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Elon Musk to join Twitter’s board of directors

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Re: Elon Musk to join Twitter’s board of directors

#831

Post by staindk »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #824
fleddr wrote: post #678

I think people are really over-analyzing this move. I think it's motivated by prestige, not money, nor is free speech the heart of the matter. Twitter is a stagnant company. They have thousands of engineers that in the span of a decade don't seem to produce much at all, nothing visible or memorable anyway. Long-lasting Twitter problems (culture, spam, algorithm issues) never seem addressed. User growth is stagnating…

> Twitter is a stagnant company. They have thousands of engineers that in the span of a decade don't seem to produce much at all, nothing visible or memorable anyway. As a Twitter user since 2019, I’ve seen improvements even in my short time on the platform. The most obvious example is that you can now restrict who can reply to your tweets. You could make the same argument about HN, and it’d be equally mistaken. How…

Twitter auto-pauses videos when I scroll down past them. It has a couple other UX quirks that I really dislike as well.

HN probably has 0-1 devs actively working on it and is (likely still) running on two machines ("master" and "standby")[1]

Not sure about the comparison between Twitter and HN. I agree with the comment above yours - IMO Twitter has been stagnant in many regards. Why not spend time really nailing down video/image hosting/viewing etc? Why NFT profile pics?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28478379

Re: Elon Musk to join Twitter’s board of directors

#832

Post by slickdork »

PostOnce wrote: post #698
fleddr wrote: post #678

I think people are really over-analyzing this move. I think it's motivated by prestige, not money, nor is free speech the heart of the matter. Twitter is a stagnant company. They have thousands of engineers that in the span of a decade don't seem to produce much at all, nothing visible or memorable anyway. Long-lasting Twitter problems (culture, spam, algorithm issues) never seem addressed. User growth is stagnating…

"stagnant company" Why must every company sustain boundless growth and 24-hour engagement? Change and growth for their own sake can be cancers. Twitter does what it does and people like it (as seen by the fact that they all use it), yet armchair generals cry out that twitter's refusal to turn into "not twitter" is somehow a failure of engineering and management, or some form of incompetence. So, I disagree, I guess.

Your post reminded me of one of my favorite quotes.

"Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.” - Edward Abbey

Re: Elon Musk to join Twitter’s board of directors

#833

Post by awb »

systemvoltage wrote: post #749
mywittyname wrote: post #673

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet, they all have Facebook, Google, and Apple accounts. You can hate them all you want, but you're not going to change them by shoveling money into their pockets. They care enough to bitch, but not enough to do anything about it. These people who hate Twitter probably don't even use Twitter. If you're not interesting or important, then nobody on Twitter cares what you have to say. It's not like Facebook, where y…

Twitter is a monopoly. When the only way for government officials to relay messages to their constituents is through a private platform such as Twitter, it ceases to have the same privilege as a private corporation. It is a de facto public square. This is not up for debate.

> It is a de facto public square. This is not up for debate.

You provide no evidence and then try to shut down other opinions? This is certainly not a self-evident fact.

Maybe the public square is still the public square? Or the Internet itself?

Isn’t “public” in “public square” important? Twitter is a private company. The public square became important to free discussion because it was owned by the public. Twitter isn’t.

And between FB, YT, Reddit, podcasting, Google search, etc. we’ve actually never had this many different, non-siloed ways of communicating publicly. If Twitter went bankrupt tomorrow there would still be many ways for the public to broadcast their thoughts to a wide audience.

I don’t understand how a website that the majority of my friends and family don’t use, isn’t public and isn’t in the top 10 visited sites can be the “de facto public square”.

Sure, it’s a major communication channel, but one of many.

Re: Elon Musk to join Twitter’s board of directors

#835

Post by stereoradonc »

I think Musk got the seat on Twitter because he didn't want to be deplatformed. Twitter is closely tied to his PR activities (for good or bad) and all the drama around "coins" (not to give him any legitimacy from a crypto-sceptic). Twitter allows him to "shoot from the pulpit".

The story is always bigger than what plays out in the shadows. I wouldn't base my decision on what is being extensively reported.

