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simonwillison.net
simonwillison.net
So Twitter was “really good” (while it was helping the many rich shareholders of a random public company) but it’s suddenly “work” a couple of days after the owner changed?
Nothing wrong for not using it because of ideological reasons, but the product’s accessibility (or anything else really) hasn’t changed yet.
https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/28/23428132/elon-musk-twitt...
And despite about a decade of similar whining on HN about deleting Facebook they are still the most popular social network around.
I personally wouldn't gamble the farm on corporation ad spending's adherence to social justice if those eyeballs are all in one place... at least long term.
At least FB has to compete with messaging apps and Instagram/TikTok. Twitter doesn't have a good #2.
It's probably a mistake to take the emotional outrage news cycles over the next month (or 3) as much more than the exact thing people will keep going back to Twitter for... ironically this outrage at Musk is the exactly what drives people to use Twitter.
What I've found is Facebook is not popular with young people: the audience many advertisers are the most interested in. The stock market is certainly not happy with their latest results. So sure, I can easily find a source that says Facebook is still the most popular platform. The details matter. Is it growth in Asia that's keeping their numbers up while US users shrink? Are they failing to attract young people? Have they lost users among the HN demographics? These details matter if you want the actual story.
> One area where Meta showed promise was in adding to Facebook’s massive user base
> Facebook has 2.93 billion monthly active users. 1.98 billion daily active users. That was up from 1.97 billion three months ago.
> Facebook has 264 million monthly active users in the United States and Canada alone. The majority of Facebook’s users belong to the 25 to 34 age group.
> Twitter has 206 million daily active users.
> TikTok has 1 billion monthly active users (MAU’s).
Facebook is going through a massive pivot and spending a wild amount of $$ on the Metaverse. All tech stocks are down. So I wouldn't put too much weight on stock price.
The other major thing is how Apple changed ad tracking works which reduce ad prices by 20% on average. That's a major decline in revenue for any company ("Advertising represented 98.2% of the company’s total revenue"). But YoY revenue only declined by 4%.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/meta-facebook-q3-earnings-repor...
Yes user-wise they do seem to be doing fine, but I'd like to know where the growth is happening. That's important.
The 2nd source has some interesting demographics, but unfortunately doesn't include growth which would be the most interesting to me.
Very interesting that their largest user base by far is now in India, which I hinted at before. I suspect much of their growth from their latest earnings report is from that region of the world. Which also helps explain why ad revenue is down. Note also that ad reach in India is a very low 30% compared to the UK at 60% or Mexico over 80%. They didn't give numbers for the US. But if a lot of the growth is in India with such a low ad reach, that doesn't bode well for ad revenue.
Facebook also seems to be failing at attracting the young demographic from the west that advertisers love. As their core user base ages it will be interesting to see if they can maintain the interest of advertisers. I think Instagram is going to prop them up for a while. But it wouldn't surprise me at all if Facebook starts to become less important to advertisers, who will quickly move to wherever their target audience spends the most time.
Either way, just because FB is doing fine user wise doesn't mean that folks on HN who threatened to quit FB didn't actually go ahead and do that. If every HN user quit FB in one day, I don't think it would even show up on any chart.
Of course it doesn't? Who cares. I deleted my account too but that doesn't mean much.
I'm highly skeptical this outrage cycle will go on for long enough to seriously impact their userbase. Absent a proper competitor to Twitter. I've been part of enough internet boycotts of them to be cynical about their odds.
Also I'm not sure why you're having trouble finding Facebook data... just google it if you care so much about dismissing their obvious dominance. And WSJ paywall is easily bypassable.
Yes paywalls are easy to bypass. It's also a reasonable choice to respect them.
> I'm not having trouble finding Facebook data. Did you get that idea from me asking you to back up your own claims?
You've asked me repeatedly about geographic and demographic data that Facebook (and plenty of 3rd party data mining sites) post publicly. If you actually care just compare it to other sites and make your own judgement calls.
If Facebook was really dying in the west then we'd be hearing about it. You seem to be using anecdotal data, in my life everyone I know hates Facebook but at least 75% of them use it... especially 90% of the non-technical ones who tend to be the best ad targets. Maybe you're not talking to enough regular people?
I didn't claim Facebook is dying in the West. That's you putting words in my mouth.
Nothing's changed? Sure it has. Trust and confidence are hard to build, easy to torch.
One week.
The only “chaos” I’m aware of is the /b/ N**r spam invasion that occurred one afternoon? The rest seems to just be Musk doing Musk and manufactured outrage (as I really do not understand how $8/mo is breaking the bank for popular celebrities and brands) over charging for validation.
Anyway, down with Habbo Hotel.
Musk doesn't understand the platform he bought, so he promised to change the existing identify verification system – part of a strategy to combat impersonation and misinformation – to a pay-for-play subscription feature.
But Twitter already has a subscription offering! He's just ruining the verification system out of ignorance and spite.
Doesn’t matter what the “in the know” understood, it’s what the blue checks perceived it to be. To them it was a hard to get item that only folks with some degree of “celebrity” received.
Boo hoo. Your little blue badge of elitism is now available to the proles, how will you ever cope with such uppityness?
Old blue checkmark: Twitter confirms that this person is who they claim to be. If an account is called DonaldTrump and has a blue checkmark, Twitter confirms it is the account of the former president.
New blue checkmark: Twitter confirms that someone pays 8 dollars every month. If an account is called DonaldTrump and has a blue checkmark, Twitter confirms that someone is paying 8 dollars every month for this account.
So, if you see a tweet from the blue checkmark @DonaldTrump saying "I am running for president", with the new system, you have no idea if the former president has publicly announced he is running again, or if some rando who had 8 dollars to spare wants to make it seem so.
Good! I can’t think of a better way to make Twitter better for the world than to eliminate the elitism.
For what it’s worth, if Twitter eliminated the blue checkmark entirely…the exact same people would be complaining about that too. It’s their special celebrity badge that separates them as “valid” from the little people.
To illustrate with an example, I follow Paul Massaro https://twitter.com/apmassaro3 because of his expertise and because he gave me advice when I needed it the most. He is, to put it mildly, a target for nation state actors,
> Paul Massaro is the senior policy advisor for counter-corruption and sanctions. Paul’s work has advanced the recognition of corruption as a national security threat. He has been described in the media as “one of America’s foremost corruption experts” and an “endless source of democratic ingenuity." His work has been similarly described as "breathtakingly prescient.” He has worked on over 13 pieces of counter-corruption legislation and facilitated the founding of the Congressional Caucus against Foreign Corruption and Kleptocracy and the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance against Kleptocracy. Paul also covers German-speaking Europe and East Asia.
> His work on the Rodchenkov Anti-Doping Act, a landmark law redefining doping as fraud and making it illegal in international competitions anywhere in the world, has for the first time provided justice to clean athletes and held to account the authoritarian actors who use sport as a tool of foreign policy. The Associated Press described the unanimous passage of the act as “a remarkable achievement considering the polarization in U.S. politics.” His work on the Transnational Repression Accountability and Prevention (TRAP) Act was similarly groundbreaking, serving as the first-ever U.S. law to respond to abuse of INTERPOL by authoritarian regimes.
https://www.csce.gov/about-csce/staff/paul-massaro-iii-polic...
He deals with sanctions and he is one of the people deeply involved in the Russian sanctions when they invaded Ukraine, https://www.csce.gov/international-impact/press-and-media/pr...
I am sure there are people who'd prefer that he was discredited, his work hampered, or just to hurt him a bit for the amount of money he's taken out of their coffers.
He is a cog in the machine, but he is one of the more important cogs in the machine. That makes him a target.
He is also an avid social media user and interacts with people on Twitter. A lot. He uses the site prolifically and has 300k+ followers due to his expertise.
If anyone could buy that badge, and millions would have to for Twitter to service the LBO's debt, then it becomes trivially easy for nation state actors to eventually create a fake, or several fake, Paul Massaros, and knowing which one is the real Paul would get harder. ("just check the username" doesn't quite work with the general public)
It would become easier to manufacture a scandal that could be used against him & the US in general.
