> I can’t see myself putting the same work in to help the world’s richest man pay the loans he took out
So Twitter was “really good” (while it was helping the many rich shareholders of a random public company) but it’s suddenly “work” a couple of days after the owner changed?
Nothing wrong for not using it because of ideological reasons, but the product’s accessibility (or anything else really) hasn’t changed yet.
The main difference isn't really who but how much money. One uses a lot of goods and services in ordinary life. Generally speaking one hopes that the provider of these goods and services uses their resources efficiently to provide them for a reasonable price including reasonable profit.
When a leveraged buyout happens (this is true for most leveraged buyouts) a large cost is put into the business that wasn't there before. And this cost does nothing to help make the good or service better. It merely exists so that person B may own the business instead of person A.
So what is the difference between Musk and the previous shareholders? The main difference is that Musk put an enormous cost on the business which will be borne by twitters users and advertisers, and that cost brings twitter nothing more than having musk as an owner.
By himself musk may be no better or worse than the previous shareholders. But just for him to rule over twitter is going to cost twitter a lot of money that will probably reduce the quality of the service.
This is true of most leveraged buyouts and whenever a leveraged buyout happens to a company you use, it is always a good idea to look for alternatives. The official response of the leveraged buyout industry is that the new management is just so much better that it is worth to saddle the company with all this debt and all these costs to just change the management. And the customer will benefit from the better management.
It is yet to be seen whether Musk is such a great manager that he can run a social media company so much better than everybody else to make it worth taking the enormous debt, and do that without having any experience running a social media company and while running two (oh wait - three ) other companies simultaneously.
But generally speaking this is not the case. It might have been the case during the beginning of the LBO industry when there was some truly entrenched bad management in some US companies but not anymore. It is possible to change management of a publicly traded company without doing an LBO, and nowadays stockholders tend to be good about holding their managers to high standards.
I’m afraid I don’t understand how Twitter can end up with debt from Musk buying it. How does that even work?
Twitter the company takes out a huge loan to pay the current shareholders a fortune (which is decided by those same shareholders, no conflict of interest there at all). But who the fuck would give them a loan like that (like you say, just to have Musk at the helm)?
There was $13 billion of debt used to finance the buy-out. It's a leveraged buy-out, so the target company owns the debt, not the buyer.
How do you think that debt ends up getting paid off? It'll be close to $1 billion every year just to service that debt.
Given that:
* Twitter has only ever made a profit in 2018 and 2019
* That the profits it made in those two years were $1.2bn and $1.4bn respectively (only just enough to service this new debt)
* That for 2020 and 2021 other tech companies were comparatively minting it, but Twitter burned ~$1.3bn
* The world is generally in the early phases of what is likely to a deep recession, with ad spend and consumer spending already well down
It feels like a bit of an interesting purchase, to say the least.
It should be noted that the plan to charge users $8 per month for a blue verification badge wouldn't even service the debt if 25 times more people bought it than currently have it for free.
It's also playing a role in his shareholders of Tesla view Musk. A recent Opening Arguments podcast explains how they could actually sue him for irresponsible behaviour that goes against his fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders. He basically tanked Tesla shares raising money for the Twitter deal. That's not maximizing the value of the shares, it's the opposite.
> I’m afraid I don’t understand how Twitter can end up with debt from Musk buying it. How does that even work?
This article explains: (a) how leveraged buyouts work, (b) how Musk's acquisition is different from a regular LBO, and (c) what debt Twitter now has due to the deal.
Edit: I must say that even after I read it I have trouble understanding how any of that happens except through well connected people moving money around to their own benefit.
The banks are on the hook, but it’s not really the banks because it’s not their money they are lending out.
I worked on Wall Street for years, a long time ago when leveraged buy-outs first really got going.
So I really understand them.
And I agree with you. "Leverage" means multiplying both risk and reward. Given a system where losses are socialized, and wins are privatized, it makes complete sense to do LBOs as much as possible - the people with money win, and everyone else loses.
"But who the fuck would give them a loan like that (like you say, just to have Musk at the helm)?"
A syndicate of banks, including Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Barclays, Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, BNP Paribas, Mizuho Financial Group and Societe Generale.
Banks usually do not care that much about clients or user experience. They look at a businesses financials and check whether it can take the extra interest payments. Apparently, Musk convinced them that with some job cuts, Twitter would be able to make the interest payments. We will see how this works out. There may be an advertiser exodus happening already and I do not think either the banks or Musk planned for that.
How I understand the parent post: Twitter has cost Musk a lot of money. Musk will now have to get a lot of value from twitter, and that will probably be bad news for the user.
It has cost Musk a lot of money, but the critical point here is that it has also cost Twitter a lot of money: Because it is a leveraged buy out Twitter owns the $13bn debt that was raised to buy it out.
Just because the new owners paid price X doesn’t mean the previous owners weren’t extracting profits that were based on the value X of the business.
Basically it seems like some people are doing some mental gymnastics to justify disliking or boycotting Twitter because Elon bought it and doesn’t seem to be going along with the program.
> So what is the difference between Musk and the previous shareholders? The main difference is that Musk put an enormous cost on the business which will be borne by twitters users and advertisers, and that cost brings twitter nothing more than having musk as an owner.
> By himself musk may be no better or worse than the previous shareholders. But just for him to rule over twitter is going to cost twitter a lot of money that will probably reduce the quality of the service.
It seems to me that his product-focused ownership (remember, he's a big user of Twitter) will either make it better or he will run it into the ground (due to naïvety and incompetence in this domain). Both seem like a win/win situation to me.
I think he has very strong incentives to make Twitter better because it is his stage, both for marketing his companies but also to stay int he limelight (ego).
Some layoffs, perhaps. There’s no reason to think they would be this large or haphazard, and without billions in new debt Twitter’s financial pressure would be far lower.
Their most profitable years would have been cancelled out by the new debt Musk brought, and that was before he tanked their ad sales.
Twitter was already under a cloud while Musk was grandstanding his acquisition stunt. Once he was forced to go through with it, his immediate actions and communication confirmed how much chaos we (users, staff, customers) were in for. Then after one week, awfully mishandled mass layoffs, demands to massively reduce infrastructure costs, etc.
Nothing's changed? Sure it has. Trust and confidence are hard to build, easy to torch.
The only “chaos” I’m aware of is the /b/ N**r spam invasion that occurred one afternoon? The rest seems to just be Musk doing Musk and manufactured outrage (as I really do not understand how $8/mo is breaking the bank for popular celebrities and brands) over charging for validation.
I still think people are just mad because verified won't be a status symbol anymore. Vanity, nothing more. No matter how Musk handled this, he would've gotten hate because he is just a controversial dude, and he does like to stir the pot.
No one who understood verification thought it was a status symbol.
Musk doesn't understand the platform he bought, so he promised to change the existing identify verification system – part of a strategy to combat impersonation and misinformation – to a pay-for-play subscription feature.
But Twitter already has a subscription offering! He's just ruining the verification system out of ignorance and spite.
> No one who understood verification thought it was a status symbol.
Doesn’t matter what the “in the know” understood, it’s what the blue checks perceived it to be. To them it was a hard to get item that only folks with some degree of “celebrity” received.
I disagree. It was a wide gamut, not just one political ideology. Just the commentary in the last week shows it was across the board. Fox News personalities to AOC to Steven King to a few other Hollywood celebs bitching about it. Wide range of political leaning, common thread…all celebrities.
All I see is a bunch of wealthy and famous folks whining that their little badge of exclusivity has become easily obtainable by the masses for the price of a latte.
Boo hoo. Your little blue badge of elitism is now available to the proles, how will you ever cope with such uppityness?
Nope, I am opining about what I have seen and heard from people publicly complaining about it over the last few days since the news came out about the change.
For what it’s worth, if Twitter eliminated the blue checkmark entirely…the exact same people would be complaining about that too. It’s their special celebrity badge that separates them as “valid” from the little people.
Old blue checkmark: Twitter confirms that this person is who they claim to be. If an account is called DonaldTrump and has a blue checkmark, Twitter confirms it is the account of the former president.
New blue checkmark: Twitter confirms that someone pays 8 dollars every month. If an account is called DonaldTrump and has a blue checkmark, Twitter confirms that someone is paying 8 dollars every month for this account.
So, if you see a tweet from the blue checkmark @DonaldTrump saying "I am running for president", with the new system, you have no idea if the former president has publicly announced he is running again, or if some rando who had 8 dollars to spare wants to make it seem so.
> So, if you see a tweet from the blue checkmark @DonaldTrump saying "I am running for president", with the new system, you have no idea if the former president has publicly announced he is running again, or if some rando who had 8 dollars to spare wants to make it seem so.
Good! I can’t think of a better way to make Twitter better for the world than to eliminate the elitism.
Yes, it's currently a status symbol, but it started out as a useful symbol. And it, arguably, still is.
To illustrate with an example, I follow Paul Massaro https://twitter.com/apmassaro3 because of his expertise and because he gave me advice when I needed it the most. He is, to put it mildly, a target for nation state actors,
> Paul Massaro is the senior policy advisor for counter-corruption and sanctions. Paul’s work has advanced the recognition of corruption as a national security threat. He has been described in the media as “one of America’s foremost corruption experts” and an “endless source of democratic ingenuity." His work has been similarly described as "breathtakingly prescient.” He has worked on over 13 pieces of counter-corruption legislation and facilitated the founding of the Congressional Caucus against Foreign Corruption and Kleptocracy and the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance against Kleptocracy. Paul also covers German-speaking Europe and East Asia.
> His work on the Rodchenkov Anti-Doping Act, a landmark law redefining doping as fraud and making it illegal in international competitions anywhere in the world, has for the first time provided justice to clean athletes and held to account the authoritarian actors who use sport as a tool of foreign policy. The Associated Press described the unanimous passage of the act as “a remarkable achievement considering the polarization in U.S. politics.” His work on the Transnational Repression Accountability and Prevention (TRAP) Act was similarly groundbreaking, serving as the first-ever U.S. law to respond to abuse of INTERPOL by authoritarian regimes.
I am sure there are people who'd prefer that he was discredited, his work hampered, or just to hurt him a bit for the amount of money he's taken out of their coffers.
He is a cog in the machine, but he is one of the more important cogs in the machine. That makes him a target.
He is also an avid social media user and interacts with people on Twitter. A lot. He uses the site prolifically and has 300k+ followers due to his expertise.
If anyone could buy that badge, and millions would have to for Twitter to service the LBO's debt, then it becomes trivially easy for nation state actors to eventually create a fake, or several fake, Paul Massaros, and knowing which one is the real Paul would get harder. ("just check the username" doesn't quite work with the general public)
It would become easier to manufacture a scandal that could be used against him & the US in general.
The kicker is that he's not even remotely the most important person on Twitter. The site has a heavy chunk of the American leadership regularly interacting with people and each other online, and they're all targets that could be used by clever propagandists.
The badge used to help mitigate it. I know if I'm talking to a Paul Massaro with a badge, then it's the real Paul. That becomes impossible without it.
> The rest seems to just be Musk doing Musk and manufactured outrage
Is it wise to sail the sea with such a captain at the helm? Sure it's the same old boat, and we're heading to the same old destination, with the same old crew. But something is amiss.
Firing key executives and teams, telling employees to print code for review and then shred it, making employees crunch on a feature they all know is a bad idea, his usual extremely bad personal comms strategy (posting like a child), losing advertisers, mass layoffs, posting cruel misinformation, wall-to-wall press coverage of his idiocy...
I've never been a fan of Twitter or any of the closed, private social networks, and Musk's takeover doesn't change anything about that, but I absolutely welcome the fact that many people are finally inspired to look at some alternatives.
They didn't do it before, but they're doing it now, and are pleasantly surprised by what they find. Even if Musk hasn't ruined Twitter yet, there's nothing wrong with him being the catalyst for this improvement.
there might be a difference in public perception: zuckerberg built his platform in the first place, so he's got a legitimate claim to destroy it in whatever way he seems fit (even if that's not really true). musk just walzed in; his aquisition looks like a hostile takeover and now seems a bit clueless about how to proceed ("20$ too much? how about 8?").
All of this seems to assume what people care about right now is what matters. The news cycle will move on in a couple weeks. That's when the real test will be for how much people really give a shit.
