[HN Gopher] I resigned from Twitter
___________________________________________________________________
I resigned from Twitter
Author : ryzvonusef
Score : 1237 points
Date : 2021-11-29 14:25 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| Tycho wrote:
| Prediction: more censorship and narrative protection incoming.
| crocodiletears wrote:
| This is my concern as well. Twitter already has significant
| issues with this. But based on Dorsey's Rogan appearances I get
| the impression that he was never entirely comfortable with
| playing the arbiter of truth/acceptable content outside of high
| profile cases. He deferred to his trust and safety team most of
| the time, though you can still find a lot of enclaves that a
| platform like facebook might have preemptively purged.
|
| His successor could very well be much more aggressive in this
| respect.
| MarkLowenstein wrote:
| It is likely that the censorship and massaging of visibility
| is done by a team composed largely of ideological activists.
| Dorsey as a founder and leader would have the sense of
| ownership that would allow him to push back on that. I would
| expect that team to steamroll over the new CEO because his
| ownership is weaker.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| I think twitter is going to be boring without him and die. I hope
| he leads some new medium or sth
| ethagknight wrote:
| What does this mean for Square? Does he spend more time there or
| focus ever more on cryptocurrency?
| busymom0 wrote:
| Question for those who use/don't use Twitter and Reddit:
|
| Twitter feeds seem more oriented towards a specific person
| whereas Reddit seems more oriented towards a specific topic.
| Which one do you think works best for you? What would you change?
| bob332 wrote:
| He will go down in history as the creator of a truly evil and
| potential humanity destroying platform
| afavour wrote:
| We're talking about Dorsey here, not Zuckerberg
| spiderice wrote:
| There is room for two with that title
| rossdavidh wrote:
| Yeah, should read "He will go down in history as _a_ creator
| of a truly evil and potential humanity destroying platform"
| dbbk wrote:
| With a 200M MAU? I think you're thinking of Facebook.
| afavour wrote:
| I have no particular beef with Dorsey but I think this would make
| sense. He's been CEO of both Square and Twitter for years now and
| no matter what time you wake up in the morning or however many
| specials diets you undertake you're not going to be able to give
| the focus a solo CEO is.
|
| I think the bigger issue is who gets to replace him: will it be
| someone with smart ideas or someone to serve as a puppet of
| activist investors? I can't find a source right now but I
| remember at the time Fleets were launched (Twitter's since-
| removed version of Stories) that the feature was pushed heavily
| by investors rather than anyone inside the company. If that's
| true then the next CEO could be a true disaster.
|
| EDIT: ah, there we are: https://pxlnv.com/linklog/twitter-fleets-
| elliott-management/, and a deeper read on Elliot Management:
| https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/08/27/paul-singer-do...
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > you're not going to be able to give the focus a solo CEO is.
|
| I agree. As much as he tried to justify the dual CEO roles, it
| never made any sense.
|
| It was also maddening to watch him shift to a 3rd focus of
| promoting cryptocurrency and his own cryptocurrency
| investments. Hanging on to the CEO role of both Twitter and
| Square put him in a great position to push both companies
| toward more cryptocurrency integration, but it never felt like
| it was being done for the benefit of the users of each
| platform.
| sporkland wrote:
| Would you critique Musk in a similar way?
|
| Honest question, because it's eerie how you could swap Dorsey
| for Musk and the statements would still apply but seem much
| less true.
| fossuser wrote:
| Yeah, musk is the perfect counter example. In the brief
| time he left Tesla in someone else's hands the other CEO
| almost killed it.
|
| I'm also skeptical of Jack's claim about founder led
| companies. When you're the exec handing things over you'd
| have to make some comment like that to show your trust is
| entirely behind the new person. I don't really buy it
| though.
|
| Also I thought Evan Williams and Biz Stone were the Twitter
| founders? Maybe I'm forgetting the history.
| madamelic wrote:
| > Also I thought Evan Williams and Biz Stone were the
| Twitter founders?
|
| He was a founder...ish.
|
| From reading his Wikipedia, it seems like it was an x.com
| / PayPal situation. He joined their company to help them
| with the idea then when they spun Twitter out, he became
| CEO.
|
| From digging in a bit deeper, the lineage of Twitter
| seems fascinating. It seems like it was the result of the
| companies of the co-founders putting together that
| created something even better than their own parts.
| sporkland wrote:
| There's a whole book, "Hatching Twitter" about the sordid
| founding of Twitter and how Dorsey and Noah Glass were
| the main originators of the concept at oOdeo, then Ev
| eventually fired them and removed them from the history.
| Only to have Dorsey come back later and remove him.
|
| Seems like a bunch of people had a hand in creating it in
| various ways.
| itsoktocry wrote:
| > _Would you critique Musk in a similar way?_
|
| Absolutely. Musk's companies manage to get stuff done, but
| are any of them particularly "well run"?
| meepmorp wrote:
| SpaceX, largely due to Gwynne Shotwell.
| batman-farts wrote:
| Elon Musk is best understood as a venture capitalist with a
| particularly concentrated portfolio.
| chasd00 wrote:
| I'm a big fan of SpaceX but sometimes i wonder why Musk
| gets such a pass on timelines. I understand things happen
| and change but when the CEO gives a date for some event
| then it needs to happen on that date or the CEO should be
| hat-in-hands sorry describing in detail why the date was
| missed.
|
| I think even the Musk superfans eyeroll whenever he gives a
| date for some new advancement. For example, didn't Musk say
| the test orbital launch for Starship was goign to be last
| July or something?
| mise_en_place wrote:
| More charitably, he may have been suckered by the crypto
| Ponzi. Many intelligent people have.
| alksjdalkj wrote:
| >> you're not going to be able to give the focus a solo CEO
| is.
|
| > I agree. As much as he tried to justify the dual CEO roles,
| it never made any sense.
|
| If I remember correctly he was originally going to step away
| from Twitter to focus on Square, but then Twitter couldn't
| find a replacement and basically begged him to stay.
| bbarnett wrote:
| _but it never felt like it was being done for the benefit of
| the users of each platform._
|
| The point of platforms is not to benefit the users,
| otherwise, every successful platform has failed.
|
| The type of synergy you are describing, is what builds value
| for the only people which count... shareholders.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| > it never felt like it was being done for the benefit of the
| users of each platform.
|
| Cynically, I'm yet to see any crypto that benefits anyone but
| the people that invented it (they benefit the most) and the
| savvy traders trying to make a buck (and sometimes succeeding
| at the expense of others).
| 0des wrote:
| > benefits anyone but the people that invented it
|
| Same could be said about social networks.
| user-the-name wrote:
| That makes no sense whatsoever.
| elliekelly wrote:
| Sure it does. I think there's a fairly solid argument to
| be made that social media is a net negative for humanity.
| It's "good" for the small group of people who make a lot
| of money but for most people it's not a positive. It
| maybe falls somewhere between alcohol (not great but a
| lot people enjoy it in moderation) and prescription
| opioids (predatory and misleading by design).
| 8ytecoder wrote:
| Social media has downsides but that doesn't mean it's
| useless or has never been useful. It did connect people.
| There was a time when you lose touch with your high
| school friends pretty much forever when you move for
| college and then a different city.
| 0des wrote:
| There was a time that cigarettes 'calmed the nerves' as
| well. Almost universally, nobody thinks social media is a
| one way street of mostly-positive outcomes.
| rocketbop wrote:
| > nobody thinks social media is a one way street of
| mostly-positive outcomes.
|
| What is?
| [deleted]
| nscalf wrote:
| This is a pretty uninformed take. There are all sorts of
| projects made in crypto: collectibles, music, art, gaming,
| loans, mortgages, debit cards with rewards, social media,
| wifi networks, anti-fraud, food security, etc. And many
| projects have a large donation component to them.
| user-the-name wrote:
| All of which don't "benefit anyone but the people that
| invented it and the savvy traders trying to make a buck".
| He got it right the first time, and you are just falling
| for the dishonest rationalisations of crypto scammers.
| nscalf wrote:
| Products don't benefit the user? Honestly, what is your
| stance here? It seems like your stance is "crypto bad".
| Yes, people who made a product benefited, as did
| investors. How is that dishonest? Audius has 5m monthly
| users, please explain why 5 million people use something
| they get no benefit from.
| InitialLastName wrote:
| Looking at the Audius website, I see no reason that
| service needs blockchain to function, which brings us to
| the final function of blockchain: Blockchain as a
| marketing gimmick.
| boringg wrote:
| Says the people who are downstream of the
| founders/traders of crypto but upstream the final bag
| holders.
|
| The game is - the more people/demand who come into the
| place, the greater the asset value. Earliest in benefit
| the most.
|
| Sure there are benefits from crypto (but those are mostly
| a distraction for its core use case and a way for murky
| individuals to validate investments to the real
| bagholders) but the costs and the model works in that you
| keep having to find more people to buy into the asset
| class in order to validate the most recent purchases.
|
| In traditional equities - you get some kind of return on
| your investment through traditionally dividends/share
| buybacks from profits generated from the business - right
| now its a lot of capital appreciation not to dissimilar
| to what I described above (i.e. TINA)
| giantrobot wrote:
| > Says the people who are downstream of the
| founders/traders of crypto but upstream the final bag
| holders.
|
| Look man, cryptocurrency isn't some kind of pyramid
| scheme! It's just a bisected cube!
| nscalf wrote:
| I was talking about using products, not investing in some
| coin. So the bag holder argument doesn't apply here,
| these are people directly getting services.
|
| But many coins have mechanisms to give dividends in the
| form of their coin, which have liquid trading markets.
| You can say they're being propped up by the next buyer,
| but many of these are used by the product as "gas" for
| transactions, creating a real use based demand economy.
| I'll readily admit that speculation has massively
| inflated these markets past their fundamental value, but
| that's not unique to cryptocurrency.
| fwip wrote:
| What other currencies do people trust that have been
| "massively inflated" by speculation?
| floatboth wrote:
| One day it's a project start-up with A Whitepaper(tm),
| the next day it's just the word "penis": https://www.redd
| it.com/r/Buttcoin/comments/7tn6ld/a_shitcoin...
|
| "Anti-fraud" is especially funny considering how
| fraudulent the whole cryptocurrency space is.
|
| But anyway, to quote Nicholas Weaver
| (https://youtu.be/xCHab0dNnj4?t=1667), "[the people
| proposing those projects] are never actually even able to
| even articulate what the hard problems are, like what
| data, what formats, what honesty, who's adding the data,
| what enforcement -- shoving garbage into an append-only
| ledger doesn't solve your problems!"
| golergka wrote:
| Bitcoin benefits drug users and dealers every single day,
| and have been doing it for almost 10 years. May be in US
| it's different, but there's just no street drug trade
| anymore around here. If you want to buy weed, you have to
| buy bitcoin, in some shape or form.
| Frondo wrote:
| Not saying _I_ ever buy illegal drugs, but my venmo
| history is full of people buying $80 of pizza or $150 of
| sushi -- this seems to be seller 's preference, as far as
| I can tell. No one in my rather wide extended circle has
| ever tried to or even suggested using crypto for these
| kinds of transactions.
| technobabbler wrote:
| Wow, your weed dealer is a very multi-talented person.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| That's because marijuana still counts as a drug. In young
| professional circles for non-marijuana drugs, there is
| definitely a major crypto backend even if you only deal
| with the middleman.
| throwaway946513 wrote:
| Sushi bars be expensive.
| tayo42 wrote:
| Going from cash to crypto is pretty expensive I think. I
| tried to do a large transaction thought crypto might work
| but it was going to be a couple hundred just to convert
| it
| xur17 wrote:
| It's really not. Coinbase pro charges ~0.5% on cash to
| crypto trades. Strike charges a very small spread on cash
| to bitcoin, and you can send directly to other lightning
| nodes for < $0.01.
|
| USDC can be converted from / to USD for free on Coinbase.
| easrng wrote:
| That's a terrible idea. Bitcoin is completely public, you
| should use a privacy coin like Monero or ZCash.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Good luck converting Monero to fiat.
| ar_lan wrote:
| Binance has it.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Hm, interesting. Binance US does not.
|
| I can't imagine that you wouldn't take a substantial
| haircut... way more people would want to sell monero on
| Binance because the benefits of selling there are way
| more than the unique benefits of buying there (it is easy
| to buy monero, it is not easy to sell monero without
| getting dirty coins).
| easrng wrote:
| With Monero you can't tell if coins are dirty so it
| doesn't matter.
|
| Edit: I misread, you're talking about Monero -> Other
| coin swaps. My bad.
| golergka wrote:
| That may be true, but that's already a widely established
| industry that doesn't accept any other coin. I'm not
| offering any value judgements, just a statement of fact.
| thendrill wrote:
| You mean Monero thou. Why use bitcoin?
| golergka wrote:
| Because that's the only coin the biggest and de-facto
| monopoly marketplace, that processes tens of millions of
| dollars worth of deals per day, accepts.
| tjr225 wrote:
| Where I live, you just go to the weed store and use USD.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Other drugs
| treeman79 wrote:
| Screw other drugs. I want to get some antibiotics without
| having to hear a lecture from 3 different doctors on why
| they won't help me, even when they do.
|
| Or that I injured my back and had to spend 2 grand at Er
| for a standard 7 day steroid pack to calm inflammation
| because doctors don't like prescribing them.
| dcow wrote:
| People should not be self-prescribing and should listen
| to medical professionals. Sorry.
| treeman79 wrote:
| This in a thread about people getting illegal mind
| altering drugs...
| phreack wrote:
| It's a lifesaver in countries with rampant inflation where
| they forbid you to buy currencies from other countries.
| Literally in some cases.
| skytreader wrote:
| So, it's easy to find a list of the countries with the
| highest inflation rates, but which of those countries
| actually forbid individuals from acquiring foreign
| currency? I assume you have a verifiable example?
|
| Not to mention, for an everyman living in one of these
| countries, how feasible is it to actually participate in
| crypto _to the point where it is useful in day-to-day
| living_? How much upfront investment will it cost? How
| much ongoing investment? Will the local merchants accept
| crypto? Will they do so any time soon?
|
| (I'm honestly not fond of crypto but I also honestly have
| no idea about these questions, which seem practical to
| know before buying into an "advantage" of crypto.)
|
| Venezuela aside, naturally. Because the way this
| statement comes across to me is is that crypto is a
| viable alternative even without government oversight
| and/or precisely because of its lack of central
| authority. Venezuela's crypto has support all the way
| from the top.
| danenania wrote:
| Argentina has very high inflation and restricts foreign
| currency purchase:
|
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-08-13/argent
| ina...
| throwaway554 wrote:
| What happens when foreign currencies also get into the
| double-digit inflation range?
| phreack wrote:
| Yeah I'm talking about Argentina.
|
| It's not so much a day to day living with crypto kind of
| situation but rather a being able to save one. Say you
| have a salary that's getting devalued by the month yet
| doesn't raise at the same rate.
|
| If you're lucky enough to be able to save say 10% of it,
| you want to stabilize it's value somehow. I don't even
| mean invest at a profit, I mean have a way to save that
| money so when you do need to spend it down the line (say
| to buy a 100k USD no-bedroom apartment to live in), you
| wouldn't have lost most of your savings' value due to
| inflation.
|
| You can't hold value in land since there's no credit,
| cars are 10x as expensive due to the economy being so
| protectionist, and you likely don't have space to hold a
| stock of long-lasting food that you might be able to
| sell. Crypto, particularly stable coins, is then a very
| attractive option in such a situation. You could buy 50
| DAI a month for example and then have a good shot that
| when you need it a few years later, it'll still be as
| valuable as it was when you bought it.
|
| A lot of old people who trusted cash and didn't realize
| how bad things are getting and didn't invest in a solid
| keeper of value, are only now realizing that their whole
| life savings are worth about as much as a TV, and even
| less every month.
|
| Nowadays, even kids need to learn about exchange rates to
| keep up.
| Geee wrote:
| This short documentary about Bitcoin in Africa makes it
| easier to understand why Bitcoin is important in
| developing (or authoritarian) countries. It'll answer
| some of those questions.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7lm7IHnKDw
| fennecfoxen wrote:
| Which countries are those? China, where it's been
| outlawed? Is the value mostly in the laws being easier to
| circumvent?
| [deleted]
| politician wrote:
| Are you implying that there is some Moral Good in
| compliance with laws that prevent you from escaping an
| inflationary environment damning you and your loved ones
| to starvation?
| webdoodle wrote:
| It's a ponzi scheme
| sdfghderwg wrote:
| > He's been CEO of both Square and Twitter for years now and no
| matter what time you wake up in the morning or however many
| specials diets you undertake you're not going to be able to
| give the focus a solo CEO is.
|
| Elon Musk
| stepanhruda wrote:
| I remember him saying he plans to step down as Tesla CEO
| eventually
| garmaine wrote:
| He tends to focus on one or the other at a time though.
| chasd00 wrote:
| I'm sure he only focuses when things are really wrong. It
| must be awful to be fixing Tesla problems when SpaceX is
| humming along. Then switch to SpaceX when it's falling
| apart while Tesla is back on its feet. It's like a
| perpetual grass-is-greener problem regardless of which side
| of the fence you're on.
|
| edit: a month or two ago there was this huge increase in
| SpaceX development all of a sudden that has since dwindled.
| I wonder if that was Musk working on SpaceX but now back at
| Tesla? of course i could be way off base too ( FAA thorn in
| SpaceX's side etc )
| garmaine wrote:
| Further testing at SpaceX is basically on hold until the
| FAA completes their review of the orbital launch
| facility, which they have promised to do by the end of
| December. Plenty of ground testing going on, albeit with
| less publicity.
| jonas21 wrote:
| He will be replaced by Parag Agrawal. In the image in the
| tweet, Jack says:
|
| > _Parag started here as an engineer who cared deeply about our
| work and now he 's our CEO... Parag will be able to channel
| this energy best because he's lived it and knows what it
| takes._
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| > activist investors
|
| Is Twitter the way it is because of activist investors, or just
| capitalists (in the literal, neutral sense of the term) who
| know that certain crowds are easily manipulated?
| [deleted]
| brightball wrote:
| Hate Elliott. They are doing everything they can to cause
| problems with Duke Power as well.
| enos_feedler wrote:
| Ned Segal?
| syshum wrote:
| >>puppet of activist investors?
|
| Seems more likely that Jack has been the puppet of activist
| employee's not investors. Hopefully Twitter will hire someone
| to have a back bone in the face of the activist employee's that
| want twitter to be a political echo-chamber / safe space
| Covzire wrote:
| Highly doubtful as long as they stay in SV. Barring some
| major backlash I don't think any major company will ever
| operate there again without making the whole company
| political.
| syshum wrote:
| Well given the ever increasing crime, taxes, costs and
| lowering of living standards hopefully we will start either
| seeing companies leave SV, or SV ceasing having any
| competitive advantage as companies realize their talent
| pool is not infact limited to SV and there are plenty of
| high talented people that have no interest in living in SV
| [deleted]
| Kye wrote:
| One of the only episodes of Joe Rogan I ever listened to
| (#1258) was the interview with Jack Dorsey and Vijaya Gadde.
| Vijaya Gadde would make a good CEO. She seems to have a clear,
| balanced, and well-informed perspective on both Twitter as a
| whole and the many micro-communities within.
| hellbannedguy wrote:
| It will be a female.
|
| The BOD know that Twitter will always be nothing more than a
| place social influencers will go to sell product, and selling
| product to females is a goldmine.
| soheil wrote:
| Honestly I'm ok with a hedge fund backed Twitter. Look what it
| has become with Dorsey at the helm. It was a cute platform to
| induce change in backward countries 10 years ago, but now it's
| a cesspool of every ideologue imaginable. The more sensational
| and toxic someone is the more successful they become on
| Twitter, generally speaking. If the goal was to make money
| primarily I don't see how brands would put up with that. I
| write off Twitter as a failed experiment, but nevertheless a
| great lesson in the nature of human beings and mob behavior.
|
| Edit: typo + speaking as an ex-Twitter engineer circa 2011
| [deleted]
| splitstud wrote:
| A platform to induce change was the highpoint?
| 1024core wrote:
| > I think the bigger issue is who gets to replace him:
|
| Jack explicitly says that Parag Agrawal (current CTO) is
| replacing him.
|
| https://twitter.com/paraga?lang=en
| Invictus0 wrote:
| > https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/08/27/paul-singer-
| do...
|
| Stunning article. Everyone has a bit of dirt on them I suppose,
| and it's more important than ever to safeguard one's privacy.
| Stratoscope wrote:
| 404?
| Invictus0 wrote:
| Oops, I copied it wrong from the parent. Sorry!
| handrous wrote:
| I've noticed that lots of C-suite and owner/CEO startup people
| have like three to five active business roles on their
| Linkedins.
|
| A fun case of "rules for thee, but not for me" when it comes to
| anti-moonlighting clauses and such. I can't "give it my all" if
| I take some weekend gigs, but you can hold two C-suite
| positions, be on two boards, plus have an "advisory" role with
| some startup? It's a lot like drug testing for front-line folks
| while the C-suite are exempt (and would fall apart if denied
| their various chemical habits).
| abootstrapper wrote:
| If you think that's unfair, wait until you hear how much
| they're paid!
| a4isms wrote:
| "Rules for thee but not for me" is interesting when placed in
| juxtaposition with a famous quote from the software architect
| and composer Frank Wilhoit:
|
| _Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit:
| There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not
| bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not
| protect._
|
| That applies to no-moonlighting clauses, but also to no
| sexual harassment clauses, no insider-trading clauses, and
| plenty more. It's not just that the rules don't apply to some
| people, but the rules and system are set up to protect them
| from the rules.
|
| With sexual harassment, for example, it's not just that HR
| looks the other way when they are accused: HR often works to
| protect them from consequences and punish/dismiss/pay off the
| victims.
|
| Source: https://crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/liberals-
| against-progre...
| r00fus wrote:
| I look at this and ask - from this analysis, what
| distinguishes conservatism from feudalism?
| handrous wrote:
| To be fair, it's not like we hide who the system's set up
| to serve. It's right there in the name. _Capital_ - ism.
| closeparen wrote:
| Managers and executives aren't capital. In fact their
| relationship with capital tends towards adversarial.
| handrous wrote:
| Middle management _certainly_ aren 't, that's true, but
| CEOs often are, or will soon join that group due to their
| income. It's true that preferential treatment for the
| C-suite is more a second-order effect, though. A
| mechanism by which favors are exchanged among and between
| capitalists, both as a high-tier reward for good
| servants, and deliberate leverage of the principal agent
| problem to capture more value _personally_ for those with
| connections. A CEO can make choices that aren 't
| necessarily the best for their company, but do scratch
| someone important's back or get them a personal favor of
| a similar sort elsewhere--see also: board members.
|
| So, both because these positions are sometimes occupied
| by full-on capitalists (who will accept _very_ few
| restrictions on their behavior) and because, when that 's
| not the case, they're occupied by people who are being
| _rewarded_ by capital (often for nepotistic reasons) they
| have much greater freedom than those lower down the org
| chart.
|
| I do think this is a _general_ behavior of class systems
| --and so, probably any large human organization--however,
| and not particular to capitalism, and certainly there are
| better-off and worse-off classes in term of norms and
| treatment by society, short of the capitalist class (as
| Fussell observes in _Class_ , with his "mid-proles"
| subject to close monitoring, tight restrictions on time,
| drug testing, and other humiliations, while his upper-
| middle drinks on the job, has their own office with no-
| one watching what they do, would be _outraged_ at having
| to submit to piss tests, and cuts out early for golf
| without consequence).
|
| In this case the name just happens to tell us, very
| directly, who's on top of the pyramid. Not like other
| systems that may try to obscure who's the most-favored
| group.
| sporkland wrote:
| I have an open mind about it and have seen it many times,
| but I struggle with the leaps of logic required to
| understand the one proposition of conservatism. On its face
| it is obviously unfair, and it's hard for me to see it as
| the obvious consequence of conservatism which is "heavily
| trust the past and move forward with caution".
|
| Can you help me connect the two or at least help me
| understand the underlying proposition?
| carapace wrote:
| It's two different meanings for the word "conservatism".
| You're quoting the more traditional meaning (for example
| "environmental conservatism" or "fiscal conservatism")
| whereas Wilhoit is using it to name an (in his view)
| ancient and universal political philosophy that he
| believes subsumes all others.
|
| (FWIW I think he's got the wrong word. He says "For
| millenia, conservatism had no name..." and then cites
| divine right of kings.)
| NoGravitas wrote:
| Well, to be fair to Wilhoit, the divine right of kings
| was only asserted after the threat of other models of
| (conservative) government were asserted, to try to
| justify something that had previously never seemed to
| need justification.
| notreallyserio wrote:
| Trust the past implies trusting those you know and grew
| up with and thus those most like you, as in your in-
| group. It also means you may overlook their mistakes and
| crimes because you may trust they're doing the right
| thing.
|
| Moving forward with caution doesn't mean you absolutely
| don't trust others but they are the out-group, if we
| assume there are two groups here. Those others won't get
| the same benefit of the doubt as your in-group and thus
| any mistake they make will be magnified (in relative
| terms).
| NoGravitas wrote:
| It helps to have more of the full quote to work with:
|
| > For millenia, conservatism had no name, because no
| other model of polity had ever been proposed. "The king
| can do no wrong." In practice, this immunity was always
| extended to the king's friends, however fungible a group
| they might have been. Today, we still have the king's
| friends even where there is no king (dictator, etc.).
| Another way to look at this is that the king is a
| faction, rather than an individual.
|
| > As the core proposition of conservatism is indefensible
| if stated baldly, it has always been surrounded by an
| elaborate backwash of pseudophilosophy, amounting over
| time to millions of pages. All such is axiomatically
| dishonest and undeserving of serious scrutiny. Today, the
| accelerating de-education of humanity has reached a point
| where the market for pseudophilosophy is vanishing; it
| is, as The Kids Say These Days, tl;dr . All that is left
| is the core proposition itself -- backed up, no longer by
| misdirection and sophistry, but by violence.
|
| That is to say: the past is built around this one
| proposition. Moving forward "with caution" translates to
| "how can we move forward (solve some current problem)
| without jeopardizing this essential proposition?"
| gostsamo wrote:
| I don't agree with GP, but if you consider "what have
| worked in the past" to be those who have the upper hand
| when setting the rules, then conservatism is cementing
| the status quo and preventing everyone else from changing
| it. In a way, preserving "what works" turns into
| "preserving what works for us".
|
| This is rather one-sided interpretation, but it
| definitely has its precedences in history and even in our
| times.
| kyawzazaw wrote:
| A lot of it is board seats or investment offices
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| Careful, you're dangerously close to realizing that
| Executives at companies provide vanishingly little day to day
| value to companies.
|
| I'd bet in most companies the CEO is basically just a buffer
| between the board and the rest of the company, and
| essentially a fall guy position so the board can avoid
| accountability.
| dang wrote:
| " _Please don 't post shallow dismissals, especially of
| other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us
| something._"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| garmaine wrote:
| I don't think that was a shallow dismissal...?
| Griffinsauce wrote:
| Ironically, (erroneously) quoting the rules at someone
| is.
| garmaine wrote:
| I was asking for clarification from the mod, which I got.
| Nimitz14 wrote:
| How the hell is it not?
| dang wrote:
| It's a grand putdown without any supporting information.
|
| Comments get more shallow as they get more grand and
| generic. "Vanishingly little value" is a dismissal. Note
| also the dismissive use of the j-word ("just") and the
| implicit admission that there's no particular support for
| the claim ("I'd bet"). Also the snark ("Careful, you're
| dangerously close to realizing"), which invokes an entire
| genre of internet putdown.
|
| There's no information here other than booing a class of
| people. Most people enjoy that when the class is high-
| status, but we're trying to optimize for curiosity on
| this site, and that genre is something else entirely.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| That's how it should feel at a well run company.
|
| It happens when the CEO has put out any fires before
| they've grown big.
|
| Or possibly when, by dumb luck, the organization runs well
| without any such interventions.
| setgree wrote:
| > I'd bet in most companies the CEO is basically just a
| buffer between the board and the rest of the company
|
| Are you thinking of companies in general, or of reasonably
| prominent/stable publicly traded companies? The CEOs at the
| startups I've worked at did a heck of a lot more than that
| -- fundraising, strategy, resolving personnel issues,
| talking to clients, etc.; I'm thinking of a small company
| (10-20 employees) and a mid-sized one (400-500).
| cm2012 wrote:
| Yeah one of the big reasons it hard to sell small
| companies is that most companies fall apart when the CEO
| leaves.
| beagle3 wrote:
| Some. But it's worth looking at the exceptions to
| understand the range.
|
| On one hand, you have Elon Musk at Tesla and Zuck at
| FBMeta. Their board is essentially non existent.
|
| On the other hand, we had Carly Fiorina, who wasn't even
| buffering the board, and was quite horrible at executing.
| jandrese wrote:
| But oh man, when it is time to replace the CEO the first
| thing you hear is "we have to offer those millions of
| dollars or some other company will snipe our CEO!" CEO is
| the only job where the company suddenly decides that it
| does have to offer the most money to attract the top
| talent.
| splitstud wrote:
| Having worked at the c level and just below at 3 large US
| corps, let me just say it matters. Ceo is more important
| than QB I'm the nfl. It's that dramatic.
| emteycz wrote:
| Well yeah, but it's not like any company values its CEO for
| the good office-desk job they do - as opposed to most other
| positions.
|
| And companies certainly do recognize that not everyone has
| to sit at a desk - all the expensive consultants...
| wayoutthere wrote:
| If it's like most of my clients, omitting consultants
| from the seating chart just means you lose your
| conference rooms all day, every day until the consultants
| are gone.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _provide vanishingly little day to day value to
| companies_
|
| As it should be if the executive isn't micromanaging. If a
| crisis erupts and they're nowhere to be found, on the other
| hand, that's a problem.
| ineedasername wrote:
| Well to be fair, good management should be practically
| invisible. It shouldn't be much of a factor in your day to
| day work. They should be overseeing larger trends, gently
| nudging things to stay on course, talking with others to
| coordinate, etc.
|
| I have reasonably decent leadership where I work, and the
| only times I have much contact outside of my direct
| reporting line is when something has gone (or might go)
| seriously wrong. Outside of that, I'm given direction,
| expected to execute, and left to get on with it as I touch
| base every few days.
| ErikVandeWater wrote:
| > They should be overseeing larger trends, gently nudging
| things to stay on course, talking with others to
| coordinate, etc.
|
| That's the point. The best managers/CEOs are mostly
| getting out of the way and telling person A to CC person
| B about a new idea. Not screwing up a system that works
| isn't the same as adding value.
| cjblomqvist wrote:
| Maybe at some companies, but I think Steve Jobs might beg
| to differ!
| jrockway wrote:
| Maybe there's some useful situational awareness that can be
| gained from being the CEO of more than one company. If
| there's a problem at Twitter, you can see if you have the
| same problem at Square. Maybe it's a "how humans organize"
| problem and it affects both, or maybe it's a social media
| problem, and only affects one. With this data, you can make
| better decisions.
|
| It's the same for programming projects. It's good to work on
| more than one, so you can pick apart intrinsic problems that
| nobody knows the answer to and just artifacts of one
| particular codebase.
|
| You have to collect this data for yourself because it's not
| like there's a service you can subscribe to that shows you
| all the problems that various public companies have.
| handrous wrote:
| Right, but somehow the "situational awareness" argument
| doesn't fly when it's a developer working at two places.
| Then it's all "oh no, you might steal our secrets with your
| brain", even though that's _the same thing_ , just framed
| differently.
|
| [EDIT] Oh, and:
|
| > You have to collect this data for yourself because it's
| not like there's a service you can subscribe to that shows
| you all the problems that various public companies have.
|
| Actually, there is! It's called management consulting. The
| main value they provide aside from the much-cited blame-
| absorbing one, is being a normalized and accepted method of
| corporate espionage. They call it stuff like "industry best
| practices" but what they're doing is telling you what your
| competitors are up to, so you can mimic the good parts.
| nostrademons wrote:
| Much of the value that a CEO adds is in figuring out _which
| rules can be broken_ without adverse consequences. They 're
| accountable for results; if they raise shareholder value
| doing terrible things but never get caught, that's a win for
| shareholders, and they get to keep their position. If they do
| get caught, they get to be the fall guy, they resign, the
| board gets to say "We are shocked that such things occurred,
| we had no knowledge of it, the guilty parties have been
| sacked, and cleaning up the mess they made is a top priority
| for the organization." Witness Uber, Volkswagon, Boeing, and
| Wells Fargo.
