> Dude bought a company. Stay or leave. Why is everyone flailing about so much?
What dude actually did was disrupt communities, which after all the talk about free speech, seems to have been a lot of the point.
Despite whatever personal feeling about Twitter you may have, some people liked it, formed social bonds there, and worked hard to post fun and interesting content. Not all of it was political outrage. Moderation policies were put in place by the old Twitter to make the experience of those people better, and Musk took those protections away. So now those people are in fact leaving after facing a deluge of hate that all of a sudden (for whatever reason) surged when Musk took over. That's the problem. Now my social network is spread across post, mastadon, substack, reddit, and twitter. And for what? To turn Twitter into Truth Social, which itself is trying to be Twitter? It's all so pointless and yet real damage to real relationships is being done.
> Talking with a software engineer who was fired by Musk. This person is saying they are conflicted. They feel mistreated, but want Twitter to survive - in spite of him, because of its outsized importance to the world.
> I agree.
I was following along just fine until this bit of corporate koolaid slipped out.
> really? thousands of people just left twitter at the idea of Musk owning it
I know a fair few people said they would, for a few different reasons. Particularly as, given the size of the user-base to start with, “thousands” is a pretty small number.
> and thousands joined out of love for Musk?
More likely because of the “freedom of speech” promises that were being made. I'd wager that many right leaning people who had previously left (or not joined in the first place) over certain other people being kicked, off are quite enamoured by the idea that their brand of rhetoric might be less unwelcome there in future. The converse (wanting that sort of talk to continue to be frowned upon) is one of the reasons some others talked about leaving. Certain messaging is key, not Musk specifically (although it was him giving off those messages).
> This is a good thing, right? We all agree that Elon is taking a good action, right?
For Musk the father, if what he’s saying is true then that’s good for him.
For me the internet denizen, this is not good. Because if we are to take Musk’s premise that Twitter was run by the whims of partisans as true, it is now the case that Twitter is run by the whims of Musk. This is not what he promised when he bought Twitter.
It might turn out fine if Musk has learned a tough lesson about the balance of privacy and safety on social media. Maybe he learned that “free speech absolutism” is a fantasy and not a tenable philosophy. If this leads to fairer, more balanced, and well thought out content moderation policies, that would be great.
But if the end result here is that we get more capricious and arbitrary policies that form to the contours of only Musk’s personal experiences, then no, that’s not good for anyone.
It seems to me that the rule at Twitter now is that Musk will take swift action to curb billionaire problems like private jet tracking, but will do nothing to curb (and even encourages) other forms of harassment like homophobia and transphobia on the platform. This is why people are so mad.
> why did Musk even start this clown show of pretending to want to acquire Twitter in the first place?
To me it seems like griefer [0] behavior. The goal is to just duck with Twitter and derive joy from others pain.
Musk is a gamer and I’ve played a lot of games. It’s pretty common to see people who are bored or max level or whatever who just mess with other players like a cat does with a mouse. They expel more of their own energy to cause discomfort to their target. An example may be spending 10 gold pieces to make the target lose 1 gold piece.
It “doesn’t make sense” rationally until you take into account the value of the confusion, pain, negative experiences for the target as a sort of currency.
So it seems perfectly common for me to see Musk spend a few billion in fines or whatever to make life worse for Twitter.
One theory I’ve seen to explain why Musk wants to buy Twitter is to shut it down. If that’s the goal then it’s actually much cheaper not to pay $40B to acquire it and shut it down, but to do this sort of thing that seeds uncertainty so when he pulls out the stock price plummets and Twitter dies from an acceleration from it’s likely path.
> Worst case Musk will run Twitter to the ground and people there will find work elsewhere.
Yeah, that would appear to be what's happening.
> So why all the hate?
For all its many many flaws, I personally enjoyed Twitter, and it was useful to many people. It is irritating to see it ruined by an idiot billionaire.
> The message is clear, whether the order to fire him came directly from Elon or whether it came from the culture he set, only positive posts about the product are allowed.
