site banner
naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   36181 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

20
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

So it looks like Elon Musk officially owns all of Twitter now, and he's already fired the CEO, CFO, and policy chief. I don't have any strong opinions on this, but does anyone want to stake some predictions?

Musk presents himself as a free speech absolutist, which is encouraging to me, but I'd be concerned about the conflict of interest. I anticipate there will be some accusations of throttling unfavorable opinions about either him or his companies (RIP rogue driverless Tesla videos). I think the tension between unrestricted speech and a quality user experience will continue to be a problem, as I can't identify an obvious solution. Blue checkmarks are making hilariously cataclysmic remarks but I predict Twitter will remain a favored haven for the journalist class.

I don't really understand the concerns scattered throughout this thread about Musk suppressing criticism of his companies. The problem with pre-Musk Twitter censorship was that it was aligned with most other large platforms censorship policies, making it genuinely difficult to discuss or mention and handful of tabooed topics with more than a small audience. I don't think Google or Reddit employees (or for that matter, the employees of Twitter itself) have the same zealous ideological commitment to defending Musk's business interests that they do for Stopping Hate and Protecting Trans Kids and Black Bodies, and in fact many seem hostile to Musk. So I doubt he would be able to censor criticism successfully even if he wanted to.

And secondly, why would he want to? People have been shitting on him and his companies for years and it doesn't really seem to have mattered. He's recently positioned himself as pro free speech. Why would he (1) contradict his stances and lose a bit of moral high ground in order to (2) censor criticism that doesn't really affect him, only to (3) fail at censorship because his underlings hate or are apathetic toward him? None of that makes sense.

And secondly, why would he want to? People have been shitting on him and his companies for years and it doesn't really seem to have mattered. He's recently positioned himself as pro free speech. Why would he (1) contradict his stances and lose a bit of moral high ground in order to (2) censor criticism that doesn't really affect him, only to (3) fail at censorship because his underlings hate or are apathetic toward him? None of that makes sense.

Agree. He and Trump have a combined 150+ million followers. That is a lot of potential customers who are loyal to him. The last thing he wants is for those people to defect to competing sites.

My guess is he sells it for less than he bought it.

That would be the first that a Musk-run company failed. Not a bet I would want to make.

I'm increasingly worried about a number of his companies when investors wake up from this crazy business cycle and go "wait, what about the cash flow?"

SpaceX and Starlink in particular could go the way of all past rocket and satellite internet companies if demand doesn't start materializing pretty quick. Or he could try rustling up some funding for another startup to funnel money to both of them the way Starlink keeps SpaceX launching.

Isn't SpaceX actually profitable right now? They're selling a lot of rocket launches to various groups, and for quite a bit more than it costs them, thanks to the reusability.

Once they get Starship running that's just going to magnify.

I seem to remember a leaked Email from Elon where he's saying if they don't get Starship running, they're screwed.

Alsk, it's not really clear how much a Falcon launch costs them. Sometimes they seem to be charging more than non-reusable providers do.

You're right, I thought they were still padding things out with Starlink, but there's several commercial and government orders a month now. Huge improvement from when I checked a year ago.

I think back then they actually had the orders, they were just slowly getting through the backlog. Now they're done with the backlog and new launches don't even need to sit in a queue.

I'm curious what the fastest turnaround is that they could do from "hey guys, we need a rocket launched" to the rocket launching.

Considering the viability of starlink and its recently revealed (to me) advantage with regards to battlefield disruptions not affecting it, I would assume than it is more probable for the US government to try to nationalize it or something to that effect than it failing.

Prediction: within six months almost all human moderation is out, Musk announced "AI" filtering is in. Musk thinks you can drop headcount and achieve better results by building a scaleable software that can give users whatever kind of experience they want. Several slidebars will allow you to tailor the AI moderation: are you offended by swears, slurs, sexuality, the existence of trans people, etc. You can choose G rated twitter or shortform 4chan. The moderation is supposed to be only for offensive content, not for content position. Users immediately try to ruin that.

Controversy ensues. New York Magazine's cover story claims that the automod keeps banning Black and Trans BIPOC Sex Workers of Colour from posting anywhere near kids, and that's Problematic because Trans Kids need to have role models. The New Yorker cover story claims that creating stronger bubbles between users is going to tear our democracy apart, as Qanon-adjacent groups use a combination of setting very strict filtration against profanity/crudity/salacious content and speaking in code that the AI doesn't pick up for violence and slurs against Blck and Trans BIPOC of Colour. The New York Times Magazine cover story claims that the filters don't work, that offensive things are still being said to Black and Trans BIPOC Women of Colour.

The last one will be accurate. Rdrama and various chans are on a mission to weaponize their autism by figuring out how to game the automod. Trolls will figure out elaborate methods to sneak through moderation, and offensive content will show up everywhere. The auto-ref doesn't work, if you are always working the refs. Discourse, such as it is, collapses.

Musk claims user counts are up. It's not clear if that's the trolls or the users getting trolled. Musk unloads Twitter for a fraction of the original purchase price to Softbank. Many blame the new management as users collapse.

A realistic tale. Which is why it's never going to happen that way. Not in this world. You need at least half a dozen more completely outlandish reversals and random events culminating into something incomprehensible and impossible to predict.

did a control-f on this thread for the word "china" and nothing came up, so I'll just point out that before Musk took over Twitter China had no leverage over the platform to censor views they find objectionable, given that Twitter is already inaccessible in China. But Musk has a lot to lose if China were to pull their support for Tesla, since so much of Tesla's manufacturing capacity is located there.

Which means that if China were to, say, take offense at the views of people who are pro-Taiwan or anti-Xianjing-concentration-camps and wanted those views taken off of Twitter, they have a really tempting point of leverage! "That's a nice Tesla business you've got there, Musk, shame if something were to happen to it."

This is definitely the sort of thing that's already happened to other businesses over which China has had leverage-- see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blitzchung_controversy for when Blizzard fired a bunch of people for being vocally pro-Hong Kong on stream, presumably to avoid China financially penalizing Blizzard in retaliation.

That would indeed be terrible if, you know, Twitter weren't already knowingly penetrated by Chinese intelligence assets.

https://apnews.com/article/elon-musk-twitter-inc-technology-congress-838866addb81ca93473b1c0dd280c2f2

It seems possible that the Chinese agents could surreptitiously sneak in some code to suppress certain content, but how would that remain undetected to the higher-ups or other employees? In contrast, if you have the 100% owner establishing a policy from the top, it's much easier to implement (granted the risk of a leak remains sky-high).

In some companies, maybe, but Twitter recently had a high-level security guy go whistleblower, citing issues like widespread unnecessary developer access and testing on production, a pattern and practice of hiding security issues and bugs from higher ups, and other problems that would make it possible to obscure (or whitewash) bad behavior.

fair point

Elon really likes China but he also strongly opposes censorship, at least so he claims. These seem antithetical , so i don't know.

I don't have any problem reconciling these.

