It will be interesting to see how Elon defines success. Twitter in it's current form is a dead end, and there's no way "more free speech" is going increase either revenue or users. So if you think Elon is going to succeed at making Twitter a better Twitter as we know it, then I'm confident this take is wrong.
Which is why he's focused on the everything X app or whatever. Now, I wouldn't want to underestimate Elon, he is good at min-maxing, but I don't know that Twitter has a great competitive advantage to build on. It's one of the smallest social networks and Twitter as Twitter, i.e. the one big open forum with politicians, journalists scientists etc _is_ it's competitive advantage. So I don't know how you get from Twitter to X when almost every other social media does the things X would do better than Twitter. The biggest thing Elon would have to do is build trust with users and partner companies and that certainly does not seem like the direction he's heading. On the one hand I wouldn't bet against Elon, on the other hand the deck seems stacked against him. He'll have to prove he can run a SASS Twitter with minimal staff, which may be possible. But I don't know he does that and goes into al these other areas (payments, advertising, trust and safety) that seem very hands on to build relationships with partner companies, PCI Compliance, handle customer concerns, fraud etc.
Managing people requires people. He wants to make the moderation process more transparent? He'll either have to invent perfect text analysis AI, or he'll need people to process and respond to abuse complaints and petitions.
> Twitter in it's current form is a dead end, and there's no way "more free speech" is going increase either revenue or users.
I think this is failing to imagine how bad things could get societally. Imagine if more consumers and advertisers start enjoying consuming and being associated with malevolent, hateful, and violence-inducing speech.
Many in the 1930s-40s enjoyed the hateful caricatures of Jews that the Nazis produced in their propaganda, and hateful people also buy refrigerators and sneakers today.
Yes, that would mean a majority of people would have to adopt those perspectives - to the detriment of society at large - but it's happened before in many parts of the world, and could happen again. That is a long-term goal of fascists anyways - to re-normalize that kind of thing, and to re-combine industry and media with a religious ethnostate.
At the very least, the previously quiet pre-existing enjoyment of malevolent speech has been exposed for all to see over the last several years. The question is whether it has a growing audience.
I'm not saying that's Elon's goal, but accelerationism seems to be something he is aligned with as long as it doesn't come at a cost to him.
> Imagine if more consumers and advertisers start enjoying consuming and being associated with malevolent, hateful, and violence-inducing speech.
Why imagine? Twitter is full of malevolent, hateful, and violence-inducing speech on any day of the week. That has long been the case. True, some instances of such speech which went contrary to political ideology of Twitter employees and management was deleted, but other instances, that aligned with their ideology, were flourishing. And consumers of Twitter and advertisers don't seem to mind too much.
Ironically? I think in order for this to happen we would have to be _less_ polarized. I don't think in the current state you could _increase_ revenue from it's current place by splitting the customer base.
On the one hand if this keeps going bad maybe he just says fuck it and goes accelerationist like you said. On the other hand, there's a lot of people who put money into this. I truly hope it remains sensible, and do still have faith that our nation isn't this bad off.
My read on the libertarian, free-speech Twitter pitch was that the mainstream media typically uses a straw man to dismiss it.
If you start with the proposition "Anyone should be able to post anything on Twitter"...
... and want to get to "Everyone enjoys reading Twitter," then there's a lot of black box space in the middle.
You can have the most vile things on your platform, but your userbase self-censors. E.g. crowdsourced shadow-banning / down-voting. Or reputation with verified identities underneath.
Or just... more transparency.
Empowering the public to data-mine Twitter opens some interesting windows to a platform that has terrible things, but empowers interested parties to fruitfully research who they're coming from.
Only because the left has been running from this idea as fast as they possibly can for the last decade or so. It used not to be the case. The left used to be the free speech movement. But then they decided they have no use for it anymore - banning and deplatforming is much more fun. And here we are.
Free speech rallies have been customarily labeled by the national media (and not only) as white supremacist, for example. Regardless of whether this has merit or not, whenever you say that you “support free speech” (without a “but”) you’ll be now suspected of being one of them.
> Free speech rallies have been customarily labeled by the national media (and not only) as white supremacist,
You have that backwards.
White supremacist rallies have labeled themselves as "free speech" rallies in an attempt to normalize their cause. This is a well documented strategy [1]
However, exercising one's free speech rights by rallying for a cause (i.e. Charlottesville's "You will not replace us") does not automatically make that cause synonymous with supporting "free speech".
