Unlike everyone else here apparently, I find his attitude pretty positive. You all act as if you would have know what twitter would become from the beginning and you would have done better, I've been in infinitesimally smaller projects with pressures that have nothing to do with building Twitter and still I thought like I was losing control of the direction the product was going.
It’s pretty hard for even CEOs to control direction sometimes especially in big companies. A company is like a cthonic beast with many writhing tentacles that is in fact composed of thousands of cats. A black mass of cats, writhing, seeking, crawling toward anything that will increase its share price or get a cat promoted…
A CEO is just an employee, paid by the shareholders to do the job shareholders want him to do. Usually, the job is "get us rich". The CEO can do a lot of things regarding the company direction, but it has to match the shareholders goals.
Generally, if it doesn't make profit short term or long term, it is unacceptable, and here, Jack Dorsey essentially wants to kill Twitter as a company, so of course he can't do that. For the same reason I won't let the mechanic I hired to maintain my car destroy it instead just because he thinks my car is bad for the environment or something. He may be right, but it is not what I paid him for. And if I discover he actually destroyed my car, not only he won't get paid, but there are good chances I will sue him.
A CEO is not “just an employee”, even when they are not a founder. You don’t get to accept that much power and that much money and then pass off any responsibility because you have someone to answer to.
Like really, if we accept that proposition how would society function? Youd have people in charge of tens to hundreds of thousands of peoples daily lives and output who just pass the buck on any issues because they got orders? Is that in anyway functionality different from a monarchy?
That seems like an uncharitable interpretation of what the OP wrote. Obviously, employees have varying degrees of power in any given company, not just the CEO. A team lead, a director, a middle manager, and so on all have varying degrees of power within an organization (at least on paper; we can speak of influence that isn't formalized). The point the OP was making is that because CEOs are ultimately employees, the same basic relevant "rules" or expectations apply to them by virtue of their employee relationship. That doesn't automatically excuse them of any wrongdoing. All employees share some responsibility and some culpability (though this part is more complex) in a company's operations. Indeed, CEOs are generally more responsible for the company's direction than any other employee, and they must assent to what the shareholders are asking them to do.
(Also, you've unfairly maligned monarchies. Monarchies are not by their nature despotic, though they can be as can other forms of government. And if you want to make the analogy, then most companies are closer to monarchies than to democratic republics in the sense that at most companies, you don't have a say in who is CEO, for example.)
> Like really, if we accept that proposition how would society function? Youd have people in charge of tens to hundreds of thousands of peoples daily lives and output who just pass the buck on any issues because they got orders? Is that in anyway functionality different from a monarchy?
1) Exactly as it does. You're looking at it.
2) Yeah, that's pretty much how it's going. Like, half the time they pass the buck even when there's no-one "above" them and they were the originator of all the orders, and somehow that seems to work out much better for them than one might hope. Did you see that last presidency the US just had?
3) More like feudal aristocracy in general, not just a monarchy, except that the serfs get to pick which of several bad lords they'll serve, but you're on the right track.
Welcome to the first steps toward left-libertarianism.
Huh? No recognizing and being uncomfortable with this stuff is that step toward left-libertarianism. Not endorsing it. Guess I didn't make that clear enough.
I will retract my criticism. Admittedly after dealing with the Mises Caucus I got sensitive to comments on left libertarianism. Thank you for the clarification
Maybe there is something to the dual class structure where the founder retains control while financing the operation. It was always taught in business school as bad corporate governance, but empowering the founder has upside too and may even be positive in the long run.
Board members have a legal duty to act in the best interest of the shareholders (except for B-corps). If he wrote an email that said "I know it will make us less or no money, but we should turn Twitter into a decentralized protocol," and then the share price dropped, shareholders could sue him.
That's right, CEO needs to focus on those quarterly numbers. For example, Apple should never have let that phone operation cannibalize their perfectly good music player business. Total mistake to let a CEO have that much control and "vision."
This is a strawman because no one has claimed that a CEO must focus on short-term shareholder profit.
The point is that the CEO works for the owners of the company. (In a publicly traded company that's typically shareholders represented by a board.) To keep their job the CEO just needs to be able to convince the owner(s) that they're making the right decisions.
In the case of Apple, most owners (shareholders) trusted Steve Jobs' decision to cannibalize existing product lines with new ones.
In the case of Twitter, I am skeptical that the owners would have trusted Jack enough to let him transition Twitter to an open protocol without some kind of long-term monetization plan.
No it isn't. The claim is "A CEO is just an employee, paid by the shareholders to do the job shareholders want him to do." That claim lets four words, "the job chareholders want," work pretty hard. Could mean anything. Could be "run great shareholder meetings with lots of swag" or it could mean "do something that we can't imagine ourselves because otherwise we'd do it instead of investing here."
In TFA Dorsey briefly describes his vision of what to do after taking Twitter private. He is speaking to who would become the effective owners. In the car repair analogy it is as if a rental van was in a fender bender. The rental co can get it fixed with a normal bodyshop or has an option to sell it.
Down the street there is a body shop with a vision. The owner of that shop knows a lady who wants to wants to start a food van and is telling her, "I know a dinged rental van you can get at a discount and when we finish conversion it will look better than new."
When you (sarcastically?) said "That's right, CEO needs to focus on those quarterly numbers" it seemed like you were implying that this was someone's argument.
As no one is making this argument, it's rather hard to continue the discussion past that point but I will try. I agree that the CEO can actively seek out new owners that more closely match the CEO's vision, but even then they are working for the existing owners (who must agree to sell) until it is sold, at which point they will be working for the new owners.
I don't think this argument is in good faith. Generally, a CEO does need to focus on the fundamentals of a company. Answering to investors ultimately means answering to a group of individuals or who are more or less interested in the long-term outlook of a company. The stock price is a function of future cash flows (or is when the market is rational), and I find it hard to believe that people don't expect some sort of innovation/R&D investment to protect and maintain those cash flows.
> Answering to investors ultimately means answering to a group of individuals or who are more or less interested in the long-term outlook of a company.
Said no-one ever about public exchange investors. Why do you think Michael Dell had to take Dell private to restructure it? Jobs had more latitude since Apple was "90 days from bankrupcy" when he returned.
Michael Dell has the won the battle for control of the computer company that he created, after shareholders backed his $24.8bn (£15.7bn) offer to take Dell private and revive the struggling business away from the incessant pressure of Wall Street.
That is true, and underappreciated. But it is also worth noting that he tried to be CEO of two companies at once - so in a very objective way he obviously could have done more to improve twitter.
If companies, then why not clubs, teams, cities, nations, the earth? There is a certain amount of intelligence, sure, or so it seems.
Collective intelligence, or maybe a hivemind though that seems a step too far, seems like a closer description than AI. From TFA, I'm not sure I actually agree that 'we can certainly agree that companies are "artificial" in the sense that humans made them' is the fundamental aspect of what 'artificial' means in terms of AI. I would argue that artificial here means more like artifact rather than simply human-made. Companies are not embodied in any artifact, whereas I think AI will surely have to be. Companies are diffuse and reliant upon actual humans to do the thinking, even if no single human "thinks" for the company. AI will rather be intelligence that is not natural and embodied in an artifact (and probably made by humans). Or many artifacts, as there could be collective AI as well.
Anyway, interesting idea. I'll have to think more about it.
It’s not that hard. Dorsey was off being a Bitcoin evangelist and running Square (now Block) instead of focusing on Twitter. He’s a narcissist and egomaniac so of course his attitude is that this happened to him rather than the reality of this happened because of him.
I'm interpreting it otherwise because the conversation is superficial to the point of being meaningless. Akin to "hey I have an idea, why don't we make it better?" "That's a great idea, how do we make it better?" "Well let's improve some aspects" "Super interesting idea!"
So much so that knowing both of these people have seen how the sausage is made, makes me wonder if it wasn't a conversation that was entirely intended to end up on the internet.
Doesn't matter. The ideas are sound. Also, those ideas are not unusual for the people who were around during the inception of the early Internet. We all thought like that, that was the norm. We still think like that.
My initial reaction was indeed very positive ( I take open protocol over corporate-owned fiefdom any day ). Then the obvious question came why this was released and how. Is it PR campaign ( Dorsey - and Musk especially - were being hit in press a lot lately ) and this is just one way to help their image?
I don't know. I would like to hope it is more than just image clean up.
For those scared of all the links, here's a simple summary from someone who runs a server with an instance of one of these applications.
* ActivityPub is just an open, flexible protocol for sharing content
* The fediverse is a nice, human friendly way to describe all the various services using activitypub to talk back and forth to each other. The value in this is that these projects are diverse, it's not all twitter clones. You have video hosting services like peertube, the twitter-esque sites like mastodon and pleroma, open source managed file stores like nextcloud, and all of them can chat if they want to
* these services are hosted by whoever wants to host an instance, and they choose who they wish to federate with and who they don't, this optional interoperability is really the key feature for the entire network and protocol
Mastodon, as a twitter replacement is good from a user perspective (except in 300+ comment threads) , but I'd strongly recommend Pleroma at this point if you intend to run your own instance. The software of the two is similar, but Mastodon is in a constant state of chasing new, usually niche or controversial features which have led to a lot of bloat in terms of both management tooling, setup, and hardware required to run it.
Checked out a random 'featured instance', first post is an image with "DOES IT FEEL LIKE THE ENTIRE WORLD FELL APART WHEN TRUMP LEFT?" in gigantic letters.
Why do I get the feeling this is where everyone who got banned from twitter goes to hang out...
It's like leaving Reddit for Voat, you'll just end up in the midst of the worst fringe groups because they can't exist on the main platform where normal people are.
If I had to sum up Pleroma's core audiences, it's right wing anime posters, Japanese instances that are 2ch-esque and don't really leave their language bubble, privacy and selfhosting folks, terfs, people who like sharing Ukraine war footage and discussing war in general, and pornposters
If I had to sum up Mastodon's core audiences, it's twitter-hating antifascists, European techies, post tumblr fetish sites, lgbt folks, Japanese instances that are 2ch-esque and don't really leave their language bubble, and pornposters
There's a lot of more random folks sprinkled throughout both, but these are definitely the most prevalent communities you'll run into just scrolling the network feeds.
Some communities are more right wing, and others are very left. You just need to look further. Most of the people on the fediverse chose to be there for many good reasons.
> Why do I get the feeling this is where everyone who got banned from twitter goes to hang out...
we need to let go of this mindset that there are undesirables in this world. there will always be a 'stable diffusion' seeking equilibrium between the places that censor and the places that dont, and the people impacted by those rule parameters will move to the places that dont censor, which will bring non mainstream ideals. Non mainstream ideals are the essence of what solves hard problems.
