Re:The most unethical thing I was asked to build while worki...
by chrisco255 on Tuesday November 08, 2022 @03:46AM
(#33517222)
> "He can't be worse" is simply not the point. His stated goal was to be better; we've seen no earnest attempt to do so (and plenty of earnest attempts at value extraction).
Sure, we have. We've seen him charge an earnest fee for a premium service that Twitter previously withheld behind a mysterious bureaucracy that arbitrarily decided who did and did not get a blue check mark. We found that employees at Twitter were charging as much as $15K to pull strings for people for that blue check.
That's already objectively better. $8 a month to verify you are who you represent yourself to be and to get less ads, more access to revenue generation features from your audience, etc? Sounds fine. It's absurd to have some mysterious service that no one really knows the rules or thresholds for. It creates the very pay for play schemes that were the status quo.
Musk's entire publicly stated justification for purchasing Twitter was doing better than the status quo. He harped for months about Twitter as a public service, the importance of transparency in moderation, made extraordinary claims about Twitter falsifying its ad and engagement numbers, and so forth.
"He can't be worse" is simply not the point. His stated goal was to be better; we've seen no earnest attempt to do so (and plenty of earnest attempts at value extraction).