Spamming "$$$ $TSLA to the moon! Get latest tips on my free Discord bit.ly/ocozxc #TWTR #GOOG #AMC #GME $$$" thousands of times for days before suspension is hardly the hardest problem on the Internet
Heck, you could even just limit the number of hashtags in a single tweet (say, 2) and fix 95% of Twitter's spam problem without harming legitimate users in any way
Uh, wouldn't spammers just...stop using lots of hashtags? Part of what makes the problem difficult is that spammers are agents who respond to the techniques you use to stop them.
There must be some expectation about the rate of share issuance, I think that's what the parent comment is getting at. ESOP pools are well understood (and IIRC defined upfront). Threatening to sell massively discounted shares equivalent to existing shares without even so much as an SEC filing about it (as of a few hours ago), that's the part where it becomes questionable for me. If the new shares are marketable, then this is a defensive measure that actively destroys value for all existing shareholders.
A company cannot issue unlimited shares without concern for existing shareholders - taken to the extreme, doing so reduces the value of all holdings to zero.
Because he's a near-10% shareholder and accounts like his are a major driver of new account growth. I wonder if this episode has impacted growth or engagement metrics any. Hard to imagine it hasn't
Bootstrapping a network the size of Twitter is nothing like easy, and might even be impossible this late in the game. Gold rushes of new users tend to wear off as new areas calcify into established concepts.
(The same would be true for launching a modern day FriendFeed / Bebo / MySpace etc)
I'd add that even if by doing this he ends up destroying twitter, it will still leave room for the growth of something new. Twitter has a lot of legacy baggage, and either it had to be shaken up dramatically or burned to the ground in order for this social media landscape to change. This could go either way.
> Gold rushes of new users tend to wear off as new areas calcify into
established concepts.
I hear ya. It's the crowd he's buying. But to me Twitter has no
"established concept". Maybe I'm the stupidest person on the planet
right now, but what exactly is Twitter? Does Musk have a brilliant
solution looking for a problem. Or is this just playing games with
money and power for it's own sake?
It is a bit like coal mining.. even the default new account experience encourages subscribing to a bunch of spam, when what is needed is mining one seam in that mess containing just the desired content (people).
Finding a tight-knit specialist community goes against everything the Twitter UI encourages, but it's how most folk who are deeply loyal to the platform actually use it. When configured well, the timeline should be significantly comprised of conversations between known people talking about desirable topics.
Personally I think this is the core of the tool - free, open access to specialist communities with no membership requirements, and no need for upfront reputation. If some conversation between experts interests you and you have a question, you can just ask.
One approach is to start by following one account you really like, then mining their replies following the folk they actively engage with. Do this for a few iterations and the result will quickly become an extremely intimate, engaging, and topical timeline. It only takes a few meaningful questions and comments added to these conversations for the follows and inclusion to start flowing your way.
It's like a watercooler around which a huge bunch of people with interesting takes and things to say on lots of different interesting things have gathered. It takes a while to find the information streams as they are not made obvious, but at least for me I got much better first hand information of both Covid and Ukrainian war from the people I follow before media.
Simultaneously, Twitter is an algorithmic echo chamber. I had the opposite experience: fear porn scaremongering throughout the pandemic with microchips in the vaccines, 5G nonsense, graphene in the vaccines, the evils of Bill Gates, and far more. My interest in Twitter has declined massively year-on-year. I used to use it as an IRC replacement with hashtags in TweetDeck in place of channels. Now all the fun stuff is happening on Matrix protocol in Matrix Spaces.
"fear porn scaremongering throughout the pandemic with microchips in the vaccines,"
Any of the algorithmic timelines are generally horrible, agreed.
I follow only people who tweet and retweet reasonable things. I use the timeline with content only from the people I choose to follow ("Latest"), and don't follow lunatics. This is a fairly nice experience, but needs a curated list of people to follow, building of which needs a while.
The only way I can stomach Twitter is using a browser extension that removes retweets and likes from others, and recommended stuff from Twitter. Also removed the Trending/News area, and the Explore tab. Added a chronological timeline back too, but really don't use it much, and feel a lot better for it.
I don't think it's even necessarily about who you follow, there's a lot of pushing celebrities who are into this rubbish.
My conspiracy theory is that Musk foresees the decline of society and owning a massive platform of communication provides him with a lot of power. Why buy a newspaper when you can buy the communication of so-much-more?
Musk has had success with Paypal, Tesla and SpaceX. All of those are/were mostly engineering problems first and then marketing problems second. None of the major problems at Twitter these days are engineering problems, but rather they are all related to politics and human group psychology. I don't see what Elon could bring to the table that Twitter does not already have.
PayPal wasn't rally an engineering problem, at least not at the scale of Tesla and SpaceX.
I'm torn. I think he has some good ideas (more open, paid vs. ads, crack down on bots), and for sure the necessary leadership to focus resources on those topics. On the other hand, it's not good that rich people own more media.
For PayPal to succeed it had to viciously hammer on a huge number of users who it algorithmically suspected might maybe be scammers. Blocking a tremendous amount of free activity in the process, punishing many innocent in addition to the guilty. This was done to create something that felt safe enough to get mainstream use.
That sounds somewhat like the Twitter of today, and not much like a hypothetical super-free-ified twitter.
