The actor threatens to pull the plug on the impersonater’s account

Elon Musk: The Secret is Out (and it’s time for Donald Trump to hang up his hat & sail into the sunset)

The secret is out, right? Elon Musk wants to own Twitter, not because he thinks it’s a great business, but because he knows that’s where real power in today’s world is. We know what happens when we post on social media. I don’t think we are going back to a world where we forget that the audience is listening and sharing ournermost thoughts with the world.

“I do think it was not correct to ban Donald Trump; I think that was a mistake,” Musk said at a conference in May, pledging to reverse the ban were he to become the company’s owner.

Relations between the men seem to have soured over the summer, with the men publicly trading barbs. After Trump called Musk a “bullsh*t artist” at a rally in July, Musk responded by tweet, writing, “I don’t hate the man, but it’s time for Trump to hang up his hat & sail into the sunset.”

The Skinner Box: Self-Destructing on Twitter During Musk’s Decay into a $1/m_Two$ Liquid

But more than professional utility ties me to the site. People are like slot machines in that they are hooked by anittent reinforcement schedule. It’s boring, repetitive and uninteresting, but occasionally, some compelling tidbits will show up. Unpredictable rewards, as the behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner found with his research on rats and pigeons, are particularly good at generating compulsive behavior.

“I don’t know that Twitter engineers ever sat around and said, ‘We are creating a Skinner box,’” said Natasha Dow Schüll, a cultural anthropologist at New York University and author of a book about gambling machine design. But that, she said, is essentially what they’ve built. It is one reason why people who self-destruct on the site should be aware of it.

It’s going to be incredibly hard. They need to identify what people will pay the most for. Yes, Twitter was experimenting with subscriptions before Musk came in, but it was languishing as a product. I was a subscriber, and I didn’t feel like I was getting much value out of it.

“Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated,” he said in the official deal announcement.

Twitter faces challenges to its free speech stance in court, as the Supreme Court agreed to take up two cases that will determine its liability for illegal content.

For a “keyhole view of what Musk will look like”, look at the alternative platforms that promise fewer restrictions on speech, said the President of Media Matters for America.

On those sites, he said, “the feature is the bug — where being able to say and do the kinds of things that are prohibited from more mainstream social media platforms is actually why everyone gravitates to them. And what we see there is that they are cauldrons of misinformation and abuse.”

The move came after mounting criticism of his chaotic leadership at Twitter, including recent decisions to suspend journalists and introduce (and then delete) a controversial policy banning the practice of linking out to rival platforms; laying off half of the company’s staff; firing others who disagreed with him; and welcoming back onto the platform previously banned figures who trafficked in misinformation, conspiracy theories, and hate speech.

That could mean lifting bans on conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who was kicked off for abusive behavior in 2018; Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., whose account was suspended in January for tweeting misleading and false claims about COVID-19 vaccines; and 2020 election deniers like Michael Flynn, Sidney Powell and Mike Lindell, who were all banned in early 2021.

Someone urged Musk to hire someone with a political view who would lead enforcement. Masters is a Republican senate candidate in Arizona and he has echoed the false claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him.

The Mastodon Story: Facebook vs. TWoT: How tech workers and journalists have figured out how to work together

Facebook is considering allowing Trump and others to return when they are not banned from the network, a precedent that could also apply to other social networks.

After a video meeting a few weeks later with Agrawal and Musk, Dorsey tersely summed up the situation in a text to Musk: “At least it became clear that you can’t work together. That was clarifying.

If it weren’t obvious before, the latest moves make clear that Musk tends to run this company the way dictators run their states: by making decisions that serve his personal interests rather than those of the public, and capriciously getting rid of people who stand in his way. That’s why tech workers and journalists who have lost their jobs in the past few weeks should come together to create non-profit social networks designed to serve the public interest.

And what do you make of the characterization that has come from Elon and people around him that Twitter is this kind of bloated, overstaffed, slow-moving company where everything takes way too long to ship, where there’s kind of a culture of sitting on your hands and not really doing much, and where with some quick, decisive action, you could really trim some fat and reestablish the company and make it profitable?

Despite the rapid rise of Mastodon, the micro-blogging site still reported 236 million daily users in July. The company hasn’t reported financial metrics since October, when Musk closed his deal to buy TWoT.

Are Facebook Ads Really The Hellscapes? The Case of Musk and WeChat, a Japanese “Super-Application”

It’s being loaded with a significant amount of debt, and he’s going to have to start making those interest payments. And so it is very important to reassure advertisers about the platform not becoming, in his words, a hellscape. Because advertisers have been really worried about that, and worried about, if these content-moderation protections roll back, are their ads going to be running next to really controversial or unseemly content?

Ah, thank you. There is something inherent to what advertising fundamentally is, which is the business of influence. I would like to have a desire in you. Maybe you’re perfectly happy and content with your life, but I’m going to create an emptiness in your life — a want or a desire — and you are going to fill that with my toothpaste or my headphones.” That is what advertising does.

Everyone’s guess is what he meant. But this summer, Musk told Twitter staff that the company should emulate WeChat, the Chinese “super-app” that combines social media, messaging, payments, shopping, ride-hailing — basically, anything you might use your phone to do.

Other American tech companies have tried this, but Chinese-style super-apps haven’t caught on in the United States.

Twitter, Facebook, and Tesla are all complaining about Musk’s departures from the Tesla-Toyota Coal Mine to $mathbfTeV$

The acquisition is starting to set in while employees wait for more from Musk. On Thursday afternoon, an internal memo was leaked which states that the code will be frozen until Tuesday, November 1 at 10AM Pacific, just a day before many employees are scheduled to see their compensation vest. Then Musk had some of Twitter’s product leaders meet with employees from Tesla, presumably to help him get a handle on what exactly he is buying. (Bloomberg first reported the meeting.) Later in the day, employees donned costumes and brought their kids to work for a #trickortweet Halloween party at Twitter’s offices.

And while Musk now finds himself in the uncomfortable position of having to hand over daily control of the company he just purchased to the tune of $44 billion, it could please some of his supporters who wish he would get back to work at Tesla and knock off the distractions.

The departures come just hours before a deadline set by a Delaware judge to finalize the deal on Friday. If there was no agreement, she was threatening to schedule a trial.

The council was to have met with representatives from Twitter Monday night. According to multiple members, the group received an email from the social networking site notifying them that they would be folding before the meeting.

Many employees have recently noted the absence of Parag Argawal, their current CEO, who Musk soured on after the two initially started talking about joining the board. “He has been completely absent for weeks,” one current Twitter employee, who requested anonymity to speak without the company’s permission, said of Argawal. One said that he had ghosted them. Both Twitter’s Slack and the Twitter employee-only section of Blind, an anonymous message board for tech workers, are full of similar comments about Argawal, according to screenshots seen by The Verge.

The execs received handsome payouts for their trouble, Insider reports: Agrawal got $38.7 million, Segal got $25.4 million, Gadde got $12.5 million, and Personette, who tweeted yesterday about how excited she was for Musk’s takeover, got $11.2 million.

Musk was questioned in court on Nov. 16 about how he splits his time among Tesla and his other companies, including SpaceX and Twitter. Musk had to testify in Delaware’s Court of Chancery over a shareholder’s challenge to Musk’s potentially $55 billion compensation plan as CEO of the electric car company.

Major personnel moves had been widely expected, and are almost certainly the first of many changes the enigmatic CEO will make.

Message to Twitter Advertisers: Elon Musk’s “Entering Twitter HQ – Let That Sink in!” A Comment on Twitter by Elon Yukawa

About the same time, he used Twitter to criticize Gadde, the company’s top lawyer. His tweets were followed by a wave of harassment of Gadde from other Twitter accounts. For Gadde, an 11-year Twitter employee who also heads public policy and safety, the harassment included racist and misogynistic attacks, in addition to calls for Musk to fire her. On Thursday, after she was fired, the harassing tweets lit up once again.

He said there was currently a threat that social media would fall into the far right wing echo chambers and cause more hate to divide society.

Yildirim said that, unlike Facebook, Twitter has not been good at targeting advertising to what users want to see. She said that Musk’s message suggests he wants to fix it.

She stated that having no content moderation is bad for business and puts them at risk of losing advertisers and subscribers.

Yildirim said that consumers should not be bombarded with things they do not want to hear about, and the platform should not be responsible for that.

Musk has said that the deal is going through. He strolled into the company’s San Francisco headquarters Wednesday carrying a porcelain sink, changed his Twitter profile to “Chief Twit,” and tweeted “Entering Twitter HQ — let that sink in!”

And overnight the New York Stock Exchange notified investors that it will suspend trading in shares of Twitter before the opening bell Friday in anticipation of the company going private under Musk.

Top sales executive Sarah Personette, the company’s chief customer officer, said she had a “great discussion” with Musk on Wednesday and appeared to endorse his Thursday message to advertisers.

Musk suggested in the past that the building should be turned into a shelter for homeless people because most of the staff didn’t work there.

Can we talk just briefly about this tweet that Elon put out earlier today — this message to Twitter advertisers? One of the strangest twists is in this whole thing. So Elon Musk has railed against advertisements for years.

Friedersdorf goes on to argue that Musk’s journalistic critics should give him more benefit of the doubt; after all, he did ban Kanye West, he refused to reinstate Alex Jones, he’s right that Twitter helped suppress the story about Hunter Biden’s laptop that later turned out to be at least partly true, and maybe his idea of amnesty for suspended accounts is not such a bad way to reset the clock and rebuild overall trust in the platform. But I think that strays toward both-sides-ism and misses the point.

A version of this article first appeared in the “Reliable Sources” newsletter. The daily digest is dedicated to chronicling the evolving media landscape.

The Impact of Twitter Blue on the Information Landscape: A Conversation with Ashoka Isaacson, Musk’s Biographer and Theoretical Analyses

But the rollout of Musk’s first signature project, a new version of the Twitter Blue subscription that will allow anyone to get a verification badge, has been a disaster.

A business story might be about charging for verified badges. But the move will have significant ramifications on the information landscape. Most notably, it will make it much more difficult for users to distinguish from authentic and inauthentic accounts.

The right has for years lashed out at “blue checks,” whom in their eyes represent elitist gatekeepers who control the conversation, even though many conservatives also don blue badges. Taking away those free blue checks, and the air of authority they give upon the profile they are appended to, will certainly delight some conservatives.

Walter Isaacson, Musk’sauthorized biographer, said in a January of last year that the best thing one could do to protect social networks, the internet, civil discourse, democracy, email, and reduce hacking was to authenticating users.

This is a transcript created using speech recognition software. Human stenographers may have found errors, even though it has been reviewed. Please email the transcripts@ny Times.com with any questions, and please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript.

Space Magnate Buys Microblogging Platform. It was a total chaos out there, when Musk closed his Twitter deal (almost) 30 years ago

It sounds a bit like a front-page headline in a movie about the future. Like, “Space Magnate Buys Microblogging Platform.” A person is laughing. You know, it’s just, like — but this is real. This happened. Just a couple of hours ago, I read it with my own eyes.

This was one of the strangest parts of the whole thing. He shows up at Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco carrying, like, a sink, and the whole point of this was to be able to make a joke on Twitter that said, let that sink in.

He shows up at the headquarters. He meets with a bunch of employees. He shakes hands and takes a coffee at an in-house coffee place. We did not hear anything on Wednesday.

I would just like to imagine how that goes, right? So you know, like, engineer Frank or whoever comes over and looks at the Twitter code, and they’re, like, yeah, you really couldn’t run that on a car.

Right, what can you learn about the code in a few hours, as a car engineer? But I would love to have been a fly on the wall for that conversation. Just a few hours ago, we learned that Musk had closed his deal.

In fact, there has been more external communication to Twitter.com than there has been to Twitter, the employees. So everything is just based on rumor. We wake up. We look at all of our various channels, we look at what our friends are messaging us, and we cross our fingers and hope to make it through another day.

Yeah, it seemed like it was just total chaos over there. No one knew what was going on or who had jobs and who didn’t. I will say there’s probably no clean way to do a transition like this, to do a take private deal for a company with thousands of employees, where frankly, a lot of the existing employees don’t like the new owner, and have said so both publicly and privately. I was surprised by how fast it all happened because this was always going to be messy.

I sort of disagree with that. If you wanted to make it less messy, you know what you could have done? Waited more than 10 minutes to fire the CEO, right?

They couldn’t have held a meeting on Friday because Parag was going to ride off into the sunset, and they didn’t know if he would be there. There were things that could have happened but didn’t.

Wait, let me ask you a question. And I’m sorry to interrupt you, but I have to ask right now. Is Parag Agarwal’s tenure as Twitter CEO one of the most legendary CEO runs of all time? The man arrives in November. He’s gone by October. He makes $42 million by mostly just not tweeting, and sending out a weekly email, saying, no new information. Will be in touch when we have more.

That is true. Although for what it’s worth, I’ve heard from very few of them jumping for joy over the payout from the sale of the stock, right? They are concerned about what the future will look like. But I do think that is a fair point. The Twitter folks — and this is why Parag is getting that 42 million. They got the absolute best price for this company that you can imagine.

If Elon learns to put a bit more thought into some of the decisions, it might do better, said an employee. He needs to learn where he does not know and let those that do know take over.

No, like, that number didn’t come from me. And so everyone sort of laughed nervously. But I thought that was interesting, both to see the interaction and to hear him say, at least to those employees, he’s not going to gut the company, at least to the levels that some people have talked about.

It’s like, he’s really looking forward to kicking the tires on this thing, figuring out what it is, what it does! But then, in the sort of note, they go, they say, sort of, two interesting things. One is, Elon wants subscriptions to be 50 percent of revenue at some point.

And he thinks that if Twitter had more credit cards on file, it could help the company with bots. Kevin, explain to me what a big percentage of revenue would be for the company.

I was wondering if any of you had seen anyone publicly excited about this. Someone is sucking up to the new boss. Is anyone saying, I’m so excited to learn — listen and learn from Elon, one of the great operators in technology history?

I have not seen that before. You would sort of assume that would be going on. We haven’t seen many of thosetweets. I couldn’t point you at one. At the same time, I think if you were an employee who really liked Elon Musk, you probably wouldn’t want to tweet about it publicly and invite the criticisms of everyone on Twitter who does not like Elon Musk, which is a substantial number of people.

Get it, get it. I don’t think Musk will follow this advice, but if he were, I wouldn’t search my name in Slack on the first day that I get access. Bad idea.

I want to read you one more paragraph, which I believe is rich with meaning. And I can’t tell you I can explain all of it, but I think it’s tantalizing for people who are listening to this, wondering, what does Elon owning Twitter mean for the future of content moderation, and just sort of, generally, what his policies will be?

We have more to say about this deal. But I just got a very exciting Slack message from my colleague, Kate Conger, who is breaking a lot of the news on Elon and the Twitter deal for “The New York Times” tonight.

I think he is now calling himself the Chief twit. Is that his official title? Do we know? Or is that just what he’s calling himself?

At most four top executives, including the CEO, were fired by Chief Twit. Have you heard anything more about potential executives being fired or additional moves that he’s going to make just in the next few hours?

Possibly hundreds, thousands, maybe even millions. That would be quite a bit, but that is what has been expected. We’ve been talking to people about the deal for months and we’ve been reporting on it. And it can be easy to get kind of caught in the sort of frenzy of activity in moments like this, but I think it is worth just taking a step back, and thinking about how major and, frankly, historic this deal is.

Does Twitter Need to Make More Money Than It Does? Exactly. That’s what I wanted to say about Musk when he bought Twitter

I believe that this is a huge moment in social media history. These companies are almost universally founder-led and very tightly controlled by the founders, right? Someone who builds a product from the ground up has a very intimate connection with the product and feels very strongly about it.

To me, the best way to actually influence Twitter now is by creating great competition from the outside. I think Twitter will survive and will still be around 20 years from now, but I think it will be made better if Tumblr is there nipping at its heels with some really excellent user experiences, maybe innovating the forms, and just pushing the bleeding edge. I mean, maybe Tumblr will always be the smaller but more innovative network. That is possible. The space before was like that. It is cool, but guess what? We will improve the rest of the web.

The direction of the company, the priorities, having a lot of the employees leave, and having a lot of new executives come in is probably going to feel similar to the one we’re about to go through atTwitter. And I guess it’s a sign of just the industry growing and maturing, and some of these companies getting to the stage in their lives where they can be bought out.

But it also is something, like you said, where this company is going from a platform that is used by people who do not have a voice and are trying to access a voice. I think this new era will bring about changes, and that other platforms will be the place to go for people to speak out.

I think today was the day that Musk discovered that 89 percent of the money he made from Twitter was targeted advertising. Like, is there any other explanation?

It’s funny that you’re saying, like, who posted on his account. He said a lot of the same things back in April when he first said that he wanted to buy the company. He said that it was important for the future of civilization and that he would use the Twitter deal as a reference point for his persona as a space explorer.

These are all projects that have the potential to change our civilization and help other people. That is sort of the vision he has for it. These are some of the things that he has said before. And I think it’s correct. It needs to make more money than it ever has.

Right. So let’s talk about that content-moderation policy change that we all, I think, expect is coming and could be coming very soon. Do you have any indication, Kate or Casey, about when these rules are going to change, when the people who were banned from Twitter previously are going to be let back on, including Donald Trump?

Twitter’s Fumble of the Post-Presidential Collision: What he’s trying to do with his company, or is he really trying to get rid of his squark?

I believe that this is one of the things that he wants to do and has made a top priority. I think that they are going to happen quickly. He took control of the company and immediately fired some of the executives who he had criticized for a long time.

He has promised to let free speech reign and has reinstated high-profile accounts that previously broke Twitter’s rules against hateful conduct or harmful misinformation. He has also said he would suppress negativity and hate by depriving some accounts of “freedom of reach.”

And this is a very interesting time to be making those moves, right? Brazil has its presidential election this weekend. There are a few days to go before the US midterms. There will be a test of the integrity of the information on the platform in these important moments.

If he reverses some of the rules in a day or two, then we will go into elections that are more free-for-all than they have been in the past.

Do You Think These People Are Going to Leave? What do they think? How did he go through the acquisition? Does Casey really think that the deal is going to be okay

Question for Kate, and then for Casey — do you think these people are actually going to leave? Do you think there will be a significant number of people who delete their Twitter accounts in the next 24 hours? Or is this part of a vocal minority?

I think that there are some people who will leave the platform, and I’ve seen some people talking about it, obviously, on Twitter, saying, I’m going to — like you said — migrate my social media presence to this other place. Follow me there. I don’t know. These moments when people leave a platform are difficult to predict.

In those moments of intense outrage, when the platform has done something or something that the people find objectionable, they just kind of rage-quit the platform. I think the deal is going to be alright, but there are things that will cause people to question whether or not this is the right time to buy a company. I’ve had enough. I’m done. I’m out of here. But I don’t think that just the deal closing is that outrage moment.

