All: please don't post low-information, high-indignation comments, such as flamebait or ideological battle. We want thoughtful, curious conversation on HN.
They need to re-free up the API. Early adopters and hackers really did some great work using the API until they walled-gardened it and rate limited it to make it unusable. They need to do this for goodwill at the very least, but I think it will spark the fire to make it popular with techies again.
Based on the recently published discovery chats we will probably see:
* High def video
* Focus on music publication
* The highest revenue sharing cut from any social media platform for content creators to get people to switch.
* Removal of twitter blue but some kind of subscriptions to edit tweets
* Paid push DMs to followers (e.g. follow this account for drops, then the tweeter has to pay to tweet to this group)
The problem isn't the bots, the problem is the lack of differentiation between bots and real accounts. I say open up the API and let people make whatever bots they wish, but if you tweet through the API then you get a big "BOT" tag next to your username on the feed.
IMO framing it as "get rid of the bots" is the wrong way to solve the problem because it's unsolvable, especially as we head more towards a world of content being generated by increasingly sophisticated ML algorithms.
It's probably best to embrace the bots and instead think about it as a problem of categorizing, quantifying, and applying more metadata to messages that let people, agents, or other bots determine the qualities about the information that they want to know.
I think you hugely over-estimate the importance of “developer APIs” to the number of bots on twitter.
You’re never going to really fully defeat browser automation or HTTP request playback with automatically generated payloads. No one technically needs an API if a web interface exists to automate something. It’s easier with an official API sure, but not super hard without.
Indeed, a truly malicious bot farm would avoid the API altogether and just fake web client requests to look as much like the real thing as possible. Anyone can capture the HTTP messages with just a computer and an open source MITM proxy to decrypt and inspect the SSL message contents for recreating in a bot script or application.
The only thing that can stop a bad guy with an API (besides policy and moderation) is a good guy with an API. Some of the very best misinfo research and tooling came from academics having access to firehose data.
My little side project is a terribly written bot that brings some joy to a niche group. I hope I don’t get excluded. It’s also brought me a lot of joy along with everything I’ve learned building it. There are a lot of automated accounts that are really interesting. Twitter is worse off right now - and people/communities hate uncertainty. Signed -@BostonTimelaps1
If they think keeping the API closed down or closing it down even more, is an effective defence against the bots… They need a quick refresher course in why the Analog Hole makes perfect DRM impossible outside of completely controlled circumstances.
Even if you required a dedicated twitter device per account, and no api at all… no more twitter website even or read only website … then you would get people building robots to touch the screen as fast as possible to “physically automate “ the devices… if you limit that device to only having one account associated with it, you would need a way to deauthorise a device for when you sell it or upgrade to a new one, so they would just automate the deauthorise workflows and “load balance” across any necessary size pool of devices.
Any efforts like this will drastically increase user friction and drive away customers/users. Simultaneously as far as they go down this path there will be (as long as twitter is still considered relevant, at least) … be state funded propaganda organisations who’s interests align with funding such a device farm, and simultaneously they would want deniability so the operators of such twitter device farms would wind up in the sort of ethically dubious zone as companies like Pegasus group (examples because its after midnight and I don’t feel like looking up exact details, consider these hypothetical examples unless they are correct) selling their hardware to “legitimate governments” to perform a once off inspection of the phone data of someone crossing the border into the USA at JFK airport in New York, and also to counties like Saudi Arabia to hack and monitor dissidents round the clock by installing root kits/exploits.
Effectively there’s no point, they should open up the api and monitor it better.
As a developer, not really a tweeter, I'd be super-happy if a read-only API was opened up again. It was a gold mine when it came to creating cool things back in the days, especially analysis stuff.
The majority of scams are not bots written with the API. They’re stollen accounts of real people that are semi-automated, semi mech turked using a variety of techniques.
If he does find the bot accounts significant enough to identify that he has been "duped" is there any recourse? I suspect this might be the canary in the mine (of social-media businesses) and Elon is passionate enough to release said numbers which could be used as a litmus for all business that marketed 'number of "users"' as something of a validator.
Maybe as a paid/subscriber feature; even YouTube seems to have a cost problem with high def video. Video ads are barely profitable, I can't imagine serving high quality video content at a loss being a good business decision.
> * Focus on music publication
I think this is a niche that Twitter currently excels at. The music industry constantly has small announcements which is well suited for Twitter's format. Should be fairly easy to add a high quality music player, and that should also save a bit on bandwidth costs since musicians currently upload a video just to play music.
Plus, if you look at musician profiles, many pay for a linktree-like service since Twitter only supports one profile link; they can easily capture much of that business for themselves.
Funnily enough, this is what MySpace tried to pivot to be. Every music brand wants to have some sort of home page they can use for advertising/promoting and communications. Difference is Twitter currently has a critical mass of musicians.
> * Removal of twitter blue but some kind of subscriptions to edit tweets
Just charge for verification. They can even be cute and make different kind of verification checkboxes with additional information like they currently do for politicians (maybe even charge the politicians). Easy ones off the top of my head: business owner with business info, musicians, brands.
> * Paid push DMs to followers (e.g. follow this account for drops, then the tweeter has to pay to tweet to this group)
They kinda did this the other way around, OnlyFans style, which makes sense since there's more people consuming tweet than notable people making tweets. Users can pay/subscribe to get noticed by the tweeter. I believe Instagram also recently launched a similar feature. There's a lot of value in having an OnlyFans feature set without the pornographic association. Or Patreon but with a massive userbase.
In the Fintweet community the wish list is probably something like:
* Ban all spam bots
* Ban all spam bots (it's that bad)
* Ability to edit tweets
* Maybe a slightly better to tack tickers. Currently you'll do something like $META but this gets problematic when there are dual-listings, or the same ticker in different markets.
it's not easy to regain that trust once you lose it. how long would Twitter's API need to remain open until you decide they're not going to reverse course and that it's worth building on? 2 years, minimum? and even then there'd be a bitter taste when i do: it would always be in the back of my mind that "what i'm building is only temporary, they're going to take this away again at _some_ point".
Twitter's video serving is embarrassingly woefully bad. Like really, really bad. So much so that Twitter videos buffering is a meme. This should be a core focus.
> They need to re-free up the API
Nobody cares about that. I mean a few developers do but 99.9% of users don't. Nor do they care about the consequences. Time and time again we've seen a growing platform embrace developers until they're large enough not to want to deal with it anymore. This is Lucy and the football at this point. When will we learn?
> They need to do this for goodwill at the very least.
Again, nobody cares about this issue, just like nobody cares about "free speech". They care about not being silenced for their particular positions. Elon's Twitter will reflect this and Elon is very much a conservative (in the US sense).
It's why you only ever hear about "free speech" when it comes to hate speech and never, say, to Palestinians getting silenced on Twitter [1].
> Twitter's video serving is embarrassingly woefully bad
I've never understood why they just refuse to let you click a button to view the higher res version of a video. Instead, it's a game of refreshing and clicking play several times until whatever automation they have realizes that you do, in fact, have enough bandwidth and decoding power to handle a 640p video.
At least youtube-dl bypasses Twitter's shenanigans, but it just seems like such a hostile feature to begin with.
I think the ship has sailed on the API. It was a different time, and the people that used Twitter's API to do fun things didn't just give up...they migrated to mastodon and discord. I don't think the golden years of twitter are coming back.
Twitter should remove Communities, Lists, Professional Profiles, Long Notes (their new take on blogging smh) and Spaces (you know that audio thing)?. These are failed experiments no?
Twitter should improve Bookmarks. I bookmark a lot of Tweets since it was introduced to the public and scrolling down for hundreds of tweets is not fun.
With regards to the API, they shut it down because there were people building apps with the stated intention of taking users from twitter and building their own platform.
I’m on my phone and don’t have a source handy, but it was a serious enough concern to force Twitter to do what they did to the API!
In addition to opening the API, it would be cool if twitter became interoperable with ActivityPub. It would be one of the biggest instances and still attract a lot of people. It would be cool but I don't think it will ever happen, sadly.
Yes like GNIP around that time these firehose startups were amazing and it was a golden age of metadata and then Twitter Killed the Golden Goose. Bring back open data! Let Open Source and all the hackers from second order efforts give back value to Twitter's Value.
Sounds like you think he will move in exactly the same direction as all the other social media platforms. He has to make the platform unique in a way that will be difficult for competitors to simply imitate. Or preferably in a direction where there are no competitors at all.
In the spirit of trying to be high-information and add value:
Where Musk is going, there are no maps. So it's very very hard to project. But we can predict likely developments.
At a very high level, it's going to involve: bringing back controversial personalities like Donald Trump; increasing Twitter's commitment to 'free speech'; assuaging skittish advertisers; retaining users who might be concerned, while bringing in new ones; managing the exodus of users (size:?) that will happen regardless; cutting a large amount of staff, while keeping Twitter's lights on; open sourcing the code, discussing the impending rearchitecture; and - long term - folding this into Elon's vision of America's WeChat, and ultimately expanding Twitter, under X.com.
That's a lot. But at a high level, I think that's correct.
I would expect Elon to take the fight to the media. Whether he's going to focus on neutrally spreading a message, going more on the attack on media outlets that would support him, or doing something in between, is unknown.