What's your source for popularity and does it do a breakdown by demographics advertisers are most interested in? Because I think that tells a very different story from "still most popular with boomers". Their earnings and stock price also tell a different story from "still most popular".
Just go through the list of most popular Twitter users and ask yourself where else are they going to go?
I personally wouldn't gamble the farm on corporation ad spending's adherence to social justice if those eyeballs are all in one place... at least long term.
At least FB has to compete with messaging apps and Instagram/TikTok. Twitter doesn't have a good #2.
It's probably a mistake to take the emotional outrage news cycles over the next month (or 3) as much more than the exact thing people will keep going back to Twitter for... ironically this outrage at Musk is the exactly what drives people to use Twitter.
> And no I don't think I need to support such a statement with a source. I'm sure you can find one.
What I've found is Facebook is not popular with young people: the audience many advertisers are the most interested in. The stock market is certainly not happy with their latest results. So sure, I can easily find a source that says Facebook is still the most popular platform. The details matter. Is it growth in Asia that's keeping their numbers up while US users shrink? Are they failing to attract young people? Have they lost users among the HN demographics? These details matter if you want the actual story.
> One area where Meta showed promise was in adding to Facebook’s massive user base
> Facebook has 2.93 billion monthly active users. 1.98 billion daily active users. That was up from 1.97 billion three months ago.
> Facebook has 264 million monthly active users in the United States and Canada alone. The majority of Facebook’s users belong to the 25 to 34 age group.
> Twitter has 206 million daily active users.
> TikTok has 1 billion monthly active users (MAU’s).
Facebook is going through a massive pivot and spending a wild amount of $$ on the Metaverse. All tech stocks are down. So I wouldn't put too much weight on stock price.
The other major thing is how Apple changed ad tracking works which reduce ad prices by 20% on average. That's a major decline in revenue for any company ("Advertising represented 98.2% of the company’s total revenue"). But YoY revenue only declined by 4%.
Good to see you finally backing up your claims with sources. The first source is paywalled though.
Yes user-wise they do seem to be doing fine, but I'd like to know where the growth is happening. That's important.
The 2nd source has some interesting demographics, but unfortunately doesn't include growth which would be the most interesting to me.
Very interesting that their largest user base by far is now in India, which I hinted at before. I suspect much of their growth from their latest earnings report is from that region of the world. Which also helps explain why ad revenue is down. Note also that ad reach in India is a very low 30% compared to the UK at 60% or Mexico over 80%. They didn't give numbers for the US. But if a lot of the growth is in India with such a low ad reach, that doesn't bode well for ad revenue.
Facebook also seems to be failing at attracting the young demographic from the west that advertisers love. As their core user base ages it will be interesting to see if they can maintain the interest of advertisers. I think Instagram is going to prop them up for a while. But it wouldn't surprise me at all if Facebook starts to become less important to advertisers, who will quickly move to wherever their target audience spends the most time.
Either way, just because FB is doing fine user wise doesn't mean that folks on HN who threatened to quit FB didn't actually go ahead and do that. If every HN user quit FB in one day, I don't think it would even show up on any chart.
> doesn't mean that folks on HN who threatened to quit FB didn't actually go ahead and do that.
Of course it doesn't? Who cares. I deleted my account too but that doesn't mean much.
I'm highly skeptical this outrage cycle will go on for long enough to seriously impact their userbase. Absent a proper competitor to Twitter. I've been part of enough internet boycotts of them to be cynical about their odds.
Also I'm not sure why you're having trouble finding Facebook data... just google it if you care so much about dismissing their obvious dominance. And WSJ paywall is easily bypassable.
Don't mistake a stagnant market for a dying one. If stagnant equalled death then Japan's economy would have been poor long ago.
> I'm not having trouble finding Facebook data. Did you get that idea from me asking you to back up your own claims?
You've asked me repeatedly about geographic and demographic data that Facebook (and plenty of 3rd party data mining sites) post publicly. If you actually care just compare it to other sites and make your own judgement calls.
If Facebook was really dying in the west then we'd be hearing about it. You seem to be using anecdotal data, in my life everyone I know hates Facebook but at least 75% of them use it... especially 90% of the non-technical ones who tend to be the best ad targets. Maybe you're not talking to enough regular people?
I asked you to back up your claims with sources. That's pretty common here, and also in scientific circles. We aren't your research assistants so if you want your claims to be taken seriously and discussed in detail, expect to give your sources.
I didn't claim Facebook is dying in the West. That's you putting words in my mouth.
And at the same time, any of his company's accomplishments are often attributed to him. You become an idol so you receive the good and the bad feedback.
It was a different time, "CEO of an unsuccessful tech company" wasn't a person you had to have an opinion on. And then once Apple became successful with iPods and iPhones, their business model was "give us money in exchange for this neat thing," which is sort generally likeable and also opt-in (technically Twitter is opt in, I guess, but all the news reporters take it very seriously for some reason, so it tends to impose even if you don't opt in).
I think it's because so many of Apple's customers idolized him. He was seen as a hero that could do no wrong, and all the poor decisions that Apple made were somehow someone else's fault. Even when I saw people complaining that Apple was making things harder for developers, Steve's name was not mentioned.
I really don’t think Jobs would have created and maintained a presence through social media - I don’t think he needed or desired the attention like Musk does... But anyway, who can ever know.
Steve was almost universally mocked/hated by anyone that didn't use Apple products. He was also had an ornery personality that didn't mesh well with many.
That’s mostly it. He got his share of criticism but it was almost entirely for what he did in his official capacity at Apple and he didn’t seem to crave the limelight or expect to influence works affairs anything like Musk, Zuckerberg, etc. do. The changing the world talk was mostly about making computers people wanted to use, and if you disagreed on whether they did that it wasn’t something which you needed to spend any time thinking about.
What do you think the shareholders of a typical public company look like?
I think you’ll find a small percentage owned by rich private individuals/family offices, some owned by private investors like insurance companies, and the rest held by pension funds or mutual funds which look like big shares on paper but don’t really exercise control and correspond to lots of tiny holdings by people who range from poor to ordinary to a small number of quite wealthy people.
That is, I think the usual answer to “who are the shareholders of this public company?” is “ordinary people through their pensions or investment accounts, skewing a little bit older and richer”. Some companies have a relatively large stake owned by some private person or fund, and others have a big share owned by their original founders or their families, but in that case those people would be named instead of just saying ‘shareholders’.
It's one thing to use a medium that is being abused by malicious actors; it's another to be on a medium that suffers constant drama fostered by an owner and CEO who spends his days vocalizing an imprecise understanding of civil rights and his contempt for his customers.
I think it;s kind of screaming into the void to call people out on their inconsistent emotional decisions when that's all musk seems to do these days. Better to stand back and accept this is just humanity and enjoy the show.
All those whiners that go to other platforms will be back. History shows that emotions take over, but then the person calms down and returns to the usual services, platforms, etc. How many whiners and alarmists were there when Microsoft acquired Github :) so what? everyone is back and happy.
Twitter also used to be owned by average people. Like most publicly traded companies. So no, it's not from "many rich shareholders" to Elon. It's more nuanced than you're making it out to be.
Then all public companies like Boeing, Lockheed Martin, & Northrop Grumman are owned with the money of "average people"...largely managed by fund advisors.
After watching some interviews with some Twitter employees, I suspect that many in the accessibility team were very political & their politics influenced their decisions.
Project Veritas is one...sure there was a hidden camera but some of the employees were quite candid with their beliefs. I don't mean to paint a broad stroke, but from the interviews, it seems like the culture of the company leaned a certain political direction.
This is a tired and often parroted talking point used to dismiss literal hours of continuous footage of execs rambling on and on about enacting their political agendas in the workplace.
The source is Project Veritas. Why not go to their website and take a look? There have been a whole bunch of cases where they got Twitter staff on record to say damning things. And no, it's not out of context. The statements are in context and speak for themselves. You can watch the videos or listen to the recordings to hear it for yourself. If you want to argue this source isn't valid, you need to prove it, because the evidence is there.
Twitter engineer: “Our jobs are at stake, he's a capitalist and we weren't really operating as capitalists, more like very socialist. Like we're all like commie as f*k.” ... “Twitter does not believe in free speech… Elon believes in free speech.”
Twitter Lead Client Partner: “The rest of us who have been here believe in something that's good for the planet and not to give people free speech.” ... “People don’t know how to make a rational decision if you don’t put out -- correct things that are supposed to be out in the public, right?” ... “If we’re implementing all these rules…and Elon wants to dismantle them, then technically our ideology has led us to not making money because we’re not making money, and Elon wants to turn it the other way so that we can make money,”
“if it was a pro-Trump thing and I’m anti-Trump… I banned his whole account… it’s at your discretion” ... Olinda Hassan, Policy Manager for Twitter Trust and Safety explains, “we’re trying to ‘down rank’… shitty people to not show up,” “we’re working [that] on right now”
Parnay Singh, Twitter Direct Messaging Engineer: “Yeah you look for Trump, or America, and you have like five thousand keywords to describe a redneck. Then you look and parse all the messages, all the pictures, and then you look for stuff that matches that stuff.” ... “the majority of it are for Republicans”
Sure. Given links I'll do that. I just did right now since you are the first person to actually provide links.
The claim was:
> literal hours of continuous footage
None of the links you provided come even close to that claim. They are FULL of cuts. Many of them don't even include the question that was asked!
And even you took quotes out of context. The quote "Twitter does not believe in free speech" was qualified by a followup that free speech allows bullying and that Twitter does not believe in bullying because it's bad for business! Which is totally reasonable if you are an advertising platform.
Can you provide what I asked for? The source to "literal hours of continuous footage"?
Also, please stop giving quotes to your links. You've done exactly what people already claimed: taken things out of context to try to make them look worse than they really are. Folks can watch uncut videos themselves and make up their own minds. If these "literal hours of continuous footage" actually even exist.
"You've done exactly what people already claimed: taken things out of context to try to make them look worse than they really are"
You want people to transcribe every word for you now? I already did the web searches and wrote out snippets for you, so the topic of each video was clear. You could have done those things yourself which is why I'm the first to dish it up; it seems uncharitable to get mad about it and now accuse me of trying to manipulate you!
No relevant context was lost or hidden here. You've added more parts of what one guy said in one case, but that stuff isn't relevant to any point anyone is making in this thread. The discussion started with someone questioning the claim that Twitter employees had radical political beliefs. The Veritas videos were cited as evidence to the contrary and clearly prove the case - one of the employees literally claims Twitter staff were "commie as fuck".
It seems that you accept this original claim is true and are now arguing about something different - that you support their justifications. But their justifications for their radical politics was not a topic in this thread. Not writing out every word isn't an attempt to hide anything, as you saw, because the video is right there - with links for your convenience - ready for you to watch it, and, if you wish, start a separate discussion about their motives.
"Folks can watch uncut videos themselves and make up their own minds"
Only if they're willing to at least do a web search to get started!
Nope, the videos are real and the things the employees say on them, equally so. Not distorted or taken out of context - on video, talking about their work in the clearest possible terms. It's a far higher calibre of evidence than a typical newspaper investigation, in which you'd get at best only quotes written down without even video evidence to back it up.
But if you'd rather be in denial about the nature of Twitter as an organization, go ahead and ignore all that. Your questions have been answered.
You gave links to highly edited videos. That is a fail.
> If you would rather be in denial about the nature of Twitter
I almost never use Twitter so I don't care. If you're naive enough to believe highly edited video from a source with a strong history of deceptively editing videos, [1], that's certainly your choice. But don't be so shocked that others are not as gullible and have a higher standard of evidence than you.
> You gave links to highly edited videos. That is a fail.
Then why did the employees say what they said? In most conversations, you wouldn't have vitriol toward a certain set of political beliefs, yet the Twitter employees in the videos do express vitriol...whether the video is edited for the mass audience (like most news interviews/exposes are) or not.
Either way, our opinions here are moot. Twitter is a private company & it can do whatever it wants. If you don't like that, build your own social network & run it the way that you want to run it. You can even recruit ex-Twitter employees if they agree with your direction...
I for one, prefer the direction of the new Twitter & perhaps even more profound, more attention is given to alternatives that are open source. Building alternatives will enhance the space & create more innovation!
