If this BBC story doesn't indicate that there is an overreaction to new Twitter management, I don't know what will.
It reminded me of when I was considering trying to move all of our customers to receive PGP encrypted mail in 2005. An intelligent employee brought up that an average business person would never do that. Luckily we never implemented it.
Mastodon is great but it isn't a replacement for Twitter. Too much friction. Too hard for the average journalist. Not enough reach.
>there is an overreaction to new Twitter management
Oh i think its a perfectly legitimate and reasonable reaction to new Twitter management. a guy worth about 200bn USD spent his first day at the office dragging a piece of plumbing around cheerleading his impending job cuts and upcoming $8 surcharge for a feature that only really benefits and legitimizes the platform. he then axes most of the company, especially the moderation team, and acts shocked when brand-safety conscious corporations pull their advertising out of an abundance of caution.
hes lucky corporate brands and advertisers havent figured out they could start their own Mastodon instance for almost nothing, plug it until it becomes more popular than Twitter, and maintain all their existing brand safety controls in the process.
If Musk wanted to take a 44bn USD kick to the knackers and spend the end of his year getting deadass roasted on his new social media platform by literally everyone, its a success.
> hes lucky corporate brands and advertisers havent figured out they could start their own Mastodon instance for almost nothing, plug it until it becomes more popular than Twitter, and maintain all their existing brand safety controls in the process.
This is a very funny way of thinking which gets reality backwards. Corporate brands go where user eyeballs are. In the past the eyeballs read newspapers, and advertisers paid newspapers for space. Then the eyeballs went to Google, and advertisers paid Google for space. Then Facebook, and Twitter took over, and advertisers started paying them. Advertisers don't tell user eyeballs what platforms to go to. They follow the users.
I don't think it's that simple is it? Companies like Ford don't advertise on sites like Parler not just because there aren't many people there, but because of the content that their adverts would be presented alongside. What seems to concern companies about the new direction of Twitter is that more extremists may be allowed back on Twitter if the content rules are loosened, and the companies' advertising may be presented alongside that. It may also be that if those extremists are allowed back then many people will start to desert Twitter, and it will be even less attractive. But I think both things - number of users and the content - are being taken into account.
As a Life long F150 owner (having owned 5 of one from each of the last 5 generations including my current one... all V8's as well, Ecoboost V6 is a terrible engine and does not belong in a truck ;) ), and a person that lives in a Red State, and a person that Knows alot of other F150 owners..
I can assure you the people screeching about twitters new ownership are not Fords Customer base. Ford's bread and butter is the F150, a class of vehicle that the twitterverse that is leaving on mass would like to eliminate from production
Ford marketing dept is extremely tone deaf listing to that crowd
Sorry but all you say in you post is a bunch of baseless personal assertions pushing a specific personal political take that has no substance or credibility.
The Ford F150 is no niche product. It's the most popular car in all US states except in 5 or 6 states. According to some sources , "the vast majority of these new trucks are [sold] in large and medium-sized cities."
So unless you want to claim that white males living in large urban centers from all corners o the US are not Twitter's demographics, your view is baseless and completely detached from reality.
But be my guest and point out the best source you used to source your claim.
>>So unless you want to claim that white males living in large urban centers from all corners o the US are not Twitter's demographics
That is not my claim at all, my claim is the people that are freaking out about Elon owning twitter, that are freaking out about having a more free speech platform, that are freaking out that conservatives views will not be instantly banned by twitter "trust and safety" are not white males living in or buying trucks in Medium to Large cities in largely fly over country outside of Coastal West, and Coastal North East states which seems to be where most of the people freaking out are based from.
Ford suspending ads on twitter is doing a disservice to ford, to appease people that were never going to buy a F150 in the first place. The twitter users Ford is targeting either does not care, or supports Elon's changes.
>>It's the most popular car in all US states except in 5 or 6 states.
Yes, and what states are those?? All blue states, and specifically Silicon Valley.
>>"the vast majority of these new trucks are [sold] in large and medium-sized cities."
I dont think that is the "gotcha" you think it is... There are plenty of Medium and even large cities in "fly over" country, further most dealers in large and medium sized cities so even if you do not live in one, or plan on using your truck in one, chances are you are traveling to a Large or medium sized city to buy the thing.
I currently live in a Medium sized city, but my truck was bought in a large city (the 3rd largest city in my state) and my previous truck was bought in the state capital even though I lived in a town of 1500 people at the time... The dealer I bought it from was a 4 hour drive away.
> conservatives views will not be instantly banned by twitter
I see assertions like this a lot. Please show me the person who has been banned from Twitter for advocating for lower taxes or social benefit cuts. Or even, if you want to stretch the definition of “conservatives views”, gun rights and climate denial.
>>Please show me the person who has been banned from Twitter for advocating for lower taxes or social benefit cuts.
That would be republican public policy views, not conservative views. They are different things.
Conservative views are less about the economy and more about culture, family, traditional gender roles, faith, etc.
There are all kinds of examples of that being banned espically since TOS is written for a progressive or left world view
Remember the banning of Babylon Bee for satirically misgendering a trans high profile public offical was the catalyst that started Elon talking about buying twitter in the first place
Ford cares what non-Parler users think. That’s it. And because there are many, many more non-Parler users than Parler users, they’ve done extremely basic cost benefit analysis.
There’s also an interesting prisoner’s dilemma to advertising, which cuts both ways. If your competitors advertise, then you need to as well. And if they don’t, then you don’t either.
I really don't think companies care what their ads appear alongside. They care about a Twitter user posting an outrage tweet with a screenshot of an ad for a Burger appearing next to the N word. As if we aren't mature enough yet to separate ad space and user generated content.
>I really don't think companies care what their ads appear alongside. They care about a Twitter user posting an outrage tweet with a screenshot of an ad for a Burger appearing next to the N word.
I don't understand what distinction you are making here? Aren't those the same things?
Companies do care what their ads appear alongside, because of the outrage tweets and because, en masse, people / the media aren't mature enough to separate ad space and user-generated content.
No a very loud, very vocal, minority of users that have an extreme authoritarian world view and will create the appearance of wide scale social outrage where there is none will scare marketers..
Of course if they had any real data on the impact of their ads they probally will realize that none of the ads are effective anyway. I have never once saw a twitter ad for a large national fast food place, or a car company and said "hey I need to go buy from them"
Now marketing for lesser known things, things I may not have even known existed well that is effective. But a Burger king add no....
>I have never once saw a twitter ad for a large national fast food place, or a car company and said "hey I need to go buy from them"
Almost no one thinks advertising works on them, but that comes from a misunderstanding of what ads are trying to accomplish. Mercedes doesn't expect you to see a Twitter ad then go out and buy a $60k car. They advertise to establish their brand so that when you do decide to buy a car, you have a perception of Mercedes that is at least partially built through the years of advertisements you have seen from them.
Pray tell, before the internet how many effective boycotts were there in media, are you suggesting this never existed?
The vocal minority has always had the largest impact in all history, that's just how humans work. And even sometimes the vocal minority is correct and the moderate masses say "Oh, yea, you're right megacorp does suck and should probably change".
Simply put there are a number of relatively high view sites that don't have what we would consider reputable advertisers because those advertisers don't agree with the message of the site.
That is simply not true.... the reality is the vocal minority can only effect change is the structures of power support their cause.
This is why people are sooo upset with the management change at twitter, and why they are going after the advertisers now while they still have at least symbolically control over the structures of power.
For at least 20 years now the far left authoritarians have had total control over the media, and the large internet platforms, this wind is starting to shift to the other direction and we are seeing the inevitable attempt to tear down the system before "the others" gain control over it
>For at least 20 years now the far left authoritarians have had total control over the media
I try not to cuss much on HN, but what the fuck are you talking about? If you think Fox News, one of the organizations with the largest audience is far left, you're out of your mind. If you think MSNBC or CBS were anywhere close to 'far left', you are again, out of your mind. Under no definition are those far left.
I think you have a confused idea that a 'open free market' system is building itself, where in reality a bunch of far right fascists are attempting a powergrab.
One slightly right authoritarian news source does not a rule make... I bet you think "republican" means right.... I am a firm believer of the unipary theory of politics
Republicans are no better than democrats. One wants to tell you what to do with your life (including your bedroom) but leave you with your money and guns, the other wants to take your money and guns but will allow you to do pretty much any thing you want (including victimize violently and take an property of others it seems)
Neither are good, both are very much authoritarian
> If you think MSNBC or CBS were anywhere close to 'far left',
If we are cussing.... What the fuck are you talking about... MSNBC not far left? What the hell do you consider far left then... MSNBC is the leftist of left.... Hell At this point they are probably more left than the Young Turks
Ground News marks them as left as well [1]. NPR is "leans left" [2] and Reuters is "Center" [3]
For every Fox news, there are 5++ Left media companies, so yes Fox nows has a large audience because it is consolidated and not spread out between MSNBC, CNN, New Times, Washington Post, and the 100's of other left and left leaning outlets.
Especially because Twitter design makes it hard to separate them. There's a small text "promoted tweet" but that's it. No background, border anything to help telling them apart.
> I really don't think companies care what their ads appear alongside.
It's always funny to see people on HN confidently assert absolute horseshit based on no experience.
As someone who's worked in ad-supported publishing, they absolutely do. A lot of time and energy goes into trying to ensure ads never appear alongside content that the purchaser doesn't want, and failure usually results in running ads for free, at a minimum.
Corporations bootstrapping their own community spaces, branded journalism, etc is historically common; the reason for not doing that comes down to cost and convenience. It saps away attention from the primary line of business to invest in a genuine, highly-engaged space like that, and it's much easier to look for platforms with a generic ad slot to insert messaging into.
But the past decades of outsource-and-automate, attaching the brand to new tech companies as they appear, has largely passed; if all the existing spaces have become unproductive sources of eyeballs, you have to change course and come up with a way to make "mcdonalds.social" an attractive hangout instead. The only reason centralized social media got as far as it did before was because the capital markets footed that bill.
Is there even a remotely balanced alignment between the number of users on a platform and that platform’s advertising market share? I think the answer is no. Google and Meta dominate ads. No-one else really has traction, irrespective of their platform’s success.
> This is a very funny way of thinking which gets reality backwards. Corporate brands go where user eyeballs are.
This is a rather naive and uninformed take. Here's yesterday's tweet of the day, where a top marketer called Elon Musk on his bullshit conspiracy theory.
Alternatively, a businessman running some of the world's most successful companies took over a failing company and in his first week took a hatchet to a slovenly working culture and overgrown staff, and along with a practical plan to mend the company's finances and break its reliance on advertising, proposed new features (community notes, improved search, payments for creators) on an aggressive timeline that have many user excited about the platform for the first time in years.
The company wasn't financially failing until Elon showed up, scared off most of the major advertisers, and stuck the company with $13B in high-interest loans he used to buy it.
Wouldn't this logic make basically all SV giants "failing" until they hit that hockey stick turning point? Hell even Tesla didn't turn a profit until 2020, and it is pretty universally considered to be a success (even if there are some raised eyebrows over their the source of the profits being tax credits, and sky-high stock price)
Twitter actually turned a profit only twice in 10 years (FY18/19) but then went right back to hemorrhaging money. There was ostensibly no reason for it beyond mismanagement and staggering waste.
No objections over it being described as mismanaged and wasteful, but "failing" implies it was on the brink of collapse. It certainly wasn't my idea of a model company, but it wasn't exactly Lehman Brothers during the financial crisis.
They have all kinds of weird tax stuff going on from 2018-2020. Just ignoring taxes, they had a loss in 2020 and 2021 (2021 was mainly due to a class action lawsuit they lost for $800 million). 2022 YTD income was just barely positive in Q2 with them showing a 970 million gain from selling a company. So not really failing, but had a very uncertain future.
>hes lucky corporate brands and advertisers havent figured out they could start their own Mastodon instance for almost nothing, plug it until it becomes more popular than Twitter
So you think the only reason that Twitter (and all social media companies) exist is because literally every other company on the planet that advertises didn't "just realize" they could "just plug" a Mastodon instance until it's more popular? McDonald's, Pepsi, Audi, Coke, Nike, etc - don't have one single person that realizes this one easy trick for displacing Twitter?
The reality is the average user could not give a crap who owns twitter, or what they do. They arent there for the owner, they're there because its a functioning social network.
The key term here is 'functioning social network' and what that actually means.
One of the truths of humanity is we don't accept 'extreme' views that we ourselves do not hold. When presented with them we will find ways to censor them from our daily lives. The opposite side of the coin is the people that hold these extreme views very commonly want to share these views with others (I would assume so that others adopt these views, but there could be other motivations). These behaviors are in conflict with each other, and if the extremists are not moderated, the moderate masses will eventually leave.
Why the owner is important is they typically become the 'buck stops here' person for policy on what is extreme and how the site will be moderated. As of so far Musk (already a controversial character to many) has not given much good information to any party involved in the continuation of twitter (users/advertisers/workers) on how this is going to proceed and given quite a fair amount of questionable information and bad signaling.
no, he really doesn’t. he very publicly blocked the ceo of an advertising company when they attempted to—professionally and politely—explain to elon what some of their concerns were.
it’s unreal how he’s so loudly demonstrating his instability and then complaining that people are saying he’s unstable.
Your post comes off as extremely negative towards Musk. I’m going to get downvoted for saying this but let’s be honest for a minute.
There were multiple videos titled something like “a day in the life of a twitter employee” were they employees at twitter documented how they drank alcohol and “chilled” on the roof after a few meetings. This doesn’t seem like work to me.
Second, the moderation team at twitter covered up the Hunter Biden laptop story because they had a bias. I don’t think they were doing a great job.
It would be hilarious watching the infighting spread over various instances themselves that were infighting.
But companies don't want the "liability" (not necessarily legal liability, but appearances) - and they don't want @thenewh1tler@nike.mastadon or whatever doing unsightly things.
Companies wouldn't have open registration. They'd run it like any other corporate resource, integrated into their ldap/ad/sso solution and with a corporate policy for what their employees could do on it.
Yeah and for Nike I think that'd be true here too. But for, say, Wired? Probably more active/useful.
That's the biggest corporate comms use of Twitter anyways, outside "Twitter as support short line" which is honestly both incredibly obnoxious and really unfair to users not on Twitter so I think it's a good thing it might die.
