Mashable: “Elon Musk’s X lets users sort replies to find more relevant comments”

The latter two reply sorting options are pretty straightforward. “Most recent” shows replies in chronological order from newest to oldest. “Most liked” shows the replies with most likes first. Blue check accounts appear to have completely lost any advantage that the paid subscription provided them when selecting either of these two menu options.

It’s unclear exactly how X is determining how to sort posts via the “most relevant” option. However, it appears to be the same sorting method as the previous default. Blue checks do still appear to be prioritized in this view.

Any user can change the reply sorting options on any post that they view, not just their own posts.

Matt Binder

I’ve noticed this change a few days before this article, first on the Twitter web site, later in the Android app as well. Slightly impressive that the company is now shipping features simultaneously on the web and in its apps, whereas for years the standard for most tech giants was to test and launch features on iOS first, with the web and Android distant seconds. A lack of polish is however manifest in small details like different labels for the choices on the web and in apps (in the Android app, ‘Most relevant’ is called ‘Trending replies’). Unfortunately, this new feature is per post rather than saved globally on your account, meaning you can’t (yet?) choose your preferred reply sorting setting and have it automatically applied on each reply section, instead you need to switch modes on each new tweet.

augment: “The Threads Creator Paradox”

Their money flow also speaks the same language. They’ve started various influencer programs that push Instagram creators (read: “celebrity” creators) to post on Threads with a promise of $5K if they get 10,000 views. They’re going for big celebrities like Taylor Swift, who, quite frankly, doesn’t care about the platform whatsoever.

With that, I have two simple questions for Meta:

1. Why are native creators who bet your platform on day one not getting financially incentivized for the labor they put in to make your platform worth visiting?
2. Why do you think that photo and video creators who, as Deirdre Assenza would say, spam and scram, will do well on a microblogging platform?

And herein lies the Threads creator paradox: Meta believes that the grass is greener if they inject creators from one site to another while ignoring that the creators who succeed on Threads are nothing like the ones on their sister site and are certainly not traditional celebrities. In fact, if they want to inject the kind of creators who succeed on Threads from platforms they own, they’re likely to find more ideal users who run Facebook Groups—community builders who engage and give space to their group members.

Anuj Ahooja

Interesting critique of Meta’s approach to Threads from someone who seems to be a lot more engaged with the platform than me. Although the parallel to Facebook Groups, if accurate, makes me even less inclined to give Threads a chance.

Platformer: “Adam Mosseri on the first year of Threads”

But my hope is that whether using Threads or Instagram or Twitter or Tik Tok or YouTube, or whatever it is, that reach is not an end, but it is a means to an end. Because ideally, you are clear with yourself about what you’re trying to get out of the platform. Are you trying to sell tickets to your gigs because you’re a musician? Are you trying to advance a cause because you’re an activist? Are you trying to just raise awareness around your art if you’re an artist?

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That said, we do care about reach, we do try to grow reach. My advice is — and I think what a lot of people don’t realize, because a lot of people are coming over from Instagram — they don’t realize how important the reply game is. If you’re really trying to grow your presence, you should reply much more than you post. And the sum of all your replies is about as valuable as the sum of all the value of all your posts.

When people treat it, like, I’m just going to post and then move on with my day and then post again in a couple days and move on with my day — that’s not what it’s designed for. If it was for that, we wouldn’t have built it as a separate app — we would have built it in Instagram. But we built it so that the reply was as important as the original post — so that you could facilitate, when you’re lucky, these great conversations, which by the way helps with discovery.

Casey Newton

So… the secret recipe for reach on Threads is to become a ‘reply guy’?!

Pirate Wires: “The End of Social Media: An Interview with Jack Dorsey”

And then, as you know, Elon backed off [on the acquisition], and that disaster happened [laughs], until he finally bought it, which was the worst timeline ever. But throughout all that, it became more and more evident that Bluesky had a lot of great ideas. And they’re ideas I believe in. I think the internet needs a decentralized protocol for social media. I think Elon needs it. I think X needs it. I think it removes liability for the company, to separate those layers.

