It's interesting to see these tech influencers and their lag time on giving Elon the benefit of the doubt before they've had enough. Will Elon ever have a "coming to jesus moment" and realize that he's alienated so many of his peers that he is, in fact, in the wrong? Or is he so delusional that he really does believe he has the answers?
I disagree, because it's not only Elon who is losing money these days. The economy is doing a nosedive. Everyone is affected, including Elon. It would've been a different conversation had everyone was making money, but Elon.
I'm interested in how you consider Ford Motor Company became so successful; did Mr Ford play to jew-haters, was he socially adept, was he a puppet, was her just lucky? What do you think? (Give your instinct if you like.)
Implicit is my search for an explanation for why Mr Ford prospered so much compared to others. Any thoughts there?
Hm on the one hand we have survivorship bias, plus the fact that capital accumulates more capital near-automatically at some point, as well as his relative lack of qualms with committing fraud (that he's gotten lucky about going un/under-punished).
But on the other hand, he built some impressive companies, he is the richest person in the world, and he has a lot of gumption, y'know?
Please explain what "smarter than eight billion people" mean? What is the smartness of eight billion people, is it some new aggregate? Do you sum it or get the mean? Are eight billion people by default always right? I am curious how it can make sense.
Not as long as Elon continues his trend of acting progressively stupider. At least to me, there’s a stark difference in his public appearances. He used to appear intelligent, thoughtful, and nuanced. Now he’s disjointed, often tired, and quick to deflect with jokes or political controversy. Doesn’t seem like the same man.
I've seen people that were super intelligent and compassionate go on drug binges and come out like Musk. Just as intelligent, but now no longer able to empathize with others and using whatever intelligence was left for malice and damage.
It's simple to realize 1. People have finite capabilities to master subjects. 2. Elon is a master in hardware engineering businesses. 3. Twitter is not about hardware engineering.
Those have never done well. They want the angry/upset reaction they can't get in an echo chamber; the Parlers, Truth Socials, Gabs etc. will never give them this.
They're already asking Musk to stop lefties from being able to even block them; it's the same phenomeon as incels. Free speech was never enough; they want an audience guaranteed, too. https://twitter.com/stillgray/status/1604052966839062528
> At both the Tweet level and the account level, we will remove any free promotion of prohibited 3rd-party social media platforms, such as linking out (i.e. using URLs) to any of the below platforms on Twitter, or providing your handle without a URL…
Yes I believe so. HN is loading too slow to find it, but a sister comment that stated the policy only applies to accounts whose primary purpose is to share other social media links. This is now further evidenced by PG’s account being suspended.
Twitter was/remains? a geopolitical & cultural instrument. The precise reason why there is a fight over who gets to say what on Twitter is because it is a powerful platform for propaganda and agitprop. You can organize uprisings on Twitter. That is why it is such a hot potato. (It is not about utility. think Payless vs Prada.)
Elon apparently bet on the fact that the establishment could not stomach the idea of reconstructing that high visibility platform elsewhere. Everyone knows it is not simply about technology. Twitter remains "the clown car that fell into a gold mine". He will probe on how far he can go but will promptly retreat (ex: EU).
My guess is that his strategy is to prolong this period of uncertainty. Things like PG's decision may signal a consensus that they need to reconstruct humpty dumpty elsewhere.
Watch for trends in use of twitter as a news source in establishment press. If that significantly declines, the political class will follow.
p.s. It is upsetting to think that one of the immediate beneficiaries of Twitter itself being 'deplatformed from polite society' is the relief it offers regimes like Islamic Republic. They are happy, that much is fairly certain.
> You're assuming that Elon isn't doing what he intended to do, turn Twitter into his own personal, right wing echo-chamber with political influence.
He simply unbanned accounts which were wrongfully banned. Accounts which simply communicated legal to hold opinions. There is nothing wrong or morally objectionable about this. I’d rather say it commendable.
If Twitter is becoming a right-wing echo-chamber it’s because left-wing accounts are leaving and nothing else.
So why are they? Are they afraid of having an argument where they can’t have the opposing view banned?
> There is nothing wrong or morally objectionable about this.
Depends on the opinion. "We must kill all the [insert ethnic group]" is a legal-to-hold opinion. But I'd say it's both wrong and morally objectionable to provide a platform for transmitting that opinion. Which is why Twitter banned people like that.
And even for those without a moral sense, I should point out that it was also bad for business. Twitter had a business choice to make: they could keep all the blatant racists or they could keep the non-white audience they targeted plus the white people that don't like open racism. Even if you're a-ok with open bigotry, it's pretty obvious that the right financial choice is to boot most of the open bigots, so that the platform feels safe enough to everybody else.
As much as I dislike Musk and what he's done to Twitter, I suspect he didn't intend that. I just think that's the natural outcome of his feelings, his position in society, and his relentless self focus.
I agree he holds those opinions. I just don't think his intent in buying Twitter was to put it in the tank for the right.
It's not clear to me that he had a fully formed intent when he made a bid for it. And a big piece of evidence there was that he tried to weasel out and was forced to buy it. Another bit of evidence is the way he has obviously been impulsively half-assing pretty much everything he's done since he took it over. He does not look like a man with a plan.
But to the extent that he had clear intent, I think it was more about hubris. There's this phenomenon in the food industry where a rich person will basically say, "I have eaten at a lot of restaurants, so I'd be really good at running one!" So they will spend a bunch of money on launching and unless they hired competent industry experts and deferred to them, they'll create a clusterfuck. I think it's a similar deal with Musk: He was a dedicated and successful Twitter user, and he thought he could run it better. Turned out it was harder than it looks.
There's this weird thing where a principal might be deluded about their own intentions. It's useful because it allows them to give inaccurate information about their future behavior without 'lying'. If a sincere/passionate person's actions regularly mismatch their words, suspect this.
I like how people always assume there is some genius underlying plan. All I'm seeing is an egomaniac going on a tantrum with something he didn't even want. What you are describing is what Trump wants with 'Truth Social' who himself wants nothing to do with Twitter.
Musk seems to be speedrunning into Howard Hughes status.
He has so much wealth that, like Hughes, he could alienate every business contact and still spend the rest of his life making leftfield investments and watching movies naked in a dark hotel room. (Well, replace watching movies with tweeting, I suppose.)
Just a reminder that just because liberals are freaking out, doesn’t mean it’s a shared opinion. I see this happening on HN constantly where over time the hivemind shares their in-group responses to articles blasting whatever their current enemy is (yes it’s heavily liberal here).
Then after a few weeks of this, you start seeing funny comment threads like this. Where there’s this sort of this tactic to take control of the narrative, and make it seem like everyone agrees that X is bad.
It works really well because of course even if only a few people leave Twitter in rage, now we can share that as proof of status quo and keep building the narrative.
Just a reminder - this is only a view shared by the extremely online / tech / liberal bubble.
As an example, on more conservative discussions boards you see the same thing happening on the opposite side. Until threads are literally fully premised on the fact that everyone agrees that someone or some org is “speedrunning Y” or whatever.
My feedback is this: don’t write like this. It makes you look daft, because it shows ether you don’t realize you’re in an opinion bubble, or you’re a willing participant in gaslighting for the only purpose of back patting / narrative control. I see this stuff all the damn time and usually ignore, but nice to have a chance to clarify this.
Every comment in this thread is phrased in a way that assumes he’s “cracked” and then goes on as though it’s universally understood.
They’d all be a lot more convincing by even just acknowledging it’s a hypothetical before leaping into crazy territory.
> Will Elon ever have a "coming to jesus moment" and realize that he's alienated so many of his peers that he is, in fact, in the wrong? Or is he so delusional that he really does believe he has the answers?
I mean read this… do I have it spell out why this reads ridiculously / assumes facts that are clearly untrue?
What facts does it assume? That Elon alienated peers?
I think Elon acted impulsively. He realized it but it was too late. A lot of the Twitter Files stuff is an attempt at revenge against the executive team that forced him to close. The problem is going full red pill is not smart tech business. He’s reaching MyPillow levels of conspiracy mongering.
Not sure his recent behaviour ruins his legacy. It’s likely far more will be remembered of say SpaceX than of this Twitter debacle. At least - to date.
But overall yes agree a great achiever (never sure about that genius tag) who has lost the plot.
Very likely the only people who can reliably send that message to Musk are $TSLA investors. Until he has the cushion provided by $TSLA stock price, he is pretty much going to continue doing whatever he wants to.
He's probably wrong but "previous Twitter" was not right either.
It's funny how "Twitter is a private company they can kick who they want from their platform" is suddenly not so popular over the crowd that used to parrot it. Hypocrites from every side, unsurprisingly.
Anyway, I can't believe his grand idea for Twitter was the botched "Twitter Blue", and the next version doesn't seem to make sense either.
Elon has been in the middle of his "come to Jesus" moment for a while.
He is running Twitter like an autocratic dictator. He is restoring extremist right wing accounts. He is banning open conversation and dissent. He is peddling QAnon conspiracy theories. He was against all covid measures and called for Fauci's arrest. He has cozied up to China and middle eastern dictatorships while putting up the "free speech" charade against democrats in the US. He was most recently hanging out with Jared Kushner in a private box at the world cup final.
Elon has right-wing reactionary brain worms. In my experience, most people who fall in never get out. I don't have much hope that a billionaire will be an exception to that.
Musk did publicly apologize to the diver and the courts ruled that Musk was not liable, so lots of people considered it a settled matter. I considered Musk a cool tech person before that event, then a weird tech person after that. Since 2020 though he has turned into just an awful tech person.
Apologies and atonement are one thing but I think it takes a certain level of emotional deficiency to even have the impulse to use your position of power to lob such petty insults. It's grossly abnormal. Same thing for people like Kanye West or Will Smith. They can tap dance between insane behavior and apologizing but like why would they ever do the things they do in the first place if they were decent people.
It's news to me that that users are not allowed to mention other social networks' accounts on Twitter anymore. Seems short sighted, how many users is Twitter losing to Instagram/Discord/Mastodon?
HN relatively deweights posts that get a lot of argument without a lot of insight. Things about politics, or tech involved culture war, or continuous divisive news stories disappear from the front page quickly.
I would classify that as ‘generic moderation policy’ rather than censorship
No, I'm just connecting the data points between what Musk says, and what he does. Mostly between what he does, actually.
If you think that this is a farce, that's because we are living in one. I suppose it is possible that he is trolling us with his moderation policies...
It's true that this generates relatively low-quality commentary, but it's not clear to me how a discussion of the behaviour of a man who says one thing, and does another can do otherwise.
>It's news to me that that users are not allowed to mention other social networks' accounts on Twitter anymore.
Isn't that a mischaracterization though? The new policy they announced, as far as I've seen, only applies if the account is "solely" promoting other brands. [0]
> Specifically, we will remove accounts created solely for the purpose of promoting other social platforms and content that contains links or usernames for the following platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, Truth Social, Tribel, Nostr and Post.
I saw that and assumed (maybe wrongly) that it was an automated ban from some internal automod-like system running amuck and due to the layoffs/quits/staff issues no body at Twitter knowing how to disable it.
Guess the jury is still out, but does anybody know if that same error is showing up for facebook links for example? If so it's a smoking gun.
> we will remove accounts created solely for the purpose of promoting other social platforms
> AND
> content that contains links or usernames for the following platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, Truth Social, Tribel, Nostr and Post.
I'm reading it explicitly how it's written when taking the grammar into account. [0] I've even expanded it below, so that you can see how it reads without a comma.
> we will remove accounts created solely for the purpose of promoting other social platforms
AND
> we will remove accounts created solely for the purpose of promoting content that contains links or usernames for the following platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, Truth Social, Tribel, Nostr and Post.
Looking at the full policy though, yeah their tweets aren't in line with what the full policy states.[1]
I'm fully willing to pile on, but I don't know that it's an example of a policy violation. It's linking to things people are doing on TikTok, not promoting a specific account or TikTok itself.
How does one find a good Mastodon server? On his website it says "Follow me at @paulg@mas.to" -- does that mean that he is on mas.to? What if I want to follow him but also someone on another server? Or do I not understand how it works?
You can follow on any server. For example, I'm on indieweb.social but follow folks in all kinds of instances: ruby.social, fostodon.org, emacs.ch, aus.social, mstdn.jp...
ps. You can also follow hashtags if interested in a specific topic.
Hm, what makes a good server? I think for me, I want: not going to disappear, high uptime, low latency, moderate moderation.
You can measure moderation by going to most server's /about page, to see which servers they've limited interactions with.
I'm on hachyderm.io. It's good, but could be better. I expect it will remain at least at this baseline level of quality, so I'm too lazy to search out other options.
My wife is on wandering.shop. I'd say it struggles much more with latency/availability, but is still fine, especially if you use an app, which can paper over some of the latency issues.
Yes, this is the thing. Mastodon has a bit of a discovery issue that other social network options don't have (it's akin to asking "What's a good email provider?").
I initially tried the https://joinmastodon.org/servers thing in November, but the things proposed seemed like very niche communities.
I just tried the https://instances.social/ link -- the top 2 hits for me were very small instances (fewer than 5 people), which I wouldn't have much faith in joining.
Actually, I guess I should have mentioned how I _actually_ chose a server. I used https://fedifinder.glitch.me/ and joined the first fast-enough server that most of my existing contacts were on.
Disclaimer: Novice, who also signed up. I've barely looked into anything, this info is just my experience.
So it's mostly like email. Logic that would work for email i think works for Mastodon. Just like with email you can generally email anyone and anyone emails you, the same applies to mastodon in my experience. However, if a server is being too <insert reason here> for your server's admins, they may block the entire thing. I don't know the finer details of how blocking can take place, but my loose belief is that you won't see posts from blocked servers. Though i may still be possible to explicitly follow someone on a blocked server.. i'm unclear there.
This amount of moderation will obviously vary from server to server. It is one of the criteria you'd look at for choosing a server.
Likewise local community is another, if you should care. There is a special Local feed, which i've found to be quite handy if the server you're on is specialized to a content type.
As for choosing your server, i think the above two points are useful metrics to help you decide. However if you're just looking to dip your toes in, pick any server. You can always decide to switch later, as you can set your old account to indicate that you moved to a different account. I've seen several accounts like this and it seems to be sane and easy.
Lots of incomplete answers - you can maybe probably follow anyone you want from any decent server. But servers block each other for a number of reasons, so for good or bad you probably want to just pick one, see if it works, and if there are people you can't reach you'll need to find another. It's possible to migrate to a different server in a relatively seamless way. From what I can tell choosibg a server is based a lot on word of mouth. Which I assume is difficult if the site you're using explicitly forbids discussion of Mastodon.
By going to the following link and creating a handle, you'll come across a lot options of severs. https://joinmastodon.org/
Say you create the following named handle kd at server mas.to. If someone else would want to follow you, you'd just give that @kd@mas.to. Note that when you join a server, you'll have to abide by their rules.
I'd suggest not being afraid to have two accounts -- join one that's more niche where the local instance community might be interesting and join one of the main/large ones.
It's easy enough to sync up follows.
Some small ones block the large ones (for their moderation policies), so having the small account will let you follow anyone, and the large can be a hedge if the smaller one becomes unstable
> There’s another exodus of twitter users, and most servers are run by individuals
Again, Expecting non-techies to self-host their own instances after several of them falling over due to light usage and signups is quite wishful thinking and reiterates the need for users to heavily rely on more centralized instances to on board users.
Well all know what happened to mastodon.technology which was run by an individual. It doesn't look smart to sit on an instance that can barely handle hundreds of thousands of users signing up at once and ends up folding up.
> give them time or run your own instance and federate
Yeah, the journalists at journa.host has never been more alive for journalists and is going just great with a much better reach than Twitter [1] /s.
Decentrialized network doesn't mean every node is equal in size. Natural user behaviour will still aggregate onto a few larger servers. That's completely normal.
Mastodon wasn't meant to be a 100% replica of Twitter nor has it ever attempted to be. The only reason it's getting such a rapid influx of users is because of Elon's sabotage.
Which instance are you on? Mastodon is decentralized, there may be servers that are overloaded whereas other are fast. Like email.
I haven't noticed any big differences in speed, i use both Mastodon for iOS and Pinafore (https://pinafore.social/ ), a PWA. Just add it to your homescreen and it will behave like a native app (and sometime in 2023 Apple has said they will add push notifications to PWAs).
