I'm trying to think of what Elon Musk might do with Twitter and why I should care. I'm coming up pretty dry, but let's go through the list.
Conservatives periodically go up in arms over the belief that Twitter has "shadow banned" them. That is to say, Twitter's algorithm has quietly reduced their influence without telling them. Musk will presumably "fix" this and then make the algorithm public, but since the whole shadow banning thing is just a conspiracy theory in the first place, this won't make any difference.
Speaking of the all-powerful algorithm, Musk has promised to make it transparent. Will he? If he does, I don't think it will matter. But I suspect he'll come up with some reason not to.
Musk will let Donald Trump and other banned public figures back on Twitter. Big deal.
Musk has made noises about making Twitter genuinely free of moderation. Anyone will be allowed to say anything they want! But he's going to find out this is harder than it sounds. A true free-for-all will (a) lose users, who just don't want the hassle of being trolled constantly, and (b) lose advertisers, who don't want to be associated with a toxic cesspool. One way or another, Musk, like every other social media owner, is going to have to figure out some compromise between free speech and profitability.
Maybe Musk will create a new paid tier. I have my doubts about this, but Musk is a helluva marketing genius. Maybe he can figure out a way to make it work.
Maybe Musk will add an edit button! Hooray for Elon! That will earn him about five minutes of goodwill before everyone figures out there are downsides to this and starts yelling at Elon to fix the edit button.
Musk also wants to eliminate spam bots, and this is a worthy endeavor that would substantially improve Twitter. The question is, can he do it without mistakenly banning lots of real people too? Nobody else has ever been able to thread this needle.
Maybe Musk will try to compete with TikTok, just like everyone else. This would require him to invest in really great video creation tools to go along with really great monetization tools for creators. Who knows? It could work. But every other social media platform is trying to crack this code too.
Get rid of the blue check? Expand the blue check? There's an astonishing amount of conspiracy theorizing that swirls around the whole blue check phenomenon.
Go back to 140 characters? Expand to 480 characters? Allow blog-length tweets?
Create a client interface that allows you to search for both users and tweets? And also isn't completely lame?
So far, none of these are things I care all that much about, nor are they things that are likely to change Twitter much. However, there's also a wild card. Elon really is a genius, even if he does throw off harebrained idiocies periodically, and he might come up with something completely unforeseen. That is, something that's seemingly unrelated to Twitter as it exists and transforms it into something totally new. Who knows?
"Musk has made noises about making Twitter genuinely free of moderation."
At least one writer critical of Musk claims Musk blocked him on twitter. Not sure if this is true or if Twitter blocked him from some other reason.
Free speech doesn't mean Musk has to listen to everything you say.
As long as the money flows...
Things like Twitter, or Reddit, are like the B-52s of the internet, you can't really make them much better than they are now, and too much monkeying will only make them unwieldy.
If you leave Twitter unmoderated and open it up to every slavering yahoo on the planet it will quickly turn into 4chan, or whichever chan it is now (Super Milk?). It will be a megaphone for mental illness and nothing else and will more likely to end up heavily regulated because of it, --should the Democrats ever grow half a ball, or the Republicans seize the government and one Democrat achieves a Twitter following.
4Chan is pedo's
My guess is he'll develop self-writing tweets that relieve users of the need to use a keyboard. Just yell "Tweet something insulting about liberals!" at the app and it will do the rest.
Also he will let cats open their own accounts.
🙂🙂🙂
You didn't mention the thing that I think may turn out to be the most significant. He will authenticate every user. That is to say, there will be zero anonymity. Perhaps there will be pseudonyms, but I'm thinking no.
Open sourcing the algorithm is nice and all, but probably won't have much impact, as you surmise. But who knows, really? Maybe it will allow people to game it all that much more.
@dril is getting doxxx'd (again).
The cool kidz will bring upset.
"Maybe it will allow people to game it all that much more."
Of course it will. That's the whole reason to keep the algorithms secret in the first place.
There was a recent scientific article describing how a simple AI works. It was very interesting because if was the (or one of the) first to tackle this. The code is open. The training data sets are known. But no one really understands how the end product ends up working the way it does.
Opening up the algorithm may not help people fully understand how it works and how the different parts play off each other. As for conspiracy theorists, it won't matter--they'll always find something wrong.
'They' might not know how it works, but 'they' know how to steer its decisions with the right training sets.
To the extent the main idea here was to distract from the new wave of Tesla competition I think Elon hoped to make a lot of noise and take no responsibility as usual. Instead he made a little bit of noise and will probably take a fair amount of responsibility. But really, who cares?