The kicker is that he's not even remotely the most important person on Twitter. The site has a heavy chunk of the American leadership regularly interacting with people and each other online, and they're all targets that could be used by clever propagandists.
The badge used to help mitigate it. I know if I'm talking to a Paul Massaro with a badge, then it's the real Paul. That becomes impossible without it.
This is a terrible idea.
in the first week.
That's chaos whatever your benchmark.
Is it wise to sail the sea with such a captain at the helm? Sure it's the same old boat, and we're heading to the same old destination, with the same old crew. But something is amiss.
Elon Musk bought Twitter specifically to hollow out its progressive cultural core.
Most people do not own individual stocks. And in fact, most people do not own stocks at all. The set of stock-owning people is far from average.
And yes, of course pension funds count. Why wouldn't they?
Alternatively, it seems to have a significant genetic component, and most of the rest will depend on the environment you grow up in. Choice isn't part of it, you don't evaluate all the possibilities and then pick the best one, you think the one you're part of is the best one because it intuitively made sense to you. The rest is rationalization.
It's true that I don't live in America, so maybe there is a difference, but you definitely are not describing a human truth.
Of course, some people do change their ideology later in life (which I don't think is the right term, because they don't actively change it, it's more that they change and their ideology is part of them), but that's not common, and overall it's remarkably stable.
If you are born in Mecca, you are very likely to become and stay Muslim. If you are born in coastal California, you are very likely to become a Democrat of leftist bend. If you are born in a small town in the English Home Counties, you are likely to become a Tory. If you are born in a Catholic part of Northern Ireland, you are likely to become a Sinn Fein voter etc.
Obviously this isn't anywhere near as sticky as your skin color or even your primary language of communication, but the defaults are still rather strong.
I think you’ll find a small percentage owned by rich private individuals/family offices, some owned by private investors like insurance companies, and the rest held by pension funds or mutual funds which look like big shares on paper but don’t really exercise control and correspond to lots of tiny holdings by people who range from poor to ordinary to a small number of quite wealthy people.
That is, I think the usual answer to “who are the shareholders of this public company?” is “ordinary people through their pensions or investment accounts, skewing a little bit older and richer”. Some companies have a relatively large stake owned by some private person or fund, and others have a big share owned by their original founders or their families, but in that case those people would be named instead of just saying ‘shareholders’.
How are we supposed to believe our eyes and ears when you haven't provided any links to video for us to watch?
Where? Can you provide a source?
https://www.projectveritas.com/news/twitter-senior-engineer-...
Twitter engineer: “Our jobs are at stake, he's a capitalist and we weren't really operating as capitalists, more like very socialist. Like we're all like commie as f*k.” ... “Twitter does not believe in free speech… Elon believes in free speech.”
https://www.projectveritas.com/news/twitter-executive-mocks-...
Twitter Lead Client Partner: “The rest of us who have been here believe in something that's good for the planet and not to give people free speech.” ... “People don’t know how to make a rational decision if you don’t put out -- correct things that are supposed to be out in the public, right?” ... “If we’re implementing all these rules…and Elon wants to dismantle them, then technically our ideology has led us to not making money because we’re not making money, and Elon wants to turn it the other way so that we can make money,”
https://www.projectveritas.com/news/undercover-video-twitter...
“if it was a pro-Trump thing and I’m anti-Trump… I banned his whole account… it’s at your discretion” ... Olinda Hassan, Policy Manager for Twitter Trust and Safety explains, “we’re trying to ‘down rank’… shitty people to not show up,” “we’re working [that] on right now”
Parnay Singh, Twitter Direct Messaging Engineer: “Yeah you look for Trump, or America, and you have like five thousand keywords to describe a redneck. Then you look and parse all the messages, all the pictures, and then you look for stuff that matches that stuff.” ... “the majority of it are for Republicans”
Sure. Given links I'll do that. I just did right now since you are the first person to actually provide links.
The claim was:
> literal hours of continuous footage
None of the links you provided come even close to that claim. They are FULL of cuts. Many of them don't even include the question that was asked!
And even you took quotes out of context. The quote "Twitter does not believe in free speech" was qualified by a followup that free speech allows bullying and that Twitter does not believe in bullying because it's bad for business! Which is totally reasonable if you are an advertising platform.
Can you provide what I asked for? The source to "literal hours of continuous footage"?
Also, please stop giving quotes to your links. You've done exactly what people already claimed: taken things out of context to try to make them look worse than they really are. Folks can watch uncut videos themselves and make up their own minds. If these "literal hours of continuous footage" actually even exist.
You want people to transcribe every word for you now? I already did the web searches and wrote out snippets for you, so the topic of each video was clear. You could have done those things yourself which is why I'm the first to dish it up; it seems uncharitable to get mad about it and now accuse me of trying to manipulate you!
No relevant context was lost or hidden here. You've added more parts of what one guy said in one case, but that stuff isn't relevant to any point anyone is making in this thread. The discussion started with someone questioning the claim that Twitter employees had radical political beliefs. The Veritas videos were cited as evidence to the contrary and clearly prove the case - one of the employees literally claims Twitter staff were "commie as fuck".
It seems that you accept this original claim is true and are now arguing about something different - that you support their justifications. But their justifications for their radical politics was not a topic in this thread. Not writing out every word isn't an attempt to hide anything, as you saw, because the video is right there - with links for your convenience - ready for you to watch it, and, if you wish, start a separate discussion about their motives.
"Folks can watch uncut videos themselves and make up their own minds"
Only if they're willing to at least do a web search to get started!
All that you've got is a quotes taken out of context that distort the original meaning. Ignorable.
But if you'd rather be in denial about the nature of Twitter as an organization, go ahead and ignore all that. Your questions have been answered.
> literal hours of continuous footage
You gave links to highly edited videos. That is a fail.
> If you would rather be in denial about the nature of Twitter
I almost never use Twitter so I don't care. If you're naive enough to believe highly edited video from a source with a strong history of deceptively editing videos, [1], that's certainly your choice. But don't be so shocked that others are not as gullible and have a higher standard of evidence than you.
[1] https://www.snopes.com/news/2016/10/18/project-veritas-elect...
Then why did the employees say what they said? In most conversations, you wouldn't have vitriol toward a certain set of political beliefs, yet the Twitter employees in the videos do express vitriol...whether the video is edited for the mass audience (like most news interviews/exposes are) or not.
Either way, our opinions here are moot. Twitter is a private company & it can do whatever it wants. If you don't like that, build your own social network & run it the way that you want to run it. You can even recruit ex-Twitter employees if they agree with your direction...
I for one, prefer the direction of the new Twitter & perhaps even more profound, more attention is given to alternatives that are open source. Building alternatives will enhance the space & create more innovation!
I agree with the sentiment of these Elon Musk quotes & it would be great for human progress if other social media networks also adopt these stances:
Twitter needs to become by far the most accurate source of information about the world. That’s our mission.
| Elon Musk
“I think wishful thinking is innate in the human brain. You want things to be the way you wish them to be, and so you tend to filter the information that you shouldn't filter.”
| Elon Musk
“The internet has been the biggest equalizer in history in terms of access to information and knowledge.”
| Elon Musk
“The extreme antibody reaction from those who fear free speech says it all.”
| @elonmusk
Nonetheless, the Twitter employees still said what they said & expressed their intent to censor political opponents. You can point out that there is no raw footage for Project Veritas, even though all news organizations rarely provide raw footage & they all editorialize & they all edit, but it still does not change the fact of what was said...You might not like their editorialization or their editing, but what was said is still on video. You can call it "deceptive practices", but all news organizations engage in the same "deceptive practices".
I hope they change their policy after my call with them because they have an opportunity be a leading example of even more transparent journalism.