True, but before about 10 years ago, the reaction to that was mostly "well, those people are wrong in everything, but they right in this - this is free speech, and we value it, even if we hate those people". Now the reaction is "well, everybody knows "free speech" is a code word for "Nazi" so no wonder...".
The latest impression is driven by conservatives' current messaging that "big tech" is censoring them, coupled with their belief that the tech mores used to calibrate that censorship are coastal, and therefore more liberal.
Ergo, free speech is conservatives' right to say conservative things.
In the 60s and 80s and 00s, it was liberal. Give it another few years to swing back.
> conservatives' current messaging that "big tech" is censoring them, coupled with their belief that the tech mores used to calibrate that censorship are coastal, and therefore more liberal.
It's not a "messaging", it's an observable fact. Look at political leanings and donations for Twitter or Facebook workers. Over 80% goes to the left. And that's before we consider that the power is not distributed equally there and if you look at the people in power it's more like 100% to the left.
> Ergo, free speech is conservatives' right to say conservative things.
That's a completely wrong conclusion. Free speech is everybody's right to say their things, but conservative's rights are infringed much more frequently, so they complain more.
> Free speech as in Twitter bans and complaining about cancel culture is largely the far right.
It’s hardly the far right. People from all 3 political groups are scared of cancel culture. Painting this as far right serves only to label anybody that cares about such things as far right. You’re attempting to shut the conversation down. This is part of the problem and is literally misinformation that could cause violence against those labeled “far right” in the future.
> Imagine if more consumers and advertisers start enjoying consuming and being associated with malevolent, hateful, and violence-inducing speech.
> Many in the 1930s-40s enjoyed the hateful caricatures of Jews that the Nazis produced in their propaganda, and hateful people also buy refrigerators and sneakers today.
I may be sidetracking the conversation here, but I must admit I find it fascinating how “hatefulness” online is almost always assumed to be right-wing extremism.
Have everyone forgotten the BLM and Antifa riots going on for months where innocent people had their property, livelihood and in some cases even their lives taken?
That was fully encouraged and endorsed by the left, en masse, and especially so on Twitter.
I heard somebody got fired by Antifa because they had a second job with BLM. Both organizations really micromanage people. I think we should start holding the leadership accountable.
Can you show me where the left was, en masse, supporting people having their livelihood and lives taken? Which prominent members of the left were cheering on killing? Biden? Bernie? Hell, was it Internet personalities like Vaush? I didn't see that at all.
Can you show me the same for the right? Not some misinformation spin (the hate/division parent is talking about), an actual en masse cheering of killing people from the right?
Why is what BLM and antifa always excused? Why can’t you condemn it so we can fix the country? Some of us are over the left v right politics and want the left to realize their problems so we can all move on.
I suspect you may be less over the left v. right split than you think you are. The person I was replying to was making specific claims about what folk on the left were doing, en masse. I asked to see it. The person making it "v. right" is you (and him).
They are, often but “the left” is not one organized group of people.
This is actually a fundamental problem with discourse that I don’t know how to solve. There is a reasonable moderate left that struggles with these kind of issues, and its pretty large. Most maybe even!
Why is it you’re acting like there’s only one “left voice”? There will always be communists and SJW’s free speech doesn’t work if you act like the extreme voices are the mainstream or only voices of value.
> They are, often but “the left” is not one organized group of people.
This is actually a fundamental problem with discourse that I don’t know how to solve. There is a reasonable moderate left that struggles with these kind of issues, and its pretty large. Most maybe even!
I actually completely agree with this.
> Why is it you’re acting like there’s only one “left voice”? There will always be communists and SJW’s free speech doesn’t work if you act like the extreme voices are the mainstream or only voices of value.
Because increasingly they look more and more aligned. And regardless if personal beliefs, the non-extremist still vote on the same lines as the extremists. That’s why we’re coming up on a recession now.
You are correct. There is no difference between oppressing people, and fighting against oppression. Nazis are the same as anti-Nazis, racists are the same as anti-racists. Remember when India rebelled and cast out the British? Literally no difference between the two sides. Racist police versus civil rights marchers in the 1960s? Hey, both sides were mad. Totally the same.
It may be obvious, but just in case it isn't: Everyone think they are fighting the good fight. Nobody sets out to be evil. Liberals thinks they are fighting for positive change. Conservatives wants to preserve what they think is good.
Ofcourse the people burning the city down and looting think they are doing the right thing, or at least doing it for the right reasons. Ofcourse the black people "taking the streets back" feel entitled to it, after whatever backstory there was.
But during the Antifa and BLM riots, actual businesses, owned by innocents bystanders got ruined. Innocent people got murdered. There were real tragedies to real people, mostly white.
