Do you think the code looked like that prior to Elon's purchase? I suspect that there was another name there before.
Separately, which of these groups do you think that they use as a control?
Separately, which of these groups do you think that they use as a control?
Who ? Musk is unique in being obsessed with being liked and relevant.
All of the other social CEOs including Porag and Jake have never really cared that much. And none of them participated in contributing content anything close to what Musk does.
It is very much likely to be the CEO a company wanting to understand his companies product.
Sounds like fairly rational behaviour.
HN isn’t a site for making unfounded personal attacks on others.
I also think many of the changes to make Twitter more open, such as now open sourcing the recommendation algorithm, publishing view counts (which indirectly makes it clear when something or somebody has been shadow banned), and more are all big steps forward in creating a much better and open service for all. Really most of every change he's pursued since taking over Twitter, from my perspective at least, seems to have been big steps forward.
What would you say has been irrational?
Really? You can't even think of one single thing?
As a platform, sure it can be better, and it wasn't exactly under the best management before (although the Twitter file leak actually made the old management look better than everyone thought). But lets not pretend that Musk is in this for the platform - he wants control of information to boost Republican leaders because in his mind, he is the savior of human race, so the best leadership is that which allows him to do the things he wants to do.
It's either free speech absolutionism, or not free speech. If you claim you are for free speech in the moral sense of the word, you have to let everything be posted.
As soon as you start removing things, it becomes your version of controlled narrative. And there is nothing wrong with just that, because of course you want to minimize potential damage. But then you have to be responsible for the things you let slide.
So when Twitter allows right wing rhetoric, a.k.a conspiracy theories about Nancy pelocies husband, pushed by the CEO, or things like Fauci gain of function research, it's clearly a controlled narrative.
I'm not a fan of Elon at all at this point. That said, this is more an indictment of the tech industry than Twitter alone. Most employees are some form of left, many of those employees sit on committees, have outsized wealth compared to the average citizen, donate accordingly, the executives among them have power, etc and tech plays an outsized roll on our lives now. This was made a lot more evident when Twitters head of trust and safety was interviewed and she was unable to identify, or had let situations go on, that were offensive to people you'd commonly call right where anything that was offensively to what people would commonly call left was getting combed over and at times over enforced. I'd also say that my perception of her was more that she had large gaps rather than outright hate. The biggest one that comes to mind is "#learntocode" which a bunch of journalists not only wrote articles but also used that hash tag on people working blue collar jobs, such as coal mining, that were under threat at the time. It's an isolated example, but that hash tag stayed promoted for quite a while.
This isn't to say that right-leaning oppression and left-leaninf oppression at categorically the same or have the same categorical effects. It does point to that we have larger class issues at play.
b) Nothing I have said is untrue.
c) This is not a normal way of measuring the health of a business. Standard metrics include EBITDA, DAU, MAU, LTV, CAC etc.
d) This is not normal behaviour from a CEO. You don't see Mark Zuckerberg, Shou Zi Chew, Evan Spiegel etc using their products the same way Elon does.
Would I do things differently if it were up to me? Sure, but it isn’t, and I can at least appreciate that they are trying to move quickly & try different things. I’m reserving my judgement for whether or not this approach works in the long run.
The problem is Musk is learning the hard way when taking something over is that the old crew is never as dumb as he hoped they were, and he wasn't as smart as he thought he was.
The normal ways of measuring the business, namely EBIDITA, DAU, MAU .., worked. They reliably reported the state of the business. Elon Musk was the only person in the financial market who looked at those measures and interpreted them as meaning “add US$1B annual debt service.”
[0] https://variety.com/2022/digital/news/elon-musk-offering-to-...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acquisition_of_Twitter_by_Elon...
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anheuser-Busch#Acquisition_by_...
It would have been reasonable if he had performed due diligence and came to that conclusion, but he explicitly chose to waive due diligence, and then tried to renege anyway.
Elon does not need you going around personally trying to shut down other people's discussion. That's cult like behavior.
