Musk warns twitter may have to declare bankruptcy

[solado]

On 11/18/2022 at 6:08 PM, Majinhoju said:

I'd be amazed if they recover from this.

Don't threaten me with a good time & hopes.

 

18 minutes ago, suicidalfranco said:

how much staff does it take to remove CP from your platform?

 

Considering the disproportionate amount of people on twitter who promote it, a lot of staff who actually care which seems to be very few at current considering the rot and degeneracy on the platform that seems to be allowed daily.

[Taf the Ghost]

@suicidalfrancoIt was around 2015 I got asked for some help by some contacts adjacent to the space. It's unfortunately why I know too much about the disaster fire that is/was Twitter's old management. Only thing really accomplished in that period was driving the *open slave selling* a lot deeper into the platform or into other ones. But most work in either that for the child protection space always ran into brick walls with Twitter. Now, most of the issues were either in the Gulf or SE Asia, but I believe it'd started to be more of a problem as several African countries joined up. (Side bar: Ugandan & Nigeria twitter are fire, haha.)

 

Twitter was a bunch of fiefdoms, and it seemed like most foreign offices were basically independent with little actual oversight. But that wasn't confirmed until Musk started firing everyone. Now, we do know they were basically operating on their own, which means several of the Twitter offices were staffed with people that should be spending a lot of time in prison. Though it also does explain the dynamics going on a lot more and how things were allowed to be so bad.

I suppose its good to have an explanation why reporting the content would normally get the reporting accounts banned. If the regional offices are near complete autonomy, no one at HQ was going to change their decisions because it would mean they'd have to take responsibility for any issues. Doing work was clearly not a part of the job at Twitter HQ.

[suicidalfranco]

7 minutes ago, Taf the Ghost said:

@suicidalfrancoIt was around 2015 I got asked for some help by some contacts adjacent to the space. It's unfortunately why I know too much about the disaster fire that is/was Twitter's old management. Only thing really accomplished in that period was driving the *open slave selling* a lot deeper into the platform or into other ones. But most work in either that for the child protection space always ran into brick walls with Twitter. Now, most of the issues were either in the Gulf or SE Asia, but I believe it'd started to be more of a problem as several African countries joined up. (Side bar: Ugandan & Nigeria twitter are fire, haha.)

 

Twitter was a bunch of fiefdoms, and it seemed like most foreign offices were basically independent with little actual oversight. But that wasn't confirmed until Musk started firing everyone. Now, we do know they were basically operating on their own, which means several of the Twitter offices were staffed with people that should be spending a lot of time in prison. Though it also does explain the dynamics going on a lot more and how things were allowed to be so bad.

I suppose its good to have an explanation why reporting the content would normally get the reporting accounts banned. If the regional offices are near complete autonomy, no one at HQ was going to change their decisions because it would mean they'd have to take responsibility for any issues. Doing work was clearly not a part of the job at Twitter HQ.

that sound like a believable insight

and if true, im more baffled by the people shocked at musk decisions than at twitter for being a literal cesspool before musk. that they are more eager to see twitter crash and burn now compared to before when CP and terrorist recruitment were the norm.

but hey

 

 

this is what productivity looks like. an adult version of a child's day care

[Kisai]

1 hour ago, suicidalfranco said:

how much staff does it take to remove CP from your platform?

Ask 4chan.

1 hour ago, suicidalfranco said:

7000 is clearly not enough .... oh wait it can be done for far less? it's as if twitter was bloated with mostly useless people that brought nothing of value to the company.

I would't believe for a second that there was "7000 people doing nothing", it's more likely that certain departments (eg copyright, and law enforcement) are generally doing nothing until something is reported.

 

Even when I worked for the auction website, work was a bottomless pit. If you finished one queue, you moved onto another queue. The way the business logic worked was that prohibited (illegal as in things like guns and CEI) was prioritized, then copyright infringement, then keyword spam, with the stuff at the bottom of the queue was things like "no item" (air guitar's, jar of air) and other intangible trash like ebooks, which only served to manipulate feedback.

 

1 hour ago, suicidalfranco said:

And now i'll wait for the obligatory i must be a "musk fan" accusation,

Who cares. There's only one person in this thread that seems unapologetically willing to kiss Elon's behind, and again, like I said. Elon does not need anyone's help. He's rich enough he doesn't need random weirdos on tech forums defending his decisions.

