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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

#921
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…

1) 'publicity' not 'prestige' so much. We're all going to be talking about it.

2) "do a few sweeping changes, and get out. Thereby proving once again that he gets shit done where others can't. " I'm doubtful as a board member he'll have the influence to make material changes. More like a series of publicly visible things.

Twitter doesn't have an 'edit button' because they're incompetent, it's just an odd choice they've made, and I think there are good reasons there. And 'edit button' is not any kind of material change.

3) I'll bet the speech issue is on his radar.

On the whole, I don't see how musk really changes the nature of what Twitter is, it's a mature product.

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

#922

People hate Musk for the same reason they hated Jobs. They love living in their world but hate themselves for it. Think Different might have more than one meaning.

I don't think that's the case. I don't like Musk because he's all sizzle and very little in terms of steak with his products. Like the most useful any of his companies has done is the work with battery tech at Tesla. The rest has been copy and paste from research done in the past. Plus, he often bungles into the product development process on the technical parts often without any context for him to make anything clos…

Reusable rockets.

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

#923
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…

Counterpoint: Twitter is the only social network I use where I get an unfiltered balance of ideas big and small - CEOs and random Joes. It's where memes are born and proliferate everywhere else (other than TikTok). Twitter WORKS. If it's profitable, it doesn't need more growth. Facebook got ruined because it thought everyone's parents and grandparents should be on it, and now that's the only people on it. My parents…

Username is deanCommie...

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say he enjoys reading Pravda, er, Twitter.

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

#924

Fascinating to me the level of vitriol that spews from people on this guy. He's just a guy, you know?

Someone said it better than me, but a lot of HN users are smart engineers and are basically jealous of what he has achieved. The pile on hate of Elon Musk in here is hilarious to watch, and it happens like clockwork.

There's a lot of genuine things to hate on. For me it's the blatant market manipulation he has been involved in.

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

#925

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh, wha?

Well, the problem I see is the following: - Claim that Twitter is a private corporation and its their rules (Btw, you can check my history in 2020 where I did support purge of Trump from social media, but I am now comtemplating). - But, anyone who starts a new platform (let's assume similar to r/conservative which is absolutely not neo-nazi or fascist), gets intense pushback from the existing incumbents not with mark…

What scares me to no end is foreign interference by intelligence agencies in domestic affairs done via social media. That is the real danger here. We are seeing the destabilizing effects of that since 2015.

I also just don't see the widespread censorship of conservative opinions that you do. JK Rowling is still there with her TERF views (which I actually largely agree with). Jordan Peterson is still there denying the predominant view on human-caused climate change. r/conservative; nobody wants to censor this or anything like it. Bret Weinstein is still there spreading his Covid vaccine misinformation. Donald Trump got kicked off after repeated ToS violations. Far-leftists also get kicked off (I know they recently shut down a bunch of far-left subreddits) and you don't see that because of your echo chamber.

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

#926

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Don’t forget that Twitter likes are also soft retweets.

When I follow you and you like a tweet from someone I don’t follow, the Twitter algorithm may show the tweet to me in my timeline, marked as “X liked this”, even several days later.

There’s a lot of interaction models built into Twitter that assume immutability.

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

#927
Let's be honest this whole thread is f**ed up.

A truth is that this guy is irrelevant. It's just your ideas that make him relevant. Just face the reality of your daily lives, and look away from some random stimulant on the net that try to rub your rough corners one way or another. Either you like him or hate him, you're just wasting your energy, people...

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

#928
post #859

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your post reminded me of one of my favorite quotes. "Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.” - Edward Abbey

Love it! Thanks for sharing, I just discovered Edward Abbey. > Abbey also left instructions on what to do with his remains: Abbey wanted his body transported in the bed of a pickup truck and wished to be buried as soon as possible. He did not want to be embalmed or placed in a coffin. Instead, he preferred to be placed inside of an old sleeping bag and requested that his friends disregard all state laws concerning bu…

if you're interested in some more hot takes, try Pentti Linkola's "Can Life Prevail".

Be warned about his views of democracy and the US. He opposed the consumerism of the US and sees democracy as "me, me, me" politics, where people vote for what they want now (or what they're told they want) rather doing the uncomfortable thing today for the sake of tomorrow.

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

#929

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The two word combination "Free speech" is so Americanised that it needs a bunch of asterisks to define what it's supposed to mean. Is it the legal thing where the government isn't allowed to arbitrarily censor citizens? Or is it the "I want everything I think to be received by everyone" that a good chunk of people seem to think it means? Or is it "I want to be a dick and everyone has to keep dealing with my shit"? As…

It means nobody is allowed to police public discourse and that anyone who wants to be a dick can be a dick and if others don’t want to deal with it they can ignore it. The only complications have always been situations where private enterprise dominates or impedes on public discourse.

> anyone who wants to be a dick can be a dick and if others don’t want to deal with it they can ignore it

The problem is that in the real world you can't silo off dicks like that. Bad opinions (e.g. racial hatred) can spread through the society and cause tremendous damage.

If you're going to argue for zero content moderation, the only good faith way to do so is to first admit that this could be a problem, and secondly admit that you have no problem if Twitter became like 8chan. If you just pretend like these kinds of things aren't possible, I can only conclude you're arguing from a position of ideology.

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

#930

you're right, hopefully all those political woke people will go elsewhere. Then they can be replaced by people who believe in minimal oversight and free speech, and then twitter will be truly apolitical.

Please don't post this sort of shallow ideological flamewar comment. It just leads to crap threads. If you want to express your substantive views more thoughtfully, that's of course fine.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30921167.

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