Never bet against Elon. Starlink alone will make more money than twitter ever could. If you don’t see the potential for Twitter. That’s fine. But don’t write an article about how it’s “hell” if you don’t have the vision for how to improve it. That’s like someone who has no idea how to cook leaving a bad review for food they could never hope to improve on. If Elon listened to Haters/Doubters like this Verge journo, the world would be worse off.
I doubt it because it's a braindead decision. It's also totally out of his wheelhouse. Twitter is not a commercial product, nor is it an engineering project. It's a forum. A really volatile forum. Elon has no experience moderating forums, he's not a site administrator. If he's the one actually calling the shots he's gonna run it into the ground because it simply isn't his field. This is the acquisition the least similar to any of his other successes he's ever made. Such a business simply doesn't run in the same logic as a contractor or manufacturer.
Besides, a huge number of Twitter's core staff just jumped ship the moment they heard the news. That's the relevant experience. That's their product people. They fled. If the brain drain hits the company hard enough and the loosening of moderation goes particularly poorly the whole site is absolutely doomed and he will lose more money than Yahoo acquiring Tumblr did.
> That’s like someone who has no idea how to cook leaving a bad review for food they could never hope to improve on
Ignoring the context of the article, I don’t believe that the example you’ve given here is really fair. It’s perfectly valid to review something which you could not create. If we excluded that whole category, then reviews would mostly cease to exist, and only peer review would be possible.
Success does breed success, but it’s not inevitable. There’s still hard work to be done and his big successes have come from hardware (batteries & rockets). Twitter is software in the social / content realm.
To use your cooking analogy, it’s like saying don’t bet against Gordon Ramsey (an expert in the cooking / media / art / experience realm) if he acquired Virgin Records. I’m sure he has connections and some knowledge that helps, but it’s a new field with new challenges.
> Starlink alone will make more money than twitter ever could.
Is there anything other than aspirational thinking behind this statement? Musk himself has said it's a cash incinerator - and that's by Musk standards (read: used to huge public subsidies and constant capital raises).
Fanboying Elon on the twitter deal of all things is just hilarious. He paid $44B with no diligence for a company with hardly a billion worth of revenue, stagnating growth, a last-generation social graph, an incredibly toxic userbase, and a very demoralized staff--and he has no plan for how to fix it either. This will go down as one of the worst deals in history and here you are saying "but Starlink".
Haters are always telling me not to jump into a barbed-wire-covered nettle bush in a tar pit - why don't any of them have the vision to help me succeed at it? :)
Nilay's job is to generate revenue for The Verge and it's shareholders. You generate revenue by increasing ad views. You can increase ad revenue with controversial hot takes with saucy language.
Nilay is doing the exact right thing, in the context of his corporate job.
Your argument falls apart here, since you can review food without being able to cook said food. For example, you don't need to know how to cook to know that something is burnt and therefore critique it based on that.
What you're really arguing here that Elon Musk is more capable than the previous people in charge of Twitter. I won't defend them much, but based on many of his previous actions I'm skeptical he's going to do any better and in fact think he'll probably do worse than the ex-leadership.
The article nails the inherent contradiction in optimizing for "free speech" and optimizing for advertising. He has burned 44 billion. He will bleed advertisers and legit users if it becomes a 4chan's pol board.
> Starlink alone will make more money than twitter ever could
In a world where people are increasingly living in urban areas, fiber will annihilate satellite internet.
Starlink is yet another niche thing which Musk is specialized in pursuing.
In fact all of Musck companies can be summarized with "everybody has heard of them in the financial and technology press, but not many people use them"
I think Elon will succeed _and_ I agree with almost everything in this verge article. But Elon has been very inconsistent in what he’s said.
It’s impossible for Elon to accomplish his current vision because it’s not internally consistent. You can’t only moderate what is within the law and make Twitter a more friendly place and make it more attractive to advertisers and grow it to a billion users, and make it the defacto public square and make it the free speech public network and eliminate bots, and make X the everything app and fire 75% of twitter employees.
So while I think Elon Musk will succeed, it’s also interesting to point out the paradoxes and difficulty and in doing so elicit curiosity in how he will accomplish his goal. Conservatives seem to be taking a victory lap today, but it’s one of those things where compromise means no one ends up completely happy.
Media has been going totally in the left direction after Trump won.
I don't really like him, but cancelling people exactly at the same time by all media companies shows that it's all controlled by a few people. Of course they try everything to say bad things about Elon now...it's funny to see actually.
This is why so much hate is directed at Elon. His repeated success in different domains causes severe cognitive dissonance. It's an in your face painful reminder that success isn't entirely due to luck.
It's a lot easier to dismiss someone's success when it only happens once.
Can't wait to see that hot takes from the free speech absolutists who have never experienced that first-hand on a platform they frequent regularly. We already know what that looks like, it's 4chan/8kun/etc and surprise, it's absolute shit.
