Is Elon Musk Nuts?
POSTED BY: SIGNYM
UPDATED: Thursday, September 3, 2026 02:05
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It Turns Out Elon Is Speedrunning The Enshittification Learning Curve, Not The Content Moderation One from the a-race-to-make-the-site-worse-and-worse dept
Wed, Jul 5th 2023 09:27am - Mike Masnick
Our most popular post last year was my post attempting to help Elon Musk “speedrun” the content moderation learning curve. People still talk to me about that post to this day. What’s been somewhat surprising to me, however, is that while nearly every other social media site eventually figures out the basics of the content moderation learning curve, Musk has a Sisyphean ability to slide back down that curve again and again and again.
But I had a realization over the weekend: it’s not the content moderation learning curve that he’s speedrunning. It’s the Enshittification learning curve.
As you’ll recall from Cory Doctorow’s excellent coinage, enshittification happens through the following process:
first, companies are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves.
Much more at https://www.techdirt.com/2023/07/05/it-turns-out-elon-is-speedrunning-
the-enshittification-learning-curve-not-the-content-moderation-one/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Twitter is great now. 
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How you do anything is how you do everything.
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Quote:Really? Today, tweets cannot be read without first getting a Twitter account.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Twitter is great now.
Twitter was locked in a chaotic doom loop. Now it’s on the verge of collapse. Since the ‘genius’ bought Twitter last year, he’s made a series of poor decisions – and now the platform is almost unusable.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jul/05/twitter-elon-mus
k-verge-of-collapse
If you use Twitter, the service that not so long ago was the best way to take in breaking news and find audiences for serious conversations, you may have found it substantially less useful in the past year. Over this past weekend you found it almost unusable. On Saturday, everything melted down. Thousands of users reported that they had major issues using the platform, including an inability to access any tweets or to post their own tweets – so, basically, everything for which one might want to use Twitter.
On Saturday, Musk announced that Twitter was limiting the ways all users could access tweets “to address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation”. In other words, Musk was blaming commercial services that might want to scrape tweets and incorporate them into machine-learning models. There is no reason to believe this is actually happening, but Musk’s longtime hostility to artificial intelligence must have led him to deploy such services as likely suspects to blame for Twitter’s fragility.
Then Musk announced that accounts that didn’t pay for the company’s Twitter Blue service (almost all of them) would be limited to viewing a total of 600 posts a day, while accounts that did pay up would be limited to 6,000. Newly created Twitter accounts would be limited to viewing 300 posts a day. Later on Saturday, after significant public ridicule and anger, Musk twice raised the limits, as if that would appease users. As of Sunday night the limits stood at 10,000 posts a day for Blue subscribers, 1,000 a day for free accounts and 500 for newly created free accounts.
Such chaotic decisions certainly cast further doubt on Musk’s competence. There is no way he ran any predictive analyses to come up with such policies and numbers. He’s just winging it – poorly.
Over the past year, since the former genius assumed complete control of Twitter, he has expressed hostility toward its most loyal and active classes of user, including journalists, political and social activists, and the very businesses Twitter depends on for advertising revenue. By driving away advertisers from an already shaky and poorly run firm, Musk has lurched toward a desperate but ultimately futile move: to coerce (not encourage) users to subscribe to Twitter Blue, a special tier of membership that costs $8 (£6) a month, or 38.29 reis in Brazil, the third-largest market for Twitter after the US and Japan. Those 38.29 reis are about half what most people in Brazil pay each month for internet access itself and is beyond a reasonable expense for the vast majority of people there.
Imagine being the sort of person who decides that even $8 a month is worth paying for a service that just keeps getting worse. Imagine wanting to pay money to the violent and oppressive government of Saudi Arabia, one of the major investors Musk brought in on the deal. This is what Musk is demanding of Twitter users, most of whom just want to keep up with what their favourite celebrities are doing and get alerted to breaking news in their area.
While promising Twitter Blue users a slightly less annoying experience and the potential to reach a larger audience than plebeian users might, Musk has degraded the service for everyone. Whether because of indignation, arrogance, ignorance or desperation, Musk has fired more than half of the staff that it took to keep Twitter running and growing at its peak. Entire teams like trust and safety, which tried to limit threats and hate speech, have been gutted.