I think that’s exactly right. Many people have a lot of good and bad feelings about Musk, but a small number of people are angry that he bought the company. I think most people will give him a grace period.

They want to see what kind of steward is he going to be of this company. He wasn’t a very good steward of it during the acquisition process. He was complaining about it and its executives a lot, but didn’t seem to have a lot of ideas for what to do with it.

Then, he spent months trying to get out of buying it. Right? So it’s really hard to look at all of that and assume that it truly is a new day and he’s turned over a new leaf. But at the same time, we must wait and see what else is out there.

Hard Fork: How Facebook, Instagram, and Facebook Have Impact on the Digital Economy: Two Insights after the Apple News Break Break

Everyone who is still ontweets is a die-hard follower. Like, they’re not going anywhere — (LAUGHING) including me. I was thinking tonight, do I really want to?

Well, believe it or not, Kevin, more things happened in the world of tech this week, and we’re going to get into them. Apple is raising the rent on the digital economy in ways that concern me, and you have some thoughts about the current state of social media. We are going to talk about both of those after the break.

I have, sort of, but I have to confess that every time a story involves App Store guidelines or privacy policies, my eyes glaze over, and I stop paying attention.

That is completely reasonable. And yet, that’s why “Hard Fork” is here for you — to walk you through things that maybe sound a little boring, but are actually going to change the entire future of the digital economy.

So I want to walk you through a handful of stories that, if you knit them together, tell you about just how much influence Apple has over not just the products and services that we use every day, but about entire businesses that will now just never be able to be built.

What is that supposed to mean? You are a developer. There’s a new app. Maybe you have a replacement for the social network that you want to sell in the App Store. But in order for it to show up, Apple’s human reviewers have to approve it. And that’s really good, right? It keeps a lot of really terrible things out of the App Store. From the beginning, reviewers are using that process to dictate what types of businesses can and cannot be formed here. So basically, this week, the company updates about 700 words revising the App Store guidelines, and here are a few things that come out of those changes.

They say that in-app purchases must be used for content you experience in an app, including buying advertisements to show in the same app as your social media posts. I understand how boring it is.

If you have a farmer’s market and you post a picture of the tomatoes on their site, they are really great this season. That is raised by you. Well, up until today, Facebook has been able to collect all of that money.

If you want to sell boosts in your app, you need to make them available as in-app purchases, according to Apple. And do you know how much of a percentage Apple gets from that?

Apple made it harder for users to be followed on the internet by implementing privacy changes to its operating system last year. That, in turn, made targeted advertising less effective.

Developers have complained about this 30 percent cut in the Apple tax for years. The company has been complaining about this for a while. It seems that Apple has been messing around with the edges to make it seem like they are easing restrictions on their devices.

Right. The question is, what should we do now? This has been done by Facebook ever since. Apple is making money. But you know, inflation is out there. 45 percent gross profit margins is what it wants to preserve. So what does it have its reviewers do? I would like for us to go through the guidelines and see where we can squeeze in a little more.

The Spotify problem: a challenge for Internet music service, which is a lot harder to buy an audiobook from Spotify than to the web

Number two is, of course, the internet music service Spotify. Spotify competes with Apple. There is a music streaming service from Apple. It does too. It doesn’t have to pay itself 30% of sales for people to subscribe to the music service, that’s a big advantage.

So this is a real challenge to Spotify, whose main business, for a long time, was selling music. So the company decided to change their name. It decides, we’re going to try to take over, literally, the entire podcasting industry, so that we can better compete with Apple. A new plank in the strategy is that they are going to sell audiobooks.

There is a problem here as well. If you have ever tried to buy a book on your phone, you will be out of luck. This purchase can’t be completed here for some reason. Maybe you will go to the web. Right?

A similar situation has occurred with Spotify. It is not uncommon for Apple to reject the app from getting any updates because they don’t like the language used to help customers find an audiobook.

Yeah, I read about this. My colleague Tripp Mickle wrote a piece about this for the small newspaper, The New York Times. This is the Byzantine process that had to go through to make Spotify work. I’ve never tried to, like, buy drugs on the dark web, but I imagine that it is actually, in some cases, easier to buy drugs on the dark web than to buy an audiobook from Spotify.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/28/podcasts/emergency-pod-elon-musk-owns-twitter.html

What to Do If Your NFT Owns Twitter? The Emergency Podcast Explains Apple’s NFT Cut and the Apple In-App Purchase Agreement

The thing number three, I believe, has the biggest long-term consequences. One of the additions to the guidelines states that apps may use In-App Purchase to sell and sell services related to non-fungible token. Apps may allow users to view their own NFTs, provided that NFT ownership does not unlock features or functionality within the app.

Maybe if you own this NFT, you get a subscription. You might come to a member. And maybe you want to unlock features of that membership within your app that’s on iOS.

I might buy an NFT from OpenSea. I might buy it on Coinbase. Apple doesn’t get its cut when I do that. If I am a developer and want to attach an NFT to a service, what should I do?

Because this means that a whole pillar of the vision for Web3 is wiped out overnight, so you have no recourse other than to hope Tim Cook changes his mind at some point.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/28/podcasts/emergency-pod-elon-musk-owns-twitter.html

Apple, the Digital Economy, and the Three Stories That Apple Cannot Let Us Live on: How Apple Becomes More Brazen About It

Yeah, it’s really interesting. It does feel like Apple has gotten even more brazen about this, because I feel like I have been observing it from afar for a while now. There was a trial.

Last year, Apple was sued for being too aggressive and acting like a monopoly, and for setting up a toll booth so that anything that occurs on the phone can’t be avoided.

But there’s this other part of the future, which is the stuff that isn’t getting built, because it can’t get built. And so those three stories I just walked you through is a story about the digital economy that can’t exist, right? We can’t have a world where social media companies can come up with quick and easy ways to boost their revenue without handing a huge chunk of it to Apple.

We can’t have an easy way to buy audio books, unless it’s an Apple audiobook. And if you want to make NFTs, the foundation of some kind of new digital service, mm, it’s actually not going to work on iOS, so your best bet is to get people to sideload it through Android, or the entire thing just has to exist on the web.

I remember after this lawsuit from Epic, they did change a little bit of the sort of guidelines for whether, basically, how apps could direct people outside of the App Store to buy things. There have been some small changes. Why do you think Apple is trying to dial this up?

It is good that it is the platform. Apple’s bread and butter is extracting money out of the apps that sit on top of its phone. I was wondering if Matt thought that Apple deserved the money. Did he give you an indication?

It is possible to slowly extend those tendrils without too much worry. The Congress doesn’t have a single new law related to the regulation of our tech companies, despite years of complaining. It can get into there and do what it wants.

So who does that leave? It really just sort of leaves the Federal Trade Commission, maybe the Department of Justice, to, if they were interested, do some sort of antitrust action against Apple. And we should say, there have been antitrust actions against Apple in Europe, and I imagine that we’ll see more of those around the world, as regulators sort of get wind of this.

Does Apple really need to close the door on me? Why Apple isn’t making a cut in its App Store; why Apple didn’t open it?

But in the meantime, it feels quite brazen. I think it is worth thinking about, what are some costs of living in a world where many of these services can never be built?

Right. I think it’s worth trying to see it from another perspective, because Apple knows these criticisms are out there. In the past, I think it said something about how we built the App Store. We built the iPhone.

Exactly what you said, they said it. I like to think I am sympathetic to that. I think that they do deserve a cut, right? And you know, I think there’s a lot of services that they provide that could probably just be done for a flat fee, right? It’s like, do you really need 1/3 of my revenue?

There ought to be limits on it, particularly when it comes to competitive services, right? I think that it’s a bad idea for a service to be a music service, because that’s not a very good business.

You have to be willing to pay for copies of my audiobooks. I think that can not take nine steps. I wonder if Apple would feel like the door was about to close on them if this came from them. You pointed out that there are antitrust actions happening in Europe.

This Epic Games lawsuit is still out on appeal, so there’s still a chance that a judge, or even the Supreme Court, could force Apple to open its App Store and reduce its cut. So I wonder if Apple is just saying, well, this whole party that we’ve been throwing for the last decade — like, it might be coming to an end. We might have to take out our toll booth, so let’s just crank the dial.

And if that’s the case, it would certainly help explain why this week, Apple also increased the price of Apple TV+ by, what, 40 percent, to $6.99 a month? So yeah, enjoy “Ted Lasso” at a much higher cost.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/28/podcasts/emergency-pod-elon-musk-owns-twitter.html

What Do Social Media Companies Think is the Most Responsible for their Performance in the Quarter-Period Failures of the Last 12 Months?

And across the board this quarter, it’s just been really bad. It was reported that it’s losing money. It lost $359 million in the third quarter. Its stock has dropped by 80 percent this year.

Meta reported that its profits have gone down 52 percent from a year ago, while spending was up by 19 percent. Its stock is down about 60 percent on the year. In the third quarter, revenue at the company that has historically been one of the more stable social media companies decreased as well.

So of these three explanations — one being, it’s just the economy, two being, it’s a lack of discipline at the big social media companies, and three being, it’s all Apple’s fault — which of those do you think is most responsible for how badly social media companies are struggling right now?

So the first is that it’s just the economy. The economy is not doing well. Inflation is high. We are possibly entering a recession. Recessions aren’t good for advertising businesses.

When a downturn comes, the advertising budget is one of the first things that gets cut.

Emergency-pod-elon-musk-owns-twitter: Where are the naive developers coming from?

In pursuit of becoming the everything platform, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has thrown a lot of stuff at the wall. Precious little of it has stuck, except for the headcount brought to work on these projects.

They hired too many people. They don’t lay people off. And so they’re just all kind of inefficient, and that they basically need to get fit. So that’s one other explanation.

Yeah. I mean, and I’m certainly prepared to believe that when you have tens of thousands or more than 100,000 employees, some of them aren’t getting all that much work done. I don’t think it’s a bad thing that Meta has too many ideas.

Like, I feel like that’s a sort of a hot take. This company has a couple of different ideas, one of which is to clone TikTok and build virtual reality. And if they’re not doing a good job, that seems like a different question than, do they have too many employees.

Right. So that’s one theory that’s out there — these companies are just lazy and undisciplined. The third theory is basically the “it’s all Apple’s fault” theory. And this is what you’ll hear from executives at some companies, including Meta.

Like, a story that popped up this week is that developers are really mad, because they’re selling their podcasts or productivity apps, and suddenly, they began to see ads for Casino gambling games that were appearing on their App Store pages. Now, Apple has walked that back, but it is clear that Apple is now building a huge advertising business on the backs of those changes.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/28/podcasts/emergency-pod-elon-musk-owns-twitter.html

Emergency-Pod-Elon Muskowns Twitter: What Do Social Networks Say About Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram, and Facebook?

Oh, gosh! You know, I don’t know, because honestly, Kevin, I would throw a couple other things in there. Like, one is competition. Right? I would be curious to know what you think of TikTok.

And then, two — and I think it’s sort of related — is like, these platforms are getting a little old and stale, right? That’s right, every social platform is like chewing gum that loses its flavor after a little bit too long. And some of these platforms are starting to lose their flavor.

Yeah, I think all of them have a lot to do with what’s going on, to some extent. I think that some of these platforms will have less time to spare when the economy recovers.

Like Snap, for example — their users are still growing. That is not an app that is in decline. And yet, they are losing money, because the advertising market just isn’t there. That seems to be an app that if the economy does turn around, they have users.

Their problem is not that they are losing popularity, whereas I think Facebook and Instagram are in much more trouble, because even if and when advertisers do come back, their usage is declining. They are losing something that makes these apps work, which is the desire of users to come back and spend hours a day on them.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/28/podcasts/emergency-pod-elon-musk-owns-twitter.html

What do social media and social media platforms want to see in our lives? A counterexample: There’s no public square anymore: TikTok

But I think all of these explanations still miss something for me, which is I think there’s something that’s actually much broader going on right now. This is an idea that I think is strong and weakly held. I don’t have much confidence in it.

I think it needs a communication layer where you and I can communicate, and a broadcast layer where we can show something to millions of people. I think a true social media platform needs to have both communication, sort of, interpersonal communication, and mass broadcast.

I think social media are driven by targeted advertising. The business model that allows them to be free, that allow them to work, and that uses all of the data that was created to make the advertising experience better and make more money to pay for the whole thing is called the business model.

The counterexample is TikTok, because what you say is that there is no public square anymore because of the rise of social media. TikTok is one of the fastest-growing apps in the country. Republicans and Democrats are there.

Republicans are going viral, spreading their talking points, just as are Democrats. So I still think you have a place where everyone is going to broadcast, to discuss. Look at the comment section of any viral TikTok, right?

Emergency-pod-elon-muskowns-twitter: How is TikTok evolving and evolving as a messaging platform?

It is very, very bright. The attention is on it. By some measure, TikTok has taken away Facebook’s position as the place where we go to get information and entertainment.

It just introduced a B-Reel clone, because it wants all my friends posting, like, a daily selfie to give me another reason to engage. All of the things are changing and morphing into each other. I think that TikTok, even though it began as a big broadcast platform, is becoming ever more of a messaging platform, and wants to keep it there as long as possible.

TikTok, every time I open the app now, it’s saying we just found this person in your contacts. They are on TikTok. Do you want to follow them? I will see friends there if they ever post a TikTok.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/28/podcasts/emergency-pod-elon-musk-owns-twitter.html

The Evolution of Private Messages and Meta and TikTok, and All That: A Conversation About Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, iTunes, and Google+

And then, third, I think you’re right. These businesses are hurting because of app- tracking transparency and that is creating a reason for these companies to open up their businesses. For Meta, it means they want to become a hardware business.

For a TikTok, it means that they will try and get you to buy stuff there by creating live shopping shows. You can buy digital gifts for creators who are making live-streaming broadcasts, right? Maybe it’s going to let you subscribe to those creators to get some extra content from them.

So the businesses are all evolving in reaction to what Apple did, but they’re not going to wither and die by that alone. So you sort of add all of that up — and I do think that you’re right that in one sense, this era where we would all go on to Facebook every day and we would post our status and comment on each other’s statuses — that does feel a little bit different.

I think there is a new era, and that era is one in which most of the funny stuff we see is from pro creators or really talented amateur, and then we discuss that over private messages. That is why it feels different, right? It’s like, all that conversation we used to be having — that used to be in public. It used to be very in-your-face.

You would post every time you change your relationship status. Look at this funny thing. LOL. Look at this funny thing. That is the current state of social media.

Right. And where I think my view on that differs from yours is that I don’t think that shift to private messaging is a temporary trend. I think it’s basically a species-level evolution.

We were all on social media for 10 years, posting ournermost thoughts, and things that we would normally only share with a group of people. All of a sudden, we were posting it to everyone that we went to high school with, everyone that we work with.

It was this era where we did not know how many people were listening. And so we were just dancing like nobody was watching. Right? And then, we kind of realized, oh, everyone is watching. I could be in real trouble.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/28/podcasts/emergency-pod-elon-musk-owns-twitter.html

Emergencypod Elion Muskowns Twitter: What do Scott and Bethany really think about Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms?

Because that is where people want not just privacy, but encryption — some of them want, which means you can’t take their data and use it to target ads. It is not a place where people have had a lot of targeted advertising. I think if iMessage started putting ads into our group chats, we’d be like, what the hell?

Someone is drafting up a memo to insert targeted ads into iMessage. But I do think that that’s sort of a thing that we’ve all learned in the last decade. And maybe to bring it around full circle to the Twitter discussion, I really think there was an era where we didn’t know how powerful these apps were.

Yeah, I think we’re changing our relationship with that audience, and we’re being much more selective about when we want to be the performer and when we want to be the audience. I think it was once when we were very happy being both on the same day. Picking and choosing our moments, which feels more sustainable for the future of the species, is what we are doing now.

Yeah. The problem is that if you don’t have these giant platforms where everyone is doing both their private communication and their public communication, you end up with a much smaller business.

Yeah. I feel like I’m in a world where people don’t feel like they have to be online for 24 hours a day just so they can get a job, right? And maybe where most of us use these apps primarily for entertainment and to sort of message our friends a few times a day — it feels a lot more chill.

The school had a lot of drama because of it. It was like, oh, did you see? Is your opinion if Scott and Bethany just changed their relationship status? There was a level of naiveta on our part, as the platforms got bigger, and about who we were talking to.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/28/podcasts/emergency-pod-elon-musk-owns-twitter.html

The End of the Millennium: A Conversation with Jonaszliunue-Chern-Thirring at the Edge of Death

I think the era is over. I think that these businesses may recover most of their revenue and profits if the economy recovers. There is a bigger change that has taken place on the part of the users that are not going to reverse themselves.

That’s right. Do you know how this era will end? When the AI-generated content gets so good, that it’s personalized only to you, and there’s not even anyone you would share it with, because it’s so specific to your personal taste, so that we just sort of enter a mode of pure consumption, and we become the people in the floating chairs like in “Wall-E.”

“Hard Fork” is produced by Davis Land. Paula Szuchman is the editor of us. This episode was fact checked by Caitlin Love. The show was engineered today by Cory Schreppel.

Original music by Dan Powell, Elisheba Ittoop, and Marion Lozano. Special thanks to many people, including: Jeffrey Miranda, Shannon Busta, Hanna Ingber, and Nell Gallogly.

What Happened to the Musk Employees in the Aftermath of the Tesla Incremental Equilibrium Leap? A Complaint

There have been conversations with eight employees today and the weekend who said that the process has been frightening and confusing. Workers have been using private Discords to share rumors and clues in lieu of official communication.

The Washington Post reports that layoffs would hit 25% of the workforce, affecting teams including sales, engineering, legal, and trust and safety.

The turmoil has split the company into two groups, one waiting to know whether they still have a job after those cuts, and the other working on new features to avoid being fired if they don’t.

One thing people were nervous about was the instructions on Friday afternoon that engineers should print out their last 30 to 60 days of code. It is a small part of a set of measures Musk and his team undertook to identify the highest and lowest-performing employees who could be at risk of layoffs.

The employees from Musk’s own company have been brought on to help with the transition, CNBC reported. One employee we spoke with said they had received a call from a Tesla engineer late at night who quizzed about their team and which engineers at the company are most highly regarded.

since no leadershippy type appears willing or interested in filling the void: if you’re feeling bleak and dismayed right now, just want you to know you’re not alone. this sucks.

Employees in other channels are sharing contact information if they lose access to their communications.

Why are the big changes coming? Why do we care about what is coming, what are we going to do, and what will we do next?

Musk has demanded that engineers complete two major projects within a few days. One is changes to Twitter Blue that would require users to pay to retain their verification badges, possibly as much as $20 a month. We can confirm that the second report is a plan to bring back the short-form video app, either as a part of the core app or as a separate product. Our colleague at The Verge Alex Heath reported that, in the case of changes to Blue, the features must ship by November 7th or the team will be fired.