|
| The moonlighting employee has the same options. Don't get
| caught. If you do get caught, you get fired, just like the
| CEO.
|
| This is also a good portion of why CEOs get paid so much. The
| average person doesn't like to inhabit the Hobbesian reality
| that CEOs do, where they're accountable for results and any
| bad things happening are automatically their fault. They want
| a world where if they _take the right actions_ and follow the
| rules, they get some reasonable amount of security.
| Employment is basically a way to create an artificial island
| of "if you follow the rules, you get paid", at the expense
| of the company capturing much of the value you create. Most
| people take this bargain, because they value security over
| maximizing profit. Those who don't are always able to take
| the opposite side of the trade, and become an
| owner/executive, at the cost of being exposed to all the
| risks of the real world.
| maxsilver wrote:
| > The average person doesn't like to inhabit the Hobbesian
| reality that CEOs do, where they're accountable for results
| and any bad things happening are automatically their fault
|
| Does this actually happen though? I'm not sure I've ever
| seen a President or CEO of a company be held accountable
| for bad behavior or bad decisions in any _meaningful_ way.
|
| Best case scenario, you mess up and get "fired" (with a
| million-dollar-or-more severance/contract payment attached,
| or similar in stocks -- enough cash paid out that you can
| basically retire for life). Worst case scenario, seems to
| be that you get hauled in front of Congress to answer
| questions and/or get teased on the internet for a few days
| -- stuff that has almost no lasting effect.
| NoGravitas wrote:
| I'd say the Golden Parachute is closer to worst case.
| Best case is "failing upward", like so many of these
| Upper Class Twit of the Year candidates seem to do.
| handrous wrote:
| This is similar to why the argument that capitalists are
| due returns because they take on risk doesn't move me.
| Please, give me the "risk" of having somewhat-fewer
| millions in the bank. I'll take on all that risk. For
| free! Meanwhile workers will be in deep shit if their
| company goes under and they don't find something else
| ASAP. Risk, indeed. The absolute worst-case scenario is
| that they might have to work for a living? Oh my, what
| horror.
|
| This isn't to say that investors _shouldn 't_ make money,
| I just find this (often presented as) quasi-moral
| justification for it absurd.
| passivate wrote:
| >Please, give me the "risk" of having somewhat-fewer
| millions in the bank. I'll take on all that risk. For
| free!
|
| Okay, and somebody who was born in poverty in a low-
| income country might be happy with far less money than
| even the lowest wage earner in America. All you're saying
| is wealth is relative. But we already know that, and it's
| not really an argument for anything!
| nostrademons wrote:
| > Please, give me the "risk" of having somewhat-fewer
| millions in the bank. I'll take on all that risk. For
| free!
|
| Why aren't you founding a company, then? Or a
| cryptocurrency token, or selling NFTs? Or leveraging up
| to become a landlord on borrowed money? Or hobnobbing
| with executive recruiters and VCs while setting yourself
| up as a thought leader? Or raising capital for a hedge
| fund? These are all things you can do right now, with
| potentially (but risky) multi-million-$ payoffs. For many
| of them you don't even need to quit your day job - your
| employment contract might say otherwise, but the actual
| work involved can be done on your downtime without them
| knowing.
|
| For most people, the real reason they don't do this is
| because they're uncomfortable with it. They don't want to
| inhabit a world of secrets, lies, non-aligned interests,
| and risk, so they take a job that lets them ignore all
| that and get paid for doing a specific task according to
| the specifications of their boss.
| handrous wrote:
| I was posting about returns on investment, not
| entrepreneurship. _Some_ entrepreneurs really are takings
| significant risks, beyond the risk that the huge numbers
| in their accounts become somewhat less huge. Some are
| even taking _more_ risk than their employees. Investors
| generally are not--again, their most-likely failure state
| is _still being rich_ and in the absolute worst-case they
| lose enough that they have to actually work for their
| income... like everyone else. Their absolute worst (but
| unlikely) case looks suspiciously similar to most folks '
| best (likely) case: a well-paid, fairly well-respected
| (among we mere plebs, anyway) job. They _are_ taking on a
| great deal of risk in one sense, but are hardly taking on
| any in another, arguably more meaningful, sense.
|
| I've repeatedly seen people use risk to justify returns
| on capital _in relation to_ wages--but the risk is all
| bullshit, in many cases. Again, I 'm not claiming that
| investment shouldn't yield returns, but I've seen the
| "risk" argument used to justify income inequality, while
| the actual real-world risk workers & capital are exposed
| to are the _inverse_ of what that would imply.
|
| Mine is essentially an argument for the marginal dis-
| utility of risk, I guess. "Capital _deserves_ a huge up-
| side for the moral reason that investors take great risk
| " is a BS argument, IMO, yet one that crops up from time
| to time. I don't think "deserves" has anything to do with
| it, and I don't think that framing holds up to any amount
| of scrutiny.
|
| The reason this was relevant is that you see similar
| arguments for why CEOs are so well-compensated--"if
| things go poorly, they'll see the consequences for it!"
| Except the "consequences" (short of actually criminal
| activity, and even then, see e.g. Wells Fargo) look an
| awful lot like what would be a life-changing-for-
| generations windfall for normal folks. Their worst day,
| after all of the shit has hit all of the fans, would be
| 99+% of people's best day of their life. So... is that,
| meaningfully, risk that justifies crazy-high
| compensation? My objection isn't even _that the
| compensation is high_ , but the way supposed risk is used
| to _justify_ it. Their compensation is, for a bunch of
| reasons, a fact, but I don 't think "it's fair because
| they take on so much risk" is even _a little_ valid. More
| likely is that it 's not, by many folks' reckoning,
| anywhere near "fair", and that's just how the system, and
| perhaps life, _is_. Investment is, largely, similar, once
| you 're past the smallest of small-fry investors, or
| people investing in their own small business ventures.
|
| [EDIT] To be clear, I'm not arguing that investors (and
| certainly not arguing that entrepreneurs, in general) _do
| not expose themselves to risk_. Of course they do. Lots
| of it, by some entirely-reasonable reckoning. Rather, I
| think the _kind_ of risk makes trying to use that as some
| kind of _moral_ justification for their returns, to be
| blunt, _extremely dumb_.
| nostrademons wrote:
| I'm speaking of causality, not justice. I agree that
| talking in terms of what people "deserve" isn't
| particularly helpful. The way I look at it, capitalism is
| a big super-organism and we're just cells that make it
| up. Do you shed a tear when your skin cells slough off or
| your gut microbiome comes out in your shit? Similarly,
| capitalism as a system is incapable of caring what
| happens to the individual workers that make it up.
|
| And then my interest is primarily in understanding _why
| does the system function the way it does_ and secondarily
| _which organ should I try to occupy myself, given how it
| functions_.
|
| Questions about why people choose (not) to occupy various
| roles or what's holding them back this are very germane.
| Up-thread, I listed a bunch of CEO-like or investor-like
| roles that people can occupy without any particular
| connections or cultural capital, merely by looking the
| part. Why don't more people go for them? After all,
| another property of capitalism is that lucrative
| positions attract competition, and in the absence of
| barriers to entry, the profit gets competed away. Why
| hasn't this happened with CEOs? Arguably, it _is_
| happening - more people are starting startups or micro-
| businesses and playing the CEO role than in the 80s /90s,
| and we're posting this on the forum of an accelerator
| devoted to helping people with this trend.
|
| I've played both the founder/CEO role and the lowly-
| engineer role, and currently am back in the lowly-
| engineer role because I realized I enjoy it a whole lot
| more (and hence am more effective in it). So there's some
| personal experience backing it up, in both the pleb and
| the capitalist role.
| handrous wrote:
| OK, I think we probably at least mostly agree on the
| particular thing I was originally posting about--the risk
| of investments, to the investor class, representing a
| kind of risk that's _incommensurate_ with the risks
| ordinary workers face in their situation, being a whole
| other kind of thing, and not justifying in any kind of
| moral "ought" sense returns on investment (or, following
| similar arguments, very high CEO comp) in relation to
| worker pay. These arguments _do_ see some use, and IMO
| they 're simply terrible, both for explanatory power and
| for the actual moral content of the argument.
|
| > Why don't more people go for them?
|
| This is definitely an interesting area to explore, and I
| think it does _partly_ relate to the rest of our
| discussion: if the key to winning big is to keep taking
| shots until you score (this seems to be the most-
| commonly-advanced route to success in entrepreneurship
| and investing, both), the _kind_ of risk that "taking
| shots" entails makes a huge difference.
|
| If it means the second-from-the-left number in your net
| worth dropping by one, but nothing else about your life
| changing, well, that's not so bad. Might go right out and
| take another "shot" immediately. Hell, do two or three at
| once. You could make several attempts before deciding
| maybe you're just not cut out for this, without much risk
| to your everyday life.
|
| If it means: leaving your job and losing all stable
| income because you're not yet high enough in the
| hierarchy to be permitted multiple well-paid simultaneous
| jobs and are subject to far-reaching non-competes,
| exclusivity, or IP clauses; having to deal with
| marketplace health insurance & costs at the same time
| that's happening (maybe for a family!); dropping _more_
| money on projecting an image of success or of being the
| right kind of person for investors to "believe in" and
| on networking; all that before before you even get to the
| part where you put the bulk of your savings into the
| company & product itself; and with the most likely
| outcome being _really bad_ and leaving you needing years
| to recover for another shot, assuming you ever do--I 'd
| say that's at least part of why people don't bother.
|
| I do not think this is the _only_ reason people who aren
| 't already quite well-off don't "shoot for the stars",
| but it's a not-insignificant part of it. Background and
| family also advantage people in business just like
| anything else (see also: Hollywood dynasties) by
| providing not just good connections for networking, but
| direct, inside knowledge about _how things work_ in fact,
| not just on paper. There are, truly, lots of people who
| just haven 't a clue how to, say, start a business, seek
| investment, et c., so much so that it wouldn't even
| _occur to them_ as a possible course of action even if a
| great opportunity were handed to them on a platter. Their
| understanding of the space is so weak, as they 've had so
| little exposure to it, that they don't know what's
| possible, so don't know what they _could_ try, even if
| they were willing to go figure out the "how" (which
| willingness is, admittedly, far from a given). It's a
| widespread case of don't-know-what-they-don't-know for
| practically the entire body of knowledge required to
| launch a business, and it's the state most people live
| their whole lives in. Some do find their way out of it.
| Others are simply _born to_ the right circumstances to
| learn all about this with little effort, and may not even
| realize how uncommon are the thousands of little pieces
| of info they picked up by _existing_ around the right
| people during their formative years.
|
| I'd add, as an aside, that founder-CEOs may very well not
| be in the capitalist class, really. Founder-CEOs who
| don't _start with_ lots of capital may in fact be taking
| both the risk-in-a-finance-sense that (say) an angel
| investor does, measured in cold dollar terms, _plus_ the
| totally different, actual, can-I-put-food-on-the-table-
| next-month risk common to ordinary workers. That 's the
| subset of the "job creator" category, if you will, that
| really _is_ taking on meaningful risk, and doing hard
| work besides.
|
| > After all, another property of capitalism is that
| lucrative positions attract competition, and in the
| absence of barriers to entry, the profit gets competed
| away. Why hasn't this happened with CEOs?
|
| Eh, that's a property of ideal markets, not of
| capitalism, which shouldn't get the credit for everything
| that markets do. In practice (I'm sure this isn't news to
| you-I'm just structuring a line of reasoning here) things
| are much messier, and IMO sky-high executive compensation
| is all tied up in out-of-control principal agent problems
| and just-enough-removed-you-can't-prosecute self-dealing
| that's widespread at the highest levels of our economy,
| to the point of practically being _the_ defining feature
| of its operation.
|
| One of the major barriers to entry, in this case, is
| having something to offer--personally, or (better) via
| family & friends connections, or through control you can
| exert over businesses you're already involved in--to the
| people selecting for CEO roles or board seats, even if
| it's only the _future potential_ of doing a few favors
| for the right folks, and nothing 's ever even implied out
| loud. Happily for the corrupt, the same traits that make
| these kinds of arrangements and mutual-aid-for-the-rich
| environments possible can also be justified for business
| reasons--well, having high-level personal and family
| connections with several other businesses will help with
| sales, right? And having already made money is a sign
| that this candidate is good at business (never mind the
| family money & connections that put these endeavors on
| easy-mode). So we'd better hire the Yale MBA who comes
| from money, has a cousin in congress, and could already,
| at least, pay their kids through prep school and college
| without working another day in their life.
|
| Down in mid-size company territory, even, you see similar
| stuff, thought pedigrees are (of course) a bit less
| impressive. Kids groomed to inherit a CEO position,
| grandkids shipped off to start in a high-level management
| position at some golfing buddy's other mid-sized company
| to lever them up to CEO candidacy at a smallish publicly-
| traded company later, that kind of thing. At all levels,
| companies performing acquisitions to bail out friends,
| family, and business allies (who'll return the favor
| later).
|
| I have a _sense_ this has gotten worse over the past
| decades, but have not done the legwork to prove it. This
| is part of a broader (also very much "gut") sense I have
| that we, as in humanity as a whole, are getting better at
| playing games and at _identifying_ them in larger
| systems, in a game-theoretical sense, to the detriment of
| anything that 's not aligned with those games, while
| we're also getting worse at discouraging people (using
| means outside the strict ruleset) from playing these to
| the letter of the rules rather than in the spirit of the
| rules.
| nostrademons wrote:
| Those are the consequences for line-level workers caught
| doing something bad, too. The company fires you and
| refuses to give you a good recommendation. Worst case,
| you might get hauled in front of court to answer
| questions.
|
| The difference is entirely in how people view those
| consequences. For most line-level workers, getting fired
| or laid off is a source of intense shame, as well as a
| big logistical inconvenience. As a result, they'll do
| almost anything to avoid it, including making bad
| economic decisions for job security. For CEOs, it's an
| opportunity to do the same shit to other people. As a
| result, they have no inhibition toward taking risks that
| might potentially get them fired, as long as the payoff
| is worth it. And then part of the reason why CEO searches
| are so challenging and CEOs get paid so much is that it's
| hard to find someone who is _rational_ about this -
| willing to take risks when the payoff is high, but
| prudent about it so they don 't tank the company on a
| whim.
| burkaman wrote:
| I'm sorry, are you serious? You think most workers don't
| want to get fired because of the shame and inconvenience?
| You can't think of any more significant motivators?
| handrous wrote:
| I read that as ironic understatement (though the
| "logistical" part doesn't seem quite right) but perhaps
| that's not how it was intended.
| schnevets wrote:
| My perspective on this might be outdated, but a corporate
| legal team can do more than just fire you for moonlighting.
| Depending on your jurisdiction/contract, there could be
| Intellectual Property ramifications.
|
| Obviously, a C-suite can have certain sway in these
| situations and a company might not go after a lowly grunt's
| pet project, but there is a wide gap between these two
| situations where there are worse ramifications than losing
| a job.
| burkaman wrote:
| This seems like a very naive perspective to me. CEOs are
| generally not "exposed to all the risks of the real world".
| If they get fired it's often with a golden parachute and
| the ability to live comfortably without ever worrying about
| money or employment. Many times, people become CEO
| precisely because they aren't ever exposed to real risk,
| and if something goes wrong they can fall back on savings
| or family or a debt-free prestigious degree.
| thomasz wrote:
| Seriously. If GM goes belly up next week, who's going to
| be without health insurance for the foreseeable future?
| likpok wrote:
| I've always thought it weird that Jack was a part-time CEO, but
| there are certainly CEOs that have at least as large of a
| "thing to manage", even if they aren't technically two
| companies.
|
| Facebook is a giant VR company and three-four giant social
| networking companies. Google runs phone infrastructure, search,
| self driving cars. Amazon is a giant retail outlet plus a giant
| cloud services company.
|
| Is running both a social media company and a fintech firm that
| different, even though they aren't grouped under a single
| corporate owner?
| [deleted]
| mjamil wrote:
| I'm in a post-Thanksgiving charitable mood, so thank you, Jack.
| The execution hasn't been perfect (as has been commented on ad
| nauseam), but Twitter is the closest to a worldwide-accessible
| [1] Speaker's Corner [2] I know of, and that - despite all the
| completely valid criticism - is a valuable public service:
| mediating access to information has been the defining tool of
| control for those in power pretty much since civilization began,
| and I, for one, will always pick an imperfectly moderated
| cesspool over the prior status quo where a church or a government
| told me what's true and what to think. FWIW, you've also
| championed transparency and decentralization for your platform
| more than any other SV social media titan [3].
|
| [1] If you have access to the Internet, that is. [2]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speakers%27_Corner [3]
| https://twitter.com/jack/status/1204766078468911106
| truthwhisperer wrote:
| yes believe the fake story
| easytiger wrote:
| Speakers corner is crackpots and insanity. So your comparison
| stands, but I doubt for the reason you intended
| winternett wrote:
| Twitter Blue apparently was another not so great idea I
| guess...
|
| Look folks, Twitter was never really profitable and it showed.
| Innovation has been lagging for years, and they had to rely on
| sensationalism from Trump that simply can't be allowed to
| persist any more.
|
| The profit model has changed, and therefore the CEO music
| change.
|
| The big question is where it all will go next. I can think of
| several ideas that will improve the platform, but nobody asked
| me to write them, and I'm not getting paid CEO money by them to
| spit it out.
|
| The biggest question now is what will happen next... I
| guarantee you though, any more plots to start billing users and
| turn Twitter into more of a "pay-for-play-ware" or "freemium"
| service will lead to a giant user base exodus. ;/
| hellbannedguy wrote:
| I have never liked Twitter. I just never got it. Talk about
| yourself?
|
| That said, I would like to find other sites. It seemes like
| the monopolies are so strong--there's just not much hope.
|
| I would like to find sites other than
|
| Hackernew reddit facebook--excuse me Meta.
|
| I thought by now there would be so many options, but I
| couldn't imagine trying to compete with a handful of huge
| sites.
|
| I'm too old for Ticktok.
| blocked_again wrote:
| > FWIW, you've also championed transparency and
| decentralization for your platform more than any other SV
| social media titan
|
| Twitter don't even have an RSS feed let alone championing
| decentralisation.
| Kinrany wrote:
| They at least talk about decentralization. This definitely
| qualifies as _more_ than any other comparably large social
| media.
| rcMgD2BwE72F wrote:
| I'm not so sure. The illusion of action could be worse than
| indifference. Who would build a service/standard that
| Twitter could make obsolete/outmoded in one day, with
| potentially billions of $ against it?
| serf wrote:
| >I'm not so sure. The illusion of action could be worse
| than indifference.
|
| absolutely right. the concept of 'squatting' on an idea
| so that it remains untouched in the market is an obvious
| strategy and likely used by many large groups.
| smsm42 wrote:
| They are actively making even access to individual tweets
| very cumbersome to people without logins. I guess maybe
| compared to something like facebook where you are completely
| blocked without login it's ok, but "almost inaccessible" is
| only a small step ahead of "completely inaccessible" - that's
| hardly championing anything, let alone "decentralization"
| which Twitter is actively hostile to.
| whyrusleeping wrote:
| I assume you havent seen https://twitter.com/bluesky ?
| madeofpalk wrote:
| Software ships.
| riffic wrote:
| bah - bluesky is not going anywhere. this "project"
| deserves scorn, derision, and cynicism until the board of
| directors shut it down for being a waste of time.
| riffic wrote:
| http://cdevroe.com/2021/10/26/bluesky-status/
|
| love this bit:
|
| "The truth is that Twitter could become decentralized almost
| overnight by simply adding some JSON-LD serializers, an inbox
| endpoint and maybe tweaking their storage schema slightly to
| become part of the fediverse - anyone who wouldn't want to
| use twitter.com could follow twitter.com users from their own
| server and so on. That does not require 2 years of making
| people who don't work for you talk to each other."
| standardly wrote:
| Did anyone tell them? Maybe they just didn't know how
| gojomo wrote:
| Indeed. If Dorsey wanted Twitter to be "open", he'd open
| it. Instead he's closed it & started a sideshow to further
| distract those who could create credible challenges to
| Twitter.
| aerosmile wrote:
| The truth is that someone's gotta pay the bills. Pleasing
| the crowd by giving the content away is easy; finding a way
| to pay the bills while upsetting the least amount of people
| who are strategically important for the next month's bills
| is the hard part.
|
| We can speculate why Jack left, but the lagging stock price
| certainly didn't help him. So if anything, rather than
| criticizing him for not giving away the content for free,
| it seems the guy should have done more of the opposite (to
| prevent someone else taking his job who will do all that
| and then some).
| breakfastduck wrote:
| > but Twitter is the closest to a worldwide-accessible [1]
| Speaker's Corner [2]
|
| More like the closest to a worldwide-accessible bar fight. It's
| been nothing but a truly destructive force.
| vadfa wrote:
| Seems you are a liberal according to your twitter profile. This
| is not a dig, just saying, your experience on that platform is
| not the same as everybody else's, which is why I found your
| whole message a bit surprising.
| smoldesu wrote:
| If Jack Dorsey wanted to encourage decentralization, he could
| have trivially supported the open-source ActivityPub standard
| instead of introducing his own competing standard. It's nice to
| see him stand up for it, but I kinda roll my eyes when I hear
| people say that he's a champion of decentralization. He's had
| years to make it work, but we've seen nothing come from it. All
| we got was a more locked down Twitter site that won't even let
| me browse a profile without getting a pop-up reminding me to
| sign in and download their app.
| whyrusleeping wrote:
| Activitypub is a pretty dated standard thats really not super
| easy to work with or adapt to a more open network. Its an XML
| based protocol that bakes in really difficult to use notions
| of identity and doesn't address the problem of data ownership
| in a meaningful way. From what I've been seeing, the bluesky
| team has been working closely with the activitypub developers
| on figuring out 'what comes next'.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| It (well its predecessor) was an XML based protocol a long
| time ago, but hasn't been in practice in years. Mastodon,
| which really popularized ActivityPub, uses JSON-LD. But
| yes, the ideas of data ownership and identity are just not
| well specified in ActivityPub. There's work in trying to
| incorporate capability-based security into ActivityPub but
| it is a large pain point right now. The protocol also has
| very varying amounts of uptake. Mastodon and Pleroma mostly
| implement the ActivityPub server-to-server API and only a
| handful of ActivityPub implementations support the client-
| to-server API. I would love to see further work between the
| Bluesky and AP teams on coming up with a new standard which
| addresses the flaws in the current protocol.
| potluckyears wrote:
| Perhaps a valuable public service should be owned and governed
| by...the public? In a corporation like Twitter, only people who
| can afford a financial stake have a say, and having more
| financial stake means having more say. Not a great structure if
| your concern is power. Perhaps everyone in the public (with a
| social rather than financial stake in a platform like Twitter)
| should have a voice in its governance.
| oblio wrote:
| We should definitely have public owned non profits, maybe
| even government sponsored ones.
|
| They're utilities and should be treated as such.
|
| I don't expect this to happen in the US unless there's a a
| Great Digital Depression.
| ctdonath wrote:
| Indeed, Twitter was great.
|
| Until the Great Bluecheck Purge, which revolved the verified
| status of significant twitterati- not because of question about
| their identity, but because their politics were incorrect.
| scrubs wrote:
| From the first comment in Twitter feed re: abandoning twitter
| for Pinterest, we got to start a new meme:
|
| I knew <software_name_here> when it used to rock-n-roll. I knew
| <software_name_here> when it used to do the pony.
|
| to tally software that started great but alas died on the vine.
| Dumblydorr wrote:
| Has mediating access to information been the defining tool of
| control for civilizations? Maybe in tyrannical, despotic
| societies that is true, but those don't allow Twitter today via
| firewalls, so that's mostly a moot point in this thread.
|
| I'd say the sword and the coin have both been far more
| controlling than limited information spread.
|
| What of free society? Is the government of the USA, UK, or
| other "enlightened" societies throughout history relying upon
| censorship and denial of information? I think they're moreso
| allowing moneyed interests and plutocracy to have lobbying and
| backdoor dealings, they can easily ignore the public square
| most of the time. I just don't see Twitter piercing the armor
| of entrenched interests that well.
|
| In contrast, I do see it degrading and toxifying democratic
| discourse, making us less resilient and more divided. That's
| anti-thetical to a free society in my view.
| mjamil wrote:
| I disagree that "enlightened" societies don't rely on
| mediating access to information as the defining tool of
| control; our difference of opinion is perhaps that you think
| of this purely as limiting information spread, where I think
| of it also as shaping the information for their own ends. The
| governments of the UK and the USA, to state two examples you
| mentioned, have used these tools effectively as propaganda
| channels repeatedly to sell their vision of armed conflict.
| The second Iraq war wasn't that long ago.
|
| I'll make a tangentially related argument: Starting with the
| printing press, and through the advent of telephone, radio,
| television, and now the Internet (mainly via the Web),
| controlling messaging via these media (or controlling these
| media directly at times) has been as much a tool of control
| for those in power in democratic societies as in autocratic
| ones.
| smsm42 wrote:
| USA is literally founded on this principle:
|
| Congress shall make no law /.../ abridging the freedom of
| speech, or of the press
|
| And while it talks about the Congress, it is clear _why_
| the founders considered it to be necessary - the principal
| value of the free and unabridged speech to forming a free
| society is tremendous.
|
| True, in an armed conflict, speech has been used as a
| weapon, and it is also true that the reality of US
| government has often fallen short of the noble ideals
| laying at its foundation. But until recently, it has been a
| widely recognized principle that unmediated and un-gated
| access to speech and expression - be it audio, printed,
| electronic or any other means of speech - is a vital
| cornerstone of a modern free society. Unfortunately,
| recently certain part of political and cultural
| establishment decided they want to "move past" these
| antiquated ideas of equality and appoint themselves as
| gatekeepers of speech - "for our common benefit and the
| benefit of the society", of which they are but selfless
| servants, to be sure.
|
| The new Twitter CEO is, unfortunately, one of these people,
| and has unashamedly promoted this approach personally.
| Thus, we can expect only redoubling of effort from his side
| to suppress and remove speech that he considers "harmful"
| and discussion of topics he considers not up for
| discussion. Fortunately, there's an easy way to deal with
| it. As David Chappelle noted recently, "twitter is not a
| real place" - and doesn't need to be elevated to the
| position of society's gatekeeper, but rather demoted to
| society's cesspool. They proved themselves not up to the
| task to maintain robust free discourse platform - let them
| rot in their own bubble.
| azekai wrote:
| >As David Chappelle noted recently, "twitter is not a
| real place" - and doesn't need to be elevated to the
| position of society's gatekeeper, but rather demoted to
| society's cesspool. They proved themselves not up to the
| task to maintain robust free discourse platform - let
| them rot in their own bubble.
|
| Agreed. Part of that is the 'hot take' represented by the
| limited characters of a tweet are inimical to nuance. So
| much of it is just people taking turns 'dunking' on each
| other, and it gets increasingly heated and rage inducing.
| Add to that an inflammatory algorithm, where outrage
| drives interaction, and of course you have a cesspit.
|
| Part of the good thing about the old internet is when you
| have to construct a blog to share your thoughts, you have
| to be driven to actually, y'know, build something. It
| also has the added benefit of being relatively closed
| off. Now everyone has easy access to an empty field with
| which to yell into the void... and it turns out with that
| low bar and high inter-connectedness comes a _lot_ of
| yelling.
| bakuninsbart wrote:
| Both you and the person two comments above have overtly
| rose-tinted glasses on the proclaimed ideas of the so-
| called "free societies".The founding fathers did not
| accidentally deny their slaves the right to free speech
| and a free life. It is no accident that no woman nor a
| man without property signed the constitution. Public
| discourse has been dominated by white, rich men since the
| inception of the US, and history is full of examples of
| active suppression of speech by women and minorities.
|
| This doesn't go against the notion that a world in which
| the reach of speech is controlled by large tech companies
| is quite dystopian either, I just really don't wanna go
| "back to the good old times" either.
| CameronNemo wrote:
| _USA is literally founded on this principle:_
|
| _Congress shall make no law /.../ abridging the freedom
| of speech, or of the press_
|
| IIRC the founders explicitly did not include that in
| their constitution. Hence it being called "First
| _Amendment_ " rights.
| trevyn wrote:
| 1) "Those in power" does not mean only the government.
|
| 2) Mediating access to information in Western societies is
| now in a much more advanced state than brute censorship.
| slowmovintarget wrote:
| > Beneath the rule of men entirely great
|
| > The pen is mightier than the sword.
| oblio wrote:
| That's easy to write when you're not on the wrong end of a
| Mongolian bow or a T-34 gun barrel.
| salt-thrower wrote:
| > What of free society? Is the government of the USA, UK, or
| other "enlightened" societies throughout history relying upon
| censorship and denial of information? I think they're moreso
| allowing moneyed interests and plutocracy to have lobbying
| and backdoor dealings, they can easily ignore the public
| square most of the time.
|
| This is definitely part of the picture. To add to this, I'll
| refer to Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky. "Propaganda"
| does still exist in modern "free societies," but it isn't
| overt like a 20th-century dictatorship would have been.
| Subtle manipulation of corporate media by monied interests to
| sway public opinion, combined with lobbying and corporate
| capture of government institutions, is more than enough to
| maintain the hegemony of certain narratives and power
| structures. I find it fascinating, and unsettling, to learn
| about.
|
| So in a nutshell, controlling information and mainstream
| media narratives _is_ important for the modern ruling class,
| but it 's much more subtle than overt censorship like a
| dictatorship would have. Which, in my view, makes it much
| more advanced and insidious.
| mariavillosa wrote:
| >Is the government of the USA, UK, or other "enlightened"
| societies throughout history
|
| That sentence piques my interest, do people see the USA and
| UK that way? I think of Switzerland and Canada that way, for
| example, but my knowledge is all based on stereotypes. Maybe
| it depends where you're from, as the stereotypes must differ
| among regions.
| webmobdev wrote:
| > _I, for one, will always pick an imperfectly moderated
| cesspool_
|
| I once thought like that. And now, after seeing the cesspool of
| hate and ignorance on social media, and the turmoil it has
| created, I miss the days of quality journalism. Today, I fear
| getting trapped into echo chambers on the net, and not knowing
| anything beyond the narrow view they create. Having to figure
| out what content to trust is also not only tiring, but
| dangerous too.
| theduder99 wrote:
| the guy responsible for these gems is the new CEO?
| "If they are not gonna make a distinction between muslims and
| extremists, then why should I distinguish between white people
| and racists." -- Parag Agrawal (@paraga) October 26,
| 2010
|
| "Our role is not to be bound by the First Amendment, but our role
| is to serve a healthy public conversation and our moves are
| reflective of things that we believe lead to a healthier public
| conversation," said Agrawal.
|
| "The kinds of things that we do about this is, focus less on
| thinking about free speech, but thinking about how the times have
| changed."
| sadfev wrote:
| Good riddance, but if history is a guide then an even more awful
| human being will head that toxic garbage of a company.
| akudha wrote:
| When it comes to social media companies, it is all relative.
| Compared to Facebook, Twitter seems like a saint.
|
| They definitely could do more, but remember they did more than
| other social media companies - warnings on tweets, banning
| accounts etc.
|
| This is not ideal, but I don't think any social media company
| is going to do more than Twitter did. Sad state of affairs
| ksec wrote:
| So the The Great Resignation in US is real.
|
| But He is still the CEO of Square.
| dcchambers wrote:
| Happy to see a CTO promoted to CEO, hopefully a signal that
| Twitter is still committed to growing/incubating the engineering
| side of the business.
| MisterPea wrote:
| I agree, but is Twitter really suffering with any engineering
| problems? I generally would like to see a CTO come in charge
| but here's a unique case where someone from product might be
| more suitable.
| 8K832d7tNmiQ wrote:
| Their web video player is still horrendously bad and still
| haven't fix their buffering problem for years.
| moffkalast wrote:
| If I had a dollar for every pixel I see in twitter videos
| I'd have two dollars which isn't a lot but it's weird that
| they still somehow call them videos.
| riffic wrote:
| yes, Twitter is crawling with bugs and problems of scale
| (with an obvious lack of user support).
|
| see /r/twitter for a summary of issues people see on a day to
| day basis.
| _hyn3 wrote:
| In that case, why would it make any sense to promote the
| person who was ostensibly most responsible for curing those
| ills?
