Just a couple examples:

>gets comedians and entertaining accounts back on board

Musk's personality and actions turn off many of these people. It will much harder for Musk to get these people back than it would be for a publicly traded company.

>lets people say what they want instead a bot army of shills repeating verbatim over and over and over

Musk himself controls an army of shills who attack anyone who disagrees with him. It has now become common for people criticizing him to stop using his name because some of his fans will search Twitter for anyone talking about him in order to aggressively defend him. Why would we expect him to work to stop shills site wide when he has put no effort into stopping his fans from exhibiting this same behavior?

People said the exact same thing before Tesla and SpaceX.

For example, was Tesla a success because of some unique ingenuity by Musk? It seemed to me that his success was more the result of a commitment, both personally and financially, to building EVs that no one had previously had. Yes, that eventually led to success. But he didn't succeed were others tried and failed. He succeeded were the other auto manufacturers didn't even try because of their own bias towards the status quo. With Twitter he would need to succeed where every other social media platform has failed.

Not even that. Other people founded the company in 2003; he became Tesla's fourth CEO when they were about to launch the Roadster in 2008.

Musk was the first investor in Tesla, and chairman of the board from the beginning. While chairman, he was involved in the business. He took over as CEO in 2008 and has grown Tesla into the world's largest car company.

Trying to claim Tesla's success is not due to Musk is just wrong.

Nitpick: The most valued car company. Many larger companies in terms of employees and car output. Everything else sounds right though!

Regardless, of how you label it Elon created Tesla and there is no Tesla without elon.

Do we say the Warren Buffet owes everything to the founder of the New Bedford based Jewelry company Berkshire Hathaway? Hate Musk all you want but IDK why people try and discredit him with stuff like this

EDIT: Changed AP => AC

That's not what the actual founders say though: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eblPwXFb7TE

They say he was not a founder within the first minute of the video.

I also think it's worth noting that he brought the best of current "good enough" manufacturing practices to luxury automobiles. I think this is the fairest examination of that, since it includes Elon himself: https://jalopnik.com/best-of-2021-in-epically-nerdy-intervie...

Our expectation around cars is that the build quality will be good from day one; this kind of incremental improvement approach is not common. IMHO it's also sub-par and somewhat dangerous for something as deadly as a car, but that's probably a side point for the current discussion.

We also see this with the Hyperloop. Big optimism, and the first actual implementation in Vegas kind of sucks. Maybe it'll improve over time, maybe not, but there's certainly an initial quality gap.

The question I'd ask is what does the equivalent look like for Twitter? I sort of think the "do it crappy, see how to improve it later" policy is more typical for social media.

I wouldn’t say best of ”good enough” .Tesla is actually one of the worst in terms of ”normal” car quality, even when compared to non-luxury cars. It has great battery, electric motors and even software, but normal items which you can see in normal car, are in the lowest side on quality. Also the way how you feel the car when driving is critized being B quality when compared for example German cars.

In many countries it has been listed on the best place on fault statistics (have most of then)

When you buy Tesla, you invest on EV research, not so much for luxury car while it might drive itself. You get a glance for the future.

Teslas, especially during the initial production runs for any given model, are built like Wayfair furniture. Good enough to do the job, but without a high level of quality. Turns out consumers will accept that.

Returning to the Twitter question: gosh, I hope Elon decides to invest heavily in areas I care about and doesn't ignore aspects which I think are vitally important.

See also: fast fashion.

Like electric cars and low cost access to space? Both of those fields are littered with the dead husks of failed attempts from prior decades.

Musk was hardly the first person to try any of this, he was the first person to be successful.

You do realize companies have been trying to make EVs even before there were fossil fuel powered ones, right?

There has never been a time in the last 150 years when some company wasn't making EVs.

The group in charge now caused more bleeding. Other social networks are doing great.

There is a lot of low hanging fruit.

He’s also guaranteeing that the soldiers still alive in the Mariupol steel plant can communicate with their families, because of a swarm of Starlink satelites currently positioned above Ukraine.

I dunno, I find the guy abrasive, but he does get results.

Whenever we achieve the grand unified theory of comment sections, it will include a formalized concept for this process of context loss as an explanation for where arguments come from.

The deeper in you go, the more likely that the reason the point was raised will be lost. And crosstalk will arise between people carrying on the original point and those who experience the latest comment as its own starting point.

Fact is the issue was largely already solved, even though the perception was that the water was still unsafe.

0. https://twitter.com/yishan/status/1514938507407421440

> They would like you to stop squabbling over stupid shit and causing drama so that they can spend their time writing more features and having to adjudicate your stupid little fights.

There is a community on Reddit that is currently at risk of being banned according to the admins. The community is a heavily moderated location to respectfully discuss controversial topics, one that is fairly insular and doesn’t advertise itself, and takes pride in respectful and nuanced discussion.

They regularly have innocuous posts removed, while nearly all posts with truly dangerous ideas stay up — we can attribute that to one-off moderation errors, but repeated threats from the admins cannot be.

The admin threats seem related to a specific issue which is not even in the top five most controversial things discussed on the subreddit. They’ve made it clear that any discussion on the topic is unacceptable, no matter how civil.

It puts a lot more burden for content moderation on the sub mods, since the community doesn't have as much ability to voice disagreement in replies (once a resident troll bans enough dissenting repliers, the only people who can reply are the remaining community minority that agree). It's also hard for the mods to detect, since they don't get any visibility to the ban system from their side. I would be hesitant to take advice on how to manage a social media communication platform at scale from anyone presiding over recent decisions at Reddit, since they seem to have equipped the most toxic users with the tools to pseudo-organically poison the well for open discussion.

Sorry for keeping it vague. The communities loves to write endless heapings of words, so I’m sure if and when it is banned, much ink will be spilled. Perhaps another member of the community will recognize which it is I am talking about (there is overlap with the HN crowd) and be able to summarize better than I.

(FWIW, if it'll save anybody else either eye strain or 5 min on Google, I ended up parsing it through Twitter Reader App to read end-to-end and print to PDF; not affiliated, never heard until 20min ago, no clue if it'll work for anybody else)

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1514938507407421440.html

I read @yishan's thread about Twitter and agree, as I think anyone who's run a forum would, that Elon is "in for a world of pain," or at least for a type of pain both much nastier than hard engineering problems, and with far less upside as well.

Where I think he's mistaken is his claim that the left and right both want to ban each other roughly equally. Among the elite, and within Twitter specifically, there is much more inclination to ban the right.

I say this as someone whose political views, if you force them onto the left-right spectrum, probably end up about 80% toward the left. E.g. I've spent millions over the past several elections supporting the Democrats.

It used to be that censorship was something the right did, and free speech was something the left were in favor of. But over the last few decades, banning "problematic" ideas has become a huge component of left culture (http://paulgraham.com/heresy.html).

Plus tech companies in general, and especially Twitter, lean to the left. Imagine walking around Twitter pre-Covid. You'd find plenty of openly far-left employees. How many openly far-right employees would you find? I don't think you'd find any.

The combination of (a) the left's recent focus on banning heretical ideas, (b) the leftward lean of tech companies generally, and (c) the leftward lean of Twitter even among tech companies, means that right-wing speech is much more likely to get banned on Twitter than left.

That's why people on the far right keep starting lame Twitter alternatives. You don't see people on the far left doing that. They don't need to. They have Twitter.

https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1515235822890532864

That part is true. Their custom tunnel machines dig twice as fast as other machines.

Boring Co's tunnel machines are just customized versions of existing machines. At best they are slightly faster than they base machines, and only in specific soil conditions.

However, as demonstrated by the Hawthorn and Vegas tunnels, the Boring Co machines are, in practice/in the real world, no faster than the non-customized machines, while at the same time yielding significantly lower quality tunnels (referring to the concrete shell built to protect the excavated portion of the tunnel).

And here's the crazy thing: if Elon had actually done his research, he would have known that the "automated digger" Boring Co plans to build already exists. They're just really expensive, because digging machines are built to-spec for each project based on soil conditions. These existing machines can be powered by multiple sources, though generally they aren't electrified due to the demands on the local power grid. In a nutshell, you'd have to build a dedicated substation to handle the electricity draw; the only reason Boring Co's tunnel machines don't is because they dig small utility-sized tunnels rather than large transit-sized tunnels.

Isn't that faster than existing machines?

Even if Boring Co actually builds such machines (and given Elon's history of grandious unmet claims that's very unlikely), no. Utility-size TBMs on the market can already bore faster than the P2 hypothetically would.

The delay in tunnel boring isn't the TBM machines; it's in the other stuff like the undisclosed power lines and other utilities that the TBM will run into while boring and which must be painstakingly rerouted, or the things above the tunnel that must be accounted for. For example, LA's "regional connector" transit project has been delayed for almost 5 years because they ran into hundreds of undisclosed utility lines and pipes while digging and had to spend years rerouting those utilities before they could continue digging. Boston's Big Dig was delayed because they had to build underground bridges while tunneling to support the weight of ongoing activities above the dig, like existing rail, highways, and subways.

Note that both of the examples above are transit-size tunnels, but the issues LA Metro ran into would still apply to Boring Co's much smaller tunnels.

Really, the biggest problem with Boring Co's tunnels is that they're basically useless boondoggles: as the Vegas tunnel demonstrates, they simply don't have the capacity to handle meaningful amounts of traffic.