We understand that the project has generated a moderate amount of enthusiasm. More than a dozen engineers volunteered to be part of the project after Musk gave it the go-ahead Sunday night.

The employees are being told to build something and show it off to Musk. An engineering director instructed his team to come up with new products and feature and give them to the CEO in an email we saw. “At best: you will get some feedback. The director wrote that he would be asking you to ship it asap. “At worst, you will be asked to stop and work on something else. Even in this case, at least you worked on something you love.”

On Monday, a senior director of software engineering at the social network sent a message to his team that said, “big changes are coming.” According to a copy of the email obtained by platformer, he thinks cultural change is the most important change. Some good and some bad.

So if you ask what should I do now: do good engineering work. Write code. Fix bugs, keep the site up. I know what the criteria is for being at a social networking site. It is not working on a fancy project. The good culture change is, it’s shipping and delivering. I encourage you to rotate more on coding and shipping, and less on documentation, planning, strategy etc. If you want to join a special group this week, code and ship as usual. Building what Elon asks or thinks sexy is not the criteria. Being helping our users and being impactful are some of the criteria. So you don’t need commands from me. You are all software engineers. You know what needs to be changed. Do it. You are in charge.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/2022/10/31/23434002/twitter-layoffs-internal-messaging-uncertainty-elon-musk

The Future of Twitter and the Work of Musk: A Power Reporter on House of the Dragon and the Future of the Social Network, or How to Reconsider Your Relationship with Twitter

Musks attention is unnerving as well. One worker we spoke with had mixed feelings about being involved in a project Musk is known to be focused on.

It’s not known if the other two members of the top leadership team will remain with the company. Twitter did not respond to a request for comment about the current employment status of Caldwell, Sullivan, Berland and Iannucci.

Calacanis earlier this week tweeted that he was in New York on behalf of Twitter meeting with “the marketing and advertising community.” He has questioned users on the features of the platform.

This week on the Gadget Lab, we chat with a power reporter from WIRED about the future of the social network and the upcoming changes.

House of the Dragon is an excellent program to watch by men who want to father children. Mike recommends the new album from Natalia Lafourcade, De Todas las Flores. Lauren recommends reevaluating your relationship with Twitter, and social media in general.

Twitter and the Fate of Twitter: A Tribute to the CEO of a Silicon Valley based Artificial Intelligence Company (NASDAQ: Telliotter)

Vittoria Elliott can be found on Twitter @telliotter. Lauren Goode is @LaurenGoode. The person is Michael Calore. You can bling the main hotline atGadgetLab. The show is produced by Boone Ashworth (@booneashworth). Our theme music is by Solar Keys.

You can listen to this week’s show via audio player, but if you wish to get every episode for free, you have to subscribe.

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Some employees are nervous that if Twitter can’t get them to return voluntarily, the company will formally rescind the notice they received Friday laying them off. If at least 33 percent of the staff are laid off, businesses with more than 100 full-time employees are required to give 60 days’ notice. The notice mentioned that people would be paid for the next 60 days and given a month of unemployment pay.

“If your employment is not impacted, you will receive a notification via your Twitter email,” a copy of the email obtained by CNN said. “If your employment is impacted, you will receive a notification with next steps via your personal email.”

Some employees tweeted early Friday that they had already lost access to their work accounts. The email to staff said job reductions were “necessary to ensure the company’s success moving forward.”

The person named in the suit was not planning on doing anything like this initially. But… Look Ma I’m suing Twitter.”

What Hasn’t Happened Over the Last Week? How CEOs and Managers Accused about Musk’s Tweets about Labor and the WARN Act

The WARN Act requires that an employer with more than 100 employees must provide 60 days’ advanced written notice prior to a mass layoff “affecting 50 or more employees at a single site of employment.”

So the closest we can get to understanding their point of view is probably from Musk’s Twitter feed, where he’s been tweeting things like, “Twitter’s current lords and peasants system for who has or doesn’t have a blue checkmark is bullshit,” and, “To all complainers, please continue complaining, but it will cost $8.” He also recently changed his bio to “Twitter complaint hotline operator” and his location to “Hell.”

We will have a normal interview and talk to them. But instead of playing you their voice, which would de-anonymize them and risk getting them in trouble or getting them fired, we are going to transcribe what they say. And then, we’re going to feed those words back into a text-to-speech AI generator and play you an AI-generated version of their voice.

What did you say that there hasn’t been a lot of communication from managers and executives over the last week? What has been said? What’s happening?

Life Under Musk Two Tweet Employees Speaker Out: An Example: How Do Robots Get Their Computational Knowledge? The Case Of Elon

I like that when we started this show, we said we would never put on AI voices unless we had a really good reason and a really limited capacity. Twice in five episodes.

You weren’t correct in thinking that this was not a podcast filled with robot podcastsers, and in thinking that the purchase ofTwitter by Elon was wrong. So two failures for the man.

Yeah. Sometimes as a reporter, you get a tip that sounds so silly, that you’re not sure if it’s true. So when I got this tip that Elon and his people were telling people, print out your last 30 to 60 days of code, I thought, well, that can’t be true.

And in fact, two of my sources are like, uh, Casey, that doesn’t sound right to me. OK? But then, I start texting around, start getting on the phone with some folks, and then the two people that told me that I was wrong came back to me and said, oh my god, he’s actually asking people to print out their code!

Why is this funny? Why is this interesting? This is a weird way to evaluate how good someone is as a software engineer. People are generally not evaluated by how much code they’ve written, right?

If you show up with a long paper of code, it isn’t necessarily a good thing. You might have done better if you’d just eliminated some code. Sort of making it easier to use. So.

Also, who made the code? The coding programs have a Print Button in them, but I was not expecting it. That is not what you are bringing to your daily review of your code.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html

How much would you pay to keep your Verification Badge if you had to pay $20 a month to Keep Your Twitter Blue? — Stephen King’s Tale of Fools

Like, there’s just this boss in charge who, like, doesn’t really seem to know what he’s doing, and everyone’s just kind of humoring him. It is not a kind of thing that happens at a big tech company.

It’s not. Well, one thing that we should state is that the engineers at the company are very interested in figuring out who is a good engineer. So Elon very much worships at the altar of the engineer. He considers himself an engineer.

I used to talk to people who get calls at night from randomTesla engineers, asking who was really good on their team. Who are the top performers? Who are the low performers?

And so this code printout exercise, as ridiculous as it seems, was all part of this sort of evaluation system where they’ve been trying to figure out, who at this company do we need to keep in order to keep the service running?

And who can we lay off? That’s sort of the unspoken piece of this. This is a code printing fiasco. On Sunday, you reported that Twitter was considering tying verifications to the subscription of its Blue service.

So Twitter Blue, however many people subscribe to it, has never been a major source of revenue. The people who are under this huge pressure to make money quickly have been looking for new revenue ideas. Right away, there was a revenue idea that came up, which was to make people payTwitter Blue in order to keep their verification badges.

$38 million is how much it would cost for all of those people to keep their check marks. Revenue was over a billion dollars in the second quarter. I do not think that anyone will pay as much as $8 a month for verification on the site, even if they are verified.

Yeah. Stephen King, the author, asked if he could pay $20 a month to keep his blue check. I will go like Enron if that gets implemented.

Stephen King has written about many of the most terrifying horrors imaginable, and nothing scared him more than the idea of paying $20 a month for his verification Badge.

And I think it would be good for Twitter and most social networks if anybody wanted to optionally verify their identity. Like, that would be good for the credibility of the ecosystem overall. So far, a lot of the questions have gone unanswered.

I got verified, like, a decade ago, because someone at the news company that I worked at put my name on a list, and all of a sudden, I had a checkmark by my name.

Why Do Social Media Blue Checkmarks Become a Fake Oprah? An Insight from Elon, Stephen King, and Musk

It’s not about, this person’s important. There were a lot of fake Oprahs on the internet and it was created because people like Oprah were already joiningTwitter many years ago. If users were going to talk to a person, they needed to know if it was the real person that they were talking to.

I think this is a necessary feature of the platform. There is a feature on every platform that is social. You need a way to say, this is the real Oprah, and that is not the real Oprah.

It’s right. And I think it’s fair to say that over the years, like, people have come to see these checkmarks next to your Twitter name as sort of a status symbol, right? Like, it means that you’re someone, it means that it —

It’s right, exactly. And so I think the idea initially coming out of the Elon war room was that people who were verified cared so much about being verified and staying verified, that they would pay for the privilege. And so that’s where we get this idea of $20 a month for verification.

That almost immediately leads to an entire timeline crash, where users say no way will we pay $20 a month. That’s more than I have to pay. I don’t pay for videos on video sharing site YouTube.

It seems crazy to keep my little check mark. Subsequently, Elon responds to Stephen King on Twitter and says, we need to pay the bills somehow. It’s not enough for Twitter to rely on advertisers. How about $8? Stephen King is a pricing consultant.

And so for them, this seems like a way to make money, while at the same time, kind of punishing the blue checkmarks, which is just very, very different from how other social media platforms treat their creators.

Both Musk and Sacks have discussed the idea in recent meetings, according to a person familiar with the matter. A plan that would allow for a short period of use on account but require a subscription would be a good idea, the person said.

It does create a lot of economic value for people like you and me. It does matter to us. News organizations use various software solutions to do various things. Maybe Twitter Blue should be part of that.

Now, apparently, Elon did say something, like they’re going to have maybe some sort of separate legacy verification program for — I don’t know — government entities that aren’t going to pay the $8 a month. There are still lots of details to be worked out.

Life under Musk Two Tweetees Talk Out: What’s Happening at the Krispy Kreme and Where Is the Future?

For me, it’s back at it again at the Krispy Kreme, one of the great moments of culture for the past 10 years. At the same time, the culture has also moved on. It is a steep hill for the idea that the code base for Vine, which is 10 years old, is going to be revived and turned into a TikTok competitor.

I would also say, like, not an immediate revenue driver, right? That’s something they’re just going to have to put a ton of effort into. You are essentially launching a new social network. That is a huge, heavy lift. I think it would be fun to have a US short-form video network that wasn’t owned by the likes of Facebook and YouTube. But we’ll just have to see if they can do it.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html

Life Under Musk Two Twitter Employees Speak Out: A Reply to “Hard Fork”, Mockingjay, on Wednesday

That is correct. They are being told that they need days to ship it. If this does not ship by this date, in some cases, a date next week, you will be fired. You will be fired if it’s past deadline.

People are sleeping very little. They are sleeping in their offices, and frankly, some of them are terrified. Some of them are here on work visas. They have 60 days to find a new job or they will be out of the country. So it could not be more serious for the folks who have these jobs.

Welcome to “Hard Fork,” Mockingjay. It is 10:00 AM Pacific on Wednesday. How is your day going? Anything notable happen today?

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html

Life Under Musk Two Twitter Employers Speak Out: The Last Three Months and the First Five Years (The Final Four Months Until Election Day)

It’s stressful. There is no support from the people above me while I am trying to keep my job, and it makes me extremely stressed. There have been many rumor mill based scares.

The layoffs were supposed to happen Monday. They did not happen. Now, the rumor has it it’s going to be Friday. It’s tiring. I know we are all paid really well.

Most of us have money to spare. Some people don’t. As we enter a really tough hiring market for tech professionals, it is very nerve-racking not to know. We are entering the holidays.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html

Life Under Musk Two Twitter Employees Talk Out: The Case Against Code Substitution and Privacy Violation by the CIOs and the CFO

Just to make sure, you have a new CEO at your company. Most of the C-suite has either been fired or resigned, and you have not received one email that says, here’s who’s in charge, and here’s the game plan for the next few days.

That is 100% accurate. We haven’t gotten any information other than what trickles down to us. Comms is incredibly sparse. Messages are not being answered in the company-wide channels.

It is almost like a scavenger hunt across seven different apps when you wake up, just to figure out what you are supposed to be doing.

You’ve probably heard about some of the code reviews. I have seen people claim that code was written entirely by them and not crediting the people who collaborated with them, all in hopes that they will appear on a preferred status list.

Absolutely. What they are asking for is volume, not quality. Everybody is sharing their code no matter how small or useless it is. It is known as theSIGS.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html

Secret Chats with the Blind: Why I Can’t ‘Cooperate’ With People Who Don’t Know What I’m Doing

I got a message from a manager who told me to work on something, if I didn’t know what I was doing. Work on anything.

I was sent a post from Blind and I wanted to read it. When you sign in with your work email with Blind, you can have these secret chats with people you don’t know.

And multiple people have sent me this post. I don’t know if you’ve seen it. I won’t read the whole thing. The headline was “I can’t cope.”

Is This the Right Time for a Tech Job? A Remark on Elon’s Role in the Work Environment, the Company, and the Executive Board

And it reads, “I’m on the 24/7 team working to make all of Elon’s ridiculous dreams come true. If we miss delivery, management will fire us even if they have no control over it. We are gone if we don’t work on Saturdays and Sundays. We are gone if we choose to leave or take PTO.

People are working long hours. I’m working around 20 hours per day at absolutely full velocity. I’m waking up in the night to attend status calls. Even when I’m not working, I can’t stop worrying about it. I can’t cope. I am an absolute mess. I’m at a breaking point. This is after just a few days of Elon.”

My heart goes out to this person. I hope that they are able to find gainful employment in four hours, while they are sleeping and taking care of themselves.

I hope the people on visas are taken care of. All of the people I know who are here on visas have no idea what will happen to them. And they have not been told anything.

So this is more than just privileged tech people crying because we’re moving from one six-figure salary to another six-figure salary. These are people who are trying to immigrate to this country and have gainful employment and do a good job, who are highly skilled.

So I do not think, though, it is because engineers and people are sitting on their hands. The way this company is structured is nearly impossible to do anything, whether it is trying to get the proper approvals by and through Byzantine processes, or not being told how things are changing from day to day. There is a bit of truth to that statement. This is the wrong way to deal with it.

On The Future Of Twitter: The Mastodon Or Post Service And Its Potentially Ridiculous, and You Might Not Want It

I wonder if you have been thinking about the degree to which that could potentially be at risk, and what fears you might have about the future of the service.

Should you opt for the possibly greener pastures of alternative networks like Mastodon or Post, where many high-profile Twitter users have already migrated? Should you stay and hope things turn around? It is possible to stop using this type of social-media posting entirely and free up some time. Here are some things that should be considered as you consider your options.

It was scary and relieved. It’s going to be hard to not have an income. I hope that everyone who gets fired will just chill out for a day or so, and then wake up on a couple of days later with a new resume out there. Got to be energized about these other jobs, because right now it’s sucking the life out of us.

Life Under Musk Two Twitter Employees Speak Out: A Case Study With a Redneck Contribution by A.J. Kaehler

Uncertainty. There are people who aren’t even certain if they should continue doing the work they’re doing. And that pile of unknowns, along with the things that have been reported on, which is all the information we really have, it leads to this cognitive dissonance and just general constant stress.

Privacy concerns or potential misuse of new features would be raised by people even in the lowest parts of engineering. Their only job is to write random code that no one will ever see, just like the piping behind the scenes. The company had a culture of letting people speak to these things. And more often than not, it caught us on issues before it ever made it to the public like.

That is complicated since no one really knew. This guy was not a good person and that is what groupthink says. There were many people that thought that this should have been banned a long time ago for his actions. And everything just sort of came from there.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html

Life Under Musk Two Tweetees Speak Out: When Did he Come to the CEO? What Did He Say? How Did They Say?

I mean, he’s certainly been more aggressively attaching himself to various political viewpoints and their talking points. And if it serves him, he’ll lean into it.

For a number of years I’ve been there, and the company has grown in many ways and not so well. I don’t disagree with people when they say there’s probably too many managers, too many engineers. Maybe delivery is a little too slow. The company has never had management’s strong point.

There is no change like this without a massive structural change. If he just came in and did the same thing, like, what’s the point?

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html

Life Under Musk Two Twitter Employees Talk Out: Is Twitter Blue Moving Faster than It Has Been Last For A Few Months?

There is no need to worry. So there’s an idea there that Twitter should be moving faster than it has been. We have been told that if you don’t ship the thing by next Monday, you will be fired. As an engineer, when you hear that you have a three – or four-day deadline, what does that do to you?

I lose my mind. I mean, having a three – to four-day deadline on something because priorities shifted, we need to have this done by Friday, that’s normal. That’s a little stressful. Maybe put in some more hours. It’s necessary to get it done. It makes sense.

But I think the major differentiator here is just the sheer scale. I wouldn’t get asked at work to completely revamp Twitter Blue by Friday. It is completely absurd.

The sheer number of systems that need to be touched on, the number of engineers that need to be dragged in, it’s like raising the Titanic from the bottom of the ocean.

Because it’s not as if there’s just a certain set of code that needs to be written. You also have to coordinate with a lot of other people, right?

Yeah. Well, I mean, if you look at some of the feature sets that have been reported on that he wants to add in, like ranking blue check users higher than others, where that ranking occurs in the stack. They have to completely reshift how that entire process works. There are whole services in the company that we have to go figure out.

Yeah. If someone came to you and told you they wanted to redo the site, what time frame would you agree to, if at all possible?

It is dependent on things. If the change requires a ton of infrastructure changes, it could take quite a while because the Twitter platform is generally pretty slow. We don’t think we are moving as fast as we could.

I suppose there is something that can be deployed within a quarter to two quarters.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html

Life Under Musk Two Twitter Employees-Speak Out: Why They Cannnot Publish a Product, But They Can Publish It

This is an engineering problem and a social problem. We need to do testing. We need to figure out how this can be abused. What are the people going to do with it? What will the Bitcoins do to try and steal more people’s money?

Right. And that’s what goes on with all major releases at a big social network, is trying to figure out, we change this feature, what are the 10 other things that happen? And you’re essentially saying it sounds like that these deadlines are so short that this stuff may be released without any of that testing or scrutiny, that sort of trying to figure out what could go wrong. They will be set loose.

Yeah. There’s one section about user privacy and privacy data. And it’s basically, we’re not doing anything with user data, so we don’t worry about that. It is a blue check on a profile.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html

Life Under Musk And His Two Twitter Employees Speaking Out: What Do You Think About These Product Changes? Is It a Good Idea?

So there’s a couple of things. It depends on your position in the leadership stack, as well as how Musk and his people are. The message that got communicated was to find something cool that you like. Hopefully, Musk likes it.

Think about it. If you present him an idea and he thinks it’s cool, he wants it done within a week. And you’ve basically just sacrificed every team around you.

God. I wanted to ask, what do you think of the various product changes proposed by Musk and his circle, such as charging $8 a month for verification on the micro-blogging site, bringing back vine, and so on? What are your thoughts on those proposals? And do you think they’re good ideas?

The first decision he made was to take the log-out view and place it on the Explore page. I am not sure what the goal is, but my understanding is that we may be able to serve ads to people who aren’t logging in.

