Elon Musk: Always A Douche

[OttoVonBismarck]

I'm simply choosing to take Musk at his word, that he is a "Free Speech absolutist", and anyone who comes from the same internet I did should know what that means. I feel like most of us here were very active on the Internet back in the 90s, and there's a lot of lessons from back then.

Reddit was originally run on almost free speech absolutism principles. The premise being, Reddit is not going to moderate the content of posts, instead it lets the people who run the subreddits do so. If a subreddit has a bunch of offensive and objectionable things in it, and you dislike how the sub's moderators handle it, don't visit that sub. Of course there were exceptions even at the very beginning--child porn I believe is technically a strict liability thing, so reddit couldn't just allow that on its platform and say "hey we don't moderate it", so that was basically always actioned even in the early/wild days of the early 2000s.

But back then, Reddit generally was the wild West outside of a few like outright direct criminal things it would stop. Reddit had to continually increase how much it moderated subreddits over time, until by 2022 you end up with pretty similar concepts to Twitter governing how reddit oversees the various subreddits.

Over time a few things happened, Reddit found that it couldn't make like any money whatsoever because advertisers simply didn't want to be affiliated with a platform that had all the NeoNazi and other awful shit on it that Reddit did. They also found that the subreddits affiliated with the most toxic online communities, also often correlated with subreddits causing serious problems that Reddit had to address. It ends up White Nationalists and people of that ilk are also the type who are going to engage in incessant campaigns doxxing, harassing users/moderators of other subreddits, threatening violence on other subreddits, and other things that were just creating too many problems for reddit. So eventually a lot of that just had to go away, and it did. Then reddit started to crack down even more broadly, there were some real gross subs with what I think are called "cuties" content, which is basically pedophiles sharing pictures of children that are not pornographic, but basically are being used for sexual gratification purposes by the pedophiles, that had to go too and was purged out.

Eventually the twin desires of getting the worst people in the world off your platform, removing subreddits that simply create too many moderation problems with frequent criminality, and removing the worst of the worst subs in terms of hurting relationships with advertisers...you end up with a platform just like Twitter that is pretty free for all but actually moderates a ton of stuff under the hood. If Musk is really to be held to his word, he would get rid of all that moderation and take Twitter back to "Day 0" reddit, where the only thing prohibited is things that create direct criminal liability for Twitter (aka child porn and use of twitter to plan/organize criminal actions.)

I should note back in then early days of Reddit I was a pretty active user and kind of a big believer in Reddit's almost pure free speech approach. It was the actual experience of living on the Internet through the last 25 years and seeing how that worked out that convinced me that approach doesn't work, and that Reddit was right to crack down on almost everything it has cracked down on.

[Syt]

[crazy canuck]

Back in the time before time things that occupied a lot of minds Was the possibility of control aid media being concentrated in a few owners.  Concerned over that drove regulation which prevented, or at least try to prevent, that sort of concentration from occurring.

The Internet changed all that. I think mainly because government officials and politicians didn't understand what was happening. Not to be too critical, few people did.  And so the Internet was completely and regulated. Unlike all other media.

It may now be too late.

Russia and China have showed great success in regulating the Internet, hope is not lost.

My greatest concern is that younger people like you equate regulation with communism. That actually makes me think that all is lost. It is your generation that is going to elect the leaders that matter most in the coming years.


Look at the discussion we are having in this thread. The fate of one of the most important worldwide communication tools is in the hands of one man.  Whole discussion revolves around what he will or won't do.  And in that context, A comment about relation is met with a stupid retort.  We are truly fucked.

[The Brain]

How much regulation of the internet did the Soviet Union manage before its end? Non-rhetorical.

[The Minsky Moment]

Musk is who he is, as the thread title indicates.  His model of corporate leadership is not one I would personally embrace; I'm confident that he is responsible for more cardiac episodes among general counsel than all other CEOs combined.

That said - the results are hard to argue with.  He's had a lot of success building high profile businesses under challenging circumstances.

Occam's razor - he saw a business he was interested in and figured he could run it better. 

[Barrister]

I should note back in then early days of Reddit I was a pretty active user and kind of a big believer in Reddit's almost pure free speech approach. It was the actual experience of living on the Internet through the last 25 years and seeing how that worked out that convinced me that approach doesn't work, and that Reddit was right to crack down on almost everything it has cracked down on.

Not sure if you were aware of this, but one of the founders of Reddit had a lengthy Twitter thread about a week ago about Musk purchasing Twitter.  Basically said that no matter how much Musk believes in free speech, the dynamics of running a large social media company force you to have a certain level of moderatio or else the entire network just will collapse.

https://twitter.com/yishan/status/1514938507407421440?s=20&t=FXMNA7faMd8wnwAjf-rBxA

[DGuller]

Let's put on an optimist hat for a moment.  Is there anything objectively good that can result from Musk owning Twitter?  We're mourning it as if it isn't a steaming pile of crap currently, but it already is.  Can he actually accomplish some objective good as the owner?

[Barrister]

Let's put on an optimist hat for a moment.  Is there anything objectively good that can result from Musk owning Twitter?  We're mourning it as if it isn't a steaming pile of crap currently, but it already is.  Can he actually accomplish some objective good as the owner?

A time-limited "Edit" button would actually be useful.  How many tweets have you seen with a typo in them, with a follow up twee correcting the typo, when surely just allowing a quick edit would be simpler?

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.

[Admiral Yi]

He could make it more profitable. 

[Berkut]

Let's put on an optimist hat for a moment.  Is there anything objectively good that can result from Musk owning Twitter?  We're mourning it as if it isn't a steaming pile of crap currently, but it already is.  Can he actually accomplish some objective good as the owner?

Absolutely.

A privately held company owned and controlled by Musk could enact some criticial changes that could improve the platform immensely.

More robust authentication of users to eliminate bots for example.

Requiring users to "prove" they are human.

One of things he mentioned was making the algorithms open source and transparent.

All of this could be very good, in fact.

[FunkMonk]

He could make it more profitable. 

Charge money per every 1,000 followers.

Create premium paid accounts that users have to pay to reply to.

Subscription model.

More ads.

[Syt]

Thread highlighting change in followership on Twitter in past 24 hours. Democrats, MSNBC et al losing followers in significant numbers. Meanwhile, Republicans, Fox News hosts, Jair Bolsonaro etc. see significant gains (Ron DeSantis gaining 96k followers ... )

https://twitter.com/cbouzy/status/1518953731961802752?s=20&t=RHcia4G6g_mW62wMSoug3g

[Syt]

[Sheilbh]

Charge money per every 1,000 followers.

Create premium paid accounts that users have to pay to reply to.

Subscription model.

More ads.

I think he has talked about a subscription/no ads model before which would be really interesting and change the service that Twitter is pretty radically. It might be interesting to see a social media company that moves away from pure data harvesting that underpins the ad modela and try to make money based on its own product

[Syt]

At any rate, some people are happy, I suppose.





(These two in the run-up to the decision - seems a bit dystopian that politicians threaten a corporation with consequences if they refuse a buyout from - how to put this delicately - an eccentric multibillionaire.)









This gloating by these people makes it hard to imagine much good will come of this. They may be in for a rude awakening, though I somehow doubt that.