4chan is a forum. Everyone who browses a 4chan board sees the same posts. For that reason, these boards are moderated, but apparently not heavily enough for the tastes of some people, to whom for 4chan is the epitome of horror.
Twitter is a platform. Everyone who uses twitter decides who to follow and who to block. Everyone sees different tweets.
Twitter for a long time had almost complete freedom of speech. It described itself as the free speech wing of the free speech party[1]. In that time, it had fewer rules then 4chan. But to use twitter did not feel like using 4chan, unless you decided to follow the kind of people who post on 4chan.
Some people will try to push the idea of individualized user-end moderation but that idea has not been successfully implemented since Usenet's Alt heirarchy faded from the internet's popular consciousness. It simply isn't practical and doesn't address that sometimes you just need to kick someone out of the platform for being a caustic shithead.
The lunatic-proof glasses put on by some users won't help the fact that people new to the site will be scared off by all the diarrhea mixed with the slowly disappearing amount of actual content to the point where the people being awful are the only ones left. Eventually they'll entrench their bullshit until that becomes the character of the whole site. Normal people are repulsed by it at first glance and those left only descend deeper and deeper into their own mad echo chamber.
Reddit became wildly successful as a clone of 4chan's textboards using digg's "comment section of the internet" idea of bare links as threadstarters, and barely moderated anything until a few years ago. For that matter, twitter itself barely moderated either until the lead-up to the 2020 election.
I won't energetically argue with you that 4chan and Reddit aren't shit, but plenty of people would. They've both been massively influential on world culture. I would argue that twitter moderation has been almost strictly political and along culture war lines. Reddit, instead, mainly targeted cruelty and child exploitation for moderation.
...for you, 4chan is one of the last places on the internet that feel like the old internet, organic, unfiltered, raw. If you can't handle it, there is Facebook for you.
I think most people that are happy about Elon taking over aren't free speech absolutists in the sense of the term you're using it.
Rather they're just tired of blatant censorship some individuals face when expressing an opinion that goes against popular politics of the time.
There's a middle ground between allowing literal nazi's to do whatever they want and blatantly influencing discussion on a mass scale by silencing those you disagree with.
And if you want a more direct analogue if you assume that the problem with 4chan is the culture and not the moderation that the absolute worst most vile Mastadon servers are no moderation to the point where major servers had to just completely blacklist them. If you want to lose all faith in humanity peruse the Gab database dump.
No moderation is a loosing game because any platform that offers better moderation will be attractive to the masses leaving the people whose decorum is so abhorrent that the "free speech" servers are the only ones that will take them.
So is twitter. At least in the last years it turned to absolute s*it.
In mid 2021 I resurrected my old long not used account. I made maybe 20 comments in 3 month before I got "banned". I'm probably not really banned I would just have to remove my last comment but I cant do that because I can not login anymore (which may or may not be related to the "banning").
The post in question was an obvious sarcastic wordplay/pun that even if interpreted literally would have meant something along the lines of "dead people wont complain" which is not only factually true its also rather soft dark humor.
As expected they lump everything together in their ToS so they can give you a paragraph of things as a reason and you dont know which rule you actually broke.
can't wait to see the people advocating against fundamental freedoms to finally get the short end of the "companies are allowed to do whatever they want" stick.
Somehow I don't feel bad about 4chan .. it's all just complete absurd mayhem but there's no agenda.. Whereas any twitter storm feels a lot heavier. Super strange.
ps: also I don't follow 4chan much, so maybe there were grave events on there
Right. It's going to fester with dark elements of the society and he's going to hire back all the content moderators he fired and then pen another open letter to advertisers.
There's a rich and beautiful irony in seeing a bunch of armchair libertarians gushing about the glories of unfettered speech on HN - a web forum that employs some of the most heavy-handed moderation in the biz.
Not sure how long Alex Jones or Mike Lindell would last in here...
There are numerous examples of tweets which aren't remotely vulgar or crude which were removed from twitter. There is no need to resort to speech like in the platforms you mentioned to bring twitter closer to a true free speech platform.
Fascinating that the OP compares Twitter to “living at Disney World”! I can’t stand the obviously fake facades and carefully curated costumes and fake smiles at Disney in large doses and never understood the mindset that could drive adults to want to live full-time at the park.
Twitter addiction has wasted the best minds of my generation and if it implodes and takes Musk with it… win-win!
My first thought when Musk bought Twitter was "His engineering has team figured out content moderation" but I've seen no evidence or talk of that. So I think it's true that he impulsively bought himself his worst nightmare.
> His engineering has team figured out content moderation
Depending on how you define content moderation this is literally not possible, 1. Because content moderation is adversarial and has to adapt and 2. Content moderation is subjective, as the original article says content moderation is the product that companies sell, and it will likely have to change as time goes on (I’m not just talking “what’s popular/offensive” but like do you allow videos, how long are the videos, do videos get prioritized above text or audio, 280 character vs 144 character tweets, editing tweets, dislike button, etc.
