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 as Twitter fails to appeal to "normies" in a way Facebook and other networks can.
A perfect target for Musk to come in, do a few sweeping changes, and get out. Thereby proving once again that he gets shit done where others can't. Case closed.
It doesn't take much. People have been begging for an edit button for a decade. If he'd get only that feature implemented, it will be remembered forever.
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.
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.
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.
I get what you're saying from a moral point of view, but we live in the real world.
In the real world, Twitter is a public company. It has existed for a long time and has barely every made a penny. It fails in comparison to other high growth networks (Facebook, Tiktok, Youtube).
And it's not an armchair comment. Twitter's own PMs have openly admitted to some of its flaws, it's failure to appeal to the masses. They're self-aware about their own incompetence.
Why do they need so many engineers though. It's not like twitter is facebook or gmail or apple tv where things are constantly shifting? I think the point was why does it take so many people? They should be raking in the cash after a 25% cull. Just saying this from the point of view if I was interested in buying their stock.
Because that growth is used as a substitute for profit (or net income or EBITDA - take your pick). For a public company having one or the other (or rarely, both) keeps the ticker price moving in the right direction.
> Why must every company sustain boundless growth and 24-hour engagement? Change and growth for their own sake can be cancers.
I agree with you on this, but I think the parent commenter was implying that if you're going to be employing thousands of engineers, you ought to have something to show for it.
It's fine to move into a "steady state", but your engineering team should eventually reflect that reality.
I agree on one hand, it's a perversion of business that seems to manifest in venture capital bubbles that growth is never satisfied. On the other hand, what are they doing with all that talent?
I think the correct word is a "changing" company. In a static environment, without competing products like IG, FB etc, Twitter can afford to stay the way it is and probably do incremental improvements.
However, in a competitive environment, and with proof that the market is expanding (Newer generation of kids are using social media), if it fails to capture the market, the company will die out.
So, there is this need to focus on user number growth.
I am sure that if the company was only adding older people, the stock would be punished inspite of growing numbers.
I appreciate this sounds counterintuitive, but even in order to stay where it is, a company needs to grow. "Staying where you are" would mean to grow by at least as much as the current inflation rate - which in Feb 22 was 7.9% annualized in the US. Anything below that would be decline - and we're not even talking about fighting off competition, offsetting the dollar value against other currencies etc.
Well even their team disagrees with you, they have for the last years chosen to focus on things like stories (dead), clubhouse (soon dead)instead of working on removing spam/scams
Well, if they're not going to develop new things they could take big hunk of the billion dollars a year that they're spending on it and return it to the shareholders.
> A perfect target for Musk to come in, do a few sweeping changes, and get out. Thereby proving once again that he gets shit done where others can't. Case closed.
Whatever merit or lack thereof Musk on the Twitter board has, I would bet money this particular scenario does not happen. Musk is not a turnaround expert or corporate savior (and for the record he's not claiming to be).
Yeah, I was thinking exactly that. Assuming that this is the case - that Musk is joining as a savior - is silly. He doesn't fit the profile nor has the track record for that.
He may be a visionary (whatever that means), but a excellent, renowned executive that revitalizes companies, heck, that really has never been the case.
> People have been begging for an edit button for a decade.
And they haven't implemented it because it's a truly horrible idea. If you messed up your tweet delete it. If it's already got traction, then it shouldn't be changed, especially because the edit feature would mostly be used maliciously to cancel retweeters.
“Retweet if you like ice cream!” then after a bunch of retweets change it to “Retweet if you love pedophilia!” No thanks. I’d never retweet it like anything again. Editing is a terrible idea.
Retweet could show the version of the tweet as it was when it was retweeted. If you see a tweet that has a new revision ready you could see a "latest" link. If you see the latest version of a tweet with a version history you could see a "history" link which would show you a revision history.
OK, I can believe this has non-engineering issues. Still cannot "edit as new" for when you want to edit what you posted in the exact some editor state as when you posted it. What you edit and what gets posted can differ radically. This is well-trodden territory in the email world. Accordingly, Fastmail service has "Edit as New" and Apple's iOS Email App has "Send Again" for email.
I'm pretty confident Twitter could manage "edit as new" for Tweets, and it would be useful with or without tweet editing.
> especially because the edit feature would mostly be used maliciously to cancel retweeters.