 

[Beerzerker]

1 minute ago, Kisai said:

Who cares. There's only one person in this thread that seems unapologetically willing to kiss Elon's behind, and again, like I said. Elon does not need anyone's help. He's rich enough he doesn't need random weirdos on tech forums defending his decisions.

 

You are correct in that we can argue for or against him all we want - Nothing we say will change anything about it.
It's gonna be what he wants it to be, that's something we don't get to decide so..... Argue away for all the good/bad it's gonna do about it.

I'm gonna stop here and leave the rest of the arguing to whomever want to continue it.
 

[Taf the Ghost]

@suicidalfrancoIt's come out that Spain Twitter was something of a mess because of some personal animosity among like 2 staff and big users. It's been known for a while that non-Latin language Twitter was a lot better. It was thought because their auto-mod tools weren't trained on other languages, but it now more seems like it was an issue of simply local settings. Twitter of India was somehow more politically involved than Twitter HQ, only some of the information was translated over to English.

 

I'd heard Vietnamese Twitter was always the best, but I don't speak or read the language so I simply don't know on that one. Japanese Twitter has suddenly stopped being Kpop all the time and become nothing but Anime and Dramas.

 

Reality is that what has always killed Twitter is they viewed themselves as a tool of information control, rather than an information pathway for PR. Hilariously, Musk's takeover might accelerate local Laws against that type of information management, now that only a blind fool can ignore what was going on. Having pure A/B examples helps matters.

 

But, all told, this is why Twitter was always valuable. Those Network Effects are massive. Musk now have real information power compared to his peers, and that really matters to those folks.

[suicidalfranco]

2 hours ago, Kisai said:

Ask 4chan

rumours say 4chan has 104 staff members, and CP is literally inexistent on it, or gets removed the moment it pops up on a thread. Even posts surrounding the netflix original movie Cuties where classed as CP and instantly removed.  Meanwhile twitter let it all linger till now

2 hours ago, Kisai said:

I would't believe for a second that there was "7000 people doing nothing", it's more likely that certain departments (eg copyright, and law enforcement) are generally doing nothing until something is reported.

 

Even when I worked for the auction website, work was a bottomless pit. If you finished one queue, you moved onto another queue. The way the business logic worked was that prohibited (illegal as in things like guns and CEI) was prioritized, then copyright infringement, then keyword spam, with the stuff at the bottom of the queue was things like "no item" (air guitar's, jar of air) and other intangible trash like ebooks, which only served to manipulate feedback.

big difference between an online auction house and a SN with no tangible product

[wanderingfool2]

3 hours ago, Kisai said:

Who cares. There's only one person in this thread that seems unapologetically willing to kiss Elon's behind, and again, like I said. Elon does not need anyone's help. He's rich enough he doesn't need random weirdos on tech forums defending his decisions.

Let me guess you are talking about me?  I only defend actions that I see people needlessly taking the other side on spewing only things like half truths and childish name calling of someone you don't like

 

The prime example being the "$13" billion in debt that Twitter has, despite things like half it being a bridge loan that appears to already being paid back.  Or the fact that everyone claims the advertisers are jumping ship without a single mention that they were doing so before hand.  Musk bought a company that had massive amounts of issues, and people before hand were already saying was overstaffed and under effective.  You can even look at my hatred towards that by looking at my posts regarding some of the twitter controversies prior to Musk's purchase.

 

What I've said isn't wrong, and other people feel this way as well.  If you are massively overstaffed and terrible culture, offering a work harder is a way to change the culture, advertisers were bailing before hand, Twitter technically could make a profit that justifies $44B (even in that post I prefaced it with that I don't think it was worth it), and again the $13 billion debt people keep quoting is wrong/still speculation on debt held.

 

3 hours ago, Kisai said:

I would't believe for a second that there was "7000 people doing nothing", it's more likely that certain departments (eg copyright, and law enforcement) are generally doing nothing until something is reported.

 

Even when I worked for the auction website, work was a bottomless pit. If you finished one queue, you moved onto another queue. The way the business logic worked was that prohibited (illegal as in things like guns and CEI) was prioritized, then copyright infringement, then keyword spam, with the stuff at the bottom of the queue was things like "no item" (air guitar's, jar of air) and other intangible trash like ebooks, which only served to manipulate feedback.