Free speech with few bounds is great. It enhances human dignity, exposes bad actors, and enhances the chances that we're accurately evaluating reality. However, it's not without its drawbacks. People can demagogue, they can spread lies, they can even spread socially damaging truths.

China is a sovereign nation and it's not my place to castigate them over their speech policies. They are in a better position to judge the consequences of unfettered political speech on their society, and they've decided the benefits aren't worth the costs. Maybe they'll change their mind some day, but outside pressure to do so would likely be counterproductive.

It also seems like U.S. allies don't get the same level of criticism that China gets re: free speech. In the U.K. you can be punished by the state for posting a picture of your dog doing a Hitler salute. AFAIK canine Hitler impersonations are still legal in China.

People can demagogue, they can spread lies, they can even spread socially damaging truths.

Yes and in my experience the best way for demagogues to do the latter two is to claim that their opposition is doing them and needs to be censored so that their half-truths can go uncontested.

Given that twitter is headquartered in the US, china censoring 'discourse' in the US would be a defcon 1 national security event and something the media of all colors would be all over, elon seeming to be a patriotic american, and china having a similar level of 'influence' with many other executives and companies in america due to the very deep trade ties between us, I don't think this is a large threat. It probably won't happen - and even if it did, the response from the US, including the "sjw bluechecks", would be significant.

This is hardly a one-off-- there was a nearly identical incident with an NBA player (see https://time.com/5694150/nba-china-hong-kong/ ). There was also an incident with Disney putting a pro-Dalai Lama movie out which China took umbrage at, the result of which was that Disney apologized and promised never to do it again: https://asia.nikkei.com/Opinion/Disney-s-magical-thinking-won-t-keep-politics-away-from-Mulan . I have not bothered to dredge up further examples, but seems like there's a lot of them, and the net effect is even greater given that the way to avoid getting embroiled in similar scandals is to never offend China in the first place.

china having a similar level of 'influence' with many other executives and companies in america due to the very deep trade ties between us

They do indeed have that level of financial influence and it is indeed significant in practice; the fact that China's influence is felt in a huge number of other places in the US economy is not a reason to feel better about China having similar leverage over the owner of Twitter.

EDIT: from incidents where China has exerted leverage in the past the response from American politicians has not generally been anything more than worried hand-wringing. I see no particular reason it'll be different for China exerting influence over Twitter, especially if it comes in the form of Twitter algorithmically downplaying stuff China might get offended by.

As ilforte said, the nba and disney things are incredibly minor and unsurprising (compare to disney's desire to make culturally-acceptable movies in the US) compared to politically censoring one of the main social media platforms in the united states. The latter is something that many maintream publications and politicans, even govt or intelligence agencies, have their eyes trained on like a hawk. If china really convinced musk to censor tianmen square 2.0 on twitter, the reaction would be severe.

The latter is something that many maintream publications and politicans, even govt or intelligence agencies, have their eyes trained on like a hawk. If china really convinced musk to censor tianmen square 2.0 on twitter, the reaction would be severe.

I don't think there's any evidence to say this. What evidence we do have, says they wouldn't care at all. Yes, the situations aren't perfectly analogous, but they are the best we have to predict what the official government reaction would be.

The closest analogy would be 'russian troll farms on social media', though? It's arguably less of a provocation, since they're just creating accounts and posting, instead of 'censoring', but there was a lot of noise about that.

Even for the china nba and disney thing, we know about them because of "mainstream media" reporting!

What if it's not full out censoring but a infobox with a warning, or a mild deprioritization?

What do you think would've happened if twitter put a misinformation infobox on a lot of the Uighur concentration camp content a few years ago, or deprioritized it? There would have been massive backlash. Internal whistleblowers, hearings, investigations, etc.

This is hardly a one-off-- there was a nearly identical incident with an NBA player

? Some entertainment workers deleting tweets and so on under CCP's pressure suggests that it's plausible that the world's richest man may turn his company into an asset of a foreign propaganda?

The degree to which Americans accept their untouchability and superiority over the Chinese as the norm, and flinch when this assumption is punctured, is just astounding and unsettling. This NBA story would be a nothingburger, if not for the implicit «wait, those yellow monkeys got an Imperial Citizen to bend the knee?» gasp. (Notably, much greater and more thin-skinned crackdown from locally powerful parties, e.g. team ADL unbanking Kanye West, is received meekly and with nuanced understanding, or kowtowing approval).

I have not bothered to dredge up further examples, but seems like there's a lot of them

Nah, that's pretty much it, a few cases of low-level hysterics.

from incidents where China has exerted leverage in the past the response from American politicians has not generally been anything more than worried hand-wringing

Meanwhile, some fake news in Bloomberg have become a pretext to wholly eradicate China's premier corporation, and there isn't even a pretext claimed for the current round of sanctions devastating advanced sectors of Chinese economy. All this is accepted matter-of-factly by the entirety of the political class and general population, as the Empire's natural entitlement.

It's okay to approve of this, but please stop the underdog act.

The degree to which Americans accept their untouchability and superiority over the Chinese as the norm, and flinch when this assumption is punctured, is just astounding and unsettling. This NBA story would be a nothingburger, if not for the implicit «wait, those yellow monkeys got an Imperial Citizen to bend the knee?» gasp.

This just sounds like a childish sneer. I'm no fan of the GAE but until recently it was completely normal to believe that your tribe or nation was superior to others. I do think America is better than China in pretty much every way that matters and that American people are for the most part better than Chinese people, mostly because China is so damaged. Applied Marxism and government thuggery really did a number on the (mainland) Chinese. Their culture and morals are degraded. Not just different, but degraded. So yeah, I do find it disgusting when American companies kowtow to Chinese pressure, in the same way one might be disgusted at anyone acquiescing to the demands of the Japanese Empire, or the Nazi State. Perhaps you feel the same about Putin.

It's okay to approve of this, but please stop the underdog act.

Americans can't do this because they haven't woken up to the reality of what China is like. I still hear people tell me about the "huge" "middle class" in China (lmao), how only the government is bad and they're just like us, etc. etc. So they have to invent a story for themselves so they don't feel like they're "punching down." But we are punching down, and we should be. Along with the rest of the West.

Some entertainment workers deleting tweets and so on under CCP's pressure suggests that it's plausible that the world's richest man may turn his company into an asset of a foreign propaganda?

No, you've missed the point entirely. The point is that even if China were to exert influence on Twitter, past events show us that most likely nobody in the government will give a shit.

Some entertainment workers deleting tweets and so on under CCP's pressure suggests that it's plausible that the world's richest man may turn his company into an asset of a foreign propaganda?

Let's make this clear, he's the world's richest man for as long as Tesla's doing well.

Well, I usually predict nothing happens because usually nothing happens, but that's the coward's move. I do think that's what will happen, but I will say that there's a low-but-not-that-low (in the proud tradition of made up confidence levels: 33%) chance he tries something aggressive/ambitious and kills twitter. Here's hoping.

High confidence (75%): Twitter will continue to be a money pit.

