Elon Musk: Always A Douche

[alfred russel]

The main difference between a company owned by one shareholder and a publicly held company is the one shareholder can completely screw the company's value without having to answer to the other shareholders.

LOL.

That may give him more flexibility to take risks that are not as palatable to a publicly traded company. But none of the things you listed appear to be in that category.

Last year twitter lost $221 million. The year before it lost over $1.1 billion.

Okay, maybe it is high growth tech company and losses aren't such a big deal. Its free cash flows have gotten worse each of the last three years.

Maybe it needs to be taking some big swings?

[Berkut]

I think Musk also floated forcing people to confirm their ID.  For whatever benefits allowing anonymous accounts brings (I follow a Canadian fighting in Ukraine on Twitter - fascinating stuff, but he never shows his face or his name), I'm pretty sure it's overwhelmed by the number of anonymous trolls who make Twitter so unpleasant.

A lot of members of vulnerable minorities would be forced off Twitter due to facing death threats etc. if they were there under their real names.

I question that as being really true.

But in any case, the issue is not forcing them to reveal their real names, it is forcing them to prove that they are real to the platform.

I think there is no reason there cannot be some standards around anonymity. In general, you should be forced to "prove" you are an actual human being, and broadly who you claim to be. If an argument can be made that in some cases, that presents a risk, then force people to make THAT argument and there can be exceptions.

But 99.99% of people using Twitter don't fall into those categories. And if we want social media to stop being so damn toxic, there has to be some kind of vetting. I am all for free speech for actual human beings. Not so much for bots, Russian psyops trolls, and advertisers.

I mean, back at brexit ref time I had people threatening me with physical violence.
And I'm a straight white guy in the UK.
To be a queer black woman in the US...

I think the number of queer black woman in the US who are actually in danger from their Twitter activity, even if their identity was known (and that is not what is being discussed anyway) is statistically close to zero.

People threaten people on the internet with violence all the time. One of the ways they get away with that (which is illegal, btw) is that they are anonymous and the law cannot actually respond to their illegal activity because of that anonymity.

If a criminal doesn't introduce himself the police in the US cannot respond to a crime?

Of course, that is definitely what I just said.

[The Brain]

I think Musk also floated forcing people to confirm their ID.  For whatever benefits allowing anonymous accounts brings (I follow a Canadian fighting in Ukraine on Twitter - fascinating stuff, but he never shows his face or his name), I'm pretty sure it's overwhelmed by the number of anonymous trolls who make Twitter so unpleasant.

A lot of members of vulnerable minorities would be forced off Twitter due to facing death threats etc. if they were there under their real names.

I question that as being really true.

But in any case, the issue is not forcing them to reveal their real names, it is forcing them to prove that they are real to the platform.

I think there is no reason there cannot be some standards around anonymity. In general, you should be forced to "prove" you are an actual human being, and broadly who you claim to be. If an argument can be made that in some cases, that presents a risk, then force people to make THAT argument and there can be exceptions.

But 99.99% of people using Twitter don't fall into those categories. And if we want social media to stop being so damn toxic, there has to be some kind of vetting. I am all for free speech for actual human beings. Not so much for bots, Russian psyops trolls, and advertisers.

I mean, back at brexit ref time I had people threatening me with physical violence.
And I'm a straight white guy in the UK.
To be a queer black woman in the US...

I think the number of queer black woman in the US who are actually in danger from their Twitter activity, even if their identity was known (and that is not what is being discussed anyway) is statistically close to zero.

People threaten people on the internet with violence all the time. One of the ways they get away with that (which is illegal, btw) is that they are anonymous and the law cannot actually respond to their illegal activity because of that anonymity.

If a criminal doesn't introduce himself the police in the US cannot respond to a crime?

Of course, that is definitely what I just said.

OK.

[OttoVonBismarck]

I'm not actually convinced Twitter's baseline business model is viable, there are actually a number of current generation companies where I hold that opinion--the Food delivery apps for example all appear to operate genuinely non-viable businesses that are simply being propped up by investors lusting for growth, and all of those apps have the imprimatur of being "tech" companies (even though in many ways they are really not), because they're mostly based in tech hubs and center their business around a smartphone app.

