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

391–400 of 1001 posts

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

#391

Post by tablespoon »

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…

> 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)

IIRC, Facebook's still toxic even with a real-name policy. Wackos often lack the shame or self-awareness to not be toxic even under their real name.

Anecdote time: one of the most toxic people I've encountered online posted under their real name--in a Web 1.0 forum where pseudoanonymity was the norm.

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

#393

Post by snarf21 »

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.

Agreed, I only use it for board game design and discussion. If you stay away from politics it is quite valuable and rarely toxic. They have recently even added explicit Communities and that has been good so far.

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

#394

Post by mrep »

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.

I'm not on twitter but the Justine Sacco incident doesn't make it sound like a nice place to me.

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

#395

Post by doom2 »

parenthesis wrote: post #79

I will become a Musk fanboi if he reverts twitter to allowing unlimited reading without being logged in.

Bring back the chrono-sorted timeline while he's at it. The algorithm sorting is a big reason why I use tweetdeck and FB purity to keep it as it was.

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

#396

Post by 2OEH8eoCRo0 »

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.

My amateur opinion is that it's not very difficult but it hurts subscriber count, clicks, engagement metrics etc. If he takes Twitter private there will be incentive to fix this because there won't be shareholders to please.

On the other hand, why are bots not considered a result of free speech? I'm not free to run hogwild on your platform with bots? That's censorship!

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

#398

Post by jmkni »

cogogo wrote: post #314

There are so many comments I may have missed the right thread but I hope Twitter doesn’t kill all automated and/or anonymous accounts. I run one (@bostontimelaps1) and it has been such a fun project for the last year with nothing other than positive interactions with my niche group of followers - even a bunch that are obviously on the opposite side of the political spectrum from me. Not to mention it has been a great…

I don't think banning them is the right move, but making it easy to clearly identify who is a real human and who is a robot/fake account would improve things a lot imo

I think there is value in robots on Twitter, and there is value in anonymous accounts (for whistleblowers etc)

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

#399

Post by slg »

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…

Sure, he could do all those things you list, but I have no idea why anyone would expect him specifically to be able to do it while no one else could.

Just a couple examples:

>gets comedians and entertaining accounts back on board

Musk's personality and actions turn off many of these people. It will much harder for Musk to get these people back than it would be for a publicly traded company.

>lets people say what they want instead a bot army of shills repeating verbatim over and over and over

Musk himself controls an army of shills who attack anyone who disagrees with him. It has now become common for people criticizing him to stop using his name because some of his fans will search Twitter for anyone talking about him in order to aggressively defend him. Why would we expect him to work to stop shills site wide when he has put no effort into stopping his fans from exhibiting this same behavior?

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

#400

Post by Arcsech »

artur_makly wrote: post #340

Having the 'richest' man w/ social Asperger fully control the largest 'public town square" seems..ironic and frankly dangerous. To me it feels like twitter or something better should simply be a DAO. What are the chances of that?

That’s a disgustingly prejudiced statement. While I don’t like Mr. Musk very much myself, I’ve known plenty of autistic folks who do a great job managing communities.
Post reply on HN