Why does it matter how much he’s worth? Never understood why people are so concerned about him cutting jobs? He bought the company and took it private. It’s his right to restructure it and try to make it generate profit as he’d wish. The board of directors of public Twitter approved of this. What do people think, the USA is FOSS?
> Never understood why people are so concerned about him cutting jobs?
There can be many different perspectives on it.
A possible perspective is someone who uses twitter. If Elon cut jobs too hastily that might risk the stability, safety, or moderation of the platform. That is a valid concern for users.
If you are an advertiser for a big brand you are concerned about what content your advertisement appears next to. Brands don’t want to see their names plastered next to things which are too controversial, or frowned uppon. This is called “brand safety”. They might worry that a deep cut in twitter’s headcount will mean that twitter can’t quarantee that they can maintain the required level of moderation for this.
There is then the perspective of a regular everyday person who is not a twitter user in any way. They are interested in a safe society. If the changes at twitter lead to an under moderated free-for-all that can give power to all kind of dangerous individuals. Radicalisation is a real thing. Free rethoric against groups of people can lead to more radical rethoric. And more radical speech can lead to violence.
> It’s his right to restructure it and try to make it generate profit as he’d wish.
Of course! That is without dispute. One can be concerned about how something is managed even if the owners of said something has every right to manage the think the way they want it.
I recently started reading history and it speaks a lot about land ownership and how peasants would get indebted to barons for working on it. On the surface that made a lot of sense, and yet this was not the type of society we wanted.
Nowadays billionaires remind me of those barons, some even buy out land (see Bill Gates and his buying spree [1]). So people mentioning someone’s net worth states their class and this is important for the context. As for Musk being entitled to fire anyone, sure he can do that, although some of it may not be legal, plus we as society may decide that this is not the norm we want to accept. Same as the peasants didn’t earlier.
> Nowadays billionaires remind me of those barons, some even buy out land
I'm pretty sure you missed the important point of that history you've been reading. The bad part is the indentured servitude, not the land ownership.
> On the surface that made a lot of sense
To whom?
> So people mentioning someone’s net worth states their class and this is important for the context. As for Musk being entitled to fire anyone, sure he can do that, although some of it may not be legal, plus we as society may decide that this is not the norm we want to accept. Same as the peasants didn’t earlier.
There are a plethora of companies that behave in this exact way that millions of people continue to patronize in a much more substantial manner than they do Twitter (Food, vehicles, electronics, etc.).
Musk's behavior is not new, unique or shocking. These people are overplaying their outrage over his behavior because they don't like the man and Twitter is their safe space. It has absolutely nothing to do with his actual business practices.
OP was not claiming all land ownership was bad. Just that rich people have commonly used land ownership to harm others. There is a long and rich history of this.
> creating legal property rights to land previously held in common.
That's not a use of land ownership, that's an amoral redistribution (theft) of land.
They took ownership from one party to another. The amorality was the transfer, not the ownership. Unless you think both parties are equally amoral for owning the land in the beginning and the end of the process.
The argument you're making would be like saying it was amoral for plantation owners to own the land they held because they had slaves. The problem is the slaves (and all the evils that came with it), not the plantation.
> Never understood why people are so concerned about him cutting jobs? He bought the company and took it private. It’s his right to restructure it and try to make it generate profit as he’d wish.
Absent a few questions about whether the layoffs have been done in a way that violates employment laws (which I've seen enough debate about that I imagine we'll have to see how lawsuits turn out), I don't think anyone is saying he doesn't have the right to do this. Rather, criticism focuses on whether it was (a) a good idea, and (b) well-executed.
There's a few major strands of criticism of the layoffs that appeal to me:
1. It was less than a week. You can't possibly have reviewed who you were firing well enough to be confident that you were firing the right people.
2. The departments that were laid off are concerning. Apparently the trust and safety teams were hardest hit, and making the already-bad moderation worse on Twitter doesn't sound great.
Because there is something distasteful about a man that rich firing loads of people. There is something almost medieval about it. He's basically a modern day king. I've never understood the complete lack of empathy displayed by so many people on HN. It's worse than Reddit.
"He bought the man, it is his property now. He can do with him as he wishes" - legal ownership can still be wrong.
> I've never understood the complete lack of empathy
A lot of Twitter employees have spent years being about as obnoxious as they possibly can be to anyone with even slightly different views. I've seen a Twitter employee practically in tears calling someone a fascist because they insisted on putting semi-colons after statements in JavaScript.
> Because there is something distasteful about a man that rich firing loads of people.
I don't think it's distasteful at all. Twitter isn't a charity and it needs to fix its finances. Even the previous CEOs recognized that there's a ton of Twitter employees that do basically no relevant work.
> "He bought the man, it is his property now. He can do with him as he wishes" - legal ownership can still be wrong.
Jesus do you even read the words you just typed? Someone bought a company that was hemorrhaging money, he let go of the fluff and you're equating it to slave ownership?!
It is somewhat telling that those who used to dismiss all complaints about Twitter's moderation practices with a variation of the "private companies can do whatever they want" canard, are not really repeating that one anymore, or worse, seem to have abandoned that principle outright and are now complaining that the owner is, indeed, doing whatever he wants.
Twitter was a $4 million a day money pit at the time of its acquisition. It has had 2 profitable years in its entire life. Corporations are not charities and it absolutely beggars belief that people seem to think radical changes were not both necessary and inevitable.
> Twitter was a $4 million a day money pit at the time of its acquisition.
Do you have a source for that? They lost $221M in 2021[1] which is ~$600k/day (and that was after a $800M lawsuit settlement which would have put them at ~$580M profit for 2021.)
Ok, do you have a source that isn't someone known for playing fast and loose with facts, especially financial ones? Anything pre-takeover that suggests they were losing $4M a day? Because it is almost certain that the $4M a day he quotes is likely only due to the $1B a year debt interest Musk himself saddled the company with.
Or do you think it is even slightly plausible for a company to go from a profit of ~$570M to a loss of ~$1.4B in under a year?
Pre-takeover is irrelevant. The statement I said was "at the time of acquisition". If you don't want to take the word of the person who likely has the greatest insights on the financial status of a nonpublic company they own, welp, don't know what to tell you.
And regardless of the rate of loss, the fact remains that twitter, throughout its entire history, has been a money-losing operation. Even taking the literally 2 years they were in the black, that doesn't wipe out the other unprofitable years. This seems like one hell of a nit to pick.
"Corporations are people" is the plural of "a corporation is people". It has nothing to do with assigning person hood to a corporate entity. "Corporations are people" is in reference to the 1st amendment free speech rights that the _people_ who make up a corporation still maintain when they are acting as a group.
Consider not eating up the soundbites of politicians without understanding the context.
Twitter has lost money nearly every year since it’s been public, and was losing $4 million a day when Elon took over. If jobs don’t generate money they can’t exist in the free market, and the real shock is that the previous board of directors didn’t initiate layoffs sooner.
From when twitter went public(2013), the deficit decreased every year and eventually the company ran a measurable profit in 2018 and 2019. It ran red in 2020 but since then has been making a profit most quarters. This seems to indicate that while they weren't running on great margins, they were above board even if just barely.
Twitter's net loss in 2021 was $221 million, far from $4 million a day, and there's nothing to indicate that had changed before he bought it. The figure he quoted is made up predominantly of the $1 billion in annual interest payments Twitter now has thanks to Musk's leveraged buy out.
There was no imminent need for Twitter do anything. It still had a healthy enough cash pile and leeway and time to layoff 10% of the workforce or so to return to pre-COVID staffing levels.
Exactly. He's running it into the ground financially by saddling a low margin business with high-interest debt and also tanking revenue by spooking advertisers. 5D chess.
System is broken and hating or getting rid of the winner does not help since there is a line of people ready to take his spot and that spot is only open for people who are not afraid of a fight. Don't hate the player, hate the game as they say.
He has a right to buy the “public square” and do whatever he wants with it. The people who occupied that public square have the right to move to a different one. Isn’t that what TFA is all about? Obviously that’s inconvenient for a lot of people and probably disastrous for Musk and his investors but I guess we’ll see what happens.
It's not just about the USA. Twitter has to follow the law wherever it operates. The way the company went about announcing redundancies in the Dublin office could well fall foul of Irish employment law (IANAL etc), and people have legitimate cause for annoyance if Musk feels he's rich and powerful enough to get away with doing it anyway.
People really like twitter. They’re concerned about the new guy coming in and making rash decisions with shaky justification. Millions of people have to deal with the implications of his decision. Just because it’s his legal right doesn’t mean people have to be happy about what he’s doing. And it’s yet another reminder that we’d rather be on platforms where users have some amount of power, but network effects and billions in investment favor platforms where that’s not the case.
Because some people think that wealth somehow equates to evil. It's a very juvenile way to think, and I suspect most people don't even know why they dislike Elon (or any other billionare - Elon is just an example). After people read so many sensationalized articles online, they adopt the author's sanctimonious opinions/views as their own.
It's shocking how people can hold so much contempt for a man they've never met. Even if Elon posts snarky shit online, who doesn't? If everyone's life was put under a microscope, they would likely be under the same media firestorm as Elon, or even worse.
EDIT: Instead of replying to me and engaging in discussion (maybe I could learn something), I get downvoted. Stay classy, HN.
> Because some people think that wealth somehow equates to evil. It's a very juvenile way to think
You set up a strawman and knock it down. There are many legitimate reason why someone might object to Musk or his wealth. Thinking that “wealth somehow equates evil” is indeed juvenile, yet somehow you assume people hold that thought and work from that assumption.
> I suspect most people don't even know why they dislike Elon
Oh great. The sheepish masses. They don’t even have a coherent thought!
Except this is your fantasy again. There are many legitimate reasons to dislike him. Why don’t you ask people, instead of labeling them empty headed media-driven zombies? This is hardly a way to “engage in discussion”.
> It's shocking how people can hold so much contempt for a man they've never met.
He kinda put himself in front of others. That is his brand. It has benefits and drawbacks. I don’t know why you think one has to meet someone to judge their character. If he does contemptible things through online discussion why can’t someone hold him in contempt?
> If everyone's life was put under a microscope, they would likely be under the same media firestorm as Elon, or even worse.
I doubt it is truly everyone. Many many individuals live a public life without kicking of a firestorm with the same regularity he does.
Money equals power. One billionaire equals too much power in single set of hands. Some of us don't like power concentrated in too few hands. it is a simple argument.
The advertisers pulled before any layoffs. Actually they started pulling the day before he took over.
The teams he cut are mostly silly teams. A climate team? At twitter? AI Ethics? He has to stop burning money.
He is moving twitter from ad funded (which never paid the bills) to subscription funded (which might pay the bills? $8/mo is nothing. It will certainly make bans hurt more. It will significantly help spam.)
A climate team at a company with a huge energy footprint is absolutely a great idea IMO. Twitter operates a lot of servers and I'm sure some optimization can be done there.
How will that save electricity for society? Those people will just work somewhere else (if they're not working at home already which is super common in IT). It's not really solving the problem, just shifting it onto someone else's plate.
Reducing things like underutilized servers could really make a big difference that won't just shift to somewhere else like fired employees would. Especially storage is something that is pretty energy intensive even when not in use very much. Our SAN systems were by far the hottest things in our datacenters even though the amount of compute capacity done on those boxes is negligible.
Absolutely! People love to hate it’s very infectious. I personally believe for-profit social media companies should have always charged a subscription. People tend to be more respectful and use things they pay for.
Most of non-Western Twitter will vanish overnight if this is a requirement to use the platform. But it's still not clear what it will actually mean and how it will affect the site culture.
Nope. This was taken on as part of Musk's acquisition which is structured as a leveraged buyout and saddled Twitter with nearly $13 billion in additional debt.
Twitter's annual debt service cost before Musk took over was an entirely manageable $60 million a year. Now it's somewhere around $1 billion.
The ad model works for instagram, youtube, and tiktok. Why can't it work for twitter? I don't understand why the mostly text-based site would be so much more expensive than the various other social media sites that don't require subscriptions to achieve high-reach. I'm sure it'll massively cut down on spam, but think Elon might be overestimating how much other ppl care about spam based on his own feed/replies/notifications.
It works financially but not ethically. Tracking users to maximize ad revenue is something advertisers demand and it's frowned on more and more. In the EU it's now illegal to do so without the user's consent. So.think it's smart to look at subscription business models and much more ethical too. At least you can give the user a choice now.
Don't know. Perhaps the fired management can comment on why it didn't work for Twitter?
> Elon might be overestimating how much other ppl care about spam based on his own feed/replies/notifications.
Difference is one does not need to follow Elon if one thinks his content is spam. Disincentivizing ubiquitous spam created by bots out of the platform will reduce the noise overall so one can curate the list of those who they follow.
I'm not describing Elon's content as spam. I'm saying he receives more spam than most people, particularly because he likes to respond to ppl that @ him and is very into crypto.
The advertisers began pulling ads after ad agency execs met with him and failed to get satisfactory answers[0] and after he posted that conspiracy theory about Paul Pelosi. It didn't help that he ignored and then blocked the head of MMA Global just after the layoffs started.[1] If he wanted to keep advertisers on board this is an odd way to go about it.
The Ethical AI team wasn't 'silly', it was working on ways to make the algorithms used at Twitter more transparent to users, avoid bias, and potentially allow for multiple algorithm choices.
Subscription funding for Twitter is never going to work as Twitter Blue showed quite clearly. At best it'll result in marginal profit on a substantially smaller and less interesting site, dominated by a few voices and with many of its members leaving to other places. Nor will it block scammers, who'll be able to use stolen cards and other payment methods to pay for access the same way they currently pay for hacked accounts. It'll just be even cheaper for them.
Nor is $8/mo 'nothing' for large groups of people, especially in the developing world, and would result in them being excluded from the platform. Musk made one vague statement about the price being adjusted for different regions but nothing further has emerged on that.
Meaning that his intention is to substantially reduce the reach of tweets for anyone not subscribing to Blue for $8 a month.
Yes, you can still tweet freely, but it’ll effectively be a shadow ban.
He even repeated it in the Spaces chat hosted by Robin Wheeler earlier today, using the analogy of non-Blue Twitter users’ tweets being like emails going to your spam folder.
An AI ethics team is 100% a core team for a business like twitter. Facebook has already proven that such a team is necessary [1] to prevent atrocities from occurring. Being able to identify biases in the content selections by "the algorithm" (read: a bundle of fancy heuristics) is a core part of their job. Their job is to identify ways bad actors are abusing their content propagation algorithms and ways to mitigate these abuses.
