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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   34369 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.)

  1. Musks is the luckiest guy in the world. Heavily benefited from esg etc to give silly valuations to Tesla and can access that cash.

  2. The asshole boss thing actually works when done well. I’ve had them who do nothing. But put pressure on you to figure something out. Actually works to motivate people to do good work.

  3. He’s a winner. He’s always figured things out. While Tesla may be overvalued he’s still made it profitable. Rocket inventiveness was dead before he came along.

  4. He has loyal engineers in Tesla and SpaceX he can use in the situation of mass quitting.

  5. Rockets are not that profitable. He found starlink and what cheap rockets can do for that industry. You just have to trust he will find a profitable business model. Telecommunications are super profitable.

  6. He’s been too red tribe with some bad tweets but a bare bones mode isn’t going to lose red tribe

  7. Social networks are sticky. People won’t want to give up their networks. So even if you lose half people are still going to maintain their other half on twitter for a while

  8. If it seems like twitter is failing then he can buy the debt for Pennie’s on the dollar to maintain control. Then rebuild.

  9. So worst case is he takes the loss on current equity and buys the debt for 3-6 billion. Then rebuilds on red tribe twitter. But that’s worst case. I think stickiness is fairly high in social media so blue tribe probably doesn’t leave.

What can he get sued for? Losing money and making a bad investment isn’t illegal.

On going funding is an issue but I’m going to make an assumption at a minimum he can figure out cash flow positive.

But say it’s not super profitable but he wants to maintain control he can lose face with his investors and buy the bank debt cheap. So he would have to put like 6 billion in on the bank debt. For relationship reasons throw the Saudis and Ellison etc some options around a 15 billion valuation.

It’s already a zero. Current financing has 1.4 billion a year in interest costs. There investments are worthless unless he does big things which mitigates the he blew it up.

to the point that Twitter is a mostly worthless husk with a domain name and a low-moat technical product.

Twitter is already a low-moat product, network effects are what keep competitors from replacing it. If the left can come up with a left-wing version of Gab/Truth Social/whatever and actually get people to use it (unlike the right-wing examples I just gave) then Twitter might be in trouble. Otherwise I think it's going to stick around.

If the left can come up with a left-wing version of Gab/Truth Social/whatever

It's probably worth noting that most of them have attempted to migrate to literally that exact thing (various Mastodon instances). I don't think they'll be particularly successful for the same reason that Gab/TS/etc. haven't been successful: there's simply no value-add in reactionary construction. They don't do anything better than Twitter does anyway.

Which is the same problem this place has, but even worse, since at least you can find this place with a Google search- you can't even do that with Mastodon instances at all. Lefty Mastodon even has the purity spiral thing built in because of how vulnerable users are to admin catfights and a de facto globally-enforced blocklist, where Twitter curbed most of the excesses of that approach- so people can't expect the stability they need to build anything good on top.

The future is not federation, it's confederation, and by its inherently freeing nature it thus can neither come from Left nor Right.

Social networks are sticky. People won’t want to give up their networks. So even if you lose half people are still going to maintain their other half on twitter for a while

Yeah, people are underestimating this. There's a lot more that goes on Twitter besides political shit-posting. Lots of people have built careers and small fortunes on the backs of their Twitter followings. I was just listening to a podcast about "threadbois" who did just that. Are they going to turn their backs on their 100k followers they've spent years building just because Elon isn't praying to the right gods?

Adjacent but sounds like Musks will let Trump get his twitter back. I think even red tribe people want Trump to die and Desantis is far superior. So I assume by mentioning it Musks has made a view that Trump loses primary. In free speech grounds Trump shouldn’t be banned but as a maga adjacent I want him banned.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1593673844996288512?s=46&t=o4yJPOOQnQoAxYXvJuPdlQ

There have been a lot of lay offs in the tech space. I’m sure Elon can hire some people. But the truth is Twitter had too much staff for the value it was getting. You need to cut costs make it through a few months and the ad boycott will end.

Unfortunately the ad boycott is likely both ideological and personal (in that a lot of people Elon got rid of were buddies to the ad buyers) and thus is unlikely to end. GroupM's shakedown letter (see bulleted list) demonstrates that.

Assuming ads actually generate revenue (who knows) companies ultimate log will pay for ads where there is a large user base.

Not if they have a more important reason than revenue not to.

Remember all those companies boycotting Facebook? Me neither. Take a look at their latest revenue and you can see it didn't matter.

If Twitter advertising is effective, then there will be plenty of demand from people who like money. The boycott will only matter if it turns out that Twitter advertising didn't work and companies were throwing money at it anyway. Which I accept is possible.

Meh, it's easy for advertising consortia to dunk on him now, in an economic downturn, when his product relies on brand advertising (i.e. ads that can't measure conversions) and brand advertising is the highest beta of all of the marketing categories. The truth is that their threats are downstream of their extrinsic need to pull back on that category of spending. It's mostly just a demand failure masquerading as a boycott.

And the staff it had were entrenched within a culture of censorship and narrative control. The better move would have been to fire most of them except the most essential while building a new Twitter HQ somewhere in rural Texas or something, and then move the whole HQ out of the compromised bay area. I bet that would be a lot cheaper of a building to run than the current one as well. Then you could also make sure the (hopefully minimal) moderation team was staffed by normal people as well, instead of the types that tend to gravitate to SF.

The better move would have been to fire most of them except the most essential while building a new Twitter HQ somewhere in rural Texas or something

Even better move would be do it all before you acquire Twitter, to have ready new management and new staff from day one.

Instead, it looks that Elon learned from Bush's success in Iraq.

1/Take over

2/Fire all management and personnel

3/???

4/Profit!

Elon's actions will lead directly to profits in a way that is easy to understand.

Twitter was bleeding money, losing $1.1 billion in 2020 alone.

They had a $13M meals program that was feeding less than 10% of the staff because no one showed up to HQ. It was costing hundreds of dollars per meal, with more people preparing food than eating it. It's laughably stupid.

My sense is Twitter was hyper-bloated, with ~10x more employees than they needed, so 90% layoffs seem about right. It's a microblogging website that grew to have a bunch of completely superfluous positions with people who literally contributed nothing.

Right-sizing the staff, cutting needless expenses, adding a revenue stream with a re-imagined Twitter Blue, reducing trolls/bots—these are all common sense. The advertisers will come back, as the only metric that matters is user engagement, and it's at an all time high & will continue to grow through 2024 with what will be the most "entertaining" election in U.S. history.

Elon will turn Twitter into the profitable Center of the Internet, and a certain tribe will be pretending the sky is falling the whole time.

#RIPTwitter & #Twitterisdown was trending during the highest engagement period in Twitter's existence. It's the fakest news that's ever been.

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.

You don't like Elon and you hope he fails

"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.

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.

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.

Do you even use twitter ?

It has sentiment analysis. Has had for the last year at least.

Write anything with slurs or even a small bit of profanity and it won't even notify someone about the reply. They'd have to search it out manually under their tweet, and then click "show additional replies".

Next time, please write about something you know, perhaps ?

All Musk had to do was take control of Twitter, say “there will be no changes to product or policy until I’ve completed a six-month review period”, then in a month say “like the rest of the tech sector, we’re facing a downturn, need to make tough decisions blah blah blah”, lay off 1/3 of the Twitter team, see who struggles from the survivors, give top performers big raises to stay, then do another big round of layoffs in three months when he’s sure he can run the company on 1/3 of the previous team while adjusting for which teams need the most or least culling, then rest and slowly implement the new product.

That would require him not being a psychopath. Musk might be a brilliant entrepreneur, but he has a gaping deficit of empathy.

All of the skilled twitter programmers I knew of online (from before elon) rom their public accomplishments/projects/writing/social media have left, as of now. And their posts indicate most of the skilled people they knew within twitter have left too. Ofc anecdote, idk anything internally, easily could be wrong, etc

How many unskilled Twitter programmers do you know?

If you don't know any, this may just be a base rate fallacy; if some percentage of programmers have left, and you only know skilled ones, of course all the ones you know who left have been skilled.

I mean skilled as in 'significantly above the average faang programmer'. I'm not claiming he's firing skilled people more than unskilled people, but you'd want to keep most of them.

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.

I have to disagree. A lot of people also care about the information environment. Just as much as people care about going to mars. I don’t want 1984 America with a fb-twitter-Liz Cheney aligned informational environment. I would work extremely hard to prevent that.

Not my core talent but I dropped a resume to twitter a few weeks after he took over. This is a big issue to me. And there are probably others here with more specific talents that care about free speech who should also consider working for twitter.

Perhaps I should have specified that the current workforce is there for the paycheck, not the dream. Good luck if you end up there.

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.

'Meaningful' in this context is subjective. There are plenty of occupations and causes that are critical to humanity that still don't inspire enough fervor in their adherents to make them work 60 work weeks for below-market wages (i.e. graduate school, or at least it was once upon a time), regardless of how many websites are created due to fears of free speech limitations.

I'd be willing to bet that the current workforce isn't willing to work 60 hour weeks in the name of free speech. Whether there's enough people out there that care who will fill the gap after they leave remains to be seen, in addition to whether those people can keep the faith when their ideals collide with the reality of running a social media platform.

I'll bet he'll find people without much problem.

And I'll bet he can run a better Twitter with 10% of the staff.

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.

It's not that meaningful to the people currently working at Twitter. There might be some silent majority of anarchist/libertarian/hacker-ethos programmers out there who'll jump to do twice the work as their peers in the name of free speech, but any "can't stop the signal" programmers probably weren't already working in the How To Stop The Signal department at Twitter when Musk bought it.

Yes! Don't underestimate the culture and how attracts/rejects people, especially in a company that's been around for years.

Anecdotally, big darling companies like Twitter employ very few hacker-ethos-type people. If they do, they're mostly siloed into doing expert work that's quite disconnected from the rest of the organization. Again, anecdotally, the silent majority seem to be folks who enjoy the high income and the upper-middle class life it affords them: raising kids, walking their dog, soldering expensive custom keyboards, etc. The loud minority are very often strong left of center folks, especially in a place like CA, who are always advocating for eg. renaming the "master" branch to "main" because of how offensive the former is.

(Again) Anecdotally, at one of my jobs, the number of people who identified them as lightly hacker-ethos-aligned (eg. pgp keysigning party, linux user, 2600 reader, etc.) number at most two dozen in a trendy, CA-based place that, at the time, boasted 12000 engineers. I suspect more strongly aligned folk just avoid Big Co. altogether.

It's not that meaningful to the people currently working at Twitter.

He was able to rid himself of 90% of them, so it's sort of immaterial.

Somewhat related...

What's interesting to me is all the flack he's getting about giving people the option to either (A) "get hardcore" and work a lot to make Twitter awesome or (B) quit and get severance.

We've gotten a bit nutty about "work-life" balance. Some people don't want that. They like to work a lot. It's not like Musk is enslaving people and forcing them to do manual labor for god's sake. They get to choose to work at a sweet ass campus doing shit they love for great pay.

I'm very certain Musk, literally one of the most recognizable people in the world, can find the people he needs to run a lean & mean ship at Twitter, and make it awesome. Because plenty of people would LOVE to work 60-80 hours a week on a free speech challenge like Twitter, when it is well-positioned to be The Center of the Internet (to the extent is isn't already).

Call me a cynic, but I'm familiar with enough people who do essentially nothing while getting paid (well) for it that I can empathize a lot with Musk here. In my career, I've seen departments with 20 people handling the workload of 2 or 3, and departments that were 90% automated years ago...but the fog of bureaucracy allowed 10 people to just draw a paycheck for standing around and watching a system.

Musk doesn't want dead weight, as no business owner does.

People at twitter are there for the paycheck,

Or worse, they're there for the kind of activism musk distinctly opposes.