At the end of the day...Elon still owns Twitter, Twitter is having a record inflow of activity & active users, Elon fired the old staff, & many people are happy about it...you can't change that either. You can complain, but it still happened.
Again, it's all moot. These people lost their jobs & good riddance. Twitter is heading in a better direction now. I doubt Twitter employees will ramble on about how they are censoring political opponents to a random stranger anymore.
Also, there was corruption with employees selling blue check marks & the management lied about their bot problem. It just doesn't seem like the company was ran ethically on many fronts. Twitter was hemorrhaging money, was obviously was not run well, & failed to live up to it's potential.
Project Veritas is an American far-right activist group ... produces deceptively edited videos ... and has propagated disinformation and conspiracy theories
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Veritas
That's a hard fail right there - from a gullible disinfo peddler. No critical thinking skills.
Ok, but what video? You didn't give any links.
> Also the entire unedited interview is available.
Where? People keep claiming unedited video is available but no one can produce a link to such video.
They didn't do it before, but they're doing it now, and are pleasantly surprised by what they find. Even if Musk hasn't ruined Twitter yet, there's nothing wrong with him being the catalyst for this improvement.
When a leveraged buyout happens (this is true for most leveraged buyouts) a large cost is put into the business that wasn't there before. And this cost does nothing to help make the good or service better. It merely exists so that person B may own the business instead of person A.
So what is the difference between Musk and the previous shareholders? The main difference is that Musk put an enormous cost on the business which will be borne by twitters users and advertisers, and that cost brings twitter nothing more than having musk as an owner.
By himself musk may be no better or worse than the previous shareholders. But just for him to rule over twitter is going to cost twitter a lot of money that will probably reduce the quality of the service.
This is true of most leveraged buyouts and whenever a leveraged buyout happens to a company you use, it is always a good idea to look for alternatives. The official response of the leveraged buyout industry is that the new management is just so much better that it is worth to saddle the company with all this debt and all these costs to just change the management. And the customer will benefit from the better management.
It is yet to be seen whether Musk is such a great manager that he can run a social media company so much better than everybody else to make it worth taking the enormous debt, and do that without having any experience running a social media company and while running two (oh wait - three ) other companies simultaneously.
But generally speaking this is not the case. It might have been the case during the beginning of the LBO industry when there was some truly entrenched bad management in some US companies but not anymore. It is possible to change management of a publicly traded company without doing an LBO, and nowadays stockholders tend to be good about holding their managers to high standards.
Twitter the company takes out a huge loan to pay the current shareholders a fortune (which is decided by those same shareholders, no conflict of interest there at all). But who the fuck would give them a loan like that (like you say, just to have Musk at the helm)?
I find that train of thought very unconvincing.
Basically it seems like some people are doing some mental gymnastics to justify disliking or boycotting Twitter because Elon bought it and doesn’t seem to be going along with the program.
This article explains: (a) how leveraged buyouts work, (b) how Musk's acquisition is different from a regular LBO, and (c) what debt Twitter now has due to the deal.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/elon-musks-twitter-d...
Edit: I must say that even after I read it I have trouble understanding how any of that happens except through well connected people moving money around to their own benefit.
The banks are on the hook, but it’s not really the banks because it’s not their money they are lending out.
So I really understand them.
And I agree with you. "Leverage" means multiplying both risk and reward. Given a system where losses are socialized, and wins are privatized, it makes complete sense to do LBOs as much as possible - the people with money win, and everyone else loses.
A syndicate of banks, including Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Barclays, Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, BNP Paribas, Mizuho Financial Group and Societe Generale.
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/05/banks-financing-musks-twitte...
Banks usually do not care that much about clients or user experience. They look at a businesses financials and check whether it can take the extra interest payments. Apparently, Musk convinced them that with some job cuts, Twitter would be able to make the interest payments. We will see how this works out. There may be an advertiser exodus happening already and I do not think either the banks or Musk planned for that.
How do you think that debt ends up getting paid off? It'll be close to $1 billion every year just to service that debt.
Given that:
* Twitter has only ever made a profit in 2018 and 2019
* That the profits it made in those two years were $1.2bn and $1.4bn respectively (only just enough to service this new debt)
* That for 2020 and 2021 other tech companies were comparatively minting it, but Twitter burned ~$1.3bn
* The world is generally in the early phases of what is likely to a deep recession, with ad spend and consumer spending already well down
It feels like a bit of an interesting purchase, to say the least.
It should be noted that the plan to charge users $8 per month for a blue verification badge wouldn't even service the debt if 25 times more people bought it than currently have it for free.
> By himself musk may be no better or worse than the previous shareholders. But just for him to rule over twitter is going to cost twitter a lot of money that will probably reduce the quality of the service.
It seems to me that his product-focused ownership (remember, he's a big user of Twitter) will either make it better or he will run it into the ground (due to naïvety and incompetence in this domain). Both seem like a win/win situation to me.
I think he has very strong incentives to make Twitter better because it is his stage, both for marketing his companies but also to stay int he limelight (ego).
Their most profitable years would have been cancelled out by the new debt Musk brought, and that was before he tanked their ad sales.
So you don't have a source to back up your claim.
> Banning people for political speech is an accessibility issue
It is not. [1]. You don't get to widen the definition of things to make them so broad as to include your claim.
Accessibility is the design of products, devices, services, vehicles, or environments so as to be usable by people with disabilities.
I do. The stated political beliefs of the people being interviewed & their claim that many @ Twitter shared their beliefs. Also the actions of the company.
> It is not. [1]. You don't get to widen the definition of things to make them so broad as to include your claim.
It is. If someone is banned from the site, the site is not accessible to that person. If people are being banned for political speech, then it certainly violates any form of platform neutrality. This is the heart of accessibility. Banning someone for exercising their free speech is anti-accessibility.
> Accessibility is the design of products, devices, services, vehicles, or environments so as to be usable by people with disabilities.
The Twitter human rights & accessibility team also includes "human rights". Freedom of Speech is a human right which Twitter has been willfully violating. The "human rights & accessibility" team failed to do their job of upholding the human rights of those who were banned for political speech.
You do not have a source. Guilt by association is not a source. You're just making a guess and you should be called out for claiming a guess is an actual source.
> If someone is banned from the site, the site is not accessible to that person.
Sure, by definition you can't access a site you are banned from. But that's not what accessibility is and that is not what the accessibility department was working on.
> If people are being banned for political speech, then it certainly violates any form of platform neutrality.
Yes it does violate any form of platform neutrality. That still has nothing to do with the actual definition of what accessibility includes.
> Banning someone for exercising their free speech is anti-accessibility.
That's absurd. Accessibility already has a definition and it's quite specific: it's about disabled people. You are free to re-define words, but folks are also free to ignore your personal definitions.
> Freedom of Speech is a human right which Twitter has been willfully violating.
I don't agree with you that they have been violating anyone's free speech but what does this have to do with your original claim that "the accessibility team acted as political speech commissars"?
Where is your actual evidence of the accessibility team doing that? Actual evidence would not include your guesses or guilt by association.
Not kicking up shit, genuinely curious why you'd have a separate team work on that, seems like something every engineer needs to know (at least on the frontend) for an app like Twitter.
Then all public companies like Boeing, Lockheed Martin, & Northrop Grumman are owned with the money of "average people"...largely managed by fund advisors.
Since when were they? The mistake was perhaps to ever think that they were. It was twitters 'priority to sell themselves to Musk, hence why they took him to court to ensure he bought them.
This is a somewhat crazy, knee-jerk reaction to some news headlines, the author has no idea of what is really happening, i'm not saying that i do, but for example the post says that 'the entire accessibility team' has been laid off then points to a tweet about someone saying there team had been laid off, firstly there is no indication that this is the 'entire accessibility team', just that the team this person was head off, secondly, the author has no idea about twitters accessibility plans in the future, for example, accessibility could have been given an even higher priority and given to a more competent team. Now i know this is likely not the case, but the real thing, is basically we don't know.