Musk has an unusually large amount of media power: that's his unique value add, in a way. I would expect this to be a 'bigger deal' as a story, as multiple stories, than I would for any other company undergoing a takeover. We'll be hearing a lot more about Twitter in the weeks to come, since the developments will keep piling up, and the press/public loves to read & discuss stories about Twitter & Musk.
Isn't that kind of the story of Twitter thus far already? Certainly on the financial front they never seemed to have much of a plan, and on the product side things always seemed like a bit of a mess to me as well.
Some fresh leadership might not be a bad thing for Twitter. Whether Musk is the right person for that...
Looking at all musk has achieved so far - despite (or because of?) boards of experts adamant it couldn’t be done - I think it’s immensely clear a plan is something he clearly has and works very hard towards.
Obviously many people will disagree with his plan, though I’m 100% certain he has one, and will make it happen.
That's certainly possible. But which of the following would you think is most likely to succeed?
(a) a company trying to build electric cars at a time when there was zero consumer demand for them and the battery technology was nowhere near good enough
(b) a company trying to launch things into space when the vast majority of nations in the world were unable to do so and even NASA seemed like it had lost its way
(c) a popular social media app with 400M users and maybe some issues with product direction
Musk has media attention, but I'm not sure it's much of an advantage at this point.
I tried getting a solar system from Tesla, and it convinced me not to consider their cars. I know it is a different side of the company, but I ended up with a used electric BMW. I was resigned to dealing with the B-hole stigma around having a beamer, but whatever. It's a nice car, environmentally friendly, and was inexpensive.
That's not what happened. Instead, Tesla owners say things like "I got the Tesla before Musk went nutso roll eyes, and it's actually pretty good, but I'm not sure I'd buy another one..."
I'm surprised how quickly the Teslas went from being a status symbol to a faux pas around here. Maybe it's a different story in less liberal areas.
However, unless I'm missing something, social signaling / image management is way more important to the Twitteratti than people buying commuter cars / kid taxis.
(Again, whatever. It's a car, not a political statement, but I've seen more than one Tesla owner apologize for owning one.)
Absolutely. How many times have you heard this statement?
"Our next car will be electric... But not a Tesla."
I hear that all the time now. My wife, who recently turned 30, would be mortified for her friends to see her in a Tesla. They associate the brand with a creepy, slimy billionaire and a legion of tech bro sycophants.
The difficulty is that some of these objectives conflict with each other. Backing off on moderation is likely to drive advertisers away; bringing back banned people could in some cases cause legal problems in countries where publishing, say, pro-Nazi speech is against the law. Making major changes will require more people, but stopping the financial bleeding will require fewer people.
Twitter already has implementations for the Nazi stuff; e.g. images with Nazi flags are allowed in general but if you try to view them from an account with location set to Germany, it will give you a "this content is blocked in your country" error message.
I'd definitely be worried about driving advertisers away though. They forced YouTube's hand at least to some degree with the whole adpocalypse thing.
One of his challenges will be to pay $1.2B in interest payments every year while also making good on the principal. That's quite a bit of debt for a struggling financial situation. Cutting HC will help in the short term; it is unclear if those cuts will be well executed. HN opinion that twitter could run with 200 engineers is woefully naive for a massive company that is under FTC consent order - they probably have >200 privacy engineers (and associated legal staff) just to comply with regulations.
The consent decree requires that the company be 5x as large as it otherwise would. It really, really, really slows down development. For every engineer, there is also a corresponding engineer whose job is to slow them down.
The bankers aren’t naive, they modeled this out. Sure it could go bad and I wonder if Elon PG’ed (personal guarantee) the debt, but you don’t underwrite your a default out of the gate. It’s one of the worst faux pas of debt capital markets.
I've been in companies where 1/5th of engineer was laid off. The state of company infra and the product dropped significantly and it took a long time to approach recovery, where they hired the same amount of staff back.
I can't imagine how dysfunctional twitter would be with %75 of staff gone, I don't even know if it will continue running as a business after that.
Will Musk actually cut 75%? Musk tends to do a lot of “thinking out loud” - so even if he really spoke that number, he won’t hold himself to it.
Whatever the actual figure is, it is unlikely to be the same figure across all departments - likely some departments will be cut much more than others. Probably engineering will experience significantly less cuts than marketing, PR, HR, government relations, business development, etc. Even in engineering, some cuts may be due to things like adjusting the manager:IC ratio.
There is a lot of cruft without touching the engineering department. And there are always those two guys in every team that when they call sick - productivity of the team increases.
> managing the exodus of users (size:?) that will happen regardless;
This is probably the biggest risk in this acquisition. Twitter wasn't doing anything special, and it's easy to launch a clone of their business model. Elon's talking about taking an axe to the things that keep the lights on at Twitter: effective content moderation and talent.
> Elon's talking about taking an axe to the things that keep the lights on at Twitter: effective content moderation and talent.
I don't think it's clear this is the case. It's just the network effect that keeps it in such a dominant position. Plenty of Twitter clones have been created, yet neither conservatives have migrated to Truth/Parler/Gab/whatever, nor have or will liberals/the anti-Musk contingent to Mastodon, or whatever the left-leaning equivalent Twitter clone coming in the next few weeks is.
Honestly, Twitter's biggest draw to most users is probably the lack of content moderation on something that gets buried beneath the politics and culture discussions: porno, porno, porno. Twitter is one of the few social media sites where porn is still allowed, for the most part. It's always funny to see a "viral" politics/culture war tweet that has "blown up" with 50k, 100k likes; any given lewd picture of Ganyu from Genshin Impact by a popular artist is going to run double those numbers.
> taking an axe to the things that keep the lights on at Twitter: effective content moderation and talent.
I have experienced the 'effectiveness' of Twitters moderation team on multiple occasions where they were very ineffective at upholding the very clear cut rules surrounding things like doxxing on their website. I had my personal information made public, and they ignored me. Multiple times. I even created a new account with no way for there to be any publicly available personal info; and yet I was still doxxed somehow, and they still ignored me.
So, in the spirit of HN's rules, I just want to say this, since end user experience should be allowable to share (I hope.).
Effective moderation at twitter is a myth as far as I see it, and their only talent is making it look like they have effective moderation when they care.
P.S. I also was doing nothing wrong in any case where this happened. It was all conversations which should have been considered civil (mostly) and one situation where it had nothing to do with politics or philosophy at all. Yet they did nothing.
> Twitter wasn't doing anything special, and it's easy to launch a clone of their business model.
And yet nobody has done it? People think social media is easy to start and succeed. FYI, its like catching lightning.
Most people are focused on censorship/content issues, but I really think the X.com "mega app" vision is the most significant part of this. It'll be hard to gain a foothold in those markets, and there'll be antitrust challenges, but it really fits perfectly with the rest of Musk's vision:
X.com Maps could tie in with Teslas, X.com Carhailing could tie-in with (future) full self-driving; Twitter could be expanded to be more like Telegram + Instagram, with channels, better DMs, "Moments", and more.
There's no attempt to create a single, wide-ranging social media platform, with payments, video, shorts, DMs, and more. China's proven that it can be done. It would create a far bigger moat and network effects, and likely be as successful as Microsoft Teams & 365, a highly integrated solution, are for work.
Are you serious? Why would I ever use that app? I already don't use twitter and there are market leaders that would have much better service (given they aren't trying to do every single thing in the world) compared to X and also, most of those services pretty much stink, so I would never think that X, while trying to do everything in the world, would also be better.
>> There's no attempt to create a single, wide-ranging social media platform, with payments, video, shorts, DMs, and more
Umm.. Facebook? Just offering all those features doesn't mean much though, you really have to be dominant in each one, since there's much less moat to debundling consumer apps vs enterprise
I wonder how this jives with his stated plan to lay off a lot of people? If he wants to implement that he'll need a lot more engineers and related support staff.
There's a cluster of things around transport and then... also Twitter? I get that in the end you want to do everything but what makes microblogging a more important day 1 feature than food delivery or gaming or online dating. It's like if Amazon did just book delivery and online photo storage.
the everything-app thing would be significant if realized, the thing about that is it has to compete not just against all the tech giants, but also against all the smaller companies who are already mostly succeeding in those verticals. having to install another app isn't really an impediment to acquiring users.
it's an interesting vision to be sure, but i'm not sure how buying twitter actually helps it - twitter has already been struggling to expand outside their core product - none of the experiments like moments, spaces, fleets, etc have really taken off. it kind of seems like twitter users just want tweets and nothing else. so now he's taken on a whole bunch of debt to acquire a userbase who is hostile to the app expanding into any other markets? I don't really see a whole lot of evidence that twitter is a good launch platform for an everything-app.
Saying it is some country’s WeChat is like a curse… as WeChat is notorious for its closed mindedness and probably hated by most of its users… and they won’t even have any other option because Tencent is actively striking down all potential competitors…
I think that means WeChat in the sense that in China WeChat isn't just an communications app, it's an app through which many/most people do a great deal of transactions -- shopping, p2p payments, paying utility bills, customer support, ride hailing, banking, etc., It encompasses what about 10 apps in the US do. You cannot understate how pervasive its use is in ways that have little to do with social media. That's what Elon wants to turn Twitter into.