People trust Musk because he has been instrumental in creating three huge businesses (and another that would be impressive for most people). There is a track record here. Either musk is the luckiest man in the history of the world or he has business chops in the top 1

% of the 1%.

I'm not sure why it can't be a mixture of skill and chops, or why chops in rocket building would necessarily transfer to social media, or why a talented person can't make big mistakes. It's equally plausible to me that Elon Musk's ego has swollen to the point where he thinks he can run Twitter with him +50 people, as it is that he really can run Twitter with him +50 people.

From a technical standpoint is running Twitter on 50 people so implausible? I imagine new features would be released very slowly, but I think that's enough to maintain the site, so long as moderation is relaxed quite a bit and mostly delegated to AI.

I didn't say it was implausible. I'm 50/50 on whether running Twitter with 50 people is possible or not. But I don't think it's convincing to appeal to Elon's genius to argue that it proves that it's possible.

They have their own datacenters, at least three of them, with hundreds of thousands of servers. 50 people would barely be enough to do the hands-on work of managing one datacenter.

Just swapping failed hard drives would probably take about two people datacenter. Assume 300k machines, 100k per datacenter, with ten percent of that footprint being machines with lots of disks, let's say thirty disks per machine. AFR for drives that are being constantly hammered as I would expect them to be is about 3%, especially if you try to stretch the lifetime of the drives.

10,000 machines * 30 drives per machine * 3% AFR = 9000 drives per year, or about 24 per day. Let's say each drive swap takes 30 minutes from the point of receiving the ticket, picking up the replacement, performing the swap, and some wiggle room for complications / ticket re-opens.

So an eight hour shift can do about 16 swaps per day. Typically datacenters don't staff drive swappers around the clock, so you need at least two people just for drive swaps.

Those people have no knowledge of how the replacement drives are stocked, someone else needs to do all the ordering of spare parts, and at least one person needs to receive and stock them. So at least three people per datacenter just for drive swaps.

Then someone needs to handle the relationships with Western Digital, Seagate, Hitachi, etc. If you don't want to be surprised as you roll out new drive models you'll need at least a couple of people whose job is to qualify new drives by abusing them for a few months and running real workloads on them.

And someone needs to handle the OS / software side of the drives. Handling firmware updates, drive settings, all the automation that goes into failure detection, handling replaced drives, investigating problems, etc. That's at least a couple of people.

Someone needs to write nad run the inventory system that cuts tickets and registers spare parts as well, let's say another two people.

We're up to 9 people at the datacenters and 7 people outside. 16 total. We haven't even written the software that's going to be using the drives yet. And this is just for hard disk-based storage, and I'm being extremely conservative. In reality two people is not sustainable for any team that needs to be oncall, you'll burn out quickly if you're oncall half of the time.

I would be pretty surprised if these jobs weren't handled by contractors. I haven't read about any ex Twitter employees talking about how difficult it will be to replace their invaluable hard drive swapping experience.

Drive swappers almost certainly are contractors, but they're still people. The claim I was responding to was about people, and most claims of this sort are also about people.

The distinction between contractors and employees is pretty arbitrary, and makes for impossible to disprove claims. If I can sneak in contractors I could plausibly say that Twitter could be run by one employee (and 10,000 contractors).

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.

Reddit had 30 employees in 2012 and it was a far more complicated application then than twitter is today.

Very implausible. Sure, a single person can build a Twitter clone (timeline of Tweets from people you follow) in a weekend, but there's a whole lot more to it than that. Realistically something like Twitter might be doable with 500 engineers (hard to say; not sure of the entire set of features), but you need a whole lot of moderation, marketing, business associates, etc. on top of that if you actually want to make money.

To elaborate, you need people handling identity, authorization, infrastructure, payments, internal tools for CSRs and moderators, customer/business facing tools, third party integrations, APIs, auditability, security, ad placement strategies, site reliability, data stores, build/test/deployment systems. Take any of those away, and you don't really have a viable business. And that doesn't even touch on new feature development (which to be fair hasn't been that important once Twitter found its niche).

When Instagram was acquired for $1 billion in 2012 it had 13 employees.

Twitter by this point has a lot of technical debt and cruft, so 50 does seems like too few. But less than 1000 seems very doable. One reason that so many people want this to fail is that they're afraid that Musk is right about these workers being worthless.

Past performance doesn’t guarantee future success but it does provide some degree of confidence. Ego could be a problem. Mistakes could be a problem. But Musk has helped build…online payment platform, telecommunication network, rocket company, a car company, and a tunneling company.

These are rather disparate things suggesting his skill isn’t domain limited.

I think I’ll trust him (when he has a lot of inside info we don’t) over a random internet poster.

At Tesla and SpaceX, he’s had great teams behind him that have been with him for many years. That isn’t necessarily the case here.

Tesla and SpaceX were also his companies from the beginning. He was well positioned to demand extreme commitment and tell people who wanted work life balance to look elsewhere. Twitter is just a company he bought and has its own culture. It seems fairly obvious to me that Musk has grossly overestimated his ability to impose his will on reality, probably because he's used to working in environments where it was genuinely easier to do so.

At the time of the original offer I remember there being lots of thinking that this is a brilliant masterplan on the part of Musk on /r/themotte (for the record I was skeptical). That we're into what very much looks like an implosion of Twitter's operations and people are still convinced this is some 1000 iq maneuvering makes me think Musk's cult of personality has a stronger grip around here than I figured. Previously I figured from experience that the typical "Musk-bro" was more a finance type.

Of course there remains an outside shot it gets all turned around, and that the problems with Twitter here are very minor and being blown out of proportion by people who are hostile to Musk and the takeover. But I think there's a good amount of fire behind this smoke.

The man waived his right to due diligence, then started publicly griping about stuff a prospective buy-side would review… during due diligence. Dog that caught the car, on this one.

and then fired the c-suite on the first day for cause

these sorts of things are common in acquisitions

this is all part of the dance, just like his bucking in the chancery court to get Twitter to make statements in response

I used to work M&A. No, waiving due diligence is the opposite of common. There are multiple SaaS providers that offer VDRs for due diligence because exceedingly rare is the transaction that exempts it.

Waiving due diligence then stating conditions within a target company pose enough of a concern you might not want to complete your transaction doesn’t work. The target can hammer you in court. Musk completed the purchase, predictably, just before the judge’s imposed deadline of heading to trial.

Twitter’s board had a responsibility to maximize shareholder value, not make blue checks happy after the sale. Musk was on the hook to (1) pay over the market share price to take Twitter private, or (2) pay Twitter a huge sum in penalties for not completing the deal. At that point, Musk had no leverage over Twitter’s board because either outcome was a win for shareholders.

Yeah, which firm?

I didn't write waiving due diligence is common, I wrote "these sorts of things," i.e., publicly whining, threatening to go to court, going to court, and all other such things because each of them can have a benefit/cost to either party.

edit: wow you made a bunch of edits after I responded

which actions?

public comments? legal threats? court?

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Yeah, which firm?

Ah, yes, I’ll just post my CV to this forum where anonymous accounts debate whether or not there are cabals of Jews that have disproportionate power in American society.

And yes, that sort of brinksmanship can have benefits. But given Musk signed away DD, assumed responsibility for mollifying any federal regulators and agreed to sizable penalties for backing out in his offer to purchase, I’m all ears as to what you think those were for Musk. Because in this case there was no incentive for concessions from Twitter’s board.

wow, you made a bunch of edits to your previous comment after I responded

Ah, yes, I’ll just post my CV

oh yes, saying you worked at CBRE is basically you posting your full name and home address to the internet

this is why I typically just roll my eyes when someone tries to capture some sort of authority with a claim about life experience which isn't immediately obvious from their comments; if you don't want to post a CV, don't attempt to use it to get some sort of air of authority

it's downright goofy someone who claims to have experience in M&A would write your comments because it has no recognition that public comments, legal threats, refusals, lawsuits, etc., are common in M&A, no demonstration of the terminology normally used in these agreements, and no discussions whatsoever in the costs or benefits of any of these tactics

all of these tactics can and are part of the dance and each of them has costs and benefits to accomplish some purpose, even as simple as stalling for time

instead you simply assume Musk is the dog who caught the bumper and "predictably" would close the deal which is why you bought Twitter stock at $36 knowing it would be bought for $55 a couple months later, right?

At that point, Musk had no leverage over Twitter’s board because either outcome was a win for shareholders.

Why start the story in the middle of the chancery case? Everyone seems to gloss over the timeline in favor of "current thing" hottakes.

Musk semi-secretly buys large stake in twitter over the period of a month. Twitter board freaks out and tells him no way and then engages in a bunch of anti-shareholder behavior in order to stave off Musk. Musk then makes a proposal. Twitter refuses the offer. Corporate lawyers start scrambling to put together a shareholder lawsuit. Twitter agrees to proposal. Musk claims he doesn't want to buy the company anymore due to fraud. Twitter sues him in Chancery Court to force the deal. Musk completes the deal.

We went from Twitter willing to fuck over shareholders to stop takeover to Twitter suing Musk to force him to take the company over and then Musk buying the company he made a no due diligence buyout agreement with and your hot take is he's just been bumbling along? Huh, okay.

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Previously I figured from experience that the typical "Musk-bro" was more a finance type.

It's more the "I fucking love science!" type.

I tend to agree Musk is hardly a good manager, but when it comes to people commenting on how he runs Twitter, we're in a "unstoppable force meets an immovable object" situation. The Cult of Musk really isn't any more clueless than an average journalist.

That said, it’s hard for some fans to reconcile the fact that Musk is a great businessman with the fact that he’s also often impulsive and reckless and perfectly capable of really fucking things up for himself. At Tesla and SpaceX, he’s had great teams behind him that have been with him for many years. That isn’t necessarily the case here.

Look at the results though. Space-x want from being a prototype to a thriving space company. Same for Tesla. Odds are he will succeed with Twitter if history is any guide . Steve jobs and Bill Gates were famously hotheaded but delivered results too.

But Elon never mismanaged his other companies to this degree, for whatever reason. I don't recall ever seeing him publicly squabbling with Tesla employees, issuing ultimatums, recklessly making huge changes, micromanaging things he doesn't understand, etc. It seems to me like either he is intentionally tanking twitter, or has suffered some kind of head injury recently causing him to lose all executive function.

Counterpoint about the bleakness of it. It's probably not the end.

And I'd contend that Twitter is already rather sludge-y, and trying to keep it remotely sane-ish is probably not worth subjecting hundreds of thousands of low-paid people to the worst that humanity has to offer.

So what I'm getting from you and other replies is "trolls/Bad Content never impacted the average user's twitter experience because they're there to read what specific famous people post". I buy that. I guess it's not a big deal until people start posting CSAM and shit, which I guess you might be able to do with a skeleton crew.

Still, then you get people using the site to run harassment campaigns or whatever. Arguably that's what the site is already used for, some people just don't call it that, so whatever.

As far as I am concerned this is all positve and Elon Musk is a hero. Twitter, as it existed before the acquisition, was a blight on humanity, Musk owning it means it either changes, which given the starting point will likely mean improve. Or it dies, which given the starting point is also an improvement. The gnashing of the teeth from journalists and ex-employees just makes my dick harder.

I used to be neutral on ol' Elon before this, now I like him.

Twitter, as it existed before the acquisition, was a blight on humanity

What was different about twitter than other social media or pre-internet TV/news/radio that makes it such a blight? It does suck, but it's not obvious that the unwashed masses will suddenly become enlightened when given >280 characters

Twitter is what you get when someone goes "You know the most addictive, para-social, skinner-box elements of Myspace, Facebook, Et Al? what if we made something that optimized for that"

Can you elaborate / post a link that fleshes this out? This is a very widespread claim but I'm not sure how true it is. The 'addictive/parasocial' elements of twitter are - as far as I can tell - tweets having likes, people having follower counts, and tweets being recommended based on likes. Aren't those basic social media features that are legitimately useful?

