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Elon Musk makes $43B unsolicited bid to take Twitter private

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Re: Elon Musk makes $43B unsolicited bid to take Twitter private

#161

Post by cainxinth »

snowwrestler wrote: post #94

As a Twitter shareholder I would vote against this. Musk says there is tremendous financial potential in Twitter but then offers $54 a share, which is not even 2x the IPO price. That’s not a “tremendous potential” premium. There is a lot of evidence that platforms which de-prioritize moderation have trouble attracting revenue and experience significant compliance costs. See: the sad story of Moot, who ran one of the…

> Musk says there is tremendous financial potential in Twitter but then offers $54 a share, which is not even 2x the IPO price.

He means tremendous financial potential for him.

Re: Elon Musk makes $43B unsolicited bid to take Twitter private

#163

Post by MadSudaca »

helsinkiandrew wrote: post #12

Interesting if he manages to take over twitter. For me Twitter has become full of people marketing themselves with lists, tweets that don't make sense out of context, replies full of bile or inane comments and animated gifs. But I'm not convinced Musk's opinions of what is good for twitter is aligned with other content creators and consumers. Paypal, Tesla, SpaceX, Boring Company have clear goals - twitter is quite d…

I mean, what else can you ask for if you're limited to 240 characters?

Re: Elon Musk makes $43B unsolicited bid to take Twitter private

#164

Post by hwers »

542458 wrote: post #126

As somebody from the first world who has had the experience of moderating Internet forums… free speech in the sense of “the government generally shouldn’t control people’s speech, with limited exceptions” is good and necessary. Free speech in the sense of “everybody should be forced to platform every idea” is silly IMO. Left alone user content rapidly devolves into the most low-effort salient content - flame wars, po…

I think we're not discussing the real point here which isn't whether "full completely unregulated free speech" should be the norm on twitter or not. Elon isn't proposing allowing CP or whatever the worst stuff you see on 8chan is. The battleground is simply in a much subtler grey area of idea space. Elon basically seems to think there's been push to disallow discussion about quite reasonable subjects (which indeed would have been allowed on HN too, e.g. covid vaccine pros and cons) and he'd like it to be allowed again.

Note also that twitter is quite different from traditional forums in the way it's structured. You follow people, you can block people. The analogy to traditional forums needing moderation isn't really one-to-one.

Re: Elon Musk makes $43B unsolicited bid to take Twitter private

#165

Post by wdn »

snowwrestler wrote: post #94

As a Twitter shareholder I would vote against this. Musk says there is tremendous financial potential in Twitter but then offers $54 a share, which is not even 2x the IPO price. That’s not a “tremendous potential” premium. There is a lot of evidence that platforms which de-prioritize moderation have trouble attracting revenue and experience significant compliance costs. See: the sad story of Moot, who ran one of the…

If you are a TWTR shareholder, then you should vote for this deal.

Just open a chart and see what a disaster TWTR stock is since transitioned into the Biden administration. The market (institution shareholders) is not stupid. The lower price is how the free market punish TWTR for their actions. They have lost a lot of their users due to many of their limited free speech and work with government actions.

Re: Elon Musk makes $43B unsolicited bid to take Twitter private

#166

Post by maxerickson »

Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #105

From observing various internet forums, including this one, I noticed that people from the "first world" countries don't know the value of free speech and often take it for granted. Sometimes even coming to such views as "free speech is dangerous" and that "we should limit free speech" (by blocking the views I don't like). Understand this: limits on free speech are far more dangerous to society than allowing fringe e…

Would you not eject someone from you property if they were harassing your other guests?

It's not an exact analogy, and there are features like mute and block that are less severe than removing someone from a platform, but people generally don't want to individually deal with every person who decides that being miserable to others is the best use for social media.

Re: Elon Musk makes $43B unsolicited bid to take Twitter private

#167

Post by u801e »

The closest thing we had (have) to online free speech was (is) Usenet. But distributors of child porn along with Andrew Cuomo (when he was the New York state attorney general) making a deal with a number of major ISPs resulted in most ISPs discontinuing their Usenet service.

Re: Elon Musk makes $43B unsolicited bid to take Twitter private

#170

Post by Frost1x »

Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #105

From observing various internet forums, including this one, I noticed that people from the "first world" countries don't know the value of free speech and often take it for granted. Sometimes even coming to such views as "free speech is dangerous" and that "we should limit free speech" (by blocking the views I don't like). Understand this: limits on free speech are far more dangerous to society than allowing fringe e…

I think many of the people described aren't taking free speech for granted, they're reevaluating the idea in a new social dynamic. Technology has changed the societal impact on free speech drastically: reach, frequency, noise, targetability. In parallel, populations have grown drastically so the scale for ideas to reach critical mass and spread have changed. The dynamics are simply different now.

I think many understand the consequences of highly restricted speech and how much benefit free speech has, including how censorship and tight control on speech has lead to undesirable government regimes historically. What people are really doing is reevaluating the costs side in the new environment where there's no longer a town square, information has the potential to spread to masses quickly, information is more difficult to separate from noise, and those with harmful intent can speak with more anonymity.

I'm a huge fan of free speech but the increasing potential damaging effects can't be completepy ignored. It's better if we can defend against such issues, in my opinion, and protect free speech, not ignore them and go on as is.

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