“This is ridiculous,” he said, according to multiple sources with direct knowledge of the meeting. “I have more than 100 million followers, and I’m only getting tens of thousands of impressions.”

- https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/9/23593099/elon-musk-twitter...

By Monday afternoon, “the problem” had been “fixed.” Twitter deployed code to automatically “greenlight” all of Musk’s tweets, meaning his posts will bypass Twitter’s filters designed to show people the best content possible. The algorithm now artificially boosted Musk’s tweets by a factor of 1,000 – a constant score that ensured his tweets rank higher than anyone else’s in the feed.

- https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/14/23600358/elon-musk-tweets...

I was (was) a daily user for the last ~8 years. Then a few months ago all of the sudden like half my timeline was either elons tweets or tweets about elon. I don’t follow him and never have. But there he was, all over my timeline.

Just anecdata though.

I had a lot of admiration for him until he became more public - now, I think he is a cruel person who’s politics do not align one bit with me.

Elon could have been this guy that was doing cool stuff, super smart and doing some good stuff for the world, but now must people think he is a jerk.

People that get known for there work, it's not really a good look for them to wade into politics or conterversal topics they have no expertise or right to start talking about.

Has no one thought that "following" Elon on Twiiter shouldn't be automagically assumed to be his fans or uniformly align with his ethos?

Do they? I don’t. I also know many people with many differing views and they don’t either. This looks again like you are projecting you opinion on the majority of people with no data to support it.

I just did a quick survey of his tweets going back to roughly February 24th.

7 Meme

1 Twitter Ad

11 American Culture War/Politics

1 Spacex

8 Starlink/Spacex Retweets

2 Tesla Retweet

2 AI Hot Take

3 Irrelevant

This is a real bad noise-to-signal ratio for me.

Everything I'm interested I can get from company accounts (SpaceX/Tesla) and/or third party reporting.

As a consequence I decided to keep him blocked since otherwise his "algorithmically enhanced Ego" has a tendency of finding its way back into my perception.

The difference with Elon is he had real power, money and influence, so in the end he used that to buy Twitter.

Much like Social media can be a distraction from our bigger desires and goals, I feel like Elon's buying of twitter is the ultimate distraction from the more intreasting work he was doing.

Elon Musk's claim regarding the algorithm flaw resulting in his de-ranking was indeed accurate.

The feature was intended to lower the ranking of frequently being blocked accounts. However, the flaw was that it did not account for larger accounts, allowing a small group of individuals to effectively engage in a DDOS attack against large accounts.

10,000 impressions per tweet for an account with over ten million followers is remarkably low, and contradicts the principle of the law of large numbers.

In my opinion, these organisations have largely turned against the tech industry, perceiving it as a competitor and a generally negative force.

For instance, The Verge is owned by Vox, which I personally consider with all due respect an extremely biased leftist institution that has increasingly engaged in activist journalism in recent times.

In my opinion, The Verge has changed significantly since 2015/2016 and is now unrecognizable.

So Fox News and Breitbart are mainstream media?

Fox is the most watched TV channel in the United States — hard to argue they're not an essential part of the current political environment. And Breitbart is certainly more prominent and influential than a niche site like The Verge. The latter's editors don't get White House jobs.

Its worth nothing that although there are no strict definitions of what counts as mainstream vs independent, the populist wings of both parties loosely group them in the same buckets.

A lifetime ago, I used to consider myself populist-left and since then there hasn't been much if any difference in what I consider as mainstream.

Media means to mediate, to get between and regulate discourse. In this case it’s to get between you and reality or you and others in the social media case.

The only way to escape media is to open your eyes and interact with things directly.

Even if you assume 60% bods, and 70% of users not reading their timeline.

Without this information it’s impossible to guess about the reasons because impressions accumulate over time.

My problem with all these twitter reporting reminds me of Tesla a few years ago, people just wildly extrapolating and infering from tiny amount of information and then deriving prove that Musk is a piece of shit and the company is going down in flames.

The first can be argued, but the second doesn't seem to be happening nearly as much as people claim.

Its also the case that he usually gets quite a few retweets and often lots of responses as well. So the number just seem low to me.

Intuitively you’d think that following someone indicates that you want to see their posts immediately after they post it, but the “algorithms” distort that entirely as a way of making money for the platform.