This could turn out to be a good thing in the long run: force the public to confront the fact that the commentary they are seeing may have, in fact, originally been on something entirely different than the context it is currently presented in.
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 far as I can tell, unless you're dealing with the government, the most legalese meaning of "free speech" doesn't apply at all.
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 free speech, so these estuaries don't exist.
"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?"
Tweets aren't forced upon anyone. Twitter isn't a megaphone in a library. It's a flexible medium that allows you to follow the people who write/retweet stuff you want to read, and ignore others.
Face it: if you interfere between Sally who writes something she wants Bob to read, and Bob who wants to read what Sally wrote, that's censorship.
(No, I am not making a legal argument. And no, I'm not interested in exploring extreme exceptions to the general principle.)
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.
>A perfect target for Musk to come in, do a few sweeping changes, and get out. Thereby proving once again that he gets shit done where others can't. Case closed.
Ha! You are drinking straight from the hose pipe and having a hangover. Not having a Edit button was a strategic decision from Twitter and not a competency one. For the longest time, Facebook did not have Dislike button and still don't; sometime back, they added few options instead. It was their product vision that drove the decision behind their feature selections.
- 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 Blue still has ads and still constantly fights you to try and show you their algorithmic timeline.
It also doesn't cover multiple accounts - and my side account, when it switches to the algorithmic timeline every other day, is convinced I want to know about pop musicians and inserts 1000 "suggested topics" about the Grammys and BTS I have to dismiss individually.
> They have thousands of engineers that in the span of a decade don't seem to produce much at all
I have always wondered. Are there "projects" adjascent the core product that I'm not aware of? I can understand the infrastructure side of the work is pretty busy, but feature development and bugfixing don't require that many people even in a fast paced product development phase. What's everyone doing?
People on HN are great at making irresponsible claims and they are the clueless ones. You can bet that thousands of engineers there are very very busy.
1) 'publicity' not 'prestige' so much. We're all going to be talking about it.
2) "do a few sweeping changes, and get out. Thereby proving once again that he gets shit done where others can't. " I'm doubtful as a board member he'll have the influence to make material changes. More like a series of publicly visible things.
Twitter doesn't have an 'edit button' because they're incompetent, it's just an odd choice they've made, and I think there are good reasons there. And 'edit button' is not any kind of material change.
3) I'll bet the speech issue is on his radar.
On the whole, I don't see how musk really changes the nature of what Twitter is, it's a mature product.
> 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.
As a Twitter user since 2019, I’ve seen improvements even in my short time on the platform. The most obvious example is that you can now restrict who can reply to your tweets.
You could make the same argument about HN, and it’d be equally mistaken.
How quickly we forget the front end redesign that lets you tweet photos when you quote tweet. The old one didn’t.
Or that they collapse new tweets into a button you can click, rather than interrupting your reading flow when it loads more. (Admittedly the old site already had this.)
Twitter auto-pauses videos when I scroll down past them. It has a couple other UX quirks that I really dislike as well.
HN probably has 0-1 devs actively working on it and is (likely still) running on two machines ("master" and "standby")[1]
Not sure about the comparison between Twitter and HN. I agree with the comment above yours - IMO Twitter has been stagnant in many regards. Why not spend time really nailing down video/image hosting/viewing etc? Why NFT profile pics?
> 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.
Why do you assume it's engineering problem? I think engineers at twitter are well capable to solve any problems, but it's just not a business need. The real problem are product owners/stakeholders/business people, incapable to transform, envision and lead at Twitter.
I think it's more basic than prestige. Musk's value add is in no small part due to his influencer status among a group of investors who primarily interact with him over Twitter. Leaving such an important part of your value subject to someone else's whims is crazy when you have the money to secure it.
> It doesn't take much. People have been begging for an edit button for a decade. If he'd get only that feature implemented, it will be remembered forever.
I was following this discussion on finclout (https://app.finclout.io/t/dD66Ww2) and also don't think that Parak will not be CEO in 12 months (probably earlier)
Twitter facilitates knowledge transfer and communication. I'd argue they are one of the largest sources for communication on the internet, and with 200 million visitors every day, I'd say they are doing what they're supposed to be doing.