Other criticisms of twitter are 'the short tweet form means anything subtle can't happen' (sort of true but its not like long-form platform with the same userbase is better), and 'the ui is awful' (kinda true)

The character limit is actually a big problem because it excludes the possibility of expressing any nuanced thought: twitter consists solely of hot takes because that's pretty much the only thing that can be communicated through twitter. Tweetlongs/twitter threads don't really ameliorate this, the content still needs to be structured into short sentences peppersprayed with hot takes that can be retweeted individually.

And then there's the fact that it trains your attention span to hold only for microscopic amounts of time, it is also uniquely bad in this, no other medium in history trained as short an attention span as twitter.

I think being exposed to that for a sufficiently long enough time will make you retarded, so yes more than 280 characters wouldn't make the masses enlightened but it would at least not cause brain damage to them.

And then there's the likes. You can only like a tweet, you can't downvote. If you don't like something you can either ignore it or respond/retweet, which, because of the response limit is going to be a hot take. So when you are on twitter all you perceive is either the hugbox of likes, anyone that disagrees with you is either invisible to you or a troglodite that responds with a short (and from your point of view stupid) "sick burn".

And then there's the fact that celebrities are on it. People who would normally have curated their public persona to a select few manicured communications (think authors, screenwriters, etc) are now absentmindedly putting all of their imbecillity on display, in fact they are using a medium that amplifies it by forcing all nuance in their thought to be expunged. I think the world is substantially worse because of this.

And then there's the moderation, by applying politically biased moderation twitter has created a false consensus on its platform, which skews the perception of what is common knowledge on anyone that interacts with it.

And finally there's the fact that journalists are on it, which means that journalists are now subjected to the mentally retarding effects of twitter, to the false perception of what is common knowledge. They also come to believe that reporting about tweets from politicians and artists is a valid form of journalism therefore amplifying the damaging effects of twitter to the entire population. And because of this they think that sitting at the computer reading twitter is a valid form of work which means they are exposed to more of twitter and more of its deletereous effects.

No other media that existed before or after twitter is as bad as twitter, 4chan is better, reddit is better, instagram is better, tiktok is better, microfilm is better, vellum is better. Literally the worst possible way to communicate ever made.

The character limit is actually a big problem because it excludes the possibility of expressing any nuanced thought

You can link articles/other long-form content though, and a solid fifth of the articles I read come from twitter links. This gets to my claim that it's more the quality of people - smart people just link stuff & read the links, and dumb people, when they read, do shitty fiction/motivational books/etc.

Attention span doesn't really make sense as a concept tbh, I argued this on reddit but twitter's "attention span" effects aren't at all different than that of casual social conversations, which happen constantly.

I think being exposed to that for a sufficiently long enough time will make you retarded

There are many, many, many competent professionals who perform at their job better than 99.9% of humanity has for all of history, and use twitter very frequently, and have for years or a decade. Programmers are one of those, but many non-programmers do too. This is just plainly and obviously false.

So when you are on twitter all you perceive is either the hugbox of likes, anyone that disagrees with you is either invisible to you or a troglodite that responds with a short (and from your point of view stupid) "sick burn".

I constantly see disagreement on twitter though. Quote tweets, replies, just general posts of the form 'this other guy said X which is bad bc Y'. It's usually not useful disagreement, but it's not like the comments sections of major newspapers, or random peoples' long-form writing, are better.

And then there's the fact that celebrities are on it.

celebrities have always been dumb and said dumb things, that's just not new at all, read a tabloid from the 19xxes or something

And then there's the moderation, by applying politically biased moderation twitter has created a false consensus on its platform

False consensus? Mainstream center-right accounts exist and get tons of engagement though? Even if those were downweighted 50%, hypothetically, there's still not a 'consensus'

They also come to believe that reporting about tweets from politicians and artists is a valid form of journalism

how is this any different than reporting on random out of context statements from long political speeches or conversations, a mainstay of journalism historically?

No other media that existed before or after twitter is as bad as twitter, 4chan is better, reddit is better, instagram is better, tiktok is better, microfilm is better, vellum is better. Literally the worst possible way to communicate ever made.

at least twitter has some complex and intelligent people, tiktok has none of those. what's a single tiktok account comparable to professional discussion among scientists on twitter, or just @thezvi, or even @rapegroyper14?

Wouldn't they do that on any other social media platform though? And offline? It's not like the NYT newsroom or universities in 1950 were less 'elite sens-makers and narrative crafters jerking themselves in a circle'

I used to be neutral on ol' Elon before this, now I like him.

I'm in the very same boat. Before this whole Twitter fiasco I thought he was a bit of a kook, and now he's a kook I find myself actively cheering on.

What ultimately matters to me is that Twitter ceases to be a propaganda tool for progressives. The worst case scenario here is that Twitter neither changes nor collapses and continues down the very same path it was on before Musk's takeover.

Twitter wasn't a tool for progressives to evangelize to others - it was a tool for them to evangelize to themselves, which is just as dangerous.

And also a place for hate mobs to gather and cancel people who fell under their gaze. Unequal enforcement meant that progressive mobs were tolerated much more than conservative ones. This unequal enforcement seems unlikely to continue under Musk.

If Twitter dies, it will simply leave a Twitter-shaped hole in the world, which will be quickly filled in by something else.

It's not like getting rid of Twitter will get rid of progressives that want to proselytize their values on the rest of the world, any more than getting rid of 4Chan or KiwiFarms magically causes edgy right-wingers to evaporate.

I'm torn. I'm no fan of Musk, and I think he may well run Twitter into the ground, but the combination of handwringing about 'he's destroying Twitter which is so important for fighting fake news and those fascist conservative types' and gloating about 'nobody likes or respects him, he's a fascist idiot who is pro-Putin' from people who are declaring they are going to quit their Hugely Important Twitter Jobs and supporters and followers of same, have made me cheer him on.

I honestly don't think the world would be a worse place if Twitter went the way of MySpace or Vine. If Musk tears it down but can't put it back together again, well so it goes.

If Twitter dies then it is because TPTB want it to die. There's an ADL-sponsored advertiser boycott going on right now, for one.

The fact of the matter is that Twitter doesn't need as many people as it had. Many of those employees had "narrative control" functions. Some of the Japanese users noted that when the mass firings began, suddenly all the trending topics were things like manga or video games rather than politics which is what it was before. Thereby suggesting that Twitter employees had a "steering function".

That's the crux of this entire affair. Twitter wasn't a free platform, it was used as a propaganda vehicle by powerful establishment interests. A mass firing of these "narrative control" workers is potentially dangerous to the regimes, because free speech is now seen as a threat to their power. It is the same reason why Julian Assange had to be taken down.

Twitter dies for good in the next six months: 80% probability

Buy down to 15%,

Still possible but I don't trust most of these claims or believe much in the importance of these roles.

Yeah, 80% is way too high. You could definitely run Twitter with less than 1000 people, but that doesn’t mean you can walk in, cut 6000/7000 jobs in the first month, and expect things to work.

I do fully expect some things to break, but in the way that one would expect things to break from Y2K. Musk doesn't need to be some kind of super CEO to triage engineers to the critical infrastructure and even something catastrophic like the whole site going down for 24 hours wouldn't kill the thing.

Buy down to 5%, but I think true odds are less than 1%. MySpace still exists. The base rate of a corporate failure of this size in less than 6 months is practically zero. The only way Twitter goes away in 6 months is if there is some massive financial fraud discovered like Enron or FTX. Even then, somebody will buy the IP and run it.

At the risk of nutpicking, there are a large number of users in my personal circles who are exchanging off-site contact information (uh, and nudes) under the assumption that the site or their account won't be accessible in days. Guys with SRE experience are talking about the site falling over in ways that can't be brought up. Other people have been encouraging everyone to grab data dumps of their account.

I'm exceptionally skeptical of these arguments, but I also haven't worked anywhere near those scale of systems.

Exchanging off-site contact information is entirely reasonable even if there's a 2% chance of it going down, because they have a large number of many-year-long friendships/acquaintances they don't want to lose contact with, and sharing contacts is a low-cost way to avoid a low-chance, high-cost outcome.

Obviously some of them are claiming it's >50% gonna die forever, which is premature, as well as probably claiming the sorts of glitches that've happened for the past five years as evidence twitter is decaying.

But the people who work in twitter SRE that I've followed say there's a decent chance bad things happen, but that twitter >80% won't die permanently

While it is certainly possible for distributed systems to be fragile in the way he describes -- the most famous example is not software but the US power grid pre-1965 -- it is not necessary. I know of large distributed systems which are not.

A good chunk of twitter's moderation is automated. Even as recently as a year ago the spam use to be way worse for certain categories.

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.

This will likely not happen. The evidence suggests engagement has only gone up. Tweets by important and or controversial people are getting 2-10x the engagement compared to a year ago. Elon's own tweets are easily getting 300k-1.5 million replies, a 5x increase from 6 months ago. The people who spend time on twitter are disinclined to leave to leave because of slurs in the replies. Otherwise, they would have quit long ago. Also, most twitter users do not read replies or do not care much about them.

I think twitter will succeed and Elon will be able to to resell Twitter for a decent profit. Elon is a savvy businessman with a good intuitive business sense . For example, he after dipping his foot in crypto early 2021 he correctly saw it for the overhyped garbage it was and bailed, only losing a little money. VCs and others rode it all the way down.

Moderation: I agree that twitter has a lot of automated moderation. Unfortunately, a good chunk of incoming Bad Shit escapes it because of the endless creativity of our great species, so that on the front lines you generally forget about the automation (until you have to fix some false positives, or do maintenance). This implies, but I want to explicitly say, that the percentage that escapes does not go to zero over time, even though you're constantly upgrading your systems. They vastly outnumber you and are always trying to post their crap, because often there's a financial incentive to do so.

Engagement: Yeah, people are saying the site may die; that's entertaining and will bring people back, but is more importantly a temporary trend. I don't think we can say how many people are coming back due to the new moderation policies, although a lower bound on that is the number of people talking about them, which is certainly a fair number (but niche in the grand scheme of things, a fact I can appreciate as someone knowledgeable about Mastodon administration).

The thing is, where are all these people quitting because they don't like the new boss and the new rules going to get jobs? Comparable jobs, at least.

I'm reading stories all the time recently about Amazon/Meta/Google are cutting jobs, shutting down projects and the like. So if you decide you are going to give up your decent-paying job at Twitter because ugh, Musk - where are you going to go?

I see arguments that the big dogs putting in hiring freezes is good for the industry as a whole, since it means smaller firms will now have access to a pool of talent that they couldn't get previously. But part of that "couldn't get previously" is "couldn't match the pay and conditions". If the Twitter people expect to walk into the same or better job elsewhere, (1) are those jobs still out there? (2) how will they feel about "have to move to Michigan for a job with a medium-sized company or bank"?

Musk may be running Twitter into the ground, but amongst all the glee and jeering I see online, nobody seems to be addressing that (a) Twitter is not the only place laying off or cutting costs (b) maybe Twitter needed the fat trimming and if Musk wasn't the one who bought it but somebody the Tumblr and others love, that guy or gal would still be making swingeing cuts to bring costs down.

maybe Twitter needed the fat trimming and if Musk wasn't the one who bought it but somebody the Tumblr and others love, that guy or gal would still be making swingeing cuts to bring costs down.

I've seen this pointed out, and I think it's quite correct. Twitter was losing money in a boom market; they weren't prepared for a bust. But:

The seemingly-intended implication of "Musk is making wise decisions now" isn't supported. Even when cuts are necessary there can be better ways and worse ways to make them and there's at least circumstantial evidence he's deep into "worse ways".