Control of media is the drill for mining for government subsidies, not the oil field.

Toyota made green cars a thing before Tesla. And Chevy and Nissan made EVs. Without the Prius and the EV1, there wouldn't have been a market for Tesla.

SpaceX launches rockets into space. 7 countries and 3 private companies were doing that for decades before SpaceX. SpaceX just does it cheaper. And note that SpaceX's research is almost entirely funded by government sources, and is largely just a continuation of reusable rocket research begun by NASA in the 1970s (which ended when their budget was cut by the Reagan administration).

"SpaceX's research is almost entirely funded by government sources"

I don't believe this is true. Do you have sources for this claim? The USG has purchased services from SpaceX, the income from which SpaceX has then used to develop reusability. But that's not the same thing as "the USG funding SpaceX's reusability development." In fact, the government missions initially specifically disallowed using reused boosters or Dragons.

This is such a tiring rebuttal.

Do you really believe Elon Musk is the best to lead any enterprise because of Tesla and SpaceX? I mean, they both produce great products, but aren't necessarily great places to work, nor do either have any measurable lifespan outside of the easiest money environment we've ever seen. That is to say, we don't really know how good these companies are...yet. One or the other, or both, could turn out to be investor capital burning machines. Which is to say, not great businesses. Twitter is already that.

You then try to make the case that because these companies have gotten money from the government that it discredits their successes as if another reality they might have failed. This isn't reasonable as an argument structure. In another reality, English might be spelled differently. That doesn't mean that you don't know how to spell. The argument structure is deeply unsound.

Next you demand certainty, but you restrict the range to just Tesla and SpaceX. If you were genuine in demanding certainty, you would have to expand the range to include PayPal and Zip2, since in those cases we can say things with certainty because his involvement is over and so judgements can be made. You do this, because you have to, because if you didn't that means you would have to accept plausible reasoning. Yet the measurements which incorporate plausible reasoning, such as the stock price, refute you to an extreme extent.

By stating all this with appeals like "do you really believe" and "this is such a tiring rebuttal" you trick yourself by employing rhetoric. It makes you seem to yourself as if your argument is much stronger than it actually is. After all, you are obviously right that he doesn't actually think what you implied he thought. So when you ask that question to him you already know that the answer is no he didn't think that. Unfortunately, there is a reason as far back in Western thought as Plato rhetoric was being described as the art of being convincing without being right. Beating up the straw man makes you think like your argument is correct so much so that you grow tired of it.

His company made rockets that fly backwards and park autonomously.

I had no idea. I always assumed he was inspired by SpaceX. October Sky is a great movie btw.

Blue Origin has accomplished practically nothing compared to SpaceX, even if they "landed a rocket before SpaceX". In the 7 years since New Shephard first flew, they've not flown anything new. To this date, BO has not launched a single gram into orbit.

For comparison, 7 years after Falcon 1 first flew in 2006, SpaceX had flown F9 v1.1 and had built a spacecraft that flew to the ISS.

It is not hard to imagine an alternative world where Elon Musk had nothing to do with the SpaceX company and the same achievements would have been reach. Or even an alternative world where the NASA funding would have gone to a completely different company, or—yet even—a world where NASA would have developed this technology them selfs (hiring the same experts off course).

All is to say that Elon Musk is not some essential figure in the development of VTVL rockets. Rocket engineers would have developed it regardless in any world where the Space Shuttle is sunset.

I think if it wasn’t for SpaceX this technology would still exist today, just developed by a different company (or even NASA them selfs if they were so inclined). SpaceX just happened to be the right company at the right time with the right engineers onboard to reap the benefits afterwards.

Bezos runs a successful business, is just as predatory, but doesn't try to fight Vladimir Putin. Or brag about throwing shade at Bill Gates. Or sleep on people's couch. The guy can't afford a hotel?

I question whether he actually sleeps on their couches. He may sleep in their spare bedrooms, or spare master bedrooms, or spare houses.

But possibly he's sleeping on couches—I guess I imagine it's more likely part of his business model, which mostly appears to me to be raising capital exceedingly well, getting other people to pay for his ventures. It's a hard sell to get investors to say, "Hey, I'm going to use all your money on these mansions." Much easier to say, "All the money you invest, I will spend on making you profits." In a way, his main model seems to be similar to nonprofit fundraising and in nonprofits, funders seem to hate if the people running the show look to be too wealthy, as it may appear to be a waste of funds.

But I could be off on this, just the vibe I get.

First of all there are a lot of questions about whether that story is true. And even if it was, it isn't material to Elon's success: https://savingjournalism.substack.com/p/i-talked-to-elon-mus...

Second, what makes Elon truly remarkable is what he accomplished AFTER he made < $200 million from selling PayPal. Most of which were impossible according to conventional wisdom in the industries that he accomplished them in. Anyone who fails to recognize that, has demonstrated a complete lack of comprehension.

Key quote:

'We had so much money we couldn't even close our safe'

So, as soon as somebody cites a fact that is confirmed by an authoritative source that can be googled pretty trivially, you cease to take them seriously. Honestly, this is par for the course with Musk fans and it baffles me.

As for Musk himself, um, I'll continue to go with "rich kid gets richer due to quantitative easing, some supposed business sense albeit not much actual evidence for it, and state subsidies for most of his businesses".

It is also probably worth calling this part out too: an interview with Elon Musk is not "balanced coverage" of Elon Musk.

"Shills" implies commercial backing. Ex. the democratic party hires operatives with shill account networks to create the illusion of popularity for certain tweets. (google sally albright)

"Stans" is the better term for Elon fanboys. I haven't seen any evidence Elon is paying these people to defend him online (would be pretty pathetic if he was). I think most of these people are just really into the cult of personality. Much more similar to kpop stans. (etymologically rooted in the eminem song "stan" - an excessively obsessed fan)

These people are not like us. They're more like sovereign corporations with a pseudo-monarch as head, and a literal army of both overt and covert support workers handling security, PR and impression management, financial operations, and so on.

Social media bot accounts are possibly the lowest cost and highest return form of PR and sentiment management ever invented.

I personally suspect that his army of stans is large enough he doesn't need shills, but it'd certainly be a huge story if they could prove he was funding shills.

(There are definitely a LOT of ~"@elonmusk59393259" fake accounts pretending to be him that try to pump coins or offer fake giveaways, but I don't think he's done so himself?)

True shilling feels significantly more morally repugnant than these sorts of 'coattail-riders', but their impact is certainly similar.

- a discoverability problem for topics, authors, and tweets

- too much garbage, spam, low quality tweets

To the point where I “churned out”.

It is clear that twitter as a platform has immense long term potential if curated properly. The fact that “cancel tribes” and virtual lynchings are a recent mainstay of the culture of the user base, shouldn’t make it surprising that critical and interesting voices (no free speech) do not feel free. Enabled wokism from the top down has materially affected the quality of the content on the platform in its current form.

The issue at twitter is likely a combination of:

- poor management

- internal cultural issues

- lack of a revamped product vision

All of the above issues are the perfect set up for an executive shakeup from an outsider.

If we take the above as true, who else has the gull and ability to do such a shake-up? Twitter’s board as demonstrated in the previous weeks seemed quite entrenched and reasonably powerful.

This seems like a good fit, IMO.

No one else tried. Twitter has been stagnating drinking the kool-aid for many years.

"Either (a) Twitter is terribly bad at detecting spam or (b) there's something about Twitter that makes detecting spam difficult or (c) they don't care.

Based on my experience detecting spam, I'd guess (c)."

"Twitter engineering: If you're going to do such a bad job of catching spam, how about at least giving us a one-click way to report a tweet as spam and block the account, like email providers do? It may even help you get better at filtering, since more reports = more signal."

Passing the bucket to anyone with 43 billions on the side still doesn’t look like a good strategy.

I would argue that not a ton of groups can put together a $43 billion offer very easily. So the pool is somewhat limited.

I don't think there is anything inherent to the twitter situation that means it can't be fixed. Do I think Musk personally is the guy to do it? Of course not. But he probably wont appoint himself CEO. If he does appoint someone competent and with a clear vision for fixing Twitter's numerous flaws, then he will succeed. He put a good head in charge of SpaceX and he merely acts as the public face. Do the same here and it will work. If he doesn't do that then it probably wont.

Yes, downright controls. /s

"When you're fresh meat, kill and throw them something fresher."

I think this captures average twitter well. It does not need much to be "controlled"

So therefore "not controlled". That tweet was funny or at least mildly amusing. We can call any likes that any celebrity gets a "controlled mob", if we go with this line of thinking.

Huh? You do realize the parent comment is not talking about Amy Schumer, right?

> It will much harder for Musk to get these people back than it would be for a publicly traded company.

So, you're saying that comedians who are on social media to gather following to promote their content... and were banned while doing that will not come back to Twitter if unbanned because Musk? Do you think they gave two shits about who the CEO or board members or majority investors were when they joined?

Shilling/bots isn’t the same as rabid fans. Yes people shouldn’t brigade and intimidate people making arguments in good faith. Of course, few people make arguments in good faith.

Because he has a track record of doing things no one else could.

Like installing solar panels on people's roofs?

Anybody who's doing incredible things will fail incredibly at least half the time.

