(2022-11-19) ZviM What's The Deal With Elon Musk And Twitter

Zvi Mowshowitz: What's The Deal With Elon Musk and Twitter? At the end of long saga well-covered in hilarious fashion by Matt Levine, Elon Musk has purchased Twitter. He then began doing things. (Musk Buys Twitter)

The response by many news sources and also individuals has been that everything is The Worst and a giant dumpster fire and what he has done will destroy Twitter, and is so much worse than we expected, oh no.

While looking at what is happening, one can also usefully look at the coverage of what is happening. Notice how media sources describe events.

it should be clear that Musk has zero interest in honoring laws or norms or contracts

It also should be clear Musk has zero interest...to ask what would happen next, or wonder whether he will inevitably lose the resulting lawsuits.

I have known about this phenomenon for a long time because my father once worked for such a person

Elon wants to reduce Twitter’s head count a lot. This has highlighted that a lot of SV/VC types have the thesis that headcounts in tech companies are drastically too high.

There are rarely good ways to fire people who do not want to be fired.

There is much mocking going around that over the weekend some of the thousand plus employees that got fired on Friday got asked to come back

there will always be quick regrets in some cases when firing this many engineers even if it is not this rapid. In which case, yes, eat some crow and hope they come back

Presenting the first replies, also the two genders.

Note that there is no contradiction between these two reactions.

I think this is good. Twitter already works and is stuck in a rut. Twitter is a place where there are lots of potential new features that could add (or subtract) a lot of value. Those features are mostly much more about ‘figure out what the right feature is’ rather than ‘this is a hard engineering problem.’

Having many employees throw stuff at the wall seems like a good fit to me.

The part where staff are being asked to work an 84-hour week? Not as good. (overtime)

*Headlines across papers said that accounts flooded Twitter with hate speech the moment Musk took over.

For now, Twitter’s head of trust and safety continues to swear that there were few layoffs in that division, that nothing has changed*

This had little to do with impacting anyone’s user experience or actually spreading hate speech. The magnitude of all this was essentially zero. What this was, instead, was a scientific experiment by those involved to see if the effective rules had changed.

The Kyrie Irving anti-Semitism thing (and the Ye anti-Semitism thing) are unfortunate timing. I do not see the link between them and Musk buying Twitter, beyond the decision on whether to whistle and pretend it isn’t happening

I don’t know, because I don’t use the algorithm, why would anyone do that? Hello, Tweetdeck exists and also lists exist.

The main character thing is legit. For the moment, Twitter is partly about Musk buying Twitter. Nothing to be done about that except wait. Should not be too long.

Yishan Wong, who used to run Reddit, gives his perspective on the Twitter content moderation problem. A lot of fascinating stuff here

However, I do think there is a principled reason to go after spam, which is that spam is asymmetrical theft of attention. (war on spam)

As a counterpoint to Yishan’s ‘the content of the content does not matter’ position

various countries and especially the EU and Germany will tell you that whatever speech they do not like (they call this category ‘hate’ speech) is illegal and you always have to find it and take it down, and also this will open up other countries to say you can’t make fun of their prime ministers, also copyright and child porn and so on and so forth. Also spam. (cf free speech)

One thing this points out is that it is inevitable that it will be impossible to comply with all the laws. This is already true of regular people trying to live normal lives, so it is not shocking that it is true of an international social network.

Meanwhile, there are some content moderation decisions on Twitter that have absolutely very much been purely about the partisan or political or ‘scientific’ content of what was posted. I expect Musk’s Twitter to make very different decisions, on the margins

Also, I expect a lot of things that have nothing to do with Musk to now be loudly blamed on Musk

This has started with the ‘fact checking’ Birdwatch operation, which is high variance

The problem, of course, is that when you give The People this opportunity to do what could be described as Wikipedia-style fact checking and edit wars on content notes on Tweets, some of them will not have truth as their top priority.

Perhaps the principle here is that civil society and the town square depend on there not being a lot of people determined to attempt to burn down the town square. So in some sense it is Musk’s fault, at least for now.

Are there also other ways to do filtering that could complement all these tactics? Musk thinks there are and wants to focus on a different approach.

Blue checks for the people? As in the people who are willing to pay? Would you pay?