I agree with the sentiment of these Elon Musk quotes & it would be great for human progress if other social media networks also adopt these stances:
Twitter needs to become by far the most accurate source of information about the world. That’s our mission.
| Elon Musk
“I think wishful thinking is innate in the human brain. You want things to be the way you wish them to be, and so you tend to filter the information that you shouldn't filter.”
| Elon Musk
“The internet has been the biggest equalizer in history in terms of access to information and knowledge.”
| Elon Musk
“The extreme antibody reaction from those who fear free speech says it all.”
There are no links to the raw footage for the Twitter interviews. I called them & asked them to provide all raw footage as they provide raw footage for some of their episodes & it would be a significant distinguishing feature for a news organization to provide raw footage for all episodes. Note that you are holding them to a higher standard than other news outlets who rarely provide the raw interview footage & mostly edit the interviews...but I do agree that all raw footage for all interviews should be provided for transparency & to provide more context.
Nonetheless, the Twitter employees still said what they said & expressed their intent to censor political opponents. You can point out that there is no raw footage for Project Veritas, even though all news organizations rarely provide raw footage & they all editorialize & they all edit, but it still does not change the fact of what was said...You might not like their editorialization or their editing, but what was said is still on video. You can call it "deceptive practices", but all news organizations engage in the same "deceptive practices".
I hope they change their policy after my call with them because they have an opportunity be a leading example of even more transparent journalism.
At the end of the day...Elon still owns Twitter, Twitter is having a record inflow of activity & active users, Elon fired the old staff, & many people are happy about it...you can't change that either. You can complain, but it still happened.
Like I said from the very beginning, you can only provide links that are highly edited and leave out the context. At the end of the day only the naive and gullible will trust those videos. Your choice of course.
Then any interview by any organization that is edited, which is the large majority, "leaves out the context" & only the "naive and gullible" would believe it. Or you have a double standard based on the narrative that you want to hear. IMO & the opinion of many, there was more than enough context...it just happens that it's not what you want to hear. They had various ramblings for well over a minute. I don't think any more context is going to change what they were expressing.
Again, it's all moot. These people lost their jobs & good riddance. Twitter is heading in a better direction now. I doubt Twitter employees will ramble on about how they are censoring political opponents to a random stranger anymore.
Also, there was corruption with employees selling blue check marks & the management lied about their bot problem. It just doesn't seem like the company was ran ethically on many fronts. Twitter was hemorrhaging money, was obviously was not run well, & failed to live up to it's potential.
Project Veritas is an American far-right activist group ... produces deceptively edited videos ... and has propagated disinformation and conspiracy theories
isn't Accessibility one of those things that's "everyones job"? Why would you have a separate team working on it?
Not kicking up shit, genuinely curious why you'd have a separate team work on that, seems like something every engineer needs to know (at least on the frontend) for an app like Twitter.
For the same reason companies have security teams. Or frontend and backend teams. Engineers can't be experts in everything. There is far too much to know.
Project Veritas had some videos about Twitter employees declaring their politics & their willingness to censor political opponents. I don't think anyone on the accessibility team was interviewed but Twitter as a whole did have a political leaning. Banning people for political speech is an accessibility issue & for some reason it was allowed to continue.
> So you don't have a source to back up your claim.
I do. The stated political beliefs of the people being interviewed & their claim that many @ Twitter shared their beliefs. Also the actions of the company.
> It is not. [1]. You don't get to widen the definition of things to make them so broad as to include your claim.
It is. If someone is banned from the site, the site is not accessible to that person. If people are being banned for political speech, then it certainly violates any form of platform neutrality. This is the heart of accessibility. Banning someone for exercising their free speech is anti-accessibility.
> Accessibility is the design of products, devices, services, vehicles, or environments so as to be usable by people with disabilities.
The Twitter human rights & accessibility team also includes "human rights". Freedom of Speech is a human right which Twitter has been willfully violating. The "human rights & accessibility" team failed to do their job of upholding the human rights of those who were banned for political speech.
> I do. The stated political beliefs of the people being interviewed & their claim that many @ Twitter shared their beliefs
You do not have a source. Guilt by association is not a source. You're just making a guess and you should be called out for claiming a guess is an actual source.
> If someone is banned from the site, the site is not accessible to that person.
Sure, by definition you can't access a site you are banned from. But that's not what accessibility is and that is not what the accessibility department was working on.
> If people are being banned for political speech, then it certainly violates any form of platform neutrality.
Yes it does violate any form of platform neutrality. That still has nothing to do with the actual definition of what accessibility includes.
> Banning someone for exercising their free speech is anti-accessibility.
That's absurd. Accessibility already has a definition and it's quite specific: it's about disabled people. You are free to re-define words, but folks are also free to ignore your personal definitions.
> Freedom of Speech is a human right which Twitter has been willfully violating.
I don't agree with you that they have been violating anyone's free speech but what does this have to do with your original claim that "the accessibility team acted as political speech commissars"?
Where is your actual evidence of the accessibility team doing that? Actual evidence would not include your guesses or guilt by association.
Mentioned this elsewhere, but in general "Project Veritas had some videos of X" is negatively correlated with X having actually occurred. They have a long history of intentional manipulation in all of their reporting.
"I was happy to do free work for that billionaire, he's part of the same ideology I've been born into. But now that it's this other billionaire, I cannot continue."
I don't see a problem with this, except being born into an ideology. Most people these days have chosen one and cultivated it according to their life. I think my ideology is good, if it wasn't I would change it to be the good version. So why would I not work with someone who shares mine? Billionaire or not.
You can choose your ideology, but there is an obvious influence of societal defaults.
If you are born in Mecca, you are very likely to become and stay Muslim. If you are born in coastal California, you are very likely to become a Democrat of leftist bend. If you are born in a small town in the English Home Counties, you are likely to become a Tory. If you are born in a Catholic part of Northern Ireland, you are likely to become a Sinn Fein voter etc.
Obviously this isn't anywhere near as sticky as your skin color or even your primary language of communication, but the defaults are still rather strong.
You don't choose your ideology, it's assigned by the tooth fairy when you lose your first tooth.
Alternatively, it seems to have a significant genetic component, and most of the rest will depend on the environment you grow up in. Choice isn't part of it, you don't evaluate all the possibilities and then pick the best one, you think the one you're part of is the best one because it intuitively made sense to you. The rest is rationalization.
Most people I know have the opposite ideology from their parents, who had the opposite ideology of their own. Many people change their ideologies throughout life, as incentives and personal experience pushes them (e.g. having a bad experience with a certain political party can often sour you to their whole ideology).
It's true that I don't live in America, so maybe there is a difference, but you definitely are not describing a human truth.
Studies suggest that genes play a significant role, and obviously there's an environmental component (ie your upbringing, for which your parents are very important but many other factors play a role, too). Hence you generally take on the ideology around you, even if that may slowly shift between generations (but it seems that people also simply have a different mindset at 20 vs at 40, so when you ask them at 20, they're very different from their parents, but that often changes when they are in similar circumstances as their parents).
Of course, some people do change their ideology later in life (which I don't think is the right term, because they don't actively change it, it's more that they change and their ideology is part of them), but that's not common, and overall it's remarkably stable.
Sure, but people aren't primarily complaining that musk is rich. That's a convenient 'bonus gripe' but the main issues are his political leanings and his apparent disregard for the company's workers.
There's a real difference between a company on the public markets and a private one. American capitalism always had a democratic bent of everyone being part of the success story by owning stock and companies being aligned with the public broadly through market signals. There's a big difference between a company answering to a usually diverse and accessible set of shareholders and a Bladerunner-esque trillionaire who uses it for whatever he wants.
Thats precisely right - the software itself isn't really that impressive [*], the connections and people is what (can) make it great (or terrible, depending on who you follow).
[*] - as a product - there is some really great engineering due to the scale of course.
'Twitter’s priorities are no longer even remotely aligned with my own.'
Since when were they? The mistake was perhaps to ever think that they were. It was twitters 'priority to sell themselves to Musk, hence why they took him to court to ensure he bought them.
This is a somewhat crazy, knee-jerk reaction to some news headlines, the author has no idea of what is really happening, i'm not saying that i do, but for example the post says that 'the entire accessibility team' has been laid off then points to a tweet about someone saying there team had been laid off, firstly there is no indication that this is the 'entire accessibility team', just that the team this person was head off, secondly, the author has no idea about twitters accessibility plans in the future, for example, accessibility could have been given an even higher priority and given to a more competent team. Now i know this is likely not the case, but the real thing, is basically we don't know.
To make a knee-jerk reaction to a bunch of assumptions is crazy.
I've been using Twitter for 16 years. I've known many people who work or have worked for the company - heck, they tried to hire me when the company was less than 20 people.
I have a friend who worked ON that accessibility team who I have known since university.
Honestly there was no way to get good PR out of this. Musk is disliked by those who form "public opinion" and he's been threatening to make their home (twitter) no longer their home (by making it no longer reflect progressive values).
There is no universe where Musk takes over twitter and gets good PR.
Getting good PR and having disastrous PR are not the only two possible outcomes. This could have been managed far better. But Musk is impulsive and there are PR consequences to being impulsive.
You could also consider that Musk rushed into buying Twitter with a poorly written contract and he was legally forced to buy the company. He didn't end up there due to a well managed plan. He's there thanks to his impulsive and childish nature.
This is weird position to contrast with the widespread fawning coverage Musk received until the last few years ago, not to mention the claim that public opinion is set by progressives which ignores both the massive conservative media ecosystem and the generally centrist leanings of most other outlets. Conservatives like to dismiss the NYT, WaPo, NPR, etc. as progressive but that’s a ploy to avoid engaging with stories which make them uncomfortable and shouldn’t be confused with sober analysis.
The reason Musk has PR problems is simple: he creates them. No other CEO at his level has such an unfiltered stream of consciousness going public without a filter, and few have his taste for pointless stunts. The stuff which hurt his reputation wasn’t things like dating rock stars or having children with women other than his wife (this is largely priced in to the reputation of very rich men) but stuff like very publicly calling someone a pedophile out of pique from being outdone. He could stop that at any time and pretty much every employee and shareholder of his companies would be grateful.
But why are people so obsessed with PR in the first place? Who cares? People are obsessed with drama. My view is there is too much of that, cut that crap out, it's irrelevant to your life.
Either Twitter as a product, is useful to you, or it's not, so either use it or don't. Twitter as a product did not change in the past week, if you never read any news headlines, you would be completely none the wiser and still happily using it if you were using it before.
There is too much real stuff to worry about to get caught up in the drama of this.
>> particularly struck me was that he laid off the entire accessibility team. For me this feels like a microcosm of the whole situation. Twitter’s priorities are no longer even remotely aligned with my own.
Since you have ignored those sentences - you had to make "crazy" assumptions.
This has been my perspective. I’m a neutral observer in regards to Musk the person. Obviously some folks have a pretty strong feelings towards him for a lot of reasons, but watching the knee-jerk reactions to every rumor and all the assumption analysis that follows on HN is entertaining.
I am not neutral on Twitter though, I think it’s a bloody cancer. If it implodes or improves under Musk. I am good either way. I can’t see it getting any worse.
The act or practice of conspicuously displaying one's awareness of and attentiveness to political issues, matters of social and racial justice, etc., especially instead of taking effective action. [1]
And from the person who coined the term:
British journalist James Bartholomew claims to have originated the modern usage of the term "virtue signalling," in a 2015 Spectator article. His 2015 formulation described virtue signalling as empty boasting.
"No one actually has to do anything. Virtue comes from mere words or even from silently held beliefs. There was a time in the distant past when people thought you could only be virtuous by doing things...[that] involve effort and self-sacrifice." [2]
Fair criticism if you ignore the coiner of the term and focus only on the first definition I supplied.
I thought it was obvious that talking about moving to a platform is very different from actually making the move. The author has presumably moved, which is taking effective action and can be contrasted with people who are saying they are going to move but haven't done anything about it.
You should also note that the coiner of the term disagrees with you:
No one actually has to do anything. Virtue comes from mere words
I don't think it's fair to call it virtue signaling when someone took effective action. Does that clarify enough?
I find this hilarious. We all understand that the core reason some people might want to hurt twitter is because it is no longer going to follow the moderation policy that they liked (namely, silencing people with different political opinions). Yet, people can't name this reason honestly, and invent some other thin weiled excuses like 'layoffs are baaaad and unethical'.
Bold prediction: this influencer with 40k followers will find that ~40 of his followers have followed him to mastodon, and will be back quietly in a few months. Likely, after finding some reconciling excuse about Musk doing something good so he can be forgiven.