>>> Because he has a track record of doing things no one else could.

>> Like installing solar panels on people's roofs?

> It's more interesting looking at what he succeeded in doing against the odds.

Not when you're dealing with the incredible and persistent hype that follows Musk.

> Anybody who's doing incredible things will fail incredibly at least half the time.

Which is exactly my point. Past performance is no guarantee of future results, even with Musk. Unfortunately he's built a cult of personality around himself, and too many people view him as some kind of tech-god (er, "technoking") that can succeed at anything.

/s, in case it wasn't obvious.

Building SpaceX is not the same set of challenges as fixing Twitter. They are different enough to be completely unrelated.

Not him specifically. Just any private owner of Twitter.

That’s the naked truth. You can spin it this way or that way; none of the reasons I’ve heard make deeply convincing arguments.

It’s basically 100% political.

To distill it further: A bottom-up argument would be that "Because Elon has done X, Y and Z; I dispise him". What's going on here is "I disagree with Elon's fundamental values, but let me pick X, Y and Z to make my case".

Cherry-picking examples that don't accurately reflect someone's values is a common problem, but that doesn't seem like what you're describing.

"Values" aren't some abstract thing; they're only visible through actions. Saying things is an action like any other (an unusually significant and/or representative one if you are a public figure).

Rephrasing my statement: What's going on here is "I disagree with Elon's fundamental values, but let me pick X, Y and Z to make my case and ignore his accomplishments, almost impossible achievements and world of good he has done for the planet, humanity more broadly."

So, it doesn't hold water IMO. Future generations will look at HN discussions (if they're perverse) and exclaim "They really argued about a rude pedo tweet vs. making our species multi-planetary. Boy,..oh boy."

I'm not certain Elon even has a declared political affiliation.

What I find absolutely true, is there are a growing number of people seeking to excuse his faults, without evidence I might add, as some kind of political motivated 'religious belief'.

It is much easier to ignore criticisms when you turn off your brain and follow some cultish belief, and 'evil liberals jumping out of trees' is quite a popular cult at the moment. Then you can ignore whatever someone says, about anything, in whatever twisted way you can think of to turn it, 'political', or into a 'them versus us' moral goodguys vs badguys argument.

His companies are badly run because he prioritizes his own ego over learning the domains he is working in. He risked worker safety because he doesn't like the color yellow. He doesn't care about the people who work for him: the California Sheriff's office had to lock his factory doors when covid was rampaging. He exploits nerd-joy to avoid having to provide safe, supportive, constructive environments that actually produce good software.

If more people were like him, the world would be a worse place for all the rest of us.

I don't believe any of that is "conservative". Aside from his drug use & exploitation of workers, I'm not sure what of it is "libertarian". And "progressive"?

This is a platitude. He seemingly has no fundamental moral compass, his beliefs are almost always entirely self-serving, which people often interpret as "libertarian."

No single person is 100% left/right/whatever. If you don't openly say what you are it leads things open to interpretation, and people seemingly paint whatever picture they like on Musk.

* Make a better tomorrow

* Solve humanities most pressing problems

* Make humanity a multi-planetary species

I have no issue with this guy, but it's odd to me the way people use him as a blank canvas and fill in all the blanks.

Nobody would take any other tech CEO's "make a better tomorrow" directive seriously, so why his?

It probably explains why he attracts the type of people he does and why he has the sort of following he does.

Most other CEOs speak corporate lingo. Have you heard Satya Nadella or Sundar Pichai speak? It's like their words make a visit to the PR office before leaving his mouth.

Sure I did. I also use their products every day and so do billions of people ranging from Downtown Manhattan to subsaharan Africa.

Meme Lord Enron Musk instead managed to get Tesla to account for a paltry 1.3% of all cars globally sold in 2021. He won the lawsuit to obtain control of Tesla in 2002. That's 20 years. 80 quarters. If my math isn't wrong that's 0.01625% per quarter growth rate. Amazing.

Oh an there is a small detail that they are rich people's toys. Badly refined rich people's toys I should add.

But hey at least he post memes just like all of us plebs /s

Look, it's fine if SV wants a politician they can identify with, but at least you guys should come out and say it openly instead of hiding behind the veil of him being a "businessman".

Businessmen don't behave like Musk, politicians do. Autocrats to be precise. He's SV Donald Trump.

I've seen the rest of your comments, please be nice.

Considering you framed me as toxic I wonder how you frame the guy you are defending, as he is the one who is bullying everybody, committing securities fraud left and right, engaging in pump&dumps and doxxing whistleblowers.

But all that is somehow okay because of empty promises of Mars, FSD or some other technoutopian pipe dream.

It's the same identical blindspot Trump voters had about his character because he made empty promises to do something about China and immigration.

The issues people care about are often exploited by autocrats and fraudsters to gain power and wealth right now while they promise to do something about the issue sometime in the future (and never do).

Fear of death is already starting to be exploited in SV by cryonics companies, but I predict Musk will enter this niche too with Neuralink as it's too juicy of a fear not to exploit.

But he is not so “Libertarian” that he refuses to accept government subsidies.

There's no point saying this in a real discussion.

Those are all “Libertarian stances”.

Personally I'd make the opposite change (everyone should be exempt) but religious organizations shouldn't get special treatment just because they're religious. The practice of having special rules which only come into play when religion is involved undermines the separation of church and state; it means that the state is discriminating between citizens on the basis of the presence of absence of a (recognized) religion.

> Corporations, and any community chest, fund, or foundation, organized and operated exclusively for religious, charitable, scientific, testing for public safety, literary, or educational purposes, or to foster national or international amateur sports competition (but only if no part of its activities involve the provision of athletic facilities or equipment), or for the prevention of cruelty to children or animals

Religious organizations are exempt from tax, but so are PETA and the ACLU. Against that background, efforts to strip tax exemptions from churches are a deliberate attack on religious organizations as compared to other civic organizations.

There are plenty of other areas where the government shows favoritism toward religious organizations besides 501(c)3 status. For example, ministers are exempt from federal income tax withholding, despite being classified as W-2 employees, and can opt out of Social Security taxes via Form 4361, which is available only to "An ordained, commissioned, or licensed minister of a church; A member of a religious order who has not taken a vow of poverty; or A Christian Science practitioner."[0] (That last one is oddly specific… and goes so far as to endorse a specific religious organization.) Membership in a "health care sharing ministry" also offers, or did offer while it was still in force, an exception to the individual insurance mandate under the Affordable Care Act (26 U.S. Code § 5000A(d)(2), "Religious Exemptions"[1]).

[0] https://www.irs.gov/forms-pubs/about-form-4361

[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/26/5000A

Ministers are exempt from withholding but they still have to pay it, and they pay FICA taxes like self employed workers: https://www.irs.gov/taxtopics/tc417

And that was the point. Other organizations have to be based around some particular beneficial purpose such as charity or education in order to qualify, and that classification can be challenged if, for example, a "charitable" organization doesn't actually redistribute most of the money it receives to charitable causes, but you can start a religious-themed amusement park (charging admission!) and call it a "church" and it's automatically tax-exempt.[0]

> exempt from withholding but they still have to pay it

Which means they're getting several months' worth of extra growth out of that portion of their income than everyone else by paying it at the end of the tax year rather than having it withheld from their paycheck. It's clearly a religious privilege; other W-2 employees would opt out of withholding if they could, but they can't since they aren't ministers.

> and they pay FICA taxes like self employed workers

Despite not being self-employed, and only if they don't use Form 4361 to opt out of Social Security, as I said before. Which is something which can only be done on religious grounds, or a lot more people would be doing the same, as SS is a poor retirement strategy compared to investing the same amount of money privately. (The average rate of return for SS contributions is lower than T-bills, much less mutual funds or stocks.)

[0] https://www.orlandosentinel.com/features/os-holy-land-experi...

There are some historical nuances about power dynamics and avoiding conflict between the church and state, but that is all long ago.

But it's 2022, not 1992, and a lot of contemporary conservative causes are based on coding conservative positions as being based on "religious beliefs" and liberal positions as being based on some sort of "rational morality." But that distinction is fictitious.

For example, liberals decry Mississippi's 15-week abortion ban as "imposing religious beliefs." So why do highly secular countries like France and Denmark draw the line at 13 or 14 weeks? In reality, the abortion debate rests on competing moral ideologies--one that emphasizes the importance of reproduction, and one that emphasizes the importance of individual choice. Neither position is based primarily on scientific facts or rigorous logic.

Likewise, when it comes to teaching kids about sex and gender. "God created man and woman and told them to reproduce" is a religious gloss on the factual observation that humanity comprises two sexes which reproduce sexually, and any sustainable human population requires each woman on average to have 2.1 children. Any conclusions you want to draw on top of that are moral judgments, not based on science or logic.

It's no different when it comes to law enforcement. Unless you're an anarcho-libertarian, you recognize that the state has a role in defending individual rights. Moreover, any system of law enforcement is going to produce problems and false positives at scale--especially when dealing with people at the margin of culpability. Leaving aside second-order effects for a moment, there is nothing inherently libertarian about asserting that we should err on the side of less aggressive policing to reduce the false positives, at the cost of allowing more wrong-doers to escape punishment. Likewise, there is nothing inherently libertarian about saying that destroying private property in riots is a justified reaction to police misconduct. These are all liberal moral judgments.

