I think he only posts polls when he believes he knows the outcome already. Yesterday he posted a poll about unsuspending the journalist accounts and when the outcome wasn't what he wanted instead of following the majority vote he posted it again with different options (with the same result, which he did abide by the second time).
I think this indicates he's tired of Twitter already. But he still owns it, so who will he put in his place? Or maybe he is expecting a landslide "no" result?
It seems like it would be the smart move to hire someone with expertise in social media, give them his high-level vision, and let them implement the details. The last few weeks of Elon's micromanagement have been a complete shitshow.
Whatever you think about removing Elon as head of Twitter, whether you believe that to be smart or not, this is just not how you go about making decisions as a leader.
Think of it this way, will Elon be conducting a new poll on whether or not to fire his replacement in a year's time? (Because that's what this type of decision making process leads to.)
This is not sustainable because it does not bring any sort of stability.
Most self-proclaimed "experts in social media" seem to be responsible for making it the disaster that it is for our societies.
The one thing that has definitely been refreshing about new Twitter is that the leader isn't yet another "social media expert" and just another social media user with similar complaints as millions of other users.
Personally I really hope they also get rid of the "UX experts" next, given how shit Twitter's UX is, especially on anything that isn't a phone.
The problem is that people who want to do social media will become what they hate, because of the very real constraints which people learn about quickly once they're actually steering the ship. Very few social media places don't suck, and it takes a pretty heavy hand to keep things from going completely to hell. The two places I know which aren't hives of scum and villainy are HN and Metafilter; both are heavily moderated, text only, and basically ad free.
I feel like to an extent that is the usual response to any sort of attempt at disruption.
For example, prior to Falcon 9 the argument used to be that SpaceX too would have to either succumb to relying on expensive cost-plus contracts or go bust like all other space companies before them. Yet, as they pushed up against that attitude and tried their own approach, they became successful and set the model that has now led to hundreds of new private space companies. Similarly, the argument against reusing F9 was that it wouldn't fly often enough to pay for reuse.
Thus I think that it isn't too crazy to consider that maybe with all this fiddling around they might stumble upon a more healthy model for social media for their scale. Especially considering that this environment of a large platform with an existing userbase undergoing said change is very unique (in that most other attempts at healthier social media have failed in part due to not being able to rely on pre-existing network effects).
Maybe they'll still fail, but I think it's still worth trying (even if it kills Twitter) rather than just appointing another 'expert' to continue to make things worse. Especially because it isn't my own money on the line :)
It certainly would be a fun experiment. But the dynamics are so quite different from what he usually deals with.
Lets start with employees... both Tesla and especially SpaceX had hordes of people wanting to work there. I don't currently see the same for Twitter, and Elon just removed a bunch of talent.
Customers are also widely different. Tesla were enthusiasts willing to overlook drawbacks and oopsies. SpaceX was few high value ones like NASA, and by now have a great track record, not to mention the price. Instead of believers in the company mission, many twitter users are just average people. They will complain. They might leave due to drastic changes. Sure, there is a strong network effect. But Musk payed a lot of money for that, should he really risk it all?
>Lets start with employees... both Tesla and especially SpaceX had hordes of people wanting to work there. I don't currently see the same for Twitter, and Elon just removed a bunch of talent.
I don't know of anyone who is clamoring to work for Twitter now but the people he fired definitely don't seem like the type you're describing either. I think he views the majority of Twitter to be inmates running the asylum.
The real question is will he be able to find replacements that share his vision/passion for Twitter like he did with those companies. Twitter seems a lot less prestigious than SpaceX or Tesla.
Does he even have a high level vision beyond generating a reaction?
(The "free speech platform" sounded like a vision, but we wouldn't have new banning offences every five minutes if that had been a serious consideration rather than something he said for the likes)
His high level vision was to create "X the everything app" in the style of mega-apps offered by Chinese tech giants. Not only does this vision require clearing massive regulatory hurdles, secure immense amount of capital funding, and acquire/build a highly diversified portofolio of companies covering multiple unrelated consumer sectors, there's probably nobody willing or capable to take that job.
It's fun to think about until you realize building the company/service portofolio that can support a mega-app would almost certainly attract ire from regulators even within the U.S., ignoring the amount of capital investment required to achieve it.
Plus, Uber/Spotify/Doordash/Yelp can barely turn a profit as-is. What incentives will the everything app offer to pull consumers away from these existing competitors other than subsidizing the services with VC money, which would only worsen profitability and sustainability?
