There’s a desire to presume Musk is playing 4D chess with his statements - or at least that he’s got some basic intentionality behind what he says - but the reality is that sometimes he just gets high (or, worse, gets sober) and says really stupid shit. I suspect this is one of those moments - he’s trying to pretend it’s a route to profitability for the company, but instead… yeah, all the things you said.
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everything he says is news because he is rich /s
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Personally I think he’s playing tick tack toe on a two by two board. I don’t really care if he loses a s#!+ton of money and Twitter goes down in flames (well, maybe a little — I use Twitter for hobby ideas, and don’t want to go to FB for that, but shrug).
I am curious what he thinks he’s getting out of such a statement, though. In his mind it was a rationale thing to do, and he’s achieving something by it. But for the life of me I can’t think what it might be. I do like @Blamp ’s idea that he’s trying to get Twitter employees to fight the merger for him. And your idea that he might just have been high — or sober — at that particular moment.
In the end I guess it’s like trying to understand why some people think the earth is flat. It’ll never make sense, and it’s a waste of time trying to figure it out.
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Although I hear the Saudis prefer bone saws to lawyers…
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Maybe he can fire so many of the employees because he’s developed a self-driving mode for the platform.
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I’m glad you’ve made Twitter work for you… but for most of us, the issues with Twitter are very obvious. I’ve run the same type of “careful-curation” strategy, and even so, the amount of hate, harassment and misinformation on my timeline is getting worse and worse. If I drill down on a thread from one of the accounts I trust for factual Covid information, there’ll be a host of anti-vaxxers howling and spewing lies in the comments. Public officials announcing a new proposal? Yup, at least half of those comments will be “gotcha” condemnations or personal attacks on the other side. And I follow some trans creators… those threads are the worst battlegrounds of all.
What are the solutions? Don’t read comments or threads? That strips out much of the functionality of the site. Block? I do, early and often, yet the amount of garbage only seems to increase exponentially, and I’ve seen profiles that brag about how many times they’ve been banned, only to start yet another account. And while moderation has been slightly better recently, I’ve seen far too many outright calls to violence judged “not a violation of our Safety Policy” to take their “mod squad” even remotely seriously. It’s a joke, and not a funny one.
I’ve spoken out in the past about the good sides to Twitter, the easy sharing of communication it allows, and the friendships and communities I’ve seen form. But I’ve also seen good people hounded and harassed off Twitter entirely, and the hate brigades are only getting bolder and louder. There’s still promise to the concept of Twitter, but the execution as it is… is profoundly broken– and it will NOT improve under Musk. If/when he takes over, I’m gone… and I’ll miss what was once good about it. But I won’t miss the toxicity that’s guaranteed to thrive under Musk’s rule.
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I’m still not and never have been entirely convinced that even the concept of twitter has promise. I know plenty who insist that their careers and lives have been made better from it, but all the benefits and features they list seem to have better analogues that are no longer used. From my own experience in my writing and gamedev and software work, the metrics I use that tell me how much twitter has brought me have suggested it’s not nearly as impactful as people lead me to believe.
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Even in the professional hashtag that I follow - things will be going along nicely, then some anti-science asshole jumps in and makes a mess, or it gets targeted for religious ads for no apparent reason. It either needs to have a massive and aggressive mod presence, or it really doesn’t serve any purpose but to be a cesspool of hate and bigotry.
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This is the core of the problem, whether we’re talking about Twitter or Facebook. Moderating any centralised social media platform (including this BBS) requires trained professional human moderators and strong systems to support them.*
At the massive scales we’re discussing in the case of Twitter and FB, that ends up being a huge cost centre that neither Zuck nor Dorsey, and certainly not Musk, are willing to spend on. Instead, they hand-wave it all away with Libertarian/Californian Ideology calls for freeze peach, which in turn makes a joke of any user conduct policies (which, as you note, have no real enforcement behind them).
I know you’re familiar with all this, but it’s important for those who say “just self-curate and block” to understand why that will never be enough to avoid bad actors on these platforms. I’ve often turned poorly designed products and services to my advantage but Twitter and Facebook are just too fundamentally broken (by design) for me to bother with them.
[* An engaged core of users who want to preserve the quality of the platform also helps, but that’s not going to happen with owners who fundamentally agree with Thatcher that “there’s no such thing as society”]
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It’s become very clear that Musk is shortly going the way of most of the guilded age nouveau riche robber barons - augered straight into the ground. Every bluff, bs stunt, brain-fart and ill-thought out misadventure will isolate him further, and he’ll just flame out. Easy come, easy go.
Are those child-labour emerald mines still operating?
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“Government doesn’t work!”
makes sure government doesn’t work
“See, I told you.”
rinse, repeat.
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or the the ability to turn on some sort of community, friends of friends, control for directly posting comments - some tool to stop popular users from becoming a center for walls of hate.
i don’t follow any conservatives, so i don’t know how they fare. it seems of all the liberal or progressive leaning people i follow, the more minority communities their identity intersects, with the more personal the attacks become
i don’t know how they manage to survive reading the replies. i don’t think i could manage it
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Looks like the government may have noticed but if the government prevents him from going through with deal he can play victim and my Facebook will be filled with “they just don’t want us to see the algorithms”.
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I suspect he was so out of his gourd (or in it), that he thought his plan to radically reduce costs would be seen as a smart move. (He really doesn’t seem to think through anything Twitter-related.) It is possible he’s instead just trying to blow up the deal, but a more likely-to-be-successful strategy is the one where it gets blocked on national security grounds (which he’s also making a case for, possibly accidentally). But yeah, whatever he’s doing is almost certainly so dumb it’s impossible to try to make sense out of it.
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If you can’t beat them, confuse them?
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Unfortunately for some of us, we don’t go looking for the hate, the hate comes looking for us. My step one for avoiding harassment on Twitter was either remove myself from it or stop being transgender. Only one of those is actually possible, so I don’t have an account anymore. It was from 2006 too, but it wasn’t worth the trouble anymore.
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Anybody who is funding this is down 67% on day 1 the moment the ink dries. Any they have no way to sell their stake since it is now a private company. It will take a lot of growth to overcome that amount of loss.
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This is why I don’t understand why people think Elon’s playing 5D chess here. He needs co-investors. That means it has to look appealing. There are two levers he has to pull. One is to somehow increase the money coming in. I don’t see that working because Twitter’s tried all manner of things short of requiring a subscription for all users or a pay-per-post scheme. The other is to decrease the money going out. Twitter’s biggest cost is resources, and the product is pretty feature complete. He can on day one cut down to the bone and actually get profitable, then worry about scaling resources/staffing back up.
This is the first step every ven cap company takes when they enter a company that is as upside down as twitter is. It shouldn’t be considered some 5D chess.
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I’d be curious to know how his various capital pals stack up in terms of motivation. The various VC shops and hedge funds with anodyne-but-occasionally-slightly-sinister names are presumably in it for the money(though there are at least two possible ways of being in it for the money; the true-believer Musk-will-revolutionize-it way; and the ‘we run a white collar chop shop’ way); the ‘crypto’ guys may be in it for the money or may be in it for the continuation of a world of madness and frothy huffing of VC money and ponzi schemes(which is their particular way of being in it for the money); while the sunny-place-for-shady-people petro plutocrats probably aren’t treating losing money as an objective; but could easily be more interesting in the cultural clout and intelligence opportunities of further stake in a nontrivial communications platform than they are in booking a profit: it’s not like you commission celebrity architects to build stadiums and aggressively court the world cup because it’s a straightforwardly profitable business.
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