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

reuters.com

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

#371
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…

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

#372

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…

“Elon” is going to jam through some changes that disrupt the company and get a lot of press for n months then get bored and go do something else.

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

#373

While I don’t advocate for anyone losing their job, my partial view on what Elon will do with Twitter once he takes it private is to shut down their ad business and focus on Twitter Blue (or some variation of subscription based product announcements). This will have several benefits. 1. Simplifies the business operation by reducing fixed headcount significantly 2. This will have a hard hit to Twitter revenue but Musk…

You could have just said he planned to throw away 40+ billion dollars, because that's far more accurate given the reality of social media subscriptions and the internet.

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

#374
post #344

This is interesting to me for a couple of reasons. One that is being discussed here in other threads is basically, "What does Musk think he can do that others before him haven't been able to?" Are we going to see a stroke of real genius here? The second point is also interesting, but isn't being discussed: Twitter enacted a poison pill on 15 April which could allow Musk to pay a ton but not get board control. I'm not…

The poison pill is just to prevent him from buying twitter on the open market. It can be removed at any time and any sale will be contingent on it being removed.

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

#375
post #255

The value of Twitter is the amplification by media. It has very little actual traction in the whole, without the amplification its worthless to anyone but narcissist and PR folk. One solution is to charge users $1 to tweet. Charge users with over 10k followers 1k a month per 10k to Tweet to their followers. Its a PR machine, not a news source. Treat it like one and its value will both rise and fall...

It is the go-to source for breaking information - how is that not a news source?

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

#376
post #344

This is interesting to me for a couple of reasons. One that is being discussed here in other threads is basically, "What does Musk think he can do that others before him haven't been able to?" Are we going to see a stroke of real genius here? The second point is also interesting, but isn't being discussed: Twitter enacted a poison pill on 15 April which could allow Musk to pay a ton but not get board control. I'm not…

UPDATE: Farther downstream https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31154330 dahfizz explains that the poison pill only goes into effect if the board does not approve the purchase. If the board accepts the offer, the poison pill won't be an issue.

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

#377
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.

I don't think that he and only he can solve the bot problem, but with question stated this way - Tesla may currently have the best machine learning hardware on the planet. With people reports + second wave of hired people for marking what is spam and what is not, this seems like a fantastic place to shine for ML - especially when you have all accounts data and full graph available.

I would not bet on it - as far as I understand it, fighting spam is like 95% of what engineers at Twitter do and openly available ML on GPUs seem plenty strong - but it is a possibility.

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

#378
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.

Because it's almost impossible to differentiate between a person posting a tweet and a bot doing the same. There is nothing humans do on Twitter than bots cannot automate.

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

#379
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.

If Twitter wanted to solve the problem they would have. Simple as that. Elon is the one who is putting his money where his mouth is to get the company to tackle the issues plaguing the company.

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

#380

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 thinks it's more about the influence that twitter has with the establishment i.e. 'people that matter'. Being able to exert influence in these quarters is what power is all about.

however I am not quite sure why Mr. Musk needs that. He once declared that his goal was to go to Mars, in other words he was about "Flyin' mother nature's silver seed to a new home in the sun"

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