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

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

#891
post #631

Ways I think Twitter could immediately improve, from the perspective of users: - Optional verification check marks for anyone who wants them. Throw out the Blue Check status symbol. Offer "real person" twitter filter. - Transparent and consistent moderation policies. Bans are inconsistently applied for reasons that are often hard to figure out. - Return to a reverse chronological time and/or down selection of rage-ba…

> Return to a reverse chronological time They've had this for years. Press the "swish" (stars) button top right.

Twitter does in fact still reset it all the time, at least on my account. I'll notice it when I run into a bunch of those recommended tweets/follows, which don't appear in the chronological feed. edit but it has been much better recently than it was when the new UI was first released.

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

#892
post #4

For all the Free Speech posturing Musk has put out around twitter, it will be very interesting to see if @ElonsJet account gets banned.

It is easy to justify banning this kind of accounts. It is borderline stalking.

Would you like it if there is a twitter account that tweets everywhere you visit?

Elon can totally hire private investigators to follow the family members of a journalist just to prove that nobody would like this kind of accounts when they are the targets.

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

#893

What’s the consequence for employees? People with 3 years left of vesting RSUs. Will those keep vesting somehow? Or they’ll get an upfront payout? And what’s my incentive to work for an established private company with no stock growth prospect? I guess Twitter will have to pay 500k senior eng. salaries in cash instead of stock?

From a legal perspective, it will depend on the details of their RSU contracts. It varies widely, but generally speaking these are written in ways that give employers shockingly few rights. The RSUs at the FAANG that I worked for had all sorts of things in their contract, including that the employer could, at vesting time, choose to deliver either more or fewer shares than the number of vesting units at their sole and absolute discretion. (I spent many years employed by that FAANG, and could not find any employee or former-employee who ever received any number of shares other than exactly the number they expected -- but it was called out very clearly in the documents)

From a "Twitter is a going concern" perspective, the company and its technology function today. In a non-functioning state, the assets have materially less value. As in effectively zero value. Therefore, it is in the interests of the new controlling owner to see to it that enough of the current employees remain at least long enough for a decision to be made about which of these employees are wanted long-term.

As a result, I anticipate that efforts will be undertaken to see that employees are made close-enough to whole that there is not a larger mass-exodus than the change in the political party of the senior leadership is likely to generate on its own, more or less regardless of whether the employees have any shareholder rights in their RSU contracts.

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

#895

I've always wanted a feature that just bins similar reactions together, so I don't have to read them. For example, I'd love replies to be binned into categories like "cruel disparagement", "wilful misunderstanding", "mindless agreement", "fallacious", "opinion as fact", and "threats and doxing". Ideally the last category would be taken seriously by law enforcement. People who write things who get binned into these ca…

If the Topic suggestions are any indication, I would have 0 faith in Twitter's ability to accurately group together similar replies.

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

#896
post #631

Ways I think Twitter could immediately improve, from the perspective of users: - Optional verification check marks for anyone who wants them. Throw out the Blue Check status symbol. Offer "real person" twitter filter. - Transparent and consistent moderation policies. Bans are inconsistently applied for reasons that are often hard to figure out. - Return to a reverse chronological time and/or down selection of rage-ba…

> Return to a reverse chronological time and/or down selection of rage-bait content.

id rather have a choice among several recommendation systems. chronological timeline is the simplest and the worst

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

#898

What most troubles me about this whole ordeal: The lack of upper limits on wealth accumulation by an individual means that a single person can eventually directly control enough funds to simply decide one day to buy one of the world's largest communication channels. No one here seems to have a problem with this. For as much as the tech community generally despises generational-wealth families like the Waltons, or for…

Nobody is forced to use Twitter. You don't get to vote against Elon, but you can simply stop using the service. On the other hand, you have no option to stop using your government, short of moving to a different country.

The billionaires you mention can only remain powerful as long as they can convince people to willingly hand over money in exchange for the goods and services they provide. They don't get to collect taxes at the point of a gun or simply print money the way the government does.

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

#899

You can check if twitter is silently oppressing your account here: https://taishin-miyamoto.com/ShadowBan/ Mine currently has "reply deboosting" applied. Twitter didn't notify me of this either. I had to actively hunt it down. And there's nothing I can do to change it. Such a shady company so far.

Note that I get different results with that site than I get on here: https://hisubway.online/shadowban/

The first site says I have a search ban, while the second says I don't.

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

#900
post #743
post #631

Ways I think Twitter could immediately improve, from the perspective of users: - Optional verification check marks for anyone who wants them. Throw out the Blue Check status symbol. Offer "real person" twitter filter. - Transparent and consistent moderation policies. Bans are inconsistently applied for reasons that are often hard to figure out. - Return to a reverse chronological time and/or down selection of rage-ba…

> Optional verification check marks for anyone who wants them. Throw out the Blue Check status symbol Those are not mutually exclusive. I may be interested to know that @emmanuelmacron and @emmanuel_macron are both real persons but I’d also want to know that @emmanuelmacron is the famous one while the other is just an homonyme. Blue Check symbols are also a lot useful to distinguish real brand accounts from fake ones…

>Moderation is a hard issue.

Honestly, Elon Musk along with the team at OpenAI using things similar to what has already been accomplished with GPT-3, can make a real improvement in AI based moderation, at least in terms of being able to understand the differences in messages and their meanings. Everything from hate speech to terroristic threats to suicidal messages can at least be accurately measured and scored by AI to move up to a human moderation queue. AI based moderation in a transparent way would really help the current opaque, biased, politicized moderation that currently exists on twitter and most other large platforms.

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