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Twitter dies for good in the next six months: 80% probability
By now you know that Elon gave staff a deadline of today (Thursday) to either commit to being "extremely hardcore" or leave (source). Unsurprisingly, most people - roughly 75%, according to some Internet rando - didn't take him up on this. Elon blinked and apparently people still have access.
That won't do much (WaPo):
But that's not even what I was going to write about, just what happened while I was composing the post. (Also let's put aside that he said "microservices are bloat" and then they killed the microservice serving SMS 2-factor login.)
To me, the biggest news is that he axed 80% of the 5500 contractors (source, Casey Newton, or someone with a premium account impersonating him I guess).
The contractors were responsible for things like moderation (source: what are they gonna do, use salaried employees?). If you don't have moderation for basic things like CSAM, you're boned. I know a thing or two about moderation, and if you let the Internet type into a text field, you get some dank shit. And crucially, you can't automate it away, because there's a human on the other side working to defeat whatever you're doing. I mean, the YouTube comment section probably has some of the most expensive automation on the planet working on it and the spam still gets worse every day, and I'm talking the obvious stuff like "HIT ME UP ON TELEGRAM <number>". The only thing that saves you is humans clicking buttons (and getting PTSD, but let's skip that for now). Google had 101k employees but 121k contractors as of March 2019, and that's what the contractors do, click buttons.
If you don't have moderation, you don't get the YouTube comments section, because they at least have contractors backed up by code (at the cost of many expensive engineer-years). You don't even get 4chan, because they at least have Those Who Do It For Free. You get some ungodly shithole most younger Internet users have never experienced. You're getting... the virtual equivalent of your local Greyhound terminal. Whatever happens to someone's chat room side project that gets posted to /b/. Sludge.
Twitter will have to either restrict posting to an unbearable degree or watch as the remaining users get tired of slurs in their replies and bounce.
Remember when Elon was just going to clean up the bots on Twitter?
(Reason for posting: I saw some takes elsewhere on this site that apparently Musk would lead Twitter to success or at least improve it or something, and disagreed.)
It is absolutely possible that Elon kills Twitter. He's moving fast and breaking things. He's thinking different. He's remembering to not be evil. Et cetera. I think most of the posts like this are praying on his downfall. You're hating. You're not just sitting back and seeing what happens. You don't like Elon and you hope he fails. I think this energy is distorting the picture of what is actually going on at Twitter.
Now, I'm not a fan of Elon, but I'm not praying on his downfall. I'm interested to see how lean he can make Twitter. It might be too much too fast, he might fuck it up in any number of ways. He's already fucked up his Blue rollout. But you have to admit, he has a way of turning Ls into Ws or Ts (ties). Someone like him who's been in the game for this long doing what he's been doing doesn't survive on luck alone. He's got skills, just not the one he advertises or would like people to think he has.
All in all, I'd be happy if he were to prove the haters, the libs, and Silicon Valley wrong, and make them eat their words, because I think they're scared he might make them. It's really reminiscent of 2015.
"outgroup is entirely motivated by their personal hatred of all that is good" is, even if kinda true, never entirely true, nor a useful contribution if not well explained!
A while ago I was arguing here that the blue checkmark plan, as stated then, made no sense and would fail. I got some pushback, most of which was argued for as opposed to 'its bc u hate beauty and greatness', but ... it was implemented, it failed, it increased impersonation and didn't stop spam, and the feature was removed because it failed. (an internal twitter doc prepared before the launch, that elon didn't listen to, made similar claims) That's evidence that it's not useful to claim "I don't like elon and hope that he fails" applies to my posts, and likely others arguing against him here!
Is OP your alt or something? I'm not talking about you, or anyone, specifically. If you want to say Elon has no haters, you're wrong. People DO want him to fail because he's the outgroup. Even though they LOVE Twitter, they'd rather see it burn to the ground if they can blame it on someone they don't like. This is a REAL and currently RELEVANT part of human nature that is playing out before our eyes as the Twitter situation unfolds.
I didn't see your post about Blue. I would have agreed with you. When I say I'm not a fan of Elon, I mean it. I don't think he represents all that is Beautiful And Great. I think he's kind an idiot (-savant). But the commentary I'm seeing around this happening is hilariously biased! It's funny how much hatred the man inspires, and the people hating seem to be completely unaware that they're hating. This isn't a recipe for good prediction making. They're not giving him the respect he's due for wheeling and dealing, scamming and ramming his way through the business, media, and legal systems of America.
you're kinda right, and I think it's happening on both sides. And not in a 'hurr both side r the same and bad' sense, but a - wow, almost everyone on social media who has an opinion on this can be perfectly divided into "previously liked musk/right wing-ish/thinks twitter is fine and musk is doing good" and "previously disliked musk/left wing-ish/thinks twitter is crashing hard and musk is doing awful". I'm actually surprised at how much that's true.
Even then though, just saying 'it's because u hate musk' isn't enough, there are more complex causes even in cases of obvious and blatant bias.
I think there are three sides. Anti-Musk, Anti-Anti-Musk (me), and Pro-Musk. The third one is virtually silent compared to the other two. And I disagree about this being a complex issue. It's really just friend/enemy.
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Honestly, I see this as a win-win situation. Whether Musk succeeds in turning Twitter into something useful or burns it to the ground, a cultural blight will have been nullified.
I like Twitter and think something worse would take its place if it collapsed.
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