To make a knee-jerk reaction to a bunch of assumptions is crazy.
tl;dr: "I don't like Elon Musk either!"
Nothing but virtue signalling.
No, you signal your virtue with actions. That action can be lots of things, from buying some brand, to protesting some policy, or hating some person.
The act or practice of conspicuously displaying one's awareness of and attentiveness to political issues, matters of social and racial justice, etc., especially instead of taking effective action. [1]
And from the person who coined the term:
British journalist James Bartholomew claims to have originated the modern usage of the term "virtue signalling," in a 2015 Spectator article. His 2015 formulation described virtue signalling as empty boasting.
"No one actually has to do anything. Virtue comes from mere words or even from silently held beliefs. There was a time in the distant past when people thought you could only be virtuous by doing things...[that] involve effort and self-sacrifice." [2]
[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/virtue%20signalin...
I thought it was obvious that talking about moving to a platform is very different from actually making the move. The author has presumably moved, which is taking effective action and can be contrasted with people who are saying they are going to move but haven't done anything about it.
You should also note that the coiner of the term disagrees with you:
No one actually has to do anything. Virtue comes from mere words
I don't think it's fair to call it virtue signaling when someone took effective action. Does that clarify enough?
Yes, it has been grossly mismanaged from a PR perspective. Expecting no fallout from that is naive.
There is no universe where Musk takes over twitter and gets good PR.
You could also consider that Musk rushed into buying Twitter with a poorly written contract and he was legally forced to buy the company. He didn't end up there due to a well managed plan. He's there thanks to his impulsive and childish nature.
But why are people so obsessed with PR in the first place? Who cares? People are obsessed with drama. My view is there is too much of that, cut that crap out, it's irrelevant to your life.
Either Twitter as a product, is useful to you, or it's not, so either use it or don't. Twitter as a product did not change in the past week, if you never read any news headlines, you would be completely none the wiser and still happily using it if you were using it before.
There is too much real stuff to worry about to get caught up in the drama of this.
The reason Musk has PR problems is simple: he creates them. No other CEO at his level has such an unfiltered stream of consciousness going public without a filter, and few have his taste for pointless stunts. The stuff which hurt his reputation wasn’t things like dating rock stars or having children with women other than his wife (this is largely priced in to the reputation of very rich men) but stuff like very publicly calling someone a pedophile out of pique from being outdone. He could stop that at any time and pretty much every employee and shareholder of his companies would be grateful.
This has been my perspective. I’m a neutral observer in regards to Musk the person. Obviously some folks have a pretty strong feelings towards him for a lot of reasons, but watching the knee-jerk reactions to every rumor and all the assumption analysis that follows on HN is entertaining.
I am not neutral on Twitter though, I think it’s a bloody cancer. If it implodes or improves under Musk. I am good either way. I can’t see it getting any worse.
I have a friend who worked ON that accessibility team who I have known since university.
I know a fair amount about Twitter.
>> particularly struck me was that he laid off the entire accessibility team. For me this feels like a microcosm of the whole situation. Twitter’s priorities are no longer even remotely aligned with my own.
Since you have ignored those sentences - you had to make "crazy" assumptions.
Bold prediction: this influencer with 40k followers will find that ~40 of his followers have followed him to mastodon, and will be back quietly in a few months. Likely, after finding some reconciling excuse about Musk doing something good so he can be forgiven.
If I doubt the future of a platform and already find the status quo questionable, I am just not as motivated to put in the time to do something on there.
I guess for many people twitter was a platform they wanted to get rid of for a while, this is just a trigger to convince the others as well.
Maybe you should invest your time productively instead
And no worries, I am more productive than most people would find normal, but thanks for your "productive" comment.
You can move away from a platform without a complete stop. I've seen people who used to post on Facebook on a daily basis claim to leave, and then they use the platform less and less until you rarely see them. What also matters is the nature of their posts. If people who used to put effort into thoughtful engaging posts start to post trivial and unengaging content, that has a similar effect to no longer using the platform.
If this happens in large numbers, it would of course impact your advertising revenue.
Yes, they would have done better. Their business should be providing the platform, not telling the users that is 'true' and what is not. That everyone should decide for themselves.
One thing is fighting spam, but what they were doing was Ministry of Truth stuff. And harm from that might be thousandfold greater than whatever Trump could ever do.
That's not how capitalism works. Their business should be doing whatever they think will generate the most long term profit for the owners. It's an advertising platform. Advertisers don't want a platform where users get to decide what the truth is. Advertisers don't want their advertisement next to some anti-vaxxer nutjob or a vocal racist. This is common sense.
Now, advertisers come from different parts of the political spectrum, and if some advertiser would decide to vacate their spot on the platform, some other business would fill the spot.
You know, earlier this year a lot of western companies have quit the russian market, like Macdonalds. Do you think there are no burgers in Russia now?
Yes, their paid users being the advertisers. The end "users" are the product.
> Trump provided a lot of engagement and popularity to the platform
Can you please give a source for your engagement figures?
> banning him was igealogy-driven and was very much against their business interests.
Again, please provide a source for this. Evidence of this could be grounds for a class action suit on the part of share holders.
For exact figures you might ask Elon himself.
I didn't claim anything. I asked for your sources. You are the one who made a claim. And now you're acting astounded that someone would dare question your claim.
Truth Social can't seem to become profitable [1]. So Trump's ability to produce (or drive away) advertising revenue is certainly open to being questioned.
> For exact figures you might ask Elon himself.
Elon didn't make the claim. You did.
> If so, I resign
If you can't back up your claims with a source, then yes, it's right of you to resign.
[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/DWAC?p=DWAC&.tsrc=fin-srch
Demanding to provide data that is clearly not publicly available is pure demagoguery, as this figure is irrelevant for our discussion: it does not matter if ad revenue from user engagement created by Trump was XXXXX USD or YYYYYY USD, as it is beyond clear that this figure was above zero. So blocking him was against the commercial interests of the platform.
Likewise, the success (or lack of it) of other platforms, like Truth social, is hardly relevant here. It is another demagogue technique called 'straw man', as you try to bait your opponent into arguing about a completely different social platform.
Now, you may claim victory in this internet discussion, and celebrate it like your other imaginary victories.
You claimed to know such data. It's clear you haven't been debating in good faith from the point you made that claim.
> as it is beyond clear that this figure was above zero.
No it's not. I provided evidence that he may in fact drive away advertisers.
> So blocking him was against the commercial interests of the platform.
That's not how it works. Blocking someone who provides a small amount of advertising revenue but who drives away other users would be in the best interest of the platform. Blocking someone who the moderators believe will incite violence is in the best commercial interests of the platform.
> the success (or lack of it) of other platforms, like Truth social, is hardly relevant here
It's entirely relevant because Trump invested in that platform and spends most of his time there. If they can't make a profit it puts your claim about his ability to attract advertisers in doubt.
> Now, you may claim victory in this internet discussion, and celebrate it like your other imaginary victories.
I never claimed victory. I simply asked you to back up your claims and you got yourself into a panic over that and threatened to quit. Ok. Bye.
Can you please give a link to the message where I claimed to know such data?
> Trump provided a lot of engagement and popularity to the platform, so banning him was igealogy-driven and was very much against their business interests.
You either have those engagement numbers or you don't. Which is it?
You either know how much advertising revenue he generated -or- how much he drove away. Or you don't.
You either have evidence that banning him was against their business interests or you are just guessing. I don't think you have those numbers. You suggested Elon Musk might have those numbers. So it's pretty clear you yourself don't have the internal business numbers that would be used to make those decisions.
Lacking sources to back up your claims, then you were arguing in bad faith. But I'm open minded. Feel free to back up that claim with actual evidence.
Cute copying me with "panic mode". I appreciate the imitation.
Didn't you resign a few comments ago? Or was that another false claim?
So Twitter moderators accurately predicted Trump's words could eventually end in violence long before it happened?
Try rereading twitters ban post: https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2020/suspensio...
