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> Things that seem to be clear at this point: > - Musk has at least some level of interest in solving the fundamental problem of how to build and manage a public square, even if the purchase of twitter itself was initially presented as a joke

It’s interesting how different people can see the same thing and reach opposite conclusions. It’s crystal clear to me that Musk has no interest in solving these problems.

The evidence is very noisy, for sure. My only basis for this is the private text exchange with Jack Dorsey where they discussed how Twitter should have been built. To me that’s the only true window into his intentions - all other public comms are tainted by other potential motivations.

To me, Musk is kind of the quintessential engineering bro, who’s fundamentally motivated by wanting to be the one who solves the trickiest problems. Sometimes his actual decision-making is influenced by vanity and voyeurism, but the underlying theme seems to be rooted in problem-solving.

It's not noisy at all. It's perfectly clear.

> My only basis for this is the private text exchange with Jack Dorsey where they discussed how Twitter should have been built. To me that’s the only true window into his intentions - all other public comms are tainted by other potential motivations.

You have to understand that text message thread in context. It's two narcissistic billionaires who think they're above everyone else talking to each other. It's a sort of billionaire pissing contest where they both also pat each other on the back. It's two people thinking they're the smartest in the room. It just so happens they were the only ones in the room.

For Dorsey, if he knew how Twitter should have been built since the beginning, then why didn't he do so? He claims to have known this from the start, but he was in full control for years. Musk was just chiming in to showcase that he gets it, whatever it is.

And yet, Musk has never solved "the trickiest problems." He simply does "first order thinking" that conveniently ignores the real issues with whatever he claims he's solving. (See, e.g., Hyperloop, Boring Co, Cybertruck, FSD, Tesla's robotic factory, the cave submarine, etc.)

At every step of the way, Musk is just cosplaying as an engineer and interfering with the actual work being done.

It's like the time he was on a podcast and promised that the next tesla would have "cold gas thrusters", literally a tank of pressurized gas that it was going to use as thrust to make it accelerate faster. Plenty of engineers worth their salt recognized right away that this is on it's face stupid, and has no point. Even if you didn't feel it in your gut, a back of the envelope calculation shows how stupid it is.

And yet, stupid people fawned over it, saying crap like he's putting rockets in the tesla and other hyped up nonsense. Some tried to backpeddle "oh it was a joke". It wasn't a joke, elon has been spouting bullshit, often technobabble for decades and whenever somebody calls him on it he handwaves it away and sicks his fans on them. Of course he genuinely thought that was a genius idea.

It's always been laughable and disgusting to call him an engineer. It's an insult to people who actually went through school, who didn't fake their degree, who didn't shirk classes to do whatever instead. An insult to the people who sometimes have to sign their name to a structure on pain of lawsuit. He should have NO credibility in any educated field.

Of course, devs often like for exactly that reason, since they love to cosplay engineers too, as if our bubble gum and duct tape plumbing industry could be considered engineering.

Your take on devs isn’t quite fair, as if being a real engineer magically makes one a much better duct tape plumber who can ship their bathroom on time, in software. There’s also hordes of regular engineers who generate and produce nonsense, you can tell it by just looking into appliances or computer parts.

I agree with you, and it's eye-opening that anyone would think that the original sentiment was clear. What has happened is that Musk has been turning Twitter into his little play pen, exactly what all the critics said would happen, but he is experiencing a lot more pushback than he expected. So in typical fashion, he's wanting to bow out to save face because he can't solve the problem and doesn't really want to, which is why he tried bailing out of the purchase in the first place. Has the grandparent comment already forgot about that? He was just grandstanding and then got caught with his foot in his mouth, and then he just wanted to be fawned over once he was forced to complete the purchase.

He doesn't care about solving the problems. If he did, he would have better understood things before firing >50% of the workforce and several other steps he skipped because he constrained himself by massively overpaying for Twitter.

I think a lot of people treat Elon Musk like their own personal self-insert character in a piece of fan fiction.

