Was it extremely valuable? I know a lot of people (myself included) viewed blue checkmarks as a "company PR account/mass-media journalist/celebrity account maintained by SMM" sign. The most interesting people I followed on Twitter were not verified.
A verified account of a newspaper is probably better than a fake one, spreading false news about the war in Ukraine, for example.
Managed by PR or not, a verified account stood for the person behind this account, and guarantees this is their (proxy or direct) opinion or a real fact about upcoming event, or information about a past event. Right now a verified account means nothing.
But you are absolutely right, that trust was very important.
And the point of the original verification system was to make sure you can trust what that person is saying especially in volatile situations e.g. during a crisis where Twitter's role was so influential and important.
Ugh, have you seen Telegram posts by the real Dmitry Medvedev (ex-President, ex-PM, now chairman of the Security Council)? I guess the line between real and parody is pretty thin here.
Besides, anyone falling for the nuclear war announcement on Twitter deserved that. Social medias aren't the trustable channel despite any verifications. What if the real account got hacked?
I believe what you just did is called “moving the goalposts”.
So the elites who we should trust as opposed to commoners that we shouldn’t
Yeah no thanks…
Imagine a bunch of nominal liberals advocating for royalty, and you have the blue check whiners.
This is the angry-for-the-weirdest-reasons thing I will read today, and it is 9:10 AM. Coupled with your post elsewhere in the thread that somehow justifies this as paying to be "part of the conversation", and it only computes as "'tis cope".
It’s silly to think that Elon isnt incredibly talented and smart in some ways. That doesn’t mean he’s universally talented and smart.
EVERYBODY is "incredibly talented and smart in some ways".
Most people are average, many are below average.
The remaining what 4 billion people that are below the average person can easily be worse at everything then the 4 billion above the average person.
If you were to enumerate every skill that improves the life of at least one human, there are probably more than 10 billion such skills which require complex analysis, deep experience, and aptitude to execute at a high level. That's enough for everyone to have something they're "best" at.
One of my favorite quotes is: "If you judge a dolphin by its ability to fly, you are the idiot."
If you're speaking of "generalized intelligence", i.e. some metric which collapses the dimensionality to just a few axes, then obviously you start seeing a more classic distribution where many people are "dumber" than you. But you'd still lack many, many life skills necessary to comfortably take over their life were you to magically swap places with them.
Not even remotely true. At best, most humans are good at something. Not exceptional. That's massively rare.
I'm sorry, but most people have nothing, even the tiniest exceptional thing, about them. There's no latent kingfu master, hidden in pandas.
Then there's the objectivist train wherein no expectations are allowed, one must duly profess their ignorance and make baseless measurements in estimation and comment on the distribution of faculties per individual and the degree of resolution to which these measurements are allowed to take place - and it isn't to the degree which any great conclusions can be drawn, I assure you. There is no means by which you can splay out a person's whole and examine them. Time spent with one or two is time spent neglecting some other specimen. Not to mention the interference added by environment. And even in the best of cases that time spent may only be revelatory of some minute fraction of the whole, where again only some shallow conclusions may be drawn and they're only conclusive insofar as the observer has decided they are at some point in the context of time and space within their ever-evolvong system because there's hardly a tape measure suited to the infinite degrees of freedom that exist in the world.
Just look into the endless pit of nothingness, the void that is a myriad of vacant, rent-by-the-hour hotel rooms, that is the average person's eyes!
There is nothing there. I think they're all chatgtp clones!
― Stephen Jay Gould, The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History
The curse of dimensionality doesn't imply all skills are equal, only that finding meaningful exceptions in high dimensional data by just data analysis is hard, but we as a society don't find and filter for exceptionality in a data driven way like that, we have a very limited set of dimensions we assign to "success" (financial means being a big one). Someone making a great cardboard bed on the street will never be one of those dimensions.