| riffic wrote:
| you ever hear the theory about failing upwards?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle
|
| edit: I think I got it wrong. maybe this is a closer fit:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Putt%27s_Law_and_the_Succes
| sfu...
| freediver wrote:
| Using their API is still a nightmare.
| DrBenCarson wrote:
| That's still fundamentally a product problem unless you're
| having issues with the API's behavior (vs its design)
| freediver wrote:
| I agree, just think that a developer-first culture would
| not allow it to happen.
| purple_ferret wrote:
| His wife is a GP at a16z[0]. I'm sure he's not unfamiliar with
| the world of Silicon Valley hyper-growth.
|
| [0]https://a16z.com/author/vineeta-agarwala/
| mathattack wrote:
| The stock popped 10%. Is this a vote of confidence against him or
| for whoever has been waiting in the wings? There has been enough
| agitation against him by the activists that this can't be a
| surprise.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| Dorsey seemed willing to stick to Twitter's core vision. It
| would not surprise me at all if investors like Paul Singer
| decided to try and convert it into a second facebook.
| soneca wrote:
| The stock is down for the day at the moment. I wonder if all
| comments rationalizing the (very) brief 10% up will rethink
| their arguments.
| mathattack wrote:
| Interesting - it could be that the reality is harder than the
| headline.
| zz865 wrote:
| > stock popped 10%
|
| stock is back to where it was a week ago, and is still lower
| than most of the year. These headlines are meaningless.
| cjrp wrote:
| Vote of no confidence surely
| tinyhouse wrote:
| Stock is red now. Pump and dump.
| koheripbal wrote:
| Twitter is extremely toxic and divisive, and Dorsey is... the
| same. People are hoping his removal will allow the platform to
| mature.
| boringg wrote:
| Are you trying to say this is Twitter's version of Uber's
| Travis Kalanick getting pushed to the exit moment?
| johncena33 wrote:
| Twitter is THE social media I am not able to use without
| letting it affect my mental health. Anytime I logged into
| Twitter, I came out more angry, bitter and outraged. It's
| like the whole platform is built around hot takes, dunking,
| bullying, and outrage. It always baffles me how mainstream
| media never utters a word how toxic Twitter is.
| [deleted]
| mbg721 wrote:
| The mainstream media are trying to recapture the attention-
| monopoly they had in the 60s-70s, and are largely
| succeeding. They don't want to compete with Twitter; they
| want to buy it.
| samtheprogram wrote:
| Any particular reason you excluded the 80s (or even the
| 90s) from the attention-monopoly time period?
| mbg721 wrote:
| Only that I think the 80s were a little past the sweet-
| spot of network television; cable was starting to become
| widespread.
| elorant wrote:
| Mainstream media has no problem with Twitter because it's
| not eating their lunch.
| JohnWhigham wrote:
| Makes me think of how many traditional media outlets had
| a lot to say about YouTube being "rabbit holes" and
| whatnot around election times, but have a lot less to say
| about them now that Google picked up the pace on
| censoring content and pruning platform capabilities
| (removing dislikes being a big one).
| basisword wrote:
| Completely agree. On top of that, even if you avoid the
| politically charged stuff, there is just a staggering
| amount of bullshit. "Thought leaders" with tens of
| thousands of followers all tweeting the same broad ideas as
| if they're original thoughts.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| Oh god. The thought leaders. The truly despicable aspect
| of Twitter. These people pop up on my feed and it's just
| extremely cringeworthy. No need to explain in depth what
| their thoughts are. Just 140 characters and off you go.
| [deleted]
| vxNsr wrote:
| > _It always baffles me how mainstream media never utters a
| word how toxic Twitter is_
|
| Because they are the toxicity.
| reTensor wrote:
| It's like when Kyle Vogt was forcibly removed from the CEO
| position at Cruise and replaced by Dan Ammann.
|
| You need someone with brains and decency (not just luck) to
| run the company.
| mattrighetti wrote:
| That won't happen, the community is there to stay and it
| won't be less toxic just because the CEO resigned.
| duxup wrote:
| >allow the platform to mature
|
| What does that mean?
|
| The medium is the message and Twitter is curt, prone to
| exaggeration / outrageous / mean spirited content.... and the
| people on there EAT IT UP.
|
| What is going to mature?
| YinglingLight wrote:
| censorship, censorship will mature
| renewiltord wrote:
| Twitter is only like that if one consumes that content.
| Like, if one only ever follows John Carmack and Gwern, that
| won't be the experience. Saying Twitter is mean-spirited is
| essentially the same as saying that no matter where one
| goes one smells shit. Everyone who feels that way should
| check the bottom of their shoe.
|
| I suggest Matthew 7:5 for them.
| duxup wrote:
| It's just too much work pruning / hoping you find folks
| who are sort a single topic accounts for me.
|
| Often they fall off the wagon and get into spats and so
| on. Too much hassle to constantly add / remove folks to
| keep a feed that isn't "typical social media feed BS".
| wutbrodo wrote:
| Fwiw, this isn't my experience. My following list is
| remarkably stable, and I've only had to prune people
| "falling of the wagon" once or twice. It's also not much
| work: you see their tweet, remember that they've done
| thus more than once recently, and click unfollow.
|
| The main cost is that this isn't conducive to a very
| large following list, but perhaps that's a good thing.
| duxup wrote:
| I think I reached that point but then the list was like
| ... 3 stable accounts.
|
| At that point I just didn't find it worth it even
| visiting. Finding more didn't seem like something I
| wanted to do.
| renewiltord wrote:
| I have been append-only to my list and it's been great.
| Only ever had to take Matt Yglesias off my list and
| that's because he tweets all the time.
|
| The downside (maybe upside) is that I run out of Twitter
| content pretty fast.
| jrsj wrote:
| Censorship and more algo driven content discovery to push
| ads and approved narratives.
|
| Dorsey was probably the biggest advocate for free speech
| amongst the CEOs of any major company & Twitter is
| significantly less toxic than Facebook partly because of
| him. I fully expect his removal to lead the company in a
| more dystopian direction.
| duxup wrote:
| I don't know what anyone means exactly by censorship
| anymore.
|
| Like someone regularly posting obvious lies and bs?
|
| I feel like I need an exact example from every person
| when the topic comes up, and that's not really easy to
| do.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| What about blocking an article about Hunter Biden's
| laptop?
|
| What's bs to you, may not be to someone else. Speech is
| way larger than just facts. I wouldn't want to live in a
| society where opinions are not allowed.
|
| Free speech is important and it's already not including
| violence (eg. Screaming fire in a crowded place is a
| crime and not covered by free speech). We don't need tech
| politicised censors on their platforms-not-platforms and
| we don't need hate speech restrictions.
| duxup wrote:
| >What's bs to you, may not be to someone else.
|
| That doesn't make it not BS.
|
| I think facts are real things.
| NaturalPhallacy wrote:
| It was leaked that twitter has a "Trends Blacklist"
|
| So it's not actually "trending" it's Twitter(tm) Approved
| Trending(r).
|
| Censoring things they know are trending because of
| arbitrary reasons is a pretty good example.
| jrsj wrote:
| The specific cases are less important than the overall
| trend which is social media companies using their control
| of who sees what to influence public opinion. It's common
| to think in terms of users being banned or users being
| censored, but the real issue is ideas being censored in
| aggregate. This allows for a more subtle distortion of
| reality than what traditional media can achieve.
| Essentially it's possible to make public opinion look
| like whatever you want it to on any given issue & control
| which issues are at the front of people's minds.
|
| They have many tools to do this. Promoting certain
| viewpoints & hiding others in feeds, manipulation of
| trending topics, various degrees of shadowbanning,
| blacklisting specific links or images, etc.
|
| None of this is regulated and there's no real
| transparency. It's dangerous and I expect it to continue
| to get worse.
| duxup wrote:
| >The specific cases are less important
|
| I completely disagree.
|
| Complaining about censorship because someone can't post
| some lies and vitriol targeting someone is far different
| than someone posting some well thought out ideas and
| getting them removed.
| splitstud wrote:
| The complaints around censorship have to do with users
| posting anything related to certain viewpoints (in fact
| or in error) no longer being able to post anything at
| all.
|
| Shaping the tenor of public discourse while also claiming
| that one is not legally a publisher is not something we
| should allow in our society.
|
| If you think this has anything to do with merely 'lies'
| or flaming, you're not keeping up.
| duxup wrote:
| I really haven't seen what you seem to be alluding to.
|
| That's kinda why I talk about having to ask for exact
| examples... I still have no clue what exactly you think
| is being censored.
| MarkLowenstein wrote:
| The propagandists have confused you and many others on
| this topic. Telling lies or BS is absolutely not
| censorship. When something is not allowed to be said or
| published, or is soft-censored by muting its
| distribution... _that_ is censorship.
|
| One reason avoiding censorship is so important is that a
| lot of times, the truth is trampled by doing so. Remember
| Galileo. And while it is being trampled, guess what the
| truth is called? "Lies".
| duxup wrote:
| I think facts exist and people can do damage spreading
| lies, threats, hate, and etc.
|
| I honestly have trouble following where you're going. I'm
| not aware of any effort to censor Galileo at this point.
| If that is the case I'd like to hear about it.
| baumy wrote:
| I'm not sure what's complicated about this.
|
| People "regularly posting obvious lies and bs" is,
| definitionally, not censorship. Censorship can only take
| place when something _isn 't_ said, not when it _is_.
|
| > I think facts exist and people can do damage spreading
| lies, threats, hate, and etc.
|
| You'd probably be very hard pressed, particularly on this
| website but even just in general, to find anyone who
| disagreed with this statement in a vacuum. But even
| beyond the (very much not straightforward) problem of who
| gets to decide what's a fact, there are people, myself
| included, who agree that damage is done in the way you
| mentioned, but believe that even worse damage is done by
| censorship.
|
| The person you're responding to is clearly not referring
| to any effort to censor Galileo _today_. They are
| observing that he was censored by the authoritative
| figures of his day for spreading what was then considered
| "obvious lies and BS", because of the amount of "damage"
| he was supposedly doing. But of course, it turned out he
| was much more correct than the people who censored him.
| This begs the question of why we should believe the
| authoritative figures of today are any more likely to be
| wholly correct about what is a lie and what is damaging
| than the authoritative figures of yesterday, and whether
| they'll trample over the truth in their attempts to
| suppress lies.
|
| Hopefully you can now follow where the conversation is
| going.
| duxup wrote:
| I understand the Galileo reference, what is the example
| today then?
| baumy wrote:
| Well I could throw out a number of examples, any of which
| you may reasonably disagree with and all of which are by
| necessity controversial, so I don't think there's value
| in steering the conversation in that direction. But
| asking for a specific example is rather missing the point
| - we are discussing the idea of censorship, not the
| merits of any individual controversial claim or figure.
| We don't know which examples of ideas being censored will
| be looked back at years from now as times when the truth
| was trampled on. And since we can't know, we can't afford
| to censor, no matter how convinced we are today that
| something is a lie or BS.
|
| For the sake of not dismissing your question entirely
| though, even though I believe it's not the right question
| to ask, I'll offer up the covid lab leak theory and
| everyone who argued in favor of it. Decried as a racist
| conspiracy theory and actively censored from social media
| for over a year, but now accepted as at least plausible,
| even probable.
| LordFast wrote:
| "I'm not aware of any effort to censor Galileo at this
| point. If that is the case I'd like to hear about it."
|
| He's saying Galileo was censored during the time Galileo
| was alive.
| duxup wrote:
| What exactly is being censored like Galileo today?
| bduerst wrote:
| Galileo's book was censored by the church because it
| insulted the pope.
|
| I'm not certain if that exists much today. Similar
| censorship would be curtailing mockery of public
| authority figures.
| bduerst wrote:
| Misinformation and lies can directly cause harm - i.e.
| scaring/deluding people into not getting a vaccine for
| COVID-19. Any blatantly incorrect speech where the
| expression alone can kill others should be evaluated for
| censorship. Even the founding philosophers of free speech
| agreed that expression should be curtailed when it would
| cause harm to others.
|
| Also weirdly enough, Galileo was censored because he
| insulted the pope, not because of his theories on
| heliocentricity. Galileo tainted (part) of his objective
| scientific truth by injecting his own biased personal
| vendetta into it.
| codezero wrote:
| Advocates for free speech that support a "public square"
| model of free speech but who refuse to adapt that to the
| modern digital communication systems are doing more harm
| than good in my opinion.
|
| A public square filled with nation state actors
| influencing the volume and contents of the subjects of
| discussion in the public square are doing more to inhibit
| free speech than any technological solution owned by a
| social media platform. Corporate censorship is a lot
| easier to fight, as users can walk or investors can react
| when things are not matching the desired effect. It's not
| perfect, but better than an open-ended "everything free"
| world where it can be manipulated by those with the right
| resources (in my opinion).
|
| What we need is for people to get a lot more creative
| with how to create, support, and sustain free speech
| online without relying on millennia old concepts which do
| not map to our current problems quite well.
| [deleted]
| Rastonbury wrote:
| Sorry but cynically toxic and divisive algos drives more
| attention thus more ad revenue (see FB), it's not going to
| get better with a more investor friendly CEO
| elzbardico wrote:
| like big tobacco selecting tobacco plant strains with more
| nicotine to ensure addiction
| LordFast wrote:
| I personally think this move, and to a larger extent the
| current trends we're seeing in our industry has much more
| to do with revenue, profits and share price than it does
| with the product or any social consequences.
| someguydave wrote:
| I think twitter moderation has been so overtly one sided
| that there is plenty of profit to be made by warming up to
| the other side.
| philjohn wrote:
| Do you have examples to share? From what I've seen of
| posts taken down and/or accounts banned it seems to be
| people spewing severe vitriol - and that's on both sides.
| ConceptJunkie wrote:
| I'll take Things That Will Never Happen for $400, Alex.
| anthropodie wrote:
| And what is the cost of that to society? These companies
| always maximize their own profits. Nobody cares about
| society or greater good anymore.
|
| I wonder if that is the reason why we are living in the
| age of misinformation.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Yeah not really sure how people think trying to squeeze
| more money out of the platform will somehow _improve_ the
| experience.
|
| Twitter has not as aggressively monetized with advertising
| as FB has, I wonder if we will see the same soon.
| testplzignore wrote:
| Did the news leak before market open? His tweet was at 10:48
| EST, and the email screenshot has 9:45 AM, which presumably is
| EST (it's certainly not PST).
|
| Edit: The submission to HN was before the tweet. Huh? I guess
| it originally linked to somewhere else.
| 333c wrote:
| The HN submission was originally a link to an article with a
| headline something like "Jack Dorsey expected to step down as
| Twitter CEO."
| vmception wrote:
| They saw Dorsey's plan, and liked another plan better. Simple.
| mathattack wrote:
| Was it plan or execution? I understand he had some very
| aggressive performance targets to hit too.
| elliekelly wrote:
| I _think_ parent comment is making a joke in reference to
| HBO's Succession: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5xBrFbNHhYk
|
| The line is a bullshit TV talking point to rationalize (to
| the markets) an abrupt 180 by one of the characters.
| mathattack wrote:
| Thanks for the cultural context!
| vmception wrote:
| Is it bullshit? The plan the buyers like has a chance of
| making just a few more dollars for their limited partners
| than Jack Dorsey's plan and thats why they bought more
| shares. Simple.
| [deleted]
| HNTA_1 wrote:
| The past few years the stock market has been so divorced from
| reality that I wouldn't read too much into it.
| sbarre wrote:
| I think people are excited for _any_ change at Twitter right
| now.
|
| They've been making progress in the last year or two but I
| suspect most people think they could be doing more...
| polote wrote:
| There is an history of tech Startups doing very well
| financially when their founders leave. See Google, Microsoft,
| Apple
| cblconfederate wrote:
| So now like 3 of the worlds most prominent tech cos are led by
| Indians, if i m counting right?
| throwaway158497 wrote:
| yes. I even went to same colleges as these guys. And Here I am
| sitting in daily standup hoping the company won't lay me off
| while I am on H1B.
| busymom0 wrote:
| His tweet the day prior to resigning was:
|
| > I love twitter
|
| Weird timing. Also I don't know anyone who actively and daily
| uses Pinterest.
| newaccount2021 wrote:
| its interesting that Jack hovers between two worlds with such
| opposed politics - Twitter is woke AF while the crypto community
| is liberatian/pro-2A/pro-markets
|
| is this an indication of Jack's political re-awakening? the rebel
| move in 2021 is to take the red pill...
| thrower123 wrote:
| It's become rather clear that any attempts to "fix" Twitter are
| sure to degrade it instead. The best thing to do would be to
| leave it alone in benign neglect, but that ain't gonna happen.
| C'est la vie.
| zxipp wrote:
| I can't even imagine what kind of lovecraftian horror will arise
| to take Jack's place at Twitter.
| rootsudo wrote:
| Doubling down on bitcoin/financial payment/payment gateway.
|
| Smart.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| First he shared Rothbard's "Enemy of the State" and now he's
| resigning from Twitter, one of our censor-happy tech overlord...
|
| I'd love to know what goes on in his head besides the PR crap
| he's posting.
| revskill wrote:
| Still remember first time i used Twitter, seems so slow due to
| Rails and decided to go away.
|
| Then about 2 years later, the site became very fast which kept me
| stay.
|
| It seems Twitter team is one of the most responsive dev team that
| i've seen.
| baby wrote:
| What's the stack now?
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| JVM (Scala)
| hsbxv wrote:
| Look at all these Indian CEOs. Cleaning up the white man mess.
| thedudeabides5 wrote:
| Twitter killed my four year relationship.
| j0ncc wrote:
| what happened?
| _nickwhite wrote:
| You graduated and had to get a job?
| wly_cdgr wrote:
| Twitter will probably end up being less fun without him. Do we
| know if he was fired or if this was actually voluntary?
| FpUser wrote:
| I sometimes read a post in Twitter when getting a link. Other
| than that my usage of Twitter is the same as of FB and the likes
| - zilch.
| neogodless wrote:
| Related:
|
| Tweet by Jack confirming...
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29381199
|
| EDIT: Now that the threads are merged, you can ignore this
| comment!
| k__ wrote:
| Also, CTO becomes CEO.
| bellyfullofbac wrote:
| Ha, ironic that his long text is a screenshot, hardly readable on
| mobile. What an excellent demonstration of the platform he built!
| /s
|
| He should've done a sentence a tweet and threw a mention to
| threaderapp at the end...
| TheRealDunkirk wrote:
| This feels like the Gates/Ballmer transition, and I think it will
| have the same effect on the world/IT: massive increase of
| integrations, profit, and assimilation, at the expense of end-
| user satisfaction.
| avrionov wrote:
| It looks very different. Twitter CEO is replaced by the CTO how
| has a phd in Computer science from Stanford. Ballmer was
| running sales and support in Microsoft.
| ldehaan wrote:
| More people need to quit twitter. The employees should all quit
| if their owners won't convert to a 501-c3 and submit to a large
| community elected board. Otherwise this will just be the tool of
| our destruction. Censorship should be censored, it's not healthy
| and so there should be a censorship board dedicated to censoring
| censorship at <social media platform>. Or just stop telling
| people what they can see and hear, Twitter is the new Facebook, i
| quit Facebook 6 Years ago and now it's the fogey platform,
| they're even rebranding like a grandmother dying her hair. Soon
| twatter will be the fogey platform and facechuck will meta itself
| out of existence. Good riddance. IRC is dead, long live IRC!
| mikepurvis wrote:
| Good for Bret Taylor-- he's had quite a career over the years,
| with being an architect of Google Maps, then founding FriendFeed,
| being acquired into Facebook and ending up in senior leadership
| at Salesforce and Twitter.
| ohmanjjj wrote:
| Bret Taylor will one day run for President
| nickysielicki wrote:
| I always liked Dorsey after he went on JRE. I really don't like
| the way they kicked the president off Twitter but Jack seemed to
| have honest intentions and I was willing to give him a pass. He
| created a monster and he was doing his best to point it in the
| interest of hard principles rather than business or political
| interests, or at least, that's what he said. Unfortunately so
| much of the coastal intelligencia and Obama-era political class
| have been allowed to usurp so much power in tech, especially in
| social media. They're calling the shots, to the point where
| Dorsey wanted to do better and couldn't win. Them's the brakes.
|
| I predict Twitter will die a death of irrelevancy sooner than we
| think, given that Dorsey was fighting and failed. Nobody is
| interested in playing in the Twitter Commons Playground if it
| can't stay fresh and neutral.
| jcun4128 wrote:
| random rant: was annoyed with the "Twitter will use BTC" then
| days later "nvm"
| twodayslate wrote:
| You can tip via the Bitcoin network
| https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/product/2021/bringing-...
| ryzvonusef wrote:
| Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey is expected to step down from his
| executive role, sources tell CNBC's David Faber.
| Twitter stock jumped more than 11% on the news. This
| is breaking news. Please check back for updates.
|
| ----
|
| This whole thing is so bizarre
| josefresco wrote:
| It said 5% when I read the article. Now they've removed the %
| and just say "Twitter stock was up on the news before being
| halted due to news pending."
| uptown wrote:
| "This whole thing is so bizarre"
|
| Why? He's been a part-time CEO whose focus has clearly been on
| Square. Having a full-time CEO focused on a company with as
| high a profile as Twitter makes a lot of sense.
| ryzvonusef wrote:
| the method of announcement not the actual contents. There was
| an investor group keep on kicking Dorsey out so that's not
| strange. But to have it announced like this on a random
| Monday morning before start of markets, and not even a proper
| presser from the board("Twitter did not respond to a request
| for comment."), but a "leak" by a reporter...
|
| TF is going on?
| gigglesupstairs wrote:
| Well, this is how breaking news are usually broken in
| tidbits as they come in. Similar lingo too. Timing is
| suspect but by the looks of it they were correct and had
| limited information at the time.
| enlyth wrote:
| It seems the stock is up on speculation they will get bought
| out by someone
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| tata71 wrote:
| The stock is up because Jack is going to finish up
| harvesting the cryptocurrency related seeds that have
| started sprouting fast over at Square, and integrate them
| all into Twitter before anyone else,
|
| making Twitter into what it "should have been" the whole
| time.
|
| Twitter tipping has already been announced, etc
| basisword wrote:
| ...Twitter's a public company.
|
| [edit: well this was a silly comment :/ please ignore ]
| Kalium wrote:
| That doesn't have to get in the way of an acquisition.
| Public companies are routinely acquired in a variety of
| ways.
| basisword wrote:
| Yep. Completely right. I'm a idiot/very tired :)
| sbarre wrote:
| Who would buy Twitter??
| tata71 wrote:
| The Saudis/SoftBank.
|
| Wait.
| travisgriggs wrote:
| Or Disney. :)
| ceejayoz wrote:
| (They considered it!
| https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/24/disney-bob-iger-on-not-
| buyin...)
| Alex3917 wrote:
| The employees have been trying to buy it through an ESOP.
| tata71 wrote:
| Fully support this -- doubtful all owners would sell.
| azeirah wrote:
| Some random tech investor? It doesn't have to be Google,
| Facebook or _insert other large tech company here_.
| cinntaile wrote:
| It's a great source of information so I'm sure they have
| some interested buyers at the right price.
| kwertyoowiyop wrote:
| Square?
| chrinic4948 wrote:
| > Who would buy Twitter??
|
| Zucc
| rvz wrote:
| > Twitter stock jumped more than 11% on the news.
|
| Right. It better _close_ up more than 11% today.
| saagarjha wrote:
| It's been updated:
|
| Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey is expected to step down from his
| executive role, sources tell CNBC's David Faber.
|
| Twitter stock jumped more than 11% on the news.
|
| Dorsey currently serves as both the CEO of Twitter and Square,
| his digital payments company. Twitter stakeholder Elliott
| Management had sought to replace Jack Dorsey as CEO in 2020
| before the investment firm reached a deal with the company's
| management.
|
| Elliott Management founder and billionaire investor Paul Singer
| had wondered whether Dorsey should run both of the public
| companies, calling for him to step down as CEO of one of them.
|
| It's unclear who's set to succeed Dorsey. But if he steps down,
| the next CEO will have to meet Twitter's aggressive internal
| goals. The company said earlier this year it aims to have 315
| million monetizable daily active users by the end of 2023 and
| to at least double its annual revenue in that year.
|
| Twitter did not respond to a request for comment.
| bhouston wrote:
| Twitter under Jack Dorsey has been a huge cryptocurrency
| promotion engine. I wonder if that remains.
| boringg wrote:
| Also just a giant botfest which happens to also pump crypto.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Other than adding mandatory 2FA and introducing a 24-hour time
| delay on account renames and 2 hours on profile name/image
| changes (which should be a given for any blue-check account),
| what else can Twitter realistically do given that the other
| side (crypto pumpers) has literally tons of money floating
| around?
| LegitShady wrote:
| Use some of the same AI they use to moderate other sorts of
| comments to moderate the crypto scammers.
| nix0n wrote:
| > the other side (crypto pumpers) has literally tons of money
| floating around
|
| No they don't, they put it all into crypto.
|
| Twitter welcomes bots (and other ways for many accounts to be
| run by few real people) because they want to increase their
| Monthly Active User count.
| space_rock wrote:
| Bitcoin. He's not a crypto supporter
| stepanhruda wrote:
| Yeah he has gone out of his way to speak against ETH.
| shrimpx wrote:
| Most of the replies to his resignation tweet are Bitcoin
| trolls.
| k__ wrote:
| When I look at the CTO's (who becomes CEO now) tweets it seems
| they will keep this going.
| asdfsd234234444 wrote:
| As someone bullish on crypto, I look forward to cleaning up all
| the spam/scammers on Twitter. I think legitimate integration
| into Twitter (i.e tipping, subscriptions, cash app, etc) will
| be powerful.
| user-the-name wrote:
| About time. Twitter has been absolutely floundering for years
| under his control, since he has absolutely no idea why anyone is
| using the site and has just been throwing random ideas copied
| from others at the wall to see what sticks (nothing, so far), and
| cryptocurrency garbage nobody wants.
| floatboth wrote:
| Sadly the cryptocurrency garbage is likely to continue:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29381806 says that the CTO
| who will become CEO is also kind of a buttcoiner.
| tootie wrote:
| Not to sound like a Boomer, but I still genuinely don't get
| what Twitter is for. I actually finally created an account a
| year ago and most of my follows are pretty high-brow
| (journalists, various industry experts, some big shots in my
| outer circle) and I still get almost no value from it. They use
| twitter to post inside jokes or promos to web content that I
| didn't have trouble finding without twitter. Maybe 1 out of
| every 1000 tweets will have an unfiltered take that I can't get
| somewhere else.
|
| Also, the promoted tweets are always way, way off my interests.
| They look like pigeon droppings on my windshield.
| dorkwood wrote:
| What Twitter used to be good for is following a particular
| niche of people. For example, if you start following just a
| handful of developers who post content you like, and follow
| other developers who they interact with and retweet, the idea
| was that you'd end up with a feed perfectly curated for your
| interests, made up only of people who post content that you
| find interesting.
|
| Unfortunately Twitter doesn't want you to use their service
| this way, so they inject other (usually divisive) content
| into your feed in an effort to increase engagement. Because
| of this, I'm not really sure what Twitter is for anymore. I
| guess you could make the claim that it's keeping your finger
| on the pulse of what random people in the world are talking
| about at any given moment?
| snowwrestler wrote:
| Twitter is the absolutely fastest way to get new information.
| For example the "Omicron" variant surfaced into my Twitter
| feed last week minutes after the first briefing by South
| African health authorities, when it was still known only by
| its numerical designation, before any news service had
| written it up.
|
| The value of this is that it gives me more time to spend
| digging deeper into topics that matter to me. I don't have to
| keep the TV on in the background all the time to maintain
| situational awareness. I don't have to constantly skim basic
| news articles just to know what is happening.