If you go to the site but aren’t a member, they will show you a bunch of posts that may prompt you to sign in. And if you linger and browse through some tweets, maybe you see some ads, right? I think a lot of people would agree that he made a fairly quick change that makes sense.

It is not the worst idea. I mean, the cynical part of me says, too little, too late. You know? TikTok is TikTok, and that’s a mighty hill to climb.

But sure. All of the original content from vine is here. So marketing-wise, the nostalgia factor is huge, which gives us kind of a foothold to at least launch something.

But we at least have the media, and trying to build a product like that, we’ve been working on that for a while. I think every tech company has at least tried. Is this something we can do? There’s been mock-ups.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html

Life Under Musk Two Twitter Employees Speak Out: What Do You Want to Do? How Do You Wanna Go To Work At Twitter?

The most boring would probably be it. You could probably make an interesting horror movie out of walking around with nothing.

There’s no communications. The people in the corner are the only ones talking. The company did not go to an all-hands meeting to learn what was happening. It’s everybody asking, are we ever going to see him? Should I keep doing my work? Do they still serve lunch?

We don’t know what your future holds as we record this. As you think about it, do you want to be working at Twitter in three months? Is it possible you are ready to be somewhere else?

Culture is very real. Cultures can be seen through the product. The way the company behaved was because people cared so much. And that can be infuriating in its own ways.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/04/podcasts/life-under-musk-two-twitter-employees-speak-out.html

Comments on Labor Lawsuits in U.S. Departments of Labor” by E.C. Casey

People have seen this. The point of this is to move fast and break things, without care for the people who are using it.

Yeah, because he’s reading the news about the work hours and stuff. He has been speculating about what labor law lawsuits will look like.

If you want to get any big scoops about what’s happening on the social media site, you can send them toCasey. Kevin is his email address. The words were used by ryuse.

The complaint was filed to make sure that employees were aware that they had an avenue for pursuing their rights and that they should not sign away their rights.

Steve Jobs and the Silicon Valley. Tesla, SpaceX, and the Employment Development Department: A Facebook Live Letter from Steve Jobs During his 1998 Breakdown

At the time, Jobs had been developing personal computers for 20 years, his entire adult life. He was familiar with the company he was running because he was the founder and led the team that created the product. In his years away from Apple, he had founded another computer company with a forward-thinking approach to the internet and next-generation operating systems. He was Steve Jobs. If anyone could quickly turn around the near-bankrupt computer giant, it would be him. Yet it took him months to come up with his plan and years to bring it to fruition. While the colorful iMac he unveiled to me that day in May would help nudge Apple’s bottom line back into the black, it wasn’t until the company’s entry into non-PC devices—like the iPod in 2001 and the iPhone in 2007—that it became a profit machine. In 1998 Apple did not make a road map for its post-PC future.

Musk need not look farther than his own successful enterprises to realize the absurdity of his haste. When he took over Tesla in 2008, the company was already five years old. After 17 years after being incorporated, Musk was able to turn around the company and post an annual profit. Musk deservedly gets a lot of credit for what Tesla has achieved—and for, among other things, his persistence. SpaceX, Musk’s other company, is private and doesn’t report earnings. It takes a long time to make a rocket ship and cutting corners can lead to people being killed.

In a letter to employees obtained by multiple media outlets, the company said employees would find out by 9 a.m. Pacific Standard Time if they had been laid off. The email did not indicate how many people would lose their jobs.

He also removed the company’s board of directors and installed himself as the sole board member. Many employees of the social media company took to the social media site to show their support for each other by writing blue heart and blue bird messages in replies to each other.

The Employment Development Department of California has not received any recent notifications from the social network, according to Barry C. White.

When the Covid pandemic kicked out, comedian Kathy Griffin told the CPCA panelist that it was a horrible experience for Donald Trump and his team

Big pharma wanted to silence me by making the Covid PLANdemic. She said that everyone tries to silence her. “Ma’am, please speak at a lower volume. I am too loud for the intensive care unit. You are not sick, you are not sick!

“Hi. Oh my god, your profile is so funny. Schumer wore a red dress and said she loved funny guys. I said that they were crazy to say I was a bot. All women, and I love funny guys like you. You should check out this website where I and other people hang out.

But the most notable person to speak in front of the council: former president Donald Trump, played by James Austin Johnson. Trump had his account banned in 2021.

We all love Truth Social and have moved to it. Donald Trump said it was very great. In many ways, it’s even worse. It is very bad. Very, very bad. It’s a little buggy in terms of making the phone screen crack, and the automatically draining of the Venmo.”

Musk began to notice that the significance of all this had begun to register with him and that satirical accounts must now include parodies in their name and bio. But if any of the fallout had come as a shock to Musk and his team, they can’t say they weren’t warned.

Comedian Kathy Griffin had her account suspended Sunday after she switched her screen name to Musk. She told a reporter that she used his profile photo.

“I guess not ALL the content moderators were let go? Lol,” Griffin joked afterward on Mastodon, an alternative social media platform where she set up an account last week.

What do future Musk and Musk’s tweets tell us about their company’s governance? The case of the Musk Blue Verification Checkmark

Actor Valerie Bertinelli had similarly appropriated Musk’s screen name — posting a series of tweets in support of Democratic candidates on Saturday before switching back to her true name. “Okey-dokey. I’ve had fun and I think I made my point,” she tweeted afterwards.

Before the stunt, Bertinelli noted the original purpose of the blue verification checkmark. Journalists accounted for a lot of recipients as it was granted free of charge to people who had confirmed their identity. It simply meant your identity had been verified. Scammers would have a harder time impersonating you,” Bertinelli noted.

The service would first be available in the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the U.K. It was not available Sunday and there wasn’t any indication as to when it would be live. Esther Crawford told the AP that it is arriving soon but it hasn’t launched yet.

No one at the company is responsible for the policies or enforcement actions and it’s unfortunate that individual employees are targeted for company decisions.

Edward Perez was the director of product management at a time when the product team was devoted to civic integrity. In September of 2021, Perez joined the company after 32 years of working in election integrity and was responsible for keeping the company safe during times of great upheaval. And as Musk guts Twitter of its staff and allows users to pay to get a coveted blue check on the platform, Perez feels he has to speak out.

Perez is a board member at the OSET Institute and is concerned that the drama surrounding corporate takeover is taking up all the oxygen in the room. He says that the focus on the Musk psychodrama might result in inadequate attention to election related issues.

Meanwhile, Musk’s increasingly erratic leadership, coupled with his habit of tweeting in eye-watering bad taste, gave many current and former employees I spoke with a sinking feeling about the future of their company.

Today we will discuss how the company mishandled layoffs, what happened inside on Monday, and what a paywall might look like.

Getting Back to Work for Vulnerable Employees: A Message from a former Employee on the Facebook app “Blind”

Managers jockeyed with their peers to preserve their jobs for vulnerable employees, such as pregnant women, employees with cancer and workers on visas, a former employee told me.

It began as a rumor on Blind, the app where employees of various companies can chat anonymously with their coworkers. It was visible within a day in public channels.

“Sorry to @- everybody on the weekend but I wanted to pass along that we have the opportunity to ask folks that were left off if they will come back. I need to put together names and rationales by 4 PM PST on Sunday,” one such message from a manager to employees read. “I’ll do some research but if any of you have been in contact with folks who might come back and who we think will help us, please nominate before 4.”

The manager said that they might use some help from the two operating systems. The company has been reaching out to both engineers and designers over the past day in an effort to get them back, Platformer is told.

Now workers fear that if they they refuse to return voluntarily, Twitter will fire them for abandoning their jobs, depriving them of what otherwise would have been three months’ pay.

How many hours are we supposed to spend working in IT? An employee perspective on the Sacks/Cashacanis/Palihapitiya transition

Meanwhile, remaining managers are bracing themselves for a much higher workload than they were previously used to. One person I spoke with was told that any technical manager should expect to manage at least 20 individual contributors, while also spending at least half their time writing code. Others have been given more direct reports.

Some of his teams are doing 20-hour days. “But the majority of the company is kind of just sitting around. No organization chart, no priorities, no chain of command, and in some instances no idea who your manager is.

Meanwhile, the health team was told to listen to Musk adviser David Sacks’ podcast for insights into why they had just lost half their colleagues, according to a former employee. Sacks, a venture capitalist who has been helping to manage the Musk transition, co-hosts the “All-In” podcast with fellow Twitter adviser Jason Calacanis and VC Chamath Palihapitiya.

“The most recent podcast covers the current layoffs happening across tech and provides some insight into why this is happening/necessary,” a vice president told employees. I think it is worthwhile listening to in order to understand the macro environment we are operating in.

Most employees were interested in their health benefits, which had become a question mark. The company’s open-enrollment period was supposed to begin today, according to its global calendar, but no information was available in the company’s human-resources system. Employees posted several questions about benefits inside Slack today, but all went unanswered by management.

By the day’s end, I’m told, at least some teams had began to hold meetings in which employees were informed who their managers are, what their organization charts look like, and what their priorities will be.

Twitter, the Verge, and the Black Hole: Why Twitter is thriving and how Tumblr is going to make a profit

On one hand, the company is telling advertisers that it is thriving, The Verge’s Alex Heath reported, adding 15 million daily users since the end of the second quarter.

The company rolled out a new version of the app on Saturday with release notes that said the new blue was now available. The copy written by Calacanis was derided for sounding like a scam. The problem is that Blue was not available, and so those who did subscribe found that they had merely gotten access to the current version of Blue.

Then, after a debate about the potential effects of unleashing thousands of new verified accounts onto the platforms in the middle of the US midterm elections, the company postponed the launch.

How is that going for Twitter? The company is small and they are able to move the numbers on the revenue more easily. Twitter is bigger — it’s not the biggest, but it is bigger — and like 85 percent of their revenue is advertising. It has to make money. Matt told us that Tumblr was still losing around $20 million a year. How hard is it going to be for Twitter to pull this off?

Tweeting the Blue: What Happens When Twitter Comes to Life? Musk, Crawford, Spiro, Crowdcroft, and All That

It was presented to Esther Crawford, a director of product management at the company who in recent weeks has risen to become one of Musk’s top lieutenants. Musk was briefed as well, sources said, as was his attorney Alex Spiro. Crawford appeared sympathetic to the concerns in the document, but wouldn’t implement any suggestions that would delay the launch of Blue. (Crawford did not respond to a request for comment.)

It could not be learned how serious Musk and Sacks are about the paywall; Twitter did not respond to a request for comment. The Blue team is occupied with the expansion of verification and it does not seem imminent.

“Tiny talk is talk so small it feels like it’s coming from your own mind,” Musk fired off shortly past 10 pm last Thursday, a thought so deep it might have bubbled up from a fish-bowled dorm room. Now that we have moved into Tiny Talk Town, all the conversation is about Musk.

Staying on twitter means you don’t have to take any action. You could sit on the sidelines, stop posting, and just ride things out to see if the reign of Musk passes and Twitter is somehow able to survive and regain some of its former glory.

A small group of people are behind the micro-messaging service. Heavy users who use English are the most frequent, accounting for less than 10% of monthly users, but giving 90 percent of all revenue and half of global revenue.

So active users are a noisy bunch, and it would be easy for, say, an electric car entrepreneur who follows a disproportionate number of extremely active “blue checks” on Twitter to mistake his own Twitter experience for everyone’s experience. Same goes for reporters. Only half of people on the social networking site use original tweeters and most of their posts are replies. They check in on current events or live sports or celebrity news, and then they go about their lives. They’re “lurkers.”

Lurking isn’t doom scrolling, a practice that took hold when a lot of people were stuck at home and unable to communicate with one another on social media. Choosing to lurk, to sit back and observe for a while, is basically a heuristic and simplistic approach to dealing with the complexity and chaos that is New Twitter. Check in on Elon Musk’s new toy, sure, then close your app or browser tab. Send a tweet, then disengage. You should always keep an eye on it during basketball games. Use DMs if you have to, then direct those message threads elsewhere. Save your most original thoughts for another time, another place.

It does get worse, and this part isn’t Musk’s fault. When the economy slows down, companies spend less money on advertising. So even if Musk weren’t doing wild stuff to alienate advertisers, such as tweeting conspiracy theories about Paul Pelosi, Twitter might have been in trouble anyway. But Musk has essentially identified himself and his company as a loose canon, which means that anyone looking to trim advertising spend might be inclined to cut Twitter first.

Now, Twitter did set up Tips — a way to send cash to people you like — but it doesn’t take a cut of that money. It takes a small cut of the revenue from Super Follows to make your tweet a subscription service, but Apple charges higher fees than that for in-app purchases.

I don’t think a lot of advertisers would want to come back to someone with that attitude toward impersonation, even without an economic downturn. The open question is whether users want to stay in that environment now that it has become a new layer of scam and hoax. Billionaire Mark Cuban has already complained that the influx of new checkmarked users has made his mentions miserable. Cuban’s thoughts are one reason people stay on the platform — drive him off, and Twitter is less valuable.

So for the banks, offloading Twitter’s debt now means taking an immediate loss. Banks may have to hold onto the debt for a while to see if the market conditions change. But if Twitter is obviously shitting the bed, unloading that debt gets even harder. Banks might be willing to negotiate with Musk about his debt repayment, as he is the richest man in the world. I wonder if they want to keep these loans for long or if they want to sell them. Banks may not be able to place the debt, that makes it hard for any other buy-outs in tech to get done.

What has the CEO in Meta? An insider’s perspective on the past five years and the future of the social media company TWITTER

Meta had an ambitious plan to enter the cryptocurrency market. Or Lasso, Meta’s ambitious attempt to outdo TikTok? Alongside projects like Shops, Meta’s ambitious plan to turn Instagram and Facebook into e-ommerce giants; its podcast plans; Facebook Portal and a Meta smartwatch to compete with the Apple Watch, they all failed.

According to companyinsiders and people tracking the company’s business from the outside, that is only a small part of the story. One former Meta employee with knowledge of the company’s operations who left shortly before the layoffs were announced, spoke to WIRED on the condition that he not be named because he did not want to offend his employer. I think it will last the last 5 to 10 years. Some of the losses can be attributed to the sheer range of risky and failed experiments the Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram parent company has conducted over the years, the former employee says. The ex-employee states that he cannot remember in the last 5 years of a successful Meta app or feature that wasn’t acquired.

New projects made it easier for Facebook to add employees. Flush with cash as one of the world’s biggest companies, and with big plans for dominating all aspects of consumers’ lives, the company formerly known as Facebook hired plentifully. In 2017, Meta employed 25,000 staff. It had 87,000 employees when it sliced 11,000 from its payroll. Over the last five years, the company’s headcount has grown by an average of 28 percent. After these latest cuts, the Meta is still three times larger than it was a year prior.

It might not look different from the outside, but there is a re-use of a seventies office block that serves as the European headquarters of social media company TWITTER. But inside, the mood has soured.

There is a list of people who have been fired. Instead employees have been looking at their colleagues’ statuses on workplace messaging app Slack to see if they are still working. Some European offices are affected by layoffs. Social media posts show employees in London have also been let go. It is not known if employees in other European hubs have also been affected.

Disappearance of an Open Social Network: Musk’s Twitter User Experience in Loss of the Glimpse and Behaviour

It is clear that we can’t depend on Musk to provide a safe and open forum. We need new, non-profit social networks run by boards responsible for considering the public’s interest when making critical decisions about things like content moderation and community standards. Many people who have these skills have just lost their jobs. There have been layoffs at several technology and journalism companies in recent weeks, with more coming at The Washington Post. The truly open town hall we need is something that the professionals should work together to create.

In the last week, one of the world’s most influential social networks laid off half its workforce, blew up key aspects of its product, and launched other features in a bid to compensate for it.

The menu option to sign up for the paid service disappeared from the app a day after it was launched, and just two days after the official launch. It was not immediately clear when the company might restore the offering.

Musk killed the gray badges feature hours after it was introduced as a way to help users differentiate celebrity and branded accounts from accounts without a blue check mark.

The account’s very next tweet, a day and nine hours later, said exactly the opposite: “To combat impersonation, we’ve added an ‘Official’ label to some accounts.”

The rocky start of the verification feature was criticized by misinformation experts who said that it would make identification of trustworthy information much more difficult, particularly in the critical period following the US midterm elections. Even some of Musk’s fellow high-powered users of the platform had tough feedback.

From one business to another, for when you have your customer service hat on. I just spent too much time muting all the newly purchased checkmark accts in an attempt to make my verified mentions useful again,” tweeted billionaire Mark Cuban.

“Bottom line is that you have a decision to make,” Cuban added. The onus is on the users to use their imagination, so stick with the new model of tweets that are free and open to all. Or use the service to make sense of the social network. One makes Twitter time and information efficient. The other is not good.

At the event held for advertisers, Musk pleaded with advertisers to continue using the platform, after a growing number of companies paused their ads. Musk accepted the responsibility of the company’s performance in an effort to appear magnanimous.

Internal Warnings Concerning the Impersonation Risk of High-Profile Twitter Accounts, and Musk’s Decision to Substitute for Blue

The team labeled the concern in the highest risk category, ‘P0’, because it said that the scampering bad actors could be willing to pay to achieve their ends.

“Impersonation of world leaders, advertisers, brand partners, election officials, and other high profile individuals” represented another P0 risk, the team found. “Legacy verification provides a critical signal in enforcing impersonation rules, the loss of which is likely to lead to an increase in impersonation of high-profile accounts on Twitter.”

On November 1st, when the document was circulated internally, Musk was considering a $99-a-year annual subscription for Blue; only later, after an exchange online with writer Stephen King, did he lower the cost. The move wound up increasing the risk for scams, as the desire to make fun of brands and government officials became an impulse buy at $8.

The team also noted removing the verified badge and its related privileges from high-profile users unless they paid, coupled with the heightened impersonation risk, would potentially drive them away from Twitter for good. “Removing privileges and exemptions from legacy verified accounts could cause confusion and loss of trust among high profile users,” they wrote. We assume that accounts have been thoroughly scrutinized to manage against false-positive actions on high-profile users. If that signal is deprecated, we run the risk of false positives or the loss of privileges such as higher rate limits resulting in escalation and user flight.”

The company’s trust and safety team did win support for some solutions, including retaining verification for some high-profile accounts using the “official badge.”

Source: https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/14/23459244/twitter-elon-musk-blue-verification-internal-warnings-ignored

The Platformer Era: Towards a Safer World, Safer for Children and Less Child Exploitation: The Elusive Debacle of Twitter

The document offers a wish list for features that can make the product more safe and easy to use, but not all of them have been approved.

Despite the warnings, the launch proceeded as planned. A few days later, with the predictions of the trust and safety team largely realized, Musk belatedly stopped the rollout.

Functions that were affected included moderation, recruiting, ad sales, marketing, and real estate. It is not known how the loss of thousands of moderators will affect the service. It is clear that the people who police the site for harmful material are no longer available.