None of this is to say that liberals are wrong about any of these things. It's okay to formulate positions based on moral ideology rather than logic. My point is simply that you can't stake out a bunch of positions based on moral ideology, while claiming the high ground of secular rationalism and attacking your political opponents as "imposing religion."

Why does it always seem like the people who are on the “margin of culpability” always minorities? Like when Ving Rhames was suspiciously sitting in his own house (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jul/28/ving-rhames-...)

There are plenty of statistics showing minorities are stopped at a higher rate, convicted more harshly, face higher bail, etc for the same crime when you control for everything else.

So if you should only marry to reproduce, does that mean old people shouldn’t get married? Should we stop people who take steps not to reproduce? Conservatives use to fight to outlaw birth control and it is still the stance of many.

None of these are “Libertarian” stances.

Because that is the only time it makes the news. It sort of follows with Coulter's Law which states roughly that if the race of a suspect isn't initially mentioned, they are non-white.

>There are plenty of statistics showing minorities are stopped at a higher rate, convicted more harshly, face higher bail, etc for the same crime when you control for everything else.

I actually used to assume this to be true. However, when you factor for income level of suspects, the variance disappears. This is probably why you almost never see black millionaires in prison. Even with Bill Cosby it took hundreds of allegations across over 40 years before he did time. Because he had money.

The police definitely don’t know my household income level (I work remotely for $BigTech and I make over twice the median income in my county) when they see my 6 foot 3 son walking through our neighborhood back to our house in a county that’s only 3.9% Black and stopped him to question him twice.

For this to be true though, whites would also have the same advantages over Asians, but it's the opposite. So logically does that mean whites are discriminated against more than Asians, since that is what the numbers say? Or is it maybe that different cultures are more or less likely than others to do things that warrant police attention?

Another example of your logical fallacy is comparing men vs women. There are HUGE disparities in police interactions between men and women, is it because of sexism or is it possible that one gender reacts more aggressively during interactions with police on average..?

Who said this?

Except the current debate isn't about marriage law, it's about what kids should be taught in school, and when. It's one thing to have marriage law accommodate different groups with different beliefs about the basis of marriage. It's a different thing to teach any particular view or set of moral judgments to kids in public schools.

> Conservatives use to fight to outlaw birth control and it is still the stance of many.

As I noted in my post, it's 2022, not 1992. Today, 90% of conservatives agree with 93% of liberals that birth control is morally acceptable. https://news.gallup.com/poll/257858/birth-control-tops-list-....

Conservatives and libertarians were on opposite sides of this issue in the 1960s. But today, the political dispute is over privately owned companies being forced to pay for birth control for employees. And on the contemporary issue, libertarians and conservatives are on the same side.

For example, the significant majority of Americans think that sex between teenagers is not morally acceptable (54-42). Do the teachers who want to teach these facts believe that? Will they use materials that depict sexual interactions between teenagers—as in many of the books that have become controversial recently? Conservatives—and many moderates, given the Florida law has strong public support—view this as a “tip of the iceberg” situation.

Isn’t the entire idea behind “libertarianism” that you can do whatever the hell you want to do as long as it doesn’t affect others?

Shouldn’t Libertarianism be more concerned about teaching that you should conform to the standards of a religious institution?

> For example, the significant majority of Americans think that sex between teenagers is not morally acceptable (54-42). Do the teachers who want to teach these facts believe that? Will they use materials that depict sexual interactions between teenagers (as in many of the books that have become controversial recently)?

Yes because “abstinence education” has shown to be really effective. I’m sure if teachers have all of their students take “abstinence pledges” it’s going to stop them from having sex just like the “Just Say No” campaigns stopped teenagers from smoking weed.

I can’t help but notice how you’ve framed this in terms of “choice” and “self expression.” Do you see why even parents who want their kids to learn to be accepting of these biologically-determined differences might be wary of how the message will be delivered in practice?

> Isn’t the entire idea behind “libertarianism” that you can do whatever the hell you want to do as long as it doesn’t affect others?

That applies to adults, who are fully developed persons. But the moral socialization of your own children—dependent humans with underdeveloped brains—is within the ambit of what the State shouldn’t mess with. Aversion to social engineering is a key distinction between liberals and libertarians on this front.

> Shouldn’t Libertarianism be more concerned about teaching that you should conform to the standards of a religious institution?

You’re not allowed to teach that in public schools either. And libertarians should be concerned about the State trying to socialize children in the opposite ideology too.

> Yes because “abstinence education” has shown to be really effective. I’m sure if teachers have all of their students take “abstinence pledges” it’s going to stop them from having sex

Teenagers will draw outside the lines. All the more reason to draw those lines rigidly. And again you confirm what ideologies will come in through the door of these discussions.

> just like the “Just Say No” campaigns stopped teenagers from smoking weed.

Legalization of weed seems to have resulted in a significant uptick in smoking of marijuana.

> Teenagers will draw outside the lines. All the more reason to draw those lines rigidly. And again you confirm what ideologies will come in through the door of these discussions.

No matter how you “draw the lines”, do you really think little Johny and Sue are going to decide not to have sex because their teacher told them “it was wrong”? Wouldn’t it make more sense to teach them how to be safe?

Sure I would rather my underage son not drink. But I also have told him if he is in a position where he shouldn’t be driving, call me. Well at least that’s the old school way. I told him to call an Uber and if I see him home without his car - no preaching. Just call the Uber to take him back to his car.

> Legalization of weed seems to have resulted in a significant uptick in smoking of marijuana.

More importantly it’s taken a tool out of the toolbelt of the police state - something that libertarians should want.

Who shouldn’t? The way you framed it—in terms of “choice” and “self expression”—it could apply to everyone. Certainly, it’s not the role of teachers to tell straight kids that they don’t have to conform to Biblical or Quranic teachings if that’s what their parents want. That’s the point. Liberals believe in non-conformity, self-fulfillment, and self-expression for everyone. Many parents therefore don’t trust liberal teachers to talk to their kids about topics that implicate morality. (My Bangladeshi immigrant mom flipped out when my high school counselor suggested I major in European History given my interests. She doesn’t suffer fools!)

> No matter how you “draw the lines”, do you really think little Johny and Sue are going to decide not to have sex because their teacher told them “it was wrong”?

Many won’t, and even the ones that do will learn to keep sex a private part of their life and identity. Either way, the point is that—e.g. some white American teacher doesn’t get to decide how some Muslim kid is socialized to think about sex.

Libertarianism is premised on independent rational actors. Libertarian freedom doesn’t apply directly to children. Instead the freedom from State interference applies to the parents in deciding how to socialize their dependent, mentally undeveloped children.

I had to look this up and while it's somewhat true, it's highly misleading. "On demand" abortion in Denmark is limited until 12 weeks. However you can still get an abortion afterwards "if the woman's life or health are in danger" or "if certain circumstances are proved to be present (such as poor socioeconomic condition of the woman, risk of birth defects in the baby, the pregnancy being the result of rape, or mental health risk to mother)."[1]

The special circumstances allowed by the Mississippi abortion ban are much more narrow, including only medical emergencies and severe fetal abnormality[2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_in_Denmark

[2] https://www.khou.com/article/news/local/texas/mississippi-ab...

Moreover, both agree that there are extenuating circumstances that can change the balance in specific cases. And they agree on the particular extenuating circumstances that are most likely to arise: risk of severe deterioration to woman's physical health, and fetal abnormalities.

All you're pointing out is that Denmark recognizes additional extenuating circumstances for special cases. Specifically, the health exception covers the risk of "severe deterioration of woman's physical or mental health." But note that the "risk to a woman's life or to her physical or mental health should be based solely or principally on circumstances of a medical character." The other grounds for second trimester abortions require unanimous approval from a special committee: https://cyber.harvard.edu/population/abortion/Denmark.abo.ht.... They are not an open-ended exception to allow second trimester abortions in ordinary cases.

I would say the former isn't about the value of reproduction any more than the principle of not killing a one-year-old is not about reproduction. It's about what counts as murder, based on what counts as human life. Whether or not one thinks of a 15 week old as being human life is all the question is about.

I have several liberal beliefs myself, but do think that other liberals delude themselves into thinking that they are somehow scientific judgements, opposed to simple moral sentiments, inherently subjective.

Yes, people don't realize that Roe v. Wade made abortion far more permissible in the US than in almost every other Western country. The only exception I am aware of is Canada, which because of a series of accidents ended up with no abortion laws at all.

I’ve had this idea that many people who talk about libertarianism, but particularly in the US those who vocalize their alignment with the Libertarian Party are just republicans who don’t want to admit it. The famous “libertarian” Thiel going mask off and then helping build the surveillance state and military industrial context convinced me.

“Conservatives” are for maintaining the power of status quo elites (in most modern developed economies, that means capitalist elites), generally by marshalling traditional/religious justifications.

These views fit together...rather well, actually.

To use abortion as an archetypal example: a fetus’s right to life is traditionally coded as “religious” and a woman’s right to autonomy is traditionally coded as “secular” but they’re both just assertions in competing belief systems. Neither of those things are scientific truths that will turn up in an autopsy—much less any conclusions you draw about how to strike a balance between the two. Thus there is no necessarily libertarian take on abortion. In a free society that recognizes that morality may be the basis for law, there is no real way to keep the government out of abortion; only to ensure that competing moral views are reconciled democratically: https://reason.com/2015/08/14/sorry-rand-paul-haters-pro-lif....

