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Comment by idlewords | Hacker News Reader

I am livid that this acquisition has put me in the position of defending Elon Musk, but people are being silly. Twitter has seen more movement on improving the core product this week than it has in the past five years, and for the first time that I can remember an active user is in charge of the site. Musk hasn't even adjusted his CEO chair back to his preferred angle and people are already writing post-mortems like this about his tenure. There needs to be more chill.

Evaluating whether the proposed changes to the site are for the better or not requires waiting a bit to let them actually happen. The complete freakout around Twitter in the media, most of whom have panicked the way a junkie would if forced to find a new heroin dealer, is not helping things. Neither is the online pity party taking place exclusively on the very site that is supposed to be dying.

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Someone should archive all these "let me dunk on Elon's Twitter acquisition now" posts and comments. If Elon's Twitter isn't a smoking hole in the ground in a year's time, a bunch of these comments are going to look really silly. If it actually succeeds in doing something interesting, or even just succeeds in roughly maintaining status quo, then seemingly a large majority of internet commenters really ought to examine their preconceived notions. It'll be interesting...

Ah yes, we can pass those archived posts around the campfire and have a good chortle about how wrong and naive those intensely wrong people were.

Maybe that's what you like to do. Personally, I like to update my priors on whose opinions are more likely to be correct.

You can name any successful company, and you can point to a large group of people who said that the company was going to fail.

Generally, humans have a bias towards saying things are "impossible" or "sure to fail" with limited personal understanding of the nature of that thing. Indeed, people are more expert about impossible things than possible things...they have encyclopaedic knowledge of things that don't work (this is a safety behaviour that some are more disposed to than others).

I have learned, through personal experience of getting this wrong, that people will surprise you more often than your pessimism will be justified.

Someone should document all of the strident defense of Musk recently. If Twitter does not succeed, my guess is that many of them will attribute it to anything other than Musk’s management.

Some ideas for that story might be:

- Elon never had a chance because woke celebrities and activists pressured advertisers to not renew their contracts with Twitter

- Twitter employees were too lazy and entitled, or maybe they intentionally sabotaged Musk’s plans for ideological reasons

- The government unfairly cracked down on Twitter, which would have been desirable a year ago but is completely unnecessary now that the good guys are in charge

- Well, Twitter’s revenue and userbase might have cratered, but really Elon won in the end because now it is a place for free speech. He never cared about the money, why are you so focused on the money?

- Twitter might have failed but it was going to fail before Elon bought it anyway so it’s not really his fault

- Elon easily could have made Twitter profitable but he realized that the cultural problems ran too deep so he turned his attention to more important projects

>Twitter has seen more movement on improving the core product

What improvements? I see lits of fired people and gruesome deadlines for the rest to implement a subscription feature.

All of that while Musk is mocking users and whines about shrinking ad money and threatens to publicly shame his customers.

Musk so far has talked about fixing search, adding the ability to post long-form video and attach long text to tweets instead of having to paste images of text, like an animal. He's also reworking the site business model so that heavy users can get a subscription tier with more features. These seem like... pretty sensible directions to take the product, based on how people are really using it.

The "fired" people get to sit around doing nothing at full pay for the next three months, while the not-fired are being asked to do a reasonable amount of work for an engineering staff of thousands. As to the mocking and whining part, if it bugs you then don't read his tweets. I've hated the guy for years and that approach has worked great for me!

>Musk so far has talked about fixing search

Talk is cheap

>He's also reworking the site business model so that heavy users can get a subscription tier with more features

You mean Twitter blue? Forcing it by combining it with the blue check and cutting feature like ad free articles isn't a good way a getting paid customers

>The "fired" people get to sit around doing nothing at full pay for the next three months

And then? Bills still need to be paid after these 3 month and at the moment most companies put a freeze to hiring new employees.

>while the not-fired are being asked to do a reasonable amount of work for an engineering staff of thousands.

Implementing a feature with short deadline or get fired sounds reasonable to you? Forcing managers to work 12 hours and 7 days a week is neither

https://9to5mac.com/2022/11/01/twitter-chaos/

>if it bugs you then don't read his tweets

It doesn't bug me, but it shows but customer relationship. He mocks the people he wants to pay the subscription and scares away or blocks advertising customers.

https://twitter.com/LouPas/status/1588599808587345921

That's not how you fix things, that's how you become a template for Horrible Bosses 3

He fired the accessibility team (who cares about the disabled, apparently), the human rights team (Twitter is in many countries and this has implications), and several other teams that were concerned with people's wellbeing.

You may be right that it's premature to guess on directions the company will take. But these acts are pretty clear.

> Twitter has seen more movement on improving the core product this week than it has in the past five years

Musk should totally buy Pinboard.

I think Pinboard is more likely to buy Twitter. And honestly this might not be the worst thing that could happen to it. Not sure if Maciej will be keen however.

With the exception that I don't have a problem defending Musk, I agree with this, especially the benefits of having someone who is a user in charge of the site. It's pretty clear that there were massive problems with impersonation and inconsistent moderation on the site, and this week seems to have made progress on those aspects, among others.

This is my take on it as well. I think Musk has been a complete douche lately, and I've never bought into the "Musk is Tony Stark" narrative.

However he is a nuanced human being, and so even though I don't like his current public persona, I know there is more there than just that.

Maybe twitter will collapse (that would be really bizarre) given all the people that still love to use it (I stopped about 18 months ago). Maybe it will become even more popular (kinda doubt it). No idea.

Regardless, the frantic claims are tiring and pointless except to monetize outrage.

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