Do you have any examples of this in practice? I'm not saying I for "1 person has all the power" but I'm not aware of any community that doesn't require 1+ moderators who have the power to hide/remove/block/etc, even HN has that.
In the facebook/tiktok/google/etc model, moderators are minimum wage workers with moderation objectives set by people who own the platform to satisfy advertisers or other central authorities. The structure resembles a mall or maybe a state. The penalty for non-compliance is isolation, and in many cases for facebook and google restriction of access to real services in the real world.
HN fits neither neatly, but is slightly more towards the first.
It's entirely fine. The problem YT/Facebook have is user's lack of control on what gets recommended. Play the "wrong" video once or twice and you will be flooded by stuff you don't want.
The fact someone somewhere on the site says something you don't like is not a problem. The problem is that it's kinda easy to go "you follow Xpotato12" -> "X potato12 is outraged by Y and hates it" -> click to see what is happens -> now YT recommends you Y because you "engaged" with it. There should be a better system to deal with that.
This is the same problem I was describing...
Users have no control over what they see, and open communities have little control over where the bar for who should be banned is or what other communities they are in contact with.
However, there is a problem that mostly is evaded or goes unexamined with many of these arguments: Does a community (in the general sense of the word) have the right to actively police/censor the content of an individual or group of people on the Internet in their own community (such as in the case of Kiwifarms)?
Does Facebook or any other community have a right to take KiwiFarms off the net? Obviously not. Is Facebook, Cloudflare or any other company allowed to decide that they want nothing to do with content like KiwiFarms and refuse to do business with them? Absolutely.
If you don't eject the extremist elements from your community, your community will be represented by them to outside world.
I do wonder what would happen with social media that had only the up/downvote system as soft moderation but without actual moderators smacking people around
Seriously, if it was up to me to design my own spam filter I could do a better job than they do.
Really I wouldn't mind there being no moderation on Twitter, but then have every user blacklist what they want from themselves.
The companies they defended by going "it's private company, they can do what they want" (which I've seen a lot every time someone is criticizing what the big social media company is doing, especially on Reddit) will do what doesn't benefit the group that defends them.
But i get shit from people pro-LLC (basically libs, neocons and fascists), so when one of those complain about a company banning them, i cannot resist saying "Companies do not have to respect the 1rst!" or something like this. Pure Shadenfreude, because i basically agree with the premise.
It's like anarcho-capitalists ("libertarians"). They have a good intuition about what freedom means, but either don't have to capacity, or the will to push the reasoning further, about what power is, what structured power looks like etc (i think it's the will, their subconscious know that if they reason further, it will cause some cognitive dissonance, so they don't).
By the way, if you're a conservative, you should read Baudrillard, in my opinion he is the only conservative who pushed the reflexion far enough (or rather, he is the only situationist who pushed his reflexion towards conservatism). And if you're leftwing (i mean, for european standards), you should too, to understand what conservatism can be if you help him think.
...for you, 4chan is one of the last places on the internet that feel like the old internet, organic, unfiltered, raw. If you can't handle it, there is Facebook for you.
And Twitter. Similarly if you don't like the filtered environment of these communities there is 4chan/8kun/etc. So then this is a solved problem and all the hand-wringing around the moderation on these platforms is unnecessary?
So is twitter. At least in the last years it turned to absolute s*it. In mid 2021 I resurrected my old long not used account. I made maybe 20 comments in 3 month before I got "banned". I'm probably not really banned I would just have to remove my last comment but I cant do that because I can not login anymore (which may or may not be related to the "banning").
The post in question was an obvious sarcastic wordplay/pun that even if interpreted literally would have meant something along the lines of "dead people wont complain" which is not only factually true its also rather soft dark humor. As expected they lump everything together in their ToS so they can give you a paragraph of things as a reason and you dont know which rule you actually broke.
Its just a generic "you violated our rules about offensive content/abuse/self-harm and suicide" or something like that. Then a link to where you can get help if you have some kind of mental breakdown. They actually twisted this as If I was suicidal so they can ban me for my own protection.
But I would bet a monthly salary some triggered long time twitter user with high reputation who just didn't understand the joke or does not have a compatible humor reported my tweet and the twitter admins just cater to these people and not to their own rules.
Unfortunately (but probably intentional) they do not allow some way to publicly prove these cases of "bad moderation". Yet there is plenty evidence that they get it wrong all the time. For example thebabylonbee is still banned.
As I said before the context was a pun but it should not matter these are factually true statements that any reasonable person would agree on.
