I'm in a post-Thanksgiving charitable mood, so thank you, Jack. The execution hasn't been perfect (as has been commented on ad nauseam), but Twitter is the closest to a worldwide-accessible [1] Speaker's Corner [2] I know of, and that - despite all the completely valid criticism - is a valuable public service: mediating access to information has been the defining tool of control for those in power pretty much since civilization began, and I, for one, will always pick an imperfectly moderated cesspool over the prior status quo where a church or a government told me what's true and what to think. FWIW, you've also championed transparency and decentralization for your platform more than any other SV social media titan [3].
"The truth is that Twitter could become decentralized almost overnight by simply adding some JSON-LD serializers, an inbox endpoint and maybe tweaking their storage schema slightly to become part of the fediverse – anyone who wouldn’t want to use twitter.com could follow twitter.com users from their own server and so on. That does not require 2 years of making people who don’t work for you talk to each other."
The truth is that someone's gotta pay the bills. Pleasing the crowd by giving the content away is easy; finding a way to pay the bills while upsetting the least amount of people who are strategically important for the next month's bills is the hard part.
We can speculate why Jack left, but the lagging stock price certainly didn't help him. So if anything, rather than criticizing him for not giving away the content for free, it seems the guy should have done more of the opposite (to prevent someone else taking his job who will do all that and then some).
The truth is that someone's gotta pay the bills. Pleasing the crowd by giving the content away is easy; finding a way to pay the bills while upsetting the least amount of people who are strategically important for the next month's bills is the hard part.
Twitter never "paid the bills" under his leadership. That's what added insult to the injury of removing previous open functionality: they pissed everybody off and didn't even make money as a result. A better idea has been obvious for more than a decade.
Twitter is most valuable to the "influencers" who have lots of monetizable followers, e.g. the various Kardashians with their beauty tips. Therefore, those influencers should be charged for the value that Twitter represents to them. They would gladly pay a percentage of the fees they receive for marketing the various products they recommend, for a Twitter experience that made that marketing more effective. It's hard to imagine why Twitter executives have missed this.
holy crap, yes, this is exactly how Twitter can monetize decentralization.
Charge the kardashian clan x amount of dollars to run a managed version of Twitter's software on kardashian.com and allow for full interoperability with other services that speak a common protocol (the w3c has a protocol. use it!)
you can also have governments and other institutional actors running the hosted software (then you can have @AOC@HOUSE.gov and @Biden@Whitehouse.gov and @x@doj.gov and @professor@mit.edu and @talkinghead@nbc.com) these all can operate as white-labeled instances of the managed Twitter service (basically, how Google Apps worked but with Twitter's software).
You could just have a rule that any commercial content requires a pro account. Casual users can use the product for free, but those who wish to use the platform for business purposes need to pay a monthly account fee.
I think you have it backwards, or at least you're missing half of the equation. The influencers are also valuable to Twitter, not just the other way around.
Exactly this. Also, AFAIK most large content sponsorship deals take place off the platform between independent business entities. Most sponsored content on YouTube works like this, and YouTube doesn't get a single cent from most of those deals, only a share of video ads revenue. How Twitter can do any better here remains to be seen, and ceding control of the client certainly won't make it any easier.
it's less about where the influencers move to and more about where the audience moves to (they're the ones that view ads).
Everyone knows that audiences can go anywhere (every time there's been a huge technological shift they've made the jump - Radio -> Television. Newspapers -> Twitter et cetera). Influencers go where the engagement is. What I'm trying to say is pay attention to where the audience is at.
Indeed. If Dorsey wanted Twitter to be "open", he'd open it. Instead he's closed it & started a sideshow to further distract those who could create credible challenges to Twitter.
They are actively making even access to individual tweets very cumbersome to people without logins. I guess maybe compared to something like facebook where you are completely blocked without login it's ok, but "almost inaccessible" is only a small step ahead of "completely inaccessible" - that's hardly championing anything, let alone "decentralization" which Twitter is actively hostile to.
That’s not what i meant,
I meant nitter is only going to work for as long as twitter doesnt start actively putting resources to prevent nitter from scraping
bah - bluesky is not going anywhere. this "project" deserves scorn, derision, and cynicism until the board of directors shut it down for being a waste of time.
I'm not so sure. The illusion of action could be worse than indifference. Who would build a service/standard that Twitter could make obsolete/outmoded in one day, with potentially billions of $ against it?
>I'm not so sure. The illusion of action could be worse than indifference.
absolutely right. the concept of 'squatting' on an idea so that it remains untouched in the market is an obvious strategy and likely used by many large groups.
We have the technology but most people don't care about decentralization. Even paying lip service helps as an admission that decentralization is good for users.
Has mediating access to information been the defining tool of control for civilizations? Maybe in tyrannical, despotic societies that is true, but those don't allow Twitter today via firewalls, so that's mostly a moot point in this thread.
I'd say the sword and the coin have both been far more controlling than limited information spread.
What of free society? Is the government of the USA, UK, or other "enlightened" societies throughout history relying upon censorship and denial of information? I think they're moreso allowing moneyed interests and plutocracy to have lobbying and backdoor dealings, they can easily ignore the public square most of the time. I just don't see Twitter piercing the armor of entrenched interests that well.
In contrast, I do see it degrading and toxifying democratic discourse, making us less resilient and more divided. That's anti-thetical to a free society in my view.
> What of free society? Is the government of the USA, UK, or other "enlightened" societies throughout history relying upon censorship and denial of information? I think they're moreso allowing moneyed interests and plutocracy to have lobbying and backdoor dealings, they can easily ignore the public square most of the time.
This is definitely part of the picture. To add to this, I'll refer to Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky. "Propaganda" does still exist in modern "free societies," but it isn't overt like a 20th-century dictatorship would have been. Subtle manipulation of corporate media by monied interests to sway public opinion, combined with lobbying and corporate capture of government institutions, is more than enough to maintain the hegemony of certain narratives and power structures. I find it fascinating, and unsettling, to learn about.
So in a nutshell, controlling information and mainstream media narratives is important for the modern ruling class, but it's much more subtle than overt censorship like a dictatorship would have. Which, in my view, makes it much more advanced and insidious.
I disagree that "enlightened" societies don't rely on mediating access to information as the defining tool of control; our difference of opinion is perhaps that you think of this purely as limiting information spread, where I think of it also as shaping the information for their own ends. The governments of the UK and the USA, to state two examples you mentioned, have used these tools effectively as propaganda channels repeatedly to sell their vision of armed conflict. The second Iraq war wasn't that long ago.
I'll make a tangentially related argument: Starting with the printing press, and through the advent of telephone, radio, television, and now the Internet (mainly via the Web), controlling messaging via these media (or controlling these media directly at times) has been as much a tool of control for those in power in democratic societies as in autocratic ones.
Congress shall make no law /.../ abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press
And while it talks about the Congress, it is clear why the founders considered it to be necessary - the principal value of the free and unabridged speech to forming a free society is tremendous.
True, in an armed conflict, speech has been used as a weapon, and it is also true that the reality of US government has often fallen short of the noble ideals laying at its foundation. But until recently, it has been a widely recognized principle that unmediated and un-gated access to speech and expression - be it audio, printed, electronic or any other means of speech - is a vital cornerstone of a modern free society. Unfortunately, recently certain part of political and cultural establishment decided they want to "move past" these antiquated ideas of equality and appoint themselves as gatekeepers of speech - "for our common benefit and the benefit of the society", of which they are but selfless servants, to be sure.
The new Twitter CEO is, unfortunately, one of these people, and has unashamedly promoted this approach personally. Thus, we can expect only redoubling of effort from his side to suppress and remove speech that he considers "harmful" and discussion of topics he considers not up for discussion. Fortunately, there's an easy way to deal with it. As David Chappelle noted recently, "twitter is not a real place" - and doesn't need to be elevated to the position of society's gatekeeper, but rather demoted to society's cesspool. They proved themselves not up to the task to maintain robust free discourse platform - let them rot in their own bubble.
>As David Chappelle noted recently, "twitter is not a real place" - and doesn't need to be elevated to the position of society's gatekeeper, but rather demoted to society's cesspool. They proved themselves not up to the task to maintain robust free discourse platform - let them rot in their own bubble.
Agreed. Part of that is the 'hot take' represented by the limited characters of a tweet are inimical to nuance. So much of it is just people taking turns 'dunking' on each other, and it gets increasingly heated and rage inducing. Add to that an inflammatory algorithm, where outrage drives interaction, and of course you have a cesspit.
Part of the good thing about the old internet is when you have to construct a blog to share your thoughts, you have to be driven to actually, y'know, build something. It also has the added benefit of being relatively closed off. Now everyone has easy access to an empty field with which to yell into the void... and it turns out with that low bar and high inter-connectedness comes a lot of yelling.
Over George Mason's (among others) protest the convention decided not to include a bill of rights in the constitution. There are a few reasons for this, one of the two more traditionally held is that it was seen as unnecessary given that many states already had their own bills of rights. The other reason supported by the historical record is that many of the delegates were concerned about giving the appearance of those being the only rights guaranteed to the people.
There is a third popular opinion, which is that the convention had been a hot, contentious affair that dragged on for months and everyone wanted to go home so they tabled the bill of rights for a later date.
You will note that none of these reasons is that anyone objected to the principles in the bill of rights. More importantly, many of the rights guaranteed in the first 10 amendments are directly targeted at the causes of the revolution. This lends significant credence to the "it's important but let's not do it now" argument, and undercuts rather dramatically the idea that the country was not founded on those ideals.
They didn't indeed. And you know why? There was a big discussion, between the fraction that said you have to spell out the most important rights so that nobody would think that it's ok to violate them, and the one that said "we already said the government has this set of very restricted functions, if we start spelling out the specific rights, people would think these are the only rights that should be protected, and others are not important and the government is OK to expand their function and violate those rights, just because we didn't include them in the list! We can't have that!" After a while, it ended up looking like it does now.
Of course, both of them turned out to be wrong. Not only people think that rights that are not explicitly enumerated do not deserve protection, not only the idea of limited government bound by constitutional limits is completely dead and buried, now people think that explicitly named rights too can be violated at will. Maybe because they have been spelled out a bit later, so they can't be that important. After all, First Amendment isn't something that's very important, that's why they made it the first one. Like the trial one, we'll do some silly stuff first, to warm up, and then we'll get to really important things.
The "founders" were not a monolithic entity with a single opinion. The history of the Bill of Rights makes it quite clear that there were many founders in favor of those amendments.
The Constitution was ratified in June of 1788. The 1st Congress convened in March of 1789, and the Bill of Rights was introduced in June of 1789. I think it is quite reasonable to consider the Constitution and the subsequent Bill of Rights as part of the foundational principles of the nation.
Yes, one possible explanation is that in a country where so many people take christian scripture seriously you can kind of see that they might not see the intellectual absurdity of treating the constitution as if it were some sort of sacred text. The problem, as ever, is that it's hard to have conversations about modern western humans being rational if we are obliged to be polite about their childish religious superstitions.
We don't have slaves anymore. At least not in Western societies. So I am not sure how it's relevant - sure, people in the past had got a lot of things wrong. They thought diseases come from bad smells, eating arsenic can cure you, and yes - some of them also thought owning slaves is ok. Now we know better about these things. We don't have slavery anymore - at least in the West (curiously, nobody seems to give a tweet about it still existing in other parts of the world?)
That doesn't mean they got everything wrong - some things they did get right, even though they came short in implementing them - just as we do. They were imperfect people - just as we are. It doesn't mean because there was slavery in the past we can't have free speech now - that makes no sense. It's just a collection of non-sequiturs - "founders were imperfect by our ideals 250 years forward, we should reject literally everything that was done" - and what?
> Public discourse has been dominated by white, rich men since the inception of the US, and history is full of examples of active suppression of speech by women and minorities.
And to fix that, we need more active suppression of speech, surely? Makes total sense, right? Because if rich, white men suppressed speech, and it was bad, then if we have now rich people, a small number of whom would be not white, not male and one or two maybe even non-binary transgender - if those people would be actively suppressing speech, then of course it'd be great. What a bunch of nonsense!
> I just really don't wanna go "back to the good old times" either.
Nobody wants that. Where would you get the idea? Of course people that want free speech don't mean they want to give up antibiotics and painkillers, stop driving cars, forgo electricity, never have a proper dental work, and do any other things that were done 250 years ago that we don't do anymore. Why would they? They just want to speak freely and discuss the ideas freely. It's not and never been the package deal - either we have slavery and free speech, or we have neither. In fact, it is the opposite - of course, if we have slavery, we can't have full freedom, as you correctly noted, free speech has to be free for everybody - any gender, any race, any societal stature. Big Tech is completely opposed to this.
It is absolutely not a coincidence that immediately after the passage of the 13th amendment, the incarceration of people of color skyrocketed following the passage of numerous racially-targeted "black codes". It's also not a coincidence that the majority of the current incarcerated population are people of color, it's a direct legacy of that system. Sure, you can't explicitly write racially targeted laws anymore, but applying an ounce of critical theory shows how the laws can be enforced along racial lines.
>And to fix that, we need more active suppression of speech, surely?
Note that no one actually suggested this as the solution.
It's always very telling that when someone of privilege is told that society has not, actually, been equitable in its supposed ideals (in this case free speech) the first reaction is always, "So instead you want to oppress and censor me??" instead of attempting to engage with the idea that maybe we should be structuring things so they're not oppressing anyone.
The best explanation I've seen of this phenomenon is that when someone has lived in an privileged and elevated position for their whole life, any calls for equity seem like an attack on your position.
> The best explanation I've seen of this phenomenon is that when someone has lived in an privileged and elevated position for their whole life, any calls for equity seem like an attack on your position.
Ah yes, the old “there can’t possibly be a flaw in my idea, it’s just your own insecurity” argument.
Penal labor and slavery are two very different things, and confusing them doesn't make any sense. Both have nothing to do with free speech - it looks like you're just grasping for arguments to say "US is bad". What's the point?
> applying an ounce of critical theory shows how the laws can be enforced along racial lines.
Laws certainly can be applied in a racist way - though you don't need any "critical theory" (which in most instances is a bunch of insane pseudo-scientific drivel anyway) to know that. Of course people can be racist and apply laws in racist ways, and there should be safeguards against that, as against any other abuse of law for purposes the law is not intended for. There's no contradiction with free speech.
> Note that no one actually suggested this as the solution.
That's patently false - a REAL LOT of people - including prominent politicians (lately one Hillary Clinton, for example), business tycoons, CEOs and C* of major companies, prominent press and culture figures, professors and government functionaries - are suggesting exactly that as a solution. And not just suggesting - implementing. Thorough and comprehensive speech suppression and censorship, in the name of correcting some past wrongs and preventing some future ones, real or invented. It is not ever about equal enforcement - nobody objects to equal enforcement of laws, but the solution they are pushing is not equality, it's censorship and suppression.
> the first reaction is always, "So instead you want to oppress and censor me??"
Because they DO want to oppress and censor me, and they are not hiding it either - they are saying it openly and boldly. They call for censorship and speech suppression all the time - and not only calling for it, they has been doing it for years, with much success and they aren't going to stop. It's not something I imagine might be happening in some distant future, it's something that has been already happening for decades. All major social media platforms are strictly censored now, all academia research is censored now, all mainstream news and entertainment is censored right now. The only reason the government is not censoring directly is the First Amendment does not let them, but they work around it by just asking their operatives in Big Tech to do it for them, and those are glad to oblige. Most of the political, academia, big tech, entertainment and press establishment are 100% in on censorship. There are some resistance to it, but those are outside mainstream, the mainstream is all censorship, all the time, and more of it.
> The best explanation I've seen of this phenomenon is that when someone has lived in an privileged and elevated position for their whole life, any calls for equity seem like an attack on your position.
That's one of the example of insane drivel I referred to above. Every time some argument is challenged, the response is "oh, you're just saying that because your privilege is attacked". You know nothing about me, you know nothing about my experience, your argument contradicts basic facts and makes no logical sense - but all that is irrelevant, because you always have this mega-argument - just say "privileged" and everything you say is automatically right and everything the "privileged" say is automatically wrong, no logic or connection to facts is needed.
> maybe we should be structuring things so they're not oppressing anyone.
Yeah, maybe we shouldn't have censorship, for example? Try to convince somebody in Big Tech of that... So far I see not much progress on this.
In what ways are you oppressed and censored? Actually, let's be more specific in that question, based on an axiom we've already agreed on:
>free speech has to be free for everybody - any gender, any race, any societal stature
Specifically, in what ways are you oppressed and censored based on your "gender, race, or societal stature"?
Because the only topics I see getting censored (by "big tech") are:
a) Rhetoric that negatively targets others based on their gender, race, or societal stature
b) Information spread with the intent of spreading harm to others
So white supremacists are censored, people calling for violence and harm are censored, and yes, people spreading counter-scientific information which would harm public health are censored.
> just say "privileged" and everything you say is automatically right and everything the "privileged" say is automatically wrong, no logic or connection to facts is needed.
Privilege doesn't mean you're wrong, it just means you lack the perspective of being discriminated against based on certain factors.
But beyond that, you haven't provided anything in the way of evidence, your logic is shaky, and when one of your "facts" get called out you simply question its relevance.
>You know nothing about me, you know nothing about my experience
I can infer pretty easily from what you've said that you're very likely white, male, and lean heavily to the political right - conservative (or possibly "libertarian"). Am I incorrect?
>The only reason the government is not censoring directly is the First Amendment does not let them
The "government" is actually censoring people - but not through some shadowy "operatives in Big Tech" (what?) but through legislation. Nine Republican states have recently directly passed laws restricting free speech. But I assume you're not angry about those, for reasons you might want to re-examine.
And just so you don't miss it, I'll repeat:
Specifically, in what ways are you oppressed and censored based on your "gender, race, or societal stature"?
I can not publicly speak on any controversial topic (at least taking the position not approved by the orthodoxy) without risk of being fired, and myself and my family attacked. In fact, merely using my true legal name instead of a pseudonym is a very risky thing right now, which has cost many people their livelihoods, their careers and sometimes their very safety. I can not publish any controversial opinion, disagreeing with government-approved policy, on any of the major social networks. I can not share information that is deemed "harmful" by the same social networks - and by "harmful" I mean politically inconvenient to them. That sounds pretty oppressive to me.
> Specifically, in what ways are you oppressed and censored based on your "gender, race, or societal stature"?
I am not claiming I am oppressed based on my race - though I know if I weren't white, speaking unorthodox thoughts would likely carry less risk for me. But the threat, of course, comes not from the race angle itself, but from the heresy. The race and social stature just changes the amount of danger the heresy leads to. But the censorship is not based on race, it's based on speaking the things that the censors do not want to be spoken.
> Because the only topics I see getting censored (by "big tech") are:
That's because you choose not to see what does not fit your predetermined conclusion. It is not possible to convince the person that something exists if the person declared upfront they wouldn't see it. There's just no way to do it.
> So white supremacists are censored
No, it works the other way - people who are censored are declared white supremacists. Including, hilariously, people like Larry Elder, Candace Owens and Winsome Sears (if you're not in the know, all these people are black), and many others like them. "White supremacist" has become a generic pejorative that the left applies to anybody they want to censor, and they no longer even bother to make it sound plausible.
> it just means you lack the perspective of being discriminated against based on certain factors.
Again, you assume a lot about people you do not know. Hint: black people aren't the only group who faced prejudice and discrimination in human history. But my personal history here is completely irrelevant, since "oppression olympics" is the most stupid game known to man. You don't need to be oppressed to be right, and "privilege" is just an attempt to silence people who you can't find an argument against. If there was some "perspective", it would have been possible to explain it without claiming "you can't possibly understand this because your skin is of a wrong color and the bits between your legs are of a wrong shape". But there's never any explanation, only "shut up, you privileged!"
> I can infer pretty easily from what you've said that you're very likely white, male
And that tells you everything you need to know about me. As a true "anti-racist" (you're an anti-racist, aren't you?), once you know person's race and maybe gender, there's nothing more you need to know to know everything about them, right?
> Specifically, in what ways are you oppressed and censored based on your "gender, race, or societal stature"?
You seem to be confused. From the fact that there's censorship, and the fact that I declared nobody should be censored, regardless of their race, etc. you somehow got to the conclusion that I claim the censorship that exists is based on race, etc. No, it's not based on race - though, given that it is largely performed by "anti-racists" - of whom many are hardcore racists, that consider race the most - and sometimes the only - defining characteristics of a person - there may be certain racial angles in their actions, but the ultimate goal has nothing to do with it. It is always about suppressing the information and the opinion that diverges from the orthodoxy.
>Is the government of the USA, UK, or other "enlightened" societies throughout history
That sentence piques my interest, do people see the USA and UK that way? I think of Switzerland and Canada that way, for example, but my knowledge is all based on stereotypes. Maybe it depends where you're from, as the stereotypes must differ among regions.
But almost all countries are more liberal than those two. My question isn't if the US and UK are the least enlightened countries in the world, but rather, if people see them as particularly enlightened among countries. Ie compared to any other random liberal country like Mexico or Czech Republic.
I understand OP's point, just curious whether the examples used reflect a common perception. To me when thinking of stereotypically enlightened societies, I think of Iceland or Canada or something. The US I think of more as a business+war society, and UK seems somewhere in the middle, but much lower than the rest of Europe.
This is based on nothing objective, just wondering what other people's perceptions of these places are
I understood "enlightened" to mean "espousing modern values of enlightenment" - basically fostering a belief in science and reason and trying to push mankind further in terms of technological and moral progress.
In this regard, both of those countries would be considered B-tier at worst.
The point of the original quote was about people with too much control over others already. In which case, a few strokes of a pen could condemn thousands to misery or death. In that sense, there was no need to be aiming a bow at a single individual.
The original quote wasn't about speech, it was about excessive control.
> FWIW, you've also championed transparency and decentralization for your platform more than any other SV social media titan
You’re taking the same company that repeatedly used their api to kill all the third party competitors to their horrible client(s)? I avoid Twitter like the plague And even I followed them enough to know they are anything but open.
And yet, just lately, they have been trying to win back and refresh the third party dev ecosystem by introducing a new API 2.0 and even newer relaxed terms for it's use. These provoked a debate two weeks ago on HN between those who watched the rug getting pulled out from under them when Twitter locked the old API, and those who just wanted to make something [1].
I wonder where Jack was behind this re-evaluation and if it might not get re-re-evaluated in his wake.
If Jack Dorsey wanted to encourage decentralization, he could have trivially supported the open-source ActivityPub standard instead of introducing his own competing standard. It's nice to see him stand up for it, but I kinda roll my eyes when I hear people say that he's a champion of decentralization. He's had years to make it work, but we've seen nothing come from it. All we got was a more locked down Twitter site that won't even let me browse a profile without getting a pop-up reminding me to sign in and download their app.
Activitypub is a pretty dated standard thats really not super easy to work with or adapt to a more open network. Its an XML based protocol that bakes in really difficult to use notions of identity and doesn't address the problem of data ownership in a meaningful way. From what I've been seeing, the bluesky team has been working closely with the activitypub developers on figuring out 'what comes next'.
It (well its predecessor) was an XML based protocol a long time ago, but hasn't been in practice in years. Mastodon, which really popularized ActivityPub, uses JSON-LD. But yes, the ideas of data ownership and identity are just not well specified in ActivityPub. There's work in trying to incorporate capability-based security into ActivityPub but it is a large pain point right now. The protocol also has very varying amounts of uptake. Mastodon and Pleroma mostly implement the ActivityPub server-to-server API and only a handful of ActivityPub implementations support the client-to-server API. I would love to see further work between the Bluesky and AP teams on coming up with a new standard which addresses the flaws in the current protocol.
Can’t help but remark that Twitter isn’t a great platform for expressing non trivial ideas. To make this post, he had to basically screenshot another write up in order to make it fit the character limit
Yeah it's one of its problems. It creates a ton of shitty posts, not citing sources, not explaining standpoints ("threads" are horrible). It encourages low quality sensational posts. Or funny jokes. That's been my experience at least.
It also encourages you to be more concise, clear and mindful of what you want to say. The problem you outlined stems from the posters and not the platform.
Yeah. I mean sure, you can have really deep thoughts, elegantly condensed into a couple of short sentences, but when you're eventually required to clarify something for one reason or another things are gonna get messy.
Perhaps a valuable public service should be owned and governed by...the public? In a corporation like Twitter, only people who can afford a financial stake have a say, and having more financial stake means having more say. Not a great structure if your concern is power. Perhaps everyone in the public (with a social rather than financial stake in a platform like Twitter) should have a voice in its governance.
The government mismanages almost everything it takes over. If it owned Twitter, the employees would take over, unionize, and demand and get a collective bargaining agreement that guarantees annual pay raises while making them almost totally immune to dismissal.
There's a reason why the government was not able to effectively execute on developing a cost-effective space launch system, while SpaceX was. The efficacy of using the profit motive and competition to engender innovation and efficiency is not corporate propaganda. It's the lesson of the last 400 years.
The sanctification of the government, as some kind of healthy antidote to corporate greed, and representative of the collective will, is a deeply misguided and extraordinarily dangerous notion. Thomas Sowell's account of his experience at the Department of Labor in 1960 is a poignant example of how untrue it is: https://youtu.be/v6PDpCnMvvw?t=38
I didn't mention "the government." There are other models for democratic governance of businesses, such as co-ops. Credit unions and REI are examples consumer-owned co-ops that have been very successful and provide great service. REI shows that it is possible to govern a business in the US on the principle of "one member, one vote" instead of "more money, more votes" and still make billions in revenue.
I would agree that Twitter transitioning to a DAO owned by its users might turn out great.
Going a bit on this tangent: one problem with a DAO for Twitter is that the tools for DAO management are still in their infancy, and in practice it means that a centralized administration holds the keys to power in existing DAOs. E.g. the administrators of the main Discord channels, the mods of the main Reddit channels, etc, have the ability to control the narrative by deciding what messages are made prominent, and which ones are censored, in community discussions.
Member-owned co-ops like credit unions and REI come to mind. They follow a "one member, one vote" rule. Credit unions are not-for-profit, while REI makes billions in revenue, and both provide great service. They're an existence proof that it's possible to still be a good business while governed democratically.
In some countries like Finland, the democratic government holds some large non-majority stake in companies that affect the public interest. However, I don't think that model would work in the US, particularly in light of some unique jurisprudence (Buckley v. Valeo, Citizens United v. FEC, and Americans for Prosperity v. Bonta) that make all three branches of government captive institutions to a small number of wealthy donors.