Sure there are undesirables in the world wide web: neo-nazies, Q-anon, pedos & NAMBLA, Russian propaganda, spammers and carders etc. Any platform that protects the freedom of speech for fringe groups will become a haven for them and will be eventually abandoned by mainstream users.
> I believe there really are undesirables -- people who have demonstrated an inability to participate in civil society and who eventually drive away or drown out all other perspectives in a community.
and
> Sure there are undesirables in the world wide web: neo-nazies, Q-anon, pedos & NAMBLA, Russian propaganda, spammers and carders etc.
Where pre listing categories and ideas that are explicitly wrongthink, versus people able to participate in a community following guidelines and an etiquette. It's not at all funny or surprising, that each community that adopts the latter, find the list growing until it's a niche community by exclusion.
The idea that any meeting place that says it's for "free thinking" or "all ideas" is a mistake. Most communities want to stick to some niche topic and use the "open" phrasing to try to grow any participation at all.
You won't get to the point where neo-nazis demonstrate inability to participate in a civil community following guidelines and etiquette. The mere tolerance of them will drive legitimate users away, people by large DO NOT practice freedom of speech. Ignoring that reality is an ideological fantasy, you either blacklist or will be blacklisted.
Yes. Normally, I do not think it has to be explicitly said, but this time it may be necessary. Speech that is not offensive does not require protection. If I say sun is shining, people will not try to deplatform me. Offensive ( and legal ) speech might cause that to happen. This is not acceptable and not part of the promise of this nation.
<< Any platform that protects the freedom of speech for fringe groups will become a haven for them and will be eventually abandoned by mainstream users.
And this is where some universal standards are necessary. But right now it is just wild west of internal guidelines and moderator's mood ( FB level 3 violent rhetoric or whatever Orwellian language they used to describe it comes to mind ).
Parent is right. The idea of undesirables has to be let go. The public square belongs to everyone. Companies with a reach in billions can't pretend to not be a public square.
If it is a public square, then it is so because the majority of people choose to use it because of the controls and filtering and exclusion of "undesirables". If it's a company with a reach in billions that's because it provides, in its current form including filtering, a service that is valued (in attention time, if not dollars) by its users.
If one compels a Twitter to host things it has decided people don't want to see, why aren't we compelling the Kochs and Murdoch's of the world to support equally "leftist" positions? It's frankly an incoherent position that Twitter should be compelled to behave a certain way and yet Rupert can continue spouting his propaganda for literal generations unimpeded.
> If it is a public square, then it is so because the majority of people choose to use it because of the controls and filtering and exclusion of "undesirables". If it's a company with a reach in billions that's because it provides, in its current form including filtering, a service that is valued (in attention time, if not dollars) by its users.
I don't think that's the case, honestly, it's a pretty explanation, but people aren't on these platforms for that, they're on these platforms because it's where come critical mass was hit, and from that tipping point these apparati were ossified. And as they became a nucleation point for all of this, their volume grew, and with that so did the content - which is crucial if content generation on the platform respects the 1% rule. And that new content is what creates the feedback loop, which is also ostensibly directly proportional with the size viola, positive feedback loop to some arbitrary user saturation point.
For example, some Youtubers have discussed it, but relocation would be a huge investment, and quite a bit of their data would be lost because they don't have archives that run back to the inception of the channel. In much the same way reputation, clout, followers and et cetera would actually go through translation losses as someone or some company transitioned from A to B, and servicing two platforms is more difficult than one (which will likely not be lucrative). It's a huge moat.
>If one compels a Twitter...
What is the actual end of this? You're not eliminating these people, nor their opinions. You're alienating them. The best case scenario is a dialectic which ultimately causes them to question their viewpoint, not to reinforce it by arbitrarily castigating them and exiling them from the public discourse. In the case where some platform does remove them, they'll find another with less criticism - an echochamber - which, to wit, only stands to exacerbate the problem.
It seems less about some class of deplorables and more about their observers. As to their rationale, the primary motive I suspect, is profit via demographic sprawl, not some humanitarian concern. And this can be imputed to the individual as much as the corporation or institution. By my reckoning this is a hazard in and of itself because it's purely superficial and thus both misguided and misapprehended - one half of that becoming concrete realizations of naive intervention and the other setting some anti-human benchmark that doesn't actually make sense. And of course the feedback people and institutions read is from some extremely small proportion of the population so it's already set up for a form of extremity by default.
And is anybody really defending ultrawealthy individuals in such a way? I don't know anybody that really condones the idea that wealth should be able to have a hard and cheap translation into hard power as it does in this instance. And there's also the fact that Twitter is a legal fiction, whose foundation is rooted in not just the concepts of property rights outlined and enforced by the US Government, but additionally is accessed and deployed through a heavily subsidized technology that was previously publicly owned and developed with taxpayer dollars. The Kochs are private persons, period.
I believe there really are undesirables -- people who have demonstrated an inability to participate in civil society and who eventually drive away or drown out all other perspectives in a community. Given the paradox of tolerance, every community is faced with the binary choice between kicking them out or becoming nothing but them. (Like how a bar that is welcoming to Nazi patrons eventually becomes a Nazi bar.)
But if people who are engaging in good-faith discussions get banned or downvoted simply because they have different opinions or perspectives then I agree that this produces a damaging homogeneity.
Striking the right balance is critical but is also challengingly subjective, so I get why many people gravitate to extremes.
They're on a social media site, for chatting and expressing opinions - that's specifically not the paradox of tolerance. That, as Popper points out, is when speech and debate are given up in favour of violence.
When it comes to the "the utterance of intolerant philosophies" Popper suggested that "we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force". Specifically if:
"they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols"
Note that he is not simply claiming the right to suppress speech that directly results in fists or pistols. His argument was that maintaining a tolerant society requires suppressing even the "utterance of intolerant philosophies" that may give rise to that kind of violence.
Are you claiming that there is no content on any social media site used for comments and opinions that advocates for an "intolerant philosophy" of the sort that Popper recommended suppressing?
Or are you claiming that some subset of the philosophies currently being suppressed by social media sites do not rise to this level?
> and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols
That's a either a direct call to violence or it implies that violence has already been threatened or used via those weapons. Which means, as the preceding part of the the quote shows, that free speech has been eschewed in favour of violence:
> they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive,
Not to argue or listen is part of free speech i.e. freedom of conscience - I don't have to listen to you or anyone I don't wish to if I am free. But Popper uses the phrase meet us on the level, these intolerant people have chosen a different level where they will not allow certain argument to occur that is against their position.
So, when you say "utterance of intolerant philosophies" he is talking about violence or assault, and certain speech, actually threatening speech has been covered by the crime of assault for over a thousand years in English common law, which American common law has continued, and SCOTUS has provided particular exceptions to the US first amendment that line up with that (to be a threat a statement must be credible and imminent).
> Are you claiming that there is no content on any social media site used for comments and opinions that advocates for an "intolerant philosophy" of the sort that Popper recommended suppressing?
No, I'm saying that there's already a well defined level that Popper, common law, and the US constitution have all given and it's not this nebulous idea of anything that gives rise to something bad. If there are people writing credible and imminent threats of violence on social media because they don't like what's being said, that is what Popper was looking to suppress.
If a Nazi, for example, wishes to engage in argument without any such threat of violence, while arguing for National Socialism, that's fine by me, because it gives me the chance to destroy those arguments using my free speech. Those who are looking to suppress that are on the same level as Nazis and reveal their lack of confidence in their own ability to counter criticism of their position - just as a Nazi might - and hence, reach for violence.
> there's already a well defined level that Popper, common law, and the US constitution have all given
The "utterance of intolerant philosophies" does not solely refer to calls for violence or assault. As you point out yourself, that sort of speech had long been covered by the "harm principle" in common law and would have been entirely superfluous for Popper to rehash in the 1940s. In this and other writings he was clearly outlining a new class of speech and proposing a restriction on it.
> it's not this nebulous idea of anything that gives rise to something bad
That is also not what Popper described. There are clearly many things that give rise to something bad yet would not qualify as "intolerant philosophies" because their adherents are willing to conduct a rational argument and unlikely to resort to violence.
Of course people are free to reject Popper's argument and embrace the lesser constraint of the harm principle so that they can do things like debate Nazis on the internet. Personally I think there are some compelling arguments in favor of erring on the side of free speech. But we should be honest that this involves rejecting Popper's argument, not stretching it to mean whatever we want.
> Those who are looking to suppress that are on the same level as Nazis and reveal their lack of confidence in their own ability to counter criticism of their position - just as a Nazi might - and hence, reach for violence.
I do not understand this. Are you saying Twitter moderating Nazis is a form of violence?
The newest features I know of are a built in language auto translator, more fine tuned administrative controls geared towards specific members of other instances (something that's already fairly robust for both platforms), default instance wide progressive scrolling of large threads, support for editing posts.
None of these are earth shattering, but all of them are very contentious aside from maybe the admin features. In general, Mastodon aims to maintain twitter feature parity, which is why things like the translator and are added. The ActivityPub protocol also doesn't really support the idea of an edit directly, and many see it as the latest in a long list of steps of mastodon trying to own the protocol.
The progressive scroll / pagination vs load the whole thread thing is a constant front end argument within various mastodon/pleroma frontends and has been for years now. The problem is that unless you use one of the real minimal, 1337, hackerish frontends, threads with 300+ comments will send your RAM straight to frown town unless you have like 12gb to spare just for what is mostly static text.
It frustrates me that Jack seems to have genuine interest in this topic but seems to be totally averse to discussing Mastodon. It's hard to believe he's unaware of Mastodon, so we have to believe he thinks it's not the solution for some reason. But how could it not be? Why doesn't he just use his big name and significant influence to throw his weight behind Twitter's most successful open protocol competitor if he really wants this? None of it makes sense to me and I wish he would speak more plainly on the matter.
The problem is that he is trying to monetize the distribution of content. All his talk about decentralization is pointless, because he wants a system where there are gatekeepers, the only difference from Twitter (or Facebook/Google) is that in his view these gatekeepers should be baked into the protocol. It would be comical if it wasn't diabolical.
In practice you rally all of the Bitcoin HODLers who are "desperate" and on average have "decent" losses - and want Bitcoin to become popular again, and ideally for them, become mainstream.
This then incentivizes them to use only platforms and services that are integrated with Bitcoin (et al), in order to try to continue the charade that Bitcoin overall provides a net benefit, in hopes that its price, based on demand, reaches at least what they paid for it to begin with - but "hopefully 10x more!" However, it's described in part as Ponzi scheme as someone is always left holding the bag, and it will be the present moment wave who are most heavily holding the bag, who will then be more willing to rally and be a coercive group; it's like religion, or a cult, that you buy into - but where you not only have a profit motive, you're motivated to make back your losses too.
