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Barring a messy, last-minute divorce, Elon Musk is on monitor to personal Twitter (and sure, mea culpa). The mercurial, sensible entrepreneur offloaded around $8.5 billion of Tesla inventory this week as he ready to pay for his $44 billion facet mission. And shortly, he’ll be free to vary the service as he pleases.

Musk hasn’t but introduced a complete plan for Twitter — he could by no means — however he is proposed a number of important adjustments value evaluating. Musk’s concepts embody lengthening character limits, open sourcing the algorithm, and successfully placing an finish to content material moderation. A debate is raging concerning the latter, however all have tradeoffs.

Alex Roetter, Twitter’s former head of engineering, joined Big Technology Podcast this week to debate Musk’s proposals, inspecting each their feasibility and advisability. Here is a take a look at essentially the most important potential adjustments, alongside together with his commentary:

Upon announcing the deal, Musk mentioned he wished to “authenticate all people.” Twitter has lengthy weighed this concept internally, questioning whether or not making folks verify their e mail or telephone quantity might assist scale back harassment and spam. The corporate by no means acted, maybe as a result of authentication might drop its consumer numbers and anger Wall Road. However it ought to’ve.

Pure anonymity, Roetter mentioned, “fosters the worst elements of speech on-line.” So he loves Musk’s authentication concept. As a personal firm, Twitter might afford to take a consumer quantity hit, a good thing about Musk’s possession.

This concept is possible and advisable. 

Musk hates the spambots. “We’ll defeat the spam bots or die attempting!” he said final week.

Roetter likes this concept, but it surely’s not that easy. To defeat the spambots, he mentioned, you’d construct a classifier that appears for traits of bots after which bans them. You’d then tune the classifier to both be actually aggressive, the place you’d eradicate bots but in addition ban a bunch of human “false positives,” or be much less aggressive, the place you’d let some bots slide and ban fewer people.

“I feel it’s best to do it,’ Roetter mentioned. “However everybody needs to be ready, there isn’t any excellent spam bot classifier.”

This concept is possible, although not excellent, and advisable. 

Musk is interested in Twitter’s subscription product and will increase it. Making folks pay for Twitter — or sure premium options — might assist scale back spam and create a income stream if Twitter’s advertisers bail over its new speech guidelines.

“It is a actually attention-grabbing concept,” Roetter mentioned. “If you do not need a bunch of what you consider as low-value exercise to occur, when you cost greater than the worth that you simply suppose individuals are extracting from it, it ought to go away.” Subscription charges may very well be normalized and scaled per location.

This concept is possible and advisable if carried out proper.