He got banned for tweets that require reading with an extra crinkly tin foil hat on to get "tried to overthrow the government".
Tech neofeudalism manifests itself as walled gardens where the cost of leaving is very high for the serfs.
It's not interoperable. It's controlled by one person. Like Facebook. When that changes we can discuss it. But until then, it's just an empty promise.
But companies do not. Buy a company and start making big mistakes and there will be consequences. The competition for users is fierce. If you want 100 days, get elected instead of being forced into buying a company you didn't really want in the first place.
Not everyone in America, much less outside it, wants to pretend that they share the values of Californian Democrats from the progressive tribe, which according to this study [0] makes up whopping 8 per cent of the American population.
You can make all the promises and guesses about the future that you want, but until those guesses materialize, they are vaporware. People can rightly continue to leave a platform they have no interest or faith in.
If any of your guesses do materialize people can presumably change their mind and come back to Twitter.
> Not everyone in America, much less outside it, wants to pretend that they share the values of Californian Democrats from the progressive tribe
That's not very relevant to an advertising platform. TV and radio stations rarely appeal to more than one or two tribes and both platforms are highly moderated to the point where the public has almost zero voice. Musk's dream of forcing people to tolerate free speech is rather idealistic. According to your source, if Musk wants to attract the biggest audience, he should ban politics from the platform.
By default I can't take any promise from Elon seriously, nor do I understand how anyone believes anything he says. He underestimates every problem and never has any plans until after he makes announcements. I can't believe how many "eventually" promises people will still believe from one guy who obviously makes them off the cuff with no thought whatsoever for what is involved. Half of HN seems to give way too much credit to hot air from this guy, he's announced (and taken money for!) many many things coming imminently years ago.
https://electrek.co/2022/09/15/tesla-facing-class-action-law...
[0]: https://www.mattmaldre.com/2017/08/02/people-leave-reddit/
[1]: https://nypost.com/2021/01/09/trump-fans-leave-twitter-after...
[2]: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/technology/facebook-ou...
Anecdotal, but I personally know a handful of people who deleted their Facebook account and use other platforms instead. So it does happen. The question is whether or not it affects their advertising revenue in the long run. Zucks's solution so far seems to have been buying up the competition.
It's not out of the question that one of these massively popular social networks will collapse in the next decade.
Case in point: I still see the “coexist” and lefty bumper stickers in the cars ahead of me at chick-fil-a drive through line pretty regularly. Everybody wants to protest and boycott products until you have that itch that only a spicy chicken biscuit can scratch.
Mastodon is way more active than what you pretend, at least in France. Some 40k influencers already have thousands of followers on mastodon.
I expect that the feature I’ll miss most from Twitter will be the algorithmic timeline!
(btw.: I'm not using Twitter (also not using Arch scnr))
That is much different then algorithm that sometimes shows chronological.
In my case, Twitter already has an algorithmic timeline.
Now I read my daily news update from few subscribed newsletters, websites as well as r/worldnews. These are far better sources of information than Twitter.
Don't get me wrong, other platforms that I enjoy such as YouTube and Reddit also has algorithmic timeline, but I've never seen such bad implementation before straight to the level of annoying and begging for uninstall.
But sometimes the reviews are accurate. Sometimes the critics and audience concur on a movie. Sometimes the people yelling on Twitter really are in the fire they're yelling about.
Another recent change they made (I think just before Elon took over) was making Notifications algorithmic. As a somewhat low-notification user, it's essentially ruined notifications for me - most of the ones I get are nonsense now instead of signals someone has interacted with me.
I think the only site I use where algos actually add value is YouTube, after many years of sending people down weird/wrong paths their algos actually seem pretty solid now in terms of suggesting content relevant to me.
I too was fascinated with the fediverse, until I used it for more than a month and realized the people posting there were just as toxic and annoying as Twitters, not to mention the plenty of instances where the petty owners have made everything even worse
But what do you know about the owners of the Mastodon instance you registered your account with? Are they accountable? Are they sensible? Are they competent? Do they even have a real identity?
None of this is true for Twitter.
So yeah, you can go to another instance, but better keep some kind of backup because you could be gone without notice
Isn't that one of the reasons for decentralization? Less power and data for a single instance.
So yeah, Musk gets investigated very often so we know things that he would rather keep hidden. Now what about your Mastodon admin with an anime profile picture?
I mean that is true in a sense, because Twitter invests a lot of work to bring the toxicity to you whether you want it or not.
If someone moves to Mastodon because there are so much politics on Twitter then they are in for a surprise
I don't buy into the "Well, you can just grow YOUR OWN island!" spiel. I don't want to make an echo chamber, I want a healthy environment where people from disparate backgrounds can discuss a topic without "AS AN XYZ THIS IS BAD AND EVIL" being the key point of discussion. And I know for a fact that the large instances that operate in that way would immediately defederate for wrongthink.
I'm pretty sure that this qualifies as an "island" - one that you would need pretty harsh moderation to maintain too, not unlike HN itself. And of course you'd likely want to defederate from the largest instances, to get away from their toxic attitudes.
You don't like the new twitter moderation? oh wellcome to Mastodon where a 12 year old can be a moderator of a instance. Global guidelines for moderation? No in Mastodon since each instance can have their own rules, 10/10 if you love being in echo chambers.
Created your account in a random instance? oh well maybe all your messages end in doxbin because the 14 year old who made the instance have access to all your messages.
On Mastodon you can choose the server to use (and thus the moderation). Sure, this means you can choose a server run by a 12-year-old who moderates poorly. But if you don't want that... don't pick that server!
The problem (no, ONE of the many problems) with creating good moderation is that different people have different definitions of what constitutes "good" moderation so it's impossible to satisfy all of them. If Mastodon allows the user to choose, that seems inherently better.
Well, maybe people will flock to the few instances ran by transparent, accountable and competent people. Maybe some apolitical non-profit? Maybe a group of passionate engineers with spare change?
In any case those instances would become pretty massive and the costs would skyrocket and......
well, we're at square one: few instances will have total control over your data, they will either inject ads or require payment to keep the servers running and nothing will have changed
On the other hand you hand waved everything I said without specifically refuting any points, so what does that make your reply?
In the context of this thread, the blog starts by justifying the authors choice by citing the laid off of the accessibility team, the alternative for the author is Mastodon which brings the complexity of selecting which instances you trust, even when you find a good instance, at some point the owners can shutdown it and you will need to migrate to another instance. If a rogue employee sent your messages to another person, they can be prosecuted, have fun trying to do that to the owner of the instance, yes, you can have your own instance which have a monetary/time cost. Using a commercial product? Oh I really hope you instance never angry the mob or they may go to your commercial provider to demand they drop you. Obviously this doesn't make the accessibility any worse /sarcasm.
Popular Mastodon instance?
* Moderation takes time, who is going to do that for free, everyday?
* Who is paying the infrastructure cost?
Mastodon
* Daily active users is 655k spread in multiples instances 1º * Private owned instances, self moderate.
* User base of the extremes of the gaussian distribution, the extreme privacy oriented and the politically motivated.
* User base is a subset that will split into another few subsets, high tendency to form echo chambers.
* Difficult to scale, closed system with rapidly increasing entropy (no accountability, highly susceptible to the instance owner desires (affected by time))
* Hard to attract people with a big following social media since the user base is small and the opportunity to grow is very small but the leak of followers to other users with small following base is high. (High cost/Low return)
I love that Mastodon exist, that it brings to the market different types of social media experiences, at the end, the market (people) will choose what is the more efficient version.
I personally doesn't use Twitter or Mastodon, I use rss with a CA instance of nitter in a RSS reader to check what a few people in the data science space tweet and my personal opinion is that the author is motivated by his political beliefs instead of the accessibility or quality of the product Twitter.
Sources:
1º https://nitter.ca/joinmastodon/status/1588168057893318657#m
Simultaneously, I've had more meaningful communication on Mastodon in the past week than I've had on twitter in the past year. I have just over 200 followers and Mastodon, and nearly 1400 on Twitter.