See this is exactly the type of quote that screams not willing to do critical thinking on this subject.  Taf's post literally says being known for a decade.

 

Even in this thread I've mentioned that advertisers were bailing because their ads got put next to this kind of content.

 

There's topics on here that show Twitter did absolutely nothing when contacted.  The prime example is a 13 year old child who reported a video of themselves to twitter posted by someone else.  Twitter chose to do nothing, they provided picture ID proving they were the one from the video and asked for it's removal, they went to the cops who asked for the removal and they didn't.  It wasn't until Homeland security stepped in did Twitter remove it.

 

Twitter was incompetent at content moderation, and there's no amount of trying to justify that they weren't informed of this stuff.  This is exactly why advertisers and such had originally left as well...because Twitter didn't care about having ads next to users who spread that stuff....because to twitter those people generated MDAU's, which is what Twitter sold to advertisers.

[Godlygamer23]

On 11/13/2022 at 1:40 PM, suicidalfranco said:

since when is a forum a social media network

Just putting this out there:

Quote

an online community of people with a common interest who use a website or other technologies to communicate with each other and share information, resources, etc.:

https://www.dictionary.com/browse/social-network

Based on that definition, forums are a social network.

[oali24]

6 hours ago, Arika S said:

Careful, you're gonna get the same treatment i did and be called a trump supporter, despite both of us being Australian.

are you saying that you agree with his reinstatement, not accusing you of anything, just genuinely curious.

[Forbidden Wafer]

40 minutes ago, oali24 said:

are you saying that you agree with his reinstatement, not accusing you of anything, just genuinely curious.

Considering he already recovered 86 million followers, I believe most people agree with his reinstatement. 

[oali24]

3 minutes ago, Forbidden Wafer said:

Considering he already recovered 86 million followers, I believe most people agree with his reinstatement. 

86 million out of who? the world population, the US population, Turmp himself (he doesn't even want to return). Musk is completely arbitrarily deciding who gets blocked (people mocking him) and who gets reinstated (trump) without setting any rules, this is completely unacceptable. their should be clear rules and they're the only ones that should be enforced.

[Forbidden Wafer]

7 minutes ago, oali24 said:

86 million out of who? the world population, the US population, Turmp himself (he doesn't even want to return). Musk is completely arbitrarily deciding who gets blocked (people mocking him) and who gets reinstated (trump) without setting any rules, this is completely unacceptable. their should be clear rules and they're the only ones that should be enforced.

Of Twitter users (440 million I believe).

Well, Trump can delete his account if he wants to.

As if Twitter previously didn't decide who got shadow banned/banned arbitrarily.

And when people complained about that, what did the corporate blue checkmarks said? Oh, it is a private business, if you don't like it build your own.

[wanderingfool2]

59 minutes ago, oali24 said:

are you saying that you agree with his reinstatement, not accusing you of anything, just genuinely curious.

I hate Trump, but I'm not opposed to reinstatement...or rather, if he wasn't reinstated then the ban-hammer should equally apply to the others making similar comments (which it wasn't).

 

11 minutes ago, oali24 said:

Musk is completely arbitrarily deciding who gets blocked (people mocking him)

Fun fact, impersonation of an account was against TOS prior to Musk.  If a blue checkmark did what they did before they could have potentially been banned.

[oali24]

22 minutes ago, Forbidden Wafer said:

Of Twitter users (440 million I believe).

Well, Trump can delete his account if he wants to.

As if Twitter previously didn't decide who got shadow banned/banned arbitrarily.

And when people complained about that, what did the corporate blue checkmarks said? Oh, it is a private business, if you don't like it build your own.

86 million is not the majority of 440 million.

[HenrySalayne]

24 minutes ago, Forbidden Wafer said:

Of Twitter users (440 million I believe).

If the Twitter userbase somehow grew by 33% overnight, I would believe we have a heavy bot problem on the platform now.

[Majinhoju]

8 hours ago, mr moose said:

Oh no, musk is letting us decide if we want to read trumps tweets.  The sheer unmitigated audacity of him!!  I don't know what's sadder, some of the things trump has said or the fact people don't understand that twitter being the arbiter of what we see is worse.