So, ok, he is super-defensive of his products, fires employees who show his company in a bad light. So? I am sure you can dig up much worse on just about any CEO or person in power. It doesn't really say anything about how this will turn out for twitter. The real question is whether one man should be in power of a huge social media platform or not. To me, it doesn't matter if it's one rich fuck or a committee of rich fucks. The latter will tend to mediocrity and common denominator, the former may actually do something fun. He's been delivering so far. You know, fuck twitter, let's see it burn, or let's see it be something different, it's a cesspool no matter how you look at it anyway. I don't understand why people are so upset.
>Being controllable by one guy who does dumb stuff on a whim?
The entire twitterverse has been complaining loudly about how terrible twitter is for years before Musk considered buying it. The problems are inherent to the product-space, not the owner.
Musk simply came in and screwed with the brand. His ownership didn't really affect the toxicity of the platform as far as I can tell (although he has definitely contributed to it with his personal usage, e.g. dogecoin shilling). If anything, he actually took heat off the overall toxicity by shifting attention to his own actions.
> I find it hilarious that people are leaving Twitter because Musk is allowing speech they find offensive and going to things like Mastodon, which has WAY LESS moderation.
It's even more hilarious that the false predictions like this one [0] and exaggerations of Twitter completely collapsing didn't happen.
> Nothing, is going to replace Twitter, Twitter is not doomed. Moving off of Twitter because you don't like the owner is fools errand.
Well, only the techies here are still pretending that Mastodon is a viable replacement to Twitter when Mastodon is the one losing users [1] because of the same fundamental issues, including less moderation - A inefficient and worse version of Discord.
Just wait until some instances get bought out by companies because of the number of users a 'moderator' has under their belt to sell the instance over. [2] So much for 'Social networking that's not for sale.".
The 220M+ daily active users on Twitter still didn't care to move to something even worse.
>there is an overreaction to new Twitter management
Oh i think its a perfectly legitimate and reasonable reaction to new Twitter management. a guy worth about 200bn USD spent his first day at the office dragging a piece of plumbing around cheerleading his impending job cuts and upcoming $8 surcharge for a feature that only really benefits and legitimizes the platform. he then axes most of the company, especially the moderation team, and acts shocked when brand-safety conscious corporations pull their advertising out of an abundance of caution.
hes lucky corporate brands and advertisers havent figured out they could start their own Mastodon instance for almost nothing, plug it until it becomes more popular than Twitter, and maintain all their existing brand safety controls in the process.
If Musk wanted to take a 44bn USD kick to the knackers and spend the end of his year getting deadass roasted on his new social media platform by literally everyone, its a success.
> because they did not like their views being challenged on twitter
> because of the rise of hate speech and an inability to moderate it
You're already changing your story.
> it's created the opportunity to build these cult like communities elsewhere
That's your characterization, which I do not agree with. Some would say that Musk himself has a cult-like following. In any case, Twitter and Mastodon have naturally segregated into pro-Musk and anti-Musk communities through no particular design by either side but simply as a result of the acquisition.
Those who enjoy Musk Twitter have no reason to leave and join Mastodon, so of course there would be less "challenge" from them on Mastodon, but whose fault is that?
> So what is the difference between Musk and the previous shareholders? The main difference is that Musk put an enormous cost on the business which will be borne by twitters users and advertisers, and that cost brings twitter nothing more than having musk as an owner.
> By himself musk may be no better or worse than the previous shareholders. But just for him to rule over twitter is going to cost twitter a lot of money that will probably reduce the quality of the service.
It seems to me that his product-focused ownership (remember, he's a big user of Twitter) will either make it better or he will run it into the ground (due to naïvety and incompetence in this domain). Both seem like a win/win situation to me.
I think he has very strong incentives to make Twitter better because it is his stage, both for marketing his companies but also to stay int he limelight (ego).
> And now Musk might try to use it for his own political and financial agenda. If that risk is serious, running twitter into the ground might be the most ethical thing an employee could do.
