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

321–330 of 1001 posts

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

#321

Post by CommieBobDole »

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…

But that's the reason that Twitter is Twitter - the algorithm optimizes for engagement, and as it turns out, the most engaging thing is conflict.

Twitter is so fantastically successful because they've created a platform that both feeds their users a constant stream of enraging content, and more importantly, incentivizes the creation of content that's enraging to someone else. In the process they've managed to mold almost the entirety of mainstream public discourse into an endless supply of hot takes, sick burns, and us-vs-them polarization that results in Twitter being an essential tool for anyone who wants to participate.

If they get rid of the rage bait and toxicity, then people won't need Twitter anymore and will move on to whatever new platform provides it for them.

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

#322

Post by Octoth0rpe »

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.

> Honest question, why can Elon, and only Elon solve the bot problem?

I don't think _only_ Elon can solve this problem, but one way of looking at the problem is that Twitter appears to be hesitant to 'solve' the bot problem because their most important metric that drives stock price is the number of engaged users, which includes bots. Taking twitter private (is this actually what Elon is doing? I haven't been following very closely) potentially removes the need to focus on this metric, freeing them to 'solve' the bot problem and not worry about the effect on the stock price when the # of engaged users drops by 40%.

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

#323

Post by Waterluvian »

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 don’t think we can just disregard the fact that he constantly shitposts like a 12 year old.

I don’t think people really appreciate how messed up that is, for someone who should be insanely busy with multiple wildly successful corporations.

I’m confident a logical case can be made. But… seriously?

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

#324

Post by jandrusk »

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…

Isn't that what the block, mute, and muted wordlist options are for? If these were not available options I could see the argument, but they are, so why isn't this sufficient for users to moderate their own content?

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

#325

Post by raxxorraxor »

MarcScott wrote: post #178

Am I the only person here that finds Twitter a nice place? I'm careful about who I follow, most of whom are tech people or educators. My feed is a really nice place to go, and I can't remember the last time I read or saw anything that triggered me in the slightest. I'm seeing loads of comments about how toxic Twitter is, but isn't that on you? Don't follow or engage and the algorithm will skip you over.

People that are offended at tweets are looking for offense. It is an error in the dopamine addiction that compels them towards the quest of real justice.

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

#326

Post by rco8786 »

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…

You're describing an old version of Twitter that did not bring in over 5 billion dollars.

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

#327

Post by ratsforhorses »

Will Musk let Trump back on Twitter? I dislike the latter but was under the impression both are kind of buddys? It's just I thought a lot of advertising revenue was driven by polarization of issues and both have used Twitter to push the boundaries on that...

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

#328

Post by kansface »

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.

Part of the answer has to be that companies don’t want to solve it because it would destroy metrics that buoy ad prices. Charge per tweet or per account and the problem would be gone overnight.

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

#329

Post by JulianMorrison »

Jaruzel wrote: post #254

The ONLY way to solve the toxic nature of Twitter is to enforce a)a real name policy, and b)fully verified[1] identities for all users/bots (opt-in, where others by default filter out non-verified accounts in their feeds) Bots can continue to exist, but must be identifiable as such and connected to a verified real user. Not only will this clean up twitter dramatically, it will also push off those who wish to hide beh…

Real name policies have done nothing to make Facebook less toxic, because bigots in general don't mind their real names being out there. This is what happens when you ignore systemic power imbalances. The bigots have that power and as a result they don't fear consequences.

The Republicans announcing public lynching of trans kids are doing it under their real names.

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

#330

Post by alpaca128 »

Jaruzel wrote: post #254

The ONLY way to solve the toxic nature of Twitter is to enforce a)a real name policy, and b)fully verified[1] identities for all users/bots (opt-in, where others by default filter out non-verified accounts in their feeds) Bots can continue to exist, but must be identifiable as such and connected to a verified real user. Not only will this clean up twitter dramatically, it will also push off those who wish to hide beh…

A real name policy mainly hurts privacy and not much else.

Those people tend to avoid platforms with effective "censorship" as they call it, and that can be done without names. The majority of internet users doesn't spend much time thinking about privacy or anonymity, and it's not uncommon that people make death threats under their real name or end their career with dumb posts on social media.

What we need is smaller communities with better moderation. Twitter with its lack of structure is the opposite and acts more like a global spam folder, and discourages meaningful posts by limiting their length. Insults and other toxic language always fits nicely in a tweet.

Post reply on HN