The sooner we get away from the delusion that "twitter is basically a public service," the better.
This timult has been good for people to internalize that it's a private, for-profit company, whose leadership can change, whose moral compass is up for grabs. Not the right venue for official communications from governments and institutions, let alone you or me...
i think elon himself is actively trying to have it both ways - he's attempting to run it like the for-profit business you've mentioned but he's also continuing that "town square" idea/rhetoric:
I like the second tweet (sadly he does not mention crimethInc, but considering he banned them I understand why) (and yes, I'll keep mentioning that ban until I get the reason why) but the first one is so full of shit, even if I'm not a fan of the guy I don't think he wrote it himself. Maybe the new corporate CEO did, totally the kind of corporate shit I'd expect from a salesman (saleswoman in that case)
This is really only because he's moving it more towards something like an utility - it still is a for-profit company, one can't easily just change that especially considering the hostility towards freedom of speech in the world currently.
> The real delusion is mastodon being a reasonable replacement
Personally, I've found Mastadon to be a fantastic replacement. What do you believe are the things that make Mastadon not a decent replacement? It definitely fits better with the public and open service that people wanted Twitter to be.
I currently follow 447 people on Mastodon, and 258 follow me. I think on Twitter, after 15 years of having an account, I followed about 1000 people, many inactive by the time I tired of Naughty Old Mr Car’s antics, and was followed by about 1000 (presumably ditto). _In my niche_, it’s a perfectly adequate replacement, and is better than old-Twitter in some ways (it is so much better than the post-Musk mess it’s not even funny), but it would not be for everyone. I post about as much, maybe a little more (it’s easier to have a conversation, for a variety of mechanical reasons.)
I do miss quote-tweets as a mechanic; while they could certainly be abused, there were legitimate use cases. Mastodon plans to add them, but AIUI getting the appropriate changes made to ActivityPub to allow for consent-based quote-posting is a whole thing.
Different technical communities are joining Mastodon one at a time (math, rust, and enthusiast product communities). Time will tell if this can lead to a critical mass. I wouldn't hold my breath but I also wouldn't discount the possibility to the point of not thinking about it.
Most of my people have moved to either Slack or Signal, depending on how much written content there was. Slack for people with a lot to say, and Signal for social chats. The majority of my Twitter follows have left the platform. I still use it though.
Most social networks try to provide the energy necessary to get a critical mass of users aboard, but Mastodon is the opposite. Mastodon throws up a torrent of Nerd Bullshit® to make sure that only the chosen few will tolerate it.
Who is nobody? Almost all of the people I used to follow and discuss the topics I cared about on Twitter are now all on Mastadon. I find that I'm having similar discussions at this point with almost all the same people I used to.
Mastodon is great for talking to an engaged audience. My feed is full of interesting stuff. Less good for narcissistic babbling to thousands of “followers.”
Mastodon is a reasonable replacement for some subset of Twitter’s userbase. It works for me, say, because the sort of people I followed on Twitter largely ended up on Mastodon. It would work less well if, say, you were into influencers (dunno where if anywhere those are going), celebs (Threads), crypto-people/metaverse-people/AI-people/other-tech-hype-people (still committed to Twitter, I think), or journalists (there are some experimenting with Mastodon, but Bluesky is generally their Twitter-in-Exile).
I’m not sure that there will ultimately be _one_ Twitter replacement; with the exception of Digg->Reddit, it’s actually rather unusual for that to happen when a social media site dies. Livejournalers-in-exile mostly didn’t go to Dreamwidth, say; they scattered to a bunch of rather dissimilar social networks.
It is more like a piblic service than ever now. Maybe the "bias" is more visible for some people than before, but it's gone down to 10% of it was before (no mass bannings of conservatives and general oppressiveness against speech!!). Only shows the blindness towards those that think it's somehow more biased now. Jesus.
The old board's moral compass was surely for sale, that is true. Never again.