After all, if I am to believe what Mercier and Sperber are saying in "The Enigma of Reason", reasoning evolved not as a tool to find the truth and make good decisions but as a social tool - to convince others to cooperate with you, to justify your actions in front of the others, to secure your social status. If your cultish following showers you with cheers no matter what you say or do (especially if you label your critics by that label that your followers hate - woke, ideological, racist, censors, or whatever), how can you not lose contact with reality?
That is the simplified version of my explanation for the phenomenon of previously really successful people saying and doing borderline insane stuff. I could name 10 famous people in the last 3 years that IMO fit that pattern.
But I give him credit for scale and gtm. I just think he doesn’t get social software
There was zero way Twitter could have survived on the path it was going; if not for drastic changes he instituted - mainly in dramatically cutting costs and overhead - they would have been dead anyway. They are no longer bleeding. They have lots of debt, thus they still need to do something new to pay it off, but at least they aren't accruing more debt like they were before.
Twitter was a niche player anyway - it was disproportionately used by techies but was far from having a broad penetration so why not move in a bold, new direction? Its current model is already known to be untenable long term - even before Elon bought them.
The real issue is ads are no longer going to be enough to sustain the tech giants (ads were mostly a scam of bot farmed clicks, over promised results, etc.). I wouldn't worry about Twitter now X - it will survive, whether this crowd feels it's for them or not. What I'm really interesting in seeing is how Google, Facebook and others are going to remain relevant. In the near term I would expect layoffs to accelerate since that's the lowest hanging fruit for these companies, but at some point they are likely going to have to come up with something more substantial and of actual value.
elmu's current wealth is owed in large part, perhaps the most, to wealth he received from his rich, apartheid African jewel mine owning parents: that is the money with which he was able to get the rest of the money
If I had multiplied the advantage provided by my upbringing in the same way that Musk had, I'd be massively wealthy (but not nearly as wealthy). From a relative perspective, Musk is still a massive success.
I haven't come close. I'm ahead in some ways and behind in others.
though, don't get down on yourself and where you started vs. where you are: the relationship obviously isn't linear: the richer you are, the easier it becomes to turn 1 dollar into 2 dollars, especially when your family is wealthy, too
I definitely would have not done that. I am not that ambitious and I guarantee I would have been happy to achieve practically nothing while enjoying the comforts of my upbringing.
I understand and acknowledge that, and tried to account for it in the full sentence, of which you only quoted half. The relevant portion is italicized below:
> if someone (perhaps, self-admittedly, not you) had been gifted the wealth elmu was, they could have turned it into more wealth the way elmu has
If everyone had the exact same head start he did (or didn't, it seems disputed), we all wouldn't have achieved what he has. Just because he had a head start that we would all have liked to have doesn't mean we all could have accomplished what he has.
It'd be like dismissing an MLB pitcher throwing a perfect game because his parents could afford to send him to private coaches.
why would it? You aren't everybody, or anybody else but you, so saying you wouldn't want to do it doesn't really have any affect on the point (especially since we're discussing ability, not ambition)
How much wealth was he gifted with? Order of magnitude would be a sufficient response.
I'm going on memory here, but that's what I remember.
And do you think an 80 IQ founder == 120 IQ founder all else being equal?
Musk and Bezos seem to have come to roughly similar outcomes, so evidence suggests yes.
Founders aren't the ones with the money. They're making it for someone else and then being paid for that.
In any case, it's what happens on average that matters, not minuscule exceptions. Money makes money.
I don't think its possible, or fair, to reduce success to a single digestible dimension.
And somone had to come out the winner in a stochastic Market. It just halpened to be Musk. No competence requirer, at all.
Personally, I don't see what the hype is around Elon. I think he's done good things, but in other ways he's not a very good businessman.
Twitter blue is an optional premium service as far as I know.
And no matter how good your reply to someone is quality-wise - a bunch of bluecheck dumbasses will be prioritized. Like every viral tweet has an absurd amount of blue-checked far-right, braindead, scammer and spammer replies below. Musk ruined Twitter by making it "pay to play".
If I were to run Twitter, I'd have offered actual verification against a reasonable price to cover the cost of validation, say 100$, years ago. On top of that, some paid features (e.g. long text publishing, uploads > 2 minutes) for those who don't pass the "notability" threshold.
nitter.net works wonderfully!