An AI ethics team isn't going to catch promotion of violence or genocide in Myanmar, that is a problem that requires local cultural and language expertise and staff performing 24/7 real-time moderation. An AI ethics team is just a PR prop for companies to trot out when something bad happens to show that they care, not an effective solution.
Mastodon is great but it isn't a replacement for Twitter. Too much friction. Too hard for the average journalist. Not enough reach.
You seem to think Twitter is for journalists. It isn't. It's for anyone who wants to use it, including people who have the time and energy to figure it out and no need for "reach". And that's more than enough.
What people fail to understand about Fediverse apps is that they aren't trying to be big. They're trying to stay small but be part of a big, connected universe. Mastodon won't ever be Twitter but it could still be incredibly useful.
Also note though that this doesn't mean Twitter is safe. Twitter's main rival is 'nothing' - eg users realising they don't want to use or read a microblogging service. People quitting Twitter because they don't like it any more is a far greater threat to Twitter than any fediverse service could ever be. Elon can happily ignore Mastodon. He can't ignore breaking Twitter (if he is, which isn't certain at all.)
I really felt that there was an overreaction and we needed time to see what changes actually happened under Musk. Lots of very confident and different guesses about what was going on.
Then Musk started to say he'd name and shame advertisers who have lowered/removed their spend on the platform. I don't know what the bar for advertisers deciding a platform is too risky to advertise on, but that has to cross it. There are a lot of different sites to advertise on, so it only really takes being riskier than the rest to lower/remove the amount you're willing to spend on the platform.
But maybe that take is just as bad as the rest. Perhaps Twitter sometime soon finds a crowd that will pay enough to sustain it, and the crowds that fled from it slowly come back after becoming frustrated with overly technical alternatives.
>It reminded me of when I was considering trying to move all of our customers to receive PGP encrypted mail in 2005. An intelligent employee brought up that an average business person would never do that. Luckily we never implemented it.
Try Tutanota, it's simple enough and you can only encrypt really important emails.
>Mastodon is great but it isn't a replacement for Twitter. Too much friction. Too hard for the average journalist. Not enough reach.
I tend to disagree, been on there a while and it's a decent replacement, much more civil as well.
Incivility on Twitter began because of several reasons:
a) 140 char limit incentivized hot takes over nuance
b) ad-based metrics (mDAUs) incentivized addiction-based UX choices (infinite scroll), and nothing keeps people glued to a screen like bad news
c) the algorithm started showing content to followers that was contextually unrelated to their follows."Here's a post from a person you don't follow, but is followed by one of your follows).
Mastodon does away with a lot of this. 500 characters allows for plenty of nuance. Federation model means there is no monolith obsessed with accumulating the most users and shoving ads at them.
I think GP's comment about reach runs in the other direction:
If someone tweets about an issue, it is trivially discovered globally and readily embedded on news sites with arbitrary volumes of traffic (or shown on TV).
They often do not verify if whatever someone wrote in a tweet was made up, and seem to forget that most people are not on twitter, and if twitter agrees on something, that's a very small part of the population.
If that happens, I mute and move on. As a result I only see the work of proper journos on my TL, not people writing 500 word hot takes on some Netflix show for Buzzfeed.
>Email is run just like this and it has plenty of reach.
The "reach" in gp's context is "audience reach". A measure of "audience size" in a broadcast type of medium. It doesn't mean reach in a technical sense like "reachable ip address or DNS resolution".
Email is more point-to-point and 1-to-1 rather than 1-to-many. Yes, the concept of "mailing lists" could arguably be described as "broadcast" but it requires explicit subscriptions and is not the same "reach" as Twitter tweets acting as global "billboards".
E.g. this HN site often has user-submitted Twitter tweets on the front page. In contrast, it's very rare to have a mailing list mirror post to HN. The reach is not the same. (E.g. last week, the thread on front page about "Adobe removing Pantone colors" was referencing a Twitter post.)
Another example related to HN... the creator of this site, Paul Graham, created a Twitter account in 2010 (https://twitter.com/paulg). It has 1.5 million followers. Clearly, the Twitter platform gives him exposure that his existing email address (and his web blog at http://www.paulgraham.com, and this HN site ycombinator.com) -- does not.
Nobody uses email to discover new email addresses, outreach is direct. Discoverability is a massive part of social media platforms and is hindered by the isolated pod structure that Mastodon supports
Discoverability and onboarding and authentication is hard.
I remember the fluffy days of Facebook, where almost in an instant there was a wildfire of 'you might know' suggestions, from harvested addressbooks and cross referencing.
I found, and find discoverability hard on Twitter. My follow list rarely gets bumped and I am pretty clueless as to who and what is in it. I have to make an effort to grow the list.
Tweet reach may be massaged by favs, comments and retweets. Not totally sure how this is different in Mastodon.
Are we talking timeline/search promotion?
I remember email round robins pre Facebook and you did add people if you recognised them.
Directory services just got pulled as they were harvested by spammers. Not that I think this would help. You need some nudging.
If I read an article and the author had an easy lookupable and addable feed, I might note it.
Can we stop pretending that email is a great example of decentralized networks? Modern email is extremely centralized with most people on either Gmail, Apple, or Outlook. No one rolls their own server.
Email on the other hand is a great example of how decentralized things become centralized over time due to the network effect. There's even a weak network effect with email and it still happened.
This is the same flawed logic that claims that Bitcoin is really centralized. You are looking at the wrong properties when you call email centralized. With email, as with Bitcoin, you can participate in the network and roll your own if you so wish, and no one can prevent you from transacting. That doesn't mean most should roll their own, but the fact that it's possible is a vast and fundamental difference. I really don't think most people understand what decentralized means. We are talking about the protocol, not the implemented topology.
Same as democracy in the US. Even if for the most part policy is set by centralized interests, just having the populace believe that it's a democracy and they have the agency to change things makes the system function in a fundamentally different way. The ruling class can't just cart blanche do whatever they want like in China, even if they are the ones holding most of the levers.
> This is the same flawed logic that claims that Bitcoin is really centralized.
Except it isn't because centralization-decentralization is not a binary discrete variable but a continuous one. There's a reason the trilemma exists and you score on each axis. No coin is at any extreme.
There’s probably a good test for competing products that one could apply. Between my daughter, me, my mother, and my grandmother, how many of us can or will want to switch to the competing product? If it’s too hard for at least two generations, you’re probably not going to meet success because you’ve already lost a large chunk of your potential user base before we even begin discussing if the users want your service in the first place.
That's an unfair comparison though. What about someone that never used either of them ? Like someone that just hit 13 (or whatever the minimum legal age is). (See also : TikTok.)
You could also probably ask how many of those people used Twitter to begin with? In my own experience, most of my friends and family don't use Twitter at all, especially if they don't have a business or creative hobby to promote online
I don't think I buy that; it's not _that_ hard. Actually, I've noticed that there are a bunch of journalists (and not just tech journalists) showing up on Mastodon suddenly; this didn't really happen with the previous Twitter exoduses.
> Not enough reach.
That... depends. Not right now, no. But for the journalist use-case (low-latency access to what's happening right now, more or less a better news wire) it could be soon. And that journalism use-case is arguably what made Twitter important in the first place.
To be clear, I don't think that journalists will _abandon_ Twitter in favour of Mastodon. But if I was a journalist I'd be getting established on it now, in case things go wrong with Twitter.
I've had pretty much no issues, but the (10k user) instance I've been on has been closed to new user registration except by invite (from any existing user) the whole time this twitter thing has been happening.
Generally I'd assume that any big open instance is going to have scaling pains right now, but not all instances.
I wonder if Mastodon can even scale because of the federation.
When I tried running Matrix server, joining any large federated Matrix servers made the server unusable and it had to be stopped. I am not saying it will be the case with Mastodon but I would not be surprised.
Same here, and even better, I'm not sure if I'm not able to do what I want because I don't understand how it should be done, or because the site is broken due to the sudden spike in traffic it is experiencing.
I don’t know about that; for instance a number of lawyers I follow are now on Mastodon and enjoying figuring it out. The biggest problems seem to be that some popular servers are disabling signups for a bit, and secondly finding out who else is there too (but Debirdify helps with that)
Not having enough reach is a chicken and egg problem. Mastodon-like protocols could have the ubiquity and ease of use of the similarly decentralized email protocol with wide enough adoption.
All you need to do is pick an instance and register an account on said instance. The friction is pretty low, in the same ballpark as friction encountered creating an account on any website.
It's not difficult, although yesterday it did take about an hour to get the confirmation email. The network is presently under heavy load due to new users.
i'm pretty sure they know this, but i'm pretty sure they're intentionally trying to "make it a thing"/fake support for it because there's a lot of hate towards musk. i don't like him much but i do like the fact that all these types of blue check journalists are pissed about it.
Just got this in my email because I signed up in Patreon as a supporter of a Mastodon node:
"So our IndieWeb server has seen a 4,333% spike in users, and every day is a new record in daily new users sign ups .... In that same time we have done one major server upgrade, and have had zero down time, and as we screen all new users before joining, so far have had zero cases of spammers or scammers from inside the instance itself. And been vigilant about blocking outside actors selling their wares or trying to push sypware, etc."
Let that sink in. 4,333% user sign ups on just this one node.
Mastodon as a whole added almost 300,000 users in the last week, and the rate of addition keeps climbing. Right now it's somewhere around 4000 signups an hour. Earlier in the week it was about 1000. Just under 100,000 people signed up in the last 24 hours. There's about 20,000 posts an hour, vs a much smaller amount two weeks ago. (I had to look at the numbers again and edit this post after I posted it, because they had jumped a bunch since I last looked a couple hours ago.)
It's not an overreaction or hysteria. It's a lot of people voting with their feet. In large part because they were already annoyed by Twitter before Musk even took over and were already open to trying something new. It's within the last month that Kanye West was mouthing off anti-Semitic slurs, before Musk even took over. And one can expect Trump to come back and start stirring the drama pot again. And Twitter's engagement "algorithm" means people get exposed to all this ugliness and the drama around it whether they hunt for it or not. I for one could never stand it and never got hooked in that world. On Mastodon I only see the interesting people I hunt for. It's a breath of fresh air.
It doesn't matter if they all stay. It doesn't have to replace Twitter. It's just something new. Twitter can remain, being what it is -- a cesspool of celebrity, narcissism, self-marketing and pithy, mean quips. It's always been that. Now it will just be worse because many of its more sophisticated users will migrate elsewhere.
In the meantime I welcome fresh blood over to Mastodon.
This is about the 4th? article about Mastodon to make the front page of HN in the last 24 hours? It's amusing that every time one gets posted most of the comments are naysaying, critical, and defensive, and "it will never amount to anything". Meanwhile, the growth continues...
Yep. Look at how Signal displaced Whatsapp (if anyone remembers this app that no longer exist) when users flooded over to it due to Musk-related controversies!
Let's speak in a month or two, see how many remain active, and then see whether this is an overreaction, and whether the experience design of Mastodon can really acommodate them?
I just saw it's about 640k in the last week. That's nice, but Twitter has over 250M daily active users.
Going from a signup to a DAU is a pretty rough game, but even assuming every signup became and stayed active, that's 40 more weeks of non stop momentum and growth at the same pace to meet Twitters numbers.
Unlikely, considering Mastodon already went through this with Gab (and later Trump's Truth Social ?) joining it a few years ago.
From what I've seen, it's mostly people sick and tired of Twitter's drama that decided to leave by themselves (whether today or in the last 6 years), while the people that were so toxic that Twitter banned them end up in mostly disconnected parts of Mastodon...
Pretty clear a good portion of the Twitter users moving to Mastodon don't understand that it's a federated application, and expect a centralized Twitter clone.
If your complaint is Elon's flavor of moderation on Twitter, moving to a Mastodon server with an admin with their own fun and unique ideas about moderation isn't the tea.
>moving to a Mastodon server with an admin with their own fun and unique ideas about moderation isn't the tea.
Well, that's supposed to be the benefit of Mastodon, isn't it? Every platform has moderation rules and owners/admins, and every platform will have these things change periodically. Mastodon is built around the idea that you can easily migrate your data to a different instance without having to leave the platform if you disagree with how it is being run. You can even be your own owner/admin of an instance if you feel strongly enough about it but still be on the same platform as other users you follow.
Totally agree, that's the fundamental principle of Mastodon and I like it.
But I think some people are just looking for "the other Twitter." Mastodon is a philosophically different idea to Twitter's centralized moderation.
I think other conversations about the network affect are apt here. Yeah, you can move to a different server all you want but in reality people want to be where other people are and don't actually want to migrate if they can help it. People aggregating in one place is the antithesis of the Mastodon federation.
If Mastodon does really catch on, it'll be a single digit number of high population servers that probably all end up having similar content moderation policy to Twitter to attract the most number of users. There won't be a grand utopia of a flat distribution of uniquely moderated servers.
IME, none of that actually matters at a practical level.
I think the biggest mistake Eugen had made is simply listing the number of users on an instance. Users will almost always pick the instance with the highest user count, which is counter productive in all sorts of ways.
Instead, we should push users to find an instance that matches their interests, and then show them the federated timeline. That's really all you need to take a user from Twitter and get them comfortable on mastodon.
But then again, Eugen dropped the federated timeline from the official apps because mastodon.social got too big to handle it, and now new users are more confused and mastodon.social is a worse experience than ever.
My general recommendation to everyone is to find a smaller instance that sounds interesting, wade through the local timeline to be sure you like the vibes, follow some people, then dive into the federated feed
Those decisions should not be taken at server level but at the level of the user. The way Mastodon is organised it is up to the server administrator to decide whether you get to interact with users on other servers. If the administrator has a bee up his bonnet on some specific subject he'll block any server which doesn't fit his idea of wrong and right with regard to that subject. This quickly leads to islands of server-groups which do not communicate with each other and as such increases the polarisation of the (small-n) netscape. Those on the "progressive" island won't hear much from the "conservative" island and vice-versa.
I've seen several comparisons between Mastodon and email servers where server administrators also have the power to block communication with other servers but those comparisons do not hold since I have yet to find a mail server administrator who blocks communication with certain other servers on ideological grounds. Mail servers are blocked because they are sources of spam, not because they host users with different opinions. Mail content itself is not moderated other than through spam filters which (for now?) do not censor on ideological grounds, "Tweets" and "Toots" are.