The polling part of this is one of the things Musk should totally be doing. If you have a 100k+ vote poll on what people would pay for on your platform, you should notice, and you should give it positive reinforcement.

We are about to get a very interesting clash of world views, then, between:

• Willingness to pay is a costly signal worth paying attention to, and also indicates that you find something of value. Allocate scarce resources via price.
• Willingness to pay means you’re running a scam (since nothing else is ever worth paying for) and also means you are evil (since only evil people pay for things.)

The issue is that you need the payment to serve as (and pay for) verification, to give the person something to lose or protect, and to guard against spam accounts. So even though you want more of it, you have to charge. Which in turn means offering a bunch of features that humans value and bots don’t.

I am not convinced Musk’s plan is correct. I do see it as eminently reasonable.

they (gasp) impersonate anyone they want.

If you don’t have a blue check and go around impersonating blue checks for comedic purposes, of course, that is totally fair play and anyone including Elon Musk who dares mess with this joins the Stanford Club, my new (just coined) name for those who Hate Fun. Which Elon kind of joins anyway. I’m against the no-not-clearly-identified-parody-accounts rule because the alternative is funnier and I want comedy to be fully legal on Twitter

It would make perfect sense, and fit the rest of his personality, for Elon Musk to not be able to take a joke, for him to be in favor of Free Speech except when someone is mean to him

If the real rule of Twitter was ‘free speech except when you get into a beef with Elon Musk... how close is that to free speech? In principle it is deeply offensive. In practice it is still deeply offensive yet this is still mostly due to the principles involved. Counterpoint is that he kind of paid $44 billion dollars for the right to do that.

If I have no checkmark, my experience is worse in that I have lower priority. I will get interacted with less often

However, in terms of what information is displayed to me, my lack of check mark seems irrelevant aside from the line about half as many ads.

Twitter was in trouble before Musk got there.

Advertisers for now are pulling out, because a story is being told about how Twitter is no longer a safe association for brands. Because there is a clear effort by various elites to go after Twitter. (advertising)

The language here could not be clearer. Musk is Bad Monkey, do not let us see you associating with Bad Monkey or you will also be Bad Monkey. (no-good shit)

The thing is, the advertisers do not care about any of the things Musk can offer them, because what they care about is the perception that Twitter Bad Now, or Twitter Risky, or Twitter Gets Me Targeted If I Advertise There.

Note that the watchword here is ‘pause.’ It makes perfect sense to pause advertisements on Twitter while it is the Current Thing and activists might get mad at you

Are real people going to be angry that a company is buying ads on Twitter? Is this actually going to matter? I mean, come on, no, of course not.

Musk is out there asking people for their ideas and getting into conversations acting like he has no idea what to do.

If your answer is ‘lol he paid $44 billion without a plan and is asking us for one’ then, all right, sure, it’s not not funny

Twitter at core has two distinct problems. You need to build a great product that people use, and you need to pay for it. Musk’s purchase made the second problem much worse and much more urgent.

Musk is acting like he needs to solve both these problems simultaneously.

Some of this is doubtless an excuse to run a tight ship and put people under pressure to get things done. It is standard VC/SV procedure to use the threat of running out of money to light fires under everyone

Before, it wasn’t a super business, but it wasn’t doing a ton of bleeding.

Elon didn’t have to take on a bunch of debt here. The interest rates are high and the payments are a serious problem for the business. He chose to do so anyway.

If I was Elon Musk, I would strongly consider buying the debt back from the banks at market value

Elon has happily gone around losing money and almost going bankrupt or needing bailouts at the last minute quite a lot.

My prediction in terms of the tech and UI and what can be done on the site is that the non-paid experience will mostly not get worse, it will get better for most users who chat with their friends

I’m maybe 75% confident in this.

I predict the website stays functional. My market has substantial down time within a year at 16% and I would take the no side of that.

People are not going to go, en masse, to Mastodon in anything like its current incarnation. Mastodon is not shovel ready

I would put the probability of Mastodon mattering at less than 10%.

When Twitter is properly used by someone who puts a lot of work into it and studies such problems very hard it can be the best and most accurate information source now. For regular people? This is not going to be a thing. I think there is about a 70% chance that I continue to think Twitter is, for me, the best source of information two years from now.