Let's imagine Google Cloud, AWS, Azure are resp. Google's / Amazon's / Microsoft's everything apps. They are managing to handle the regulatory weight of supporting applications of all kinds of nature, and if you rethink Twitter as a platform you can do the same as well.
Many things are possible, and the Twitter app today may even continue to work as-is. But underneath it will be able to power more apps and more use cases, all tied under a common cohesive set of interactive primitives, much higher level than what cloud applications today support. This means less to reinvent, less to rediscover, and easier more natural integration between apps, services and components.
It'd be a lot of work, definitely not a 2-3 month project. So you'd need also a survival strategy that keeps Twitter 1.0 working and profitable.
Google, Amazon, and Microsoft absolutely do not have "everything" apps. Google Maps is the closest to a mega-app and it's still highly focused on things that are location-based.
These companies also don't favour their own services over others on their cloud platforms. That's why regulators aren't coming after them. Twitter is not a cloud service provider and it's not hard to see why the argument you presented does not hold up.
1. A general purpose computing platform is an everything app.
2. Cloud platforms and their APIs are a significant step towards moving higher-level in development platforms compared to, say, compiling a raw binary and running it on Linux.
3. Keep moving in that direction.
1. The "everything app" being talked about is essentially a Chinese tech giant mega-app, which are absolutely not general purpose computing platforms which are not "apps" themselves.
2. Agreed but this has nothing to do with Twitter or mega-apps whatsoever.
3. Transitioning to cloud service is not what Twitter needs to do right now even under the mega-app vision. And attempting so under their current situation is a sure fire way to actually go bankrupt.
His everything app idea is similar to WhatsApp yes, but he's had this idea from way back, when he got the X domain. The thing I'm describing is a long term vision, you need to first be profitable with the current platform before you start that.
Has he ever stated anywhere that his long term vision is a "general computing platform"? Because mega-apps are not that. There has been zero building happening or even hinted at towards his everything app vision while he is wrecking everything at Twitter.
He has compared Twitter to a neural network where we (and bots) are the nodes. I feel this was him mostly trying to sound fancy, but in my mind I'm absolutely gonna grab this and run with it.
Mega-app, the way I understand that term, is not what he's after. He's mentioned that he wants to allow HQ video and compete with YouTube and have a separate app which shows a YouTube-like view of only tweets with videos on them. Like a projection of that content, from the same platform.
Or alternatively you can see it as merely a "videos tab" in a single "mega-app", but this distinction is not quite substantial on a higher level, only about the logistics of marketing the app and maintaining it.
As for there being zero building happening... of course. He's trying to stop bleeding cash for now. I'm not suggesting he's working on this NOW.
Let's agree to disagree here because we are clearly not talking about the same things at all. I suggest reading up on what Chinese mega apps look like and Musk's personal comments that referred to WeChat. Adding longform video is exactly part of a conventional mega-app and it is absolutely not revolutionary whatsoever.
Haha, funny response, but I did say the details matter ;-)
I may be projecting my own ideas onto "everything". When Elon took over Twitter, I was inspired by his idea, and combined with concepts from some projects I'm working on, over two weeks or so, in my free time I wrote like 50+ pages of notes on what "Twitter 2.0" might be.
Is Elon's idea anything close to so comprehensive, I don't know. We only know he wanted payments in it, but this is barely scratching the surface of what Twitter could be.
Twitter's timeline of messages could be seen as a communication platform, computation platform, verified facts registry and so on. The rabbit hole is deep if you let your fantasy run wild.
I'm not sure it's meant to make him look good or bad as much as just say "What person who Elon would agree with, who also has an idea of how to run a social media/moderation business, would agree to work for him and implement his vision."
The problem with being someone with ideas outside of the rest of your community is that you generally can't find other people with complimentary skills who agree with you.
And I hate just about anyone you probably consider an experts “vision” on social media, especially since what it ended up becoming was a “”private”” end run around the 1st and 4th amendments.
It really is perfect, a not-government entity making wink-wink decisions at the behest of unelected executive branch employees.
- Level the playing field between the "blue-checks" and everyone else. I think the intent of that is to encourage the 90% of people who passively consume content to engage more, and encourage lurkers without accounts to sign up.
- Reduce the dependency on advertisers by pivoting to a model that is partly user-funded. Reddit seems to have had some success with this, for example.
- Signal that Twitter is going to be less politically partisan going forward, probably in an attempt to rope back in users who moved to right-wing Twitter clones.
I don't think those are objectively terrible ideas, but the implementation so far has been remarkably bad.