> Credit unions are not-for-profit, while REI makes billions in revenue,
Periodic reminder: revenue is not profit. A not-for-profit can bring in billions in revenue. (I don’t know of any non-profit organizations that fit this description)
The US Supreme Court is within spitting distance of wading into these waters. See Justice Thomas' concurrence in the grant of cert for Biden v. Knight First Amendment Institute[1]. "The similarities between some digital platforms and common carriers or places of public accommodation may give legislators strong arguments for similarly regulating digital platforms."
It sounds like Justice Thomas is suggesting that this might be a reasonable thing for legislators to write laws about. It is not Justice Thomas saying, the US Supreme Court is likely to issue opinions on Twitter as a common carrier.
Maybe that’s what you intended to suggest, by the phrase “wading in.”
> I, for one, will always pick an imperfectly moderated cesspool
I once thought like that. And now, after seeing the cesspool of hate and ignorance on social media, and the turmoil it has created, I miss the days of quality journalism. Today, I fear getting trapped into echo chambers on the net, and not knowing anything beyond the narrow view they create. Having to figure out what content to trust is also not only tiring, but dangerous too.
Seems you are a liberal according to your twitter profile. This is not a dig, just saying, your experience on that platform is not the same as everybody else's, which is why I found your whole message a bit surprising.
Until the Great Bluecheck Purge, which revoked the verified status of significant twitterati - not because of question about their identity, but because their politics were incorrect.
Why is this something that adults invest their energy into? It feels very much like being back in grade school and getting upset over who got a sticker. Shouldn't both sides of that conflict have better things to be pissed over?
Because it was the moment Twitter decisively shifted from an open fair neutral public forum, where contributor accounts could be neutrally & objectively confirmed to be who they claimed to be, to a biased forum which refused legitimate identification of anyone not in line with certain sociopolitical views.
Anonymity is important, and Twitter gave that to anyone who wanted it. Identification is important too, and Twitter denied that to dissenting views (not weirdos, but about half the population - normal mainline opinions).
Twitter isn’t grade school. It succeeded as the new global online public town square, widely quoted as an authoritative forum. If @Talanes posts something important, good to know it’s the real Talanes people assume it is - but if he’s denied a blue check because he promotes wrongthink (even if shared by hundreds of millions), the validity of the post is questioned.
I’ve seen enough “not really who you think it is” accounts obfuscate truth to know it’s a real problem. Online identity verification, when wanted, is important.
I guess it's hard to care because @Talanaes has been denied a Blue Check since they were introduced.
It was never a real or fair identification system, it was a promo tool for early Twitter to boost celebrity engagement that they should have revamped or retired six or seven years ago.
Edit: What a wonderful time to realize my HN handle is mistyped, lol.
Twitter Blue apparently was another not so great idea I guess...
Look folks, Twitter was never really profitable and it showed. Innovation has been lagging for years, and they had to rely on sensationalism from Trump that simply can't be allowed to persist any more.
The profit model has changed, and therefore the CEO music change.
The big question is where it all will go next. I can think of several ideas that will improve the platform, but nobody asked me to write them, and I'm not getting paid CEO money by them to spit it out.
The biggest question now is what will happen next... I guarantee you though, any more plots to start billing users and turn Twitter into more of a "pay-for-play-ware" or "freemium" service will lead to a giant user base exodus. ;/
1) Remember that CEOs of public companies are essentially unable to say what they think or want. The cost of doing it is being sued for damages, having to spend countless hours with lawyers, etc. Jack might think X, but he's only allowed to say Y, and he doesn't want to go beyond that because he doesn't want to fight that fight.
Only people in a close circle really know what's going on, and it's most certainly not random people on the Internet (or HN).
2) Also, consider that Twitter, and perhaps Facebook (sorry but I don't give a sh*t that its new name is Meta), are really difficult companies to run, especially if you'd like to do some public good, as opposed to just maximizing returns.
There are so many things that can go wrong, so many other things that will set your company on fire without warnings, and that doesn't give people the time to think strategically on how to tackle certain difficult scenarios.
Twitter and Facebook essentially control most of the public discourse these days; never seen such amount of power in the hands of a few companies.
3) Despite common opinion, I actually think that Twitter (unlike Facebook) has done more good than harm. Why? Because it has essentially enabled an incredible explosion of "voices" that can be heard (err, read) all over the world.
4) Yes, we can think of countless ways to make Twitter better, but remember that Twitter is not run by Jack Dorsey, nor that other companies are run by their CEOs. Companies are run by boards, which means, by large funds with controlling interest in these companies. Even a well-intentioned CEO has to fight against many things his/her board want. And unlike enlightened CEOs, enlightened boards are essentially a very rare creature, almost never seen on planet Earth (IMHO).
5) You might think I'm defending Jack, perhaps I am, but it might be because hatred is really easy to dispense, while trying to be balanced in your judgement is really hard, and perhaps the conversation about Twitter should benefit from cooler heads, as opposed to quick slogans.
I lean moderately left and I really disagree with #3. The explosion of voices is only ones that are "allowed". Twitter is one of the biggest offenders of cancel culture (i.e. silencing people).
OK, "Younger and left-leaning outrage tends to dominate on Twitter" ^ "Older and right-leaning outrage tends to dominate on Facebook" => Twitter has "done more good than harm (unlike Facebook)?" That's ageism of first order right there.
This is nonsense. I talk with my favorite furry purveyors of printable guns on twitter nearly daily. I have criticisms of how Twitter bends to the establishment left, but there's a lot of stuff on twitter that makes many blue people very angry.
I don't see Twitter as an improvement over what we had before.
The same people controlling the media once, are on the boards of the companies that allegedly made the change possible.
On the other hand, their faces are hidden now, so we can't really say if a certain topic is legitimately important for the general public or the consensus has been fabricated or, even worse, their platform has been abused and we won't know until it's too late because it's bad PR.
At least in the past I could almost be sure that a media outlet was not easy to infiltrate so their opinion reflected their beliefs and I could take a stance pro or against.
> Before Twitter you didn’t have a voice you were afraid to lose.
it depends on where and when
people with no voice are still with no voice, even with Twitter
people that had some kind of voice, still have a voice, probably more.
people with lots of voice power, still have a lot of power
except now people that have gained popularity don't want to lose it to silence potentially dangerous actors, because they are on the same boat, and entities with a lot of resources can have a voice (sometimes very convincing) where they wouldn't have before.
Think about the staggering amount of visibility the Talibans have on platforms like IG, they are influencers now!
Not entirely Twitter's fault, but the Jack Dorseys didn't think about the consequences and here we are.
They did what they are good at: built a platform, made it grow exponentially, lost control of it, but profited.
Not judging the intentions, they could have been the best ever, but the result is that they built something that we have to deal with, whether we like it or not.
Before, the voices I heard were people in my life and my local community.
The media was just the media; they'd get put in their own box for analysis and skepticism.
Twitter's great power is controlling peoples' impression of what the people around them are thinking and saying. Or, rather, allowing various aggressive agenda-driven groups to control that.
So now the corps don't just control the voice of the media; they control the voice of your community too.
That stuff is an issue, but it's nothing compared to positive effects arising from an increased ability for people to communicate and coordinate in actual oppressive states
> There are so many things that can go wrong, so many other things that will set your company on fire without warnings, and that doesn't give people the time to think strategically on how to tackle certain difficult scenarios.
> never seen such amount of power in the hands of a few companies.
These two points seem contradictory. If you are very powerful, you can draw on great resources, and you can address many things.
Twitter has more than enough resource to prevent it from being the extremely harmful manipulation machine that it is.
There is no excuse beyond “we want money more than a healthy society.”
>These two points seem contradictory. If you are very powerful, you can draw on great resources, and you can address many things.
Power isn't a single resource that can be accumulated and spent. The accumulation of soft power over public discourse isn't the sort of thing that inherently helps you put out fires, and in fact managing that growth can be one of the fires.
>There is no excuse beyond “we want money more than a healthy society.”
Which GP covered in their 4th point. Even a CEO who doesn't believe that answers to a board who does. And if the board has reservations, they answer to shareholders who do. It's a structure that continually passes the buck so no one has to consciously decide to put profits over people.
Fiduciary duty is a pretty slick moral hack, making the act of chasing the dollar feel like a communal good.
> There is no excuse beyond “we want money more than a healthy society.”
Socrates's prosecutors called, they want their undisprovable accusation back! Serious any claims of "ruining" or "harming" society are specious and a classic symptom of a moral panic. You would think people would have learned from atonal music, Jazz, rock and roll, and rap alone having already ruined society. Let alone allowing women and minorities to vote and gay marriage and things getting better from a "ruined" society.
This probably isn't what the parent meant, but also:
I began using Twitter a week ago after avoiding it for years. Imo it incentivizes you to gain likes/followers, but in order to do so you have to tailor your content to appeal to bots/algo/quick-digestion. And it's not fun tweeting if nobody interacts, so you end up self-censoring to post clickbaity hype content
I don't think it is valid to say that the difficulty of running large successful companies buys moral leeway for their CEOs. They get payed the big bucks for a reason, let's hold them responsible.
Of course, exceptions don’t prove rules, they disprove them. Maybe Musk is showing that CEOs could say a lot more than they choose to, at least if they have charisma. And run certain kinds of businesses, appealing to a certain kind of investors and customers.
It will be interesting to see how Twitter changes as a result. Twitter with selective following and setting your timeline to 'time order' creates a pretty good environment for me. It feels like the equivalent of living in only a few chosen 'subreddits' rather than getting the full frontal reddit experience.
The difference for me has always beem that Twitter is organized by person rather than by topic. In some ways that's good if I'm following someone because I care about them personally, but usually I follow people because I'm interested in a particular aspect of their work like art or announcements. In those cases, I don't want to hear about their political opinions or what their child did that week. I know you can follow topics as well, but that often seems overwhelming and imprecise. Social media as a platform is just incredibly confusing in the way it blurs the line between performer and audience.
Yup. There was this "follow the whole person!" bullshit on infosec Twitter a while back, and it was just such nonsense. I follow them because I'm interested in their thoughts on computer security, no other reason. I couldn't care less about a security nerd's political opinions; it's just as irrelevant to me as a politician's thoughts on computer security.
My solution was to mute words. It was way too tedious to say “show fewer of Bob’s RTs”. So like, I muted the word “Trump”. But I use twitter in a really specific way, and I acknowledge this isn’t a great solution.
This has been my fundamental problem with Twitter; I use Facebook to follow actual friends and their goings-on, and Twitter to follow Important People with Important Things To Say.
Turns out, I care a lot more about the former than the latter.
You could relatively easily flip the script and use the platforms in the opposite way. (although Twitter's narrow reach makes it harder to follow IRL "friends" because they're not so likely to be on the platform or use it regularly).
Likes and Retweets are the big annoyances, IMO. If I'm following someone, it's because I want to see the content that they are consciously putting out, not just whatever they impulsively click a heart on. And unless you're a personal friend or a particularly interesting content aggregator, I probably don't care about your RTs either.
I've been mostly successful in removing likes from people I'm following by using (on the desktop) the ... > I'm not interested in this tweet > show fewer likes from X. Though sometime likes reappear and I have to reload the page once or twice to get a chronological timeline. Though that doesn't do anything about retweets.
This seems to hold true for many social media sites: facebook, reddit, twitter. It takes effort on behalf of the user to make their experience on the site "better".
And by better I mean, less divisive, and less mindless scrolling of memes/low effort content.
Thinking about it from the business's perspective, it probably ultimately also lowers their user engagement metrics. Users get a higher quality experience using the site, but also spend less time on the site. It sorta reminds me of the freemium/grinding experience in games today. It makes for a worse game experience, but a better company bottom line.
I think if its sufficiently niche (topic or membership wise), the communities can have fairly civil conversations (and even disagreements). I think this is largely due to the fact that being niche means its less likely to attract troll-types looking for a platform.
Reddit is and will change more over time. Today I get “posts you may like” on my home feed which are basically rehashed horrible takes from /r/politics on a different subreddit.
True, but it's easy to find games that don't use that model (especially on desktop or console), whereas it's hard to find a way to consume thoughts from interesting people outside of twitter.
I don't think this is solvable, or indeed even a problem to be solved. Our definition of "better" probably overlaps quite a bit, but it decidedly does not with many, many people. There are a lot of people who really enjoy "memes and low-effort content".
The reason it takes effort on behalf of the user is because there's no such thing as a perfect read-your-mind content recommendation system that doesn't require any inputs from you, as much as people like to pretend machine learning is magic. Twitter/Reddit et al are a tool for building a content stream that fits you perfectly: their recommendations aren't intended to be blindly and indiscriminately consumed, but to narrow your search space to make the construction of this stream possible in the first place.
This is a simple extension of the trend of broadening distribution we've seen, from having three broadcast channels (all reporting the same news with the same slant and the same blind spots), through cable television, all the way up to today's wide-open, bottom-up distribution system. The root of this type of complaint about social media is that they treat their users with too much respect, trusting them to have the emotional continence and intellectual maturity to build a custom content stream that fits them instead of being told precisely what to believe and what to care about by Walter Cronkite.
It seems reasonable to propose that perhaps most people do not find that experience "better." Frankly, I've not been that careful about who I follow, and the curated feed is better than the uncurated one.
Long ago I made a reddit account with the first suggested name after the one I asked for was 'taken', disabled following all the subreddits, and then selectively added subreddits specific to my hobbies.
I don't see anything that normally hits the front page, everything I do see is somewhat relevant to me, and it basically deletes all politics from what is presented.
By far the best reddit experience possible, I think.
I don't get any news from reddit - its purely an entertainment vehicle for me, so I don't worry about the bubble portion of it. If I'm in a synthesizer or fiction writing bubble, so be it.
they're literally my personal interests. Find smaller subreddits related to your personal interests. If you don't like the same things I like my subreddits are unlikely to be interesting to you.
The whole point here is to get rid of the all of the default subreddits, since they become garbage once they become default no matter what, and then find things that you're actually interested in that aren't default and thus not full of 'normies' who ruin most of reddit.
There was a time before reddit got huuuuge that most of it was pretty ok, but that time was years and years ago. Now there are just niche subreddits of quality and an ocean of garbage.
I used to enjoy reddit so much but it’s honestly the worst place on the internet today. Every major sub is infested with politics, bias mods and toxic comments.
I wouldn’t be surprised if reddit is heavily influenced by bot activity. If you were a foreign influence who wanted to convey a certain narrative, then reddit would be the de-facto place for that.
1. Upvote and downvote system, where downvoted squelch bad takes, is perfect for narrative forming.
2. The demographic for reddit are young minds who most likely have a position on a certain topic because they’ve been told to from a place like reddit.
I use tweetdeck and only follow specific users, i.e., all my columns are "user" columns. It's kind of like a micro-blog RSS feed of sorts. It's wonderful if you're careful about who you follow.
Check out “Fenix” (3rd party client on Apple platforms) - it mimics the multi-column view, but is more flexible; a list can be a Twitter list, a search query etc.
I haven't used Fenix before (it does look nice!), but I can definitely do all of the above in tweetdeck and did so in the past before raising my walls by following only specific users.
Society is going through a learning process in understanding the value of scope in our social environments. If you simply connect all the nodes into a gigantic hyper graph you get a constantly evolving shithole.
It’s like programming using only global variables.
There is both value and risk in highly personalized social scoping. The largest risk IMO is epistemic closure, which at large scale is corrosive to society. A platform which has the effect of enabling frictionless epistemic bubbles for everyone is harmful, not beneficial.
This is a systemic risk of decentralization in all of its forms, too, really. At its most extreme, a world comprised of arbitrarily many self-governed communities is a dystopia.
...which was discussed on the #fediblock tag as soon as it went up, with a lot of admins who set up their own Mastodons because they were sick of that guy constantly showing up on Twitter immediately defederating from that particular instance.
Being able to block entire instances is a really, really nice power.
There's zero explanation in the email for why he resigned. He's re-iterating the point that the company is fine moving forward with the rest of the board, the new CEO and the existing team, but no actual reason as to why he left.
Twitter, ~$35B Market Cap, no profits, operating expenses keeps growing with Gross Profits. Future projection of profitability is still slim. Along with trillions of social / political issues that you have to due with because you are running social media.
Square, ~$100B Market Cap, profitable, still mainly US based and growing. Crypto and Payment. Lots of potentials.
Yeah from people that work there: it's hard to keep ad companies happy. Ad services want more personal info, tracking systems, they want geo, they want the user signed in, etc. Ad companies can get ALL that on facebook. This is completely against what twitter users (the vocal ones anyway) want.
Not sure what your point is. Even gambling addicts like to donate or give away money to the hostesses and waitresses at the bar.
The addiction is earning money. Accumulating wealth. Donating it, if anything, adds to that addiction, since it lets you play god for a bit.
Not saying Jack is all of those things, and donating money is objectively a good thing, but the greedy race for money can't be solved by promoting charity.
Its not about "personal" profits or money, although money is certainly an indicator. It is about impact. I question Twitter's growth and future impact, good or bad.
Not only that, but it's a much simpler proposition: "Our mission is to sell payment processing". With Twitter it sounds like there was a constant battle between employees, some championing free speech, others wanting twitter to curb abuse, others angry Trump got banned, a different group angry similar Trump adjacent folks are still on Twitter...
What a headache. I'm not trying to dismiss these issues, but I can certainly see why it's a lot easier to spend your time worrying about how to make everyone happy at the company when it's Square than Twitter.
Running social media company is a job, where in the best case, half of the world hates you. No matter how good you’re, you’re always walking thin line between hate, free speech, conspiracy theories, political polarization, media and countless other issues. It’s a game you cannot win, and I’m pretty sure that’s why he’s resigning.
Uncharitable explanation: he's being forced out over his pro-free-speech views. He's been pretty vocal about disagreeing with Twitter's recent actions.
That makes no sense. He is the CEO and on the board, he _is_ the decision maker and could reverse any action he disagreed with. Any disagreement was purely theatre.
A CEO isn't a dictator. They still need board support. If everyone on the board decided that Jack wasn't the guy anymore, Jack can't wave a magic wand and make them disappear. CEOs have been ousted many times.
The board can't unilaterally decide the color of the Twitter logo is now green. They can pressure the CEO and threaten to hold a vote to fire him if he doesn't change it, but up until that point the CEO is the ultimate decision maker for the company.
Jack saying he didn't like decisions Twitter made is like if I started complaining that I didn't like the restaurant I chose for dinner.
That's because Zuckerberg stacked the decks that way because he pressed his advantage early. He owns controlling interest of his operation and it can't be wrested from him.
I don't think it's the best approach to manage a company but it's sure been lucrative for Mark.
I don't hear many FB shareholders complaining either, I wouldn't claim equal voting rights on my few shares even if I could (please don't crucify me HN, I'm just a tiny fish that dislikes the company but likes the stock). On paper, supershare structures are not a great thing for the common shareholder as it makes their shares basically free of voting rights when the CEO (or united group) holds such a supermajority. In practice, a strong operator like Mark gets more leeway to steer the ship with fewer barriers and inside power struggles. Imagine if the board stopped him from buying IG or WA, these purchases were very controversial at the time and many thought he was a lunatic for paying such a steep price, it only looks genius in hindsight. When/while it works, it is an effective governance structure.
Notable that these types of structures are no longer allowed, companies like Facebook, Google and Berkshire (no super-majority here) got grandfathered in.
> Notable that these types of structures are no longer allowed, companies like Facebook, Google and Berkshire (no super-majority here) got grandfathered in.
Could you maybe elaborate on that? I have never heard about this before, what exactly isn't possible these days?
Am I misremembering? I vividly recall finding information with regards to this type of structure not being allowed (unsure if regulatory or stock exchange level) with these examples (Mark's majority, Page+Brin's majority, BRK A shares) last time I came across this, but now I come up empty-handed. So I'm unsure and don't have much time to dig in, maybe someone more knowledgeable comes by. Feels bad that I can't edit in a disclaimer to my previous comment, I don't want to parrot misinformation.
Look for a video of his speech during the Bitcoin conference that happened in Miami this year. Some activist invaded the area blaming him for censorship and then he proceed to apologetically explain that the pressure comes from the companies advertising on Twitter.
If you think that the CEO of a company can just do whatever they like then you haven't run a company.
If you attempt to do things that the employees do not want to do then your company will turn to shit. People will leave, and those that remain will have terrible productivity.
Yes, you get some "Just do as I say" points, but you have to choose where to spend them very wisely.
This is par for the course, ask a politician a question get a non-answer, ask an NFL coach about the next game “They are a good team, we have to practice hard.” It’s all just talking without really saying anything.
yes, that's the downside of the 'iterated game' dynamic: the desire to minimize leaks of future strategy. the upside, of course, is fewer defections/betrayals. it's one of the reasons we need independent journalism in society not beholden to moneyed/political interests. unfortunately, just about every news outlet, including npr, has been subverted at this point.
here's hoping jack actually believes in sacrificing money and power to defect out of this information oligopoly, though i'm skeptical as those forces are irresistable to most humans.
This is a great skill to learn BTW... along with answering only the questions you want and saying only what you want when asked questions. Rumsfeld was a master of it. It's more than public relations but also negotiation and diplomacy even in the non-political sense. I mean try to get a school board to do something or your local govt.
Replying to my own comment, but if I had to guess (on absolutely zero context and evidence :p), I would say he wants to focus on crypto/Square, and Twitter is more of a time sink. Twitter is in a good enough state at the moment that the team can move without him so it's a good moment to leave.
Other than Musk for Tesla and SpaceX, I can't think of any of the major companies who would really be impacted much by their CEO leaving. Maybe Zuck leaving FB might make a small difference but IG seems decently independent of him anyway.
Zuckerberg by all accounts bullied Kevin Systrom out of the company and now it prompts you to sign in when trying to browse photos; doesn't seem independant
He is/was CEO of two companies, but seems more interested in what's going on at one more than the other. Makes sense. Get out of the way of the people focused on the mission.
I was digging around this morning and found this from 2020. You think he was just feeling the heat lately and wanted out? Or has this been in the works from opposing forces for a while now?
A billionaire Republican megadonor has purchased a "sizable" stake in Twitter and "plans to push" to oust CEO Jack Dorsey among other changes, according to new reports, raising the prospect of a shocking election-year shakeup of the social media platform that conservatives have long accused of overt left-wing political bias.
Paul Singer’s Elliott Management Corp. has already nominated four directors to Twitter's board, a development first reported by Bloomberg News, citing several sources familiar with the arrangement. The outlet noted that unlike other prominent tech CEOs, Dorsey didn't have voting control over Twitter because the company had just one class of stock; and he has long been a target for removal given Twitter's struggling user growth numbers and stock performance.
Aside from these two paragraphs the rest of the article is a lot of speculation and some quotes from people who've been against Twitter for some time:
Not really. When you don't want the discussion to linger for the whole transition period, announcing the news the last minute can make sense. Not saying it's the case here though, just saying it's a possibility.
They've fired him before and last year he nearly got fired by the board when an activist investor came on board. I think if that was the case it would be public knowledge.
Honestly, does he really owe the public a reason? I am no Jack Dorsey fan, but it would be unusual for any CEO of even a moderately successful company to expose any internal business with the public.
He probably realistically owed the public (or shareholders) an explanation of how he could justify being CEO of two companies more than he owes an explanation of why he left one of them.
You're seeing a lot of political consolidation around getting rid of, or revamping considerably section 230 which most social media platforms have been protected from lawsuits for a while now.
When you have both parties in agreement that FB, Twitter and Google are a threat to free speech and democracy, you best watch out.
This was my thought. The heat was getting too much for him. Law makers repeatedly asking him to come testify on this and that. The pressure to get rid of 230, and have better controls on banning people may have just worn on him enough where he just decided to toss in the towel and move onto something else and quietly disappear.
The issue with Dorsey is that he acknowledges how toxic Twitter is, but has no idea how to fix it nor did he seem ready to do so, and this made investors very nervous.
I don't think this is ... necessarily the wrong thing.
Acknowledging that it is a difficult problem and you don't know how to solve it might be better than thinking you know how to solve it and doing something worse.
People are also quick to blame platforms without acknowledging that a lot of people are awful, the venue in which they practice their awfulness isn't necessarily at fault but it's easier to blame a thing which could be destroyed (religion, organization, social network, etc) than to acknowledge that this is a feature of humanity.
"the problem is unsolvable nothing can be done" is obviously false, because things were not always this divisive. Of course it's people's fault that twitter is awful, but twitter isn't in charge of people, it's in charge of twitter. Investors won't take "not our problem" as an answer here.
They absolutely did. Twitter et al. just change the shape of who you socialize with, humans weren't in solitary confinement before the Internet. The platform was more local more community based for example there were often awful people at church.
You're choosing an overly generous definition of platform.
A surly neighbor, a dreaded personage at church, has limits on their influence based on simple geography. They experience pushback against their behavior via ostracism (exclusion from events and groups) and non-verbal cues (facial expressions, body language).
The same type of character on a massive online platform has the opportunity to reach a much broader audience, aided by engagement-focused algorithms that can suggest similarly cantankerous personalities to commiserate with. There is less opportunity for negative feedback against their opinions and actions, because there are seldom any "unlike" buttons, and bans and mutes are usually invisible to the originator of the speech: they can opt to interpret silence as acceptance.
Twitter and similar platforms aren't just bigger versions of a soap box in a town square, or gossip circles in a small community. They're categorically different things, with categorically different effects on society.
HN is not what I'd call cancer. Social media doesn't need to be an engagement-obsessed, emotionally charged misinformation hose. Social media is broader than the category that twitter and FB live in. It can be less toxic, but less toxic platforms are less exciting and don't get the same kind of attention, which is what all the toxic stuff optimizes for.
I don't think that's a contradiction personally. Most reasonable people accept that some level of censorship is necessary for a good discussion, especially when hundreds or thousands of people are involved. HN style moderation doesn't exactly scale to twitter size easily though.
People try to make the argument that Twitter and (maybe to a lesser extent) Facebook are akin to a "town square", whereas I don't think people consider the HN comments section a "town square".
HN as a platform is effectively dedicated to a narrow set of topics, with a largely homogeneous user base (compared to any mainstream social media at least). I don’t think the consensus here is particularly favourable towards free speech, and it certainly has a very narrow Overton Window of acceptable ideas. The user moderation features also heavily reinforce whatever groupthink is popular, you have to “accepted” by accumulating a large amount of karma to influence voting, and 4 in-group users disagreeing with a comment is enough to remove it from the discussion.