Now, no one is even trying to make the experience of Twitter pleasant or unthreatening. Many on the technic
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:Really? Today, tweets cannot be read without first getting a Twitter account.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Twitter is great now.
A. That's supposed to be a temporary thing.
B. Twitter accounts are free.
C. Who cares?
(NOTE: Haken would be doing himself a favor by locking fff.net to only be viewed by accounts, since anybody without an account can read posts here, including Google which can come up with all of your links to pirated intellectual property in a search).
Quote:
Twitter was locked in a chaotic doom loop. Now it’s on the verge of collapse. Since the ‘genius’ bought Twitter last year, he’s made a series of poor decisions – and now the platform is almost unusable.
Sounds like a lot of crying from babies who got their favorite propaganda toy and echo chamber broke to me. Twitter works just fine.
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How you do anything is how you do everything.
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Quote:Musk is crazy at running Twitter and SpaceX and Tesla. Not every decision at those companies is crazy, except all the ones Musk makes are completely nuts. Musk decided to not build a launchpad at SpaceX the same way as everybody else because he is crazy:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
A. That's supposed to be a temporary thing.
B. Twitter accounts are free.
C. Who cares?
Musk decided to not build self-driving cars the same way as everybody else because he is crazy:
Why Doesn't Tesla Care About Using Sensors for Autonomous Driving?
Tesla's autonomous driving tech used to rely both on cameras and radar, but it ditched the latter and adopted a new approach called Tesla Vision. Musk Vision would be more accurate because it is all Musk's dim idea to cut costs.
https://www.makeuseof.com/tesla-self-driving-no-sensors/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Twitter is fine.
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How you do anything is how you do everything.
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The Rich Are Crazy for Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Paul Krugman
The Rich Are Crazier Than You and Me
July 6, 2023, 7:00 p.m. ET
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a crank. His views are a mishmash of right-wing fantasies mixed with remnants of the progressive he once was: Bitcoin boosterism, anti-vaccine conspiracy theories, assertions that Prozac causes mass shootings, opposition to U.S. support for Ukraine, but also favorable mention for single-payer health care. But for his last name, nobody would be paying him any attention — and despite that last name, he has zero chance of winning the Democratic presidential nomination.
Yet now that Ron DeSantis’s campaign (slogan: “woke woke immigrants woke woke”) seems to be on the skids, Kennedy is suddenly getting support from some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley. Jack Dorsey, who founded Twitter, has endorsed him, while some other prominent tech figures have been holding fund-raisers on his behalf. Elon Musk, who is in the process of destroying what Dorsey built, hosted him for a Twitter spaces event.
So what does all this tell us about the role of technology billionaires in modern American political life? The other day I wrote about how a number of tech bros have become recession and inflation truthers, insisting that the improving economic news is fake. (I neglected to mention Dorsey’s 2021 declaration that hyperinflation was “happening.” How’s that going?) What the Silicon Valley Kennedy boomlet shows is that this is actually part of a broader phenomenon.
What seems to attract some technology types to R.F.K. Jr. is his contrarianism — his disregard for conventional wisdom and expert opinion. So before I get into the tech-bro specific aspects of this weird political moment, let me say a few things about being contrarian.
One sad but true fact of life is that most of the time conventional wisdom and expert opinion are right; yet there can be big personal and social payoffs to finding the places where they’re wrong. The trick to achieving these payoffs is to balance on the knife edge between excessive skepticism of unorthodoxy and excessive credulity.
It’s all too easy to fall off that knife’s edge in either direction. When I was a young, ambitious academic I used to make fun of stodgy older economists whose reaction to any new idea was “It’s trivial, it’s wrong and I said it in 1962.” These days I sometimes worry that I’ve turned into that guy.
On the other hand, reflexive contrarianism is, as the economist Adam Ozimek puts it, a “brain rotting drug.” Those who succumb to that drug “lose the ability to judge others they consider contrarian, become unable to tell good evidence from bad, a total unanchoring of belief that leads them to cling to low quality contrarian fads.”
