I think the thing to watch will be ads and other revenue streams. Most companies aren't going to want their ads next to 'free for all' content, so we'll see what happens.
Also, many are acting like Musk has free rein in running the company. Yes and no.
Beyond needing employees to actually run the thing, he also has loans to pay back ($13B!) and investors to maintain good relationships with. More on that here: https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/who-is-financing-elon-mus...
Perhaps some kind of "HN gloves off" mode might work. Or HN After Dark. Then the traditional civil mode could be retained, while allowing the more wild tangents to run their course in a separate but related area or mode. I think this is inevitable for online discussion. Politicians have their formal, respectful discourse zones, but gloves come off in certain places and contexts where heated exchange is not only acceptable, but expected. And these are the people running things. So to deny the same for the general population, will never sit well.
Want to have some open and honest discussions about programming languages, databases, APIs, careers, or math? There are few places where you can read more interesting and intelligent discussions on things like this.
Want to have some civil, but honest discussion about anything truly contentious: say race, religion, crime, homelessness, foreign affairs, IQ, sexuality, immigration, etc? Fully open and honest discussions on these sorts of topics are just not possible unless you have a very commonplace and milquetoast viewpoint.
Whether that is compatible with their business goals is another question.
1. Most are optimizing to maximize user engagement, and it seems like most platforms have concluded that emotionally charged hot takes are the best way to keep the feed scrolling and the likes and shares flowing.
2. Most don't have the small communities or active moderation necessary to build a culture of civility. (HN is an outlier, though even here I think there are still some topics where the site becomes echo chamber-y.)
Just as an example take the insipid "let's go Brandon" slogan. Sentiment analysis would rate that as a positive statement unless it was specifically flagged. That's a trivial example. There's untold numbers of covert meanings for emojis, even for banal things.
Isn't this Instagram thing - my impression at least - have not used longer than a day or two because it's basically fluff only.
Cutting out negative sentiment - whatever the definition - would make it boring IMO
Will have to prefix tweets with I positively hate...
The word "unalive" itself was coined and became popular to escape such basic filters that have no sense of meaning.
1. I just tried the following on the first online sentiment analysis tool I found, and scored 85% positive: You sound very 'smart'. I have warm and fuzzy feelings at the thought of you being unalived, with your genius
I think if you have a place with useful conversation and also the attention of people, you can make money.
Whether Musk will actually do that: dunno. But I don't think it's inconceivable that Twitter could become something much better than it is today.
It's the same reason none of the reddit clones have ever taken off, turns out most people don't want to participate in a virtual space free of censorship because it just turns into a cesspool
It's unfortunate ad hominems, logical fallacies, and the "mic drop one liner" get so much traction and amplification.
When I find myself making snap judgments about an issue, I dive in to the opposition, doggedly seek out the underpinning ideas, from academic or level headed folks.
It's helped strengthen my personal convictions on some matters and moderated my pre held notions.
I really disagree. I think you have fringe folks on the left but outlandish ideas are mainstream amongst conservatives. For example, 70% of republicans believe Joe Biden did not legitimately win the 2020 election.
https://www.poynter.org/fact-checking/2022/70-percent-republ...
You just aren't going to find such strong belief in anything that absurd on the left.
>When I find myself making snap judgments about an issue, I dive in to the opposition, doggedly seek out the underpinning ideas, from academic or level headed folks.
I agree! Obviously some subjects like anti-vaxxers or election deniers don't have level-headed or academic folks who can support them.
That's really why you need intense moderation because quality content doesn't rise to the top. An 'anything goes' environment tends to promote the absolute worst ideas, as people like Gwyneth Paltrow and Joe Rogan have a far wider audience that actual scientists. If you allow them to lie about important issues, the lie is going to suffocate any academic or level-headed person who has something to say.
The 4 years of russian meddling? It genuinly seems to have been widespread to me.
And with the biden one, AFAICT it is not directly about stealing it, but rather enacting stuff that resulted in an unfair benefit to democrats, that seemed unlawful. (Mail in voting by default, for example)
So, no, I don't believe it's mostly one side. But rather that both sides have the loud, crazy, minority.
You mean the highly documented russian interference in our elections? Is that what you're talking about?
>And with the biden one, AFAICT it is not directly about stealing it, but rather enacting stuff that resulted in an unfair benefit to democrats, that seemed unlawful. (Mail in voting by default, for example)
I'm not going to delve too deep into the idiotic conspiracy theories behind the 'stop the steal', the reality is that there is zero evidence impropriety.
The idea that making it easier to vote by mail is a benefit to one party speaks volumes about what conservatives believe.
The fight against vote-by-mail has nothing to do with lawfullness. Conservatives focus on making it hard to vote/voter disenfranchisement because they know they are a minority party.
It doesn't sound too complicated to me
I have to wonder if there was already some pushback from larger advertisers that prompted Elon's tweet in the first place. Time will tell but we've already got 4chan and some users and advertisers would rather go to a "mall-like" experience to not have to deal with the "crap".
