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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

#731

Post by rvnx »

ipaddr wrote: post #719
georgeglue1 wrote: post #640

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we have to tolerate a certain amount of irrationality from shareholders. If you bought a $100k home which then dipped to $80k during Covid, would you accept an unsolicited bid of $90k? It's reasonable for some people to take the bid, since you could arguably buy another comparable house for $80k and pocket the $10k difference, but I think a lot of other people would reasonably choose not to. (I'm not totally…

You build a home and 10+ years in 2021 it's worth 100,000 today 60,000 and someone offers you 80,000 for it you might sell.

If you sold it 80'000 then it means it was worth 80'000, not 100'000

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

#732

Post by memish »

emodendroket wrote: post #728
memish wrote: post #696

Some points from the All in Pod. 1. The Twitter board of directors has become a status thing. It's like a country club. They don't have real skin in the game; they don't own much stock. They're not aligned with the shareholders. It's about status and cultural power. 2. Why should we believe that the company will become more valuable when the stock price is where it was way back in December 2013? Compare to how the S&…

> The elites have somehow inverted history so they now believe that it is not censorship that is the favored tool of fascists and authoritarians, even though every fascist and despot in history used censorship to maintain power, but instead believe free speech, free discourse, and free thought are the instruments of repression. It feels a little silly to act like the guy trying to spend billions of dollars to get his…

That's like saying SpaceX isn't about going to Mars and Tesla isn't about reducing carbon emissions.

At this point we can say these are mission focused moves. This is about free speech in the public square.

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

#733

Post by paisawalla »

ehsankia wrote: post #716
darth_avocado wrote: post #706

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One AI engineer from Tesla could solve Twitter’s bot and spam problem I think you underestimate how hard the problem is or you don’t fully understand how it works. The scale at which Twitter operates makes it near impossible to take down spam in real time. You don’t think Twitter is working on it, but they are. What you see is a much smaller percentage of the actual spam generated, and the reason you see it is beca…

To think that a company that has failed to create self-driving for nearly a decade could solve "content moderation", one of the hardest problem on the internet that every single of the big companies (who btw hire the best talent) have been struggling with, is truly a shocking statement to me. If all Google and Facebook couldn't solve it, why could a Tesla engineer of all people...

We're not talking about the hardest content problems on the internet. Look at any of Elon Musk's (or anyone in crypto's) popular tweets and you'll see a flood of incredibly obvious bots that poorly mimic his account, spamming some shit coin or advertising a BTC address.

Also, you're really understating how good Tesla self-drive is. It's not full self-drive but it's a real achievement.

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

#734

Post by jokethrowaway »

axg11 wrote: post #129
UnpossibleJim wrote: post #105

So, I'm not very corporate savvy and this might be a very stupid question. Is there a NON-culture/political reason for all the push back against Musk buying Twitter? From the read, this just seem to be opening the door for someone else to try and take majority control and pining away for the days of Dorsey (which, if looked at objectively, weren't great... just filling an opportunity).

The pushback is simple: Twitter stock price was higher than Musk’s offer for most of 2021. We are in a downturn affecting the entire tech industry, and it’s likely that prices will return to previous levels at some point. Elon’s offer is a lowball and Twitter can bring more value to shareholders with or without Elon.

2021 was a growth without fundamentals for the entire market, mainly funded by currency inflation and government influence.

This bear market is returning to reality and paying the price for those profits.

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

#735

Post by tdehnel »

M2Ys4U wrote: post #691
tdehnel wrote: post #604

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You say “free speech” mockingly in quotes as if it’s not the one right that literally all your other rights depend on.

It's not, though. In fact free speech is in direct contradiction to other rights, and these have to be balanced against each other for society to function. Take the right to privacy, for example. My right to privacy necessarily entails restricting your right to disseminate information about me. Or the rights to life and bodily autonomy - the prohibition on inciting violence is a restriction of free speech.

Who advocated for those rights and why were they allowed to?

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

#736

Post by soperj »

viraptor wrote: post #715
darth_avocado wrote: post #706

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One AI engineer from Tesla could solve Twitter’s bot and spam problem I think you underestimate how hard the problem is or you don’t fully understand how it works. The scale at which Twitter operates makes it near impossible to take down spam in real time. You don’t think Twitter is working on it, but they are. What you see is a much smaller percentage of the actual spam generated, and the reason you see it is beca…

An alternative take: there's spam that's trivial to spot and spam that's hard to spot. Twitter is ignoring both. I can give you both searches and keywords to post which will return lots of spam ready to block. Not everything of course, but let's not post the "spam is a hard problem" excuse until they nuke every account responding with "metamask" and a link to Google forms.