I think Dang’s moderation is usually pretty decent, but I really don’t think this is a place where free speech is championed. In any thread on the topic, calls for increased speech regulation seem to be very popular.
I've been lurking on HN for about the last 8 years or so but only a few years ago made an account and I sparsely comment. Only a couple of weeks ago was my account considered worthy of being able to vote down. Meanwhile I've seen users essentially "game" their comment karma to high amounts within a few weeks.
I don't really agree with the idea that this place is an echo chamber, but I do sort of see it as similar to an IT meetup. You generally don't go to an IT focused meetup and start talking about abortion, religion, etc. and nobody would be surprised if you were kindly asked to leave the venue if you insisted on soap-boxing. If someone came and carted you off in a black van for speaking in a public place about your feelings on abortion I'd expect there to be a lot of push back from the public.
I think it's discussed only where it's considered "on-topic". In my experience, many politcal articles are quickly removed as off-topic unless there's some technological bend to it. For example, politics in a thread about Julia 1.7 release would be "off-topic", politics in a thread about net neutrality might be on-topic but only up to a certain degree.
Not the OP, but your examples of bot level garbage and trolling content are perfect for Twitter. I would include self promotion, but that is such a core part of social media.
As a long time /lit/-izen I wanted bring up 4chan as an counter-example of a toxic platform that hasn't been optimized for attention. But the longer I thought about it, the more I grew sure that it isn't as toxic as it seems to be. Sure people will respond to your post calling you a bundle of sticks or the n-word. But in the end I had more heart-to-hearts with people that have widly different opinions than on any other platform. Some anon on /wg/ even convinced me to see a therapist about my suicidal-ideation. Hearing that from a voice in the void where there was no karma/likes/hearts/reblogs/etc. attached seemed more genuine, honest and caring than any other "help" I experienced online.
HN it's both highly regulated, and focuses on a few niche topics. I can tell you how to create a mobile app using flutter and firebase. I can't tell you how to handle a relationship.
I can argue flutter is easier than react native without getting personal. I don't argue about my relationships, or anyone else's relationships. I have extremely strict criteria for anyone I let into my life, whether that be a friend or a partner. This has worked very well for me.
You're not going to find what you want in every single city, life can become drastically better just by moving.
But that's it. I don't need to argue about why I live where I do.
I don't need the validation of random people when it comes to my life decisions. However if you want to argue with me that I can get better server-side performance via a Rust backend rather than firebase, I might listen.
HN is not for profit. In fact, it's purposely a loss leader. They can afford to be heavily moderated because they aren't trying to appease anyone but their specific small, targeted audience.
It's toxic if you're actually an expert in the subject at hand. People here would rather feel smart than wrong. Lots of armchair experts here touting misinformation but you don't notice it unless there's a topic you know well.
If HN is "toxic" then you'll have to define the word toxic, because generally this is one of the best-behaved discussion forums on the internet. Even jokes get downvoted.
I mean, I work in tech, and even I find it very difficult to read the comments sections here on anything related to racial justice, gender equality, etc. People post nasty stuff and it gets upvoted to the top.
I agree. To me, the definitive negative characteristic of Social Media is the "feed," where each person has a unique view of content. There's no good way to "curate" that for engagement (or monetize for advertising) without creating toxic incentives.
HN is a forum because everyone sees the same discussion.
That's a really important distinction I hadn't thought about.
When you can make a feed that "feeds" you own preconceived ideas as reality, you get told the world is just as you imagined, you're always right, and those who disagree are obviously evil and/or stupid.
That's really insightful. Maybe that's one reason that I like MeWe: it has a feed, but it's so useless that I ignore it completely and use the chats attached to the various groups I joined. I use it like a hub of forums.
Do you think it's possible forums can make a true comeback? They are overall healthier, but can they be profitable? Also if anyone has more research on social media alternatives, I'd love some references.
Reddit is kinda-sorta a forum site. You can treat a single sub as a forum by ordering posts chronologically. phpbb style forums still exist and are the best place to discuss some topics. In the RV/truck space there are still many forums that have been bought and consolidated under a few holding companies. They still operate as distinct boards, however.
I don't think a binary definition is meaningful. Instead, what I focus on is the continuum of how much control you as a user have over the content that is presented to you.
At one end, you have the default Reddit front page. You get a torrent of posts completely unrelated to your specific interests or people you care about. It's as close to "the front page of the Internet" as you can get. Like staring into the collective psyche of the web.
At the other end, you have Google search. You only see pages you specifically request for by an explicit search query at that point in time. If you don't search, nothing is given to you. You have almost complete control over your attention.
Social media sites/apps are generally points between those. Critically, most give you more flexibility in how you use them than users get credit for. If you use Reddit by just browsing the front page and not even logging in, yes, it's the worst of all possible worlds. But if you create an account, unsubscribe from all the default subreddits, and only follow subreddits that are interesting to you and well moderated, then you have a lot more control. My Reddit experience is uniformly positive and enriching.
Twitter can also be a nourishing experience, but you have to be careful about who you follow, and turn off retweets for most of the people you follow.
Facebook is harder but if you disable all posts from sites that users often reshare, that removes a ton of clutter. Unfollowing people also helps.
Complete control over attention maybe, but not complete control over what you see. Google targets your results like Twitter and Facebook target your feed. Reddit and HN don't do this.
I don't think a continuum along a single axis can reveal what's truly pathological about social media. If you break it up into multiple axes, I think problematic tech will cluster into quadrants where algorithms are targeting you personally in various ways.
I think there's a few well-moderated large subreddits that I read periodically that are pretty similar to HN. Like if you go to r/linux, I doubt most people would say that's toxic. It's probably worse than HN, but that might be down to dang be good at moderating.
I guess it's a social medium but it feels different.
I appreciate this level of blatant obviousness. It is wildly thought provoking. Someone might take this flat statement as being antagonistic, but these 5 words are exactly the point!
You're right, HN is a social medium. It suffers from many of the same issues as Twitter. Much of the negativity and positivity it creates is similar to what I can see on Twitter. Perhaps that's the human condition "at scale"?
I think somehow, for the time being, the audience and size of HN is "okay" and most of the devils haven't leapt out of their lightly corked bottles just yet within the community.
Nothing is published on HN, it's just a content aggregator. Importantly, the content that appears on HN is submitted by the same users who leave the comments. That makes it markedly different from, say, someone's blog with a comment section.
HN is unappealing to the average internet user. It's topical, nerdy, lacks images and video, has zero engagement algorithms, and the "karma" is hidden.
It's also aggressively moderated. I can only post ~4 times a day since my account got flagged / rate limited for participating in flame wars about China, Apple, monopolies, etc. There's probably no way out of this except to create a new account.
Remove Section 230 protections for profit driven social networks, carve out exemptions for public goods and other sites operated without a profit intent (Wikipedia, the Internet Archive, Hacker News, etc) and the problem solves itself (the cost to police/moderate the platform rises above a point where the revenue returned is no longer sufficient to make the endeavor worthwhile). Social media is toxic due to the social fabric impact being externalized and socialized while the profits are privatized.
I could get behind some more restrictions on websites of a certain size, but putting any burden on brand-new web site owners beyond urgently dealing with problematic content is too much of a burden. It just acts as a moat for powerful incumbents, and they have far too deep moats as it is.
You can't know the quality of content before it is submitted. It would effectively turn the internet into TV. Did you forget web hosting is also protected by section 230? Web hosting as we know it would go away. Every site update would need to be pre-approved by the web hosting company.
No disagreement that free speech is important, but the solution proposed up-thread wouldn't safeguard it. In practice, it would instead limit controversial content to only a small set of sites while everything else (for fear of lawsuits currently headed off by S230 protections) would either close shop or become more moderated than it already is.
... This is in addition to the legal / philosophical criticism that the government repealing S230 protection for all but a few websites would be equivalent to the government providing libel-lawsuit protection to only a few state-sanctioned media outlets. Wholly incompatible with the first amendment.
It really doesn't matter the system - people are already upset that people they don't like are doing things like selling NFTs (please don't buy NFTs, they're cringe)
OK, Facebook is now a non profit which only income comes from selling ad space to "Definitely Not Facebook Inc" at such a price which avoids racking up profits. (Like ad house of old.)
All of those do count, but many people have a narrower definition because of how the term "social media" is often shorthand for Twitter, FB, IG, and similar when used in the traditional media.
My point is that if you want to ban something then you need a specific dividing line other than "like Twitter." Otherwise either everything is banned or nothing is banned since everyone just uses loopholes. And if everything is banned you better be sure you actually want everything banned.
I could survive without HN. The internet existed before it. We had things like webrings and mailing lists that were highly personal forms of communication & aggregation.
You could even find content that you wanted online before Google made search pay-to-play.
Killing social media and requiring services (like email, etc) not be an ad-supported free model (where the product is the user) would completely transform the internet (and its balance of power) as we know it and for the better.
SomethingAwful charging $10 for an account was always/accidentally the right idea.
My consistent answer to the "if companies weren't allowed to spy on you and do other horrible shit, and if ad dollars dried up, all these sites would go away!" argument is that all those sites have value approaching zero anyway. So they go away. Oh well.
The Web loses 1% of its decent content, while the remaining 99% gets higher visibility, more funding, more interest/attention (which can improve quality, as in, say, collaborative communities like Wikipedia, or open source). The rest of the cost is the loss of a bunch of shit content that most people could/would replace with time-wasters like sudoku or Tetris or entertainment magazines, and carry on with life. Seems like a bargain to me.
You also couldn't have megalithic companies like Google that bait you into their ecosystem with "free shit" like Gmail and search completely bankrolled out of their other primary enterprise.
Google uses Ads to unevenly compete with every other software company on the planet. Google can buy your company and outpay you for engineers with what is essentially their financial fingernail clippings. The thing that's gained in this scenario is all of the talent that could be going to other things besides optimizing ads.
They use those advantages to compete with other companies and with volunteer efforts. That's another reason I'm not too worried about doom-and-gloom predictions of what would happen if we killed the ads (and spying-fed ML) golden goose: we do not know how much better protocols, free (open source) products, non-profit services (as in Wikipedia), and paid software/services would be without ad-fed giants sucking all the air out of the room at best, and deliberately using their advantages to kill things (competitors, protocols, et c.) at worst. I suspect all of those would be a whole lot better, absent the money-firehoses dependent on bad & dangerous behavior.
Excellent point, it is easy to forget the minor miracle of FOSS. Plus, without the ad revenues there would be no mega-corps vacuuming up all the new grads, so I would anticipate a significantly greater rate of innovation and FOSS contribution broadly.
There's even an interest or social-reward factor to participating in these kinds of things. Working on an open-protocol messaging client for free is a lot less rewarding when the userbase of the entire protocol is 1% or less of all online messaging, because most of that market's captured by closed platforms that forbid and/or discourage other clients, than when it works with 20+% of clients and even your non-geek friends are using the protocol, if not your particular client.
I truly think we couldn't launch something like the email protocol these days and have it gain traction, and I don't mean because of its flaws. I judge that a pretty crappy state of affairs, and I think the #1 cause is that it's so lucrative to keep your users in a position where you can track & spy on them very well, while avoiding leaking anything they're doing so that competitors can see it—IOW incentives are set up to greatly reward successful closed platforms while discouraging interoperability, so we get even more of that than we otherwise might.
> I truly think we couldn't launch something like the email protocol these days and have it gain traction...
Sadly it's worse than you expect here. Enter ElasticSearch.
The company behind the innovation you propose will piggy-back on open source projects (Lucene), add a novelty to it (clustering) and choose a permissive open-source license to encourage contributions. Once hitting a significant market penetration threshold, the project then will move to a mixed-source, enterprise license model with intentionally-crippled community versions (think Neo4j, JFrog, etc).
ElasticSearch isn't even alone here, it's just the most obvious example. I've actually been insisting for a long time that we need an Apache-licensed standard solution for clustering generic applications...something useful enough that anyone can connect part A & part B to get "clustered Lucene" instead of "ElasticSearch". Something reasonably deployable (read: is monitorable, has RBAC) without massive licensing costs (read: Neo4j). Not an easy problem, for sure.
I was around at the time, and webrings were useless from the start. Mailing lists, usenet and IRC were fine but they were just as viciously combative and abusive as any social media we have now. You're looking at the past with rose-tinted glasses.
You might also be forgetting that Google first became big because they created a search engine that actually worked. Getting Altavista or Lycos to find what you were looking for was a real skill.
Webrings definitely were not useless from the start, but they were useless after a couple of months. For a very short while though, they were great, and there are even some efforts to revive the concept today.
I'm not out celebrating when a country like Turkey or something blocks Twitter.
No, I'm advocating the Amish approach. It's perfectly reasonable and noble for a society to get together and decide "we're not going to use X". There's nothing censorial about that. It's the same kind of logic people use to advocate against things like ICEs and eating meat. Are vegans trying to "censor" your meat-eating? No. It's the same kind of reasoning behind us having _any_ laws to begin with.
And I'm not even talking about blocking Twitter. I'm saying that legislatively we should make sure that no company with a product like it can do business in our country(-ies). The same way that we have laws in place that prevent companies from business practices like "dumping toxic waste next to your housing development" under threat of force (like we will fine you to hell and back and then throw you in prison). Is that censorship too?
Come back with a more thoroughly-reasoned argument, please.
Twitter does a have a large "health" department tasked with figuring how to measure and improve the quality of the content and discourse in the platform. I don't have details since I only interviewed for a role in that team, but I do know it exists and it has a large number of PMs, Data Scientists, and Researchers. They have even collaborated with academia on the topic and a recent open RecSys competition (recommender system) was organized by Twitter with their data.
His directness and ability to say what he doesn't know is a good thing.
I enjoyed his interview with Sam Harris. He was honest and direct in answering tough questions about Twitter. He explained how they try to balance free expression but also want Twitter to be a safe place for people to interact.
Compare this to Zuckerberg who is never candid or forthright in public.
The big tech CEO attitude is that all of these issues stem from human behavior. They just sit back and stroke their beard at everyone blaming them. They ignore it and move on.
It's important to remember that in common usage “activist” doesn't mean anything other than trying to change how a company is run — there isn't the connotation of social values or similar which the term has in common usage.
I have no particular beef with Dorsey but I think this would make sense. He's been CEO of both Square and Twitter for years now and no matter what time you wake up in the morning or however many specials diets you undertake you're not going to be able to give the focus a solo CEO is.
I think the bigger issue is who gets to replace him: will it be someone with smart ideas or someone to serve as a puppet of activist investors? I can't find a source right now but I remember at the time Fleets were launched (Twitter's since-removed version of Stories) that the feature was pushed heavily by investors rather than anyone inside the company. If that's true then the next CEO could be a true disaster.
I've noticed that lots of C-suite and owner/CEO startup people have like three to five active business roles on their Linkedins.
A fun case of "rules for thee, but not for me" when it comes to anti-moonlighting clauses and such. I can't "give it my all" if I take some weekend gigs, but you can hold two C-suite positions, be on two boards, plus have an "advisory" role with some startup? It's a lot like drug testing for front-line folks while the C-suite are exempt (and would fall apart if denied their various chemical habits).
Much of the value that a CEO adds is in figuring out which rules can be broken without adverse consequences. They're accountable for results; if they raise shareholder value doing terrible things but never get caught, that's a win for shareholders, and they get to keep their position. If they do get caught, they get to be the fall guy, they resign, the board gets to say "We are shocked that such things occurred, we had no knowledge of it, the guilty parties have been sacked, and cleaning up the mess they made is a top priority for the organization." Witness Uber, Volkswagon, Boeing, and Wells Fargo.
The moonlighting employee has the same options. Don't get caught. If you do get caught, you get fired, just like the CEO.
This is also a good portion of why CEOs get paid so much. The average person doesn't like to inhabit the Hobbesian reality that CEOs do, where they're accountable for results and any bad things happening are automatically their fault. They want a world where if they take the right actions and follow the rules, they get some reasonable amount of security. Employment is basically a way to create an artificial island of "if you follow the rules, you get paid", at the expense of the company capturing much of the value you create. Most people take this bargain, because they value security over maximizing profit. Those who don't are always able to take the opposite side of the trade, and become an owner/executive, at the cost of being exposed to all the risks of the real world.
> The average person doesn't like to inhabit the Hobbesian reality that CEOs do, where they're accountable for results and any bad things happening are automatically their fault
Does this actually happen though? I'm not sure I've ever seen a President or CEO of a company be held accountable for bad behavior or bad decisions in any meaningful way.
Best case scenario, you mess up and get "fired" (with a million-dollar-or-more severance/contract payment attached, or similar in stocks -- enough cash paid out that you can basically retire for life). Worst case scenario, seems to be that you get hauled in front of Congress to answer questions and/or get teased on the internet for a few days -- stuff that has almost no lasting effect.
I'd say the Golden Parachute is closer to worst case. Best case is "failing upward", like so many of these Upper Class Twit of the Year candidates seem to do.
Those are the consequences for line-level workers caught doing something bad, too. The company fires you and refuses to give you a good recommendation. Worst case, you might get hauled in front of court to answer questions.
The difference is entirely in how people view those consequences. For most line-level workers, getting fired or laid off is a source of intense shame, as well as a big logistical inconvenience. As a result, they'll do almost anything to avoid it, including making bad economic decisions for job security. For CEOs, it's an opportunity to do the same shit to other people. As a result, they have no inhibition toward taking risks that might potentially get them fired, as long as the payoff is worth it. And then part of the reason why CEO searches are so challenging and CEOs get paid so much is that it's hard to find someone who is rational about this - willing to take risks when the payoff is high, but prudent about it so they don't tank the company on a whim.
I'm sorry, are you serious? You think most workers don't want to get fired because of the shame and inconvenience? You can't think of any more significant motivators?
Loss of healthcare, loss of income risking food insecurity, homelessness, debt, etc. Shame is a driver, but if you ask the average person why they don't want to get fired, they'll accurately say "because I need money to live", not "it would be inconvenient and I'd be embarrassed", even if that's a secondary concern.
I guess I'm assuming an American perspective because we were talking about an American company, but maybe others are not. I realize the stuff I'm saying does not apply in many other countries.
This is a failure to break down goals into subgoals, which IMHO the OP is correct in ascribing to shame. Or perhaps they're wrong about shame specifically, but it's some strong emotion that keep most people from analyzing the situation properly.
There are plenty of other jobs that will provide both healthcare and a good income. You get them by making yourself seem indispensable to the people with hiring authority. How do you do that? It varies by field. In software engineering you usually just need to seem personable and confident, ace all the Leetcode interviews, and have some basic subject matter relevant to the job. In finance, you need to know rich people, and you need to convince them to give you money to manage, which usually means feeding them some potentially profitable insight that they didn't think of themselves but can trade on and then offering to manage part of their portfolio in exchange for 2 & 20. In sales, you're doing this all the time (for your employer's product, not for yourself), so the interview is the job and the job is the interview. You don't need to actually be good at the job but you need to plant the idea in their head that you'd be better at it than they are, and so it's worth paying you to do it for them. In other words, be shameless.
Rational people, when they get fired, think "Oh, it's time to fall back on this algorithm until I get a new job." Irrational but normal people think it's a personal failing that they got fired and tend to avoid dealing with it until desperation (their bank statement) sets in. That also makes normal people very averse to being fired, but this makes them lack practice in the skills that will get a new job.
> getting fired or laid off is a source of intense shame, as well as a big logistical inconvenience
I read this as that it's inconvenient both from a psychological as well as a practical perspective.
You want to avoid shame/guilt, and you want to avoid the hassle of having to run to job interviews, get recommendation letters from old jobs, perhaps move to a new place closer to better employment, get a haircut etc. There are a lot of practical inconveniences to getting fired that could be classified as "logistical".
(the above is just my interpretation of what OP said)
This is similar to why the argument that capitalists are due returns because they take on risk doesn't move me. Please, give me the "risk" of having somewhat-fewer millions in the bank. I'll take on all that risk. For free! Meanwhile workers will be in deep shit if their company goes under and they don't find something else ASAP. Risk, indeed. The absolute worst-case scenario is that they might have to work for a living? Oh my, what horror.
This isn't to say that investors shouldn't make money, I just find this (often presented as) quasi-moral justification for it absurd.
> Please, give me the "risk" of having somewhat-fewer millions in the bank. I'll take on all that risk. For free!
Why aren't you founding a company, then? Or a cryptocurrency token, or selling NFTs? Or leveraging up to become a landlord on borrowed money? Or hobnobbing with executive recruiters and VCs while setting yourself up as a thought leader? Or raising capital for a hedge fund? These are all things you can do right now, with potentially (but risky) multi-million-$ payoffs. For many of them you don't even need to quit your day job - your employment contract might say otherwise, but the actual work involved can be done on your downtime without them knowing.
For most people, the real reason they don't do this is because they're uncomfortable with it. They don't want to inhabit a world of secrets, lies, non-aligned interests, and risk, so they take a job that lets them ignore all that and get paid for doing a specific task according to the specifications of their boss.
I was posting about returns on investment, not entrepreneurship. Some entrepreneurs really are takings significant risks, beyond the risk that the huge numbers in their accounts become somewhat less huge. Some are even taking more risk than their employees. Investors generally are not—again, their most-likely failure state is still being rich and in the absolute worst-case they lose enough that they have to actually work for their income... like everyone else. Their absolute worst (but unlikely) case looks suspiciously similar to most folks' best (likely) case: a well-paid, fairly well-respected (among we mere plebs, anyway) job. They are taking on a great deal of risk in one sense, but are hardly taking on any in another, arguably more meaningful, sense.
I've repeatedly seen people use risk to justify returns on capital in relation to wages—but the risk is all bullshit, in many cases. Again, I'm not claiming that investment shouldn't yield returns, but I've seen the "risk" argument used to justify income inequality, while the actual real-world risk workers & capital are exposed to are the inverse of what that would imply.
Mine is essentially an argument for the marginal dis-utility of risk, I guess. "Capital deserves a huge up-side for the moral reason that investors take great risk" is a BS argument, IMO, yet one that crops up from time to time. I don't think "deserves" has anything to do with it, and I don't think that framing holds up to any amount of scrutiny.
The reason this was relevant is that you see similar arguments for why CEOs are so well-compensated—"if things go poorly, they'll see the consequences for it!" Except the "consequences" (short of actually criminal activity, and even then, see e.g. Wells Fargo) look an awful lot like what would be a life-changing-for-generations windfall for normal folks. Their worst day, after all of the shit has hit all of the fans, would be 99+% of people's best day of their life. So... is that, meaningfully, risk that justifies crazy-high compensation? My objection isn't even that the compensation is high, but the way supposed risk is used to justify it. Their compensation is, for a bunch of reasons, a fact, but I don't think "it's fair because they take on so much risk" is even a little valid. More likely is that it's not, by many folks' reckoning, anywhere near "fair", and that's just how the system, and perhaps life, is. Investment is, largely, similar, once you're past the smallest of small-fry investors, or people investing in their own small business ventures.
[EDIT] To be clear, I'm not arguing that investors (and certainly not arguing that entrepreneurs, in general) do not expose themselves to risk. Of course they do. Lots of it, by some entirely-reasonable reckoning. Rather, I think the kind of risk makes trying to use that as some kind of moral justification for their returns, to be blunt, extremely dumb.
I'm speaking of causality, not justice. I agree that talking in terms of what people "deserve" isn't particularly helpful. The way I look at it, capitalism is a big super-organism and we're just cells that make it up. Do you shed a tear when your skin cells slough off or your gut microbiome comes out in your shit? Similarly, capitalism as a system is incapable of caring what happens to the individual workers that make it up.
And then my interest is primarily in understanding why does the system function the way it does and secondarily which organ should I try to occupy myself, given how it functions.
Questions about why people choose (not) to occupy various roles or what's holding them back this are very germane. Up-thread, I listed a bunch of CEO-like or investor-like roles that people can occupy without any particular connections or cultural capital, merely by looking the part. Why don't more people go for them? After all, another property of capitalism is that lucrative positions attract competition, and in the absence of barriers to entry, the profit gets competed away. Why hasn't this happened with CEOs? Arguably, it is happening - more people are starting startups or micro-businesses and playing the CEO role than in the 80s/90s, and we're posting this on the forum of an accelerator devoted to helping people with this trend.
I've played both the founder/CEO role and the lowly-engineer role, and currently am back in the lowly-engineer role because I realized I enjoy it a whole lot more (and hence am more effective in it). So there's some personal experience backing it up, in both the pleb and the capitalist role.
OK, I think we probably at least mostly agree on the particular thing I was originally posting about—the risk of investments, to the investor class, representing a kind of risk that's incommensurate with the risks ordinary workers face in their situation, being a whole other kind of thing, and not justifying in any kind of moral "ought" sense returns on investment (or, following similar arguments, very high CEO comp) in relation to worker pay. These arguments do see some use, and IMO they're simply terrible, both for explanatory power and for the actual moral content of the argument.
> Why don't more people go for them?
This is definitely an interesting area to explore, and I think it does partly relate to the rest of our discussion: if the key to winning big is to keep taking shots until you score (this seems to be the most-commonly-advanced route to success in entrepreneurship and investing, both), the kind of risk that "taking shots" entails makes a huge difference.
If it means the second-from-the-left number in your net worth dropping by one, but nothing else about your life changing, well, that's not so bad. Might go right out and take another "shot" immediately. Hell, do two or three at once. You could make several attempts before deciding maybe you're just not cut out for this, without much risk to your everyday life.
If it means: leaving your job and losing all stable income because you're not yet high enough in the hierarchy to be permitted multiple well-paid simultaneous jobs and are subject to far-reaching non-competes, exclusivity, or IP clauses; having to deal with marketplace health insurance & costs at the same time that's happening (maybe for a family!); dropping more money on projecting an image of success or of being the right kind of person for investors to "believe in" and on networking; all that before before you even get to the part where you put the bulk of your savings into the company & product itself; and with the most likely outcome being really bad and leaving you needing years to recover for another shot, assuming you ever do—I'd say that's at least part of why people don't bother.
