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Twitter CEO fires two top executives, freezes hiring

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Re: Twitter CEO fires two top executives, freezes hiring

#641

Post by toolz »

kranke155 wrote: post #610
kyledrake wrote: post #189

I've been using Twitter since it's main novelty was that it was a successful Ruby on Rails app, and honestly I've been trying to figure out where the exit is for my personal use of Twitter lately. If the acquisition goes through, Twitter won't make enough money to service it's debt, and the things they will do to fix that are pretty much guaranteed to lower the quality of the platform, which frankly has never worked…

Musk’s idea of “anything that is legal” is a terrible idea, it comes from someone who’s clearly never moderated a community. Generally any unpleasantness and lack of civility needs to be moderated out in some extent, or the platform gets completely taken over by trolls and normal people leave. That’s just the end result. Anyone who’s been involved in online communities know this. I see this in subreddits. The subredd…

There's an extremely wide chasm between moderating trolls and banning subject experts and even the former president of the USA. It really doesn't matter what you or I think of the president, he was a democratically elected leader of arguably, the most influential nation in the world.

Musk claims to be all about freedom of speech. Moderation and freedom of speech are not antithetical to one another. You can downrank or make trolls more convenient to block and not stifle their ability to say something. If you solve the bot problem you make a lot of other moderation problems much easier to solve.

Essentially my point is that we don't know what Musk will do, exactly, and any speculation proposed as an understood fact is simply spreading FUD and it makes me question (not a strong concern, mind you, but a concern none-the-less) if your concerns are sincere or if you have an agenda.

Re: Twitter CEO fires two top executives, freezes hiring

#642

Post by ryandrake »

jkubicek wrote: post #420
KerrAvon wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> has been mostly de-platformed by now Completely inaccurate. No one side has been deplatformed in aggregate. A few individuals have been suspended permanently for violating TOS. They should have been removed earlier, but were considered special cases due to their prominence. It amounts to Twitter removing its own inhibition on enforcing its TOS for certain prominent users. If you want a hard-right-wing heavy experie…

I totally agree with this take. I'm also surprised that there hasn't been more strident push-back against the "conservatives are being banned from Twitter" story from conservatives themselves. If I were right-leaning I would certainly not want to be associated with the q-anon advocates for violence that are being kicked off the platform.

This is exactly the "Oh, you know the ones" take, that conservative opinions in general are not what's being banned[1]:

1: https://twitter.com/ndrew_lawrence/status/105039166355267174...

Re: Twitter CEO fires two top executives, freezes hiring

#643

Post by UncleOxidant »

knubie wrote: post #622
ilamont wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I also think the proposal to have Twitter allow all content that is "legal under US law" is a dangerous idea for the platform being a healthy community that most people actually want to participate in. This is key. If @dang suddenly threw up his hands and said "anything goes on HN within U.S. law" this wonderful virtual discussion forum would die and most of us would sign off forever. I say that as someone whose be…

The difference between Twitter and Reddit, hacker news, or 4chan, is that on Twitter you ostensibly only see content from people you follow. If you don’t like the content someone is putting out, you just unfollow them. Twitter is more like email than Reddit in that sense, and no one is arguing for email to be moderated.

> on Twitter you ostensibly only see content from people you follow

But that seemed to becoming less and less true in recent months. I was often seeing tweets from people I wasn't following because the algorithm was starting to recommend them based on other tweets I had clicked on. I deactivated my account this past weekend and moved over to mastodon - it seems so much more chill.

Re: Twitter CEO fires two top executives, freezes hiring

#645

Post by rsuelzer »

shapefrog wrote: post #341
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Elon is margin called by year end is roughly 40% according to option prices The margin loans will almost certainly be replaced with outside equity prior to closing.

I am wondering what is in it for those people lining up - they are paying 20% over the market value to be locked in with musk.

