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It looks like I’m moving to Mastodon

simonwillison.net

191–200 of 472 posts

Re: It looks like I’m moving to Mastodon

#191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter used to be run by progressives, so there was a modicum of "we are, or should be, doing good things here". Elon Musk bought Twitter specifically to hollow out its progressive cultural core.

"I was happy to do free work for that billionaire, he's part of the same ideology I've been born into. But now that it's this other billionaire, I cannot continue."

There's a real difference between a company on the public markets and a private one. American capitalism always had a democratic bent of everyone being part of the success story by owning stock and companies being aligned with the public broadly through market signals. There's a big difference between a company answering to a usually diverse and accessible set of shareholders and a Bladerunner-esque trillionaire who uses it for whatever he wants.

Re: It looks like I’m moving to Mastodon

#192
post #68
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People keep talking about laying off half the company like it's a bad thing. Don't get me wrong, there are lots of negative factors to laying off staff and I'm not denying those. But anyone who has worked in a large org, especially a public one, knows that there is excessive bloat. Many people at large orgs do nothing. They go to great lengths to ensure it looks like they're doing something, which I guess is somethin…

I think even if he was correct that Twitter has a lot bloat that needs to be cut, I really struggle to believe you could accurately judge who or what needs to be cut when slashing your 7000 employee business in half within 5-6 days of walking in the door. The chance of making big mistakes and cutting critical staff and teams is very high.

> The chance of making big mistakes and cutting critical staff and teams is very high.

It turns out that in the big picture, there are fewer people who are truly critical than most people think.

Especially individual contributors. There are rare exceptions but those, who truly make a difference, stand out.

Re: It looks like I’m moving to Mastodon

#193

I expect that the feature I’ll miss most from Twitter will be the algorithmic timeline! I must be old. I remember a time when people wanted a chronological timeline (on by default). Twitter still offers a chronological timeline, but now that people are migrating to Mastodon, I've come across the wish to have an algorithmic timeline again quite often :). I just find this interesting (I can relate, I find the algorithm…

I constantly switch Twitter back to chronological and immediately notice when it pushes me onto the algo timeline.

Another recent change they made (I think just before Elon took over) was making Notifications algorithmic. As a somewhat low-notification user, it's essentially ruined notifications for me - most of the ones I get are nonsense now instead of signals someone has interacted with me.

I think the only site I use where algos actually add value is YouTube, after many years of sending people down weird/wrong paths their algos actually seem pretty solid now in terms of suggesting content relevant to me.

Re: It looks like I’m moving to Mastodon

#194
> but one that particularly struck me was that he laid off the entire accessibility team

How accessible is Twitter's website? As a normal user I already find it to be an utter chaos, a horrible UX, which is why I rarely go there.

Are the apps better? Doesn't some third party offer a more accessible interface?

Re: It looks like I’m moving to Mastodon

#195
post #128
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>But one thing he obviously does frequently is fix broken shit, then try again if that fails. This works in small starting companies not in a Behemoth like Twitter. And I doubt he fixed so much. The traffic problems he claimed to fix with the Boring Company are nowhere near fixed, same with FSD.

From an engineering standpoint traffic is really easy to fix. Just build more roads with as much “flow” as possible (tunnels). But it doesn’t work because traffic is a human problem, not a technical problem.

And that is exactly why I think this acquisition will fail. He is a great engineer…

Re: It looks like I’m moving to Mastodon

#196

[flagged]

The left has always been about decentralisation, opposed to corporate censorship, concerned with election integrity and open source. And they're not going to drop their environmental concerns just because of new Fed appointees.

I'm sure there are people in the political center (or maybe politically undecided or flexible is more accurate?) who do change their opinions based on how the political winds blow, but most of these issues have been left-wing issues for a long time.

Re: It looks like I’m moving to Mastodon

#197
post #151
post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that's exactly elons problem now. every unpopular action will be pinned on him personally. https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/28/23428132/elon-musk-twitt...

Facebook's ire seems to always be focused on Zuckerberg. It was always that way, especially after the Social Network movie. And despite about a decade of similar whining on HN about deleting Facebook they are still the most popular social network around.

What's your source for popularity and does it do a breakdown by demographics advertisers are most interested in? Because I think that tells a very different story from "still most popular with boomers". Their earnings and stock price also tell a different story from "still most popular".

Re: It looks like I’m moving to Mastodon

#198
post #42
post #26

The author quit Twitter primarily because the entire accessibility team was sacked. Understandable... if you know nothing about Elon Musk. I am not a fanboy in the least. But one thing he obviously does frequently is fix broken shit, then try again if that fails. He does these things in public and listens to feedback. He clearly keeps a sense of humor about things, which rattles a lot of people understandably. I know…

My impression is that he has a unique way of building “Brand Elon” which seems to work because of the times we’re in. He enters like a bull in a china shop, destroying everything regardless of quality or value. He then hands over day-to-day running to a team of competent people to build it back up as something new, but leveraging the original brand. Elon Musk then gets the credit because of legendary stories of all h…

I personally wouldn’t underestimate his courage and hard work as an engineering leader; he did reach places that were very hard to reach with this approach. The problem is that social media is not (solely) an engineering problem.

Re: It looks like I’m moving to Mastodon

#200
post #49

> I can’t see myself putting the same work in to help the world’s richest man pay the loans he took out So Twitter was “really good” (while it was helping the many rich shareholders of a random public company) but it’s suddenly “work” a couple of days after the owner changed? Nothing wrong for not using it because of ideological reasons, but the product’s accessibility (or anything else really) hasn’t changed yet.

The main difference isn't really who but how much money. One uses a lot of goods and services in ordinary life. Generally speaking one hopes that the provider of these goods and services uses their resources efficiently to provide them for a reasonable price including reasonable profit.

When a leveraged buyout happens (this is true for most leveraged buyouts) a large cost is put into the business that wasn't there before. And this cost does nothing to help make the good or service better. It merely exists so that person B may own the business instead of person A.

So what is the difference between Musk and the previous shareholders? The main difference is that Musk put an enormous cost on the business which will be borne by twitters users and advertisers, and that cost brings twitter nothing more than having musk as an owner.

By himself musk may be no better or worse than the previous shareholders. But just for him to rule over twitter is going to cost twitter a lot of money that will probably reduce the quality of the service.

This is true of most leveraged buyouts and whenever a leveraged buyout happens to a company you use, it is always a good idea to look for alternatives. The official response of the leveraged buyout industry is that the new management is just so much better that it is worth to saddle the company with all this debt and all these costs to just change the management. And the customer will benefit from the better management.

It is yet to be seen whether Musk is such a great manager that he can run a social media company so much better than everybody else to make it worth taking the enormous debt, and do that without having any experience running a social media company and while running two (oh wait - three ) other companies simultaneously.

But generally speaking this is not the case. It might have been the case during the beginning of the LBO industry when there was some truly entrenched bad management in some US companies but not anymore. It is possible to change management of a publicly traded company without doing an LBO, and nowadays stockholders tend to be good about holding their managers to high standards.

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