Likewise many contemporary conservative debates have to do with what public schools (the State) teach kids against the wishes of parents. These teachings, for the most part, are not scientific truths like evolution or climate change, but rather unfalsifiable moral assertions. The true libertarian solution here would be something like school vouchers, but taking public schools as a given, it’s wholly consistent for libertarians to side with religious parents against State schools that want to teach their kids a particular moral framework.

Conservatives and libertarians are different. But it’s 2022, and the alignment of contemporary conservative political causes is different than in 1992.

But every position I argued in my original post is about giving the government less power over people that objectively doesn’t affect someone else.

This does not follow. There are various ways to approach a libertarian position on the morality of abortion per se which don't devolve into "striking a balance" between conflicting rights (a decidedly non-libertarian concept; natural rights are all negative rights, which do not conflict), but in the end it doesn't matter because there is only one entity involved with both the ability and the standing to justly apply either defensive or retributive force in response to a threatened or actual infringement of their rights, and that is the woman having the abortion. Anyone else using violence to either stop the abortion or punish the woman for having it would be in violation of the Non-Aggression Principle, as they are neither directly harmed by it nor acting with the informed consent of, and under the direction of, any party who was harmed.

> The true libertarian solution here would be something like school vouchers…

The "true libertarian solution" here would be private schools, with 100% private funding. Though of course anything that allows for more choice in where students can receive their education and what they are allowed to learn represents a step in the right direction, all else being equal.

> There is only one entity involved with both the ability and the standing to justly apply either defensive or retributive force in response to a threatened or actual infringement of their rights

Presumably your stance here is that the fetus does not have the ability to apply defensive or retributive force, and therefore has no right to it. This seems to suggest you hold a "might makes right" morality: If someone isn't able to defend themselves, then they have no right to. Taken to its logical end, wouldn't this imply that any murder would not be immoral, since if someone was not able to defend themself from murder, then there is no violation of the Non-Aggression Principle?

No, that "therefore" does not follow. One does not lose a right just because one lacks the power to exercise it. The fetus would not be wrong to employ violence to resist any attempt to kill it—though even putting it in those terms presumes a degree of conscious decision-making and self-ownership which is not in evidence.

> Taken to its logical end, wouldn't this imply that any murder would not be immoral…?

No. To begin with, I never said that abortion wasn't immoral or a violation of the Non-Aggression Principle. Both of those are debatable; from a libertarian point of view the answer to the latter question hinges on whether the fetus can claim self-ownership, which presumes a degree of conscious control and responsibility for the effect of one's actions on others.

That is all quite abstract, however, because in practical terms it would be a violation of the NAP for anyone else to intervene. An adult, or even a young child, who found themselves harmed or threatened with harm could consent to allow someone else to fight on their behalf; or, just as importantly, could withhold that consent. (For example, they could be a pacifist and believe that fighting back would be immoral.) In the case of a murder one could look to a will or the like as evidence of the victim's wishes. For an abortion, however, there is no such evidence. Anyone responding to it with force is doing so entirely on their own, and not in self-defense, which makes them the aggressor.

Standing is where the Libertarian argument collapses. It is the age old question of when does a human have standing and a right to life. Can you kill your 5 year old child, 1 year old, 9 month fetus, 15 week, fetus, ect?

There is no clear libertarian or scientific answer for when rights and "standing" enter the human body. You extended the NAP to requiring direction or awareness from the harmed party, but there is the matter of time.

Would the harmed party in this case object if given time and awareness? If you shoot someone before they object, do they have no standing? If you poison them secretly, without knowledge to object, do they have no standing?

Anything that is harmed has standing, human or not, conscious or not. A tree has standing to fight back when it's threatened with an axe. The fetus certainly has standing here. What it lacks is the ability to act on it, or to request or consent to someone else acting on it. Not only physically but developmentally, it lacks the capacity to make conscious, intentional, deliberate choices and take responsibility for the consequences. Likewise for "right to life"—the right to respond with defensive force against aggression which threatens your life. It has the right to defend its own life but not the ability.

> You extended the NAP to requiring direction or awareness from the harmed party…

I didn't "extend" anything. The NAP is a convention which applies only between self-owners, as otherwise action affecting any lifeform (cattle, plants, …), or even non-living matter, without its "consent" (assuming that's even possible) could be read as a violation of the NAP. The question of whether the "harmed party" does in fact have the quality of self-ownership is thus relevant. Whether an entity has self-ownership is determined by its ability (and will) to make choices and take responsibility for their consequences.

This, by the way, is the root of the justification for employing defensive force: Deliberately causing harm to others, or failing to take responsibility for unintended consequences of one's actions, undermines one's status as a self-owner, thus placing one outside the protection of the NAP. The relationship changes from that of two self-owners to that of a human actor and a harmful element of their environment.

> Would the harmed party in this case object if given time and awareness?

Would the tree object to being cut down if we found some way to endow it with consciousness and the ability to communicate? Perhaps, but that isn't the situation we actually find ourselves in, and it won't happen unless someone puts in the effort to make it happen.

> If you shoot someone before they object…? If you poison them secretly, without knowledge to object…?

Obviously they have standing, but that isn't really the point since they're dead and can't do anything about it. They have a (posthumous) right to restitution and retribution in either case. The question is whether they delegated the enforcement of that right to someone else (which could be "anyone" or a specific person or group) before they were killed. If not, that doesn't imply that the victim didn't have a right to live or that it wasn't wrong to kill them, but it does mean it would be wrong for someone else who wasn't harmed to initiate violence unilaterally against their killer, when they can't rationally claim to be acting for the victim in accordance with their wishes.

The version of the history of the founding of the US is very much a sugar coated version of what actually happened.

Are we in 1992 or 2022? Because I learned the "real history" of the civil war growing up in Virginia in the early 1990s back when it was solidly Republican.

It takes immense willful blindness not to acknowledge that the opposition to "CRT" in schools arose at the same time as school districts began paying folks like Ibram Kendi to come lecture to teachers: https://www.fox5dc.com/news/fairfax-county-schools-defending....

If you're a parent whose school sent them a reading list including Kendi, who writes in his latest book:

> The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.

Maybe, just maybe, you might have objections that while not supporting "Lost Cause" narratives of the Civil War?

There are very few conservative teachers who teach the Lost Cause version of the civil war. There are some debates within the historical community so it isn't really fully settled though. Many in the North were talking about the federal government trampling state's rights and they weren't talking about slavery so it isn't quite as simple as you make it out to be.

I assume you are talking about slavery when it comes to your last point? If that is the case there are no conservative teachers denying slavery happening in the US including the fact that some of the founding fathers had slaves.

As far as the “Lost Cause” not being taught..,

https://www.montgomeryadvertiser.com/story/news/education/20...

It’s pretty obvious Trump and Alex Jones tweeting again would bring in a lot of eyeballs for better or worse.

> He exudes libertarian, progressive and conservative values depending on the context

The context is whatever fits his self interest, wallet or ego in that specific moment in time.

People on this board like to proud themselves of how smart they are, it turns out IQ doesn't matter that much in such situations. You just can't measure street smarts and the ability to call out cults and snake-oil salesmen.

What does this look like to you and how am I not doing that? Because it sounds like you are saying I shouldn't criticize what Musk might do which would be pretty ironic considering so many people think Musk is doing this to force Twitter to allow freer speech.

Why not tell him to let things play out?

You're not credible if you say comedians don't want a platform that cracks down on mob cancellation.

yeah like when he smoked weed on the joe rogan podcast... comedians absolutely hate that. and tweeting about shibu coin or whatever... ELON YOU CAN'T JUST TWEET SILLY THINGS! THE COMEDIANS WILL HATE IT!

"Musk himself controls an army of shills who attack anyone who disagrees with him."

no he doesn't.

"Why would we expect him to work to stop shills site wide when he has put no effort into stopping his fans from exhibiting this same behavior?"

you sound like when the military industrial complex was trying to shut down bernie by inventing the term "Bernie bro" and then saying that Bernie is bad because he doesn't shut down his "toxic fanbase" on Twitter. such a pathetic argument.

Twitter is so fantastically successful because they've created a platform that both feeds their users a constant stream of enraging content, and more importantly, incentivizes the creation of content that's enraging to someone else. In the process they've managed to mold almost the entirety of mainstream public discourse into an endless supply of hot takes, sick burns, and us-vs-them polarization that results in Twitter being an essential tool for anyone who wants to participate.

If they get rid of the rage bait and toxicity, then people won't need Twitter anymore and will move on to whatever new platform provides it for them.

In my opinion, there's two reasons for this; first, Twitter has largely moved mainstream discourse to a superficial conflict-based format, even among those who might previously have enjoyed quiet reasonable discussion; a lot of these people are no longer going to get what they need, emotionally speaking, from a less confrontational platform. Second, the nature of Twitter has brought a lot of people into the mix who were not interested in participating in online discussion at all, but have been energized by the presence of a platform that provides an opportunity to dunk on jerks all day. These people, likewise, are not going to be served by a less-confrontational platform, and are going to move to the next thing or just disperse if no suitable platform is offered.