Or the simpler answer that doesn't fit your narrative is that lots of folks don't like Musk and his actions and his approach to running businesses. Lots of people find Musk repulsive. It shouldn't be a surprise that those people want to leave.
That doesn't tell the real story though. Actual alternatives to these services do exist now and have some popularity. So some people do actually move. MySpace is an example of an eventual mass exodus.
Anecdotal, but I personally know a handful of people who deleted their Facebook account and use other platforms instead. So it does happen. The question is whether or not it affects their advertising revenue in the long run. Zucks's solution so far seems to have been buying up the competition.
It's not out of the question that one of these massively popular social networks will collapse in the next decade.
Wanting to leave on principle, but unable to leave because of your own impulses and needs are two different things. Personally I bet most folks come back after the dust settles, and I bet Musk is banking on that.
Case in point: I still see the “coexist” and lefty bumper stickers in the cars ahead of me at chick-fil-a drive through line pretty regularly. Everybody wants to protest and boycott products until you have that itch that only a spicy chicken biscuit can scratch.
That’s why I deleted my account. Musk and the rest of the PayPal mafia are hardcore neofeudalist libertarians, a movement that has gradually infected more and more of the tech world.
It is a promise. Its value will be established sooner or later. It is too early to call any Twitter-related promise "empty". Even new governments traditionally have 100 days before it is considered fair to rip into them.
> Its value will be established sooner or later. It is too early to call any Twitter-related promise "empty".
By default I can't take any promise from Elon seriously, nor do I understand how anyone believes anything he says. He underestimates every problem and never has any plans until after he makes announcements. I can't believe how many "eventually" promises people will still believe from one guy who obviously makes them off the cuff with no thought whatsoever for what is involved. Half of HN seems to give way too much credit to hot air from this guy, he's announced (and taken money for!) many many things coming imminently years ago.
> Even new governments traditionally have 100 days
But companies do not. Buy a company and start making big mistakes and there will be consequences. The competition for users is fierce. If you want 100 days, get elected instead of being forced into buying a company you didn't really want in the first place.
There will be consequences both ways. It is well possible that new Twitter will attract other people if its politics changes.
Not everyone in America, much less outside it, wants to pretend that they share the values of Californian Democrats from the progressive tribe, which according to this study [0] makes up whopping 8 per cent of the American population.
Lots of things are possible. But what we are discussing is why GP deleted his account: Musk and the rest of the PayPal mafia are hardcore neofeudalist libertarians.
You can make all the promises and guesses about the future that you want, but until those guesses materialize, they are vaporware. People can rightly continue to leave a platform they have no interest or faith in.
If any of your guesses do materialize people can presumably change their mind and come back to Twitter.
> Not everyone in America, much less outside it, wants to pretend that they share the values of Californian Democrats from the progressive tribe
That's not very relevant to an advertising platform. TV and radio stations rarely appeal to more than one or two tribes and both platforms are highly moderated to the point where the public has almost zero voice. Musk's dream of forcing people to tolerate free speech is rather idealistic. According to your source, if Musk wants to attract the biggest audience, he should ban politics from the platform.
I don’t mean he’s a tech neofeudalist, I mean he is an ancap small government libertarian. Like he wants to do away with government (except for enforcing property rights) and have crypto currency instead of a real currency with no taxation and everything privatised/user pays.
For me it is much, much simpler. I invest a lot of my time in putting content and thoughts onto a platform.
If I doubt the future of a platform and already find the status quo questionable, I am just not as motivated to put in the time to do something on there.
I guess for many people twitter was a platform they wanted to get rid of for a while, this is just a trigger to convince the others as well.
This is how I feel as well: I’ve been pretty ambivalent about twitter for a while (seems like a good machine for getting into arguments online), but network effects have kept me on it. That network effect might be now be breaking.
I should have linked to that in my post, because it was very influential on my thinking. It helped me realize that my trust in Twitter had just been completely decimated.
Maybe I phrased that wrong: I don't use "a lot" of my time in absolute terms on social media (an hour a week maybe), but I value my time so if I spend it somewhere I want it to count.
And no worries, I am more productive than most people would find normal, but thanks for your "productive" comment.
Over the last week I've favourited every single person claiming to leave Twitter. In a few weeks I intend to do some analysis and see how many stop posting. So far the answer is none out of 200, but it's early days.
You're not even approaching what would be considered a scientific and somewhat useful study.
You can move away from a platform without a complete stop. I've seen people who used to post on Facebook on a daily basis claim to leave, and then they use the platform less and less until you rarely see them. What also matters is the nature of their posts. If people who used to put effort into thoughtful engaging posts start to post trivial and unengaging content, that has a similar effect to no longer using the platform.
If this happens in large numbers, it would of course impact your advertising revenue.
You could be right, assuming he manages to indeed keep the platform running smoothly. I think that will be the most important factor. And while I honestly can’t be bothered to care whether people are banned or not from Twitter, it just sounds to me like the idea that less moderation is always good could be an oversimplification of the problem. If I am not mistaken there were attempts to create “free speech” platforms that never went anywhere. Also, from the point of view of the survival of the platform itself, banning a few people to please many more others seems to be more reasonable than taking some kind of ideological stand (in one way or another). So, the question is, can the platform survive (smoothly) supported mainly by the happy attitude of so-called freedom fighters?
As someone who has maintained a personal mastodon instance since ~2017, I'm quite sceptical of your hopes that this sudden influx of users will remain active.
Yeah, I like living in a democracy, so I appreciated when twitter silenced certain people that tried to use it to violently overthrow my democratically elected government. Donald Trump tweeted all the time, many of his tweets were of a very different political opinion than mine (when they were coherent), yet he was not silenced. Not until he tried to violently overthrow the US government.
This is a brilliant example of a selective memory. What you have forgotten is that long before Jan6, Twitter blocked retweets of Trump's tweets, attached various warnings to his tweets, was selectively 'fact-checking' him, how that notebook story was banned on Twitter right before the elections. If that is not silencing, then what is? Can you name some other person on Twitter that had undergone a similar treatment?
The real question is, would they have done better by not acting on his antics? I think every moderation decision is a trade-off, and the final goal is always the health of the platform itself, not “society” or whatever. Yeah, some people will be hurt, but not acting would hurt too. So… I don’t know. It seems too “romantic” to me to believe that there is a handful of left-wing bigots in the company and all you need to do is get rid of them. I have a hunch the problem is more complex (and that Twitter cannot solve it, only try to survive).
> The real question is, would they have done better by not acting on his antics?
Yes, they would have done better. Their business should be providing the platform, not telling the users that is 'true' and what is not. That everyone should decide for themselves.
One thing is fighting spam, but what they were doing was Ministry of Truth stuff. And harm from that might be thousandfold greater than whatever Trump could ever do.
That's not how capitalism works. Their business should be doing whatever they think will generate the most long term profit for the owners. It's an advertising platform. Advertisers don't want a platform where users get to decide what the truth is. Advertisers don't want their advertisement next to some anti-vaxxer nutjob or a vocal racist. This is common sense.
That's not how capitalism works. Their business should be providing value to their users, which, in turn, would make their platform attractive for advertisers. Trump provided a lot of engagement and popularity to the platform, so banning him was igealogy-driven and was very much against their business interests.
Now, advertisers come from different parts of the political spectrum, and if some advertiser would decide to vacate their spot on the platform, some other business would fill the spot.
You know, earlier this year a lot of western companies have quit the russian market, like Macdonalds. Do you think there are no burgers in Russia now?
Are you seriously claiming that a person with 90 million followers with hundreds of thousands of retweets and countless replies didn't produce a lot of advertising revenue for Twitter? If so, I resign from arguing with you.
> Are you seriously claiming that a person with 90 million followers with hundreds of thousands of retweets and countless replies didn't produce a lot of advertising revenue for Twitter?
I didn't claim anything. I asked for your sources. You are the one who made a claim. And now you're acting astounded that someone would dare question your claim.
Truth Social can't seem to become profitable [1]. So Trump's ability to produce (or drive away) advertising revenue is certainly open to being questioned.
> For exact figures you might ask Elon himself.
Elon didn't make the claim. You did.
> If so, I resign
If you can't back up your claims with a source, then yes, it's right of you to resign.
I resign from communicating with you because you are not arguing in good faith.
Demanding to provide data that is clearly not publicly available is pure demagoguery, as this figure is irrelevant for our discussion: it does not matter if ad revenue from user engagement created by Trump was XXXXX USD or YYYYYY USD, as it is beyond clear that this figure was above zero. So blocking him was against the commercial interests of the platform.
Likewise, the success (or lack of it) of other platforms, like Truth social, is hardly relevant here. It is another demagogue technique called 'straw man', as you try to bait your opponent into arguing about a completely different social platform.
Now, you may claim victory in this internet discussion, and celebrate it like your other imaginary victories.
> Demanding to provide data that is clearly not publicly available
You claimed to know such data. It's clear you haven't been debating in good faith from the point you made that claim.
> as it is beyond clear that this figure was above zero.
No it's not. I provided evidence that he may in fact drive away advertisers.
> So blocking him was against the commercial interests of the platform.
That's not how it works. Blocking someone who provides a small amount of advertising revenue but who drives away other users would be in the best interest of the platform. Blocking someone who the moderators believe will incite violence is in the best commercial interests of the platform.
> the success (or lack of it) of other platforms, like Truth social, is hardly relevant here
It's entirely relevant because Trump invested in that platform and spends most of his time there. If they can't make a profit it puts your claim about his ability to attract advertisers in doubt.
> Now, you may claim victory in this internet discussion, and celebrate it like your other imaginary victories.
I never claimed victory. I simply asked you to back up your claims and you got yourself into a panic over that and threatened to quit. Ok. Bye.
> Trump provided a lot of engagement and popularity to the platform, so banning him was igealogy-driven and was very much against their business interests.
You either have those engagement numbers or you don't. Which is it?
You either know how much advertising revenue he generated -or- how much he drove away. Or you don't.
You either have evidence that banning him was against their business interests or you are just guessing. I don't think you have those numbers. You suggested Elon Musk might have those numbers. So it's pretty clear you yourself don't have the internal business numbers that would be used to make those decisions.
Lacking sources to back up your claims, then you were arguing in bad faith.
But I'm open minded. Feel free to back up that claim with actual evidence.
I provided a quote of the claim you made up based on guesses you made and that you have no evidence for. There is nothing wrong with guessing, just admit it next time when someone asks for your source of data.
Cute copying me with "panic mode". I appreciate the imitation.
Didn't you resign a few comments ago? Or was that another false claim?
I expect that the feature I’ll miss most from Twitter will be the algorithmic timeline!
I must be old. I remember a time when people wanted a chronological timeline (on by default). Twitter still offers a chronological timeline, but now that people are migrating to Mastodon, I've come across the wish to have an algorithmic timeline again quite often :). I just find this interesting (I can relate, I find the algorithmic timeline "easier" to consume, I don't have to invest time to find the perfect user to follow, I don't have to fiddle with lists etc..., just open Twitter and consume).
(btw.: I'm not using Twitter (also not using Arch scnr))
I constantly switch Twitter back to chronological and immediately notice when it pushes me onto the algo timeline.
Another recent change they made (I think just before Elon took over) was making Notifications algorithmic. As a somewhat low-notification user, it's essentially ruined notifications for me - most of the ones I get are nonsense now instead of signals someone has interacted with me.
I think the only site I use where algos actually add value is YouTube, after many years of sending people down weird/wrong paths their algos actually seem pretty solid now in terms of suggesting content relevant to me.
After Youtube stopped displaying the number of downvotes for a video, algos is the only thing left that you can rely upon to understand if the video is good. But I'd prefer being able to rely on downvotes number.
You just discovered that happy people aren’t complaining on social media. 99% of people can be perfectly happy with something that’s constantly dumped upon.
You see this with chain restaurant reviews. A great one can have endless bad reviews on Google, Yelp, etc because by and large only people who had trouble bother to review.
But sometimes the reviews are accurate. Sometimes the critics and audience concur on a movie. Sometimes the people yelling on Twitter really are in the fire they're yelling about.
I must've set it up wrong. My Twitter home page is filled with posts that I don't care from people I don't watch, Twitter repeatedly recycles and then pushes those content to me because it thinks I'll be interested. How arrogant.