I also have seen incredibly too much "It's just a joke bro" "defenses" for saying certain things that I have little sympathy for it. Learn the bounds of the platform/community you want to participate in and either stay within those bounds or find somewhere else to participate.
I dont care if they ban jokes if they openly say so. Their platform their rules.
It's the completely arbitrary (or biased) interpretation and enforcement of rules that is the problem.
NH is not a place to make jokes (some still do it) but twitter was a place for jokes since day one. And like I said, even if the joke went over someones head the statement was factual correct and not inciting violence or anything like that.
"It was a joke" was not a defense but rather the reasoning why I would even make a so obviously factual statement.
People often seem to fail to understand that humor is inherently a complex system of shared values, consent, trust, and context. The personal jabs my gym bros and I make at each other would be near fighting words of said by a stranger. The sometimes off-color jokes made by my girlfriend and I to each other are understood to be parody, based on years of trust and context around who the other person is, while an outsider would have no way of distinguishing them from the real thing. A person going to a comedy show may well hear jokes they'd never tolerate in a work context. But a certain subset of the population seems to not understand this and think they can just shout out whatever terrible thing they want and everything it should be fine because it's a "joke".
Either that our they are just pretending not to understand to cover their own bad behavior.
https://twitter.com/ncri_io/status/1586007698910646272?s=20&...
Also, lol for twitter having n-word graph in their metrics
Rather they're just tired of blatant censorship some individuals face when expressing an opinion that goes against popular politics of the time.
There's a middle ground between allowing literal nazi's to do whatever they want and blatantly influencing discussion on a mass scale by silencing those you disagree with.
I'll also be the first to say that Twitter (and most) moderation isn't 100% evenly handled. Just look at world leaders/political figures and what they can say that others cannot, I fully agree this is not ok and should not be allowed. My issue is that it's to the point that I can't hear "blatant censorship" in connection with social media without hearing the dog whistle. Those people who are so up in arms about FB/Twitter/etc "censorship" seem to be absolutely silent about the Gab/Parlor/Truth Socials of the world.
https://www.foxnews.com/media/twitter-double-standard-hunter...
https://www.foxnews.com/us/critics-twitter-censorship-obitua...
https://www.foxnews.com/tech/media-company-grabien-suspended...
https://www.foxnews.com/media/twitter-suspends-jordan-peters...
https://www.foxnews.com/media/twitter-facebook-censor-trump-...
EDIT: To make my comment a bit less argumentative, here is a good chart on the biases of media outlets: https://my.lwv.org/california/torrance-area/article/how-reli... , scroll down to adfontes.
The fact that you can't easily find any record of these events outside of Fox News is a part of the issue and "mass scale" censorship.
Any of them will explain to you how reporting the facts created a false sense of equivalence between Clinton and Trump for voters. Voters couldn't understand how Trump bragging to a frat boy reporter that he could just grab pussy, his using a nonprofit as a vehicle to dodge taxes on a painting, and his denial that McCain was the best hero were far worse than the 1994 Crime Bill, superpredators, Clinton Foundation associations with dictators, the Iraq War, Russian uranium, Haiti, and Honduras.
I mean you still need some moderation to push the community the right direction but give people ability to downvote toxic shithole to oblivion and block users and a lot of it is already done. The biggest problem is probably brigading and spamming the space with low effort content but first one is rare and second one don't need that much moderation work compared to trying to moderate every comment.
This isn't what people are moderated for on twitter. You can pick a random woman on twitter, and identically reply after every tweet she makes that she's just saying that because she's ugly. You can get your friends to join in and organize under a hashtag. Twitter is not interested in moderating that.
I blame it on the hundreds of celebrity reply guys who just wait for a Trump or an Ilhan Omar to tweet, and reply with abusive non-sequiturs. It really should have been nipped at the relatively-benign bud when Zuckerberg's posts on facebook would be accompanied with thousands of comments filled with friend-me spam, or even way back when "Tom's" posts started the same thing on Myspace.
Internet moderation has become fixated on silencing enemies, when it really should have been focused on removing the irrelevant and facetious. Instead of ever censoring the stupid and the spam, the targets became the naysayers and the contrarians. This is nothing but a boon for government and corporate covert interference, because their aim is to disrupt conversations, not to participate in them.
ps: also I don't follow 4chan much, so maybe there were grave events on there
Not sure how long Alex Jones or Mike Lindell would last in here...
Twitter is a platform. Everyone who uses twitter decides who to follow and who to block. Everyone sees different tweets.
Twitter for a long time had almost complete freedom of speech. It described itself as the free speech wing of the free speech party[1]. In that time, it had fewer rules then 4chan. But to use twitter did not feel like using 4chan, unless you decided to follow the kind of people who post on 4chan.