The manager noted in the company’s channels that one of his contractors was deactivating while the company made some important changes to its child safety procedures. This is worrying because we previously reported that for years,Twitter struggled to adequately police child sexual exploitation material on the platform.

Some employees told us they had been bracing for cuts since layoffs earlier this month. But the abrupt nature of the cuts will likely send many former contractors scrambling: as Platformer was first to report, vendors told them via email their medical benefits would end today, their final day of employment.

Twitter Was Not Disturbed by the Sunday Day Skimplash: Why Are We So Close to the Site? How Many of Our Users, Engineers, and Customers affected by Sunday’s Whislash?

But I’m not here to speculate on the true motives behind Sunday’s whiplash; I don’t think that’s helpful. After all, intention and impact are separate things. When someone hits you in the face, they have also hit you in the face. You have to deal with the situation they have created. So my thoughts instead turn—and I hope yours will also—to the people impacted by the weekend’s policy change. Those Twitter users who spent Sunday wondering whether the platform they used and trusted to find and promote their work, make connections with others in their field, and in many cases, rely on for income, would allow them to continue.

Employees continue to show a great deal of solidarity among one another. The goons that have been carrying out Musk’s orders are not those from the volunteer venture capitalists or on-loan engineers from the Boring Company.

This was more than just a run-of-the-mill code freeze, during which engineers can commit code but not deploy it. Since Musk took over, it has been under one for most of the time. The goal of the freezes is to prevent a bug from disrupting the systems.

This time, however, engineers were told they couldn’t even write any code — “until further notice,” according to an internal email obtained by Platformer. Exceptions will be granted if there is an “urgent change that is needed to resolve an issue with a production service, including any changes reflecting hard promised deadlines for clients,” the email said, and employees get “approval from VP level and Elon explicitly stating that the change needs to be made.”

The engineers at the late-night meeting were confused. “Is there a ticket I can reference?” asked an engineer who was being tasked with implementing the freeze. “I don’t see any context.” “We don’t have much context as of now,” a colleague responded. “But this is coming from Elon’s team.”

I want to apologize for the slower than expected performance of the site in many countries. App is doing >1000 poorly batched RPCs just to render a home timeline!” On Sunday morning, Musk referred to remote procedure calls. Musk also complained about the number of microservices Twitter employs, which are generally understood to prevent the entire site from breaking every time one part of it goes down.

The experience in India is not great. That’s because the payload gets delivered from further away (laws of physics come into effect) and that back-and-forth data transfer between the phone and the data center starts compounding.

Not to mention that places like India have a higher concentration of low power phones that tend to perform worse in general — as opposed to all of our overpowered iPhones and such.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/14/23459244/twitter-elon-musk-blue-verification-internal-warnings-ignored

Why is the Code Freeze? Eli Lilly, T-Mobile, and GM were halted or pushed out after the Blue Debacle

So why the code freeze? No one knows for certain, but some theorize that Musk is paranoid that some disgruntled engineers may try to sabotage the site on their way out.

Eli Lilly paused all its ad campaigns on Friday after the Blue debacle. The move potentially cost Twitter millions of dollars in revenue, according to the Washington Post. The fake account that impersonated Eli Lilly’s had said on its verified account that the medication would be free.

Brands may also be miffed that many of Twitter’s ad sales employees who managed their campaigns have been fired or pushed out, including after another round of layoffs and exits Monday.

“I know that many of your markets and clients are seeing large declines in Q4 and in particular L7D,” wrote Twitter’s global business lead in Slack. “Please add any commentary, questions, issues in this thread and I’ll endeavor to raise as many as possible TY!”

The employee said that T-Mobile had asked to suspend the campaigns due to brand safety concerns. Musk said “no” when John Legere asked him to let him run the world’s most popular social network.

Another Twitter employee said General Motors had also asked to pause campaigns. elections are the initial reason they gave, but it looks like an open ended pause after the team requested to meet to discuss why they shouldn’t. The same employee added that GM should be paused until the end of the year. Brand safety is the reason now.

According to an email obtained by platformer, GroupM told its clients that it was a high-risk media buy. The situation was explained in a way that made it clear that Groupm have updated their brand safety guidance to high risk due to the recent senior departures. While they understand that our policies remain in place, they feel that Twitter’s ability to scale and manage infractions at speed is uncertain at this time.”

Preserving effective content moderation is something that requires a certain level of commitment.

Two-Factor Authentication and Subscriptions: What Happens After Musk Says Its Not Really The Right Thing?

Mid-afternoon on Monday, after Musk announced he would begin disconnecting up to 80 percent of unspecified microservices, some users said two-factor authentication temporarily stopped working via SMS. Some people noticed partial site disruptions and difficulty getting their archives.

There are people who know how to fix all those things, but they either have been told not to ship any new code or no longer work for the company. At the end of the day, engineers wanted to know how many new cracks would appear in the service and when.

“I’ve always thought that a move to a subscription business would make sense for Twitter … it’s never been a great advertising platform,” said Larry Vincent, associate professor of marketing at USC’s Marshall School of Business. Since it doesn’t offer the same level of user targeting as competitors like Facebook, its advertising business has been smaller.

There was a misunderstanding after the meeting with Cook, and Apple might have just said that they don’t want to approve Blue until it’s fixed. I think that is more likely. As Matt talked about, they usually hold things up in review for arbitrary amounts of time because of other non-related issues.

Even still, there is no guarantee that continuing to capture the online world’s attention will translate into subscription payments or other revenue growth.

The Fork in the Road: How Elon Musk Decided to Leave Twitter (and he Found Out his First Job with Copywriting)

Have you ever received an email at midnight from the boss that said “a fork in the road”? Granted, email etiquette today says we’re not supposed to get midnight emails from bosses at all. But Elon Musk is no ordinary boss, and it’s safe to assume he didn’t get the memo on empathetic leadership. So, true to form, as chief executive of Twitter, after laying off nearly half of his staff, bringing a sink to work and proclaiming he would be sleeping at the office “until the org is fixed,” Mr. Musk recently issued this late-night ultimatum to his remaining employees: From this point forward, Twitter was going to be “extremely hard core.” Were they ready to be hard core? They could select “yes” — or opt for three months of severance pay.

To Mr. Musk, “hard core” meant “long hours at high intensity,” a workplace where only the most “exceptional performance” would be accepted and a culture in which midnight emails would be just fine. It immediately conjured images of sweatyWall Street bankers collapsing at their desks, Silicon Valley wunderkinds sleeping under theirs and the high income people who work so hard that they don’t have time to rest, and I suppose that more than a few of them were turned off by the It is a mind-set that many employees are determined never to leave, even if it is their boss who wants them to.

Many users followed in the footsteps of others and followed a short epitaph for the platform. For some, like writer Dan Sheehan, gaining a platform on Twitter later allowed them to excel in their personal and professional lives.

“I built this following for myself, and that got me some of my first job offers just in the copywriting space. He says he paid the bills with that method.

Through copywriting, a project that was made a reality in part because of his large social media following, was able to be written by him.

“The fact that I was able to keep the lights on, the bills paid, while writing the book, and then have the book reach that audience of over 100,000 people directly, none of that could have been done through traditional means,” he says.

“For the longest time, creative fields have been cornered by the wealthy, or the children of the wealthy… You were able to build an audience that became obvious to the people holding the keys to that.

Azucena was able to gain a platform and open a door into the journalism industry outside of traditional routes due to the help she received from social media.

“I don’t know what is going to happen with the diversity problem that continues, those communities are not going to find each other.” She says that by following people and reading their work on the internet, she was able to see it right there.

The Twitter Files, Part Duex! Explaining Musk’s Disruption of Twitter and the Outbreak of the MS MS Epidemic

Wendi Muse, a Ph.D candidate with multiple sclerosis, was an active member of ‘Disability Twitter’ for years. She spent the pandemic posting resources to help people get masks, as well as sending some from the personal stockpile she had amassed. She noticed that more people in theimmunocompromised community want reliable N95 masks.

Muse says he sent more than 12,000 masks alone from his living room since January. She thinks she wouldn’t be able to reach as many individuals if it wasn’t for her presence on the social networking site.

It has been crucial because it has been a way to get more information about the outbreak as well as reach out to other people who may not have access to these resources.

For Muse, and many others, the potential end of Twitter would be a big loss, even as alternative sites like Discord or Mastodon have seen a recent influx in new users.

I think the lack of knowing is making it more difficult, especially for people with disabilities or elderly people who don’t have social networks in person.

Davisson is of the opinion that Twitter, which has been gutted by moderation staff, won’t be able to enforce Musk’s policies in a way that covers all users.

If you’ve been shadow banned, you’ll know how to appeal via a software update that will show your true account status. He did not provide additional details or a timetable.

Musk reversed the platform’s ban of Trump after getting feedback from his fans, but initially stated he would consult experts on the decision. Musk on Monday also disbanded its Trust and Safety Council, a group of outside experts who consulted with the company on sensitive issues.

The second set of the so-called Tweets Files, shared by journalist Bari Weiss, showed how the platform restricts the reach of certain accounts or topics that it deems harmful, such as by limiting their ability to appear in the search or trend sections of the platform.

The internal documents appear to have been given directly to the journalists. Musk posted Weiss’ thread in a Saturday post and wrote, ” The Twitter Files, Part Duex!!” Along with two popcorn expressions.

How Do Right-Leaning Figures Get Their Censored? Embedding Trump’s Discrimination Into Twitter

Weiss said that there are several examples of right-leaning figures who have moderation actions taken on their accounts, but it was not clear if they were taken against left-leaning or other accounts.

A person familiar with the matter told CNN Monday that the former head of trusts and safety left his home after an increase in threats from Musk.

The documents shared on the social media platform offer a glimpse into internal debates among some of the company’s employees ahead of the ban on then- President Donald Trump.

Among Roth’s tweets was one he wrote on Election Day 2016 that read, “I’m just saying, we fly over those states that voted for a racist tangerine for a reason.”

I want to be clear, we have all made questionable statements, but I support Yoel. My sense is that he has high integrity, and we are all entitled to our political beliefs,” Musk tweeted.

Weiss’ tweets suggest that in the wake of January 6, there were Twitter employees both in favor of and against the idea of banning Trump. A screenshot from an internal Twitter slack conversation, where employees’ names have been redacted, shows one employee raising concerns about “censorship” while another notes that “we impose far stricter rules on effectively everyone else on the platform.” Weiss wasn’t sure if employees in the discussion were involved in the decision making that led to Trump’s ban.

I am not seeing clear orcoded instuction to violence from Trump, as he claimed on January 8th, after 75,000,000 great Americans voted for him in the presidential election. They won’t be treated unfairly or disrespected in any shape or form.

avaroli told the committee that she and her staff were concerned about the risk of violence after they found that the Proud Boys and other groups who supported Trump posted violent content on their social media accounts.

Another staffer, whose name was taken off the screen, said in chat that a subsequent message from Trump saying he wouldn’t attend the inauguration was also not a violation. Weiss stated that a different staffer questioned if that tweet could be proof that Trump doesn’t support a peaceful transition.

The process of involving multiple staffers and teams and relying on research for high-profile decisions does not appear out of line with how Twitter and other social platforms make content moderation decisions, especially in crisis situations.

The Twitter Twitter Trust and Safety Council: Online Children’s Abuse, Exploitation, and Misrepresentation of the Company’s Role

The council members, who provided images of the email from Twitter to The Associated Press, spoke on the condition of anonymity due to fears of retaliation.

A volunteer group provided expertise and guidance on how to better fight hate and harassment but did not have the authority to make any decisions or look into content disputes.

The volunteers on the Trust and Safety Council gave up years of their own time to help with a wide range of online harms and safety issues. At no point was it a governing body or decision making.

The former council members were attacked online after Musk lambasted them for not doing enough to stop child sexual exploitation on the platform.

A growing number of attacks on the council led to concerns from some remaining members who sent an email to Twitter on Monday demanding the company stop misrepresenting its role.

The Advisory groups of the Trust and Safety Council were focused on child exploitation. The Rati Foundation, Youth Adult Survivors & Kin in Need, and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children were included.

The CEO of the Automattic Company: Selling e-Commerce to Millions of Users: A Rejoinder on 17 Years of Supporting the Open Web

I think you are our first repeat CEO guest inside of a year. We had a lot of discussion about the websites in March. I wanted to have you back since you are one of the few people that have ever purchased a social network and I think it is a great time to discuss the challenges of buying a huge, at-scale social network with millions of users. So welcome back.

The CEO of Automattic, the company that makes the popular e-Commerce buying solution, is behind the reason that talking about buying a social network is relevant. Just give the audience a really quick refresher on what Automattic is and how you think about the company.

17 years ago I founded a holding company to support the open web, called Automattic. We do WordPress.com, Tumblr, Pocket Casts, and Day One, which is a great journaling app. A lot of people start writing on paper at the beginning of the year when the new year arrives.

Thank you. We are trying to make the web a better place with everything that we make. We’re always asking, “How can we put users more in control? How can we align our business model more with what our customers and users want?”

That is also a theme of the website. I want to create a web that’s fully open-source. There are many great proprietary competitors. We forced them to open up by being the open alternative, much like Android kind of forces iOS to unclench a little bit and open up some of the things they do, like not allowing changes to defaults. There is a force toiOS to be better. You need a good nemesis and competitor in business, otherwise you get lazy.

I believe open-source to be a fundamental human right. As technology continues to grow, it is just as important as freedom of speech, freedom of religion, or any other freedom. It is important that we have the freedom to modify the software.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/23506085/wordpress-twitter-tumblr-ceo-matt-mullenweg-elon-musk

Twitter: Where are you coming from? Where do you stand, what are you going to do? How can you make a good social media presence? How do you feel about it?

All of our investors now think you’re really smart for being on the platform. You spent way less and the metrics are looking really good.” We have definitely had waves of users and advertisers coming over saying, “Hey, we want an alternative. Some principles and things Musk has said are disagreeing with us. Can we come spend money with you?” Which is great.

We’re seeing that happening in real time at Twitter. They will allow someone like Ye to go back on while taking him off again. There is a phrase that we use for a large amount of speech, and it islawful but awful. It could cause harm or be mean, but it is not technically illegal. It would be great to host it, but you need to think about your users and society. It is the same as being at a party. It is important that everyone in the place is provided with a safe environment, which includes food, water, and restrooms. I feel like when you’re hosting a social network, it’s your responsibility to provide a safe and healthy environment.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/23506085/wordpress-twitter-tumblr-ceo-matt-mullenweg-elon-musk

How Should We Choose Social Media? Elon Musk, Tumblr, Twitter, Art, and Social Media in the Presence of Adversaries

I want to get all the way there. Honestly, I want to spend most of our conversation talking about what those kinds of decisions are like. I think far too often the casual observer thinks they’re easy, and far too often Elon Musk acts like they’re easy. Anyone who has tried to make those decisions will find them very difficult. Everyone hates you after the tradeoffs are bad. Let’s start at the beginning. Why did you buy Tumblr?

You can make money writing and posting on the site by making you post text and images. I think a piece of art is a post on the internet. I’m like you, I’m a blogger. Tumblr incentivizes you to make that thing. We would stop yelling about the First Amendment because we agree that the platforms should be transparent about moderating and what the rules are. I think most people want to visit places where there are not a bunch of racists and sexists. I think they are dreaming of making art and having a nice time.

I wanted to find out if we could create a mainstream social media that was not dependent on advertising as a business model. We run ads on Tumblr, we have a few changes that turn them off, and we are introducing lots of other subscriptions. If we can make it a subscriber-supported thing, then we can truly be aligned. Even if I were no longer running Automattic or Tumblr, the business model would align the users with its business.

Totally. Over the last few weeks, we have seen some amazing examples of that. At its best, it’s like, “Well, what if people’s social media time could go to something like that?” It puts a bit more control in the hands of users. You should feel good after using it. That’s what we have been working on since we bought it.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/23506085/wordpress-twitter-tumblr-ceo-matt-mullenweg-elon-musk

Free Like A Pupil? When We Were Born and Learned to Buy: How Tumblr Was Built and Used to Be Built

Have you heard the phrase “free like a puppy”? There was a transaction cost that we had to pay. But it was a deal in which we took on all of its liabilities and all of its legal cases, we kept all the employees and all the costs to run it. The website was burning a bit of cash. People were like, “Oh, you could buy an apartment in New York for that,” but you would be buying something that costs $60 or $70 million a year to run. You would be taking on all of those obligations as well.

When you say it’s de minimis, you are basically saying that Verizon sold it to you for the smallest amount they could. And that you bought it for the smallest amount you would pay, knowing that its carrying costs were so high. Was that a one-on-one conversation? We’re not going to figure out how much money Tumblr makes and do a number of revenue in order to make a valuation. This needs a good home because it’s bleeding cash. We will be the home. What’s the smallest number your board of directors will accept?”

There was a lot of attrition on Tumblr. Good Tumblr engineers were getting caught in the elevator because the building they worked in had a sharing agreement with Facebook. This was also the time when there was crazy tech comp. At that time, it was a little wild, but now it has settled down.

It is a tough thing to buy an acquisition for a reason. If it was doing well, it wouldn’t be a turnaround. Some of the employees have been less successful than you would expect, which is nice, but they probably shouldn’t be there. But we also bought it because it was working. Despite what I would say was corporate mismanagement,tumblr still had a vibrant user base. It was still growing, and there were still a ton of mobile ties and young users, which was very, very interesting to us.

I think the problem with advertisers is lack of targeting. Some people might quit the site due to their uneasiness with the younger users and the silliness of it. That’s fine. I would say we can unlock a lot of revenue, but we have decided to not do the tracking and targeting that everyone else does. That means it’s more of an uphill battle to get advertisers to spend money. We are introducing some. There is some tracking I’m totally okay with, like device and country. That sort of stuff can be found naturally. It also includes both users and advertisers. Some of it is quite enlightening. Your user base could do it or your listeners could go in and buy an ad on Facebook or Twitter. They all have self-service tools. It’s kind of crazy that you are able to do so much targeting.

How do you not throw the baby out with the bathwater? We brought the whole team over from day one, and we also tried to switch a bunch of people that were long-tenured Automatticians, which are people who have been at Automattic for a long time. I took some of my very best people in the company and switched them to different jobs inside the company, like engineers, designers, et cetera. That helped us identify low performance, form a new team, and merge our cultures.

We have replaced the team with new one, we made the tech, and are starting to remake the product. I’m also very excited because now we’re starting to have some fun. You saw the blue checkmark thing. We are also experimenting with the format a bit. It is now possible to have a post with a gallery and a video on Tumblr, it is basically multimodal social media posting. Blogs have done this for a long time, but we’re bringing it into the social media form and onto mobile. That is great for me, because the creativity being expressed there is way more than what you can do on any other network right now.

