“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)