I know this will be perceived as “mean” or “bad discussion” but based on your comment history you truly have an unhealthy obsession with Elon Musk and that fact really scares me because on this site your vote equals ten of mine because you post all the time.
I have a healthy appreciation of the person. If he was an AI, or an anonymous council, I would say the same. But these entities tend to be exceptional humans. I have had largely the same opinion of the man for ~10 years and understand where his decision-making comes from so with nowadays's trendy ill-informed hate-opinions I tend to drive discussion out of the distasteful anti-progress rhetoric that is undeserved. I can assure you my decisionmaking and posts come from a good place. In an increasingly skewed world straight lines don't look right anymore. For what it's worth, I don't think you're unaligned to the current state of the world saying what you're saying.
> Because I post all the time
I don't? I have had lengths of years of just lurking. Maybe I'm a bit more active nowadays but am far from as active as the top 20% or so on the platform probably. Also my vote doesn't count more than yours. But from what I've seen at times I think some botters votes truly mean more than ours. I still put the original thought and work to every single one of my writings while knowing that. Truth and hard work will always prevail.
It's possible that the end goal for him is to have a political influence and not some kind of direct profit from X(Twitter) as a compan. Then the revenue is not a problem, but the plummeting number of users is.
That was 100% the goal of buying Twitter. Just look at the people he's routinely photographed with in the VIP lounges at various events. He was buying the influence machine, not a business. No doubt about it.
If you tweet something along the lines of "I'd buy a tshirt with that image on it" you'll immediately get ten bots offering to sell you that shirt from a print-on-demand site.
Unfortunately there are a lot of Elon haters who just make stuff up. I’m not saying you are one of those. But I will say that because of this phenomenon, when you make claims of this sort, if you don’t provide evidence you are likely to be asked for evidence.
Can you link a few examples where: "If you tweet something along the lines of "I'd buy a tshirt with that image on it" you'll immediately get ten bots offering to sell you that shirt from a print-on-demand site."?
There should be thousands upon thousands of examples, a single search away, to choose from right?
That is what the second link is. Most of those replies are fake, you can tell because there are bots working in call-and-answer pairs, with one stating their admiration for a shirt design and the second one providing a storefront that has miraculously spontaneously generated to fit that product demand.
For the second link in your previous comment, only 4 accounts posted the same link 5 times total, and only one of the accounts looks suspicious enough to be a bot, the others have join dates of 2011, 2012, etc., and not too suspicious posting histories.
Did you actually take a close look? If you did, why did you pick one of the least convincing examples?
Your analysis is wrong. @livpost_br, @cosasdevida_13, @humseila, and @Steven_Mr9 are all bots. Early reg dates and retweeting of the content of others does not prove an account is not a bot. If you actually skim those accounts' replies more carefully, you will see the spamming of t-shirt links.
I concede that may not have been the best example. Did you actually read my comment in full? If you did, why did you pick one of the least convincing examples?
That bot shouldn't have even gotten as far as to spam all of those tweets in the first place. You'd think they would have created a more bot-proof account signup process. Not to mention, that thread was made on 10/21, there's no telling how many days it took for it to be suspended after someone had to make a thread about it.
As the other poster pointed out, the signup was years ago for some of them so it’s unfair to blame current management for that. I would encourage you to report any bots you notice though. And as Elon said they will make mistakes. As we all know bots versus humans is an eternal arms race, not much new here.
> You'd think they would have created a more bot-proof account signup process
So you’re concerned about the signup process at sign up time.
Sorry to edit but I wasn’t clear before and can’t reply.
I just don’t see these. I think they are buried deep in threads that aren’t surfaced. Only by searching specifically can you find them. That’s pretty much what Elon planned: freedom of speech, not freedom of reach.
Also it seems reasonable to speculate that these particular bots are not prioritized to the extent that they are directly addressing specific requests on essentially (often) leaf nodes of conversations.
Reg date proves nothing. Accounts can be shared, sold, or hacked.
> As we all know bots versus humans is an eternal arms race, not much new here.