 

 

I honestly don't care who gets banned or unbanned on twitter. I'm just pointing out that few remaining advertisers Twitter has might jump ship if Elon keeps this up. Regardless, I have my popcorn ready.

[Forbidden Wafer]

9 minutes ago, oali24 said:

86 million is not the majority of 440 million.

And a single person deciding to ban him out of nowhere is the majority of 440 million?

9 minutes ago, HenrySalayne said:

If the Twitter userbase somehow grew by 33% overnight, I would believe we have a heavy bot problem on the platform now.

But it didn't, since it already had 436 million active users in January. https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-networks-ranked-by-number-of-users/

[oali24]

3 minutes ago, Forbidden Wafer said:

And a single person deciding to ban him out of nowhere is the majority of 440 million?

But it didn't, since it already had 436 million active users in January. https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-networks-ranked-by-number-of-users/

he broke the rules of the platform, if I go into a bar and am underage, I get kicked out by the manager even if the majorithy of the other people wanted me to stay.

[Forbidden Wafer]

5 minutes ago, oali24 said:

he broke the rules of the platform

If you are saying that this is the case, then why are you complaining Elon is banning people for breaking the new rules of the platform?

Breaking the law is a completely different matter, and it wasn't the case.

[HenrySalayne]

6 minutes ago, Forbidden Wafer said:

But it didn't, since it already had 436 million active users in January. https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-networks-ranked-by-number-of-users/

That's just an estimate and you will find all kind of different estimates on Statista. Twitter only makes the mDAUs public. And they are around 250 million.

[ravenshrike]

8 hours ago, Taf the Ghost said:

Twitter was a bunch of fiefdoms, and it seemed like most foreign offices were basically independent with little actual oversight. But that wasn't confirmed until Musk started firing everyone.

The change in Twitter Japan's activity was hilarious.

[Taf the Ghost]

1 minute ago, ravenshrike said:

The change in Twitter Japan's activity was hilarious.

Yeah, it would appear Twitter Japan was run by a BTS fan.

[Kisai]

3 hours ago, wanderingfool2 said:

Let me guess you are talking about me?  I only defend actions that I see people needlessly taking the other side on spewing only things like half truths and childish name calling of someone you don't like

Don't confuse devil's advocacy for "i'm digging in my heels because I know I'm wrong, but I want to see how much rope this person wants to hang themselves with", again there are people on this forum who lack the self-awareness that this is a tech forum, it's not 4chan, and acting like a child gets them treated like a child. 

 

 

3 hours ago, wanderingfool2 said:

The prime example being the "$13" billion in debt that Twitter has, despite things like half it being a bridge loan that appears to already being paid back.

Nobody on this forum seems to understand finances, so I've let people talk out their behind about it. None of you know know how any of this works. Those "loans" are how you buy, merge, or sell a company. Elon doesn't go write a 44 billion dollar check to mr.twitter and mr.twitter hands over the keys. This is not a house or car mortgage, this is debt financing, and every company has "debt", and not all debt is bad. It can be to ones advantage to secure a low-interest debt payment financing when interest rates are low, which is what the entire real estate and investment sector does. 

 

3 hours ago, wanderingfool2 said:

 Or the fact that everyone claims the advertisers are jumping ship without a single mention that they were doing so before hand. 

Ad apocalypses happen all the time, See Youtube. There are only two companies that have outsized influences on American companies.

Google

and

Mastercard

 

What Google or Mastercard says, every American company has to comply with or they will not get advertising revenue, or be unable to accept/make payments. However, and I say this with a "I certainly know more than you do on this subject", there is an entire "brand-safe" apocalypse happening right now, and Twitter is only a small part of it. VISA has been harassing creators for years, it's to the point that selling cosplay and artwork is effectively banned by VISA. In the last month, there has been a crackdown on companies that sell anything "adult" natured, pretty much being told by card processors, (eg Stripe, and by extension kofi, patreon, onlyfans, etc.) they can't sell anything but vanilla goods. You know where adult artists market themselves? Twitter.

 

Trying to comply with Googles censorship policies for advertisement's is asinine at best. "This page is demonetized because it has nudity"... there are no photos or illustrations on the page... Oh I see, it's because there was an ad for birth control products on the page. Gee can't have that. I've had both Google and Apple complain about nudity where, at worst you saw a butt crack or cleavage. There is no consistency, what-so-ever, and we should be telling these companies to pound sand, but we can't.

