Twitter… what happens next

[Kalbear]

7 minutes ago, Fire and Jace said:

And before someone points out that twittering is not actually the town square, I would then demand to know why the whole fucking town is losing its mind at transfer of ownership.

Because it's a thing they enjoy using or at least use regularly, and they don't want it turned into something shitty. 

I mean, if Ran went away from the board and gave ownership to RSBakker I think people wouldn't love it either

[JGP]

13 minutes ago, Kalnestk Oblast said:

I mean, if Ran went away from the board and gave ownership to RSBakker I think people wouldn't love it either

[chokes on his coffee]

[Jace, Extat]

16 minutes ago, Kalnestk Oblast said:

Because it's a thing they enjoy using or at least use regularly, and they don't want it turned into something shitty. 

I mean, if Ran went away from the board and gave ownership to RSBakker I think people wouldn't love it either

But no one would call such a thing a threat to national discourse, or the deliverance of the news of the day, if the far superior Westeros.org were facing Twitter's future.

[Kalbear]

3 minutes ago, Fire and Jace said:

But no one would call such a thing a threat to national discourse, or the deliverance of the news of the day, if the far superior Westeros.org were facing Twitter's future.

I think that anyone not looking at a social media system with 100m scale and significantly larger reach that has already been used for both good and harm as a threat is deluding themselves. 

[Zorral]

15 hours ago, Fire and Jace said:

My best effort.

OooooK!

"Most Americans don’t use Twitter at all. But they certainly hear about it." [This latter certainly applies to yours truly!]

How about this piece which delineates how Musk's experience of the twitting space differs from about 99.5 of everyone else twitting - it is a long, thoughtful and informed piece:

Why Elon Wants to Make Them Pay: Nice Twitter account you got there. Shame if something happened to it.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/11/why-elon-musk-wants-to-make-twitter-users-pay.html

Quote

 

...  In isolation, back-of-the-napkin math suggests that charging verified users won’t make much of a dent [in the debt load], and anything that threatens Twitter’s underlying advertising business, which accounts for 90 percent of its revenue, is risky as hell. A forensic profile isn’t necessary to explain what’s happening: Prodding around for new ways to charge customers while dramatically cutting costs is basic leveraged-buyout behavior. [This goes along with your comments, Jace.]

Using subscription revenue to reward an undefined class of “content creators,” on the other hand, is a plan for an ambitious future Twitter that does not yet exist and that Musk would like to manifest, somehow, after he’s done firing half of the company’s employees and placating his creditors: an “everything app” with a YouTube-style creator economy but also payments and crypto and taxis and shopping and freedom of speech and lots of “human happiness,” et cetera. (Oh, and Vine! And Cameo! And porn?) It’s more hyperloop than Tesla — a bit like asking Musk about Space X’s next contract with NASA and getting a response about the future economic system on Mars. Musk’s tense-shifting can be misleading, but it has served his companies well — the way Musk tells specific stories about the future provides energy, and capital, to his enterprises today. Teslas still don’t fully drive themselves after years of Musk insisting that the technology was imminent. For critics, it became a meme. In the meantime, Musk sold a lot of cars to customers who would mostly say they’re satisfied. It’s not too hard to imagine a certain kind of customer paying to subscribe today to a Twitter that exists, for now, as a Muskian hypothetical. 

Back in the present, Musk’s alien experience on old Twitter might explain not just his chaotic behavior at the helm, or his plans for new Twitter, but his interest in the deal in the first place. He’s one of the most popular users on the service, which could be why he’s so obsessed with bots, who fill up his Twitter replies by the thousand.

He’s an extremely public and controversial figure, which means his Twitter experience involves lots of people with blue checks — journalists, short sellers, rivals, politicians — saying things about him that he believes to be unfair, calling him a dumbass, or declaring him dangerous, which might explain some of the visible streak of contempt in his early moves. (Other social-media firms, including Facebook, have experimented with paying for content from news organizations, whose business models they helped destroy but whose favor they desired; in contrast, Musk may effectively tax them millions of dollars a year.) At the same time, his feed is overflowing with worshipping fans and high-profile suck-ups, which might explain, well, everything else.

But for Musk, as a user, Twitter has also been an incredible tool for making money. He’s used it to promote his companies, pump his stocks, attack his rivals, and go to war with regulators. It’s where his supporters and fans, many of whom buy his cars but also shares in his companies, gather to hear what he has to say — it’s helped him build his extremely valuable reputation. By the time he bought it, Twitter had already been worth billions to Musk as a marketing tool, and he had never paid it a dime. Twitter helped Musk become wealthy enough to buy Twitter! You can see how he might convince himself it has untapped potential as a business. ....

 

Much more before and after the above.

 

[dog-days]

Nice thread from the Bodleian. 

 

[DMC]

1 hour ago, Kalnestk Oblast said:

I mean, if Ran went away from the board and gave ownership to RSBakker I think people wouldn't love it either

I don't know who this RSBakker is but they must be pretty special if they're as inherently odious as Musk.

[Ran]

I doubt people would notice any real difference if Scott Bakker ran the forum, assuming I gave it to him after he became a diehard ASoIaF fan and showed he'd run the community as such rather than turning it into a philosophy-and-Prince of Nothing focused forum.

Musk talks a lot about Twitter as this town square thing, so I don't really think the changes he wants to make are really going to change the underlying hellscape social media service.

