Twitter is a poor place

[TheAlkaizer]

Well, given that the statement that he was good at social media AND investing, we are okay then. It isn't great when you leave off half of what someone says, and call them disingenuous for the lack.

Given that what I covered is neither social medias nor just straight investing, I don't see the problem. I didn't leave half of it. He didn't just pump his inherited wealth like most wealth investors do. As I said, what he does and does well is much more strategic in nature.

His only actual areas of expertise are getting big mad on social media at people who criticize him in any way, and investing inherited wealth.

Since I didn’t say that, this seems an odd reply.

My reply is a proposition that he's also an expert at lateral thinking, moving and managing assets and technologies between different business domains to get and advantage. So I'm saying that what you listed are not his only actual areas of expertise. I don't see how it's disconnected.

 

[Gradine]

Twitter, like most forms of online communication, is a perfectly fine and occasionally fantastic medium that is crowded with bad faith actors using the medium to stoke hatred and bigotry and spread misinformation; as well as a slew of good faith actors who have been manipulated into insisting on absolutely purity of ethics, morality, and politics.

 

[Jer]

Twitter is, from a design and communication perspective, really awful. It's a firehose of thoughts from individuals you're following all interleaved together with no rhyme or reason and no way to impose any order onto them (at least not built in to Twitter directly - you used to be able to find 3rd party apps that would at least try to give you a decent user experience, I don't know if they still exist). The algorithm that they organize tweets with is not just opaque, it seems to be designed to be nonsense and to also raise people's blood pressure.

The only reason to be on Twitter as a platform is for the people who are using it. The actual tech and user interface of Twitter is a trashfire. The only thing that made it even remotely usable to me was by being very loose with the block button and just blocking anyone who was a jerk in public on it, and even then actually finding anything on the app/site is aggravating - the only thing it's good for is "empty calorie one-way 'discussion'" - it doesn't do depth on a topic well, it's not great about breadth, and honestly even the comedy on the site is mostly some variation of the same joke over and over again (i.e. pointing at something happening in the world and saying some variation on "can you believe this nonsense?"). And eventually I realized that I got absolutely nothing off of Twitter but aggravation. I'm now Twitter free for over a year and I can honestly say my life is much better off now than it was before I logged off.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Given that what I covered is neither social medias nor just straight investing, I don't see the problem. I didn't leave half of it. He didn't just pump his inherited wealth like most wealth investors do. As I said, what he does and does well is much more strategic in nature.

If that was your intent, you communicated it very poorly.

You literally said

He's not my favorite person, but it's disingenous to say he's only good at social medias.

This statement does not say what you seem to think it says.

It's also really bad form to accuse me of disingenuousness just because you disagree with my assessment.

My reply is a proposition that he's also an expert at lateral thinking, moving and managing assets and technologies between different business domains to get and advantage.

And there is very little evidence supporting this idea. He bought his way into being called a "founder" of a company he didn't have any part in founding, and wasn't even one of the initial investors in, and then bought out the actual founders so he could position himself as "the guy who started Tesla Motors". He then hired some actual engineers (I've met a few, btw, and a couple fabricators of various skillsets. He's a terrible boss.) to make a rocket company, and then let his various engineers talk shop with eachother and share ideas.

Paypal is the closest he's ever come to actually coming up with anything especially interesting.

So I'm saying that what you listed are not his only actual areas of expertise. I don't see how it's disconnected.

What you said is that I was being dishonest (that's really what the word means) by saying a thing that I objectively did not say.

And I'm not as polite as Umbran, so I'll just come out and say it. He is not an engineer. He's a rich guy that likes tech.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Twitter, like most forms of online communication, is a perfectly fine and occasionally fantastic medium that is crowded with bad faith actors using the medium to stoke hatred and bigotry and spread misinformation; as well as a slew of good faith actors who have been manipulated into insisting on absolutely purity of ethics, morality, and politics.

It's just gonna get worse, unfortunately.

Twitter lacked the guts to kick out the nazis before, now it's owned by a guy who buys into the "sunlight as disinfectant" nonsense, and who will kick his critics off the platform while reinstating the account of a seditious former POTUS who primarily uses the platform to harass people and encourage violence.

I used to have some small hope for twitter. We'd be better off with Bezos owning it, and I speak as someone who views Bezos as someone whose influence on our nation is almost exclusively negative.

 

[Guest 85555]

Social media is reach, so there is a trade off, but I basically pulled off twitter, scaled back my other social media tremendously, and what a difference it made in terms of restoring my writing, my reading, my thinking, etc. Not to mention my state of mind. Everyone is different but I definitely found stuff like twitter destroyed my ability to think, read and write in ways that were invisible to me. That said, there is that trade off: you definitely lose reach if you do that, and reach is something that genuinely matters if you are publishing or just trying to secure employment in a creative field.

 

[Umbran]

Twitter is, from a design and communication perspective, really awful.

But, from an engagement perspective, it is apparently freaking awesome.

Which of these do you think actually gets them money?

 

[Jer]

But, from an engagement perspective, it is apparently freaking awesome.

Which of these do you think actually gets them money?

I'm honestly skeptical of Twitter's financial future - it's the pet rock of the 21st century in a lot of ways. For all the talk of its importance, it's really only important because a whole lot of journalists use it to promote themselves. Facebook's (sorry - "Meta's") social media platforms are a lot more sticky and also they've put quite a bit of thought into always having a new one available as younger folks don't want to be on their parent's social network (though they got caught flat-footed with TikTok - Facebook/Meta is getting bloated).

I think the Twitter board is skeptical too - which is why once they figured out that Musk was serious and wasn't just trolling them (which, let's be honest, is a reasonable thing to think he might be doing) they jumped at the opportunity to sell it to him. Taking it private and making it's profitability his and his funders problem instead of theirs is probably a load off a lot of their minds.

 

[Morrus]

It does what it’s intended to do very well. It just that what it’s intended for isn’t necessarily what you want it to be intended for. That, however, isn’t a problem with Twitter.

 

[Umbran]

I'm honestly skeptical of Twitter's financial future - it's the pet rock of the 21st century in a lot of ways. For all the talk of its importance, it's really only important because a whole lot of journalists use it to promote themselves.

6000 tweets per second, on broad average. About half a billion tweets every day.

There are not that many journalists on the planet.