The actual quality of the advertising product almost doesn't matter, it's not like any of the advertisers can reasonably independently validate the claims or performance, they're trusting them as given.
Elon has never been a member of the advertising club, he famously chooses to have his company refuse to even be a client, and he doesn't have a reputation for any of those values. Wouldn't at all be surprised if major clients put a hold on their Q4 spend with Twitter the moment they got news of the completed acquisition.
Google, Facebook, and Snap all had major advertising earning misses, the agencies would be pressuring for better deals regardless.
This isn't Bezos buying the Post outright and running it as a vanity project, Musk has stakeholders.
What you predict (financial ruin) will probably happen if he doesn't do that.
I also understood Vijaya Gadde and pre-Musk Twitter's position better even if I still think their systems end up hitting marginalized people more than the people who want to marginalize them. The task is harder than Musk realizes, and he fired the person who's been working hardest on it for most of the last decade and understands the problem space best.
I know this sounds like a cynical question, but without a name your comment seems a little bit fanatical.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/golden-parachutes-3-fired...
And people who lend money typically have contracts and the ability to seize assets if they don't get paid. (I have no idea what the $13B of loans looked like, but can't imagine they were personal, non-recourse loans.)
There are a few publicly known partners, and a few who got turned away. They have equity.
I'm from Brazil and the extreme right is abusing all the communication platforms. it's a complete madness in what people believe right now. Our society is on the verge of crumbling.
Musk constantly shits on the work those people did and says he's going to change it all. I bet they have some pride in what they built and it would feel insulting for some outsider to constantly criticize without knowing the reasons why they did what they did. I'd feel hurt too. Plus his companies have a reputation for chewing you up and spitting you out again. People might not like the cultural U-turn.
Please stop talking about the far left. It's just silly. It's like 12 people who share these extreme views and comparing them to the far right is really misleading. The far right are organised and training with weapons. The far left are arguing on Twitter with anime profile pics.
saying that the far left is in no way comparable to the far right is pretty silly. they both exist, they both have violent sects, both have anime fans, and there are most definitely more than 12 of them
And hell they banned Jordan Peterson?
I don't know what kinda echo chamber you operate in to think the 'left' is not 'trying to influence communication platforms'
Have you heard of reddit?
- extreme intersectionality
- the original non-diluted Marxism-inspired version of CRT (e.g. punctuality and objectivism in academia are “white values”)
- literal dissolution of police (not just creating better social services)
and much more. So they are far left not in the classic sense. This term has been somewhat redefined in the context of culture war (similar to far right).
How do you define far left in the US? People who advocate for the redistribution of income and wealth and for a brotherhood of all workers?
If it was, then we would have seen a left exodus years ago and not suddenly coming up now. This comment has me so confused.
The argument only goes through when you look at the platform reputation as a whole. That's why platforms like Parler have trouble attracting ads. There are a lot – a lot – of people trying to hit Twitter's platform reputation right now, but their problem is that the best place to degrade companies' (and people's) reputations is Twitter.
That's fine, I won't see any of their ads anyways and neither should any of you.
Now, can we please get over this era of _advertising companies_ deciding what is acceptable in the digital town square?
He's making a deal with the devil to fund Twitter, and if that means selling out to guys like Peter Thiel and other conservative power brokers, then he will do it. Just in time for the 2024 presidential election media cycle too...What could possibly go wrong?
I mean, that's no different from Twitter and other platforms currently operate in terms of how they define hate speech or who they cancel.
I think the point is that while right now, 'unfair' things might happen, perhaps they will become even more uneven in the future, as he exerts more personal sway into what's ok and what's not, rather than attempting to stick to some guidelines.
Exactly -- and I think that's the source of most folks' pre-schadenfreude. A lot of us have been around long enough to have seen "free speech" platforms come and go and this feels no different, so far.
Sure they can. "You take down tweets we don't like, or Tesla loses China as a market, we arrest all the employees currently in China, and take your factories and other assets there".
Can he say "fine"? Sure, technically.
I actually don't think so, I think this was bluster, or if they are safe haven it will be safe in the way that a subreddit is safe. You can freely talk amongst eachother but that content won't be promoted to people who don't want to see it.
I mean this was his latest tweet: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1586059953311137792?cxt=...
My prediction is he ends up growing twitter into a fairly bland chat/communications app/social network, and the focus on global political and social debates slowly weans over time.
Can't help but smile.
Here's the text of it in case others can't see it:
> Twitter will be forming a content moderation council with widely diverse viewpoints.
> No major content decisions or account reinstatements will happen before that council convenes.
I don't think they've ever had more than 2 9s of reliability.
My prediction is he ends up growing twitter into a fairly bland chat/communications app/social network, and the focus on global political and social debates slowly weans over time.
https://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Racist-tweets-quickl...