Calls into question claims that there have been substantiative gains made in that arms race, though- which is the point of this sub-thread in the first place!
As I said I don't see spam on the site (other than these deep leaf node posts surfaceable only by pinpoint targeted searches which is not normal usage) so I think it's gotten a lot better. You so far haven't convinced me that it's worse, but you're free to question things.
The t-shirt monger scam is just one I've heard about secondhand. What really annoys me is I'm somehow stuck on a bot target list where every other tweet I make gets instantaneously hit with at least one like from an account that is clearly a bot. It's sufficiently annoying that I end up doing a dance where I report the account for spam, block it, and then delete and retweet the tweet just to get rid of the fake interaction. So I'm understandably miffed at the degradation of my twitter experience.
The alternatives are only slowly taking shape, and the network effects are pretty strong. So I'm not surprised that it is slow, but my impression is that the efforts to move away are getting more serious. It varies by topic, but in some areas I've seen a lot of people on Bluesky now. A large number of them still use Twitter as well for now, I suspect this could change once it becomes clearer whether Bluesky will work out well enough.
The activity is low, the discussions are boring and the communities are homogeneous.
It's nothing like when twitter started.
The young us started the energy on twitter, and the old us moved out of it. This means the new services have people with the same opinion, less energy and busy life. It makes for a bland experience.
I'm pretty sure the current young crowd is on platforms we are not, innovating, creating their culture, and we are just not there to participate, or even witness it.
More people claimed that they wanted to leave than actually left. I've heard a ton of people claim that they'd leave, but then they've decided to stick around for DMs and then just never left and now their back using Twitter/X like nothing happened.
it definitely feels like it to me - my account is more than 14 years old and looking in my following list recently i lamented how many accounts i enjoyed are have become minimally active or have moved to other platforms like bluesky/mastodon
The worst thing Elon has done to Twitter imo is elevate the paid blue checks to the top of the comment stream. The replies usually had the best information, and were my favorite part of the site. Now I have to scroll past dozens or hundreds of nonsense replies to get to anything good. And for that reason good commenters don't bother much anymore.
Although maybe I should thank him, because my time on Twitter has gone basically to zero, and my overall mood and productivity have gone up.
I guess I'll never not read "X" as an unknown value that should be filled-in by the reader. That headline is quite confusing, and by no fault of the writer.
Imagine believing that X has made efforts against bots. Every day I get hundreds of necro-likes on ancient tweets from zero-follower accounts with profile pics of almost-naked women. The bot problem is way worse than it ever was before Musk.
It's the opposite for me. I have less bots in me feed. I do have the same like problem you do, but it's a less of an issue for me than having a stream polluted with empty tweets, crypto scams and political robots.
I don't know how Twitter really was 5-10 years ago, and I was mostly on technical topics anyways - only recently I started to be more interested in getting "news" from there.
Gosh, the amount of fake news and hate speech is freaking insane. It's worse than being at the stadium.
Every tweet I read I had to Google or research for authenticity, until I found a few profiles more reliable - however this doesn't prevent fake news/hateful comments in the tweets.
Needless to say, I deleted my account when I realized that Elon has a political agenda. Bah. Next.
EDIT: I only feel like saying: poor newer generations. They will need a critical thinking like never before.
I think Musk drastic method could bring interesting changes to twitter.
But building wechat is not my idea of a better world.
Cashless societies are one step away from diving into dystopian nightmares. And a centralized chat and payment system is just way too much power in one spot for the gov not to abuse it.
I dislike what Musk has done to Twitter so far. It feels closed, greedy and messy.
But in fairness, one has to say that after building a $650B company (Tesla) and a $150B company (Space X), it is not necessarily a sign of business failure when one buys a $44B company they want to restructure and cut revenues in half in the process.
Like when you have built a 65 floor skyscraper and buy a 4 floor house as the base for your next project. You wouldn't probably be that scared to take off 2 of the floors if your plan is to reshape it into the next skyscraper.
You do know the difference between market valuation and profit and revenue, right? Because it doesn’t sound like it.