Re: Elon Musk to join Twitter’s board of directors

#836

Post by majormajor »

ceeplusplus wrote: post #730
MisterSandman wrote: post #707

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> at the same time if Twitter as a company isn't really doing much, why do they have thousands of developers on staff? ...to keep the app running? New devices, new standards, a lot of things change that you need devs to keep up with. Also, what's up with people saying twitter is stagnant? They've added Spaces, Twitter Blue and Crypto Profile Pictures - all 3 massive features added to their product. They're all trash,…

Those things you mention hardly justify thousands of expensive developers to maintain and create. I bet a team of 10 top notch engineers could create Spaces+Blue+Crypto pfp's in a couple months and run it at Twitter scale. Don't forget Instagram was acquired when it had 13 employees serving tens of millions of users. Speaking out of experience, most engineers in big tech are bike shedding on internal tools that don't…

There is a huge difference between building a clone today on top of today's tools and commodity cloud platforms versus building it originally on what was around in 2006 and then having to constantly add features, change things, and then maintain 15 years worth of accumulated special edge cases forever without downtime.

Comparing to Instagram seems pretty unfair too as it's newer, it was even-more-featured-limited for a long time, is now part of a much larger behemoth and had much lower scale than today's twitter when it was acquired, and my guess would be that it's an easier scaling problem too (lower on post frequency, more read-heavy workload).

Re: Elon Musk to join Twitter’s board of directors

#837

Post by pcmoney »

fleddr wrote: post #678

I think people are really over-analyzing this move. I think it's motivated by prestige, not money, nor is free speech the heart of the matter. Twitter is a stagnant company. They have thousands of engineers that in the span of a decade don't seem to produce much at all, nothing visible or memorable anyway. Long-lasting Twitter problems (culture, spam, algorithm issues) never seem addressed. User growth is stagnating…

5yr returns: Twtr: 235% Fb: 65%

Re: Elon Musk to join Twitter’s board of directors

#838

Post by dragonwriter »

systemvoltage wrote: post #749
mywittyname wrote: post #673

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet, they all have Facebook, Google, and Apple accounts. You can hate them all you want, but you're not going to change them by shoveling money into their pockets. They care enough to bitch, but not enough to do anything about it. These people who hate Twitter probably don't even use Twitter. If you're not interesting or important, then nobody on Twitter cares what you have to say. It's not like Facebook, where y…

Twitter is a monopoly. When the only way for government officials to relay messages to their constituents is through a private platform such as Twitter, it ceases to have the same privilege as a private corporation. It is a de facto public square. This is not up for debate.

> Twitter is a monopoly.

In what market? What is the evidence of non-substitution/pricing power?

> When the only way for government officials to relay messages to their constituents is through a private platform such as Twitter

It’s...not the only way.

> it ceases to have the same privilege as a private corporation

First Amendment rights of private parties are not privileges.

> It is a de facto public square.

It is neither a de facto nor de jure public square.

> This is not up for debate.

Saying “This is not up for debate“ does not make your bare assertion into an actually unquestionable position.

Re: Elon Musk to join Twitter’s board of directors

#839

Post by [deleted] »

ejb999 wrote: post #715
deanCommie wrote: post #690

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counterpoint: Twitter is the only social network I use where I get an unfiltered balance of ideas big and small - CEOs and random Joes. It's where memes are born and proliferate everywhere else (other than TikTok). Twitter WORKS. If it's profitable, it doesn't need more growth. Facebook got ruined because it thought everyone's parents and grandparents should be on it, and now that's the only people on it. My parents…

>>Twitter is the only social network I use where I get an unfiltered balance of ideas If you think you are getting 'unfiltered balance' from twitter, then you don't know twitter very well.

[deleted]

Re: Elon Musk to join Twitter’s board of directors

#840

Post by oneplane »

fleddr wrote: post #678

I think people are really over-analyzing this move. I think it's motivated by prestige, not money, nor is free speech the heart of the matter. Twitter is a stagnant company. They have thousands of engineers that in the span of a decade don't seem to produce much at all, nothing visible or memorable anyway. Long-lasting Twitter problems (culture, spam, algorithm issues) never seem addressed. User growth is stagnating…

The two word combination "Free speech" is so Americanised that it needs a bunch of asterisks to define what it's supposed to mean. Is it the legal thing where the government isn't allowed to arbitrarily censor citizens? Or is it the "I want everything I think to be received by everyone" that a good chunk of people seem to think it means? Or is it "I want to be a dick and everyone has to keep dealing with my shit"? As far as I can tell, unless you're dealing with the government, the most legalese meaning of "free speech" doesn't apply at all.
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