The success of most* social media platforms was largely unconnected with the developers who built it or the underlying software. You can't just hire a few hundred retrenched developers and expect to come up with a successful social media platform after some number of months. Timing, marketing, and user psychology are much more important.
* I'd say TikTok is the exception, because delivering (a) instantaneous video and (b) useful algorithmic recommendations is a technically difficult proposition. But at the same time, I'd argue their success was driven largely by the music licensing deals they initially cut (and their insane marketing spend), which is what caused their early growth.
I agree with a lot of what you say, but in this hypothetical I'm envisioning this a bit differently then a completely new social network so much as Twitter 2.0 with a very direct focus on getting a large "Lift and Shift" of users directly from Twitter. I should also be clear that I'm assuming a relatively proportional level of talent across Product, Design etc too not just retrenched engineers.
>getting a large "Lift and Shift" of users directly from Twitter
Why would someone switch from Twitter? If anything, you might expect more freedom of speech and less bots on Twitter. On the parallel Twitter the maximum you can expect is the old Twitter minus some functionality, plus some offline time and some bugs.
It's not hard to have a free speech platform. It's hard to have a useful speech platform. Useful speech probably requires editing and moderation and so far it's pretty clear algorithms and upvote/downvote systems aren't terribly good at it.
It seems to me that the last decade or so provides ample evidence that allowing everyone to say everything they want is almost certainly anti-correlated with substantial and meaningful debate.
It seems to me that the last decade or so provides ample evidence that not allowing everyone to say everything they want is almost certainly anti-correlated with substantial and meaningful debate.
I have a fairly plausible mechanism behind my observation: Getting your thoughts published and disseminated used to require buy in from a wide range of people, the publishers essentially.
Publishers edited and moderated what they published so they could gain a reputation as trustworthy or sensationalist. Maintaining that reputation was essential for the business. Who would buy a newspaper with a reputation for false reporting?
Removing the publishers at replacing them with algorithms designed to maximize engagement removed this intermediate layer of reputation checks. Further as the infrastructure is paid for exclusively by ads and those can be targeted fairly well, engagement is far more important than platform reputation. This has reduced the level of public discourse markedly and wrong and discredited opinions can gain substantial audiences and establish strong societal narratives with no "human editor in the loop".
This we are seeing an influence of conspiracy theoretical thinking on advanced democracies that would have been unthinkable even in the 90s.
“as the infrastructure is paid for exclusively by ads and those can be targeted fairly well, engagement is far more important than platform reputation”
This is the key problem for sure, but it applies to all content providers from the largest publishers to tiny “publishers” like you and I when we post a comment on a site that is ad-supported. To take away people’s freedom of expression due to the revenue model is arbitrary and inconsistent with a free, advanced society.
You suggest that there should be gatekeepers to verify the reputation and veracity of content and the individual posting the content, but these gatekeepers are themselves biased and unable to know the “truth” in most situations as there is a debate about what is the truth. Stifling debate through this filter is detrimental to discourse and results in group-think and a general lack of creative thought. It is generally unscientific and authoritarian, which history (very recent history at that) has proven quite clearly.
> To take away people’s freedom of expression due to the revenue model is arbitrary and inconsistent with a free, advanced society.
This is the rhetorical slight of hand due to which any meaningful discussion of this topic is impossible on Hacker News. I talk about a lack of moderation and editorial work and you reply about "taking away peoples freedom of expression".
Put another way, 30 years ago it was not considered a limit on your freedom of expression if you couldn't get your conspiracy theory published in any news paper. Today you argue/feel like it is a limit on your freedom of expression if you can't publish it on social media.
> these gatekeepers are themselves biased and unable to know the “truth” in most situations as there is a debate about what is the truth.
First, it is not always true that there is a debate about what is the truth. Secondly, if there is only one gatekeeper (e.g. the state) this is obviously detrimental to discourse. But if there is a multitude of gatekeepers, and if there is a strong culture of accepting high quality divergent opinions, it is not.
> Stifling debate through this filter is detrimental to discourse
Non sequitur! You assume that the gatekeepers will control by alignment with their own opinion, rather than by quality. That's a danger, but there are mechanisms against it. If there is a healthy landscape of publishers this is something that can be demonstrated and will become known because competing publishers have an interest in exposing this.
(If all your media is owned by Murdoch you have a problem anyway).
> It is generally unscientific and authoritarian, which history (very recent history at that) has proven quite clearly.
What historical precedence are you thinking about with this?