The problem is they've never actually been able to compete with non-Bitcoin platforms and services - and perhaps at its foundation due to the higher cost of using Bitcoin vs. just using the internet with encryption and other security protocol; let alone story after story showing the $ billions stolen in Bitcoin; from the beginning in Bitcoin-related startup pitch decks - you'd never see a price comparison slide for Bitcoin vs. current offerings.
This "army of HODLers" is however a potentially dangerous situation, as these are real people with voting power in democracies - and as I referenced above there was fairly early on an effort to "educate" politicians: how much the broader society be manipulated into adopting Bitcoin, simply through nudging of making it more normalized, all so the current HODLers can profit and pass the bag onto the next unsuspecting, misled laypeople? It only takes a single person with $ billions to $10s of billions to gain if this scheme continues, and who may already have $ billions of cash to spend say 50% of trying to manipulate to move it along strategically.
> He says "it can't have an advertising model" and that it shouldn't be centralised.
That does not contradict the idea that you can have gatekeepers: just make it so that the your "decentralized platform" requires payment for distribution of content and/or that it is not subject to any equivalent to "Common Carrier" rules. Sure, in theory everyone would be playing by the same rules, but in practice you'll be turning one single gatekeeper (Twitter) into many (Big Corporations, VCs, media companies, already established influencers), and everyone would presumably be paying a cut to whoever is running the distribution platform.
Sunk-cost fallacy with his indoctrination and vested interest in Bitcoin.
Jack, Twitter, having been invested in early by Union Square Ventures, Fred Wilson et al, who also invested in Coinbase, CryptoKitties, Brave Browser, etc; USV believed they need to, or saw an opportunity to, basically create the whole ecosystem infrastructure for facilitating selling shovels during the "coin" rush.
Many years ago before Fred (at AVC.com) removed the Disqus commenting system - USV sold it off, so clearly Fred no longer had a financial reason to keep utilizing it - I would near daily engage in long-form conversation in the comment section with other experienced individuals of various domains and have engaging and mostly intellectual conversation.
Fred had valued that community, stated so many times and that it was invaluable to meeting many of the entrepreneurs he'd end up investing in - and where he regularly engage with comments. As soon as however he/they/USV started drinking the Bitcoin (Ponzi-MLM-like scheme) then there were people with the countering narrative, highly intelligent regular comments, narratives that all Bitcoin fanatics would have to ignore, avoid, dismiss in order to not shatter their ungrounded, uncriticially analyzed beliefs. Around that time Fred started getting eloquently articulated backlash, he heavily stopped engaging with the comments - and obviously avoided those critical and pointing out flaws, pitfalls, or ignored realities of the narrative they were following and propagating; and helping evolve, not to mention funding a lobbyist organization to "educate" politicians about Bitcoin and crypto-"currencies."
The SEC should have immediately attempted to put a hard stop to them - albeit a challenge with its decentralized nature, but they could have limited the layperson from losing $100,000s; I personally know a few relatively unsophisticated and unknowledgeable, gambling type people who lost large sums - and many who lost a few thousand; most I predict don't announce their losses publicly. Rather the SEC seems in bed with the VC-finance industrial complex, and it seems like their friends must have been set to make money not transaction fees - but also they likely were bought into the earlier or lower part of the Ponzi-MLM scheme, and so then they, as a decentralized "community" of "HODLers" could benefit and participate in essentially pump and dumps; at least "HODL" is the mantra, those making and not losing money of course weren't holding - they were selling, but depended in part on the manipulating the community to hold off from selling - so then they themselves could sell higher - but primarily for the price to artificially get higher and higher.
One young fellow I met ~7 years ago in the valley, having entered Bitcoin early, already had returns of over $40 million - to which he bought real estate with. He then used the rent money to continue buying Bitcoin during the troughs - as many people likely did - helping drive the relatively artificial-baseless price back up, making it continue to appear like there was higher demand than in reality. Rinse and repeat - sell high, buy low; transferring wealth weighted from the late adopters to the early adopters - the later adopters being left holding the bag of various weights depending on exactly when they "invested" in the scheme.
He may not be clear of Twitter enough to do something like this. I’m wondering if a public action like that coukd open him up to some legal jeopardy. Just a guess.
He also plainly stated that the thing he wants to start is a protocol, not a company, so it is hard to class it as “a competitor” in the traditional sense.
Your anti-cryptocurrency bias is blinding you to the fact that neither party to these conversations needs or wants any more money than they have presently.
When you're a multibillionaire and you're still building new shit from scratch, you build to build. Monetary gains are a side effect.
He said earlier that he wants to do it differently.
Which I totally understand, Activity pub is an absolute failure when it comes to user discovery especially when a user is using his/her own server, which is the whole point of the entire protocol.
Yes, it does. Mastodon heavily emphasizes its moderation features. Pleroma has some moderation controls but does something even more powerful with its MRF [0].
Lastly, if you want to have crypto/web3 to monetize the content distribution, there is Mitra [1], which is an AP-server being developed by ONE person and in less than a year has delivered more than the whole vapoware from Bluesky team has done since Jack announced it.
My main issue with Mastodon is that your identity is tied to whatever instance you signed up with. So if I sign up at example.social I will be bob@example.social. If the moderators ban me or the instance stops working I am losing all my tweets and followers.
Ideally you would sign up with your own domain (bob@mydomain.com) and point some dns records to whichever instance you want, this way you stay flexible and you own your identity.
It is actually very easy to move your identity along with follows and followers from one Mastodon instance to another. I did it a couple times to finally land on my own instance I have running on a Raspberry PI.
Identity is always an issue in a decentralized systems. DNS can be used but not everybody owns a domain name. Ultimately if you want to keep your identity over a federated network you have to rely on an identity provider : Government issued, centralized platform that act as Id Provider (facebook, github, google, etc). I'm not aware of decentralized provider, maybe in a blockchain, there are a lot of writings on the topic: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10848...
I’ve followed mastodon for a while but have never known anyone else who uses it so didn’t get into a particular server. All the public servers didn’t really seem interesting to me.
So this seemed like a problem for me as a loner as the people I actually knew weren’t going to join.
Twitter, for all its flaws, is dead simple to join and start yelling.
Unless you dont have a telephone, like me. You get to sign up, then inevitably after your first tweet your account is flagged for review, requiring phone to interact further.
I don't have a phone, I'm Amish, I just wanted an account to see the 4th and 5th posts in a "twitter thread" someone posted to HN and it keeps locking the screen with a signup/login modal after I scroll to the 3rd tweet in the thread.
After a while I just wonder if I'm not the target audience and move on, found nitter.net so that's neat.
You might look into what Amish life is actually like outside of movies. Most depictions in the media tend to at best be caricatures of our most conservative sects like Schwartzentruber Amish. Beachy Amish, Schwarzenau, even Mennonites have some conveniences; a computer is just a tool of my trade. Each community inside each sect will have its own Ordnung, which is just a mutual agreement on values and conduct when it comes to community. I like to joke with my English friends that we're the original neckbeards :)
For someone invested in decentralized protocols, it just sounds like people trying to reinvent the wheel. "let’s make it decentralized" "wow, very cool idea".
Those guys are business guys but they have no idea what they are talking about. They don’t know the first bit about technical decentralization, about prior art, about the politics involved.
They are so close of realizing that their companies are Frankenstein monsters they don’t control anymore. They are so close of getting the whole idea that Stallman is trying to articulate for the late 40 years. But they are locked in their business/company/VC model and can’t get out of that.
God forbid someone learns business and has produced multiple successful businesses in some of the most forward looking, technical fields. That does not immediately disqualify their ability to know technical topics and if even may signal quite the opposite. This level of elitism often among the HN crowd creates an echo chamber that stifles innovation since it arbitrarily discriminates the dissemination & mixing of ideas that aren't fully "technical". These guys understand the concepts and can communicate with each other with that shared understanding and constructs. It's wild but that's how the top people within the field may chat, simply, efficient, and pointedly.
No one is born knowing it all. People learn along the way, people change, people get greedy for a moment then have more time to relax once they've arrived to a comfy state, then reflect and either get more greedy or have enough head space to realize what they've done and regret. Granted, Rare are those who regret and what to do better, but yes, I can give credence to such sentiment.
It’s strange that he has apparently felt this way a long time, started Twitter as a “protocol”, was at the helm of Twitter, but now that he’s a billionaire thinks it was all a mistake. He could have made what he describes or apparently believes in but at the cost of becoming a billionaire. It’s a little too convenient isn’t it? Sounds like a billionaire just wanting to be the smartest person in the room. This is a common pattern amongst all these billionaires.
I think there is evidence that Dorsey was bothered for a long time. Scott Galloway, shareholder in Twitter and public figure, has been calling him an absent CEO for 10 years. He was largely disengaged and the board had to drag him into the room to make decisions, which many times he did not do.
Bring back Costello. At least he appeared to give a shit. Dorsey seems to thrive on the image of being a tortured and begrudging de facto CEO, a genius saddled by his creation.
It's possible to be both successful and remorseful. Maybe when he says "protocol," he means "stayed with an open API" so third party clients could have stuck around.
Were there plenty of times/chances to see the writing on the wall? Sure... but I really do think when you're in that deep, the money isn't really a factor, its the "life." Twitter ran Jack more than Jack ran Twitter.
True, cheap talk from him now. I only meant to push back against the idea that "they are locked in their business/company/VC model and can’t get out of that", which is directly contradicted in the source we're discussing.
Considering Dorsey's active participation and evangelising on Bitcoin and the Lightning Network, I expect that he will be working in that direction; building a messaging protocol based on the Lighting Network that allows users to upvote with satoshis. This monetises the user engagement and makes bots less feasible, aligning user incentives.
Dorsey has been hitting at that for a while but AFAIK never delivered.
Meanwhile some guys created Nostr[0] that is so simple and functional its comical. Basically you sign a message and broadcast to one or more relays. Its not even p2p.
Keet/Holepunch[1] are based on DHT and some bittorrenty things. Basically serverless and p2p as far as I can understand. There is some scrutiny about the source code not being available but they said the project is really nascent and as soon as they clean the code they'll release it. I'd like to see that.
If you could do that effectively then what is the point of spending money to upvote?
Also look into the current state of play to earn games [1] and some NFT auction methods where people are selling their participation quite openly [2]
It’s no longer a Sybil attack if it is real people who value their moral “vote” less than the market rate of that vote. It’s just an open market encouraging wealthy participants to on-board buyable users.
The idea would be a fixed price for an upvote. Not to create a market, but for two other advantages.
It creates a cost for bots and hence a cost for massive spam campaigns. And it creates compensation to the system for processing and displaying the content.
As for people selling their vote, this occurs even without costs in the form of vote brigading, and seems pretty controllable on e.g. reddit.
The market isn’t the price of the vote, it’s the price to buy someone’s vote. That’s a race to the bottom.
Right now the cheapest option is a bot. A perfect anti-bot solution shifts this so that the cheapest option is the global poor.