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| Evidently the solution is to create a loginwall so that
| you're forced to create an account rather than being able to
| access the content without one. That way Twitter can provide
| "value".
| latexr wrote:
| > most of my follows are pretty high-brow (...) and I still
| get almost no value from it. They use twitter to post (...)
| promos to web content that I didn't have trouble finding
| without twitter.
|
| Have you considered you're not getting value from it
| _because_ your follows are high-brow?
|
| Instead of following big shots with their own marketing
| teams, follow small creators in areas that interest you (e.g.
| indie game developers).
| tootie wrote:
| If the platform made it easier to discover these kind of
| niches, that would be some real value.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| It will be interesting to see how Twitter changes as a result.
| Twitter with selective following and setting your timeline to
| 'time order' creates a pretty good environment for me. It feels
| like the equivalent of living in only a few chosen 'subreddits'
| rather than getting the full frontal reddit experience.
| nend wrote:
| This seems to hold true for many social media sites: facebook,
| reddit, twitter. It takes effort on behalf of the user to make
| their experience on the site "better".
|
| And by better I mean, less divisive, and less mindless
| scrolling of memes/low effort content.
|
| Thinking about it from the business's perspective, it probably
| ultimately also lowers their user engagement metrics. Users get
| a higher quality experience using the site, but also spend less
| time on the site. It sorta reminds me of the freemium/grinding
| experience in games today. It makes for a worse game
| experience, but a better company bottom line.
| tqi wrote:
| I don't think it's necessarily a business incentives/metrics
| thing. Rather I think a social media experience can be at
| most 2 of 3:
|
| - Uncensored/unmoderated
|
| - Encompasses all viewpoints
|
| - Civil
| milesward wrote:
| I do not think you can get a site to be uncensored and
| remain civil, assuming anonymity.
| tqi wrote:
| I think if its sufficiently niche (topic or membership
| wise), the communities can have fairly civil
| conversations (and even disagreements). I think this is
| largely due to the fact that being niche means its less
| likely to attract troll-types looking for a platform.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| It takes effort on behalf of the user to make their
| experience on the site "better"
|
| Broadly, I agree.
|
| I would say that for me, Twitter falls approximately halfway
| between:
|
| 1. Facebook: which is only barely tolerable, after much
| effort, and still seems to optimize for negative emotions,
| spam, etc
|
| and
|
| 2. Reddit: with minimal effort (just need to subscribe to
| subreddits) it is an entirely personalized experience of
| exactly what I want to see
| emodendroket wrote:
| It seems reasonable to propose that perhaps most people do
| not find that experience "better." Frankly, I've not been
| that careful about who I follow, and the curated feed is
| better than the uncurated one.
| wutbrodo wrote:
| I don't think this is solvable, or indeed even a problem to
| be solved. Our definition of "better" probably overlaps quite
| a bit, but it decidedly does not with many, many people.
| There are a lot of people who really enjoy "memes and low-
| effort content".
|
| The reason it takes effort on behalf of the user is because
| there's no such thing as a perfect read-your-mind content
| recommendation system that doesn't require any inputs from
| you, as much as people like to pretend machine learning is
| magic. Twitter/Reddit et al are a tool for building a content
| stream that fits you perfectly: their recommendations aren't
| intended to be blindly and indiscriminately consumed, but to
| narrow your search space to make the construction of this
| stream possible in the first place.
|
| This is a simple extension of the trend of broadening
| distribution we've seen, from having three broadcast channels
| (all reporting the same news with the same slant and the same
| blind spots), through cable television, all the way up to
| today's wide-open, bottom-up distribution system. The root of
| this type of complaint about social media is that they treat
| their users with too much respect, trusting them to have the
| emotional continence and intellectual maturity to build a
| custom content stream that fits them instead of being told
| precisely what to believe and what to care about by Walter
| Cronkite.
| ecuzzillo wrote:
| True, but it's easy to find games that don't use that model
| (especially on desktop or console), whereas it's hard to find
| a way to consume thoughts from interesting people outside of
| twitter.
| throwaway6734 wrote:
| >it's hard to find a way to consume thoughts from
| interesting people outside of twitter.
|
| You can subscribe to high quality substacks and
| publications
| imajoredinecon wrote:
| Read a book?
| Spooky23 wrote:
| I'm sure the first change will be the redemption of a certain
| political figure.
| riffic wrote:
| why bother. certain political figure has their own Mastodon
| installation now.
| egypturnash wrote:
| ...which was discussed on the #fediblock tag as soon as it
| went up, with a lot of admins who set up their own
| Mastodons because they were sick of that guy constantly
| showing up on Twitter immediately defederating from that
| particular instance.
|
| Being able to block entire instances is a really, really
| nice power.
| 63 wrote:
| The difference for me has always beem that Twitter is organized
| by person rather than by topic. In some ways that's good if I'm
| following someone because I care about them personally, but
| usually I follow people because I'm interested in a particular
| aspect of their work like art or announcements. In those cases,
| I don't want to hear about their political opinions or what
| their child did that week. I know you can follow topics as
| well, but that often seems overwhelming and imprecise. Social
| media as a platform is just incredibly confusing in the way it
| blurs the line between performer and audience.
| rconti wrote:
| This has been my fundamental problem with Twitter; I use
| Facebook to follow actual friends and their goings-on, and
| Twitter to follow Important People with Important Things To
| Say.
|
| Turns out, I care a lot more about the former than the
| latter.
|
| You could relatively easily flip the script and use the
| platforms in the opposite way. (although Twitter's narrow
| reach makes it harder to follow IRL "friends" because they're
| not so likely to be on the platform or use it regularly).
| cpeterso wrote:
| Muting words or hashtags helps a lot for focusing your
| timeline, though Twitter's mute list has a max of 200 words.
| jasonladuke0311 wrote:
| Yup. There was this "follow the whole person!" bullshit on
| infosec Twitter a while back, and it was just such nonsense.
| I follow them because I'm interested in their thoughts on
| computer security, no other reason. I couldn't care less
| about a security nerd's political opinions; it's just as
| irrelevant to me as a politician's thoughts on computer
| security.
| ragebol wrote:
| I mostly ignore the stuff not about the topic I followed a
| person for, but it does help me to keep my world view wider.
| nfrankel wrote:
| I've found the solution a while ago: unfollow. I only follow
| people who tweet about themes that interest me.
|
| If somebody wants to tell the world their private life, good
| for them, but without me.
| ryantgtg wrote:
| My solution was to mute words. It was way too tedious to
| say "show fewer of Bob's RTs". So like, I muted the word
| "Trump". But I use twitter in a really specific way, and I
| acknowledge this isn't a great solution.
| [deleted]
| joelthelion wrote:
| I suppose they're going to monetize more aggressively? Sigh...
| localhost wrote:
| I use tweetdeck and only follow specific users, i.e., all my
| columns are "user" columns. It's kind of like a micro-blog RSS
| feed of sorts. It's wonderful if you're careful about who you
| follow.
| lucasverra wrote:
| i've been using tweetdeck the last 2 weeks and its a dream.
| is there something better?
| spamfilter247 wrote:
| Check out "Fenix" (3rd party client on Apple platforms) -
| it mimics the multi-column view, but is more flexible; a
| list can be a Twitter list, a search query etc.
| localhost wrote:
| I haven't used Fenix before (it does look nice!), but I
| can definitely do all of the above in tweetdeck and did
| so in the past before raising my walls by following only
| specific users.
| [deleted]
| koheripbal wrote:
| There's just too much noise - not nearly enough signal.
| emerged wrote:
| Society is going through a learning process in understanding
| the value of scope in our social environments. If you simply
| connect all the nodes into a gigantic hyper graph you get a
| constantly evolving shithole.
|
| It's like programming using only global variables.
| preseinger wrote:
| There is both value and risk in highly personalized social
| scoping. The largest risk IMO is epistemic closure, which at
| large scale is corrosive to society. A platform which has the
| effect of enabling frictionless epistemic bubbles for
| everyone is harmful, not beneficial.
|
| This is a systemic risk of decentralization in all of its
| forms, too, really. At its most extreme, a world comprised of
| arbitrarily many self-governed communities is a dystopia.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| Same. It's a handy RSS replacement. Or a telegraph office
| AzzieElbab wrote:
| Personally, I prefer using lists but I do not participate much,
| just consume ...
| jerlam wrote:
| Lists are fantastic. Pinning them on mobile makes them very
| accessible. They can be set to private which means that you
| don't show up as a follower.
|
| I think Twitter has forgotten about them, since they don't
| display ads.
| AzzieElbab wrote:
| I wish I could pin more than 5 of them
| LegitShady wrote:
| Long ago I made a reddit account with the first suggested name
| after the one I asked for was 'taken', disabled following all
| the subreddits, and then selectively added subreddits specific
| to my hobbies.
|
| I don't see anything that normally hits the front page,
| everything I do see is somewhat relevant to me, and it
| basically deletes all politics from what is presented.
|
| By far the best reddit experience possible, I think.
| ryantgtg wrote:
| I assumed this is how almost everyone uses reddit!
| LegitShady wrote:
| by vote counts its clear the default subs (and subs that
| used to be default) are the biggest with the most traffic,
| so probably not.
| 8ytecoder wrote:
| Mind sharing a few interesting ones?
| riffic wrote:
| mind sharing what you're into?
| LegitShady wrote:
| they're literally my personal interests. Find smaller
| subreddits related to your personal interests. If you don't
| like the same things I like my subreddits are unlikely to
| be interesting to you.
|
| The whole point here is to get rid of the all of the
| default subreddits, since they become garbage once they
| become default no matter what, and then find things that
| you're actually interested in that aren't default and thus
| not full of 'normies' who ruin most of reddit.
|
| There was a time before reddit got huuuuge that most of it
| was pretty ok, but that time was years and years ago. Now
| there are just niche subreddits of quality and an ocean of
| garbage.
| hanniabu wrote:
| r/ethfinance
| bikson wrote:
| This is the way. But also creating information bubble.
| LegitShady wrote:
| I don't get any news from reddit - its purely an
| entertainment vehicle for me, so I don't worry about the
| bubble portion of it. If I'm in a synthesizer or fiction
| writing bubble, so be it.
| FooBarBizBazz wrote:
| Smart. Leading Twitter was like riding a tiger; he got off before
| it ate him.
|
| Notably, he left well before the 2024 election season.
|
| He'll face a lot less political pressure now.
| yhoneycomb wrote:
| The irony in the fact that his resignation tweet was an image of
| text, designed to get around the character limit, was not lost on
| me.
|
| You want Twitter to be the most transparent company? Maybe start
| by making it accessible to the visually impaired by not posting
| images of text.
| synergy20 wrote:
| So, Trump can be back to use this platform as Taliban and CCP
| have always been doing?
| vincentmarle wrote:
| Isn't it ironic that the CEO of Twitter has to announce his
| departure in a screenshot?
| 1cvmask wrote:
| Maybe they should put a product guy as head or a UI/UX expert who
| can solve the weird threads issues which occur due to the
| chronological nature of Twitter. Seems like a quick fix to make
| Twitters appeal more broader.
| butMyside wrote:
| This is the world realizing there's little novel data inside
| these noisy black boxes; just noisy people easily distracted by
| screens like the TV generation.
|
| Investors want to cash out before things implode, if they can.
|
| Jack wants people connected and gets that's all it's about. The
| attention economy is dying off as we learn what it means for
| privacy. The big social brands are going to fade like Best Buy
| and circuit city as kids grow up never being allowed on Twitter
| and Facebook (mine aren't and won't be allowed to until they're
| 18); we have Plex and that's all I'm going to say about that :)
|
| Facebook -> Meta started me thinking this way and this has me
| even more convinced.
|
| The daily use cases of our gadgets is well established
| emotionally. The honeymoon is over.
| TeeMassive wrote:
| He was pretty much CEO in name only at this point, as was pretty
| much apparent during his Congress testimonies.
| tfang17 wrote:
| Odds are Jack does something in Web3 next?
| riffic wrote:
| Looks like activist investors are getting their Christmas wish
| this year.
|
| Twitter's not immune from ending up on this list (on a long
| enough timeline):
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defunct_social_network...
| egfx wrote:
| I think conversely Twitter is the only one that is immune.
| krolden wrote:
| Are people really using the term 'activist investors'
| unironically?
| barbecue_sauce wrote:
| I think the term has been around since the 80s.
| riffic wrote:
| Bloomberg and CNN did, last year:
|
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-02-29/singer-s-.
| ..
|
| (previous link paywalled, outline:
| https://outline.com/gxqsh2)
|
| https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/29/tech/elliott-twitter-jack-
| dor...
| acdha wrote:
| Yes -- it's been in use for years, with some examples here:
|
| https://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/activist-investor.asp
|
| It's important to remember that in common usage "activist"
| doesn't mean anything other than trying to change how a
| company is run -- there isn't the connotation of social
| values or similar which the term has in common usage.
| koheripbal wrote:
| The issue with Dorsey is that he acknowledges how toxic Twitter
| is, but has no idea how to fix it nor did he seem ready to do
| so, and this made investors very nervous.
|
| See his recent interview on CNN :
| https://www.facebook.com/cnn/videos/2100868666791589/
| nostromo wrote:
| His directness and ability to say what he doesn't know is a
| good thing.
|
| I enjoyed his interview with Sam Harris. He was honest and
| direct in answering tough questions about Twitter. He
| explained how they try to balance free expression but also
| want Twitter to be a safe place for people to interact.
|
| Compare this to Zuckerberg who is never candid or forthright
| in public.
| Aperocky wrote:
| The toxicity is linearly correlated with its success, of
| course that would be very hard to fix from a business stand
| point.
| jcadam wrote:
| I don't think it can be fixed. Social media in general is a
| cancer.
| busterarm wrote:
| Social media can be fixed by legislating it out of
| existence.
|
| It doesn't even need a watchdog agency like the environment
| does.
| marcinzm wrote:
| Define social media? Does discord count? Does mastadon
| count? Do forums count? Does hacker news count? Stack
| overflow? Github?
| smolder wrote:
| All of those do count, but many people have a narrower
| definition because of how the term "social media" is
| often shorthand for Twitter, FB, IG, and similar when
| used in the traditional media.
| marcinzm wrote:
| My point is that if you want to ban something then you
| need a specific dividing line other than "like Twitter."
| Otherwise either everything is banned or nothing is
| banned since everyone just uses loopholes. And if
| everything is banned you better be sure you actually want
| everything banned.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Remove Section 230 protections for profit driven social
| networks, carve out exemptions for public goods and other
| sites operated without a profit intent (Wikipedia, the
| Internet Archive, Hacker News, etc) and the problem
| solves itself (the cost to police/moderate the platform
| rises above a point where the revenue returned is no
| longer sufficient to make the endeavor worthwhile).
| Social media is toxic due to the social fabric impact
| being externalized and socialized while the profits are
| privatized.
| chx wrote:
| OK, Facebook is now a non profit which only income comes
| from selling ad space to "Definitely Not Facebook Inc" at
| such a price which avoids racking up profits. (Like ad
| house of old.)
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Non profit can't have shareholders, and there are
| regulations around how non profits operate financially.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Sadly, the solution so described amounts to nationalizing
| free speech (between the removal of protections and the
| "blessing" of some few channels).
|
| Wouldn't fly in the US, so it's a non-starters since
| those companies are based in the US.
| busterarm wrote:
| Except in reality it's the opposite.
|
| Free Speech is SO IMPORTANT that it can't be fettered by
| private companies for private gain like Facebook.
| viro wrote:
| That would just destroy all user generated content on the
| internet....
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| It would destroy user generated content below the value
| of moderation cost on certain platforms.
| smolder wrote:
| I could get behind some more restrictions on websites of
| a certain size, but putting any burden on brand-new web
| site owners beyond urgently dealing with problematic
| content is too much of a burden. It just acts as a moat
| for powerful incumbents, and they have far too deep moats
| as it is.
| jacquesm wrote:
| What makes you think HN is exempt from that?
|
| If you feel it needs fixing by killing it then why are
| you participating in it, and by extension validating it
| rather than arguing for that fix?
| busterarm wrote:
| I could survive without HN. The internet existed before
| it. We had things like webrings and mailing lists that
| were highly personal forms of communication &
| aggregation.
|
| You could even find content that you wanted online before
| Google made search pay-to-play.
|
| Killing social media and requiring services (like email,
| etc) not be an ad-supported free model (where the product
| is the user) would completely transform the internet (and
| its balance of power) as we know it and for the better.
|
| SomethingAwful charging $10 for an account was
| always/accidentally the right idea.
| NoGravitas wrote:
| This, 100%. I only come to the Orange Website to see what
| bad ideas are currently popular in the industry, and it
| never fails to provide.
| handrous wrote:
| My consistent answer to the "if companies weren't allowed
| to spy on you and do other horrible shit, and if ad
| dollars dried up, all these sites would go away!"
| argument is that all those sites have value approaching
| zero anyway. So they go away. Oh well.
|
| The Web loses 1% of its decent content, while the
| remaining 99% gets higher visibility, more funding, more
| interest/attention (which can _improve_ quality, as in,
| say, collaborative communities like Wikipedia, or open
| source). The rest of the cost is the loss of a bunch of
| shit content that most people could /would replace with
| time-wasters like sudoku or Tetris or entertainment
| magazines, and carry on with life. Seems like a _bargain_
| to me.
| busterarm wrote:
| You also couldn't have megalithic companies like Google
| that bait you into their ecosystem with "free shit" like
| Gmail and search completely bankrolled out of their other
| primary enterprise.
|
| Google uses Ads to unevenly compete with every other
| software company on the planet. Google can buy your
| company and outpay you for engineers with what is
| essentially their financial fingernail clippings. The
| thing that's gained in this scenario is all of the talent
| that could be going to other things besides optimizing
| ads.
| handrous wrote:
| They use those advantages to compete with other companies
| _and with volunteer efforts_. That 's another reason I'm
| not too worried about doom-and-gloom predictions of what
| would happen if we killed the ads (and spying-fed ML)
| golden goose: we _do not know_ how much better protocols,
| free (open source) products, non-profit services (as in
| Wikipedia), and paid software /services would be without
| ad-fed giants sucking all the air out of the room at
| best, and deliberately using their advantages to kill
| things (competitors, protocols, et c.) at worst. I
| suspect all of those would be a whole lot better, absent
| the money-firehoses dependent on bad & dangerous
| behavior.
| nwiswell wrote:
| Excellent point, it is easy to forget the minor miracle
| of FOSS. Plus, without the ad revenues there would be no
| mega-corps vacuuming up all the new grads, so I would
| anticipate a significantly greater rate of innovation and
| FOSS contribution broadly.
| handrous wrote:
| There's even an interest or social-reward factor to
| participating in these kinds of things. Working on an
| open-protocol messaging client for free is a lot less
| rewarding when the userbase of the _entire protocol_ is
| 1% or less of all online messaging, because most of that
| market 's captured by closed platforms that forbid and/or
| discourage other clients, than when it works with 20+% of
| clients and even your non-geek friends are using the
| protocol, if not your particular client.
|
| I truly think we _couldn 't_ launch something like the
| email protocol these days and have it gain traction, and
| I don't mean because of its flaws. I judge that a pretty
| crappy state of affairs, and I think the #1 cause is that
| it's so lucrative to keep your users in a position where
| you can track & spy on them very well, while avoiding
| leaking anything they're doing so that competitors can
| see it--IOW incentives are set up to _greatly_ reward
| successful closed platforms while discouraging
| interoperability, so we get even more of that than we
| otherwise might.
| busterarm wrote:
| > I truly think we couldn't launch something like the
| email protocol these days and have it gain traction...
|
| Sadly it's worse than you expect here. Enter
| ElasticSearch. The company behind the innovation you
| propose will piggy-back on open source projects (Lucene),
| add a novelty to it (clustering) and choose a permissive
| open-source license to encourage contributions. Once
| hitting a significant market penetration threshold, the
| project then will move to a mixed-source, enterprise
| license model with intentionally-crippled community
| versions (think Neo4j, JFrog, etc).
|
| ElasticSearch isn't even alone here, it's just the most
| obvious example. I've actually been insisting for a long
| time that we need an Apache-licensed standard solution
| for clustering generic applications...something useful
| enough that anyone can connect part A & part B to get
| "clustered Lucene" instead of "ElasticSearch". Something
| reasonably deployable (read: is monitorable, has RBAC)
| without massive licensing costs (read: Neo4j). Not an
| easy problem, for sure.
| ryan93 wrote:
| Care to explain why your hackernews profile says "Censors
| have never been on the right side of history" ?
| busterarm wrote:
| That's not censorship.
|
| I'm not out celebrating when a country like Turkey or
| something blocks Twitter.
|
| No, I'm advocating the Amish approach. It's perfectly
| reasonable and noble for a society to get together and
| decide "we're not going to use X". There's nothing
| censorial about that. It's the same kind of logic people
| use to advocate against things like ICEs and eating meat.
| Are vegans trying to "censor" your meat-eating? No. It's
| the same kind of reasoning behind us having _any_ laws to
| begin with.
|
| And I'm not even talking about blocking Twitter. I'm
| saying that legislatively we should make sure that no
| company with a product like it can do business in our
| country(-ies). The same way that we have laws in place
| that prevent companies from business practices like
| "dumping toxic waste next to your housing development"
| under threat of force (like we will fine you to hell and
| back and then throw you in prison). Is that censorship
| too?
|
| Come back with a more thoroughly-reasoned argument,
| please.
| smolder wrote:
| HN is not what I'd call cancer. Social media doesn't _need_
| to be an engagement-obsessed, emotionally charged
| misinformation hose. Social media is broader than the
| category that twitter and FB live in. It can be less toxic,
| but less toxic platforms are less exciting and don 't get
| the same kind of _attention_ , which is what all the toxic
| stuff optimizes for.
| jedberg wrote:
| HN is not for profit. In fact, it's purposely a loss
| leader. They can afford to be heavily moderated because
| they aren't trying to appease anyone but their specific
| small, targeted audience.
| loceng wrote:
| It's a marketing and awareness channel for YCombinator,
| not directly for profit.
| hanniabu wrote:
| It's toxic if you're actually an expert in the subject at
| hand. People here would rather feel smart than wrong.
| Lots of armchair experts here touting misinformation but
| you don't notice it unless there's a topic you know well.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| HN it's both highly regulated, and focuses on a few niche
| topics. I can tell you how to create a mobile app using
| flutter and firebase. I can't tell you how to handle a
| relationship.
|
| I can argue flutter is easier than react native without
| getting personal. I don't argue about my relationships,
| or anyone else's relationships. I have extremely strict
| criteria for anyone I let into my life, whether that be a
| friend or a partner. This has worked very well for me.
|
| You're not going to find what you want in every single
| city, life can become drastically better just by moving.
|
| But that's it. I don't need to argue about why I live
| where I do.
|
| I don't need the validation of random people when it
| comes to my life decisions. However if you want to argue
| with me that I can get better server-side performance via
| a Rust backend rather than firebase, I might listen.
| gameswithgo wrote:
| HN is _heavily_ moderated, which is interesting given how
| often it is used as a platform to decry censorship.
| vlunkr wrote:
| I don't think that's a contradiction personally. Most
| reasonable people accept that some level of censorship is
| necessary for a good discussion, especially when hundreds
| or thousands of people are involved. HN style moderation
| doesn't exactly scale to twitter size easily though.
| cauthon wrote:
| I think OP is pointing out the irony that HN is popular
| among people who claim to not accept that.
| 22c wrote:
| People try to make the argument that Twitter and (maybe
| to a lesser extent) Facebook are akin to a "town square",
| whereas I don't think people consider the HN comments
| section a "town square".
| boringg wrote:
| Can you provide specific examples please? It would seem
| that it moderates trolling content, self promotional or
| bot level garbage.
| ssully wrote:
| Not the OP, but your examples of bot level garbage and
| trolling content are perfect for Twitter. I would include
| self promotion, but that is such a core part of social
| media.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| That in itself makes it more heavily moderated than
| Facebook or Twitter, though of course that's also
| attributable to manageable scale.
| re wrote:
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&
| que...
|
| You can also try searching for "please by:dang"
| boringg wrote:
| Great examples - social media platforms could do well and
| follow dang's example.
| attemptone wrote:
| As a long time /lit/-izen I wanted bring up 4chan as an
| counter-example of a toxic platform that hasn't been
| optimized for attention. But the longer I thought about
| it, the more I grew sure that it isn't as toxic as it
| seems to be. Sure people will respond to your post
| calling you a bundle of sticks or the n-word. But in the
| end I had more heart-to-hearts with people that have
| widly different opinions than on any other platform. Some
| anon on /wg/ even convinced me to see a therapist about
| my suicidal-ideation. Hearing that from a voice in the
| void where there was no karma/likes/hearts/reblogs/etc.
| attached seemed more genuine, honest and caring than any
| other "help" I experienced online.
| NoGravitas wrote:
| HN is _extremely_ toxic for anyone who 's not a VC-
| adjacent techbro. If you're part of the target audience
| for /pol/, you wouldn't notice that /pol/ is toxic,
| either.
| enraged_camel wrote:
| I mean, I work in tech, and even I find it very difficult
| to read the comments sections here on anything related to
| racial justice, gender equality, etc. People post nasty
| stuff and it gets upvoted to the top.
| fastball wrote:
| Have any examples?
| zarzavat wrote:
| If HN is "toxic" then you'll have to define the word
| toxic, because generally this is one of the best-behaved
| discussion forums on the internet. Even jokes get
| downvoted.
| loceng wrote:
| Even thoughtful, well articulated comments packed with
| critical thinking and citations get downvoted.
| Aloha wrote:
| Agreed, I regularly have discussions with people who I
| disagree with here, good, informative ones that inform my
| perspectives and help me learn.
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| HN is a social medium.
| softfalcon wrote:
| I appreciate this level of blatant obviousness. It is
| wildly thought provoking. Someone might take this flat
| statement as being antagonistic, but these 5 words are
| exactly the point!
|
| You're right, HN is a social medium. It suffers from many
| of the same issues as Twitter. Much of the negativity and
| positivity it creates is similar to what I can see on
| Twitter. Perhaps that's the human condition "at scale"?
|
| I think somehow, for the time being, the audience and
| size of HN is "okay" and most of the devils haven't leapt
| out of their lightly corked bottles just yet within the
| community.
| datavirtue wrote:
| I'm patiently awaiting the day I can leap out of my
| bottle to ransack HN.
| echelon wrote:
| HN is unappealing to the average internet user. It's
| topical, nerdy, lacks images and video, has zero
| engagement algorithms, and the "karma" is hidden.
|
| It's also aggressively moderated. I can only post ~4
| times a day since my account got flagged / rate limited
| for participating in flame wars about China, Apple,
| monopolies, etc. There's probably no way out of this
| except to create a new account.
| jacquesm wrote:
| There actually is, you can mail hn@ycombinator.com to ask
| for a reprieve.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| The more I think about this, the less I agree.
|
| To be a social medium/network, I think you need to
| follow/"friend" specific people. That's what makes it
| social.
|
| I'd say HN is a "forum".
|
| I realize these are my personal definitions, and there
| are no correct answers.
| munificent wrote:
| I don't think a binary definition is meaningful. Instead,
| what I focus on is the continuum of how much control you
| as a user have over the content that is presented to you.
|
| At one end, you have the default Reddit front page. You
| get a torrent of posts completely unrelated to your
| specific interests or people you care about. It's as
| close to "the front page of the Internet" as you can get.
| Like staring into the collective psyche of the web.
|
| At the other end, you have Google search. You only see
| pages you specifically request for by an explicit search
| query at that point in time. If you don't search, nothing
| is given to you. You have almost complete control over
| your attention.
|
| Social media sites/apps are generally points between
| those. Critically, most give you more flexibility in how
| you use them than users get credit for. If you use Reddit
| by just browsing the front page and not even logging in,
| yes, it's the worst of all possible worlds. But if you
| create an account, unsubscribe from all the default
| subreddits, and only follow subreddits that are
| interesting to you and well moderated, then you have a
| lot more control. My Reddit experience is uniformly
| positive and enriching.
|
| Twitter can also be a nourishing experience, but you have
| to be careful about who you follow, and turn off retweets
| for most of the people you follow.
|
| Facebook is harder but if you disable all posts from
| sites that users often reshare, that removes a ton of
| clutter. Unfollowing people also helps.
| naasking wrote:
| Complete control over attention maybe, but not complete
| control over what you see. Google targets your results
| like Twitter and Facebook target your feed. Reddit and HN
| don't do this.
|
| I don't think a continuum along a single axis can reveal
| what's truly pathological about social media. If you
| break it up into multiple axes, I think problematic tech
| will cluster into quadrants where algorithms are
| targeting you personally in various ways.
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| Isn't Reddit usually considered a social medium? HN seems
| pretty similar to Reddit, but without subreddits and with
| better moderation.
| Aea wrote:
| I'm not sure if "subreddits" / "interests" alone make
| reddit social media, but combined with its scale it
| definitely does.
|
| I have blocked hundreds of subreddits just to make my
| reddit experience tolerable.
| burlesona wrote:
| I agree. To me, the definitive negative characteristic of
| Social Media is the "feed," where each person has a
| unique view of content. There's no good way to "curate"
| that for engagement (or monetize for advertising) without
| creating toxic incentives.
|
| HN is a forum because everyone sees the same discussion.
| JasonFruit wrote:
| That's really insightful. Maybe that's one reason that I
| like MeWe: it has a feed, but it's so useless that I
| ignore it completely and use the chats attached to the
| various groups I joined. I use it like a hub of forums.
| abnercoimbre wrote:
| Do you think it's possible forums can make a true
| comeback? They are overall healthier, but can they be
| profitable? Also if anyone has more research on social
| media alternatives, I'd love some references.
| pbourke wrote:
| Reddit is kinda-sorta a forum site. You can treat a
| single sub as a forum by ordering posts chronologically.
| phpbb style forums still exist and are the best place to
| discuss some topics. In the RV/truck space there are
| still many forums that have been bought and consolidated
| under a few holding companies. They still operate as
| distinct boards, however.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| That's a really important distinction I hadn't thought
| about.
|
| When you can make a feed that "feeds" you own
| preconceived ideas as reality, you get told the world is
| just as you imagined, you're always right, and those who
| disagree are obviously evil and/or stupid.
| [deleted]
| root_axis wrote:
| If every website with a comment section can be described
| as "social media" then you're diluting the meaning of the
| term to the point of being useless.
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| Nothing is published on HN, it's just a content
| aggregator. Importantly, the content that appears on HN
| is submitted by the same users who leave the comments.
| That makes it markedly different from, say, someone's
| blog with a comment section.
| mikeiz404 wrote:
| For those who don't have fb I believe this is the video (but
| I'm guessing from the comment's content only) --
| https://edition.cnn.com/videos/tv/2018/08/19/jack-dorsey-
| spe...
| colechristensen wrote:
| I don't think this is ... necessarily the wrong thing.
|
| Acknowledging that it is a difficult problem and you don't
| know how to solve it might be better than thinking you know
| how to solve it and doing something worse.
|
| People are also quick to blame platforms without
| acknowledging that a lot of _people_ are awful, the venue in
| which they practice their awfulness isn 't necessarily at
| fault but it's easier to blame a thing which could be
| destroyed (religion, organization, social network, etc) than
| to acknowledge that this is a feature of humanity.
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| all of this is true.
|
| but those people had no such platform before, maybe not
| thinking about the consequences because "growth" wasn't a
| great idea after all.
| colechristensen wrote:
| >but those people had no such platform before
|
| They absolutely did. Twitter et al. just change the shape
| of who you socialize with, humans weren't in solitary
| confinement before the Internet. The platform was more
| local more community based for example there were often
| awful people at church.
| joe-collins wrote:
| You're choosing an overly generous definition of
| platform.
|
| A surly neighbor, a dreaded personage at church, has
| limits on their influence based on simple geography. They
| experience pushback against their behavior via ostracism
| (exclusion from events and groups) and non-verbal cues
| (facial expressions, body language).
|
| The same type of character on a massive online platform
| has the opportunity to reach a much broader audience,
| aided by engagement-focused algorithms that can suggest
| similarly cantankerous personalities to commiserate with.
| There is less opportunity for negative feedback against
| their opinions and actions, because there are seldom any
| "unlike" buttons, and bans and mutes are usually
| invisible to the originator of the speech: they can opt
| to interpret silence as acceptance.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| "the problem is unsolvable nothing can be done" is
| obviously false, because things were not always this
| divisive. Of course it's people's fault that twitter is
| awful, but twitter isn't in charge of people, it's in
| charge of twitter. Investors won't take "not our problem"
| as an answer here.
| bmsleight_ wrote:
| Irony, posting about toxic social media, to a facebook link.
| sonofaragorn wrote:
| Twitter does a have a large "health" department tasked with
| figuring how to measure and improve the quality of the
| content and discourse in the platform. I don't have details
| since I only interviewed for a role in that team, but I do
| know it exists and it has a large number of PMs, Data
| Scientists, and Researchers. They have even collaborated with
| academia on the topic and a recent open RecSys competition
| (recommender system) was organized by Twitter with their
| data.
| datavirtue wrote:
| The big tech CEO attitude is that all of these issues stem
| from human behavior. They just sit back and stroke their
| beard at everyone blaming them. They ignore it and move on.
| askin4it wrote:
| don't say that! if twitter ends up there, where will NPR get
| its journalistic content?
| [deleted]
| fluidcruft wrote:
| They could have ended up on that list with Dorsey in charge
| anyway.
| nafizh wrote:
| People love to bash Dorsey but he had more of a backbone than
| Zuckerberg in every possible way. And while the game is always
| about money, Dorsey did try to improve the eco-system in a
| principled way even if arguably he failed in many ways - this
| courage was probably there because he was a founder of the
| company. The new CEO will be more like Pichai at Google or Cook
| at Apple - only there to make money.
| fundad wrote:
| Actually it turns out he was ousted for standing up to
| Republicans. He's been ousted so Twitter can amplify facists.
|
| https://www.foxnews.com/politics/twitter-paul-singer-republi...
| throwaway2077 wrote:
| remarkably, those who bash him are the same people twitter has
| done everything to bend over backwards for. same on reddit,
| facebook, twitch, etc.
|
| people on the opposite side of the privileged class are barely
| allowed to exist on those platforms - only if they police their
| speech very carefully to avoid breaking a myriad of vague and
| unwritten rules, and even then they're still subject to being
| unpersoned for some perceived offense committed off-platform.
| kevingadd wrote:
| If you really want to post about how vaccines make your blood
| cells broadcast 5G radio waves, you can go make a Parler
| account regardless of whether you get "unpersoned" (?) by
| Twitter.
|
| Twitter's rules enforcement is historically EXTREMELY casual,
| the only thing I can think of is that they are relatively
| consistent about punishing death threats regardless of
| context. Even then, they let some of that slide. Very often a
| rules violation just results in a tweet being deleted or
| marked with a disclaimer, not a ban - few services would
| treat rules violations that way.
| throwaway2077 wrote:
| >If you really want to post about how vaccines make your
| blood cells broadcast 5G radio wave
|
| oh, that's a great example, actually. as far as I vaguely
| recall from the times before the pandemic, expressing
| skepticism or criticism towards the government and
| corporations was not against the rules.
|
| >Twitter's rules enforcement is historically EXTREMELY
| casual
|
| yes - for the privileged class, twitter does indeed "let
| some of that slide".
| astroalex wrote:
| > only if they police their speech very carefully to avoid
| breaking a myriad of vague and unwritten rules, and even then
| they're still subject to being unpersoned for some perceived
| offense committed off-platform
|
| Not sure what you're talking about. Can you provide
| examples/evidence?
| throwaway2077 wrote:
| there's no way I can be more specific without getting
| [flagged][dead]. this isn't my first throwaway.
| badRNG wrote:
| > people on the opposite side of the privileged class are
| barely allowed to exist on those platforms - only if they
| police their speech very carefully to avoid breaking a myriad
| of vague and unwritten rules, and even then they're still
| subject to being unpersoned for some perceived offense
| committed off-platform.
|
| I'm having trouble understanding what any of this means
| will4274 wrote:
| Parent is saying that these platforms cater to left leaning
| reactionaries ("social justice warriors"), and that people
| on the opposite side (conservatives) are far more
| restricted, but most of the criticism comes from those same
| left leaning reactionaries about the sites not further
| restricting the already-restricted side.
| badRNG wrote:
| What is it that conservatives are not able to say on
| Twitter due to restrictions?
| fullshark wrote:
| There's this: https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-
| policies/medical-misin...
|
| Also this: https://www.businessinsider.com/jack-dorsey-
| ny-post-remains-...
|
| Zero hedge was locked:
| https://www.cbsnews.com/news/twitter-bans-zero-hedge-
| coronav...
|
| Trump was deplatformed of course, so everything he has to
| say.