So yeah, I've thoroughly explored it, and I am definitely investing myself into it -- and have no intention of going back.
I have already stopped checking Twitter for weeks at a time or longer. I only open it to see if I have a message from a friend (since I turn off email notifications for basically everything), or maybe tweet at some brand whose service has made my day crappier.
It's like something must stink before it goes on Twitter.
Not even close to my experience as a Mastodon user and I've been on it for years. I guess this shows the limited predictive value of any single individuals experiences.
other members of the dev team can/are already doing this
Maybe he plans to make it part of everyone's job
Maybe he has his own team to replace it
We have zero knowledge of what's going to happen so jumping ship without knowing the full picture seems haphazard to me.
That's a gross mismanagement of sweeping changes. Which is in itself an indication. Anyone could have predicted people leaving the platform if they were told ahead of time how the layoffs and extra hours would be so poorly communicated.
So a grossly mismanaged change from a PR perspective. Of course there is going to be fallout from that.
An application can and should have good accessibility by default without a dedicated team
Musk is a driven, childish, stubborn, fairly intelligent, 90s era libertarian who really likes first principles reasoning and this leads to both success (SpaceX) and failure (Boring company).
So anecdotal evidence?
> they're mostly pretty hating him for things he hasnt done, views he doesnt hold and traits he doesnt have
So they have actual reasons to hate him. Superficial reasons, but you didn't once mention anything having to do with it being in vogue. Evidence of it being in vogue would be people who don't know why they hate Elon, but they do know their friends hate Elon.
> no, he isnt a success because he had an uber wealthy father who owned an emerald mine, it was a tiny share in a mine and his father contributed little to Musks business ventures
This is debatable by reasonable people.
> Musk is a driven, childish, stubborn
These sound like real reasons he could be disliked rather than it being your claim that it's simply in vogue or "traits he doesnt have" in your words.
> who really likes first principles reasoning
That's part of his PR and the image he tries to convey. He fails at it quite often because of his childishness and impulsive knee jerk reactions that he falls victim to on a regular basis. He is far more driven by emotion than by reason. I mean it's highly probable he owns Twitter now by being legally held to a poorly written contract he had no real intention of following through on. It ironically seems like neither he nor many of his customers want to be at this party he ended up at.
What percentage of Twitter users are saying this?
https://twitter.com/thebillygregory/status/55246601271378329...
I think the article mentioned the dismissal of Twitter's whole accessibility team as a sign that Musk has no respect or understanding of what the fired people did or why it was important. Ditto for other dismissed teams, like those researching machine learning ethics.
> An application can and should have good accessibility by default without a dedicated team
I used to think that, I used to think that understanding accessibility was a part of doing a good job on front-end so people who care about doing a good job will address it. Now I think formal and informal education about is so bad about not including accessibility concerns as a part of creating interfaces that there's too much for people to unlearn. Everyone has some responsibility for the accessibility of the final product but few will give it enough time or consideration.
Additionally, if an application is big enough to have a team working on it, that means there are some specialists in a variety of areas. With sufficient team size, that should include accessibility specialists who know what the right thing to do is or conduct research to make a decision about what the right thing to do is.
FB was among the first social sites crawling the links and creating a thumbnail with crucial info. When OG tags were introduced (by them nonetheless!), FB started honoring them. Twitter some year later finally decided to do the card thing and thought that skipping OG and having their own syntax under meta would be best way.
"Day 2: still accessible? check. Day 3: still accessible? check."....
Accessibility is important, but once you build a wheelchair ramp into a building, the ramp builders have nothing more to do. Likewise, Twitter remains fairly static, with only minor changes over the years.
> As someone who cares for a blind father, I can't stomach the decision...
So you could stomach the decision if you didn't have a blind father? That's not how shared values of accessibility should work - the care factor depending on who you know.
Accessibility should be part of every design team. Any new features being developed need accessibility input. This includes all the different mobile apps and integrations with native accessible platforms and accessibility tools. It also needs full internationalisation and language support too, which increases complexity. It needs a few more people than just ticking boxes or building workarounds or ramps after a feature has been developed.
Additionally, Twitter also takes in external links from webpages and so can influence the meta markup of these via their API / open graph / social sharing. So it works on the wider web accessibility standards too.
I imagine bootstrap and all the other libraries twitter publishes are also part of the teams remit.
Yes but that doesn't mean dedicated people. Accessibility knowledge is already well understood by designers and developers, particularly at the big end of town.
The previous team would have presumably written plenty of documents and guidelines and generally fostered a culture of thinking about accessibility. No reason why that will disappear.
Patterns and best practice methodologies are common in tech, precisely for efficiency reasons. They belong in standards, and shared knowledge - which is better for the industry as a whole. If every small team needed dedicated accessibility staff, the system is BROKEN.
it seems easier to have a team focused on a features like that keeping things consistant and whatever dosen't seem that crazy.. fatter than what a startup would but twitter is a multinational worth tens of billions
Okay, now see how well that wheelchair user can use the elevators and bathrooms. Do you have braille signs everywhere someone goes? Does your building have ambient features which are difficult for people with sensory processing issues? Are there controls which are hard for people with limited motor skills or only one hand? Did the market change and now people are using motorized wheelchairs which are larger than you designed the ramp for?
Accessibility is like performance or cost optimization: there isn’t a point where you’re done and everything you do affects it. An accessibility team should be working with the developers closely to make sure that their changes don’t impact accessibility and working with users to identify where they could be doing better. Some of that requires fairly deep skills (e.g. screen reader proficiency) where it makes sense to have dedicated specialists to help everyone else understand challenges and evaluate trade offs.
Ramps are built according to a strict building code. Your suggestion the ramp might need modifying in only the Twitter building by a dedicated team, doesn't add up when considering all ramps in all buildings.
> there isn’t a point where you’re done
My point is accessibility is inherently part of the design process anyway. Designers are not just making things pretty, clueless to accessibility. After all, Twitter is primarily text. You can always recruit outsiders from time to time, who will stress test and audit. That's a good way to keep on top of accessibility, by getting actual users who need accessibility features, to evaluate your service. But full time in-house? No.
This is like saying you don’t need ML specialists because it’s just math, or that we don’t need those expensive security people because Accenture told the CIO they could us experts any time we need them.
Accessibility is far more than just “can a screen reader produce text for this element” — starting from the fact that there are many accessibility concerns to which the issue of media forms is irrelevant but going much deeper into how you organize that information. Even if we ignore the prevalence of non-text content, Twitter isn’t a single chunk of prose but the much harder problem of a lot of complex elements which update frequently. You can’t treat this as some quarterly exercise where a consultant runs a scanner - there’s a lot of behavior which must be designed in and tested continuously.
When you talk about meeting outside users, yes, that’s good. Guess which team organizes that? Guess which team makes sure you get representative users? Guess who helps make sure developers and designers get the training and time they need?
If anything, you may end up with a higher quality of accessibility (and moderation, spam filtering, whatever) down the line. Or not. Who knows. The current iteration of the company has ossified - not making changes is arguably against the long term interests of your blind father.
I would encourage people to read the first paragraph more carefully:
> There are many terrible stories emerging about how this went down, but one that particularly struck me was that he laid off the entire accessibility team. For me this feels like a microcosm of the whole situation.
That's not me saying "I quit because he fired the accessibility team".
That's me saying "There are many terrible stories emerging about how this went down" as a shorthand for how this has been one of the worst-handled layoffs I've ever heard of in my industry - see https://twitter.com/gergelyorosz/status/1588517143490199552
And then "For me this feels like a microcosm of the whole situation." - I'm using the accessibility team here as a single representative instance of how I feel about the decisions Elon has been making, but I disagree with practically every other decision he has made in the last 8 days.
I'm sorry (OK, not sorry) I didn't write a detailed essay about the many reasons I was leaving Twitter.
The goal for my post was to talk about the things I was liking about Mastodon so far.
