Interesting if he manages to take over twitter. For me Twitter has become full of people marketing themselves with lists, tweets that don't make sense out of context, replies full of bile or inane comments and animated gifs.
But I'm not convinced Musk's opinions of what is good for twitter is aligned with other content creators and consumers. Paypal, Tesla, SpaceX, Boring Company have clear goals - twitter is quite different.
I feel like most people must use Twitter wrong. Despite how common a criticism it is, your description is not even remotely my experience.
I don’t know why. Maybe most users follow people who they like or respect or think are good people not people who share content they care about or write interesting original tweets? Maybe they think the only recourse to not liking what they see on their timeline is to complain and wish people were better rather than unfollow? Or maybe some whole major topics/spheres of interest are just entirely toxic to the core.
Twitter is incredibly valuable to me as a source of news, insight, and discussion on a wide range of topics (from programming to space to politics to skiing and more). It’s been nothing short of revolutionary for my consumption of news and information.
Twitter is actually better than RSS (though I do miss RSS being a thing) at what RSS was designed for, because curating your follows can give a better signal to noise ratio than taking everything from a given site, AND gives you a wider range of sources because you don't personally need to discover a source to see articles from it.
It also provides for some excellent debates, discussion, and interactions between really smart people.
I do agree with Elon though. The direction of the product is poor and there are many baffling decisions. It sometimes seems like Twitter themselves don’t even know why their product is valuable or what it’s potential really is.
I’d love to see some really radical changes. The kind that might not work and could be the end of Twitter if they fail. I’d love to see Twitter become really open, even open source, become a federated network, integrate privacy and anonymity tech, etc.
We don’t know his plans and I doubt it’ll happen, but Elon is one of the few people who has demonstrated willing to risk everything on an outcome he thinks is important. I hope this is one of this cases, and his instincts are at least reasonable.
I'm always baffled about this as well. I keep the people I follow heavily curated, and I don't follow more than 90 - 120 people at a time. Unfollowing and Refollowing is easy, why should I amass a list of thousands of follows like some people do?
If I notice a negative pattern or drop in quality I simply unfollow, that's it. It's the big advantage over Facebook, the relationships are not bi-directional for me as an average user.
In short: I get a quality experience and lots of useful information from Twitter because I only follow people that tweet quality content and useful tweets.
However I do have to mention that the algorithmic timeline IS really bad, so I do feel like Twitter is constantly fighting me and trying to turn my feed into polarizing crap.
Agreed, if you can’t read enough of the temporally sorted timeline the answer right now is unfollows not the algo timeline.
I would totally use something to sort and filter my feed so I could proceed it quicker and follow more insightful people. It just needs to be external to Twitter, transparent, and under my control, and have financial incentives aligned with my goals.
I actually like the idea of a marketplace for both human curated and algorithmic “edit streams” (h/t Neal Stephenson) as views over Twitter and other social/internet data that are transparent about what they filtered out or boosted and why, and could be provided by FOSS and collaborative communities as well as companies with a variety of business models.
I'm similar but I keep a hard cap of 80 accounts I follow, if I'm at that it's one in and one out.
That way every new follow comes with a cost because I have to a) drop something I thought was following b) weigh up which is least valuable.
As a result all I follow on twitter is open source projects, companies I use products from (i.e. JetBrains) and people I actually like/have something interesting to say.
It makes twitter very useful to corral all that stuff into one place.
I joined Twitter fairly recently and am mostly following journalists and thought leaders for subjects I'm interested in, and a few high quality creators. There's an odd gem but there's still a ton of noise per signal.
I don't think Dorsey has any idea what he's doing and I think even less of Musk. The value to society that can be derived from a platform like Twitter is completely separate from the value it can bring to investors.
You can't read anything relevant until you have curated who you follow, which takes a long time.
Whatever you write goes into the void, until you have gained followers, for which you must keep posting into the void for hopes of getting followers...
In short, it only works for accounts from way back with enough circlejerk, or famous people.
Twitter (and Reddit, and Facebook) is like beans. Beans are a great nutritious tasty food of you know how to prepare them. But if you eat raw beans directly out of the package from the producer, you will get sick or die.