|
| Search through this for examples, I see a lot of ctrl-F
| "right" results fwiw
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_suspensions
| badRNG wrote:
| I don't think that there is anything inherently
| "conservative" about misinformation about a disease in
| the midst of a pandemic. If Biden decides tomorrow to
| claim COVID is a hoax, vaccines have microchips, drinking
| bleach cures COVID, or attempts a violent coup against
| the government, it'd be fair game to ban him from the
| platform, regardless of whether he's considered "liberal"
| or "conservative."
|
| I did go through the "Ctrl-F" for the link, and it was a
| list of terrorists, Holocaust deniers, neo nazis, and
| hate speech. I don't think being a conservative
| necessarily entails any of these things either, even if
| they are often linked to being "*-right."
| fullshark wrote:
| Ahh you weren't really asking, just trying to prove a
| point that conservatives are allowed to speak freely on
| twitter, as long as they don't accidentally set off a
| COVID misinformation ML classifier in their criticism of
| a gov't COVID policy, or have enough people flag their
| posts as misinformation.
|
| I guess i should have just responded with the NYPost
| thing, which is the only thing I recalled initially,
| given it was particularly egregious right before an
| election and even Dorsey admitted it was a mistake:
| https://nypost.com/2020/11/17/jack-dorsey-admits-lockout-
| of-...
| badRNG wrote:
| >Ahh you weren't really asking, just trying to prove a
| point that conservatives are allowed to speak freely on
| twitter, as long as they don't accidentally set off a
| COVID misinformation ML classifier in their criticism of
| a gov't COVID policy, or have enough people flag their
| posts as misinformation.
|
| It's hard to convey intent over text, but I couldn't be
| more genuine in my curiosity. Accidentally setting "off a
| COVID misinformation ML classifier" is a legitimate
| concern. Are otherwise appropriate posts being
| misclassified as misinformation? And wouldn't that be of
| concern to folks across the political spectrum? Same goes
| for flagging posts; this seems like a concern that isn't
| restricted to a single political position.
| fullshark wrote:
| Well there's a lot of "conservative" aka right-wing
| American complaints about twitter silencing their voices
| for political reasons, some of them are just trolls who
| were being jerks bellyaching, but some do have a scent of
| legitimacy to me. It's all gray area really, personally
| you can read about some of the people banned on that list
| (cntl-f "conservative" = 24 results) or the NY post
| situation if you like and decide for yourself.
|
| I personally think these media platforms are evolving
| policies that will be enforced selectively (e.g. NYpost
| account frozen for writing a story involving "hacked"
| materials) based on the bias of the people enforcing the
| rules (well that's really a violation of our policies,
| but that other post isn't because of _nuance_ , that
| _nuance_ really just a reflection of bias in either the
| classifier, or human being making final judgement call).
| draw_down wrote:
| You mean to say you like that he banned Donald Trump. A fine
| opinion to have of course.
| anaisbetts wrote:
| > Dorsey did try to improve the eco-system in a principled way
|
| By blocking any 3rd party use of Twitter and making it
| impossible to write your own clients? It's more like he Killed
| the eco-system
| 1_player wrote:
| True, but it's not like Twitter has suffered in popularity
| even without API access. We just have fewer cool bots, but
| the platform is full of bots already, and not of the
| interesting kind.
| mardifoufs wrote:
| How did dorsey stand up to anything? They are trying to
| monetize twitter just as much, with extremely annoying dark
| patterns to boot. They just don't seem to succeed as well. The
| way they redesigned feeds, made linking to tweets a coin toss
| because of how often they just show "oops something went wrong"
| if you aren't logged in, or if you are lucky made it so Twitter
| threads just don't show anything but the single linked tweet.
| I'm not sure if trying and failing to grow and monetize like
| facebook counts
|
| And it's not like he has shown some sort of political backbone
| either. Twitter is much much more of a political cesspool, and
| has an odd persuasive influence on real life politics that
| facebook posts just doesn't have. And that's with Twitter being
| pretty okay with handing out bans and protecting blue
| checkmarks (and it's obvious they have a very heavy biais when
| it comes to who they verify). I'm genuinely puzzled that you
| can see dorsey as having stood up for pretty much anything.
|
| I know this is very unpopular but while Zuckerberg has
| obviously no problem with turning his platform into a creepy ad
| filled universe he controls, he's still infinitely more
| "backboned". 99% of the attention fb or Zuckerberg are getting
| is due to their (relatively) unwavering obsession with their
| vision of free speech and an open platform. Every single major
| media platform on pretty much both sides has been trashing him
| and facebook for the past 4 years. He could've gone the dorsey
| way of just yielding and taking the very easy path of doing
| whatever to make the controversy go away but he didn't. You can
| agree or disagree with his stance, but at least _he has one_
| (again, I 'm not talking about the monetization or ad side). If
| he didnt, the past 4 years would've been a breeze for him and
| Meta. Remember, most of the mainstream controversy has been
| about allowing fake news, wrong think, how the platform is
| moderated, how meta is totally why the other side won... The
| privacy/tracking/advertising issues have been mostly ignored in
| comparison (they probably have been covered extensively on HN
| but that's an outlier) unless they overlapped with a political
| tribe issue.
| xeromal wrote:
| https://twitter.com/jack/status/1349510769268850690?lang=en
|
| Here's an example off the top of my head. Banning Trump I
| felt was pretty courageous.
| castis wrote:
| > Banning Trump
|
| After years of letting him say whatever he wanted, they
| waited until the opposing party was firmly seated and the
| threat of retaliation was lowest. Good move tactically I
| guess but it took no bravery.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Banning any politicians is exact opposite of being
| courageous. Now courageous would have been to kick out
| those who ask for censorship...
| [deleted]
| kevingadd wrote:
| They waited FOREVER to actually ban Trump. A staffer
| enforced the rules to ban him well before that and Jack's
| organization courageously reversed it. Until they finally
| banned him, they openly violated their own rules for years
| to keep him on for attention.
| latexr wrote:
| And they explicitly used him as a selling point for
| Twitter: https://www.cnet.com/news/donald-trump-twitter-
| ad-campaign-j...
| mardifoufs wrote:
| Even then, he waited at the last minute to make sure there
| was no possible retaliation. Sure, that's a good business
| move. But how does that prove any _courage_? It 's the
| opposite. At least zuck can say that he wants to keep his
| platform open, that facebook is open to challenging point
| of views or whatever but that Trump didn't leave them a
| choice at that point....and he'd at least be coherent.
| Dorsey can't, because he mostly doesn't care for any "big
| idea" that isn't related to his weird crypto fascination.
| So I guess I was wrong & he did show a backbone for
| something... Consistently not doing anything about crypto
| spam. Afterall, Twitter is notorious for being filled with
| crypto scams and being ground zero for most shady crypto
| schemes!
| kevingadd wrote:
| I don't know how you could write this comment unless you've
| barely used Twitter in the last 5 years. Their API stewardship
| is a mess, their support for third-party clients is miserable,
| Tweetdeck is constantly neglected, Web Twitter is chaotic+slow,
| and they constantly cram awful/broken new stuff like fleets and
| spaces into the UI and saddle it with user-hostile stuff like
| broadcasting what you're doing to all your followers as an opt-
| out. Making bad decisions that anyone who knows your audience
| would advise against is not "courage", it's foolishness.
|
| Wasting tons of his time and resources on promoting
| cryptocurrency + NFTs was also actively bad for the Twitter
| ecosystem - it creates lots of negative sentiment and attention
| that distracts from features relevant to the rest of the
| userbase. These days I periodically see high-profile Twitter
| accounts being hijacked by hackers in order to boost crypto and
| NFTs and when you read coverage of NFTs in the news it's often
| about scams - why would you willingly associate Twitter with
| that kind of negative buzz when you could wait until it's
| settled down?
| sneak wrote:
| So did I, after a dozen years on the platform. I won't donate
| content or attention to a site that decides what I am allowed to
| read (they censor their search!).
| smt88 wrote:
| Every website you've ever used decides what you're allowed to
| read on their site.
| sneak wrote:
| My web host is a service. Twitter is a service.
|
| I was hosting my own content on Twitter's service, same as I
| do on my web host.
| smt88 wrote:
| > _I was hosting my own content on Twitter 's service, same
| as I do on my web host._
|
| In both cases, you're not "hosting your own content" by
| anyone's definition of the term. You're paying someone to
| host it. Anyway, all web hosts have rules aka terms of
| service aka censorship.
|
| It's my right (and Twitter's) to offer a service that has
| terms, and those terms can include removal of speech that I
| feel is bad for my business. This is a basic freedom of
| association -- I don't have to do business with people
| whose speech I don't like, and I certainly don't have to
| broadcast it.
|
| Arguing that Twitter must be a neutral host is like arguing
| that Uber or Airbnb can't ban customers for saying racist
| things (both have) or that Facebook must accept 100% of
| ads.
|
| If you are conveying someone's speech as a service as part
| of a for-profit, private business, you can choose _not_ to
| convey that person 's speech for any reason. There is no
| demand in the US (Constitutional, statutory, or otherwise)
| that a private entity broadcast the speech of another
| entity. In fact, that's a violation of the broadcaster's
| First Amendment rights (as repeatedly upheld by liberal and
| conservative justices, over and over again).
| gonational wrote:
| Censoring speech is completely counter to everything this country
| was built on. Every corporation doing this, YC included, is
| plainly undermining our freedom of speech. Using the public
| square exception, while also censoring and editorializing,
| creates a moral hazard, wherein the offending corporations are
| are actually publishers that ate not responsible for the content
| they publish, yet they are benefitting from it.
|
| There are no "community standards". There are corporate rules and
| censorship. We are not a community if we can't have free speech.
| We are subject to a corporation that is publishing and
| benefitting our content, subject to their terms and political
| beliefs.
| saagarjha wrote:
| Might be worth updating the link:
| https://twitter.com/jack/status/1465347002426867720
| scrubs wrote:
| From the first comment in Twitter feed re: abandoning twitter for
| Pinterest, we got to start a new meme: Humor HN:
| I knew <software_name_here> when it used to rock-n-roll.
| I knew <software_name_here> when it used to to the pony.
|
| to tally software that started great but alas died on the vine.
| spion wrote:
| Twitter and other social media are probably the biggest problem
| of our time.
|
| By providing simple rules of information flow: small amount of
| content, retweet, followers) and rewards (likes), they've created
| the most efficient engines for finding and spreading novelty at
| the expense of everything else.
|
| There are no incentives to improve accuracy, increase
| thoughtfulness, paint nuance. Fact checking gets lost in the
| wind.
|
| The environment is essentially one designed for brain viruses,
| where whether you click RT (after thinking around 5 seconds about
| it) determines the Rt. The most superficially convincing, novel
| looking and emotion inducing content wins. You can get your
| misinformation in two flavors: deliberate disinformation by
| grifters, or accidental misinformation, sometimes by real experts
| who (like everyone else) make a sensational mistake that gets
| super amplified.
|
| The worst bit is that social media is becoming the primary source
| of news for most people today. The results have been nothing
| short of catastrophic.
|
| The new CEO has quite a bit of work in front of them.
|
| https://science.sciencemag.org/content/359/6380/1146
| captainmuon wrote:
| No, gullible people, misinformation, polarisation has been
| there before social media. But in the old days, classic media
| used to keep a lid on it by _mediating_ which positions could
| be heard publicly. We haven 't learned yet as a society to
| ignore the unimportant noise.
|
| I believe that free publishing, or many-to-many media, is
| crucial for the future of our society. If anything, it is still
| not easy enought to get ideas out there and discussed (unless
| you have enough reach).
|
| To phrase it a bit provocatively, I believe radical democracy
| is a good thing, even if many of the plebs are stupid.
| runjake wrote:
| Well said.
|
| But as CTO, the new CEO seems to have focused on increasing
| engagement and growing audiences. Unless that changes, expect
| the problem you describe to get bigger.
| lazyeye wrote:
| Its the asbestos or thalidomide of our time..software is eating
| the world.
| Nasrudith wrote:
| You do realize that there is a pandemic ongoing, right? While
| not good the moral panic about social media is downright absurd
| and lacks any sense of proportion.
| spion wrote:
| You do realize that social media is responsible for quite a
| few of the problems we have had during the pandemic?
|
| People are dying because of social-media-amplified
| misinformation:
| https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1460368038859919361.html
| cletus wrote:
| The real problem here is people, not the platforms or the
| products. How do I know this? Because the problems have existed
| far longer than any of the platforms.
|
| Maybe people here are too young to remember how toxic,
| argumentative, irrational and judgmental everything else was
| that came previously: forums, mailing lists, Usenet, you name
| it.
|
| Sure products can influence user behaviour but they can't
| totally change it. And if none of them (as you assert) "improve
| accuracy, increase thoughtfulness, paint nuance" ask yourself
| why: is it because all the platform providers are wrong? Or
| simply that's what users want?
|
| Personally I've never liked Twitter. Of all the platforms I
| find it dominated by people who like the sounds of their own
| voices. I've described it as a "write only" platform. Even
| calling it "social media" seems like a stretch as there are no
| relationships, just people you follow and a news feed.
| Dumblydorr wrote:
| If humans are inherently violent, why hand them free guns? If
| they're inherently greedy, why hand them free credit cards?
| If humans are inherently toxic and disingenuous and biased,
| why hand them the free reach to thousands of gullible minds?
|
| I'm in agreement humans are flawed, but why should we allow
| billionaires, who mostly want power and wealth, to decide how
| to referee our public discourse?
|
| To me, these companies are run by humans and used by humans,
| so like drinking and driving, speed limits, personal safety,
| and all other kinds of laws: we need guardrails against bad
| actions.
|
| We need some rudimentary policing, for as Hamilton stated:
| "if men were angels, no government would be necessary"
| tcoff91 wrote:
| I'm sure people were saying the same things about the
| printing press as people are saying about social media.
| People were printing pamphlets in the 1800s that were just as
| crazy as any of the misinformation we see online today.
| datavirtue wrote:
| I have been on a lot of forums where it was generally
| amicable, informative, and unarguably valuable. Sure, there
| was toxicity but was usually just enough to be comic relief
| and could be ignored. However, a lot of dumbshits were still
| carrying around flip phones and did little else than play
| hunting or monster truck games on a PC. Now they have a
| frictionless platform from where they can interject thier
| wisdom into just about any forum without having anything
| invested.
| mtoddsmith wrote:
| The difference with the new platforms is their ability to
| push content to users. And that content can be driven by bad
| actors.
| spion wrote:
| We should have (software) systems that amplify our strengths
| and help us deal with our flaws, not the other way around.
| wonderwonder wrote:
| I think they are a symptom, not the root. The root started
| before them with the advent of pay per click advertising.
| Everything else has spiraled from that. I truly believe that
| the massive divisiveness of the last 2 decades can be traced to
| this. Social media echo chambers, youtube rabbit holes, click
| baity headlines, all of it is because of pay per click
| advertising. The ML algorithms we have now have become so
| effective that the problem is only getting exponentially worse.
| Your news is fed to you with the sole purpose of making you
| click so they earn $.
| pmcp wrote:
| As someone who started working at an ad agency during the
| online metrics boom, then went to a national news
| organisation to work as digital strategist, I tend to agree.
|
| But I would pinpoint it to the inflated value of impressions.
| My experience (but i can not back this up) tells me that ad
| sellers tend to over estimate the impact of an impression,
| which makes the value chain completely inflated, and skews
| the business model. If ads were worth less (and, according to
| me, closer to the real value), less money would go round, and
| creating value for the end user would become more a
| necessity.
|
| But I might be wrong, obvs.
| netizen-936824 wrote:
| Don't basically _all_ salespeople inflate the value of the
| products they sell?
| TheCondor wrote:
| Was this an internet age thing? I mean 24hour news networks
| found out long before social media took off that they can eat
| a bigger piece of the pie and not spend money working on news
| by running opinion hacks. Just decide which echo chamber you
| want to pander to and then fill up your schedule with
| pundits. Their market share went up, their costs went down
| and no matter what happens or doesn't happen each day, they
| have a group of people that want to tune in. People like to
| hear their world view reaffirmed.
|
| Silicon valley just optimized it and turned it in to a
| science.
|
| I'm sure various social scientists and historians could link
| it other issues. Advertising and selling goods in and of
| itself doesn't really explain how people just fall in to
| utter bullshit beliefs, does it?
| wonderwonder wrote:
| The internet is a little different as on tv they cant
| follow you from channel to channel recommending things for
| you to watch. Tv shows cost a good deal of money to produce
| so the range of offerings is limited. On the internet,
| algorithms track your every click even to the point of
| noticing that you paused on a headline but did not click
| it. They are able to build a profile on you that is likely
| more accurate than anything ever created before including
| your understanding of yourself. With this profile they also
| have an almost unlimited supply of videos, articles and
| social media posts to send your way that your profile says
| you will likely click on. Each time you click on something
| their profile is updated and improved. They are able to
| create a steady stream of offered media that cannot help
| but reinforce your views on the world as you are quite
| often not presented with much of an alternative. If you are
| not a technical person and you are only presented with news
| that supports your political ideology you may very well
| think that everyone else is getting the same feed. This
| would make them think that if you are getting the same news
| as them and still hold a different viewpoint then you are
| being willfully ignorant and choosing to be malicious. See
| the rise of the "liberalism is a disease" meme. For example
| if all the news you see says Biden is senile and a terrible
| person, why would you not believe it? In the same way in
| which someone on the left was presented with a very
| negative feed of Justice Brett Kavanaugh during his
| nomination process. A good example of how powerful the ML
| algorithms are now is NBA player Kyrie Irving and his trip
| down the youtube rabbit hole that convinced him the earth
| was flat. He also holds Anti-Vax ideas, which were most
| likely influenced by his internet browsing habits.
| mattnewton wrote:
| But I think calling it pay-for-click is a misnomer, that's
| just the latest version of a very old business model. Cable
| news, like Fox, has had the same outrage-fueled engagement
| metrics that predate the internet, and before them there were
| newspapers doing the same thing. I think the technology of
| social media is just creating small efficiencies in an
| existing business model preying on very old aspects of human
| nature.
| noahtallen wrote:
| I think the difference is that cable news is hard to access
| for a lot of people. For example, you don't have ML
| algorithms on cable boxes trying to suggest a show which
| will result in high engagement. It's fairly siloed, in that
| you have to deliberately choose to watch cable news.
| (Though they definitely keep you hooked!) Social media
| really allows it to be much more pervasive.
| mattnewton wrote:
| Annecdotally, Cable news seems to work just as
| effectively at confirming prior biases as social media
| among my relatives who don't have computers /
| smartphones, maybe even more effectively. I'm skeptical
| that the algorithms are so much better than people self
| sorting between news networks that it's a difference of
| kind rather than degree, and I think we give "the
| algorithms" way too much credit in general
| intricatedetail wrote:
| Isn't it how media in general work? Only difference is that
| almost anyone can publish and you don't have to wait for it to
| print and reach stores, subscribers... E.g. when the press
| publish something false you may get correction few issues later
| somewhere in small print, whereas on Twitter you actually can
| get a chance of seeing rebuttal in the thread. Most people only
| read headlines regardless of the medium.
| spion wrote:
| For what its worth, its highly likely that this comment had
| artificial negative points added in the background for its
| sorting, after which it stopped its super quick gain in points
| (156 in 1-2 hours) and suddenly dropped to page two.
|
| I wonder what the mods found objectionable. Its a general news
| event, so this kind of commentary seems relevant. Social media
| CEOs are facing this problem everywhere and they seem unable
| (or unwilling?) to fight it.
| rich_sasha wrote:
| Is the is very different to what newspapers were when they
| first appeared?
|
| Of course they never achieved the same technological pace.
| Also, nowadays, when you think of newspapers, you think mostly
| of quality publications, writing considered, contextualised
| pieces.
|
| But even nowadays, there are plenty of crappy tabloids chasing
| ad revenue (clicks?), with no regard for information and only
| about the shock factor. And in the past it was much worse,
| since the whole cesspit of attention-grabbing was contained in
| newspapers and pamphlets.
|
| Tech changes, humans don't.
| wutbrodo wrote:
| > Also, nowadays, when you think of newspapers, you think
| mostly of quality publications, writing considered,
| contextualised pieces.
|
| This is a very unique perspective. It's one I don't share,
| and neither do the majority of Americans[1]. The economic and
| cultural forces shaping journalism make it so that it's
| vanishingly rare to find pieces that meet (my personal bar
| for) "considered, contextualized pieces". It's been a decade
| since the world of blogs/independent publishing has been an
| infinitely better source for that type of writing than
| traditional media has.
|
| Naturally, independent publishing is also where you go to
| find the absolute worst of analysis and reporting, to a
| degree that traditional media would never stoop to. The core
| problem is that of discovery, finding the subset of high-
| quality sources in the acres of chaff that is the modern news
| environment.
|
| It turns out that aggregators like Twitter are amazing for
| this, for those with the mental maturity and cognitive
| ability to use them with discipline. It's not very difficult
| to start with a trusted core of intellectually honest
| follows, then iteratively (and hyper-selectively) add high-
| quality accounts/author that you find through your existing
| follows. You have to be okay with a sparse feed to start, and
| you have to be disciplined enough to recognize perspectives
| that are high-quality even if you disagree with them, but
| it's an extremely straightforward path towards a much better
| media diet than the vast majority of people.
|
| Note that this process doesn't disadvantage traditional
| media; it just fails to give it an undue advantage.
| Traditional publications and individual journalists within
| them can be treated like a source like any other, that can be
| compared to In practice, this is nominal only: in my
| experience, the incentives of the industry are such that 99%
| of them fall massively short of the basic quality and
| intellectual honesty bar. (Seriously, try it: start checking
| the sources and reading the papers cited by every article you
| read from eg the NYT and see how long you maintain confidence
| in modeling them as basically intelligent people telling you
| what's basically the truth).
|
| [1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/355526/americans-trust-
| media-di...
| Dumblydorr wrote:
| While I agree printed media is biased and is a medium for
| propaganda, it's hard to argue it's comparable in scale or
| effectiveness to social media.
|
| 1) in the Renaissance, literacy was much lower, books were
| scarce and expensive, and writing was often made in Latin,
| like the original bibles and Newton's Principia Mathematica.
| Therefore, print had MUCH less reach than social media.
|
| 2) the attentional cost of a book is vastly greater than a
| tweet. Tweets are designed to be simple and read in seconds;
| books are often complex and take weeks to digest.
|
| 3) due to 2, I feel Twitter's discourse evolves and devolves
| much, much faster into extremism and bullying and bad
| behaviors. It takes a long time for book disses to reach
| their target, not so for Twitter.
|
| I could go on, but suffice to say, social media is an
| exponential notch above printed media in it's potential
| misuse and damage to society.
| hadlock wrote:
| A lot of printed media was released in poorly bound
| booklets, without covers, it was roughly equivalent to a
| tweet or blog post today. The good ones got reprinted
| and/or compiled into an anthology, the bad ones were simply
| lost to time as kindling for the hearth.
|
| Not as fast as a tweet, but low cost, sub-book media has
| existed as long as the printing press was around. The
| classic books we study today are the equivalent of the
| criterion collection dvd sets.
| dionian wrote:
| What's worse, is it has ushered in a Technocracy, where
| unelected corporate interests now decide which political views
| are "misinformation" and, for example, may threaten "election
| integrity", which drugs doctors should prescribe, etc.
| [deleted]
| zpeti wrote:
| To be fair I think it's more unofficial capture by those in
| power. There is a gun at this point at Facebook and Twitters
| head by super powerful people (including journalists) to get
| them to comply or else...
|
| I think Silicon Valley made a major misjudgement thinking
| geeks with products with billions of people won't be taken
| over by politicians with decades of power game experience.
| It's not even a fair game. These are literally the biggest
| power players in the world, Zuckerberg and Dorsey didn't
| stand a chance.
| jMyles wrote:
| If feed-generating algorithms were dispassionate - amplifying
| liked content rather than massaging feeds for advertising and
| other behavior manipulation - then your assessment of the
| results as "brain viruses" might be more accurate. And the
| world might actually benefit from them.
| spion wrote:
| The thing is, the "natural selection" of this network is
| decided by people on average spending 5 seconds of thought
| before getting outraged/scared/intrigued etc (also, whatever
| is that emotion that says "look world, I found something
| really clever that y'all have missed!") and clicking retweet.
| I find that incredibly unlikely to yield any great content
| whatsoever.
| akomtu wrote:
| It's a clever trick. Short tweets with pictures skip the
| rational thinking part of the brain, for those tweets don't
| have anything to think about, and go straight to the
| emotional animalistic part of the brain. So twitter turns
| into a sort of colossus stadium where millions of apes
| screaming at each other. Usually, the stadium splits into a
| few big chunks where apes chant the same meme.
| manigandham wrote:
| Advertising is placed into the feed, but it doesn't determine
| it. You still get what you like and engage with the most.
| jMyles wrote:
| I'll believe claims of this sort when production feed
| generation algorithms are released under an open license.
| nprz wrote:
| Have you read Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent, Public Opinion
| by Walter Lippman, or Propaganda by Edward Bernays? If so, I
| don't think you would come to the conclusion that the media
| landscape prior to social media was bastion of truth and
| honesty.
| spion wrote:
| Yes. While that situation was bad, it was not nearly as bad
| as the completely out of control results we get from social
| media.
|
| I actually think there is a great opportunity here to fix
| this problem as SM has made it painfully obvious and visible
| to everyone, while also democratizing the entire process.
| (Democratizing manipulation and outrage isn't necessarily the
| best thing in the world though, but we can at least start
| thinking what causes it and what can be done to improve
| things)
| datavirtue wrote:
| Yeah, traditional media was/is a consent manufacturer. The
| elite decide among themselves the truth, and then repeat it
| over and over.
| mysecretaccount wrote:
| Yeah, I cannot imagine how someone would say social media is
| the "biggest problem of our time" unless they were ignorant
| to the work you cited, and many other fundamental issues
| (profit motive turning the planet into a convection oven, for
| one).
| game_the0ry wrote:
| > Twitter and other social media are probably the biggest
| problem of our time.
|
| No, social media is not the root problem - it showed us who we
| really are.
|
| > The worst bit is that social media is becoming the primary
| source of news for most people today. The results have been
| nothing short of catastrophic.
|
| There is good news - people are figuring out the effects of
| social media. Your post is one example - you see there are
| issues, you have "woken up." The "Social Dilemma" on netflix is
| another example, that deprogrammed a lot of people. Frances
| Haugen's testimony to congress, another. Slowly and surely,
| people will build "immunity" to "mind viruses." Humans fought
| this battle and won [1], but the war will go on as long as
| humans and media coexist.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism
| randomsearch wrote:
| It's not novelty that is optimised for, it's engagement, and
| engagement is usually directly correlated with enragement.
| ckastner wrote:
| > _By providing simple rules of information flow: small amount
| of content, retweet, followers) and rewards (likes), they 've
| created the most efficient engines for finding and spreading
| novelty at the expense of everything else._
|
| Those are indeed elementary factors, but I think that Twitter's
| effectiveness stems from how it enables tribal thinking and
| actively _nourishes_ it with its algorithmic ranking.
|
| It's one gigantic outrage machine, and few things are as
| addictive as outrage.
| brightball wrote:
| Where it all went sideways was when mainstream news started
| showing tweets on air.
|
| EDIT: I need to add clarification. I don't mean when breaking
| news gets onto mainstream channels. No question that happens.
|
| What I mean is the use of a single tweet with maybe 1 or 2
| likes here or there to reflect public sentiment on different
| issues. All any news station had to do was fish through the
| pile of tweets about any given topic to find something they
| wanted to show on air and then act as if it represented a large
| segment of people. I watched it happen over and over for years.
|
| Twitter created the ability to engineer the perception of
| public sentiment already with bots, but when main stream news
| joined in things went downhill much, much faster.
| mmastrac wrote:
| I agree. News stories about X "dragging" Y on Twitter were
| rock bottom.
| stcredzero wrote:
| Perhaps things had started to slide sideways before that? I
| distinctly remember a period of time, I think nearly a decade
| back, when I'd constantly hear about something on NPR and
| think, "I saw that headline on reddit yesterday! Are they
| even trying!?"
| datavirtue wrote:
| Everything of significance comes by way of open sources. It
| isn't odd for anyone to do a story that was reported in
| another source.
| sjg007 wrote:
| Broadcasters love it when the news writes itself.
| criddell wrote:
| Are they just giving audiences what they want?
| alpha_squared wrote:
| Mainstream news used to have a near-monopoly on access to
| events and crime scenes. The advent of smartphones with ever-
| improving cameras gives the average citizen, who's there in
| the moment, first access. Twitter just happened to be the
| medium with lowest barrier to sharing that, but it would've
| happened regardless. As stations couldn't keep up with the
| "breaking" part of news, it just made sense (unfortunately)
| to adopt the share-what-others-say model and talk about that
| instead.
| brewdad wrote:
| I don't think eyewitness video is the biggest problem. When
| @LGBrandon8534932 gets their tweets posted on the evening
| news and it's treated the same as a statement from Dr Fauci
| _. THAT 'S a problem.
|
| _Hyperbole. But not by much.
| [deleted]
| alpha_squared wrote:
| Once the floodgates have opened to allow social media
| statements to permeate mainstream news, there's no
| limiting which social media is acceptable and which
| isn't. Eventually, social media itself becomes the news.
| That feels like a natural progression to me, personally,
| despite how much I hate it.
| bonestamp2 wrote:
| I think that's a symptom and not the root cause. The root
| cause was when we stopped paying for news with money and
| started paying for news with clicks. That changed how news
| was gathered, reported, and shared.
| cletus wrote:
| Another case of blaming a symptom rather than the cause.
|
| The media began showing Tweets because Twitter had reached a
| sufficient audience size. The real problem is the audience
| size.
|
| Stroustrup famously said [1]:
|
| > There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people
| complain about and the ones nobody uses.
|
| I'd paraphrase this about communication platforms (including
| social media, Reddit, forums, etc):
|
| > There are only two kinds of communication platforms: the
| ones where people are reactionary, argumentative, tribal,
| incendiary, conflict-seeking, virtue-signaling and just
| downright mean and the others too small for that not to have
| happened yet.
|
| [1]: https://www.stroustrup.com/quotes.html#:~:text=%22There%
| 20ar....
| downandout wrote:
| Interesting take. I do think that social media is driving the
| selection of increasingly unfit political candidates worldwide,
| which is a big problem. In an environment where the objective
| is to share things that get the most "WTF" comments from those
| with whom you disagree and the most applause from those with
| whom you do agree, only the most extreme and/or inept
| candidates wind up getting attention and the resulting votes.
| dragontamer wrote:
| https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2011647630/
|
| William Randolph Hearst
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Randolph_Hearst) did all
| of this first in the early 1900s. (Along with his rival
| Pulitzer. But the image above is clearly in Hearst's image, a
| fact probably lost to the modern audience)
|
| The "problems" you state are far older than Twitter, and its
| best to study history and the problem of "Yellow Journalism".
| Over 100 years ago, people were complaining about false-outrage
| that manipulates the American public.
|
| The only thing that has changed is that the American public has
| _forgotten_ what it was like to live in a outrage-fueled
| society, and we have to relearn the lessons of the past now. We
| need laws and society to change and recognize that all this
| fake-outrage is damaging ourselves, our psyche, and ultimately,
| our society.
| spion wrote:
| Some the problems are old... and some are new.
|
| The old press was broadcast-only and had to catter to the
| lowest common denominator. As a result, at least some people
| were immune.
|
| The new "press" is crowdsourced and tailored just for you.
| Social media doesn't even have to do research on what works
| or what doesn't on who. Natural selection by means of
| retweeting does all the work. You can find misinformation of
| all levels of sophistication, all the way to incorrect
| scientific papers if thats your shtick. (It will mostly be
| based on reading abstract conclusions in those cases without
| checking quality of methodology, or on whatever the funding
| intrests of big companies are)
| dragontamer wrote:
| > You can find misinformation of all levels of
| sophistication, all the way to incorrect scientific papers
| if thats your shtick.
|
| This isn't new at all. "More doctors smoke Camel
| Cigarettes". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gCMzjJjuxQI
|
| And the Tobacco industry funded all types of scientific
| papers, that were published all over the place to
| demonstrate Tobacco's "health benefits".
|
| -------
|
| The only reason we can't find examples older than maybe the
| mid 1900s or so, was because doctors weren't even trusted
| until the 1900s. 1800s doctors were well recognized as
| quacks and had very little reputation among the American
| people. So there was no reason to use doctors as a
| propaganda point back then.
