And some 80% of that are retweets or replies, not original tweets.
Most people do not use Twitter at all. When they do use it, it is mostly read-only. When it's not read-only, it's most retweeting stuff.
You can't deny that Twitter has an outsized cultural influence, but the underlying reality is sobering. It's not a "speech" platform for the masses as no actual speech happens by the masses themselves. If the retweet button were to be removed, the platform would collapse.
It's not surprising that the masses don't post. You can't express yourself on Twitter due to the character limit, so all you can do is witty superficial takes. Threading and replies are a disaster making a structured discussion impossible. These two things alone make the platform useless for most speech purposes.
And let's not forget the sour atmosphere of extreme hostility, permanent outrage, bad faith discussions, smearing, doxxing, cancellations, the culture is terrible.
Back on point, I think Twitter has a far bigger problem than a free speech problem. There is very little speech and it excessively rewards the most unreasonable speech.
Those same stats are true for EVERY social media platform. Twitter is not the exception here. What percentage of Reddit users do you think comment on a post? What percentage of hacker news readers submit new posts or write comments? Instagram content consumers vs producers?
Most people are followers and that’s ok. You can get off your soap box now.
There's at least two key differences between something like Reddit or HN and Twitter. The Twitter platform is structured so that a large mass of people will "follow" a few influencers. It creates a really asymmetric power dynamic. On Reddit and HN, if you have interesting content, you can make the front page. On Twitter, your odds are much bigger if you're famous, and every comment a famous person makes is hugely amplified.
The second difference is that Reddit and HN are organized by topic. HN only has a single topic, but there's moderators to enforce that posts be somewhat on topic and retain a certain minimum of civility. Twitter is not organized like that. Even if you're just interested in programming, Twitter will try to get you to engage in political topics, and if you do engage, you might get responses from random people Twitter also pulled from other discussions who have very little context, and you'll get to exchange with this random set of people through responses that are limited in length. If a famous person happens to strongly disagree with you on Twitter, their hordes of fans will start to attack you.
So yes, all social media platforms have more active and influential users[0] , but no, these platforms are not all the same, and a lot of the difference is structural.
This is a big reason I can't stand the culture of twitter. When I interact with someone on Reddit, the two of us are on equal footing. There are many other strange Reddit specific cultural details to keep in mind when commenting, but the two of us are just two mostly equal users.
I once disagreed with someone on twitter that I didn't realize had a huge following and was easily upset. They retweeted my response and called on their tens of thousands of followers to back them up in our disagreement. I deleted twitter that day.
> This is a big reason I can't stand the culture of twitter. When I interact with someone on Reddit, the two of us are on equal footing. There are many other strange Reddit specific cultural details to keep in mind when commenting, but the two of us are just two mostly equal users.
This is far from true. If you interact with a user who is a mod and you piss them off they have every ability to ban you from subreddits they manage. It’s common enough on Reddit for a user to be mods of multiple subreddits or have friends who mod multiple subreddits.
Mods can also create scripts to specifically ban people who participates in specific subreddits.
Reddit’s block feature can make it so that when a user blocks you , you won’t be able to comment on the same sub thread. I don’t believe I don’t have to spell out the nefarious abuses this can wreak.
Reddit is one the last places I would say users are equal. The only difference is that Reddit opinions aren’t centralized like Twitter but it gives far more power to the worst person than Twitter gives to worst person on their platform.
That's right. Twitter has problems, but that's not one of them. What are the problems?
1. It has a free speech problem. The defacto public town square doesn't believe in free speech!
2. It has a political problem. Twitter bends the knee to the loudest activists and is sympathetic to a specific political party. The town square has been captured by a political party. It doesn't matter which one because being captured by any party is a problem. The town square must be neutral. Free and open debate is paramount for society to progress.
3. It has an anger problem. Twitter rewards anger and fear.
4. It has a transparency problem. How does the algo work? Who are they shadowbanning and downranking and why? What topics do they remove on trending? Which do they boost?
I’d add a minor item to the list: it is progressively raising garden walls. I do not have a twitter account, I will not give my mobile number to twitter to get one. Right now I can still follow the few accounts I find interesting with nitter and browser favorites. The twitter website itself has become unusable.
Before labeling "problems" I wish people would define what is the ideal social platform? What are the qualifications and rules everyone must follow for a "speech" to be free of unequal censorship?
> What are the qualifications and rules everyone must follow for a "speech" to be free of unequal censorship?
I'd say the first and only rule is that there aren't any rules that everyone must follow. There will be subpockets with different subcultures, with each one building and enforcing their own set of rules, but no single centralized style of enforcement.
No commercial network with a company backing it could ever offer a space like that, because they are liable to monitor and moderate the worst content that goes through their property, thus creating a single centralized culture based on the company's values.
> I'd say the first and only rule is that there aren't any rules that everyone must follow. There will be subpockets with different subcultures, with each one building and enforcing their own set of rules, but no single centralized style of enforcement.
That sounds like a free market. A government provides a minimal container and you’re free to create your own sub-pocket with your own rules inside of that structure. If you don’t like the rules of sub-pocket A (ex. Twitter), you can go create sub-pocket B (Truth Social). And they have no centralized style of rule enforcement because they are their own unique private enterprises.
Maybe the problem isn’t Twitter. Maybe the problem is expecting Twitter to act like an unbiased government when they’re not. They’re a for-profit sub-pocket with their own subculture. Just like Reddit, YT, FB, TikTok, etc. They’re all competing for eyeballs and ad dollars while independently enforcing their own rules.
A free society, yes. A free market no, because you are not setting prices for making transactions for exchanging limited products; the information distributed through the network can be indefinitely replicated and multiplied.
The different 'subpockets' will be competing for expansion as organisms in an evolutionary environment, but describing it was a market would be using the wrong model. The trend of simplifying every free organizations as markets is harmful to rational analysis, and I'd say it comes from over-reliance on a set of values that see it as the only valid tool for solving every problem - i.e. an irrational prejudice. We should do better in our analysis of the evolving world, since society is going through never-seen changes and applying old recipes will limit our understanding.
So basically like old reddit then.. Sadly we see how that turned out in the end. But yeah, I do agree that would be the best.. But even better would be to kill off SM entirely and return to dedicated sites/forums.
> The defacto public town square doesn't believe in free speech!
Twitter is not “the defacto (sic) town square”. The claim that it is is most typically deployed as an argument that it should be regulated. The rest of this comment continues apace. These are standard talking points in the (right wing) drumbeat to try and curtail free speech by regulating Twitter (and other social media companies).
Somehow you got it twisted that the right is the one controlling or attempting to control free speech. Clearly you’ve not been on HN long as it was nearly exactly on party lines, with the left wanting to stifle the speech of some, and the right wanting it completely open.
>>These are standard talking points in the (right wing) drumbeat to try and curtail free speech by regulating Twitter (and other social media companies).
Government mandating tech companies to censor information is supported by a far higher percentage of Democrat voters:
Well hey, in this case it seems that Elon musk has purchased 9% of Twitter and is likely going to use that influence to make Twitter's moderation promote open discourse more.
I hope you don't complain about this ever in the future and just accept that Elon is allowed to pressure Twitter to change it's moderation policy to support the principles of open discourse more.
Man, you should see how the same type of people are reacting on twitter right now and around the net.. The cries of "private exception" have suddenly become "NO NOT THAT WAY!" overnight. lol
1. Twitter has a terms of service, and advertisers don't want their adverts next to hate speech.
2. there are SO MANY right wing people on twitter, tweeting away merrily. They adhere to the Terms of Service.
