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Pretty ironic to hear someone arguing a truly free speech platform—which Musk explicitly says is his most important goal with Twitter—is not that meaningful...on a website that had to be created because of fears of free speech limitations on the social media website from whence it escaped.
A "truly free speech platform" is one of the most-tried ideas on the Internet and it ends the same way every time. To pull it off, you'd need to know at least a little bit about social dynamics and moderation, which Elon isn't doing a good job of demonstrating.
Yeah, he's better at rockets than NASA, but he'll fail at being a Reddit mod. Sure.
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It's not that meaningful to the people currently working at Twitter. There might be some silent majority of anarchist/libertarian/hacker-ethos programmers out there who'll jump to do twice the work as their peers in the name of free speech, but any "can't stop the signal" programmers probably weren't already working in the How To Stop The Signal department at Twitter when Musk bought it.
Yes! Don't underestimate the culture and how attracts/rejects people, especially in a company that's been around for years.
Anecdotally, big darling companies like Twitter employ very few hacker-ethos-type people. If they do, they're mostly siloed into doing expert work that's quite disconnected from the rest of the organization. Again, anecdotally, the silent majority seem to be folks who enjoy the high income and the upper-middle class life it affords them: raising kids, walking their dog, soldering expensive custom keyboards, etc. The loud minority are very often strong left of center folks, especially in a place like CA, who are always advocating for eg. renaming the "master" branch to "main" because of how offensive the former is.
(Again) Anecdotally, at one of my jobs, the number of people who identified them as lightly hacker-ethos-aligned (eg. pgp keysigning party, linux user, 2600 reader, etc.) number at most two dozen in a trendy, CA-based place that, at the time, boasted 12000 engineers. I suspect more strongly aligned folk just avoid Big Co. altogether.
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He was able to rid himself of 90% of them, so it's sort of immaterial.
Somewhat related...
What's interesting to me is all the flack he's getting about giving people the option to either (A) "get hardcore" and work a lot to make Twitter awesome or (B) quit and get severance.
We've gotten a bit nutty about "work-life" balance. Some people don't want that. They like to work a lot. It's not like Musk is enslaving people and forcing them to do manual labor for god's sake. They get to choose to work at a sweet ass campus doing shit they love for great pay.
I'm very certain Musk, literally one of the most recognizable people in the world, can find the people he needs to run a lean & mean ship at Twitter, and make it awesome. Because plenty of people would LOVE to work 60-80 hours a week on a free speech challenge like Twitter, when it is well-positioned to be The Center of the Internet (to the extent is isn't already).
Call me a cynic, but I'm familiar with enough people who do essentially nothing while getting paid (well) for it that I can empathize a lot with Musk here. In my career, I've seen departments with 20 people handling the workload of 2 or 3, and departments that were 90% automated years ago...but the fog of bureaucracy allowed 10 people to just draw a paycheck for standing around and watching a system.
Musk doesn't want dead weight, as no business owner does.
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'Meaningful' in this context is subjective. There are plenty of occupations and causes that are critical to humanity that still don't inspire enough fervor in their adherents to make them work 60 work weeks for below-market wages (i.e. graduate school, or at least it was once upon a time), regardless of how many websites are created due to fears of free speech limitations.
I'd be willing to bet that the current workforce isn't willing to work 60 hour weeks in the name of free speech. Whether there's enough people out there that care who will fill the gap after they leave remains to be seen, in addition to whether those people can keep the faith when their ideals collide with the reality of running a social media platform.
I'll bet he'll find people without much problem.
And I'll bet he can run a better Twitter with 10% of the staff.
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