In my case, Twitter already has an algorithmic timeline.
Now I read my daily news update from few subscribed newsletters, websites as well as r/worldnews. These are far better sources of information than Twitter.
Don't get me wrong, other platforms that I enjoy such as YouTube and Reddit also has algorithmic timeline, but I've never seen such bad implementation before straight to the level of annoying and begging for uninstall.
I never disliked the algorithmic timeline, I just disliked the fact Twitter did everything it could to get you use it, including switching back to it after a while without telling you. The second I notice a platform not only being manipulative, but thinking I'm stupid and wouldn't notice, I start to resent it.
When you say "figures", do you mean that's what the evidence shows? If so, presumably twitter's automatic switching from chrono to algo is a significant factor.
I think OP meant “it figures,” as in “that’s not surprising.” But regarding figures as in statistics and usage, I have only anecdata but it seems Twitter recently is respecting the user selection for a longer period.
Algorithmic makes no sense to me. Imagine being in a group chat with friends where an algorithm decides which messages you can see and the way the messages are sorted. It would be absolute nonsense.
I think that it is case of preference or just different use case. If you follow few people that tweet sparsly, you want chronological. If you follow many people who tweet a lot, you want algoritmus.
That just sounds like algorithmic with extra steps. An algorithm can take information about your follows tweeting patterns and adjust the amount of chronological timeline you see.
The availability of the chronological timeline is what's kept me on Twitter; hate the algorithmic. If they ever do away with the chronological, I'm gone.
It doesn't seem sensible to invest yourself so much into Mastodon without having thorougly explored it.
I too was fascinated with the fediverse, until I used it for more than a month and realized the people posting there were just as toxic and annoying as Twitters, not to mention the plenty of instances where the petty owners have made everything even worse
For Mastodon to 'work' in a way I'd enjoy, it would need a culture that it just does not have, and that has never emerged from any microblogging platform. The Fediverse as a whole is filled with enraged culture warriors, going out of their own way to be upset and exclude others.
I don't buy into the "Well, you can just grow YOUR OWN island!" spiel. I don't want to make an echo chamber, I want a healthy environment where people from disparate backgrounds can discuss a topic without "AS AN XYZ THIS IS BAD AND EVIL" being the key point of discussion. And I know for a fact that the large instances that operate in that way would immediately defederate for wrongthink.
> I want a healthy environment where people from disparate backgrounds can discuss a topic without "AS AN XYZ THIS IS BAD AND EVIL" being the key point of discussion.
I'm pretty sure that this qualifies as an "island" - one that you would need pretty harsh moderation to maintain too, not unlike HN itself. And of course you'd likely want to defederate from the largest instances, to get away from their toxic attitudes.
Just wait until people start realizing the privacy problems that Mastodon have unless you make your own instance.
You don't like the new twitter moderation? oh wellcome to Mastodon where a 12 year old can be a moderator of a instance. Global guidelines for moderation? No in Mastodon since each instance can have their own rules, 10/10 if you love being in echo chambers.
Created your account in a random instance? oh well maybe all your messages end in doxbin because the 14 year old who made the instance have access to all your messages.
I just can't get myself to see this as a genuine disadvantage.
On Mastodon you can choose the server to use (and thus the moderation). Sure, this means you can choose a server run by a 12-year-old who moderates poorly. But if you don't want that... don't pick that server!
The problem (no, ONE of the many problems) with creating good moderation is that different people have different definitions of what constitutes "good" moderation so it's impossible to satisfy all of them. If Mastodon allows the user to choose, that seems inherently better.
So let's say a lot of people think in that way and avoid instances managed by nameless accounts. Where does that leave us?
Well, maybe people will flock to the few instances ran by transparent, accountable and competent people. Maybe some apolitical non-profit? Maybe a group of passionate engineers with spare change?
In any case those instances would become pretty massive and the costs would skyrocket and......
well, we're at square one: few instances will have total control over your data, they will either inject ads or require payment to keep the servers running and nothing will have changed
.....or they would find an equilibrium that doesn't require massive centralization. Your analogy gets from point A to point be with a lot of empty speculation and hand waving.
My only assumption is that most people will choose an instance based on its reputation and that reputable instances will be far fewer than amateurish and unreliable ones. This is a very generous assumption and if we suppose people will choose even more randomly then the situation can only get bleaker.
On the other hand you hand waved everything I said without specifically refuting any points, so what does that make your reply?
You're making assumptions about collective behavior leading to a runaway process. Your second sentence isn't coherent "hand waved everything [you] said", but I'm guessing you mean to suggest I'm handwaving away what you said. I am not doing that. I am saying I see no reason to assume one possibility over an equally plausible alternative, especially just reasoning from speculation.
AFAIK fosstodon.org, social.librem.one and mastodon.technology (and likely more) have more or less similar reputation, so your argument is purely theoretical, not supported by the reality. They all have a reasonable number of interesting posts (i.e., users) if you look at some common tags.
It can totally not be a disadvantage for you, I'm not debating that, I even encourage others to explore Mastodon, there is probable a market for a product like Mastodon for a small subset of individuals. But that doesn't mean it isn't a disadvantage for most people.
In the context of this thread, the blog starts by justifying the authors choice by citing the laid off of the accessibility team, the alternative for the author is Mastodon which brings the complexity of selecting which instances you trust, even when you find a good instance, at some point the owners can shutdown it and you will need to migrate to another instance. If a rogue employee sent your messages to another person, they can be prosecuted, have fun trying to do that to the owner of the instance, yes, you can have your own instance which have a monetary/time cost. Using a commercial product? Oh I really hope you instance never angry the mob or they may go to your commercial provider to demand they drop you. Obviously this doesn't make the accessibility any worse /sarcasm.
Popular Mastodon instance?
* Moderation takes time, who is going to do that for free, everyday?
* Who is paying the infrastructure cost?
Mastodon
* Daily active users is 655k spread in multiples instances 1º
* Private owned instances, self moderate.
* User base of the extremes of the gaussian distribution, the extreme privacy oriented and the politically motivated.
* User base is a subset that will split into another few subsets, high tendency to form echo chambers.
* Difficult to scale, closed system with rapidly increasing entropy (no accountability, highly susceptible to the instance owner desires (affected by time))
* Hard to attract people with a big following social media since the user base is small and the opportunity to grow is very small but the leak of followers to other users with small following base is high. (High cost/Low return)
I love that Mastodon exist, that it brings to the market different types of social media experiences, at the end, the market (people) will choose what is the more efficient version.
I personally doesn't use Twitter or Mastodon, I use rss with a CA instance of nitter in a RSS reader to check what a few people in the data science space tweet and my personal opinion is that the author is motivated by his political beliefs instead of the accessibility or quality of the product Twitter.
I mean, what instance did you register on? Because I've been using it for a couple years and uhh, the toxicity is nearly non-existent for me. I see some stupid crap once in a while in a response to some highly-followed user, but then I just mute the person's entire instance (if I find that similarly-toxic crap is a common sort of output from there).
Simultaneously, I've had more meaningful communication on Mastodon in the past week than I've had on twitter in the past year. I have just over 200 followers and Mastodon, and nearly 1400 on Twitter.
So yeah, I've thoroughly explored it, and I am definitely investing myself into it -- and have no intention of going back.
I have already stopped checking Twitter for weeks at a time or longer. I only open it to see if I have a message from a friend (since I turn off email notifications for basically everything), or maybe tweet at some brand whose service has made my day crappier.
Since I made the above post (two days ago) I now have 243 followers. All people who I'm in contact with on other platforms - I'm not even sure how they found me, but either way. The momentum is honestly accelerating. Sorry, 244 followers - just got another follow request.
Twitter is usually the only reliable, direct way to ask a question of a faceless corporation because they happen to prioritize actually answering tweets. I don't know why, but it's become the only way I ask questions of some service that has millions of users, because I don't feel like signing up an account on a service portal or filing a ticket with a convoluted customer support system. Or even worse, "chatting" with a bot that will just funnel me to poorly-written FAQs that don't even remotely help me with the problem I'm encountering.
It's possible that it's just the broadcasting format that makes things suck, rather than Twitter's specific content/moderation policies. It's like handing a ton of people in a room all megaphones to talk to each other; the incentive is always going to be that you should be 'louder' to get more attention over everyone else.
people with megaphones are the point, the problem is when there are mechanisms of moderation to manipulate them and make them into groups, if there is no such mecanisms and moderation is up to the user completely(unfollow/block) things function very differently
Moderation that is solely user-based doesn't work well at scale. It means you expect every user to block every asshole they come across, and each time they have to endure some asshole first before blocking them.
for me that would be completely reasonable, but it isn't necessary, you can have many decentralized filters like automatically block people that are blocked by a % of people I follow and many similar mechanisms
We know many things about Musk because he's a well known public figure which has attracted the attention of plenty of investigative journalists.
But what do you know about the owners of the Mastodon instance you registered your account with? Are they accountable? Are they sensible? Are they competent? Do they even have a real identity?
You say this like he's quietly minding his own business and some pesky journalists are revealing what a dickhead he is. That is not the case, he is outspokenly a dickhead. He wants to broadcast what a dickhead he is _so_ badly, that he bought the worlds foremost social network to control the medium.
What Musk says publicly is basically useless. All the truly important information about him has been the result of deep investigations through papers and documents and third party accounts.
So yeah, Musk gets investigated very often so we know things that he would rather keep hidden. Now what about your Mastodon admin with an anime profile picture?
A Mastodon instance owner can read everything you've ever posted, log everything even if you deleted it, doxx your IP and your private messages, delete or modify everything about your account on a whim and block you even if you make an account elsewhere. Plus they can keep very quiet about it since they have zero accountability.
So yeah, you can go to another instance, but better keep some kind of backup because you could be gone without notice
That's exactly right, to a point that decentralize app like Mastodon would be valid alternatives when everyone run its own instance (and is able to secure it), of course that's in theory already possible, but in practice it's difficult.
>until I used it for more than a month and realized the people posting there were just as toxic and annoying as Twitters,
Not even close to my experience as a Mastodon user and I've been on it for years. I guess this shows the limited predictive value of any single individuals experiences.
As someone who cares for a blind father, I can't stomach the decision to eliminate the accessibility team. I am myself moving to Mastodon. I was amazed in doing this that the UI/UX of Mastodon is much better than Twitter. I feel better.
This. Even before Musk arrived there was a lot of debate about Twitter being overstaffed and departments are not producing any value at all. I don't know more or the details, but this is what sometimes I was reading years back.
That's the baffling thing to me. For the better part of a decade people have talked about Twitter being an overstaffed pack of idiots whose day to day largely consists of presiding over the fall of Western civilization. Now that they've been purchased by a jackass, however, they're suddenly a bunch of saints who've only been doing their best to hold back the tides of barbarism. I get the feeling that someone less of an asshole and more ideologically-aligned to the commentators could do the exact same housecleaning Musk is doing and they'd be cheering him on.
By your reasoning hating on Kevin Spacey is also in vogue. It's probably not in vogue. It's more likely that his own words and actions are resulting in lots of people not liking him. Imagine that. A world where your own words and actions have consequences.
Based on talking to those who dislike him they're mostly pretty hating him for things he hasnt done, views he doesnt hold and traits he doesnt have (no, he isnt a success because he had an uber wealthy father who owned an emerald mine, it was a tiny share in a mine and his father contributed little to Musks business ventures).
Musk is a driven, childish, stubborn, fairly intelligent, 90s era libertarian who really likes first principles reasoning and this leads to both success (SpaceX) and failure (Boring company).
> they're mostly pretty hating him for things he hasnt done, views he doesnt hold and traits he doesnt have
So they have actual reasons to hate him. Superficial reasons, but you didn't once mention anything having to do with it being in vogue. Evidence of it being in vogue would be people who don't know why they hate Elon, but they do know their friends hate Elon.
> no, he isnt a success because he had an uber wealthy father who owned an emerald mine, it was a tiny share in a mine and his father contributed little to Musks business ventures
This is debatable by reasonable people.
> Musk is a driven, childish, stubborn
These sound like real reasons he could be disliked rather than it being your claim that it's simply in vogue or "traits he doesnt have" in your words.