But what happened is, people started seeing Bluesky as something to run to, away from Twitter. It’s the thing that’s not Twitter, and therefore it’s great. And Bluesky saw this exodus of people from Twitter show up, and it was a very, very common crowd.

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I’m impressed with the iterations of the algorithm that they’re doing. I think it’s generally really good work. My only ask is to open it up even more and let people choose what algorithm they want to use, even write their own algorithms to filter all the conversations. To me, that would give users ultimate agency, and ultimate freedom. Because this whole ‘freedom of speech, not reach’, is yet another tool of censorship in the end, because the algorithm is determining reach. If you truly believe in the freedom of speech, you gotta go to the heart of where it’s now being decided. And that’s not the policy, it’s the actual algorithm itself.

Mike Solana

On some level, I admire Jack’s commitment to decentralization and his idealism around freedom of speech. Alas, we live in the real world, not in some abstract, platonic realm of ideas, and thus we need to compromise and accept constraints in most situations – any ideal can devolve into delusion if it becomes mired by absolutism and does not recognize its inherent limitations.

New York Magazine: “Inside Elon Musk’s ‘Extremely Hardcore’ Twitter”

On Musk’s first full day in charge, October 28, the executive assistants sent Twitter engineers a Slack message at the behest of the Goons: The boss wanted to see their code. Employees were instructed to print out 50 pages of code you’ve done in the last 30 days and get ready to show it to Musk in person. Panicked engineers started hunting around the office for printers. Many of the devices weren’t functional, having sat unused for two years during the pandemic. Eventually, a group of executive assistants offered to print some engineers’ code for them if they would send the file as a PDF.

Within a couple of hours, the Goons’ assistants sent out a new missive to the team: UPDATE: Stop printing, it read. Please be ready to show your recent code (within last 30-60 preferably) on your computer. If you have already printed, please shred in the bins on SF-Tenth. Thank you!

Zoë Schiffer, Casey Newton, Alex Heath

So much has happened since Elon Musk begrudgingly took over Twitter that one could almost draft a novel just by citing story headlines. I had intended to compile a list of them as a blog post, but I gave up as they kept piling on with no end in sight. Even as the agitation settled down somewhat after six months or so, the stream of failures and foolish ideas from Musk never stopped. Instead, I will focus on my two main conclusions from this utterly pointless and fully preventable fiasco – though I’m not certain these count as separate, as they both relate to the prevailing narratives in the media and how they distort perceptions and ultimately cloud underlying facts.

The Verge: “Threads launches for nearly half a billion more users in Europe”

Meta’s Twitter competitor, Threads, is now available in the European Union, CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced. Today we’re opening Threads to more countries in Europe, Zuckerberg wrote in a post on Threads. The launch follows the service’s debut in the US and over 100 other countries across the world, including the UK, in July 2023. But until now, Threads hasn’t been available to the 448 million people living in the EU, and the company has even blocked EU-based users from accessing the service via VPN.

To coincide with today’s launch, Meta is giving users in the region the ability to browse Threads without needing a profile. Actually posting or interacting with content will still require an Instagram account, however. The move was earlier reported by The Wall Street Journal.

Jon Porter

Looks like I was right that Threads would launch in the European Union before having full ActivityPub compatibility. Threads is starting to test this, but it’s limited and one-sided at this stage, meaning you can’t post from other ActivityPub networks to Threads, nor move your account between services – a cynic might say this is a great tactic to improve the reach of Threads posts while giving nothing in return to the wider fediverse.