This. I'm on the fosstodon.org server and it seems to be holding up pretty well. That's one reason I chose it: the people running it know what they're doing.
Mastodon servers are self-hosted by various groups or individuals so they aren't designed to be as scalable as Twitter. Today's events caused a large influx to pretty much every prominent server. A few ones I follow have announced they are either going down for maintenance or upgrading their servers already.
The most ridiculous problem with Mastodon I think is the fact that even if I visit his profile I can't follow him because we are on two different servers. I have to copy his profile url and paste it in my logged in instance. This then takes me to his profile where I can follow him. That's just too much work!
There's a few browser extensions that help with that. I just started using this one, it's pretty slick: https://github.com/Lartsch/FediAct
The underlying problem is that browsers are not designed with this sort of federated application use case in mind, so Mastodon and friends have to do some awkward tricks to get it to work at all.
That's why you see Mastodon customer support here and on Mastodon itself by the techies here just for choosing an instance and even explaining why it is all slower than Twitter. For example: [0]
Normal people do not care enough to go on a safari hunt for finding instances, user names of those claiming to have left Twitter or deleting their accounts or even bothering self-hosting just for a username on their own instance.
Having to install a browser extension makes it a hard no for many, the most annoying thing for me is there's no app like Tweetbot for Mastodon that's even like 5% as useful.
I know many people used Twitter.com or their official app, but many people find a simpler native app experience much more useful.
To make the user experience more like what they're used to from Twitter.
It's frustrating that the web platform doesn't accommodate federated services like Mastodon that span multiple servers very well, but those are the cards we're dealt. It does work, it's just not ideal.
> I have to copy his profile url and paste it in my logged in instance.
It used to be different; in older versions of Mastodon, when you clicked on the Follow link on another instance, it asked for the name of your home instance, and redirected to a pre-filled follow screen on it. This was probably changed because it's an obvious phishing risk: it could redirect you to a fake domain which asked for your Mastodon account credentials (as if your login had expired), so it's not good to get people used to that kind of mechanic.
2. Paste "@paulg@mas.to" into the search dialogue and click the magnifying glass ...
3. Paul's profile will pop up in the results under "People".
4. Either click on the person icon to follow directly, or ...
5. Click on the avatar / profile name/description to view the profile page itself.
If you do click the "Follow" icon from mas.to (and don't already have an account there), you'll be prompted to do what I've described above.
Keep in mind that the Fediverse is, well, Federated. Someone else's home instance is where their bits and their configuration live. Your instance is where your configuration lives. You subscribe from your instance for that reason.
Some instances block others, in which case the profile won't appear, though odds are low that mas.to is among those yours has blocked.
(I've been on Mastodon since 2016, yes, this was confusing at first. I've since sorted it out.)
HN is minimalism with less than 65kB resources to download. This is a deliberate decision, it works very well and it is usually very fast (not right now though).
Mastodon on the other hand downloads 2.6MB resources to display what exactly? Some tiny images, three posts and an ad. That does not look like a winner.
Wow, Twitter is collapsing much faster than I expected. With PG and some other high-profile accounts gone, many will loose interest in their Twitter feed fast. Rinse and repeat.
I thought it'd collapse on the tech side before the policy side. Rather shocked the mask has come off this quickly on what "free speech" actually meant.
Large distributed systems that have already been built can often limp along for a very long time before falling over. I would give Twitter at least another 3-6 months for stuff to start breaking.
Agreed entirely, but I thought the "free speech" stuff would last longer than that 3-6 months, if for no other reason than to avoid the embarassment of it.
On what level do you mean? 2fa already broke at one point (no clue if they fixed it I don't use two-factor as my twitter account is not terribly important)
You'll know the level when it happens - I am referring to multi-day outages. 2fa being broken doesn't surprise me at all. I bet the didn't want to pay the bill.
Oh yeah the full "can't access the site" could be a long way off. Could also be tomorrow if the wrong thing starts breaking and no one left understands how to maintain it.
While I sort of expected the same... I think our HN crowd (myself included) is biased to assume the importance of technology more than the importance of the social dimension. But also, I think Musk put a heavy hand on the tiller far faster than I expected he would (the wise thing to do would have been to assume there was much to learn; he seems to have stomped into his new company with a belief he knows what's best, and that's not meshing well with what was already there).
But we should remember our own tech-first biases. Twitter ran in frequent-fail-whale mode for months with users accepting that because it fed their social needs. The moment it stopped serving those needs, people started leaving no matter how good the tech is.
No offense, but pg doesn't really post all that much stuff that would make me reconsider Twitter as a platform if he left. And, to be fair, neither does anyone else. Twitter is a marketing platform not a social network.
I use it primarily as a RSS feed and the occasional "get up to speed with the latest news fast" alternative.
Amazing that just a month ago he tweeted[1]:
"It's remarkable how many people who've never run any kind of company think they know how to run a tech company better than someone who's run Tesla and SpaceX.".
It's been fascinating watching so many VC types ignore so many red flags just because some of Elon's early actions validated their priors (e.g. tech companies are bloated and need to layoff staff).
Why is that amazing? When people do what you think is right, or what you think might be right, you agree with them or willing to see where things go. When people do what you think is wrong you disagree or break with them. That seems perfectly reasonable.
And the demolition of Elon's image as a tech/business genius. If I'd set out to wreck his reputation, I could not have done half the job Musk has done since he bid for Twitter.
I'm not sure what the damage is supposed to be, in apart from to Musk and co-investors. There are enough alternatives, including Mastodon - that people will still be able to share short form content if Twitter disintegrates.
If he wanted to? The man has his own ICBMs and a fleet of land-based remote control bombs in Tesla, not to mention access to all archived DMs on Twitter. There's no way he pulls anything off, because we don't live in a comic book, but it's worrisome to realize that such an "eccentric" visibly has that kind of access.
Hm, the remote controlled bombs angle is one I hadn't clued in to yet. The ICBM one was clear. For both you'd hope that if he tried anything like that his employees would perform a citizens arrest and hand him over to DHS.
Now you've got me worried that in the comic book villain version of reality, that he had mass drivers installed in the Starlink constellation, and is able to hit rival's private jets, but only if their flight plan gets shared on Twitter for some obscure comic book logical reason.
The ability to land shit from orbit at a moving target looks somewhat more menacing from that perspective ;) Fortunately private jets move a lot faster than barges. Think of it as a POC.
I think that, by leaving Twitter alone, he already has. If we've learned something about Elon so far, from previous episodes of the cursed news cycle we all inhabit, is that he's vindictive and petty to an irrational extent (calling rescue officers who don't agree with him pedophiles, banning journalists who report on the jet account, ...)
I am not an Elon fan, but I agree Musk is a smart guy. I just don't think smartness on its own is very valuable. Indeed, it can be very dangerous when it lets you think that you know better than everybody else despite them having way more experience in their fields. A classic example is the XKCD cartoon "Physicists": https://xkcd.com/793/
I've met some incredibly smart narcissists, and you know what they use their smarts for? The same sort of continuous ego inflation that less smart narcissists do. Their smartness just makes things worse, because they're less likely to have the sort of comeuppance that leads to a moment of clarity.
I think they are laying the groundwork to allow creators to monetize their tweets and additional content. As it stands a lot of creators are monetizing their content off platform (patreon, substack, youtube, onlyfans, etc.) and the goal is to lock them and their content into twitter.
I think it's a good idea as content is king, but they should have rolled this out after they had established an ability to monetize. Once people leave the platform it will be tough to get them back unless they offer a very lucrative comission split with creators.
Do you even use twitter? Activity is the same as it's ever been. I think many people are overstating how many people are "fleeing" because of their personal disdain for Musk.
If they were actually concerned with people fleeing why would they do something which is more likely to make creators leave?
Someone can be both smart and Dunning-Kruger themselves in the face.
I don't know why someone who (self-diagnosed?) as having Asperger's thinks they'd be a good fit for leading a social media company, that feels like having a an amputee selling staircases [0]; but the rocket nerds I follow seem pretty convinced Musk genuinely knows actual rocket science.
[0] as in: it could work, but you'd not expect it by default
This is absolutely true. But I think “smart” leadership avoids repeatedly doubling down on their mistakes. You can, very rarely, double down on what looks like a bad bet and come out ahead. I’m not even sure I’d call that smart but it does happen. But it takes a not-smart person to see the losses stacking up over and over and decide to dig in their heels.
Even if you’re absolutely certain your goals and overall strategy are right a smart person would understand that something needs to change in the messaging and/or execution given the overwhelmingly negative feedback.
I really don't want to be defending Elon, but I think saying "Elon must be stupid because of how he handled Twitter" is as silly as "Elon had success with Tesla and SpaceX therefore he knows how to run companies". Those two seem like two extremes.
The answer seems more along the lines of, Twitter and its problems are very very different from Tesla/SpaceX, and while Elon may have been good at the latter, he has zero experience with the former.
That being said, not realizing the above I guess makes him partly not-smart, and I assume the shortsightedness was due to the inflated ego caused by his previous two successes.
For a classic example see former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. By any conventional measure he was very smart, and yet he made a series of catastrophically bad decisions which are still impacting US national security today.
Intelligence is overrated in leaders. Character, humility, principles, and discipline are far more valuable in avoiding huge mistakes.
It really depends on the organization being led. Vision is not something you can easily outsource or task subordinates with. I mean one of the classic leader types would never set himself up to fail in early days SpaceX.
What a startup, a market leader and a government organization need are distinct types of leadership. Sometimes there are prodigies who can do two of these. Musk did.
Intelligence is neither a binary nor a one-dimentional concept. Within certain contexts Musk is certainly a smart entrepreneur but I would not call him that without a lot of such qualifiers.
Elon is undoubtedly smart. It also seems like maybe he's on a mental health episode or just got so rich he decided he's done with building companies and just wants to be an asshole out of spite. Who knows? But he's accomplished plenty of things that suggest he's not an idiot.
do morons get accepted into Stanford's STEM PhD programs? You can hate Musk for his personality and maybe say he has mental health issues but to say he's stupid seems strange
> do morons get accepted into Stanford's STEM PhD programs
is a lie perpetuated by Musk and co. [1] contains links to court documents.
According to the court documents, not only does he not have a physics or other technical degree, he obtained a bachelor in Econ in 1997, not a physics degree in 1995.
The scan of the diploma does not specify department, has no year date, and is a bachelor of arts.
The diploma is a bachelor of arts, so that's definitely not the business degree and is probably for physics. Penn, like most liberal arts schools, offers a bachelor's in arts for stem fields. IIRC he did an uncoordinated dual degree and his wharton degree would have been a bachelor of science in economics (its not really an econ major, its a business major, the real econ major is a bachelor of arts), while his college of arts and science degree was a bachelor of arts in physics.
So, if his only degree is a bachelor of science in economics like the filing claims, what's the scan of the bachelor of arts degree then? He's got some sort of secret other degree in biology or chemistry he's never told anyone about? Fwiw he's listed as having a ba physics and bs econ in the alumni directory, and penn has confirmed those in emails, so like, you can pretend that he doesn't have the degrees he has, but idk what that accomplishes. And maybe he said a few times that he had a b.s. in physics (which is not a thing at penn) instead of a ba but that's meaningless
I’m not an Elon basher but I’m genuinely confused by what you’re saying. You’re saying the fact he has a BA implies it’s something in STEM rather than Econ? Maybe I’m wrong but isn’t a BA the degree you would expect to get an basically any school when studying Econ?
This is specific to Penn, where elon went, and the post does mention that they believe he only has a BS in econ, not the ba, but then dont explain why they have a screenshot of a ba. (Also fwiw I am personally a bit of an elon basher now, I really think he's gone off the deep end with twitter).
Elon did a dual degree, one bachelor in the business school (wharton) and one in the arts and sciences school (aka the college). Basically, whether a degree is a bachelor of arts or sciences is totally meaningless, schools do whatever they want (science and math are both liberal arts). At penn, the undergrad business degree is a bachelor of science in economics. You wouldn't call yourself an econ major with that degree though, since you only take 3 or 4 econ classes for that degree, you would call yourself a business major or identify by your concentration (e.g. finance, marketing. The alumni portal shows that elon concentrated in entrepreneurial management, idk if thats complete since ive heard the university confirmed he has a second concentration). The college hosts your liberal arts majors - physics, biology, chemistry, math, English, history, sociology, (real) economics, anthropology, gender studies, the works. All these are bachelor of arts degrees. I believe there's even a BA version of computer science that's offered (as distinct from the bachelor of science in engineering (BSE) in Computer science or the bachelor of applied science (BAS) in computer science degrees the engineering school offers). So if you say he has a wharton business degree (the post mentions they've confirmed the b.s. economics), and you also have evidence of a bachelor of arts granted the same year, then that BA needs explanation. I guess theoretically he could have gotten an econ major from the college too, I'm sure some hedge fund wannabes do that. These sorts of dual degrees are super common at penn btw, through formal and informal programs (e.g. i have a ba biology and bs econ)
But the ground truth here is that he has a ba in physics from the college and a bs econ (aka business degree) from wharton and when asked to provide evidence of his physics degree, he correctly provided his ba. And also that at some point elok screwed up and said he had a bs physics (which is not a thing at penn) instead of a ba which they've latched onto.
Wait also the date is literally right there on the diploma so idk where the no date statement comes from - that frankly calls the credibility of that "reporting" into question when it literally says anno salutis mcmxvii right on the image they've annotated with the claim that the diploma doesn't contain the date
How do I know? Because I am pretty smart as well, with a PhD from math, but that didn't stop me from making a series of stupid mistakes in my life. Sometimes out of sheer optimism, sometimes because I missed some crucial information, sometimes because closeness to some other person made me miss important red flags, sometimes because I overextended my abilities, sometimes because I underestimated my adversaries.
If I bought Twitter, I would have run it into the ground in days.
Allowing is doing a lot of work in this sentence when in North America pretty much all political parties I can vote for (that have a chance of winning) support the status quo in power.
Yet, he has the courage of expressing those opinions without sarcasm, on his own public account, and later own admit to change his mind, while being a very exposed figure.
Did he change his angle, or is all of it (the initial statement, the leaving, the clarification) just a rich man's self-interest, and no real semantic content?
Is it necessary to believe anyone is "stupid" as a personality?
I just disagree with people's opinions on certain things. And if I frequently disagree with someone enough, then I just quietly stop paying any attention to what they say.
How is judging people’s way of thinking as being a binary between “necessary” and “unnecessary” not just calling people “stupid” or “not stupid” the same thing just using different words?
In addition to "I don't know" is "I messed up". Everyone does stupid things occasionally. Stupid people double down on their stupidity once they realize what happened instead of owning up to it.
There's some nuance there though. Doubling down is (almost) always a stupid move but it isn't always stupid people that do it. It's rooted in insecurity which is independent of intelligence.
Someone who claims to hold a basic concept of something as straight forward as "free speech absolutist" and doesn't see the logical incoherence of proceeding to ban reporters and others who publish and aggregate publicly available information (@elonjet).
Further, I think “somebody that spends an extraordinary amount of money to become admin on a forum (one of the worst jobs on earth)” qualifies as “a stupid person” well before “being incredibly, laughably, hilariously inept at being a forum admin” even gets factored into the “How stupid can a person be?” equation.
stupid doesn't end a conversation. It starts it. Ok, someone thinking is different (stupid). But how exactly do they think? Why? What drives? Where does the break or wrong start?
Perhaps not your intent, but you have hit on the entire social media mindset, distilled.
TV debate long ago decided that every complex human concern can be profitably reduced to a crass binary which can be argued about in front of a camera for the audience's thumbs up or down.
Social media democratised this decerebrate approach. A thumbs up or down from your tribe. Mastodon, Post.news et al only replicate the Twitter model.
It doesn't matter which platform PG, or anyone else, is on. They're all worthless distraction. Fiddling while Rome burns etc.
You can tell who's actually discussing a person's intelligence and who's status-signaling how smurt they are because only one group gets terribly offended when you disagree.
Still nothing compared to the billions so many VCs have lost on crypto this year ignoring those far more obvious red flags. No matter how bad Elon damages Twitter at the very least its actually still generating revenue. I cannot tell what crypto generated.
VCs made plenty of money, they receive pre-mined amounts of whatever token they're investing in, and then dump it on retail once the coin lists on the exchanges.
OK, but to be fair[1], that's what we want, right? Our thought leaders should change their minds when they turn out to have been wrong, and correct. pg is doing good here, and that needs to be celebrated and not mocked. We all get stuff mixed up.
