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Comment by strangattractor | Hacker News Reader

There is no money is promoting free speech or at least not the kind of money Twitter needs to pay back it's investors and creditors. There have been multiple poor business decisions since the buyout. The "burn it the ground and start over mentality" is effectively placing the company in a startup position. Given the risk of startups it would have likely been cheaper/smarter to start a new company than pursue a leveraged buyout. Any value Twitter had is rapidly deteriorating. The capital put into the purchase would have been better spent just starting a new company.

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Destroying Twitter, or at least rendering it unusable by its current audience, is clearly the objective. I'm not entirely sure why but it seems to be to "own the libs".

(edit: I have been pointed at the EU rules https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/priorities-... under which "gatekeeper platforms" may not "prevent consumers from linking up to businesses outside their platforms". However I expect Twitter to implode before any enforcement action completes)

Destroying Twitter should be a liberal effort. It's frankly sickening to step back and consider how much influential public discourse took place on a private platform. If you're a classical liberal, implementing protocols like ActivityPub is essential to promote competition across apps and platforms. Even if you're a conservative, it should be readily apparent how centralizing our communications power is a bad idea.

Whatever the case, it's clear that Twitter is beyond the pale now. Our only option is building a better world, there's no hope in putting the pieces back together like they used to be.

If you're a "classical liberal", whatever that means, surely you're not in favour of randomly destroying things that work and that people are happily using, by state action, in favour of an unpopular alternative?

The random destruction is already done by the market. We gave them an opportunity to out-innovate each other and now it's a warzone. Do we set things straight or let opportunists pick up the pieces? It doesn't really matter to me, but I think the liberal sentiment favors a corrected implementation.

Elon plays a mean game, but it's a board we built and he's using rules we made. IMO, the proper response is not to change the rules, but use powerful technology to make his control irrelevant. Writing bespoke legislation for Twitter is truly unthinkable, there are better ways to approach this.

Classical liberals are typified by Reagan style republicans and the current democratic party - business first, pro capital, infinite growth party.

That’s… called neoconservatism (and weirdly neoliberalism is a basically a synonym). Classical liberalism is closer to libertarianism, is usually against government involvement in private matters. Those ideas are much older and came before McDonalds, Goldman Sachs, Cayman Islands, quantitative easing, and trillion dollar bailouts type of economic system of today. Sure, Reagan and current day republicans steal rhetoric from classical liberalism all the time, but the political-economic system is unrecognizable.

The “big corporation-style” capitalism is definitely a new flavor, and unfortunately that’s seen as centrism today, adopted by moderates of all political sides across the western world and even beyond.

Maybe, but I don't feel particularly owned. This feels more like a neighbor had a confederate flag up, and the neighborhood asked him to take it down, so he burned his own house down to spite everyone. I guess you showed us, weird combative neighbor!

Haha yeah it does have a strong “hurr durr jokes on you I was only pretending to be retarded” vibe. And I was never even on the anti-Elon bandwagon.

Maybe earlier in his life people could tell him to sit down and behave. But at a certain point of fame, you’ll have a set of loyal yes men in your circle independent of your actions who religiously validate everything you do and say. It’s a dream for narcissists, but also their demise. The danger of yes men is they lower the signal-to-noise ratio making it really difficult to orient yourself accurately in the outside world.

> rendering it unusable by its current audience

Since journalists are so overrepresented on twitter, I’ve been wondering if undermining them is a goal here? Business people and conservatives are generally pretty hostile to journalism. It would be a pretty big coup for them if the NYT, Wapo, etc lost eyeballs because Twitter went down the tubes.

Is that worth biting tens of billions on? Probably not. But I’m sure Elon and David Sacks wouldn’t shed any tears if all the preachy lib journalists just disappeared one day!

I don’t really buy that there _is_ a master plan. I suspect everyone has just been telling him he’s a magical super-genius for so long that he’s started to believe it, so obviously Twitter would be easy.

Yeah, I think this is a singular personality with outsized influence rather than an intentional playbook. And it's not that everyone's been telling him he's magic, but that his personality desires that feedback and that it's increasingly coming not from everyone but from a subset. If a solid part of that subset is let-it-burn/popcorn agitators, well, good luck! The plight of a $40B investment is somewhat in the hands therefore of people using the results as free entertainment.

There’s been some speculation he is trying to build an Everything app a-la WeChat in China. Aside from the fact that the everything app concept has never really worked outside China, and certainly won’t fly with the EU — he probably would have been better starting it from zero. I’m pretty sure if he could have got out of the Twitter acquisition he would have.