3. Once again, I mostly see that coming from accounts with a certain political bent
4. Fair
The way most of these platforms work your ad is actually never “next to” anything anymore. Most people don’t associate online ads the same way as say a TV show. It is expected that you would get unrelated ads to your content when the content you consume is diverse, unlike TV ads which are very specifically on one topic. Then depending on if you view on mobile, ads again aren’t even part of the broader message. They take up the whole screen and aren’t associated with content again. Sponsorship, meaning your ad specifically supports the product, and online ads are different.
>Twitter has a terms of service, and advertisers don't want their adverts next to hate speech
Why? Does an ad get contaminated by association?
Or it's a minority who gets to call what's "hate speech" and what's not, and pushes advertisers to not want to risk this (who wouldn't give a fuck otherwise)?
People buying ads certainly think so. Or more specifically they think their brand or product denoted in the ad will be associated with the context in which it appears.
Shadowbanning is very real on many platforms. It is a method designed to ban a user without pushback from the user and minimize the ability of them to work around the ban. Explicitly lying to users like this, even the bad ones, should be something that is banned the by government. If you paid money for a service and they tricked you into not receiving the service without telling you this wouldn’t be allowed, but for some reason it’s okay to trample on the expectations of users when giving out free service.
No, it's that there is a healthy balance on the site, and the people who get banned have typically posted some REALLY unsavoury stuff - and plenty of left wing people have also been banned for posting unsavoury stuff.
I follow links onto twitter sometimes, though I dont use it. how does it have a "free speech problem?" what does this even mean in practical terms. I think that talking point is completely made up.
One cannot make a comment on the site that’s counter-narrative without having the mob of social activists bombarding you, and ultimately canceling you.
It actually doesn’t clearly say any at all. Like literally.
Random Joes that have no voice will not be banned. Make a name for yourself and start gaining followers and you most certainly will unless it’s too damaging to twitters reputation. Their sporadic treatment of these types of people are what allow you to hide behind this reasoning, they keep you guessing on their procedures.
Hm, #1 and #2 here just seems like a copy/paste of a conservative talking point.
You're literally in the middle of a discussion about how Twitter isn't the "de facto" public town square, because nearly nobody actually authors original tweets.
In any event, fuck the public town square. That's where slaves were sold, that's where gay men were stoned, that's where people were hanged for all manner of terrible reason that had nothing whatsoever to do with justice.
Twitter, as awful as it is, is many orders of magnitude better than the town square. May we never return to those times again.
Free speech is a core liberal value. I can't believe how many people are confused about this.
[Free speech and the open town square is how we got away from the atrocities you outline. There is no societal progress without free speech, which twitter is actively clamping down on. It's regressive and taking us back to when dominant ideas couldn't be challenged.]
Agreed, but what's actually unbelievable is that people seem to not realize that it goes both ways, and I'm just as free to shame and ridicule someone for their speech as they are to express their shitty little racist ideas.
[No, we got away from the practices I mentioned above through discussion that did not take place in a "public" town square.
Basically anywhere else, but certainly not the "public" town square. One reason, among many, is that a "town square" is not nearly as ubiquitous as you seem to believe, historically. Dominant ideas can easily and are frequently challenged on Twitter and in modern discourse generally, it's just not tolerant of the racist, awful ideas that some might want to discuss.
It's not going to lead to progress to continue to discuss how one race is superior to another, for example, and yet that's all some groups seem to want to talk about.]
Sure. No one is arguing you shouldn't be able to ridicule someone online (I guess it depends on who you're ridiculing right?). But I don't think you should get banned from the platform for doing so. That's the problem people have with Twitter. Especially since its very inconsistently applied and very out of touch with what the overwhelming majority of the country believes.
There's also a cultural aspect that can't really be solved by Twitter, like petitioning someone to be fired for making a gay joke ten years ago.
Don't the owners of twitter get some say? If you can't keep your argument with some nazi p.o.s. dialed down to an 8, why should they have to host either of you? I mean they own the platform, you and the nazi can take it to DMs on some other platform.
I guess that the "appeal" was ruled reasonable and zuby made it back? Of course Washington Examiner will never follow up on the matter as they're well known, like Fox, to print front page knee jerks and way-back-page retractions.
Or just disproving your statement. Depending on your mental capacity.
Or was your statement made such that only the right wing makes such headlines?
Or are you russian and just trying to sow division?
Which is it?
Also you still didn’t change what I said, just avoided it by trying to claim “whataboutism”. Fight it all you want, it’s not going to change the truth.
Your implication that only Fox spits out clickbait. You seem to be dead set on hiding behind whataboutism and ignoring the facts. You want to smear Fox’s name, but fight veraciously to defend CNN. That’s all anybody needs to know, and is clearly on display in your comments here.
>That's where slaves were sold, that's where gay men were stoned, that's where people were hanged for all manner of terrible reason that had nothing whatsoever to do with justice.
That's also how you get slaves fred, labour laws passed, and so on. Most revolutions started on public squares (and public cafes, and such). And further progress was created by open dialogue, in books and other discourse spaces. Which people thinking like the above wanted to stiffle.
And, no, the "public square" wasn't what brought slavery for example.
It was more the discussion in the "polite"/"good" upper echelons of society, for their own benefit. The same people who run and profited from that racket. And the same, good, rich and aspiration class people who wrote diatribes against gays, or intented scientific racism, eugenics, and other such novelties.
In other words, by the same kind of classes who today dictate what the unwashed masses should talk about and what not, now.
I would love to hear what you think would happen to you if you had openly discussed the equality of man irrespective of race in the "public" town square in a southern plantation town in the 1850s.
I would further love to hear what you think would happen if you did that while committing the "crime" of being black.
Getting made fun of on Twitter seems like a substantially less severe consequence than what would happen if you proposed radical ideas in the "public town square" throughout history.
>I would love to hear what you think would happen to you if you had openly discussed the equality of man irrespective of race in the "public" town square in a southern plantation town in the 1850s.
I would love to hear how you think the idea of giving up slavery was discussed and eventually won over in the North itself (who kept slavery well after the revolution).
I would also love to know why you think the public square means addressing everybody (like giving a lecture or declaring some platform), as opposed different people being able to discuss things with others in a public space.
>I would further love to hear what you think would happen if you did that while committing the "crime" of being black.
The same thing that would happen if you commited what is considered a crime against today's order on a modern public space.
>Getting made fun of on Twitter seems like a substantially less severe consequence than what would happen if you proposed radical ideas in the "public town square" throughout history.
That's only because 99.999% of it is of less consequence - compared to people discussing the abolition of slavery or setting up a revolution back then.
Try something that the current establishment considers threatening and equivalent to the above, and see how far you stay (a) on Twitter (b) in a job, (c) out of jail.
So you accept that the "public" town square was highly discriminatory, suppressed non-conformist thought, was consistently violent, and oppressive to people of minority racial groups?
...and you want more of that? Gotta start to question your motives here, friend. Not seeing any real upside to this, and I'm starting to wonder if the goal is maybe to take the voice away from the people who are, for the first time, finally getting a say in how the world is governed, because you don't like what's being said.
>So you accept that the "public" town square was highly discriminatory, suppressed non-conformist thought, was consistently violent, and oppressive to people of minority racial groups?
No, but nice strawman.
I only accept (rather, I know, don't have to "accept" or not "accept" as hand given) that the public square was at the main representative of the general sentiment, but also the space to discuss and break from it.
It hasn't been always and/or globaly "consistently violent, and oppressive to people of minority racial groups". Often it was more progressive than the elites towards those groups, who had more of a chance to discuss their ills and suggestions in the public square than in the "englightened" spaces of the rich, the government/powerful, and the upper-middle class, which peddled more in the conformist ideas of the time, were the ones who actually profitted from slavery - and of course the ones that owned plantations...
>Not seeing any real upside to this, and I'm starting to wonder if the goal is maybe to take the voice away from the people who are, for the first time, finally getting a say in how the world is governed, because you don't like what's being said.