Medium confidence (50%): Musk will try to divest himself from twitter in the next four years. Musk clearly noticed the above issue and wanted to back out, but his ego and/or market position may make it difficult. (Nothing says confidence like the guy who just overpaid for the company immediately trying to unload his position).

Very low confidence (5%): Musk pulls off a miracle and makes Twitter into a profitable company that isn't a socially corrosive dumpster fire.

Musk presents himself as a free speech absolutist

Musk has a history of being incredibly thin-skinned and willing to use his clout to retaliate against critics. There may be a more scrutinizing eye cast on critics of Musk and his companies and a slight refocusing, but I doubt there's going to be a huge boost to freedom of discourse on twitter. Nor will there be a mass exodus - the cost of moving to a new platform (which platform, anyway?) is too high. In the mean time, Twitter's moderation practices will continue to be erratic and arbitrary.

FWIW Elon posted a statement this morning

It seems like he wants to make it so that users themselves have more control over what they see rather than top-down moderation. I also think he is okay with moderation of “hate speech” to a certain extent, but he will stop moderating “misinformation” like Twitter has done for covid, the 2020 election, hunter biden story, etc. in the past. My prediction is that moderation of slurs, calling for violence, etc. will be handled much the same way it has been, but that opinions which don’t use no-no words will be allowed. I think most people won’t notice a difference but all he really has to do is not ban for “misinformation” and 99% of the controversy about twitter’s moderation policy is gone. Most people won’t care that you still can’t use slurs or whatever and journalists will get over the “misinformation” thing when crying about it stops being a useful tactic.

Update: Elon is forming a content moderation council

It goes without saying that seeing as his strategy for making twitter profitable seems to be "cut expenses by firing employees" he has straightforwards business reasons for a looser moderation policy.

turn back the dial to pre-2013 or so. He has to promise to not be as bad as his predecessor, which is a very low bar.

Thanks for the update. I think you're reading him optimistically, though. "Twitter obviously cannot become a free-for-all hellscape, where anything can said with no consequences [...] our platform must be warm and welcoming to all" doesn't read as meaningfully different from the 2022 establishment line on free speech.

It's early but I'm feeling good about my predictions, where I guessed a modest pullback from the censorship spike of 2020 but not root-and-branch reform. We're already hearing rumblings of threats from EU officials, too, though it could be just one guy spouting off.

There’s a piece from the Verge that I think does a decent job describing the situation.

I think the author starts out strong. Saying Twitter has political problems, not tech problems, and Elon is now the King of Twitter are statements I fully agree with.

I think he’s wrong to assume that Twitter is still going to utilize an advertising based model. Twitter’s power user base seems a lot closer to Substack than Instagram or Facebook, in that it is preferred by the intelligentsia. The value of the platform is in these power users and the audiences of people who want to hear what they have to say. I think Twitter could probably also steal some business from OnlyFans, since the platform is already a major funnel for creators on that platform. A creator based model probably makes a lot more sense than an advertising model, since the platform is far less visual than, say, Instagram.

The cryptocurrency exchange Binance is reportedly one of the investors in Twitter, hoping to turn it into a cryptocurrency friendly platform and fulfill the promise of web3. Quite frankly I’m not sure how much crypto is needed to fulfill much of the promise of web3 (letting people own their own data, essentially), but I think in the long run letting users monetize themselves rather than relying on advertisers is a winning strategy for some platforms in the long term.

Running some quick numbers: Twitter has about 400M users, 200M are daily active users. Twitter’s revenue in 2021 was $5 billion.

Let’s say one million Twitter users (half of one percent) are popular enough that they can charge for the content they produce. Lets also assume an 80/20 revenue split between users and Twitter (the same as OnlyFans). If those one million users can generate an average of $2100/month in revenue (at $10/month this is only around 200 people), then that’s about $5 billion in annual revenue (1M users * $2100/month * 12 months/year * 20%).

Is this enough to justify Elon buying the company? No, but the point of the exercise is to demonstrate that given that it isn’t hard to replicate Twitter’s current revenue without an advertising model. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to suggest that a shift to a creator business model could unlock far greater revenue for the company and make the purchase both worthwhile.

The author goes on to say that Elon will have trouble dealing with governments in Germany and the Middle East…frankly, they need Twitter more than Twitter needs them. Social media is absolutely part of a government’s power projection tools, and Twitter is arguably the most important for verified government officials.

My predictions would be that if Twitter shifts to a creator business model rather than an advertising model, it will double its revenue by 2025. I’d also predict that while one or two countries may ban Twitter, most fears about governmental retribution against Twitter will turn out to be unwarranted.

I think he’s wrong to assume that Twitter is still going to utilize an advertising based model. Twitter’s power user base seems a lot closer to Substack than Instagram or Facebook, in that it is preferred by the intelligentsia.

I wouldn't have believed you a year ago, but keeping tabs on the Ukraine war has surprised me by how many analysts and OSInt people use Twitter as their primary method of communication. Long threads of a dozen+ tweets analyzing a particular topic are common. It's bizarre since Twitter is an unbelievably terrible website for this type of content, yet that's where it gets posted for some reason.

I didn't realize until recently that the most skilled twits doing longform make sure to write occasional "quotable" segments that draw people into the essay like a headline, but distributed throughout. So parts 12 and 44 of 87 can blow up individually and drive traffic and engagement the way a single longform piece can't. The absolute master of this is 0HPLovecraft, who has all of his tweets crosslinked in an elaborate index.

It's scary how good humans are at algorithmically optimizing things like that when there's social clout on the line.

I think he’s wrong to assume that Twitter is still going to utilize an advertising based model. Twitter’s power user base seems a lot closer to Substack than Instagram or Facebook, in that it is preferred by the intelligentsia. The value of the platform

Advertisers are paying so much per click or 1000 impression that it's hard to think how they can diversify away from it . Maybe a 'premium tweets' option, like Substack.

If advertisers are willing to pay so much, maybe Elon can just ignore their demands to control what kind of content is allowed on the platform?

I think he’s wrong to assume that Twitter is still going to utilize an advertising based model.

Then why is Elon tweeting reassurances to advertisers?

Ads could remain a part of the business, have non subscribers get an ad supported peek at the content.

I should clarify my original point about “content creator business model” doesn’t necessarily exclude advertisers. I meant more that the primary driver of revenue would be exclusive, paywalled content. A content creator centered business model can still have advertisers. For example, on Tik Tok, influencers show off the clothes they just bought, apply cosmetic products, or talk about what restaurants they’re trying. Twitter could utilize the paid subscription model for premium content, but have advertisers pay for placement in free, sponsored content. The two are not mutually exclusive

Why wouldn’t he reassure advertisers, even if he plans to phase them out?

Prediction: No one pushing the idea that Twitter was trying to get out of the deal circa October 4th will aknowledge error.

Did those people understand the board of a publicly traded company has a fiduciary responsibility to shareholders, whatever any employees may think, and Musk offered above share price, waived due diligence (legally-irrelevant public tantrum about bots aside) and assumed responsibility for clearing any objections from regulators?

