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Paul Graham is leaving Twitter for now

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Re: Paul Graham is leaving Twitter for now

#901

Post by dan-robertson »

ehsankia wrote: post #837
_cenw wrote: post #599

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SpaceX has talented people working there despite Elon, not because of him. They supposedly have an entire handbook on "managing Elon" for deflecting his weird requests and framing things in a way that doesn't provoke his ire. They put up with it because they only have so many opportunities to work on space. Twitter has people dependent on their H-1B and very few true believers that are unfit to serve in their role. E…

Right, Twitter is absolutely nothing like SpaceX or Tesla. Twitter's problems aren't engineering issues, they're political and related to moderation. Content moderation is one of the hardest problems current which no company has managed to solve. Especially when you have the user-creator-advertiser triangle. It was clear from the very start Elon has no clue what he was walking into.

My impression were that Twitter’s problems included:

1. Not having that much revenue

2. Being expensive to run

Firing a bunch of people probably helped with #2. But there are definitely engineering problems in there too. For #1, there was the whole verified checks thing but I think that’s not going to bring in anywhere near as much money as ads did. Seems one good thing to do there is not upset advertisers. Currently advertisers seem upset. An alternative would be allowing more advertisers, eg gambling ads are quite lucrative.

The whole censorship/hellsite stuff doesn’t strike me as such an immediate problem – I think Twitter could have done ok for a while with the previous moderation policy changing at the previous rate. Though figuring out better things to do there would probably be necessary in the long term and something a private company might better be able to do, eg figuring out how to focus on the long-term interests of users rather than numbers that shareholders think are important.

But maybe I’m totally wrong and if Elon wasn’t seen to be doing things about censorship the whole thing would fall apart?

Re: Paul Graham is leaving Twitter for now

#902

Post by antifa »

videah wrote: post #667
raspberry1337 wrote: post #643

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter has less bots yets more activity than ever. In what dimension do these Hacker news posters live?

I have never had as many spam bots in my DMs and replies as I have right now.

Twitter keeps emailing me about how I need to log in and look at fake notifications I've already seen. I verified I was already unsubed from all the various fake notifications they generate (including the specific fake ones they generated).

Re: Paul Graham is leaving Twitter for now

#903

Post by kmlx »

kmlx wrote: post #850
samtp wrote: post #606

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well he did very publicly call the cave diver who saved 12 children a pedophile because he was jealous of him. He also called for a leading infectious disease expert to be jailed, further endangering someone who was already under armed protection from previous threats. And there was that one time that he shared an unfounded conspiracy theory about an elderly man who was attacked with a hammer in his own home. There w…

> Well he did very publicly call the cave diver who saved 12 children a pedophile because he was jealous of him. this is false. he called him that after the cave diver told Musk to “stick his submarine where it hurts”. it only takes 1 minute to search google.

https://amp.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/15/elon-musk...

> Musk visited the cave system himself. Unsworth said the billionaire “was asked to leave very quickly”. He also told CNN Musk could “stick his submarine where it hurts”.

Re: Paul Graham is leaving Twitter for now

#904

Post by fundad »

IAmGraydon wrote: post #506
pg wrote: post #350

I'm not leaving Twitter. It seems more likely than not that Elon will reverse the ban on links to other social media sites. I just don't want to hang out there in the meantime. Plus given the way things are going, it seemed like a good time to learn about alternatives. I still think Elon is a smart guy. His work on cars and rockets speaks for itself. Nor do I think he's the villain a lot of people try to make him out…

I’m curious to hear your thoughts on him banning Ukrainian phone numbers, effectively making it so that Ukrainians can’t sign up to share information about the war.

He chose his side in that war and it’s totally legal to use a private company to aid genocide.

Re: Paul Graham is leaving Twitter for now

#905

Post by space_fountain »

MisterMower wrote: post #683
space_fountain wrote: post #555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think villains don't exist in the real world. There are no Voldemort with no discernible reason for doing bad things, but Elon has been doing a lot of bad things lately and is inching into the realm that seems worth calling a villain to me

How can Elon be a villain if you don’t think villains exist in the real world? Your comment doesn’t make sense.

I'm speaking in two senses of the word villain. It's clear that for basically everyone if you dig deep enough you can understand why they do things, it's also true that some people do bad things and cause harm and it's not the craziest thing to call those people villains

Re: Paul Graham is leaving Twitter for now

#906

Post by drusepth »

videah wrote: post #667
raspberry1337 wrote: post #643

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter has less bots yets more activity than ever. In what dimension do these Hacker news posters live?

I have never had as many spam bots in my DMs and replies as I have right now.

By the numbers, I'm now receiving ~2.2 spam/DAY via DMs, up from ~2.4 spam/WEEK via DMs averaged over Jan-Oct.

Re: Paul Graham is leaving Twitter for now

#907

Post by fundad »

sulam wrote: post #583
pg wrote: post #350

I'm not leaving Twitter. It seems more likely than not that Elon will reverse the ban on links to other social media sites. I just don't want to hang out there in the meantime. Plus given the way things are going, it seemed like a good time to learn about alternatives. I still think Elon is a smart guy. His work on cars and rockets speaks for itself. Nor do I think he's the villain a lot of people try to make him out…

So I agree that he did smart things in the past. However he is totally incompetent managing Twitter in a rational business way. For a while there I thought he might be trying to get the debt reduced substantially and was preserving cash in the meantime. The last few weeks and the constant own-goal-via-shitposting that he does are solid evidence that any strategic plot has been well and truly lost. I get the sense tha…

I think we can stop thinking he’s running Twitter for revenue. This is clearly politically motivated and he’s even quite open it.

Re: Paul Graham is leaving Twitter for now

#908

Post by _ea1k »

DonHopkins wrote: post #866
pg wrote: post #498

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks, but as I learned when I was running HN, being a regular user of a forum (which the moderator necessarily is) and writing essays are fundamentally incompatible. If you're known to be a regular user of a forum, then when someone says something about you and you don't reply, it reads as a tacit admission that they're correct. And when you write essays people say all kinds of things about you. The combination is…

Can't we all just go back to syndicating RSS? It was so simple in those days. Except for that time before they got html escaping figured out and some joker put an unclosed tag in their title, and the entire blogoverse started blinking.

Agreed, but centralized services will always be easier to use and people drift toward the easiest solution.

People value freedom a little less than convenience.

Re: Paul Graham is leaving Twitter for now

#909

Post by adl »

pg wrote: post #350

I'm not leaving Twitter. It seems more likely than not that Elon will reverse the ban on links to other social media sites. I just don't want to hang out there in the meantime. Plus given the way things are going, it seemed like a good time to learn about alternatives. I still think Elon is a smart guy. His work on cars and rockets speaks for itself. Nor do I think he's the villain a lot of people try to make him out…

I do not agree with your opinion on Elon Musk, but I admire how calm, rational and polite your response to this situation is. Most people (including me) would let our emotions take over. You, sir, are a class act.

Re: Paul Graham is leaving Twitter for now

#910

Post by honkler »

dusing wrote: post #692
sleepybrett wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have lost many of their previous highend brand advertising. I now see almost exclusively advertisting from right wing alt brands like 'black rifle coffee'. One can safely assume that their advertising revenue has taken a huge hit. A few thousand people tossing elon $8 a month isnt going to make up for that.

You think coffee is “alt” right?

wait till you know about MyPillow
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