Yeah wtf would anyone touting freedom of speech bring up China in any way? Tencent, owner of WeChat, said they'd block NBA Houston Rockets games because one of the Rockets' managers tweeted "Fight for Freedom. Stand with Hong Kong." [0]. Granted, I got kicked off of twitter for "misinformation" for saying "some day we'll all die".
This. As someone living in China and having used wechat for years I've always found it ultra cringey when American businessmen/influencers are like "omg have you guys seen what Chinese are doing with wechat! They have this all in one app where..."
First of all this idea of a superapp is nothing new. In fact iOS or Android is also a "superapp". Basically a software that has an ecosystem inside of it. Wechat has just created their own ecosystem within a ecosystem, because they want to control everything.
Second, when compared to most other Chinese apps I do have to admit that wechat is much more finished, but when compared to other global messaging apps like Telegram, Slack etc. I'd say wechat is about 10-15 years behind in everything and lacking the most fundamental features.
The social media aspect of wechat which is called "Wechat Moments" is also extremely limited: Basically like Instagram without you being able to see or follow people you don't know personally. If your friend posts a photo and his friend (who you don't know) makes a comment on it, you cannot see this comment but you can see your friends replies to him/her. Yes, super confusing. Also no images, videos, gifs in the comments etc.
Third, a lot of people like to mention that "you can do everything with wechat". You can do a lot of things, but I don't know anyone who only uses wechat. There are a lot of other apps that you need to live comfortably: Alipay (this is another superapp), Taobao (like ebay), Jingdong (like amazon), Dianping (like Yelp), Eleme/Meituan (like Uber eats), Baidu maps, banking apps etc. etc.
Wechat does have it's internal "miniprogram" system (alternative to native apps) where you can have some of these apps I previously mentioned, but there are severe app size, memory and performance limitations, proprietary API and the performance and functionality is from early 2010s internet. Laggy and slowly opening pages, collapsing and bouncy layouts etc. Also wechat does not support multitasking: When you are using for example Tim Horton's miniprogram to order coffee, you can't chat with your friends, you can't open a Starbucks/some_other_coffee_company miniprogram on the side and compare prices. You have to close and kill the current "app" and then open a new "app" for new action.
This is somewhat understandable due to the iOS/Android limitations of a single app (in regards to performance and memory), but it highlights why this kind of a "superapp" idea is fundamentally flawed.
So basically IMO "superapp" is a solution looking for a problem. We already have iOS, Android or web browser. We don't need another forced ecosystem but we need good apps for existing ones.
It sounds like Musk is going to tell advertisers to kick rocks and try to monetize the platform.
Where are people gonna go if not on Twitter? The left isn't gonna have better luck with their own truth social or parler. The network effect is too big with Twitter. It's not fun if you're not dunking on your enemies. That's the fun of Twitter.
I think you may be over-estimating how much most people "need" something like Twitter. For the vast majority of users, a news feed and private messaging (WhatsApp, iMessage, etc.) are good enough.
I appreciate your perspective. I used Twitter to follow industry news. But the people I cared about left and so did I. It’s so boring and pointless now. Absolutely no value to me anymore.
Facebook could allow for special profiles that are only comprised of statuses. That would be a Twitter clone in a nutshell that would already have high adoption.
That would require Facebook to make a shrewd business decision though so never mind.
Maybe I've just been working for tech companies in the Bay Area too long. But I don't want to work for a company where I don't have equity that I can cash out.
And now all those engineers are working for a company where equity doesn't exist? An exception could be a Netflix model where you make a buttload of money. But Twitter isn't that.
We know one thing: half of the $44B was loans that will cost Twitter around $1B per year, so it has to make some kind of profit. Otherwise who will pay?
How would Twitter be WeChat of America if WeChat is fundamentally for private messages and private transactions (unless it’s groups) but Twitter is for broadcasting yourself
Let's assume he makes Neuralink happen in the sense of really giving a locked-in person the ability to communicate in real words and sentences.
He now has the network to connect those people directly to the rest of the world, under his umbrella. Sure, he could have just used (old) Twitter's API, and that's what he'll be using, but it won't be "we (as in 'Neuralink') and Twitter made this happen", but "we (my companies)" made this happen.
I also wonder how useful Twitter's infrastructure could be for machine-to-machine communication, where he certainly could have some uses for it with Tesla and Starlink.
I'm excited about the possibility of a more decentralized / open source WeChat coming out of this. Twitter has their BlueSky project for decentralized social media and is bringing on many pro-crypto people into management (e.g. https://twitter.com/sriramk). It would be a great story of USA freedom vs Chinese control that could be really good for the world and Twitter.
There was talk of him using crypto currency as a way of disincentivizing bots. Not sure how well thought out the ideas were, but there might well be some interesting integrations with crypto on the platform
There is not only personalities like Trump, peoples like Silvano Trotta, Christian Perronne, Astrid Stuckelberger, Christine Cotton, should also be unbanned if he do things right. All theses peoples have switched to Telegram, but they might come back on twitter if Musk is serious about free speech and unban them. With their followers...
1. Musk is going to discover (and maybe admit?) that fixing Twitter is harder than he thought. It will be just like self-driving, which seems straightforward, but which actually has thousands of edge cases which are hard to solve with a single general system. Nevertheless, he will persist, because that's what he does.
2. Current Twitter makes a profit on advertising, which means Twitter needs to encourage high levels of engagement, which means they need controversial (emotional) content, but not so emotional (toxic) as to drive people away. They need to be as close to the line as possible, which is why they spend so much effort on moderation. Musk's solution is, I predict, to try different revenue sources so that engagement with the feed is not the primary metric.
3. Musk has already stated that his goal is the Everything App (which he calls X). The Everything App has news, social media, games, videos, and a payment infrastructure (both to pay for content and to get paid). He wants Twitter to replace Facebook, Instagram, Google News, YouTube, Twitch and PayPal, etc. Will he be able to pull it off? I expect he will deliver the 20% of those services that are high-value, but pitch it as a complete solution. That might actually be good enough for most people.
4. If he accomplishes #3, then the revenue source is obviously: they will take a cut out of every transaction going on in the network. Maybe ads are a component, but they don't have to be a major component. If engagement is no longer the most important metric, then it's possible to allow every person to have a radically personalized feed. Even something as simple as only showing you tweets from people you follow (what a concept!) would revolutionize the experience and drastically reduce the need for moderation.
5. Since Twitter is private, Musk can front-load #4 even before the Everything App is ready. If he hasn't already burned the current team, he can make the experience better relatively quickly and worry about profit later.
6. Now for my safest prediction: No matter what he does, some people will hate him for it.
The way he got bored running Tesla and SpaceX for ~20 years?
I really don't get where this meme of "impulsive, erratic, hotheaded Musk" comes from given he demonstrated ability to stick with a business in the toughest of times.
Tesla was literally days away from bankruptcy at one time and Musk made it work.
After first 3 failed launches he was about to run out of money and yet he financed another launch, which worked.
He hasn't had a business failure yet.
Is that a guy who gets bored and moves on to something else?
I think it's not exactly fair to compare Twitter with his other endeavours. Others are very hard problems. What Musk will do with twitter is figure out an action plan: IMO changing twitter into X will be a viable way of letting it survive. He's gonna chart a course of action that could work and give the reins to someone else for execution.
Musk's time is valuable given that he's leading a lot of companies. He's not going to sit around and mull over twitter. The best thing he can do is spend time => chart a plan => hire a capable CEO who is best at execution (Tim Cook for instance). If he spends more time on twitter, his other bets will get hurt disproportionately.
This is my guess as well, but on a bit longer timescale. I think we'll see some noteworthy features over the next year as he tackles low hanging fruit(the reply button for example, although it sounds like that was already in development). This will be followed by a year or two of slow down as they run into social/technological issues, followed by Musk selling off the company.
Seriously considering #3 a solid idea to even discuss is a delusion. Twitter already has videos (YouTube, Twitch), a feed (Facebook, Google News), images (IG), etc. did it replace any of the above mentioned services or do you think the only missing element in this massive intercontinental cross-technological enterprise is Elon Musk?
They just need his guidance and leads, PMs, design, engineers, … and, most importantly, users of these existing platforms will all align and populate this brave new super app.
4) don't overestimate cut of transaction and underestimate ad revenue (promoting the transaction seekers). Let's use Amazon as an example: They run a 3P marketplace with a transaction cut business model, and it's not very profitable. Vs. their ads based sponsored product which is extremely profitable (soon to larger than AWS for profit at Amazon). This is a very different ad business than twitter's current performance marketing ad product.
I think first party ads promoting commerce on your platform can be very lucrative. And % of transactions tend not to be, with the exception of Android / iOS app store markets.
I haven't done the math because nobody is paying me to. But your example of Amazon might reinforce my point in that all three components (retail, ads, AWS) reinforce each other. Amazon is trying to be the "Everything App" also because they see synergies (even if only in shared infra).
And Amazon can afford to be less agressive with ads because it's a smaller part of their business, compared to (e.g.) Meta or Twitter. Apple is in a similar place: they can afford to care more about privacy because they don't make money from ads.
The more revenue Twitter can get from non-ad sources, the better the user experience (in my opinion).
But you're right that there's no guarantee that they will be able to get much non-ad revenue.
> Even something as simple as only showing you tweets from people you follow (what a concept!) would revolutionize the experience and drastically reduce the need for moderation.