[alfred russel]

I'm not actually convinced Twitter's baseline business model is viable, there are actually a number of current generation companies where I hold that opinion--the Food delivery apps for example all appear to operate genuinely non-viable businesses that are simply being propped up by investors lusting for growth, and all of those apps have the imprimatur of being "tech" companies (even though in many ways they are really not), because they're mostly based in tech hubs and center their business around a smartphone app.

During the 2000 tech bubble, a local startup called "kudzu" started grocery delivery. It had no minimum and no delivery charge. My roommate and I at the time would use it for our groceries on a item by item basis. Watching TV and we wanted to drink an Arizona iced tea? We'd order two and 30-45 minutes later we'd have two teas. It was pretty awesome until the tech bubble went bust and kudzu went bankrupt.

[DGuller]

If a criminal doesn't introduce himself the police in the US cannot respond to a crime?

Of course, that is definitely what I just said.

OK.

It sure is nice to be on a platform that allows you to write more than one sentence. 

[The Brain]

If a criminal doesn't introduce himself the police in the US cannot respond to a crime?

Of course, that is definitely what I just said.

OK.

It sure is nice to be on a platform that allows you to write more than one sentence. 

What happens if Musk buys Languish though?

[viper37]

1)
Also, of course Musk has no fucking clue what he's going to do and likely hasn't thought this through at all. But he doesn't have to--he's making bets by leveraging Tesla shares, which are massively overvalued because millions of idiots think Musk is a genius and are willing to value his company at hundreds of times future revenue and higher than every other carmaker in America combined (despite having like 1/65th of their production output.)

2)
If Musk means what he says about "doing no more than the law itself" on limiting speech, that also means not limiting anonymous speech, under current free speech jurisprudence you are entitled to anonymity. Now a private company isn't bound to respect that, but Musk has said he wants no further restrictions beyond what the law requires. Well, the law doesn't require you identify yourself to engage in speech.

1) He is a genius.  No social skills at all, possibly due to his asperger, but he is a pretty smart guy.  He's also quite arrogant, which comes with being a multibillionaire genius.

2) Twitter operates in many countries.  If Elon Musk will go as far as the law allows it to, does it mean it will censor accounts from a country where hate speech is illegal, or where it's illegal to criticize a government's decisions?  I mean "Fuck the J* and the N*" is perfectly legal speech in the US.  In Canada, I'm entering hate speech territory (a little more complex than that obviously, but you get the gist of it).  Will Twitter protect my free speech or abide by Canadian laws where I am located and where Twitter likely has servers?

I think it's a little more complex than what Republicans envision.  Also, Twitter didn't start censoring speech because they were authoritarians.  They did it because it made sense for their business, like Reddit.  It's always a question of how many people you lose vs how many you gains.  4Chan/8Chan stuff like that get talked a lot, but they don't have the user base to generate billions in revenue.  Will Musk accept the price?

[viper37]

If a criminal doesn't introduce himself the police in the US cannot respond to a crime?

Of course, that is definitely what I just said.

OK.

It sure is nice to be on a platform that allows you to write more than one sentence. 

What happens if Musk buys Languish though?

We will become a haven of free speech where people are free to troll and insult each other at will without moderation intervention.

Basically, business as usual.

[garbon]

If a criminal doesn't introduce himself the police in the US cannot respond to a crime?

Of course, that is definitely what I just said.

OK.

It sure is nice to be on a platform that allows you to write more than one sentence. 

What happens if Musk buys Languish though?

We will become a haven of free speech where people are free to troll and insult each other at will without moderation intervention.

Basically, business as usual.

Pretty sure our active mod wouldn't let us descend into 4chan chaos currently.

[OttoVonBismarck]

I think the core problem with Twitter is the people that get the most value out of it are people with huge numbers of followers, because it is essentially a form of "free" advertising. The issue is--those are the same people/entities who Twitter in theory probably needs to try and capture revenue from, and they have a decreased interest in paying for advertising when most of the value they get out of the platform is offered for free.

