When I heard that Musk wanted 50 pages of code printed out, I knew the end was coming. That is the most useless metric you could possibly measure by.

The haphazard firings, then the "Please come back" we fucked up. The dismantling of anything resembling moderation on the platform.

The fact people are coming forward and telling tales of an environment being run by an unhinged lunatic with delusions of grandeur doesn't surprise me one bit. This is his shtick.

Though imagine your a DC engineer who got let go from this shitshow, getting a job right now..

"Yeah, nobody is left, but we built such a resilient infrastructure he can unplug entire racks and it'll keep working.. for a while.."

>We worked on ways to improve our toxic-speech-identification algorithms so they would not discriminate against African-American Vernacular English as well as forms of reclaimed speech. All of this depended on rank-and-file employees. Messy as it was, Twitter sometimes seemed to function mostly on goodwill and the dedication of its staff. But it functioned. > >Those days are over. From the announcement of Musk’s bid to the day he walked into the office holding a sink, I watched, horrified, as he slowly killed Twitter’s culture. Debate and constructive dissent was stifled on Slack, leaders accepted their fate or quietly resigned, and Twitter slowly shifted from being a company that cared about the people on the platform to a company that only cares about people as monetizable units. The few days I spent at Musk’s Twitter could best be described as a Lord of the Flies–like test of character as existing leadership crumbled, Musk’s cronies moved in, and his haphazard management—if it could be called that—instilled a sense of fear and confusion. > >Unfortunately, Musk cannot simply be ignored. He has purchased a globally influential and politically powerful seat. We certainly don’t need to speculate on his thoughts about algorithmic ethics. He reportedly fired a top engineer earlier this month for suggesting that his engagement was waning because people were losing interest in him, rather than because of some kind of algorithmic interference. (Musk initially responded to the reporting about how his tweets are prioritized by posting an off-color meme, and today called the coverage “false.”) And his track record is far from inclusive: He has embraced far-right talking points, complained about the “woke mind virus,” and explicitly thrown in his lot with Donald Trump and Ye (formerly Kanye West). > >Devaluing work on algorithmic biases could have disastrous consequences, especially because of how perniciously invisible yet pervasive these biases can become. As the arbiters of the so-called digital town square, algorithmic systems play a significant role in democratic discourse. In 2021, my team published a study showing that Twitter’s content-recommendation system amplified right-leaning posts in Canada, France, Japan, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Our analysis data covered the period right before the 2020 U.S. presidential election, identifying a moment in which social media was a crucial touch point of political information for millions. Currently, right-wing hate speech is able to flow on Twitter in places such as India and Brazil, where radicalized Jair Bolsonaro supporters staged a January 6–style coup attempt. > >Musk’s Twitter is simply a further manifestation of how self-regulation by tech companies will never work, and it highlights the need for genuine oversight. We must equip a broad range of people with the tools to pressure companies into acknowledging and addressing uncomfortable truths about the AI they’re building. Things have to change.

This was an interesting perspective from someone who experienced this shift firsthand. It's certainly worth taking heed of the warning of algorithmic biases that are already baked into many systems. Further, self regulation though laudable, has proven at least in most tech sectors, to be ineffective at best. What we need are regulators who are familiar with key issues that are facing technology as it relates to broader society, but not beholden to tech companies or platforms. This will be tricky going forwards, but if properly administered can bring lasting benefits not just to the platforms, but also to the rest of society as well.

reddit > twitter

“Culture”? It was and still is an echo chamber most of the time for either side. There was no “culture”.

It’s a private company. Who cares. If ppl don’t like it they can choose another platform. Or better yet build their own and not sell.

This is hilarious.

Meh, twitter is still a toxic place and bots so not much changed.

This clown show was great for the rest of the tech companies cause we all got to hire the bright people from Twitter who weren’t going to bend over and accept this nonsense

"Someone I don't like bought the company I worked for, so government should come in and tell him how to run his company"

From where I'm sitting, this is a really weird take. I get that it's upsetting to see the culture of an online space destroyed; that's the reason I rarely visit Twitter any more. It is, indeed, a festering shithole these days.

The idea that regulation would somehow have prevented that, though, is dubious. It's just as likely that regulation would have prevented the culture the writer enjoyed from ever appearing in the first place.

The problem here isn't a lack of regulations; it's a simple matter of one guy being in charge of a popular platform and enacting his own agenda on it (in addition to that one guy having a cult following that includes a disproportionate number of toxic assholes). It's unfortunate that Musk's priority with Twitter seems to mainly be to piss off as many people as possible for clicks (a tactic familiar to anyone who's followed other media for any length time), but how could you possibly regulate that in a way that wouldn't stifle innovation elsewhere?

I just don't see how any attempt to use regulations to enforce user behavior at a government would be anything but a dismal failure. It'd be subject to the priorities of whoever's in charge at the time, and it seems to me that this is one of those cases (and as a flaming liberal it pains me to say this out loud) where free market forces would do far good more in the long term than any legislation would. If Twitter continues to be a shithole, people will continue to create alternatives, and users will continue to flee.

This all just sounds like it's treating Twitter as a platform that's too big to fail, so it must be "fixed" rather than to let it go the way of countless social media media platforms before it for which there were better alternatives. We don't need to force Twitter to be better; we just need to let someone else do it.

Good. Twitter is bad for people and discussion and should be replaced by something better, or we should go back to blogs.

I dunno I like Twitter more now. It's refreshing to be part of a platform that tries and fails often. Rather than the static, nothingness under the previous regime.

[removed]

Schizophrenic echo chamber is not culture

What a garbage take. We absolutely do not need more "oversight" from government, or from shady third party companies. Last I checked, the government does not do well with oversight or accountability, and third party companies follow wherever the almighty dollar takes them.

I'll take a bit of chaos please over that please.

Elon Musk is buying Reddit!? WHAAAAAT!?!!

The line between genius and madness is thin and fuzzy. Musk made a stupid and terrible mistake. I hope this is just a one time screwup, and not the start of a descent into madness

Why should the govt protect a toxic echo chamber? Who does that help? At whose cost? Twitter is a net negative the last thing it needs is government protection.

I guess it doesn't matter if I hit the paywall since the publication has baked its bias into the headline.

You mean killing the culture that didn’t generate any profit ? Where was the shareholder value ?

Why do people hate freedom so much.

Maybe Twitter doesn't actually matter, and if some guy wants to ruin his privately-owned business that's his prerogative.

It’s his own private company 🤷🏼‍♂️

Pretty sure Elon buying it out actually constitutes "meaningful tech oversight" over a "culture [of] the inside."

No one would have been hankering for it, and Elon would never have threatened and them gotten forced to follow through with, a purchase if it hadn't been failing its own oversight and failing to stay neutral on public debates to begin with.

What gets me is her reaction to the image cropping feature in that her reaction to something being slightly biased is to shitcan the whole thing rather than idk adding more black people to the dataset. Really speaks to the ridiculous mindset and indicates to me that it was a good thing that she got fired.

What is Musk's and MbS's endgame? They are the Face and "Silent" Owner of Twitter.

Hilarious that this guy finds the horror of Elon shaking things up, but all the meetings with government Alphabet entities is perfectly fine. FBI tells them to suppress an actual factual story? Perfectly fine. Elon cut costs then evil bad man.

“He has embraced far right talking points…”

Yet advertisers continue to pay…all the self proclaimed woke artists and famous people continue to tweet….media companies and personal continue to use it as the the president

What does that all say about society as it is?

depressing…