Whether it’s requiring people to pay $$ to reach more followers, or promoting “posts” (ads) from other paying accounts that you’re not following, or even promoting sticky content designed to keep users on the app a little bit longer (and thus expose them to more ads + boost their DAU count). The whole “timeline” paradigm is a lie. I mean, it’s rarely even sorted by time.

With that in mind, Elons main option is to ask the algorithm for more impressions in the black box feed. That will get him into the feeds of non followers and show his tweets to followers when they eventually log in.

I experienced something similar on LinkedIn. I used to have a lot of followers and high engagement. At some point it changed such that the algorithm could bury you or promote you as it sees fit. At that point the only option is to write content that the algorithm promotes rather than content which your followers find interesting. Everyone worked this out and started writing their vulnerable virtue signalling stories for engagement, and the platform went downhill.

That seems to happen to almost all people who are popular on social media and Youtube. They have millions of loyal followers and it really gets to their head. The same happened to Jordan Peterson. He used to have good insights on psychology but lately he seems to believe he has perfect wisdom on everything and he has tons of people who tell him that.

As far as Musk goes, for me the breaking point was the Thai cave situation where he tried (and succeeded) to suck up attention with their submarine prototype although nobody working on it knew anything about cave diving. Sheer arrogance and attention seeking.

E.g. it might feel nice to diss on Elon, and you might even be correct about everything you're saying. But the point is to write a comment that teaches readers something about the world. Empty insults don't teach us anything.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html are worth reading, along with https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html. It's more than just a list of rules; the latter goes into the philosophy of why the curiosity mindset ends up fostering a healthier community.

I'm not new to HN and I don't think any such rule of thumb exists. Writing vindictive flame comments is one thing, but writing a measured opinion of someone's actions is another. Your comment sounds condescending and I don't think it accurately represents the community's mindset here.

As for being condescending, I’ve often wondered how Dan manages not to sound condescending when explaining the philosophy behind why the rules are in place. It’s true that he’s articulate in a way that I probably can’t match.

But if you ask him, I’ll bet you money he’d agree that the Elon flame was a net negative.

I wanted to try something other than “downvote and move on,” since they’re new to the site. Maybe that was a mistake.

If it's a rule violation in your opinion, then report it and it will be handled. Otherwise you at best come across as brown nosing and at worst the exact same kind of person that gets cancelled on Twitter for confronting and calling the police on a family barbecue in the park.

my equally-unsolicited friendly advice to you would be that if you do look at someone's comment history before replying, it's quite uncouth to comment on it, and you probably should avoid speaking for the community, especially if what you're saying isn't literally directly in the community guidelines

That said, this is a prime example of downvote/flag moment and move on.

—from “Collected Sayings of Muad’Dib” by the Princess Irulan

Dune, Frank Herbert

Whatever your target, whatever you achieve... it is not enough.

Sometimes these answers make me believe they are created for bot brigades and astroturfing.

These things are invariably popular, repetitive, and nasty. You may not owe $BILLIONAIRE better but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

(We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34980579)

Not what I intended at all." - Elon

You can think what you want of Elon, but he is in the right here.

Maybe they just wants to express how much they don't like Elon any opportunity they gets.

I would add this one:

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1630640058507116553

I had no idea about this drama either, so I didn't understand what Elon was talking about, now it seems clear.

But "Based"? Is it the name of his new AI company? Where does that come from?

on 4chan it's largely used to mean something along the lines of "fitting the 4chan anti-groupthink groupthink"

See also "pilled."

There's nuance to the etymology of any word of course. In fact I sometimes see the extremely online left try to (ironically?) appropriate "based." But I think in the context we can all figure out which connotation Elon was using.

it's just general internet speak at this point

              Lil B
    (based ≈ doing your own thing (in a good way)
             not swayed by critics)
             ↙           ↘
       Gen Z             4chan
   (based ≈ cool)        ("based and redpilled"
                          ≈"unswayed by pop rhetoric"
                           and "sees the world beyond the 'illusion'", resp.)

It is also a catchphrase of the extremely online left with exactly the same in-group vs. out-group implication (and, amusingly—because of the different meanings of “liberal” and “lib” favored by the two sides—usually identical meaning with regard to “libs/normies”.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyle_Chapman_(American_activis...

It's a reference to the BasedGPT "jailbroken" ChatGPT persona that responds to answers in a less politically correct manner.

