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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   34390 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 14, 2022

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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):

“I know of six critical systems (like ‘serving tweets’ levels of critical) which no longer have any engineers,” a former employee said. "There is no longer even a skeleton crew manning the system. It will continue to coast until it runs into something, and then it will stop.”

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.)

You could run Twitter with 1500 people instead of 7000 (as I’ve argued many times, tech hiring sprees have bloated every big tech business), but you want those 1500 people to be the good ones, you want them to be able to take over for their fired coworkers, and you want them to be distributed so that at least some of the survivors are in all the critical teams you need with the accumulated knowledge to keep the ship moving.

The problem is that in the rocket and electric car businesses, you can 'exploit' highly motivated talent because some huge proportion of aerospace engineers was raised on a steady diet of science fiction and October Sky. People are willing to do the crushing work weeks if they believe that their work is lifting humanity to the stars and enabling the first interplanetary colony in ways that they just won't to make sure MAGA/progressives can snipe at each other with meaningless, puerile gotchas. People at twitter are there for the paycheck, people at SpaceX are there for the dream.

Pretty ironic to hear someone arguing a truly free speech platform—which Musk explicitly says is his most important goal with Twitter—is not that meaningful...on a website that had to be created because of fears of free speech limitations on the social media website from whence it escaped.

A "truly free speech platform" is one of the most-tried ideas on the Internet and it ends the same way every time. To pull it off, you'd need to know at least a little bit about social dynamics and moderation, which Elon isn't doing a good job of demonstrating.

Yeah, he's better at rockets than NASA, but he'll fail at being a Reddit mod. Sure.

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