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Twitter board adopts poison pill after Musk’s $43B bid to buy company

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Re: Twitter board adopts poison pill after Musk’s $43B bid to buy company

#571

Post by jimmydorry »

pbreit wrote: post #521
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> fate of the company after it has been taken private doesn't matter as far as "fiduciary duty" is concerned If it goes private. As always, Matt Levine says it better than I can: "...the financing seems to be made up of cobwebs and phlogiston. But also Musk has joked about taking companies private before, and he generally changes his mind a lot. (He agreed to join Twitter’s board last week! And then changed his mind…

Levine is being disingenuous, as usual. Obviously he would have banks and investors fighting to finance the deal. Wouldn't a breakup penalty address the breakup problem?

Not to mention he is being disingenuous by implying there was no material change between getting offered a seat at the board, and hearing what accepting that seat would entail.

Re: Twitter board adopts poison pill after Musk’s $43B bid to buy company

#572

Post by tayo42 »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #470
tayo42 wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> opens sourcing Twitter algorithm People need to stop saying this. It's nonsense. Or maybe keep saying it so we know your clueless about how anything works that your commenting on

> It's nonsense Why? (Honest question.)

which part do you want open sourced? timelines are generated after going through machine learning and then multiple services. even then, some of the infrastructure limits what you see in the end.

https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/infrastruc...

> Unfortunately, Haplo has its limits. Since we try to pull every single Tweet ID in a conversation every time a conversation is loaded in real-time, this is potentially an unbounded amount of data. We’ve found that if our platform tries to load more than a certain number of entries from our cache at once, our cache request latency will spike, and we begin to time-out on a significant fraction of read requests. Because of this, there is a limit of thousands of Tweets per conversation tree in this cache.

even just showing an ad is a ton work has a bunch of services involved

https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/infrastruc...

Other stuff that I think explains the complexity

https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/insights/2...

https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/insights/2...

https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/insights/2...

there's no single algorithm, its a bunch of parts coming together from hundreds of engineers and multiple services.

Re: Twitter board adopts poison pill after Musk’s $43B bid to buy company

#573

Post by MrMan »

nikolay wrote: post #309

I think he should just use a fraction of the price and build a bot-free Twitter clone. He has such a massive following, which will quickly populate the new platform!

so yes to unnattended smart contracts but no to unattended text generators?

Re: Twitter board adopts poison pill after Musk’s $43B bid to buy company

#574

Post by the_only_law »

burnished wrote: post #503
hooande wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As is detailed by many smart people below, fiduciary duty lawsuits are difficult to win. They'd pretty much have to have board members emailing each other saying "This would be in the best interest of shareholders, but let's screw them over instead" This was an epic debacle. Musk invested 4 BILLION dollars in an asset of questionable value, because "free speech". If he times it right he could come out ahead financial…

I'm not getting the impression that his actions are the result of a highly polished corporate public personna, I think his actions make way more sense if you imagine that he's just some regular, kinda bright, really eccentric asshole with more money than god. Like, you can probably imagine at least one person you know acting this way if they discovered a genie.

> I'm not getting the impression that his actions are the result of a highly polished corporate public persona.

This has been my thought for a while. Dudes is a character, playing a part.

Re: Twitter board adopts poison pill after Musk’s $43B bid to buy company

#575

Post by stephen_g »

maxlybbert wrote: post #471
Waterluvian wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why will the price tank? None of this changes the value of Twitter if he walks away.

I also believe that Musk will walk away and the stock will tank. Musk’s recent stock purchase and discussion about joining the board made the price jump significantly. You’re right that there’s no obvious reason that his involvement should change Twitter’s value, but the market appears to think otherwise. If he walks away, at a minimum, I would expect that the stock price will drop to what it was before he started pl…

I’ve muted him, and I’m sure many other people have. Honestly if he leaves and that makes some of his fans leave too, I don’t see how that would do that much except for slightly raise the quality of conversations across the board!

Re: Twitter board adopts poison pill after Musk’s $43B bid to buy company

#576

Post by Uehreka »

tag2103 wrote: post #522
tehwebguy wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody will switch from Twitter to some knock off he or anyone else makes. (By “nobody” I mean both nearly 0% of users and only people who will not be missed on Twitter)

I hate to disagree with you but when was the last time you checked your MySpace page?