A board would have to be able to sell shareholders on its stock being significantly undervalued to turn that down.

So it looks like Elon Musk officially owns all of Twitter now, and he's already fired the CEO, CFO, and policy chief. I don't have any strong opinions on this, but does anyone want to stake some predictions?

It's like a coup. That's how cooperate takeovers work. You get rid of the old mgmt and bring in new. It's not at all like the democratic transfer of power people are accustomed to .

Musk presents himself as a free speech absolutist, which is encouraging to me, but I'd be concerned about the conflict of interest. I anticipate there will be some accusations of throttling unfavorable opinions about either him or his companies (RIP rogue driverless Tesla videos).

Free speech in this context can mean many things. It can mean equal enforcement of the rules, which twitter under the old regime was lacking. Free speech means that anyone can criticize Tesla or Musk on one's own personal account, but Tesla or Musk have the right to block such users or posts, analogous to forcing a guest to leave. I think even with some bias or possible throttling it will still be better than how it used to be. Musk knows that his credibility and investment in large part hinges on upholding free speech, even criticism of him or Tesla.

In the fight between network effects and identity politics, I think identity politics will win the long term victories. We've all seen what happens when "Twitter, but for conservatives" services get launched. When will we see the first "Twitter, but for SJWs" go live? And will that work out any better for them?

I would not predict Twitter's immediate demise, but I did not really anticipate Facebook's abrupt demise. I've used Facebook for years without much complaint, but in the last year or two they've declared war on my adblockers and serve me 10 ads for every status update I see from people I actually care about. This means I no longer routinely use Facebook or any of their products, even though I've been a piece of their captured audience for more than 15 years.

My students report almost no Facebook use, outside of Instagram, and when I ask them about social media they usually say TikTok or YouTube (the latter of which I do not think of as social media at all). Many also use Discord but for some reason don't seem to think of Discord as "social media." If it was publicly traded, I'd probably buy stock in Discord as the next Facebook-like center of online activity. Most of my students have heard of Twitter, and absolutely never use it.

Twitter won't collapse overnight, and I think Musk has better business intuitions than Zuckerberg, but I think history is against him. At some point enough people will quit that the network effects will collapse. The question is whether Musk can spin the company into something more sustainable before that happens.

This means I no longer routinely use Facebook or any of their products, even though I've been a piece of their captured audience for more than 15 years.

Yeah this is really weird to me. I quite enjoyed facebook for many years, as it was the only reasonable way I could keep track of people I knew above my Dunbar limit. It was genuinely quite pleasant to get a drip-trickle of new information about people I knew, like oh neat they went to Spain, oh dang that's some insane workplace drama, oh wow they have triplets! And EVERYONE used it, so it worked almost perfectly as an address book of sorts.

The downside for me started maybe about 5 years ago, where instead of seeing my friends' status updates, I was increasingly bombarded with seeing their 'likes' on thoroughly shitty meme pages. It just felt so depersonal all of a sudden. I had to duct tape a variety of browser extensions to get it anywhere near usable but it just got worse. The vibe felt off, maybe it was just the culture war but people felt increasingly nasty and hostile, just shoving outrageous clickbait into everyone's face and saying "LOOK AT THIS SHIT". I truly hated it.

Nowadays it's desperately trying to claw onto attention by pretending it's TikTok, so I just get inundated with videos about pugs acting silly. I keep it around as an archive I guess, and it's still useful as very limited address book. But besides that, it's more or less useless.

Which brings me to the biggest loss of all: events. Oh my god, events. This was the best feature by far. Because everyone had a facebook account, the default assumption was that you will create a page on facebook for all your parties. And jesus fucking christ it cannot be understated how amazing of a feature it was that you could see who was going!!! I admit it, if I was on the fence about a party, I'd trawl through the 'attending' tab to see if any hotties were going. Facebook also let me know what their favorite bands were. I'd show up to the party already equipped with a solid opener.

Those were the days, and there's no comparable replacement for events. RIP.

Is it really that bad a business model? Discord's paid options mainly offer cosmetic things with a side of what I'm going to call "premium infrastructure access" (i.e. I think you get better bitrates in voice calls and such). People seem to be fine paying for purely-cosmetic digital things, and premium infrastructure access is something a lot of services offer. Is it more that those things are not enough to sustain it?

Twitter for SJWs already exists in the default mastodon, uh, servers? Instances? I don't know the lingo. It became a thing back when they were furious that Twitter didn't have enough censorship.

Of course now it's just tiny isolated islands of "LGBTQ+ antifa hacker" servers that all block each other over not blocking the right fascists. Pixiv's Pawoo and Baraag, which I think are by far the largest, are totally isolated from the wokiesphere. Plus I think there's still some GNU Free Speech guys lurking out in the wastes like shitposting Fremen.

Twitter for SJWs already exists in the default mastodon, uh, servers? Instances? I don't know the lingo. It became a thing back when they were furious that Twitter didn't have enough censorship.

Mastodon WTF Timeline is a pretty interesting description

And Twitter allied itself with the Blue side in the war, making the Red side progressively more and more unwelcome on the system. Some of this alliance was expressed overtly, for instance by creating an "advisory board" to guide Twitter culture and staffing it with some of the most hateful of Blue leaders. Other actions were done covertly, such as by "shadowbanning" persons identified as Red by AI systems to prevent them from being able to communicate with each other through Twitter while maintaining plausible deniability that the system was taking a side. This stuff created a steady stream of Red refugees who still wanted to use a system like Twitter but didn't want to or could not use Twitter in particular. But there were also many on the Blue side angry that the Red side still had not been completely annihilated and they considered themselves refugees from a space rendered unsafe by the ongoing presence of the Red side. Both kinds of people wanted to go somewhere other than Twitter.

Around March 2017 I started hearing about Mastodon in a significant way from my contacts on Twitter, who I'd like to emphasize include both Red and Blue (making me unusual among Twitter users) as well as a lot of Japanese people who are outside that classification. There also started to be media coverage of Mastodon at this time. The coverage, all from Blue-aligned media, largely presented Mastodon as a cool new alternative to Twitter that would be free of "harassment," which is a Blue code word for the mere existence of the Red side.

At that time I thought I could see the train wreck coming, because I knew enough to know that the Red side was already strongly entrenched in the pre-Mastodon GNU Social network, and I thought I foresaw that as Blue users showed up thinking they owned the place, the federation would dissolve into fighting the same war that had devastated English-language Twitter, and so it would never be a successful Twitter replacement. I was wrong about this; what actually turned out to be the big divisive issue was something much more entertaining.