Tesla is bigger than ALL of the major car manufacturers summed if you compare market cap (# shares x share price).
But let's look at reality today and not hyped up 10 year numbers:
Tesla's revenue and profit is a tiny fraction just Toyota alone. Toyota's revenue last year was $10 TRILLION, with a profit of $500 B and a market cap of $289 Billion. Tesla? 25B revenue, 2.7B profit, market cap? 649 Billion, twice the size of Toyota's despite 1/100th the revenue!! That's a full on LOL. And Tesla only became profitable a few years ago after 10 years without musk and 10 years with musk (roughly, and putting aside the first year's profit due to BitCoin investments).
Now, Musk revealed in the recent earnings call that their margins are around 7%.
The real numbers paint a far dimmer picture than those of Big Casino.
I'm really interested to see what the second decade of Musk Tesla looks like. Will people buy used Teslas? Will batteries last 2x as expected? Will people second-life their car batteries as home backup? Will it really cost 2/3rds the price of a Tesla for new batteries? I have a feeling Tesla will remain a small niche brand (it describes itself as a carbon offset company), and instead focus on charging stations which seems far more profitable.
Familiar with the old cliche about who made money during the gold rush of 1800's California? The people making pickaxes and shovels. Infrastructure with endless rental fees is the way to go IMHO. Also, I'm a terrible investor. :)
> Tesla's revenue and profit is a tiny fraction just Toyota alone. Toyota's revenue last year was $10 TRILLION, with a profit of $500 B and a market cap of $289 Billion. Tesla? 25B revenue, 2.7B profit, market cap? 649 Billion, twice the size of Toyota's despite 1/100th the revenue!!
You're mixing JPY and USD. The numbers you give for Toyota need to be divided by 150 JPY/USD. So $66B revenue with $3B profit.
I wouldn’t ask a world class surgeon to defend me in criminal court. Self awareness about domain expertise is crucial. Otherwise, your Dunning-Krugering your way to value destruction.
“I am brilliant and will succeed at anything” runs into a wall when your acumen in a specific domain and a string of luck hits the wall.
Twitter was not an engineering problem to be solved when purchased, for example. Which makes sense! It was a social network, and driven by the whims of the system of humans using it. Does Elon know people? Enough to sell Teslas, but not enough to protect or grow the value of a social network.
Blind Elon faithers are unshakable. Figure out what it would take to boycott the last of the advertisers on Twitter still providing revenue and put it out of its misery. It will live on as a Wikipedia page as a cautionary tale around going public, lack of corporate governance, and the whims of the ultra wealthy and their outcomes on the rest of us.
Hey, you can judge him whenever you want. I'm just saying that this forum has no predictive power and has low quality knowledge about the world.
How much time he "gets" is probably between him and his creditors.
Inevitably some guy will come around organizing some Twitter boycott. Or maybe some Elon fanboy meme. I'm going to be honest with you.
Normal people don't do that. Only people who post online obsessively making low quality predictions and then complaining about a loneliness epidemic and stuff like that.
Surely if you support free speech you support consumers collectively expressing to brands who they would prefer they not do business with from a marketing perspective. If not preferring the actions of wealthy, power hungry monsters is not normal, I agree to not be normal.
If this forum has no predictive powers and low knowledge of the world, you need not worry about comments here, as they have no relevance towards the outcome. Right?
I suggest therapy if this is considered fun, regardless of individual, but that’s a topic for another thread. Good people should not be miserable, and people who take pleasure in the suffering of others need professional help.
Certainly though, enjoy when your own predictions are correct.
If it hadn't been Musk, it would have been someone else. Twitter was grossly over-valued, over-staffed and under-performing in a business sense. There might have been a gentler way to handle the transformation, but Musk being Musk is attempting to speed-run the transformation and pay no attention of how it hurts staff or certain parts of the user base.
Twitter was stuck in a local maxima. Having lots of "important metrics" trending downward isn't news. The fact that someone took the helm and made the difficult decisions that nobody was willing to do (including the founder!) is pretty big news.