A better solution would be to have users select their own moderators just like they can choose their own content filtering (e.g. uBlock Origin) rule sets but I do not see how something like that can be implemented given the way Mastodon works.
You do have control here. You do select your moderator, and you do have the power to change that.
You select which server your account lives on. If you disagree with the admin at such a fundamental level, this is probably not the right server for you. You can simply select another server.
You also have the option to run your own server. It's not hard to handle just a few accounts, and there's even places you can pay to host and configure it for you. I know several people running their own servers, and a few of them just have one account.
Let's compare to Tumblr for a second. They've had a wild ride with content moderation over the years, and this has led many people to leave the platform. Those people lost their accounts and their followers forever with no recourse. If your mastodon moderator starts getting scared by nipples, you can simply migrate to a new server and keep all your followers.
The real trick about mastodon is that you can take full control if you really want to. However, most of us don't want to deal with running a server, so you just have to trust someone else to do it. If you find a community that matches your interests, it's actually a very pleasant place to be
What happens with you "followers" when you change servers? Do they follow along automagically or do they have to undertake action to re-connect to @you@new.server?
As to running your own server - something I have been looking in to because I support the decentralisation of the 'net - I am under the impression that Pleroma is a lot easier on the hardware than Mastodon. Does you concur?
Anyone following your old account will automatically follow the new account. The only thing that does not transfer is your post history, for mostly technical reasons.
I don't know anything about pleroma, sorry. I do know that mastodon uses a ton of resources when you get a lot of users, but for <5 you can use anything including a raspberry pi
This will not happen is the Admin of the server you are one chooses to block the server you want to move to....
Mastodon has long become a political project ever sense their very public dispute with Gab... They ceased to be a neutral project and clearly showed the limitations of the federation space when it comes to putting users in control, as that control is largely symbolic and just like centralized system unless you run your own server, and you do not run afoul of the project dev team so you do not get put on a default deny list then you are not in control of your data
No, it sounds like censorship. Apart from the fact that Gab is not a "Nazi server" just like your average Mastodon server is not a "Communist server" even though there may be some neo-Nazis on the former and are sure to be a number of communists on the latter it sounds like a petty action by the project maintainers if certain servers are blocked by default.
It sounds like a form of digital McCarthyism.
I'll have a look at the Pleroma source to see if they also engage in this type of ideological censorship. If not it sounds like Pleroma is the better alternative, being both lighter as well as (hopefully) free from censorship.
If it sounds petty, you should find the actual story. People generally don't take such extreme measures as banning an entire server from the network with no reason.
Having checked the Pleroma source [1] I can state that there are no default domain or user blocklists. It does support blocking on domain and user level but it is up to the administrator to provide blocklists.
Huh? 250+ citations that support their assertions are all just some part of a narrative? The CEO being a holocaust-denying anti-semite is just coincidental? Their SEC filing saying Gab is meant for nationalists and conservatives was a mischaracterization of their own platform? Being dropped from a litany of service providers for violating hate speech policies (and abject / nonexistent moderation against it) were fabrications?
"they're not neo-nazis, they're just self-identified nationalists and anti-semites! and yeah okay the platform has a ton of neo-nazis, and the CEO of the platform is a holocaust denier and says Jews should die, but c'mon! free speech!"
> you can easily migrate your data to a different instance without having to leave the platform if you disagree with how it is being run.
As long as "your data" doesn't include your history, as far as I understand? You can leave your home server as long as you're willing to leave everything you ever wrote.
> Mastodon is built around the idea that you can easily migrate your data to a different instance without having to leave the platform if you disagree with how it is being run
I’m not super clear on how it works. If you do this, what happens to the people who follow you? Since they had to type in your address (including instance) wouldn’t you lose all followers in this case?
The migration tool publishes a message to the instances of each of your followers informing them of your new handle, which in theory then gets updated seamlessly.
It was pretty rough when first introduced but seems to be solid now.
Ye, seems like a good fit for the terminally-online Twitter users as their main complaint about Elon is him wanting to be fair in terms of moderation and not favouring their side. Even launched their Twitter clone called "Tribal" to have a "fascist free" alternative without wrongthink..
I think I'll go look at forks of the Mastodon/Pleroma code, see who's working on a clustered mega-server to give people a more Twitter-like experience at one place instead of relying entirely on federation. Then again, maybe the people doing that are not being so obvious about it. Pretty sure there's someone, though. Probably even a VC or two throwing money at them.
Mastodon and federated systems like it will not succeed beyond a tiny niche, will not replace twitter, and don't even solve most of the problems they try to solve.
They don't fix the upstream issues that lead to centralization. Incentives mean most users end up centralized on a handful of servers with a worse experience. It's the worst of both worlds. As designed the UX is bad and cannot be fixed because of these issues.
Twitter has been a terribly mismanaged company for a long time and there's general consensus on this. Jack knew this, but was powerless to actually make the changes necessary to fix it. Elon may not succeed, but I hope he does and what he's doing is a necessary prerequisite. People dismiss his obvious success elsewhere in other insanely hard domains, they can largely be ignored.
I want a world where people have actual ownership over their computing, but federated system designs like Mastodon will not get us that and we have thirty years of failure to prove it. The press pretending otherwise because they hate Elon and see tech companies as a threat are just embarrassing themselves.
I’m always surprised when there are still people acting like Elon isn’t just BEGGING to be hated.
I’m still of the opinion he is not doing the work and his success is mostly throwing money at eager (and smart) engineers. That’s a smart thing to do, good call on his part, but it’s almost like he doesn’t know that’s how his companies work.
Maybe he is just great at running tech companies or something but acting like the media/everyday people hate him for no reason is just dishonest.
How many rich people and fund managers around the world have been throwing money at engineers they thought were smart for the past several decades?
How many have succeeded on the scale Elon has? "Throwing money at smart engineers" is not a novel idea. Executing it well is extremely hard, especially when cash has been cheap for the past two decades.
The criticisms are getting more and more comical. Michael is a friend of Elon and trusted Elon with many of his ideas and contacts. I'm sure Musk would say as much. Do you think Michael was sharing these ideas and contacts with just anyone? Why do you think he specifically chose to work with Elon?
Mike saw Elon was good at recruiting Silicon Valley talent and selling the whole "save humanity by going to Mars" story (but even that was Mike's idea with Orbital).
There's nothing comical about it. They went to two different Russian firms to partner with before it was even called SpaceX and were turned down because Elon kept running his mouth on subjects he didn't understand and they lost all confidence in the project.
Er, no. That was his stated goal as a member of the Mars Society's board of directors when these talks happened. He wanted to purchase a Dnepr ICBM and retrofit it for that purpose. When the deal was rejected, he discussed building his own rockets with Michael Griffin.
There's really a recurring thread here, or elsewhere, which is that elon doesn't do shit, and deserve much credit for his success. To me he seems like a hard worker, and deserves credit
Do you think he's crafting his tweets with hours of deliberation?
Honest question, how much time do you think he spends trying to antagonize people on Twitter per week?
One of the most valuable parts of Musk is his personal brand. He can raise money and hire talent in large part because he's a household name. Everything he does, from naming his child X Æ A-12 to producing a house track, is to proliferate the public perception that he is an eccentric genius, a modern-day polymath like the Da Vincis and Franklins of old.
It may not seem like "real" work, but if Elon Musk and I both started different companies on the same day, who do you think is going to attract funding and top talent more quickly?
If so, he's doing an absolutely fabulous job of trashing his reputation inside of a week.
Musk can be great when he does his homework and first principles analysis. It is obvious he hasn't done it here.
Having advertisers take a huge step back because they seek minimal uncertainty and you spend the entire week maximizing uncertainty is bad (& shows incompetence).
Having advertisers drop campaigns literally in the middle of the call to sell next year's baseline because you aren't even close to prepared for the questions is deeply arrogant incompetence [0].
Threatening "thermonuclear name and shame" on your advertisers [1] — your primary customers — is unnecessarily showing the entire world that you've lost it.
Same goes for starting the week with the now-infamous claim that "a bunch of activists" are chasing away the revenue (would Musk accept that kind of excuse from any exec reporting to him?)[2], then having it explained WHY they are actually pausing by one of the people in the meeting [3], then blocking the guy you just spoke with the day before...
I cannot begin to see how any of this is remotely good for Musk's brand. He's showing the world in real-time that he's in over his head, has no idea what is the business model and the key elements, and just thrashing about blaming everyone else, when literally he is entirely to blame for the chaos.
Oh, and I've yet to read the other HN Pg1 headline [5] that Musk/Twitter is already asking some of the people it fired yesterday to return!
If you can actually explain how any of this is remotely good for Musk, Twitter, or anyone, I'd be interested to hear it... Because it looks like he's trying really hard to sink Twitter faster than Digg sunk. (There's actually a good argument that his initial intent was to sink Twitter when he first made the comment and offer, to maximize uncertainty and tank their '23 sales, but then he was forced to buy it b/c he was too foolish to even have a proper excape clause in the contract, and here we are)
I agree that his approach is odd, to say the least. But Elon is clearly marketing himself as part of a counter-culture movement that's opposed to the current dominant neoliberal/corporate zeitgeist (but isn't quite alt-right). It's extremely deliberate. Whether or not it's a good idea remains to be seen. Certainly in the short term it hasn't been.
Yes, I see that he wants to market to that not-quite-alt-right-but-not-neoliberal customer.
I just do not see how any of his actions actually help enhance that even with even an idealized version of such a customer, and does not alienate even that customer.
How does it establish any credibility with anyone to 1) be so unprepared for a critical advertiser's (your customers) presentation that customers literally cut their spend during the meeting; 2) publicly make excuses trying to blame for your failures on some "activist groups" who actually had no influence on advertisers' (your customers) decision to cut spending; 3) destroying verification and turning it into a anyone-can-pay-$8-to-say-they-are-anyone-and-get-greater-reach; 4) come into a $44B deal making a lot of noise and failing to articulate a plan, any plan that gets anyone on board?; etc., etc., etc.
I wish Elon all the success in the world, but he is seriously flailing here, and creating confidence in no one. I expect that he has a good chance of sorting it out once he understands the issues, but he's clearly done no homework up front, so is figuring it out in real time.
I do not see how this helps him, even with his ideal customer. Of course, as usual his comments have plenty of fanbois claiming whatever he does must be 4-D Chess, but seriously, how does this much public flailing, thrashing, and excuses give anyone confidence?
Can you point to any specific action that would actually give such a customer more confidence? From what I've read, the RW people are also really pissed at him because they expected to be able to rush right in and raise hell, and that's not yet happening either...
EDIT: A new case in point:
"Comedy is now legal on Twitter" 5:16 PM · Oct 28, 2022 [0]
"Going forward, any Twitter handles engaging in impersonation without clearly specifying “parody” will be permanently suspended" 5:53 PM · Nov 6, 2022 [1]
How does this kind of obviously figuring it out as he goes along increase credibility with anyone?
Even if we were to accept that as true as stated, which I don't, that doesn't explain Paypal and Tesla. Even if you think this Michael Griffin guy did everything - why did Elon bet on him? Why didn't anyone else? Tons of people had the money to do it at the same time. None of them did.
Musk talks about his employees and how critical they were/are constantly. This whole notion that "Musk didnt do it all" is such a clown argument because theres no other form of attack from people who simply dont like him and his politics.
....and Griffin gave him ~$2B of taxpayer money. (DARPA and COTS contracts before SpaceX flew a single rocket and CRS for Falcon 9). All discussed in the link above.
Throwing money at people and saying “I want these charts to be customizable” vs “let’s land a rocket booster, it’s ok if a few blow up, we can test it live” will get VERY different levels of passion/expertise
Do you know the NFL betting scam? It's awesome. Here's how it works.
You choose 1024 people, and you send all of them a prediction about one upcoming sports game, free of charge. 50% get one prediction, 50% get the other.
Next week, you have 512 people who think you can guess pretty good. You pick another game. 256 people get one prediction, 256 get the other. The following week, 256 people think you got two in a row correct. You send 128 of them one prediction, etc. etc. etc.
When you're down to 1 person, maybe they'll pay you for the next prediction.
A track record of success is not sufficient evidence, especially when cash has been cheap for the past two decades and especially when even the first random success (selling Zip2 to an over-eager AltaVista) paid off so well.
It might not be 1024, but he probably has more failures than successes: Solar City, Neuralink, Boring Company, Hyperloop (he decided not to turn this into a company, but he wasted his and his other companies' resources on this so I think it is fair to consider it a Musk failure).
Solar City isn't a failure, it's part of Tesla now. Still selling panels, as far as I know.
Boring company is also not yet a failure, and has recently built several tunnels. Neuralink is an early stage research company and is still humming along. It may fail some day, but it certainly hasn't failed yet. As for Hyperloop, he specifically said he wasn't going to build it, and several companies are still working on it, including in China:
None of these things are "failures". They may become failures one day. It'd be crazy if some of them didn't. But you can't count a research project as a failure just because it doesn't have a product yet.
None of those companies have any real success to show for themselves. They haven’t met the hype that Musk has put on them or shown any real progress in reaching that hype.
I can at least understand you saying it might be too early on something like Neuralink, but I don’t understand calling Solar City a success. Musk had to bail it out with his other company in a deal shady enough to trigger lawsuits.
I'm aware of this scheme. But I don't think you understand why it works. Track records are absolutely evidence of skill, if you understand the distribution from which they're drawn. Elon's track record is very, very far outside the null hypothesis of that distribution.
They typically just purchase the company instead. See: Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Apple.
Let's not forget that Elon Musk's real success has been in marketing. He has created a cult of personality, claimed his efforts are for the good of humanity (yet to be seen, especially with the way he treats his labor force, i.e. horribly). It's not a shock that Tesla stock is a _meme stock_. It is because of Elon's marketing.
> Let's not forget that Elon Musk's real success has been in marketing.
He has obviously been highly successful at marketing. But his "real success" has been in delivering products like useful electric cars and reusable rockets that didn't previously exist. His marketing skills help with that, but all the marketing in the world isn't going to sell a product that doesn't exist (except in crypto).
Undeniably Elon’s success is his tremendous wealth, the basis of which are two very valuable companies that the cofounded and has as CEO marketed brilliantly, if not always honestly.
He obviously knows a lot about what people to work with.
It is highly unlikely he knows how to build or design almost anything Spacex or Tesla makes.
