this post was submitted on 25 Apr 2022
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Twitter accepts buyout, giving Elon Musk total control of the company (www.theverge.com)
submitted 2 years ago by Amicchan@lemmy.ml to c/technology@lemmy.ml
34 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Ah yes. Buying a company is totally subversive! /s

all 35 comments
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[–] MerchantsOfMisery@lemmy.ml 26 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Elon Musk is like the spoiled loser who wasn't invited to the party, so he buys the whole venue and tries to force everyone to be his friend. Then most people inevitably leave because the party is no longer cool, he'll throw a classic billionaire tantrum and just fill the place with a bunch of goons who agree with everything he says.

Right now I'm sure people are saying they won't drop Twitter but just wait until he tilts all the rules and enforcement on Twitter in favor of the most obnoxious, toxic people who just happen to be Musk supporters, and the place becomes undeniably bad.

[–] angarabebesi@lemmy.ml 7 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (2 children)

Twitter is already a toxic dump of scum and villany. It's not like it can be worse.

In the mean time, Musk promised to open source a lot of stuff, which I see as a big win.

[–] MerchantsOfMisery@lemmy.ml 9 points 2 years ago (1 children)

You truly believe he will make good on his promises? I really don't get why people believe his nonsense claims.

[–] angarabebesi@lemmy.ml 3 points 2 years ago (2 children)

we'll find out

[–] MerchantsOfMisery@lemmy.ml 14 points 2 years ago

I mean, are you not aware of his long history of making great promises (i.e. hyperloop, OpenAI being open source, etc) and then completely failing on those? He doesn't have a clue what he's talking about when he talks about open-sourcing Twitter's algorithm, he just knows enough to make it sound like he knows what he's talking about and people for whatever reason just give him a pass.

[–] Godless_Nematode@lemmy.ml 6 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Yeah, Trump's back baby! They will still keep anti-war/anti-lmperialist folks off though.

[–] American_Communist22@lemmygrad.ml 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

oh god he's coming back, I honestly loved his insane tweets, the comments section was one of the best warzones

[–] Fissionami@lemmygrad.ml 2 points 2 years ago

Indeed. I was missing him really

[–] wazowski@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 years ago

so just regular twitter then? 🤔

[–] angarabebesi@lemmy.ml 25 points 2 years ago

https://joinmastodon.org/

[–] Hagels_Bagels@lemmygrad.ml 25 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I hope this will be good for the FediVerse. Perhaps a small positive of this.

[–] Ghast@lemmy.ml 7 points 2 years ago

Yea, Linuxrocks.online has seen a big uptick as well.

[–] Decentralizer@lemmy.ml 17 points 2 years ago (1 children)

If anything i hope people leave the bird side and joining the fediverse.. mastodon is such much better anyway

[–] _ed@sopuli.xyz 13 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

Gargron: *Hi! mastodon.social is being slow right now, as far as I can tell because there's twice as many people using it at the same time as ever have; * So looks like people are checking it out at least.

[–] Amicchan@lemmy.ml 8 points 2 years ago

Link them to joinmastodon.org and other mastodon instances.

[–] Ferk@lemmy.ml 17 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (2 children)

I'm not interested in Twitter (or any "individual-centric" social network to be honest... I don't want to "follow" people, but ideas/topics). So I don't have anything to lose from this.

I might have something to gain if he actually open sources the algorithms Twitter uses, because if they are actually good (I have no idea), they could have other applications too.

[–] Ephera@lemmy.ml 11 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Usually, these algorithms of big webpages are needlessly complex, because they need to be resilient to people trying to game the system. So, yeah, it may be good at what it does, but I doubt it would be terribly useful for e.g. Mastodon to adopt...

[–] Ferk@lemmy.ml 3 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

Personally, I wouldn't say that an algorithm that relies on obscurity (needless complexity being a form of obscurity) would be a good algorithm, not when it's public. I guess we'll see.

It's possible that the algorithms will have to be heavily refactored, cleaned up and maybe simplified before they are publicly released, since I expect that many of those approaches would be useless against someone with access to the code and the ability to run tests against it systematically to "game the system".

[–] Ephera@lemmy.ml 4 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Yeah, if you open-source an obscure algorithm, you lose the "security by obscurity".