The fanclub of temporarily-embarrassed-billionaires cannot square the reality of him just being some rich idiot trust fund kid playing dressup as Serious Business Man with his dad’s apartheid emerald money with their idea that they too can become unimaginably wealthy if they just find the right amphetamine-to-shroom-microdose ratio.

> a public square

I must be out of touch or have a dead imagination but I have no clue what this means/what this looks like hypothetically.

Hundreds of thousands of people screaming at each other.

It really needs a better model because the idea of scaling up the town square is just a terrible idea.

Robin Dunbar must be laughing now...

How about... a recursive network of medium-sized public squares.

it's the Section 230 platform/publisher conundrum, which itself is kind of just a moral-positioning smokescreen for "we want advertisers to buy ads on our website and advertisers don't want their ads to appear alongside objectionable content".

And I am again forced to ask this silly question, but what are you referencing in regards to Section 230? There is no such delineation that is made as part of Section 230[0] and there is no legal definition for being a platform. Thusly there is no conundrum here.

This is a talking point that got beat dead in 2020 and I am shocked that it still has any life on HackerNews. It's not only moral positioning, it's a fundamental misunderstanding of what makes someone a publisher and what is actually covered as part of Section 230.

[0] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/12/publisher-or-platform-...

all true, but the conundrum remains, especially as there's been talks to rejigger S230. but again, it's all a smokescreen for creating advertiser-friendly websites.

Who will pay for the shortfall?

The bills Twitter runs up won't pay themselves and I don't see it recovering from the tailspin that Musk has put it in. Who is at the helm may no longer be all that important.

If they reverse Musk's policies, Twitter could return to profitability and paying its debt. Twitter's problem is that if new management does reverse Musk's policies, Musk would just fire them like he did the previous people running the company, costing the company more golden parachutes and leaving it even worse off.

Precisely. As long as Musk owns it I don't see Twitter as salvageable, and even afterwards, you have to wonder who he gave access to the data. Twitter is now a time bomb for any future owner.

Wasn’t Twitter’s policies prior to Musk essentially a reversal of Musks policies already? Would that really do it on its own?

You haven’t been paying attention. Elon has made Twitter’s debt situation so much worth that even if they could do a full reset to what the company was like before he acquired it, they would still be on the fast path to bankruptcy. It has been such a colossally fucking stupid move. He needs to be checked into rehab for his substance abuse before he loses it all.

> Twitter could return to profitability and paying its debt.

Twitter was profitable in 2018-2019, but that was a brief blip and wasn't profitable before or afterwards. And, with a bunch of debt piled on from the acquisition, they need a fair bit of operating profit to cover it.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/299119/twitter-net-incom...

"quasi-principled interest".

That's not even near that. It's all been hypocritical through the through. "Free speech" is "me speech".

The man doesn't even know about Section 230 and referred to Twitter as a "publisher". He is completely clueless as to what it is that he bought for $44 billion. Most of us spend more due diligence buying a coffee grinder.

I continue to be amazed how much vitriol Musk manages to stir up by being an arbitrary agent of chaos for the wrong side. Who cares if he wastes $44B? If anything, he's fighting inflation by removing mistakenly-assigned value of $44B from circulation.

It's him - he assigned the value.

I care for a number of reasons:

1. I had friends at Twitter who were laid off

2. I actually do think Twitter has value

3. I don’t think Elon is good for public discourse

4. I don’t think Elon is good for tech culture

5. I think we’d all be better off if he STFU and went back to working on rockets and electric cars.

Also Twitter peaked in its traffic rankings recently which is weird timing to buy something. Why was he so insanely late to the party?

Contemporary social media is not a "public square."

Weaponized speech is real, and "more speech" is zero defense against it.

Content moderation is a hard problem, in multiple dimensions, and blundering erratically from rookie mistake into rookie mistake serves by design or by accident mostly to enable and empower the worst exploitation, and the worst voices.

The pretense that there is some design and genius behind pathetic Dunning-Kruger narcissism and cognitive errors and neurological deficits has expired.

How's that anagram go, "a man, no plan, root canal: painful yawn"?