You got it backwards. You don't like things being said. I don't like things not allowed to be said.
The "public" town square as you've described it has literally never existed. You're asking to return to a time that simply never happened. You talk about strawmen, but you've invented from whole cloth a concept from history that simply did not exist. In classic conservative fashion, you want to "go back" to some idealized era of history that didn't in any way look the way your rose colored glasses seem to tell you it did, and you completely throw out the outright racist, sexist attitudes that pervaded literally everything happening in prior centuries.
Just logistically, how did these "public" town squares function? Were they periodic meetings? Did people just walk to the center of town and start shouting? Who spent their time in these town squares, when they could be working/providing for their family? Since they didn't actually exist in history, there's nowhere I can look this up, and I'm curious about what you think happened historically.
Setting aside this made-up "town square" concept for a moment, you really seem to want to allow some speech, but to not allow other speech, and that is really the problem here.
If you want to allow all speech, then you necessarily must allow for speech that (successfully) calls for the "cancelling" of people who speak, as well.
In other words, either you support Twitter's ability to express itself through the banning some users for their speech (which it does exceedingly sparingly to begin with, people are not banned for ideas, but for specific expressions of those ideas), or you only selectively support free speech. You don't get to have it both ways.
Very well put. (all of it) It's astounding how many people can't look past the little things they don't like in order to see the ridiculous level of danger that comes from an anti-speech POV.. ESPECIALLY for minorities and other so-called marginalized groups. I mean we are at the point of critical thought where "all i need to do is stop people with the wrong opinions from talking" is seen as a sane, healthy and safe POV! What if YOU aren't the one making the decision though?
The position that Twitter can’t ban people is the anti-speech position.
Only one side of the argument wants people to say anything they want, once you realize association is a form of speech. The side that supports Twitter’s expression of speech is closer to “everyone gets a say” than the side forcing Twitter to publish content it doesn’t want to.
You still get to speak, just not on Twitter. You don’t get to trample on Twitter’s rights. That’s anti-speech.
> I would love to hear how you think the idea of giving up slavery was discussed and eventually won over in the North itself (who kept slavery well after the revolution).
Certainly not in public squares. If I think about it , Black freedom and black rights came from not from discussion but action. Forcing Everyone , everywhere to look at the issue it was by hitting the hearts and minds of Americans brought the newspaper and television that allowed Civil Rights movement to propagate that it did.
It was Media , not the public square that won our rights. Not white men who suddenly found a guilty conscience and talked about it. Hell the discussion had to forced.
I'll stay on my soap box for a little longer. The statistics are important for their implications.
We're talking about these platforms in relation to "free speech". This implies it's used by the masses for speech, but that isn't the case.
We also call it our "digital town square". It isn't. The square is empty and has a handful of people with a megaphone.
Politicians, media and businesses consider the narratives on social media to reflect actual culture and political views, but this couldn't be further from the truth.
This matters because Twitter has an outsized cultural and political influence, which is not the case for all the other networks you mentioned.
> The square is empty and has a handful of people with a megaphone.
Have you ever been to a real town square? Its a handful of people with Megaphones trying to rally a crowd - and a bunch of people having private conversations around it. Thats twitter + DMs.
I suspect even there that's true. I text very rarely, even with my closest friends. My wife texts people much more, and I have some friends who text constantly. There's clearly some sort of differential there, and I wouldn't be surprised if it roughly follows a similar sort of 80/20 rule.
I don't think that's true. On Facebook the majority of active users post some original content at least a few times per year. I've seen a lot of profiles for my own friends and various other users.
After the last few days I more and more strongly suspect that's because of a few events like r/place where it becomes incentivized to have many accounts per real user.
There is a widely-known Internet rule of thumb that 1% of users add content, and 99% lurk. There have been several studies that seek to validate that, several of which are outlined in the Wiki summary:
If you think other social media is toxic and stifles speech in the same way Twitter does, you are intentionally being dishonest, have your head in the sand, or simply have little understanding of how these platforms work (I'm going with the latter based on your characterization of reddit alone).
- Reddit has endless communities, and long text forum posts and comments. Most people lurk in the top subs, but almost everyone has a niche subreddit they have actively posted in, or has an alt just for that purpose
- I find it hard pressed to find someone who purposefully creates an Instagram account and does not, at the very minimum, share photos with friends and family. I use the app daily, and even the boomers that are finally coming onto the platform regularly post photos.
Most people are followers in the broad sense, but on a community level, especially with their friends, families, and communities, are sharers. That's the difference between twitter versus facebook, instagram, and reddit. You are making the fallacy of applying the influencer syndrome across the entire platform. The majority of users are not remaining on the platform because of influencers. These other platforms are primarily about individuals communities and friends. They start by joining the platform because of a friend, a family member, or to join a niche community of likeminded folk, and then they are gradually exposed to the platform-specific SEO junk food. Twitter on the other hand, is demonstrably, provably, about certain power users. It's about following the "right" people to get the most out of it. There is no community in the organic sense of the term on twitter, except by pure happenstance ("tech twitter", "black twitter", and so on, but even then it's at best, a loose association).
So before you tell someone to get off their soap box, maybe make sure you have a clearer understanding.
Endless communities yet the top ones are run by a tiny percentage of power-mods who have outsized influence (Six power mods control 118 of the top 500 subreddits [1])
You read my post and got out of it that I somehow cared about the top ones? Or are you just cherry picking something to attack? Let's have a good faith discussion.
Maybe you should understand what you're talking about before you start in on somebody else.
Reddit is VASTLY more hostile to the average user than twitter. On twitter, all I have to do to stay in good standing is abide by community guidelines. You might disagree with those guidelines, but they're there and are generally easy to follow.
On reddit? Not only does each user have to pay attention to the reddit guidelines, but each subreddit is its own fiefdom with an absolute monarch (head mod) who can ban you at any time, for any reason, without repercussion and there is no appeals process. I know because I've done it. There were people causing trouble in a sister sub to one I run, and I did not hesitate to permaban them when I saw what was going on. And from all the other subs I run. They cried, complained, bitche and moaned to reddit admins, and nothing happened. Mods don't owe users platforms.
Because on reddit, you are free to start your own subreddit. You are not free to just post whatever you want, and there have been many subs that have been banned for not abiding by the rules.
Reddit has slowly been censoring, banning and closing out "unwanted" people and views for a while now.. It's not uncommon for admins to ban people for the wrong opinions on even small subs at random. They allow an entire sub dedicated to nothing but attacking other subs they don't like and trying to get them banned. (they even go as far as posting CP with alts in order to report on their mains, trying to get the sub banned) And the Admins allow this. To say nothing of the subs, some major ones included, which use scripts to auto ban EVERYONE who posts or joins subs they don't like.. without exception. (something almost spelled out in the rules from day one as being against said rules.. but as long as it only targets the "wrong" people/side, nobody has ever been able to get even a comment from the admins about it in ~8 years)
Not an attempt to refute your points, but just some input. IG is the only social media platform I’m still on, and I don’t think anyone except meme accounts, influencers, brands are posting anymore.
1. My wife and I have been joking for a couple of years about the large number of old acquaintances & family members that follow us that haven’t posted in years. They still watch every story we post though!
2. IG just re-introduced the ability to sort your feed chronologically. When I first looked at my chronological feed, it was immediately clear that they took it away because there wasn’t enough new content anymore. I follow between 250-300 accounts and there is consistently less than 20 accounts posting a day (and those are mostly meme or ‘influencer’ accounts).
It is possible that I’m just following boring people though.
>Not an attempt to refute your points, but just some input. IG is the only social media platform I’m still on, and I don’t think anyone except meme accounts, influencers, brands are posting anymore.