Won't making the algorithm open make it easy to be copied? In theory, can't another group simply copy it and set up another version of Twitter? Maybe "Tweeter".
The common argument against this is that users will be more than happy to pay or stay for the other things the company provides, in this case a robust userbase and the myriad other features Twitter provides.
That said, I suspect the algorithm is fueled by things like opaque sentiment analysis and user reputation metrics, that are, themselves fueled by private and proprietary data, which will not be disclosed. In the end, the conservatives who think this will reveal explicitly terrible things don't understand the concept of abstraction in software development.
Change "conservatives" to "political people on Left and Right" and you have a generalised observation.
I am hoping Elon will do this: Certify everyone with a means of confirming individual identity, but allow everyone to remain anonymous on the platform unless they wish to be known. This will confer anonymity but allow Twitter to prevent and block bots, scam artists, and similar miscreants. Just as now, it should be possible for users to block, but this certification will ensure these blocks cannot be avoided. Timeouts make sense too in case certain accounts break the TOS. If Twitter is going to be a town square, it needs to behave in a similar fashion, with similar rules. You can't keep the crazy 'the end is nigh' guy out but at least you can ignore him, and the rabble rouser is allowed as long as he doesn't break any laws. I'd also like to see an enforced age limit.
I don’t know how you enforce an age limit while also allowing anonymity. You have to know the ID you’re using to verify age actually belongs to the person showing it to you… otherwise kids will just flash someone else’s ID.
The idea is that the user's identity would be known to Twitter, but not revealed to the public.
“Musk will let Donald Trump and other banned public figures back on Twitter. Big deal.”
I don’t use Twitter, because I don’t believe anyone has a “great” idea I need to read if they can express it in 140 characters (or whatever the current limit is). But I’ve enjoyed the relative silence from The Real Donald Trump or whatever his handle was, since without the ability to fire off a dozen or more tweets a day, the entire 24/7 news apparatus that existed between 2015 and 2020 apparently solely to rebroadcast his tweets to those of us not on twitter ceased to exist. I’ll miss the last 15ish months of being able to go an entire news cycle without hearing Trump’s opinion on anything.
I saw at least one wag opining that the banning of Trump has probably hurt Democrats, in that TFG is a (or, rather, "the") prime motivator for Democrats in terms of energization, turnout, etc. I hadn't considered that angle myself (and, I, too have "enjoyed" the absence of Trump tweets), but it's not obviously crazy.
+10
Most Americans only learn of Trump's tweets from newscasters. The newscasters are the gatekeepers not Twitter.
"Elon really is a genius...." Is this true? I don't really know. I guess I hear more about the harebrained stuff than the genius stuff. His "free speech" announcement today was idiotic.
Kevin apparently subscribes to the strain of Calvinist capitalism that assumes that wealth and fame indicate superior character/genes and divine favor.
I think it's more acknowledging Musk becoming the public face of the first successful independent car company in almost 70 years making truly different cars, and running a company building reusable orbital rockets. No one had ever done that before, either.
This. Elon Musk is probably the Tony Stark of whatever dismal timeline this is.
IOW, he just had good timing, because the emergence of Tesla and SpaceX as viable commercial ventures has a lot more to do with systemic factors than it does with Elon Musk. Yes, somebody had to do it, but that doesn't mean he's a genius.
Yeah, I don't think this is true either.
It's clear he's not stupid, but he's mostly just regular smart-ish person who got lucky. That's it.
Savant
I can make pages on Drumpf's Ashkenazi ancestry and Republican gay powder parties. Good.
Will Twitter ban Biden after he calls Putin a faggot???
Noah Smith is suggesting Musk might go after China/Russia bots.
Aren't those at least half his troll army that targets his online haters?
Why would Elon ban his "people"?
Musk is buying Twitter just so he can shut down that kid who has been tweeting every movement of Musk's private plane.
After that I suspect he'll get bored in a month or so then all the hassles of running Twitter will be too much and he'll sell it, maybe at a profit.
Shadow banning is definitely a thing. If you follow people with heterodox opinions, (like Lia Thomas should not be swimming on the women's team), you will see that the comments from people you recognize are hidden behind one or two more clicks.
First you have to click on "Show more replies," but that won't show you all of them. It's ironic how often I click on "show additional replies, including those that may contain offensive content" and find completely unoffensive matter hidden there.