"Elon now controls twitter. Unleash the racial slurs. K---S AND N-----S," said
one account, using slurs for Jews and Black people. "I can freely express how
much I hate n-----s . . . now, thank you elon," another said.
Some of the Twitter influx was organized on other platforms, including the pro-Trump
forum TheDonald, where its top posts Friday morning showed tweets celebrating lies
about Trump's 2020 election loss and memes criticizing transgender people under the
headline "When you can't get banned on Twitter anymore."
> My prediction is Musk flails about, burns a pile of money, and decimates any goodwill his associated companies (e.g. SpaceX, Tesla, Starlink) currently have.
I hope you’re right.
As for Musk, he's playing with other people's money. At that scale he can afford to tell the American banks to go fuck themselves. The foreign investors are probably cheering on this nonsense. The Saudis want pro-oil republicans, the Russians are going to relish the chaos, and at the very least the Chinese will cheer on the loss of a TikTok competitor. There aren't a lot of guardrails here.
https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Kanye-West-s-Twitter-acc...
Elon Musk has been talking about how awesome Gigafactory Shanghai is for the past year, thanks to Chinese workers who don't talk back to their boss and work harder than their American counterparts.
Dude loves his Chinese anti-speech factory. Or at least, he already is pretending to do that so that he gets his Chinese sales numbers up.
Musk makes the public statements he needs to do business. He has no morals outside of money as far as I can tell. Dude is 100% willing to spout off anti-American propaganda / stereotypes to serve his Chinese masters (at least, this year when his Chinese factory is opening up. We will see if he really believes those words or if he's just playing dumb or something...)
EDIT:
> I think there will be some very strong companies coming out of China. There’s just a lot of super talented and hardworking people in China that strongly believe in manufacturing. And they won’t just be burning the midnight oil. They’ll be burning the 3am oil. So they won’t even leave the factory type of thing. Whereas in America, people are trying to avoid going to work at all.
But when China goes 100% lockdown for the past year, he turns a blind eye to it and calls them hard workers instead. His anti-American bias, at least when talking with the Chinese, is pretty darn obvious.
Of course, it all disappears when he flies back to the USA. My point is he's a two-faced double-talking political type. He says what he needs to say to get the money and prestige he needs to do what he wants. Expect more pro-Chinese sentiment from him. The Chinese factory is one of the most important elements of Tesla's strategy right now.
He’s a politician/actor for business, and people love it. Everybody claims to hate politics, but it’s become yet another reality tv drama to which we’ve become addicted. Elon is a great actor and he’s paid very well for it. He knows the game he’s playing, and has no moral compass to hold him back.
Unfortunately, it’s the most real form of reality tv yet, where we all eventually bear the consequences. Personally, I have never and will never use or read Twitter. My concern for most social media platforms is whether or not they’re going to damage society.
It’s not like we have a choice anyway. So take a good look at your surroundings, and a year or two from now, ask yourself if we’re better or worse off than now.
The reason this idea does not go far is because the people who pay usually do not necessarily post good quality content , that degrades the quality of UGC and view time therefore ad revenue loss
I agree that introducing paid accounts would make it harder for content farms to exist - primarily due to the fact that they would need a very large number of bank accounts and/or payment cards. However I don't think it's a real solution to this problem. Maybe as a part of some holistic anti-bot system? Yes, that could work.
Like, I want to show my gun ads next to Trump's posts and want to show abortion clinics next to Biden's. Nothing wrong with this. Want to show public works ads next to Bernie's ads.
Then when you want to post wild things, anonymous mode will kick in and those posts will not be posted in an identifying fashion. They will be posted in an area that cannot lead to the post owner being "accurately" identified. That way nobody knows who posted it. That should reduce some legal issues. If the poster decides to post it as the owner and successfully gets past the Nazi filter, their reputation will be affected depending on the public reception of their post.
Just like in real life. You stay away from people who you don't like.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/28/23428132/elon-musk-twitt...
Or government funded/controlled socials.
I think there is a need for smaller existing community-based social networks. They can be paid for by certain people or crowdfunded once in a while like Wikipedia.
https://twitter.com/ProfessorShaw/status/1586064942972575746
Also, I assume the point is a presidential run within the next cycle or three.
Elon Musk is not eligible to be President.
Implying that people are dunking on you for being wrong instead of amplifying what you said.
His issue is that he wasn't born a US citizen, not that he was born in South Africa.
Excellent idea, let's deplatform people by creating lots of bot accounts to follow them so that they have to pay for it!
I see today’s Twitter as a chat app where popular people promote their content to less popular. Maybe it would make sense to help populars sell stuff directly and get a cut.
What's your proposal for how Twitter makes money? Just double-down on the harvesting of personal information instead?
This is a misconception.
Outsiders don't know anything about ads.
Twitter needs to be more useful, especially to iOS users. It users outside of major US metros. It needs older users.
It will need better targeting and science.
Then it will increase ad revenue.