> For me Twitter has become full of people marketing themselves with lists, tweets that don't make sense out of context, replies full of bile or inane comments and animated gifs.
I've found twitter's quality is a direct correlation to how discerning I am about who I follow. I don't really tweet or reply, so for me it is a read-only exercise. As such, the people I follow tend to be really high-quality (I am not typically following "regular" people like friends, etc.). Journalists, experts in specific domains, etc. And I try to make sure I am following people that have views different than mine along with those I do agree with. As a result, I've noticed I read pretty detailed information well before I see it break in major news organizations, and it is surprising balanced on the whole.
Yeah. I mostly left Twitter about 9 years ago (!) for the same reasons.
I wonder if a celebrity like Musk is overestimating how important Twitter really is. Because in my view, it's a cesspool of self-promoters, hate, corporate marketing and superficial populism. I believe correcting that course is impossible. It's been like that for 10 years with no change.
#1 make twitter efficient. firing 80-90% of the employees and replacing them with effective workers and management saves a ton of money.
#2. Mitigate the bots and trolls by requiring payment and identification.
#3. Open the feed algorithm and give people more control
#4. Reduce the silencing of users.
The last one is probably going to turn out to be harder than Elon expects. If Elon owned Youtube this week he would be sued for enabling the NYC subway terrorist. Same thing will happen on Twitter once he owns it.
Tesla also fired a union organizer (while tweeting about how they are free to join a union) [0], banned a journalist from buying a Tesla[1], threatened to sue another journalist[2], and tried to destroy the life of a whistleblower[3].
Did you read the lawsuit? He isn't saying that Top Gear has no right to say negative things about Tesla. He is saying that when those negative things are lies and damage the business Top Gear should pay for damages.
But you're overall point is correct, Elon's definition of Free Speech is not universally agreed upon by everyone. However, it is impossible to draw a line between acceptable and unacceptable speech that everyone will agree with.
> There's also the other possibility that Twitter, as a product, is limited to a more niche audience than something like Facebook.
You state that as if what twitter is as a product is set in stone and delivered as a commandment. It is defined by the product people, engineers, and the executives of the company who have been doing a terrible job at that. If they were competent and the way out was to be Facebook, they should’ve been Facebook by now. FWIW, Facebook was not Facebook either. It didn’t have news feed before it copied twitter. Ironic.
#1. Efficient at what? And how do you know the amount of chaff is 80-90%? And exactly how do you find "effective" workers. Like this bullet point alone is just so hand-wavy and vague. Might as well have just said "Make twitter more gooder".
#2. This kills the twitter. First of all, no one is going to pay to read Elon Musk's tweets. Not for more than a month or two.
#3. What would "open[ing] the feed algorithm" accomplish here? I assume you mean publish the source of the algorithm so we can see how it works. Why? So I can run my own twitter? And what do you mean by "more control"? Control of what?
#4. I assume you mean fewer bans and removal of tweets. And I assume by "reduce" you don't mean eliminate. And I assume you don't want elimination because you recognize that some bans and deletions are necessary. That's a sticky wicket. You don't disagree with the action so much as the degree and/or the conditions of the action. This comes down to the question of why should your standards be preferable to twitter's?
And ironically, it's actually probably one of the easier ones to do. As I don't think you have well-defined definitions for efficiency, effectiveness, or control. Which isn't an uncommon phenomenon. It's like having a really good idea for a story/movie/series/book/whatever. As long as you never actually have to make it, the idea gets to be as awesome as it could be. But execution is the bitch.
"Twitterized" - means you can no longer absorb anything but simple concepts that can be delivered in a few lines, due to too much time spent on Twitter. To quote some early 20th century propaganda monkey, "The essence of propaganda is to take a complex subject, reduce it to a simple concept that a small child can understand, and then repeat, repeat, repeat."
That's what Twitter is ideal for, and that's what political and media types use it for. Add in siloed echo chambers like Facebook groups and Reddit subreddits... I urge everyone to flush it all down the toilet.
But I'm not convinced Musk's opinions of what is good for twitter is aligned with other content creators and consumers. Paypal, Tesla, SpaceX, Boring Company have clear goals - twitter is quite different.