Twitter took out Clubhouse in about a week with what is now Twitter spaces. They've introduced Twitter Blue. Not that stagnant, and if you think it's stagnant, an edit button wouldn't be thing that changes that.
a proof that he get shit down? Yah just like he got the underground tunnel project don-... oh wait, he ended up building 10% of the original plan and it sucked
My intuition is that Twitter's CEO will be looking for big changes to turn Twitter's stock price around. Now his largest shareholder is also a famous entrepreneur with some big ideas.
Why would Elon Musk spend his capacity to get things done on something like Twitter? He's got planets to colonize. Interesting point to question his motives, but for now I take him at his word regarding the free speech thing. I guess it could be something more nefarious as well.
Counterpoint: Twitter is the only social network I use where I get an unfiltered balance of ideas big and small - CEOs and random Joes. It's where memes are born and proliferate everywhere else (other than TikTok).
Twitter WORKS. If it's profitable, it doesn't need more growth. Facebook got ruined because it thought everyone's parents and grandparents should be on it, and now that's the only people on it.
My parents and grandparents are scared of Twitter, and that's how I like it.
It also doesn't try to charge me for access to my own followers like Facebook does.
Twitter may have problems but I like the balance they've struck.
An edit button by the way would RUIN it because people who have gone viral with a bad take would simply edit it away.
> A perfect target for Musk to come in, do a few sweeping changes, and get out. Thereby proving once again that he gets shit done where others can't. Case closed.
Typical musk cult bullshit. I'm sorry, it sounds so wrong it makes me questions your honesty here.
He won't "do a few sweeping changes and get out". The only shit he will get done is abusing his influence over the top of the hierarchy to slowly but surely get more control over what gets fed to twitter users. Remember how Facebook has been crucial for election manipulation over the world? Now Musk gets to play this game too.
By the way, that's how he took over Tesla from its original founders. He invested an amount of money large enough so that he could force his way into becoming CEO. Then he fired the few remaining people who could oppose him.
So, no, he's not going to get out. Your post sounds more like "nothing to see here" than anything else. There's a big thing to see here. The richest US person calmly and openly taking over one of the largest social network in the world.
It's not over-analyzing, it's obvious. But in our troubled times such things are somehow happening in plain sight and nobody bats an eye.
I think Twitter's CEO summed it up well, and I agree:
> He’s both a passionate believer and intense critic of the service which is exactly what we need on @Twitter, and in the boardroom, to make us stronger in the long-term. Welcome Elon!
I give his tenure as CEO 6 months at most before he's forced out by the board, or resigns for ideological differences. The changing wind that Elon is going to usher in is going to be fundamental and sweeping, and I wouldn't be surprised to see an exodus of employees follow.
I do think Elon will provide a valuable counter-balance to the current monoculture that drives Twitter.
But I do not believe Elon in of himself can really resolve Twitter's ills (by my subjective assessment). Twitter and other social networks are ultimately reflections of parts of humanity. Us humans have our biases and our drives that don't just go away. You can obviously (and should) tweak the product to incentivize more productive dialog, but you can't overwrite our biases/drives/distribution of competencies by updating Twitter.
Personally, I view these social networks as mirrors, revealing parts of our humanity as it currently is. A lot of us don't like what we see, and we fixate strictly on the mirror, suggesting it's strictly the mirror's fault for displaying the unflattering image.
Social media is a mirror in the same way that baseball is a mirror. Individual personalities are tested and the fact we're playing it is because we're human, but the rules of baseball are not the rules of life. When we're playing baseball we're doing something very different from when we're relating to each other or spending time together.
Twitter is a social game, and distorts the behavior of its participants. Its a fun house mirror, not a reflecting pool.
It's either this or one of its competitors rises to take them on at some point and we get a bifurcated society where specific companies cater to specific politics. That may be unavoidable anyways.
I think people outside the SV bubble (I grew up there, don't live there anymore) don't realize how hated and despised their censorship policies really are. Musk has his pulse on that, so I'm happy to see him step in and shake up the group think.
Outside of the SV bubble people have actual lives that don't resolve around tech companies. Until someone shows actual evidence with real numbers behind it it's hard to take the whole "people don't realize how much people do or think X" seriously.
As someone who lives in the midwest, very disconnected from the SV bubble, this is spot on. I know several conservative-minded people that absolutely care about the censorship and policies SV companies push and despise them for it.
This, honestly. It _feels_ more like the only people that care about SV censorship policies are the people affected by them: SV types that live almost entirely on the platforms they're scared of being censored from. Well, that and people who make their entire careers pushing other peoples' boundaries and, as a result, generate a big negative following.