> DM limits
I've been wanted a way to forbid people to DM me for a long time. Thanks Elon!
Then you should have been happy in like, 2018? when they added that.
You could restrict DMs to people you followed for a long time. The only thing Musk did was add, and then force on for users, "only followers and people who have paid me eight bucks a month can DM you".
"Thanks Elon", indeed.
Nothing of value was lost. I'm only one person in a large Internet, and I'm sure they won't miss the $0.03 of advertising revenue I brought them.
IMO, the cost of living crisis was one impediment, but the other, more significant one was the politicisation of it all. If he'd stayed neutral, and offered reliable, useful functionality behind that subscription, I would gladly have paid £5-10/month for the service. As it happens, I will almost certainly never subscribe to Twitter/𝕏 now.
Important to remember that he is the one who pushed the Twitter car over the cliff into financial free-fall with his leveraged buyout.
It's documented that twitter before Musk was working with the US democratic party.
Saying certain things that the far-left disagreed with could also result in a ban.
However it's easy to see how moving Twitter to the centre, appears to be political move right from the perspective of the Left.
"Get verified to message this user. Only verified users can send Direct Message requests to people that don’t follow them. Sign up for Twitter Blue to continue."
I wouldn't exactly call DMs a premium service.
Doesn’t seem to know anything about tech though. And he’s burned his reputation to the ground this last year.
“Slapping a name on other people’s work” is something leaders do. They also typically are the ones who gather those people together and create the environment in which they can do their best work.
…that said, yes, I think Musk is an idiot.
There's a reason he was lauded before this Twitter/X debacle.
This describes an investor, not a genius founder/engineer. Also, IIRC his reputation was pretty low key before he got involved in Tesla. Not sure how meaningful "putting his reputation on the line" was at the time.
The backlash against Musk was also already growing long before Twitter. Between constantly over-promising and under-delivering regarding Tesla, wacky ideas like the hyper loop, and his social media antics (pedo guy, taking Tesla private for $420) his image was already taking quite a hit.
I didn't know this one and just read more about it. This is so absurd.
There’s an episode of the podcast On With Kara Swisher where she goes into detail about who he was and how he went off the rails. The date is 2022-11-14. I found it really helpful to square this circle.
I’m not as familiar with Tesla, but I’ve been following SpaceX pretty closely since around 2014. He’s not in the trenches doing CFD to optimize cooling on the latest iteration of the raptor engine, and who knows whether reusability was originally his idea, but he knows his shit. When you hear him talk about rockets, he sounds very competent, unlike when he talks about software. And I’ve never heard any actual rocket scientists say Elon doesn’t know shit about rockets.
(He does sometimes move fast and ignore established wisdom though, as with the concrete pad that got obliterated during the last launch. But sometimes that’s how you sidestep decades of cruft)
I do wish Gwynne Shotwell were more of a household name. She’s the one running SpaceX while Elon is off Eloning.
Well I do. Or at least I did.
He made electric cars sexy. They were decidedly unsexy before he bought Tesla.
He gave us reusable rockets. Without that, the US would now be embarrassingly dependent on Russia's Soyuz.
He also contributed something to PayPal. I don't know what, and I personally hate PayPal, but some people clearly love it.
Up to this point, he came across as a genius serial entrepreneur. I don't know if this was just luck+money, or that he really had some talent that contributed to these successes, but after this, people started lauding him as a real-life Tony Stark, and he apparently started to believe a bit too much in his own genius, and he started to do increasingly stupid things.
But there absolutely was a time when the hype seemed absolutely justified.
My personal take at the time when I regarded him positively was that he, although not really a genius, "got" things in general and being in a position of power, would allow those who really were geniuses to do their jobs.
If that was ever true, he switched from letting those brilliant people do their work to actually telling them to blindly follow his crazy ideas (for lulz and otherwise).
Afaik only paypal had some kind of actual work done by him personally (and frankly, I hate paypal with a burning passion so that’s not necessary a good thing).
