Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Twitter set to accept Musk's $43B offer – sources

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 1001 posts

Re: Twitter set to accept Musk's $43B offer – sources

#181

Post by soabeb »

giarc wrote: post #147

Honest question, why can Elon, and only Elon solve the bot problem? Software devs have been trying to solve this problem since the beginning of the internet and yet bots still fill every space on the web.

No, they haven’t been trying to solve the problem. They want the bots on there for financial and political reasons. It is easy to solve the problem - require identification to use the site. I mentioned the advantages of social media doing this about 10 years ago and was downvoted on this very website because of “privacy and anonymity on the internet is great!”.

Re: Twitter set to accept Musk's $43B offer – sources

#182

Post by evandale »

boredumb wrote: post #105

People act like this is some spiteful thing he's doing in order to just post edgy memes or have a 'private' social media for himself. Twitter, despite being a toxic place the majority of people avoid, brought in over 5 billion dollars last year. If elon removes bots, welcomes non-extremists back on, gets comedians and entertaining accounts back on board and lets people say what they want instead a bot army of shills…

>gets comedians and entertaining accounts back on board and lets people say what they want instead a bot army of shills repeating verbatim over and over and over

I'm most looking forward to Patti Harrison getting back on Twitter.

context: https://youtu.be/HZIvpTrNNmo?t=127

Re: Twitter set to accept Musk's $43B offer – sources

#183

Post by photochemsyn »

boredumb wrote: post #105

People act like this is some spiteful thing he's doing in order to just post edgy memes or have a 'private' social media for himself. Twitter, despite being a toxic place the majority of people avoid, brought in over 5 billion dollars last year. If elon removes bots, welcomes non-extremists back on, gets comedians and entertaining accounts back on board and lets people say what they want instead a bot army of shills…

I'd argue the most important of the changes Musk has suggested are transparency around the recommendation and ranking algorithms and the datasets used to train them, and increasing the character count of posts up to 512-1024 characters.

There's a lot of mystery about how these algorithms are designed, trained and used in practice - and not just at Twitter - and having all that open-sourced would in itself be a huge benefit to the whole world. A whole lot of authoritarian outfits are trying to use these algorithms as a means of social control and popular opinion manipulation - and not just in places like Russia and China - and it's reached the point where understanding how such systems are used is kind of critical to preserving the future of non-authoritarian society.

As far as long-form Twitter, at the very least doubling the character count would allow for a lot more nuance in Twitter communication, which is defintely lacking at present. And no, multiple posts in threads don't really work for that purpose because of the way those individual posts are distributed elsewhere, without context.

Re: Twitter set to accept Musk's $43B offer – sources

#184

Post by mark_l_watson »

I understand the arguments on why some censoring is required but I would like to still make a counter argument:

Twitter allows users to select unwanted tweets and say ‘not relevant to me.’

Allowing people to set there own filters seems like a better option to me. Also, Twitter could have a standard set of filters that users could choose from.

Re: Twitter set to accept Musk's $43B offer – sources

#185

Post by root_axis »

qgin wrote: post #113

“Everything that isn’t illegal is allowed” sounds great until you see what that actually means on the internet. Anyone who has ever worked in content moderation / trust & safety knows what kind of unrelenting deluge of obnoxious / disturbing / spam-filled / miserable race to the bottom of the lizard brain stuff that is constantly being pushed back on any moderately popular social media site. It seems so easy from a d…

> Everything that isn’t illegal is allowed

This won't actually happen though. Content moderation, censorship, and bans will continue on Twitter unabated.

Re: Twitter set to accept Musk's $43B offer – sources

#186

Post by orblivion »

qgin wrote: post #113

“Everything that isn’t illegal is allowed” sounds great until you see what that actually means on the internet. Anyone who has ever worked in content moderation / trust & safety knows what kind of unrelenting deluge of obnoxious / disturbing / spam-filled / miserable race to the bottom of the lizard brain stuff that is constantly being pushed back on any moderately popular social media site. It seems so easy from a d…

I agree that people take for granted just how much spam there could be if the flood gates were opened.

Is there a reason you can't turn all of the bans (of legal stuff) into filters? Then users could turn on and off nazis, Q, sex, porn, etc? People could turn them all off and get the same experience as today.

Re: Twitter set to accept Musk's $43B offer – sources

#187

Post by dkjaudyeqooe »

qgin wrote: post #113

“Everything that isn’t illegal is allowed” sounds great until you see what that actually means on the internet. Anyone who has ever worked in content moderation / trust & safety knows what kind of unrelenting deluge of obnoxious / disturbing / spam-filled / miserable race to the bottom of the lizard brain stuff that is constantly being pushed back on any moderately popular social media site. It seems so easy from a d…

No post body was provided.

Re: Twitter set to accept Musk's $43B offer – sources

#188

Post by bitshiftfaced »

altacc wrote: post #41

He's already said that he'd follow all local laws so it would be interesting to see if he can find the elusive path of maintaining free speech, following the law and not having Twitter being a toxic cesspool used mainly to shout down those not our your "side". Personally my reservations are because I think running a social media site is a lot about understanding people and defining a healthy culture for your elusive…

> Musk has admitted he doesn't understand people, is a self-confessed troll & edgelord and and Tesla's culture seems less than ideal. So lacks any of the qualifications I see as being needed to run something like Twitter.

That's why he's perfect for this task. Most decision-makers feel intense scrutiny and tip toe around things that cause backlash, especially things that threaten the status quo.

When you're oblivious to how people will react to your vision, you're more able to follow through and make it to the other side.

Re: Twitter set to accept Musk's $43B offer – sources

#190

Post by ssl232 »

qgin wrote: post #113

“Everything that isn’t illegal is allowed” sounds great until you see what that actually means on the internet. Anyone who has ever worked in content moderation / trust & safety knows what kind of unrelenting deluge of obnoxious / disturbing / spam-filled / miserable race to the bottom of the lizard brain stuff that is constantly being pushed back on any moderately popular social media site. It seems so easy from a d…

Michael Saylor had an idea he discussed on a recent Lex Fridman podcast. People should be able to post $10 collatoral via the Bitcoin Lightning network for safe passage on the web. This can be done by your browser via HTTP. Bad behaviour (such as causing abuse) results in a penalty being applied to the collatoral. You get what's left back when you leave. Because it uses Lighting, it's super fast and cheap, far faster and cheaper than a typical 2.5% credit card.

His point was that there's no conservation of energy on the internet right now. Requiring a small ransom for safe passage would fix that, retaining anonymity.

Post reply on HN