I do not think this is the only reason people who aren't already quite well-off don't "shoot for the stars", but it's a not-insignificant part of it. Background and family also advantage people in business just like anything else (see also: Hollywood dynasties) by providing not just good connections for networking, but direct, inside knowledge about how things work in fact, not just on paper. There are, truly, lots of people who just haven't a clue how to, say, start a business, seek investment, et c., so much so that it wouldn't even occur to them as a possible course of action even if a great opportunity were handed to them on a platter. Their understanding of the space is so weak, as they've had so little exposure to it, that they don't know what's possible, so don't know what they could try, even if they were willing to go figure out the "how" (which willingness is, admittedly, far from a given). It's a widespread case of don't-know-what-they-don't-know for practically the entire body of knowledge required to launch a business, and it's the state most people live their whole lives in. Some do find their way out of it. Others are simply born to the right circumstances to learn all about this with little effort, and may not even realize how uncommon are the thousands of little pieces of info they picked up by existing around the right people during their formative years.
I'd add, as an aside, that founder-CEOs may very well not be in the capitalist class, really. Founder-CEOs who don't start with lots of capital may in fact be taking both the risk-in-a-finance-sense that (say) an angel investor does, measured in cold dollar terms, plus the totally different, actual, can-I-put-food-on-the-table-next-month risk common to ordinary workers. That's the subset of the "job creator" category, if you will, that really is taking on meaningful risk, and doing hard work besides.
> After all, another property of capitalism is that lucrative positions attract competition, and in the absence of barriers to entry, the profit gets competed away. Why hasn't this happened with CEOs?
Eh, that's a property of ideal markets, not of capitalism, which shouldn't get the credit for everything that markets do. In practice (I'm sure this isn't news to you–I'm just structuring a line of reasoning here) things are much messier, and IMO sky-high executive compensation is all tied up in out-of-control principal agent problems and just-enough-removed-you-can't-prosecute self-dealing that's widespread at the highest levels of our economy, to the point of practically being the defining feature of its operation.
One of the major barriers to entry, in this case, is having something to offer—personally, or (better) via family & friends connections, or through control you can exert over businesses you're already involved in—to the people selecting for CEO roles or board seats, even if it's only the future potential of doing a few favors for the right folks, and nothing's ever even implied out loud. Happily for the corrupt, the same traits that make these kinds of arrangements and mutual-aid-for-the-rich environments possible can also be justified for business reasons—well, having high-level personal and family connections with several other businesses will help with sales, right? And having already made money is a sign that this candidate is good at business (never mind the family money & connections that put these endeavors on easy-mode). So we'd better hire the Yale MBA who comes from money, has a cousin in congress, and could already, at least, pay their kids through prep school and college without working another day in their life.
Down in mid-size company territory, even, you see similar stuff, thought pedigrees are (of course) a bit less impressive. Kids groomed to inherit a CEO position, grandkids shipped off to start in a high-level management position at some golfing buddy's other mid-sized company to lever them up to CEO candidacy at a smallish publicly-traded company later, that kind of thing. At all levels, companies performing acquisitions to bail out friends, family, and business allies (who'll return the favor later).
I have a sense this has gotten worse over the past decades, but have not done the legwork to prove it. This is part of a broader (also very much "gut") sense I have that we, as in humanity as a whole, are getting better at playing games and at identifying them in larger systems, in a game-theoretical sense, to the detriment of anything that's not aligned with those games, while we're also getting worse at discouraging people (using means outside the strict ruleset) from playing these to the letter of the rules rather than in the spirit of the rules.
>Please, give me the "risk" of having somewhat-fewer millions in the bank. I'll take on all that risk. For free!
Okay, and somebody who was born in poverty in a low-income country might be happy with far less money than even the lowest wage earner in America. All you're saying is wealth is relative. But we already know that, and it's not really an argument for anything!
It's an argument against justifying CEO pay (or returns on capital) by appealing to what's owed due to the supposed risk taken. I'm saying that not just wealth is relative, but (relatedly, yes) so is risk. The risk your average worker at a megacorp operates under every day is far more meaningful than the risk the CEO, or the idle investor class, takes in their roles, even if the worker's risk is relatively tiny in dollar terms.
This isn't even an argument against the compensation itself, but an argument against a particular justification for why it's "right" that things are structured this way, or why it's necessary that they are, which argument is fairly common, but, IMO, laughably weak. Yet you see this argument advanced fairly often, in exactly these terms: "well of course megacorp CEOs are paid millions per year, look at all the risk they take that you don't have to, that's why they're paid the big bucks!" or "it's not just necessary but right that we reward capital, look at all the risk capital takes!" Meanwhile, my oh my, please, give me their "failure" state when that risk is realized.
>The risk your average worker at a megacorp operates under every day is far more meaningful than the risk the CEO, or the idle investor class, takes in their roles, even if the worker's risk is relatively tiny in dollar terms.
Okay, and roofers and oil rig workers have far more fatal injuries than software devs, so then the person who works the riskiest job should get paid the most? Personally, I don't think it is a good idea to base an economy that way, but that is a whole another discussion.
>This isn't even an argument against the compensation itself, but an argument against a particular justification for why it's "right" that things are structured this way, or why it's necessary that they are, which argument is fairly common, but, IMO, laughably weak.
Wait, so if your not against the higher compensation, and you do acknowledge that capital takes at-least some risk, what is your real argument here?
This seems like a very naive perspective to me. CEOs are generally not "exposed to all the risks of the real world". If they get fired it's often with a golden parachute and the ability to live comfortably without ever worrying about money or employment. Many times, people become CEO precisely because they aren't ever exposed to real risk, and if something goes wrong they can fall back on savings or family or a debt-free prestigious degree.
My perspective on this might be outdated, but a corporate legal team can do more than just fire you for moonlighting. Depending on your jurisdiction/contract, there could be Intellectual Property ramifications.
Obviously, a C-suite can have certain sway in these situations and a company might not go after a lowly grunt's pet project, but there is a wide gap between these two situations where there are worse ramifications than losing a job.
Maybe there's some useful situational awareness that can be gained from being the CEO of more than one company. If there's a problem at Twitter, you can see if you have the same problem at Square. Maybe it's a "how humans organize" problem and it affects both, or maybe it's a social media problem, and only affects one. With this data, you can make better decisions.
It's the same for programming projects. It's good to work on more than one, so you can pick apart intrinsic problems that nobody knows the answer to and just artifacts of one particular codebase.
You have to collect this data for yourself because it's not like there's a service you can subscribe to that shows you all the problems that various public companies have.
Right, but somehow the "situational awareness" argument doesn't fly when it's a developer working at two places. Then it's all "oh no, you might steal our secrets with your brain", even though that's the same thing, just framed differently.
[EDIT] Oh, and:
> You have to collect this data for yourself because it's not like there's a service you can subscribe to that shows you all the problems that various public companies have.
Actually, there is! It's called management consulting. The main value they provide aside from the much-cited blame-absorbing one, is being a normalized and accepted method of corporate espionage. They call it stuff like "industry best practices" but what they're doing is telling you what your competitors are up to, so you can mimic the good parts.
Contractors can and do work at multiple places. Full time employees cannot, sort of by definition. It’s an interesting discussion why most developers end up being full time employees.
“Rules for thee but not for me” is interesting when placed in juxtaposition with a famous quote from the software architect and composer Frank Wilhoit:
Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
That applies to no-moonlighting clauses, but also to no sexual harassment clauses, no insider-trading clauses, and plenty more. It’s not just that the rules don’t apply to some people, but the rules and system are set up to protect them from the rules.
With sexual harassment, for example, it’s not just that HR looks the other way when they are accused: HR often works to protect them from consequences and punish/dismiss/pay off the victims.
I have an open mind about it and have seen it many times, but I struggle with the leaps of logic required to understand the one proposition of conservatism. On its face it is obviously unfair, and it's hard for me to see it as the obvious consequence of conservatism which is "heavily trust the past and move forward with caution".
Can you help me connect the two or at least help me understand the underlying proposition?
I don't agree with GP, but if you consider "what have worked in the past" to be those who have the upper hand when setting the rules, then conservatism is cementing the status quo and preventing everyone else from changing it. In a way, preserving "what works" turns into "preserving what works for us".
This is rather one-sided interpretation, but it definitely has its precedences in history and even in our times.
It's two different meanings for the word "conservatism". You're quoting the more traditional meaning (for example "environmental conservatism" or "fiscal conservatism") whereas Wilhoit is using it to name an (in his view) ancient and universal political philosophy that he believes subsumes all others.
(FWIW I think he's got the wrong word. He says "For millenia, conservatism had no name..." and then cites divine right of kings.)
Well, to be fair to Wilhoit, the divine right of kings was only asserted after the threat of other models of (conservative) government were asserted, to try to justify something that had previously never seemed to need justification.
Trust the past implies trusting those you know and grew up with and thus those most like you, as in your in-group. It also means you may overlook their mistakes and crimes because you may trust they're doing the right thing.
Moving forward with caution doesn't mean you absolutely don't trust others but they are the out-group, if we assume there are two groups here. Those others won't get the same benefit of the doubt as your in-group and thus any mistake they make will be magnified (in relative terms).
It helps to have more of the full quote to work with:
> For millenia, conservatism had no name, because no other model of polity had ever been proposed. “The king can do no wrong.” In practice, this immunity was always extended to the king’s friends, however fungible a group they might have been. Today, we still have the king’s friends even where there is no king (dictator, etc.). Another way to look at this is that the king is a faction, rather than an individual.
> As the core proposition of conservatism is indefensible if stated baldly, it has always been surrounded by an elaborate backwash of pseudophilosophy, amounting over time to millions of pages. All such is axiomatically dishonest and undeserving of serious scrutiny. Today, the accelerating de-education of humanity has reached a point where the market for pseudophilosophy is vanishing; it is, as The Kids Say These Days, tl;dr . All that is left is the core proposition itself — backed up, no longer by misdirection and sophistry, but by violence.
That is to say: the past is built around this one proposition. Moving forward "with caution" translates to "how can we move forward (solve some current problem) without jeopardizing this essential proposition?"
Middle management certainly aren't, that's true, but CEOs often are, or will soon join that group due to their income. It's true that preferential treatment for the C-suite is more a second-order effect, though. A mechanism by which favors are exchanged among and between capitalists, both as a high-tier reward for good servants, and deliberate leverage of the principal agent problem to capture more value personally for those with connections. A CEO can make choices that aren't necessarily the best for their company, but do scratch someone important's back or get them a personal favor of a similar sort elsewhere—see also: board members.
So, both because these positions are sometimes occupied by full-on capitalists (who will accept very few restrictions on their behavior) and because, when that's not the case, they're occupied by people who are being rewarded by capital (often for nepotistic reasons) they have much greater freedom than those lower down the org chart.
I do think this is a general behavior of class systems—and so, probably any large human organization—however, and not particular to capitalism, and certainly there are better-off and worse-off classes in term of norms and treatment by society, short of the capitalist class (as Fussell observes in Class, with his "mid-proles" subject to close monitoring, tight restrictions on time, drug testing, and other humiliations, while his upper-middle drinks on the job, has their own office with no-one watching what they do, would be outraged at having to submit to piss tests, and cuts out early for golf without consequence).
In this case the name just happens to tell us, very directly, who's on top of the pyramid. Not like other systems that may try to obscure who's the most-favored group.
You clearly do not know what feudalism actually is if you are asking that question.
Feudalism is about a structure of hierarchical allegiences. You swear fealty to your count who swears it to his duke, etc.
The conflation is basically a shibboleth for Marxists in the same way that creationists pluralize evidence as evidences, and holocaust deniers ask if a conclusively documented and damning event happened.
Careful, you're dangerously close to realizing that Executives at companies provide vanishingly little day to day value to companies.
I'd bet in most companies the CEO is basically just a buffer between the board and the rest of the company, and essentially a fall guy position so the board can avoid accountability.
It's a grand putdown without any supporting information.
Comments get more shallow as they get more grand and generic. "Vanishingly little value" is a dismissal. Note also the dismissive use of the j-word ("just") and the implicit admission that there's no particular support for the claim ("I'd bet"). Also the snark ("Careful, you're dangerously close to realizing"), which invokes an entire genre of internet putdown.
There's no information here other than booing a class of people. Most people enjoy that when the class is high-status, but we're trying to optimize for curiosity on this site, and that genre is something else entirely.
Well to be fair, good management should be practically invisible. It shouldn't be much of a factor in your day to day work. They should be overseeing larger trends, gently nudging things to stay on course, talking with others to coordinate, etc.
I have reasonably decent leadership where I work, and the only times I have much contact outside of my direct reporting line is when something has gone (or might go) seriously wrong. Outside of that, I'm given direction, expected to execute, and left to get on with it as I touch base every few days.
> They should be overseeing larger trends, gently nudging things to stay on course, talking with others to coordinate, etc.
That's the point. The best managers/CEOs are mostly getting out of the way and telling person A to CC person B about a new idea. Not screwing up a system that works isn't the same as adding value.
You're right, there are some outliers where micro managing have been successful, but I consider them just that: outliers. Because only a vastly minor portion of the population has that level passion and tunnel-vision of focus that is also right.
> I'd bet in most companies the CEO is basically just a buffer between the board and the rest of the company
Are you thinking of companies in general, or of reasonably prominent/stable publicly traded companies? The CEOs at the startups I've worked at did a heck of a lot more than that -- fundraising, strategy, resolving personnel issues, talking to clients, etc.; I'm thinking of a small company (10-20 employees) and a mid-sized one (400-500).
But oh man, when it is time to replace the CEO the first thing you hear is "we have to offer those millions of dollars or some other company will snipe our CEO!" CEO is the only job where the company suddenly decides that it does have to offer the most money to attract the top talent.
Having worked at the c level and just below at 3 large US corps, let me just say it matters. Ceo is more important than QB I'm the nfl. It's that dramatic.
If it’s like most of my clients, omitting consultants from the seating chart just means you lose your conference rooms all day, every day until the consultants are gone.
> you're not going to be able to give the focus a solo CEO is.
I agree. As much as he tried to justify the dual CEO roles, it never made any sense.
It was also maddening to watch him shift to a 3rd focus of promoting cryptocurrency and his own cryptocurrency investments. Hanging on to the CEO role of both Twitter and Square put him in a great position to push both companies toward more cryptocurrency integration, but it never felt like it was being done for the benefit of the users of each platform.
> it never felt like it was being done for the benefit of the users of each platform.
Cynically, I'm yet to see any crypto that benefits anyone but the people that invented it (they benefit the most) and the savvy traders trying to make a buck (and sometimes succeeding at the expense of others).
So, it's easy to find a list of the countries with the highest inflation rates, but which of those countries actually forbid individuals from acquiring foreign currency? I assume you have a verifiable example?
Not to mention, for an everyman living in one of these countries, how feasible is it to actually participate in crypto to the point where it is useful in day-to-day living? How much upfront investment will it cost? How much ongoing investment? Will the local merchants accept crypto? Will they do so any time soon?
(I'm honestly not fond of crypto but I also honestly have no idea about these questions, which seem practical to know before buying into an "advantage" of crypto.)
Venezuela aside, naturally. Because the way this statement comes across to me is is that crypto is a viable alternative even without government oversight and/or precisely because of its lack of central authority. Venezuela's crypto has support all the way from the top.
It's not so much a day to day living with crypto kind of situation but rather a being able to save one. Say you have a salary that's getting devalued by the month yet doesn't raise at the same rate.
If you're lucky enough to be able to save say 10% of it, you want to stabilize it's value somehow. I don't even mean invest at a profit, I mean have a way to save that money so when you do need to spend it down the line (say to buy a 100k USD no-bedroom apartment to live in), you wouldn't have lost most of your savings' value due to inflation.
You can't hold value in land since there's no credit, cars are 10x as expensive due to the economy being so protectionist, and you likely don't have space to hold a stock of long-lasting food that you might be able to sell. Crypto, particularly stable coins, is then a very attractive option in such a situation. You could buy 50 DAI a month for example and then have a good shot that when you need it a few years later, it'll still be as valuable as it was when you bought it.
A lot of old people who trusted cash and didn't realize how bad things are getting and didn't invest in a solid keeper of value, are only now realizing that their whole life savings are worth about as much as a TV, and even less every month.
Nowadays, even kids need to learn about exchange rates to keep up.
This short documentary about Bitcoin in Africa makes it easier to understand why Bitcoin is important in developing (or authoritarian) countries. It'll answer some of those questions.
Are you implying that there is some Moral Good in compliance with laws that prevent you from escaping an inflationary environment damning you and your loved ones to starvation?
Social media has downsides but that doesn’t mean it’s useless or has never been useful. It did connect people. There was a time when you lose touch with your high school friends pretty much forever when you move for college and then a different city.
There was a time that cigarettes 'calmed the nerves' as well. Almost universally, nobody thinks social media is a one way street of mostly-positive outcomes.
Sure it does. I think there’s a fairly solid argument to be made that social media is a net negative for humanity. It’s “good” for the small group of people who make a lot of money but for most people it’s not a positive. It maybe falls somewhere between alcohol (not great but a lot people enjoy it in moderation) and prescription opioids (predatory and misleading by design).
This is a pretty uninformed take. There are all sorts of projects made in crypto: collectibles, music, art, gaming, loans, mortgages, debit cards with rewards, social media, wifi networks, anti-fraud, food security, etc. And many projects have a large donation component to them.
"Anti-fraud" is especially funny considering how fraudulent the whole cryptocurrency space is.
But anyway, to quote Nicholas Weaver (https://youtu.be/xCHab0dNnj4?t=1667), "[the people proposing those projects] are never actually even able to even articulate what the hard problems are, like what data, what formats, what honesty, who's adding the data, what enforcement — shoving garbage into an append-only ledger doesn't solve your problems!"
Says the people who are downstream of the founders/traders of crypto but upstream the final bag holders.
The game is - the more people/demand who come into the place, the greater the asset value. Earliest in benefit the most.
Sure there are benefits from crypto (but those are mostly a distraction for its core use case and a way for murky individuals to validate investments to the real bagholders) but the costs and the model works in that you keep having to find more people to buy into the asset class in order to validate the most recent purchases.
In traditional equities - you get some kind of return on your investment through traditionally dividends/share buybacks from profits generated from the business - right now its a lot of capital appreciation not to dissimilar to what I described above (i.e. TINA)
I was talking about using products, not investing in some coin. So the bag holder argument doesn’t apply here, these are people directly getting services.
But many coins have mechanisms to give dividends in the form of their coin, which have liquid trading markets. You can say they’re being propped up by the next buyer, but many of these are used by the product as “gas” for transactions, creating a real use based demand economy. I’ll readily admit that speculation has massively inflated these markets past their fundamental value, but that’s not unique to cryptocurrency.
All of which don't "benefit anyone but the people that invented it and the savvy traders trying to make a buck". He got it right the first time, and you are just falling for the dishonest rationalisations of crypto scammers.
Products don’t benefit the user? Honestly, what is your stance here? It seems like your stance is “crypto bad”. Yes, people who made a product benefited, as did investors. How is that dishonest? Audius has 5m monthly users, please explain why 5 million people use something they get no benefit from.
Looking at the Audius website, I see no reason that service needs blockchain to function, which brings us to the final function of blockchain: Blockchain as a marketing gimmick.
Bitcoin benefits drug users and dealers every single day, and have been doing it for almost 10 years. May be in US it's different, but there's just no street drug trade anymore around here. If you want to buy weed, you have to buy bitcoin, in some shape or form.
Screw other drugs. I want to get some antibiotics without having to hear a lecture from 3 different doctors on why they won’t help me, even when they do.
Or that I injured my back and had to spend 2 grand at Er for a standard 7 day steroid pack to calm inflammation because doctors don’t like prescribing them.
That may be true, but that's already a widely established industry that doesn't accept any other coin. I'm not offering any value judgements, just a statement of fact.
I can't imagine that you wouldn't take a substantial haircut... way more people would want to sell monero on Binance because the benefits of selling there are way more than the unique benefits of buying there (it is easy to buy monero, it is not easy to sell monero without getting dirty coins).
Not saying I ever buy illegal drugs, but my venmo history is full of people buying $80 of pizza or $150 of sushi -- this seems to be seller's preference, as far as I can tell. No one in my rather wide extended circle has ever tried to or even suggested using crypto for these kinds of transactions.
That's because marijuana still counts as a drug. In young professional circles for non-marijuana drugs, there is definitely a major crypto backend even if you only deal with the middleman.
Going from cash to crypto is pretty expensive I think. I tried to do a large transaction thought crypto might work but it was going to be a couple hundred just to convert it
It's really not. Coinbase pro charges ~0.5% on cash to crypto trades. Strike charges a very small spread on cash to bitcoin, and you can send directly to other lightning nodes for < $0.01.
USDC can be converted from / to USD for free on Coinbase.
Because that's the only coin the biggest and de-facto monopoly marketplace, that processes tens of millions of dollars worth of deals per day, accepts.
Yeah, musk is the perfect counter example. In the brief time he left Tesla in someone else’s hands the other CEO almost killed it.
I'm also skeptical of Jack's claim about founder led companies. When you're the exec handing things over you'd have to make some comment like that to show your trust is entirely behind the new person. I don't really buy it though.
Also I thought Evan Williams and Biz Stone were the Twitter founders? Maybe I'm forgetting the history.
> Also I thought Evan Williams and Biz Stone were the Twitter founders?
He was a founder...ish.
From reading his Wikipedia, it seems like it was an x.com / PayPal situation. He joined their company to help them with the idea then when they spun Twitter out, he became CEO.
From digging in a bit deeper, the lineage of Twitter seems fascinating. It seems like it was the result of the companies of the co-founders putting together that created something even better than their own parts.
There's a whole book, "Hatching Twitter" about the sordid founding of Twitter and how Dorsey and Noah Glass were the main originators of the concept at oOdeo, then Ev eventually fired them and removed them from the history. Only to have Dorsey come back later and remove him.
Seems like a bunch of people had a hand in creating it in various ways.
I'm a big fan of SpaceX but sometimes i wonder why Musk gets such a pass on timelines. I understand things happen and change but when the CEO gives a date for some event then it needs to happen on that date or the CEO should be hat-in-hands sorry describing in detail why the date was missed.
I think even the Musk superfans eyeroll whenever he gives a date for some new advancement. For example, didn't Musk say the test orbital launch for Starship was goign to be last July or something?
>> you're not going to be able to give the focus a solo CEO is.
> I agree. As much as he tried to justify the dual CEO roles, it never made any sense.
If I remember correctly he was originally going to step away from Twitter to focus on Square, but then Twitter couldn't find a replacement and basically begged him to stay.
He will be replaced by Parag Agrawal. In the image in the tweet, Jack says:
> Parag started here as an engineer who cared deeply about our work and now he's our CEO... Parag will be able to channel this energy best because he's lived it and knows what it takes.
I've always thought it weird that Jack was a part-time CEO, but there are certainly CEOs that have at least as large of a "thing to manage", even if they aren't technically two companies.
Facebook is a giant VR company and three-four giant social networking companies. Google runs phone infrastructure, search, self driving cars.
Amazon is a giant retail outlet plus a giant cloud services company.
Is running both a social media company and a fintech firm that different, even though they aren't grouped under a single corporate owner?
Honestly I’m ok with a hedge fund backed Twitter. Look what it has become with Dorsey at the helm. It was a cute platform to induce change in backward countries 10 years ago, but now it’s a cesspool of every ideologue imaginable. The more sensational and toxic someone is the more successful they become on Twitter, generally speaking. If the goal was to make money primarily I don’t see how brands would put up with that. I write off Twitter as a failed experiment, but nevertheless a great lesson in the nature of human beings and mob behavior.
Edit: typo + speaking as an ex-Twitter engineer circa 2011
Seems more likely that Jack has been the puppet of activist employee's not investors. Hopefully Twitter will hire someone to have a back bone in the face of the activist employee's that want twitter to be a political echo-chamber / safe space
Highly doubtful as long as they stay in SV. Barring some major backlash I don't think any major company will ever operate there again without making the whole company political.
Well given the ever increasing crime, taxes, costs and lowering of living standards hopefully we will start either seeing companies leave SV, or SV ceasing having any competitive advantage as companies realize their talent pool is not infact limited to SV and there are plenty of high talented people that have no interest in living in SV
If you want to criticize SV you should avoid complaining about "high taxes" since it reveals you don't actually know anything.
The people who live here and complain about that are talking their book, they universally pay like $3000/year property tax on $3 million mansions and don't want Prop13 repealed.
One of the only episodes of Joe Rogan I ever listened to (#1258) was the interview with Jack Dorsey and Vijaya Gadde. Vijaya Gadde would make a good CEO. She seems to have a clear, balanced, and well-informed perspective on both Twitter as a whole and the many micro-communities within.
Is Twitter the way it is because of activist investors, or just capitalists (in the literal, neutral sense of the term) who know that certain crowds are easily manipulated?
> He's been CEO of both Square and Twitter for years now and no matter what time you wake up in the morning or however many specials diets you undertake you're not going to be able to give the focus a solo CEO is.
I'm sure he only focuses when things are really wrong. It must be awful to be fixing Tesla problems when SpaceX is humming along. Then switch to SpaceX when it's falling apart while Tesla is back on its feet. It's like a perpetual grass-is-greener problem regardless of which side of the fence you're on.
edit: a month or two ago there was this huge increase in SpaceX development all of a sudden that has since dwindled. I wonder if that was Musk working on SpaceX but now back at Tesla? of course i could be way off base too ( FAA thorn in SpaceX's side etc )
Further testing at SpaceX is basically on hold until the FAA completes their review of the orbital launch facility, which they have promised to do by the end of December. Plenty of ground testing going on, albeit with less publicity.
„no matter what time you wake up in the morning or however many specials diets you undertake you're not going to be able to give the focus a solo CEO is“
Good for Bret Taylor— he's had quite a career over the years, with being an architect of Google Maps, then founding FriendFeed, being acquired into Facebook and ending up in senior leadership at Salesforce and Twitter.
I agree, but is Twitter really suffering with any engineering problems? I generally would like to see a CTO come in charge but here's a unique case where someone from product might be more suitable.
If I had a dollar for every pixel I see in twitter videos I'd have two dollars which isn't a lot but it's weird that they still somehow call them videos.
Twitter recently rolled out full support for their v2 API along with improvements to the usage policy, and the ability to get started quickly with essential access. What issues do you have with the API?
The stock popped 10%. Is this a vote of confidence against him or for whoever has been waiting in the wings? There has been enough agitation against him by the activists that this can’t be a surprise.
Censorship and more algo driven content discovery to push ads and approved narratives.
Dorsey was probably the biggest advocate for free speech amongst the CEOs of any major company & Twitter is significantly less toxic than Facebook partly because of him. I fully expect his removal to lead the company in a more dystopian direction.