[1] And for the record I think pg indeed ignored WAY too many red flags for WAY too long in this particular case.
If I was a friend of his, I'd suggest that it's a good chance to think about why he was convinced Elon would do well and adjust as necessary, but it's also quite possible that he doesn't feel like he's obliged to do that self-examination in public. And he's not.
It looks to me like he might still be ignoring those red flags. Like I said elsewhere, PG can be an inspiration and still be wrong about a whole bunch of things.
For sure. Given that Musk was fired from [deleted, see note 1] and PayPal, you'd think they might have had more questions. But people look at failure much more carefully than they look at success.
I think the next wave of interesting questions is around the extent to which Musk contributed the apparent successes, SpaceX and Tesla. We won't know for a long time, as a lot of the people in the know have a strong incentive to keep quiet. But one possible explanation is that he is good at PR and using hype to raise money, but is not a competent manager without help. Consider, for example, this bit from someone who says they were a SpaceX intern: https://www.tumblr.com/numberonecatwinner/701567544684855296...
I asked a former SpaceX person about that and was told it seemed right, that SpaceX worked because everybody believed in the mission and worked hard at managing Elon so that they could get the actual work done.
[1] I incorrectly thought he was fired by the board from Zip2, but they just refused to make him CEO. Thanks to dontknowwhyihn for the correction: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34042958
SpaceX worked because they hired experienced people from ULA and other launch services companies who weren't held back by the fear of risk taking that is endemic in the MIC. They wouldn't have succeed if they just tried to play rocket engineer like Carmack did.
Musk is a celebrity. Celebrities start successful companies all the time. Is Rihanna a brilliant business woman for starting a successful beauty line? Is she a business genius, which is what Musk gets labeled so often? Maybe she really is, but I don't see her get that label, I think her value add is very clearly "she is famous, people will buy shit that she puts her name on".
What they have in common is that they have fame and money, and it turns out you can do a lot with that.
Rihanna’s underwear company Savage X Fenty was estimated to be worth $3 billion earlier this year, which is roughly the same as the market cap of Victoria’s Secret.
Probably that estimate would be lower now, given the market downturn. But clearly she’s well on her way to building up a competitor to the established brands.
Don't see any evidence that it's worth 3 billion dollars. All I see is a quote from Rihanna herself saying she thinks her company can raise that much by the time they IPO. Forbes estimates the value of her company at 1 billion on the high end.
And while it's true that VSCO's current market cap is 3 billion, at the time that Rihanna made her comment VSCO's market cap was 5-6 billion. It has dropped significantly in recent months.
Yes. That's what market cap means. I can understand you might disagree with the valuation, but that doesn't change it.
Also, don't forget that Rihanna has something the top three beauty supply companies don't have - a growing brand. That has a massive impact on market cap.
> Elon Musk was barely more than a nobody when he got involved with Tesla and started SpaceX.
He was extremely wealthy and had a lot of connections from buying his way into other companies. He was not yet a household name/ global celebrity, only one in more niche (but very powerful) circles, that changed soon after.
How many tried? Lots of people don't actually want to do that. I know lots of very wealthy people who are not at all interested in increasing their wealth or running companies or being famous.
I don't see how. I said celebrity and wealth are what they have in common and what they have leveraged. Elon was wealthy before he was famous, he became famous in important circles, and eventually he became globally famous.
Yeah... I'm failing to see how "barely more than a nobody" can be applied to anyone who had access to lot of wealthy networks. Maybe in comparison to others in that universe, but put any one of them out in the general public and the imbalance of power is pretty obvious.
If you can reasonably self-fund a startup with employees for a while, you are not a nobody and you are likely far more powerful than 95% of the population. You can literally dictate what other human beings do for 40 hours a week. That's not being a nobody...
> Robyn Fenty, known to the world as Rihanna, launched Fenty Beauty in 2017, she sought to create a cosmetics company that made “women everywhere (feel) included.” A perhaps unintended consequence: The beauty line has helped her enter one of the world’s most exclusive ranks: Billionaire.
> Rihanna is now worth $1.7 billion, Forbes estimates—making her the wealthiest female musician in the world and second only to Oprah Winfrey as the richest female entertainer. But it’s not her music that’s made her so wealthy. The bulk of her fortune (an estimated $1.4 billion) comes from the value of Fenty Beauty, of which Forbes can now confirm she owns 50%. Much of the rest lies in her stake in her lingerie company, Savage x Fenty, worth an estimated $270 million, and her earnings from her career as a chart-topping musician and actress.
Yeah I was being a little facetious. But not much. I have heard of her, but don't know any of her music nor her fashion brands. I probably have seen her likeness, but I have no mental image of what she looks like. I couldn't tell you the names of any of her songs or the names of her brands.
I know who Musk is, I know what he does, I know about the companies he founded, I know what he looks like. All I know of Rihanna is that she is a pop star.
Musk simply does a lot of the basics right and knows how to talk bullshit, had the assets to start at all, is apathetic to social perception (his narcissistic sociopathic tendency) which makes it easier to go against the flow both in a good and bad way, and has the mental ability to work long hours.
His successes just delivered what the market demanded but established powers did not want to pursue for one reason or another. He knows to outsource actual work to experts and offers them attention which is easier due to his interest in tech/science.
Of course, he sees them as tools and he doesn't need to care about labor laws but that's a part of the longer list of his flaws and mistakes.
After Tesla/SpaceX took off, it has been as you described.
Many celebrities end up burning out or spending all their money, start failed businesses, etc.
Rihanna imo is very savvy and the Fenty brand was a very successful business, involving a couple pivots from fashion to more lingerie and beauty. The big Savage x Fenty musical production event every year is a smart move that leverages her music industry connections and draws lots of interest and new customers.
Arguably she is doing better than Musk atm, given that he started life with a huge capital advantage and is likely losing big on Twitter right now (as well as tanking his public image).
No later than Friday, I was discussing with an acquaintance working for Tesla who compared Musk's leadership here to Trump at the white house: there is an entire team responsible for doing internal damage control after Musk announcements on Twitter. It's a lot of work, and sometimes the entire company just need to cope with the boss's whims (“ok next year there's going to be the Cybertruck thing [which he basically compared to the “not a flamethrower”] but fortunately for 2024 we're working on real cars”).
To be absolutely fair… do you have a reference for Zip2? I was at AltaVista for the acquisition and while I wasn’t close enough to it to be sure, I know he walked away with a bunch of money.
Thanks for the correction! That's my mistake. I remembered it as the board firing him from CEO, as happened at PayPal, but according to Wikipedia, at Zip2 the board only refused to make him CEO.
IIRC some pieces frame Sorkin joining as Elon being "demoted" to CTO; after ousting Sorkin, he tried to become CEO but, as you said, the board shot him down.
As I mentioned elsewhere, I was wrong about Zip2; the board just refused to let him become CEO. But at PayPal, the board fired him after 6 months as CEO. That's documented in many places, including here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk#X.com_and_PayPal
Musk is a victim of his own success. Even if he isn't solely responsible for the success of Tesla and Space X in his mind enough of it is him.
The problem here is overconfidence / blind spots. Twitter is a different type of business. Musk looks to be doing a Mike Jordan or a Shaq. Basketball isn't baseball, nor is it rapping. Both of them recovered from those bad decisions. Will Musk? Time will tell.
Yeah, there's a phenomenon called "Acquired Situational Narcissism", where if somebody spends enough time in an environment that's all about them, they start thinking it's all about them.
There's some evidence Musk was like this all along, but it is a lot harder to learn humility when you're doing well.
All we can really compare Musk to is to Bezos. Bezos basically destroyed Blue Origin in 2017 after they blew up a test stand. This is the sort of thing that happens when you're developing rockets. You just have to accept it and move on. It'll cost you millions and many months, but if you want to develop rockets... After the test stand incident Bezos fired the CEO, brought in an incompetent one and brought in a "no mistakes" type of culture that doesn't get anything done.
In contrast, check out the Tom Mueller interview about Elon Musk and "face shut off". This feature is one of the top reasons why the SpaceX Merlin rocket engine is such a great engine. Mueller thought it would be very hard to get it to work in a large engine and he was right. They blew up hundreds of engines and a bunch of test stands. But Musk was supportive the whole time. That's a big deal, and what you want from a CEO during development.
But "better than Bezos running a rocket company" is a pretty low bar to hurdle.
Tory Bruno at ULA and Peter Beck at Rocket Lab from the outside appear to be outstanding CEO's. But they've been starved for resources for different reasons. What could they have done with the resources that Musk & Bezos brought to their companies?
Rocket Lab in particular is one of the companies that could challenge SpaceX's dominance.
This sort-of implies that BO was functional prior to that incident.
BO was founded in 2000. By 2017, they had existed for 17 years without reaching the orbit. (Which SpaceX managed in 6 years, Astra managed in 17 years, RocketLab in 12 years).
It seems to me that BO is just continuing to be an expensive failure, which, unlike all the other failed space startups, keeps dragging itself on, because it can rely on basically unlimited funding.
For the first part of its existence Blue Origin was basically a think tank. For a while its only employee was a science fiction author. Neal Stephenson is great, but he's not a rocket designer. As a think tank it was highly successful -- they successfully identified VTVL reusability as the future of space independently from SpaceX and similarly chose methalox. By 2017 Blue Origin was basically about a decade old as a "real" company. And progress was reasonable. New Shepherd was real and successful and looked like it could launch humans at any time. New Glenn was ambitious and BE-4 looked close.
Expecting them to reach orbit as quickly as SpaceX or Rocket Lab is unfair since SpaceX & Rocket Lab had an orbital rocket as their first product, and Blue Origin didn't.
It's unfair to compare everybody to SpaceX -- their success is exceptional. Pre-2017 Blue Origin wasn't as functional as SpaceX but I wouldn't call them dysfunctional. Post-2017 Blue Origin is dysfunctional.
This is all based on heresay, so take from it what you will.
It almost seems a dream to a space nerd. A O'Neill protoge with a long term vision of "moving heavy industry into space to enable the Earth to turn into a garden planet" and uninterested in short term profits investing a billion dollars a year to pursue that vision.
They then successfully identified the first two steps along that road. 1: dramatically reduce the price of access to space through reusability. 2: return to the moon for exploration on the path to exploiting its resources to enable the space industry that's the long term goal. 3: LEO space station.
That SpaceX beat them to the first two goals should be cause for celebration and partnership and a move on to the next goal. Instead they've been fighting SpaceX with dirty tricks that luckily have failed.
Musk is a fraudster. Someone must compile a timeline of his claims. Just the content that pops up from Thunderf00t on Youtube calling it out is enough for investigations. The only way I see investors going along with it is embarassment, riding the tide and not knowing when it will change. SoftBank style. It's changing now, economic corrections, just a time he's leveraged more than a sane person would value his companies at. lol
Then there's China. Tesla's 25% yearly revenue after being the first US company to launch without being 50% hand-in-hand with a local business. He agreed to teach the locals his methods, and they now sell straight-up copies at half the price. lol
Right? Mass random firings of employees in multiple incompetent waves, blocking and expelling journalists and activists, re-enabling known hate-speech accounts, walking out of press conferences when questioned, spreading QAnon adjacent conspiracy theories... none of this annoyed Paul Graham enough to leave.. and in fact he defended the guy...
But blocking links to Mastodon? That makes him leave? Like, uh, fine, but... maybe he could have not mocked us for pointing out the dysfunction weeks and weeks ago?
Between all the crypto implosions happening and this, wealthy Silicon Valley investor types and their hanger-ons are really having a "moment" these past few months. Sheesh.
No, it's not code in this case. Many of the accounts he re-enabled were full-on white supremacists. That's not an "opposing point of view" it's beyond the pale of civilized society and we literally fought wars to defeat it last century.
And the list of accounts he banned were from a list left-wing/anarchist accounts given to him by known self-proclaimed fascists.
What hyperbole? We've got a policy that is link-banning while unbanning people who are holding "legally allowed opinions" (nice edit) like Mr. West and other racists.
> Also: while Kanye is clearly his own kind of category of crazy, what “other racists”?
>
> I don’t know a single such case.
One example I remember reading about was Andrew Anglin [1], the founder of The Daily Stormer [2], a website that, to save you a click, Wikipedia describes as "an American far-right, neo-Nazi, white supremacist, misogynist, Islamophobic, antisemitic, and Holocaust denial commentary and message board website that advocates for a second genocide of Jews".
As his Wikipedia article [1] notes,
> Anglin was banned from Twitter in 2013, but was reinstated weeks after the site was acquired by Elon Musk in 2022.
That seems to be a real boon for advertising revenue there at twitter. Just what advertisers dream of, their ad next to a post by some antisemitism/racism/lgbt hate.
You just lost a large group of potential customers. Brilliant marketing strategy.
Maybe if you sell flags that go on oversized pickups. About everyone else is a miss in that sort of stupidity.
In a free country there's this thing called the first amendment and freedom of speech; because someone doesn't like a certain opinion doesn't make it hate speech.
However, blocking links to a competitor is pretty clear-cut anticompetitive behavior. Imagine AT&T refusing to serve Verizon's websites.
Some of those people especially the YC alumni need to be upfront about whether they’ve invested in Musk’s Twitter. Because direct questions have been asked without answer.
Because otherwise I can not understand the logic behind defending Musk’s reign as CEO. Ignoring the chaotic policy changes what bothers me is the treatment of Twitter’s employees. Nobody should ever have to leave their house because of death threats. And surely Parag/Jack should be ultimately held accountable for what happened at the company under their reign.
Obsession with weird/extremist polarizing politics is a cancer. I don't think you're necessarily going to become incompetent just because you decided to get involved in city government. The critical thinking capability that keeps you from wasting time on QAnon and conspiracy theories is the same stuff that lets you accomplish useful things in the world.
Majority of people here on HN were also convinced he will try to make Twitter better. Not everybody believed that he will succeeded but it seems like majority belived that he will at least try hard. Like improve app to purchase things (one click checkout), integrate with real time news, some free speech, sports, … so many ideas
Personally, I assumed he had multiple overlapping motivations. Prove that he knew tech products better than SV insiders, own a major media platform to push his viewpoint, save a media platform from "woke" people and let people like Trump back on, silence his critics, make money, pretend he really intended to purchase something he didn't actually want to. I'm not sure that even he knows why he does what he does, because so much of it is impulsive and can't be attributed to a coherent plan with specific goals.
The only thing that will definitely hold true is that there is an audience of tens of millions of Americans who feel mocked by "the Elites." They will shower adoration on anyone with Elite creds - be it academic, media, or business - who tells them there really is a conspiracy to oppress them and that they're the straight shooter who will go to battle for them. That is a very seductive amount of positive feedback when the other things you're doing aren't home runs.
The thing is that Twitter 1.0 had the exact same ideas. Every one of them that Musk has thought of to date.
They simply were too slow in implementing them. Some of them eg. payments are due to all of the regulatory challenges that Twitter faces as a top tier social network. Others are just incompetence eg. not doing more with Vine.
They needed a better executor. Problem is Musk immediately fired everyone. And has constantly underestimated the complexity of the system. So bit hard to see how they were ever going to do better as Twitter 2.0.
I confess, I was one of those people who believed that he’d try hard to make a positive change. The reality seems to be exactly what the most cynical takes were; it’s all about money and petty personal things. It’s a shame. The wasted potential is enormous.
...except they don't do that. This is no different than Reddit's own policies on spam and self-promotion. You're expected to use the site for discussion and building community, not directing people elsewhere. If the latter is your goal then you can pay for advertising. What's changed here is that people who previously were given free reign to promote themselves without paying a dime are now being told they need to pay up. I'm finding it hard to sympathize with them.
Well I find hard to sympathize with the people saying that horrible abuse will not be moderated because "free speech", yet mentioning the fact that you use other social media apps will get your account banned as "unpaid self-promotion".
It doesn't inspire confidence in that their previous stance was truly motivated by their love of the unrestricted diffusion of ideas.
Every time someone mentions this I ask for examples, and generally all I ever receive in reply are examples of people disagreeing with them. I begin to think that those who shout about 'abuse' are incensed that those they formerly silenced by bending the rules are now using those rules against them, particularly to voice their legitimate opinions, and they're using their institutional power elsewhere to try to tank Twitter as a result.