He knows a lot about everything they make of course, and can get more detailed briefings and information on it that anyone, but he didn’t make it.
So the wealth and the successful companies are his success sure, but his greatest personal accomplishments are obviously his marketing skills.
I don't know how you're measuring "greatest" but I certainly consider his greatest accomplishments to be putting together, betting on, and operating the companies that produced these products. Of course he doesn't know how to build a Tesla batter or a SpaceX rocket himself - probably no one person does.
These were very difficult industries, industries that were extremely contrarian to bet on when he did. Making the financial bet alone would be a great accomplishment for any normal person. Peter Thiel is a famous investor for making far less contrarian and far less successful bets without operating anything except Paypal.
Musk's bets were far more concentrated, and he chose the personnel, operated the companies, made the strategic decisions, and yes, also marketed them brilliantly. But he only got to flex those marketing muscles because he spent a decade assembling, managing, and financing the teams that built the product in the first place.
Yes, I agree with that. I guess I’m just trying to reconcile the person that could do that, with the irresponsible and impulsive person he displays publicly for the past few years.
Perhaps it’s just that his wealth got the better of him.
> his success is mostly throwing money at eager (and smart) engineers
This meme is on fire but I did not expect it here on HN where people can understand what he is talking about. There are many videos like this [1] and interviews (e.g. with Munro regarding Tesla) where the guy shows deep technical knowledge.
Besides, try making a startup throwing money and smart engineers. Just money will not even get you the really good ones. People who have a choice don't work for morons.
I mean, sure, there's plenty to hate (there was much more to hate about say Columbus, Gandhi or Ford), but if we were dismissing achievements of people who give others good reasons to hate them we wouldn't have calculus.
Let's try to let people stand out without gaslighting them if they are doing some great things. There are many people who smell real bad, are a*holes, have really weird opinions on some topics and were necessary for us to be able to write these comments here.
He doesn't have deep knowledge, he a broad high level understanding of the technologies and processes used at his company. In the interview you can see how he's aware of what the major components are supposed to do, but he'd be completely useless if you told him to do the engineering design and analysis behind it. Which is perfectly fine, that's how it's supposed to be as a CEO.
A certain % of the population are clinical narcissists, which is a massive amount nominally online. And narcissists cant stand when other people are successful. I'm convinced thats who these people are.
My theory is that getting smart people to make twitter vs landing reusable rocket boosters… will yield VERY different levels of passion/interest.
Which again is FINE. Personally, I just wanna do cool stuff and have a great work/life balance. I don’t want to (and don’t have the expertise to) land a rocket booster.
I guess… not everyone’s problem domains are interesting enough to lure a team like space-x etc. again, I don’t like him, but credit to Elon for at least trying to solve these tough problems. Just admit FSD isn’t a year away!
Because it is hard to trust those you hand your money to and not get in the way by checking in too often. Also, not every passionate engineer should be trusted that much. Being able to spot those that are passionate about what you want done, while simultaneously being both competent and trustworthy is a skill that will make you very wealthy, and almost no one has it consistently. A success or three may show that he is one of those people. Or that he is survivorship bias waiting for a reality check. I don't know how to tell, or I would be quite wealthy as well.
> paying smart people and expecting them to work hard - why isn't literally everyone else doing the same?
is that a real question that expects an answer , or one of those 'SV-Wisdom from-on-high' sentences?
Here's an easy practical answer that will fit 95% of the responses : I don't have the money to hire a lot of experts to execute my ideas, nor do I have the familial or business connections in order to facilitate the loans needed.
> I don't have the money to hire a lot of experts to execute my ideas, nor do I have the familial or business connections in order to facilitate the loans needed.
There are lots of people that have those things and are still not a tiny fraction as successful. Most people could be given all of those things and they'd quickly waste them all in a spectacular fashion. Often the people that are the loudest on this issue don't even have their own absolutely trivial finances in order.
Aerospace had a lot of overqualified, underutilized engineers that were spectacularly easy to tap into with a little bit of extra money and a very interesting project.
That does not hold for Twitter. There is no magic clump of overqualified, underutilized people to tap into without throwing LOTS of money around. On top of that, Twitter mostly isn't that interesting.
At the moment there is a magic clump of such people, large language model experts from big tech who have left because they got sick of not being able to apply the technology.
They are currently floating around in various startups, but we are entering a tough market for VC funding. Twitter can offer hardware, data and a culture of shipping.
I don’t agree with them, but this counter argument doesn’t quite work. In a system with x% chance of success, we’d expect most people to fail for small x. But some few will still succeed multiple times.
Throw in that your odds get better the more you’re successful, and it’s classic survivorship bias.
Companies don’t have to be profitable to be successful. A charismatic leader + lofty goals (FSD, rockets, flame throwers) and you’ll get a ton of money even if you never turn a profit.
Let’s not forget the tunnels I’m Vegas btw. They aren’t all winners.
He's definitely the 'chief engineer' of his companies in that he made engineering decisions, but to pretend that somehow means he does ALL the engineering work and grunt works is a very silly notion.
But yes, there's indeed the thousand of engineers and technicians doing the work. He even credits them for making his dream possible!
I don't know why people think he's not doing the work. Have they actually read interviews and books? The books I read does not paint him in a very flattering light people-wise.
It's also possible to be simultaneously an egoistic asshole, genius, having actual skills, being a money man and visionary leader, People act as if a person who's a jackass can't have positive traits or vice versa.
"I’m still of the opinion he is not doing the work and his success is mostly throwing money at eager (and smart) engineers. "
To me it seems, his success comes from being an engineer himself and wanting to get shit done and kick people until shit gets done in a working way. And yes that includes throwing money at smart engineers, but to do this, you have to be smart and have domain knowledge to do so.
The problem started, when he got too much success and lost touch with the ground of reality.
In general they show that it was indeed a bit more than a high idea, to which it was reduced around many places.
Still, a funny quote from Elon:
"Frankly, I hate doing mgmt stuff. I kinda don't think anyone should be the boss of anyone. But I love helping solve technical/product design problems."
I think he means it. But of course it is BS, when he is in fact the boss of so many people and making them burn out for productivity in various ways.
You sound very conflicted. I can see like at least two places where you directly contradict yourself. You have to learn what people say and what people do are very different. Elon Musk is a bullshitter and narcissist. It's time to stop listening and believing anything he has to say. Otherwise they'll keep dragging you in and you'll keep finding reasons to give them another chance.
I am not really conflicted, I can respect his achievements without negating the downsides or the narcistic, egomanic "BS". I thought I made that clear, with labeling it as "BS".
I respect his achievements about as much as I respect any corrupt company that has had success by having money to spend and people willing to work for them to pay their rent. While many people chose to work for Musk because they believed in a formidable mission.. I don't believe that will be the case for much longer. I truly think he is now acting out of desperation as he's seeing a large downward trend that has him on edge.
> I respect his achievements about as much as I respect any corrupt company that has had success by having money to spend and people willing to work for them to pay their rent
Just to extend this, there are a large number of plausibly legitimate reasons people might hate Musk. Maybe you're stuck in Tesla service hell, or maybe you retired to Boca Chica and now have to deal with rocket noise and road closures. Maybe you're an environmentalist who doesn't like to see a launch facilities next to a wildlife preserve. Maybe you're a Tesla employee who was injured due to company negligence. Maybe you're a Neuralink researcher who is embarrassed over Musk's absurdly fantastical claims about what your technology can do. Maybe you founded a visionary electric car company only to see it sabatoged and taken over by Musk and have him launch your vehicle into space. Maybe you're a stressed out worker at any of Musk's companies who resents his demands for a work/life imbalance. Maybe you're a market trader who lost money due to Musk's fraudulent "funding secured" tweet. Maybe you're uncomfortable with the constant stream of vaporware, dumb ideas, and bogus dates issued by a false messiah preying on the technological optimism of your fellow nerds. Or maybe you're just an American who is tired of seeing bullshit artists wag the dog, behave illegal and unethically, and never be held to account for their actions.
There are many good things one might say about Musk, but don't pretend there aren't any bad things.
> and his success is mostly throwing money at eager (and smart) engineers
Doing that with this level of success in these domains is extremely rare and even more important. In most cases, the investors are far more important than the workers.
Eh. I dislike Elon, BUT being able to efficiently allocate resources and identify an opportunity and/or valuable employee, who is more than just talk is a valuable skill that surprisingly few people have.
Yeah, people have different roles and talents. The face of the company does get most of the praise and fame, but that's true of nearly every organization I can think of.
Musk's skills are pretty domain-specific and not, I think, transferable. He really excels at:
1. Choosing hard (and inspiring) problems that decompose down to a series of relatively linear engineering challenges;
2. Getting large amounts of investment money from the market or government sources to fund development;
3. Yelling at engineers to solve problems (and remaining close enough to engineering to identify the specific problems to yell about), often through overwork, while keeping the core mission inspiring enough to reduce churn;
4. Cutting corners in order to productionize faster than more risk-conscious competitors.
In other words, Musk is very good at steering organizations through certain kinds of complicated challenges. But he's also terrible at complex challenges, where the path isn't linear and yelling at engineers isn't enough to unstick the process, or where cutting corners is going to be disfavored by the market or by regulators.
Twitter is by its nature a horribly complex, poorly-understood, highly-dynamic complex system that will react unpredictably to any interaction. The decisions Musk needs to make aren't engineering-based (except when it comes to slashing staff and yelling at the survivors to work harder), but open-ocean strategy: product design; market fit; and playing nice with the userbase, high-profile accounts, and advertisers. Unfortunately, Musk has never demonstrated an ability to succeed in these areas -- consider SolarCity, which held a commanding lead early on, but had to be acquired by Tesla due to debt and growth problems, and has fallen to a tiny fraction of the market due to poor sales strategy and customer complaints. Add on the fact that he has a very narrow critical path to profitability (he bought a barely-profitable entity and loaded it up with a cool $1bn/year in debt payments that will need to come out of expenses), and there's more than can go wrong at Twitter than right.
Beyond that, Musk's problem with Twitter is simply that he looked at his social media experience and assumed that it was reflective of Twitter's userbase as a whole. But the alt-right instigators, bots, crypto-enthusiasts, and general (to be frank) weirdos that developed a parasocial relationship with his account are a tiny fraction of a fraction of Twitter's population; even if we consider "political" Twitter as a whole, it's tiny, just loud since it's populated by people with media megaphones. Most Twitter users have much more normal hobbies: sports, pop culture, videogames, whatever, and with Musk catering to his followers (who he seems to think are much bigger and more valuable than they are), their experiences are likely to get a lot worse. So unless he's willing to act more like a normal social media mogul -- aggressively mute the communities that create undesirable experiences for other users, turn down the personality volume on public communications, and suck up to the ad agencies and advertisers who keep the lights on -- I don't expect Twitter to get more successful.
Acting like Elon hasn’t given people legit reasons to dislike him? Anybody is allowed to overlook the flaws he has but you shouldn’t ignore them outright.
I’d actually argue he was the darling of the tech world for a while and his awful personality has eroded that over the last handful of years.
It seems to me like there is a possible, albeit compromised, middle ground between highly centralised and the (in reality) partially centralised Mastodon model where users flock to popular monoliths: strictly per-user instances.
Given the right tooling etc etc, expediting user's migration to their own instances, of something like a Mastodon node, could be an achieveable route to greater decentralisation without getting muddled down in things like blockchain etc.. And executed correctly the model could be more communicable than what it presently appears to be.
From what I can see though, Mastodon isn't currently the technology stack to achieve, perhaps it could get there.
No solution is going to be perfect, but surely an emphasis on data sovereignty would reduce the volume of arguments over what a given platform should be.
> I want a world where people have actual ownership over their computing, but federated system designs like Mastodon will not get us that and we have thirty years of failure to prove it.
Counterpoint: email has been working great for the past 30 years.
The reason why email works over centralized schemes is because it has tiered decentralized controls - sending server, relays (when they were a thing), receiving servers and the client each have an opportunity to accept, reject or drop a message.
Mastodon has a great chance of succeeding. All it needs is an easy-to-use client,decent discovery and giving users control of what they see. It does not have to be a constellation of mini-Twitters.
> email has been working great for the past 30 years
When spam means you're either flooded with garbage or are forced to just totally block potentially innocent senders (like people running private mail servers)...
...and probably 95%+ of people I know use Gmail for their personal accounts...
...I'm not sure e-mail is the best example of federation working great.
Still you can pick any server you want, any client you want, move your data freely if you are not happy with provider. And there's no corporation that can say that tomorrow you are going to pay $5/month more or you can kiss your contacts goodbye (sure you can loose your address if you don't have own domain, but you still can access the network).
I will gladly take it over closed protocol, even if it has reaction gifs built in.
That's very strange definition of failure: many non-homogenous systems have Pareto distributions. That in itself is not indicative of failure.
30 years ago, AOL may have been most popular email provider, it was displaced by Hotmail, then Yahoo, now GMail. Having different leaders over time is evidence of the resounding success of email federation, those domains still exist and can still send/receive emails universally. If email had hypothetically been non-federated and proprietary to AOL, it would be dead today (or as close to it as gopher)
>don't even solve most of the problems they try to solve
I mean it does somewhat solve the problem of Musk running twitter into the ground. For most people, I imagine mastodon is a lateral move, not a step up.
One could argue that the centralization process is already in place. Only servers that are deemed 'acceptable' are recommended ( I think the criteria for acceptability no hate speech, no transphobia, no homophobia ). It is interesting to the point that Guardian in its article trying to describe mastodon suggested it is left leaning. I chuckled. I mean, I suppose it is, but the whole point of an individual instance is just that..
I agree with your point. I think people are generally missing forest for the trees.
Correct - email is a failure as a federated system, people are centralized on a handful of providers and you can't even run your own server these days without getting blacklisted.
The promise of the decentralized web of the 90s is a failure. The majority of users are centralized on handful of megacorporation apps despite the ad business making this pretty awful.
We're trapped in a local maximum because of the underlying system designs. Spam, linux server admin being too hard, terrible devex are some of the forces that lead to this [0]. It's a hard problem to get out of without thinking from first principles.
Well a handful is still way better than only one. If tomorrow someone want to leave Gmail they have quite the list of alternatives and can forward their mail to their new address. Compared to leaving Twitter or Facebook this is so much better.