Zoom out, is the problem is manipulation not bots. Bots are just the best weapon today. Does this new scheme present a sustainable solution to manipulation?
I don’t believe it does. over time, power and wealth will be more able to pay the per vote cost and raising it will disproportionately deny real peoples voice.
Looping back, this is why I asked if any of it was needed once we assume the presence of a working moderation scheme (which you credit as the protection today from vote buying).
I don’t think that works either as direct democracy results in lots of mediocre content getting massively upvoted.
I think the key is to have individual sets where each user has particular people whose upvotes and downvotes count for more and use that to filter content. This would be transparent at least to the users involved so there’s no black box algorithm.
It kind of reminds me of overlaying vectors and for any given user there would be particular vectors to overlay to rate every thing according to its value to the user.
It sounds good at first, but then the biggest issue is that a platform like this becomes really susceptible to manipulation/pushing an agenda etc.
Anonymous 'vote buying' is even worse than working with ads.
It's funny how you can take a multi-billion dollar idea, write it all out for the world to see, and it still gets ignored or ridiculed by everyone.
It's also funny how you can take two of the greatest minds in our generation and dismiss them out of hand, mostly due to your previous biases of what you think they are all about.
If email cost the sender 1 cent per email, spam could have been eliminated.
This system would do the same thing. 5 cents to post, 1 cent to comment, 1 cent to upvote. 80% of money goes to poster and commenters. 20% pays the bills. Maybe a downvote option that costs 2 cents?
Influencers make money. Users pay a small proportional amount to interact, free to read.
Decentralization is the key, just like for crypto. No one controls the content. No one censors Hunter Biden's laptop posts.
You load up with $5 and add more when you are depleted. Everything in sats or ADA, etc. It stays in your "wallet" so it can't be frozen or taken from you.
You can have a tipping and buying system as well, all built in.
Mentioning BTC/LN on HN has a way of provoking irrational group think. It’s frustrating that proposing a v2 of the ad-laden hellscape that is the current internet economic structure is so vehemently opposed. But then again most folks here are probably paid in some way, shape, or form from this status quo.
You can read the same idea, time and time again in this same website, I even have heard this exact multi-billion dollar idea from my drunk cousin who is into crypto but has no idea of the complexities of running a tech business. So like always the common wisdom is that more than the idea, what matters is the implementation.
And while I also share the negative outlook on these 2, I'm aware that they are part of the group who could get it done, as they have the business know how, the connections and the money. Yet like Trump before with his social network, I still don't think they can beat the network effect.
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.[0]
It's called the Media business model where we get the user to trade privacy for features and earn revenue on abusing privacy.
Given Apple's moves in the iOS app space and the way young people talk and behave; the next social media platform will be a low paid app that has full privacy and is non-ad revenue based and is centralized.
It will be some company that is super transparent but at the same time has figured out that one can provide paid services of value user of social media would pay for.
It might even be one of us that is reading this message that goes on to form such a social platform.
Watch this walk around Starbase with Elon and Tim Dodd, and you'll get a pretty good sense that he has an engineering brain that really understands the complexities of design, build and execute more than anything.
https://youtu.be/t705r8ICkRw
I will watch it, but is he the same the “engineering” brain that thinks his Tesla tunnels are a good idea, continually promises tech that is decades away from realization is right around the corner (like self-driving cars or a humanoid robot or a Mars mission), and got replaced as the runner of the actual engineering organization (SpaceX)?
Elon clearly overpromises - but he also over delivers. SpaceX's current capability to deliver payloads to orbit is so far ahead of anyone else (particular considering they started from scratch only 20 years ago). Even their Starlink in just a few years had leapfrogged over incumbent providers. Tesla may not have achieved all they have promised but there is no denying they are the company that is leading innovation in not only EV but even in their approach to manufacturing.
My family has had reservations for the Roadster, the Cybertruck, and we have a first-edition Model 3 & X.
Tesla has overpromised on all of our reservations, and the final product, imo, is not "overdelivering". It's honestly just barely "delivering".
>but even in their approach to manufacturing.
This is pure Tesla propaganda. Yes they have built bigger versions of existing technology (supepress, gigafactory), but they're definitely not leading innovation in car production, as evidenced by M3s still having the largest panel gaps in the industry.
Well, I am not an Elon Musk fan or hater and I don’t own any Tesla product. However, I think if your standard for him is “he hasn’t delivered yet on the two brand new proposed models of high-priced EVs that my family has reservations to buy”—I can tell you that I can’t drive 2 minutes without seeing several Teslas, I can see strings of Starlink satellites sometimes when I look into the sky, and at least a couple of times a month I can see SpaceX launches from my backyard.
Seems to me Musk may not be delivering on what you want, which I suggest is a couple of items serving a tiny elite market, but no doubt he is delivering something.
I’ll take a loose lipped dreamer that eventually delivers on most of his promises in a spectacular way over a buttoned down PR rep that consistently goes over budget, pushes delivery dates by years and drops a disappointing and outdated product at the end any day.
Admittedly, no. But, in addition to that, he has a Physics degree from UPenn and was accepted to a PhD program in MechE at Stanford, was co-founder of X.com, is Chief Engineer at SpaceX, and has some of the most respected people in their respective fields (some of whom have worked closely with him) vouch for his engineering chops (Andrej Karpathy[0], John Karmack[1], Gareth Reisman[2], an astronaut and Professor of Astronautics Practice at USC, Jim Keller[3]).
Unless you present your engineering qualifications that are of equivalent credibility as that of the aforementioned people, as well as present evidence that you've worked with him as closely with Elon Musk as some of these folks have, I'll stick with my conclusion that, yes, he's indubitably an engineer.
Is the work you do to your credit or your boss's? I fundamentally reject the argument that being financially invested in engineering projects makes him an engineer.
I'm of the opinion that engineering things is what makes someone an engineer. If you're under the impression that Musk's entire career has been in management, I'd encourage you to do some more reading.
There are many other examples that can be found by just doing a quick search.
But it seems that some individuals even refuse to do so. They would rather stick to their strong (sometimes objectively flawed) opinions. Which is totally fine. Everyone is entitled to.
It's just embarrassingly bad when they try to regurgitate it to others and continue to double down. Even when presented with irrefutable data or new information.
That’s fine you think that, but do you have anything that isn’t the same third party anecdotes that get repeated as nauseam? At least one of those is by an extremely unreliable narrator and an Elon sycophant and one of the others by another who thinks he’s knows everything as well.
I could have predicted half of those tired examples. They’re all third party anecdotes and the same ones that get passed around and regurgitated. There’s also third-party anecdotes of Elon having no idea what he’s talking about, and several first-party arguments he’s made that shows he’s a bit of a charlatan.
The most charitable interpretation is that this does nothing to disprove the perception he is simply taking credit for others engineering work. At best it is not proof he played a significant role on the engineering side of the projects he's financed. At worst, it is very much playing into the stereotype of the manager who got far too grand ideas of his talent from writing code 30 years ago.
That's because he is the brains behind a lot of innovation. If you're looking for companies which had plenty of technical talent but no one of his calibre providing a coherent and technically sound vision, there's a whole graveyard of e.g. private space companies out there, and a hospice full of ones that will inevitably end up in the ground soon.
I personally see that as his role in society, just like someone else in the companies role might be to grind 50 hours a week on making some shit telemtry service for rocket engine computers to send data too.
Some of it might be luck, some jobs are more desirable, but it's just how I see things.
I think we're arguing whether or not "greatness" exists or is more something we invent, a mental construct.
I personally think it's more of an illusion and some people are just "lucky" there job is to set a vision while others jobs seem more rudimentary...one can't exist without the other. The rich entrepreneur persona cannot exist without the minions below, and in that sense, it's an illusion to me.
It's actually why I think the conversation was ridiculous in the first place given the subject of conversation. It was a very blaze way to talk about a rather important project...more than anything, I was just having a laugh about how far out humans can get.
The most prominent is the hyperloop. The energy needed to maintain the vacuum entirely cancels out, and possibly adds some, energy savings from reduced friction. Plus the speed gained would be negligible compared to a well designed atmospheric bullet train. It adds cost, complexity, and energy usage for literally no reason
I never heard anybody claim that Hyperloop vacuum tunnels were about energy savings. Hyperloop is about replacing air travel with an alternative that could offer similar or higher speeds. If you want to go 1000+ km/h (or multiples) reducing friction is a requirement and definitely not because of energy savings but because the vehicle would heat up and/or break, and then of course the turbulence and noise.
Well maglevs are not used today exactly because of this issue - going past 600 km/h is dangerous - causes noise and turbulence affects the train too much, so it makes sense to venture in another direction, such as maglevs but in tunnels.
What's addressed in your comment? You didn't show any other alternative offering speeds like Hyperloop, in theory, could.
Not sure what you mean by your question about "which designs" - well, Hyperloop. Or do you expect me to hand you a finished project? It's just started. Even bullet trains took decades to get from proposal to project to finished.
He did none of that single-handedly though. Thousands, maybe millions of ours of man hours went into making all that happen. What spurred my original comment was that when I hear him talk, I think he does fail to acknowledge the people around him a little to conveniently. I don't care, I just don't think it's a good quality and I think longer term, it will probably lead to him having lower performing teams and people around him.
See my comment below but TL;DR I’d like to hear a bit more about “the great team” rather than Musk because I know behind that interview what hard work people are going through to make the things he is showing off happen.
This one , as someone who often reads these types of mails is just a pep talk, to tell someone they respect me more than a rich person isn’t very flattering.
Look I think you just like Elon Musk a lot. I don’t mind him either, I just know almost all of his success is built on the back of a lot of hard working individuals, which I think is pretty hidden behind a dude in XXXL T-shirts
I actually thought more about this and I am curious, why you sent that video, what goalposts are you referring too?
I'm saying that I personally believe that Musk can have a pretty large ego at times, I don't find him to be a particularly humble person. I cite the time he injected himself into the Thai Cave Rescue and then called the guy who rejected his ideas a "pedo guy"? That's the type of thing I'm talking about.
Whenever I see him interviewed I can't help think of all the smart people who help him become that successful...why are you so worried about that?
I think that thread with JD is kind of reflective of my feelings. It's a blasé way to talk about a fairly large scale project which would have pretty big large impacts for a lot of people, including shareholders and employees at the company (Twitter), and to just talk about it like you're inviting someone to the movies seemed funny to me.
It almost just feels like you had that link bookmarked and were looking for someone to send it too?
No because nearly every single complicated thing we’ve done, every problem solved has likely been done on the back of prior knowledge or technologies which were provided by others, there in lies my point.
You watch someone like Musk and you enjoy the spectacle and the idea of an engineering hero billionaire, or you realise that while he may have brilliant ideas and moments, I find he often fails to acknowledge the fact that he isn’t an island and even if he says things like, “I have a great team” I think it’s not enough because I’m generally one of those people who spends a LOT of time solving problems for other people within a team to help make complicated things happen…I wouldn’t have the time to go on TV half of the time which I why I likely know who is doing the real work.