The seemingly-intended implication of "Musk was making a wise decision to buy Twitter to fix it" is almost outright contradicted. Imagine if he'd had the patience to wait a little longer, until Twitter was already running low on operating funds and making drastic cuts internally. First, the cuts probably would have come out better, since without an ownership change acting as a Schelling point for layoff timings, there wouldn't be a conflict between "need to make a lot of cuts at once to avoid losing the best people to preemptive job changes" and "need to deliberate over who to cut to avoid losing the best people to poor firing choices". Second, he could have been seen as the hero (coming in to save the failing Twitter! outside funding bringing an end to the layoffs!) rather than the villain (coming in to destroy Twitter! laying off people who were totes going to have 20 year careers here otherwise!). Finally, he could have bought it at fire sale prices, rather than "peak of a bubble right before a crash" prices.

Don’t forget the time pressure on him to buy it. It was getting bottier, leftier, and tankier by the week, and had he waited long enough to make it a viable business, he might have himself been banned.

If this is true, why does non-English twitter not look like this even though it has next to no human moderation (or really attention from the company at all)?

If anything, the bot situation was the worst part about twitter and in the non-English part and it's already better.

If this is true, why does non-English twitter not look like this even though it has next to no human moderation (or really attention from the company at all)?

Because if you're ESL and want to be a troll, you head to English-language Twitter anyway.

okay, so instead of trolling in non-English twitter, you go to English twitter to get banned?

burner troll accounts with no followers aren't remotely effective so creating new accounts each time you get banned for venturing over to English twitter doesn't make sense

Yes. As a troll, your goal is others' reactions, which there are simply more of on English twitter.

I don't browse non-English twitter, but I think Elon's gonna cut non-English moderation staff even faster than he cuts English staff. Only a matter of time.

there was already near zero non-English moderation staff and that part of twitter is not the hellscape the OP claimed it should be given his doom and gloom predictions of the elimination of mod staff

not everyone speaks english, so the claim the reason nonenglish twitter isn't this predicted hellscape just falls flat

the claims of twitter apocalypse looks a lot like the "title 2 'net neutrality' removal will destroy the internet" hysteria and then it's years later, no prediction came true, and none of the hysterics learned anything

“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.”

Just wanted to push against messages like this, because this sounds like something from "revenge of the nerds."

Big systems like Twitter's have accumulated multiple layers of redundancy in case of failure over the years. There's probably quite a bit of automation to take care of the steady stream of problems like faulty hard drives or network cards. It can probably keep on going for quite some time this way.

Also, the biggest source of incidents? Change.

If so many Twitter engineers have left/been fired, then I imagine the rate of changes introduced into the system is approaching the level of a code freeze--basically a ban on introducing changes to the system around the holidays because they want to minimize risk even though it carrier a very high cost.

In this state, I would expect a skeleton would be able to keep things running for months. Especially if you can get some really good ones to tackle the 'black swan' type incidents that actually do require some clever thinking to fix--but again, this is all about pushing the systems back into a stable state (less risky) rather than "fixing forward" (more risky).

What I would be worried about is sabotage that can fall under plausible denial. Stuff like setting a primary key on a database column to an int32, which will hit the limit in weeks/months and is annoyingly hard to fix. But maybe by then Musk will have a larger set of solid engineers working at Twitter.

(1) Yes, there are a steady stream of problems addressable by automation, but those have never been a problem. SREs exist for the other problems.

Shit just falls over and you won't know why. That's just how these systems are. You can make a system that doesn't do that, but then you pay thousands of dollars per line written, which they're obviously not gonna do.

To put meat on the bones, see this list of common things SREs deal with, or this log of the SRE chatroom for Wikipedia & friends.

(2) Change is unavoidable and constant. There are security patches for your dependencies released continuously and you will update your system or face the consequences. Often times your dependency is an underfunded open-source thingy, despite your best efforts to avoid those, and thus the only way to get the new code is to use the newest version of the thingy, which means you might have to upgrade all of your code that uses the thingy.

(3) Regarding "pushing the systems back into a stable state" - then you're gonna have the same problem again unless you fix the root cause, which, again, requires code changes.

SRE is my day job :). Worked at one of these behemoths at some point, specifically deep on the infrastructure side of things.

You can make a system that doesn't do that, but then you pay thousands of dollars per line written, which they're obviously not gonna do.

None of these companies ever even dreamed of it. It's all about cheap hardware, multiple replicas, and the ability to reroute traffic between failure domains.

Change is unavoidable and constant.

That's the thing--it's not constant. Like I mentioned earlier, companies do holiday code freezes so the rate of change decrease to a very small amount. Even security patches can be split into critical and non-critical, then those critical patches can be further split into "requires downtime" and "nothingburger."[1]

So if there's a feature freeze at twitter, then the rate of change is drastically reduced. And if people leave/get fired, that reduces the rate even further. And if you ignore all but the critical patches, then the rate begins approaching zero. That's a lot of "ifs", but all of them seem like good decisions with positive impact, also based in an accepted industry norm (code freezes), so I'm betting that management at Twitter will go down this path.

But let's wait and see! We're trying to infer what's happening inside of a black box. If my reality leans toward my bet, what I'm expecting to see is, over the course of the next year:

  • multiple instances of graceful degradation: users missing avatars for a few hours; intermittent general slowness; a few instances of data loss for a small group of users.

  • multiple instances of planned downtime.

  • a few instances of unplanned downtime, but no longer than 1-2 days.

Now, and correct if I'm wrong please, if reality leans toward your bet, what I would expect to see is:

  • multiple instances of unplanned downtime, ranging anywhere between a few hours to days, maybe even 1-2 weeks.

  • at least one prolonged outage (>4 weeks)

  • almost constant degradation of service: twitter being noticeably slower; multiple days when users can't log in; multiple instances of data loss for large (single digit %) group of users.

Let's see what happens!

[1]: Also, you reminded me about an oft overlooked source of change: shit expiring. Certificates, but also licenses, generators, and whatnot. These are silent killers, because they're hard to track and require manual work. I'm still counting them into my "low or no change" bet--that's where I would expect to see unplanned downtime that's fixed in a couple of hours.

People seem to forget that the world is larger than the US. Users across the world don't care as much about this drama as americans. I doubt Indian, Saudi, Japanese or German users care as much about the Musk situation. Twitter tends to be less censored in smaller languages than english as the censors can't understand the content and the AIs aren't as trained.

There may be an increase in spam but most likely a lot of the censors weren't handling pure spambots but more difficult to parse content than "milfs in your area, click here to meet"

The biggest reason for twitter surviving is the user base, unless all the important users migrate at once people will still have a reason to visit twitter.

Japanese users

Well, see this.

On the colony bit. Some times I believe foreigners deserve a right to vote in American elections because America influences to them a great extent. Actually made a comment questioning womens right to vote has been bad the other day. So I think thru nuances.

You all should apply to be Puerto Rico and a territory so atleast you get a house rep.

Decolonization doesn’t make sense. Economies of scale and trade are good at boosting living standards.

I am conservative but don’t believe in America first. As a global hegemon which I think is good for our living standards we still have debts to our colonies.

Brexxit didn’t work because of geopolitical realities. But America has a broad umbrella some times more important than local politics and you might deserve a say in our view.

Honestly an interesting subject that might be worth a top level posts.

I hate wef and a lot of your politics so don’t even think of 2 senate seats.

Oh I thought you meant decolonize as an American colony.

I am genuinely appalled at the extent to which America, my country, has colonized the cultural landscape of our supposed allies. I would apologize but that seems a trifle in the face of what is in some ways a cultural genocide. It seems as though in many countries, there are no genuine foreigners, just Americans who speak a different language.

There is, i feel, a degree to which cancel culture is just... Twitter culture. Where do mobs find stuff to hate? Twitter. Where do they organize? Twitter. Where are the employers nice and easy to contact via, essentially, short form open letter? Twitter again.

Don't get me wrong, cancel culture can still exist without twitter, but i expect it to be far more of a minor and localized phenomenon.

Anyway, this is a silver lining if shit all goes south and Twitter dies. Though for my part i still gain value from Twitter and i'd be bummed out.

And on reflection, cancel culture is just the dark mirror of legitimate accountability-- MeToo would not have gotten off the ground without twitter, nor would protests over various police abuses of power.

A failed Twitter would have lots of cultural consequences.

but twitter is also a force against cancel culture. Some of the most popular accounts are individuals who are critical of the left.

I feel like one core insight of cancel culture is that if you have 1000 detractors and 20000 supporters the detractors can still make your life shit in ways your supporters can't really help with (phoning your boss, doxxing you, sending rape threats, harassing organizations that have the capacity to inconvenience you, etc.)

Or in other words, it's the same old Heckler's Veto, just at international scale this time.

Cato the Elder, famous for the saying "Carthago delenda est," actually ended up a bitter rival of Scipio Africanus, who actually accomplished it.

I have said "Twitter delenda est" and I won't be as picky as Cato about how it is done. Now, I know that Twitter fills a niche, and I have no expectation that what fills it next will be better, but for now, I will take it.

Yep, Twitter delenda est. This is great news as far as I'm concerned. It won't last, as you noted - but I'll enjoy it while it lasts.

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I write in favor of letting criminals vote. The main argument is that gatekeeping the franchise is not easy and requires a lot of state capacity to securely enforce it. Most of the world lets current and former criminals vote, and I generally don't find arguments to restrict it to be very convincing:

It's not that crazy, because the norm across the world is letting people vote from prison. Literally ballot boxes installed in prisons. To the extent there are any limitations imposed, they're doled out selectively, with apparently fewer than a handful of countries even considering restricting the vote of criminals post-release. In contrast, the United States is rather unique in its disenfranchisement zeal. Only Vermont, Maine, and DC allow voting from prison, but otherwise, the norm in most other states is automatic voting restoration upon release. In total, about 4.6 million Americans can't vote today because of a felony conviction, which is about triple the percentage it was in 1976, but down from a peak in 2016.

Despite all the words here, I'm actually not someone who particularly cares about democracy. While I can acknowledge the strong correlation between democratic governments and overall quality of life, I'm in the consequentialist camp on this issue. Give me Hong Kong under British colonial rule over democratic India any day of the week. Beyond that, voting is a waste of time on an individual level and not something I ever engage in (to answer the tiresome what if everyone thought that? retort: "Then I would vote"), and my anarchist foibles generally leave me politically stranded.

But my egalitarian foibles are why felony disenfranchisement bothers me. A steelman could be either consequential or an appeal to fairness. If you take a "wisdom of crowds" defense of democracy --- that it is a mechanism to arrive at better policies --- then perhaps giving former criminals a say would lead the ship astray. But most of the world seems to function OK despite letting criminals vote, and neither Vermont or Maine seem notably dysfunctional in any way (maybe DC does, but not sure how much you can pin that on the voting prison population). But even if consequences be damned, perhaps violating the social contract is cause enough to muzzle you. I concede it's a slightly stronger argument, but I'm not convinced the justification isn't used as a pretextual excuse to tip the scales in some political party's favor. This wouldn't be a novel effort, as Mississippi implemented literacy tests and poll taxes in 1890 with the express purpose of indirectly suppressing the black vote without explicitly violating the 15th Amendment. The state's governor, James Vardaman, said outright in 1903 the restrictions were imposed "for no other purpose than to eliminate the nigger from politics". Nowadays, nefarious motivations require a little more finesse. Good data on felon voting trends is hard to come by, but the obvious demographic skew (blacks are significantly more likely both to vote for Democrats and to have a felony record), combined with the energy in sustaining felony disenfranchisement coming almost exclusively from Republicans, is enough to sustain my suspicions that this is a pretextual exercise.