When that gets cheered on at social media-sites like twitter (or live on CNN!), it's hard to frame it as anything except hate against white people.
Maybe they thought they were fighting oppression. But at the same time they were oppressing. They became what they claimed to fight.
Who are to say they are better than the people they claimed to be fighting, which didn't burn down cities, didn't kill innocent civilians?
The ends does not justify the means. Not in a lawful society at least. These were hateful acts. EOT.
Which cities did BLM protestors burn down? What crime did George Floyd commit that merited his public execution? Or Breonna Taylor, who was shot by police while sleeping? What was she guilty of?
BLM protestors looted and rioted many cities. It was all over the news. They even took control of a police station and part of a town. It’s concerning you’ve forgotten this portion of our history.
George Floyd’s killer was found guilty and sentenced. Does that mean nothing?
Breonna Taylor was with someone that shot at police. It’s unfortunate what happened but perhaps one shouldn’t associate with people doing such things if they want to avoid these situations.
>>BLM protestors looted and rioted many cities. It was all over the news.
Sure, which cities did they burn down? The person I replied to made a specific claim I was asking about. You don't seem to be able to list them, either, despite them being all over the news.
>George Floyd’s killer was found guilty and sentenced... Breonna Taylor was with someone that shot at police.
And? The comment I was replying to said that the people BLM claimed to be fighting hadn't killed any innocent people. What was George Floyd's killer convicted for then? What did Breonna Taylor do that left her guilty?
I understand that situations are more complicated than what they end up reduced down to. But op made specific, false claims.
I think it's perfectly reasonable to rank acts by the threat they post to the Republic. The left wing riots you speak of were a problem in few very limited locations (parts of a few cities). They didn't threaten to end democracy. Major parts of the Republican party are actively trying to bring American democracy to a close. It's hard to see the benefit of both-siding in the presence of that threat.
I'm not taking trying to take any absolute sides. Even the best of people will do bad things. You can find dirt on anyone, if you like.
What I was originally responding to was the fear of twitter allowing hateful speech, which ofcourse had to be right-wing "hateful" speech.
My comment was more directed towards how I found that (default) assumption weird, since I see tons and tons of clearly hateful content and attitudes from all sides of the political spectrum online and in social media.
When I see people complaining about all that "hateful" speech online from one end of the political spectrum, I have a hard time seeing that as something else but denial about the hateful speech their side of the political spectrum themselves are promoting, or worse deliberately ignoring.
The fact that you find someone else's opinion disagreeable, distasteful or "hateful" is not a blanket-license for you yourself to act disagreeable, distasteful or "hateful" in response. It's a chance for you to be a better person.
If you want to fix our divided world, you need to show people there's a middle way, and you do that by calling out bullshit on both sides.
It's easy to say "I'm not trying to take any sides" but way harder to practice. For example, repeating the same rhetoric used by the hateful right-wing groups, while having to repeatedly put "hateful" in quotes, as if those groups aren't hateful or something, is taking a side.
It’s also very hard to convince the left they have a hate problem as well. Read your comment again, you’re claiming that hate only comes from one side. Republicans have been called Nazis, facists, ultra mega MAGA, uneducated, all to sow hate against them. Are literally all republicans Nazis? Or facists? Or is the left being extreme and spreading hate?
You actually did, the hateful rhetoric from the right tells all anybody needs to know. If you think hateful rhetoric comes from the right then you are the problem.
Government fetishism. The threat they "post" to some abstract concept like "the republic" is not more important than the threat they pose to their fellow man.
> Major parts of the Republican party are actively trying to bring American democracy to a close.
NO! This is extremely dangerous misinformation. Nobody on the right is trying to end democracy. This is a lie started by the left media in order to convince the left to get out and vote. If you keep spreading this misinformation, you will likely push people on the left to violence.
No one "burned down cities" and the vast majority of protests in the BLM movement were peaceful. In some cases, property damage and at least one actual murder were traced back to right-wing provocateurs, as well. You have to take that into account when framing things this way.
The damage from the riots is estimated in 1-2 billion of dollars. Nice for you to handwave it as "in some cases, property damage" and the classic "fiery, but mostly peaceful" of course. For some people who lived through it and witnessed it, however, it sounds like nothing but apology for lawlessness and wanton destruction. When you will ask yourself "why politics is so polarized in the uS" - that's why. When people hear that for you burning down their business, or trashing their car, or making their city unsafe and unlivable is just "mostly peaceful and some cases of property damage and actually it's probably all right-winger's doing anyway" - they would not trust another word coming from you, ever. Because if we can't agree on something as basic as "arson and mayhem is bad", then there's nothing for us to agree on.
