zlacker

The underlying issue: Musk's incentives don't give him much reason to care if Twitter goes under. Musk likely feels he might as well push for any changes he likes, and gain whether Twitter survives or not.

What was Musk's biggest bugbear about 'old' Twitter? The moderation system. If Twitter goes under, the only practical alternative at the moment is Mastodon, and Mastodon can't replicate Twitter's moderation due to its architecture. So Musk gets what he wants anyway. He doesn't have much to lose in this scenario: Financially, he'd remain a very rich person. One can argue he'd be better off without Twitter anyway.

>>yyyk+(OP)
Hate speech is far more tolerated on Twitter than on Mastadon. It’s not a free for all.

>>jquery+I9
Doesn't that depend on the instance (with some not being as strict)? Regardless, such people could always decamp to their own servers - an option that was not available with Twitter. Also, volunteer instance admins will never have the resources Twitter has had to combat abuse.

>>yyyk+Ob
"Their own servers" has always existed, just look at Truth Social. And in the same way you don't have to go to that site, Mastodon supports blocking entire instances.

Lots of instances also screen signups. There's no requirement for them to accept everyone. The server that Marcan (M1 Linux) and Alyssa Rosenzweig (Linux GPU drivers) are on claim a total of 700 active users for example. You'll still get new content as your users can boost (retweet) from other servers, while they act as gatekeepers by not boosting others.

Tumblr announced they would join the Fediverse. That would be interesting. Of course nothing stops Twitter from joining either.

>>yyyk+(OP)
> If Twitter goes under, the only practical alternative at the moment is Mastodon

WeChat: "am I a joke to you?"

Seriously, Zuck wishes he had the kind of daily center-stage that WeChat has in their customers' lives. Totally guarantee that if Twitter officially folded they'd at least make a play and they might well come out on top.

WeChat is absolutely the #1 beneficiary of any Twitter collapse scenario - which is one of China's reasons for lending Musk all that money. It's win-win, either they own musk and twitter (they've already got him banning chinese journalists and pushing the state position), or twitter collapses and they get a play at WeChat 2.0 for the western market.

Russia is the other big player in Musk's loans... not sure if there's an immediate benefit to them from collapse, but, if it succeeds they'll have a similar venue for psyops and misinformation campaigns at a minimum, plus potentially some direct leverage just like china.

> Mastodon can't replicate Twitter's moderation due to its architecture. So Musk gets what he wants anyway.

Oh, not only does Mastodon have moderation but it's worse than that: mastodon is effectively community moderation. The problem of edgelord shit (literally edge, finding the exact boundary of the law/written policy/etc and dancing around it) is that everyone knows it when they see it, but that's not a coherent editorial policy. But if you're an edgelord nazi or kf'er you'll just get banned from pods, or pods will refuse to federate with you at all. People have no obligation to play the tap-dance with you around what the exact boundary is, if you wanna be an edgelord fuck then get banned. Hell you'll get put into banlists (like ublock lists) that servers will subscribe to and block you everywhere.

This is not government censorship after all, just good old fashioned O(1) moderation. I'm sure you know what would happen if you posted nazi shit in your local discord. What the fuck bro *kick*. And if the "nazi pod" forms, that will get filtered out of everyone's peering.

Social media always adapts whenever the social norms or group expectations (for a particular community) are too at-odds with the moderation policy. When someone turns into a badmin and violates community norms, as musk is doing by inviting nazis and shit back onto the platform, the community will melt away and re-form somewhere else that aligns with the social norms. And the thing is, now that you've moved away from centralized moderation, there is no one single finely detailed moderation policy for you to play games with, it's just what the hachyderm admin or whoever wants to set as their policy, it's different on a per-pod basis, and a lot of those people aren't going to be inclined to play footsie with nazis or KF'ers. It's transgressive/edgelord content precisely because most people don't like it, after all.

>>yyyk+(OP)
Why wouldn’t he care if Twitter goes under? It would be a double digit % decrease of his net worth if Twitter halves in value. It would also be a public embarrassment, and a wasted opportunity to have spent more time at his other companies.

>>paulmd+4z
Best comment in this thread, thank you for the precise analysis.

>>paulmd+4z
> they've already got him banning chinese journalists and pushing the state position

Mind elaborating on this? Would be a shame if something so important got lost in all the noise.

>>paulmd+4z
>WeChat: "am I a joke to you?"

WeChat is way beyond Twitter. It's nigh an alt-OS. Doesn't really follow (any) Store policy, but allowed due to CCP influence. If it becomes popular in West, West will very likely ban it, maybe based on store policy. If TikTok is problematic, no way WeChat will be allowed.

>mastodon is effectively community moderation. >it's different on a per-pod basis

Exactly. It's not a free-for-all, but being able to operate their own pods and infiltrate others is a preferable state for 'transgressives' than 'old' Twitter. Decentralization is still worth it, but the end result would inevitably allow them some freedom to do shit.

>there is no one single finely detailed moderation policy for you to play games with

Moderation policy was result of Twitter becoming gigantic. I suspect any huge enough instance will have to adopt a policy and reach same impass.

>>im3w1l+ya1
This is what I was thinking of. China was suppressing information about the protests online by having Twitter ban activists, arresting (and beating) journalists, and running a spam campaign at the same time to push the results out of the feed.

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/11/elon-musk-slashed-tw...

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/nov/28/chinese-b...

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/twitte...

HRW points out the general problem here, predictably it came to pass less than a month later lol.

https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/11/02/why-twitter-under-elon-m...

>>awb+OH
He also leveraged a bunch of his tesla holdings to make the purchase. As his actions repeatedly make the TLSA price fall, there is risk of a margin call and him having to forfeit his collateralized shares.

Will be pretty funny if he loses control of Tesla.