The specific cases are less important than the overall trend which is social media companies using their control of who sees what to influence public opinion. It’s common to think in terms of users being banned or users being censored, but the real issue is ideas being censored in aggregate. This allows for a more subtle distortion of reality than what traditional media can achieve. Essentially it’s possible to make public opinion look like whatever you want it to on any given issue & control which issues are at the front of people’s minds.
They have many tools to do this. Promoting certain viewpoints & hiding others in feeds, manipulation of trending topics, various degrees of shadowbanning, blacklisting specific links or images, etc.
None of this is regulated and there’s no real transparency. It’s dangerous and I expect it to continue to get worse.
Complaining about censorship because someone can't post some lies and vitriol targeting someone is far different than someone posting some well thought out ideas and getting them removed.
The complaints around censorship have to do with users posting anything related to certain viewpoints (in fact or in error) no longer being able to post anything at all.
Shaping the tenor of public discourse while also claiming that one is not legally a publisher is not something we should allow in our society.
If you think this has anything to do with merely 'lies' or flaming, you're not keeping up.
The propagandists have confused you and many others on this topic. Telling lies or BS is absolutely not censorship. When something is not allowed to be said or published, or is soft-censored by muting its distribution...that is censorship.
One reason avoiding censorship is so important is that a lot of times, the truth is trampled by doing so. Remember Galileo. And while it is being trampled, guess what the truth is called? "Lies".
Misinformation and lies can directly cause harm - i.e. scaring/deluding people into not getting a vaccine for COVID-19. Any blatantly incorrect speech where the expression alone can kill others should be evaluated for censorship. Even the founding philosophers of free speech agreed that expression should be curtailed when it would cause harm to others.
Also weirdly enough, Galileo was censored because he insulted the pope, not because of his theories on heliocentricity. Galileo tainted (part) of his objective scientific truth by injecting his own biased personal vendetta into it.
I think facts exist and people can do damage spreading lies, threats, hate, and etc.
I honestly have trouble following where you're going. I'm not aware of any effort to censor Galileo at this point. If that is the case I'd like to hear about it.
People "regularly posting obvious lies and bs" is, definitionally, not censorship. Censorship can only take place when something isn't said, not when it is.
> I think facts exist and people can do damage spreading lies, threats, hate, and etc.
You'd probably be very hard pressed, particularly on this website but even just in general, to find anyone who disagreed with this statement in a vacuum. But even beyond the (very much not straightforward) problem of who gets to decide what's a fact, there are people, myself included, who agree that damage is done in the way you mentioned, but believe that even worse damage is done by censorship.
The person you're responding to is clearly not referring to any effort to censor Galileo today. They are observing that he was censored by the authoritative figures of his day for spreading what was then considered "obvious lies and BS", because of the amount of "damage" he was supposedly doing. But of course, it turned out he was much more correct than the people who censored him. This begs the question of why we should believe the authoritative figures of today are any more likely to be wholly correct about what is a lie and what is damaging than the authoritative figures of yesterday, and whether they'll trample over the truth in their attempts to suppress lies.
Hopefully you can now follow where the conversation is going.
Well I could throw out a number of examples, any of which you may reasonably disagree with and all of which are by necessity controversial, so I don't think there's value in steering the conversation in that direction. But asking for a specific example is rather missing the point - we are discussing the idea of censorship, not the merits of any individual controversial claim or figure. We don't know which examples of ideas being censored will be looked back at years from now as times when the truth was trampled on. And since we can't know, we can't afford to censor, no matter how convinced we are today that something is a lie or BS.
For the sake of not dismissing your question entirely though, even though I believe it's not the right question to ask, I'll offer up the covid lab leak theory and everyone who argued in favor of it. Decried as a racist conspiracy theory and actively censored from social media for over a year, but now accepted as at least plausible, even probable.
Everyone who uses Twitter has seen the little ! triangle saying a tweet has "misinformation". Or read about people suspended for discussing
- Possible therapies for COVID like ivermectin or HCQ
- Claims that the 2020 U.S. presidential election was swung via fraud
- Hunter Biden's laptop [edit: had D. Trump here but that's covered by above]
I'm fairly confident that you have, yet have decided to be obtuse. If you haven't then maybe you aren't the right person to opine about censorship on Twitter.
What about blocking an article about Hunter Biden's laptop?
What's bs to you, may not be to someone else. Speech is way larger than just facts. I wouldn't want to live in a society where opinions are not allowed.
Free speech is important and it's already not including violence (eg. Screaming fire in a crowded place is a crime and not covered by free speech). We don't need tech politicised censors on their platforms-not-platforms and we don't need hate speech restrictions.
I applaud this objectivist stance (I think we all agree facts exist) but speech can be about interpretations of facts.
If you want the fact can be "The New Yorker claims these photos of Hunter Biden smoking crack are real".
Despite that, the article was censored on Big Tech's platforms and the NYT called it unsubstantiated. 9 months later they conveniently removed "unsubstantiated" from their article.
Advocates for free speech that support a "public square" model of free speech but who refuse to adapt that to the modern digital communication systems are doing more harm than good in my opinion.
A public square filled with nation state actors influencing the volume and contents of the subjects of discussion in the public square are doing more to inhibit free speech than any technological solution owned by a social media platform. Corporate censorship is a lot easier to fight, as users can walk or investors can react when things are not matching the desired effect. It's not perfect, but better than an open-ended "everything free" world where it can be manipulated by those with the right resources (in my opinion).
What we need is for people to get a lot more creative with how to create, support, and sustain free speech online without relying on millennia old concepts which do not map to our current problems quite well.
Twitter is only like that if one consumes that content. Like, if one only ever follows John Carmack and Gwern, that won't be the experience. Saying Twitter is mean-spirited is essentially the same as saying that no matter where one goes one smells shit. Everyone who feels that way should check the bottom of their shoe.
It's just too much work pruning / hoping you find folks who are sort a single topic accounts for me.
Often they fall off the wagon and get into spats and so on. Too much hassle to constantly add / remove folks to keep a feed that isn't "typical social media feed BS".
Fwiw, this isn't my experience. My following list is remarkably stable, and I've only had to prune people "falling of the wagon" once or twice. It's also not much work: you see their tweet, remember that they've done thus more than once recently, and click unfollow.
The main cost is that this isn't conducive to a very large following list, but perhaps that's a good thing.
Yea, that is pretty low. I stabilized at a couple dozen. I run out of tweets on days when I'm being particularly idle, but that doesn't seem like a bad thing.
I also do get a trickle of new accounts. I recognize a name after appreciating their threads a few times, and then click through to their profile and read a bit to increase my sample size. If it turns out I got a skewed sample, I unfollow them using the same process I described above.
This process really feels like almost no work, and I've gotten enormous benefits from it. Most concretely, it's been trivial to frontrun traditional media and public health recommendations by several months during the entirety of the pandemic. I can pretty much credit my Twitter feed with myself and my extended family getting through the pandemic much more safely and healthily (incl mental health) than we likely would otherwise have.
Sorry but cynically toxic and divisive algos drives more attention thus more ad revenue (see FB), it's not going to get better with a more investor friendly CEO
I personally think this move, and to a larger extent the current trends we're seeing in our industry has much more to do with revenue, profits and share price than it does with the product or any social consequences.
Do you have examples to share? From what I've seen of posts taken down and/or accounts banned it seems to be people spewing severe vitriol - and that's on both sides.
Twitter is THE social media I am not able to use without letting it affect my mental health. Anytime I logged into Twitter, I came out more angry, bitter and outraged. It's like the whole platform is built around hot takes, dunking, bullying, and outrage. It always baffles me how mainstream media never utters a word how toxic Twitter is.
Completely agree. On top of that, even if you avoid the politically charged stuff, there is just a staggering amount of bullshit. “Thought leaders” with tens of thousands of followers all tweeting the same broad ideas as if they’re original thoughts.
Oh god. The thought leaders. The truly despicable aspect of Twitter. These people pop up on my feed and it’s just extremely cringeworthy. No need to explain in depth what their thoughts are. Just 140 characters and off you go.
The mainstream media are trying to recapture the attention-monopoly they had in the 60s-70s, and are largely succeeding. They don't want to compete with Twitter; they want to buy it.
Makes me think of how many traditional media outlets had a lot to say about YouTube being "rabbit holes" and whatnot around election times, but have a lot less to say about them now that Google picked up the pace on censoring content and pruning platform capabilities (removing dislikes being a big one).
Is it bullshit? The plan the buyers like has a chance of making just a few more dollars for their limited partners than Jack Dorsey's plan and thats why they bought more shares. Simple.
Dorsey seemed willing to stick to Twitter's core vision. It would not surprise me at all if investors like Paul Singer decided to try and convert it into a second facebook.
Did the news leak before market open? His tweet was at 10:48 EST, and the email screenshot has 9:45 AM, which presumably is EST (it's certainly not PST).
Edit: The submission to HN was before the tweet. Huh? I guess it originally linked to somewhere else.
MIT Technology Review interviewed the new CEO recently:
> Our role is not to be bound by the First Amendment, but our role is to serve a healthy public conversation and our moves are reflective of things that we believe lead to a healthier public conversation. The kinds of things that we do about this is, focus less on thinking about free speech, but thinking about how the times have changed. One of the changes today that we see is speech is easy on the internet. Most people can speak. Where our role is particularly emphasized is who can be heard. The scarce commodity today is attention. There's a lot of content out there. A lot of tweets out there, not all of it gets attention, some subset of it gets attention. And so increasingly our role is moving towards how we recommend content and that sort of, is, is, a struggle that we're working through in terms of how we make sure these recommendation systems that we're building, how we direct people's attention is leading to a healthy public conversation that is most participatory.
I read it differently than "shaping public opinion". The reality is that social media (and Twitter especially) is toxic. That underlying toxicity comes from humans of course, but recommendation algorithms accelerate and highlight it because it leads to high "engagement", and thus more money. These sites already "guide" conversation, just using metrics that can end up being harmful.
A social media CEO that's interested in breaking the cycle there and trying to recommend content that's more constructive than inflammatory sounds like a great thing to me. Yes, there are a dozen pitfalls awaiting anyone that tries, but it's still worth attempting.
The problem here is that "toxic" is subjective, what I find toxic and disagreeable may not be the same thing you find toxic and disagreeable. Take for example hot button issue of Gun ownership, I believe it an essential right and extension of self defense, others view any talk about guns as toxic that should be banned.
Who's worldview should win? Mine, your's, Twitters?
IMO platforms like twitter should not be making the choice as to what is or is not toxic, they should be giving users the ability to curate their feed's.
> others view any talk about guns as toxic that should be banned.
Do they? Are you sure? I’ve certainly seen many calls for the glorification of violence to be limited, stuff like that. But banning actual discussion of guns? I’d be interested to see examples of people advocating for that. In any case, Twitter can simply ignore people asking for that because it isn’t a reasonable request.
You can have sensible, level headed discussions about guns and gun control. You can also have inflammatory, toxic discussions about them. It’s interesting to think how you’d develop a system that prioritises the former without bringing along the latter.
> Who's worldview should win? Mine, your's, Twitters?
What does "win" mean, here? If you're the CEO of Twitter then Twitter's worldview should always win. Of course, as CEO you also get to choose what Twitter's worldview is.
>>I’ve certainly seen many calls for the glorification of violence to be limited
Guns was probably a bad choice for Twitter, would have been better for YT as YT has recently cracked down hard on firearms content.
However even on twitter the "the glorification of violence" is very subjective. For example people celebrating the jury verdict in the Rittenhouse trial, who many believe was an attack on the very right to self defense, has been reported by many as "glorification of violence"
Even more recently, I have seen attempts to censor conversation, and video around the shooting / death of Chad Read.
Then you going to have a conservation around Self defense use of guns it will include violence, there is no way around that, if you are going to censor violence then by necessity you have to sensor guns or relegate it to a discussion about hunting only.
> However even on twitter the "the glorification of violence" is very subjective
Sure. Running a company is subjective! That's why we celebrate CEOs rather than try to perfect an objective CEO algorithm that runs in the cloud. Lines have to be drawn somewhere. You could draw the line at "absolutely anything is allowed" but that might not be a wise business decision.
> who many believe
> has been reported by many
> I have seen attempts
I'm sorry but these are all very vague assertions. I don't know what any of us are supposed to do with them.
Yes they are pretty vague when you take them out of context and do not look at the over all statement, if however you read the entire thing it is pretty clear what I am talking about. If you have followed that news event then you would also be more aware of what I was referring to. if you did not follow it you may have a harder time with the context but I think it is still pretty clear
Twitter will amplify the most extreme positions on both ends, the ones to cause most outrage
- Ban all guns, completely!
- No restrictions on gun ownership should be allowed whatsoever, not even age limits!
These cause the most outrage / emotion => therefore they get the most retweeted => create a distorded mental picture of even deeper division. We're never going to solve anything that way.
The problem isn't one of free speach and censorship. Its a problem of amplification of emotionally manipulative content. The amplification is exponential (because the retweet process is exponential). This is a disaster.
It's their tool, so they get to build it to their liking, until law is created requiring them to do otherwise. The question in the meantime is, "what is moral?" and "do we as an entity (twitter) enforce our morality at all, and to what extent?"
For example, millions of people believe the lie, the fabrication that the 2020 presidential election result was fraudulent. If there are organizations on your platform amplifying messages that are fraudulent or intentionally misleading in nature, should Twitter take action?
The new CEO seems to think the answer is "yes".
IMO people should be able to curate their own feeds, but Twitter has the full right (and perhaps the moral obligation) to flag content that is bullshit as bullshit. The danger, of course, is that the kinds of people who fall for conspiracy propaganda from fascists on the right will then think, if their leaders' lies are called out, that the calling out is itself a conspiracy, and further entrench themselves rather than heed warnings.
"How to keep a social media platform from enabling anti-democratic demagogues" is an unsolved problem.
There are many facets of this comment I would like to address.
First lets make the assumption that I agree false information should be (or even can be) curbed on social media, things like Flat Earth... The problem here as we saw with COVID picking "authoritative" sources is not always accurate and tends to curb legitimate dissent as much as it does false information. Anything from the origins to COVID to the flip flopping nature of mask wearing, to discussions over mandates have all been censored in various ways under the guise of curbing false information. That is very very dangerous IMO, in fact to me it more dangerous than the false information itself. It is akin to the legal standard of "better 10 guilty people go free, than 1 innocent be imprisoned falsely" well to me, it is better than 10 false statements be spread than 1 true statement be suppressed
Then you have to take into account the clear political bias in deciding what is "false" information, you talk about the "big lie" of election fraud, but what about the continuing lies about the Rittenhouse trail, the protests / riots, the Waukesha Atrocity, Russia Gate, and many others continuing to be spread by the "authoritative sources" that many of these platforms use as Ministries of Truth. None of which has any kind of censorship or fact checking attached to it, it seems only one political camp has these fact checker flagging deployed to them. If you are going to fact check the "Big Lie" on election fraud, then I want to see fack checks on all those other topics as well.
Then you talk about Twitter "flagging" content, I actually agree that is the correct path. What twitter (and youtube) does to add a flag, or content message directing people to different sources is a good thing, I have no problem with this I just want ti deployed in a political neutral, fact based way. Today it is not being done that way.
What I do have a problem with is suppression, bans, and other direct forms os censorship often employed by twitter and other platforms. I am a firm believe that the solution to speech one believes is false or "bad" is more speech you believe is true or "good" not attempts to censor and suppress which often has an amplifying effect.
There are better ways to win the hearts and minds of the population than authoritarian control of what people see, hear and say. No one likes to be controlled by someone else. Censoring discussion of the issue is only going to make more people assume the election was in fact "fraudulent". Similarly Sam Harris has said in a podcast how laws against Holocaust denial do more to create more Holocaust deniers than they help because they automatically make people assume you have something to hide, even if you don't.
In general, intelligent people feel an intellectual responsibility to question what they are told.
The irony is that millions of the people you’re trying to defend as free-thinkers who can look at any speech and make good choices, are literally controlled by Fox News and Alex Jones propaganda.
Side note: In fact I believe there’s a legal path to suing Tucker Carlson out of existence by proving, with real data, that people really do believe the nonsense. The only reason Carlson is still trumpeting destructive lies from a megaphone is that so far, judges have accepted the argument that “no one in their right mind believes that what Carlson says is true; he’s obviously a satirist.”
> are literally controlled by Fox News and Alex Jones propaganda.
You think you've got it, and though that may seem obvious I must set you straight even if it scares you as much as it does me: it is the other way around; those are mere reflections ultimately under their control (as much as anyone controls their beliefs).
Your parenthetical statement casts a large shadow over the rest of your statement, because yes, control varies, and people with low control (correlates with low education) are precisely the ones who fall prey to cynical propaganda.
There's this idea that there are millions of mind-numbed conservative zombies out there, blindly following Trump or Tucker Carlson or spokesman x, but I don't see it. What I think is closer to the truth is that there are a ton of angry cultural conservatives who distrust everybody, but begrudgingly watch Carlson because they perceive him as better than the actively-hostile rest-of-the-news. That doesn't necessarily mean they're making good choices, but it's good practice to understand why people make the political choices they do.
The theory that a huge percentage of Tucker's audience is watching it knowing full well that Tucker is a full of shit zero-content "satirist" just isn't convincing at all. Unfortunately, though, it has been convincing to some judges but like I said I hope that will change.
That said, I now a bunch of people firsthand who are getting brainwashed on Tucker and Alex Jones. They really do believe the crap.
The problem is of course, he won't ever do that consistently. Instead he will simply decide that people he doesn't personally like a "lying" and "spreading misinformation", whilst people who are powerful or who he does like, never do.
Consider that if Twitter censored everyone who believed a lie or fabrication, every public health person who claimed masks didn't work and then that they did, would all lose their Twitter accounts or be hidden. Guess what, they will never do that.
Thus it is reasonable to interpret their use of the word "healthy" to be "heavily left wing biased".
To not promote toxicity, one could just avoid amplifying anything that’s a hot button or divisive issue. However, incentives don’t align with that.
The key is the issue is the amplification. Promoting of content you’re not following in feeds.
Of course, completely changing it back to only content from those you follow in chronological order and allowing you to curate would solve that problem as well, but there’s no way they go back to that as there’s far less money involved.
It doesn't mean "something I don't like". It means an outright lie, or a statement made in order to mislead or bait people into useless or malicious behavior.
Trolling, lying, saying stupid and libelous things with the intent to anger. Bad faith is about intent.
I also look forward to the day that "censorship" is allowed nuance. If you think Twitter deciding it won't be a party to disinformation campaigns is "censorship", we have bigger issues.
It probably is not what you personally mean, but outright censorship is what will likely happen if we do not actively resist the calls for silencing the deplorables. Freedom of expression is not the default state of the world.
Do you believe that Twitter banning the Hunter Biden laptop story (to the extent that you couldn't even DM a link to it to other users) before the election wasn't an act of political corporate censorship?
Youtube for one has banned a lot of discussions around guns, and gun channels. There is a very limited number of things they allow and gun channels are walking on egg shells. The Rittenhouse trial cause alot of banns, strikes, and etc as well. Including one of the most popular law channel's getting taken down for a time.
That is one example, I can instead highlight any number of other topics like abortion, pronouns, gender, sexuality, any of the other "culture war" topics.
I subscribe to multiple high-sub-count YouTube channels that post videos about guns on a regular basis. Are you referring to their rules about violent/explicit content? That is absolutely not a subject matter ban like 'you can't discuss guns' and the facts don't support a claim that they ban guns.
YouTube's rules enforcement for videos is notoriously bad and has been forever, but that doesn't change their actual policies.
Enforcement is more pertinent than policy. If their policy allows for such videos, but in practice removes them, it doesn't really matter what their policy is.
That’s unfortunate. This is exactly how I want Twitter not to be. I just want a feed filled with Tweets by the people I follow, ordered by the time posted.
But as seen on Instagram, YouTube and TikTok, this is not most effective way to make money.
He's only acknowledging that they're already algorithmically guiding the conversation and shaping public opinion. The algorithms are just bad: there are tons of feedback loops, too much emphasis on amplifying the already-popular and virtually no effort to de-emphasize the trash, and so you end up with a dumpster-fire / cacophony that Twitter is today.
Hacker News discussions are great because they're so well-moderated. It's not hard to imagine Twitter doing a better job of algorithmically demoting some of the obvious rage-bait, fake news, straight-up hate speech, etc.
As someone bullish on crypto, I look forward to cleaning up all the spam/scammers on Twitter. I think legitimate integration into Twitter (i.e tipping, subscriptions, cash app, etc) will be powerful.
Other than adding mandatory 2FA and introducing a 24-hour time delay on account renames and 2 hours on profile name/image changes (which should be a given for any blue-check account), what else can Twitter realistically do given that the other side (crypto pumpers) has literally tons of money floating around?
Any speculation as to the reason and timing for this?
Twitter was Jack's baby, and he loved it so much that he gave 50% of his Square time to leading Twitter. Jack has so much more to gain from Square from both an equity and Bitcoin maximalist perspective, it's curious why Jack would try to lead two very demanding companies simultaneously. (Not that it can't be done. Elon, Jack, et al. have done it for years.)
My thought is that this is Jack returning focus to Square after the recent SQ earnings report miss, slowing growth of Cash App, stock slip (down 20%), and incredibly increased competition from Shopify, PayPal, and now MAGMA. (Microsoft is entering BNPL, Google/Apple/Facebook pay, etc.)
Am I the only one found it ironic he is announcing this on twitter.. yet he has to screen shot the content b/c it would normally not fit into twitter media :)
I have mixed feelings about the implications for free speech, but in the last 10 years I’ve seen YT comments transition from toxic cesspool to “never was heard a discouraging word.” I started investing in Twitter a few months ago when observing how good they’ve become at selectively hiding tweets that would upset the thread.
Twitter is already taking steps to get less unpleasant. Having a thoughtful tech-oriented CEO work on their issues full time ought to go a long way toward accelerating their progress, if Microsoft is any example.
This is my concern as well. Twitter already has significant issues with this. But based on Dorsey's Rogan appearances I get the impression that he was never entirely comfortable with playing the arbiter of truth/acceptable content outside of high profile cases. He deferred to his trust and safety team most of the time, though you can still find a lot of enclaves that a platform like facebook might have preemptively purged.
His successor could very well be much more aggressive in this respect.
It is likely that the censorship and massaging of visibility is done by a team composed largely of ideological activists. Dorsey as a founder and leader would have the sense of ownership that would allow him to push back on that. I would expect that team to steamroll over the new CEO because his ownership is weaker.
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey is expected to step down from his executive role, sources tell CNBC’s David Faber.
Twitter stock jumped more than 11% on the news.
This is breaking news. Please check back for updates.
Why? He's been a part-time CEO whose focus has clearly been on Square. Having a full-time CEO focused on a company with as high a profile as Twitter makes a lot of sense.
the method of announcement not the actual contents. There was an investor group keep on kicking Dorsey out so that's not strange. But to have it announced like this on a random Monday morning before start of markets, and not even a proper presser from the board("Twitter did not respond to a request for comment."), but a "leak" by a reporter...
Well, this is how breaking news are usually broken in tidbits as they come in. Similar lingo too. Timing is suspect but by the looks of it they were correct and had limited information at the time.
The stock is up because Jack is going to finish up harvesting the cryptocurrency related seeds that have started sprouting fast over at Square, and integrate them all into Twitter before anyone else,
making Twitter into what it "should have been" the whole time.
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey is expected to step down from his executive role, sources tell CNBC's David Faber.
Twitter stock jumped more than 11% on the news.
Dorsey currently serves as both the CEO of Twitter and Square, his digital payments company. Twitter stakeholder Elliott Management had sought to replace Jack Dorsey as CEO in 2020 before the investment firm reached a deal with the company's management.
Elliott Management founder and billionaire investor Paul Singer had wondered whether Dorsey should run both of the public companies, calling for him to step down as CEO of one of them.
It's unclear who's set to succeed Dorsey. But if he steps down, the next CEO will have to meet Twitter's aggressive internal goals. The company said earlier this year it aims to have 315 million monetizable daily active users by the end of 2023 and to at least double its annual revenue in that year.
I remember spending a summer on the Twitter campus and the whole time I was wondering - why the heck does Twitter need all these employees (5500 as of last count [0])? The functionality hasn't budged much in years. I get the need for IT ops to keep stuff running (especially since failwhale days). But honestly, I never got why Twitter couldn't do with 1/10 the staff they have / had. I hope this great resignation wave continues across the company.
They need all those employees because apparently there is not really any algorithm at work... An insider leaked at some point on Reddit a while back that there are just a bunch of people applying back end controls on each user account to limit their posting activity in one of a few ways, and when I saw it it did a lot to ease my mind about how the erratic way Twitter works. I personally think that some accounts simply get shadowbanned for life unless they pass the "money making controversial post attention" threshold.
Smoke and mirrors and pay-for-play have completely corrupted social media now since the pandemic. "Success" on social platforms depends on how much you can afford to pay for it.
I understand everyone has bills to pay, but these services started out as free services and converted stealthily and at times deceptively into paid services, and that shouldn't be just overlooked or given a pass.
Investors have priced the company at a market cap of $36.8 Billion, so approx. $6.8M per employee. I guess you could subtract their assets and IP but I doubt it will change the figure much.
That doesn't make sense. Employees per revenue is not measured by market cap, but by revenue. Revenue was $3.7B as last reported. So you're 10x off by that measure. Also, not all employees are engineering and ad relationship management.
Please edit snarky swipes like "Ahh yet another person who" out of your comments here. As the site guidelines say, a good critical comment teaches us something.
Which systems are the "hard" parts? Given zero functionality change, how much larger can and should Twitter grow? Is the complication a function of ad revenue, volume of content, user traffic?
Just because you don't see functionality changing doesn't mean it isn't. Lots of new features, just not for the normal users. Not to mention all the backend work to make all this data flow around, be accurate, and be reliable.
And also, there's not just engineering. HR, Accounting, Lawyers, Trust and Safety, it's all there
The question is valid though as to why they've kept growing if the user-facing product hasn't changed. There are some good reasons but lots of bad ones too.
The point I'm trying to make is assume that user-side functionality stays exactly the same - frozen - for say 10 years. Given what you say above, it would be reasonable to expect the company to continue to grow in any case on its current 10-20% compounded annual rate with no end in sight. Is that truly sustainable?