You don't nuke the accounts, you make it so no one can see their posts and they don't realize. Make them waste their time instead of creating a new account.

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

#737

Post by viraptor »

soperj wrote: post #736
viraptor wrote: post #715

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An alternative take: there's spam that's trivial to spot and spam that's hard to spot. Twitter is ignoring both. I can give you both searches and keywords to post which will return lots of spam ready to block. Not everything of course, but let's not post the "spam is a hard problem" excuse until they nuke every account responding with "metamask" and a link to Google forms.

You don't nuke the accounts, you make it so no one can see their posts and they don't realize. Make them waste their time instead of creating a new account.

Implementation detail ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ you can handle this in many ways. The point was that Twitter doesn't currently care to use even minimal effort.

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

#738

Post by memish »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #730
tptacek wrote: post #721

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"One AI engineer from Tesla could solve Twitter's bot and spam problem." It's hard to take any of the rest of this seriously after that "detail".

I think this is the first time I disagree with you. Bot problem, perhaps not. Spam problem, definitely. https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1487022342630957062?s=21&t=... https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1496549841912094733?s=21&t=... https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1485588476057825290?s=21&t=... and https://twitter.com/id_aa_carmack/status/1473752736537657349... https://twitter.com/id_aa_carmack/status/139902863019023…

For those blindly downvoting that, here's what Paul Graham said:

"Either (a) Twitter is terribly bad at detecting spam or (b) there's something about Twitter that makes detecting spam difficult or (c) they don't care.

Based on my experience detecting spam, I'd guess (c)."

"Twitter engineering: If you're going to do such a bad job of catching spam, how about at least giving us a one-click way to report a tweet as spam and block the account, like email providers do? It may even help you get better at filtering, since more reports = more signal."

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

#739

Post by __turbobrew__ »

randyrand wrote: post #174
randyrand wrote: post #82

How are poison pills legal? If the board can make arbitrary rules can’t they just zero out Musks or anyone else’s shares right now? Or say “Anyone with the last name of Musk now owns type D share with 1/100th ownership value”. Poison pills seems pretty close to doing just that.

From ArsTechnica: “Even before Friday, Twitter had bylaws that "could have the effect of rendering more difficult, delaying, or preventing an acquisition deemed undesirable by our board of directors," the company said in a February 2022 SEC filing. That includes "a classified board of directors whose members serve staggered three-year terms," and the ability to "authoriz[e] 'blank check' preferred stock, which could…

That is insane. Was never a holder of $TWTR and never will be given these insane bylaws which allow the board to issue preferred stock without any accountability.

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

#740

Post by sillysaurusx »

memish wrote: post #738
sillysaurusx wrote: post #730

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is the first time I disagree with you. Bot problem, perhaps not. Spam problem, definitely. https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1487022342630957062?s=21&t=... https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1496549841912094733?s=21&t=... https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1485588476057825290?s=21&t=... and https://twitter.com/id_aa_carmack/status/1473752736537657349... https://twitter.com/id_aa_carmack/status/139902863019023…

For those blindly downvoting that, here's what Paul Graham said: "Either (a) Twitter is terribly bad at detecting spam or (b) there's something about Twitter that makes detecting spam difficult or (c) they don't care. Based on my experience detecting spam, I'd guess (c)." "Twitter engineering: If you're going to do such a bad job of catching spam, how about at least giving us a one-click way to report a tweet as spam…

They’re likely downvoting my somewhat dubious claim of being able to singlehandedly make a big dent in crypto spam tweets.

I appreciate your gesture, but I don’t mind the downvotes. Bold claims warrant skepticism. And talking about votes makes the conversation less interesting for the audience.

But you’re right to point out that the problem isn’t nearly as intractable as it seems. There are many ways to deter crypto spammers.

Think of it this way: suppose Twitter’s stock price was inversely proportional to the amount of crypto spam (without accidentally removing genuine tweets). Does anyone believe the stock price would go down?

It’s why I suspect Twitter simply hasn’t made it a priority.

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