He's not asking you to take him seriously. He's taking executive action while others wait infinitely for some kind of "real numbers" to come in. Analysts make terrible entrepreneurs.
That's what makes all of this so ironic to me. Social media platforms and their users (especially Facebook) are not left-leaning. That a vast majority of Twitter users feel he will improve it means that the bias is fictional.
“It's either this or one of its competitors rises to take them on at some point and we get a bifurcated society where specific companies cater to specific politics. That may be unavoidable anyways.”
one can dream. as of now all corporations follow the same ideology of neoconservative imperialism because they are all owned by the same people (blackrock, etc)
You mean like the news? As an experiment try this for two months. On month 1 - watch only CNN. On month 2 - watch only Fox. Maybe take a 1 week break between both and write down your thoughts on the world... very interesting how it evolves based on what you watch/listen too... From what I hear if you just watched Russian state media it'd be an even more extreme version. The great thing about our free society is you have the choice to do this experiment, as I understand it you can't do this in Russia today...
> as I understand it you can't do this in Russia today...
Or Ukraine or many other countries. Not sure why you singled out Russia specifically.
However, if you are just watching corporate media you're not getting the full picture either. CNN and Fox News have very similar opinions on non-culture war issues.
"It's either this or one of its competitors rises to take them on at some point and we get a bifurcated society where specific companies cater to specific politics."
Not ideal, but better than the status quo where there is 1 company catering to 1 group.
> don't realize how hated and despised their censorship policies really are.
Majority of Americans (and most people I'd imagine) do not really care about their policies. They don't give two figs about it, and just go about their life just fine without being affected by it one bit. I'm sure you can find some people on both sides of the spectrum regarding their policies, but the vast majority don't. As someone who isn't from SV or has ever worked for in or for an SV company, my bubble is surrounded by farmers.
Doesnt seem that way from my perspective. Do you grant this is simply your impression? I tend to distrust you because you just assert this general truth that is rather controversial and you dont cite any data.
> Majority of Americans (and most people I'd imagine) do not really care about their policies. They don't give two figs about it, and just go about their life just fine without being affected by it one bit.
That's the problem with not giving a shit. When things finally do become bad enough that it affects you personally, it's too late. When it comes to standing up for what's right - and I define what's "right" as mostly what the Constitution of the United States lays forth as our inalienable rights, you better give a shit from the word "go" and you better oppose it stridently because once freedoms get stripped away from you, they're nearly impossible to recover.
I can't even imagine how the Founders would react to things like the PATRIOT Act.
And we can blather on all goddamn day about "muh private corporations!" but when these corporations are actively suppressing competitors and are working hand-in-hand with news outlets to label any new alterative as a Mos Eisley-esque shithole that no respectable person would frequent, the point is moot.
Facebook and Twitter are the modern day public square. Some people will want to claim it's "The Internet" itself; you can just go make your own public square and publish your own website, etc., but that's not actually how a public square works. Just because you hop on your tractor and box blade your front yard flat and pave it over with concrete and add some park benches to it, doesn't turn it into the public square. You actually have to have the public actively occupying it. The public square is where the people are. And the people are on Facebook and Twitter... at least in America.
> and we get a bifurcated society where specific companies cater to specific politics.
That's exactly where we are now? When twitter censors right of center ideas and de-platforms those who think them, we invariably seek refuge in alternatives that engender far more radical thinking than if we had stayed in a larger public discussion.
This is great news! Twitter and the rest of the rotten and censorious platforms could use a proper shake-up. Hope the authoritarians and political repressives and anyone who works on the content moderation team all resign in protest! Good riddance!
In South Africa, my father had a private plane we’d fly in incredibly dangerous weather and barely make it back. This is going to sound slightly crazy, but my father also had a share in an Emerald mine in Zambia. I was 15 and really wanted to go with him but didn’t realize how dangerous it was. I couldn’t find my passport so I ended up grabbing my brother’s – which turned out to be six months overdue! So we had this planeload of contraband and an overdue passport from another person. There were AK-47s all over the place and I’m thinking, “Man, this could really go bad.”
His grandfather (Dr Joshua Haldeman) was head of Technocracy Inc:
It’s easy to call for change without actually having to build any of it.
Odds are zero things change about Twitter’s content policy, as it’s about as permissive as you can get while operating in the US.