Export your Twitter archive – and practical ways to use it

As many feared previously, under Elon Musk’s management Twitter has been in a perpetual state of disarray, to the point of having its former identity erased when Musk decided to rebrand the site as X. Currently there doesn’t seem to be a clear alternative on the horizon, despite numerous attempts with different approaches. The constant erosion of the platform, and various rumors that Musk considers removing free accounts, have made me reflect on my options when this site – inevitably – goes dark. While I obviously can’t do anything to prevent it, like any other user I can at least backup my data. I gather links and various information in my Twitter likes, so this data is particularly important to keep for future reference.

The process is fairly straightforward: on the home page in the left-hand menu under ‘More’ go to ‘Settings and privacy’, then ‘Your account’ and finally ‘Download an archive of your data’. After confirming with your password and a verification code by email, Twitter will start generating the archive and will notify you with an in-app notification when it’s available for download. You receive a .zip file which can be quite large and contains a lot of files – mine is over 900MB and has more than 12,000 files.

Where’s Your Ed At: “The End of the Honest Internet”

Threads lacks any of the magic of a new social network because it already built its own caste system. If you had a big Instagram following, it automatically guaranteed you a big Threads following, except the biggest accounts on Instagram do not produce the kind of content that makes a network like Threads interesting to use. Twitter’s value was that your thoughts could theoretically stand toe-to-toe with a celebrity or influencer’s. By cramming popular accounts into the network from day one, Meta has decided who will be popular.

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Threads isn’t built for you to talk to other people — it’s built to inject insipid “content” into your life and interfere with as much of the human experience as possible. Perhaps it’s because Zuckerberg already saw how unprofitable Twitter is and decided the only way to do this would be to make a significantly worse experience.

More fundamentally, Threads isn’t a social network. It’s a marketing channel for the least-interesting people on Earth. It’s exactly what you’d expect of a text-based Instagram — a mediocre algorithmic nightmare of content slop that barely resembles entertainment.

Ed Zitron

Harsh words for a product that’s barely a week old – a reflection of current times when people are treated to more engagement for quick and radical takes. To include Twitter in some idealized ‘honest internet’ is a gross exaggeration – people may be more authentic there, but there’s no shortage of self-promotion, propaganda, and misinformation, just like elsewhere. I think we can acknowledge the unique Twitter culture pre-Musk without placing it on a pedestal that it never earned.

Independent.ie: “No Instagram Threads app in the EU”

Sources close to Meta said that the tech giant has refrained from rolling the service out in the EU because of what the company believes is a lack of clarity contained in the EU’s Digital Markets Act. Under the Act, companies such as Meta become “gatekeepers”, with restrictions on how they mingle users’ personal data.

The new Threads platform is designed to import data from Instagram, including behavioural and advertising information.

In its US format, the platform tells users that it will collect a wide variety of data from users, including health, financial information, browsing histories, location, purchases, contacts, search history and sensitive information.

In the EU, Meta has been prevented from launching advertising services on Whatsapp that uses data from Facebook or Instagram. The tech giant is allowed to mingle the two data streams in the US, which has weaker privacy laws.

Adrian Weckler

As expected, Meta’s Twitter replica launched last week to a fulminant start, reaching 70 million signups in a single day (although 95 million posts and 190 million likes as it reached 30 million sign-ups doesn’t seem that impressive when you consider it translates into an average of 3 posts and 6 likes per user). A less expected aspect of this launch: how the app was missing for the entire European Union…

Café Lob-On: “Why did the #TwitterMigration fail?”

Mastodon is at risk of falling into the trap that a lot of free/open source software does, where the idea of the software being “free as in speech” is expected to outweigh or explain away deficiencies in its usefulness. However, this ignores three salient facts:

• Most people don’t give a thruppenny fuck about their freedom to view and edit the source code of the software they use, which they would not know how to do even if they cared;
• Most people are not ideologically opposed to the notion of proprietary software, and cannot be convinced to be because it is simply not important to them and cannot be explained in terms that are important to them; and
• When given the choice between a tool which is immediately useful for achieving some sort of goal but conflicts with some kind of ideological standpoint, and a tool which is not as useful but they agree with ideologically, they will probably choose the former.