Perhaps Elon has heard of K-Means Clustering, and you haven't...
"Solving" content moderation is a losing battle -- there is no way to humanly moderate anything at the rate it can be produced, and Elon knows this. It's insane, so he probably won't do it.
But, allowing content to be produced, but making sure no real person ever sees it, until the content producer earns their way into "your" group -- now that can be automated.
Elon has access to Exascale hardware, so K-means Clusters with arbitrarily large dimensionality is at his disposal.
> Twitter is a disaster clown car company that is successful despite itself
Isn't this the best kind of company to acquire ? A product that has such inherent value that even a bumbling clown car of company could not sabotage its ability to retain users. Imo, Reddit and Twitter have monopolized 2 of the most effective forms of communication to have existed on the internet: Forums and memes (memes in the Dawkinian sense) and their tiny size is entirely a result of terrible leadership.
While musk didn't buy it for a particularly cheap price (at least in Winter 2022 prices), He should be able to justify the net worth as well as any competing tech company will be able to.
To quote Charlie Munger:
> Never underestimate the man who overestimates himself. These weird guys who overestimate themselves occasionally knock it right out of the park. I would never buy Tesla stock and I would never sell it short.
Elon isn't worried about valuation. His consideration could be 'can I fix low hanging fruit and provide value'
If elon is right the current content moderation has gone wrong, and it has. Then by fixing this it should provide a return on his investment. Not to mention the counter force of those who cannot allow free discussion who may buy him out in order to stop it.
But more important, what elon also understands. What is a billion $? Elon is wealthy enough he can own any toy or thing he ever wants. It has less to do with some currency and himself. He has surpassed this point in economics placing him amongst a select few who have won this game.
Now he has the chance to use this excess wealth to form the future. Which scares people.
"Are you excited for the Chinese government to find ways to threaten Tesla’s huge business in that country over content that appears on Twitter? Because it’s going to happen."
This will happen and not only with China. Just think about Bezos, the Washington Post and Saudi Arabia. But on the other side I think Tesla and SpaceX shouldn't do business with dictatorships anyway. So maybe in the end this will be a good thing.
Nilay Patel is a national treasure. Every word is true, but especially this:
>The essential truth of every social network is that the product is content moderation, and everyone hates the people who decide how content moderation works.
Hell indeed. A problem space with intractable non technical challenges. The saddest part for me is the distraction from the potential of his other businesses, most specifically SpaceX. I just want to see Starship succeed.
Is Twitter not dying? The youth don’t care, the elderly don’t care, and those in the middle (late twenties, early forties) are ending their terminally online lives for families, careers, travel, etc.
Twitter is being distilled into a political tool - both side, endlessly crying into the void, appealing to their confirmation biases.
Hop on over to /pol/ to see what unregulated politic speak turns into.
I don’t think it’ll be like /pol/ if you mean that it’ll be a right wing monopoly. There are too many leftists for that to happen.
There wasn’t a right wing monopoly 10 years ago when Twitter barely had any moderation and people were more conservative. There won’t be one in the future, unless Elon bizarrely goes fascist and bans all the liberals.
Everyone who owns mass media[1] and now will be competing with Elon is playing a game of throwing rotten hate tomatoes in his direction, very entertaining to watch.
He said it was about free speech but Twitter is already about as free as it's possible to be without permitting a whole bunch of content that is NOT protected under the first amendment (CP, calls to violence etc).
And if it is about free speech then it cannot be an automated moderation play, because there is nothing to moderate if you're a pure free speech platform.
The best I can guess, is it's a political play? Turn down politicians who he dislikes? Or he just had a drunk/high/bipolar period and did it without a plan.
> Or he just had a drunk/high/bipolar period and did it without a plan.
I'm still convinced this is how he makes more than half of all of his decisions (see for example, him 'building a submarine' or 'boring/loop'). His success seems to be because he sometimes takes already-known-obvious-good bets that no other person could take first because they aren't billionaires.
> The best I can guess, is it's a political play?
I don't think it's a political play, so much as he got angry and impulsive and jumped in without thinking, couldn't back out, and desperately needs to ret-con this into making any sense, so is pivoting in into a political play.
I've just assumed this is the new version of buying media outlets. Bezos bought the Washington Post, Musk decided to buy Twitter. I'm sure it won't be long before Musk hating gets you kicked off the platform.
< He said it was about free speech but Twitter is already about as free as it's possible to be without permitting a whole bunch of content that is NOT protected under the first amendment (CP, calls to violence etc).
There are plenty of things that are nothing of the sort, merely “sins against wokeism” that will get you instantly banned until you repent. Look, I would prefer conservative people treat feminists and trans people with more sensitivity, but examples that come up over and over are people getting banned for making jokes about there actually being innate differences between men and women, or the ways that slogans like “trans women ARE women” might be a bit too strongly worded.