Which users? Internal users? External users? External developers (I know, I know) or academics consuming their APIs? Advertisers?
Starting from the position of what don't I know about this situation, and / or what systems could cause it to be in this seemingly intractable state leaves you open to all sorts of new learnings vs. assuming there aren't intelligent, capable people on the other side.
Twitter is a platform that offers a product. Your attention is the product.
The part of Twitter required to maintain a decent stock of product has not needed to change outwardly, because it hasn't had to. There hasn't been a new version of human in a very long time. But even then, anything that creates more product (drives more engagement) means more revenue opportunity for the 90% of the platform you will never touch.
The parts of the product that theoretically make revenue for Twitter have changed significantly over time. Analytics, ad intake/spend, promotion for influencers/brands/etc.
Twitter is an advertising platform and it's the ads, ad targeting, advertiser tools that change. Doing new things with a large volume of data requires a lot of engineering.
"If you're not paying for the product, you are the product" as they say
It’s usually about the systems that serve the clients(the people who pay money to Twitter) and other parts of the company. They probably have a lot of internal system and corporate facing that change and evolve as the business evolves. Think contents management, legal, payments, BI, abuse prevention, systems performance, testing, growth, compliance, ads management for the customers and management for the ads purchases and performance, custom access to select people or clients and god knows what.
What kind of board allows an announcement like this to happen in such an uncontrolled way? I feel like this is just more evidence that Twitter's board is weak.
You don't leak it to a reporter like it's the latest variant of the iPhone.
There should have an announcement from the board, a LONG time before markets were to start (ideally end of markets on friday) clearly explaining WHAT is happening and WHY (even if it's a bullshit reason, there should be a reason).
It would have allowed markets to absorb the news instead of the NYSE having to halt trading amid the uncertainty.
Serious question: What does making an announcement while the market is closed actually do? Are you not just throwing money to the people willing to trade after hours?
My unqualified guess is that it makes time to ensure the full story and context to be digested by traders. If the story is emerging during trading, there is risk of more volatility / unpredictability as the fastest information may not be the most complete.
equal access to information. (no "insider" benefit)
people trading off market are taking their own risks willingly, the market itself tries to be fair w.r.t. reported
if you are listed, you effectively agree to release info on certain terms, so that off-market don't get a better advantage also
When I had posted this, there had been no tweet, just a leak from a CNBC reporter with three lines : breaking news, Jack is rumored to be leaving, stay tuned for more info.
there was a massive info asymmetry, so NYSE had to halt trading until it deems news has percolated enough, I guess.
the tweet came a few hours after CNBC leaked it, what I had posted on HN was the original article, it was changed with the tweet after the fact by some mod here.
My comment dates from when we didn't have a tweet or any info, no one knew who the next ceo of twitter was, simply the rumour (not even confirmed news) that jack had left. no one knew, Twitter PR was refusing reporter questions and NYSE had to stop trading until the situation settled
Form 8-K filed with the SEC concurrently with a Press Release and interviews announcing his successor and explaining why this will be a "good thing."
The 8-K is functionally a legal requirement for this and the rest is just making sure you control the message to reduce speculation which can hurt you.
This makes me uncomfortable. Not the idea of it per se, but the narrative the GOP's anti-cancel-culture bloc builds around it. Echoes of Thiel's involvement with Bollea vs. Gawker.
Yeah we better get used to disappointment. I think the best hope we have is that Twitter becomes the next Facebook and people we read go somewhere else. It's very dangerous but this is a dangerous time in a dangerous place.
Yeah Twitter acted first out of belief that it's possible for the right to go too far. Any relevant business or publications fell all over themselves to sweep Jan 6 under the rug. Companies went back on their vow not to fund Republicans.
Zuck and Jack were alone but only Zuck is untouchable.
More people need to quit twitter. The employees should all quit if their owners won't convert to a 501-c3 and submit to a large community elected board. Otherwise this will just be the tool of our destruction. Censorship should be censored, it's not healthy and so there should be a censorship board dedicated to censoring censorship at <social media platform>. Or just stop telling people what they can see and hear, Twitter is the new Facebook, i quit Facebook 6 Years ago and now it's the fogey platform, they're even rebranding like a grandmother dying her hair. Soon twatter will be the fogey platform and facechuck will meta itself out of existence. Good riddance. IRC is dead, long live IRC!
Twitter has been boring at least as long as Facebook. I quit once my feed of what used to be casual acquaintances I met at tech conferences turned into an unavoidable stream of rage-bait sanctimonious bs; a long time ago at this point.
It's become rather clear that any attempts to "fix" Twitter are sure to degrade it instead. The best thing to do would be to leave it alone in benign neglect, but that ain't gonna happen. C'est la vie.
Twitter has always been a mess. Anyone sensible who wasn’t speculating had dismissed Twitter as a platform for serious usage about 5 minutes after it launched.
Not necessarily, but the character limit necessarily limits the amount of seriousness and quality within content on Twitter. It's very format necessitates that Twitter is full of vapid and inane content, and driven by pithy outrage inducement.
The word limit might in theory encourage it, but in practice twitter certainly does not require it. In fact, you're generally better off being overnice, imprecise, and livid. People could tweet a poem, but they don't.
What I'm saying is that it doesn't force you to be precise (or vivid, whatever that means in practice), making it not a great choice for a lot of the mass communication roles Twitter has been foisted into.
Many of the harshest insults also fit in one Tweet.
Unless you're Shakespeare or a master of your language of similar stature, it's very hard to convey a deep and nuanced thought with so few characters. People write books because the more complex the idea, the more words it requires to fully explain.
It's very hard to convey a deep and nuanced thought with any number of characters. People add more because they're anxious they're failing and adding more words is easier than picking better words. And because you need 250 pages worth of them to get a publishing contract, of course
It's uncommon to read a 300 page book that couldn't have made its points better in 30 pages - and properly rare to read one that couldn't have done it in 150
the "I'm a Twitter shitter" Penny Arcade comic eloquently explained Twitter back when, I thought. I have yet to see a better expression of the value of the platform.
People love to bash Dorsey but he had more of a backbone than Zuckerberg in every possible way. And while the game is always about money, Dorsey did try to improve the eco-system in a principled way even if arguably he failed in many ways - this courage was probably there because he was a founder of the company. The new CEO will be more like Pichai at Google or Cook at Apple - only there to make money.
How did dorsey stand up to anything? They are trying to monetize twitter just as much, with extremely annoying dark patterns to boot. They just don't seem to succeed as well. The way they redesigned feeds, made linking to tweets a coin toss because of how often they just show "oops something went wrong" if you aren't logged in, or if you are lucky made it so Twitter threads just don't show anything but the single linked tweet. I'm not sure if trying and failing to grow and monetize like facebook counts
And it's not like he has shown some sort of political backbone either. Twitter is much much more of a political cesspool, and has an odd persuasive influence on real life politics that facebook posts just doesn't have. And that's with Twitter being pretty okay with handing out bans and protecting blue checkmarks (and it's obvious they have a very heavy biais when it comes to who they verify). I'm genuinely puzzled that you can see dorsey as having stood up for pretty much anything.
I know this is very unpopular but while Zuckerberg has obviously no problem with turning his platform into a creepy ad filled universe he controls, he's still infinitely more "backboned". 99% of the attention fb or Zuckerberg are getting is due to their (relatively) unwavering obsession with their vision of free speech and an open platform. Every single major media platform on pretty much both sides has been trashing him and facebook for the past 4 years. He could've gone the dorsey way of just yielding and taking the very easy path of doing whatever to make the controversy go away but he didn't. You can agree or disagree with his stance, but at least he has one (again, I'm not talking about the monetization or ad side). If he didnt, the past 4 years would've been a breeze for him and Meta. Remember, most of the mainstream controversy has been about allowing fake news, wrong think, how the platform is moderated, how meta is totally why the other side won... The privacy/tracking/advertising issues have been mostly ignored in comparison (they probably have been covered extensively on HN but that's an outlier) unless they overlapped with a political tribe issue.
Even then, he waited at the last minute to make sure there was no possible retaliation. Sure, that's a good business move. But how does that prove any courage? It's the opposite. At least zuck can say that he wants to keep his platform open, that facebook is open to challenging point of views or whatever but that Trump didn't leave them a choice at that point....and he'd at least be coherent. Dorsey can't, because he mostly doesn't care for any "big idea" that isn't related to his weird crypto fascination. So I guess I was wrong & he did show a backbone for something... Consistently not doing anything about crypto spam. Afterall, Twitter is notorious for being filled with crypto scams and being ground zero for most shady crypto schemes!
After years of letting him say whatever he wanted, they waited until the opposing party was firmly seated and the threat of retaliation was lowest. Good move tactically I guess but it took no bravery.
They waited FOREVER to actually ban Trump. A staffer enforced the rules to ban him well before that and Jack's organization courageously reversed it. Until they finally banned him, they openly violated their own rules for years to keep him on for attention.
I don't know how you could write this comment unless you've barely used Twitter in the last 5 years. Their API stewardship is a mess, their support for third-party clients is miserable, Tweetdeck is constantly neglected, Web Twitter is chaotic+slow, and they constantly cram awful/broken new stuff like fleets and spaces into the UI and saddle it with user-hostile stuff like broadcasting what you're doing to all your followers as an opt-out. Making bad decisions that anyone who knows your audience would advise against is not "courage", it's foolishness.
Wasting tons of his time and resources on promoting cryptocurrency + NFTs was also actively bad for the Twitter ecosystem - it creates lots of negative sentiment and attention that distracts from features relevant to the rest of the userbase. These days I periodically see high-profile Twitter accounts being hijacked by hackers in order to boost crypto and NFTs and when you read coverage of NFTs in the news it's often about scams - why would you willingly associate Twitter with that kind of negative buzz when you could wait until it's settled down?
True, but it's not like Twitter has suffered in popularity even without API access. We just have fewer cool bots, but the platform is full of bots already, and not of the interesting kind.
remarkably, those who bash him are the same people twitter has done everything to bend over backwards for. same on reddit, facebook, twitch, etc.
people on the opposite side of the privileged class are barely allowed to exist on those platforms - only if they police their speech very carefully to avoid breaking a myriad of vague and unwritten rules, and even then they're still subject to being unpersoned for some perceived offense committed off-platform.
> people on the opposite side of the privileged class are barely allowed to exist on those platforms - only if they police their speech very carefully to avoid breaking a myriad of vague and unwritten rules, and even then they're still subject to being unpersoned for some perceived offense committed off-platform.
I'm having trouble understanding what any of this means
Parent is saying that these platforms cater to left leaning reactionaries ("social justice warriors"), and that people on the opposite side (conservatives) are far more restricted, but most of the criticism comes from those same left leaning reactionaries about the sites not further restricting the already-restricted side.
I don't think that there is anything inherently "conservative" about misinformation about a disease in the midst of a pandemic. If Biden decides tomorrow to claim COVID is a hoax, vaccines have microchips, drinking bleach cures COVID, or attempts a violent coup against the government, it'd be fair game to ban him from the platform, regardless of whether he's considered "liberal" or "conservative."
I did go through the "Ctrl-F" for the link, and it was a list of terrorists, Holocaust deniers, neo nazis, and hate speech. I don't think being a conservative necessarily entails any of these things either, even if they are often linked to being "*-right."
Ahh you weren't really asking, just trying to prove a point that conservatives are allowed to speak freely on twitter, as long as they don't accidentally set off a COVID misinformation ML classifier in their criticism of a gov't COVID policy, or have enough people flag their posts as misinformation.
I guess i should have just responded with the NYPost thing, which is the only thing I recalled initially, given it was particularly egregious right before an election and even Dorsey admitted it was a mistake:
https://nypost.com/2020/11/17/jack-dorsey-admits-lockout-of-...
>Ahh you weren't really asking, just trying to prove a point that conservatives are allowed to speak freely on twitter, as long as they don't accidentally set off a COVID misinformation ML classifier in their criticism of a gov't COVID policy, or have enough people flag their posts as misinformation.
It's hard to convey intent over text, but I couldn't be more genuine in my curiosity. Accidentally setting "off a COVID misinformation ML classifier" is a legitimate concern. Are otherwise appropriate posts being misclassified as misinformation? And wouldn't that be of concern to folks across the political spectrum? Same goes for flagging posts; this seems like a concern that isn't restricted to a single political position.
Well there's a lot of "conservative" aka right-wing American complaints about twitter silencing their voices for political reasons, some of them are just trolls who were being jerks bellyaching, but some do have a scent of legitimacy to me. It's all gray area really, personally you can read about some of the people banned on that list (cntl-f "conservative" = 24 results) or the NY post situation if you like and decide for yourself.
I personally think these media platforms are evolving policies that will be enforced selectively (e.g. NYpost account frozen for writing a story involving "hacked" materials) based on the bias of the people enforcing the rules (well that's really a violation of our policies, but that other post isn't because of nuance, that nuance really just a reflection of bias in either the classifier, or human being making final judgement call).
> only if they police their speech very carefully to avoid breaking a myriad of vague and unwritten rules, and even then they're still subject to being unpersoned for some perceived offense committed off-platform
Not sure what you're talking about. Can you provide examples/evidence?
If you really want to post about how vaccines make your blood cells broadcast 5G radio waves, you can go make a Parler account regardless of whether you get "unpersoned" (?) by Twitter.
Twitter's rules enforcement is historically EXTREMELY casual, the only thing I can think of is that they are relatively consistent about punishing death threats regardless of context. Even then, they let some of that slide. Very often a rules violation just results in a tweet being deleted or marked with a disclaimer, not a ban - few services would treat rules violations that way.
>If you really want to post about how vaccines make your blood cells broadcast 5G radio wave
oh, that's a great example, actually. as far as I vaguely recall from the times before the pandemic, expressing skepticism or criticism towards the government and corporations was not against the rules.
>Twitter's rules enforcement is historically EXTREMELY casual
yes - for the privileged class, twitter does indeed "let some of that slide".
This feels like the Gates/Ballmer transition, and I think it will have the same effect on the world/IT: massive increase of integrations, profit, and assimilation, at the expense of end-user satisfaction.
It looks very different. Twitter CEO is replaced by the CTO how has a phd in Computer science from Stanford. Ballmer was running sales and support in Microsoft.
Censoring speech is completely counter to everything this country was built on. Every corporation doing this, YC included, is plainly undermining our freedom of speech. Using the public square exception, while also censoring and editorializing, creates a moral hazard, wherein the offending corporations are are actually publishers that ate not responsible for the content they publish, yet they are benefitting from it.
There are no "community standards". There are corporate rules and censorship. We are not a community if we can't have free speech. We are subject to a corporation that is publishing and benefitting our content, subject to their terms and political beliefs.
Twitter is a private platform that has a 1st amendment right to exercise editorial control about what happens to their own platform. Same for a blog with a comment section, a restaurant review service, a moderated forum about tech news, an image sharing service. It shouldn't matter how large a corporate entity is. Same for the cable news networks. Same for newspapers and magazines.
Correct. But then they cannot enjoy the protections that come with being a "Public Square". You don't get to choose "OK I'm going to be a publisher/editor of content, but I will enjoy the protections of being a Public Square". Currently all of these companies are breaking the law, it's a known thing, but nobody is doing anything about it, same for the Logan act and many other laws that we have that are broken all the time and nobody enforces them.
If you're a publisher the size of Twitter of contact, then it's much harder to create a monopoly, because you need to spend countless millions of hours per week editorial editing content to make sure that none of it is illegal/defamatory/etc. Having the protections of a public square well only pretending to actually be one is fraud.
So, can we have Twitter with its content transition over to a "public good" and "public service", anytime soon?
I am biased here because it's the only place I have any sort of social 'presence or interaction', and care about it more than Facebook, which I don't use, or any other service that stores people's data.
I know it's technically possible to "download my content", but that's a poor substitute for a more transparent Twitter, with _easy_ and _open_ API access.
OT: I am wondering about the 9:05 time. Is this a new thing to start meetings after the full hour? During the pandemic I noticed that many meeting are organized without any break in between. So at my company we tried to set the default end of meetings to X:25 and X:50 but it doesn't seem to help much (as everybody is used to running meetings to the full hour).
So I am wondering if setting the start to X:05 might help?
Question for those who use/don't use Twitter and Reddit:
Twitter feeds seem more oriented towards a specific person whereas Reddit seems more oriented towards a specific topic. Which one do you think works best for you? What would you change?
the guy responsible for these gems is the new CEO?
"If they are not gonna make a distinction between muslims and extremists, then why should I distinguish between white people and racists."
— Parag Agrawal (@paraga) October 26, 2010
“Our role is not to be bound by the First Amendment, but our role is to serve a healthy public conversation and our moves are reflective of things that we believe lead to a healthier public conversation,” said Agrawal.
“The kinds of things that we do about this is, focus less on thinking about free speech, but thinking about how the times have changed.”
So is this one of those, "the board fired me and let me "quit" on my own terms" emails? I skimmed it and I don't see any substance, just the usual platitudes.
So did I, after a dozen years on the platform. I won't donate content or attention to a site that decides what I am allowed to read (they censor their search!).
> I was hosting my own content on Twitter's service, same as I do on my web host.
In both cases, you're not "hosting your own content" by anyone's definition of the term. You're paying someone to host it. Anyway, all web hosts have rules aka terms of service aka censorship.
It's my right (and Twitter's) to offer a service that has terms, and those terms can include removal of speech that I feel is bad for my business. This is a basic freedom of association -- I don't have to do business with people whose speech I don't like, and I certainly don't have to broadcast it.
Arguing that Twitter must be a neutral host is like arguing that Uber or Airbnb can't ban customers for saying racist things (both have) or that Facebook must accept 100% of ads.
If you are conveying someone's speech as a service as part of a for-profit, private business, you can choose not to convey that person's speech for any reason. There is no demand in the US (Constitutional, statutory, or otherwise) that a private entity broadcast the speech of another entity. In fact, that's a violation of the broadcaster's First Amendment rights (as repeatedly upheld by liberal and conservative justices, over and over again).
This surely signals the end of an era. Not sure i) if there will be an NFT of the resignation tweet in the manner of the first tweet? [0] and ii) if the future will be "better" than the past in any meaningful way... The stock market reaction suggests it will be not.
Yes but a screenshot is clearly not the best way to convey the information of an email. You cant search it, screen readers cant read the text, you cant zoom it properly if you have bad eyesight, etc…
Can screen readers still not read text in images? Years ago I could understand that being a problem, but now? If that's still true then it seems to me those screen readers could really use an upgrade. My phone has been able to copy text out of screenshots flawlessly for years.
I do agree with the overall point though that images are a suboptimal way of conveying text.
> Can screen readers still not read text in images?
They shouldn't have to do OCR, a description of the image should be provided, there is even an attribute for that on the web, it's called "alt", or use picture/caption. Twitter and its shitty UI has no excuse.
Not entirely true. My blind friend encourages me to annotate screenshots whenever possible. It's just a pain, because you have to remember to do it as you tweet (you can't do it later), and only you can do it (why not crowdsource it?)
Twitter was never meant to be a platform that all information can be shared their 280 characters. It was always meant to be abbreviated and force short handed information. OP comment that Jack had to post an image to pass on the information completely misunderstands what/how and why twitter was built.
OP comment was a throwaway comment trying to say that long form text based comments should be allowed on twitter? Think how terrible twitter would become if that was the reality.
Twitter started out as a way to organize protests via cellphone, TXT2MOB. Jack just used it to post a manifesto as an image of text because the platform cannot support long-form communication. It is not a medium for subtlety, complexity, or depth. Both statements are true. Your complaint has nothing to do with Twitter's failure as a substantial communication mechanism, and my point simply illustrates that failure. We're both right.
I expect the Trump ban to be overturned starting next year. And also Twitter to become lot more neutral. Whatever someone's political beliefs might be, it is bad for business when you alienate good number of users and also result in encouraging other alternatives to the already crowded social media space.
And shareholders expect this which is why shares are up today.
News say the current CTO is going to replace him. We'll see how it turns out. Very surprising to me that are going with someone with zero relevant experience. If I were a Twitter share holder I would sell all my stocks today.
i remember jack on the JRE podcast having a debate with a right-wing journalist. he was put into the position of trying to deny that twitters moderation favors far-left narratives. its emblematic of the role of CEO because i have always imagined that the true challenge of being the CEO of a top company is to be stuck between honesty and the company. jack wanted to say that yes of course the moderation skews left because to do otherwise would threaten the solvency of the company. but to say it out loud would make it all redundant. a thousand people think that if only they ran twitter they would put an end to X. no you wouldnt. and i would guess that jack has gone through more than most of us could imagine.
Twitter and other social media are probably the biggest problem of our time.
By providing simple rules of information flow: small amount of content, retweet, followers) and rewards (likes), they've created the most efficient engines for finding and spreading novelty at the expense of everything else.
There are no incentives to improve accuracy, increase thoughtfulness, paint nuance. Fact checking gets lost in the wind.
The environment is essentially one designed for brain viruses, where whether you click RT (after thinking around 5 seconds about it) determines the Rt. The most superficially convincing, novel looking and emotion inducing content wins. You can get your misinformation in two flavors: deliberate disinformation by grifters, or accidental misinformation, sometimes by real experts who (like everyone else) make a sensational mistake that gets super amplified.
The worst bit is that social media is becoming the primary source of news for most people today. The results have been nothing short of catastrophic.
The new CEO has quite a bit of work in front of them.
William Randolph Hearst (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Randolph_Hearst) did all of this first in the early 1900s. (Along with his rival Pulitzer. But the image above is clearly in Hearst's image, a fact probably lost to the modern audience)
The "problems" you state are far older than Twitter, and its best to study history and the problem of "Yellow Journalism". Over 100 years ago, people were complaining about false-outrage that manipulates the American public.
The only thing that has changed is that the American public has _forgotten_ what it was like to live in a outrage-fueled society, and we have to relearn the lessons of the past now. We need laws and society to change and recognize that all this fake-outrage is damaging ourselves, our psyche, and ultimately, our society.
The class of problem and its origins are constant in the interaction between human nature and an open market.
The specific problems of today are utterly unlike anything older. The medium is overwhelmingly determinate of impact.
The simplistic version of this is: there are profound non-linearities introduced by lack of friction. "Superficial" differences in the role of feedback and tailored results which are noise in the case of print and broadcast media, are everything in contemporary social media.
Most particularly, the so-called "algorithm" problem is specific to contemporary social media; and it is imbedded in our society in ways that are unlike anything which has challenged it previously: as the citizen-facing sharp edge of surveillance capital, in which the origin and flow of "value" (i.e. consumer data) is all but entirely removed from public view and individual agency; and acts as a meta-filter, which is the sharp edge of social media serving increasingly as the sole mechanism whereby people receive media.
We live in a world in which what we read is ever more carefully targeted, deluded in the belief that we have agency in what we see and some defense about what it does not just to us, but to society as a whole.
Contemporary social media is stochastic mind control. And as said, it is currently performed almost entirely in service of ends very much at odds with the common good, in almost any dimension you choose to inspect.
This included at least 15 years of harsh occupation, as the Philippine Katipunan (in the north) and Moros (the Muslims of the south) fought a guerilla war against their US occupiers, with roughly 200,000 dead from famines and war. I mean, USA occupied the Philippines until the 1940s (the seeds for Philippine independence were planted by the 20s, but WW2 severely delayed plans). But just because US Citizens have forgotten the story doesn't mean that this stuff didn't happen.
The Yellow Press has been a bane upon US society for over a century. There's letters from Ben Franklin about how he manipulated the press (ie: leaking false "scalping" stories about native Americans / British) to aid in the US Revolution. (See Henry Hamilton, a British Administrator who was widely believed to be a scalper, but proof never was offered on the subject: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Hamilton_(colonial_admin...)
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This is literally who we are as a people. Easily manipulated, outraged filled citizens who individually seem to have difficulty doing any form of critical thinking. Then a few elites get a good idea about how to manipulate the masses: be they Benjamin Franklin, William Hearst, his rival Pulitzer, or today Zuckerberg or Jack Dorsey.
Its been like this for centuries, and it will continue to be like this long after you or I die.
Both Pulitzer and Ben Franklin are national heroes for their ability to levy the masses and gain popular support.
Problem #1 is explaining to people that the outrage-filled Yellow press is a problem in the first place. Too many people yell "free speech" and "freedom", and point out these heroes of the past.
People don't even think this is a problem. So it won't get solved. If you can convince enough people that maybe we should do something about this, feel free to do so.
One thing that is happening is that social media is escalating the problem so much that its becoming visible to everyone, which in turn will increase the demand to do something about information quality (including defining what it is or is not). This seems to be already in progress.
Another thing I'm hoping for is that we can get NLU that is advanced enough to detect and elevate great quality material (both from research but also from educational perspective) that can successfully counteract "yellow journalism" and misinformation. We could combine this with NLU that can detect common techniques that take advantage of flaws in our reasoning abilities.
I'm actually optimistic this may be possible now. I also suspect it won't be necessary to go against free speach to achieve this.
> I also suspect it won't be necessary to go against free speach to achieve this.
We only need to look at the misinformation from 10 years ago to see how quickly "free speech" comes into play as a counter-argument.
"Obama is a Muslim" and "Obama was born in Kenya" are two pieces of misinformation. Explain what methodologies you'd do to stop these pieces of misinformation from spreading on Facebook, Twitter... or hell... Fox News / traditional media.
Any such restriction you think up with will immediately bring out the free-speech advocates. People want the "freedom" to spread these lies around for political gain.
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Its easier to use 10-year-old conspiracies because they're no longer "hot". I'm sure there are still people who believe in this misinformation today, but they're more riled up about current misinformation rather than past misinformation.
> Explain what methodologies you'd do to stop these pieces of misinformation from spreading on Facebook, Twitter... or hell... Fox News / traditional media.
Explaining that these sources of information are not reliable, because they use techniques to manipulate public opinion. We have to discredit entire subsets of media that aren't willing to give up manipulative practices.
Saying that we can and should demand higher quality for our information, just as we demand high quality for other products. We make all kinds of (life) decision based on information.
Offering an alternative, better source of information, which is transparent, has a well defined methodology, can "show you the work" if you want to see it. One where you will know people put a lot of effort into producing high quality material and went to great length to avoid common pitfalls of human reasoning. A new kind of media to improve the quality of our lives by improving the quality of our information.
Free speach is totally fine to continue existing. Traditional media can also continue to exist. That doesn't mean we have to take it seriously - nobody bans tabloids either, but we don't put much into them.