You can do that right now by turning off retweets for the people you follow. You have to do that individually for every user you follow but it allows for a highly curated timeline. I turn of retweets for about 80% of the people I follow because I am interested in their original content but not in their random retweets. The other 20% introduce me to new content through their retweets.
I had a chance to buy 76.com before the oil company realized they should buy it. Had I any access to capital as a kid I would have bought it for $2k. well at least I get it as a trump in dns stories missed out on.
Having used WeChat, LINE and the like I shudder. Not just because they naturally become bloated slow ugly behemoths to use but also because they more generally become de-facto monopolies. Not having to compete with anyone is the ultimate killer of innovation.
As much as people dislike Musk, he draws excitement and captivation not only to himself, but to whatever he touches. Now for the first time people actually care about the "future" of Twitter, or in a sense, have a vision for its future that isn't defined by its frequent moderation-related controversies.
Is Musk's financial success and unparalleled cultural relevance a science that can be replicated? I mean, as much as people don't like him he has gotten to a financial position where anything he wants seems easily achievable. Is it the fact that he always carries the implied promise of "bold new future that will change your life" more than any other cultural entity?
Obviously Mark Zuckerberg is trying the same thing with Meta, but that's been a failure.
People hate Musk's personality, but no companies occupy the reverence in people's mind as much as SpaceX and Tesla. Even a man for a while much richer than Elon, Bezos, couldn't muster much in terms of cultural relevance for Blue Origin than a PR stunt with William Shatner.
Does Musk have a internal "toolbox" of guiding principles and behaviors that tremendously advantage him in his current position as outgoing tech CEO, or is he just extremely lucky? Is it merely because of his seeming utopian ambitions that make him more than a guy merely obsessed with financial success that he has ended up much more wealthy than if he were a much more grounded, brass-tacks CEO?
The rocket landing stuff largely borrow from DC-X and the spinoff work at NASA (+Lars Blackmore), all originally Strategic Defense Initiative stuff.
He used all that money from Mike as collateral for loans to Tesla.
He deserves some credit for impressive financial engineering and attracting talent under the guise of purpose ("going to Mars") but he took a lot of shady money along the way. And then there is the Saudis..
Most people who work with Musk 1:1 know he's unpredictable but pretty mentally unimpressive.
If it were just a matter of money, any of the other billionaires who tried to build rocket companies would have succeeded. SpaceX got payload to orbit with ~$100M. The only other company that has come close to this is Rocket Lab with a bit over $200M invested.
By comparison, Bezos has been sinking > $1B per year into Blue Origin for nearly a decade without making it to orbit, and probably won't until 2024 at the earliest.
You keep talking about people as if you they are one homogenous block that you deeply understand and represent.
Most people really couldn't care less about SpaceX, Tesla or the future of Twitter. And they definitely wouldn't put Musk at the pinnacle of cultural relevance.
It's a minority of the population that is on sites like this that care. And for many of us there is a much more discerning and skeptical attitude towards Musk and his antics.
SpaceX is cool. I think musk definitely draws excitement and his companies have great brand reputation. Tesla sells an idea, a lifestyle. When you look at the product, its not great. ill-thought out features (camera rain sensor, parking sensors being taken out), crappy materials, and promises that might never be delivered (self-driving).
I think musk really just is an optimist and a big thinker that is driving constantly towards the future, and people love that. Even if he accomplishes 10% of what he sets out to do, thats still a massive step forward.
Honestly I think we’re all just scared he is going to help get the boy king elected and if that’s the case, if that happens there’s a good chance that will be the end of civilization as we know it.
That is legit the only reason anyone I know of cares at all about this deal.
The drama is unbecoming. Contrary to claims, civilization didn't end when Trump took office. The economy didn't crash, it grew. Food prices didn't soar, they went down. Unemployment didn't go up, it went down, especially for minorities. Gas prices didn't hit $7 in California. Home energy bills went down. People had more disposable income and less tax burden. We didn't experience wild inflation. There was no prospect for a third world war.
But then Biden took office and many of those predictions came true through a variety of factors, not the least of which was the incompetence of State Governors, Chinese Communists and Democrats.
> Even a man for a while much richer than Elon, Bezos, couldn't muster much in terms of cultural relevance for Blue Origin than a PR stunt with William Shatner.
When/if Blue Origin starts actually launching ships to orbit and then landing them, they'll gain a lot of relevance.
I mean, yeah? If I personally started launching ships to orbit and landing them, I would gain a lot of relevance too.
The point is, somehow SpaceX is able to do things Blue can’t. Combined with Tesla being able to do things other automakers can’t, it seems there’s a common factor.
Firing Vijaya is a hell of a move here. Parag had been in the CEO seat for less than a year and had no real experience, and Twitter's not such a unique company financially that the CFO is anything special, but Vijaya had been in charge of legal and policy for a decade at a company that regularly has to tangle with nation state governments, as well as navigate all the other kinds of various policy hell that is Twitter's product - that kind of unique direct experience and learned wisdom is not easily replaceable.
You are spot on. That style of working or perspective towards policy is exactly what Musk wants to remove at the grassroots level.
Agreed that this wisdom and experience is not replaceable. But Musk intends to replace it with something else. If you think about it, Vijaya's perspectives and intuition is only going to pull back Musk's vision however vague that might be. Musk doesn't want to sit around and convince Vijaya of his opinion towards content moderation. I think if Vijaya showed appreciation or interest towards Musk's policy on some level at least, she would have had a non-zero chance to be around. The difference of opinion is at a stark contrast in my opinion.
This is the fastest and brutal way of Musk moving forward with his plan.
Yes, but he presumes her "overly woke" perspectives towards community and censorship were anathema to his approach to libertarian free speech and also resulted in deplatforming Trump so away she goes! Why do you need someone in charge of legal and policy if you're going to stop caring about those things wholesale?
Just watching Tim Poole throw hard questions at her and her dodging for two hours on Rogan is enough to make me understand why Musk would fire her. She doesn’t share Musks vision at all when it comes to censorship.
AFAICT he's planning on folding to any authoritarian governments demands [1], while fighting for free speech mostly in the American context (and that too, just online). For that, he probably doesn't need Vijaya.
I hope someone pays her buckets of money now to fight at the actual frontline of free speech (Texas government sanctioned book bans perhaps?)
You're forgetting he has access to teams of competent lawyers (and their networks) who will already have to interact with international law for Tesla et al.
There's a reason lawyers specialize. No one is as qualified to fight for speech on Twitter as the person who's done it through the company's most tumultuous decade. The next most qualified person is probably Facebook's general counsel since they deal with all the same problems, and the places they differ probably still benefit from the portable experience. After that, there aren't a lot of people leading work on speech policy at this scale. You can't just drop in an IP lawyer or a real estate lawyer and hope for the best.
> but Vijaya had been in charge of legal and policy for a decade at a company that regularly has to tangle with nation state governments
In charge of, but almost certainly not the DRI, or related talent, for any of that. Her direct experience is most certainly minimal, compared to the people actually doing that work. This assumes there's not significant corruption of course.
So the questions would be, will Elon see the value in those groups responsible, and will those groups stick around on their own? I imagine so.
For example, he stopped talking about the bot population on the platform altogether after he could not get out of the deal.
Was he honest about this being a big issue in the first place?
For me, it’s not easy to believe this because this bot issue appeared right after Twitter staff did not like his speech, and talks with the CEO fell apart.
Am I mistaken about how it all played out?
If not, do you think being deceitful to a certain degree is okay?
From your point of view, do you consider him deceitful?
Every one of us has run into situations where choosing to be honest has materially cost us. You accidentally scratch a parked car on your way out. Do you stop and leave a note with contact info or not?
The richer you are, the more leverage you have and larger the material cost for these situations. A fellow rich friend gives you a little insider info that a stock you hold is about to crater. Do you sell some?
In other words, being honest is a tax, and the wealthier you are, the higher that tax rate. Given that, I think the only way to reach certain levels of wealth is by not paying that tax.
Therefore, I treat anyone at Musk's level of wealth as intrinsically untrustworthy. You don't get to be a billionaire by being a normal honest human. And if by miracle you should happen to, being a billionaire I think fundamentally changes your psychology such that you cease to be normal and honest. There may be exceptions, but I think they are exceedingly rare.
Billionaires are functionally a different species.
Being honest is an investment in an honest society and a just future. Of course, the problem with being honest is that, as with any ideological conflict, those who volunteer for the front lines make the most sacrifices, and have to trust that the tide will someday turn in favor of their side, even though they may never see it happen. So there's a lot of "you go first" noise instead of active effort to walk the talk.
Nonetheless this trending fad of referring to any cost that has no obvious immediate benefit to the payer a tax is starting to outgrow the original, and usefully narrow, scope it once had.
It would be equally valid, semantically, (and I would argue more valid prescriptively) to observe that having to constantly verify at great expense what in an honest society you could you could otherwise trusted at nearly zero expense, is the more costly and pernicious "tax" on total human productivity.
If anything I'd say it's the opposite. A random person can get away with cons and scams for a long time. Whenever they get caught, they can just set up shop somewhere else. They can change their name (or simply lie to others about their name). Famous people can't do that. If you're famous, you can commit one scam before your reputation is ruined. Even if the story manages to avoid the news, people talk and word spreads. The incentives are such that a purely selfish billionaire sociopath is better off being honest.