There’s a lot less sinister intent than one might think at first blush; Twitter wants users to stick around, banning them is a really bad way to do that.
What's to build? Twitter already built all the tools to ban, censor, and editorialize content. OP is simply suggesting that Twitter use those tools less.
"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 of people have not read.
> This is the second line in the linked filing, and something a number of people have not read.
Not sure it's that it was left unread or if it just doesn't matter.
As best as I can tell, it just means he won't overtly threaten the company with a takeover or equivalent because he's been given soft power to influence.
My lay reading suggests that Twitter is now basically operating at his whims to keep him from leaving the board and executing a takeover plan 90 days thereafter.
>> he won't overtly threaten the company with a takeover or equivalent
Well, he can overtly threaten all he wants. He can begin the process. He can make all the money arrangements and make agreements with other shareholders. He just cannot complete the takeover by actually acquiring more stock (or other instruments) until after 90 days. Imho that isn't a practical limit on threats.
> My lay reading suggests that Twitter is now basically operating at his whims to keep him from leaving the board and executing a takeover plan 90 days thereafter.
Honestly, it might be amusing if he does do that. Twitter stock looks to still flat from the IPO price, even after the spike after this announcement.
I say, let him tie up a significant portion of his net worth in a vanity project with no real growth potential.
The board seat was granted in tandem with a guarantee from Musk that he will limit the number of voting shares he amasses. I don’t think it’s an uncommon arrangement when an outside investor joins the board.
OK, Elon, lets settle. Let's give you a board seat but you have to promise not to try and buy up controlling shares in the company and privatize it in a hostile takeover.
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.
It's easy to look at Musk's tweets and think he's just doing buying in so he can shitpost more effectively, but he is savvy enough to realize that Twitter is not nearly as valuable as it could be. Its reach is as huge as any network and anyone with a public presence "has to" be on it.
The big knock against it is that users and brands are afraid of spontaneous howling mobs. Fewer users means less reach and fewer brands means less $$$. My guess would be that he has some ideas about how to change this. Maybe (spitballing here) more tools for users who are QT'd?
I hope that's the reason. I've always said Twitter has unbelievably untapped potential that for whatever reason, its current management is unable or unwilling to realize. Over the years they've kept the platform stagnant at best or filled with user dark patterns at worst. Not to mention their hostility to the developer community.
> Maybe (spitballing here) more tools for users who are QT'd
Yes - slowing down the rate of Twitter pile ons would help a lot. Rate limiting QTs from non-followers would help a lot I think. You could even extend this to manual text quotations and screenshots, using either printer dots or OCR. Subtweeting is fine - the point should be to avoid making randos the "it" person on Twitter.
I agree and people forget Twitter owned TikTok four years before TikTok was a thing (in the form of Vine). I'm still amazed that people take Twitter seriously as a business while they have still have board members around from when Vine was closed down. That kind of ignorance seems inexcusable to me.
Thanks for breaking my brain. Possible complement :P
I got as far as "bot" <-> "the cloud is just someone else's computer" <-> "tree that owns itself" before my train of thought SEGVed loudly in complaint.
Is there a law akin to Godwin's or Sturgeon's about all social media trending toward some failure state? Several years ago I deleted all my FB content and then disabled my account. Looks like it's time to do that with my Twitter account now.
I didn't come up with it and I don't know if there is a name for it but here's a comment I wrote a while ago about how I model the decline of social media and other systems.
Readit News
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 as Twitter fails to appeal to "normies" in a way Facebook and other networks can.
A perfect target for Musk to come in, do a few sweeping changes, and get out. Thereby proving once again that he gets shit done where others can't. Case closed.
It doesn't take much. People have been begging for an edit button for a decade. If he'd get only that feature implemented, it will be remembered forever.
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.
"Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.” - Edward Abbey
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.
In the real world, Twitter is a public company. It has existed for a long time and has barely every made a penny. It fails in comparison to other high growth networks (Facebook, Tiktok, Youtube).
And it's not an armchair comment. Twitter's own PMs have openly admitted to some of its flaws, it's failure to appeal to the masses. They're self-aware about their own incompetence.
Last I checked not even half the US population is on twitter, not even close to half. Who is this "all" in "they all use it?"
I agree with you on this, but I think the parent commenter was implying that if you're going to be employing thousands of engineers, you ought to have something to show for it.