Twitter is huge; it's scaled for the kind of vast crowds that are attracted by the particular flavor of discourse it offers; if any significant portion of those vast crowds go away because it starts offering a different kind of discourse, then it will collapse under the cost and complexity of running a platform of that size.

I mean, the three threads with the most comments in the past week (by a significant margin) have all fallen under "rage-based engagement" (two threads on Elon-Twitter and the thread on Google Docs' new inclusivity checker). So while HN may be better in that regard, it is by no means exempt from that same influence.

People are inclined to argue in comment sections, and Twitter is one big comment section.

(It's also worth noting that HN enjoys its comparatively high signal-to-noise engagement because of its fairly heavy moderation; it seems self-evident what more "free speech" would do to that)

> If they get rid of the rage bait and toxicity

because AFAICT Elon wants to make speech more open on the platform, and when I hear that I think -> less moderation, which means -> more opportunity for rage posting, which doesn't really add up in my brain.

Yes, but being an international speech platform is a massive liability. And when you take a role of an arbiter of what politicians and MNCs can and cannot say you have to navigate thin lines. Just look at the chart of its stock price since IPO to see that its success is not financial. It’s basically a place for first-hand short-form news and for pretend-journalists to do “research” and pad their articles. Oh, and for overly online people to argue about controversial topics.

Even though I'm not a twitter user on multiple occasions I've had to deal with impersonators there pretending to be me and acting abusively towards friends and colleagues with threats and harassment, only to have twitter dumbly respond with that no rules are being broken and only taking action after enduring months of it and rolling the report dice over and over again. In the mean time, I got to watch friends calling out abuse get suspended for harassment and forced to remove their posts.

A lot of people see twitter's moderation as politically motivated, and while I don't doubt that some of it is-- a lot of it is just bad and chaotic: allowing deeply abusive behavior to persist when randomly raining hell fire down on someone who merely said something a bit controversial. That inconsistency convinces people that it's politically motivated because they notice when someone is suspended over something inconsequential while at the same time so many examples of serious abuse continue.

There isn't any guarantee that it's possible to do better, for sure-- but I'd like to think that it's possible. Certainly there are other sites (like HN!) which do a much better job, but they tend to be facing challenges of an entirely different scale.

All that blather aside, the obvious implication of that 5 billion dollar revenue isn't that it could be grown-- it's that much more of it could be returned to twitter's owners. For all twitter spends on development, it still manages to be a service where even its CEO posts photographs of text to tweet longer messages. Perhaps there is a good reason for all the longstanding gaps in functionality-- perhaps twitter is all it could be -- but if so, it could be returning a lot more value to its owners.

>> Comedians like Stephan Fry left exactly because people were saying whatever they wanted and being abusive. You can't have it both ways.

> People will be hurtful and abusive no matter how moderated the platform is.

Which only proves the point that the GGP's formula for Twitter's success doesn't add up.

Also, we're not talking about a binary condition, but one of degree. If people are leaving now because of too much of "people ... saying whatever they want... and being abusive," it's reasonable to assume more people like that will leave as the moderation lightens up. Other people might join because of the policy change, but I doubt they'll be "comedians and entertaining accounts."

Most companies, figures, games, movies, etc have twitter accounts to convey information or offer support. If anything Musks ambitions will draw more of those entities back, especially ones that were not aligned with the twitters political views.

Sure, it is social media, but the individual users that used to use twitter like Facebook, browsing trends etc have left for the next new platform, for example TikTok.

I find it really hard to imagine that there is a significant number of such companies that is just waiting for Milo Yiannopoulos, Steve Bannon, and Alex Jones to be unbanned, so they can finally resume using Twitter for their commercial purposes.

Perhaps My Pillow?

But yeah, the claims just don't pass the smell test. You bring in more people like those (and more of the TheDonald.win crowd), and you'll either polarize the platform by driving off existing users or have more of a toxic, polarized, trollish, bitchfight that isn't good for anyone or anything except maybe Twitter, Inc.

I don't think that proves anything. It's an example of one person.

In a well moderated environment, only once. Or at least, once in between probations.

Can't say I see the problem here.

What are the two "ways" that supposedly are in conflict?

2. no abusive comments

Content moderation is difficult.

It's not going to happen because this model is not going to generate any revenue unless Elon figures out something.

I've barely had my coffee, and I've already seen the most "HN living in a bubble" comment of the day.

Totally. Why would anyone self-host when it could be written to a blockchain and be decentralized, tamperproof and censorship resistant? Twit-coin could reward influencers for their certified engagement metrics without knowing their underlying physical identity by maintaining value flows virtually. Brave browser is 80% there already.

Censorship resistance is only meaningful if there are actual people exchanging ideas and building community. Cryptocoin and 100% free speech is a perfect recipe to create an online space even more dominated by trolls, bots, and conspiracy theorists than Twitter is today.

Unfortunately, between Musk’s obvious enjoyment of manipulating markets however he can and Dorsey’s increasing focus on dWeb/Web3/“magic crypto sprinkles” I imagine they will run full speed towards more or less exactly the model you describe.

“Every tweet is an NFT now! Popular accounts charge Twitcoin to follow them! Advertisers can pay people Twitcoin to follow and retweet!” Etc. Etc.

Ambiguity is a spice in life. I was thinking the name "twit-coin" would give the game away.

> actual people exchanging ideas

I enjoy exchanging ideas with ideas and with people. Anyone here may be an actual person or a biological process hosting a meme collection.

> conspiracy theorists

Are "conspiracy theorists" individuals who theorize about conspiracies or groups of people conspiring to promote a theory?

Thanks for bringing up the NFT. I had that in mind to add in but got distracted during composition. Imagine the possibilities of fractional ownership of 144 characters--it would open up a whole new world of ETFs.

But.. Bittorrent is actually about 20 years old. Maybe getting on for 25.

BTW the site you are currently on has two moderators.

Hackernews has two moderators and several orders of magnitude fewer users. I would argue that the amount of moderation required increases exponentially with the number of eyeballs.

Better mind than yours have chosen to solve this problem, they work at facebook and twitter and it's been a disaster! Twitter has been impotent, and facebook have been a public danger. The hard truth of it is that HN just isn't a scalable solution. It ropes in users to self-moderate which results in some really unehealthy issues at scale.

Moderation is hard work, and making users do their own moderation themselves defeats the purpose from a user perspective (e.g. exposing Fry to toxic comments so he can theoretically moderate them away himself on his own instance is not practically different that giving him an unmoderated platform).

> It's not going to happen because this model is not going to generate any revenue unless Elon figures out something.

Musk isn't going to figure out anything. If anyone does, it will be someone working for him and he'll get all the credit.

You can't wave that away with a wand and an incantation.

If I only want tweets that contain the words “Zaphod Beeblebrox” then that’s all I want to see, and should have that ability.

You can already mute words on Twitter.

And that is what scares some people.

The only other place I’ve seen it happen is some Reddit AMAs and it was always clear which ones were being coordinated by PR and which got unhinged and out of control.

He's come out and said that he's buying it to fulfill some kind of free-speech absolutism fantasy. If you think Twitter is toxic now, wait until it's just Parlor with 100x the users.

It’s not a fun place to be if you aren’t specifically using it to advance your own agenda. Occasionally I will end up on Twitter to read a thread linked from somewhere else, but if I’m forced to log in to read I always close the tab and move on with my day…

I don't agree with everything that the twitter leadership does but I'd be shocked if there were simple actions they're deciding not to take that would dramatically increase the quality of the site.

A privately owned twitter will behave very different from a public one.

Great example is that the bot problem contributes to MAU's, which impact Twitter's quarterly earnings. This means that they *can* solve the bot problem, but don't want to solve it right away lest it impact their metrics.

So ultimately the decision to take the company private will help execs stop focusing on short-term earnings and focus on long term values

> the bot problem contributes to MAU's, which impact Twitter's quarterly earnings.

For instance - I don't think MAUs "impact" Twitter's quarterly earnings - it is a stat that contextualizes their quarterly earnings for the market. So they have an incentive to not solve the bot problem if not solving it makes the site seem more popular - but that is very different from "being able to solve it."

Like, I just think that problems at scale are hard. There are bots that seem, to me, to be hurting Twitter's apparent position as a public company and it seems like, if they could fix those bots, they would.

Here is a real world example: A technology company I was at was acquired by Cisco Systems. During onboarding Cisco said that usernames on e-mail addresses couldn't be longer than 8 characters. Someone raised their hand and said "What do you mean? E-mail addresses can be longer than 8 chars. Cisco responded well that may be true technically, it isn't possible at Cisco"

Allowing 20 char e-mail addresses is a very simple action, but that organization couldn't do it.

If you're the CTO of Cisco, what do you do there? Do you risk your job and the continued existence of the company, spending God knows how many developer hours refactoring your codebase? Or do you just deal with 8-character email addresses?

The Climate change situation would be better off if we didn't have Tesla disrupting the status quo on EVs?

Rural and Emergency responders and the Ukrainian civilians would be better off if Starlink didn't exist?

The idea that a problem "looks easy to solve" and therefor the problem is that the people in charge are dumb is a childish way of looking at the world. All of large companies I've worked in / with have dumb restrictions. Everyone knows they are dumb. In my experience they are sometimes right and sometimes wrong but it's true that implementing "obvious" fixes is much, much harder than you might imagine.