And not only speculation, he tweeted this in October 2022:

”Buying Twitter is an accelerant to creating X, the everything app”

Forgive me for being stupid, but why would any consumer want an "everything app"? It's not exactly a compelling need I've ever heard anyone express.

Yes, multiple things can be combined, but if it works, probably just coincidence.

We already have "everything apps" - it's called a browser. I would indeed be missing that if we didn't already have it.

I can also imagine how people might find it convenient to have essentially browser, messaging and payment combined into a single thing (essentially WeChat) they can use instead of a variety of separate apps/accounts.

But I'm also sceptical anyone can make that happen in democratic capitalist countries without insane amounts of investment.

Ok, the browser I buy and agree.

But outside web-browsers, I'm not sure it is anything anyone wants - like you imply, in China it's probably handy, because it is a reliable route into all the services that are blessed by the CCP, which means you avoid running into firewalls & thought police.

> why would any consumer want an "everything app"?

1. Everyone else has it

2. You can pay with it anywhere (pay in shops, pay people, pay online)

The Apple and Android app stores are everything apps.

"Everyone else has it (China)" doesn't make me want one.

It’s called the network effect.

Twitter, Facebook and WeChat are mainly valuable because others have it.

You may be immune to the network effect, but then again, you’re commenting on Hacker News. :-)

Smartphones saw rapid growth in China at the same time as mega-apps formed. The tech giants that built these mega-apps also acquired many consumer services that used to be independent companies and integrated them into the mega-app over time. Then out of the interest to compete with each other, these tech giants kept making their own mega-app larger in order to capture more user activity within their ecosystem of services. The emergence of mega-apps in China was not the consumer's choice.

I'd say that Elon's claims about the future are highly speculative as well. After all, he's the same guy who claimed there would be a million Tesla robotaxis on the street by the end of 2020. I think it's more useful to look at them as PR statements and ask what effect they were intended to have.

At this rate it'll be the nothing app.

I’ve noticed a lot of entrepreneurs have those kinds of ambitions but nobody is hiring at the scale of WeChat (well, Tencent Holding). You’re talking about a platform/ecosystem that has tens of thousands of developers actively working on it. Twitter is in the opposite position having been cut down to the bone. Not going to happen.

Tecent already had a diversified Internet business before they launched WeChat. Musk needs a whole portofolio of companies to enable his mega-app vision, and that is not considering all the anti-competition lawsuits coming his way should he acquire those companies and refer to them exclusively within the X app.

FB/Meta and Google likely had similar ambitions and they haven't succeeded in building one despite being in a far better position to do so. Google Maps is probably the closest thing we can get to a mega-app in the Western world, for now.

> the everything app concept has never really worked outside China

Grab and Careem are both decent attempts at it

Yeah, watching twitter over the past two weeks has definitely made we wish it were my bank too.

You owe me a new, tea-free keyboard.

So far Elon's actions have consisted entirely of destroying and zero building. He promised a money market feature (which is a prominent part of Chinese mega-apps e.g. Alipay and WeChat), but there have been no concrete plans or any regulatory talk related to it.

If Elon Musk is still serious about building a mega-app then he needs to rapidly acquire/launch a lot more companies in consumer spending sectors e.g. entertainment, hotels, delivery, restaurant reviews, etc. But linking to those services within the mega-app would run into trouble with anticompetitive lawsuits pretty much everywhere.

There is a big hill for Elon to climb yet he's only focused on kicking rocks barefoot at the bottom of that hill.

That's what amazes me. The path to attempt that was pretty straightforward. Get in control, make some small changes to accommodate as many people as possible, reassure advertisers, add some surprising features that start to extend Twitter and see how people take to them. Make it more about creating and enjoying rather than just outright fighting. No one wants their polarised-arguing app to also be their banking and housing and everything app!

Even fewer people want their maybe kicked off at any moment due to the capricious whims of the founder app to also be their banking and housing app…

I was thinking of this and if you take TV news media there’s a clear political dichotomy with CNN and Fox News. If you look at that deeper, Fox News is the most watched station in the USA. Still more, the Fox News audience is profitable to advertisers offering Cash-For-Gold and worthless symbolic doodads. Until now online media has not followed the same course - TikTok, Facebook, and Twitter are all chasing Gen-Z and democratic and progressive markets, while trying to put forth an impartial image to moderation. With Twitter’s pivot, it may lead to the same sort of fracturing that we see in television. Sadly, given US demographics, building a conservative safe-space echo chamber might also be a better way to make money.

I’m not sure that crowd is tech-savvy enough to be on Twitter in the first place

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