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by PartiallyTyped 1312 days ago
> And let's say another 500k for bennies. So our operating expense for top dev talent comes out to 20 million a year. You can have an elite tier dev team, for 20 million a year that could easily build a twitter. He could've tried to interview ex-Twitter and get feedback on technical debt, pain points, problems to have fixed in the newly architect-ed model.

No, you won't. There's a lot more to running a social media site than just building it. You can't just build and ship.

Either it is a paid service, or it runs on ads. For the former, good luck amassing any substantial amount of users.

For the latter, well, evidence shows that brand security is important and advertisers don't want their brands displayed along the endless stream of n-words, racism, and homophobia enabled by free-speech absolutionists like Elon. So with such a cesspool, why would anyone in their right mind join? Without users, you can not run an ad-based social network either.

Now that I covered the bare minimum; this is a great read on why you can't just build and ship, if it was easy, twitter wouldn't have been unprofitable for years, and all other twitter clones with free speech wouldn't have failed.

https://www.techdirt.com/2022/11/02/hey-elon-let-me-help-you...

1 comments

Alright. Even if you double it to 40 million to hire the elite tier dev team, ops, and sre. They could definitely build, ship, and maintain. Yes, he'd be losing money at 40 million a year just on salaries, but I'd imagine they could build something pretty amazing at that rate.

Advertisers have already pulled out of Twitter and Elon is talking about publicly shaming them. How is his current reality any better than starting fresh. He could've invested in building technology from scratch to handle hate speech and removing bad apples.

> Advertisers have already pulled out of Twitter and Elon is talking about publicly shaming them.

Either Elon is delusional, or he is posturing. Either way, he is in no position to demand anything [1,2]. In [1], Elon was told by industry leaders what the issues with his approach are, and then Elon blocked one of them. Elon claims that activists are pushing advertisers but according to industry leaders, that is not true [1].

> Elon, Great chat yesterday, As you heard overwhelmingly from senior advertisers on the call, the issue concerning us all is content moderation and its impact on BRAND SAFETY/SUITABILITY. You say you’re committed to moderation, but you just laid off 75% of the moderation team!

> Advertisers are not being manipulated by activist groups, they are being compelled by established principles around the types of companies they can do business with. These principles include an assessment of the platforms commitment to brand safety and suitability.

So really; free-speech absolution does not work. Read the post I linked to.

> He could've invested in building technology from scratch to handle hate speech and removing bad apples.

Probably no. Read the post in the comment above.

Handling hatespeech from an operational perspective is one thing, and from a technical perspective e.g. identifying and categorizing it is a whole different thing.

Elon has already gone back to his free-speech absolutionism [3].

His tweets:

> Twitter will not allow anyone who was de-platformed for violating Twitter rules back on platform until we have a clear process for doing so, which will take at least a few more weeks

> Talked to civil society leaders @JGreenblattADL , @YaelEisenstat , @rashadrobinson , @JGo4Justice , @normanlschen , @DerrickNAACP , @TheBushCenter Ken Hersch & @SindyBenavides about how Twitter will continue to combat hate & harassment & enforce its election integrity policies

As for this one:

> How is his current reality any better than starting fresh.

He has users, for now. This means that he doesn't need to spend money on growth.

[1] https://www.mediaite.com/news/elon-musk-gets-pilloried-by-to...

[2] https://edition.cnn.com/2022/11/09/tech/musk-twitter-brands-...

[3] https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/right-wi...