> Twitter is already about as free as it's possible to be without permitting a whole bunch of content that is NOT protected under the first amendment
This is just wildly untrue. There is a huge range of gender-critical views, vaccine skepticism, any combination of race/gender/genetics/IQ discourse, and a ton of other topics that will get you banned, that come nowhere near first amendment protections.
You might think that's a good thing, that's a valid argument, but it's simply untrue to imply that the limit is similar to 1A protections.
You are suggesting the only people banned from twitter are those posting "CP, calls to violence etc" - not true. Also, other than bans there are suspensions such as the New York Post for a story on Hunter Biden.
Plus there are plenty posting call to violence who are not banned, but are suspiciously on the "right" side of politics.
I'm betting that something like the Google Circles gets implemented but at a higher level. In order to engage with certain people you have to be a member of certain groups/circles or not a member of certain circles/groups. These groups would be moderated by the people that run them. So instead of having Twitter pick and choose who is allowed on the platform, you crowdsource it to the people who want to moderate their groups - and lots of these people exist.
> I'm betting that something like the Google Circles gets implemented
This would actually be a great outcome IMO. Supporting shared blocklists would have similar effect, and probably be easier to implement. Unfortunately, I very much doubt than Elmo Nutsack would allow that. Despite all his claims about "free speech" I'm pretty sure enabling those who would silence people they deem too "woke" via harassment is very much part of the reason behind his takeover. Check out the #TwitterTakeover tag to see the hordes slavering at the prospect (but be aware that it's hard on the stomach if you're a decent person).
Sounds like Mastodon/Fediverse blocking of entire instances, which is workable. Kind of fun to see Elon's Twitter taking and implementing ideas from the Fediverse to be honest.
"Content moderation is what Twitter makes" - that's a brilliant summation of the problem. These social networks have turned themselves into publishers (by centering the recommendation algorithms where else could you end up?). That's the thing no one wants to think too hard about because of the very uncomfortable implications...
A lot of worrying here about moderation in the new Twitter. Musk though will just whip up a version of Full Self Driving to automate the moderating and problem solved, I'm pretty sure.
This is quite a ridiculous blog post. Hyperbole is way too common these days, and this is the type of submission that drove away many of the smartest HN users.
I will always remember when I first learned about bitcoin here in 2010 when the white paper was linked.
Now we have shrieking missives warning about mean people writing stuff on the internet.
Full of spite. We'll see. But moderation was kinda solved at Something Awful by demanding to pay 10 bucks at sign up. Mr. Musk may use something like this; he can demand 10 dogecoins in order to unblock someone mischievous. Hell, it could even be proportional to the reach of the account.
The key quote which other comments are overlooking:
> Here are some examples: you can write as many polite letters to advertisers as you want, but you cannot reasonably expect to collect any meaningful advertising revenue if you do not promise those advertisers “brand safety.” That means you have to ban racism, sexism, transphobia, and all kinds of other speech that is totally legal in the United States but reveals people to be total assholes. So you can make all the promises about “free speech” you want, but the dull reality is that you still have to ban a bunch of legal speech if you want to make money. And when you start doing that, your creepy new right-wing fanboys are going to viciously turn on you, just like they turn on every other social network that realizes the same essential truth.
The one thing that can be counted on Elon doing is Elon doing what makes him the most money.
Elon has also talked about open sourcing "the algorithm" or letting people customize the algorithm that suggests content for them, etc. I suspect that plays in here - by default, Twitter users (and unauthenticated browsers) will probably continue to see Twitter the same way as today, with relatively safe, moderated content.
Logged-in folks will also have the option to go into unmoderated mode, which will drop you into the cesspool if you so desire. Presumably respectable companies will only advertise on the default layer; ads in the cesspool will be for "edgy" t-shirt companies and extremist politicians and others who don't care about their brand being displayed next to questionable content (or prefer it!).
Illegal content of course must continue to be moderated regardless.
To play the devil's advocate: So why haven't advertisers abandoned Fox News? As long as Musk limits his newly acquired toy to being no worse than Fox News (which is plenty bad!), he can still keep advertising dollars coming in.
According to their latest quarterly report they had $1.18B in revenue, $1.08B from advertising. Is there really enough potential in "premium users" or something else to forgo that billion dollars per quarter?
“ Twitter, the company, makes very little interesting technology; the tech stack is not the valuable asset. The asset is the user base: hopelessly addicted politicians, reporters, celebrities, and other people who should know better but keep posting anyway. You! You, Elon Musk, are addicted to Twitter. You’re the asset. You just bought yourself for $44 billion dollars.”
Yeah, I think this absolutely nails it, and what I find interesting is that in all the time this acquisition has been up in the air Musk has failed to ever engage in the detail of how to address these issues. Elon Musk is interestingly probably the worst person to run Twitter, because whilst the previous guys running twitter weren't very competent, they had their product and they were navigating through issues under extreme pressure. Musk on the other hand, has 1,000 pain points to press on that everyone who previously tried to coerce twitter will now be looking at. Whether it be the federal government pressing on SpaceX, Union busting at Tesla, or whether it's Texas coming after Twitter for abortion information, he is going to be so much more exposed.
