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Elon Musk to join Twitter’s board of directors

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Re: Elon Musk to join Twitter’s board of directors

#761

Post by spsful »

systemvoltage wrote: post #749
mywittyname wrote: post #673

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet, they all have Facebook, Google, and Apple accounts. You can hate them all you want, but you're not going to change them by shoveling money into their pockets. They care enough to bitch, but not enough to do anything about it. These people who hate Twitter probably don't even use Twitter. If you're not interesting or important, then nobody on Twitter cares what you have to say. It's not like Facebook, where y…

Twitter is a monopoly. When the only way for government officials to relay messages to their constituents is through a private platform such as Twitter, it ceases to have the same privilege as a private corporation. It is a de facto public square. This is not up for debate.

This is very much up for debate. Elected officials actually have free postage and can send letters if they need to. Not only that, they likely enjoy direct access to their local news networks and can broadcast messages through that avenue. Most have email lists, and can send interested constituents updates through that platform. Most also have websites on official .gov accounts where they could host press releases as well.

Not everyone has a Twitter account, and I think you need to seriously reframe your perspective if you think it is the cure-all for delivering news to constituents.

Re: Elon Musk to join Twitter’s board of directors

#762

Post by topspin »

neilc wrote: post #226
tmp_anon_22 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its a modern incarnation of a billionaire buying a newspaper. Has that ever worked out well? Has it ever been altruistic?

I don't think Bezos' ownership of the Washington Post has gone badly so far.

And yet, in a remarkable display of self unawareness, WaPo has declared[1] that Musk's move "Could Be Bad News for Free Speech."

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/elon-musks-twitter-i...

Re: Elon Musk to join Twitter’s board of directors

#763

Post by dkislyuk »

ceeplusplus wrote: post #730
MisterSandman wrote: post #707

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> at the same time if Twitter as a company isn't really doing much, why do they have thousands of developers on staff? ...to keep the app running? New devices, new standards, a lot of things change that you need devs to keep up with. Also, what's up with people saying twitter is stagnant? They've added Spaces, Twitter Blue and Crypto Profile Pictures - all 3 massive features added to their product. They're all trash,…

Those things you mention hardly justify thousands of expensive developers to maintain and create. I bet a team of 10 top notch engineers could create Spaces+Blue+Crypto pfp's in a couple months and run it at Twitter scale. Don't forget Instagram was acquired when it had 13 employees serving tens of millions of users. Speaking out of experience, most engineers in big tech are bike shedding on internal tools that don't…

I think this is a pretty naive take. Developing anything at Twitter-scale will run into security considerations, infrastructure development or optimization, constructing data workflows, multiple design iterations, UX design (how do people find and use this feature?), i18n, accessibility, product marketing, user testing, copy testing, and other functions and that’s not even considering the actual product development, which is of course across multiple platforms. See also: https://danluu.com/sounds-easy/

Re: Elon Musk to join Twitter’s board of directors

#764

Post by JoshTko »

One single feature can solve the spambot problem, monetization problem, and comment quality. Pay to comment - the cost scaling up based on the follower count of the tweeter. You comment is free if enough whitelisted folks like your comment. Note, this is just pay to comment. Tweeting should remain free. The whitelist would be ~10% of users. List initially aglo determined and long term curated manually.

Re: Elon Musk to join Twitter’s board of directors

#765

Post by mavhc »

ejb999 wrote: post #757
dieortin wrote: post #732

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience Twitter is way more appealing to younger people than Facebook.

and tiktok is 100X more appealing to them than either of those. Facebook is for grandparents, twitter is for bots.

Twitter is for journalists who now don't have to walk downstairs to get the pointless opinion of the man on the street

Re: Elon Musk to join Twitter’s board of directors

#766

Post by TechBro8615 »

smolder wrote: post #655
LudwigNagasena wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s about culture in small tight communities, it’s not about monstrous billion people wide networks without any coherent identity of community.

I think while the effect was first noted in a relatively small community, the idea applies broadly to all sizes of open public forum, especially where things are organized chronologically. There's difficulty in developing and establishing cultural norms when there are constant new arrivals who can't have learned from past developments. That's what the term represents to me.

