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Twitter set to accept Musk's $43B offer – sources

reuters.com

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Re: Twitter set to accept Musk's $43B offer – sources

#161
post #147

Honest question, why can Elon, and only Elon solve the bot problem? Software devs have been trying to solve this problem since the beginning of the internet and yet bots still fill every space on the web.

He wants to charge for a checkmark. This both increases the cost of bots and is a form of authentication. It’s much easier to compare payment methods between accounts.

Re: Twitter set to accept Musk's $43B offer – sources

#162
post #89

Looking at the problems Twitter has, why does anyone think Musk can even solve one? If one believes Twitter has a free speech problem: Musk shouts about free speech but shut down Teslas PR department, lashes out against any criticism against him, canceled a preorder because he didn't like a journalists' article etc. Musk is great at self-promotion and this often helps his companies in some sense, but what else does h…

>Looking at the problems Twitter has, why does anyone think Musk can even solve one?

Transparency about moderation is the easiest to fix. All everyone wants out of Twitter is to know why posts are moderated, promoted, shadow-banned, etc. It doesn't have to be super specific, in terms of moderation, but giving everyone an overall sense of how and why things are moderated the way they are, would help to restore a sense of fairness.

If he does well with Twitter in that regard, all the other platforms aren't hard to replicate if you've got the servers and money.

OR

He loses most of his wealth selling off stock to try to do this, and we learn the difference between paper and real wealth.

Re: Twitter set to accept Musk's $43B offer – sources

#163
post #113

“Everything that isn’t illegal is allowed” sounds great until you see what that actually means on the internet. Anyone who has ever worked in content moderation / trust & safety knows what kind of unrelenting deluge of obnoxious / disturbing / spam-filled / miserable race to the bottom of the lizard brain stuff that is constantly being pushed back on any moderately popular social media site. It seems so easy from a d…

It also sounds great until you consider other countries. Most people on Twitter are not in the US.

Re: Twitter set to accept Musk's $43B offer – sources

#164
post #113

“Everything that isn’t illegal is allowed” sounds great until you see what that actually means on the internet. Anyone who has ever worked in content moderation / trust & safety knows what kind of unrelenting deluge of obnoxious / disturbing / spam-filled / miserable race to the bottom of the lizard brain stuff that is constantly being pushed back on any moderately popular social media site. It seems so easy from a d…

Yaknow, I've helped build sites for Nazis and furries and fisting fans and others who were not anticipating a broad welcome; and their boards were remarkably civil places. Even with the inevitable and never ending "yall are sinners and need jesus" crews such places attract.

Just maybe its the enforcement of orthodoxy that makes "content moderation" so toxic?

Re: Twitter set to accept Musk's $43B offer – sources

#165
post #113

“Everything that isn’t illegal is allowed” sounds great until you see what that actually means on the internet. Anyone who has ever worked in content moderation / trust & safety knows what kind of unrelenting deluge of obnoxious / disturbing / spam-filled / miserable race to the bottom of the lizard brain stuff that is constantly being pushed back on any moderately popular social media site. It seems so easy from a d…

Personally I'd consider it an improvement, but that might be because of my naive assumption that people will finally stop mistaking twitter for a sensible way of communicating.

Re: Twitter set to accept Musk's $43B offer – sources

#166

People act like this is some spiteful thing he's doing in order to just post edgy memes or have a 'private' social media for himself. Twitter, despite being a toxic place the majority of people avoid, brought in over 5 billion dollars last year. If elon removes bots, welcomes non-extremists back on, gets comedians and entertaining accounts back on board and lets people say what they want instead a bot army of shills…

It's not even that, if he added "lookalike audience" for ad publishers, it could bring revenues significantly higher, twitters ad platform is disaster compared to other social media

Re: Twitter set to accept Musk's $43B offer – sources

#167
post #40

I feel like people have invested in Elon in large part because of his alignment with i) moving humanity away from fossil fuels and ii) making life multi planetary. He is obviously free to do as he pleases with this new wealth but I cant help but feel this as a huge redirection of resources (in terms of both capital and focus) from those goals

I feel that most people have invested in Elon because he knows how to make a lot of money and they want to be part of it.

Investors are here for the money. While some will favor some companies over others for ethical reasons, no one invests to lose money. In the case of, for example, Tesla, the reasoning is usually that governments all around the world want to move away from fossil fuels and because Tesla is in that market, it will eventually make shittons of money.

That Elon Musk wants to buy Twitter shouldn't have an impact on the potential profits Tesla can make, Elon or not, Tesla will continue making electric cars in a world that demands electric cars to move away from fossil fuels. As for SpaceX (the "interplanetary" side), it is private, so you can't invest.

Re: Twitter set to accept Musk's $43B offer – sources

#168
post #147

Honest question, why can Elon, and only Elon solve the bot problem? Software devs have been trying to solve this problem since the beginning of the internet and yet bots still fill every space on the web.

Someone might’ve said, how is Elon going to make space flight far more affordable?

I have no idea, but he’s a better bet than most other folks I’d say.

Will he succeed? I’d bet not, but I can’t think of someone better to try.

Re: Twitter set to accept Musk's $43B offer – sources

#169
post #113

“Everything that isn’t illegal is allowed” sounds great until you see what that actually means on the internet. Anyone who has ever worked in content moderation / trust & safety knows what kind of unrelenting deluge of obnoxious / disturbing / spam-filled / miserable race to the bottom of the lizard brain stuff that is constantly being pushed back on any moderately popular social media site. It seems so easy from a d…

It's almost like this kind of thing does not exist. Just go to 8chan or whatever it is called now. You will want to pour Clorox in your eyes. Feel free - enjoy "free speech".

The Internet was actually LESS free back in the day, in the sense that we hung out on tightly moderated Perl CGI discussion boards, where idiots and trolls were not tolerated. Usenet was great too, without moderation, as it required one to be pretty technical to get there.

Re: Twitter set to accept Musk's $43B offer – sources

#170

People act like this is some spiteful thing he's doing in order to just post edgy memes or have a 'private' social media for himself. Twitter, despite being a toxic place the majority of people avoid, brought in over 5 billion dollars last year. If elon removes bots, welcomes non-extremists back on, gets comedians and entertaining accounts back on board and lets people say what they want instead a bot army of shills…

> Twitter, despite being a toxic place the majority of people avoid, brought in over 5 billion dollars last year. If elon removes bots, welcomes non-extremists back on, gets comedians and entertaining accounts back on board and lets people say what they want instead a bot army of shills repeating verbatim over and over and over...

Elon Musk is absolutely not the right person for this job though. Indeed, he's one of the main forces hell-bent on making Twitter a toxic place. Look at this tweet for example (I'm not cherry-picking something from way back in the past; this is the third most recent thing he's tweeted):

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1517707521343082496

The quality of that post is significantly below the quality of anything that routinely makes it to my own personalized feed. And in case you don't understand the context of that post, it's because Bill Gates may have shorted Tesla or something. So in retaliation for that, Elon is making fun of Bill Gates's appearance on the largest platform he has, and countless of his followers will take up this mantle and run with it.

It's actually hard for me to think of a worse person to come along and try to improve the quality of Twitter, except for maybe Trump.

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