> who really likes first principles reasoning
That's part of his PR and the image he tries to convey. He fails at it quite often because of his childishness and impulsive knee jerk reactions that he falls victim to on a regular basis. He is far more driven by emotion than by reason. I mean it's highly probable he owns Twitter now by being legally held to a poorly written contract he had no real intention of following through on. It ironically seems like neither he nor many of his customers want to be at this party he ended up at.
Musk is eminently hatable. He's also a competent businessman. The odds of him turning Twitter into Stormfront are very low, yet many are acting like it's already happened. What is the point of calling for a boycott of a company that hasn't yet done the thing you don't like?
Not at all, but that's not what they say they care about. "Fuck Elon Musk, boycott twitter" is an entirely valid position. "Elon Musk has turned twitter into 8chan" is an absurd falsehood.
No one is moving from Twitter to Mastodon because the latter is more accessible to people with disabilities. It's not, definitely not the main Mastodon UI (vs. 3rd party UIs).
I think the article mentioned the dismissal of Twitter's whole accessibility team as a sign that Musk has no respect or understanding of what the fired people did or why it was important. Ditto for other dismissed teams, like those researching machine learning ethics.
> An application can and should have good accessibility by default without a dedicated team
I used to think that, I used to think that understanding accessibility was a part of doing a good job on front-end so people who care about doing a good job will address it. Now I think formal and informal education about is so bad about not including accessibility concerns as a part of creating interfaces that there's too much for people to unlearn. Everyone has some responsibility for the accessibility of the final product but few will give it enough time or consideration.
Additionally, if an application is big enough to have a team working on it, that means there are some specialists in a variety of areas. With sufficient team size, that should include accessibility specialists who know what the right thing to do is or conduct research to make a decision about what the right thing to do is.
Not really: the implication there is that people who need additional accessibility work are not users. The UX of a system is the sum totality of the experience of all users of the system, regardless of their needs.
If UX is the sum totality of the experience of all users of the system, it can be significantly better for most users but worse for a small number. I’ve never used the app so I have no idea, I’m just saying UX is more than accessibility, so you can have a great UX for most people while being useless for others.
The purge is of the specific individuals of that team not the concept of accessibility itself. Same goes with all these changes, it is a reboot.
If anything, you may end up with a higher quality of accessibility (and moderation, spam filtering, whatever) down the line. Or not. Who knows. The current iteration of the company has ossified - not making changes is arguably against the long term interests of your blind father.
I wouldn't go that far. I agree that there's a lot of that visible right now, but Elon demanded round-the-clock hours from employees as his first "executive order", as well as locking down offices. He just doesn't seem that good of a boss, and more like a traditional capitalist in a sense. Is it ideological to want decent working hours?
That's a gross mismanagement of sweeping changes. Which is in itself an indication. Anyone could have predicted people leaving the platform if they were told ahead of time how the layoffs and extra hours would be so poorly communicated.
In terms of web accessibility, it had improved the alt text / meta descriptions, etc of external websites through the "cards" when you share a page on twitter, over the years, encouraging web developers to put them in their own websites. (same with faceboook etc)
Twitter just followed what everyone else was doing, and not even correctly, they had to have their own way.
FB was among the first social sites crawling the links and creating a thumbnail with crucial info. When OG tags were introduced (by them nonetheless!), FB started honoring them. Twitter some year later finally decided to do the card thing and thought that skipping OG and having their own syntax under meta would be best way.
What would a team of "accessibility engineers" occupy themselves with every day anyway? Did they build features that will fail unless someone is there to handhold?
"Day 2: still accessible? check. Day 3: still accessible? check."....
Accessibility is important, but once you build a wheelchair ramp into a building, the ramp builders have nothing more to do. Likewise, Twitter remains fairly static, with only minor changes over the years.
> As someone who cares for a blind father, I can't stomach the decision...
So you could stomach the decision if you didn't have a blind father? That's not how shared values of accessibility should work - the care factor depending on who you know.
It most likely needs a smaller team than they used to have, but some dedicated employees are necessary.
Accessibility should be part of every design team. Any new features being developed need accessibility input. This includes all the different mobile apps and integrations with native accessible platforms and accessibility tools. It also needs full internationalisation and language support too, which increases complexity. It needs a few more people than just ticking boxes or building workarounds or ramps after a feature has been developed.
Additionally, Twitter also takes in external links from webpages and so can influence the meta markup of these via their API / open graph / social sharing. So it works on the wider web accessibility standards too.
I imagine bootstrap and all the other libraries twitter publishes are also part of the teams remit.
> "Accessibility should be part of every design team"
Yes but that doesn't mean dedicated people. Accessibility knowledge is already well understood by designers and developers, particularly at the big end of town.
The previous team would have presumably written plenty of documents and guidelines and generally fostered a culture of thinking about accessibility. No reason why that will disappear.
Patterns and best practice methodologies are common in tech, precisely for efficiency reasons. They belong in standards, and shared knowledge - which is better for the industry as a whole. If every small team needed dedicated accessibility staff, the system is BROKEN.
> Accessibility is important, but once you build a wheelchair ramp into a building, the ramp builders have nothing more to do
Okay, now see how well that wheelchair user can use the elevators and bathrooms. Do you have braille signs everywhere someone goes? Does your building have ambient features which are difficult for people with sensory processing issues? Are there controls which are hard for people with limited motor skills or only one hand? Did the market change and now people are using motorized wheelchairs which are larger than you designed the ramp for?
Accessibility is like performance or cost optimization: there isn’t a point where you’re done and everything you do affects it. An accessibility team should be working with the developers closely to make sure that their changes don’t impact accessibility and working with users to identify where they could be doing better. Some of that requires fairly deep skills (e.g. screen reader proficiency) where it makes sense to have dedicated specialists to help everyone else understand challenges and evaluate trade offs.
The building analogy is no longer suitable if you're suggesting the ramp suddenly fails to accommodate new wheelchair designs. The wheelchair design should be your new focus of scrutiny. If the new wheelchair fails to conform to EXISTING ramps found everywhere, the wheelchair is the problem, not the ramp.
Ramps are built according to a strict building code. Your suggestion the ramp might need modifying in only the Twitter building by a dedicated team, doesn't add up when considering all ramps in all buildings.
> there isn’t a point where you’re done
My point is accessibility is inherently part of the design process anyway. Designers are not just making things pretty, clueless to accessibility. After all, Twitter is primarily text. You can always recruit outsiders from time to time, who will stress test and audit. That's a good way to keep on top of accessibility, by getting actual users who need accessibility features, to evaluate your service. But full time in-house? No.
> After all, Twitter is primarily text. You can always recruit outsiders from time to time, who will stress test and audit. That's a good way to keep on top of accessibility, by getting actual users who need accessibility features, to evaluate your service. But full time in-house?
This is like saying you don’t need ML specialists because it’s just math, or that we don’t need those expensive security people because Accenture told the CIO they could us experts any time we need them.
Accessibility is far more than just “can a screen reader produce text for this element” — starting from the fact that there are many accessibility concerns to which the issue of media forms is irrelevant but going much deeper into how you organize that information. Even if we ignore the prevalence of non-text content, Twitter isn’t a single chunk of prose but the much harder problem of a lot of complex elements which update frequently. You can’t treat this as some quarterly exercise where a consultant runs a scanner - there’s a lot of behavior which must be designed in and tested continuously.
When you talk about meeting outside users, yes, that’s good. Guess which team organizes that? Guess which team makes sure you get representative users? Guess who helps make sure developers and designers get the training and time they need?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think twitter still doesn't work at all without JavaScript functioning. That's not an easy fix after the event and sorting that alone could probably keep an accessibility team busy for the foreseeable future.
I'd imagine there's some amount of work, I doubt it was a huge team but they probably needed a few people to focus on the various platforms and regions their apps support
it seems easier to have a team focused on a features like that keeping things consistant and whatever dosen't seem that crazy.. fatter than what a startup would but twitter is a multinational worth tens of billions
Looks like this blew up on Hacker News right after I went to sleep.
I would encourage people to read the first paragraph more carefully:
> There are many terrible stories emerging about how this went down, but one that particularly struck me was that he laid off the entire accessibility team. For me this feels like a microcosm of the whole situation.
That's not me saying "I quit because he fired the accessibility team".
That's me saying "There are many terrible stories emerging about how this went down" as a shorthand for how this has been one of the worst-handled layoffs I've ever heard of in my industry - see https://twitter.com/gergelyorosz/status/1588517143490199552
And then "For me this feels like a microcosm of the whole situation." - I'm using the accessibility team here as a single representative instance of how I feel about the decisions Elon has been making, but I disagree with practically every other decision he has made in the last 8 days.
I'm sorry (OK, not sorry) I didn't write a detailed essay about the many reasons I was leaving Twitter.
The goal for my post was to talk about the things I was liking about Mastodon so far.
I'd also encourage people to read about the "trust thermocline", which really helped me understand why, at least for me, things were going downhill far too quickly to continue wanting to ride it out and see what happens: https://mastodon.social/@garius/109279394369832433
I think it'd be great for more decentralized platforms to supplant centralized ones, but they usually seem to struggle to acquire more mainstream users. Even if Twitter collapses under Musk's leadership, my hunch is that a (new?) centralized competitor is more likely to take most of their market share, rather than Mastodon.
I know, I know, there's some obvious exceptions like email, or just the web in general, but it seems like usually decentralized platforms are at a disadvantage in terms of marketing to new users, explaining how they work, and the whole onboarding experience. The very fact that they can work in different ways to different people seems like a minus in terms of getting into the public consciousness.
Email isn’t really an exception - it’s largely another federated system failure with most users on one centralized system (gmail).
You can’t even run an email server yourself without getting blacklisted these days. I doubt Twitter is going anywhere, I’m not even sure it can be replaced, it’s an unusual niche product of its time and network.
Mastodon doesn’t solve the underlying problems that lead to centralization either so most users end up on one server. Back to the same issues, except the experience is also worse than a competent centralized system.
To solve this for real you have to solve spam (need IDs), there can’t be a distinction between a user account and a server, and the server needs to be trivial to run and manage with automatic updates.
The reason why this happened is instructive. Fighting spam is really hard and the best way to do it is to be good at machine learning and to have access to a good percentage of worldwide mail, unencrypted.
Since there's no reason to think that Mastodon is immune to the spam issue, this strongly suggests that whatever replaces Twitter will quickly consolidate to a single dominant player, or perhaps a handful. Or it could collapse under the spam issue like Usenet did.
If Musk wants twitter to be the town square for the world, that town square needs to be accessible for all.
Even though this might not directly affect Simon, hats off to him for making that decision. If twitter starts becoming as inaccessible as most other systems it will lock out people and remove their voices from twitter. That feels like an incredibly valid reason, and isn't the point of free markets to vote with your feet?
Have you ever actually looked at their website? You need to use a 3rd-party service like nitter to make twitter accessible.
It really feels like people have never used twitter and are reading the news and go "aha! they've canned the accessibility team! they're trying to exclude the blind!"
Maybe that was once true but it hasn't been. Here's a deafblind user of Twitter (the iPhone app) who had immediate trouble using the main Mastodon app [0].
Twitter only formed an accessibility team in 2020. Accessibility improvements had been made over the years before then but since the team was formed, improvements have been arriving much more steadily. Since Musk didn't only fire this team but half the staff overall, Twitter has not only lost expertise but people with the time to devote to these areas.
You don’t need a whole accessibility team for a product to be accessible. It can be handled by raising the awareness of other product teams plus some central auditing, for example (Twitter after all is a pretty basic product, UX wise).
Maybe the employees on the accessibility team were all useless and hated by the whole org? Maybe starting fresh with real accessibility experts is a better way forward?
There was no accessibility team before 2020, Twitter hired real accessibility experts to be on the team, and they have been responsible for a number of accessibility improvements.
You make it sound like the role of an accessibility team is to be the valve that prevents the floodgates of inaccessibility opening. That's one hell of an expensive valve.
Or that whatever the team has built up until this point, won't function unless they're in the office?
> "incredibly valid"
At this point, many opinions about Twitter are ranging from invalid to pathetic whinging. Twitter is still Twitter, and not everybody there got fired. I think it will get better after dust settles.
I find it comedic whenever someone talks about how they're a truly longtime user of Twitter but they can't stomach staying on now that the owner doesn't share their values. Elon's values are extraordinarily similar to Jack's! If you were going to leave when someone's values diverged hard, you'd have left when Parag joined, because his did, and that's the entire reason Elon bought it! In reality it is some combination of personal association and public persona. And these are not the worst reasons to refuse to use a service, most of us have been guilty of the same at one point or another, but at least admit that that's why.