Yeah, I also don’t see why such patterns should apply differently to any community past a sufficiently large Dunbar number, modulo some tribal factor. Humans simply haven’t evolved to differentiate between a tribe of three thousand, or three million.

Want proof? Tell me how many people might read this comment and agree with it.

Humans are bad at large scale pattern recognition and suffer from extreme proximity bias. It’s why filter bubbles exist.

For the same reason, it seems dangerous to promote the idea that it’s even possible to “have a conversation as a society.” If any such conversation is taking place, surely its level of inherent selection bias would render any of its conclusions irrelevant. Only a participant or biased observer could claim otherwise.

Society has a filter-bubble deficiency. For a global population nearing ten billion humans, the number of distinct information channels is alarmingly low in comparison. It’s not possible to have an honest “conversation as a society” in such an asymmetrical information environment.

Re: Elon Musk to join Twitter’s board of directors

#767

Post by colinmhayes »

BurningFrog wrote: post #508
thebradbain wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

His companies compensate engineers below market, does he not? Also- weird take that both of your examples seem to focus on one specific genre of role. I’ve dealt with many more useless software engineering and product managers on a day-to-day basis than HR-types, who are there if you want/need to contact them or in the background if you don’t. Maybe Musk would benefit from them, actually …especially considering Tesla…

> His companies compensate engineers below market, does he not? If that's true, those engineers would leave for better jobs. If you think like an economist, the fact that his engineering departments remain fully staffed shows they're paid enough. I'll take that as fact over angry internet rumors about a controversial billionaire.

> If you think like an economist, the fact that his engineering departments remain fully staffed shows they're paid enough.

Well enough does not equal market rate though. There are many reasons people don't switch jobs, economists are well aware of this. Being at a company lead by such a big personality adds even more reasons.

Re: Elon Musk to join Twitter’s board of directors

#768

Post by divbzero »

paxys wrote: post #531
throwaway5752 wrote: post #493

"For so long as Mr. Musk is serving on the Board and for 90 days thereafter, Mr. Musk will not, either alone or as a member of a group, become the beneficial owner of more than 14.9% of the Company’s common stock outstanding at such time, including for these purposes economic exposure through derivative securities, swaps, or hedging transactions." This is the second line in the linked filing, and something a number o…

I'm not sure I understand. What is the relevance of this line?

The board seat was granted in tandem with a guarantee from Musk that he will limit the number of voting shares he amasses. I don’t think it’s an uncommon arrangement when an outside investor joins the board.

Re: Elon Musk to join Twitter’s board of directors

#769

Post by chc »

spsful wrote: post #758
fleddr wrote: post #678

I think people are really over-analyzing this move. I think it's motivated by prestige, not money, nor is free speech the heart of the matter. Twitter is a stagnant company. They have thousands of engineers that in the span of a decade don't seem to produce much at all, nothing visible or memorable anyway. Long-lasting Twitter problems (culture, spam, algorithm issues) never seem addressed. User growth is stagnating…

- Completely redesigning their UI two times over, - Launching a subscription-based service (which seems to make it the first social media network without ads) - Lengthening tweets to 280 characters - Letting users make money off their following (super followers) I'm confused as to how any of this makes it stagnant.

Four achievements in 10 years isn't actually a lot, and two of those are just "they added more monetization."

Re: Elon Musk to join Twitter’s board of directors

#770

Post by olliej »

pengaru wrote: post #759
PostOnce wrote: post #698

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"stagnant company" Why must every company sustain boundless growth and 24-hour engagement? Change and growth for their own sake can be cancers. Twitter does what it does and people like it (as seen by the fact that they all use it), yet armchair generals cry out that twitter's refusal to turn into "not twitter" is somehow a failure of engineering and management, or some form of incompetence. So, I disagree, I guess.

> Twitter does what it does and people like it (as seen by the fact that they all use it) Last I checked not even half the US population is on twitter, not even close to half. Who is this "all" in "they all use it?"

The 217 million active daily users? It is "only" $~80 million in the US, I'd love to know how a quarter of the US population using it daily represents an insignificant user base.
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