Maybe you should review these pages and get your facts straight:
If it was so easy to bring this kind of stuff to market then why aren't more people as wildly successful? This kind of "Musk didn't do do anything or have the vision" hate is beyond tiring.
I love to shit on Musk as much as anyone but I dunno about this lol.
There's a lot of skill in hiring good technical people. IMO that "skill" basically just comes down to being a good technical person yourself so you can tell the difference. You can't hire an elite engineering team with hype, out of 100 applicants you'll get 2 good ones and 98 muppets that want to work at the trendy place and be seen to be doing so.
I've worked for like 5+ companies that were doing fine before some dipshit head of engineering hired a bunch of other dipshits and they took over and turned it into a big dipshit orgy hellbent on driving a perfectly good company straight into an iceberg. The person doing the hiring has a shitton of influence in how a business goes unless your business model can live with enterprise-grade average and you can just hire everyone. I can't see that being the case at Tesla or SpaceX...
I think Musk deserves some credit for Tesla and SpaceX. Doesn't stop him being a flog though.
What he's doing with Twitter is, I guess, a similar leap of faith, but I don't think it is going to pan out this time.
Incidentally, Atlas V used/uses Russian engines. Pretty bad idea in retrospect but at the time a lot of people thought it seemed reasonable.
> cost effective
That's another matter entirely. It would have been cheaper to use conventional disposable rockets. Even better than that is reusable conventional rockets; the economic sense of which has now been demonstrated by Falcon 9.
When a normal person gets a lot of money (like by winning the lottery) they do not become like Elon or Bezos. A third of lottery winners will declare bankruptcy within five years. The smartest ones will put their money in an index fund and enjoy a nice retirement.
For people with actual ideas, there are lots of ways to get funding- venture capital, government money etc. Having your own money to spend is nice but that's not the overwhelming advantage everyone seems to think it is.
On the other hand, doing the "actual work" as a scientist/engineer is not particularly difficult. Each individual engineer is responsible for a very small and well-defined problem that can be solved using skills that are taught at thousands of universities around the world. If any of them were to quit, they could be easily replaced with someone who's just as good.
That aside, in many cases it takes an engineering-minded businessman to create the greatest enterprises. Not just in valuation, but in general value and appreciation in fields where one can do a lot of good but not get a lot of profit.
I actually don't agree with this because I find Tesla's so unsexy, I would never buy one. What I think he did do though, is bring a fairly reliable electric car into production, which was pretty cool, and because of the climate crisis, people wanted to contribute by ditching their petrol guzzler. It's also a bit of a "flex".
What Musk did was show the oil addicted automakers that EV's are both practical to manufacture and own. Using the word sexy to describe machinery and inanimate objects in general is just weird and I consider it the peak of marketoid speak.
The Space Shuttle would like a word.
The Shuttle did fulfill something like half of those, just those were pointless goals. But it wasn't reusability alone that made Shuttle a technical failure.
What is known is that it was designed to go to a polar orbit, where many spy satellites are, deploy a satellite and return to the launch site after a single orbit. It's that "single orbit" part that particularly necessitates the large cross-range capability, since 90 minutes later the launch site will about 1500 miles to the east of where it was. If landing after a single launch weren't necessary, they could just orbit for a day and wait for the landing sight to come around again. Deploying a satellite in a single orbit would be an incredible feat, but capturing one in a single orbit is just too far-fetched.
The idea of doing this was apparently to launch a US spy satellite quickly without giving the Soviets much time to track the exact orbital parameters the satellite was being deployed into. TBQH it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me, unless the spy satellites themselves are presumed to be stealthy to Soviet radars. Maybe that was the case. I can see why the Soviets thought it was a nuclear bomber. Anyway, the Shuttle never actually went to polar orbit at all, so in this sense you could say the Shuttle never fulfilled its purpose.
True that.
> He gave us reusable rockets. Without that, the US would now be embarrassingly dependent on Russia's Soyuz.
Well, NASA decided that building rockets isn't their core purpose anymore as rocket building isn't as scientific, experimental anymore and could be comodotized and financed private industry to take over.
