Short Sellers drove WSJ Reviewer Dan Neil to deletion of his Twitter

[strangecosmos]

Trent, you comments in this thread seem to me to be missing an important point, namely that much of the discussion around Tesla is not proceeding under good faith. It is not regular disagreements between individuals. You earlier post (19) contains lots of great stuff for communicating with good faith and is helpful for elevating discourse.

I think what many are struggling with is the bad faith nature of events like Dan's harrasment. ...reasoned responses are simply overwhelmed or responded to with harrassment. If the misinformation is ignored, it spreads. If it is challenged, they overwhelm or intentionally devolve to threats.

I agree that what you described does indeed happen. There are some very vocal people out there, such as Montana Skeptic, who bully, insult, and harass rather than engage in a real conversation. However, there are also folks like Professor Scott Galloway who do engage in good faith and simply present an argument backed up by financial metrics and other evidence.

Conversely, there are also Tesla fans who bully, insult, and harass folks who disagree with them, and who even target journalists like Dana Hull. My view is that this behaviour is bad, regardless of which side of the Tesla debate you happen to agree with.

I want to challenge the tribalistic narrative of “those shorts are bad, but us longs are good!” That is missing the point. We shouldn’t draw the line between pro-Tesla and anti-Tesla, or long Tesla and short Tesla, but between people who engage in respectful, good faith conversations and people who behave abusively and either aren’t able or willing to have a real dialogue.

Abuse is always bad, and never justified. Disagreement, on the other hand, is super useful because it helps you challenge your ideas. Disagreement is good and should be encouraged. Shutting down or villainizing anyone who happens to disagree with your position (as a few Tesla fans are wont to do) is dangerous and wrong. So, I think we should be pro-disagreement and anti-abuse.

We should definitely block and ignore folks like Montana Skeptic who are abusive. But we should relish the chance to hear an opposing view from someone like Professor Galloway.

 

[PeterK]

Dana Hull does not deserve to be harassed, however I am truly disappointed in the turn her reporting has taken in recent months. She used to be pretty balanced in her praise and criticisms for Tesla, its products and Musk, often reaching out to owners to more deeply understand stories. But lately it’s almost entirely negatively skewed. She completely lost me with the “Tesla Doesn’t Burn Fuel, It Burns Cash” piece three months ago.

 

[Ulmo]

I just laugh at illogical activists now. Dan Neil probably isn't used to that.

Dan should go have a beer with his dad, do some sport, have a BBQ, and then reopen his Twitter account and craft a new speaking strategy that doesn't respond to every tweeter. (If he's a geek like me and doesn't have a dad like me, then he can go watch Stargate SG-1, sprint to his mailbox and back, have some water or a sip of coffee, and if he's hungry, eat a sensible meal, and drive his car on the race track (calmly).)

Twitter is like a combination of the sports arena with everyone shouting at you, a political convention of your own party, a war in the Gaza strip, a dungeon full of spooks and spies, some criminals down at the bad part of town where no one sleeps, the University, High School, the classroom, and the research den where they compare papers and notes overlooking quaint vistas, big beautiful experiments, and picturesque towns, kitchens where they compare recipes, bird watching, the floor of the stock & commodity exchanges before computer trading, and a bar and a nightclub. If you respond to every tweet, you're going to feel like the homeless guy down on the corner yelling at everyone.

Here's today's Dilbert:

 

[Ulmo]

Man, these people are worse than the gamergaters. “YOUR REVIEW IS WRONG”

Damn, I missed that! I wasn't on Twitter then. That would have been great! (I would have had to watch on the sidelines since I'm not a gamer or gamer activist, but it would have been fun to see the crazies and the sanes figure each other out.)

 

[Ulmo]

I've had perfectly lovely interactions with people who disagree with me about Tesla. I would love to have more. When someone can challenge you intellectually and yet remain respectful and friendly, that is a gift. It's fun and it's an important way to advance your thinking.

That reminds me. In $TSLA investment discussions, whether here on TMC or on Twitter or elsewhere, there's often a bunch of irrational argumentative people, and then a small handful of people that want to find out the truth and be honest. Often the people who want to find out the truth and be honest are on opposite sides of the bench, usually tustling with each other about interpretation and possibilities and how to do estimates, but when it comes to facts, they help each other out (sometimes with fresh information, often with point counterpoint but still fact based), and they often disagree, even at length, about it, but if anybody comes in brash with a fistful of lies, you'll often see the shorts and longs that normally argue with each other about what the truth is instantly preciously protecting each other from the liars and shrills. A few of the older members who don't have time just remain aloof and don't get involved, but there's definitely a sense they're also feeding off of and supporting the same attitude of respecting the respectful and disrespecting the disrespectful, regardless of sides, although they often (not always) tend to make their side clear, as is to be expected.

I've come to enjoy trying to always keep and raise my standards to that of the best fact-based discussion I can do, and while it is a struggle, when I succeed, I get to enjoy the same protection as the other people who try hard to talk about the facts they know. Then, I look at all the yellers and whatnot, and they just humor me. I just skip them, although on rare occasion I'll point out a single logical fallacy in their statements in the hope it's like a pin needle to a balloon.

(Example of not telling the truth: omission; misrepresentation; ignorance; lack of effort; lack of imagination; poor math skills; inexperience; inferior experience; lying. Example of telling the truth: finding a new piece of information, linking to the source of the information and posting an excerpt with what you think is new about it, inputting that new information into the information set you already have and seeing if it gives you any new information and if it does, then presenting that, and then if you see someone else post like that but they misinterpreted something, you reply back and state your case.)

 

[R.S]

I just laugh at illogical activists now. Dan Neil probably isn't used to that.

