Muskovite Birds of a Feather: Notes on the Great Twitterpation

Notes on the Great Twitterpation

Nilay Patel↱, for The Verge:

You fucked up real good, kiddo.

Twitter is a disaster clown car company that is successful despite itself, and there is no possible way to grow users and revenue without making a series of enormous compromises that will ultimately destroy your reputation and possibly cause grievous damage to your other companies.​

As many users verge into panic over the implications of the Twittish Muskovization of 2022, a.k.a., the Great Twitterpation, certain realities dominate more realistic expectations. Patel's critique opens confidently, "because the problems with Twitter are not engineering problems". It's one thing to say the problems are "political", but there are also basic realities shaping what that means. "Twitter … makes very little interesting technology", he explains, "the tech stack is not the valuable asset".

If we abide the context that "the asset is the user base", we quickly encounter the difference between various political complaints about censorship, silencing, and cancellation, to the one, and the realities of business decisions, to the other, in this case writ large to the tune of forty-four billion dollars.

Here are some examples: you can write as many polite letters to advertisers as you want, but you cannot reasonably expect to collect any meaningful advertising revenue if you do not promise those advertisers “brand safety.” That means you have to ban racism, sexism, transphobia, and all kinds of other speech that is totally legal in the United States but reveals people to be total assholes. So you can make all the promises about “free speech” you want, but the dull reality is that you still have to ban a bunch of legal speech if you want to make money. And when you start doing that, your creepy new right-wing fanboys are going to viciously turn on you, just like they turn on every other social network that realizes the same essential truth.

Actually, there’s a step before trying to get the ad money: it turns out that most people do not want to participate in horrible unmoderated internet spaces full of shitty racists and not-all-men fedora bullies. (This is why Twitter is so small compared to its peers!) What most people want from social media is to have nice experiences and to feel validated all the time. They want to live at Disney World. So if you want more people to join Twitter and actually post tweets, you have to make the experience much, much more pleasant. Which means: moderating more aggressively! Again, every “alternative” social network has learned this lesson the hard way. Like, over and over and over again.​

And it's worth reiterating a point, "that most people do not want to participate in horrible unmoderated internet spaces full of shitty racists and not-all-men fedora bullies". It is not so much that the free speech of cacophony somehow overlooks the fact of imposed dysfunction, but, rather, the whole principle seems intended to encourage such outcomes. And a lesson easily observed, over and over and over again, is that the free speech of cacophony is dysfunctional. Consider our own community: While the Administration worries that basic standards of discourse or expectations of good faith will silence some unenumerated political views, the people such notions expect to bear the burdens of abusive behavior will simply stop participating. And, yes, we ought to wonder about the conscience that describes that as freedom.

In our community, such turns feel dramatic because at one point we pretended rational discourse was of some value, and even made silly pronouncements about how the overriding feature of our site is that it has respect for the scientific method, and values evidence over conjecture. If, as it seems, none of that was ever true, what remains true is that the signs were already there; even in pronouncing our respect for scientific method and evidence, the range was limited: If the evidence and result treads into the realm of politics, the site as an entity should avoid looking like it has any official stance. You could always sail an armada through that gap; that's what it was for.

Consider the idea that some arguments are hard to justify rationally. There is a reason this idea is significant; imagine a competition in which one side is bound by certain rules, while the other can do whatever it wants, and everyone in the audience is expected to pretend these are equal circumstance, indeed, the same contiguous circumstance. Eight years ago, the example was abortion, and there isn't really any mystery what it would say if, upon filtering out all the make-believe, misrepresentation, and insupportable presuppositions, there was nothing left for anti-abortion advocates to say. The site wouldn't be taking an official stand on abortion as an issue; but look at the counterpoint, the idea of silencing a political view: There isn't really any mystery about the implication that an issue is invalid if it is falsely founded. Does that mean anti-abortion is somehow verboten? No, it just means a certain range of anti-abortion arguments is no more valid than phrenology or young-Earth creationism, or any other such superstition and fantasy.

Think about the idea of letting people you know are wrong tell you what the discussion is about, that you let them set the terms of discourse. In the specific example of anti-abortion advocacy, the issue is tied into a lot of other stuff similarly based on make-believe and prejudice, so an actual course that appears to reduce the number of abortions taking place in society is unacceptable to those advocates and voters, because it violates other, related prejudicial expectations. The political discussion about abortion does not change, at Sciforums or in society at large, because one faction is allowed to repeat make-believe nonsense and everyone else is supposed to pretend and play along. It's not that a proverbial nobody challenges the make-believe, but that bodies social hold it inappropriate to challenge the make-believe in certain ways. In our own community, rational discourse is one thing, but we don't wish to silence certain political voices by maintaining any expectation of truth, evidence, rational discourse, honesty, or good faith.