I don't find it hilarious. It is rather sad that stupid people who know nothing about physics, end up billionaires through tech companies/innocations, while physics genius like you remain anonymous on the internet.
Can you be more specific? You're talking about a guy who was able to make a company that returned a booster 14 times back to Earth. Physicists and engineers that tried before him couldn't make it. Not even John Carmack could. How come Musk is so stupid if he's done it when others couldn't?
(yes I know he's not the engineer turning the bolts on the rocket. There's incredible value in good management and leadership, though - and for that you need to know a lot about what you're doing. )
Crazy conspiracy theories, eh? People running those companies routinely talk to one another. When it seems they act together, it's often because they actually do act together.
I have to admit this is a bit surprising from Musk. I was pretty firmly of the theory that his real motive re Twitter was basically narcissism, and I'm still not sure that's wrong. I note he's not agreeing strongly with Dorsey, with the strongest phrase being "I'd like to help if I can".
And I still think he would be better off using any money he might have spent buying Twitter on funding a handful of open source competitors instead. The most charitable reason I can think of for trying to salvage Twitter for this grand goal of fixing web communication is to keep the network effect of having everyone be there. Would that even be meaningful in a real transition to something with a totally different architecture?
>I was pretty firmly of the theory that his real motive re Twitter was basically narcissism, and I'm still not sure that's wrong.
Why is it so hard to believe that Musk genuinely believes in exactly the version of "freedom of speech" that everyone in his generation grew up with, that served as the impetus for much of the internet's creation, etc.?
Well personally I don't believe that because I watched his ted talk and it didn't seem like he had spent more than a few minutes thinking through the specifics of what his implementation of free speech would mean.
It seems like a lot of people (Rogan, the Thiel guys, Calcanis) are coming to him talking about free speech, and he kind of nods along, but I didn't really see anything that demonstrated his own passion for the topic. He seems primarily motivated by a belief that Twitter is poorly run as a business, and that it will be difficult or impossible to turn it around as a public company.
Because this viewpoint isn’t consistent with his actions; he has a long history of retaliating against anyone who criticizes him, including attacking journalists and threatening them with lawsuits as well as firing employees who raise issues within his companies.
Your comment is baffling. You ask, 'How is "retaliating against criticism" contradictory to free speech?', then spend the rest of your comment explaining why it's good to not retaliate against criticism.
Did you mean to ask and answer your own question? If that was your intent it sure wasn't clear. Do you not know what "retaliate" means, even with the context clue of threatening lawsuits against journalists? Is your first paragraph meant to be entirely causally disconnected from the rest? If so I kind of have to respect it, but it would sure help to give us some clues because that is not a conventional writing structure. What, in short, are you trying to say?
Retaliation with the intent to silence critics is acting to undermine free speech. He could, for example, welcome the criticism and respond with facts.
Which is full of honestly ridiculous examples like "he told an analyst to shut up and stop asking boneheaded questions." Or "he told his followers to edit his wikipedia page" ...?
The "best" examples are of workers are are currently in litigation.
Everything else, I see no reason why one couldn't support free speech on a social platform while also requiring beta testers to sign NDAs.
>welcome the criticism and respond with facts
Do you have examples of where/when this could have been done?
At the end of the day, I feel like a lot of this just comes from the fact that when one supports free speech, it comes with a *. It's easier to say "I support free speech" vs "I support the idea people should be able to post their opinions online without being banned (this doesn't mean anyone can post live execution videos or organize crime, etc)."
I feel like this response deliberately avoids the point I was making, in favor of kicking up confusion.
He grew up on the internet. At a time when everyone was turning their internet web pages black to protest censorship. At a time when "the internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it" was a slogan touted proudly by technologists and philosophers.
It's not Elon Musk that changed, it seems to me. It's the cultural values on the internet that have changed, and arguably not for the better - more control, more censorship, more centralization.
I don't know how much you remember about the transition from BBSes to the internet, but the heavy handed moderation of FidoNet is one of the exact reasons we all flooded into UseNet when it started to become available, and most likely a big part of why "FidoNet" is consigned to history's dustbin despite being, at one time, the most popular forum discussion system.
Because if that's his real motivation, it's more efficient to build a competitor. It would probably be even more efficient to put polish on existing competitors like Mastodon. Buying Twitter is one of the silliest possible approaches. Thus, skepticism.
It’s likely 99.9% of Twitter’s user base does not care about this issue. Would be hard to build a product that is compelling enough to overcome the extreme network effect of something that is arguably a utility.
network effects are overcome all the time. all the social networks are dying sooner or later. even facebook is panicking because they're losing the next generation and instagram is panically trying to emulate tiktok or whatever because they have _something_.
I agree that most social media networks have been cyclical, but Twitter seems to stand the test of time. Maybe not with the youngest generations, but Twitter definitely hasn’t seen the exodus that Facebook has.
Even if you require ID, the internet will always feel less personal.
This started because of anonymity, but it could very well be embedded into the culture by now. Just because we feel that 'things on the internet do not count'. That is caused by anonymity; but also obscurity of your actions; the impersonal connection; the fact that you are communicating to the entire world; the fact that your interlocutor is someone you barely know, a lot of 'bad' digital communication is the first and last time two people are talking at each-other; and the fact that a lot of communication on the internet is largely performative because it is public.
In summary, removing anonymity alone will probably not get close to fixing things.
Anonymity is a design choice of HTTP. What if there were a different protocol where the users are never anonymous. You never have to transmit ID in that case because sockets are only established between trusted end points
I don't think so at all. He's posting it here because it's one of the few places remaining on the internet free of advertising and outside bias (mostly)
Musk and his team put together a fundraising deck and were actively looking for investors. It was never vanity for Musk. The deck was pretty clear about what Musk thought Twitter could become.
It's so obvious that Musk was not really interested. The social balance was totally non-existent in this conversation. Musk's one line replies sound so generic. Seems like he wanted to keep the door open but Dorsey hadn't convinced him really yet. "I'd like to help if I can" is such a without obligation sentence. Then Jack replies with another well-designed text.
Have you listened to Elon speak? He’s not exactly gifted when it comes to conversational skills. His texts read pretty typical for someone more interested in working out details than wasting time on small talk.
What/who is Dorsey referring to when he says "Back when we had the activist come in" ? It's cute Musk thinks decentralised Twitter is a 'Super interesting idea' - come on, really? It's like two people discussing Blockchain when it first entered into the Zeitgeist a decade ago.
> Sounds like every other billionaire who once they have one foot in the grave rediscover themselves as philanthropists...
Or like most US presidents discovering the war on drugs is a scam and the military-industrial-entertainment complex is out of control only after they leave office...
I don't think that's old age. a young president could serve a single term, lose re-election and still be under 40. In their post-presidency they have the freedom of not pandering in order to be re-elected so they can speak freely. But this is independent of their age/mortality.
I did not imply anything about age. And there was no president under 42 so far, and one that finishes a term before 40 would be a stretch since 35 is the minimum age limit for being elected POTUS.
Remember, this was not intended to be public. You read this as a public statement when it's really just a leaked chat conversation. Your version might still be true, but this is not proof for it.
Is it leaked? I was under the impression this was stuff that came out in discovery for the current lawsuit. Either way, at Muck/Dorsey's level, you have to assume that anything you're just sending as a normal text on a device associated with you is something that may end up public at some point for some reason.
Which isn't to say it is a public statement, but that it's closer to an email you send your coworker on your work email. You assume that someone other than you at least can read this, and that if required, it would be made public.
Agreed. He's milked this cow for a decade and now wants to pivot in to being one of the good guys (TM), and show us cool new things about decentralized computing, by ignoring all the projects out there 10 years in.
There's an axiom in discussions here where Twitter needs saving.
Why?
In what way is it non successful?
In what way is it broken?
I mean most Twitter discussions I ever saw are disgusting or plain dumb mascarading as profound.
I don't think the medium of a public square like that is a good thing, and I would be happy to see its demise.
But it seems successful in the way it usually lead the public discourse similarly to how newspapers did. So what's exactly wrong with Twitter from that perspective? It seems very successful.
My biggest issue with Twitter is the lack of moderation, theres SO much propaganda on there. I report tweets where someone threatens someone and they are like 'oh no violation'... I reported a tweet with a video of ukraine where they showed un-blured body parts of dead people and a message praising russian soldiers for 'smashing nazis into little pieces'... and it was 'no violation' (thankfully this was removed when I reported it a second time)
And Twitter is banned in China, yet the number of accounts which have location set to China, you shouldn't even be able to select China and there should be no state run media accounts.
Hmmm, I thought musk and Dorsey want less moderation...
Anyway, the ugliness you talk about seems inherent in the medium. I don't think that's fixable, especially as it doesn't seem to hurt Twitter bottom line. Which, let's face it, is the only metric that any corporations really care about.
>My biggest issue with Twitter is the lack of moderation, theres SO much propaganda on there.
Yes and no. There's too little moderation in some areas and way too much in other areas.
If you follow conservative politics, someone can say something like "men are women are biologically different" and they'll have their account banned for a catch-all "hate speech" violation. Meanwhile, someone can say "Trump should be assassinated", and get thousands of retweets and no administrative action.
Case in point, Trump is still banned from Twitter for tweeting "go home in peace and love", yet Putin, the leader of a country we're currently in a proxy war against, still has a verified account.
Bottom line, Twitter is an irredeemable toxic cesspool full of both propaganda and massive censorship.
I think there's actually value in keeping the propaganda but maybe flagging and delisting it. Hell, I think you shouldn't be able to delete either you can maybe add an addendum or follow up for an apology or something but when bad people like Trump and Putin have an easy platform like this it's possible at some point they're going to say the "quiet part" aloud.
Like someone live streaming a crime spree. When it's easier to self incriminate maybe more justice gets met, maybe not.
It's a two edged sword. The best way I think would be use ai to basically score people based on maybe a political compass like with an x and y score then you at least can know a bit about the history and motives of someone.
Plus this would make finding bots easier because if you examine 3 month intervals and someone is top left of political compass then from to bottom right in a wild swing then back to something else it's likely they're playing multiple voices to stir up shit.
Then all your comments have a color or badge representative of your ideals. Could also score things like empathy.
That way also you could have a vote tally that's by side and a unified score.
At least then you kinda know everyone's motives or leanings so you know what to expect. Like I know how convos are going to go when I talk to my right wing family why not normalize knowing how you relate to a perfect stranger based on previous interactions they've had.
Of course this could lead to a dystopian social credit system that would be horrible..
>If you follow conservative politics, someone can say something like "men are women are biologically different" and they'll have their account banned for a catch-all "hate speech" violation.