It's like if Twitter was an ActivityPub instance even if it had 99.9% marked share at least you could leave without leaving everything behind
> people are centralized on a handful of providers
Still better than a closed protocol. The fact that Google knows everbody can switch away from Gmail without any real downsides for sure keeps them in check. There are no real network effects for one company to take advantage of, unlike it is the case with closed protocol systems like WhatsApp.
>The fact that Google knows everbody can switch away from Gmail without any real downsides for sure keeps them in check
They do? Changing your email address across every service provider you use is a colossal pain in the ass, and that's when they let you change your email address.
You can just forward incoming email to your old Gmail account to your new email account and take your sweet time to update your old emails all over the internet.
It’s not quite that bad. I ran my own mailinabox server on a vps a few years ago and didn’t have much issues with spam lists. Only gave up because I couldn’t be bothered updating the thing.
That's the death of all decentralized systems, it's too much work in the long run.
They work great when they're the ONLY option in town, but eventually people centralize on one aspect of it, as they did with email.
Email used to be so decentralized that it was literally run on your machine (not your terminal, which was dumb, but the machine the terminal connected to) and even a single company department might have 10+ machines that could receive email (email addresses would look like name@machine.department.company.com).
Then it devolved to one per department, and then one per company, and now one per massive IT provider.
Security became big as well. Mail servers used to get hacked constantly and you’d have your private data leaked and your server turned in to a spam gun.
These days to host anything securely you need a team of the top minds in that domain working full time on it. Just makes no sense to run your own mail server when for less money you could let someone else do it and they will do it much better.
This is just a sign of the industry maturing imo. You could relate it to construction. Used to have people building their own mud and stick huts but now everything requires planning, regulation, codes, licensed workers, etc.
So all the newsletters I'm on are getting sent out to subscribers one by one? Man, seems really inefficient. If only there were a way to specify many individuals who wanted to receive the same email so they could send it only once...
> If only there were a way to specify many individuals who wanted to receive the same email so they could send it only once...
Getting an email with a really large number of recipients to be actually delivered is difficult enough that there are entire companies e.g. Mailchimp devoted to making it work. You can't just bung a million addresses into BCC and hope.
There is a comparison to be made between the IP protocol and ActivityPub.
When we all first went online we hopefully had more than one ISP to pick from, because they could federate data between each other using the IP protocol.
I believe that the same type of evolution is going to happen in social media. Whether it will be with ActivityPub, ATP or whatever else I don't know but it must happen. Because having just one ISP, one social media platform, one online shopping platform is not a healthy system.
This is all-or-nothing thinking that's endemic to Silicon Valley's subsidies-as-a-service business model.
Mastodon does not have to monopolize microblogging the way Twitter has, because it isn't competing with Twitter's cursed ad-based revenue model. Similarly, the tiny niches that do migrate are likely more valuable to have than the hordes of Twitter users who never post anything, and just juice the algorithm by liking and retweeting.
I don't disagree, but the design of urbit is such that there's a path to it being good - that's not true of any other system built on the current stack (imo) because they don't fix the underlying incentive failures that lead to centralization in the first place.
I’ve spent a lot of time at the edge of decentralized and useful tech. You’re right that most decentralized systems don’t accomplish the goals they set out to achieve.
A few key things: decentralized means a network of at least 3 nodes where no operator controls more than 1. Anything beyond that is vanity or more censorship resistance depending on your vantage point.
What we actually want is governance with checks and balances. I would argue that the problem with the US has been the centralization of power in the executive and judicial branches, particularly the executive. A functioning parliamentary system with three branches of governance is quite effective when there is a balance of power.
Now to how emulate that in software is another quandary. I think ethereum for all of its faults is doing a decent job at decentralized governance.
I think we’re still in the very early days of decentralized finance. A lot of lessons will be learned (and relearned from the past) as we move forward.
> I would argue that the problem with the US has been the centralization of power in the executive and judicial branches, particularly the executive. A functioning parliamentary system with three branches of governance is quite effective when there is a balance of power.
On the contrary, I'd argue that the power has towards the executive and legislative branches. The judicial branch exists to curb the excesses of the other two through the invocation of law that was already written. The other two either write whatever the hell they want and vote on it or invoke their powers by fiat (i.e. executive orders).
Crypto is trying to solve this in a different way. Namely projects like lens protocol.
The idea is that the blockchain is a shared, decentralized database and you store simple messages on the blockchain and larger files on something like ipfs. This forms a social graph that a frontend ui can then import and provide a view into (a lens if you will).
It's nice because users just need one account (a wallet) and they have access to the whole social graph if they want, or they can configure their apps to only show certain things. The downside is that it's all public and once you lose your keys you're locked out of your account. Also, you can't really prevent anyone from posting things but you can choose which types of posts you allow on your feed.
It's a different set of tradeoffs that's interesting to explore.
I would LOVE if there was a way to federate FB, instagram, twitter, etc...
You post and read on your preferred platform but can see posts from your friends from other platforms, or even their own implementation on their own server!
You're describing a federation of platforms, and this can work, at least technically. XMPP worked wonderfully for a brief moment. Unfortunately, profit incentives are aligned against it.
The Fediverse, at least as I see it advocated here, is not a federation of platforms but a federation of social cliques, where your ability to communicate with someone else is determined by connectivity in the clique graph.
This is a great thing for the kinds of people who would have become deeply invested in a web forum or newsgroup back in the day, but it cannot (and arguably should not attempt to) address the mass market.
XMPP still works wonderfully if you want to setup a chat server for your friends and family and be independent from all the walled garden messaging apps.
I don't know if he's going to succeed or fail (or even what "success" and "failure" are in this case), but I think it'd be better for the world if he failed. Twitter isn't necessary and can be replaced, but it would be good for Musk to be mired in legal problems for a while and hopefully lose a lot of money. Reducing the power and influence of both Musk and Twitter seems like a clear win-win in the long run. I feel bad for all of the people at Twitter being trampled over in the process, though.
He’s kind of said it himself on multiple occasions.
“Twitter as a company has always been my sole issue and my biggest regret. It has been owned by Wall Street and the ad model. Taking it back from Wall Street is the correct first step.”
He had only a tiny amount of company ownership, didn't have total voting power, the board (which barely even used Twitter) made it impossible for him to make the changes he'd want to make and just generally seemed obstructionist/bad. Jack has talked a lot about how making Twitter a company (instead of a protocol) was a mistake, he's talked about Web5 which lands on a lot of the same ideas as Urbit, but trying to tack it on top of the existing stack. He supported Elon taking power and being able to actually make the necessary changes and recently tweeted support of the layoffs too.
Pre IPO Twitter was doing interesting things with API access and being more protocol like, but they killed all of that stuffed ads on it and went public. Ben Thompson talks a lot about how they're a terrible ad product and I think he's generally right. Subscriptions are a more interesting model.
If you read the texts between Jack and Elon that came out during the recent legal fights over the sale you can see these things for yourself.
That's somewhat of a rambling answer, but a lot of this stuff is publicly verifiable.
Why are so many people calling Elon Musk by his first name, like he's their buddy or neighbor? This reminds me when Steve Jobs had passed away, many people were walking the streets with candles and cards in memoriam of "Steve". How come?
The obvious counter to the notion that the issues with Mastodon can't be fixed is that nothing would prevent a carbon-copy of Twitter (or Twitter itself, for that matter) to federate. It's not about Mastodon, but about ActivityPub.
And sure, most users will end up centralised on a handful of servers, and that is not a problem as long as they can move when a specific server does not meet their needs. The biggest importance is a safety valve.
I don't know which parts of the UI you think can't be fixed, but I don't agree. Better search is needed, but can be externalised (nothing stops someone from federating with the main instances and signing up to a few relays and offering more comprehensive search). A better experience when looking up external users timelines is largely down to Mastodon's developers having very specific ideas about how to do things. The logic for following or boosting/liking toots when you're on a different instance's timeline is awkward but can be improved with an optional intermediary (falling back to the awkward request for your address for those who insist on opting out of an intermediary providing a mapping).
The upside with Mastodon is that it's not a single thing. It's the server, and the web UI, and you can replace either or both. E.g. you can run Pleroma with the Mastodon web UI, or it's own, and there are additional web UI's. Or you can (and people do, and I'm doing so to) build your own, so we'll see a number of choices of platforms that will look very differently.
Personally I hope Elon fails, because it will make things easier, but I think the long term belongs to ActivityPub over Twitter in any case for the simple reason that the presence of ActivityPub means that the threshold to stand up a viable social network has dropped massively. On one hand you have the software you can set up in less than a day (been there, done that), but far more importantly, sign up to a relay and within hours you have an instance that looks lively, even though most toots are via federation. Where there before was a massive chicken and egg scenario, there's now an increasingly vibrant starting point for people to experiment with their own visions for what social media should be, and each one of them will add to the network effects of ActivityPub.
Mastodon may well fail, but social networks has a history of reaching tipping points that very abruptly changes things dramatically. In both directions. But the federated networks are far less vulnerable to people moving elsewhere.
As for the failures of federation, e-mail and mailing lists is the obvious counter. As is the web. Social media is a newfangled baby in comparison to the successful federated services.
> Elon may not succeed, but I hope he does and what he's doing is a necessary prerequisite.
Everything he's done so far reads like he's deliberately trying to destroy the company. The only reason I don't really think that's his intention is that I don't see how he could hope to benefit from it. But it doesn't make sense.
i have a suspicion that much of what he’s doing is just chest thumping for his new fan base, “look at how i do whatever i want. i behave how i want. they can’t stop me, i’m The Strongman!”
just red meat for that particular crowd who worship strongmen. tho if he’s even a fraction of the irrationality that he’s portraying, i completely agree, twitters in trouble.
The Twitter status quo was one of stagnation (took them ten years to ship edit to a handful of people) - they're a good example of how you can basically do everything wrong, but if you have product market fit it's hard to fail.
He's trying to pivot them into a focused company. I think his actions make sense in that context.
There's no context in which many of his actions make sense. He ranked people based on lines of code written, immediately fired thousands of them based on that objectively stupid metric, than immediately tried to rehire a bunch of them because the company couldn't function without them. "Random flailing" is the most charitable way to characterize that.
> As designed the UX is bad and cannot be fixed because of these issues.
For fun I just tried signing up and the process itself is confusing, sluggish, buggy, and ultimately didn’t work. It feels like it’ll need to improve very quiclkly if it’s going to capture any significant amount of Twitter users.
The slowness and bugs might be due to the sudden influx of people from Twitter. I just joined a small server that is now having to scale up a bit to accommodate all the new traffic, and I assume the more popular servers are seeing an even bigger bump.
I was actually expecting the sign up process to be a lot more difficult than it was for me, just based on the impression I'd gotten from various HN comments over the years. I encourage anyone curious to try it out for themselves.
> The slowness and bugs might be due to the sudden influx of people from Twitter
Yeah definitely, feels like they should have seen this coming though. They have an opportunity that won’t come around again, and poor performance and confusing UX seem like pretty serious problems.
I dunno, on performance they could just have limited number of registrations to what they can handle. Better that than having potential users getting a bad impression because everything is too slow.
> I want a world where people have actual ownership over their computing, but federated system designs like Mastodon will not get us that and we have thirty years of failure to prove it. The press pretending otherwise because they hate Elon and see tech companies as a threat are just embarrassing themselves.
This is the media capitalising at the maximum over the emotions of the tech crowd to move to a platform that is worse than Twitter, especially in UX and is essentially a solution that is creating more problems than it is trying to solve.
It really is not early days anymore with this, and the hype around Mastodon is manufactured by outrage due to 'Elon Musk' being the new villain of the month. If you have to explain what Mastodon is, which server you have to choose and how to find which people you followed on Twitter are on Mastodon due to its poor discoverability, then it tells us that it is another pointless hurdle for users to bear with, resulting in a worse experience.
Mastodon clearly is a solution that is creating more problems for users and the media is clearly parroting over the hype and emotion to pretend that it is an alternative or a threat to Twitter.
I'm actually laughing at you and the entire Twitter chaos on this 'migration' made up of the same techies overhyping with the media taking advantage of the current outrage pretending that Mastodon is a viable 'alternative' when it remotely isn't.
Given that it already takes much explaining how to use it, 'choosing and instance', struggling to solve it's poor discoverability since a minute amount of Twitter users out of 200M+ have tried to move themselves, it means that you are already losing.
It is not 'early days' anymore. After 6 years of 'exoduses', Mastodon doesn't cut it as an 'alternative' and especially with the exact unchallenged reasons I've stated. It is not about getting manipulated by the current hype by the media, it is always about the retention afterwards that counts. Twitter is here to stay despite the 'current outrage' that the media is riding on.
Sorry to burst your (techie) bubble as hundreds of millions of non-technical people are still using Twitter and won't delete their accounts over something worse.
I agree. It’s going to be the worst thing that happened to some of the communities there. Scam and Spam in particular have fresh greenfield with little to stop them. That is if the entire thing doesn’t fall over.
the fediverse has also been a safe haven for some otherwise marginalized communities too, and I am concerned that a flood of other users that are not familiar with the culture could overwhelm things and change the vibe significantly.
Also worried about what happens when advertisers & corporate money finds its way to the fediverse. Where users go, advertisers always follow, sadly.
We'll see how long this new surge lasts. I have 2 accounts on different instances and watched a 3rd that I used a lot vanish along with the instance itself when it became flooded with very illegal content.
I'm not sure I would call it a safe haven. The same infighting that plagues marginalized communities on Twitter is there on Mastodon. I've had to block entire instances of people I otherwise agree with because they spent all their time making callouts, many quite questionable.
I have no clue what Twitter will be turned into by Musk. I also don’t have a very strong opinion about the entire situation or about the changes he’s implementing right now.
But here is what concerns me: the speed of execution. Ofc speed matters a lot in startups. But Twitter is a not a startup anymore.
Compare that to when Steve Jobs returned to Apple. He took some weeks (months?) to understand what was going on inside Apple thoroughly. Only after he understood the situation (he did product review sessions) and had developed a strategy, only then he executed it quickly. And even then, he knew that results would come eventually but not immediately.
Now, ofc you could argue that the situation is different since Musk is a long-term twitter user himself and knows the platform, at least outside in. Yet, Jobs was an Apple user, too.
I don’t know. We will see how this turns out. Musk has some other companies that are running quite well.
Still, this might be the one which won’t because he rushed it.
The deal for Musk to buy Twitter was agreed in April.
He has indeed taken control only this week but he had months to get a plan together, with, as far as I know, a level of access to Twitter's internals during that time.