And then think about the idea that the result of this, sustaining a vicious politic, is how we avoid looking like we take any official stance. That is, if we don't allow certain political groups to lie, if we don't validate their dishonesty, we're apparently being too political, but aiding and abetting antisocial, deceptive behavior presented in bad faith says nothing about the site's politics. No, really, think it through: If we do not aid and abet certain unethical and supremacist politics, we are being too political; the only way, in that outlook, to not be too political is to deliberately aid and abet particular politics. In the end, the site has taken an official stand by pretending not to. You could always sail an armada through that gap; that's what it was for.

Eight years ago was also a benchmark in our community's erosion of our own basic principles, in this case to attack an argument and not a person; we'd done it before, for anti-"Mexican" bigotry. This time around it had to do with a woman hurting a man's feelings, so naturally the only thing to do was scold the woman according to what were, technically speaking, false pretenses. We had much less to say about the man's conduct, but, like the Mexican-invasion rhetoric, there are downstream iterations of both, the child-corruption accusation and the Mexican invasion rhetoric, writ large in society. Our experience, here, is both exemplary and mundane; it is an example of how easily people might facilitate dangerous false justifications by simply refusing to challenge them. In the one, we eroded the difference between attacking the argument and attacking the person, i.e., to explain why an argument is racist is to accuse the advocate of racism, which in turn is an attack ad hominem that ought to be prohibited. In the other, she attacked the behavior, as such, and functionally speaking, we managed to illustrate the difference between two Spanish-language verbs that both mean, "to be".

Patel suggests "most people do not want to participate in horrible unmoderated internet spaces" rife with racism and bullying, and one point that stands out in our virtual experience is that the people who benefit most from our low standards are often the ones who complain about low site traffic.

The internet is rife with examples showing what the free speech of cacophony brings; even the Twitter knockoffs observably make the point. Multiple platforms scrubbed to sanitize against opposition simply failed to satisfy; the rightists who wanted Parler, Gettr, Gab, and Truth Social needed Twitter, as the professor put it, several months ago↗, because they wanted "access to … people they can harass", or, as the attorney turned journalist explained, the racism and harassment "is what makes social media 'fun' for them".

Meanwhile, the first week did not go well for Elon Musk; revenues are plunging and his publicly-announced plans are ridiculous and ridiculously insufficient; the company is hemorrhaging talent, and insiders describe something akin to the Trump administration, often learning of policy changes via Twitter.

It shouldn't cost forty-four billion dollars to learn this lesson, or, worse yet, fail to learn.
____________________

Notes:

Patel, Nilay. "Welcome to hell, Elon". The Verge. 28 October 2022. TheVerge.com. 4 November 2022. https://bit.ly/3DdQPoi

 

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well put

& the thing about one of the down sides of capitalism and greed is that no none wants to tell elon he is wrong because he is rich.
a lot of behaviour is all about enabling the rich person to spend more money.
in this case somewhat ironic considering the price.
elon wont miss 44 billion dollars
but a hospital would

maybe kanya west will start his own social media platform

 

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Wasn't he buying Parler, or something like that?

 

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it will be lost money for sure
thats a sinking ship

kanye had quite a financial back lash from his recent hate speech episodes.
he is likely to lose more of his income as time goes on.

he probably cant afford to buy it even though any money invested in parler will be lost in my opinion.

parler is a crack pot conservative talk platform which appears to be bringing in censorship to try and allow for advertising so they can make money
im guessing all the money so far has come from conservative think tank people.

 

... How It's Going

The story so far, per Josh Marshall↱:

Let's review. Musk went on a bender and offered to buy Twitter at a price based on a weed meme. Then he agreed to a binding agreement to purchase it. Apparently he didn't fully grasp how binding it was. Then he tried to get out of the deal. Twitter sued to force him to purchase the company. He was losing in court and decided to give up. He was forced to buy the company. Today he's firing half the company's employees. Advertisers are leaving in droves after one week. He's spent the last three days posting passive aggressive tweets about his new subscription program that if successful would raise maybe 5% of current revenue? Also, he's loaded the company with a billion dollars of annual debt service. Musk needs to sign up 10 million subscribers to Twitter Blue just cover the debt service fees. This morning, one week in, he's reduced to this.

"Twitter has had a massive drop in revenue, due to activist groups pressuring advertisers, even though nothing has changed with content moderation and we did everything we could to appease the activists.