Facebook (the thing I think people will agree destroyed MySpace) was not started by someone fed up with MySpace saying “I’m going to make the same thing, but I’ll moderate it differently!” It was started before MySpace had reached peak popularity, by an entrepreneur with a totally different product vision and way of looking at the world. Elon’s hypothetical Twitter-clone would probably be more like Gab, Parler or the Trump thing: Twitter, but with less moderation and some sort of weird gimmick, like “starting midnight Tuesday, I’m giving a free Model 3 to the first 1000 people who sign up!” or “I’m hosting a quarter of the load on servers on StarLink satellites!”

Twitter won’t be destroyed by someone making a slightly different Twitter clone, it’ll be destroyed by something that re-imagines entirely in a way that also supplants it, and it’ll probably come from someone we don’t know yet.

Re: Twitter board adopts poison pill after Musk’s $43B bid to buy company

#577

Post by cmurf »

toephu2 wrote: post #457

Wow, my prediction is Musk will walk away, Twitter stock price will tank, and Twitter will be flooded with thousands of shareholder lawsuits (for breaching their fiduciary duty).

If Musk is sincere, he will turn Twitter into an 8chan racist hellhole. He has said he believes in absolute free speech. Racism, trolling, libel, dick pics, blatant racism are all fair game. He'd reverse Trump's lifetime ban.

Maybe Twitter was always doomed because it was just fad. But the idea Musk alone can save it is absurd.

Re: Twitter board adopts poison pill after Musk’s $43B bid to buy company

#578

Post by quickthrowman »

fullshark wrote: post #435
guyzero wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I don't like it" != financial distress. From Twitter's 2021 10K: "FY 2021 Highlights Total revenue was $5.08 billion, an increase of 37%, compared to 2020." 2021 net losses were $221M, which is a big improvement on $1.135B in 2020. Honestly seems like things are really shaping up @ Twitter.

I’m actually a bit amazed they aren’t profitable yet. Hasn’t their user base been stagnant/shrinking for years? What are they investing in?

https://www.sec.gov/edgar/browse/?CIK=1418091&owner=exclude

Re: Twitter board adopts poison pill after Musk’s $43B bid to buy company

#579

Post by myko »

treeman79 wrote: post #250
Cookingboy wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Woke means broke I guess. That sentence alone means you weren't even discussing this in good faith. It's very well possible that the Twitter board believes that they can achieve higher value for the shareholders than what Elon offered. It's also very well possible that after talking to Elon through private conversations that you were not part of, they fundamentally disagree with his value and the direction he wants…

The entire Twitter battle is about the woke left taking over / banning all of America culture.

This implies American culture is pro-fascism, and while there are elements of that I don't believe that encapsulates American ideas - the gamut of ideologies have been part of the nation since its founding, though the ideas and what that means have shifted over time

Re: Twitter board adopts poison pill after Musk’s $43B bid to buy company

#580

Post by kmeisthax »

psyc wrote: post #535
a-dub wrote: post #501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

from what i understand it's a matter of ideals combined with the technologist's desire to see the machines (all types, including sociopolitical) work correctly. he wants to see the first amendment function with autistic precision. he wants to remove any messy personalization because it interferes with that purity. he wants fully transparent moderation and proof of fairness. he doesn't like the idea that one organizat…

I have this recurring fantasy in which some Satoshi figure creates a decentralized global bulletin board, such that anybody can post and view anything anonymously and untraceably, and nobody - not the U.S. government, nor the CCP, nor the Mossad, nor the NSA - can stop it short of dismantling the whole Internet and starting over. Nobody can blame anybody, because nobody can stop it. Not because I think such a thing i…

This already existed, it was called Freenet[0], and it was just as much of a trash dumpster as one might imagine. I have no idea if it still works.

The fact of the matter is that such a system absolutely would not scale. USENET crumbled under the weight of early 90s AOL subscribers; imagine even a fraction of today's Facebook or Twitter users moving to a similarly open system. It would be absolutely unusable chaos.

The thing is, these systems are not "the whole psyche of humankind projected into public view". That's far, far too generous for it. What usually happens is that the loudest extremists scream over everyone else, sock-puppet support for each other, create an echo chamber, and then proclaim that everyone who doesn't think like them isn't a real human being. The vast majority of people do not actually interact with the system.

[0] Technically speaking it was some extra overlay software on top of Freenet. I don't remember the name.

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