Circa Friday the 14th: English-speaking users, especially on mastodon.social, start becoming horrified by what is varyingly described as a flood of Japanese-language postings; an organized invasion by Japanese Internet trolls; a flood of "anime" (significant because "anime avatars" used by white people had been considered an emblem of the Red side in the Twitter Culture War); and a flood of "child pornography." Thoughtful discussion and unhinged hysteria ensue, simultaneously. The fact of Twitter's having been huge in Japan was not generally known in the English-speaking world at the time, which helps support the sheer incomprehension of where all these people could possibly have come from. There's speculation that maybe Mastodon had received some kind of mainstream media coverage that attracted a lot of Japanese attention, or had attracted attention on some popular Japanese Web site other than Twitter, though neither appears to have really been the case - such coverage happened later, as an effect, not a cause, of the sudden influx of Japanese users.

On the night of Friday the 14th: Pixiv (presumably a small group of their employees tasked to do this as an experiment) creates a Mastodon instance (pawoo.net) and it immediately starts growing on roughly the same curve as mstdn.jp. Early on the morning of the 15th, it passes mastodon.xyz to become the third most populous instance on the entire network. Much traffic on and from this instance consists of the amateur artists who populate Pixiv itself sharing their artwork especially including that which they're not allowed to post on Twitter, namely ロリコン.

Midnight, start of Saturday the 15th: mastodon.xyz announces that it is blocking pawoo.net (i.e. refusing to exchange message traffic) "due to a lot of pedopornographic accounts there, without any action from the administrator." The unbelievable idea that ロリコン is really acceptable to Pixiv and Japan generally, and is not a form of extreme misbehaviour by a fringe of trolls, has not sunk in on the English-language side.

Saturday the 15th, afternoon: Gargron the Mastodon developer and admin of mastodon.social creates a Github issue to discuss technological aspects of the ロリコン issue, mostly focused on the potential legal exposure for server admins whose servers may end up caching, and thus "possessing," material that is illegal to possess in their local jurisdiction. In postings there and on the Mastodon network, both in English and Japanese, the administrators of pawoo.net declare that they will not ban from their own servers material that is legal in Japan, but they will attempt to enforce a rule that "mature images" must be hidden by NSFW tags, and they will cooperate with other technical workers in attempts to keep "mature images" out of caches where they might create liability for third parties.

I think that the word choice of the Pixiv admins calling this stuff "mature images" in their English-language communications is telling: Japanese people think what the English speakers are freaking out over is the possibility that children might see the images. They're "mature" images that ought to be for consenting adults only, is the objection to ロリコン that comes closest to making any kind of sense from a Japanese point of view. The idea that even consenting adults ought not to be allowed to see such images isn't on the Japanese radar, and would seem to be wacky moonbat nonsense, even though it is so obvious, and so obviously sensible, as to be unspoken on the English side.

My assessment is supported by the Japanese-language side of the ongoing discussion on the network itself, where Japanese people frequently suggest (English-language commentary) that the network needs "age verification" and that that will somehow solve the problem. At this point I make it something of my own mission to inform the Japanese that that's not the English-speaking point of view, and verifying the age of users will not solve any relevant aspect of the problem that the English speakers see; while similarly informing the non-Japanese of how the Japanese do see things. I don't know if I make much headway in this effort.

Pixiv's Pawoo and Baraag, which I think are by far the largest, are totally isolated from the wokiesphere.

The reasons for which being absolutely hilarious given the groomer thread.

His affected squeamishness is hysterical, isn't it? Almost as much as Matt Skala absolutely failing to hide his power level in the linked post lol.

I was referring to watching the drama unfold between people arguing democrats/leftists/"the woke" are groomers and people who identify with those labels taking offense to the label while thinking to myself how ridiculous the arguments of both sides are given how "the wokiesphere" responded in that case. Or how Reddit responded to similar concerns. Or how Facebook did.

EDIT: Grammar.

Is there some reason why you think he's not actually squeamish? I'm not familiar with him as a writer.

We've all seen what happens when "Twitter, but for conservatives" services get launched. When will we see the first "Twitter, but for SJWs" go live? And will that work out any better for them?

Oh yes, very much so. Or at least, if they fail it won't be for the same reasons. While officially Parler was killed because of hate speech and such, my impression was that was just a pretense. It seemed pretty clear to me that actually, Parler was killed because it was offensive to the woke ideology which dominates big tech companies. Whereas "Twitter for SJWs" wouldn't be offensive ideologically, so if it fails it will be because it couldn't get a user base (unlike Parler, which imo was smothered as an act of censorship).

Parler was in long-standing violation of Amazon's rules regarding moderation (something like 6 weeks before getting kicked off after the Jan 6th riot), but it's also worth noting that there was possible (probable?) political pressure on the tech giants to ban it when people started paying more attention, which does support your point that ideology played a big hand in deciding Parler's fate.

I think that with layoffs coming there is a message of depolitization coming in the FAANG...

deleted

This is my experience exactly. I hated the shit out of the suggested posts side hustle, just show me my cousin's baby photos goddamn it

deleted

"Twitter, but for SJWs" go live? And will that work out any better for them?

No. Normies are the lifeblood of social media, and any ideologically inflected alternative is going to suffer from the fact that normies aren't going to be interested in switching platforms to hang out with a bunch of fanatical weirdos. Being slightly more reputable that right-wing conspiracy theorists is not enough.

Many also use Discord but for some reason don't seem to think of Discord as "social media."

Most people are operating off a vibes-based rather than rigorous definition of social media. "Social media" means the big, talked about platforms - Twitter, FB, Instagram, etc... Not private forums, the comments section of a news site, or a blog.

I'd argue that some people probably think that an outward facing surface is part of what makes traditional social media, the idea that you can tweet out to whoever the retweets take you to or that you can be looked up by randos on facebook. Discord kinda doesn't have that, its all invite based, its mostly not used to send 1 message to a large audience, and you can't really look someone up unless you know their discord ID.

It's still social media in the broad sense but its more like myspaceified IRC than chatroomified twitter.

Another interpretation might be that Social Media is a place where individuals share, consume, and create viral content. YouTube/Twitch are becoming more like legacy media and Discord is more a communication tool.

"Twitter but for X" services die for a simple reason; you can't really start a new social media just as a clone of an existing one but for a certain limited audience, there's just not enough "there" there for that to work. Social medias simply die when there's enough social medias with new, more interesting and more fluent (one might say: more addictive) mechanics to take their place and the potential new users start using them. Myspace didn't die because someone established a MySpace but for Bush supporters or whatever, it died because new, more interesting social medias with different mechanics took their place.

Switter (twitter for sex workers) seemed to be going strong before legal issues made continued operation dicey.

"Twitter but for X" services die for a simple reason

That's a false premise. They don't tend to die, they're active but less popular.

I would not predict Twitter's immediate demise, but I did not really anticipate Facebook's abrupt demise. I've used Facebook for years without much complaint, but in the last year or two they've declared war on my adblockers and serve me 10 ads for every status update I see from people I actually care about. This means I no longer routinely use Facebook or any of their products, even though I've been a piece of their captured audience for more than 15 years.

Demise? It still has 2 billion users, plus 2 billion Instagram, plus 2 billion for What's App, although there is a lot of overlap between these.

Twitter won't collapse overnight, and I think Musk has better business intuitions than Zuckerberg, but I think history is against him. At some point enough people will quit that the network effects will collapse. The question is whether Musk can spin the company into something more sustainable before that happens.