Bloonface

The (now imminent) launch of Meta’s newest Twitter-like product based on the decentralized protocol ActivityPub has sparked a weirdly virulent reaction among some Mastodon instances, the other network built on the protocol and moonlighting as a Twitter alternative. The instances decided to pre-emptively block Meta’s new entry; this would prevent Threads – and by association Meta – from accessing posts on these instances, but is also effectively shutting these communities off from this newcomer with a great potential to scale.

Platformer: “Instagram’s co-founders are mounting a comeback”

Artifact — the name represents the merging of articles, facts, and artificial intelligence — is opening up its waiting list to the public today. The company plans to let users in quickly, Systrom says. You can sign up yourself here; the app is available for both Android and iOS.

The simplest way to understand Artifact is as a kind of TikTok for text, though you might also call it Google Reader reborn as a mobile app, or maybe even a surprise attack on Twitter. The app opens to a feed of popular articles chosen from a curated list of publishers ranging from leading news organizations like the New York Times to small-scale blogs about niche topics. Tap on articles that interest you and Artifact will serve you similar posts and stories in the future, just as watching videos on TikTok’s For You page tunes its algorithm over time.

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TikTok’s innovation was to show you stuff using only algorithmic predictions, regardless of who your friends are or who you followed. It soon became the most downloaded app in the world.

Artifact represents an effort to do the same thing, but for text.

I saw that shift and I was like, oh, that’s the future of social, Systrom said. These unconnected graphs; these graphs that are learned rather than explicitly created. And what was funny to me is as I looked around, I was like, man, why isn’t this happening everywhere in social? Why is Twitter still primarily follow-based? Why is Facebook?

Casey Newton

Interesting concept; it seems Twitter’s turbulent present and uncertain future are opening up niches for competitors. I would certainly love a valid alternative to Twitter for news discovery, as Mastodon doesn’t seem that appealing to me – or fit for this purpose.

The Wall Street Journal: “Instagram challenges BeReal and adds Notes Short-Message Feature”

Instagram’s Candid Stories still prompts users once a day and includes a timestamp so friends know when you posted. Unlike BeReal, however, users can enhance their daily posts with text or squiggles, and can opt out of the daily alert whenever they would like. (They also aren’t marked tardy.) Instagram previously enabled the dual-camera function, which simultaneously uses front and back lenses.

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The new features are intended to give users more ways to engage with people they know, says Tessa Lyons-Laing, director of product management at Instagram.

Notes—the only announced feature now hitting the app—lets users share their thoughts in a 60-character text post with close friends or people who follow them back. The note appears at the top of recipients’ inboxes and invites them to respond before it disappears in 24 hours.

Cordilia James

Barely a week after reports that Meta employees were brainstorming how to build the next Twitter, one of the proposed features called Instagram Notes is seemingly ready for public rollout!

Galaxy Brain: “Welcome to Geriatric Social Media”

I’ve been trying to talk myself into the social-media death-spiral idea, but it feels like the wrong framework to describe what is essentially just an evolution of the way people use the internet. To suggest that momentary stalls or plateaus, or even declines in platforms, spell certain death is, to some degree, to buy into Silicon Valley and Wall Street’s notion that anything other than perpetual hockey-stick growth is a death knell (and I find that outlook generally toxic and grating).

There are a few things that I think are probably going on, instead. The first is that some platforms just have a natural network decay. Facebook was, at first, novel and exclusive (I got an invite from a friend who was in college! Very exciting!). Then, it grew and took on a different kind of utility (you could find all kinds of people on it from your past, or whom you met at a party!). Soon, every human you knew was on it, and, overnight, it morphed into a lot of people’s main news source. The loudest, angriest people—many of whom didn’t quite understand how to talk to people online—made it an unpleasant place to be, so a lot of people left or stopped engaging, and the loudest voices got louder.