| spion wrote:
| Right, except now its not just pathological aspects of
| capitalism causing the problem - its democratized. Now
| _everyone_ can misinterpret papers in novel an exciting
| ways that are likely to spread far and wide.
| aaroninsf wrote:
| The class of problem and its origins are constant in the
| interaction between human nature and an open market.
|
| The specific problems of today are utterly unlike anything
| older. The medium is overwhelmingly determinate of impact.
|
| The simplistic version of this is: there are profound non-
| linearities introduced by lack of friction. "Superficial"
| differences in the role of feedback and tailored results
| which are noise in the case of print and broadcast media, are
| _everything_ in contemporary social media.
|
| Most particularly, the so-called "algorithm" problem is
| specific to contemporary social media; and it is imbedded in
| our society in ways that are unlike anything which has
| challenged it previously: as the citizen-facing sharp edge of
| surveillance capital, in which the origin and flow of "value"
| (i.e. consumer data) is all but entirely removed from public
| view and individual agency; and acts as a meta-filter, which
| is the sharp edge of social media serving increasingly as the
| sole mechanism whereby people receive media.
|
| We live in a world in which what we read is ever more
| carefully targeted, deluded in the belief that we have agency
| in what we see and some defense about what it does not just
| to us, but to society as a whole.
|
| Contemporary social media is stochastic mind control. And as
| said, it is currently performed almost entirely in service of
| ends very much at odds with the common good, in almost any
| dimension you choose to inspect.
|
| Oh well. We had an OK run.
| dragontamer wrote:
| > The specific problems of today are utterly unlike
| anything older. The medium is overwhelmingly determinate of
| impact.
|
| The USA literally started a war on false pretenses and took
| over the Philippines as a result of Yellow Journalism.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Maine_(1889)
|
| This included at least 15 years of harsh occupation, as the
| Philippine Katipunan (in the north) and Moros (the Muslims
| of the south) fought a guerilla war against their US
| occupiers, with roughly 200,000 dead from famines and war.
| I mean, USA occupied the Philippines until the 1940s (the
| seeds for Philippine independence were planted by the 20s,
| but WW2 severely delayed plans). But just because US
| Citizens have forgotten the story doesn't mean that this
| stuff didn't happen.
|
| The Yellow Press has been a bane upon US society for over a
| century. There's letters from Ben Franklin about how he
| manipulated the press (ie: leaking false "scalping" stories
| about native Americans / British) to aid in the US
| Revolution. (See Henry Hamilton, a British Administrator
| who was widely believed to be a scalper, but proof never
| was offered on the subject: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H
| enry_Hamilton_(colonial_admin...)
|
| -------
|
| This is literally who we are as a people. Easily
| manipulated, outraged filled citizens who individually seem
| to have difficulty doing any form of critical thinking.
| Then a few elites get a good idea about how to manipulate
| the masses: be they Benjamin Franklin, William Hearst, his
| rival Pulitzer, or today Zuckerberg or Jack Dorsey.
|
| Its been like this for centuries, and it will continue to
| be like this long after you or I die.
| spion wrote:
| Or, this might actually be another important problem that
| humanity should find worthy of recognizing and finally
| solving.
| dragontamer wrote:
| Both Pulitzer and Ben Franklin are national heroes for
| their ability to levy the masses and gain popular
| support.
|
| Problem #1 is explaining to people that the outrage-
| filled Yellow press is a problem in the first place. Too
| many people yell "free speech" and "freedom", and point
| out these heroes of the past.
|
| People don't even think this is a problem. So it won't
| get solved. If you can convince enough people that maybe
| we should do something about this, feel free to do so.
| spion wrote:
| Lots of things will need to happen, I agree.
|
| One thing that is happening is that social media is
| escalating the problem so much that its becoming visible
| to everyone, which in turn will increase the demand to do
| something about information quality (including defining
| what it is or is not). This seems to be already in
| progress.
|
| Another thing I'm hoping for is that we can get NLU that
| is advanced enough to detect and elevate great quality
| material (both from research but also from educational
| perspective) that can successfully counteract "yellow
| journalism" and misinformation. We could combine this
| with NLU that can detect common techniques that take
| advantage of flaws in our reasoning abilities.
|
| I'm actually optimistic this may be possible now. I also
| suspect it won't be necessary to go against free speach
| to achieve this.
| dragontamer wrote:
| > I also suspect it won't be necessary to go against free
| speach to achieve this.
|
| We only need to look at the misinformation from 10 years
| ago to see how quickly "free speech" comes into play as a
| counter-argument.
|
| "Obama is a Muslim" and "Obama was born in Kenya" are two
| pieces of misinformation. Explain what methodologies
| you'd do to stop these pieces of misinformation from
| spreading on Facebook, Twitter... or hell... Fox News /
| traditional media.
|
| Any such restriction you think up with will immediately
| bring out the free-speech advocates. People want the
| "freedom" to spread these lies around for political gain.
|
| --------
|
| Its easier to use 10-year-old conspiracies because
| they're no longer "hot". I'm sure there are still people
| who believe in this misinformation today, but they're
| more riled up about current misinformation rather than
| past misinformation.
| spion wrote:
| > Explain what methodologies you'd do to stop these
| pieces of misinformation from spreading on Facebook,
| Twitter... or hell... Fox News / traditional media.
|
| Explaining that these sources of information are not
| reliable, because they use techniques to manipulate
| public opinion. We have to discredit entire subsets of
| media that aren't willing to give up manipulative
| practices.
|
| Saying that we can and should demand higher quality for
| our information, just as we demand high quality for other
| products. We make all kinds of (life) decision based on
| information.
|
| Offering an alternative, better source of information,
| which is transparent, has a well defined methodology, can
| "show you the work" if you want to see it. One where you
| will know people put a lot of effort into producing high
| quality material and went to great length to avoid common
| pitfalls of human reasoning. A new kind of media to
| improve the quality of our lives by improving the quality
| of our information.
|
| Free speach is totally fine to continue existing.
| Traditional media can also continue to exist. That
| doesn't mean we have to take it seriously - nobody bans
| tabloids either, but we don't put much into them.
| dragontamer wrote:
| > Explaining that these sources of information are not
| reliable, because they use techniques to manipulate
| public opinion. We have to discredit entire subsets of
| media that aren't willing to give up manipulative
| practices.
|
| Sure. I can believe that's a step in the right process.
| But have you ever tried to discredit Fox News for pushing
| the lie that "Obama is a Muslim" ?? Or "Obama was born in
| Kenya" ??
|
| Even if you point out that a certain news publication
| does this, no one really seems to care in my experience.
|
| -------
|
| Look, people believe Obama was not born in the USA
| because they _want_ to believe that their political
| opponents are cheating at the process. And Fox News
| simply delivers to them what they want.
|
| Cater to people's worst desires and worst beliefs... you
| know, those beliefs that no one else is willing to
| discuss... and you'll become a trustworthy friend of
| theirs.
|
| Similarly: people want to be optimistic about COVID19.
| They want to believe in a cure (that isn't that cure that
| liberals are pushing). So now you have Hydroxychloroquine
| and Ivermectin. Give them the optimism they so desire,
| and they'll believe you.
|
| People are right to be scared and afraid of COVID19.
| People are right to search for a cure and have optimism.
| But its when these media outlets feed on these fears and
| pushes misinformation that things get dangerous.
| sAbakumoff wrote:
| Yeah, feeling of novelty causes a dopamine spike, but shortly
| afterwards the level is back and we feel like they need more
| new stuff. Mindless purposeless scrolling may last hours and
| hours. Twitter is bad, but Tik Tok is the worst. Remove all
| this stuff from your phone and read HN instead. Here you at
| least should focus on sophisticated comments like yours!
| drjasonharrison wrote:
| Please don't use dopamine to explain addictive/repetitive
| behaviors. It's like blaming your eyes for finding the button
| to click. It's more complex.
| https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/women-who-
| stray/20...
| hellbannedguy wrote:
| Plus most medical doctors know modern Psychiary, and the
| brain, are still a mystery. Psychiatry is art. Yes all
| medicine is an art, but psychiatry takes tie cake.
| sAbakumoff wrote:
| OF COURSE it's more complex than this, the human's brain is
| a very sophisticated machine. But I just read a couple of
| "brain for dummies" books[1][2], so my knowledge is pretty
| limited.
|
| [1] - "Behave" by Sapolsky [2] - The Willpower Instinct
|
| From that I recall they explain that the reward system
| responds to feeling of novelty because it's good for
| survival, f.e. you can find food or water source in a new
| location or maybe notice a hostile animals there. So, it's
| a behaviour caused by evolution. Twitter, Facebook, etc.
| just exploited it. And they admitted it:
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/09/facebook
| -...
| electrondood wrote:
| TikTok is terrifying. It is designed to be nicotine for your
| attention span, achieving engagement at any cost. Now they've
| added keyboard shortcuts.
|
| The effects of social media on our collective attention span
| legitimately scare me. Our attention spans are shrinking with
| each generation, and the effect has gone parabolic in the
| last 15 years. Look at old movies, and notice the longer
| length of cuts compared to movies today. Now look at the
| infinite feed on TikTok.
|
| What happens when the minority of the population that
| actually does their civic duty of informed voting can no
| longer pay attention to important issues?
|
| What happens when people can't think about any topic beyond a
| sound bite or meme?
|
| What happens when no one has more than 1000ms of patience to
| question whether they're looking at a deepfake?
|
| Climate change? Holding politicians accountable for
| corruption or abuses of power?
|
| I think we need to take a good look at where we're headed.
| c7DJTLrn wrote:
| I wonder how much your mind would have to distort reality for
| you to believe you're providing the world with a good service
| when you're at the helm of Twitter or Facebook.
| rtkwe wrote:
| There's a fair amount of motivation to find a reason to
| believe it's a "the good out weighs the bad" situation. For
| starters they're making incredible amounts of money and then
| there's the desire to not think you're doing something bad.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| I expect it's quite easy; you believe that you're connecting
| people and that this is a good thing, and then you ignore the
| undesirable second-order effects of how you're doing it.
| Nasrudith wrote:
| You just need to respect human agency instead of thinking you
| inherently know better than the world how to use it. It is a
| sentiment which is very out of current zeitgeist with its
| "boy who cried dystopia" bent.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| How do gigantic globe-spanning ad machines "respect human
| agency"?
| jabedude wrote:
| I can see the argument. Nothing forces an individual to
| click on or engage with an advertisement
| fossuser wrote:
| The tweet of his email:
| https://twitter.com/jack/status/1465347002426867720?s=21
| option_greek wrote:
| I expect the Trump ban to be overturned starting next year. And
| also Twitter to become lot more neutral. Whatever someone's
| political beliefs might be, it is bad for business when you
| alienate good number of users and also result in encouraging
| other alternatives to the already crowded social media space.
|
| And shareholders expect this which is why shares are up today.
| smt88 wrote:
| I wouldn't assume the Trump ban is a net negative for Twitter.
| Banning divisive accounts tends to make a site less unpleasant.
|
| I think you're right, but it's debatable whether it's a good
| business decision.
| vermontdevil wrote:
| He announced his resignation of course via a tweet:
|
| https://twitter.com/jack/status/1465347002426867720?s=20
| mrkramer wrote:
| It's too late, damage has been done. Twitter is a mess.
| tristor wrote:
| Twitter has always been a mess. Anyone sensible who wasn't
| speculating had dismissed Twitter as a platform for serious
| usage about 5 minutes after it launched.
| h2odragon wrote:
| the "I'm a Twitter shitter" Penny Arcade comic eloquently
| explained Twitter back when, I thought. I have yet to see a
| better expression of the value of the platform.
| wly_cdgr wrote:
| ...and hurried back to Hacker News to engage in serious,
| hyperbole-free discussions with fellow bigbrains? :rolls
| eyes:
| tristor wrote:
| Not necessarily, but the character limit necessarily limits
| the amount of seriousness and quality within content on
| Twitter. It's very format necessitates that Twitter is full
| of vapid and inane content, and driven by pithy outrage
| inducement.
| wly_cdgr wrote:
| Or you could say that the limit forces you to be concise,
| precise, and vivid. Many of the world's most admired
| poems would fit in one Tweet.
| monocasa wrote:
| Many of the world's most admired poems have had their
| statements argued about for centuries because they're so
| vague too.
| wly_cdgr wrote:
| So you're saying people have cared about these poems
| enough that they've formed communities around discussing
| them for literal centuries? :)
| monocasa wrote:
| What I'm saying is that it doesn't force you to be
| precise (or vivid, whatever that means in practice),
| making it not a great choice for a lot of the mass
| communication roles Twitter has been foisted into.
| jjk166 wrote:
| The word limit might in theory encourage it, but in
| practice twitter certainly does not require it. In fact,
| you're generally better off being overnice, imprecise,
| and livid. People could tweet a poem, but they don't.
| 1_player wrote:
| Many of the harshest insults also fit in one Tweet.
|
| Unless you're Shakespeare or a master of your language of
| similar stature, it's very hard to convey a deep and
| nuanced thought with so few characters. People write
| books because the more complex the idea, the more words
| it requires to fully explain.
| wly_cdgr wrote:
| It's very hard to convey a deep and nuanced thought with
| any number of characters. People add more because they're
| anxious they're failing and adding more words is easier
| than picking better words. And because you need 250 pages
| worth of them to get a publishing contract, of course
|
| It's uncommon to read a 300 page book that couldn't have
| made its points better in 30 pages - and properly rare to
| read one that couldn't have done it in 150
| bluescrn wrote:
| The world is a mess. And social media is to blame for a fair
| bit of that mess.
| MichaelMoser123 wrote:
| I am curious, will Trump now get his twitter account back?
| (getting my popcorn ready)
| tricky wrote:
| What kind of board allows an announcement like this to happen in
| such an uncontrolled way? I feel like this is just more evidence
| that Twitter's board is weak.
| fundad wrote:
| There was more drama than we know. This was brewing for a
| while.
|
| https://www.foxnews.com/politics/twitter-paul-singer-republi...
| riffic wrote:
| I fully agree here: Jack was sacked.
| fl0wenol wrote:
| This makes me uncomfortable. Not the idea of it per se, but
| the narrative the GOP's anti-cancel-culture bloc builds
| around it. Echoes of Thiel's involvement with Bollea vs.
| Gawker.
| fundad wrote:
| Yeah we better get used to disappointment. I think the best
| hope we have is that Twitter becomes the next Facebook and
| people we read go somewhere else. It's very dangerous but
| this is a dangerous time in a dangerous place.
| notyourwork wrote:
| How would you like it to happen? Twitter schedules a formal
| press conference to announce it or otherwise?
| kgermino wrote:
| Form 8-K filed with the SEC concurrently with a Press Release
| and interviews announcing his successor and explaining why
| this will be a "good thing."
|
| The 8-K is functionally a legal requirement for this and the
| rest is just making sure you control the message to reduce
| speculation which can hurt you.
| notyourwork wrote:
| I wasn't sure what was expected to happen, thank you for
| explaining!
| ryzvonusef wrote:
| YES!
|
| You don't leak it to a reporter like it's the latest variant
| of the iPhone.
|
| There should have an announcement from the board, a LONG time
| before markets were to start (ideally end of markets on
| friday) clearly explaining WHAT is happening and WHY (even if
| it's a bullshit reason, there _should_ be a reason).
|
| It would have allowed markets to absorb the news instead of
| the NYSE having to halt trading amid the uncertainty.
| yupper32 wrote:
| I don't get it. Who cares? You sound like you just want the
| status quo.
|
| Sending a tweet works just as well to get the message out.
| ryzvonusef wrote:
| the tweet came a few hours after CNBC leaked it, what I
| had posted on HN was the original article, it was changed
| with the tweet after the fact by some mod here.
|
| My comment dates from when we didn't have a tweet or any
| info, no one knew who the next ceo of twitter was, simply
| the rumour (not even confirmed news) that jack had left.
| no one knew, Twitter PR was refusing reporter questions
| and NYSE had to stop trading until the situation settled
| jon_richards wrote:
| Serious question: What does making an announcement while
| the market is closed actually do? Are you not just throwing
| money to the people willing to trade after hours?
| alistaira wrote:
| My unqualified guess is that it makes time to ensure the
| full story and context to be digested by traders. If the
| story is emerging during trading, there is risk of more
| volatility / unpredictability as the fastest information
| may not be the most complete.
| ryzvonusef wrote:
| equal access to information. (no "insider" benefit)
|
| people trading off market are taking their own risks
| willingly, the market itself tries to be fair w.r.t.
| reported
|
| if you are listed, you effectively agree to release info
| on certain terms, so that off-market don't get a better
| advantage also
|
| When I had posted this, there had been no tweet, just a
| leak from a CNBC reporter with three lines : breaking
| news, Jack is rumored to be leaving, stay tuned for more
| info.
|
| there was a massive info asymmetry, so NYSE had to halt
| trading until it deems news has percolated enough, I
| guess.
| ryzvonusef wrote:
| I feel this was a "leak", the timing of which was suspect.
| echelon wrote:
| Any speculation as to the reason and timing for this?
|
| Twitter was Jack's baby, and he loved it so much that he gave 50%
| of his Square time to leading Twitter. Jack has so much more to
| gain from Square from both an equity and Bitcoin maximalist
| perspective, it's curious why Jack would try to lead two very
| demanding companies simultaneously. (Not that it can't be done.
| Elon, Jack, et al. have done it for years.)
|
| My thought is that this is Jack returning focus to Square after
| the recent SQ earnings report miss, slowing growth of Cash App,
| stock slip (down 20%), and incredibly increased competition from
| Shopify, PayPal, and now MAGMA. (Microsoft is entering BNPL,
| Google/Apple/Facebook pay, etc.)
| antoniuschan99 wrote:
| From the tweet do you think Parag and/or Bret pushed him out?
| frontman1988 wrote:
| Parag doesn't look like a guy who could push anyone out.
| antoniuschan99 wrote:
| In that case, Dorsey brought in Bret and he's now become
| board chair. Whereas Dorsey now has stepped down as CEO.
|
| But more importantly, he says he eventually will leave the
| board?
| egberts1 wrote:
| In short, Twitter Board of Directors fired Jack.
| lvl100 wrote:
| I personally think Jack is grossly out of touch with reality.
| Even when it comes to crypto, he refuses to support anything
| outside of BTC. Twitter is still the best medium for real-time
| news and information dissemination. Hopefully they can keep that
| going.
| [deleted]
| simonebrunozzi wrote:
| A few reflections on this announcement.
|
| 1) Remember that CEOs of public companies are essentially unable
| to say what they think or want. The cost of doing it is being
| sued for damages, having to spend countless hours with lawyers,
| etc. Jack might think X, but he's only allowed to say Y, and he
| doesn't want to go beyond that because he doesn't want to fight
| that fight.
|
| Only people in a close circle really know what's going on, and
| it's most certainly not random people on the Internet (or HN).
|
| 2) Also, consider that Twitter, and perhaps Facebook (sorry but I
| don't give a sh*t that its new name is Meta), are really
| difficult companies to run, especially if you'd like to do some
| public good, as opposed to just maximizing returns.
|
| There are so many things that can go wrong, so many other things
| that will set your company on fire without warnings, and that
| doesn't give people the time to think strategically on how to
| tackle certain difficult scenarios.
|
| Twitter and Facebook essentially control most of the public
| discourse these days; never seen such amount of power in the
| hands of a few companies.
|
| 3) Despite common opinion, I actually think that Twitter (unlike
| Facebook) has done more good than harm. Why? Because it has
| essentially enabled an incredible explosion of "voices" that can
| be heard (err, read) all over the world.
|
| 4) Yes, we can think of countless ways to make Twitter better,
| but remember that Twitter is not run by Jack Dorsey, nor that
| other companies are run by their CEOs. Companies are run by
| boards, which means, by large funds with controlling interest in
| these companies. Even a well-intentioned CEO has to fight against
| many things his/her board want. And unlike enlightened CEOs,
| enlightened boards are essentially a very rare creature, almost
| never seen on planet Earth (IMHO).
|
| 5) You might think I'm defending Jack, perhaps I am, but it might
| be because hatred is really easy to dispense, while trying to be
| balanced in your judgement is really hard, and perhaps the
| conversation about Twitter should benefit from cooler heads, as
| opposed to quick slogans.
| MaximumYComb wrote:
| I lean moderately left and I really disagree with #3. The
| explosion of voices is only ones that are "allowed". Twitter is
| one of the biggest offenders of cancel culture (i.e. silencing
| people).
| StevePerkins wrote:
| Realistically speaking, Twitter has _" done more good than
| harm (unlike Facebook)"_ because:
|
| 1. Younger and left-leaning outrage tends to dominate on
| Twitter.
|
| 2. Older and right-leaning outrage tends to dominate on
| Facebook.
|
| 3. Any conclusions are going to be subjective AF accordingly,
| and HN is a more young and left-leaning cohort.
|
| All social media is a double-edged sword, under the most
| charitable view.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| Compare to before, where the only voices you heard where ones
| that were allowed by a hand full of media execs.
| bad_username wrote:
| > it has essentially enabled an incredible explosion of
| "voices" that can be heard
|
| Very controlled, curated, and politically corrected explosion.
| "Very lively debate within allowed spectrum".
| Aeolun wrote:
| What exactly would you like to discuss on Twitter? I've never
| felt censored there regardless of what my opinion was.
| randomsearch wrote:
| > There are so many things that can go wrong, so many other
| things that will set your company on fire without warnings, and
| that doesn't give people the time to think strategically on how
| to tackle certain difficult scenarios.
|
| > never seen such amount of power in the hands of a few
| companies.
|
| These two points seem contradictory. If you are very powerful,
| you can draw on great resources, and you can address many
| things.
|
| Twitter has more than enough resource to prevent it from being
| the extremely harmful manipulation machine that it is.
|
| There is no excuse beyond "we want money more than a healthy
| society."
| hartator wrote:
| > Remember that CEOs of public companies are essentially unable
| to say what they think or want.
|
| Elon Musk seems pretty free. He just pays the fines time to
| time.
| ralfd wrote:
| Yes. I guess Musk is the exception proving the rule.
| wheelerof4te wrote:
| Great. Now resign Twitter.
| snarkypixel wrote:
| There's zero explanation in the email for why he resigned. He's
| re-iterating the point that the company is fine moving forward
| with the rest of the board, the new CEO and the existing team,
| but no actual reason as to why he left.
| snarkypixel wrote:
| Replying to my own comment, but if I had to guess (on
| absolutely zero context and evidence :p), I would say he wants
| to focus on crypto/Square, and Twitter is more of a time sink.
| Twitter is in a good enough state at the moment that the team
| can move without him so it's a good moment to leave.
| koheripbal wrote:
| The 10% appreciation of the shares as a result of him leaving
| is reason enough. He's still a big shareholder.
| hartator wrote:
| Except now the stock is DOWN 2.7%.
| busymom0 wrote:
| Other than Musk for Tesla and SpaceX, I can't think of any
| of the major companies who would really be impacted much by
| their CEO leaving. Maybe Zuck leaving FB might make a small
| difference but IG seems decently independent of him anyway.
| superflit2 wrote:
| Maybe there is a current trial or lawsuit that could damage his
| reputation and then the company?
|
| Like a trial that is touching a lot of big players in tech?
|
| something.. something.... L*** express?
|
| Thus resigning is better for the shareholders and him.
| at-fates-hands wrote:
| You're seeing a lot of political consolidation around getting
| rid of, or revamping considerably section 230 which most
| social media platforms have been protected from lawsuits for
| a while now.
|
| When you have both parties in agreement that FB, Twitter and
| Google are a threat to free speech and democracy, you best
| watch out.
|
| This was my thought. The heat was getting too much for him.
| Law makers repeatedly asking him to come testify on this and
| that. The pressure to get rid of 230, and have better
| controls on banning people may have just worn on him enough
| where he just decided to toss in the towel and move onto
| something else and quietly disappear.
| tinyhouse wrote:
| When a CEO leaving the same day the news come out, it means it
| wasn't his decision.
| at-fates-hands wrote:
| I was digging around this morning and found this from 2020.
| You think he was just feeling the heat lately and wanted out?
| Or has this been in the works from opposing forces for a
| while now?
|
| _A billionaire Republican megadonor has purchased a
| "sizable" stake in Twitter and "plans to push" to oust CEO
| Jack Dorsey among other changes, according to new reports,
| raising the prospect of a shocking election-year shakeup of
| the social media platform that conservatives have long
| accused of overt left-wing political bias._
|
| _Paul Singer's Elliott Management Corp. has already
| nominated four directors to Twitter 's board, a development
| first reported by Bloomberg News, citing several sources
| familiar with the arrangement. The outlet noted that unlike
| other prominent tech CEOs, Dorsey didn't have voting control
| over Twitter because the company had just one class of stock;
| and he has long been a target for removal given Twitter's
| struggling user growth numbers and stock performance._
|
| Aside from these two paragraphs the rest of the article is a
| lot of speculation and some quotes from people who've been
| against Twitter for some time:
|
| https://www.foxnews.com/politics/twitter-paul-singer-
| republi...
| bin_bash wrote:
| They've fired him before and last year he nearly got fired by
| the board when an activist investor came on board. I think if
| that was the case it would be public knowledge.
| sedatk wrote:
| Not really. When you don't want the discussion to linger for
| the whole transition period, announcing the news the last
| minute can make sense. Not saying it's the case here though,
| just saying it's a possibility.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Uncharitable explanation: he's being forced out over his pro-
| free-speech views. He's been pretty vocal about disagreeing
| with Twitter's recent actions.
| mike_d wrote:
| That makes no sense. He is the CEO and on the board, he _is_
| the decision maker and could reverse any action he disagreed
| with. Any disagreement was purely theatre.
| Negitivefrags wrote:
| If you think that the CEO of a company can just do whatever
| they like then you haven't run a company.
|
| If you attempt to do things that the employees do not want
| to do then your company will turn to shit. People will
| leave, and those that remain will have terrible
| productivity.
|
| Yes, you get some "Just do as I say" points, but you have
| to choose where to spend them very wisely.
| swalsh wrote:
| Everyone (except maybe Zuck) has a boss.
| bombcar wrote:
| Perhaps he did reverse or prevent some actions the board in
| general felt he shouldn't, and this is the "please leave".
| ulzeraj wrote:
| Look for a video of his speech during the Bitcoin
| conference that happened in Miami this year. Some activist
| invaded the area blaming him for censorship and then he
| proceed to apologetically explain that the pressure comes
| from the companies advertising on Twitter.
|
| EDIT: here it is
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFd5zlw13FU
| mgfist wrote:
| A CEO isn't a dictator. They still need board support. If
| everyone on the board decided that Jack wasn't the guy
| anymore, Jack can't wave a magic wand and make them
| disappear. CEOs have been ousted many times.
| mike_d wrote:
| The board can't unilaterally decide the color of the
| Twitter logo is now green. They can pressure the CEO and
| threaten to hold a vote to fire him if he doesn't change
| it, but up until that point the CEO is the ultimate
| decision maker for the company.
|
| Jack saying he didn't like decisions Twitter made is like
| if I started complaining that I didn't like the
| restaurant I chose for dinner.
| solumos wrote:
| People forget that Jack was ousted in 2008!
| delaaxe wrote:
| From what I hear that's not the case the with Zuckerberg,
| in that most decisions go through him. I would guess the
| same with Elon
| r00fus wrote:
| That's because Zuckerberg stacked the decks that way
| because he pressed his advantage early. He owns
| controlling interest of his operation and it can't be
| wrested from him.
|
| I don't think it's the best approach to manage a company
| but it's sure been lucrative for Mark.
| nicce wrote:
| Zuckerberg owns too much from the company. Elon is the
| public figure of his companies and firing him crashes the
| stock.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > A CEO isn't a dictator. They still need board support.
|
| Dictators can't operate without support either.
| justapassenger wrote:
| Running social media company is a job, where in the best case,
| half of the world hates you. No matter how good you're, you're
| always walking thin line between hate, free speech, conspiracy
| theories, political polarization, media and countless other
| issues. It's a game you cannot win, and I'm pretty sure that's
| why he's resigning.
| hitpointdrew wrote:
| Welcome to public relations.
|
| This is par for the course, ask a politician a question get a
| non-answer, ask an NFL coach about the next game "They are a
| good team, we have to practice hard." It's all just talking
| without really saying anything.
| clairity wrote:
| yes, that's the downside of the 'iterated game' dynamic: the
| desire to minimize leaks of future strategy. the upside, of
| course, is fewer defections/betrayals. it's one of the
| reasons we need independent journalism in society not
| beholden to moneyed/political interests. unfortunately, just
| about every news outlet, including npr, has been subverted at
| this point.
|
| here's hoping jack actually believes in sacrificing money and
| power to defect out of this information oligopoly, though i'm
| skeptical as those forces are irresistable to most humans.
| ksec wrote:
| Twitter, ~$35B Market Cap, no profits, operating expenses keeps
| growing with Gross Profits. Future projection of profitability
| is still slim. Along with trillions of social / political
| issues that you have to due with because you are running social
| media.
|
| Square, ~$100B Market Cap, profitable, still mainly US based
| and growing. Crypto and Payment. Lots of potentials.
|
| It is not too hard to pick which one to run.
| trentnix wrote:
| All while telling us how amazingly transparent the company is.
| jms703 wrote:
| He is/was CEO of two companies, but seems more interested in
| what's going on at one more than the other. Makes sense. Get
| out of the way of the people focused on the mission.
| authed wrote:
| LoL... his tweet was too long so he used a screenshot of it?
| Ekaros wrote:
| How come 280 characters isn't good enough. Or really should
| have done it in 140 as they intended...
| artembugara wrote:
| I remember this joke from Twitter:
|
| "Startup idea: Twitter with full-time CEO"
|
| Well, some things come true.
| cortexio wrote:
| good. i feel like your track record of political bias was too
| damaging to the company. Sure it brought in alot of money, but i
| dont think it's a good longterm strategy.
| LatteLazy wrote:
| I have to say I've really liked his hard stance on free speech,
| though I know this is a pet issue for me..
| h2odragon wrote:
| His "stance on free speech" is a boot on the neck of any
| discussion they dont like. Or that matched a poorly crafted
| regexp.
| dimgl wrote:
| You've liked his hard stance on free speech? What stance is
| that? That some speech is okay and other speech is not okay?
| rubyist5eva wrote:
| Twitter is just a heaping cesspool, he should pull the plug on
| his way out.
| abdel_nasser wrote:
| i remember jack on the JRE podcast having a debate with a right-
| wing journalist. he was put into the position of trying to deny
| that twitters moderation favors far-left narratives. its
| emblematic of the role of CEO because i have always imagined that
| the true challenge of being the CEO of a top company is to be
| stuck between honesty and the company. jack wanted to say that
| yes of course the moderation skews left because to do otherwise
| would threaten the solvency of the company. but to say it out
| loud would make it all redundant. a thousand people think that if
| only they ran twitter they would put an end to X. no you wouldnt.
| and i would guess that jack has gone through more than most of us
| could imagine.
| Shadonototra wrote:
| thanks to the shareholders, i guess twitter will become facebook
| in no time!
| [deleted]
| tinyhouse wrote:
| News say the current CTO is going to replace him. We'll see how
| it turns out. Very surprising to me that are going with someone
| with zero relevant experience. If I were a Twitter share holder I
| would sell all my stocks today.
| rexreed wrote:
| I remember spending a summer on the Twitter campus and the whole
| time I was wondering - why the heck does Twitter need all these
| employees (5500 as of last count [0])? The functionality hasn't
| budged much in years. I get the need for IT ops to keep stuff
| running (especially since failwhale days). But honestly, I never
| got why Twitter couldn't do with 1/10 the staff they have / had.
| I hope this great resignation wave continues across the company.
|
| [0]
| https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/TWTR/twitter/numbe...
| taurath wrote:
| Automated ad networks still require a lot of engineering and
| relationship management
| rexreed wrote:
| What's the usual ratio of engineering / relationship
| management per ad dollar revenue?
| oceanplexian wrote:
| Investors have priced the company at a market cap of $36.8
| Billion, so approx. $6.8M per employee. I guess you could
| subtract their assets and IP but I doubt it will change the
| figure much.
| rexreed wrote:
| That doesn't make sense. Employees per revenue is not
| measured by market cap, but by revenue. Revenue was $3.7B
| as last reported. So you're 10x off by that measure.