I try not to flame here, but that viewpoint may actually be insane.
It's a job. You're not changing the world. If you don't like the politics of the CEO, leave.
You're not a freedom fighter. Real people in the world are actually fighting for their lives, their freedoms and the right to eat and live in dignity. Literally hundreds of millions. None of those people are based in Silicon Valley.
Speaking as a person who has been generally well-disposed towards Elon Musk and like him also would describe myself as a left-leaning, centrist, free-speech absolutist, I think his behavior has been erratic lately. Perhaps his behavior has always been erratic, but it just never affected me personally.
Speaking as a resident of a country neighboring Russia, his amateur diplomacy from a few weeks ago does affect me, and in my view was literally dangerous. He pontificated from a place of profound ignorance at best and continued to double down even in the face of very smart domain experts and ordinary Ukrainians asking him - begging him - to please zip it. Then he acted aggrieved and hurt when his "peace proposal" was not received well.
I'm not sure what is being accomplished by the latest Twitter shenanigans, but I'm seeing the same behavior of his ignoring domain experts. For instance, moderation is a difficult social and technical problem irrespective of political view. Advertisers are not renewing their contracts with Twitter, not because of Musk's political views, but because they did not have confidence that their brands would not be tainted by association with unmoderated nastiness. Again, Musk attributed this to left-wing activists and not his own inability to reassure his business associates. He framed it as a free-speech issue when it is absolutely not. Then he threatened to "name and shame" the advertisers who declined to renew. He fired the domain experts who understand moderation, and so the institutional knowledge about it - arguably, what he bought when he bought Twitter - is gone, never to return.
So, I don't think Twitter will recover from that. Perhaps if I had not experienced his amateur diplomacy directly, I would just continue to think of Musk as a fellow who is very good at business and is possibly playing multi-dimensional chess. But I cannot unlearn what I have learned. His personal brand is permanently tarnished, for me.
> The only reason I've heard someone suggest to move from Twitter is because the new owner opened his mouth about political views.
So. I've been on Twitter 15 years, since early 2007. I feel a lot of affection to it in some ways, but particularly over the decade, it has become in many ways a pretty unpleasant experience. And yet I was still there. Matt Levine on Twitter:
> My favorite might be Ben Thompson’s rather bearish post, which argues essentially that Twitter is a very unpleasant product that most people do not want to use, but is extremely appealing and addictive to a small minority of us with significant personality flaws.
He's probably not wrong.
Elon has either promised to, or already has, made the site worse in a number of ways:
- The paid checkmark thing. People who pay for this will, Musk has promised, have their tweets essentially boosted by the algorithm. Frankly, I don't particularly want to hear from the sort of person who's buying the checkmarks, and paying for attention is a corrosive design dynamic. Even dating apps, which invented it, at this point mostly realise it can only be used sparingly without destroying the experience (for instance, Grindr has a thing where you can pay a couple of euro to appear higher in the grid of people than you should for an hour or something, but not permanently, because then the grid would be permanently full of the sort of people who pay for attention, and no-one wants that.)
- He's bringing back all manner of complete monsters. There are the big high-profile ones, of course, but also thousands of local monsters. Irish twitter got a lot better a few years back when a couple of prominent local Neo-Nazis were sent on their way, say. Twitter moderation was already too lax; this is very much going the wrong direction.
- A lot of the people I liked following have either already left, or are much less active.
- I find Elon personally extremely irritating, and there's just no escaping him on Twitter right now.
After 15 years, I'm basically done. I'm keeping the account for now (you never know; there's a bit of a history of social media sites being re-sold after a bad acquisition), but Mastodon is now filling the gap for me. It's pretty good; there are some annoyances, but in general it scratches the same itch as Twitter without a lot of the irritants.
I do think one mistake Elon makes is that he seems to think everyone loves Twitter. My suspicion is that most Twitter users, or at least most heavy users, find Twitter barely tolerable, but addictive. It doesn't take much to make people in that situation say "screw this".
> In most companies, you can get rid of 50% of the company and things will still keep running and even improve.
