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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

#911

Post by octodog »

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.

You can disagree but you're wrong. Twitter is the definition of a stagnant company.

The stock has gone nowhere since its IPO and Twitter has never paid a dividend. It has revenue of $5bn but cannot seem to turn a meaningful profit and is not growing.

So far it has been a massive failure for shareholders, who are the stakeholders that the board and management are actually there to serve.

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

#912

Post by s-lambert »

spsful wrote: post #758
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…

- Completely redesigning their UI two times over, - Launching a subscription-based service (which seems to make it the first social media network without ads) - Lengthening tweets to 280 characters - Letting users make money off their following (super followers) I'm confused as to how any of this makes it stagnant.

Twitter's UI didn't get vastly better with the redesigns, it just looked different, which is an example of a company stagnating IMO.

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

#913

Post by [deleted] »

awb wrote: post #863
nopenopenopeno wrote: post #848

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It means nobody is allowed to police public discourse and that anyone who wants to be a dick can be a dick and if others don’t want to deal with it they can ignore it. The only complications have always been situations where private enterprise dominates or impedes on public discourse.

In the US, this isn’t accurate at all. > It means nobody is allowed to police public discourse No, it means the government cannot restrict speech. > Freedom of speech, also called free speech, means the free and public expression of opinions without censorship, interference and restraint by the government. [0] Most people assume “free speech” means “nobody” can restrict it, but it is in fact only “by the government”.…

[deleted]

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

#914

Post by ChadNauseam »

topspin wrote: post #746
throwaway5752 wrote: post #493

"For so long as Mr. Musk is serving on the Board and for 90 days thereafter, Mr. Musk will not, either alone or as a member of a group, become the beneficial owner of more than 14.9% of the Company’s common stock outstanding at such time, including for these purposes economic exposure through derivative securities, swaps, or hedging transactions." This is the second line in the linked filing, and something a number o…

Someone fill me in here: TWTR is a NYSE traded stock. What, hypothetically, would prevent someone from just paying the market price for whatever percent of Twitter's stock they care to buy, such that they would have to agree to these terms?

Absolutely nothing, although when management is opposed to the takeover they have techniques to make it very costly for the attacker. In this case, the requirements are conditions for a seat on the board – if Elon wanted, he could resign and buy as much stock as he pleases.

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

#915

Post by awb »

bambax wrote: post #875
awb wrote: post #863

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the US, this isn’t accurate at all. > It means nobody is allowed to police public discourse No, it means the government cannot restrict speech. > Freedom of speech, also called free speech, means the free and public expression of opinions without censorship, interference and restraint by the government. [0] Most people assume “free speech” means “nobody” can restrict it, but it is in fact only “by the government”.…

Yes, but the paradox is that, because the government can't properly regulate speech (outside of the categories you listed), speech is heavily regulated by private operators, starting with you at your house, going to newspapers, TV, and Twitter, Facebook, etc. Everyone has their own rules, some explicit, some secret, most entirely arbitrary, and there is never a proper appeals process.

> Everyone has their own rules, some explicit, some secret, most entirely arbitrary, and there is never a proper appeals process.

That’s by design.

The government creates a framework within which you can then create your own private experience.

The free market, freedom of choice, freedom of association, etc. is the balancing act to self-regulate private party practices.

If we start centralizing and standardizing free speech requirements from the government all the way down to your blog, we’d be putting all our eggs in 1 basket. The government does not restrict repetitive speech for example, yet you’d now be powerless to regulate spam. You’d also be powerless to moderate HN or any other topical social community, as off-topic speech is protected at the federal level.

The variety in free speech rules is a feature not a bug.

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

#916

Post by spanktheuser »

octodog wrote: post #911
PostOnce wrote: post #698

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

You can disagree but you're wrong. Twitter is the definition of a stagnant company. The stock has gone nowhere since its IPO and Twitter has never paid a dividend. It has revenue of $5bn but cannot seem to turn a meaningful profit and is not growing. So far it has been a massive failure for shareholders, who are the stakeholders that the board and management are actually there to serve.

> The stock has gone nowhere since its IPO and Twitter has never paid a dividend.

This is a terribly short-sighted and impoverished definition of stagnation. If Elon shakes things up and Twitter generates 2x the profit and 2x the social destruction as Facebook would you call them a vibrant and successful concern?

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

#917

Post by [deleted] »

fastball wrote: post #890
oneplane wrote: post #840

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's Americanized because most other countries on Earth don't enshrine it as a principle at any level, whether private or public. The topic is hairy in the US because the government is actually obligated to care, so there are various grey areas when it comes to the interaction between US laws/constitution/government/private businesses. Compare this to say the UK where neither corporations nor the government enshrine…

[deleted]

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

#918

Post by tluyben2 »

mrighele wrote: post #844
ejb999 wrote: post #757

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and tiktok is 100X more appealing to them than either of those. Facebook is for grandparents, twitter is for bots.

On twitter you can find lot of great people to follow; journalists, scientists, experts of any kind. If you are looking for information, you can find it. The main issue is that all those diamonds are covered by an abundant amount of material of... let's just say lower quality, so the search can be long and tedious.

But most people don’t want that info; most people want to be entertained, every second of the day. And for that tik tok now wins until the next, even shorter attention span thing pops. Twitter started that by artificially limiting input of course, but people still had to read. Tik tok was obvious really. But people will come up with better ways to put less info into entertaining seconds people will want to watch 24/7; it will be a unicorn again in the coming years and TikTok will be for old people.

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

#919

Post by pmayrgundter »

A lot of comments and no mention of The Washington Post?

Maybe it's worth a board seat to not get boxed out, esp if the media owned by your opponents has been demonstrably unfriendly and you're ramping up your goals.

https://twitter.com/davidpowellbham/status/15113983601372774...

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

#920

Post by nl »

MisterSandman wrote: post #707
0xffff2 wrote: post #704

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree with you, at the same time if Twitter as a company isn't really doing much, why do they have thousands of developers on staff? I don't think there's anything wrong with being a stable, profitable company, but logically it should also come with a whole lot of layoffs.

> 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,…

> They've added Spaces, Twitter Blue and Crypto Profile Pictures - all 3 massive features added to their product.

I think your definition of "massive" is different to mine.

Spaces is at least a new medium. The other two are incremental features that a small (<10 person) team would ship in a few months at another FANG company.

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