I think the opposite will happen. Twitter will gain popularity as a free speech friendlier alternative to other platforms, and also increased engagement under Musk.

When will we see the first "Twitter, but for SJWs" go live?

Already exists.

Also Tumblr

Also Mastodon.

My opinion of Musk is very low, I think he's essentially a fraud, so I don't have much hopes for his ability to improve Twitter.

Even if he does end up being a competent leader, I worry he will simply be unable to do much. It turns out Dorsey was a libertarian-leaning idealist all along, and he was unable to push his own company in that direction, and had to wait until retirement to actually start making idealistic noises again. If Musk does do anything, we're going to see another round of "No Clicks For Hate" or that WSJ article about Youtube that triggered the Adpocalypse.

I think the best case scenario we can realistically hope for is that he drives Twitter into the ground.

Cost to launch a payload into space:

Space shuttle (USA): $54k/kg

Ariane 5 (Eurozone): $9.1k/kg

Proton (Russian): $4.3k/kg

Falcon 9 (Musk): $2.7k/kg.

Falcon Heavy (Musk): $1.4k/kg

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_launch_market_competition

What a fraud. He definitely lacks the ability to execute.

This seems to be comparing the total cost of the space shuttle program to the advertised cost of the Falcon 9. Is there an actual apples-to-apples comparison somewhere, with a breakdown of how the figures were arrived at?

Elon is a fraud

This is genuinely one of the most confusing takes to me, and I kind of assume it is bordering on a social contagion.

A fraud in what way? I have a Tesla model Y. It is by far the best car I’ve ever driven, and I’ve driven many many cars that are substantially more expensive than this one.

I have a starlink and use it. It works, and when compared to its competitors, absolutely embarrassed them. They aren’t competitors.

SpaceX is clearly a real company which absolutely revolutionized space launches, and has eviscerated anybody who could reasonably claim to be a competitor. It isn’t even close.

As far as self driving: yeah actually my model Y does self drive, and I use it every single day. The “well actually it’s not self driving and it crashes into pedestrians!” YouTube hoaxes are 100% of the time people using autopilot as if it were self driving. It isn’t, and those people shouldn’t be doing that.

I just absolutely fail to see how anything Elon is doing is “fraudulent” especially since I use some of the products and they are almost indistinguishable from magic.

Well yes. But he promises turbo bonkers hypermagic with rainbow-shitting unicorns, and repeatedly swears it'll be released 2-5 years faster than turns out to be the case. And he totally milks his Iron Man/Weirdo Autistic Visionary/Space Messiah image for what are sometimes obviously small-minded purposes (and also to maintain absurd PE ratios). So he's a fraud relative to his own hyperbolic marketing, I guess?

Anyway, people just love to hate those who seem to have much more than them.

More subtly, some people here are blackpilled in a particular manner that prompts them to deny that in the current world (which they believe to be on net irredeemable) true doers and dreamers may achieve such abnormal prominence.

For my part, I have no problem accepting that Musk is exactly who he claims to be (but also not what he not-unsuccessfully attempts to hint at being). He's a strong, flawed man in the spirit of the greatest American capitalist champions – Rockefeller, Carnegie, Ford, Hughes... Fate strikes the strong man in the end. But it'll be an interesting ride.

and I kind of assume it is bordering on a social contagion.

I suppose sharing your opinion over the internet, and backing it up with arguments is how social contagion works, so I guess you're right on this one.

A fraud in what way?

In the way he presents himself as someone he's not, and promises things he can't deliver.

I have a Tesla model Y. It is by far the best car I’ve ever driven, and I’ve driven many many cars that are substantially more expensive than this one.

That's cool. I never drove one, and I'm not into cars, so I can't judge, but I find it extremely unlikely it's so good that it justifies valuing the company more than all other auto manufacturers combined.

I have a starlink and use it. It works, and when compared to its competitors, absolutely embarrassed them. They aren’t competitors.

How well does it compare to a mid-range fibre-optic connection?

SpaceX is clearly a real company which absolutely revolutionized space launches, and has eviscerated anybody who could reasonably claim to be a competitor. It isn’t even close.

No it hasn't. The Falcon 9 is ok, but not mind blowing. The stuff that would be impressive is still just a promise that hasn't materialized.

As far as self driving: yeah actually my model Y does self drive, and I use it every single day. The “well actually it’s not self driving and it crashes into pedestrians!” YouTube hoaxes are 100% of the time people using autopilot as if it were self driving. It isn’t, and those people shouldn’t be doing that.

Ok, hold up. They're hoaxes, because they're using a product called "Full Self Driving" as if it were capable fully driving he car by itself? You really don't see that as a tiny bit fraudulent?

Also Elon was promising us robotaxis by now. And whatever happened to the Tesla Truck that was supposed to beat rail on costs in a convoy scenario. How doesthe Hyperloop make any goddamn sense at all, and why did he lie about inventing it?

deleted

Wasn't there also something called "Full Self-Driving" way back in 2017?

Then I guess I'll have to be optimistic based on Musk's track record with products I've personally witnessed:

  • Tesla really changed the game for electric cars. They're fast, powerful, cool, techy. People want them. At least in my PNW costal city, you see them everywhere now.

  • Starlink allows a friend to live in the middle of nowhere and still remote-desktop to work seamlessly. He reports that even online multiplayer gaming is doable with satellite internet.

  • SpaceX developed into an (I think, as a layman) impressive technology, doing things that previously weren't possible.

Like, I look around and really do see the Teslas on the street. I really do see the Starlink satellites in the sky. I've watched SpaceX launches. Admittedly, I haven't paid any attention to the financials, so maybe it's all going to come crashing down, but people have been saying that for years, and they're still going strong.

as a layman

I'm a dilettante myself (went Applied Math, haven't even been to an AIAA conference in a decade), but it doesn't take a lot of knowledge to be impressed. Manned orbital launches have been accomplished by Russia, major US consortiums (e.g. Mercury was accomplished by like 5 companies working with 3 government agencies), China ... and SpaceX. Their workhorse rocket isn't quite "doing things that previously weren't possible" (unless you count the longest string of launches without a failure in history), but it is doing things that weren't possible economically, and it was created for a tenth the cost that NASA would have taken to develop it, according to reports from NASA. In each of the first three quarters of this year, the "most orbital launches" competition has ended up with SpaceX in 1st place, China in 2nd, and "everybody else in the entire world put together" in 3rd. They're on track to soon have more satellites in orbit than the rest of the world (including China, this time) put together. Their biggest problem right now is that their current R&D project is so ambitious that, despite a vehicle like Starship being a clear necessity for any significant exploitation or human exploration of space, none of their competitors would even attempt anything like it.

About the only thing I wouldn't expect a layman to be at all aware of is just how long the list is of other space industry outsiders trying to do what Musk did and failing. This isn't "oh, he just saw an opportunity and grabbed it"; the "smart" money in the beginning would have been split between "Blue Origin will beat him to the punch and make SpaceX irrelevant" and "the outsiders will all fail, again; yes this actually is rocket science".