ETA: @DMC R. Scott Bakker, fantasy author. I don't think the intention was to suggest he was odious in the same way that Kal sees Musk as odious(?), but more that he was an example of someone who probably comes off as having very different priorities and views and that could maybe impact how he ran things? I don't know.

I mean, if I handed the forum to Elon Musk -- he's a big fan of GoT and I guess ASoIaF, I've read -- the big difference would be a new floob and intense scrutiny as everyone and their uncle wanted to be where Musk was and/or report on what he was doing and/or explain the consequences of this unprecedented act. But would he really run things very differently? I doubt it. We have a pretty light touch The vast majority of bans we have on the forum are for spammers, and I assume he'd be no more merciful to them than we are.

[IheartIheartTesla]

When 'free speech' meets the 'free market'. Surely a billionaire would be in favor of the latter, even after being the beneficiary from government largesse in the past?

[DMC]

8 minutes ago, Ran said:

ETA: @DMC R. Scott Bakker, fantasy author.

Ah.  I'm familiar with the author but I guess I assumed Kal was referring to an actual poster here taking his name - after all, I'm still pretty much a noob (or floob) when it comes to this forum's history.

11 minutes ago, Ran said:

I mean, if I handed the forum to Elon Musk -- he's a big fan of GoT and I guess ASoIaF, I've read -- the big difference would be a new floob and intense scrutiny as everyone and their uncle wanted to be where Musk was and/or report on what he was doing and/or explain the consequences of this unprecedented act.

Hey it's a free country, make the offer.  It'd at least be fun to watch!

[Kalbear]

8 minutes ago, Ran said:

I doubt people would notice any real difference if Scott Bakker ran the forum, assuming I gave it to him after he became a diehard ASoIaF fan and showed he'd run the community as such rather than turning it into a philosophy-and-Prince of Nothing focused forum.

Musk talks a lot about Twitter as this town square thing, so I don't really think the changes he wants to make are really going to change the underlying hellscape social media service.

ETA: @DMC R. Scott Bakker, fantasy author. I don't think the intention was to suggest he was odious in the same way that Kal sees Musk as odious(?), but more that he was an example of someone who probably comes off as having very different priorities and views and that could maybe impact how he ran things? I don't know.

I mean, if I handed the forum to Elon Musk -- he's a big fan of GoT and I guess ASoIaF, I've read -- the big difference would be a new floob and intense scrutiny as everyone and their uncle wanted to be where Musk was and/or report on what he was doing and/or explain the consequences of this unprecedented act. But would he really run things very differently? I doubt it. We have a pretty light touch The vast majority of bans we have on the forum are for spammers, and I assume he'd be no more merciful to them than we are.

The RSBakker thing is more about him being disliked personally and not trusting his choice of moderators as well as turning this into Yet Another TSA thread, which is what all threads eventually do. 

If Elon Musk took over what you'd notice almost immediately is all the mods being fired and reporting being turned off. Which is what's happening with Twitter right now, as it turns out. So you'd see more harassment, more personal attacks, and likely a whole lot more ability to embed gifs. Seriously whyyyyyyyyy can't we do this

Per reports the layoffs were largely based on how many lines of code you've written in the last year. Which if you've worked in tech at all you can understand how insane that is to gauge anyone's quality, and in particular the teams that focus on things like security, privacy, AI, deployments, architecture and tooling would almost certainly be gutted. And of course, teams like this - the entire human rights policy part of Twitter:

 

 

[Spockydog]

Christ, what a cunt. 

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

4 hours ago, JGP said:

lol

Spinning all the time has got to be exhausting.

This guy gets his marketing advice from Kanye and Kyrie.

Again, if I had to put my money where my mouth is, I'd heavily fade Twitter's value. 

[Ran]

13 minutes ago, Kalnestk Oblast said:

Seriously whyyyyyyyyy can't we do this

We have moved well past needing pictograms and cave paintings to communicate. 

[JGP]

My brother had this strange little mancrush on Musk for a few years, occasionally piping up with weird tidbits about him and how he does business. There were a few arguments and lots of laughs. 

But like...

 

The dude is clearly a triple A piece of shit.

 

[Madame deVenoge]

Disclaimer: I do not use Twitter.

I do find Elon Musk to be a contemptible human. I think the layoffs alone are very revealing as to what type of person he is, and I’m not noted for being the most labor-friendly person on this Board.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

2 minutes ago, Ran said:

We have moved well past needing pictograms and cave paintings to communicate. 

We'll never move past needing to post Simpsons clips to communicate.

(also, having just read a chapter on ancient cave paintings, a lot of it might have been about casting a spell or wishing for something to happen rather than being a form of communication)

[Ran]

17 minutes ago, JGP said:

The dude is clearly a triple A piece of shit.

 

I don't think that screenshot is legit. Very easy to fake these things. The tweet isn't in her timeline and no one has reported on it in the news, so someone just decided to be funny.

[JGP]

Yes, I'm aware 

 

Lots of Elon Musk blue check accounts today. The best people.

[Ran]

1 minute ago, JGP said:

Yes, I'm aware 

Not everyone is in fact aware, though. I had to spend time looking it up to see if it was legit or not. Not everyone, alas, would make the same effort and would just believe Grimes actually said something that she did not.