Elon Musk

well.

the "free speech absolutist" thing is so incredibly stupid. I remember an era where there really was "free speech" online and it fucking sucked. you couldn't look at anything in a public setting because people would spam goatse everywhere. decent message boards would get brigaded and become unusable. like, look at the YouTube live comment boxes whenever there's a political event going on (at least, back when there actually was live chat) - just an endless parade of racial slurs and swastikas. Elon himself has been known to retaliate against anyone who speaks up against him so it's blindingly obvious that his "free speech" charge is just replacing one type of moderation with another. idk how this is gonna work out for him but I can't imagine it will be good!!

It would kinda dope if Musk bought Twitter and just shut it off…. Lol

— ICE T (@FINALLEVEL) April 25, 2022

didn't he promise an edit button for twitter? can't wait for an endless parade of people getting 100K retweets on "jack in the box hit different at 1AM" and editing it to say something like "hitler was cool and the age of consent should be 9"

frogbs otm

and joestork

and ice-t tbh

Maybe Pierre Omidyar could buy Truth Social

Making Twitter not suck is a simple matter of curating one's feed. I have the former president's name muted, I have Kanye West's name muted, and I don't follow any political accounts unless they have something else to offer, so basically my Twitter feed is a stream of people talking about jazz and metal and art (and pro wrestling, but whaddya gonna do).

So proud to be supporting an African owned business✊

— Liam Bright (@lastpositivist) April 25, 2022

yup the conservatives have finally learned a second joke

reddit was seriously ideologically committed to free speech absolutism for many years and they eventually had to abandon it after it proved to be totally unworkable, expecting this to basically play out the same way except stupider. problems included totally unchecked harassment (already a problem on twitter as is), borderline child porn, creep shots of women, and the obvious nazis.

musk really should have bought reddit though, it's still the most elon musk social media site.

Making Twitter not suck is a simple matter of curating one's feed.

No. That's only making one's feed not suck. Twitter would still be a cesspool.

also can I say it fucking sucks that "free speech", which is legitimately under attack right now from a political party that is trying to sanitize American history, determine what can and can't be taught to kids, and is now punishing companies for not discriminating against certain employees, is instead used to mean "you have to engage with my shitty, bad faith arguments". drives me up the fucking wall that the right wing is always complaining about "big tech censorship" when the objective reality is that most social media platforms have been bending over backwards to appease them!!

OTFM

I found a weirdo on there who is a Dunning-Kruger candidate that claims to be THE source on COVID, even though he's not a virologist or immunologist or epidemiologist or doctor and won't give his credentials other "I'm a social scientist" or "I wrote this substack". and dude is followed and given actual words of support by tons of legitimate experts, people like Dr Kim Prather, who is an aerosol specialist who actually gets interviewed and quoted in major COVID stories.

kooks wind up in your feed even if you follow reputable people, cos they get retweeted by people you do follow

frogbs otm and i'm legit depressed living in FL atm

I wonder if he’ll just more or less leave it as is, at least for a while. too many (undoubtedly dumb) changes in the interest of making it too epic or owning his detractors via TOS or what have you, and I’d suspect lots of people will just bounce.

or are there some platforms (eg Facebook??) that are just Too Big to Fail?

He's pretty likely to leave it as is I think. There'll be PR stuff around free speech and whatnot, but in terms of actually changes that seems a lot less likely

I feel uncomfortable with this latest Twitter purchase antic

what would be the point of buying it if hes not going to change it

He’ll waltz in and try to make it more epic but will break it badly and piss off employees because he has no idea what he’s doing, then dump it when it becomes too much of a hassle.

i suspect hes got some sort of business idea to make it worth more, not saying its going to work or that its really substantial but kinda doubt hes just doing this for the lolz or whatever

one thing going in his favor is his demonstrated ability get weird money losing business overvalued

on the other hand there is a non zero chance he is just actually going crazy

one interesting thing that could happen during this process is teslas stock price coming back to earth

my guess is that he's the impulsive pea-brain flibbertigibbet front-puppet for a crew of way more sinister and hardheaded forces (thiel obv but not just thiel) who are happy to let him blunder hither and yon breaking things while they corral the culture-war responses to the elements unleashed

they allow him to think he is doing one thing (w/his vast cloud of dimwit simps n minions shrieking in excitement at every development) while quietly firming up their own stuff

do these dark forces have a high opinion of him? no of course not -- they despise him more than we do lol, he is just their dullard princeling wound up and pointed at stuff they wanted knocked over

at outside worst (for them) (and best for us) all his crypto-currency will be rugged at some point soon 👍🏽

hair plugs, dumb cars, 2nd (3rd?) divorce. he’s probably having the richest man on earth’s rarefied version of a midlife crisis.

https://reductress.com/post/breaking-man-makes-midlife-crisis-everybodys-problem/

No. That's only making one's feed not suck. Twitter would still be a cesspool.

