> 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.
Accessibility is supposed to change and improve. It's fair to expect that to halt when the entire staff has been fired.
Surely no one felt more desperation for Mastodon to operate as an adequate substitute for Twitter than GOP leadership in the aftermath of Trump's Twitter ban and the 2020 election. If those people, the most motivated people in all of time to make Mastodon work, can't make Mastodon work, then I struggle to see how the Musk-haters plan to switch over successfully. I'd apply the same argument to every other platform - i…
But Mastodon works. If Trump's people can't make it work, it's possible that it's not Mastodon that's the problem.
(For the record, I'm not on Mastodon, but I follow a lot of people who are.)
It's easier to rally against some foe when that foe is one person. When it's a bunch of shareholders, the hatred is diluted.
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...
I wonder how Steve Jobs avoided this. Perhaps by being less political I guess
I find this hilarious. We all understand that the core reason some people might want to hurt twitter is because it is no longer going to follow the moderation policy that they liked (namely, silencing people with different political opinions). Yet, people can't name this reason honestly, and invent some other thin weiled excuses like 'layoffs are baaaad and unethical'. Bold prediction: this influencer with 40k follow…
Over the last week I've favourited every single person claiming to leave Twitter. In a few weeks I intend to do some analysis and see how many stop posting. So far the answer is none out of 200, but it's early days.
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".
Just go through the list of most popular Twitter users and ask yourself where else are they going to go?
I personally wouldn't gamble the farm on corporation ad spending's adherence to social justice if those eyeballs are all in one place... at least long term.
At least FB has to compete with messaging apps and Instagram/TikTok. Twitter doesn't have a good #2.
It's probably a mistake to take the emotional outrage news cycles over the next month (or 3) as much more than the exact thing people will keep going back to Twitter for... ironically this outrage at Musk is the exactly what drives people to use Twitter.
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…
Is he?
Many of his ideas seems to come from sort if Sci-Fi that doesn't work in the real world.
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…
After Youtube stopped displaying the number of downvotes for a video, algos is the only thing left that you can rely upon to understand if the video is good. But I'd prefer being able to rely on downvotes number.
>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.
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…
Interesting take. I guess the upcoming Walter Isaacson biography on Musk will reveal.
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…
> To assume Elon has simply discarded the issue of accessibility altogether is to me the least likely assumption. Yep indeed, it could be that Musk doesn't really know who does what at Twitter, nor which teams are effective or not. Maybe noone does. In that case the best path forward could well be to blow up everything, leaving only a skeleton crew to keep the lights on, then rebuild on top of the scorched earth. In…
That sounds very good as an approach for building a product, but for managing a communication platform, I’m not sure. The problem is that there is a kind of overgeneralized understanding (built out of prejudice, imho) that moderators are a bunch of left-wing power-thirsty bigots. However, moderating is a hard problem, one that has not (and never will have) any well-defined final solution. There will always be variance and noise in moderation, and people will always complain; it’s a trade-off.