That could certainly mean that a pay-per-follower or pay-per-tweet model for large accounts might be a way to capture more revenue, but I'm not sure at a sufficient level to make Twitter a highly profitable or even moderately profitable company.

The big difference between Twitter and other platforms is it mostly serves a lot of people who want to listen to a few, more important people--be it a news source they care about, a celebrity, a politician etc. This means people have much less of a reason to "engage" on Twitter in ways that Facebook for example heavily monetizes. Facebook as a platform was designed to leverage on two powerful human instincts--the desire for people to toot their own horn to people they barely know and extended family, and the desire of people to be nosy and follow what people they barely know and extended family do. This leads to lots of "engagement" on Facebook in ways that create reams of personal data that Facebook can use to better monetize its users. It also lead to much higher user growth on Facebook than on Twitter.

Instagram, which is also owned by Facebook, leverages a desire for people to consume shared images and to share images, stripped out of the "cruft" of a traditional platform like...Facebook. But it actually still creates good user data based on what type of images people like to consume and etc, you can build a customer profile.

Twitter in many ways looks more like a quasi-RSS feed, with far less aptitude for building such profiles. There are certainly millions of "ordinary people" inanely tweeting nonsense, but those tweets aren't producing much value because they are rarely tied to the sort of robust profile a Facebook account has. In another sense, you could say "well getting rid of anonymity would somewhat fix this", and it would probably make Twitter profiles more valuable per unit to advertisers, but it would also probably significantly reduce Twitter's total number of active accounts--because again, many experts think a non-negligible number of Twitter accounts are dupe accounts, bot accounts etc. It is a genuine question as to whether "cleaning that up" and the resultant decline in accounts, will result in a net positive as to how Twitter can market itself to advertisers.

Additionally, the way the far right is gleefully looking forward to "taking over" Twitter is a big risk to all of this. I can't frankly think of any platform in which the far right dominates by spewing nonsense, that has survived with a healthy population. Such environments almost always become closed to / uninteresting to outsiders--see how 4chan / 8chan developed (not that those sites were ever intended to be profitable.)

[Grey Fox]

If a criminal doesn't introduce himself the police in the US cannot respond to a crime?

Of course, that is definitely what I just said.

OK.

It sure is nice to be on a platform that allows you to write more than one sentence. 

What happens if Musk buys Languish though?

I see someone missed post 22275 of a certain thread.

[The Brain]

If a criminal doesn't introduce himself the police in the US cannot respond to a crime?

Of course, that is definitely what I just said.

OK.

It sure is nice to be on a platform that allows you to write more than one sentence. 

What happens if Musk buys Languish though?

I see someone missed post 22275 of a certain thread.

I'm sorry.

Have you guys noticed any differences since Musk bought Languish?

[Jacob]

Pretty sure our active mod wouldn't let us descend into 4chan chaos currently.

I'd actually enjoy wielding the ban-hammer with CdM-esque abandon, at least for while.

I suspect Musk would fire me fairly quickly, though.

[Sheilbh]

Interesting take from the Guardian's Tech Correspondent - which I basically agree with - adapted from his Twitter thread and then sent in his newsletter (both platforms captured by the far-right for "free speech" reasons ):