That timeline is really interesting. You bought it in the year of 2019 but it’s not until the year of 2020 when you say that you are having fun. That is a long time to integrate the cultures, reset the expectations, and then get to product innovation. Or maybe from a user perspective it’s a long time, but from your perspective maybe it’s lightning fast. Which one do you think it is?

I said it earlier, and I repeat it now: it’s the most challenging thing in my business career. I have been doing this a while. We have done a few successful acquisitions, like WooCommerce, but this is harder than anything I have done before, so I stepped in to run it at the beginning of February. We weren’t seeing the amount of turnaround that we had hoped for.

Do you think that part tracks with the timelines on social media? Musk comes in, he takes over Twitter, he’s like, “screw it,” and then there’s a gigantic,

sweeping culture reset

and gigantic, sweeping public comments about how the company was trash at every level. Do you want to do something like that? Would that have been effective?

By the way, just to provide you cover for this answer, there’s a part of me as a leader that is sometimes like, “Maybe I should just run around saying everything is trash and reset.” I think every leader likes this way of working. Most people are not this kind of person. I am not. I would not be able to sleep at night if I did this to my team.

If you’re in any leadership position though, there is something appealing about saying, “Oh man, I wish I could just clear the deck.” I was a mean person when I worked at another large company and would often wonder if I could fire half of the people on the floor. Would anyone even notice?” There’s something about a big company that engenders that kind of thinking. Do you think you should have done something more drastic after I gave you cover?

Source: https://www.theverge.com/23506085/wordpress-twitter-tumblr-ceo-matt-mullenweg-elon-musk

Talent Exodus in a Golden Child: How Many Employees Were Let This Company Lose? (Delta Is the Hardest Part)

I don’t know. It’s very hard to play it back again. About 85 percent of the team is new on Tumblr, or was not there at the acquisition. That is a pretty big switch that happened over a couple of years. Some of it was natural attrition, and some of it was performance management.

There is also something that I’ve just never seen in my business career, which is the talent exodus. As an example, Stripe laid off 15 to 16 percent of its staff, which was surprising, because Stripe is a golden child. You assume that they tried to do it as performance management. They tried to take off the folks who they considered to be low performers. I think that a layoff would probably be smaller than the one it was, although maybe not quite as sloppy. I’m sure they were going to, because every other tech company has.

An example would be that of Stripe making mistakes there. You could assume that some percentage of the people they laid off, who they considered to be low performers, were actually quite good, but you would maybe be cautious to hire out of that layoff. We would assume that these were not the people that had said, “These are the crucial people we need to keep.”

Source: https://www.theverge.com/23506085/wordpress-twitter-tumblr-ceo-matt-mullenweg-elon-musk

Twitter Spaces: An Audio Product Launching Team for the Missionaries of Intel – How did Intel come to existence in tech history? What happened in Tech History — How Intel came into existence

It’s funny. I feel like you and I have come up with what happened in tech history. Intel was created because a team of people left Fairchild Semiconductor, so now Intel exists and we think of it as an institution. It feels like maybe we’re living through that moment again as tech companies have these gigantic layoffs, where entire teams of people who like working together are now available. The Twitter Spaces audio team that built Spaces is just like, “We’ll come do this for you again, but we want to work together.” Would you like to make a live audio product? Would you just make that team?

I don’t know if we would do a live audio product, but I think that team is quite good. We put a dedicated landing page together that was basically a transcript of my conversations. The first line on the page is, “We love Twitter,” which is true. I am an ardent follower of the social networking site, as well as a fan of Twitter.

If you’re hiring the missionaries, you don’t do it with a “we’re going to crush Twitter” message, because they have poured their heart and soul into Twitter over the past however-many years. They are not motivated to kill Twitter, because they also love it. I think asking if we can do it again, avoiding some of the mistakes, and creating an alternative is interesting.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/23506085/wordpress-twitter-tumblr-ceo-matt-mullenweg-elon-musk

Do You Really Need a Tumblr Team? A Few Quick Questions, Just Before You Go Wild: Acquisition of ThetaMesh

A few quick questions, just to complete the acquisition story. You said the burn when you bought it was $60 million-ish a year. Are you closer to profitability now or is that burn the same number?

No. We brought it down, but we would need to grow Tumblr’s revenue by another $20 or $30 million a year to get it to break even at its current people cost.

The good news is that we are beginning to combine some of the teams. For example, Tumblr doesn’t need its own separate trust and safety, or terms of service. It did have one, but we actually have similar problems across all of our properties, like protecting against illegal content, responding to DMCAs quickly, and taking down hate speech. The issues are similar, so we can use the same tools to monitor everything. It’s not only a Tumblr cost at that point.

That’s very good. We have talked a bunch about hiring and size, and you said you’ve had 85 percent turnover. Is the Tumblr team bigger or smaller than when you acquired it?

This is one of the classic decoding questions. How is that team structured? Is it structured in the same way as when you acquired it, or have you transferred some of the numbers?

Source: https://www.theverge.com/23506085/wordpress-twitter-tumblr-ceo-matt-mullenweg-elon-musk

What Is Most Important to Me, and What I Don’t Know About Content Moderation at Work? A Reflection of the Pro-Ana Community

The structure of the company has changed because I have become the CEO and am now running a lot of different things. I am a leader who pushes a lot of things onto the leads within the company. I’m not like, “We need to have a meeting every day with the executive team and blah, blah, blah.” I’m more like, “Here are the five most important things to me, get them done. What are your most important things? What am I missing?

Automattic does a lot of asynchronous communication. There haven’t been big changes. I brought over some Automattic people to help me out, including the COO, that is really helping with the day-to-day. I would say it’s a fairly standard structure other than that.

Then there’s the other set of incentives. Here is what we want from you and here is what we want to show people. Positive incentives are usually overlooked when it comes to the content moderation puzzle. Does that seem right to you? Is it correct to say that the people on social networks are basically making content moderation?

Yes, yeah. I think I sent that message. I don’t agree with the title headline, although it was a good one. But man, it was spot-on. You really nailed it. If you are listening, go read that post, and I think you link to some of the nuances of content moderation and doing it at scale.

There is a learning curve. It is not wise to attract a user base that is going to cause problems even if you know what will happen. For example, Tumblr has a younger demographic, teenagers, that are maybe stereotypically a little more angsty, so mental health things are really big there. We build a lot of stuff so that if we show you something, you will get a message saying, “Hey, do you need help?” Here’s a phone number. It gets better.”

There was one thing that I learned about called the pro-ana community, ana being short for anorexia. This was a community of folks who were using a social network in a way that’s not illegal, but was basically encouraging anorexic behaviors. I am not an expert in this but I believe that this is a mental health challenge and can be very harmful for people who suffer from it. What do you do with the kids and the people who are following your content, if you are promoting it? Again, it’s not illegal, but it is your responsibility to control the distribution of that, to tamp it down if people are posting it, and to try to provide them pointers to resources — because we’re a tech company, we can’t help with that. We can point people to nonprofits that are professionals at what they are doing, and try to get them to go in the right direction.

By the way, that really works. There are some stories about how technology has made society better. I will talk about two issues. One that has been covered a little bit is around child exploitation material — people who abuse children, take pictures, et cetera. Tech companies have come together to create technological solutions that are good at catching this. Then it all gets passed to law enforcement and they do their thing. I think it has helped a bit.

Then there’s suicide prevention. On most social networks and search engines if you type in a certain way, they will jump in and say, “Hey, here’s pointers to resources.” There has been a lot of sharing on what people click more, what resources are best, how to provide a phone number, how to do this internationally, how to do this in every language, et cetera. I think tech companies, including competitors, share this quite freely with each other, because we all agree this is something that is part of our responsibility to society.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/23506085/wordpress-twitter-tumblr-ceo-matt-mullenweg-elon-musk

Why do we care about what you’re doing on a social network? What do we have to do to prevent what you don’t want to do?

You are shaping the product to fit the internal values of the company, when you are doing those things. I don’t mean to diminish those things but preventing them from happening is something everyone agrees on.

Right. We should not encourage young people, especially young women, to be anorexic. That’s a huge problem in that community. And we should aggressively intervene in suicidal ideation or communication to stop it and provide resources. Those are aggressive moves. You’re saying, “We’re going to stop the speech, we’re going to shut it down, we’re going to show up when we see this stuff to get in your way and say, ‘Go to these resources.’” They are aggressive interventions, but they’re not controversial.

While they are smaller, they are still scale compared to most everything else. We have to overcome the liberalism in the moderation team of the social network if we want to run it well. We under-rank because people don’t want to be in a platform full of racists. Advertisers do not want to be near that content, which is causing content moderation decisions. Has that been your experience? Advertisers exert pressure on what things you allow.

The owner of the company was like, “This isn’t us.” There are some values which might support pushing the boundaries of allowed speech past what a platform like Facebook or Instagram might allow. Then there’s Apple, which says, “We won’t let this app on the store if it has content that we object to.” Credit card companies, like Visa and others say they won’t support transactions for pornography.

It is not clear who is qualified to say what people should be looking at other than the platform itself. The values inside the company might not line up with what you want users to be able to do on the platform. External actors have their own values and control over the platform. Walk me through this. I can pick any speech area that has the same exact problems as porn, because I am picking on it.

We introduced a rating system where users can self-tag when they post something. “This contains X, Y, Z,” and X, Y, Z could be drugs, it could be violence, it could be the human form in adult ways. We still don’t allow what we jokingly internally call “things going into things,” or what people might call hardcore pornography. The service is not appropriate for something like that, but there is a window for what is allowed, which is what we have done for a long time. We were kind of unifying Tumblr’s position with ours.

It’s very Tumblr. I think Tumblr had content moderation issues. They were shut down by Apple because they were not doing a good job policing illegal content and the porn stuff. I wasn’t there at the time, but my guess is that Apple also wanted to make an example by shutting Tumblr down and removing it from the App Store, even though it’s owned by Verizon, which is one of Apple’s largest partners in the world. It must have woken everybody up, like, hey, they are taking this seriously.

We changed something since our last show, we reopened more adult content, which we call artistic expressions of the human form. If you had posted literally Michelangelo’s statue of David on Tumblr before, the content moderation rules would have locked the post or locked your account. We got good at appeals and everything like that, but we were stuck with these old rules, and we couldn’t really change those rules until we had some better community moderation in place.

The MPAA movie rating system is something that was talked about in the first iteration of this feature. It’s quite difficult to get into the history of the rating system. Think about it. If there was a single female nipple in a film, it would be rated R, but if there was any amount of violence, gore and blood spurting out, it would be ratedPG-13, which is not great for kids. We went to a kind of classification that was a bit more nuanced.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/23506085/wordpress-twitter-tumblr-ceo-matt-mullenweg-elon-musk

How do Twitter and Reddit Get Away with It? You Can Easily Turn It Off at Google, but What Do You Need to Know?

All that stuff is off when you sign up for Tumblr. There are different ways to turn it on if you go to the website, for example you can choose to see it normally, or if it goes on my feed, I would prefer it not to.

You perform as a female Burlesque performer in New York City. Bathtub Gin, right? It’s one of the most famous, and well-liked, Burlesque places. You want to post pictures from your performance. You don’t want kids to see these, so you tag them and they will be protected. Folks under 18 won’t even know it exists, but people who want to see this can find it. Everyone is happy. The incentives are connected.

Now, the violations are not about what you post, but about mistagging. We take mistagging very seriously, because, obviously, that’s wrong. It could be dangerous to kids. It could do a lot of things. If you’re tagged correctly, we allow you to post a lot more stuff. We were able to do it while navigating Apple’s App Store, credit card processor, and everything else.

Yeah. Well, how do Twitter and Reddit get away with it? They allow everything, like “things going into things.” Pretty much anything you could find on a porn site is also on Twitter and Reddit. How do they get away with it? One, maybe they’re just too big and they have enough legit content that Apple wasn’t really worried about it. They may also have made these web-only toggles. We decided to just copy that feature.

I wish we knew more, that’s the thing. We have no idea what happens when Apple engages in backroom dealings about the app store and distribution. If you have someone like Matt who is willing to speak about it, you are out of luck.

We probably made a mistake in submitting the app, so we created another week. Then Thanksgiving happened. It is an odd platform. Most of our tech, you could just ship whenever you want. You can take things down or test them. It goes through a person, and depending on whom the person is, they can interpret the rules differently.

I would say moderation is day and night at Apple andGOOGl. With Google, you get awesome tools, where you can roll out to percents of users and then roll it back. Everything is very fast and they allow a lot of stuff. They are not as strict about forcing in-app purchases. It’s totally different.

It is very hard to cancel a subscription to The New York Times on the website. 30 minutes is how long it takes to talk to someone. It is like canceling a membership at the gym. It is terrible. It’s a horrible user experience. You can cancel your subscription if you subscribe to The New York Times through Apple. I think that is Apple advocating on behalf of users for something that is user-friendly. Now, they have things we probably all agree on, like canceling subscriptions, and they have a section that they do. It feels like they still think they are the center of attention.

It’s like they still think they have an existential risk of being snuffed out any moment. Apple has a lot more cash in their bank than most countries. They are one of the most powerful entities on the planet, even more than most governments. I am seeing them realizing their size and their power as they begin to shift into a more benevolent role.

It is good that they are being pushed. The EU and the US are all starting to push a little bit. I bet some inside of Apple agree with my stance on these issues. It could also be the end of an era. New leaders may change some of the organization’s policies.

What you’re describing are people who didn’t come up as the underdogs. Most of the current executives were there when Apple was the underdog. You just see their culture over time.

He was the CEO of WordPress and he was not fond of describing that as the most difficult moment in his career. He was talking about being the CEO and owner of Tumblr, and that was the most embarrassing part of his career. Because then you have a mass of users. Millions of users do whatever they want, and you have to control them.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/23506085/wordpress-twitter-tumblr-ceo-matt-mullenweg-elon-musk

What is the best place for me? What do you think about Tumblr, what’s going on, and what is going on?

I guess the best way to probably summarize where I am in 2022 — and this has evolved over the past year and the past 10 years — is that I’m extremely libertarian in terms of what people should be allowed to say. I’m okay with people saying bad things about me, and I also disagree with the things they say. I am a public figure. Great.

Where I think I have become more conservative is in bullying and hate speech, that sort of stuff. Obviously, calls to violence are not controversial. I think bully is more in the middle. During the early days of Flickr, such as with Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake, they fostered a great community by commenting on new users or highlighting what they saw.

That whole fun, amazing, beautiful thing happened partially because we created a space where you could have a “yes, and…” improv environment, with people riffing off each other and without a few bad actors coming in and spoiling it. Some of the stuff that is on Tumblr will be more like that in the future. It actually keeps growing, too. What are those posters supposed to be called? I saw a picture yesterday, and there’s actually Goncharov posters now.

He is goofing. He’s posting memes. You’re obviously deeply aware of Tumblr and the community. You’re in it. Do you think it’s important for you, as the leader, to be consuming the service as a member of the audience? I believe it cuts both ways.

It’s one hundred percent. There is a little bit where I do understand. My guess is that folks, like a Mark Zuckerberg, a Parag Agrawal A lot of leaders on social media use the platforms, but they might be hiding a secret account. They have an alt.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/23506085/wordpress-twitter-tumblr-ceo-matt-mullenweg-elon-musk

The Political Economy: Making Sense of the Media, of the Internet, and of the Commercialization of Societies and the Industrialization of the Middle East

You have to also be sensitive. My preferences are not the ones I impose on the entire community. I am a liberal, all those sorts of things. That is me. I’m going to be open about that. I am not saying that people who don’t agree with me should not be welcome.

I think there are two levels to this. One is getting too close to something. Advertisers say, “I disagree with xyz” and they leave. They vote with their wallets, which they’re welcome to do. There is a free market. It’s capitalism. That’s kind of the expression of it.

I have no idea if I agree with that name and shame. I believe it’s important for us all to do more capitalist activism. We should vote with our money and support companies that have the same principles as we do. I talked about the second level of the business model earlier and I think that is inherent to it. Sorry, I’m blanking on the name of the author who wrote the book on this.

I think we’re grappling with the intersection of that and democracy. If democracy says that free, informed citizens are able to vote on people and vote on how they’re governed, I like that model. There’s a social contract and a principle morality to it that we can all agree to as participants in the system, which I think social networks and private companies miss. You don’t necessarily vote for the policies and elect the leaders of Facebook.

Machine learning and artificial intelligence become so good, it becomes amazing at what they can do. We’re seeing this today. How good is the TikTok program? Is it true that the ads are very good on social media? “Gosh, they know me so well. I buy more stuff on IG than in any other place. They’ve got me dialed in.” That being applied to political influence is playing off in both sanctioned and unsanctioned ways. Actors like China, Iran, Russia are taking advantage of our free and open society to influence Americans. It’s the whole thing.

There is a way to influence the voters without hacking the voting machines, which was a good story.

We were worried about hacking the voting machines because it was a good story, but that’s easier to just hack the people and influence the voters The voting machines have an effect on voters. It happens in every election. We know this for a fact. It isn’t a conspiracy. How do we protect and inoculate society against that, when the business models of these networks are designed around the engagements and the influence, essentially?

Source: https://www.theverge.com/23506085/wordpress-twitter-tumblr-ceo-matt-mullenweg-elon-musk

Tumblr: Something more Creatively Charged. How Do I Get What I Have Learned in the Last 20 years? A Conversation with Ceo Mullenweg

We want to create a space which is much more creatively charged. We want Tumblr to be like going to a music show or a museum. You’re going to see some stuff that you haven’t seen before, you’re going to discover new stuff, and you’re also going to leave creatively charged. That’s not a mindset which is as conducive to advertising, but I do think that we can find a set of advertisers and a set of products that fit well with that.

The companies still have to pay those bills, though. They have to build the data centers, they have to pay for the network, they have to do all that stuff. There is a cost associated with it and advertisers subsidize that.

Even moreso when the advertisers tell you that your entire purpose in buying the thing is to less moderate than you have been. There is a tension that I think is difficult. Do you hear from companies that need you to measure your brand safety before they give you money, when you are trying to build an advertising business?

Source: https://www.theverge.com/23506085/wordpress-twitter-tumblr-ceo-matt-mullenweg-elon-musk

Where are we going with the moderation buck? Why does the government need to step up? A line of dicta from a case that was overturned

By the way, for all the stuff the tech companies do, the telecom companies are way worse. With Comcast, you can effectively target a set of three or four houses and serve cable ads to just them, and then track that. Credit card companies and banks correlate your data with your spending habits, so you can decide whether or not to use your card. It is insane the amount of tracking. Capitalism isn’t self-regulating all that well there so we need governance to step in.

I want to ask where you believe moderation should reside in the stack. My point was that you have a choice of hostingWordPress.com,WordPress.VIP, orTumbled for enterprise customers. There is this idea that the closer you are to the pipes of the internet, the less moderating you should do. So Comcast and AT&T should not look at the bits that are going across their network. Cloudflare maybe shouldn’t, right? They are an infrastructure provider that rides on top of those rails. They won’t host white supremacist sites, but that is the only policy they have. That is the entire line.