> Explaining that these sources of information are not reliable, because they use techniques to manipulate public opinion. We have to discredit entire subsets of media that aren't willing to give up manipulative practices.
Sure. I can believe that's a step in the right process. But have you ever tried to discredit Fox News for pushing the lie that "Obama is a Muslim" ?? Or "Obama was born in Kenya" ??
Even if you point out that a certain news publication does this, no one really seems to care in my experience.
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Look, people believe Obama was not born in the USA because they _want_ to believe that their political opponents are cheating at the process. And Fox News simply delivers to them what they want.
Cater to people's worst desires and worst beliefs... you know, those beliefs that no one else is willing to discuss... and you'll become a trustworthy friend of theirs.
Similarly: people want to be optimistic about COVID19. They want to believe in a cure (that isn't that cure that liberals are pushing). So now you have Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin. Give them the optimism they so desire, and they'll believe you.
People are right to be scared and afraid of COVID19. People are right to search for a cure and have optimism. But its when these media outlets feed on these fears and pushes misinformation that things get dangerous.
The idea isn't to focus on any individual bit of misinformation. Its to throw away the whole thing, conceptually, as a bad way of getting information, as a low quality source of it. It might have to include some left-leaning media as well, or most media in general as we know it today, because unfortunately most media today is manipulative instead of informative.
The hard bit is offering a good alternative, based on a decent set of principles, that will preserve its independence. Some principles might include:
- linking and detailed referencing to existing, primary sources
- grading the quality of information sources based on levels of evidence determined by experts
- showing the work i.e. using modern tech to allow the reader to expand on the whys and details if they want to (wiki style) without necessarily getting bogged down getting the gist of it (if they don't)
- you should be able to get from a lightweight, easy-read, to-the-point news article with a video to a full blown code-available paper that is also a Jupyther notebook with the anonymized dataset included, if you click deep enough
- full transparency to the entire process with public versioning of drafts and detailed commentary / editorialization etc - for those that want to access it. Open source and open data journalism, science and science communication.
(I'll be honest, the above list is super rough WIP at the moment - some of those might turn out to be bad ideas)
The reason why people might care now is that they are actually dying or getting maimed because they were exposed to misinformation. Between special interests pushing their narratives and solo manipulative grifters that are banking on building an audience, its hard to tell who to trust.
With a system like this, I suspect it might actually be possible to remove taboos eventually. Taboos are only taboos because we fear their effects on mass misinformation, misinterpretation and other systemic (un)intended negative effects. If we can find a new way of thinking that gains wide acceptance and is immune to those flaws, then maybe we can open up taboo topics.
> The idea isn't to focus on any individual bit of misinformation. Its to throw away the whole thing, conceptually, as a bad way of getting information, as a low quality source of it. It might have to include some left-leaning media as well, or most media in general as we know it today, because unfortunately most media today is manipulative instead of informative.
No. The important thing is to _GET OTHER PEOPLE_ to do this.
My mom, or my sister's father in law, will not trust what I say if it contradicts their news sources. So there's no feasible way I (or really, anyone else) can get them to throw away their bad news sources.
- don't focus on what their news sources are saying but instead
- you focus on why the old way is bad in general (across both left and right news media).
Thats the new message. Not "your news sources are bad" but "the entire approach of most news media today is bad. here is this new media utilizing a new approach where anyone can do the work and is fully open source so harder to manipulate"
The old press was broadcast-only and had to catter to the lowest common denominator. As a result, at least some people were immune.
The new "press" is crowdsourced and tailored just for you. Social media doesn't even have to do research on what works or what doesn't on who. Natural selection by means of retweeting does all the work. You can find misinformation of all levels of sophistication, all the way to incorrect scientific papers if thats your shtick. (It will mostly be based on reading abstract conclusions in those cases without checking quality of methodology, or on whatever the funding intrests of big companies are)
And the Tobacco industry funded all types of scientific papers, that were published all over the place to demonstrate Tobacco's "health benefits".
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The only reason we can't find examples older than maybe the mid 1900s or so, was because doctors weren't even trusted until the 1900s. 1800s doctors were well recognized as quacks and had very little reputation among the American people. So there was no reason to use doctors as a propaganda point back then.
Right, except now its not just pathological aspects of capitalism causing the problem - its democratized. Now everyone can misinterpret papers in novel an exciting ways that are likely to spread far and wide.
Where it all went sideways was when mainstream news started showing tweets on air.
EDIT: I need to add clarification. I don't mean when breaking news gets onto mainstream channels. No question that happens.
What I mean is the use of a single tweet with maybe 1 or 2 likes here or there to reflect public sentiment on different issues. All any news station had to do was fish through the pile of tweets about any given topic to find something they wanted to show on air and then act as if it represented a large segment of people. I watched it happen over and over for years.
Twitter created the ability to engineer the perception of public sentiment already with bots, but when main stream news joined in things went downhill much, much faster.
Mainstream news used to have a near-monopoly on access to events and crime scenes. The advent of smartphones with ever-improving cameras gives the average citizen, who's there in the moment, first access. Twitter just happened to be the medium with lowest barrier to sharing that, but it would've happened regardless. As stations couldn't keep up with the "breaking" part of news, it just made sense (unfortunately) to adopt the share-what-others-say model and talk about that instead.
I don't think eyewitness video is the biggest problem. When @LGBrandon8534932 gets their tweets posted on the evening news and it's treated the same as a statement from Dr Fauci. THAT'S a problem.
Once the floodgates have opened to allow social media statements to permeate mainstream news, there's no limiting which social media is acceptable and which isn't. Eventually, social media itself becomes the news. That feels like a natural progression to me, personally, despite how much I hate it.
Another case of blaming a symptom rather than the cause.
The media began showing Tweets because Twitter had reached a sufficient audience size. The real problem is the audience size.
Stroustrup famously said [1]:
> There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses.
I'd paraphrase this about communication platforms (including social media, Reddit, forums, etc):
> There are only two kinds of communication platforms: the ones where people are reactionary, argumentative, tribal, incendiary, conflict-seeking, virtue-signaling and just downright mean and the others too small for that not to have happened yet.
Perhaps things had started to slide sideways before that? I distinctly remember a period of time, I think nearly a decade back, when I'd constantly hear about something on NPR and think, "I saw that headline on reddit yesterday! Are they even trying!?"
If, at that time, NPR was aggregating information, that would be one thing. I really got the impression that they were mindlessly lifting headlines and story ideas.
I think that's a symptom and not the root cause. The root cause was when we stopped paying for news with money and started paying for news with clicks. That changed how news was gathered, reported, and shared.
I think they are a symptom, not the root. The root started before them with the advent of pay per click advertising. Everything else has spiraled from that. I truly believe that the massive divisiveness of the last 2 decades can be traced to this. Social media echo chambers, youtube rabbit holes, click baity headlines, all of it is because of pay per click advertising. The ML algorithms we have now have become so effective that the problem is only getting exponentially worse. Your news is fed to you with the sole purpose of making you click so they earn $.
As someone who started working at an ad agency during the online metrics boom, then went to a national news organisation to work as digital strategist, I tend to agree.
But I would pinpoint it to the inflated value of impressions. My experience (but i can not back this up) tells me that ad sellers tend to over estimate the impact of an impression, which makes the value chain completely inflated, and skews the business model. If ads were worth less (and, according to me, closer to the real value), less money would go round, and creating value for the end user would become more a necessity.
But I think calling it pay-for-click is a misnomer, that's just the latest version of a very old business model. Cable news, like Fox, has had the same outrage-fueled engagement metrics that predate the internet, and before them there were newspapers doing the same thing. I think the technology of social media is just creating small efficiencies in an existing business model preying on very old aspects of human nature.
I think the difference is that cable news is hard to access for a lot of people. For example, you don’t have ML algorithms on cable boxes trying to suggest a show which will result in high engagement. It’s fairly siloed, in that you have to deliberately choose to watch cable news. (Though they definitely keep you hooked!) Social media really allows it to be much more pervasive.
Annecdotally, Cable news seems to work just as effectively at confirming prior biases as social media among my relatives who don't have computers / smartphones, maybe even more effectively. I'm skeptical that the algorithms are so much better than people self sorting between news networks that it's a difference of kind rather than degree, and I think we give "the algorithms" way too much credit in general
Was this an internet age thing? I mean 24hour news networks found out long before social media took off that they can eat a bigger piece of the pie and not spend money working on news by running opinion hacks. Just decide which echo chamber you want to pander to and then fill up your schedule with pundits. Their market share went up, their costs went down and no matter what happens or doesn't happen each day, they have a group of people that want to tune in. People like to hear their world view reaffirmed.
Silicon valley just optimized it and turned it in to a science.
I'm sure various social scientists and historians could link it other issues. Advertising and selling goods in and of itself doesn't really explain how people just fall in to utter bullshit beliefs, does it?
The internet is a little different as on tv they cant follow you from channel to channel recommending things for you to watch. Tv shows cost a good deal of money to produce so the range of offerings is limited. On the internet, algorithms track your every click even to the point of noticing that you paused on a headline but did not click it. They are able to build a profile on you that is likely more accurate than anything ever created before including your understanding of yourself. With this profile they also have an almost unlimited supply of videos, articles and social media posts to send your way that your profile says you will likely click on. Each time you click on something their profile is updated and improved. They are able to create a steady stream of offered media that cannot help but reinforce your views on the world as you are quite often not presented with much of an alternative. If you are not a technical person and you are only presented with news that supports your political ideology you may very well think that everyone else is getting the same feed. This would make them think that if you are getting the same news as them and still hold a different viewpoint then you are being willfully ignorant and choosing to be malicious. See the rise of the "liberalism is a disease" meme. For example if all the news you see says Biden is senile and a terrible person, why would you not believe it? In the same way in which someone on the left was presented with a very negative feed of Justice Brett Kavanaugh during his nomination process. A good example of how powerful the ML algorithms are now is NBA player Kyrie Irving and his trip down the youtube rabbit hole that convinced him the earth was flat. He also holds Anti-Vax ideas, which were most likely influenced by his internet browsing habits.
> Twitter and other social media are probably the biggest problem of our time.
No, social media is not the root problem - it showed us who we really are.
> The worst bit is that social media is becoming the primary source of news for most people today. The results have been nothing short of catastrophic.
There is good news - people are figuring out the effects of social media. Your post is one example - you see there are issues, you have "woken up." The "Social Dilemma" on netflix is another example, that deprogrammed a lot of people. Frances Haugen's testimony to congress, another. Slowly and surely, people will build "immunity" to "mind viruses." Humans fought this battle and won [1], but the war will go on as long as humans and media coexist.
The real problem here is people, not the platforms or the products. How do I know this? Because the problems have existed far longer than any of the platforms.
Maybe people here are too young to remember how toxic, argumentative, irrational and judgmental everything else was that came previously: forums, mailing lists, Usenet, you name it.
Sure products can influence user behaviour but they can't totally change it. And if none of them (as you assert) "improve accuracy, increase thoughtfulness, paint nuance" ask yourself why: is it because all the platform providers are wrong? Or simply that's what users want?
Personally I've never liked Twitter. Of all the platforms I find it dominated by people who like the sounds of their own voices. I've described it as a "write only" platform. Even calling it "social media" seems like a stretch as there are no relationships, just people you follow and a news feed.
If humans are inherently violent, why hand them free guns? If they're inherently greedy, why hand them free credit cards? If humans are inherently toxic and disingenuous and biased, why hand them the free reach to thousands of gullible minds?
I'm in agreement humans are flawed, but why should we allow billionaires, who mostly want power and wealth, to decide how to referee our public discourse?
To me, these companies are run by humans and used by humans, so like drinking and driving, speed limits, personal safety, and all other kinds of laws: we need guardrails against bad actions.
We need some rudimentary policing, for as Hamilton stated: "if men were angels, no government would be necessary"
I'm sure people were saying the same things about the printing press as people are saying about social media. People were printing pamphlets in the 1800s that were just as crazy as any of the misinformation we see online today.
I have been on a lot of forums where it was generally amicable, informative, and unarguably valuable. Sure, there was toxicity but was usually just enough to be comic relief and could be ignored. However, a lot of dumbshits were still carrying around flip phones and did little else than play hunting or monster truck games on a PC. Now they have a frictionless platform from where they can interject thier wisdom into just about any forum without having anything invested.
I wonder how much your mind would have to distort reality for you to believe you're providing the world with a good service when you're at the helm of Twitter or Facebook.
There's a fair amount of motivation to find a reason to believe it's a "the good out weighs the bad" situation. For starters they're making incredible amounts of money and then there's the desire to not think you're doing something bad.
You just need to respect human agency instead of thinking you inherently know better than the world how to use it. It is a sentiment which is very out of current zeitgeist with its "boy who cried dystopia" bent.
I expect it's quite easy; you believe that you're connecting people and that this is a good thing, and then you ignore the undesirable second-order effects of how you're doing it.
Is the is very different to what newspapers were when they first appeared?
Of course they never achieved the same technological pace. Also, nowadays, when you think of newspapers, you think mostly of quality publications, writing considered, contextualised pieces.
But even nowadays, there are plenty of crappy tabloids chasing ad revenue (clicks?), with no regard for information and only about the shock factor. And in the past it was much worse, since the whole cesspit of attention-grabbing was contained in newspapers and pamphlets.
While I agree printed media is biased and is a medium for propaganda, it's hard to argue it's comparable in scale or effectiveness to social media.
1) in the Renaissance, literacy was much lower, books were scarce and expensive, and writing was often made in Latin, like the original bibles and Newton's Principia Mathematica. Therefore, print had MUCH less reach than social media.
2) the attentional cost of a book is vastly greater than a tweet. Tweets are designed to be simple and read in seconds; books are often complex and take weeks to digest.
3) due to 2, I feel Twitter's discourse evolves and devolves much, much faster into extremism and bullying and bad behaviors. It takes a long time for book disses to reach their target, not so for Twitter.
I could go on, but suffice to say, social media is an exponential notch above printed media in it's potential misuse and damage to society.
A lot of printed media was released in poorly bound booklets, without covers, it was roughly equivalent to a tweet or blog post today. The good ones got reprinted and/or compiled into an anthology, the bad ones were simply lost to time as kindling for the hearth.
Not as fast as a tweet, but low cost, sub-book media has existed as long as the printing press was around. The classic books we study today are the equivalent of the criterion collection dvd sets.
> Also, nowadays, when you think of newspapers, you think mostly of quality publications, writing considered, contextualised pieces.
This is a very unique perspective. It's one I don't share, and neither do the majority of Americans[1]. The economic and cultural forces shaping journalism make it so that it's vanishingly rare to find pieces that meet (my personal bar for) "considered, contextualized pieces". It's been a decade since the world of blogs/independent publishing has been an infinitely better source for that type of writing than traditional media has.
Naturally, independent publishing is also where you go to find the absolute worst of analysis and reporting, to a degree that traditional media would never stoop to. The core problem is that of discovery, finding the subset of high-quality sources in the acres of chaff that is the modern news environment.
It turns out that aggregators like Twitter are amazing for this, for those with the mental maturity and cognitive ability to use them with discipline. It's not very difficult to start with a trusted core of intellectually honest follows, then iteratively (and hyper-selectively) add high-quality accounts/author that you find through your existing follows. You have to be okay with a sparse feed to start, and you have to be disciplined enough to recognize perspectives that are high-quality even if you disagree with them, but it's an extremely straightforward path towards a much better media diet than the vast majority of people.
Note that this process doesn't disadvantage traditional media; it just fails to give it an undue advantage. Traditional publications and individual journalists within them can be treated like a source like any other, that can be compared to In practice, this is nominal only: in my experience, the incentives of the industry are such that 99% of them fall massively short of the basic quality and intellectual honesty bar. (Seriously, try it: start checking the sources and reading the papers cited by every article you read from eg the NYT and see how long you maintain confidence in modeling them as basically intelligent people telling you what's basically the truth).
Yeah, feeling of novelty causes a dopamine spike, but shortly afterwards the level is back and we feel like they need more new stuff. Mindless purposeless scrolling may last hours and hours. Twitter is bad, but Tik Tok is the worst. Remove all this stuff from your phone and read HN instead. Here you at least should focus on sophisticated comments like yours!
TikTok is terrifying. It is designed to be nicotine for your attention span, achieving engagement at any cost. Now they've added keyboard shortcuts.
The effects of social media on our collective attention span legitimately scare me. Our attention spans are shrinking with each generation, and the effect has gone parabolic in the last 15 years. Look at old movies, and notice the longer length of cuts compared to movies today. Now look at the infinite feed on TikTok.
What happens when the minority of the population that actually does their civic duty of informed voting can no longer pay attention to important issues?
What happens when people can't think about any topic beyond a sound bite or meme?
What happens when no one has more than 1000ms of patience to question whether they're looking at a deepfake?
Climate change? Holding politicians accountable for corruption or abuses of power?
I think we need to take a good look at where we're headed.
OF COURSE it's more complex than this, the human's brain is a very sophisticated machine. But I just read a couple of "brain for dummies" books[1][2], so my knowledge is pretty limited.
[1] - "Behave" by Sapolsky
[2] - The Willpower Instinct
From that I recall they explain that the reward system responds to feeling of novelty because it's good for survival, f.e. you can find food or water source in a new location or maybe notice a hostile animals there. So, it's a behaviour caused by evolution. Twitter, Facebook, etc. just exploited it. And they admitted it:
Have you read Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent, Public Opinion by Walter Lippman, or Propaganda by Edward Bernays? If so, I don't think you would come to the conclusion that the media landscape prior to social media was bastion of truth and honesty.
Yeah, I cannot imagine how someone would say social media is the "biggest problem of our time" unless they were ignorant to the work you cited, and many other fundamental issues (profit motive turning the planet into a convection oven, for one).
Yes. While that situation was bad, it was not nearly as bad as the completely out of control results we get from social media.
I actually think there is a great opportunity here to fix this problem as SM has made it painfully obvious and visible to everyone, while also democratizing the entire process. (Democratizing manipulation and outrage isn't necessarily the best thing in the world though, but we can at least start thinking what causes it and what can be done to improve things)
For what its worth, its highly likely that this comment had artificial negative points added in the background for its sorting, after which it stopped its super quick gain in points (156 in 1-2 hours) and suddenly dropped to page two.
I wonder what the mods found objectionable. Its a general news event, so this kind of commentary seems relevant. Social media CEOs are facing this problem everywhere and they seem unable (or unwilling?) to fight it.
> By providing simple rules of information flow: small amount of content, retweet, followers) and rewards (likes), they've created the most efficient engines for finding and spreading novelty at the expense of everything else.
Those are indeed elementary factors, but I think that Twitter's effectiveness stems from how it enables tribal thinking and actively nourishes it with its algorithmic ranking.
It's one gigantic outrage machine, and few things are as addictive as outrage.
Interesting take. I do think that social media is driving the selection of increasingly unfit political candidates worldwide, which is a big problem. In an environment where the objective is to share things that get the most “WTF” comments from those with whom you disagree and the most applause from those with whom you do agree, only the most extreme and/or inept candidates wind up getting attention and the resulting votes.
Isn't it how media in general work? Only difference is that almost anyone can publish and you don't have to wait for it to print and reach stores, subscribers...
E.g. when the press publish something false you may get correction few issues later somewhere in small print, whereas on Twitter you actually can get a chance of seeing rebuttal in the thread. Most people only read headlines regardless of the medium.
But as CTO, the new CEO seems to have focused on increasing engagement and growing audiences. Unless that changes, expect the problem you describe to get bigger.
What's worse, is it has ushered in a Technocracy, where unelected corporate interests now decide which political views are "misinformation" and, for example, may threaten "election integrity", which drugs doctors should prescribe, etc.
To be fair I think it’s more unofficial capture by those in power. There is a gun at this point at Facebook and Twitters head by super powerful people (including journalists) to get them to comply or else…
I think Silicon Valley made a major misjudgement thinking geeks with products with billions of people won’t be taken over by politicians with decades of power game experience. It’s not even a fair game. These are literally the biggest power players in the world, Zuckerberg and Dorsey didn’t stand a chance.
No, gullible people, misinformation, polarisation has been there before social media. But in the old days, classic media used to keep a lid on it by mediating which positions could be heard publicly. We haven't learned yet as a society to ignore the unimportant noise.
I believe that free publishing, or many-to-many media, is crucial for the future of our society. If anything, it is still not easy enought to get ideas out there and discussed (unless you have enough reach).
To phrase it a bit provocatively, I believe radical democracy is a good thing, even if many of the plebs are stupid.
You do realize that there is a pandemic ongoing, right? While not good the moral panic about social media is downright absurd and lacks any sense of proportion.
If feed-generating algorithms were dispassionate - amplifying liked content rather than massaging feeds for advertising and other behavior manipulation - then your assessment of the results as "brain viruses" might be more accurate. And the world might actually benefit from them.
The thing is, the "natural selection" of this network is decided by people on average spending 5 seconds of thought before getting outraged/scared/intrigued etc (also, whatever is that emotion that says "look world, I found something really clever that y'all have missed!") and clicking retweet. I find that incredibly unlikely to yield any great content whatsoever.
It's a clever trick. Short tweets with pictures skip the rational thinking part of the brain, for those tweets don't have anything to think about, and go straight to the emotional animalistic part of the brain. So twitter turns into a sort of colossus stadium where millions of apes screaming at each other. Usually, the stadium splits into a few big chunks where apes chant the same meme.
I believe that the feeds are far more manipulated than this. Facebook got caught once intentionally manipulating feeds to attempt to produce negative mental states. Do you honestly think they just completely stopped? I think it's plausible that it's happening on a much larger scale than it was then.
There are some fantastic fringe right-wing communities I’m going to miss tremendously after the new CEO inevitably starts purging the ”unconventional” content
He is a CEO and is replacing the first person to hold the Republican president accountable after Jan 6. I think that impacts his decision making, working the refs works dude.
I think neither he nor Tim Cook are stooges for Republicans but they are scared to look anti-Republican. Serious question, do you think the new CEO is going to be more bold in the face of right-wing criticism than your average CEO?
I knew we're not talking about Apple but their last liberal-seeming act was speaking out against a bathroom bill that is clearly unconstitutional; but the backlash shut them up.
I really liked the "Hi mom!" at the end of the letter. To be one of the co-founders and CEO of global tech co, and to say "Hi mom!" at the end of the your publicly shared resignation letter is such a big flex.
I understand his mom must already have been very proud of him, but this hit different.
> you're not going to be able to give the focus a solo CEO is
How the fuck does Elon do it then? The mf has like four concurrent organizations under his helm.
> I think the bigger issue is who gets to replace him: will it be someone with smart ideas or someone to serve as a puppet of activist investors?
The rising stock price implies yes. Elliot MG has been desperate to make twitter the next mega app. Expect payment options, return of VIne as a tiktok clone, etc
Engagement is key, afterall. Good bye to text, I guess.
As for Neuralink and The Boring Company…well, I am typing this, not using my brain-machine interface, and my friend took the Blue Line from O’Hare this morning, and not some underground supertrain.
>As for Neuralink and The Boring Company…well, I am typing this, not using my brain-machine interface, and my friend took the Blue Line from O’Hare this morning, and not some underground supertrain.
I'm not sure what point you intended to get across with this take. I don't own any Lenovo products, is Lenovo defunct?
Edit: Yikes. My analogy isn't perfect, sorry folks.
Exactly. Lenovo has viable and desirable products that you could purchase if you were so inclined. That's not the case for Boring and Neuralink.
Boring makes a D-grade tourist attraction and offers no viable solution to the problem they claim to be solving.
Neuralink's biggest success has been in bringing attention to the field, but has made no actual progress of its own.
And that's not to say they won't bring viable products/solutions some day, but it's clear where Musk shines (e.g. bringing in money, hype, PR) and where he's atrocious (e.g. executing, planning, people). Shotwell is a fantastic example of a CEO using Musk where he shines, and keeping him away from where he's bad. What Tesla, Boring, and Neuralink all need are their own respective Shotwells.
Only one of Elon's companies is public and there are regular calls for him to be removed, but its stock price has been on a trajectory that makes that impossible without him "canceling himself". Elon is just very good at hiring exceptionally good people to run stuff for him with a small amount of oversight and steering.
Jack is CEO of two public companies and one is arguably underperforming, that's an untenable situation.
Exactly. If your responsibilities are limited to calling some shots and coming up with some wild ideas here and there, and having the money to make it happen, you don't need to focus on things as much.
Anyway the guy's a wreck and wrecking ball, I wouldn't be surprised if he disappears or takes a step back for a while soonish. Tesla's stonks will crash, etc.
He's gonna run his body into the ground before he even thinks about leaving SpaceX for anything else. It is his life's mission, that much is obvious to those who have seen enough candid interviews. He doesn't talk about anything else with the same level of importance.
Same reason SpaceX won't go public if he can help it (and why Starlink is critical for a revenue stream). He needs to maintain complete control in order to put people on Mars.
Absolutely. I have no expectation of SpaceX going public this decade at the very least. Especially once Starship will start generating revenue, SpaceX may not need outside investment for a long time.
Twitter is 3x in 5 years, while S&P 500 is 2x in 5 years...It's not awesome, but I wouldn't call it underperforming...it's the same growth as Facebook.
Elon was kept only because he didn't give away founder control. At the end outside MBAs always try to take over and destroy the companies.
Well that's a major cherry-pick. How about we use a neutral start point such as TWTR IPO date? Since Nov. 8, 2013, TWTR is up 16.8% and has paid 0 dividends. Meanwhile, SPX is up 162% since then, plus it has paid a dividend of an additional 1.5 - 2.5% per year during that time. And QQQ is up a whopping 381% in that time. Twitter has been one of the worst performers in the Nasdaq 100 over the last 8 years.
Sorry, It wasn't cherry picking, my main criteria was that this was the largest exact date range that I could set in Google finance, that's why I usually look at 5 year horizon:)
Not really :). 5 years is a pretty arbitrary, flattering timeline. Twitter is +18% all time growth. Facebook doubled a billion to 2B then to 3B users. In the same time span Twitter plateaud their user growth. Love the product, but the company is horrific in building things.
The 3x growth is only because they finally figured out monetization 7-8 years post ipo and rode the rising Ad wave that lifted all CPMs across Snapchat and TradeDesk.
Overall, pretty subpar stock and pretty grim outlook.
What's your evidence that Twitter's market is significantly larger?
