I hope that the wheels stay on sufficiently to get an idea of where EM wants to take Twitter and find out what kind of value it can bring. Having said that, he really made it obvious to me as an eng that the severance is the option I would be taking. Going "hardcore" on things can be fun, at the right time in your life, for the right reasons, with the right people. But somebody who takes over the company and accrues so much social debt so quickly for no other discernible reason than looking like the smartest person in the room misses the bar for "the right people" by a pretty significant margin.

>Going "hardcore" on things can be fun, at the right time in your life, for the right reasons, with the right people.

I don't see what it is about the Twitter product that would require going "hardcore". It's a lose-lose situation; I don't think Twitter's problems would be solved by engineering harder; and you will spend 80 hrs/wk where you can end up fired because people aren't as deterministic as cars.

It's a completely bewildering move; I'm not sure what Elon was thinking when he even decided to buy Twitter. What's most surprising it seems he has no thesis for the company or how it can be made better or what was so terrible about it.

> I'm not sure what Elon was thinking when he even decided to buy Twitter.

The first time? It really looks like it was the result of a disagreement with the Twitter board. They wouldn't accept his advice or help on how to make twitter better after he became a 9.1% shareholder. The offer to buy the company outright might have been more spite than anything else.

I think he calmed down and realised what a bad idea his offer was (especially at that price), and then spent the next month or so trying to back out.

The second time? Well, he was kind of trapped and was actually forced to buy it.

The twitter board were suing him to hold him to the binding deal to buy at $44 billion that he signed. He only finalised the deal to avoid the lawsuit. It's possible he was afraid of what discovery would reveal.

Its clear that Jack Dorsey let Elon know about the only real alternative path for Twitter, which is opening protocols and reversing profit-seeking decisions made many years ago now.

The conversation, leaked: https://twitter.com/TechEmails/status/1575588277700026368/ph...

However, I'm beginning to think Elon didn't get the deep dive he needed to understand what this really means. I have my ears up for the language or relationships showing he is really spending time on this... but I have only seen a dog chasing its tail.

At some level, Elon is characteristically aligned with this version of Twitter, however by saddling current Twitter with so much serviceable debt it is probably more difficult to go back in time than it ever was before.

I mean, there is a model that works, it's Discord. Small self-associating groups from various parts of our lives. TBH that's so far ahead of facebook - humans draw meaning from being in groups where there groups are small enough to know and have repeat interactions with people. You all know bigger discords you're in (gpu drop discord lol) where you're just a face in the sea and it's much harder to maintain meaningful relationships in a place like that, fediverse would be like that too. Humans evolved for smaller group sizes and a group of like 30 or 50 active users is EXCELLENT for social media, Discord nails this perfectly, personal communication breaks down at like 75-100 active users tops.

Facebook is an ocean and it's unstructured (Google Plus or whatever had user grouping, which was an advancement imo - you can say "that's a work person" and interact with them in certain ways) unless you go out of your way to set it up like that. Discord really just works amazingly well for that, I have tons of hobby groups and game groups where I've known people for a super long time and friend groups from whatever community. Kids have the "school chat discords" and if I was in college we'd have had study groups on it I'm sure, we had FB groups then. No reason you can't have a "family discord" too (so uncool, mom!).

Mastodon basically is (or could be) that as a protocol, if you want to treat it like that. Dress it up in a discord-like client and get it onto phones/etc and make the user-story good. People already show they'll pay to self-host discord servers etc, so come up with a cool "Algo" style ansible deployment thingy that makes it super simple, just fires up a server on an AWS account for you and gives you a link you can send to your friends etc. Congrats, you are now the Underwater Basketweaving Enthusiasts Discord Server, here's a random (or generated human-meaningful) link. Not everybody needs to run a server, but, make it easy enough that people can do it. And as a user, just join the discords you like and let the server op run it/mod it, just like now.

https://github.com/trailofbits/algo

What exactly does Twitter do in this business model, though, lol? And how do you get there? Twitter's "broadcast" model is nothing at all like that. I guess they're gonna... throw it all away and start fresh? Seems like that's what's happening I guess.

But I guess I just don't see the value in federation generally, to the end user. Pods aren't authoritative, they're decentralized and human-meaningful (in Zooko's Triangle), so oauth type stuff doesn't really matter, I would never want to "auth against UnderwaterBasketweaving" or whatever, because it's trivial to spin up another instance and make fake users etc. And why would I want to "cross the streams" between my home and work pods, or let Wendys marketing come and mine/advertise my server, etc, if I'm the one running it? Am I paying for wendys to scrape my content? Consistent cross-discord-instance identity is all I really want from social media, at most and that doesn't need to be tied to this at all, you can do that via google auth or some other idp(s) that solves that problem. Where is the revenue stream in this at all?

I don't want "community moderation service" in my decentralized communities... there are places where "work moderation" would pitch a fit and some places where work protocol would be incredibly uncool. But with small communities, O(1) moderation works fine, you don't need it, just let the discord server op do discord mod shit and delegate roles/etc to other mods too. Yes, godmode is fine in self-organizing communities because if moderation drifts sufficiently far from group norms the community will reorganize without you. Crossing the streams also ruins that, it means you have to moderate the firehose or punt it to an authority who will, and it's all just a big "why" when discord mods are fine.

Similarly, want a feed of interesting content? We had an app for that, it was called "mee6 bot", and the server admin asks what twitters/youtubes/etc people want for certain channels. You want a new channel? Ask for it, or make it. I am on a server with 30-ish active members and everyone has basic "add channel/rename/reorder/etc" and "warn" punishments etc, it's fine. If you're constantly being a dick you'd get kicked out but it's never been a problem. Family discord, or work discord, or some other close-knit irl community? just let people do things. social ostracism will keep people in line with the norms, people mostly don't like losing friends.

(maybe disk quotas though, because that is one that will add up faster than users realize. Nobody has solved "free content service" without it being tethered to another business, like youtube or imgur or discord. no, I am not interested in your IPFS childporncoin either. give me a sustainable, "local" method for hosting content... like requiring users to host content themselves on an instance or server hosts providing user-quotas for hosting etc. Define how important you consider your content (indefinite, 30 days, etc) and refuse new uploads if they're past quota.)

And if you just want a service where you click it and it runs in a hosted instance by a cloud provider... well, discord exists, and dropbox remains popular even in a world of NASs, etc.

But none of that has anything to do with Twitter or will have anything to do with Twitter, lol.