Do... you not have friends or what? I'm even too old (35) to be in the IG niche generation but my IG is active and lively... no meme accounts, no brands followed whatsoever.
About Instagram, I've had an account there for eight years. It was created so I could follow my then-girlfriend, who posts occasionally, and is today my partner and mother of my child. It's use is basically to keep tabs on that account and, very rarely, check in on trending stuff (say Azealia Banks when she makes the news, since she was booted off Twitter). I've never used the account to post anything and it follows just that one account since 2014.
> So before you tell someone to get off their soap box, maybe make sure you have a clearer understanding.
The irony.
Reddit users lament quite often that there are subreddits that will ban you for saying things against the viewpoints of those subs (r/(white|black)peopletwitter, r/the_donald, r/latestagecapitalism, etc). Sure, one can just make their own sub, but Twitter users can follow different people too.
Instagram users (the Gen Z ones) often have zero posts and use it mainly for its group or individual chat features, as everyone in their friend group has an IG. It's often preferred to not share photos on there as it's more private for them than having anyone who follows them to see their photos.
Twitter is not special in its toxicity, all social media is the same.
25% is actually really really good. Its just above the 80/20 pareto principle. Prices law probably makes more sense here but the point is still the same, pretty much all platforms where you are publishing you'll see a similar distribution.
Pretty all the users except a few contribute little to nothing and a very few contribute the most highest value output and accumulate a lot of value (followers/influence).
Usage (consumption is what you are looking for).. like monthly active users..
> If the retweet button were to be removed, the platform would collapse.
I disagree. I was a twitter user before the retweet button appeared. We all got creative to effectively RT others without the need for a button. The button appeared because users organically developed the retweet and the button just made it more convenient.
Studies show 99%+ of TV, radio and newspaper consumers contribute less than 1% of the content.
What does that have to do with the impact such mediums have on the masses? Twitter is a read-heavy broadcasting platform. Just because the masses don't publish there, that doesn't mean they don't consume it and aren't impacted by it (embeds, story pick-ups, cultural influences, and on it goes). There's a reason nearly everyone that's anyone uses Twitter to broadcast to their public still to this day, despite Twitter being an aged platform at this point; that spans from famous musicians or athletes, to politicians.
The war in Ukraine? You can follow it on Twitter from official sources; in many cases better and faster than you can get it from any other mediums. Zelenskyy's Twitter account is one of the most important broadcast mediums that he has access to.
> If the retweet button were to be removed, the platform would collapse.
There's nothing interesting about that premise. If you removed the same feature from tumblr at the height of its popularity, it would have collapsed as well. If you remove integral features, it's usually bad for products.
Most people are mimics, not originators. There is no scenario where a platform is going to exist that is both massive in scale and is primarily original content produced by the masses. Most content on massive platforms will be cloned, copied, retweeted / reposted content. The sole exception is photo posting, in which the masses post photos from their lives (which are going to tend to be technically unique and generally require zero creativity to originate, point and shoot).
I'm sure there are more retweets than replies, but still. 10% of users (is that the math? probably not.) are actively posting original tweets, and even more are replying to them. That's alright I think.
25% is ~50 million people. Also just because 80% of tweets are retweets, that doesn't mean only 20% of them are tweeting original content, it's probably a mix. So realistically we're looking at tens of millions of people forming the core contributor community. Hardly a small elite.
The reason I stay on Twitter is that I can find experts in niche fields to follow. For example, since the start of the invasion of Ukraine, I have followed a number of credentialed military and Russia experts, and have consequently a better understanding of current events there.
>There is very little speech and it excessively rewards the most unreasonable speech.
never going to change--the most intolerant win as taleb has demonstrated formally. If anything is to change Twitter must go to the limit of constitutionally protected speech (dont @ me with `twitter is a private company`)
I probably do 100 replies for every 1 original tweet.
This is fine and "good actually"
Consider a traditional PHP forum. How much of the discussion is the "OP" post in a thread, and how much is all of the discussion afterwards? It's the same on twitter.
Twitter's value proposition isn't your ability to contribute, it's the fact that VIP you care about is there publicly contributing, and the flaws you describe are 100X worse on the only competitor that can boast similarly - Facebook.
Conversations on Twitter are bad, but Facebook's are so much worse. Just finding a reply in an FB thread is near-impossible. Even finding the same post on FB twice is challenging.
My local journos, politicians, favorite webcomic artists, bands, podcasters, city councilors, are all accessible and engaging on twitter. That's the value proposition. It's no coincidence that twitter was Trump's preferred platform - it just works well with that use-case.
Nobody cares about my tweets of "hey look at this cocktail I had at the bar". That's where FB or Insta are better.
It has some bad incentive issues that lead to outrage and dumb hostile retweets driving increased engagement/follower count, but it's also possible to just ignore and block all of that stuff.
You can find high quality accounts to follow and interact directly with interesting people doing interesting things. When used well and filtered properly it is the best source of high quality real time information available anywhere. There's just a lot of noise so filtering well can be tricky (and most people like the noise because it plays into tribal human nonsense).
The reason most people don't participate imo is because there's a lot of competition. It's hard to be interesting when competing on a truly global scale, it's a lot more competitive and the 'easy' ways to get attention are also often the worst. Most people would be tweeting into a void without anyone paying attention.
My issue with the speech thing is not Twitter's flawed moderation (which is an exercise of their speech), it's that we're trapped in a local maximum where massive centralized companies end up with a responsibility they shouldn't have that's effectively impossible for them to do well. The issue here runs deeper and isn't something we can escape without some serious changes to the computing stack we're operating in. Things can be tweaked and improved as they are, but can't be truly fixed with our current stack - it's a problem of incentives and capability.
Ideally it's not the responsibility of a CEO to moderate billions of people (or to establish teams to do so). The promise of the world wide web was a decentralized system of individuals controlling their own distribution. In that world speech is free, but people decide who they listen to absent incentive issues around engagement and platforms having to make decision about users they give service to.
My comment isn't about your personal experience on Twitter, rather the role it plays at a macro level. It is a platform that is politically impactful, and not in a good way. It rewards division, extremism, polarization, it brings out the worst in us.
That's on Twitter. They actively designed the product to do so.
> "You can't express yourself on Twitter due to the character limit, so all you can do is witty superficial takes. Threading and replies are a disaster making a structured discussion impossible. These two things alone make the platform useless for most speech purposes."
My reply was pushing back against this - it's too strongly positioned. I don't disagree with the issues that exist at the macro level, but people can and do express themselves in ways that make the service useful and valuable.
You can find interesting people saying things, but most of them will be appealing to their audience by complaining when their ingroup gets any negative commentary, and quote retweeting shade at their outgroup. It's like some weird version of British Parliament where the stakes are as low as which obscure philosopher is actually more like this philosopher than that one.
Ugh Yeah.. I am so so happy that I stayed away from unsocial media from the start.. Took one look at it in the early days and decided to nope out! Can't wait until SM collapses under it's own hate and the net, fandoms and discourse can go back to where it belongs. Small to medium sites and dedicated message forums.
> And some 80% of that are retweets or replies, not original tweets.
Somewhat related:
I recently found the feature where you can go through your contacts and ignore the retweets of them individually. I don't know how long this feature has been around but it's great!
We should expect Twitter’s read-only ratio to be smaller because of the low friction of just tweeting. But is there another platform or medium where the creator-to-passive consumer ratio is significantly better? I’d assume blogging was much more read than done, back in the day.
(public broadcast platforms, I mean — presumably e-mail has more parity in participation between consumers and creators)
I don't think Twitter has a problem, I think companies who use Twitter to plan their strategy have a problem. Companies who spend money to look good on Twitter, companies who pay ad companies who use Twitter to design their campaigns, etc etc.