The same thing is happening on Twitter. One thing I’ve noticed a lot is that a lot of my favorite power users have become power lurkers. They haven’t given up the platform, but they realize that posting is mostly a losing game full of professional liabilities, endless and futile fights, and diminishing returns. And that’s grim because, for those who do post, we’re much more likely to encounter the loudest, angriest, most politically charged voices in response, which in turn makes the place less fun to be around!

Charlie Warzel

I find this notion of the impending doom of social media hilarious. While a minority is arguing about the supposed death of social networks on Twitter, regular people are perfectly happy sharing and chatting over private messages. The only ones caring about this non-issue are those who obsess over status and signaling: politicians, celebrities and journalists, companies looking for their next incremental sale.

Time: “The Twitter Whistleblower Needs You to Trust Him”

Zatko had come from a long line of jobs where he had free rein to tear up organizational structures and prioritize security above all else. But at Twitter, current and former colleagues say, he found himself in a different environment: navigating tense internal politics at a corporation bent on boosting revenue, without support from his superiors. Some employees caught up in the tumult perceived Zatko to be a figure hired by then CEO Jack Dorsey for publicity reasons, stepping on the toes of qualified colleagues with more institutional knowledge. Technically brilliant and morally rigid, Zatko was an iconoclast stepping into a corporate bureaucracy. It’s like asking a doctor who’s been trained to do brain surgery to suddenly become a podiatrist, says a former Twitter colleague.

The polarized reactions to Zatko’s disclosures illustrate just how atypical a tech whistle-blower he is. Last year, Frances Haugen, a former Facebook product manager, disclosed tens of thousands of pages of internal company documents that revealed a company prioritizing profits over user safety. But readers didn’t have to take Haugen’s word for it; they could read the words of Facebook’s own safety teams. Zatko is different. As a former senior executive, he had a bird’s-eye view into Twitter’s decision-making, ultimately responsible for hundreds of staff in some of Twitter’s most high-priority work streams. But he didn’t release the same breadth of documentation as Haugen; while Zatko supplied some exhibits to support his claims, including internal emails, his partially redacted disclosures rely largely on his own credibility as one of the most celebrated figures in cybersecurity. He is implicitly asking the public to trust that his version of events is the correct one, and that Twitter is lying.

Billy Perrigo, Andrew R. Chow & Vera Bergengruen

That Twitter has major security holes was pretty evident back in 2017 when an employee deactivated Donald Trump’s personal account on their last day of work; and again in 2020 when teenagers temporarily hacked the accounts of Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Elon Musk, and other celebrities. As troubling as it may be to think that these security flaws remain uncorrected, I have a hard time believing Peiter Zatko’s allegations in the absence of hard evidence. Some of them don’t make much sense; others, such as regarding bots and spam, actually support Twitter’s position and reveal Zatko’s superficial understanding of internal processes.

Salon: “Elon Musk, Twitter and the future: His long-term vision is even weirder than you think”

In brief, the longtermists claim that if humanity can survive the next few centuries and successfully colonize outer space, the number of people who could exist in the future is absolutely enormous. According to the “father of Longtermism”, Nick Bostrom, there could be something like 10^58 human beings in the future, although most of them would be living “happy lives” inside vast computer simulations powered by nanotechnological systems designed to capture all or most of the energy output of stars. (Why Bostrom feels confident that all these people would be “happy” in their simulated lives is not clear. Maybe they would take digital Prozac or something?) Other longtermists, such as Hilary Greaves and Will MacAskill, calculate that there could be 10^45 happy people in computer simulations within our Milky Way galaxy alone. That’s a whole lot of people, and longtermists think you should be very impressed.

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So the question is: If you want to do “the most good”, should you focus on helping people who are alive right now or these vast numbers of possible people living in computer simulations in the far future? The answer is, of course, that you should focus on these far-future digital beings.