Maybe. But you have to take a few months to figure out which 50% if you have half a braincell. Especially if it is a complicated company in field outside your expertise, which for Elon this is (although he might have seen this different when taking over).
By this point you could have picked up a random person on the street and they easily would have done a better job than mister impulsive over there.
I mean the guy accidentally bought a company — a company to whose product he is addicted to. My speculation how that happened: his right leaning followers got constantly banned, so he wanted to proof to then, that the liberal snowflakes at Twitter HQ will not take his generous offer because they are against free speech and have political motives. So his prediction was that they would say no, because in his mind that is who they are and he could then take this No as ammunition to his followers. But the twitter people were not lefty liberals but mostly business people and so they said yes and from that point onwards everything mister impulsive did was pure and utter panic.
What we have observed here is not how someone in control looks like, even if we generously assume he is pretending not to be in control for stupid 12-dimensional chess reasons us mere mortals are just too simple to understand. He is giving orders people will not follow, that makes him look weak. He makes impulsive decisions he has to wheel back hours later. He wants screenshots of source code to make hiring ad firing decisions.
You could literally make a wet towel the CEO of Twitter and it would be running better than under him.
And even if we generously assumed that this is part of an painful restructuring the company might have needed, nobody remotly in control would plan to do it that way in a company that relies on money it gets from advertising and has workers who are heavily sought after and can literally pick a new job hours later if they choose to do so.
> Mostly because I like my job and the goals of my organization even if it makes bad decisions.
Keep in mind that Musk intentionally turned Twitter completely upside down. Anything that people there liked about it before Musk is likely gone—coworkers, WFH, perks.
> interesting about the engineering layoffs - was Musk right?
Yes and no. Twitter was started before so much of the common “web scale” Open Source projects existed. Cassandra, Kafka, Spark, Kubernetes, etc didn’t exist yet.
So versions of the aforementioned and then some were completely done from scratch at twitter, who has continued to maintain those projects despite them not being the premier open source offering in each of those categories. They also never achieved the scale of some of the largest tech companies where it makes economic sense to have say, a custom database or queue system.
Finally, Twitter has been using GCP for some of their new projects in the last few years, but they still had old legacy systems and teams to maintain that software, so they couldn’t fully reap the rewards of the cloud.
So, if you rebuilt twitter today you could likely do it for a fraction of the engineers they had at peak, by leveraging either cloud or popular existing OSS solutions. But that’s from scratch, not porting millions of lines of legacy code.
What Musk should have done was migrate various systems, then wind down teams. That probably would have worked, but been expensive in the short term.
So I think they cut too much, and I also think they honestly thought more engineers would be up for “hardcore twitter”, instead of quitting.
Musk forgot that all his very loyal Tesla employees may have also factored in their 10x RSU appreciation. It’s a lot easier to put up with insane working hours when your next years stock grant is 500k or million or something. Doesn’t apply at twitter.
Tl;DR: not a Musk hater at all, but he fucked up at Twitter.
> tweeting nonsense that could damage the company/brand
Oh, I think Twitter has done enough to itself to damage the company/brand as it is. Most people in the real world think the site is an absolute joke.
Musk can only bring good things to Twitter, and as a result, the world. The era of corporate censorship (in favor of their favorite side, of course) may finally be coming to an end!
What dude actually did was disrupt communities, which after all the talk about free speech, seems to have been a lot of the point.
Despite whatever personal feeling about Twitter you may have, some people liked it, formed social bonds there, and worked hard to post fun and interesting content. Not all of it was political outrage. Moderation policies were put in place by the old Twitter to make the experience of those people better, and Musk took those protections away. So now those people are in fact leaving after facing a deluge of hate that all of a sudden (for whatever reason) surged when Musk took over. That's the problem. Now my social network is spread across post, mastadon, substack, reddit, and twitter. And for what? To turn Twitter into Truth Social, which itself is trying to be Twitter? It's all so pointless and yet real damage to real relationships is being done.
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