Ah, yes. The difficult decisions to brashly say you will buy a company at an inflated price, attempt to weasel out of the sale after later regretting it, only to be forced by a judge to go through with it.
To push Russian propaganda, to threaten to blackmail advertisers by removing their verified status if they don't spend more money, to utterly destroy tens of billions of dollars in valuation in mere months.
Not to mention the renaming of a company that had achieved a household name status that many marketers could only dream of, etc.
I'm sure glad someone had to step in and make all these tough decisions.
Not just the company name, “tweet” was a household verb and noun. What do you do now on X? Post? I can post anywhere, I’ve been posting in other places for decades. There was just one place to tweet, it boggles my mind that they tossed that aside.
When the shape of the hole changes, people still try to fit the same peg inside of it. I'm not sure why. People resist change I guess. Twitter is dead. Elon bought the scraps to short cut early network effective that is impossible to do otherwise. This was the price of admission to a game he is playing against zuck and friends. In 5 years, people won't be asking what do you call a tweet now? Tweets won't even matter. Most people tweet into a black hole. This purchase was about a starting point for a new platform that has more in common with chinese super apps than it does with anything else in the US mobile app market, including the former twitter.
> Twitter is dead. Elon bought the scraps to short cut early network effective that is impossible to do otherwise.
He didn’t buy the scraps, he bought a whole ass company. Scrapping it happened afterward.
If he were smart he would’ve kept the twitter name going and launched the X “everything platform” alongside using the same accounts like Instagram/Threads. But maybe even put it inside the current twitter app, since they still don’t have any new features to make a separate “everything” app out of. Things disconnected from “tweets” like direct messaging could’ve been immediately reshuffled into being X features.
Repurposing the blue checkmark with preferential tweet promotion could’ve been launched as paid bonus for “X Pro” or something, maybe causing less kerfuffle about charging for twitter.
But that’s just my opinion as someone who bailed on social networks years ago, who knows if it would’ve gone better.
Elon has actually tried to do some good things for Twitter, like maintaining free speech, for which he has been largely castigated by the liberal media and avoided by advertisers, who hate "controversy".
Not just substack. He deliberately instructed the team to delay links out to multiple specific websites.
People keep saying he is some bastion of free speech, when talking about a guy who literally fires people who contradict him, bans people he dislikes, and downright disconnects his platform from the rest of the online discourse.
I remember last year’s zeitgeist that after 75% of the people are fired, Twitter will stop working.
It works even better now. And they’ve added lots of features. Not a fan of the new branding, but I prefer free speech and community notes over opacity of previous Twitter admin.
Ad revenue went down because of boycott calls by dissatisfied Twitter-users who could not handle the opening of the Overton window. To many that open window was a breath of fresh air but to them it carried in the stench of different ideas which had formerly been filtered out. Many of them made a great show of claiming to leave Twitter and some of them left - they're part of that 15%.
Twitter is still not my thing because I dislike the format which I see as a textual forerunner of the likes of TikTok but it got more palatable after Musk brought in the kitchen sink and started throwing out the old censorious guard.
Among one of the other aspects, one of the quite hopeful posts I've seen on X was from X engineering:
- Completely rebuilt the For you serving and ranking systems from the ground up, resulting in a decrease 90% reduction in lines of code from 700K to 70K, a 50% decrease in our compute footprint, and an 80% increase in the throughput of posts scored per request.
Among a ton of other improvements. Obviously the company is now more tech-focused. And shedding its old skin (not users the way people are saying, 15% goes literally inside random year-to-year deviation). X/Twitter has proven that it can endure Freedom.
One thing I'm sure is that the sale has shifted us off one very bad timeline.
Musk has a track record of proving skeptics and commentators alike wrong. With Tesla and spacex. Now one should assume the same with twitter. Even if my experience with the platform has made me move further away from it. Maybe it will be a totally different thing in a couple of years. Time will tell.