> ... probably in an attempt to rope back in users who moved to right-wing Twitter clones.
The problem with Twitter isn't free speech, but objective reality. There's only room for one reality on Twitter -- not two, or three, or four.
Truth Social and the right wing platforms don't challenge people's view that the 2020 election was a fraud, that pizza gate really happened, so they will probably continue now as they are.
For a lot of right-wing people I have spoken to, the Hunter Biden story getting falsely removed for "Russian disinformation" was the last straw. Think of it as a dumb scandal if you want, but the issue was a legitimate news story published by high-profile mainstream news outlets getting removed using counter-disinformation tools. That really damaged Twitter's credibility.
Now they would rather hang out on a site where they don't have to worry about overbearing moderation, at the cost of a handful of nutters talking about Satanic rituals or whatever. I think Musk had a plausible route to getting those users back if he could promise slightly more limited and fair enforcement of the rules.
Is it the fact they don't want anyone to question their belief system? Because that's what I see.
When they are questioned, they martyrize themselves to spark more outrage. (I'm a victim of the woke left!) And then use that as a crutch to deflect further criticism or questions.
If it wasn't Hunter Biden's Laptop, it would be something else, e.g. Pizzagate, Voting Machines, Mail-in Balloting, Fake school shootings, etc.
You can't blame the mainstream media if you're the one that's calling "wolf" over and over without facts.
I don't really think that's the case. We can see the dynamic in action on the Fediverse, a space where anyone can make their own server and moderate it according to their wishes. There are right-wing servers that have created their own walled gardens (Gab, Truth Social), but at the same time the left-wing servers have created server blacklists that include most of the "free speech" servers. Given the option, a lot of people across the political spectrum apparently want hugboxes.
I'm not saying it doesn't happen on the left as well. I'm just saying it's easier to recognize when it does happen on the right. The Dominion v. Fox News lawsuits come to mind here. Parents of Sandy Hook v. Alex Jones, too.
Back around 1991/1992 the Democrats in congress were so convinced there was an October Surprise in the 1980 election. There just wasn't anything there.
Hugboxes don't force you to question your belief system, right? You can go on living in whatever world you want to. But anything coming out of those hugboxes, no one should take seriously, right?
Before social media we would have called much of this stuff "conspiracy theories".
The hard right, and their conspiracy theories about Pizzagate, Voting Machines, Mail-in Balloting and Fake school shootings are crazy and disgraceful, in my opinion. And I lost any respect I might have had for Trump after the aftermath of the 2020 election.
But I'm equally disapproving of the left in their handling of the 2016 election and its aftermath, and the way they represented it as "stolen", as well as their narratives during the BLM "protests" and January 6 "insurrection". Imo, if Trump had really wanted a coup, he would have placed his people in top positions of the armed forces, and used actual armed soldiers. Q-anon and others involved on January 6 did not seem to have anywhere near the kind of organization to carry out an actual coup.
Also, Twitter and outher outlets suppressing (then and even now) the Hunter laptop (not the porn, but the actual evidence of corruption that looked like it involved Joe) made it look super-partisan.
Later on, the partisan divide arround covid, with crazy anti-vaxxers on one side, and similarly irrational support for excessive lockdowns and suppression of the WIV story on the other, it seemed like Twitter was contributing to the excesses of both sides.
The world (and perhaps especially the US) needs a platform where moderates of both sides can meet to discuss their differences, and where moderation is (to the extent it is carried out) applied to the crazy people of BOTH sides when it becomes excessive.
That way, one can hope, it may be possible to separate facts from matters of opinion from outrights falsehoods.
If too many people consistently tow the party line (which many be the case for anyone consistently agreeing with their own side on all issues above), I think a breakup of the USA is inevitable. The result will be one Woke-merica and one Maga-merica, and quite possibly civil war.
When Musk took over, I was hoping he would take the platform in a direction where it would support a moderate centre.
> That way, one can hope, it may be possible to separate facts from matters of opinion from outrights falsehoods.
Jan. 6th was a based on a series of falsehoods. Fox News and several Republican politicians claimed it was a antifa "False Flag" operation the night after it happened.
Fox News downplayed much of the Trump scandals in his presidency. So now turnabout is fair play I guess with the coverage of whatever's on Hunter Biden's laptop? The entire narrative is clouded by Giuliani and company apparently tampering with the data that made it to the NY Post.
> .. and quite possibly civil war.
