1891

Tweeter is the Axios business reporter. Link is to a WSJ story.

1892

I’m sure Musk will solve this with more shitposting and polls making fun of “woke” corporations.

I would not put it past the incoming Republican-majority House to introduce legislation making it illegal for corporations to not advertise because of a site’s moderation policies. Or something stupid like that.

1893

He really is behaving like a 2008 message board poster, isn’t he?

  1. Come up with idea that was long-ago floated in some production meeting and found to be either impossible to implement or which was otherwise problematic and thus scrapped.

  2. Set idea from step one as a post as a sort of trial balloon.

  3. Hear from the community the reasons why the idea never got past brainstorming sessions.

  4. Shitpost to make fun of the community telling you why your idea sucks.

  5. Repeat.

1894

Well that and most any new head of a department who comes in to “shake things up.”

“Have you guys tried doing it [some other way]?”
“Yes, 10 years ago and it failed miserably.”
“Well, let’s try it again and see if it works out differently!”

Or even better:

“Here are the 20 reasons why that won’t work.”
“Well it won’t with that attitude!”

1895

Business consulting is such a racket. It works on a cycle.

Year one: pay consultant millions for ideas. Idea: if we move a lot of people from the individual departments to a central “shared service” model you will save money.

Year 20: pay consultant millions for ideas. Idea: if we move all the people from the central service to the individual departments it will save you money.

Repeat.

1896

The beatings will continue until… until… the beatings will continue.

1897

That’s hysterical, except that it will probably happen.

1898

Twenty years is far too long - I’ve worked in large aerospace companies where the switch between functional-based engineering teams, to aircraft-based engineering teams, and back again, happened on a 2-3 year cycle… I was seconded to Spain for two years, and there were two re-orgs while I was away. Which at least meant I came back into the same structure I’d left ;)

1899

I find it weird that all the attention is on moderation. I’m sure Tom has actual numbers, but I doubt more than 1% of QT3, needs more moderation than the warning on a handful of posts in a year. Outright bans are exceedingly rare. Twitter attracts a different type of person than QT3, but I think 90-95% of Twitter users also don’t need more than rare moderation.

There is a helluva of alot more wrong with Twitter than just moderation, bots, hat t speech etc.

The platform sucks, and there has been essentially no innovation in the 14 years I’ve been on it or the 10 years I’ve been actively using it. The only two improvements I’ve seen are 280 characters and verified users, aka blue check marks. I think Elon can help with that. SpaceX has 12,000 employees, Twitter has 7,500. I don’t think it is an exaggeration to say that innovation per employee is probably an order of magnitude better at SpaceX than Twitter.

  1. Editing how long have users asking for this? Just yesterday I added the word never, to the wrong sentence completed negating the point I was making. There was enough feedback I couldn’t really delete the tweet, but also couldn’t edit it. There needs to be some thought into how to display edits, but it isnt rocket science either.
  2. Working search. Right if I want o see what Elon tweeted about Twitter today I use Google. On Facebook and QT3 I used the platforms search function.
  3. A thread reader/writer. Easy ways to read and write tweets with more than 280 characters.
  4. Better control over DMs
  5. A better UX. I literally have to use Google to do anything other reading or compose a tweet, delete that requires googling
  6. Better targeted ads, compared to Facebook, or Google Ad word the ads I see on Twitter are seldom relevant to me.
  7. Better video posting.
  8. More options for controlling my feed, with better explanations
  9. More information about followers.
  10. Better alerting about fake news.

That’s just some things I came up with 20 of thought, I’m sure there are 20 other ones.

A better platform might convince me to fork out $8

1900

But I’d bet 70% of the Twitter employee base is content moderation. 20% is sales and marketing, 9% is IT security, and 1% is development. Cutting 50% of the base is going to all come from content moderation. They can’t afford to cut anything else.

1901

I had no idea SpaceX had so many employees. If pressed, I would have guessed maybe a thousand or two.

1902

Twitter’s product is the user base, and the user base exists because of the moderation. Not because of the technology, which as you say is not very good. But the technology almost doesn’t matter, if they mostly get the moderation right.

1903

Deleting is literally the top three dots option on desktop and second on mobile. I suspect some of your issues may not be Twitter issues.

1904

I agree the content is king. Right now I primarily use Twitter to follow the War in Ukraine. The moderation is light and virtually irrelevant to me. This is despite knowing there are organized propoganda teams by both countries to influence it. I also follow startup news, moderation is not an issue for that topic.

According to Google, 1,500 Twitter employees are involved in moderation, and as of Oct 22, 2022, 3023 engineers. So @jpinard numbers are widely wrong. I’m not sure how they count an engineer working on automated moderation tools.

Before Trump moderation was not a big deal on Twitter. Yes, trolls were an issue, but I’d argue no more than most other social media. Trump, MAGA, fake news, election deniers etc. have made it more important but it is simply not true that moderation is the core do the Twitter experience, any more than it is true on Reddit or QT3.

The difference is that mainstream media is not on QT3 and Reddit and it is those are big issues to them. So when Elon talks about Trump coming back it is big deal to the media. There are tens of millions of tweeter users who don’t care about politics, I use to be one of them.

1905

About those rigorous ID checks…
(I mean, maybe they add that when Elon’s own legal team says “My dude”. I hope so, but…)

1906

Even if every single blue check signs up and pays, that’s only $3.2 million a month. This does not save Twitter.

This just sounds like a way to monetize the bots, not get rid of them.

1907

FTFY.

1908

I get why famous people might need a blue checkmark… But why would I pay for one?

1909

Has he tweeted “You’ll get over it” yet?

Anyone here remember the Fark redesign incident of 2007?

1910

Notice that Elon didn’t sign it himself.