It is similar to what Microsoft did with Facebook in the early days of slowing acquiring a stake in the company. But this is an aggressive version of that with OpenAI. What you have now is the exact opposite of their original goals in: [0]

Before:

> Our goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return. [0]

After:

> Our mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence—AI systems that are generally smarter than humans—benefits all of humanity. [1]

The real 'Open AI' is Stability AI, since they are more willing to release their work and AI models rather than OpenAI was supposed to do.

[0] https://openai.com/blog/introducing-openai/

[1] https://openai.com/blog/planning-for-agi-and-beyond

Do we have any reason to believe this isn't just more empty grifting from him to optically distance himself from a unethical company he profits from?

He is not part of it any more.

>In 2018, Musk resigned his board seat, citing "a potential future conflict [of interest]" with his role as CEO of Tesla due to Tesla's AI development for self-driving cars, but remained a donor

I don't think he counts as an investor, and I'd imagine he has stopped donating.

If people are feeling conflicted about who the asshole is in this situation, don't be, they are all morally bankrupt assholes who all already have many lifetimes of unimaginable wealth yet must take ever more. These are not people who should have any power in our world.

The whole "ELON MUSK BAD NOW" change to the zeitgeist is alarming to me. He was the darling of the left for years because of Tesla and SpaceX, but now he's completely persona non grata for...reasons?

It smacks of excommunication for heresy.

How you can build a successful car company in the US without getting super rich, I don't know.

It seems a bit ironic that "evil" Google openly published the paper ("Attention is all you need") that desribes the "Transformer" architecture that now anyone such as OpenAI with the money and inclination can use to build their own ChatGPT. Turns out it's about money (10,000 GPUs + tons of data to train this thing) not any secret sauce.

And now Musk's concern has changed from AI being in too few hands to the fact that it's "woke" so he wants to create another AI company to create the racist/threatening non-woke AI that he thinks the world needs. Or, at least the one that he needs, to keep himself at the center of attention.

Tesla was set up as a for-profit company and is such beholden to shareholders, and so using closed-source AI for profit is the path Tesla is going down.

OpenAI was set up as a non-profit company and only beholden to its values, and promised to be open-source.

These two organisations incentives contradict each other, and so it makes sense for Elon Musk to separate himself from one of them. You could argue that Elon Musk should have instead separated himself from Tesla, but that is a big ask for someone to leave their main lifetime project.

I don't think you can put the blame on Elon Musk that OpenAI later became ClosedAI (while not under his watch), some other members of OpenAI have to be responsible.

The models used at Tesla are vastly different than the LLM models. There is nuance here.

Part of me feels that in the run to more privacy, we don’t really have a reputation system anymore. You mention that Jack and Miles are good people, but how can we know such things as a general public?

In the days of yore and people were local you kind of new who was who. In the global space, this becomes hard. I feel this ties in with discussions on trust and leaning into people who are responsible and wise.

This is the corporate equivalent of "think of the children". A justification that could have been used to gate-keep any and all aspects of computer science, and one that isn't even logically consistent since they only hide their code and weights while still publishing their research: making it ultimately reproducible by malicious actors, especially those well-funded, while slowing down researchers and competitors.

We are privileged to work in a field where we have open access journals, and where there is a large undergoing drive to improve the reproducibility of papers by releasing the code and weights. Their behaviour is the antithesis of what the field is working towards and having talked to many researchers, I don't know many that are fooled by it.

It's uncanny how much this sounds like a 17th century peasant praising their Good King.

I think this hardly matters. Both companies are competing in a market and if the ethics stands in the way of market dominance and shareholder value, ethics will generally lose out.

In other news, imo, if a startup doing society altering work per the article is going to be closed, at least, imo, the people working there are decent people.

Just out of curiosity, are you trying to say that these people are Effective Altruists, and for that "genuinely good humans", and so, if they're making money, it's for a good cause?

Apologies if my guess is off. I'm not very au fait with EA, but I'm trying to get more er, more au fait.

I don’t; Elon takes swipes at everything he doesn't currently control, especially if he has a past connection to it.

> If he cares so much about them not making money, maybe he should have put his twitter cash there instead?

Musk has a finite quantity of tine and money to devote to destroying businesses, so some of them he'll just have to complain about without personally acquiring to run into the ground. Everyone has limits.