So we need to restore Trump to the presidency, suspend the constitution, or whatever the right wing demands or there will be violence? Why can't it be just as simple Fox News, Alex Jones, OANN, and Newsmax agreeing to no longer manufacture outrage for ratings?
> So we need to restore Trump to the presidency, suspend the constitution, or whatever the right wing demands or there will be violence?
Not what I'm saying at all, rather the opposite. But if both sides stop interpreting everything coming frome moderates on the other side in the worst possible light, that's a start in mitigating polarization.
> I think the issue is that social media is the most amazing tool for propaganda ever invented.
The Russians realized it in 2016, and the data I've seen indicates that they promoted both Trump and Sanders at the time.
> One of the two political parties learned from that experience rather than wanted to fix it.
Both sides spread a lot of lies and even more half truths both in social media and more traditional media. The loyalists on both sides also both seem unable to spot where their own side is spreading disinformation and propaganda.
Changing the prior poll made sense. The options were “unban immediately”, “unban in a day”, “unban in a week”, “unban in some longer a lot of time”.
The issue with this is obvious: there’s only one “you fucked up” option and the “I agree but let’s talk specifics” group is divided into three. So even though the majority of people said “I agree”, the “you fucked up” got the most votes. Classic first-past-the-post failure mode.
That said, the later poll didn’t reflect this dynamic. My suspicion is that early on in polls the answers are likely to lean pro-Elon, as the votes are more likely to to be Twitter stan’s. As time goes by word of mouth spreads news of the poll to people who aren’t as active on twitter and accordingly are less likely to be pro-elon.
It was the same with the “should I step down” poll, started out pro-Elon, flipped as popularity increased.
Lex Fridman’s subreddit is notoriously trigger-happy with bans and post removals. Lex is a mod, but it’s not clear who is doing the heavy-handed moderation. It’s well-known on Reddit that you don’t post anything less than glowing agreement with Lex on his subreddit, unless you want your post removed and to risk getting banned. I know his podcast personality is popular, but this is not the guy you want calling the shots on social media governance.
OTOH, Elon picking Lex as the fall guy to take the blame wouldn’t entirely surprise me.
Heh, I was permanently banned from /r/lexfridman in a thread about his Duncan Trussell interview. My comment was basically:
"Oh, great, another 'podcaster interviews another podcaster for reciprocal exposure' episode?"
Snarky, sure, but still unfortunate he can't handle some rib jabbing about interviewing a clown like Trussell compared to the more intellectual guests he (used to) interview. :)
> Amazing this guy was ready to get on his knees for Putin up until January.
What do you mean exactly?
> For sure he has a soft spot for Autocrats both in Moscow and in San Francisco
The West establishment has a soft spot for autocrats: whitewashing the wealth of oligarchs, buying cheap oil stolen from common people, selling anti-protest crowd control gear and tear gas, etc, etc; even though "lots of stuff are known about Putin since 2000 till January 2022, some perhaps even worse than Ukraine invasion". I don't think Lex has done or has expressed a wish to do anything comparable to that.
> Every video of his that YT pushes in my feed I see Putin in the thumbnail with sunglasses and behind a huge explosion
I just scrolled through the past 8 years of thumbnails on his main channel and the past year of thumbnails on his clips channel. The thumbnail you describe doesn't exist.
What I found is that he has several thumbnails of Putin looking stern, but without any sunglasses or nuclear blasts. (He also has thumbnails of Hitler and Stalin looking stern, but I don't take that to suggest he's simultaneously a communist and a nazi.) Additionally he has several videos with nuclear blast thumbnails, but none of them have anybody superimposed on front of the explosion. And he doesn't have any meme-like photoshopped sunglasses thumbnails. That sort of meme thumbnail doesn't seem to be his style.
(I didn't watch any of these videos because I can't stand Lex, so I can't comment on what he actually says. But the sort of thumbnail you're describing just isn't his style.)
Having watched a lot of Lex, I know that his family is Ukrainian and he recently visited Ukraine. It's very clear that he is by no means in support of Putin. However, he is clearly interested in Putin and other dictators as a historical and psychological phenomenon and seems fascinated by the idea of interviewing someone like that and the ethical aspects of it.
He does seem like a sycophant to me, his interviewing personality grates on my nerves for several reasons and this is one of them. But I'm about 90% sure he's not been trying to make Putin look cool. At least, not in the thumbnails.
Interesting. Maybe he found the CEO he wants earlier than expected. That would make sense. If the poll says so he can step down immediately, and if not then he can still step down later whenever he feels like. Of course he still maintains ultimate control either way but he can go back to focusing on SpaceX and Tesla more, either immediately or maybe in a few months.
