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by agubelu 976 days ago
> Diversified away from ad revenue.

He was forced to due to ad revenue plummeting as a reaction to his own actions and policies.

>Introduced breaking changes to accustom the user base to faster development.

What does faster development have to do with breaking almost a decade's worth of UX and muscular memory? You can ship _bad_ changes quickly. I lost track of the amount of times I tapped Reply instead of Retweet after they shifted all buttons right when they introduced viewcounts.

> Shrunk a bloated team to die-hards via whaling-and-culling.

I'd argue there's a reasonable middle ground between "a bloated team" and "just the die-hards".

> largely solved the content moderation problem via Community Notes.

Community notes existed before Musk, and their role is to dispute a claim or provide context. They don't moderate content in any way.

1 comments

>He was forced to due to ad revenue plummeting as a reaction to his own actions and policies.

That’s incorrect. The need to diversify away from ad revenue was a topic discussed with Jack prior to the acquisition. The rationale was that advertisers effective control content moderation policies due to the revenue which they provide.

This is true. Whether it’s bad on or not depends on your viewpoint and ideological position. What advertisers want for now, e.g. with regard to social policy, may be aligned with what you or I want now.

But there’s no guarantee that will be true in the future.

>I’d argue there’s a reasonable middle ground between “a bloated team” and “just the die-hards.

Layoffs are painful, and they were handled poorly. But there can be no doubt the prior company was massively overstaffed.

If you’re going to cut, generally you want to cut deep to prevent future rounds. Arguably not increasing the size of the first layoffs led to the second, and more people could have been preserved in total.

There’s very little virtue in “middle ground” in this context.

> Community notes existed before Musk, and their role is to dispute a claim or provide context. They don’t moderate content in any way.

It doesn’t moderate content in any way… except for placing large labels to “dispute a claim or provide context.”

Sure, if you very narrowly constraint content moderation to the Trust and Safety definition of removing content and administering bans it doesn’t.

Birdwatch existed, but the prominence of the feature and improved reliability of the feature weren’t launched until after acquisition.

It solved the main edge cases for content moderation by only displaying labels when moderators who disagreed sufficiently on other issues agreed on that particular label.

It has significantly impacted the disinformation at scale problem for the better.