congrats you now own mos eisley, good luck lol
— vocational politics stan account ???? (@Convolutedname) October 28, 2022
Musk has already discovered that advertisers don’t share his ‘edgy’ sense of humor (apparently he pulled that tweet down), nor does ‘for cause’ severance legally allow ‘I don’t wanna pay for the golden parachutes I just set to open’. And that’s just the *start* of his tsuris…
“You! You, Elon Musk, are addicted to Twitter. You’re the asset. You just bought yourself for $44 billion dollars.”https://t.co/lirXNyCGBO
— Charlie Warzel (@cwarzel) October 28, 2022
… Twitter is a disaster clown car company that is successful despite itself, and there is no possible way to grow users and revenue without making a series of enormous compromises that will ultimately destroy your reputation and possibly cause grievous damage to your other companies.
I say this with utter confidence because the problems with Twitter are not engineering problems. They are political problems. Twitter, the company, makes very little interesting technology; the tech stack is not the valuable asset. The asset is the user base: hopelessly addicted politicians, reporters, celebrities, and other people who should know better but keep posting anyway. You! You, Elon Musk, are addicted to Twitter. You’re the asset. You just bought yourself for $44 billion dollars…
What I mean is that you are now the King of Twitter, and people think that you, personally, are responsible for everything that happens on Twitter now. It also turns out that absolute monarchs usually get murdered when shit goes sideways.
Here are some examples: you can write as many polite letters to advertisers as you want, but you cannot reasonably expect to collect any meaningful advertising revenue if you do not promise those advertisers “brand safety.” That means you have to ban racism, sexism, transphobia, and all kinds of other speech that is totally legal in the United States but reveals people to be total assholes. So you can make all the promises about “free speech” you want, but the dull reality is that you still have to ban a bunch of legal speech if you want to make money. And when you start doing that, your creepy new right-wing fanboys are going to viciously turn on you, just like they turn on every other social network that realizes the same essential truth.
Actually, there’s a step before trying to get the ad money: it turns out that most people do not want to participate in horrible unmoderated internet spaces full of shitty racists and not-all-men fedora bullies. (This is why Twitter is so small compared to its peers!) What most people want from social media is to have nice experiences and to feel validated all the time. They want to live at Disney World. So if you want more people to join Twitter and actually post tweets, you have to make the experience much, much more pleasant. Which means: moderating more aggressively! Again, every “alternative” social network has learned this lesson the hard way. Like, over and over and over again…
And it gets worse the second you leave the United States! Germany is a huge market for Tesla. Are you going to flout Germany’s speech laws? I would bet not. The Indian government basically demands social media companies provide potential hostages in order to operate in that country; you can’t engineer your way out of that shit. Are you ready to experience the pressure Twitter faces in the Middle East to block and restrict accounts? Are you ready for the fact that the Iranian government will fucking murder people over their social media posts? (Are you ready for how Twitter is being used by Iranians protesting that government right now?) Are you excited for the Chinese government to find ways to threaten Tesla’s huge business in that country over content that appears on Twitter? Because it’s going to happen.
The essential truth of every social network is that the product is content moderation, and everyone hates the people who decide how content moderation works…
First order of business for the world's richest man, now in charge of the global town square: digging into catturd. pic.twitter.com/JhCVejFSih
— Brandy Zadrozny (@BrandyZadrozny) October 28, 2022
War for Ukraine Day 249: Life Imitates Art
Mike in NC
The first obituary of 2023 that I wish too see is this Elon Musk person.
Roger Moore
The thing about having Tesla engineers working on the buyout is another lawsuit waiting to happen. Those engineers work for Tesla, not for Elon Musk. Even if he’s paying Tesla for their time, he’s taking them away from their duties at Tesla to serve his personal interests. At the very least, it’s a gigantic conflict of interest. If I still owned any Tesla stock, I’d be seeing if there was a class action lawsuit for breach of fiduciary duty.
eclare
@Mike in NC: That is a toughie…but since you mentioned him first, that is fine with me.
MobiusKlein
@Mike in NC: Two months left in 2022, aim higher
eclare
@Roger Moore: Also brings up a lot of intercompany charge issues, especially since one company is public and one is not.
Splitting Image
@Mike in NC:
This is presuming that that fucker Kissinger takes his dirt nap in the next 60 days or so?
Honestly, I wouldn’t be too quick to wish death on Elon Musk. The longer he runs Twitter, the further into the ground he will run it. Give him some time. The next person in charge of Twitter might be competent enough to keep it alive.
livewyre
@Splitting Image: I’d go so far as to categorically say that death isn’t a cure for what’s afflicting us. Not in that sense, anyway.
Our work will be to keep more of these examples from popping up by stopping what makes them. Harder than wishing for a lightning bolt, but nicer track record, at least.
Dangerman
@Mike in NC: Would be an interesting choice for this website (WARNING: Only read if you don’t mind some seriously dark humor. You’ve been warned):
Stiffs.com
Amir Khalid
I’m not enough of an optimist to share the confident belief that Twitter will prove to be Elon Musk’s nemesis anytime soon. It may, eventually; but in the meantime he’s just going to use it to broadcast his insufferable, narcissistic bullshit.
