I'm optimistic from a nihilistic point of view: for Twitter the only way is up, and yet even a complete failure would be a net improvement to the world.
There's a laundry list of uncontroversial improvements he can make to the product itself. Twitter as a product is broken in so many ways. Musk is the kind of outcome-driven character to get things done. And it will be done in a way that does not directly conflict with existing pressures, like ads.
He claims to commit to get an understanding of the algorithms for both censorship and promotions/verifications, and make them more transparent. As to what this will reveal, or how this will be changed, we don't know, except for a general direction of less censorship. So far he mentioned to want to strike a balance where both extremes (left, right) are equally unhappy.
My hope, but I expect to be disappointed, is that the influence that both extremes have on Twitter is nuked. A reversal of roles, where sane and reasonable voices capture the majority of attention, instead of rage-addicted mobs.
The truly tricky thing though is that if you dis-empower these extremists, you'll find that there's not much else. Twitter is basically those people and the rest retweeting it. What remains when you take away this outrage snowball activity...not very much. Twitter isn't at all a mainstream platform.
There's a laundry list of uncontroversial improvements he can make to the product itself. Twitter as a product is broken in so many ways. Musk is the kind of outcome-driven character to get things done. And it will be done in a way that does not directly conflict with existing pressures, like ads.
He claims to commit to get an understanding of the algorithms for both censorship and promotions/verifications, and make them more transparent. As to what this will reveal, or how this will be changed, we don't know, except for a general direction of less censorship. So far he mentioned to want to strike a balance where both extremes (left, right) are equally unhappy.
My hope, but I expect to be disappointed, is that the influence that both extremes have on Twitter is nuked. A reversal of roles, where sane and reasonable voices capture the majority of attention, instead of rage-addicted mobs.
The truly tricky thing though is that if you dis-empower these extremists, you'll find that there's not much else. Twitter is basically those people and the rest retweeting it. What remains when you take away this outrage snowball activity...not very much. Twitter isn't at all a mainstream platform.