Comment by throwaway9274 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway9274 | Hacker News Reader

Generally I appreciate Elon Musk’s work a lot. He created two world-changing companies in SpaceX and Tesla. I wanted him to be good at running Twitter/X.

It seemed like a good match. Staid company meets indefatigable executive.

His early moves prompted a lot of pushback but were generally wise: Diversified away from ad revenue. Introduced breaking changes to accustom the user base to faster development. Cut costs they couldn’t afford by shuttering a data center. Shrunk a bloated team to die-hards via whaling-and-culling. Not least, open sourced some recommender system code, and largely solved the content moderation problem via Community Notes.

Individually, all good steps. Sure, there were many misfires along the way: the verification system, launch of Twitter Blue, and erratic public ideation of potential features.

But I am ready to declare the Musk&Twitter/X experiment a failure.

The crux of the matter is this: Twitter exists as part of an ecosystem. Elon has alienated a large part of that ecosystem, both in terms of creators and advertisers.

I don’t know whether the network effect will tip or the business will run out of cash first, but I am confident it will not grow enough to justify the investment.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe alternate revenue streams and the value of Twitter’s data for AI training will be enough to keep it viable.

But I’m just not seeing the path.

> Diversified away from ad revenue.

He was forced to due to ad revenue plummeting as a reaction to his own actions and policies.

>Introduced breaking changes to accustom the user base to faster development.

What does faster development have to do with breaking almost a decade's worth of UX and muscular memory? You can ship _bad_ changes quickly. I lost track of the amount of times I tapped Reply instead of Retweet after they shifted all buttons right when they introduced viewcounts.

> Shrunk a bloated team to die-hards via whaling-and-culling.

I'd argue there's a reasonable middle ground between "a bloated team" and "just the die-hards".

> largely solved the content moderation problem via Community Notes.

Community notes existed before Musk, and their role is to dispute a claim or provide context. They don't moderate content in any way.

>He was forced to due to ad revenue plummeting as a reaction to his own actions and policies.

That’s incorrect. The need to diversify away from ad revenue was a topic discussed with Jack prior to the acquisition. The rationale was that advertisers effective control content moderation policies due to the revenue which they provide.

This is true. Whether it’s bad on or not depends on your viewpoint and ideological position. What advertisers want for now, e.g. with regard to social policy, may be aligned with what you or I want now.

But there’s no guarantee that will be true in the future.

>I’d argue there’s a reasonable middle ground between “a bloated team” and “just the die-hards.

Layoffs are painful, and they were handled poorly. But there can be no doubt the prior company was massively overstaffed.

If you’re going to cut, generally you want to cut deep to prevent future rounds. Arguably not increasing the size of the first layoffs led to the second, and more people could have been preserved in total.

There’s very little virtue in “middle ground” in this context.

> Community notes existed before Musk, and their role is to dispute a claim or provide context. They don’t moderate content in any way.

It doesn’t moderate content in any way… except for placing large labels to “dispute a claim or provide context.”

Sure, if you very narrowly constraint content moderation to the Trust and Safety definition of removing content and administering bans it doesn’t.

Birdwatch existed, but the prominence of the feature and improved reliability of the feature weren’t launched until after acquisition.

It solved the main edge cases for content moderation by only displaying labels when moderators who disagreed sufficiently on other issues agreed on that particular label.

It has significantly impacted the disinformation at scale problem for the better.

>Diversified away from ad revenue

Ad revenue diversified away from Twitter, and Musk is desperately trying to get any cashflow he can while refusing to pay bills

>Introduced breaking changes to accustom the user base to faster development

Why is this a good thing, on any planet? "We broke shit on purpose so that you would be used to us breaking shit regularly"

>Shrunk a bloated team to die-hards via whaling-and-culling

This is a weird way to say "fired anyone who told him that he was being dumb"

>Not least, open sourced some recommender system code

No he didn't. This one irks me so much. I work with machine learning models every day, and if you were familiar with working with ML, you would easily recognize what was "open sourced" (it's just source available) as just the basic scaffolding code AROUND the model. It would be like if you said you were going to open source your excel spreadsheet of important data, and you just put up the code for OpenOffice on github. You didn't "open source" anything that matters, and certainly not "the algorithm"

I said “parts of the recommender system code.”

This is the kind of highly emotional reaction that’s not helpful.

Yes, I am quite familiar with building ML models, both training and building my own for which I’ve been paid large sums of money, and I’m here to tell you that you don’t know what you’re taking about.

There’s so much more information about an ML system than just the trained model that is important for understanding the effects of the system on a society, and its legal, ethical, and social ramifications.

Just seeing the type of RS being used, the ranking approach, and the information on SimClusters is enough for RAI folks to start to understand the ecosystem effects and how that can show up downstream in social effects.

https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/open-sourc...

Counterpoint: he has behaved as an idiot the entire time.

Yeah, that’s the only bad argument.

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