It's fine to move into a "steady state", but your engineering team should eventually reflect that reality.
But Twitter and twitter employees want the company to grow. But they fail to do so.
However, in a competitive environment, and with proof that the market is expanding (Newer generation of kids are using social media), if it fails to capture the market, the company will die out.
So, there is this need to focus on user number growth.
I am sure that if the company was only adding older people, the stock would be punished inspite of growing numbers.
Whatever merit or lack thereof Musk on the Twitter board has, I would bet money this particular scenario does not happen. Musk is not a turnaround expert or corporate savior (and for the record he's not claiming to be).
He may be a visionary (whatever that means), but a excellent, renowned executive that revitalizes companies, heck, that really has never been the case.
And they haven't implemented it because it's a truly horrible idea. If you messed up your tweet delete it. If it's already got traction, then it shouldn't be changed, especially because the edit feature would mostly be used maliciously to cancel retweeters.
I'm pretty confident Twitter could manage "edit as new" for Tweets, and it would be useful with or without tweet editing.
It's almost like cancelling was always a garbage idea centered around lies ans deception from the start
This could turn out to be a good thing in the long run: force the public to confront the fact that the commentary they are seeing may have, in fact, originally been on something entirely different than the context it is currently presented in.
Compare this to say the UK where neither corporations nor the government enshrine free speech, so these estuaries don't exist.
Tweets aren't forced upon anyone. Twitter isn't a megaphone in a library. It's a flexible medium that allows you to follow the people who write/retweet stuff you want to read, and ignore others.
Face it: if you interfere between Sally who writes something she wants Bob to read, and Bob who wants to read what Sally wrote, that's censorship.
(No, I am not making a legal argument. And no, I'm not interested in exploring extreme exceptions to the general principle.)
The only complications have always been situations where private enterprise dominates or impedes on public discourse.
Ha! You are drinking straight from the hose pipe and having a hangover. Not having a Edit button was a strategic decision from Twitter and not a competency one. For the longest time, Facebook did not have Dislike button and still don't; sometime back, they added few options instead. It was their product vision that drove the decision behind their feature selections.
I'm confused as to how any of this makes it stagnant.
It also doesn't cover multiple accounts - and my side account, when it switches to the algorithmic timeline every other day, is convinced I want to know about pop musicians and inserts 1000 "suggested topics" about the Grammys and BTS I have to dismiss individually.
I have always wondered. Are there "projects" adjascent the core product that I'm not aware of? I can understand the infrastructure side of the work is pretty busy, but feature development and bugfixing don't require that many people even in a fast paced product development phase. What's everyone doing?
People on HN are great at making irresponsible claims and they are the clueless ones. You can bet that thousands of engineers there are very very busy.
2) "do a few sweeping changes, and get out. Thereby proving once again that he gets shit done where others can't. " I'm doubtful as a board member he'll have the influence to make material changes. More like a series of publicly visible things.
Twitter doesn't have an 'edit button' because they're incompetent, it's just an odd choice they've made, and I think there are good reasons there. And 'edit button' is not any kind of material change.
3) I'll bet the speech issue is on his radar.
On the whole, I don't see how musk really changes the nature of what Twitter is, it's a mature product.
As a Twitter user since 2019, I’ve seen improvements even in my short time on the platform. The most obvious example is that you can now restrict who can reply to your tweets.
You could make the same argument about HN, and it’d be equally mistaken.
How quickly we forget the front end redesign that lets you tweet photos when you quote tweet. The old one didn’t.
Or that they collapse new tweets into a button you can click, rather than interrupting your reading flow when it loads more. (Admittedly the old site already had this.)
HN probably has 0-1 devs actively working on it and is (likely still) running on two machines ("master" and "standby")[1]
Not sure about the comparison between Twitter and HN. I agree with the comment above yours - IMO Twitter has been stagnant in many regards. Why not spend time really nailing down video/image hosting/viewing etc? Why NFT profile pics?
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28478379
Why do you assume it's engineering problem? I think engineers at twitter are well capable to solve any problems, but it's just not a business need. The real problem are product owners/stakeholders/business people, incapable to transform, envision and lead at Twitter.
Facebook is for grandparents, twitter is for bots.
He is anything but conventional, he is not there to go for low hanging fruit I don't think
Funny you mention that: https://www.ign.com/articles/elon-musk-largest-twitter-share...
don't see how an edit button will change any of that!