 

3 hours ago, wanderingfool2 said:

 

Musk bought a company that had massive amounts of issues, and people before hand were already saying was overstaffed and under effective.  You can even look at my hatred towards that by looking at my posts regarding some of the twitter controversies prior to Musk's purchase.

So what? If you don't work at Twitter, all you have is hearsay. Sure we can all go "yeah that seems believable" but there are people on this forum that seem to live in a different socio-political sphere who are seeing a different world. It's rare to see  left and right wing people united on dunking on something like twitter or someone like Musk. They may come to that realizion through different means, but they're united in saying "wow Twitter is operated by an idiot."

 

3 hours ago, wanderingfool2 said:

What I've said isn't wrong, and other people feel this way as well.  If you are massively overstaffed and terrible culture, offering a work harder is a way to change the culture,

As opposed to Musk demanding people "grind" now. Sounds to me that there was a better work-life balance before.

 

3 hours ago, wanderingfool2 said:

Even in this thread I've mentioned that advertisers were bailing because their ads got put next to this kind of content.

Advertisers are not the ones "pulling the ads", it's idiots on the left and right seeing something they don't like next to something they like and having a hissy fit. This is not isolated to adult images either. Every time a political ad lands in front of the wrong audience, there will be reports about it to anyone. If anything, election cycles generate the most reports of bad ads, because the people doing the spend for political types are completely tone deaf, and just go "show this ad to everyone in this state", without any any context that the "high value" websites they may be advertising on may be counter to the ad's message in some very messed up ways. Seeing ads for anti-abortion, anti-vaxx, and other anti-intellectual topics on "smart" sites results in lots of complaints. It makes it look like the site is endorsing the ad, when it's really some ad middle-man saw a way to make a quick profit on dumping the ads on the site before they get blocked.

 

Ads are a two-way street. The advertiser may decide what to broadly advertise on, but the sites they advertise on can completely botch that experience in a way that advertisers decide that their ad spend is not worth it, because it results in receiving hate. That's why big advertisers like Coke and Pepsi can be compelled to stop spending on a platform, because they don't want the contagion of "oh coke advertised on the twitter model who also uses lovense sex toys that you can interact with them"

 

 

3 hours ago, wanderingfool2 said:

There's topics on here that show Twitter did absolutely nothing when contacted. 

There are plenty of examples of Twitter doing absolutely nothing. Period. I even showed examples in this thread. I don't need to repeat it. There are people who are stalkers who send absolutely vile, violent images to people to try and shut them up and scare them off the platform. Blocking does squat when they just create a new account every 12 hours.

 

 

3 hours ago, wanderingfool2 said:

 

Twitter was incompetent at content moderation, and there's no amount of trying to justify that they weren't informed of this stuff.  

Water is wet. No site is competent at content moderation without paid staff, and past a certain point, a site scales too large for humans to handle the moderation. Again, I've literately worked for the big auction site in this position, there amount of "work" there is absolutely endless. It's possible to spend the entire day taking down counterfeit listings for Tiffany Jewelry and Pokemon carts and not see anything else and never make it to the keyword spam queues. 

 

Clearly there was a problem of prioritization, or not enough over-lapping staff to manage moderation, but to say "wow 7000 people sat on their ass and did nothing" is likely untrue. There are things I did at the auction site, that I wrote my own automation tools for, and despite that, "that was not good enough" because it's always the human element that is slow, the part where you have to actually investigate things, and not simply click a box that says "take this down"

 

 

 

[HenrySalayne]

20 minutes ago, Kisai said:

Clearly there was a problem of prioritization, or not enough over-lapping staff to manage moderation, but to say "wow 7000 people sat on their ass and did nothing" is likely untrue.

Clearly? We only see the things moderators missed, not the stuff they fished out. You can't conclude that there was a problem with prioritization without knowing the other part of the story.

28 minutes ago, Kisai said:

because it's always the human element that is slow, the part where you have to actually investigate things, and not simply click a box that says "take this down"

Exactly. Tweets are public to everyone. So a much more heterogeneous group of people will read them and probably complain about them. On something like Facebook the community is constituted in mostly homogeneous groups (with group administrations) which will lead to much less complaints overall. Because of this, Twitter just needs a s***load of moderators to even do the bare minimum of filtering.