Beyond whether or not disenfranchisement is the right thing to do, there's also the question of implementation:

The next step further up --- restoration upon completion of supervision --- is where the difficulty really starts to ramp up. Unlike inmate rosters updated on the daily, when exactly someone's supervision ends is information that will be buried within reams of figurative dossiers in filing cabinets scattered across the state. There's nominally a system in place, such as the National Voting Rights Act, which allows different parts of the country to keep everyone up to date about voting registration. But I've written about how judicial record systems have to straddle an unenviable position: simultaneously maintaining an iron grip on legacy compatibility (imagine the nightmare of a computer upgrade wiping out entire convictions) while cracking the door just widely enough to allow cross-pollination with other systems.

Consider the situation in detail. Let's say that I, your favorite public defender, am able to track down a judgment & sentence order from the 1990s and find that my client was sentenced to X months in prison and Y months of supervision after release. I can't just plug that into a date calculator. First, I would need to know if this was the only charge they served time under, including, potentially, an extradition hold for a warrant from another jurisdiction. Then I'd need to track down whether any early release for good behavior applied to their charge, including noting any legislative changes that may have occurred and been retroactively applied. Even if I have a definitive release date, the length of supervised release is far less static. Maybe there was a court order that ended it early, or maybe there was a change in the law for that specific offense, or maybe their supervision time was tolled or extended for whatever reason by the probation authority. And so on. Despite what I do for a living, I have absolutely no confidence that I am able to accurately calculate the precise end of someone's supervision, and this is why I always leave that task to the math wizards at the Department of Corrections. I hope and pray to Allah they get it right, because there's no fucking way I'll know otherwise.

And beyond implementation by the state, there's also the question of how normal people are expected to navigate the cobwebs:

Pamela Moses' case in Tennessee illustrates how much of a bog this is even for experienced legal professionals. Moses was previously convicted of an evidence tampering felony, and in 2019, she tried to run for mayor. Election officials told her she was not eligible because she had not yet finished her probation. A court echoed what those officials said, but her probation officer later signed off on a certificate of restoration that Moses submitted when she registered. Moses was convicted of voter fraud and sentenced to six years in prison before her conviction was overturned on appeal. The probation officer was wrong about her probation term being over, but that wouldn't have mattered anyway because her predicate conviction --- evidence tampering --- was one of the few Tennessee offenses that led to permanent disenfranchisement. This was a fact that neither the probation officer, his supervisor, nor the trial judge knew about, as seen from page 24 of the trial transcript (cleaned up):

PROSECUTOR: The tampering with evidence we're addressing today, which is permanent. I don't remember all the ones. I know murder, probably rape ---

THE COURT: That's something I didn't know. Are you telling me if you get convicted of tampering with evidence, you can never vote? Where is that in the law?

DEFENSE: It's titled-- I think it's 39-15 or 39-17 where it talks about the interference with government operations. Those are ---

PROSECUTOR: It's 40-29-204.

THE COURT: "Those convicted after July 1, 1996, but before July 1, 2006 --- those convicted after July 1, 2006, any of the offenses set forth in one and two above, voter fraud, treason, murder in the first degree, aggravated rape." And then it goes on to say, "Any other violation of title 39 chapter 16 part one, four, and five, designated as a felony" --- so are you telling me I've got to go back and look at 39-16?

PROSECUTOR: Yes. Now you have to, and that's where the tampering with evidence, along with --- it falls under, like, bribery, contraband, false pretense, the ones that are felonies.

Apparently, it's impossible to wade through the cobwebs of cross-referencing statutory codes without tripping up somehow, even if wading boots are part of your job uniform. And absent malicious intent, these examples illustrate how easy it is for mistakes to happen. What purpose does punishing these types of mistakes accomplish? Focusing one's ire toward the people ensnared by the cobwebs doesn't do anything to get rid of the cobwebs. Getting rid of the cobwebs gets rid of the cobwebs.

And finally:

I’ve already made my position on felony disenfranchisement clear: I don’t think there should be any. If you believe otherwise, that’s fine, but the argument in favor needs to take into account the additional resources such a regime necessarily eats up. You need higher state capacity to check people’s convictions, calculate the terms of their sentence, and tabulate their LFOs, and an entire additional apparatus to investigate and prosecute scofflaws. Any argument in favor of disenfranchising felons has to explain why these additional costs are worthwhile.

I think in the current environment it’s tough to defend disenfranchising criminals. But it won’t happen in red states since they are viewed as likely D voters.

That being said I’m against giving the women the right vote and believe it’s largely been a net negative. Ok with letting females be in office. Largely I think women are too emotional and able to emotional manipulation and that’s lowered the voting quality of the electorate. Prime example is nuclear energy which has very wide male/female spreads. If women could not vote we would likely have cheap nuclear as our primary electricity supply. Emotional nuclear can be scary. Analytically it’s obviously great policy.

Seems a lot to pull from a single correlation.

I think I'm okay with letting some ex-cons vote if the crime committed wasn't too bad. Current prisoners: no, at least not for national elections. Maybe they can vote on some things only related to prisons. As for the bureaucracy, I think we should expand it. Federal ID can track whether or not you've been imprisoned before or not.

We can't let prisoners vote in local elections because there are counties where the prisoners outnumber residents.

"you should argue to understand, not to win" has been on my mind lately, especially with your comments. you have excellent comments showing wisdom and philanthropy but i think the latter is often your weakness. the comments addressing your points are hardly seeking understanding. still . . .

the policies of other countries, yes yes, in norway anders breivik hunger strikes for a new playstation. america would have hit him with a rock. ours is the better, and you said this isn't why, just as you said the "pretextual" knots you twist into aren't. you're flatly wrong to imply today's opposition to felons voting is from lingering racism. after all, those republicans are champions of policy that would see more black babies born. but you've said this isn't your motivation, i only mention them because:

egalitarian foibles

i feel this isn't the first time you've spun a whole essay from discomfort; that you're uncomfortable thinking you're better than anyone, even as you know so well how you are better than so many.

i am approximately christian. christian enough. i am not essentially better than any man, all fall short. i am practically better than most and the only discomfort i have is wishing others would be the same—by bettering them, not worsening myself. but this is transhuman promise (and transubstantial promise). not the mistaken belief they can be changed through simple policy of as-extant man.

you know the philosophy. serious crimes reject the social contract and that includes voting. thieves might serve enough time in prison to be absolved, but the criminals who destroy? no. we can hope released murderers have "done their time" and will not kill again, but a murderer stopped someone from voting forever. their permanent loss of that privilege is equality. traffickers and monstrous abusers? their voice is not equal to mine, and as my voice is worth one vote, theirs is worth none.

who's the worst person you went to court to defend? was it a murderer? you're better than them. the world doesn't slow because people know and act their station, it slows because people know and act their station while insisting it doesn't exist.

edited for clarity

This is quite an interesting comment and I appreciate the sentiment. I'm narcissistic enough that I'm not shy about acknowledging that I am practically better than most people, on most metrics. If I could pull a lever and have 535 of my clones take over Congress, I would struggle to think of a practical reason not to.

Egalitarianism can be thought of in different axes, and I don't have a ready non-arbitrary defense for why some axes are better than others. I don't think we should care about egalitarianism when we're designing spaceships or graduating doctors. And as I said about democracy, I also have no attachment towards egalitarian political decision-making. If I express discomfort in my post, it's primarily anchored in seeing a bargain reneged upon, and under dishonest circumstances. If we're propping up a system that says one-man/one-vote, we should mean it. If we're making exceptions to the rule, we should be transparent and honest about it.

In my opinion, we should be limiting the franchise, not expanding it. Expanding it does not lead to improved outcomes, it only dilutes the votes of people who would make good judgements on which politicians we should be electing. Criminals, especially felons, have notoriously bad judgement. Why should we want their input on governing our society?

Yes, I already acknowledged this as an argument for restricting the franchise but my point here is that you should also justify the increased bureaucracy costs. Do you think it's worthwhile?

One thing I didn't touch upon is that it seems like a good policy to let ex-felons vote at least as a way to encourage them to be part of civil society again. Disenfranchising them seems like it would encourage them to just check out completely.

I'm not sure exactly why you think it would be so expensive to restrict the franchise. Why can't you just give voter IDs out like driver's licenses to those who tick the correct boxes. The less people allowed to vote, the cheaper that is.

encourage them to be part of civil society again

Felons are not anywhere near as civic-minded as you think they are.

I'm not sure exactly why you think it would be so expensive to restrict the franchise.

I wrote my reasons in detail, did you miss that above?

Sometimes there are difficult cases. How many of them are there and how expensive are they? "Voting can be hard to figure out for some felons, if they're banned" is probably true, but how many felons aren't bothering to try and register in the first place? If felons are allowed to vote, how much is spent on getting them registered and tabulating their votes?

The more people you can cut with general rules (e.g. only landowning married men can vote), the less expensive dealing with edge cases becomes.

but how many felons aren't bothering to try and register in the first place?

If Florida is any indication, about 10% of the adult population has a felony record and unable to vote and few (~100k?) have bothered to register to vote. This tends to be true in most states that have post-release disenfranchisement, unless restoration is automatic, few people bother trying. Running elections seems to come with high fixed costs and low marginal costs, so it doesn't seem likely that additional votes would materially increase costs.

The more people you can cut with general rules (e.g. only landowning married men can vote), the less expensive dealing with edge cases becomes.

I would agree there's likely a "reverse Laffer curve" where increasingly high disenfranchisement gets progressively cheaper, but I don't see your argument for where we are currently on the curve. If cost was your only concern then you could justify getting rid of voting entirely.

Cost is a minor concern overall, but I was arguing that more people voting in general is more expensive, not the other way around.

Yes, I already acknowledged this as an argument for restricting the franchise but my point here is that you should also justify the increased bureaucracy costs. Do you think it's worthwhile?

What increased bureaucratic costs? We already know who is married, who has kids, who own property, who pays more taxes than they accept in government aid.

Wouldn’t you need to balance that out with cheaper elections (since there are less votes)? Also perhaps GOTV apparatuses would be smaller if the vote was held by a smaller percentage of the population. If people behind gotv could do something productive, that would be a net win.

Running elections seems to come with high fixed costs and low marginal costs, so it doesn't seem likely that additional votes would materially increase costs. Throwing additional votes into the tabulation machinery seems way cheaper than having real life bureaucrats carefully scrutinizing individual registrations as I outlined in my examples.

The cost of running elections is negligible... how many $10 million miles of highway would we need to give up? Not many.

Campaigning though isn’t low marginal costs.

It is if the marginal campaign dollar is going on paid media (which, in America, it probably is)

How would you feel about a politician who agreed with you in principal but was able to enact legislation that included you among the disenfranchised? I don't know your personal history but one could presumably construct some sort of schema whereby it's presumed that your judgment would be worse than those who are given the franchise.

I'm Latino. I'd support a politician that wanted to take away the Hispanic franchise, because my fellow Latinos tend to vote for socialism at a much higher rate than Anglos.

I feel like any legislation that disenfranchises me at this point in my life is not in line with my principles.

But, in principle, if I were to fall into a category of drains on society, yeah, my opinion should be disregarded.

I'm young and probably not a net contributor to taxes yet. I would gladly have my franchise taken away if it meant that people like me (who overwhelmingly vote the opposite way I do) could not vote anymore. Based on those characteristics, it is perfectly correct to presume that my judgement would be worse than, say, net taxpayers.

Because it's their right. I believe everyone has a fundamental right to get input into how society is run, regardless of how poor their judgement is. Frankly, I don't trust a felon's judgement much less than that of the American electorate in general, which is incredibly poor. But I think the general public (poor as their judgement is) still deserves their right to vote, and so too do convicted criminals.

