Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by mountainriver 1528 days ago
Elon taking over Twitter would be a good thing for Twitter and probably a bad thing for him.

Twitter is dying, and could probably use a fundamental revamp which Elon would provide. However Elon really has more important things to worry about.
2 comments
mlindner 1527 days ago
As a fan of Elon I completely agree on your second point. Tesla and SpaceX are WAAAY more important for the future than Twitter.
link
hooande 1528 days ago
every suggestion he's floated so far is bad. edit button, open source algorithm, "time outs" instead of bans, "free speech". all of these ideas have obvious flaws that he does not address and none of them would be sufficient to drastically change twitter's stagnant share price.

If Musk, or anyone, has solutions to the problems with freedom of speech that have existed since civilization, let's hear them. If the ideas are good and he's the best person to implement them, then there's a good chance that people will want to do it.

link
kyleplum 1528 days ago
He did mention changing the monetization scheme used by twitter from being ad-based to being subscription based. I've heard this idea floated around for awhile and my favourite version is something along the lines of requiring a monthly payment once you reach a specific size of followers/audience. The idea being that today, twitter is being used by corporations/individuals as essentially free marketing.

Although not guaranteed to solve the issue of "free speech", I would be interested to see the results of a social media service that is not designed to maximize engagement to drive the most ad dollars.

link
mountainriver 1528 days ago
yup me too, my biggest complaint with twitter is all the ads, oh and jerks
link
KennyBlanken 1528 days ago
I love how he's all for open-sourcing the algorithms for twitter because of supposed harm...but not for the algorithms causing his cars to steer toward telephone poles and cyclists
link
moralestapia 1528 days ago
>open source algorithm

Huh? What's wrong about this?

link
hooande 1528 days ago
people will immediately reverse engineer it to find what criteria give tweets the most engagement. if it's something like "joke tweet at 7 am" then millions of people will do whatever that is. Not to mention it will open it up to spammers, scammers and software hackers.

There may be common sense solutions to mitigate those problems. but I haven't heard them from Musk

link