"Extremely messed up! They’re trying to destroy free speech in America."​

​

The list of musked-up strangeness chattering through the twitsphere is ridiculous: printing eight hundred thousand lines of code for review by the wrong kind of programmers, forcibly unfollowing thousands, ordering eighty-hour weeks building revenue schemes, and even layoffs by email access. Pretty much all signs point to Elon Musk having precisely no clue whatsoever what he has gotten himself into.

Forty-four billion dollars, and he might have just taken revenge for something that never happened. We might wonder what happens when investors in his other ventures finally take notice.
____________________

Notes:

@elonmusk. "Twitter has had a massive drop in revenue, due to activist groups pressuring advertisers, even though nothing has changed with content moderation and we did everything we could to appease the activists. Extremely messed up! They’re trying to destroy free speech in America." Twitter. 4 November 2022. Twitter.com. 4 November 2022. https://bit.ly/3t13tCh

@joshtpm. "Let's review. Musk went on a bender and offered to buy Twitter at a price based on a weed meme. Then he agreed to a binding agreement to purchase it. Apparently he didn't fully grasp how binding it was. Then he tried to get out of the deal. Twitter sued to force him to …". (thread) Twitter. 4 November 2022. Twitter.com. 4 November 2022. https://bit.ly/3zKhvMx

 

His ego got him into this one and it's going to be costly for his bank account and his ego. It was already losing money, even before the increased debt so whatever happens is self-inflicted whether that "self" is Musk or the prior management of Twitter.

 

Highlights

As Elon Musk laments that free speech is trying to destroy free speech, which is strangely backwards, but never mind, George Takei explains it to him over the course of two↱ tweets↱, which might still be asking a bit much of the chief twit:

Keep the platform brand safe for advertisers, who don’t like to see bullying, racism, and hate next to their products, and they will come back. Bonus, it helps keeps this place from becoming a hellscape! Stop encouraging trolls and respect your actual customers, the advertisers.

When you go in and immediately fire the content moderation team, and then far-right users start posting hate to test the limits of what is acceptable, is it any surprise that advertisers hit pause? Perception is so important, and these big companies are risk averse.​

Whereas Nilay Patel↑ suggested no amount of "polite letters to advertisers" will help "if you do not promise those advertisers 'brand safety'", Musk has instead responded with absurd threats↑ of a "thermonuclear name & shame", which in turn suggests he still doesn't quite get how public disapprobation works.

 

Revenue is irrelevant. I think they lost about $200 million.

In other news, today the Northbound traffic on I-5 (in Seattle) was shut down by peaceful protestors worried about their relatives in the Tigray district of Ethiopia...yep...

 

What does that even mean?

According to Twitter, they've been at it for over seventeen hours. An hour ago, yesterday's photo was happening right now. Or, right then. Whatever.

Anyway, what was that? A conservative needed to complain about Black people? I don't know, am I supposed to be surprised? Are those protesters being too scary? Or are the women makin' too many baby daddies?

†​

Seriously, though, it's not exactly an original bit, just a puzzling bit of stupidity: Say something completely bizarre, like, "Revenue is irrelevant", and then change the subject to complain about Black people.

Then again, that is part of the Muskovite Folly; Elon was upset that bigots were not being given what he considered appropriate deferential respect.

Compared to forty-four billion, though, with the banks losing five hundred million off the top and a bad revenue situation becoming dire, the idea of complaining about Black people while pretending "revenue is irrelevant" starts to make a lot more sense.

We might wonder, when investors must account for, or at least acknowledge, Musk's forty-four billion dollar revenge fantasy agaisnt a figment of his own imagination, how many can afford to pretend revenue is irrelevant. Meanwhile, sure, I can imagine at least a few of them complaining about Black people. But at some point, revenue will become relevant.

 

If you are capable of reading Bell's post directly above mine, she starts out by saying that Twitter wasn't broke and that they have revenues of $5 billion. I said revenue isn't relevant. Net profit or loss is. I could have $5 billion in revenue if I started selling cars for $1 but I'd also have losses close to that. Get it?

I know you're more of a rambler than a financial guy but surely even you can understand that.

We know that you're a racist but I didn't say anything about "black people" and I'm not a "conservative" nor am I "stupid" but I did just see that the interstate was shut down for an hour due to protests regarding the situation in Tigray. This was in Seattle. I found it unusual to shut down a freeway in Seattle due to the situation in Tigray Ethiopia.

This is unusual. Your post frequently are all over the place so your comments don't ring true. Surely even a racist gay man can understand that, whether you're stupid or not stupid. Don't you agree?

