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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

#811
post #670

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're wondering about the neutrality premise. The furthest ~25% on the left and right have an increasingly extreme, partisan, borderline psychotic view of the world that you're either with us or against us. That polarization has become radically more aggressive over the past decade. Just to use a simple example: someone might might say it's not enough to not oppose men becoming women and dominating female swimmin…

This doesn’t really make sense what you described isn’t actually a neutral stance — hell just the framing alone betrays your feelings. You’re already using extremely polarizing vocabulary in your attempt to be neutral. Someone in support of trans men and women being able to compete would take issue with: * “men becoming women” — transitioning doesn’t change your gender, it only aligns your outward appearance to the g…

> transitioning doesn’t change your gender, it only aligns your outward appearance to the gender you have always been

Is that really true? There's a growing body of evidence that "the gender you have always been" doesn't really apply as a general case. For example: detransitioners, autogynephiles, abusive parents attempting to 'trans the gay away' in their kids, and so on.

Of course there are people who also report having felt like their dissonant gender identity for as long as they remember, and will for the rest of their lives. But this is not universal.

Seems there are many reasons why one may decide on transitioning, and not all of them are positive.

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

#813
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…

> People have been begging for an edit button for a decade. And they haven't implemented it because it's a truly horrible idea. If you messed up your tweet delete it. If it's already got traction, then it shouldn't be changed, especially because the edit feature would mostly be used maliciously to cancel retweeters.

OK, I can believe this has non-engineering issues. Still cannot "edit as new" for when you want to edit what you posted in the exact some editor state as when you posted it. What you edit and what gets posted can differ radically. This is well-trodden territory in the email world. Accordingly, Fastmail service has "Edit as New" and Apple's iOS Email App has "Send Again" for email.

I'm pretty confident Twitter could manage "edit as new" for Tweets, and it would be useful with or without tweet editing.

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

#815
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…

> People have been begging for an edit button for a decade. And they haven't implemented it because it's a truly horrible idea. If you messed up your tweet delete it. If it's already got traction, then it shouldn't be changed, especially because the edit feature would mostly be used maliciously to cancel retweeters.

Retweet could show the version of the tweet as it was when it was retweeted. If you see a tweet that has a new revision ready you could see a "latest" link. If you see the latest version of a tweet with a version history you could see a "history" link which would show you a revision history.

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

#816
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…

I think it's more basic than prestige. Musk's value add is in no small part due to his influencer status among a group of investors who primarily interact with him over Twitter. Leaving such an important part of your value subject to someone else's whims is crazy when you have the money to secure it.

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

#817
post #769
post #758

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- 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."

And changing the character limit seems unbelievably trivial.

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

#818

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…

Even highly effective engineers will have trouble delivering features, in a large company, when they could easily deliver the same features in a smaller company. Process and politics is part of it, but the one of the problems with having so many developers, is that these developers end up writing code, all of that code ends up making things more complicated than they need to be, which makes introducing new features more complicated, due to all the systems you need to integrate with.

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

#819
post #716

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strange that both of you would say that. He's a ruthless result-driven executive that doesn't accept excuses. If it's at all impossible for something to get done, he'll get it done. I'm not at all a fan of him, but his power is in execution. A vision is worthless.

His power is in blood diamond money from mummy and daddy during apartheid. His power is in ignoring regulations and laws he doesn't like. His power is in being a modern-day version of PT Barnum. Execution and result-driven like that giant coffin-box he tried to claim could be used to rescue boys from a cave where rescuers were swimming through spaces so narrow they couldn't wear their diving gear? Result-driven, powe…

This is very true, and another thing is, he wasn't even a founder of Tesla. He swooped in about a year after it was founded with wads of investment cash, and with his now well-known egotistical drive, decided to make the company all about him. When of course all the actual work was being done by the experts rather than this arrogant dilettante who did more to impede their work than effectively manage it.

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

#820
post #278

Does that mean he's now announcing the next five years, that Twitter's next feature will be ready next year?

I predict a new entry in the Terms of Service: "Tracking private jets is forbidden".

Yes, but it will have to be rebranded as an anti-stalking rule to get the right people on board.
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