I haven't paid any attention to the financials

Neither has anyone else who isn't a major private investor; they've been keeping details under tight wraps. Best guess seems to be that they're raking in profit on Falcon 9 but can't really expand that market much more, and that they're still losing money on Starlink. The big question is whether Starlink goes into the black as soon as they're done with the build out costs, or when their number of subscribers increases past some point, or not until they have a fully-successful Starship cutting down on constellation maintenance costs. Even if the latter isn't the case, the cost of Starship development is another open question. If there's a bigger downturn and they have to tighten their belts and Starship ends up getting delayed a decade because Musk burned "I need to finance tens of billions of dollars fast" credibility on Twitter of all things I'm going to be grossly disappointed.

Musk's track record

The other question is how much of this is Musk's track record. I suspect he'd have failed before Falcon 9 if not for Gwynne Shotwell and Tom Mueller, but what the hell do I know (archive link because apparently when you're shut down that hard you go back and "protect" your tweets).

Musk's product range from working-I-suppose-but-wildly-overhyped to "I am confident we will have working in two years (or two years more... or two years more... or two years more...) .

I haven't paid any attention to the financials, so maybe it's all going to come crashing down

And likewise I might very well be wrong, and Musk is going to change the world, but I'm worried about a lot of contrarians I sympathize with staking their reputation on him.

I could agree that Musk has many times over-promised and under-delivered, but there's no way I can turn that into "Musk is a fraud." There's far too many actual delivered, working products for that to be anywhere close to true.

The only universe where "Musk is a fraud" would make sense is if Musk is pure front-man to a secret behind-the-scenes mastermind. He's not even a great front-man though, his presentations are often awkward and primarily engaging because of the products involved.

working-I-suppose-but-wildly-overhyped

Man, why should you care how hyped they are? Objectively I think some might actually be underhyped, but regardless, why judge accomplishments by whether you think that people under- or overestimate them? Some of these products are enormously important.

My impression is his reputation is based on the hype around his products, rather than their actual value.

For example, a lot of people are pointing to SpaceX's cost reduction, but from what I'm reading that relies on overestimating the Space Shuttle launch costs, and some creative accounting on SpaceX's side. Take out the hype, and it seems you're left with some decent rockets, that haven't revolutionized anything.

OK, look, reputation is ALWAYS based on hype rather than based on actual value. That's kind of by definition how hype and reputation work--while they may have slightly different meanings, both refer to social standing rather than actual accomplishments. So having a "reputation based on hype around his products, rather than their actual value" is just usually true of all people in general.

But sorry for being overly literal, I get that what you're saying is that the hype outpaces the actual products. I don't really agree--my understanding is that both Tesla and SpaceX really have made some pretty major advancements--but I don't know enough to argue the point. The point I was making is that if we're trying to judge a man, we should judge his accomplishments, not judge whether his accomplishments match the hype around them. It's just SO MUCH more productive to argue about whether Edison invented the lightbulb than to argue about whether he deserves 1 million or 100,000 fans for his accomplishments.

It's at least important to be familiar with "Elon time" if you're planning to be a consumer of his upcoming products.

The new orbital payload economics just from Falcon 9 have already changed the world. Starship would represent a revolution.

It turns out Dorsey was a libertarian-leaning idealist all along, and he was unable to push his own company in that direction, and had to wait until retirement to actually start making idealistic noises again.

He had many opportunities to take a principled stand against censorship and failed. He oversaw the bannings of many accounts.

He was constrained by advertisers and by his board. He didn't control the company like Zuckerberg controls Facebook.

That's not actually particularly relevant. If you don't uphold your principles in the face of "my business might suffer" or "I might get fired", then they aren't actually principles. So, Jack Dorsey may have made an understandable decision that many would make in his shoes... but in so doing, he gave up any claim to bring a principled believer in free speech.

If you don't uphold your principles in the face of "my business might suffer" or "I might get fired", then they aren't actually principles.

Martyring yourself doesn't do anyone any favors. If getting fired compromises your ability to implement your principle, then you should avoid getting fired and work to optimize the implementation of your principle instead.

And note that Jack Dorsey was instrumental in persuading Elon to buy Twitter in the first place.

Martyring yourself doesn't do anyone any favors. If getting fired compromises your ability to implement your principle, then you should avoid getting fired and work to optimize the implementation of your principle instead.

And note that Jack Dorsey was instrumental in persuading Elon to buy Twitter in the first place.

I like how Scott phrased it in his WebM post (actually not a WebM post but stealth bombing another topic, as he is wont to do): "Everyone has to make their own compromise between morally-pure-but-useless and tainted-but-useful".

On the other hand, consider that everyone else is doing that same rationalization in their head. How does that work in the end? Whoever manages to rationalize away the most principles tends to win the competition and rule the world. That's the way Moloch works.

I wholeheartedly disagree. A principle is that which must not be violated, no matter the cost. If you compromise your principles to advance them, then they weren't actually your principles at all, simply your preferred outcome.

Yes that's what I'm saying, but my theory isn't that he didn't want to, but because he had some sort of knife on the throat.

"Less that 10% of 266 Twitter employees who participated in a poll on messaging app Blind expected to still have their jobs in three months. Blind allows employees to air grievances anonymously after they sign up with corporate emails."

(probably not an accurate estimate bc sampling + bad answers, but does indicate mood in twitter)

I predict twitter becomes substantially more popular and profitable.

Possibly brings back vine to compete with Tik Tok.

Trump account is supposed to be back on Monday.

I've never used TikTok, in part because I see so many through twitter already

agree. Elon will come out ahead on this

Possibly brings back vine to compete with Tik Tok.

This seems like an easy and all-but-guaranteed win.

I never did understand why they killed off Vine in the first place.

I think he's gonna fire a ton of employees and lose a bunch more from attrition (likely not regretted), and probably reinstate some people who have received lifetime bans, and probably Twitter will become less ban-happy for conservative leaning opinion.

But on the whole, my prediction is that nothing is really going to change in the short to medium term. Twitter may get some new features and new monetization products for power users, but isn't going to change dramatically. It isn't going to become anything like 4chan, Gab, Parler, etc. Maybe Trump will get back on, but that'll be the biggest change in that direction.

I think there's a nontrivial chance (say, 15%?) that Twitter ends up banned from various app stores like other 'free speech' twitter clones have. Lets say within one year.

If NOT, then that will create a tremendous precedent that these other sites should be allowed on the app stores.

I'm guessing 50% chance that Trump gets reinstated before the year is out.

An idea that I think would be neat to implement would be a "Political Speech" or "Electoral Speech" section of twitter that is subject to more stringent moderation than Twitter at large. The goal would be to allow existing politicians or candidates and their constituents to have a 'clear' channel for communicating with each other. This would imply that only 'verified' users get to tweet at the politicians, but said politicians would also be unable to block them.