And from a standpoint of outcomes, I think you also need to consider the consequentialist argument for liberalism in general. When you abridge the rights of anyone, it makes it easier (and more likely) to abridge the rights of everyone. Therefore you have to very narrowly tailor how and when you abridge rights. I'm not convinced that keeping criminals from voting actually gives us a better outcome.

Because it's their right.

Do you support minimum voting age? If so, it's easy enough to get from there to restricting the rights of mentally challenged, criminals, welfare recipients, women, etc.

Mentally-challenged, I'll grant you. You're going to have a harder time selling on welfare recipients and women.

We accept disenfranchisement of children because they are dependents. They are not responsible for making any decisions governing their own lives, so it seems natural they wouldn't make any decisions about their government.

The reason it's reasonable for dependents to not make decisions is because they don't pay the cost for those decisions. They will therefore err on the side of too much cost. It's not that they just don't have money or whatever, they actually just have no idea what cost is, whether monetary or through work.

  • Children - not responsible for themselves in any capacity

  • Mentally challenged - same

  • Welfare recipients - same, arguably they are responsible for feeding/housing/clothing themselves within a budget, but they get the money for those things for free. See no benefit if the government spends less.

  • Women - same, but a bit different. While some ladies are independent heads of households, overall they are ultimately not responsible for maintaining civilization and as such would not be held responsible if SHTF. If men stop going to work, huge problem. Ladies mad. If women stop going to work, small problem for a short period of time, nobody mad.

A) 46.6% of the workforce is women, so it's not "some ladies are independent heads of households" it's "women are independent heads of households at almost the same rate as men."

B) "Not responsible for maintaining civilization" is a vague assertion. Who isn't holding them responsible? You? Because that means nothing.

C) "If men stop going to work, huge problem. Ladies mad." It would be a huge problem. I'm not sure why "ladies", in particular, would be angrier about the situation than any other group.

D) "If women stop going to work, small problem..." - No. It would not be a small problem. If 46.6% of your workforce decides not to work, that is not a small problem. If it's also ~75% of your healthcare workers, that is an absolutely enormous problem.

E) "...nobody mad." Of the people I know, none of them would be angry if a large group of people stopped working. They would be concerned. If they were angry, they would be no less angry about women leaving the workforce than men.

Every part of that statement was wrong in a number of different ways.

A) Having a job is not the same as being independent or the head of the household. About a third of dual income couples have the woman making more. According to that article the most common cases are where the husband is a bartender, barber, kindergarten teacher or waiter. My hunch is that most of these cases are women out-earning their partners by a small amount, given that this arrangement is way likely to end in divorce. So while it is true that a sizeable fraction of women are breadwinners, it is not nearly the same rate as men and they are way more likely to get divorced (i.e. are unhappy). I should mention single moms here as well, but what percentage of the independent ones (i.e. not on child support, welfare) are happy with their arrangement and not seeking a man who makes more than them?

B) It is vague but it does mean something in a couple ways. Most simply, women are holding them responsible. Sort of like how a bachelor's house and a married couple's house looks way different, a large amount of civilizing pressure comes from women. There's also the situation on the ground. Ladies are heavily concentrated in some industries, but there aren't many that I would call staples of "civilization". Between resource extraction, the energy, utilities, manufacturing, shipping, agriculture, none have a sizeable fraction of women handling any core responsibilities. Finally, there is the historical precedent. Through antiquity, if the men of a tribe grew weaker than another tribe, they would be killed. The women would be absorbed into the stronger tribe.

C) If a man just stops going to work, his lady would be very mad in pretty much all cases. The reverse is not true nearly as often. Generalize this and women are upset on a level that men just aren't.

D) Like B, the workforce is concentrated in less essential areas. Again there is historical precedent. Before WWII about 20% of women were working, mostly young ones and in low level jobs. This seemed to work fine. Same to say those jobs could be absorbed by men if they had to.

E) The rates of depression and general malaise among ladies along with plummeting fertility rates makes me think that the current arrangement isn't all it's cracked up to be. Women are in a prisoner's dilemma. Each individual is usually worse off if they don't work, but collectively they are worse off all working. If they all quit, SSRI use would drop in a hurry.

A) Having a job is not the same as being independent or the head of the household. About a third of dual income couples have the woman making more. According to that article the most common cases are where the husband is a bartender, barber, kindergarten teacher or waiter. My hunch is that most of these cases are women out-earning their partners by a small amount, given that this arrangement is way likely to end in divorce. So while it is true that a sizeable fraction of women are breadwinners, it is not nearly the same rate as men and they are way more likely to get divorced (i.e. are unhappy). I should mention single moms here as well, but what percentage of the independent ones (i.e. not on child support, welfare) are happy with their arrangement and not seeking a man who makes more than them?

Women make less in general, I agree. But you're excluding single women, single moms, lesbians and basically anyone who isn't in a traditional nuclear family, then adding the requirement that they be happy, have no outside income (no disability, welfare or child support), and... not be looking for a relationship?

I don't any hard numbers on how many men fail the "independence" requirements that you've laid out here, but I would guess it's a lot. I've met a lot of men who are in unhappy marriages, a lot of men who are single and looking for a relationship, and an enormous number of men that are on disability.

B) It is vague but it does mean something in a couple ways. Most simply, women are holding them responsible. Sort of like how a bachelor's house and a married couple's house looks way different, a large amount of civilizing pressure comes from women. There's also the situation on the ground. Ladies are heavily concentrated in some industries, but there aren't many that I would call staples of "civilization". Between resource extraction, the energy, utilities, manufacturing, shipping, agriculture, none have a sizeable fraction of women handling any core responsibilities. Finally, there is the historical precedent. Through antiquity, if the men of a tribe grew weaker than another tribe, they would be killed. The women would be absorbed into the stronger tribe.

Yeah, maybe we should take a poll. Because I've never met a woman that "held men responsible for civilization." I would guess this is something unique to your social circle. So basically, no offense- but I don't believe you.

C) If a man just stops going to work, his lady would be very mad in pretty much all cases. The reverse is not true nearly as often. Generalize this and women are upset on a level that men just aren't.

Again, I just don't believe you. I'm 35 years old. I've lived in a lot of different places and met a lot of different people- if a person is in a relationship and their significant other decides to quit with no discussion, then the non-quitting partner would almost universally be angry. If they quit with discussion, then the anger would depend on the reasons.

D) Like B, the workforce is concentrated in less essential areas. Again there is historical precedent. Before WWII about 20% of women were working, mostly young ones and in low level jobs. This seemed to work fine. Same to say those jobs could be absorbed by men if they had to.

If you want to argue that men leaving the workforce would be worse than women leaving the workforce, then I would agree. But originally, you stated that it would be a "small problem". By any measure, 75% of your healthcare workers quitting would be an enormous problem. The education system is dominated, top to bottom, by women. Banks are run by women. This isn't pre-WWII anymore, and there are lots of jobs that aren't agricultural or construction-related that we need workers in.

E) The rates of depression and general malaise among ladies along with plummeting fertility rates makes me think that the current arrangement isn't all it's cracked up to be. Women are in a prisoner's dilemma. Each individual is usually worse off if they don't work, but collectively they are worse off all working. If they all quit, SSRI use would drop in a hurry.

Speculation, and also (as with the happiness requirement in A) beside the point.

I believe everyone has a fundamental right to get input into how society is run, regardless of how poor their judgement is

This statement implies children should be allowed to vote

I believe everyone has a fundamental right to get input into how society is run, regardless of how poor their judgement is.

Why?

Poor judgment about crime doesn’t have to mean poor judgment about people. Drunk drivers are a blight upon society. They also haven’t proven anything about their grasp of macroeconomics or foreign policy.

Either way, the most valuable boon of democracy is not wisdom of the crowds, but consent of the governed. The pressure release valve of getting to go vote rather than go pogrom. Why is it a good idea to take more away from those who allegedly have paid their debts to society?

Poor judgment about crime doesn’t have to mean poor judgment about people.

There is a hypothesis called Multiple Intelligences Hypothesis, which postulates the existence of several orthogonal kinds of intellect. A competing one claims there exists a "G Factor" aka "Everything is Correlated" with remaining PC's being negligable. One could, by analogy, establish two hypotheses of judgement.

but consent of the governed.

Laws of a country apply to everyone on its teritorry, but only adult citizen are usually permitted to vote. So being "governed" doesn't require one to "consent" (which you define as voting).

Why is it a good idea to take more away from those who allegedly have paid their debts to society?

If they are still banned from voting, society has apparently deemed the debt to not yet been repaid in full.

I don’t really buy into multiple intelligences, as g seems to do pretty well, but that’s not necessary. Making the correct assessment on “What’s the risk-benefit on selling drugs/embezzling/assault?” is just poorly correlated with being right about “is voting X good for the country/community/me?” Partly because political strategy is a hard problem for anyone, and I don’t think non-felons do a great job either. Partly because of the layers of insulation between a voter and any policy.

consent of the governed

Currently, “citizen” has a pretty expansive definition, and those who are governed without it are the exception rather than the rule. Children are the biggest one, restricted under the same strict scrutiny that we apply to all the other ways we don’t let them consent. Immigrants are the other big contingent; I don’t really have a problem with requiring their submission to government. I consider it another prerequisite to actually naturalizing and getting the full rights.

not repaid in full

Is this a reasonable expectation? It strikes me as perverse to have “...and permanent suspension of your voting rights” silently tacked on to all sentences in states with such laws. When sentencing guidelines are set, I don’t think voting rights get much consideration compared to the deprivation of physical liberty. In that sense, completing the prison time would be reasonably interpreted as paying the debt.

I would prefer to have slightly longer sentences in exchange for removing this afterthought of an indefinite punishment.

Making the correct assessment on “What’s the risk-benefit on selling drugs/embezzling/assault?” is just poorly correlated with being right about “is voting X good for the country/community/me?”

I don't think it's about having the intelligence to figure out the best policy for the country. I think it's about whose interest you're voting for. Criminals will vote for policies that benefit themselves. I would rather not optimize society for criminals. So it makes sense to me to do everything practical to exclude them from voting. I think we're better off when politicians don't have to pander for the support of murderers, rapists and drug dealers.

Maine and Vermont let people vote from prison. Do you have any evidence that this leads to bad policies being implemented?

Maine and Vermont have certain other characteristics that result in them being pleasant places.

Felons vote for the Democrats something like 2-1 and I believe most of the Democrats' policy positions are bad and also mostly beneficial to criminals and the criminal-adjacent (bloated welfare state, racial spoils system, defund the police, soft on crime). So yeah, I believe that Maine and Vermont will have marginally worse policies because they allow felons to vote than they otherwise would. If you believe that left wing policies are good then you will disagree but there's no way to resolve that argument.

Murderers wouldn't vote to make murder legal, because they know very well that they could be the victim of murder by someone else. (They might vote to make murder legal only if done by themselves and not by anyone else, but laws like that aren't on the table.) And if a crime is victimless, I'd be fine with letting criminals vote to legalize it. There may be edge cases (a vagrant who doesn't own property may want to make sleeping on someone's property legal) but I doubt that such things would be seriously proposed as laws anyway.

They might not vote to make murder legal, but they'll very plausibly vote for things like eliminating cash bail, defunding the police, making punishments more lenient and expanding the welfare state.

Either way, the most valuable boon of democracy is not wisdom of the crowds, but consent of the governed

Right, but we get consent of the governed who matter by including them in the electorate. Broadly, the electorate should reflect people with some influence and good judgement.

Whom do you think worthy of the vote and how do you propose we find these people?

Most of the world, historically, limited the franchise to landowning men- that is, heads of established households. And that’s probably a pretty good filter for not being a total train wreck.

I would suggest that ‘no criminal record, over 21, employed or married’ would fill a similar function today.

What metric do you consider to determine whether your voting filter is a good idea? The fact that a system was used historically doesn't tell us about its merits.

Most of the world, historically, limited the franchise to landowning men- that is, heads of established households.

Most of the world, historically, limited the franchise to the aristocracy if they had voting at all. I'm not sure what "established" household means but prior to the Reform Acts in the mid 19th century the franchise in Britain was extremely limited - far more so than just married, non-lumpen men.

Western societies historically had some means of franchise available for (adult, male)full members. Rome and Greece famously spent a lot of time as republics, the ancient germanics allowed landowning men to sit in the thing, etc.

The ancien regime in France was the exception, not the rule. Most western societies had legislative bodies elected by commoners(although often with property requirements).

To clarify, men only or women as well?

Men and women- it fills the same function as previous laws restricting voting to established persons who contribute to society.

One more question, if you don't mind. How strict are we talking for no criminal record? Squeaky clean down to zero moving or parking violations or do we allow a certain amount of flexibility for misdemeanors? I'm not poking at you, I'm just genuinely curious about your ideas on this.

Citations should be fine (eg speeding, parking ticket, etc). Misdemeanor maybe ten year window? Felon forever.

To be clear this entire exercise is just spitballing ideas to mirror a historical ‘full membership’ requirement, but I’d imagine ‘nothing other than minor violations/period of years since last violation’ both make sense here.

I keep toying with the idea of having to post a bond of some substantial value that is forfeit if the voter leaves their legislative district before some term of years. Potentially allowing for rolling it election to election instead of continually posting a new one each term unless someone wanted the flexibility. Maybe making the bond cost progressive. The whole having skin in the game effect since people seem so allergic to restricting the franchise to landowners.

That would restrict voting to the rich, since poor people couldn't afford the risk. That would also mean that the government could hurt people and they wouldn't be able to leave to escape without paying the government off.

Poor people already significantly do not vote compared to rich. Although realistically there should be some nontrivial cost floor. Paul voting whether or not Peter should be robbed to pay for Paul has some issues. The franchise being conditioned on the bond does not stop poor people from leaving, only those who voted for that same government in the first place who cannot bear the cost. And a progressive cost on the bond would mean that it would be proportionally costly for rich and poor.

Net taxpayers. You must pay more than $X in tax more than you receive via government subsidy.

Expanding it does not lead to improved outcomes

Improved outcomes for whom? Politics is about competing interests; there are very few issues on which there is a single "common good," and even fewer where that common good is knowable. Saying that "group X should not be allowed to vote" is saying that group X's interests do not matter. And, although as a person who is both more highly educated and better read than the average person, I might know a lot more about a lot of things than most people, but I almost certainly know less than they do about what their interests are.

I'm comfortable saying as a matter of policy that serious enough crimes have you constructively banished from society. Since we lack the capability to actually cast people out into the wilderness or deport them to the unsettled frontier, we do this by declaring their interests to not matter to the rest of society. They are free to remove themselves if they don't like it.

This seems to be based on an assumption that voter's judgement has a significant impact on the politicians the US winds up electing, which strikes me as unproven and not at all obviously true, considering the extreme filtering effect of money, inside baseball in the nominating parties, and primaries. There's an alternative model which I find more plausible to represent reality, which is that quality of candidates is almost entirely determined by these other processes, and the final voting only serves to shift the incentive gradient that the politicians who get into positions of power either way will have to follow. That is to say, to a coarse approximation, letting the smartest 10% vote would result in the same politicians getting into power, but they now would only have to make the smartest 10% happy; conversely, expanding the franchise to felons would result in the same politicians getting into power, but now they would also have to consider making felons happy to the same extent as they do for the average mediocre and uninfluential free citizen. It does not seem to me that the bad judgement of felons is a relevant counterargument in the latter scenario.

Apparently, it's impossible to wade through the cobwebs of cross-referencing statutory codes without tripping up somehow, even if wading boots are part of your job uniform. And absent malicious intent, these examples illustrate how easy it is for mistakes to happen. What purpose does punishing these types of mistakes accomplish?

I largely agree with your overall point, but I want to have a stab at this. I assume it's rhetorical, but obviously, for the lay people: this is the whole point of law in the first place. Honest free men can't be coerced as easily as criminals can. When everything is potentially criminal, government has achieved normality and can focus on fighting over who gets to selectively enforce which laws. This is why we have a legal profession, because if laws were easy enough for the people who are supposed to be following them to understand, it wouldn't be necessary.

This quote of yours is damning, and true, but it's true of every law. It's a fully generalizable argument, because law is designed, intended and implemented to be impenetrable and to criminalize as much as possible.

I don't disagree that this is a risk, but I would pushback on how generalizable it is. Almost all my criminal caseload involves acts that are unambiguously wrong (dude stabs a guy, man shoots a gun, woman shoplifts, etc.) where the accused is not at all surprised that they're being charged with a crime. Granted, edge cases exist (esp. self-defense) but I don't think every law can be accused of being impenetrable to the common person.

If everything were in fact potentially criminal, I don't think you'd be able to judge the effects of that by surveying your caseload, or even all the caseloads in the country. Arcane self-defense laws, for example, probably have a chilling effect. Someone might avoid moving to a rough neighborhood for fear that they can't defend themselves reasonably, or decide against buying a gun for self-defense for fear of the consequences of using it, or hesitate to shoot an armed burglar or robber for fear of going to prison. So the rough neighborhood gets rougher because upstanding citizens avoid it, and the burglary victim is harmed financially or even physically because of their inability to trust that the law would be on their side. And you'd never hear about it.

If "rough neighborhood" means a rough part of a generally functioning city, then the unanimous view of people-who-are-not-Americans is that cleaning it up is a job for the police, not for armed gentrifiers. If the neighborhood is so bad that even the police won't go there then

  1. You are probably in Sweden and your problem is immigration policy (and housing policy as well, as far as I can see), not self defense law

  2. Sane people are not going to move into the neighborhood because "It is okay if I get mugged, the law lets me defend myself."

Only because in the main, the legal force of the law is enforced in ways that accord with the public morality. This is what gives it "legitimacy". You know as well as I that if all the laws on all the books were enforced equally and to the full extent, the government would fall tomorrow. It is only by not enforcing the vast majority of the law (which criminalizes the entire population) that the powerful can selectively choose the exceptions to that rule. The unlucky few to get charged with some obscure statute that gets used once a decade or so. It's a handy tool to have, deciding who is a criminal and who isn't based on your own personal (and influenced/lobbied/payed etc.) opinion.

This is what leaves me conflicted on the matter of felony disenfranchisement, really.

On principle, I'm against it, because I see the potential for it to be abused. "Quick, in this moment while we have control of the legislature and a friendly judiciary, let us render felonious some behavior that is characteristic of the other tribe so they can never vote again!" Now, of course, that's really unlikely to happen in that way, and if that ever becomes possible, surely we have bigger problems, but I still don't like leaving doors open to tyranny.

But. As you point out, it's not as though the current population of disenfranchised felons has a major number of otherwise-innocents who are just being persecuted in this way; instead, if your experience is generalizable, "almost all" have executed uncontestedly bad judgment, and if ever it is possible for somebody to have forfeited the power to vote, it's not like our current system is wildly missing the mark.

Now, the principle is still probably the deciding factor to me, but I cannot pretend that the short- or medium-term effects of abiding by it would be good. But hey, nothing says life cannot dish out no-win scenarios.

As you point out, it's not as though the current population of disenfranchised felons has a major number of otherwise-innocents who are just being persecuted in this way

There's a way to steelman the opposing view. A lot of the distinction between felony and misdemeanor seems arbitrary to me and the best example is DUI. I think driving drunk evinces horrifically bad judgment, especially if you do it multiple times, but in almost every state you have to get caught drunk driving at least 4 times within a given time period before it can count as a felony. The jail penalties ramp up, as do the collateral consequences (losing driver's licence, etc), but it's notable how reluctant state legislatures are in just declaring DUIs to be a felony. I think the reason why is because DUIs are by far the most "intersectional" of crimes in that almost any slice of the population is liable to trip up and get one. Because of that, they keep the misdemeanor gloves on.

There are also a bunch of edge cases. I once had a guy get charged with burglary (felony) because he stole one can of red bull from a walmart. Normally that would just be misdemeanor shoplifting, but it got upgraded to burglary because he already had a trespass order against him (burglary = intent to commit a crime + entering without permission, prosecutor dropped the charges because prosecuting a felony over $3 was not worth it to anyone). Similarly, I had a client who pawned off jewelry given to her by her boyfriend. Months later, boyfriends beats the shit out of my client and she reports it to the police. Literally the same day, the boyfriend's mom files a police report claiming that the jewelry my client pawned off was stolen. The value was something like $70, which assuming the mom wasn't lying would be just petty theft, but because my client pawned it she got hit by trafficking stolen property felony. [fyi I got her charges dropped once I showed the prosecutor the timing indicated the mom's police report was retaliatory]

Another thing to consider is how nominally neutral laws can still be enforced in a biased and targeted manner. The difference in jail time between a misdemeanor and a low-level felony for a first time offender is almost non-existent. But the collateral consequences of a felony conviction are severe. People lose gun rights and voting rights, and in some places they're also categorically prohibited from pursuing entire professions and, less formally, makes it difficult to find housing and employment. Felony convictions are a modern day legal vehicle used to stuff a bunch of collateral punishments on people. If you don't like someone, just find a way to peg them with a felony and you've virtually guaranteed their pariah status for life on a whole host of issues, not just voting.

On principle, I'm against it, because I see the potential for it to be abused. "Quick, in this moment while we have control of the legislature and a friendly judiciary, let us render felonious some behavior that is characteristic of the other tribe so they can never vote again!" Now, of course, that's really unlikely to happen in that way, and if that ever becomes possible, surely we have bigger problems, but I still don't like leaving doors open to tyranny.

While I'm very sympathetic to this view, recent Red/Blue tribal warring has begun to convince me that there's really no legal safeguard, check, or balance you can implement that can prevent abuse of one tribe by another if there's sufficient tribal hatred and insufficient faith in our system of laws and government. It might stall the abuse for a time, but that time is probably a lot shorter than I previously imagined. And so any potential benefits of banning felons from voting ought not to be weighed against the potential for that ban to be used as a political weapon. Because in an ugly tribal conflict almost anything can and will be used as a political weapon.

The objection based on cost seems insincere, and an invented practical justification for a more ideological belief. This is like people that oppose the death penalty and cite the increased cost relative to life in prison. If perfectly tracking disenfranchisement was implemented at zero cost, would your opinion change? If the death penalty cost less than life, would death penalty opponents suddenly change their mind? I really doubt anyone is deciding this issue based on cost

I don't doubt that insincere objections exist, but why do you suspect I'm guilty of that here? If perfectly tracking disenfranchisement was implemented at zero then yes I would change my mind. I would still question why people should lose the right to vote but as I said I don't really care about voting in general, and at least in your hypothetical scenario we wouldn't be burning up resources for what to me seems to be a pointless endeavor.

If the death penalty cost less than life, would death penalty opponents suddenly change their mind? I really doubt anyone is deciding this issue based on cost

I can think the death penalty's financial costs are sufficient reason to oppose it without thinking they're a necessary reason. That is, in no way, "insincere".

Sounds like arguments as soldiers, tbh. But "insincere" is, if one doesn't also attempt to increase the cost of execution by suing to make cheap painless methods such as the firing squad illegal, inaccurate.

Suppose I thought my child should quit smoking to live longer. I might also believe they should quit smoking to save money. I can believe each of these reasons are sufficient to quit smoking. Finally, suppose I wrote letters to my senator urging for higher taxes on tobacco products.

There is no contradiction, hypocrisy, or insincerity here.

My child might dislike me for writing to my senator to enact a policy that will hurt their wallet, but they can hardly accuse me being contradictory, hypocritical, or insincere.

Humans are not ideal spherical cows.