Twtr: -5%
Fb: +488%
When you're the richest man in the world, and your main companies are on track, what is it that motivates billionaires?
Prestige. Visibility. Legacy.
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Tesla: Sustainable transport
SpaceX: Becoming a multiplanetary species
Twitter: Free speech in the public square
IMO it's actually the most important mission of the 3 since it's the basis for societal progress.
Tesla: Gimmicky electric cars as a status symbol
SpaceX: Maximizing profits on government space contracts
Twitter: Tactical manipulation of stock prices
All of them are about increasing Musk's clout and net worth.
Twitter WORKS. If it's profitable, it doesn't need more growth. Facebook got ruined because it thought everyone's parents and grandparents should be on it, and now that's the only people on it.
My parents and grandparents are scared of Twitter, and that's how I like it.
It also doesn't try to charge me for access to my own followers like Facebook does.
Twitter may have problems but I like the balance they've struck.
An edit button by the way would RUIN it because people who have gone viral with a bad take would simply edit it away.
If you think you are getting 'unfiltered balance' from twitter, then you don't know twitter very well.
Stakeholders will think otherwise.
> An edit button by the way would RUIN it because people who have gone viral with a bad take would simply edit it away.
Just add a change history like (I think) FB has. No big deal.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say he enjoys reading Pravda, er, Twitter.
"Twitter WORKS. If it's profitable, it doesn't need more growth."
You don't get to decide that. It's a publicly traded company. Which means you do need more growth.
"My parents and grandparents are scared of Twitter, and that's how I like it."
Strange thing to be proud of. I guess your own family isn't "cool" enough.
Finally, an edit button can have a timer, as every edit button ever has had for decades.
Typical musk cult bullshit. I'm sorry, it sounds so wrong it makes me questions your honesty here.
He won't "do a few sweeping changes and get out". The only shit he will get done is abusing his influence over the top of the hierarchy to slowly but surely get more control over what gets fed to twitter users. Remember how Facebook has been crucial for election manipulation over the world? Now Musk gets to play this game too.
By the way, that's how he took over Tesla from its original founders. He invested an amount of money large enough so that he could force his way into becoming CEO. Then he fired the few remaining people who could oppose him.
So, no, he's not going to get out. Your post sounds more like "nothing to see here" than anything else. There's a big thing to see here. The richest US person calmly and openly taking over one of the largest social network in the world.
It's not over-analyzing, it's obvious. But in our troubled times such things are somehow happening in plain sight and nobody bats an eye.
> He’s both a passionate believer and intense critic of the service which is exactly what we need on @Twitter, and in the boardroom, to make us stronger in the long-term. Welcome Elon!
https://twitter.com/paraga/status/1511320964813910017
But I do not believe Elon in of himself can really resolve Twitter's ills (by my subjective assessment). Twitter and other social networks are ultimately reflections of parts of humanity. Us humans have our biases and our drives that don't just go away. You can obviously (and should) tweak the product to incentivize more productive dialog, but you can't overwrite our biases/drives/distribution of competencies by updating Twitter.
Personally, I view these social networks as mirrors, revealing parts of our humanity as it currently is. A lot of us don't like what we see, and we fixate strictly on the mirror, suggesting it's strictly the mirror's fault for displaying the unflattering image.
Social media is a mirror in the same way that baseball is a mirror. Individual personalities are tested and the fact we're playing it is because we're human, but the rules of baseball are not the rules of life. When we're playing baseball we're doing something very different from when we're relating to each other or spending time together.
Twitter is a social game, and distorts the behavior of its participants. Its a fun house mirror, not a reflecting pool.
Why does a critic make Twitter stronger? And why is that needed?
Will that account that tacks his plane continue tracking his plane?
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> eh wow lol
or something to that effect
I think people outside the SV bubble (I grew up there, don't live there anymore) don't realize how hated and despised their censorship policies really are. Musk has his pulse on that, so I'm happy to see him step in and shake up the group think.
If they think the information is censored by tech companies, they'll care a lot about that!
"Elon will improve Twitter by expanding freedom of speech on the platform"
https://twitter.com/NarrativesProj/status/151139309757754574...
one can dream. as of now all corporations follow the same ideology of neoconservative imperialism because they are all owned by the same people (blackrock, etc)
Or Ukraine or many other countries. Not sure why you singled out Russia specifically.