― more difficult than I look (Aimless), Monday, 25 April 2022 bookmarkflaglink

How would you know?

I know all kinds of twitter bullshit that no one I follow engages in

i logged off forever and yet am still exposed to Horrible Tweets basically every day

literally every time this comes up some super users are like "you just gotta rigorously customize your feed, it's so easy" and personally i think you're all sociopaths

i suspect hes got some sort of business idea to make it worth more, not saying its going to work or that its really substantial but kinda doubt hes just doing this for the lolz or whatever

I don't think hes buying it for the lols, and he may or may not have certain plans for it, but what does that look like in practice? If its to make it into a 'free speech haven' or something, I don't see how thats possible, all those free speech alternatives that keep springing up are moderated to the hilt

I know all kinds of twitter bullshit that no one I follow engages in

― Chappies banging dustbin lids together (President Keyes), Tuesday, 26 April 2022 bookmarkflaglink

But you've got an account, that's usually enough.

also the degree to which everyone is performing for the likes undermines it as a useful transmitter of ... information, criticism, *jack voice* consciousness. i should be posting this in the twitter thread

this is why i'm glad ilx has no likes system, you can only tell if your posts are good if everyone says "otm" afterwards

Musk is taking on $25 billion in debt financing to acquire Twitter, at an avg interest rate of between 4.5-5%. That means Twitter's going to have to pay $1.15-$1.3 billion a year in interest alone, which is more than it made before interest and taxes last year.

— James Surowiecki (@JamesSurowiecki) April 26, 2022

good at business

xxpost I kind of like the "tough room" aspect of ilx. Who cares if a bunch of dum dums like my tweet? I'd rather get a "heh" from a jaded Replacements fan.

literally every time this comes up some super users are like "you just gotta rigorously customize your feed, it's so easy" and personally i think you're all sociopaths

― flamenco drop (BradNelson), Tuesday, April 26, 2022 9:49 AM (seven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

this is 100% right, but I'm also an old cranky twitter user who just uses tweetbot on my phone 99% of the time. it's just people I follow, all chronological

I also stopped replying to comments on tweets that are dumb and just block people who make egregious replies to people I follow instead of replying, because the urge to reply to bad twets gives me bad brain

i like looking straight into the vortex of chaos like those dudes in CHERNOBYL (2019) who opened a door and there was the naked reactor glowing spookily back at them

apparently the terms of the loan Elon took out against his tesla shares are really funny

if he can't pay back the loan -- which he probably never will have to, all these guys do is just chain loans forever -- he'll have to forfeit five times the number of tesla shares compared to its current valuation

related: he mainly wants to play pump-yr-crypto, including w/the algs

people really don't get the "stock rich, cash poor" thing. saw a few tweets about how he could have given every person in the world X amount of dollars instead of buying twitter, etc

there's no cash! if a stock-rich guy wants to buy anything more expensive than a hamburger they just take out a loan against their stock assets

I think ppl saying this is going to fail massively overrate the degree to which insanely rich people fail at anything. At some point, being rich is self-fulfilling.

Expecting capitalism or market forces or whatever to punish the richest person on earth seems to be missing the point.

Mh otm. Afaict, claims the financing is dumb book down the same idea as “the government should run its checking account like a family”

*boil

Elon now on first name basis with EU

Brussels has warned Elon Musk that Twitter must comply with the EU’s new digital rules under his ownership or risk hefty fines or even a ban, setting the stage for a global regulatory battle over the future of the social media platform.

Thierry Breton, the EU’s commissioner for the internal market, told the Financial Times that Elon Musk must follow rules on moderating illegal and harmful content online after Twitter accepted the billionaire’s $44 billion takeover offer.

Breton said: “We welcome everyone. We are open but on our conditions. At least we know what to tell him: ‘Elon, there are rules. You are welcome but these are our rules. It’s not your rules which will apply here.’”

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/04/eu-warns-elon-musk-over-twitter-moderation-plans/