Uh, I don't know about Mastodon, can't judge about it, but I'm following your website's own RSS feed. Website + RSS feed does the job for me. And as long as you keep publishing a feed, I'm able to read your content just fine.
The web is already 'social media'!
Edit: oh, by the way, my homegrown newsreader only shows the first x amount of characters, so I always have to click through to your website if I want to read more.
I respect their line of though, only because it is their own opinion. I know projects such as Orca and give real praise to all of them.
But to me, leaving Twitter because Musk fired the accessibility team does not seem like the best argument for leaving. If anything, it just sped up what was already happening (internally) even before Musk bought Twitter.
Accessibility becomes ‘real’ (though not perfect) thanks to a wide range of technologies that work together and respect certain patterns, not just due to the UI interface. This, assuming Twitter represents a big chunk of the real world, which I doubt, though it reaches a great proportion of it.
However, what is it to say that Twitrer’s accessibility will get worse, or that Musk will not hire even more capable people later? This is why I think the person left Twitter not only because Musk fired the accessibility team, but also because Twitter itself does not represent anymore the philosophy they believe in.
The same kind of posts happened when zuck changed the private policy of whatsaap a few months ago, everyone was migrating to Signal. Who uses signal now?
It's the typical anti-<whatever> hate waves that happen in HN. Outside of this bubble, people don't really lose sleep over it.
Signal is a very good example because WhatsApp is getting more popular as the days go by as opposed to what one could possibly infer from the waves of posts that appeared not long ago here about it.
It's just so important to separate this otherwise insignificant group of minds vs the many other several millions that aren't here and don't share the views - or perhaps (some) do but then it comes down to the network effect once again which has always been a present issue in every alternative among other factors. This time won't be different I'm afraid.
I just counted all of my signal chats that have had activity since the beginning of September and there’s 34 of them. On WhatsApp that number is 29 and on iMessages(not SMS) it’s 21.
The best way I’ve found to actually get people to keep using signal after you’ve got them to download it is to respond to their WhatsApp messages on signal. It won’t take long until they stop initiating conversations on WhatsApp.
Or do what I had done - delete whatsapp and text them saying it’s either text messages or download Signal from here [link]. Everyone I gave a shit about had done that.
I use WhatsApp. Everyone in Latin America uses it. I don't believe that Zuckerberg is reading my chats, and not concerned enough about E2E encryption to bother evangelizing another app to everyone I know.
Is there a proof that there is no backdoor in WhatsApp? Client code is not released. By default it does unencrypted backup to cloud. You don't know if encryption keys are leaving device.
I don’t know if there’s proof, but I have a friend that works on the team that I trust. I’ve also seen the tools for analyzing the metadata for police warrants and they only deal with metadata (because content is encrypted).
For signal - phone numbers as IDs allow them to retain no other info on their servers. They don’t have your phone book (though if someone gets your device and forced you to unlock it that’s different, but then they’d have your contacts anyway). There’s a reasonable tradeoff here imo to retain as little as possible server side. Signal is also working on a non phone ID option iirc.
Same problem. I have multiple groups on WhatsApp that I don’t want to leave, but don’t believe they’ll migrate. Three family groups, close friends, school parents, son’s football club.
A lot of these people were the last to migrate to WhatsApp from email and SMS, and will now be the last to migrate away from it. And they’re a huge majority compared to the early adopter crowd we see on HN.
Have you tried a WhatsApp-bridge with element/matrix? You could use matrix internally while being available to clients via WA. I would strongly discourage any company to use meta-clients internally.
I'm having a bit of a... culture shock? Not sure how to call it. We're a small company from an eastern european country, building one product and trying to make it into the big world. We don't have the luxury of caring about if a messenger app is meta or not. Is it doing its job? yes. Is it encrypted? Sortof, but truth be told we'd use it anyways.
If we have extra time we spend it on checking backups, or improving performance, or researching new cool stuff we can add to our product. Which messenger app to use?! Yeah, definitely culture shock. Severe, too.
This was the event that pushed me to go XMPP only for messaging. Pulled in my family and some friends. Internet standards without vendor lock-in is now a requirement for me.
The sad thing is that I jumped to Matrix (with Element) and waited for the influx; 2 people moved. The rest either stayed on WhatsApp or moved to Telegram (to be fair, almost all my contacts, including my mother, actually did move to Telegram from WhatsApp). No signal, no matrix.
Matrix is nice in theory but Element is not very nice and the messing around with keys is not something most people will understand. This needs to be automatic by default, not a complete pain as it is now.
We have an example of a perfect chat client UI; Telegram. Why is no one just copying it verbatim for matrix? This is a question to, mostly, Element developers really. I don’t know why it is quite as unfriendly as it is, but of course we can all jump in and help out, that’s why I keep using it and sponsoring it. Even though I can only talk to 2 people.
> This is a question to, mostly, Element developers really
o/
We’re currently rebuilding Element on mobile (and native desktop apps) so it behaves much more like Telegram or similar, built on matrix-rust-sdk. The codename is currently Element X, but it will shortlyish replace Element proper.
Quite possibly the most responsive native social media application for all platforms.
It's got free storage (basically free Google Drive), behaves like Messenger, has public channels and groups like Discord and YouTube, mind-blowing cloud sync, can connect to people without sharing a phone number and tons of features that I can't really list here but you can check them out here: https://t.me/TelegramTips
Couldn't have said it better. If they would have e2e for all chats & groups I would live in this thing. It's much better than Slack etc for me, but I trust them even less than Slack.
Matrix has, like Slack, sub conversations which I like, so they have, on the server, everything that Telegram has and more, is open source and I can host myself, but the clients :( Yes, I can write one myself or help with Element. I guess this is something to really think about as the commercial offerings are simply not very good outside Telegram but I don't really trust them with my data.
Yeah, I'd really like an option for permanent E2EE on all platforms but I trust Telegram with my data.
As long as they're not selling it to advertisers and their apps remain FOSS, I'm fine with sharing my data.
I also really like Telegram's privacy policy (https://privacyspy.org), which is why I'm okay with cloud side encryption instead of E2E.
Every E2EE app that I've tried in the past, has been a UX nightmare and cloud sync is something that's extremely essential to my workflow so Telegram has been a pretty amazing free service.
This seems a bit different, given that Musk's leadership has a high potential to very radically change Twitter; he did just lay off half the company, for example.
People keep talking about laying off half the company like it's a bad thing.
Don't get me wrong, there are lots of negative factors to laying off staff and I'm not denying those.
But anyone who has worked in a large org, especially a public one, knows that there is excessive bloat. Many people at large orgs do nothing. They go to great lengths to ensure it looks like they're doing something, which I guess is something itself.
PS - I'm neither for nor against the layoffs at Twitter.
I think even if he was correct that Twitter has a lot bloat that needs to be cut, I really struggle to believe you could accurately judge who or what needs to be cut when slashing your 7000 employee business in half within 5-6 days of walking in the door. The chance of making big mistakes and cutting critical staff and teams is very high.
I think that even worst is that it does not look fair or transparent at all. Which means, remaining employees are going to be demotivated and resentful. It is going to be chaos organizational, competences will be unclear etc. Which will make organization as a whole more dysfunctional then it needs to be.
Exactly. It smells very strongly of the same kind of overgeneralized superficial thinking that leads people to believe that less moderation is always good. You can’t possibly expect that everyone in your company will be 150% invested work-any-time business evangelists. Maybe the 50% who are left now have to work double? Are they so incredibly enthusiastic about the job to take the hit silently?
Technically I use it (although I haven't had a legitimate message on there since ... 2016?) but I'll tell you what I don't use any more - WhatsApp. It's either iMessage, Telegram, or for a (dwindling) handful of annoying people, FB Messenger.
All my family and about half of my friends are still using it. In, almost everyone who I know who joined during that time stayed, but most still use WhatsApp and Telegram as well.
Maybe they were fired because the Twitter UI is so horrible? Given that the site doesn't work without JavaScript, I doubt accessibility was ever that high on Twitters list of priorities. If the team has not managed to show any real work or progress, I can see some one like Musk just dropping the entire team.
But yes, it would be great to hear from people who depend on accessibility feature: How good is Twitter really.
> I can’t see myself putting the same work in to help the world’s (current) richest man pay the billion dollar annual interest on the loans he took out to buy the place on a weird narcissistic whim.
If Twitter and Mastodon were taken permanently offline tomorrow, would this be of any significant loss to the world?
When I see people like the author getting so publicly and verbosely upset about a social media website, I wonder about their perspective. There are surely much more important things going on than preening to the crowds.
There are more important things happening on twitter than preening to the crowds. It's easy to dismiss if you don't find utility in it yourself, of course, but many people clearly find it very useful. Twitter is a very simple tool - it's what you make of it. That can be preening or organising revolutions or anything in between.
Twitter is a great place to read work by scientists, researchers and other academics. There aren’t many places to tap into that world if you’re not already working in academia.
I find Mastodon doomed by design, understanding design as a whole, not just software. It looks like the technical right choice, including all the bells and whistles: decentralized, own your instance, etc.
However twitter's issue, and most of social network issues are the human factor. And by that design Mastodon is not inmune to any of it, it even encourages larger echo chambers, and reduces audiences.
I would say, very tech savvy people used their hammer to something they believed to be a nail.
Musk is simply roleplaying as a competent businessman, with a side mission of appeasing his bizarre army of deluded sycophants who worship him for being a kooky crazy genius (he isn't). This is exactly the kind of image he thought he had when he swanned in and fired everyone: he thought it made him look like a cutthroat, intelligent businessman; it's simply a coincidence that Twitter does happen to be a bloated, mismanaged mess.
If you're not setting up your own instance, make sure to help fund the instance you are using. Maybe it's on the about page or DM/Mention the server admin! They can tell you where to donate
Please don’t get me wrong; I also don’t care (never used Twitter) and this is an honest question. Why does it bother you that people are consternated? I mean, Twitter is one of the leading communication platforms internationally, and LOTS of people use it intensively both for business and personal stuff. I guess it’s understandable that it affects them deeply. It is at minimal weird that half the staff has been fired in less than a week. If you ask me it sounds much more like a hit job than an honest attempt to improve it.
Unfortunately I have to say that I’m too removed from this to care (I guess decisions like this happen invisibly in every company all the time). However, the true intentions about this acquisition do make me curious. Does he really think that patting the backs of a handful of conservative extremists will make Twitter better? (An already global leader in its segment?) can anyone give me a concrete analysis of the scenario? As far as I know there were a couple of attempts to create such “free” networks and it never really goes anywhere. I really appreciate his work as an engineer but I have a feeling he overreached here.
Is it really getting all that many users. If so: What kind of users?
From Musks perspective Twitter isn't about the HN crowd or personal interaction between lower and middle- class people. It's all about the real influencers, entertainers, politicians, journalists, C-suite class, investors, millionairs and billionairs. Sure if you follow these people, boosting their follower count and their ego, you're welcome on the platform, but you're only there to read the messages from the upper echelons of society. If your yearly income isn't measured in the millions of dollars you're not really part of Elon Musks vision for Twitter.
Academics, scientists, and engineers. Almost every non-institutional account I used to follow in Twitter is now actively using Mastodon. The only "category" of people I haven't seen migrating yet is independent journalists, and I can understand why.
'It looks like' - so the big headline already contains a 'maybe'?
recent tweet of his: 'To clarify: I'll likely continue to post new stuff (blog posts, project releases etc) here, and I'll watch out for DMs and mentions, but I'm not going to be refreshing my timeline or actively seeking out conversations to engage in any more' - link for the curious: https://twitter.com/simonw/status/1588778119422701568
reminds me of all the "Quitting Facebook" memes.
I'm gladly going to be wrong, but Mastodon will never be mainstream _anywhere near_ to what Twitter was/still is for all the reasons that have been pointed out on every HN thread about it for days now... How about waiting to see what happens instead of an ideological knee-jerk 'pat myself on the back' half-quitting but not really reaction? Sigh... and the love it gets here, I can't understand it...
It's going to come off as harsh but I can't read this and not think of a petulant child not getting what it wants.
Maybe it's just because I don't have Twitter, Facebook or any of that crap so I guess I can't understand it because I don't have a stake in any of it... guess that kind of reaction is typical for someone living the messy life of hour by hour social media craze.