In short: I know full well that this has nothing to do with free speech arguments and everything to do with institutional actors being incensed that they can't use Twitter as their own propaganda institution anymore. I won't pretend that Elon is a friend of the proletariat, but I'm also not going to pretend that those opposing him somehow are either. This is a slap fight between two groups of bourgeoisie, and petit bourgeoisie actors are trying to convince everyone else it's some sort of fight for liberty, justice, mom and apple pie. Utter nonsense.
In the end, some of you are going to have to accustom yourselves to the idea that you are not gatekeepers of public forums, the people have interests that do not coincide with your own, and no amount of force or fraud is going to change that. Don't like it? Learn to code, I guess.
> Every time someone mentions this I ask for examples, and generally all I ever receive in reply are examples of people disagreeing with them
Then you haven't been watching harassment on trans and other LGBT people, being told to die in horrible ways (I'm sure you can point to other high-profile people getting that kind of threats, but this one gets such abuse merely for existing).
Fully agree that having public forums gatekeeped by centralized actors deciding what you can communicate is worrisome; we should get distributed ways to announce the existence of your personal publications to people that may be interested in its subject - like like the Usenet newsgroups of old (which are still in operation, but are not known to the general public).
> Majority of people here on HN were also convinced he will try to make Twitter better.
I mean. I still think he is trying to do that. Is he succeeding? I don’t think so.
If it all hits the ground and twitter is no more a going concern will he claim that was his plan all along? Probably. Doesn’t mean it is true.
Even on the day he offered to buy twitter he was offering more money than the stock was worth. That is only rational if you believe you have a plan to run it better.
According to reports he is spending a lot of his time managing twitter in quite a hands-on way. Do you think he is not trying to make it better in his own mind?
> Even on the day he offered to buy twitter he was offering more money than the stock was worth. That is only rational if you believe you have a plan to run it better.
> According to reports he is spending a lot of his time managing twitter in quite a hands-on way. Do you think he is not trying to make it better in his own mind?
I think it's a case of the gambler having enough money to buy the casino.
But this sounds incredibly like “buy the dip!”
The situation with twitter is dire. Nothing indicates that any of the things listed are remotely achievable.
People believed he could make Twitter better based on the assumption that he will implement these changes. I personally thought it'd be great if we could tailor our own recommendation algorithms. Turns out none of those happened and this has been a dumpster fire all along.
It's interesting how VCs suddenly seem to believe "tech companies are bloated and need to layoff staff", now that they can't just show up at a bank and get literal buckloads of other people's money with no justification or due diligence, but were all in on "tech startups must continually grow at any cost" just a few months ago.
Once again, society will be left holding the rich sociopaths' bags and dealing with the externalities of their uncontrolled gambling.
I think the way Twitter is faring is actually proof to the contrary, you can't lay off half your staff and expect the machine to just keep chugging along. You either design it from day #1 to be run with a very tight crew or it becomes a much larger machine with a different kind of profile.
I'm not sure. 2000 is pre-AWS which means a lot of easy things were more complicated than they are now. Though Twitter is famously on-prem as well, so maybe they're equivalent?
My impression is Twitter handles traffic and complexity in a different magnitude than Netflix in the 2000. Internet usage was significantly smaller back then.
On-prem is a good point though. I don’t know a lot about their core infra.
I think we can be honest and admit many large tech companies are bloated and can lay off staff - with the proper planning and care. Taking an axe to an org you just took over is typically not associated with proper planning and care.
Of course some tech companies are bloated, and of course some other tech companies must grow further. But the tune about what the tech industry as a whole must do seems to suddenly shift, depending on whether it's pump season or dump season.
He waited for evidence. I think PG made a good call.
Based on the weight of Elon's past achievements PG gave him the benefit of the doubt. Then when Elon overstepped he reacted appropriately.
The evidence was in plain sight before Musk took over. He's not the kind of person that should run something like Twitter, it was going to be a disaster.
> Amazing that just a month ago he tweeted[1]: "It's remarkable how many people who've never run any kind of company think they know how to run a tech company better than someone who's run Tesla and SpaceX.".
That is still a valid point tho. The thing is, we're not going to know who is right or wrong until it all plays out. And considering there are billions on the lines and Musk plays fast and loose with the rules, he's probably going to come out of the otherside better for it.
> It's been fascinating watching so many VC types ignore so many red flags just because some of Elon's early actions validated their priors (e.g. tech companies are bloated and need to layoff staff).
Again it's still a valid point. Tech companies are bloated and need to layoff staff, that's why they're ALL doing it.
People can be right and still do dumb jackass moves.
Another well-known notable over-eager divergent opinion blocker is Garry Tan [0].
This is the first time I've seen the finger of accusation point to Paul Graham for excessively blocking. Is it possible the @fennecsound account participated in previous harassment and the target doesn't wish to endure more low-quality interactions?
My expectation is: HN folks, being generally sensitive souls, would have spoken up vocally on this site if it were a common ocurrence. I couldn't find any such prior accusations on algolia or web search.
Quite the opposite, I think it shows that what you call a red flag, they analyzed seriously before making a judgment. And now that they have more data, they change their mind about their conclusion.
Paul's first comment [1] in the referenced tweet says: "Do you think Elon will fail and Twitter will go out of business?" and finished it with: "Bet your reputation on a prediction now".. it's a heavy prediction and a bold statement to bet your reputation on!!
Social media promotes a vicious callout culture where everything you say in the past is permanently used against you in the court of public opinion whenever you change your mind. While I did not share PG's opinion at the time I also don't think it was completely unreasonable to think that someone like Musk would be capable of running Twitter judiciously after the acquisition. I appreciate that instead of digging in his heels PG seems to have evolved his judgement after recent developments.
he also had a similar take that I've seen from technologists more than a few times "the man runs a rocket company, how hard can running a social media site be?"
A lot of tech folks seem to have a mindset of a 60s Soviet technocrat. "We shot a dog into space comrades, let's apply our engineering genius to all the social problems the stupid managers can't solve". Spoiler alert, it is pretty hard to govern hundreds of millions of people
I’m not so sure. I left a month ago and apart from the current tire fire, I’m just glad not to be using it. Or anything else. It was almost strictly a waste of my time, and I’d really lost sight of how rarely it wasn’t wasteful.
At this point it genuinely seems as though doing nothing would be better than using Twitter. It produces a convincing illusion of being entertaining or even useful at times, but for me it truly and wholly lacked any significant utility or fulfilling elements.
Apart from HN, I’m totally off the social media train and fairly content with it being that way.
I suppose PG has more use for social media than I do, so the case may be a little different. Even so, I doubt very much that him returning to Twitter (or anyone for that matter) is inevitable.
That’s great it sounds like Twitter and social media in general isn’t a big value add for you.
I think for Paul Graham it’s a different story since he talks to other influencers and occasionally goes viral. That sort of feedback loop well that’s quite addictive. There’s a reason why there’s no obvious Twitter competitor.
> Paul is an out of touch reactionary billionaire.
Elon Musk is billionaire reactionary distilled into its purest form. I mean the guy is literally spending 100% of his time reacting to things he doesn't personally like.
Yep. Along with Musk and Kanye. Those are cases where the poison has fully penetrated. How many of our elites are less noticeably but still significantly impaired though? It's a frightening thought.
Ehh, I mean Kanye has been on this journey for a long time. Talking about how "George Bush doesnt care about black people" in 2005 and grabbing mics to announce that "Beyonce had the best video of all time" in 2009. I was a fan and apologist of his for sometime after these incidents, but he lost me somewhere around his 2011 album with Jayz.
I really wish I could see Twitter's internal dashboards. One thing I have a hard time estimating is, outside of my bubble, how is Twitter doing? Are these things hurting Twitter? Is the controversy helping it?
I can't imagine what would motivate the decision to ban Mastodon links. Were they really losing users to Mastodon? That would be a huge problem, but not one that banning links would solve.
It was any server that shared links with the server which hosted that. So mathstodon.xyz, for example, which is where a bunch of math Twitter ran to, and not particularly political, was also hit. Even if you endorse banning links to someone sharing public information, it was an extremely broad brush.
in the short term controversy and events drive traffic up. world cup going on, holidays and seasonal traffic, elon chaos. all probably makes twitter looks like a success at the moment. it would be to hard to separate out the traffic i think.
They have lost many of their previous highend brand advertising. I now see almost exclusively advertisting from right wing alt brands like 'black rifle coffee'. One can safely assume that their advertising revenue has taken a huge hit. A few thousand people tossing elon $8 a month isnt going to make up for that.
Anecdotally the content in my feed seems to be drying up, with less and less fresh new tweets every time I open the app. Either people are posting less, leaving or there's technical issues around serving content.
To all extents and purposes that are relevant it is, or you can treat it as such. I'm not aware of pg overruling dang on anything, though obviously it is property of YC and there are limits to what dang can do when it comes to risking the site (legal risk, for instance).
PG used to post here but he left because of the negative comments as I remember. A couple of users got banned as well. Twitter allows you to just post and forget without much blow back except for the weird subtweets where people take you out of context. As such successful tweets tend to overgeneralize to avoid nuance or imply that there is nuance but not discuss it. A lot of YC tweeters do this. The problem is we have to take them at their word.
What would be more interesting would be to discuss specific things as evidence for a more general truth.
For example there is a huge criticism of the social sciences in this website (and in general) but none of it is specific criticism of specific hypotheses. (Yes, yes I know people will argue that there are no hypotheses in the social science literature and it is not testable etc... but that is a weak argument and not always true).
Ah ok. Well, after he quit MS as day to day leader there was that bit around his divorce, the Epstein link and more sordidness.
Gates didn't really change, he just used his fortune to whitewash his reputation. He's still smart and I would be happy read what he has to say but a nice person he isn't and never was.
You have to start reading about Gates before he spent millions to wash his reputation and adopted a disguise of philanthropist to buy a stairway to heaven. Anything before he left Microsoft, with the corruption scandals, the insults, the patent trolling, and so on.
It's getting harder and harder to find though. I should have saved offline compiled files.
I think there’s a legitimate line to draw between “bastard does capitalism” and “philanthropist post capitalism”. Bill Gates could have laundered his reputation just fine without committing to give away the majority of his wealth.
The foundation is not meant to give away Gates money while he is alive.
It's a way to be able to keep investing his money without paying taxes.
It only spends the legal minimal amount for charity, 5% (way less than taxes that would go to build roads, hospitals and schools). The rest is invested in a portfolio that, by the magic of being in a non profit, can make billions without paying any tax.
Since he directs the charity, he can therefore move the capital where he needs it to, including founding Monsanto and weapon makers, which he had to withdraw from after people noticed that it was quite the opposite of the claimed foundation mission.
That's why most billionaires have some kind of charity: they keep all the power of their money, get good PR (which given that the wealth gap makes people grumpy, is a great shield) and they optimize their finance while people defend them.
The PR operations worked well: most people on the internet now believe that Gates is a good person. A statement that would have made anybody smile in the 90'.
> It only spends the legal minimal amount for charity, 5% (way less than taxes that would go to build roads, hospitals and schools). The rest is invested in a portfolio that, by the magic of being in a non profit, can make billions without paying any tax.
To clarify, 5% of what? Of capital in the non-profit? Of revenue generated by the non-profit? Something else?
They are just out of touch in different ways. Gates' banana comment became the quintessential example of how out of touch rich people are even though it was ultimately inconsequential.
Mark Cuban is not the example that I would reach for. He's been an asshole since before Yahoo! threw too much money at him.
I know a few, but they're modest people and that's why I will not name them here, I will name one that is deceased, René Sommer, if you want to know more about him, I wrote about him here:
I've taken to skimming through the Elon/twitter threads curious to see if there's anything actually new. I'm glad I saw your post and clicked the link, that was a very pleasant story to read.
I find quite amazing that expressing such mild opinion as Paul Graham does can yield reactions so strong and labels so intense as "out of touch reactionary x".
I have at least half of my friends that express weirder, more dangerous opinions that are in total opposite to mine. Is that what internet is all about now? Taking every people we disagree with and dress them as Hitler so we can shit on them? It used to be were I went to actually meet people with different point of views and new things.
On hacker news, I expect people that disagree with Graham to prove him wrong with an argument.
Name calling feels more like being with my mom on facebook.
You finding his opinions “mild” doesn’t make them so, and half of your friends are probably not billionaires with a lot of power and influence in the tech industry.
If you want to defend Paul then do so, but most of this comment is just hyperbolically complaining about how he is criticized.
There’s an old adage about never meeting your heroes that applies well to PG.
Some of his daily takes were so embarrassing and insipid that it was hard to maintain respect. It’s funny because his long form posts which are often insightful were likely reviewed/edited by a third person. A concept he has actually said only exists in the modern commercial publishing era.
or else just had the benefit of more time to think about them. i certainly know i say some dumb stuff, but if i write it down and think about it for a week before saying it to anybody else, i'm going to censor like 90% of the stuff that comes out of my head.
That was always the dumbest criticism of Obama - that he took frequent pauses when speaking (the uuuuhs) and chose his words carefully - his critics used it against him where anyone with half of brain understood why. That being said, Trump essentially DDoS the art of the inartful / wrong / dumb, so maybe that was a better way to go. Who knows....
Very off topic, but... Most presidential speeches are written by a speech writer & displayed on the teleprompter, not ad libbed on the spot. The "uuuuhs" were an intentional mannerism.
So I notice a trend for people to take seem to take stabs at PG whenever he's brought up, and sometimes not seemingly even relevant to the article at hand.
I suppose you can only speak for yourself, but I find the words "insipid" and "embarrassing" particularly emotional / unscientific. Out of curiosity, what is there a connection to the article at hand or alternatively why do you feel it's important to spread awareness of his incompetence?
Just last month, he was passionately defending Elon Musk's decisions running Twitter, on Twitter, from all those annoying plebs who dared to speak their minds about it, not even having ran any companies themselves.
The topic of "the article at hand" is, inevitably, his incompetence.
Are you saying frustration is simply that he changed his mind on this issue then? And actually it sounds like you think he changed his mind in the right direction.
Dude the other day he said "Automation is inductive proof that Marx is wrong"! A mistake you wouldn't make if you sniffed Marx's wikipedia page, let alone opened your eyes to read it.
(...after, hilariously, Matt Bruenig replied with a correction from ChatGPT - which is also deleted because he auto-deletes tweets.)
e: Reading the thread now, I love this reply from pg, who I've seen attack marxism, socialism, leftism, what-have-you, endlessly and smugly in the past:
> I freely admit I have only a superficial grasp of Marxist doctrine. I could no more debate the finer points of it with an actual Marxist than I could debate the finer points of church doctrine with a Jesuit. (Nor would I want to be able to do either.)
The finer points!!! Amazing. Something to keep in mind when the billionaires tell the ol' lefties to read econ 101!
> You still occasionally hear people saying that founders don't deserve to be rich, because their employees created all the value. But the falsity of this claim becomes increasingly obvious as automation enables founders to grow companies with fewer and fewer employees.
Do you disagree with this, or just disagree that it’s in contradiction to Marx?
To start with, "don't deserve [...] because employees created all the value" is a straw man. Lots of other value Out There that they exploit that comes from other places than their employees' labor but also isn't "created" by the founder. Also lots of reasons people shouldn't be rich, whether or not they are founders and whether or not they "created" value.
Disagree that this is even the question. The role of "founder" is mostly tangential to the discussion - rather it's the "owner" that Marxists would argue don't deserve their wealth (and if it's the same person, you have to separate the roles in your head - the 'founder' role produce some irreplaceable value, while the 'owner' role is easily replaced.)
The fact that automation makes your firm exponentially more productive over time doesn't contradict Marx at all. That's just a premise he borrows from classical economics to then argue why that leads to bad stuff, in his view. It seems like maybe PG is taking issue with the labor theory of value or something? In which case... /shrug, that's ok, get in line with the rest of us?
What's really happening here though is PG isn't familiar with the discourse whatsoever, so he makes a weird scattered argument and smugly attributes some strawman opinion to Marxists, then gets mad at the reaction. Trying to make sense of it as if he knows what he's talking about just kinda leads to insanity.
e: I'm also not claiming to have some deep knowledge of Marxism at all... I've read like 1 or 2 chapters of Capital. It's just that, like I said above, you just have to have basic familiarity to realize PG speaks from his ass.
Really like this comment -- dovetails nicely with Bill Gates "Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can't lose," and helps illuminate the fundamental problem: status insulates you from accountability, but without accountability you lose a crucial form of feedback essential in nearly everyone's ability to correctly assess themselves.
