What’s with the sink?
„Musk bought Twitter. Let that sink in!” As usual, Musk fails to be funny. You’d think he could afford some good gag authors but that probably goes against his ego.
I thought it was funny. Each to their own.
Elon Musk Owns Twitter; CEO and CFO have left
101–110 of 135 posts
Re: Elon Musk Owns Twitter; CEO and CFO have left
#102Re: Elon Musk Owns Twitter; CEO and CFO have left
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
Tbh the best direction for twitter to move in is to stop recommending content people did not subscribe to. And then adjust the rules to allow anything legal to be tweeted to your own page. If you object to someones tweets, don't follow them. There may still need to be rules on replying to others tweets since thats pushing content on people.
Discoverability is important, but imo there should be a dedicated section for it instead of mixing it with the tweets of the people you actually follow. But on the other hand, people might not really be willing to "switch tabs" and so if you move the feature somewhere else then people will never really see it. It's kind of a trade off. I think what's a bit annoying is that often times these discovery features are use…
I use twitter because you can switch to a chronological feed by using the "sparkle/stars" button in the upper right corner. This removes all of the suggestions and tweets from people you don't know. Basically it turns discoverablity off. You still get retweets if shared by someone you follow (you can also turn that off by going to their profile).
This is the main reason it's the only social media company I use. I can avoid the algorithm completely.
I also use Twitter lists and made a list of close friends so I can see a feed of just their tweets in case I miss them in the chronological feed.
The tools are already there. The UX to surface them needs to be better though.
Re: Elon Musk Owns Twitter; CEO and CFO have left
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is assuming that political power comes from influencing all Americans rather than a small fraction who hold true power (politicians, donors, journalists, industry groups, etc.). If the small fraction is all on Twitter then viola the rhetoric is meaningful.
> politicians, donors, journalists, industry groups, etc Do you have any reason to believe they are? Except journalists, I he obviously are.
Just look at the big bad orange man's past usage of twitter.
Re: Elon Musk Owns Twitter; CEO and CFO have left
#105This whole thing has been rather interesting to observe. I do wonder how the platform will change now that it's privately owned. I don't really care a lot about the platform itself, but it's influence on politics is very real. Personally I don't think this acquisition is healthy for a democracy, but nonetheless, it's something I want to observe. I've always thought these platforms need more democratic structures of g…
>Personally I don't think this acquisition is healthy for a democracy, but nonetheless, it's something I want to observe.
This is an interesting point, curious if you could elaborate how you see elontwitter as unhealthy to democracy.
Twitter has no impact on the democratic institutions or function of the politicians. In fact, national security ensures the function of the elected politicians to continue. The only day twitter's influence can do anything to influence the democracy is election day.
The only thing that is unhealthy to a democracy on election day is anything which makes the election unfair. It's not twitter boarding up windows while the vote is being counted. Twitter does have impact on how people vote.
It's the politician and journalist's jobs to ensure the people are educated and know how to vote. This is where twitter comes in. Their current censorship of only 1 side of politics was an effective way to ensuring people didn't know how to vote. Resulting in a measurable boost to the given team. This is the unhealthiness. This is what elon at least claims he plans to fix. So to me, elon buying twitter is potentially going to be better for democracy.
Re: Elon Musk Owns Twitter; CEO and CFO have left
#106Re: Elon Musk Owns Twitter; CEO and CFO have left
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
The people didn't vote him in the first time. We just have weird rules that enable our minority party to win the presidency. This is often claimed to prevent tyranny of the majority, but it's not a boon for democracy, rather a way to limit the extreme outcomes of democracy. It's never good when someone denies the legitimacy of the very system that brought them into power. This is the part that makes him "terrible for…
Come on. 50million+ people voted for him. Maybe he "shouldn't have won" in some technical senses (but not others), but to say he wasn't hugely supported by the Demos, the People, is ridiculous. Embezzling every penny he could, modeling himself after Hitler, raising a mob to storming the capital to kidnap the vice president, and filing fake lawsuits about the election, was far far worse than losing the unofficial popu…
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Re: Elon Musk Owns Twitter; CEO and CFO have left
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
How on earth can you think this is less democratic? It is by far more democratic. Twitter under previous leadership was on a banning, censoring, rampage against anything that didn’t agree with their own narrative.
It seems to me that democracy relies on there being a degree of respect/safety for diverging viewpoints. Therefore, for democracy to work there has to be some restriction on behavior that doesn't follow those norms. That could be in the form of educational enculturation into those norms, social consequences for breaking them, or censorship.
I'm sorry but did you just say that democracy only works if we have censorship?
Re: Elon Musk Owns Twitter; CEO and CFO have left
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
Twitter is fundamentally different form and IRC channel. In an IRC channel, everyone sees every message, that's why moderation is necessary. On twitter, people themselves choose who to follow and block, they themselves moderate their own experience.
You could ignore people on IRC too, choose whether or not to join a particular channel or not, and choose which people to message in private. The problems I've run in to on it is that that some channels on IRC were run by powertripping assholes, and you'd get banned for disagreeing with them or having different opinions.... even if you were perfectly polite, didn't threaten or harass anyone, etc. Of course, you could…
The problem I had is that the space I created in the beginning was quite nice, and we had lots of nice people in it. But as word spread that people wouldn't get banned we started getting a lot of "undesirable" people, people that had been banned from every other place (and for good reason). In the end, it drove everyone else away and the channel died because once everyone was gone there was no reason for these undesirable people to stick either.
In many ways, these people don't really care about having a space to say things and instead they want a space to be able to say it to people who don't want to hear it. It is why they don't actually use the spaces they've created for themselves like parlor or truth social. They want to tell trans people that they are not valid, they want to tell women to stop having abortions, they want to tell black people that they're criminals, etc. They need an audience. And if you allow them to have it, what ends up happening is that these people being insulted and belittled will leave.
Re: Elon Musk Owns Twitter; CEO and CFO have left
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because less people are now in control of the decisions. In theory, a public company is controlled by its shareholders who are the ones that choose the board. Now the company is privately owned, meaning there are less owners than before. Less democracy means less people are in control of the decisions, that is precisely what has happened.
But that's not really true - few shareholders or shareholder groups had enough % to choose the board.
Yes. But now it's one man, no? I don't think the situation before was in any way ideal; I simply think it is worse now.