Also, being extremely rich makes you a target for ambitious or activist prosecutors. Everything everywhere is securities fraud.[1][2] Whether you're hung out to dry or not is determined by how much your behavior has annoyed people in certain departments of the US government, or how much you've annoyed their friends.
I think what you are talking about is morality and not honesty. Musk is brutally honest - with the people he works with, with the investors, with his followers on twitter and everyone. He is brutally honest by letting them know on their face what he thinks is right and wrong. I would argue that not being honest about something wouldn't make you move forward.
You can be brutally honest and immoral at the same time. Not leaving a note for scratching a parked car is being immoral to someone.
Morality doesn't get you up the ladder because there are certain hard decisions you need to make. You may argue that dishonesty can take you up. I think dishonesty can only take you so far. It definitely can't get you to become someone like Musk.
The wealthier you are, the bigger the cost of certain actions, sure.
I'm not at all convinced that the rate gets higher. I'll go ahead and bet the opposite, that the cost of being honest represents a smaller fraction of your wealth as you have more.
Somewhat analogous to "fuck you money". If you badly need a job, you have to be silent about many issues.
It was a legal dispute over billions of dollars, nobody was telling the truth it is all a game to win a case and a negotiation tactic to get a favorable deal. It wasn’t an opportunity for an honest conversation with internet commentators with no actual stake in what happened.
There are legal arguments and then there is being deceitful, there’s quite a lot of distance between the two.
Many people say they dislike Musk because of his ego, his shitposting, his tendency to lash out at critics, etc. I like him specifically because of those attributes: he may be the richest man on the planet, but he never gives the impression of being a lizard person like e.g. Bezos does. He's a normal guy, including plenty of normal-guy flaws, just an extremely successful one.
I think the thing to watch will be ads and other revenue streams. Most companies aren't going to want their ads next to 'free for all' content, so we'll see what happens.
I'm very skeptical of the idea that Twitter can become a place where people discuss things with civility. It seems like the mechanics of the conversation encourage outrage.
It's a good sentiment, but he kind of has to say that right? He just spent $44B taking this company private, if advertisers flee and it starts running at a substantial loss, it could mean financial ruin for him
Firing the person who fought against government censorship and worked to establish a balanced content policy for almost a quarter billion people across the planet is not a great move if he wants anyone to believe that. The only people who even know who she is either know the good work she does or had it out for her over the reluctant and long-delayed ban of Trump. She just kind of quietly kept Twitter from turning into a complete snake pit while making sure the maximum number of people could speak. Evidence that keeping your head down and doing good work isn't enough if the people who decide these things don't know about it.
I think you're broadly correct. I'm curious to see where it all ends up. Content moderation is not fun or easy, and I could see him getting thoroughly sick of all of it.
But we can see Twitter being supported by extreme right foundations.
I'm from Brazil and the extreme right is abusing all the communication platforms. it's a complete madness in what people believe right now. Our society is on the verge of crumbling.
the same could said about the far left in America. well i guess it could be said about the far right too. its up to the folks in the middle, the progreservatives (or consegressives depending on how you look at it), to end the madness but most of us are too busy living our own lives to care about how crazy the fringes of society are beyond the entertainment value of it all.
The 'brand safety' super omnia argument isn't nearly as straightforward as it's made out to be. Twitter already has an enormous amount of content that is perfectly within the terms of service, yet that you wouldn't think most companies would want their ads next to. Hardcore pornography, for example. It more or less works out, because Twitter ads aren't associated with particular tweets in the same way that YouTube ads are associated with particular videos.
The argument only goes through when you look at the platform reputation as a whole. That's why platforms like Parler have trouble attracting ads. There are a lot – a lot – of people trying to hit Twitter's platform reputation right now, but their problem is that the best place to degrade companies' (and people's) reputations is Twitter.
Well, speaking in those terms, I think the thing to watch will in fact be censorship. Elon is extremely idealistic, so it will be fascinating to watch him melt down when confronted with the reality of how complex free speech and censorship issues really are. I predict that he will succeed in turning Twitter into the rightwing safehaven that "Truth" Social, Parlor, etc have all been trying to become.
He's making a deal with the devil to fund Twitter, and if that means selling out to guys like Peter Thiel and other conservative power brokers, then he will do it. Just in time for the 2024 presidential election media cycle too...What could possibly go wrong?
Elon Musk has been talking about how awesome Gigafactory Shanghai is for the past year, thanks to Chinese workers who don't talk back to their boss and work harder than their American counterparts.
Dude loves his Chinese anti-speech factory. Or at least, he already is pretending to do that so that he gets his Chinese sales numbers up.
Musk makes the public statements he needs to do business. He has no morals outside of money as far as I can tell. Dude is 100% willing to spout off anti-American propaganda / stereotypes to serve his Chinese masters (at least, this year when his Chinese factory is opening up. We will see if he really believes those words or if he's just playing dumb or something...)
EDIT:
> I think there will be some very strong companies coming out of China. There’s just a lot of super talented and hardworking people in China that strongly believe in manufacturing. And they won’t just be burning the midnight oil. They’ll be burning the 3am oil. So they won’t even leave the factory type of thing. Whereas in America, people are trying to avoid going to work at all.
> I predict that he will succeed in turning Twitter into the rightwing safehaven that "Truth" Social, Parlor, etc have all been trying to become.
I actually don't think so, I think this was bluster, or if they are safe haven it will be safe in the way that a subreddit is safe. You can freely talk amongst eachother but that content won't be promoted to people who don't want to see it.
My prediction is he ends up growing twitter into a fairly bland chat/communications app/social network, and the focus on global political and social debates slowly weans over time.
he should make the platform $5/month to post and free to read. That would likely increase the quality of content and provide another source of revenue.
I don’t think $5/month would stop the biggest offenders: content farms. I have reported dozens of accounts that have posted tens of thousands of tweets in the last few years. Accounts that spam US politicians with things like “I am a democrat and I will not vote for Biden because he is neo-Nazi…” and so on and so forth. Accounts that ruin the discussion, waste attention. Accounts that are obviously not authentic users but are a part of a foreign propaganda campaign. These accounts can afford to pay $5/month.
Companies will want their content next to specific content which they will pick when placing bids based on a reputation value which will be computed by a secret algorithm. Whoever has a better reputation will attract more ads and get more cuts from the money twitter collects.
Like, I want to show my gun ads next to Trump's posts and want to show abortion clinics next to Biden's. Nothing wrong with this. Want to show public works ads next to Bernie's ads.
Then when you want to post wild things, anonymous mode will kick in and those posts will not be posted in an identifying fashion. They will be posted in an area that cannot lead to the post owner being "accurately" identified. That way nobody knows who posted it. That should reduce some legal issues. If the poster decides to post it as the owner and successfully gets past the Nazi filter, their reputation will be affected depending on the public reception of their post.
Just like in real life. You stay away from people who you don't like.
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Based on the recently published discovery chats we will probably see:
* High def video
* Focus on music publication
* The highest revenue sharing cut from any social media platform for content creators to get people to switch.
* Removal of twitter blue but some kind of subscriptions to edit tweets
* Paid push DMs to followers (e.g. follow this account for drops, then the tweeter has to pay to tweet to this group)
He really hates the bots, so he'll probably close up the API.
Until bots gets solved, no developer should expect the API to open up.
That term bot conflates at least three distinct meanings. Not sure how blocking the API would affect #2 or #3
1) Automated accounts probably using the API that are run by a program to post content. Can be benign. Here's an example:
https://twitter.com/happyautomata/
2) Large accounts that push a particular point of view, often state sponsored, run in teams. Does not need an API. Here's an example:
https://twitter.com/sprintermonitor
3) Small accounts paid to push or disrupt a particular agenda in replies. Often state sponsored. Example I suspect:
https://twitter.com/DaBoy1804/with_replies
It's probably best to embrace the bots and instead think about it as a problem of categorizing, quantifying, and applying more metadata to messages that let people, agents, or other bots determine the qualities about the information that they want to know.
You’re never going to really fully defeat browser automation or HTTP request playback with automatically generated payloads. No one technically needs an API if a web interface exists to automate something. It’s easier with an official API sure, but not super hard without.
Indeed, a truly malicious bot farm would avoid the API altogether and just fake web client requests to look as much like the real thing as possible. Anyone can capture the HTTP messages with just a computer and an open source MITM proxy to decrypt and inspect the SSL message contents for recreating in a bot script or application.
He shut up about the bots as soon as it was evident the excuse wasn't working. Bots are of no concern otherwise.
Even if you required a dedicated twitter device per account, and no api at all… no more twitter website even or read only website … then you would get people building robots to touch the screen as fast as possible to “physically automate “ the devices… if you limit that device to only having one account associated with it, you would need a way to deauthorise a device for when you sell it or upgrade to a new one, so they would just automate the deauthorise workflows and “load balance” across any necessary size pool of devices.