> There's an old adage about never meeting your heroes that applies well to PG.
I wonder how much of that is down to the person themselves (judging someone else, through the lense of whatever prejudices and biases) and not their heroes.
As they say from where I am: short of meeting true evil, there's no one worse than your own self.
I've met PG at a book signing and he was quite pleasant. I asked about when Arc would be released (this was a while back) and he laughed and joked about it. Really nice guy.
Do you really think twitter equates to meeting someone?
> Do you really think twitter equates to meeting someone?
I think you learn more about a person through Twitter than meeting them since for better or worse people drop the polite, professional veneer that normally associates face to face meetings.
It showcases (a) what concerns them so much they have to Tweet about it, (b) what their values are, (c) how they read situations, (d) how they treat people etc.
It's weirdly like you're watching them perform in some scientific experiment and seeing how they react to different stimuli.
But you go to far. "Meeting someone" is meeting that public veneer that they use when meeting new/random people. It is not spending a lot of time with them and getting to know them. It is about how first, in-person impressions match up against your expectations.
> Do you really think twitter equates to meeting someone?
That really is one of the worst parts of Twitter. The form of short-form drive interaction encourages some of the most pithy and dismissive conversations and leads to some really hostile interactions that often dispense with human decency.
(I mean, not restricted to Twitter, I've experienced it here, and on Mastodon, but Twitter really takes the cake.)
He actually wrote a blog post about how he writes. He sends drafts to people and heavily rewrites, sometimes over the course of weeks or months (IIRC).
So, yea, the agitated dad vibes get (dare I say) edited out in the process.
Something I explained to my children today: don’t tweet about things you explained to your children today apropos of nothing, it makes you sounds like a jackass
This should cause a significant degree of cognitive dissonance for quite a lot of Hacker News users. fascinating to see two members of the billionaire tech class disagree publicly like this.
Do you live under a rock? This place has always been libertarian, and since Trump has turned into an echo chamber of alt-right grievances in tech. The initial burst of cheering from this forum over Elon initially buying twitter to "destroy wokeness" was deafening.
..like most of the world, really. I'm not sure where some people got the impression that people are anywhere close to being 50/50 between left vs right.
only if people haven't been paying attention to the absolute shitshow that musk was doing with twitter. elon is not a smart man even if he cosplays one.
As an HN user who is mostly interested in open source projects of various sorts, I don't really care that much about 'billionaire tech class' conflicts. I do appreciate Elon Musk's successful effort with electric vehicles and reusable rockets, though I expect others to eventually catch up, as is normal with tech innovation (VW electric vehicles are looking good).
As far as social media, if it all goes away I wouldn't be that concerned. Net neutrality and access to basic Internet services for all is a much more important issue, IMO. Blocking servers from the Internet (unless they're actually hosting criminal content and taken down by legal prosecution) would be the more serious free speech violation.
I thought electric vehicles were a really dumb idea. Too many problems to be solved for. Range. Charging. Depreciation. Getting people to switch. All of the other infrastructure. Now it's what everyone does, and Tesla is (last I checked) one of the very few EV makers that is able to make a profit on EVs, while upstarts in the space (including Ford) are losing money on every EV sale.
I thought self-landing rockets was a dumb idea.
I thought Starlink was a dumb idea.
I think a lot of what Elon is doing now is a very dumb idea, but as a Twitter user with friends across the political spectrum, I have seen what has appeared to be a suppression of speech that largely affected my right leaning friends, while my left leaning friends gloated about it. I've watched journalists like Taylor Lorenz break the rules with impunity while journalists on the right were deplatformed for doing less.
This is clearly a departure, and I would argue that many right leaning friends were hoping that Elon would stop the pendulum swing, I don't think any were expecting the pendulum to swing back the other way so hard. Elon's actions have seemed arbitrary, but a) Every change looks bad when you don't know their motivations, and b) I've been wrong about Elon's entire life to this point.
It's possible that he's done surveys or polls or gotten data indicating that fear of doxxing is a thing that is meaningfully suppressing Twitter engagement. It is possible that he knows what he's doing, but it isn't what he's said he's doing and it definitely isn't what we expected him to be doing.
I don't know the answer to those questions, and so I don't know if he's ruining Twitter or just transforming it into something that it hasn't been, and I'm mindful of the fact that practically every single change that Twitter has ever made has been received as "the end of Twitter," from verified accounts, to changing their API ToS, to blocking apps, to suing users with any vague reference to 'tweet' in their apps, to bookmarks, analytics, 280 characters, etc., etc.
Elon's had a busy productive life, and my take on my University friends who've had busy productive lives is that they now have the self-insight of a baked potato, roughly. No doubt because they haven't had spare time to reflect on their actions or motivations. But that doesn't mean they can't self-correct, it just means they usually have to run into a brick wall or two before they do. I'm guessing he'll correct this latest boner.
I'm still highly critical of what Musk is doing (again, without knowing the 'why') but something that seems important and is going unnoticed is that while the previous administration's actions were just as arbitrary and capricious, they almost always related to events that were popular topics of discussion like recent elections, a global pandemic, and other things that are naturally topics of discussion.
I think the current rules are likely just as dumb, but the number of people likely to be suspended for doxxing Elon or posting about Mastodon is undoubtedly a MUCH smaller segment of the population.
It's amusing watching the reactions to it. I've run enough communities in the past to appreciate how many times you have to make decisions that go against your personal ethics for the sake of the community. Everyone draws different lines on the sand on what they consider "free" speech, and anything closely resembling what is protected in America will likely get you into trouble internationally. Elon is finding out that it's hard, and while it may seem like he's setting his lines in untenable spots, it seems just as possible to me that we're all wrong and he isn't.
You're right, about the previous Twitter administration and how it worked. Take away this (big) pinch and Twitter can be a real improvement on the last version.
I have trouble swallowing this abuse of market power because the courts and govts have allowed so much such abuse for so long. It's a big issue for me (and the EU.) Without that context, I might find it easier to shrug off.
No question, speech and community make for interesting decisions; if he can stay within the law, he'll have a fair bit of leeway from me.
The bustiest times twitter has ever been have all been after he bought it, if you believe him.
And he's so controversial - even here - that all he has to do is keep fiddling with it and people flock to the circus with popcorn.
What evidence does anyone have that it's being destroyed? What are the metrics for any social media site being destroyed?
Thinking about myspace and digg - it seemed to be loss of user base. Does anyone have metrics independent of Musk/twitter insiders that it's losing users? Seems like https://alexa.com/ is dead...
He's just got his devs to debug the new algorithm live. It's hilarious to see 47882394 people get banned or restricted in some way and every one of them thinks Elon hates them personally.
It's a mess but it's the right idea, a social network cannot be run with either hand curation or self curation. If something destroys Twitter it'll be some place with a better algo.
You know how Musk promises one thing and delivers something else? I'm not the biggest Musk fan but I believe he has a very effective process and he is a product person - that is understands what is a good product.
He will never deliver a free speech platform, he is a free-speech NIMBY and has an agenda os something that drives him but he can still turn Twitter into something valuable.
Then people will come back for whatever Twitter will become. But because he claimed free-speech absolutism he will be held accountable for it and his persona will degrade and people won't cut him a slack and that's the risk for him to fail completely. Until very recently he was able to get thousands of dollars of payment for a product that don't exists and he even jacked up the price over the years, many people are called frauds for less than this but Musk has huge social credit among the techies and He can continue selling that product and continue claiming that it will deliver next year - indefinitely.
He needs to figure out Twitter before his personality loses credit completely and losing the support of Paul Graham, a prominent persona from the scene, is not a good sign.
> I'm not the biggest Musk fan but I believe he has a very effective process and he is a product person
What a weird thing to say after he killed twitter with his "process". Perhaps this dumpster fire is the best view yet into what he really believes, and how he really runs his companies. Elon is a modern day Kissinger
His process as, I understand it, is to re-discover the wheel and see how else it could have been done. It is messy and might not yield good results if his predecessors already did a good job but I think he has a chance and will look like a dumpster fire until he learns and finds a new path. If he fails, it will look like extinguished dumpster fire :)
I'm sure some fanboy will say that but that's not what I say. He is still just learning how the product works and tries things. Will he succeed? More likely than not, I think.
I wish it were not so, but Apple has shown you can get away with a whole truck of anticompetitive ‘no you may not hear about my competitor’ behavior without harming a business.
> You know how Musk promises one thing and delivers something else? I'm not the biggest Musk fan but I believe he has a very effective process and he is a product person - that is understands what is a good product.
No, in the case of Twitter he clearly doesn't. Twitter's business model is advertising, yet he's been driving them away since he's started.
Even in the user-facing side he made a weird mess with the blue checkmarks that was completely unnecessary, didn't make anything better and only created confusion.
That's true but as I've learned here on HN, that wasn't working very well already and Twitter was just an afterthought for the large advertisers. Twitter wasn't huge money maker.
That's something that he can change, this is not something fundamental about the product.
Now one might argue that Musk wants to ignore advertisers entirely and target the actual users. That could be an interesting thing to try. But when why is he naming and shaming and whining about advertisers? If he decided to change business models, then it doesn't matter whether Apple advertises.
If he's aiming to profit from the users, he's also doing it wrong by bringing back all kinds of formerly banned unsavory people. This will over time reduce the market share to the very specific audience that's in line with his preferences, and probably invite trouble from the EU.
> But when why is he naming and shaming and whining about advertisers? If he decided to change business models, then it doesn't matter whether Apple advertises.
So far he sucks at managing a community and apparently doesn't understand the business he got it. Can he get his understanding to a point where he doesn't screw up every time and gets some sizeable wins? I don't know, I think it's not impossible and I think he is trying hard. But maybe before he gets on track for success, he will need to distance himself from the alt-right folks because as I see it they have completely different agenda and it's not their money and reputation on the line so they fight their ridiculous culture wars in their fantasy world and if Musk keeps feeding himself from these people He won't get real signals, real feedback and won't be able to correct course.
I highly doubt it. He's drastically overpaid for Twitter, to the point that it ever being profitable dubious.
Twitter is also not really that important. He's paid way too much for something that on the user side is unimpressive tech, and that is only valuable because of its inertia, and that's by no means guaranteed.
As I understand it, if Twitter shuts down tomorrow Musk will still be tremendously rich man. Sure, he will upset some investors but the debt he took for the buyout was actually in the name of Twitter and he won't be exposed to it.
Maybe he doesn't have to make Twitter profitable to justify the outrageous price he paid, maybe it's good enough to make it break even?
> As I understand it, if Twitter shuts down tomorrow Musk will still be tremendously rich man.
What does that have to do with anything? My argument is that I disagree that he "understands what is a good product", and is a good business person, at least in the context of Twitter.
Whether he can survive Twitter failing is not part of the discussion.
> Maybe he doesn't have to make Twitter profitable to justify the outrageous price he paid, maybe it's good enough to make it break even?
Profit is anything right above break even, even just one cent. So no.
Let's agree to disagree then. My arguments looks weaker ATM anyway, I'm starting to think that he shaving his head from the top and peeing on the streets might be a plausible end to this saga.
> Example of the “don'ts” - Gatekeeper platforms may no longer:
> treat services and products offered by the gatekeeper itself more favourably in ranking than similar services or products offered by third parties on the gatekeeper's platform
> prevent consumers from linking up to businesses outside their platforms
>It's not impossible. Elon is a smart guy. He doesn't currently understand how different social media is from cars and rockets, but he could well figure it out before it's too late.
What is it you were looking to partake in? Racism, violence, fascism, colonialism, white supremacy, religious extremism, nationalism, homophobia, or transphobia?
You can join any other Mastodon server, and still follow him even though you're on a different server. Just put his handle (the one you can find on his site) on the search bar of your Mastodon server after logging in.
It's fine for my use case. I only go to twitter through links, mostly from here and Reddit. IMO Mastodon has a slightly better interface for linked to reading but it's six of one, one half dozen of the other at the end of the day. Occasionally I read replies on tweets and always regret it...
For those wondering about how to sign up to mastodon and what server to pick:
It's like picking an email server. They all have their differences, but generally they are interoperable. You can read users from anywhere, and follow from anywhere. Better yet, it's fairly easy to move your account from one server to another if you don't like it.
Your best bet is some of the bigger second-tier servers (ones that have thousands but not hundreds of thousands of users) because they aren't as heavily loaded.
> It's like picking an email server. They all have their differences, but generally they are interoperable.
Disagree. Mastodon servers can be all over the place from politics to hobbies to tech. It’s not like an email handle at all your choice _matters_ because others moderate the server and who you can connect with.
Self hosting is the only way to go with Mastodon (costs the same as Twitter Blue btw if you don’t want to do your own)
> Your best bet is some of the bigger second-tier servers.
Until they get overloaded, and face the same issues as the "first tier" ones...
I know that what I am about to say is out of personal interest, but I really wish people took the analogy to email servers more seriously and started looking at commercial providers. I'm offering Mastodon services for about $0.50/user/month [0], and I have the infra to host 20-30k users efficiently.
For this type of case, there is nothing more sustainable, fair and efficient than letting the market figure things out. But if we keep thinking that accounts should be offered for free, there will be always market distortions.
Yes, you can export, and most servers will put up a helpful forward pointer once you move your account so people see where your new profile is. I haven't tried it but others who have seem to keep all their followers / following seamlessly.
Yes, you can export your data to any new server and you can even redirect your followers to your new identity. You´d only have trouble if the instance admin blocks your account before you get to do any of that, but for anything like that to happen you'd have to have done something truly egregious and/or your admin is one shitty, petty person.
Yes, there is a button to export all your data as csv.
Honestly, i think something better can be done around the Activitypub protocol than mastodon. And i'm not a social media guy, so i will wait until someting better is built.
That page (like many others) do need a lot of UX love. Pretty soon I hope to be launching managed instance hosting (i.e, people that want to have their own instance, under their own domain) and I'm already scratching my head at how to present two complete different classes of products on the same page.
Figuring out these small issues is hard, it gets even harder when I am promising that I am not doing any type of user tracking or analytics. I just saw a message on the support site about someone who wanted to make a deposit, but reported "on mobile, the button is grayed out". Turns out that on mobile there is no cursor to indicate that the user needs to select the payment method first. So, technically not broken, but functionally this issue could've cost me hundreds of dollars already?
But is there something, like, serving as a bridge to Twitter and stuff? I'm really uneducated in this stuff, I don't have an account neither on Twitter, nor on Mastodon, and I don't really understand, what people do on Twitter. For me, the only reason I ever wanted to join Twitter (but not strongly enough for me to type in my phone number) is being subscribed to all these celebrities like Musk, Kanye West or whoever is the most popular ATM, just to cut out one link in the chain and seeing that stuff before it appears in the news anyway.
I think DMs should be treated as semi-public on any platform without end-to-end encryption and a method for verifying keys of who you're DMing. So not really that different than Twitter, Facebook, and many others.
I wonder when, if ever, mainstream migration will happen. For example most TV channels were posting World Cup goals on Twitter asap. Same if you follow for example NFL. Easy to follow the games with instant highlights. When will these leave or simply stop posting?
Social media is a massive advertising platform for these companies. They'll go where the people are. Most likely it'll begin with posts being mirrored between the two places, and then switching over when/if Twitter becomes less and less relevant.
1,090 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 397 ms ] threadIt sounds like you might be mistaking ideology with intelligence?
http://web.archive.org/web/20170808092345/http://www.rotten....
I'm interested in how you consider Ford Motor Company became so successful; did Mr Ford play to jew-haters, was he socially adept, was he a puppet, was her just lucky? What do you think? (Give your instinct if you like.)
Implicit is my search for an explanation for why Mr Ford prospered so much compared to others. Any thoughts there?
Thanks in advance.
But on the other hand, he built some impressive companies, he is the richest person in the world, and he has a lot of gumption, y'know?
They're already asking Musk to stop lefties from being able to even block them; it's the same phenomeon as incels. Free speech was never enough; they want an audience guaranteed, too. https://twitter.com/stillgray/status/1604052966839062528
https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/social-platfo...
> At both the Tweet level and the account level, we will remove any free promotion of prohibited 3rd-party social media platforms, such as linking out (i.e. using URLs) to any of the below platforms on Twitter, or providing your handle without a URL…
The idea that HN is some sort of libertarian paradise is ridiculous. This is definitely a liberal haven.