Yeah. I think you summarized it really well. Ben Thompson laid out a framework for Moderation in his book. It’s true that at the base layers you want to give the governments more control when it comes to what you can and can’t do. That’s because governments have their checks and balances. We have courts, we have elections, we have all of these things that suggest that feedback should be part of society, and what should be allowed to exist or not.

Do you think the United States government should get involved, though? Everyone wants someone else to solve the problem or make the decisions. It is certain that the most likely set of actors would be government officials. Especially in this country, they should not make those rules. The First Amendment states: Do not make speech regulations. So I’m just like, my frustration…

Okay, but I think this is the disconnect between basically everyone. The government should make rules for the First Amendment.

That’s a line of dicta from a case that was overturned. Everyone points at it, but

there’s no law against shouting “fire” in a crowded theater

.

Voluntary manslaughter exists if you are creating harm. There are laws pertaining to hate speech. There are laws around certain types of crimes.

Yes, yeah. Now I’m with you, but you’ve gotten all the way to “you murdered someone.” There is no law against hate speech. You can just say that people of other races are bad. You can just do it.

Sure, in other countries. But in this country here, most people are like, “The government should make some rules,” and almost every example that I’m given is like yelling “fire” in a crowded theater or whatever, which is not actually a rule. The law in this country, the case that overturned the yelling of “fire” in a crowded theater,

Brandenburg v. Ohio

, changed the standard from, “You’re going to cause clear and present danger,” to, “Your speech is directed at inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.” You can shout fire in a crowded theater as you please, but you are not going to cause lawless action. You are going to get people to leave. So that’s what I mean.

Germany is a good example. When you think about it, Germany has a history that is better than America’s, so they will take a more firm stance against Nazi-type stuff. They have decided that as a society. It may change over time.

The US has had tons of horrible laws in its history, maybe more bad ones than good ones. Over time, those will evolve. Perhaps even the First Amendment needs to evolve over time, but how would we change that? It would require a new amendment, which would require states to ratify. Changing these things requires a high bar.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/23506085/wordpress-twitter-tumblr-ceo-matt-mullenweg-elon-musk

The slowness of government can be a good thing: Beto O’Rourke was a hacker, and he was working as a web designer

By the way, that’s a good thing. It’s possible that the slowness of the government can be an advantage, as it may help forge a better outcome. It’s not a good example for that right now, with the polarization and the way the parties fight, but ideally, they reach a middle. Companies do not do that. If you look at content moderation boards and everything companies try to do, they are essentially trying to recreate government a little bit in a private sector, which lacks accountability, lacks feedback mechanisms, and lacks courts. It is a weird system.

I wish governments had better laws around this. I agree that there are some terrible outcomes when they have tried to wade into this. There are a lot of terrible laws that have come out of the government trying to regulate this stuff, but I remain hopeful as new generations of leaders come up. They’re digital natives. Beto O’Rourke used to be a hacker. He was part of a cult. I spoke to him and he said that he used to work as a web designer.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/23506085/wordpress-twitter-tumblr-ceo-matt-mullenweg-elon-musk

A better system for social responsibility, power and power: a comment on the blog by Ceo Mullenweg and Leoni Musk in the Verge

I know, but there are others who are coming up who can. We definitely have an issue where people are holding onto power for a really long time, since the ‘70s or ‘80s. The gerontocracy that we have is very different from what we have in the past. As that starts to shift, I think that we’ll start to see a more dynamic republic. At least that’s what I’m hoping for. I will be donating to and voting for that person. As a citizen, I’m trying to advocate for more of that.

It does not mean that I want to be removed from responsibility or pressure. I do not think the responsibility and power put on me and our team is justified by the social contract in our society or from our users. I’m just philosophically saying that there’s a better system for this.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/23506085/wordpress-twitter-tumblr-ceo-matt-mullenweg-elon-musk

TikTok is not a content moderation. It’s just a dynamic, but it is interesting to think about what users think about government speech

Yeah, and I’m terrified of government speech regulations. It’s my open bias as a journalist. I think they’re bad on their face. I see them in places where they work. Germany has a long, tortured history. They are still difficult in that country. I think from thousands of miles away that it looks pretty good. People in Germany think this is more complicated than you think.

TikTok doesn’t give you an incentive to make text posts. It does not want them on its platform. It motivates people to watch videos. A lot of them are hacks and fascinating to think about. The platform isn’t geared to make you post text. It’s geared to make you post videos. That is a content moderation, I think. That the users have done something else is just a fascinating dynamic inside of that platform.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/23506085/wordpress-twitter-tumblr-ceo-matt-mullenweg-elon-musk

Is the New York Post hacked or not? How to take down a blog from the Twitter feed of Hunter Biden laptop, or the New york Post, after you publish it?

Also, is this as big of a deal as we’re making it out to be? All of the issues we have talked about have had robust public discussions. I only know that you make mistakes 100 percent in content moderation.

You always do. It’s humans. Humans are fallible and they will make mistakes. It’s how you correct the mistakes that really matters. We’re at the center of a lot of these stories, as well, with the Hunter Biden laptop stuff that’s now the Twitter files. The New York Post story was not linked to on the micro-commentator. Do you know who hosts the New York Post? We do.

We have some other questions where we should block the links or take the story down. What should we do? We had an internal discussion about that and decided, “This is the New York Post, blah blah blah. It fits in with the rules we have against hacked material, and that it is a major-tier journalism organization and public interest. There was a decision that we made not to touch it.

Wait. So WordPress VIP hosts the New York Post. And when the Post published the Biden laptop story you had to have a meeting about whether to take down New York Post links?

There was a discussion. Yeah, absolutely. There is always a discussion and there are reports. People contact us if they say this is violating their policy. There are many policies that are just a starting point. The interpretation of the policies is really where I think the art and science of it is.

We will also make mistakes. We’ve accidentally taken down blogs, either by some script that went wrong, or by a human who clicked the wrong button or made a mistake interpreting our policies. How you fix it is all that matters.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/23506085/wordpress-twitter-tumblr-ceo-matt-mullenweg-elon-musk

Is Donald Trump really censored? A warning to all who care about the internet and what we don’t know about the Macaulay government

I think we’re in a weird period where particularly the right in America is incentivized to say that there’s a huge censorship problem or that they’re being suppressed. Donald Trump was the leader of the free world and also the United States’ most powerful man. That is a shtick that I’m amazed continues to work, but is the problem actually there? Does he not have a platform? Is there a robust discussion of the Hunter Biden laptop? Is there no endless article, testimonies or anything else?

We can say that this is working right now and that we should question the theory that something is broken here in the first place. The current system will make mistakes in the future. It is not perfect, but gets to be correct in a matter of hours or days.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/23506085/wordpress-twitter-tumblr-ceo-matt-mullenweg-elon-musk

What would you say to Elon Musk if you bought a Tumblr? A perfect question, but what would you like to see next?

The final question is the perfect one. You have done this for the past few years. The social network you bought was mentioned in the book. You were a very good tech executive when you bought Tumblr. You were very successful with WordPress and all the other companies, so for you to say that this is the most humbling experience of your business career, I think that is very meaningful. You have now done it for three years. What advice do you have for Elon Musk?

I actually believe he will do this, to keep an open mind. Whether I agree with him or disagree with him, I believe he’s someone who can update his views when new facts come. Over the last few weeks we have seen that happen on the social networking site. I fully expect him to end up where the rest of us are and where Twitter was prior to him. I wish he’d have avoided a lot of pain, but I also know that there’s no atheists in foxholes. When you realize the complexity of the public square and the responsibilities to the users and society, there are no free speech absolutists who run social networks.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/23506085/wordpress-twitter-tumblr-ceo-matt-mullenweg-elon-musk

Comments on Elon Musk’s Twitter: How it affects the public opinion of Musk and the tech community at large ad spendthrift

That’s awesome. Matt, I could talk to you about this for a long time. I’m fascinated by the actual experience of running these companies, so thank you for coming on Decoder. We’ll see if we can set a faster record for you to come on next time than we did this last year.

Now to put all this in context I’m joined by Verge deputy editor Alex Heath. He’s going to tell me how this all has something to do with Musk. Alex, welcome to the site.

I wanted to talk to you because you have been reporting deeply on Twitter. I want to just close the loop on some of the things you heard from Matt and some of the things you’re hearing out of Elon Musk’s version of Twitter.

When they also booted Parler from the Apple store, there were some leaked emails between Parler and Apple that were like, “You need to improve your moderation,” and it was very vague. It is the thing with Apple. There are always vague threats.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/23506085/wordpress-twitter-tumblr-ceo-matt-mullenweg-elon-musk

X.com: How to turn a Twitter account into a bank? A response to a tweet from an elon

Then there’s what they’re actually trying to build towards. It is amazing how similar they are. They want to shift away from advertising and use paid consumer products likeTwitterBlue or tipping on the site. One of the funniest social media products is that oftumblr, which has fake verified badges.

Is the payment part of it? They’re all talking about payments. They want to be able to make you send money to other people on the network. It seems like, “What if a bunch of people are sending money around and we took cents out of every transaction?” I get why you’d be interested in that, but it is also the most boring product for a social network. Also, I don’t know that I want to be sending money on 50 different platforms.

It is up to you. If you have a thriving creator system where creators are posting more content and asking for payment, maybe you do want to have money in the system. The original idea for X.com was proposed by a man named elon. I reported on a meeting recently where he told employees that PayPal was just phase one of what he actually wanted to do. This Project X is intended to be turned into a bank as he calls it on his social media accounts. No one has done that successfully.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/23506085/wordpress-twitter-tumblr-ceo-matt-mullenweg-elon-musk

What Do CEOs Tell Us About Apple? A Conversation with Musk, Elon Sweeney, and I was inspired by his frustrations with Apple

That was going to be a follow-up question. Is there anything else? Is it, “Okay, I saw a good tweet, I’m going to kick a couple bucks towards the person who wrote the tweet”? I am not quite sure why I would do that.

The Musk and Apple relationship appears to have been irreparably damaged by Musk’s angry messages about Apple reducing ad spend, in-app purchases, and free speech. They had a conversation after he went to the Apple campus. Musk told employees in a public Twitter space that Apple’s spend was all the way back up, and he has stopped complaining about the 30 percent fee. He is going to spend the ad dollars back to Apple. That is pretty funny. The money is moving in a circle.

I found this striking, because Matt is a good CEO — he is a long-tenured, extremely well-regarded, extremely effective CEO in Silicon Valley who makes a product that millions of customers use. He was like, “Buying Tumblr has been the most humbling experience in my career.” The content moderation is a large part of it. His perspective is that he’s a very libertarian-leaning person when it comes to what people are allowed to say, even if on some other issues he’s more to the left. He was libertarian and said that on speech. To run a website, I need to know something about computers. A lot of stuff has to be shut down.

Over and over again on this show, we discover the line of what CEOs are going to say about Apple. I think that’s just utterly fascinating. I think the thing with Elon that is fascinating is that line does not exist for him.

I think what Elon has shown is that the conversation is shifting from, “Apple’s control is a business issue for everyone,” to, “It’s actually a speech issue.” We’re seeing Tim Sweeney and other CEOs kind of pile on this. I think this is the next phase. Even though Ron and Elon are public figures, they may have a problem if they say you are threatening free speech. I’m not sure Apple is equipped to engage with that level of attacking.

I think they are ready for it. I believe that they are going to show you how to use these apps. You don’t want your kids to see bad things. We sit in the middle and make sure that your kids don’t see that stuff. If you want to see that stuff, go use our web browser.” I think that’s been their answer for a long time.

Twitter and the Town Square: Why Isn’t it Better than It Looks? What Happens When You Close Your Twitter Account to a Flight Tracking Account?

@ElonJet, an account run by college student Jack Sweeney that uses public flight-tracking data to tweet the location of the entrepreneur’s private jet, is at the heart of these policy changes. Sweeney has said Musk previously offered him money to take down the account, but Musk said in November, after he took control of Twitter, that he would allow it to stay online. The New York Times, The Washington Post, and CNN are some of the organizations with suspended reporters. Even links to Mastodon have been blocked, with Twitter identifying the site as “potentially harmful.”

He is not there right now. The mantra inside Twitter is that you could essentially say the most hateful thing, and unless it’s illegal, it’s going to be on the site. Our job now is to not amplify it or suggest it, and to corner that speech off to the follower graph of that account.

Right now their baseline for success is, “We are not amplifying hateful, racist, misogynistic tweets and we’re not putting them next to ads.” That has not happened yet, but that is what they want. They think they are complying with their freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach, and no platform has shown that that is enough.

People would like to be on a platform with bad people. That is the strange part to me. It’s funny. Some people agree with Matt that there is racism, sexism, and transphobia, but they agree that it is bad. Then there’s a lot in the gray area. People don’t want to be on platforms where there is a lot of bad stuff. Don’t you need to do more than just wall it off in order to grow the user base and have payments? Don’t you need to just make it go away?

I think so, especially if you want to be the town square. It turns out that if you actually think about the digital representation of what an actual town square would look like, it’s not a good place to be. It’s everyone from the town in one square yelling at each other, which is what Twitter has already been. The best thing they can do is to try to get rid of the worst voices in a more measured way based on their internal correspondence. It is possible that this whole town square concept doesn’t work because people don’t want that.

You said the Twitter files have been disseminated by Elon. It’s unclear how they’re being generated or vetted. There are a lot of question marks there. What they basically show, from what has been publicly revealed, is well-meaning people earnestly debating difficult decisions and arriving at some conclusions. Maybe you don’t agree with that at all. Maybe you don’t think they’re well- meaning. Even if you think it’s a shadowy liberal conspiracy, you can’t really disagree with, “Yeah, they’re talking about hard decisions and reaching a conclusion, while also talking about how to justify their conclusion.”

What Elon is saying about social media and what he is trying to do with his Twitter account (and why he didn’t respond to him publicly)

Then there’s this concept of shadow banning and limiting your reach, and what you just described is exactly that. “We’re going to detect the content of your tweets and make sure we don’t show them to anyone.” Because they don’t like how racist you are, they will limit you, even though they will be more transparent about it. That is a very qualitative, very difficult kind of judgment. I don’t think that you can automate it. Do you have any sense of how they will actually implement that?

No, and they don’t know. They hope to automate the worst of the worst, but you’re right, there’s so much nuance and tone. There is no platform that does this automated de-amplification of nuanced, potentially sarcastic but dangerous speech at scale. I think it is odd that he is having these files dumped because they show him doing exactly what he said he was not going to do.

I guess with the new Twitter 2.0, the hardcore Twitter, he’s trying to make a point that it will continue, but it won’t be politically motivated. I guess the insinuation is that the people before were doing this because of their political leanings. There are a lot of cringe-worthy things that formerTwitter execs did and they showed their leanings in that way. But it’s the same thing. He is implying that he will keep doing this, but you will like me so it will be okay.

You are the benevolent dictator when you become the head of a social network. It seems like Elon just wants to be the dictator, like he doesn’t want to be.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/23506085/wordpress-twitter-tumblr-ceo-matt-mullenweg-elon-musk

Where Was Jack? When was he there? What happened when Jack was at Apple and where did he get it? How did you find out? What has happened in Twitter?

He tried not to think of it. It was almost for the worse. He tried too hard to not be involved, and we are seeing that now. It’s like, “Where was Jack?” It’s a whole other thing.

The effects of the power where you sit in the stack and the decisions you make are not considered in this day and age.

We have to do more to figure out how companies deliberate, and either almost or not do something like that. That’s the closest I can come to agreeing with how the Twitter files are being handled. I agree with the core nut of that idea, but the way it’s being done is not great. Matt talked about that because it shows the conversations that we don’t know about are important to us on the internet.

I do think it is important for everyone to remember now that we’re deep into it. If you want to, you can get Hunter Biden’s laptop. Apple sells it in the store. There was a time when no one understood the provenance of the laptop, and no one understood what was on it. Mostly it was a bunch of non-consensual nudes being shared, and people thought that it was a Russian operation. That discussion probably came from the over-heatedness of that moment. It is very remarkable for the technical capability of that conversation to exist.

And that we are still talking about it. It might be because it is something that could have happened and occurred on the micro-blogging site. When something is political, we realize it in the heat of the moment. We actually have these platforms that sit at various layers of the stack that have tremendous power to literally just wipe that off of the internet. What happens if they actually do it?

Source: https://www.theverge.com/23506085/wordpress-twitter-tumblr-ceo-matt-mullenweg-elon-musk

Covering the President’s Words: The Case Against “Probable” / “Fuci” Phenomenology

All right, this has been a fascinating episode. I would like to know how much time it takes to come back around to the baseline of a social network. Matt’s a smart guy. Zuck, for all of his mistakes, is a very smart person and he has moved to a place that looks much like the place Tweet was at. If the constraints are like that, I would like to know if all of the smart people end up at the same general position.

I told my colleagues in the newsroom that when Trump was inaugurated we should not cover everything he said or wrote. Previously, a president’s every word was assumed to be a carefully chosen signal of future policy, and was reported as such. Many things were said by Trump to get a rise out of people. Reporting on them, I argued, just fed the flames. Another editor pushed back. He said he was the president, or words to that effect. “What he says is news.”

Here, we saw a lot of rapid-response news stories about Musk’s December 11 statement that his pronouns are “probable”/ “fuci,” a reference to the government’s former chief infectious disease expert. He has a photo of his bedside table with two replica guns on it, along with more info about his use of social media.

This is how coverage of Trump was done. The liberal-leaning media were often drawn to stories confirming the belief that a person so clearly unfit to be president would only succeed in bringing himself (or the country) down in flames, while the right-wing media treated his evident egomania, corruption, and lack of interest in grasping basic policy issues or actually doing the job as at best irrelevant and at worst essential qualities for reforming Washington. There was a lot of reporting going on at the same time, but the accounts that dominated the conversation were the ones that were controversial. The public’s understanding of what was occurring across the country was forced through incompatible narratives around the behavior of one man in the White House.

Twitter Shutdown of a Jet Tracking Account of the Musk-Mueller and High-Energy Senator from the United States

She said she had posted the documents to Twitter, including a Musk email address. That address is not current, Lopez said, because “he changes his email every few weeks.”

But by later Wednesday, Twitter suspended all of them, including Sweeney’s personal account. He operates accounts on Facebook and other social platforms to follow Musk’s jet.

The account was permanently suspended for breaking its rules after he joined the micro-publishing platform. But the note didn’t explain how it broke the rules.

Before it was again shut down, the account was back up again. The policy team had sought to clarify Wednesday that the new rules on the micro-blogging website are not public.

Musk accused the reporters of violating the platform’s policy against doxes by sharing his exact real-time location. None of the reporters banished, including CNN’s Donie O’ Sullivan and The Washington Post’s Drew Harwell, did so. Musk and Twitter didn’t respond to CNN’s requests for comment.