| Also, not all employees are engineering and ad
| relationship management.
| ksec wrote:
| I would have thought even 2000 engineers on Ad Network is
| still pretty insane.
|
| And their Operating Expense keeps growing with Gross Profits.
| milesward wrote:
| Ahh yet another person who sees the user facing systems as "the
| product", or worse "the hard part". Sigh.
| dang wrote:
| Please edit snarky swipes like "Ahh yet another person who"
| out of your comments here. As the site guidelines say, a good
| critical comment teaches us something.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| rexreed wrote:
| Which systems are the "hard" parts? Given zero functionality
| change, how much larger can and should Twitter grow? Is the
| complication a function of ad revenue, volume of content,
| user traffic?
| mrtksn wrote:
| It's usually about the systems that serve the clients(the
| people who pay money to Twitter) and other parts of the
| company. They probably have a lot of internal system and
| corporate facing that change and evolve as the business
| evolves. Think contents management, legal, payments, BI,
| abuse prevention, systems performance, testing, growth,
| compliance, ads management for the customers and management
| for the ads purchases and performance, custom access to
| select people or clients and god knows what.
|
| The hard part is the business part.
| vimda wrote:
| Just because you don't see functionality changing doesn't
| mean it isn't. Lots of new features, just not for the
| normal users. Not to mention all the backend work to make
| all this data flow around, be accurate, and be reliable.
|
| And also, there's not just engineering. HR, Accounting,
| Lawyers, Trust and Safety, it's all there
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| The question is valid though as to why they've kept
| growing if the user-facing product hasn't changed. There
| are some good reasons but lots of bad ones too.
| rexreed wrote:
| The point I'm trying to make is assume that user-side
| functionality stays exactly the same - frozen - for say
| 10 years. Given what you say above, it would be
| reasonable to expect the company to continue to grow in
| any case on its current 10-20% compounded annual rate
| with no end in sight. Is that truly sustainable?
| mfringel wrote:
| Twitter is a platform that offers a product. Your
| attention is the product.
|
| The part of Twitter required to maintain a decent stock
| of product has not needed to change outwardly, because it
| hasn't had to. There hasn't been a new version of human
| in a very long time. But even then, anything that creates
| more product (drives more engagement) means more revenue
| opportunity for the 90% of the platform you will never
| touch.
|
| The parts of the product that theoretically make revenue
| for Twitter have changed significantly over time.
| Analytics, ad intake/spend, promotion for
| influencers/brands/etc.
| ctvo wrote:
| Which users? Internal users? External users? External
| developers (I know, I know) or academics consuming their
| APIs? Advertisers?
|
| Starting from the position of what don't I know about
| this situation, and / or what systems could cause it to
| be in this seemingly intractable state leaves you open to
| all sorts of new learnings vs. assuming there aren't
| intelligent, capable people on the other side.
| cheriot wrote:
| Twitter is an advertising platform and it's the ads, ad
| targeting, advertiser tools that change. Doing new things
| with a large volume of data requires a lot of engineering.
|
| "If you're not paying for the product, you are the product"
| as they say
| winternett wrote:
| They need all those employees because apparently there is not
| really any algorithm at work... An insider leaked at some point
| on Reddit a while back that there are just a bunch of people
| applying back end controls on each user account to limit their
| posting activity in one of a few ways, and when I saw it it did
| a lot to ease my mind about how the erratic way Twitter works.
| I personally think that some accounts simply get shadowbanned
| for life unless they pass the "money making controversial post
| attention" threshold.
|
| Smoke and mirrors and pay-for-play have completely corrupted
| social media now since the pandemic. "Success" on social
| platforms depends on how much you can afford to pay for it.
|
| I understand everyone has bills to pay, but these services
| started out as free services and converted stealthily and at
| times deceptively into paid services, and that shouldn't be
| just overlooked or given a pass.
| rexreed wrote:
| This is the answer I was expecting. There's clearly a non-
| scaling factor at work here.
| sol_invictus wrote:
| There are some fantastic fringe right-wing communities I'm going
| to miss tremendously after the new CEO inevitably starts purging
| the "unconventional" content
| fundad wrote:
| I don't think that's the direction they're going.
| https://www.foxnews.com/politics/twitter-paul-singer-republi...
| swalsh wrote:
| You think this guy
| (https://twitter.com/paraga/status/28773976508) is a stooge
| for the Republicans?
| fundad wrote:
| He is a CEO and is replacing the first person to hold the
| Republican president accountable after Jan 6. I think that
| impacts his decision making, working the refs works dude.
|
| I think neither he nor Tim Cook are stooges for Republicans
| but they are scared to look anti-Republican. Serious
| question, do you think the new CEO is going to be more bold
| in the face of right-wing criticism than your average CEO?
|
| I knew we're not talking about Apple but their last
| liberal-seeming act was speaking out against a bathroom
| bill that is clearly unconstitutional; but the backlash
| shut them up.
| smt88 wrote:
| You feel that Twitter is an irreplaceable source of fringe,
| right-wing community? Aren't there a ton of sites that serve
| that purpose?
| sol_invictus wrote:
| Where else can I build a feed of all the different subgroups
| that exist within the RW spectrum?
|
| Please dont say something like Parler
| wodenokoto wrote:
| Is there a way to hit link to Twitter images?
|
| It's really difficult to read when you can't properly zoom and
| stuff
| thomasyoung99 wrote:
| https://reachpals.com/stories/2021-11-29/2294204
| danschumann wrote:
| Twitter made me feel: some combination of violated, indignant,
| numb, inferior, empty, powerless, disappointed, embarassed,
| furious, annoyed, and infuriated.
| dnautics wrote:
| I used to feel that way, but I aggressively moderated who I
| follow in a purge, and being selective about who I add as
| follows.
|
| It _feels_ like it 's easier to marie-kondo people I don't care
| for anymore in twitter since there's little-to-no-expectation
| that I know anyone on twitter, and for me, anyways, twitter is
| a much more pleasant experience than any other social network
| has been.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| Aggressively unfollowing people is the only way to keep
| Twitter useful.
|
| I think the mistake people make is approaching Twitter
| follows like they would friendship links on Facebook or other
| platforms. You don't have a relationship with the people you
| follow. Don't hesitate to let it go.
|
| The loudest people on Twitter are often the worst at
| providing actual value. They optimize for clickbait and
| engagement, which can trick people into thinking that the
| person is a good follow.
|
| The moment you realize someone's Tweets are not providing
| value or they're always making you sad/angry/outraged, click
| that unfollow button. It makes a world of difference.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| I agree that it's possible to curate a good Twitter
| experience, but it's concerning to me that Twitter is
| hostile by default. I'm not sure if it's trying to
| promulgate a specific repugnant ideology or maybe it tries
| to provoke everyone equally (e.g., for engagement), but in
| either case it seems socially harmful. And to be clear, I
| don't mind that it shows me a lot of content from people
| with whom I disagree (even forcefully), but I _do_ mind
| that the content it boosts is the lowest quality
| argumentation (calling it "argumentation" is too
| generous). For example, in a recent high profile self
| defense case, Twitter didn't boost any legal expert
| analysis, but it _did_ boost the d-list celebrities and
| popular journalists (and their vitriolic followers) whose
| views don 't survive even the slightest encounter with the
| evidence. And to be clear, the issue isn't that it's
| promoting this stuff _to me_ (I have thick skin,
| apparently), but that it 's promoting it to everyone by
| default, such that it is a systemic problem.
| dylan604 wrote:
| >Aggressively unfollowing people is the only way to keep
| Twitter useful.
|
| Aggressively not following people to require unfollowing
| later would be another way
| tills13 wrote:
| The only issue with this is you create your own echo chamber.
| imo it's why conservatives feel so emboldened, recently --
| they have surrounded themselves with people who agree with
| them making their "movement" seem larger than it actually is.
| dnautics wrote:
| I actively try to not create an echo chamber, but sure. I
| suppose it's something that people do.
| packetlost wrote:
| That goes both ways. The hyper progressive echo chambers
| are just as problematic. Echo champers are problematic in
| general, it doesn't matter the political leanings.
| danschumann wrote:
| Because echo chamber is distant from the rest of people.
| Distant-> withdrawn or numb ( both anger emotions )
| sergers wrote:
| i think that goes for any of the movements today... where
| its the silent majority, who dont want to say anything in
| face of backlash of small few with big voices.
|
| not just conservatives
| tshaddox wrote:
| > they have surrounded themselves with people who agree
| with them making their "movement" seem larger than it
| actually is.
|
| At least in the U.S., I think that's more attributable to
| their enormously disproportionate political power.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| I don't use Twitter for politics. It's a cesspool where the
| biggest assholes win.
| eyelidlessness wrote:
| It certainly has this reputation. But nearly 100% of the
| political content on my feed is respectful and thoughtful
| --much moreso than most political content I see here. And
| my follows are definitely not an echo chamber, I'd
| estimate that at least 1/3 of my political follows are
| far more conservative than I am.
| pjscott wrote:
| I've noticed this as well. I think it has to do with
| people self-sorting to different parts of Twitter based
| on what kind of political discussion they want. The
| people who just want to be loudly scornful of $OUTGROUP
| go to the places where that happens all the time,
| avoiding the parts of Twitter they'd find boringly calm;
| and people who'd rather talk about things calmly stick to
| the places where that's the norm, avoiding the parts of
| Twitter they'd find to be content-free sound and fury.
| (And if you ever look at the replies to a tweet that
| crossed the streams, you get a glimpse of a strange other
| world.)
| wheybags wrote:
| I just aggressively unfollow anyone who talks about
| politics, either right or left. I also unfollow anyone
| whose average tweet rate is > 0.5/day. Works fine for me,
| but I understand that would just kill the whole experience
| for many people.
| Hackbraten wrote:
| I can enjoy a tweet while at the same time disagreeing with
| it.
|
| Same on HN. I often upvote comments, even though I disagree
| with them, whenever I feel they're a meaningful
| contribution to the discourse.
| dheera wrote:
| Kudos. Many times if I want to bring up an unpopular
| opinion of mine it will get downvoted to oblivion, so I
| have to self-censor.
| jacobr1 wrote:
| I see a pattern where they are downvoted initially, then
| later return. I suspect type of people that read HN
| periodically are different than those that are refreshing
| regularly.
| KoftaBob wrote:
| This is mostly an issue if you use Twitter for politics. If
| you use it to follow people in topics that you're
| interested in/hobbies, this isn't really relevant. You
| don't really need to worry about an echo chamber among
| baking pages, or DIY home guides, etc.
|
| Honestly, life was so much more peaceful once I curated my
| social media apps to focus on my hobbies and remove
| "general news/current events" from my feed, which are
| largely garbage. I'll look up info about candidates when
| elections roll around, the rest of the year, I don't want
| to hear the worthless bullshit in that space.
| seanw444 wrote:
| This doesn't apply exclusively to conservatives. The echo
| chambering is definitely a bipartisan issue. This is
| obvious on almost any platform.
|
| Edit: Submitted this on an out-of-date page, not realizing
| so many people would respond the same. Not being a copycat.
| ARandomerDude wrote:
| Yeah! The only people who should feel emboldened are the
| ones who have the courage to agree with me!
| tills13 wrote:
| I was giving an example, I'm not sure what your point is
| here other than to just mock a point I didn't make.
| TheRealDunkirk wrote:
| I have a very short list, like 150 or so. I add people one or
| two at a time, and see how my TL responds. If it starts
| skewing sideways, I unfollow. I find this very successful.
|
| What kills me are the brand accounts. Like, McDonald's: 4.3M
| followers. For what? Why are you purposely asking for
| advertising in the middle of your advertising?
| aniforprez wrote:
| I agree. Every so often, I just glance at my feed and see if
| I can KonMari out some people. At this point I follow some
| decent tech feeds, a lot of art and game dev feeds and some
| very pleasant and funny people. I find it pretty fun to
| scroll through the feeds about once a day
|
| It's a huge contrast from reddit where you can follow
| subreddits but most of the stuff you see is surfaced up and
| there's a hive mind at work. I won't even bother with FB
| since I deleted my account months ago
| brewdad wrote:
| I see so many people complain about Facebook but it's
| probably my best behaved social network. The key for me was
| to unfriend any high school "friend" I haven't seen in real
| life for almost 30 years. Then mute my Boomer relatives who
| I need to remain Facebook friends with to keep the peace.
| The result is a feed of about 20 people I enjoy who share
| pictures and goings-on day to day with the occasional
| posting from someone outside the core group who I still
| enjoy interacting with.
| striking wrote:
| For anyone else looking to do the same, consider using
| https://tokimeki-unfollow.glitch.me/
| amelius wrote:
| This is about people leaving the company Twitter as
| employees, not about people unsubscribing from the service.
| [deleted]
| rtkwe wrote:
| Yeah, that's the trick to Twitter definitely. You're very
| much in charge of what you see there beyond the tricks you
| have to pull to get retweeted items out of your feed.
|
| I really wish there were more aggressive options to do that
| in lists, some people have great content but retweet an
| insane amount of things as well and it'd be nice to be able
| to exclude those from a list but not universally across the
| whole feed like you can with block words.
| salehenrahman wrote:
| Same, but I go a step beyond.
|
| Any tweet I see that I don't like (usually someone using a
| tone that gives me a terrible vibe from them), I block the
| author of the tweet.
|
| Now almost all tweets that I see have a positive vibe.
|
| Edit: I also adhere to an old adage that goes "follow slowly;
| block fast".
| notreallyserio wrote:
| I do this too. I don't block people based on their politics
| because I don't want to be in a bubble, but I do block
| people that make bad faith arguments. Unfortunately, that
| means I end up in a bit of a bubble because so many folks
| of a particular political persuasion love to make bad faith
| arguments.
| eyelidlessness wrote:
| Same, but I went the opposite direction and started following
| more people to curate my feed. I seldom unfollow anyone
| unless I feel any interaction with them is likely to have a
| high proportion of conflict or strong disagreement on values.
|
| I considered a similar purge, but ultimately decided the
| variety and evolution of what I'm exposed to is better for my
| experience. I've also made several friends through Twitter
| (and even a short romantic relationship, which also led to me
| adopting a puppy who's the light of my life!), so I've tended
| to keep a pretty open mind about the whole thing.
| dnautics wrote:
| Yeah I had a very selective strategy for purging:
|
| - follow only tech people/tech-adjacent people
|
| - unfollow any tech people/tech-adjacent people who post
| too much off-topic and/or do too much clickbait or too much
| emotionally taxing stuff
|
| and moving forward I do:
|
| - follow a more diverse (race, ethnicity, country,
| political leaning, gender) people, while following the
| above guidelines.
|
| - follow _some_ people who "post interesting shit" while
| following the above guidelines.
| Swizec wrote:
| To sum it up: Most worthwhile twitter follows are a mini
| publishing house in disguise. They talk about a few
| things, regularly, but aren't using twitter to shoot the
| shit with friends.
|
| This is the exact opposite of how twitter felt in the
| beginning - a massively global IRC chatroom for people to
| shoot the shit.
| dnautics wrote:
| I wouldn't say that, a few of the people I follow are
| shooting the shit with friends. That counts as
| "potentially interesting shit" and that sort of long-tail
| content does wind up on my feed.
| bhelkey wrote:
| I would argue that a social media platform that default to
| reinforcing negative emotions and one has to "aggressively
| moderate" to get value from is not a good social media
| platform.
| sanderjd wrote:
| My problem is that "person" is a broader category than I want
| to unfollow. There are precious few people whose posts I want
| to see all of. Most people I have ever followed exist
| somewhere on a continuum of what proportion of their tweets I
| want to see. It would be nice to have more positions on the
| knob than 100% and 0%.
|
| What I'd really like would be to say "don't show me tweets
| like this from this person". Yes it's hard to figure out what
| "tweets like this" mean to me, but hey, you're a giant
| company that does nothing but show an updating page of
| hypertext, seems like you could throw some work toward
| figuring this out.
| jacobr1 wrote:
| > seems like you could throw some work toward figuring this
| out.
|
| They already have a start - they push following categories.
| So presumably they are categorizing individual tweets into
| these categories. It should be feasible to both provide
| finer-grain categories, and tooling to include/exclude how
| those intersect with those accounts one is following.
| JasonFruit wrote:
| The link between categories and the tweets assigned to
| them is weak. I puzzled over a political tweet
| categorized under Science until I realized that it
| included the word "reaction". (Or something like that.)
| That's a frequent occurrence. I unfollowed categories.
| sanderjd wrote:
| Oh yes, but they should simply do a much better job at
| this :)
| sanderjd wrote:
| Indeed. The final step is learning fine grained personal
| preference informed (but not entirely) by those coarser
| categories.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Agreed. There are a lot of people and companies that are
| very important in the tech world who espouse repugnant
| racial ideologies a few times per year as the prevalent
| political fashion demands. I'd like to not block half the
| tech world, but I'd also like to hide their sporadic,
| vapid, ideo-tribal signaling posts.
| nostromo wrote:
| May I ask why you used it then?
| danschumann wrote:
| I couldn't know what it produced at the time. Keyword is
| "used".
| fullshark wrote:
| Why do political junkies keep the outrage drip going? Some
| combination of philosophical purpose, self-flattery, comfort
| amid chaos, and sometimes enlightenment.
| Perizors wrote:
| That was Instagram for me. Twitter has been much less
| frustating and mucho mire useful for me.
| juancampa wrote:
| Here's a tip on how to make the best out of Twitter: unfollow
| anyone that makes you feel that way. Think about it, it's not
| Twitter per se, it's the people you follow, and that's under
| your control.
| xwdv wrote:
| I did this, and in the end - I quit.
| 535188B17C93743 wrote:
| Until they start suggesting friends of friend's tweets. Or
| random trending/suggested tweets. Or you might like your
| friend's tweets but get fed with all of their garbage "liked"
| content and can't filter that out.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| A tip: This doesn't seem to show up for me unless I scroll
| so long that Twitter runs out of things to show me.
|
| If you're seeing a lot of friends-of-friends content, you
| might be scrolling too long or not following enough people
| you actually want to hear from.
| eyelidlessness wrote:
| You can switch to the chronological timeline and it filters
| all of that out. The only "suggested" content is retweets
| and the usual ads. Historically Twitter was notorious for
| reverting this setting, but at least for the last year or
| so I haven't had to reenable it.
| vmarsy wrote:
| > but get fed with all of their garbage "liked" content and
| can't filter that out.
|
| I definitely filter those out.
|
| About once every 6 months the tweets "liked" by people I
| follow pop up again, it's usually very noticable as the
| feeds quality turns down dramatically.
|
| To get rid of those, I do the "..." > "I don't like this
| tweet" > "show fewer likes from XYZ" on 2 or 3 tweets, and
| they're all gone for another few months.
|
| It's not ideal, a settings menu where you can disable those
| permanently would be far better, but it works.
| charkubi wrote:
| This is good advice generally.
| hi5eyes wrote:
| this in, man that engages with toxicity finds a toxic feed
| systemvoltage wrote:
| Twitter and largely social media encourages echo chambers. I
| try to be a contrarian on HN but in some threads, especially
| around social justice and political threads, it definitely has
| a tendency to become one.
|
| When 10 people are agreeing vicariously and there is a sense
| that any dissent is crushed, time to be the person playing
| devil's advocate and challenge them. This can happen in a small
| context and it usually is harmless. But on Twitter, you're
| going to feel the weight of the world when you go against the
| grain. The mob will chase after you. They'll become more
| powerful as bystanders join. You will be crushed. Others will
| take a note and feel the chilling effect.
| Nasrudith wrote:
| I don't get it, isn't social media is an anarchic free for
| all compared to traditional media publications? Newspapers
| were infamous for excluding other points of view especially
| when drumming up panic and not including "here is why that is
| a load of crap" letters to the editor.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| It is entirely possible for the experiment of putting every
| user in the network into a giant echo chamber with relatively
| low walls, no real concept of "subtopics" or "forums," and no
| moderation but self-moderation (which does not scale when
| thousands of individuals choose to spend a scant five of
| their seconds haranguing you)...
|
| ... can fail. As in, there's no guarantee the system so
| designed is good, or healthy, or net-gain valuable.
| colechristensen wrote:
| HN seems to be the least echo-chamber groupthink general
| population around excluding a few topics where one position
| is particularly popular. I think this is mostly because of
| the high quality moderation of dang and associated cultural
| norms here.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| Agreed it's probably the best discussion forum. My point
| was that even the best has the _tendency_ to become an
| echo-chamber.
|
| It's worth reading Christakis's 2009 book "Connected:
| Surprising power of social networks". It's mind blowing
| that social networks are not regulated to some form. I
| don't mean censorship but meme-acceleration and propagation
| of information needs to be curbed. Unfortunately it goes
| against engagement metrics and will never happen.
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| What I did was stop following tech people and started following
| comedy people. It really made Twitter a much more fun place.
| b20000 wrote:
| sounds like facebook
| BurningFrog wrote:
| In many ways, Twitter is as life itself.
| geebee wrote:
| I've never written a tweet. I avoid comments too much. I do use
| it to follow reading lists from a few journalists, writers,
| academics, and artists. There are much better ways, but twitter
| is what everyone uses.
|
| Comments are often terrible. You know the kind of comment where
| you have absolutely _no idea_ what is being discussed or why,
| only that it has made someone very angry? Twitter is the land
| of such comments, devoid of anything other than hostility or
| snark (for a mile example, a gif of "double face palm, when
| one face palm isn't enough" kind of thing - you really have no
| idea that the person is responding to or what their thought
| are).
| spiderice wrote:
| It's hilarious to me that people actually put up with a
| social network like this. Everyone in this thread is talking
| about how all you need to do is unfollow half of people you
| see tweets from, never read comments, put in a ton of work to
| get your feed exactly how you want it, etc.. and only then
| does Twitter become bearable. Yet people still defend it,
| even after admitting to all that.
|
| It's like getting a 5 course meal of poison food, and
| defending the meal because the dessert was delicious, and
| "all you have to do" is not eat the rest of the meal.
| eequah9L wrote:
| If they put their objections in words, they run the risk of
| entering an actual discussion, which would force them to
| defend their view. Much easier to just post a meme or an
| emoticon as a sort of a dog-whistle. Can't argue with a
| double-facepalm!
| hvs wrote:
| I used to feel this way. Then I unfollowed all
| political/current events/venting Twitter and started following
| creators and retrocomputing types. It's very enjoyable now.
| sanderjd wrote:
| Honestly kind of curious: are furious and infuriated not
| synonyms for you?
| danschumann wrote:
| Feelings wheel, my friend. Jealous and Furious are similar,
| jealous is when you want someone else to not have something,
| and furious is when they come for your stuff. Infuriated and
| annoyed are linked, and infuriated is when you get so annoyed
| you start yelling back. I'm trying to make all the emotional
| categories more distinct in my philosphy, recently posted a
| video as such https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfZwxLUrlrk
| sanderjd wrote:
| Interesting! I don't really relate to those definitions -
| furious and jealous don't seem similar to me, nor do
| infuriated and annoyed seem particularly similar - but
| thanks for the explanation.
| danschumann wrote:
| Most of the time people say they're curious on the
| internet, they're actually feeling dismissive, but just
| need more ammo to be able to dismiss the person. Which
| makes it skepticism, not curiosity.
| sanderjd wrote:
| I was both curious and skeptical about this. I
| appreciated the explanation which successfully sated my
| curiosity, though I remain skeptical. But I also have a
| new interesting thing to consider, to compare and
| contrast my thinking against. Moving forward I'll be
| wondering whether any fury I feel is more akin to
| jealousy or annoyance and that will be a new and
| interesting lens to look at things through.
|
| I really was curious! But that isn't mutually exclusive
| with skepticism.
| jader201 wrote:
| I feel none of these, because I use Twitter as an RSS feed of
| companies/websites I'm interested in seeing updates from.
|
| I don't post, and I don't follow people.
|
| If anyone is feeling any of what the OP has felt, strongly
| encourage changing how you use it.
|
| Nothing is worth this.
| par wrote:
| i agree with this, and it's not a hot take. It just describes
| what twitter does to people.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| Made you, you mean like, forced you? In any case you can't
| voluntarily join an emotional rollecoaster and then complain
| that it's moving too fast
| ARandomerDude wrote:
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/make#English
| spaniard89277 wrote:
| Twitter didn't make you feel anything, it's the people who uses
| twitter that made that to you.
|
| Maybe we just should accept that we are not cognitively
| equipped to deal with all that comes with social media. It's
| just too much for our brains, and having a sane relationship
| with them requires an active effort to moderate who you follow.
|
| Yes, they optimize por clicks and views, yet Twitter at least
| allows you total control of what are you consuming.
|
| So if there's any social media out there that has both utility
| and allows control, it's Twitter.
|
| FB it's another level of shady shit we can discuss another day.
| geebee wrote:
| I agree, but the format and limitations of twitter are
| unusually prone to degraded public discourse.
| rgrieselhuber wrote:
| Intentionally
| KoftaBob wrote:
| Sounds like you follow crappy pages.
| danschumann wrote:
| Does an individual voter have a responsibility to know also
| the disgusting events of modern times or only the happy ones?
| Twitter seemed to overweight discuss-ting events and angry
| events. Maybe cuz I avoid such things on other platforms, I
| used twitter to stay informed on the darker side. Sure, my
| fault. Disregard this whole thread! Lol.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I think Twitter can amplify what we seek (whether consciously
| or not). I found the complete opposite: it built tremendous
| confidence as I went from 0 to thousands of followers who were
| interested in my parenting+comedy niche.
| leesec wrote:
| Cool. It mostly made me happy
| danschumann wrote:
| If I had to include happiness emotions... I guess getting
| some of the videos made me feel valued a bit, maybe thankful
| now and again? Maybe feeling successful if I pwned a pleb,
| but these are empty thrills.
| unclebucknasty wrote:
| Sounds like you had the political/current events Twitter
| experience. It's pretty much tailor-made to evoke all of those
| emotions.
| solmag wrote:
| Inevitable after that Space.
| ekam wrote:
| Which space?
| cabernal wrote:
| I'm not sure if this is what @solmag is referring to, but
| there was a white nationalist AMA space that was appearing
| under users' recommendations.
| ngcazz wrote:
| Is there anything written about this? Failing to Google it
| cabernal wrote:
| I might be wrong with what op was referring to though,
| but if you limit your search to the last 24hr you might
| find something.
| MrBuddyCasino wrote:
| Many were speculating about his power level. Guess it wasn't as
| high as people thought.
| ghostcluster wrote:
| MIT Technology Review interviewed the new CEO recently:
|
| > _Our role is not to be bound by the First Amendment_ , but our
| role is to serve a healthy public conversation and our moves are
| reflective of things that we believe lead to a healthier public
| conversation. The kinds of things that we do about this is,
| _focus less on thinking about free speech, but thinking about how
| the times have changed_. One of the changes today that we see is
| speech is easy on the internet. Most people can speak. Where our
| role is particularly emphasized is who can be heard. The scarce
| commodity today is attention. There 's a lot of content out
| there. A lot of tweets out there, not all of it gets attention,
| some subset of it gets attention. And so increasingly our role is
| moving towards how we recommend content and that sort of, is, is,
| a struggle that we're working through in terms of how we make
| sure these recommendation systems that we're building, how we
| direct people's attention is leading to a healthy public
| conversation that is most participatory.
|
| https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/11/18/1012066/emtech-s...
|
| Sounds like he advocates an emphasis on how to algorithmically
| "guide" the conversation and shape public opinion....
| afavour wrote:
| I read it differently than "shaping public opinion". The
| reality is that social media (and Twitter especially) is toxic.
| That underlying toxicity comes from humans of course, but
| recommendation algorithms accelerate and highlight it because
| it leads to high "engagement", and thus more money. These sites
| already "guide" conversation, just using metrics that can end
| up being harmful.
|
| A social media CEO that's interested in breaking the cycle
| there and trying to recommend content that's more constructive
| than inflammatory sounds like a great thing to me. Yes, there
| are a dozen pitfalls awaiting anyone that tries, but it's still
| worth attempting.
| syshum wrote:
| The problem here is that "toxic" is subjective, what I find
| toxic and disagreeable may not be the same thing you find
| toxic and disagreeable. Take for example hot button issue of
| Gun ownership, I believe it an essential right and extension
| of self defense, others view any talk about guns as toxic
| that should be banned.
|
| Who's worldview should win? Mine, your's, Twitters?
|
| IMO platforms like twitter should not be making the choice as
| to what is or is not toxic, they should be giving users the
| ability to curate their feed's.
| spion wrote:
| Twitter will amplify the most extreme positions on both
| ends, the ones to cause most outrage
|
| - Ban all guns, completely!
|
| - No restrictions on gun ownership should be allowed
| whatsoever, not even age limits!
|
| These cause the most outrage / emotion => therefore they
| get the most retweeted => create a distorded mental picture
| of even deeper division. We're never going to solve
| anything that way.
|
| The problem isn't one of free speach and censorship. Its a
| problem of amplification of emotionally manipulative
| content. The amplification is _exponential_ (because the
| retweet process is exponential). This is a disaster.
| ViViDboarder wrote:
| To not promote toxicity, one could just avoid amplifying
| anything that's a hot button or divisive issue. However,
| incentives don't align with that.
|
| The key is the issue is the amplification. Promoting of
| content you're not following in feeds.
|
| Of course, completely changing it back to only content from
| those you follow in chronological order and allowing you to
| curate would solve that problem as well, but there's no way
| they go back to that as there's far less money involved.
| syshum wrote:
| Speech is easy if all you post is kitten video's
|
| The most interesting conversation by necessity have to be
| "hot button" or "divisive" that is how we grow as a
| culture, a society.
|
| If we always avoid anything that is divisive than we
| never can address any problems
| unethical_ban wrote:
| Lies and bad faith should not be tolerated in the public
| square.
| finite_jest wrote:
| Well, that's obviously a comment made in "bad faith".
| People who advocate for censorship should not be
| tolerated in the public square.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| It doesn't mean "something I don't like". It means an
| outright lie, or a statement made in order to mislead or
| bait people into useless or malicious behavior.
|
| Trolling, lying, saying stupid and libelous things with
| the intent to anger. Bad faith is about intent.
|
| I also look forward to the day that "censorship" is
| allowed nuance. If you think Twitter deciding it won't be
| a party to disinformation campaigns is "censorship", we
| have bigger issues.
| finite_jest wrote:
| It probably is not what you personally mean, but outright
| censorship is what will likely happen if we do not
| actively resist the calls for silencing the deplorables.
| Freedom of expression is not the default state of the
| world.
|
| Do you believe that Twitter banning the Hunter Biden
| laptop story (to the extent that you couldn't even DM a
| link to it to other users) before the election wasn't an
| act of political corporate censorship?
| unethical_ban wrote:
| It's their tool, so they get to build it to their liking,
| until law is created requiring them to do otherwise. The
| question in the meantime is, "what is moral?" and "do we as
| an entity (twitter) enforce our morality at all, and to
| what extent?"
|
| For example, millions of people believe the _lie_ , the
| _fabrication_ that the 2020 presidential election result
| was fraudulent. If there are organizations on your platform
| amplifying messages that are fraudulent or intentionally
| misleading in nature, should Twitter take action?
|
| The new CEO seems to think the answer is "yes".
|
| IMO people should be able to curate their own feeds, but
| Twitter has the full right (and perhaps the moral
| obligation) to flag content that is bullshit as bullshit.
| The danger, of course, is that the kinds of people who fall
| for conspiracy propaganda from fascists on the right will
| then think, if their leaders' lies are called out, that the
| calling out is itself a conspiracy, and further entrench
| themselves rather than heed warnings.
|
| "How to keep a social media platform from enabling anti-
| democratic demagogues" is an unsolved problem.
| syshum wrote:
| There are many facets of this comment I would like to
| address.
|
| First lets make the assumption that I agree false
| information should be (or even can be) curbed on social
| media, things like Flat Earth... The problem here as we
| saw with COVID picking "authoritative" sources is not
| always accurate and tends to curb legitimate dissent as
| much as it does false information. Anything from the
| origins to COVID to the flip flopping nature of mask
| wearing, to discussions over mandates have all been
| censored in various ways under the guise of curbing false
| information. That is very very dangerous IMO, in fact to
| me it more dangerous than the false information itself.