Musk, on the other hand, needs the audience.
Elon apparently bet on the fact that the establishment could not stomach the idea of reconstructing that high visibility platform elsewhere. Everyone knows it is not simply about technology. Twitter remains "the clown car that fell into a gold mine". He will probe on how far he can go but will promptly retreat (ex: EU).
My guess is that his strategy is to prolong this period of uncertainty. Things like PG's decision may signal a consensus that they need to reconstruct humpty dumpty elsewhere.
Watch for trends in use of twitter as a news source in establishment press. If that significantly declines, the political class will follow.
p.s. It is upsetting to think that one of the immediate beneficiaries of Twitter itself being 'deplatformed from polite society' is the relief it offers regimes like Islamic Republic. They are happy, that much is fairly certain.
Give it a while.
He simply unbanned accounts which were wrongfully banned. Accounts which simply communicated legal to hold opinions. There is nothing wrong or morally objectionable about this. I’d rather say it commendable.
If Twitter is becoming a right-wing echo-chamber it’s because left-wing accounts are leaving and nothing else.
So why are they? Are they afraid of having an argument where they can’t have the opposing view banned?
Cmon! You can do better than this.
Depends on the opinion. "We must kill all the [insert ethnic group]" is a legal-to-hold opinion. But I'd say it's both wrong and morally objectionable to provide a platform for transmitting that opinion. Which is why Twitter banned people like that.
And even for those without a moral sense, I should point out that it was also bad for business. Twitter had a business choice to make: they could keep all the blatant racists or they could keep the non-white audience they targeted plus the white people that don't like open racism. Even if you're a-ok with open bigotry, it's pretty obvious that the right financial choice is to boot most of the open bigots, so that the platform feels safe enough to everybody else.
To be fair, that has always been allowed to say on Twitter as long as the target is either white, men or both.
The only news is now you’re (equally) allowed to spread that kind of toxic hate towards other groups as well.
Is that a good thing? Possibly not, but at least it is objectively more fair than it used to be.
https://www.businessinsider.com/left-wing-activists-banned-f...
https://www.salon.com/2022/12/01/elon-musks-twitter-is-purgi...
https://observer.com/2022/12/left-wing-twitter-accounts-crit...
https://theintercept.com/2022/11/29/elon-musk-twitter-andy-n...
David Roth did a good job looking at the dynamic: https://defector.com/the-eternal-mystery-of-a-rich-mans-poli...
And Adam Serwer has a useful take as well: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/12/legal-righ...
It's not clear to me that he had a fully formed intent when he made a bid for it. And a big piece of evidence there was that he tried to weasel out and was forced to buy it. Another bit of evidence is the way he has obviously been impulsively half-assing pretty much everything he's done since he took it over. He does not look like a man with a plan.
But to the extent that he had clear intent, I think it was more about hubris. There's this phenomenon in the food industry where a rich person will basically say, "I have eaten at a lot of restaurants, so I'd be really good at running one!" So they will spend a bunch of money on launching and unless they hired competent industry experts and deferred to them, they'll create a clusterfuck. I think it's a similar deal with Musk: He was a dedicated and successful Twitter user, and he thought he could run it better. Turned out it was harder than it looks.
He has so much wealth that, like Hughes, he could alienate every business contact and still spend the rest of his life making leftfield investments and watching movies naked in a dark hotel room. (Well, replace watching movies with tweeting, I suppose.)
It’s both possible that Musk is a genius and that he’s cracked as many geniuses do.
His embarrassment in no way erases his accomplishments of the past decade and warrant a “he was never smart”.
But his downright pathetic demeanor the past few months do eclipse and ruin what could’ve been an incredible legacy.
Then after a few weeks of this, you start seeing funny comment threads like this. Where there’s this sort of this tactic to take control of the narrative, and make it seem like everyone agrees that X is bad.
It works really well because of course even if only a few people leave Twitter in rage, now we can share that as proof of status quo and keep building the narrative.
Just a reminder - this is only a view shared by the extremely online / tech / liberal bubble.
As an example, on more conservative discussions boards you see the same thing happening on the opposite side. Until threads are literally fully premised on the fact that everyone agrees that someone or some org is “speedrunning Y” or whatever.
My feedback is this: don’t write like this. It makes you look daft, because it shows ether you don’t realize you’re in an opinion bubble, or you’re a willing participant in gaslighting for the only purpose of back patting / narrative control. I see this stuff all the damn time and usually ignore, but nice to have a chance to clarify this.
They’d all be a lot more convincing by even just acknowledging it’s a hypothetical before leaping into crazy territory.
> Will Elon ever have a "coming to jesus moment" and realize that he's alienated so many of his peers that he is, in fact, in the wrong? Or is he so delusional that he really does believe he has the answers?
I mean read this… do I have it spell out why this reads ridiculously / assumes facts that are clearly untrue?
I think Elon acted impulsively. He realized it but it was too late. A lot of the Twitter Files stuff is an attempt at revenge against the executive team that forced him to close. The problem is going full red pill is not smart tech business. He’s reaching MyPillow levels of conspiracy mongering.
I dont know if he does drugs, but sure he seems to behave strange.
But overall yes agree a great achiever (never sure about that genius tag) who has lost the plot.
It's funny how "Twitter is a private company they can kick who they want from their platform" is suddenly not so popular over the crowd that used to parrot it. Hypocrites from every side, unsurprisingly.
Anyway, I can't believe his grand idea for Twitter was the botched "Twitter Blue", and the next version doesn't seem to make sense either.
He is running Twitter like an autocratic dictator. He is restoring extremist right wing accounts. He is banning open conversation and dissent. He is peddling QAnon conspiracy theories. He was against all covid measures and called for Fauci's arrest. He has cozied up to China and middle eastern dictatorships while putting up the "free speech" charade against democrats in the US. He was most recently hanging out with Jared Kushner in a private box at the world cup final.
Why are people still doubting who he really is?
There were a couple of other duplicate discussions, but that's the main one.
I would classify that as ‘generic moderation policy’ rather than censorship
Free speech is defined as the intersection between anything-thats-legal and anything-that-doesn't-upset-its-owner.
If you think that this is a farce, that's because we are living in one. I suppose it is possible that he is trolling us with his moderation policies...
It's true that this generates relatively low-quality commentary, but it's not clear to me how a discussion of the behaviour of a man who says one thing, and does another can do otherwise.
Isn't that a mischaracterization though? The new policy they announced, as far as I've seen, only applies if the account is "solely" promoting other brands. [0]
> Specifically, we will remove accounts created solely for the purpose of promoting other social platforms and content that contains links or usernames for the following platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, Truth Social, Tribel, Nostr and Post.
[0]: https://twitter.com/TwitterSupport/status/160453126541959168...
EDIT:
The tweet linked seems to be the mischaracterization and not this take.
Reading the full policy[1] does say that, while their tweets don't.
[1]: https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/social-platfo...
I don't see PG reacting to that news on twitter. Is there a reaction anywhere?
I saw that and assumed (maybe wrongly) that it was an automated ban from some internal automod-like system running amuck and due to the layoffs/quits/staff issues no body at Twitter knowing how to disable it.
Guess the jury is still out, but does anybody know if that same error is showing up for facebook links for example? If so it's a smoking gun.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Don't be an ass.
> we will remove accounts created solely for the purpose of promoting other social platforms
> AND
> content that contains links or usernames for the following platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, Truth Social, Tribel, Nostr and Post.
I'm reading it explicitly how it's written when taking the grammar into account. [0] I've even expanded it below, so that you can see how it reads without a comma.
> we will remove accounts created solely for the purpose of promoting other social platforms
AND
> we will remove accounts created solely for the purpose of promoting content that contains links or usernames for the following platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, Truth Social, Tribel, Nostr and Post.
Looking at the full policy though, yeah their tweets aren't in line with what the full policy states.[1]
[0]: https://www.grammarly.com/blog/comma-before-and/
[1]: https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/social-platfo...
https://web.archive.org/web/20221218194037/https://help.twit...
Fortuitously preserving LibsOfTikTok and Elon's good relationship with the CCP
>we will remove any free promotion of prohibited 3rd-party social media platforms
>Accounts that are used for the main purpose of promoting content on another social platform may be suspended
Has been hilarious watching this car crash.
Same for Truth Social.
ps. You can also follow hashtags if interested in a specific topic.
AFAIK, only if your server is on Mastodon 4.0.0 or newer, as Mastodon 3.x didn't have that feature yet.
Hm, what makes a good server? I think for me, I want: not going to disappear, high uptime, low latency, moderate moderation.
You can measure moderation by going to most server's /about page, to see which servers they've limited interactions with.
I'm on hachyderm.io. It's good, but could be better. I expect it will remain at least at this baseline level of quality, so I'm too lazy to search out other options.
My wife is on wandering.shop. I'd say it struggles much more with latency/availability, but is still fine, especially if you use an app, which can paper over some of the latency issues.
I haven't tried it myself, but this purports to suggest a server based on some info about you (https://instances.social/). And (https://joinmastodon.org/servers) is kind of the "main" list.
I initially tried the https://joinmastodon.org/servers thing in November, but the things proposed seemed like very niche communities.
I just tried the https://instances.social/ link -- the top 2 hits for me were very small instances (fewer than 5 people), which I wouldn't have much faith in joining.
Actually, I guess I should have mentioned how I _actually_ chose a server. I used https://fedifinder.glitch.me/ and joined the first fast-enough server that most of my existing contacts were on.
So it's mostly like email. Logic that would work for email i think works for Mastodon. Just like with email you can generally email anyone and anyone emails you, the same applies to mastodon in my experience. However, if a server is being too <insert reason here> for your server's admins, they may block the entire thing. I don't know the finer details of how blocking can take place, but my loose belief is that you won't see posts from blocked servers. Though i may still be possible to explicitly follow someone on a blocked server.. i'm unclear there.
This amount of moderation will obviously vary from server to server. It is one of the criteria you'd look at for choosing a server.
Likewise local community is another, if you should care. There is a special Local feed, which i've found to be quite handy if the server you're on is specialized to a content type.
As for choosing your server, i think the above two points are useful metrics to help you decide. However if you're just looking to dip your toes in, pick any server. You can always decide to switch later, as you can set your old account to indicate that you moved to a different account. I've seen several accounts like this and it seems to be sane and easy.
So far i've been quite happy with Mastodon.
A small cool detail you didn't add: when you do that, anyone who was following you will automatically and seamlessly follow the new account.
Say you create the following named handle kd at server mas.to. If someone else would want to follow you, you'd just give that @kd@mas.to. Note that when you join a server, you'll have to abide by their rules.
It's easy enough to sync up follows.
Some small ones block the large ones (for their moderation policies), so having the small account will let you follow anyone, and the large can be a hedge if the smaller one becomes unstable
https://mas.to/@paulg/with_replies
His first toots remind me of his first tweets:
https://twitter.com/paulg/status/22300310058
https://twitter.com/paulg/status/22307238459
Again, Expecting non-techies to self-host their own instances after several of them falling over due to light usage and signups is quite wishful thinking and reiterates the need for users to heavily rely on more centralized instances to on board users.
Well all know what happened to mastodon.technology which was run by an individual. It doesn't look smart to sit on an instance that can barely handle hundreds of thousands of users signing up at once and ends up folding up.
> give them time or run your own instance and federate
Yeah, the journalists at journa.host has never been more alive for journalists and is going just great with a much better reach than Twitter [1] /s.
[0] https://ashfurrow.com/blog/mastodon-technology-shutdown/
[1] https://twitter.com/ajaromano/status/1594432548222152705
Mastodon wasn't meant to be a 100% replica of Twitter nor has it ever attempted to be. The only reason it's getting such a rapid influx of users is because of Elon's sabotage.
How fast it is depends on the provider you use.
I haven't noticed any big differences in speed, i use both Mastodon for iOS and Pinafore (https://pinafore.social/ ), a PWA. Just add it to your homescreen and it will behave like a native app (and sometime in 2023 Apple has said they will add push notifications to PWAs).
https://mas.to/@paulg
https://mastodon.social/@terretta
https://indieweb.social/@paulg@mas.to
That's advantage of federation!
The underlying problem is that browsers are not designed with this sort of federated application use case in mind, so Mastodon and friends have to do some awkward tricks to get it to work at all.
Normal people do not care enough to go on a safari hunt for finding instances, user names of those claiming to have left Twitter or deleting their accounts or even bothering self-hosting just for a username on their own instance.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34042216
I know many people used Twitter.com or their official app, but many people find a simpler native app experience much more useful.
It's frustrating that the web platform doesn't accommodate federated services like Mastodon that span multiple servers very well, but those are the cards we're dealt. It does work, it's just not ideal.
It used to be different; in older versions of Mastodon, when you clicked on the Follow link on another instance, it asked for the name of your home instance, and redirected to a pre-filled follow screen on it. This was probably changed because it's an obvious phishing risk: it could redirect you to a fake domain which asked for your Mastodon account credentials (as if your login had expired), so it's not good to get people used to that kind of mechanic.
1. On your own instance ...
2. Paste "@paulg@mas.to" into the search dialogue and click the magnifying glass ...
3. Paul's profile will pop up in the results under "People".
4. Either click on the person icon to follow directly, or ...
5. Click on the avatar / profile name/description to view the profile page itself.
If you do click the "Follow" icon from mas.to (and don't already have an account there), you'll be prompted to do what I've described above.
Keep in mind that the Fediverse is, well, Federated. Someone else's home instance is where their bits and their configuration live. Your instance is where your configuration lives. You subscribe from your instance for that reason.
Some instances block others, in which case the profile won't appear, though odds are low that mas.to is among those yours has blocked.
(I've been on Mastodon since 2016, yes, this was confusing at first. I've since sorted it out.)
Mastodon on the other hand downloads 2.6MB resources to display what exactly? Some tiny images, three posts and an ad. That does not look like a winner.
To be clear, it could take years.
But we should remember our own tech-first biases. Twitter ran in frequent-fail-whale mode for months with users accepting that because it fed their social needs. The moment it stopped serving those needs, people started leaving no matter how good the tech is.
I use it primarily as a RSS feed and the occasional "get up to speed with the latest news fast" alternative.
It's been fascinating watching so many VC types ignore so many red flags just because some of Elon's early actions validated their priors (e.g. tech companies are bloated and need to layoff staff).
[1] https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1592852796185128961
PG mocked those who thought we would end up here.
Just imagine the kind of damage that would ensue if for instance all of Twitters DMs became somehow public.
[1] https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1604557444247539712
I've met some incredibly smart narcissists, and you know what they use their smarts for? The same sort of continuous ego inflation that less smart narcissists do. Their smartness just makes things worse, because they're less likely to have the sort of comeuppance that leads to a moment of clarity.
I think it's a good idea as content is king, but they should have rolled this out after they had established an ability to monetize. Once people leave the platform it will be tough to get them back unless they offer a very lucrative comission split with creators.
If they were actually concerned with people fleeing why would they do something which is more likely to make creators leave?
you're asking this in a sub-thread about if Elon is smart or not? I thought the answer was obvious.
I don't know why someone who (self-diagnosed?) as having Asperger's thinks they'd be a good fit for leading a social media company, that feels like having a an amputee selling staircases [0]; but the rocket nerds I follow seem pretty convinced Musk genuinely knows actual rocket science.
[0] as in: it could work, but you'd not expect it by default
Even if you’re absolutely certain your goals and overall strategy are right a smart person would understand that something needs to change in the messaging and/or execution given the overwhelmingly negative feedback.
The answer seems more along the lines of, Twitter and its problems are very very different from Tesla/SpaceX, and while Elon may have been good at the latter, he has zero experience with the former.
That being said, not realizing the above I guess makes him partly not-smart, and I assume the shortsightedness was due to the inflated ego caused by his previous two successes.
Intelligence is overrated in leaders. Character, humility, principles, and discipline are far more valuable in avoiding huge mistakes.
What a startup, a market leader and a government organization need are distinct types of leadership. Sometimes there are prodigies who can do two of these. Musk did.
Smart + deficient in the ethics department is a recipe for disaster.
> do morons get accepted into Stanford's STEM PhD programs
is a lie perpetuated by Musk and co. [1] contains links to court documents.
According to the court documents, not only does he not have a physics or other technical degree, he obtained a bachelor in Econ in 1997, not a physics degree in 1995.
The scan of the diploma does not specify department, has no year date, and is a bachelor of arts.
