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Should I step down as head of Twitter? I will abide by the results of this poll

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Re: Should I step down as head of Twitter? I will abide by the results of this poll

#291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No one wants the job who can actually keep Twitter alive. There is no successor. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1604628761395138561?s=46...

He’s probably right, right? When was Twitter profitable, and was it profitable enough to pay for his leveraged buyout?

It seems like an awful idea to say it out loud though, right?

Re: Should I step down as head of Twitter? I will abide by the results of this poll

#292
Every day I mourn a little bit more the timeline where Twitter really does turn into 8chan.

Elon could have done it. It would have been stupid and glorious.

People keep on clutching pearls, saying you need moderation. You don't need more than what's legal, many websites are doing fine being wild jungles. Arguably, more than fine if you count creativity.

Really the only downside is that the advertisers and uninteresting people would fuck off. Neither would have mattered if instead of this pay for blue system they started charging accounts depending on how many followers they have.

Re: Should I step down as head of Twitter? I will abide by the results of this poll

#293

Can we please stop falling for this obvious tactic? How many days in a row does he have to do something seemingly-unhinged, and then follow it with some spectacle of a poll to shift the narrative? Is it really that easy ?

I don't even think he's doing it on purpose, I think he's completely in over his head. Someone referred to Elon as "speedrunning being a forum moderator", or "running a Lowtax" and yeah, so far.

It may be a subconscious tactic.

Re: Should I step down as head of Twitter? I will abide by the results of this poll

#294
"oh yeah, I have plenty else going on. I'm the head of other innovative companies. I don't need this crap over at twitter."

At this point, twitter's goal (whether headed by Elon or someone else) should be to join the fediverse, and be accepted by other large instances for federation with them.

Re: Should I step down as head of Twitter? I will abide by the results of this poll

#297
post #136

In the six weeks he's been CEO, he totally gutted Twitter, and chased away who knows how many advertisers. There's no reasonable way to right that ship. I think he knows he's on the Titanic. I think he's looking for a pretense to get out, to stop this from taking TSLA down with it even further. TSLA is down -50% in three months, whereas the S&P500 is flat.

Yep. He said just now that Twitter is "in the fast lane to bankruptcy": https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1604626103326253056

don't be an ass, he said it's been in the fast lane to bankruptcy _SINCE MAY_.

Any jackass can formulate an argument against someone by misquoting, the real skill is in doing it while being accurate.

Re: Should I step down as head of Twitter? I will abide by the results of this poll

#298
post #226

It's instructive to contrast what other billionaires did with media properties they owned: - Jeff Bezos personally bought Washington Post but he left it alone and let the editors run it. What Jeff did do was invest some money into the IT department to modernize the workflow tools (metrics dashboards, etc) for journalists. He stayed out of the decisions of what stories get run on the front page. - Rupert Murdoch owns…

> Hopefully, Elon notices that we don't have endless HN and reddit front page articles about Rupert Murdoch's jet. Are you kidding? He loves the attention, and we are only talking about Twitter because Elon bought it rather than some boring guy. I still don't see the impending death of Twitter. Where is the evidence that it is going down the tubes? PG will be back, because everything bad about Twitter is even worse o…

You aren't wrong in some senses, but I think you're wrong in the most important sense: Twitter's servers run on electricity, and electricity is paid for with ads and MAUs, not outrage on HN (and other tech forums).

Re: Should I step down as head of Twitter? I will abide by the results of this poll

#299
post #226

It's instructive to contrast what other billionaires did with media properties they owned: - Jeff Bezos personally bought Washington Post but he left it alone and let the editors run it. What Jeff did do was invest some money into the IT department to modernize the workflow tools (metrics dashboards, etc) for journalists. He stayed out of the decisions of what stories get run on the front page. - Rupert Murdoch owns…

Also consider when yishan was ceo of reddit:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/nov/13/reddit-ce...

At the time, yishan drew a ton of criticism, but now what has happened at Twitter dwarfs that story.

Recall that yishan was also from the Paypal mafia and had early experience at facebook. Yet was unable to make things work. Important for any of the current would-be Twitter investors to ponder.

Re: Should I step down as head of Twitter? I will abide by the results of this poll

#300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Everything app" seems like a great vision. Let's not get hung up on the details of, you know... everything.

It's fun to think about until you realize building the company/service portofolio that can support a mega-app would almost certainly attract ire from regulators even within the U.S., ignoring the amount of capital investment required to achieve it. Plus, Uber/Spotify/Doordash/Yelp can barely turn a profit as-is. What incentives will the everything app offer to pull consumers away from these existing competitors other…

Let's imagine Google Cloud, AWS, Azure are resp. Google's / Amazon's / Microsoft's everything apps. They are managing to handle the regulatory weight of supporting applications of all kinds of nature, and if you rethink Twitter as a platform you can do the same as well.

Many things are possible, and the Twitter app today may even continue to work as-is. But underneath it will be able to power more apps and more use cases, all tied under a common cohesive set of interactive primitives, much higher level than what cloud applications today support. This means less to reinvent, less to rediscover, and easier more natural integration between apps, services and components.

It'd be a lot of work, definitely not a 2-3 month project. So you'd need also a survival strategy that keeps Twitter 1.0 working and profitable.

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