I know it isn't a simple as editing a config file that has "MAX_CHARS=8". It is going to break some peoples' spreadsheets and processes, but the world will not end, and the company will not go bankrupt because of that change.

There's a lot of mystery about how these algorithms are designed, trained and used in practice - and not just at Twitter - and having all that open-sourced would in itself be a huge benefit to the whole world. A whole lot of authoritarian outfits are trying to use these algorithms as a means of social control and popular opinion manipulation - and not just in places like Russia and China - and it's reached the point where understanding how such systems are used is kind of critical to preserving the future of non-authoritarian society.

As far as long-form Twitter, at the very least doubling the character count would allow for a lot more nuance in Twitter communication, which is defintely lacking at present. And no, multiple posts in threads don't really work for that purpose because of the way those individual posts are distributed elsewhere, without context.

If that was true, I'd imagine you could get quite a nice payday from Google.

That's not to say it's never been gamed, but it doesn't seem notably more "gamed" than Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, etc.

I'm reminded of Elon's tweet where he said a second stimulus would not be in the best interest of the people:

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1286673686821515266

People got PISSED...because they conveniently ignored the very next tweet where he said he supports UBI:

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1286675223434141697

I don't, however, think that one-time stimulus could maintain the current inflation, which is probably due more to the hiring difficulties and natural positive feedback loop that maintains inflationary economies.

Of course, if we hadn't diverted so much of the economic gains from the past decades to the wealthy and instead allowed a proportional increase across the economic strata, I expect the inflationary effect of the economic stimulus would have been far less muted (since there would have been much less pent up demand).

Even those that have the self control not to engage will eventually get tried of filtering content and leave. Then your are just left with the 4chan crowd.

IMO this is a lost cause— they're on Tiktok now, and it's in many ways a better platform for that type of content in terms of its ability to drive engagement and also deal with abuse.

She approvingly describes a story where the Youtube content moderation team traveled to Thailand, and agreed to censor (with a geofence) gratuitous insults to their king. But it's hard to imagine they would have even considered this if, say, Alabamians wanted them to take down some blasphemous material. In another case, she mentions that "the video was restored once its political significance was understood", but have they ever made such an exception when it's significant towards political causes Youtube trust and safety team doesn't agree with?

“Despite” is misplaced. Twitter has carefully calibrated toxicity as part of it's engagement model.

> If elon [...] welcomes non-extremists back on, [...] and lets people say what they want

You do realize that those are opposed goals, the first about decreasing and the second increasing Twitter’s existing toxicity, right?

I don’t think people really appreciate how messed up that is, for someone who should be insanely busy with multiple wildly successful corporations.

I’m confident a logical case can be made. But… seriously?

As Elon himself says:

"If our twitter bid succeeds, we will defeat the spam bots or die trying!"

"And authenticate all real humans"

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1517215066550116354 & https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1517215736606957573

If Elon erodes privacy even more than at present, won't everyone else follow suit?

Very few companies make major changes without a major champion. Could apple have turned around without Jobs? Maybe. Did it? No.

With a fresh start with new people where needed, it can have very different capabilities.

This is a hedge. If Twitter loses money Elon will say "I wasn't trying to make money"; and if Twitter makes money Elon will say "I made money despite not even trying". Win-win.

You can want to protect free speech and want the company to do well too. But I do believe his priority is free speech first. Profits, if possible, second.

The changes needed are drastic and in any environment where there's a lot of ceremonial overhead that slows down a clear vision, those changes can't be attained. Having somebody in a leadership position who can clearly say, "this is where we are going, this is how we are going to get there and no, I don't have to run it by anybody for approval" is worth it.

The users are already there.

I think more likely, he feels like if he owns the platform he will be free of legal oversight and SEC interference in regards to whatever he wants to say over his bully-pulpit - Twitter. We have (literally) the richest man in the world being told that he's not allowed to do something, and he thinks he has the means to fix that.

It’s not about how much you make. It’s about how much you keep. Besides the demographics of people who want the crazies back on Twitter are not exactly the type that mainstream advertisers care about. Have you seen the types of advertisers on most far right sites?

But he IS rage bait. He taunts, mocks, and slimes social media constantly. How could his leadership look any better if he treats it like shit personally?

At that point twitter will get problems with many countries and their laws like the Network Enforcement Act in Germany.

It could get a similar reputation like telegram as a place for conspiracy theorists and extremists.

I don't know if this attracts many ad partners.

As long as it doesn't violate the laws, conspiracies and extremists should be allowed.

If anything is wrong, court should be the one who decides that, not a random twitter employee.

Which court? Iran, Russia, Saudi Arabia?

This is good for repressive regimes, as their critics can no longer express themselves on Twitter without revealing their identity.

Doesn't sound like free speech to me

So is this a generational thing? Much like YouTube, where I spend a lot of my time instead of watching TV, the people I follow on Twitter are practically nobodies posting really funny and interesting stuff. Since 2015-2016, I'd say there really hasn't been a need for the old celebrities as we used to know them, there's plenty of people creating good content now.

You don't need to be approved by Netflix or HBO and be paid millions just to be funny.

> a bot army of shills repeating verbatim over and over and over

I really only see this under crypto tweets, and I've eliminated most crypto talk from my feed. Problem solved.

I actually think this will be the demise of Twitter.

No content moderation makes harassment and abuse rampant and the good users will flee and you're left with a cesspool of hate.

While TikTok is eating Meta, YouTube and Twitter together for lunch? Twitter's problem with making money are not just internal anymore, There's an established competitor to which young people are flocking to just like we did with Twitter when we were younger and advertisers go behind the young.

Well, he did reveal the intent to do it with a series of snarky tweets.

I think what people want is to act like a bot army of shills repeating verbatim over and over. I doubt that bots are to blame when it comes to harassment campaigns in rather niche fandoms. A frightening number of people I respond to are somehow convinced that toxic echo chambers are a good thing.

I don't think you have seen the power of cancel culture. Once, X number of celebrities decide that Y needs to be cancelled, the pressure is enormous on all businesses and their CEOs to join the cancel parade. It's literally you are with us or against us. In fact, these cancel culture torch bearers will now use Twitter itself to put pressure on subscribers and advertizers.

Just imagine Trump coming back, posting something very controversial and all celebreties up in arm against Musk to ban him again. At that moment, it is no-win scenario (I call it getting "Zucked"). If you ban him, republicans paints target on you. If you don't then dems do that job. Musk has companies that require belovancy from government and it is not really hard to put him at enormous disadvantage.

Then there’s his view of what Twitter is; de facto public square. When the user base is 300 million MAU minus bots and spam, it’s hardly pushing numbers that make me believe it’s to be taken seriously as a place for discourse.

His greater good pandering to the middle ground who just want the Clinton years back, appeals to his wealth as some sort infallible measure of his correctness, it’s all just more of the same human lizard brain going where it feels warm and fuzziest; no one has any evidence any of these efforts are helping the future and the industrial and social wasteland they create seem to indicate the opposite.

Why would he remove bots? Isn’t having bots post on my behalf covered under my free speech?

Being financially sound is not always great for society.

A good example is France right now. Many peoples voted against Lepen. But do they know what exactly they voted against, can they elaborate ? No.

One example, the media say she is racist, but she got 60-70 % score in DOM-TOM (Martinique, Guadeloupe, etc).

I would call Macron an extremist. Of the rich, of the globalist and europeanist.

Although it makes for a funny thought, you don't become the richest person on earth by throwing your money around at memes or for some sort of "revenge".

This looks like classic overstep.

If only there was a rational segment of investors ready to make a counterpoint here about anyone saying they are going to fix Twitter ... LOL ...

This is the universe balancing itself. Elon will have to mess up Elon, and my bet (or wishful thinking) is this inflection point right here. He'll be going to Mars to forget this mess.

Popcorn, please!

however I am not quite sure why Mr. Musk needs that. He once declared that his goal was to go to Mars, in other words he was about "Flyin' mother nature's silver seed to a new home in the sun"

I'm most looking forward to Patti Harrison getting back on Twitter.

context: https://youtu.be/HZIvpTrNNmo?t=127

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdZZpaB2kDM&t=930s

Elon Musk is absolutely not the right person for this job though. Indeed, he's one of the main forces hell-bent on making Twitter a toxic place. Look at this tweet for example (I'm not cherry-picking something from way back in the past; this is the third most recent thing he's tweeted):

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1517707521343082496

The quality of that post is significantly below the quality of anything that routinely makes it to my own personalized feed. And in case you don't understand the context of that post, it's because Bill Gates may have shorted Tesla or something. So in retaliation for that, Elon is making fun of Bill Gates's appearance on the largest platform he has, and countless of his followers will take up this mantle and run with it.

It's actually hard for me to think of a worse person to come along and try to improve the quality of Twitter, except for maybe Trump.

Twitter _is_ a toxic place with or without him.

He had thousands of replies to that tweet with people posting pictures of Musk looking even worse. Sure he posts low quality garbage on Twitter but so does everyone else. The entire point of the site is to post low quality 140 character zingers every waking second of the day.

You're missing the cause-and-effect here. People are stooping to his level. He's serving as a prime example of the worst kind of behavior to emulate, and emulate they are.

I disagree. Musk is stooping to the level of Twitter. Musk's shitposts generate way more activity than any of his SpaceX or Tesla posts.