Weird, I see phrases like this and even some laced with actual hate speech all the time in twitter.
>Bottom line, Twitter is an irredeemable toxic cesspool full of both propaganda and massive censorship.
Damn right in this, they censor the silliest things, but allow even the propaganda that conservatives are censored in twitter.
For Musk, the answer is pretty clearly that he thinks Twitter is poorly run as a business and has no respect or confidence in their management. He thinks he can change the company to make more money.
For all the VC types he's texting with, Twitter is broken because it bans people, and because (they believe) those bans are biased against conservatives. The ban (actually a suspension) of the Babylon Bee twitter account for a satirical article naming a specific individual transwoman "man of the year" seems to have been a radicalizing moment among the tech oligarchy
I didn't see a coherent claim by musk about the business side of Twitter. What are his qualms?
He shitposts all the time, he sends his masses of fan boys to pile on adversaries. These are exactly the type of things that makes Twitter a cesspool.
I guess expecting integrity and coherence from ppl who are the new royalty is anachronistic on my part.
It's all about power and influence. The rest is just show.
This seems like double-talk to me. The talk is about decentralization, but also bakes in the idea it will be done exactly to their specification. Nonsense, of course.
As Satoshi Nakamoto noted: "The nature of Bitcoin is such that once version 0.1 was released, the core design was set in stone for the rest of its lifetime."
I can imagine Dorsey wants to strive for the same thing: build a protocol in such a way that it becomes very difficult to change key aspects of the system.
The chat thread looked so farcical that I had to double check it wasn't a parody account. Is it possible the text has been edited? It just looks too scripted, especially since Jack Dorsey had shared his thoughts regarding Twitter being intended as a protocol publicly.
Completely agree, none of the facts align with what they are saying. I mean imagine having billions of dollars in your pocket and pretending you can’t start a protocol that looks like mastodon or xmpp… These guys know their records are going to be subpoenaed.
This doesn’t really strike me as private conversation. Jack was probably just telling Elon because he probably didn’t know about the protocol comments. I follow Twitter pretty closely and I didn’t know he said that.
You can see in the other Tweets posted by that account that he acknowledges that he knows Twitter has fake users prior to making a private offer. Although the fake users thing was never and is not a valid legal reason to void the contract. However, it's incredible to see that he didn't have the foresight not text about the fact that he knew this ahead of time.
You're either deliberately ignoring facts to retcon this, or have not paid much attention to this at all. The question has never been "are there bots?"; it has been "did Twitter mislead me/the public about how many?".
But he says he wants to take the company private because if they fix their bot estimates it will tank the stock price. Which implies he "knew" the bot estimates were wrong (to the extent they were, which seems dubious based on available evidence) or in other words he was not misled
This is pretty cool; the internal messaging of big tech heads. Really interesting to see the way these bigshots converse; terse, to the point, no-nonsense.
This text thread is basically entirely nonsense. They are speaking in pointlessly vague terms about "big ideas" that aren't new, novel, or interesting.
The courts can frown on deliberately choosing mediums that can’t be subpoenaed. For example Musk didn’t provide a screenshot of a Signal he sent; the recipient also received a subpoena and sent a screenshot of the text. Twitter is therefore asking for adverse inference about Musk’s discovery compliance.
But also notice all the times they ask for a phone call, which wouldn’t be recorded (other than that it happened and length). Of course the contents of that call can be asked about in deposition but people lie, misremember, don’t recall, or “don’t recall” all the time in depositions.
Surveilled doesn't come into play here. The text messages were ordered to be disclosed and the people involved complied. It doesn't matter that the conversation was encrypted, if you have a record, you have to turn it over. Using a messaging service that automatically deletes old messages might be a way to avoid it.
This is quite interesting to see because Jack has plenty of stock in twitter obviously? So it kind of shows that he doesn’t really care about profits, instead he wants to do more interesting thing, what a geek, just like all of us lol. Or the other way to see it is that he felt that twitter can’t be saved and he wants to create a new profitable thing.. who knows about how billionaires think
Billionaires care deeply about money. For the most part it’s accurate to say it’s the only thing they care about, but it’s certainly the thing they care about most.
If you care more about anything more than money you have so many opportunities to express that preference long before you get to a billion dollars that the existence of the billion dollars pretty much proves that there’s nothing above money on the list.
That doesn't seem correct to me. Using Rivian as an example, at what point did any founders become "billionaires" i.e. their stock/ownership value was at a billion? I'm guessing long before they had a working assembly line.
I think people misunderstand how little a billion dollars can be when it refers to net worth and particularly one's stock ownership.
In the US, part of litigation is something called discovery. This is when involved parties ask for and provide documents to establish facts of the case (requests can also be disputed, and deleting documents is a Problem). The communication of executives with Musk would be relevant to a civil case between Musk and a company.
Litigation isn’t something that should generally be taken lightly because things like discovery will tend to bring dirty laundry into public record unless documents are given additional requests to seal them. And even these seals can be litigated for certain interested parties to access them.
Dorsey has said in the past (tweeted even) that he wanted to turn Twitter into a federated protocol. It was 1 random message, and then never brought up again. Interesting that he's still thinking about that.
I know they are talking about new sexy distributed / federated stuff, but we actually had what they were talking about a long long time ago, and it was distributed in a very similar way - orgs, corps and just plain people used to run NNTP and IRC servers as they pleased, and cooperated with each other as they wanted.
Glad to see good ideas don't die, they just get reinvented.
Reading this conversation reminded me of something Steve Jobs once said:
"Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.
Once you learn that, you'll never be the same again"
Having money and resources, influence and respect certainly doesn't hurt either. I've known a lot of great people with great ideas but poor in resources, networks, and connections, and also lacking much respect out of small circles. They were certainly smarter than others, but they were also unable to influence much.
True - but most founders don't have any of those. I know many, many founders.
They were all broke as f*ck for years to build it, living off a spouse working ... to magically exit.
It ain't money, it's hard work eschewing the other opportunities many so quickly jump at. It's being there building long enough to have "the timing" work out for you. Or it's being so right with timing that you in essence lucked on that part of the curve out.
People don't like hearing this bc it's against their personal narrative.
2 people 1 middle income wage with kids (most I knew had young kids).... is close to scraping by. Some were on foodstamps. Meaning - it can be done by many in the U.S. - that's the take-a-way for everyone reading this.
I mean my anecdote vs. your anecdote, but every successful founder I have ever met had significant personal resources that allowed them to take almost no personal risk, and in most cases they had immense resources that gave them a significant leg up. I have never, ever seen a successful founder who was broke, unless they were a college student in which case broke is not really as useful a descriptor.
Choose your own storyline version. If you don't think you can do it because you're not rich - you're right. If you know you can do it because you are not - you're right.
I sympathize, but there is also a tendency for these "big things" that attract groups of really smart people to be the rooms of the biggest money-making ventures rather than the best-social-benefit ventures, no?
I’d agree if you replace “smart” with “competent and experienced in the domain in question” and “room” with “the place where their decisions are going to be implemented”.
Intelligence has diminishing returns. Not enough, and that is a problem, but as you get more it becomes worth less and less by itself. The most valuable commodity in our economy is productive attention. A dude with a 105 IQ who "grinds" 16 hours a day will out-compete a dude with a 130 IQ who has a million ideas and thoughts, but can't grind them to reality. Of course someone who is high in both, can become Elon Musk.
It's not intelligence. I've found too smart of people typically prophesize as an intellectual exercise rather than feeling the "I have to do something or I'm a failure so let's get building" of the lesser IQ's.
I will be honest, even if I would inherit a fortune 2x as large I would still not be able to achieve what that guy has done. Impressive regardless of any inherited ‘privilege’. Sure he is a little weird but who isn’t.
I think Elon is a shit person, and deserves tons of scrutiny, but this line of attack is not really true.
It's hard to square the idea that he inherited all that money with his life in Canada as a student, where by all accounts he was living with a lot of debt, paycheck to paycheck.
I think it's fair to say he was well off enough that he knew he had a nice fallback if he took some risk. He may not have actually been getting checks from his parents but I'm sure he had a nice inheritance coming.
What is your definition of success? What is your definition of morals?
Parent probably means something like “become a billionaire through hostile takeovers” and “interpersonal applied empathy, conscientiousness, and compassion.”
> Elon Musk was definitely privileged, but he built himself up.
Mostly he got lucky that his early crappy company got acquired by Paypal, and then he won the Paypal lottery. The Musk story is about 70% right-place-right-time, 25% great salesmanship and 5% actual engineering genius.
Keep in mind this is a guy who thinks a billion dollar explosive vacuum tube[0] is a better idea than... a train.
I think Musk is both an engineer but also a great salesman. The stupid tube is the salesman part...
A lot of people won the paypal lottery, also other lotteries...if you keep winning the lottery(paypal, starlink, tesla, spaceX) maybe it's not a lottery after all. Few have driven a handful of companies to success like he did.
That being said, it's hard to trust the guy, because you never know when it's the salesman or the engineer making the pitch. Also, I wouldn't want to work for him.
> The Musk story is about 70% right-place-right-time, 25% great salesmanship and 5% actual engineering genius
It's just so hard for me to believe this when he's had 3 successful companies. At that point he's making his own luck. I'd put the numbers at 20% luck for being able to attend expensive schools, 65% salesmanship for getting people into EVs and rockets and being a huge persona on twitter, and 15% being good at listening to the engineers he hires and getting the most out of them.
If a billion people put all their money on a single number on roulette five times in a row, we wouldn't call the three that won geniuses as a result.
Meritocracy is a myth. billionaires are no better at the awful game of trying to exploit others than the millions of others with privilege, intelligence, drive, and the willingness to do anything to anyone no matter how awful to make line go up. They're just the ones that won.
You don't have to make your own luck when you're a billionaire - everyone else will make it for you. Anything Elon musk touches is instant investor catnip and he has a cult of true believers that chase any trend he offhandedly mentions. Evidence: look what happens to any shitcoin he tweets about.
I don't get the point obsessive need for more Twitter, or the need for a protocol. Honestly I think the world needs less connectivity, with more thought going into communication
We already have the internet where anyone can go an put something up for people to see
From another Musk's conversation [1], if you ever wondered how you reach high management positions - hard work:
Musk: Please send me anyone who actually writes good software
Steve Jurvetson: Ok, no management good coders, got it.
Musk: Yes
Musk: Twitter is a software company (or should be)
Jurvetson: Yes. My son at Reddit and some other young people come to mind.
Venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson texts to recommend former Uber exec, Emil Michael, for the Twitter CEO job. When Musk says he’s looking for people who can code, Jurvetson volunteers his son.
I'm not surprised by this. Isn't it the case that most founders usually get pushed out within a matter of a few years when a company finally finds its footing in the market? It doesn't seem to be all that common to see a founder stick around unless they've done everything they can to ensure they have the controlling stake in the company they created.