NotMax
I take Musk at his word that it won’t be a free-for-all hellscape.
Expecting premier and elite tiers by subscription, allowing choice folk to pay for the hellscape.
//
mrmoshpotato
@Dangerman: Great Ken Starr entry!
Splitting Image
@Amir Khalid:
Elon Musk’s nemesis is Elon Musk’s big mouth. Owning Twitter simply gives that nemesis more power to hurt him.
oatler
The site I hate-read holds up Musk as an ideal Leader, as it does with Bolsonaro, Orban, and a few others come to mind. He’ll make the trains run on time (or defund them).
Kristine
Found this Medium post yesterday. In a way, it seems too 12-dimensional chess, but given how these tech bro billionaires think, maybe they believe they can pull it off.
The rest of the article, which is more a Q&A, is a combination of scary and “huh?”
leeleeFL
@Kristine: It would appear that Dorsey has swallowed his own bullshit. He may well have opened the Pandora’s Box that will devour civilization, or maybe just damage it beyond redemption.
Remains to be seen
eclare
@Kristine: I saw that too! Basically do nothing to improve the here and now, spend all energy and $ to live on other planets in the future. But what it said about destabilization sure is true, so who knows? Yes, scary.
Eolirin
There isn’t a face or palm big enough.
VOR
@leeleeFL: Dorsey got a lot of money for his share of Twitter. He’s going to be fine.
Frankensteinbeck
There was a big burst of racial epithets when Musk took over. That we know. We don’t know what happened to the posters. That’s important. One of the first things Musk said after buying is that he’s not changing moderation policies or reinstating anybody any time soon. Are those assholes in the process of finding out they still get banned under the new king? We kinda need to know.
Note that TFG ain’t back, and Musk has been assuring his fanboys for ages that’s why he wanted Twitter.
And I find Musk taking down his own tweet terribly amusing. If he has to moderate his own shitposting now or watch the investment he couldn’t really afford flush down the toilet… I mean, that’s his hobby gone, right there. He won’t like Twitter anymore.
The new $20 monthly requirement for verified users is a sign he may sink the company through his own incompetent management practices. SpaceX works because he lets someone else run it. Tesla is a chaotic mess that survives on stock inflation and government handouts.
And now I tack on my usual disclaimer, that with an emotionally immature, impulse driven troll like Musk it’s impossible to predict what he’ll do. Unlike some rich jackasses, he at least noticed when financial reality slapped him in the face, hard. Can he hold it together against his own shitty whims, like the one that got him into this?
Baud
@Frankensteinbeck:
Wow. That’s pricey.
Ten Bears
Is there a rat somewhere short in its hindquarters?
VeniceRiley
@Kristine: I saw that and everyone should read it
lowtechcyclist
@Splitting Image:
I keep holding out hope that he’ll live long enough to be tried for war crimes.
EmbraceYourInnerCrone
@Baud: it is when you think about the fact that a lot of politicians just starting out and journalists and authors use twitter to reach people. So do people in countries without a free press. A lot of these people are not by any means wealthy.
EmbraceYourInnerCrone
I am hoping all the C suite people he fired “for cause” take him to the cleaners in court
Shalimar
@Kristine: We got a glimpse at Musk’s DMs from discovery in the Twitter lawsuit, and none of the idiots in his circle of high-powered sycophant friends including Dorsey is smart enough to run a scheme like that.
Ken
@Roger Moore: Also, expertise at vehicle monitoring and control software does not translate into expertise at distributed database and networking software. Even the AI parts of the systems don’t overlap that much, though both do some image-recognition.
Betty
As Musk fires and lays off so many employees, isn’t he creating the opportunity for someone with financing and common sense to create a better Twitter by scooping up the expertise?
MisterDancer
There were some bans, yes. That said — I’m going to say, in a different way, what I said to the commenter who said the Leaving Twitter thing was an over-reaction.
Musk has been telling us, for years now, who he really is. And as the old saying goes, when someone tells you who they are, believe them.
Saying “hey, stay on because that might have been a one-time thing” (which isn’t quite what you’re saying , I know) also says that I “should have” the mental and emotional capacity to withstand seeing racial epithets flung across Twitter without care. And that’s…a lot to ask of people.
There’s a thing people who have shared background in trauma tend to have to fight for, which is our instincts in situations. It’s a privilege to be able to say “hey, maybe they have a ‘good heart'” or “maybe this isn’t as bad as it seems” when they are treating you like shit — but everyone else sees their good side.
And in more situations than I care to contemplate, it’s also a matter of life and death to be able to quickly assess an encounter, and make judgements with limited data. Judgements that, to an outside observer lacking context, seem knee-jerk — but are not. And with doxxing/swatting, that can jump from online to real-world with a quickness.
Everything Musk focuses on, is a risk if you’re not in his “club.” And he’s been very vocal about who’s in it — and who’s out. And, more crucially, how to treat those who are out.