Dan should go have a beer with his dad, do some sport, have a BBQ, and then reopen his Twitter account and craft a new speaking strategy that doesn't respond to every tweeter. (If he's a geek like me and doesn't have a dad like me, then he can go watch Stargate SG-1, sprint to his mailbox and back, have some water or a sip of coffee, and if he's hungry, eat a sensible meal, and drive his car on the race track (calmly).)

Twitter is like a combination of the sports arena with everyone shouting at you, a political convention of your own party, a war in the Gaza strip, a dungeon full of spooks and spies, some criminals down at the bad part of town where no one sleeps, the University, High School, the classroom, and the research den where they compare papers and notes overlooking quaint vistas, big beautiful experiments, and picturesque towns, kitchens where they compare recipes, bird watching, the floor of the stock & commodity exchanges before computer trading, and a bar and a nightclub. If you respond to every tweet, you're going to feel like the homeless guy down on the corner yelling at everyone.

Here's today's Dilbert:

The best way to use twitter is to not read any comments, or even worse answer to them. No matter the subject, you will always find some a-holes.

Author George R. R. Martin recently tweeted about a colleague and friend of his dying and people respond with: "He died waiting for your books" , or "Maybe take better care of yourself, or I fear you will be next" and even worse stuff.

And those people are fans of his, I guess?

My theory is, that there is a good portion of twitter that just likes to make other people feel bad, no matter the topic.And they just love it, if you reply, because then they know their punch hit you.

So like you said, just ignore them. Or be like Dan and delete your Twitter. In a couple of years it will be as dead as Facebook is today.

 

[Jaguar]

It ain't gonna happen but I'd like to see real names attached to tweets. It might help to civilize the tone.

 

[bhzmark]

It ain't gonna happen but I'd like to see real names attached to tweets. It might help to civilize the tone.

Yeah like on facebook

 

[bhzmark]

Long investor drove short seller to deletion of his twitter account

Elon Musk Reportedly Called Boss Of Well Known Tesla Critic To Complain

Mark B. Spiegel on Twitter

 

[PeterK]

Long investor drove short seller to deletion of his twitter account

Elon Musk Reportedly Called Boss Of Well Known Tesla Critic To Complain

Mark B. Spiegel on Twitter

I find this hard to believe - for one, MS hides his identity - but if it is true my guess is Elon was acting in response to Dan Neil’s hounding.

 

[neroden]

Lawrence Fossi was identified by two separate investigators as "Montana Skeptic". His long campaign of dishonest disinformation was bad enough, but now that he's harassed a Pulitzer-prize-winning reporter into leaving Twitter, it's totally appropriate to call his boss and say "Hey, did you know your employee harasses people on Twitter? Check it out."

 

[Ulmo]

Lawrence Fossi was identified by two separate investigators as "Montana Skeptic". His long campaign of dishonest disinformation was bad enough, but now that he's harassed a Pulitzer-prize-winning reporter into leaving Twitter, it's totally appropriate to call his boss and say "Hey, did you know your employee harasses people on Twitter? Check it out."

His employer might give him a bonus. Unless it's illegal (or confers uncompensated liability), I don't think anything can be done about it. However, I gander that the likelyhood it's illegal and/or causes liability costs is high.

 

[dramsey]

After many decades I have come to the reluctant conclusion that any unmoderated online social site will eventually be overrun by haters and trolls.

Back in the halcyon days of the 80s, I was a sysop on Compuserve's Mac forums (for the younger people in the audience, "Compuserve" was a pre-Internet online community you accessed with an analog modem through your phone line. There were hundreds of forums for various interests; I was in the MAUG forums ("Micronet Apple User's Group", "Micronet" being the name Compuserve used before, well, "Compuserve".)

As a sysop I was expected to read every message on the forums I was responsible for every day, and to hide or delete inappropriate ones. And our bar for this was pretty low: these were Mac forums, so if you started a thread about, say, torque steer on front-wheel drive cars (this is a real example), and it went beyond a couple of messages, it would get zapped. If it would if you started insulting people, using profanity, et cetera. Our sysop tools let us do everything from warn a user to cool it in a private message to the dreaded "L flag", which would lock the account out of the forums.

This was very rarely used; I handed out (IIRC) two L flags in over 5 years. And you couldn't just zap back in with a new account, as starting a new account required both time (several days) and money.

I think the MAUG forums, in all of their primitive text-only glory (you know, like the current official Tesla forums), may have been a high point for sheer information density in an online forum. DAMN there was a lot of good stuff there. Not to mention a real sense of community: back in the days when MacWorld Expos were twice a year, massive real world meetings would take place, generally at large restaurants, and a good time was had by all.

I think the forced use of real names on accounts and the no-nonsense moderation is why this worked so well. On the other hand I could just be an old fart, reminiscing.

But as others here have noted, the official Tesla forums, in addition to being functionally gelded (really, Tesla? Any high school kid with a liter of Coke and an hour to kill could install MySQL and VBulletin FOR FREE and have an exponentially better system than the one you have now. Arg.), are pretty much a complete snakepit. There are some good folks there, but honestly I don't know why they stay. In addition to the various free energy crazies that pop up with astonishing regularity, there's the modern-day equivalent of the Hitler Youth, who consider it their sacred duty to hound anyone who disagrees with them on any of their checklist items completely off the board. Tesla doesn't seem to care, although if enough people complain they can sometimes get accounts banned, which works for about 5 seconds 'cause it's so easy to sign up for a new account.

Twitter's format encourages brief, snappy posts and discourages nuance and discussion. No matter how bizarre and perverse your particular slant is, it's trivially easy to find a few hundred people who share it and to sic 'em on the target du jour. I don't think it's salvageable as a platform, really, any more than the local abattoir could be pressed into service as a pet shelter.

 

[Dr. J]

abattoir

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