I think science is an excellent example, and as a scientist I am well familiar with scientific discourse, and how it functions. It does absolutely _not_ function as a free for all. First of all, if you can't get your stuff published in a reputable journal nobody will take you serious. Generally to be part of the scientific discourse you are expected to demonstrate solid understanding of the underlying material. You will not get to speak at a conference unless you have demonstrated this to a number of reputable scientists who will vouch for you in the program committee.
What this comes down to is simply this: A healthy discourse in which the best ideas win and new ideas can be tried out requires structure. In a free for all, there is no guarantee that the best idea wins, in fact you would expect the most easily amplified and persuasive idea to win. Ease of amplification will depend on the medium and humans can be persuaded of any number of things that are blatantly untrue rather easily.
We require so much structure in the scientific enterprise to guard against our own individual vanity and fallibility.
---
As an aside, something I have been meaning to read into more deeply but haven't looked at yet very much:
[Jürgen Habermas](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%BCrgen_Habermas) has written extensively about the prerequisites for a discourse to work well, long before social media blew things wide open. I am sure there are plenty of thinkers that have tried to develop these ideas further into the contemporary setting.
> His most known work to date, the Theory of Communicative Action (1981), is based on an adaptation of Talcott Parsons AGIL Paradigm. In this work, Habermas voiced criticism of the process of modernization, which he saw as inflexible direction forced through by economic and administrative rationalization.[24] Habermas outlined how our everyday lives are penetrated by formal systems as parallel to development of the welfare state, corporate capitalism and mass consumption.[24] These reinforcing trends rationalize public life.[24] Disfranchisement of citizens occurs as political parties and interest groups become rationalized and representative democracy replaces participatory one.[24] In consequence, boundaries between public and private, the individual and society, the system and the lifeworld are deteriorating.[24] Democratic public life cannot develop where matters of public importance are not discussed by citizens.[25] An "ideal speech situation"[26] requires participants to have the same capacities of discourse, social equality and their words are not confused by ideology or other errors.[25] In this version of the consensus theory of truth Habermas maintains that truth is what would be agreed upon in an ideal speech situation.
For a scientist, you sure do ignore the facts of fallible human nature and basic mathematical set logic theory. These platforms are not newspapers and magazines printed by individual companies with a cultivated set of content creators; they are platforms that are open to all people in the world. Applying the same principal to these platforms is inconsistent and arbitrary.
“This is the rhetorical slight of hand due to which any meaningful discussion of this topic is impossible on Hacker News. I talk about a lack of moderation and editorial work and you reply about "taking away peoples freedom of expression".”
You fail to see that we are saying the same exact thing and your attempt to equivocate by avoiding stating the obvious that moderation and editorializing is restricting expression doesn’t pass muster with me. We will have to disagree on this.
“We require so much structure in the scientific enterprise to guard against our own individual vanity and fallibility.”
Yet vanity and fallibility still reign amongst scientists, especially given the way science is funded. I refuse to accept such a naive notion and blindly apply that principal to discourse amongst people.
I nowhere claimed that platforms are like newspapers. I claimed that newspapers provided a function that improved discourse and that has been lost.
I also claim that discussion of this function is made difficult by a blanket appeal to freedom of expression.
I don't claim that we already know how to replicate the function that the publishers played in the new world. But moderation is not censorship and freedom of expression is not entitlement to access to a platformn either.
Your last paragraph almost wilfully seems to miss my point. Scientific consensus works in the presence of fallibility and vanity. If it only would work in their absence it wouldn't work because it is a consensus among humans and humans are prone to both.
High quality discourse requires norms, moderation and rules. I challenge you to show any counter example. Most obviously, we are on a website that is actively moderated and has a long section of guidelines that are somewhat between norms and rules. Do you think the discourse here would be improved without these "limits on expression"?
Yes but this is good timing. A lot of people are pretty unsatisfied with Musk as a human lately and it seems like if there was an alternative available, people would go there quickly.
I've seen him say and do a lot of controversial and in my opinion very immoral things in the last year.
Maybe I'm just talking for myself but if I used Twitter, and a decent modern alternative existed, I'd at least make an account and hope other came along so I didn't have to be part of his "town square" or his "everything app" (which sounds like a nightmare).
I think Musk has done some good things in the past, but honestly, he seems like an asshole and increasingly willing to do questionable things for money and to protect his interests.
I don't use any of his products and I'd been more than happy if it stays that way.
Interesting. What technologies do you use that you are fully aware that no assholes were involved in its creation? How does one go about ensuring they follow this no-asshole rule?
