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Elon Musk owns Twitter: The story so far

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Re: Elon Musk owns Twitter: The story so far

#551

Post by golemotron »

ribosometronome wrote: post #498
julianeon wrote: post #57

In the spirit of trying to be high-information and add value: Where Musk is going, there are no maps. So it's very very hard to project. But we can predict likely developments. At a very high level, it's going to involve: bringing back controversial personalities like Donald Trump; increasing Twitter's commitment to 'free speech'; assuaging skittish advertisers; retaining users who might be concerned, while bringing…

"There are no maps" doesn't seem to jive with "WeChat but for America".

China and America are very different. We can't use one map for the other.

Re: Elon Musk owns Twitter: The story so far

#552

Post by rajin444 »

sosodev wrote: post #137
mooreds wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. I think he understands that, as indicated by https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1585619322239561728 That doesn't sound like someone burning Twitter to the ground. Also, many are acting like Musk has free rein in running the company. Yes and no. Beyond needing employees to actually run the thing, he also has loans to pay back ($13B!) and investors to maintain good relationships with. More on that here: https…

I'm very skeptical of the idea that Twitter can become a place where people discuss things with civility. It seems like the mechanics of the conversation encourage outrage.

Civil discussion requires high trust societies. Our elites have been doing everything possible to destroy that recently.

Re: Elon Musk owns Twitter: The story so far

#553

Post by jameshart »

rburhum wrote: post #373
bambax wrote: post #353

The reason why Musk eventually bought Twitter, when he did, and at the price he paid, was to avoid having to testify under oath in the lawsuit against him. He was going to be deposed, exposed, and in the end he was also going to lose and suffer the indignity of having to pay a high price for something he fiercely said he didn't want anymore. Better bite the bullet earlier than later. Now that doesn't explain why he w…

He implied in a few interviews that he wants to turn it into a WeChat version of the west. Doesn't 200M+ daily active users opens up that door.

I can't square that ambition with the idea that Twitter is 4x overstaffed and needs to shed 75% of its workforce, though.

If he has ambitions to turn Twitter into an Everything App, he'll need to diverrt a significant portion of the workforce onto that project, leaving him with a fraction of a fraction of the current workforce to keep Twitter's microblogging and ad shilling platform up and running.

Re: Elon Musk owns Twitter: The story so far

#555

Post by the-printer »

No reason to take my word on this, but I think that this will blow up in his face agonizingly in a way similar to Zuckerberg/Meta. I think that US-owned social media platforms as we them are beginning to flounder into a sort of soft irrelevancy. In other words, they are stagnating and their user bases will likely plateau in terms of growth and overall culture of the platforms.

Culturally Twitter has been dead for almost a decade as far as the quality of the posts go and the general “vibe” of the place, sort of like Reddit. I really think social media has become low-brow entertainment with a little more reading involved than a Television. Social media is almost an online iteration of the airport bookstore.

Re: Elon Musk owns Twitter: The story so far

#556

Post by concinds »

mNovak wrote: post #472
concinds wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people are focused on censorship/content issues, but I really think the X.com "mega app" vision is the most significant part of this. It'll be hard to gain a foothold in those markets, and there'll be antitrust challenges, but it really fits perfectly with the rest of Musk's vision: X.com Maps could tie in with Teslas, X.com Carhailing could tie-in with (future) full self-driving; Twitter could be expanded to be…

>> There's no attempt to create a single, wide-ranging social media platform, with payments, video, shorts, DMs, and more Umm.. Facebook? Just offering all those features doesn't mean much though, you really have to be dominant in each one, since there's much less moat to debundling consumer apps vs enterprise

Their platforms are siloed off. The point of a mega app is that it's not siloed off; the reels, videos, DMs and tweets would be part of the same experience, and rely on the same usernames, hence the moat.

Re: Elon Musk owns Twitter: The story so far

#557

Post by kaesar14 »

bradgessler wrote: post #543
cutenewt wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's going to be more in the other direction. He really hates the bots, so he'll probably close up the API. Until bots gets solved, no developer should expect the API to open up.

IMO framing it as "get rid of the bots" is the wrong way to solve the problem because it's unsolvable, especially as we head more towards a world of content being generated by increasingly sophisticated ML algorithms. It's probably best to embrace the bots and instead think about it as a problem of categorizing, quantifying, and applying more metadata to messages that let people, agents, or other bots determine the q…

100%. Allow open, reasonably rats-limited access to the API, and use the absolutely gargantuan amounts of data Twitter has built up to sort through bots. If other services can do it why can’t Twitter?

Re: Elon Musk owns Twitter: The story so far

#558

Post by pmoriarty »

memish wrote: post #540
pmoriarty wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Would be interesting if he makes Twitter more dev friendly (open APIs etc)" How open and dev friendly is Tesla?

More open and friendly than most. https://www.tesla.com/blog/all-our-patent-are-belong-you

...and then there are stories like this[1] where Tesla is refusing to release autopilot data to an owner who claims Tesla's autopilot caused his car to crash.

That's not very open.

[1] - https://www.detroitnews.com/story/business/autos/2020/02/26/...

Re: Elon Musk owns Twitter: The story so far

#560

Post by ChainOfFools »

munificent wrote: post #504
wzyoi wrote: post #349

I always wonder: how much honesty is in him? For example, he stopped talking about the bot population on the platform altogether after he could not get out of the deal. Was he honest about this being a big issue in the first place? For me, it’s not easy to believe this because this bot issue appeared right after Twitter staff did not like his speech, and talks with the CEO fell apart. Am I mistaken about how it all p…

Every one of us has run into situations where choosing to be honest has materially cost us. You accidentally scratch a parked car on your way out. Do you stop and leave a note with contact info or not? The richer you are, the more leverage you have and larger the material cost for these situations. A fellow rich friend gives you a little insider info that a stock you hold is about to crater. Do you sell some? In othe…

> being honest is a tax

Being honest is an investment in an honest society and a just future. Of course, the problem with being honest is that, as with any ideological conflict, those who volunteer for the front lines make the most sacrifices, and have to trust that the tide will someday turn in favor of their side, even though they may never see it happen. So there's a lot of "you go first" noise instead of active effort to walk the talk.

Nonetheless this trending fad of referring to any cost that has no obvious immediate benefit to the payer a tax is starting to outgrow the original, and usefully narrow, scope it once had.

It would be equally valid, semantically, (and I would argue more valid prescriptively) to observe that having to constantly verify at great expense what in an honest society you could you could otherwise trusted at nearly zero expense, is the more costly and pernicious "tax" on total human productivity.

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