How are the people that disagree with you in this thread trying to shut down your discussion?
Didn't this just reveal that they're A/B testing on Musk's tweet performance? At the very least they're avoiding regressions, and I guess any incidental improvements to it won't be reversed, so isn't it fundamentally the same? Unless we're taking the word "everyone" literally, I guess.
I don’t know why you think I’d like Tucker Carlson or why Tucker being sensational would make Verge and Vice not clickbait.
he is isn't a CEO, he is a whining baby
Ah so he makes jokes, and is well known enough to need security precautions. This makes him “a whiny baby”. Solid argument.
Oh and I forgot, he also helps ukranians vs the Russians. Not a good idea if you want a risk free life.
This is a meta-level bias!
When you run an A/B test you randomly divide your users into groups, one (treatment) getting the new behavior and one (control) getting the current production behavior. So your question doesn't make much sense?
I doubt that Twitter and most of these social platforms are driven by Ai... Maintaining and changing complex algos could not be done on a rapid pace like what occurs now... I think Twitter has moderators, and scripts that control everything, and it can be more easily adjusted to tweak what is visible on the platform based on whatever agenda they want to represent (politics, revenue, PR/damage control).
Twitter frequently bends the rules to serve celebrities, politics, and sponsors and for that they need to be able to quickly adjust scripts. True Ai is meant to function on it's own with minimal intervention, and therein a simple change to a massive logic scheme would completely FUBAR everything.
I think there are rooms full of people that filter and either promote or suppress posts on Twitter every day, namely suppressing any tweets critical of the platform and it's owner... I've noticed that at night time hours, moderation of Tweets is less restrictive as a cue to what goes on there.
There are certain topics that are not moderated as heavily as others (3d Design and other non-controversial topics), and some topics (for example music and porn) that are restricted heavily visibility-wise because they force people to run ads to rank in trending (because it generates a lot of opportunistic money for Twitter as a platform).
Users that are critical of the platform and Elon and his allies (for example) can easily be neutered by moderators and put on shadow ban for any period of time in order to preserve the illusion of calm concerning Twitter operations. Complaints about Twitter only become visible when the majority of the audience tweets about problems (as that can't be moderated out without exposing moderation).
It's pretty much all smoke and mirrors there in order to maintain order in my opinion, and it's pretty much futile and torturous to people who just want to create and seize opportunity for their business without spending tons of money on platform marketing...
I’m sure your simping for Elon is highly appreciated. Maybe he’ll let you taste his boots next.
However, if you believe that it was to be used as part of a system for increasing engagement, then you are asserting that it is a system with no control groups, which is a stupid mistake that wouldn’t be made by an undergraduate taking their first statistics class. They wouldn’t make that mistake even on the first day of that class, because they took a class in statistics in high school!
But no, please, go off on your tangent that is not at all centered in reality.
Such a system, which certainly exists, was also made extremely quickly. We all know the timeline. We all have seen the rants and then the immediate effect of manual changes made to please the rants. I could easily see control groups going out the window when your boss expects their tweets to be prioritized yesterday.
I also like how confident you are in a company’s ability after they explicitly laid off and fired the majority of its staff. Generally speaking, when that happens, people lose confidence rather than gain it, but here you are proving us all of wrong. Gold star for you, maybe you’ll even get the other boot now!
I’m sure it feels so rewarding to simp for a man who will never even look in your general direction, let alone talk to you or know all the great things you said about him and his companies.
I mean, considering you didn't even know what the title of the "previous owner" even was, you seem to do that a lot.
And far more important things than worrying whether said tweets are popular or not.
If the general public cares about the CEO’s tweets, then necessarily there will be a danger that the death of the CEO will ignite a crisis in the general public; e.g. Steve Jobs at Apple.
The producer is not the star.
I never suggested the CEO needs to be the star tweeter. What I am saying is that the CEO needs to be a tweeter, i.e. personally invested in his/her company's product. Companies with CEOs who don't give a shit about about their product/users tend not last long as "immortal entities".