I'd also encourage people to read about the "trust thermocline", which really helped me understand why, at least for me, things were going downhill far too quickly to continue wanting to ride it out and see what happens: https://mastodon.social/@garius/109279394369832433
I know, I know, there's some obvious exceptions like email, or just the web in general, but it seems like usually decentralized platforms are at a disadvantage in terms of marketing to new users, explaining how they work, and the whole onboarding experience. The very fact that they can work in different ways to different people seems like a minus in terms of getting into the public consciousness.
Since there's no reason to think that Mastodon is immune to the spam issue, this strongly suggests that whatever replaces Twitter will quickly consolidate to a single dominant player, or perhaps a handful. Or it could collapse under the spam issue like Usenet did.
You can’t even run an email server yourself without getting blacklisted these days. I doubt Twitter is going anywhere, I’m not even sure it can be replaced, it’s an unusual niche product of its time and network.
Mastodon doesn’t solve the underlying problems that lead to centralization either so most users end up on one server. Back to the same issues, except the experience is also worse than a competent centralized system.
To solve this for real you have to solve spam (need IDs), there can’t be a distinction between a user account and a server, and the server needs to be trivial to run and manage with automatic updates.
Mastodon doesn't but standalone activitypub compatible blog does.
The layoffs will have effect, but it doesn't have to be a bad one. Once they get leaner, they might have a clearer vison and know where to expand.
Even though this might not directly affect Simon, hats off to him for making that decision. If twitter starts becoming as inaccessible as most other systems it will lock out people and remove their voices from twitter. That feels like an incredibly valid reason, and isn't the point of free markets to vote with your feet?
Or that whatever the team has built up until this point, won't function unless they're in the office?
> "incredibly valid"
At this point, many opinions about Twitter are ranging from invalid to pathetic whinging. Twitter is still Twitter, and not everybody there got fired. I think it will get better after dust settles.
It really feels like people have never used twitter and are reading the news and go "aha! they've canned the accessibility team! they're trying to exclude the blind!"
Twitter only formed an accessibility team in 2020. Accessibility improvements had been made over the years before then but since the team was formed, improvements have been arriving much more steadily. Since Musk didn't only fire this team but half the staff overall, Twitter has not only lost expertise but people with the time to devote to these areas.
[0] https://twitter.com/HabenGirma/status/1586829640827404288
It’s also a valid reason to leave because space captain Musk is in control.
The web is already 'social media'!
Edit: oh, by the way, my homegrown newsreader only shows the first x amount of characters, so I always have to click through to your website if I want to read more.
But to me, leaving Twitter because Musk fired the accessibility team does not seem like the best argument for leaving. If anything, it just sped up what was already happening (internally) even before Musk bought Twitter.
Accessibility becomes ‘real’ (though not perfect) thanks to a wide range of technologies that work together and respect certain patterns, not just due to the UI interface. This, assuming Twitter represents a big chunk of the real world, which I doubt, though it reaches a great proportion of it.
However, what is it to say that Twitrer’s accessibility will get worse, or that Musk will not hire even more capable people later? This is why I think the person left Twitter not only because Musk fired the accessibility team, but also because Twitter itself does not represent anymore the philosophy they believe in.
Don't get me wrong, there are lots of negative factors to laying off staff and I'm not denying those.
But anyone who has worked in a large org, especially a public one, knows that there is excessive bloat. Many people at large orgs do nothing. They go to great lengths to ensure it looks like they're doing something, which I guess is something itself.
PS - I'm neither for nor against the layoffs at Twitter.
It turns out that in the big picture, there are fewer people who are truly critical than most people think.
Especially individual contributors. There are rare exceptions but those, who truly make a difference, stand out.
All my family and some friends use it as our primary platform for communication.
A lot of these people were the last to migrate to WhatsApp from email and SMS, and will now be the last to migrate away from it. And they’re a huge majority compared to the early adopter crowd we see on HN.
Not sure if on purpose or just serendipitous misspell.
I use whatsapp because my clients use whatsapp. Which means the team uses whatsapp. Friends are spread on several apps.
Have you tried a WhatsApp-bridge with element/matrix? You could use matrix internally while being available to clients via WA. I would strongly discourage any company to use meta-clients internally.
If we have extra time we spend it on checking backups, or improving performance, or researching new cool stuff we can add to our product. Which messenger app to use?! Yeah, definitely culture shock. Severe, too.
I don’t know if there’s proof, but I have a friend that works on the team that I trust. I’ve also seen the tools for analyzing the metadata for police warrants and they only deal with metadata (because content is encrypted).
https://www.macrumors.com/how-to/end-to-end-encrypt-whatsapp...
Yes, we do, because our friends and acquaintances are not HN users.
Signal is a very good example because WhatsApp is getting more popular as the days go by as opposed to what one could possibly infer from the waves of posts that appeared not long ago here about it.
It's just so important to separate this otherwise insignificant group of minds vs the many other several millions that aren't here and don't share the views - or perhaps (some) do but then it comes down to the network effect once again which has always been a present issue in every alternative among other factors. This time won't be different I'm afraid.
The best way I’ve found to actually get people to keep using signal after you’ve got them to download it is to respond to their WhatsApp messages on signal. It won’t take long until they stop initiating conversations on WhatsApp.
Matrix is nice in theory but Element is not very nice and the messing around with keys is not something most people will understand. This needs to be automatic by default, not a complete pain as it is now.
We have an example of a perfect chat client UI; Telegram. Why is no one just copying it verbatim for matrix? This is a question to, mostly, Element developers really. I don’t know why it is quite as unfriendly as it is, but of course we can all jump in and help out, that’s why I keep using it and sponsoring it. Even though I can only talk to 2 people.
It's got free storage (basically free Google Drive), behaves like Messenger, has public channels and groups like Discord and YouTube, mind-blowing cloud sync, can connect to people without sharing a phone number and tons of features that I can't really list here but you can check them out here: https://t.me/TelegramTips
Matrix has, like Slack, sub conversations which I like, so they have, on the server, everything that Telegram has and more, is open source and I can host myself, but the clients :( Yes, I can write one myself or help with Element. I guess this is something to really think about as the commercial offerings are simply not very good outside Telegram but I don't really trust them with my data.
As long as they're not selling it to advertisers and their apps remain FOSS, I'm fine with sharing my data.
I also really like Telegram's privacy policy (https://privacyspy.org), which is why I'm okay with cloud side encryption instead of E2E.
Every E2EE app that I've tried in the past, has been a UX nightmare and cloud sync is something that's extremely essential to my workflow so Telegram has been a pretty amazing free service.
o/
We’re currently rebuilding Element on mobile (and native desktop apps) so it behaves much more like Telegram or similar, built on matrix-rust-sdk. The codename is currently Element X, but it will shortlyish replace Element proper.
I then switched to Telegram and haven't used WhatscrApp ever since.
How accessible is Twitter's website? As a normal user I already find it to be an utter chaos, a horrible UX, which is why I rarely go there.
Are the apps better? Doesn't some third party offer a more accessible interface?
But yes, it would be great to hear from people who depend on accessibility feature: How good is Twitter really.
This
When I see people like the author getting so publicly and verbosely upset about a social media website, I wonder about their perspective. There are surely much more important things going on than preening to the crowds.
However twitter's issue, and most of social network issues are the human factor. And by that design Mastodon is not inmune to any of it, it even encourages larger echo chambers, and reduces audiences.
I would say, very tech savvy people used their hammer to something they believed to be a nail.
it's like the more modern version of buying a vanity newspaper and looks to be following the same pattern
From Musks perspective Twitter isn't about the HN crowd or personal interaction between lower and middle- class people. It's all about the real influencers, entertainers, politicians, journalists, C-suite class, investors, millionairs and billionairs. Sure if you follow these people, boosting their follower count and their ego, you're welcome on the platform, but you're only there to read the messages from the upper echelons of society. If your yearly income isn't measured in the millions of dollars you're not really part of Elon Musks vision for Twitter.
recent tweet of his: 'To clarify: I'll likely continue to post new stuff (blog posts, project releases etc) here, and I'll watch out for DMs and mentions, but I'm not going to be refreshing my timeline or actively seeking out conversations to engage in any more' - link for the curious: https://twitter.com/simonw/status/1588778119422701568
reminds me of all the "Quitting Facebook" memes.