As a result: Trump coming back, or not, is not my primary concern at this point. What has already happened, is enough to trigger my “personal safety online first” mode, and get the hell out of Dodge.
And I think it’s worth people thinking on “why are these people leaving?” over trying to parse tea leaves and “are they actually blocked?” stats, at this stage. There’s a place for that, and I’m not knocking that effort. But I’ve also seen so many spaces over-run by trolls that know how to attack without being obvious about it, leaving well-meaning people to wonder “WTF is wrong? There’s no deep issues on this service?” while many users just run for the hills for very good reasons.
So far as any reporting I’ve seen, he’s only really said this once, at a conference. What has happened is that “Musk intends to reverse Trump Ban” keeps being a headline, but the actual reporting is more muted, so I take all this with a grain of salt (and, again, it’s NOT what’s driving the decisions I, and others, are making here) He’s said more generally he “doesn’t believe in lifetime bans” but hasn’t explained a damn thing about what that actually means, or how it would be implemented.
That’s fair. And that’s also a deciding factor in just not being around to take that risk — and having that be a valid choice.
MisterDancer
No social media is just about technical expertise. If it was, Google’s efforts would have took off like a rocket.
For Twitter: Upon public release, they found a niche — SMS-based posting — that allowed it to grow in communities lacking Internet infrastructure at the time. That is, in my opinion, a big reason why so many marginalized groups have such presence, on the service. And that gives it a unique reach for Advertisers.
That’s a cultural niche that’s hard for a new service to replicate. Nowadays, esp. with the growth of trolls and harmful bots, a lot of those voices have already been moving to Discord, and I suspect that will accelerate. But because of how Discord is setup in ways that isolate communications/communities, they cannot replicate what Twitter has done.
Starfish
@Roger Moore: Engineers are not interchangeable. Twitter already had good engineers. I am seeing rumors of them having to work all weekend or be fired to get some stupid nonsense out by next week. Highly qualified engineers have options. Also, they are not interchangeable. Good luck to Tesla engineers trying to work on a system they don’t know in computer languages that they do not know.
Starfish
@MisterDancer: I saw something saying that GM put its ads on hold while figuring out what Musk is going to do. It sounds like a number of people have said they are not running ads on Twitter if Trump is allowed to come back.
Twitter is not one of the top, nor one of the growing social media sites. Advertising platforms can afford to cut it loose.
different-church-lady
I wonder what the next worldwide social media addiction will be.
different-church-lady
@MisterDancer: I don’t know about trusting my instincts about leaving a platform. But so far my instincts for never trusting a platform in the first place have been spot on.
Ken
@different-church-lady: Science fiction has been promising direct stimulation of the pleasure center of the brain for decades, but as with flying cars, reality continues to fail us.
Ken
@Starfish: The Intercept made much the same point, also reminding everyone that twitter’s customers are the advertisers, not the users. Though I thought I saw something about charging verified users $5/month for the coveted blue checkmark?
Starfish
@Ken: I saw something saying that the blue checkmark would be $20/mo. I also saw a bunch of people with blue checkmarks saying they were not going to pay that.
NotMax
@different-church-lady
Colebook.
//
Eolirin
@different-church-lady: It’s already TikTok
Which isn’t great, since the Chinese government has access to its data.
GregMulka
@Ken: No Tasp for you.
RaflW
@Ken: “expertise at vehicle monitoring and control software”
Are the fatal crashes on ‘autopilot’ part of the expertise? Not to pick on you, Ken, but the whole fanboi world that thinks Elmo and his guys are so perfect.
StringOnAStick
We know someone who works for this company on the tech side. As long as he doesn’t get laid off today, he gets his stock options so I’m assuming he will get laid off today.
I read something yesterday about how much the monthly debt financing (interest, etc) costs, and this company has never come close to making a profit, much less making this vig. As advertisers flee, the stock will decline and maybe half the financing is through firms and based on the stock price of the “car” company (I’m trying not to use names that can be searched on, not be vague for vagueness sake). As the recent acquisition declines, they will force him to come up with $ to cover the decline, which will mean selling the “car” stock the loans are guaranteed with. Looks like a great way to cause a swirling drain effect for both companies. Couldn’t happen to a more deserving guy.
Geminid
@StringOnAStick: Tesla stock seemes way overvalued, with a Price to Earnings Ratio of around 70. By contrast, Toyota’s P/E is around 10. I think Tesla’s stock value is a bubble but investors don’t agree. Still, I can see how Tesla and Twitter could have a negative synergy like you suggest.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
Truthfully, I’m not that invested in Twitter. For me, this is like watching a slow moving crash, wondering whether the driver realises it yet and if so, what he’s going to do. Musk has built profitable businesses, so he’s not completely divorced from reality. How will he respond when his pet theories about the platform don’t work out? No matter what he does, he’s going to enrage some people. He’s not used to that, and he volunteered for it. I mean, this kind of thing takes political finesse. He’s got Asbergers, so no finesse and no awareness.
leeleeFL
@VOR: Don’t care one way or the other how he comes out of this. It’s the damage he’s done to democracy I worry about