Show me advertisers who are happy to monetize on this exact content then.

You also have advertisers willing to target the outrage crowd, so they would also stand to gain from the post.

Not all advertisers care about the things that advertisers from companies like Disney or the NFL care about.

From there it has spread to numerous other brands like Moon Pies, Sunny Delight, etc. Many snack and food brands were highly visible early adopters of this iteration of internet culture as a way to rep their brands.

So I ask again, show me examples of advertisers that enthusiastically advertise on shitposts.

Your own chosen example was Elon Musk recent twitter history. Debating the difference between your chosen example and Dennys to identify an obvious principle that distinguishes them is asking people to play calvinball with you.

... and I say this as someone who agrees with the argument that twitter is deeply toxic, that it systematically rewards, promotes, and monetizes toxicity, and that in this case Elon was behaving in a manner which within the abhorrent norms of the overall platform. [Though, I'm sure Mr. Gates will be fine, and that ultimately the comment mostly just makes Mr. Musk look bad...]

But having a different opinion on that doesn't make someone a killjoy. Someone isn't humorless because they think that mocking someone's appearance like that-- particularly outside of special context like a comedy club-- is gross.

Humor is very hard to monetize.

Elementary grade humor is still more funny than advertiser friendly, because the latter means safe. And safe hot takes don't really work.

I use Twitter to be redirected to other sites or topics, but not recently anymore because they banned anonymous users.

And it is still far better than some corporate consultants shilling for new rules for speech.

You’re saying it’s ok for an “algorithm” to slap the comedian off the stage but not Will Smith?

Your definition of “toxic” should be made explicit. I imagine you believe “offensive == toxic” which is naïve.

Not an easy problem, but if you’re a public figure then the rules surrounding satire / humor are different.

Because he can, it's a flex

The premise for this is that Twitter saw a huge loss of revenue as a result of deliberate actions like removing @realDT (Twitter share prices actually peaked a few weeks later in February 2021).

I haven't received a good answer yet for how Elon would solve the bot problem.

It's as if misinformation/disinformation/harassment are propagated only by bots and not real people, So would these people be blocked along with the bots? Would censorship be fine here then?

Social media firms have turned a blind eye towards bots/click farms because it has helped them to exaggerate their engagement figures to the advertisers, Just like any other online-advertising firm.

Then again, Elon seems to have expressed some views against advertisements on Twitter.

There are millions upon millions of bot accounts, trivially identifiable as “word647829585729” with a profile that reads “Soccer mom. Ohio. Loves baseball. Hates cheese.” or similar.

Every single one of those could be removed and the problem would be improved even if not eliminated. Pick the low-hanging fruit first…

That said I don’t imagine Elon Musk has any intention of doing that, and don’t intend to stick around on Twitter to find out.

It's not like bot operators can't change handles or like the flags which would really catch them "engages on $politicalwedgeissue and amplifies "$particularpoliticalcause" are uncontroversial

Take the most extreme case: a bunch of new accounts with long-numbered names posting identical political messages. It turns out that many of these have (unique!) real people behind them. They're not bots, they're coordinated people who are part of a campaign that's either grassroots (sign up and make ourselves heard!) or AstroTurf (I've been paid by a PR company to...). Are these excluded as bots? After all, a lot of PR accounts are paid to post.

Many other 'bot' accounts have scheduled high-volume posting, but are directly operated by a single human; they may be spammers, but they aren't anything other than who they claim to be.

What about political clubs brigading? If I get my mates to set up alts and frequently shitpost about politicians we dislike, is that a bot army, or privacy-friendly political activism?

In the end, you just have to take a view and decide what you're prepared to accept.

Isn't "remove ads" on his takeover agenda?

Of course it can turn into a cesspool. Of course there are ways around that problem. Like allowing more customizability for users.

Like a ‘old Twitter’ filter that would allow only content compatible with the old moderation norms.

He's probably going to unban Trump and other awful people. His buying Twitter is literally a risk to the foundation of civilization (if far-right clowns gets into power again and destabilize the US and Europe). Billionaires gained a lot of money and power in the past few years.

What is this even supposed to mean? Extremist in what sense?

If we are talking about politics, a common context for this kind of language, the United States is the most extreme capitalist nation in human history, so just being a US patriot should reasonably be considered an extremist position.

Paywalls are the most effective way to screen out bots and frivolous bullshit.

Is Trump a non-extremist?

If anything, as time goes on it’s becoming more obvious there was a continual coup against him, including direct collusion by the opposition political party with foreign governments and actors to try to prevent his election.

Confession through projection.

The autocoup was basically attempted between election day 2020 and the end of his lawful term in office, though some preparatory groundwork was done before, and quite a lot of residual activity continued after (mostly, it seems, around preventing accountability rather than continuing the initial coup attempt). Jan. 6, 2021 was key crisis point in the attempt (and often conflated with the attempt rather than being viewed as part of a larger whole.)

Is extremism inherently wrong?

—Barry Goldwater, 1964

You think "Lord Edge" is going to make Twitter less of a cesspool? Everything he's said and done indicates he wants the limits Twitter currently has on speech to be removed.

Reducing speech limits won't reverse the clock, but it does make me think that speech limits and cesspool-ness are largely independent of each other.

Either way, reddit is unlike twitter and more like a network of networks, so the same result might not occur there.

> At the same time, Reddit has been trying to increase monetization. In the aftermath of Taylor's firing, reports surfaced that the company was planning to add more video interviews and other sponsored content to generate more money with popular features on the site, something that Taylor apparently advised against.

You're talking about the obvious in your face censorship and bans that were going on at the same time as these other changes to become attractive to advertisers (and their target demographic) fleeing facebook. But these changes all happened at once and they came from the same source. They cannot be separated.

I remember that, and just like most other times there is a mass protest on a social media site about social media itself, the uproar and discontent was largely weak, reactionary, and disturbingly out-of-touch with the business realities of the company. There's a very good reason the complainers didn't get what they wanted.

My perspective isn't more valid than yours, but I think you might underestimate how many people literally fled reddit due to the deluge of hate and highly antagonistic posts about US politics.

Indeed, if Elon Musk takes Twitter private and uses his power to force 'free speech' on the rest of us, and I start seeing references to kikes and fags and such in every casual tech discussion, I'll just close my Twitter account and walk away.

I want a moderated forum. I like what dang does for HN. I don't want a free speech heaven, because it reliably turns into hell. I used to run my own BBS back in the 80s, and even then it was obvious. If you don't put in guardrails, the assholes take over and suck all the oxygen out of the room.

While HN is moderated, you can have pretty much any fair view as long as it contributes to the discussion. Which is nice and the ideal middle ground. Although I will say, I never have any issues with Twitter and the moderation is just fine besides some high profile cases I disagree with. I would say it's even to lax.

The longer a service is around, and the more broad (less cohesive) its userbase, the more likely it is garbage.

Focused communities can last a long time.

Broad communities flame out, particularly when user-interaction becomes the gauge of what's shown by default.

The irony is that there were far fewer mice running around when we didn't set out mousetraps.

People love to ponder how to improve social networking, and what the best model might be. The truth is that the best forum is simply the new one that the masses haven't caught onto yet.

W.r.t removing current limits, again I see no evidence of that, except maybe people who were banned for making fun of journalists for telling them the same thing they were telling other people (learn 2 code) might get reinstated. Death threats? No chance. Blatant racism? Nope. Harassment? Well does that happen already? It's not clear. Sexism? Again no clear lines here. Trump I hope never comes back and it may stay that way. I don't think Elon really cares about Trump.

Why would he force trans people out? Elon doesn’t seem like some religious conservative or anything.

This reminds me of how the media and folks fed and ate the narrative that Jordan Peterson is a kind of terrible human who hates trans people.

> Mr Peterson told him that being trans was a “sociological contagion” which he compared to “the satanic ritual abuse accusations that emerged in daycares in the 1980s.”

https://web.archive.org/web/20220206173028/https://www.indep...

I'm really confused here. Joe Rogan has had other guests like Sanjay Gupta and Bernie Sanders on as well. Would their comments be further amplified on Twitter (or whatever you are envisioning here) as well via a similar indirect link to Elon Musk?

But the whole blow up was because he did not think the Canadian government should force people to use the correct pronouns. He said he would use them voluntarily if someone asked him, but it was wrong to use force to require others to do so.

Therefore he is a trans hater and an evil person.

Sounds amazing. Maybe then we'll finally have a truly neutral platform with no censorship of any kind.

This utopian "free speech" bastion never works out on the internet and always devolves into congregations of hate groups, which normalize themselves and spread. Look at 4ch => 8ch => Brennan's postmortem on the experiment.

Plus there will always be a level of moderation. No censorship of any kind would immediately become overrun with child porn. This has already happened countless times on other platforms.

It simply will never work.

Nope. These places are full of all kinds of people. There's just a wider spectrum. You'll see the best and worst of humanity.

> No censorship of any kind would immediately become overrun with child porn.

That's obviously not allowed anywhere, not even on chans.

Let’s not forget the current lawsuits against Tesla for its treatment of minority employees, or the dead-on-arrival roll-out of the cyber truck, or the Boring Company’s baffling underground-tunnel-turned-traffic-jam-generator.

The evidence and history points against “if.” Best of luck to it.