Meghan Murphy needs to be reinstated. Misgendering can not be a bannable offense, if death threats are no big deal.
Lia Thomas absolutely should be swimming with women, but she should have taken a medical redshirt to complete her confirmation.
Why do you think he/she should be swimming with women?
Lia Thomas is well over 6 feet tall.
Is a leg shortening procedure to be part of her transition, to make it more fair for her to compete with female swimmers? I guess arm shortening will also be needed - how does that work, exactly?
Women don't serve as an affirmation source for dysphoric males. Sport is segregated by sex for a reason.
Lia Thomas doesn't exist. Another reason why excessive individualism needs abolished.
He's not buying this entirely with his own money, and he reportedly had to actually provide a plan and some concessions in order to get the financing to do this. It's hard to say whether any of that means something, or whether they just said it as a figleaf because they really just want to be on Musk's favored list for when he finally takes SpaceX and Starlink public (probably for something ridiculous like $250 billion each).
One of my bigger fears is that it will turn into a massive money sink for him, and he'll respond by leaning into all kinds of scammy stuff to try and increase its profitability. Data mining and sale, officially sanctioned aggressive crypto promotion, companies allowed to really push their product with bots and "clean up services" that removes negative commentary for a fee, and so forth.
The dangers of cheap money. The US Fed (central bank) needs to find new mechanisms to address (un)employment and recessions rather than the cheap money that has fueled the growing inequality and the rising global oligarchies.
The rumor is that he is borrowing most of it at a high interest rate, like 10%. That will put a ruinous burden on Twitter. They're already unprofitable, and adding $2B in interest payments a year would make it impossible.
That distracts from his real focus, Tesla and SpaceX. If he damages these valuable businesses for the sake of this whim, that would be a disasater.
Musk has not only promised to end moderation, but to end advertising and to rely on subscriptions to fund it. I.e. he has promised to drive it out of business.
Musk has not only promised to end moderation, but to end advertising, and selling of user data and to rely on subscriptions to fund it. I.e. he has promised to drive it out of business.
Authentication of identity is the first step towards authoritarian control, distinguished only by the -ism of the authority having jurisdiction over Twitter's local operations.
If Musk were so confident of his ideas, he would have put out a competing product rather than offer $44B for an existing platform -- or does he not think he can compete with existing platforms if he simply poured a couple billion into a startup?
On the basis that this buyout will feed into global oligarchies, the FTC and EU Commission on Competition ought to step in and block this buyout. We're headed towards a disastrous world guided by a small group of egotistical assholes.
Discussion about "shadow banning" and Twitter's algorithm puzzle me. Apparently people read tweets in their feed, and what appears in their feed is algorithmically determined. Which makes me ask, "Why read your feed?" Related: who want's a feed with a mix of serious and frivolous and uninteresting-at-the-moment tweets?
I never read my feed. I know which accounts I want to look at, have a bookmark for each one (~120) and go to each one I'm interested in that day* to read everything posted/retweeted by that person or organization.
Of course, that means I use Twitter from a laptop, which apparently is a minority of users. I have no idea how anyone can efficiently use Twitter on a cellphone. On a cellphone, how easy is it to, for example, download an image on Twitter, modify as appropriate, store in the appropriate folder, and then upload? Straightforward with a (moderately) large screen with browser, word processor, and image app all their in view or easily accessible.
The more I learn about Twitter, the more it seems that it's really for short bursts of ephemeral data. Sure, there are long Twitter threads, but most "serious" authors have moved to Patreon or substack or, like Kevin, their own blog.
* depending on my mood, sports or weather or showbusiness or mathematics or geography ,,,
Another benefit of using Twitter on a laptop: Blocking ads.
What you can do is follow a small number of accounts, and insist on "show latest Tweets." Then you get what was sent out by the people you follow, in chronological order. Nothing served up by "the algorithm."
I do this and every so often I'll see something I didn't expect and above it is "Patrick Rothfuss liked this." So I know I have to insist again on latest tweets. I want to see if Patrick Rothfuss tweets, I don't care what he likes.
Thanks! I'll try that.
My guesses:
(1) He's doing it to get shot of his previous tranche of Tesla stock (which is not yet wildly overvalued but heading that way.)
(2) He gets access to a massive personal data trove (even allowing for the smaller user base), with no real limits on how it can be monetised.
(3) He doesn't feel so bad in those Zoom calls with Zuckerberg.
(Personally, I think it's reason number 3.)
