Elon Musk ‘orders Twitter to remove suicide prevention feature’ | Hacker News Reader

Elon Musk ‘orders Twitter to remove suicide prevention feature’

theguardian.com

25 pointsahiknsr14 comments

Musk added the view count. He removes this feature. He sees himself as a power user. But none of these things help Twitter grow.

Twitter isn’t a feature driven company. Engagement and sign ups increased under Musk because of the drama he created. He’s desperate to get Trump back to fuel even more engagement.

Good point. Twitter, iirc, broke out of the reputation of a pointless microblogging concept "nobody cares what you had for breakfast" to a sort of real time information source, because the media for whatever reason got on board and started pushing what people had tweeted about stuff well before anyone actually cared. Eventually, people did care, and it transformed into the live discussion and reporting hybrid it was recently.

None of that really was on the strength of technical features (which does suggest that headcount reduction was long coming). So where is the "technical" path to taking Twitter to another level?

There’s an interesting bit in the recording of Musk on Spaces the other day where he says it took him weeks to understand that the ad targeting has ended up targeting fewer click throughs, as that leads to more impressions.

They’ve got into a kind of brand advertising negative feedback loop, it seems. I can imagine him shaking that out - although presumably would be short term revenue hit. It’s a technical change though.

Similarly - he talks about telcos scamming Twitter at scale by making bots that request large numbers of 2FA SMS numbers which they make profit from Twitter on. The reason some 2FA broke was to put pressure on those telcos to stop that.

Musk’s shitposting and authoritarian banning are awful. I’m excited by the boost this is giving Mastodon and hope Twitter stops being the primary place for many professional communities.

Nevertheless, there do seem to be large technical issues in Twitter that for whatever reason nobody before had the power or reward system to fix.

> They’ve got into a kind of brand advertising negative feedback loop

This was a key blind spot for Elon. He thought advertising should work better with more engagement (or something like that if I am ascribing too much intent). It usually should. But that's not how Twitter evolved to work.

Once you poop in the brand advertising punch bowl, you are pretty much done.

There seems to be a real need amongst some people to ascribe some sort of underlying master plan to Musk’s nonsense. Really, Occam’s, and Hanlon’s, Razor say that he is just severely out of his depth and unwilling to seek help.

A common thing with people who are constantly told they're a genius/amazing/etc... and get so big they don't have anyone to tell them "No." (think George Lucas, Madonna, and such)

It especially doesn't help that Elon surrounds himself with people who worship at his virtual altar, and go to bat for any dumb thing he ever says.

> They’ve got into a kind of brand advertising negative feedback loop, it seems. I can imagine him shaking that out - although presumably would be short term revenue hit. It’s a technical change though.

Could you explain this in a different way. I’m having trouble understanding the consequences? You’re saying more engagement doesn’t mean more click throughs because it’s the same users?

I think it was that click throughs (and someone say buying something) reduce ad impressions, as they’re no longer scrolling Twitter.

As a result Twitter ad targeting has ended up only good for brand advertising, when at least in theory companies would pay for highly targeted ads eg in threads where people were talking about a product.

This is so third hand though you should take this comment with a pinch of salt!

Is there any evidence the “view count” is accurate? Apparently it’s just an estimate based on analytics, and I see no reason they wouldn’t just overstate it.

It's probably the same as the Impressions count that was already available to the owner of the tweet.

From the existing Q&A out there, a lot of people think it's real but that it errs on the side of over counting (e.g. no deduplication, excluding owner views, etc.). But at Twitter's scale I'd imagine there's at least some extrapolation going on.

In the recording of Elon Musk on Spaces the other day, there is a bunch of conversation about views being computed off prem in Google Cloud unlike, say, the likes count which is computed in the main Twitter in prem database. Wasn’t quite clear if they’ve changed this since - I assume not.

My sense was it is pretty good but was more designed for AI use - for example the Tweet recommendation (which Musk seemed to think was really well done compared to the ad algorithm).

> It had shown at the top of specific searches contacts for support organisations in many countries related to mental health, HIV, vaccines, child sexual exploitation

I remember one of the supposed big positives of Musks takeover was that he was going to help stop child sexual exploitation.

As with everything else Musk says and does, it's all part of his toolkit to weaponize timely political topics. He doesn't actually care, beyond what he can use to bludgeon or harass people into submission.

Only a few months until we find out if Elon is Gavin Belson or Russ Hanneman.

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