Stop tweeting.
Hire a CEO who has a vision of where to take the company so that it can be profitable and useful to society.
Ask HN: If you were in Musk's position, how would you improve Twitter instead?
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Re: Ask HN: If you were in Musk's position, how would you improve Twitter instead?
#12Bring in new features. Pre-Musk twitter only brought one new feature per year. Reduce bots, spam. Make sure that verified users are not able to change their usernames anyhow they want (currently you will find hundreds of elon musk verified accounts). Improve twitter mobile app (less bloat unlike reddit app) Use crypto payments to pay for twitter blue. Crypto payments meaning not only BTC and Dogecoin but privacy coin…
spam is maybe bad, bots are not categorically bad. I like the idea of an automated feed like Google News which is algorithmically generated to show me news or new things, I dont call it a "bot" in a pejorative way just because its automated. Bots making comments on threads, on the other hand is annoying, but as they get more sophisticated we won't be able to weed this content out. You might say, as a facile take, just only allow verified accounts, but a real account can very reasonably post content that was generated in an automated way. We won't be able to tell the difference.
Re: Ask HN: If you were in Musk's position, how would you improve Twitter instead?
#13I wouldn't charge the content creators for one, they are the lifeblood of the platform. I would do the opposite, I would let them charge their fans with membership tiers and such. I would also provide an API for content creators to be able to authorize their fans to access content outside of Twitter, basically turning the site into a membership portal. Like Patreon, but with better discoverability, as the paid conten…
This + newsletters
Re: Ask HN: If you were in Musk's position, how would you improve Twitter instead?
#14I would design the algorithms so that they tended to amplify accurate information and civil discussion. Here are some essays I have written on the subject:
https://deliberati.io/give-truth-the-advantage/ https://deliberati.io/moderation-as-consensus/
Re: Ask HN: If you were in Musk's position, how would you improve Twitter instead?
#15- E2EE on everything, including the PM
- Remove phone # requirement and invent a better way to verify, since phone # -beside the privacy concerns- barely prevents the bot/spam issue.
- Improve the UI
- Create an interest-based system, I don't want for example to read politics news when I'm an artist, or read medicine related news when I'm a programmer, and so on.
Re: Ask HN: If you were in Musk's position, how would you improve Twitter instead?
#16I mean, given the extra debt servicing required as a result of the acquisition, it's not inconceivable that returning it to profitability is simply _impossible_.
Realistically, the only way for Twitter to increase revenue significantly is probably to add users. But the trouble there is, it's _Twitter_. It has likely already more or less saturated the market for _people who like things like Twitter_. It's really hard to see a world where everyone in the developed world uses Twitter, but that's probably what you need.
(This has been Twitter's problem for a long time, IMO; Twitter execs looked at things like Facebook and TikTok and Instagram and said "~everyone in the developed world uses those things, thus they can be made to use our thing" without necessarily understanding how different it was. Twitter should probably never have been a $40bn business).
Re: Ask HN: If you were in Musk's position, how would you improve Twitter instead?
#17I’m pretty sure calm rational thinking wouldn’t have put me into an untenable situation in the first place so I’m going to have to assume not me. Let me take a crack at it.
1) What is twitter? Public square? Publication? Ad platform? Well how do they make money? (If you’re putting down $44B you at least need to know where the money comes from) So, Ad platform. Profitable? No. Crap. Opportunity for eliminating waste? Maybe. $1.5B worth? (Just servicing the acquisition debt costs $1B/yr) No. Pass.
2) ok, but still want. Fine. make a reasonable offer with contingency clauses. Don’t worry if you don’t know how to do that your lawyers do —and will (unless you tell them not to. Don’t do that)
3) shit, you ignored one and two. Ok well at least don’t piss off the advertisers any further by like firing the whole quality and safety team… annnd you did that.
4) ok we can still save this, slow and steady, figure out the lay of the land, lean into the positive, trim the negative. No? Ok then just go off half cocked, fire anyone you lay eyes on, personally moderate all tweets. Good luck to ya.
Re: Ask HN: If you were in Musk's position, how would you improve Twitter instead?
#18[dead]
Re: Ask HN: If you were in Musk's position, how would you improve Twitter instead?
#191) Revenue solved: Allow limited paid ads after tweets from commercial accounts
So, people who follow Starbucks, for example, would see paid Starbucks ads after Starbuck tweets, say 20% of the time. If you hate the ads, you can unfollow Starbucks.
2) Moderation/Cancelling solved: Allow Twitter users to sign-up/opt-out of content moderation "jury duty." You'd get "Does this Tweet lie or offend standards?" on flagged Tweets. If enough people say "yes", the tweet could be red-flagged, blocked or the Tweeter put on timeout, etc.
3) Faceless Ban Bots solved: Implement a content moderation "Court of Appeals" where a blocked/banned tweet or account could be appealed, again with Twitter users acting as jury. You'd at least get to know why something was banned and get a chance to appeal your case to fellow humans.
Re: Ask HN: If you were in Musk's position, how would you improve Twitter instead?
#201- authentication by authority: don't give check marks to people, give check marks to organizations, and they can give to their associated humans (employees/members etc), as they fit, and they lose it if they leave the organization.
this puts the burden of the verification (and content, by proxy) on the authenticating body, not on the platform. Twitter simply cannot verify all people, but it can verify the much smaller subset of organizations or have further organization verification even.
Who is this @ElonMusk guy? I don't know, but the "?" mark next to his name says that his account is verified by @Tesla, which in turn was verified by @Nasdaq, who might provide social media to all listed companies, for a fee.
@JoeBiden? He was once Verified by the@USSenate, then @VP, and now the @POTUS.
After retirement, it's upto them if they want to continue provide authentication or pretend like @DonaldTrump doesn't exist.
Youtube could provide Authentication for youtubers, Newspapers providing authentication for its journalists, etc.
What about random ol' me? I am an unaffiliated noob, so I could maybe get authentication from my university as a part of being an Alumni... or maybe I could verify my own damn self for $8 like Elon is trying to sell... but at a lower tier to authority led verification (but higher tier than the plebs, I guess)
Twitter could sell verification packages to organization for like $X for #Y associated account verifications or whatever.
Similarly, to advertisers, offer packages of verified organizations accounts to advertise against. A bloc of all authors verified by Big 5 Publishing is $X, if you want further granularity, it costs further... and you roll the dice on their comments.
Pressure is now on the verifying authority to keep their verified accounts in check, and if an author spews shit, their account remains and comments remain, but drops out of the package after losing verification, so advertiser are not affected.
that's my $0.02, haven't thought it all through yet.
E&OE.