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2012/mar/22/twitter-tony-w...
I won't energetically argue with you that 4chan and Reddit aren't shit, but plenty of people would. They've both been massively influential on world culture. I would argue that twitter moderation has been almost strictly political and along culture war lines. Reddit, instead, mainly targeted cruelty and child exploitation for moderation.
Not a redditor, I see? Reddit crushed almost all right wing related subs, most famously r/The_Donald, and the entire gender critical / TERF / radical-feminist / LGB-non-T space. Among others, transgenderism is not a valid topic of discussion on Reddit.
Twitter addiction has wasted the best minds of my generation and if it implodes and takes Musk with it… win-win!
His twitter profile currently says "Chief Twit". Teenage boy level humor but the joke is on the joker.
Which of his engineering teams? Tesla? SpaceX? I don't see why they would be working on content moderation.
How good will it be? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ DALL-E is pretty good, let’s see where this goes.
I can't imagine it having any benefit whatsoever for Tweet moderation above using some GPUs for ML.
Also Musk likes to pitch integration between his companies but the reality is that there's very little.
In the past the board of SpaceX got angry at its workers and resources working for Boring Company:
> The arrangement alarmed some longtime investors in SpaceX, including its largest outside backer, Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, some of the people said. The investors learned in recent months that despite the diversion of SpaceX resources and staffing to the fledgling Boring startup, it was Musk who was in line to receive almost all of any future profits, these people said.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/new-questions-over-elon-mu...
It was basically embezzlement, but they ended up with a quiet settlement giving SpaceX some shares:
> In early 2018, The Boring Company was spun out from SpaceX and into a separate corporate entity.[27] Somewhat less than 10% of equity was given to early employees, and over 90% to Elon Musk. Subsequent concerns by SpaceX shareholders resulted in a December 2018 reallocation of 6% of The Boring Company's equity to SpaceX.
"Solving" content moderation is a losing battle -- there is no way to humanly moderate anything at the rate it can be produced, and Elon knows this. It's insane, so he probably won't do it.
But, allowing content to be produced, but making sure no real person ever sees it, until the content producer earns their way into "your" group -- now that can be automated.
Elon has access to Exascale hardware, so K-means Clusters with arbitrarily large dimensionality is at his disposal.
Ya figure he might not have thought this through?
I didn't meant to be rude; but, you claiming "I've seen no evidence of that" also seemed rude. Sorry for responding "in kind", and not assuming the best.
But, seriously; I immediately thought "Wow, I've seen evidence of that", straight from Elon's latest "AI Day" presentation...
My theory on "why" so many smart Google / Meta / Twitter / ... people have not implemented K-Means Clustering? Because it gives power back to the Agents in the system -- they can't shove their pre-selected content in your face to drive Ad clicks. I think Elon doesn't care so much about that. Or, sees how giving back authority to the agents will eventually attract orders of magnitude more agents / interaction into the system, offsetting the per-agent reduction in Ad revenue.
EDIT: Sorry, O(nlogn) deterministic or O(n) time-random approximations for Fermat-Weber.
Depending on how you define content moderation this is literally not possible, 1. Because content moderation is adversarial and has to adapt and 2. Content moderation is subjective, as the original article says content moderation is the product that companies sell, and it will likely have to change as time goes on (I’m not just talking “what’s popular/offensive” but like do you allow videos, how long are the videos, do videos get prioritized above text or audio, 280 character vs 144 character tweets, editing tweets, dislike button, etc.
Isn't this the best kind of company to acquire ? A product that has such inherent value that even a bumbling clown car of company could not sabotage its ability to retain users. Imo, Reddit and Twitter have monopolized 2 of the most effective forms of communication to have existed on the internet: Forums and memes (memes in the Dawkinian sense) and their tiny size is entirely a result of terrible leadership.
While musk didn't buy it for a particularly cheap price (at least in Winter 2022 prices), He should be able to justify the net worth as well as any competing tech company will be able to.
To quote Charlie Munger:
> Never underestimate the man who overestimates himself. These weird guys who overestimate themselves occasionally knock it right out of the park. I would never buy Tesla stock and I would never sell it short.
Elon isn't worried about valuation. His consideration could be 'can I fix low hanging fruit and provide value'
If elon is right the current content moderation has gone wrong, and it has. Then by fixing this it should provide a return on his investment. Not to mention the counter force of those who cannot allow free discussion who may buy him out in order to stop it.
But more important, what elon also understands. What is a billion $? Elon is wealthy enough he can own any toy or thing he ever wants. It has less to do with some currency and himself. He has surpassed this point in economics placing him amongst a select few who have won this game.