Someone did not respond to the request for comment. Musk has promised to eradicate automatically generated spam from the platform, but Twitter allows automated accounts that are labeled as such — as Sweeney’s were.

Since the Musk took over, the account has chronicled all of his journeys from his home in Austin, Texas to various California airports for his work.

Musk was shown flying to New Orleans for a meeting with the French President ahead of a major event on the East Coast.

In a January post pinned to the top of the jet-tracking account’s feed before it was suspended, Sweeney wrote that it “has every right to post jet whereabouts” because the data is public and “every aircraft in the world is required to have a transponder,” including Air Force One that transports the U.S. president.

The New York Times stated that the suspension of a number of prominent journalists on the social networking site was questionable and unfortunate. Neither The Times nor Ryan have received any explanation about why this occurred. We hope that all of the journalists’ accounts are reinstated and that Twitter provides a satisfying explanation for this action.”

“We believe banning journalists without consistent defensible standards or clear communication in an environment where many people believe free speech is at risk is too much for a majority of consumers to continue supporting Mr. Musk/TSLA, particularly people ideologically aligned with climate change mitigation,” Rusch wrote.

Kara Alaimo, an associate professor at the Lawrence Herbert School of Communication at Hofstra University wrote about issues that affect women and social media. Her book “This Feed Is on Fire: Why Social Media Is Toxic for Women and Girls — And How We Can Reclaim It” will be published by Alcove Press in 2024. Her own opinions are expressed in this commentary. Read more opinion on CNN.

The perks that made Twitter an attractive place to work pre-Musk have been eradicated. Food at the office? It’s bad and now we have to pay for it. And, I know this sounds petty, but they appear to have obtained the absolute worst coffee vendors on earth.”

The company would be lifting the suspension after the results of the public poll are in, according to Musk. The survey showed that over a fifth of respondents wanted the accounts to be immediately unsuspend and over 40% wanted the suspensions to be lifted in seven days.

Most of the accounts were back early Saturday. One exception was Business Insider’s Linette Lopez, who was suspended after the other journalists, also with no explanation, she told The Associated Press.

Mastodon, CNN, and MSNBC: The News Disappears as a Digital Journalism Regime after Musk Takes Over Twitter

The move sets “a dangerous precedent at a time when journalists all over the world are facing censorship, physical threats and even worse,” U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric said.

The sharing of information on the platform has been restricted by the company. It began blocking links to Mastodon last week. On Sunday, Musk made that practice explicit, before the policy was suspended less than 24 hours later.

Sally Buzbee said that technology reporter Drew Harwell was removed from the Post because of accurate reporting about Musk.

CNN said in a statement that “the impulsive and unjustified suspension of a number of reporters, including CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan, is concerning but not surprising.”

Another suspended journalist, Matt Binder of the technology news outlet Mashable, said he was banned Thursday night immediately after sharing a screenshot that O’Sullivan had posted before his own suspension.

The Los Angeles Police Department sent a statement to multiple media outlets about how they were in touch with Musk’s representatives about the alleged stalking incident.

I oppose the new regime at Twitter, it seems like the old regime has the same problem, it’s governed by its own biases.

The platform would be changed at the fundamental level if the media organizations leave, according to Lou Paskalis, who was the head of global media at Bank of America.

CBS temporarily took its activity on the social network down in November due to uncertainty about new management.

“We all know news breaks on TWITTER and now to go after the journalists who really saw them at the main tent pole of Twitter,” he said. “Driving journalists off Twitter is the biggest self-inflicted wound I can think of.”

The suspensions may be the biggest red flag yet for advertisers, Paskalis said, some of which had already cut their spending on Twitter over uncertainty about the direction Musk is taking the platform.

On Thursday night, Twitter’s Spaces conference chat went down shortly after Musk abruptly signed out of a session hosted by a journalist during which he had been questioned about the reporters’ ousting. A “Legacy bug” caused Musk to take Spaces offline. Spaces came back late Friday.

Mastodon on Friday had more than 6 million users, nearly double the 3.4 million it had on the day Musk took ownership of Twitter. On many of the thousands of confederated networks in the open-source Mastodon platform, administrators and users solicited donations as disaffected Twitter users strained computing resources. Crowd-funded networks are referred to as “instances.” The platform is designed to be ad-free.

The Twitter Downgrade: Why Did Musk Leave the CIO Job? On the Role of Social Media in the Suppression of Musk’s Facebook Page

More than 50 percent of users who responded to the survey said yes, when the poll ended on Monday.

Replying to a tweet Sunday, in which MIT artificial intelligence researcher Lex Fridman said he would take the CEO job, Musk hinted he hasn’t been completely happy with his new gig.

All Musk needs from his audience is some attention, with a promise that they will vote on major policy changes in the future.

His $44 billion takeover of the company — that he tried desperately and unsuccessfully to get out of — started with a poll, and it would be both appropriate and timely if his time as its CEO ended the same way.

There are investors waiting for Mr. Musk to come up with his next steps. For the first time in two years, the carmakers market valuation has fallen below that of ExxonMobil. Some shareholders blame Mr. Musk for being too focused on his micro-transactions on the social networking site, which distracted him from the real problems at the company. Musk blames macroeconomic troubles beyond his control.

More than 17 million votes were cast in a referendum on his chaotic leadership of the social media network, which has seen a slew of layoffs, the suspension of journalists who covered him and policy changes made and reversed in real time.

It would have been hard to enforce the limits on the millions of users who use the platform around the world if accounts included banned websites in their profile. Not only links but attempts to bypass the ban by spelling out “instagram dot com” could have led to a suspension, the company said.

But that decision generated so much immediate criticism, including from past defenders of Twitter’s new billionaire owner, that Musk promised not to make any more major policy changes without an online survey of users.

Musk had taken action to block competitors after he shut down a Twitter account that was being used to track Musk’s private jet.

Musk had behaved in a way that created a “brand public backlash” that could hurt his brand image with key consumer groups.

Oppenheimer specifically cited Twitter’s decision last week to ban several journalists, including CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan, as a catalyst for the downgrade.

The Social Media CEO of Musk and the Saudi Royal Family: An Interview with Jason Calacanis, David Sacks and Sriram Krishnan

The lieutenants who have helped run the company since Musk’s takeover are most likely to be the new CEO. The short list likely includes investor Jason Calacanis, Craft Ventures partner David Sacks and Sriram Krishnan, an Andreessen Horowitz general partner focused on crypto and Twitter’s former consumer teams lead.

Calacanis, who emerged in the tech world as a reporter during the dot com boom, is an early-stage investor who has backed well-known companies such as Uber and Robinhood. He has also launched several media properties and hosts two podcasts (one in partnership with Sacks).

Calacanis asked who would like the most miserable job in tech and media. Who is crazy enough to have a account on the micro-blogging site? Calacanis also ran his own Twitter poll asking followers whether he or Sacks should run the company, separately or together, or whether someone else should take over. The majority of respondents voted for “other.”

Musk and Sacks are co-founding partners of PayPal and have experience managing a social network. He sold his enterprise communication platform to Microsoft for over $1 billion.

On paper, Krishnan seems to be the obvious choice of the group. He is familiar with the work on the product, having been involved in managing the teams responsible for features of the platform. He also previously worked on mobile ad products for Snap and Facebook.

More recently, he has invested in crypto startups at Andreessen Horowitz, which could give him experience helpful to fulfill Musk’s goal of building payment capabilities for Twitter and making it more than just a social media app.

Krishnan is probably the least controversial member of the current leadership team of Musk’s social media company.

There is speculation about other leaders for the social media company, including Donald Trump’s son-in-law, who was recently spotted watching the World Cup with Musk.

The Saudi Royal Family is one of the largest investors in the social networking site, and is friendly with Kushner. Prior to working as an advisor in Trump’s White House, Kushner worked for his family’s real estate development company, and last year he said he would leave politics and start an investment firm. The New York Observer was previously owned by Kushner.

Elusive billionaire attack: the elephant in the room when Musk didn’t post on Monday, 2021 — after Hic et Nunc went under

Given Musk’s propensity for tweeting, and his rapid decisions after previous polls, many expected he would have addressed the elephant in the room by now. He has not. Musk refrained from posting for 18 hours on Monday, which was the quietest Monday of his life.

In the field of information security, there’s a kind of vulnerability known as the evil maid attack whereby an untrusted party gains physical access to important hardware, such as the housekeeping staff coming into your hotel room when you’ve left your laptop unattended, thereby compromising it. A new analog is just as capable of damaging systems and leaking data. If you want to, call it the evil billionaire attack. Money is the weapon, and in order to make a difference, you have to have it. The call is coming from inside the house.

The reason that this strategy works is that most ideas of any consequence are owned by people with more money than you and that when possible they string them together into a network to make the gravity inescapable. Founders and investors and excitable technology writers like myself frequently use the term “platform” to describe technical systems with granular components that can be used to compose new functionality, and the power sources propelling the technology industry find platforms particularly appealing when the bits can be monetized each time they are used.

Blockchains fight this problem on the deepest level possible. It is very difficult for Musk to kill off a blockchain if a few users object. The amount of access lost is infinitesimal due to the nature of Duplicating across many computers. This comes with different complications, of course, but losing information outright due to a hostile party is not one of them. When Hic et Nunc went under in late 2021, there was a new version of the marketplace that had a new wrapper around the same content. The blockchain acts as a shared resource that forces interoperability, almost like organic self-defense.

The case of WordPress is a good example of how general-purpose content management software has grown from the earlyblogspot engine. About 40% of the open web is powered by it. A huge economy has sprung up around it: companies that develop websites, developers who work for those companies, indie developers who work for themselves, many of them writing plugins which can be unlocked or extended with licensing fees. The core is an open source project and encourages the same things as it does. WordPress has been around for a long time and its straightforward RSS feeds decisively lost out to Twitter’s social features, so in 2022 there is a reasonable argument that it is a bit long in the tooth. But we must now understand it to be a bigger technical success than Twitter, simply because it is not at risk.

“We are excited to see Mastodon grow and become a household name in newsrooms across the world, and we are committed to continuing to improve our software to face up to new challenges that come with rapid growth and increasing demand,” Rochko wrote.

As of Tuesday morning, Mastodon’s app stood at number 8 among free social networking apps on the Google Play Store and at number 11 in the social networking category on Apple’s app store. (Mastodon is a decentralized social network, meaning that there are also numerous third-party apps for the platform beyond its own.)

The Power of Elon Musk, the CEO of Social Media, Needs to Step Into His Own Opinion: Comments on Trump’s Twitter Disruption

The Mastodon founder commented on the link ban for the first time in a blogs post, highlighting the power of Musk as owner and CEO of the social media network.

The reminder that centralized platforms can impose unfair limits on what you can and cannot say is a stark reminder.

At Free Press, a media and technology justice advocacy organization, she is the senior counsel and director of digital justice and civil rights. Free Press is a founding member of the #StopToxicTwitter coalition. Her own opinions are expressed in this commentary. CNN has more opinion on it.

We at Free Press agree that Musk must step aside. Someone who knows the basics of how a social media platform works needs to be the next CEO, not because he is a good one, but because he knows how to keep users safe.

Neo-Nazis like Andrew Anglin, right-wing activists like Laura Loomer and other figures have resumed their activities after he gave up his suspension of their accounts.

In regards to reversals, the potential new leadership needs to change their decision to allow Covid-19 misinformation to spread across the social network. The blue checkmark feature that allows verified users to post longer videos and have their content prioritised at the top of replies, mentions and searches should be retired. And they must cease Musk’s “general amnesty” plan on accounts that were suspended before he took over.

When Elon Musk polled Twitter users about whether to reinstate former President Donald Trump’s account, he quickly followed through on the majority’s wish to do so. He pronounced it with a Latin phrase: The voice of the people is the voice of God.

He went ahead and did it when users voted to provide general amnesty to suspended accounts on one of his polls. He also heeded user votes in a poll to restore the accounts of tech journalists that he had suspended on Friday.

It is not certain how he would restrict voting to those who pay for the service, but it is likely that the number of users will be reduced. It would affect those who can vote and others who can’t due to the paid verification feature Musk pushed for. Musk’s Monday tweet immediately prompted comparisons to poll taxes.

A paid verification feature that was immediately manipulated by satirical accounts pretending to be verified brands, athletes, and other public figures on the platform was not launched over a matter of days.

Others who had backed Musk’s bid for Twitter appeared frustrated at the decision. Paul Graham said that the policy was the last straw. I give up.

Mr. Musk also openly questioned the quality of anyone applying for the role. Beyond the “foolish” crack in Tuesday’s tweet, he previously wrote, “Those who want power are the ones who least deserve it.”

I will forgive you for coming back to it, but please ask yourself what the hell happened last weekend, as I am hopelessly online.

I am fortunate to know a lot of people, from creatives to journalists and tech workers. It was delivered to me by the artists who were worried they’d be banned from making use ofTwitter for their work because of their links to their own portfolios. I read horror stories from authors who were terrified that the Linktrees their publishers asked them to create to promote their books, reviews, and Goodreads profiles were suddenly bannable offenses on Twitter.

What was essentially a small online riot ensued, with Twitter users from all corners decrying the new policy. Within hours, not only had the company backtracked, but all mentions of the less-than-day-old policy had been scrubbed from Twitter feeds and the company website. It was a whirlwind for anyone who was online to see it. (Although if you missed it, I wouldn’t say you missed it, if you know what I mean.)

My friends on Twitch interrupted their streams to discuss the news, worried that they wouldn’t be able to tweet to announce they were starting a new stream, or add a link to their Twitter bio to help viewers find them. All of these things created the potential for lost income for people who, I would argue, need it more than the folks who made these policy decisions. After all, these same creators have the kind of disruptive, entrepreneurial spirit that everyone in Silicon Valley claims to want to foster and empower.

How to Decide Whether to Leave Twitter: The Mastodon Experience Revisited, Revisiting, and Reconnect with Other Users

Michael Calore is a person. The most terrifying thing about this story is the fact that in the next seven or eight days, anything can happen.

As 2023 arrives, it’s time to take action. It’s a deadline for those of you who have been waiting, so make sure you make your decision by the deadline.

Why would anyone want to do this? You may feel like your sunk cost of investing so many years on the platform is too much to let go. There are things that make you smile on the platform. You may be able to ignore some of the ugliness on the rest ofTwitter if you’ve carefully sorted the people you follow. Maybe you only dip in and out and the chaos hasn’t affected your experience. Maybe you don’t care about what’s happening outside of your account.

Mastodon has gotten the lion’s share of attention as alternatives to Twitter have entered the conversation. It launched in 2016 and has a familiar format and feel that doesn’t seem foreign to longtime Twitter users. The character-count limit of 500 is much higher than that ofTwitter, and there are many ways to post images, sound, animations, links, and polls. Unlike on Twitter, you can edit posts, but old versions of the posts are still visible to others, and if your edited post was reposted, others will be made aware of your edits. Mastodon also has a useful content warning feature that allows you to warn followers about sensitive or triggering information in a post.

Because different server instances can be tailored to specific interests or types of communities, you may be able to find people with similar interests and feel welcome more quickly than you would on other social networks. Plus, there are tools to help reconnect with other users who came over from Twitter.

Source: https://www.wired.com/story/how-to-decide-quit-twitter-mastodon-post-hive-social/

How Live is Twitter? When Musk and Google Hangouts Ascended into a Tanking Live User Engagement Room at the Mastodon Headquarters

Because of its decentralized nature, all of Mastodon’s users aren’t on one server; instead they’re spread across different communities, and new users must choose where they want to start. It could be a problem to get started if you’re indecisive.

Mastodon has no official verification process, paid or otherwise, for users, because of its decentralized nature. Users can get links to home pages automatically verified, but not their Mastodon profile itself.

On Tuesday, Musk gathered a group of engineers and advisors into a room at Twitter’s headquarters looking for answers. His engagement number are tanking.

“This is ridiculous,” he said, according to multiple sources with direct knowledge of the meeting. I have more than 100 million followers, but I only get a small number of impressions.

Employees showed Musk internal data regarding engagement with his account along with a Google Trends chart. Musk’s popularity in search rankings was indicated last April by a score of 100. Today, he’s at a score of nine. Engineers investigated whether Musk’s reach was artificially restricted, but found no evidence that the app was biased against him.

Since 7 weeks ago, the public view counts have been added. At the time, Musk promised the feature would give the world a better sense of how vibrant the platform is.

“Shows how much more alive Twitter is than it may seem, as over 90% of Twitter users read, but don’t tweet, reply or like, as those are public actions,” he tweeted.

Putting out fires and performing impossible tasks. Where are you? Employees in the San Francisco headquarters don’t talk anymore about their work

“We haven’t seen much in the way of longer term, cogent strategy,” one employee said. A lot of our time is dedicated to three main areas: putting out fires, performing impossible tasks, and improving efficiency, without clear guidelines of what the expected end results are. We mostly move from dumpster fire to dumpster fire, from my perspective.”

One of the employees said that at times he sleeps late and then says something that doesn’t make sense. One person will say they cannot do something on the platform, and we have to chase some outlier use case for one person. It does not make sense.

The San Francisco headquarters, where the tenant is suing for nonpayment, has a sad air. When people pass each other, they are told the standard greeting is “where are you interviewing?” and “where do you have offers?” The eighth floor is still stocked with beds, and employees have to reserve them in advance.

“People don’t even chat about work things anymore,” the employee said. It’s heartbreaking. I have more discussions with my colleagues on the platforms that I use. In the team channel, it wasn’t unusual to have a discussion about what everyone did that weekend. There’s none of that anymore.”

Source: https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/9/23593099/elon-musk-twitter-fires-engineer-declining-reach-ftc-concerns

What Are the Least Fireable Responses That I Can Have Right Now? An Employee’s Perspective on the Twitter Era and the Relaunch of Twitter Blue

“When you’re asked a question, you run it through your head and say ‘what is the least fireable response I can have to this right now?’” one employee explained.

(Of course, that’s not true for everyone at the company. An employee says there are a number of true believers who are just ass-kissers and brown-nosers who are trying to take advantage of the clear vacuum.

The employee cited the disastrous relaunch of Twitter Blue, which resulted in brands being impersonated and dozens of top advertisers fleeing the platform.

At the same time, “he really doesn’t like to believe that there is anything in technology that he doesn’t know, and that’s frustrating,” the employee said. “You can’t be the smartest person in the room about everything, all the time.”

“I do think the recent vibe overall in tech, and fear of not being able to find something else, is the primary factor for most folks,” an employee said. Most of my team is doing hardcore interviewprep and would jump at any chance to walk away.

There is also a sense of unease about how recent changes will be reviewed by regulators. As part of an agreement with the Federal Trade Commission, Twitter committed to following a series of steps before pushing out changes, including creating a project proposal and conducting security and privacy reviews.