So in this case he may not believe he knows the outcome ahead of time, but it doesn't matter because the outcome is the same either way. Only the timing is different.
I can guarantee you there are plenty of people who do, you really don't need an ex-social media CEO or whatever to do it. Would be absolutely hilarious if he somehow managed to get moot to be the CEO.
> Although I'm not sure who would want to run Twitter now.
If it pays well enough that I could retire afterward then I'd give it a shot. I somehow doubt it's physically possible to fuck things up anywhere near as badly as what's already happened.
Ask any head coach of the Dallas Cowboys working under Jerry Jones how this kind of relationship works out for those involved. I get the sense that it would be very similar.
I'm sure plenty of people would love that job on their CV or filling their bank account but of the actually qualified people, who would want to be micromanaged by Elon Musk? There's better options out there
I'm sure any of the goons who helped plan this debacle after he was forced to buy^H^H^H make good on his agreement to buy it would be delighted to run it.
Of course he knows what the results will be. He owns twitter. He has all the admin passwords to the server that runs the poll. The admins that run the server answer to him. The result of this poll will be whatever Elon Musk wants it to be.
Email to the admins: "Hey guys I'd like the results of the poll to be the following..."
No chance.
Interesting side note: Here in Australia this morning on the ABC public broadcaster's national News channel, one of the presenters said "if you hate Elon Musk, vote yes"... encouraging the mostly left-leaning ABC viewers to log on and vote Musk out. The poll will get swamped by this politically divisive Musk-hating recruitment drive, which is why the results stand as they are.
Clearly, the vote count is full of fraud because all of the users are bots anyways, yeah? In the pools of thought that Elon floats in, it would only be more fraudulent if Dominion was conducting the poll.
Some people have different modes of making decisions and framing the results, like all good outcomes being on them and all bad outcomes being due to external circumstances and “wasn’t me”. You think that’s cowardice (and assume morals), for other people it could be just convenience
The second poll about unbanning the journalists went for 24 hours (the first was only an hour or so), so even though "now" was the winning option, he still got the outcome he was looking for by giving them a 24+ hour suspension.
what was that outcome? fewer people knowing about his childish behavior? no, that wasn't it. fewer people knowing about his private jet and the mechanisms of being able to track it. nope, didn't work that way either. showing the world he's a petulant little child that throws a hissy fit when he doesn't get his way. now we're getting somewhere.
> I think he only posts polls when he believes he knows the outcome already.
Agreed, and this move would almost certainly be more of a distraction than an actual stepping down. Whoever is put in charge will still be under Elon’s thumb, but with a different person in the CEO seat, Elon can pass blame for the bad decisions and ride in like a white knight to reverse any unpopular actions.
> I think this indicates he's tired of Twitter already.
He’s also facing a huge amount of backlash, pent-up backlash, that he hasn’t experienced before or more successfully insulated himself from before. For example, when he was recently booed off stage.
I saw someone comment elsewhere that he is also highly leveraged, and that if Twitter tanks and Tesla’s stock keeps falling, he stands to lose a lot of money and even potentially control of Tesla. I haven’t looked into the veracity of the argument, but it seems plausible that he’s in over his head in more ways than one.
He’s just going to put someone like Blake Masters or David Sacks in charge. Which, honestly, would be worse than old Twitter but better than erratic Elon Twitter.
Rules dropping out of the blue around flight tracking, not being able to link to other social media sites, the confusing verification issue with all the fake/parody accounts, mass banning of journalists for linking to reporting he didn’t like etc. Old Twitter had none of this.
He doesn't want to lead Twitter... social media is a junk hole mostly filled with lowest common denominator users. He's definitely tired of the stupid issues on both sides that are filled with entitled users and whiners. It's a lose lose, let someone else fill their day with that.
He bought Twitter. From day one he didn’t need to be CEO. But he chose to immediately show up and make big changes, both in personnel and in the platform itself. He doesn’t need a poll to hire somebody else to run the company.
Maybe, or maybe not, but the fact of the matter is that a poll in a private platform does not a vote make, and using it as such for varying degrees of impactful events is either irresponsible or willfully deceptive.
> "and when the outcome wasn't what he wanted instead of following the majority vote"
Not true, he changed the poll well before its conclusion. Then he abided by the majority vote and unbanned those users. But you're not happy, and need to make stuff up about what he did or didn't do.