[1] https://twitter.com/capitolhunters/status/159330754193247436...
Elon did a dual degree, one bachelor in the business school (wharton) and one in the arts and sciences school (aka the college). Basically, whether a degree is a bachelor of arts or sciences is totally meaningless, schools do whatever they want (science and math are both liberal arts). At penn, the undergrad business degree is a bachelor of science in economics. You wouldn't call yourself an econ major with that degree though, since you only take 3 or 4 econ classes for that degree, you would call yourself a business major or identify by your concentration (e.g. finance, marketing. The alumni portal shows that elon concentrated in entrepreneurial management, idk if thats complete since ive heard the university confirmed he has a second concentration). The college hosts your liberal arts majors - physics, biology, chemistry, math, English, history, sociology, (real) economics, anthropology, gender studies, the works. All these are bachelor of arts degrees. I believe there's even a BA version of computer science that's offered (as distinct from the bachelor of science in engineering (BSE) in Computer science or the bachelor of applied science (BAS) in computer science degrees the engineering school offers). So if you say he has a wharton business degree (the post mentions they've confirmed the b.s. economics), and you also have evidence of a bachelor of arts granted the same year, then that BA needs explanation. I guess theoretically he could have gotten an econ major from the college too, I'm sure some hedge fund wannabes do that. These sorts of dual degrees are super common at penn btw, through formal and informal programs (e.g. i have a ba biology and bs econ)
But the ground truth here is that he has a ba in physics from the college and a bs econ (aka business degree) from wharton and when asked to provide evidence of his physics degree, he correctly provided his ba. And also that at some point elok screwed up and said he had a bs physics (which is not a thing at penn) instead of a ba which they've latched onto.
How do I know? Because I am pretty smart as well, with a PhD from math, but that didn't stop me from making a series of stupid mistakes in my life. Sometimes out of sheer optimism, sometimes because I missed some crucial information, sometimes because closeness to some other person made me miss important red flags, sometimes because I overextended my abilities, sometimes because I underestimated my adversaries.
If I bought Twitter, I would have run it into the ground in days.
When someone is incapable of building stuff or running a company, we (as a society, collectively) hand them shittons of money to be a VC.
And you use a throwaway.
https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1604557444247539712
https://www.amazon.com/Never-Thought-That-Way-Conversations/...
They might just be evil.
I just disagree with people's opinions on certain things. And if I frequently disagree with someone enough, then I just quietly stop paying any attention to what they say.
- the ability to explain why you think a certain way or did something (i.e. when you ask a child why they threw a glass they'll say "I don't know"
- the speed at which you learn/process new information
- the ability to understand your emotions and the level of control you have over them
- your willing to engage in debate
- how inquisitive you are
Further, I think “somebody that spends an extraordinary amount of money to become admin on a forum (one of the worst jobs on earth)” qualifies as “a stupid person” well before “being incredibly, laughably, hilariously inept at being a forum admin” even gets factored into the “How stupid can a person be?” equation.
and also learnt many many people do not bother with thinking, and just throw crap out - due to their immediate emotions
TV debate long ago decided that every complex human concern can be profitably reduced to a crass binary which can be argued about in front of a camera for the audience's thumbs up or down.
Social media democratised this decerebrate approach. A thumbs up or down from your tribe. Mastodon, Post.news et al only replicate the Twitter model.
It doesn't matter which platform PG, or anyone else, is on. They're all worthless distraction. Fiddling while Rome burns etc.
[1] And for the record I think pg indeed ignored WAY too many red flags for WAY too long in this particular case.
If I was a friend of his, I'd suggest that it's a good chance to think about why he was convinced Elon would do well and adjust as necessary, but it's also quite possible that he doesn't feel like he's obliged to do that self-examination in public. And he's not.
I think the next wave of interesting questions is around the extent to which Musk contributed the apparent successes, SpaceX and Tesla. We won't know for a long time, as a lot of the people in the know have a strong incentive to keep quiet. But one possible explanation is that he is good at PR and using hype to raise money, but is not a competent manager without help. Consider, for example, this bit from someone who says they were a SpaceX intern: https://www.tumblr.com/numberonecatwinner/701567544684855296...
I asked a former SpaceX person about that and was told it seemed right, that SpaceX worked because everybody believed in the mission and worked hard at managing Elon so that they could get the actual work done.
[1] I incorrectly thought he was fired by the board from Zip2, but they just refused to make him CEO. Thanks to dontknowwhyihn for the correction: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34042958
What they have in common is that they have fame and money, and it turns out you can do a lot with that.
Probably that estimate would be lower now, given the market downturn. But clearly she’s well on her way to building up a competitor to the established brands.
And while it's true that VSCO's current market cap is 3 billion, at the time that Rihanna made her comment VSCO's market cap was 5-6 billion. It has dropped significantly in recent months.
Also, don't forget that Rihanna has something the top three beauty supply companies don't have - a growing brand. That has a massive impact on market cap.
Elon Musk was barely more than a nobody when he got involved with Tesla and started SpaceX.
Fenty was founded after Rihanna had scored countless hits and was basically a household name.
He was extremely wealthy and had a lot of connections from buying his way into other companies. He was not yet a household name/ global celebrity, only one in more niche (but very powerful) circles, that changed soon after.
If you can reasonably self-fund a startup with employees for a while, you are not a nobody and you are likely far more powerful than 95% of the population. You can literally dictate what other human beings do for 40 hours a week. That's not being a nobody...
> Rihanna is now worth $1.7 billion, Forbes estimates—making her the wealthiest female musician in the world and second only to Oprah Winfrey as the richest female entertainer. But it’s not her music that’s made her so wealthy. The bulk of her fortune (an estimated $1.4 billion) comes from the value of Fenty Beauty, of which Forbes can now confirm she owns 50%. Much of the rest lies in her stake in her lingerie company, Savage x Fenty, worth an estimated $270 million, and her earnings from her career as a chart-topping musician and actress.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/maddieberg/2021/08/04/fentys-fo...
She is a business mogul in the best sense of the word, just in industries far away from here.
I know who Musk is, I know what he does, I know about the companies he founded, I know what he looks like. All I know of Rihanna is that she is a pop star.
Celebrity is very contextual.
Hence celebrities getting married and divorced every three weeks, it keeps them in the news.
His successes just delivered what the market demanded but established powers did not want to pursue for one reason or another. He knows to outsource actual work to experts and offers them attention which is easier due to his interest in tech/science. Of course, he sees them as tools and he doesn't need to care about labor laws but that's a part of the longer list of his flaws and mistakes.
After Tesla/SpaceX took off, it has been as you described.
Rihanna imo is very savvy and the Fenty brand was a very successful business, involving a couple pivots from fashion to more lingerie and beauty. The big Savage x Fenty musical production event every year is a smart move that leverages her music industry connections and draws lots of interest and new customers.
Arguably she is doing better than Musk atm, given that he started life with a huge capital advantage and is likely losing big on Twitter right now (as well as tanking his public image).
Musk example[1] of this, he sold 1 million USD worth of perfume with smell of burnt hair in a few hours.
https://www.reuters.com/lifestyle/oddly-enough/elon-musk-sel...
The problem here is overconfidence / blind spots. Twitter is a different type of business. Musk looks to be doing a Mike Jordan or a Shaq. Basketball isn't baseball, nor is it rapping. Both of them recovered from those bad decisions. Will Musk? Time will tell.
There's some evidence Musk was like this all along, but it is a lot harder to learn humility when you're doing well.
In contrast, check out the Tom Mueller interview about Elon Musk and "face shut off". This feature is one of the top reasons why the SpaceX Merlin rocket engine is such a great engine. Mueller thought it would be very hard to get it to work in a large engine and he was right. They blew up hundreds of engines and a bunch of test stands. But Musk was supportive the whole time. That's a big deal, and what you want from a CEO during development.
But "better than Bezos running a rocket company" is a pretty low bar to hurdle.
Tory Bruno at ULA and Peter Beck at Rocket Lab from the outside appear to be outstanding CEO's. But they've been starved for resources for different reasons. What could they have done with the resources that Musk & Bezos brought to their companies?
Rocket Lab in particular is one of the companies that could challenge SpaceX's dominance.
This sort-of implies that BO was functional prior to that incident.
BO was founded in 2000. By 2017, they had existed for 17 years without reaching the orbit. (Which SpaceX managed in 6 years, Astra managed in 17 years, RocketLab in 12 years).
It seems to me that BO is just continuing to be an expensive failure, which, unlike all the other failed space startups, keeps dragging itself on, because it can rely on basically unlimited funding.
Expecting them to reach orbit as quickly as SpaceX or Rocket Lab is unfair since SpaceX & Rocket Lab had an orbital rocket as their first product, and Blue Origin didn't.
It's unfair to compare everybody to SpaceX -- their success is exceptional. Pre-2017 Blue Origin wasn't as functional as SpaceX but I wouldn't call them dysfunctional. Post-2017 Blue Origin is dysfunctional.
This is all based on heresay, so take from it what you will.
That said, they are backed by Bezos, one of the richest people on the planet, so I think it is fair to expect some real achievements from them.
It almost seems a dream to a space nerd. A O'Neill protoge with a long term vision of "moving heavy industry into space to enable the Earth to turn into a garden planet" and uninterested in short term profits investing a billion dollars a year to pursue that vision.
They then successfully identified the first two steps along that road. 1: dramatically reduce the price of access to space through reusability. 2: return to the moon for exploration on the path to exploiting its resources to enable the space industry that's the long term goal. 3: LEO space station.
That SpaceX beat them to the first two goals should be cause for celebration and partnership and a move on to the next goal. Instead they've been fighting SpaceX with dirty tricks that luckily have failed.
Then there's China. Tesla's 25% yearly revenue after being the first US company to launch without being 50% hand-in-hand with a local business. He agreed to teach the locals his methods, and they now sell straight-up copies at half the price. lol
I'm sorry but this whole thing is one big joke.
But blocking links to Mastodon? That makes him leave? Like, uh, fine, but... maybe he could have not mocked us for pointing out the dysfunction weeks and weeks ago?
Between all the crypto implosions happening and this, wealthy Silicon Valley investor types and their hanger-ons are really having a "moment" these past few months. Sheesh.
“Hate speech” is left-wing code for “someone with an opposing point of view”.
Having those accounts unbanned, if nothing else, is a healthy sign.
What this thread is about though (banning outbound links to other platforms), not so much. That plain reeks of desperation.
And the list of accounts he banned were from a list left-wing/anarchist accounts given to him by known self-proclaimed fascists.
If you think that's healthy, you have problems.
Does hate speech exist? Yes. Are we in danger of overusing the term? Yes.
Also nice hyperbole you got there.
Also: while Kanye is clearly his own kind of category of crazy, what “other racists”?
I don’t know a single such case.
>
> I don’t know a single such case.
One example I remember reading about was Andrew Anglin [1], the founder of The Daily Stormer [2], a website that, to save you a click, Wikipedia describes as "an American far-right, neo-Nazi, white supremacist, misogynist, Islamophobic, antisemitic, and Holocaust denial commentary and message board website that advocates for a second genocide of Jews".
As his Wikipedia article [1] notes,
> Anglin was banned from Twitter in 2013, but was reinstated weeks after the site was acquired by Elon Musk in 2022.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Anglin
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Daily_Stormer
You just lost a large group of potential customers. Brilliant marketing strategy.
Maybe if you sell flags that go on oversized pickups. About everyone else is a miss in that sort of stupidity.
However, blocking links to a competitor is pretty clear-cut anticompetitive behavior. Imagine AT&T refusing to serve Verizon's websites.
Because otherwise I can not understand the logic behind defending Musk’s reign as CEO. Ignoring the chaotic policy changes what bothers me is the treatment of Twitter’s employees. Nobody should ever have to leave their house because of death threats. And surely Parag/Jack should be ultimately held accountable for what happened at the company under their reign.
Speaking only for myself, but I'd honestly contest that.
The only thing that will definitely hold true is that there is an audience of tens of millions of Americans who feel mocked by "the Elites." They will shower adoration on anyone with Elite creds - be it academic, media, or business - who tells them there really is a conspiracy to oppress them and that they're the straight shooter who will go to battle for them. That is a very seductive amount of positive feedback when the other things you're doing aren't home runs.
They simply were too slow in implementing them. Some of them eg. payments are due to all of the regulatory challenges that Twitter faces as a top tier social network. Others are just incompetence eg. not doing more with Vine.
They needed a better executor. Problem is Musk immediately fired everyone. And has constantly underestimated the complexity of the system. So bit hard to see how they were ever going to do better as Twitter 2.0.
They are well within their rights to do so, but that's the exact opposite of competing purely in the market of ideas.
1. https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/social-platfo...
It doesn't inspire confidence in that their previous stance was truly motivated by their love of the unrestricted diffusion of ideas.
Every time someone mentions this I ask for examples, and generally all I ever receive in reply are examples of people disagreeing with them. I begin to think that those who shout about 'abuse' are incensed that those they formerly silenced by bending the rules are now using those rules against them, particularly to voice their legitimate opinions, and they're using their institutional power elsewhere to try to tank Twitter as a result.
In short: I know full well that this has nothing to do with free speech arguments and everything to do with institutional actors being incensed that they can't use Twitter as their own propaganda institution anymore. I won't pretend that Elon is a friend of the proletariat, but I'm also not going to pretend that those opposing him somehow are either. This is a slap fight between two groups of bourgeoisie, and petit bourgeoisie actors are trying to convince everyone else it's some sort of fight for liberty, justice, mom and apple pie. Utter nonsense.
In the end, some of you are going to have to accustom yourselves to the idea that you are not gatekeepers of public forums, the people have interests that do not coincide with your own, and no amount of force or fraud is going to change that. Don't like it? Learn to code, I guess.
Then you haven't been watching harassment on trans and other LGBT people, being told to die in horrible ways (I'm sure you can point to other high-profile people getting that kind of threats, but this one gets such abuse merely for existing).
Fully agree that having public forums gatekeeped by centralized actors deciding what you can communicate is worrisome; we should get distributed ways to announce the existence of your personal publications to people that may be interested in its subject - like like the Usenet newsgroups of old (which are still in operation, but are not known to the general public).
I mean. I still think he is trying to do that. Is he succeeding? I don’t think so.
If it all hits the ground and twitter is no more a going concern will he claim that was his plan all along? Probably. Doesn’t mean it is true.
Even on the day he offered to buy twitter he was offering more money than the stock was worth. That is only rational if you believe you have a plan to run it better.
According to reports he is spending a lot of his time managing twitter in quite a hands-on way. Do you think he is not trying to make it better in his own mind?
I think it's a case of the gambler having enough money to buy the casino.
I was one of them. But slowly we saw him fuck it up, and then double down. Twitter is toast unless Elon is dumped by his investors
Once again, society will be left holding the rich sociopaths' bags and dealing with the externalities of their uncontrolled gambling.
Compare Instagram with Twitter.
On-prem is a good point though. I don’t know a lot about their core infra.
That is still a valid point tho. The thing is, we're not going to know who is right or wrong until it all plays out. And considering there are billions on the lines and Musk plays fast and loose with the rules, he's probably going to come out of the otherside better for it.
> It's been fascinating watching so many VC types ignore so many red flags just because some of Elon's early actions validated their priors (e.g. tech companies are bloated and need to layoff staff).
Again it's still a valid point. Tech companies are bloated and need to layoff staff, that's why they're ALL doing it.
People can be right and still do dumb jackass moves.
Called this a month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33659020
"The emperors have no clothes"
This is the first time I've seen the finger of accusation point to Paul Graham for excessively blocking. Is it possible the @fennecsound account participated in previous harassment and the target doesn't wish to endure more low-quality interactions?
My expectation is: HN folks, being generally sensitive souls, would have spoken up vocally on this site if it were a common ocurrence. I couldn't find any such prior accusations on algolia or web search.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32639125
Edit: Thanks for the reality check replies! Perhaps story submissions and discussions on this matter get flagged and die at a high rate.
He banned me, and I think I've never had an interaction with him.
I've seen people I follow mentioning these bans, but most just shrug.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_hand
It's the sane thing to do.
1. https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1593199305384685573
A lot of tech folks seem to have a mindset of a 60s Soviet technocrat. "We shot a dog into space comrades, let's apply our engineering genius to all the social problems the stupid managers can't solve". Spoiler alert, it is pretty hard to govern hundreds of millions of people
You're right that assuming success at Tesla/SpaceX indicated success at Twitter ended up being wrong.