Surely no one felt more desperation for Mastodon to operate as an adequate substitute for Twitter than GOP leadership in the aftermath of Trump's Twitter ban and the 2020 election. If those people, the most motivated people in all of time to make Mastodon work, can't make Mastodon work, then I struggle to see how the Musk-haters plan to switch over successfully.
I'd apply the same argument to every other platform - if someone could have done it better than Twitter, then you'd better believe that the GOP would have already been all-in on that platform long before you got there.
Anecdotal - I had a account in one of the largest english mastodon instances for a few years now and have seen multiple waves of twitter exodus into mastodon. Server becomes extra lively for a few weeks and then it returns to normal. None of these people last.
It is fascinating that people feel justified ignoring the user experience on Twitter when talking about whether to use Twitter.
I don't know what it "really means" when all the motivations, incentives and goals are unpacked, but there are surely some fascinating lessons here to be learned. Previously I've only seen social networks come under pressure when the user experience changed markedly so this seems new.
I've never been good at mob behavior or just doing what I'm told.
I'm staying on Twitter until I see if it's significantly better or worse. IMHO, the current "I'm leaving" fad seems to be somewhat political, and I don't think political boycotts are constructive.
I dont really understand how Mastodon works. I tried to search for this guys profile (our of curiosity, I dont know who this is) and it doesnt come up in search results even if I search by his handle directly. Why is that? Do I need to be on the same server as him or something?
It looks like the Mastodon instance host Simon is using, masto.host, closed for new sign-ups 8 hours ago. Is there another recommended alternative? I don't think I have the energy to maintain a self-hosted Mastodon instance. I sure haven't missed running a mail server...
Judging by the top responses to the accessibility guy’s tweet, things look pretty grim right now. I never used Twitter so I don’t know if it’s always like that, but those people are really angry and negative. That is kinda depressing.
Top responses to his tweet are a very extreme sampling of twitter users. It'd be like going to a D&D convention in New York and judging Americans by what people say there.
Is it possible to create a program that would create timelines/filters for me individually and locally, based on my clicks maybe, not sending anything to the net? Like a personal AI.
Mastodon may not have the better interface, or the better community, or it may not yet be the most intuitive to use.
But I want to invest my time to help Mastodon reach the critical mass it needs. I would love to have a social network not controlled by capitalistic needs, and let open source developers help evolve it.
Regarding Mastodon, I really like the idea behind it but always hit a wall when thinking about starting an instance.
The alternatives appear to be
* paying around $9/month for a managed instance
* hosting it yourself (with all the costs and responsibilities that come with yet another self-hosted service)
* signing up at a public instance (and potentially lose everything connected to it once an operator loses interest)
None of them sound particularly inviting. I don’t see either me or anyone I know paying at the rate stated for this kind of social media access. I don’t see me hosting an instance for an extended time and offering it to friends, much less the public. Should I lose interest or lack the resources to look after it, all of it disappears in an instant. Same when you stop paying for a hosted service.
From an outsider point of view – and likely I’m missing something major here – Mastodon appears to be a typical solution for technically-inclined people and adjacent subgroups, libertarians and communities that would be immediately blocked everywhere else (and possibly are on several Mastodon instances).
For a technological solution to work, it needs to solve the issues people have in a useful way. Since I cannot seem to grasp what issue Mastodon solves in a useful way, I’d be grateful for any enlightenment that’s not centered around the tech.
I keep saying that ActivityPub should be a static protocol to begin with, then people can host their profile on some Github Page easily. Effectively zero cost.
Mastodon doesn't require you to host an instance. You can sign up for an account on any instance of your choosing.
Every service offers a choice between "run your own" or "trust someone else". I don't trust Twitter but the people I follow are on there so I guess I'll keep my old account. I trust the Mastodon folks more because they're running on donations, which makes their profit model quite transparent.
The difference between the two is that Mastodon doesn't go down when one hosted instance collapses due to politics or spam or any other problem these servers face. Major servers can go down and there will still be plenty of content available through the distributed set of smaller servers.
Mastodon is also not as much of a combined network as it may look. It's more of a set of small social networks that all interact with each other, just like you used to be able to use XMPP to talk between chat services like Facebook and GTalk. Everyone sort of does their own thing on their own server but they have the option to also follow content from other servers.
Some people just like hosting instances. It gives some control back to the users that want it. It's good to have the option, but most people aren't expected to go that route.
There are definitely toxic servers just like on Twitter that are part of an optional blacklist that's being distributed online. Whether you want to apply that blacklist on your server is your choice; most people do, but server owners can make their own decisions. It's certainly no different from other social media in that toxic people ruin the experience for everyone, but with these things it's nice that the worst of the worst are siloed off in their own little space that you can choose to interact with if you really wish.
I'm a little surprised that Trump's instance has federation disabled, I guess they don't want to admit that they grabbed an old version or Mastodon and applied a theme to it after saying they're making a new service from scratch. Or maybe they don't want "leftist" outside influences in their little hateful echo chamber, because exposing your network to the outside does imply that you have to deal with people with differing opinions.
Personally, I don't do much with Mastodon because I use Twitter as a read-only platform. None of the people I follow mirror their posts into Mastodon and I don't care enough to set up an active Twitter proxy for an instance of my own to bridge the gap. The social networking problem is real.
Thanks for the details, of which most I already figured. However, your response does not address the issue of solving content disappearing once the instance goes away. It doesn’t matter if the network itself is alive when the content itself can disappear at any time without warning.
If I am correct in this assessment, I can really see no upside besides minutiae regarding an illusion of control to established social media. In this regard, a website with a comment section would serve much the same purpose.
If twitter.com goes down, all of twitter is gone. There is no secondary Twitter server or alternative service that you can use to do your day to day tweeting without completely depending on Twitter's centralised API.
If mastodon.social goes down, c.im accounts will still be live and I'll be able to follow them through a mastodon.nl account if I want to. It'll be sad to see the toots from mastodon.social disappear, but most of the Fediverse network will remain online. By segmenting users across different servers, the ecosystem can remain alive despite the collapse of a big server.
I feel like there is a massive branding issue with Masto. Derives its name from an extinct animal (often misspelled or confused with the band), toots sound funny. Twitter got this right from the get-go.
Mastodon is too difficult to understand for the average user. I got on some page where I needed to select a room of some sort, most of it was in german and I couldn't find Trump or anybody I wanted to listen to. Is anybody actually believing that there will be some mass migration?
There's been numerous mass migrations to Mastodon since 2016, from different individual communities. The furry community, lgbtq+ individuals who wanted to leave twitter, comic book artists who overlapped with the two prior groups, political news junkies from India, and every year there's a couple more.
I don't think that all of Twitter is going to migrate but just some slice of the user base, just like all the previous times.
We're more polarized now compared to when mastodon, and twitter, were first introduced. I'm convinced making a twitter clone is going to be impossible as most people are seeking to sort themselves into ideological buckets at the outset.
Yup, federation can only work if the parts actually connect to one another. Isn’t Trump’s TruthSocial build on some federated protocol too? But if you connected your node to it, everybody else would shun you.
If I recall correctly, it was initially built on a relicensed version of Mastodon, with federation disabled. No idea what's going on with it now, or if it was even legal to do so with Mastodon's AGPL license.
I don't think it's even relicensed, they pretty much just stole the code as far as I'm aware. From what I've read (I can't even reach the service as a foreigner) it's not even built on a recent version of Mastodon.
the single largest Mastodon instance is Japanese if I'm not mistaken, and overall it is significantly less US centric than Twitter. Among the top 15 I count about five Japanese ones, an Italian, French and German one and two dedicated to sex and tech workers. Substantially less US centric than mainstream media, including Twitter which bombards you with US politics even if you are like in my case, German.
The move to decentralised tech is not to escape corporate censorship. It's to avoid the right's obnoxiousness that's set to spike now on Twitter under Musk's "free speech" vision.
The left has always been about decentralisation, opposed to corporate censorship, concerned with election integrity and open source. And they're not going to drop their environmental concerns just because of new Fed appointees.
I'm sure there are people in the political center (or maybe politically undecided or flexible is more accurate?) who do change their opinions based on how the political winds blow, but most of these issues have been left-wing issues for a long time.
I’m also in the process of moving from Twitter to Mastodon, albeit I have very few followers on either. As such, I found it both interesting and useful. I imagine he does want engagement and wants to get it from Mastodon instead of Twitter.
It's just another salvo in the culture war - from this point of view, a management change in a major SM platform is pretty significant, especially when that platform was openly biased in one direction. So you have the usual noise, which has absolutely nothing to do with Twitter as a product or company.
It's just some dude's blog. You chose to read it. Entering into someone's personal newsletter and expecting them to NOT write about themselves is a weird thing. Maybe the egocentrism is not on _that_ side of the equation hm.
I’ve made a living working with Django for the better part of the decade, and certainly know who Simon is, but still wouldn’t kid myself about this meaning anything.
It is funny cause your comment makes you sound like the insufferable one. I bet more than anything if people shift to a new network that you'd be the one to eventually change and pretend like you always saw it coming.
> They exist and thrive only through validation from social media.
Exactly. They will announce that they are 'leaving' but don't have the guts to delete their Twitter accounts and their followers as they will continue to lurk and post links from Twitter on wherever they moved to.
The author quit Twitter primarily because the entire accessibility team was sacked. Understandable... if you know nothing about Elon Musk.
I am not a fanboy in the least. But one thing he obviously does frequently is fix broken shit, then try again if that fails. He does these things in public and listens to feedback. He clearly keeps a sense of humor about things, which rattles a lot of people understandably.
I know nothing about the accessibility team there, but for all we know he has a better team lined up. The author and I both agree the reverse may also be true. Could be they get replaced by something worse. To assume Elon has simply discarded the issue of accessibility altogether is to me the least likely assumption.
From an engineering standpoint traffic is really easy to fix. Just build more roads with as much “flow” as possible (tunnels). But it doesn’t work because traffic is a human problem, not a technical problem.
I think you might in fact be a fanboy. Which is fine, fanboy all you like if it makes you happy!
Maybe he does have people lined up to replace all the people he just fired. Maybe he really was able to ascertain who was essential and who was dead weight within days of taking over. Maybe against all appearances his actions are actually helping retain the best people at Twitter. Maybe having a public strop and suggesting he might publicly “shame” advertisers will have them falling over themselves to come back and spend their ad dollars with him. Maybe he really cares about “free speech” for speech that is not his own or that he disagrees with.
My impression is that he has a unique way of building “Brand Elon” which seems to work because of the times we’re in.
He enters like a bull in a china shop, destroying everything regardless of quality or value. He then hands over day-to-day running to a team of competent people to build it back up as something new, but leveraging the original brand. Elon Musk then gets the credit because of legendary stories of all his hard work.
His social media presence causes competent people to underestimate him as a joke, not realising he’s playing by different rules to most businesses. On the other hand, it causes his personal army of fanboys to overestimate him as some kind of business genius. Really, he’s just a social media celebrity in an age when people give huge financial value to that status.
I personally wouldn’t underestimate his courage and hard work as an engineering leader; he did reach places that were very hard to reach with this approach. The problem is that social media is not (solely) an engineering problem.
> To assume Elon has simply discarded the issue of accessibility altogether is to me the least likely assumption.
Yep indeed, it could be that Musk doesn't really know who does what at Twitter, nor which teams are effective or not. Maybe noone does. In that case the best path forward could well be to blow up everything, leaving only a skeleton crew to keep the lights on, then rebuild on top of the scorched earth.
In fact this approach might even attract some more hungry and gung ho warrior types who are attracted by musk's style, and could be better suited to bringing about his vision than the existing team.
That sounds very good as an approach for building a product, but for managing a communication platform, I’m not sure. The problem is that there is a kind of overgeneralized understanding (built out of prejudice, imho) that moderators are a bunch of left-wing power-thirsty bigots. However, moderating is a hard problem, one that has not (and never will have) any well-defined final solution. There will always be variance and noise in moderation, and people will always complain; it’s a trade-off.
So Twitter was “really good” (while it was helping the many rich shareholders of a random public company) but it’s suddenly “work” a couple of days after the owner changed?
Nothing wrong for not using it because of ideological reasons, but the product’s accessibility (or anything else really) hasn’t changed yet.