Edit: I made a pretty unbiased and rational comment. But I can see how many people are biased and despise musk for some reason or the other. I do not have any bias or baked interest. I’m just stating facts as I see them
Tesla and SpaceX are successes because of government programs and legitimately competent leadership outside of Musk. Twitter has neither of those things.
They’re also in very different “legacy” manufacturing industries that hadn’t been disrupted in a while, not in consumer facing software. PayPal was his last foray in that.
Indeed. A year ago, Twitter / X was predicted to completely collapse 6 months after Elon bought the company followed by bankruptcy afterwards.
We have given the predictions enough time to manifest and they haven't. Had the layoff not happened, the company would already be bankrupt much earlier.
Because the thing's wasn't built too well originally. Twitter/X has been hard at work the last year making itself more efficient, check @XEng:
This has been a year full of engineering excellence that sometimes can go unnoticed. Besides all the visible changes you see on our app, here are some of the most important improvements we have made under the hood.
- Consolidated the tech stacks for For you, Following, Search, Profiles, Lists, Communities and Explore around a singular product framework.
- Completely rebuilt the For you serving and ranking systems from the ground up, resulting in a decrease 90% reduction in lines of code from 700K to 70K, a 50% decrease in our compute footprint, and an 80% increase in the throughput of posts scored per request.
- Unified the For you and video personalization and ranking models, which significantly improved video recommendation quality.
- Refactored the API middleware layer of our tech stack and in doing so simplified the architecture by removing more than 100K lines of code and thousands of unused internal endpoints and eliminating unadopted client services.
- Reduced post metadata sourcing latency by 50%, and global API timeout errors by 90%.
- Blocked bots and content scrapers at a rate +37% greater than 2022. On average, we prevent more than 1M bots signup attacks each day and we’ve reduced DM spam by 95%.
- Shutdown the Sacramento data center and re-provisioned the 5,200 racks and 148,000 servers, which generated more than $100M in annual savings. In total, we freed up 48 MW of capacity and tore down 60k lbs. of network ladder rack before re-provisioning it to other data centers.
- Optimized our usage of cloud service providers and began doing much more on-prem. This shift has reduced our monthly cloud costs by 60%. Among the changes we made was a shift of all media/blob artifacts out of the cloud, which reduced our overall cloud data storage size by 60%, and separately, we succeeded in reducing cloud data processing costs by 75%.
- Built on-prem GPU Supercompute clusters and designed, developed, and delivered 43.2Tbps of new network fabric architecture to support the clusters.
- Scaled network backbone capacity and redundancy, which resulted in $13.9M/year in savings.
- Started automated peak traffic failover tests to validate the scalability and availability of the entire platform continuously.
Yet the platform was repeatedly predicted to completely collapse afterwards, which it did not. We gave those predictions enough time to make sure that Twitter / X would not survive its first year.
So here we are 1 year later, hundreds of millions of users still continuing to use the platform regardless of all of that.
Sorry but Elon is probably in the top millionth of a percentile in brainpower alone. He will likely single-handedly bring humanity out of the dark ages and into the interstellar space. Articles like this are just trying to be relevant by glomming onto Elon’s name and we shouldn’t give them our attention.
As such, I have flagged this article and will flag any articles that paint Elon in a bad light. Go have your fun with someone else who isn’t saving humanity. Once you all learn to behave yourselves I will remove the flag.
You’re right, I haven’t brushed up on the guidelines and my comment was pithy.
I did notice however there are no official guidelines for flagging. I will reach out to HN to see if they can update this. I did find one relevant comment by dang.
> The purpose of flagging is to indicate that a story does not belong on HN. Frivolous flagging—e.g. flagging a story that's clearly on-topic by the site guidelines just because one personally dislikes it—eventually gets an account's flagging privileges taken away. But there's a new 'hide' link for people to click if they'd just like not to see a story.
This timult has been good for people to internalize that it's a private, for-profit company, whose leadership can change, whose moral compass is up for grabs. Not the right venue for official communications from governments and institutions, let alone you or me...