Much like with encryption algorithms, you could push out the obscurity into parametrisation, but that only makes more transparent how the algorithm could work in theory.
In practice, it will still be obscured, which is where Musk supposedly wants more transparency.

So, yeah, either he doesn't open-source it, the open-sourcing is useless for transparency or we'll watch Twitter burning to the ground. 🙂

[–] Ferk@lemmy.ml 3 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

There's still the chance that they have/make an algorithm that can actually be transparent without being exploitable in ways that are detrimental (which is what I would consider a "good algorithm")... but I agree that this is the least likely outcome.

Still, I couldn't care less about any of the other outcomes. I have nothing to lose whether Twitter burns or stays as it is 😁

[–] Ephera@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Well, I'm of the opinion that creating such an algorithm isn't possible, because it is fundamentally possible to game the system (by e.g. creating multiple accounts), and making transparent why a post is promoted also necessarily makes this transparent for anyone wanting to game the system.

Having said that, it seems Musk wants to enforce that all users need to verify as a real, unique person. That would make it harder to game the system, and then they could use an algorithm akin to those for governmental elections.

But yeah, then that algorithm again isn't useful by itself.
I also doubt the EU will be amused by his plans to nuke user privacy for no real reason.
I'm not opposed to him burning down Twitter either, though. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[–] Ferk@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Hmm... that's interesting actually. Having users have to authenticate might help some instances of trolling and abuse, but at the same time there's the problem of the identification causing trouble for privacy.

A middle ground would be allowing non-verified users to participate, but have them have a lower influence in the relevance of the content, perhaps having caps that limit how much non-verified influence can affect the weighted relevance of a post (so.. content promoted by unverified accounts would be of a lower priority, and pushing it with a farm of non-verified bot accounts would not have much of an impact).

Of course there's likely gonna be some level of bias based on who are the people who would go through the trouble of verifying themselves... but that's not the same thing as not being transparent. Bias is gonna be a problem that you cannot escape no matter what. If a social network is full of idiots the algorithm isn't gonna magically make their conversations any less idiotic. So I think the algorithm could still be a good and useful thing to come out of this, even if the social network itself isn't.

[–] wazowski@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

twitter isn't and "individual-centrered" social network really: sure, it often can be, but it doesn't have to

there are also a lot of organisations, projects, networks, loose associations of whatever variety

before my twitter account was banned the feed was even dare i say interesting 🤷‍♀️

[–] Ferk@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

It's definitelly not optimal for that. In my opinion, using proper blogs, websites and feeds is a much more intelligent, decentralized, and powerful alternative to artificially limited microblogging.

The only reason companies and groups love having a Twitter is because it allows them to advertise themselves there, due to how big its userbase is. It also allows them to have a more direct engagement with their "followers" or appear to be more "down to earth" preciselly because of the way it's traditionally a platform more "individual-centered". Twitter just happens to be good for Marketing. And the same goes for Facebook.

Imho, the blogosphere was in a very good place before Twitter and Facebook started to rise in popularity, when having a personal website was more of a common thing to do instead. Imho, the solution isn't Mastodon either.. I'd much rather go back to when using feed readers was a thing. I just wish there was a more modern pub-sub like alternative to RSS that we could use for websites (or maybe there is but nobody uses it...), and a more standardized API for viewing/posting coments to a blog post directly from your feed reader.

[–] jokeyrhyme@lemmy.ml 12 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Bahaha https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm

[–] angarabebesi@lemmy.ml 4 points 2 years ago (1 children)

this is hilarious. is it real?

[–] Fissionami@lemmygrad.ml 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

It's from the official Twitter GitHub account though

[–] angarabebesi@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 years ago

niiiiiice

[–] Ferk@lemmy.ml 3 points 2 years ago

aaaand it's down.

[–] tracyspcy@lemmy.ml 7 points 2 years ago

🤡

[–] projjalm@lemmy.ml 5 points 2 years ago

I wish buyouts and sellouts like this happen more, just so the fediverse can get more attention. Will direct many people to the FOSS world as well <3

[–] Leftyfox@lemmygrad.ml 5 points 2 years ago

The paywall he supposedly has planned will be - quite literally - subversive, just not in the intended way.

[–] jokeyrhyme@lemmy.ml 3 points 2 years ago

Urgh, it is disturbing how scatter-brained and clueless this guy is: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/04/elon-musk-twitters-next-owner-provides-his-definition-of-free-speech/