Anyone who thinks Twitter is an accurate representation of the general population is building houses on a sand beach.
> Anyone who thinks Twitter is an accurate representation of the general population is building houses on a sand beach.
E.g. So called "cancel culture" works because companies routinely assume that Twitter outrage translates to real world outrage. Would be nice if companies could recalibrate their response.
It's part of the reason why I'm against companies, especially media ones and fandoms, from dealing with their "fans" through SM. Even in general, doing so means loss of differentiation between your fans and tens of millions of random people.. some of whom might have other reasons for giving input. But this is a whole other issue of its own.
> I think Twitter has a far bigger problem than a free speech problem.
Not Twitter has the problem, society has. Twitter is growing fine on its own, there is no end in sight. But the platform is more and more influencing the rest of the world, and usually it's more of the toxic than healthy kind of influence.
Largely correct, I mostly only use it as my news feed from mainstream (oh no!) news sources and some bloggers when they post a new blog; this is post giving up on RSS feeds. I think I only have one twitter post to date after 7 or 8 years.
>no actual speech happens by the masses themselves
Not true. Maybe most don't bother but anyone can. And it's kind of unique that I as Joe Public can tweet to @JoeBiden or whoever. I don't know any other platform like that.
Maybe no one will bother reading my tweet but it's a free world and that's their choice.
As someone who doesn't use twitter primarily because of this "everything is retweets" phenomenon, I wouldn't say that means no one uses it. Twitter is an idea propagation platform. It's not about everyone just sharing and consuming original content; what good is original content if only direct connections ever see it?
Twitter's most important aspect is watching ideas spread, even if it's misinformation, even if it's a cat video, even if it's a big game of telephone and the meaning gets corrupted in transit, you get to see what resonates with people. And that is very valuable.
Sure, but that's a separate thing. Lots of people don't use Twitter at all. Then, there is a smaller but huge group that uses it purely to read. Then, there is a smaller but large group that writes. Then, there is a tiny group that writes a lot.
Worth noting that the date of buying these shares is March 14th, and the date he started rather unsubtly tweeting about Twitter's approach to free speech is March 25th. So to be clear, anyone who thought that Musk's actions are the result of the twitter poll he ran has clearly been misled.
Interesting that he filed his >5% report on Schedule 13G rather than Schedule 13D, and has checked the box for the exemption in Rule 13d-1(c)[1]. This exemption requires that he "has not acquired the securities with any purpose, or with the effect, of changing or influencing the control of the issuer, or in connection with or as a participant in any transaction having that purpose or effect."
If he's indeed seeking to participate actively in changing things at Twitter, he may have opened yet another front in his antagonization of the SEC.
Background: the SEC requires purchasers of >5% of a U.S. public company to provide certain information about themselves and their intentions in making the purchase. Generally, you file Schedule 13D if you're seeking to conduct a takeover bid. The shorter Schedule 13G is supposed to be used only for "passive" investors.
Here, perhaps Musk would say he's not seeking a change in the "control" of the company (voting share ownership), just a change in governance practices not involving a change in control.
Update: some press coverage raising the same questions. The silly part about this is the filing deficiencies seem either inept or willful. Mr. Musk can certainly afford good securities lawyers to make the proper filings. A 13D is not that much more burdensome than a 13G, and some activists use the filing (which gets a lot of free attention) to make statements that to support their objective, whatever that may be.
His Twitter poll about selling 10% of Tesla was equally disingenuous.
He had pre-arranged those sales in mid-September according to regulatory filings. He also didn’t mention in the tweets that he has millions of stock options that must be exercised.
It makes me sad to see that his fan base turned into a cult for the most part. I used to admire him until the veil fell off, I still admire the technologies him and the smart people at Tesla and SpaceX have created, but my admiration doesn't extend to him anymore.
The guy knows how to hire smart people and keep them around, that in an of itself is rare these days and worth admiration.
I can't think of many living CEOs as effective as him in this regard.
I wouldn't say my admiration extends outside of areas he is an expert in though, usually when he starts talking about anything else he talks out of his ass.
Executives != smart people, some of them are but revolving door of executives speaks more to how hard it is to find good executives and just how cutthroat of an environment Tesla is performance wise.
I know for a fact the good engineers are sticking around because I know a bunch of them personally. I wouldn't say all of them are staying because of Elon alone but it generally factors into the calculation (along with massively appreciated stock options ofcourse...)
People stayed even with the stock was getting crapped on by Wall Street, he was clearly able to convince everyone that the company would succeed and opinions of the companies future would turn around.
Going to Tesla a few years ago was a hard choice, they paid below market (substantially) but offered pretty generous stock grants.
The stock hadn't really appreciated in-line with the companies growth because of the enormous risk of the Model 3 project. This represented massive risk overhang that until cleared didn't allow the stock to really take off.
2020 (over?) corrected for that however so now the employees that have put in the years are sitting on massive unrealized gains.
He's a good salesman in getting people to invest money or (in this case) time. But the discussion was talking about retention. And that's just because people are about to clear huge paydays.
Man but the bad 10% is so rough. The Thai diver situation wasn't some off the cuff rant, that was someone wealthy and influential in concerted effort to utterly destroy someone who had done some good in the world. Intellectual genius but moral void can still apparently be admirable?
I wouldn't call it a moral void. Heroes are better and worse than ordinary people, it's unfortunate that we've been raised on simplistic stories where if someone is worth being on a side with they can't have any significant flaws.
I fully recognize that people exist in shades of gray.
However, I also believe that there are actions that people can and do take that put them beyond what contrition could repair-- and Musk hasn't publicly apologized for this, even.
If I wrote off every genius who is also unstable or acts like an ass I would have to delete a lot of my music collection.
If you are idolizing someone, it's because the veil hasn't fallen off yet. Everyone is crazy. The question for me is: does the good outweigh the bad?
I'd say it does for Elon. Reusable rockets and helping push EVs over the adoption hump are far more important than trolling like a thirteen year old boy on Twitter or playing Dukes of Hazard with the SEC.
I don't think Elon was strategically necessary to get EVs over the adoption hump, in that the market was primed for _someone_ to do it. And retrspectively it's been a huge distraction from the change we really need, which is the improvement of public transportation in our largest cities.
But I can't comment on the reusable rockets thing, I suppose time will only tell.
I would estimate that Musk accelerated the transition to electric cars by 1-5 years. I believe he claims the same thing you do, that moving to electric is inevitable, and that his strategy has just been to nudge it along a little bit faster.
For a single person, this is still a significant contribution (if we presume that Tesla would not have survivied without him), which just happened to also make him wealthy.
Nah, it just doesn't work that way. Things don't happen until someone does them. Doesn't matter how easy the pitch is. Someone has to hit the ball.
In my experience most companies and governments are risk-averse and nobody wants to do anything until the mythical "someone else" does it. In the absence of a market equilibrium "defector" (game theory) it usually takes a government mandate or subsidy, and even that often fails if it results in "malicious compliance" like GM's EV1 debacle. (The EV1 was clearly sabotaged. It was intended to fail and when drivers actually liked it it was pulled, with GM even more or less confiscating and crushing them.)
The truth is that a significant proportion of the classical auto industry hated EVs. Some still do. The car industry is long wedded to the ICE and the good old fashioned "vroom vroom" as being essential to what makes a car a car, and everyone from unions to equipment makers to oil companies and petrostates had no interest in disruption.
There are still holdouts like Toyota that are just now being dragged into EVs and Koch Industries is still bankrolling anti-EV disinformation.
The reusable rockets thing was much worse than EVs. The space industry used to be smaller and was dominated by stolid mega-corporations with backgrounds in defense contracting that had absolutely zero incentive to change anything. The conventional wisdom in engineering was that current space launch tech was as good as it could get to the point that you had people authoring paper studies claiming that reusability actually wouldn't deliver much of a win (stop laughing!).