Musk was in thebright spot ant the right time, with enough capital and hype to take over the engineers and and funds and found the right executive team.
These are achievements, but I he hadn't blue origin or somebody else would be in the spot.
What is your basis for this belief? Blue Origin was founded two years before SpaceX, by a man who was far richer than Elon Musk, hired people connected and accomplished in the space industry and with that opportunity has accomplished far far less. They've never put anything into orbit, even as a test. SpaceX's success has not precluded Blue Origin's success. Blue Origin hasn't succeeded despite hiring many of the best people in the industry because they're unfocused and undriven. Blue Origin is poorly managed by Bezos, not hindered by SpaceX's success.
Really, explain your reasoning for thinking otherwise. I would love to hear this.
PayPal is really old at this point though, the original people have had nothing to do with it for a very long time. IIRC PayPal had novel and useful functionality initially, before it was run into the ground as a product.
Billionaires are uniquely positioned to be, because they tend to get away repeatedly with things that would be career- or life-ending for others.
The concept of reusable rockets isn't new, but Musk and Shotwell helped make them reality. What really made it work and where Musk doesn't get enough credit is in the iterative "fail fast" approach to rocket design... something untenable under risk-adverse bureaucracies like NASA and Boeing.
His contributions to Paypal are dubious (IIRC) at best.
I think his true genius was building a fan base with the technocratic class that appealed to their techno-libertarian dreams of a future utopia. This allowed him to raise huge amounts of money despite constantly failing to meet his promises. Trump for us nerds, basically.
Honestly, this may be one of the good things he did. The entire population has gotten way too comfortable with free and it would be ideal if we could get away from this model.
Much like any tech company, hardware and operational costs are a small fraction of the total expenses.
It is not possible to factor that “cost” in. They're volunteers: they're donating their time, and their time has no market value. Electricity, however, does.
> Every other month there is a big Mastodon instance going offline because
Every other month there is a big website going offline. A big social group disbanding. This is the normal way of things: human social structures don't endure like friendships do.
> human social structures don't endure like friendships do
IOW, the donation-based instances are not sustainable. If you want to have a service that you can rely on, you will need to resort to a professional service.
Also there are occasionally overt ads for companies funded by said VC firm inserted into the list on the front page. You can recognize these because they have the comment sections disabled.
The fact that there is someone with deep pockets that see this whole network as an opportunity for building their branding does not mean that they look at a balance sheet, or find "advertisers" in case their fund makes an expected loss, or anything like that.
Let me repeat. HN, by itself, is not a business. It is pointless to talk about its "business model", "funding", "revenue" or whether is breaks even or not. HN is not a core part of YC.
Twitter/Facebook/Reddit are at its core social media networks. They wouldn't exist as businesses if they are not expecting to get any type of revenue based on their social media offering. There is no way to compare any of them with HN.
Who said HN is a business? I never said that, you seem to be reading between lines, words I didn't write. To reiterate, you asked if HN is funded by ads. I responded that HN is an ad (an ad, not a business), and furthermore often contains overt ads. And I never said anything about Twitter/Facebook/Reddit at all.
Anyway, if you want to argue with the version of me that exists in your imagination, you obviously don't need the real me here for it. So peace out.
And that is a ridiculous statement.
> And I never said anything about Twitter/Facebook/Reddit at all.
Then you interjected without any relation to the context of the conversation, and instead made this flawed and unrelated argument about "HN as an ad".
However, beyond the general development Twitter has taken since Musk took over and especially how the premium memberships were rolled out - the conflation of paying for the account with being verified has killed that as an option for me. Nowadays the blue mark rather is an anti-pattern to many. This is what you get when you sell "reputation".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_X:_Tales_for_an_Acc...
I've turned the corner on this. I think he's turning twitter into a place where blue checks publicly talk to other blue checks, and people willing to pay a recurring fee to try to be included in that conversation can try to get their attention. What it's going to be is a massacre of reply guys (who are going to lose visibility) and sockpuppets (whose new/unused accounts will be useless.)