The main draw for Truth Social is not posting on it. If he was "truthing" 50 times a day, they would be doing a lot better.
I suspect some negotiation is going on. The main content creator wants a bigger slice of the business.
Trump never posting on TruthSocial seems to be a pretty low commitment from him. Or maybe he sent a welcome/test message. Meanwhile, he doesn't even have someone crossload his blog entries.
I know you're being dramatic, but at least charities in the UK do have vastly different treatment by HMRC, and much more granular financial reporting requirements.
Just a suggestion, but please lead with what the company does, not a link to the blog of some engineering micro-bubble. That really gives a bad impression. Many folk here are scanning for companies they want to work for, not tech teams doing "tech stuff". That's everywhere
This is an expensive lesson I think everyone gets to learn at some point. There's no such thing as a file worth excluding from a backup, it always fucks you, some (like me) more than others. Have to buy twice as much disk? Fine, at least you know you actually have a backup
Signal's insistence on doing the wrong thing for 99% of users (storing media blobs in SQLite) drives me crazy. Protect our metadata over the wire, fine, but there is almost no additional protective benefit whatsoever by storing the files inside SQLCipher when the user's fingers can be broken one-by-one until they unlock their phone.
Meanwhile it causes issues just like this, not to mention broken integration with every audio/gallery/video app on the device.
Accusing them of doing the "wrong thing for 99% of their users" is pretty hyperbolic. They've managed the feat of offering simple, easy E2EE for messages, audio and video calls for one-to-one and groups, without charging anyone a penny for it. Their protocol is so successful it's been adopted by others and is often considered a gold standard.
Having used SQLCipher myself for an app I created, I've often thought about the tradeoffs between security and convenience. I struggle to see how the only benefit to using SQLCipher to encrypt the stored data is to try to protect against someone breaking someone's fingers and forcing someone to give up their password.
Do you not think there are other, much less violent, ways for someone to read an unencrypted database on a phone?
The files on disk are already encrypted (or at least are encryptable: there is a flag the developer can technically turn off), remember, by iOS itself; this is an additional layer of what I'd think really amounts to nothing more than "obfuscation" added by the application (unless the app itself has to be separately unlocked each time you use it--to prevent this key from being stored on disk--which I don't think is true of Signal? or, if it is, is not how that user is clearly using it). The concept of SQLCipher makes the most sense as part of some (evil) defense-in-depth DRM scheme, with the goal of preventing the owner of the phone from getting access to data that is "for developer eyes only", which is how I swear I most often had seen it used. (It is also fine for encrypting data files in transit, or putting passwords on specific files; which, of course, fits perfectly with sqlite being used as an app-specific file format, but that definitely isn't the case for here.)
> The files on disk are already encrypted (or at least are encryptable: there is a flag the developer can technically turn off), remember, by iOS itself;
Just to clarify on this, I had been thinking that the user had to opt into full disk encryption on iOS, does it come enabled by default?
> (unless the app itself has to be separately unlocked each time you use it--to prevent this key from being stored on disk--which I don't think is true of Signal? or, if it is, is not how that user is clearly using it)
At least for the way I use Signal on iOS, the screen can lock and be unlocked by Face ID, but yes, no separate key I have to enter to unlock the SQLCipher database.
So yeah, maybe it doesn't add too much to the current implementation, especially if files are encrypted by default by iOS. If not, then I can see the benefit in adding the "well the device isn't encrypted but at least the Signal files are."
For my case, it was more like this:
> or putting passwords on specific files; which, of course, fits perfectly with sqlite being used as an app-specific file format, but that definitely isn't the case for here.
I built an app for micro-journaling about how I was feeling and I wanted it to be super private, so, at the time, it was local-only and stored the data in a SQLCipher database. The user had to enter a password each time to enter the app and unlock the database, AFAIK, I coded it so the password wasn't stored anywhere.
Yes, the idea was defense in depth, maybe too intense at the time and maybe even less necessary now that more phones seem to have full encryption than they did in 2012-14 when I was making this.
AFAIK the storage is encrypted using (a key derived from) a unique device key in the secure enclave and thus the storage is tied to the physical device.
Further keys are generated using the Passphrase and the unique device key, so they are tied to the user and the device.
The application can chose per file:
* Encrypted when locked: NSFileProtectionComplete
* Encrypted until first unlock: NSFileProtectionCompleteUntilFirstUserAuthentication
* Encrypted unless used by the applications background tasks: NSFileProtectionCompleteUnlessOpen
I think the keys used for file encryption are unique per application and then again per file, but I didn’t find information on this.
I appreciate you both providing more info on this. It seems iOS is much more encrypted than I had thought it was. Still, if I resurrect the micro-journaling app, I'll probably keep an app-specific password and SQLCipher to add that extra layer of protection.
Matrix is a federated protocol, so it depends on what server you use (including self-hosting your own). Not using it because a server has a lot of furry porn rooms would be like not using email because hotmail has furry porn.
For what it's worth, I've self-hosted a matrix server for years for my family and friends, have participated in a reasonable number of rooms on the flagship matrix.org server, and have never run into any furry porn.
I'm probably slightly tempered from just having read this article, but curious how anyone could confidently arrive at an economic estimate of the global trade in CSAM
Heck, you could even just limit the number of hashtags in a single tweet (say, 2) and fix 95% of Twitter's spam problem without harming legitimate users in any way