Public algorithm -- if twitter is anything like any of these ML revenue or engagement optimizers, the 'algorithm' can't be explained transparently. It is instead a network of immense transformation matrices filled with numbers, each of which feeds some of its results into different next stage transformations. The initial inputs are things like your likes, tweeting history and viewing history. The whole goal is to optimize revenue, and you'll never be able to make any sense of its 'decisions.'
"It's right there in the code!"
if politics.x > romney.mitt then user.reputation -= math.huge
I never view Twitter using the "Home" feed, which is the awful algorithm, but instead switch to the "Latest Tweets" view so only Tweets from those I follow arrive in chronological order. And, I mostly use Twitter to keep on top of breaking news, weather, and other alerts. It's great for learning about auto accidents that might block the highway ahead or the appearance of a tornado. I don't know of any services that allow you to create your own curated feed of continuous breaking news like this. Hopefully, Musk won't ruin basic functionality of Twitter like this.
By the way, if Trump does return the knock-on effect is the problem, not the actual Tweets. For the news media, who are all on Twitter, Trump is like crack cocaine. They can't get enough and every single news source becomes a Trump magnifier 24/7. I gave up on watching morning news shows when Trump was on Twitter. The morning news was always about the latest outrageous Trump Tweet that happened overnight.
Yeah, it blows my mind that anyone uses the algorithm version of Twitter. The whole original appeal of the platform was that it's chronological and self-curated. All of the complaints about algo nightmare stuff are very neatly circumvented by clicking the Latest Tweets button.
Yep, and then you can just unfollow anyone if you don't like what they are Tweeting. I rarely see any dreck in my personally curated feed. Using the algo is like all the people that complain about their hangover after having knocked back too many drinks the night before.
Tweeters will now have to pay a subscription to join/stay on it .
That would certainly be interesting to see. Personally, I don't care if the subscription was $1/month - I wouldn't pay. Twitter is just a mild distraction, while I do enjoy the topics I follow there, I can get the information without Twitter. It is not a vital service by any means.
"Elon really is a genius"
Citation required.
Taking twitter private could do a lot to help the spambot problem. There is too much risk as a public company that the overall number of boys was so high that the stock price would plummet if they demonstrated that half (or whatever) of their activity was from bots.
I expect a slow start, but then, when we look back five or ten years, full Rupert Murdoch. Twitter is the establishment brand for establishment journalists. Right now, it tolerates a dissident and independent community for reputational purposes. That can be algorithmically marginalized and eventually eliminated.
Musk has given a few hints in his statements about making the algorithm more transparent. Transparent to whom? Why not to advertisers?
Might as well sit back and enjoy the show. It strikes me that this is the perfect expression of the scientific method: Let the chips fly where they may. Is lack of censorship bad for twitter good or bad? (Define your terms _beforehand_!) The same for authentication of identity. Readers of a certain age might recall the musings of, say, David Brin. Or Vernor Vinge (is that guy dead or something? He hasn't published anything in years.)
IOW, that is, paraphrasing that natural philosopher, Peanut Butter. "Hollywoo Stars and Celebrities: What Do They Know? Do They Know Things?? Let's Find Out! "
I find Twitter semi-useful but a mess. I think that's its optimal state. My guess is for every problem Musk fixes he'll create a new and bigger one.
I don't understand the financials. When Bezos bought an important media property, he bought WaPo for $250M. Chickenfeed for him. Musk is spending $43B (172x Bezos' investment), a substantial part of his personal fortune, for a company that doesn't make money. Taking it private means he won't have the chance to realize a gain in its stock price. From a Business 101 standpoint, it's a crap deal.
Now Tesla stock is down 11%, more than $100B off its market cap. That 2 to 3 times the advertised price tag for Twitter. This could be one of the worst deals in business history.
Musk had one job really -- to electrify the automobile industry. His legacy will largely (~95%) rest on his success doing that. I hope he comes to understand that.
"Musk had one job really -- to electrify the automobile industry."
Call me a fogie, but I think GM and Ford are the tortoises to Tesla's hare. The hipsters and the cultists may love them, but Teslas are starting to become a punchline, on their way to DeLorean or Edsel world.
DeLorean and Edsel were flops from the start. No comparison with Tesla, which is the hottest car company on the planet.
The world can't wait for GM and Ford to get their shit together.
Musker: a Man & His Vision.
"A true free-for-all will (a) lose users, who just don't want the hassle of being trolled constantly"
Remember usenet? I go in to some old groups a few times a year, and they're all trolls trolling each other, or Q-raddled loonies. Everyone else is gone.