I'm honestly interested in that. I don't even post on twitter, I read, so I'm not giving the perspective of an active twitter participant, but tbh 99% of non-blue-check twitter participants only cost twitter money, are dumb and their accounts should be nuked from orbit. Their only purpose was to make the room feel crowded, and thus to attract more broke users. Not that most of blue check twitter isn't terrible, but that's the terrible that people are actively looking for. Terrible with a fanbase.
So, in the future, you should be paying for twitter or have an account at least a year or two old in order to harass journalists, politicians, and people you watch on television. I could see that being appealing to almost everybody.
Here you are advocating a literal pay for play, and you're identifying certain classes of users as being "worthless" and advocating "nuking them from orbit."
That seems way more radically elitist than wanting to know if something is a parody account or not? Help me understand here?
But charging in pursuit of removing "worthless" users from the platform - you see what I'm saying there right? That's literally constructing an underclass, deciding they are unwashed and unacceptable in refined company, and then charging money to keep them out.
It's the business model of a country club. Maybe it's a cheap country club, that's a difference of degree.
I've paid similar amounts of money to join closed forums before and found them to be enjoyable and relatively free of trolls. I'm not opposed to it in principle. What I was asking about was the contradiction.
The only thing that had value on Twitter was free speech, and the previous leaders had corroded it. At least Musk brought some of it back.
What of Musk? Could it be that he just likes strongmen and weird bigots, and it's for them he wants free speech, and everyone else can hang?
(Hint: it's this one.)
Twitter used to fight those, as I mentioned. And won a lot of them. Again: what of Musk? Surely it's not just an act and he's a simp for dictators.
Under Twitter’s previous ownership, the social media site complied with government takedown requests at a lower rate.
Twitter fully complied with 440, or 50 percent, of requests and partially complied with 377, or 42 percent, during the 12-month period before Musk’s takeover.
Turkey was also the biggest source of these requests at 27 percent, followed by South Korea with 20.6 percent and India with 12.8 percent.
- https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2023/5/2/twitter-fulfillin...
* Changed the moderation policies to allow more speech that had previously been considered impermissible hate speech or violent speech.
* Increased compliance with government censorship requests (which are predominantly of the form "please make this person stop saying bad things about me," and, in many cases, isn't actually permissible under that country's constitution).
He not allowing his own ass or companies to be criticized on his own platform, I can take as still an improvement free-speech-wise other the previous situation.
For him there is. Twitter at $44b cash was not a business decision, it's something he arrived at through a level of reality-deflecting hubris and vindictiveness that remains unmatched by anyone since.
Remember how he appealed to Trump to return to the site, and Trump ignored him and stuck to Truth Social? He then tried to back his rival DeSantis with a campaign launch on Twitter, which failed miserably.
It's not 2016 anymore, Twitter's lost its pull as a political kingmaker and/or disinformation platform. That was the one thing Musk could realistically have expected his acquisition to still be able to deliver. Now that users and advertisers are fleeing and news sites are using Twitter sources less, he may as well bury the site, as it's outlived its usefulness to him.
Feel like Musk has caught some of the PriceWaterhouseCoopers 'Introducing Monday' nonsense. At least we could attribute that to the dotcom madness.
https://www.goldennumber.net/wp-content/uploads/pepsi-arnell...
So great it inspired a song.
The corporate PowerPoint visuals just adds so much.
It's like someone read about Time Cube for too long and then tried to port that reasoning to the logo redesign.
Holy crap, to be a fly on the wall in the room when this was presented lol
Could this be a way to secure a global payment system away from a potential tyrannical alternative? Probably not. But if you were more in the know and were an insane billionaire, you might want to try..
Good, never liked these massive social media conglomerates. Give me back my forums.
This is a straw man - like many other of the comments here. Full of emotion, but vapid in real substance.
Good.
I've got to say, the verified list was not very valuable
There is absolutely no reason to rename Twitter. The name isn't even that stained compared to like Comcast or what ever the name was of that phone company in the 90s that sucked so bad it was renamed.