However, if you are just watching corporate media you're not getting the full picture either. CNN and Fox News have very similar opinions on non-culture war issues.
Not ideal, but better than the status quo where there is 1 company catering to 1 group.
Majority of Americans (and most people I'd imagine) do not really care about their policies. They don't give two figs about it, and just go about their life just fine without being affected by it one bit. I'm sure you can find some people on both sides of the spectrum regarding their policies, but the vast majority don't. As someone who isn't from SV or has ever worked for in or for an SV company, my bubble is surrounded by farmers.
That's the problem with not giving a shit. When things finally do become bad enough that it affects you personally, it's too late. When it comes to standing up for what's right - and I define what's "right" as mostly what the Constitution of the United States lays forth as our inalienable rights, you better give a shit from the word "go" and you better oppose it stridently because once freedoms get stripped away from you, they're nearly impossible to recover.
I can't even imagine how the Founders would react to things like the PATRIOT Act.
And we can blather on all goddamn day about "muh private corporations!" but when these corporations are actively suppressing competitors and are working hand-in-hand with news outlets to label any new alterative as a Mos Eisley-esque shithole that no respectable person would frequent, the point is moot.
Facebook and Twitter are the modern day public square. Some people will want to claim it's "The Internet" itself; you can just go make your own public square and publish your own website, etc., but that's not actually how a public square works. Just because you hop on your tractor and box blade your front yard flat and pave it over with concrete and add some park benches to it, doesn't turn it into the public square. You actually have to have the public actively occupying it. The public square is where the people are. And the people are on Facebook and Twitter... at least in America.
That's exactly where we are now? When twitter censors right of center ideas and de-platforms those who think them, we invariably seek refuge in alternatives that engender far more radical thinking than if we had stayed in a larger public discussion.
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The ideological complex has not allowed anyone to rise. That's the issue. Even neutrality is considered distasteful.
https://web.archive.org/web/20140809023548/http://www.forbes...
In South Africa, my father had a private plane we’d fly in incredibly dangerous weather and barely make it back. This is going to sound slightly crazy, but my father also had a share in an Emerald mine in Zambia. I was 15 and really wanted to go with him but didn’t realize how dangerous it was. I couldn’t find my passport so I ended up grabbing my brother’s – which turned out to be six months overdue! So we had this planeload of contraband and an overdue passport from another person. There were AK-47s all over the place and I’m thinking, “Man, this could really go bad.”
His grandfather (Dr Joshua Haldeman) was head of Technocracy Inc:
https://www.technocracy.news/shock-elon-musks-grandfather-wa...
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Odds are zero things change about Twitter’s content policy, as it’s about as permissive as you can get while operating in the US.
There’s a lot less sinister intent than one might think at first blush; Twitter wants users to stick around, banning them is a really bad way to do that.
This is the second line in the linked filing, and something a number of people have not read.
Not sure it's that it was left unread or if it just doesn't matter.
As best as I can tell, it just means he won't overtly threaten the company with a takeover or equivalent because he's been given soft power to influence.
My lay reading suggests that Twitter is now basically operating at his whims to keep him from leaving the board and executing a takeover plan 90 days thereafter.
Well, he can overtly threaten all he wants. He can begin the process. He can make all the money arrangements and make agreements with other shareholders. He just cannot complete the takeover by actually acquiring more stock (or other instruments) until after 90 days. Imho that isn't a practical limit on threats.
Honestly, it might be amusing if he does do that. Twitter stock looks to still flat from the IPO price, even after the spike after this announcement.
I say, let him tie up a significant portion of his net worth in a vanity project with no real growth potential.
So he doesn't down the stock with his decisions and buys it cheap later?
The big knock against it is that users and brands are afraid of spontaneous howling mobs. Fewer users means less reach and fewer brands means less $$$. My guess would be that he has some ideas about how to change this. Maybe (spitballing here) more tools for users who are QT'd?
Yes - slowing down the rate of Twitter pile ons would help a lot. Rate limiting QTs from non-followers would help a lot I think. You could even extend this to manual text quotations and screenshots, using either printer dots or OCR. Subtweeting is fine - the point should be to avoid making randos the "it" person on Twitter.
I got as far as "bot" <-> "the cloud is just someone else's computer" <-> "tree that owns itself" before my train of thought SEGVed loudly in complaint.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30927615
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29977822