It took an utter lunatic to be willing to lose hundreds of millions to billions of dollars to disrupt space. As SpaceX worked on reusability they did so against a chorus of classical aerospace people and even NASA people claiming they would either fail or build a system that would be more expensive than disposable rockets.
I heard people continuing to make this claim even after F9 cores had been flown multiple times. They seemed to shut up when the video of those two Falcon Heavy cores landing in unison came out.
I think the Shuttle experience convinced everyone that reusability wasn't economically feasible. The whole industry had a bad case of learned helplessness combined with an addiction to cost plus contracts.
Edit: speaking of EVs:
I have this hypothesis that Elon's sort of kind of flirting with the alt-right and Trumpism was a ploy to ingratiate himself to Trump during the Trump era to possibly stop any attempt by Trump to kill either Tesla or SpaceX on behalf of his oil company and old school defense contractor allies. Elon may have decided that sucking up to Trump was the price of avoiding a backlash until Trump was out of office.
I have also wondered if his Texas move and appeals to "red America" aren't a marketing ploy to sell that demographic on EVs, since obviously the latte sipping liberal crowd are already on board with the EV revolution. Tesla is capped at blue state early adopters if they can't cross over into the mainstream and that means selling the non-techno-nerd and non-progressive part of car culture.
No clue, just speculation. Elon is first and foremost a marketer.
This is what happens when you gradually drive away the reasonable people from any group - what's left is a combination of natural cultists and formerly reasonable-ish people who got railroaded into a cult without realizing it.
Just like him I've got to a position where I can live very comfortably, but I would never ever give up my comfortable life and all my money for creating/buying startups that will most likely fail (of course I'm still investing).
I have all admiration for him that can't be taken away by any kind of fan base.
Is this a common belief? That he is taking "risks" others don't have the courage to? This is a new one to me and interesting cultural development for sure.
Edit: Just kind of seems in contradiction to the previous stories of him where it focused on his intelligence/de facto technocratic authority to save the world. It wasn't so much his courage, but his moral rectitude combined with capital resources -- "he is going to save the world! Take us to mars!"
His two main companies have apparently taken risks that established companies in those areas were not willing to do.
Could Boeing built a self-landing reusable rocket? Almost certainly. Would they have been willing to, considering it almost certainly involves failing in explosive ways multiple times? That may be a risk they aren't willing to take.
> Could Boeing built a self-landing reusable rocket? Almost certainly.
McDonnell Douglas is part of Boeing and (before they were part of Boeing) did the DC-X prototype.
One failure ended the program, but it was transfered from McDonnell to NASA at that point I think and funding was shifted towards the reusable VentureStar. But it did demonstrate reuse and went through a partial failure of a hydrogen explosion and recovery:
I would say it’s common. Both SpaceX and Tesla almost ran out of money with Musk maximally invested. Both moments were widely reported 5-10 years ago when they happened.
Sorry I was not clear, it was not the fan base that turned me away from him. It was the way he treated his workers during the start of the pandemic, forcing them to work. Along with other workplace controversies.
That's just my opinion, but I don't admire someone that prioritizes profit over human life.
You’re right, but actually the workers know what they are getting into in return for their options packages, it’s clear on Glassdoor. When I was looking for jobs in 2016, my slogan for myself was invest in Tesla, work at Google, not the other way around.
The only problem is that the stock price was growing more than the revenue, so I’m not sure how fast it can keep up growing, and what the current employees are expecting.
I believe OP is referring to Musk re-opening production against Alameda County's standing work-stop rules at the time.
This isn't necessarily the same as forcing people to work, but I have no idea if Tesla employees willing to return vs. those deciding to follow county rules saw any advantages or disadvantages at work as a result. Certainly forcing people to defy government rules to keep their jobs would be highly problematic to me as well, for example.
He could waste a lot of money on failed startups and never have any appreciable impact on his day to day life and standard of living other than his own satisfaction of seeing $BigMoneyNumber.
Even if you say that someone like him simply enjoys work, it seems clear that he's often working an uncomfortable amount, in order to achieve his two stated objectives, which at least in his perspective are altruistic (and are objectively not the best ways for him to get richer.)
I'm not sure you can argue that the richest man in the world got rich by accident while pursuing purely altruistic goals. He clearly knows what he's doing.
I say this while having an appreciation for the existence of Tesla and SpaceX, but let's not pretend he supresses unionisation at his factories because he cares too much.
not by accident, but getting rich clearly wasn't his goal when he dumped all his money into the start ups. why aren't we glad the richest man in the world got there by using his resources for futuristic ideas instead of something like oil and gas
I actually am glad of that - I think Elon is one of the less-bad billionaires. His views are stupid and most of his ideas are too, and billionaires shouldn't exist at all, but I am glad that he made his money building companies that are doing important things. Well, SpaceX and Tesla are - the Boring Company and Neuralink seem like boondoggles, to say nothing of Hyperloop.
SpaceX is interesting, but are they really doing anything important? Maybe if starlink goes global, but until then it doesn't seem to change anything in my or many peoples lives by not existing.
They are working on interesting problems though, far more interesting to me than most companies (including Tesla)
> SpaceX is interesting, but are they really doing anything important?
I'd say it's the most important company on the planet seeing as it's the only one that's truly carving a path for us to one day become a spacefaring civilization and doing so at a seemingly 10x faster pace than competitors
Spacefaring? Hopefully you mean Marsfaring (at best, if you can find a good reason to set up a colony there)
The average stellar density around our sun is about 0.004 per cubic light year, so definitely don't get your hopes up on some Star Trek scenario for the next few hundred years at least.
What is SpaceX's value again? P.S. Musk himself admits that SpaceX wouldn't be a thing if it hadn't been saved by a phone call from NASA. You know, the government, the same entity that Musk worshipers seem to dismiss as the lesser party when it comes to ingenuity and forward-progression.
I don't see that at all. We're never going to spacefare on chemical rockets, unless you mean maybe going as far as the asteroid belt.
Reusable rockets are about satellites and maybe the space station. But until we see something use the cheap launches to improve life on earth, it's meaningless.
That said, I'd invest in SpaceX for the Starlink potential if it was public.
SpaceX has drastically lowered cost/mass to put something in orbit with Falcon 9. If they are successful with Starship they will do so again. Already lowering cost to orbit is increasing access to space for companies, universities, and governments. This is huge. Their success has lead to a number of new companies trying to innovate in a similar way and even. altering how governments plan to run future space programs.
Lower cost to transportation is key for pretty much any economic growth. People and companies have significantly more plans than just a couple probes every few years. Exploration, mining, tourism, scientific research, manufacturing are a couple things that come to mind. There are probably many more ideas than what i can think of and that’s the point. Make it cheaper for people with ideas to make them a reality. When only the largest of governments can afford to put something into space then we won’t see much innovation/economic growth.
You should check your facts. Elon doesn’t own any houses, he lives in rentals. Also in 2008 when he didn’t even have money for that after putting all his PayPal money into the startups, he was living at his friends’ places.
But the main point is the side comment: I’m having fun coding whenever I want to, but I strictly do non-payed hobby projects, as I don’t want to get into commitments ever again.
Loads of wealthy people live in houses that they themselves don't directly own. Instead they'll form a real estate LLC that owns property, pays contractors to maintain the houses, and the people will then pay rent to their own LLC to live there to cover the maintenance costs and whatever mortgage/debt the LLC has.
The link you sent doesn’t confirm the comment that he owns lots of houses. Of course he won’t live in a bad place, but that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t stick to facts.
