Comment by wpietri | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wpietri | Hacker News Reader

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Traffic is down modestly, revenue is down dramatically, outages are up, bugs are up, abuse is up, many users have departed, and the value of the company has fallen by something between half and two thirds. One of its core assets, the blue checkmark for verified notable accounts, has been permanently destroyed. I no longer use it, but word from my friends who still do is that is has become grimmer, less fun. Musk has stopped releasing statistics, but I expect that new users signups and net promoter scores are well down as well.

Musk keeps picking fights with vendors; the latest feud with Google means they may soon lose significant trust and safety tooling. Twitter keeps losing staff, Ella Irwin being the latest, and word is that they're running skeleton crews for core functionality, with a lot of the current staff being people who are trapped in the jobs by visas and the like. That suggests we'll be seeing more messes like the failure of DeSantis's campaign launch.

And that's all off the top of my head. If you want to read more, I'd suggest Casey Newton's articles on it; he's been covering it pretty well.

I don't notice any of the things you mentioned. As a user, I haven't felt much difference before and after Musk's takeover. If anything, I think Twitter is a little bit better and more vibrant now, because the censorship is not like before.

Yes, lot's of people tried Mastodon as an alternative, but I still see almost all my followees on Twitter.

Your comments reminds me of the metaphor of boiling a frog.

Twitters users, the advertisers, have noticed. Thus the revenue decrease. Twitter's product, sets of eyeballs, are still around (despite being compositionally a different population, mostly).

Oh? What are some examples of the "censorship is not like before" that you think have improved things?

People aren't getting banned for telling "journalists" to learn to code.

People were getting banned for harassing individual laid-off journalists. A tweet expressing a view about good jobs for journalists changing industries was not ever a problem, so it wasn't a free-speech concern. Being a dick to people is not a legal right.

> Being a dick to people is not a legal right.

It's not illegal either.

Depending on how one does it, that's true. But that's also not relevant here. Twitter as a private entity does not have to just say, "Welp, it's legal" to anything that happens on their site.

They “don’t have to” say it but they legally can.

Originally you asked "that you think have improved things".

And then someone gave a valid response.

And then you responded to this response by saying "Twitter as a private entity does not have to just say, "Welp, it's legal" to anything that happens on their site."

This response is a non sequitur.

Nobody in this thread said that twitter is forced to do anything. Instead, the original claim is that this was an improvement.

And yes, twitter is allowed to make this change where they censor less things.

I believe you mean "non sequitur", but my comment wasn't one of those either.

The claim I'm responding to was in the a part you failed to quote, "censorship". Censorship is generally meant as suppression of content, not behavior. In the case described, Twitter was cracking down on harassment, not specific content.

As a clear example, imagine I call you up at all hours of the day and night, reciting the Bill of Rights every time you answer. When you stop answering, I show up out front of your house with a bullhorn and start reading the Federalist Papers at maximum volume. When you call the police and they haul me off, is that censorship? In typical usage, no, because the problem is not my ideas expressed.

Ok, use whatever word you want to describe it.

The point being that some people think that all legal speech, or legal "insert whatever word you want to describe what twitter now allows" should be allowed on the platform.

So talking about "Twitter as a private entity" is not really a valid response, and actually works against you.

It is not a valid response because twitter the private entity is now choosing to allow this stuff, whatever you want to call it.

> When you call the police

In the context of these types of conversations, people are usually saying that they want all legal behavior to be allowed on the platform, not illegal behavior.

> people are usually saying that they want all legal behavior to be allowed on the platform

People saying that are generally people who have not tried to run a for-profit social media site. Or even thought about it much, really.

To have a functioning social media platform these days, you need a lot of users and a lot of advertisers. This means you need the site to feel reasonably safe and welcoming to all concerned. However, many of those people and brands do not want to spend time around many of the things that are in a typical T&S policy. Which is why all major platforms converged on pretty similar policies, and why the anything-goes platforms tended to stay niche and look like incel Klan rallies.

It's not like Jack Dorsey really cared about anybody but Jack Dorsey. Ceteris paribus, he would have been happy to stick with Twitter's original "free speech wing of the free speech party" ethos, if only because it saved a lot on moderation costs. But he recognized that his platform could either have the racist shitgibbons or the people that said shitgibbons got their kicks from attacking, by which I mean the great bulk of humanity.

There's also the moral and practical vacuity of treating "whatever the legislature voted on" as the correct standard for anything except criminal enforcement, but let that pass for now.

>Being a dick to people is not a legal right.

Your understanding of the law is highly dubious.

You realize that twitter is a corporation and not a government right? They don't enforce laws they enforce rules, which they also set.

Before: denial of violent events gets you blocked, disinfo accounts get marked and shadowbanned.

After: reporting on e.g. Russia invasion of Ukraine gets you shadowbanned, troll farm accounts get boosted once they pay for Blue.

Definite improvement, if you run a state sponsored propaganda troll farm.

Much of that “disinfo” you’re referring to turned out to be legit info.

Twitter used to be my key source of technology research and almost all the folks I used to see in my timeline are either dormant or gone now. On top of that I see two tabs with mostly irrelevant stuff from someone far far afar in the network.

Earlier I used to see irrelevant ads. Now I see suspicious ones, like one promising an AI girlfriend and another one promoting some dubious bitcoin token and random people promoting themselves.

> I'd suggest Casey Newton's articles on it

That explains why the rest of your comment doesn’t make sense to me. IMHO Casey Newton is a vulture journalist. He specializes in exaggerate and twist every minor problem he can find in tech companies.

So what isn’t true of the listed problems? One might argue that some of those are not big problems, but advertisers pulling out is an absolutely major problem.

The bulk of what I said can be verified from other sources, so if you don't like Casey Newton, feel free to look for other stuff.

But I am one of Twitter's first 500 users and am a former Twitter employee who keeps an eye on Twitter. And I think Newton's doing a much better job of reporting on Twitter than most places.

Is there really any serious argument about Twitter revenue being down and major ad buyers leaving?

Hopefully Musk will buy NewsCorp or Sinclair next.

Blue checkmarks are now widely mocked.

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