His latest poll deciding his own fate reveals the bold transparency approach. People can't handle transparency it seems. Almost like they want things decided behind closed doors that decide the terms they agree to. The world needs more transparency not less.
It will be sad to see him step down, if the poll decides that. It's been highly entertaining. The outrage and temper tantrums sparked in entitled over-sensitive Twitter users and commentators, is quality popcorn material. Must the curtain close?
> The outrage and temper tantrums sparked in entitled over-sensitive Twitter users and commentators, is quality popcorn material. Must the curtain close?
I do mostly agree with you—Musk's outrage and temper tantrums have been pretty funny. This is probably been the funniest time Twitter has, just weeks of everyone dunking on him and watching him flail in rage. But honestly, it's getting kind of tiresome. Every time the conversation moves on to something else, he bans someone or adds some new rules or gets mad about something, to keep himself in the center of attention. I think it's probably time to close the curtains.
Actual outrage from users, including celebrity meltdowns and viral whinging. The amount of users threatening to leave, linking to their tumble-weed infested Mastodons is hilarious.
All Musk did was rattle cages with a few truth bombs and mild trolling. Entertaining stuff. Anyone voting "yes" takes life way too seriously.
Not to mention devaluing the insights of Twitter Files and FBI-tweaked moderation processes and staffer ideology influence. It's good to see all that exposed in the light. Musk did the dirty work that was needed.
> It's good to see all that exposed in the light. Musk did the dirty work that was needed.
The twitter files did reveal the kind of insider access that powerful people get to journalists in order to push a narrative, but I do wish he had accomplished that without doing the exact same thing he was complaining about—giving journalists insider access to power in order to push a narrative.
I muted his account months ago, but still got the retweets. I voted yes, which seems to be getting momentum and is now leading by a very comfortable margin.
I have him blocked. Surprisingly, I can still click through and it looks like I could vote if I wanted to (which feels like a bug, but, eh, probably not Twitter's biggest issue right now).
If you mute, the rewtweets will be masked unless you reveal them. I saw this one because it was on HN before it closed. I never saw the previous polls until they were closed.
not too long ago he claimed that spam and bot accounts make up an estimated 11% of Twitter’s total user base, I don't think that has changed much so I agree these polls are simply a farce.
Chamath has his SPACs and Calacanis has his syndicate. They know how to craft deals that benefit them over other investors. I assume Sacks does the same with his investments.
They know a bad deal because they are usually the ones crafting them.
He's stuck with Twitter now, at an overinflated price. He'll never be able to make enough money from it to justify the valuation. Will he leave, no he wont, he'll still pull the strings from behind the scences. He just wont be doing it so publically anymore, he'll get a front to do it for him.
That is not what happened at all. In the first poll, he asked when the journalists should be unsuspended and the options were (a) now, (b) tomorrow, (c) in 7 days, and (d) longer. Choice (a) got 43%, not the majority. Choices (c) and (d) totaled 52.5%, which means the 𝗺𝗮𝗷𝗼𝗿𝗶𝘁𝘆 voted for a minimum suspension of 7 days. Elon then essentially invoked "rank choice" voting and ran a new poll with only the top two choices (a) now, and (b) 7 days. "Now" won, and he made good on it.
Look, if you want to claim you are governing by poll and have people believe it then you can't change the rules after you start no matter how bad they are. It's far too easy to manipulate the result by adding or removing options after you know the voting trends. It's not as if this was that important of a decision anyway. There was no downside to simply respecting the first poll result and counting it as a lesson to think about the options a little harder next time.
Eh, for whatever reason I don’t think he’d do that. He’s in it for the chaos, and what says chaos more than letting a Twitter mob decide who should be ceo?
Whether you think he would or not he’s not given me any reason to trust him about anything ever again. As a bonus he did get me to quit my Twitter habit after over a decade. Now that I’ve built up a good size list of people to follow on mastodon I actually like it more.
I understand the point is he’s hoping people will log back in to engage. But I’m just done. Even if he steps down his actions have shown what a massive single point of failure the whole thing is.
So I guess what I’m saying is: the fact that he controls everything is more the problem than whether he will exercise this one specific control.
It made sense to remove the first poll. It wasn’t constructed in the best way. The revision was warranted in my opinion, and doesn’t necessarily show that he was being tricksy.
I thought Jason Calacanis was going to run it. He'd be much better.... also the type to not put up with crap - and not the type either to "run by committee".
I think this indicates he's tired of Twitter already. But he still owns it, so who will he put in his place? Or maybe he is expecting a landslide "no" result?