| It is akin to the legal standard of "better 10 guilty
| people go free, than 1 innocent be imprisoned falsely"
| well to me, it is better than 10 false statements be
| spread than 1 true statement be suppressed
|
| Then you have to take into account the clear political
| bias in deciding what is "false" information, you talk
| about the "big lie" of election fraud, but what about the
| continuing lies about the Rittenhouse trail, the protests
| / riots, the Waukesha Atrocity, Russia Gate, and many
| others continuing to be spread by the "authoritative
| sources" that many of these platforms use as Ministries
| of Truth. None of which has any kind of censorship or
| fact checking attached to it, it seems only one political
| camp has these fact checker flagging deployed to them. If
| you are going to fact check the "Big Lie" on election
| fraud, then I want to see fack checks on all those other
| topics as well.
|
| Then you talk about Twitter "flagging" content, I
| actually agree that is the correct path. What twitter
| (and youtube) does to add a flag, or content message
| directing people to different sources is a good thing, I
| have no problem with this I just want ti deployed in a
| political neutral, fact based way. Today it is not being
| done that way.
|
| What I do have a problem with is suppression, bans, and
| other direct forms os censorship often employed by
| twitter and other platforms. I am a firm believe that the
| solution to speech one believes is false or "bad" is more
| speech you believe is true or "good" not attempts to
| censor and suppress which often has an amplifying effect.
| native_samples wrote:
| The problem is of course, he won't ever do that
| consistently. Instead he will simply decide that people
| he doesn't personally like a "lying" and "spreading
| misinformation", whilst people who are powerful or who he
| does like, never do.
|
| Consider that if Twitter censored everyone who believed a
| lie or fabrication, every public health person who
| claimed masks didn't work and then that they did, would
| all lose their Twitter accounts or be hidden. Guess what,
| they will never do that.
|
| Thus it is reasonable to interpret their use of the word
| "healthy" to be "heavily left wing biased".
| unethical_ban wrote:
| You have some false equivalences in your argument.
| tonguez wrote:
| There are better ways to win the hearts and minds of the
| population than authoritarian control of what people see,
| hear and say. No one likes to be controlled by someone
| else. Censoring discussion of the issue is only going to
| make more people assume the election was in fact
| "fraudulent". Similarly Sam Harris has said in a podcast
| how laws against Holocaust denial do more to create more
| Holocaust deniers than they help because they
| automatically make people assume you have something to
| hide, even if you don't.
|
| In general, intelligent people feel an intellectual
| responsibility to question what they are told.
| shrimpx wrote:
| > No one likes to be controlled by someone else.
|
| The irony is that millions of the people you're trying to
| defend as free-thinkers who can look at any speech and
| make good choices, are literally controlled by Fox News
| and Alex Jones propaganda.
|
| Side note: In fact I believe there's a legal path to
| suing Tucker Carlson out of existence by proving, with
| real data, that people really do believe the nonsense.
| The only reason Carlson is still trumpeting destructive
| lies from a megaphone is that so far, judges have
| accepted the argument that "no one in their right mind
| believes that what Carlson says is true; he's obviously a
| satirist."
| Maursault wrote:
| > are literally controlled by Fox News and Alex Jones
| propaganda.
|
| You think you've got it, and though that may seem obvious
| I must set you straight even if it scares you as much as
| it does me: _it is the other way around;_ those are mere
| reflections ultimately under their control (as much as
| anyone controls their beliefs).
| mbg721 wrote:
| There's this idea that there are millions of mind-numbed
| conservative zombies out there, blindly following Trump
| or Tucker Carlson or spokesman x, but I don't see it.
| What I think is closer to the truth is that there are a
| ton of angry cultural conservatives who distrust
| _everybody_ , but begrudgingly watch Carlson because they
| perceive him as better than the actively-hostile rest-of-
| the-news. That doesn't necessarily mean they're making
| good choices, but it's good practice to understand why
| people make the political choices they do.
| [deleted]
| the_doctah wrote:
| Take Reddit for instance. They have started hiding
| "controversial" comments by default (it's a setting now).
|
| It's pretty well known that Reddit is Liberal-dominated,
| hence Conservative opinions are far more likely to be
| downvoted. And now, hidden by default.
|
| It's easy to see how systems like this just serve to
| amplify the echo chamber.
| kevingadd wrote:
| Who's banning discussion of guns? I can't think of a single
| service that does
| syshum wrote:
| Youtube for one has banned a lot of discussions around
| guns, and gun channels. There is a very limited number of
| things they allow and gun channels are walking on egg
| shells. The Rittenhouse trial cause alot of banns,
| strikes, and etc as well. Including one of the most
| popular law channel's getting taken down for a time.
|
| That is one example, I can instead highlight any number
| of other topics like abortion, pronouns, gender,
| sexuality, any of the other "culture war" topics.
| kevingadd wrote:
| I subscribe to multiple high-sub-count YouTube channels
| that post videos about guns on a regular basis. Are you
| referring to their rules about violent/explicit content?
| That is absolutely not a subject matter ban like 'you
| can't discuss guns' and the facts don't support a claim
| that they ban guns.
|
| YouTube's rules enforcement for videos is notoriously bad
| and has been forever, but that doesn't change their
| actual policies.
| andymockli wrote:
| Enforcement is more pertinent than policy. If their
| policy allows for such videos, but in practice removes
| them, it doesn't really matter what their policy is.
| afavour wrote:
| > others view any talk about guns as toxic that should be
| banned.
|
| Do they? Are you sure? I've certainly seen many calls for
| the glorification of violence to be limited, stuff like
| that. But banning actual discussion of guns? I'd be
| interested to see examples of people advocating for that.
| In any case, Twitter can simply ignore people asking for
| that because it isn't a reasonable request.
|
| You can have sensible, level headed discussions about guns
| and gun control. You can also have inflammatory, toxic
| discussions about them. It's interesting to think how you'd
| develop a system that prioritises the former without
| bringing along the latter.
|
| > Who's worldview should win? Mine, your's, Twitters?
|
| What does "win" mean, here? If you're the CEO of Twitter
| then Twitter's worldview should always win. Of course, as
| CEO you also get to choose what Twitter's worldview is.
| syshum wrote:
| >>I've certainly seen many calls for the glorification of
| violence to be limited
|
| Guns was probably a bad choice for Twitter, would have
| been better for YT as YT has recently cracked down hard
| on firearms content.
|
| However even on twitter the "the glorification of
| violence" is very subjective. For example people
| celebrating the jury verdict in the Rittenhouse trial,
| who many believe was an attack on the very right to self
| defense, has been reported by many as "glorification of
| violence"
|
| Even more recently, I have seen attempts to censor
| conversation, and video around the shooting / death of
| Chad Read.
|
| Then you going to have a conservation around Self defense
| use of guns it will include violence, there is no way
| around that, if you are going to censor violence then by
| necessity you have to sensor guns or relegate it to a
| discussion about hunting only.
| afavour wrote:
| > However even on twitter the "the glorification of
| violence" is very subjective
|
| Sure. Running a company is subjective! That's why we
| celebrate CEOs rather than try to perfect an objective
| CEO algorithm that runs in the cloud. Lines have to be
| drawn somewhere. You could draw the line at "absolutely
| anything is allowed" but that might not be a wise
| business decision.
|
| > who many believe
|
| > has been reported by many
|
| > I have seen attempts
|
| I'm sorry but these are all very vague assertions. I
| don't know what any of us are supposed to do with them.
| syshum wrote:
| Yes they are pretty vague when you take them out of
| context and do not look at the over all statement, if
| however you read the entire thing it is pretty clear what
| I am talking about. If you have followed that news event
| then you would also be more aware of what I was referring
| to. if you did not follow it you may have a harder time
| with the context but I think it is still pretty clear
| leodriesch wrote:
| That's unfortunate. This is exactly how I want Twitter _not_ to
| be. I just want a feed filled with Tweets by the people I
| follow, ordered by the time posted.
|
| But as seen on Instagram, YouTube and TikTok, this is not most
| effective way to make money.
| rrrrrrrrrrrryan wrote:
| I don't think that's what he's saying at all.
|
| He's only acknowledging that they're _already_ algorithmically
| guiding the conversation and shaping public opinion. The
| algorithms are just bad: there are tons of feedback loops, too
| much emphasis on amplifying the already-popular and virtually
| no effort to de-emphasize the trash, and so you end up with a
| dumpster-fire / cacophony that Twitter is today.
|
| Hacker News discussions are great because they're so well-
| moderated. It's not hard to imagine Twitter doing a better job
| of algorithmically demoting some of the obvious rage-bait, fake
| news, straight-up hate speech, etc.
| joering2 wrote:
| Am I the only one found it ironic he is announcing this on
| twitter.. yet he has to screen shot the content b/c it would
| normally not fit into twitter media :)
| jon_richards wrote:
| It's especially funny considering how many companies do
| sentiment analysis of Twitter text for algorithmic trading.
| Ekaros wrote:
| I wonder if they are going to add picture OCR... And how this
| could be gamed...
| goatcode wrote:
| Probably not, but it's more poetic than ironic.
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| Ironic that his very own medium is insufficient to convey enough
| information, so he has to post a picture of a document. smh.
| williamtrask wrote:
| The medium supports images so I'm not sure this critique is
| valid.
| gcthomas wrote:
| Pictures of text support the OP and really annoy me.
| tacker2000 wrote:
| Yes but a screenshot is clearly not the best way to convey
| the information of an email. You cant search it, screen
| readers cant read the text, you cant zoom it properly if you
| have bad eyesight, etc...
| _whiteCaps_ wrote:
| Visually impaired people using a screenreader won't be able
| to read it.
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| Can screen readers _still_ not read text in images? Years
| ago I could understand that being a problem, but now? If
| that 's still true then it seems to me those screen readers
| could _really_ use an upgrade. My phone has been able to
| copy text out of screenshots flawlessly for _years_.
|
| I do agree with the overall point though that images are a
| suboptimal way of conveying text.
| brazzledazzle wrote:
| Does your phone perform the OCR locally or does it farm
| it out to a service? There's privacy implications for the
| latter.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| Not entirely true. My blind friend encourages me to
| annotate screenshots whenever possible. It's just a pain,
| because you have to remember to do it _as you tweet_ (you
| can 't do it later), and only you can do it (why not
| crowdsource it?)
| Barrin92 wrote:
| so does my code editor but I wouldn't consider it good design
| if I have to paste code in the form of jpgs because it caps
| at 140 characters per file
|
| Given the amount of hacks from twitlonger, to unrolling
| threads, to audio I feel it is simply annoying at this point
| szundi wrote:
| Like it was not abvious what the replyee meant.
| boringg wrote:
| You misunderstand the entire premise of the company if you
| think this.
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| Share your insight.
| boringg wrote:
| Twitter was never meant to be a platform that all
| information can be shared their 280 characters. It was
| always meant to be abbreviated and force short handed
| information. OP comment that Jack had to post an image to
| pass on the information completely misunderstands what/how
| and why twitter was built.
|
| OP comment was a throwaway comment trying to say that long
| form text based comments should be allowed on twitter?
| Think how terrible twitter would become if that was the
| reality.
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| Twitter started out as a way to organize protests via
| cellphone, TXT2MOB. Jack just used it to post a manifesto
| as an image of text because the platform cannot support
| long-form communication. It is not a medium for subtlety,
| complexity, or depth. Both statements are true. Your
| complaint has nothing to do with Twitter's failure as a
| substantial communication mechanism, and my point simply
| illustrates that failure. We're both right.
| ssully wrote:
| Not every tool is meant for every job.
| [deleted]
| ryzvonusef wrote:
| > you're not going to be able to give the focus a solo CEO is
|
| How the fuck does Elon do it then? The mf has like four
| concurrent organizations under his helm.
|
| > I think the bigger issue is who gets to replace him: will it be
| someone with smart ideas or someone to serve as a puppet of
| activist investors?
|
| The rising stock price implies yes. Elliot MG has been desperate
| to make twitter the next mega app. Expect payment options, return
| of VIne as a tiktok clone, etc
|
| Engagement is key, afterall. Good bye to text, I guess.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| > How the fuck does Elon do it then? The mf has like four
| concurrent organizations under his helm.
|
| Tesla = primary concern | SpaceX = Gwynne Shotwell (Prez & COO)
| | Boring Company/Neuralink ["Labs" projects] = funsies
| [deleted]
| datameta wrote:
| Every company he starts/runs is to enable viable Mars
| civilization. SpaceX = get us there. Tesla = cash cow for
| SpaceX + Mars ground transportation. SolarCity = energy infra
| for a Mars colony. Boring = radiation protection for Mars
| habitats. Neuralink = moonshot cash cow, advancement of
| neural medicine for Mars colony.
|
| Trying to advance/safeguard humanity is the most funsies
| thing one can do.
| capitalsigma wrote:
| If you definition of "X is for Mars" is so broad as to
| include "brain-computer interfaces just like on Earth, but
| done on Mars" then yeah I suppose pretty much everything is
| done in the service of Mars. For example, Google is working
| on having the best search engine available to use for
| search on Mars. Facebook wants to build the best social
| network, for Mars. Etc.
| officeplant wrote:
| I'll take two of whatever you're smoking because I want on
| this ride.
| AbsoluteNonce8 wrote:
| 1 point by AbsoluteNonce8 0 minutes ago | root | parent | next
| | edit | delete [-]
|
| I think the secret is having some really stellar #2's. Gwynne
| Shotwell Does wonders for space-x giving Elon the space to
| focus on the non-boring next-gen stuff. Jack had the same with
| Sarah Friar at Square but she left for Nextdoor. He also used
| to have Anthony Noto doing the company building at Twitter but
| he left for Square? But honestly, Elon's probably an anomaly
| and no one else could match that ethic and sprawl
| dang wrote:
| We detached this subthread from
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29380373.
| V__ wrote:
| > How the fuck does Elon do it then? The mf has like four
| concurrent organizations under his helm.
|
| There is SpaceX (mostly run by Gwynne Shotwell) and Tesla.
| DeepMind/Boring Company are mostly just marketing schemes.
| mulcahey wrote:
| He has nothing to do with DeepMind. Maybe you're thinking of
| Neuralink?
|
| I wouldn't demote them to "marketing schemes" -- he actually
| wants to bring these technologies to market (unlike
| Hyperloop) -- but they're pretty slow burn / almost hobby
| projects compared to SpaceX & Tesla. Both have started
| posting job reqs for Austin.
| V__ wrote:
| You're right it's Neuralink. Oh, I kinda believe he wants
| to make it work but it will be overpromised and
| underdelivered as always.
| perardi wrote:
| I was under the impression that, at SpaceX, Musk is the "vision
| guy", and Gwynne Shotwell is doing the nitty-gritty day-to-day
| operations.
|
| https://www.wired.com/story/how-elon-musk-gwynne-shotwell-jo...
|
| As for Neuralink and The Boring Company...well, I am typing
| this, not using my brain-machine interface, and my friend took
| the Blue Line from O'Hare this morning, and not some
| underground supertrain.
|
| https://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-biz-elon-musk-hyp...
| ziddoap wrote:
| > _As for Neuralink and The Boring Company...well, I am
| typing this, not using my brain-machine interface, and my
| friend took the Blue Line from O'Hare this morning, and not
| some underground supertrain._
|
| I'm not sure what point you intended to get across with this
| take. I don't own any Lenovo products, is Lenovo defunct?
|
| Edit: Yikes. My analogy isn't perfect, sorry folks.
| viro wrote:
| it would be closer to if Lenovo had no products.
| tenpies wrote:
| > I don't own any Lenovo products
|
| Exactly. Lenovo has viable and desirable products that you
| could purchase if you were so inclined. That's not the case
| for Boring and Neuralink.
|
| Boring makes a D-grade tourist attraction and offers no
| viable solution to the problem they claim to be solving.
|
| Neuralink's biggest success has been in bringing attention
| to the field, but has made no actual progress of its own.
|
| And that's not to say they won't bring viable
| products/solutions some day, but it's clear where Musk
| shines (e.g. bringing in money, hype, PR) and where he's
| atrocious (e.g. executing, planning, people). Shotwell is a
| fantastic example of a CEO using Musk where he shines, and
| keeping him away from where he's bad. What Tesla, Boring,
| and Neuralink all need are their own respective Shotwells.
| samwillis wrote:
| Only one of Elon's companies is public and there are regular
| calls for him to be removed, but its stock price has been on a
| trajectory that makes that impossible without him "canceling
| himself". Elon is just very good at hiring exceptionally good
| people to run stuff for him with a small amount of oversight
| and steering.
|
| Jack is CEO of two public companies and one is arguably
| underperforming, that's an untenable situation.
| zaat wrote:
| > Elon is just very good at hiring exceptionally good people
| to run stuff for him with a small amount of oversight and
| steering
|
| Isn't this the major part of the definition of excellent
| manager?
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Exactly. If your responsibilities are limited to calling
| some shots and coming up with some wild ideas here and
| there, and having the money to make it happen, you don't
| need to focus on things as much.
|
| Anyway the guy's a wreck and wrecking ball, I wouldn't be
| surprised if he disappears or takes a step back for a while
| soonish. Tesla's stonks will crash, etc.
| datameta wrote:
| He's gonna run his body into the ground before he even
| thinks about leaving SpaceX for anything else. It is his
| life's mission, that much is obvious to those who have
| seen enough candid interviews. He doesn't talk about
| anything else with the same level of importance.
| samwillis wrote:
| Same reason SpaceX won't go public if he can help it (and
| why Starlink is critical for a revenue stream). He needs
| to maintain complete control in order to put people on
| Mars.
| datameta wrote:
| Absolutely. I have no expectation of SpaceX going public
| this decade at the very least. Especially once Starship
| will start generating revenue, SpaceX may not need
| outside investment for a long time.
| xiphias2 wrote:
| Twitter is 3x in 5 years, while S&P 500 is 2x in 5
| years...It's not awesome, but I wouldn't call it
| underperforming...it's the same growth as Facebook.
|
| Elon was kept only because he didn't give away founder
| control. At the end outside MBAs always try to take over and
| destroy the companies.
| GDC7 wrote:
| > At the end outside MBAs always try to take over and
| destroy the companies.
|
| Hyperbole. De-risk companies is the right word, MBAs unlike
| wide eyed founders understand that odds are against
| companies and survival is the priority.
|
| They understand that a company like Yahoo! which in 20
| years produced lots of value for shareholders, customers,
| users and employed so many people...that's a happy story.
|
| People on HN see Yahoo! and think "failure", that's the
| same as saying Derrick Rose is a failure for not being
| Lebron, well if that's the case where's your 100M net worth
| for playing basketball?
| pyrrhotech wrote:
| Well that's a major cherry-pick. How about we use a neutral
| start point such as TWTR IPO date? Since Nov. 8, 2013, TWTR
| is up 16.8% and has paid 0 dividends. Meanwhile, SPX is up
| 162% since then, plus it has paid a dividend of an
| additional 1.5 - 2.5% per year during that time. And QQQ is
| up a whopping 381% in that time. Twitter has been one of
| the worst performers in the Nasdaq 100 over the last 8
| years.
| xiphias2 wrote:
| Sorry, It wasn't cherry picking, my main criteria was
| that this was the largest exact date range that I could
| set in Google finance, that's why I usually look at 5
| year horizon:)
|
| I take back my comment, 16% is awful.
| AbsoluteNonce8 wrote:
| Not really :). 5 years is a pretty arbitrary, flattering
| timeline. Twitter is +18% all time growth. Facebook doubled
| a billion to 2B then to 3B users. In the same time span
| Twitter plateaud their user growth. Love the product, but
| the company is horrific in building things.
|
| The 3x growth is only because they finally figured out
| monetization 7-8 years post ipo and rode the rising Ad wave
| that lifted all CPMs across Snapchat and TradeDesk.
|
| Overall, pretty subpar stock and pretty grim outlook.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| While I agree that Musk's hockey stick stocks mean
| removing him would piss of the people who could remove
| him, removing Dorsey because twitter isn't a great stock
| seems weird. Stock matters for fundraising and for
| compensation, and as long as that stuff is working, the
| rest of the stock considerations should be secondary.
| Obviously they aren't secondary to investors and
| investors have disproportionate power, but it still seems
| stupid.
| AbsoluteNonce8 wrote:
| You're right! But honestly, Twitter is one of the worst
| product companies I have ever seen. In the second
| commenter, I've replied with some examples of how they
| completely fudged it up.
|
| My favorite example is when Twitter said "hey guys,
| growing users is hard. You know what our North Star from
| now on is? Monetizable Daily Active Users"
|
| Imagine a social network deciding it's entire North Star
| is ad dollars. Pretty damning.
| sflicht wrote:
| > love the product
|
| Seems to me that everything good about the product was
| present pre-IPO and it has only gotten worse over the
| years. I still use it but I find the
| interface/functionality strictly less pleasant with each
| design change.
| AbsoluteNonce8 wrote:
| You're exactly on the money. Anecdotally and even talking
| to ex-Twitter folks, for some reason they entered a
| glacial period where there really wasn't any backbone or
| product authority to ship or improve. I'll give them
| credit that in the last 1.5 years they're getting better,
| but below average is not good enough. I think Twitter can
| do more. I'm just not sure there's a product leader
| outside of Facebook or Google who can handle that mandate
| whimsicalism wrote:
| It's funny how the same people who are very pro-privacy
| will crap on Twitter for not taking the same aggressive
| anti-privacy stance as FB.
| AbsoluteNonce8 wrote:
| I'm really not pro-Facebook. And my slamming Twitter is
| because they genuinely are bad at building and improving
| consumer experiences. It's always fascinating how Jack
| can have an innovative product org like Square and
| oversee a bumbling morass like Twitter. So interesting!
| whimsicalism wrote:
| And FB isn't bumbling? I have a much better experience on
| Twitter and far less intrusive targeting of ads/following
| you across the web - which is where FBs monetization
| happens.
|
| The growth discrepancy has a lot to do with FBs
| innovation on the tracking component of things -
| advertising is what drives profit for these companies.
| AbsoluteNonce8 wrote:
| I think you're mixing two different things here.
|
| Facebook grew not because of Ad Dollars. It grew because
| it built an all-star product experience for consumers.
| It's easy now to look at Facebook and think of its as
| Fait Accompli. But when Facebook came about, they arrived
| in the second renaissance of social networking. You had
| so many competitors right from incumbents like MySpace
| and right to upstarts like Friendster, Friednfeed.
| Literally then no one could predict who would win.
|
| Facebook's relentless product building made big enough to
| earn the problems of scale. Remember, when Facebook IPO'd
| it literally had a blip of ads business.
|
| Both things can be true. But what I'm saying is, Facebook
| absolutely lights out built an incredible product
| experience and moat.
|
| Now, they're finally dealing with problems of scale.
| Which honestly aren't due to bumbling per se, but really
| just come with the territory. Twitter haven't even gotten
| their cowboy pants on
| wpietri wrote:
| What's your evidence that Twitter's market is
| significantly larger?
|
| Non-tech people sometimes ask me whether they should get
| on Twitter. I ask them why they might want it, and very
| often my answer is, "No, don't worry about it." And
| that's coming from somebody who uses Twitter enough to
| have two separate accounts plus a Twitter bot (sfships).
|
| Twitter, like HN, is a niche social network. [1]
| Twitter's niche is much larger, of course. But I don't
| think it makes much sense to compare it to FB, whose
| target market is "anybody with friends or relatives".
|
| [1] Technically, I'd call it a multi-niche network, in
| that it gets the most publicly active segment of people
| in a whole bunch of social groups. For example, tech
| people is has are the sort most likely to write books and
| articles, speak at/go to conferences, etc. But if you're
| the sort of workaday programmer who punches a clock at a
| bank and pays no attention to the industry, Twitter
| doesn't do much for you.
| AbsoluteNonce8 wrote:
| You're slightly missing my point. I'm not claiming
| twitter's niche is bigger. I'm saying for a social
| network to plateau at 300M users for 7-8 years that's
| very embarrassing. Especially when the positioning was
| that "we're a Facebook alternative." For a social network
| to figure out tablestakes monetization 7-8 years post-
| ipo, that's equally damning. The biggest offender is
| actually the glacial product development that Twitter
| has. Several Rudimentary features non-existent or canned
| because of analysis paralysis.
|
| I'll actually challenge you on the niche point. Twitter
| is niche because they completely failed to elevate the
| product experience to the masses. Mark was able to bring
| Facebook beyond a college network, Spiegel built snap
| beyond teens and texting, but Twitter continually fails
| for the average mom and pop. Every single piece of user
| research and UX audit finds Twitter to be very confusing
| for new users.
|
| So Twitter being niche isn't a victory. It's an admission
| of defeat a la segways
| wpietri wrote:
| I agree with you that Twitter's feature velocity has been
| terrible. Although in the last year or so they've
| definitely been trying more new things, so maybe they've
| finally fixed the internal barriers to that.
|
| But I'm not getting what you think "Twitter for the
| masses" should be. The current value prop is something
| like, "globe-spanning discussion around hot topics".
| Fewer people care about that than "keep in contact with
| family and friends" or "look at pretty pictures". I don't
| see a mom-and-pop version of Twitter in the same way that
| I don't see a mom-and-pop version of the WSJ or the NYT.
| The mom-and-pop version of the NYT is perhaps USA Today,
| but that's not an expanded product, just a different one.
| AbsoluteNonce8 wrote:
| Yep! I think they've slowly learned to ship over the last
| 1.5 years.
|
| Gotcha, honestly what I meant by mom-and-pop, I was
| thinking of growing Twitter just beyond the power user.
| Similar to you, I don't believe twitter's addressable
| market is as big as Facebook's. If Facebook's TAM is N,
| twitter's is n where n<N. My main issue with them is that
| they're actually 3/5ths of that n. I genuinely think they
| have an opportunity to make the product more accessible
| but they really have been not good :(. And I say this as
| a big Twitter fan!
| aeternum wrote:
| Twitter is a great idea ruined by terrible UI. It's clear
| that people do want to listen to what famous people have
| to say, and they want to hear it directly from the
| person, not a PR team.
|
| If only the UI let you do things like follow a thread,
| set up proper notifications, and made at least some
| attempt at filtering out the spammer/scam replies.
| wpietri wrote:
| Those all strike me as very much advanced-user features,
| so as much as I'd enjoy using some of them, I doubt
| they'd make much difference to general-audience growth.
|
| And I think you're being unfair about the spam/scam
| replies. Twitter has made great improvement there in
| terms of downranking/hiding junk replies. It'll never be
| perfect, but it's at the very least much better than it
| was. I have to go a long way down in most threads I look
| at to see that stuff if it appears at all.
| nemo44x wrote:
| > At the end outside MBAs always try to take over and
| destroy the companies.
|
| Yup. Many once great companies, for one reason or the
| other, believes they have to at some point bring these
| people in. Who then of course bring more in, who bring more
| in, etc. And the people that built the company from nothing
| to something huge are slowly runout and all the leaders
| from engineer and technology backgrounds are replaced by
| the "business people". And the culture dies as the company
| becomes one of abstract "deals" and "efficiencies" and
| growth stops and it is sold off.
| icedchai wrote:
| Longer term, TWTR has not performed well. I got into both
| FB and TWTR shortly after their IPOs. In 8 years, TWTR bas
| gone no where, while FB is up 600%. They're not even in the
| same category.
| itsoktocry wrote:
| > _At the end outside MBAs always try to take over and
| destroy the companies._
|
| Far, far more companies have been destroyed by cluesless
| founders than MBAs, and I don't think it's close.
| rohit89 wrote:
| From what I see, his system seems to be about focusing on one
| company, one problem at a time. Neuralink and Boring are side
| projects. And I believe he definitely doesn't recommend running
| two companies at a time.
| itsoktocry wrote:
| > _How the fuck does Elon do it then?_
|
| Outside of his role as a visionary and promoter, I think his
| affect on the day-to-day of his companies might be questionable
| to negative.
| kranke155 wrote:
| Elon is not CEO of SpaceX as many here have already pointed
| out. _edit_ this is wrong, he is CEO. Ms. Shotwell is COO and
| President.
|
| Outside of Tesla the other companies are not viable yet.
| ryzvonusef wrote:
| > Elon is not CEO of SpaceX
|
| Elon is most definitely the CEO of SpaceX (and Chief
| Engineer, for whatever that's worth)
|
| if you are thinking of Ms. Shotwell (what an appropriate name
| for a rocket scientist!) She's the COO.
| kranke155 wrote:
| Darn, not sure why I got confused. She's COO and President.
| Isinlor wrote:
| Elon actually makes major decisions on engineering too e.g.
| switch from carbon to steel.
|
| Or pushing the idea of catching payload fairing and now
| boosters.
|
| Especially catching boosters is the type of crazy stuff
| that only Elon would have stomach to try.
| bitwize wrote:
| Shot _very_ well by reputation!
| teekert wrote:
| You've got to love that first response :) where's that person
| going now then to release his knee jerking anger, one wonders.
| a-dub wrote:
| so the stock jumped like ten percent on this news... why? are
| they going to bring trump back? that would be horrible.
| dingosity wrote:
| meh.
| streamofdigits wrote:
| This surely signals the end of an era. Not sure i) if there will
| be an NFT of the resignation tweet in the manner of the first
| tweet? [0] and ii) if the future will be "better" than the past
| in any meaningful way... The stock market reaction suggests it
| will be not.
|
| [0] https://edition.cnn.com/2021/03/23/tech/jack-dorsey-nft-
| twee...
| hackbinary wrote:
| He quit so he could have better management run the company he
| owns and so he can enjoy his money.
|
| His move is the ultimate founder/rich playboy move. Maybe he will
| buy that magazine.
| davedx wrote:
| What? He's still CEO of Square. One public company keeps
| someone plenty busy enough
| pohl wrote:
| This is probably how Paul Singer plans to un-ban DJT.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| So is this one of those, "the board fired me and let me "quit" on
| my own terms" emails? I skimmed it and I don't see any substance,
| just the usual platitudes.
| surfingdino wrote:
| He's left to focus on his ideas for making money with Bitcoin.
| Compared to crypto, Twitter is just not very exciting.
| agumonkey wrote:
| a few videos of him chatting with "investors" are on youtube et
| al
|
| he seems also a bit into the transhumanist narrative
| trevyn wrote:
| Can you share a couple of the better links?
| agumonkey wrote:
| I forgot which one I saw but it's in there https://www.yout
| ube.com/results?search_query=jack+dorsey+elo... somewhere
|
| it's interesting to hear them chat but don't expect deep
| stuff, it's rich people having fun about markets and
| futures
| dang wrote:
| " _Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic
| tangents._ "
|
| We detached this subthread from
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29384379.
| adh636 wrote:
| I don't know him personally so I could certainly be mistaken,
| but from listening to him speak/write and based on his
| charitable giving I don't get the impression at all that Jack
| is motivated by riches. I think he is genuinely interested in
| Bitcoin as a tool for advancing humanity. I also don't get the
| impression he is interested in 'crypto'. I guess it remains to
| be seen though.
| blocked_again wrote:
| Yeah. I think apart from that he knows how painful is to work
| with the current payment systems given the trouble they had
| to go through to get credit card companies work initially
| with Square to give their card readers for small businesses.
| baby wrote:
| I wouldn't be surprised if that's the reason why FB
| investigated cryptocurrencies as well, they had/have so
| much trouble getting payment features approved in different
| countries.
| tshaddox wrote:
| Even if it's not about personal riches, I think it's pretty
| clear that he's motivated by scale of impact, which for any
| for-profit company would likely be strongly correlated with
| "riches."
| dheera wrote:
| > based on his charitable giving I don't get the impression
| at all that Jack is motivated by riches.
|
| Well, if you have more riches, you can do more charitable
| giving, so I don't see why he would not be motivated by the
| possibility of more riches.
| pvsukale3 wrote:
| Unrelated:
|
| I really liked the "Hi mom!" at the end of the letter. To be one
| of the co-founders and CEO of global tech co, and to say "Hi
| mom!" at the end of the your publicly shared resignation letter
| is such a big flex.
|
| I understand his mom must already have been very proud of him,
| but this hit different.
| pram wrote:
| Yeah also a big flex saying the company you just quit should be
| the most transparent (but not during my tenure of course)
| the-pigeon wrote:
| Haha yeah. What an asshole move.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| servytor wrote:
| I have never liked Twitter because for a long time I thought it
| was a platform that enabled people to scream crazy things into
| the void (I have been thinking this for the last 7-10 years).
|
| I mean either you share links to long-form content, or source an
| opinion, or you are contributing nothing to a discussion.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-11-29 23:00 UTC)