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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

#601

Post by WesleyHale »

realmod wrote: post #599

He, undoubtedly, overpaid for Twitter. Also, the blue-check allows key users to distinguish themselves and is one major reason that "notable" people are using Twitter for essentially all their communications. Elon's plan to diminish the blue-check by giving it to anyone who has verified themselves by buying Twitter Blue would be very destructive and hurt Twitter's moat. -- Edit -- Actually, disregard the blue-check c…

the blue check is already meaningless. It's been handed out to people with 100's of followers and no names.

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

#602

Post by hintymad »

MarcScott wrote: post #178

Am I the only person here that finds Twitter a nice place? I'm careful about who I follow, most of whom are tech people or educators. My feed is a really nice place to go, and I can't remember the last time I read or saw anything that triggered me in the slightest. I'm seeing loads of comments about how toxic Twitter is, but isn't that on you? Don't follow or engage and the algorithm will skip you over.

I also find Twitter a nice place, as I mainly follow science and engineering topics. As for occasional stray into politics and culture wars, I simply try to get information and analysis but ignore opinions. Take the controversy on the "don't say gay" bill, I simply tried to get answers to questions like what the bill says, does it target any specific group, was what Disney said true, why some people were angry that the bill forbids teaching any sex orientation before 3rd grade, why sex education is such a divisive topic in the US, and etc.

As long as I focus on getting information and ignore those who consistently gave doctored information, Twitter is awesome.

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

#603

Post by paulgb »

realmod wrote: post #599

He, undoubtedly, overpaid for Twitter. Also, the blue-check allows key users to distinguish themselves and is one major reason that "notable" people are using Twitter for essentially all their communications. Elon's plan to diminish the blue-check by giving it to anyone who has verified themselves by buying Twitter Blue would be very destructive and hurt Twitter's moat. -- Edit -- Actually, disregard the blue-check c…

I kinda doubt it. Notable people were using Twitter long before blue checks were a thing, and although people threaten to leave twitter for other platforms, they usually come back.

Instead, I think his ideas for blue check verification won’t happen because blue checks are unofficially a carrot that Twitter can hang for brands that spend on their ad platform.

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

#604

Post by ldiracdelta »

macspoofing wrote: post #220

How did it go from hostility to acceptance so quickly? I understand playing hard-ball to negotiate a higher price, BUT why play hard-ball and just accept the initial offer? Or is there something else at play (maybe expectation is that shareholders reject it?) and this is just a PR ploy.

Pure speculation -- Lawyers are scary. Someone with an army of lawyers is a formidable opponent.

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

#605

Post by quirino »

I wonder about the potential for Twitter to improve as a product with a little shakeup/different priorities.

Stuff like not needing to login to browse or a better system for longer tweets/threads. I'd also be a fan of a very fast/lightweight interface, something closer to nitter.net.

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

#606

Post by WesleyHale »

qgin wrote: 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…

Twitter is already a cesspool. I doubt it could get any worse. The only real change I see is more users crying that theres more "transphobia" on the platform.

We're about to see a digital clash of cultures.

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

#607

Post by TrapLord_Rhodo »

altacc wrote: post #41

He's already said that he'd follow all local laws so it would be interesting to see if he can find the elusive path of maintaining free speech, following the law and not having Twitter being a toxic cesspool used mainly to shout down those not our your "side". Personally my reservations are because I think running a social media site is a lot about understanding people and defining a healthy culture for your elusive…

> find the elusive path of maintaining free speech, following the law and not having Twitter being a toxic cesspool used mainly to shout down those not our your "side".

Verified, real people will change the dynamic.

> Admitted he doesn't understand people, is a self-confessed troll & edgelord and and Tesla's culture seems less than ideal.

He got all those self-confessed trolls & edgelords together, created companies in hard sciences and made everyone rich in the process. I worked at Tesla, it was a good time.

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

#608

Post by javajosh »

davesque wrote: post #585

Here's the mental hurdle I have to get over with all this. And call me old fashioned, but I'm trying to figure out how a guy who has himself essentially proved to be a troll is supposed to be the right person to improve the quality of human interaction on the platform. The whole "pedo guy" episode comes to mind. Are my concerns too simplistic here? Somebody help me feel better about all this.

Another approach is to look at all the people you admire, and I mean ALL of them, and read up on the things they've done, and recognize that you either take the good with the bad, or you end up alone. Musk was wrong about the "pedo guy" thing. There are also stories of him firing people for no reason, to satisfy his own petty emotional needs. None of this is okay.

Einstein (and Ghandi, and MLK) cheated on their wives. Harvey Weinstien is a predator who produced Pulp Fiction. Ben Franklin (and Henry Ford) were virulent anti-semites. Von Neumann wanted to preemptively nuke Russia. Lincoln freed the slaves but was overtly racist.

So go ahead and cut Musk out of your life for his behavior. But don't forget to cut out everyone else who's done what he's done, and worse. And cut out all those who don't agree with you, and certainly do not dirty yourself by the use of their discoveries. Do not watch, listen, or use what they've made, for these are the products of bad men, and by using their work you become bad, too.

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

#609

Post by napolux »

quirino wrote: post #605

I wonder about the potential for Twitter to improve as a product with a little shakeup/different priorities. Stuff like not needing to login to browse or a better system for longer tweets/threads. I'd also be a fan of a very fast/lightweight interface, something closer to nitter.net.

I bet 5 dogecoins that we won't get anything of this.

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

#610

Post by ericmay »

realmod wrote: post #599

He, undoubtedly, overpaid for Twitter. Also, the blue-check allows key users to distinguish themselves and is one major reason that "notable" people are using Twitter for essentially all their communications. Elon's plan to diminish the blue-check by giving it to anyone who has verified themselves by buying Twitter Blue would be very destructive and hurt Twitter's moat. -- Edit -- Actually, disregard the blue-check c…

He could maybe do different colored "verified" (maybe green?) checks.

Obviously anyone with a blue check is going to be inclined to defend the exclusivity of it, but that's the problem. There are also notable people who aren't verified because they didn't jump through Twitter's hoops to become verified.

Personally I'd like to see real human verification and filtering based on "real human" and I'd pay for something like Twitter Blue if it had this. Sam Harris recently interviewed Eric Schmidt (former CEO of Google) and he had a very interesting and related point which was free speech should be just for real humans, bots don't have such rights. Unfortunately it seems that there is Blue Checkmark land and then spam land for the rest of us. If it kills Twitter for certain people to lose their status symbol, well, it would have killed Twitter in the long run anyway by maintaining it.

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