Well I bought TWTR at it's peak... I'm voting my shares against a buyout (won't matter), mostly because it locks in a loss that I feel would have been recoverable in the next 5 years...

Re: Twitter CEO fires two top executives, freezes hiring

#646

Post by iudqnolq »

ben_w wrote: post #235
SemanticStrengh wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The crypto crisis should significantly diminish musk wealth no?

No, why would you think that? His wealth is mostly owning 20% of Tesla, plus some extra few billions from owning significant fractions of SpaceX, The Boring Company, and Neuralink. Presumably there’s some cash in there as well, but on his scale a hundred million is a rounding error.

One theory goes that the same people are invested in Tesla and Crypto. If their crypto holdings are wiped out they might have to sell their stock holdings to keep their roofs over their heads. Even if it's not that bad they might become more risk-adverse now one of their big bets has failed.

Not endorsing that, not an expert. Just think it's not as absurd as you suggest.

Re: Twitter CEO fires two top executives, freezes hiring

#647

Post by dave5104 »

Graffur wrote: post #623
kranke155 wrote: post #603

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say twitter threads need robust support and the edit button is sorely missed. But yes in a way the paralysis that Twitter is in is interesting in a world where everything is being changed always all the time in agile cycles. Twitter feels like it just exists and this is the way it works.

If they introduce an edit feature people will abuse it in the following ways: * Bait and switch. Now replies to the original tweet will be out of context * Everyone will edit their tweet and put EDIT: at the end. This is what happens on Reddit.

> * Bait and switch. Now replies to the original tweet will be out of context

I used to think this could be a problem too... but Reddit has had an edit button as long as I can remember, and bait and switch doesn't really seem to be much of a problem.

Perhaps it'd be more troublesome with the concept of retweets or quote tweets?

Re: Twitter CEO fires two top executives, freezes hiring

#648

Post by munificent »

kranke155 wrote: post #610
kyledrake wrote: post #189

I've been using Twitter since it's main novelty was that it was a successful Ruby on Rails app, and honestly I've been trying to figure out where the exit is for my personal use of Twitter lately. If the acquisition goes through, Twitter won't make enough money to service it's debt, and the things they will do to fix that are pretty much guaranteed to lower the quality of the platform, which frankly has never worked…

Musk’s idea of “anything that is legal” is a terrible idea, it comes from someone who’s clearly never moderated a community. Generally any unpleasantness and lack of civility needs to be moderated out in some extent, or the platform gets completely taken over by trolls and normal people leave. That’s just the end result. Anyone who’s been involved in online communities know this. I see this in subreddits. The subredd…

> A rule I’ve learnt recently and really loved is - every community can be judged quickly by how comfortable women are in it.

I've thought about this rule for many years. It applies equally well to offline real-world communities.

Re: Twitter CEO fires two top executives, freezes hiring

#649

Post by saghm »

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #639
throwaway_1928 wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Job offer or not, $42 million for doing almost nothing is a great deal.

Not if your one desire is to run large corporations and you're easily bored.

I'd consider myself easily bored, but I think $42 million would give me plenty of novel ways to entertain myself. (I definitely would _not_ want to run a large corporation though, so I guess it's a good thing I'd never get hired for one of these jobs anyways)

Re: Twitter CEO fires two top executives, freezes hiring

#650

Post by iudqnolq »

vincvinc wrote: post #493
paganel wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That only works because HN is, mostly, politics-free. I'm not a regular Twitter user but afaik that platform is pretty heavy on politics, more than that, it's pretty heavy when it comes to a certain political spectrum, the other side has been mostly de-platformed by now. I don't consider that as a healthy platform to comment on for the general public (even though, I agree, it might be ok for people who happen to shar…

Hmm, are we on the same HN? I feel like I see a lot of topics debated I’d call political (“about how society ought to function”) on a daily basis.

Political comments made up about 2/3 of my upvotes. It's everywhere here, it's just moderated so that it's discussed in a very armchair manner.
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