But these "priors" are still very true. Tech companies are bloated, Elon sucking at running a social network doesn't change that fact
> I don't think [Musk] realizes that the techniques that work for cars and rockets don't work in social media
At this point it genuinely seems as though doing nothing would be better than using Twitter. It produces a convincing illusion of being entertaining or even useful at times, but for me it truly and wholly lacked any significant utility or fulfilling elements.
Apart from HN, I’m totally off the social media train and fairly content with it being that way.
I suppose PG has more use for social media than I do, so the case may be a little different. Even so, I doubt very much that him returning to Twitter (or anyone for that matter) is inevitable.
I think for Paul Graham it’s a different story since he talks to other influencers and occasionally goes viral. That sort of feedback loop well that’s quite addictive. There’s a reason why there’s no obvious Twitter competitor.
<https://mas.to/@paulg/109536542792559441>
Elon Musk is billionaire reactionary distilled into its purest form. I mean the guy is literally spending 100% of his time reacting to things he doesn't personally like.
I can't imagine what would motivate the decision to ban Mastodon links. Were they really losing users to Mastodon? That would be a huge problem, but not one that banning links would solve.
No idea if they still are. I don't hang out on Twitter. But sheesh.
PS: You're posting this on pg's site.
What would be more interesting would be to discuss specific things as evidence for a more general truth.
For example there is a huge criticism of the social sciences in this website (and in general) but none of it is specific criticism of specific hypotheses. (Yes, yes I know people will argue that there are no hypotheses in the social science literature and it is not testable etc... but that is a weak argument and not always true).
My theory is that humans are just not evolved for billionaire levels of wealth disparity. It's not a criticism, it just appears to be a fact.
Honest question: are there any "in touch" billionaires? Maybe Mark Cuban in some ways for example?
Gates didn't really change, he just used his fortune to whitewash his reputation. He's still smart and I would be happy read what he has to say but a nice person he isn't and never was.
It's getting harder and harder to find though. I should have saved offline compiled files.
It's a way to be able to keep investing his money without paying taxes.
It only spends the legal minimal amount for charity, 5% (way less than taxes that would go to build roads, hospitals and schools). The rest is invested in a portfolio that, by the magic of being in a non profit, can make billions without paying any tax.
Since he directs the charity, he can therefore move the capital where he needs it to, including founding Monsanto and weapon makers, which he had to withdraw from after people noticed that it was quite the opposite of the claimed foundation mission.
That's why most billionaires have some kind of charity: they keep all the power of their money, get good PR (which given that the wealth gap makes people grumpy, is a great shield) and they optimize their finance while people defend them.
The PR operations worked well: most people on the internet now believe that Gates is a good person. A statement that would have made anybody smile in the 90'.
To clarify, 5% of what? Of capital in the non-profit? Of revenue generated by the non-profit? Something else?
https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/part-one-the-ballad-of...
I know a few, but they're modest people and that's why I will not name them here, I will name one that is deceased, René Sommer, if you want to know more about him, I wrote about him here:
https://jacquesmattheij.com/in-memoriam-rene-sommer/
We’re doomed.
I have at least half of my friends that express weirder, more dangerous opinions that are in total opposite to mine. Is that what internet is all about now? Taking every people we disagree with and dress them as Hitler so we can shit on them? It used to be were I went to actually meet people with different point of views and new things.
On hacker news, I expect people that disagree with Graham to prove him wrong with an argument.
Name calling feels more like being with my mom on facebook.
If you want to defend Paul then do so, but most of this comment is just hyperbolically complaining about how he is criticized.
Some of his daily takes were so embarrassing and insipid that it was hard to maintain respect. It’s funny because his long form posts which are often insightful were likely reviewed/edited by a third person. A concept he has actually said only exists in the modern commercial publishing era.
or else just had the benefit of more time to think about them. i certainly know i say some dumb stuff, but if i write it down and think about it for a week before saying it to anybody else, i'm going to censor like 90% of the stuff that comes out of my head.
I suppose you can only speak for yourself, but I find the words "insipid" and "embarrassing" particularly emotional / unscientific. Out of curiosity, what is there a connection to the article at hand or alternatively why do you feel it's important to spread awareness of his incompetence?
The topic of "the article at hand" is, inevitably, his incompetence.
Was he rude to you personally or something?
You don't have to guess, he lists the names of every person who reviews his posts at the bottom of the posts.
pg deleted it and posted this response: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1600122386346450944
(...after, hilariously, Matt Bruenig replied with a correction from ChatGPT - which is also deleted because he auto-deletes tweets.)
e: Reading the thread now, I love this reply from pg, who I've seen attack marxism, socialism, leftism, what-have-you, endlessly and smugly in the past:
> I freely admit I have only a superficial grasp of Marxist doctrine. I could no more debate the finer points of it with an actual Marxist than I could debate the finer points of church doctrine with a Jesuit. (Nor would I want to be able to do either.)
The finer points!!! Amazing. Something to keep in mind when the billionaires tell the ol' lefties to read econ 101!
> You still occasionally hear people saying that founders don't deserve to be rich, because their employees created all the value. But the falsity of this claim becomes increasingly obvious as automation enables founders to grow companies with fewer and fewer employees.
Do you disagree with this, or just disagree that it’s in contradiction to Marx?
The fact that automation makes your firm exponentially more productive over time doesn't contradict Marx at all. That's just a premise he borrows from classical economics to then argue why that leads to bad stuff, in his view. It seems like maybe PG is taking issue with the labor theory of value or something? In which case... /shrug, that's ok, get in line with the rest of us?
What's really happening here though is PG isn't familiar with the discourse whatsoever, so he makes a weird scattered argument and smugly attributes some strawman opinion to Marxists, then gets mad at the reaction. Trying to make sense of it as if he knows what he's talking about just kinda leads to insanity.
e: I'm also not claiming to have some deep knowledge of Marxism at all... I've read like 1 or 2 chapters of Capital. It's just that, like I said above, you just have to have basic familiarity to realize PG speaks from his ass.
Doubly so when intersected with the crowd that publicly eschews earthly possessions.
Turns out hypocrites aren't self aware
I wonder how much of that is down to the person themselves (judging someone else, through the lense of whatever prejudices and biases) and not their heroes.
As they say from where I am: short of meeting true evil, there's no one worse than your own self.
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2010-01-29
Do you really think twitter equates to meeting someone?
I think you learn more about a person through Twitter than meeting them since for better or worse people drop the polite, professional veneer that normally associates face to face meetings.
It showcases (a) what concerns them so much they have to Tweet about it, (b) what their values are, (c) how they read situations, (d) how they treat people etc.
It's weirdly like you're watching them perform in some scientific experiment and seeing how they react to different stimuli.
That really is one of the worst parts of Twitter. The form of short-form drive interaction encourages some of the most pithy and dismissive conversations and leads to some really hostile interactions that often dispense with human decency.
(I mean, not restricted to Twitter, I've experienced it here, and on Mastodon, but Twitter really takes the cake.)
So, yea, the agitated dad vibes get (dare I say) edited out in the process.
(I am centre-right by my country's standards, yet my perception of HN is that it leans even more right)
As far as social media, if it all goes away I wouldn't be that concerned. Net neutrality and access to basic Internet services for all is a much more important issue, IMO. Blocking servers from the Internet (unless they're actually hosting criminal content and taken down by legal prosecution) would be the more serious free speech violation.
I thought electric vehicles were a really dumb idea. Too many problems to be solved for. Range. Charging. Depreciation. Getting people to switch. All of the other infrastructure. Now it's what everyone does, and Tesla is (last I checked) one of the very few EV makers that is able to make a profit on EVs, while upstarts in the space (including Ford) are losing money on every EV sale.
I thought self-landing rockets was a dumb idea.
I thought Starlink was a dumb idea.
I think a lot of what Elon is doing now is a very dumb idea, but as a Twitter user with friends across the political spectrum, I have seen what has appeared to be a suppression of speech that largely affected my right leaning friends, while my left leaning friends gloated about it. I've watched journalists like Taylor Lorenz break the rules with impunity while journalists on the right were deplatformed for doing less.
This is clearly a departure, and I would argue that many right leaning friends were hoping that Elon would stop the pendulum swing, I don't think any were expecting the pendulum to swing back the other way so hard. Elon's actions have seemed arbitrary, but a) Every change looks bad when you don't know their motivations, and b) I've been wrong about Elon's entire life to this point.
It's possible that he's done surveys or polls or gotten data indicating that fear of doxxing is a thing that is meaningfully suppressing Twitter engagement. It is possible that he knows what he's doing, but it isn't what he's said he's doing and it definitely isn't what we expected him to be doing.
I don't know the answer to those questions, and so I don't know if he's ruining Twitter or just transforming it into something that it hasn't been, and I'm mindful of the fact that practically every single change that Twitter has ever made has been received as "the end of Twitter," from verified accounts, to changing their API ToS, to blocking apps, to suing users with any vague reference to 'tweet' in their apps, to bookmarks, analytics, 280 characters, etc., etc.
Elon's had a busy productive life, and my take on my University friends who've had busy productive lives is that they now have the self-insight of a baked potato, roughly. No doubt because they haven't had spare time to reflect on their actions or motivations. But that doesn't mean they can't self-correct, it just means they usually have to run into a brick wall or two before they do. I'm guessing he'll correct this latest boner.
I think the current rules are likely just as dumb, but the number of people likely to be suspended for doxxing Elon or posting about Mastodon is undoubtedly a MUCH smaller segment of the population.
It's amusing watching the reactions to it. I've run enough communities in the past to appreciate how many times you have to make decisions that go against your personal ethics for the sake of the community. Everyone draws different lines on the sand on what they consider "free" speech, and anything closely resembling what is protected in America will likely get you into trouble internationally. Elon is finding out that it's hard, and while it may seem like he's setting his lines in untenable spots, it seems just as possible to me that we're all wrong and he isn't.
I have trouble swallowing this abuse of market power because the courts and govts have allowed so much such abuse for so long. It's a big issue for me (and the EU.) Without that context, I might find it easier to shrug off.
No question, speech and community make for interesting decisions; if he can stay within the law, he'll have a fair bit of leeway from me.
And he's so controversial - even here - that all he has to do is keep fiddling with it and people flock to the circus with popcorn.
What evidence does anyone have that it's being destroyed? What are the metrics for any social media site being destroyed?
Thinking about myspace and digg - it seemed to be loss of user base. Does anyone have metrics independent of Musk/twitter insiders that it's losing users? Seems like https://alexa.com/ is dead...
It's a mess but it's the right idea, a social network cannot be run with either hand curation or self curation. If something destroys Twitter it'll be some place with a better algo.
He will never deliver a free speech platform, he is a free-speech NIMBY and has an agenda os something that drives him but he can still turn Twitter into something valuable.
Then people will come back for whatever Twitter will become. But because he claimed free-speech absolutism he will be held accountable for it and his persona will degrade and people won't cut him a slack and that's the risk for him to fail completely. Until very recently he was able to get thousands of dollars of payment for a product that don't exists and he even jacked up the price over the years, many people are called frauds for less than this but Musk has huge social credit among the techies and He can continue selling that product and continue claiming that it will deliver next year - indefinitely.
He needs to figure out Twitter before his personality loses credit completely and losing the support of Paul Graham, a prominent persona from the scene, is not a good sign.
What a weird thing to say after he killed twitter with his "process". Perhaps this dumpster fire is the best view yet into what he really believes, and how he really runs his companies. Elon is a modern day Kissinger
You're going to have to elaborate on that fascinating historical reference.
No, in the case of Twitter he clearly doesn't. Twitter's business model is advertising, yet he's been driving them away since he's started.
Even in the user-facing side he made a weird mess with the blue checkmarks that was completely unnecessary, didn't make anything better and only created confusion.
That's true but as I've learned here on HN, that wasn't working very well already and Twitter was just an afterthought for the large advertisers. Twitter wasn't huge money maker.
That's something that he can change, this is not something fundamental about the product.
Now one might argue that Musk wants to ignore advertisers entirely and target the actual users. That could be an interesting thing to try. But when why is he naming and shaming and whining about advertisers? If he decided to change business models, then it doesn't matter whether Apple advertises.
If he's aiming to profit from the users, he's also doing it wrong by bringing back all kinds of formerly banned unsavory people. This will over time reduce the market share to the very specific audience that's in line with his preferences, and probably invite trouble from the EU.
So far he sucks at managing a community and apparently doesn't understand the business he got it. Can he get his understanding to a point where he doesn't screw up every time and gets some sizeable wins? I don't know, I think it's not impossible and I think he is trying hard. But maybe before he gets on track for success, he will need to distance himself from the alt-right folks because as I see it they have completely different agenda and it's not their money and reputation on the line so they fight their ridiculous culture wars in their fantasy world and if Musk keeps feeding himself from these people He won't get real signals, real feedback and won't be able to correct course.
Twitter is also not really that important. He's paid way too much for something that on the user side is unimpressive tech, and that is only valuable because of its inertia, and that's by no means guaranteed.
Maybe he doesn't have to make Twitter profitable to justify the outrageous price he paid, maybe it's good enough to make it break even?
What does that have to do with anything? My argument is that I disagree that he "understands what is a good product", and is a good business person, at least in the context of Twitter.
Whether he can survive Twitter failing is not part of the discussion.
> Maybe he doesn't have to make Twitter profitable to justify the outrageous price he paid, maybe it's good enough to make it break even?
Profit is anything right above break even, even just one cent. So no.
He promises one thing and delivers a new promise for something else. Or a flamethrower.
I can foresee that Twitter Orange will be launched next week, which for 8$/month allows you to link to other social media platforms.
On a more serious tone, does anyone know if this is legal in the EU, given the recent Digital Services Act?
> Example of the “don'ts” - Gatekeeper platforms may no longer:
> treat services and products offered by the gatekeeper itself more favourably in ranking than similar services or products offered by third parties on the gatekeeper's platform
> prevent consumers from linking up to businesses outside their platforms
>It's not impossible. Elon is a smart guy. He doesn't currently understand how different social media is from cars and rockets, but he could well figure it out before it's too late.
Unbelievable. Like Paul, I will not be adhering to this absurd new rule. If they ban me for that, then I guess that's that.
So...what?
It's like picking an email server. They all have their differences, but generally they are interoperable. You can read users from anywhere, and follow from anywhere. Better yet, it's fairly easy to move your account from one server to another if you don't like it.
Your best bet is some of the bigger second-tier servers (ones that have thousands but not hundreds of thousands of users) because they aren't as heavily loaded.
https://instances.social/
https://github.com/McKael/mastodon-documentation/blob/master...
Disagree. Mastodon servers can be all over the place from politics to hobbies to tech. It’s not like an email handle at all your choice _matters_ because others moderate the server and who you can connect with.
Self hosting is the only way to go with Mastodon (costs the same as Twitter Blue btw if you don’t want to do your own)
For HN users, this is one among many reasonable tech-oriented choices:
https://techhub.social
Here are a couple that are infosec oriented:
https://infosec.exchange
https://ioc.exchange/
Until they get overloaded, and face the same issues as the "first tier" ones...
I know that what I am about to say is out of personal interest, but I really wish people took the analogy to email servers more seriously and started looking at commercial providers. I'm offering Mastodon services for about $0.50/user/month [0], and I have the infra to host 20-30k users efficiently.
For this type of case, there is nothing more sustainable, fair and efficient than letting the market figure things out. But if we keep thinking that accounts should be offered for free, there will be always market distortions.
[0] https://communick.com/packages
I don't have the time to set up a Mastodon server right now, but part of the appeal of Mastodon is having more control over my data.
Honestly, i think something better can be done around the Activitypub protocol than mastodon. And i'm not a social media guy, so i will wait until someting better is built.
But I do think your approach is the right one. I hope you succeed a breaking even and generate a margin for your time.
Maybe you could benefit from clearer price ? For instance not mixing group prices with prices for single accounts?
Idk I suck at that, but I know all those services pretty well and I was having difficulty to follow prices.
Figuring out these small issues is hard, it gets even harder when I am promising that I am not doing any type of user tracking or analytics. I just saw a message on the support site about someone who wanted to make a deposit, but reported "on mobile, the button is grayed out". Turns out that on mobile there is no cursor to indicate that the user needs to select the payment method first. So, technically not broken, but functionally this issue could've cost me hundreds of dollars already?