Now he has the chance to use this excess wealth to form the future. Which scares people.
This will happen and not only with China. Just think about Bezos, the Washington Post and Saudi Arabia. But on the other side I think Tesla and SpaceX shouldn't do business with dictatorships anyway. So maybe in the end this will be a good thing.
>The essential truth of every social network is that the product is content moderation, and everyone hates the people who decide how content moderation works.
Twitter is being distilled into a political tool - both side, endlessly crying into the void, appealing to their confirmation biases.
Hop on over to /pol/ to see what unregulated politic speak turns into.
I give it 10 years and it’ll be a ghost town.
* Youth
* Late 20s to early 40s
* Elderly
[1] https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/futureofmedia/index-us-mains...
He said it was about free speech but Twitter is already about as free as it's possible to be without permitting a whole bunch of content that is NOT protected under the first amendment (CP, calls to violence etc).
And if it is about free speech then it cannot be an automated moderation play, because there is nothing to moderate if you're a pure free speech platform.
The best I can guess, is it's a political play? Turn down politicians who he dislikes? Or he just had a drunk/high/bipolar period and did it without a plan.
E.g. in Trump's case they could have deleted the few tweets which they considered calls to violence instead of handing out a permanent ban.
(I'm not saying they should have done that.)
Plus there are plenty posting call to violence who are not banned, but are suspiciously on the "right" side of politics.
This is just wildly untrue. There is a huge range of gender-critical views, vaccine skepticism, any combination of race/gender/genetics/IQ discourse, and a ton of other topics that will get you banned, that come nowhere near first amendment protections.
You might think that's a good thing, that's a valid argument, but it's simply untrue to imply that the limit is similar to 1A protections.
I'm convinced half the polarization in America comes from neither side understanding the other side's basic arguments.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/covid-truther-alex-berenson-fi...
It will be particularly telling to see how Elon handles this category of moderation.
I'm still convinced this is how he makes more than half of all of his decisions (see for example, him 'building a submarine' or 'boring/loop'). His success seems to be because he sometimes takes already-known-obvious-good bets that no other person could take first because they aren't billionaires.
> The best I can guess, is it's a political play?
I don't think it's a political play, so much as he got angry and impulsive and jumped in without thinking, couldn't back out, and desperately needs to ret-con this into making any sense, so is pivoting in into a political play.
There are plenty of things that are nothing of the sort, merely “sins against wokeism” that will get you instantly banned until you repent. Look, I would prefer conservative people treat feminists and trans people with more sensitivity, but examples that come up over and over are people getting banned for making jokes about there actually being innate differences between men and women, or the ways that slogans like “trans women ARE women” might be a bit too strongly worded.
Circles are more like trusted connections between people. Like how society works.
I should be able to see the content “everyone” makes or be able to limit myself to exclude certain groups or only include certain groups of people.
This way if there is content that you consider harmful to yourself or you are unable to live with it, you can still participate on the platform. It’s an individuals choice, not a corporations.
This would actually be a great outcome IMO. Supporting shared blocklists would have similar effect, and probably be easier to implement. Unfortunately, I very much doubt than Elmo Nutsack would allow that. Despite all his claims about "free speech" I'm pretty sure enabling those who would silence people they deem too "woke" via harassment is very much part of the reason behind his takeover. Check out the #TwitterTakeover tag to see the hordes slavering at the prospect (but be aware that it's hard on the stomach if you're a decent person).
Don't think that works when you can just make another account if you do not want to be associated with something on your main one.
1- verified and is not anonymous.
2- verified but remains anonymous.
3- anonymous.
I will always remember when I first learned about bitcoin here in 2010 when the white paper was linked.
Now we have shrieking missives warning about mean people writing stuff on the internet.
> Here are some examples: you can write as many polite letters to advertisers as you want, but you cannot reasonably expect to collect any meaningful advertising revenue if you do not promise those advertisers “brand safety.” That means you have to ban racism, sexism, transphobia, and all kinds of other speech that is totally legal in the United States but reveals people to be total assholes. So you can make all the promises about “free speech” you want, but the dull reality is that you still have to ban a bunch of legal speech if you want to make money. And when you start doing that, your creepy new right-wing fanboys are going to viciously turn on you, just like they turn on every other social network that realizes the same essential truth.
The one thing that can be counted on Elon doing is Elon doing what makes him the most money.
Logged-in folks will also have the option to go into unmoderated mode, which will drop you into the cesspool if you so desire. Presumably respectable companies will only advertise on the default layer; ads in the cesspool will be for "edgy" t-shirt companies and extremist politicians and others who don't care about their brand being displayed next to questionable content (or prefer it!).