You mean the state with one of the lowest effective property tax rates in the country? Your property tax is pegged to 1% of the purchase price, and essentially never goes up ever again.
One of the only (if not the only) state where that happens.
The main reason not to own in CA is the insane purchase price, not the taxes.
Can't he both be a smart person and encouraging his fanbase to more cultish?
If one looked at life and fame as an engineer, having a rabid and large fanbase allows for new opportunities (financial and otherwise). So it'd be suboptimal not to encourage that.
Or as Matt Levine pontificated, if you're the kind of guy who can spike a cryptocurrency by writing something nice on Twitter, and you manage a public company, there's an argument that it's your fiduciary responsibility to do so in a buy-tweet-sell manner.
Matt Levine was, clearly, being snarky. Especially considering that such activity would be illegal.
As for "suboptimal", if you're trying to maximize financial or other gains regardless of societal impact or human suffering, maybe what you describe is correct, but it also requires the person to be a bit of a sociopathic asshole to choose that path.
It may take a long time for the ship to turn, but it has turned. John McAfee was indicted by the CFTC for doing this sort of pump & dump. I think anyone as high profile as a CEO would find themselves in the same boat.
Separately from that is the way Musk keeps Tesla in the public eye through various stunts etc., which is a little different than a pump & dump. How much of that is his personality, and how much of it is deliberate strategy? I don't know. I'd speculate that some of it started as personality, and when he saw the results he leaned into it hard and it became strategy. On that aspect of things, you have a point in that a CEO who can do that should probably take advantage of it, and I wouldn't necessarily attach sociopathic tendencies to that behavior as a requirement for acting that way: it doesn't seem to hurt anyone. At least I think it doesn't? Who suffers if TSLA is overvalued? And that would require a good way of determining if it actually is overvalued, something I don't think is straightforward. I guess short sellers suffer, but they could simply have been wrong about TSLA being over valued, and that's on them.
I don't think all CEOs should give it a try though. First because, well, most just don't have whatever quality is necessary to make it work. Second because if everyone tried it, it would just become so much noise, and probably drown out the efforts of those like Musk who can actually pull it off. In Levine-esque speculation, I wonder if Musk would have a legal case against those CEO's if they made his own antics worthless? Some type of tortious interference maybe?
Wasn't McAfee personally trading though? I'm not as up on his more recent insanity.
+1 agreed on the rest. It's an interesting thought problem. Capital was less formal during the late 19th century monopoly era in the US, but it makes me wonder if there were schemes where Morgan or Rockefeller publicly circulated market moves.
The poll is open to everyone on Twitter. Not just his fans. I bet many of his fans voted not to sell his Tesla stock. While people hate him are more likely to vote yes.
> people who hate him don't visit his Twitter or are you saying they would abstain from the poll on principle?
I would hope they wouldn't hate visit his twitter. But I didn't think it was a principle thing. I would imagine trust in a poll correlates with trust in the person putting on the poll. People who hated American Idol didn't hate call in options, even though they could have.
> It's usually some pedantic thing like a Twitter poll.
I think that's more because everyone here has a view of Elon that's mostly immutable. The minutia leads to interesting discussions (sometimes)
I enjoy my job, I also get paid to do it. If being a twitter troll is both a past time and road to riches for Elon I think it’s just win-win for somebody who seems to need attention and wealth.
There's only a limited amount of time one has. The private jet is to save time (convenience). In one of his interviews he talks about how he is always solving problems and his brain is running a million miles a minute. His brain is wired differently than most people. He has so many ideas running through his head. He doesn't have time to work on them all.
He doesn't have many expensive tastes. He doesn't live a life of luxury, he's not covered from head to toe in brand name clothes. He doesn't own a private island. He could care less about that stuff. Yes he has a huge ego but rightfully so. Look at all that he has accomplished against incredible odds (Tesla and SpaceX almost failing).
I do think he is genuinely trying to expand the realm of human consciousness and save the planet and create a backup plan for humans (colonizing Mars). Overall I think he is a net positive for mankind.
If anyone really thinks he is doing all this just to get rich needs to do some more research on him.
> He doesn't live a life of luxury, he's not covered from head to toe in brand name clothes. He doesn't own a private island. He could care less about that stuff.
Elon is extremely vain so he doesn't put on anything by accidents.
>If anyone really thinks he is doing all this just to get rich needs to do some more research on him.
It's incredibly obvious he's doing this to be rich. He has incredibly expensive taste that goes far beyond than things like fancy yachts or private islands. He cares about money because it affords him soft power, influence, public adoration and the ability to buy things like you know... *10% of Twitter*.
He is both very well accomplished and a textbook narcissist who ties his sense of self-identity with the world's perception of him. That's why he gets incredibly defensive against naysayers and he is always pushing to "one-up" others.
So yeah, he absolutely cares about being rich because to him it's a validation of his own ego and also allows him to continue to purchase influence and power and attention.
If he's doing it all for money and to live a life of luxury then why does he live in a 50k house in Texas? Yes he had a McLaren F1, so what? That was a long time ago when he was young. He drives a model S these days.
If he's doing it all for money then why start the companies he did? All of them are helping to solve a problem for mankind. He didn't become a drug dealer, sell things that are addicting, etc. He doesn't run a tobacco company.
There's a scale for it, we've quantified the lack of satire!
---
The celebrity-persona parasocial identification scale (CPI) is designed to measure how media consumers develop identification with celebrities or popular fictional characters. Identification is defined as a persuasion process that occurs when an individual adopts the behavior or attitudes of another individual or group based on a self-defining relationship (Kelman, 1961, p. 63). Identification is a psychological orientation through which individuals define themselves based on their group membership and derive "strength and a sense of identity" from the affiliation (Kelman, 1961). Identification is often confused or entangled with parasocial interaction. Although both parasocial interaction and identification are both forms of audience involvement, they are distinct processes (Brown, Basil, & Bocarnea, 2003b, Brown & Fraser, 2006). Parasocial interaction often predicts identification because people commonly seek to adopt the values, beliefs, and behaviors of celebrities and media persona whom they admire. However, there are examples of celebrities that fans have strong parasocial interaction with, and yet the fans do not want to be like that person (Matviuk, 2006). This brief chapter discusses various aspects of the CPI online survey and its use in these contexts. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved)
This is incorrect and he has denied it on a number of occassions. He does live in a relatively small cheap house (likely around $50k when he bought it), but it's in Boca Chica Village near Brownsville, and it's not a prefab.
> The consequences of this poll will be important. Please vote carefully.
Is pretty disingenuous when it turns out that he's launched the poll a week after he already decided to buy 10% of the stock. Do you seriously think Musk spent several billion dollars on twitter stock and then decided to check what people think?
I just don't think it's very likely that Elon Musk spend billions buying a stake in twitter before he knew what he wanted to do with the company, especially since his view on free speech is already well known and goes far beyond even vocal free speech advocates.
In what way is his view on free speech far beyond vocal free speech advocates? I think it’s pretty uncontroversial that Twitter is the de-facto public square on the internet, and so it is bad that they clearly have a political leaning when it comes to content moderation. I know they’re a private company. But it’s just naïve at this point to think Twitter is the same as any old private company.
Well on the "far beyond free speech advocates", the position that the SEC can't prevent market manipulation due to the first amendment is a position that basically no one sensible takes. Or that he's happy using "Free Speech" to slander people.
On the subject of Twitter being a public square, I think that's a pretty absurd assertion, it's one of a plethora of social media sites - Facebook, Youtube, Instagram, Whatsapp, Reddit, Tiktok, Telegram, Snapchat. And it's not even particularly large compared to that competition. It's not even like Twitter has grown to become some behemoth, it's share price is about flat over the last decade. This isn't some behemoth that needs regulating.