Any efforts like this will drastically increase user friction and drive away customers/users. Simultaneously as far as they go down this path there will be (as long as twitter is still considered relevant, at least) … be state funded propaganda organisations who’s interests align with funding such a device farm, and simultaneously they would want deniability so the operators of such twitter device farms would wind up in the sort of ethically dubious zone as companies like Pegasus group (examples because its after midnight and I don’t feel like looking up exact details, consider these hypothetical examples unless they are correct) selling their hardware to “legitimate governments” to perform a once off inspection of the phone data of someone crossing the border into the USA at JFK airport in New York, and also to counties like Saudi Arabia to hack and monitor dissidents round the clock by installing root kits/exploits.
Effectively there’s no point, they should open up the api and monitor it better.
How relevant is the API though?
Is it possible to put together a Selenium script that posts a tweet?
Instead of trying to maximize in-house value open ecosystem works better for Twitter.
Maybe as a paid/subscriber feature; even YouTube seems to have a cost problem with high def video. Video ads are barely profitable, I can't imagine serving high quality video content at a loss being a good business decision.
> * Focus on music publication
I think this is a niche that Twitter currently excels at. The music industry constantly has small announcements which is well suited for Twitter's format. Should be fairly easy to add a high quality music player, and that should also save a bit on bandwidth costs since musicians currently upload a video just to play music.
Plus, if you look at musician profiles, many pay for a linktree-like service since Twitter only supports one profile link; they can easily capture much of that business for themselves.
Funnily enough, this is what MySpace tried to pivot to be. Every music brand wants to have some sort of home page they can use for advertising/promoting and communications. Difference is Twitter currently has a critical mass of musicians.
> * Removal of twitter blue but some kind of subscriptions to edit tweets
Just charge for verification. They can even be cute and make different kind of verification checkboxes with additional information like they currently do for politicians (maybe even charge the politicians). Easy ones off the top of my head: business owner with business info, musicians, brands.
> * Paid push DMs to followers (e.g. follow this account for drops, then the tweeter has to pay to tweet to this group)
They kinda did this the other way around, OnlyFans style, which makes sense since there's more people consuming tweet than notable people making tweets. Users can pay/subscribe to get noticed by the tweeter. I believe Instagram also recently launched a similar feature. There's a lot of value in having an OnlyFans feature set without the pornographic association. Or Patreon but with a massive userbase.
In the Fintweet community the wish list is probably something like:
* Ban all spam bots
* Ban all spam bots (it's that bad)
* Ability to edit tweets
* Maybe a slightly better to tack tickers. Currently you'll do something like $META but this gets problematic when there are dual-listings, or the same ticker in different markets.
* Have URLs not count towards character limit
it's not easy to regain that trust once you lose it. how long would Twitter's API need to remain open until you decide they're not going to reverse course and that it's worth building on? 2 years, minimum? and even then there'd be a bitter taste when i do: it would always be in the back of my mind that "what i'm building is only temporary, they're going to take this away again at _some_ point".
Twitter's video serving is embarrassingly woefully bad. Like really, really bad. So much so that Twitter videos buffering is a meme. This should be a core focus.
> They need to re-free up the API
Nobody cares about that. I mean a few developers do but 99.9% of users don't. Nor do they care about the consequences. Time and time again we've seen a growing platform embrace developers until they're large enough not to want to deal with it anymore. This is Lucy and the football at this point. When will we learn?
> They need to do this for goodwill at the very least.
Again, nobody cares about this issue, just like nobody cares about "free speech". They care about not being silenced for their particular positions. Elon's Twitter will reflect this and Elon is very much a conservative (in the US sense).
It's why you only ever hear about "free speech" when it comes to hate speech and never, say, to Palestinians getting silenced on Twitter [1].
[1]: https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2021/5/13/social-media-co...
I've never understood why they just refuse to let you click a button to view the higher res version of a video. Instead, it's a game of refreshing and clicking play several times until whatever automation they have realizes that you do, in fact, have enough bandwidth and decoding power to handle a 640p video.
At least youtube-dl bypasses Twitter's shenanigans, but it just seems like such a hostile feature to begin with.
It's been the de facto Tesla API for 3rd party devs for a number of years now, and Tesla seems to be perfectly fine with it existing.
Twitter should improve Bookmarks. I bookmark a lot of Tweets since it was introduced to the public and scrolling down for hundreds of tweets is not fun.
I’m on my phone and don’t have a source handy, but it was a serious enough concern to force Twitter to do what they did to the API!
Where Musk is going, there are no maps. So it's very very hard to project. But we can predict likely developments.
At a very high level, it's going to involve: bringing back controversial personalities like Donald Trump; increasing Twitter's commitment to 'free speech'; assuaging skittish advertisers; retaining users who might be concerned, while bringing in new ones; managing the exodus of users (size:?) that will happen regardless; cutting a large amount of staff, while keeping Twitter's lights on; open sourcing the code, discussing the impending rearchitecture; and - long term - folding this into Elon's vision of America's WeChat, and ultimately expanding Twitter, under X.com.
That's a lot. But at a high level, I think that's correct.
I would expect Elon to take the fight to the media. Whether he's going to focus on neutrally spreading a message, going more on the attack on media outlets that would support him, or doing something in between, is unknown.
Musk has an unusually large amount of media power: that's his unique value add, in a way. I would expect this to be a 'bigger deal' as a story, as multiple stories, than I would for any other company undergoing a takeover. We'll be hearing a lot more about Twitter in the weeks to come, since the developments will keep piling up, and the press/public loves to read & discuss stories about Twitter & Musk.
We'll see how it goes.
Some fresh leadership might not be a bad thing for Twitter. Whether Musk is the right person for that...
Obviously many people will disagree with his plan, though I’m 100% certain he has one, and will make it happen.
(a) a company trying to build electric cars at a time when there was zero consumer demand for them and the battery technology was nowhere near good enough
(b) a company trying to launch things into space when the vast majority of nations in the world were unable to do so and even NASA seemed like it had lost its way
(c) a popular social media app with 400M users and maybe some issues with product direction
I tried getting a solar system from Tesla, and it convinced me not to consider their cars. I know it is a different side of the company, but I ended up with a used electric BMW. I was resigned to dealing with the B-hole stigma around having a beamer, but whatever. It's a nice car, environmentally friendly, and was inexpensive.
That's not what happened. Instead, Tesla owners say things like "I got the Tesla before Musk went nutso roll eyes, and it's actually pretty good, but I'm not sure I'd buy another one..."
I'm surprised how quickly the Teslas went from being a status symbol to a faux pas around here. Maybe it's a different story in less liberal areas.
However, unless I'm missing something, social signaling / image management is way more important to the Twitteratti than people buying commuter cars / kid taxis.
(Again, whatever. It's a car, not a political statement, but I've seen more than one Tesla owner apologize for owning one.)
"Our next car will be electric... But not a Tesla."
I hear that all the time now. My wife, who recently turned 30, would be mortified for her friends to see her in a Tesla. They associate the brand with a creepy, slimy billionaire and a legion of tech bro sycophants.
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I'd definitely be worried about driving advertisers away though. They forced YouTube's hand at least to some degree with the whole adpocalypse thing.
I can't imagine how dysfunctional twitter would be with %75 of staff gone, I don't even know if it will continue running as a business after that.
Twitter will function better with 75% of the staff gone.
Whatever the actual figure is, it is unlikely to be the same figure across all departments - likely some departments will be cut much more than others. Probably engineering will experience significantly less cuts than marketing, PR, HR, government relations, business development, etc. Even in engineering, some cuts may be due to things like adjusting the manager:IC ratio.
This is probably the biggest risk in this acquisition. Twitter wasn't doing anything special, and it's easy to launch a clone of their business model. Elon's talking about taking an axe to the things that keep the lights on at Twitter: effective content moderation and talent.
I don't think it's clear this is the case. It's just the network effect that keeps it in such a dominant position. Plenty of Twitter clones have been created, yet neither conservatives have migrated to Truth/Parler/Gab/whatever, nor have or will liberals/the anti-Musk contingent to Mastodon, or whatever the left-leaning equivalent Twitter clone coming in the next few weeks is.
Honestly, Twitter's biggest draw to most users is probably the lack of content moderation on something that gets buried beneath the politics and culture discussions: porno, porno, porno. Twitter is one of the few social media sites where porn is still allowed, for the most part. It's always funny to see a "viral" politics/culture war tweet that has "blown up" with 50k, 100k likes; any given lewd picture of Ganyu from Genshin Impact by a popular artist is going to run double those numbers.
I have experienced the 'effectiveness' of Twitters moderation team on multiple occasions where they were very ineffective at upholding the very clear cut rules surrounding things like doxxing on their website. I had my personal information made public, and they ignored me. Multiple times. I even created a new account with no way for there to be any publicly available personal info; and yet I was still doxxed somehow, and they still ignored me.
So, in the spirit of HN's rules, I just want to say this, since end user experience should be allowable to share (I hope.).
Effective moderation at twitter is a myth as far as I see it, and their only talent is making it look like they have effective moderation when they care.
P.S. I also was doing nothing wrong in any case where this happened. It was all conversations which should have been considered civil (mostly) and one situation where it had nothing to do with politics or philosophy at all. Yet they did nothing.
Nothing.
That's very subjective. "Misinformation" is more moderated than child porn and literal terrorist organizations.
X.com Maps could tie in with Teslas, X.com Carhailing could tie-in with (future) full self-driving; Twitter could be expanded to be more like Telegram + Instagram, with channels, better DMs, "Moments", and more.