Phil Torres

In my previous linked article, the author writes at some point that he believes Elon Mask wants to do some flavor of good. And here we have some clues as to what Musk considers ‘good’ for the future of humanity. I would take this with some grain of salt, as we can’t definitely know what his plans and expectations are, but seems plausible considering the kind of projects he’s involved in.

Mike Industries: “Anchors Away”

So in short: More callousness at the company, bad. More callousness on the service, bad.

I’m not sure why we would expect a man who has shown zero ability to empathize with anyone to improve either of those situations. In fact, I think we should expect both to get much, much worse if this transaction ends up going through (which I’m not yet convinced it will).

One other distinction I think is important is that I don’t think Musk’s callousness crosses over into hate or nihilism. No nihilist would work as hard as he has over the course of his lifetime. I actually believe the guy wants to do some flavor of good. I just think his definition of “doing good” is measured only by the accomplishments and not the damage; especially the emotional damage, which again he has openly admitted to not being able to detect or understand. It’s similar to the way I have heard certain Facebook executives describe their service: it’s a “net positive” to society. As if that distinction only requires helping 100 people after you hurt 99.

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If you agree with me about those three factors, there are a few things you can do about it. You can try and solve them, you can leave them alone and make your service more popular in other ways, or you can just be cool with the idea that Twitter doesn’t need to be as big as its contemporaries.

The company has actually tried versions of all of the above. They’ve made a TON of progress on curbing abuse (although it’s never enough unless you hit zero), they’ve made the service more visual (although there is a limit before the nature of the service changes), and they’ve made it a bit easier to connect with friends. If you ask me, it’s always been that last one that holds the most promise. Twitter — like many things in life — is just so much better when your friends are there.

Mike Davidson

A thoughtful and balanced article on Twitter’s past and future from a former employee. I agree with most of his remarks, especially regarding Elon Musk. There’s a long-held view that people who work at Twitter don’t really understand Twitter, and I think the author also misunderstands Twitter’s fundamental appeal when he argues that it is just so much better when your friends are there.

Reuters: “Musk told banks he will rein in Twitter pay, make money from tweets”

Bloomberg News reported earlier on Thursday that Musk specifically mentioned job cuts as part of his pitch to the banks. One of the sources said that Musk will not make decisions on job cuts until he assumes ownership of the company later this year. He went ahead with the acquisition without having access to confidential details on the company’s financial performance and headcount.

Musk told the banks he also plans to develop features to grow business revenue, including new ways to make money out of tweets that contain important information or go viral, the sources said.

Ideas he brought up included charging a fee when a third-party website wants to quote or embed a tweet from verified individuals or organizations.

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Musk has also lined a up a new chief executive for Twitter, one of the sources added, declining to reveal the identity of that person. He told Twitter’s chairman Bret Taylor earlier this month that he does not have confidence in the San Francisco-based company’s management. Parag Agrawal, who was named Twitter’s chief executive in November, is expected to remain in his role until the sale of the company to Musk is completed.

Krystal Hu & Anirban Sen

The drama surrounding Elon Musk’ deal to acquire Twitter continues, and will probably stay a hot topic until the deal comes through, and afterwards… That he’s planning layoffs is hardly a surprise – he already started harassing prominent Twitter executives on Twitter, no doubt hoping they’ll quit before he fires them, saving him from paying their severance packages – nor is his lack of confidence in the current CEO – I continue to suspect he will seek to reinstate Jack Dorsey.