If I managed to convince a death penalty opponent that the death penalty was in fact very economical, he wouldn't give up on his ideological reason. But if somehow he were to lose the ideological reason, he'd automatically discard the economics reason. Pretty much nobody (short of the lizardman constant) would actually care about the economics reason on its own, so trying to refute it is pointless.

Yes, it's logically possible. But nobody (again, short of the lizardman constant) actually behaves that way. And the answer to "do people in real life behave that way" can be different for smoking and for the death penalty (especially since it's common to object to other things, like rolls in gacha games, that are expensive but don't cause cancer.)

But if somehow he were to lose the ideological reason, he'd automatically discard the economics reason.

I doubt it. The economics reason is pretty rock solid for me, and I don't feel any particular ideological attachment to not executing, say, Jeffrey Dahmer or Ted Bundy (beyond, perhaps, that they plead guilty and so spared everybody the rigamarole of their trial).

There's no appropriate, just way to do executions more cheaply - if you speed up the process to cut down the legal fees, you also greatly increase the unconscionable possibility of an innocent man being executed for a crime he didn't commit.

There's no appropriate, just way to do executions more cheaply

That's a moral reason disguised as an economics reason. You're not denying it can be done cheaply, but that it can be done cheaply and morally.

I can think the death penalty's financial costs are sufficient reason to oppose it without thinking they're a necessary reason. That is, in no way, "insincere".

Except 99.99% of that cost is caused by opponents of the death penalty. So it is insincere, because its a "heads I win, tails you lose" argument.

What kind of insane country is run such that execution is more expensive than life in prison?

Guillotines exist. There are many guns in America. Killing people is not some complex technical feat. Any idiot can do it. Apparently the execution costs about $100,000 (4 orders of magnitude too high), the majority is legal fees and the costs of a higher security prison. These costs could be avoided if the legal niceties were bypassed. Given the cost of execution is ridiculous nonsense, I'm willing to be the legal niceties have a similar ratio of waste.

https://www.nbcrightnow.com/news/what-costs-more-the-death-penalty-or-life-in-prison/article_2d18f8a1-d1ce-5382-8bd6-15471a1b4194.html

China made a profit on its executions, harvesting organs at the same time. I fully expect someone to have an objection about the incentives of killing people for profit. But surely it's much more perverse for there to be a gigantic legal-bureaucratic-medical farce around the death penalty, squandering huge amounts of money.

Voting is primarily a means of electing people who decide how to allocate public funds. I don't see why individuals who live off the government, at great cost to the taxpayer (something like $100k/yr per inmate in California) should have any input into how other people's money is spent. Determining who has the "right" to vote should probably be rolled under the IRS' jurisdiction anyway, with a voter card sent out with your tax return. If a felon gets out of prison and makes enough money to actually pay taxes, then sure, let them vote, just like any other taxpayer.

There's a separate argument, one that I'm partial to, where franchise should be tied to your net tax contribution (and if you're at a deficit, with more benefits received than paid, then you get no vote until you make up the difference), but that's even further outside the overton window, so.

for the sake of argument, your first point could be applied to just about anyone who is a net drain on the economy, like old people, unhealthy people, or disabled people.

I think that would be a good thing, because it avoids the unproductive people of our society from voting for more resources to be allocated to them at the expense of everyone else.

The point of voting is to manage the myriad distinct interests of the whole population, which does in fact require people to vote for resources to be allocated to them at the expense of everyone else. If not directly in cash payments, then indirectly in public works projects that benefit their district, laws that benefit their industry, and the like. There's no nice clean law that exists up in heaven and is totally neutral between the whole population, certainly not any that is actually available to us lowly mortals here on Earth.

yes, but that in the end only ends with the wolves outvoting the sheep on what is for dinner.

Most of the world lets current and former criminals vote,

But most of the world seems to function OK despite letting criminals vote,

Among comparable countries, voter ID and mandatory registration are common, but considered by many to be immoral in the US.

I concede it's a slightly stronger argument, but I'm not convinced the justification isn't used as a pretextual excuse to tip the scales in some political party's favour. The state's governor, James Vardaman, said outright in 1903 the restrictions were imposed "for no other purpose than to eliminate the nigger from politics".

Reading the minds of today's political enemies by assigning them dimmest motives using more than a hundred year old example would disprove a lot more than merely felon disenfranchisement. It also an example of a genetic fallacy.

As for the bureaucracy point, any further restrictions (such as age or citizenship) than allowing any person that comes to the polls to vote, but purple-thumbing them, requires some sort of updatable database necessitating a state with a higher capacity than a mere bulk-purchaser of paper, and two kinds of ink.

Reading the minds of today's political enemies by assigning them dimmest motives using more than a hundred year old example

Well it keeps happening:

Before enacting that law, the legislature requested data on the use, by race, of a number of voting practices. Upon receipt of the race data, the General Assembly enacted legislation that restricted voting and registration in five different ways, all of which disproportionately affected African Americans. In response to claims that intentional racial discrimination animated its action, the State offered only meager justifications. Although the new provisions target African Americans with almost surgical precision, they constitute inapt remedies for the problems assertedly justifying them and, in fact, impose cures for problems that did not exist. Thus the asserted justifications cannot and do not conceal the State’s true motivation.

Well what keeps happening? Passing laws which disproportionately affect African Americans? There is long list of laws which disproportionately affect African Americans from laws against theft to laws against murder.

So are we to impute those laws were enacted for racist reasons? Or only if there is an anecdote from centuries ago of a person claiming the reason for enacting something similar is for racist reasons?

Well what keeps happening?

People keep trying to disenfranchise African Americans.

So are we to impute those laws were enacted for racist reasons?

There's no imputation required in this case - the disparate impact was very much by design.

How can you tell it was racist?

Because there is a disparate impact.

Why does disparate impact prove racism?

Because it was by design.

How can you tell it was racist?

Because disparate impact.

Did you pay any attention to the details of the case? Because this response makes me think you didn't and are just resorting to pattern matching against a strawman. The NC state government did not pass some facially neutral policy which had disparate impact:

the legislature requested data on the use, by race, of a number of voting practices. Upon receipt of the race data, the General Assembly enacted legislation that restricted voting and registration in five different ways, all of which disproportionately affected African Americans.

All this right after having a consent decree originally imposed for racist electoral policy lifted. The "golly gee, how did that happen" doesn't fly. If you ask for racial data and then immediately use it to enact policies which are de facto racially discriminatory, the most likely explanation is that it was deliberately discriminatory.

these aren't "details of the case," they're an argument

the NC state government explicitly passed a facially neutral policy which mentioned nothing about racial discrimination whatsoever

that's what "facially neutral" means

the response under VRA 1965 jurisprudence is that even though it's facially neutral, it's racially discriminatory because it was passed with racist intent because of the disparate impact of facially neutral laws

why? well a few judges in the 4th Cir declared the NC legislature is racist because they enacted outrageous voter laws like not allowing same day registration, requiring voter ID, and others which are already used around the USA (and still are to this day), because a member of the legislature requested data and the legislature passed the law after data was produced showing some of the restrictions would impact the way blacks vote more than nonblacks

Did you read this case or an article about it? If the later, why not link the article that you read instead of the case you didn't?

"The legislature" doesn't request data. Someone in the legislature did, according to some procedure, which is not set forth in the quoted section. Later in the opinion (pgs. 13-15) the language is changed to "legislators requested," which could mean that individual lawmakers asked for the data, but isn't dispositive. I do not know, but suspect, that the data would have been added to the record by progressives explicitly for the purpose of teeing up this challenge - it's not exactly a new position that the left regards Voter ID and anything but the most cursory controls on absentee- and early balloting as racist, nor is it a new charge that the GOP rejects this characterization and claims to support these policies on their own merits and for race-neutral reasons. This, obviously, would throw some water on the "those racists investigated just how they could screw over the blacks and then went and did it" narrative.

Moreover, the discontinuance of methods one group disproportionately uses is not evidence of discriminatory intent so long as adequate and facially race-neutral mechanisms of voting exist which are open to all. There is no general right to a long pre-election early-balloting window, whatever the color of one's skin, nor is there a requirement that outside organizations be allowed to do the thing that (likely) killed Edgar Allen Poe and conduct prospective voter cattle-drives. Nor is there a racial component to Voter ID requirements (provided that the Government also has race-neutral methods of distributing government-issued ID) - as has been stated many times, both here and many other places, just about every developed (and most developing) nations have some sort of Voter ID requirement, and do not regard the matter as particularly controversial.

Among comparable countries, voter ID and mandatory registration are common, but considered by many to be immoral in the US.

Maybe I'm thinking of something else, but who thinks mandatory registration is immoral? I don't think either policy is immoral, but I do question the utility of voter ID. I think the fears about voter suppression from requiring people to get an ID are severely overblown, but I can't say they're zero in a country where ID cards are not mandatory. Voter ID policy can only help mitigate against "impersonation fraud" (and not completely, since fake IDs exist) and I'm not sure how much of a problem that is. The effects one way or another seem slight, so I don't really have a strong opinion on voter ID.

Reading the minds of today's political enemies by assigning them dimmest motives using more than a hundred year old example would disprove a lot more than merely felon disenfranchisement. It also an example of a genetic fallacy.

That's not what I intended to communicate, all I said is that pretextual excuses have been used before to suppress the vote. Whether or not pretextual excuses are used now is a different analysis and I explained why I'm suspicious of some efforts.

Is anyone arguing disenfranchising people explicitly isn't suppressing the vote? It is by design suppressing the vote.

Your claim is then to undermine any argument in favor of banning felons from voting by saying there may be a pretextual reasons for the people advocating for it, but that criticism would be possible for the people arguing against it as well.

Because of that, it looks like you're just trying to smear people by association who argue for something similar as being racist because people in the past who passed the law said it was for racist reasons.

Is anyone arguing disenfranchising people explicitly isn't suppressing the vote?

Yes, I would. The question of "what are the criteria to be in the electorate" is prior to the question of suppression - i.e., whether qualified electors are being prevented from voting.

Fair enough. I would argue explicitly in favor of "suppressing the vote" as well as vastly reducing the number of people who are a qualified elector. To me this seems like splitting hairs to avoid the negative connotations of the phrase "suppressing the vote," but if that were a serious hurdle itself then there is no chance one gets to implementing it anyway.

Would be interesting to see if there is a correlation internationally between prisoner voting rights and demographic skew of the prison relative to the general population.

I'm in one such 'comparable' country, Australia, and voter ID is not mandatory (you don't need an ID to board a domestic flight either, which is nice).

One aspect in which the Australian political system is more unique, however, is the fact that everyone is obliged to vote in each federal, state, and local election. There are many benefits to this (overall it lowers the temperature and mitigates extremism while making mandates meaningful), but institutionally, one of the biggest is that the corrosive debate over who should be 'entitled' to vote does not exist. The vote should be sacralised to be beyond base, Machiavellian partisan machinations.

Historically, its important to note most long-term felons would not be able to vote in any society, because they would have been executed or exiled.

I'm not sure what the import of what felons were historically able to do is -- historically most of any kind of person would not be able to vote, if anyone could vote at all.

Man, one of these days, I really need to get around to writing up an effort post and hopefully generating some discussion around the core, "what's the goal of voting?". Not that this hasn't been covered in quite a few venues, but it seems like it really gets directly to the heart of so many arguments around voting policy and procedure. I don't have all that strong of feelings on the felon vote, but including literal prisoners seems absolutely insane to me, because I don't regard the currently incarcerated as a legitimate constituency to appeal to and certainly see no need to include the wisdom of current prisoners as part of the selection process. The thing that keeps jumping out is that those aren't considerations that people arguing for a broader franchise agree with as top priorities - we're arguing from such different perspectives that there's no way we're going to agree.


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