Non-tech people sometimes ask me whether they should get on Twitter. I ask them why they might want it, and very often my answer is, "No, don't worry about it." And that's coming from somebody who uses Twitter enough to have two separate accounts plus a Twitter bot (sfships).
Twitter, like HN, is a niche social network. [1] Twitter's niche is much larger, of course. But I don't think it makes much sense to compare it to FB, whose target market is "anybody with friends or relatives".
[1] Technically, I'd call it a multi-niche network, in that it gets the most publicly active segment of people in a whole bunch of social groups. For example, tech people is has are the sort most likely to write books and articles, speak at/go to conferences, etc. But if you're the sort of workaday programmer who punches a clock at a bank and pays no attention to the industry, Twitter doesn't do much for you.
You’re slightly missing my point. I’m not claiming twitter’s niche is bigger. I’m saying for a social network to plateau at 300M users for 7-8 years that’s very embarrassing. Especially when the positioning was that “we’re a Facebook alternative.” For a social network to figure out tablestakes monetization 7-8 years post-ipo, that’s equally damning. The biggest offender is actually the glacial product development that Twitter has. Several Rudimentary features non-existent or canned because of analysis paralysis.
I’ll actually challenge you on the niche point. Twitter is niche because they completely failed to elevate the product experience to the masses. Mark was able to bring Facebook beyond a college network, Spiegel built snap beyond teens and texting, but Twitter continually fails for the average mom and pop. Every single piece of user research and UX audit finds Twitter to be very confusing for new users.
So Twitter being niche isn’t a victory. It’s an admission of defeat a la segways
I agree with you that Twitter's feature velocity has been terrible. Although in the last year or so they've definitely been trying more new things, so maybe they've finally fixed the internal barriers to that.
But I'm not getting what you think "Twitter for the masses" should be. The current value prop is something like, "globe-spanning discussion around hot topics". Fewer people care about that than "keep in contact with family and friends" or "look at pretty pictures". I don't see a mom-and-pop version of Twitter in the same way that I don't see a mom-and-pop version of the WSJ or the NYT. The mom-and-pop version of the NYT is perhaps USA Today, but that's not an expanded product, just a different one.
Yep! I think they’ve slowly learned to ship over the last 1.5 years.
Gotcha, honestly what I meant by mom-and-pop, I was thinking of growing Twitter just beyond the power user. Similar to you, I don’t believe twitter’s addressable market is as big as Facebook’s. If Facebook’s TAM is N, twitter’s is n where n<N. My main issue with them is that they’re actually 3/5ths of that n. I genuinely think they have an opportunity to make the product more accessible but they really have been not good :(. And I say this as a big Twitter fan!
Twitter is a great idea ruined by terrible UI. It's clear that people do want to listen to what famous people have to say, and they want to hear it directly from the person, not a PR team.
If only the UI let you do things like follow a thread, set up proper notifications, and made at least some attempt at filtering out the spammer/scam replies.
Those all strike me as very much advanced-user features, so as much as I'd enjoy using some of them, I doubt they'd make much difference to general-audience growth.
And I think you're being unfair about the spam/scam replies. Twitter has made great improvement there in terms of downranking/hiding junk replies. It'll never be perfect, but it's at the very least much better than it was. I have to go a long way down in most threads I look at to see that stuff if it appears at all.
While I agree that Musk’s hockey stick stocks mean removing him would piss of the people who could remove him, removing Dorsey because twitter isn’t a great stock seems weird. Stock matters for fundraising and for compensation, and as long as that stuff is working, the rest of the stock considerations should be secondary. Obviously they aren’t secondary to investors and investors have disproportionate power, but it still seems stupid.
You’re right! But honestly, Twitter is one of the worst product companies I have ever seen. In the second commenter, I’ve replied with some examples of how they completely fudged it up.
My favorite example is when Twitter said “hey guys, growing users is hard. You know what our North Star from now on is? Monetizable Daily Active Users”
Imagine a social network deciding it’s entire North Star is ad dollars. Pretty damning.
Seems to me that everything good about the product was present pre-IPO and it has only gotten worse over the years. I still use it but I find the interface/functionality strictly less pleasant with each design change.
You’re exactly on the money. Anecdotally and even talking to ex-Twitter folks, for some reason they entered a glacial period where there really wasn’t any backbone or product authority to ship or improve. I’ll give them credit that in the last 1.5 years they’re getting better, but below average is not good enough. I think Twitter can do more. I’m just not sure there’s a product leader outside of Facebook or Google who can handle that mandate
I’m really not pro-Facebook. And my slamming Twitter is because they genuinely are bad at building and improving consumer experiences. It’s always fascinating how Jack can have an innovative product org like Square and oversee a bumbling morass like Twitter. So interesting!
And FB isn't bumbling? I have a much better experience on Twitter and far less intrusive targeting of ads/following you across the web - which is where FBs monetization happens.
The growth discrepancy has a lot to do with FBs innovation on the tracking component of things - advertising is what drives profit for these companies.
Facebook grew not because of Ad Dollars. It grew because it built an all-star product experience for consumers. It’s easy now to look at Facebook and think of its as Fait Accompli. But when Facebook came about, they arrived in the second renaissance of social networking. You had so many competitors right from incumbents like MySpace and right to upstarts like Friendster, Friednfeed. Literally then no one could predict who would win.
Facebook’s relentless product building made big enough to earn the problems of scale. Remember, when Facebook IPO’d it literally had a blip of ads business.
Both things can be true. But what I’m saying is, Facebook absolutely lights out built an incredible product experience and moat.
Now, they’re finally dealing with problems of scale. Which honestly aren’t due to bumbling per se, but really just come with the territory. Twitter haven’t even gotten their cowboy pants on
> At the end outside MBAs always try to take over and destroy the companies.
Hyperbole. De-risk companies is the right word, MBAs unlike wide eyed founders understand that odds are against companies and survival is the priority.
They understand that a company like Yahoo! which in 20 years produced lots of value for shareholders, customers, users and employed so many people...that's a happy story.
People on HN see Yahoo! and think "failure", that's the same as saying Derrick Rose is a failure for not being Lebron, well if that's the case where's your 100M net worth for playing basketball?
> At the end outside MBAs always try to take over and destroy the companies.
Yup. Many once great companies, for one reason or the other, believes they have to at some point bring these people in. Who then of course bring more in, who bring more in, etc. And the people that built the company from nothing to something huge are slowly runout and all the leaders from engineer and technology backgrounds are replaced by the "business people". And the culture dies as the company becomes one of abstract "deals" and "efficiencies" and growth stops and it is sold off.
Longer term, TWTR has not performed well. I got into both FB and TWTR shortly after their IPOs. In 8 years, TWTR bas gone no where, while FB is up 600%. They're not even in the same category.
Every company he starts/runs is to enable viable Mars civilization. SpaceX = get us there. Tesla = cash cow for SpaceX + Mars ground transportation. SolarCity = energy infra for a Mars colony. Boring = radiation protection for Mars habitats. Neuralink = moonshot cash cow, advancement of neural medicine for Mars colony.
Trying to advance/safeguard humanity is the most funsies thing one can do.
If you definition of "X is for Mars" is so broad as to include "brain-computer interfaces just like on Earth, but done on Mars" then yeah I suppose pretty much everything is done in the service of Mars. For example, Google is working on having the best search engine available to use for search on Mars. Facebook wants to build the best social network, for Mars. Etc.
The reason an advanced Neuralink could be invaluable on Mars is because all the complex machinery required for diagnosis of brain-related ailments will be prohibitively difficult to set up on a Mars colony for a good while. The brain is the least understood ogran in our body - Elon is trying to accelerate development and generate awareness in the field by giving it an honest go with his own company. A BMI like Neuralink would also be a multiplier of human effort when there is a limit to how many colonists we can ferry per unit time.
Neuralink aside, you seem to not have mentioned the other companies - I wonder what you think of my theory regarding them?
From what I see, his system seems to be about focusing on one company, one problem at a time. Neuralink and Boring are side projects. And I believe he definitely doesn't recommend running two companies at a time.
He has nothing to do with DeepMind. Maybe you're thinking of Neuralink?
I wouldn't demote them to "marketing schemes" -- he actually wants to bring these technologies to market (unlike Hyperloop) -- but they're pretty slow burn / almost hobby projects compared to SpaceX & Tesla. Both have started posting job reqs for Austin.
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I think the secret is having some really stellar #2’s. Gwynne Shotwell Does wonders for space-x giving Elon the space to focus on the non-boring next-gen stuff. Jack had the same with Sarah Friar at Square but she left for Nextdoor. He also used to have Anthony Noto doing the company building at Twitter but he left for Square? But honestly, Elon’s probably an anomaly and no one else could match that ethic and sprawl
I have never liked Twitter because for a long time I thought it was a platform that enabled people to scream crazy things into the void (I have been thinking this for the last 7-10 years).
I mean either you share links to long-form content, or source an opinion, or you are contributing nothing to a discussion.
About time. Twitter has been absolutely floundering for years under his control, since he has absolutely no idea why anyone is using the site and has just been throwing random ideas copied from others at the wall to see what sticks (nothing, so far), and cryptocurrency garbage nobody wants.
Not to sound like a Boomer, but I still genuinely don't get what Twitter is for. I actually finally created an account a year ago and most of my follows are pretty high-brow (journalists, various industry experts, some big shots in my outer circle) and I still get almost no value from it. They use twitter to post inside jokes or promos to web content that I didn't have trouble finding without twitter. Maybe 1 out of every 1000 tweets will have an unfiltered take that I can't get somewhere else.
Also, the promoted tweets are always way, way off my interests. They look like pigeon droppings on my windshield.
What Twitter used to be good for is following a particular niche of people. For example, if you start following just a handful of developers who post content you like, and follow other developers who they interact with and retweet, the idea was that you'd end up with a feed perfectly curated for your interests, made up only of people who post content that you find interesting.
Unfortunately Twitter doesn't want you to use their service this way, so they inject other (usually divisive) content into your feed in an effort to increase engagement. Because of this, I'm not really sure what Twitter is for anymore. I guess you could make the claim that it's keeping your finger on the pulse of what random people in the world are talking about at any given moment?
Twitter is the absolutely fastest way to get new information. For example the “Omicron” variant surfaced into my Twitter feed last week minutes after the first briefing by South African health authorities, when it was still known only by its numerical designation, before any news service had written it up.
The value of this is that it gives me more time to spend digging deeper into topics that matter to me. I don’t have to keep the TV on in the background all the time to maintain situational awareness. I don’t have to constantly skim basic news articles just to know what is happening.
> most of my follows are pretty high-brow (…) and I still get almost no value from it. They use twitter to post (…) promos to web content that I didn't have trouble finding without twitter.
Have you considered you’re not getting value from it because your follows are high-brow?
Instead of following big shots with their own marketing teams, follow small creators in areas that interest you (e.g. indie game developers).
Evidently the solution is to create a loginwall so that you're forced to create an account rather than being able to access the content without one. That way Twitter can provide "value".
I don't know him personally so I could certainly be mistaken, but from listening to him speak/write and based on his charitable giving I don't get the impression at all that Jack is motivated by riches. I think he is genuinely interested in Bitcoin as a tool for advancing humanity. I also don't get the impression he is interested in 'crypto'. I guess it remains to be seen though.
Even if it’s not about personal riches, I think it’s pretty clear that he’s motivated by scale of impact, which for any for-profit company would likely be strongly correlated with “riches.”
Yeah. I think apart from that he knows how painful is to work with the current payment systems given the trouble they had to go through to get credit card companies work initially with Square to give their card readers for small businesses.
I wouldn't be surprised if that's the reason why FB investigated cryptocurrencies as well, they had/have so much trouble getting payment features approved in different countries.
Twitter made me feel: some combination of violated, indignant, numb, inferior, empty, powerless, disappointed, embarassed, furious, annoyed, and infuriated.
I used to feel that way, but I aggressively moderated who I follow in a purge, and being selective about who I add as follows.
It feels like it's easier to marie-kondo people I don't care for anymore in twitter since there's little-to-no-expectation that I know anyone on twitter, and for me, anyways, twitter is a much more pleasant experience than any other social network has been.
Aggressively unfollowing people is the only way to keep Twitter useful.
I think the mistake people make is approaching Twitter follows like they would friendship links on Facebook or other platforms. You don’t have a relationship with the people you follow. Don’t hesitate to let it go.
The loudest people on Twitter are often the worst at providing actual value. They optimize for clickbait and engagement, which can trick people into thinking that the person is a good follow.
The moment you realize someone’s Tweets are not providing value or they’re always making you sad/angry/outraged, click that unfollow button. It makes a world of difference.
I agree that it's possible to curate a good Twitter experience, but it's concerning to me that Twitter is hostile by default. I'm not sure if it's trying to promulgate a specific repugnant ideology or maybe it tries to provoke everyone equally (e.g., for engagement), but in either case it seems socially harmful. And to be clear, I don't mind that it shows me a lot of content from people with whom I disagree (even forcefully), but I do mind that the content it boosts is the lowest quality argumentation (calling it "argumentation" is too generous). For example, in a recent high profile self defense case, Twitter didn't boost any legal expert analysis, but it did boost the d-list celebrities and popular journalists (and their vitriolic followers) whose views don't survive even the slightest encounter with the evidence. And to be clear, the issue isn't that it's promoting this stuff to me (I have thick skin, apparently), but that it's promoting it to everyone by default, such that it is a systemic problem.
My problem is that "person" is a broader category than I want to unfollow. There are precious few people whose posts I want to see all of. Most people I have ever followed exist somewhere on a continuum of what proportion of their tweets I want to see. It would be nice to have more positions on the knob than 100% and 0%.
What I'd really like would be to say "don't show me tweets like this from this person". Yes it's hard to figure out what "tweets like this" mean to me, but hey, you're a giant company that does nothing but show an updating page of hypertext, seems like you could throw some work toward figuring this out.
Agreed. There are a lot of people and companies that are very important in the tech world who espouse repugnant racial ideologies a few times per year as the prevalent political fashion demands. I'd like to not block half the tech world, but I'd also like to hide their sporadic, vapid, ideo-tribal signaling posts.
> seems like you could throw some work toward figuring this out.
They already have a start - they push following categories. So presumably they are categorizing individual tweets into these categories. It should be feasible to both provide finer-grain categories, and tooling to include/exclude how those intersect with those accounts one is following.
The link between categories and the tweets assigned to them is weak. I puzzled over a political tweet categorized under Science until I realized that it included the word "reaction". (Or something like that.) That's a frequent occurrence. I unfollowed categories.
Same, but I went the opposite direction and started following more people to curate my feed. I seldom unfollow anyone unless I feel any interaction with them is likely to have a high proportion of conflict or strong disagreement on values.
I considered a similar purge, but ultimately decided the variety and evolution of what I’m exposed to is better for my experience. I’ve also made several friends through Twitter (and even a short romantic relationship, which also led to me adopting a puppy who’s the light of my life!), so I’ve tended to keep a pretty open mind about the whole thing.
To sum it up: Most worthwhile twitter follows are a mini publishing house in disguise. They talk about a few things, regularly, but aren't using twitter to shoot the shit with friends.
This is the exact opposite of how twitter felt in the beginning – a massively global IRC chatroom for people to shoot the shit.
I wouldn't say that, a few of the people I follow are shooting the shit with friends. That counts as "potentially interesting shit" and that sort of long-tail content does wind up on my feed.
I agree. Every so often, I just glance at my feed and see if I can KonMari out some people. At this point I follow some decent tech feeds, a lot of art and game dev feeds and some very pleasant and funny people. I find it pretty fun to scroll through the feeds about once a day
It's a huge contrast from reddit where you can follow subreddits but most of the stuff you see is surfaced up and there's a hive mind at work. I won't even bother with FB since I deleted my account months ago
I see so many people complain about Facebook but it's probably my best behaved social network. The key for me was to unfriend any high school "friend" I haven't seen in real life for almost 30 years. Then mute my Boomer relatives who I need to remain Facebook friends with to keep the peace. The result is a feed of about 20 people I enjoy who share pictures and goings-on day to day with the occasional posting from someone outside the core group who I still enjoy interacting with.
I have a very short list, like 150 or so. I add people one or two at a time, and see how my TL responds. If it starts skewing sideways, I unfollow. I find this very successful.
What kills me are the brand accounts. Like, McDonald's: 4.3M followers. For what? Why are you purposely asking for advertising in the middle of your advertising?
I do this too. I don't block people based on their politics because I don't want to be in a bubble, but I do block people that make bad faith arguments. Unfortunately, that means I end up in a bit of a bubble because so many folks of a particular political persuasion love to make bad faith arguments.
Yeah, that's the trick to Twitter definitely. You're very much in charge of what you see there beyond the tricks you have to pull to get retweeted items out of your feed.
I really wish there were more aggressive options to do that in lists, some people have great content but retweet an insane amount of things as well and it'd be nice to be able to exclude those from a list but not universally across the whole feed like you can with block words.
I would argue that a social media platform that default to reinforcing negative emotions and one has to "aggressively moderate" to get value from is not a good social media platform.
The only issue with this is you create your own echo chamber. imo it's why conservatives feel so emboldened, recently -- they have surrounded themselves with people who agree with them making their "movement" seem larger than it actually is.
That goes both ways. The hyper progressive echo chambers are just as problematic. Echo champers are problematic in general, it doesn't matter the political leanings.
I just aggressively unfollow anyone who talks about politics, either right or left. I also unfollow anyone whose average tweet rate is > 0.5/day. Works fine for me, but I understand that would just kill the whole experience for many people.
I see a pattern where they are downvoted initially, then later return. I suspect type of people that read HN periodically are different than those that are refreshing regularly.
This is mostly an issue if you use Twitter for politics. If you use it to follow people in topics that you're interested in/hobbies, this isn't really relevant. You don't really need to worry about an echo chamber among baking pages, or DIY home guides, etc.
Honestly, life was so much more peaceful once I curated my social media apps to focus on my hobbies and remove "general news/current events" from my feed, which are largely garbage. I'll look up info about candidates when elections roll around, the rest of the year, I don't want to hear the worthless bullshit in that space.
It certainly has this reputation. But nearly 100% of the political content on my feed is respectful and thoughtful—much moreso than most political content I see here. And my follows are definitely not an echo chamber, I’d estimate that at least 1/3 of my political follows are far more conservative than I am.
I've noticed this as well. I think it has to do with people self-sorting to different parts of Twitter based on what kind of political discussion they want. The people who just want to be loudly scornful of $OUTGROUP go to the places where that happens all the time, avoiding the parts of Twitter they'd find boringly calm; and people who'd rather talk about things calmly stick to the places where that's the norm, avoiding the parts of Twitter they'd find to be content-free sound and fury. (And if you ever look at the replies to a tweet that crossed the streams, you get a glimpse of a strange other world.)
i think that goes for any of the movements today... where its the silent majority, who dont want to say anything in face of backlash of small few with big voices.
Here's a tip on how to make the best out of Twitter: unfollow anyone that makes you feel that way. Think about it, it's not Twitter per se, it's the people you follow, and that's under your control.
Until they start suggesting friends of friend's tweets. Or random trending/suggested tweets. Or you might like your friend's tweets but get fed with all of their garbage "liked" content and can't filter that out.
You can switch to the chronological timeline and it filters all of that out. The only “suggested” content is retweets and the usual ads. Historically Twitter was notorious for reverting this setting, but at least for the last year or so I haven’t had to reenable it.
> but get fed with all of their garbage "liked" content and can't filter that out.
I definitely filter those out.
About once every 6 months the tweets "liked" by people I follow pop up again, it's usually very noticable as the feeds quality turns down dramatically.
To get rid of those, I do the "..." > "I don't like this tweet" > "show fewer likes from XYZ" on 2 or 3 tweets, and they're all gone for another few months.
It's not ideal, a settings menu where you can disable those permanently would be far better, but it works.
I used to feel this way. Then I unfollowed all political/current events/venting Twitter and started following creators and retrocomputing types. It's very enjoyable now.
Twitter didn't make you feel anything, it's the people who uses twitter that made that to you.
Maybe we just should accept that we are not cognitively equipped to deal with all that comes with social media. It's just too much for our brains, and having a sane relationship with them requires an active effort to moderate who you follow.
Yes, they optimize por clicks and views, yet Twitter at least allows you total control of what are you consuming.
So if there's any social media out there that has both utility and allows control, it's Twitter.
FB it's another level of shady shit we can discuss another day.
Twitter and largely social media encourages echo chambers. I try to be a contrarian on HN but in some threads, especially around social justice and political threads, it definitely has a tendency to become one.
When 10 people are agreeing vicariously and there is a sense that any dissent is crushed, time to be the person playing devil’s advocate and challenge them. This can happen in a small context and it usually is harmless. But on Twitter, you’re going to feel the weight of the world when you go against the grain. The mob will chase after you. They’ll become more powerful as bystanders join. You will be crushed. Others will take a note and feel the chilling effect.
It is entirely possible for the experiment of putting every user in the network into a giant echo chamber with relatively low walls, no real concept of "subtopics" or "forums," and no moderation but self-moderation (which does not scale when thousands of individuals choose to spend a scant five of their seconds haranguing you)...
... can fail. As in, there's no guarantee the system so designed is good, or healthy, or net-gain valuable.
I don't get it, isn't social media is an anarchic free for all compared to traditional media publications? Newspapers were infamous for excluding other points of view especially when drumming up panic and not including "here is why that is a load of crap" letters to the editor.
HN seems to be the least echo-chamber groupthink general population around excluding a few topics where one position is particularly popular. I think this is mostly because of the high quality moderation of dang and associated cultural norms here.
Agreed it’s probably the best discussion forum. My point was that even the best has the tendency to become an echo-chamber.
It’s worth reading Christakis’s 2009 book “Connected: Surprising power of social networks”. It’s mind blowing that social networks are not regulated to some form. I don’t mean censorship but meme-acceleration and propagation of information needs to be curbed. Unfortunately it goes against engagement metrics and will never happen.
I've never written a tweet. I avoid comments too much. I do use it to follow reading lists from a few journalists, writers, academics, and artists. There are much better ways, but twitter is what everyone uses.
Comments are often terrible. You know the kind of comment where you have absolutely no idea what is being discussed or why, only that it has made someone very angry? Twitter is the land of such comments, devoid of anything other than hostility or snark (for a mile example, a gif of "double face palm, when one face palm isn't enough" kind of thing - you really have no idea that the person is responding to or what their thought are).
It's hilarious to me that people actually put up with a social network like this. Everyone in this thread is talking about how all you need to do is unfollow half of people you see tweets from, never read comments, put in a ton of work to get your feed exactly how you want it, etc.. and only then does Twitter become bearable. Yet people still defend it, even after admitting to all that.
It's like getting a 5 course meal of poison food, and defending the meal because the dessert was delicious, and "all you have to do" is not eat the rest of the meal.
If they put their objections in words, they run the risk of entering an actual discussion, which would force them to defend their view. Much easier to just post a meme or an emoticon as a sort of a dog-whistle. Can't argue with a double-facepalm!
I think Twitter can amplify what we seek (whether consciously or not). I found the complete opposite: it built tremendous confidence as I went from 0 to thousands of followers who were interested in my parenting+comedy niche.
If I had to include happiness emotions... I guess getting some of the videos made me feel valued a bit, maybe thankful now and again? Maybe feeling successful if I pwned a pleb, but these are empty thrills.
Why do political junkies keep the outrage drip going? Some combination of philosophical purpose, self-flattery, comfort amid chaos, and sometimes enlightenment.
Does an individual voter have a responsibility to know also the disgusting events of modern times or only the happy ones? Twitter seemed to overweight discuss-ting events and angry events. Maybe cuz I avoid such things on other platforms, I used twitter to stay informed on the darker side. Sure, my fault. Disregard this whole thread! Lol.
Feelings wheel, my friend. Jealous and Furious are similar, jealous is when you want someone else to not have something, and furious is when they come for your stuff. Infuriated and annoyed are linked, and infuriated is when you get so annoyed you start yelling back. I'm trying to make all the emotional categories more distinct in my philosphy, recently posted a video as such https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfZwxLUrlrk
Interesting! I don't really relate to those definitions - furious and jealous don't seem similar to me, nor do infuriated and annoyed seem particularly similar - but thanks for the explanation.
Most of the time people say they're curious on the internet, they're actually feeling dismissive, but just need more ammo to be able to dismiss the person. Which makes it skepticism, not curiosity.
I was both curious and skeptical about this. I appreciated the explanation which successfully sated my curiosity, though I remain skeptical. But I also have a new interesting thing to consider, to compare and contrast my thinking against. Moving forward I'll be wondering whether any fury I feel is more akin to jealousy or annoyance and that will be a new and interesting lens to look at things through.
I really was curious! But that isn't mutually exclusive with skepticism.
Sounds good. I'm still dialing in the categories. The goal is to have a complete list of all the distinct emotions a person can have, with simple definitions and (for lack of a better word) distinctions.
Every event in a life should be able to be categorized into the categories, without unused categories, in a way that feels satisfyingly granular.
I think "furious", the more I think of it, is an anger regarding lack (ie if someone's house gets vandalized and the feel a loss in property value).
Curiosity could culminate with inquisitiveness, which functionally feels like adopting new beliefs. Skepticism can culminate with dismissiveness. So as long as you're open to the possibility that your mind could be changed, it counts as curiosity, I suppose.
Maybe they should put a product guy as head or a UI/UX expert who can solve the weird threads issues which occur due to the chronological nature of Twitter. Seems like a quick fix to make Twitters appeal more broader.
I personally think Jack is grossly out of touch with reality. Even when it comes to crypto, he refuses to support anything outside of BTC. Twitter is still the best medium for real-time news and information dissemination. Hopefully they can keep that going.
I always liked Dorsey after he went on JRE. I really don’t like the way they kicked the president off Twitter but Jack seemed to have honest intentions and I was willing to give him a pass. He created a monster and he was doing his best to point it in the interest of hard principles rather than business or political interests, or at least, that’s what he said. Unfortunately so much of the coastal intelligencia and Obama-era political class have been allowed to usurp so much power in tech, especially in social media. They’re calling the shots, to the point where Dorsey wanted to do better and couldn’t win. Them’s the brakes.
I predict Twitter will die a death of irrelevancy sooner than we think, given that Dorsey was fighting and failed. Nobody is interested in playing in the Twitter Commons Playground if it can’t stay fresh and neutral.
[1] If you have access to the Internet, that is. [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speakers%27_Corner [3] https://twitter.com/jack/status/1204766078468911106