Indeed, yes. It was sarcasm/parody. I felt it insulting to include the /s but may have been wrong.
I realize it's not HN-appropriate, but once in a while I break down and make fun of those who see no difference between oppression and fighting against the oppression (or fundamentally don't understand the difference between "being mean" and "systemic oppression")
Their comment history doesn't demonstrate trolling or false equivalency making, so by principle of charity I will believe it's sarcasm, until proven otherwise.
But such equivalencies appear to be an idea you've promoted though, if I'm reading your past comments correctly.
> It's one of the smallest social networks and Twitter as Twitter, i.e. the one big open forum with politicians, journalists scientists etc _is_ it's competitive advantage. So I don't know how you get from Twitter to X when almost every other social media does the things X would do better than Twitter.
Being the elites' gathering place is indeed its biggest advantage, and the fact that consumers can get public visibility on issues they're facing helps companies with their public image. There are many times where I or friends have posted about issues after exhausting the standard support channels, and quickly cut through the bureaucratic red tape and got our problem solved. I think that's a monetizable angle.
I think something similar would apply to other elites as well. Politicians can get direct feedback from constituents, music artists get direct feedback from fans (see the recent Lizzo "spaz" thing), and so on. However, in the current climate, elites are getting skewed feedback, so "more free speech" could actually help, if it's done right.
Maybe, but most of these things would require "brand safety" which is in the opposite direction of free speech. Maybe if twitter had billions of users like facebook, they could strongarm companies and get away with it, but all of the things you describe are probably going to require twitter directly interfacing with said celebrities/politiians/journalists, which will require lots more employees and a different tact than Musk seems to be taking.
Besides the fact that "more free speech" seems to involve making fun of trans people and bringing back donald trump, which do not correlate with more accurate feedback to elites.
We'll see how it goes, but "making fun of trans people" is an unfair summary of the situation. Megan Murphy and Rowling were not making fun of trans people, for instance.
You are correct, my purpose was to diminish the value of so called “free speech” for a platform like Twitter, not to diminish the negative impact on those targeted. I did not mean to exclude those targeted by death threats but you are correct that there are many other consequences of “free speech”, and I also don’t believe death threats provide value to twitter as a platform.
I have no doubts that a super app will succeed in the US like Pinduoduo has in China but I highly doubt that's going to come from the environment that Elon is already establishing at Twitter. You can't successfully build dozens of new products by laying off a big chunk of the staff and telling people to work 12 hour shifts 7 days a week when they've gotten comfortable with a reasonable work-life balance (I know Tesla and SpaceX are notorious for rejecting work-life balance in general but they aren't software companies).
Exactly. Why would you want a single app that has other apps? You could easily go download a standalone app from the app store that delivers a superior experience. There would need to be some competitive advantage or economy of scale of the single app. But what that advantage is remains to be seen.
Just as an example: both Facebook and Snapchat (and I'm sure others) have tried adding games to their platform. Both efforts have failed because you can get a better gaming experience by playing a standalone game. If you want to play with a friend, you can message them and say "hey, let's play X." There is limited upside to playing in Facebook or Snapchat, and a lot of downsides (limited catalog, performance restrictions, etc.)
One exception to this is any feature that requires exposure to an audience. Social media is very good at exposing people to content. Something like Facebook marketplace can be successful because sellers want their listings to be seen by people and buyers want to go to places that have the most sellers.
This is true, today. But look at things like the Digital Markets Act in the EU; there is a significant chance those "super apps" iOS and Android are forced to submit to government regulation in the future, which will create new opportunities - if/once the App store monopoly is removed for example, the ability for any app to become the "super-app" is greatly enhanced, even if very hard. Twitter as brand and platform I could imagine playing in a post-mandatory App store landscape - but so too will a lot of others of course.
I have no desire for a super app and I don’t think anyone else does either tbh.
The Chinese internet is heavily restricted and censored and regulated by their government. It simply cannot be used as a model in the west. Technology progresses in cycles, and the Chinese and American internet cycles don’t line up. Eg China uses QR codes for payment everywhere because they cycled off cash while the US largely missed that train, but has near universal credit cards and NFC availability. Americans would never pay at a cash register through QR codes.