I am sure Dorsey understands he can’t put the cat back in bag even if he really wanted to. Twitter is a company and a company platform whether he likes it or not. More so it’s been a company for 16yrs now, so I wouldn’t put any ounce of credence to this dialogue other than a founder ruing his mistakes. It just served to seed the idea in Musk’s brain to buy it.
Really interesting that Dorsey unironically says "governments" instead of "government" and expects us to believe that Twitter has not been aiding and abetting foreign assets after that whistleblower testimony came to light in Congress
California is a government too, separate from the federal government of the United States, and it hasn't been shy about regulating tech companies. I don't think this jump to foreign governments is substantiated.
Very interesting. I noticed that too, in part because I always remove it from the Twitter links I copy; even though I'm not entirely sure what/how it tracks, I know enough to know it's not needed to load the tweet in question.
I'm amuse to find that https://urbit.org/ is a lot more legit-looking than it used to be. Good for them.
Is it still based on 'Hoon' and 'Nock' though? Because inventing your own nonsense programming language is antithetical to a serious attempt at building something.
Mostly I am just disappointed that very-smart people don't realize that such idiosyncratic decisions require a strong defense to get other people to believe in them. It doesn't seem reasonable to say "this is our serious plan to fix the internet, and also here's our ridiculous approach, sound good?".
If it's a serious plan with seriously dubious components, it needs a real defense. "Sometimes you need to build new languages from scratch" isn't a defense -- certainly not one that is proportional to the dubiousness of the plan.
https://developers.urbit.org/reference/hoon/overview has a lot of justifications that ... don't land. They're valid reasons to _consider_ doing what they've done, but on net, I just am not even slightly convinced that it's a tradeoff that is worth it. Especially the tradeoff of "not only should we make our own weird languages, we should make them totally obtuse to read and write, just for fun'. It is clearly not the tradeoffs a person trying to make a successful project that attracts developers would make.
I suppose I have an axe to grind with apologists for this because I think it's a shame they aren't putting their efforts into something with a better chance of succeeding, since I agree with their goal but not their plan for getting there.
two white rich guys talking about a solution to a problem that doesn't exist.
dorsey should be extremely happy that twitter even took off and not lament how he is going to start a new company to fix it. if this was his principle he should have reached out to people like musk to begin with and not drive twitter to motization, etc.
I don't understand why techies keep working on these uncontrollable platforms, when they are clearly incompatible with how society works. What's the problem that they are trying to solve? "How do we change society to anarcho-communism"?
Stop making these decentralised uncontrollable platforms, they just get overtaken or shut down by authorities, because we don't live in a lawless society.
Currencies that can't be controlled, publishing platforms that can't be controlled, platforms where people can work for free. I mean, really, what's the idea here, I'm really losing my patience with these experiments.
They will never succeed anyway, because we still live in a physical world and even the most decentralised and uncontrollable platforms can just get shut down, as we have seen so many examples of.
Why not try to make something that is actually compatible with how society works?
Stop hacking for a moment and spend a little time understanding the domain.
Decentralization has never worked in human history beyond hunter gatherers.
It’s continually amazing to me that people listen to people like Musk and Dorsey as if they have a clue they know what they’re talking about. You can tell they have full confidence that they do, trapped in their bubble of fame.
Because centralization works REALLY well, right? That's why the US practices decentralized command, that's why centralized economies have been so successful. This idea that decentralization has never worked is insane.
That's always an important question to ask when we discuss new ideas. New ideas doesn't arise for no reason. There are problems and people will ignore (not negate) them to defend the status quo when discussing alternative paths. As always, the truth lies somewhere between and that's why we love HN. We're not twitter.
I didn’t say centralization works well. My point is that anything “decentralized” becomes not so or if not, doesn’t work well.
Do you have examples of something decentralized that has stayed so and was not taken over by centralization or became highly bottlenecked or continued to work well?
Capitalism is inherently decentralized. Even just currency lets you separate production and consumption in time and space, which decentralized trade. Writing, even with manual copies but certainly with the printing press, decentralized learning to great effect.
In theory. The wealth gap and inequality would say otherwise. The percentage of people who own as much as the bottom 60% is in the sub thousandths of a percentage. It’s so small I can’t remember the amount of zeros after the decimal point.
That wasn't my point. The lack of equality means that the very few make all the decisions in this "decentralized" capitalism. The decisions that control and influence capitalism are highly centralized among a comparatively small group.
It sounds like you're just saying it's a winner-takes-all system. That's not inconsistent with decentralized decisionmaking. It's a virtue vs consequentialism thing - you can either maximize the amount of decentralization produced, which often requires some centralization to defeat network effects, or you can build systems that act in decentralized ways, which commonly leads to centralization of power due to winner-takes-all effects.
Compare recently how the decentralized nature of the internet led to centralization of services.
Let's not throw out the baby with the bath water. Inequality is clearly a problem but at least way more people have basic necessities and modern conveniences than at any point in history. Capitalism isn't perfect but it is immensely more positive than anything else that has been tried.
> but at least way more people have basic necessities and modern conveniences than at any point in history
Maybe, but that's just because of the scale of our population. By the same token, more people are considered starving today than there were people even alive just around 200 years ago.
[Jack Dorsey] "I believe it must be an open source protocol, funded by a foundation of sorts that doesn't own the protocol, only advances it. A bit like what Signal has done. It can't have an advertising model. Otherwise you have surface area that governments and advertisers will try to influence and control. If it has a centralized entity behind it, it will be attacked. This isn't complicated work, it just has to be done right so it's resilient to what has happened to twitter."
[Elon Musk] "Super interesting idea"
-- Screenshot 2:
[Jack Dorsey] "I'm off the twitter board mid May and then completely out of company. I intend to do this work and fix our mistakes. Twitter started as a protocol. It should have never been a company. That was the original sin."
[Elon Musk] "I'd like to help if I am able to"
[Jack Dorsey] "I wanted to talk with you about it after I was all clear, because you care so much, get it's importance, and could def help in immeasurable ways. Back when we had the activist come in, I tried my hardest to get you on our board, and our board said no. That's about the time l decided I needed to work to leave, as hard as it was for me."
[Elon Musk] "Do you have a moment to talk?"
[Jack Dorsey] "Bout to head out to dinner but can for a minute"
-- Screenshot 3:
[Jack Dorsey] "I think the main reason is the board is just super risk averse and saw adding you as more risk, which I thought was completely stupid and backwards, but I only had one vote, and 3% of company, and no dual class shares. Hard set up. We can discuss more."
[Elon Musk] "Let's definitely discuss more"
[Elon Musk] "I think it's worth both trying to move Twitter in a better direction and doing something new that's decentralized"
[Jack Dorsey] "It's likely the best option. I just have doubts. But open"
Mastodon is worse than twitter. You need to either maintain or join a server that is often managed by tyrannical admins that are even more trigger happy on silencing individuals and even other servers. You, your post history and account identity are at the mercy of those server administrators who can basically lock you out.
IMO credentials and identity management must be self hosted mobile and preferably not dependent on server hubs.
I dont use mastodon, I use forums, but you just have to look until you find a good place and dont think you own your "avatar" or posts or anything.
I have left few forums when they started to feel wrong and I have no problem with that.
(not OP) Not really. Accounts are linked to one single instance, and if the admin of that instance decides to ban you, the other instances can’t do anything about it. It’s not one decentralized administration but a lot of smaller centralized administrations.
Why would other instances have any say over it? Like what you're describing is the purpose of decentralization. What you want is one large centralized administration that can dictate what each smaller instance can do. You're basically describing Reddit at that point.
It's like claiming IRC isn't decentralized because the mods in a channel can kick people out for spam or whatever.
> What you want is one large centralized administration that can dictate what each smaller instance can do.
Not at all. I want some administration that’s shared between instances. If you take a SQL database and split it into one instance per table, is that "decentralization"? I would rather think that decentralization is adding more nodes to the same database, such as no data is lost if a node is down.
Mastodon is like this: instead of sharing all the messages on all instances, you have multiple independant instances that may or may not mirror the messages of other instances. If one server goes down, all the content that wasn’t mirrored is lost and all the user accounts are lost.
Okay, but the end result of your decentralization is exactly what Mastodon is. Which is in order to be truly decentralized instances should have the option to opt into one or more shared administrations. But functionally that ends up being the same thing as what you complain about which is that ultimately administration and/or accounts are localized at certain administration levels. 'Instances' in Mastodon are that administration you want.
If you try and force a shared administration and say 'This is the central administration that you register on and instances share' then you no longer have a decentralized social network. You have Reddit.
> If you try and force a shared administration and say 'This is the central administration that you register on and instances share' then you no longer have a decentralized social network.
I was thinking of something based on concensus (see also how blockchains work) but I don’t know of any social network that work like this and I don’t know if it’s feasible.
If there’s no synchronization between these administrations I fail to see how this has anything to do with decentralisation. It doesn’t remove the centralization, it just reduces its scope.
It's an odd choice, I agree. It just doesn't sound like something that is going to succeed as a social media. This is 100% subjective and exclusively based on a feel.
Edit, PS: I'd be glad to be proven wrong here. It's a great project!
for starters its missing all the meta information that tells you what time they were sent, how much time between replies, what was going on in the real world with both their lives when they were messaging.
to me it looks like two guys spitballing and being open to move onto the next step... ang guess what thats all a billionaire is.
Not trying to be arch or reductive. I'm not fond of either of these men. But... haven't they pretty much demonstrated that they do the things that would be considered hubris in others?
I know both of these guys use signal.org. Such correspondence could not end up in public record unless one of them chose to make it public. Then comes the question of why they chose to make this correspondence public.
If they have disappearing messages turned off and get a subpoena they are obliged to turn over those messages.
I suspect, but I'm less sure, that if they have disappearing messages turned on but get a subpoena before the messages are actually deleted, then they are obliged to save them before they are deleted and turn them over.
"I want to to be decentralized and not open to government interference"
So what happens when it's taken over by terrorists? What happens when, much like every "right-wing alternative", it becomes filled with propaganda-addicted radicals planning and organizing real-world violence? What happens when the kiddy-diddlers fill it with CSAM?
"Ok, I want to have the ability to ban people, block content, suppress views"
More like, "tech company" has nothing to do with whether a company's product or competitive advantage lies in technology and just means "popular company" or today more like "SHR-funded company".
I'm reminded of how often I had to read about "tech companies vs. telcos", "tech companies vs. ISPs" during the net neutrality discussion, or "tech company vs. car company" for AVs, or "tech company vs. broadcaster" for streaming/advertising...
I think it’s a tech company. They employ lots of software engineers who develop a software product which is their central business. Why do you think it is not a tech company?