He had no access to internals during that time, and the calibre of the 'planning' revealed during discovery in the trial was neither deep nor substantial.
There are now reports that some of those laid off are being asked to come back, in a belated recognition that it was a chaotic and flawed process.
Maybe he had access to internals. But do you really believe it's comparable to the SJ situation? He was the CEO and could talk to all the people in person. He spent most of his time understanding. It's seems very different now.
Kara Swisher said some advertisers had told her, after a meeting with Musk last week in NY, that either he came to the meeting totally unprepared or he actually had no plan. He could not articulate a sensible plan to them.
We know that Steve Jobs still knew many many people inside Apple when he returned and had ongoing business relations with them. Yet, he didn’t skip the step of understanding from the people directly once he was CEO.
The most challenging thing I faced when I first joined some niche Mastodon server was what to make of the three feeds available to me:
- the mostly quiet local feed (even though it niche suit me well)
- the inaccessible firehose that is the "federated" feed
- and the completely empty personal feed
Where do you go from there? But after a few days, after I started recognizing some of the locals and having talked with them, after following some interesting accounts and some people I knew from Twitter, I got rather comfortable with the slow and small pace of Mastodon. Twitter's now very good at finding you a spot in it's network quick (especially since tech twitter's pretty active) but I remember signing up way back on my old account when I had to spend time curating it before it was any kind of enjoyable. The post-algorithm, organic vision of the Mastodon will also be very familiar to people familiar to the cozyweb (Discord, Telegram...etc).
And I think the cozyweb's exactly what people should keep in mind when joining Mastodon. You'll not get to _at_ your country's leader and your favorite retail chain, you'll discuss the news with people in your network and not with whoever has the most attention grabbing takes but hopefully, you'll have more meaningful interactions and build a more lasting relationships. It feels more like Facebook/Facebook groups of old except your locale isn't whoever you went to highschool to origin, if you're not familiar with cozyweb. It's definitely not Twitter and I personally think there'll always be place for something like it but maybe journalists and the kind of conversations they're supposed to help facilitate shouldn't be had on micro-blogs.
If your local feed is too quiet, slowly microdosing the firehose to curate your personal feed is probably the best approach.
The other is to manually browse other small instances of interest to do that same curation: a bit more involved (& not possible with some private ones) but worthwhile.
Once you've built a small amount of variety you should be able to check out people's boosts & maybe the follower lists on their profiles if you feel you need to further expand.
Even if mastodon takes off, it will be like any other protocol on the internet: A centralized free service will appear , like Gmail did, which most people will be there . Twitter will probably convert its service to activityPub then. Slightly better than what we have today, but it wont be immune.
Also, does anyone remember the backlashes every time facebook made a major change to their website? Yeah , all those users went to friendster for sure ... Social networks have network lock-in. The more mad your users are, the more they talk about it, on the service, which ironically is good for the service.
I didn't believe your point about Gmail, expecting many companies to still host their own mail servers or use other services, so I went looking for some data. Found [1], which says that Gmail has 34% market share and Microsoft Exchange 33%. GoDaddy is third with 15% and all others are < 2.5%. Contrary to my expectations, this does confirm that Google and Microsoft are quite close to a duopoly; I'd expected there to be many more providers still.
Still, if Twitter would use ActivityPub I'd consider that a huge improvement. I can send a mail from my @outlook.com to your @gmail.com account, and I can send a text message from my Verizon phone number to your AT&T one; while apps like Twitter, Whatsapp, Messenger are all closed off. If Twitter would adopt an open protocol, IMO that would be a huge improvement, preventing lock-in, allowing users to choose between different UIs, having instances with slightly different features competing.
(Also, regarding your last point, remember when Digg did a major redesign? Change can happen ;-) )
While it sucks that Gmail dominates e-mail, it is still important and useful that they don't control all of it and that essentially everyone continues to interoperate with the protocol enough that I can still run my own server even if most people don't. You don't have to have a fully distributed protocol with no large players to gain powerful benefits from decentralization.
GMail dominating email is mainly bad because their level of influence allows them to do things like cripple IMAP (their broken support heavily influences how clients must implement IMAP - usually wrongly on purpose) & push other major hurdles for clients like their "trusted apps" auth ux.
However, all things considered, Gmail is still in a way better state than any popular social media service. I can talk to someone on gmail without having a google account. They can talk to me. I can migrate my data on and off it with relative ease. That's not possible with any major social network (gdpr has made the data out situation better but it's still inconsistent and high effort).
So even if mastodon gets popular enough to become dominated by a large corp instance, the protocol still represents a massive improvement over the current twitter status quo.
I spun up my own instance today (just for me). It’s not super hard but equally it’s not straightforward.
Admittedly I could just have signed up on an existing instance but this felt like a better way to understand the platform and what it offers.
I’ve been off social media for some time so I figure I’ll give it a few weeks and see how it goes.
For most people it means trusting unknown people with their data and trusting them to not delete your account or turn off the instance eventually, which doesn't make it really better than twitter. Ideally everyone should run its own instance but it won't be the case.
A lot of this overreaction reminds me of when Facebook bought WhatsApp. All the alternatives came up for a few weeks/months, but the dust settled and not that many left in the end. Maybe it’s different this time? But the cycle feels the same
I mainly use only signal now. I feel very uncomfortable using other messaging platforms that keep the text sitting in a database that is either plain text or encrypted with keys they have. I mean private messaging apps, not things like twitter or HN.
Yep. I have tons of people on signal today, and when I started it was just 1 or 2. About half came after the whatsapp exodus, and then it's been a steady trickle.
To be clear, it's still not enough to start a group chat with random people because of course that's a problem in 2022.
This makes no sense and I call BS by a media that is plainly controlled by the state.
Why would anyone who actually used Twitter, an obviously curated social media, want to move to a more free platform because Elon bought Twitter and wanted to ostensibly make it more open.
There is an obvious attempt to destroy Twitter, for whatever reason, with big advertisers pulling out and the government mouth piece, the BBC, is now encouraging users to leave.
BBC title correction according to their own article: "Some Twitter users jump to Mastodon - but what is it?". It's certainly not even remotely close to all.
> The social network says it now has over 655,000 users - with over 230,000 having joined in the last week.
Not all of them will be active. I think I even have an account I have not used in many years. The actual user base is likely smaller, and in a few weeks much less. There will be some attempts to link Mastodon and Twitter, but Twitter is incentivized to prevent decentralization of their platform.
Mastodon is obviously federated, but they also have quite a collective ideology they use to enforce policies. For example, rightfully or wrongfully, they blocked the largest Mastodon node Gab Social [1]. It wasn't even a majority vote, it was just those who maintain servers and develop apps that were able to do this - so a handful of people.
I think there's a fair amount of 'status quo' bias here.
Mastodon isn't going to be a massively federated system that recreates every nuance of the Twitter UX.
It could still be a worthwhile alternative to Twitter. It would be nice if there were thousands of Mastodon servers, but perhaps a handful is ok. Mastodon has a slightly confusing user experience, but so was early Twitter - maybe that's ok too.
Whatever the downsides to Mastodon are they should be weighed against the benefits of moving away from Twitter, which are enormous. Irrespective of whether the Town Square metaphor fits exactly, Twitter hosts a massive amount of influential political discussion. Demonstrating that many users will stop using a venue for political speech if a billionaire gains unfettered control of it is an incredibly important precedent to set.
Mastodon doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be a bit better than Twitter. I think it probably clears that bar easily.
If anyone seriously thinks Mastodon is going to become a replacement for Twitter they're deluded. The whole convoluted nature of it will put off average users. Nobody gives a crap that its decentralised yet they insist on shoving it down everyones throat as they jump through hoops trying to work out how to follow someone.
That's the same for every new tech. Sometimes enough people invest their focus in overcoming the hurdle to push the needle to a point where network effect "forces" the rest (if they want to stay in whatever loop motivates their social media participation).
Can't say mastodon will do this but if you asked me last week I would've agreed with you, yet what I'm seeing this week is unprecedented.
There's Lemmy[0] which is a reddit clone though it's multiple "subreddits" per server is how it's implemented. It's rather small currently and the existing crowd's mainly software developers and hardcore leftists.
"jump" ratio = 230,000 / 400,000,000,000 = 0.0575% of users. The English are masters of understatement, which is why BBC did not say "users leap" and used the word jump instead ..
Shouldn't BBC wait just a bit, like a month, before breathlessly telling us how users are jumping to another network?
Do you think stories like this may influence people to leap or jump to Mastedon?
And would you characterize this piece by BBC as "making news" or "reporting news"?
Isn't that the whole point of that article? When the exact same thing happened to a different political option (people moving to Parler, or Gab) the whole coverage was about making the move as unpalatable as possible.
It is 100% making news at the moment, and it is quite obvious that mainstream journalists are a bit uneasy about no longer being the protected cast on Twitter.
The Mastodon software is not horizontally scalable. So, each instance is forced to be relatively small. One instance will not be able to handle millions of users.
If federation works as intended this should not be a problem since it should (...) not matter whether someone uses server_X.org or server_Y.net. As to whether this works in practice I have no real idea. I have self-hosted a number of Peertube instances which also support activitypub and am on-and-off experimenting with a Pixelfed instance ("Instagram goes activitypub") but since these are all small-scale experiments they neither prove nor dispell the utility of activitypub-as-a-protocol.
Having too many servers (many thousands) could be a big drawback for onboarding. Choice paralysis, and difficulty / time consumption of picking a suitable server to join.
As a VERY technical user. I STILL have these same problems.
I've tried to join Mastodon at least a dozen times in the past few years, and every time I get stuck at step one (which server should I choose). Every server has a vibe of its own and joining one feels like an endorsement of it, and because the server name is part of your handle that endorsement follows you all over the fediverse.
If I feel this confused. I can't imagine what a non-technical user would feel. It's a fatal flaw and I don't know how they overcome it.
Exactly. Think of how many products succeed just because they're "easier" than the alternatives.
You could probably be up and tweeting in just a few minutes. You could be posting or commenting on reddit (provided the sub) in just a few minutes.
I remember being interested in Mastodon as a technology a few years back. It has _always_ been confusing for a significant # of people. A decent % posts about it shouldn't be "how do I sign up, how do I follow people, how do I subscribe, which do I join, etc." That's all the Mastodon reddit was a few years back.
Seems like minus all the posts about current events, it's still largely lots of confused users. Which sucks, because the idea seems pretty good in theory. My only qualm (besides what's already been mentioned) is what's to stop instances from colluding like reddit with it's "powermods" ? Which can honestly be worse in a lot of cases.
The worst part of those questions is the responses they get. "Pick a server to sign up to, request an invite and wait, but if you want to follow someone in another server you need to go to this tool to work out what server they are on, and then copy and paste that into the search box".
It's a very, very shit setup, and it absolutely will not take off.
I have no clue which previous server I signed up to. And looking through themed servers I found one with an interest, but it's hardly my only interest and was met with welcome text saying post something interesting.
One idea is for public libraries to host instances. Public employees responsible for the administration are already bound by privacy laws that would make them more trustworthy than some rando that starts an instance.
If done on a branch by branch basis, this could be a good way to have an online local network. Maybe this would be an open Nextdoor as well.
Local account access could be limited by library card eligibility, which combined with terms of service could avoid abuse by far away troublemakers and limit the noise from local ones.
While eligibility may depend on having a library card, public anonymity could still exist. Just as libraries keep my borrowing history private, they could also shield my real identity.
This idea is inspired by the Twitter space I talk about at
The current architecture is not designed to be horizontally scalable. You need one big primary database node. That works well if you are willing to optimise a lot, see the one example: stackoverflow. But it requires a lot of efforts and cannot scale that much.
One could probably create a new implementation that scale though.
I'm very new to the project. Do you happened to know if the software architecture is inherently coupled to that physical tech choice (one big postgresql)? I have seen some well architected RoR apps sidestep that limitation, but they seem to be the exception.
Seems to me the biggest challenge for Mastodon is that the most high profile Twitter users explicitly want the centralisation it provides. They are going there literally to get on a sandbox and propagate their messages to as many millions of followers as they can. They will not understand the theoretical possibility of federation - they will see anything that introduces any kind of barrier or complexity in the way of them reaching their audience as an antifeature.
I think Mastodon, or whatever else tries to follow it, needs to bury the federation aspect as a technical detail and design from the ground up something that emphasises a unified system. It's not that easy when probably a large fraction of the people building it are introverted engineers who have difficulty even comprehending how someone can want to interact with hundreds let alone thousands or millions of other people. But as long as the fundamental concept of the system is in contention with what the core user base wants, it's hard to think how it will be very successful, at least at replacing a service like Twitter.
I don't want to be too confrontational / personal but your comment contains hubris at levels I've rarely seen & it's something I think may be worth reflecting on. The worst offender:
> probably a large fraction of the people building it are introverted engineers who have difficulty even comprehending how someone can want to interact
At least this starts with "probably", admitting some level of uncertainty, but the overall tone shows a derision & contempt for a group of people you've almost certainly (ironically) never interacted with. I guarantee the developers behind Mastodon understand how people want to interact much better than you do; they're highly intelligent & have actively engaged on the problems around human interaction for years. This is not a system that's been created in a vacuum.
> the most high profile Twitter users explicitly want
> They are going there literally to get
> They will not understand
> they will see
You've made a lot of very confident statements here about what these high profile people want and will do: I'm not seeing a lot of data to back that up.
Regardless, even if there are a subset of people who do want that: what makes them high profile? Mostly it's the platform they're on. If they don't gain a high profile on Mastodon, it's not Mastodon's loss, it's theirs. All Mastodon needs to do is serve the needs of a critical quorum in aggregate, not the needs of a specific supposedly-influential few users.
All-in-all, the main reason people favour centralisation is habit. In reality, even on e.g. Facebook you see communities developing within its "groups" feature, as a parallel to what Mastodon is fundamentally designed around.
-- on the one hand, be outraged that Elon bought Twitter, and be upset that he's doing layoffs --
-- and on the other, enjoy schadenfreudistic pleasure that Elon has just been forced to pay $40B for an obvious pile of garbage --
-- all because they love to hate the loud rich guy.
I mean, I do understand, but the two thoughts don't seem logically compatible. Either Twitter is shit, layoffs were overdue, and he's a bagholder; or it's a valuable thing with necessary staff that he's acquired; I don't see how it can be both.