Smart move for a billionaire that wants to influence public opinion. The usual route is to buy a magazine or newspaper but in our new world, being a highly influential stock owner of a social media company is the way forward.
(I'd suspect Musk of wanting to run for office, except I don't think he'd accept a lesser office than President which he's ineligible for. Maybe a state governor like Arnie?)
Because those types of people want power, and even when you're the richest guy in the world, there are things you can't do unless you're head of a country.
What power do politicians have? I guess you can nudge bureaucratic legislation to favor one group of developers over another and get favorable investment deals, but that just gets you more money.
Or maybe you can elect a district attorney and go after an enemy of yours, but even that's not an easy win. And you can always buy influence for this sort of thing without going through the trouble and cost of running
You certainly can't wave a magic wand and garner favor and respect from people. People hate politicians in the US.
I don't know, I just don't see the "power". It's just an appeal to narcissism as people in the media would be obsessing over you and dissecting every word you say. But that's definitely not power.
The fewer politicians there are, the more power they have. In the US, levers of power are widely distributed compared to a typical autocratic country. If you want to avoid autocratic rule, split up the power into many hands. The end result may look like a top heavy lumbering bureaucracy, but if it's difficult to wrest control of someone's lever of power from them then you have a better defense against autocratic takeover.
It almost like it was intentional on the part of the founders of the US
Sadly we did not heed their wisdom and we have over the course of time consolidated power in the the hands of fewer people by putting more things into the hands of the federal government, allowed congress to shift their responsibility to the executive, and failing to increase the size of congress.
Trump vaporized Soleimani; you can't do that when you're just the host of a TV show.
Obama to this day loves to brag about how he sent SEAL Team 6 to deal with enemies of the US; you can't do that either when you're just a successful author.
Hollande (former French president) also bragged to journalists, many times, about assassinating ISIS leaders.
These are "normal" leaders elected in democracies; it's much worse of course with more authoritarian regimes.
Real power is the power to kill other human beings and not suffer any consequence for it. We don't usually talk about that when discussing politics, but this is what aspiring leaders really crave.
It's not like President Musk would have the authority to murder anyone. His murder powers would largely be limited to the Middle East and loosely defined enemies of the United States.
Musk has never shown a desire to murder random people and he has never shown particular hatred for those in the Middle East. Why would he want the power to murder people who are basically unrelated to him?
>Real power is the power to kill other human beings and not suffer any consequence for it. We don't usually talk about that when discussing politics, but this is what aspiring leaders really crave.
Well put. It makes sense in that context that Musk's fans think he has no interest in politics and his detractors think he must.
As insane as Musk's fanbase can be, I still find his detractors' view of the world less realistic. There's a metric to assess that opinion by. As a fan, I predict he won't run for political office on Earth.
> Trump vaporized Soleimani; you can't do that when you're just the host of a TV show.
True, but Musk has a fleet of absurdly huge rockets at his command. If he really wanted to, he could de-orbit something large on top of Tehran.
Given the rate at which he is progressing toward his stated goals, he’s not that far from being able to do that and get away with it - by moving to Mars.
Yeah, this post is mostly tongue-in-cheek, but there is some truth to it. SpaceX is a company with assets that could easily be weaponized far in excess of many country’s militaries. I’m now imagining a future where a crazed trillionaire executes a first strike against some country with kinetic energy weapons, flees to a different planet, and all the governments of the world are scrambling trying to figure out if they can retrieve him.
> I’m now imagining a future where a crazed trillionaire executes a first strike against some country with kinetic energy weapons, flees to a different planet, and all the governments of the world are scrambling trying to figure out if they can retrieve him.
I get what you're saying, and I would agree that the power of _most_ politicians is minimal compared to the absolute richest people in the world (so not just mere single-digit billionaires, unless their wealth is built on owning a platform, like Oprah).
However, read the book Charlie Wilson's War. Wilson had no money to speak of, but the book reveals the incredible power that he wielded, largely by sidling up to selective groups (like the Israeli lobby) and getting key committee appointments. And Wilson wasn't even a U.S. Senator! (Generally speaking Representatives have far less power than Senators)
I mean, it would be trivial for a president with a lot of stock in EV companies to reduce domestic oil drilling/pipelines, start a "police action" in the Middle East that combined with super harsh sanctions on Iran, Russia and Venezuela sends oil soaring.
Why would he run for president, when he could quite possibly own a planet if he keeps moving forward with his Mars goals.
If he establishes a base on mars, it is essentially his. Earth based countries are forbidden (in treaty at least) from claiming ownership of celestial bodies. What's to stop him declaring himself emperor of Mars. The person that controls the flow of supplies to an isolated world is pretty much all powerful.
> Why would he run for president, when he could quite possibly own a planet if he keeps moving forward with his Mars goals.
Countries have armies. Armies enforce international (and eventually planetary) rights. Countries also make laws. Laws that Musk must follow or risk consequences.
> If he establishes a base on mars, it is essentially his. Earth based countries are forbidden (in treaty at least) from claiming ownership of celestial bodies. What's to stop him declaring himself emperor of Mars.
He’d be a paper emperor. No method or means of enforcing his claimed dominion.
> The person that controls the flow of supplies to an isolated world is pretty much all powerful.
Countries control the right to launch those supplies. Musk is a few steps below that in the chain of power.
You realise he needs permission from the government to even develop rockets, much less launch them into space and all the other crap. Unless there's an autonomous community on Mars that can defend from the US Space force, no private entity will be emperor of anything unless they are controlling things on Earth.
He already has permission to launch his rockets. Or he can just move the company to another country. Once the colony is established and has reached a certain size its probably inevitable. At that point what is the US going to do? Nuke the colonies to prevent independence? Figure out a way to load 100's of marines onto rockets and send them to mars? Starve the colonies? I very much doubt any of those things happen. As soon as a colony is established I think the path to independence begins.
He does not even have to move an openly hostile country, better if he doesn't, Any country in south america or africa would bend over backwards to get his companies. Imagine the economic boom those countries would experience via trade with a space faring nation.
You might recall a certain movement asking for Obama's birth certificate to prove that he was born in the US, back when he ran for president.
It's not completely clear that you need to be born in the US - several presidents and presidential candidates weren't - but it's pretty clear that foreigners who become naturalized US citizens later in life are not eligible to run for president.
Yes - I don’t believe there is a requirement to be born inside US territory (Ted Cruz was born in Canada and clearly desperately wants to be president!) - just to be a US citizen at birth.
He was born in the British colony of Virginia. There's no point in history where you could describe that as "foreign" to the US, in the same way you wouldn't say Stalin was "foreign born" from the USSR.
Why would being largest shareholder of a company not give you any special privileges in a company? Also, it guarantees him at least one seat on the board, and probably enough clout to help dictate the future direction of the company.
If your largest shareholder says the current methodology used for content manipulation and account banning is bad for business, then there will be systemic changes as a result.
And some 80% of that are retweets or replies, not original tweets.
Most people do not use Twitter at all. When they do use it, it is mostly read-only. When it's not read-only, it's most retweeting stuff.
You can't deny that Twitter has an outsized cultural influence, but the underlying reality is sobering. It's not a "speech" platform for the masses as no actual speech happens by the masses themselves. If the retweet button were to be removed, the platform would collapse.
It's not surprising that the masses don't post. You can't express yourself on Twitter due to the character limit, so all you can do is witty superficial takes. Threading and replies are a disaster making a structured discussion impossible. These two things alone make the platform useless for most speech purposes.
And let's not forget the sour atmosphere of extreme hostility, permanent outrage, bad faith discussions, smearing, doxxing, cancellations, the culture is terrible.
Back on point, I think Twitter has a far bigger problem than a free speech problem. There is very little speech and it excessively rewards the most unreasonable speech.