It’s sort of like saying Amazon is a delivery company. It’s part of a division of their company, and a main component at that. But it’s not like SREs working at AWS know or care about logistics.
I don't really understand the parallel. It's not like software engineers at Bloomberg really know or care all that much about finance. The vast majority just work on the software product that moves financial information.
uh, Bloomberg's original business was selling computer systems.
" Bloomberg developed and built his own computerized system to provide real-time market data, financial calculations and other financial analytics to Wall Street firms. "
Bloomberg itself is "the old industries", in several domains including supposed-journalism. In the parlance of starry-eyed overglorified bloggers, they're the "legacy media".
Hard to call Twitter a "tech company" considering how difficult it was for them to switch to 280 chars. What tech milestones did they hit in the past 7-8 years? Muted words?
It seems to me that once your middle management is infested with the wrong kind of non-tech people (because you couldn't resist "growing" forever), you don't stand a chance anymore.
To me it seems this is what happened to Larry & Sergey, too.
> It seems to me that once your middle management is infested with non-tech people (because you couldn't resist "growing" forever), you don't stand a chance anymore.
I fixed a redundancy for you.
Otherwise, spot on, and if I had one of those vinyl printers my wife uses to put things like “Home is where your heart is” on the wall, I’d print this, and hang it secretly on the bathroom walls at work.
I’m experiencing this right now sadly. Came to work at a company a decade ago with a lot of equality and flat/low management. Engineers of various disciplines were predominantly middle/older, so there was a sense of “we’re all adults here” and it’s worked pretty well for a long time. But as staff is retiring and the business is growing because it forking worked well, the cry for more middle management to “scale” has been heard. Need point people. Points of responsibility. Because we can’t spare real engineers, these are often people with “some engineering in their background” or just know how to play the good buddy network really well and evoke a sense of “trust.” The relationship that’s emerging now with middle management layers is more the family structure. Instead of being a group of collaborative light management adults, the middle manager assumes the parent role, and the workers become the kids. They get to take less risk, be less responsible and avoid the “adulting” stuff that is (endless) meetings and the like. The management/parents obsess about the way their group/family is seen elsewhere in the company. Protecting them name and reputation takes an increased precedence. The “adult kids”, the experiences engineers who want to be treated like adults and not over managed, start looking for a new home to move to.
Flat management hasn't really worked well for Valve. With no formal power structures they seem to have just formed informal power structures which aren't necessairly pushing the company forward...
As I see it, most every structure works when you've got a fountain of never ending cash. The true test of a corporate structure is when that fountain starts to run dry or there was never a fountain to begin with. Facebook is hitting that wall now.
They have stagnated product wise but it seems that their employees are happy and they make enough money to be profitable.
I think this is also a function of their competitors being jerks (Epic) or not really caring (Apple App Store). So a true competitor could likely eat their lunch if they really wanted to.
If valve didn't have access to free effortless money then it's informal structures might look very different by necessity. As of now there must not be much drive to change anything.
Why do you think our startup heroes were failed from below, rather than simply "having been promoted to the level of their incompetence"?
Dilbert, et al, rewrote the principle as, you promote the incompetent so they don't interfere with the real work. Or maybe that brown-nosers get promoted until they get fired. Or that the more incompetent you are the more you get promoted. But it's always been about how smart people who do good work end up in over their heads.
The reward for a job well done is another job, a harder or different job. Eventually you run up against a harder, bigger, different job you just can't hack. It doesn't matter if you're being promoted by your manager, yourself, or the invisible hand of the market.
yup. I live the Peter principle every day. Its really that your promoted because you were good at your old job, but that doesn't guarantee that you are good at your new job, and eventually you get promoted to a job you're not good at. Where I work, a lot of excellent tech people have been promoted into management positions, and we all suck at it. We're better at tech.
Over a long enough time, everything is. The question is whether they had a better alternative along the path. If many/most companies are infested, the wrong kind of middle management must be quite common. If it’s quite common, avoiding hiring from it (or avoiding the effects when you do) could be very difficult. It’s still a problem that lands on their desks, but might be less “how could they be so stupid?!” than portrayed above.
Yes, but it's easy to get overwhelmed during that explosive growth phase and, well, see the Steve Jobs anecdote about "A players". Once the damage is done it's hard/impossible to undo.
Yeah I reckon at Google, that came from above. That was Schmidt.
> "There is what I call the creepy line," he said, according to The Hill. "The Google policy on a lot of things is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it."
Schmidt ran the company relatively well. Googles issue is the lack of focus and rewarding technically complex 10x ideas. Meaning long term recurring compound gains is not rewarded.
In Dorsey's own words, he was only one vote on the board, and only had 3% share in the company.
Whether he put 100% of his time into Twitter or 1%, that doesn't change the fact that he had very limited influence over his own company. Twitter's board is what has caused all their problems, often by explicitly rejecting Dorsey's advice.
I think to a certain extent there's an overwhelming culture in the SV VC world of being completely credulous. That exchange just seems like a uniquely weird situation of two people talking absolute bollocks and neither being willing to mention the elephant in the room. It's no wonder the second their plan hit the real world it exploded on impact. You would have thought the guy who ran twitter would actually understand the challenges that faced twitter, but I guess he really was so unengaged he's just unaware. They sound like 13 year olds.
> two people talking absolute bollocks and neither being willing to mention the elephant in the room
It just reads to me like two friends having a casual chat about an idea.
It also reads to me like the context is well known and shared. You don't usually actively restate context in real life; it's not a movie where you need to let the audience in. That's not avoiding an elephant, that's just real world conversation.
> It's no wonder the second their plan hit the real world it exploded on impact
What? Musk backed out. That’s nothing to do with "hitting the real world". It's not like regulators stopped it or something.
Maybe I’m missing some inside baseball, but what exactly is wrong here? Dorsey created Frankenstein and has regrets. I don’t see what’s childish about that.
It's about the context, Dorsey has basically been an absent CEO for the last 5 years. All the reporting is basically that he wasn't engaged, didn't make decisions, and in the end he didn't really step down from Twitter, he was forced out by activist investor buying up shares and pushing him out. It's not like he didn't have an opportunity to address the issues at Twitter, it's that he went off and worked at a different company whilst still being CEO of Twitter and as a result completely squandered the opportunity.
There's also the fact that he's on the board of directors of Twitter while he's sending these text messages conspiring against the shareholders he represents!
I don't see anything here that seems at all like "conspiring against the shareholders".
He wanted to change the company in ways that he thought were better, but he couldn't get the support of the other stakeholders so he's leaving the board. He's discussing with a friend a combination of A) lessons learned and what he'd do differently if he could go back with his current knowledge and B) an abstract hypothetical that after he leaves the board maybe he'll work on a new project that does things better.
There is a huge difference between "I'm going to use my position at company X to harm company X" and "After I leave company X, I'd like to do a new project using the lessons I've learned".
That’s going to be a battle of cash poured into PR teams. While competitive, I am layman and do not see that it rises to the level of conspiracy. You can’t exactly call a non-monetizing protocol the competitive beast that a publicly traded, global behemoth like Twitter is.
Not all (or even most) CEOs have the same amount of power as, say, Mark Zuckerberg at Meta. Most CEOs cannot take the company in the direction of an entirely different business model without the Board of Directors agreeing. Dorsey was booted out as Twitter CEO once before, in 2008, and then brought back in an attempt to fix things, after he had already started Square.
It appears, not only from this text but many other comments he's made, that he found the board to be just as difficult to work with. I think he's spot on here, identifying the root cause of the problem, and a realistic appraisal of the chances of changing the existing company.
Consider they're at least somewhat aware this conversation would be subpoenaed during a lawsuit should the acquisition go sour. Musk's "can we talk on the phone?" means "tell me more, but without the evidence trail"
Every time someone wanted to have a call with me, it was so they could push me into something with their whining, or so they could misinterpret what was said without me being able to point at a timestamped sentence. For these reasons I always refuse calls about anything important - and never had any problems solving various business issues over text.
Above signal flags, text is almost the lowest possible bandwidth form of human-human conversion. It will take you an hour to write something that you could explain to someone in 5 minutes via voice.
Even if you do manage to find the time to write all down, you quickly hit problem 2.
Text is shit for communicating any form of sentiment or emotional valence, which is a pretty critical part of communication, especially when you’re getting into the nuanced ends of any particular topic.
"Emotional valence" is a sublime way of putting it.
Text is an excellent way of transmitting information. Do this, go there, this is the answer, etc. But unless you have a deep, long-lasting connection with the other person, text will lose a lot.
So much of what's on YouTube is so irritating to me because it's 10 minutes of mostly filler to transmit a few facts that could be read in a minute or less. But I'll listen to a 3 hour conversation between two people who are passionate about history or Lego or whatever and not think anything of it. The emotional valence makes it worthwhile.
That you’ve never felt this way does not preclude that others may.
Texts do not convey emotion. Allow verification of nuanced points with simple interjections and interrogatives. The limitation of threads of conversation to simplify discourse through a more direct dialog and rebuttals.
I have had relationships due specifically because texts are really incomplete and poor means of conversation and the other side fails to pick up and acknowledge the severity of the situations I was trying to describe.
I'm not choosing the people, there's no overflow of opportunities where I live. Almost always it seems like the ones who handle money/hold political power are toxic, and I need to protect myself from them. Never had any such issue with my friends, so I doubt it's really just about me.
You have my sympathy. I once worked in an organizational culture that produced toxic behavior. I was privileged with enough experience, savings, and alternative options to get out quickly.
If I was forced to work in places where I could not trust that my coworkers and I have each other's backs I feel like I would be very bitter.
It would appear by implication that you would see meetings as always less useful than documents. This is clearly not true. Calls and meetings are almost always better for working through nuanced issues.
Yes I'd never let any serious business issue be solved on a meeting. Tech talk etc, sure. Money is involved? Never. Or rather, sure, let's discuss - but then we send a written record of exactly what was agreed.
Yes, there are some narrow cases where audit trails are important, but that doesn't apply to most situations, certainly not those where you're both thinking out loud and trying to come to some common understanding or whatever. It seems you allowed some personal grievance get the better of you because in this particular context, your characterization does not apply.
The Elephant in the room is that Musk is pretty much the perfect example of what makes Twitter terrible, and Dorsey had more than enough opportunity to fix it because he was literally in charge of the company for years and did nothing. All the shit Musk is throwing at Twitter now is stuff Dorsey was responsible for.
Dorsey was never the controllable option, his net worth is tied into his other weird crypto scam, not twitter. He might have come back out of love, but he never showed twitter the attention it deserved- at a minimum, working 9-5 on twitter not block.
Aptly put. Dorsey was goofing off for years as Twitter’s CEO and now suddenly he is the guy who cares about Twitter. I remember people compared him to Steve Jobs when Dorsey returned to Twitter because Jobs at one point managed Pixar and Apple. What misplaced faith!