 

Elon needs to hire me to save twitter

monetizing a purchase price of the verified user is a new level of nightmare that will lose more advertisers

the entire point of the blue check is that it needs to be verified and validated and monitored to maintain its core value.

simply selling them will open up to scammers which will maker the blue check verified mark something to avoid.
in exchange for what ?
it wont make up for all the lost revenue.

advertisers rely on verified account status to back their access to customers as authentic

if you can buy a verified blue check mark and then copy a celebrity or company and make a few thousand dollars
many people are going to do it.

?

 

Elon Musk has embraced the tiger.

It isn't the company, because that's only nominally what Twitter is. The animal he needs to tame is the commercial worth of a company with no business model; he might have paid more for it than it's worth, I guess we'll see. He is also having some difficulty with his grasp of California's employment laws. He might be in trouble with his business model regarding the hiring and firing thing.

Twitter is unusual, let's say. A lot like cryptocurrency is. Both of these "assets" only exist because algorithms do.
I say the success of these things depends more and more on good algorithms, They're like selection mechanisms for the evolution of machine intelligence.

Ahem

 

Yes, it's easy enough to get it: Revenue is irrelevant within your solipsistic outlook. And whatever that means to you is what it means to you. Twitter lost over a billion dollars in 2020, a massive turn after 2019, and that bleeding was shored up to about a hundred million dollars red last year.

In this context, revenue is not irrelevant; indeed, the stuff Musk has to sell, over and over and over again, to make up for lost adrev, just won't do the job. Cutting overhead won't do the job.

Revenue is irrelevant to some context that means something and makes sense to you, but instead of actually explaining that, you left that horseshit to sit there while spending more words complaining about Black people:

You "didn't say anything about 'black people'"? Okay, fine, it's easy enough accept you do not know there are Black people in Africa, and that Ethiopia, which is in Africa, has a lot of Black people, and the Tigray genocide inovlves Black people, nor recognize that the people protesting on behalf of their Black African relatives might be Black. And it's easy enough to accept that random change of subject which just happens to involve Black people that you apparently didn't know about inasmuch as you "didn't say anything about 'black people'", to turn attention away from your crackpottery about revenue.

And while a question does arise, wondering just how stupid you want people to believe you are, we already have a place to discuss it, so, sure, I'll ping you, there, whenever, and, well, yeah, whatever.

Then start a thread about it, or write a short-message profile post. What does a protest about Tigray genocide have to do with Elon Musk buying Twitter? Nothing.

Actually, I stand corrected: Musk fired the human rights team, or, as Shannon Raj Singh↱ explained, "I am enormously proud of the work we did to implement the UN Guiding Principles on Business & Human Rights, to protect those at-risk in global conflicts & crises including Ethiopia", while Jack Dorsey↱ apologized for growing the company too quickly; as one critic↱ observed, "Jack didn't apologize for getting them fired. He apologized for hiring them in the first place."

And while the relationship between social media and genocide probably wasn't really what you were after, yeah, sure, that, too, would be a good thread in and of itself, as the question extends beyond the Muskovization of Twitter.
____________________

Notes:

@barney1776. "Jack didn't apologize for getting them fired. He apologized for hiring them in the first place. He's saying, 'Musk was right to fire Twitter's entire Human Rights team. I never should have hired that team.'" Twitter. 5 November 2022. Twitter.com. 5 November 2022. https://bit.ly/3WD5FgT

@ShannonRSingh. "Yesterday was my last day at Twitter: the entire Human Rights team has been cut from the company. I am enormously proud of the work we did to implement the UN Guiding Principles on Business & Human Rights, to protect those at-risk in global conflicts & crises including Ethiopia". (thread) Twitter. 4 November 2022. Twitter.com. 5 November 2022. https://bit.ly/3Uw9brt

 

Of course you don't. Imagine for a moment, James, that we have been having a discussion, or a series of discussions, over the course of years, and you haven't so much failed to notice, but, rather, seem unable to keep track.

For instance, four and a half years ago, in the Mod Lounge, discussing good faith in relation to what ws going on in the moment, I made the same point: These considerations can be very important in understanding what is going on around Sciforums, but that discussion is presently precluded, poisoned at the well in defense of unenumerated politics and points of view, as it has been for years. Or some months later, along the way in the Memoranda, we considered the kind of antisocial behavior we have cultivated in order to accommodate unenumerated "political views".

I actually mentioned it along the way to someone else↗ after they complained about another's conduct, explaining that worry about silencing political views isn't universal, but applied to an unenumerated range of subjects apparently according to personal sentiment. There's actually a funny story, there, but it can wait for its time.

Last year, I was already weary of reminding you, which is evident in the tone of the summary↗: There's the bit about behavior and unenumerated political views, and the shape of what is absent.