Musings on Markets: “Elon’s Twitter Play: Valuation and Corporate Governance Consequences”

The problem that Twitter’s management will face in mounting a case that Twitter is worth more, if it is run differently, is that they have been the custodians of the company for the last decade, and have been unable or unwilling to deliver these changes. Shareholders in Twitter will welcome management’s willingness to consider alternative business models, but the timing makes it feel more like a deathbed conversion rather than a well thought through plan. Elon Musk’s problem, on the Twitter deal, is a different one. If you think Jack Dorsey was stretching the limits of his time by running two companies, I am not sure how to characterize what Musk will be doing, if he acquires Twitter, since he does have a trillion dollar company to run, in Tesla, not to mention SpaceX, the Boring company and a host of other ventures. In addition, Musk’s unpredictability makes it difficult to judge what his end game is, at least with Twitter, since he could do anything from selling his position tomorrow to bulldozing his way through a poison pill, taking Twitter down with him. I know that there are question of how Musk finance the deal and whether he can secure funding, but of all of the impediments to this takeover, those might be the easiest to overcome. The fact that Twitter’s stock price has stayed stubbornly below Musk’s offering price suggests that investors have their doubts about Musk’s true intentions, and whether this deal will go through.

Aswath Damodaran

A valid point that I have thought about multiple times: people loved to criticize Jack Dorsey for being a part-time CEO, but nobody complained about Musk running God-knows how many companies and projects simultaneously. If I were to speculate, it was probably because Musk is viewed as highly involved in everything, a workaholic micromanager with no personal life, and Americans love to adulate such role models, despite promoting an unhealthy lifestyle. I for one do not envy the pressure Twitter employees will find themselves in should this deal go through.

Every: “Elon is Right: Twitter should Open Up the Algorithm”

As everybody knows, Elon Musk wants to buy the company, and one of the ideas he’s pushing is to open-source the algorithm that decides how tweets are ranked in all of our timelines. Whether or not the sale goes through (seems unlikely), I actually think this is a great idea. In fact I would go further and argue Twitter should not only open-source their algorithm so we can all see how it works, I think they should create an open marketplace for algorithms where anyone can build their own, and use algorithms created by others.

For example I’d want to try an algorithm that attempts to prioritize nuanced conversations about important topics. Maybe someone else would want algorithms to find mind-expanding threads, savage dunks, or thirst traps of hot new snax.

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Would this transform society? No. Would it “unlock Twitter’s true potential”? Probably not, tbh.

But I do think it would be a solid step towards making Twitter a better and more fun place for everyone, and I think it could rebuild some marginal trust in Twitter as an institution, by demanding less of it. It would give more control to users, and move Twitter back towards its pirate roots of operating more like an open protocol, while still protecting against the downsides of full decentralization.

Nathan Baschez

If feels like the notion of open-sourcing Twitter’s algorithm has been around forever, and now that Elon Musk has developed a malign interest in the company, he adopted it as one of his solutions to ‘fix’ the site. It strikes me as the type of thought that, when you think about them for more than five seconds, you realize they’re a rare combination of completely preposterous and utterly ineffective.

Bloomberg: “Elon Musk Bought Some Twitter”

Look this all makes complete sense, obvious, intuitive, simple sense. If you are the richest person in the world, and annoying, and you constantly play a computer game, and you get a lot of enjoyment and a sense of identity from that game and are maybe a little addicted, then at some point you might have some suggestions for improvements in the game. So you might leave comments and email the company that makes the game saying “hey you should try my ideas”. And the company might ignore you (or respond politely but not move fast enough for your liking). It might occur to you: “Look, I am the richest person in the world; how much could this game company possibly cost? I should just buy it and change the game however I want.” Even if your complaints are quite minor, why shouldn’t you get to play exactly the game you want? Even if you have no complaints, why not own the game you love, just to make sure it continues to be exactly what you want? The game is Twitter, the richest person in the world is Elon Musk, and:

Elon Musk has taken a 9.2% stake in Twitter Inc. to become the platform’s biggest shareholder, a week after hinting he might shake up the social media industry.

Matt Levine

I read this news last week with a sense of dread, fully expecting Elon Musk to come in guns blazing and pressure Twitter to match his wild random ideas about how the platform should operate. The story quickly became crazier still, from Musk doing some sneaky stock market manipulation by delaying to file a form, to Twitter offering him a seat on the board in exchange for a limit on his stake in the company, to Musk announcing today that he will not be joining the board after all…