It seems like the anger is misplaced. Who pocketed the $40B? If the whole thing was bullshit all along, and somebody just checkmated Elon into bribing him $40B to end the grift and hang the Potemkin employees out to dry -- who was that person who took the money? Who cashed out, betraying the lower employees? Who did Elon buy Twitter from?
Mastodon is enjoying a bit of the network effect right now. More and more people are posting that they're trying it out without leaving Twitter - and this in turn drives others to try it too. Whether it will be enough for them to stick around I don't know. But they got the ball rolling a little bit.
Twitter will do at least as well under Musk as it did under the previous leadership, in terms of user satisfaction, reach and retention. But it will have moderation policies that are noticeably different from those of the competition. My prediction made while everyone is freaking out.
Like most everyone else on here I think there is no way Mastodon could possibly take over for Twitter (or anything else). It will never appeal to anyone outside of certain tech circles or very specific niche areas. What I am curious about is Dorsey's new project, Bluesky. Does that have potential to bring a wholesale change to social media? Will it fix ownership of data issues while also leading to easy to use, popular and appealing platforms? It feels promising (based on the marketing and buzz amongst tech circles) but it is still early days.
What's most exciting and optimistic to me about all this hullabaloo is that people are organically starting to make a move back to a more-decentralized web (decentralized in the original, 90s internet sense). What's cool is it's happening 100% organically and independent of technology. I love the idea of different "corners" of the internet becoming more of a thing again. We need more diversity of thought, not less, and this move (however small) makes it more likely, not less.
If you're considering Mastodon, you might want to instead use Pleroma (https://pleroma.social/) which provides access to Mastodon instances but is less demanding of computing resources, and easier to create your own instance (if you choose to go that route) as it has fewer dependencies.
Regardless of hype, or whether this is a watershed moment for Mastodon or not, I'm pleased to see a mainstream media article signed off with "You can follow me on Mastodon (... or Twitter)".
I know that signature is a bit tongue in cheek, but I love seeing this growth of a (then) unknown OSS project to potential household name.
> The first thing you have to do when you sign up is choose a server
> It doesn't hugely matter which one you are on because you will be able to follow users on all the others anyway
> The server you choose becomes part of your user name
> Unlike Twitter, Mastodon won't suggest followers you may be interested in
OK, so this shouldn't be the first step unless the "server" is a key part of the experience or has other benefits. A company laser focused on signups, like Twitter was at one point, would aim a growth team at this and remove all unnecessary signup steps to reduce friction. Steps like... first enter email, then auto-suggest a username, then suggest some interests (i.e., people) to follow, then (and only then) allow for the editing and selection of your username.
> he had over 6,000 new joiners in 24 hours and had to pause registration
You don't turn off signups when things get too hot. You allow signup and then throttle the experience. Reach back out when things cool down and get people re-engaged. (This is difficult, but better than nothing.)
In any case, if Mastodon is a bit like email (as another comment suggested), what will make it "just work" is an upgraded experience to make it easy to sign up. Yes, you will be "picking your server" by selecting your upgraded experience -- such as AOL, Gmail, Yahoo, etc. -- but then they will also need to monetize it or track your usage for other reasons.
In fact, if it gets any traction, perhaps Google will spin up a Mastodon service as a companion to Gmail.
> OK, so this shouldn't be the first step unless the "server" is a key part of the experience or has other benefits.
It is; the local timeline of the server you pick is often the best way to discover new people as a new user. It becomes progressively less important as you build out your network (I hardly look at it these days) but for bootstrapping as a new user it helps.
The important point here is that this puts a big decision in front of people before they get started, rather than treating this as something more like a post-signup engagement vehicle.
For general adoption, every ounce of friction has to be removed from signup.
Furthermore, reading the docs here[1]:
> Before you sign up for a service, it is important to understand its policies and terms of use. A Mastodon website will usually have its policies listed on the /about/more page, which can be found by clicking “learn more” on the landing page while not logged in to that website.
Every server can have different terms?
> Mastodon allows website administrators to set one of three different signup modes
Surprising that mastodon has only half a million users?! Way below what I expected after so many years.
I am looking forward to new Twitter. So many cool changes coming: Vine coming back. Maybe even Periscope coming back. Birdwatch getting more love. And over all more diversity and openness. Pretty sweet.
From my experience, the only people use Mastodon are super integrated into the web/open source communities. There's also a strange mix of anime, furry, and weird gamer people.
So, getting a little meta and just a little frustrated: I am amazed at the continued downward trend of the quality of the commentary on this site in regards to news relating to hacker culture, when topics like this come up.
A pointy haired narcissist with a track record of taking credit for other people's work takes over a tech company and fires half of its employees based on a metric of the number of lines of code they wrote. Cartman style Ha-Ha "they probably deserve it what do those people do all day anyways"
Microsoft-owned Copilot violating the spirit and possilby the legal letter of the GPL? "Don't care, it writes my boiler plate code for me. I hope all lawsuits against it lose"
A federated open source ad-less social network starts to get some popularity? "It will never amount to anything. Pointless over-reaction."
Has hacker culture truly changed this much since I came up into in the 90s? Or has the demographic just shifted here that much? I was around running a UUCP node, Citadel BBSes, logging into MUDs and MOOs and IRC back in the late 80s and early 90s, when the Internet went through several of its early growth explosions, lived through the fall of '94 when AOL users first flooded the web, saw the fallout from that, etc. and then saw this culture and the open source and free software movement grow throughout the 90s and into the milennium.
People who comment like this are unrecognizable to me as part of that same movement.
When you comment on an article about the growth of a federated open source network built by hackers... with disparaging snark -- what exactly are you contributing to hacker culture?
Presumably your comment is directed at me, but I think we probably have overlapping wants and disagree on how to get those results.
I think you're wrong about Musk, but that aside - I want us to escape the ad-driven model we're trapped in. I want users to have actual control over their computing. I want hackers back.
I just do not think these federated attempts will get us there, I think that's been proven over the last thirty years, and I don't want us to waste time on half-measures destined to fail.
It's not a disagreement about the goals - it's a disagreement about the focus and the tactics to get the goal we want. I want more than some system that serves a handful of highly technical niche users (arguably poorly) in a mostly centralized fashion. I want a path to actually achieving the goals the cypherpunks of the 90s web originally set out to achieve.
I mean, I'm active on Mastodon this week and I'm boosting it because it's having its moment. But I don't disagree with many of the criticisms of it. But it doesn't really matter, because this is something having a growth moment right now and it's overall a positive thing and it's something that can actually be built on.
Mastodon itself is fairly meh software. ActivityPub itself is reasonable as a potential starting point, though it won't satisfy the purists.
In the meantime, we are potentially seeing the beginning of an exponential growth curve on Mastodon. It could fizzle out. But it's a net positive thing, from the POV of this old wizened/grouchy Internet veteran.
> I just do not think these federated attempts will get us there, I think that's been proven over the last thirty years, and I don't want us to waste time on half-measures destined to fail.
Email seems pretty successful by any measure…
All this really needs is an overlay (app or something) so people don’t have to care about the underlying technology. With all the newfound interest there’s probably someone working on such a thing and other people looking for somewhere to throw a bunch of money to cash in on the new trend.
Just look a the pandemic and WFH, video conferencing went from some niche thing to something my 70 year old parents were doing on a regular basis to keep in touch with the family. The first month or so it was a bigger mess than the current twitter exodus and an almost direct comparison.
IDK, having the beeb give a pretty balanced overview doesn’t seem like such a bad thing. Unfortunately nobody cares about that and just want to go on about how Elon is the worst human ever.
People have been bringing email up a lot, but it’s really a good example of why federated systems end up centralizing and fail to accomplish their goals.
Almost nobody runs their own email server, the few that do struggle with not getting blacklisted by Google and the tiny number of other companies everyone else uses.
Even the tiny number of highly technical users that persist despite that are communicating almost entirely with people on gmail anyway. This is a failure.
It’s a failure for the same reasons mastodon will fail: spam is a hard problem, servers are too hard to run, centralization has UX advantages that can’t be overcome without changing underlying problems with the software stack (dependencies, general complexity, how updates are deployed across a federated network).
Urbit is trying to do this, as far as I can tell nobody else is taking it seriously.
HN is not just about the cypherphunk culture, actually it's far from that IMO. It's much more about the startup and product culture. It was started by a VC after all.
Personally, I'm happy to read realistic and pragmatic comments here. Mastodon is not going to kill twitter. The headline is frustratingly clickbaity. What's nice is that it will get a nice bump of users thanks to this article, and the project will be stress tested.
Mastodon may very well kill Twitter. What make you think that a company with descent financial backing can't scale a Mastodon instance to Twitter-size levels?
In my view, its basic idea is wrong. Mastodon reduces the connection between communities and will have worse "free speech" problems when it reaches the twitter scale. If money could solve everything, google+ would still be a thing today.
Smaller communities are easier to moderate. Reduced interaction with other communities means that any one person can only have a limited effect before a remote moderator intervenes.
What happens when a toxic community starts causing problems in the wider network? Quite simply, they get cut off from the network. Every individual user can block an entire instance. Each server can also block another instance. There is also precedent for ALL servers to block one particularly bad instance.
You probably can't prevent toxic communities from forming. Since it's an open protocol, you also can't prevent certain political parties from setting up their "free speech" instance and doing what they do. But you can cut them off from everyone else just trying to have a good time.
The community structure should tend to gather like-minded people together. That would mean some instances becoming intensely toxic. Which is what we have seen happen. On the other hand the isolated structure makes it easy to just ban that entire community with one button.
You make it sound like a company running a large Mastodon instance scaled across hundreds of thousands of nodes couldn't make changes to solve whatever "free speech" problems. Just because it is open source doesn't mean that they couldn't make changes and contribute to the code upstream to solve many of these issues.
Mastodon has some structural problems, and instances do not scale well. Mastodon.social is run by Eugen (who created mastodon), and he's had to disable core features of the service (local and federated timelines) just to cope with the sheer number of users.
AFAIK, it would take significant work to rewrite the software such that it scales the way Twitter does.
I'm not new here, and.. well ... It's always been a mix of both, but that mix seems to have shifted in % and tone in the last couple years especially. Maybe reflecting broader culture wars issues.
But there used to be a much broader consensus in the industry among nerds about responses to this kind of thing.
Empathy to fellow software engineers in our tech industry is one thing I would expect re: the twitter layoffs. I worry about apathy about license violations for the license that literally made Linux (and therefore huge swathes of the modern tech infrastructure) possible. Again, not recognizable to me is the dismissive sneer about new possibilities in social networks and tech.
And yeah, perhaps Mastodon is annoying/frustrating to these people precisely because it isn't a monetized money making scheme.
FWIW I am one of those "software engineers" you mention and did my decade in a FAANG. But I only got that title because of the time I spent as a hacker-nerd in my teens.
I'm trying not to paint too much of a straw-man here, but it feels like a trend to me, a worrisome one.
You and I must be reading different HN's, because I see an awful lot of people anti-layoffs, anti-Copilot, and pro-Mastodon.
So I wonder if you're actually complaining about diversity of thought? Because HN isn't the "hacker culture" you're talking about from the late 80s and 90's. It's got a whole bunch of those people, but also a whole bunch of everything else.
When people comment, why should they be trying to contribute to "hacker culture" at all? Why shouldn't they simply be offering their diverse perspectives?
And criticizing Mastodon is a valid perspective to have. If people are looking to jump ship from Twitter now, it's important to be realistic about whether Mastodon is or isn't "ready for business" both from technical and consumer perspectives. It's counterproductive to only hype up projects and never criticize them.
> what exactly are you contributing to hacker culture?
This is a board run by an incubator investment firm, so I don't really view it as an outpost of hacker culture.
I have been reading here over the past week here about private Amway rail cars, underperforming CEOs being replaced, notes about Stripe/Twitter layoffs. Most of this is peripheral, or even unrelated, to hacker culture, but I don't really read here for Hacker culture.
I've seen a lot of hacker culture in the past few months, and a lot of innovation, not necessarily here, although there's been references to it here. For what I'm interested in a lot of it has been based around Github recently, but it varies over time.
I don't see the angels, incubators, VCs, startup founders, FAANG business development and product managers, and occassional programmers talking here to have much influence on hacker culture one way or the other. I'm sure a lot of people hacking on stuff have read this board, or even commented. Not all - I know a lot of very good programmers who never even heard of this board.
You have to understand a lot of people own Tesla's and Tesla stock and they feel attacked personally seeing anything succeed that might affect their stock or opinions of Musk. By seeing other people be successful that might take away from Musk's success, they feel like it will affect their potential to get richer.
> Has hacker culture truly changed this much since I came up into in the 90s?
The revolution eats its own children. The games industry used to be the target of hacker attacks, and cracking games, pirating them, was more fun than doing damage, according to the self-image of the 80th, 90th, 00th.
Who would have guessed that such a spirit could also turn against its own community, in a community where manipulation and deception took place even in the past, as long as it served one's own goals?
There has never been good and evil. Only feasible and delightful.
I regret it, however there is only so much we can do.
I do have a pet theory that between GPT-3, various parsers, bots, 4chan influx we saw tendencies that eventually took slashdot and other forums down. I personally try to keep HN spirit alive, but I will admit it has gotten harder lately.
It would be sad news for me, because I see HN as last bastion of real conversation online.
> Has hacker culture truly changed this much since I came up into in the 90s? Or has the demographic just shifted here that much?
Demographic shift which did affect the hacker culture. It's not that hard to spot the image of an average hacker of today. But I'm not gonna go into details - it would be like setting fire to a dumpster.
This may be the only time this phrase has ever been warranted, but...crypto solves this?
I mean, you want decentralization but Mastodon is decentralized at the whim of whoever happens to own your server. So, what if you had a bunch of fungible providers all incentivized to etc etc...
The “Vertically Integrated Messaging Apparatus” is in overdrive this weekend, now providing manuals on how to sign up for a different social network that none of them heard of last week because of Current Thing.
We’re going to hear exaggerated stories about how no one uses Twitter anymore and everyone who is anyone is on Mastodon. The articles will be tweeted, of course.
It reminded me of when I was considering trying to move all of our customers to receive PGP encrypted mail in 2005. An intelligent employee brought up that an average business person would never do that. Luckily we never implemented it.
Mastodon is great but it isn't a replacement for Twitter. Too much friction. Too hard for the average journalist. Not enough reach.