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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 31, 2022

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I'm not "trusting" musk. I'm saying that from my perspective as a professional in the field, the things he has said he plans to do - when given as executive direction to a competent security team - can result in a bunch of very clear changes that have clear mechanisms that might reduce or at least bury spam.

As in, if I were evaluating projects for my team to do from the perspective of "can they work", these would get onto the roadmap.

Also, you're assuming they'd disable 8/mo blue check accounts' ability to rename. I'm not sure they would do that

Yes, I'm evaluating the projects he's proposing from the perspective that details which don't fit into a tweet will be thought through by competent teams of professionals, rather than from the perspective of an Elon hater who assumes it won't work. (Just like electric cars, rocket ships, and sending payments on the internet without getting destroyed by fraudsters won't work.)

Almost all of the security improvements you're positing will either not actually happen, or come from changes that could be easily made without adding paid bluechecks!)

Feel free to specify a mechanism for verifying people at scale without charging.

I don't have anything for or against musk,

...

Also says "will suspend accounts that impersonate without clearly specifying parody", which i assume refers to all accounts? That kinda sucks tbh, and is not very free speech.

Lol, the first statement very much seems plausible.

https://twitter.com/HeheWaitWhut/status/1590489781502611458 https://www.snopes.com/news/2022/11/09/verified-accounts-ben-shapiro/

I mean, it's incredibly funny and dramapilled, but it doesn't really accomplish the 'reduced spam' and 'reducing misinformation' goals i think

Okay, just saw this on twitter https://twitter.com/somebadideas/status/1588876465915166721

"A huge problem with spam and bots and trolls"

"Verified users will pretty much always be at the top of comments and search ... You’ll have to scroll really far to see unverified users"

that would really suck! Compare that to the 4chan or rdrama ethos, right? Baby, bathwater

full 1hr conversation - https://youtube.com/watch?v=WgQBTo0EUxA

the early part is about tesla and is a great read (although not a great listen, really hate the talk/podcast format vs reading)

Other transcript excerpts (heavily edited for brevity, a solid 1/2 to 2/3 of words removed per excerpt, the voice format just sucks)

now on Twitter you'll see many links to YouTube and and TikTok - Twitter isn't giving content creators enough video length, and has no means of monetizing video - we're going to change that rapidly at Twitter"

That might work

On the verified change -

The point is to make crime not to pay - right now to create a bot on Twitter costs less than a penny - that's part of why crime and hateful conduct pays but if somebody risks losing eight bucks it's too expensive to have 100k fake accounts at $800k a month

Can't tell if 'hateful conduct' was just thrown in there to sound good (the guy he was talking to asked about antisemitism) because there aren't "100k hate speech bots" but if not, the 8/mo thing reducing 'hateful conduct' is not great

difficulty with activist groups pressuring major advertisers to drop us ... despite doing everything possible to appease them and clarify that moderation and hateful conduct rules haven't changed ... we've made no change in our operations at all

successful in in causing a massive drop in Twitter advertising revenue ... nothing working at appeasing them ... frankly an attack on the First Amendment

I think this is a sign that content rules won't loosen too much, not sure though.

[my] workload went up from about I don't know 70 to 80 hours a week to probably 120 . um so yeah I go to sleep I wake up I work go to sleep wake up work do that seven days a week ... I think once Twitter is set on the right path I think it is a much easier thing to manage than SpaceX or Tesla

[...] I'm aware of [...] how to make a way better PayPal [...] I there's there's a product plan [later: x.com game plan] I wrote I wish I'd kept a copy of in July 2000 to make the most valuable financial institution in the world and we're going to execute that, which amazingly no one has done, I think that's what part of why Twitter will be ultimately extremely valuable

the comment about x.com vision clashing with the twitter vision?

how do we get 80% of America - not like the far left and far right - to join a digital Town Square and voice their opinion and exchange ideas and once in a while change their minds

[...] decide what kind of experience you want to have on Twitter [...] pick your preference and and decide if you want full contact battle or to look at puppies

when asked why invest in tesla vs much cheaper p/e car companies making EVs: "many times I've recommended people don't invest in Tesla and I've said our stock is too high but when people just ignore me and keep buying the stock some reason [...] at a very high level I'd say that autonomy is an insanely fundamental breakthrough and and no one is even close to Tesla for solving generalized autonomy or generalized self-driving Vehicles"

I'm saying that from my perspective as a professional in the field

Alright in that case - sorry for the accusation!

Feel free to specify a mechanism for verifying people at scale without charging.

I don't mean identity verification, I mean - for replies to tweets from people like musk or vitalik, specifically, or other tweets that are 'high risk of spamming', heavily downweight replies that 'might be spam' using heuristics that you allow to have a much higher false positive spam-detection rate than your normal anti-spam heuristics to decrease the false negative rate. The problem with weighting comments by verification (aside from people buying verified accounts), to crowd out the spam, is that - if, as you say, you put verified comments at the top to crowd out the spam, that's like (for those top comments) using a spam-filter with a false positive rate of 95% (from my browing, the ratio of good replies by bluechecks : good replies by non bluechecks). You're going to filter out almost all of the good / funny comments in favor of whatever bluechecks like. But if you just 'crank up your spam filter' for specifically that sorting, or use more effective but also error-prone metrics, I think that'd be better at filtering out that specific kind of spam, and with a 'false positive' rate plausibly lower than 30% - also, with much less effort than reworking twitter blue.

I don't have anything for or against musk, > ...

I'm actually a big fan of technical competence and leadership, and musk is great at that, I just like the technical details of whether things will work or not as much!

I would guess that it looks like musk mishandled some things, most confidently the whole 'rushing the team to release twitter blue quickly, and as a result the twitter UI offering people the ability to purchase blue checkmarks, and telling existing blue subscribers they have checkmarks, without actually displaying the checkmarks' thing seems like a clear error, and some of the other publicized actions seem like mistakes too, but idk.