I am personally hoping that Twitter will break Elon Musk, and then go out of business. That would be the best possible outcome. I am not holding my breath that it will happen, but it would be incredible.
Yeah, had the same thought. People seem to be perfectly happy to participate in horribly moderated internet spaces full of people who are exactly like not-all-men fedora bullies, but in the other direction - mostly because there's no alternative (yet).
Right, I think Elon's idea is moving censorship into everyone's own responsibility, something like: Follow who you want to, ignore who you don't, it's not your responsibility nor your right to silence other people off a monopoly platform just because you disagree with them.
While I agree with the author on many things, this one upset me:
> fucking government... They’re out here banning books, Elon!
I don't believe that repeating a lie will make it true. The government is not banning any books, Nilay. Parents do. And not globally, but at a local level.
It's another question whether they should or not, but I'd expect more precision and integrity from a prominent journalist. Most people don't fact check everything and if they learn something from a reputable source, they believe it.
The local township library and school board are both literally the government, and the book banning is largely happening based on local election results (typically county positions and/or school board positions -- both from election ballots)
It's not wrong at all to say the government is banning books -- that statement is objectively correct, it's just happening at the lowest levels of government.
This article makes no sense; it sounds like leftist propaganda.
Advertisers only care about 'brand safety' to the extent that it impacts their ability to sell stuff.
So long as users keep using the platform, advertisers will keep coming back - They're not going to vacate the platform and let their competitors get all the eyeballs... If they did, those competitors would gain market share and make incumbents irrelevant.
Users have made it clear that they want free speech on social media platforms so I don't see how giving users what they want would cause them to leave.
The problem with Twitter so far is that they sold out to big governments and big corporations and completely neglected their users in the process. Having front-row access to users, Twitter is actually in a position to dictate the rules; it should not be taking orders from politicians and corporate executives when those orders are harmful to its users.
It does sound a bit like someone panicking that the Twitter might stop censoring stuff they don't agree with.
And the whole "content moderation" argument is really weak, sites worked entirey fine without the heavy content moderation (including Youtube, porn and copyright violation was removed but for good part of site's existence pretty much anything went). It only got more heavy because Google wanted to appease the ad market
Sure you can argue you have to take account laws and such and that will take effort but social sites don't exactly stop there.
> Having front-row access to users, Twitter is actually in a position to dictate the rules; it should not be taking orders from politicians and corporate executives when those orders are harmful to its users.
It's a corporation so priority will always be money one way or another. Now putting themselves as "open" might work, but so might doing what Twitter (and google, and facebook, and pretty much any big tech with social media) does and nudge the visibility of content to stuff they want to happen. "Censorship" isn't even needed, it isn't removed, it just won't show up in search results or recommendations. Pretend people don't click it and of course nobody can verify that and you're all good.
If that initial statement about not caring about the ad's context were true the advertising companies wouldn't have torched Youtube's as revenue 5 years ago because explicitly their ads were played on unsavory content. It turns out they do care, probably not for moral reasons but presumably because some bean counter actively calculated that they'd lose more than they gained from such perception of being associated with Fringe viewpoints.
nelsonic|3 years ago
uni_rule|3 years ago
everdrive|3 years ago
Ignoring the context of the article, I don’t believe that the example you’ve given here is really fair. It’s perfectly valid to review something which you could not create. If we excluded that whole category, then reviews would mostly cease to exist, and only peer review would be possible.
awb|3 years ago
Success does breed success, but it’s not inevitable. There’s still hard work to be done and his big successes have come from hardware (batteries & rockets). Twitter is software in the social / content realm.
To use your cooking analogy, it’s like saying don’t bet against Gordon Ramsey (an expert in the cooking / media / art / experience realm) if he acquired Virgin Records. I’m sure he has connections and some knowledge that helps, but it’s a new field with new challenges.
tenpies|3 years ago
Is there anything other than aspirational thinking behind this statement? Musk himself has said it's a cash incinerator - and that's by Musk standards (read: used to huge public subsidies and constant capital raises).
Invictus0|3 years ago
michaelt|3 years ago
kbenson|3 years ago
I agree it's like that but disagree there's a problem with that. Ultimately it's the consumers that are the judges if it's a business.
beej71|3 years ago
And the way to make it better would be to go back in time and not make the mistake of buying it.
runjake|3 years ago
Nilay is doing the exact right thing, in the context of his corporate job.
yladiz|3 years ago
What you're really arguing here that Elon Musk is more capable than the previous people in charge of Twitter. I won't defend them much, but based on many of his previous actions I'm skeptical he's going to do any better and in fact think he'll probably do worse than the ex-leadership.
drcongo|3 years ago
paulpauper|3 years ago
b0sk|3 years ago
jayd16|3 years ago
Bubble_Pop_22|3 years ago
In a world where people are increasingly living in urban areas, fiber will annihilate satellite internet.
Starlink is yet another niche thing which Musk is specialized in pursuing.
In fact all of Musck companies can be summarized with "everybody has heard of them in the financial and technology press, but not many people use them"
mikkergp|3 years ago
It’s impossible for Elon to accomplish his current vision because it’s not internally consistent. You can’t only moderate what is within the law and make Twitter a more friendly place and make it more attractive to advertisers and grow it to a billion users, and make it the defacto public square and make it the free speech public network and eliminate bots, and make X the everything app and fire 75% of twitter employees.
So while I think Elon Musk will succeed, it’s also interesting to point out the paradoxes and difficulty and in doing so elicit curiosity in how he will accomplish his goal. Conservatives seem to be taking a victory lap today, but it’s one of those things where compromise means no one ends up completely happy.
xiphias2|3 years ago
I don't really like him, but cancelling people exactly at the same time by all media companies shows that it's all controlled by a few people. Of course they try everything to say bad things about Elon now...it's funny to see actually.
memish|3 years ago
It's a lot easier to dismiss someone's success when it only happens once.
joshstrange|3 years ago
amadeuspagel|3 years ago
Twitter is a platform. Everyone who uses twitter decides who to follow and who to block. Everyone sees different tweets.
Twitter for a long time had almost complete freedom of speech. It described itself as the free speech wing of the free speech party[1]. In that time, it had fewer rules then 4chan. But to use twitter did not feel like using 4chan, unless you decided to follow the kind of people who post on 4chan.
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2012/mar/22/twitter-tony-w...
uni_rule|3 years ago
pessimizer|3 years ago
I won't energetically argue with you that 4chan and Reddit aren't shit, but plenty of people would. They've both been massively influential on world culture. I would argue that twitter moderation has been almost strictly political and along culture war lines. Reddit, instead, mainly targeted cruelty and child exploitation for moderation.
wooque|3 years ago
...for you, 4chan is one of the last places on the internet that feel like the old internet, organic, unfiltered, raw. If you can't handle it, there is Facebook for you.
CodeSgt|3 years ago
Rather they're just tired of blatant censorship some individuals face when expressing an opinion that goes against popular politics of the time.
There's a middle ground between allowing literal nazi's to do whatever they want and blatantly influencing discussion on a mass scale by silencing those you disagree with.
Spivak|3 years ago
No moderation is a loosing game because any platform that offers better moderation will be attractive to the masses leaving the people whose decorum is so abhorrent that the "free speech" servers are the only ones that will take them.
noxer|3 years ago
So is twitter. At least in the last years it turned to absolute s*it. In mid 2021 I resurrected my old long not used account. I made maybe 20 comments in 3 month before I got "banned". I'm probably not really banned I would just have to remove my last comment but I cant do that because I can not login anymore (which may or may not be related to the "banning").
The post in question was an obvious sarcastic wordplay/pun that even if interpreted literally would have meant something along the lines of "dead people wont complain" which is not only factually true its also rather soft dark humor. As expected they lump everything together in their ToS so they can give you a paragraph of things as a reason and you dont know which rule you actually broke.
throwaway0x7E6|3 years ago
agumonkey|3 years ago
ps: also I don't follow 4chan much, so maybe there were grave events on there
hn2017|3 years ago
https://twitter.com/ncri_io/status/1586007698910646272?s=20&...
b0sk|3 years ago
ryandvm|3 years ago
Not sure how long Alex Jones or Mike Lindell would last in here...
_blz2|3 years ago
wdr1|3 years ago
evouga|3 years ago
Twitter addiction has wasted the best minds of my generation and if it implodes and takes Musk with it… win-win!
labrador|3 years ago
andsoitis|3 years ago
Which of his engineering teams? Tesla? SpaceX? I don't see why they would be working on content moderation.
mikkergp|3 years ago
Depending on how you define content moderation this is literally not possible, 1. Because content moderation is adversarial and has to adapt and 2. Content moderation is subjective, as the original article says content moderation is the product that companies sell, and it will likely have to change as time goes on (I’m not just talking “what’s popular/offensive” but like do you allow videos, how long are the videos, do videos get prioritized above text or audio, 280 character vs 144 character tweets, editing tweets, dislike button, etc.
datalopers|3 years ago
andsoitis|3 years ago
His twitter profile currently says "Chief Twit". Teenage boy level humor but the joke is on the joker.
pjkundert|3 years ago
"Solving" content moderation is a losing battle -- there is no way to humanly moderate anything at the rate it can be produced, and Elon knows this. It's insane, so he probably won't do it.
But, allowing content to be produced, but making sure no real person ever sees it, until the content producer earns their way into "your" group -- now that can be automated.
Elon has access to Exascale hardware, so K-means Clusters with arbitrarily large dimensionality is at his disposal.
Ya figure he might not have thought this through?
screye|3 years ago
Isn't this the best kind of company to acquire ? A product that has such inherent value that even a bumbling clown car of company could not sabotage its ability to retain users. Imo, Reddit and Twitter have monopolized 2 of the most effective forms of communication to have existed on the internet: Forums and memes (memes in the Dawkinian sense) and their tiny size is entirely a result of terrible leadership.
While musk didn't buy it for a particularly cheap price (at least in Winter 2022 prices), He should be able to justify the net worth as well as any competing tech company will be able to.
To quote Charlie Munger:
> Never underestimate the man who overestimates himself. These weird guys who overestimate themselves occasionally knock it right out of the park. I would never buy Tesla stock and I would never sell it short.
incomingpain|3 years ago
Elon isn't worried about valuation. His consideration could be 'can I fix low hanging fruit and provide value'
If elon is right the current content moderation has gone wrong, and it has. Then by fixing this it should provide a return on his investment. Not to mention the counter force of those who cannot allow free discussion who may buy him out in order to stop it.
But more important, what elon also understands. What is a billion $? Elon is wealthy enough he can own any toy or thing he ever wants. It has less to do with some currency and himself. He has surpassed this point in economics placing him amongst a select few who have won this game.
Now he has the chance to use this excess wealth to form the future. Which scares people.
amai|3 years ago
This will happen and not only with China. Just think about Bezos, the Washington Post and Saudi Arabia. But on the other side I think Tesla and SpaceX shouldn't do business with dictatorships anyway. So maybe in the end this will be a good thing.
TradingPlaces|3 years ago
>The essential truth of every social network is that the product is content moderation, and everyone hates the people who decide how content moderation works.
harshaw|3 years ago
lemondrink|3 years ago
Twitter is being distilled into a political tool - both side, endlessly crying into the void, appealing to their confirmation biases.
Hop on over to /pol/ to see what unregulated politic speak turns into.
I give it 10 years and it’ll be a ghost town.
badcppdev|3 years ago
* Youth
* Late 20s to early 40s
* Elderly
qualudeheart|3 years ago
diimdeep|3 years ago
[1] https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/futureofmedia/index-us-mains...
erellsworth|3 years ago
erellsworth|3 years ago
zach_garwood|3 years ago
LatteLazy|3 years ago
He said it was about free speech but Twitter is already about as free as it's possible to be without permitting a whole bunch of content that is NOT protected under the first amendment (CP, calls to violence etc).
And if it is about free speech then it cannot be an automated moderation play, because there is nothing to moderate if you're a pure free speech platform.
The best I can guess, is it's a political play? Turn down politicians who he dislikes? Or he just had a drunk/high/bipolar period and did it without a plan.
maxsilver|3 years ago
I'm still convinced this is how he makes more than half of all of his decisions (see for example, him 'building a submarine' or 'boring/loop'). His success seems to be because he sometimes takes already-known-obvious-good bets that no other person could take first because they aren't billionaires.
> The best I can guess, is it's a political play?
I don't think it's a political play, so much as he got angry and impulsive and jumped in without thinking, couldn't back out, and desperately needs to ret-con this into making any sense, so is pivoting in into a political play.
bluehatbrit|3 years ago
TexanFeller|3 years ago
There are plenty of things that are nothing of the sort, merely “sins against wokeism” that will get you instantly banned until you repent. Look, I would prefer conservative people treat feminists and trans people with more sensitivity, but examples that come up over and over are people getting banned for making jokes about there actually being innate differences between men and women, or the ways that slogans like “trans women ARE women” might be a bit too strongly worded.
paulpauper|3 years ago
unknown|3 years ago
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qualudeheart|3 years ago
ultra_nick|3 years ago
I'm convinced half the polarization in America comes from neither side understanding the other side's basic arguments.
bpodgursky|3 years ago
This is just wildly untrue. There is a huge range of gender-critical views, vaccine skepticism, any combination of race/gender/genetics/IQ discourse, and a ton of other topics that will get you banned, that come nowhere near first amendment protections.
You might think that's a good thing, that's a valid argument, but it's simply untrue to imply that the limit is similar to 1A protections.
Chris2048|3 years ago
Plus there are plenty posting call to violence who are not banned, but are suspiciously on the "right" side of politics.
yreg|3 years ago
E.g. in Trump's case they could have deleted the few tweets which they considered calls to violence instead of handing out a permanent ban.
(I'm not saying they should have done that.)
memish|3 years ago
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nemo44x|3 years ago
notacoward|3 years ago
This would actually be a great outcome IMO. Supporting shared blocklists would have similar effect, and probably be easier to implement. Unfortunately, I very much doubt than Elmo Nutsack would allow that. Despite all his claims about "free speech" I'm pretty sure enabling those who would silence people they deem too "woke" via harassment is very much part of the reason behind his takeover. Check out the #TwitterTakeover tag to see the hordes slavering at the prospect (but be aware that it's hard on the stomach if you're a decent person).
ilyt|3 years ago
Don't think that works when you can just make another account if you do not want to be associated with something on your main one.
inawarminister|3 years ago
SilverBirch|3 years ago
twoWhlsGud|3 years ago
entropicgravity|3 years ago
18pfsmt|3 years ago
I will always remember when I first learned about bitcoin here in 2010 when the white paper was linked.