There's no attempt to create a single, wide-ranging social media platform, with payments, video, shorts, DMs, and more. China's proven that it can be done. It would create a far bigger moat and network effects, and likely be as successful as Microsoft Teams & 365, a highly integrated solution, are for work.
Umm.. Facebook? Just offering all those features doesn't mean much though, you really have to be dominant in each one, since there's much less moat to debundling consumer apps vs enterprise
it's an interesting vision to be sure, but i'm not sure how buying twitter actually helps it - twitter has already been struggling to expand outside their core product - none of the experiments like moments, spaces, fleets, etc have really taken off. it kind of seems like twitter users just want tweets and nothing else. so now he's taken on a whole bunch of debt to acquire a userbase who is hostile to the app expanding into any other markets? I don't really see a whole lot of evidence that twitter is a good launch platform for an everything-app.
[0] https://www.npr.org/2019/10/07/767805936/houston-rockets-gm-...
First of all this idea of a superapp is nothing new. In fact iOS or Android is also a "superapp". Basically a software that has an ecosystem inside of it. Wechat has just created their own ecosystem within a ecosystem, because they want to control everything.
Second, when compared to most other Chinese apps I do have to admit that wechat is much more finished, but when compared to other global messaging apps like Telegram, Slack etc. I'd say wechat is about 10-15 years behind in everything and lacking the most fundamental features. The social media aspect of wechat which is called "Wechat Moments" is also extremely limited: Basically like Instagram without you being able to see or follow people you don't know personally. If your friend posts a photo and his friend (who you don't know) makes a comment on it, you cannot see this comment but you can see your friends replies to him/her. Yes, super confusing. Also no images, videos, gifs in the comments etc.
Third, a lot of people like to mention that "you can do everything with wechat". You can do a lot of things, but I don't know anyone who only uses wechat. There are a lot of other apps that you need to live comfortably: Alipay (this is another superapp), Taobao (like ebay), Jingdong (like amazon), Dianping (like Yelp), Eleme/Meituan (like Uber eats), Baidu maps, banking apps etc. etc.
Wechat does have it's internal "miniprogram" system (alternative to native apps) where you can have some of these apps I previously mentioned, but there are severe app size, memory and performance limitations, proprietary API and the performance and functionality is from early 2010s internet. Laggy and slowly opening pages, collapsing and bouncy layouts etc. Also wechat does not support multitasking: When you are using for example Tim Horton's miniprogram to order coffee, you can't chat with your friends, you can't open a Starbucks/some_other_coffee_company miniprogram on the side and compare prices. You have to close and kill the current "app" and then open a new "app" for new action. This is somewhat understandable due to the iOS/Android limitations of a single app (in regards to performance and memory), but it highlights why this kind of a "superapp" idea is fundamentally flawed.
So basically IMO "superapp" is a solution looking for a problem. We already have iOS, Android or web browser. We don't need another forced ecosystem but we need good apps for existing ones.
Where are people gonna go if not on Twitter? The left isn't gonna have better luck with their own truth social or parler. The network effect is too big with Twitter. It's not fun if you're not dunking on your enemies. That's the fun of Twitter.
I think you may be over-estimating how much most people "need" something like Twitter. For the vast majority of users, a news feed and private messaging (WhatsApp, iMessage, etc.) are good enough.
That would require Facebook to make a shrewd business decision though so never mind.
I wonder if he needs to do this.
Maybe I've just been working for tech companies in the Bay Area too long. But I don't want to work for a company where I don't have equity that I can cash out.
And now all those engineers are working for a company where equity doesn't exist? An exception could be a Netflix model where you make a buttload of money. But Twitter isn't that.
Why? Elon is not the guy who gonna do it.
He wants freedom of speench under his control.
Tesla for instance is very much anti open source.
He now has the network to connect those people directly to the rest of the world, under his umbrella. Sure, he could have just used (old) Twitter's API, and that's what he'll be using, but it won't be "we (as in 'Neuralink') and Twitter made this happen", but "we (my companies)" made this happen.
I also wonder how useful Twitter's infrastructure could be for machine-to-machine communication, where he certainly could have some uses for it with Tesla and Starlink.
Is that supposed to be an attempt at imagining the most horrible future possible?
Umbrella corporation anyone?
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In the same vein, the influx of new users who had avoided Twitter due to its censorious, hostile community norms.
1. Musk is going to discover (and maybe admit?) that fixing Twitter is harder than he thought. It will be just like self-driving, which seems straightforward, but which actually has thousands of edge cases which are hard to solve with a single general system. Nevertheless, he will persist, because that's what he does.
2. Current Twitter makes a profit on advertising, which means Twitter needs to encourage high levels of engagement, which means they need controversial (emotional) content, but not so emotional (toxic) as to drive people away. They need to be as close to the line as possible, which is why they spend so much effort on moderation. Musk's solution is, I predict, to try different revenue sources so that engagement with the feed is not the primary metric.
3. Musk has already stated that his goal is the Everything App (which he calls X). The Everything App has news, social media, games, videos, and a payment infrastructure (both to pay for content and to get paid). He wants Twitter to replace Facebook, Instagram, Google News, YouTube, Twitch and PayPal, etc. Will he be able to pull it off? I expect he will deliver the 20% of those services that are high-value, but pitch it as a complete solution. That might actually be good enough for most people.
4. If he accomplishes #3, then the revenue source is obviously: they will take a cut out of every transaction going on in the network. Maybe ads are a component, but they don't have to be a major component. If engagement is no longer the most important metric, then it's possible to allow every person to have a radically personalized feed. Even something as simple as only showing you tweets from people you follow (what a concept!) would revolutionize the experience and drastically reduce the need for moderation.
5. Since Twitter is private, Musk can front-load #4 even before the Everything App is ready. If he hasn't already burned the current team, he can make the experience better relatively quickly and worry about profit later.
6. Now for my safest prediction: No matter what he does, some people will hate him for it.
Yeah I think he's going to intensely focus on Twitter for ~6 months, not change much, get bored, and then move onto something else.
I really don't get where this meme of "impulsive, erratic, hotheaded Musk" comes from given he demonstrated ability to stick with a business in the toughest of times.
Tesla was literally days away from bankruptcy at one time and Musk made it work.
After first 3 failed launches he was about to run out of money and yet he financed another launch, which worked.
He hasn't had a business failure yet.
Is that a guy who gets bored and moves on to something else?
He hasn't given up on self-driving after it turned out to be much harder than he thought. He's still pouring money and time into it.
And he hasn't given up on Starlink, even though it is not nearly as profitable as he hoped originally. He's just launching more satellites.
And he hasn't given up on Starship even though it is years late. He's doubling down on its development.
But I conceded that he might not see Twitter as critical for his ultimate goals. Maybe he'll just sell it to a bigger fool in a few years?
Musk's time is valuable given that he's leading a lot of companies. He's not going to sit around and mull over twitter. The best thing he can do is spend time => chart a plan => hire a capable CEO who is best at execution (Tim Cook for instance). If he spends more time on twitter, his other bets will get hurt disproportionately.
They just need his guidance and leads, PMs, design, engineers, … and, most importantly, users of these existing platforms will all align and populate this brave new super app.
I think first party ads promoting commerce on your platform can be very lucrative. And % of transactions tend not to be, with the exception of Android / iOS app store markets.
I haven't done the math because nobody is paying me to. But your example of Amazon might reinforce my point in that all three components (retail, ads, AWS) reinforce each other. Amazon is trying to be the "Everything App" also because they see synergies (even if only in shared infra).
And Amazon can afford to be less agressive with ads because it's a smaller part of their business, compared to (e.g.) Meta or Twitter. Apple is in a similar place: they can afford to care more about privacy because they don't make money from ads.
The more revenue Twitter can get from non-ad sources, the better the user experience (in my opinion).
But you're right that there's no guarantee that they will be able to get much non-ad revenue.
You can do that right now by turning off retweets for the people you follow. You have to do that individually for every user you follow but it allows for a highly curated timeline. I turn of retweets for about 80% of the people I follow because I am interested in their original content but not in their random retweets. The other 20% introduce me to new content through their retweets.
so, AOL?
so, WeChat?
WeChat in China, LINE in Japan, Gojek in Indonesia... A lot of those platforms are crazy profitable
Is Musk's financial success and unparalleled cultural relevance a science that can be replicated? I mean, as much as people don't like him he has gotten to a financial position where anything he wants seems easily achievable. Is it the fact that he always carries the implied promise of "bold new future that will change your life" more than any other cultural entity?
Obviously Mark Zuckerberg is trying the same thing with Meta, but that's been a failure.
People hate Musk's personality, but no companies occupy the reverence in people's mind as much as SpaceX and Tesla. Even a man for a while much richer than Elon, Bezos, couldn't muster much in terms of cultural relevance for Blue Origin than a PR stunt with William Shatner.
Does Musk have a internal "toolbox" of guiding principles and behaviors that tremendously advantage him in his current position as outgoing tech CEO, or is he just extremely lucky? Is it merely because of his seeming utopian ambitions that make him more than a guy merely obsessed with financial success that he has ended up much more wealthy than if he were a much more grounded, brass-tacks CEO?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_D._Griffin#Career
The rocket landing stuff largely borrow from DC-X and the spinoff work at NASA (+Lars Blackmore), all originally Strategic Defense Initiative stuff.
