Musk is missing a key way that people use Twitter[0]: for community.
Communities aren't a feature-supported thing. They're a spontaneous self-organization. People associate with others around some area of interest. They don't want it to be private; they want to be open and inviting. But they also want to be able to exclude those who make trouble.
Musk suggests using mute instead of block, but that throws off the way communities work. It means you yourself won't see troublemakers, but your followers will unless they've also muted them. People can come and pick fights, interrupting the conversation you had hoped to have among your community.
Musk seems to view Twitter at the high level, of everybody talking to everybody, and at the lowest level, of his own personal feed. But he's missing the spontaneous layers that occur in between, and if he doesn't support that, they'll leave.
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[0] I'm using the name "Twitter" to refer to the site for which the users developed their behavior. It sounds as if X will prove to be a very different thing, with a different user pattern.
I think the only reasonable option would be for users to make all their tweets only replyable by their followers. It sort of defeats some of the point of twitter, but if the alternative is all the haters and trolls replying, it seems to be the least bad option.
To what extent is he eroding the trust in his other projects with everything he's done at Twitter so far? If this is how he runs things, I really don't want to be in/near a car built by a company run by Elon.
What he's doing at X seems to be in line with his other projects. (I don't mean to say that what he's doing at X or his other projects is great, visionary and flawless)
Ironically blocking is now more effective than ever, because the logged-out twitter.com experience has been weirdly broken for weeks. If you block someone, it's a real pain for them to look at your timeline.
Was Musk always this mercurial or was he more competent at his previous companies? I still have trouble understanding how this man created something as good as SpaceX despite displaying no obvious indications of genius, and every sign of mediocrity, in his current state.
> I still have trouble understanding how this man created something as good as SpaceX despite displaying no obvious indications of genius, and every sign of mediocrity, in his current state.
Well either your perception of things Musk does at SpaceX is wrong or your perception of things Musk does at X is wrong, right ?
The other option (and the one that would appear to be true in this case) is that SpaceX has more effective management, and Musk isn’t as closely involved.
I mean, there are extensive technical interviews with Kim Jong Un on North Korean tv talking about whatever the random factory he’s visiting does; wouldn’t read too much into that.
(Actually, I’m not 100% sure if Un does this; Il was certainly big on it)
I have the same question. It’s hard to judge from the outside like this but there are Trump-ian displays of arrogance, disconnection and incompetence that seem at odds with his massive successes with SpaceX and Tesla in particular. He’s clearly book smart, but seems like a petulant, chronically insecure man-child in most areas from the accounts both public and insider. I find the incongruence strange.
Elon Musk isn't responsible for the success of his companies - they succeed in spite of him, because of the quality of the people who do the actual work, and their ability to manage him and keep him from doing to Tesla and SpaceX what he's doing to Twitter.
Unfortunately, modern American capitalism is obsessed with hero worship of CEOs and the myth of Elon Musk as a real life Tony Stark is just too compelling for people to shake off.
That's obviously false, because then it would be highly unlikely to have two highly successful companies (Tesla and SpaceX, not even counting PayPal) if it was just him being lucky with employees.
The more you know about something that Musk talks about as if he’s an expert in it, the more you realise that he’s a bluffer. He real skill may be his motivational & promotional skills but from all that’s known, he’s neither reasonable or honest when doing that.
Now when someone spams you with images of rotting dead bodies you just get to wait the three weeks for Twitter's moderation to get around to banning them instead of being able to block them. Great!
So many times I heard “but you can just block them” as a defence for allowing any speech on Twitter. How’s that plan working out?
I give it 10 minutes after the feature is turned off and Musk is flooded with tweets that trigger him before he reinstates his personal ability to block people he doesn’t like.
Pretty great, actually. I'm a staunch believer in that strategy, although I'm on Mastodon and not Twitter.
Mastodon really perfects the block feature by adding a "Block from instance" button that filters entire websites from your feed. You can wipe *@threads.com off your timeline with 2 clicks, it's glorious.
Mastodon and Twitter are absolute shit ways to engage in productive conversation with people and ideas that you disagree with. They’re both far worse than formal debate, which is shit in its own ways. If you wanna force people to listen to tankies and Nazis, a microblogging platform isn’t the place to do it.
Communities aren't a feature-supported thing. They're a spontaneous self-organization. People associate with others around some area of interest. They don't want it to be private; they want to be open and inviting. But they also want to be able to exclude those who make trouble.
Musk suggests using mute instead of block, but that throws off the way communities work. It means you yourself won't see troublemakers, but your followers will unless they've also muted them. People can come and pick fights, interrupting the conversation you had hoped to have among your community.
Musk seems to view Twitter at the high level, of everybody talking to everybody, and at the lowest level, of his own personal feed. But he's missing the spontaneous layers that occur in between, and if he doesn't support that, they'll leave.
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[0] I'm using the name "Twitter" to refer to the site for which the users developed their behavior. It sounds as if X will prove to be a very different thing, with a different user pattern.