I'm gladly going to be wrong, but Mastodon will never be mainstream _anywhere near_ to what Twitter was/still is for all the reasons that have been pointed out on every HN thread about it for days now... How about waiting to see what happens instead of an ideological knee-jerk 'pat myself on the back' half-quitting but not really reaction? Sigh... and the love it gets here, I can't understand it...
It's going to come off as harsh but I can't read this and not think of a petulant child not getting what it wants.
Maybe it's just because I don't have Twitter, Facebook or any of that crap so I guess I can't understand it because I don't have a stake in any of it... guess that kind of reaction is typical for someone living the messy life of hour by hour social media craze.
(sorry I could not refuse to write this comment)
I'd apply the same argument to every other platform - if someone could have done it better than Twitter, then you'd better believe that the GOP would have already been all-in on that platform long before you got there.
It looks to me like not all of them go away. There was a noticable step up after the spike in May.
(For the record, I'm not on Mastodon, but I follow a lot of people who are.)
I don't know what it "really means" when all the motivations, incentives and goals are unpacked, but there are surely some fascinating lessons here to be learned. Previously I've only seen social networks come under pressure when the user experience changed markedly so this seems new.
I'm staying on Twitter until I see if it's significantly better or worse. IMHO, the current "I'm leaving" fad seems to be somewhat political, and I don't think political boycotts are constructive.
Also Mastodon isn't the only platform, there are some other activitypub compatible engines which are able to federate with Mastodon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse https://fediverse.party/
* I am happy to pay for an account on an instance and have to never worry about that side of it again: where should I sign up?
* What’s the quickest way to import people I follow on Twitter?
* What’s the least annoying iOS app?
I know there are clients enough to use on iOS, but I mean servers to do my own hosting.
But I want to invest my time to help Mastodon reach the critical mass it needs. I would love to have a social network not controlled by capitalistic needs, and let open source developers help evolve it.
For those who are wondering, the page you are looking for is at https://joinmastodon.org/
The alternatives appear to be
* paying around $9/month for a managed instance
* hosting it yourself (with all the costs and responsibilities that come with yet another self-hosted service)
* signing up at a public instance (and potentially lose everything connected to it once an operator loses interest)
None of them sound particularly inviting. I don’t see either me or anyone I know paying at the rate stated for this kind of social media access. I don’t see me hosting an instance for an extended time and offering it to friends, much less the public. Should I lose interest or lack the resources to look after it, all of it disappears in an instant. Same when you stop paying for a hosted service.
From an outsider point of view – and likely I’m missing something major here – Mastodon appears to be a typical solution for technically-inclined people and adjacent subgroups, libertarians and communities that would be immediately blocked everywhere else (and possibly are on several Mastodon instances).
For a technological solution to work, it needs to solve the issues people have in a useful way. Since I cannot seem to grasp what issue Mastodon solves in a useful way, I’d be grateful for any enlightenment that’s not centered around the tech.
Every service offers a choice between "run your own" or "trust someone else". I don't trust Twitter but the people I follow are on there so I guess I'll keep my old account. I trust the Mastodon folks more because they're running on donations, which makes their profit model quite transparent.
The difference between the two is that Mastodon doesn't go down when one hosted instance collapses due to politics or spam or any other problem these servers face. Major servers can go down and there will still be plenty of content available through the distributed set of smaller servers.
Mastodon is also not as much of a combined network as it may look. It's more of a set of small social networks that all interact with each other, just like you used to be able to use XMPP to talk between chat services like Facebook and GTalk. Everyone sort of does their own thing on their own server but they have the option to also follow content from other servers.
Some people just like hosting instances. It gives some control back to the users that want it. It's good to have the option, but most people aren't expected to go that route.
There are definitely toxic servers just like on Twitter that are part of an optional blacklist that's being distributed online. Whether you want to apply that blacklist on your server is your choice; most people do, but server owners can make their own decisions. It's certainly no different from other social media in that toxic people ruin the experience for everyone, but with these things it's nice that the worst of the worst are siloed off in their own little space that you can choose to interact with if you really wish.
I'm a little surprised that Trump's instance has federation disabled, I guess they don't want to admit that they grabbed an old version or Mastodon and applied a theme to it after saying they're making a new service from scratch. Or maybe they don't want "leftist" outside influences in their little hateful echo chamber, because exposing your network to the outside does imply that you have to deal with people with differing opinions.
Personally, I don't do much with Mastodon because I use Twitter as a read-only platform. None of the people I follow mirror their posts into Mastodon and I don't care enough to set up an active Twitter proxy for an instance of my own to bridge the gap. The social networking problem is real.
If I am correct in this assessment, I can really see no upside besides minutiae regarding an illusion of control to established social media. In this regard, a website with a comment section would serve much the same purpose.
If mastodon.social goes down, c.im accounts will still be live and I'll be able to follow them through a mastodon.nl account if I want to. It'll be sad to see the toots from mastodon.social disappear, but most of the Fediverse network will remain online. By segmenting users across different servers, the ecosystem can remain alive despite the collapse of a big server.
Jack Dorsey rolled in his equity. Do you really think these people are different??
Anyway, see you on Twitter in a few weeks.
I don't think that all of Twitter is going to migrate but just some slice of the user base, just like all the previous times.
This is actually excellent for open platform technology improvement, as most engineers tend to lean left.
Although it's always a good thing when outrage drives people to open-source and federated platforms.
I am not a fanboy in the least. But one thing he obviously does frequently is fix broken shit, then try again if that fails. He does these things in public and listens to feedback. He clearly keeps a sense of humor about things, which rattles a lot of people understandably.
I know nothing about the accessibility team there, but for all we know he has a better team lined up. The author and I both agree the reverse may also be true. Could be they get replaced by something worse. To assume Elon has simply discarded the issue of accessibility altogether is to me the least likely assumption.
Maybe he does have people lined up to replace all the people he just fired. Maybe he really was able to ascertain who was essential and who was dead weight within days of taking over. Maybe against all appearances his actions are actually helping retain the best people at Twitter. Maybe having a public strop and suggesting he might publicly “shame” advertisers will have them falling over themselves to come back and spend their ad dollars with him. Maybe he really cares about “free speech” for speech that is not his own or that he disagrees with.
Maybe.
Yep indeed, it could be that Musk doesn't really know who does what at Twitter, nor which teams are effective or not. Maybe noone does. In that case the best path forward could well be to blow up everything, leaving only a skeleton crew to keep the lights on, then rebuild on top of the scorched earth.
In fact this approach might even attract some more hungry and gung ho warrior types who are attracted by musk's style, and could be better suited to bringing about his vision than the existing team.
He enters like a bull in a china shop, destroying everything regardless of quality or value. He then hands over day-to-day running to a team of competent people to build it back up as something new, but leveraging the original brand. Elon Musk then gets the credit because of legendary stories of all his hard work.
His social media presence causes competent people to underestimate him as a joke, not realising he’s playing by different rules to most businesses. On the other hand, it causes his personal army of fanboys to overestimate him as some kind of business genius. Really, he’s just a social media celebrity in an age when people give huge financial value to that status.
This works in small starting companies not in a Behemoth like Twitter.
And I doubt he fixed so much. The traffic problems he claimed to fix with the Boring Company are nowhere near fixed, same with FSD.
Many of his ideas seems to come from sort if Sci-Fi that doesn't work in the real world.
Do you think manufacturing cars and rockets happens without a lot of course correction, pun intended?
Fixing traffic or social media is a whole different level.
It's like fixing full autonomous driving. Still didn't happen and he is fixing it quite some time.
Social media is even harder.