Now we have shrieking missives warning about mean people writing stuff on the internet.
valeg|3 years ago
minimaxir|3 years ago
> Here are some examples: you can write as many polite letters to advertisers as you want, but you cannot reasonably expect to collect any meaningful advertising revenue if you do not promise those advertisers “brand safety.” That means you have to ban racism, sexism, transphobia, and all kinds of other speech that is totally legal in the United States but reveals people to be total assholes. So you can make all the promises about “free speech” you want, but the dull reality is that you still have to ban a bunch of legal speech if you want to make money. And when you start doing that, your creepy new right-wing fanboys are going to viciously turn on you, just like they turn on every other social network that realizes the same essential truth.
The one thing that can be counted on Elon doing is Elon doing what makes him the most money.
lastofthemojito|3 years ago
Logged-in folks will also have the option to go into unmoderated mode, which will drop you into the cesspool if you so desire. Presumably respectable companies will only advertise on the default layer; ads in the cesspool will be for "edgy" t-shirt companies and extremist politicians and others who don't care about their brand being displayed next to questionable content (or prefer it!).
Illegal content of course must continue to be moderated regardless.
ThrowawayR2|3 years ago
throwaway71271|3 years ago
lastofthemojito|3 years ago
According to their latest quarterly report they had $1.18B in revenue, $1.08B from advertising. Is there really enough potential in "premium users" or something else to forgo that billion dollars per quarter?
https://s22.q4cdn.com/826641620/files/doc_financials/2022/q2...
mikkergp|3 years ago
SilverBirch|3 years ago
93po|3 years ago
Do you mean engage publicly, or engage even privately within his own teams?
NN88|3 years ago
unknown|3 years ago
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throwaway0x7E6|3 years ago
I will be very happy if all their frontend people get axed.
karaterobot|3 years ago
influx|3 years ago
Marazan|3 years ago
Technically I did say something. I said "Cool, get those Nazi's out of here, good job."
keeperoftruth|3 years ago
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popilewiz|3 years ago
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pipeline_peak|3 years ago
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happytoexplain|3 years ago
Edit: After my post, the parent was edited to include the qualifier, "both of these opinions are the extreme".
commandlinefan|3 years ago
Covzire|3 years ago
hdjjhhvvhga|3 years ago
> fucking government... They’re out here banning books, Elon!
I don't believe that repeating a lie will make it true. The government is not banning any books, Nilay. Parents do. And not globally, but at a local level. It's another question whether they should or not, but I'd expect more precision and integrity from a prominent journalist. Most people don't fact check everything and if they learn something from a reputable source, they believe it.
maxsilver|3 years ago
The local township library and school board are both literally the government, and the book banning is largely happening based on local election results (typically county positions and/or school board positions -- both from election ballots)
It's not wrong at all to say the government is banning books -- that statement is objectively correct, it's just happening at the lowest levels of government.
pionar|3 years ago
dymk|3 years ago
objectivetruth|3 years ago
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gjsman-1000|3 years ago
jongjong|3 years ago
Advertisers only care about 'brand safety' to the extent that it impacts their ability to sell stuff.
So long as users keep using the platform, advertisers will keep coming back - They're not going to vacate the platform and let their competitors get all the eyeballs... If they did, those competitors would gain market share and make incumbents irrelevant.
Users have made it clear that they want free speech on social media platforms so I don't see how giving users what they want would cause them to leave.
The problem with Twitter so far is that they sold out to big governments and big corporations and completely neglected their users in the process. Having front-row access to users, Twitter is actually in a position to dictate the rules; it should not be taking orders from politicians and corporate executives when those orders are harmful to its users.
ilyt|3 years ago
And the whole "content moderation" argument is really weak, sites worked entirey fine without the heavy content moderation (including Youtube, porn and copyright violation was removed but for good part of site's existence pretty much anything went). It only got more heavy because Google wanted to appease the ad market
Sure you can argue you have to take account laws and such and that will take effort but social sites don't exactly stop there.
> Having front-row access to users, Twitter is actually in a position to dictate the rules; it should not be taking orders from politicians and corporate executives when those orders are harmful to its users.
It's a corporation so priority will always be money one way or another. Now putting themselves as "open" might work, but so might doing what Twitter (and google, and facebook, and pretty much any big tech with social media) does and nudge the visibility of content to stuff they want to happen. "Censorship" isn't even needed, it isn't removed, it just won't show up in search results or recommendations. Pretend people don't click it and of course nobody can verify that and you're all good.
uni_rule|3 years ago
_hcuq|3 years ago