Many considered Steve Jobs to be an asshole. Do you use an apple product? How about Bill Gates and Microsoft? Or Linus and Linux? Or Amazon and Jeff Bezos? Or Oracle and Larry Ellison? Or Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg? Or …
Funny because I use Linux as my primary OS, while I think Linus can be abrasive, I don't think he is an asshole in the same way, because with Linus, it's not about money, in the same way that money is a thing for Musk or Gates. Woz built a lot of Apple and I feel his presence in a lot of their earlier stuff. He wasn't a money guy.
So I actually think I have a point.
I don't use FB because I don't like MZ, I try use Amazon as little as possible although sometimes, it's hard to avoid in some cases. I use an iPhone because I think Androids are less secure. I think Windows is a pathetic product and I've never liked it, I've never been a fan of Bill Gates and his ethos anyway. I'd actually avoid buying a Tesla because of false claims around self-driving and I'm also starting to feel like Tesla is synonymous with poor quality and issues.
So with all due respect, I'm not sure you have a great argument.
Life is (thankfully for me) about choices, and I'm making them.
Overall I personally agree with most all of those decisions. However, my decisions are made based on the product or business practices not my perception of the personality or political beliefs of their founders or significant contributors based on social media or news accounts.
Just because someone has an abrasive personality or differing political views doesn’t mean they are a worse person than someone who has a nice personality or similar political beliefs.
> What technologies do you use that you are fully aware that no assholes were involved in its creation?
Asshole or not asshole, the role of a CEO of a public company is to sign off quality of life for the public.
Musk is not signing off anything. At best you could say that he's aspirationally signing off quality of life for people who are not even alive yet and would benefit from a less warm Earth. But that is contentious given that solving transportation alone won't solve climate change and Tesla for sure won't be the sole player in transportation. As a matter of fact it will be a small player and the electrification will be provided by the legacy OEM.
Character flaws pale compared to the big question: "What is this guy doing for me?" . There were no such questions with the other people you mentioned.
Fair question. Elon is definitely not the answer to all that ails the planet. Yes, electric cars are not a panacea: they require mining of nasty elements from the ground and (especially the batteries) must be disposed of properly; they still require electricity which is largely still created using fossil fuels.
For me, the big advantage is that electric cars can be charged from many root sources including solar, wind, and nuclear. These sources can be sourced locally to one’s home or at least within the country, which reduces the perpetual excuse for wars to secure access to fossil fuels. That’s a significant contribution and Elon Musk is largely credited with moving the auto industry in that direction.
Also, I like his Don Quixotic nature. Charging forth into areas despite the naysayers and avoiding analysis paralysis by taking action and accomplishing some amazing feats with a team of people of course. We have enough tepid “leaders” who just want to copy other money-making ideas with easy fed money distributed by simple-minded venture capitalists.
He’s doing some things right. I am personally getting a big bucket of popcorn to watch what he does with Twitter and how he’s going to deal with all of the attacks from the government and individuals that are frightened of human beings expressing themselves more freely on Twitter.
> That’s a significant contribution and Elon Musk is largely credited with moving the auto industry in that direction.
Which is a direction which doesn't benefit the quality of life of contemporaries in any way and it's contentious that it will benefit people living in the future.
When something benefits you, well you know because you use that stuff. Today is Sunday and I used dozens of different flavors of Microsoft. Same with Amazon, Google, Apple, Facebook, Exxon, BP, Fidelity, Wells Fargo, JPM...you get the gist. I don't suspect, I KNOW that Jobs was an asshole and so is Gates, not to mention Zuck and Dimon...but quality of life provided by company they direct, trumps assholery.
I can't say the same for any of Musk companies, and he's supposedly the GOAT and he's 51. Mind I am not a sub-saharan farmer , I am a well traveled person, but I never used one of his products or services, the closest I was when an Uber was supposed to come pick me up in a Tesla but canceled.
Interesting that you think he's done a lot of unethical things over the past year compared to previous ones... this is the year where a good half of starlink terminals in Ukraine are being SpaceX funded. Rather than the year he accused someone of being a pedophile or the year he refused to comply with covid regs.
He did also threaten to shut them down after receiving flack for suggesting that a sovereign country give up part of it's territory to a lunatic, so yeah, still not a great year.
Which he said not long after the comments were made, so maybe it's coincidental, but I mean, there was never any talk of having problems paying before the anti-musk comments were made.
Switching cost is 0 as long as your friends are on the other platform. Just get enough people pissed off at elon to "try" out the new service and enough might stick around.
* I'd say TikTok is the exception, because delivering (a) instantaneous video and (b) useful algorithmic recommendations is a technically difficult proposition. But at the same time, I'd argue their success was driven largely by the music licensing deals they initially cut (and their insane marketing spend), which is what caused their early growth.