Tech bros appear to be especially susceptible to brain-rotting contrarianism. As I wrote in my newsletter, their financial success all too often convinces them that they’re uniquely brilliant, able to instantly master any subject, without any need to consult people who’ve actually worked hard to understand the issues. And in many cases they became wealthy by defying conventional wisdom, which predisposes them to believe that such defiance is justified across the board.
Add to this the fact that great wealth makes it all too easy to surround yourself with people who tell you what you want to hear, validating your belief in your own brilliance — a sort of intellectual version of the emperor’s new clothes.
And to the extent that contrarian tech bros talk to anyone else, it’s to one another. The tech entrepreneur and writer Anil Dash tells us that “it’s impossible to overstate the degree to which many big tech C.E.O.s and venture capitalists are being radicalized by living within their own cultural and social bubble.” He calls this phenomenon of venture capitalism “VC QAnon,” a concept that I find helps explain many of the strange positions taken by tech billionaires lately.
Let me add a personal speculation. It may seem odd to see men of vast wealth a
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Idiot Paul Krugman is just mad that the "wrong" rich people are backing Kennedy.
He'd be thrilled about Kennedy if it were Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffet and George Soros that were backing him.
Fuck idiot Paul Krugman.
ETA: Twitter is working just fine and isn't going anywhere. This will end up being one more idiot thing that comes out of Krugman's idiot mouth that I'll get to rub in his idiot face when it doesn't happen.
Why do you listen to that idiot. He hasn't been right about anything in his life.
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Quote:6ix, you are crazier than Musk or Trump, but then I have never known an East Texas Trumptard who wasn't crazy, yet didn't know that craziness was the cause of all their problems, not Democrats.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Twitter is working just fine and isn't going anywhere. This will end up being one more idiot thing that comes out of Krugman's idiot mouth that I'll get to rub in his idiot face when it doesn't happen.
Why do you listen to that idiot. He hasn't been right about anything in his life.
Here is something crazy Musk did, without thinking about what his fired employees would do to him in revenge: Elon Musk’s Firing Spree Comes Back to Haunt Twitter
The social media company has threatened litigation against Meta for allegedly stealing trade secrets by hiring ousted employees to create Threads in a matter of months.
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/elon-musks-fi
ring-spree-comes-back-haunt-twitter-1235531218/
Crazy people and, especially, Trumptards are never good at correctly imagining the consequences when they exercise their super-inflated ideas of what freedom means. Trumptards and some Democrats cannot grasp the connection between what they do and what happens to them if there is a time delay of more than a week between their action and the consequences. Bad things happen to them for no apparent reason because they don't understand time and mostly never will.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:6ix, you are crazier than Musk or Trump, but then I have never known an East Texas Trumptard who wasn't crazy, yet didn't know that craziness was the cause of all their problems, not Democrats.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Twitter is working just fine and isn't going anywhere. This will end up being one more idiot thing that comes out of Krugman's idiot mouth that I'll get to rub in his idiot face when it doesn't happen.
Why do you listen to that idiot. He hasn't been right about anything in his life.
So you've said.
Quote:
Here is something crazy Musk did, without thinking about what his fired employees would do to him in revenge: Elon Musk’s Firing Spree Comes Back to Haunt Twitter
The social media company has threatened litigation against Meta for allegedly stealing trade secrets by hiring ousted employees to create Threads in a matter of months.
Yeah. He's probably going to win that lawsuit too.
Meta's Threads is not going to overtake Twitter. Just like Mastadon didn't overtake Twitter. Just like Tribal didn't overtake Twitter. Just like Bitchute and Rumble didn't overtake YouTube.
Quote:
Crazy people and, especially, Trumptards are never good at correctly imagining the consequences when they exercise their super-inflated ideas of what freedom means. Trumptards and some Democrats cannot grasp the connection between what they do and what happens to them if there is a time delay of more than a week between their action and the consequences. Bad things happen to them for no apparent reason because they don't understand time and mostly never will.
At least you've added "some Democrats" to that. It is capable of learning!
PEOPLE. You're describing people.
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How you do anything is how you do everything.
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