Indeed, it should be doable to Geolock things such that only actual constituents of a given politician (as determined by their physical location) are allowed to tweet at their official account for their office. And this seems like the ideal situation. A special area where trolls are kept out, politicians are able to reach their constituents and tweet at each other and the level of discourse is (theoretically) kept higher than usual so the signal/noise ratio is improved.

The rest of twitter can be anarchic as can be legally achieved.

I think this makes sense because even if we use the "Twitter as Town Square" analogy, I don't think it requires us tolerate someone who brings an airhorn into said square and keeps blaring it every time an opposing politician attempts to speak to the audience.

I think there's a nontrivial chance (say, 15%?) that Twitter ends up banned from various app stores like other 'free speech' twitter clones have. Lets say within one year.

It'd be hilarious if it happened, and then Musk invested serious money into some alt-appstore for Android. And maybe somehow broke iPhones to allow alternate app stores there too. Tho EU is already solving that particular problem apparently.

Indeed, it should be doable to Geolock things such that only actual constituents of a given politician (as determined by their physical location) are allowed to tweet at their official account for their office. And this seems like the ideal situation. A special area where trolls are kept out, politicians are able to reach their constituents and tweet at each other and the level of discourse is (theoretically) kept higher than usual so the signal/noise ratio is improved.

I don't see how that necessarily helps. In your version of Twitter, I presumably cannot quote-tweet a politician who isn't nominally over me. However, I'm pretty sure there are some workarounds to that.

  1. Quote-tweet someone who quote-tweeted the original post and get seen that way.

  2. Just mention who I'm talking about and people in that area may see my tweets regardless.

You're certainly throwing up a barrier, but I don't see how the problem has ever been "People who aren't from the same area as a politician are interfering by responding directly".

Indeed, nothing stops you from screenshotting any tweet you like.

The idea is more that a politician shouldn't have to deal with trolling responses from "fartblaster69420" but also can't block responses and discussions from their own confirmed constituents. If there's to be trolling, at least it's by people who can actually vote in that particular election.

Ah, so you'd ban actual blocking in the first place as well? Or require that people verify their address to be "unblockable" by some others? Because I figured a troll would just get blocked, and there's a public block record or something.

I'm saying that in the 'Political Speech' section of Twitter could keep out anonymous posters, and indeed, only permit people with verified locations to post in their politician's mentions. Everyone can read them, but interactions are limited to people are who are geographically within the given politician's constituency, and between politicians themselves.

Which is to say, let it function more like an actual town square, where 'residents' are privileged and don't have to worry as much about outsiders screaming over them.

Bluesky is interesting. Twitter was already working on it as a protocol, under which, users could choose from different algorithms to populate their feed.

I think it's closer to 90% but given that this is a binary, one-time outcome it's hard to quantify this. Elon and Trump have the two most active accounts on twitter by far, I think something like 150 million users combined and tens of thousands of comments per tweet. There is no way he would want to disappoint so many people who are expecting Trump to be unbanned .

I would anticipate possible issues arising with reinstating Trump's account, not the least of which might be intentional sabotage.

The principal problem is that Trump owns his own Twitter clone, and if he leaves the sinking ship and goes back to Twitter, absolutely no one will use Trump Twitter.

I don’t think twitter is going to be as free speech as gab, I just think the rules will be looser.

Even so, I expect that threatening app store bans will be a tactic used to try to influence the platform.

I expect that Elon would call their bluffs successfully.

Twitter won't be removed for the same reason Fox News is still on every major cable package. It isn't some minor service, its the primary use case for the smart phone for tons of people.

Fox News is unlikely to start featuring guests who sling slurs or recount truly absurd or inflammatory conspiracies.

But you've got One America News and RT America getting booted from cable, nonetheless.

To say nothing of Infowars.

Hence I'm saying 15% in a year. If they can coordinate enough 'behind the scenes' to make this play, I see it as the threat they use to get Twitter back under their thumb.

The tension is easy to resolve, and Reddit of all places almost had it with the quarantine idea. Whatever would have been taken off the platform is instead put behind a "whoah there, are you sure you want to see whatever nastiness the unfiltered internet can come up with?" button. The default feed doesn't have to change a single iota from today (moderators can even continue exactly as they are, but rather than remove/delete the content they flag, it just goes behind the barrier), but so long as people who want to see Alex Jones or whoever CAN do so by seeking him out and following/subscribing/whatever, then the promised freedom is there.

Let's say these are for April 1, 2023.

  • 99%: Trumps Twitter ban has been lifted

  • 95%: At least one case of Twitter moderation has happened for which the NY Times or WaPO has written a story highlighting hypocrisy

  • 90%: Hate speech rules for protected classes remain, neither being retracted nor expanded to cover everyone

  • 70%: Misgendering and deadnaming no longer fall under this category, however

  • 70%: Payment processors, cloud service providers, banks, and the US government have NOT taken measures to leverage or punish Twitter for content policies. (This one is tricky to adjudicate so I'll leave it to you.)

  • 70%: The EU HAS taken measures to leverage or punish Twitter for content policies. (Same.)

  • 60%: Twitter's medical misinformation rules have been modified.

  • 60%: Twitter's election misinformation rules have been modified.

Agree about Trump coming back. The misgendering one is a more difficult one because it may fall under harassment , assuming the person being misgendered has a twitter account, instead of just misinformation or other speech.

Easier to fix this issue by providing (paid?) users robust blocking abilities, I would think. Hard to claim harassment when you can trivially never see it.

One angle I've heard, and will be interested to see play out, is that since Tesla sells a lot of cars in China there's a risk of the Chinese government putting pressure on Elon to censor anti-CCP comments on Twitter by threatening to restrict Tesla's activities in China.

I just checked Twitter and it's basically been a celebration by "heterodox" voices. I saw a lot of attacks on leftist orthodoxy - e.g. a lot of previously-bannable comments on transwomen.

I hope - for their sake - that Musk is who they think he is, otherwise a whole bunch of prominent accounts like LibsofTikTok and Matt Walsh and so on have basically written their own death warrants.

I think the tension between unrestricted speech and a quality user experience will continue to be a problem

Eh, I remember when Twitter was wrestling with its libertarian impulses when ISIS was using it for propaganda. They eventually folded but...was the user experience that much worse? There'll be a lot of whining but I'm not convinced it'll matter.

The real concern is advertisers, which is why I don't think Elon will go full unrestricted speech.

I hope - for their sake - that Musk is who they think he is, otherwise a whole bunch of prominent accounts like LibsofTikTok and Matt Walsh and so on have basically written their own death warrants.

I doubt it. I think Musk will not disappoint them. Musk's investment, $40+ billion, in part hinges on his brand of tolerating speech, and he himself supports The Babylon Bee and LibsofTikTok .

The real concern is advertisers, which is why I don't think Elon will go full unrestricted speech.

Twitter took no action for 4+ years when Trump had the most popular account on Twitter by far, only banning him for Jan 6th, so evidently advertisers did not seem too perturbed. More engagement will be a net-positive.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats