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Comment by aliqot | Hacker News Reader

Elon owning Twitter is the most public accountability Twitter has ever had. Him owning Twitter, the way he's currently operating, will force a critical eye toward a lot of bad behaviors that we all experience but nobody really talks about on every network.

I say bravo. Twitter is dead. Long live Twitter.

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As someone who already despised Twitter there is only good outcomes for me if it either declines into oblivion or they somehow rescue it from this pit into something more like ~2010-2012 Twitter moderation wise.

Best case we get a more decentralized option or a centralized option that isn’t so politicized by the owners… or at least an owner who isn’t a contentious celebrity that is a black/white villain/hero to a big portion of the population.

Unfortunately all of my experiences with Mastadon have been negative (particularly the UI and how it encourages bubbles harder than Reddit hypermodding), but Mastadon seems to be all people talk about.

I like Mastodon but agree about the bubble. I think the best case scenario is something like a return to the glory days of RSS.

I'm still very surprised that api access and payment to have bots hasn't been added (back)

The days when Twitter was cool is when you could get your toaster to tweet when your toast is up.

Removing dedicated bots just made for bots that are trying to hide their bot-ness

> the way he's currently operating, will force a critical eye toward a lot of bad behaviors

Yes, running an engine at eleven will show you where it creaks. But it may also fling shrapnel through itself and everyone nearby.

I think he could’ve done that. I would’ve welcomed that. But his revelations mixed with his red pilling colors it badly. I voted yes and I’m a Tesla owner. He can’t run twitter because he’s too susceptible to the ego trip involved. He’s making rules from his personal POV, not from the perspective of the health of the platform or an actual fairness doctrine.

He also has no plan… his successor needs a holistic strategic mindset and a business development methodology. Perhaps he had support from leadership lieutenants at Tesla and Space X and is trying to solo this one. Something’s different enough with his floundering at Twitter.

> Him owning Twitter, the way he's currently operating, will force a critical eye toward a lot of bad behaviors that we all experience but nobody really talks about on every network.

Are you talking as a communist meaning "The society has been too lenient on the class of billionaires, but now that one of them is exposed as a destructive idiot, people will be forced to ask whether the rest of them deserve their power over us"?

Because that's the only logically consistent interpretation of your statement I can find.

How did you jump from that to Communism? I though the meaning was pretty clear: People will be more critical regarding social networks. Meaning they will more carefully assess the merits and flaws of Social Networks, instead of just assuming they're good and fun with no real drawbacks.

But the thing is, all these things are happening not because Twitter is social media; they're happening because Twitter is led by Elon Musk. I'm not saying everything is fine under Zuckerberg or Pichai, but whatever their flaws are, organizations led by other billionaires don't suffer the same kind of pathology as Musk's Twitter. They operate very differently.

So, whatever Musk does, it will not lead to people critically looking at Facebook and Reddit. It will more likely lead to people critically looking at Tesla and SpaceX.

It's the same thing as trump in the presidency - many things were uncovered to be norms that people follow, rather than strict law

When run well, social media stays out of the spotlight, with it's issues swept under the rug enough for regulators to not notice. With musk loudly showing those issues, regulatory interest is drawn, and new rules for social media will be crafted for everyone's benefit across all social media

That's a salient point. Biased, uneven, nontransparent moderation was always happening with weak justification, it was just done by unaccountable people and propagandized as righteous.

Remember people getting banned for saying "learn to code", disallowing certain news links even in DMs, shadowbanning undesirables with no transparency.

"unbiased moderation" is fundamentally impossible for an international service like Twitter with millions of users. Each country has its own rules about which content you are allowed to post and it has its own regulatory agencies that may demand you behave in a certain way. Your moderators will all apply their own cultural norms to their own behavior as well.

I agree that it's not "righteous" somehow but the idea that Twitter could be moderated evenly in an "unbiased" way is incredibly naive and it seems to be one of the illusions Elon was under before he took over.

> unbiased moderation" is fundamentally impossible for an international service like Twitter with millions of users.

Especially given that the pool of California tech people from which Twitter might draw moderators are to the left of 99% of that international community of users.

You can bet that in many countries the conservative right is more the left that the Democrats.

Inter-cultural policy differences aren't new and being able to moderate on an international online forum like Twitter is pretty challenging.

It really depends on what metric you're talking about. That's not true of trans rights or abortion for instance.

We’re not talking about “democrats.” We are talking about college educated California democrats. On cultural issues—which dominate when it comes to moderation decisions—the Overton window of a typical Twitter employee is well to the left of people in most European countries, and far to the left of those in Asia or Africa or the Middle East. For example, center left Emmanuel Macron or solidly left Mette Frederiksen wouldn’t be able to express their views on immigration at a Twitter staff meeting: https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20221102-mette-frederi...

Contrast the recent post about Stanford’s language policing guide, with Macron calling such guidance “woke nonsense.” https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/emmanuel-mac...

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