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0 pointsslg3y ago0 comments

>I guess I set up the false dichotomy because based on the statements of 85% of the people on hacker news, you would think that they have all the right answers for running twitter, and Elon is simply not following their advice. So if he fails, even if it is well intentioned, it is only because he is boneheaded enough to not listen to the geniuses on hacker news and reddit.

But that is still a false dichotomy because I don't need to know the right answer to recognize boneheaded management. Any independent observer can see that Musk is going back and forth on certain decisions: saying "comedy is now legal on Twitter" then banning parody accounts for mocking him or laying people off then immediately asking them to come back. These are self inflected mistakes that I recognize as objectively bad management without knowing the specifics of how to properly manage Twitter.

>Elon has successfully run more than just a car business in a wide variety of fields.

And none have been a media company let alone a social media company. Building cars, rocket ships, and tunnels are all relatively similar from a management perspective and are very different from running a social media company. Running a social media company requires a much more complex understanding of people and social systems. It isn't as simple as just building a good product. Twitter's technical product was never the primary issue with the company. The problems Twitter faces are all human problems. Musk hasn't shown an ability to fix those type of issues.

>There are free apps that let you archive your Twitter feed, and there are free apps that let you find messed it on users from their Twitter account. I'm sure those tools would get even better and easier to use if the writing was on the wall that Twitter is going down.

Those apps are generally worthless at the scale we are talking about. Twitter has 450m monthly users. Mastodon has 1m. Retaining 0.2% of your audience when transferring platforms doesn't provide much value.

>What you say about personal investment is true, but it is true about literally everything. If you personally invest in Macedon, I messed it on fails, then you have wasted your time and all of your work is worthless.

Yes, the point it that it didn't seem like Twitter failing was a likely situation a year ago. Today it seems like a realistic possibility.

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googlryas3y ago· 2 in thread

Parody accounts that are labeled as parody accounts aren't banned. Parody accounts that may trick people into thinking they are real accounts will be banned. I don't really see the problem with that. If you ever look at any popular tech related Twitter account, you will see a ton of crypto scams in the replies from people purporting to be vitalic or other famous members of the community.

I just can't understand anyone that lists that as the first gripe or example regarding how he is running things poorly. Elon also lined up at billions of dollars from institutional investors to take Twitter private, and I'm fairly sure they had an understanding of Elon before a week ago. And yet they still gave him billions of dollars.

May I guess that you were an Elon negativist, or a mastodon positivist before there was any mention of Elon buying Twitter?

I'm not saying that Elon is guaranteed to succeed, I'm saying that it isn't clear that he is bound to fail. Most CEOs of social media companies that reach a billion plus dollar valuation don't have any experience running social media companies either. But somehow they do it.

I guess we'll have to agree to disagree about the likelihood of Twitter failing. Would you like to place a friendly wager on it ? I'd happily bet $1 on whether Twitter is dead on basically anytime frame that you would provide less than 5 years.

slgOP3y ago

>Parody accounts that are labeled as parody accounts aren't banned.

That isn't true[1].

>I just can't understand anyone that lists that as the first gripe or example regarding how he is running things poorly. Elon also lined up at billions of dollars from institutional investors to take Twitter private, and I'm fairly sure they had an understanding of Elon before a week ago. And yet they still gave him billions of dollars.

It was listed as the first gripe because it is objective. Musk said one thing then did another. There are levels of debate you can have about most of his other management issues. There is no debate here. This is a situation in which Musk said Twitter would handle a situation in a certain way then they immediately handled it a different way.

>May I guess that you were an Elon negativist, or a mastodon positivist before there was any mention of Elon buying Twitter?

No. You can look into my post history if you need proof. I am a fan of Tesla, I think they make great cars. However, Musk in the last couple of years has seemingly become more and more detached and destructive.

I think Mastodon is doomed to fail (or at least never succeed) because centralization was not Twitter's main problem and the federated nature of Mastodon can actually exacerbate those real issues.

>Most CEOs of social media companies that reach a billion plus dollar valuation don't have any experience running social media companies either. But somehow they do it.

But they at least usually have worked in media or social media before. Dorsey's and Zuckerberg's qualifications to run their billion-dollar companies was that they grew those companies into a billion dollar entities. Agrawal's qualification was that he worked at Twitter for years before becoming CEO of the company. Musk's qualification is that he has billions of dollars.

>I guess we'll have to agree to disagree about the likelihood of Twitter failing. Would you like to place a friendly wager on it ? I'd happily bet $1 on whether Twitter is dead on basically anytime frame that you would provide less than 5 years.

Nothing I said here is a prediction that Twitter will fail, what failure even means for a company like Twitter, or the timeline that failure might play out over. My point is that failure wasn't a real concern a year ago, now it is, and the only reason for that is Musk's management.

[1] - https://www.vulture.com/2022/11/kathy-griffin-twitter-banned...

googlryas3y ago

Yes it is true.

The rules[0] state:

> What is required under this policy?

> To avoid confusing others about an account’s affiliation, parody, commentary, and fan accounts must distinguish themselves in BOTH their account name and bio

In the screenshots[1], you can see that he said the account is a parody in the bio, but not the name. Only specifying it in the bio means that you would look like a real account when tweet replying.

My point is that failure isn't a more real concern than it was previously, except for, largely, people who already hate Elon, or, perhaps in your case, for people who are misinformed about policy rules and violations.

[0] https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/parody-accoun...

[1] https://twitter.com/connorratliff/status/1589473721030701058...

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