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.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I think it's totally plausible from a technical standpoint if those 50 people are talented and hardworking. All the hard stuff for a basic scaled social media platform is a cloud API or open source library these days, and Twitter is past its startup design sprint anyway. A low cost structure would give him a lot of headroom to ignore the problems that his employee bloat is aimed at addressing right now.
The issue is that a 50-person giant social media empire isn't a stable equilibrium. It's similar to why you rarely see charities that spend ~100% of their funds on the cause: if spending a dollar on marketing gets you more than a dollar in increased contributions, then why wouldn't you do that? Likewise if you had a scaled 50-person giant social media empire, then the return of hiring a marginal employee is much greater than the cost.
The issue for Musk specifically is that he needs to pay a billion dollars a year in interest payments for the leverage that he took on in order to acquire Twitter. So he doesn't have the luxury of running the shop at low cost and telling advertisers to take it or leave it.
Since he needs advertisers to pay his interest, he needs to solve a lot of the messy social problems that drove a lot of that employee bloat in the first place. He needs good sales teams. He needs good marketing. He needs good moderation to keep the tone of Twitter consistent with advertisers' brand expectations. He needs giant compliance teams to keep up with the onerous, schizophrenic, internally inconsistent and offensive regulations imposed by the likes of Europe and India. None of those are purely technical problems; they require giant teams of people, and (pre-AGI) they always will. Why? Because they aren't static goals; they're adversarial goals with elements of competition. They're basically a policy market, in the sense that if it could all be automated, advertisers and regulators would have more headroom to increase the onerousness and contradiction of their demands until it couldn't. The only check on advertisers' demands of Twitter is how they compare with other social media platforms in terms of brand safety, and the only check on regulators' demands of Twitter is how onerous their regulations can be before Twitter will go dark in their country (or before the US government initiates WTO actions against them, and no one is betting on Biden's willingness to bail out Elon Musk in the international policy market).
I dunno if he'll pull it off. I suspect he will, but no outcome here will surprise me.
One outcome that particularly wouldn't surprise me is if Musk capitalizes on the chaos to threaten his lenders with bankruptcy, and uses that threat to buy out his debt for 20-50 cents on the dollar. Good luck marketing this debt, guys: no one has ever demonstrated that Twitter can have positive economic value, and a high-profile failure by Elon Musk isn't going to increase anyone's estimation of those odds. Then his cost structure becomes much simpler and he can tell advertisers and foreign regulators to get fucked, the prospect of which at this point I am sure provides him with near-sexual arousal.
More options
Context Copy link