Android and IOS are great at providing a moldable surface for apps. A super app aggregates censorship to one entity, which isn’t a market force in the west. The “chat bot” style super apps also didn’t take off in the west because our technology is more expensive. We’re richer so we have, on average, higher end devices that can render more AND we can pay to build more feature rich native apps. We aggregate app data at the operating system level (notification center, Google home app, Siri, Uber integration into native mapping app, etc). China can’t because most of android is created in America, and they’d essentially have to hard-fork it to build changes their way (again those changes largely include censorship choke points)
996 (72hr weeks) apparently works in China, so why wouldn't it be made to work here, especially if all the rich companies use the economic headwinds to collude and reduce compensation/QoL/perks?
Also a massive fraction of young US techies are Chinese immigrants -- are they as vulnerable to 996 in US or are they a select group who escaped it?
And can Musk and others staff up in China (if US and Chinese politics/government allows it)?
I think you'd have to provide a lot more research to "996 (72hr weeks) apparently works in China". What type of companies, what type of jobs, ubiquity etc.
China has a vast vast oversupply of software engineers.
In order to make 996 work in the US, there would need to be a pretty big oversupply of talent (and a lower standard of living) to make people desperate enough to give up their entire lives to their work. Unfortunately, I think we may be getting close to that about now or at least heading down that path.
What makes you think that there is an oversupply of (good) Software Engineers? All I see every day is that it's still pretty difficult to hire good people.
> you can't successfully build dozens of new products by laying off a big chunk of the staff
Considering the leadership culture that grew twitter to nearly ten thousand, for Twitter, I don't think "dozens" was anywhere near feasible. I suppose it depends on your definition of "product".
The one thing Twitter has going for it is network effect. Tons of people are trying to spin up competitors and encouraging people to go there based on political leanings or other reasons. The fragmentation will just lead to Twitter remaining as the place where everybody comes back.
I’ll be shocked if it doesn’t work out for him because network effects are really hard to overcome.
He won't need PCI compliance. He's going to attempt to make a wechat with cryptocurrency as a method of payment in collaboration with binance. We'll see if it sticks.
There's a lot of porn on Twitter. The "paid videos" feature that you get with a blue check seems to be focused on this crowd.
Can you imagine someone as volatile and vain as Elon Musk having your porn viewing history? There's a good reason why most sex entrepreneurs stay off the radar.
I personally can't wait for him to kinkshame a Twitter influencer who makes him mildly upset.
Pretty much, although Musk might be more persistent in the face of being lolnoped by regulators than Facebook and the financial institutions they invited along to try to add credibility to their project.
>Twitter in it's current form is a dead end, and there's no way "more free speech" is going increase either revenue or users.
Twitter was on its death bed until Trump signed on and became the shit-posting President. This is not an endorsement of Trump or bringing him back, but the type of "free speech" people are talking about saved Twitter, made it a pile of money, and made other media/press companies billions of dollars covering the chaos.
I do not have that impression at all. Twitter was made more relevant by Trump's presidency but you'd have to show me revenue numbers that somehow he saved it.
Trump announced his run for the Presidency and began shit-posting his way into the White House in 2015, the year Twitter had over a 50% increase in revenue.
If the guy can make a fully self-driving car, he can make a fully self-moderating social network.
He'll either be the GOAT or the goat, but the gamble is clearly on the table, and Musk being Mush will declare victory before the dice even start to roll.
If the guy can blow enough hot air about self driving cars to make people buy the hype, he might be able to blow enough hot air about a self-moderating social network to make people buy the hype.
Unfortunately, eventually you need more than hype before the public and regulators come for you because you haven’t delivered.
Which is why he's focused on the everything X app or whatever. Now, I wouldn't want to underestimate Elon, he is good at min-maxing, but I don't know that Twitter has a great competitive advantage to build on. It's one of the smallest social networks and Twitter as Twitter, i.e. the one big open forum with politicians, journalists scientists etc _is_ it's competitive advantage. So I don't know how you get from Twitter to X when almost every other social media does the things X would do better than Twitter. The biggest thing Elon would have to do is build trust with users and partner companies and that certainly does not seem like the direction he's heading. On the one hand I wouldn't bet against Elon, on the other hand the deck seems stacked against him. He'll have to prove he can run a SASS Twitter with minimal staff, which may be possible. But I don't know he does that and goes into al these other areas (payments, advertising, trust and safety) that seem very hands on to build relationships with partner companies, PCI Compliance, handle customer concerns, fraud etc.
Managing people requires people. He wants to make the moderation process more transparent? He'll either have to invent perfect text analysis AI, or he'll need people to process and respond to abuse complaints and petitions.
This TC article sums up the X challenges pretty well: https://techcrunch.com/2022/10/08/elon-musk-x-everything-wec...