He used all that money from Mike as collateral for loans to Tesla.
He deserves some credit for impressive financial engineering and attracting talent under the guise of purpose ("going to Mars") but he took a lot of shady money along the way. And then there is the Saudis..
Most people who work with Musk 1:1 know he's unpredictable but pretty mentally unimpressive.
By comparison, Bezos has been sinking > $1B per year into Blue Origin for nearly a decade without making it to orbit, and probably won't until 2024 at the earliest.
Sources?
Most people really couldn't care less about SpaceX, Tesla or the future of Twitter. And they definitely wouldn't put Musk at the pinnacle of cultural relevance.
It's a minority of the population that is on sites like this that care. And for many of us there is a much more discerning and skeptical attitude towards Musk and his antics.
I think musk really just is an optimist and a big thinker that is driving constantly towards the future, and people love that. Even if he accomplishes 10% of what he sets out to do, thats still a massive step forward.
* try audacious things and don’t give up
* aggressively, rudely shut down everything around you that’s not contributing to your audacious goal
* spend 80 hours a week working ferociously
… so, if that’s something you can do, it’s replicable
That is legit the only reason anyone I know of cares at all about this deal.
But then Biden took office and many of those predictions came true through a variety of factors, not the least of which was the incompetence of State Governors, Chinese Communists and Democrats.
Funny how the real world works.
When/if Blue Origin starts actually launching ships to orbit and then landing them, they'll gain a lot of relevance.
The point is, somehow SpaceX is able to do things Blue can’t. Combined with Tesla being able to do things other automakers can’t, it seems there’s a common factor.
Agreed that this wisdom and experience is not replaceable. But Musk intends to replace it with something else. If you think about it, Vijaya's perspectives and intuition is only going to pull back Musk's vision however vague that might be. Musk doesn't want to sit around and convince Vijaya of his opinion towards content moderation. I think if Vijaya showed appreciation or interest towards Musk's policy on some level at least, she would have had a non-zero chance to be around. The difference of opinion is at a stark contrast in my opinion.
This is the fastest and brutal way of Musk moving forward with his plan.
Plan?
You say "i don't what his plan is", and then "this was a mastermind move for him to execute his plan".
>Elon Musk’s First Move Is To Fire The Person Most Responsible For Twitter’s Strong Free Speech Stance
https://www.techdirt.com/2022/10/28/elon-musks-first-move-is...
This reads like a BuzzFeed article after the author finished squeezing their own head in a vice.
I hope someone pays her buckets of money now to fight at the actual frontline of free speech (Texas government sanctioned book bans perhaps?)
[1]: https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-free-speech-twitter-gl...
EDIT: Citation added upon request.
citation needed
Like the Texas social media law that twitter is fighting (though industry lobby groups) in the supreme court?
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/10/courts-decision-uphold...
In charge of, but almost certainly not the DRI, or related talent, for any of that. Her direct experience is most certainly minimal, compared to the people actually doing that work. This assumes there's not significant corruption of course.
So the questions would be, will Elon see the value in those groups responsible, and will those groups stick around on their own? I imagine so.
For example, he stopped talking about the bot population on the platform altogether after he could not get out of the deal.
Was he honest about this being a big issue in the first place?
For me, it’s not easy to believe this because this bot issue appeared right after Twitter staff did not like his speech, and talks with the CEO fell apart.
Am I mistaken about how it all played out?
If not, do you think being deceitful to a certain degree is okay?
From your point of view, do you consider him deceitful?
The richer you are, the more leverage you have and larger the material cost for these situations. A fellow rich friend gives you a little insider info that a stock you hold is about to crater. Do you sell some?
In other words, being honest is a tax, and the wealthier you are, the higher that tax rate. Given that, I think the only way to reach certain levels of wealth is by not paying that tax.
Therefore, I treat anyone at Musk's level of wealth as intrinsically untrustworthy. You don't get to be a billionaire by being a normal honest human. And if by miracle you should happen to, being a billionaire I think fundamentally changes your psychology such that you cease to be normal and honest. There may be exceptions, but I think they are exceedingly rare.
Billionaires are functionally a different species.
Being honest is an investment in an honest society and a just future. Of course, the problem with being honest is that, as with any ideological conflict, those who volunteer for the front lines make the most sacrifices, and have to trust that the tide will someday turn in favor of their side, even though they may never see it happen. So there's a lot of "you go first" noise instead of active effort to walk the talk.
Nonetheless this trending fad of referring to any cost that has no obvious immediate benefit to the payer a tax is starting to outgrow the original, and usefully narrow, scope it once had.
It would be equally valid, semantically, (and I would argue more valid prescriptively) to observe that having to constantly verify at great expense what in an honest society you could you could otherwise trusted at nearly zero expense, is the more costly and pernicious "tax" on total human productivity.
Also, being extremely rich makes you a target for ambitious or activist prosecutors. Everything everywhere is securities fraud.[1][2] Whether you're hung out to dry or not is determined by how much your behavior has annoyed people in certain departments of the US government, or how much you've annoyed their friends.
1. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-06-26/everyt...
2. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-06-22/everyt...
You can be brutally honest and immoral at the same time. Not leaving a note for scratching a parked car is being immoral to someone.
Morality doesn't get you up the ladder because there are certain hard decisions you need to make. You may argue that dishonesty can take you up. I think dishonesty can only take you so far. It definitely can't get you to become someone like Musk.
I'm not at all convinced that the rate gets higher. I'll go ahead and bet the opposite, that the cost of being honest represents a smaller fraction of your wealth as you have more.
Somewhat analogous to "fuck you money". If you badly need a job, you have to be silent about many issues.
I don’t think Yvon Chouinard is a liar though, for example.
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If the case everything should be viewed through that lens.
> From your point of view, do you consider him deceitful?
With no judgement of morality here; this is Elon Musk. Yes absolutely he is.
There are legal arguments and then there is being deceitful, there’s quite a lot of distance between the two.
That's extremely depressing, and I think you want to possibly re-evaluate your general outlook in life.
Also, many are acting like Musk has free rein in running the company. Yes and no.
Beyond needing employees to actually run the thing, he also has loans to pay back ($13B!) and investors to maintain good relationships with. More on that here: https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/who-is-financing-elon-mus...
I'm from Brazil and the extreme right is abusing all the communication platforms. it's a complete madness in what people believe right now. Our society is on the verge of crumbling.
If it was, then we would have seen a left exodus years ago and not suddenly coming up now. This comment has me so confused.
The argument only goes through when you look at the platform reputation as a whole. That's why platforms like Parler have trouble attracting ads. There are a lot – a lot – of people trying to hit Twitter's platform reputation right now, but their problem is that the best place to degrade companies' (and people's) reputations is Twitter.
That's fine, I won't see any of their ads anyways and neither should any of you.
Now, can we please get over this era of _advertising companies_ deciding what is acceptable in the digital town square?
He's making a deal with the devil to fund Twitter, and if that means selling out to guys like Peter Thiel and other conservative power brokers, then he will do it. Just in time for the 2024 presidential election media cycle too...What could possibly go wrong?
Elon Musk has been talking about how awesome Gigafactory Shanghai is for the past year, thanks to Chinese workers who don't talk back to their boss and work harder than their American counterparts.
Dude loves his Chinese anti-speech factory. Or at least, he already is pretending to do that so that he gets his Chinese sales numbers up.
Musk makes the public statements he needs to do business. He has no morals outside of money as far as I can tell. Dude is 100% willing to spout off anti-American propaganda / stereotypes to serve his Chinese masters (at least, this year when his Chinese factory is opening up. We will see if he really believes those words or if he's just playing dumb or something...)
EDIT:
> I think there will be some very strong companies coming out of China. There’s just a lot of super talented and hardworking people in China that strongly believe in manufacturing. And they won’t just be burning the midnight oil. They’ll be burning the 3am oil. So they won’t even leave the factory type of thing. Whereas in America, people are trying to avoid going to work at all.
I actually don't think so, I think this was bluster, or if they are safe haven it will be safe in the way that a subreddit is safe. You can freely talk amongst eachother but that content won't be promoted to people who don't want to see it.
I mean this was his latest tweet: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1586059953311137792?cxt=...
My prediction is he ends up growing twitter into a fairly bland chat/communications app/social network, and the focus on global political and social debates slowly weans over time.
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Like, I want to show my gun ads next to Trump's posts and want to show abortion clinics next to Biden's. Nothing wrong with this. Want to show public works ads next to Bernie's ads.
Then when you want to post wild things, anonymous mode will kick in and those posts will not be posted in an identifying fashion. They will be posted in an area that cannot lead to the post owner being "accurately" identified. That way nobody knows who posted it. That should reduce some legal issues. If the poster decides to post it as the owner and successfully gets past the Nazi filter, their reputation will be affected depending on the public reception of their post.
Just like in real life. You stay away from people who you don't like.
What's your proposal for how Twitter makes money? Just double-down on the harvesting of personal information instead?
This is a misconception.
Outsiders don't know anything about ads.
Twitter needs to be more useful, especially to iOS users. It users outside of major US metros. It needs older users.
It will need better targeting and science.
Then it will increase ad revenue.