Earlier this year, I was pretty direct↗: Remember, we're not enforcing any standards of rational discourse or expectation of good faith in order to accommodate your desire to avoid suppressing unenumerated political views that apparently require such cover.

Anyway, see Internal Memoranda #2791 for your appeal on behalf of unenumerated political views. There remains a question↗ whether you can discern between an opinion and a behavior: Now, why would I ask that? Because the difference between behavior and a political view is one of the underlying, long-unanswered questions. And over time, the best estimation of the answer is found in the shape of what is absent. Or as I told someone else in that one post: It's over five years later, and we've never found out what these mysterious, endangered "political views" we're supposed to fret for actually are. (Spoiler alert: With enough data points, the shape of what is absent can sufficiently resolve.) Actually, it was over four years, but now it's over six years later, and we still don't know. Well, except for the shape of what is absent.

And there was the time in 2019, I stitched two parts together↗ for someone, describing a shite-blithe, ignorantly featureless pretense against suppressing an undefined range of political views, and, pointing out, Years later, we still don't what those political views are. The best we can figure is a strange vantage according to the shape of what is absent.

The shape of what is absent is a strange attribute of your method; by the time I mentioned it in the discussion about talking to God↗, well, by that time I'm just that accustomed to it: If you're worried about "pseudo-psychiatry", maybe try a more affirmative argument instead of leaving people to guess at the shape of what is absent. And toward that, I would think a certain measure obvious, that if you don't like people trying to guess what you're thinking, don't leave them to guess what you're thinking.

Inasmuch as you're hardly the only person in the world who behaves like that, I used similar phrasing to describe a challenge↗ facing political scientists, describing a discipline where the key to comprehension is discovered by scrutinizing what is not explicitly untrue in order to discern the shape of what is absent from the presentation.

It's one thing if you believe considerations of people's behavior is a manner of suppressing political views, but you never did tell us what those were, and these years later, recurring themes provide enough data points to start defining the shape of what is absent. So, while we don't know explicitly what those political views are because you never told us, time and circumstance have afforded sufficient opportunity to observe what requires such shelter; we can fill in the list for ourselves, i.e., discern the shape of the unenumerated political views, by watching which political arguments need that protection.

But I actually review the history for a particular reason: While I have no doubt that you would, will, and do disagree about much I have to say on these points, the idea that, this far in, you are actually so clueless is, well, apropos.

More usefully, though, or, at least, functionally, I would think even you could figure out that if your reliable fallback is not knowing what's going on, people will eventually accept that you don't know what you're on about.

Really—

—we can only wonder what good you think it does any of us if I take you at face value and accept that you really are this confused. Seriously, James, you just spent two posts trying to convince us you don't know what's going on, but it's hard to imagine you thanking anyone for accepting that you are.

Meanwhile, the point remains: It shouldn't cost forty-four billion dollars to learn this lesson, or, worse yet, fail to learn. After all, we do it for free, on our own time. That part, at least, shouldn't be confusing. The overlap between your pretenses of free speech at Sciforums and what Elon Musk thinks he's betting forty-four billion dollars on is sufficient to suggest that, sure, we could have told him what's about to happen.

 

Bells mentioned Twitter revenue, which is irrelevant since profit (net income) is the issue. It's not "crack pottery".

Talking about a protest shutting down I-5 is not "complaining about black people".

Are you capable of rational thought without calling everyone "stupid"? Do you ever leave the basement (except for when the cat gets trapped under the neighbor's deck)?

Do you have a two day turnaround for replying to posts? To the one, that's one day to milk the dictionary for terms like "solipsistic" and to the other, that's day two as notation day?

You don't actually have any issue with my comments on Musk and Twitter. They're the same as yours. You just aren't capable of interacting with others, are you? Is that why you are in the basement? Get out and get some fresh air. Try and make a few friends in your neighborhood.

You may never be the life of the party but you can at least be invited to a party. You have to ask for help before it can effectively be given but we can help you with that antisocial behavior if that's what you want.

Is that what you want? Who do you think reads your foot notes? Is this some sort of compulsion that we should know about?

You seem obsessed about race and racism. How long have you had these issues?

OK, go back to your Twitter patter ...

 

Since profit is revenue less costs, I'd actually say that revenue is not irrelevant. Keep costs the same, increase revenue, you have more profit. Similarly, keep revenue the same, reduce costs, you have more profit. So it's not irrelevant, but ideally needs to be understood alongside profit.
Revenue also speaks to the overall scale of the company that profit alone simply can't. A company with 10 USD revenue and 5 USD costs is significantly more profitable than Twitter (in both % and actual terms) was last year. But hardly the same scale of company.
So revenue, again, is hardly irrelevant.

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