OK, I was wrong: I really thought Musk was bullshitting. But he is, as tech analyst Benedict Evans puts it, "a bullshitter who delivers". He doesn't care if things are true when he says them, but sometimes makes them true anyway.
    We can file "I'm going to buy Twitter for $54.20" alongside "I'll sell a flamethrower", "I'll start a tunnelling business called the Boring Company", and "I'll call my baby X Æ A-12" as things that didn't sound sincere but apparently were.
    What next for Twitter, though? I think it's still the case that the model for Musk is "billionaire buying a sports team" rather than "billionaire investing in a high-yielding asset" – but his bankers will be demanding a return.
    That means limited scope to make fundamental changes. For all he discussed in now-deleted tweets about removing adverts and improving the subscription offering, those things cost money, and he needs to boost Twitter's profit, not shrink it.
    So the changes we should expect fall into two camps: minor tweaks demanded by a notorious power user – and shifts in matters of principle, which are free to make and only likely to affect the bottom line in diffuse ways.
    On the former, Twitter has already built an edit button that it could enable at the flick of a switch. He's also talked of "authenticating all humans", likely by offering the "verified" label to anyone who wants to send in proof of ID.
    As for the matters of principle, Musk has been clear: "Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated."
    There are obvious high profile changes he could order – chief among them demanding the reinstatement of Donald Trump's account (though the former president has said he doesn't want to come back).
    Musk could also fiddle with Twitter's terms of service. Perhaps a man who famously called the Covid panic "dumb", sued to avoid lockdowns and said he wouldn't get vaccinated might oppose bans on Covid misinformation, for instance.
    But most free speech controversies happen at the coal face of a moderation queue, where a part-time owner (remember, Musk still owns and runs SpaceX, Tesla, Neuralink, and the Boring Company) is unlikely to spend much time.
    So expect the free-speech push to largely happen at the level of extravagant public interventions over high-profile cases. If you're famous enough that your Twitter ban catches Musk's attention, you might have a good shot at a reversal.
    Musk has also suggested that "the twitter algorithm" needs to be made open source. This might happen quickly, but I don't think it's likely to affect much: random chunks of computer code being published that refer to other bits of code that haven't been published tells us ... nothing?
    And while he wants Twitter to be a free-speech platform, the direction of travel is against him, especially overseas. What is he going to do when Twitter's lawyers tell him about the UK's Online Safety Act, which requires all sorts of content moderation? Or Germany's NetzDG?
    Or, for that matter, China. As the Wall Street Journal's Mike Forsythe points out, Twitter is now owned by someone with major manufacturing and sales dependencies in the PRC. What happens if Musk is quietly told to dox a Chinese dissident or see Teslas banned from sale?
    And so people are leaving Twitter. Not in their millions, yet, but certainly in their thousands. As a very unscientific datapoint: I've lost 30 followers since the acquisition was confirmed. Even scaled up to the whole platform, that's not enough to worry Twitter, yet, but it's telling.
    The question is, where does a Twitter power user go? The popular answer seems to be Mastodon, a decentralised, "federated" clone of Twitter that is spread over thousands of volunteer-run instances, each of which can interact with each other, or not, as they see fit.
    "Since August 2018 I have run a social network site called Friend Camp for about 50 of my friends," writes Darius Kazemi, the creator of one such Mastodon instance. "I think Friend Camp is a really nice place ... and I'd like to see more places like Friend Camp on the internet."
    Personally, I like Mastodon in theory, but in practice, I fear fragmenting a Twitter-style social network over untold instances feels a bit too much like responding to Microsoft putting adverts in Windows by recommending Linux on the desktop.
    Others have mooted Tumblr, which is darkly humorous because a huge chunk of Tumblr's power users moved over to Twitter in 2017 after an unpopular acquisition led to changes in moderation that were disliked by some of the site's loudest communities. Turn the volume up, Elton John.
    I don't think it's possible for a site to be both a replacement for Twitter, and a healthy social network, because I no longer think it's possible for a healthy social network to exist that connects the world.
    "A lot of the internet is 10,000 people bullying someone who deserves to be bullied by maybe 1 to 3 people" has become a foundational piece of social network analysis for me, and it's not clear how Musk owning Twitter makes that worse, nor how decentralised replacements fix that.
    But back to Musk. What should we look out for in the weeks to come? First is a staff exodus at Twitter. Not (just) because he's as hated as he is loved, but because going private changes, and likely reduces, the compensation for people who used to get paid in part in stock options.
    Second is a gentle tap on the brakes of some of the site's more controversial moderation decisions. Some high-profile bans will be rescinded, some phrases will disappear from Twitter's terms of service, but the day-to-day experience will take much longer to shift.
    In the mid-to-long term, I wonder if there's cause for optimism. The story of Twitter over the last decade has been of a site stuck in a fundamental disconnect between its incredible socio-cultural importance, and the underperforming business that owns and runs it.
    For the first time, Twitter is owned by someone who thinks the most important part of the site is the conversation, not the adverts that are delivered in between. Maybe he'll ruin everything, but at least he's focusing on the right thing.