Illegal content of course must continue to be moderated regardless.
I suspect part of the problem with Twitter is that then you probably are ending up trying to build a conservative social network, and I suspect there isn't a big enough market for a conservative social network, at least as big as the one that Twitter wants to be. Maybe as time goes on and more conservatives end up younger.
According to their latest quarterly report they had $1.18B in revenue, $1.08B from advertising. Is there really enough potential in "premium users" or something else to forgo that billion dollars per quarter?
https://s22.q4cdn.com/826641620/files/doc_financials/2022/q2...
Do you mean engage publicly, or engage even privately within his own teams?
I will be very happy if all their frontend people get axed.
Technically I did say something. I said "Cool, get those Nazi's out of here, good job."
> fucking government... They’re out here banning books, Elon!
I don't believe that repeating a lie will make it true. The government is not banning any books, Nilay. Parents do. And not globally, but at a local level. It's another question whether they should or not, but I'd expect more precision and integrity from a prominent journalist. Most people don't fact check everything and if they learn something from a reputable source, they believe it.
The local township library and school board are both literally the government, and the book banning is largely happening based on local election results (typically county positions and/or school board positions -- both from election ballots)
It's not wrong at all to say the government is banning books -- that statement is objectively correct, it's just happening at the lowest levels of government.
> I assume you mean the state or federal government wants to introduce a new law.
Why? If it were any other issue, no one would care about the distinction. If Allegan County, Michigan banned firearms, people would still claim it's an infringement of 2nd Amendment rights, even though it's just "concerned parents asking relevant institutions at the local level" and not necessarily a state/federal law. But when that same exact county bans books and/or libraries instead, suddenly it "doesn't count" for some reason?
Advertisers only care about 'brand safety' to the extent that it impacts their ability to sell stuff.
So long as users keep using the platform, advertisers will keep coming back - They're not going to vacate the platform and let their competitors get all the eyeballs... If they did, those competitors would gain market share and make incumbents irrelevant.
Users have made it clear that they want free speech on social media platforms so I don't see how giving users what they want would cause them to leave.
The problem with Twitter so far is that they sold out to big governments and big corporations and completely neglected their users in the process. Having front-row access to users, Twitter is actually in a position to dictate the rules; it should not be taking orders from politicians and corporate executives when those orders are harmful to its users.
The people who only want to consume government and corporate propaganda will only see content from like-minded people anyway; they will get the safe experience that they want. No problem! Companies can target them and sell them cricket flour, dried maggots, lab-grown meat and COVID booster vaccine number 27... These people won't even realize that the deplorables also use Twitter because they will be in a different filter bubble.
If someone wants to be brainwashed in a particular way by limiting their exposure to alternative ideas, they are free to do that to themselves! But if someone wants to expose themselves to as many diverse ideas as possible and open up their minds as much as possible, then they should also be free to do that!
If this ends up posing a threat to a small number of elites... Maybe it means that these people have too much exposure and power anyway. Maybe society should be reorganized so that power is more spread out; giving up some power is a good way to reduce the number of one's problems and enemies. That's what the British Royal family did; and that's why they still have their heads on their shoulders.
If this is the case, it is anti-competitive. Companies should not prevent new markets from forming around growing new ideologies and communities (regardless of how deplorable they find them). Companies have to choose; stay true to their current ideology and miss out on new market opportunities or embrace changing ideologies and risk losing some of their existing user base.
And the whole "content moderation" argument is really weak, sites worked entirey fine without the heavy content moderation (including Youtube, porn and copyright violation was removed but for good part of site's existence pretty much anything went). It only got more heavy because Google wanted to appease the ad market
Sure you can argue you have to take account laws and such and that will take effort but social sites don't exactly stop there.
> Having front-row access to users, Twitter is actually in a position to dictate the rules; it should not be taking orders from politicians and corporate executives when those orders are harmful to its users.
It's a corporation so priority will always be money one way or another. Now putting themselves as "open" might work, but so might doing what Twitter (and google, and facebook, and pretty much any big tech with social media) does and nudge the visibility of content to stuff they want to happen. "Censorship" isn't even needed, it isn't removed, it just won't show up in search results or recommendations. Pretend people don't click it and of course nobody can verify that and you're all good.
Everyone keeps referencing the internet of yesteryear. I would love to go back to the internet of yesteryear with the limited audience it had but Youtube's revenue is 2022 is seven times what it was in 2015! Twitter grew four x since 2011. The Content Moderation story has completely changed.